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How Do You Write Plays for a Divided Country? Listen Carefully.
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Second City to Open Its First New York Outpost
Long a staple of Chicago, the improv and sketch company plans to open a theater and training center in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn next year.The founders of Second City, the storied comedy theater, took its name from essays by The New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling, who skewered Chicago as inferior to his hometown. Now, more than 60 years later, Second City has found a home in New York.The improv stage and training center, based in Chicago since 1959, announced on Thursday that it would open a location in New York City for the first time. Over the decades, Second City has opened outposts in Toronto and Hollywood, which are still in operation, as well as in Detroit and Las Vegas, which have closed.Starting next summer, the institution that was an early home for performers such as Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert and Keegan-Michael Key will also have a physical location in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, the company said.“As we came out of the pandemic and saw the resurgence of our stages and our consumer demand and the fact that we’re selling out every night, it became more immediate for us to start thinking about expansion,” said Ed Wells, Second City’s chief executive, who recently joined the company from the nonprofit organization that produces “Sesame Street.”“New York just feels obvious,” he said.The expansion will include a main stage for performances, a stage for students, a restaurant and classrooms, the company said. It said that New York, after Chicago and Hollywood, was its third-largest market for virtual classes.Comedy institutions have struggled during the coronavirus pandemic because of lengthy closures and the slow return of audiences. About a year into the pandemic, Second City was sold to a private equity group based in New York — the first time the company had changed ownership since the 1980s.Upright Citizens Brigade, the storied improv and sketch comedy hub, cited “financial strain” when it closed its two Manhattan locations in 2020, leaving a segment of New York’s up-and-coming talent wanting a brick-and-mortar training center.The last couple of years have been a period of transformation for Second City. In addition to the financial challenges of the pandemic, there were complaints in 2020 from performers of color who told stories of being marginalized and tokenized. The company’s chief executive and executive producer, Andrew Alexander, resigned as a result, and the leadership pledged to “tear it all down and begin again.”Second City’s new leadership included Parisa Jalili, the chief operating officer, and Jon Carr, an improv veteran and the company’s second Black executive producer, who has since left the company. They said last year that they were working to become a more equitable institution with more diverse performers, as well as to expand the company’s reach. More
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Billy McFarland Is Out of Jail and Ready for His Next Move
Five years after the Fyre Festival, the convicted fraudster is planning a comeback.“Is this technically Dumbo?” Billy McFarland asked, walking toward the East River shoreline. “It’s super cool. Are the rents here crazy too?“I never spent much time in Brooklyn, until the Brooklyn detention center,” he continued. “I was always like, ‘I’m never going to live in Brooklyn.’ Now, I think it’s kind of nice.”Mr. McFarland, who in 2018 entered guilty pleas for fraud stemming from his role in organizing the Fyre Festival — a Coachella-for-the-Bahamas affair that went spectacularly awry and established him as the Elizabeth Holmes of party promoters— had been a free man for all of 15 minutes. And he didn’t seem inclined to lay low after spending close to four years in prison, plus another six months of additional confinement.Moments after removing an electronic ankle monitor at the Gold Street halfway house where he had stayed earlier this year, he was posing for a New York Times photographer and talking to a reporter whom he’d approached toward the end of his confinement with the help of a publicist.“I thought it was going to be a big process, but it turns out they just hand you scissors and you cut it off,” said Mr. McFarland, 30, who is 6-foot-3 and post-prison lean. He was wearing a dark T-shirt and navy pants that he said were from Uniqlo. On his feet were Gianvito Rossi sneakers that looked like Converse All Stars, but retail for around $700.Mr. McFarland — who has little money in the bank, around $26 million in financial amends to make and no immediate job prospects — said he had purchased the shoes before his legal problems.“Friends joke that my entire wardrobe is from 2016,” he said.Back then, Mr. McFarland — who grew up in Short Hills, N.J., and dropped out of Bucknell University after less than a year — was known as the founder of a company called Magnises, whose flagship charge card was pitched as a kind of American Express Black card for millennials.Mostly, those who joined were given access to an open bar at a Greenwich Village townhouse where he held parties. Another membership perk: Bahamian excursions, including to Norman’s Cay, a small island that once served as a hub for the Medellín Cartel’s cocaine-smuggling operation.That was the site Mr. McFarland had selected to hold an epic coming-out festival for his next invention, Fyre, an Uber-like app through which people could book their favorite celebrities for special events. He enlisted Ja Rule, Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski to help promote the 2017 party, which featured more than 30 musical guests, including Blink-182 and Tyga. Tickets cost up to $12,000.But the Fyre Festival — which would go on to achieve cultural notoriety, if not for the reasons Mr. McFarland had intended — was poorly planned, and its finances were a mess.The night before the first attendees arrived on the island, an intense rainstorm hit.The site of the Fyre Festival in Exuma, Bahamas, in 2017.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesPeople showed up to find that the “luxury villas” that came with their ticket packages were, in fact, disaster relief tents located on a makeshift camping ground.And the “uniquely authentic island cuisine” guests were promised in promotional materials turned out to be cheese sandwiches served in plastic foam containers, though Mr. McFarland countered in our interview last week that reports of the meals had been vastly overblown.“There’s a reason there’s only one photograph of that,” he said, referring to a viral shot of a sad pile of lettuce topped by two tomato slices, above two slices of prepackaged cheese serving as a sort of garnish for two slices of untoasted wheat bread.Ultimately, the event — which stranded thousands of attendees in the Bahamas and left them scrounging for makeshift shelter on a dark beach — was scrapped without a single performance taking place. Less than two months later, Mr. McFarland was arrested and charged with fraud.“They took me to the Brooklyn detention center for one night,” he said. “My head was swirling with all these things, and I panicked like, ‘I need to pay everybody back tomorrow or else this is real.’”Class-action lawsuits followed.While on probation, Mr. McFarland launched a V.I.P. ticket service that promised users tickets he didn’t have to events including the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” the Victoria’s Secret fashion show and the Met Gala.There was another round of fraud charges.“I probably added years on to my sentence by doing that,” he said. “I just was making bad decision after bad decision.”By the water in Dumbo, Mr. McFarland struck a few plaintive poses. “I can’t wait to go swimming,” he said.Mr. McFarland was weighing a return to the tech world.Ben Sklar for The New York TimesHe then took an Uber to his small second-floor apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.On the curb outside his new building, he continued to speak of the borough with tourist-like wonder. “Was this street terrible years ago?” he asked. “Because there are all these nice new buildings.” (Before the Fyre Festival, Mr. McFarland had lived in the meatpacking district. “I was 21 when I moved there — cut me some slack,” he said.)With characteristic vagueness, Mr. McFarland said the rent for his new place was being paid by “family and friends.” He did not say whether that included his parents, Steven and Irene McFarland, who are real estate developers based in New Jersey.It had taken a lot, Mr. McFarland said, for his parents to understand that “someone they were so close to was capable of lying like I did.” He continued, “I hurt them, and it sucks.”Had he personally apologized to his victims? “No,” he said, then posed a question of his own:“What would you say to them if you were me?”The terms of Mr. McFarland’s six-month house arrest allowed him to go outside only to go to the grocery store or the gym. He chose a membership at Blink Fitness, which he paid for with a debit card. “I don’t think I can get a credit card,” he said.His new apartment was Airbnb-neutral. The only decorations were a few plants he’d picked up at Trader Joe’s — a bird of paradise, two money trees — along with a white board that was blank as the decor. The bed was perfectly made, the floor immaculate.The work of a cleaning service? “You’re never going to believe it,” he said. “I learned how to do it!”As Mr. McFarland recalled it, his housekeeping education began at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he was first held, then continued at the Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where he was transferred in early 2019. “It was like Danbury,” he said, referring to the less hard-line cushy-by-prison standards facility where Martha Stewart did her time. “But I messed it up.”How?“I brought in a USB drive.”He was storing notes for a possible book on his saga, he said, which had already been memorialized in dueling documentaries for Hulu and Netflix.Mr. McFarland pleaded guilty in 2018 to two counts of wire fraud.Mark Lennihan/Associated PressGuards confiscated the drive and Mr. McFarland spent three months in solitary confinement, where he said he fell asleep to the sounds of a screaming gang member known as the White Tiger, so named because of tattoos of the animal that covered his face and other areas of his body.After that, he was resettled at FCI Elkton, a low-security federal correctional institution located in Ohio.Then, in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic hit. Mr. McFarland appealed for compassionate release, claiming that allergies and asthma placed him in a high risk category for health complications. His efforts were unsuccessful. “Hope clouds your judgment,” he said. “There was no way I was going to get out.”In the fall of that year, he wound up in solitary confinement again, this time for participating by pay phone in a podcast (“Dumpster Fyre”) about the Fyre Festival.Ultimately, prison records show, Mr. McFarland spent six months there, though the records do not specify why. His lawyer, Jason Russo, said in a phone interview that he had written letters to prison officials attempting to get Mr. McFarland out of solitary confinement, only to be stonewalled at every turn. Mr. Russo said he could not even get a specific answer as to why Mr. McFarland was there for such an extended period of time. Emails and phone calls to the prison by The New York Times were not returned.Mr. McFarland read a lot during those months. “There was nothing else to do,” he said.One of the books he finished was Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.” Another was Gregory David Roberts’s novel “Shantarum.”“It’s about an Australian who breaks out of jail and joins the Indian mafia,” said Mr. McFarland. “Really cool.”In Mr. McFarland’s Bedford-Stuyvesant living room, on a small shelf by the gray couch from Wayfair — “A friend bought it for me,” he said, “I couldn’t afford it” — were copies of Don Winslow’s “City on Fire” and Sebastian Mallaby’s “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the Future.”But Mr. McFarland said hadn’t been doing as much reading since he began home confinement and acquired a Mac desktop computer with a Westinghouse screen. “I just missed the computer so much,” said Mr. McFarland. “I missed that more than anything.”Mr. McFarland owes tens of millions of dollars to his victims.Ben Sklar for The New York TimesAs part of his plea, Mr. McFarland is barred for life from serving as a director of a public company. His earnings will be garnished until he pays back the full amount he owes his victims, more than $25 million.“Obviously, he’s got a lot of work ahead of him,” Mr. Russo said.At least for now, Mr. McFarland has abandoned the idea of writing his memoir.“The book’s not going to pay the restitution, let me put it that way,” he said.So what will?“I’d like to do something tech-based,” he said a few minutes later, walking to BKLYN Blend, where he ordered an egg sandwich and a coffee. “The good thing with tech is that people are so forward-thinking, and they’re more apt at taking risk.“If I worked in finance, I think it would be harder to get back,” he continued. “Tech is more open. And the way I failed is totally wrong, but in a certain sense, failure is OK in entrepreneurship.”Seated at a quiet table in the corner — no one at the coffee shop appeared to recognize him — Mr. McFarland mulled whether he’d prefer to work for himself or someone else. “At the end of the day, I think I could probably create the most value by building some sort of tech product,” he said. “Whether that’s within a company or by starting my own company, I’m open to both. I’ll probably decide in the next couple of weeks which path to go do.”He said he was “not particularly interested in crypto,” though he would make an exception for the latest frontier in blockchain technology, decentralized autonomous organizations, which he said were “allowing people to come together online to effect real world change in a way they previously couldn’t, taking people to places they couldn’t get to — and, once they’re there, enabling them to effect real-world change.”In April 2020, while in prison, Mr. McFarland made his first foray into philanthropy. He led a drive called Project 315, which raised money to cover the costs of calls between underprivileged inmates and their families. Four days after the project’s Instagram launch, fees were waived nationwide. “We did it,” the Instagram account associated with Mr. McFarland’s “non profit organization” said, claiming credit. (In fact, the suspension of fees came after campaigning by Senator Amy Klobuchar and a group of other Democratic senators that had begun well before Mr. McFarland got the idea.)But it whetted his appetite for good works, he said. Now, Mr. McFarland is talking about forming a charity that would pay travel costs for the families of prisoners.“I met some really amazing people in prison,” he said. “Half the people are just naturally bad and the other half are great.” (Mr. McFarland hedged, when asked which group he belonged to. “But I think I’m a better person than I was four years ago,” he said.)Mr. McFarland said he wanted people to know that he was sorry for what went wrong with the festival and for his actions. “I deserved my sentence,” he said. “I let a lot of people down.”He attributed his choices in part to “immaturity” and hubris.“I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” he said.Partly, he blamed the tech world — the very same world he was musing about re-entering — which he said sometimes operates by an “ends justify the means” ethos.Still, he took some issue with news articles that compared him to Bernie Madoff; he wasn’t running a decades-long scheme to defraud people of their life savings, after all. Plus, he said, he hadn’t planned for things to end up the way they did.Much was made in both the Hulu and Netflix documentaries about the local workers in the Bahamas who were stiffed when the festival was canceled and debts piled up.Mr. McFarland argued that this characterization was somewhat misleading because, he said, most of them were working on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis, and therefore suffered limited losses. (One restaurant owner said in the Netflix documentary that she spent $50,000 of her savings preparing for the festival and received no compensation from organizers. In May 2017, she told The New York Times that she was owed $134,000.)Two of his former Bahamian employees traveled to New York for a post-house-arrest party Mr. McFarland hosted on the evening of his release at Marylou, a French bistro in the East Village.Ozzy Rolle, Mr. McFarland’s principal consigliere in the Exumas, an island district in the Bahamas, said the following afternoon that he’d been paid almost everything he was owed for the festival, before it imploded. “I was treated good. Probably a week I wasn’t paid for.” He even went as far as to say the Fyre Festival had been good for tourism in the Bahamas. “So many people came after reading about what happened,” he said.But Scooter Rolle, his cousin and travel companion, said he had yet to get a dime of what he was owed for his work, in the days before Fyre. “I came to clarify things,” he said.That didn’t exactly happen, but Mr. McFarland did buy him a post-party lobster roll at Sarabeth’s Kitchen. “Billy tried his best,” he said.Back at the Bed-Stuy cafe, Mr. McFarland said the biggest sin he had committed was digging himself in deeper with dishonesty.“I lied,” he said. “I think I was scared. And the fear was letting down people who believed in me — showing them they weren’t right.” More
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Jaimie Branch, Trumpeter Who Crossed Genre Lines, Dies at 39
One of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, she forged a direct emotional, and even spiritual, connection with her listeners.Jaimie Branch, an innovative avant-garde trumpet player and composer whose punk-rock intensity and commitment to experimentation and to dissolving the distinctions between genres invigorated the music scenes of New York and Chicago, died on Aug. 22 at her home in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She was 39.Her death was announced by International Anthem, the Chicago-based label that released albums by her groups Fly or Die and Anteloper. No cause was given.Over the last decade, Ms. Branch emerged as one of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, coaxing a remarkable range of sounds from her horn. She used electronic effects and toy noisemakers (including a Fisher Price Happy Apple from the 1970s) to further extend her sonic spectrum. She would often play a complicated passage, step back and scream, and then plunge back into playing without missing a beat.“I mean every note that I play,” she told the online music journal Aquarium Drunkard in 2019. “When I’m up there, I’m putting it all out on the table. It’s like high risk, high reward.”Ms. Branch forged an emotional, even spiritual, connection with listeners. Her energy could barely be constrained by the stage, filling a room not just with the sound of her trumpet but also with the force of her presence.Offstage, she was just as magnetic. Known to friends as Breezy, she was a gregarious figure, as averse to formality and affectation as she was to capital letters (she preferred her name and song titles lowercase).Ms. Branch was conservatory-trained, but her stage attire was unconventional for jazz circles: an Adidas track suit, a kimono draped over a “Young Latin & Proud” T-shirt, a baggy Outkast “ATLiens” baseball jersey. Her head was always covered, whether by a hoodie, a jauntily askew baseball cap or a knit toque, and her forearms were festooned with colorful tattoos.“She was the quintessential example of ‘honest music,’” Scott McNiece, International Anthem’s co-founder and director of artists and repertoire, said in an interview. “Music that has the capacity to change people’s lives and change the world, which everyone needs now more than ever.”Ms. Branch composed most of the music with Fly or Die, a quartet whose other members were Chad Taylor on drums, Jason Ajemian on bass and Lester St. Louis on cello (who replaced Tomeka Reid after the group’s first album, called simply “Fly or Die”). She favored improvisation for Anteloper, a dub-influenced duo with the drummer Jason Nazary, both of whom also doubled on synthesizers and other electronic gear.While she regularly performed concerts for cultural programmers like Roulette (where she was a 2020 resident artist) and Arts for Art, Ms. Branch was equally at home creating dissonant synthesizer squiggles on a noise-rock bill at Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, or playing an impromptu jam session at the San Pedro Inn in Red Hook with her most recent trio, c’est trois, with the bassist Luke Stewart and the drummer Tcheser Holmes.In a 2017 article on women in jazz, the New York Times critic Giovanni Russonello described “Fly or Die” as one of “the most startling debut albums in jazz this year,” adding that “Ms. Branch uses extended technique and blustery abstraction to a dizzying effect.” In DownBeat magazine’s 2020 critics poll, Ms. Branch was voted “rising star” on trumpet.Ms. Branch in action with her group Fly or Die at the Winter Jazzfest in New York in 2018.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesOn the 2019 album “Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise,” she revealed her impressive singing voice on two songs, one of which, “prayer for amerikkka pt. 1 & 2,” recounts the story of a young Central American woman detained after crossing the Southern border. (The song was based on the actual case of an El Salvadoran teenager whom Ms. Branch’s mother had assisted.)Despite the power of her trumpet playing, Jaimie felt very vulnerable, her sister, Kate Branch said in an interview, and she felt even more so when singing, adding, “She really cared about the message.”Jaimie Rebecca Branch was born on June 17, 1983, in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. Her father, Kenneth, was a mechanical engineer; her mother, Soledad (Barbour) Branch, known as Sally, is a psychotherapist and social worker. “Jaimie” is spelled the way it is, her sister said, because the girls’ Colombian maternal grandmother couldn’t understand why their mother would call her daughter Jaime, a boy’s name, “so my mom added another ‘i’ so my grandmother could properly pronounce it.”Jaimie started playing piano at age 3 and wrote her first song, “My Dreams End in the Sky,” at 6. A small orchestra at the family’s church in Long Island performed it, and Jaimie sang it and dedicated it to a retiring minister.When she was 9, the family moved to Kenilworth, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, where she began playing trumpet in the school band. After playing extensively at New Trier High School in Winnetka (including a stint in a ska-punk group, the Indecisives), she moved to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied jazz performance.After graduation Ms. Branch moved to Chicago, where she became a fixture of the jazz scene. “You could hear her all-encompassing sound just by looking her straight in the eyes,” the trumpeter Rob Mazurek, a frequent Chicago collaborator, said in an email.She left Chicago in 2012 to attend graduate school at Towson University in Baltimore, but departed a few credits short of a master’s degree in jazz performance. She told The Chicago Reader in 2017 that she had begun using heroin in 2008, and she struggled with opioids for years, enrolling in multiple inpatient treatment programs, most recently on Long Island in 2015.Following her time in that program, Ms. Branch moved to Red Hook. She gigged constantly, whether as the leader of her own groups or as a guest in the ensembles of the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and the vocalist Fay Victor.“She was a true collaborator, and that’s why she was so damn good at playing this music,” said the Brooklyn composer and vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, who began improvising with Ms. Branch soon after she arrived in Brooklyn. “She could listen, give and receive in equal measure with an unparalleled generosity. She had so many extremely close friends who also were collaborators, and because of that she wanted each individual to be really strong and strengthen the community as a whole.”In addition to her sister, Ms. Branch is survived by her mother and two half brothers, Clark and Russell. Her father died in 2017; the first Fly or Die album was dedicated to him.Ms. Branch had recently finished mixing Fly or Die’s third studio album. Ever seeking new sounds, she was also discussing potential projects like dub remixes of Anteloper and exploring her interest in the Chicago electronic dance music genre known as footwork.“A lot of her collaborators were jazz musicians,” said Piotr Orlov, a friend and supporter who wrote the liner notes for the 2021 album “Fly or Die Live,” “but ‘the music’ for her was much broader, always filled with rhythm for moving, improvisation for keeping it interesting or unexpected, and camaraderie. Which is why the connections she made between so-called jazz and contemporary classical, beats and electronic music, rappers and dancers, standards and the hard-core songbook, were completely organic, and always fascinating.”On Wednesday night, as news of Ms. Branch’s death spread, about 75 of her friends and fellow musicians gathered on Valentino Pier in Red Hook, a few blocks from her apartment. As “Fly or Die Live” played through a phone propped up against a small, tinny-sounding megaphone, some in the crowd tapped out beats on drums or on the concrete, others banged tambourines and sleigh bells, and the young saxophonist Zoh Amba played melancholic funereal blasts.From across the Red Hook Channel the distant sound of another trumpet could be heard, most likely from a mariachi band in a waterfront bar, joining the music in a phantom collaboration. More
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Michael K. Williams’s Unfinished Business in Brooklyn
Three months before he died, the actor Michael K. Williams spent all day at a block party in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. In some ways it had the vibe of any block party — a D.J. making people move, kids riding bikes in the street, smoke billowing out of an oil-drum grill. But this wasn’t just another summer day in Brownsville. Mr. Williams and a group of community activists had persuaded seven of the politicians hoping to be New York’s next mayor to show up, granting them a forum to explain why they deserved the support of a Black community that was used to being ignored.One by one, the candidates took turns sitting at a folding table in the middle of the block and fielded tough questions from a panel of young people who lived there. Some of those young people belonged to a gang. Many had lost friends and family members to gun violence, and few had faith in the government’s ability to protect them. Mr. Williams sat at the table, too, listening intently.When Eric Adams arrived, wearing a tight orange T-shirt with the slogan “We Can End Gun Violence,” Mr. Williams expressed concern over his use of the term “law and order” at a recent debate. He chose his words with care, the thumb and forefinger of his right hand pressed together in concentration.“Do you think putting more police on the streets is the way to deal with the violence in our community right now?” Mr. Williams asked.Mr. Adams assured him that he didn’t. “We don’t need an overproliferation of cops,” Mr. Adams said. “People commit crimes,” he added, because “a lack of resources came from the city.”Mr. Williams had an intimate understanding of the kind of violence that results from a lack of resources. Before the world knew him as Omar, the gay stickup artist with a strict moral code from the TV series “The Wire,” he was just a kid from the Vanderveer Estates, a complex of 59 buildings spanning 30 acres of East Flatbush, a largely Caribbean neighborhood deep in Brooklyn. In his memoir, “Scenes From My Life,” which will be published this month, he recalls “The Veer” as a vibrant place where block parties had “the air of family cookouts,” but also as a setting of deprivation and pain. During the so-called crack epidemic, police officers called a local intersection “the front page” because of all the murders that drew reporters to those corners. When Mr. Williams was a teenager, he watched a friend die of a bullet wound right in front of him.Mr. Williams at an event at the Howard Houses in Brownsville in October 2020. Toward the end of his life, he devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s Black communities safer.Sue KwonToward the end of his life, Mr. Williams devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s Black communities safer. He pursued this mission, in part, by helping build a model for organizing that he hoped would eventually inspire a national movement. Through this initiative, called We Build the Block, he and the other organizers held “block activations” throughout Brooklyn, culminating in the mayoral summit in Brownsville. Teenage activists would engage their neighbors in conversations about the political process and register them to vote. The group deliberately chose blocks that the police regarded as gang strongholds, while persuading the police, remarkably, to stay out of the way. “It was a way to say we can take care of our own,” Mr. Williams wrote in his memoir. None of these events, as he noted, were ever disrupted by violence.Last summer, We Build the Block took on an ambitious new challenge. With the help of a Black police captain who was interested in unconventional approaches to crime reduction, they began planning to pay a group of young people touched by gang violence to take part in “healing circles” — weekly conversations led by a therapist. In August, one of Mr. Williams’s collaborators, Dana Rachlin, a white woman in her 30s from Staten Island, texted Mr. Williams that one of their requests for funding was out “in the universe.” Mr. Williams replied, “Damn right it is!”That was the last time she ever heard from him. One week later, on Sept. 6, Mr. Williams was found dead of a heroin and fentanyl overdose in his apartment in Williamsburg. He was 54.Dana Rachlin, who helped found We Build the Block with Mr. Williams.Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York TimesThe healing circles began the next month. At the first session, a facilitator used singing bowls in an attempt to get the kids to meditate. It didn’t go well. As the kids horsed around and mocked the activity, Ms. Rachlin thought about Mr. Williams. If he’d been there, she thought, the kids would have followed his lead. Lying on a yoga mat, she began to cry. And then she thought about one of the reasons Mr. Williams had been so good at connecting with people: his sensitivity to the pain of others. These boys, she knew, had lost friends too.Mr. Williams’s interest in community organizing can be traced to his mother. He describes her in the memoir as an energetic, caring woman who taught Sunday school, opened a day-care center in their building, and cultivated a network of relationships with community leaders. He loved and admired her. He also feared her. After his father left, when he was 11, his mother tried to protect him from the violence that surrounded them by forbidding him from fighting, a rule that she enforced, as he pointed out, by inflicting violence on him herself. Frustrated by his defiance, she would sometimes tell him that he was unworthy of God’s love.Remembering Michael K. WilliamsThe actor, who starred in the pioneering HBO series “The Wire,” was found dead on Sept. 6, 2021, in his home in Brooklyn. He was 54. Obituary: Williams brought a hard-edge charisma to his portrayal of Omar Little in David Simon’s five-season epic. Tributes: Following news of his death, co-stars, musicians and authors shared their thoughts on the beloved actor. Best TV Performances: Throughout his career, Williams explored provocative intersections of race, crime, sexuality and masculinity. A Legacy Interrupted: To complete the new season of Williams’s series “Black Market,” the producers enlisted the help of some famous friends.He grew to be sensitive and insecure — “the softest kid,” he writes, “in the projects.” After two older men molested him, he “fell into a dark, empty state.” His willingness to venture back into that state, to conjure up his most painful memories for the sake of an acting role, was the quality that would most clearly define him as an artist. The scar across his face, sustained in a razor attack outside a bar on his 25th birthday, seemed to tell of deeper wounds. “We are all broken,” he notes in the book. “And people find it astonishing to see the inside made so visible.”Royal Hyness Allah, one of the young people who helped start the community-organizing campaign, in Brownsville at a We Build the Block event in June 2021.Sue KwonMr. Williams at a graduation ceremony at L&B Spumoni Gardens in Brooklyn.Sue KwonHe was 35 when he landed his most iconic role. A fan of “The Wire” might have assumed that the guy playing Omar shared the show’s political outlook, its outrage at the drug war, but he still knew “close to zero” about politics when the fifth and final season aired. That began to change when an African-American senator from Chicago, running for president that year, declared Omar Little to be his favorite character on his favorite show.Around the same time, Mr. Williams was arrested on drunken-driving charges twice in six months. He had struggled with an addiction to alcohol and cocaine, crack and powder, since he was a teenager. Ordered to do community service, he offered to talk about addiction to high-school kids. What began as an obligation became a passion. While Barack Obama’s praise sparked an interest in the political forces affecting his community, the school visits awakened him to the possibility that he could “redeem” himself by working with young people. But it would still be years before this would become the guiding insight of his life.In 2016, he appeared in “The Night Of,” an HBO drama about the moral rot of New York’s criminal-justice system. Playing a charismatic former boxer confined on Rikers Island, he often thought about his nephew, Dominic Dupont, who was convicted at 19 of second-degree murder. Serving 25 years to life in prison, Mr. Dupont started a mentorship program and, in 2017, received clemency from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Mr. Williams’s nephew, Dominic Dupont, who was convicted at 19 of second-degree murder. He started a mentorship program and, in 2017, received clemency from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York Times“The Night Of” told a less redeeming tale, and the performance took Mr. Williams to a dark place. “He was willing to sacrifice himself for some roles,” Mr. Dupont told me. “And those happened to be the characters that people loved the most.” After years of sobriety, Mr. Williams began using drugs on the set, which was an actual prison in upstate New York. It got so bad, his memoir revealed, that the shoot had to be shut down for a day.While promoting the series, Mr. Williams realized he wanted to learn more about the mass incarceration of young people from neighborhoods like his. This led him to make “Raised in the System,” a documentarythat captures the vulnerability and neglect of incarcerated children. Ms. Rachlin, who met him as he was finishing the film, helped him organize a series of screenings for police officers, correction officers, prosecutors and judges. “We wanted the power holders to bring compassion and empathy to the youth before them, their families and communities,” she said.Ms. Rachlin was in some ways an unlikely ally. She had grown up in a conservative Staten Island household. As a teenager, she made campaign calls for George W. Bush. She recalls assuming that people who committed crimes were “bad.” But after college, while working as an advocate for crime victims in the Staten Island courthouse, she found herself, for the first time, spending time around young people who had been arrested and jailed. It was eye-opening. She soon began working with adolescents who had been getting into trouble, eventually starting a nonprofit.As Mr. Williams became an increasingly prominent advocate for criminal-justice reform, Ms. Rachlin continued working closely with him, connecting him with nonprofit groups in the field, teaching him about the inner-workings of government, prepping him for meetings with elected officials. Mr. Williams, for his part, used his fame to attract attention to her work, and served as a personal mentor — “Uncle Mike” — to kids in her organization.Capt. Derby St. Fort with Mr. Williams at a We Build the Block event in Crown Heights in 2020. Captain St. Fort would collaborate with the organization on healing circles.Sue KwonThen, in the summer of 2020, as protests over police violence surged through New York and the rest of the country, Mr. Williams began talking to Ms. Rachlin about how to bolster the role that Black New Yorkers played in shaping the city’s public-safety policies. With the radio host Shani Kulture and five high school students from Brooklyn, they started We Build the Block, the community-organizing campaign.Royal Hyness Allah, one of the young people who helped start the initiative, recalled how down-to-earth Mr. Williams always seemed at their block activations. “He was outside at every event,” he said, “no security, no nothing, talking with the old people and the people rolling dice and smoking weed, getting to know where their head’s at, spreading the word about how to make the community safer.”“He was unique,” Eric Gonzalez, Brooklyn’s reform-minded district attorney, said. “A lot of people with his celebrity, they do social media or they donate money to causes, but he kept it on the ground.”Captain St. Fort felt a deep kinship with Mr. Williams. “With all his success, he didn’t feel deserving,” he said. “I felt the same way at times.”Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York TimesIn 2019, Ms. Rachlin introduced Mr. Williams to Derby St. Fort, the police captain who would collaborate with them on the healing circles. Captain St. Fort felt a deep kinship with Mr. Williams. “With all his success, he didn’t feel deserving,” he said. “I felt the same way at times.” When he told Mr. Williams about a group of young men who were causing harm in his precinct, Mr. Williams said he could imagine how they felt — unworthy of love, incapable of change. “He looked at the pain of those who caused pain,” Captain St. Fort said. Arresting them wouldn’t change their perspectives. So the three of them developed a strategy that they hoped would.This was how the healing circles came about. Despite skepticism inside the police department, Captain St. Fort fully embraced the idea and even participated in the circles himself. He found it hard to imagine that the kids would ever trust him, but he was open with them, acknowledging that he had made mistakes in his life. Slowly, he said, the teenagers began to open up too. “A lot of times they felt they had done so much harm in their lives that they weren’t deserving of support,” Captain St. Fort said. “We had to challenge that. I told them, ‘You deserve it.’”Two of the participants, Dorian Garrett, 18, and Kareem Holder, 20, now volunteer as community organizers. One recent afternoon, they met with Captain St. Fort and Ms. Rachlin, along with representatives of the Public Advocate’s Office, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and other groups in the basement of a public library, where they were leading an effort to plan a back-to-school event for younger kids in their neighborhood. They’d both gotten steady jobs through the program, and neither had been arrested since the sessions began.They’d never met Mr. Williams, but Ms. Rachlin and Captain St. Fort had told them all about the guy with the scar they’d seen on TV — how he made people feel like they mattered, like somebody cared. “That’s something that I definitely want to do,” Mr. Garrett said, “because the stuff that I experienced, I don’t want that for the younger generation.” He wanted those kids to know something. “I’m here, and they are loved.”Mr. Williams at a voter registration in Brooklyn in 2020. “We are all broken,” he wrote in his memoir. “And people find it astonishing to see the inside made so visible.”Sue Kwon More
- in Movies
Michael K. Williams’s Unfinished Business
Three months before he died, the actor Michael K. Williams spent all day at a block party in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. In some ways it had the vibe of any block party — a D.J. making people move, kids riding bikes in the street, smoke billowing out of an oil-drum grill. But this wasn’t just another summer day in Brownsville. Mr. Williams and a group of community activists had persuaded seven of the politicians hoping to be New York’s next mayor to show up, granting them a forum to explain why they deserved the support of a Black community that was used to being ignored.One by one, the candidates took turns sitting at a folding table in the middle of the block and fielded tough questions from a panel of young people who lived there. Some of those young people belonged to a gang. Many had lost friends and family members to gun violence, and few had faith in the government’s ability to protect them. Mr. Williams sat at the table, too, listening intently.When Eric Adams arrived, wearing a tight orange T-shirt with the slogan “We Can End Gun Violence,” Mr. Williams expressed concern over his use of the term “law and order” at a recent debate. He chose his words with care, the thumb and forefinger of his right hand pressed together in concentration.“Do you think putting more police on the streets is the way to deal with the violence in our community right now?” Mr. Williams asked.Mr. Adams assured him that he didn’t. “We don’t need an overproliferation of cops,” Mr. Adams said. “People commit crimes,” he added, because “a lack of resources came from the city.”Mr. Williams had an intimate understanding of the kind of violence that results from a lack of resources. Before the world knew him as Omar, the gay stickup artist with a strict moral code from the TV series “The Wire,” he was just a kid from the Vanderveer Estates, a complex of 59 buildings spanning 30 acres of East Flatbush, a largely Caribbean neighborhood deep in Brooklyn. In his memoir, “Scenes From My Life,” which will be published this month, he recalls “The Veer” as a vibrant place where block parties had “the air of family cookouts,” but also as a setting of deprivation and pain. During the so-called crack epidemic, police officers called a local intersection “the front page” because of all the murders that drew reporters to those corners. When Mr. Williams was a teenager, he watched a friend die of a bullet wound right in front of him.Mr. Williams at an event at the Howard Houses in Brownsville in October 2020. Toward the end of his life, he devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s Black communities safer.Sue KwonToward the end of his life, Mr. Williams devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s Black communities safer. He pursued this mission, in part, by helping build a model for organizing that he hoped would eventually inspire a national movement. Through this initiative, called We Build the Block, he and the other organizers held “block activations” throughout Brooklyn, culminating in the mayoral summit in Brownsville. Teenage activists would engage their neighbors in conversations about the political process and register them to vote. The group deliberately chose blocks that the police regarded as gang strongholds, while persuading the police, remarkably, to stay out of the way. “It was a way to say we can take care of our own,” Mr. Williams wrote in his memoir. None of these events, as he noted, were ever disrupted by violence.Last summer, We Build the Block took on an ambitious new challenge. With the help of a Black police captain who was interested in unconventional approaches to crime reduction, they began planning to pay a group of young people touched by gang violence to take part in “healing circles” — weekly conversations led by a therapist. In August, one of Mr. Williams’s collaborators, Dana Rachlin, a white woman in her 30s from Staten Island, texted Mr. Williams that one of their requests for funding was out “in the universe.” Mr. Williams replied, “Damn right it is!”That was the last time she ever heard from him. One week later, on Sept. 6, Mr. Williams was found dead of a heroin and fentanyl overdose in his apartment in Williamsburg. He was 54.Dana Rachlin, who helped found We Build the Block with Mr. Williams.Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York TimesThe healing circles began the next month. At the first session, a facilitator used singing bowls in an attempt to get the kids to meditate. It didn’t go well. As the kids horsed around and mocked the activity, Ms. Rachlin thought about Mr. Williams. If he’d been there, she thought, the kids would have followed his lead. Lying on a yoga mat, she began to cry. And then she thought about one of the reasons Mr. Williams had been so good at connecting with people: his sensitivity to the pain of others. These boys, she knew, had lost friends too.Mr. Williams’s interest in community organizing can be traced to his mother. He describes her in the memoir as an energetic, caring woman who taught Sunday school, opened a day-care center in their building, and cultivated a network of relationships with community leaders. He loved and admired her. He also feared her. After his father left, when he was 11, his mother tried to protect him from the violence that surrounded them by forbidding him from fighting, a rule that she enforced, as he pointed out, by inflicting violence on him herself. Frustrated by his defiance, she would sometimes tell him that he was unworthy of God’s love.Remembering Michael K. WilliamsThe actor, who starred in the pioneering HBO series “The Wire,” was found dead on Sept. 6, 2021, in his home in Brooklyn. He was 54. Obituary: Williams brought a hard-edge charisma to his portrayal of Omar Little in David Simon’s five-season epic. Tributes: Following news of his death, co-stars, musicians and authors shared their thoughts on the beloved actor. Best TV Performances: Throughout his career, Williams explored provocative intersections of race, crime, sexuality and masculinity. A Legacy Interrupted: To complete the new season of Williams’s series “Black Market,” the producers enlisted the help of some famous friends.He grew to be sensitive and insecure — “the softest kid,” he writes, “in the projects.” After two older men molested him, he “fell into a dark, empty state.” His willingness to venture back into that state, to conjure up his most painful memories for the sake of an acting role, was the quality that would most clearly define him as an artist. The scar across his face, sustained in a razor attack outside a bar on his 25th birthday, seemed to tell of deeper wounds. “We are all broken,” he notes in the book. “And people find it astonishing to see the inside made so visible.”Royal Hyness Allah, one of the young people who helped start the community-organizing campaign, in Brownsville at a We Build the Block event in June 2021.Sue KwonMr. Williams at a graduation ceremony at L&B Spumoni Gardens in Brooklyn.Sue KwonHe was 35 when he landed his most iconic role. A fan of “The Wire” might have assumed that the guy playing Omar shared the show’s political outlook, its outrage at the drug war, but he still knew “close to zero” about politics when the fifth and final season aired. That began to change when an African-American senator from Chicago, running for president that year, declared Omar Little to be his favorite character on his favorite show.Around the same time, Mr. Williams was arrested on drunken-driving charges twice in six months. He had struggled with an addiction to alcohol and cocaine, crack and powder, since he was a teenager. Ordered to do community service, he offered to talk about addiction to high-school kids. What began as an obligation became a passion. While Barack Obama’s praise sparked an interest in the political forces affecting his community, the school visits awakened him to the possibility that he could “redeem” himself by working with young people. But it would still be years before this would become the guiding insight of his life.In 2016, he appeared in “The Night Of,” an HBO drama about the moral rot of New York’s criminal-justice system. Playing a charismatic former boxer confined on Rikers Island, he often thought about his nephew, Dominic Dupont, who was convicted at 19 of second-degree murder. Serving 25 years to life in prison, Mr. Dupont started a mentorship program and, in 2017, received clemency from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Mr. Williams’s nephew, Dominic Dupont, who was convicted at 19 of second-degree murder. He started a mentorship program and, in 2017, received clemency from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York Times“The Night Of” told a less redeeming tale, and the performance took Mr. Williams to a dark place. “He was willing to sacrifice himself for some roles,” Mr. Dupont told me. “And those happened to be the characters that people loved the most.” After years of sobriety, Mr. Williams began using drugs on the set, which was an actual prison in upstate New York. It got so bad, his memoir revealed, that the shoot had to be shut down for a day.While promoting the series, Mr. Williams realized he wanted to learn more about the mass incarceration of young people from neighborhoods like his. This led him to make “Raised in the System,” a documentarythat captures the vulnerability and neglect of incarcerated children. Ms. Rachlin, who met him as he was finishing the film, helped him organize a series of screenings for police officers, correction officers, prosecutors and judges. “We wanted the power holders to bring compassion and empathy to the youth before them, their families and communities,” she said.Ms. Rachlin was in some ways an unlikely ally. She had grown up in a conservative Staten Island household. As a teenager, she made campaign calls for George W. Bush. She recalls assuming that people who committed crimes were “bad.” But after college, while working as an advocate for crime victims in the Staten Island courthouse, she found herself, for the first time, spending time around young people who had been arrested and jailed. It was eye-opening. She soon began working with adolescents who had been getting into trouble, eventually starting a nonprofit.As Mr. Williams became an increasingly prominent advocate for criminal-justice reform, Ms. Rachlin continued working closely with him, connecting him with nonprofit groups in the field, teaching him about the inner-workings of government, prepping him for meetings with elected officials. Mr. Williams, for his part, used his fame to attract attention to her work, and served as a personal mentor — “Uncle Mike” — to kids in her organization.Capt. Derby St. Fort with Mr. Williams at a We Build the Block event in Crown Heights in 2020. Captain St. Fort would collaborate with the organization on healing circles.Sue KwonThen, in the summer of 2020, as protests over police violence surged through New York and the rest of the country, Mr. Williams began talking to Ms. Rachlin about how to bolster the role that Black New Yorkers played in shaping the city’s public-safety policies. With the radio host Shani Kulture and five high school students from Brooklyn, they started We Build the Block, the community-organizing campaign.Royal Hyness Allah, one of the young people who helped start the initiative, recalled how down-to-earth Mr. Williams always seemed at their block activations. “He was outside at every event,” he said, “no security, no nothing, talking with the old people and the people rolling dice and smoking weed, getting to know where their head’s at, spreading the word about how to make the community safer.”“He was unique,” Eric Gonzalez, Brooklyn’s reform-minded district attorney, said. “A lot of people with his celebrity, they do social media or they donate money to causes, but he kept it on the ground.”Captain St. Fort felt a deep kinship with Mr. Williams. “With all his success, he didn’t feel deserving,” he said. “I felt the same way at times.”Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York TimesIn 2019, Ms. Rachlin introduced Mr. Williams to Derby St. Fort, the police captain who would collaborate with them on the healing circles. Captain St. Fort felt a deep kinship with Mr. Williams. “With all his success, he didn’t feel deserving,” he said. “I felt the same way at times.” When he told Mr. Williams about a group of young men who were causing harm in his precinct, Mr. Williams said he could imagine how they felt — unworthy of love, incapable of change. “He looked at the pain of those who caused pain,” Captain St. Fort said. Arresting them wouldn’t change their perspectives. So the three of them developed a strategy that they hoped would.This was how the healing circles came about. Despite skepticism inside the police department, Captain St. Fort fully embraced the idea and even participated in the circles himself. He found it hard to imagine that the kids would ever trust him, but he was open with them, acknowledging that he had made mistakes in his life. Slowly, he said, the teenagers began to open up too. “A lot of times they felt they had done so much harm in their lives that they weren’t deserving of support,” Captain St. Fort said. “We had to challenge that. I told them, ‘You deserve it.’”Two of the participants, Dorian Garrett, 18, and Kareem Holder, 20, now volunteer as community organizers. One recent afternoon, they met with Captain St. Fort and Ms. Rachlin, along with representatives of the Public Advocate’s Office, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and other groups in the basement of a public library, where they were leading an effort to plan a back-to-school event for younger kids in their neighborhood. They’d both gotten steady jobs through the program, and neither had been arrested since the sessions began.They’d never met Mr. Williams, but Ms. Rachlin and Captain St. Fort had told them all about the guy with the scar they’d seen on TV — how he made people feel like they mattered, like somebody cared. “That’s something that I definitely want to do,” Mr. Garrett said, “because the stuff that I experienced, I don’t want that for the younger generation.” He wanted those kids to know something. “I’m here, and they are loved.”Mr. Williams at a voter registration in Brooklyn in 2020. “We are all broken,” he wrote in his memoir. “And people find it astonishing to see the inside made so visible.”Sue Kwon More
- in Theater
Ukrainian Children Bring a Play From a Bomb Shelter to Brooklyn
The group recently arrived in New York to perform “Mom on Skype,” first staged in April in Lviv, at the Irondale Center this weekend.In a converted Sunday school space in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn on Monday, eight children, who recently arrived from Ukraine, gathered on a pair of risers and broke into song.Hanna Oneshchak, 12, on the accordion, accompanied the other seven as they sang a Ukrainian folk song, “Ta nema toho Mykyty,” about a man who decides to leave the country to seek better work, but then looks to the mountains and, struck by their beauty, changes his mind.“Whatever the grief we have,” they sang in Ukrainian, “I won’t go to the American land.”The children, students at the School of Open-Minded Kids Studio Theater in Lviv, were rehearsing the song ahead of two weekend performances of the play “Mama Po Skaipu” (“Mom on Skype”) at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn. This will be the American premiere of the 80-minute show, being presented on Saturday and Sunday night.“We share our emotions with Americans,” Anastasiia Mysiuha, 14, said of the group’s play.Calla Kessler for The New York Times“We share our emotions with Americans,” Anastasiia Mysiuha, 14, said in English. And, she said, she hopes that audience members will “better understand what’s happening in Ukraine.”The show, which will be performed in Ukrainian with English subtitles, is a series of seven monologues about family separation told from the perspective of children. Written by contemporary writers from Lviv, the true stories were inspired by the mass exodus from Ukraine in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. At that time, many men and women went to other countries to work so they could provide for their families back home.“Mom on Skype” was first staged in a warehouse-turned-bomb shelter in Lviv, in western Ukraine, in April, just two months after the Russian invasion began. There it was directed by an arts teacher turned active-duty Ukrainian soldier, Oleg Oneshchak, who is the father of two of the children in the play: Hanna and Oleksii, 7. It was one of the few cultural events to take place in Ukraine at that time.“Lots of people were crying when we did it in Ukraine,” said Khrystyna Hniedko, 14, one of the performers.Now, the children, ages 7 to 14, are performing for audiences in Brooklyn this weekend.The idea for the visit came about when Jim Niesen, artistic director of the Irondale Center, the home of the nonprofit Irondale Ensemble Project theater company, saw a photo essay in The New York Times in late April about the performance in Ukraine.“I was so inspired by them,” Niesen said in an interview at the theater this week. “There was this horrific war going on, and here they were, doing a play.”He and the theater’s executive director, Terry Greiss, tracked down Oneshchak on Facebook Messenger and proposed an idea: Would he and the children consider bringing the show to Brooklyn?The students, from left: Sofiia Goy, Marharyta Kuzma, Khrystyna Hniedko, Anastasiia Mysiuha (foreground center), Nikol Bodiuk, Valeriia Khozhempa, and the siblings Hanna Oneshchak and Oleksii Oneshchak (seated).Calla Kessler for The New York TimesOneshchak, the children and their families were all enthusiastic about the idea, and Greiss and the team at Irondale began raising money to pay for travel and accommodation costs — the total bill for the monthlong stay for the eight children and their three chaperones, which will also take them to Connecticut and Massachusetts, is around $40,000, he said. (Oleg Oneshchak wasn’t able to make the trip, but his wife, Mariia Oneshchak, who is also an actor and educator at the theater program, was.)A majority of the group’s meals have been donated, and many of them are staying in the homes of Irondale board members and others. The offices of Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries also helped the group book visa appointments, which are difficult to secure because so many people are trying to leave Ukraine, ahead of their arrival on July 22.The generosity of other donors meant that the itinerary for the trip quickly ballooned to include a weeklong performing arts summer camp in Connecticut, where the children taught American campers three Ukrainian folk songs; an outing to see “The Lion King” on Broadway; visits to the Guggenheim Museum and Coney Island; a Russ & Daughters bagel factory tour; and a private tour of the Statue of Liberty.When we spoke at Monday’s rehearsal, Valeriia Khozhempa, 12, said she had been immediately struck by one thing: the absence of air-raid sirens.“It’s a really beautiful life,” she said. “In Ukraine, there are so many air alarms.”There was also a humorous attribute, Khrystyna said: American politeness. “People always say ‘Sorry’ and ‘Excuse me,’” she said. “It’s surprising because everyone is really polite.”Hanna Oneshchak, left, and Nikol Bodiuk in Brooklyn.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesThe children began working on the show in January before being forced to halt rehearsals when Russia invaded Ukraine. Even though the play was originally about stories from the 1990s, families are being separated again because men are fighting in the war. (Most Ukrainian men ages 18 to 60 — of conscription age — are not allowed to leave the country.)The theme of each of the show’s monologues is that parents do not realize how detrimental their decisions, even if financially prudent, can be to their children’s happiness. “Money can never compensate you for losing your connection to the people you love,” a character says in one of the stories, titled “Through the Eyes of Children.”All of the children are anxious about whether American audience members will understand their message, because of the language barrier and having to read subtitles.“I know it will be hard,” Anastasiia said. “But if they will come, I hope they will try to understand.”All of the proceeds from this weekend’s shows — as well as performances in Hartford, Conn., and Boston next week — will go toward a fighter jet that the group hopes to help purchase for the Ukrainian military. (A used jet costs approximately $1 million, Oleg Oneshchak said.)Hanna Oneshchak, who sings a patriotic Ukrainian song she wrote, said she hoped the audience would see not just the play, but the underlying message about the war that the performers embody.“The world sees this like a film,” she said. “I want them to remember us.” More
- in Theater
Review: In ‘Bottom of the Ocean,’ a Deep Dive Into the Soul
Themes of change, death and rebirth abound in this peculiar production, a triumph of style and low-budget ingenuity.A spa day, a sound bath, a moving meditation and an initiation into strange and tentacled rites, “Bottom of the Ocean,” an immersive experience staged in a semifinished Brooklyn basement, ranks as the weirdest show in town right now, in a town that doesn’t lack for weird. How odd is it? Show me another work that hides baby octopuses (yes, OK, fake baby octopuses) in its communal bathroom.“Bottom of the Ocean” is the third production, following “Houseworld” and “Whisperlodge,” from Andrew Hoepfner, who runs a newish company, called Houseworld Immersive, dedicated to participatory theater. I had missed the two earlier shows, but over the last month or so, a couple of friends had recommended “Bottom of the Ocean” and I had heard it mentioned in conversation. Booking a ticket began to feel a little like destiny. And there are worse Tuesday-night fates than being delivered to the basement door of a 19th-century church across the street from a smoke and vape shop. Knock at the appointed time and a small window will open. Speak the password and a man in elaborate robes will play a xylophone, welcoming you into new worlds.Undersea motif: An installation of baby octopuses in a bathroom at “Bottom of the Ocean.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesI can’t really tell you what “Bottom of the Ocean” — which you can experience singly, doubly or in a group of five — is about. Probably I shouldn’t. Immersion depends on surprise, on not knowing what you will encounter around the next corner. More abstract than immersive hits like “Sleep No More” or “Then She Fell,” “Bottom of the Ocean” dilates, broadly, on themes of change, death and rebirth. There is often an undersea motif, though that evaporates in certain rooms.The show borrows, ecumenically, from ancient rites (the Eleusinian Mysteries seem to be a particular point of inspiration) and New Age practices. It invents some rituals outright. At one point I may have worshiped a jellyfish.Throughout, the performance insists on radical intimacy. During the preshow, you will be given a safe word that you can utter if touch is not your thing, though the touch provided is gentle and respectful and never delivered without consent. But not all intimacy is physical. The three actors (Hoepfner, Chia Kwa and Naja Newell on the night I attended) play characters, but you play only yourself. And in the course of the performance you will be asked to offer up your own regrets, desires and prayers.I am unaccustomed to making disclosures like these to strangers. I barely make them to my therapist. So if you pride yourself on privacy and personal boundaries, the show may induce some very squirmy feelings. (Maybe that squirminess is appropriate for a show with so many cephalopods.) Those, like me, with lousy night vision, should proceed with caution. The stairs are steep. And those, again like me, who don’t love to sing in public — well, do your warm-ups.Chia Kwa appears in a show that “privileges interiority and reflection over action, sending each participant on a private journey toward something like peace,” our critic writes.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesI have sometimes thought about the politics of immersive theater, what it means to prefer individual experience over communal joining. And I thought of it again a few times during “Bottom of the Ocean,” at least when I wasn’t thinking of the jellyfish or whether the fire burning on the salver was maybe a little high or how to locate the emergency exit in the dark. But the aims of “Bottom of the Ocean” are strictly apolitical. The show instead privileges interiority and reflection over action, sending each participant on a private journey toward something like peace.Personally, the depths of my soul aren’t my favorite destination, but there is so much to enjoy along the way. Only two designers are credited — Laura Borys, who created the hallucinatory costumes, and the technical designer Howard Rigberg — but “Bottom of the Ocean” is a triumph of style and low-budget ingenuity, achieved through the simplest means: balloons, beans, wax, water. In the fewest square feet, it provides a sensory deluge. Each new room reveals a strange and distinctive environment.If I sometimes found the closeness uncomfortable (the closeness and the singing), discomfort is the trade-off for two hours spent in what can feel like a lucid dream. At the end I emerged, from one sort of warm, wet dark into another. My aura, if I had one, was definitively cleansed.Bottom of the OceanAt Gymnopedie, Brooklyn; boto.nyc. Running time: 2 hours. More
