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      Hitting the Right Notes When Setting History to Song

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      In the wake of “Hamilton”-mania, critics, creators and historians debate how stage musicals since balance the complexities of the past and the politics of the present. A lot of history is happening in American musical theater right now. (Sorry, last “Hamilton” joke, we promise.) On Broadway, “Paradise Square,” which was just nominated for 10 Tony Awards, tells the story of a mixed Irish and Black community in Lower Manhattan in the 1860s that’s torn apart by the Civil War draft riots. Downtown, at the Public Theater, the sold-out “Suffs” depicts the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment.And coming to Broadway in September (now in previews in Cambridge, Mass.), Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page’s revival of “1776” revisits the debate over the Declaration of Independence, with a cast of women, nonbinary and trans actors as the founding “fathers.”This is American history with a capital H — shows that aim to illuminate who we are, who we were, who we want to be. Those questions have only gotten more complicated in the years since 2015, when “Hamilton” took the culture by storm. We’ve been through two elections (and an insurrection), a pandemic, and a broad reckoning on race and racism, including in American theater. All this has changed how we see — and stage — the past.We asked The New York Times critics Jesse Green and Maya Phillips to discuss the phenomenon alongside Paulus, a 2013 Tony winner; Claire Bond Potter, a professor of history at the New School and co-editor of the essay collection “Historians on Hamilton”; and Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a professor of history at Rutgers University and a co-executive producer of HBO’s “The Gilded Age.” Jennifer Schuessler, who covers intellectual life for the Times (and wrote about the creation of “Suffs”), led the conversation. Edited excerpts follow.During its development, “Suffs” came to explore how Black women were marginalized in the movement for women’s suffrage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJENNIFER SCHUESSLER What strikes you all about the ways American history is being depicted and invoked onstage right now? Is something new happening?JESSE GREEN Theater, particularly musical theater, has often abetted the distortion and flat-out erasure of inconvenient histories. Now it’s trying to do a better job. That’s a good thing. But you can’t fix the past with broken shows. History may be dramatic but it isn’t necessarily theatrical — and that’s the pitfall. How do you make facts sing?MAYA PHILLIPS There is built-in tension: does one prioritize the narrative of the past or the politics of the present? I’m not saying these necessarily have to be in opposition, but it’s a delicate balance. You don’t want a show with a story that feels squeezed into the frame of our present in a way that’s too obvious or didactic, which was a problem with both “Suffs” and “Paradise Square.”DIANE PAULUS Artists, especially right now, are interested in shifting the gaze — looking to tell stories that need to be told, stories that have not had their due. I also think producers, and we can’t forget that it is the producers who determine what gets on stage, are looking to play their role in how to expand the stories that audiences are exposed to.SCHUESSLER OK, historians: Do you see this as an exciting moment? A frustrating one?CLARE BOND POTTER I think Americans are hungrier for historical explanations, in part because so many historically unprecedented things have occurred in the past 15 years. The first Black president, and the failure to elect the first woman president — twice! Then the Trump presidency, which exploded the idea of what politics is. Americans are digging into the past to find answers for questions about why politics seems to be both producing radically new dynamics — and reproducing old ones.ERICA ARMSTRONG DUNBAR It’s more than political — it’s creative and it responds to the feelings and needs of the public. It reminds me of the moment that [the television mini-series] “Roots” first aired, in 1977. The history wasn’t perfect, and it was overdramatized, but it was new and important and people, Black people in particular, were immediately invested in this new kind of storytelling. The same thing is happening with musical theater.GREEN The opportunities are huge and the stakes are high; popular history has a way of replacing the real kind. (Check out “The King and I,” a gorgeously crafted and hugely influential show that’s almost completely untrue.) Which is why representation is so important. Erica, you work on “The Gilded Age,” which I feel sure is providing, for white people anyway, the first we’ve really heard about the Black middle class of that era, a story somehow omitted from our education and consciousness. But I think you’re saying that it’s not just about “fixing” history but also about artists finding stories that compel them.DUNBAR Exactly! I don’t think any of us go to the theater for a history lesson. We want to be entertained, we want to fall in love, be angry, and learn a bit if we can.SCHUESSLER Wow, a historian saying we don’t go to the theater for a history lesson — you’re really playing against type, Erica!Diane, what you would say from the perspective of an artist? What appealed to you about reviving “1776” — a very familiar history with a very familiar set of (white, male) characters. And how do you see the show as speaking to the present?Crystal Lucas-Perry, center, as John Adams with castmates in a new revival of the musical “1776” that features women, trans and nonbinary actors.Evan Zimmerman for Murphy MadePAULUS I really agree that audiences are interested in looking back to our history to understand the present moment. The theater is uniquely positioned to do this in a way that taps into our imaginations, into empathy, and what I love about the theater is that it can only happen in the presence of an audience. In “1776,” I have been excited to build this production with my co-director and choreographer, Jeffrey L. Page, in a way that actively poses questions to the audience: How can we hold history as a predicament, versus an affirming myth?SCHUESSLER Can you say a little bit about your and Jeffrey’s broader intentions in doing this show with a diverse cast of women, nonbinary and trans actors? Why is that gender-flip interesting to you?PAULUS When taking on a revival, I am always interested in how to make the production speak to a contemporary audience, while respecting the authors’ original intentions. “1776” was written in the late ’60s, during the civil rights movement and at the height of the Vietnam War. There is a critique of our country built into the bones of this musical. Our casting bridges the realities of the past and the present, from who was excluded from Independence Hall to an aspirational vision of an inclusive society.The “1776” revival is co-directed by Diane Paulus, right, and Jeffrey L. Page, who is also the show’s choreographer.Matthew MurphySCHUESSLER This brings up the question of how to balance the historical record with the needs of the present. It’s different with a show like “1776,” where everyone already knows the basic story, versus shows like “Suffs” and “Paradise Square,” where many people will not know the history at all. How should shows confront the ugliest, messiest realities of the past, versus giving us a more uplifting version?POTTER It’s important to emphasize that theater — go back to Shakespeare — has never been historically accurate. It always speaks to questions of the moment. But when we say stories are not well known, I would say the story of the Draft Riots is well known to Black Americans. And the depiction in “Paradise Square” — which ends with a multiracial community coming back together — is emphatically not what occurred. True, “Paradise Square” also presents this moment as a “future yet to be realized” — a turning point where people have choices, and that is an important story to tell about racial division in this country. But Kaitlyn Greenidge’s recent novel “Libertie” frames this event differently, as a 19th century 9/11, where Black New Yorkers flee to Brooklyn, traumatized and covered with ash, and are taken in by the Black residents of Weeksville. Greenidge’s account is also fiction, but better history, in that it conveys what a catastrophe this was for African Americans in New York City.SCHUESSLER Erica, your scholarship has been about free Black women in the urban North before the Civil War. What do you think about the history in “Paradise Square”?Joaquina Kalukango, center, plays a bar owner with a key role in “Paradise Square,” a storytelling choice one historian praises as “powerful.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDUNBAR I think “Paradise Square” attempted to tell the story of trauma and resistance, and strength within the context of 19th century history. Was it completely accurate? Probably not, and I’m not sure that any show always gets the history right. But once again, it’s about more than facts and figures. It’s about moving people into the center of narratives who have never been there for the public to see. To center a story about the draft riots around a Black woman is fresh, and powerful.PAULUS I completely agree, Erica. In “1776,” some of the most moving parts of the musical are the scenes with the courier — not a founding father. Franklin, Jefferson and Adams are the famous historical characters. The courier, who delivers the dispatches from the battlefield to the Continental Congress, is literally nameless. But this character, who has the least power in the room, gets one of the most powerful songs — “Momma, Look Sharp.”SCHUESSLER Jesse, you were less than enthusiastic about “Paradise Square.” And Maya, I gather you felt similarly. How well do you think that recentering worked?GREEN As an approach, I’m all for what we’re calling recentering. The problem with “Paradise Square” isn’t the perspective from which it is told, but that in attempting to pile the whole history of a community (even the made-up parts) onto a few fictional figures who represent elements of the conflict, the authors created stick people who couldn’t bear the burden. This leaves you with the false impression, as musicals by nature tend to, that there’s one hero and one villain. Only because Joaquina Kalukango was so phenomenal in the leading role was anything richer conveyed. There’s history, and then there’s craft.PHILLIPS Well-put, Jesse. The question of scope is always a tricky one to navigate in these history shows — how large is our lens? In my review of “Suffs,” I argued that a show can’t be everything to everyone; an attempt to do that will end up sacrificing story and character.SCHUESSLER “Suffs” drew a lot of comparisons with “Hamilton,” but there was something fundamentally different about it, starting with its title. It was about a movement, not an individual — which may be truer to history, but also a lot harder to dramatize. Claire, what did you think of how “Suffs” handled the history?POTTER Much like “Hamilton,” “Suffs” tended to reduce both the successes and the flaws of the campaign for the 19th amendment to the personality of one person, Alice Paul. And while I appreciated the elevation of Paul, Ida B. Wells, and others to the status of male “founders,” the risk is simply refocusing on personalities rather than some of the movement’s broader themes: for example, its racist dynamics, tactical differences and generational divides.I also want to speak to Jesse’s point about the reductionism of “Paradise Square.” He’s right, but then the musical also, in a way, addresses the question of contemporary populism: are poor white people entirely to blame when they lash out at women, people of color and the state? How are anti-democratic dynamics promoted and provoked by others — in the case of “Paradise Square,” a Copperhead politician [as those northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War and supported a negotiated peace with the South were called]?SCHUESSLER Suggesting the draft riots (or the Civil War itself!) were driven mainly by the machinations of elite capital is … a strange interpretation. But I think it also connects with the show’s efforts to resonate with today’s politics (and the way people view America’s recent wars). More broadly, do these shows fall into a trap of trying to provide a comfortable, “relatable” place for the audience (especially the white audience)? That was one of the criticisms of “Hamilton” from historians, including some who were huge fans: that by exaggerating (some might say inventing) his credentials as an abolitionist, the show gave us a founding father it was “safe” to like.GREEN The audience can handle the dissonance! It’s white authors’ comfort that seems to be at stake. They come off as terrified of failing to check off every box on the sensitivity list. That’s no way to make a musical.SCHUESSLER When I interviewed the creators of “Suffs,” they talked about how the events of 2020 — the George Floyd protests, and the roiling conversation around the We See You White American Theater letter — prompted a big conversation among the company. They ended up expanding the role of Ida B. Wells, along with other changes. Diane, was there a similar conversation among the “1776” team?PAULUS The process of making theater feels very different to me now. We are centering antiracism as a core value, we make community agreements as a collective across the entire company for how we want to exist together. All of this is a process we are learning from every day.SCHUESSLER Erica, you started working on “The Gilded Age” back in 2019. How has the summer of 2020 affected things?Louisa Jacobson and Denee Benton, right, in the HBO series “The Gilded Age,” which includes a storyline about the Black middle class.Alison Cohen Rosa/HBODUNBAR I’d like to circle back quickly to Jesse’s comment. Jesse mentioned “terrified white authors” or something like that — and how fear has pushed creatives to think more about sensitivity. Well, fear can be a great motivator! And sometimes, it’s for the best. When I began consulting with “The Gilded Age” I was working with an entirely white creative team. A great team, but entirely white and male. There must be diversity in the creative process to produce authentic and powerful entertainment. While there were conversations before the summer of 2020, I believe that moment moved the needle. While I am infuriated that it takes the murder of Black people to move the needle, well, that’s what happened. Because of the changes and additions, we produced a better show.POTTER I’d like to return to the topic of flattering the audience: It is something theater producers must do, to some extent, and it’s something good historians can’t do — and look at the outcomes when we don’t! The massive attack on the 1619 Project is in part a massive refusal of a past that challenges both progressive and patriotic narratives held dear by many white Americans.What even flawed shows like “Suffs” and “Paradise Square” can do, much like historical fiction, is get people interested enough to do their own research and reading. History is a series of choices. People are self-interested, stubborn, brilliant, irritating — they don’t always make the right ones. And that is an important historical dynamic to understand.GREEN True sensitivity comes from deep knowledge and empathy. It welcomes the audience to accept complexity so that characters aren’t just saints or signposts. I’m thinking especially of Arthur Scott, the hard-to-like father of the Black heroine in “The Gilded Age.” What I find unhelpful is signaling one’s sensitivity so vividly that it’s the only thing the audience can see. In a way it defeats the purpose of recentering the narrative.DUNBAR Ultimately, this is about authentic storytelling (which if it’s a period piece must rely on accurate history). When done correctly, it doesn’t feel two-dimensional and we are able to see the complexity of characters.SCHUESSLER I wonder if this isn’t easier in long-form television, or even in straight plays, than in musicals. Maya, you mentioned the other day that you thought “Wedding Band,” the new (old!) play by Alice Childress that recently ended a run in New York, may be a better depiction of history than some of these capital-H History shows. Can you say more?PHILLIPS Writing in the early 1960s, Childress uses a few fictional relationships to tell the story of race in America at the time. It’s an interracial love story that takes place in 1918 South Carolina, and we find Black people — especially Black women — of different means and situations. It’s not just about the rift between whites and Blacks but also the class divides among Blacks. The play isn’t trying to be a history lesson; history is simply happening in and around the story and the characters. And the play doesn’t need to prove to us that it’s relevant. We can read our present racial politics into it.SCHUESSLER “History is happening around the story”: I love that. We talk about “living through history” when something big happens, but we’re always living through history.Maya’s recommendation of “Wedding Band” leads me to ask all of you to speak to a moment of dramatized history — either a show/movie/whatever — that you really loved?POTTER I am practically the only person I know who is digging Showtime’s “The First Lady.”SCHUESSLER OMG! You are canceled.DUNBAR Ha!POTTER I know! But I think it demonstrates the limits and possibilities of gender at different moments in time, but also the ways that First Ladies stretched the limits of what it meant to be a woman in politics at each moment.DUNBAR I’m going to be very liberal with the term dramatized history — meaning history is something that happened yesterday. Sooo …. I think one of the most incredible shows on television right now is “Atlanta.” While it is a show that takes place today (or for this answer, yesterday) it is fresh, brave, and really creative in the ways that it engages everyday life for Black people.PAULUS I recently rewatched [the 2018 film] “The Favourite,” which I think did a brilliant job of taking Queen Anne’s reign and making that history feel raw and immediate. For more recent “history,” I thought [the Hulu mini-series] “Dopesick” was devastating in its examination of the opioid crisis.GREEN The musical that best reframed history for modern audiences this season was “Six” — the “Tudors Got Talent” competition about the women who were married to Henry VIII. The facts were right enough, the characters were hilariously contemporized and, perhaps most important, the tunes were catchy. A song always cuts deeper than a sermon. More

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      in Theater

      Susan Nussbaum, 68, Who Pressed for Disability Rights in Her Plays, Dies

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      In a wheelchair after being hit by a car in her 20s, she became an advocate for people with disabilities in her writing for the stage and as a novelist.Susan Nussbaum, a playwright and novelist whose work reflected her concern for the rights of people with disabilities, died on April 28 at her home in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. She was 68.Her sister, Karen Nussbaum, said the cause was complications of pneumonia.Ms. Nussbaum began using a wheelchair after being hit by a car at age 24 and soon became an integral part of Chicago’s burgeoning disability-rights scene.Incensed by a lack of accessibility in the city for theater people with disabilities, she wrote her own plays, starring herself and other disabled actors.“If the dominant culture was saturated with backward concepts of who we were, I would answer back with my own collection of disabled characters,” she wrote in a 2012 essay published in The Huffington Post.Ms. Nussbaum began her playwriting career with “Staring Back,” which was performed on the Second City’s E.T.C. stage in 1983. She then collaborated with Mike Ervin, a disability activist who writes a column for Progressive.org, on a series of satirical sketches about disability. Titled “The Plucky and Spunky Show,” it was presented at the Remains Theater.The first reading of her acerbic comic play “Mishuganismo” was in 1992 in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune, in an article about that reading, called it “a mad-sad-glad whirl of politics, activism, love, need, sex and other items.”Directed by her father, Mike Nussbaum, an actor, and based on her own letters, the play took its title from a term that one of Ms. Nussbaum’s friends coined, meaning “a syndrome when a Jewish woman goes crazy for a Latin guy.” The play was later published in the 1997 anthology “Staring Back: The Disability Experience From the Inside Out.”Her last major play, “No One as Nasty,” which documented the relationship between a disabled woman and her paid caretaker, was performed in 2000 at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago.As a member of the Chicago-based disability rights organization Access Living, Ms. Nussbaum campaigned to make theaters more accessible to wheelchair users and participated in other protests, including efforts to make public transit in the city accessible.After decades of work in theater, she turned to fiction. Her novel “Good Kings Bad Kings,” which follows workers and residents in a Chicago care institution for people with disabilities, earned acclaim for its candor and sensitivity and won the 2012 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.The book’s title came from reporting in The New York Times about Jonathan Carey, an autistic boy who was killed by an employee of the Oswald D. Heck Developmental Center, near Albany, where Jonathan was living. “I could be a good king or a bad king,” the man told the boy as he asphyxiated him, according to court documents.That line stuck with Ms. Nussbaum, she said in a 2013 interview with the website Bitch Media. “It became the title because it reminded me how, when it comes to kids, the adults have all the power. And when the adult in question has no emotional connection to the child, and the child’s welfare is turned over to that adult — as is the case in institutions — terrible things can happen.”She continued: “The disabled characters we’re presented with usually fit one or more of the following stereotypes: victim, villain, saint, monster. The fate of the disabled character is usually miraculous cure, death or institutionalization.”In writing the novel, as in her other work, Ms. Nussbaum said, “It was really important to me to give disabled characters — more than one — their own voices, and the agency to represent themselves and their own perspective on what happens.”Susan Ruth Nussbaum was born on Dec. 2, 1953, in Chicago to Mike and Annette (Brenner) Nussbaum. Her mother worked in public relations. She grew up in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, and attended Highland Park High School, graduating in 1972.Interested in theater from a young age after running lines with her father, she began writing plays in high school. After graduating, she took drama classes at the Goodman School of Drama (now The Theatre School at DePaul University) in Chicago.She was on her way to an acting class when she was struck by a car. She spent seven months in the hospital.She then navigated through life as a wheelchair user, becoming angry at the lack of accessibility. At one job, as she recounted in a 2013 Psychology Today article, the workplace did not have accessible bathrooms. Finding no ramps on public transportation, she and other wheelchair users began taking an ambulance to and from work. These experiences galvanized her to join Access Living and begin writing plays.Her activism extended outside Chicago as well. A longtime leftist, Ms. Nussbaum visited Nicaragua and Cuba as a member of coalitions on disability rights. Later in life she founded Empowered Fe Fes, a Chicago organization for disabled young women seeking to explore their sexuality.In addition to her sister, she is survived by her father; a brother, Jacob Nussbaum; and a daughter, Taina Rodriguez. More

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      in Music

      Mahmood and Blanco’s Eurovision Song Shows Italy’s L.G.B.T.Q. Progress

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      The love song, and its video showing the artist Mahmood embracing another man, has been well received in a nation with a spotty history on L.G.B.T.Q. rights.MILAN — In February, the artists Mahmood and Blanco turned to each other onstage at Italy’s national song competition and sang, “I’d like to love you, but I’m always wrong.” It was the refrain of “Brividi” (translated as “Chills”), a song about the vulnerability of love, as experienced by all people — regardless of gender, identity or sexuality.When the song won at that competition, the Sanremo contest, and became Italy’s entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, the unexpected happened: There wasn’t much pushback.The two after winning the Sanremo music contest in Italy in February.Ettore Ferrari/EPA, via ShutterstockThere was some grumbling from a socially conservative politician about what he called L.G.B.T. “domination” at the contest, and disdain that Mahmood performed one evening wearing a garter, but Alessandro Mahmoud, known as Mahmood, had been expecting a bigger response, he said in a recent interview.When the musician — who was born in Italy to an Italian mother and an Egyptian father — won the national song contest in 2019, anti-immigration comments followed. But this year, even those polemics normally trumpeted by conservative politicians did not flare up. The 29-year-old artist saw the muted criticism for “Brividi” as a sign that “something has happened in Italian society.”Italy has long been influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, which for generations considered homosexuality as a taboo topic to be either ignored or shunned. In a 2005 text approved by Benedict XVI, who was pope at the time, homosexuality was described as “not a sin” but essentially “an intrinsic moral evil.”L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Italy have advanced after decades of campaigning, but some legal challenges remain. Same-sex civil unions were legalized in 2016, years after other European countries, but same-sex marriage is not legal, nor can someone in a same-sex civil union legally adopt his or her partner’s biological child.On Being Transgender in AmericaPhalloplasty: The surgery, used to construct a penis, has grown more popular among transgender men. But with a steep rate of complications, it remains a controversial procedure.Elite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.Transgender Youth: A photographer documented the lives of transgender youth. She shared some thoughts on what she saw.Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.So when two men sang a love song, clearly engaging with each other, as part of a cherished national competition, it was a first. The track “normalizes what should have always been normal,” Mahmood said.The song’s video more explicitly shows Mahmood tenderly embracing a man, while Blanco sings to a woman. A video of the song on Mahmood’s official YouTube page has been viewed more than 55 million times.Italian society’s approach to sexuality is changing. “Sexual orientation no longer has any importance, nor is it important to label oneself anymore,” said Aldo Cazzullo, a columnist in the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera. In the 1950s and 1960s, many gay people in Italy were not open about their sexuality, Cazzullo said. This was followed by an era of coming out and empowerment, and “now there’s no longer the need to say anything,” he said. He pointed out that two of Italy’s southern regions had voted to elect gay men as regional presidents.Mahmood said that although his songs speak volumes about who he is, he doesn’t define his sexuality: “It makes no sense to make distinctions anymore.”Blanco, the stage name of Riccardo Fabbriconi, 19, said that his “generation is much more open” and that people his age no longer thought in terms of gender identity. In just two years, he has gone from posting videos “singing in my underwear in my bedroom,” he said, to a multicity Italian summer tour that sold out in 72 hours.And Blanco said he also saw Italy as being “more open in general — I hope.”A recent headline in the newspaper La Stampa in Turin captured this sentiment: “Blanco, son of the fluid century, his generation will save us.”“My generation is much more open,” said Blanco, 19, left. Mahmood, 29, says he doesn’t define his sexuality.Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York TimesOn Tuesday evening, the Italian hosts for the Eurovision Song Contest semifinal broadcast included Cristiano Malgioglio, a songwriter and popular television personality also known for his outlandish couture, who riffed on his love life. Speaking of the five countries that automatically get into the final — Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Britain — he quipped, “I have a boyfriend in every nation.” He was a host last year, too.Eurovision has always “had a large L.G.B.T.Q. element in its fandom,” said Catherine Baker, a historian at the University of Hull who has written about the competition. After significant rulings by the European Court of Human Rights in the late 1990s and the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, which banned discrimination against people on the grounds of sexual orientation, “Europe became associated with the idea of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and symbolically that had an impact on Eurovision, even if it wasn’t organized by the European Union,” Baker said.The competition has also long been a trailblazer when it comes to L.G.B.T.Q. representation onstage, featuring artists like Iceland’s Paul Oscar, Israel’s Dana International and Finland’s Saara Aalto over the years.L.G.B.T.Q. people face openly hostile environments in several European countries, including Poland, Hungary and Russia. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the powerful head of the Russian Orthodox Church, recently justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by claiming that it was part of a struggle against ideals imposed by liberal foreigners that included gay pride parades.Franco Grillini, a prominent Italian L.G.B.T.Q. rights activist, said a song like “Brividi” would once have been “unimaginable” at a festival that normally has Italians glued to their television screens.In the past, homosexuality could also hurt a musical career in Italy, he said, citing the case of Umberto Bindi, a talented, gay singer-songwriter who caused a scandal in Sanremo in 1961 by wearing a pinkie ring (then a presumed sign of homosexuality). He never got the recognition he deserved because “he was brutally discriminated” against, Grillini said.But democracies have a way of righting wrongs, according to Angelo Pezzana, another L.G.B.T.Q. rights activist. “It’s always been like this. Remember that not a century ago, women went to jail for the right to vote,” he said. In Italy, women only got the right to vote in 1945. The Mahmood-Blanco duet “was a sign that things had changed in a positive way,” he said.The track “normalizes what should have always been normal,” Mahmood said of the Eurovision song.Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York TimesThat said, Italy’s record on equal rights for L.G.B.T.Q. people remains spotty. Apart from not having fair representation when it comes to marriage and adoption, in October, the Senate rejected a bill meant to make violence against L.G.B.T.Q. people a hate crime, a label that would have meant harsher penalties. Critics blamed the lack of consensus both on political bickering as well as on Vatican interference, given that a few months earlier the Vatican had openly opposed the bill, saying it infringed upon guaranteed religious liberties.“Italy is still profoundly linked to the Vatican, which conditions Parliament,” said Grillini, who was a lawmaker for seven years.Even under Pope Francis, the message has been mixed. Shortly after his election in 2013, Francis said, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” and he has continued to encourage the church to be more welcoming toward the L.G.B.T.Q. faithful. But since then, the Vatican has rejected the notion that gender identity can be fluid, and it has reaffirmed its opposition to same-sex marriage.But at least at the Sanremo contest, old prejudices didn’t seem to apply.“All my songs speak of my way of experiencing love and sex,” Mahmood said. “The least an artist can do is give an example.” More

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      in Television

      Brownface in Hong Kong TV Show Draws Outrage and Shrugs

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      The TV show “Barrack O’Karma 1968” fueled debate online. To many Filipinos, it was about racism and classism. Other viewers jumped to the actress’s defense.HONG KONG — The Hong Kong supernatural anthology TV series has an eye-catching name, “Barrack O’Karma 1968,” and an eyebrow-raising plot.A Filipino domestic worker, navigating deceit, discrimination and accusations of voodoo, is transformed by her seemingly well-intentioned employers into a Cantonese-speaking surrogate daughter.The TVB series not only chose a Chinese Canadian actress, Franchesca Wong, as the main character for a two-episode subplot. It also cast her in brownface. On the show, her skin grows lighter and she gains a new fluency in the dominant language of the city.After the first episode aired on April 12 and backstage footage emerged of Ms. Wong affecting a singsong accent — presumably meant to be Filipino — as she brushed dark makeup onto her legs, some viewers said they could not believe their 21st-century eyes.“I was really shocked,” said Izzy Jose, 27, a Filipino performer and educator in Hong Kong. “That morphed into feeling really angry and morphed further into feeling disappointed.”The footage quickly became a flash point of debate. To many Filipinos in Hong Kong, it was a twinned mockery — racism and classism. To some actors, it was an all-too-familiar dehumanizing and undignified representation, a reminder that minority performers are often locked out of roles that purport to portray people like them. To others, the brownface portrayal was another example of colorism rearing its ugly head.But another strain of reaction began bubbling up. Many viewers of the show — which first aired in 2019 and which also has elements of romance and drama — jumped to its defense. Chinese-language news media lauded Ms. Wong’s performance and her efforts at a Filipino accent. Others declared it a matter of creative autonomy. Some accused critics of crying racism without understanding the full context of the plot, which, they argued, portrays Ms. Wong’s character as a victim.It all boiled down to a clapback that asked: What’s the big deal?TVB defended Ms. Wong in a statement saying she had “successfully portrayed her character” with “professional performing techniques and sophisticated handling of role-playing.” Franchesca Wong, who wore brownface in the TVB show, apologized on social media last week.TVBEric Tsang, an actor and general manager of TVB, further denied that racism played any part in the show and insisted that brownface was crucial to the plot.“Actually the main character is Filipino, and then she turns pale,” Mr. Tsang told reporters at a TVB event last week. “That’s the tricky part,” he added. “You can’t find a Filipino to paint white, so you can only paint an artist black first, so that she can turn pale again. If we’re making movies about aliens, and we can’t find an alien to the play the part, are we discriminating against aliens? This is what the plot calls for.” TVB’s publicists said that Mr. Tsang was unavailable for comment.Using brownface in this way for a plotline and assuming that all Filipinos are a certain color perpetuate odious stereotypes, critics say.“It essentially is an exercise of privilege,” Christine Vicera, a Filipino filmmaker and researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in an interview. “Franchesca, at the end of the filming, is able to remove the brown skin. Whereas, Filipinos or Southeast Asians or South Asians in Hong Kong, we don’t have that privilege of removing our skin color.”Jan Gube, an assistant professor at the Education University of Hong Kong who studies multicultural education and diversity, said that many local viewers lacked the historical context to understand why brownface is offensive. Professor Gube said that most students in Hong Kong’s public schools do not grow up interacting with peers who look different from them. Local schools did not teach cultural respect — let alone the context for brownface — in an in-depth way, he said.“You’ll see a lot of comments from social media and local media saying that the actress is being faithful to her role,” he said. “Not a lot of people are looking at it from a cultural point of view, which means they may not necessarily be aware that donning that kind of makeup means something else to other people,” he added.Brownface (and yellowface — imitations of brown and Asian people by light-skinned performers) evolved from the racist vaudeville tradition of blackface, a staple of American minstrel shows in the early 1800s. Mostly white actors applied dark makeup to play mocking caricatures of Black people. With few other representations of Black people onstage — and later onscreen — blackface performances helped reinforce dehumanizing tropes.Asian countries have had a history of perpetuating colorism, in which the preference for lighter skin is imbued in cultural and social mores. Cosmetic companies have been criticized for selling skin-lightening creams. In Pakistan, the TV series “Parizaad,” about the struggles of a dark-skinned laborer, the lead actor appeared to have darkened his face to play the role, drawing criticism from some social media users. But the show was a big hit when it debuted last year.“Brownface is always wrong because it constructs a racist stereotype. The underlying racist premise of brownface is that the essence of a person is embedded in their physical features, not in their character or actions,” said Jason Petrulis, an assistant professor of global history at the Education University of Hong Kong who studies race and politics in U.S.-Asia relations.“An actor who performs in brownface is suggesting that she can portray the inner character of a Filipina domestic worker by embodying her, by mimicking her skin color or speech patterns or hair texture,” he added.About 203,000 Filipinos live in Hong Kong, forming the largest non-Chinese ethnic group in the city, according to a 2021 census. About 190,000 are domestic workers. In the past two years, as Hong Kong has doubled down on Covid restrictions, the domestic workers have been singled out for mass testing and have been slapped with fines for violating social distancing rules that often exceed their entire monthly salary.For Filipinos who find work as actors in the city, the roles are often limited to clumsy maids, gangsters or bit players in ads for cleaning products.“I’ve always felt that our ethnicity and skin color is used as props to add creative value on set,” said Ray Yumul, a 29-year-old Filipino actor and headhunter. “It’s something that needs to stop and change.”Mr. Yumul said he once responded to calls seeking a Filipino actor in a commercial, only to learn that he would be playing a germ.Ricky Chu, who leads Hong Kong’s anti-discrimination watchdog, the Equal Opportunities Commission, said brownface cannot be the sole measure in determining discriminatory behavior. The watchdog would also have to consider whether the makeup is “very exaggerated” with accompanying “speech and gestures,” he said in an interview.As for whether Ms. Wong’s affected accent in the behind-the-scenes footage constitutes offensive behavior, he said a formal complaint would have to be filed before the commission could judge. (The commission, citing confidentiality, declined to say whether it had received complaints.)Mr. Chu did say that as a viewer of the TVB show, he was more concerned by dialogue that used phrases like “all you domestic helpers” that reinforced “negative stereotypes.”TVB, a 55-year-old broadcaster known for variety shows and serial dramas, has faced boycotts from pro-democracy protesters who accuse it of a pro-China bias. It has also drawn complaints for using racial epithets in a historical drama.The latest controversy intensified after the two episodes in which Ms. Wong appeared in brownface. The broadcaster has since removed those episodes from its streaming site, saying it would review their content.Ms. Wong, who did not respond to a request for comment, apologized on social media last week, saying that she had learned that trying to “analyze, interpret and act” was only part of the job.Many of her supporters responded that she had nothing to be sorry for. More

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      One Last Takeaway From ‘The Slap’: Leave Black Women’s Hair Alone

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      Lost in the Oscars fray is the hurt inflicted when a group is denigrated for a laugh. Chris Rock, who has examined this issue in a documentary, should have known better.While the Slap Heard Round the World has been vigorously debated and dissected since Will Smith confronted Chris Rock at the Oscars, there was more to the incident than its abrupt physicality.Rock’s joke, and Jada Pinkett Smith’s resulting eyeroll, echoed even more thunderously for Black women. Her glare encapsulated the fatigue and frustration that so many of us deal with in the complex daily feat of simply wearing our hair as we like. That Chris Rock would point to a Black woman’s hair for a joke left me breathless, and I wasn’t alone.“When Black women’s hair is mocked by comedians like Rock, he ushers in the everyday forms of microaggressive hatred against Black women that normalized blatant discrimination,” Ralina Joseph, a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the director of the Center for Communication, Difference and Equity, said in an email interview.Black women’s hair has been the object of scrutiny, derision and ridicule in American society since it’s been growing out of our heads. Thanks to standards of beauty that for too long excluded us, we are arguably the largest demographic in the country whose hair is continually policed. Court cases document fights against school districts and corporations trying to govern how we can wear our hair. A segment of people who don’t live with it, in all its iterations of textures and lengths, somehow wants to dictate how and when it’s pretty, professional or unkempt.Distaste for Black hair seeps into our everyday lives: Just last month, the House of Representatives passed the CROWN Act, banning discrimination against natural hair in hiring, public housing placement and public access accommodations. Let that sink in: Exclusionary actions stemming from disdain toward our hairstyles are so pervasive, they require legislation.Nowadays, visibility and a touch of glamorization in mainstream media (I’m lookin’ at you, Beyoncé), have fostered a growing fascination with our manes — a double-edged sword. Bosses scrutinize or give it a shout-out, strangers try to paw or photograph it, friends and frenemies praise or judge it — even Tinder prospects weigh in on it.Academic studies have outlined how strongly the identity of many Black women is tied to their hair. Not having the type of hair that’s affirmed and considered “womanly” in the culture at large can dent one’s sense of self. And feeling that what’s considered a key part of womanhood needs altering to be accepted, especially from childhood, makes it hard to see one’s image as positive.The Altercation Between Will Smith and Chris RockThe Incident: The Oscars were derailed when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, who made a joke about Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.His Speech: Moments after the onstage altercation, Mr. Smith won the Oscar for best actor. Here’s what he said in his acceptance speech.The Aftermath: Mr. Smith, who the academy said refused to leave following the incident, apologized to Mr. Rock the next day after the academy denounced his actions.A Triumph Tempered: Mr. Smith owned Serena and Venus Williams’s story in “King Richard.” Then he stole their moment at the Oscars.What Is Alopecia?: Ms. Smith’s hair loss condition played a major role in the incident.Since it’s hard to separate our image from our hair, poking fun at a Black hair style is an easy way to get a laugh while devaluing Black women. Witness Jamie Foxx lampooning us as Wanda on “In Living Color” and Martin Lawrence as Sheneneh. It’s incomprehensible that a Black comic would reach for it in such a high-profile setting as the Oscars — especially a man so closely associated with a film about Black women’s hair struggles.Not only did Rock produce and narrate the 2009 documentary “Good Hair,” which brought Black hair culture to the big screen, but he created it with his own daughters in mind. In the opening, he recounts how one of his girls asked him, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?” Onscreen, he speaks to a range of women, including celebrities like Raven-Symoné, who explain that when they relaxed their hair, the goal was also about making society comfortable with them.Chris Rock in “Good Hair,” a documentary he narrated and produced.Roadside AttractionsWhile the film could have delved further into how Black women have thrived in a beauty culture (including a hair-care industry) that has rarely included them, it illuminated our struggle to audiences that may not have known one existed. It’s hard to understand how he could help bring that gem of a film to life and yet take a swipe at a Black woman’s hair. Did he so quickly forget the lessons of that film, which seemed to recognize how American society “otherizes” us and our tresses?Or, worse still, did the lessons never matter? Rock has a history of dogging not just Black women, but the entire Black community, or as Joseph calls it, “in-group punching down.”“Despite a brief ‘Good Hair’ moment. where he celebrated (and mocked) Black women, his punching down has also been broadly anti-Black woman,” she noted.Through his career, Rock has demonstrated a penchant for belittling and mischaracterizing Black women, from his ex-wife to female romantic partners in general. In a 1997 episode of “The Chris Rock Show,” he skewered Black women’s need to join the Million Woman March to his guest — Jada Pinkett Smith, a march participant.There’s another sensitive aspect to Rock’s dig at Pinkett Smith. In interviews and on her Facebook series “Red Table Talk,” she has chronicled her painful ordeal with alopecia, a condition that disproportionately affects Black women. She initially concealed her hair loss under wigs. That she decided to shave her head and reveal the reason was to be commended, not jabbed at. To be clear: Whether Rock knew of her condition or not, the joke wasn’t hurtful only because Pinkett Smith deals with alopecia (an affliction to which “Good Hair” even devotes special attention). The insult added an extra layer of hurt, especially because Black women can be harsh on ourselves about hair, amid social pressures and Eurocentric beauty standards that we’ve internalized, often to an extreme degree.Generations of Black American women recall weekend afternoons spent watching an iron comb glow like molten lava on the stove burner. We waited for our mothers to wield the hot comb like a weapon, ready to press our thicket of coils into submission to make us more culturally palatable. Even at a young age, I wondered who I was supposed to be impressing.When I was deemed old enough, I “leveled up” to chemical straighteners that would frequently blister my scalp — all for a flouncy bob I detested. “Beauty is pain,” my hairdresser would chirp as she kneaded the chemical cream into my roots and I winced. In my mid-20s, I decided beauty wasn’t worth that pain, so I chopped off most of my hair and have since maintained a very short, natural style.“When Black women’s hair features as the butt of jokes, the very real and myriad forms of multiple marginalization against Black women is erased and even justified,” Joseph noted. “It hurts.”Even though the jokes at the expense of us and our hair predate Rock, we don’t need him to lead the way in turning up the savagery of the practice, let alone on Hollywood’s biggest evening.Like the director Jane Campion’s misstep a couple weeks ago at another awards show (which, sadly, also involved the Williams sisters, one of the focuses of the Will Smith film “King Richard”), this takedown of a Black woman stings even more for having been unleashed by someone who should know better — in Rock’s case, as a Black father of daughters; in Campion’s, as a woman who’s also probably dealt with sexist professional slights. But the result each time was the same: Black women were expected to smile and take the stab.In one sense, the entire Oscars to-do, and its flurry of embarrassment and apologies, could have been avoided by choosing not to drag a Black woman down by her hair. Yet for too many and for too long, it has felt irresistible not to mess with it, mess with us.So to anyone who ever feels the urge to mock, I’ll reframe Will Smith’s warning at the show: Keep the mention of Black women’s hair out of your mouth. More

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      Using Film to Tell a Personal History of America and Race

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      With “Who We Are,” the lecturer Jeffery Robinson and the directors Emily and Sarah Kunstler follow in the tradition of documentaries that excavate our past.For over a decade, Jeffery Robinson has been telling an unvarnished history of the United States in an ever-evolving lecture presentation. His talks, now presented as part of his organization, the Who We Are Project, delve into how racism against Black people was bound up with the country’s legacy since its founding. The new documentary, “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,” captures Robinson’s eye-opening account (filmed at Town Hall in New York City) and intersperses interviews with civil rights figures and others from his travels across the country.The film, directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler, joins a lineage of documentaries that excavate race and the histories of marginalized people in America, like Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” and Ava DuVernay’s “13th.”“This is not ‘Eyes on the Prize,’” Robinson said of the new movie, which is available on major digital platforms. “But I think it is a call to us being something radically different going forward.”Reviewing “Who We Are” for The Times, Ben Kenigsberg made it a Critic’s Pick and wrote, “It’s a confrontational film, but never an alienating one.”Robinson, a criminal defense lawyer by profession, was the director of the A.C.L.U.’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality in New York, and he remembers walking past the former Cotton Exchange on the way to work. I spoke with him and the Kunstlers (whose last feature, “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” was about their father, the civil rights attorney). These are excerpts from our interview.“Who We Are” partly aims to chart the role of white supremacy in U.S. history. How did you approach that?JEFFERY ROBINSON I say it as a rhetorical question in the film: “What if I said America was founded on white supremacy? Somebody might say, ‘Jeff, that’s really extreme.’” But when you read the words of the people that founded our country and see what they did, I think it’s an inescapable conclusion. Some people have said the Constitution was a compromise between those who wanted slavery and those who didn’t want slavery. This “compromise” protected the institution of slavery, gave the South extra congressional representatives and Electoral College votes to protect the institution of slavery, and made Black attempts to be free unconstitutional. It was unconstitutional for me to try and get away from my owner!SARAH KUNSTLER And they accomplished all of that without using the word slavery. We have a history of hiding what we mean as a country. When we enact laws preserving and maintaining white supremacy, we don’t actually say what it is that we’re doing.ROBINSON There is no way you can associate white supremacy with a law that says you cannot change the name of iconic monuments in the state of Alabama — until you understand that these are all monuments to slavery, essentially, and to people that enslaved people.Robinson with Josephine Bolling McCall, the author of a book about her father’s lynching in Alabama in 1947.Jesse Wakeman/Sony Pictures ClassicsThe film also uncovers the details of lived Black experience: for example, the fingerprints that enslaved builders left behind on walls they made.EMILY KUNSTLER The facts in the abstract don’t mean anything if you can’t connect them to actual human experience. Those fingerprints are one example of a monument to a history of lived experience of enslaved Black people in Charleston, S.C., and in fact, all over this country, that despite the best efforts to erase them, persist. The same way the foundations for the houses in Tulsa, Okla., [site of the 1921 massacre], still exist where the homes were never rebuilt.ROBINSON There was a moment when we were talking with Mother Randle [a survivor of the Tulsa massacre] and she was saying, “There was a pile of bodies.” There was just a chill that went up and down my spine — this woman over 100 years old going back to that memory in her life.Jeffery, how did it feel to share your, and your family’s, experiences of racism, like the school basketball game where the hosts didn’t want you to play?ROBINSON We went to Dr. Tiffany Crutcher and asked her to talk about her feelings about her brother being killed on live television, practically, by the Tulsa police [in 2016]. And it felt like, All right, I should share something. Dick [a basketball coach who stuck up for Robinson] was 21 years old at the time this incident happened in Walls, Miss. This is just several years after civil rights workers got disappeared and murdered in Mississippi. Where he got the courage to handle that the way he did, I just don’t know. But it was clear that if I didn’t play, we were all leaving. And he wasn’t going to put that on me at 12 years old. I think he saw me as essentially his younger brother.Could you talk about including the conversation about slavery with a man you encountered at a Confederate statue who represented Flags Across the South, the pro-Confederate flag group?EMILY KUNSTLER I felt like it encompassed the thesis of the film. I asked Jeff, “Do you think that that gentleman could be reached?” And Jeff said, “I don’t know if he can be reached, but I know that if nobody tries, he certainly won’t be.” There’s value in making the effort, there’s value in laying out the facts and continuing to do so. We can’t be frightened into silence by people who think differently, speak very loudly, and come out in force and wave Confederate flags.ROBINSON The conversation didn’t go the way he perhaps thought it was going to go in terms of me getting angry at him or something. There’s a little twitch in his face as we were leaving, and I think we at least made some wheels turn in his head.How does the movie relate to the controversy around laws banning the teaching of certain American history?ROBINSON The first time we met in person to talk about this [movie] was June 20, 2017. No one was even talking about CRT [Critical Race Theory] back then. It would have been like, “What is that, a breakfast cereal or something?” So this was not done in response to those laws. But those laws coming up can tell you how afraid people are of the information that’s in this film.This goes to the concept of “the minds of the rising generation.” All the way back in 1837, John C. Calhoun, one of the most virulent racists in American history, was saying that we can’t teach children in school about the abolition of slavery, because if we teach that, slavery is done for. The day before the [Trump] administration left office, they put out something called “The 1776 Report” that talked about a return to patriotic education, and they use the exact same quote that John C. Calhoun did: “the minds of the rising generation.”SARAH KUNSTLER Before there were anti-CRT laws, there were textbook wars. So there’s an unending battle of what and how much our children are taught in school about our nation’s history. One of the most compelling things about Jeff’s talk is that he goes back to primary sources. You don’t need to just learn it in school. You can seek it out for yourself. More

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      Disney Says It Hopes Florida Anti-LGBTQ Law Is ‘Struck Down’

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      Moments after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bill into law on Monday, Disney released a statement condemning it and saying that its “goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down by the courts.” Disney employs roughly 80,000 people in the Orlando area.Labeled by opponents as “Don’t Say Gay,” the law restricts classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also gives parents an option to sue a school district if they think the policy has been violated.This month, Disney was criticized by many of its employees for refusing to take a public stand against the legislation, leading to a series of moves from the company’s chief executive, Bob Chapek. Mr. Chapek broke the company’s silence and stated Disney’s opposition; apologized repeatedly; paused political giving in Florida pending a review; and created a task force to develop an action plan for Disney to be a more positive force for the L.G.B.T.Q. community, including through its content for families. He is going on a listening tour at Disney workplaces, both domestically and overseas, this week.On March 9, Mr. Chapek told shareholders at Disney’s annual meeting that he had called Mr. DeSantis to “express our disappointment and concern” about the bill. “The governor heard our concerns, and agreed to meet with me and L.G.B.T.Q.+ members of our senior team in Florida as a way to address them,” he said.Mr. DeSantis responded with defiance, promptly deriding the company as “Woke Disney” in a fund-raising email to supporters. On Monday, as he signed the bill, Mr. DeSantis said: “I don’t care what Hollywood says. I don’t care what big corporations say. Here I stand. I’m not backing down.”The hosts of the Academy Awards on Sunday made fun of the legislation during their opening stand-up routine.In its statement on Monday, Disney added that it was committed to the national and state organizations working to overturn the law. “We are dedicated to standing up for the rights and safety of L.G.B.T.Q.+ members of the Disney family,” the company said, “as well as the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community in Florida and across the country.” More

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      The Flea Theater, Experimenting Again, Walks a New Tightrope

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      Back from the brink of extinction, the Off Off Broadway fixture is testing a new structure that gives artists the autonomy they demanded.Since its inception in the mid-1990s, the Flea Theater has positioned itself as a haven for experimentation, an unpretentious home for risk-taking and for young actors eager to get their start.But for years, discontent simmered beneath the surface.Actors were frustrated by the fact that the theater asked for lots of work with no pay; Black artists felt mistreated even while working on shows meant to center Black experiences; artists felt exploited, intimidated, voiceless.In 2020, the bad feelings bubbled over when an actress who had performed at the Flea, Bryn Carter, published a letter detailing her experiences, pointing out what she described as elitist, racist and soul-crushing encounters and attitudes.When the reckoning at the organization collided with the pandemic shutdown, the survival of the Flea became uncertain.“What we’re doing is driven by our mission,” said the Flea’s artistic director, Niegel Smith, right, with Hao Bai, the show’s lighting, projection and sound designer.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesBut now, the Off Off Broadway nonprofit theater is fighting to come back — this time with a new hybrid structure built to give complete artistic autonomy to a group of writers, directors and actors that has spoken out against the old Flea. That group, now known as the Fled Collective, is being given funding by the Flea to stage its own programming in the theater’s TriBeCa space. In addition, the Flea will produce shows of its own, but now all actors will be paid and there will be a focus on work by “Black, brown and queer artists.”The first Flea-produced show at the theater in two years, “Arden — But, Not Without You,” took the stage last month and just extended its run.But major challenges, chiefly financial, remain. When the organization’s longtime producing director, Carol Ostrow — a target of much of the criticism — retired following calls for her ouster, about half of the Flea’s board members followed her out the door. The departures resulted in a loss of trustee donations and fund-raising that depleted the organization’s $1.5 million budget by about a third, said Niegel Smith, the organization’s artistic director.Dolores Avery Pereira, a leader of the Fled Collective, which is trying to build a new future within the reconfigured Flea, said she is not discouraged.“I believe that the money will come,” she said. “I choose my artistic freedom every time.”When the Flea was born in 1996, the founders, who included the theater couple Jim Simpson and Sigourney Weaver, viewed it as a passionately edgy alternative to the commercial imperatives of Broadway.From its beginnings, the Flea was seen by aspiring actors as a place they could exercise their talents without needing to present a long résumé or a fancy degree at the door.“If you didn’t go to Juilliard or Yale or Brown, this was a place you could start,” said Adam Coy, a Fled leader who joined the Bats, the Flea’s resident acting company, in 2017.The first Flea-produced show at the theater in two years, “Arden — But, Not Without You,” during rehearsals in January.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe new iteration of the Flea pushes the parameters of that kind of experiment a good bit further in its effort to dismantle traditional hierarchies — think autocratic impresarios — that have long ruled over theater spaces. In its push to democratize the production of works, the Flea is echoing the sorts of demands heard in theater communities across the country over the past two years as the pandemic’s threats to the industry and urgent calls for racial equity have spurred collective organizing among artists.But to pull it off under new financial constraints, the Flea’s leaders have had to reckon with the reality that its output may not match what it had been in the past, especially now that all actors will be paid. (In March 2020, for example, the Flea had 13 employees; it currently has two.)“We do a whole lot less now, and we’ll probably do a whole lot less for a long time,” said Smith, who is one of few Black artistic directors at New York City theaters. “But at least what we’re doing is driven by our mission.”The issue of pay for actors had been kicking around the Flea for years. Some recalled receiving no payment except a single stipend of $25 or $75 after spending weeks in rehearsals, on top of a requirement to spend several hours a month doing unpaid labor around the theater.The issue became particularly frustrating to actors when the Flea opened a new three-theater performing arts complex in TriBeCa which cost an estimated $25 million in 2017. As the Flea was transitioning to the new building, the phrase “pay the Bats” appeared written on the walls of its old theater, said Jack Horton Gilbert, who had been a member of the Bats for about five years. Beyond the question of surviving in New York, the lack of pay focused attention, critics said, on the demographics of who could afford to work for free.Leaders of the Flea have said that, going forward, they intend to employ a more democratic vision of artistic creation that gives actors, writers and other creatives greater voice in productions. Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“By not paying actors, the diversity of the company suffers because the people who can actually be around and invest are privileged,” Carter, who had been part of the Bats troupe, wrote in her June 2020 letter. “Many actors of color have not felt welcome or safe in your doors.”Much of Carter’s criticism was directed at Ostrow, who she said had mistreated her, generally was patronizing toward Black creatives and did “not know how to speak to Black people.” Once, she said, Ostrow had touched her hair without permission. Another time, she said, Ostrow had mixed up a Black lead actor and her understudy.Flea leaders apologized. Ostrow wrote Carter in June 2020 to say that she was “accountable for the behavior that you describe” and was “deeply sorry.”Later that month, a group of artists with the Flea posted a letter on social media condemning the theater for, among other things, creating a culture of “intimidation and fear.” The letter cited a case in which Black artists who took issue with a “trauma-centered” season of works about race were told, the critics said, that they could be replaced; it also repeated the concerns about expecting actors to work for free.“We have seen these same artists paid to cater your events and galas, rather than for their creative work,” the letter said.Members of the Fled Collective met in the Flea Theater in TriBeCa to plan their first season.Christopher Garofalo In response, the Flea’s leadership declared it would pay all artists for their work and said the theater needed to “reckon with the intersection of racism, sexism and pay inequity.”Later that year, the artists’ collective delivered demands to the Flea’s board, which included involving artists of color in planning the season, making sure there was board representation from their ranks and getting rid of Ostrow.In November 2020, Ostrow, who had been working without a salary for years, announced her retirement. Soon after that, five members of the board resigned, Smith said, resulting in a loss of about $475,000 in annual contributions. (Ostrow and her husband, the board member Michael Graff, had been major funders: the couple was listed as having donated more than $500,000 to the Flea’s new building.)Neither Ostrow nor her husband responded to requests for comment.Relations only soured further when the board, in what it said was a cost-saving measure, decided to dissolve its resident artist programs, including the Bats, infuriating the artists’ collective that had worked for months to try to shape an organization that they would be willing to return to.In a statement posted to social media, the artist group, now operating as the Fled, made a bold appeal to the Flea to “hand over the keys.” In a statement to New York Magazine days later, Simpson and Weaver threw their support behind the idea.Later on, Smith shocked Pereira when he told her that he and the board would be willing to explore actually transferring the property in TriBeCa to the Fled.Artwork by Carrie Mae Weems, one of the creators of “Arden,” in the rehearsal space. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe agreement that was actually struck was more modest, but still extraordinary. The Flea, which continues on as a nonprofit, will still own the building. But the Fled, which is made up of about 100 artists, will operate there under a three-year residency, whose costs will be underwritten in part by the Flea. The theater will also provide production and marketing support.Separately, the Flea is producing its own content, like “Arden,” which was funded by a collection of grants. “Arden” includes sculpture and video by the visual artist Carrie Mae Weems, music by the multi-hyphenate artist Diana Oh, as well as improvisational song by the choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili and the designer and director Peter Born.Smith’s own segment of the show addresses the Flea’s recent turmoil head on, something he felt was necessary to do in the first work under the Flea’s new mandate.Wearing a white robe and no shirt, Smith walks around the stage of the small black-box theater in a ritualistic trance, muttering — and eventually shouting — the phrase “this place is fraught.”“This place has held oppressive structures fueled by coercion and ambition,” he says in the show.Some artists say they are still skeptical that an organization with the same artistic director can truly start anew. Others are simply uninterested in performing, or even sitting in the audience, at the Flea again after their personal experiences there.“I just moved on from wanting to be involved in any way in that space,” Carter said, noting that she nonetheless supports the Fled’s work.The leaders of the Fled, which plans to host its first developmental workshop at the Flea in May for a play by Liz Morgan, are unsure whether it will go beyond the three-year contract. The goal right now is to hold the Flea to the promises it has made and to create a model for an effective artist-led theater collective, said Raz Golden, one of the Fled’s leaders.“It hasn’t been easy,” Pereira said. “But it’s a relief to be at the art-making part.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More