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      Theater 80 in New York City Could Become Another Pandemic Casualty

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      Battered by a coronavirus lockdown and conflict over a loan, Theater 80 could become another New York City casualty of the pandemic.There are fewer and fewer places left in New York City where you can walk through a door and feel transported back in time. Among them is 80 St. Marks Place, a Prohibition-era speakeasy converted into an Off Broadway theater in the early 1960s.Inside the front door there are still hooks embedded in the brick where steel plates were once hung to buy time during police raids. The lobby walls are covered with framed, autographed photos from dozens of famous actors, including Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and Myrna Loy.A narrow hallway connects the theater lobby with William Barnacle Tavern, where you can still get absinthe from a bar that has been in place since the 1920s. The performance space itself, Theater 80, is intimate, with a 199-seat capacity. You can hear someone speaking at a normal volume from anywhere in the room.The space of William Barnacle Tavern, which is connected to the theater, was once a Prohibition-era speakeasy.Zack DeZon for The New York TimesBut like so many of the city’s treasures, the theater, the tavern and the Museum of the American Gangster, on the second floor, are all facing extinction because of the pandemic.Lorcan and Genie Otway, who own the connected buildings at 78 and 80 St. Marks Place and live in an apartment upstairs, are now scrambling to prevent a mortgage investor from auctioning them off.“The shutdown offered us no protection from creditors, which I think is unconscionable,” Lorcan Otway said during a recent tour of the building and its underground tunnels, through which contraband was smuggled during the 1920s and ’30s.Otway, whose father bought the buildings in 1964, said that the theater, museum and tavern were in good financial health until March 2020, when they were shuttered by a state mandate that affected virtually all corners of the performance and service industries. Shortly before then, he had taken out a $6.1 million mortgage against the properties to settle an inheritance dispute, pay legal fees and finance needed renovations.With the pandemic lockdown and a precipitous decline in revenue, that loan went into default and was purchased by Maverick Real Estate Partners about a year ago. The firm, according to court documents, has closed over 130 distressed debt transactions, with a total value of over $300 million.The lobby walls are covered with framed, autographed photos from dozens of famous actors.Zack DeZon for The New York TimesOtway, who dug out the theater space with his father when he was 9 and had turned down numerous offers by developers over the years, said that he had hired an attorney to renegotiate the payment terms, but the original lender stopped returning his phone calls and sold the debt to Maverick without his knowledge.Maverick, Otway said, then raised the interest rate to 24 percent, from 10 percent, bringing the roughly $6 million debt to about $8 million. The company did not respond to messages asking for a comment.Joe John Battista, the artistic director of the 13th Street Repertory Theater, is familiar with a conflict like this. His company was recently evicted from the space it has called home since 1972 after a majority of the building’s shareholders locked it out.“Real estate is real estate, but this is the arts,” Battista said. “There ought to be some special attention paid when the city stands to lose a piece of cultural history like this.”Theater 80 hosted plays throughout the 1960s, including the pre-Broadway run of the musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” From 1970 until Otway’s father died in 1994, the space was used to screen movies; for a time, it was New York City’s longest continuously running house devoted exclusively to revival films.City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and remembered seeing Shakespeare at Theater 80 when she was a teenager. “This is a heartbreaking story,” she said, adding that the complexities of running even the smallest business in New York now require a team of experts.“This is a huge advantage to the larger developers, the real estate companies, the financial institutions that can both take on this cost and hire a team to manage it,” Rivera said. “And the detriment is, not just to the small landlords and the deterioration of assets to people of otherwise moderate means, but also to the community at large who lose the landlords who are interested in providing beneficial things.”The 199-seat theater is so intimate, you can hear someone speaking from anywhere in the room.Zack DeZon for The New York TimesArthur Z. Schwartz, a lawyer with a reputation for representing underdog clients, said that there needs to be some type of legislative change to rein in distressed mortgage purchasing.“Beside the fact that you have a predatory lender who set this up so there was basically no way he would ever be able to make the payments, then shift it from being a mortgage to being some kind of commercial paper,” Schwartz said. “That lets you get around a lot of the stuff we have these days protecting mortgagees because of Covid.”John McDonagh, an old friend of Otway’s, has scheduled a benefit performance of his show “Off the Meter,” a comedic monologue about his decades of driving a yellow cab in New York, with all the profits benefiting Theater 80.“I’m just trying to help save a theater that Covid, gentrification and big bankers are trying to take,” said McDonagh, whose show runs Jan. 21-23 as part of Origin Theatre Company’s 1st Irish Festival.“St. Marks Place without Theater 80 would be like Houston Street without Katz’s Deli,” McDonagh said. “It would always feel like something was missing from the East Village.” More

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      Raven O, a Nightlife Fixture for Four Decades, Takes a Final Bow

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      Since the ’80s, Raven O has choreographed, directed, hosted, danced and sung on many New York stages. After three final shows, he’ll return to Hawaii.For a stage artist who has made gender fluidity a cornerstone of his career, Raven O isn’t especially picky about pronouns. “When people ask,” he explained recently, “I say he or she, or both.” (“They” is out: “That just doesn’t make any sense to me.”)Acquaintances often use the first, but while growing up in Oahu, Hawaii, he was frequently assumed to be female: “People would say to my mother, ‘What a beautiful girl.’” The truth was more complicated, he discovered. “In Hawaiian culture, there is the mahu — the two-spirit personality,” he said. “They’re the healers and teachers and spiritual guides, revered, but colonialism and white supremacy turned it into something bad. I thought it was an insult. Then I learned it was a great thing. I identify as mahu — he/she.”Downing a large bottle of water on a brisk December afternoon, Raven O — he prefers to always be called by his full show-business moniker, which retains only the first letter of his given last name — exuded a relaxed charisma that defied all gender stereotypes. Turning up at the East Village alt-cabaret spot Pangea, where he has frequently performed, Raven O, 59, sported vinyl pants and a turtleneck sweater, both black, his naturally silver-white hair cascading down to his shoulders. His jacket was designed by the glam rocker Patrick Briggs, one of numerous collaborators and friends whose projects he would plug. An anarchy sign was stitched on one sleeve, the Japanese translation for a profane command on the other.Neither adornment matched Raven O’s vibe, which was warm and wistful as he traversed a range of subjects, among them his apparently imminent retirement from live performance.Since the ’80s, he has choreographed, directed, hosted, danced and sung — in a warmly dusky, rangy voice that eventually became his primary asset — in storied venues such as Boy Bar, the Box, Bar d’O and Joe’s Pub. After spending the Covid-19 shutdown in Hawaii with his husband, John Deutzman, a retired investigative television reporter whom he proudly called “a badass,” Raven O had hoped to resume appearances on a regular basis.But Deutzman worried about his spouse’s increasing struggles with severe osteoarthritis — a condition that plagued Raven O’s father and grandfather and currently affects his older brother. An athlete and fitness trainer in his youth, he also suffers from spinal stenosis and bone spurs. “John said, ‘You can’t work. You can’t even walk,’” Raven O said. “I told him I could do this another 10 years, but coming back into the colder weather taught me that, no, I can’t.”Three farewell shows are now scheduled before Raven O returns to Oahu, where he plans to begin stem cell therapy. He’ll appear at Pangea for two sets on Saturday; on Sunday, he’ll join fellow nightlife stalwarts Joey Arias and Sherry Vine at Indochine, for the latest and likely last anniversary of their Bar d’O collaborations in the ’90s, which fused bawdy and elegant drag — or “showing my female mahu side,” for Raven O — with soulful singing and spicy banter.“I said I would never give up performing,” Raven O said, “but here we are.”Hunter Abrams for The New York TimesArias, who worked with and championed Raven O for years before that decade-long stint, said Raven O’s last chapter is far from written. “I think Raven’s going to reinvent himself without even knowing it. The body may retire, but his mind won’t, or his love of music and art and dance and people,” Arias said. “I think his legacy is in being honest — not wasting time with trivial questions, being very direct, being able to shock people with his use of language.”As a fledgling performer, Raven O had two roommates undergoing gender transitions, and considered following their lead. “We had a band called FDR Drive, and one day at rehearsals I realized I was standing to use the bathroom, and trans women don’t do that. I had a moment of clarity: I was doing this for the wrong reason — because I got more positive attention as a woman than as a male.”One can expect similar candor in an upcoming memoir about Raven O’s New York adventures. “Kate Rigg, one of my hanai sisters, is writing it with me,” he said, using the Hawaiian term for friends essentially adopted as siblings; he has a bunch of them. Raven O arrived in New York at 18 and, by his account, spent most of the ’80s and early ’90s homeless.“When it got cold, I’d find a place to sleep, usually by picking up a guy,” Raven O said, with a matter-of-fact smile. “I was a hooker, too; I sang for my supper, but if I needed money I did what I had to do. Usually it was, I’ll have sex if you let me sleep at your house and feed me and maybe give me some money.” Then drugs became a factor — crack and crystal meth. He gradually began partying less; he and Deutzman even swore off alcohol two years ago. “We just decided, we’re done,” Raven O said. “My big weakness now is sugar. And I do have a fried chicken fetish.”There will likely be fewer personal revelations on an album Raven O recently recorded with the bassist Ben Allison, another longtime collaborator. It will be titled “Piece of Sky,” he said, after one of two original songs; the other tracks include standards and “some surprises, contemporary songs we made into jazz songs.” Painting, an old hobby that Raven O picked up again while hosting the Cirque du Soleil show “Zumanity” in Las Vegas, will provide another creative outlet. Arias had originated the Cirque part, “and Joey said, ‘If you ever give up performing, you should paint.’ I said I would never give up performing, but here we are.”Should the stem cell therapy work well enough, Raven O wouldn’t rule out a return to the stage. “But I’d never do it as intensely,” he said. “In Hawaii, I can let nature take care of me. My older brother told me, you have to come home and let the aina — the island — heal you. And he’s a badass, too.” More

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      Review: Live Theater Returns, With Mike Daisey and His Beefs

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      The monologuist appeared onstage, indoors, in front of a real audience, on the first day possible. Maybe he shouldn’t have rushed.Mike Daisey has been a monologuist for more than 20 years. Not continuously — though it has sometimes felt like it.So his disappearance from the stage during quarantine was an especially vivid marker of the pandemic’s devastating effect on live theater. Likewise, his re-emergence in a new show, which popped up on Friday night like a bud in early spring, signifies the beginning of a long-hoped-for renewal.But what will that renewal be like?On the evidence of the 90-minute monologue Daisey performed in front of an actual audience at the Kraine Theater in the East Village, it will be — at least at first — a hasty and hazy affair with redeeming glints of brilliance.The haste is to be expected: Daisey was eager to be the first actor back onstage on the first day permitted by new state regulations. That was Friday, when plays, concerts and other performances were allowed to resume at reduced capacity, with the audience masked and distanced. At the 99-seat Kraine, that meant a sellout crowd of 22; to accommodate others — in all, 565 tickets were sold — the show, produced by Daisey and Frigid New York, was also livestreamed.That’s how I saw it; for additional safety, the Kraine requires all in-person audience members to show proof of vaccination, and I have not yet been jabbed. (One unvaccinated couple was turned away.) But even watching remotely, I was tickled by the familiar old sounds of people settling into their seats, and the sight of their heads silhouetted against the blue light of a stage awaiting action.The show quickly dispelled those good feelings. Daisey has never been what you’d call a feel-good performer; he usually has a beef, and it’s often overcooked. In “21 Dog Years,” his breakthrough, the beef was with Amazon, where he’d once worked. In “How Theater Failed America,” it was the corporatization of entertainment that, he argued, had ruined theater as a building block of community. And in “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” it was, somewhat infamously, the Chinese supply chain that feeds our iPhone addiction.Daisey’s new show lacks the invigorating animus supplied by such adversaries. If it has a beef, it is with the pandemic itself: a foe of little inherent dramatic interest. (A virus is no Iago.) At the same time, the pandemic is still too present to be fully fathomed, as Daisey’s title admits with a shrug: “What the Fuck Just Happened?”Daisey’s performance was among the first live indoor shows allowed under new state regulations.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt doesn’t help that after an amusing public-address introduction — “The management regrets to inform you that the role of Mike Daisey will be played by Mike Daisey” — he begins, sitting as usual at a simple table with a glass of water and a pad of notes, by telling a seemingly sitcom tale about a bedbug infestation that he and his girlfriend endured in late 2019. Getting rid of the insects involved hiring a company to heat his apartment to 180 degrees for five hours.The bedbug gambit is ironic; Daisey uses it to suggest how unprepared he and everyone else were for the worse disruptions that would come in 2020. Unfortunately, the “worse” is not fleshed out except in trivial ways that have the effect of deflating yet centering Daisey himself. The apartment in which he and his girlfriend are stuck “in captivity” is so small, he tells us, that he must work on the deck, sometimes in the rain. They have to learn to plan and make their own meals, something people move to New York specifically not to do.Small talk has rarely seemed smaller. And even as the story grows to include Daisey’s delivering food in the spring, cheering the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer and phone banking for the November election — all admirable — he somehow winds up the star in each case. His self-deprecation is only a kind of chamois, polishing his brass.For a monologuist, that’s a professional hazard. (He calls his calling “an exercise in mansplaining.”) But in previous works, Daisey has managed to use himself as a lens; here he is more of a mirror, reflecting his own obsessions, disappointments and, it has to be said, thin skin. Apparently, he is an underappreciated giant in a world of straw men.In this self-promoting mode, I find him no more (or less) interesting than an old college chum who corners you at a party and doesn’t notice your eyes glazing over. In his social-critic mode — sniping at obvious targets like Donald J. Trump, whom he has pilloried elsewhere — I find him unexceptional; is it so revealing to refer to the ex-president’s last day in office as “Garbage Day”? As he feels his way through the sweaty dark toward a theme that just isn’t there, you begin to wonder whether his apartment ever cooled off.But in his oracular mode, which though built on the bedbug story at the start doesn’t arrive until the end, he is outstanding. Connecting Covid-19 not only to ecological disaster but also to the pandemic of racism, he finally aims at antagonists worthy of his rhetorical big guns.In language that is burnished and implacable — and, it seemed to me, less improvised but more alive than the rest of the show — he says that though the “plague was not a gift” it was an opportunity, a “dress rehearsal.” Noting that there’s “no vaccine for fascism,” he calls for a “refining fire” that will burn out the hate in our system.These were startling and stirring words, the kind that hogtie your attention. They are worth having Daisey, and live theater, back for. Perhaps by the time he repeats the show, on May 9, there will be less of him and more of them.What the Fuck Just Happened?Repeated on May 9 at the Kraine Theater, Manhattan; frigid.nyc. More

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      Douglas Turner Ward, Pioneer in Black Theater, Dies at 90

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDouglas Turner Ward, Pioneer in Black Theater, Dies at 90A founder of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York in the 1960s, he was outspoken about limited opportunities for fellow Black actors and directors.Douglas Turner Ward, right, in 1971 with the director and producer Michael Schultz on the set of the play “The Sty of the Blind Pig.”Credit…Edward Hausner/The New York TimesFeb. 22, 2021Douglas Turner Ward, an actor, playwright and director who co-founded the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company, a New York theater group that supported Black writers and actors at a time when there were few opportunities for them, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.The death was confirmed by his wife, Diana Ward.Mr. Ward was establishing his own career as an actor in 1966 when he wrote an opinion article in The New York Times with the headline “American Theater: For Whites Only?”“If any hope, outside of chance individual fortune, exists for Negro playwrights as a group — or, for that matter, Negro actors and other theater craftsman — the most immediate, pressing, practical, absolutely minimally essential active first step is the development of a permanent Negro repertory company of at least Off-Broadway size and dimension,” he wrote. “Not in the future … but now!”The article got the attention of W. McNeil Lowry, the Ford Foundation’s vice president of humanities and the arts, who arranged a $434,000 grant to create precisely the kind of company that Mr. Ward was proposing. Thus the Negro Ensemble Company was born, in 1967, with Mr. Ward as artistic director, Robert Hooks as executive director and Gerald S. Krone as administrative director.The company went on to produce critically acclaimed productions, among them Joseph A. Walker’s “The River Niger” (1972), which won the Tony Award for best play in 1974 and was adapted for film in 1976. Mr. Ward not only directed the play but also acted in it, earning a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a play.Other notable productions by the company included Samm-Art Williams’s “Home” (1979) and Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “A Soldier’s Play” (1981), about a Black officer investigating the murder of a Black sergeant at a Louisiana Army base during World War II, when the armed forces were segregated. The cast included Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. (It, too, was adapted for film, as “A Soldier’s Story,” in 1984.)Frank Rich of The Times called the production, directed by Mr. Ward, “superlative.” (The play was revived last January on Broadway, starring Blair Underwood, before being forced to close because of the pandemic.)The Negro Ensemble Company became — and continues to be — a training ground for Black actors, playwrights, directors, designers and technicians. Many of the troupe’s actors over the years went on to become stars, among them, in addition to Mr. Washington and Mr. Jackson, Angela Bassett, Louis Gossett Jr. and Phylicia Rashad.Mr. Ward, right, in 1967 with the ensemble company co-founder Robert Hooks. They started the troupe that year with a grant from the Ford Foundation, setting up headquarters at St. Mark’s Playhouse in the East Village.Credit…Don Hogan Charles/The New York TimesThe company, and Ford’s contribution, won immediate praise after its founding. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said the grant represented “a magnificent step toward the creation of new and greater artists in the community,” and Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the N.A.A.C.P. at the time, said the foundation had “recognized the potential in the Negro theater” and the talent of “hundreds of actors and entertainers who have struggled individually.”The company began racking up Obie, Tony and Drama Desk awards and recording firsts. In 1975, the Times critic John J. O’Connor acknowledged the historical significance of a “superb” television production of Lonne Elder III’s play “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” set in 1950s Harlem. “The event marks the debut of a major Black theater organization, the Negro Ensemble Company, on American network television,” he wrote.Mr. Ward starred with Rosalind Cash in 1975 in the well-received ABC television movie adaptation of the play “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men.” Credit…Bert Andrews/ABC, via Getty ImagesThe company enabled Mr. Ward to solidify his own career as an actor and director.“I love acting for the communal thing — you know, working with people,” he said in an interview with The Times in 1975. But directing, he added, “sort of happened to me.”“I never had any intention of functioning as a director,” he continued, “but as the artistic director of the company, I choose the plays, and if I can’t find someone to direct them for us, I do it myself.”One of the first plays he directed was Richard Wright and Louis Sapin’s “Daddy Goodness” (1968), about a town drunk in the rural South who falls into such a stupor that his friends think he is dead.In an interview, Mr. Fuller said, “Doug is the only director I have worked with that could read any play and know whether its story line and characters would ‘work’ onstage.”The Negro Ensemble Company was not immune to criticism, however. The founders were criticized early on for setting up their headquarters at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in Manhattan’s East Village rather than at a theater in Harlem, and for appointing a white administrator, Mr. Krone. (He died last year at 86.)Mr. Ward, front left, on opening night of a revival of “A Soldier’s Play” in New York last January. He shook hands with the play’s author, Charles Fuller. Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRoosevelt Ward Jr. was born on May 5, 1930, in Burnside, La., to Roosevelt and Dorothy (Short) Ward, impoverished farmers who owned their own tailoring business. His family moved to New Orleans when he was 8, and he attended Xavier University Preparatory School, a historically Black Roman Catholic institution.Mr. Ward was admitted to Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1946, then transferred to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he studied politics and theater. He quit college at 19 and moved to New York City, where he met and befriended the playwrights Lorraine Hansberry and Mr. Elder.In the late 1940s, Mr. Ward joined the Progressive Party and took to left-wing politics. He was arrested and convicted on charges of draft evasion and spent time in prison in New Orleans while his case was under appeal. After his conviction was overturned, he moved back to New York and became a journalist for the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker.He also began studying theater, joining the Paul Mann Actors Workshop and choosing the stage name Douglas Turner Ward, in homage to two men he admired: the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner, who led a revolt against slavery.One of Mr. Ward’s first acting roles was in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” in 1956 at Circle in the Square in Manhattan; another was as an understudy in Ms. Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” on Broadway in 1959, with Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil in the lead roles.He also began developing as a playwright. In 1965, an Off-Broadway double-bill production of his satirical one-act comedies “Happy Ending” and “Day of Absence” became a hit, bringing him a Drama Desk Award for outstanding new playwright. Surviving a transit strike, the production ran for 15 months.Mr. Ward had lead roles in many plays, including “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” for which he won the Drama Desk Award, and “The Brownsville Raid,” about an incident of military racial injustice in a Texas town. Clive Barnes, reviewing “Brownsville” for The Times, wrote “Ward, who, to be frank, I usually admire more as a director than an actor, has never been better.”Among his many awards and honors, Mr. Ward received the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award. In 1996, he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.He continued to write into his later years. Last March, he published “The Haitian Chronicles,” a series of three plays that he had been working on since the 1970s, all centered on the Haitian Revolution, which threw off colonial rule in the early 1800s. His wife said that he had considered the project his magnum opus and that she and others were hoping to have the plays staged in New York with alumni from the Negro Ensemble Company.In addition to Ms. Ward, whom he married in 1966, he is survived by their two children, Elizabeth Ward-Cuprill and Douglas Powell Ward, and three grandchildren.At the Negro Ensemble Company, Mr. Ward often played matchmaker in connecting actors to roles, seeking out opportunities for people whom he knew had not been getting much work.“Doug never saw N.E.C. as a place to feature himself,” the playwright Steve Carter, who was a production coordinator for the company, said in a phone interview for this obituary in 2017. “He was always looking for new people.”Mr. Carter, who died last year, said Mr. Ward had been known for his willingness to step into any role in which he was needed. He recalled in particular a 1972 production of “A Ballet Behind the Bridge,” by the Trinidadian playwright Lennox Brown. With the actor Gilbert Lewis unable to appear one evening, Mr. Ward was hastily summoned to fill in.“Doug went on with script in hand,” Mr. Carter said. Then Mr. Ward actually injured his hand on the set and began bleeding profusely, but he refused to go to the hospital until he had finished the show.“He would always do what was necessary for N.E.C.,” Mr. Carter said.Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More