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      ‘Suffs’ Review: Young, Scrappy and Hungry for the Right to Vote

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      Shaina Taub’s new musical at the Public Theater tells the story of the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment.I don’t remember my grade school history books dedicating more than a few sentences to the women’s suffrage movement. The nearly 100-year history of women fighting for the right to vote is often trimmed down to two main talking points — Susan B. Anthony and the 19th Amendment — and some dismissed the suffragists as self-serious rabble-rousers.In an effort to counter those notions of these revolutionary women and their fight, the new musical “Suffs” begins with the satirical vaudeville-inspired “Watch Out for the Suffragette!,” sung by the ensemble, made up of female and nonbinary actors. (The show was scheduled to open Wednesday at the Public Theater, but canceled because of positive coronavirus tests.) They’re dressed in drag — even mustaches — caricaturing their male detractors. We’re in for a tedious history lesson, these hypothetical skeptics predict in song; a dreaded feminist is “planning to scold you for three hours straight.”My first thought: Dear God, I hope not.“Suffs” has a hefty two-hour-and-45-minute running time, after all, and though the musical isn’t guilty of scolding, it is guilty of stifling an impressive — though exhausting — breadth of U.S. history through its contemporary lens.Shaina Taub, the Public Theater’s playwright in residence and creator of the musical, stars as Alice Paul, the headstrong young suffragist who assembles a group of women who lead protests, suffer abuse and incarceration, and march on Washington for their right to access the ballot box.Taub gives a steely performance as Paul, though her standby (Holly Gould) has stepped into the role, as Taub tested positive for the coronavirus just before the production’s scheduled opening.Hannah Cruz, center, in the satirical vaudeville-inspired number “Watch Out for the Suffragette!” in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPaul is joined in the metaphorical barracks by Lucy Burns (played by an understated Ally Bonino), her friend and fellow suffragist who helped Paul form the National Woman’s Party. There’s also Doris Stevens (Nadia Dandashi, teeming with earnestness), an eager young student and writer from Ohio, and Ruza Wenclawska (a droll Hannah Cruz), the tough-as-nails Polish American factory worker and union organizer. Inez Milholland (Phillipa Soo), a labor lawyer and chic socialite, is their public face; as Inez, Soo, the beloved “Hamilton” alum, brings sugar, sass and style to the group, marching with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other.In the seven years that are covered in the musical — 1913 to 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally ratified — Paul butts heads with her sisters in the fight. She has a yearslong dispute with Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella), who, as the head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, thinks Paul’s moves are too radical. And there’s the journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James), who unsuccessfully tries to bring race into the movement, challenging Paul’s myopic vision for change.But her actual opponent is the president, Woodrow Wilson (Grace McLean), who noodles around the stage, step-kicking down stairs with a top hat and a cane while gaily singing misogynistic lyrics like “Men make the money/Ladies make the bread/Men make the rules/Ladies make the bed.” McLean’s jaunty performance introduces some of the few moments of levity in the musical; otherwise a general stiffness pervades the production.Nikki M. James, center, as Ida B. Wells and Cassondra James, right, as Mary Church Terrell in a subplot highlighting the tensions between two suffragists with differing ideas about how to elevate race in the movement.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMaybe that’s because the whole production feels so attuned to the gender politics and protests of today, so aware of possible critiques that it takes on its subject with an overabundance of caution. So a mere 20 minutes into the show, “Suffs” makes it clear it’s not framing Paul as the perfect warrior-saint of the movement. When Paul is dismissive of Wells she responds with the song “Wait My Turn” (“Do you not realize you’re not free until I’m free./Or do you refuse to see?”), establishing her role as the racial conscience of the musical, popping up every once in a while as a reminder of the pitfalls of white feminism. And all these women and stories of their activism are uncomfortably stuffed into a show too scared to miss anything that it becomes bloated with information.In many ways “Suffs” lands like a clunky heir of the Public’s other big historical musical, “Hamilton,” borrowing some of its approaches to structure while trying to avoid the criticisms about its politics around women and slavery. But that’s the risk that comes with recasting history with today’s sensibilities in mind. Even this feminist tale occasionally serves retorts to those funky founding fathers who met in “the room where it happens”; our suffragists sing about how no women got to witness the signing of the 19th Amendment themselves because “a man signed the paper behind a closed door in a room somewhere.”But the musical doesn’t need to try so hard to defend itself or prove its relevance, say, by showing the threats and taunts of men interjected into songs like “The March.” Neither does it need to fall back on preciousness, like when a Tennessee state senator’s mother, an “old farmer’s widow,” sings a banjo-heavy song pleading with her son to vote for suffrage with a promise of his favorite meatloaf in return. Or the pat pairing of some couples in the end, and the heavy-handed finale, “Never Over,” about the continuous march toward progress.The direction, by Leigh Silverman, feels as methodical as the text; the pacing is speedy, and the songs are dense with exposition like those of “Hamilton.” But “Suffs” turns out to be all work and mostly no play, and when it comes to the music itself nothing really pops. There are a few dry touches of vaudeville, and pop and some sugary songs like “If We Were Married,” a number that feels like a contemporary stab at Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s 1937 rendition of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” It’s a parody of such cutesy courtship numbers yet it delivers just that.Taub, left, as Alice Paul and Jenn Colella as Carrie Chapman Catt, who thinks Paul’s moves are too radical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe music is most interesting when it sheds the exposition and allows the characters space to express their hopes, frustrations and desires. Colella slays her performance in one such song, the prickly “This Girl.” Colella clips her words and sharpens her gestures, hitting her notes with the punch of a boxer in the ring. The harmonies, too, like those in the ensemble number “How Long,” which shifts from a tone of despair to one of resilience, also provide the music with much-needed dimension.The choreographer Raja Feather Kelly’s typically transgressive style (exhibited in shows like “A Strange Loop” and “Fairview”) feels defanged, ball-and-chained to its very literal interpretation of the material; there’s much marching and posing, syncopated stepping. Mimi Lien brings a similar austerity to her set design — the stately steps and columns of Congress, perhaps, or some institutional building — but the simplicity here works, allowing “Suffs” to focus on its diverse cast of history-makers. In the costume design, Toni-Leslie James strikes a satisfying balance between formal high-waisted skirts and black lace-up boots, and the splashy wide-brimmed hats have enough ribbons and feathers to make a Southern churchgoer swoon.“Suffs” ends with a passing of the torch from one generation of change-makers to the next, revisiting the latest clash of new politics versus old politics: What was once revolutionary becomes out of date. For all the work this show does to illuminate the successes — and failures — of the women’s rights movement, and the constantly evolving nature of our politics, it focuses so much energy on seeming as timely as possible. But, as the suffs learn, movements transform; our government leaders change, as do the demands of the people on the picket line. It’s a lesson the musical should take to heart: You can’t live in the past, present and future of our nation’s politics all at once — at least not without losing your way.SuffsThrough May 15 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Shaina Taub’s ‘Suffs’ Tells the Suffragist Tale in Song

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      Shaina Taub’s highly anticipated musical explores women’s crusade for the vote through a movement often divided along generational, class and racial lines.On a recent afternoon, Shaina Taub was standing in a rehearsal room at the Public Theater with a group of 18 women in corsets and long skirts, paired with T-shirts and sports bras, planning a grand parade.Taub was suited up — halfway at least — as Alice Paul, a founder of the National Woman’s Party, and a main character of “Suffs,” her new musical about the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.“How will we do it when it’s never been done?” Taub sang as the performers bustled up and down the risers. “How will we find a way where there isn’t one?”The song, “Find a Way,” was about the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Procession, the first large-scale political demonstration ever held in Washington. But Taub might have been singing about “Suffs” itself, and its winding, eight-year road to the stage after multiple pandemic delays, three set redesigns and script revisions prompted by the tumultuous politics of the country — and American theater — since the racial justice protests of 2020.“It’s amazing how much the experience of making the show mirrors what they were doing,” Taub said during a break. She slipped off her period-correct high-heeled Oxfords and put on cloth slippers. Would the corsets be staying for the real show?“It’s a hot topic,” Taub said. “But — yes.”From left: Ally Bonino, Phillipa Soo, Taub, Hannah Cruz and Nadia Dandashi in the musical at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn an age of riot grrrl playlists and “The Future Is Female” tattoos, it can be hard to see past the petticoats and big hats and recognize the “ladies” of the suffrage movement as the hard-nosed political strategists they were — and to fully appreciate the radical nature of their demands. “Suffs,” in previews now and scheduled to open April 6 at the Public, aims to release the movement from its starchy image, drawing on the sounds of Tin Pan Alley, early jazz, pop-gospel and what Taub calls “the sounds of the future the suffs were trying to create.”The highly anticipated production — whose extended run, through May 1, is already sold out — may wear its idealism on its sleeve. But it also digs into the complexities of a movement that was often sharply divided along generational, class and racial lines. That last was an aspect of the show, Taub said, that she worked to deepen after the murder of George Floyd.“I’m not trying to glorify or vilify,” Taub said. “I’m trying to humanize, and dramatize.”“SUFFS” BEGAN sprouting in 2014 when the producer Rachel Sussman (“What the Constitution Means to Me”) gave Taub a copy of “Jailed for Freedom,” Doris Stevens’s account of the militant suffragists who, in addition to organizing the parade, assembled the first picket of the White House, which led to dozens being arrested, beaten and force-fed in prison.She tore through it in a single night. “I couldn’t believe how dramatic it was,” she recalled.As an activist-minded theater kid growing up in Vermont, Taub, 33, had been fascinated by the history of the civil rights movement, ACT-UP and other social change movements. Why, she wondered after reading Stevens’s book, had she been taught virtually nothing about this one?“There’s just been this hidden treasure trove in my own backyard this whole time,” she said. “I emailed Rachel at 3 a.m. and said, ‘We have to do it!’”Making a musical just about women battling men didn’t seem very dramatic. “I thought the audience might be a bit ahead of it,” she said. But she saw potential in the internal conflicts.“How do various characters who do want the same things go about it differently?” she said. “That could help me focus on the women most of all.”Today, Taub, whose album “Songs of the Great Hill” will be released April 1, is an in-demand musical theater talent whose (many) other projects include a collaboration with Elton John on songs for a musical adaptation of “The Devil Wears Prada,” set to open in Chicago this summer.But back in 2014, she was a singer-songwriter with regular gigs at Joe’s Pub and other venues. At the recommendation of Sussman (who also teamed up with the producer Jill Furman, of “Hamilton”) the director Leigh Silverman went to see her and instantly became, in Silverman’s words, “a crazed Shaina Taub superfan.”“I was just dazzled,” said Silverman, who at the time was directing her first musical, the Broadway production of “Violet.” “I just thought, how can I get attached to Shaina Taub forever?”Over the next two years, Taub worked on the musical between projects, including “Old Hats,” with the clowns Bill Irwin and David Shiner, and her original musical adaptation of “Twelfth Night,” for the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park. In late 2017, Taub played the first 20 minutes of music for Silverman.“It was thrilling,” Silverman said, before taking a long pause. “Those first 20 minutes did a thing I think the show does incredibly well, which is, it tells a story and gives you an emotional arc of character.”Jenn Colella (“Come From Away”), who plays Carrie Chapman Catt, the leader of the old-guard National American Woman Suffrage Association (who was often at odds with the more radical Paul), participated in the first workshop. She recalled an immediate “crackling of energy.”“We found ourselves sitting straight up, standing when we didn’t need to — crying,” she said. “From go, this was a moving piece.”From left, Jenn Colella, Taub and Susan Oliveras during a rehearsal.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTaub, who did historical research at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library and read what more than one collaborator described as seemingly every book on the subject, has laced the piece with quotes and detailed references. (She even found a juicy love story in a footnote. “Every musical needs a love story!” Taub said.) But “Suffs,” Silverman emphasized, is not an “eat-your-spinach history musical.”“We’ve done a lot of work around deepening all the characters, the friendships, the betrayals,” she said. “In a way, the movement is the protagonist.”ALICE PAUL WAS a notoriously opaque figure, with a monomaniacal focus and, as the historian Susan Ware (one of many scholars Taub consulted with) has written, no personal life. “She never married, never had a partner, we don’t know about her sexuality,” Taub said.What helped unlock the character, Taub said, was Paul’s “deep, fraught, crazy-making friendships” with other suffragists, which Taub said were not so different from hers with her collaborators.“It was that stew of ‘We love each other, we’re hanging out but you’re driving me crazy, we have to do this thing, I don’t want to mess around, I want to work,’” she said, doubling the tempo on her normal mile-a-minute speech.Initially, Taub, whose acting credits also include the Off Broadway productions of “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,” imagined she might play Doris, whom she described as “the writer-downer, like Mark in ‘Rent.’” But she eventually connected with what she called Paul’s “fear of failure” — and also, as anyone who has watched the 5-foot-3 Taub in action for five minutes might notice, with her intense focus and make-it-happen energy.Taub said she even briefly entertained having the suffragist and labor lawyer Inez Milholland (played by Phillipa Soo, from “Hamilton”), who led the 1913 parade, appear onstage on a real horse. “For a minute, I was like, ‘How much would it cost to shut down Lafayette Street for four hours?’” she said.By late 2019, the plan was to open at the Public in September 2020, shortly after the centennial of the 19th Amendment — and a few months before the presidential election. Then the pandemic hit. “It took a minute for it to really drop that it wouldn’t be happening,” Taub said.Then, in June 2020, came the George Floyd protests, and intense discussions about structural racism in the theater world, including at the Public, which in May 2021 announced a broad “anti-racism and cultural transformation plan.”From the beginning, the show had addressed the uglier sides of a movement that reflected — and sometimes actively bolstered — the racism of American society. It was a time when Jim Crow had solidified and Woodrow Wilson (played in “Suffs” by Grace McLean) had presided over the segregation of the federal work force.One of the first songs Taub wrote was “Wait My Turn,” sung by the suffragist and journalist Ida B. Wells (played by Nikki M. James) in response to Paul’s decree that Black women would march in a separate section at the back of the 1913 parade, to appease Southern white marchers. (Wells refused, and marched with her state delegation.)But amid the 2020 protests, Taub and Silverman realized they needed to revisit not just the show itself, but also their approach to making it. “I realized I had more to do, and deeper to go,” Taub said.They brought in two additional collaborators to the core creative team, assembling an expanded dramaturgical brain trust, nicknamed the Coven, which started meeting weekly. It included Taub and Silverman, along with the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly (who is also credited as a creative consultant) and, as dramaturg, Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar at Arizona State University.Thompson, who became a scholar-in-residence at the Public in 2020, was initially puzzled by the invitation. (“The first thing she said to me was ‘I hate musicals,’” Silverman recalled.) In a video interview, Thompson said the idea of a musical about the suffrage movement initially sounded “like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch.”“I just thought ‘Oh my god, that’s the worst idea ever,” she said, imagining “the earnestness, the whiteness, the tweeness.”Cast members rehearsing “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” a vaudeville-style romp in which they portray jeering men.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Obviously, that was all my bad preconceived ideas,” she said. “There’s a really rich story here — not just about women battling men, but a really interesting intergenerational battle” that’s “almost Shakespearean in its complexity.”Thompson, who has written extensively on race and performance, also spearheaded a rethinking of the approach to casting. Most of the prominent characters — Paul, Catt, Wells, the Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell — are played by actors of the same race. But the other, mostly white characters, including male historical figures, were cast very deliberately with women and nonbinary actors of a range of races and ethnicities — not just for the sake of a diverse company, but to challenge assumptions about who gets to be (to use a favorite Thompson word) “virtuosic.”“We wanted to give women, and particularly women of color, the same kind of mutability usually granted to white men,” she said.A downtown choreographer and director, Kelly (“Fairview,” “A Strange Loop”), whose work has often examined issues of appropriation, said that when Silverman approached him last summer, he was initially hesitant. “I was like, ‘I’m not a woman,’” he said. “Was that going to be a thing for some people?”One of the challenges, he said, was creating a movement language that would help the audience figure out how to read the bodies onstage. The opening three songs, he said, set up some of the registers.The vaudeville-style romp of “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” sung by ensemble members costumed as jeering men (and inspired by real anti-suffrage songs of the period), is followed by the stylized proper-lady tableau of “Suffrage School” and then the naturalism of “Alice and Carrie,” which establishes the dynamic between Catt and the upstart Paul.As for the diverse casting, Kelly said, “something that was important to me was, how does the musical hold space for all these characters, and allow the perspective to shift, without feeling like it’s checking boxes?”Actors also helped push beyond the boxes. James, a Tony winner for “The Book of Mormon” who has been close with Taub since they both appeared in “Twelfth Night,” had been singing Wells’s number “Wait My Turn” for years at workshops and benefits. But after the summer of 2020, she said, “I started feeling pretty conflicted, and I think Shaina did, too.”In Taub’s initial script, Wells (who actually intersected very little with Paul or the National Woman’s Party after 1913) sang the song, then largely disappeared. “I really encouraged Shaina to find ways to give Ida more of a voice,” James said.Taub added a second-act song for Wells, in which she reflects on the personal costs of her battles. She also reworked a scene between Wells and the genteel Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, in which they debate the merits of the inside game (“dignified agitation,” as Terrell, played by Cassondra James, puts it) versus confrontation.It’s a mirror of the conflict between Paul and Catt, with its interplay of sharp disagreement and mutual respect. “Two people can have the same goal, but totally different ideas about how to get there,” James said.“Suffs” is opening in the same theater where “Hamilton” — and America’s runaway romance with the roguish “ten dollar founding father” — was born. Are audiences open to seeing Taub’s feminist founding mothers as similarly three-dimensional heroes, shaded by their flaws rather than simply damned by them?“Suffs” may be about women. But their long fight for the vote, Taub said, can stand in for any of the great social movements in American history, all of which were also messy, fractious, imperfect — and unfinished.She cited a line from the last song: “Don’t forget our failure. Don’t forget our fight.”“You can hold both truths in your hand,” she said. More

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      ‘On Sugarland’ Review: A Nameless War, and Too Many Wounds to Count

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      Inspired by Sophocles’ “Philoctetes,” Aleshea Harris uses poetic language, songs and symbolism to explore the trauma of being alive, especially for Black people.Let’s begin with the war. Not the war that’s in the headlines. Not Iraq or Vietnam. I’m talking about war as metaphor. And in the realm of metaphor, anything can happen: A veteran’s wound may incessantly — and inexplicably — bleed for years, and a slain soldier’s daughter may have the ability to raise the dead.This allegorical war, along with an impaired officer and a junior necromancer, are of the world of “On Sugarland,” a beautifully produced play that struggles to follow through on its ambitions. “On Sugarland,” which opened Thursday night at New York Theater Workshop, is the latest from the Obie-winning playwright Aleshea Harris (“Is God Is,” “What to Send Up When It Goes Down”), whose work often lifts the everyday trauma of being alive, especially as a Black person, to the plane of poetry through heightened language, songs, rituals and symbols.Speaking of symbols, that’s how the heavy-drinking Odella, played by Adeola Role with delicate vulnerability, describes Sugarland, a makeshift memorial of odds and ends that sits among the cul-de-sac of mobile homes where she lives with her teenage niece, Sadie (KiKi Layne, most exquisite at her most understated). Sugarland is just a symbol, Odella reminds Sadie, though not everyone agrees; a neighbor, tired of mourning, dismisses it as “some kind of horrifying carnival graveyard.”In an early scene, Odella and Sadie are on their way to a funeral for Sadie’s mother, Sergeant Iola Marie, who died in the nameless war. She’ll be commemorated at Sugarland, where a helmet, scarves, dog tags, bottles and other items are arranged into upright posts to remember locals who have died in the war. Every funeral is honored with what the locals call a “hollering,” a ritual of wooting and wailing that’s led by Staff Sergeant Saul Greenwood (Billy Eugene Jones, perfection). He had enlisted with Iola and now suffers trauma that’s both psychological and physical: on his right foot is an unhealing wound.Stephanie Berry is a comic delight as the vain and irreverent Evelyn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd yet Saul extols the virtues of being a soldier and encourages his teenage son, Addis (a profoundly forlorn Caleb Eberhardt), to imagine himself a warrior — while forbidding him to enlist because Addis is intellectually disabled. Tending to Sugarland is Tisha (the underused Lizan Mitchell), a woman in her 60s who speaks to her deceased son through the sacred memorial and lives with her vain, irreverent sister Evelyn (Stephanie Berry, the play’s comic delight). Watching everything unfold mostly from the sidelines is Sadie, who doesn’t speak except for her long soliloquies to the audience. She can raise the dead, she reveals, and summons several generations of ancestors to help her find her mother from beyond the grave.There are a lot of characters and a lot of story lines in this nearly three-hour production. A Greek chorus of neighborhood children called the Rowdy round out the cast of 14. The chorus isn’t the only element Harris borrowed from the Greeks; “On Sugarland” was inspired by the Sophocles play “Philoctetes,” about two soldiers who try to persuade a master archer with a chronically festering foot wound to rejoin the Trojan War. Both works involve an ailing soldier, but whether Harris makes any deeper connections to the Sophocles work, or aspires to some dialogue between her piece and the classic, is unclear.Harris certainly isn’t the only playwright who writes lyrical dialogue with its own internal meter, but she is one of the best navigators of shifts in language and registers, even within a single scene. So we get tasty figurative gumdrops that subtly illuminate the inner thoughts of the characters, like the glamorous Evelyn’s description of the setting sun, which, she says, looks “like a starlet whose solo is over.” But Harris struggles with an overambitious story. “On Sugarland” is unable to adequately unpack its cornucopia of themes: post-traumatic stress disorder, Black masculinity, the history of Black soldiers, Black women fighting racism and misogyny, the ways Black women respond to grief, the choices Black women make about their bodies in a world of prejudice.Layne as Sadie, left, and Adeola Role as Odella, her heavy-drinking aunt.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEven the opposing force within the play’s metaphorical war is a mystery: Perhaps it’s any country or peoples that the U.S. government calls enemy, or perhaps it’s the racist citizens in the characters’ backyards. The issue isn’t a lack of exposition; it’s that “On Sugarland” is inconsistent in the vocabulary it builds for itself.The characters suffer for it, too; they’re saddled with so many symbolic meanings that their roles become muddled and there’s little space for their actual development. In Evelyn, who talks about pregnancy and at one point sheds tears of blood, I found allusions to the phenomenon of bleeding Virgin Mary statues and the higher pregnancy mortality rates for Black women. I wondered if Sadie, with her supernatural ability and muteness, may be an archetypical prophet figure, like Tiresias, the blind soothsayer from the Greek dramas.In other words, I never knew the bounds of the metaphors.With her direction, Whitney White occasionally dips too far into melodrama, but otherwise nimbly adapts to the tonal shifts and key changes of Harris’s script. Raja Feather Kelly’s electric choreography adds a physical syncopation (stomping, marching, pacing, dancing) that complements the rhythms of the dialogue.Caleb Eberhardt, far right, being taunted by members of the Rowdy, a Greek chorus of neighborhood children.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe play’s most intoxicating moments are when all of those bodies are onstage hollering, each moving in such carefully curated directions in such diligently structured postures that they become like a liberated tableau. (The riotous quality of the noise, the combative moves and the sheer volume of the Rowdy are radical; these performers push back against the notion that Black people must act meek and nonthreatening for the comfort of white people.) The cast’s smart costumes are by Qween Jean, whose designs include the casual streetwear of the Rowdy and Evelyn’s taffy-pink ball gown.Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting design is its own eloquent form of storytelling — from the soft sepia-toned light of a lonely street lamp to the vertical Gatorade-green lights that flank the stage — and, at times, works alongside Starr Busby’s bold original music to transform the space into a club.And Adam Rigg’s dynamic set design cleverly uses a multilayered layout to allow action to happen at different heights: On the top are three mobile homes, windows revealing characters arguing or drinking from their domicile; the middle level is a circular grassy platform, the plot of yard called Sugarland; at the bottom, railroad tracks wind around Sugarland and out of sight.“We strong We brave We quick / We aim and … We don’t never miss,” Sadie says, speaking of the women in her family. The story of “On Sugarland,” however, flounders at times; it’s hard to hit a bull’s-eye when a mess of targets cloud your sightline.On SugarlandThrough March 20 at the New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      ‘A Strange Loop’ Won the Pulitzer. Now It’s Coming to Broadway.

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      The playwright Michael R. Jackson describes his musical as “a big, Black and queer-ass American Broadway show.”“A Strange Loop,” Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning meta-musical, is coming to Broadway this spring.The show’s producers announced on Monday that the musical would run at the Lyceum Theater; they did not announce specific dates, but it is planning to open before the eligibility deadline for this season’s Tony Awards, which is expected to be in late April.The show is a self-referential musical comedy about a Black gay musical theater writer trying to write a musical about a Black gay musical theater writer. Unsparingly introspective and sexually straightforward, it was staged Off Broadway in 2019 at Playwrights Horizons in a collaboration with Page 73 Productions. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “jubilantly anguished” and said it featured “an assortment of the kind of infectious, richly harmonic melodies that would have your grandparents leaving the theater humming. That is, if they hadn’t walked out before.”The musical went on to win the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in drama, and was described by the Pulitzers as “a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities.”Since November, “A Strange Loop” has been running at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, where it received a rave review from The Washington Post. The critic Peter Marks called it “marvelously inventive” and “exhilarating.”Jackson said he was delighted to see the musical find a home on Broadway. “I think it’s significant because this show is one that made its way out of nowhere, and stuck to its guns and to itself,” he said. “That doesn’t happen often with new musicals.”And does he believe the musical can succeed in a Broadway dominated by jukebox musicals and adaptations of movies? “The challenge I laid out for myself is that ‘A Strange Loop’ is a big, Black and queer-ass American Broadway show,” he said. “I believe we can entice audiences from all over to come take part.”The musical is directed by Stephen Brackett and choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly; the Broadway cast has not yet been announced. The Broadway run will be produced by Barbara Whitman. More

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      in Television

      Raja Feather Kelly and 'The Kill One Race': TV and Theater

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      Raja Feather Kelly’s “The Kill One Race” and “This American Wife” exist in a realm between, changing our relationship with what we witness.There’s reality and there’s fiction: an easy distinction to make, right? Well things aren’t always so cut and dried, especially when we consider the performances we undertake in our real lives and the fictional stories that borrow from reality — the boundaries between what’s true and what’s false often get blurred.In Playwrights Horizons’ new series, “The Kill One Race,” reality TV meets theater for an examination of the ways we shape our values, form relationships and bounce between the realms of reality and fiction in both our entertainment and our daily lives. This streaming production, and another recent digital theater hybrid, “This American Wife,” reflects how the peculiar combination of theater and reality TV may complicate the viewers’ contract with the art form and their understanding of what is artifice and what is truth.“The Kill One Race,” conceived by the choreographer Raja Feather Kelly and his company Feath3r Theory, brings us to a dystopia where 24-year-olds become contestants in a reality competition full of social experiments. The most ethical person in the group is granted the honor of dying and ascending to the Empire, a vague Xanadu of eternal comfort and righteousness.Seven characters compete over seven days that are rife with challenges and schemes and manipulations. You may be thinking of “The Hunger Games” or any of the countless other dystopian works of fiction that involve monitored competitions. Despite the proliferation of these stories, I was still surprised by the variation theater brought to the theme. Filmed at Playwrights Horizons and released over the course of eight overly lengthy episodes, “The Kill One Race” so closely mimics the style of “Big Brother,” “The Real World” and other classic reality series that “theater” feels like a terribly insufficient way to describe it.Kelly, who also directs, borrows the filming conventions of the genre, with many split screens, confessionals and voyeuristic close-ups. He uses the techniques so well, in fact, that the naturalism is jarring — confusing, even. The performances of the cast, too, are so exact and understated, with each actor having such a clear understanding of his or her character’s disposition and way of thinking that the ethical discussions feel uncannily real.Jamen Nanthakumar, left, and Raja Feather Kelly, who created and performs in the production. Kate EnmanThis is what tripped me up (other than the production’s long run time and the fascinating though similarly overlong Ethics 101 discussions): Was I actually watching some kind of social experiment, featuring real people responding in real ways within the scaffolding of a fictional world?It reminded me of the discomfort I felt watching “This American Wife,” with its meta play on the Bravo “Real Housewives” franchise that reproduced actual scenes and dialogue from the shows alongside scripted and improvised material. In my review I wondered what was improvised, what was borrowed from the franchise and what was real.My problem has to do with the question of artifice and honesty — fitting for a show about ethics. I avoid watching reality TV dramas because the performances of these supposedly “real-life” scenarios are too transparent. They feel disingenuous, parodies of reality despite the shows’ claims to the contrary. And this extends beyond the frames of the TV screen — the carefully curated fiction of characters’ stories and their relationships with one another become part of those individuals’ celebrity. It’s profitable.Though theater isn’t an art form of total honesty either, it is its own kind of artifice; the difference is in the presentation of that fiction. In theater there is the expectation of fantasy — we sit in an audience and wait for the curtains to open. When we step into a theater we agree to suspend our disbelief for the duration of a show. Reality TV, however, depicts lives that continue without intermissions and characters who actually exist in the world.When these two realms collide, then, as they do in “The Kill One Race” and “This American Wife,” it warrants a renegotiation of terms between the theatrical production and the audience — a redefinition of the art form and what is generally known and expected of it in its most traditional forms.I’ve stated my unease with this collision between reality TV and the “honest” fiction of theater, but that’s not to say that this is an aberration — or even an error — that productions ought to avoid. In fact, such contortions and hybridizations of theater and other media allow art to confront audiences with their preconceived notions about which stories should be told in which ways. In the end, perhaps the truest sentiments lie somewhere in the space between reality and theater.The KILL ONE RaceThrough July 4; thekillonerace.com More

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      New York Theaters Are Dark, but These Windows Light Up With Art

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      The Irish Repertory Theater is streaming poetry readings, and Playwrights Horizons and St. Ann’s Warehouse are showcasing art dealing with race and injustice.Like many cultural organizations, the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan has streamed pandemic programming on its website.But a few days ago, the theater added a new sort of broadcast to its repertoire, setting up two 60-inch screens in windows that face the sidewalk, installing speakers high up on the building facade and airing a collection of films that show people reading poems in Ireland, London and New York.On a recent morning, Ciaran O’Reilly, the Rep’s producing director, stood by the theater on West 22nd Street, gazing at the screens as they displayed Joseph Aldous, an actor in Britain, reading “An Advancement of Learning,” a narrative poem by Seamus Heaney describing a brief standoff with a rat along a river bank.“These are not dark windows,” O’Reilly said. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”In the past year, theaters and other performing arts institutions in New York have turned to creative means to bring works to the public, sometimes also injecting a bit of life into otherwise shuttered facades. Those arrangements continue, even as the State of New York has announced that arts venues can reopen in April at one-third capacity and some outdoor performances, like Shakespeare in the Park, are scheduled to resume.The panes of glass, though, have provided a safe space. Late last year, for instance, the artists Christopher Williams, Holly Bass and Raja Feather Kelly performed at different times in the lobby or in a smaller vestibule-like part of the building in Chelsea occupied by New York Live Arts. All were visible through glass to those outside.Three more performances by Kelly of “Hysteria,” in which he assumes the role of a pink-hued extraterrestrial and explores what Live Arts’ website calls “pop culture and its displacement of queer Black subjectivity,” are scheduled for April 8-10.The Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s photographs of sculptures are on display at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnother street-level performance took place behind glass last December in Downtown Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Ballet staged nine 20-minute shows of select dances from its “Nutcracker.”The ballet turned its studio into what its artistic director, Lynn Parkerson, called a “jewel box” theater; chose dances that kept masked ballerinas socially distanced; and used barricades on the sidewalk to limit audiences.“It was a way to bring some people back to something they love that they enjoyed that they might be forgetting about,” Parkerson said in an interview. “It did feel like a real performance.”She said that live performances were planned for April and would include ballet members in “Pas de Deux,” set to Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Gavotte et Six Doubles,” with live music by the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.Pop-up concerts have been arranged by the Kaufman Music Center on the Upper West Side, in a storefront — the address is not given but is described on the center’s website as “not hard to find” — north of Columbus Circle.Those performances, running through late April, are announced at the storefront the same day, to limit crowd sizes and encourage social distancing. Participants have included the violinist Gil Shaham, the mezzo-soprano Chrystal E. Williams, the Gabrielle Stravelli Trio and JACK Quartet.St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn is displaying Julian Alexander and Khadijat Oseni’s “Supremacy Project,” public art that addresses the nature of injustice in American society.The word “supremacy” is superimposed on a photograph of police officers in riot gear, and there are images by Michael T. Boyd of Sandra Bland, Elijah McClain and Emmett Till.And at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown, the Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day is placing photographs of sculptures of human figures in display cases, encouraging viewers to reckon with definitions of beauty and race. Those displays are part of rotating public art series organized by the artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein and the set and costume designer David Zinn.The aim, Finkelstein said in January when the series was announced, was to display work that “makes constructive use of dormant facades to create a transient street museum” and to “remind the city of its buoyancy and originality.”O’Reilly, at the Irish Rep, said the theater heard last year from Amy Holmes, the executive director of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, who thought the theater might provide a good venue to air some of the short films the organization had commissioned to make poetry part of an immersive experience.The series being shown at the theater, called “Poetic Reflections: Words Upon the Window Pane,” comprises 21 short pieces by the Irish filmmaker Matthew Thompson.“These are not dark windows,” said Ciaran O’Reilly of the Irish Repertory Theater. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThey show contemporary poets reading their own works as well as poets and actors reading works by others, including William Butler Yeats and J.M. Synge, and were produced in collaboration with Poetry Ireland in Dublin, Druid Theater in Galway, the 92nd Street Y in New York and Poet in the City in London.“I think there is something special about encountering the arts in an unexpected way in the city, especially an art form like poetry,” Holmes said.The readers in the films include people who were born in Ireland, immigrants to Ireland, people who live in Britain and a few from the United States, like Denice Frohman, who was born and raised in New York City.Frohman was on the theater’s screens on Tuesday night, reading lines like “the beaches are gated & no one knows the names of the dead” from her poem “Puertopia,” when Erin Madorsky and Dorian Baker stopped to listen.Baker said he saw the films playing in the window as symbolizing a “revitalization of poetic energy.”Madorsky had regularly attended theatrical performances before the pandemic but now missed that connection, she said, and was gratified to happen upon a dramatic reading while walking home.She added that the sound of the verses being read stood in contrast to what she called the city’s “standard” backdrop of blaring horns, sirens and rumbling garbage trucks.“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “There’s something so soothing about her voice, it just pulled me in.” More