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      Kate Nash Keeps Getting Back Up. This Time, Off Broadway.

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      What stuck out at a recent rehearsal of the new musical “Only Gold” was how little Kate Nash stuck out.It wasn’t just that her hair was not its signature fiery red anymore, but a shade of auburn. Nash, who wrote the score and plays the narrator, quietly melded with the rest of the cast, as the director-choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, of “Hamilton” fame, fine-tuned a couple of numbers. When not actively participating in a section, she tended to stand against a wall, her eyes intently tracking the dancers.The London-born singer-songwriter spent a decade and a half releasing records and touring the world — in 2007, her debut single, “Foundations,” was No. 2 in Britain while her debut album, “Made of Bricks,” hit the top spot of the charts there — and she also acted in the Netflix wrestling comedy “GLOW.” But despite “Only Gold” being her first experience in theater, Nash was at ease, maybe even at peace.“Being here, I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, this feels like home for my music,’” she said happily, sitting in the empty mezzanine of MCC Theater, where the show is currently in previews before opening on Nov. 7.The show is, as Nash put it, “about having the courage to follow your heart. And we’re telling that story through Paris in the 1920s and the royal family from Cosimo.” (She is referring to a kingdom invented for “Only Gold.”)The period musical, which involves a king trying to marry off his daughter, may sound like a stretch for an artist known for an incisive, personal style anchored in the here and now. But Blankenbuehler, a three-time Tony Award winner and longtime fan of Nash’s, grasped early on that her sensibility and craftsmanship would fit the story he’d dreamed up and arranged a meeting in 2010. “The thing I liked about Kate’s lyrics were that I found them to be poetic and funky and weird, but at the same time rhythmic in a way that really catered to my choreography, because I like to be offbeat all the time and syncopated all the time,” he said. “I also liked that there was equal parts of low and high — like, she would write really high, quirky stuff and really low, nasty, badass stuff.”Nash, center, at an “Only Gold” rehearsal at MCC Theater.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesBut it didn’t just take clicking her heels together three times to find that artistic home. Nash’s life and career had taken a few turns since she burst onto the pop scene in 2007, fully formed at just 20. Since that early success, Nash has been through a personal and professional wringer that could have easily derailed her.Born in a middle-class family (her father worked in information technology, her mother was a nurse), Nash was barely out of the BRIT School, a London arts institution whose alums include Adele and Amy Winehouse, and working at a sandwich shop when her Myspace page caught the attention of record executives. When “Foundations” came out, its prickly, evocatively personal storytelling established her as a bracing new voice. In 2008, she won the BRIT Award for best British female solo artist and began touring extensively around the world. But in 2012, her record label unceremoniously dropped her. This barely slowed down the singer, who released her third album independently the following year.Then, in 2015, bad news came: Nash, then living in Los Angeles, discovered that her manager had been defrauding her. She was pretty much bankrupt.“I was selling all my clothes and having to move out of my apartment because I had no money,” she said. “I packed up all my things, I sold everything, I moved home to England and I was like, ‘What am I going to do?’ And then I got this audition for ‘GLOW.’”She was eventually cast as the street-smart Rhonda, a struggling model who becomes a wrestler with the nom de ring Britannica. The opportunity was a lifeline as well as a dream coming true for Nash, who had long dreamed of being an actress.In a joint video chat, the “GLOW” creators and showrunners Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch zeroed in on Nash’s team spirit and doggedness. To win them over during the casting process, she filmed herself performing guerrilla-style moves, “being like, ‘I’m auditioning! I’m coming! Don’t forget about me!,’” Mensch said. “She entered one of the most perfectly bonkers tapes.”“I was selling all my clothes and having to move out of my apartment because I had no money,” said Nash, second from left. “And then I got this audition for ‘GLOW.’”Erica Parise/Netflix“There’s something kind of gonzo about her,” Flahive added, admiringly. “Even as a musician, she has a real kind of punk-rock spirit and has been doing her own thing outside of the system for so long, and you get that feeling from her.”In the documentary “Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl” (2018), Nash’s indomitable grit is plain to see. “She just keeps getting up every time she gets knocked down,” said Amy Goldstein, the documentary’s director. (The two met through their mutual hairdresser in 2014.) “That is why I made the movie: to see a woman who just won’t fall down.”Netflix canceled “GLOW” in 2020, after three seasons. But “Only Gold,” which had been in the works on and off for a decade, was finally ready to taxi to the runway.Initially, Blankenbuehler, who wrote the show’s book with Ted Malawer, had wanted to retrofit existing songs to fit the concept of a period fantasy involving three couples with relationship troubles. “I was just kind of like, you want to make a musical with my music, knock yourself out. Have fun,” Nash said.It quickly became obvious that this approach had creative limits, so they both agreed that she would write original material. (Beloved oldies do appear in the show, like “Mouthwash,” from “Made of Bricks.”)“Kate’s the kind of person who — and this is a compliment — writes what she wants to write,” Blankenbuehler said. “If she’s feeling it, she writes it, so she’s always in her own music. To be in somebody else’s story was hard for her because she’s not those personalities. One thing she’s worked really hard at is wearing the character’s clothes, writing the song from the inside of the character.”Nash found that particular experience liberating rather than constraining. “Oh, my God, writing for male characters — it was euphoric,” she said. “I understand how rappers feel now, because it feels amazing: Big yourself up and talk about masculinity and power. It was really fun to start writing for characters. It was just another string to my bow.”“I naïvely thought I was just going to do music on the show,” Nash said. “Until I got my contract and it said ‘actor’ and I was like, wait, why does it say ‘actor’ on my contract?”Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesNow she can do more of that in other mediums: Earlier this year, she released the irresistibly catchy “Imperfect,” which she wrote for the Netflix series “The Baby-Sitters Club.” “I think that I’m able to dive fully into things like that because of ‘Only Gold,’” Nash said. “I was like, ‘OK, teenage girl, pop power, scene in their bedroom during a fashion show about embracing imperfections — give me five minutes!’ How I would express that for myself as a 35-year-old woman wouldn’t be ‘Imperfect,’ but now I can write and enjoy that and not worry about it.”In the musical, coming up with a batch of new songs for, well, a king (played by the Broadway veteran Terrence Mann) was only part of what awaited Nash, she discovered fairly late in the process. “Even our first workshop, I naïvely thought I was just going to do music on the show,” she said. “Until I got my contract and it said ‘actor’ and I was like, wait, why does it say ‘actor’ on my contract? And I suddenly got so scared.”For Blankenbuehler, having Nash in the musical was a no-brainer. “I felt like the mechanism of the show was the beat, the music,” he said, “and so it only made sense to me that this quirky voice — and nobody sounds like her — should narrate the show.”Her experience learning to wrestle for “GLOW” made figuring out choreography less daunting. Another point of entry was finding an unexpected connection with the other cast members, many of whom were trained dancers.“Someone in a workshop once told me, ‘Every dancer knows who you are because of “Nicest Thing,” because every girl performs it at dance competitions across the U.S.A.,’” Nash said, mentioning a track from her first album. “I wrote that in my living room on an acoustic guitar when I was 18, pining over wanting love,” she added, chuckling.Those days feel remote now, as Nash settles into her new life on the New York stage. “Every time I see the opening sequence, it brings me to tears,” she said, then laughed. “There’s going to be times when I’m going to have to really clench my jaw and not cry.” More

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      Quinn Christopherson Finds Cause for Celebration

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      On his debut album, the Alaskan singer-songwriter moved into new emotional territory.Born in Anchorage to a wedding D.J. father and a karaoke-loving mother (whose own grandfather was a skilled luthier), Quinn Christopherson got his start in a music scene he describes as “closed in, so there’s nowhere to run.” For about six years, he played local shows and open mic nights while doing construction gigs and working with homeless and runaway teens at Covenant House. But that all changed in 2019, when he won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest with his melancholy single “Erase Me,” which details his raw feelings relating to his gender transition. Last month, after wrapping a summer tour with Sharon Van Etten, Julien Baker and Angel Olsen, he released his debut album. “Write Your Name in Pink” is the sort of dreamy record you want to listen to at night, maybe with some flickering candles.“I’m glad I gave music a full-time shot, because in the past my songs were really sad,” says the 30-year-old Alaska Native, who is of Ahtna and Iñupiat ancestry. “The sliver of time I spent on music was spent trying to heal myself. When I started coming into my studio every morning, I could cover all kinds of emotions instead of just using [my music] as therapy.”His new offerings are more joyful — a celebration, he says, of his youth. Not that the songs are any less deeply felt. “Neighborhood,” the first track he wrote for the album, concerns Christopherson’s complex relationship with his mother. “Retelling these stories, I learn along the way,” he says. “My mom and I had some really rough times, but she was hurt before she hurt me. Having empathy for her younger self is important in telling my story, too.”His family has never hid their struggles, Christopherson says, and their openness has inspired him to be vulnerable in his music. “We, as native people, have had a lot to overcome, and we’re still climbing our way out of it,” he says. “You can take a lot of things from people, but you can’t take our stories.” More

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      Anita Kerr, an Architect of the Nashville Sound, Dies at 94

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      She and her background vocalists were heard “oohing” and “aahing” on thousands of country and pop hits recorded in the 1950s and ’60s.Anita Kerr, the prolific session singer and arranger who was an architect of the sumptuous Nashville Sound and later had a multifaceted career in pop music, died on Monday in Geneva. She was 94. Her death, at a nursing home in the city’s Carouge district, was confirmed by her daughter Kelley Kerr.Working with producers like Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, Ms. Kerr and her quartet of background vocalists, the Anita Kerr Singers, were heard “oohing” and “aahing” on thousands of recordings made in Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s. In the process, they contributed to the birth of the lush orchestral Nashville Sound, refining the rough-hewed provincial music for which the city was known into something that appealed to a wider audience.Just as important, Ms. Kerr and her ensemble helped preserve country music’s viability in the face of the commercial threat presented by the emergence of rock ’n’ roll.Ms. Kerr sang soprano and wrote and conducted arrangements for the group, which included the alto Dottie Dillard, the tenor Gil Wright and the bass Louis Nunley. Together they performed on hits by future members of the Country Music Hall of Fame like Red Foley, Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow, as well as on major pop singles, including Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957), Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” (1960) and Burl Ives’s “A Little Bitty Tear” (1961).Ms. Kerr and her singers also crooned the indelible “dum-dum-dum, dooby-doo-wah” on “Only the Lonely,” a No. 2 pop hit for Roy Orbison in 1960.With the possible exception of the Jordanaires, the Southern gospel quartet featured on landmark recordings by Elvis Presley and Patsy Cline, no vocal ensemble was in greater demand for session work in Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s than the Anita Kerr Singers.“At the beginning we recorded two sessions per week,” Ms. Kerr wrote on her website, describing the postwar boom in Nashville’s music industry. “Then, by 1955, we were recording eight sessions per week, plus a five-day-a-week national program at WSM with Jim Reeves.”“Gradually,” she went on, “we grew to 12 to 18 sessions per week, and I was writing as many arrangements for these sessions as was physically possible. Loving every minute of it, mind you. Tired at times, but happy.”Beginning in 1956, the group began working in New York City as well, winning a contest on the popular CBS television and radio variety show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” They soon began making regular trips to appear on the program.In 1960, another quartet led by Ms. Kerr, the short-lived Little Dippers, had a Top 10 pop hit with the dreamy ballad “Forever.”Ms. Kerr, center, with the 1970 version of the Anita Kerr Singers in Amsterdam. She, her husband and her daughters moved to Switzerland that year.Fotocollectie AnefoThe Anita Kerr Singers signed a contract with RCA Victor Records in 1961 and went on to release a series of albums of easy-listening music, some of them credited to the Anita Kerr Quartet. One, “We Dig Mancini,” which featured renditions of TV and movie themes written by Henry Mancini, won a Grammy Award for best performance by a vocal group in 1966, besting the Beatles’ “Help!” for the honor.The Kerr group won the same award the next year for their cover of “A Man and a Woman,” the theme song from the 1966 French film of the same name.During the early ’60s, the group, augmented by four additional vocalists, released several albums of contemporary pop material as part of RCA’s Living Voices series.Ms. Kerr and her ensemble also lent their voices to a number of significant R&B hits of the day, including Carla Thomas’s “Gee Whiz” (1960), Esther Phillips’s “Release Me” (1962) and Bobby Bland’s “Share Your Love With Me” (1963).In addition, Ms. Kerr wrote and recorded jingles for some of the era’s popular AM radio stations, including WMCA in New York City and WLS in Chicago.Anita Jean Grilli was born on Oct. 13, 1927, in Memphis to William and Sofia (Polonara) Grilli, Italian immigrants who settled in Mississippi with their families as teenagers and became farm workers. Moving with his wife to Memphis, her father opened a grocery store there. Her mother, a contralto, had the opportunity to study classical music in New York but instead became a homemaker.Anita and her two older brothers studied piano at their mother’s insistence, but only Anita, who began taking lessons at the age of 4, stayed with it. By the time she was in the fourth grade at St. Thomas Catholic School, she was playing organ for the school’s Masses.At 15, she was hired as a staff musician for an after-school radio program in Memphis. She also played with local dance bands, for which she composed arrangements.She married Al Kerr in 1947 and moved to Nashville after he accepted a job as a disc jockey at the local radio station WKDA. Ms. Kerr again worked with dance bands, and she also assembled a vocal quintet that was eventually hired by WSM, the station that broadcast “The Grand Ole Opry,” to perform on its show “Sunday Down South.”A year later, Ms. Kerr and members of her group were hired as background singers for Decca Records. They changed their name, at the label’s urging, from the Sunday Down South Choir to the Anita Kerr Singers.In 1965, after almost two decades in Nashville — and after she had divorced Mr. Kerr and married Alex Grob, a Swiss businessman who became her manager — Ms. Kerr moved to Los Angeles, where she wrote orchestral scores and worked in pop, jazz, Latin and other idioms besides country music.She assembled a new edition of the Anita Kerr Singers and released a series of musically omnivorous records, including three mariachi albums credited to the Mexicali Singers. She made several records devoted to the catalogs of songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David and composed, arranged and conducted the music for “The Sea,” an album featuring the poetry of Rod McKuen. And she served as the choral director for the first season of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1967.In 1970, Ms. Kerr and her husband, along with her two daughters from her first marriage, moved to Switzerland. Ms. Kerr formed yet another edition of her singing group there and continued to write, record and conduct. Two of the gospel albums she made during this period were nominated for Grammys.In 1975, she and her husband established Mountain Studios in Montreux. They later sold it to the English rock band Queen, which eventually turned it into “Queen: The Studio Experience,” a museum and exhibition benefiting the Mercury Phoenix Trust.Ms. Kerr remained active into the 1980s and beyond, writing scores for films including the 1972 drama “Limbo” and conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and other ensembles.Ms. Kerr, who wasn’t always credited for her work as an arranger and group leader in Nashville — and is still is not a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame — received a special award from the music licensing organization ASCAP in 1975, recognizing her “contributions to the birth and development of the Nashville Sound.” In 1992 she was honored by the Recording Academy with a Governors Award for her “outstanding contribution to American Music.”“Anita Kerr: America’s First Lady of Music,” a biography written by Barry Pugh with a foreword by Mr. Bacharach, was published this year.In addition to her daughter Kelley, Ms. Kerr is survived by her husband; another daughter, Suzanne Trebert; five grandchildren; and two great-granddaughters.From early childhood on, Ms. Kerr said, she knew she would spend her life making music.“I did everything regarding music, I couldn’t get enough,” she wrote on her website. “I never had the problem of wondering what I was going to do when I grew up. I always knew that it would be music.” More

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      Melissa Etheridge and Jill Sobule Bring Their Whole Lives to the Stage

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      They both first made a splash in the ’90s. They’re now in New York to present new theatrical memoirs that mix storytelling and songs.When musicians as popular and as varied as Brandi Carlile, King Princess, Syd, Hayley Kiyoko and Girl in Red can be so openly, so matter-of-factly gay, it’s easy to forget that the vibe was not quite as welcoming 30 years ago.In the 1990s, singing paeans about making out with other women was a bold move. So when the Kansas-born lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge released the album “Yes I Am” in 1993, featuring the hits “Come to My Window” and “I’m the Only One,” she made a splash. A couple of years later, Jill Sobule, a sly, funny bisexual pop singer-songwriter, released “I Kissed a Girl” — with a video starring the actor and model known as Fabio.Coincidentally, both women are currently settling in New York to present new stage memoirs that mix storytelling and songs. On Thursday, Etheridge starts previews for “My Window — A Journey Through Life,” with a book by her wife, Linda Wallem, at New World Stages. The next day, Sobule follows suit with “F*ck7thGrade” at the Wild Project.Born a few months apart in 1961, the two women have been on parallel trajectories over the years but did not really meet until Sobule joined the musical lineup on the 2019 Melissa Etheridge cruise. “We were getting done in our room, and we were all singing, ‘Come to my porthole,’” said Sobule, whose recent land-bound experiences have included starring in Matt Schatz’s musical “A Wicked Soul in Cherry Hill” at the Geffen Playhouse.On Friday morning, Etheridge and Sobule gathered again over a breakfast of oatmeal, fruit and herbal tea. It was the day after the Denver Broncos had lost an excruciating game to the Indianapolis Colts, and Sobule, a Colorado native and football fan, was still reeling. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The two women did not really meet until Sobule joined the musical lineup on the 2019 Melissa Etheridge cruise.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesWhy did you both decide to look back on your life and music in a theatrical format?JILL SOBULE I have a theater agent, and he said, “You should come up with a concept and maybe something with your songs.” So many of them directly deal with the worst year of my life: seventh grade.MELISSA ETHERIDGE That’s everyone’s worst year.SOBULE I was this badass little girl. I was the best guitar player, but there were no role models for us. And as a little strange girl with queer feelings in the ’70s, the only role models I had for that was Miss Hathaway from “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Or my gym teacher, who looked like Pete Rose.ETHERIDGE My wife’s gym teacher was named Miss Lesby. It’s like something out of “S.N.L.”! One of my major influences was the Archies [they both start singing “Sugar, Sugar”]. I thought, “Why can’t I grow up and be Reggie? I’m going to have Veronica and live a happy life.”SOBULE We wanted to make sure that the show wasn’t just for people interested in my career because most people could give a [expletive]. I’m not that famous. It’s kind of this universal story of a weirdo growing up.What was it like coming of age at a time when it must have been difficult to put words onto some feelings?SOBULE I have a brother who’s six years older than me. I happened to stumble upon one of his softcore magazines, and there was a series of soft-focus photos of girls in a French boarding school. I thought, “Oh my god, how do I transfer to that school?”ETHERIDGE I think the first media I saw was “The Children’s Hour.” All of a sudden I’m feeling stuff. And then she [Shirley MacLaine’s character] hangs herself, because anything gay you saw, they were criminals or killed themselves. I remember Time magazine had something about gay liberation on the front. My father was a high school psychology teacher, and he had a book that said, “Homosexuality — we don’t think it’s a mental illness anymore.” It was kind of nice: Maybe I’m not crazy.Etheridge and K.D. Lang. “It was the drama geeks getting together and having fun,” Etheridge said about Hollywood in the ’90s.Steve Eichner/WireImage, via Getty ImagesHow did you get into music?ETHERIDGE In high school, I was in professional bands. I made money every weekend; I was very independent. I was a security guard in college. I made $7 an hour, and that was hard work, in a hospital. So I went down to the subway — it was in Boston, I went to the Berklee College of Music — I opened up my case, and I played for an hour. And I made seven bucks. So I went, “Well, I can make as much here as I do doing that job.” I never looked back after that.SOBULE When I was in eighth grade, I was the guitar player in our jazz stage band, and we won State because I brought my brother’s Marshall amp and wah-wah pedal, and I did a solo of “2001.” That’s the only thing I’ve ever won in my whole life. Later I was in Spain, and a friend said, “Let’s go busk on the street.” A guy walked by and went, “Would you guys like to play in my nightclub?” I ended up dropping out of school.ETHERIDGE I dropped out of school, too.Is it difficult to tell your stories in a new medium?SOBULE I think it’s a natural progression because we’re storytellers, and now we get to grow it out, we get to be more cinematic, in a way. I was telling my theater friends, “I’m moving on from music to Off Broadway because it’s so lucrative.” [They both roar with laughter.]ETHERIDGE I always hate to say “at our age,” but in this phase of our life to be able to have a different creative expression is fantastic. I came from rehearsal last night, and I could not get to sleep. My brain was so tickled and delighted by what I can do.Melissa, what was it like playing St. Jimmy in “American Idiot” in 2011?ETHERIDGE It was amazing. This was a full Broadway show, and there were so many things that I didn’t really realize I was getting into. Especially when they said, “Now we’re going to rehearse the death drop.” I said, “Excuse me, the what?” I climb up two flights of these stairs that move around, and I fall backwards into two people’s arms. And I’m not a dancer! To me it represented my own fear of stepping into the theatrical world. So I said, “You got it!”SOBULE Theater was a learning curve. I remember the first time a director said, “OK, move stage left.” And I was, “What the [expletive] is stage left?” We have so much dialogue, and I don’t even memorize my own lyrics. I was like, “Can I have a monitor? Did Springsteen have a monitor?” They were like, “You are not Springsteen.” OK, fair enough.Jill, you’re working with the playwright Liza Birkenmeier on your show’s book. And Melissa, your wife, Linda, is helping out. How do you collaborate with them?SOBULE Basically we have conversations, and we figure out how to best put the jigsaw puzzle together. Every day, I’m like, “Let me add this little one-liner.”ETHERIDGE My Covid experience really focused this show because I did a thing called Etheridge TV. I turned my garage into a streaming studio, and every week I would stream five shows. On Wednesdays my wife and I would do a chat show, and on Fridays I would do what I called the Friday Night Time Machine. I started digitizing my old pictures and old videos, and I would show them and tell my life story. I got used to telling it, and my wife started writing it down. But I’m going to still be speaking extemporaneously in the show — I’ll hit the beats so that everything matches right, but I’m not reciting lines.How much excavating did you do in terms of music?ETHERIDGE I’m playing a couple tracks that I hardly ever play live because they were so theatrical, so dramatic that there was never a place for them in my concerts. There’s one from “Your Little Secret” called “This War Is Over” — I think I did it in concert in ’96 and that was the last time. There’s one from “The Awakening” called “Open Your Mind.” You’re going to hear a song I wrote when I was 11 years old, and four or five songs that were never recorded.SOBULE We took out the first song I ever wrote, which was called “Nixon Is a Bad Man, Spiro Agnew Is Too.” I don’t remember the music, but I’m sure it was hot.ETHERIDGE Unfortunately, I did remember the music of mine.Sobule performing in 2000. “When I had ‘Kissed a Girl’ coming out, it was dicey because it was like, ‘Is she a lesbian singer-songwriter?,’” Sobule said.Hiroyuki Ito/Getty ImagesJill, reassure us: Does your show include “I Kissed a Girl”?SOBULE Yeah. People call me a one-hit wonder, and I say, “Wait a second, I’m a two-hit wonder!” When I had “Kissed a Girl” coming out, it was dicey because it was like, “Is she a lesbian singer-songwriter?”ETHERIDGE It was revolutionary. I remember seeing that, my jaw dropped, and I went, “Wow, here we go.” It was punk, it was edgy, it was that MTV cool. Someone called me once, like management, and said, “Your songs are too sexual.” It was the “Lucky” album. I was having a lot of sex, what can I say?I read that you were involved in some fun parties back in the day.ETHERIDGE It was Hollywood in the early ’90s. I happened to know K.D. Lang; Ellen DeGeneres was this stand-up comic, so was Rosie O’Donnell. I met Brad Pitt after he did a little independent film with Catherine Keener, who’s a real good friend of mine. None of us had kids, and we were all young and crazy. There was a lot of smoking and drinking. It was the drama geeks getting together and having fun.What do you do for fun now?ETHERIDGE Fun is getting in bed before midnight. I watch football. [To Sobule] You’re not a Broncos fan, are you? Last night was brutal. I have to hug you.SOBULE My whole family was at the game and they FaceTimed me. I almost didn’t make today, it was so awful.ETHERIDGE I’m with the Kansas City Chiefs: We’re set. In high school we had powder-puff football. We showed up for the first practice — I was the quarterback, thank you very much — and then they came and said, “We’ve got to shut this down, we don’t have insurance,” or something. Because of Title IX, we were supposed to be able to do it, but we didn’t, and it broke my heart.SOBULE The last couple years I’ve been totally into basketball. I like it because there’s so many games and it doesn’t matter.ETHERIDGE Oh no, I like something to be on the line. Every. Play. More

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      Geffen Hall Commissions New Art That Honors Black and Latino History

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      Public art commissions are tricky. The creator has to make something that’s accessible but enduring, relevant to the site but also able to stand on its own. Still, Jacolby Satterwhite and Nina Chanel Abney, tapped by Lincoln Center, the Public Art Fund and the Studio Museum in Harlem to celebrate the reopening of David Geffen Hall with a pair of major new installations, make it look easy.Photo of “An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time,” a video by Jacolby Satterwhite at David Geffen Hall in Manhattan.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesSatterwhite, 36, a Brooklyn-based artist, works in performance, 3-D animation and sculpture, often incorporating drawings by his mother, Patricia Satterwhite, into elaborate installations. Abney, 40, best known for painting, also lives in New York and is a public art veteran. They were chosen from a short list of nominated artists after submitting proposals. Between them, the artists incorporate the history of the Lincoln Center and its performing companies, and also of San Juan Hill, the largely Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood displaced by the performing arts complex, into deeply thoughtful pieces that are also joyful and welcoming.Both will stay up 18 months before giving way to new commissions. (Sadly missing is Richard Lippold’s majestic, 40-foot “Orpheus and Apollo,” removed from the hall in 2014 and currently slated to reappear at La Guardia Airport.)“San Juan Heal,” Abney’s contribution, comprises 35 large vinyl squares ornamenting most of the building’s northern facade. Collagelike shapes render an apropos figure, letter or phrase: “Soul at the Center,” “San Juan Hill,” Thelonious Monk in a red cap. (He lived in the area.) The mixture captures the sometimes dissonant vibrancy of this particular patch of Manhattan; several large letter Xs could stand for multiplying different influences or for the overlooked histories that have been crossed out. But the bold colors and easy legibility, and the way the whole thing makes the building look almost like an educational children’s toy, reach out and grab you across Broadway.Satterwhite’s “An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time,” a half-hour video that will play on all 400 square feet of the lobby’s digital wall whenever it’s not simulcasting concerts, offers a kind of simulated timeless Lincoln Center. News tickers share factoids about the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, especially relating to Black musicians and composers (like the opera singer Marian Anderson or the child prodigy Philippa Schuyler).Dancers and musicians, choreographed by Satterwhite, silently follow their muses under billboard-size photos of performers from the past in a constantly moving digital landscape. As the views swing gently in and out and the video’s muted colors cycle through four sections, the piece achieves an extraordinary balance between stasis and movement, picture and narrative, the excitement of the present and the grandeur of history. More

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      Anton Fier, Drummer Who Left Stamp on a Downtown Scene, Dies at 66

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      He worked with everyone from the Feelies to Herbie Hancock to Laurie Anderson, as well as leading the indie-rock supergroup the Golden Palominos. But there was a troubled side.Even at his musical peak in the 1980s, Anton Fier, a drummer, producer and bandleader who brought power and precision to his work with acts as diverse as the Feelies, Herbie Hancock, Laurie Anderson and his own star-studded ensemble, the Golden Palominos, seemed to glimpse a dark end for himself.The film and music critic Glenn Kenny, in an email, remembered running into Mr. Fier in the mid-1980s at the Hoboken, N.J., nightclub Maxwell’s, then a cauldron of indie rock, and querying him about alarming details on the sleeve of the Palominos’ album “Visions of Excess.”The rear cover featured a photograph of Mr. Fier, visibly drunk, quaffing a cocktail at a rock club. With it was an acknowledgment that read, “For Jim Gordon and Bonzo,” a reference to the Derek and the Dominos drummer who murdered his own mother during a psychotic episode, and to John Bonham, the Led Zeppelin drummer who died at 32 after consuming some 40 shots of vodka.Mr. Fier seemed to be hinting at his own grisly demise. “I don’t care,” Mr. Kenny recalled him saying. “I’m not going to live to be 35.”With anyone else, the episode might fit a familiar narrative — the self-destructive rocker in a death spiral. But throughout his life, friends said, Mr. Fier always resisted easy categorization.He was a punk-rock provocateur who could extemporize, seemingly for hours, about free-jazz pioneers and Ghanaian percussion luminaries; an artist with big ambitions and a web of platinum connections, but also a loner who shunned interviews and self-promotion; a prickly contrarian who seemed to revel in confrontation, but who was also known among friends for a kind, generous spirit.“Anton was kind of like a Tootsie Pop, with a hard exterior and a soft core,” the singer-songwriter Lianne Smith, a close friend who worked with him, said in a phone interview.Little wonder, then, that his death on Sept. 14 at 66 — confirmed by a cremation notice from a service in Basel, Switzerland — left as many questions as answers. The cause was rumored to be voluntary assisted dying, the location said to be in Switzerland, and suicide itself did not seem out of the question. Plagued by money troubles and waning career prospects, he had openly discussed the topic among friends in recent years. But where? When? How?He had certainly fallen on hard times. Dogged by money woes, lacking musical inspiration and, after injuring his wrists, hindered in playing drums to his own high standards, he had lost his only outlet. “He had a lot of pressures and a lot of anxieties,” Ms. Smith said. “But when he played music, he was a complete human being.”Mr. Fier in 1987. “Anton was kind of like a Tootsie Pop,” a friend and fellow musician said, “with a hard exterior and a soft core.”Rick McGinnisAnton John Fier III was born on June 20, 1956, in Cleveland, to Anton J. Fier Jr., an electrician and former Marine, and Ruthe Marie Fier. His parents split up when he was young, and Mr. Fier, who was known as Tony in his school days, endured a difficult relationship with his stepfather, a polka musician, he later told friends.Turning to music, he worked in a record store as a teenager and eventually drummed his way into the Cleveland proto-punk scene, recording with a version of the Styrenes and playing on the seminal 1978 EP “Datapanik in the Year Zero” by Pere Ubu, the conceptual band that calls its genre “avant garage.”Soon after, Mr. Fier followed his musical dreams to New York, where he brokered his encyclopedic knowledge of music into a job at the SoHo Music Gallery, a record store catering to the downtown music cognoscenti. There, he seemed more interested in chatting about records than selling them.Mr. Kenny recalled, “I remember walking in one day and these two cats” — Mr. Fier and the experimental saxophonist John Zorn, a fellow clerk — “were sitting up front talking about Charlie Parker, treating browsers like they were minor inconveniences.”Mr. Fier did more than talk about music. A gifted and ferocious drummer, he got his big break in 1978 when he answered an ad in The Village Voice placed by the Feelies, a cerebral indie group from New Jersey that The Voice had recently called the best underground band in New York. The group was looking for a drummer.“We asked the people who called what they thought of Moe Tucker,” Glenn Mercer, the band’s guitarist and vocalist, said, referring to the Velvet Underground’s drummer. “We were thinking in terms of very simple, primitive drumming. I think he was the only one that even knew who she was.”With a bookish air and a subversive sensibility, Mr. Fier fit the ethos of the band. His explosive drumming helped fuel the group’s first album, “Crazy Rhythms,” which the critic Robert Christgau later described as “exciting in a disturbingly abstract way, or maybe disturbing in an excitingly abstract way.”But Mr. Fier’s personality proved explosive as well, making his tenure with the band a short one. As the Feelies pulled up to a gig at one club, where the line was around the block, he gushed about how thrilled he was to be in the band. After a raucous set that had the packed house cheering, his mood inexplicably turned.“When the show was over, he was like, ‘You guys are so controlling, I can’t believe it,” Mr. Mercer recalled Mr. Fier saying. “Just like that, a 180.”Mr. Fier with the Golden Palominos in 2012.Christopher Gregory for The New York TimesEven so, Mr. Fier’s career continued to flourish. He joined the Lounge Lizards, John Lurie’s avant-jazz combo, for their first album, released in 1981, before Mr. Lurie rose to fame as an archetype of New York cool with his roles in Jim Jarmusch’s indie films “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down by Law.”His career rose to new heights in the mid-1980s: He toured with the jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock following Mr. Hancock’s 1984 pop-funk crossover hit “Rockit,” and played on Laurie Anderson’s acclaimed 1984 album, “Mister Heartbreak.”By that point his musical ambitions could not be contained behind the drum kit, so Mr. Fier formed the Golden Palominos, an ever-evolving indie-rock supergroup that attracted a parade of guest stars, including Michael Stipe, John Lydon and Richard Thompson, through the rest of the 1980s and into the ’90s.“The band revolved around anyone Anton liked at the time,” Syd Straw, the iconoclastic singer-songwriter who got her start with the group, said by phone. “He had pretty bizarre social skills, but he was a magnet for brainy musicians. I think that he was, at heart, an amazing casting director.”In whatever musical role, Mr. Fier was exacting. “He never ‘settled,’’’ Chris Stamey, a founder of the indie band the dB’s who performed with the Palominos, recalled in an email. “And this could be unsettling at times. But we all wanted to see that blissful smile when something finally met his high standards.”Through the 2000s and early 2010s, Mr. Fier began to focus more on producing, working on albums by Ms. Smith, Julia Brown and the guitarist Jim Campilongo, although he did continue to perform with a highly regarded combo headed by the singer, guitarist and bassist Tony Scherr, a former Lounge Lizard.He also quit alcohol, a habit that had grown prodigious, particularly since the hard-partying Hancock tour, Mr. Stamey said.Hounded by creditors, however, Mr. Fier drifted further and further off the grid, avoiding even banks. He seemed to conclude, in eerily analytical fashion, that life was no longer worth living. Ms. Smith said he told her that he wanted to “fly to Thailand, have a wonderful vacation, take a lot of drugs and walk into the ocean.”The pandemic seemed only to deepen his despair. Without work or family (his only marriage, in 1976, lasted less than a year), he began researching his options. Last fall, Mr. Stamey recalled, Mr. Fier told him that he had been burned when he paid $900 over the internet for a veterinary tranquilizer, which he had decided “was the most peaceful way to go.”A few months ago, Mr. Fier texted his friend J.P. Olsen, a filmmaker and musician who had recently moved to Indiana, asking him for his new address. Mr. Fier had some boxes he wanted to send him. On Sept. 21, word began circulating that he was dead, apparently from an assisted suicide in Switzerland. Four days later, Mr. Olsen received the boxes, which were filled with piles of Mr. Fier’s clothes.And on Oct. 1, Nicky Skopelitis, a Palominos guitarist and the executor of Mr. Fier’s estate, received the cremation notice, dated Sept. 14, along with Mr. Fier’s remains.Questions about his last days linger. But in a way, friends said, that seems fitting for a man who was only too comfortable with loose ends.Two years ago, Mr. Stamey urged Mr. Fier to write a memoir, to pull him out of his funk. Mr. Fier’s response, Mr. Stamey recalled, was curt: “He said that he wanted to be the only one who didn’t write a book.” More

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      in Music

      Liverpool Will Host 2023 Eurovision Song Contest

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      The popular competition would have been held in Ukraine, which won this year’s event, but safety concerns sent it to Britain instead.Liverpool will host the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023, organizers of the musical competition announced on Friday, choosing the birthplace of the Beatles for one of Europe’s premier cultural events.The M&S Bank Arena, an 11,000-capacity arena, will stage the competition on May 13, 2023, organizers said.The announcement capped an unusual selection process, in which Ukraine, which earned the right to host next year’s event after winning this year’s contest, was ruled out by Eurovision organizers, who said the war-torn country could not provide the necessary “security and operational guarantees.”Instead, Britain, the runner-up in 2022, was named host. Liverpool was selected from a shortlist of seven cities that also included Glasgow, the runner-up, along with Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield.Hosting Eurovision “means everything” for Liverpool, the city’s director of culture, Claire McColgan, told the BBC on Friday.“We’re doing it for Ukraine first of all, for our brilliant city and for the people who come here,” Ms. McColgan said. “It’s going to be incredible.”Ukraine had offered three potential locations that it said were safe from the fighting: Lviv, in western Ukraine; the Zakarpattia region, which borders Hungary and Slovakia; and the capital, Kyiv.But the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the competition, announced in July that Britain would host instead. At the time, Martin Österdahl, Eurovision’s executive supervisor, pledged that Ukraine would be “celebrated and represented throughout the event,” with representatives from a Ukrainian broadcaster working with the BBC.Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, also said the network was “committed to making the event a true reflection of Ukrainian culture alongside showcasing the diversity of British music and creativity.”Eurovision began in 1956, gathering musical artists from countries across Europe, as well as some farther afield, including Australia and Israel.Britain has hosted the event eight times, most recently in 1998 in Birmingham.The selection will bring a major international spotlight to Liverpool. Over 160 million people watched in May as Kalush Orchestra, a Ukrainian rap act, was crowned the winner in Turin, Italy.Sixty-two years after the Beatles formed, Liverpool remains closely tied to the enormously influential rock band. The band is central to the city’s tourism, with Beatles-themed museums, tours and a statue along the waterfront.Though Liverpool has produced fewer star international acts recently, the local music scene is small-scale and “healthy,” said Karl Whitney, the author of “Hit Factories: A Journey Through the Industrial Cities of British Pop.” There are “lots of great bands from Liverpool,” he said, “but the Beatles, obviously, sort of overshadow everything.”The city plans collaborations with Ukrainian street artists, designers and musicians to bring the country’s culture to the city, The Liverpool Echo reported this week. Claire McColgan, the director of Culture Liverpool, told the newspaper that “this is their party, it just happens to be in our house,” referring to the Ukrainians.“If we are chosen as host city there’s no question Eurovision will take over Liverpool in a way no single event has ever done before,” she said this week. More

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      in Theater

      Suzan-Lori Parks Is on Broadway, Off Broadway and Everywhere Else

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      The first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama has four shows this season. “If you can hear the world singing, it’s your job to write it down,” she said.Suzan-Lori Parks is drawn to archways. Early on in her New York life, long before she became one of the nation’s most acclaimed playwrights, she lived above a McDonald’s on Sixth Avenue — the Golden Arches. Then she moved out by Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, with its triumphal Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch. Now she lives in an apartment overlooking the marble monument honoring the nation’s first president at the entrance to Washington Square Park.“It’s very symbolic,” Parks told me. “I’m always orienting myself to arches.”Arches, of course, are gateways, portals between one world and another, and Parks is endlessly thinking about other worlds.This season, audiences will have ample opportunity to join her.A starry 20th-anniversary revival of “Topdog/Underdog,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning fable about two brothers, three-card monte and one troubling inheritance, is in previews on Broadway. “Sally & Tom,” a new play about Parks’s two favorite subjects, history and theater, but also about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, has just begun performances at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. “Plays for the Plague Year,” Parks’s diaristic musings on the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic and a coincident string of deaths, including those of Black Americans killed by police officers, is to be presented next month at Joe’s Pub, with Parks onstage singing and starring. And “The Harder They Come,” her musical adaptation of the 1972 outlaw film with a reggae score, will be staged at the Public Theater early next year.“I’m like a bard,” she said. “I want to sing the songs for the people, and have them remember who they are.”At this point in her career, Parks, who in 2002 became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama, is a revered figure, regularly described as one of the greatest contemporary playwrights.“She occupies pretty hallowed air: She’s the one who walks among us,” said the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who teaches playwriting and performance studies at Yale.“She’s the reigning empress of the Black and weird in theater,” he said. “And she really is the most successful dramatist of the avant-garde working today.”PARKS HAS BEEN TELLING STORIES since she was a child. She wrote songs. She tried writing a novel. There was a period when she made her own newspaper, called The Daily Daily, reporting on what she saw through a Vermont attic window. (She was born in Kentucky, and moved frequently because her father was in the military.)While an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke, she had the good fortune to take a creative-writing class at nearby Hampshire College with James Baldwin, who suggested she try playwriting, and, even though she feared he was just trying to politely steer her away from prose, she did. “That’s what I’m doing still,” she said. “Trying theater.”Her apartment is filled with evidence of a furiously busy creative life: shelves heaving with plastic crates containing thoughts on pending and possible projects; elements of a second novel marinating on a wallboard cloaked by a blanket; index cards in Ziploc bags; a laptop perched on a crate atop the dining table; lyric revisions in notebooks on a music stand by an ever-at-the-ready guitar. (She is a songwriter who occasionally performs with a band; this season’s four productions all feature music she wrote.)“Writing, I think, is related to being kind of like a witch,” she said as she showed me around. “Writing is magical. I loved mythology, and folk tales, and I could hear them — old stories — not in a recording of something that somebody living in my presence had told me, but if you listen, you can hear organizational principles of nature, which includes the history of people, which is narrative.”So writing is listening? “Not in a passive way,” she said. “I’m on the hunt.” By this point, she was on her feet, pantomiming the stalking stance of a wild cat, preparing to pounce. “You’re being drawn toward it, and you’re reeling it in at the same time, like a fisher.”As she talked, she kept cutting herself off, reaching for ways to differentiate her craft. “There’s a lot of writers who have ideas, and they have an agenda, and that’s cool,” she said. “I think I’m something else.”Digging in to the question of why she writes, she became more and more expansive, reflecting on the songlines of Indigenous Australians, which connect geography and mythology.“We have our songlines too — we just forgot them a long time ago,” she said. “They’re encoded in all the religious texts. They’re in African folk tales. They’re in the stories that your mom or your grandmother taught you. They’re there, and I can’t get them out of my head.”“If you can hear the world singing,” she added, “it’s your job to write it down, because that’s the calling.”PARKS IS NOW 59, and her work has been in production for 35 years. In 1989, the first time The New York Times reviewed her work, the critic Mel Gussow declared her “the year’s most promising new playwright.” In 2018, my critic colleagues at The Times declared “Topdog/Underdog” the best American play of the previous quarter century; explaining the choice, Ben Brantley, who was then the paper’s co-chief theater critic, described Parks as “a specialist in the warping weight of American history,” and declared, “Suzan-Lori Parks has emerged as the most consistently inventive, and venturesome, American dramatist working today.”“She’s a national treasure for us,” said Corey Hawkins, left, who is starring opposite Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in a revival of Parks’s Pulitzer-winning “Topdog/Underdog” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“She is a genre in and of herself,” said the playwright James Ijames, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in drama for “Fat Ham.” And what is that genre? “It is formally really dazzling, in terms of how she structures the play; there is humor underpinned with horror and political satire; there’s this real thread of the blues and folkways and things that are just root Black American signifiers; it’s musical, it’s whimsical, it’s playful, and it’s dangerous — all of the stuff that’s so exciting to see onstage.”Her early plays were experimental (“opaque,” Brantley once wrote). The recent plays have been more accessible, for which Parks makes no apologies.“People — not you, but people — when they ask that question, they’re like, ‘Oh, so now you’re selling out! You’re getting more mainstream and you’re not being true to your roots!’” she said. “Oh, no. I’m becoming more and more and more true. Trust me on this one: I’m following the spirit, no doubt. So, yeah, ‘Plays for the Plague Year’ looks like real life, cause it is. So maybe we ought to think about what am I writing about, and if I’m true to what I’m writing about.”Reflecting her singular stature, Parks has an unusual perch from which to work: She is a writer in residence at the Public Theater, where she receives a full-time salary and benefits. At the Public, she also conducts one of her great ongoing experiments, “Watch Me Work,” a series of events, in-person before the pandemic and online now, at which anyone can work on their own writing while she works on hers, and then they talk about creativity. Early in the pandemic, Parks held such sessions online every day.“Her great subject,” said the Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, “is freedom. It’s both what she writes about, and how she writes.”Parks is also an arts professor at N.Y.U., which is how she wound up across from Washington Square Park, where she lives in faculty housing with her husband, Christian Konopka, and their 11-year-old son. For years, they shared one bedroom; this summer, they finally scored an upgrade, just 70 steps down the hall (their son counted), but now with a bit more space and that archward view.She has surrounded herself with a striking number of good-luck charms: not only the pink unicorn balance board on which she stands while typing, but also a tray of unicorn plushies; James Baldwin and Frida Kahlo votive candles; a hamsa wall hanging she picked up at a flea market; milagro hearts from Mexico; Buddha, Ganesh, rabbit and turtle figurines; and a deck of tarot cards (yes, she did a basic reading for me; I drew the high priestess card). Also: she has tattooed into one arm, three times, a yoga sutra in Sanskrit that she translated as “submit your will to the will of God.” (She calls herself a “faith-based, spiritual-based person,” and is also a longtime practitioner of Ashtanga yoga, which she does every morning, after meditation and before writing.)“All the help I can get, baby,” she said.Parks, 59, has four productions this season: a revival, a new play, a collection of pandemic-prompted playlets and songs, and a jukebox musical.Erik Carter for The New York TimesTHE MANY ARTIFACTS on display in her apartment include a shelf set up as a shrine to Baldwin, a dollar bill Parks collected when, feeling the need to perform, she tried busking in a subway station, and a “Black Lives Matter” placard she held at protests during the summer of 2020, when she also signed the “We See You White American Theater” petition, written by an anonymous collective, calling for changes in the industry.“Hey, I’m angry as the next Black woman,” she said. “And yet, to get through this, we need to also listen — listen to the voice of anger, listen to the voice of love, listen to the voice of wisdom, listen to the voice of history.”She added, “Let’s not just stand around telling people that they suck. At least where I come from, that’s not a conversation, and, at least where I come from, that’s not good dialogue.”The tone of some of the conversation around diversity in theater is clearly a concern of hers — that’s obvious in “Plays for the Plague Year,” which, in the most recent draft, contains a playlet called “The Black Police,” in which three “Black Cops” approach a “writer,” played by Parks, and say, “We’re here to talk with you about your blackness/Why you work with who you work with.”In our interview, Parks said she was troubled by “the policing of Black people by Black people, and not just in the arts,” adding, “we have to wake up to the ways we are policing each other to our detriment.”“No more trauma-based writing!” she said. “These are rules. And Suzan-Lori Parks does not like to be policed. Any policing cuts me off from hearing the spirit. Sometimes the spirit sings a song of trauma. I’m not supposed to extend my hand to that spirit that is hurting because it’s no longer marketable, or because I should be only extending my hand to the spirits who are singing a song of joy? That’s not how I want to conduct my artistic life.”She also said she is troubled by how much anger, at the Public Theater and elsewhere, has been directed at white women. “Not to say that Karen doesn’t exist. Yes, yes, yes. But it’s interesting that on our mission to dismantle the patriarchy, we sure did go after a lot of white women. If you talk about it, it’s ‘You’re supporting white supremacy.’ No, I’m not. I’m supporting nuanced conversation. And I think a lot of that got lost, and lot of times we just stayed silent when the loudest voice in the room was talking, and the loudest voice in the room is not always the voice of wisdom.”THIS SEASON, SHE’S PIVOTING back toward the stage after a stretch of film work in which she wrote the screenplay for “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” and was a writer, showrunner and executive producer of “Genius: Aretha,” both of which were released last year.At the start of the pandemic, she assigned herself the project that became “Plays for the Plague Year,” writing one short play each day for 13 months. The discipline was a familiar one: In 2002, after winning the Pulitzer, she began “365 Days/365 Plays,” then she did another daily playwriting exercise during the first 100 days of the Trump presidency. The pandemic play is part personal history — how the coronavirus affected Parks and her family — and part requiem for those who died during that period, from George Floyd to Parks’s first husband. The play, like much of Parks’s work, features songs she wrote. “I was moved into other states, where I wasn’t just documenting what happened that day, but I wanted to sing,” she said.She’s got plenty still to come — she’s still polishing “The Harder They Come,” which will feature songs by Jimmy Cliff and others, including Parks, who said the story, set in Jamaica, “really captures a beautiful people in their struggle.” She’s then hoping to turn to that second novel (a first, “Getting Mother’s Body,” was published in 2003).She is planning a screen adaptation of “Topdog,” as well as a new segment of her Civil War drama “Father Comes Home From the Wars” (so far, three parts have been staged; she said she expects to write nine or 12). Also: she’s writing the book, music and lyrics for an Afrofuturist musical, “Jubilee,” that she’s developing with Bard College; “Jubilee,” inspired by “Treemonisha,” a Scott Joplin opera that was staged on Broadway in 1975, is about a woman who establishes a new society on the site of a former plantation.Parks’s latest play is “Sally & Tom,” starring Luke Robertson and Kristen Ariza. The first production is now underway at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; it is expected to be staged next fall at the Public Theater in New York.Dan NormanOn a recent afternoon in Minneapolis, Parks settled in behind a folding table to watch a stumble-through of “Sally & Tom,” which is being developed in association with the Public, where it is expected to be staged next fall. The work, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, is structured as a play-within-a-play — it depicts a contemporary New York theater company in the final days of rehearsing a new play about Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, an enslaved woman. Parks has had a longtime interest in Jefferson and Hemings, and at one point had worked on a television project about the relationship that never got made; the play, she said, is not a straight historical drama, but “about how the world is made, and how we live in this country.”The protagonist is a playwright who, like Parks, is warm but exacting, and is rewriting and restructuring the show as opening night nears. When I asked Joseph Haj, the Guthrie’s artistic director, how much he thought the play was about Parks, he at first shrugged it off, saying artists are always present in their work. After the run-through, he grabbed me to amend his remarks. “I take back everything I said,” he said. “I see her all over this.”Kristen Ariza, who is playing the playwright as well as Hemings (the fictional playwright stars in her own play) said “the play is full of humor, until it’s not.”“It feels so meta, because we’re doing the play, within the play, and we’re doing all these things like within the play,” she said. “She’s constantly questioning, ‘Does this fit? Is it working? Is it flowing correctly? She’s hearing our voices and adding things and making things work better as we go.”A few days later, Parks was in Times Square, watching an invited dress rehearsal for “Topdog/Underdog.” The set is draped in a floor-to-ceiling gold-dipped American flag, meant, the director, Kenny Leon, told me, to reflect the way commerce infuses the culture.Two actors who have enjoyed success onscreen, Corey Hawkins (“In the Heights”) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (“Watchmen,” “Aquaman”), play the story’s brothers, mischievously named Lincoln and Booth. They share a shabby apartment; Lincoln, fatefully, works as a Lincoln impersonator at an amusement park where patrons pretend to assassinate him, while Booth makes ends meet by shoplifting. Their relationship to each other, to truth-telling, and to their shared history is at the heart of the story.Both actors encountered the play as undergraduates; Hawkins was a stagehand on a production at Juilliard, and Abdul-Mateen read a few scenes as Booth while at Berkeley. “It’s the first piece of material that I ever performed on a stage that I felt like was written for someone like me,” Abdul-Mateen said.Like many people I spoke with, Abdul-Mateen was particularly struck by Parks’s ear for dialogue. “It’s as if she eavesdropped on these two characters,” he said, “and just wrote everything down as she heard it.”Hawkins called the play “an ode to young black men who don’t always get to live out loud.” And he is embracing that opportunity — one night, he called Parks at 2 a.m. to discuss a section of the play; she has also helped him learn the guitar, which he had not played before getting this role. “There’s something very grounding about that peace that she carries,” he said. “When she walks in the room, she carries the ancestors, the people we’re trying to honor, with her.”Shortly after we hung up, my phone rang: Hawkins again, this time with a reverential plea. “Make us proud, man,” he said. “She’s a national treasure for us.” More