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      The Shakespearean Tall Tale That Shaped How We See Starlings

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      Researchers debunked a long-repeated yarn that the common birds owe their North American beginnings to a 19th-century lover of the Bard. Maybe this ubiquitous bird’s story is ready for a reboot.In 1890, a mustachioed eccentric named Eugene Schieffelin released a few dozen European starlings into New York City. His supposed goal? Introduce all the bird species mentioned in William Shakespeare’s plays to America.More than a century later, the European starling is one of the most plentiful bird species in North America. Something like 85 million starlings inhabit this continent, from Alaska and Newfoundland all the way to Mexico. The animals are gorgeous, with polka-dot feather patterns and a purply-green sheen. They fill the skies in great numbers, flying in synchronized patterns called murmurations.But they are also considered a pest, said to spread disease to livestock and cause $800 million worth of agricultural damage each year. The species is believed to take over their nesting cavities, leading to population declines.Add it all up, and it makes one heck of a story about how even the tiniest of actions can trigger profound consequences. The butterfly effect, there for all to see in every roadside murmuration. A starling flaps its wings in Central Park, and around 130 years later, a woodpecker loses its nest and a dairy farmer loses their livelihood.“If true, it would suggest that a long-dead dramatist totally reshaped the ecosystem of a foreign continent, which is a fascinating connection between literature and science,” said John MacNeill Miller, an assistant professor of English at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.However, Dr. MacNeill and a Lauren Fugate, a student who worked with him, recently concluded that crucial parts of the story are not true. And that made them wonder: What else have scientists and naturalists gotten wrong about the European starling’s narrative? Is there more to this bird known mostly as an invasive pest?The Bird and the Bard-LoverThree starlings collected in Central Park, including, from left, two juveniles collected in 1892 and an adult collected in 1890, in the American Museum of Natural History’s historical collection.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesFeathers of one of the European starling study skins from 1890. The museum’s starling collection includes specimens from their native, as well as introduced, range.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesDr. Miller has long been fascinated by the tale of Eugene Schieffelin. But there was a problem with the narrative.“In all the places that I had seen this story before,” he said, “I never saw a single reliable source from the time period when this supposedly happened.”So he and Ms. Fugate, started digging through archives and databases for any link between the Bard-lover and the bird. According to their findings, which were published in the journal Environmental Humanities in November, Schieffelin did release 40 pairs of European starlings into New York City twice in the springs of 1890 and 1891. But Ms. Fugate and Dr. Miller failed to find evidence that Schieffelin was the Shakespeare superfan he has been made out to be.They found in an essay collection published in 1948 that Edwin Way Teale, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nature writer, was the first to link the two. He referred to Schieffelin’s “curious hobby” of introducing “all the birds mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare.”Determined to find the source for Teale’s claim, Dr. Miller drove to the University of Connecticut to sort through a collection of Teale’s archives. (He died in 1980.) In a draft of the essay, Teale muses that perhaps Schieffelin had been influenced by a Shakespeare garden being started in Central Park around the same time — a botanical homage to the Bard that sought to nurture plants, not birds, mentioned in his plays.However, Teale got the timing wrong. The Shakespeare Garden — which you can still visit today — wasn’t planned until a decade after Schieffelin’s death, or 22 years after he first released starlings. Therefore, the garden could not have been a factor. The final version of the essay omitted the mention of the garden but left the connection between Schieffelin and Shakespeare. This statement of fact has since been repeated again and again without challenge in magazines, newspapers of record and birding websites.Several starlings in Fort Tryon park.Karsten Moran for The New York Times“Long story short, we concluded that this commonplace story is mostly fictional,” Dr. Miller said.Dr. Miller and Ms. Fugate also question whether today’s birds are uniquely descended from Schieffelin’s flocks, as is often parroted. Numerous records exist of earlier European starling introductions, starting in 1872, to locations including New York City, Ohio and even as far away as Oregon. Such releases were part of a movement at the time known as “acclimatization” where people deliberately experimented with transplanting species into new areas, either to see how they would adapt or because those species were seen as beneficial in some way.Some tellings of the Schieffelin starling origin story note these earlier introductions but suggest that those birds failed to survive. However, wild starlings were caught in Massachusetts in 1876, far from any of the documented introductions. Likewise, there is a record of wild starlings in New Jersey in 1884. And who knows how many birds truly survived in nature beyond human notice, the researchers argue.“From the perspective of an invasion biologist, most invasions come from multiple introductions,” said Natalie Hofmeister, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University.In 2019, Ms. Hofmeister published a study in the journal Molecular Ecology of the European starling’s genetic variation across North America. If all the birds came from Schieffelin’s small flock, then you’d expect to see a tight genetic bottleneck in the data. Likewise, if the other, earlier introductions had been successful, that should have injected more diversity into the results. But her findings landed somewhere in between.“It does seem like there’s a lot of ambiguity as to whether or not the New York birds were really the beginning of the starlings’ expansion,” said Ms. Hofmeister, who has a follow-up study in the works.Hell Is Empty and All the Starlings Are HereA scavenging starling near the southwest entrance to Central Park. Something like 85 million starlings inhabit North America — they are one of the most plentiful bird species on the continent.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesDr. Miller and Ms. Fugate also take issue with the depiction of starlings as biological terrors. As evidence, they point to a well-regarded study from 2003 that found out of 27 native cavity-nesting birds, only one showed hints of decline that might be attributed to the introduction of starlings: the small woodpeckers known as yellow-bellied sapsuckers.Nicole Michel, director of quantitative science for the National Audubon Society, sees it differently. It’s her job to drill down into bird population data. And she says looking for declines as a result of any one variable sets “too high of a bar.”“There are many factors out there that we know are impacting birds — cats, building collisions, pesticides,” she said. “And yet it’s very difficult to determine population level impacts.”She added: “So do starlings affect other birds? Definitely. Are they the only ones that affect other birds? No.”Nearly three billion birds have disappeared from North America since 1970. The European starlings here are counted among them, actually, with an estimated decline of 49 percent over the same time frame. (Starlings are also “declining rapidly” in Europe.)Even on the downswing, with about 85 million animals, starlings are bound to create an impact. The more likely scenario is that scientists don’t know enough to see the effects of starlings, said Daniel Simberloff, a biologist at the University of Tennessee.“We have no idea what its real impact is on insect populations, for example,” said Dr. Simberloff, who is also the editor of the journal Biological Invasions. Nor do scientists know much about more subtle but no less important impacts, such as the way starlings may affect how nutrients cycle through an ecosystem, he said.Anti-perching spikes are used to discourage birds, including starlings, from resting near the runways and taxiways at LaGuardia Airport.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesStarlings are believed to threaten native birds by taking over their nesting cavities, leading to population declines.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesOne factor that’s not subtle is the way European starlings descend on feedlots and dairy farms by the tens to hundreds of thousands. Starlings usually eat insects during the winter, but when livestock feed is available, they’ll pick through it for steam-flaked corn, which is higher in protein and fiber than other parts of the feed. And when that many birds are taking the M&Ms out of the trail mix, so to speak, it can affect growth and milk production in cows and cost dairy farmers millions of dollars, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates.The birds are also suspected of transmitting diseases to livestock, though proving how this happens exactly has been as slippery as deciphering the impacts on native birds. While feedlots with more starlings had higher incidences of antibiotic resistant E. coli, killing more than 70 percent of the starling flock did not change how much E. coli the cows had. It’s also unclear if starlings are bringing microbes into the feedlots or simply spreading microbes that are already there.A research economist for the U.S.D.A.’s National Wildlife Research Center, Stephanie Shwiff has seen how starlings congregate at dairy lots firsthand and, she said, it is “impressive.” But as she tallies up losses to the agricultural sector, she sees no redemptive arc for these birds — only financial harm.“A lot of producers know exactly the damage that the birds are doing, but they have this overwhelming sense that it’s just the cost of doing business,” Dr. Shwiff said. She said blueberry farmers and wine grape vineyards also get slammed: “They have an almost defeated attitude.”To help farmers and livestock owners, the U.S.D.A.’s Wildlife Services program helps disperse, relocate or eradicate starlings. In 2020 alone, the program shooed away nearly eight million European starlings, and killed another 790,128 of them. A vast majority of these animals were killed with a poison invented specifically for them called DRC-1339, or Starlicide.Starlings and Arrows of Outrageous FortuneJoan Berry Hale of Stockbridge, Ga., a survivor of a 1960 Eastern Airlines plane crash that was the result of a bird strike.Audra Melton for The New York TimesWhile starlings’ impact on native birds is still debated, no one can question the effect they’ve had on American aviation. Just ask Joan Berry Hale.On Oct. 4, 1960, Ms. Hale was working as a flight attendant for Eastern Airlines when the Lockheed L-188 Electra she was crewing scared a flock of starlings as it took off from Boston en route to Philadelphia.“I could see out the window in the back, and I saw all these black birds fly by,” said Ms. Hale, now 85. The plane’s propellers ingested hundreds of starlings, which disturbed the engines and forced the craft to pitch left and crash nose first into the bay. “They didn’t find the front-end crew until they pulled the nose up out of the mud the next day,” she recalled.Of the 72 people on board, only 10 survived. Most were severely injured, but Ms. Hale emerged unscathed and helped survivors exit the wreckage, put on life preservers and board rescue boats.The Electra crash remains the deadliest accident resulting from a bird strike in world history. It was also a turning point in aviation safety.“That was the crash that started it all,” said Carla Dove, program manager for the Smithsonian Institution’s Feather Identification Lab, which was created in response to the Electra accident.Since its formation, the Feather Identification Lab has worked with the Federal Aviation Administration to make air travel safer. Using the Smithsonian’s vast collection of feathers, Dr. Dove and other experts can take a piece of “snarge,” what they call bits of bird that have gone through a jet engine, and figure out which species it belonged to. Then, airport managers and wildlife biologists can work together to make the facilities less attractive to those species.For starlings, says Richard Dolbeer, a science adviser for the U.S.D.A.’s Airport Wildlife Hazards Program, something as simple as letting the grass grow can discourage the birds from landing. Spacing out trees also cuts down on large, communal overnight roosts that might keep the animals near an airport.This Great Breach in the Starling’s Abused NatureRyan Kronenbitter, the operations group supervisor for the team at LaGuardia Airport that helps manage wildlife.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBut while starlings have caused plenty of wreckage to agriculture and aviation, the birds may have some admirable qualities that are typically overlooked.Dr. Simberloff, a pioneer in the field of invasion biology, said that it was a great tragedy that starlings had been introduced, but that some of the rhetoric around them is overblown.“You see a lot of these popular papers that talk about it as one of the great scourges of North America,” Dr. Simberloff said of starlings. “And they don’t seem to be that.”Dr. Dolbeer, who is also an ornithologist, said he had “great admiration for starlings because they are so adaptable.” He’s also fascinated by the way starlings can intermingle and even roost with native species, such as red-winged blackbirds. “It’s sort of like the analogy of America being a melting pot, with all the people coming in and gluing together,” he said.Dr. Simberloff said his daughter rescued a starling and raised it up from a chick. “It knows its name very clearly,” and will sometimes say it — Blue — when prompted, he said.There may even be reasons to further consider the birds’ ecological impact. The 2003 paper on starling dominance found three species of woodpeckers experienced population increases since the European birds arrived, although it does not make a case for causation. And Ms. Fugate and Dr. Miller point to a 1915 study by U.S.D.A. scientists who concluded that starlings gobbled up fewer crops and ate more crop pests than native species.And while his research has made the Shakespearean starling legend seem well and truly dead, the question of how to view the European starling these days seems very much to depend on whom you ask.After more than 60 years, Ms. Hale thinks about the crash anytime she sees a large flock of birds. So many innocent people lost their lives, and she’ll never forget the cold bite of the water. Ultimately, she thinks she became a better person because of the accident.And while she “doesn’t care much for those pesky birds,” she also doesn’t blame the European starling. “It wasn’t their fault,” Ms. Hale said. “That’s just nature.”A starling flaps its wings in Central Park, and a life changes course in the frigid waters of Boston Harbor.A starling undeterred by an anti-perching device on a lamppost at LaGuardia.Karsten Moran for The New York Times More

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      Matthew Broderick, Starring in Broadway’s ‘Plaza Suite,’ Tests Positive

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      Matthew Broderick, who is now starring on Broadway in a revival of the Neil Simon comedy “Plaza Suite,” has tested positive for the coronavirus. He did not perform Tuesday night, and it is not clear when he will return to the show.Broderick’s co-star, Sarah Jessica Parker, who is also his wife, has tested negative, and went on Tuesday night opposite Michael McGrath, who is Broderick’s Tony Award-winning understudy. (McGrath won in 2012 for a production of “Nice Work if You Can Get It” that starred Broderick.)Broderick’s positive test result comes as coronavirus cases have once again been rising in New York City, and a number of Broadway shows have been affected.Last Saturday, the actor Daniel Craig was among several members of the company of a new Broadway production of “Macbeth” to test positive, and that show has since canceled all performances until Monday. More

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      Alan J. Hruska, a Founder of Soho Press, Dies at 88

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      A litigator for 44 years, he was also a novelist; a writer, director and producer of plays and films; and helped establish the independent publishing house Soho Press.Alan J. Hruska, a corporate litigator who had a second, wide-ranging career as a founder of the independent publishing house Soho Press, which invests in serious fiction by unsung authors; as a novelist; and as a writer, director and producer of plays and films, died on March 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was lymphoma, his daughter, Bronwen Hruska, the publisher of Soho Press, said.Even before Mr. Hruska retired from his day job at Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York in 2001 after four decades there, he published his first novel, in 1985. The next year, with his wife, Laura Chapman Hruska, and Juris Jurjevics, a former editor in chief of Dial Press, he founded Soho Press.Soho Press made its reputation by welcoming unsolicited manuscripts from little-known writers. Its ambitions, Mr. Jurjevics said, were “not to have a certain percentage of growth a year and not to be bought by anybody.”Soho Press, based in Manhattan, has specialized in literary fiction and memoirs with a backlist that includes books by Jake Arnott, Edwidge Danticat, John L’Heureux, Delores Phillips, Sue Townsend and Jacqueline Winspear. The company also has a Soho Teen young adult imprint and a Soho Crime imprint that publishes mysteries in exotic locales by, among others, Cara Black, Colin Cotterill, Peter Lovesey and Stuart Neville.Mr. Hruska (pronounced RUH-ska) often said that there was less of a vocational disconnect between lawyering and literature than met the eye. Both, done successfully, he said, are about storytelling, whether arguing a case in a legal brief or writing a novel, script or screenplay.“I was a trial lawyer, and, while I would expect my actors to remember their lines better than my witnesses did, there is less disparity between the two professions than might be thought,” he said in an interview with a blogger in 2017.“A trial and a play are both productions,” he added. “Putting each together involves telling a story. So does writing a brief or making an oral argument to a panel of judges. If you don’t tell a story, you will very likely put them to sleep.”Mr. Hruska made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005.Joan MarcusAlan Jay Hruska was born on July 9, 1933, in the Bronx and was raised in Far Rockaway, Queens. His father, Harry Hruska, was in the textile business. His mother, Julia (Schwarz) Hruska, was a homemaker.While he was undecided on a profession, Alan had a penchant for filmmaking that took hold when he was 8. As a youth, he would ride the subway into Manhattan to attend double features at first-run movie theaters.After graduating from Lawrence High School on Long Island, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale in 1955 and was persuaded to apply to Yale Law School by a college professor who was impressed by his skills in logic and rationalization. He, in turn, found the law to be an ideal vehicle for his writing and reasoning.He graduated from the law school in 1958, the same year he married Laura Mae Chapman, one of three women in their law school class.She died in 2010. In addition to their daughter, he is survived by two sons, Andrew and Matthew; his wife, Julie Iovine, a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, whom he married in 2013; and six grandchildren.Mr. Hruska borrowed from his litigation experiences in major cases in writing a number of his novels, including “Wrong Man Running” (2011); “Pardon the Ravens” (2015); “It Happened at Two in the Morning” (2017), which The Wall Street Journal said showed the author “at his thriller-writing best”; and “The Inglorious Arts” (2019).Michael Cavadias as the cross-dressing character Wendy in a scene from the romantic comedy “Nola,” a 2003 film written and directed by Mr. Hruska.Samuel Goldwyn FilmsHe also wrote and directed the film “Nola,” a romantic comedy starring Emmy Rossum which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.Other films of his include “The Warrior Class,” a comedy about a rookie lawyer that premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2005; and “The Man on Her Mind,” an existential comedy based on his play of the same name, which premiered at the Charing Cross Theatre in London in 2012.He made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005. Ten years later, when a surreal play of his about love, marriage and an impending hurricane opened, the critic Alexis Soloski wrote in The Times in 2015, “If an existentialist philosopher ever attempted a light romantic comedy, it might sound a little like ‘Laugh It Up, Stare It Down,’ Alan Hruska’s quaintly absurdist play at the Cherry Lane Theater.”Mr. Hruska oversaw a wide range of civil litigation at Cravath in the 44 years before he retired in 2001. He was named senior counsel in 2002. He also served as secretary of the New York City Bar Association.Asked by The American Lawyer in 2015 whether he ever felt that the law was not his true calling, he replied: “Not at all. I had a great experience. I did about 400 cases, won 200 and settled 200. I’m particularly proud of the settlements because they can put people in a much better position than winning a case.” More

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      ‘Macbeth’ performances on Broadway pause after Daniel Craig tests positive for the coronavirus.

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      The show, which just began previews on Tuesday, hopes to resume on April 8.Daniel Craig, who is starring in the title role of a new Broadway production of “Macbeth,” tested positive for the coronavirus on Saturday, forcing the show to cancel most of next week’s performances.The show, which just began previews on Tuesday and is scheduled to open April 28, had already canceled Friday night’s performance, citing another positive coronavirus test among cast members, when on Saturday it canceled both the matinee and an evening performance, citing Mr. Craig’s positive test. Then, late Saturday night, the production said that it was canceling all performances until April 8 “due to the detection of a limited number of positive covid test results within the company.”Coronavirus cases have recently been rising in New York City, and several Broadway performers have tested positive. In most instances, shows have been able to turn to understudies to keep going, but because “Macbeth” had just begun performances, it had not yet fully rehearsed the understudies.All Broadway actors — in fact, all workers in Broadway theaters — are required to be fully vaccinated. Broadway also currently requires that ticket holders be fully vaccinated and wear masks except when eating and drinking; on Friday, the theater owners and operators said that those rules would remain in place at least through April 30, and that they would decide by April 15 whether to retain, alter or drop the audience protocols after the end of the month.“Macbeth,” of course, is a well-known and much-loved tragedy by William Shakespeare, and this revival has been one of the most anticipated productions of the spring on Broadway. Mr. Craig, who is fresh off his long run playing James Bond on film, had repeatedly said he wanted to be part of Broadway’s efforts to rebound after the industry’s long pandemic shutdown.Mr. Craig is starring opposite Ruth Negga, as Lady Macbeth, in the production, which is directed by Sam Gold. The show does not have much leeway — it is already scheduled to be the last production to open this season, and its opening night is on the final day when shows can open to qualify for this year’s Tony Awards. More

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      A Playwright Makes the Scene in New York’s Living Rooms

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      In the fall of 2020, a young playwright named Matthew Gasda decided to entertain some friends by staging a one-act drama on a grassy hilltop of Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. The masked audience quickly realized that what they were watching was conspicuously relatable: Performed on a picnic blanket by seven actors, “Circles” presented a group of pandemic-weary friends who gather over wine one night in a city park to catch up on their lives.After the applause, Mr. Gasda, 33, passed around a hat for donations. Then he began plotting his next play.A few months later he unveiled “Winter Journey,” a drama loosely based on Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” in a chilly backyard in Bushwick. Then came “Quartet,” a comedy about two couples who swap partners, which he put on in a TriBeCa apartment. He staged his next play, “Ardor,” about friends who gather for a weekend in the country, in a loft in Greenpoint. He was a long way from Broadway, or even Off Broadway, but he was grateful for the attention.“I’d long been staging plays in New York in anonymity,” he said, “but during the pandemic I became like the rat that survived the nukes. Suddenly, there was no competition.”In the spring of 2021, he fell into a downtown social scene that was forming on the eastern edge of Chinatown, by the juncture of Canal and Division Streets. What he witnessed inspired his next work, “Dimes Square.”“Dimes Square became the anti-Covid hot spot, and so I went there because that’s where things were happening,” Mr. Gasda said.Named after Dimes, a restaurant on Canal Street, the micro scene was filled with skaters, artists, models, writers and telegenic 20-somethings who didn’t appear to have jobs at all. A hyperlocal print newspaper called The Drunken Canal gave voice to what was going on.Mr. Gasda, who had grown up in Bethlehem, Pa., with the dream of making it in New York, threw himself into the moment, assuming his role as the scene’s turtlenecked playwright. And as he worked as a tutor to support himself by day, and immersed himself in Dimes Square at night, he began envisioning a play.From left, Bob Laine, Bijan Stephen, Ms. Grady, Mr. Lorentzen and Eunji Lim rehearse a scene from “Dimes Square,” a new play about a downtown scene.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThe reflected face of the critic Christian Lorentzen during a rehearsal of Matthew Gasda’s “Dimes Square.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThe actor Cassidy Grady, under a flag blanket at the same rehearsal.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSet in a Chinatown loft, “Dimes Square” chronicles the petty backstabbing among a group of egotistic artists and media industry types. It’s filled with references to local haunts like the bar Clandestino and the Metrograph theater, and its characters include an arrogant writer who drinks Fernet — Mr. Gasda’s spirit of choice — and a washed up novelist who snorts cocaine with people half his age.Adding a touch of realism, Mr. Gasda cast friends in key roles: Bijan Stephen, a journalist and podcast host, portrays a frustrated magazine editor; Christian Lorentzen, a literary critic, plays a haggard Gen X novelist; and Fernanda Amis, whose father is the author Martin Amis, plays the daughter of a famous writer.Since the play opened in February at a loft in Greenpoint, “Dimes Square” has become an underground hit that consistently sells out performances. The people who see the show include insiders eager to see their scene committed to the stage, as well as those who have kept track of it at a distance via Instagram. The writers Gary Indiana, Joshua Cohen, Sloane Crosley and Mr. Amis have all attended.The play, which is scheduled to start a Manhattan run at an apartment in SoHo on Friday, also won Mr. Gasda his first big write-up, a review by Helen Shaw in New York Magazine’s Vulture, that compared him to Chekhov and declared: “Gasda has appointed himself dramatist of the Dimes Square scene.”After the appraisal ran online, Mr. Gasda received a text from a friend on his battered flip phone congratulating him on the fact that he had been “dubbed our chekhov.” But even as Mr. Gasda is getting his shot at success in literary New York, something about the noise surrounding his play has been troubling him.The playwright in his Brooklyn apartment.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“I’m thankful for the attention, but the people coming to see the show seem to think the play is complicit with the scene, and that’s getting totally warped by them,” he said. “The play is pessimistic about the scene.”Moments before actors took the stage at a recent performance, audience members sipped cheap red wine and made small talk about the Twitter chatter surrounding the show. As the lights dimmed, Mr. Gasda, wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches and his usual scarf, reminded his guests to pay for their drinks on Venmo.After the performance, as the loft cleared out, one audience member, Joseph Hogan, a 29-year-old filmmaker, offered a critique: “The likability of these characters is irrelevant to me,” he said. “What’s important to me is if their insecurities are relatable. And as a person who moved to this city from somewhere else and is trying to make it here in New York like they are, I feel I can identify with them.”“If they’re not considered likable,” he continued, “then neither am I. And that’s fine with me.”The play’s cast made its way to its usual bar, Oak & Iron. There, Mr. Gasda nursed a Fernet as Mr. Lorentzen passed along an evaluation of the show.“A journalist came up to me and told me she thought you’d be just another Cassavetes rehash,” Mr. Lorentzen said, referring to John Cassavetes, the noted indie filmmaker of the 1970s and 1980s. “But afterward she told me, ‘No, he gets it. He’s doing his own thing.’”“I’ve gotten Cassavetes references before,” Mr. Gasda said. “But it’s not my job to be interested in what people think. My job is to keep secreting and writing.”He took a sip.“It’s great we’re getting attention,” he said, “but it’s not like I’m making money out of this. I still have my day job.”“It reminds me of this story I heard about a guy seeing ‘Einstein on the Beach,’” he continued, referring to Philip Glass’s 1976 opera. “Then the guy needed to get his toilet fixed, so he called a plumber. The plumber shows up, and the guy asks him, ‘Aren’t you Philip Glass?’ Glass tells him, ‘Yeah, but I’m not making money on the show yet.’”Mr. Gasda watches from below as George Olesky and Cassidy Grady act out a scene from his play “Minotaur.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesMr. Gasda’s quest to become a New York playwright began during his teenage years in Bethlehem, where his father was a high school history teacher and his mother was a paralegal. He grew up watching Eagles games on TV with his dad and hearing stories about a grandfather’s days as a steelworker. He became bookish, compulsively reading “Ulysses” and devouring the works of the poet John Ashbery and the novelist William Gaddis.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Syracuse University, Mr. Gasda hopped a bus to Port Authority. He spent his first day walking aimlessly until he stumbled on Caffe Reggio, a Greenwich Village institution that was once a gathering spot for bohemians and Beat Generation poets. And there, even among the New York University students doing their homework, he felt at home. He soon moved into an apartment in Bushwick and started his reinvention.He wrote on a Smith Corona electric typewriter. He rocked the scarf and turtleneck to literary parties. He hung out in the stacks of the Strand and made Caffe Reggio his office, writing parts of over a dozen plays there. To make the rent, he taught English at a charter school in Red Hook and worked as a debate coach at Spence, the Upper East Side private school. He is now a college prep tutor and lives in a book-cluttered apartment in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn.But even after a decade in the city, he could get few people aside from friends and family members to see his work — until his luck changed during the pandemic, when young New Yorkers, weary of Netflix, seemed up for some live theater.Now, in addition to the second run of “Dimes Square,” another one of Mr. Gasda’s plays, “Minotaur,” is scheduled to open soon at a small venue in Dumbo. An early and intimate staging of the production included the actress Dasha Nekrasova, who has a recurring role on “Succession” and co-hosts the provocative politics and culture podcast “Red Scare.”Mr. Gasda at home.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAfter a recent “Minotaur” rehearsal in Midtown, Ms. Nekrasova and another cast member, Cassidy Grady, huddled for a smoke on the street while Mr. Gasda chatted with them. They discussed the debut novel of the moment, Sean Thor Conroe’s “Fuccboi,” as well as the new play that was rounding into shape.“‘Minotaur’ is a kind of Ibsenian drama,” Ms. Nekrasova said. “I’m enthusiastic about Gasda because he represents a burgeoning interest in theater, post-Covid, in the city.”Mr. Gasda slipped into a nearby sports bar. He ordered a glass of Fernet, and as he considered the impending run of “Dimes Square,” he suggested that audiences think about his play differently.“Ultimately, ‘Dimes Square’ is a comedy,” he said. “I’m not trying to send people to the therapist. And I’m not saying I’m better than the people in my play.”“The other side of the play is about striving in New York,” he added. “So it’s about something that’s universal, too.” More

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      Jack Willis, TV Producer and Empathetic Filmmaker, Dies at 87

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      A survivor of a crippling accident, his documentaries and news coverage for public television focused on poverty, race and other social issues.Jack Willis, a journalist and television executive who won several Emmys and a Polk Award for his innovative films and news and documentary programming during the embryonic years of cable and public broadcasting, died on Feb. 9 in Zurich. He was 87.He underwent assisted suicide at a clinic there, his wife, Mary Pleshette Willis, said. He lived in Manhattan.When he was in his late 30s, Mr. Willis broke his neck in a body surfing accident that temporarily left him a quadriplegic before he miraculously recovered, his wife said, inspiring a television movie. But after a half century, the injuries were taking their toll. Six years ago, he broke his hip and began using a wheelchair, she said.From 1971 to 1973, Mr. Willis was director of programming and production for WNET, the public television station in New York, where he introduced innovative local news coverage as executive producer of “The 51st State,” a program that took its name from the zany 1969 mayoral campaign of the author Norman Mailer, who proposed that New York City secede from New York State.The program, which won an Emmy Award, focused on communities rather than the more traditional fare of the nightly local news.Patrick Watson, center, the anchor of the WNET program “The 51st State,” moderated a discussion of racial tensions in New York City in 1971. Mr. Willis was the program’s executive producer. WNET records, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries“He pioneered in-depth local coverage of New York’s outer boroughs on WNET, focusing on long-ignored and disenfranchised minorities and immigrants, often letting them speak for themselves,” said Stephen B. Shepard, former editor in chief of Business Week and founding dean of the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. “For Jack, it was always about the people affected by government decisions.”Mr. Willis was an executive producer of another Emmy-winning series, “The Great American Dream Machine,” a weekly 90-minute program on PBS. The television critic John J. O’Connor of The New York Times, writing in 1971, said the program had been conceived as “a free‐form program that could offer the viewer worthwhile bits and pieces of humor, controversy, entertainment, investigative reporting, opinion, documentary and theatrical sketches.”“It has been called a hodgepodge of the brilliant and the trite,” he added, but concluded that it was “one of the most exciting and imaginative segments of television to come along this season.”Looking back, Mr. Willis himself told The Times in 2020: “It was a great time in public television. If you thought it, you could do it.”Marshall Efron, left, and Andy Rooney, two of the stars of the PBS program “The Great American Dream Machine,” in 1972. Mr. Willis was its executive producer. WNETIn 1963, he directed his first documentary, “The Streets of Greenwood,” a 20-minute film about a voter-registration drive in the Mississippi Delta. Collaborating with two friends, Phil Wardenburg and John Reavis, Mr. Willis shot it with a camera he had borrowed from the folk singer Pete Seeger, whose concert in a cotton field was featured in the film.In 1979, Mr. Willis shared the George Polk Award for best documentary with Saul Landau for “Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang.” The film focused on the journalist Paul Jacobs’s investigation of radiation hazards from atomic testing in Nevada in the 1950s and ’60s and the federal government’s efforts to suppress information on its threat to public health.Two other films he produced — “Lay My Burden Down” (1966), about the plight of tenant farmers in rural Alabama, and “Every Seventh Child” (1967), questioning tax subsidies and other government benefits for Catholic education — were shown at the New York Film Festival.Mr. Willis wrote, directed and produced “Appalachia: Rich Land Poor People” (1968), which exposed grinding poverty largely caused, the film argued, by corporate greed, racism and ineffective local government.Mr. Willis’s commitment to civil rights was reflected in his enduring friendship with the singer Harry Belafonte, an activist in the movement, who described Mr. Willis in an email as “a soul brother” whose “intellect and humor, combined with his courageousness, make him one of the most precious people I have ever known.”“For those on the political left,” Mr. Belafonte added, “he was living proof of the proverb, ‘You can cage the singer but not the song.’”Jack Lawrence Willis was born on June 20, 1934, in Milwaukee to Louis Willis, a manufacturer of women’s shoes, and Libbie (Feingold) Willis, a homemaker. The family moved to California when he was 9.He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1956 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also played shortstop on the varsity baseball team. He liked to recall that he was recruited by a Boston Red Sox minor-league team.Mr. Willis dropped out of U.C.L.A. School of Law to serve in the Army for two years, then graduated in 1962 and moved to New York, where he hoped to connect with a job teaching in Africa or the Middle East.While waiting for a job abroad that never materialized, he worked briefly in television for Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera” and David Susskind’s “Open End.”He ran a movie production company in California, then was hired as vice president for programming and production at CBS Cable, a short-lived but well-received performing arts channel.From 1990 to 1997, Mr. Willis was president of KTCA, the public television station in Minneapolis-St. Paul, then returned to New York, where, working for George Soros’s Open Society Institute, he developed a media program. In 1999, he was a founder of Link TV, a nonprofit satellite TV network. He retired in 2011.Jack Willis in an undated photo. via Mary WillisIn addition to his wife, he is survived by their two daughters, Sarah Willis and Kate Willis Ladell; three grandchildren; and his brother, Richard.Mr. Willis and his wife wrote a book, “… But There Are Always Miracles” (1974), about his body-surfing accident in 1969 off Southampton, N.Y. They had been planning to marry when a crashing wave broke his neck and left him paralyzed from the chest down. He was told he would never walk again.After two operations and six months of inpatient rehabilitation, he walked out of Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in Manhattan. The couple married a year later.His story was adapted into a TV film, “Some Kind of Miracle” (1979), with a screenplay by the couple. They wrote and produced other films together.Shortly before he died, Ms. Willis said, her husband told her that the accident had “taught me to put everything in perspective — including the fear of failure.” He admitted to no regrets, she said, “except,” she quoted him as saying, “for taking that wave and turning down the Boston Red Sox.” More

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      in Music

      Where Jazz Lives Now

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      SurfacingWhere Jazz Lives NowThe jazz club, with its dim lighting and closely packed tables, looms large in our collective imagination. But today, the music is thriving in a host of different spaces.The vocalist, flutist and producer Melanie Charles sings at a rehearsal in her Brooklyn home, which has become a rehearsal space, recording studio and gathering spot.A disco ball threw beads of light across a crowded dance floor on a recent Monday night in Lower Manhattan while old film footage rolled across a wall by the stage. A half-dozen musicians were up there, churning waves of rhythm that reshaped over time: A transition might start with a double-tap of chords, reggae-style, from the keyboardist Ray Angry, or with a new vocal line, improvised and looped by the singer Kamilah.A classically trained pianist who’s logged time with D’Angelo and the Roots, Angry doesn’t “call tunes,” in the jazzman’s parlance. As usual, his group was cooking up grooves from scratch, treating the audience as a participant. Together they filled the narrow, two-story club with rhythm and body heat till well past midnight.Since before the coronavirus pandemic, Angry has led his Producer Mondays jam sessions every week (Covid restrictions permitting) at Nublu, an Alphabet City venue that feels more like a small European discothèque than a New York jazz club. With a diverse clientele and a varied slate of shows, Nublu’s management keeps one foot in the jazz world while booking electronic music and rock, too. On Mondays, it all comes together.The bassist Jonathan Michel, the drummer Bendji Allonce and the keyboardist Axel Tosca at Cafe Erzulie in Brooklyn.Cafe Erzulie, a Haitian restaurant and bar, hosts a wide range of music including a weekly Jazz Night.As New York nightlife has bubbled back up over the past few months, it’s been a major comfort to return to the legacy jazz rooms, like the Village Vanguard or the Blue Note, most of which survived the pandemic. But the real blood-pumping moments — the shows where you can sense that other musicians are in the room listening for new tricks, and it feels like the script is still being written onstage — have been happening most often in venues that don’t look like typical jazz clubs. They’re spaces where jazz bleeds outward, and converses with a less regimented audience.“The scene has started to fracture,” the drummer and producer Kassa Overall, 39, said in a recent interview, admitting that he didn’t know exactly what venue would become ground zero for the next generation of innovators. “I don’t think it’s really found a home yet. And that’s good, actually.”It’s an uncommonly exciting time for live jazz. Young bandleaders have wide followings again — Makaya McCraven, Esperanza Spalding, Robert Glasper and Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah each rack up millions of plays on streaming services — and a generation of musicians and listeners is lined up to follow their lead, or break away. This year, for the first time, the most-nominated artist at the Grammys is a jazz musician who crossed over: Jon Batiste.The saxphonist Isaiah Collier gives a fist bump at the Arts for Art On_Line Salon at the Clemente in Manhattan.The saxophonist Isaiah Collier and the bassist Tyler Mitchell at the Arts for Art On_Line Salon.The drummer Andrew Drury performs as part of Jason Kao Hwang’s Human Rites Trio at the Arts for Art On_Line Salon.These players’ music has never really seemed at home in jazz clubs, nor has the more avant-garde and spiritual-leaning work of artists like James Brandon Lewis, Shabaka Hutchings, Angel Bat Dawid, Kamasi Washington, Nicole Mitchell or the Sun Ra Arkestra, all of whom are in high demand these days.Maybe it’s a case of coincidental timing. A confluence of forces — the pandemic, the volatility of New York real estate, an increasingly digital culture — has upset the landscape, and with the music mutating fast, it also seems to be finding new homes.Jazz is a music of live embodiment. Part of its power has always been to change the way that we assemble (jazz clubs were some of the first truly integrated social spaces in northern cities), and performers have always responded to the environment where they’re being heard. So updating our sense of where this music happens might be fundamental to re-establishing jazz’s place in culture, especially at a moment when the culture seems ready for a new wave of jazz.A musician warms up on melodica at Nublu’s Producer Mondays.The scene at Nublu, an Alphabet City venue that feels more like a small European discothèque than a New York jazz club.Producer Mondays sessions regularly fill the narrow, two-story club with rhythm and body heat till well past midnight.FIFTY-NINE YEARS ago, the poet and critic Amiri Baraka (writing then as LeRoi Jones) reported in DownBeat magazine that New York’s major clubs had lost interest in jazz’s “new thing.” The freer, more confrontational and Afrocentric styles of improvising that had taken hold — Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor’s revolution, for short — were no longer welcome in commercial clubs. So artists started booking themselves in downtown coffee shops and their own lofts instead.The music has never stopped churning and evolving, but since the 1960s, jazz clubs — a vestige of the Prohibition era, with their windowless intimacy and closely clustered tables — have rarely felt like a perfect home for the music’s future development. At the same time, it’s been impossible to shake our attachment to the notion that clubs are the “authentic” home of jazz, a jealously guarded idyll in any American imagination.But Joel Ross, 26, a celebrated vibraphonist living in Brooklyn, said that especially in the two years since coronavirus shutdowns began, many young musicians have become unstuck from the habit of making the rounds to typical jazz venues. “Cats are just playing in random restaurants and random spots,” he said, naming a few musician-run sessions that have started up in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but not in traditional clubs.Sometimes it’s not a public thing at all. “People are getting together in their own homes more, and piecing music together,” Ross said.The vocalist, flutist and producer Melanie Charles, 34, has made her Bushwick home into a rehearsal space, recording studio and gathering spot. And when she performs, it’s usually not at straight-ahead jazz clubs. Her music uses electronics and calls for something heavier than an upright bass, so those venues just might not have what’s needed. “Musicians like me and my peers, we need some bump on the bottom,” she said. “Our material won’t work in those spaces the way we want to do it.”Collier warms up with the pianist Jordan Williams at the Arts for Art On_Line Salon.The bassist Ken Filiano peforming with Jason Kao Hwang’s Human Rites Trio at the Arts for Art On_Line Salon.High among Charles’s preferred places to play is Cafe Erzulie, a Haitian restaurant and bar tucked along the border between the Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods of Brooklyn. With bluish-green walls painted with palm-leaf patterns and bistro tables arrayed around the room and the patio, the club hosts a wide range of music, including R&B jams; album release shows and birthday parties for genre-bending artists like KeiyaA and Pink Siifu; and a weekly Jazz Night on Thursdays.Jazz Night returned this month after a late-pandemic-induced hiatus, and demand had not ebbed: The room was close to capacity, with a crowd of young, colorfully dressed patrons seated at tables and wrapped around the bar.Jonathan Michel, a bassist and musical confidante of Charles, was joined by the keyboardist Axel Tosca and the percussionist Bendji Allonce, playing rumba-driven rearrangements of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” jazz standards and traditional Caribbean songs. The crowd was tuned in all the way, which didn’t always mean quiet. But when Allonce and Tosca dropped out and Michel took a thoughtful, not overly insistent bass solo, the room hushed.Charles sat in with the trio partway through its set, singing a heart-aching original, “Symphony,” and an old Haitian song, “Lot Bo.” Almost immediately, she had 90 percent of the place silent, and 100 percent paying attention. With the band galloping over “Lot Bo,” she took a pause from improvising in flowing, diving, melismatic runs to explain what the song’s lyrics mean: “I have to cross that river; when I get to the other side, I’ll rest,” she said. “It’s been hard out here in these streets,” she told the crowd, receiving a hum of recognition. “Rest is radical, low-key.”“Musicians like me and my peers, we need some bump on the bottom,” Charles said. said. “Our material won’t work in those spaces the way we want to do it.” Cafe Erzulie is just one of a handful of relatively new venues in Brooklyn that have established their own identities, independent of jazz, but provide the music an environment to thrive. Public Records opened in Gowanus in 2019 with the primary mission to present electronic music in a hi-fi setting. It had initially planned to have improvising combos play in its cafe space, separate from the main sound room, but its curators have recently welcomed the music in more fully.Wild Birds, a Crown Heights eatery and venue, has made jazz part of its regular programming alongside cumbia, Afrobeat and other live music. It will often start a given night with a live band and audience seating, then transition to a dance floor scenario with a D.J. In Greenpoint, IRL Gallery has been hosting experimental jazz regularly alongside visual art exhibitions and electronic-music bookings. Due south, in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, the Owl Music Parlor hosts jazz as well as chamber music and singer-songwriter fare; Zanmi, a few blocks away, is another Haitian restaurant where jazz performances often feel like a roux of related musical cultures.And jazz is proving to be more than just a feather in a venue’s cultural cap. The rooms are actually filling up. “For one, we cater to a very specific sort of demographic: young people of color, who I think really understand and appreciate jazz music,” said Mark Luxama, the owner of Cafe Erzulie, explaining Jazz Night’s success. “We’ve been able to fill seats.”Besides, he added, “it’s really not about the money on Jazz Night. I think it’s more about creating community, and being able to create space for the musicians to do their thing and have a really good time.”The scene at Producer Mondays, a jam session held weekly at Nublu in Manhattan.The pianist Ray Angry playing with the Council of Goldfinger, including Kamilah on vocals and Andraleia Buch on bass at a recent Producer Mondays night.FROM THE START, the story of jazz clubs in New York has been a story of white artists receiving preferential treatment. The first time history remembers jazz being played in a New York establishment was winter 1917, when the Dixieland Original Jass Band — all white, and dishonestly named (so little about their sound was original) — traveled up from New Orleans to play at Reisenweber’s Café in Columbus Circle. The performances led to a record deal, and the Dixieland band had soon recorded the world’s first commercially distributed jazz sides, for the Victor label.During Prohibition, jazz became the preferred entertainment in speakeasies and mob-run joints. The business of the scene remained mostly in white hands, even in Harlem. But many clubs served a mixed clientele, and jazz venues were some of the first public establishments to serve Black and white people together in the 1920s and ’30s. (Of course, there were notable exceptions.) In interviews for the archivist Jeff Gold’s recent book, “Sittin’ In: Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s,” Quincy Jones and Sonny Rollins each remembered the city’s postwar jazz clubs as a kind of oasis. “It was a place of community and pure love of the art,” Jones said. “You couldn’t find that anywhere else.”But when jazz grew too radical for commerce, the avant-garde was booted from the clubs, and up sprang a loft scene. Artists found themselves at once empowered and impoverished. They were booking their own shows and marketing themselves. But Baraka, writing about one of the first cafes to present Cecil Taylor’s trio, noted a fatal flaw. “Whatever this coffee shop is paying Taylor,” he wrote, “it’s certainly not enough.”The money piece never quite shook out on the avant-garde, and by the 1980s the lofts had mostly closed amid rising rents and unfriendlier civic attitudes toward semi-legal assembly. Still, that form-busting, take-no-prisoners tradition — whether you call it avant-garde, free jazz or fire music — continues.In recent decades, it has had a pair of fierce defenders in the bassist William Parker and the dancer Patricia Nicholson Parker, a husband-and-wife duo of organizers. The Parkers run the nonprofit Arts for Art, and since the 1990s they’ve presented the standard-bearing Vision Festival, often at the Brooklyn performing arts space Roulette. They’ve also long brought music to the Clemente, a cultural center on the Lower East Side, and during the pandemic they’ve added virtual concerts to their programming.It’s hard to argue with results, and if Arts for Art has never built a huge audience, it has retained a consistent one while nurturing some of the most expansive minds in improvised music. James Brandon Lewis, the tenor saxophonist whose album “Jesup Wagon” topped many jazz critics’ appraisals of last year’s releases, has that creative community partly to thank for shepherding his career. Zoh Amba, another uncompromising young saxophonist, is cutting a strong path for herself thanks largely to Arts for Art’s support.“What Arts for Art asks of people is that they really just play their best,” Nicholson Parker said. “If your music is about getting people to consume alcohol, then that’s different.”“You need places and people who support that kind of creative freedom,” she added.The drummer Kate Gentile at the Jazz Gallery in Manhattan.AT SMALLS JAZZ Club, the storied West Village basement, purebred jazz jam sessions still stretch into the wee hours on a nightly basis, inheriting some of the infectious, insidery energy that existed in its truest form into the 1990s at clubs like Bradley’s. But today it’s hard to argue that Smalls is the right destination for hearing the most cutting-edge sounds.And although they don’t usually say it publicly, seasoned players have come to agree that the code of conduct at Smalls’ jam sessions went a little flimsy after the 2018 death of Roy Hargrove. His frequent presence as an elder there had helped to keep the bar high, even as the room had come to be filled with musicians whose hands-on experience of jazz arrived mostly through the distorted lens of formal education.The Jazz Gallery, a nonprofit club 10 blocks north of Union Square, has combined the Bradley’s legacy with a dedication to bringing forward new works by progressive young bandleaders, and it’s become an essential hub. Rio Sakairi, the Gallery’s artistic director, cultivates rising talent and encourages mentorship between generations, often by offering targeted grants and commissions of new work.A light switch in Charles’s home is adorned with an image of Ella Fitzgerald.An array of instruments in Charles’s home.She’s come to terms with the Gallery’s place on the receiving end of jazz’s academic pipeline. “You cannot take the fact that jazz is being taught at conservatory out of the equation,” she said. “Younger musicians that are coming out, they all go through school systems.”Partly as an extension of the way jazz conservatories work, jam session culture doesn’t really exist at the Gallery. Shows end when they’re scheduled to. To Charles, it feels “more like a work space” than a club. “I’m glad those spaces are there,” she said.Looking at a jazz scene in transition, a fan can only hope that some of the energy accrued at the margins, in cross-pollinated clubs and more experimental settings, might flow back into spaces where the jazz tradition is a common currency: places like Smalls, the Jazz Gallery and the National Jazz Museum in Harlem (all of which have nonprofit status, and the economic flexibility associated with it).“It just needs to be reconnected: The Smalls people need to be talking to the Jazz Gallery people; the beat machine kids need to be talking to the Smalls people,” said Overall, the drummer. “Maybe there needs to be a space that acknowledges all these different elements.”For now, Charles said, the old haunts still feel needed, and loved. “At the end of the day I still end up at Smalls,” she said. “It’s like a church whose heyday is gone, but you still come and pay your respects.”Drury, the drummer, grabs a bite before performing with Jason Kao Hwang’s Human Rites Trio.Surfacing is a visual column that explores the intersection of art and life, produced by Alicia DeSantis, Jolie Ruben, Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick. 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      in Theater

      The Flea Theater, Experimenting Again, Walks a New Tightrope

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