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    Working on a Sri Lankan-Australian Epic, He Learned His Family’s Past

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    As the acclaimed “Counting and Cracking” makes its North American debut, the playwright describes the work as “my soul on a plate.”The playwright S. Shakthidharan has lived in Australia since he was a toddler, but when he speaks of his homeland, he means Sri Lanka.That’s where he was born, where he spent his first birthday, where his ancestors were rooted. Then in 1983, the South Asian nation descended into what would become a 26-year civil war. His family, part of the country’s Tamil minority, had the means to flee to safety. So they did, going to India, Singapore and finally Australia, in 1984.“I do think of Sri Lanka as my homeland, but I think of Australia as my home,” he said the other day, his accent redolent of Sydney, where he grew up. “I think I carry the two simultaneously. Sri Lanka lives somewhere in my chest. Always. Wherever I am.”He was saying this in New York, after a rehearsal of his epic play, “Counting and Cracking,” in which the personal and political are inextricably entwined. Jet lag had a hold of him, but he was game to talk about the show, which has a largely South Asian cast of 19 and a running time of three and a half hours (intermissions included).Shiv Palekar, center, and other performers at N.Y.U. Skirball. Multiple trips to Sri Lanka and India were involved in assembling the cast.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAn autobiographically infused hit in Australia, where it had its premiere in 2019, it is now in previews at N.Y.U. Skirball in Greenwich Village. Produced by Belvoir St Theater and Kurinji, and presented by the Public Theater and N.Y.U. Skirball, it’s a multigenerational saga about a Sri Lankan-Australian family and the dangerous fragmenting of a society that can drive people to leave their beloved country and risk trying to forge a new life elsewhere.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An ‘Obsession’ With Philip Glass Inspires a Director’s Memory Play

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      In “Tao of Glass,” Phelim McDermott, who has directed three Glass operas, turns to his personal history with the composer’s work.The first piece of theater that Phelim McDermott made after college, decades ago, used music by Philip Glass. And directing productions of three of Glass’s operas has brought McDermott — and Improbable, the theater company he helped found in 1996 — glowing reviews and sold-out houses.So it’s not surprising that McDermott’s “Tao of Glass,” which arrives at the NYU Skirball on Thursday, is a loving tribute to his long relationship — what, in an interview, he called “my obsession” — with Glass’s seemingly repetitive yet constantly transforming music.“Philip’s music has been like this river that’s gone through my creative life,” McDermott said on a video call from London, where he was completing rehearsals for a revival of his juggling-heavy production of Glass’s “Akhnaten” at English National Opera. “It connects me to a part of myself that sometimes I neglect and have forgotten about. It’s like an invitation to return to myself.”Improbable’s productions tend to be built from everyday stuff, but “Tao of Glass” is even more modest than most. It is essentially a one-man show for McDermott. (Glass doesn’t perform live in the piece, but is present in ghostly form through a sophisticated player piano that plays back precisely what he put down on it, including every detail of touch and phrasing.)Onstage, McDermott is surrounded by shadow play, sticky tape and creatures formed from tissue paper as he tells stories about his life; his history with Glass, both the work and the man; his experiences in meditation-encouraging flotation tanks; and his encounters with the writings of Lao Tzu, the open-minded principle of “deep democracy” espoused by the author and therapist Arnold Mindell, and a shattered coffee table made of, yes, glass.In the interview, McDermott talked more about his relationship with Glass and how the show came together. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.The composer Philip Glass in 1980.Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesTalk about the roots of your relationship with Glass’s work.I was at college in London, what was then Middlesex Polytechnic, and I became very obsessed with his music. This was in 1982 or ’83, and I would take out VHS tapes of him playing with the Glass Ensemble, and footage of the operas and so on. And then, in the last six weeks of my degree course, I made an adaptation of an Ian McEwan short story, “Conversation With a Cupboard Man.”It was a monologue about a guy who lives in what, in the U.K., we call a wardrobe — quite a dark, sort of strange piece about this guy who’s a misfit. And Philip’s music from “Glassworks” was so appropriate to that piece. It became the music we used in the show.And when did you take on one of the operas?I was approached by John Berry at English National Opera. It was 2005, and I was performing a show called “Spirit” at New York Theater Workshop, literally around the corner from where Philip lives, and he met me at Atlas Cafe. I’d been asked to do “Einstein on the Beach,” and I thought it was a stupid idea. Philip asked me, “Why do you want to do ‘Einstein’?” And I said, “I don’t.” So we talked a bit, and he said, “Your genuine reluctance to do this piece makes me think you should do it.”But then he mentioned “Satyagraha.” And I went away and listened to it, and it’s not a bio-opera about Gandhi; it’s about a concept. I got excited by this idea of collective social activism, of big groups of people and how they can exchange ideas. And it resonated with Arnold Mindell’s “worldwork”: If you want to do social activism and change, you have to work on yourself. If there’s an outer conflict, you also have to work on that conflict within yourself. That idea of “deep democracy” is in “Tao of Glass.”Your stagings of “Satyagraha,” “Akhnaten” and “The Perfect American” have different unifying concepts.With “Satyagraha,” which we first did in 2007, it was big-scale spectacle, but using humble materials: sticky tape, newspaper — building those into large-scale puppetry. That became a model or metaphor for how, collectively, you can create something powerful even with humble materials. For “The Perfect American” (2013), which is about Walt Disney, it was about animation, and about all the work that goes into it between every frame. And for “Akhnaten” (2016), about the Egyptian pharaoh, it was juggling — and it turned out the very first image of juggling is in an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic.The countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, center, as the title character in McDermott’s staging of Glass’s “Akhnaten.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow did “Tao of Glass” come about?It’s a show that happened when another one didn’t, which I talk about in “Tao of Glass.” Philip and I were supposed to adapt Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen.” I’d come out to New York; I’d done a storyboard and what musical bits might happen; but Maurice’s sad death, in 2012, meant that project veered into not happening.John McGrath at the Manchester International Festival said even if that project’s not happening, if I was to dream what I might make with Philip, what might that be? And I got a vision, floating in the flotation tank, of me and Philip onstage together. I went to Philip and said, “I have a vision: I’m doing the puppetry, and you’re at the piano.” And he never said no.Part of the story is my dream of getting him back into a rehearsal room the way I imagine he did when he was just starting out, just a downtown rehearsal space and some musicians. And it happened: There was this week where Philip did come into the rehearsal room, and I told stories — about him, about Taoism, about Arnie Mindell — and he would riff, and then he went away and arranged those bits of music he’d played. And, in a way, the show made itself. In the breaks, he would take us to a Tibetan curry house where they all knew him. It was Philip having a good time, really.They say don’t meet your heroes, but I did, and I ended up making a crazy show with him that’s one of the things I’m proudest of. When you’re making a show like this, you have to trust something, and what you end up trusting is just doing the next step and the next step and the next step. And that’s what Philip’s music does. People say it’s repetitive, but it’s not really repetitive. It’s cyclical and it changes, and you get to a place where you don’t know how you got there, a deeper place.What comes next for you and him?The last time I saw Philip — we always have a little conversation about what happens next, and he said, “When we work together, it seems to go quite well.” And at the moment we’re talking again about “Einstein,” to complete the trilogy with “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten.”There’s probably vocabularies from those other productions that will go into our version of “Einstein” — probably a new vocabulary, too, but also elements of those other productions. When we met, he talked about various things, but the thing he’s most excited about is the trilogy: that we’ve got to do our Improbable version of “Einstein,” so that we can do all three operas across a city at the same time.He’s a bit slow now, but he said, “You’ve got me all fired up.” So I know that that’s what Philip wants to happen — and I’m saying that publicly so that it does. That’s how you make things happen. More

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      in Music

      Review: Iranian Female Composers Speak Indirectly to the Moment

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      Planned before anti-regime protests broke out in Iran, a concert centered on connectivity finds itself tied to the news of the day.From its founding in 2017, the Iranian Female Composers Association has found itself frequently tied to the news of the day.Niloufar Nourbakhsh, a composer and one of the association’s founders, wrote in liner notes for a recording of “Veiled,” her lyrical yet aggrieved 2019 work for the cellist Amanda Gookin, that, “personally as an Iranian woman, I carry a lot of anger with me.”That rage, Nourbakhsh specified when the recording was released in 2021, was informed by her own experiences, as well as the more general feeling of “growing up in a country that actively veils women’s presence through compulsory hijab or banning solo female singers from pursuing a professional career.”Still, when the musicians of the International Contemporary Ensemble and the organization Composers Now drew up the program for an evening focused on the Iranian Female Composers Association at NYU Skirball on Saturday, few could have anticipated how specifically this concert would connect with the moment: Anti-regime protests in Iran were entering their fifth week, following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who had been held in the custody of the morality police, accused of improperly wearing a required head scarf.The association has posted statements of solidarity with the protesters on social media, and some of its composers have spoken directly about the events in interviews. But nothing was said from the stage on Saturday; after all, the connection between the group’s mission and the events in Iran spoke for itself. So too did the concert’s title, “Peyvand,” the Persian word for connectivity, a reminder of the connections among the featured composers in this revealing and essential evening.Nourbakhsh’s three-movement “C Ce See”— a commemoration of the contemporary music advocate Cecille (Cece) Wasserman — closed the program. And it employed a conceit reminiscent of the Fluxus movement, courtesy of a kinetic sculpture, by the artist Roxanne Nesbitt, that circled six instrumentalists and sometimes made sounds with them; picture small conical objects rotating, in Rube Goldberg fashion, among string players and percussionists, with all those elements connected by a long, single thread manipulated by the percussionist Ross Karre.In the first and second movements, the result of that string-on-string interference was often a hazy yet interdependent din. But at the end of the second movement, when the conductor, Steven Schick, dramatically cut the wires snaking through the string instruments (and into the rotating mini-sculptures), there was a sense of release. The short third movement — featuring scalar, zigzagging, independent parts for flute, vibraphone and strings — heralded a brief but hard-won freedom.Nourbakhsh’s music is something of a known quantity, not least because she is one of National Sawdust’s recent Hildegard Competition winners. Less so is Nina Barzegar, whose world premiere “Inexorable Passage” was thrilling in its fusion of experimental, extended-technique effects, as well as melodic and chordal inventions.Written for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, the eight-minute “Inexorable Passage” felt packed, and moved along with momentum. The cello swerved in and out of mellifluous melody; each time its lines slid into heedless-sounding glissandos, you wondered if the center would hold. But Barzegar’s compositional command kept it together. (Trained as a pianist and composer at the University of Tehran, she’s now a doctoral candidate at University of California, Santa Cruz.)There isn’t much of Barzegar’s music on YouTube yet. But what’s there is promising — including a piano work “for slain protesters around the world,” and the spare (then galvanic) “Chronoception,” for the group Yarn/Wire.Also of note on Saturday were intimate, brief pieces by Nasim Khorassani and Golfam Khayam. A pair of untitled solo performances by Niloufar Shiri, on kamancheh (a small, bowed string instrument) were similarly transporting.If not everything else on the two-hour program achieved similar mastery, that was understandable; the artists here were on the younger side. But their music’s delivery, by the International Contemporary Ensemble, argued well for additional exposure, no matter the news cycle.PeyvandPerformed on Saturday at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. More

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      in Music

      Mick Moloney, Musician and Champion of Irish Culture, Dies at 77

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      An Irish immigrant to the U.S., he was a recording artist, scholar and concert presenter who also encouraged women to join a male-dominated folk tradition.Mick Moloney, a recording artist, folklorist, concert presenter and professor who championed traditional Irish culture and encouraged female instrumentalists in a male-dominated field, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan, in Greenwich Village. He was 77.Glucksman Ireland House N.Y.U., New York University’s center for Irish studies, announced his death. No cause was given. Less than a week earlier, Mr. Moloney had performed at the Maine Celtic Festival in Belfast, Maine.An immigrant from Ireland, Mr. Moloney was a pioneering scholar in the field of Irish-American studies at N.Y.U., where he was named a global distinguished professor. The university houses his extensive collection of materials in its Archives of Irish America. He reissued a wealth of music by 19th- and 20th-century Irish bands and brought the music to a wide audience whose familiarity with Irish culture often did not extend much beyond commercialized Saint Patrick’s Day events.A superb musician, Mr. Moloney sang and played the guitar, the mandolin and the banjo, with the tenor banjo his primary instrument. He was a founder in 1978 of Green Fields of America, an interdisciplinary Irish touring ensemble whose members include Michael Flatley, the founder of Riverdance, the theatrical show featuring Irish music and dance.Mr. Moloney was passionate about exploring the connections between Irish, African, Galician and American roots music and organized many concerts and lectures highlighting those synergies. On one program in the “Celtic Appalachia” series that he led, presented in 2012 at Symphony Space in Manhattan by the Irish Arts Center, the Malian musician Cheick Hamala Diabaté performed on Indigenous African instruments that predated the banjo. Mr. Moloney also collaborated with the Filipino vocalist Grace Nono, among other musicians.Mr. Moloney’s research extended to the often troubled relationship between Irish Americans and African Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries; at his death he was working on a film called “Two Roads Diverged,” about how those communities found common ground through music and dance despite their antagonisms.His scholarship also embraced Irish-Jewish relations. On an entertaining recording called “If It Wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews,” Mr. Moloney highlighted vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley collaborations between those two groups of immigrants in America. (One verse asked, “What would this great Yankee nation really really ever do/ If it wasn’t for a Levy, a Monahan or Donohue?”)Mr. Moloney was involved as a musician or a producer, or both, on some 125 albums, according to the ethnomusicologist and musician Daniel T. Neely. Other notable Moloney recordings include “Slow Airs and Set Dances,” “Strings Attached,” “Green Fields of America,” “McNally’s Row of Flats” and “The Washington Square Harp and Shamrock Orchestra,” with an N.Y.U.-based ensemble he founded in 2000.Until the 1980s, instrumentalists in traditional Irish music were mostly male, but Mr. Moloney encouraged women to perform as well, organizing a festival in Manhattan in 1985 called “Cherish the Ladies” (the name of an Irish jig) and a concert the next year called “Fathers and Daughters.” He produced an album by the all-female group Cherish the Ladies called “Irish Women Musicians in America.”Mr. Moloney, who hosted shows about folk music on American public television, was honored by the Irish government in 2013 as a recipient of the Presidential Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad. In 1999, Hillary Clinton, the first lady at the time, presented him with the National Heritage Fellowship, the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts, given by National Endowment for the Arts.Mr. Moloney was a mentor to many subsequent N.E.A. fellows, including the flutist Joanie Madden, of Cherish the Ladies.He wrote a 2002 book called “Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish-American Immigration Through Song” accompanied by a CD of songs. And he led regular tours of Ireland, highlighting Irish culture through concerts, studio visits, castle tours and pub visits.“At the heart of the Irish American experience is a sense of displacement, from one country to another, from a rural to a more complicated way of life,” Mr. Moloney told The New York Times in 1996. “There’s that sense of a tug from across the ocean. There’s a profound sense of loss.”Mr. Moloney performing at Symphony Space in Manhattan in 2015. He “has a charming, disarming gift of gab with which he deftly mingles wry humor and flashing barbs of comment,” a reviewer wrote in 1971.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesMichael Moloney was born in Limerick, in southwestern Ireland, on Nov. 15, 1944, one of seven children of Michael and Maura Moloney. His father was the chief air traffic control officer at Shannon Airport, west of Limerick, and his mother was the principal of a primary school in Limerick.Mick, as he was called, studied the tenor banjo, the mandolin and the guitar in his youth, becoming particularly attracted to the “wild sound” of the banjo after first hearing it in the 1950s, he said. Lacking opportunities to hear traditional instrumental music in Limerick, he recalled, he would travel to nearby County Clare to listen to tunes in pubs and record them so that he could learn them.In his youth he played with the Emmet Folk Group and with a trio called the Johnstons, with whom he recorded and toured Europe and America. “Much of their personality stems from Mr. Moloney,” the critic John S. Wilson wrote in The Times in 1971, “who has a charming, disarming gift of gab with which he deftly mingles wry humor and flashing barbs of comment, punctuated by a marvelously Mephistophelian eyebrow.”Mr. Moloney received a bachelor’s degree in economics from University College Dublin and lived briefly in London as a social worker helping immigrant communities. He moved to the United States in 1973 and received a Ph.D. in folklore and folk life from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. In addition to N.Y.U., he taught ethnomusicology, folklore and Irish studies at the University of Pennsylvania and at Georgetown and Villanova.In 1982, Mr. Moloney founded the Irish/Celtic Week at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, W.Va., modeled after the Willie Clancy Summer School, an annual event in County Clare that teaches traditional Irish arts.In his last two decades, he lived in both Manhattan and Thailand, where he volunteered as a music therapist and teacher for abandoned children with H.I.V. at the Mercy Center in Bangkok. He performed online from Thailand for Irish for Biden presidential campaign events in 2020.His marriages to Philomena Murray and Judy Sherman ended in divorce. His survivors include his partner, Sangjan Chailungka with whom he lived in Bangkok; a son, Fintan, from his marriage to Ms. Murray; and four siblings, Violet Morrissey and Dermot, Kathleen and Nanette Moloney.While he dedicated much of his career to academia, Mr. Moloney never lost his energy for making music, describing himself as an artist first and foremost.“There are thousands of tunes in the tradition, so when we sit down for rehearsal, our job really isn’t to find material, it’s to exclude material, because we’d play them all if we could,” he said in a video interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2015. “On my tombstone,” he added, “I want the inscription banjo driver.” More

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      in Music

      Maggie Rogers’s Higher Calling

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      Musicians often talk about seeking the divine in their work. The 28-year-old singer-songwriter went to Harvard to study it as she made her second major-label album, “Surrender.”“I wanted to build a framework for myself, for how to keep art sacred,” Maggie Rogers said of her detour to Harvard Divinity School during the pandemic.OK McCausland for The New York TimesLike a lot of artists during the early days of the pandemic, Maggie Rogers was living a sequestered, solitary life. She had retreated to coastal Maine, trying to alleviate the burnout of touring for her 2019 major-label debut “Heard It In a Past Life,” with little plan to write. “I was hiding out,” she said. “At a complete loss for words.”But Rogers, who had earned a Grammy nomination for best new artist with that album, which merged her folky singer-songwriter roots with dance-tent momentum, didn’t stay cloistered for long. Remembering that “making beats is fun,” she joined a virtual song-a-day accountability group with the likes of Feist, Damien Rice and Mac DeMarco. “I would go for a walk and then listen to all my favorite artists make some [expletive] in our kitchens,” she said. “It was so sick.” The demos she produced in her own home studio sounded joyful, which surprised her.She thought the tumult and rage of the moment would lead her elsewhere. And then it did.“I talk so much about the artist’s job being to feel,” she said recently. “Feeling through the last couple of years — there’s been so much pain and so much suffering and so much injustice in the world. It brought up a lot of questions for me about what I believe, and how I want to structure my artistic practice or my business. Or my life.”So Rogers, while she was busy concocting sick beats in her kitchen, enrolled in Harvard Divinity School. “I wanted to build a framework for myself, for how to keep art sacred,” she said.Rogers was an undergraduate at New York University when her track “Alaska” drew a viral bit of adulation from Pharrell Williams, and she tried to recapture the city’s energy on her new album.OK McCausland for The New York TimesShe graduated in May with a master’s degree in religion and public life, a new program for mostly secular professionals “whose work is focused on having a positive social impact,” according to the university. In Rogers’s case, it included her struttingly confident performance at Coachella this past spring. “I feel super religious, if music is a religion,” she said. “When I’m in the crowd of fans or onstage, that’s when I felt the most connected to something greater than myself.”As she was studying, she was also completing “Surrender,” her second album for Capitol, a hypnotically danceable ode to ecstatic abandon, making leaps and navigating worry. Co-produced by Rogers and Kid Harpoon (Harry Styles, Florence + the Machine) and embracing distortion — a new sound for her — it’s due out Friday.“Right now, the joy on the record feels like the greatest form of rebellion,” Rogers, 28, said. It’s a hard-won hope, which — politically, culturally, environmentally — might be the vibe of the moment. “Surrender” was also part of her thesis, which examined cultural consciousness, the spirituality of public gathering and the ethics of pop power. The album, she told me, is “joy with teeth.”Terry Tempest Williams, an essayist, naturalist and writer in residence at Harvard Divinity School, taught Rogers in a class called “Finding Beauty in a Broken World.” Her fans may know her as “a rock star,” Williams wrote in an email. “But I know her as a writer. Her words are lean, staccato, unadorned, visceral. She writes through the full range of emotion that she inhabits. ”Williams added that Rogers “is mindful of the responsibility that comes especially as a musician with a large stage.”“The bridge between a public life and private life is stillness, having time to remember who you are and who you are not,” Williams wrote. “She dances between motion and stillness.”On a drizzly June weekday, Rogers and I met at an Upper East Side corner diner, to wait out the rain before making a pilgrimage to one of her sacred spots in the city, Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. She wore a chopped-off white undershirt, a cozy black thrifted sweater (all hail the Portland, Maine, Goodwill) and her once long, Laurel Canyon songwriter-esque hair shorn into a pixie — a development that was covered by Teen Vogue, though she’s sported that cut for most of her life. An angular Ferragamo mini-purse and square metal-capped boots were the only hints of major label star.Freckle-faced and warm, she was eloquent about her musical choices, with an undercurrent of goofball (like when she shoved a tampon up her nose to stanch a nosebleed while dancing at Coachella — and then used the video clip to advertise her set).Rogers had just moved out of her grad school apartment in Cambridge, Mass., a few weeks before — “my hot take on Boston: great food, bad lighting” — and was still determining where she would set up her new artistic life. “I feel like I’m in post-grad for the next year or something,” she said. “I’m doing field research.”She grew up in rural Easton, Md.; the Los Angeles apartment where she now stores her stuff has never quite felt like home. While she was an undergraduate at New York University studying music production and engineering, her track “Alaska” drew a viral bit of adulation from Pharrell Williams, and she felt a pull to the city as the place where she learned “what kind of artist I wanted to be.” “Surrender” seemed to her like a punky New York album; she missed what she called “the raw human energy, and community — that claustrophobic, someone sweating on you in the subway” connectedness.“There’s been so much pain and so much suffering and so much injustice in the world,” Rogers said. “It brought up a lot of questions for me about what I believe, and how I want to structure my artistic practice or my business. Or my life.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe video for the propulsive, synthy first single “That’s Where I Am,” with a bed of glitches and handclaps underneath Rogers’s clarion vocals about desire, pays tribute to that, as she catwalks through downtown Manhattan in a green boa, and piles into a cab with a New York crosscurrent — club kids and office workers. (The guitarist Hamilton Leithauser, the photographer Quil Lemons and David Byrne, who she cold-called to collaborate, show up too.)Her musical process starts with making a mood board. “In production, I always think of records as world building — if I understand that, what the world is, it’s way easier for me to understand what the bass should sound like,” she said.Kid Harpoon, the British producer, with whom she co-wrote her 2018 single “Light On,” remembered that the images for “Surrender” included black-and-white grittiness and ’70s New York — “Someone on their knees in a club with their top off, sweat all down them. Up-close teeth.” Rogers insisted on recording in the city too, a choice he didn’t necessarily understand until they set up shop last summer at Electric Lady, the storied West Village studio. “I’ve seen her just completely uncompromising on some of her ideas — quite brutally sometimes,” he said. “It’s a real strength. She knows what she wants.”They used the location to bring in other musicians, like Florence Welch, who was upstairs recording with Jack Antonoff and played tambourine on the jagged power anthem “Shatter,” and Jon Batiste, who was “just reacting” with so much delight, Kid Harpoon said, that they sometimes had to reset the take for his keyboards because the Grammy-winning bandleader was laughing.And Rogers, after years of performing — she had self-released two albums by the time she was 20 — found other shades in her own already protean vocals. “I learned how to use my lower register,” she said, “to just sing with my whole body.”“Right now, the joy on the record feels like the greatest form of rebellion,” Rogers said.OK McCausland for The New York Times“Heard It in a Past Life” was suffused with nature samples; “Surrender” uses distortion, which Rogers had hardly worked with previously. But she found an audio plug-in and flew with it. “The world was collapsing and my life in Maine was incredibly quiet,” she said. “Noise felt so therapeutic.”In a video introducing the album, she called it “chaos I could control.”When the skies cleared, Rogers and I meandered to Bethesda Fountain. Along with St. Mark’s Church in the East Village — where Patti Smith had her first poetry-and-electric-guitar gig — it’s a place she often detours to, for inspiration. She was drawn in by its history, too: “Angel of the Waters,” the 8-foot tall bronze sculpture at the center of the fountain, was designed by Emma Stebbins, the first woman to be commissioned for a major public artwork in New York, and unveiled in 1873.“This feels hopeful to me,” Rogers said, as tourists snapped pictures by the fountain and dozens of turtles dozed and lapped in the lake beyond. “The angel represents peace and temperance. She holds a lily. People still come here.”Once she even saw Joan Didion, a hero, being wheeled around by an attendant for an afternoon constitutional. Rogers was too awed to approach her, but did notice she was sockless. “I remember seeing her ankles,” she said, “and being like, whoa, that’s so intimate.” Rogers has a fine radar for the vulnerable points; Didion, the master modernist writer, died not long after. “I might cry talking about it,” she said.She is still working out how to apply what she learned in the last year to her creative life. But one way is just to pay close attention. “I always think about performance as a practice of presence,” she said. “It’s just this moment that is slipping through your fingers as it’s happening, and it can never be created again. And that’s what feels so sacred about it.”The rain started up again, but she went without an umbrella — she liked the patter of the summer drops. The album’s closing song is full of fret about “the state of the world,” and Rogers sought out education to respond to that feeling. Her music gets her there too; the song ends on a wishful note — with banger percussion — about togetherness. “I think part of creating anything is having hope that there is something else that’s possible,” she said. “I feel like I don’t have any other choice.”OK McCausland for The New York Times More

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      in Television

      Immersed in ‘Stranger Things,’ Then Strolling to Beckett

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      Our writer checked out two very different experiences in New York. In Netflix’s TV re-creation, you fight Demogorgons. In “Cascando,” you walk off your existential angst.Before the pizza parlor, before the arcade games, before the ice cream shop and the merch kiosks (so many merch kiosks!) and the photo op with a fiberglass-and-silicone Demogorgon, “Stranger Things: The Experience,” at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, puts on a show.Netflix, which has created other immersive entertainments based on its “Bridgerton” and “Money Heist” properties, co-produced this 45-minute experience with Fever. Based on the teen-horror pastiche “Stranger Things,” it plunks participants, many of them dressed in 1980s finery, into tens of thousands of square feet of Hawkins, Ind. Some rooms have an unfinished feel (did the budget not include ceilings?); others suggest a theme-park-quality buildout. The most fully realized ones are nestled inside Hawkins’s cheery state-of-the-art lab. Ostensibly, ticket holders have signed up for a sleep study. An interdimensional rift soon complicates study protocols. Will these test subjects survive? Of course. They have tote bags to buy afterward.“Stranger Things: The Experience” is a piece of fan service that adopts the vocabulary of immersive theater. While legible, barely, for those unfamiliar with the series, this story has been built for devotees, allowing them to enter into the fictional world. Enterprises like this used to be lower-budget affairs of the do-it-yourself variety, the province of live-action role-players and tabletop gamers. Now for about $58 — less for gutsy under-17s, more if you book on a weekend — Netflix and its partners will do the doing for you.“We look at live experiences as providing fans another way to see themselves more in the stories they love,” Greg Lombardo, the head of live experiences at Netflix, told me in an interview a couple of days after my visit.This show, which runs for about 45 minutes, chugs along like a reasonably well-oiled machine. What eldritch fluids comprise that oil? Best not ask. The cast members who circulate are trained improvisers, skilled at eliciting responses, practiced at batting those responses back. At one point I was harangued by a journalist character — sweaty, anxious, overconfident. Ow.The Upside-Down World of ‘Stranger Things’After a three-year wait, Netflix’s sci-fi series returns with a fourth season.Season 4 Guide: As in seasons past, this go-round is full of nods and Easter eggs to 1970s and ’80s pop culture. Here are the major highlights.Review: “Stranger Things” has gone from lovingly echoing 1980s touchstones to industriously copying itself, our critic writes of the show’s fourth installment.The Duffer Brothers: The “Stranger Things” creators seem to share a brain. But they could never lock themselves in a writing cabin together.David Harbour: While “Stranger Things” was on hiatus, the actor tackled a string of strangely compelling deadbeat characters.While immersive, “The Experience” doesn’t really depend on you. The Demogorgons will eventually explode, whether or not you deploy your extrasensory powers. Which is a letdown. Because there is a fantasy that many of us entertain about the art we love — that we might matter to the art as much as it matters to us. Still, the teenagers and young adults in the room gasped and screamed and unleashed their psychic abilities with apparent delight.“We’re trying to give fans a chance to be the hero of their stories,” Lombardo said. This is pushing it. Eleven, the psychokinetic phenom played by Millie Bobby Brown, who appears via hologram, is the real hero here. The motivating factors of “The Experience” owe less to art than to marketing, and its ultimate goal suggests a branding ouroboros: devotion to the show encourages consumption of the experience, consumption of the experience urges re-engagement with the show.After “The Experience,” with the rift safely sealed, you can consume without the distractions of a plot — which is when “Stranger Things: The Experience” achieves its final and ideal form. There is pizza to be eaten and ice cream to be licked and cocktails to be drunk. Bertolt Brecht used to rail against the culinary theater, a theater that delivered only emotion and sensation, rather than intellectual engagement. Brecht probably never had a drink with a stroopwafel as garnish. I didn’t buy a tote bag, but I did play through the “Stranger Things”-branded pinball game. I think I did pretty well.“Cascando,” an adaptation of a Beckett radio play, comes courtesy of Pan Pan Theater. Upon arrival each ticket holder is outfitted in a black-hooded robe and handed a pair of headphones.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTo wander the streets of Manhattan dressed as a high-fashion druid, a goth garden gnome, is fun of a kind.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNo amusement genius has yet made a Samuel Beckett pinball machine — I imagine a gloomy palette, defective flippers and a high-score list that reads GODOT GODOT GODOT. But those eager for a Beckett brand extension can instead arrive at New York University’s Skirball Center for “Cascando,” an adaptation of a Beckett radio play from the early 1960s. It comes courtesy of Pan Pan Theater, an Irish company with an insouciant approach to the classics.Originally created in conjunction with the composer Marcel Mihalovici, “Cascando” is intended as a passive audio experience. But this “Cascando,” directed by Gavin Quinn and designed by Aedin Cosgrove, adds a participatory element.Upon arrival each ticket holder is outfitted in a black-hooded robe and handed a pair of headphones. Loosed onto La Guardia Place, a quiet street adjacent to Washington Square Park in Manhattan, participants begin a single-file walk around and through the neighboring blocks. As they stroll, they listen to the text, prerecorded here by Andrew Bennett and Daniel Reardon.To wander the Village dressed as a high-fashion druid, a goth garden gnome, is fun of a kind. But there are no stops along the way, no interactions, no activations. The choreography — a sharp turn here and there — is minimal. At one point, I wondered, with almost breathless excitement, if we would sit. We did not sit.While it makes sense to encounter Beckett’s text via headphones — there are references throughout to a story existing only in someone’s head — the alone-together walk doesn’t illuminate or galvanize the text, which is, like so much of Beckett’s work, heavy on repetition and ellipses. On the rainy sidewalk, meaning slid away.In another city, at another moment, a show like “Cascando” might at least have ornamented the street life. But New York’s typical street life is already a variety of theater, druids or no. As we re-entered the park, I saw a clump of skateboarders look us up and down. We had become part of their story, I thought for a moment, part of their experience. Then they shrugged and returned to their conversation. Just another Wednesday in the Village, bro.Stranger Things: The ExperienceThrough Aug. 21 at Duggal Greenhouse, Brooklyn; strangerthings-experience.com. Running time: 45 minutes for the show, then mingling.CascandoThrough July 3 at N.Y.U. Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 30 minutes. More

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      N.Y.U. Names New Performance Space After Nation’s First Black Theater

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      The university is commemorating the African Grove Theater, part of a new building opening in 2023.A new performance space at New York University will be named “The African Grove Theater” in honor of the African Theater, a historic New York production company and venue widely considered to be the first Black theater in the United States, the university announced on Wednesday.Supported by a $1 million donation, the theater is on the fourth floor of a new multipurpose educational building at 181 Mercer Street that will open in spring 2023. It also will house the graduate acting and design programs for stage and film of the university’s Tisch School of the Arts.Where there was once merely a plaque with a brief history of the theater, there will be space to host theatrical performances, lobby displays, educational seminars and an annual symposium on the history of Black theater and culture.“This theater wasn’t ‘somewhere downtown’; it was on our campus,” said Laurence Maslon, an arts professor at N.Y.U. Tisch School of the Arts who is also a theater historian and co-chair of a university Committee to Commemorate the African Grove. “It has been part of our DNA for over 200 years.”“Felicitous is the word I keep coming back to,” he added.The original African Theater was started in 1816 by William Alexander Brown, a retired ship steward who started hosting music, poetry and short plays for Black New Yorkers in his backyard at 38 Thomas Street. The entertainment “tea garden” became known as the African Grove, one of the few spaces where Black patrons could enjoy leisure arts.In 1821, the theater moved to Bleecker and Mercer Streets — where the new performance space will stand next spring — expanding to a 300-seat venue known for staging operas, ballets and Shakespearean classics alongside original work, initially performed by Black performers for Black audiences and, later, integrated audiences. The original venture was not entirely peaceful. The theater faced harassment from white rivals and police raids. A yellow fever epidemic further ravaged the theater, which closed two years later. The last known playbill for an African Theater production was dated June 1823.The new theater will be a “space where we celebrate another tradition in the culture of New York City that has often been disregarded and overlooked and not understood,” said Michael Dinwiddie, an associate professor at N.Y.U.’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, who is also a theater historian and co-chair of the Committee to Commemorate the African Grove. “This was a theater that in its early time, was really creating a model for what the American theater could be. And that’s what we want the modern African Grove Theater to be.”Dinwiddie said he was excited “to see what happens culturally” for students who learn about the theater and understand that they are performing in a place that is “historic and sacred and new, at the same time.” More