Parks, Suzan-Lori

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    ‘Sally & Tom’ Frees Sally Hemings From Being a Mere Footnote

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    Suzan-Lori Parks’s play is the latest work by a Black writer seeking to prioritize Hemings’s life and perspective to make her fully dimensional.Sally Hemings might be a household name these days, but we still know so little about the relationship between Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Yet, Hemings endures as a figure of endless fascination: American writers aspire to tell her story, and there remains a yearning for a deeper understanding of the enslaved woman who left no firsthand accounts of her inner thoughts.In “Sally & Tom,” Suzan Lori-Parks is the latest writer trying to fill in the gaps in order to present Hemings as a multidimensional character — and, in the process, rescue her personhood onstage. “We don’t know what happened,” Sheria Irving, who portrays Hemings in the play, told me, adding that Parks is “building on this factual account.” (The play has been a hit for the Public Theater and runs there through June 2.)She continued: “We do not have to reimagine, we can really imagine what it is for a 14-year-old to be looked at by a 41-year-old, and not just looked at but to engage in sexual exploitation with this man.”Parks’s fidelity to the history means she doesn’t alter Hemings’s fate. Instead, she experiments with the storytelling by plotting “Sally & Tom” as a backstager, or a play within a play, in which the main character, Luce (also played by Irving), is an African American dramatist who is writing a play about the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson. Luce is playing Hemings in her own play, which is called “The Pursuit of Happiness.”In fact, each cast member plays two parts: Luce’s partner, Mike (Gabriel Ebert), is playing Tom in the production, and Alano Miller plays both Hemings’s older brother, James, and Kwame, a Hollywood actor who has returned to his old theater company. When the historical story and the present-day one collide, they often reveal the sometimes comical and often complicated reality that can arise when mounting a show dealing with race relations in the American theater today.Contemporary woes: Irving and Ebert as a modern couple struggling to produce a play (and overcome race relations in the American theater) in “Sally & Tom.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWe 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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      Review: In ‘Sally & Tom,’ Plantation Scandal Meets Backstage Farce

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      The 30-year relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is the basis for Suzan-Lori Parks’s hilarious and harrowing nesting doll of a play.If I were reviewing “The Pursuit of Happiness,” produced by a “low-budget-no-budget” troupe called Good Company, I might note that the subtlety, cleverness and humanity with which it approaches the story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson come as quite a surprise. After all, Good Company is best known for “politically charged,” “finger-waggy” provocations like “Patriarchy on Parade” and “Listen Up, Whitey, Cause It’s All Your Fault” — work that leaves audiences running for the exits while casts bid them farewell with the bird.But “The Pursuit of Happiness” isn’t real: It’s the play within Suzan-Lori Parks’s backstager “Sally & Tom,” which opened on Tuesday at the Public Theater.Still, my review stands — except for one thing. The subtlety, cleverness and humanity with which “Sally & Tom” approaches the story of Hemings and Jefferson, dazzlingly doubled in the story of the troupe putting it on, come as no surprise at all. They are the hallmarks of an author incapable of writing a line unfilled with the bewildering burden — or is it the treasure? — of human contradiction.Indeed, Parks begins with an unprovable yet also undisprovable thesis. She has Luce, the author and star of “The Pursuit of Happiness,” decree: “This is not a love story.”Luce (Sheria Irving) feels compelled to say so because her boyfriend, Mike, the show’s director — and also its Jefferson — wants a happier ending than the one she has written. As a proper white ally, Mike (Gabriel Ebert) understands that love is, at best, a problematic notion when one of the lovers is owned by the other. Even after 30 years together, Jefferson did not free Hemings in his will.But would it be so awful, he wonders, to make more money and draw a wider audience — which Luce mishears as a “whiter” one — by introducing just a bit of recognizable romance at the curtain? Can the not-yet-third president and the teenager who would soon bear six of his children at least hold hands?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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      Alicia Keys Is Making a Musical. Her Own Life Inspired the Story.

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      The show is a highlight of the Public Theater’s new season, which will also include plays by Suzan-Lori Parks, Itamar Moses, Mary Kathryn Nagle and Ife Olujobi.For more than a decade, Alicia Keys has been quietly developing a musical inspired by her own turbulent adolescence growing up among artists in New York City. Now that musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” is almost ready for viewing: It will be staged this fall at the Public Theater, the downtown nonprofit where “A Chorus Line” and “Hamilton” were born.By any measure, the musical will be big: It has a cast of 20, the biggest budget of any show the Public has ever done, and, of course, music by Keys, an R&B and pop singer who has sold tens of millions of records. The show will feature some of Keys’s best known songs, as well as new material she has written for the musical.“This is my pride and joy,” she said in an interview. “This is a major, major turning point in my journey.”“Hell’s Kitchen” doesn’t precisely track the events of Keys’s own life, but there are strong parallels. Set in the 1990s, it takes place over a few months in the life of a 17-year-old named Ali, who is being raised by a single mother in Manhattan Plaza, a large housing complex where many of the residents are performing artists; there is family tension, sexual exploration and musical discovery. (Ali, like Keys, is transformed by a passion for piano.)Keys has been deeply involved with the show’s development, and her own production company has the commercial rights to whatever life the show might have beyond the Public. “I’m never hands off,” Keys said. “There’s not one page, there’s not one sheet, there’s not one word, there’s not one song, there’s not one melody, there’s not anything that happens in this piece that moves without me completely immersed in it and ensuring its authenticity.”The musical was Keys’s idea, and in 2011 she selected the playwright Kristoffer Diaz (“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity”) to write its book; in 2018, the two asked Michael Greif (“Rent”) to join the project as director, and Greif then brought it to the Public.“It’s very much about a young woman testing boundaries,” Greif said. “It’s a story about a series of collisions she has with very important people in her life when she’s 17, and how those collisions affect the person she was to become.”“Hell’s Kitchen” is scheduled to begin previews Oct. 24 and to open Nov. 19. An emerging actor named Maleah Joi Moon will play Ali; her mother will be played by Shoshana Bean (“Wicked”), and her estranged father will be played by Brandon Victor Dixon (“Hamilton”); Camille A. Brown will choreograph.The Public is already planning to stage “Hamlet” this summer, directed by Kenny Leon and starring Ato Blankson-Wood, as its sole Free Shakespeare in the Park production, but now will follow that with a new Public Works adaptation of “The Tempest,” with songs by Benjamin Velez and directed by Laurie Woolery. The Public Works program, which stages musical adaptations of classics featuring a handful of professional actors and a large ensemble of amateur New York City performers, began in 2013 with a different adaptation of “The Tempest.”“The Tempest” will be the final production at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park until 2025; the Public is trying to figure out whether and where it might stage a production next summer while the Delacorte is being renovated.In October, the Public will partner with NYU Skirball to present three Seán O’Casey plays staged by Ireland’s Druid theater.Starting in November at its downtown theater, the Public plans to stage “Manahatta,” a play that connects Manhattan’s Native American history with its contemporary finance industry, written by Mary Kathryn Nagle and directed by Woolery. That will be followed in February by “The Ally,” written by Itamar Moses and directed by Lila Neugebauer, starring Josh Radnor as an atheistic Jew whose social justice commitments are complicated by Middle East politics. In March comes “Sally & Tom,” written by Suzan-Lori Parks and directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, about a contemporary theater company trying to do a play about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. And in April is “Jordans,” written by Ife Olujobi and directed by Whitney White, a comedy about Blackness in an overwhelmingly white workplace.One thing the Public will not be doing: presenting its previously annual Under the Radar Festival of experimental work. “It’s entirely a financial decision,” said Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director. “This does not mean the Public is abandoning its relationship with downtown experimental artists, but we’re going to be looking for a new way of embodying that.” More

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      Review: In ‘Plays for the Plague Year,’ the Soundtrack of Our Lives

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      Suzan-Lori Parks wrote one play a day for 13 months during the pandemic. Those stories come to life onstage in the form of monologues, dialogues and songs at Joe’s Pub.Upon entering Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater for Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Plays for the Plague Year,” audience members are handed a Playbill, a pencil and two yellow notecards, each with a question about the pandemic: “What would you like to remember?” “What would you like to forget?” The responses are placed in a basket from which they are picked and read during the show. At my performance, someone wrote that they’d like to forget “fear and worry, foreground and background.” People in the audience murmured in assent.We’d all probably like to forget our own experiences of fear and worry during that first year of zealous hand-washing and ever-changing mask mandates. Parks, however, made a project of remembering: For that first pandemic year, she resolved to write a play a day about “whatever happens,” including the mundane goings-on in her apartment, the deaths of friends and strangers, and the Black Lives Matter protests.Here, Parks performs a version of herself called the Writer, who creates plays each day while quarantining with her husband (played by Greg Keller) and their 8-year-old son (Leland Fowler) in their one-bedroom apartment.What unfolds is some configuration of those plays, though “play” is too restrictive a word for these micro-performances, which take the forms of monologues, dialogues and songs. Parks, who also plays the guitar here, is joined onstage by seven other cast members in various roles and a band (Ric Molina, guitar; Graham Kozak, bass; Ray Marchica, percussion).An accounting of each day — an electronic placard hanging above the stage flashes the date and title of each section, presented chronologically from March 19, 2020, to April 13, 2021 — provides the show with a built-in structure to link what often feels like a hodgepodge.Parks wisely uses a series of shorthands to quickly bring us back to specific moments in those early pandemic days — an actor, for example, gliding past Parks in an ornate doublet and Tudor-style cap to signal theater closures, the cast hollering and clapping for a brief moment to signal the daily 7 p.m. cheer for frontline workers.In the plays in which Parks isn’t writing or with her family, she’s talking to a dead Little Richard or negotiating with her Muse who, fed up with Covid, threatens to abandon her. In another, a character named Bob looks for a job. There’s one in which Earth, embodied by a woman wearing a crown of branches and holding a scepter, warns that the pandemic is only the beginning of the world’s disasters.From left: Orville Mendoza, Martín Solá, Danyel Fulton and Rona Figueroa in a short play about Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker who was shot and killed by police officers in Louisville, Ky.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRuth Bader Ginsburg appears, on the day of her death, as a triumphant Lady Liberty, and the virus, personified as a horror movie villainess named Corona, wheezes and stalks the stage in a black-gray-white ombré dress and virion headpiece with red “spikes.” The costume design, by Rodrigo Muñoz, is as imaginative and visually stunning as runway couture, especially the layered fabrics of the Muse’s handkerchief hem skirt, made to resemble scraps of paper with scribbled writings, and the 3-D elements, like the butterflies on Earth’s chiffon dress.But not all days are created equal, and this three-hour production does feel as if we’re reliving a year’s worth of material. At least the variety in Parks’s script keeps things unpredictable enough to hold our attention.The direction, by Niegel Smith, occasionally gets too darling, like the first scene, when the family members introduce themselves (“I am the writer. I am the hubby. I am the son.”) while passing a red paper heart to one another. But Smith, who also choreographed the show, does make organized chaos in the intimate space (design by Peter Nigrini), rotating characters on a tiny stage adorned with a few pieces of low-sitting furniture — table, armchair, dresser, lamp, rack covered in books.The show’s music is as eclectic as the storytelling; the songs are short, plucky, with hints of folk, jazz and R&B. The surprising mash-up of genres include the doo-wop style of “Bob Needs a Job,” and the bluesy “Praying Now” soon picks up tempo, turning into an upbeat clap-and-stomp. Most aren’t particularly memorable, but the strongest songs — “RIP the King” and “Whichaway the World” — build with an alternating mix of spoken word/rap and soulful crooning from two performers in particular, Fowler and Danyel Fulton.Sometimes it seems as if Parks is overreaching, as when she speaks to her former mentor, James Baldwin (perfectly embodied by Fowler, who replicates his posture and cadence of speech), so he can muse about American history. Or in a long ceremony during which the cast hands flowers to the audience at the end of a section about Breonna Taylor, played by Fulton; but Fulton’s performance is poignant enough on its own.The playwright’s conversations with the dead, however, many of whom begin their scenes unaware or in denial of their demise, is the show’s most compelling motif. She speaks to several who are Black, especially those lost to Covid and those to police brutality. Through these post-mortems, Parks is asking trenchant questions about how we memorialize Black bodies. What would the dead say? How would they want to be remembered, if at all? So the Brooklyn educator Dez-Ann Romain, who died from complications of the coronavirus, snapping “Don’t make me speak of myself in the past tense,” and George Floyd asking, “Would I be safe if Harriet Tubman was on the 20?” become tragic self-written elegies. We’re watching the dead mourn themselves.Then there’s Parks, who, even playing this version of herself, always feels earnest, as when she listens to the speeches of her characters, while sitting off to one side of the stage, leaning forward attentively. You can easily imagine this being the way Parks sees the world refracted back to her, conversing with the dead, building abstractions.Unfortunately, her own domestic narrative feels flat by comparison. So “What’s the takeaway? What’s the concept? What’s the tone,” as the Writer’s TV producer asks her at one point during a conversation about the Writer’s plays project.“Plague Year” never answers these questions; the Writer ultimately discovers that the plays “didn’t save us.” But this isn’t Parks renouncing her ambitious undertaking. She’s offering another way to think about the production, which isn’t always a cohesive work of theater: Perhaps it doesn’t have to.Theater doesn’t save us, the Writer says, “but it does preserve us somehow,” so this piece still is a record. This is catharsis. It’s preservation.Plays for the Plague YearThrough April 30 at Joe’s Pub, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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      Review: In ‘The Harder They Come,’ Innocence Lost to a Reggae Beat

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      A stage adaptation of the 1972 movie about a Jamaican singer turned outlaw hero sounds great but falls hard at the Public Theater.It looks like such a bright, sunshiny day as the lights rise on “The Harder They Come,” the reggae musical that opened on Wednesday at the Public Theater. The patchwork vibrancy of Kingston, Jamaica, where the story takes place, is efficiently and joyfully sketched in a tin-sided, palm-fronded, louvered and latticed streetscape, lit in happy yellows and purples and bursting with people wearing island florals. And when we meet our hero, the “country boy” Ivan, who has come to the city to seek his fortune as a singer, he is bubbly and hopeful, with a bubbly and hopeful opening number to match: “You Can Get It If You Really Want.”But can you?Alas, over the next two hours or so, the answer will prove to be no, not just for Ivan but also for the audience. Like the chaotic 1972 movie it’s based on, which helped introduce reggae to audiences beyond Jamaica through the songs and charisma of Jimmy Cliff, the musical, adapted by Suzan-Lori Parks, is yanked apart by irreconcilable aims. The uplift of the infectiously danceable tunes keeps obscuring what turns out to be a deeply unsunny story.Not that the movie, directed and co-written by Perry Henzell, was very clear to begin with. Though considered a landmark by many, and certainly a point of national pride for Jamaica, it cannot count narrative logic as one of its strong suits. Its fascination is more like that of a fable, tracing the quick, jagged course of Ivan’s descent. Barely off the bus to visit his mother, he’s robbed of his meager belongings; soon thereafter he’s robbed of his soul, forced to sell his first song for just $20.Conflicts with the church (he falls for Elsa, a preacher’s ward), the police (he’s punished with lashings for defending himself) and even the ganja trade (what do you know, it’s corrupt!) gradually turn his disillusion into derangement. By the time this Candide becomes a semi-psychotic outlaw idol, like the characters in spaghetti westerns, it’s hard to keep track of the chain of injustice or even just the genre.If it’s easy to see why Parks might have wanted to work with this rich material — the movie’s soundtrack is deservedly a classic — it’s also clear that it needed rethinking for the stage. Yet her adaptation is full of choices that, however sensible they seem at first, ultimately make the problems worse.To give the story larger and more legible implications, she pushes the loosely drawn characters of the movie toward greater extremes of badness and goodness. The preacher is not just a hypocrite but a full-blown Judge Turpin, all but slavering over Elsa. The payola-scheming music executive and the police officer who controls the drug cartel are not just grifters but sharky megalomaniacs.Jones as Ivan and Meecah as Elsa, lovers in the movie whose courtship in the musical takes a more conventional turn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the same time, Ivan (Natey Jones) is radically softened, as if the muddled moral middle ground were a dangerous place to locate a musical. His braggadocio is sanded down to mere optimism, his crimes minimized and justified to emphasize his essential innocence. This takes a bizarrely conventional turn in his courtship of Elsa, whom he doesn’t merely shack up with but marries.Evidently the idea is to downplay the characters’ complexity and culpability in favor of an overtly political interpretation of the story that the movie, in its laid-back way, was mostly content to suggest without comment. Parks’s script, and the staging by Tony Taccone and Sergio Trujillo, heavily underline the larger forces — colonialism, capitalism, racism — that help explain or even require Ivan’s bad choices.Though that’s perfectly valid in theory, the heavy-handedness is quite a surprise coming from Parks, whose greatest plays float at the midpoint between archetype and individual. “Father Comes Home From the Wars” superimposes Homer’s “Odyssey” on the tale of a Black man who buys his freedom by fighting for the Confederacy. “Topdog/Underdog,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and was recently revived on Broadway, pulls off a similar balancing act in telling the story of hustling Black brothers named Lincoln and Booth.That balance has been thrown off in “The Harder They Come.” One reason is that the original was a movie with songs, and the songs were all diegetic: They arose from situations in which characters were actually singing, in a church or nightclub or recording studio. But because Parks was writing a musical, the songs had to do and be much more. The movie’s short tunestack — really just four or five main numbers — would have to be expanded.Still, it was another reasonable idea that backfired to expand it quite this much: There are 33 numbers listed in the program. About a dozen are by Cliff, from the movie or elsewhere; several are by other songwriters of the period; and three quite good ones are by Parks herself. (In her non-playwriting life, Parks fronts a “Modern Soul, Black-Country, Psychedelic-Afro-Righteous” band.) They’re deftly arranged for eight musicians by Kenny Seymour.But to accommodate so many, most are reduced to mere atmospheric snippets, curtailing their effectiveness. Even when they are pushed toward more prominence, they tend to evaporate on contact, as they’re forced, like the songs in jukebox musicals, into uses for which they weren’t designed. The rhythmic groove that makes reggae so intoxicating prevents the kind of development that edges a character forward, just as the repeated chorus structure, usually with repeated lyrics to match, stalls when deployed as drama.J. Bernard Calloway rattles the rafters with “Let’s Come in the House,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least the songs are sung well: Jones is as beamish as his music sounds; you can see and hear how his Ivan might be the star the show says he is. Meecah, as Elsa, and Jeannette Bayardelle, as Ivan’s mother — both roles greatly expanded to counteract the episodic nature of the underlying material — take full advantage of their brief vocal moments to shine. As the preacher, J. Bernard Calloway rattles the rafters with “Let’s Come in the House,” a terrific gospel shout. The rest of the ensemble backs them up appealingly, and dances Edgar Godineaux’s choreography even more so.Still, the promise of the show, like the promise of its opening imagery — sets by Clint Ramos and Diggle, lighting by Japhy Weideman, costumes by Emilio Sosa — goes largely unfulfilled. Neither its satire of criminal celebrity nor its tragedy of sullied innocence nor even the sonic pleasure of its catchy score escapes the distorting gravity of its oversized intentions. Instead, “The Harder They Come” falls right into the trap of the rest of that title lyric: “the harder they fall.”The Harder They ComeThrough April 2 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      When Black Characters Double-Deal to Make Ends Meet, It’s Never Enough

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      In three Broadway plays this season, a quest for financial stability can’t undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In “Between Riverside and Crazy,” a Black man haggles over the concessions he’s being offered by his former employer, the New York Police Department, eight years after he was shot by a white cop. In “Topdog/Underdog,” two brothers hustle pedestrians on the street and, at home, each other. And in “The Piano Lesson,” family members bristle at a scheme that would involve hocking a precious heirloom.While these Broadway plays couldn’t be more different, they all similarly explore what happens when Black characters aren’t able to achieve financial stability through traditional, or official, channels. They are left little choice but to create and work in their own separate economies: A hustle is the only way the Black characters can even the playing field. And yet they never manage to do so — at least not for long. Even when one profits from a con, it’s a Faustian bargain that comes at the expense of another Black man’s opportunities.Ultimately, there’s no real winning, no outcome that can undo the trauma of the past or dismantle the architecture that places a ceiling on Black futures.In that regard, the shows mirror the reality facing many Black Americans who have dared to dream of financial success. Back in the 1930s, the setting of “The Piano Lesson,” federal housing programs under the New Deal segregated Black families by steering them to urban housing projects far from the almost exclusively white suburbs. The effects of these government programs, along with a variety of other exclusionary tactics used by agents and white residents — what we now call “redlining” — put many Black Americans at a disadvantage. (In Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic “A Raisin in the Sun,” revived this past fall at the Public Theater, the Younger family experiences this firsthand when a white representative from the neighborhood where they recently bought a house offers them a bribe to keep them from moving in.)And it’s not just housing: There are racial inequities in hiring practices, and in pay rates and retention in the job force; gaps in access to quality education and health care; and of course Black Americans are imprisoned at disproportionately higher rates than white Americans.Corey Hawkins, left, as Lincoln and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Booth in “Topdog/Underdog,” which is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what the brothers do with a deck of cards.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” a revival of which is at the Golden Theater through Sunday, the brothers Lincoln and Booth share Booth’s tiny efficiency apartment. Lincoln’s wife has kicked him out, and Booth refuses to hold down a job. Lincoln supports them with a gig as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and Booth spends his days shoplifting, aggressively trying to woo an ex and planning his debut as a master of three-card monte. In some ways, Booth’s on top: Though he has no job, he gets along fine and still has his $500 inheritance. Lincoln’s struggling: a job that he fears he’s going to lose, no wife, no home and his own $500 inheritance is long gone.“Topdog/Underdog” is full of hustles, games of deception and power plays that go beyond what Lincoln and Booth do with a deck of cards. Booth never subscribed to the losing game of American capitalism by getting a 9-to-5, and yet Lincoln, a former card hustler, now takes “nowhere jobs” and plays the 16th president in an arcade that underpays and then fires him.Though the economy Lincoln built on the street was illegal, it was at least more reliable than what he faces in the traditional job market. Yet again, there’s a blood cost. After Lincoln pulls off the ultimate con — hustling his brother out of his inheritance — Booth shoots him.Nobody wins. Nobody profits.Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Between Riverside and Crazy,” now playing at the Helen Hayes Theater (and livestreaming its final two weeks of performances), had its Off Broadway debut in 2014, during the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the play, Walter, a Black former police officer who was shot while off duty, has lost his wife and is now being pushed out of his rent-stabilized apartment in an area experiencing gentrification.He tells his son, Junior, that despite following the straight and narrow — “Married your mother. Joined the police. Paid taxes. Bought insurance. Got a Riverside Drive apartment. Had you. Put down firm roots” — he knew he would be cheated and disrespected. It doesn’t matter that he’s an “old patriotic, tax-paying, African American ex-cop, war veteran senior citizen,” as he says twice in the play. At the end of the day, he’s still just a Black man in America.So he has no qualms lying about a detail in the shooting and later about demanding that his former partner’s $30,000 engagement ring be included in his new settlement. Given the circumstances, Walter’s con feels like reparations, not thievery. He successfully gets his payout and keeps his apartment, and the play ends with Walter ready to move on from his old life. But in this final scene we also see that his son has taken his father’s seat at the kitchen table. Dressed in Walter’s robe, Junior, an ex-con with a roomful of suspiciously acquired electronics, has been left behind. Though the city, in its deal with Walter, has expunged Junior’s criminal record, the play suggests that this is far from enough for Junior to build a life of success.In “The Piano Lesson,” a family grapples with how best to preserve its painful legacy, which is represented by an elaborately carved piano.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThese plays depict dire times — contemporary times (“Between Riverside and Crazy” is set in 2014, and “Topdog/Underdog” premiered at the Public in 2001) when the American dream, which has been accessible to white Americans since before the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence, is still so far out of reach for Black people.August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” however, is set in 1936, during the overlapping period of the Great Depression and the Great Migration, when Black Americans were working to distance themselves from the economy that slavery built — trying to survive, even thrive, amid national fiscal insecurity.When Boy Willie, a sharecropper in Mississippi, arrives in Pittsburgh at the home that his uncle Doaker Charles shares with Boy Willie’s sister, Berniece, he feverishly reveals his plan to become a respectable landowner. He simply needs to sell the watermelons that he hauled up there in his broken-down truck, and find a buyer for a family heirloom in his sister’s possession.The land he wants to purchase isn’t just any plot — it belonged to Sutter, the white man whose ancestors owned the Charles family as slaves and who employed Boy Willie as a sharecropper. By cashing in on his family’s history, and pain, Boy Willie wants to buy a piece of the American dream that was stolen from his family generations ago.Berniece is adamant that the price is too high, and she suspects that the recently deceased Sutter was killed by Boy Willie so that he could buy the property. Boy Willie goes behind his sister’s back to sell the heirloom, a piano engraved with the Charles family’s story of enslavement, separation and death, which is in large part a result of the instrument — a slave-owner’s anniversary gift to his wife, paid for in slaves. Though Berniece keeps the piano, and thus a connection to their family’s legacy, the cost is Boy Willie’s dream of the financial security and independence that would have come from owning his own property. (Though that dream, the play indicates, was always a delusion, because a Black landowner in the South would almost certainly be targeted.)Wilson’s play is a window into the ways our country’s perverse economics make even one’s trauma psychologically too pricey to keep. At least that’s Boy Willie’s feeling. For Berniece, it’s too valuable to sell off and forget.Boy Willie misses out on landownership, Junior loses his father, Booth his inheritance, and Lincoln his life. When it’s Blackness versus the American dream, that paradise of white capitalism, the house always wins. More

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      Corey Hawkins, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in ‘Topdog/Underdog’ and the Art of Deception

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      “I know we brothers,” Lincoln tells his younger sibling, Booth, in Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog.” With a slight hesitation, he then asks, “but is we really brothers, you know, blood brothers or not, you and me, whatduhyathink?”The question, posed late in this dynamic two-hander, is both a catalyst and crisis for Parks’s most famous characters: Lincoln, or “Link,” a three-card monte con artist turned whiteface-wearing Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and Booth, a shoplifter and ladies’ man. And for the actors starring in the play’s Broadway revival, Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, the question takes on an even deeper meaning given their electrifying chemistry onstage.“What I love about this experience is that there’s so much respect back and forth between Corey and me,” Abdul-Mateen, 38, who portrays Booth, said. “It’s no ego, just respect.”Hawkins, 34, playfully quipped, “I have a little bit of ego.”In his review, Jesse Green praised both actors, noting Hawkins’s “astonishing verbal and physical performance” as Lincoln and how Abdul-Mateen, in his Broadway debut, “fully meets the challenge, banking sympathy with his sweetness.”Hawkins, left, as Lincoln and Abdul-Mateen as Booth in the acclaimed production, directed by Kenny Leon.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor those familiar with his more debonair roles in movies like “In the Heights” or “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Hawkins, a Tony nominee for “Six Degrees of Separation,” has so thoroughly transformed himself into a man downtrodden by bad choices and racism that he is virtually unrecognizable. Abdul-Mateen, who won an Emmy for “Watchmen,” intoxicates with his exuberant Booth, both flashy and naïve. We realize, too late, that his character has also been changing, and though his metamorphosis might be slower, it is even more jarring.Under the direction of George C. Wolfe and starring Jeffrey Wright and Yasiin Bey (the rapper formerly known as Mos Def), “Topdog/Underdog” first appeared on Broadway 20 years ago. That year, Parks became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the play, and in 2018, The Times named it the best American play of the previous 25 years.Kenny Leon’s new production of “Topdog/Underdog” was a bit of a risk at a time when young Black playwrights are getting more opportunities on Broadway, and pioneers like Alice Childress and Adrienne Kennedy are finally getting their due. I’ve always considered Booth and Lincoln shaped by the language, swagger and blunted ambition of our earlier hip-hop generation, a sentiment that the show’s sound designer, Justin Ellington, underscores with songs by Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Lupe Fiasco, Kendrick Lamar and Nipsey Hussle.As a result, I wondered how Lincoln and Booth would appear as millennials and in a moment of greater gender fluidity and more nuanced masculinity than the one in which Parks originally conceived them. In an interview this month before one of their performances, Hawkins and Abdul-Mateen described their first encounters with “Topdog/Underdog,” why they think their characters struggles with masculinity still resonate, and how they care for each other as actors and friends in this industry.Unlike the sibling rivalry they’ve perfected onstage, the two men were genuinely excited to be together offstage, often ending their answers with a compliment for their co-star or by finishing each other’s sentences. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“I felt seen,” Abdul-Mateen said of first encountering the play.Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesHawkins said he views “the play as an ode or love letter to Black men.”Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesDid you know each other before the show?YAHYA ABDUL-MATEEN II I used to say that I met Corey once at a party in 2012. But it just might not be true. But I was familiar with Corey for a very long time. I went to Yale, and he went to Juilliard, and you know who’s who in the New York circles.COREY HAWKINS We all knew of each other. Before I got to Juilliard, I knew how many Black folks were in the program. There were only a certain number of us. But this was my first time meeting him. Of course, I knew his work.When did you first learn about “Topdog/Underdog”?HAWKINS I was a junior in high school when the play first premiered at the Public Theater in 2001, so it wasn’t until I was at Juilliard that I came across the show in a student production. A friend of mine, the actor Sheldon Woodley, was directing Amari Cheatom and Johnny Ramey in a version of this play. I was in my first year, wearing what they call “theater blacks” and moving the set pieces around the stage, so I was in the orbit of the play. And then I read it and fell in love with it from there.ABDUL-MATEEN It might have been in 2010 for me. At Berkeley [where he received a bachelor’s degree], a student was doing a director’s showcase of 15-minute scenes. I had one scene from “Othello,” then I did one scene from “Topdog/Underdog,” and I played Booth. It was the first time I read anything contemporary that felt like it was made for me. There was a line from the play that just stayed with me, “She gonna walk in here looking all hot and [expletive], trying to see how much she can get me to sweat, how much she can get me to give her before she gives me mines.” That made me think of my family, my cousins, my people and my friends. And I felt seen, so I said, “Oh, I got to go investigate Booth some more.”Twenty years ago, we had less nuanced conversations about Black masculinity than we are having now. Do you think that changes how we see these characters?HAWKINS I think naturally those differences will be evident because Yahya and I are Black men who live in this era versus 20 years ago. There have been shifts in the conversations around men’s roles and responsibilities, but how I, as an artist, see those things might be different than how my character, Link, sees them. I have to be true to the intentions of what Suzan-Lori Parks wrote, but I do see the play as an ode or love letter to Black men. We can be raw, right, wrong, joyous, funny, heartbreaking and unapologetically Black onstage.ABDUL-MATEEN I think Booth imagines himself as a romantic who knows about women. He’s probably not in the social circles that are speaking about toxic masculinity, but, like a lot of people I know, he fashions himself a gentleman. But, the beautiful thing about this play is that we get to be masculine and also play husband and wife, be silly, immature and vulnerable. We cry, laugh, talk about being hurt in our family, and tell lies designed to make us seem bigger than we are. And then we call each other out when we can see that we’re not succeeding. The test of the play is who comes out on top, so masculinity is always on display within that room.“There are moments in the play where I just get to listen, and I’m just like, “Man, this brother’s killing this right now,” Abdul-Mateen said of Hawkins’s performance.Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesYour characters’ arcs are subtle and then, especially in Booth’s case, suddenly explosive. How do you prepare for these transformations?ABDUL-MATEEN I make it my responsibility never to see it coming. Because we don’t see our transformations coming in life. As for Booth, I’m trying to keep it positive for as long as possible since he doesn’t know he has a change coming. And as an actor, I also want to stay ahead of the audience so they can be hopeful for as long as possible. And then they’re surprised or caught off guard at the end, which is what Corey refers to as the “three-card monte” trick within the play.HAWKINS With three-card monte, you’re just moving the cards around and trying to react to what’s in front of you. I have to hold off for as long as possible with Link as well. He has to fight the drug that is the cards because there is nothing as powerful as when he picks up those cards one more time. And that’s what begins the downward slippery slope for him. But until then, Link and Booth are just bouncing up against each other, pushing until they can’t anymore. That makes it heartbreaking, tragic and surprising for me every night.Are there any instances in which you’ve been astounded by the other’s performance?ABDUL-MATEEN It happens all the time.HAWKINS All the time.ABDUL-MATEEN Show to show.HAWKINS Moment to moment.ABDUL-MATEEN There are moments in the play where I just get to listen, and I’m just like, “Man, this brother’s killing this right now.”HAWKINS Yeah, at the end of the play, every single show, night after night, I feel like I’m just sitting there watching you give a master class, and I wonder what you will do next. And that’s so exciting, man, because there’s not too many people who can access that range of emotion.Ultimately, this is a tragedy, but I was struck by the handshake and hug that you give each other onstage after the show ends. Why is that important for the audience to see?HAWKINS I know we’re both going through it, so I just think it’s a matter of knowing that I got another brother in the fight. We make it look easy, but it isn’t easy going up there. But, for me, I have to let Lincoln go and literally leave him on the floor. So, when I get up, I’m able to reset.ABDUL-MATEEN I am not Booth, and Corey is not Lincoln. When we take a bow, I am being myself. But, at the beginning, when that curtain goes up, only Corey and I are out there and putting on this show for two and a half hours. I have an obligation to get as close to my character’s truth as possible, and when I want to get that hurt out, I got to give it to Corey’s character. That’s my job. And it’s his job to do the same thing back to me. So, when we take our bows, I get to say, “I appreciate you for taking care of me and that this was a pleasure to do this.” More

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

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

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      ‘Topdog/Underdog’ to Star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins

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      The 20th anniversary Broadway revival will be directed by Kenny Leon. Previews begin in September at the John Golden Theater.Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II will star this fall in a Broadway revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer-winning comic drama “Topdog/Underdog.”The play, first staged on Broadway in 2002 after an Off Broadway run at the Public Theater, is a portrait of two brothers: One, named Lincoln (Hawkins), is an Abraham Lincoln impersonator and the other, named Booth (Abdul-Mateen), aspires to play three-card monte the way his brother once had.In 2018, The New York Times declared “Topdog/Underdog” the best American play of the previous 25 years. Explaining that choice, the critic Ben Brantley wrote that the play “plies the fine theatrical art of deception to convey the dangers of role-playing in a society in which race is a performance and prison.”Hawkins, 33, has been featured in a string of films, including “In the Heights,” “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and “Straight Outta Compton.” He has two previous Broadway credits, and picked up a Tony nomination in 2017 for his starring role in a revival of “Six Degrees of Separation.”Abdul-Mateen, 35, is best known for his work in the HBO series “Watchmen,” and he recently was featured in the films “Ambulance,” “The Matrix Resurrections” and “Candyman.” “Topdog/Underdog” will be his Broadway debut.The original Broadway production starred Jeffrey Wright and Yasiin Bey, who was known at the time as Mos Def.This 20th anniversary revival, scheduled to run for 16 weeks, is to begin previews Sept. 27 and to open Oct. 20 at the John Golden Theater. It will be directed by Kenny Leon, who in 2014 won a Tony Award for directing a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” The producers are David Stone, a lead producer of “Wicked,” as well as LaChanze, Rashad V. Chambers, Marc Platt, Debra Martin Chase and the Shubert Organization.This season is shaping up to be a big one for Parks. In addition to the Broadway revival of “Topdog/Underdog,” the Public Theater on Tuesday said it would stage productions of two new works she has written: “Plays for the Plague Year,” a series of playlets Parks wrote during the early pandemic, and “The Harder They Come,” a musical adaptation of the 1972 film, with a book by Parks and a score that includes songs by Jimmy Cliff. More