Police Brutality, Misconduct and Shootings

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    A Landmark of Black Cinema, Restored for a New Age

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    The British director Horace Ové struggled to get his 1975 film, “Pressure,” made and released. Now, weeks after his death, a new restoration is celebrated in New York and London.On a recent, rainy evening in London, movie fans gathered at the British Film Institute theater for a much-anticipated premiere, though the film was made nearly 50 years ago: Horace Ové’s newly restored “Pressure,” considered the first feature by a Black British director.Ové died last month, just weeks before his film was set to be celebrated internationally with screenings at both the London and New York Film Festivals. Herbert Norville, who starred in “Pressure” when he was 15, said in a speech at the London screening that he hoped the audience saw “what it was like being Black, being British and growing up in an era where racism was rife.”A roiling social-realist drama shot in 1974, “Pressure” follows Tony, a young Black Londoner looking for a job and a sense of belonging. He is pulled in several directions: by his activist older brother, by his pious West Indian mother and by white British society, which refuses to embrace him.Gradually radicalized by encounters with potential employers, a friend’s landlord and the police, Tony reaches a boiling point. In an interview after the screening, Norville, who played Tony, described the film as “pulling no punches” in its depiction of the reality of Black life in London in the ’70s. In an earlier Q. and A. with the audience, he had noted that the film’s themes of “institutional racism and police brutality” were still relevant in Britain today.In recent years, mainstream cultural institutions including the Tate museums and the BBC have been giving work made about Black British, and specifically Caribbean, lives more attention. The restoration of “Pressure” is accompanied by a major British Film Institute retrospective, “Power to the People: Horace Ove’s Radical Vision,” though in prior decades, the director struggled for recognition from the establishment.Oscar James and Sheila Scott Wilkinson in scene from “Pressure.” The film features professional and nonprofessional actors. BFI National Archive/The Film FoundationThe journey to get “Pressure” made was fraught. In 1972, Robert Buckler, who produced the film, was working as a script editor for the BBC, looking for stories about “the struggle for ordinary people,” he said in a recent interview. Buckler, who is white, spent part of his youth in the racially mixed London neighborhood of Peckham, and felt that the BBC’s programming wasn’t “reflecting fully the way our society was changing around us,” he said.In Britain in the 1970s, the Caribbean Artists Movement was thriving and Black British artists, poets, playwrights and theater directors were making work — just not for mainstream film or TV. Buckler said he approached Ové, a documentarian and photojournalist from Trinidad, to develop a script, but was unable to convince the BBC to fund a film “about a Black Englishman.” He recalled executives asking, “‘Well, who on earth would be in it?’”Instead, the British film Institute, or B.F.I., eventually financed “Pressure,” in 1974. Ové cast a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, and the movie debuted at the London Film Festival the following year. But “Pressure” did not receive a theatrical release until 1978. “Banned is technically the wrong word,” said Arike Oke, a B.F.I. executive responsible for the organization’s archive; the delay in reaching movie theaters was more to do with “bureaucratic cul-de-sacs.” But the B.F.I. didn’t “proactively champion the film” at the time, Oke conceded.Its themes, however, were prescient. In “Pressure,” Tony is beaten by the police and arrested after attending Black Power meetings and marches; in 1976, a riot erupted following Notting Hill Carnival in west London, and as Buckler put it, “a sort of warfare between the youth and the police” broke out.Horace Ové in 1987. After making “Pressure,” he worked prolifically in TV.John Nobley/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesIn the same way that New York Magazine would later argue there could be “violent reactions” to Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing” from Black audiences, Buckler said he wondered if the theatrical release of “Pressure” was delayed because of concerns it would heighten racial tensions.The British movie industry remained tentative about investing in Black talent for decades after the “Pressure” release, and filmmakers that followed Ové, like John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien, worked mostly in gallery spaces, while Ové worked prolifically in TV. He made only one other theatrically released movie, the 1986 comedy “Playing Away.”Zak Ové, the filmmaker’s son, said “Pressure” showed “exactly where we’ve come from and the kind of determination that was necessary.” He added that his father’s “honest depiction of a gritty reality” was a part of history at risk of disappearing if it was not honored.If it wasn’t for Ové, said Ashley Clark, the curatorial director at the Criterion Collection, that history “may not have been captured” at all. The director carved out a space “for Black people to speak for ourselves, in a landscape where a lot of those conversations were being had for us,” he said.Clark, who is British, but lives in the United States, has championed “Pressure” for several years. He said that Criterion plans to release a Blu-ray edition of the movie in 2024, and recalled programming screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the film played from “a rickety 16-millimeter print.” With the movie’s cerebral Black Power advocates campaigning for Black rights, Caribbean immigrants striving for middle-class security and disenfranchised Black British youths driven to crime by a lack of opportunity, “Pressure” offers “a meeting of different ideas and forms and embodiments of Blackness,” Clark said.At the New York screenings of the film, he said, there were “young, trendy Brooklyn people from across the diaspora” asking: Where has this been all my life? More

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      ‘Sound of the Police’ Review: The Silence and the Fury

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      This documentary dives into the nation’s outrageous history of the policing of Black citizens by touching on the 2022 killing of Amir Locke.It is not the first image in “Sound of the Police,” a documentary about the chronically vexed relationship between Black people and police officers, but it is its most chilling: the ominous hush of the police at a front door, signaling the horror to come.In February 2022, a SWAT team entered an apartment in Minneapolis. Body camera footage, released by the city’s police, shows a key being quietly inserted into a lock during a no-knock search warrant operation. Seconds later, Amir Locke, 22, who had been asleep on the living-room couch when roused by the officers, was mortally wounded. Footage shows him, groggy and confused, under a blanket holding his legally owned handgun.The director Stanley Nelson’s freighted film opens with family and friends gathering for Locke’s funeral, a celebration of his life, followed by interviews with his parents. The movie also concludes with them. In between those sad but cleareyed bookends, the filmmakers have packed a necessary history of policing. That Locke’s death came after the killings of Breonna Taylor (also a no-knock warrant) and George Floyd, underscores the movie’s argument: Reforming policing remains a life-or-death matter.For viewers who’ve digested the bitter lessons of the documentaries “13th” and “MLK/FBI,” as well as more recent social-justice portraits of the activist Rev. Al Sharpton (“Loudmouth”) and the civil rights attorney Ben Crump (“Civil”), many of the images of brutality and insights about the abuses of institutional power will be familiar, though no less outrageous. Some early police forces in America were formed from slave patrols, and their violent tactics descend from post-Civil War attempts to control and contain Black people, engendering a justified mistrust.The film boasts a formidable collection of interviewees — among them the legal scholar James Forman Jr., the historian Elizabeth Hinton as well as David Simon, the creator of the police procedural “The Wire.” Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, dissects the social conditions that have enabled police departments to rebuff oversight and have emboldened white citizens to imagine a personal relationship to the police. (The montage of white women making 911 calls to report Black citizens — bird watching, lemonade selling, just tending to life — might be amusing, were it not so pathological.) If you need a refresher on what “systemic” looks like, these thinkers offer it.Sound of the PoliceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and on Hulu. More

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      Do You Have a Civic Duty to Watch the Video of Memphis Police Beating Tyre Nichols?

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      The video of Memphis police beating Tyre Nichols challenges public complacency — and complicity. What are our duties as citizens and as human beings?Do you have a civic duty to watch, or a moral obligation not to?Some version of that question has confronted us since the body- and pole-camera footage of Memphis police officers beating Tyre Nichols was released on Friday evening. The argument isn’t necessarily about whether the Police Department should have posted the roughly hourlong, four-part, lightly redacted video online for everyone to see.The legal and political reasons for doing so, at the urging of Mr. Nichols’s family, seem obvious and cogent. Too often, the worst abuses of power are allowed to fester in secrecy, shrouded in lies, bureaucratic language and partial information. Raw video offers clarity, transparency and perhaps accountability — a chance for citizens to understand the unvarnished truth about what happened on the night of Jan. 7.That is the hope, in any case: that concerned Americans will become witnesses after the fact, our senses shocked and our consciences awakened by the sight of uniformed officers repeatedly kicking and punching Mr. Nichols, who would die from his injuries three days later. “I expect you to feel what the Nichols family feels,” Cerelyn Davis, the Memphis police chief, said in anticipation of the video’s impact. Her appeal to common humanity expressed faith in the power of even the most horrific images to foster empathy and community — and faith in the human capacity to experience outrage and compassion when shown such images.That faith provides a strong argument for the importance of looking. To turn away in circumstances like this would not merely be to succumb to a loss of nerve, but to risk a loss of heart. In insisting that the world see what had been done to her son, RowVaughn Wells, Mr. Nichols’s mother, recalled Mamie Till-Mobley, who in 1955 placed the disfigured body of her murdered son, Emmett, in an open coffin so that the viciousness of the racists who killed him could not be denied.A delicate ethical line separates witness — an active, morally engaged state of attention — from the more passive, less demanding condition of spectatorship. The spectacle of violence has a way of turning even sensitive souls into gawkers and voyeurs. Violence, very much including the actions of the police, is a fixture of popular culture, and has been since long before the invention of video. For much of human history, public executions have been a form of entertainment. The history of lynching in the United States is in part a history of public spectacle, in which the mutilation and murder of Black men brought out white crowds to stare, cheer and take photographs.I’m not saying that looking at the video of Mr. Nichols’s beating is equivalent to joining in one of those crowds, but rather that Black suffering in America has often been either relegated to invisibility or subjected to exploitation and commodification. That is the dilemma that Ms. Wells and others in her position have faced, even as she challenges the public to acknowledge her son’s full humanity.We don’t automatically recoil from violence. We can just as easily respond with indifference, morbid fascination — or worse. Images are powerful, but not powerful enough to compensate for a society’s failures of decency or judgment, or to overcome its commitment to denying truths that should be self-evident. Mr. Nichols’s case can’t help but recall the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991, captured on video by a neighbor. The officers in that case were acquitted, and unrest swept the city.On Friday, not long before the Memphis videos were posted, a police body-cam clip was released showing part of the Oct. 28 assault on former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, at his home in San Francisco. That attack, carried out by an apparent right-wing extremist, had been the subject of grotesque jokes and lurid, baseless speculations from some of his wife’s political enemies. While the video seems to refute all such claims, it is unlikely to stem the tide of conspiracism and fantasy in some right-wing precincts. The assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, also involved extremists hunting for Ms. Pelosi, and in spite of abundant documentation has been treated by partisans as a tangle of mystery, indeterminacy and through-the-looking-glass distortion.A clip from the attack on Paul Pelosi at his home in San Francisco.San Francisco Police Department, via Associated PressVideo may not lie, but people do. The fact that even the plainest images are open to interpretation, manipulation and mischaracterization places an ethical burden on the viewer. The cost of looking is thinking about what we see. Video is a tool, not a shortcut or a solution. Three decades after the Rodney King beating, Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd, and a bystander’s video of his killing galvanized a global protest movement. What we do with the images is what matters.What do we do with these images that come from official sources, and that exist partly because of the impulse to keep a closer eye on law enforcement? In the Memphis videos what is perhaps most heartbreaking, and most chilling, is the casual indifference of the officers to Mr. Nichols’s anguish — and to the cameras that recorded it.In the pole-camera video, which is the longest of the four segments and has no sound, you see him crumpled against the side of a patrol car and collapsing onto the ground as his assailants and an ever-increasing number of their colleagues mill around, mostly ignoring him. Someone lights a cigarette. Someone fiddles with a clipboard. Because of the silence of the soundtrack and the immobility of the camera, time seems to slow down, and action mutates into abstraction. A human catastrophe is playing out under a ruthlessly impersonal eye looking down from above.The body-cam footage puts viewers in the position of the police officers.Memphis Police Department, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe body-cam adds sound and movement. You feel the frenzy of the chase and the impact of bodies as Mr. Nichols is taken down. Then you hear his anguished, pleading, desperate cries. You also hear the officers complaining that he made them run after him and made them pepper-spray one another, insisting that he must be “on something” and embroidering a story — which they may well believe — about how he took a swing at one and grabbed for another’s gun.After a while, the drama of the traffic stop, the chase and the beating fades into the routine tedium of the job. The semi-intelligible voices on the radio, the blend of jargon and profanity in the officers’ conversation, their mixture of weariness and bravado — all of this is familiar. We’ve seen this before, not only in real life but also, perhaps most of all, in movies and on television. And of course in first-person games, which the body-cam footage uncannily and unnervingly replicates. We see the violence from the point of view of a perpetrator. We aren’t bearing witness so much as experiencing our own complicity, and taking account of that is perhaps where the work of watching these videos should begin. More

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      The Riverside Drive Apartment Where a Broadway Play Was Born

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      “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning script, is set in a rent-controlled apartment that was inspired by the playwright’s own.The world of “Between Riverside and Crazy,” the Stephen Adly Guirgis play that opened on Broadway last month, is confined to a rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment building, where the dark comedy spools out over kitchen table bickering and rooftop joint passing.It’s the kind of New York City apartment that has stayed in the family despite rising rents and a landlord bent on eviction — the kind of apartment that Guirgis himself inherited from his father, an Egyptian immigrant who managed a restaurant at Grand Central and had little else to pass on when he died.Like the one in the play, the real Riverside Drive apartment is a “grand old railroad flat with chandeliers and a river view,” as Guirgis’s introduction to the play reads, with “beautiful fixtures, family mementos and antique furniture competing for survival with dust, stains, garbage, leaks and unattended junk.”About a decade ago, Guirgis started gathering actors there to read his developing play, about a Black New York City police officer who was shot while off duty at a bar by a white officer and has been seeking justice ever since.A fixture of the living room readings was Stephen McKinley Henderson, a friend and frequent visitor whom Guirgis had imagined in the lead role from the beginning. A parade of well-known actors participated in the readings on Riverside Drive along the West 80s, including John Leguizamo, Ellen Burstyn and Chris Rock, whose Broadway debut was in a Guirgis play.“The first time I read it, it was 15 pages,” Henderson said. “And as it grew, it grew on me.”Colón-Zayas and the playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis at his Riverside Drive apartment in 2014, the year the play premiered Off Broadway.Monique Carboni The play that developed from those readings became a patchwork of autobiography and fiction, organized around an idea based on a local news story from the 1990s. Directed by Austin Pendleton, “Between Riverside and Crazy” went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama after premiering at Atlantic Theater Company in 2014 and running Off Broadway for a second time in 2015. (In that production, Ron Cephas Jones, a friend of Guirgis’s who once lived at the four-bedroom Riverside Drive apartment, played the lead character’s son, Junior.)Eight years after its premiere, the play has landed on Broadway — the Second Stage production at the Helen Hayes Theater still stars Henderson, with Common now playing Junior — in a radically altered landscape.Since the actors first gathered at Guirgis’s apartment, police shootings of Black men have fueled waves of protest. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in 2020 reignited the movement, with myriad industries, including theater, facing calls for large-scale racial justice efforts. In addition, rent rates in New York City have been soaring, boxing out lower-income residents from once-affordable neighborhoods, and evictions have picked back up after a pandemic lull.The actors who have inhabited their characters for years say they approach the work with a new depth and personal understanding, but the dialogue remains almost entirely the same. One short line was added, from Junior, a parolee who struggles to get the kind of love from his father that he received from his recently deceased mother.“Pops, it’s 2014,” Junior says, situating the audience in time. Guirgis said he asked that the line be added to prevent references to Donald J. Trump and Rudy Giuliani from sounding outdated.The actress Liza Colón-Zayas, who has been involved since early script readings as a character called the Church Lady, said people who have seen this production and previous ones (including her mother) are convinced that the play has been significantly altered over the years.In the play, a widower fights to keep his home and win a long-running lawsuit against the New York Police Department, as messy relationships and messier politics surface among his housemates and guests.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThough the writing is largely unchanged, the actors approach the work with a new depth and personal understanding in light of the cultural conversation surrounding police shootings since the play’s premiere.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The writing didn’t change,” Colón-Zayas said. “The pain, and the years, and what we’ve survived has changed this play in ways that I can’t exactly articulate.”The seed for the story came in 1994, when a white off-duty New York City police officer opened fire on a Black undercover transit officer on a Manhattan subway platform, seriously injuring him. The white officer, Peter Del-Debbio, said he was responding to a shotgun that had discharged and had fired when he saw the plainclothes transit officer, Desmond Robinson, running with a gun.Part of the white officer’s defense was that the Black officer wasn’t wearing his badge or the color that would identify him as a plainclothes officer, so Guirgis remembered the story as the “color of the day” case. Del-Debbio was convicted of second-degree assault and was sentenced to probation and community service.“It always stayed with me,” Guirgis said.Years later, the playwright said, he was visiting Henderson when the veteran actor, having health troubles, remarked that his career would be slowing down.“I just lied and I was like, ‘Oh I started writing two plays for you: one where you’re the lead and one where you’re the supporting,’” Guirgis said. “When I went home I was like, OK, now I’ve got to come up with something.”By the time he started holding script readings, Colón-Zayas, who met Guirgis when they were students at State University of New York at Albany, had been visiting the Riverside Drive apartment for decades. When Guirgis’s mother died in 2006, he recalled, his family returned to the apartment to find Colón-Zayas and other friends cleaning it.After his mother’s death, Guirgis moved into the apartment, getting his father a dog, Papi, for additional companionship. The apartment became a haven for friends who needed one, Guirgis said, including a recovering addict who started to see Guirgis’s father like he was his own.“Anybody who walked into my apartment with me or with my sister was automatically given a blank check of love and acceptance,” he said.Common, right, is making his Broadway debut as Junior. He said part of what attracted him to the role was the message of redemption.Timothy O’Connell for The New York TimesThe unconventional household is intimately depicted in the play. The ex-cop, Walter Washington, welcomes his son’s sweet but clueless girlfriend, Lulu (Rosal Colón), and his friend Oswaldo (Victor Almanzar), who spent time in prison and is trying to stay sober.Like Guirgis did for his father, Junior brings a dog into the household to keep him company; Walter calls the dog by a choice curse word instead of his name, but the emotional attachment is apparent underneath the derision. (Papi, the fox-like mutt that Guirgis had adopted for his father, died recently, and the cast has mourned the loss of an original attendee of those early script readings.)A stubborn and ailing alcoholic, Walter gripes about his housemates and expresses love begrudgingly, but the core of the play is his inclination to welcome them into his home no matter their mistakes.“As with all of his characters, it’s a lesson in, ‘Who are we to judge anybody, really?’” Colón said.Common, who is making his Broadway debut as Junior and has done advocacy work within the prison system, said part of what attracted him to the role was the message of redemption.When he entered the cast as the only newcomer in a tight-knit group of actors, he received a welcome not unlike the kind Walter tends to give: matter of fact but unconditional.“One day Liza came up to me,” he recalled, referring to Colón-Zayas, “and she said, ‘You aight, you aight. You can roll with us.’”(Colón-Zayas was replaced in the role this month by Maria-Christina Oliveras because of a scheduling conflict.)In the play, as Walter fights to hold on to his home and win his long-running lawsuit against the New York Police Department, a series of characters passes through the apartment — ostensibly there to help a solitary widower. Two police colleagues gather for dinner and a serving of nostalgia; the Church Lady comes to chat and give communion.But in “Riverside,” the intentions of the houseguests are never clear-cut. The relationships get messy, and the underlying politics of the story even messier.Henderson’s character is portrayed as both noble and, at times, misguided. He maintains both a righteous grudge against the New York Police Department and a fierce pride for it. His children, biological and not, are both trying to change their lives for the better and backsliding into old ways.Guirgis is well aware that the persistent character flaws have the tendency to rankle some audience members who would have preferred to see their worldviews affirmed more emphatically. But he’s interested in telling a more complicated story, and says he thinks present-day audiences will see that, just as they did in 2014.“If the characters all just have white hats and black hats, then we’re watching a cartoon, and there’s nothing to learn from it,” he said. “I try to make it messy but I try to lead with love.” More

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      Review: In ‘A Kid Like Rishi,’ Hazy Uncertainty Shrouds a Teen’s Killing

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      A cast of three recount the gripping drama of the death of a teenager by the Dutch police in 2012.No matter where you decide to sit, you won’t see everything in “A Kid Like Rishi,” Kees Roorda’s thrumming documentary play at the Cell Theater, and surely that is very much by design.The task looks straightforward enough, going in — nothing obvious like columns to obstruct a person’s view. The room is deeper than it is wide, and the set consists mainly of a long wooden table and a few microphones, with audience members choosing seats along each wall. Projected feeds from four video cameras show various angles of the space we’re in, which is not large. We would seem to have the area sufficiently surveilled.Yet from the start of this gripping, understated drama, which recounts the killing of a 17-year-old boy of Surinamese descent by the Dutch police in 2012, we can’t always get a clear perspective. An actor’s back is to us, or one of the performers is blocking our vantage on another, or the video is too indistinct to show what we’re looking for. Which, ordinarily, would be maddening.In Erwin Maas’s stark production for Origin Theater Company, it becomes instead an exercise in visceral understanding — because our interpretation of events in the world has everything to do with how clear our sightlines are and what’s blocking our view, literally or metaphorically. And the people who witnessed Rishi Chandrikasing’s shooting early one November morning on a train station platform in The Hague — or participated in the police pursuit of him, or passed legal judgment on it, or were left bereft by it — all saw and heard, or believed they saw and heard, very different things in the same lone teenager and the same abrupt execution.“The District Court in The Hague deems legally and convincingly proven that the defendant intentionally inflicted grievous bodily harm resulting in the death of the victim,” a judge pronounces at the top of the show.The defendant is an unnamed police officer; the victim is Rishi. But this is an acquittal, not a conviction — because, the judge reasons, even lethal force can be justified, and the police “had to assume that the person in question was armed and dangerous.”The acting is for the most part restrained, wisely letting the words — of bystanders, of a police shooting instructor, of Rishi’s haunted mother — speak for themselves.Rory DuffyDid they have to, though? And how much do racist fears shape perceptions of innocuous events, injecting mortal peril where no danger at all had been? Those are the questions at the heart of this Dutch play, assembled from courtroom, interview and other transcripts, and performed by a cast of three (Sung Yun Cho, Atandwa Kani and Kaili Vernoff) in an English translation by Tom Johnston.The acting is for the most part restrained, wisely letting the words — of bystanders, of a police shooting instructor, of Rishi’s haunted mother — speak for themselves. Vernoff strays from this in one portrayal, telegraphing a journalist character’s odiousness, while Kani can’t quite slip into the rhythms of Rishi’s girlfriend. Otherwise, the performances are solid.And Guy de Lancey’s scenography is outstanding: each element of the set, video, lighting and projections shaping our perception of what is murky and uncertain and what is bright and sure.Bits of the dialogue are in Dutch, interspersed throughout the play: audio calls relaying tenuous information to police dispatch centers in the minutes before and after the shooting. (The smart sound design is by Fan Zhang, who also composed the production’s tension-filled underscore.) As the recordings play, we don’t see supertitles projected, just the occasional phrase — “Black man,” “Take this with a grain of salt,” “You be careful.”The full translations of the calls are printed in the program, but our comprehension of those exchanges during the performance is fragmentary, as is the dispatchers’ in what comes to seem like a precarious game of telephone. A nebulous report of a possible firearm, seen by no one, morphs for the police into an urgent, adrenaline-charged, presumed reality: that a threatening man in a white coat has a gun.Not a single grain of salt appears to have been consumed.A Kid Like RishiThrough June 19 at the Cell Theater, Manhattan; origintheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      The First Play Returning to Broadway Is Doing Things Differently

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      Anna Martin and Phyllis Fletcher and After the opening night performance of “Pass Over,” hundreds gathered for a block party. The playwright, Antoinette Nwandu, spoke to the crowd from a balcony above the theater marquee.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis episode contains strong language.Antoinette Nwandu’s “Pass Over” made its Broadway debut this week. Drawing on “Waiting for Godot” and the Book of Exodus, the play follows two Black men trapped on a city block — both by existential dread, and by the fear of being killed by police.But Broadway audiences won’t see the play’s original ending, which featured the death of one of the main characters.“I no longer wanted to work on a play that ended with the murder of a Black man,” said Nwandu, who rewrote the final scene. “I want to focus on life.”Nwandu’s play was the first to debut on Broadway since theaters closed their doors in March of 2020 and the first since a coalition of theater artists of color demanded change from the theater ecosystem in America.Nwandu spoke with the theater reporter Michael Paulson about the changes she is personally bringing to theater, and her hopes for the industry — still grappling with the pandemic — as the curtains rise again.“Thank you for celebrating Black joy!” Nwandu told celebrants at an afterparty on West 52nd Street, outside the theater. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAudience members in masks react after the curtain call.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTheatergoers gave a standing ovation to the three actors: Jon Michael Hill, left, Namir Smallwood and (unseen) Gabriel Ebert.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times More

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      In ‘What to Send Up,’ I See You, Black American Theater

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      Our critic reflects on the significance of Aleshea Harris’s play, at BAM Fisher, for Black audiences.We didn’t know what to do about this piece.Whether I, a Black critic, should review Aleshea Harris’s breathtaking “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” even though my former colleague Ben Brantley, a white critic, already reviewed and raved about the show’s initial run in 2018. Whether I should be in conversation with a white critic or another Black critic.This is the piece I came up with: I’m reporting on a moment in time when I, a Black critic and a Black woman in America, felt the safest and most embraced by my Blackness in a theater.On a gloomy Friday evening, I went to BAM Fisher for the play, being presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Playwrights Horizons in association with the Movement Theater Company. I headed to the downstairs lobby, which featured portraits of Black men and women killed by the police. The room was full of Black people.If you can’t imagine the comfort of being with people who look like you in a space where art is being made, it’s something like sipping from a steaming cup in the dead of winter: the warmth is precious, immediate and shocking all at once.Harris, a veritable poet of a playwright who also wrote “Is God Is,” describes the play as “a space in the theater that is unrepentantly for and about Black people” — “a space for affirming, and reflecting.” She calls it “an anger spittoon” and “a dance party.” It’s true that “What to Send Up” feels less like a play than it does a series of cathartic experiences — which isn’t to say it isn’t beautiful theater, because it is still very much that.Early on in the show, directed by Whitney White, in a kind of intimate workshop, one performer (Kalyne Coleman, who is stunning as both a performer and the host) asks the audience members, who are all standing in a large semicircle, to step forward if they’d ever witnessed a race-based act of police brutality or if they’d ever been a victim of a racially motivated act of police brutality. Most people stepped forward after the former. About a dozen people, of the 50 or so in attendance, stepped forward in response to the latter, including a 30-something Black couple.Then a series of skits charts all the horrific ways Black people are stereotyped and generally misrepresented in art and in real life. There are biting parodies of troubling Black tropes in entertainment, like the supplicant servant figures in “Driving Miss Daisy” and “The Help.” And there are surreal monologues (one woman recounts how she snatched the mouth off a white man and how it flopped like a fish) alongside stepping, choral songs and spoken word.This was a show that validated my fear and sorrow as a Black citizen of this country and yet still alerted me to the privilege of having had a sheltered suburban upbringing. I thought about the first time someone directly called me the N-word, casually slinging it to the side of my face while I was walking through Midtown Manhattan one weeknight. I thought of all the times I’ve felt uncomfortable as a Black person in a space — in my career, in academia, in social settings. I thought about my growing discomfort around police officers, especially in the last several years.It’s rare for a play to allow me access to both that validation and that awareness of my privilege — because so rarely is Blackness shown onstage and so pointedly aimed toward a Black audience with all the nuances and variations that come within the experiences of their lives.Denise Manning, left, and Kalyne Coleman in “What to Send Up When It Goes Down.”Donna WardAt one point in the show, there is a symbolic Black death, tender though devastating, followed by an extended moment of silence. At another point, we were invited to write messages to Black Americans — they would join the scores of postcards with messages from other audience members that adorn the walls of the theater. Later we were asked to let out a collective, soul-cleansing scream — something I, an introvert, would usually pass on. But the mighty wall of sound led by Black voices — a great sound of exaltation and frustration and defiance all at once — invited me in, and my own voice, unsteady and hesitant, joined. It was like stretching a muscle I never realized existed; the feeling was overwhelming in its depth and release.But, I wondered, can any such space truly and wholly be for a Black audience, especially when there are white audience members there, too? Some part of me was quietly policing the white people in the theater — how they responded to certain scenes and questions, if and when they laughed at certain jokes, if they seemed to hold themselves accountable, if they were taking up too much space.As a critic and a reporter, part of what I do is read the room — how and why audiences react to the happenings onstage, and what that says about the work. But here, I didn’t want to care. In the show’s final minutes, non-Black audience members were invited to leave the theater and gather in the lobby. When I recounted this to a friend afterward, she asked what the white audiences saw, if anything, but I don’t know and — I know this is shameful to admit — I don’t care.I am concerned only with how Harris’s play made me and the other Black people in that room feel. I noted how the couple from earlier clutched each other through most of the show. At some point, the woman left and returned wet-eyed with a handful of tissues. Her partner lovingly rubbed her back.I also ended the show in tears, which I hadn’t expected — but among Black performers and audience members, I felt newly seen and safe. I had a fresh moment of realization, considering my duty as a Black critic. And as a Black poet, I had a moment of inspiration: I want more art like this.Affirmations, exclamations of joy, moments of commemoration: I’ll skip the particulars of those last few holy minutes that were exclusive to the Black audience. I want to honor and extend the loving, communal Black space Harris creates in an art form that has so few of them. And I want to keep it for myself — and for that couple and for the Black woman who, earlier in the show, had said she wished for a future version of this country where she could feel more “human.”I took a slow tour of the theater after the show, and read the messages others had left. “When you breathe, the universe sings,” one notecard read. Any other day in any other place in America, I’d probably find that sentiment too hokey. When have I ever heard singing when inhaling the air of this supposedly great free nation?But at BAM Fisher on that Friday night, I believed in a song of community, of strength and beauty and Black life despite whatever funereal tune is forced upon the lives of Black Americans. Of course I believe in theater for everyone, but I also believe in theater for Black people, and Black people alone.Leaving the venue, I thought of what a pleasure and privilege it was to receive theater gift-wrapped especially for me. And what a pleasure and privilege it is for me to laud it. But the greater pleasure? To tell you something special happened among the Black people in a theater with a qualifier: This play, non-Black theater lover, is not for or about you, and that’s perfectly fine.What to Send Up When It All Goes DownThrough July 11 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org More

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      in Music

      South African Opera Star Says She Was Mistreated by French Police

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      Pretty Yende, an acclaimed soprano, says she was forced to submit to a body search at a Paris airport. “I felt stripped of my human dignity,” she said.The South African soprano Pretty Yende expected her visit this week to France, where she is starring in a production of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula,” to be relatively uneventful.But when she arrived at Paris’s main airport on Monday, Yende was taken aback. The French authorities told her she did not have the proper documents to enter the country. They took her for questioning and forced her to submit to a body search that she described as invasive.“I felt stripped of my human dignity,” Yende said in an email. “It was absolutely uncomfortable.”Yende took to social media to share her experience, saying she was “stripped and searched like a criminal offender” during the ordeal, which lasted more than two hours. While she was not asked to remove her clothes, she says, the police told her, without explanation, to take off her shoes and kept her in a cold, dark room. She suggested that she had been singled out because she is Black.“Police brutality is real for someone who looks like me,” Yende wrote on Facebook, adding that she feared for her life.Yende’s account was shared widely online, with fans and artists expressing outrage and calling the incident an example of racism and discrimination in French society.The French authorities disputed Yende’s portrayal of the incident, saying they acted in accordance with standard procedures. The police say Yende was forced to submit to a pat-down but say it was carried out in a professional manner by a female officer. They acknowledge her cellphone was taken away; she was given access to a landline phone while she was being held at the airport.“We made the usual checks,” the National Police said in a statement. “We did what we do with any passenger facing the same problems.”The police said Yende, who landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris around 3 p.m. Monday on a flight from Milan, did not have a valid visa to enter France. Yende presented a provisional residence permit from Italy, where she lives, but the French authorities said she needed a separate one-time visa. Yende and her lawyer say she had all the documents required by law to gain entry.The authorities eventually issued Yende a visa and allowed her to go around 6 p.m., after speaking with managers at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, where she was to perform on Tuesday.The South African embassy in France said it was aware of the incident and had raised it with the French authorities.“Notwithstanding these unfortunate events, we are pleased that Ms. Yende is continuing with her scheduled performances in Paris,” said Lihle Mancoba, a spokeswoman for the embassy.Yende, 36, is a renowned figure in opera, a charismatic coloratura soprano who has performed on many of the world’s leading stages, including the Teatro alla Scala in Milan and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Born in a small town in South Africa, she has won wide acclaim in an industry historically dominated by white performers. Since last week, she has been singing the role of Amina in “La Sonnambula” at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.Yende received an enthusiastic ovation for her performance on Tuesday night, her fourth time in the role this month. But she said her experience at the airport was never far from her mind.“It was very, very hard for me,” she said in an email after the performance. “I was shaking and couldn’t focus.” More

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      in Television

      Shows Like ‘Cops’ Fell Out of Favor. Now Texas May Ban Them.

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      Lawmakers passed a bill named for Javier Ambler II, who died in 2019 after officers arrested him in front of a “Live PD” television crew. If the governor signs it, this would mean the end of police cooperation with reality TV shows.Two years ago, a television crew gathered in the small city of Hawkins, Texas, to film the life and work of Manfred Gilow, the chief of police there.Cameras followed Chief Gilow as he and his officers responded to calls, snapped handcuffs onto wrists and searched vehicles for drugs. The program was not available on Texas televisions; Chief Gilow is from Germany, and that is where “Der Germinator” (a portmanteau of “German” and “The Terminator”) was broadcast.Last year, after the nationally broadcast policing shows “Cops” and “Live PD” were canceled, “Der Germinator” filmed a second season. But prospects for a third may have dimmed last week, when the Texas Legislature passed a bill that would make it illegal for law enforcement agencies to authorize reality television crews to film officers on duty.“Policing is not entertainment,” said James Talarico, the Democratic state representative who introduced the legislation. The office of Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, did not respond to requests for comment this week about whether he would sign the legislation.Reality law enforcement shows, Mr. Talarico said, “rely on violent encounters between citizens and the police to boost their own ratings.” He cited an investigation by The Austin American-Statesman, which reported last year that law enforcement officers in Williamson County, Texas, were more violent when the “Live PD” cameras were rolling.The bill, which the Legislature passed with bipartisan support on May 13, is named after Javier Ambler II, a 40-year-old father of two who died in 2019 after Williamson County officers forcibly arrested him in front of a “Live PD” camera crew.Mr. Ambler’s sister, Kimberly Ambler-Jones, 39, said she believed that her brother would still be alive if the television crews had not been filming. “Because they had ‘Live PD’ there, it had to be hyped up,” she said. “It had to be drama.”That show was taken off the air in June. So was “Cops,” which had beamed arrests, confrontations and car chases to televisions across the United States for decades.The cancellations came amid nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. They also followed years of campaigning by the racial justice organization Color of Change, which had been pushing networks to drop “Cops” since at least 2013.Arisha Hatch, the organization’s vice president and chief of campaigns, said the shows were one-sided and served as propaganda for law enforcement.“They violate the civil liberties of people who are forced to become the stars of the show,” she said. “They operate to make a joke about how Black communities and poor communities are overpoliced.”Ms. Hatch welcomed the Texas bill, noting that the state-level legislative approach appeared to be without precedent.But with two flagship policing programs already canceled, it is unclear whether the law would have any immediate effect if approved by Governor Abbott.A reality series set in Texas called “Lone Star Law,” on Animal Planet, could most likely continue filming as long as it keeps its focus on wildlife and game wardens, Mr. Talarico said.“Der Germinator,” on the other hand, could be at risk.Chief Gilow argued that the program should be allowed to continue, characterizing it as more of a documentary than a reality show. He said it offered German viewers a glimpse of life in the United States, as well as a cautionary tale about the consequences of crime.“I think it is positive,” Chief Gilow said. “But you will have some people just hating it because they hate the police.” He added that the show did not violate anyone’s rights and blurred the faces of people who did not consent to be filmed.Police body cameras captured the 2019 arrest of Javier Ambler II. Crews from “Live PD” were also filming, but their footage was never broadcast.Austin Police Department, via Associated PressMs. Ambler-Jones said she hoped that Mr. Abbott would sign the bill — and that similar legislation would spread beyond Texas.“I know people feel like this is just entertainment,” she said of reality policing programs. “But you don’t understand what the person on the other side of that camera is dealing with.”For months after Mr. Ambler’s death, his family did not know what had happened to him — only that he had died in law enforcement custody. The details became public last year, after The Austin American-Statesman and the news outlet KVUE obtained body camera footage.Mr. Ambler was driving in the Austin area on March 28, 2019, when Williamson County deputies tried to stop him because he did not dim his headlights to traffic, officials said. After deputies tried to pull Mr. Ambler over, the authorities said, he kept driving for more than 20 minutes before crashing his vehicle.The body camera footage showed that the officers restrained Mr. Ambler and used a Taser on him multiple times. “I have congestive heart failure,” Mr. Ambler could be heard saying. “I can’t breathe.”Mr. Ambler was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. “Live PD” footage of the arrest was never broadcast on television.Since then, Williamson County officials have faced several lawsuits related to reality television footage. Two deputies were indicted on second-degree manslaughter charges in Mr. Ambler’s death, and the former county sheriff, who lost his seat after a November election, was indicted on charges of evidence tampering. All have pleaded not guilty.A spokeswoman for Williamson County declined to comment because of pending litigation. Big Fish Entertainment, the production company behind “Live PD,” did not immediately respond to emailed questions.Mr. Talarico said he hoped the legislation, if signed into law by the governor, would keep “Cops” and “Live PD” out of Texas for good. “Without the force of law, there’s nothing preventing these shows from coming back,” he said, “except for their own conscience.” More