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    Overlooked No More: Go-won-go Mohawk, Trailblazing Indigenous Actress

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    In the 1880s, the only roles for Indigenous performers were laden with negative stereotypes. So Mohawk decided to write her own narratives.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.For a long time, theatrical roles for Indigenous characters were laden with stereotypes: the savage, the tragic martyr, the helpless drunk. And it was rare in stories of any kind, on the page or on the stage, for an Indigenous character to have a starring role.By the late 1880s, the actress Go-won-go Mohawk had had enough. “I grew tired of being cast in uncongenial roles,” like meek princesses or submissive women who were restrained in corsets, she told The Des Moines Register and Leader in 1910. So she decided to write her own roles, ultimately carving out a groundbreaking career in which she told stories onstage about Indigenous people as the heroes of their own lives. She also did it while performing as a man.Mohawk’s primary work was “Wep-ton-no-mah, the Indian Mail Carrier” (1892), which follows the title character, a young Indigenous man, as he saves a young white woman from a stampede, winning her heart and earning the respect of her family.The woman’s father, a colonel, offers Wep-ton-no-mah a position as a mail carrier, which he initially turns down. “I could not start being under the control of anyone but the great Manitou,” Wep-ton-no-mah says, referring to the spiritual power of the Algonquians. “I want to be free–free–free like the birds, the eagles and deers — owning no master but one.”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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      in Theater

      John Leguizamo on His Play, ‘The Other Americans,’ and Latino Representation

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      In his new play, “The Other Americans,” John Leguizamo stars as Nelson Castro, a Colombian laundromat owner in Queens whose life begins to unravel as his family struggles to, as Leguizamo puts it, “survive the American dream.”Most of his previous stage outings have been solo shows, like “Mambo Mouth” and “Spic-O-Rama,” but Leguizamo wrote this new play for an ensemble. He said a full cast was necessary to flesh out the strain in the Castro household, but he also wanted to write a Latino family drama that could stand next to the greats, to show that Latino writers can produce plays as good as those of Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill or David Mamet.Leguizamo has called for more Latino representation in entertainment, including this year through a full-page ad in The New York Times in June and a speech at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards in September. “Turns out not complaining didn’t change anything,” he said during that speech. “So for the past few years, I’ve been complaining.”Leguizamo and Rosa Arredondo in “The Other Americans,” which is scheduled to run through Nov. 24 at Arena Stage in Washington.T. Charles EricksonWhile he praised the television industry for some progress, he told The Times he felt Latino representation in the theater world was “abysmal,” which was one reason he wanted to write “The Other Americans.”The actress Luna Lauren Velez, who plays Castro’s wife, Patti, said of the play: “It made me realize just how little you see this kind of material for us.”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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      in Music

      How Jazz Musicians Like Louis Armstrong Paid Homage to Trains With Music

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      Jazz lovers worldwide know well the passion that Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong had for trains, especially for the elegant Pullman cars that toted them to gigs across the country. Within the velvet-appointed sleeping carriages, African American porters shined the musicians’ shoes, nursed their hangovers, clipped their hair and served them mint juleps and Welsh rarebit — the same service afforded wealthy white passengers.In return, the maestros composed their now famous songs of homage to trains. There’s Duke’s throbbing “Happy Go Lucky Local,” the Count’s bow to the “Super Chief” and Satchmo’s romantic rendering of “Mail Train Blues.” But few fans appreciated the real reason these jazz legends worshiped not just the railroad generally, but George Pullman’s sleeper car: It saved them from the threat of terrifying violence.In that Jim Crow era of racial segregation, Black people were relegated to separate and unequal accommodations in everything from schools and parks to water fountains and restrooms. Just getting out of an automobile or bus to look for a meal and a bed could prove perilous in unfamiliar cities below the Mason-Dixon line. Wrong choices sometimes led to berating, beating or worse, with racial violence reaching new peaks in the early 1900s. Even the music makers’ fame couldn’t fully protect them. Only on the Pullman cars, where they were served by fellow African Americans, could they truly relax while on the road.“To avoid problems, we used to charter two Pullman sleeping cars and a 70-foot baggage car,” Ellington wrote in his 1973 memoir, “Music Is My Mistress.” “Everywhere we went in the South, we lived in them.”Duke Ellington’s band members on a train in 1941. In the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, Black people were relegated to separate and unequal accommodations in everything from schools and parks to water fountains and restrooms. Otto F. Hess Collection / New York Public LibraryThe Count Basie Orchestra did, too. Traveling in stylish Pullmans “was my piece of cake,” Basie recalled in his 1985 autobiography, “Good Morning Blues.” “Lots of times, instead of me getting into my bed, I used to sit and look out the window most of the night as we rambled from one place to another. That was music to me.” More

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      in Theater

      Alicia Keys, LaChanze and Billy Porter Celebrate Black Theater

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      The stage stars were among more than 600 people who turned out for an evening of dinner and performances to benefit Black Theater United.LaChanze was in the mood to celebrate.“I am so ready to party,” the actress, wearing a sequined red gown with a bold red lip, said on the red carpet before the second annual Black Theater United gala at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan on Monday night.LaChanze is the president and a founding member of Black Theater United, a nonprofit that aims to combat racism in the theater community. She was one of more than 600 people — including the singer Alicia Keys, the actor Billy Porter, the actress Kristin Chenoweth and the pop-classical musician Josh Groban — who gathered at the grand event space for a live auction, dinner and performance on a night when most Broadway shows were dark.The gala raised money for the nonprofit founded by an all-star team of Black theater artists, including the Tony Award winners Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Phylicia Rashad and LaChanze in the summer of 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis.Mr. Mitchell remembered a call at the time with Ms. McDonald, the director Schele Williams and LaChanze. “They just started saying, ‘We’ve got to do something,’” he said.The organization now offers programs for aspiring young Black theater artists including student internships, a panel and discussion series, a musical theater scholarship and a program that aims to educate artists of color about designing for the theater.From left: Nichelle Lewis, Stephanie Mills and Sydney Terry performing “Home” from “The Wiz.” Ms. Mills was the original Dorothy in the 1975 production of the musical, a retelling of the classic “Wizard of Oz” story.Nina Westervelt 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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      in Music

      Janet Jackson Repeats False Claims About Kamala Harris’s Race

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      After Ms. Jackson told The Guardian that Ms. Harris is “not Black,” her representatives said a man who apologized on her behalf was not authorized to speak for her.There was a swift backlash on Saturday after the pop star Janet Jackson challenged Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity in an interview with The Guardian. On Sunday, a man who identified himself as her manager apologized for her statements.Then Ms. Jackson’s representatives quickly distanced her from that man and his apology, saying he was not her manager and was not authorized to speak for her.The unusual turn of events began when The Guardian published a wide-ranging interview with Ms. Jackson timed to promote the European leg of her concert tour. When the reporter, Nosheen Iqbal, said the United States “could be on the verge of voting in its first Black female president,” referring to Ms. Harris, Ms. Jackson responded by saying: “Well, you know what they supposedly said? She’s not Black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian.”When Ms. Iqbal replied that Ms. Harris, the Democratic nominee, is the daughter of an Indian woman and a Jamaican father who is Black, Ms. Jackson responded, “Her father’s white.”“That’s what I was told,” she added. “I mean, I haven’t watched the news in a few days. I was told that they discovered her father was white.”Across social media, people expressed bewilderment over Ms. Jackson’s comments. On “The View” on Monday, one of the hosts, Ana Navarro, said Ms. Jackson had been “very irresponsible” and had used the Guardian interview “carelessly, to spread misinformation.”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

    • 63 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Danzy Senna Discusses ‘Colored Television’

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      Long before Zendaya was our biggest young movie star, before the Kardashians became an aesthetic and economic juggernaut and certainly before Barack Obama (let alone Kamala Harris) ascended the political ranks, the novelist Danzy Senna predicted we’d soon be living through what she called the Mulatto Millennium.“Strange to wake up and realize you’re in style. That’s what happened to me just the other morning,” she wrote in a 1998 essay. “I realized that, according to the racial zodiac, 2000 is the official Year of the Mulatto. Pure breeds (at least Black ones) are out; hybridity is in. America loves us in all of our half-caste glory.”Droll, insouciant, provocative? Of course — Danzy Senna wrote it. Over nearly three decades, she has spun up hilarious (and occasionally unsettling) stories about the lives of characters who happen to be multiracial — “the country I come from,” as she put it. Her debut novel, “Caucasia,” also published in 1998, followed two biracial sisters born in 1970s Boston who are separated by their parents and whose lives take very different paths. It was a best seller.Her latest book, “Colored Television,” her sixth, satirizes Hollywood, academia, the publishing industry, the housing market, ambition and, not least, the pervasive trope of the tragic mulatto.It is also very, very funny.Like much of Senna’s fiction, “Colored Television,” which Riverhead will release on Tuesday, borrows elements from her own life and torques them to the extreme. The novel follows Jane Gibson, a biracial novelist in Los Angeles married to a brilliant, slightly mad painter named Lenny and their two young children. 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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      in Movies

      Why an Asian American Reporter Wanted to Write About Romance

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      Hollywood has portrayed Asian American men in unflattering ways for decades. One Culture reporter aimed to bring the uncomfortable conversations out of group chats, and into The Times.There is a scene in the 2023 film “Past Lives” in which Nora Moon, the protagonist, calls Hae Sung Jung, her childhood friend, “really
masculine, in
this
way
I
think
is
so
Korean.”When I first heard that dialogue, I remember jolting to attention. It felt like the movie was going out of its way to label an Asian man as manly. I had never heard that kind of talk on the big screen before.And, if I’m being honest, it made me, a Korean American man, feel good.I knew there was more I wanted to unpack, and doing so falls into my jurisdiction as a reporter on The New York Times’s Culture desk. So I was delighted when The Times’s Projects and Collaborations team asked me if I’d be interested in writing about the representation of Asian American men — and specifically their romantic roles — onscreen.Asian and Asian American men have been emasculated and marginalized for decades on American screens, and I wanted to chronicle the modest, but meaningful, shift happening right now. The article, which was published online today alongside visuals from Ricardo Nagaoka, explores how roles available to Asian and Asian American actors have evolved, especially over the last few years.I spoke to almost two dozen Asian Americans: Mostly actors, writers and directors, but also scholars, historians and everyday people. I needed to understand how laws and immigration policy — and especially pop culture — had shaped America’s view of Asian men. And I was interested in how the years of unflattering Hollywood portrayals made Asian and Asian American men feel.Surveys from the 2000s and 2010s had concluded that Asian men, along with Black women, were at the bottom of the racial romantic hierarchy when it came to dating in real life. And the frustration felt by Asian American men in that realm has at times manifested itself in misplaced toxicity, anger and resentment — particularly toward Asian women.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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      in Movies

      Asian American Actors Are Finally Getting Romantic Lead Roles

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      It was not long ago that the actor and writer Joel Kim Booster first began going to auditions only to quickly realize that the roles available to him as an Asian American man were severely limited.“It does not get better from here, no matter how many Chinese-food delivery boys you play,” he recalled being told by other Asian American actors.But Booster kept at it. And eventually, in 2022, he got to portray a gay Asian American man in “Fire Island,” a groundbreaking rom-com that he also wrote. “So much of that movie,” Booster said, “is just a literal transcript from my life.”As it turned out, things did get a little better for Asian American men in Hollywood during the decade that Booster spent toiling. And he senses that the momentum has continued in the two years since “Fire Island” debuted.Many of the newest Asian and Asian American stories seem unconcerned with “the white gaze,” he said. And so “the conversation has sort of moved on for a lot of people,” he said, adding that his movie “almost feels a little retrograde now.”Indeed, since the 2018 blockbuster “Crazy Rich Asians” became a box office hit, Asian and Asian American stories and characters have proliferated in American pop culture. And after decades of degrading, often emasculating portrayals, Asian and Asian American men like Booster have been at the center of the new work, often playing the sort of hunky hero parts that Hollywood long kept out of reach.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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      in Theater

      At ‘Slave Play’ in London, a ‘Black Out’ Night Emerges From Controversy

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      Critics slammed the idea of “restricting audiences on the basis of race,” but at a recent performance, Black spectators praised producers for creating a safe space.Elaine Grant was pleased with the scene unfolding outside the Noël Coward Theater in London on Wednesday night.Unlike most nights at the theater in the West End, there was a sea of majority Black faces laughing and jovially chatting in a line that snaked around the block before a performance of Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play.”Grant, who works in the arts, had organized a group of more than 100 people, mostly Black women, to see the show. “A lot of the people that I work with don’t necessarily go to the theater a lot,” she said, and so it was important for them to be in a space where they could feel safe experiencing a range of emotion.This was a “Black Out” performance, an idea Harris first announced for his play’s Broadway 2019 run, in which he invites Black audience members to attend a specific performance, to experience and discuss art away from the white gaze. Joaquina Kalukango, an actress in the show’s New York run, told the Times in 2020 that she felt on those nights that she was performing to an audience “that fully understood the story and understood where these characters were coming from.”In London, the mood on the theater steps was upbeat and there seemed little concern that when this “Slave Play” transfer — including two Black Out performances — was announced in February, it drew the wrath of some British commentators, and got caught up in ongoing debates over race in British cultural institutions. Even the office of the prime minister at the time, Rishi Sunak, chimed in, saying, “restricting audiences on the basis of race would be wrong and divisive.”Harris responded to the widespread criticism on social media, addressing what he called a “moral panic” among parts of the British public.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