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    ‘The Piano Lesson’ Review: August Wilson’s Phantom Notes

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    John David Washington, Danielle Brooks and Samuel L. Jackson star in the first Broadway revival of Wilson’s haunting family drama set in 1936.Four Black men gathered around a kitchen table exuberantly sing a work song (“When you marry, don’t marry no farming man, hoh-ah,” they holler, clapping and stomping their feet), a Black woman girds herself with her grief for the husband and father she lost to the anger of white men, and siblings fight over a seemingly haunted family heirloom that tells a story of generational trauma and loss. These circumstances are more than enough to raise the dead.Or at least they are in the Charles household, in the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” which opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.First staged in 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theater, “The Piano Lesson” made its Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr three years later. That year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama — one of two Wilson won for his American Century Cycle, a collection of 10 plays, one for each decade of the 20th century, depicting African American life.In “The Piano Lesson,” it’s Pittsburgh, 1936, in the house of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), an old railroad worker who is now a train cook. His niece, Berniece (Danielle Brooks), and her 11-year-old daughter, Maretha (played by Jurnee Swan at the performance I saw), live with him in what is, in Beowulf Boritt’s too on-the-nose scenic design, a skeletal facsimile of a house — just beams and planks, some of which don’t even connect. Though there’s not much to the house — a love seat, a tiny kitchen with an ice box — there is an ornately carved piano that commands attention, despite its place in the far corner of the living room.It’s an august instrument with a knotty history, linking the Charles family to their enslaved ancestors and the white family that owned them. Each panel is covered with figures representing the Charleses; even the piano’s front legs are elaborately sculpted.From left, Ray Fisher, Washington, Brooks, Trai Byers, Jurnee Swan and Samuel L. Jackson. The elaborately carved piano is covered with figures of the Charles family.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBerniece’s brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), has traveled up north from Mississippi with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) planning to cash it in for a plot of land and in the process hoping to transform an artifact of their family’s past struggles into a path to a better future. But Berniece refuses to give up the piano and all the bloody history it represents. To complicate matters, the piano is haunted by a recently dead member of the white family that once owned generations of the Charleses.Wilson’s usual signatures are here, including the somber subject matter related to Black disenfranchisement, prejudice, history and trauma — paired with witty, casual dialogue and flights into the surreal. Wilson makes poetry out of the mundane minutiae of daily African American life without forgetting how the past is present, alive and immediate like the melody of a song played by a piano that seems to have sprung to life.And yet even among Wilson’s outstanding and occasionally surreal plays, “The Piano Lesson,” both a family drama and a ghost story, stands out as one of the odder works. It’s a mix of themes and tones, both concrete and ethereal, ghoulish and comedic, but the imbalanced direction here, by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, overemphasizes the horror too literally; it works best on a metaphorical level.The performances are, in almost every case, engaging. Michael Potts, the veteran stage and screen actor who has appeared in other Wilson works, including the 2017 Broadway revival of “Jitney” and the 2020 film adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” is perfection as Doaker’s brother Wining Boy, an itinerant musician who can never seem to hold onto a dollar.As the surviving Charles brothers, Potts and Jackson (who played Boy Willie in the original 1987 production) have a breezy rapport: They joke, drink and reminisce like a couple of cads retired from most — but not all — of their wayward ways. Wining Boy remains a smooth scammer, and Doaker is an even-tempered dispenser of wisdom. Trai Byers, as Avery, a new reverend who’s enamored with Berniece, takes on his character’s highfalutin sermonizing with comedic aloofness, and April Matthis makes a brief, though memorable, appearance as a minor character with some big-city attitude. As the simpleton Lymon, Fisher occasionally goes too hokey, especially when it comes to his Southern drawl, but is endearing nonetheless with his dopey physicality and witless expressions.From left: Potts, Fisher, Jackson and Washington singing an old work song from their time as sharecroppers.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFisher is a great contrast to Washington’s downright feverish performance as Boy Willie. He speaks in a hot spitfire of stubborn refusals, denials and lofty aspirations, convinced that he can put a price tag on his family’s past and use the money to build a future where he is equal to the white men who owned his ancestors and still hold power over him and his family.Washington, in a revelatory stage debut, is a blaze of energy lighting every scene he’s in. Brooks, who was a delight in “The Color Purple” and “Much Ado About Nothing,” as well as in her TV roles in “Orange is the New Black” and “Peacemaker,” isn’t as radiant a presence as in her other outings. Though she has a few standout moments, she, like her character, too often fades into the background, overshadowed by the extensive history and myths in the play.Despite Wilson’s eloquent writing, “The Piano Lesson,” at nearly three hours, drags on. The repetitive dialogue, especially in the second act, evokes a nagging sensation of déjà vu. The spooky shifts in lighting (by Japhy Weideman) and Boritt’s broken home, like a metaphor brought to life, leave nothing to the imagination.While in this production the play’s supernatural elements come across like anomalies, on the page they aren’t; the characters aren’t all that shocked by the eerie, odd occurrences and in fact continue on with their lives as usual. What haunts the Charles household is what haunts Black America every day — the living history of racial violence and pervasive inequality. Part of what’s missing in this mostly entertaining but often underwhelming “Piano Lesson” is the sense that this is a reality we’ve lived ourselves. Who hasn’t heard the melody of a ghost’s song in the middle of the night?The Piano LessonThrough Jan. 15 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; pianolessonplay.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      LaTanya Richardson Jackson on Directing ‘The Piano Lesson’ (and Her Husband)

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      As she makes her Broadway directorial debut, she said her “vision is about seeing a deeper way into” what August Wilson intended with his Pulitzer Prize-winning play.LaTanya Richardson Jackson believes in ghosts. Better put: She believed her parents, and grandparents, when they talked about being frequently visited by people who were invisible to the human eye. Such a childhood has not only opened her up to having similar experiences but also made her uniquely qualified to bring one of August Wilson’s most haunting plays, “The Piano Lesson,” back to Broadway this fall.It first premiered there in 1990, and this Broadway revival — the show’s first — will star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington. The play, initially produced in 1987 at Yale Repertory Theater, is the fourth in Wilson’s 10-play series known as “The Pittsburgh Cycle,” which explores a full century of African American life in Pennsylvania’s Steel City.Jackson saw that original production, in part, because she was an actress and lifelong admirer of Wilson’s work. (She later starred in a Tony-nominated revival of Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” in 2009 and made her directorial debut with his “Two Trains Running” at True Colors Theater Company in Atlanta in 2013.) But she was also there to support her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, who was playing the lead character, Boy Willie. He’s also starring in the revival, but as Boy Willie’s uncle Doaker.From left: Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and Ray Fisher in “The Piano Lesson” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where it is scheduled to open Oct. 13.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSet in 1936, “The Piano Lesson,” for which Wilson also won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1990, follows two siblings, Boy Willie (Washington) and Berniece (Brooks), as they debate the fate of their family heirloom, a piano upon which the faces of their great-grandmother and her son are carved. Boy Willie wants to sell the piano and buy the property their enslaved ancestors worked on in the South. Berniece wants to keep it, understanding that the piano itself offers them another connection and liberation from their oppressive past. In contrast, Doaker sees the piano as haunted both by Boy Charles, his dead older brother and Boy Willie and Berniece’s father; and the ghost of the white slave owner, Sutter.On Broadway, Jackson, 72, is best known for portraying Lena Younger in a 2014 revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” and, more recently, as Calpurnia, in the substantially expanded role of Atticus Finch’s sagacious and reserved housekeeper in Aaron Sorkin’s 2019 adaptation of “To Kill A Mockingbird.” But, within African American drama, in regional theaters and on television shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” Jackson has long been a familiar face.“The star thing,” she told me. “You have to have a mind-set for that. And I just was never willing to do that.”What she has been doing is giving life to complex Black female protagonists on the stage and screen, and now working to unlock the deeper elements of Wilson’s women. Wilson once said he wanted to create a female character in “The Piano Lesson,” which “was as large as Troy was in Fences.” But, in the end, Wilson had to admit that his interests in the themes of self-worth, tradition, and tracing the history of the piano for 135 years took over the plot so much that his female character was “not as large as I intended.”Knowing that, Richardson said she paid homage to Wilson the best way she knew how: by making visible the many worlds, obvious and hidden, his play offers us. She added that her early encounters with the play, as well as Wilson and his other works, empowered her to take those risks here in her Broadway directorial debut.In a recent video interview, Jackson talked about navigating the gender politics of Wilson’s plays, what working with Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington has been like and how she discovered that directing was really her first love. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.You’re the first woman to direct an August Wilson play on Broadway. How has your perspective as a Black woman impacted your approach to his material?August was such a man’s man. When I directed “Two Trains Running” for Kenny Leon’s True Colors company in Atlanta, I told him [Leon], “As a woman, I look at things differently, and what might appear to you as minutiae, I find to be an important point.”I remember telling Pauletta [Washington], who played Risa, “Every time one of those men mention a woman who has died or was killed, you drop something in the kitchen and make a big, loud noise so that they have to stop and think about what they just said.” We can’t just have a conversation about women being cut or stabbed to death like that’s just a regular part of life. Our presence should not be something that’s taken for granted. Our presence is important.In “The Piano Lesson,” Berniece, like Risa, is the only woman in the cast.Yes, Berniece is surrounded by all of this testosterone. I saw the first production of this play at Yale, and I remember asking August after, “Where are all the women? Where are all the parts for women?” And he said, “Well, you know, Joe Turner has women.” I said, “But we’re always singular.” Then, he told me, “I’ll write about them when I really know what I’m saying.”My mentor, Douglas Turner Ward, told me: “Great playwrights don’t always know what they’re writing or what they have written. They attempt to do something, and if it’s great, the spirits visit them, and they just write. It’s a director’s job to see what they have actually written, whether or not it was their intention or not. Usually, with great writers, it’s bigger than what they intend.” And I find that to be so true of August.You embrace the otherworldliness of this story. Why was that important to you?Oct. 2 was the anniversary of August’s transition, so I’ve been thinking about him and his widow, Constanza Romero, and how to approach this story spiritually. I’m telling everybody, “This is a ghost story.” I believe there are other worlds where things are occurring, even if we don’t see them. To manifest that in the play, I felt that every member in that house was fighting their own ghosts. But Sutter [the white slave owner] represents the ghost of racism and the cruel manner we have had to navigate life in this country. August metaphorically shows that this ghost was an albatross around our necks. But I wanted to visually manifest it so that there was no question that we were attempting to exorcise it.Like any good ghost story, the house also seems haunted.I told myself that I had to find a designer who could build a house that was not raggedy but was really broken. August was a genius. In this play, he gave us these two-sided Janus figures. Not just between Boy Willie and Berniece, but [the brothers] Wining Boy and Doaker Charles, and the family and Lymon [Boy Willie’s friend]. And he did so because he believed that our people deserve to be recorded and documented in a classical way. That’s why we call him our Shakespeare.So, when I told our gifted set designer, Beowulf [Boritt], that house had to be split open, he was intrigued. Then when I said, “And the house has no walls.” He said, “I’m going down that rabbit hole with you.” Listen, we don’t change August’s words. That’s sacrosanct. That’s not what this vision is about. This vision is about seeing a deeper way into what he has given us.Mostly known for her work as an actress, Jackson says directing is her true passion: “I wish I were younger. But this is all I want to do now.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe piano is so meaningful to this family, and its symbolism is heightened by its physical beauty. Is there a story behind its design?Other versions of the play always have these pianos with these beautifully carved fresco plaques on them. But, Sam and I — you know I am married to Sam Jackson, right? — well, back in our house in Los Angeles, we have a Tree of Life statue made by the Makonde sculptors from East Africa. They start with a piece of ebony and then pass it among the community members to carve until it is all done. So, I wanted the piano to look like a Makonde statue and Mama’s face had to be the most prominent, and then the little boy Charles. And you know how they made that happen? A 3-D printer.Speaking of Samuel L. Jackson, he starred as Boy Willie in the original production. Now, he is playing the role of one of the uncles, Doaker Charles. What was it like for you to direct him?Sam and I are used to working together and being around each other 24/7. But I realized in this particular context, he doesn’t like to take a note. I had heard that about him before, but I just thought, “Oh, he just doesn’t like to take notes from people he feels don’t know what they’re talking about.” I didn’t think I’d even have to tell him, “That’s the note, brother.” And when I did, he said, “Well, I think I would know how that goes.” And I said, “I’m just bringing it to your attention that it didn’t go the way I would like it to go.”The way that I operate is that there are no stars in the room. We are an ensemble, and we are moving together or not at all. But, it was a true gift that this project came to me with Sam and John David already attached to it.This is John David Washington’s first play. You’ve also known him for a long time, did anything surprise you about his performance?Denzel and Pauletta Washington have been very generous with their children with me, and I love all their children. They, like our daughter, Zoe, are all worker bees. So to watch John David’s career and be able to help develop it is beyond a responsibility. It’s like being given something from God that says, “OK, you take care of and nurture this.” And to him, I said, “We got this. Just trust me. Your instrument is built soundly. We are going to give you the notes, and all you have to do is play them.” And he has exceeded my wildest imagination.This brings us back to Berniece. There are the words on the page, and then what you bring to her character.Or what Danielle [Brooks] brings. I’ve only been trying to guide Danielle toward who I think Berniece is. I’ve seen different renditions of this character, and she is always so angry, almost too angry. And I know she’s frustrated because she lost Crawford, the love of her life, and blames Boy Willie. But there are times that the anger covers up that hurt. So, I’ve told her, “Sometimes I just want to see the hurt because it allows me into you in a different way.” This is a family that loves each other, so she has to have a heart for him, too.Do you want to continue directing?Since I was in sixth grade, I knew that this was something inside of me, and God only knows who or what I could have been or done by now if I had just followed that track. I wish I were younger. But this is all I want to do now. More

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      Black Film and TV Actors Get a Chance to Shine on Broadway

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      On Broadway this fall, it’s less about new playwrights making their debuts and more about established stars giving the stage a shot.One of the most exciting parts of the 2021-22 Broadway season was the number of people who looked like me, both onstage and behind the scenes. We saw the Broadway debut of seven plays by Black playwrights, starring Black actors, in an art form that too often tokenizes people of color, alienates them, misrepresents them or ignores them altogether.But even when productions are bathed in the bright lights of Broadway, they can still be overlooked: Many of last fall’s works seemed to disappear as quickly as they appeared in the tough post-shutdown return period. This fall, Broadway may not have as many new works by Black playwrights, but it will serve old favorites with promising casts of versatile Black actors who have built careers not just on the stage, but also in film and TV.One of last season’s highlights was the playwright Alice Childress receiving her long-overdue Broadway debut with the stunning comedy-drama “Trouble in Mind.” So, what better time to give even more neglected writers of color their moment in the spotlight? The experimental Black playwright Adrienne Kennedy will follow this November with a similarly belated premiere, a production of her harrowing 1992 play “Ohio State Murders,” starring the stage luminary Audra McDonald as a writer who returns to her alma mater to speak about the violent imagery in her work.A lethal mix of present-day racial injustice and unrelenting racial trauma from the past, “Ohio State Murders,” directed by Kenny Leon, will have an exciting peer in a revival of August Wilson’s 1987 play “The Piano Lesson,” directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson (a cast member of the 2009 Broadway revival of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” to cite another Wilson work). Her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, who originated the role of Boy Willie in “The Piano Lesson” at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1987, will also join this revival, now in the role of Doaker Charles, Boy Willie’s uncle who recounts the titular piano’s history. The Pulitzer Prize-winning play follows siblings who are at odds over whether to sell a piano bearing depictions of their enslaved ancestors.The appeal of these plays doesn’t just come down to the material and the ethnicity of the casts, however; the Black casts this season represent captivating newcomers and veterans from various realms of theater, film and TV. So those only familiar with Jackson’s explosive acting style in, say, an action-packed Marvel movie or a brutal Quentin Tarantino film, will now see how the actor’s energy translates to the stage. The same will be true for Jackson’s castmate Danielle Brooks, a star of the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black” who made an acclaimed Broadway debut in “The Color Purple” in 2015 and tickled audiences as the brassy Beatrice in the Public Theater’s 2019 production of “Much Ado About Nothing.”Film and TV are, after all, a different ballgame than the theater, where actors must respond in real time to the action onstage and perform with a resonance that will reach the upper echelons of the balcony. That will be the challenge for John David Washington (“Tenet,” “BlacKkKlansman”), who is new to the theater and will be making his Broadway debut in “The Piano Lesson.”Elsewhere on Broadway this season, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II will transition from his arresting roles on TV (“Watchmen”) and film (Jordan Peele’s “Candyman” reimagining) in a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning work that follows the daily rituals of two impoverished brothers named Lincoln and Booth. He will make his Broadway debut opposite Corey Hawkins, who played the charming cab dispatcher Benny in John Cho’s film adaptation of “In the Heights.” Hawkins also played Dr. Dre in “Straight Outta Compton” and Macduff in Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” and was nominated for a Tony Award for his role as the con man Paul Poitier in the 2017 Broadway revival of John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation.”Most of these plays are contemporary, dating only from the last three decades or so. (The neglect or erasure of early works by Black artists and other artists of color is, unfortunately, common.) But a West End and Young Vic revival of “Death of a Salesman” reconfigures Arthur Miller’s beloved 1949 classic into a story about a Black family, starring Wendell Pierce, André De Shields and Sharon D Clarke, who won an Olivier Award for best actress for her portrayal of Linda Loman in the British production and is known stateside for her knockout performance in last season’s “Caroline, or Change.”So anticipation is running high this season not just for the polished onstage products — the glamorous and funny, tense and heart-rending Black productions — but also for the array of Black talent, from the Broadway of decades past to today’s Hollywood stars, that will meet, creating something utterly of the moment. More

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      ‘Piano Lesson’ With Samuel L. Jackson Plans Fall Broadway Bow

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      The revival of August Wilson’s play, directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, will also star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington.From left, Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and John David Washington, who will be appearing in the revival of “The Piano Lesson” at the St. James Theater.Caroline Brehman/EPA, via Shutterstock, Leon Bennett/Getty Images, Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images LaTanya Richardson Jackson first saw August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” in 1987 — it was the original production, at Yale Repertory Theater, and of course she was going to see it, because her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, was in the cast.This fall, Richardson Jackson will direct a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, again with her husband in the cast, although in a different role.The Broadway revival — the first since “The Piano Lesson” arrived there in 1990 — will star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington as a sister and brother at odds over whether to sell a piano on which are carved the faces of their enslaved ancestors. Jackson will play their uncle, Doaker Charles (at Yale, he played the brother).Richardson Jackson will be the first woman to direct a Wilson play on Broadway. She is best known as an actress — in 2018, she originated the role of Calpurnia in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and in 2014, she was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as Lena Younger in a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” This will be her first time directing on Broadway, but she has directed elsewhere, including a production of Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” at True Colors Theater in Atlanta.In her view, Richardson Jackson said in an interview, the play is “about the struggle of African Americans in this country to actually face what it is that we’re against.” She noted that her own ancestors had been enslaved, and reluctant to talk about it, and she said that she sees the tension within the Charles family as a vehicle for exploring “us facing all of it.”“I’m dealing with this as a ghost story — I’m unashamedly, unabashedly telling a ghost story,” Richardson Jackson said. “And it’s about the bigger ghosts that haunt us, that are part of our lives, that we are carrying around like an anvil.”“The Piano Lesson” is part of a series of 10 plays Wilson wrote about African American life; each is set in a different decade of the 20th century. “The Piano Lesson” takes place in the 1930s, and, like most of the plays, is set in Pittsburgh.The revival is scheduled to begin performances on Sept. 19 at the St. James Theater; the run is expected to last 16 weeks.Brian Moreland (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”), Sonia Friedman (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”) and Tom Kirdahy (“Hadestown”) are the producers. Moreland said the play would be capitalized for about $6 million.The producer Scott Rudin previously planned to stage a revival of “The Piano Lesson,” with many of the same artists, but relinquished the rights when he stopped producing after being accused of bullying employees and collaborators. The actor Denzel Washington, who is John David Washington’s father, last year told The Daily Mail he was planning to produce a film adaptation, with the same stars, and with Rudin as a co-producer; a spokesman for Denzel Washington said the actor is still planning to produce a film adaptation. More

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      Before Jussie Smollett Sentencing, His Supporters Ask for ‘Mercy’

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      A judge must decide whether to send the actor to prison after a jury convicted him last year of falsely reporting that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime in 2019.Ahead of a sentencing hearing on Thursday, celebrities and racial justice advocates like Samuel L. Jackson and his wife, the actress LaTanya Richardson Jackson; the Rev. Jesse Jackson; and Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., have written letters pleading for leniency for Jussie Smollett, the actor convicted of falsely reporting that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack.“Jussie has already suffered,” the Rev. Jackson wrote to the judge handling the case. “He has been excoriated and vilified in the court of public opinion. His professional reputation has been severely damaged.”Mr. Smollett, 39, was convicted of felony disorderly conduct — which carries a maximum of three years in prison — relating to conversations he had with the police just after reporting the attack. But defendants convicted of similar crimes in the past have been sentenced to probation and community service.Many of the letters cite Mr. Smollett’s history of volunteer work, the nonviolent nature of his offense and the reputational damage he had already suffered following charges that the 2019 attack was actually a hoax that he had planned to drum up publicity. Others who have written on his behalf include the actress Alfre Woodard and Melina Abdullah, a founder of Black Lives Matter in Los Angeles.During the trial, the prosecution argued that Mr. Smollett had instructed two brothers, Abimbola Osundairo and Olabinjo Osundairo, to attack him near his Chicago apartment building, yelling racist and homophobic slurs at him, punching him hard enough to only create a bruise and placing a rope around his neck like a noose. Both brothers testified against him, acknowledging their role in the incident, which they said had been staged. The actor himself took the stand during seven hours of testimony over two days to deny that he had played any role.Prosecutors have not indicated whether they will push for prison time at the hearing.“It’s the judge who has the total and exclusive authority to impose a sentence,” said Daniel K. Webb, the special prosecutor who handled the case.Daniel K. Webb, the special prosecutor who handled the Smollett case, has not said whether he will recommend that the actor be sent to prison. Tannen Maury/EPA, via ShutterstockAt the outset of Thursday’s proceeding, Judge James B. Linn is expected to rule on a motion by lawyers for Mr. Smollett, who is best known for his role in the hip-hop drama “Empire,” that seeks to have the conviction thrown out or for the actor to gain a new trial.In papers filed with the court last month, the lawyers argued that Judge Linn displayed a “hostile attitude” toward the defense and acted inappropriately when the defense attempted to present evidence that one of the brothers had made homophobic statements and that the attack on Mr. Smollett, who is gay, could have been motivated by bias.In their motion, the defense lawyers cited an instance in which Judge Linn called a line of questioning about a homophobic comment by Olabinjo Osundairo “very collateral matters.”The defense argued that this comment could have swayed the jury and that the line of questioning was central to their argument that the Osundairo brothers perpetrated a “real attack” against Mr. Smollett “driven by homophobia.” (During testimony, Olabinjo Osundairo repeatedly denied being homophobic.)During the trial, Judge Linn rejected the defense’s request for a mistrial at the time, defending his use of the term “collateral” as simply referring to matters outside the direct facts of Mr. Smollett’s case.As part of their bid for a new trial, the defense also argued that during jury selection, prosecutors displayed a pattern of seeking to dismiss Black potential jurors — resulting in a final group that included one Black juror and a Black alternate.Prosecutors argued in court papers that the accusation of discrimination during jury selection was unfounded and that they had provided “race-neutral” explanations for challenging the inclusion of those jurors.Possibilities for Mr. Smollett’s sentence also include restitution, which, in his case, would likely mean paying the city of Chicago for the money it expended while investigating his hate crime report.In a court filing ahead of the sentencing, a city lawyer and the superintendent of the Chicago Police Department urged prosecutors to ask the court to order Mr. Smollett to pay them more than $130,000, explaining that police officers had “worked around the clock” to find the perpetrators of the attack.“The city is a victim of Mr. Smollett’s crimes because his false reports caused CPD to expend scarce resources that could have been devoted to solving actual crimes,” the filing said. The city currently has a pending lawsuit against Mr. Smollett in which they asked for the same amount of money.In their letter to Judge Linn, Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson Jackson said they have known Mr. Smollett since he was a child and later through charitable work. The Jacksons asked Judge Linn for “mercy” and argued that Mr. Smollett “used his celebrity to impact community outreach work,” including to aid people in Flint, Mich., during the water crisis.In his letter, Rev. Jesse Jackson wrote that he worried about Mr. Smollett’s safety in prison as a “well-known, nonviolent, Black, gay man with Jewish heritage.”In making the sentencing decision, the court will consider Mr. Smollett’s criminal history, which involves a single incident from 2007 in California. He was convicted in that case of driving under the influence, driving without a license and giving false information to the police, all misdemeanors. Mr. Smollett was sentenced to probation and community service and was required to complete substance abuse treatment, according to a pre-sentencing report written by a probation officer and filed with the court.The report was based on an interview with Mr. Smollett after his conviction, in which the actor said he had been suffering from “excessive stress,” dealing with financial problems and asking to undergo substance abuse treatment for a few years. Mr. Smollett told the probation officer that he hoped to pursue directing.The actor, who is out of jail on bond, generally declined to discuss the specifics of his case during the interview with the probation officer. But when asked how his family had responded to the ordeal, he said, “They know me, and they know I did not do this.”Asked whether he planned to stay in his apartment in New York City, Mr. Smollet replied, “Everything is up in the air right now.” More

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      Douglas Turner Ward: A Lens on ‘Questions That the Country Wasn’t Asking’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDouglas Turner Ward: A Lens on ‘Questions That the Country Wasn’t Asking’Samuel L. Jackson, David Alan Grier, Phylicia Rashad and others remember the Negro Ensemble Company founder.Douglas Turner Ward waiting to go onstage after the opening night performance of “A Soldier’s Play” in January 2020. Kenny Leon, who led the production, called Ward’s presence and smile up there that night “the greatest experience for me as an American director.” Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 23, 2021Updated 5:20 p.m. ETDouglas Turner Ward, who died at 90 on Saturday, left a legacy of extraordinary reach.By the time he founded the Negro Ensemble Company in 1967 with Robert Hooks and Gerald Krone, he had already been on Broadway in the original 1959 cast of “A Raisin in the Sun,” playing a tiny role while understudying Sidney Poitier.In the mid-’60s, Ward made a splash with his short satire “Day of Absence” — in which Black actors in whiteface makeup played white characters — and with an essay in The New York Times titled “American Theater: For Whites Only?” He dedicated his career to making sure that the answer was no.Nurturing the talents of Black artists through his company, he watched a remarkable number go on to fame — not least those from his acclaimed 1981 original production of Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Soldier’s Play,” whose cast included Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson and David Alan Grier.This week, company alumni and other colleagues reminisced about Ward and how he shaped the field. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson JacksonNegro Ensemble Company alums; in a joint interviewLATANYA RICHARDSON JACKSON He wanted the work of great African-American and Black artists to be as important to the world and to the artists themselves as the dominant culture. And his love of that original Negro Ensemble Company was always first in his conversation about art, because he so respected all of those actors and felt that they represented the best of the best inside the business, period.SAMUEL L. JACKSON He carried, like, four newspapers around with him. Every day. And when we were in rehearsal, he would sit in the back of the theater reading the paper. He would be in the back left corner reading the paper, and then, you know, you’d look up, and by the time you’d finished the first act, he’d be in the middle of the theater reading the paper, and then he’d be in another corner reading the paper, or in the balcony reading the paper. And at the end of rehearsal, he’d come down and give you notes! And we’d be like, “You’ve been reading the paper!” And then we started to find out that he only looked up from reading the paper when there was a bad line reading, or something sounded off.From left, Sophie Okonedo, Denzel Washington, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Bryce Clyde Jenkins and Anika Noni Rose in a 2014 performance of “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLATANYA RICHARDSON JACKSON We stayed in touch with Doug. When I was doing “Raisin,” he was one of the first persons I saw when we came off the stage.SAMUEL L. JACKSON I remember when I was doing “Shaft,” he just walked into my trailer one night.LATANYA RICHARDSON JACKSON Yeah, he kept up with his people now. He would find you.SAMUEL L. JACKSON Sometimes when people pass, you can actually feel the hole in the universe. This is one of those.Robert HooksA founder of the Negro Ensemble CompanyWe bonded on the road with “A Raisin in the Sun.” Douglas got to play the Sidney Poitier role, Walter Lee [Younger], which was a role he had understudied from the very beginning.He was a highly intellectual man. Read all the time about everything. I was not into politics at all. But by the time we closed “Raisin in the Sun,” I was a politico. We talked politics all the time. We talked about Black art.His whole sense of humor as it relates to his writing was classic. He proves it, of course, in “Day of Absence,” when all the Black people disappear from this Southern town. It’s just hilarious. But the white folks that were laughing, their heads would roll down the aisle because that’s the kind of humor Douglas wrote: scathing, scathing stuff.Of all the men that I’ve ever met in my life, he was the greatest influence. My father died when I was 2. But when I met Douglas Turner Ward, I had a father and a brother.Phylicia RashadNegro Ensemble Company alum; in a written statementDouglas Turner Ward was a “salt of the Earth” person who brought those sensibilities to the art of theater. He was daring. He was bold. He was honest. He was kind. He made room for many theater artists. He even created space.Phylicia Rashad in the play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at the Broadhurst Theater in 2008. She said of Ward: “He was daring. He was bold. He was honest. He was kind.”Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWoodie King Jr.Producing director and founder of New Federal TheaterHe was touring in “A Raisin in the Sun,” and they came to the Cass Theater in Detroit, and I went down to see the play and waited around. Then I walked them back to the hotel, and we talked. I showed up the next night and the next night. Finally they said, “When you get to New York, man, we can talk all the time.” I said, “Well, while you’re in Detroit for these two weeks, can I come back tomorrow?” So that was my first encounter with Douglas Turner Ward.Two weeks later, I saw Sidney Poitier in “The Defiant Ones.” These two dark-skinned actors sort of like put a stamp on the acting profession. That’s what I wanted to be. It seemed possible. Absolutely possible.Sade LythcottChief executive of National Black Theater, founded by her mother, Barbara Ann TeerDouglas and my mom grew up together, artistically. It was such a seminal moment in our country, the mid-1960s. It was the birth of Black consciousness. And “Day of Absence” was such a seminal work. My mom was in it. And that was such a metaphor for so much of their relationship: the support onstage and behind the stage to do something that felt revolutionary and felt accurate in the telling of our stories, and that that could be the revolution — Black stories in the way that Douglas wrote that. From our lens, the questions that the country wasn’t asking.David Alan Grier, second from left, facing Nnamdi Asomugha in “A Soldier’s Play,” in 2020. Grier was also in the original 1981 production of the Charles Fuller play, with Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDavid Alan GrierNegro Ensemble Company alum Growing up in Detroit, I read about the Negro Ensemble. My parents took me to see a road company of “The River Niger.” These were artistic heroes to me, and specifically Douglas Turner Ward. When I went into the company of “A Soldier’s Play” [in the original production], I auditioned for him. I was really nervous, and he directed and put me in.I was in town to do “Race” back in 2009, and I ran into Doug in a restaurant we used to hang out in. He came over and he said, “I really want to congratulate you on all of your success on television and in film. But please, you guys” — meaning me, Denzel, Sam Jackson, not to put myself on their level, but we were all in the play together, that was our connection — he said, “Don’t forget the theater, man. Always come back. We need you here, and the theater needs you here.”Sometimes those words, those moments of mentorship, mean and resonate so much and so deeply.Kenny Leon, with the microphone, thanked Douglas Turner Ward, second from left, and Charles Fuller, third from the left, on opening night of “A Soldier’s Play” last year.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKenny LeonDirector of the Broadway production of “A Soldier’s Play,” in 2020The greatest experience for me as an American director was when the curtain went down that opening night, for me to call Douglas Turner Ward and Charles Fuller on that stage. To have Doug come up there and have him smile like that.Hattie WinstonA founding member of the Negro Ensemble CompanyDouglas Turner Ward is responsible for — and I say this without hesitation — the careers of not only Sam and LaTanya and Denzel and myself, but Phylicia Rashad, Debbie Allen, Charles Weldon, Adolph Caesar came through there. Not just actors, but costume designers, set designers, directors.Michael Schultz directed our very first production at the company, a play called “The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey” that was written by Peter Weiss, who was a German playwright who was a friend of Doug’s. It was all about colonialism in Africa. With that play, N.E.C. was chosen to represent the United States of America in the international theater festival in London. That was monumental.So Douglas Turner Ward, he’s in my heart, and he will always be in my heart. He’s responsible for me being who I am. It all came from Doug. We’re his children.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More