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    In ‘Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!,’ Alina Troyano Explores How Art Can Live Inside Others

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    You never can tell where your inheritance will come from, but the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins almost missed out on some of his.In 2007, as a New York University graduate student, he nearly dropped a course on the uses and abuses of sentimentality because it conflicted with a job he had just gotten at The New Yorker. But it was a small class, and he was the only guy. So his instructor — Alina Troyano, the Cuban-born Obie Award winner who teaches under her stage name, Carmelita Tropicana — put up a fight.“He stayed in the class because I begged him to stay,” she said.Thus began an acquaintanceship that turned into a friendship that turned into a collaboration: “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!,” their hallucinatory new play at Soho Rep. It is the last production at the theater’s longtime home, in TriBeCa, before the company moves into temporary accommodations at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown. Written by the two of them, and starring her, it is about creative legacy, generational change and the ways that autobiographically and culturally specific art made by one person can live, and morph, inside others.In the show, Troyano performs as both Alina and her comic alter ego, Carmelita: a feminist, sex-positive lesbian from Havana who borrows stereotypes to send them up, campily ridiculing bigotry, misogyny, machismo, colonialism. Ugo Chukwu plays Branden.The trippy premise is that when Alina threatens to kill Carmelita, an alarmed Branden asks her to sell him the persona instead. How this would work when Carmelita has lived inside Alina since before Branden was born is the mind-bending question at hand.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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      Two More New York Theaters to Share Space

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      The prestigious downtown nonprofit Soho Rep will share space with Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan while figuring out a longer-term plan.In another indication of how postpandemic economics are rattling the nonprofit theater world, the prestigious Soho Rep is giving up its longtime home in TriBeCa and will instead share space with Playwrights Horizons, a Midtown theater company, while trying to figure out a longer-term plan.The move, prompted by real estate constraints as well as fiscal concerns, comes at the same time that another important New York nonprofit, Second Stage Theater, is leaving its Off Broadway home. That company is now planning to reside, at least temporarily, with Signature Theater, which in recent years has had more space than it can afford to program.The two decampments follow a 2022 decision by the Long Wharf Theater, in New Haven, Conn., to let go of its waterfront home and become itinerant.Taken together, the transitions are a reminder of the enormous stresses facing nonprofits, and suggest that revisiting real estate choices will become part of the solution for some.“If you look at the field-wide vulnerability, partnerships are a result of that,” said Eric Ting, one of Soho Rep’s three directors. “We look to each other for support and for strength.”Soho Rep, established in 1975, is small: Its current annual budget is about $2.8 million, it has just five full-time employees and since 1991 it has been presenting most of its work in a 65-seat TriBeCa space, making it an Off Off Broadway theater. But the company, committed to what it calls “radical theater makers,” punches way above its weight. It was the first to stage Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2019, as well as Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s “Public Obscenities,” which was a Pulitzer finalist this year. The theater has regularly introduced New York audiences to work by important, and often provocative, playwrights, including Sarah Kane, Aleshea Harris, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lucas Hnath.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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      Pride Month 2024: An Abundance of Theater of All Stripes

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      From Broadway to the city’s smaller stages, a flurry of shows with wide-ranging appeal, familiar faces and rising talent.American theater has long been more welcoming to queer lives and stories than Hollywood has been, so the abundance of shows during Pride Month is unsurprising. It’s also overwhelming — there is just so much to see.On Broadway, queer characters play central roles in productions as starkly different as “Illinoise,” a dance-theater work based on a Sufjan Stevens album, and Paula Vogel’s autofictional “Mother Play,” starring Jessica Lange. In the Max Martin jukebox “& Juliet,” a romance involving Juliet’s nonbinary best friend makes up a sweet subplot.And of course, the gayest show of the year returns on June 26, when Cole Escola’s madcap comedy “Oh, Mary!” — about Mary Todd Lincoln’s secret life and aspirations — begins previews on Broadway after a popular run at the Lucille Lortel Theater. As Joshua Barone wrote in his review, “Escola’s humor is tailored like a Bernadette Peters concert gown to New York gays who were brought up on a diet of alt-cabaret and ‘Strangers With Candy.’”Cole Escola, left, as Mary Todd Lincoln and Conrad Ricamora as Abraham Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!,” which is moving to Broadway after a run at the Lucille Lortel Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSusannah Millonzi, left, and Purva Bedi in Bailey Williams’s “Coach Coach.”Maria BaranovaSave some money for the city’s smaller stages, though, because they are offering a flurry of shows for Pride Month and are where you can spot rising talent.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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      Review: In ‘The Fires,’ a Triptych of Stories About Gay Men and Love

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      Raja Feather Kelly makes his playwriting debut with a spellbinding story of three generations of Black men at Soho Rep.The choreographer Raja Feather Kelly’s dance-theater works have made him a mainstay on the downtown arts scene. With his latest piece, “The Fires,” Kelly is making his debut as a playwright. Rarely does a show live up so honestly to its title — wrecking and illuminating in equal measure.In his lustrous, emotionally textured play, which opened on Tuesday at Soho Rep, three gay Black men are stuck in a railroad apartment. But those men — Jay, Sam and Eli — are not roommates; they live in the same space across separate time periods: 1974, 1998 and 2021. Since the actors rarely leave the elongated stage, the characters’ stories play out in tandem.In the ’70s, Jay (Phillip James Brannon) lives with his lover, George (Ronald Peet), and becomes depressed while journaling about the Greek goddess Aphrodite, whom, he claims, is gravely underestimated: More than a mere mirthful goddess of love, Aphrodite was vengeful, war-driven and unsettled because, like Jay, she never knew her real father. Sam (Sheldon Best) in the ’90s is George’s son. He feels deeply misunderstood but finds a kinship with his recently deceased father while reading the journals he and Jay left in the apartment. Eli (Beau Badu) in the 2020s has the most sexual freedom but is stuck playing a tug-of-rope game with Maurice, (Jon-Michael Reese), a tender young man who has the potential to be Eli’s great love.Kelly does not have these characters speak directly to one another across time, but there are parallels in each scene that evoke a ghostly connection between the men. And the idea is supported by the scenic designer Raphael Mishler’s set: Most of the 1974 scenes occur on our left in a bedroom with a fireplace, typewriter and a retro two-knob radio; for the majority of the 2021 scenes, our attention is directed to the right, to a living room with an electric fireplace, Eli’s laptop and a smart speaker. Time and technology leap forward, but human desire for heat, expression and a groove remain the same.Jumbling timelines on a railroad apartment of a set does present some direction challenges, as when characters in one period trek right in front of (but aren’t acknowledged by) characters in another. You can find yourself ping-ponging between these freewheeling vignettes, desperate to catch all of the action.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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      ‘Snatch Adams’ Review: Gross-Out Humor for Not-So-Easily-Shocked Liberals

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      Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte’s amorphous variety show aims to be a queer spectacle but is mostly improv strung together with non sequiturs.The usually unassuming Soho Rep entrance is now flanked by giant labia glinting with gold-and-fuchsia sequins. Beyond them, a flamingo-pink-hued tunnel leads to the intimate stage, where a colossal pair of brassy legs are splayed as if for a gynecological exam in an amusement park fun house.Much of what occurs between them during “Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month,” an amorphous, slap-and-tickle variety show, seems designed to shock audiences while gingerly reinforcing their presumed liberal politics. Once it quickly achieves both, “Snatch Adams” continues to push its crotch-in-your-face humor further over the top, but to diminishing returns.The action onstage tests the limits of what can be described in print. So here is my attempt at a tame sampling.The creator and performer Becca Blackwell (“Is This a Room?”), dressed for the role of Snatch in a towering vagina costume with patches of flesh-colored felt and feathers, asks an audience volunteer to locate the clitoris, represented on Blackwell’s face by a squeaky red clown nose (the crafty and audacious production design is by Greg Corbino). Amanda Duarte, who co-stars as Tainty, wears a puckered-anus headpiece and balloon-size testicles that swing from her shoulders. The getup’s missing member, she explains, was a casualty of #MeToo.Looking like doctor’s office diagrams come to life to a patient on LSD, the performers retreat behind a pair of pink desks, mics in hand, and proceed to banter. Duarte, who also controls the sound effects (think air horns and crickets), appears to follow a run of show on a laptop. But after the initial sight gags and a steady flow of low-hanging puns, “Snatch Adams,” presented in association with the Bushwick Starr, consists mostly of improv strung together with non sequiturs.Duarte, the creator of a recurring comedy night for discarded jokes, plays a gruff and gleefully vulgar captain to Blackwell’s gentle and almost childlike jester, who at times seems adrift. (“What do we do now?” Blackwell repeats sincerely between several bits. In an underdeveloped narrative frame, Snatch is newly unemployed from Planned Parenthood.) They are joined at intervals by Amando Houser and Becky Hermenze, who gamely act out parody commercials, or “capitalism breaks,” for products like poppers and period cups.At intervals in the production, parody commercials for products like poppers and period cups are gamely acted out.Julieta CervantesDirected by Jess Barbagallo, who also developed the show with Corbino, “Snatch Adams” has the freewheeling style of late-night sketch comedy and the queer, campy aesthetic of downtown avant-garde theater, where Blackwell has for years worked to expand understanding of gender diversity. But this is not a show that bristles with punk resistance, alongside its well-justified warning about the use of bodily secretions. For much of their 90 minutes onstage, Blackwell and Duarte simply seem to be riffing off each other while daring the audience to be grossed out. But destigmatizing genitals and menstruation is a low bar, especially for this crowd.Attempts to address fraught issues head-on are uneasy and fall flat. In one early segment, Blackwell reads sobering headlines about the daily challenges facing women and L.G.B.T.Q. people on a local level. Duarte punctuates each one with a fart sound. (Cue the crickets.)At each performance, interviews with a surprise guest promise to be a wild card. Bridget Everett’s entrance on the night I attended was like a blast of pure oxygen: finally a comedian who wasn’t overcommitted to a bit. Everett talked frankly about grief and her body in a way that cut deeper than anything that had come before.It’s when Blackwell steps out of the act at the end, and tries to point out the arbitrary boundaries that society erects between us, that “Snatch Adams” finally seems to have something to say. If only it had been more explicit earlier.Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the MonthThrough Dec. 3 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: about 1 hour 30 minutes, depending on the special guest. More

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      At Soho Rep, Eric Ting and Caleb Hammons to Join Leadership Team

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      Following the departures of Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, the two will join Cynthia Flowers as the company continues its shared leadership model.Eric Ting and Caleb Hammons will join Cynthia Flowers as the next directors of Soho Rep, the Lower Manhattan theater announced on Thursday.They will replace Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, who had directed the Off Off Broadway company with Cynthia Flowers since 2019 under its shared leadership model. (Both women, who departed in June, have said they wanted to focus more on their own creative output.)“The spirit of the theater centers risk and experimentation,” said Ting, 50, who made his New York City directorial debut with the Jackie Sibblies Drury play “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915” at Soho Rep in 2012 before becoming the artistic director at the East Bay theater company Cal Shakes, a position he held until 2022. “There’s a boldness to the work and a kind of artistic rigor that I’ve never found anywhere else.”The size of the organization — with a 65-seat theater that has long been a home for experimental, formally inventive work — was part of the appeal for Hammons, who comes to the theater from the Fisher Center at Bard, an incubator for commercially promising new work in the Hudson Valley. (He has been the director of artistic planning and producing since 2020, after joining the organization as senior producer in 2013.)“After working at a larger organization outside the city, I knew I wanted to return to my roots in the smaller, scrappier and more experimental realm of theater,” said Hammons, 38, who previously served as a producer for Soho Rep from 2011-13.Flowers, who has been with the theater since 2012, said Hammons not only shares Soho Rep’s vision of trying to make its producing practices more equitable and sustainable, but also “has the practical experience to put those values into action.”And Ting, who recently directed the world premieres of Lloyd Suh’s “The Far Country” at the Atlantic Theater Company and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “The Comeuppance” at the Signature Theater, has long worked “to make theater more anti-racist and humane in a very intense way,” she said.Ting said he was drawn to Soho Rep, which produced Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon,” in 2014, and Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview,” in 2018, because of the premium the theater places on having practicing artists in leadership positions. He said he still plans to direct one or two shows each year at theaters in New York, “and also hopefully for Soho Rep from time to time.”As for Hammons, he said he plans to continue his career-long focus on sustainable and humane producing practices, including pay equity. That includes the continuation of Soho Rep’s Project Number One, a job creation program developed early in the pandemic that brings artists into the organization each season as salaried staff members with benefits. But he also wants to prioritize crew members.“We can’t put all our focus on just making strides to provide sustainable wages to artists when we aren’t taking the same consideration to providing sustainable wages to folks who work behind the scenes,” he said.Both men will start their roles in September. More

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      Sarah Benson, Soho Rep’s Former Director, Wants Theater to Push You

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      At the helm of Soho Rep, Benson presided over a long streak of ambitious, thought-provoking works. As she heads out the door, she reflects on her vision for theater’s future and plans for her own.Contemporary American theater would not be the same without a 65-seat theater tucked away on a quiet TriBeCa side street. Founded in 1975, Soho Rep has produced new, often boundary-pushing plays, including, in recent years, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon,” in 2014, and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview,” in 2018.Indeed, for the last decade and a half, the theater has been on quite a roll, presenting shows by a formidable cohort of playwrights that also includes Lucas Hnath, Anne Washburn, David Adjmi and Aleshea Harris. This golden age coincided with the tenure of Sarah Benson, who became Soho Rep’s artistic director in 2007 and departed the institution on June 30.Benson, who grew up in Britain, moved to the United States as part of a Fulbright program and earned an M.F.A. in directing at Brooklyn College. She had run Soho Rep’s Writer Director Lab for two years before replacing Daniel Aukin at the company’s helm.The first show Benson directed for the Rep, Sarah Kane’s bleak, gruesome “Blasted,” which starred Marin Ireland and Reed Birney, became a sensation in the fall of 2008. That show was both an outlier (“Blasted” was 13 years old then and Soho Rep would go on to focus on new work) and a harbinger of the many thought-provoking, destabilizing productions to come. Benson herself went on to direct “An Octoroon” and “Fairview,” which demolished the fourth wall and kept upending audiences’ expectations of where the plays were going.From left, Chris Myers, Danny Wolohan and Amber Gray in Benson’s 2014 production of “An Octoroon.”Pavel Antonov“The first time we worked together, it became the gold standard by which I judge all collaborations,” Jacobs-Jenkins said over the phone. “She’s incredibly open and shockingly egoless. Her shows are the kind that you can go back to again and again because she’s got so much in every corner that it’s hard to take them all in one go,” he added. “I’d say she’s radical, but entertaining and visionary.”(Benson’s résumé also includes “Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical,” which ranks among the most surreal Super Bowl ads ever made.)In 2019, Soho Rep switched to a shared leadership, with Benson, Cynthia Flowers and Meropi Peponides on equal footing as directors. “Sarah has an incredible design brain and I am a much more abstract thinker,” Peponides, who also just left, said on the phone. “We were able to round out each other’s skill sets in terms of how to make a big, wild, ambitious idea happen.” One of those ideas was Project Number One, which was announced in September 2020 and provides theater artists a living wage as they develop new works for Soho Rep.Now a free agent, Benson has several projects in the works, including César Alvarez’s “NOISE (A Musical)” at Northern Stage in Vermont later this month and Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs’s “Teeth” at Playwrights Horizons early next year. At a coffee spot near her home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the director, 45, chatted about her vision of theater and her plans for the future. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Did you leave because you wanted to spend more time on directing and less on paperwork?That’s part of what has led to this moment. I’m ready to be able to say yes to more projects. It’s been an incredible gift to be working at that level of artistic risk and to be surrounded by other artists working at that level of risk. It’s been life-changing, truly. And it’s a lot [laughs].Did you have any management experience before Soho Rep?I had experience as an artist, that was it. But as a director, you are in a position of leading and figuring stuff out. I think that the skill sets of an artist are actually very well-suited to being in leadership.Why choose “Blasted” for your first outing as director at Soho Rep?Marin Ireland instigated that project. I’d always absolutely loved that play, but for me it was about the Northern Irish conflict. So I read it again, and I got this jolt, like, “Oh no, this is about civil war and what is happening right now.”Do you need a jolt to decide to do a play?Immediately I start imagining pictures and feelings. I’m always attentive to what feelings I get because that is the best information that’s going to take me to “What’s the real material? What can I bring to this material?” I’m always trying to seek out that charge.You have directed very different plays, but the one through line is that your stagings, besides being surprisingly entertaining, avoid the naturalism common in American theater.To get to an honest place of having an embodied conversation about joy and pain, and how close we can look at those things together — naturalism just doesn’t get there for me. For me realism is a closed system. It’s like, “Here’s the thing, look at it.” I’m much more interested in something where there’s space for the audience to get in there and complete the event through that feedback loop of live theater. People want to see ambitious work and things they haven’t seen before. They want to be challenged.From left, Charles Browning, Heather Alicia Simms and Roslyn Ruff in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview,” directed by Benson for Soho Rep in 2018.Emon Hassan for The New York TimesWhat are your first steps when you start working on a new show?“What’s the problem?” is always interesting to me, so I’ll often start from there. I do a lot of work on my own initially, reading and research and images, and kind of start from that place of, “Where am I feeling the heat and the energy? What am I feeling confounded by?” I’ve been lucky to have these phenomenal, deep collaborations with designers where we’ll meet early and often and really approach it like conceptual art, or whether design can really inform, in many cases, the text.How has Soho Rep changed as an institution over the past 16 years?With Meropi and Cynthia, we completely changed the planning horizon of what was possible. We’re commissioning to produce, so when we commission an artist, we’re going to do whatever they write. So it’s moved away from agents submitting plays. People still, of course, do that somewhat, but we don’t have a literary department — it’s much more about building relationships with artists and committing to them for the long haul.As a director, do you think you’ll be able to pursue completely different opportunities now?I’m getting invited to do opera. There’s a lot of big ideas and spaces that I’m now dialoguing with. I’m like, Yeah, I am interested in scale. This is what I’m very ready for. The gift of Soho Rep has been this room where you could literally cut a hole on the floor for “Blasted.” You can be very impolite with that room, get in there and have a conversation with that space, and that’s been amazing. But I know that room very well, and I’m excited to situate my practice in other kinds of spaces.How do you think the New York theater ecosystem has changed in the past two decades?Around 2004, 2005, I would be out seeing eight or nine shows a week sometimes. It was truly experimental in a very amazing way. I don’t have nostalgia for that time because there were a lot of issues and no one was getting paid. It was hard. But the work was oriented around a community, and that was very real. I feel like that communal north star has evaporated, and it became much more oriented toward mainstream success of some kind. But I feel like Covid broke that apart and now I feel weirdly close to that time from the aughts, where it’s up to artists to decide what we want to make and see.That makes you one of the few optimistic people in the field right now!Everything’s going to [expletive], it’s all falling apart. Even in the mainstream commercial spaces, the old model of tourists and all of that, it’s gone, the subscription model is gone. There’s a lot of second-guessing that doesn’t put any trust in the audience — it’s really patronizing. But audiences want to see something new. They don’t want to see what they’ve seen over and over and over again. More

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      Review: ‘The Whitney Album’ Looks to Theater to Remake a Painful Past

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      Eschewing a conventional narrative, Jillian Walker’s soulful show seeks to heal deep wounds through ritual and celebratory singalongs.In “The Whitney Album,” a heady and ritualistic new show that recently opened at Soho Rep, the playwright and actor Jillian Walker uses Whitney Houston as an object lesson: The pressures heaped on gifted and famous Black women, Walker suggests, are stifling, destructive and rooted in colonial subjugation.Unlike the pop-diva-inspired musicals proliferating uptown, “The Whitney Album” eschews a hit catalog for a soundtrack that’s sui generis, with percussive body movements, a cappella solos and, eventually, a group singalong. The director Jenny Koons’s production unfolds — on a mostly white stage (designed by Peiyi Wong), with a brass singing bowl gleaming down center — as a kind of happening, unconcerned with conventional narrative. The show assumes the style of what Walker might call “a vibe.”After offering a warm welcome, the playwright delivers a lecture about the power of theater to remake history (“the archive is the unsung silence,” she says). Dense with academic syntax and punctuated by elemental rites (like the pouring of water or sand from one vessel to another), “The Whitney Album” blends intellectual theory and ceremony to the point of abstraction. (Walker studied to become an Afro-Indigenous priest, she says, after being passed over for a prestigious full-time professorship.)The actor Stephanie Weeks joins Walker onstage, and the two trade off playing Houston and the women she was closest to — her mother and a longtime confidante — in scenes fraught with the stress of celebrity. (The sound designer Ben Jalosa Williams, who operates an onstage board, briefly plays the role of an impatient white interviewer.) Walker likens Houston’s prodigious perspiration to the sweat, tears and saltwater graves of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, tracing the consumption and disposal of Black women over three centuries. It’s a powerful argument, at once persuasive and oversimplified. (“The Whitney Album” does not extend to consider today’s Black female pop stars, like Beyoncé, for example, who maintain a high degree of control over their labor and publicity.)The show’s shuffle of forms — including direct address, re-enactment, live and recorded vocals — can feel like an especially soulful, high-concept record that’s more evocative than linear. But its piled-up ideas, many of them couched in esoteric language that’s not easy to parse in a 90-minute performance, ultimately don’t cohere into a moving or insightful whole.Walker’s passion and intellect seem to place her along the continuum of artists and scholars she calls out by first name — like Saidiya, Lauryn and bell, among others. But how can Walker avoid participating in the cycle of consumption she aims to critique? It’s a question that she proves has no easy answers.The Whitney AlbumThrough July 2 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      In ‘Public Obscenities,’ the Transgender Activist Tashnuva Anan Makes Her New York Debut

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      Tashnuva Anan Shishir, who became her country’s first transgender news anchor in 2021, is performing in “Public Obscenities” at Soho Rep.When Shayok Misha Chowdhury wrote the character of Shou for his new bilingual play, “Public Obscenities,” about a couple who interviews queer locals in Kolkata, India, he was “super worried” about casting the role. The performer would not only need to be of the appropriate gender but also a Bangla speaker with the right “linguistic fluency” to capture the character, who speaks “exuberantly and forthrightly and confidently,” he told me recently.Shou identifies as kothi, an Indian gender that encompasses a breadth of expressions, Chowdhury said. So he reached out to a friend for advice: Debanuj DasGupta, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is “very in the sort of Bangali queer and trans space.” After the professor mentioned Tashnuva Anan Shishir, Chowdhury searched her name online, and several questions came into his head: Is she even in New York? Would she be interested in auditioning?When he posted a casting call on Instagram, and Anan responded, a plan started to coalesce. She was in New York, performing in Queens, in “I Shakuntala,” a play by Golam Sarwar Harun and Gargi Mukherjee, a married couple who would also go on to star in “Public Obscenities.” Anan’s role was small, but she “stole the show,” Chowdhury said.After she auditioned for his play, it was practically unanimous, he said: “We have found the person.” While Shou doesn’t appear until 50 minutes into “Public Obscenities” — its run at Soho Rep (in a coproduction with the National Asian American Theater Company) has been extended through April 16 — the character has been among its most memorable.In “Public Obscenities,” Anan, center, plays a scene-stealing interview subject, our critic wrote in a review of Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s play.Julieta CervantesIn March 2021, Anan made history as the first transgender news anchor in Bangladesh. For three minutes, on International Women’s Day, she spoke on the air and was seen by millions of her compatriots. She went on to anchor occasionally for the network, Boishakhi TV, through November 2021.In December of that year, she came to New York, her first time in the United States. Her trip was primarily to receive care related to what she calls her transformation. And while here, professional opportunities have arisen: Last year she became the first transgender model from Bangladesh to walk in New York Fashion Week.Anan, 31, grew up in a conservative Muslim family and has had a grueling journey to this point. She has endured relentless harassment and survived suicide attempts; been shunned by family members, including her father; and lived penniless in a slum.“I really wanted to be an actress,” Anan, who performed in theater in South Asia and in a small Bangla film, “Kosai,” told me recently in a video interview. “People shouldn’t be considered by their gender. People should acknowledge their work. People should acknowledge their skill.” Being a news anchor in Bangladesh was eye-opening, she said, but it couldn’t quite open up the world for her like the United States could. “I was feeling that I have to swim. So I should swim in the ocean, not in a pond, not in a river. So if I can achieve, I can achieve. If not, then not.”Here are excerpts from our conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.“I had to pay a lot. I had to leave my family to prove my identity,” Anan said.Desmond Picotte for The New York TimesHow has life in New York been for you?It’s a lot of adaptation. I’m born and raised in a village, not a city. The city is highly competitive, but I like this competition. Being an activist, this is a great eye-opening for me to learning, to adapting to each other, to teaching how is the activism going on. When I was in Bangladesh, I was working in a national level. Now I’m in New York, and I’m working globally. I’m contributing internationally. So this is a good opportunity for me.You’ve shown remarkable perseverance. What gives you strength?For myself, that I believe: Do your own job. Just do hard work. There is no shortcut in life. Just believe in yourself. And just, first, inspire yourself. I have competition only with myself, because I’m trying to do a little bit better than yesterday.Why do you think Shou has been so memorable to audiences?Shou is intelligent, Shou is extra-talented, an extrovert, and Shou knows actually about this scenario: the situation of queer people, queer activism, especially in Kolkata, Bangladesh, Pakistan. So Shou is charming everyone. Shou is connected with everyone.Shou is very common character in South Asia because Shou is kind of a feminine guy, so Shou would like to wear femininity in her body or in their body. So this feminine guy represents South Asian queer community also.How do you see yourself in this character and how are you different?Tashnuva bold, Tashnuva sexy, Tashnuva brave, Tashnuva iconic — and the brand I created, I had to pay a lot. I had to leave my family to prove my identity. Shou is also powerful. Shou is also entertaining. Shou is also jolly. Shou is also friendly. Tashnuva is sometimes moody, because people can consider my self-esteem or people can consider my self-respect as an ego, but I had to maintain it. But Shou doesn’t have that; Shou is more friendly.When I get confirmation from my team, I was a little bit tense actually, because, see, I have long hair, and the show is going to put, like, a wig. Then I asked Misha, “Should I cut my hair? I can’t!”First time, when I watched myself with that wig, with proper costume, I was so low — believe me, I was so low. I didn’t feel well because still, then, I didn’t believe Shou. So I was trying to just discover what was going on. Now, I literally fall in love with that wig. Yeah, this is me, this is Shou.How has the reception been from South Asian audiences?Oh my God, they appreciate a lot. They were looking at their sorrows in front of them. They’re looking at their life in front of them, through Shou’s eyes. I got lots of messages from my friends — “Tashnuva, you’re doing really well because this is not doing acting, this is very natural.” I wanted to be a natural actor. I want to play a character that should be more natural, that should be believable. I really believe when I am doing something, people should believe.Last night, when I’m coming toward audience, a girl literally was crying, and she was from Bangladesh, and she born and raised here. She only heard me by social media, and this is the first time we get connected in person. And she was telling me, “Tashnuva, this is the story that we know but we couldn’t tell in front of people.”What’s next for you?I don’t like to say my dream because people are always critics. So I love to keep my dream inside. I am looking for opportunities to act more. So I think now, just now, after this project, I want to jump into another project. There I can play a more powerful character. There I can say another story. I don’t want to pursue any character that is very common.When I think about performance — light, camera, action — I love Broadway performance. Today and tomorrow, is my dream that I will perform in Broadway, or I will perform in a Hollywood film. When I start working, I just forget my every pain. I just forget everything. And this is the performance that inspired me a lot, that did a lot for me. More