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      Things To Do in New York: Halloween Events and Activities

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      Haunt the streets at Halloween parades. Dance at a “Zombie Prom.” Or find your way through a corn maze. We’ve got you covered on how to celebrate.During Halloween, it’s OK — even encouraged — to frighten your neighbors and devour mounds of Twizzlers and candy corn without judgment. This tradition was partially halted by the pandemic, as walk-through haunted houses mutated into drive-throughs and theaters shut out viewers, while streaming services welcomed them.As in-person programming bounces back, here’s a guide to pumpkin picking, drag shows, haunted houses and more to enjoy throughout New York City with friends and family. All scare levels are welcome.Frights for the FamilyIn its 49th year, the Village Halloween Parade returns on Halloween Day with hundreds of puppeteers, dancers, artists and musicians marching — or crawling — along Greenwich Village. The parade, which begins at 7 p.m. on Sixth Avenue between Spring Street and 16th Street, encourages thousands of costumed New Yorkers to walk alongside the performers.At the annual Bronx Halloween Parade, beginning Oct. 22 at noon, Halloween enthusiasts can enjoy a similar experience as the New York Police Department marching band, the Philadelphia 76ers drum line and dozens of community organizations haunt the streets for about a half mile, from Southern Boulevard and Westchester Avenue to Dawson Street and Rogers Place, adjacent to Bill Rainey Park. The comedian Radel Ortiz will host the post-parade festivities, and all ages are encouraged to participate in a costume contest for a cash prize.Run as you are, whether in a witch costume or your racing attire, during the NYCRuns Haunted Island 5K and 10K. The race takes place early on Oct. 29, wrapping around Governors Island — twice for 10K runners — and provides age and gender-specific awards. All racers can enjoy a ferry ride, a post-race breakfast and Halloween candy. Governors Island will also host Pumpkin Point, its annual pumpkin patch and fall festival at Nolan Park (Oct. 22-23 and Oct. 29-30), where guests can enjoy pumpkin picking with a suggested donation, arts and crafts, pumpkin painting and trick-or-treating. Pumpkins that don’t find a home will be composted or donated locally to organizations combating hunger.At the Amazing Maize Maze at the Queens County Farm Museum, visitors can join a scavenger hunt through acres of towering cornstalk.Matthew BorowickAt the family-run Decker Farm on Staten Island, visitors can handpick the perfect pumpkin, hop on a tractor-towed hayride exploring the 11 acres of farmland, wander through the children’s hay maze and even chuck a gourd (exactly what it sounds like) on October weekends and Oct. 10. The farm, established in the 19th century and a designated New York City landmark, also welcomes guests for fall-themed family portraits and pumpkin painting.In the Amazing Maize Maze, located at the Queens County Farm Museum, visitors can embark on a scavenger hunt through acres of towering cornstalk on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in October and on Oct. 10. For an added challenge, Maze by Moonlight allows visitors to venture through the path at night on four select dates, using only a flashlight to guide them.If you’re in search of a different leafy plant this season, watch “Little Shop of Horrors” Off Broadway at the Westside Theater/Upstairs, Tuesday through Sunday on select afternoons and evenings. The 40-year-old musical, created by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, follows a bloodthirsty plant, Audrey II, that catapults a geeky flower shop assistant, Seymour, to stardom. The musical, inspired by Roger Corman’s 1960 black comedy, has since grown into one of the most produced shows in high schools nationwide. As the plant’s size multiplies, so does Seymour’s prominence. The story reminds viewers “of the special potency of grisly things that come in small, impeccably wrapped packages,” the former New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote in a 2019 review.The streaming service Disney+ has resurrected the cult classic that follows three kooky sisters who cast spells on the unfortunate youth in the city of Salem, Mass. In Anne Fletcher’s “Hocus Pocus 2,” Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy reprise their witchy roles as they zap into the 21st century, summoned by a charmed candle. The sisters run amok using Roombas instead of flying broomsticks and chug anti-aging creams in a local pharmacy. A treat for the whole family, the film embraces existing fans and attracts new ones.“RuPaul’s Drag Race Night of the Living Drag” in Los Angeles last year. On Oct. 30, the drag queen Yvie Oddly will lead the show at Kings Theater in Brooklyn.Emma Mcintyre/Getty ImagesHorror With a Hint of GlamHouse of Yes, a club in Bushwick, Brooklyn, known for theatrical, sky-high performances and pulsating rhythms, has a full slate of Halloween-themed events such as “Vampire Ball” (Oct. 20) and “Zombie Prom” (Oct. 27), where guests are encouraged to dress as “bloody (bat)dies” and “gory ghouls.” A Halloween edition of the venue’s popular variety show “Dirty Circus” will begin Oct. 26 and conclude with “Absolutely: A Halloween Drag Spectacular” on Halloween night.Kings Theater will also host a night of drag queen royalty with “RuPaul’s Drag Race Night of the Living Drag,” led by Yvie Oddly, the absurdist drag queen and Season 11 winner, and featuring eight other performers in an interpretation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”Particularly PetrifyingThe NYC Ghosts tour visits eight to 12 locations throughout the city, including the Morris-Jumel Mansion, which served as Gen. George Washington’s headquarters during the Revolutionary War, and a Revivalist Greek brownstone called the House of Death, where Mark Twain lived for about a year. Tours range from an hour to 90 minutes and are held nightly throughout the year.For a true bloodcurdling experience, Blood Manor, a 10,000-square-foot haunted house in TriBeCa with clowns, corpse brides and cannibals, would be a good place to start. The renowned Halloween destination, where Kevin Hart and Jimmy Fallon shrieked in terror in 2016, has welcomed the fearful and fearless for more than a decade. This year, the house brings attractions like “Maggot Invasion” and “Hannibal’s Hell” as well as killer clowns and a paranormal battlefield. Attend at your own risk on weekends and select weekdays through Nov. 5.For those willing to venture outside the city, Headless Horseman Haunted Attractions, upstate in Ulster Park, guarantees a horrifying immersive experience along its 65-acre property with escape rooms, haunted houses, a corn maze and a new walk-through trail. More sinister than the special effects are the masked serial killers and squealing clowns in each dimly lit, blood-smeared room. It’s open Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings, with Children’s Days, which tone down the thrills, from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the second and fourth Saturday in October. More

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      In ‘Heart Strings,’ the Ties That Bind a Family (and a Culture)

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      Atlantic for Kids’ new play explores sibling relationships, using the delicate weavings of a Hawaiian craft.Every good story requires a thread. Some writers have difficulty finding theirs, but not Lee Cataluna. The line that runs through her latest play, “Heart Strings,” comes from the real knots and tangles of a centuries-old Hawaiian craft.That technique, known as hei (pronounced HAY), consists of creating figures and patterns by manipulating a single loop of string. Although often compared to cat’s cradle, hei is more than a children’s game; it is a symbolic language. Each design has meaning: for instance, a star, the moon or the night becoming day.Seated at an outdoor cafe table on a recent afternoon in Manhattan, Cataluna, who is of Portuguese and Indigenous Hawaiian ancestry, placed a cord around her hands. Deftly moving her fingers, she transformed the string into a narrow rectangle with two triangles at its center.“So this is the house, right?” she said of the rectangle. “Then it breaks apart, and the two children run away.” She pulled her hands wide, and the triangles shot in opposite directions, then disappeared. “That’s the story I have to write,” she said she thought when, during research, she discovered this traditional hei. “I have to figure out what that means.”Different characters create that hei and others in “Heart Strings,” which runs through Oct. 23 at the Linda Gross Theater in Chelsea. Presented by Atlantic Theater Company as the first Atlantic for Kids production since the pandemic lockdown, it welcomes young audiences — the public on weekends and school groups on weekdays — with a drama that is both culturally specific in its details and universal in its themes.“I thought about what kind of issues would resonate with kids and their parents,” Cataluna said. Sibling rivalry immediately sprang to mind.But in “Heart Strings,” the meaning of “sibling” is complicated by another cultural tradition. The play’s central characters — Hoku, 10, and Mahina, 6 — are sisters according to hanai (huh-NYE), a Hawaiian custom in which couples take in children who are not their own. Hoku’s grandparents are raising both girls, and the reserved, studious Hoku, who once welcomed the infant Mahina into the family, now resents the high-spirited, questioning kindergartner she has become.“You’re not my real sister,” Hoku says, shutting out the younger girl with a force that threatens to shatter their household as utterly as that hei collapsed in Cataluna’s hands.Born on Maui, Cataluna remembered hei, but she did not choose it as a recurring motif to dazzle New Yorkers. She originally wrote “Heart Strings” for her teenage son’s theater group in Honolulu. His school had requested a play incorporating something tangibly Hawaiian, much as Kathryn Schultz Miller’s “A Thousand Cranes,” which the students had previously performed, celebrates Japanese culture through origami.When the coronavirus pandemic ended the school’s plans to present “Heart Strings” at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Cataluna successfully submitted her work to ReImagine: New Plays in TYA. (TYA stands for Theater for Young Audiences.) Established by a consortium of theatrical organizations, ReImagine awarded grants in 2021 to playwrights who were Black, Indigenous or people of color. As a grant winner, Cataluna could also select a participating theater company to workshop her play.She felt immediately drawn to Atlantic, which was also eager to acquire “Heart Strings” and is now giving it its world premiere: Here was a play that highlighted a culture that was part of America but that was almost never explored onstage.“It’s so three-dimensional, the storytelling that happens in the hei,” Alison Beatty, the artistic director of Atlantic for Kids, said in a post-rehearsal interview. After the pandemic’s isolation, she added, “having something that was tactile — that you could feel with your hands, and that was such an integral part of how the story is told — really appealed to me. And then, I think, just the questions that are asked by the play: what it means to be family, what it means to be at home.”Aczon, far left, in a scene from the Atlantic for Kids production, with, clockwise from top left, Jeremy Rafal, Kristi Donna Ng and Un Joo Christopher.Julieta Cervantes“Heart Strings,” which is directed toward children over 6 — an older audience than most Atlantic for Kids offerings — also gave the company a rare opportunity to help shape a playwright’s vision instead of importing a finished production. Beatty, for instance, suggested adding hula gestures, another form of choreographed storytelling, to the production. John-Mario Sevilla, a hula scholar, then taught some movement to the cast.The script also evolved. Cataluna had set her earliest drafts in the present, but after her son’s classmates asked why the characters were playing with string when they had cellphones, she switched the action to the 1930s. She also wanted to highlight the pressure on Indigenous peoples to assimilate. Hoku, played by Sienna Aczon, doesn’t mind using an English name and words at school; Mahina, portrayed by Un Joo Christopher, rebels against those rules. (Almost all the actors in the Atlantic production have lived in Hawaii.)“In my father’s era, and before his, Hawaiian was not allowed to be spoken in the public schools,” Cataluna said. She drew on her family’s past again in a scene in which Hoku’s friend Josiah (Aaron Banes) reflects on his love for his Hanai sister, as Cataluna’s father once did.But she has resisted acknowledging another autobiographical detail as more than mere coincidence: She has a younger biological sister from whom she is estranged.“One of my best friends keeps calling me on it,” Cataluna said, noting that he pointed out parallels to her play. She and her sister haven’t reconciled, but, Cataluna added, “if she ever needed a kidney, I would give her my kidney.”Audiences, however, don’t need to have siblings to recognize how vulnerable — or how steadfast — the bonds of love are, Kat Yen, the production’s director, said in the same conversation.In families or friendships, “we delve into struggle, we delve into confrontations, but you never lose the love,” Yen said. “Somewhere in there is a message that I’m interested in for the audience.”But that isn’t all that children take home: The company provides instructions on how to make a hei. More

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      Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan to Star in Hansberry Revival

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      “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” a rarely revived play by Lorraine Hansberry, will be presented at BAM starting in February.Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan will star in a rare revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” starting in February at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.The play, about a pair of bohemian artists struggling to preserve their marriage at a time of political upheaval, was first staged on Broadway in 1964, five years after the arrival of Hansberry’s far better known work, “A Raisin in the Sun.” In 2018, writing in The New York Times Book Review, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins called “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” “a shattering study of liberal self-delusion and whiteness as an existential crisis” and declared the play “criminally neglected.”The revival, which is scheduled to begin performances Feb. 4 and to open Feb. 23, will be directed by Anne Kauffman, who previously directed it in 2016 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Reviewing that production for The Chicago Tribune, the critic Chris Jones called the play “a masterpiece lost in plain sight” and “a drama so infused with emotional intelligence, linguistic treasures and the human conditions of dread and longing that it keeps you bolt-upright in your seat for nearly three hours.”The artistic director of BAM, David Binder, said he read “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” while he was working as the lead producer of a 2004 Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” He and Kauffman have been talking about mounting a New York production ever since.Isaac and Brosnahan are best known for their work onscreen — he for “Star Wars” sequels (he played Poe Dameron) and she for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (she plays the title character). But both have stage credits as well; Isaac played Hamlet at the Public Theater in 2017, and Brosnahan played Desdemona in a production of “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop in 2016.Before the pandemic, Isaac had been planning to appear in a new production of “Three Sisters,” directed by Sam Gold at New York Theater Workshop. That production, which has been repeatedly postponed, now appears on the theater’s website as part of the current season, but with no date, and the note, “We are working hard to confirm the cast for the 2023 production of ‘Three Sisters’ and we hope that the full original cast will be available to continue on with the production.” (Representatives for Isaac and New York Theater Workshop offered no further details.)Hansberry died in 1965, at the age of 34, and in recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in her life and work, with productions and books, a documentary and even a sculpture that is touring the country. A new revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara, is now in previews at the Public Theater. More

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      A Splashy, Messy All-Naked Revue

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      Florentina Holzinger’s striking, bewildering and stomach-churning new piece, “Ophelia’s Got Talent,” opened the season at the Volksbühne theater in Berlin.BERLIN — A group of naked women hump a helicopter suspended above an onstage swimming pool; a tattooed sword swallower inserts blades down her throat — as well as a tube with a camera that gives us a tour of her guts; someone else sticks her hand deep inside another woman’s vagina and retrieves a key; the key-bearer later pierces her cheek with a large pin. These are a few of the striking, bewildering and stomach-churning things that take place at the Volksbühne theater during “Ophelia’s Got Talent,” a new work by Florentina Holzinger.Over the past few years, that Austrian choreographer and director’s radically feminist — or postfeminist — brand of dance theater has garnered critical acclaim and gained a cult following. “Ophelia’s Got Talent,” an all-naked female revue about women and water, is Holzinger’s second production at the Volksbühne. And unlike the first, “A Divine Comedy,” which was originally seen at the Ruhrtriennale festival before transferring to Berlin last season, “Ophelia’s Got Talent” is tailored to the Volksbühne’s round and technically versatile stage.At the performance I attended, the atmosphere was electric. The packed audience roared its approval before, during and after the performance. If nothing else, Holzinger has succeeded in bringing back a sense of frenzied enthusiasm to the company, which has struggled since the 2017 exit of its legendary artistic director Frank Castorf after 25 years running the theater, which inaugurated a period of decline and dysfunction.The theater’s current artistic leader, René Pollesch, a writer-director who is a veteran of the Castorf era, has certainly scored a popular coup in recruiting Holzinger, who is part of the Volksbühne’s artistic advisory board and will create several new works for the theater in the coming years. Based on the evidence, Berlin audiences have a large appetite for her brash, energetic and exuberantly discomfiting work, with its unflinching and unsentimental look at women’s bodies and desires. And, let loose on the Volksbühne’s vast stage, Holzinger can work on a grand scale that allows her to create theatrical tableaus of undeniable power. Inexplicable as it was, the flying helicopter orgy was a wild sight to behold.Less convincing, however, than such stunning and disturbing set pieces (at one point, a performer literally hangs from her teeth), is the director’s sense of dramatic clarity, structure and rhythm. At close to three hours, “Ophelia’s Got Talent” is, simply put, a mess.“Ophelia’s Got Talent” begins as a talent-show parody, including an attempted escape from a water tank.Nicole Marianna WytyczakThe production starts off as a parody of a shlocky TV talent show, complete with overemotional judges. After a Houdiniesque escape from a water tank goes wrong, the talent show breaks off and is replaced by a vaudeville-style revue that is frequently exasperating. Titles projected on the back of the stage suggest various aquatic themes, but little connects the endless procession of tap dancing, swimming, scenes of self-harm and confessional monologues.It’s not that there are too few ideas to sustain the long running time; it often feels that there are too many. Watching this show, one has the impression that Holzinger and her fearless co-stars fell down a deep, dark well of associations and haven’t fully emerged.Is “Ophelia’s Got Talent” a homage to Shakespeare’s drowned heroine? A treatise on the depiction of submissive aquatic women, or dangerous mythological figures, in Western art and literature? The evening seemed to be headed in those directions — until the performers became dancing, brawling sailors, a mash-up of “Anchors Away” and Fassbinder’s “Querelle.” But that, too, quickly fell away, and a sense of strange body horror took over. At one point a performer appeared to give agonizing birth to a reptilian, or possibly mechanical, creature as the water in the long onstage pool turned blood-red. Holzinger’s aesthetic is very in-your-face, but some subtlety would have also gone a long way. If this was a show about water’s metamorphic power, and of women as bearers of water and life, I would have preferred a more sustained engagement with those themes. Instead, the production swerved in a militantly ecological direction late in the evening, with hundreds of plastic bottles raining down into the pool.Then, toward the end, the show veered unexpectedly into sentimentality with an assist from a group of adorable young children who scampered onstage and announced themselves as representatives of the future. It was a baffling way to draw the bold, confused and exhausting spectacle to a close. More to the point, however, it struggled to convince; the environmental twist felt like straining for relevance and even a touch hypocritical. With thousands of gallons of water (there is a pool and two massive tanks on the stage) required for each performance, this is clearly not a resource-light production. As one of the onstage children says, water is “the blood of the earth.” I wonder if spilling so much of it night after night is justifiable.The sea is “the only lover whose arms are always open to us,” wrote the gender-bending French writer and photographer Claude Cahun, whose unique body of work inspired the season opener at the Münchner Kammerspiele. Performed on the playhouse’s smallest stage, that piece, “La Mer Sombre,” is a compact production by the exciting young German director Pinar Karabulut. A short work that Karabulut developed with three excellent actors from the Kammerspiele’s permanent troupe, “La Mer Sombre” is more successful as a stylized fusion of fluid mise-en-scène, eye-popping design and accomplished performances than as an exploration of Cahun’s unconventional life and pioneering work, which is enjoying a revival of interest.Christian Löber, Thomas Hauser and Gro Swantje Kohlhof in “La Mer Sombre,” by Pinar Karabulut.Krafft AngererAt the start of the hourlong performance, the actors are casually embedded in the audience. It’s hard to miss them, however, since the straight black wigs and oddly cut, closefitting costumes they wear make them look like androgynous alien joggers. It’s difficult to get much of a hold on the dialogue, which is drawn largely from Cahun’s writings but often decontextualized. Instead, the production poetically honors her iconoclastic spirit by tearing down barriers. The performers have no fixed identities, rather they seem to collectively form a fractured persona; the spectators rub shoulders with the actors as they flit between the stage and the auditorium and an audience member is even invited to serve as the prompter; stagehands wander the set installing and removing props.Brightly colored and filled with music, the production proceeds by associative logic as the Kammerspiele’s actors — Thomas Hauser, Gro Swantje Kohlhof and Christian Löber — play off one another in a surreal fun house decked out with shell-shaped mirrors, illuminated hearts, a reflective floor and, at the play’s climax, a bathtub filled with bubbles.Despite the energetic and witty performances and the finely honed aesthetic of Aleksandra Pavlovic’s set design, this remains a modest production that operates within a small web of themes and motifs. While succeeding on its own terms, “La Mer Sombre” merely dips a toe into Cahun’s life and work: It doesn’t go for a full plunge. Even so, the hour spent with the Kammerspiele’s three actors somehow seemed richer and more theatrically satisfying than the nearly three endured with Holzinger and her nude 12-woman troupe.Ophelia’s Got Talent. Directed by Florentina Holzinger. Through Nov. 27 at the Berlin Volksbühne.La Mer Sombre. Directed by Pinar Karabulut. Through Nov. 20 at the Münchner Kammerspiele. More

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      ‘I’m Revolting’ Review: All About the Skin They Live In

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      Gracie Gardner’s play about illness, the body and our health care system is just as impersonal as the waiting room where her story is centered.With another pandemic winter on the horizon, it’s hard not to imagine all of the ways our physical health determines the shape and quality of our lives and reveals the most intimate facets of ourselves.That’s what I suspect the playwright Gracie Gardner (“Athena”), who is also an E.M.T., was aiming to get at in her new play, “I’m Revolting,” which opened Wednesday night at the Linda Gross Theater. But despite the show’s attempts to tell a moving story about illness, the body and the U.S. health care system, this Atlantic Theater Company production fails to make a compelling work of theater out of the issues facing patients in the waiting room of a skin cancer clinic.Bookmarked by conversations between two doctors, Jonathan (Bartley Booz, with the same bumbling brand of comedy he perfected as the wacky butler in “The Play That Goes Wrong”) and the veteran Denise (a mechanical Patrice Johnson Chevannes), “I’m Revolting” initially seems to be a play about the struggles of doctors and health care workers. Then it seems as if it will be a play about physical and emotional health, but it veers off course, and never works its way to a clear statement.In the impersonal space of a waiting room are seven blue chairs lined up neatly in a row, a water cooler, a vending machine, some fake plants, and a table with a bottle of hand sanitizer on it (set design by Marsha Ginsberg). The doctors discuss the day’s patients, identifying them by their maladies, their race and gender, their medical history.The flesh-and-blood counterparts gradually appear, beginning with Reggie (a stiff Alicia Pilgrim), a young woman concerned about how her surgery will affect her appearance, and her self-involved older sister, Anna (a brusque, hilarious Gabby Beans). There’s also Toby (Patrick Vaill), a sullen young man convinced his cancer is a punishment, and his hippie New Age mother, Paula (Laura Esterman); the meek Liane (Emily Cass McDonnell), who’s endured multiple surgeries, and her degenerate husband, Jordan (Glenn Fitzgerald); and the oddball regular, Clyde (Peter Gerety), who dispenses unsolicited advice.From left: Laura Esterman, Patrick Vaill, Glenn Fitzgerald, Emily Cass McDonnell, Peter Gerety and Alicia Pilgrim in the playwright Gracie Gardner’s new work.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThey mostly talk among their groups — Anna tells Reggie to assert her rights as a patient, Liane and Jordan discuss the merits of a particular lotion — and occasionally to one another. Paula’s suggestion that meditation and positive thinking is all the cure her son needs leads to a waiting room debate about science and alternative medicine.And yet there’s little to no depth to these patients, or anything novel in their conversations, which occur while they wait to be called on by Jonathan and Denise. It soon becomes clear that the thin plot is in desperate need of a raison d’être.The direction, by Knud Adams (“English”), is unremarkable; the actors not only lack chemistry but also deliver stiff readings of their lines. And for a play about the Big C, there’s no sense of urgency or threat. Even with a spare 90-minute running time, and the occasional laughs Beans, Booz and Gerety generate through their characters’ particular quirks and expressions, “I’m Revolting” drags like the hours in waiting room limbo.In those moments when the script rolls out some visceral details (describing the repurposing of a flap of forehead skin, or the archaeological dig into an eye socket), it feels like an empty attempt to have the audience squirm.During the play, I kept thinking of my neighbor who recently told me about his own battle with skin cancer. His story wasn’t just about the skin on his nose but his path to the malady — from a childhood running in the sun and several years working under the cloudless sky in the Caribbean — and his ongoing recovery.We are more than our afflictions, and the story of our nation’s medical care over the past few years warrants more than a few drive-by conversations in a waiting room. As it is, “I’m Revolting” only skims the surface when what it really needs is to perform a thorough examination.I’m RevoltingThrough Oct. 16 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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

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

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      in Theater

      Charles Fuller, Pulitzer Winner for ‘A Soldier’s Play,’ Dies at 83

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      He was the second Black playwright to win the award and later adapted the play into an Oscar-nominated film, “A Soldier’s Story.”Charles Fuller, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982 for “A Soldier’s Play,” which finally made it to Broadway 38 years later, in a production that earned two Tony Awards, died on Monday in Toronto. He was 83.His wife, Claire Prieto-Fuller, confirmed the death.Mr. Fuller was only the second Black playwright to win the Pulitzer for drama. (Charles Edward Gordone won in 1970 for “No Place to Be Somebody.”) His plays often examined racism and sometimes drew on his background as an Army veteran. Both of those elements were evident in “A Soldier’s Play,” which was Mr. Fuller’s reimagining of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and centered on the murder of a Black Army sergeant and the search for the culprit.The play was first staged in 1981 by the Negro Ensemble Company with a cast that included Denzel Washington. Frank Rich, in his review in The New York Times, called it “a relentless investigation into the complex, sometimes cryptic pathology of hate” and praised Mr. Fuller’s delineation of both the Black and the white characters.“Mr. Fuller demands that his Black characters find the courage to break out of their suicidal, fratricidal cycle,” Mr. Rich wrote, “just as he demands that whites end the injustices that have locked his Black characters into the nightmare.”Hollywood came calling. A 1984 film version, retitled “A Soldier’s Story” and directed by Norman Jewison, had a cast that included Mr. Washington, Howard E. Rollins Jr., David Alan Grier, Wings Hauser, Adolph Caesar and Patti LaBelle. It received three Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Fuller’s screenplay.Denzel Washington, left, and Charles Brown in 1981 in Mr. Fuller’s acclaimed play “A Soldier’s Play,” staged by the Negro Ensemble Company in New York.Bert AndrewsIn “A Soldier’s Play” and his other works, Mr. Fuller strove to serve up not idealized Black characters but ones who reflected reality.“In the ’60s and early ’70s, Black plays were directed at whites,” Mr. Fuller told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, when the Negro Ensemble Company’s production of “A Soldier’s Play” was staged in San Diego. “They were primarily confrontational pieces, whose major concern was to address racism and white-Black relationships in this country. Now we are much more concerned with examining ourselves, with looking at our own situations — historically in many instances. We are seeing characters who are more complex, ones who have bad qualities as well as good ones.”“A Soldier’s Play,” he told The Times in 2020, drew in part on his upbringing in a tough neighborhood of North Philadelphia.“I grew up in a project in a neighborhood where people shot each other, where gangs fought each other,” he said. “Not white people — Black people, where the idea of who was the best, toughest, was part of life. We have a history that’s different than a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t cheat on each other, kill each other, love each other, marry each other, do all that, things that, really, people anywhere in the world do.”Kenny Leon (with microphone), who directed a 2020 revival of “A Soldier’s Play” on Broadway, addressed Mr. Fuller, third from left, onstage after a performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCharles H. Fuller Jr. was born on March 5, 1939, in Philadelphia. His father was a printer, and his mother, Lillian Teresa Fuller, was a homemaker and foster mother. He was a student at Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia when he attended his first play, a production performed in Yiddish at the Walnut Theater.“I didn’t understand a word,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1977, but somehow it sparked his interest in becoming a playwright.He studied for two years at Villanova University and then joined the Army, where his postings included Japan and South Korea. After four years, he returned to Philadelphia, taking night classes at LaSalle College (now University) while working as a city housing inspector.In 1968, he and some friends founded the Afro-American Arts Theater in Philadelphia, but they had no playwrights, so Mr. Fuller gave it a try.One result was his first staged play, “The Village: A Party,” about a racially mixed utopia, which was produced in 1968 at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.“What the evening proves,” Ernest Albrecht wrote in a review in The Home News of New Brunswick, N.J., “is that the theater is not Fuller’s bag.”But Mr. Fuller kept at it. In the 1970s he relocated to New York, where the Negro Ensemble Company in 1974 staged his drama “In the Deepest Part of Sleep” and opened its 10th-anniversary season in 1976 with another of his plays, “The Brownsville Raid,” based on a 1906 incident in Texas in which Black soldiers were accused of a shooting. Walter Kerr, writing in The Times, praised Mr. Fuller for not making the play a simple story of racial injustice.“Mr. Fuller is interested in human slipperiness, and his skill with self‐serving, only slightly shady evasions of duty helps turn the play into the interesting conundrum it is,” Mr. Kerr wrote.Although he set out as a playwright to examine difficult questions, Mr. Fuller did so with a certain degree of optimism about the future of the United States.“America has an opportunity, with all its technology, to develop the first sensible society in history,” he said in the 1977 interview with The Inquirer. “It could provide all its people with some rational way to live together while still glorying in their cultural diversity.”By the late 1980s, though, he had tired of New York and moved to Toronto, where he was living at his death. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, David; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.“A Soldier’s Play” was finally produced on Broadway in 2020 by the Roundabout Theater with a cast that included Mr. Grier and Blair Underwood. It was eligible to win the best-revival Tony even though it had never been produced on Broadway previously — the more familiar prerequisite for the category — because, under Tony rules, it was by 2020 considered “a classic.” Mr. Grier himself won a Tony for best actor in a featured role in a play.“It has been my greatest honor to perform his words on both stage and screen,” Mr. Grier said of Mr. Fuller on Twitter, adding that “his genius will be missed.” More

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      in Television

      Da’Vine Joy Randolph Doesn’t Want Anyone Finishing Her Sentences

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      Whether in comedies like “Only Murders in the Building” or dramas like “On the Come Up,” the ubiquitous actor refuses to be pigeonholed.Please forgive Da’Vine Joy Randolph if she needs to stifle the occasional yawn. When she hopped on a video interview in late September, the omnipresent, extremely busy and still slightly jet-lagged actress had only just returned from Colombia, where she was filming “Shadow Force,” an action movie for the director Joe Carnahan.Despite the exotic locale and a fulfilling work experience, the otherwise upbeat Randolph emphasized that she was happy to be back on her home turf in Los Angeles. “Even on a vacation,” she said, “after the two-week mark, no matter how amazing the vacation is, you’re like, I’m ready.”Randolph, 36, has been on a relentless professional pace for more than a decade now, playing a range of memorable roles in theater, film and television. She recently co-starred in the drama “On the Come Up,” the directorial debut of Sanaa Lathan, playing Pooh, the supportive but no-nonsense aunt of an aspiring teenage rapper (Jamila C. Gray).Yet Randolph is probably better known for her work in several comedies, including the Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building” and films like “Dolemite Is My Name.”Why Randolph keeps turning up alongside the likes of Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy and Martin Short, she said, is anyone’s guess. “It’s actually quite a conundrum,” she said. “I think I have a good sense of humor, but I don’t consider myself funny.”Whatever type of story she is telling, Randolph said, she often takes a similar approach to her roles: “I really just focus on their dedication — everyone wants something.”She explained, “When people get into extreme situations or they want something bad enough, hilarity can ensue because the stakes are just that high. To the viewer, it can be comical. To me, I’m like in a Greek tragedy over here.”Rather than be remembered as a comedic or a dramatic performer, Randolph said she wants to be called “a transformational actor”: “I never want to get pigeonholed or known for one thing. I don’t want people to be able to finish my sentences.”Randolph shared the stories behind a few of her most memorable roles. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Randolph as Oda Mae Brown in “Ghost the Musical.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Ghost the Musical’In the stage adaptation of the 1990 movie, which ran on Broadway in 2012, Randolph was cast as Oda Mae Brown, the psychic played in the film by Whoopi Goldberg.That was my first job ever, and it started very quickly. Like, roller coaster plunging down — there was no windup. You booked it [whooshing sound]. Now my life is fortunately and unfortunately like that — that can be the nature of what it is. But to be thrown in, in that way, was a lot of getting used to. When we found out that “Ghost” was closing, I remember saying to my agents, “I want to do a movie and a TV show and a straight play.” And I booked one of Robin Williams’s last movies [“The Angriest Man in Brooklyn”], an episode of “The Good Wife” and an original play at Atlantic Theater Company [“What Rhymes With America”]. I was like, whoa. Good manifesting.‘Selfie’Randolph played Charmonique, a co-worker of the pharmaceutical firm staffers played by Karen Gillan and John Cho, on this short-lived ABC cult sitcom from 2014.I got to learn all the ins and outs of network television. After an episode was released, I remember the producers being like: “The numbers, the numbers, what are the numbers? What are the ratings?” I was like, whoa, that’s a whole thing. You did the pilot, then after you get 13 [episodes], then you find out if you get the back nine. Which we didn’t on that show. And — because people ask me all the time — I genuinely don’t know why. Our co-workers don’t know why. I have spent time with Karen Gillan. We don’t know why. I promise you there’s no secret I’m withholding.‘Empire’On the Fox hip-hop soap opera that ended in 2020, Randolph played Poundcake, a onetime fellow prison inmate of Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson).They built a whole soundstage and turned it into a prison, and it was just a two-hander with Taraji and me. It felt like getting back to the fundamentals, where I really got to dig in and play a different type of character. We were almost a whole other show within that show. Even the other actors were like, “How come you get to do all this stuff?” Craig [Brewer], the director of “Dolemite,” was directing me in one of the episodes for “Empire.” I was like, “You’re really cool to work with. Do you have any interesting stuff down the pike?” He said nothing. And then I go to the [“Dolemite”] audition, and I’m like, “Craig!” He was like, [sheepishly] “Oh, I didn’t know.”Randolph with, from left, Craig Robinson, Mike Epps, Tituss Burgess and Eddie Murphy in “Dolemite Is My Name,” a game-changer for her career.François Duhamel/Netflix‘Dolemite Is My Name’This 2019 comedic biopic starred Eddie Murphy as the stand-up and Blaxploitation actor Rudy Ray Moore and Randolph as Moore’s “Dolemite” screen partner Lady Reed.“Dolemite” changed the trajectory of my career. On my end, the work is never changing. My process, my way in — I don’t save myself for the big roles and phone it in for everything else. But the collaborative energy allowed my character to have a space to be seen and heard. Eddie is very meticulous with his work and this was a passion project for him, but he was so generous. Interestingly enough, I had booked it — deal signed and everything — and then they were like, uh, we don’t know. They made me re-audition, which was intense. But the gift in it was, if that didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have felt as confident and forthright. I was able to come to work being like, This is what I have to offer. Before I would have been like, [mousy voice] “What do you think, Mr. Murphy?” Now I was like, I know who she is and what they want from her.‘The Lost City’In this year’s hit comedy, Sandra Bullock starred as a romance novelist caught up in an unexpected jungle adventure and Randolph as her intrepid publisher.That was like my first true work-cation. It was wild. The last scene of the movie, where we were all on the beach, that’s where we lived. If the camera turned back, you would see the hotel we were staying at. The travel bans were just starting to come up from Covid, so for a lot of us, we were also very excited to be working. When you’re literally on the beach, it’s pretty hard to be a jerk. A lot of it had to do with Sandra Bullock and how she just took care of the actors.Sandra never got diva-ish or distanced herself, like, I’m over here and you’re down here. We were all in it together. I was having fun with the hair department. The moment I go into the jungle, I knew my hair was going to get more and more frizzy. It became like a game — each scene would be like, OK, so how frizzy is it?As Detective Williams in “Only Murders in the Building.”Patrick Harbron/Hulu‘Only Murders in the Building’As the resourceful Detective Williams on this Hulu comedy series, Randolph often crosses paths with the amateur sleuths played by Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez.That job, one thousand percent, was because of “Dolemite.” Steve Martin told me he saw “Dolemite,” was very impressed — “You held your own,” that whole thing — and that was a straight offer from him and the showrunner. It’s such a wonderful working environment. Lovely hours. You’re out by like 6, 7 o’clock. You go have dinner, a life. And just to be around Steve Martin and Martin Short — they still have this childlike anticipation and excitement, like it was their first project. That blows me away, every single time.Williams is damn good at her job and has a crazy case that she’s trying to crack. She’s aggressive and that has made her successful. Then these three civilians get in the middle of things, trying to solve it for her, alongside her, in spite of her. That makes her job more difficult. But in the process, she learns maybe it is OK to not work by yourself all the time. She’s coming to terms with it and it’s awkward and uncomfortable. That’s where the comedy comes in.‘On the Come Up’Randolph’s character, Aunt Pooh, is the streetwise sister to Jay, an absentee mother played by Lathan, the film’s director, and the mentor to her niece, an aspiring rapper played by Gray.When I found out about that job, I was filming Netflix’s “Rustin,” playing Mahalia Jackson, so I’m giving full Christian, Southern Baptist auntie. To then go to that kind of auntie really intrigued me. But especially in telling Black-specific narratives from Black voices, there always has to be a message. Even with “Empire,” I don’t care if I’m an inmate, but there has to be a positive message that we grow and learn from. You see throughout the movie all the roles that Aunt Pooh was to her: I was her parent, and she was my niece and my best friend, if not a little sister. Which I think keeps their relationship very complex. As tough as Aunt Pooh is, she has this gushing heart for her family and for her niece, which was really quite special.The physical transformation was quite significant, and in a short amount of time. When I got to set, the costume just wasn’t quite hitting it. But the costume designer was really cool — I was like, “Do you trust me? I know who this person is and I can show you better than I can explain it to you.” She was like, “Sure, no problem.” And so, for two days, I went shopping here in L.A. and got all the costumes. Literally everything that I wear, that is what we pulled and bought. The moment I put it on, I was like, oh, OK. When you’re going from movie to movie, a lot of times, actors are wigged. But Sanaa Lathan, who had done a movie all about hair [“Nappily Ever After”], was like, “I think you really should rock your own hair.” I was like, no, no, I don’t want to do it. But the moment that we did the look, I was like, damn it, that’s it. Being that it was my own hair, I had to rock my hair like that on and off the set. The attention you get from that — I couldn’t be more different from it. I’m not method and I don’t usually subscribe to that. But it allowed me to stay in it and understand her. More