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      Jeff Weiss, an Unconventional Theatrical Force, Dies at 82

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      Downtown, he was known for sprawling works and vivid performances, but later in his career he drew praise as an actor in mainstream productions, too.Jeff Weiss, a playwright and actor known for innovative, offbeat shows in out-of-the-way New York theaters as well as for roles in mainstream productions, including more than a dozen on Broadway, died on Sept. 18 in Macungie, Pa., near Allentown. He was 82.His brother, Steve, said the cause was metastasized prostate cancer.Mr. Weiss was an important figure in the experimental theater scene in New York, beginning in the 1960s. His plays were seen at Caffe Cino in the West Village, La MaMa on the Lower East Side and other Manhattan spots known for the provocative and the outlandish. Those include his own Good Medicine and Company, a Lower East Side storefront theater that he ran with his partner in theater and in life, Carlos Ricardo Martinez. His plays were also sometimes staged in Allentown, where he grew up.The works he wrote were impossible to classify and did not lend themselves to conventional plot description. In “F.O.B.” (1972), Mr. Weiss spent much of his onstage time immersed in a bathtub full of cold water. “Hot Keys” (1992), Mr. Weiss’s response to the AIDS crisis, was a late-night serial about a serial killer.Some of his performances lasted four hours, five hours, even eight hours. His best-known and most ambitious work could be said to have lasted decades. It was called “… And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid.” Part I was first staged in 1966. Part IV appeared in 1984.In some of his works, including “… And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid, Part III,” Mr. Weiss played all the characters — and there could be a lot. In others, he made roles for other actors and could place extraordinary demands on them. “… And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid, Part IV,” for instance, consisted of dozens of scenes, with more added as the run went along, and they could be presented in any order.“Jeff would post the order for a particular evening an hour before the show,” Nicky Paraiso, an actor and musician who worked with him for decades, said by phone.The actress Kate Valk was part of the grueling adventure that was “Part IV,” which was subtitled “The Confessions of Conrad Gehrhardt,” with Mr. Weiss playing the title character.“Was Conrad a maniac?,” Ms. Valk said by email. “Or an actor who played a maniac? That was the edge Jeff walked in his work. It always felt a little dangerous.”“To perform onstage with him,” she added, “was to be right there inside his glorious mania, virile and vibrant.”A 1966 poster for “…And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid,” Mr. Weiss’s best-known and most ambitious work.La Mama ArchivesMr. Weiss performing in “…And That’s How the Rent Gets Paid” at La MaMa on the Lower East Side in 1966.La MaMa ArchivesThe goings-on could be tough sledding for anyone expecting a conventional play. In 1982, when Charles Richter, then the chairman of the theater department at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, brought to the school a Weiss play called “Last Gasps,” he was blunt in describing its appeal to The Morning Call, the Allentown newspaper.“I wouldn’t consider the play avant-garde,” he said. “I think it defies categorization. It’s part vaudeville, part intellectual, part blatant sensationalism. I think a large part of the audience won’t get it.”Yet enough people got Mr. Weiss that he developed a following, one that stretched beyond the experimental theater world. Part IV of his “Rent” opus drew a favorable notice from Mel Gussow in The New York Times during a production with members of the Wooster Group in SoHo in the summer of 1984.“As the play entered its fourth hour in the un-air-conditioned Performing Garage,” Mr. Gussow wrote, “one had long ago accepted discomfort as a way of Weiss life. Though the evening had its excesses, it also had a visceral investiture of theatrical imagination.”One whose attention Mr. Weiss caught was the actor Kevin Kline, who became a fan and friend and in 1986 was preparing to play Hamlet for Joseph Papp’s Public Theater.“During the casting process I was trying to think what actor could play the Player King,” Mr. Kline said by email, “one who could both inspire and confound Hamlet, someone as humane as he was unabashedly histrionic. To me Jeff was the man.”He left a note at Mr. Weiss’s theater asking if he’d consider auditioning, though that prospect seemed unlikely; some years earlier, Mr. Weiss had been cast in a Public show but had withdrawn, unable to handle the demands of conventional theater.“To my surprise, he responded favorably,” Mr. Kline said. “He came in and auditioned for the director, Liviu Ciulei, who was so knocked out that he asked him to play not only the Player King but also the ghost of Hamlet’s father, as well as Osric. He couldn’t get enough of him.”Mr. Weiss acknowledged that casting him was a risk.“They took bets at the theater on whether I would show up for rehearsal, and how long I would last,” he told The Times in 1986. “I do have a reputation for fleeing in the face of possible success.”Succeed he did.“Next to Mr. Kline, the most intriguing acting comes from Jeff Weiss, an idiosyncratic actor and playwright in the experimental theater,” Mr. Gussow wrote in his review. Mr. Weiss, he wrote, “reveals a hitherto concealed talent for the classics.”That performance started a run of more conventional acting jobs for Mr. Weiss. Those included Broadway appearances in “Macbeth” in 1988 with Glenda Jackson and Christopher Plummer, an “Our Town” revival later that year, “Present Laughter” in 1996, “The Invention of Love” in 2001 and “Henry IV” in 2003, with a cast that included Mr. Kline.Mr. Weiss worked in high-profile Off Broadway productions as well, including as a drag queen in “Flesh and Blood,” Peter Gaitens’s stage adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel, at New York Theater Workshop in 2003. “Mr. Weiss is terrific,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times, “trilling the expected, crowd-pleasing notes while providing a darker, more intricate bass line.”Mr. Weiss found himself in demand elsewhere. He turned up as a judge in multiple episodes of the television series “Law & Order.” In 1990, at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., he took on the role of Ebenezer Scrooge in the seasonal production of “A Christmas Carol,” to much acclaim. Francis X. Kuhn directed that production.“A professional actor with no headshot, Jeff was described to me as a downtown theater ‘outlaw,’” Mr. Kuhn said by email. “But he proved to be a generous and exhilarating collaborator.”“He was deeply and absolutely committed to exploring and sharing Scrooge’s spiritual journey,” Mr. Kuhn added. “That’s what he cared about, and what he made the audience care about.”Mr. Weiss and Cherry Jones in an Off Broadway production of “Flesh and Blood” in 2003. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJeffrey George Weiss was born on April 30, 1940, in Reading, Pa., and grew up in Allentown. His father, Benjamin, was an executive at a cement company, and his mother, Helen (Eagle) Weiss, was a homemaker.Mr. Weiss wrote his first plays before he was a teenager. Formal education, though, was not for him.“I was kicked out of school pretty regularly, because I was a cutup and kind of neurotic,” he told The Times in 1986, “so I left when I was 16.”Soon he was in New York and had met Mr. Martinez. Their Good Medicine and Company theater had 10 seats and, in the early years, no electricity.“People would learn to bring flashlights to a Jeff Weiss show,” using them to help illuminate the stage, said Mr. Paraiso, Mr. Weiss’s longtime collaborator.Ticket revenue was put to quick use — to buy the makings of dinner, to be served to the playgoers.“While I was performing,” Mr. Weiss told The Pittsburgh Press in 1988, “Carlos was upstairs cooking, so when the show was over, the food would be ready.”Mr. Weiss moved back to Allentown in 1997, though he continued to appear in New York productions. His brother said that Mr. Weiss had wanted to be near their aging mother. Mr. Martinez joined him, and when Mr. Martinez developed Parkinson’s disease, Mr. Weiss cared for him, Mr. Paraiso said.Mr. Martinez died in 2017. Mr. Weiss’s brother is his only survivor.Mr. Kline recalled a vibrant personality offstage as well as on.“Jeff loved to laugh,” he said. “Being with him, just like watching his plays, could make you giddy. There was no one like him.” More

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      ‘Hedda Gabler’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’: 2 Takes That Shout Subtext

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      Irreverence can be illuminating. But Bedlam’s energetic productions of classics by Ibsen and Shakespeare lose insight in the process.Forgoing subtlety onstage has its advantages. Exaggeration leaves little room for doubt, obvious feelings burn hot, and in-your-face humor doesn’t‌ risk flying over your head. At least, that’s the idea. But in the Bedlam theater company’s productions of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” and Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” now playing in repertory at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn, subtlety isn’t just dead, it’s the devil in need of exorcis‌ing.Take the newlywed Hedda Tessman, sunk low in a chair, coolly lighted at center stage as the 1891 play that bears her maiden name begins. Portrayed with viscous, palpable disaffection by Susannah Millonzi, she is a woman so unsuited to domesticity that her chair is leopard print. And when Hedda greets her doting, unrefined aunt (“Visiting us so early — that’s so very… kind of you”) her expression of good manners, which Ibsen soaked with subtext, becomes overtly sarcastic, subverting the play’s careful attention to the ways people use language to hide or reveal themselves.Bedlam, now in its 10th anniversary season, has built a reputation for reinterpreting classic texts, like “Sense & Sensibility” and “The Crucible,” with stripped-down, energetic stagings and a modern touch. Under the direction of the artistic director Eric Tucker, many of these revivals have sought to expose the essential bones of familiar works. Here, Tucker, who directs and acts in both productions, seems to be reacting against received ideas about the texts, resisting what’s expected of these classics with an exceptionally playful hand. But it’s a tricky gesture that, in each case, tends to obscure more than it illuminates.Using a colloquial adaptation of “Hedda Gabler” by Jon Robin Baitz, the production recasts the drama of betrayal in captivity as a daffy but dour comedy that happens to end in death. If Ibsen is known for his design of psychological interiors and subconscious intentions, here every room is turned inside-out, with feelings and attitudes sprung in the open. Rag-tag vintage furniture is pressed against the periphery of the stage (set design is by John McDermott), suggesting the drawing-room realism that Ibsen fathered has been deliberately cast aside.With a Hedda this sour and cunning from the start, her union with Tucker’s chipper, oblivious Tessman can only come off as a farce, its absurdity radiating outward. Line readings defy logic; one moment Tessman is shouting to Hedda as if she’s on the roof, the next he’s surprised to find her right beside him. Innuendo turns literal, as when Judge Brack (Ryan Quinn) all but humps the legs of Hedda’s chair. Dialogue and action are mismatched, as when Hedda claws meat off a roast chicken in the fridge, though she purports to be reading a letter. (She’s a woman of appetite, remember?) ‌‌The consequence of so much funny business is that there’s not much to ponder about the characters’ inner lives, which makes Ibsen far less interesting to watch. And the lighting (by Carolina Ortiz) and sound (by Jane Shaw) are heavy handed, indicating when the mood turns serious and sincere. With Hedda’s misery so loud and clear upfront, modulation also becomes a problem. By the time her foul deeds come to a head, she is throwing up, slapping the walls and hollering in a way that seems unsuited to a woman averse to public scandal.Lisa Birnbaum as Hermione and Eric Tucker as Leontes in “The Winter’s Tale,” the most unwieldy of Shakespeare’s plays, with a bear attack and a statue that comes to life.Ashley GarrettThe transgression of social bonds — between husbands and wives, fathers and sons, leaders and citizens — links the repertory pairing and seems to make Bedlam’s case for its resonance in the present.Suspicion of infidelity kicks off “The Winter’s Tale,” in which Tucker’s volatile, and obtuse, patriarch Leontes rules over a frat party-style royal court. With its swing from apparent tragedy to roving rom-com, and its grab bag of devices (a bear attack, a 16-year time jump, a statue that comes to life), Shakespeare’s play is an unwieldy beast to wrangle onstage, and one of the most amenable to bold and wacky interpretations. ‌‌Leontes and the neighboring king Polixenes (Elan Zafir) start out demonstrating their brotherly affection by slapping each other across the face with flour tortillas between shots of cheap liquor. But when Leontes suspects the queen Hermione (Lisa Birnbaum) is pregnant by Polixenes instead of him, the jig is up in a flurry of banishments and deaths that leaves him without his wife, child and friend.A cast of seven (some of whom appear in both productions) double and triple up roles in “The Winter’s Tale,” with only slight changes in the ’80s thrift-store costumes by Daniele Tyler Mathews to help viewers distinguish between them. The most impressive juggling act comes from Zafir, who plays both father and son in a confrontation at the altar of young love. Karen Alvarado, as faithful servant Camillo (and the ardent, naïve Thea in “Hedda Gabler”) is a standout in both, a rare anchor of earnestness and ease. But not everyone is as comfortable, especially with Shakespeare’s verse; under Tucker’s direction, some of the actors fall into the trap of gesturing at rather than conveying the meaning of words.There is something to be said for a company clearly having a blast — several, including Tucker, broke character cracking up at Mike Labbadia’s Clown (modeled after his pop culture moniker Chad, or loathsome alpha male), a laugh that might have been more fun were everyone in on the joke.Improvised bits of modern dialogue and a variety of acting styles give the productions a sense of a particularly collaborative rehearsal process. Challenging the form and style of revered material is what keeps them alive. But neither revival makes easy work of identifying cohesive or incisive arguments about the texts while also allowing the audience to follow along.If less can be more, as previous Bedlam productions have shown, “Hedda Gabler” and “The Winter’s Tale” suggest that more can also be too much. So much exuberance can demonstrate a breach of trust in the material, and the audience’s ability to understand it. As Ibsen and Shakespeare both point out, underestimating people comes at a cost.Hedda GablerThrough Nov. 19 at the Irondale Center, Brooklyn; bedlam.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.The Winter’s TaleThrough Nov. 20 at the Irondale Center, Brooklyn; bedlam.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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      Patti LuPone Says She Resigned From Stage Actors’ Union

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      The actress left months ago, and revealed her exit on Monday after her name arose during discussion of the errant reprimanding of a “Hadestown” patron who was using a captioning device.The much-honored stage actress Patti LuPone said on Monday that she resigned from the labor union Actors’ Equity months ago, revealing the news after her history of reprimanding cellphone-using audience members was invoked in a new controversy about the policing of electronic devices.The drama that consumed the corner of social media obsessed with theater began to unfold last week when a “Hadestown” audience member with hearing loss said she had been reprimanded by one of that show’s current stars, Lillias White, while using a theater-approved captioning device mistaken for a cellphone.“On a daily basis, actors are confronted with digital devices illegally capturing their work,” the musical’s producers said in a statement on Monday. “In this case, following a terrible miscommunication, in the middle of a live performance, Lillias mistook the closed-captioning device for a cellphone.”The “Hadestown” incident, for which the show apologized, prompted significant criticism of White. Then, on social media, LuPone’s name was cited in the discussion because she had in the past been celebrated for seizing a cellphone from a texting theater patron.Some of the criticism directed toward White was ugly. “The discourse on social media around the incident has devolved into racist, ageist and other abhorrently discriminatory language we unequivocally condemn,” the production said.The tenor of the criticism of White, who is African American, prompted some on social media to recall that LuPone, who is white, has been lauded on occasions when she has chastised misbehaving theatergoers.Because the patron White reprimanded was using a device for legitimate purposes, it is an imperfect comparison. But LuPone turned to Twitter on Monday in an apparent effort to distance herself from the situation, writing: “Quite a week on Broadway, seeing my name being bandied about. Gave up my Equity card; no longer part of that circus. Figure it out.”LuPone left the union over the summer, long before the “Hadestown” incident, upon finishing her Tony-winning run in a revival of “Company.”“When the run of ‘Company’ ended this past July, I knew I wouldn’t be onstage for a very long time,” LuPone said in a statement emailed in response to a question about her tweet. “And at that point I made the decision to resign from Equity.”Her departure came after a change in union rules that eliminated a cap on dues collected from high-earning performers. She had expressed concern about the change and the way it was communicated, according to people familiar with the thought process behind her resignation.Her spokesman, Philip Rinaldi, when asked about the issue, said only: “It was a number of issues that led to her decision. Patti was an Equity member for 50 years.”It is not clear what the statement means about her professional future. But this is not the first time LuPone, 73, who also won Tonys for her work in “Evita” and a revival of “Gypsy,” has said she was going to step back. In 2017 she said she expected “War Paint” to be her final musical; a year later she was back onstage in “Company” in London.In some instances, it is possible for performers who are not members of Equity to perform on Broadway. It is also possible to rejoin a union.The “Hadestown” controversy has also renewed discussion about monitoring audience behavior. The playwright Jeremy O. Harris urged reconsideration of such policies, saying, “Having a more realistic relationship to technology as well as more generous read of the actions of others would stop things like this from happening.” More

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      ‘My Window’ Review: An Out-and-Proud Trailblazer Finds Her Way

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      Melissa Etheridge’s limited run at New World Stages is a celebration of its smoky-voiced 61-year-old star, and contains some confessions, along with her hits.Not long into the second act of Melissa Etheridge’s new Off Broadway show, she tells a funny, sexy, completely charming tale of falling in love with a married woman in the late 1980s, and pairs it, playfully, with a gorgeous version of her 1995 song “I Want to Come Over.”Discreetly — no names — she recalls what a blast she and that partner and their showbiz friends used to have together in 1990s Los Angeles, in the heady early days of Etheridge’s rock fame. Then she mentions cannabis, which she didn’t enjoy at the time.“It always made me feel like everyone knew I was hiding something, you know?” she said on Friday, the second night of a 12-performance run at New World Stages. “Like they could all see this sadness that I was hiding.”In an almost solo show that wants very much to be a good time for the audience, and a kind of celebration of its smoky-voiced 61-year-old star, suddenly here is a confession of personal vulnerability — spoken, not sung. It turns out to be valuable foreshadowing, because there is some deep, dark sadness in “Melissa Etheridge Off Broadway: My Window — A Journey Through Life.” And mostly, amid some staggeringly beautiful renditions of songs, that sadness is well camouflaged.Written by Etheridge with her wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge, and directed by Amy Tinkham, the show recounts the story of Etheridge’s life in strict chronological order, from the day she was born in 1961 in Leavenworth, Kan. It’s a journey from midcentury, Midwestern conformity to a career as a Grammy Award-winning, out-and-proud trailblazer.Starting with darling black-and-white baby pictures shown huge on the upstage wall, the smart projections (by Olivia Sebesky) become increasingly intricate and eye-popping throughout the evening, particularly when Etheridge’s memories turn psychedelic. (The minimal set is by Bruce Rodgers, the luscious lighting by Abigail Rosen Holmes.)Some Etheridge hits are, of course, among the two dozen or so songs and song fragments strung through the performance, including a fiery version of “Bring Me Some Water,” from her 1988 debut album, and a buoying, sing-along “Come to My Window,” the 1993 hit that gives the show its name. She also plays endearing obscurities, like the first songs she wrote as a child.For all its musical polish, though, the show is verbally shaggy; Etheridge isn’t reciting memorized text but rather improvising, storyteller-style, from an outline of the piece’s main points, which scroll by on her monitor. (You will notice the monitor only if it’s behind you and you cheat like I did and turn around and look for it.) The upside to that looseness is a sense of thoughts articulated in the moment. The downside is a certain lack of eloquence.The instant Etheridge gets a guitar to strap across her chest, her whole body relaxes.Richard Termine for The New York TimesClocking in at three hours, including an intermission, the performance is surprisingly light on songs for about the first 30 minutes, and pushes a little too hard with the comedy of a roadie character (Kate Owens), who comes on to swap out Etheridge’s many jackets and guitars. (Costumes are by Andrea Lauer.)Initially, Etheridge doesn’t even have the armor of an instrument as she roams the stage. The instant she gets a guitar to strap across her chest, her whole body relaxes. Similarly, she is most expressive when she has the rhythm and structure of music to hold onto. So the show’s chatter works best when it’s threaded around and through a song, as happens gracefully with “Juliet,” the companion to Etheridge’s reminiscence of her brief time at Berklee College of Music, and of finding lesbian community in Boston.A life is a delicate thing to parade onstage, even or maybe especially in front of an adoring audience — lots of women, many apparent baby boomers and more straight couples than you might expect. A theatrical autobiography that’s honest can’t be neat, because some roughnesses refuse to be smoothed. So it goes here with the discussion of family, both the one Etheridge was born into and the ones she formed with the two women who are the other mothers of her four children.Personal details are skated around, presumably for the usual reasons — privacy, or to spare someone’s feelings, or because humans are complex and there simply isn’t time. Her father, who chaperoned her at the gigs she played when she was underage and responded with love when she came out to him as a young adult, emerges as a sympathetic figure. Others, in some ways including Etheridge, come off less than well. It’s here that you sense the sadness, hidden until it’s not.There comes a point, near the end of the show, when the stage plunges into inky blackness and Etheridge tells the story of the death of her 21-year-old son, Beckett, in 2020. It is spare and searing, the words uttered from a pit of grief.And as she speaks of the healing power that performance has for her, you realize that this is part of what she’s doing here — that music and memories and the embrace of an ardent crowd might help, just maybe, to assuage the pain.Melissa Etheridge Off Broadway: My Window — A Journey Through LifeThrough Oct. 29 at New World Stages, Manhattan; melissaetheridge.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      A Pioneering Black Ballerina’s Life Story Comes to the Stage

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      HOUSTON — When Lauren Anderson was promoted to principal dancer at Houston Ballet in 1990, she made history as one of the first Black women to be a principal at a major American ballet company.“My goal was just to get in the company,” Anderson, 57, said in a recent interview. “My dream was to be a soloist. I didn’t expect to go past soloist.”But she did, dancing the lead in ballets like “Cleopatra” and collecting accolades. Reviewing “Cleopatra” in 2000, the critic Clive Barnes called her “the superb, stunning Lauren Anderson” and “an authentic star.” (The snake headband she wore is in the National Museum of African American History and Culture.) Now Anderson has another kind of starring role: as the subject of a new show, “Plumshuga: The Rise of Lauren Anderson,” which opened last night at the Stages theater here and runs through Nov. 13.Written by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, the first Black poet laureate of Houston, “Plumshuga” — the title riffs on one of her signature roles, the Sugarplum Fairy in “The Nutcracker” — features performers from the Ensemble Theater, Houston Ballet and Houston Ballet Academy. The show, which charts Anderson’s rise and career in ballet, also examines her personal life, including experiences of abuse and her struggles with alcoholism.Anderson as Cleopatra and Dominic Walsh as Marc Antony in Houston Ballet’s “Cleopatra” in 2000. Geoff Winningham/Houston Ballet
      “In approaching this work, I considered three paths,” Mouton said in an interview. “Who is she as an artist, who is she as a woman and who is she as an addict? And how do those things give us a more whole and complete understanding of Lauren Anderson — the person?”Anderson, whose repertory included works by George Balanchine and Kenneth MacMillan, was a pioneer in a field that still struggles with diversity. One of the few Black women to follow her as a principal dancer in a major company, Misty Copeland of American Ballet Theater has credited her as an inspiration. Copeland’s stardom is a welcome sign, Anderson believes, of needed change in the industry.“I think when it comes to changing things that need to be changed, the young people got it,” she said.After Anderson, a Houston native, retired from dancing in 2006 (and after revelations about her addiction became public, in 2009, when she was pulled over in Houston for speeding), she set out on a new professional path, though one in which dance remains central: She works as the associate director of the Houston Ballet’s education and community engagement program, a role that allows her to cultivate the next generations of dancers.In a recent conversation at Houston Ballet, Anderson spoke about “Plumshuga,” being a ballet pioneer and being frank about addiction. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.from “Plumshuga,” on opening night.Take me back to 1990. What was your initial reaction to your promotion?So let’s get this right. In 1990, I didn’t know my promotion was historic. I thought my promotion was that the miracle happened. I didn’t think I’d be at the top of the company. I was thinking that’s probably impossible. And lo and behold, it happened. I knew I was the first Black person to be a principal dancer. But I wasn’t thinking history making; I was just thinking, “I got to the mountaintop.” Now I know. And throughout my career, I’ve understood the gravity of it.You said in an interview, “My blackness never bothered me, it bothered other people.” How did Houston react?I’ve been here my whole life, for 57 years. The city of Houston has seen my face on the stage since 1972, because I was in Houston Ballet’s first Nutcracker. However, in 1983, when I did my first Sugarplum Fairy, when I turned to face the audience, they let out this huge gasp, because they just hadn’t seen this. And then, at the end of the show, we got a standing ovation. From that moment on, the city of Houston has had their arms open, and they have given me a giant hug.The staff had to deal with some things, though. Whenever there’s hate mail or anything of that kind, the F.B.I. opens a file, so I know Houston Ballet’s F.B.I. file on me has to be a mile high. Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesDeborah D.E.E.P Mouton, the first Black poet laureate of Houston, wrote “Plumshuga” after talking with Anderson over three years.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesYou’ve been recognized as a groundbreaking dancer with regard to race, but also challenging norms of visibility for dark-skinned Black women in the arts. How did you grapple with racism and colorism in the industry?It wasn’t an issue here at the Houston Ballet; it was an issue in other places. Because we’ve had every color brown here. But there has definitely been a longstanding issue. Beige ballerinas are allowed to be more things than dark-skinned ballerinas. There’s definitely more beige ballerinas that are at the top of their company than there are those who are dark-skinned.I see the way little girls look at me, and I’ll never forget the way the little brown girls look at me. It’s with that look of “I could be her.”How did you arrive at the decision to allow someone else to tell your life story onstage?Deborah Mouton is someone that I absolutely respect, so when she came to me and said that she’d like to write a piece about my life, I was like, “Are you sure?”What was the process?You could just really piece the pieces together, but she said, “No, I want it in your words.” So we did three years of interviews.She took my words and made them sound like cursive. She makes me sound so good. So much so that when I read it, and I hear it, some of it hurts. I get to relive and reflect and have all the feels. That’s how in my words it is.Deborah wrote it, and I changed things like the floor wasn’t wood, it was linoleum; or the wall wasn’t green, it was purple. We did a drive-through of some of the places we talked about around Houston.A scene from “Plumshuga.”Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesWhat were some of those places?We went to where Houston Ballet was when I first walked through the doors in 1972; it’s now a drive-through Starbucks. We drove by Lamar High School. We went to the house I was born in. We went by my dad’s house.You’ve been candid about your struggles with addiction. Did you feel any hesitation about that period of your life being on display in this manner?If I was going to tell my story, how could I leave that out? It was awesome in the sense that I was full, and I got to empty myself to Deborah after a certain amount of trust. One day I emptied so well, I stopped seeing my therapist. And I was scared. But when I talked to my therapist about that decision, she said, “We’re supposed to get divorced honey, it’s OK.”Are there any aspects of the performance that might surprise the audience?Everything. Some people will know these sides, but nobody knows what I was thinking or what I was feeling. I didn’t let people know what I really thought and really felt when I walked into my first dance studio. It’s the feels all the way through.Destiny McGlothen, 7, and her mother, Danielle, as the Lauren Anderson character is awarded prestigious roles early in her career.Annie Mulligan for The New York TimesYou’ve been cited as an inspiration by Misty Copeland, your fellow Houstonian Solange Knowles and other Black artists. Do you feel a sense of surprise or pride for inspiring so many Black women?I’m absolutely full anytime anyone says that Lauren Anderson inspired them. But I’m just me, I’m just Lauren Anderson from the Third Ward in Houston.I remember speaking with Tina Knowles years ago at an event and she told me that she brought her daughters to see me perform. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the Solange post [crediting Anderson as an inspiration]. The last time I saw Solange, who went to school with my stepdaughter, she was a kid!How has ballet changed since you retired, and will those changes improve conditions for dancers from marginalized communities?Young people are louder than we were. Oh, this generation feels their feels, honey, and they let you know how they feel! And I love that.What keeps you in Houston?My roots are deep. The Houston Ballet, my family’s here. My parents are here and are getting older, and I want to be with them as much as possible.After the performance wraps, how do you intend to continue sharing your own story?The thing about being in recovery is that you recover by giving it away. You keep your sobriety by giving it back, just like dance. How do I keep performing? How do I keep ballet? By sharing it with the next generation. More

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      Review: In ‘Everything’s Fine,’ the Discomfort of Adolescence

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      In Douglas McGrath’s one-man show, his account of an experience as a teenager unfurls with the can’t-look-away quality of a slow-motion crash.What’s unnerving about “Everything’s Fine” is how breezy the tone is: The story at the center of Douglas McGrath’s solo autobiographical show, set during his youth in Texas, is one of emotional and psychological distress, after all. McGrath is not exactly making fun of what happened, but he’s not not making fun of it, either. It is hard to tell whether this is a deliberate choice abetted by John Lithgow’s direction or if McGrath is not a crafty enough performer to shake off a naturally avuncular demeanor.But the droll tone is effective, if sometimes startling. And while McGrath may not be a superlative actor, he is a good storyteller — he is best known as the screenwriter and director of “Emma” (1996), and he wrote the Tony-nominated book for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” His account of something that happened to him as a teenager unfurls with the can’t-look-away quality of a slow-motion crash. You might be appalled but laughing, eager to hear what happened next while also dreading it.McGrath, 64, grew up in Midland, a wind-ridden town in West Texas where many people moved to work in the oil and gas industry. Such was the case for his father, a Connecticut-raised Princetonian with “the deluxe name Raynsford Searle McGrath,” whose family included a witty wife and their three children, of which Doug, as he was known, was the eldest.McGrath sets up the scene evocatively, and for a little while, it looks as if the show will be a cozy family tale. His father had worn a glass eye since a terrible accident when he was 10, and his mother, Beatrice, had worked at Harper’s Bazaar magazine alongside Diana Vreeland and an upstart Andy Warhol. McGrath could have easily milked an entire evening out of his urbane parents living in the wilds of Texas.The focus, however, eventually tightens on eighth grade. Doug was 14, and a new history teacher, whom he calls Mrs. Malenkov, entered the picture. This married 47-year-old mother took a liking to him, to put it mildly, and started leaving notes written on blue onionskin paper in his locker. (John Lee Beatty’s set evokes a schoolroom looking half-abandoned and a little desperate.)Those were different times, and a 14-year-old boy from the early 1970s was not like our modern teenagers constantly plugged into the illuminating world of the internet. But even by the standards of his time, McGrath paints a portrait of himself as being a little slow on the uptake. “I was not precocious,” he says. “I was barely coscious.”Yet even the innocent, happy-go-lucky Doug realized that Mrs. Malenkov was not well and that the situation was untenable. When he finally came up with a way to extricate himself from his predicament, the scheme was equally laughable and cringe inducing.As our narrator, McGrath is, of course, aware he is navigating a minefield, and he does so adroitly and without judgment — if anything, he makes fun of himself the most and looks at Mrs. Malenkov in a perplexed, sensitive manner. He acknowledges the impropriety of what he is dealing with, recreating his feelings as he experienced them in the heat of the moment and as an adult looking back. But this also means that McGrath picks whatever point of view suits the story’s suspenseful unfolding, and it’s not always coherent. Sometimes he editorializes with the wisdom he has now, and sometimes he is content to remain locked in his adolescent perspective, which means ignoring glaring blind spots. What was Mrs. Malenkov’s husband up to, for example?Songs like “Teacher’s Pet” and “Come On-a My House” play between some scenes — a little on the nose, too, setting up easy chuckles. Which does not mean they are entirely comfortable.Everything’s FineThrough Jan. 22 at the DR2 Theater, Manhattan; everythingsfineplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Exploring James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry’s Friendship

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      The acclaimed writers are communing once again in productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” and “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.James Baldwin recalled first meeting Lorraine Hansberry in 1958 at the Actors Studio in Manhattan after a workshop production of “Giovanni’s Room,” a play based on his novel of the same name. The “biggest names in American theater” were there, he noted, and gave their critiques of the play. But then he locked eyes with a woman yet-unknown to the theater establishment who articulated a full appreciation of him and his work. Of that encounter, Baldwin wrote: “She talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten.”For the next seven years, Hansberry and Baldwin would continue to find moments of deep understanding, forging a relationship even though they often did not live in the same place. But their storied friendship was cut short by Hansberry’s untimely death at the age of 34 in 1965.This fall the two writers are communing once again at the Public Theater and, perhaps, finishing a few conversations, with productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” created by and co-produced with the Elevator Repair Service, and a revival of Hansberry’s classic play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara.From left: John Clay III, Paige Gilbert and Tonya Pinkins in Robert O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” running through Oct. 23, presents a re-enactment of a 1965 debate between Baldwin, the writer and civil rights activist, and William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative founder of National Review. The two men argued the motion, “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.”The play provides a historical touch point for our fractious political present. The director John Collins said: “I think there are several ways to frame why you should listen to those you disagree with, and sometimes it is because one should allow for the possibilities that the people you don’t agree with might have something intelligent and worthwhile to say. The other reason, though, is to really understand the seriousness, and sometimes the danger, of these other arguments.”Drawing verbatim from the debate transcript, the play ends with an imagined conversation between Baldwin and Hansberry that was inspired by a 1961 discussion about Black Americans in culture. (In addition to Baldwin and Hansberry, the other participants included the essayist and publisher Emile Capouya, the journalist and social commentator Nat Hentoff, the poet Langston Hughes and the writer and critic Alfred Kazin.) While they focused primarily on the question of Black writers in American literature, they also considered the status of Black Americans.On the subject of crafting Black characters, Baldwin explained, “Faulkner has never sat in a Negro kitchen while the Negroes were talking about him, but we have been sitting around for generations, in kitchens and everywhere else, while everybody talks about us, and this creates a very great difference.”Hansberry confirmed, “Which is a different relationship, because the employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house.” She continued as Baldwin and the rest of the room erupted in laughter, “We have been washing everybody’s underwear for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean.” The recording captures Baldwin and Hansberry’s intimacy and the joy they felt in each other’s company.Imani Perry, the Princeton University professor whose books include “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry,” describes theirs as “an intimate intellectual companionship. They are both deeply concerned with Black life and regular Black folks’ lives, and also think about the politics of race and its depiction in the public arena.”“He trusted her artistically, which is a big deal, for someone who is his junior, younger than him, and also when they became friends, he had a larger visible platform,” Perry said of Baldwin, who was 34 when he met a 28-year-old Hansberry. “It was a beautifully intimate friendship. It’s the kind of thing that I think every person who’s either an artist or intellectual, and certainly a person who’s both, yearns for.”Greig Sargeant as James Baldwin and Daphne Gaines as Lorraine Hansberry in the Elevator Repair Service’s production of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” at the Public Theater.Richard Termine for The New York TimesGreig Sargeant, who plays Baldwin and conceived the play, notes that Elevator Repair Service wanted to show the public and private Baldwin. “We did some research,” he said, “and one of the things that we found was that article ‘Sweet Lorraine,’” the essay Baldwin wrote to eulogize his dear friend. In writing the last scene of the play, Sargeant and April Matthis, who originated the Hansberry role, consulted numerous essays, interviews and speeches. Baldwin and Hansberry “sharpen each other by having these debates,” Matthis said, “and it’s always loving, and it’s all meant to hold each other to account with so much love.”The Public Theater’s fall season also includes a revival of Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a Black family’s struggles to achieve their dreams within the constraints of a segregated America. The drama, directed by Robert O’Hara and opening on Oct. 19, centers on the Youngers and their decision to buy a house in a white neighborhood in Chicago. It emphasizes the impact of desegregation.To drive home this point, O’Hara decided to include a scene with a neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, that is usually cut from productions. “We know where they’re moving in many ways is more dangerous than where they were living,” he said. “I love the scene where Mrs. Johnson says she’s for ‘people pushing out.’ And then she says, but you might get bombed. She’s a harbinger of what the Youngers will face in suburban white America.”Ahead of the play’s historic premiere on Broadway (it was the first written by a Black woman to be produced there), Hansberry and Baldwin reunited in Philadelphia for its run at the Walnut Street Theater. Sargeant noted, “I read an article once where Baldwin said that the great thing about going to see ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ was that he had never seen so many Black people in the audience,” because “Black people ignored the theater because the theater ignored them.”“So now the good thing about being in 2022,” he added, “is that we have an institution that is making an effort to make positive changes for the future, having us both there at the same time, highlighting the relationship between Baldwin and Hansberry.”One hears in both O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” a longing for missed conversations. “Baldwin” offers trenchant examinations of the American condition, and “Raisin” questions the American dream. “Lorraine Hansberry had this incredible, fantastic, lightning bolt of a play, and then she died so early,” O’Hara said. She did not live to see the Black power movement, or the queer women of color who led third-wave feminism. O’Hara continued, “Imagine what she would have been able to do if she were able to dream longer with us, and that’s what’s exciting, we can now acknowledge her queerness.”Producing the play in 2022, O’Hara anticipates the impact of the civil rights movement in the late 20th century, a period that Baldwin lived through and wrote about. He continued, “Doing it downtown, we can investigate some of the more difficult crevices.”The production takes on substance abuse, depression, sexism, classism, and the virulent racism that shaped mid-20th-century American society and continues to inform our own. O’Hara said his take on the American classic draws from his general approach to making art. “I live by this tenet as an artist and a human being that I will not be limited by your imagination,” he said. “Because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean that it’s unimaginable.” Similar to Baldwin and Hansberry’s exchanges, O’Hara said, “I bring a cavalcade of interesting and exciting people around me to push me into the future.”He noted the enduring importance of Hansberry’s classic and, similar to “Baldwin and Buckley,” how it anticipates our present. “I think of it as a tragedy in hindsight,” O’Hara said. “There’s uplift in the play of them wanting to move out of where they are. But I don’t want us to get lost in the glorious ending. They are moving into the white suburbs in 1959 Chicago. I just think about King saying that Chicago was more dangerous and more racist than the South.”These two works feature questions not only about the status of America but also the theater by remembering two iconic American artists. Baldwin and Hansberry challenge, as O’Hara noted, the idea that “there’s one type of Black story. There’s one type of reality that fits Blackness.” The story contains many more chapters waiting to be written. More

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

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