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      Review: ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’,’ Saving Its Love (and Pain) for You

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      A revival of the Fats Waller musical revue emphasizes the blues in its blueprints.PITTSFIELD, Mass. — I don’t know whether the creators of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” were sending a deliberate message of ambivalence by front-loading the 1978 revue, after its delightful title number, with a song called “Lookin’ Good but Feelin’ Bad.”In any case, the team behind the rousing Barrington Stage Company revival, playing through July 9 in this becalmed Berkshires city, sure are. The up-tempo zing of that song’s melody, by Thomas Waller, better known as Fats, never completely undoes the sting of a lyric, by Lester A. Santly, that speaks of “weary days and lonely nights” spent “grievin’ over you.”That’s because the double message in this “Fats Waller Musical Show,” as the subtitle puts it, is more than intentional: It’s emblematic. Leaving intact the original plotless structure — which Richard Maltby Jr. hammered together from 30 of the hundreds of songs Waller wrote or recorded — the director and choreographer Jeffrey L. Page has subtly shaped the show to push the “grievin’” further past romance and into the sphere of Black identity.That’s true even in the breezy first act, as five skilled performers sail through insanely catchy and often risqué songs like “’T Ain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do” (which Waller recorded) and “Honeysuckle Rose” (which he wrote with Andy Razaf). These numbers are set in Harlem between the world wars, specifically at the Savoy Ballroom, as Black artists perform for Black audiences.And though it’s hard to have deep thoughts while watching people jitterbug — or while listening to “The Joint Is Jumpin’,” the exuberant first act finale — you keep noticing phrases and attitudes that have been slightly retuned. If Maltby’s brilliant original production favored a perfect coat of Broadway gloss, the Barrington version, which he approved, looks for cracks in the show’s composure.Spangled, feathered and zooted: Jarvis B. Manning Jr., from left, Allison Blackwell, Anastacia McClesky, Maiesha McQueen and Arnold Harper II in Oana Botez’s playful costumes.Daniel RaderSometimes, it’s a matter of design. Oana Botez’s exaggerated costumes — the three women profusely spangled and feathered and the two men wearing the zootiest zoot suits ever — suggest that even the playfulness of self-advertisement amounts to a form of disguise. Hidden in the proscenium of Raul Abrego’s black-and-gold Art Deco set are images of African masks.But in the second act, the meaning of the masking changes, as the uptown artists grow more popular among the downtown, mostly white crowds cartooned in “Lounging at the Waldorf.” (“They like jazz but in small doses,” goes a Maltby lyric for a Waller instrumental. “Bop and you could cause thrombosis.”) Soon the trade-off of authenticity for popularity becomes more disfiguring, as songs like “Your Feet’s Too Big,” “Find Out What They Like,” “The Viper’s Drag” and the devastating “Mean to Me” offer a performative version of Blackness that exaggerates stereotypes of belligerence, concupiscence, addiction and abandonment.Eventually, after an egregious bit of minstrelsy called “Fat and Greasy,” when the high spirits become impossible to maintain, the show takes a silent, sour pause. This puts “Black and Blue,” the climactic number, in a new context, or perhaps a clearer version of the original one. Its lover’s complaint of a lyric — “Browns and yellers, all have fellers/Gentlemen prefer them light” — moves outward to a consideration of injustice, in which the value of Black skin (“my only sin”) is set by white beholders.You wouldn’t think a show that trades in virtuosic swing could drop so deep and keep its balance, but then an ambivalence about appropriation is clearly part of Waller’s blueprint. (The tricky piano runs aren’t running from nothing.) Yet Page never goes so far as to strip the songs of their ticklish pleasures while stripping them of their varnish. More varnish might actually help; opening after just three days of previews, the production needs more shine. The sound is still muddy and the lighting still awkward. The performers, at first, are a bit of both, acting the lyrics too insistently, with a gesture for every word.Soon, though, they settle down, each delivering a specialty number that recalls (and then lets you put aside) the stellar original cast. Maiesha McQueen, singing Nell Carter’s songs, delivers a heartbreaking “Mean to Me”; Jarvis B. Manning Jr., taking on André De Shields’s track, is especially compelling in “The Viper’s Drag,” a song about smoking weed in which his body seems to become smoke itself. The others — Allison Blackwell, Arnold Harper II and Anastacia McClesky — all have great moments; the seven-person band, led by Kwinton Gray, has nothing but.Back in 1978, “Ain’t Misbehavin’” celebrated songs and performers from an era — the 1920s and ’30s — within many people’s living memory. Now, more than 40 years later, it’s important to replenish the context that time has drained. Even a show so universally admired benefits from thoughtful reconsideration. I don’t mean updating but something more like what happens in this production when we hear Luther Henderson’s stunning arrangement of “Black and Blue,” largely unchanged. It’s then that a deco drop flies up to reveal the back wall of the theater, as if what Waller swung and sang the blues about were happening now. It is.Ain’t Misbehavin’: The Fats Waller Musical ShowThrough July 9 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Boston Revisits ‘Common Ground’ and Busing, Onstage

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      The Huntington Theater Company is staging a play based on the seminal J. Anthony Lukas book, reconsidering the legacy of the busing crisis.BOSTON — It’s been nearly half a century since a federal judge ordered the city schools here desegregated by busing, and 37 years since the writer J. Anthony Lukas plumbed the resultant turmoil in his Pulitzer-winning tome, “Common Ground,” which entered the canon of seminal Boston texts.Now a leading nonprofit theater here, arguing that the shadow of busing and the depictions in “Common Ground” continue to shape this city’s reputation and its race relations, is staging a reconsideration of the book, filtered through the prism of a diverse group of contemporary artists.The play, “Common Ground Revisited,” which opened June 10 at the Huntington Theater Company, has been 11 years in the making, begun as a thought experiment in a classroom at Emerson College, and delayed, like so many stage projects, by the coronavirus pandemic. The cast is made up of Boston actors, and the work layers their observations on top of the events in the book, which follows the busing crisis through the lives of three families.“This book has a strong, vibrant legacy in Boston — many people have read it, and there are varying opinions about it and what it means,” said the playwright Kirsten Greenidge, who developed the project with Melia Bensussen; Greenidge wrote the adaptation, and Bensussen, who is the artistic director of Hartford Stage, directed it.“We’re insistent on the ‘revisited’ part,” Greenidge said. “It’s not a straight up adaptation of the book — it’s having the book be in conversation with us, in the present day.”The play, bracketed by several alternative ways of staging — and seeing — a final high school encounter between two students, one Black and one white, is not a takedown of the book, but does gently suggest that there are other historical figures whose stories also matter to Boston’s history, or, as one actor says during the play, “There’s more than one book.”The play, like the book on which it is based, depicts three families affected by busing. Cast members include Lyndsay Allyn Cox, Shanaé Burch, Omar Robinson, Elle Borders and Kadahj Bennett. T Charles Erickson“Boston, to me, as it was sold: Revolutionary War, maybe a little bit of busing, and then somehow we’re here, with ‘The Departed,’ ‘The Town’ and ‘Good Will Hunting’ sprinkled in there,” said Omar Robinson, a Baltimore native who relocated to Boston and is one of the actors in the cast. “But our actual history is so rich and multicultural and Black, and that is very frequently overlooked. Maybe not anymore, hopefully.”That history can sometimes feel very present, and sometimes very distant. The play is being staged in the city’s South End, described in “Common Ground” as “a shabbier, scruffier part of the city,” but now polished and pricey. The city, long led by white men, now has its first Asian American mayor, Michelle Wu; she followed an acting mayor, Kim Janey, who was the first Black person to hold that office, and who had been among those bused for desegregation purposes when she was a child.The school district’s demographics have also changed enormously: Today, just 14.5 percent of students in the Boston public schools are white, down from 57 percent in 1973. And the school system is about half the size it was: There are currently 48,957 students, down from 93,647. (By comparison, in New York City there are about 1 million public school students, of whom 14.7 percent are white.)Although many in the 12-person Huntington ensemble are too young to have lived through the busing crisis, it still looms large. During that era, the actress Karen MacDonald’s stepfather taught at the city’s Hyde Park High School; the actor Michael Kaye’s friend’s father was a state trooper assigned to Charlestown High School, where busing had been greeted by walkouts, protests and an attempted firebombing of the building.Kadahj Bennett, another member of the cast, noted that the events of those days had changed the course of his own schooling a generation later. “My father is an immigrant from Jamaica, moved here and he was involved in busing — he got bused to West Roxbury High and had a miserable time,” he said. “With that, my parents decided I wasn’t going to go to public school.”Theodore C. Landsmark, a city planner and scholar who now directs an urban policy research center at Northeastern University, was on his way to a meeting at Boston City Hall in 1976 when he was attacked by a man wielding an American flag. This photograph, by Stanley Forman, won a Pulitzer Prize.StanleyFormanPhotoOne striking aspect of performing a play about recent history in the city where it took place: Many people in the audience have memories of the scenes depicted, or even know some of the characters. Some nights, the actors say, patrons come up to tell them what they got wrong, or right, in portraying the city and its struggles, and to share their own memories.Some still have deeply personal connections to the history being depicted.Tito Jackson, a former Boston city councilman and mayoral candidate who now runs a cannabis company, has a particularly remarkable link: He learned a few years ago that his birth mother was Rachel E. Twymon, who was a child in one of the families featured in the book. Twymon became pregnant at age 12, and her mother insisted that the child be given up for adoption. Just last year, The Boston Globe reported that Jackson had discovered he was that child.“I read the book four or five times when I was in college — I was a history and sociology major — so finding out that my birth was in the book was a huge surprise and pretty emotional,” Jackson said in an interview. The book describes the pregnancy that led to Jackson’s birth as the result of sexual experimentation and “foolin’ around,” but Twymon said the truth is she was raped, and Jackson credits the Huntington play with making that clear.“Her life was indelibly stamped, and often framed, by this book, and, frankly, the short shrift that the book gave to a pregnancy and the birth of a child,” Jackson, who is now 47, said. “Then the folks at Emerson questioned how a 12-year-old, in 1975, with one of the strictest moms ever, got pregnant.”Jackson said of the play, “I’m very touched, and I feel that Rachel’s story — her perspective as well as her truth — was finally acknowledged.”His mother, who is now 60, is less enthusiastic, feeling that the play doesn’t sufficiently capture the horrors of the busing era. “You’re talking about a time when things were very hectic, and very unstable,” Twymon said. “The play was told nicely, and that’s not how Boston was at that time.”“Boston, to me, as it was sold: Revolutionary War, maybe a little bit of busing, and then somehow we’re here, with ‘The Departed,’ ‘The Town’ and ‘Good Will Hunting’ sprinkled in there,” said the actor Omar Robinson (foreground). T Charles EricksonAnother intense personal connection to the play is that of Theodore C. Landsmark, who now directs an urban policy research center at Northeastern University. Landsmark has had a distinguished career, but will forever be known as the Black man who was set upon by a white man wielding an American flag as a weapon in Boston’s City Hall Plaza in 1976; Stanley Forman’s photograph of the assault won a Pulitzer Prize, and came to symbolize the racism and violence of the busing era.“Initially I found it off-putting to have all of my life defined by that one moment,” Landsmark, 76, said. “Over time I’ve gotten used to it, and I recognize it’s an opportunity to talk about things I care about — the inequalities that continue to exist in Boston, particularly within our professional ranks.”Landsmark said “Common Ground” remains hugely influential. “The book is assigned to all kinds of high school and college classes as a point of entry into understanding Boston, and I know that many people look at Boston through the prism of ‘Common Ground’,” he said. “People who have never been to the city will immediately raise either the book or the photograph as a reason for their reluctance to relocate from places that are easily as racist as Boston is.”Bensussen, the director, said she wasn’t sure whether the play would have a life outside Boston, given its intensely local focus, but noted that local students were more likely to study the national Civil Rights movement than the Boston busing crisis, and said she was hopeful that the play might prompt some rethinking of that. Landsmark said he could imagine excerpts from the play being staged in a variety of settings to spark discussion about ongoing forms of segregation.As for the actors, several of them said they wanted to feel optimistic that progress is underway, but were torn about whether that is realistic given the state of the nation today.“I want there to be hope, but it’s not a thing I see every day — it’s not a thing I’ve encountered during my nearly 20 years in the city,” Robinson said. “Reading this book, working on this, it shined a bright light on its past, and therefore its present, in a lot of ways for me. Not just here in Boston — this country has got a loaded history. But I hope for hope.” More

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      New Soho Rep Season Spotlights Emerging Artists

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      A Bengali-English play and a meditation on the work of Whitney Houston are among the offerings.Soho Rep, a 65-seat Off Off Broadway theater in Lower Manhattan, has always been a home for experimental, formally inventive work. But a play in its new season is beyond anything one of the company’s three directors, Meropi Peponides, ever thought it would be able to support: A Bengali-English play.“I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams when I started working at Soho Rep that that would be something we would ever be able to produce,” Peponides said. “It’s so exciting to be able to represent the experiences of South Asian Americans in the diaspora.”The play, “Public Obscenities” by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, is part of the theater’s 2022-23 season, which is set to run from October to July 2023. There will be three world premieres, two of which were written by artists who were members of the first class of the theater’s pandemic-era job creation initiative, Project Number One.The premieres “are emblematic of what Soho Rep does,” said Peponides, who directs the theater alongside Sarah Benson and Cynthia Flowers. “We commit to an idea when it’s still an idea and develop it all the way through to production.”First up is Kate Tarker’s “Montag” (Oct. 12-Nov. 13), a play about female friendship set in a basement apartment in a small German town near an American military base. The production, which is set to be directed by Dustin Wills (“Wolf Play”), is described as a “domestic thriller, a sleep-deprivation comedy and a rebellion celebration under threat of annihilation.”It will be followed by Chowdhury’s bilingual “Public Obscenities” (Feb. 15-March 26, 2023), which originated during his time as a member of Project Number One. The production is a co-commission and coproduction with the National Asian American Theater Company’s National Partnership Project. It tells the story of a queer studies doctoral student who returns to his family home in Kolkata, India, with his Black American boyfriend and makes an unexpected discovery. Chowdhury will also direct.Closing out the season is “The Whitney Album” (May 24-July 2, 2023). The play, by Jillian Walker (who also participated in Project Number One), explores Walker’s relationship to the life and death of Whitney Houston, as well as perceptions of her in the American imagination. Jenny Koons directs.And Project Number One returns, with its third class, this time with the stylist and costume designer Hahnji Jang and the lighting designer Kate McGee. The initiative brings artists into the organization as salaried staff members ($1,250 per week) with benefits, including a year of health insurance coverage and a $10,000 budget to create a new work. More

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      Libyans Try to Move On From Conflict With Comedy and Burgers

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      MISURATA, Libya — When Taha al-Baskini won a part in a new play about soldiers who reunite after dying in combat, his costume was already in his closet. His onstage camouflage pants were the same ones he had worn as a militia fighter during Libya’s most recent civil war a few years ago, when an airstrike injured Mr. al-Baskini and killed several of his comrades as they defended their city.“People are sitting and talking to you, and the next moment they’re bodies,” Mr. al-Baskini, 24, whose brother died in the same conflict, said after a recent rehearsal for the play, “When We Were Alive,” at the National Theater in Misurata, Libya’s third-largest city. “You never forget when they were smiling and talking just moments before.”As an actor, “I try to show reality to the people,” he went on. “The message of the play is: ‘No more war.’ We’ve had enough war. We want to taste life, not death.”Friends playing in Tripoli. Many Libyans embraced militia culture as teenagers, but the trend is waning.Laura Boushnak for The New York TimesTo the audience, that message is hardly a tough sell.After more than a decade of violent chaos — years that saw their country overrun by foreign mercenaries and subjugated by militias whose power made them a law unto themselves — Libyans are clamoring for peace. The question is whether the country can maintain a brittle truce even as two rival governments and their foreign backers jockey for power, raising fears that Libya is, once again, sliding toward conflict.To achieve lasting peace, Libya needs not only to find its way out of the current political crisis, but also to demobilize a generation of young men who have grown up knowing little but war.Misurata, whose powerful militias were key to overthrowing Libya’s longtime dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, during Libya’s 2011 Arab Spring revolt, is full of such men. More than 40 of them — mostly veterans of Libya’s conflicts — now act at the National Theater, a former meeting hall for Colonel el-Qaddafi’s political party. They hope to bring Misurata entertainment, they say, and some semblance of normalcy.But there is no avoiding the city’s damage, physical and psychic alike, onstage.A damaged building in Misurata. “The theater is impacted by Libya’s reality,” said an actor, adding: “A play is like a mirror reflecting the consciousness of our society, and our society is sick.”Laura Boushnak for The New York Times“I’d rather do something funny to lighten people’s moods, instead of reminding them of the friends and brothers they lost,” said Anwar al-Teer, 49, an actor and former fighter who raised money and put his own earnings toward converting the venue, which city officials were renting out as a wedding hall, into the National’s 330-seat theater.“But the theater is impacted by Libya’s reality, even when you don’t want it to be,” he said. “A play is like a mirror reflecting the consciousness of our society, and our society is sick.”Libya’s 2011 revolution made rebels into heroes. In the years that came after, as the country splintered into rival political factions and warring regions, many former rebels and new fighters joined armed militias, hoping to defend their hometowns or simply to make a decent living. Militias could pay three times as much as the average salary or more. It was not only the money that appealed. At a time when weapons spoke loudest and wearing a militia uniform inspired deference, young men took to imitating the fighters’ style, even if they had never fired a shot: driving pickup. trucks with blacked-out windows, wearing their beards long, dressing in fatigues.Taha al-Baskini, left, Mohammed Ben Nasser, bottom, and others rehearsing for “When We Were Alive.” Many of the actors say they hope to bring a sense of normalcy to the city.Laura Boushnak for The New York Times“They were seen as heroes,” said Mohammed Ben Nasser, 27, a rising star in Libya’s small-but-growing television industry who also acts in “When We Were Alive.” “It was how you got money, power, cars.”Mr. al-Teer, the theater’s owner, has used social cachet to steer young men toward acting instead. Put them onstage, he says, and their social media likes will pile up. (Women are in the audience, and a few act, but in a country that remains deeply conservative, most of his actors are men.)“It’s like with TikTok,” he said. “Everyone wants to get famous.”For the four decades of Colonel el-Qaddafi’s rule, no one was allowed to be more famous than the dictator. Soccer players’ jerseys carried no names, only numbers, lest they gain a following. Paranoid about what it saw as the contamination of foreign ideas, the regime banned foreign films. If Libyans saw anything else during that period, it was thanks to smuggled-in videotapes and, eventually, illicit internet downloads.A building pockmarked by bullets in Misurata. “People are sitting and talking to you, and the next moment they’re bodies,” said Taha al-Baskini, an actor, recalling his time in Libya’s civil war.Laura Boushnak for The New York TimesSo Mr. al-Teer is teaching many Misuratans how to be a theater audience, down to when to clap. He stages comedies, tragedies and histories from Libya and abroad. He plans to add movie screenings, which will make his venue Misurata’s first cinema since the few allowed under Colonel el-Qaddafi closed down during the revolution. One Misuratan father recently told him that when it opens, it will be the first cinema his children have ever visited. Many of the plays carry an antiwar message. “When We Were Alive” is a black comedy in which dead soldiers return to confront their general, who survived and went on to glory. One character had joined up for money, another for fame, a third because he wanted to fight. They all ended up the same: dead.Weaponry used in the 2011 conflict, in Misurata. Its powerful militias were key to overthrowing Colonel el-Qaddafi during Libya’s 2011 Arab Spring revolt.Laura Boushnak for The New York Times“I feel like the audience knows what we we’re talking about,” Mr. al-Baskini said. “The generals are doing political deals with the enemy, while we’re fighting and giving our lives.”Mr. al-Baskini still bears scars on his left palm and left knee from Libya’s most recent civil war, from April 2019 to June 2020, in which forces from the country’s east marched on Tripoli, the capital.Three hours’ drive along the coast west of Misurata, Tripoli, too, has violence etched all over it: Half-destroyed houses still litter Tripoli’s outskirts, and families still occasionally scramble to get children home from school when rival militias clash.A business that made light of such violence might seem unwelcome. Yet right downtown is a burger joint called Guns & Buns, where most of the items on the menu are named after weapons. The Kalashnikov burger comes with mayo; the grenade with onion rings; the PK machine gun with tomatoes.Soccer practice in Misurata in May. During Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s rule, soccer players were not allowed to have names on their jerseys, a measure meant to prevent them from gaining fame.Laura Boushnak for The New York Times“DON’T CALL 911, WE JUST MAKE BURGERS,” reads a sign on the back wall — though the “N’T” has been rubbed out.The owner, Ali Mohamed Elrmeh, 40, opened Guns & Buns in 2016, when Libyans were battling to expel the Islamic State. He said the concept was controversial, but it helped his business stand out. It has become so successful, he’s about to open another branch.“Now we have kids, teens, even girls — when they hear the sounds of weapons, they can say whether it’s a Kalashnikov or a 9-mm gun or a grenade,” he said. “This is the Libyan reality. But my idea was that when you say ‘Kalashnikov’ or ‘PK,’ these things don’t have to frighten people. Now you just laugh.”In Tripoli, half-destroyed houses from the civil war still litter the capital’s outskirts, and families still occasionally scramble to get children home from school when rival militias clash.Laura Boushnak for The New York TimesLibyans hardly needed burger names or plays to remind them of the violence that has infused every part of life. After more than a decade, Libyans say, they are fed up with the lawlessness, the impunity and the violence that the militias have come to stand for. These days, dressing like a rebel is more likely to draw sneers and headshakes than imitators.Mr. Ben Nasser, the television actor, said he had many friends who had embraced militia culture as teenagers, including some who dropped out of school to join. Now, the trend is waning, and most have gone back to university or into business. A few, seeing his success, have joined him in show business.“They realized, ‘We’re fighters, but we have nothing,’” he said. “They started feeling ashamed of being fighters, because now it’s a shame on your family to be a fighter. When they looked at others, they saw you can succeed without being a fighter.”Ali Mohamed Elrmeh, 40, the owner of the Guns & Buns burger joint, in Tripoli, Libya. “My idea was that when you say ‘Kalashnikov’ or ‘PK,’” he said, “these things don’t have to frighten people. Now you just laugh.”Laura Boushnak for The New York TimesThe financial incentive to fight is also fading: Libya has been largely stable for the past two years, though politicians continue to pay militias for their own protection. One such politician, Abdul Hamid Dbeiba, the prime minister of Libya’s Tripoli-based and internationally recognized government, has blunted demand for militia jobs (and netted popularity) by handing out subsidies to families and newlyweds.But recent clashes between militias loyal to Mr. Dbeiba and others aligned with the Sirte-based rival prime minister, Fathi Bashagha, are a reminder that violence is never far away.“People are too used to these things,” said Alaa Abugassa, 32, a dentist ordering a Guns & Buns burger on a recent afternoon. “It’s become part of their reality. It’s the new normal.”A day at the beach in Tripoli. A generation of young men have grown up knowing little but war.Laura Boushnak for The New York Times More

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      ‘Hooded; or Being Black for Dummies’ Review: A Tragic Pageantry

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      Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm’s ambitious and sometimes metaphysical comedy playfully tries to tackle thorny issues at 59E59 Theaters.What defines Blackness? The idea that there might be a clear answer is absurd. But skin color is all it takes to land two diametrically opposed teenagers in the same jail cell. In the eyes of the law, at least, the connotations of race are obvious.The laughable and at times deadly assumptions that attend Black men in America are the subject of “Hooded; or Being Black for Dummies,” an imaginative and occasionally metaphysical comedy of identity by the playwright Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm. The production at 59E59 Theaters has the playful mood and aesthetic of an insightful and ambitious school project, traversing thorny terrain with deceptive simplicity.Marquis (Lambert Tamin) is splayed out on the ground playing dead, a pose he calls “Trayvonning,” after Trayvon Martin. “It’s a meme,” he explains, like planking or owling. Though his cellmate, Tru (Tarrence J. Taylor), doesn’t see the point of it, he’s not surprised to hear that Marquis was caught doing such nonsense with some white friends (in a cemetery, no less) and that only Marquis was arrested.“Typical,” says Tru, who embodies certain conventions associated with Blackness — fly kicks, street smarts, bravado — that Marquis utterly lacks. Adopted by a white mother (Tjasa Ferme), an arrogant lawyer who easily springs both boys from the town slammer, Marquis lives in Achievement Heights, where he attends an all-white academy. His mom thinks Tru would be a good (that is, Black) influence on her son and invites him to live with them (assuming that Tru comes from poverty and lacks sufficient parental care).Marquis’s classmates are caricatures of whiteness, affluence and ignorance — the girls are all blond and selfie happy, and his best friends, Hunter (Zachary Desmond) and Fielder (Henry James Eden), are troublemakers who make him the scapegoat. Marquis fits right in with his peers, with their retro-preppy uniforms and lofty life goals (costume design is by Latia Stokes). But if racial identity is a performance, Tru considers that Marquis doesn’t have the right script. So Tru writes one, called “Being Black for Dummies,” that winds up in the wrong hands.“Hooded” demonstrates a voraciousness for forms and ideas. Chisholm deploys an array of devices — scenes that reset and repeat, a light-up laugh sign — that disrupt the narrative rhythm and provoke indirect associations. Greek theater looms large (the set design, of deconstructed cardboard columns, is by Tara Higgins), and Chisholm engages with Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy to illustrate the duality inherent to his young Black characters. “There’s a little bit of Apollo and Dionysus in all of us,” Marquis tells Tru. (In case you couldn’t tell, Marquis is the kind of teenager who reads Nietzsche in bed.)It’s a lot to pack into two hours, just as a dummy’s guide to being Black could hardly be contained between binder clips. “Hooded,” presented by Undiscovered Works, is evidence of a provocative and spirited writer whose inkwell overflows onto the page. The play’s exploration of race as a kind of tragic pageantry suits its current form, but there’s more style and substance here than ultimately coheres into a convincing theatrical argument.The director, George Anthony Richardson, gives the production a freewheeling assurance. It is pleasantly lo-fi, but for projections, designed by Hao Bai, that draw wry inspiration from European art, like the schoolyard that resembles Edvard Munch’s expressionist painting. The adult actors play their teenage characters with a touch of exaggeration, suggesting both the volatile eagerness of youth and that Chisholm is interested in the origins and politics of self-presentation.“I am Black, and so whatever I do is acting Black,” Marquis tells Tru. “Or not. Or whatever!” he says, growing flustered. As with any signifier, meaning is determined by the beholder as much as by the object itself. The question isn’t what defines Blackness, but who.Hooded; or Being Black for DummiesThrough July 3 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. More

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      In ‘Downtown Stories,’ Theater That Uses New York as Its Stage

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      “Mic check 1, 2, 1, 2. Welcome to the official unofficial unauthorized ‘Hamilton!’ walking tour,” the actress Michelle J. Rodriguez called out into her portable voice amplifier, a headset with a microphone and speaker, worn like a fanny pack. “Just kidding, it’s authorized. I just like to say that.”So begins “Uncovering Downtown: A Magical Expedition of Unrecorded Dreams,” one of two walking tours in “Downtown Stories,” a series of interactive theater being staged through June 25 in downtown Manhattan. Presented by Downtown Alliance, a nonprofit organization that manages Lower Manhattan’s business improvement district, and En Garde Arts, an experimental theater company, the three productions — two guided tours and one “docu-theater” play — weave New York City’s landmarks into the storytelling.The actress Michelle J. Rodriguez leads a fictional walking tour about Alexander Hamilton. Calla Kessler for The New York Times“Who wore it better, Lin-Manuel or Alexander?” Rodriguez continued with the enthusiasm of a college tour guide, drawing from her days as an actual campus tour guide at Williams College. Fun facts are delivered like a history lesson until you remember that you’re on a fictional walking tour. Were Hamilton’s gold epaulets really sold at auction for $1.15 million? (They were.)The play takes its audience members through crowds of rushed New Yorkers and unhurried tourists, perhaps some on their own “Hamilton & Washington” history tours, meandering from Bowling Green Park to the back alley of Marketfield Street — stopping for a moment north of Bowling Green Park to observe tourists gawking at the bronze “Charging Bull” sculpture. (“Boy, do people really like to take pictures with an ass,” Rodriguez says.)Anne Hamburger, the artistic director of En Garde Arts, said the inspiration for the work came from “theater being ingrained with the city at large.”Rodriguez is enthusiastic, drawing from her days as a college tour guide. Calla Kessler for The New York TimesShe added, “That’s what I’m excited by, coming together with a group of artists and saying, ‘How would you use this city as a stage?’”All three productions tell the tales of what the company calls “dreams from New York’s oldest streets.” In “Uncovering Downtown,” directed by Jessica Holt and co-written by Holt and Mona Mansour (“The Vagrant Trilogy”), audiences follow an out-of-work Puerto Rican performance artist who takes a job leading a “Hamilton!” walking tour. “We the People (Not the Bots),” written by Eric Lockley and directed by Morgan Green, introduces a man visiting from the future. He’s here to teach lessons about the past in hopes of stopping the world from becoming a robot-controlled society. The time traveler, played by Lockley, takes his audience to the Soldiers’ Monument at Trinity Church, where he embodies a prisoner of war in 1777, and to the Department of Motor Vehicles at 11 Greenwich Street, where he tells the story of a young Jean-Michel Basquiat tagging Lower Manhattan with graffiti art.In an afrofuturistic guided tour written by Lockley, he plays a time traveler who teaches lessons about the past to protect against a possible robot-controlled society.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesIn writing a sci-fi production heavy on rendering historical moments, Lockley said he wanted to think about how Black people might “use ancestry in the future to arm ourselves.”“I want to remind people that we are more than what we see,” he said. “There’s a spiritual element to it.”In the documentary-theater piece “Sidewalk Echoes,” performed at the John Street United Methodist Church, the playwright Rogelio Martinez and the director Johanna McKeon tell the stories of working immigrants. An Irish immigrant lands a job at an Italian restaurant but can’t pronounce orecchiette. A Catholic man from India begins working as a gas station attendant but quits after three days when the owner asks him if he wears a diaper on his head. An Uzbeki immigrant by way of Israel earns his barber’s license by demonstrating a haircut on a homeless man.The production “Sidewalk Echoes” blends fact, fiction and history. The story draws from real interviews with local business owners in New York City. Calla Kessler for The New York Times“When you see someone sleeping on the subway it’s not because they don’t want to work,” the barber says. “Maybe they just work too hard.”These are the stories of the people working in downtown Manhattan’s businesses. To write the script, Martinez listened to hours of interviews that Hamburger had conducted with local business owners. He then created narratives about immigrants building their lives in New York City. Some of the lines in the play were taken verbatim from their conversations, others are composites of multiple characters, blending together history, fact and fiction.“As an immigrant myself, I’m always interested in reinventing yourself and changing the pattern of one’s stories,” said Martinez, who is from Cuba. “This is my chance to listen to a community reflect. And from there, I could craft my story.”In the show, a banker turned food and wellness advocate tells a friend back in her native Australia that here, “people are really restless.”“We reinvent ourselves,” she tells the audience, sitting in the church pews. “Body cells replace themselves every seven years or so. And that’s in our DNA. And it just so happens it’s in New York’s DNA, too.”Each 45-minute walking tour concludes at neighborhood restaurants where audience members can use their $20 ticket as a meal voucher to support a local eatery. “Sidewalk Echoes” is free. More

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      in Music

      Donald Pippin, Conductor on Broadway and Beyond, Dies at 95

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      As music director, he contributed to the success of acclaimed shows including “Oliver!,” “Mame,” “La Cage aux Folles” and “A Chorus Line.”Donald Pippin, a versatile conductor and composer who won a Tony Award in 1963 on his first try at being musical director for a Broadway show, “Oliver!,” and went on to work on some of the biggest musicals in Broadway history, including “Mame” and “A Chorus Line,” died on June 9 in Nyack, N.Y. He was 95.His former wife, the Broadway performer Marie Santell, confirmed his death, in a hospital. She said chronic obstructive pulmonary disease may have been a factor.Mr. Pippin had more than two dozen Broadway credits, mostly as music director — the person in charge of preparing the orchestra and often conducting it, interpreting the score and coordinating with the director and choreographer — though he was also often credited with vocal arrangements. He was a favorite of the composer and lyricist Jerry Herman, serving as music director not only for “Mame” (1966), for which Mr. Herman wrote the music and lyrics, but also for “Dear World” (1969), “Mack & Mabel” (1974), “La Cage aux Folles” (1983) and other Herman shows.“La Cage” ran for more than four years, but it wasn’t Mr. Pippin’s biggest success. That was “A Chorus Line,” which opened on Broadway in 1975 with Mr. Pippin as music director and ran for some 15 years, a record at the time.Mr. Pippin talked his way into the music director job on “Oliver!,” the musical based on Dickens’s “Oliver Twist,” with few credentials. He’d worked as assistant conductor on the 1960 show “Irma la Douce,” which was produced by David Merrick. When he heard Mr. Merrick was bringing “Oliver!” to Broadway, he hounded his secretary for an appointment, although the two had never met, and told Mr. Merrick that he should hire him. Mr. Merrick did.Mr. Pippin won a Tony Award in 1963 for “Oliver!,” the first Broadway show for which he was the musical director..“You’d better be as good as you think you are,” Mr. Merrick told him, as Mr. Pippin recounted the moment in an interview with the Baylor School of Chattanooga, Tenn., where he went to high school.His self-confidence was not misplaced. The show ran for 774 performances, and Mr. Pippin won the Tony for best conductor and musical director. He was one of the last people to win that award, which was discontinued after 1964.Mr. Pippin’s other Broadway credits as musical director or musical supervisor included “110 in the Shade” (1963), “Applause” (1970), “Woman of the Year” (1981) and another Herman show, “Jerry’s Girls” (1985).The conductor Larry Blank, for whom Mr. Pippin was both friend and mentor, said in a phone interview that Mr. Pippin had a warm personality that was well suited to working with the varied figures in the theater, especially leading ladies like Angela Lansbury (“Mame”) and Lauren Bacall (“Woman of the Year”).“He said to me once that he believed in ‘persuasive accompaniment,’” Mr. Blank said. “He would say it with a twinkle in his eye.”Broadway was only one element of Mr. Pippin’s résumé. He also wrote the score for several musicals, including “The Contrast” and “Fashion,” both staged in New York in the 1970s. In 1979 he was named music director of Radio City Music Hall, a post he held for years. In 1987 he shared an Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in music direction for “Broadway Sings: The Music of Jule Styne.”He also appeared as guest conductor with orchestras all over the United States. One program he enjoyed presenting was a salute to his friend Mr. Herman, featuring songs from “La Cage,” “Mame” and other shows, with Broadway singers joining him. Critics agreed that his long working relationship with Mr. Herman enhanced those performances considerably.The director and choreographer Michael Bennett and members of casts past and present at the record-breaking 3,389th performance of “A Chorus Line” at the Shubert Theater on Broadway in 1983. The show was Mr. Pippin’s greatest success.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“Pippin and the orchestra exposed all of the music’s many subtle and complex orchestrations,” John Huxhold wrote in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch when Mr. Pippin presented the Herman program with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1997.In 2020, when Broadway staged a tribute to Mr. Herman, who had died in December 2019, Mr. Blank, who led the orchestra for that show, said he made sure to ask Mr. Pippin to conduct one of the numbers, the title song from “Mame,” using Mr. Pippin’s original vocal arrangement. Mr. Pippin was 93.Mr. Pippin was born on Nov. 25, 1926, in Macon, Ga., and grew up in Knoxville, Tenn. His father, Earl, worked at an A.&P. and later was a poultry wholesaler. His mother, Irene (Ligon) Pippin, started him on piano lessons when he was 6. At 8 he won a state piano competition, so when he was 9, since he had already won in the younger age group, the contest organizers put him in the division for 10- and 11-year-olds. He won that too.When Mr. Pippin returned to Knoxville in 1996 to lead a program called “Donald Pippin’s Broadway Melody” with the Knoxville Symphony Pops Orchestra, a high point of the evening came when he paid tribute to Evelyn Miller, his first piano teacher, who was in the audience. In her honor, he played Grieg’s Waltz in A Minor, which she had taught him for that first piano competition.Ms. Miller had also come to a preview performance of “Oliver!” in New York in 1963, and Mr. Pippin invited her to a party afterward, where she met the cast members, including Bruce Prochnik, the British boy who played the title character. He autographed a photo for her, trying for something he thought sounded Southern. “To my Tennessee honey chile,” he wrote.Mr. Pippin’s mother died when he was 10, and in 1938 he was sent to the Baylor School, then a military-style school for boys. The school let him bring his Steinway piano, which was installed in the chapel.He graduated in 1944, then served in the Army Medical Corps in occupied Japan. He attended the University of Chattanooga before moving to New York in 1950 to study at the Juilliard School, paying his way by playing in piano bars and at churches.He left Juilliard without graduating to enter the working world and took a job at ABC-TV writing for its musical productions. He found the job frustrating.“The conductors were so inept that they’d just destroy the music by having the wrong tempos,” he told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 1996.That inspired him to learn conducting. He studied with Oscar Kosarin, who had worked on Broadway. Then came “Irma la Douce” and his breakthrough, “Oliver!”He and Ms. Santell married in 1974. They eventually divorced but remained close. Mr. Pippin, who lived in Brewster, N.Y., leaves no immediate survivors.He especially enjoyed his years at Radio City Music Hall.“Nothing’s more exciting than to come rising out of that orchestra pit on those hydraulic lifts and playing an overture at Radio City in front of 6,000 people,” he told The News-Sentinel.His work there found him conducting the annual Christmas show, which featured live animals, including camels. Ms. Santell recounted a story he used to tell about one particular camel, which apparently took a liking to him when they encountered each other backstage. The beast would even sometimes rest his head on Mr. Pippin’s shoulder.In Ms. Santell’s memory, the camel’s name was Henry; when Mr. Pippin told the story to The Journal News of White Plains, N.Y., in 1992, it was Oscar. In any case, what happened during one performance is uncontested: Henry, or Oscar, was led onstage, saw his buddy Don, folded his legs, sat down where he wasn’t supposed to and resisted all entreaties to move along.“He wanted to watch me conduct,” Mr. Pippin explained to the newspaper.Ms. Santell provided the kicker: the note Mr. Pippin received from the stage manager the next day.“To the maestro,” it read. “Do not fraternize with the camels anymore.” More

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      in Theater

      She Won a Tony. But Deirdre O’Connell ‘Can’t Think About That.’

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      When Deirdre O’Connell returned to work two days after winning this year’s Tony Award for best performance by a leading actress in a play, the production staff of her current show, “Corsicana” at Playwrights Horizons, greeted her with a balloon arch and cake. O’Connell, 68, enjoyed it. For a little while, anyway. But “Corsicana,” a lonesome, oblique quartet by Will Arbery, is in previews. It begins press performances soon. O’Connell needed to rehearse. So she put the celebration aside.“I just went, ‘Well can’t think about that anymore,’” she said, later that same day. “I have to work.”Perhaps you saw last fall’s “Dana H.,” the show that won her the Tony, in which she spent a harrowing hour and change lip-syncing a woman’s recollections of her abduction by a white supremacist. Or maybe you have already caught “Corsicana,” in which she seems to unseal her character’s soul as casually as you or I uncap a beer. Or, at some point in the last four decades, you might have witnessed the performances that earned her Obies, Lucille Lortels, and a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Prize.O’Connell in “Dana H.,” lip-syncing and “brilliantly pulling off one of the strangest and most difficult challenges ever asked of an actor,” Jesse Green wrote in his review.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut possibly you have never seen O’Connell onstage, so here is what I can tell you: She is an actress of rigor and possibility. She will abandon herself to a character without apology or vanity or self-preservation. Some actors are simply better at the business of being alive, at seeming to present life onstage, and she is one of them.Her absolute focus, Lucas Hnath, the “Dana H” playwright, told me, “creates an opening for something — call it life, call it the spirit. Something ineffable and wild rushes in to fill the space.”Or here is how Les Waters, the director of “Dana H.,” put it: “She is available to life.”O’Connell — Didi, to her intimates — is petite and nimble, with a queenly nimbus of red hair and a default expression, offstage anyway, of intent curiosity. She grew up in western Massachusetts, the granddaughter of a Ziegfeld girl and the daughter of Anne Ludlum, an actress and playwright. As a child, she was, as she put it, “a classic theater nerd,” shy and uncomfortable offstage. “And then strangely comfortable and excited” when performing, she said.Jamie Brewer, left, and O’Connell in the Will Arbery play “Corsicana,” now in previews at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAfter two years of college, she made her way to Boston, apprenticing with an experimental theater company there, and then joining others — in San Francisco, in Baltimore. That scene took a lot out of her. “I felt a little too vulnerable just having my life swallowed up by it,” she said, so in her mid 20s she moved to New York, determined to become what she called “a regular actress.” (Has anyone ever thought of O’Connell as “regular?”) Yet she carried experiment with her. Even in her most controlled performances — “Dana H.” among them — there is something feral, ungovernable at the heart.She spent the next five years pouring drinks, pouring coffee, learning how to audition, learning how to act. In her late 20s, right around the time she found the rent-stabilized East Village apartment (with a bathtub in the kitchen) where she still lives, she booked the national tour of John Pielmeier’s “Agnes of God.” Except for the five years she spent in Hollywood, amassing just enough jobs for a nest egg and a Screen Actors Guild pension, she has rarely been offstage since. Screen acting, it turns out, never gave her what she wanted, a feeling of un-self-consciousness, of surrendering to a role in a way that sounds a little like religion, a little like ego death.“I’m into the numinous experience,” O’Connell explained. “I’m into the thrills.”She hadn’t expected to win the Tony on Sunday night. With good reason. “Dana H.,” which required O’Connell to mouth along to prerecorded interviews with the playwright’s mother, demanding complete submission to the text and its rhythms, is more challenging than most Broadway fare. And it had closed in November, meaning that some Tony voters might already have forgotten it. Besides, three of the four women in her category (LaChanze, Ruth Negga and Mary-Louise Parker) are far better known.O’Connell had watched the Tonys for decades, once in person, but much more often at home, in that same rent-stabilized apartment that she shares with her partner, Alan Metzger, an educator. She knew that at the moment an award is announced, everyone stares at the losers. So as the Tonys entered its final hour, she prepared herself.“I was ready to be so awesome and classy,” O’Connell recalled.But she didn’t lose. And so O’Connell, who had appeared on Broadway only twice before, found herself walking up the aisle of the Radio City Music Hall, in a black jumpsuit from Rent the Runway. On that jumpsuit: “I thought it was going to be a little more Cinderella, but then I was like, I guess not, I guess I’m old,” she said. (None of the designers her producers contacted offered to dress her. Their loss.)O’Connell in her dressing room at Playwrights Horizons. “There should be a pamphlet that helps people get through the days after,” she said of the post-win experience. “You really don’t know how to behave.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesA person could argue that this award was the culminating moment of a nearly five-decade career. And yet, O’Connell — who looked awesome, classy and indisputably shocked — used her 90 seconds of speech time to look forward, manifesting the theatrical future she hopes to see.Holding her statuette, she said, “Please let me standing here be a little sign to you from the universe to make the weird art.”After receiving the award, a golf cart shunted her to one press room, then another. The ceremony had ended by then. She had left her purse at her seat when she walked onstage. “What New Yorker walks away from their keys and their phone?” she said. Still, she managed to reunite with Metzger, and they attended an after-party at the Plaza and a second one at the Omni and then it was after 3 a.m. and she was in a car, heading back to that bathtub in the kitchen.The next day, Monday, she slept late and then read through congratulatory texts and emails, too many to ever answer. Washing dishes, she suddenly felt devastated that she hadn’t thanked Metzger in her speech; she had felt too reluctant to reveal any of her private life. Which is to say, there were a lot of feelings, most of them good.“There should be a pamphlet that helps people get through the days after,” she said of the post-win experience. “Because you’re so suddenly shot out of a cannon, and you really don’t know how to behave.”On Tuesday, after cake, she spent some hours rehearsing the role of Justice, a librarian, an anarchist, a would-be lover, a friend. Sam Gold, the director of “Corsicana,” who in an email noted both her “free and open energy” and her extreme technical precision, gave her notes. She catnapped. Then she performed — baring her character’s soul, without showiness or fuss.“I like the excavating of finding another person inside me,” she said of her process.After bows, she changed her clothes and tidied up. Just past 10 p.m., she emerged into the fetid air of Hell’s Kitchen, greeted a few friends and fans, and went to find a restaurant that was still open.Even offstage, over a mediocre dinner at a sidewalk table on a block that smelled of sewage, it was something fine and rare to be held in her attention, to be, for a moment, her collaborator.This, anyway, has been Arbery’s experience. “It almost feels a little unfair to get to work with someone so good,” he told me.She marveled that she had been able to keep going for typically long hours, at typically low pay, for all of these years. That cheap apartment helped, she said. As did the fact that she has no children, though she is close to Metzger’s. The Tony could have come to her earlier. “I could have taken it at 48. I could have used it,” she said. But she has never felt that she missed out on much. The numinous experience, the thrills, they have always been near at hand. And she is happy to have received the prize now.“I certainly didn’t think that it was going happen this way,” she said. “It wasn’t a plan. But it’s pretty sweet.” More