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      in Television

      Daniel Isaac, 'Billions' Actor, Cedes the Spotlight While Quietly Commanding It

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      Daniel K. Isaac, a theater actor with a steady gig on the series “Billions,” is appearing at the Public in Lloyd Suh’s play “The Chinese Lady.”“I’m the type of actor who won’t take up the most space in the room,” Daniel K. Isaac said.This was on a weekday morning, at the Public Theater, an hour or so before Isaac would begin rehearsal for “The Chinese Lady,” a play by Lloyd Suh that runs through March 27. Isaac perched at the edge of his chair — arms crossed, legs crossed, chest concave, occupying the bare minimum of leather upholstery.“It’s a big chair,” he said.Isaac, 33, a theater actor and an ensemble player on the Showtime drama “Billions,” combines that reticence with intelligence and warmth, qualities that enlarge every character he plays. (On this day, he was dressed as a New Yorker, all in navy and black, but his socks were printed with black-and-white happy faces.) With his sad eyes and resonant voice, he is an actor you remember, no matter how much or little screen time or stage time he receives.Isaac, left, and Shannon Tyo in Lloyd Suh’s “The Chinese Lady” at the Public Theater, in a production from Barrington Stage and the Ma-Yi Theater Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Chinese Lady” is inspired by the life of Afong Moy, a Chinese woman who came to America as a teenager in 1834 and was exhibited as a curiosity before disappearing from the popular imagination. Isaac plays Atung, her translator, who made even less of a dent in the historical record. “He exists as a side note,” Isaac said.Isaac created the role, in 2018, in a production from Barrington Stage and the Ma-Yi Theater Company. Even in a two-hander, he rarely takes center stage, ceding that space to Shannon Tyo’s Afong Moy.“I am irrelevant,” Atung says in the play’s opening scene.Isaac relates. In the first decade of his career, he felt ancillary, in part because of the roles available to Asian American men. He still feels that way. But now, in his 30s — and with his debut as a playwright coming later this year — he is trying to be the main character in his own life.“I don’t think I’ve ever had the big break or the large, hugely visible or recognizable thing,” he said. “My life has been a slow burn, a marathon rather than immediate sprint.” Isaac ought to know: He recently trained for his first marathon, and then posted cheerful selfies — of him in his NipGuards — to Twitter.Isaac with Tyo. “I just want somebody to give him the chance to be like, a small town hero cop,” she said. “There is a range of people I would love to see him take center stage doing.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIsaac was born in 1988, in Southern California, the only child of a single mother who had immigrated from South Korea. At her megachurch, his mother heard a story of a pastor who suffered from stage fright. And because she imagined that Isaac might one day become a preacher — or a lawyer, or a doctor, who might have the occasional lecture — she signed him up for the church’s drama troupe.In high school, he participated for the first time in secular theater, playing a gambler in “Guys and Dolls.” He loved it. “There’s nothing like the community of theater, or what I still call the church of theater,” he said. This was also a time when he was struggling with his attraction to men and voluntarily undergoing conversion therapy. Theater, by contrast, allowed him to experiment with his identity, to try on different ways of being.“It became the safe space that allowed me to grow up, mature, open up more,” he said.He finished high school at 16 and went on to study theater at the University of California, San Diego, where he accepted his sexuality, which led to an estrangement from his mother. (They’re still working on it.) After graduation he moved to New York City and found restaurant work. He had set his sights on classical theater because peers had told him that, as an actor of color, he might find more parts there.“I was trying to imagine, could I be the token Asian in a project?” he said. “And would that be enough?”Seven years, some Off Broadway plays and a few episodes of television later, he landed a small part in the “Billions” pilot. He didn’t think much of it. He knew that plenty of pilots didn’t take. And he’d been killed or written off in ones that did. But “Billions” took, and his character, Ben Kim, an analyst who became a portfolio manager, remains alive. Isaac has appeared in every episode. (Still he didn’t quit his restaurant job until midway through Season 2. And technically, the restaurant told him to go.)Dhruv Maheshwari, left, and Isaac in “Billions.”Christopher Saunders/ShowtimeThe showrunners of “Billions,” Brian Koppelman and David Levien, hadn’t had huge plans for the Ben character. Once they understood Isaac’s intelligence and versatility, they expanded the role. “Daniel is a fearless actor, and that gives us huge freedom,” they wrote in a joint email.There’s a sweetness to his “Billions” character, which contrasts with the macho posturing of his colleagues at an asset management company. And that sweetness, as his co-star Kelly AuCoin said during a recent phone conversation, is all Isaac. “He could not be a more lovely or positive person,” he said. “He emanates love.” AuCoin broke off, worrying that his praise sounded fake. Which it wasn’t, he assured me. Then he broke off again. Isaac had just texted to wish him a happy birthday.For Isaac, who tries to do theater in between “Billions” shoots, taking on the role of Atung felt personal. And it felt important, not only as a way to explore who these characters were, but also as a means to reclaim their history.“Daniel understands the sacrifices made to get him where he is, and it imbues his work with a sense of purpose,” Ralph B. Peña, the play’s director, wrote in an email.Isaac says that theater “became the safe space that allowed me to grow up, mature, open up more.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIn 2018, playing Atung, and reckoning with the weight of what men like him had suffered, felt painful. “I think I took it a lot more personally,” Isaac said. In the intervening years, anti-Asian prejudice, fueled by misinformation around Covid-19, seemed only to increase, which has made the work feel even more necessary.“If art has any capacity to make space for understanding, or empathy, or can be more than just entertainment, which I hope and live by, then I want to share that,” he said.Isaac has a way, in conversation and seemingly in his life, of taking the emphasis off himself and putting it onto the work, his colleagues, the world. That’s why he started writing plays.“Because then I could literally give the spotlight to others,” he said. “And sit in the shadows and still experience something and the joy of creation.” Ma-Yi will produce his first play in the fall, “Once Upon a (Korean) Time,” which explores the Korean War through the medium of Korean fairy tales.Tyo, his “The Chinese Lady” co-star, would like to see him find his light. They often help each other film auditions, so she has seen the range of what he can do. “I just want somebody to give him the chance to be like, a small town hero cop,” she said. “He’s very good at it. He’s very good at surfer bro. There is a range of people I would love to see him take center stage doing.”He is trying, he said. And at the risk of sounding what he called “extra woo-woo,” he thanks theater for helping him to try. “I credit the theater community because that’s where I felt safest and saw people being fearlessly themselves,” he said. “That gave me permission to try to step toward that in my own journey. And I’m still doing that.” More

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      in Music

      Is There Such a Thing as Black Thought?

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Tariq Trotter — the rapper who fronts the legendary hip-hop band the Roots — pulled up to the Pershing Square Signature Theater on 42nd Street in Manhattan, where he was rehearsing for the new Off Broadway musical “Black No More.” He drove a black sedan that reminded me of the Batmobile — suitable for an artist who goes by the nom de guerre Black Thought, the name of a bearded Negro superhero if ever there was one. Five minutes earlier, Trotter had sent me a text: “Stay around. I have some music I want to play for you.” The city was dark and quiet, and I climbed into a car whose make I didn’t know.Trotter didn’t speak as we pulled into traffic. I imagined we were headed to the famed Electric Lady Studios on Eighth Street to hear this new music. Instead, we stopped for gas. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised: Trotter drives an hour from his home in suburban New Jersey to the theater and then back every day; why wouldn’t he pump his own gas? As I waited for him to finish, someone shouted, “Nice AMG!” referring to the car. When he hopped back in, we stayed parked and bumped the music like two teenagers in a hooptie in the late ’90s, rap taking us somewhere else. Trotter turned his speakers to ear-bleed level and played songs from four albums of unreleased music, songs with a sonic landscape best described as jazz meets Motown meets funk. The music’s most persistent subject was what it means to be Black. The thesis could be captured succinctly: Blackness is not a monolith. Every other lyric was dedicated to demonstrating the truth of that idea. Astonished at the amount of music I was hearing — music he’d kept hidden from hungry fans — I asked Trotter if he’d just played his entire oeuvre or if he was like Prince, who was famed for hiding away decades’ worth of unreleased music, only presenting a narrow sliver to the public.“Like Prince,” he told me. “The Roots, we got albums and albums upon albums worth of work in the vault.”In other words, he has creative gears he hasn’t deigned to show us yet. Now, Trotter, an M.C. who rapped in one of those unreleased songs that he was “Black as a Renaissance Harlemite,” is helping to reimagine the 1931 satirical novel “Black No More,” by George S. Schuyler, a Harlem Renaissance novelist, journalist and critic, as a musical. Both the novel and the musical tell the story of the dubious doctor Junius Crookman, who invents the Black No More treatment, guaranteeing that he can transform the darkest Negro to the whitest alabaster. When the protagonist Max Disher, a Harlem resident who feels perpetually burdened by all the ways society uses his Black skin to deny him the future his talents and ambition might secure, learns of this cure, he rushes to undergo Dr. Crookman’s treatment. Soon after that, nearly all of Black America follows Disher through the Black No More machine, upending the American racial order. Schuyler’s book grew out of his incendiary ideas about American race relations. “The Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon,” he wrote in his 1926 essay “The Negro-Art Hokum.” Schuyler viewed Black racial identity as a scam perpetuated by racists and race men like W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and James Weldon Johnson, all of whom he lampoons in “Black No More.” He believed that, if they could, Black people would abandon their Blackness for whiteness the first chance they got.In the musical, Trotter and his collaborators — the director Scott Elliott, the screenwriter John Ridley and the choreographer Bill T. Jones — are trying to turn Schuyler’s thesis on its head. Trotter has written the musical’s lyrics, penning words for rap songs, ballads, some blues, gospel, reggae and even pop tracks. In a strange twist, he also plays Dr. Crookman. Trotter’s commitment to a distinct Black artistic and intellectual tradition make him the antithesis of Schuyler, who once argued that there is no such thing as Negro art and, consequently, no such thing as Black thought; but in taking on the project, Trotter was interested in crafting a rejoinder to Schuyler’s arguments.Thinking about “Black No More,” I wondered how he and his collaborators were going to make contemporary a book premised on the literal erasure of Trotter’s commitment to Blackness as a way of living. “I do a lot of ‘defining Blackness,’” Trotter told me. The impulse puts him in existential conversation with Schuyler. “Whatever that definition is, it drives the entire scope of my work,” he said. That work “might be the quest for that definition.” Unlike Schuyler, Trotter argues that Blackness “goes above and beyond racial identity. It’s an experience. It’s lived.”The rapper Tariq Trotter escaped the orbit of violence that claimed family and friends in his native Philadelphia.Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont for The New York TimesTrotter told me that he hadn’t read “Black No More” until Ridley introduced him to the book during a 2015 meeting at NBC studios, where the Roots work as the house band for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” He thought the meeting would result in him acting in one of Ridley’s films. “I immediately began preparation for my ‘13 Years a Slave’ audition,” he joked to me. Instead, Ridley wanted to discuss Schuyler’s novel, which he believed covered topics that were urgent in their relevance to American culture. Scott Elliott, artistic director of the New Group, thought the novel would work as a piece of musical theater. The two men arranged to meet with Trotter, the Roots drummer and producer Questlove and the Roots manager Shawn Gee. “We agreed to be a part of the project on the same day I saw ‘Hamilton’ for the first time, Off Broadway, at the Public Theater,” Trotter says. “Hamilton” was its own riff on American history, using hip-hop as the vehicle to narrate a familiar story about the founding of the United States of America and Alexander Hamilton’s life. But Schuyler’s “Black No More,” and his broader ideas about race, differ radically from the more optimistic framing of race in “Hamilton.”Trotter wants to offer a divergent vision of how Black people think about their existence in this country. This makes sense for an M.C. who cites Richard Wright, Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison and Frantz Fanon as influences. Trotter is a thinker whose work is in conversation with the Black literary tradition, especially the work of the Harlem Renaissance, with its prescient inquiry into the question of what constitutes Blackness. This musical is a chance for Trotter to have his say — to talk back to a thinker he disagrees with.“Schuyler’s ‘Black No More’ is an essay,” he told me. “Ours is an essay on that essay. A critique of a critique.”Tariq Trotter is a 50-year-old artist in a genre where youth is an asset and middle-aged rappers are rare. His voice is gravelly, though wildly flexible when rhyming. He is noticed in every room he walks into. A brother who pays attention to the way the fedora on his head cuts against his face and has been wearing sunglasses inside since his high school years. At 5-foot-8, he has been mistaken for the 5-foot-11 Rick Ross and the 6-foot-5 James Harden. Some would say it’s the beard. When asked if he straightens out those who mistake him, he says: “I’d rather not correct them. I let people have that moment, because for them it’s just as special.”Trotter, who once called himself “the invisible enigma,” has always been reluctant to speak about his past. He was born in Philadelphia, in 1971, less than two years before and a hundred miles away from hip-hop’s birth in the Bronx. His family belonged to the Nation of Islam, and he came of age during the years when crack cocaine ravaged American streets. He was 13 when, in 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped an improvised bomb on the Black-liberation group MOVE, destroying 61 houses and killing 11 people. For Trotter, the bombing had the same effect that the Rodney King beating had on those who came of age during the 1990s, giving him a sudden awareness of anti-Black violence. He remembers how he “felt the gravitational pull of the propaganda,” recognizing a current in the media that suggested the bombing was justified. “It felt way too one-sided to be believable,” he said. “Like these were people who looked like people I knew.”Amid a backdrop of a tragedy — his father, Thomas Trotter, was murdered when Trotter was 2 — Trotter came up in a house of music. His mother, Cassandra, would buy those best-of-the-decade collections of ’60s and ’70s music and ensconced Trotter in a home full of James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Earth Wind & Fire. And, of course, the sounds of Philly — from Hall & Oates to Patti LaBelle — permeated his childhood. When they moved to South Philly and were closer to his grandmother, he got nothing but gospel in her house. Years later, his grandmother would get a healthy dose of the Roots: “For a long time she’d be right there — side of the rear of the stage in a chair.”He was influenced by a song called “The Micstro,” a 1980 jam that featured the M.C. RC LaRock rhyming for almost 10 minutes without cease. And once Run-DMC came out, rocking sweats with fedoras and leather jackets, looking like people from his block, the young Trotter was hooked. By age 9, he had already given himself a rap moniker: Double T. He and a fellow Philadelphia native and classmate, Dwight Grant, formed the Crash Crew for an elementary school talent show; Grant went on to become the platinum-selling M.C. Beanie Sigel. It’s a bit like imagining the future N.B.A. Hall of Famers LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony playing on the same youth basketball team, honing their craft together. At the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts, Trotter met Ahmir Thompson, later known as Questlove, a fellow student whose Casio keyboard turned him into a roving beat maker with whom Trotter would found the hip-hop band the Roots.Those were tough years for Trotter. When he was a junior in high school, his mother was murdered. For some things, there is no solace, and I asked if he’d ever confronted the failure of art to do the thing you wanted it to do. “That’s one way to look at it,” he told me. “Another way to look at is everybody I know, damn near all the people I grew up with, they all dead, they all in jail. For me, art has been my saving grace, that’s my salvation.” It’s not only that music has taken him around the world and been the foundation of so many of his longest friendships, but that it has been the lifeline for a man that knows full well what could have been. As Trotter’s friend, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, tells me, “Trotter is a voice that knows social ills and violence, but he chose art.”Trotter enrolled in Millersville University, 75 miles away from Philly, but the music called him back to the city: He met fellow rapper, Malik B., who would join the Roots crew; a year later they were doing shows in Europe, freestyling to sax and trumpet solos. Back in Philly, Trotter lived in an apartment with books and musicians as his companions. “I didn’t have a phone, I didn’t have a TV,” he has said. “I hardly had furniture at my place at that time. There was just books, lots of books and CDs.” Trotter became an autodidact, Ghansah told me. “He was the reader,” she said. “He takes everything in. Everything is a reference, a possible citation. And then it is all wrapped up in his Philadelphia Negro uplift thing — he loves his Blackness.”Around this time, Trotter discovered the music of the Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti, whose example became another lasting influence on his style. “Finding Fela was like finding my spiritual animal,” he told me. He was in Tower Records with his childhood friend, the singer Santigold, who was buying a Fela record for her father’s birthday. Intrigued, Trotter listened along when Santigold’s father played the music, which was a revelation. “I was blown away by how regal all the music sounded, the political message, how free he was onstage,” he said. Fela’s work ethic — he tended to perform regularly and intensely — and big-band sensibility gave Trotter a sense of what it meant to be a performer.“Felt like James Brown meets Bob Marley with a Nigerian funk sensibility,” Trotter said. Trotter’s gift as a lyricist is his penchant for turning observation of the world around him into social commentary. When Trotter’s verse turns to the streets, it adds complexity to the narratives of violence that some rappers tend to glorify. Foretelling an argument that the legal scholar James Forman Jr. would make in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Locking Up Our Own,” Trotter, in the song “Panic!!!!!” from the Roots’s 1996 album (their second full-length release), “Illadelph Halflife,” rhymes that while “police levels increase,” there’s “still crime on the street.” The lyric points to Trotter’s awareness that in Black communities, the presence of police does not guarantee protection. Another song from that album, “Section,” has Trotter rapping of his shared experience with those who run the streets: “We congruent, lay on the corner with the traum’ unit.” While Trotter presents his familiarity with street life and its prevalence in communities like his, he doesn’t lose sight of the violence that often accompanies that life. In an era in which gangster rap dominated the charts, Trotter could have woven tales of street woe and disaster. But, he told me: “I came up in a family of gangsters and people who were in the street life. Both my parents, that’s what they got off into, they were involved in. My extended family, my brother. And it never ends well. It’s always short-lived. I didn’t want the career version of that.” Trotter and the Roots crew insisted that Black life include more than the narratives of violence and street life.In part, this vision of a socially engaged and intellectually curious hip-hop was inspired by the Roots’ longtime manager, Richard Nichols. “That was Rich, man,” Trotter told me. “Rich would put us on to a concept, like the concept of nuclear half-life, nuclear fallout,” an idea that inspired the title “Illadelph Halflife.” Nichols, who died in 2014 at 55 from complications of leukemia, was a Philadelphia native and student of Black culture whose thinking became central to Trotter’s intellectual development and the band’s identity. “He’d throw you a book — Chinua Achebe, check this out. Check this Malcolm Gladwell out,” Trotter remembered. Nichols was a student (literally) of Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez, architects of the Black Arts Movement and literary inheritors of the Harlem Renaissance. Nichols brought Trotter into that tradition. “Rich was the brains of this operation in more ways than one,” Trotter told me. “He was a visionary. He was an artist. He went above and beyond the role of management or producer. He was our oracle. He was Obi-Wan Kenobi.”Put another way, Nichols envisioned the group as an example of hip-hop’s relationship to a wider Black culture. Because of Nichols, the Roots crew knew Black Arts Movement poets like Baraka and Ntozake Shange personally. Sonia Sanchez, the Philadelphia poet who helped pioneer Black-studies programs, was “Sister Sonia” to Trotter. Often, his lyrics foregrounded his relationship to this lineage. “I’m just as dark as John Henrik Clarke’s inner thoughts at the time of the Harlem Renaissance,” he once rapped, name checking the trailblazing historian of the Black experience. Maybe it isn’t surprising, then, that Trotter found his way to “Black No More.” Schuyler’s original novel is a classic of the Harlem Renaissance, even if it does diverge from the period’s complicated love affair with Blackness. Schuyler mocked his contemporaries as race-obsessed fools, but “Black No More” is a book no less caught up in the Renaissance’s incessant inquiry into the substance of this thing we call “Black experience.” And while Schuyler’s novel says that Black America hungers to be white, Black Thought’s remix asserts the Black experience can be interrogated independent of whiteness.Trotter at a jam session in Philadelphia in 1993, during the early days of the Roots. The group later became a fixture on late-night TV.Photograph from the estate of Mpozi TolbertWhen I showed up for a tech rehearsal of “Black No More” in January, the choreographer Bill T. Jones walked central actors through a pivotal moment. In the novel, Max’s best friend Bunny is a Black man who follows him through the Black No More machine, but the musical’s Bunny (renamed “Buni”) is a Black woman who demands more of him. When the newly whitened Max — who now goes by Matthew Fisher — abandons Harlem for Atlanta, Buni and another friend, Agamemnon, show up at the train depot, hoping to convince him to stay. “I see a world of possibility, and all you see is Black … and white,” Max tells Agamemnon. Disgusted, Agamemnon declares that “Harlem is better off without him.” But Buni won’t abandon her friend. Watching Max leave, she retorts that “we’re never ‘better off’ without each other.” It’s a powerful assertion of Black solidarity — an enduring community extending even to those who would deny their Blackness, one based in a commonality of experience.The distinct difference between this production and Schuyler’s novel is the belief in cultural, rhetorical and physical ties that bind Black people into a shared heritage that isn’t at all related to white people or white supremacy. Jones’s choreography is key to this idea. During tech rehearsal, Jones walked dancers through the moment just after the whitened Max arrives in Atlanta. In the scene, Max tentatively approaches a group of white people dancing before he is welcomed into their ranks, his white skin finally giving him the entry he desires. But Brandon Victor Dixon, the actor who plays Max, is not wearing make up; he is still Black. In that moment, Jones’s choreography convinces the audience that these are four Southern white country dancers, including the brown-skinned Dixon as Matthew Fisher. Scenes like this, which present a racialized art form only to subvert notions of who can perform it, both reinforce the notion of distinct racial cultures while undermining the idea that those cultures are fixed in stone. Unlike Schuyler’s book, it holds two truths at once: race is constructed, and no less real for being so. In this sense, Trotter and his collaborators force viewers into a complex and sometimes even uncomfortable conversation about the substance of racial identity.Nowhere is this more obvious than in Trotter’s lyrics.One song features the “whitened” Max in his guise as Matthew — now, improbably, the leader of a white-supremacist organization — singing about Black people as the equivalent of flies. As Trotter described it to me, the song slaps but is immensely ignorant; it had me rocking in my seat, but made me fear what a dope beat can do. As beautiful women twerked onstage to a crescendo of keys, Matthew unleashed the song’s hateful chorus, referring to Black people with a racial epithet and glorifying anti-Black violence. Still, my head bopped.The song presents us with a set of questions: Is cringing and turning away from a work of art that depicts persistent truths of American racial politics the most radical thing that we might do? How can Black art provide the background for anti-Blackness? Trotter’s lyrics don’t provide answers. They let us sit in that formal and ethical difficulty.Trotter’s interest in presenting these hard questions isn’t new. You have to look no further than to Dec. 14, 2017, for proof. That day on DJ Funkmaster Flex’s show on the New York radio station Hot 97, he dropped a freestyle that put the internet on notice. “I like to answer people’s demands,” Funk said by way of introduction. “Black Thought is here.” And then Trotter delivered something singular — a relentless amalgamation of story and poem that becomes more cogent as it becomes more discursive. “Einstein, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Tesla, recording artist slash psychology professor,” Trotter raps, suggesting the scope of his thinking. He weaves together literary tradition, social critique, his interest in world history and reflections on his own oeuvre and family history into an epic that could never have taken place within the tight strictures of a Roots album. “The mic I spray resembling the sickle of death/It ain’t strenuous to come from a continuous breath.” This was the reintroduction of the Talented Mr. Trotter as a solo artist who challenged listeners with his breadth of knowledge and sharp skills as an M.C. He soon began releasing solo albums that “gave people, some of whom have been lifelong Roots fans at this point, an opportunity to not even become reacquainted, but to finally become acquainted with me personally as an artist,” he told me. This version of Black Thought had big things on his mind. “How much hypocrisy can people possibly endure?/But ain’t nobody working on a cure my young bull,” he proclaimed in that freestyle.Trotter at the Pershing Square Theatre.Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont for The New York TimesI was interested to see how the musical played to audiences — specifically, audiences of the kind that would gather at Black Theater Night, Broadway’s attempt to bring in more diverse crowds. As Bill T. Jones reminds me, “One of the most transgressive things Schuyler does in this transgressive novel is to imply that secretly we all want to be white.” What would Black theatergoers make of that notion? Dr. Crookman introduces the Black No More device with an in-joke that might only get laughs out of a Black audience: “How is it, Dr. Crookman, you ask, are you able to accomplish what the Lord Himself cannot? The answer is simple. The Good Lord is not a Howard Man.” At the show I attended, the audience laughed together. Such moments felt typical — choral call and response and inside jokes gave the show the feel of a summer cookout. But when Dr. Crookman explained the Black No More treatment, the laughter slowly subsided and the tension rose. The device used to conduct the treatment resembled a barber’s chair and sat center stage. Max’s transformation — signaled by him constantly running his fingers along his arms, which are still brown — elicited discomfort.In contemplating how exactly to pull off this transformation to whiteness, Trotter told me that the show’s creators considered it all — make up, different clothing, lighting — but decided on simple physical gestures. If the audience was any indication, those gestures worked, strangely conveying the way warped reality gives rise to warped desires. In the musical, Max — who becomes white in part to pursue Helen, a white lover who initially rejected him — constantly looks at his skin to remind himself and the audience of his change and of the moral quandary it provokes. “What a fine mess I’ve gotten into, after everything that I had been through,” Max sings. But that mess isn’t Max’s alone. The show foregrounds that ethical quandary, forcing the audience to deal with the aftermath of Max’s yearning as well.Schuyler himself tried to play down the messiness of identification by writing “Black No More.” He married Josephine Cogdell, an heiress from Texas and a white liberal, in 1928. During the 1930s, she published journalism in the Black press under various names and even, according to Carla Kaplan’s book “Miss Anne in Harlem,” wrote an advice column for Negro women under the name Julia Jerome. And she was more complex than the depiction of any white character in the satire her husband published three years after they married. While Helen is a vulgar racist in the novel, the musical’s version of Helen is reminiscent of Schuyler’s wife. She becomes a reminder that, even in 1931, race relations and the contradictions that roiled beneath them were far more tangled than the satirical depiction of race hustlers and Black people clamoring for ways to straighten their hair and skin-cream their way to whiteness.The vast range of music, lyrics and dance that the musical juxtaposes is an argument for the existence of a Blackness independent of whiteness, a Blackness that is also the confounding of easy racial categorization. Because of this, the show insists on frustrating the audience: You laugh and then stop to question if laughing was appropriate. The original “Black No More” is written with the unflinching belief that the author knows what Blackness is and is not. The musical, though, is more searching, less certain of what Blackness is, though far more secure in the belief that Black folks’ singular desire is not to run from it but rather to survive in America.There is a refrain in the musical that struck me: “If my body is my home, and it’s built of blood and bone, and survives on, even thrives on love alone, it’s not hard to understand how the measure of a man, is to show more than the love that he’s been shown.” And if you listen closely to the lyrics and music of “Black No More,” you know that the arguments all become a case that Trotter is making, capturing so much of what it means to have Black thoughts in this world and the sheer tragedy of running from them.Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer and contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote about the actor Michael K. Williams. Racquel Chevremont is a curator, an art adviser and a model who works under the name Deux Femmes Noires along with Mickalene Thomas. Mickalene Thomas is an artist known for her paintings of African American women that combine historical, political and pop-culture references. More

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      in Theater

      On London Stages, Maverick Responses to Mortality

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      Creative adaptations of “Wuthering Heights” and Ionesco’s “The Chairs” grapple with death and feature inclusions of the coronavirus and performance artists.LONDON — The opportunity to see Kathryn Hunter in peak form is a rare treat, and one that is currently available by booking a seat for the Almeida Theater’s revival of “The Chairs.” This hugely gifted actress plays a character, billed as the Old Woman in Ionesco’s 1952 classic, with enough boundless wit and energy to make a mockery of age.Recently, Hunter has been acclaimed onscreen for playing all three witches in Joel Coen’s adaptation of “Macbeth,” starring Denzel Washington, for which she won a New York Film Critics Circle award. But this American-born mainstay of the London theater also gleams onstage with an unbridled delight in performance that is a pleasure to behold.The result lends a welcome immediacy to Ionesco’s potentially inaccessible exercise in absurdism, which hasn’t been staged here since 1997. That version, directed by Simon McBurney, Hunter’s longtime colleague at the Complicité theater company, transferred against expectation to Broadway, garnering six Tony nominations. This new iteration, adapted by its director, Omar Elerian, runs until March 5, leaving time for Hunter to limber up for her next stage assignment: playing Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe this summer.The Old Woman, in fact, is in her 90s, so older than Lear but blessed in Hunter’s interpretation with a wide-eyed sense of wonder. Having been coupled for 75 years with the Old Man (played by Hunter’s own husband, Marcello Magni, another Complicité veteran), she joins her elegantly dressed spouse in awaiting the arrival of any number of guests to attend some sort of conference that may save the world. Or, more likely, not.Among them is a Speaker (Toby Sedgwick), who is this play’s equivalent of Beckett’s elusive Godot. The difference is that the Speaker actually does show up, allowing the duo to bow out of lives that haven’t been easy: “We shall decompose in marine solitude,” announces the Old Man. “Let’s not complain too much though.”Premiered in French by the Romanian-born Ionesco, “The Chairs” preceded “Waiting for Godot” by one year and represents a landmark text more often than not confined to the classroom. Committed to dusting away the cobwebs, Elerian’s English-language version insists upon the contemporary whenever possible. Before he is even seen, the Old Man is heard fretting about the performance: “Tell [the audience] I have Covid,” he says to his wife in an offstage argument about whether or not to do the show. Afterward, we learn that the Old Woman has had 21 booster shots.Once they emerge before us, the pair call to mind two aging vaudevillians having one last hurrah. She totters about in a red wig and dark petticoat, curtsying with endearing politesse and suggesting in her singularly throaty voice that “we cut the next bit; it’s terribly long.” (The production runs nearly two hours, no intermission.) He proffers a handkerchief to a nearby audience member and readies himself for the chairs of the title, several of which Magni manages to catch in midair: no mean feat for someone of any age. Ionesco’s original text calls for 40 chairs minimum, but I lost count of the quantity at the Almeida.Those chairs, of course, sit empty as comic business gives way to the stuff of tragedy. We hear of the children the couple wanted but never had and the “pain, regrets, remorse” that have been their shared fate instead, the Old Man chastising himself for allowing his mother to die, untended, in a ditch. Abandonment, he says, is an inescapable fact of life.The emotional pull of the material remains sufficiently strong that I wish Elerian’s adaptation wasn’t quite so fussy. The opening shenanigans are awfully forced, as are the closing remarks from the Speaker, who usually utters scarcely a word in this play. A discourse on “alternate truths,” this orator’s rambling observations are attuned to the concerns of the world today but nonetheless feel like padding. Its farcical elements notwithstanding, the play is sufficiently powerful as is, Ionesco’s overriding bleakness as topical now as ever, which speaks volumes to how little has changed in 70 years.From left, Sam Archer, Ash Hunter and Lucy McCormick in “Wuthering Heights,” adapted and directed by Emma Rice at the National Theater.Steve TannerEven more so than Elerian, Emma Rice is a prominent director-adapter who doesn’t take familiar texts at face value. A former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Rice made her name running the touring company Kneehigh, which deconstructed such time-honored titles as “Brief Encounter” and “Tristan & Yseult.” Since then, Rice has started a theatrical entity called Wise Children, whose irreverent take on the Emily Brontë novel “Wuthering Heights” can be found on the Lyttelton stage of the National Theater through March 19.The eclectic impulses behind this production are evident from its cast, which brings together dancers, performance artists and a “Hamilton” alum to tell the corpse-strewn story of the foundling, Heathcliff (Ash Hunter, the veteran of the aforementioned musical), and the ill-starred Catherine (Lucy McCormick, a maverick talent who moves between self-devised work and plays such as this one). Juggling several roles is the charismatic Sam Archer, an actor-dancer whose nimble movement very explicitly keeps Rice’s take on this 1847 novel from seeming earthbound: It’s always helpful to have a performer on hand capable of soaring at any moment.Rice’s freewheeling approach to the material won’t suit the purists. It’s surprising to find the Yorkshire moors — a setting crucial to the novel — brought to three-dimensional life by an assemblage led by the arresting Nandi Bhebhe, who seems to be wearing a crown of sticks and twigs and has a retinue of similarly attired human plants. Elsewhere, the convolutions of the plot are confronted head-on. “How is anybody expected to follow this?” asks the resident narrator, Lockwood (one of Archer’s several roles), only for Bhebhe to chip in with an awareness that “no one said this is going to be easy.”Rice’s goal is to ease a path through a labyrinthine novel by bringing her total-theater aesthetic to a music-heavy production that announces the characters’ fates on a chalkboard, a choice that taps directly into the association many will have with this novel from their student days. A trim or two wouldn’t go amiss, and there are times when the reinvention seems reckless, not revelatory.But I won’t soon forget a fierce-eyed McCormick haunting the action from beyond the grave like an ongoing premonition of doom, and Katy Owen’s chirpy Isabella Linton all but steals the show: a figure of audience-friendly fun amid the landscape of mortality that, as with “The Chairs,” we come to realize is our shared lot.The Chairs. Directed by Omar Elerian. Almeida Theater, through March 5.Wuthering Heights. Directed by Emma Rice. National Theater, through March 19. More

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      New Haven's Long Wharf Theater to Become Itinerant

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      Long Wharf Theater, a regional nonprofit on New Haven’s waterfront, is ending a long, bumpy chapter there, hoping to expand access and reduce costs.New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater will move out of its longtime headquarters and embrace itinerancy as the company seeks a fresh start after a period of extraordinary upheaval.The leadership of the nonprofit theater is framing the move as an opportunity to reach new audiences and reimagine its operations, and the city is supporting the change, which it says will help the organization better serve the community.The move is the latest chapter in a time of extensive change at the theater, which in 2018 fired its executive director, Gordon Edelstein, a day after The New York Times reported sexual misconduct allegations against him. As the company remade itself, it faced a real estate quandary: whether to renew its expiring lease at the New Haven Food Terminal, just off Interstate 95, where it has been performing for 57 years.The theater, which has been among the nation’s leading regional nonprofits, also faces the same challenges as its peers: demonstrating to patrons, artists and donors that it can move forward following the lengthy pandemic shutdown, and that it is committed to shifting priorities in response to industrywide calls for more diversity, equity and inclusion.“Long Wharf Theater has an incredible legacy, and it’s had some complicated challenges,” said Jacob G. Padrón, the theater’s artistic director. “The next several years will be about discovery.”The theater’s leaders said they could have chosen to renew its lease when it expires in June, but that they opted not to, both because the theater was spending too much money on rent and upkeep, and because its location, once treasured for free parking and easy highway access that appealed to suburbanites, was inconvenient for some New Haven residents and difficult to access via public transit.The theater, which had thought of the industrial waterfront location as temporary when it opened there in 1965, has contemplated relocating before. In 2004, it announced plans to move to downtown New Haven, but in 2011, citing a worsening economy, it abandoned those plans, opting to renovate the Food Terminal location instead.Padrón said he views the decision to relocate to a variety of yet-to-be-determined spaces around New Haven as a way of rethinking “how a regional theater makes its art,” and a way to “expand our imagination of how a theater can show up for its community.”“It’s exciting to think about what’s the project, and what’s then the right container for that project,” he said.Jacob G. Padrón, the theater’s artistic director, said that “the next several years will be about discovery.”Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesThe theater’s leadership, including not only Padrón but also the managing director, Kit Ingui, and the board chairwoman, Nancy Alexander, all said that they believe the institution is financially stable, and that it would benefit from the flexibility of its next phase. They said that the new arrangement should not only reduce its costs but also expand its reach to audiences who, because of geography, transportation or economics, have not found their way to the waterfront district from which the theater takes its name.“There’s no sense that we’re hanging on by a thread or that we have to live on a shoestring,” Alexander said. “We have been blessed with some longtime givers who have created a strong endowment for us, and we are projecting budgets that will work.”Long Wharf plans to stage at least two more shows at its current location — a new play called “Dream Hou$e,” by Eliana Pipes, which the theater describes as being about “the cultural cost of progress in America,” and “Queen,” by Madhuri Shekar, about “brilliant women confronting inconvenient truths.” The theater is still talking with its landlord about whether it might continue producing in the building later this year, but by the fall of 2023 the leadership expects to present full productions at other locations in and around New Haven — possibly in rented theaters, and possibly in spaces not traditionally used for theater.“We believe you can produce theater anywhere,” Ingui said.Long Wharf, which in 1978 won the Tony Award for regional theater, survived the pandemic with significant support from the federal and state governments. Its staff is less than half the size it was — about 30, down from 65 before the pandemic; the annual budget, which had been about $6.5 million before the pandemic, is now a little over $5 million.The theater’s leaders said they have not yet decided whether they will remain itinerant long-term, or whether this will be a short-term phase. But they all said the crises faced by the theater were catalysts, not causes, for the move.“We’re going into this with excitement,” Alexander said. She said that the theater’s pandemic performances in city parks demonstrated that new locations could attract new audiences, and that by moving around New Haven, Long Wharf is seeking to become “a theater that is much more widely in our community, and, we hope, valued by our community.”“We really are being mindful that this is a period of exploration and experimentation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we ultimately decided to have something like an anchor space and then continue producing in some other creative spaces as well, in some kind of hybrid model,” she said.Adriane Jefferson, New Haven’s director of cultural affairs, said Long Wharf was one of the most important nonprofits in the city, and that its move would strengthen both the organization and the city. She said she believed the shift would help Long Wharf become more anti-racist, in keeping with the city’s new cultural equity plan, which called attention to “inequities that prevent people from participating in arts and culture in every corner of our city.”“Long Wharf’s idea of being more mobile, moving throughout the city and coming to communities who are not making it down to where Long Wharf is now, is very responsive to our plan,” Jefferson said. “I would have concerns if they weren’t thinking along these lines.” More

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      Amber Gray on Leaving 'Hadestown' for 'Macbeth'

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      The actress, who has played Persephone in “Hadestown” in three countries and four productions, is leaving to join a new “Macbeth” on Broadway.Amber Gray spent eight years as a Greek goddess.She joined “Hadestown” in 2014, back when the songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and the director Rachel Chavkin were still trying to figure out how to turn Mitchell’s Orpheus-and-Eurydice concept album into a stage show.Gray had read lots of mythology as a classics-obsessed kid, and felt an immediate connection to Persephone, the split-level queen who spends half of each year in the underworld as Hades’s wife and half on earth as a harbinger of spring.“I kind of knew, ‘Oh, this is my job,’ which is not a feeling I have often,” she said. “I felt possessive of it — that it belongs to me, and it was my baby to help raise.”Her Persephone, clad in green aboveground and black below, is an ageless merrymaker with a taste for drink, toughened by time but still soft of heart. She created the role Off Broadway in 2016, refined it through a Canadian production in 2017 and a London production in 2018, and then was nominated for a Tony Award after originating the role on Broadway, where the show opened in 2019 (winning the Tony for best musical). Along with the rest of the principals, she stuck with the show through an 18-month pandemic shutdown; “Hadestown” returned in September to the Walter Kerr Theater.Her performance won praise from Jesse Green, The New York Times’s theater critic, who wrote, “Ms. Gray, never better, makes something quite brilliant out of Persephone: a free spirit, a loose cannon, a first lady co-opted by wealth yet emotionally subversive.” He declared of her closing number, “you at last wish the show would slow down so you could live in the glowy moment forever.”But on Saturday night, Gray, 40, sang that song for the final time. She is leaving the show to join Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga in a production of “Macbeth” that begins performances in March at the Longacre Theater, directly across 48th Street from the Walter Kerr. She will play Macbeth’s friend Banquo; her “Hadestown” alternate, Lana Gordon, will assume the role of Persephone full time.For the last several months, Gray has been sharing the role of Persephone with another actress, so she could spend more time with her two children.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn her single day off between finishing “Hadestown” and beginning rehearsals for “Macbeth,” she talked about her long run; an ovation-filled final night that included special attention from her co-star André De Shields; and her next chapter. These are edited excerpts from the interview.How are you doing?I don’t know how I’m doing. You have to help me process.At your final performance there were tears on your face at the start, at the end, in the middle. What was going through your head?I’m having great waves of grief, and I’m heartbroken, but I also feel very excited about a new chapter. It feels like commencement.What happened after the audience went home?My partner was there, and we went across the street to Hurley’s, where we go often, the cast and the band, and we just chatted for another hour. I sort of stood around and loved on everyone, and let them love on me. Lots of crying, and there was some sneaky footage of André kissing me, which we watched and laughed and laughed and laughed. It felt very celebratory.What’s it like to spend so long with a single character?It’s kind of like a deep, meditative trance state while I’m doing it. Every 50 shows or so, you go deeper, which is so rad. And in those last few weeks of performing, my peripheral vision opened up. I saw things I’d never seen before that have been happening for years.How has your approach to Persephone changed over time?A huge shift came after two full productions, when the alcohol was introduced. In London, Chavkin came up to me and was like, “I think you’re trashed for a while, and it’s like ‘Ab Fab’ — you’ve got to be like ‘Ab Fab’ trashed.” I was like, “Really, are you sure?” I didn’t get it. And then it became great fun.What does Persephone think of Hades?She loves him. You know, they’ve been married for hundreds of years. They’re like an old couple that knows how to fight well and make up well. That’s important in a long-running relationship.Gray, flanked by Patrick Page, left, and André De Shields, right, toasts the audience in the musical’s final song.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesHow did you stay in shape physically and vocally for this role?Physically, I don’t do anything but the show — that’s plenty of exercise. Vocally, I learned in school to stay away from certain foods, like dairy. I rolled my eyes, but I have really found if you stay away from stuff like that it’s so much easier to sing and scream and growl night after night. I see an ENT [an ear, nose and throat doctor] once a week, and get an IV of a bunch of shots to make sure you never get sick. And I haven’t had alcohol in a couple of years — that’s another way that my physical, spiritual, vocal self is just healthier.Did you have Covid?I got Covid in December with the rest of the cast — I got Omicron after being vaxxed and boosted. It was like a really bad cold for about 36 hours. That was it.How did playing for a masked audience affect your performance?I thought the masks were going to feel weird, but it doesn’t. You can still feel the audience. They did start serving alcohol, though, a couple of weeks ago, and that difference I very much noticed. I was like, “Oh, they love me these last couple of weeks,” and then I was like, “Oh, they’re serving alcohol again.”Why are you an actor?Well, I’m an Army brat that had to move every two or three years, and I was deeply shy. And actors are really nice — they accept the freaks and geeks, no questions asked. I also grew up skiing, but the jocks were not nice. So if I were to make friends in the new town every two or three years, I had to do the play. By the time college rolled around, it was the only thing I loved.During your time in “Hadestown,” you had two children, and when the show reopened you started sharing the role with an alternate. Tell me about that.Before the pandemic hit, I asked for an alternate to do the Sunday matinee and Tuesday night, so that I could have three days off, away from that building, one of those days being Sunday, when my children are not in school. I wasn’t seeing my kids, and that was deeply painful. I didn’t have kids to not raise them. All I wanted was a little family time, and they gave it to me.There were job-sharing experiments both at “Hadestown” and “Jagged Little Pill” that turned out to be short-lived, for different reasons.I’m a big believer in job-sharing. Several productions have done it in London, and that’s what gave me the idea. And in Korea they job share. It’s a wild puzzle to put together, but they’ve figured it out.What’s it like watching other actresses play Persephone?It’s wild. I always offer survival tips. And any Persephone I have watched I always steal one thing from, as a gesture of honor.“It’s time to try new things,” said Gray, sitting on the stage before her final performance at the Walter Kerr Theater. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis is your first commercial hit. How does that feel?I’m not always aware of what a hit it is, because I don’t use social media and I don’t go through the stage door. But you know, I was totally that kid in high school — I would go to the library and get a CD of “Jesus Christ Superstar” or “The Who’s Tommy” and listen over and over again. So I know what it is to be a teenager who really latches on to a story and an album. Lots of people wrote me over the pandemic about how much “Hadestown” helped them, and it’s beautiful to know that the art is functioning in that way.Why did you decide to leave?I was too comfortable. It’s just time to grow. It’s time to try new things. I come from a short-run world. It’s what I love about theater: it’s ephemeral, it goes away, it evaporates, right? I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I don’t keep any fan mail or fan art or show paraphernalia. I very neurotically photograph it all. I write back to anybody. But then anything that’s paper I burn in the backyard. And then it’s on to the next one.Why “Macbeth?”Because it was the job I got. I was banging out all these auditions, and that one came through. I auditioned for Lady Macduff and Witch One, and then the next day they were like, “Actually, do you want to play Banquo?”Banquo was written as a man. Any thoughts on what you’re going to do?I am a woman and I will play it as a woman. I’m also excited to play a parent onstage, to a sweet 10-year-old that I haven’t met yet. It’s my first time playing a parent in a play after being a parent, and I really look forward to that.A lot of actors have superstitions about “Macbeth.” Do you?It’s been a joke in the cast for a while. Patrick [Page, who plays Hades] has a copy of the folio in his pocket onstage, and every now and then he’ll throw it down on top of our dominoes game to try to scare me.So much of your career has been downtown. I wonder how you viewed Broadway before you worked there, and how your assessment of it has changed.I’ve been on Broadway only twice, but both times were pieces that I helped nurture from little Off Broadway gems. Then you get there, and the realities of producing a show on Broadway are very different, and, to be totally honest, I find the maintenance of the machine quite heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking to see things become moneymaking machines, and the money doesn’t necessarily always go to the artists. But I will say “Hadestown” is doing a ton of work to try to have these conversations about how things could and can change.You have one day off between “Hadestown” and “Macbeth.” Are you planning to rest?No, I’m going to go see Taylor Mac’s “The Hang” for some artistic healing, and then my partner and I are going to go do a shamanic ceremony with a medicine from a frog for spiritual and emotional and energetic cleansing. I’m like, “Bring it on! Let’s clean the slate!” More

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      ‘The Same’ Review: Do You See What I See?

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      Enda Walsh’s play, which had its U.S. premiere at the Irish Arts Center, stars two sisters who play different versions of the same character.Imagine that on one otherwise normal day, while going about your normal activities, you encounter someone who looks uncannily familiar — it’s you. Does the discovery cause you discomfort or give you relief? Are you met with assurance or fear?It’s the situation a woman named Lisa — well, two women named Lisa — face in “The Same,” by Enda Walsh, that opened on Sunday for its U.S. premiere, at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan.The Corcadorca Theater Company production stars Catherine Walsh and Eileen Walsh, who are sisters in real life (with no relation to Enda Walsh), as two expressions of Lisa. The younger Lisa recounts her recent arrival to a new city and what is presumably a mental health facility. She occasionally leaves her “small blue room,” as she calls it, for errands or groceries or, on one particular day, to take a job helping prepare for a repast after a funeral. There she meets the woman who shares her face and her memories: her future self.The two Lisas sit, stand and pace, reminiscing about their childhood. They speak in a steady back-and-forth, trading lines and swapping roles in what feels less like a conversation than a team recitation of a story they both know by heart. Their dialogue reflects a constantly changing perspective; sometimes they speak in the first person, sometimes the second, sometimes the third, as though each Lisa is, even individually, too fragmented to maintain a consistent point of view.The production, directed by Pat Kiernan, runs a trim 50 minutes, less than the time it takes to get from some corners of Brooklyn to the Irish Arts Center’s swanky new Midtown location on 11th Avenue.The set design, by Owen Boss, is immersive. It feels like a waiting room; the audience sits in upholstered chairs and love seats arranged in a loose square on a patch of carpet, giving a sense of the contours of a room. There’s a bookcase, a potted plant, and around and alongside the seats are signs of interrupted progress: tables cluttered with half-empty mugs of coffee and half-eaten cookies and an unfinished game of solitaire. The seating faces the center of the space, where the two actors spend most of the play. It’s novel to sit among the action, with one Lisa or another shuffling past your seat, though ultimately the effect doesn’t support its execution.Kiernan’s direction, however, imbues the production with an unsettling feeling: The actresses mirror each other in ways that aren’t always exact replications but rather variations on themes. And so there’s an interplay among their postures, movements and energies — younger Lisa gets worked up and older Lisa is calm, until she, too, gets worked up and younger Lisa becomes subdued. Michael Hurley’s lighting design and Peter Power’s sound design also seem triggered by the volatility of the Lisas’ minds. Kiernan has some of the set’s effects suddenly spring to life — two TV sets suspended in the corners of the room awaken to show clips from a game show or an episode of “Judge Judy,” a bingo machine whirs to life and then chaotically spews its contents on the floor.The success of the play’s Gemini effect is in large part because of the actresses’ talents. Eileen’s performance is jittery, her version of Lisa so full of neuroses that she seems like a shaken can of soda, fizzing just beneath the surface. Catherine gives off a similar, though more muted, anxiety; her Lisa embodies a different type of pressure, one of a dam carefully constructed over the years, pushing back against the waves crashing against its walls.Walsh’s script, however, doesn’t leave as lasting an impression. The play, which was originally commissioned by Corcadorca in celebration of the company’s 25th anniversary, has the usual signatures of the playwright, whose most recent New York production was the arresting “Medicine,” starring Domhnall Gleeson, at St. Ann’s Warehouse. There’s an intentional obliqueness, the traces of a narrative that are blurred and contorted by the characters. It all comes back to the slippery nature of the playwright’s language, which is full of repetition and half-formed ideas; sentences have some unspoken antecedent or trail off, spiraling inward to form an ouroboros of thoughts.But Walsh typically uses those linguistic maneuvers to add more shades to his text; rarely is he interested in a singular theme or mode of storytelling. Here, the short run time prevents him from getting too complicated, but the result is a script that, though still unconventional, is limited.How does a person grow from trauma? What happens when she resolves to leave part of herself behind, only to re-encounter that part unexpectedly? “The Same” circles these questions but never reaches a sharp point. It’s almost as though the play gets trapped simply gazing in the mirror.The SameThrough March 6 at the Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 50 minutes. More

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      Review: Learning ‘English,’ When Your Accent Is a ‘War Crime’

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      In a rich new play by Sanaz Toossi, four Iranians and their language teacher find second selves in a second tongue.If you’ve ever tried, as an adult, to learn a new language, you know how painful it can be; it’s bad enough to hear yourself mangling Italian, but worse to hear it mangling you. For those of us accustomed to sounding sharp with our words, it can come as quite a blow to discover the shabby figure we cut in the ill-fitting suit of someone else’s.How our mother tongue gives us voice yet limits our world — and how a new tongue expands that world yet may strangle our voice — is the subject of “English,” a rich new play by Sanaz Toossi that opened on Tuesday at the Linda Gross Theater. Both contemplative and comic, it nails every opportunity for big laughs as its English-learning characters struggle with accents and idioms. But the laughter provides cover for the deeper idea that their struggle is not just linguistic.The play, a coproduction of the Atlantic and Roundabout theater companies, is after all set in Iran in 2008, against a backdrop of travel restrictions and family separations. Each of the four students prepping for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl, at a storefront school in Karaj, a city of two million not far from Tehran, has a different reason for enrolling.For the cheerful 18-year-old Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), the promise and pleasure of new opportunity is reason enough. “English is the rice,” she explains in the inadvertent poetry of the partially fluent. “You take some rice, and you make the rice whatever you want.”But the others are more ambivalent. Dignified Roya (Pooya Mohseni) is there only because her son, who lives in “the Canada” with his wife and daughter, has insisted she speak English if she wants to live with them. He will not have his daughter’s assimilation threatened, he has warned, by a grandmother cooing in Farsi.If Roya is angry about this situation, she mostly suppresses the feeling, leaving her son hilariously passive-aggressive voice mail messages in which she offers evidence of her growing fluency. “I know all the numbers now,” she tells him. “Forty-three. Five hundred and thirty-eight. And seven.”But for Elham (Tala Ashe), anxiety is upfront: Having failed the Toefl five times, she must pass it if she wants her provisional acceptance at an Australian medical school to become official. When the Toefl teacher, Marjan (Marjan Neshat), tells her that “English isn’t your enemy,” she answers, “It is feeling like yes.” Her accent, she adds, is “a war crime.”Marjan learned English during nine years spent living in Manchester, England, gradually experiencing the way the fog of alienation can give way, through language, to the thrill of connection. Now that she is back in Iran, though, her English is eroding at the edges, at least in comparison to that of the fourth student, Omid (Hadi Tabbal), whose accent is minimal and vocabulary exceptional. Playing a game in which everyone must name items of clothing as quickly as possible while tossing a ball, he wins handily, wowing the others with “windbreaker.”Tabbal, left, plays the standout student in the English class taught by Neshat’s character. We understand her fluency (nine years in Britain), but there’s a mystery behind his (where did he learn the word “windbreaker”?).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOver the course of 22 scenes representing lessons, office hours and smoke breaks during the six-week course, we get to know all five characters well, and yet they also remain as stubbornly enigmatic as people do in real life. Their progress, too, is unpredictable, their skills sometimes stalling, then bounding forward, with new words and seemingly new ideas emerging.Not that we are told this; we just see it happen, thanks to Toossi’s clever theatricalization of the process. (When the characters speak English, they do so haltingly and with an accent; when they speak Farsi, which we hear in English, it’s swift and unaccented.) Even Elham, her W’s no longer sounding like V’s, and her tempo improved from largo to allegretto, is eventually able to pose a challenge to Omid’s fluency.The mystery of that fluency (why does he know “windbreaker”?) is one of the more obvious tensioning devices in a play that, despite its pleasures — but also at the root of them — has a somewhat schematic structure. Like a lifeboat movie, it features the immediate and broad differentiation of characters, their shifting alliances in the face of a looming threat and an eventual resolution involving the revelation of lies and someone cast overboard.Nor are its themes entirely novel; the drama of superimposing one language on another is at the heart of works as widely varied as Brian Friel’s “Translations” (in which a 19th-century cartographer is charged with rendering Irish place names in English) and the hyper-asterisked Leo Rosten novel “The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N,” set among immigrants in a night school English class and turned into a musical in 1968.But the delicacy of Toossi’s development handily makes up for both problems, especially the hysteria of lifeboat melodrama; in a recent interview in The New York Times, she told my colleague Alexis Soloski that “writing a trauma play makes me want to dry heave.”So in dealing with characters who could easily be exoticized in their chadors, Toossi has chosen instead to focus on their familiarity; like most of us, they deal less with the disaster of geopolitics than with an atmosphere of mild if daily discomfort. As such, the insights here are deep but never shattering, as when Roya perceives the crucial distinction between the verbs “visit” and “live” in one of her son’s messages. If the world’s happiness does not depend on it, a grandmother’s does.The director Knud Adams gently underlines the calm, almost classical rhythms of Toossi’s writing. Chopinesque piano solos play between scenes. As the play contemplates the question of language from several angles, the cube-like set, by Marsha Ginsberg, slowly rotates, offering in turn a street view of the building, the classroom interior and an entry portico. The cast is uniformly excellent, in a suitably unshowy but fully lived-in way.Too much delicacy has a way of wearing thin, though; with its refusal of trauma and even climax — the romance, if there is one, is buried — “English” begins to feel a bit overlong despite its moderate running time of an hour and 45 minutes.Still, the longueurs are worth it, forcing the audience into a useful position of slight non-fluency. We don’t always know what is going on in the play, as we don’t in the world either. And as each character struggles to decide whether to become another person by mastering another language, we are asked to consider whether we in the English-speaking West are not just cultural imperialists but linguistic ones as well. And whether, perhaps, those are really the same thing.EnglishThrough March 13 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Writing a Trauma Play Makes Me Want to Dry Heave’

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      The playwright Sanaz Toossi on her two comedies about Iranian women, both debuting this season: “English” and “Wish You Were Here.”“Writing a play is a terribly embarrassing thing,” Sanaz Toossi said. “The only way you get to the finish line is if you genuinely love what you’re writing about. I guess I love writing about Iranian women.”Toossi, who completed an M.F.A. in dramatic writing at New York University in 2018, is making a double debut this spring, with “English,” in previews now and set to run through March 13 at the Atlantic Theater Company, and “Wish You Were Here,” which is scheduled to begin previews on April 13 at Playwrights Horizons. Both plays are set in Karaj, Iran — “Wish You Were Here” in the late 1970s and ’80s, “English” in the present — in classrooms and living rooms mostly populated by women.“I feel like your relationships with other women are the most profound and the most devastating of your life,” she said on a recent freezing morning at a diner near the Atlantic. Toossi had dressed against the cold in layered scarves and sweaters. Around her neck hung a gold necklace. The pendant? Her own name in Farsi.“I’m a basic Iranian girl,” she joked.Toossi, 30, grew up in Orange County, Calif., the only child of Iranian immigrants. She fulfilled a pre-law major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was accepted to several law schools. Somehow she couldn’t make herself go. Instead she began writing plays, which she hid from her parents. (Her mother, sensing Toossi had a secret, assumed she was pregnant.) Those first plays were terrible, Toossi said. But then she began writing about the people she knew — Iranians and Iranian Americans — and the plays got better.From left, Tala Ashe, Hadi Tabbal, Marjan Neshat, Ava Lalezarzadeh and Pooya Mohseni in “English,” set in a class for English-language learners.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow she writes comedies, which are also, arguably, tragedies. “English,” copresented with the Roundabout Theater Company, and set in a class for English-language learners, explores the ways in which language and identity intertwine. “Wish You Were Here,” written as a gift to her mother, follows a group of friends through the upheavals of the Iran-Iraq War. Both plays interrogate the losses — real and symbolic — that come when characters can’t fully express themselves.“Sometimes I’m talked about as a writer who writes political content,” she said. “It just means that I write Middle Eastern people. And those people have not been on our stages very often.”Over coffee and eggs, Toossi — anxious, glamorous — discussed language, representation and the comic potential of bleeding onto the furniture. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Were you raised speaking Farsi?We were not the Iranians who were like, “We’re in America now.” I grew up naturally bilingual. I’m a writer now. I make my living in the English language. And my Farsi gets worse every year. It’s painful for me. I wonder if my kids will know Farsi. I did work with a Farsi tutor. I went in thinking, I’ve got this. You’re going to love me. She goes, “Your grammar is very bad.” I was like, OK, that’s great. Tear me a new one, girl.These two plays are about Middle Eastern characters. Is that typical of your work?The family drama I’ve just finished, it’s about Southern Californian Iranians. Everything else has been set in Iran. What happens if I show up with a play about three white girls? Will anyone want to do it? Even if it’s really good? Sometimes I worry that I am the right kind of Middle Eastern. When the Muslim ban [Donald J. Trump’s 2017 executive order that at first barred nationals from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering America] was enacted, I felt a shift. Middle Eastern artists have been knocking at the door for a really long time. People finally started listening.So you worry about being pigeonholed?If all that ever gets produced of my work is just my stories about Middle Eastern people, I don’t think I would ever be upset. But there’s always the worry that I am in the person-of-color slot in a season. It starts to feel a little icky. I don’t know that I’ll ever stop writing about Middle Eastern people until it doesn’t feel special. It feels special right now to have — especially in “Wish You Were Here” — these Iranian girls onstage. It’s a little bit about politics, but it’s mostly about them trying not to period on a couch. Maybe that won’t feel special in 30 years, and that’s fine, too.You have said that “Wish You Were Here” is for your mother. Whom is “English” for?“English” is for me. I had to write it. I wrote it as my thesis. I was really angry that year. After the travel ban, I white-knuckled it for two years, and I wrote “English” because I was furious with the anti-immigrant rhetoric. I just wanted to scream into the void a little bit. It’s a huge thing to learn a different language, a huge thing to give up that ability to fully express yourself, even if you have a full command over language.I was about to graduate. I wanted to be a writer, and it also probably came out of my own insecurities that I would never actually have the words to say what I wanted.What does it mean to present these plays to mostly white, mostly American audiences?The most meaningful responses for me have been the first-generation Middle Eastern kids who come to see “English.” I feel like they’re totally in it with me. Our white audiences, it’s tricky. There is laughter sometimes where I do not think there should be laughter. The accents get laughs. And it’s really uncomfortable some nights. I think the play takes care of it in a way. The pain is so real at the end of the play that I don’t think anybody’s laughing. But it is not easy.Why have you written these plays as comedies?I’m not a political writer. I’m not a public intellectual. I am, at my core, someone who loves a cheap laugh. I would fling myself off this booth to make you laugh.Both “English” and “Wish You Were Here” are sad. “Wish You Were Here” is more obviously sad. But writing a trauma play makes me want to dry heave. I just think it’s so flattening. It doesn’t help people see us as three-dimensional. I just can’t do it. And I don’t think it’s truthful. I don’t think that’s how life works.Politics come into the room, and you’re still trying to make your best friend laugh, or you’re still annoyed that you perioded on the couch — it’s all happening at once. Do people think that Middle Eastern women are huddled under a chador, like, bemoaning our oppressions? Pain looks different than how we think it looks and also joy is always there. Kindness is always there. There’s so much laughter through it. More