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      Fehinti Balogun's Call to Action Unfolds Onstage at COP26

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      A filmed version of Fehinti Balogun’s play about his awakening to climate issues is being shown at the COP26 summit. He is among the theater artists trying to make a difference through their work.The actor Fehinti Balogun knows that theater can mobilize people toward climate action, because that’s what it did for him.Back in 2017, while preparing for a role in “Myth,” a climate parable, he began reading books about climate change and became alarmed by the unusually warm summer he was experiencing in England. The play itself called for him and the other actors to repeatedly run through the same mundane lines, to the point of absurdity, as their environment ruptured terrifyingly around them — the walls streaking with oil, the stove catching fire, the freezer oozing water.The whole experience changed his life, Balogun said. Suddenly, nothing seemed more important than addressing the global crisis. Not even landing the lead in a West End production (a long-coveted dream) of “The Importance of Being Earnest.” His growing anxiety made him feel as if he were living a real-world version of “Myth” in which society kept repeating the same old script even as the planet descended into chaos.“Knowing all that I did made me angry at the world for not doing anything,” the 26-year-old Balogun (“Dune,” “I May Destroy You”) said in a phone interview. “I didn’t get how we weren’t revolting.”That sense of urgency is what he said he hopes to pass along to audiences in “Can I Live?,” a new play that he wrote, stars in and created with the theater company Complicité. A filmed version of the piece, which also features supporting actors and musicians and was originally conceived as a live show, was screened Monday as part of COP26, the United Nations climate meeting in Glasgow. The resulting work is as innovative as any piece of theater to emerge during the Covid-19 era: Initially it appears to be just an intimate Zoom session with Balogun but evolves into an explosive mix of spoken word, animation, hip-hop and dialogue.Balogun in “Can I Live?,” which he conceived and wrote. The play, a mix of spoken word, animation, hip-hop and dialogue, can be streamed online through Nov. 12.David HewittThe hourlong production, which the Barbican Center has made available for streaming on its website through Nov. 12, combines scientific facts about how the greenhouse effect works with the story of Balogun’s own journey into the climate movement. It also focuses on the gap between the largely white mainstream environmental groups he joined, and the experiences of his primarily Black friends and family.Throughout the show, Balogun fields phone calls from family members about issues seemingly unrelated to the central thrust of the play, asking him when he’s going to get married or why he left a bag in the hallway at home. Though at first it seems as if they are interrupting Balogun’s primary narrative about “emissions, emissions, emissions,” as he sings at one point, their interjections hammer home one of his central ideas: If the movement isn’t willing to prioritize someone like his Nigerian grandma, it’s missing the point. Climate action, in other words, is for everyday people with everyday concerns.“The goal is to make grass-roots activism accessible, and to represent people of color and working-class people,” he said. To that end, he interweaves his own story with that of the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who campaigned against destructive oil extraction on behalf of his Ogoni people. “So often we don’t talk about the global South,” Balogun said. “We don’t talk about the communities who’ve been leading this fight for years.”Though Balogun is the only theater artist on the official COP26 schedule, he is certainly not the first playwright to grapple with climate themes. Climate Change Theater Action, an initiative of the nonprofit the Arctic Cycle, was created to encourage theater-making that might draw greater attention to COP21, the U.N. climate meeting in 2015 that resulted in the landmark Paris Agreement. (The theater group has never been officially affiliated with any of the annual COP meetings.)Since its inception, the group has produced 200 works that have been performed for 40,000 people in 30 countries, said its co-founder, Chantal Bilodeau. The organization commissions plays with environmental themes, paying the writers and then providing the scripts free to theater companies, schools or any other groups that want to stage readings or productions.The first year, Bilodeau said, they ended up with a “whole lot of depressing plays.” Now they try to steer playwrights away from dystopia and toward visions of a livable future, and encourage those staging the works to pair them with programming that helps audiences get a deeper understanding of the issues.Superhero Clubhouse’s after-school program, Big Green Theater, helps produce works focusing on climate issues. One such piece, “The Mystical Jungle and Luminescence City,” being filmed above, was written by fifth-grade students in Queens and is now on YouTube.Rachel Denise AprilLanxing Fu, co-director of the nonprofit Superhero Clubhouse in New York City, spends part of her time focused on those who will be most affected by a hotter planet: the next generation. Through Superhero Clubhouse’s after-school program Big Green Theater, run in collaboration with the Bushwick Starr and the Astoria Performing Arts Center, public elementary school students in Brooklyn and Queens are taught about climate issues and write plays in response to what they’re learning.Over a decade after the program began, Fu said that what is most striking about the students’ plays is how instinctively the young writers understand a basic truth about climate that evades a lot of adults: to find long-term solutions, we’ll need to work together.“A huge element of climate resilience is in the community we build and how we come together,” she said. “That’s always really present in their stories; it’s often part of the way that something gets resolved.”The Queens-based playwright and TV writer Dorothy Fortenberry also spends plenty of time thinking about children’s roles in the movement. Her play “The Lotus Paradox,” which will have its world premiere in January at the Warehouse Theater in Greenville, S.C., asks, What happens when children are constantly receiving the message that it’s their job to save the world? Like much of Fortenberry’s work in TV (she’s a writer on “The Handmaid’s Tale”), “The Lotus Paradox” includes the subject of climate change without making it the singular focus of the story.From left, the actors DeBryant Johnson, Jason D. Johnson and Dayanari Umana during a workshop for “The Lotus Paradox,” which debuts in January at the Warehouse Theater in Greenville, S.C.Andrew Huang“If you’re making a story about anything, in any place, and you don’t have climate change in it, that’s a science-fiction story,” she said. “You have made a choice to make the story less realistic than it would have been otherwise.”That’s a sentiment also shared by Anaïs Mitchell, the musician and writer of the musical “Hadestown,” which reopened on Broadway in September. In her retelling of Greek mythology, Hades is portrayed in song as a greedy “king of oil and coal” who fuels his industrialized hell of an underworld with the “fossils of the dead.” Aboveground, the lead characters, Orpheus and Eurydice, endure food scarcity and brutal weather that’s “either blazing hot or freezing cold,” a framing that was inspired by headlines about climate refugees.It’s worth intentionally wrestling with climate narratives in the theater, not just because they make plays more believable, Mitchell said, but also because theater might just be one of best tools for handling such themes. Like Orpheus trying to put things right with a song that shows “how the world could be, in spite of the way that it is,” Mitchell sees theater as a powerful tool for helping us imagine our way into a better future.“Theater is capable of opening our hearts and our eyes to an alternate reality than the one we’re living in,” she said.That’s why Balogun — though he remarks more than once in “Can I Live?” that he’s “not a scientist” — said he believes he has just as crucial a role to play as any climatologist. “Scientists are begging for artists and theater makers to help deliver this message,” he said. “And there’s a need for it now more than ever.” More

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      New York’s Irish Arts Center Upgrades to a ‘Flagship Hub’

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      Irish Arts Center, a New York nonprofit devoted to championing the culture of Ireland and Irish Americans, is finally moving into a home as big as its aspirations.The organization, founded in the East Village in 1972, has been operating for decades out of a onetime tenement in Hell’s Kitchen. Now, wrapping up a pandemic-delayed construction project first set in motion 15 years ago, the center is moving just around the corner after converting a longtime tire shop into a state-of-the-art performance facility where it aims, starting in December, to present theater, dance, music, visual art and more.Ireland “still has these incredibly deep roots to its own artistic legacy, and it still fundamentally feels like a land of poets in its sensibility and its storytelling,” said Aidan Connolly, the center’s executive director. But, he added, “New Yorkers might not know how exciting the emerging contemporary dance scene in Ireland is; they might not know how Ireland’s cultural evolution in the last 20 years has yielded an exciting, dynamic, more diverse generation of musical artists, and on and on.”The centerpiece of the new building is a flexible theater space that can seat up to 199 people.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesFabric banners and black curtains can be used for acoustic purposes, modifying the way sound is heard in the theater.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe theater’s walls are covered in red oak plywood panels that have been stained and textured.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe four-story, 21,700-square-foot building on 11th Avenue, which retains its original brick repair shop facade, houses, at its center, a black box theater space that has 14 approved configurations, the largest of which will seat 199 people. The theater is a major technological upgrade for the center, with retractable seating, flexible lighting, sound, and set rigging, an overhead wire tension grid and the capacity for digital capture and streaming.On the ground floor, the building has a cafe, with blackened steel panels and a walnut bar, which will be run by Ardesia, a local wine bar. And above and below the theater are rooms that can be used for educational and community programs, as well as rehearsals and meetings.The $60 million building was designed by Davis Brody Bond, a New York-based architecture firm, in consultation with Ireland’s state architect. There are nods both to the industrial history of Hell’s Kitchen, and the Irish mission of the center — lots of brick and steel, and also lots of places to sit and talk, because the center sees hospitality as an Irish virtue.Irish Arts Center is led by the executive director Aidan Connolly, center, along with Rachael Gilkey, left, its programming director, and Pauline Turley, the vice chair.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThere are Irish touches throughout the building — most conspicuously, the main stairway will feature lines of Irish poetry on the risers, but also the signs throughout the building are in Irish as well as English, in a font created in collaboration with the Irish typographer Bobby Tannam. Much of the furniture is from an Irish craft furniture designer, Orior, which makes pieces “injected with Irish character.”The center plans to keep its offices in its existing building, on West 51st Street; at some point, it plans to redo that building and resume using its 99-seat auditorium for smaller-scale performances. Cybert Tire, which previously occupied the 11th Avenue site, by the way, still exists — founded in 1916, it claims to be the city’s oldest tire shop, and has simply moved around the corner, onto West 52nd Street.Irish Arts Center began its life as an Off Off Broadway theater that produced its own work, but over the last 15 years it has embraced a broader portfolio; Connolly often says he likes to think of the center’s programming as a hybrid of the 92nd Street Y and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Irish culture is represented in New York in any variety of ways — there are periodically Irish writers on Broadway, for example, and the Irish Repertory Theater presents often acclaimed productions of Irish drama, but Connolly argues that, until now, there has been “no flagship hub to celebrate and promote Irish culture in a way that is commensurate with its impact,” akin to institutions like the French Institute Alliance Française or Scandinavia House.The organization remains modestly sized, at least by the scale of New York City nonprofits, with an anticipated $7 million budget for its first year in the new building. But it has been growing at a steady clip — its operating budget was only $690,000 in 2006-07.Above the theater is a wire tension grid for lighting, sound and other technical equipment.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe lighting is meant to be easily adjustable.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe building also has infrastructure to allow video capture, broadcast and streaming.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIn a demonstration of the expanded work made possible by the new theater, the center plans next summer to stage its first musical, an adaptation of the 2012 film “Good Vibrations,” about the Belfast punk rock scene. The first year will also include a production of “The Same,” a play by Enda Walsh about two women in a psychiatric institution, and “Chekhov’s First Play,” via Dead Centre, an Irish/English theater company.The center will open with a monthlong run by the Irish-French cabaret singer Camille O’Sullivan, who said she would fondly remember the old building, where she performed several times.“They’re family, and they’re friends,” O’Sullivan said, “and they’re very much giving a home to people like myself.”There will also be dance programs from Oona Doherty; Mufutau Yusuf; and Sean Curran with Darrah Carr. And there will be an array of music, poetry, readings and visual art.There are 31.5 million Americans of Irish ancestry, but the center has a broad view of Irishness, and although its donor base is made up primarily of Irish Americans, its audience is varied.The theater retained the brick facade of the tire shop that previously occupied the site. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesMiranda Driscoll, an Irish curator, arranged an opening exhibition of visual art for the building.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe structure’s building materials are primarily wood, brick, glass and steel.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“They have a really inclusive way of thinking about the culture of the Irish diaspora,” said Georgiana Pickett, an arts consultant who staged several collaborations with the center when she was executive director of the Baryshnikov Arts Center. “They’ve done a lot to ensure that they’re linking the histories of the arts that come through Ireland to many other places in the world, and that’s allowed them to include Appalachian music, new immigrant communities in Ireland, people of Irish descent that collaborate with other cultures — it’s the Irish Arts Center, but has a really diverse definition of what that means.”The project is primarily funded by government largess in both the United States and Ireland — New York City, which has supported multiple arts institutions over time, set aside $37 million for the project.“This amazing building is so timely,” said Gonzalo Casals, the city’s cultural affairs commissioner, “because it brings down the barriers among disciplines, and offers an in-depth understanding of Irish culture.”The Irish government contributed $9 million, and the state of New York gave $5 million. Private donors contributed $15 million. That’s $66 million raised thus far — the money not spent on the new building will be used in part to support the operating budget.The Irish government continues to support the center through Culture Ireland, which promotes Irish culture around the world as part of an effort announced in 2018 to double the country’s global footprint. Irish Arts Center has been a significant beneficiary of that effort; Christine Sisk, the director of Culture Ireland, said her agency is making a “big investment” in the center.“New York is an amazing city for the arts, and we also see it as a gateway to the rest of the U.S.,” said Sisk, who said she expected that Irish artists whose work is presented at the center could then more easily tour the United States. “It’s a shop window, and a guaranteed space, to present Irish arts.” More

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      Raging Prince and Simpering King: A Tale of Two Shakespeares

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      Livestreamed productions of “Hamlet” and “Macbeth” from London reflect the vital role directors have in redefining these classic characters.I’ve seen Hamlet cry. And pout. And waffle. And jest. And rave. But I haven’t seen Hamlet rage the way Cush Jumbo’s Hamlet does in a new production of Shakespeare’s tragedy at the Young Vic in London. It’s the kind of determinate rage that convincingly powers him through his revenge.Yet this production gets its spark from the politics of having a Black woman in the role, directing her anger at an injustice.What this “Hamlet” — and its fellow Shakespeare tragedy “Macbeth,” which is also onstage in London right now, at the Almeida Theater — reminds us of is the important role that a director can play in molding these central characters who are defined by their resolve, or lack thereof. Their choices may not only render a classic new again, but also make space for contemporary gender and racial politics.These plays, running in person and via livestream — which is how I saw them — show two different approaches to directing Shakespearean tragedies. Greg Hersov’s “Hamlet” has a compelling, well-defined protagonist inhabiting a not-quite polished production; while Yaël Farber’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” is an appealing production with bland lead performances.Farber typically has a strong command of her stages; her productions are often dark, and hung with a polished, ornate melancholy. (Her gracefully haunting take on “Hamlet,” starring an electric Ruth Negga, felt stolen from the dreams of Edgar Allan Poe.) This “Macbeth” is bleak, spare and gritty. (Soutra Gilmour is the set designer.)The play opens with an overturned wheelbarrow full of soldiers’ boots and a man bathing in a bucket of blood. And yet it’s also delicate, with Tom Lane’s cello score (performed by Aoife Burke); and stately, with the three elder Weird Sisters (Diane Fletcher, Maureen Hibbert and Valerie Lilley) dressed in handsome gray suits that David Byrne would envy. (Joanna Scotcher designed the costumes.)Farber takes a political stance in her direction, making the war imagery brutal and heavy-handed. But the largest surprise, and slip-up, in this otherwise charismatically styled and beautifully filmed production is that the central couple, played by James McArdle and Saoirse Ronan, are rather conventional and unremarkably defined.James McArdle and Saoirse Ronan in Yaël Farber’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” at the Almeida Theater in London.Marc BrennerI say central couple, though Macbeth was never the most interesting part of the play; he is ambitious but irresolute. He must be goaded on by Lady Macbeth, one of the most fearsome, emasculating — and fascinating — women in English literature. Though undoubtedly a great performer with a gleam of Hollywood celebrity, Ronan feels miscast in the role. Even as a murderer, Ronan has a jejune, effervescent quality that’s at odds with the base evil of the character.Farber sometimes positions Lady Macbeth as a sexual figure, her body sprawled in bed or on the floor draped in gauzy cloth, and her legs wrapped around Macbeth’s waist in greeting. But Ronan and McArdle lack chemistry, and this Lady Macbeth is also presented as oddly virginal; Ronan, wearing a playful white-blond bob, and mostly white attire, is the brightest image in this gloomy production.This Lady Macbeth could also represent a certain dangerous white female power that comes at the expense of men and women of color; in one scene, Macduff’s wife (Akiya Henry) and children, who are all played by Black actors, are viciously murdered as Lady Macbeth guiltily stands to the side. It’s an overly violent scene, punctuated by Lady Macduff’s jagged screams, that drags on for an excruciatingly long time.As for McArdle, he gives a believably shocked and earnest portrayal of Macbeth, and, later in the production, manages to deliver a rabid version of the murderous Scottish king. But he bumbles through the steps in between. Ultimately, we’re left with a murderous couple that somehow manages to be forgettable.On the other hand, in Hersov’s “Hamlet,” the trappings of the production are less lively: The music and costumes have an early 1990s vibe, though the reason is unclear. The livestream is, impressively, very accessible. You can watch from various camera angles, and captions and British Sign Language are also provided. Still, the video and audio quality leaves more to be desired.Where Hersov does provides a decisive interpretation is in the melancholy prince — and his suicidal lover. This Hamlet is not the desperate, confused young man so many productions present, but a prince empowered by his feelings. Jumbo gives a fiery, vitriolic performance; this Hamlet’s grief passes through a sieve of righteous anger. His wit is barbed with sneers and eye rolls. Even his jokes are delivered with an acerbic bite.Norah Lopez Holden as Ophelia, with Jumbo as Hamlet, in the production that is streaming through Saturday.Helen MurrayThe decision at the heart of the play — “to be or not to be,” that famous meditation on living and dying — seems less of an open question in this production. Jumbo’s prince philosophizes almost for the sport of it; he always seems resolved to what he must do.Ophelia (Norah Lopez Holden), who so often is just a girlfriend tragically lost to hysterics, is here as clear and confident as Jumbo’s Hamlet. In her first scene, she seductively sways her hips while listening to music, and she fantasizes a sexy Latin dance with Hamlet before she’s jolted back to reality. She isn’t a receptacle of Hamlet’s desire, but a young woman with sexual agency and desires of her own. Holden’s Ophelia has attitude, telling off her elder brother for his hypocrisy and firing back at Hamlet when she’s had enough of his gibes and babble.And when she descends into madness, it does not seem like the insanity of a girl who’s heartbroken and grieving; it seems as much an act as Hamlet’s, and her suicide appears to be a rejection of the world she inhabits.For Ophelia to show such agency within the bounds of the character as written is quietly extraordinary. And to see a Black woman reframe Hamlet as confident and righteously enraged is a political take unusual for the play. Hersov’s “Hamlet” remakes its main man from the ground up. After all, what a piece of work is a man — or a Black woman — on a fresh stage.The Tragedy of MacbethThrough Nov. 27 (streaming through Saturday) at the Almeida Theater in London; almeida.co.uk.HamletThrough Nov. 13 (streaming through Saturday) at the Young Vic in London; youngvic.org. More

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      in Theater

      Kristina Wong’s Pandemic Story: Sewing With Her Aunties

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      The performance artist ran a mask-making operation during the pandemic. That inspired her new comedy at New York Theater Workshop.Kristina Wong is an in-your-face performer who, until this month, hadn’t performed for an in-person audience since March 2020. The thought of looking into dozens of eyes, not just the little green light on her laptop, made her feel, well, weird.So her stage manager, Katie Ailinger, came up with a plan to ease her back into the rhythms of live performance: She taped stock photos of people’s faces around the rehearsal room at New York Theater Workshop, where in September Wong began to prepare “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord,” a one-woman show about running a sewing group during the pandemic.“Just turning my head and having a range of motion is a whole thing — and having eye contact again is huge!” Wong, 43, a comedian, performance artist and community activist, said recently during a phone interview from her dressing room. She was about to run through an afternoon technical rehearsal of the 90-minute production, a hybrid of stand-up, lecture and performance art that is scheduled to open Nov. 4.“I feel like I got more done for the world by running a mutual aid group than as an elected official,” Wong said, who is also a member of the Wilshire Center Koreatown Neighborhood Council.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesWhile Wong was stuck at home in Los Angeles, she stayed busy leading the Auntie Sewing Squad, a volunteer group of mostly Asian American women she founded in March 2020 to make face masks for health care workers, farm workers, incarcerated people and others. She recruited 6-year-old children, her 73-year-old mother and others for the operation, which ballooned to more than 800 “Aunties,” a cross-cultural term of respect and affection for women, as well as “Uncles” and nonbinary volunteers in 33 states. Together, they distributed more than 350,000 masks.“I feel like I got more done for the world by running a mutual aid group than as an elected official,” said Wong, a third-generation Chinese American from San Francisco. (She’s served as an unpaid elected representative of the Wilshire Center Koreatown Neighborhood Council in Los Angeles since 2019, an unusual electoral journey that is the subject of her one-woman show “Kristina Wong for Public Office,” whose national tour was interrupted by the pandemic.)After disbanding the sewing squad (she hosted a retirement party for the Aunties in Los Angeles in September), Wong shifted her focus to bringing the tale of her 504 days leading the group to the stage in a production directed by Chay Yew. And a streaming version of the show ran at New York Theater Workshop in May.In a conversation a few days before previews began, Wong discussed her journey from an out-of-work artist to the leader of hundreds of volunteers, her mother’s changed opinion of her performing arts career and how she hoped the show would reshape people’s perceptions of Asian Americans. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.In March 2020 your tour for “Kristina Wong for Public Office” was postponed. What made you want to start a mask-making group?I was home without income feeling sorry for myself, and I stumbled across some articles that said there was a need for homemade masks. It started with me taking my Hello Kitty sewing machine and fabric and making a naïve offer to the internet: “If you need masks and don’t have access to them, I will help you!” But my ego wrote a check my body couldn’t cash, and within four days I was inundated with requests, so I started a Facebook group of people whom I knew could sew. We had Aunties cutting the elastic off their fitted sheets, the straps off their bras. It was a Robinson Crusoe situation.Why did you call yourself a “sweatshop overlord”?My first volunteers were all Asian women, and I was like, “Oh, my God, this is the sickest moment, we are a modern-day sweatshop.” Our mothers and grandmothers did garment work — my grandmother and grandfather did laundry work as part of their rite of passage to America — and now we find ourselves doing this work again, for free, because the government hasn’t prepared us for this moment. So it was this gallows humor joke that I was the sweatshop overlord — also humor about child labor because I was ordering children around.At what point did you realize this was a show?Within the first 40 days, one of the Aunties — my first mentor, Leilani Chan of TeAda Productions [a Los Angeles-based theater company] — was like, “We’re going to try to figure out how to make work online.” So I’d get a booking from a college or a theater and then would just create new sections up to that point in the pandemic.The shows, which were all [streamed] live, became an event for the Aunties. I would post in our Facebook group “I’m doing a performance about us now,” and they would all change their name to “Auntie So and So” in Zoom. They’d openly chat with audience members during the performance and be there for the Q. and A. afterward, usually at their sewing machines. So it was me half-entertaining them, but also trying to bring our story into existence.“With this show,” Wong said, “I wanted to find a way to tell the story that’s more than us just being beat up, beat up, beat up, but also about how we survived.”Calla Kessler for The New York TimesWhat changes did you make for the in-person production?Doing the show from my home on Zoom — and the fact that we were all in a pandemic — was a great shorthand for the audience, but now I’m moving into a neutral space that is a representation of my home. So I realized I’d have to spend more time laying out context that we might’ve forgotten, and also trying to think about the bigger meaning of all this, rather than just putting moments to memory.You use comedy as a way of talking through micro- and macro-aggressions against Asian Americans. How did anti-Asian sentiment affect you personally?The great irony is that I didn’t even wear a mask for the first few weeks I was sewing them, because I felt like the mask I permanently wear on my face was already a sign to the world: “I’m a foreigner. I’m an immigrant. I brought the virus here. Come get me.” With this show, I wanted to find a way to tell the story that’s more than us just being beat up, beat up, beat up, but also about how we survived.Were you concerned that people wouldn’t want to relive the pandemic?We need to figure out how to visibly see Asian Americans and culture. During the pandemic, I saw Asian American women not as quiet, subservient virus passers but as warriors behind sewing machines doing the work of protecting Americans. If there’s a museum one day about this moment in history, please let there just be a little footnote that remembers our work. And I’ve learned that, especially as an artist of color, I can’t wait for someone else to write that footnote, so this show is really me screaming at people to know how to respect our labor.As recently as 2015, your mother was still sending you newspaper articles with the average pay for careers like doctors and government officials to try to dissuade you from pursuing a performing arts career. Is she more supportive now?My mom called me when I first started this and told me, “You’ve got to stop making those masks; stay inside!” I got really mad at her, but then she completely surprised me — she was like, “OK, mail me some fabric, get me the patterns.” Then she recruited all her friends and got really into it. I think she feels really proud.Is she coming to see the show?She was really scared to come to New York because of hate crimes and the Delta variant, but she and my dad are coming to watch the show. I’m really happy she gets to see it, and I think she’ll be surprised because she doesn’t know how much she’s in it. My shows have been my way to have honest conversations with my parents from a distance — they learn more about me from watching my shows than us sitting at the dining room table, where I’m mostly just lying to them and hiding stuff. And I think they know this!How much of the show is just you, Kristina Wong, on that stage, and how much is you playing a character?This is my great dilemma! I play a character named Kristina Wong who’s mostly me, but highly dramatized. Did I really crawl on my belly to go to the post office? No, but it did feel like life or death a lot of the time. More

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      in Television

      Val Bisoglio, Oft-Cast Character Actor, Dies at 95

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      He was seen on “Quincy, M.E.” and “The Sopranos.” He also memorably played John Travolta’s father in “Saturday Night Fever.”By 1986, after 30 years in the business, Val Bisoglio had made such an impression as a character actor that Danny Arnold, a producer casting a new police series called “Joe Bash,” wrote in a casting notice for a particular part simply that he was looking for “a Val Bisoglio-type.”Mr. Bisoglio saw the notice and figured that he was probably as good a Val Bisoglio-type as anybody. He called Mr. Arnold and landed the role, a desk sergeant.“Joe Bash” was short-lived, but the anecdote shows just how much Mr. Bisoglio was able to do with an Everyman-ish face, a distinctive voice and a versatility that enabled him to play cops, tough guys, bartenders, judges, fathers.He was perhaps best known for portraying the father of John Travolta’s character in the film “Saturday Night Fever” in 1977 (he whacks Mr. Travolta upside the head several times in a memorable dinner scene) and the owner of a restaurant preferred by the title character, a medical examiner played by Jack Klugman, on the television drama “Quincy, M.E.” from 1976 to 1983. But from the 1960s through the ’80s, television viewers were likely to encounter him in a seemingly endless list of guest roles.“If it was a popular TV show,” his wife, Bonnie (Ray) Bisoglio, said in a phone interview, “he was on it.”Mr. Bisoglio, right, with Jack Klugman in an episode of “Quincy, M.E.” He played the owner of a restaurant, and Mr. Klugman played a medical examiner. “Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant.”United Archives via Getty ImagesMr. Bisoglio died on Oct. 18 at his home near Los Olivos, Calif. He was 95.His wife said the cause was late-onset Lewy body dementia, which had been diagnosed a year ago.In an interview with The Daily News of New York in 1977, when he was early in his run on “Quincy” (he eventually appeared in the vast majority of the show’s 148 episodes), Mr. Bisoglio gave himself a nickname of sorts that was a reference to his “Quincy” role but could well have applied to much of a career in which he specialized in making a memorable impression in a brief amount of time.“Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant. It’s only one minute or two, at the most. So I’m the one- or two-minute man.”Italo Valentino Bisoglio (pronounced bee-ZOL-yoh) was born on May 7, 1926, in Manhattan. His father, Mario, was a greengrocer during the Depression, then worked in construction, and his mother, Virginia (Gallina) Bisoglio, did piecework sewing. Both had emigrated from the Piedmont region of northern Italy.Growing up in New York, he said, he was more interested in going to vaudeville and other theaters than in going to school; he dropped out after 10th grade and at 16 made his way to Los Angeles, where he lived for a while, also spending time in Las Vegas. But he came to acting late; first he worked at various jobs, including, in his early 20s, selling water-softening devices, which made him a significant amount of money.“It went through my hands faster than water could soften it,” he told The News, largely because he developed a fondness for gambling.Ms. Bisoglio said that migraine headaches helped drive her husband to take acting classes as a form of tension-relieving therapy. He studied with Jeff Corey, a character actor who after being blacklisted in the 1950s became a well-regarded acting teacher, and by the early ’60s Mr. Bisoglio was back in New York and establishing himself as a theater actor.At the Off Broadway Sheridan Square Playhouse in 1965, he was part of a production of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” that also included Robert Duvall, Jon Voigt, Susan Anspach and Richard Castellano, all then still early in their careers. The next year he made his only Broadway appearance, in Frederick Knott’s “Wait Until Dark,” playing a con man (Mr. Duvall played another).He began to find television work as well, appearing in episodes of “Bonanza” and “Mayberry R.F.D.,” among other shows, and in 1969 he landed a recurring role on the soap opera “The Doctors.” By the ’70s he had residences on both coasts to accommodate his increasingly busy TV and stage careers.Mr. Bisoglio tended to be offered roles as mobsters and other heavies — he held up Archie Bunker and family in a 1972 episode of “All in the Family” — but, as his wife said, “he yearned for roles where he could show something else,” and he turned down the thug parts when he could. Partly, he said, that was because they stereotyped a particular sort of Italian, one not representative of his family’s origins; his mother bristled whenever he took such a part.“She doesn’t cook much pasta,” he told United Press International in 1977. “We northern Italians in the Po Valley area eat mostly rice. We’re from peasant stock.”But, he told The Daily News, he also disliked such roles because they reminded him of his time as a gambler.“When I was a New York gambler I had to mix with those tough guys,” he said. “God, they were tough. Their arms were like iron. Their necks were like iron. Now it’s embarrassing for me to play them.”That said, his final credits were in three episodes of “The Sopranos” in 2002, playing a character named Murf who was part of Junior Soprano’s crew. But Mr. Bisoglio said he always enjoyed the chance to play comic roles.In the early 1980s, for instance, he was in several episodes of “M*A*S*H,” playing a cook named Pernelli. In one, Alan Alda’s Hawkeye lectures him at length on how to delicately prepare the perfect French toast. Mr. Bisoglio then ignores him and dumps all the ingredients, including the bread, into a giant pot.Another role that took Mr. Bisoglio a long way from Italian stereotypes came in 1979, when he played an erudite Indian chief named Gray Cloud in the comic western “The Frisco Kid,” with Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford. George American Horse, an actual American Indian, was an adviser on the film, and in 1978 he told The New York Times that, the uncomfortable cross-cultural casting notwithstanding, Mr. Bisoglio’s portrayal was a welcome change from “the stoic Indian sitting on his pony with his arms crossed and wearing war paint.”Mr. Bisoglio’s marriage to Joyce Haden was brief and ended in divorce. He and Ms. Bisoglio married in 1996. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Joseph Bisoglio and Scott Chapman. More

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      Two Theaters, Different Worlds

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      Munich is throwing off a provincial reputation to become a global cultural powerhouse. Yet tensions between local and cosmopolitan impulses in the city’s playhouses remain.MUNICH — This month, hundreds of elegant Bavarians, many decked out in the region’s traditional dress of lederhosen and dirndls, gathered for the festive opening of the new Volkstheater, a striking and luxurious performing arts complex built into the cobbled courtyards of a 19th-century abattoir.That the Volkstheater was inaugurated a week after the opening of Isarphilharmonie, a world-class concert hall, seemed a further signal that Munich is throwing off its provincial reputation and growing into a global cultural powerhouse.Yet tensions between local and cosmopolitan impulses in the city’s arts scene remain, and nowhere are they clearer than in the different approaches of the Volkstheater and another state-funded playhouse, the Münchner Kammerspiele. Once described as Munich’s “unloved child,” the Volkstheater was willed into existence in 1983 by a conservative mayor who wanted a more traditional alternative to the artistically and politically provocative Kammerspiele.The Volkstheater’s $150 million venue is a vindication of the artistic course that its longtime leader, Christian Stückl, has charted for the house. In 2002, Stückl arrived as the artistic director and set about building an ensemble of young actors, including many fresh out of drama school. Nearly two decades later, the theater is known far and wide as an incubator of talent. The company’s “Radical Young” festival, founded in 2005, showcases productions by up-and-coming directors from theaters throughout the German-speaking world.The Kammerspiele — whose history stretches back more than a century and includes world premieres by the dramatic titans Bertolt Brecht and Frank Wedekind — is also in the midst of a new beginning. It recently kicked off its second season under its artistic director, Barbara Mundel, who has brought in a mostly new (and greatly expanded) acting ensemble and a diverse team of artistic collaborators.Jan Meeno Jürgens, left, and Alexandros Koutsoulis in the Volkstheater’s “Edward II.” Arno DeclairStarting in the middle of a pandemic, however, has not been easy, and the Kammerspiele has often struggled to define or articulate its vision. So I wouldn’t be too surprised if the theater is eying the Volkstheater, whose splashy opening is still making headlines and generating excitement here, with something like envy.With a swanky home for its tried and tested model of traditional theater performed by young players, the Volkstheater seems in the ascendant. But it remains to be seen whether the company can appeal to a public beyond its mostly local base.Stückl’s production of Christopher Marlowe’s “Edward II,” which inaugurated the stage, seems the sort of stylish yet conventional staging that could attract wider audiences. The production is sensitively acted and poignantly illustrates the medieval English king’s passionate and heedless love for Gaveston, the earl of Cornwall, which the monarch pursues as his court plots against him.With its sizable dramatis personae, “Edward II” proves a good opportunity to show off the Volkstheater’s fresh-faced ensemble, as well as the technical capacities of the stage. The costumes and the minimal props — including a bathtub and throne — vibrate with electric pinks and purples against the black expanse of the neon-lit stage, whose frequent rotations facilitate seamless entrances and exits over two intermissionless hours.“Edward II” is the first of 15 premieres that the house has planned for this season, along with works by George Orwell and Oscar Wilde and several new plays. Yet the company’s repertoire leans heavily on the classics, from Shakespeare to foundational German works.Pascal Fligg in “Felix Krull,” an adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel at the Volkstheater.Andrea HuberA brilliantly acted chamber version of Thomas Mann’s “The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man” is the Volkstheater’s first revival in its new home. Presented in the house’s second, smaller theater, the 2011 staging, adapted from the novel by the show’s director, Bastian Kraft, feels remarkably fresh considering its age. Kraft succeeds in conjuring the colorful life and globe-trotting adventures of Mann’s charming confidence man with limited means.The cast remains unchanged from a decade ago: Pascal Fligg, Nicola Fritzen and Justin Mühlenhardt give heroic performances, dividing the role of Krull among them. The three bring the rakish trickster to life through a series of fast, witty and sweaty performances that are triumphs of bravura acting.“Felix Krull” is one of the Volkstheater’s classic productions, and it still sells out. Things look very different over at the Kammerspiele, which is building up its repertoire pretty much from scratch. (Almost none of the company’s productions from before Mundel’s tenure have been retained.) The program includes few famous plays or recognizable titles. Instead, the Kammerspiele is taking a gamble on recent and freshly commissioned works by international artists, dramatists and theater collectives.The cast of Sivan Ben Yishai’s “Like Lovers Do (Memoirs of Medusa),” directed by Pinar Karabulut at the Kammerspiele in Munich.Krafft AngererOne young author working at the theater is the Israeli writer Sivan Ben Yishai, whose “Like Lovers Do (Memoirs of Medusa)” recently received its world premiere there. This provocative play is a ferocious and uncompromising dramatic treatise about sexual violence, abuse, self-harm and the psychologically damaging expectations placed on girls and women in a sexist society. The playbill contains a trigger warning that may be tongue-in-cheek. (“Trigger warnings sell,” a character tells us.)Thankfully, Pinar Karabulut’s stylishly campy and colorful production does not put any violence or cruelty onstage. The spirited five-member cast, drawn from the house’s ensemble, recite (and occasionally sing) the X-rated dialogue while decked out in wacky comic-book costumes by Teresa Vergho. Karabulut’s whimsical dollhouse aesthetic provides a much-welcome contrast to the play’s relentless brutality; the production’s irony and dark humor help the audience get through what would otherwise be an unremittingly grim evening.The Kammerspiele’s terrific ensemble is also front and center in “The Politicians,” a dramatic monologue by Wolfram Lotz. It’s a lengthy poetic manifesto that feels outraged and urgent — though what it means isn’t always clear. In its incantatory power and rhythmic flow, it can be mesmerizing on a purely aural level, and its mix of sense and nonsense opens up an infinite number of theatrical possibilities.Bekim Latifi in “Like Lovers Do (Memoirs of Medusa)” at the Kammerspiele. Krafft AngererWhen performed for the first time, embedded inside a Berlin production of “King Lear” at the Deutsches Theater, the entirety of “The Politicians” was entrusted to a single actress; in Munich, the director Felicitas Brucker distributes Lotz’s text among three performers. For a little over an hour, Katharina Bach, Svetlana Belesova and Thomas Schmauser declaim the agitated text with white-hot intensity. Performing from isolated cubbyholes that resemble a bedroom, a workshop and a kitchen in one, and whose walls often crawl with video-game-like animation, the agile actors inject hilarity and disquiet into their absurd speeches.The single weirdest, most wonderful moment in this dizzying evening is when Bach — who delivers the most impressively unhinged performance — pauses briefly amid a fiery torrent of nigh-incomprehensible babble to ask the audience, with deadpan directness, “Any questions?”Based on the evidence so far, the Kammerspiele under Mundel is more interested in art that poses questions rather than provides answers. I hope Munich’s theater lovers rise to the challenge of discovering the untested repertoire that she is introducing to this storied house. By comparison, the more popular and crowd-pleasing Volkstheater, installed in its state-of-the-art home, finds itself in a better position than ever before to convince audiences — including those skeptical about a more traditional approach — of its theatrical vision.From left, Katharina Bach, Svetlana Belesova and Thomas Schmauser in “The Politicians,” directed by Felicitas Brucker, at the Kammerspiele.Judith BussEdward II. Directed by Christian Stückl. Münchner Volkstheater, through Nov. 25.Felix Krull. Directed by Bastian Kraft. Münchner Volkstheater, through Nov. 6.Like Lovers Do (Memories of Medusa). Directed by Pinar Karabulut. Münchner Kammerspiele, through Nov. 15.The Politicians. Directed by Felicitas Brucker. Münchner Kammerspiele, through Nov. 24. More

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      Review: ‘Caroline, or Change’ Makes History’s Heartbreak Sing

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      An electrifying revival of the 2003 musical, featuring a titanic performance by Sharon D Clarke, follows the money to the source of American inequality.Difficult, even painful stories are no impediment to great musicals. Maybe the opposite is true. Pogroms, suicides and revolutions have all been turned into transcendent shows.Still, few have dared to tell as many such stories as “Caroline, or Change” does. But of the subjects “Caroline” grabs in the meaty fist of its ambition — civil rights, economics, mourning, the Mississippi floodplain — the most radical is also the most traditional: the anguish of troubled love.I speak not of love like Tony and Maria’s, nor even Porgy and Bess’s, but of the love, more honored in the breach, between Blacks and Jews. No musical has ever faced its country’s history, its creators’ history and the history of its genre — which has often caricatured both groups — as unblinkingly as “Caroline.”That was true when it premiered at the Public Theater in 2003 and feels truer now in the electrifying Broadway revival that opened on Wednesday at Studio 54. Not because much has changed in the show itself. Tony Kushner’s book and lyrics, no less than Jeanine Tesori’s flood of ’60s-style music, remain models of thematic concision, wonders of imagery, daring pileups of incompatible emotions.But the world around “Caroline” has changed in ways that make it seem more prescient, more painful and — despite a performance of tragic grandeur in the title role by Sharon D Clarke — more hopeful now than it did back then. As if to acknowledge that, the first thing we see in Michael Longhurst’s shrewd staging for the Roundabout Theater Company, based on his 2018 British production, is a Confederate statue called “that ol copper Nightmare Man.” By evening’s end, at least that nightmare will be over.Others will remain to prickle your conscience and your politics; the premise almost seems designed to make you squirm. Caroline Thibodeaux is a 39-year-old Black woman who, in 1963, works for the Gellmans, a Jewish family in Lake Charles, La. Cleaning, doing laundry and minding 8-year-old Noah after school, she earns $30 a week; on that paltry salary, lacking the help of her absent husband, she must sustain her children. With tyrannical self-discipline that leaves little time for warmth, she very nearly manages.As the leading character in a musical, Caroline is unique: Titanically dour, she seeks to repel all sympathy her circumstances might invite. Noah, too, is a complex character, mourning his mother’s death from lung cancer and fixating on Caroline as a substitute parent. (In this production, three young actors alternate in the role.)Despite their twinned sadnesses, Noah’s love thaws Caroline only to the point of allowing him to light her daily cigarette. Otherwise, she treats him as she might an untrained puppy, shooing him out of the basement where she works, “16 feet below sea level,” in the oppressive heat and humidity of the appliances of her trade.The equilibrium of this precarious system is carefully set up in the opening scenes, as is the musical’s stylistic daring. Instead of a chorus, Kushner provides a pantheon of singing allegorical figures: the bubbly washing machine (Arica Jackson), the infernal dryer (Kevin S. McAllister), the sexy radio (Nasia Thomas, Nya and Harper Miles, wearing aerial tiaras), and the serene moon (N’Kenge). (Later, there’s also a bus, wonderfully voiced by McAllister.) Around these companions she can be herself, as she daren’t around Noah or his despised new stepmother, Rose.Clarke, center, in the musical in which the emotional underpinnings of the household are equated with economics, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCaroline’s imperviousness at first tips the balance of the show’s sympathy toward Noah, whose fantasy of being centrally important in her life is excused by his youth and his grief. (If he is something of a martyr, perhaps it is not insignificant that Kushner sets the semi-autobiographical story at 913 St. Anthony Street.) In a more typical musical, the fulfillment of his needs would fulfill Caroline’s as well.Instead, Noah (Jaden Myles Waldman on the night I attended) precipitates the show’s crisis, unwittingly egged on by Rose (Caissie Levy). Recently married to Noah’s feckless father, and trying to assert authority in the awkward situation, she imposes a new rule: Caroline should keep any change she finds in Noah’s dirty clothes. When Noah, in response, starts leaving money deliberately, Caroline must fight with herself about taking it; the emotional underpinnings of the household, which Kushner equates with economics, very quickly collapse. Change causes change.And that’s barely the half of it. “Caroline” is as full of incident as Kushner’s “Angels in America,” but hugely condensed and then heightened by song. The wonder is that it is never less than thrilling to experience. This being a musical, the music is part of that; Tesori’s wondrous score is like the search function on a car radio, picking up snippets of every genre on the dial. The sounds of klezmer, blues, Broadway, Motown, Mozart and girl-group pop, among many others, pinpoint each character but also serve as expressive vehicles for the larger ideas the story is assembling.Those ideas start small. It seems merely an irritating infraction, for instance, that Rose mispronounces Caroline’s name as Carolyn — until you notice Clarke wincing as if struck when it happens.And Noah’s fantasies, which at first seem merely sweet, soon grow ridiculous and grandiose. He imagines Caroline’s children — teenage Emmie (Samantha Williams) and her younger brothers Jackie and Joe (Alexander Bello and Jayden Theophile on the night I attended) — praising him over dinner for his largess: “Thank God we can eat now!” In reality, they do not think of him at all.Caroline does, if no longer as a pitiful boy then as an ethical dilemma, an heir to the exploitative ways of even liberal whites. Nor does she see Rose as anything more than a tightfisted employer. I’m afraid I almost did, too; it’s a rare miscalculation that she is made the villain of a piece that doesn’t need one. (Surely Noah’s father, Stuart, a musician who in John Cariani’s performance is as mournful as the clarinet he plays, is just as culpable.) In any case, the force of the characters’ needs, once set in motion, is more than enough to do the damage.From left, Adam Makké, Caissie Levy, John Cariani, Chip Zien, Stuart Zagnit and Joy Hermalyn at a Hanukkah dinner that sets up the oncoming collision.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLonghurst best dramatizes the oncoming collision in his acute staging of the Gellmans’ Hanukkah dinner. At the middle of the stage, the family — now expanded to include Rose’s lefty father visiting from New York (Chip Zien) and Stuart’s don’t-rock-the-boat Southern parents (Stuart Zagnit and Joy Hermalyn) — sing and dance and argue. Rose’s father offers Noah a marvelously compact sermon along with a fateful $20 bill:Money follows certain laws,it’s worth how much it’s worth becausesomewhere, something’s valued less;it’s how our blessings come, I guess.Meanwhile we see Caroline, her friend, Dotty (Tamika Lawrence), and Emmie hustling to prepare and serve the holiday meal as they circumnavigate the Gellmans on a turntable. Though the whites are literally centered, the image nevertheless decenters whiteness, with the Black characters often obscuring them. Thus we are well prepared, though we may still gasp, when late in the second act Noah asks if he and Caroline can ever again be friends.Her answer is crushing: “Weren’t never friends.”That huge lesson in the boy’s life, a lesson the actual boy evidently took to heart, is but a moment in Caroline’s. The story does not end with him but with her and her family. If this is an admirable insight from white authors, keep in mind that the musical was strongly shaped by Black artists as well, among them the original director, George C. Wolfe, and his Caroline, Tonya Pinkins. Their imprint is everywhere.Now Clarke, who won an Olivier award for her performance in the British production, adds hers. She makes of the maid an almost Shakespearean figure; even at the depths of the character’s despair, in the scarifying 11 o’clock number “Lot’s Wife,” she commands attention without begging for it, and does not allow herself, because Caroline wouldn’t, the luxury of collapse.The result of that restraint is more painful than cathartic, leaving the story’s emotional release to those who can afford it: Caroline’s children. The chance to believe in change is her hard-won bequest to them — and, in this devastating, uncomfortable, crucial musical, to us.Caroline, or ChangeThrough Jan. 9 at Studio 54, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Tour the Old Steel Town at the Center of ‘Lackawanna Blues’

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      In his Broadway play, Ruben Santiago-Hudson revisits the Lackawanna, N.Y., of his youth. A lot has changed since the late 1950s and ’60s, reflected here in recent photographs of the area.Today, it’s Tifft Nature Preserve, a 264-acre refuge in Buffalo, just north of Lackawanna, N.Y. In the 1950s and ’60s, it was an industrial site of train tracks, grain elevators and a handful of small ponds. That area is where Ruben Santiago-Hudson — the writer, director and star of “Lackawanna Blues,” on Broadway through Nov. 12 — went fishing as a child. It is also one of the many places that he fondly reminisces about in his autobiographical show.Santiago-Hudson’s play takes place in and around a boardinghouse at 32 Wasson Avenue owned by a big-hearted landlady, Ms. Rachel Crosby (affectionately known as “Nanny”), who took him in and raised him. While the 90-minute autobiographical one-man show is an ode to Nanny, it includes at least 25 neighborhood figures (all artfully played by Santiago-Hudson in various postures, accents and cadences).An aerial view of Lackawanna, including the site of Bethlehem Steel.via Lackawanna Historical AssociationAmong the lost souls, petty hustlers and philosophers waxing poetic was Ol’ Po’ Carl, a would-be chef and former baseball player. At a rehearsal of the play in mid-August, Santiago-Hudson recounted a conversation the pair had about fishing. (Ol’ Po’ Carl called him “doc” because there was always a chance Santiago-Hudson would be a doctor someday.)“He’d say to me, ‘Hey, doc! You little curly-headed, raggedy-headed rascal. You going the fishing?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, I might go the fishing.’ Not ‘going to fishing,’ ‘going the fishing.’“He’d say, ‘You’d better get on out there before they caught up all the fish.’ And I’d be like — I was 11 years old — I’m like, ‘He might be right, they caught all the fish!’ And I’m thinking, as I got older, I’m like, ‘How you going to catch all the fish?’”Recently, Malik Rainey, a photographer based in Buffalo, toured Lackawanna to capture the area during dusky evenings. Those images — along with archival photographs from the ’50s and ’60s that include photographs of Santiago-Hudson as a boy and Nanny with her husband, Bill — tell the story of a town’s rich past and present.Text excerpts from “Lackawanna Blues” 1956 Lackawanna, New York, like all Great Lakes cities, was thriving! Jobs everywhere, money everywhere. Steel plants, grain mills, railroads, the docks.Everybody had a new car and a conk. Restaurants, bars, stores, everybody made money.The smell of fried fish, chicken and pork chops floating in the air every weekend. In every bar the aroma of a newly tapped keg of Black Label, Iroquois, or Genesee beer, to complement that hot roast beef-on-weck with just a touch of horseradish.These snowbound cities that kissed the shores of the Great Lakes tried to live up to that privilege. And they were jumping; Cleveland, Buffalo, Chicago, Erie, Toledo, Detroit, Gary, Lackawanna!After-hour joints were jumping, sisters from Alabama frying pork rinds, brothers from Tennessee slopping sauce on freshly smoked slabs of ribs and shots of Black Velvet or Canadian Club whisky overrunning the shot glasses.You could get to town on a Monday and by Wednesday have more jobs than one man can take. These were fertile times.The 2020 census counted 19,949 people in Lackawanna. In the late ’50s and ’60s, when “Lackawanna Blues” is set, the town was thriving, courtesy of the Bethlehem Steel mill.In 1983, the steel mill closed its doors. Today, wind turbines spin where steel was once manufactured.The play, Santiago-Hudson said during an interview in August, allows him to revisit and remember where he came from.“People say things like, ‘Well, how did you escape? How did you get out?’ I didn’t want to escape,” he said. “I didn’t want to go nowhere. I’d have never left. If Nanny didn’t make me go to college, I’d have never left. It’s the honest to God truth. I’d rather take a job in the steel plant and stay in Lackawanna, and be with these people.”Bethlehem Steel closed in the early 1980s.Malik Rainey for The New York TimesSome of the current residents of Wasson Avenue.Malik Rainey for The New York TimesTifft Nature Preserve, and grain elevators in the distance.Malik Rainey for The New York TimesHouses as seen from Albright Court.Malik Rainey for The New York Times

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