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    ‘The Wind and the Rain’ Review: How Sunny’s Bar Weathered the Storm

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    On a barge in Brooklyn, the story of a beloved watering hole and a neighborhood’s recovery after Hurricane Sandy.How do we hold our shared history? Like a drink? Like a lover? Or does it slip through our fingers, like water from the bay? “The Wind and the Rain,” a new play by Sarah Gancher (“Russian Troll Farm”), which reclaims the recent past as pageant, offers one model.The play, which Jared Mezzocchi has staged on a barge that doubles as the Waterfront Museum and in the blocks of Red Hook, Brooklyn, just beyond, is ostensibly about Sunny’s, a bar that has occupied the ground floor of a brick building on Conover Street since 1907. Opened by Antonio Balzano and his wife, Angelina, each an immigrant from Italy, it survived world wars; prohibition; the building of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; urban blight; Hurricane Sandy, which sent the basin surging into the bar; and legal challenges. Now presided over by Tone Balzano Johansen, the bar remains a neighborhood stronghold. (Johansen is the widow of Antonio Balzano, an actor and painter named for his grandfather, and affectionately known as Sunny.) Every Saturday it hosts a bluegrass jam session. Johansen often sings.From a window of the barge, Sunny’s can almost be seen. Out another window, the Statue of Liberty beckons. The Vineyard Theater produced this show with En Garde Arts, a pioneer of site-specific and site-responsive performance. As the actors strut and a bluegrass combo strums and sings, the barge lurches underfoot. The play, performed by four actors on a narrow strip of stage in the barge’s center, is mostly Johansen’s story. Much of the text derives from interviews with her (Gancher is a Sunny’s regular) and she is played by Jen Tullock with lucid good sense. (Pete Simpson plays Sunny; Jennifer Regan and Paco Tolson fill out the other roles. Ample audience participation is also a feature.) Other vignettes are based on research, some are wholly invented. In a corner the band plays.The whole is affectionate, emotive, playful, but with a fuzziness around the edges — the way the world looks after one too many Manhattans. Instead of focusing only on Tone or on Sunny’s more generally, the play also offers a deep history of the neighborhood (from the British to the Dutch to the Lenape to the Laurentide ice sheet, all the way back to the Big Bang) and it lingers for a long time, too long, with the fraught love stories of Sunny’s grandparents and Romeo (Simpson again), a longtime bar employee.These discursions and the script’s fondness for philosophical postulates (“How do you make a play where everything past and future exists at once?” “How do you talk about time?”) tend to distract from the play’s core — the place of the bar within the greater community, the bar’s recovery after Sandy. The story of the bar is the story of the neighborhood, about a community coming together in the face of something as indomitable as a hurricane. It is a kind of living history, a collective memory in Christmas lights and scuffed wood.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Invasive Species,’ the Acting Bug Bites, Dramatically

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      Maia Novi stars in her play about a Hollywood-struck actress from Argentina who stops at Yale’s drama school and an inpatient psych ward on her way.Maia Novi’s “Invasive Species” is being marketed as an outrageous dark comedy, but it’s a quieter play than that: about being an Argentine immigrant with Hollywood ambitions, a graduate acting student at Yale and a psychiatric inpatient plagued by intrusive thoughts.“My name is Maia,” the play’s central character (Novi) tells the audience near the top of the show. “And this is a true story.”Well, true-ish, given that we’ve just seen her get bitten by the Acting Bug (Julian Sanchez), a human-size creature with a giant proboscis whose process of infecting Maia involves spitting voluptuously onto her face from above. A bit of hallucinatory license, then, has sometimes been taken.Directed by Michael Breslin at the Vineyard’s Dimson Theater, the play fragments into different worlds. The most realistic is the hospital in New Haven where Maia wakes up, in March 2022, to find she is a patient — admitted to a children’s ward, where suicide is a temptation for some of the adolescent patients.The play’s other worlds are more heightened and satirical, though they, too, have the whiff of veracity: the drama school, where a teacher says that Maia — trying to lose her accent by diligently imitating Gwyneth Paltrow — has a “lazy tongue”; the Connecticut dating scene, where a dimwitted American bro swallows every stereotype-laced lie that Maia concocts, prankishly, about her family in Argentina; a film set where a British director who casts her as Eva Perón has a blithely wrongheaded sense of authenticity.Partially inspired by the 1977 production of Spalding Gray’s theater piece “Rumstick Road,” an investigation into his mother’s suicide, “Invasive Species” carries the thrum of fear that can accompany a family history of mental illness. Maia worries — so does her father — about what she might have inherited from her own mother.Presented by a group of producers who include the playwright-provocateur Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play”), Breslin’s roommate when they studied drama at Yale, “Invasive Species” is crisply directed on a nearly bare stage. The supporting cast members (who include Raffi Donatich, Sam Gonzalez and Alexandra Maurice) are quicksilver-changeable in their multiple roles, and it’s always clear which reality or unreality the characters have stepped into, even when worlds overlap. (Yichen Zhou’s lighting is instrumental in that.)This is a well acted, neatly assembled, carefully modulated play with a cumulative force that is less than it might have been. The satire — of drama school, of xenophobia — isn’t the freshest, and the obliqueness of the hospital strand softens its impact, and ultimately the play’s.“Invasive Species” is a portrait of a young woman attempting, for the sake of ambition and survival, to force herself into various molds that do not fit who she truly is.“Pretend,” one of the teenage patients advises her, practically. “You should be good at that — you’re an actress, right?”Invasive SpeciesThrough June 30 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; invasivespeciesplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Russian Troll Farm’ Review: A Stream of Memes, Eroding Trust in Democracy

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      An unlikely dark comedy imagines the people pushing #PizzaGate, Donald Trump and who knows what next.No one misses the early days and dark theaters of the Covid pandemic, but the emergency workaround of streaming content was good for a few things anyway. People who formerly could not afford admission suddenly could, since much of it was free, and artists from anywhere could now be seen everywhere, with just a Wi-Fi connection.That’s how I first encountered “Russian Troll Farm,” a play by Sarah Gancher intended for the stage but that had its debut, in 2020, as an online co-production of three far-flung institutions: TheaterWorks Hartford, TheaterSquared in Fayetteville, Ark., and the Brooklyn-based Civilians. At the time, I found its subject and form beautifully realized and ideally matched — the subject being online interference in the 2016 presidential election by a Russian internet agency.“This is digitally native theater,” I wrote, “not just a play plopped into a Zoom box.”Now the box has been ripped open, and a fully staged live work coaxed out of it. But the production of “Russian Troll Farm” that opened on Thursday at the Vineyard Theater is an entirely different, and in some ways disappointing, experience. Though still informative and trenchant, and given a swifter staging by the director Darko Tresnjak, it has lost the thrill of the original’s accommodation to the extreme constraints of its time.Not that it is any less relevant in ours; fake news will surely be as prominent in the 2024 election cycle (is Taylor Swift a pro-Biden psy-op?) as it was in 2016. That’s when, as Gancher recounts using many real texts, posts and tweets of the time, trolls at the Internet Research Agency — a real place in St. Petersburg, Russia — devised sticky memes and other content meant to undermine confidence in the electoral process, sow general discord, legitimize Trumpism and vaporize Hillary Clinton.But the play is less interested in classics of the conspiracy genre like #PizzaGate and Frazzledrip than in the kinds of people who would dream them up. In the manner of sitcoms like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Office,” “Russian Troll Farm” focuses on four such (fictional) trolls, neatly differentiated from one another and from their dragonish supervisor, Ljuba (Christine Lahti).King, left, and Lavelle as two of the trolls whose various schemes for advancement and connection end disastrously.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Scene Partners,’ Dianne Wiest Delivers Another Master Class

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      The transcendent Dianne Wiest stars in an absurd yet poignant new play about a 75-year-old woman who sets out to be a star.“Acting Like a Maniac” is not your typical acting class: You have to sign a personal injury waiver to join it. But then Meryl Kowalski, with that double whammy of a theatrical name, isn’t your typical student. Though 75, she’s no cute oldster; Hugo Lockerby, the guru-like teacher with a wandering accent, thinks she may even be a genius. Performing the autobiographical “blueprint” she’s been writing as an exercise, her fellow students are amazed and baffled by the tale (did she really get an agent at gunpoint?) but also the style. “Do you want it realism or should it be more like whoa,” one asks.“Scene Partners,” by John J. Caswell Jr., with the transcendent Dianne Wiest as Meryl, is definitely more like whoa.Twee, snarky, meta, manic, maddening and yet eventually poignant, the play is a moving target, its tone as hard to pin down as its facts. Take the setting, a maybe Hollywood in an iffy 1985. (Also, the Soviet Union and most of the 20th century.) In any case, it’s often impossible to tell whether what we’re watching is Meryl’s life, a film about her life, a dream about the film, a hallucination of the dream, or some other nesting doll of narration.If the authorial bait-and-switch too often feels like throat-clearing, it does serve a purpose, building around the story a border that is also a blur. In Caswell’s world, as in Meryl’s, limits are always permeable.“Scene Partners,” which opened on Wednesday at the Vineyard Theater in a top-drawer production directed by Rachel Chavkin, is part of a genre you might call the absurd picaresque. Meryl is a hardheaded Candide, a sharp-eyed Don Quixote. When we meet her just after the long longed-for death of her abusive husband, she is leaving Wisconsin for California so fast she doesn’t bother burying him. “Within the year I will rise to fame and fortune as an international film star,” she says in farewell to her drug addict daughter. Sure enough, she soon acquires not just her agent and acting coach, but also a contract to write the movie of her life.What makes her life a fit subject for a movie, or even this play, is a useful question. Surely it’s not the banal details: the stepfather, the trauma and the mother who looked away are all tossed off too lightly to stick. Caswell doesn’t at first seem very interested in them except as opportunities to create fascinating verbal spirals, cross-references and death drops, like a game of biographical Chutes and Ladders.Wiest and Josh Hamilton, as an acting teacher, are in top form in John J. Caswell Jr.’s play at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet the process of making the banal fascinating is, it seems, Caswell’s point. When Meryl becomes successful, it is not because her life has been special; hers is the stardom of the ordinary, built on perseverance not glamour, and on the recognition that the only thing keeping her from her life goals is her life. “We lose countless masters like this woman,” says Hugo (Josh Hamilton, hilarious yet also noble), “simply because they lacked a certain access at a certain time in history.” The play’s structural gymnastics, which also make room for the possibility of dementia, give Meryl that access, and elevate her.As does Wiest. It’s a little rich to have her play a character in an acting class, considering how many acting classes she’s given over the years, onstage and on film. Still, it’s a great pleasure to watch her make Meryl’s innocence and bloodthirstiness equally believable, equally fresh. The same age as her character, with more than 50 years of theater behind her, Wiest nevertheless seems to be discovering herself each moment, in material that can’t make that easy.The difficulty, though occasionally an indulgence — even at just 105 minutes, “Scene Partners” could stand a 10-minute trim — is also the play’s great distinction. And Chavkin, while maintaining the level of stylishness that has become her trademark in musicals like “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” is careful not to flatten its extremes. Her rigorous production commits to both cold stretches and warm ones, ripe satire (a nimble supporting cast covers dozens of characters) and barely spoken tragedy. Sometimes — as in scenes with Johanna Day (excellent) as Meryl’s sister — the crosscurrents shift so quickly you don’t know which kind you’re in.Perhaps what we feel tugging at us in those moments is the undertow of addiction and abuse in the story — subjects Caswell has also touched on in his two previous major New York outings, “Wet Brain” and “Man Cave.” Both embraced the surreal as a way of repairing and elevating what appear to be unimportant, unsalvageable lives. Yet by ricocheting off others, in an absurd plane if necessary, they may achieve a kind of magnificence.Indeed, when an interviewer, suspicious of Meryl’s story, asks if she’s ever heard of delusions of grandeur, she answers: “Oh yes, and they can be so helpful!” Without them, we might not have grandeur (or plays, or great actors) at all.Scene PartnersThrough Dec. 17 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘This Land Was Made,’ Huey Newton Walks Into a Bar

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      Tori Sampson’s look at the Black Panther movement is a warm sitcom that becomes a jarring inquest into a real murder.In Oakland, Calif., in 1968, Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther leader, was convicted of killing a white police officer. In 1971, after two more trials and nearly two years in prison, he was cleared of all charges. So who pulled the trigger?That’s the question at the heart of “This Land Was Made,” the gutsy but murky new play by Tori Sampson at the Vineyard Theater. Part murder mystery and part counterfactual yarn, with generous helpings of sitcom and social drama thrown in, it doesn’t hold together in the largely naturalistic framework provided by Taylor Reynolds’s production. But several elements remain compelling on their own, especially when they acknowledge and repurpose familiar forms.Most successful is the sitcom element, which could be titled “Trish’s,” an Oakland bar where everybody knows your name. Miss Trish (Libya V. Pugh) is a New Orleans transplant with a sharp if loving tongue, serving beer and soul food to regulars who come for the schmooze as much as the fare. In one corner, her daughter, Sassy (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy), trims the Afros of old-timers and revolutionaries alike.For about 25 minutes, Sampson serves up something warm and piquant at Trish’s: an interplay of zingers, flirtations, spats and politics. Sassy is being romanced by Troy (Matthew Griffin). Her flashy friend Gail (Yasha Jackson) spars with the out-of-work Drew (Leland Fowler). Mr. Far (Ezra Knight), an avuncular mechanic, smooths everything over, with one affectionate eye on Trish and one on her fried chicken.Opinion on the Black Power movement is neatly divided among them. Troy, studying government in college and planning to be a judge, has no time for performative radicalism; Drew, who styles himself a “King Black Man” and is enamored of the Panthers, calls Troy a sellout. Mr. Far doesn’t like seeing “youngins stomping round with big chests” instead of working, but is sympathetic. And Trish, who lost a son in Vietnam, is fatalistic.“They gotta give up power for you to get some,” she says of white people. “Newsflash, that ain’t finna happen.”Antoinette Crowe-Legacy as the narrator, Sassy, and Matthew Griffin, left, as her boyfriend, Troy, in the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat Newton himself then walks into the bar seems like the setup for a joke — and, indeed, at first, he is handled cheerfully. With his swagger and charisma, and despite the bandolier of bullets draped sash-like over his leather coat, he is, in Julian Elijah Martinez’s electrifying performance, way more exciting than scary. Later, Martinez will fill in the more troubling aspects of the character, but at this point even Troy finds him impressive and approachable enough, despite their antipodal politics, to accept his invitation to a rally.Whether this meet cute of radicalism and conservatism is historically plausible, it is compelling as part of the playwright’s mission. Sampson, who grew up in a Black Power household, recently told my colleague Naveen Kumar that in writing “This Land Was Made” she “wanted to talk about the lowercase-p Panthers, as people.” When she intermittently achieves that sort of conversation — and in the process dramatizes the ways some Black Americans responded to the uppercase-p Panthers — the play hits a sweet spot at the intersection of fact and fiction.Then it swerves. The officer is killed and Sassy, in her secondary role as present-day narrator, sets out to reveal, as history has not, whodunit. “This Land Was Made” offers three variations on the fatal confrontation. Unfortunately, the staging, with interstitial rewinds as seen in “Hamilton,” is so unclear you may have trouble following any of the outcomes, which all involve one of the regulars at Trish’s.A bigger problem is the meaning of the invention. Is it designed to counteract an un-nuanced and possibly racist judgment on the movement as extremist and anti-American? The play’s title — taken from the song “This Land Is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie’s bitter retort to “God Bless America,” suggests as much. But it’s one thing to probe the past and extrapolate some answers; it’s another to claim, as Sassy does, that the play depicts “the exact events” that the world has never known “until today.”Perhaps that magical yet iffy omniscience — Sassy calls herself a griot, or traditional keeper of stories — would have felt less jarring in a more abstract production. (Wilson Chin’s set, though handsome, is compulsively detailed, right down to the B.B. King showcards.) In 2019, the fable-like “If Pretty Hurts,” Sampson’s first professionally produced play, got an impressionistic staging at Playwrights Horizons that enhanced her rich language instead of fighting it. Another Sampson play that year, “Cadillac Crew,” about women workers in the Civil Rights movement, did not, and fell flat.A more ambitious work than either, “This Land Was Made” does not yet seem certain of what it wants to be. Its sitcom setup (Sampson credits Norman Lear as an inspiration) clashes with the deadly seriousness that comes later, reducing the effectiveness of both. With a killing still unsolved at its center, it can’t, as Sassy instructs, “tell it like you know it.” It can only hazard a few unsatisfying guesses.This Land Was MadeThrough June 25 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      For Her New Play, Tori Sampson Revisited Her ‘Black Power Household’

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      “This Land Was Made,” at the Vineyard Theater, is rooted in the playwright’s personal connection to a political movement’s awakening.The narrator of “This Land Was Made,” the playwright Tori Sampson’s speculative account of the Black Panther Party’s powder-keg origins, is an aspiring writer named Sassy. “Consider me your time-traveling griot,” she tells the audience with wry buoyanc‌y, evoking the West African tradition of storytellers who propagated endangered legacies.The play, which opens on Sunday at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, is an act of oral history rooted in Sampson’s personal connection to the political awakening at its center. “Sassy is not me,” Sampson made clear during a recent interview off the courtyard of the Marlton Hotel, a short walk from the theater.“The Black Panthers were like family to her,” Sampson said of her mother, who was orphaned at the age of 3 and raised by an aunt who was a member of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s. She would accompany her aunt to meetings, where activists became like kin and their reverence for Blackness a guiding principle.Sampson’s mother, Wanda Louise Thompson, went on to raise the playwright and her sisters (her twin and an older sister) in a “Black Power household,” first in Boston and then in North Carolina, where they were taught, with some militancy, to value Black beauty and culture. (When her twin sister wanted a Britney Spears poster, for example, their mother insisted that two posters of Black artists go up alongside it.)Antoinette Crowe-Legacy as Sassy and Julian Elijah Martinez as Huey P. Newton in the play “This Land Was Made” at the Vineyard Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut orphanhood was also to be part of Sampson’s inheritance; she was 13 when her mother died of a pulmonary embolism, and she and her twin sister, whom Sampson calls “my lifeline and compass,” became wards of the state. After a year of moving between foster homes, the twins petitioned to attend an all-Black boarding school in Mississippi, where their independence was contingent on high achievement.“I’m trying to connect who I am with my past,” said Sampson, 34, who lives in Los Angeles and has written for the streaming TV series “Citadel” and “Hunters.” She has only recently begun to process that her experience as an orphan is integral to her work. “I was always yearning to understand what it would look like to have a family,” Sampson said. “My imagination would run wild making up stories.”That impulse reverberates through “This Land Was Made,” which is set inside a Bay Area tavern with soul food simmering in the back kitchen. “I wanted to write a story where Huey P. Newton walks into a bar and changes the lives of the people there forever,” Sampson said of the Black Panther Party co-founder. She got the idea for the play, a blend of historical fiction and sitcom conventions, when she learned that Newton’s rise to prominence began with an unsolved mystery.The facts in the murky case are these: In 1967, Newton and a friend were pulled over during a traffic stop in Oakland, Calif., in which Newton took a bullet to the stomach and a police officer was fatally shot. ‌Newton was charged and later convicted of voluntary manslaughter. (His conviction was eventually overturned‌.) Rallies ‌to “Free Huey” helped set off the Black Power movement.Sampson, right, with Kathleen Cleaver, a retired law professor and former communications secretary for the Black Panther Party, at Yale in February 2017. via Tori SampsonSo, if Newton didn’t pull the trigger, Sampson thought, who did? And what might Newton’s influence have been on his neighbors before his activism grew to an international scale? In the play, Sassy, Sampson’s narrator, claims to have heard the truth through the grapevine. “This Land Was Made” then unfolds as both a comedy and a call to action.Sampson said her taste for humor that bends toward social justice also comes from her mother. Though Thompson didn’t let her kids watch much television (only “The Cosby Show” for an hour a day), she adored “All in the Family” and considered its skewering of bigotry the height of the form. That show’s creator, Norman Lear, remains an inspiration for Sampson, who likes to wind up her characters and set them loose to elicit eye-opening laughs.“Tori has a particular tempo in mind for each character and how the ensemble builds together musically,” the play’s director, Taylor Reynolds, said of Sampson’s ear for dialogue. In fact, both women said the production was deep into tech rehearsals before Sampson watched the play with her eyes open.“Let them be loud and wrong,” Sampson said of her Lear-inspired ethos. “Just give them conviction and don’t hold them back.”Adam Greenfield, the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, where Sampson’s play “If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka” was presented in 2019, said her work demonstrates an “unrelenting investigation of identity that feels both global but also very personal.” A sharp and riotous sendup of ‌Eurocentric beauty standards, “If Pretty Hurts” is punctuated with fourth-wall-breaking monologues and draws on Sampson’s personal experience to interrogate the body-image pressures faced by Black women. (The New York Times critic Jesse Green called the play “an auspicious professional playwriting debut.”)While more grounded in the conventions of realism, “This Land Was Made” demonstrates Sampson’s fascination with how social constructs shape imbalances of power. (Sampson earned a ‌bachelor’s degree in sociology from Ball State University.) The play’s Oakland residents argue about colorism, assimilation and the fallacies of trusting the system, embodying the tensions that propelled Newton’s broader ideologies about Blackness.Sampson, who also writes for TV, has various projects in the works. “My life has never been a box,” she said, “so my mind doesn’t work that way.”Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesBut Sampson, who began “This Land Was Made” in 2014, during her second year at what is now called the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, also aims to render the civil rights movement in America on a human scale.“I wanted to talk about the lowercase-p Panthers, as people,” Sampson said, in addition to exploring their role in striking up political currents that continue to reverberate. As violent incidents at the hands of the police have gained visibility over the past decade, often captured on video during traffic stops like the one Sampson imagines onstage, the consequences of failing to recognize the humanity of Black people have only grown.Conversations with former Black Panthers were also crucial to Sampson’s research process, more and less serendipitously. She spoke to Ed Bullins, the renowned playwright and the party’s onetime minister of culture, with permission from his wife, while he was in the hospital in 2014. (Sampson’s godfather happened to be his doctor.) “Make sure you remember those were some funny cats,” Bullins, who died in 2021, told Sampson of the party’s co-founders, Newton and Bobby Seale.The playwright ‌also interviewed Kathleen Cleaver, the first woman to hold a leadership position in the party, after Cleaver, now a retired law professor, spoke at Yale.If it’s true what Sassy says, that “every great story is about journeying to find home,” it follows that Sampson’s work will continue to venture in many directions. She is developing a play about a nerdy comedian who embarks on a superhero quest to regain her Black card after she mispronounces Tupac Shakur’s name during sex. (“It’s a lot,” she said.)‌ And she will directly address her orphan experience for the first time in an animated series called “How to Succeed Without Parents.”“It’s always going to look different,” Sampson said of her idea of home. “My life has never been a box, so my mind doesn’t work that way.” More

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      Michael R. Jackson on the Soap Opera Origins of ‘White Girl in Danger’

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      The musical’s creator and creative team discuss their influences, including “Days of Our Lives,” “Showgirls” and D’Angelo.Hearing Michael R. Jackson, the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright of “A Strange Loop,” speak about soap operas is like getting lost in a Wikipedia wormhole. With nary a pause, he rolls through the details of characters’ yearslong arcs, including every stolen identity, forbidden romance and vicious backstabbing — literal and figurative.He’s amassed decades of knowledge: He became hooked at 5 years old, when he started camping out in front of a “gigantic” wooden television set with his great-aunt. “I would watch ‘The Young and the Restless’ at 12:30, ‘Days of Our Lives’ at 1, ‘Another World’ at 2, ‘Santa Barbara’ at 3. And I would do that every day — Monday through Friday,” Jackson, 42, said in a recent interview. “The more I sat and watched with her, the more engrossed I got in these characters’ lives and the story lines. I sort of grew up obsessed with them.”So it’s not surprising that these shows, which he began recording on VHS when he was older, would eventually become a source of inspiration for Jackson: His new musical, “White Girl in Danger,” is rooted in soap opera themes and tropes. It’s now in previews in a joint production of Second Stage and Vineyard Theater, and is scheduled to open April 10 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater.Latoya Edwards, center, as Keesha, a character who is trying to transcend racial stereotypes and get a more prominent story line.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show takes place in Allwhite, a world defined by soap tropes and ruled by three white teen-girl stereotypes: Megan, Meagan and Maegan (pronounced MEG-an, Mee-gan and MAY-gan, FYI). Much of the show’s action takes place in and around Allwhite’s high school, where “the Megans” are preparing for a battle of the bands competition. Then there’s a Black girl named Keesha, who is trying to get her own story line and level up from being a forgettable Blackground character, forever stuck in slave narratives and police brutality stories. Meanwhile, the town’s residents are reeling from a mysterious spate of murders.In separate interviews, Jackson, along with the director, Lileana Blain-Cruz; the choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly; the set designer, Adam Rigg; and the costume designer, Montana Levi Blanco, spoke about the show’s many influences (including romance novels, Lifetime movies and Black girl groups) and how those influences were reimagined for the stage.Gothic melodramaJackson described “Days of Our Lives” as the soap opera that most shaped his understanding of and love for melodrama — specifically a 1993 episode in which the rich socialite Vivian Alamain (Louise Sorel) drugs her nemesis, Carly Manning (Crystal Chappell), and buries her alive. Jackson gushed about the scene, which begins with Vivian plucking the petals from a bouquet of roses, maniacally chanting “She loves me, she loves me not” atop Carly’s grave; he called Sorel’s “incredible” performance downright Shakespearean. “I was 12 years old and it was, to this day, one of the most seminal soap moments; it’s burned into me because I had never seen something so Gothic and terrifying happen,” Jackson said. “I was like ‘This is my form.’”There are many other iconic soap moments that are alluded to in “White Girl in Danger”: Adam Rigg designed a curtain inspired by a pink beaded rhinestone gown that Joan Collins, as Alexis Carrington Colby, wears in “Dynasty,” and looked back at a famous fight scene from the show between Alexis and Diahann Carroll’s Dominique Deveraux that leaves both characters — and the room they’re in — in tatters. Rigg used some of the background details of that scene — a vase, the peach and coral color palette of the room and furnishings — in the show’s set design.When it comes to characters and their roller-coaster arcs, Jackson’s favorites are Viki Lord (Erika Slezak), the “One Life to Live” matriarch with dissociative identity disorder whose alter egos emerge to dictate her romantic life, blackmail people, murder people and trap her enemies in secret rooms, and Kristen Blake (Eileen Davidson), the good-girl-turned-bad girl who also kidnaps and hides her enemies in secret rooms.Jackson’s love of these soaps runs deeper than the cloak-and-dagger plots and mustache-twirling villains. He even layered in musical references: The show’s opening number includes musical allusions to Peabo Bryson’s “One Life to Live” and the opening of “Another World,” sung by Gary Morris and Crystal Gayle.Three sides of Mark-Paul GosselaarMark-Paul Gosselaar, right, as the mischievous Zack Morris, with Mario Lopez as Slater, left, and Dustin Diamond as Screech, in “Saved by the Bell.”NBCThere are footprints of the late ’80s and early ’90s high school sitcom “Saved by the Bell” all over the musical, from Rigg’s kitschy Memphis-style design of the Allwhite school to Keesha’s colorblock windbreaker.And then there’s that show’s beloved Zack Morris, played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar. In “White Girl in Danger,” Jackson pulled from boyfriend tropes — not only Zack but also some of the other roles Gosselaar has played in his career — to mold a boyfriend character (known as Matthew Scott, Scott Matthew and Zack Paul Gosselaar, and played by one actor) opposite “the Megans.” Jackson cited as inspirations Gosselaar’s roles as a frat boy who sexually assaults a college freshman played by Candace Cameron in the TV movie “She Cried No” and as a loving, supportive brother in “For the Love of Nancy.”“This concept of three different boyfriends in one was born out of that, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar specifically, because he played all these parts really well,” Jackson said.Teen queen dreamsFrom left, Tara Reid, Rachael Leigh Cook and Rosario Dawson as small town musicians vying for a big break in the 2001 film “Josie and the Pussycats.”Universal Pictures, via Associated PressThe female clique atop the teen social hierarchy is a well-loved trope. For Kelly, the groups of alpha it-girls in movies like “Clueless,” “Jawbreaker” and “Heathers” greatly influenced how he choreographed “the Megans.”“The opening number, for me, is kind of like ‘Josie and the Pussycats,’” he said. “Everything they do is super cute and super meticulous.” There’s duality to their gestures, Kelly added, which can “flip from being really cute to being insidious.”Blain-Cruz mentioned “My So-Called Life,” and shows “about young women trying to navigate that in-between space of childhood and adulthood, but also claiming their own space.”“And those spaces generally tended to be occupied by white women or white girls,” Blain-Cruz said, noting that one of her favorite scenes to develop was a band rehearsal in which each of the girls’ performance styles recalls that of ’90s pop starlets.‘Hollywood, sex and murder’Gina Gershon, left, and Elizabeth Berkley in the 1995 film “Showgirls.”Murray Close/United ArtistsAffairs, dalliances and general sexcapades are hallmarks of soap operas, so “White Girl in Danger” follows suit with kooky seduction scenes, surprising bedfellows and sprays of bodily fluid. For the choreography of a scene featuring a sudden sexual reveal, Kelly enthusiastically references one of his favorite movies, the erotic 1995 drama “Showgirls.” He described it as “the wild and crazy cat-fight-love-festival that was between Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon.”For Jackson, it wasn’t just the sexy daytime and prime time dramas that left an impression, it was also the work of the romance writer Jackie Collins.“I was like 10 years old and my older cousin gave me a copy of ‘Chances,’” Jackson said. “I devoured it, because it was so dirty. It was like my form of pornography, because I lived in a pretty strict religious home,” he continued. “That took me into this world of Hollywood, Vegas, gangsters, sex and murder.”Black music in the BlackgroundThere’s no “White Girl in Danger” without the Black characters who try to escape the racist, stereotypical Black stories in the Blackground. Three of the show’s Blackground women — Florence, Caroline and Abilene — serve as a kind of Greek chorus. For their fashion and choreography, Blanco and Kelly channeled the Pointer Sisters, the Mary Jane Girls, the Dreams, the Ronettes, even the trio of singer-narrators in “Little Shop of Horrors.” Kelly said the Blackground women represent “the trope of the three women 30 feet from stardom on the outskirts of every story.”For Tarik, a Blackground character whose roles are exclusively getting killed and going to jail, Black music was also prominent influence. “Tarik is every Black male stereotype from ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ to its counterpart; he’s also D’Angelo. He’s also Ginuwine. He’s also Usher,” Kelly said, specifically calling out D’Angelo’s bare-chested video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” Though Tarik has his own deliberately underdressed jacket-open moment, Blanco’s costume design for him includes a “Fresh Prince”-style cap and Hammer pants. More

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      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Sandra,’ a Search for a Friend Leads to Self-Discovery

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      In the playwright David Cale’s thriller, a woman looking for a vanished friend discovers a new sense of self.David Cale’s new play, “Sandra,” is packed with classic thriller tropes, as if he had challenged himself to cram as many of the genre’s staples as possible into a 90-minute show — I kept waiting for someone to transfer information from a computer to a USB key as seconds ticked by.Though this tale of a woman’s search for a missing friend is built using basic potboiler blocks, “Sandra,” which opened Sunday at the Vineyard Theater, is far from generic.Cale is operating, as he has been for over 35 years, within the parameters of the monologue — a style demanding of writer and actor, and not one usually associated with white-knuckle suspense. He also weaves in the themes that have long permeated his work, including the way people reinvent themselves, often to deal with trauma, and the need for transformation in the face of adversity.The playwright usually performs his own shows, but here he is lending his voice to another actor, as he did with his 2017 hit, “Harry Clarke,” which starred Billy Crudup and introduced Cale to a wider audience.Marjan Neshat (“English,” “Wish You Were Here”) plays all the characters, chief among them the narrator, Sandra Jones, a woman in her 40s who owns a cafe in Brooklyn and is vaguely dissatisfied with her life. One day, a close friend, a musician named Ethan, leaves for a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; he never returns. Ethan’s compositions live on with Sandra (the lovely piano score is by Matthew Dean Marsh, Cale’s collaborator on the 2019 play with music “We’re Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time”), who listens to them often. But physically, it’s as if he has vanished off the face of the earth.Our heroine decides to look for him, jumping on the first of several flights she will take over the course of the show. Once in Mexico, Sandra — who is separated from her husband and, perhaps, had not realized how emotionally and physically bereft she was — falls for Luca, a younger hunk. He says he’s a student, and glows with a magnetic, insouciant masculinity, with just the right amount of enticing mystery about his background. Luca is a male counterpart to the sultry sirens who have long lured film noir’s male protagonists, and at times it feels as if Cale is having great fun flipping the codes of the 1990s erotic thriller.Though the show’s plot can seem outlandish, Neshat acts as an anchor, infusing Sandra with a perfectly calibrated balance of effortless warmth.Sara KrulwichLeigh Silverman’s sober staging can dull the impact of the show’s suspenseful set pieces, as when Sandra surreptitiously searches a bag while its owner is in the shower, or when she stealthily records an incriminating conversation on her phone. Thom Weaver’s lighting is the great technical asset, romantically moody in the early stages of Sandra and Luca’s relationship, then suggesting the ominous chiaroscuro of film noir when the plot thickens.Neshat mostly stays rooted to a spot, sometimes standing and sometimes sitting, and the show feels uninterested in the body as a storytelling tool. The actress is literally at the center of it all, and has been handed a thorny gift of a role that requires the protean ability to portray a variety of characters, including the manager of Sandra’s cafe, an Australian surfer dude and an older gentleman straight out of a Tennessee Williams play. She struggles to differentiate them, and even Luca does not register much as Neshat goes in and out of his accented “potpourri of a voice.”But she shines as Sandra herself, a woman who was confident enough in her identity to name her cafe after herself but feels adrift, and defined mostly in relation to others. As far-fetched as the plot gets, Neshat is a steadying force, infusing Sandra with a perfectly calibrated balance of anxious hope and effortless warmth — her smile alone is a masterpiece of complexity, in turn melancholy, joyous, triumphant, bittersweet. We immediately understand, for instance, why Sandra throws herself into the relationship with Luca (the reverse is not as convincing).Early on, Sandra informs us that when Ethan was about to depart for Puerto Vallarta, he told her that they were “so simpatico, if I vanish you’d probably disappear from your life too.” Yet Sandra does build herself out of Ethan’s absence, and even, ultimately, her own.SandraThrough Dec. 11 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      in Television

      New Musical From ‘Strange Loop’ Writer to Run Off Broadway

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      “White Girl in Danger,” a soap opera satire by Michael R. Jackson, will be staged in New York next spring by Second Stage and Vineyard theaters.As a child, Michael R. Jackson would religiously watch soap operas with his great-aunt. “Days of Our Lives.” “Another World.” “Santa Barbara.” “The Young and the Restless.”He kept watching through high school. He interned at “All My Children” in college. And then he moved to New York, hoping to become a soap opera writer.Instead, he became a dramatist, and an acclaimed one at that: His first musical, “A Strange Loop,” a meta take on a Broadway usher writing his own musical, won both the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best musical, and it’s now running on Broadway.Next spring, his sophomore musical will arrive Off Broadway. It’s called “White Girl in Danger,” and it’s a race-conscious sendup of the soap opera genre.“White Girl in Danger” imagines a soap opera set in a town called Allwhite, with a group of Black characters, called Blackgrounds, who are featured only in story lines about slavery and policing. One of those characters, Keesha, seeks to break that pattern by seizing a central story line from a trio of white protagonists, Meagan, Maegan and Megan, but in so doing she also risks running afoul of an Allwhite killer.“There’s a lot of genre elements coming from the soap opera, Lifetime movie, melodrama world,” Jackson said. “The idea for the show was going to be a broad satire, but then these conversations around representation, diversity, equity, inclusion started to happen in the theater world, and I started to think about those issues, and suddenly one molecule attached itself to another.”Jackson has been developing the musical since 2017, and last summer the incubator New York Stage and Film presented a two-day, concert-style reading of it in the Hudson Valley.The musical, with a 12-person cast, will be jointly produced by two New York nonprofits, Vineyard Theater and Second Stage Theater, and will be staged next spring at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater. The show, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz and choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly, is scheduled to start previews on March 15 and open April 10. More