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      ‘Different Way of Fighting’: Lyrics Are the Weapons of All-Women Roma Band

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      Many Roma women face pressures to marry young and take on traditional gender roles. Pretty Loud, a hip-hop group from Serbia, wants girls to decide for themselves.Laetitia Vancon and BELGRADE, Serbia — The members of Pretty Loud, possibly the world’s first all-Roma female hip-hop group, don’t write saccharine love songs.Their lyrics focus instead on the pains Roma women experience: marrying and having children too young, feeling like second-class citizens and not finishing high school.“Don’t force me, Dad, I’m too young for marriage,” the six members, who hail from Serbia and are in their midteens to late 20s, sing in one song. “Please understand me, or should I be quiet?” they rap in another. “No one hears when I use my Roma girl’s voice.”Persecuted for centuries, many Roma people in Europe — the continent’s largest ethnic minority — live in segregated communities with limited access to amenities and health care. Women and girls also face gender expectations like being wives and mothers at a young age, which some say cause stress and isolation.The six members of Pretty Loud are in their midteens to late-20s.The group’s youngest members, Elma Dalipi and Selma Dalipi, 15, who are twins, are still finishing high school.“They are taught when they grow up that they will get married, cook and raise kids, but we want to change this,” Silvia Sinani, 24, said of Roma girls, adding that such expectations made it hard for women and girls to finish their educations.One of the band’s goals is to show there is another way. “We want every girl to decide for herself,” Ms. Sinani said.The women of Pretty Loud are hoping their music, authenticity and visibility as performers — already rewriting social conventions in their community in Belgrade, the Serbian capital — can help women and girls elsewhere find their own voices. Formed in 2014, Pretty Loud has danced, sung and rapped on stages across Europe.“It is a different way of fighting,” said Zivka Ferhatovic, 20. “We fight through the music and songs.” Zivka Ferhatovic, left, and Dijana Ferhatovic, members of Pretty Loud, in their house in the Belgrade neighborhood of Zemun.“It is a different way of fighting,” Zivka Ferhatovic, 20, a band member, said of her activism. “We fight through the music and songs.”She added that the group wanted its fusion of traditional Roma music and Balkan hip-hop to confront the everyday realities of many Roma women — be it domestic abuse, sexism or racial discrimination. In one song, they warned that marrying someone abusive would not bring happiness. In another, they addressed their experiences of discrimination. Music was an obvious medium for the band’s members to express themselves and to continue celebrating the signature sound of Roma music.“We grow up with music for when we feel bad and when we feel happy,” said Zlata Ristic, 28. “I sleep with music. I can’t live my life without music.”When she’s performing, Ms. Ristic, said, “I feel like the strongest woman in the world.”Pretty Loud began as a project of GRUBB, an organization running educational and artistic programs for Roma youth in Serbia. On a summer afternoon, they rehearsed for a performance in front of the distorted mirrors at GRUBB’s center in Zemun, a neighborhood in Belgrade where many of the city’s Roma people reside.Pretty Loud began as a project of GRUBB, a center in Zemun, a neighborhood in Belgrade where many of the city’s Roma people live.“We grow up with music for when we feel bad and when we feel happy,” said Zlata Ristic, 28, “I sleep with music. I can’t live my life without music.”Fearing social stigma, the band’s members were initially reluctant to write songs and perform. But others involved with GRUBB helped them to focus their writing and performance on personal experiences.Over time, they grew more comfortable with the idea of melding the personal with the artistic. One performance used a silk sheet with a red spot to theatrically recreate the ritual of inspecting sheets after a wedding as a way of “proving” the bride’s virginity.“It became very poetic,” said Serge Denoncourt, a professional artistic director and longtime volunteer who said he encouraged them to explore the power of art. “They understand there you can talk about anything if you have a way to talk about it.”Now, Pretty Loud’s songs signal a unified hope: to represent Roma women in a modern world free of racism and sexism.A tourist in the Zemun area of Belgrade asking a group of Roma musicians to play for him. Raising her son was like having a “baby doll,” Ms. Ristic said. “We grew up together.” “The whole point of the music is to help them use their voice, not to speak for them,” said Caroline Roboh, a founder of GRUBB. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Pretty Loud’s own community, where members have become role models, a point of pride for them.“Little girls, they come to me and say: ‘Bravo, I want to be like you one day,’” Ms. Sinani said.Even outside their circles, they are amassing supporters who say the group is sending a modern message that Serbia needs to get behind.“Their energy breaks through the walls and spreads love,” said Joana Knezevic, a Serbian actress who watched a recent Pretty Loud performance. “They are women who have something to say.”It is a message that Ms. Ristic, who brings a cheerful energy to the group’s dynamic, learned early on. At 16, she got married and, soon after, pregnant. When the union broke down and she confronted being a single mother, Ms. Ristic became depressed. Raising her son, who is now 11, was like having a “baby doll,” she said. “We grew up together.”Zivka Fahratovic on a youth program on TV Pink in Belgrade. Outside their circles, members of Pretty Loud are amassing supporters who say the group is sending a modern message that Serbia needs to get behind.When Zivka is not studying or helping her grandmother at home, she is a teacher at GRUBB. The organization runs education and artistic programs, working predominantly in Serbia with Roma children and young people.Now, she wants to set an example for women who are unhappy in their marriages, even if they fear raising children alone.“I know when they are divorced, they think their lives stop,” Ms. Ristic said of women. “But I want to show they can continue with their dreams.”It is sometimes a difficult balancing act for members of Pretty Loud, who are trying to live the messages they preach. Some work at Grubb while holding other jobs; others, like the group’s youngest members, Elma Dalipi and Selma Dalipi, 15, are still finishing high school.“We’ve had numerous offers for marriage, but we never accepted any,” said Zivka Ferhatovic of her and her sister, Dijana Ferhatovic, 19. Their determination to finish school is supported by their grandparents and has a personal motivation — they believe their mother, who had her children young, ultimately left the family, in part, because she married too early.“We know the pain,” Zivka Ferhatovic said.After one of Pretty Loud’s most recent performance, the cheers made Dijana Ferhatovic’s chest tighten, she said. “We’re really doing something,” she added, though she called it a small step.Her sister disagreed. “How can you say it’s small?” Zivka Ferhatovic said.The coronavirus pandemic has slowed the band’s activity, and existing inequalities left Roma people in Europe particularly vulnerable to it. (Many of Pretty Loud’s members contracted Covid-19.)Over the summer, as borders reopened in Europe, Pretty Loud again took to stages: to cheers at a United Nations event celebrating refugees, under blue lights in Slovenia, at an audition for a Croatian talent show. And the bandmates have more dreams: of making a real demo for an album, performing in Times Square, writing a book about their lives — perhaps even entering politics.Though not yet household names or able to make a living solely from their music, the band is beginning to attract wider European attention. Earlier this month, a video of their successful audition for that Croatian talent show drew 120,000 views.Ms. Ristic, now a dance teacher at GRUBB, wants to grow her followings on TikTok and Instagram, where she posts Pretty Loud performances. Though it has exposed her to racist and sexist comments, she won’t stop posting, she said.“I don’t delete them because it’s not my shame,” she said, adding: “This is how people treat us. I want to show why we fight.”Pretty Loud members watching a recording of their performance after a show in June in Belgrade. Their songs signal a unified hope: to represent Roma women in a modern world free of racism and sexism.Most of the members of Pretty Loud said there was still room for romantic love, children and marriage in the future — so long as they get to choose when.In the future, Ms. Ristic wants to try just about everything: getting her license and then driving a truck while smoking a cigarette, making music with Serbian artists and raising her son, she said, with strong Roma role models so he grows up respecting women.Most of the members of Pretty Loud say there is still room for romantic love, children and marriage in the future — so long as they get to choose when. But after one marriage, Ms. Ristic has seen enough.“I make my own way forward for me, alone. It’s very hard, but I will try,” she said. “I don’t need husband. I want only fun.”Formed in 2014, the group has danced, sung and rapped its way from rookie status to being featured at events across Europe.Laetitia Vancon More

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      in Television

      Netflix Series Stirs Debate About the Lives of Ultra-Orthodox Women

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      The show, “My Unorthodox Life,” tracks the world of Julia Haart, who fled a religious community she found repressive. But some in the community she left say they feel misrepresented.MONSEY, N.Y. — Even at the most liberal flanks of the ultra-Orthodox community here there are daily moments where women live quite differently from men.At synagogue, they must pray in segregated balconies or curtained-off sections. They are prohibited from becoming rabbis and are cautioned against wearing pants, or singing solo or dancing in front of men, lest they distract the men from Torah values.But do they go to college, have careers, watch television, enjoy their lives?Yes, say women of the Yeshivish community in this suburban hamlet 30 miles north of Manhattan, some of whom are upset by how they are portrayed on Netflix’s popular reality series “My Unorthodox Life.”The nine-episode show tracks the world of Julia Haart, 50, who fled Monsey in 2012 and became a successful fashion and modeling executive. Haart paints a dismal picture of her old ultra-Orthodox life, portraying it as oppressive, suggesting women are deprived of decent educations and are basically allowed just one purpose — to be a “babymaking machine.”In the show, Julia Haart describes her former life in an ultra-Orthodox community as repressive, and rejoices in the freedom she feels now that she has left it behind.   Olivia Galli for The New York Times“The women in my community are second-class citizens,” she says in one episode. “We only exist in relation to a man.”It is an image that is rejected by women like Vivian Schneck-Last, a technology consultant who has an M.B.A. from Columbia University and worked as a managing director at Goldman Sachs. She feels Haart diminishes the intellectual and professional strides that women in the community have made.“People in Monsey are upset because she has misrepresented what Orthodox people and particularly Orthodox women are all about,” Schneck-Last said.Roselyn Feinsod, an actuary and partner in the giant accounting firm of Ernst & Young who was once friendly with Haart, said she and her daughter graduated from the same girls high school as Haart, Bais Yaakov of Spring Valley, and that most of its graduates now go on to college. Defying stereotypes of ultra-Orthodox women as unworldly, Feinsod said she has run seven marathons and biked 100 miles around Lake Tahoe.“Monsey is a beautiful community with educated people respectful of each other,” she said.Reactions to the show, both positive and negative, have spread beyond Monsey. The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel and lohud.com, which covers an area that includes Monsey, all featured articles about the debate. Critics and supporters of the show have posted videos on YouTube.Under the hashtag #myorthodoxlife, women have described their own successful careers and general satisfaction with the religious life.Roselyn Feinsod, who was once a friend of Julia Haart, said the show misrepresents the career opportunities available to ultra-Orthodox women like herself, a partner at a major accounting firm.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York Times“People were beyond upset, people were personally insulted,” said Allison Josephs, the founder of the Jew in the City website, who said people posted complaints on the site, which she created to change negative perceptions of religious Jews. “Pretty much every Jew I encountered was feeling, ‘Can you believe what they did to us again?’”Haart defends her depiction as accurate and says she has heard from many ultra-Orthodox and formerly ultra-Orthodox women who agree with her that the community represses women.“Everything about your story resonated so deeply with me,” one woman wrote in a message on Haart’s Instagram page. “I too left the Orthodox community and had to start over after struggling for so long with being unhappy.”Several people familiar with the ultra-Orthodox community wrote directly to The Times to express their support for Haart’s perspective, including Tzivya Green, a former member of the same Yeshivish community in Monsey.“Women are still told to keep quiet and, taught from a young age, that men hold all the power,” Green wrote. “We are taught to never go against a man’s word. Men are everything and women are nothing.”Haart describes the criticism as a personal attack that distracts from the sense of female empowerment she hopes to promote. Since leaving Monsey she has created her own shoe business and is now chief executive of the Elite World Group, among the world’s largest modeling agencies. Her show was just picked up for a second season.Haart agreed to address the debate over her show in an in-person interview if it could be filmed as part of her show. After The Times declined that arrangement, she and The Times were unable to agree on an alternative.Monsey is home to a variety of Orthodox Jews — some modern, some Hasidic and some of the ultra-Orthodox variation that Haart was part of, known as Yeshivish. Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesThough she did not respond to written questions from The Times, saying she had addressed them in prior interviews, she did provide her perspective by pointing out remarks she has made on social media and also by releasing a statement. It said in part: “My sole purpose in sharing my personal story is to raise awareness about an unquestionably repressive society where women are denied the same opportunities as men, which is why my upcoming book and season 2 of my show will continue to document my personal experience that I hope will allow other women to insist on the precious right to freedom.”There are communal pressures in Monsey against television-watching as a waste of time, as the show depicts. The role of women as mothers and homemakers is prized. Though some scholars argue it should not be interpreted as a slight, a prayer in which men thank God for not making them a woman is recited each morning.Still, several women interviewed in Monsey said the show’s perspective is often dated, sometimes exaggerated and conflates the multiple strains of Orthodox Judaism practiced in Monsey.The hamlet of Monsey derived its name from the Munsee branch of the Lenape Native Americans who populated the area before the arrival of Dutch and British colonists. Monsey has become a metonym for the Orthodox Jews of Rockland County, who represent more than a quarter of its population and gather at more than 200 synagogues and roughly half that many yeshivas. Their arrival converted Monsey, a one-stoplight town with a single yeshiva in 1950, into a place populated by a variety of Orthodox Jews — some modern, some Hasidic and some of the ultra-Orthodox variation that Haart was part of, known as Yeshivish or Litvish (Lithuanian), and within those groupings, several gradations or sects of each.That diversity, perhaps not as multicolored as Joseph’s coat, is nonetheless visible on the streets where thick-bearded men in black silk robes and cylindrical fur hats known as shtreimels mix with clean-shaven men in Polo shirts and chinos, recognizable as observant only by their skullcaps.Haart has spoken in interviews about the gradations of Judaism, but some critics of her show say it does not do enough to depict the variations of Orthodox Judaism.  Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesHaart has acknowledged in media appearances and other settings that there are “gradations of Judaism,” and that others from her community may not share her perspective. At its best, she acknowledged in a TV interview with Tamron Hall, her religion fosters an appreciation of charity, of kindness.But critics say those nuances are not captured on the show, where she uses terms like “brainwashed” and “deprogram” to describe ultra-Orthodox life in Monsey in ways that suggest it is more a cult than a personal choice. They say they worry the show describes strictures more typical of, say, the Brooklyn-based Satmar Hasidim, not the less stringent community of which she was part.For example, while the show accurately presents television as frowned upon in Yeshivish circles, they say it doesn’t make clear that many people, including Haart, owned one. (Haart acknowledged on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” that she had a television in her later years in Monsey and said she lied about it to school officials who otherwise would not have admitted her children.)And yes, as Haart explains on the show, some in the community are not crazy about women riding bikes because the pedaling might expose their knees. But the critics said the show does not make clear that women, including Haart, still rode bikes, in modest attire. (Haart posted about her family bike rides on her Instagram account earlier this month.)Though Haart has said she feels she was deprived of an education by a subpar school system, several women said she was a brilliant, top-notch student who could have attended college without any problem, or stigma, had she decided to.“She was very popular, had every opportunity, a leader in the class, and now she’s turned it into some persecution situation,” said Andrea Jaffe, a certified public accountant and former American Express executive who said that for many years she lived across the street from Haart.Haart, left, reaching out to her daughter Batsheva. Haart has said providing her children with a less restricted way of life was one motivation for her decision to leave Monsey.  NetflixMuch of the Netflix show concerns Haart’s relationship with her four children, three of whom retain various ties to Orthodoxy. (Haart is divorced from their father, but has since remarried. Both men appear on the show.) In Monsey, where religious traditions prescribe the patterns of daily life, her candid discussions with the children about her own sexuality, and theirs, run counter to the norm.Feinsod, a mother of four, said she was offended by what she characterized as Haart’s effort in front of a national audience to draw her children away from an observant life.“It’s fine for her to make choices, but for her to try and force the children’s hand in front of an audience of millions of people is disappointing,” she said.Of course, freeing her children from what she describes as the stifling imprint of ultra-Orthodoxy is exactly what Haart embraces as her mission.“I lived in that world and it’s a very small and sad world, a place where women have one purpose in life and that is to have babies and get married,” she tells her 14-year-old son, Aron, in the second episode.She says that, for her, the low-cut tops she favors are not just gestures of style, but emblems of freedom, of a woman controlling her own body and how it is presented.Netflix declined to comment on reactions to its show, which is at least the third it has presented in recent years about Orthodox life. “Unorthodox,” a mini-series, focused on another woman’s flight from her Brooklyn Hasidic community.The Israeli family drama “Shtisel” has been applauded by many in the Orthodox world for its subtlety, rounded characters and humor.Several women who have lived in Monsey or spent considerable time there said that kind of nuance is missing from Haart’s show, which they said gives no sense that some women cannot only avoid misery, but thrive, while maintaining ultra-Orthodox values.“There’s no monolithic Monsey,” Josephs said.Additional reporting by Colin Moynihan. More

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      in Theater

      Neil LaBute Seeks ‘The Answer to Everything’ in Germany

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      The American playwright’s first new play since he parted ways with his theater in 2018 during the #MeToo movement finds a stage far from New York.AUGSBURG, Germany — If all you know about Neil LaBute’s new play “The Answer to Everything” is that it’s an artistic response to #MeToo and “cancel culture,” you might brace yourself for an upsetting evening at the theater.A tightly coiled chamber piece about three women who plot vengeance on the men who’ve wronged them, “The Answer to Everything” is the prolific and polarizing playwright’s first full-length stage work since “How to Fight Loneliness” in 2017. Since then, he’s fallen from grace in the rarefied world of New York theater.LaBute has long been a diagnostician of dark, uncomfortable aspects of human relationships. A number of his best-known plays (several of which he’s adapted and directed for the screen, including “In the Company of Men,”) are unsettling examinations of cruelty that can leave viewers wondering whether LaBute supports or condemns his unsavory characters. Cynicism, viciousness and mercilessness — especially toward his female characters — have been some of the tools of his trade.In recent years, these signature themes and attitudes have come under scrutiny. In 2018, one of New York leading nonprofit theaters, MCC Theater, abruptly ended its 15-year relationship with LaBute. No specific reason was given for the break, but the theater’s executive director told The New York Times, “We’re committed to creating and maintaining a respectful and professional work environment for everyone we work with.” The internet was abuzz with speculation that LaBute’s obsessive depictions of toxic gender dynamics had put him out of step with the contemporary cultural climate.This background helps explain why “The Answer to Everything,” in which female retribution looms large, isn’t premiering at any of the New York theaters where LaBute has worked over the past three decades, but instead in Augsburg, a southern German city that is famous for being the birthplace of Bertolt Brecht.It is unusual, to say the least, for a new play by a leading American playwright to debut abroad and in translation. In an email, LaBute explained why he chose a German theater to premiere his latest work.“There are so many brave artists outside the United States who are willing to table material that might be less politically correct or audience-friendly,” he wrote, “and those are the places that I want to be.”Any fears that LaBute’s new work would be a pity party after his exile from MCC, an evening validating misogyny or an anti-#MeToo manifesto evaporated once the curtain went up on Susanne Maier-Staufen’s sleek hotel set. Not only does the play take its female protagonists seriously, it also offers zero apology for entitled (and crude) male behavior.In the play, the nervous and often chatty banter between the three heroines circles a vengeful pact that binds them to one another.Jan-Pieter FuhrIt’s difficult to talk about “The Answer to Everything” without giving spoilers, but I’ll do my best. LaBute does a deft job of keeping us in the dark for the first half of the evening, as the nervous and often chatty banter between the three heroines circles a central issue — a vengeful pact that binds them to one another — without naming it. Maik Priebe, the director, knows how to sustain the suspense and tension, which are carefully rendered in Frank Heibert’s German version of the script, although the odd moments of comic relief are mostly lost in translation.LaBute has funneled a wealth of influences and rendered them in his own signature style, with rapid-fire and naturalistic overlapping dialogue. The plot’s themes are redolent of Patricia Highsmith and Hitchcock, two masters of suspense not exactly known for their positive portrayals of women. Look more closely, though, and you find traces of other works about implacable women that have rubbed off on LaBute, from ancient Greek tragedy to films like “Diabolique” and “Drowning by Numbers.”LaBute loves corkscrew-like plots and although “The Answer to Everything” can feel like a 100-minute ticking time bomb, it doesn’t detonate as one might expect. In lieu of wild twists, we get a gradual series of painful revelations. (LaBute is going for something entirely different from the explosive force of Emerald Fennell’s film “Promising Young Woman,” another recent drama of female retribution.)One of the most refreshing things about “The Answer to Everything” is how it avoids moralizing. LaBute does not manipulate his characters or audience, and the tone is far from judgmental. We are not explicitly invited to either applaud or condemn the “answer” that this group has settled on in order to remove predatory men from their lives. Instead, we’re asked to examine the spectrum of gray between justice and revenge.There is one critical plot twist that flies in the face of the call to “believe all women,” which I could see making American audiences squirm if the play makes it stateside (there are no concrete plans yet for a U.S. premiere).An unflinching approach to examining bad behavior is nothing new for LaBute, but here he goes to uncommon lengths to make us understand his protagonists’ motivations and weaknesses. The group portrait is sobering and also less dreadful than you might expect.Sieder plays Carmen, the gang’s no-nonsense ringleader. Jan-Pieter FuhrThe actresses play off one another skillfully, though not always with the nuance the script seems to require. With her mix of sang-froid and simmering rage, Katja Sieder is the most impressive of the bunch as Carmen, who is the gang’s no-nonsense ringleader. Ute Fiedler’s conscience-stricken Cindy equivocates and pleads with pathos-laden urgency. Paige, who is often stuck in the middle of the battle, feels the least fleshed out, both as a character and in Elif Esmen’s interpretation.There were moments when this production felt like something of an out-of-town tryout. Judging by the enthusiastic response from an audience full of teenagers and older adults at the weeknight performance I attended, local theatergoers in Augsburg were eager to embrace the play’s conundrums and ambivalences, even if it meant going home with more questions than answers.The Answer to Everything. Directed by Maik Priebe. Staatstheater Augsburg, through March 12, 2022 More

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      in Music

      Dottie Dodgion, a Standout Drummer in More Ways Than One, Dies at 91

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      At a time when a female jazz percussionist was a rarity, she played with Benny Goodman and went on to work with Marian McPartland and other big names.Dottie Dodgion, one of the very few high-profile female drummers in the male-dominated jazz world of the 1950s and ’60s, died on Sept. 17 in a hospice center in Pacific Grove, Calif. She was 91.The cause was a stroke, said her daughter and only immediate survivor, Deborah Dodgion.Ms. Dodgion, who was known for her steady and swinging but unobtrusive approach to the drums, worked for more than 60 years with some of the biggest names in jazz, including Benny Goodman, Marian McPartland and Ruby Braff. She also led her own combos. But she rarely recorded.“She didn’t get the exposure that she might have gotten through recording because of her gender,” said Wayne Enstice, who collaborated with her on her autobiography, “The Lady Swings: Memoirs of a Jazz Drummer” (2021). “She wasn’t taken as seriously as she should have been — not by other musicians, but by people on the business side.”Unlike some drummers, Ms. Dodgion was more concerned with keeping the beat than with calling attention to herself.“There’s no denying that many drummers love the spotlight,” she wrote in her autobiography. “That’s why I sometimes say I’m not a ‘real drummer.’”She rarely took solos, she wrote, and when she did solo her approach “came from being a singer.”“I’d hear the melody inside my head,” she added, “so the rhythms I laid down always followed the song form of whatever tune I played.”She continued to play until she was 90, with her own trio, on Thursday nights at the Inn at Spanish Bay in Pebble Beach, near her home in Pacific Grove — a gig that lasted 14 years. After breaking a shoulder in 2019, she sang while another drummer, Andy Weis, filled in for her, until the coronavirus forced the hotel to shut down temporarily.Ms. Dodgion performing in Delaware Water Gap, Pa., in the 1980s with the pianist John Coates Jr. and the bassist DeWitt Kay. via Dottie Dodgion/University of Illinois Press“She swung hard — and that meant there was a lesson to be heard in watching her play,” Mr. Weis said by phone. “She knew exactly what tempo would swing the hardest.”The celebrated jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington recalled that she had begun playing drums at 7 and first saw Ms. Dodgion about two years later at a women’s jazz festival. As far as Ms. Carrington knew at the time, Ms. Dodgion was the only female drummer around.“She always had a beautiful time feel, which is the most important part of being a drummer,” Ms. Carrington said in a phone interview. “She was never the fanciest, trickiest drummer in the world who dazzled with solos, but she really captured the essence of being a drummer.”Dorothy Rosalie Giaimo was born on Sept. 23, 1929, in Brea, Calif. Her father, Charles, was a drummer. Her mother, Ada (Tipton) Giaimo, aspired to be a dancer but became a waitress after her husband left the family when Dottie was 2.One day, when she was 5, her father stopped by her grandparents’ house in Los Angeles, where she was living, and, as she said, “kidnapped” her, taking her on the road for two years to the hotels, road houses and strip joints where he led a band. Absorbing the sounds and rhythms of her father’s drumming was her introduction to show business, albeit against her will. She was 7 when she returned to her mother, who had remarried.Her stepfather, a chicken farmer, raped Dottie when she was 10; he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. After she and her mother moved to Berkeley, Calif., Dottie found peace in her weekend bus trips to San Francisco to see her father’s band at a strip club, Streets of Paris.“His excellent time attracted all the best strippers,” she wrote.As a teenager, she sang at private parties and weddings, which led to work in the mid-1940s with bands led by the jazz guitarist Nick Esposito and the renowned bassist Charles Mingus. Singing eventually gave way to drumming, which she picked up by listening to her father, and through the 1950s she played in clubs in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Nevada. For a time, she was the house drummer at Jimbo’s Bop City in San Francisco.When the pianist Marian McPartland formed an all-female band in 1977, Ms. Dodgion was her drummer. From left, Mary Osborne, Vi Redd, Ms. Dodgion, Ms. McPartland and Lynn Milano.Marian McPartlandMeeting the bassist Eugene Wright, who would become an integral part of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, had a transformative effect on how she viewed her role in a band.“Eugene coached me on the nuances of playing in a rhythm section,” she wrote, “including the intangible insides on how to fit with the piano and the bass.”Ms. Dodgion’s first marriage, to Robert Bennett, was annulled; her marriages to Monty Budwig, a bassist, and Jerry Dodgion, a saxophonist, ended in divorce.With Mr. Dodgion, who was in Benny Goodman’s band, Ms. Dodgion moved to Manhattan in 1961. On their first day there, the band rehearsed for an engagement at Basin Street East. Ms. Dodgion dropped her husband off; when she returned at the end of the rehearsal, she was surprised when Goodman, who was looking for a new drummer, asked her to sit in with the band.“I thought it was just a jam session,” she told The New York Times in 1972. “Benny’d call out a number — ‘Gotta Be This or That’ — and I’d start looking for the music. But he’d say, ‘Don’t open the book.’ Every tune, it was the same — ‘Don’t open the book.’ At the end of the rehearsal, Benny said: ‘See you tonight, Jerry. You, too, Dottie.’ That was how I found out I was going to play with the band.”Ten days into the engagement at the club, Goodman forgot to introduce her when he name-checked some members of his 10-piece band. When the crowd demanded that he announce her name, he relented, and she received a standing ovation. But as she left the bandstand, she later recalled, Goodman’s manager whispered “’Bye” in her ear, indicating that she was being fired for getting more applause than her boss.Ms. Dodgion was not out of work for long. She quickly got a job with Tony Bennett at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Over the next 40 years, she played with Marian McPartland, Ruby Braff, Zoot Sims, Wild Bill Davison, Joe Venuti and others.“She could adapt from swing to bop, to Latin rhythms, all without calling attention to herself,” Mr. Enstice said. “She could fit in with anyone.”Ms. Dodgion worked with Ms. McPartland in 1964 and again 13 years later, when Ms. McPartland led an all-female band.“Dorothy had a natural sense of swing,” Ms. McPartland told The Sacramento Bee in 1989. “She keeps steady time and she swings — those are the most important things for a good drummer.” More

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      in Movies

      Give Phoebe Robinson the Title She Deserves: Boss

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      The comic has a publishing imprint, TV deals, even a primer on leadership she wrote after noting the absence of Black women’s perspectives in business books.Mention “The Devil Wears Prada” to the comic Phoebe Robinson and she’ll lean forward and tell you she has some opinions. The real villain in the tale of an ultra-demanding fashion magazine editor and her assistant is the assistant’s boyfriend, played by Adrian Grenier, for complaining when she has a work event. “Do you know centuries of women stood by their men pursuing careers?” Robinson said over lunch. “Adrian, calm down.”As for the title character — Miranda Priestly, the Anna Wintour-type boss — Robinson, 37, has more mixed feelings. “It’s easier to judge someone from afar,” she said, adding that women of her generation had to be tough to get ahead. “At the same time, you don’t have to be a monster.”In a time when pop culture and the news are filled with portraits of bad bosses, Robinson has been thinking a lot about what makes a good one. In the past few years, she has evolved from a hustling stand-up into a mini-mogul with a staff, a production company and myriad projects. This year alone, she released a Comedy Central series, “Doing the Most With Phoebe Robinson”; shot her debut hour special (“Sorry, Harriet Tubman,” premiering Oct. 14 on HBO Max); started a book imprint, Tiny Reparations; guest-hosted for Jimmy Kimmel; sold a half-hour sitcom; and wrote her third book, “Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes,” which is, among other things, a primer on leadership. If that’s not enough, she’s in the process of moving.Robinson backstage before filming her new comedy special, “Sorry, Harriet Tubman.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times“It’s a lot, not going to lie,” she said, pointing out that her career models have shifted from comics like Wanda Sykes to multihyphenates like Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling.Robinson’s style has always been down to earth, self-deprecating, with proudly basic music taste (U2 is a lodestar). Her instinct was to be the cool boss, she said, but the uneasy looks on her employees’ faces after she asked them to go bowling on a Friday night taught her a lesson: “I was like: ‘Right right right right right, I get it. If my boss asked me to hang out on a Friday I’d be like, no, I see you every day, I’m good.’”The first time I saw Phoebe Robinson was a decade ago. She had been doing stand-up for a couple of years, typically in vests, jeans and a T-shirt. “I dressed so nothing would signal I’m a woman,” she said, adding that she was hyperaware of being the only female comic in the room. “I was so insecure and nervous.”Even then, she had an ingratiating voice that cut through the clutter of competition, often playing with language, tweaking words, showing signs of a literary bent that would eventually lead her to publishing. When I reminded her of a joke she told about movies that cast handsome people as rapists, she cringed, saying she would do that in a more nuanced way now. At that moment, the sunlight shifted and she grabbed her sunglasses. Before putting them on, she said: “I don’t want you to think I’m doing this to look cool.”In early August, a week before shooting her new special at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Robinson walked onstage at Union Hall in a headband and comfy dress. The Delta variant had forced audiences to put their masks back on and she wasn’t hearing the explosive laughter that she had only weeks earlier, even though the crowd immediately responded when she started talking about her relationship, which has become a regular part of her act. “I’m the Rosa Parks of the bedroom,” goes one line aimed at her British boyfriend. “I’m not getting up for any white man.”Robinson decided to write about leadership after realizing there were a dearth of business books with a Black woman’s perspective.Penguin RandomhouseA week later, Robinson said she was too in her head in that show, that she needed to remind herself to have fun. “It’s hard to stay in the moment for someone like me who is always thinking about the next 20 moves,” she said by phone.Robinson had done a chunk of material about the difference between her 20s and 30s, including one bit about being more concerned with frivolous things earlier, like shaving body hair, which she did so much, she said, “that she didn’t read a book for 10 years.”Now she’s an author and publisher who tries to read a book a week. “I miss that innocence a bit,” she said, explaining that she didn’t have to worry about her employees or brand back then. A few years later, her profile would grow thanks to a regular show with Jessica Williams called “2 Dope Queens” that moved from small rooms to HBO. In the years since, she said, their paths have diverged. “It’s one of those things where you meet for an amount of time and then you grow in different ways.”A multitasker at heart, Robinson has juggled writing, performing and podcasting. She even recently joined Michelle Obama on her book tour, interviewing the former first lady, a major career turning point for Robinson, one that also provides the set piece closing out her new special.An imprint that would let her champion writers of color had been a longstanding dream that Robinson pitched over the pandemic. She said her first book, the 2016 best seller “You Can’t Touch My Hair,” was rejected by every publisher except Plume (which now runs her imprint), and the reason she heard was that books by Black women don’t sell. That stuck with her. Following the September debut of “Please Don’t Sit,” Tiny Reparations has two releases set for the spring, both debut novels by authors of color: “What the Fireflies Knew,” by Kai Harris, a coming-of-age story, and “Portrait of a Thief,” by Grace Li, about an art heist. “I don’t want to read trauma all the time. That’s something I have been particular about,” Robinson said. “I really want hopeful stuff.”Robinson filming her special at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times“Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes” is filled with thoughts on management and work, the product of an immersion in business books, podcasts and personal experience. The book is in part a response to the absence of Black women’s perspective in this genre. She writes: “Where’s ‘Lean In’ for us?”Robinson calls herself a “reformed workaholic,” but she’s not short of plans: an idea for a romantic comedy, a talk show, specials she would produce and, perhaps the most challenging one, a two-week vacation. Meanwhile, she must manage a growing business. With the pandemic, people are questioning how they work, and while Robinson understands balking at excessive hours, she insists there’s a middle ground that involves working more efficiently. She has cut down on meetings, for instance. “I love Zoom but I don’t need to see your face,” she said.Robinson said she knew that stereotypes about Black women might get her judged more harshly, but she had learned that one of the hard things about being a boss is asking your employees to do things they don’t want to do. “As someone who does comedy where you want everyone to feel good, you’re like, oh, I’m the problem?” she said, laughing at herself.Miranda Priestly isn’t as far from her as she used to be. “It’s really tough to be a boss,” she said, “because you have to accept you are going to piss people off.” More

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      Louise Farrenc, 19th-Century Composer, Surges Back Into Sound

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      Orchestras are turning to her turbulent symphonies; pianists, to her sophisticated études; chamber musicians, to her superb Nonet.Read the reviews that the composer, pianist and teacher Louise Farrenc received in the middle of the 19th century, and the kinds of gendered, backhanded compliments that male critics have so often given to female artists pop up with tiresome regularity.There was innuendo. “By the magic of her musical palette,” a critic wrote in 1841, “the composer envelops you with nocturnal images, at once mysterious and blissful.”There was surprise. “It is such a rarity for a woman to compose symphonies of real talent,” offered a journal in 1851.There was patronizing praise. “Well written,” Hector Berlioz called a Farrenc overture in 1840, “and orchestrated with a talent rare among women.”But if Farrenc’s success, greater than any of her female contemporaries except Emilie Mayer, had critics admitting she stymied their stereotypes, those stereotypes were then slyly reimposed. “The dominant quality of this work, composed by a woman, is precisely what one would least expect to find,” a critic wrote of her First Symphony in 1845. “There is more power than delicacy.”The conductor François-Joseph Fétis, one of her leading promoters, made the gambit clear. “With Mme. Farrenc,” he wrote, “the inspiration and the art of composing are of masculine proportions.”As the classical music world belatedly tries to put behind it the myriad prejudices it has inherited and perpetuated, Farrenc’s music is returning to a prominence that her newfound proponents argue she has always deserved.“The symphonies and the overtures should hold a similar place as Schumann and Mendelssohn,” said Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who conducted Farrenc’s Second Symphony this summer with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and leads her Third with the Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal on Oct. 29. “I do believe that she’s completely deserving of that.”Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra during the pandemic in a streamed performance of Farrenc’s Symphony No. 2.Jeff FuscoScholarly attention to Farrenc remains meager in English, with no full biography appearing since Bea Friedland’s in 1980; unlike Florence Price, for example, she has enjoyed little in the way of persistent academic advocacy.But much of the chamber music in which Farrenc excelled has been recorded, including her sonatas, piano trios and famous Nonet, the success of which in 1850 led her to demand, and receive, equal pay on the faculty of the Paris Conservatory, where she had become the first female professor in 1842.“I find that a lot of pianist-composers from that time knew what instruments should sound like, but their craftsmanship was not always as immaculate as hers,” said the hornist James Sommerville, who performs the Nonet with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players on Nov. 7. “She has a great ear for melody, a great sense of structure.”And orchestras are turning to the three turbulent symphonies Farrenc wrote in the 1840s, which achieved significant success despite the Parisian public’s hostility to orchestral scores.“They are written in a style that is both Romantic and Classical, with a great thematic and harmonic originality, both poetic and energetic,” said the conductor Laurence Equilbey, who released recordings of the First and Third with the Insula Orchestra this summer and leads the Third with the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston on Nov. 5 and 7. “Her music is not as avant-garde as that of Berlioz, for example, but it is so solidly constructed.”Craft was Farrenc’s trademark, one she honed in a strikingly supportive environment. Born Jeanne-Louise Dumont in 1804, she came from a line of court sculptors and grew up among artists resident at the Sorbonne. Her brother Auguste’s “The Spirit of Liberty” still crowns the Place de la Bastille.Farrenc learned piano and theory from 6, tutored by a godmother who had studied with Muzio Clementi. At 15, she began private lessons with Anton Reicha, a friend of Beethoven’s who, as a professor at the Conservatory that barred Farrenc from entry as a composition student, also taught Berlioz, Liszt and César Franck.She briefly broke off these studies in 1821 to marry Aristide Farrenc, a flutist and publisher of some of the era’s major composers, Beethoven included. It was an unusually congenial match, if not an affluent one. Aristide encouraged Louise to perform, partnered with her to organize salons and other events that showcased her writing in the context of their joint interests, and, crucially, published her works.Conforming to the composer-virtuoso model of the day, Farrenc’s early piano pieces were rondos or sets of variations on popular and operatic tunes, but they were far from the ostentatious, flimsy norm. Her “Air Russe Varié,” from 1835, caught the attention of Robert Schumann, who praised its “delightful canonic games” in the spirit of Bach, and declared that “one must fall under their charm.”Joanne Polk, a professor at the Manhattan School of Music, last year released an excellent recording of the “Air Russe” and half of Farrenc’s set of 30 Études, which — like Chopin’s from the same decade — escape their pedagogical constraints.“She really knew how to write well for the piano,” Polk said, “so that the music fits beautifully in the fingers and yet challenges you.”The cover of the autograph manuscript of Farrenc’s 30 Études (Op. 26), which, like Chopin’s, escape their pedagogical constraints.Bibliothèque nationale de FranceFarrenc laid the groundwork for a generation of female pianists to succeed as interpreters in Paris, a group that included her daughter Victorine. Victorine’s first prize at the Conservatory in 1844 — one of several pupils of Louise’s to achieve that distinction — foreshadowed what the journal Le Ménestrel declared in 1845 would be the “reign of the women.”Even so, as the musicologist Katharine Ellis has written, Farrenc was unique among such women for her large-scale compositions, finding a niche as audiences and critics at once enthroned Beethoven and sought a retreat from his late style.This was a difficult environment for anybody to write in, let alone a woman, but it was an unavoidable one. Every living composer who had a symphony performed from 1831 to 1849 by the Société des Concerts, Paris’s sole enduring outlet for orchestral music, found Beethoven closing the bill. Even at matinees chez Farrenc, Beethoven dominated programs, though she sometimes took the opportunity to promote his more radical works, playing his Op. 109 sonata at the premiere of her Second Piano Quintet in 1840.Like Mendelssohn, Farrenc drew praise for working within the confines of older traditions. When the prestigious Institute de France awarded her a chamber-music prize in 1869, it cited her for works that “glow with the purest classical style.”That is not to say that her works sound dutifully conservative now, though that reputation surely once hurt their prospects; they seem to glance back less in imitation, and more as if to teach listeners where they are coming from.Her two overtures from 1834 — Pablo Heras-Casado and the Pittsburgh Symphony perform the first on Oct. 22 and 24 — look back to Haydn and Mozart, just as some of her études trained players in Baroque styles. But they have a spirit, even in their darkness, that is wholly their own.The same is true of the symphonies. The First, from 1841, “is more in a Baroque style,” Equilbey said, “really the beginning of something.”The Second, from 1845, is somewhat more experimental. “The Scherzo reminds me of the first symphonies of Bruckner, with the same kind of covered angst; it’s fleeting, but it’s dark,” Nézet-Séguin said. “There is a connection with Mendelssohn in the last movement, in the counterpoint, but she takes it to another level. It’s used as a dramatic construction.”The Third, from 1847, is her masterpiece, with a brisk, light Scherzo and a slow movement that unfolds gloriously.“When I dug inside the score, I discovered an incredibly skillful hand,” said Gianandrea Noseda, who led a fiercely dramatic account of the Third with the National Symphony Orchestra in June and will reprise it in February. “She had a personal language, while reflecting the form. There are moments where she suspends the development section, for instance, inserting more ideas, going in the direction of a third melodic idea without getting to that point. It’s very creative.”But Farrenc’s development was, perhaps, cut short. After the death of her daughter in 1859, she retreated from composition, writing just a few miniatures.She turned instead to trying to start an early-music revival, arranging a series of lecture-recitals in the Salle Érard from 1862, at which her students paired her works with those of Byrd, Frescobaldi, Rameau and others. When Aristide died in 1865, he left only eight completed volumes of their carefully edited compendium of three centuries of piano music, “Le Trésor des Pianistes.” Louise added 15 more, while continuing to teach.Farrenc died on Sept. 15, 1875, with a notice reaching The New York Times later that month. By then, tastes had already started to turn. “It is sad to say,” wrote one witness at her memorial, “but at the funeral rites for this genuine artist, the Conservatory — where she was professor for 30 years — was conspicuous by its absence.”Happily, Farrenc is an absence no more. More

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      Musicians Flee Afghanistan, Fearing Taliban Rule

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      Dozens of artists and teachers from a prominent music school that promoted girls’ education left the country, but more remain behind. “The mission is not complete,” its founder said.More than 100 young artists, teachers and their relatives affiliated with the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, a celebrated school that became a target of the Taliban in part for its efforts to promote the education of girls, fled the country on Sunday, the school’s leaders said.The musicians, many of whom have been trying to leave for more than a month, boarded a flight from Kabul’s main airport and arrived in Doha, the capital of Qatar, around midday Eastern time, according to Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the head of the school, who is currently in Australia. In the coming days, they plan to resettle in Portugal, where the government has agreed to grant them visas.“It’s already a big step and a very, very big achievement on the way of rescuing Afghan musicians from the cruelty of the Taliban,” Mr. Sarmast, who opened the school in 2010, said in a statement. “You cannot imagine how happy I am.”The musicians join a growing number of Afghans who have fled the country since August, when the Taliban consolidated their control of the country amid the withdrawal of American forces. Among figures in the arts and sports worlds who have escaped are members of a female soccer team who resettled in Portugal and Italy.Still, hundreds of the school’s students, staff and alumni remain in Afghanistan and face an uncertain future amid signs that the Taliban will move to restrict nonreligious music, which they banned outright when they previously led Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001.The school’s supporters, a global network of artists, philanthropists, politicians and educators, plan to continue to work to get the remaining musicians out of Afghanistan. “The mission is not complete,” said Mr. Sarmast, an Afghan music scholar. “It just began.”A girl practiced at the music institute in 2013. Hundreds of the school’s students, staff and alumni remain in Afghanistan and face an uncertain future under the Taliban.Musadeq Sadeq/Associated PressYo-Yo Ma, the renowned cellist, helped raise awareness about the plight of the musicians among politicians and other artists. He said he was “shaking with excitement” by the news that some of them had escaped.“It would be a terrible tragedy to lose this essential group of people who are so deeply motivated to have a living tradition be part of the world tradition,” Mr. Ma said in a telephone interview.Of the musicians who remain stuck in the country, he said, “I am thinking about them every single hour of the day.”The Afghanistan National Institute of Music was a rarity: a coeducational institution devoted to teaching music from both Afghanistan and the West, primarily to students from impoverished backgrounds. The school became known for supporting the education of girls, who make up about a third of the student body. The school’s all-female orchestra, Zohra, toured the world and earned wide acclaim, and became a symbol of Afghanistan’s changing identity.The school has faced threats from the Taliban for years, and in 2014 Mr. Sarmast was wounded by a Taliban suicide bomber.Since the Taliban returned to power, the school has come under renewed scrutiny. Mr. Sarmast and the school’s supporters have worked for weeks to help get students, alumni, staff and their relatives out of the country, fearing for their safety. The government of Qatar helped arrange safe passage for the musicians to Doha, and played a key role in negotiating with the Taliban.An empty room at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music last month. The musicians plan to resettle in Portugal, where the government has agreed to grant them visas.Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSeveral students and young artists affiliated with the music institute said in interviews with The Times in recent weeks that they had been staying inside their homes, for fear of being attacked or punished by the Taliban. Many stopped playing music, hid their instruments and tried to conceal their affiliation with the school. They requested anonymity to make comments because of the fear of retribution.In the final days of the American war in Afghanistan, the school’s supporters led a frantic and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to evacuate nearly 300 students, teachers and staff affiliated with the school, along with their relatives. The operation was backed by prominent politicians and security officials in the United States. At one point, the musicians sat in seven buses near an airport gate for 17 hours, hoping to get on a waiting plane. But the plan fell apart at the last minute when the musicians were not able to obtain entry to the airport and as fears of a possible terrorist attack escalated.The Taliban have tried to promote an image of tolerance and moderation since returning to power, vowing not to carry out reprisals against their former enemies and saying that women would be allowed to work and study “within the bounds of Islamic law.”But they have sent signals that they will impose some harsh policies, including on culture. A Taliban spokesman recently said that music would not be allowed in public.“Music is forbidden in Islam,” the spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said in an interview with The Times in August. “But we’re hoping that we can persuade people not to do such things, instead of pressuring them.”John Baily, an ethnomusicologist at the University of London who has studied cultural life in Afghanistan, said it would be difficult for the Taliban to eradicate music in the country entirely, after years in which the arts have been allowed to flourish.“You have got literally thousands of young people who have grown up with music,” he said, “and they’re not going to be just kind of switched off like that.” More

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      in Television

      Onstage, ‘Designing Women’ Sheds the Shoulder Pads, Not Its Politics

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      The hit sitcom, which ended in 1993, is back as play, premiering in Arkansas. But how do its laughs land in our more pointed political landscape?FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the Emmy-nominated writer and producer, started hearing voices earlier this year, voices she hadn’t heard in nearly 30 years. Those voices wouldn’t shut up.“I told my husband, I’m going to have to get a gun and shoot them,” Bloodworth-Thomason said during a recent phone conversation.She didn’t know how else to make them stop.The voices were those of Julia Sugarbaker, Suzanne Sugarbaker, Mary Jo Shively and Charlene Frazier, the characters from “Designing Women,” the half-hour sitcom that premiered on CBS in 1986. Nominated for a slew of Emmys, it won only one, for outstanding achievement in hairstyling. Set in Atlanta, and centered on a quartet of mouthy women who orbit an interior design firm, it combined feminist politics with click-clack comedy rhythms, celebrating the New South with wit and pluck and shoulder pads.The show earned her, Bloodworth-Thomason said, citations from both Mitch McConnell, who had praised an antipornography episode, and the A.C.L.U. The A.C.L.U. one she framed.The show wrapped in 1993. Prime time and popular culture moved on. But friends and fans would often ask Bloodworth-Thomason what Julia, the outspoken founder of the design firm, played by Dixie Carter, might say about same-sex marriage or the #MeToo movement or the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency.More recently, Bloodworth-Thomason began to think about answers.Those answers coalesced into a two-act comedy, “Designing Women.” Directed by Bloodworth-Thomason’s husband, Harry Thomason, the play had its premiere recently at TheaterSquared, in Fayetteville, Ark. (Thomason grew up in Hampton, Ark.; Bloodworth-Thomason in Poplar Bluff, Mo., just over the border.) The play runs through the end of October. It will also be available to stream, starting Oct. 15.The cast of the original “Designing Women” included, clockwise from bottom left: Jean Smart, Alice Ghostley, Delta Burke, Dixie Carter, Annie Potts and Meshach Taylor.Fotos International, via Getty ImagesA sleek, glass-walled building, a paper airplane’s flight from the University of Arkansas campus, TheaterSquared occupies a busy-ish corner. It has two theaters: the West, where “Designing Women” plays, which seats 275, and the Spring, which seats 120. The building hosts rehearsal spaces, administrative offices, scene and wardrobe shops, a flexible lobby performance space and a welcoming cafe where pastry always seems to be baking.Its programming favors lively dramas and musicals from contemporary playwrights of diverse backgrounds. This season includes Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop,” Mike Lew’s “Tiger Style!” and Kristoffer Diaz’s “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.” Fayetteville, where more than 77 percent of residents identify as white, is not itself especially diverse.“If you’re a theater company that sets as its mission creating a more equitable community, then you want to bring people along,” Martin Miller, the theater’s executive told me. He had found me on the cafe’s patio, in early September, demolishing some local goat cheese. I’d come to northwest Arkansas for a few days of table work and rehearsal because I had wanted to see if an ’80s sensation, a sensation I had loved as a kid, still had anything to say to a 2020s audience. And, if I’m honest, I wanted to know just what this sensation was doing in Fayetteville.In “Designing Women” — the theatrical version — the diversity centers on the class backgrounds of its characters, their religious beliefs, their voting patterns, as the TV one had. Set in the very recent past, the script eavesdrops on the women and a few new characters as they contend with the pandemic, the possible financial collapse of their firm and the 2020 presidential election. It is no spoiler to say that the women ultimately triumph, bridging their differences stylishly. The creators and producers hope that it will encourage audiences across the political spectrum to build some bridges, too.“We just need to look at each other with more grace and more love, that’s what I’m gathering from this play,” Carmen Cusack, the Tony-nominated actress who plays Julia in the theatrical version, said. “At the end of the day, what’s most important is just appreciating that we’re all in this together.”The original “Designing Women” wore the skirt suits and heels of a workplace comedy. But the workplace occupied Julia’s living room, so it was a domestic comedy, too. Part of a late ’80s boom in women-centered shows that included “Roseanne” and “Murphy Brown,” it wrestled — sometimes explicitly, sometimes obliquely, often in heels — with the feminist discourse of the day.Joan Williams, the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, described the series as a helpful fiction suggesting that women could have both careers and families without apparent conflict. “It opened a fantasy, a conceptual space, an idealized image that it was going to be possible for women to be very successful professionals and very successful mothers,” Williams said.The fantasy largely favored an empowerment agenda, implying that if a woman just tugged on her big-girl panties and stood up tall in them, she could bend the world to her will. But episodes also exposed systemic problems — sexual harassment, violent pornography — without offering easy answers.“‘Designing Women’ really did try to speak to the particular political moment, even as it attempted to negotiate it within the politics of television,” said Alfred Martin, a media and cultural studies scholar at the University of Iowa.The show’s director, Harry Thomason, far left, with Jason Lynch, the production lighting designer, and Austin Bomkamp, the programmer, at a tech run.Rana Young for The New York TimesThe show wasn’t entirely progressive. Its sole character of color, Anthony Bouvier (Meshach Taylor), had a subordinate role in the firm, and queer characters were rare. But it gave its characters divergent attitudes, insisting that the experience of women wasn’t uniform. In a logline, the characters might have come across as stereotypes — hardass, bimbo, pragmatist, naïf — yet as played by Carter, Delta Burke, Annie Potts and Jean Smart, they had smart minds and big hearts. Even as they fought, they supported one another.That’s what makes this theatrical version of “Designing Women” more than an attempt to capitalize on familiar intellectual property. As a television show, it straddled the political divide, allowing both progressive and conservative women to see themselves represented, glamorously. Those divides are wider now. But if these characters can still talk to one another onstage, maybe audience members can continue those conversations offstage, with or without repartee.Though TheaterSquared announced the show in early 2020, Bloodworth-Thomason didn’t start writing it until this year, ultimately amassing some 7,000 pages. (Those voices really wouldn’t shut up.) The September draft flaunted her practiced style, a rapier wit with a bedazzled handle, and included a few callbacks for dedicated fans, like a riff on Julia’s “the lights went out in Georgia” speech.The feminism still isn’t especially intersectional, even as the firm now includes a co-owner who is Black and queer, Anthony’s cousin Cleo (Carla Renata). But the script has updated its politics. The first line has Julia instructing Hayley (Kim Matula), the new receptionist, in temperature checks for clients. “If they refuse, kick ’em out,” Julia says. “If they’re wearing a MAGA hat, don’t let ’em in.” In the background a voice mail message plays, calling Julia a “lying socialist slut.”Bloodworth-Thomason dreams of a tour of the South for the play and an eventual berth on Broadway. But it’s dialogue like this that explains why she and Thomason chose TheaterSquared for the tryout. Washington County, which encompasses Fayetteville, went for Trump in 2020, though by a somewhat narrow margin — 50.39 percent to Trump, and 46.49 percent to Joseph R. Biden’s ticket — and the theater attracts spectators who don’t all vote the same way.“I know that not everybody who walks in the door would automatically agree with me in a conversation over a beer,” Miller told me. But the theater deliberately programs plays that prompt those conversations. And the cafe has 16 local beers on tap.On a Tuesday, about two weeks before previews began, the theater thrummed with activity — set painting, costume stitching, wig combing. The scenery was half assembled, and a variety of faux topiary dotted the back of the auditorium. The theater had recently announced new Covid protocols, which require that audience members offer proof of vaccination or a recent negative test, and Miller had to devote several hours to handling angry responses, like an email describing the protocols as “an imperialist act against our democracy” — only a step or two removed from “lying socialist slut.”A rehearsal in early September. Thomason said he wanted the play’s cast members to capture some of the aura of the original actresses, without quite impersonating them.Rana Young for The New York TimesUpstairs, in the rehearsal space, the masked actors arrayed themselves around several folding tables, with cookies and water bottles in reach. Bloodworth-Thomason had hoped to join them, but an illness had kept her at home in Los Angeles. (A glitchy Zoom connection made table work possible.) Though the characters ought to be in their 70s by now, the actresses, and a few male love interests, were mostly in their 50s, suggesting either a suspension of disbelief or some superb plastic surgeons. The mood was friendly, while also faintly tense, a reflection of the work ahead.Playing beloved characters — characters associated with even more beloved actresses — applies deep-tissue pressure. Most of the actors had seen the show during its original run. (Cusack, who grew up in an evangelical Christian household, is an exception.) They spoke, feelingly, about what it had meant to see smart women, funny women, Southern women, beamed into their living rooms. Several of them voiced an obligation to honor those performances.“I do feel a responsibility, particularly to the fans,” Elaine Hendrix, who plays Charlene, said.In an interview the next day, just before rehearsal, Thomason said he hoped that this cast would capture some of the aura of the original actresses, without quite impersonating them. “That’s all one can hope for,” he added. “Because if you try to just duplicate them, then the audience will not forgive you.”During the rehearsal, as coffee bubbled in a percolator, everyone tried to inhabit the characters, old and new, even when the characters voiced opinions that diverged from the actors’ own.“It’s the challenge, right?” said Matthew Floyd Miller, who plays Suzanne’s latest ex-husband, a Trump supporter. “How do you sympathize and humanize somebody who has diametrically opposed views than you do?”But what will audiences forgive? What will get them in the door? There’s already a glut of reboots, reimaginings and screen-to-stage variations. And not everyone wants to see “Designing Women,” which was overtly political to begin with, revived for our era. Thomason had heard from friends about some people’s plans to protest the show, even before they knew a lick of its plot or a line of the script.That didn’t faze his wife. “I would love to see a big crowd outside with a lot of signs,” she said.It did, however, give some of the actors pause. “I’m a little nervous because I say some stuff that is blunt and is hard-core and is extremely politicized, and I’m a Black person in Arkansas,” Renata said.When Cusack told her mother about the show, her mother told her she planned to be among the protesters. Cusack didn’t try to dissuade her. “I said, ‘Mom, I’ll buy your plane ticket,’” Cusack recalled. “‘Come. Bring it. Let’s have the discussion.’” More