RESTART STAGES
Lincoln Center, the Isabel and Peter Malkin Stage at Hearst Plaza
Company SBB//Stefanie Batten Bland, Look Who’s Coming to Dinner
Tuesday, August 3, free with RSVP, 7:00
Debra Ann Byrd, Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey
Wednesday, August 4, free with RSVP, 7:00
Ryan J. Haddad, Dark Disabled Stories
Thursday, August 5, free with RSVP, 7:00
www.lincolncenter.org
Lincoln Center’s ambitious Restart Stages program, welcoming back audiences with free outdoor multidisciplinary performances, continues this week with one-time-only shows by three distinct creators, available through the TodayTix lottery. On Tuesday, August 3, at 7:00, Company SBB//Stefanie Batten Bland serves up Look Who’s Coming to Dinner, a new take on Stanley Kramer’s 1967 film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The movie, which was nominated for ten Oscars and won for Best Actress and Best Original Story and Screenplay, is about an interracial couple portrayed by Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton who are celebrating their engagement by visiting her parents, a liberal couple played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn who are not exactly thrilled at first to see who their daughter will be marrying. SBB has been busy during the pandemic, presenting such works as Kolonial for BAC, This Moment for Works and Process at the Guggenheim, Unnatural Contradictions for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Mondays at Two, exploring safe spaces, isolation, racial injustice, and the coronavirus crisis, in addition to a three-week residency at the Yard on Martha’s Vineyard that culminated in the dance-theater installation Embarqued: Stories of Soil.
Debra Ann Byrd brings her one-woman show, Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey, to Restart Stages this week (photo by Christina Lane / Shakespeare and Company)
If you missed Debra Ann Byrd’s Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey at Shakespeare & Company’s Roman Garden Theatre earlier this month, you can catch it on Wednesday, August 4, at 7:00 on the Isabel and Peter Malkin Stage at Hearst Plaza at Lincoln Center. Directed by Tina Packard, the one-woman show of song and text details Byrd’s experiences as a Black woman attempting to be a classical actress, detailing a life that has included foster care, teen pregnancy, trauma, abuse, and single parenting on a path to play Othello (while also becoming the founding artistic director of the Harlem Shakespeare Festival).
In February 2021, Ryan J. Haddad’s one-man show, Hi, Are You Single?, streamed from Woolly Mammoth, where it was filmed live onstage in front of a limited, socially distanced, masked audience made up of members of the staff and crew, one of the first to do that; the bittersweet autobiographical piece follows Haddad, who has cerebral palsy and requires a walker, as he searches for love in all the wrong places. Haddad can currently be seen in “Wings and Rings,” a short film he made with set designers Emmie Finckel and Riccardo Hernández for Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon’s installation The Watering Hole at the Signature. In the ten-minute work, Haddad relives a terrifying moment from his childhood involving swimming in a pool. On Thursday, August 5, at 7:00, at Restart Stages, Haddad will premiere his latest solo show, Dark Disabled Stories, in which he discusses a crosstown bus, a bathroom stall, and Gramercy Park as he encounters strangers and confronts ableism wherever he goes.