“Art is not a mirror with which to reflect society but a hammer with which to shape it” is a popular quote attributed to Bertolt Brecht — and a favorite of contemporary composer David T. Little’s. Born and raised in the New Jersey countryside, Little is a renaissance man when it comes to opera. He was inspired to become a composer after being enthralled by Danny Elfman’s gothic score for The Nightmare Before Christmas, which he saw when he was fifteen; he later played drums in a rock band and got into musical theater and the avant-garde before turning to classical music.
He incorporates these elements and more into each of his works, which explore sociopolitical issues in unique and subtle ways. JFK is a two-hour grand opera that takes place the day before JFK’s assassination; Soldier Songs tells the story of a young veteran suffering from PTSD; and What Belongs to You is based on Garth Greenwell’s novel about an American teacher obsessed with a hustler in Sofia, Bulgaria.
In these and other pieces, Little, a two-time Grammy nominee, reshapes expectations of what opera is and can be while working with a wide range of impressive collaborators in multiple genres of music, movement, and film. This weekend, his seventy-minute industrial opera Black Lodge makes its New York debut, running January 11–15 at BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn; it’s part of the Prototype festival, a coproduction of Beth Morrison Projects and HERE that focuses on new multidisciplinary opera and musical theater works.
The live multimedia experience, set in a bardo where a writer (Timur Bekbosunov) struggles with his demons and encounters a mysterious woman (Jennifer Harrison Newman), features a libretto by poet Anne Waldman, sound by Garth MacAleavey, lighting by Matthew Steinberg, film written and directed by Michael Joseph McQuilken and photographed by Daniele Sarti, and performances by tenor Timur and the Dime Museum and the Isaura String Quartet, who present such songs as “Electric Cerberus,” “The Hungry Ghost Who Sings in Lamentation,” and “Premonition of the Worm.” Timur and his band appeared at the inaugural Prototype in 2013, as did Little’s Soldier Songs; the opening night of Black Lodge includes an immersive concert by Timur and the Dime Museum, while the January 12 show at 5:00 will be followed by an artist conversation.
In a twi-ny talk, Little discussed his eclectic taste in music, collaboration, bearing witness, and grappling with big questions.
David T. Little navigates through the world of opera in unique and inventive ways (photo courtesy David T. Little / Instagram)
twi-ny: You have composed works for string quartets, percussion quartets, contemporary ensembles, solo cello, church choirs, and others, with music styles ranging from classical and operatic to rock, goth, metal, and punk. What type of music did you listen to growing up? How did your taste become so eclectic?
david t. little: I grew up in a house that was full of music. For one, classic musicals, so music theater was in my DNA from the start. Also in heavy rotation at the time was ’50s/’60s pop (aka “oldies” at the time), Johnny Mathis, the Ink Spots, Dave Brubeck, Peter, Paul, & Mary, and the Kingston Trio. Then a little later — through my stepparents — Harry Chapin, Willie Nelson, and Garth Brooks crept in, all great musical storytellers.
Around age ten or so I started to discover harder/heavier music: Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys, the Cure, and hair metal; then Led Zeppelin; then through friends: Public Enemy, Megadeth, Guns n’ Roses, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry . . . then Pantera, then Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, etc. I also had an aunt who made a copy for me of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which was life-changing. And when I was fifteen I went to a summer program at Berklee to study jazz drumming, where I heard a Naked City cover band (seriously) which blew my mind. The Rite of Spring came not long after, as would a period of intense obsession with Oingo Boingo, and a few years later a similar obsession with Ani Difranco, Dar Williams, and Utah Phillips.
And this whole time I was also playing in a fife and drum corps, playing Revolutionary and Civil War–era tunes, performing onstage in musicals, and exploring classical music. My grandfather was a great lover of classical music and played the organ. I heard a lot of music for the first time through him. My stepfather also had a lot of records of classical music, which I’d listen to: one that had [Charles Ives’s] “The Unanswered Question” and [Sergei Prokofiev’s] “The Love for Three Oranges Suite” was especially transformative.
So I don’t know, I think I just always loved music! If there was music to be heard, I wanted to hear it. I certainly had likes and dislikes, but it was never about genre per se. It was just about what spoke to me and didn’t — that’s still how I listen, and I still listen to a really wide range.
twi-ny: That wide range is also evident in many of the famous figures who have influenced and/or inspired your work, from JFK, Iggy Pop, and Spalding Gray to Robert Johnson and the Freedom Riders. In the case of Black Lodge, it’s David Lynch, William S. Burroughs, and Antonin Artaud. Do you see any commonalities in these people, specifically the last three?
dtl: Writing a piece of music provides a great opportunity to think about big questions, and I think for me each of these figures you mentioned poses some kind of a big question through their life or their work about something that felt really important to me at the time.
I also want to mention a few others whose names might not be as widely known: Last Nightfall was inspired by Rufina Amaya, the only survivor of the massacre at El Mozote. and the sky was still there was inspired by the story of my friend Amber Ferenz separating from the US military. And of course there are all of the people who lent their voices to Soldier Songs: Amber, of course, but also Justen Bennett, Rich Girardin, my grandfather Joe Little, uncle Gene Little, and stepfather Gene Woznicki. And of course Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Lou Harrison (in “The Conjured Life”) and Utah Phillips (in “Valuable Natural Resources”). I think some of this may be about documentary, about bearing witness to events, and people, what they did and how they lived.
But sometimes it is less clear. This was definitely the case with Lynch, Burroughs, and Artaud. I was initially drawn to what I saw as common threads in their work, which made me ask whether there was any influence between them. Not finding evidence of that, the really interesting questions started to emerge: If they hadn’t influenced each other, what accounted for the commonalities? This then became about the psychological and the spiritual. That, to me, is where the piece really lives.
These are three figures whose work stares the dark and difficult squarely in the face, and they were doing so — I believed — in search of some kind of spiritual balm. This was something I was grappling with at that time myself, which stemmed from questions to do with depression, escape, transcendence, spirituality, and the darker parts of life, including processing trauma. I found that Lynch, Burroughs, and Artaud all grappled with some versions of these issues (and others) through their work.
As I wrote the piece, winnowing my way through a dark and strange ten-year-long path, I was trying to move toward some sort of light at the end of the tunnel, which I thankfully found. I think those who have traveled a similar road will feel this story in the piece, even as the narrative itself is more abstract.
twi-ny: During the pandemic, you virtually reimagined Soldier Songs with Johnathan McCullough for Opera Philadelphia, where Black Lodge premiered online. What was it like turning Black Lodge into an in-person live presentation in front of an audience — and essentially doing the opposite with Soldier Songs?
dtl: It has been a really thrilling process full of discoveries! It is amazing to see how the brain tries to parse what it is seeing and hearing during the live show. Like, you know that Timur is singing live, but he is so synced with his image on the screen, you start to hear the live sound as recorded. Similarly with the visual world — the live image and the film somehow blur in your perception, making you doubt your senses. It really messes with you in a terrific way that feels totally perfect for what Black Lodge is exploring.
twi-ny: Timur is remarkable in it. Did you always have him and his band in mind when you were putting the show together?
dtl: My partner in crime! Yes — Timur was the voice of the piece from the beginning, absolutely! He’s so amazing. I first heard them perform at Prototype, actually, all the way back in 2013. His performances of both Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” and Klaus Nomi’s “Total Eclipse” just blew my mind, and I knew immediately that I needed to work with him and the band, who are equally amazing. It has been a real pleasure to build this piece for and with him.
twi-ny: You are program chair at Mannes at the New School, where you teach New Opera Labs. What are your thoughts about the future of opera, based on what your students are doing and the success of such festivals as Prototype? A lot has changed over the last twenty-five years in the world of opera.
dtl: I think the opera world right now is also full of big questions. During the pandemic, there was such an eruption of inventiveness and creativity, because we needed to pivot somehow just to survive. To me that was the “shock doctrine” moment our field really needed, and I had high hopes. But since things reopened, a big part of the field has just gone back to their prepandemic plans, as if pretending that we hadn’t been permanently altered by what we experienced in those years! Add to this the fact that things have become very expensive to produce and you have an industry that has grown more risk averse, which are not great conditions for new work.
The good news is that most artists don’t tend to think or care about this stuff. We’re going to make the work we need to make, that feeds our souls, and then we’ll figure out how to put it onstage. My students at Mannes (and our alums) are doing tremendous work in this area — rethinking what opera can (and will) be moving forward — and, like always, we will find a way to make those pieces happen as a community.
All this to say, the operatic future I imagine is, by and large, the same as the world I came up in: a DIY scene where artists make work they love and make performances happen despite impossible odds. This, to me, is where the most interesting work has always originated, work that then gets taken up by forward-looking opera companies and producers. I’m grateful for festivals like Prototype and producers like Beth Morrison who continue to provide vital support to the artists who really see the future and insist on taking us there.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The Vivid Unknown uses generative AI and immersive sound to reimagine Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
TECHNE: THE VIVID UNKNOWN
Under the Radar Festival / BAM Next Wave
BAM Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 4-7, $10
Series continues through January 19 utrfest.org www.bam.org
“I like people to break things. I’m always interested in how kids interact with things because they’re going to do things that someone else might not do,” artist John Fitzgerald told me at the inaugural presentation of TECHNE: The Vivid Unknown at BAM’s Fishman Space, a multimedia reimagining of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 documentary Koyaanisqatsi, which means “life out of balance,” “life disintegrating,” and “a state of life that calls for another way of living” in the Hopi language.
Fitzgerald was not referring to the hardware but “the rules of engagement” that he’s designed with an expert team. “Anyone can bring their own story to it. That’s something I learned from Godfrey, who calls it the autodidactic experience of watching Koyaanisqatsi,” he said. “He’s not telling you, ‘technology bad, humans good — the natural world is safe.’ He’s giving you the opportunity to have thoughts about things, to experience things. Everyone will always watch it differently. I’ve seen that movie dozens and dozens of times; there are a lot of different ways that you can interpret it. So I’m excited to see how this evolves and unfolds. People might want to come in here and sit down on the floor, they might want to go out and get some fresh air and come back in; it’s an open experience.”
There are numerous ways to experience The Vivid Unknown, and it’s left up to each individual to decide, mimicking how we approach life. AI-generated images speed across three large screens as immersive AI sound envelops the room. You can sit on the floor right in front, move around, or take a regular seat in the back. If you decide to participate — and I highly recommend you do — you will discover that when you are in an oval of light, the shape of your body will be picked up by sensors behind you and your onscreen silhouette will eventually be filled by an image different from what is already being projected.
For example, amid slow-motion and time-lapse shots of beachgoers, mountains, metropolitan cities, airplanes, waterfalls, clouds, traffic, the demolition of a housing project, and other scenes, a rocket taking off fit into my outline and followed me onscreen as I walked across the room. Meanwhile, a woman stood near the middle, moving like a dancer. Couples posed together. A few kids jumped up and down. Humanity fused together with technology and the environment as some of us participated and others merely watched from the back.
Almost all the young boys and girls chose to become involved with the art, which brought out the child in the adults who got up from their seats and interacted with it as well. Noticing that, Fitzgerald, who has a five-year-old and a four-month-old, said that the older one is “the best product tester out there. He’s the first to be, like, ‘That’s too long,’ or ‘I want to see more of that.’ He speaks without a filter.”
Curated by Onassis ONX, TECHNE consists of four digital installations that are part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival and Under the Radar; it begins January 4-7 with The Vivid Unknown and continues January 8-11 with Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser’s The Golden Key, January 12-15 with Margarita Athanasiou’s Voices, and January 16-19 with Stephanie Dinkins’s Secret Garden. (Tickets for each is $10; a series pass is $35.) BAM Rose Cinemas will be showing Koyaanisqatsi on January 7 at 7:30, with Fitzgerald and Vivid Unknown codirector Reggio on hand for the conversation “Terra techno firma” afterward.
Onassis ONX NY program director Jazia Hammoudi shared information with me about how it all works, but I opted to discover much of The Vivid Unknown on my own, which was extremely satisfying. In the program, she writes, “The refined interactivity of the work’s music and visuals subverts the source material’s linear minimalism and subtly engages the body in epic vistas from mountainscapes to oil fields. Within The Vivid Unknown’s zone of immersion, the connection between individual and collective action reflects the complex relationships between human agency and planetary outcomes.” In addition to TECHNE, Onassis ONX is presenting Christiana Kosiar’s RUNWAY and Viola He’s A {room} of one’s own January 10-14 at the Olympic Tower on Fifth Ave. as part of Under the Radar’s Under Construction series.
Fitzgerald met Reggio about two years ago, when he went out to Santa Fe to visit the now-eighty-four-year-old filmmaker, who also made the sequels Powaqqatsi in 1988 and Naqoyqatsi in 2002; all three films in the series feature original soundtracks by Philip Glass.
Audience participation enhances experience of multimedia The Vivid Unknown by John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Since this was the first public presentation of the work at BAM, I asked Fitzgerald what he thought about the audience’s response.
“It’s exceeding expectations on all levels,” he said. “We’ve never had this many people in it. One of the things about making creative technology art is that it’s always half broken until it’s not, until you have to press play and make sure everything comes together. The idea was that Koyaanisqatsi is a depiction of the state of the world in the latter half of the twentieth century as chaos unfolded. So I was just playing around with this idea of how you don’t really control anything but you do have an impact on this.”
That concept is also represented by a video sculpture off to one side, a refurbished slot machine that was transformed into an interactive artwork by the fabrication studio Chateau Brooklyn. When you pull down the S2000 lever, images speed by a trio of small monitors; it offers an additional moment of connection, but it has no effect on the film. It exists on its own, but it offers a sense of power and involvement even though the results are random. One boy was having a blast with it, pulling the lever a few dozen times, too young to consider the metaphor of how we gamble in life, taking or avoiding risk.
At several points, the barrage of images dropped out and the screens went dark; only the shapes of the audience members standing in the oval of light could be seen. “I want people to feel like they’re making an impact on the images,” Fitzgerald said. “That’s why the last state is left this way; the film disappears, and it’s fuel to give a reflection of your presence.”
He was also quick to share credit. “This is a project made by a dozen artists; it’s truly a collaborative effort,” Fitzgerald explained. “Everyone is unified behind Godfrey and his vision to show humans where we are right now. It’s like a mirror into ourselves.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library explores a little-known part of the life of Hannah Arendt, portrayed by Ella Dershowitz (photo by Valerie Terranova)
MRS. STERN WANDERS THE PRUSSIAN STATE LIBRARY
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Through November 10, $44
212-279-4200 www.59e59.org
“Personally I think that is the first big mistake in the history of thought — that truth comes at the end. I think truth comes at the beginning of a thought,” the title character says in response to a prison guard’s question about hidden truth in Jenny Lyn Bader’s outstanding drama Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library, which opened Thursday night at 59E59 for a limited run through November 10.
The show takes place in 1933 Berlin, where twenty-six-year-old burgeoning historian, philosopher, and author Hannah Arendt — her married name at the time was Stern; she and her first husband, Günther Anders Stern, would divorce in 1937 — has been arrested by the Gestapo and is being held in a dank cell. She is visited several times a day by Karl, an inquisitive guard who appears to be just as interested in her philosophy as in the identities of her dissident, Zionist friends; he also gives her updates on how her mother, who is in a different cell, is doing, although sharing such information is against the rules. The terrific cast features Ella Dershowitz as Hannah, Brett Temple as Karl, and Drew Hirshfield as a lawyer; the play, which resonates with the rise of antisemitism in today’s world, is beautifully directed by Ari Laura Kreith, with an immersive set by Lauren Helpern. Coincidentally, the load-in for the production was done on what would have been Arendt’s 118th birthday, on October 14.
A prolific award-winning playwright who graduated from Dalton and Harvard, Bader (The Whole Megillah: A Purim Spiel for Grown-Ups,None of the Above,Manhattan Casanova,In Flight) has written more than thirty full-length and short works, including ten virtual presentations, in addition to numerous essays and the web serial drama Watercooler. She and her husband, author and educator Roger Berkowitz, are raising two children on the Upper West Side.
Berkowitz and Bader will team up for a talkback following the 7:15 performance of Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library on November 3; there will also be talkbacks with Mark Schonwetter, Ann Arnold, and Isabella Fiske on October 29 (7:15), Bader on October 30 (2:15) and November 7 (2:15), and Bader and Dawn Tripp on October 30 (7:15).
I recently spoke over Zoom with Bader, who is a friend of mine and my wife’s, discussing Hannah Arendt, misquotations, the playwriting process, and the search for the truth.
“I have a pandemic cat. She’s absolutely wonderful. It was my daughter who insisted on getting the cat, and now I’ve become obsessed with her. That’s what happens,” Bader explains about Terry, who is half Abyssinian and half Bengal (photo courtesy Jenny Lyn Bader)
twi-ny: What was the genesis of the project?
jenny lyn bader: I was at a meeting at the League of Professional Theatre Women. We used to have something called the Think Tank. I was at a Think Tank meeting and my friend Cindy Cooper said to me that she was curating an evening called “More Jewish Women You Should Know” at the Anne Frank Center because she had done an evening called “Jewish Women You Should Know,” and it had been so popular that the center asked her to bring “More Jewish Women” there.
She asked me if I was writing anything about a Jewish woman, and I said, Yes, I was working on something about some obscure housewives who had been part of the antinuclear protest movement. And she said, No, they can’t be obscure. It has to be a woman with an image and a name and do you have anything like that? And I said I don’t, and that could have been the end of the conversation, but I said, But I could write something for the occasion. And this was interesting because everybody else was doing an excerpt of a project they were already working on, and here I was, I had nothing. And she said, Okay, who? And I suggested a couple of people, and I think the third person I suggested was Hannah Arendt. I said, I have a lot of her research materials and a lot of books written by her and about her in my home.
I’ve also attended an alarming number of conferences inspired by Hannah Arendt. I’m an adviser to the Hannah Arendt Center and have been involved with it and been there a lot even before joining the board of advisers because my husband, Roger Berkowitz, founded the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. So I am very steeped in her thinking all the time. Roger has a weekly reading group, and people come from all over the world, from different countries, time zones, to discuss reading Arendt. I’m often on that Zoom meeting, but I also can sometimes hear the meeting in my apartment even if I’m not signed on. So I’m very submerged in the world of Hannah Arendt, by osmosis and more proactively depending on the time of day.
I suggested Hannah Arendt. She said, Okay, Hannah Arendt, I like that. The next time I saw her, she handed me a flyer and said, Oh, here’s the flyer for our event. And it said, “More Jewish Women You Should Know: Readings of Excerpts of New Plays at the Anne Frank Center.” And there were these photographs of four important historical women: Emma Goldman, Emma Lazarus, Gisa Konopka, Hannah Arendt. And it had the names of four playwrights and these four historical women — and it was in six weeks. I’ve had this happen before, where the brochure preexists the script, but that usually happens in a situation where I know the exact goal of the script or if it’s a commission, what it’s supposed to be about.
Here I only had a character, but I didn’t know if I was writing about her when she was old or young or what was happening. I had a subject, but I didn’t have the subject. So now I had to figure out what the play was about. I was going to see another show of mine in Boston with my husband, and we were taking the Acela, so we had a few hours and I said to him, I’ve got this flyer, this thing is happening. Everyone else has a full-length play. I’ve got nothing. What do you think is the most dramatic thing that ever happened to Hannah Arendt? And it can’t be the [Adolph] Eichmann controversy; there’s already a movie about that. And it can’t be the [Martin] Heidegger relationship, because there’s already a play about that.
And Roger said, Huh, I think it’s probably her experience with Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., this committee after the war that decided what happened to all of the Judaica and where everything went. So it was a very emotional experience for her. She returned to Germany after the war and sat on this committee and had to decide whether to see Heidegger while she was there and decide where things went and heard more about what had happened to her friends. It was a lot.
Roger starts telling me about this for a couple of hours and I’m taking all these notes, and then, as the train pulls into the station, he says, There was that time she was arrested. That week I started to try to write the Cultural Reconstruction play, but I wasn’t finding my way into it. I couldn’t figure out whether it started on the airplane or back in Germany or in a conversation with which characters. I just couldn’t find the shape of the play. The play was not writing itself, it was not doing that for me. And I believe that a really good idea writes itself.
Hannah Arendt was born in Germany in 1906 and died in New York City in 1975
twi-ny: Did you feel, at that point, that you were on the right track even though it wasn’t writing itself?
jlb: No. After a couple of hours I kind of gave up on this play and I thought, Well, I have to find another subject. What is this thing about her being arrested? I’ve never heard of it. I know Hannah Arendt scholars, I know people who knew Hannah Arendt. I’ve talked to a lot of people about her. I’ve been to many conferences at the Arendt Center, not necessarily about her work but inspired by her work in some way. I’ve been in the orbit of Hannah Arendt for a while, but I did not know that she was arrested when I began this project. And one reason I didn’t know was that it was not something she talked about a lot. She really didn’t mention it during most of her life because after the war, people didn’t really talk about their stories. Gruesome things happened to people and they didn’t want to talk about that.
And then less gruesome things happened and those people didn’t want to tell their story because it wasn’t as gruesome. They felt it wasn’t significant. In fact, she says in the interview she gives where she finally does tell the story, “What actually led me out of Germany I never told since it’s so inconsequential.”
Miraculously, I immediately picked up and found the one book where she mentions this, and it was in this 1964 interview with Günter Gaus, which you can watch online now, but you couldn’t at that time.
[ed. note: You can also watch Arendt’s last interview, in 1973 with Roger Errera, here.]
twi-ny: I looked at some of it. It was amazing to be able to see her talk, casually smoke her cigarette.
jlb: Yes! So I read this interview, and in the interview she says she was arrested by a young man with a decent, open face who had been working for the criminal police, had just got promoted to the political police, doesn’t really know what to do with her and has to figure out how to charge her. This is so different from his last job. And a little more, but I don’t want to say too much for those who haven’t seen it, about exactly what happened. And I thought, Well, there’s your play.
twi-ny: There it is.
jlb: Yeah. And I started writing it. That first version just had two characters, and I brought it into my writers group, the Playwrights Gallery, and two actors read it. I asked those two actors to do the reading at the Anne Frank Center that was coming up the following week. And then the actress dropped out the night before; she got a better-paying job that conflicted.
So I ended up being in that first reading myself. I had this two-character short play that some people thought was an excerpt. This is like the downtown Manhattan version of Hamilton at the White House story, right? They had a song and they said it was from a musical, but there was no musical. I had this scene that I told people was from a play, but I didn’t have the play; I didn’t know what the play was yet. I only knew what that scene was.
So I ended up doing it that night. People would say, This is a really interesting premise; you should expand this play! But I couldn’t figure out how to expand it because a short play doesn’t always turn into a long play. And also it was hard for me to evaluate the short play because after that first performance, people kept inviting me to perform it myself, with a guy playing the officer. So I never saw it because I was always in it. I was always performing it. And then one day there was a festival about Jewish women from history at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and one of the organizers asked me, Could we do your Hannah Arendt piece? I said, Yes, but I’m going to be out of town. And they said, Oh, that’s okay. We don’t want any playwrights acting in their own pieces in this festival. And I said, Fine. They actually cast Kate Hamill.
twi-ny: Wow!
jlb: Kimberly Eaton directed that version, and she cast Kate Hamill, who also has a play coming up at 59E59 Theaters this season [The Light and the Dark (the life and times of Artemisia Gentileschi), starting November 2]. She’s an absolutely wonderful actress. She did the scene and I saw her, she was a very tiny, tiny Kate Hamill on my Zoom screen, where I was watching from out of town; I participated in the Zoom rehearsal, and then I came back into town and there was some kind of miracle where there was a blizzard on the day of the festival and it was entirely postponed. So I thought I was going to miss it, but I actually saw it because it happened three days later and I got to see Kate Hamill do the scene and I watched it and I thought, Oh my gosh, I know how to turn this into a full-length play.
There’s a third character, and I know who he is, and he’s mentioned twice in that original interview, but not in the way I’m going to dramatize it. There are two references to attorneys in that interview, but I’ve hit upon a way of adding the attorney that changes the shape of the play.
Jenny Lyn Bader starred in her solo play Equally Divine: The Real Story of the Mona Lisa in 2019 at Theatre Row
twi-ny: Yes, it does. What’s that feeling like?
jlb: Oh, I mean, it’s absolutely wonderful. I’m a big believer in the unconscious mind and in the subconscious mind. Sometimes I’ll go to sleep thinking about a problem and I’ll wake up and I’ll have dreamt the answer. I believe we need to court our subconscious, bring lattes to our subconscious, whatever you need to do just to be tapped into that. Playwriting is a really unusual kind of writing because so much of it has to do with reading aloud and being in a role. And so I find if I participate in a developmental reading of a play of mine and I play a role, I mainly get insight on how to develop that role, how to develop that character, what they would say, what they would not say, what are the emotional transitions, are they logical, or are they emotionally justified. But I don’t necessarily get an insight into the whole.
It helps to watch different people in the roles, although sometimes the best ideas come when you’re not watching, you’re just thinking about something else or going somewhere. I find sometimes just changing locations is really important when you’re trying to spur on the creative process. The first play that I wrote that was produced in New York I got the idea for on the crosstown bus; just being in motion or going to a new place. When you’re stuck, it can be good to leave your office and go out in the world.
twi-ny: Prior to your knowing Roger, were you already a Hannah Arendt fan? Did you know a lot about her or was it through your relationship with him?
jlb: Prior to knowing Roger, I think I had only read Eichmann in Jerusalem, but I was familiar with her in general, what people said about her. I’d seen a lot of stuff about her. Now there are five documentaries, a couple of plays, a biopic. I was aware of her in the cultural imagination, and I had read about The Origins of Totalitarianism. I don’t think I had attempted to read it — it’s a very intense book — yet it’s become, in recent years, a bestseller in the United States, years after she wrote it. [The book was published in 1951.]
It’s just full of wisdom for us today. I should mention that there’s a quotation that has gone viral recently on the internet, and it had at one point more than fifty thousand downloads just on one of the social media sites, and it’s a misquotation. Roger actually wrote a piece about how it was a misquotation.
Shortly after that, I saw it misquoted again, this time with a photo of someone who is not her. I thought, What is this? Why are people doing this? Why do we want her to have written with less complexity and nuance than she did? And why do we want her to look different than she did? What is this strange way that she’s getting refashioned by social media?
twi-ny: I read that piece; it’s the quote about constantly lying.
jlb: The other day I noticed it was Eugene O’Neill’s birthday and I wanted to post something about it. I looked for a quotation, and there were so many things that he did not say attributed to him.
twi-ny: There are sites dedicated to things Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin never said. Has the play changed in the five years since it premiered at Luna?
jlb: Yes. Yes, it has. I mean, it’s the same, but as you work on a play, you make more discoveries, especially when you’re working with a director like Ari Laura Kreith, who does very deep exploration. We had a wonderful rehearsal process. The play at Luna was five scenes, and this version is six scenes. So one of the scenes has been broken up in a way that I think is more effective for the dramatic arc. And then there were still a couple of lines in there that were holdovers from the short piece, which sort of gave too much away early. So there’s been a little bit of tweaking and restructuring, I would say.
But I was very proud of the version that was at Luna. I was considering sending it out to publishers, but I always try not to do that until two, possibly three productions in, because you always make changes. I always say, look at Sam Shepard. He won the Pulitzer, and seventeen years later he totally rewrote Buried Child. You never know what it’s going to be. Plays are living; they are alive.
twi-ny: Ella is a tremendous Hannah Arendt. What was the casting like?
jlb: Brett did the play in New Jersey, so he was a real find in 2019. So that was set; we didn’t have auditions for his role. This time around we only auditioned potential Hannahs and potential Erichs. It was very exciting when Ella came into the room.
twi-ny: It clicked right from the start.
jlb: I am a big crossword puzzle fan, so when I saw that she was a crossword constructor in her spare time — some people wait tables, she constructs crosswords for the New York Times,Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times. Also on her resume it said she had studied philosophy and psychology at Yale, which is not the kind of thing that usually gets you an acting job, but in this case I found it really impressive. And she’s just a transformational actress.
So I was very excited about the audition, but I was also nervous. I really thought this was cool that she was a crossword constructor, but was I biased toward her? She was blonde at the time. Was the blonde hair going to be an issue? Everybody knows what Hannah Arendt looked like. I said to the casting director, What are the rules about that? What is the proper way to ask her if she would be willing to dye her hair? The rules were explained to me. But then the next time Ella walked into the room, five minutes later before she left she said, By the way, I’m willing to dye my hair. So she removed the final obstacle, but I don’t know, she’s just a really special, vulnerable, riveting actress.
twi-ny: Definitely.
jlb: And Drew, playing the attorney, that’s a really hard scene actually. Drew makes it look easy, but he just walked in and gave one of the best auditions I’ve ever seen. He has a few minutes to establish the main conflict of the play, the main dilemma. A lot of the burden of the play’s climax rests on his performance. And of course, Brett is just extraordinary in portraying the inner conflict of the police officer, with some kind of humanity.
twi-ny: Which is not how we think of Nazi prison guards.
jlb: It’s funny. A lot of people come up to me after the play and say, Oh, I really like the Nazi. But he’s not technically a Nazi. He was a member of the criminal police; the Gestapo had just started that week and had not been fully “Nazified” yet, so we still have him in last week’s uniform.
twi-ny: There is no swastika on it.
Mrs. Stern made its Luna Stage debut in 2019, with Brett Temple as Karl Frick and Giuliana Carr as Hannah Arendt (photo by Mike Peters / Montclair State)
jlb: In the 2019 production, we did have a swastika, and it was not historically accurate, but the design team felt it would give people the right vibe. The play now looks like it’s set in a Gestapo cellar, which is, I think, where she would’ve been. In the 2019 production, they made it a jail with bars. They thought that conveyed the sense of being imprisoned. So there were certain dramatic liberties taken in the design.
What’s interesting about this period is there isn’t yet a swastika on everything. There’s about to be. We’re in the last vestiges of the old Germany. But I think the audience sees the swastika even if it’s not there.
twi-ny: And the swastika is mentioned in the dialogue. Speaking of libraries, another part of the play that works so well is how relevant it is to what’s happening today, with banned books and parents and schools deciding what all kids can and can’t read. That’s always a bad cultural sign. Was that consciously done in the writing?
jlb: I feel that suppression of thought leads to suppression of people, and that leads to violence. I think that is at the core of this story and of what happens to her. I was thinking about trying to send this play to a festival that said “no Holocaust plays.” And I said to myself, Well, this is not actually a Holocaust play. Maybe I can send it. Right? This is pre-Holocaust. Nobody’s being put in a gas chamber. Someone is being questioned, but this play has some comedic elements, and maybe this festival that doesn’t want Holocaust plays would read it.
But then the play was featured in a source book called Women, Theater, and the Holocaust, and someone suggested that the play be listed in it, and it now is. So it’s both not a Holocaust play and a Holocaust play in the sense that this is the kind of thing that leads to much darker things.
When you start saying what people can read and you make it illegal for them to distribute materials about antisemitism and hate, and you make it illegal for them to do that the day after they already did it, it’s very scary.
twi-ny: Fifteen or twenty years ago, I don’t think Arendt would’ve been as well known as she is today. So even for people who think they know her through books and movies and other plays, what do you think they will learn from yours?
jlb: Well, I think that often there is a tendency to talk about women through men and through their relationships with men and what they have said about men. And part of that is the problem of sexism and misogyny in general; who wants a story about a woman? Oh, there’s a man in it. Okay. So it was interesting that at our first talkback, there was a question about Heidegger, who had nothing to do with the play. It torpedoed the conversation momentarily. In our second one, there was a question about Eichmann.
I’ve written about neither of those people. It could be argued that there are references or connections in the play to both of those people, but they are not characters in the play. The play is not about them. The play is about a woman, and a woman who was extremely courageous and who was very perceptive about what was going on in her time and who was really able to talk to anybody, even her prison guard. And she’s this incredible human being who has written some controversial things.
She managed to write thirty books and to have a huge number of insights, very, very wide-ranging ideas, and she’s multidisciplinary. She doesn’t just stick to one field. She’s taught today in philosophy programs, in politics programs and literature and genocide studies and Jewish studies. You can find her work across humanities disciplines, and you can find people in different walks of life who are deeply influenced by her work. I’ve met doctors, lawyers, scientists, psychologists who say that Arendt has been a big influence on them.
What I do is I show her when she’s twenty-six years old, when she already has a kind of ethical and moral backbone that is extraordinary and the social gifts and the wit that are legendary. She hasn’t written all thirty books yet, but what I decided at a certain point is that she’s already thinking about them. She’s already starting to figure them out. So I decided it’s all there. In some ways, this situation is giving her ideas for more books.
Hannah Arendt (Ella Dershowitz) is visited by a lawyer (Drew Hirshfield) in gripping play by Jenny Lyn Bader (photo by Stephanie Gamba)
twi-ny: In addition, the thing that is key for her, even more important than herself, is her mother, who’s also imprisoned. She’s more concerned about her mother’s safety and well-being than her own. And not everybody’s going to feel that way when they’re locked up in a dungeon.
jlb: When you write a play that’s about a [fictional] brilliant woman, a random, brilliant, strong woman, you’re going to get a lot of feedback. Like, Oh, did this person really do that? Can’t you make this character more soft or whatever. Whereas if you write about a real person, you don’t get these sexist critiques of the brilliant woman. She really did exist. So there’s something especially exciting about this story, this story that’s centered on a woman, but it’s not about being a woman. It’s not about having a relationship with a man. It’s about a person who is a human being who understands what it means to be a human being and understands our common humanity.
This connects back to what you asked me earlier about getting ideas. And that actually happens in the play. You watch her getting ideas and you see her coming up with ideas and realizing she may be executed before she gets to write them.
twi-ny: Right. And even though you know that she isn’t going to get executed, you still have this fear, this tension.
jlb: There’s several weird things about this play, Mark. One weird thing I learned was at the first public reading of the play, at Urban Stages. I had no idea how suspenseful the play would be. There were a whole bunch of people there who were on the board of the Arendt Center, or went to conferences regularly at the center, who knew full well that Hannah Arendt was not executed for treason, but they were on the edge of their seats, worried about her; because, sitting in the audience, we know she survived, but we don’t know exactly how.
And there’s just the suspension of disbelief when you go into the world of the play. Even people who absolutely know better were taken into that suspense. So that was a surprise to me. And then another surprise was how we live in a very politically polarized world, and Hannah Arendt is one of those thinkers who asks us how we can all talk to each other, how we can talk across ideological divides, how we can find common ground with those who disagree with us. And that’s a very important thing that people are talking about now who are influenced by her work.
You asked if I had intended it being a story about the suppression of thought and all of the censorship that’s happening today. And yes, I did intend those things. What I didn’t intend was that I would somehow hit upon the common ground between left and right that people keep talking about in this country. There’s no common ground. Well, people who are leftist activists and conservative activists have both embraced this play.
twi-ny: There’s hope for our future.
jlb: I feel like they now have something in common, and now we can begin a conversation.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Curator and cultural historian John T. Reddick will give a talk on Tin Pan Alley on September 11 at the Society of Illustrators (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
ILLUSTRATING TIN PAN ALLEY: FROM RAGTIME TO JAZZ
Society of Illustrators
128 East Sixty-Third St. between Park & Lexington Aves.
Wednesday – Saturday through October 12, $10-$15
Tin Pan Alley Talk & Reception: Wednesday, September 11, $10-$15. 6:30
212-838-2560 societyillustrators.org
Longtime Harlem resident and Yale University School of Architecture graduate John T. Reddick is into bridge building — but in this case, the bridges aren’t physical structures but those that involve the lesser-known history of Tin Pan Alley. The birthplace of American popular music, Tin Pan Alley flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when dozens of music publishers and businesses lined the streets of what is now Chelsea, in the West Twenties.
Born and raised in the integrated Philadelphia neighborhood of Mount Airy, Reddick got involved in trying to save Tin Pan Alley when five buildings on West Twenty-Eighth St. were in danger of being demolished by their owner/developer. In 2019, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated them historic landmarks.
A founding member of Harlem Pride and the director of community engagement projects for the Central Park Conservancy, Reddick has been an avid collector of sheet music art, focusing on songs composed and/or performed by Black and Jewish entertainers. What began as a curiosity and hobby has blossomed into a dazzling exhibition at the Society of Illustrators, “Illustrating Tin Pan Alley: From Ragtime to Jazz,” on view through October 12.
“I felt like these artists were groundbreakers. I see in them many parallels to hip hop, in that ragtime’s innovation for its time was as jarring as hip hop’s,” he said of the composers and performers of the era during a tour of the show. “My journey began after I went to a talk on the Lower East Side given by Jeffery Gurock, who lectured on the period when Harlem was Jewish. That was a revelation to me, that Harlem had once been the second largest Jewish community in New York City. From that point I went to the library, did research, and started buying items on eBay. It was just shocking; as I bought sheet music or got to see the names, I realized they all lived in Harlem during the same time period.”
Arranged chronologically, the exhibit focuses on sheet music and its accompanying art, which reveals the developing connections between American Black and white music, beginning with the cakewalk, a Black dance that originated in America but became a craze when introduced in Europe, advancing its popularity as a hit in the United States. Several photographs and illustrations depict the cakewalk being performed, including two works by French artist Georges-Bertin Scott, sheet music covers for the songs “Darktown Is Out To-Night” and “Cake Walk Neath the Dixie Moon,” and a drawing in which Uncle Sam relaxes while watching dancers’ cakewalk around a tree.
On a nearby wall is the sheet music for “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” a popular 1898 song composed by Ernest Hogan that sold more than a million copies. Hogan, a prominent Black composer and performer, appeared in shows with the leading African American performers of the day. However, the song’s sheet music art, which featured unflattering caricatures of Black men and women, became such a crippling definer of Hogan as an artist that it led to his demise.
Reddick noted, “All of a sudden, this ragtime music is popular, and you want to show and sell us more. What do you use to image that music?” Reddick grouped together the sheet music covers for “Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd” by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion [Cook], “Cotton: A Southern Breakdown” by Albert Von Tilzer, and “Watermelon Am Good Enough for Mine” by G. Barker Richardson and Von Tilzer. “I have three things in there: cotton, chicken, and watermelon. They’re in the lyrics; they’re in the titles,” Reddick said. “A lot of the signifying, I feel, is coming out of music publishers just trying to meet the commercial market where its mind is at. You don’t cartoon something unless its understanding is pervasive. For me it’s the beginning of bridge building to some identity that’s beyond that becomes an American music.”
Other excellent groupings juxtapose two different sheet music covers for Lew Pollack’s “Vamping Sal the Sheba of Georgia” and three for Shelton Brooks’s “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.”
Pointing out that a lot of sheet music was dedicated to songwriter and journalist Monroe Rosenfeld because the performers knew he could talk them up in the newspaper, Reddick zeroed in on the team of Bert Williams and George Walker.
“Rosenfeld has this bridge relationship, so you see a lot of people pandering to him, even Williams and Walker, who coined themselves ‘the two real coons.’ They claimed the tag and the stage to establish their own authenticity and artistry. I realized in many ways it’s just like hip hop. You could have been the greatest hip-hop singer in the world, but if you went to amateur night at the Apollo and started singing in a tuxedo, you would be booed. You wouldn’t even get your mouth open because there’s a certain kind of drag they expect you to be in to perform. Williams and Walker knew they were good, but they realized that more whites were blacking-up and playing Blacks onstage than actual Black performers. It was so much more sophisticated. They could show that there’s parody and all this irony in lot of stuff they did.”
Every element, even the way the show is hung, carries some kind of weight. Reddick explained that for most of the works, a black frame indicates the song was written by a Black composer, a white frame by a white composer.
Perhaps not accidentally, the cover sheet for Jean Schwartz’s 1908 “The Whitewash Man,” depicting a smiling Black man carrying a paint bucket and a broom, is placed over a water fountain, evoking the “Whites Only” signs of the Jim Crow era.
Among the other composers and performers Reddick discussed were James Reese Europe and Ford T. Dabney, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, Irene and Vernon Castle, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Miss Aida Overton Walker, drummer Buddy Gilmore, Fats Waller, Sophie Tucker, Josephine Baker, and W. C. Handy as well as the Clef Club, the Ziegfeld Follies, the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Al Hirschfeld and Sydney Leff, two Jewish artists who attended the Vocational High School for the Arts on 138th Street in Harlem.
“Think of the names of Motown groups,” Reddick said. “The Supremes, the Marvelettes, the Temptations. Nobody’s a gangster. They’re claiming we deserve to be on the other side. Now we have a credential. . . . When the Central Park jogger case happened [in 1989], the term ‘wilding,’ it was just a term for young people being in nature and the park, not being there in the park to victimize people. But that was the first time it crossed over as a term from the Black community to the broader public. . . . So, I always think, what if bling had crossed over, associated with a jewelry store robbery as opposed to the fashions of hip-hop artists. Again, the word already had that meaning in my culture. Bling and jewelry. You got bling on, but at a certain point it crossed over, right? Maybe a hip-hop person, whatever. What was the bridge that made it happen?”
Tin Pan Alley exhibition winds down narrow hallway (photo courtesy of Society of Illustrators)
One of the most striking works is E. Simms Campbell’s gorgeously detailed 1932 “Night-Club-Map of Harlem,” which locates such hot spots as Smalls Paradise, Club Hot-Cha (“where nothing happens before 2 a.m.”), “the nice new police station,” Gladys’ Clam House, the Lafayette Theatre, the Radium Club, and the Savoy Ballroom, with cartoon vignettes of people dancing the lindy hop and the snakehips, men purchasing “marijuana cigarettes,” Bill “Bojangles” Robinson tapping away, and Tillie’s offering “specialties in fried chicken — and it’s really good.”
Reddick, who will give a lecture at the Society of Illustrators on September 11 at 6:30, followed by a reception with pianist/preservationist Adrian Untermyer, then told a story about American composer and violinist Will Marion Cook, who had studied with and influenced Antonín Dvořák’s take on America’s “Negro Music.”
“He performed and got a review that said he was one of the nation’s best colored violinists. And he took his violin to the critic and broke it and said, ‘I’m the best violinist.’ He wanted to start writing for Black shows and other Black players. He wrote with [poet and novelist] Paul Laurence Dunbar. But his family was so embarrassed for writing that ‘n—er’ music that in his first productions, he didn’t use his last name. However, Cook-associated shows such as 1898’s Clorindy and 1903’s In Dahomey served to bring a more diverse African American identity to the stage. What does that mean politically? If people are liking you, then they are seeing you in another light. What’s that going to mean on the political landscape?”
He added, “Now they could be voters. Picking cotton, you weren’t a voter. They’re playing at Madison Square Garden, so they’re at this elevated level. They’re having a life that was unimaginable for most Blacks.”
Above “All Coons Look Alike to Me” is a quote by W. E. B. Du Bois from his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others . . . one ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings.”
In “Illustrating Tin Pan Alley: From Ragtime to Jazz,” Reddick is reconciling those strivings and more, building bridges across race and class through a unique moment in New York City musical history.
[On September 19, the Society of Illustrators will host a happy hour from 5:00 to 9:00, with free admission, drink specials, and live music by Charlie Judkins, Miss Maybell, and Robert Lamont. Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Harriet Stubbs will perform at Joe’s Pub on June 2 (Drew Bordeaux Photography)
HARRIET STUBBS
Joe’s Pub
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Sunday, June 2, $32.50 (plus two drink or one food item minimum), 6:00
212-539-8778 www.joespub.com www.harrietstubbs.com
“If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area,” David Bowie said in a 1990s video interview. “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
British classical pianist, William Blake scholar, and Bowie aficionado Harriet Stubbs has built her career on such advice, as evidenced by her latest album, the exciting Living on Mars; the record is the follow-up to 2018’s Heaven and Hell: The Doors of Perception, a title inspired by Aldous Huxley’s autobiographical 1954 book The Doors of Perception and 1956 essay Heaven and Hell and Blake’s 1793 tome The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Now based in London, Los Angeles, and the East Village, the British-born Stubbs took to the keys when she was three and has performed at such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, St Martin-in-the-Fields, the Cutting Room, Tibet House, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. On June 2, she will play Living on Mars in its entirety at her Joe’s Pub debut; be sure to get a good look at her shoes, which are always spectacular.
The eclectic record features Stubbs’s unique solo adaptations of the Thin White Duke’s “Space Oddity” and “Life on Mars” as well as Nick Cave’s “Push the Sky Away,” Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird,” and Beethoven’s “Pathétique” in addition to homages to the duos of J. S. Bach/Glenn Gould and Frédéric Chopin/Leopold Godowsky.
My wife and I first became interested in Stubbs when Cave gave her a shout-out at an October 2023 show at the Beacon; earlier this month my wife saw Stubbs perform a private Coffee House Club concert at the Salmagundi Club on Fifth Ave., and then we bumped into her on the street by Sheridan Square. Clearly, our paths were destined to cross.
In this exclusive interview, Stubbs talks about Blake and Bowie, the pandemic, swimming with Cave, and playing in New York City.
twi-ny: You started your career early, first performing publicly as a pianist at the age of four and performing piano concertos as soloist at the age of nine. Growing up immersed in classical music performance, when did you become interested in contemporary pop music?
harriet stubbs: My love of music outside of classical really developed as a teenager and as I was transitioning from a career as a child prodigy to that of an adult artist: what I wanted to do with classical music, how I wanted to remain in it, why, and how these were going to come together to inform my professional adult life. A moment that I remember in particular was hearing the Verve live at Glastonbury in 2008 and realizing that it would always be music that I wanted to dedicate my life to. The thrill of a shared moment in music where everyone has been moved by the same thing is simply extraordinary.
twi-ny: That thrill was changed when the pandemic hit. During the Covid-19 crisis, you played live daily, from your London flat — 250 twenty-minute concerts. Do you have any favorite memories from that rather dark time? How did it feel to get back in front of larger audiences in person again after the lockdown ended?
hs: I think that period was so bleak that every concert in its own way was a deeply moving experience, whether it was two people in the pouring rain or two hundred. Pre-vaccine it was outside of a small window, attached to an amp attached to an upright at a busy intersection of traffic, with people very distanced and masked — who I waved at through the window.
At the time there was no end in sight, so just to have a shared experience in that way — however tentative — was needed more than ever. The two hundredth concert was in December of 2020 and the last at that address and under those circumstances in the dark and the rain. When the spring came, people were starting to be vaccinated, and as they were, I was able to offer them drinks outside; the weather was beautiful (mostly), there was a grand piano, a bay window, and a quiet, residential street where people could hear properly. Being awarded a British Empire Medal [in 2022] by the late Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was very special, as was Nick Cave showing up to hear “Push the Sky Away”! Those concerts were made by the regulars who came right up until the border opened back up for me to return to New York.
twi-ny: Speaking of Nick Cave, we recently saw him play the Beacon, and he raved about you. Your cover of “Push the Sky Away” is on your new album, Living on Mars. How did the Nick Cave connection come about?
hs: Nick and I met in a park in London a few years ago and became fast friends and swimming partners, and eventually Nick became an integral part of how the album came to be. We swam in a lake together every day and would talk about everything from philosophy to music, politics, literature, and what we were working on as the seasons changed around us.
These are some of my happiest memories. If Nick hadn’t insisted under the moon on a dark New Year’s Day swim that I “get on with” the new album — just as he was starting his [Wild God will be released August 30] — I would never have been on a plane to LA three weeks later to record it. Mike Garson wrote the arrangement of Nick’s “Push the Sky Away” as a thank-you to Nick, and it became the centerpiece.
twi-ny: I’m glad you brought that up. How does a classical pianist end up recording one album with Russ Titelman, who has worked with Randy Newman, Rickie Lee Jones, James Taylor, the Monkees, and Eric Clapton, and then Garson, who’s produced and played with the Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, and, primarily, David Bowie?
hs: I have been in New York for fifteen years now and over that time have had so many adventures, many of which were not directly related to classical music. Russ and I met at Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side through our mutual friend, author Julian Tepper. Russ wrote his number on a Barney receipt and we would meet for milkshakes. Two years later we were on a train to Pleasantville to “try out” recording together, which then turned into Heaven and Hell: The Doors of Perception, recorded at Samurai NYC.
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Russ invited Marianne Faithfull because of my love of William Blake — I recently wrote the lead editorial article for The Journal of the Blake Society,“Invisible Women in Blakean Mythology” — and really the point of the record was just that, to bring together the worlds of rock and roll, literature, classical, and popular music, to see all of them in each other and to have as Blake would have referred to it an “illuminated” experience. Living on Mars continues this threading of the worlds together, just a little more literally.
[ed. note: Stubbs also participated in a January 2022 panel discussion at the Global Blake conference that you can watch here. Faithfull narrates Blake text over John Adams’s “Phrygian Gates” to open Heaven and Hell: The Doors of Perception.]
twi-ny: There are Blakean influences throughout Bowie’s work, particularly in the 1970s. What makes his music so translatable to classical?
hs: I have always been a Bowie fan, and over the years there have been many ways in which our worlds seemed to collide serendipitously. I loved Bowie as a teenager and through my friendship with May Pang became friends with [producer] Tony Visconti and later Mike Garson, who produced and arranged Living on Mars. Before the Bell Canyon wildfires I went to Mike’s home there and played for him, and we started to conceive of the album. We finally got to record it in 2023 in LA, entirely live, which was a thrilling experience.
twi-ny: Who are your favorite classical composers?
hs: It depends who I am at any given time of the day but usually somewhere between late Beethoven’s final piano sonatas living on the border between life and death or dancing through some gothic Prokofiev.
twi-ny: Besides Bowie and Cave, what other contemporary performers or songwriters do you listen to? Who’s doing things that you find musically intriguing?
hs: I have recently started listening to the Last Dinner Party. My rotation at the moment seems to be some [Krystian] Zimerman Brahms B flat piano concerto, the Magnetic Fields, [Marc-André] Hamelin’s late Busoni, Rob Zombie, Judas Priest, Alter Bridge, and the National, but that’s just this week. Always a mix!
twi-ny: Yes, that is quite a mix. Having performed on both sides of the Atlantic for years, do you notice any difference between American and British or European concertgoers, especially over time, pre- and postpandemic?
hs: I think that location is becoming less relevant to those that consume their music entirely through platforms such as TikTok. I think that the US has been more open to contemporary reimagining of classical music than other locations around the world, but social media has changed that concentration, as has the growing need for audience development. Anywhere that there is a live, enthusiastic audience is the same thrill, but there’s nothing like playing to my adopted hometown of New York; it’s electrifying.
twi-ny: You’ll be in New York on June 2 at Joe’s Pub. Have you ever been there before?
hs: I am so excited to perform at Joe’s. This will be my first show there and I can’t wait!
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Artist Richard Ayodeji Ikhide stands next to Mother’s Embrace at Candice Madey gallery (photo by Kunning Huang)
RICHARD AYODEJI IKHIDE: TIES THAT BIND WITH TIME
Candice Madey
1 Freeman Alley off Bowery
Tuesday – Saturday through June 15, free, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm www.candicemadey.com www.instagram.com/pandagwad
Richard Ayodeji Ikhide is having quite a week. He and his partner, Gina, had a baby on April 29 in London; Gina celebrated her birthday on May 2; Ikhide flew that day to New York City for the May 3 opening of his second solo show at Candice Madey on the Lower East Side, “Ties That Bind with Time”; and he then returned home for his newly expanded family’s first Mother’s Day together.
Born in Lagos, Nigeria, and based in London, Ikhide studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and the Royal Drawing School. His first exhibition at Candice Madey’s 1 Rivington St. home, June 2022’s “Emiomo,” introduced the title character, a child emissary or messenger, inspired by West African spiritual beliefs and legends, who undergoes a metamorphosis with other figures in a fantastical world. He broadens that vision in the new show at Madey’s Freeman Alley space, in which Ikhide again incorporates his interests in weaving, textile design, comic books, manga, Nigerian mythology, and video games in large-scale watercolor, gouache, and collaged paintings on paper that are screwed into the walls. But this time, there’s a sharper focus on motherhood — and fatherhood — across generations. Each of the five works tells its own story, bursting with swirling colors that depict symbolic animals, ritualistic objects, and red and blue circles.
In Mother’s Embrace, a woman clutches her child, their eyes closed, their bond offering them protection from whatever they may face. In Familial Procession, a man and a woman march with several children, surrounded by floating faces; one of the kids emits a dialogue bubble with an abstract shape in it instead of recognizable words. And in Patriarch’s Principles, a family prepares for a ceremony at a table filled with artifacts.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, I bumped into Ikhide at Madey’s Rivington gallery, where he generously agreed to sit down for an impromptu interview. “Ties That Bind with Time” is up through June 15, the day before Ikhide will experience his first Father’s Day as a new dad.
twi-ny: There’s a lot of imagery with children and a mother and father in these paintings. How did that evolve? You started this series before your partner was pregnant.
Richard Ayodeji Ikhide: I think obviously it’s that thing of bringing a new life into the world. It’s kind of like you have all these ideas and associations in terms of what you might think a family might be, or what you might want for your family. And I was saying to people that I felt like this body of work was almost a bit like a visual manifesto, for myself in terms of what I might want for my family unit and how I might want things to be. And one thing I was meditating a lot on was the role of the patriarch; even the word “patriarch” itself can be this oppressive figure in the family dynamic. It was something I really wanted to push against. It’s like a narrative around the idea of the patriarch not as this oppressive figure but also a nurturer, somebody who’s also propagating the life and the vitality of the family.
twi-ny: Fathers get short shrift sometimes.
rai: Exactly. I mean, I’m going to be a Black father; there are so many narratives around Black men and their children, their family units. I don’t want to be that kind of father. I really wanted to counteract or push against some of these narratives.
twi-ny: Why is that narrative still with us? I went out with a bunch of white friends recently and we got into political discussions, and those narratives came up, with some of them arguing that that’s what’s wrong with Black society.
rai: It’s funny because Oprah did a recent study that talked about participation amongst fathers, and African American fathers were quite high. [ed. note: OWN Spotlight: Oprah and 100 Black Fathers aired in June 2021.] A lot of African American fathers are quite active in their kids’ lives, but like you said, that’s a narrative that’s still propagated today. I’m from London, but that’s something that, across the waters, still affects how people view things. It’s been interesting for me. I’ve been to every single midwife visit. I was there in the delivery room. I was there for the baby’s first change. So that’s the role I would like to play in my child’s life. This body of work was a deep meditation on what kind of dad would I like to be, and what kind of family unit would I like to have. It was really interesting to bring it all together, even the whole nine months of seeing my partner’s body change and how she’s adapting. Okay, now we’ve had the baby, she’s breastfeeding, all these things. We’re doing this together. I love her to bits. It’s been both of us, like Bonnie and Clyde. Also, I’ve got a family to feed, so on a financial level I’m thinking, Hey, look. My wife’s been on maternity leave for a while so I’m literally paying for every single bill.
twi-ny: What does she do?
rai: She’s in marketing and research and strategy, so she works with brands and agencies like Sony and Converse. She’s taking time off work, so I can’t expect to be like, You need to chip in your share. That’s all on me now. We’re also talking about all the baby responsibilities, right? And the duty you have as a father, in terms of how you need to make sure your family unit is okay. So yeah, there’s a piece with the patriarch’s principles that’s right in the middle where, you know, you have this patriarchal figure almost giving assurance and direction and almost kind of like life lessons in the sense of okay, this is how you might want to go about doing certain things. I was talking to Jake [Borndal], the director of the gallery, about one thing I got into recently, and that’s all these stats about the involvement of fathers and how the odds for children in terms of their education, career, finances, economic literacy shoot up if the father’s involved. Society needs to also incentivize men to want to play an active role. But if you have this narrative of Oh, men are just going to traumatize their families, then it’s not necessarily incentivizing us.
twi-ny: They’re going to go out for cigarettes and not come back.
rai: Exactly. I’m at a point where, I don’t know, maybe it’s a bit idealist or utopian of me, but I’m like, Hey, maybe that’s the kind of work I would like to make, put that narrative out into society.
twi-ny: And that comes across in your show without preaching at the viewer.
rai: Yeah, exactly.
Richard Ayodeji Ikhide’s “Ties That Bind with Time” is on view at Candice Madey through June 15 (photo by Kunning Huang)
twi-ny: So you’re in London, and your wife gives birth four days ago.
rai: Yeah.
twi-ny: You are there at the birth.
rai: Yeah.
twi-ny: And then you’re on a plane, and you come here to give birth to this show. And tomorrow you’re going right back home.
rai: Yeah.
twi-ny: So what have these five or six days been like for you?
rai: Intense. I’m running on empty. I mean, a couple hours ago I was changing diapers. The night before I had to fly, the baby was waking up like every hour, and I’m like, Oh my god, she needs to eat again. I don’t think I’ve cried so much as in the past four days. Yesterday, towards the end of the opening, I was getting quite emotional because we were in a hospital for about four days, just preparing for it, because our baby was late, so the doctors were like, Okay, we might need to do this, we might need to do that, we might need to do this, and I’m just there like, No, I need to make sure my partner’s okay, she doesn’t want a C-section, no, we’re not doing that. So I was in practical, logical mode. And then Monday, when we came back home, I think that’s when all the emotions started to hit me. Like, Oh my god, we have a child.
And the funny thing is, my partner’s birthday was on Thursday, the night I flew out. So her and my daughter, they’re both Tauruses now — their birthdays are three days apart — I feel really appreciative and grateful to be able to have this experience in my life: a partner’s birthday, a child being born, a show opening.
twi-ny: And now Mother’s Day.
rai: Yeah, so it’s just been absolutely mind blowing, incredible for me. All I can say is I’m grateful, you know?
twi-ny: You look deliriously happy. It’s like there’s this aura around you.
rai: It’s just been incredible to work with the gallery, with Candice and the team, with Jake. They’ve both just been absolutely amazing and incredible, they’ve treated me well, so it’s been such a lovely experience. I know I’m here for only a short time, but it’s been absolutely stellar.
twi-ny: I’m glad I just walked into this, glad you were here.
rai: It’s a synchronous moment.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Austin Pendleton is revisiting Orson’s Shadow for its twenty-fifth anniversary (photo by Jonathan Slaff)
ORSON’S SHADOW
Theater for the New City
155 First Ave. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through March 31, pay-what-you-can – $25
212-254-1109 www.theaterforthenewcity.net
In 1960, Orson Welles directed the first English-language adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s fascist parable, Rhinoceros, with a cast that included Laurence Olivier and his soon-to-be third wife, Joan Plowright, as Olivier’s marriage to Vivien Leigh fell apart. It was a scandal-ridden, problematic production that would be Welles’s theatrical swan song.
In 2000, writer, director, actor, and teacher Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow opened at Steppenwolf in Chicago, a fictionalized behind-the-scenes foray into the making of that show, with actors portraying Olivier, Plowright, Leigh, Welles, critic Kenneth Tynan, and a stagehand named Sean. The play was directed by up-and-comer David Cromer.
Pendleton is revisiting Orson’s Shadow for its twenty-fifth anniversary, codirecting a slightly tweaked version at Theater for the New City, presented in association with Oberon Theatre Ensemble and Strindberg Rep. Pendleton’s play focuses on ego and legacy, the stage and the silver screen, things that the Tony winner is eminently familiar with; he has more than 160 television and film credits (My Cousin Vinnie,Homicide,Oz,Law and Order,Finding Nemo,The Muppet Movie,Catch-22) and nearly five dozen theater credits for acting and directing (Fiddler on the Roof,The Little Foxes,The Diary of Anne Frank,Between Riverside and Crazy,Life Sucks.). In 2007, he received a Special Drama Desk Award as “Renaissance Man of the American Theatre,” and his continuing legacy was celebrated in the 2016 documentary Starring Austin Pendleton.
During a wide-ranging Zoom talk that was scheduled for fifteen to thirty minutes but lasted an hour and a half, Pendleton, a true New York City raconteur who was born in Warren, Ohio, and turns eighty-four this week, discussed his superstar-filled life and career sans ego as he shared stories about working with Welles, Jerome Robbins, Lynn Redgrave, Mike Nichols, Tracy Letts, Victor Mature, and Frank Langella, among countless others. And this is only the first part of the interview; look for twi-ny’s Substack post later this week, in which Pendleton does a deeper dive into Fiddler on the Roof and Tennessee Williams.
twi-ny: In the documentary Starring Austin Pendleton, Ethan Hawke says the following about you: “If this guy didn’t look the way he looks — he’s got a stutter, he’s five-whatever-he-is, he’s a funny-looking guy, and his hair’s all screwy — he’d be Marlon Brando.” What do you think of that description?
austin pendleton: Well, anything Ethan says, I take to heart, yeah. I’ve known him for years and years.
twi-ny: You have more than two hundred television, film, and theater credits. You’ve been teaching at HB Studio since 1968, and you’ll be turning eighty-four next week.
ap: That’s right.
twi-ny: Were you born with this energy? Have you ever slowed down in your entire life?
ap: No, I never have.
twi-ny: How come? What gave you that drive?
ap: Well, let’s see. I was born into a household where my mom had been a professional actress. And then she decided to give up the profession. And you know why? Well, in the mid-1930s, she got offered a very flashy part of one of the young girls in Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour. You know that play, right?
twi-ny: Yes.
ap: And all the students in there, some of them are, you know, those are flashy parts. And she got one of them for the national tour. My dad had already proposed to her once, but she wanted to pursue a professional career, because things were looking up.
That tour of The Children’s Hour was canceled when a lot of the cities realized that the play contained a compassionate portrait of a lesbian. They wouldn’t allow it in their cities.
And then my dad proposed again, and she thought, You know, what the hell? I mean, this is no way to spend one’s life. So they got married in 1938. I was born in 1940. My younger brother was born exactly a year and a half later; my birthday is March 27, his is August 27. And then after the war, my sister was born. She lives up on a farm in the Boston area, a town called Lincoln, Mass. I go up and spend a week at her farm a few times a year.
twi-ny: You’re still very close.
ap: Oh, yeah, we’re very close. Yeah. And so then, two or three years after the war, some of the people in town — the town was Warren, Ohio — came to my mom and said they wanted to start a community theater.
The county that Warren is in in Ohio is Trumbull County, so they were calling it Trumbull New Theatre. In other words, TNT. And so the first few plays were rehearsed in our living room at night after dinner.
My brother and I after dinner would set up all the furniture in the living room to conform to the needs of the play. And then we would sneak down once the rehearsal began — we were supposed to be in bed — and watch those evening rehearsals. I was just smitten.
And that’s how I got obsessed with theater. Around that time, when I was about eight or nine years old, I developed a stutter. It got a lot worse in my teenage years. But I found that when I was acting, it didn’t happen. It was fascinating. Or it happened way less and less, how shall I say, significantly. So I was free of it pretty much a lot of the time, all through my teenage years and into my twenties.
I acted in big parts in college and all that. Then, as fate would have it, the first professional job I had when I got to New York was a play called Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad [A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition], in which the character has a stutter.
The guy who auditioned me for it was the director Jerome Robbins.
Austin Pendleton played Jonathan Rosepettle in Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (photo courtesy of Arthur Kopit Papers, Fales Library, NYU)
twi-ny: I’ve heard of him.
ap: Yes, right. I read, and I auditioned for it fluently. The character speaks where he’s beginning sentences over and over again, but Jerry, who had never heard of me, of course, was impressed with the audition.
Afterward he said, Do you stutter? And I said, Well, yeah, but I’ve been in college shows and I’m fine. And he said, No, I was just curious. I’m wondering, how did he pick up that I actually stuttered?
I played it for a year. Some nights would be fine. Some nights it was okay. Some nights I would have a real problem with the stutter. And sometimes I’d have a severe problem with the stutter, and it was driving me crazy. So when that started to happen, I went to Jerry’s apartment, which is two blocks south from where I am right now. He was on East Seventy-Fourth between Lex and Third. The first audition I did was great.
Then I did a callback and the callback was just awful, not in terms of the stutter, just in terms of acting. When I auditioned for plays in college, they didn’t have callbacks. And, of course, in a callback the part is yours to lose.
I did a terrible callback. And so Jerry called me back the next day and said, What happened? And I decided to go for the truth. And I said, I didn’t know what I was doing anymore.
He said, Fine, I’ll just keep auditioning you. So six auditions, and I was beginning to give up. They improved, but they didn’t come anywhere near that first audition.
twi-ny: If they’re giving you six auditions, they’re obviously interested.
ap: Well, Jerry was famous for this. In fact, there’s an equity rule that was established later, unofficially known as the Jerry Robbins rule, in which after a certain number of auditions, the actor has to be paid to audition, because he would he would audition people a lot of times.
But also he kept auditioning me for this, because he wanted to see if I could get back to the excitement of the first audition. So I went home for Christmas finally. There was an agency that had set me up for the part, an agency I got with a friend who I’d made at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where I’d been an apprentice.
The agency called me the day after Christmas and said, He wants to see you again. And I said, Oh, what’s the point? I don’t know how to get back to when it was really good. I just think I’d like to stay through January, here in Warren, Ohio, and chill with my friends. The lady from the Deborah Coleman agency said, So I’m to let Jerome Robbins know that you would rather chill with your friends in Warren, Ohio.
I said, Okay, you win. I flew back the next morning to New York. At that point, I roomed with about eight people on the Upper West Side, who I knew either from Warren or from college.
I went to audition, and there to read the first big scene between the boy and the girl, if you know the play, was Barbara Harris.
It soared, and we both got the parts that day. This was only a little over two weeks before rehearsals began. The mother was cast during that time, Jo Van Fleet.
twi-ny: That’s quite an auspicious beginning.
ap: Yeah, I mean, Jo Van Fleet and Barbara Harris, they were two of the best things in town.
twi-ny: Did the trouble you had over those six auditions have anything to do with your trying to control the stutter?
ap: No, it was just bad acting.
twi-ny: But then you’re with Barbara Harris and you shined.
ap: Well, I must say, anybody who couldn’t shine with Barbara Harris should have reexamined their career. So we got the parts two weeks before rehearsals. We were going to begin rehearsals on a Monday. On the Saturday night before the Monday, Barbara was staying in an apartment that some friends of hers had, because she didn’t know whether she’d be going back to Chicago or not.
She invited me to come over, and we worked on the two long scenes the boy and the girl have. My first really great acting lesson was with her that evening. Still, every time I pass the building, I kiss my hand and put it on the wall. It was on East Seventy-Fourth Street between Second and First. I did two shows there, each of which ran a long time. Oh Dad, Poor Dad, and then a musical by Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford called The Last Sweet Days of Isaac.
twi-ny: Right.
ap: That was there for about a year and a half. So I spent a long time at that theater, but it was torn down years ago.
twi-ny: You’re still in that neighborhood.
ap: Yeah. I still wander over there hoping the theater has somehow reappeared.
The other thing that happened was that every year during the mid-1940s, in the late 1940s, there would be a new touring company of Oklahoma! And my parents would take me, even though they were all evening shows and I was quite young.
twi-ny: Would it just be you or would your brother and sister go too?
ap: No, no, just me. And I was entranced by Oklahoma! I still am. There’s a route between Cleveland and Warren called Route 422. I remember you pass a lot of farms. I remember the moon shining down on one farm, at around midnight. On the way back from Cleveland, I remember making a vow then that I was going to be an actor.
twi-ny: Did you see the Oklahoma! that Daniel Fish did a few years ago?
ap: Oh, I loved that.
twi-ny: So did I. I wrote extremely favorably about it. The only negative comment I got online was from Oscar Hammerstein III. He was not happy with the whole production.
Barbara Blier, Barbara Maier Gustern, and Austin Pendleton performed cabaret together (photo by Maryann Lopinto)
ap: Oh, I thought it was brilliant. I think Hammerstein himself would have loved it, because he was extremely innovative. The woman who was the musical director, the musical coach for the singers, a couple of years ago, almost right now, got murdered.
twi-ny: I remember that.
ap: Barbara Maier Gustern.
twi-ny: In February 2020, my wife and I attended her eighty-fifth birthday party, a beautiful tribute to her held at Joe’s Pub. [ed. note: If Music Be the Food of Love, with Justin Vivian Bond, Taylor Mac, Diamanda Galas, Debbie Harry, Penny Arcade, John Kelly, and many others.
ap: I’m involved with a cabaret that we do three or four times a year, almost always down at Pangea on lower Second Avenue, and we had just had a rehearsal at Barbara’s apartment on West Twenty-Eighth, and she was performing in the cabaret as well. She was so excited that night. She went out to the street to hail a cab to get to Joe’s Pub, where one of her students was singing, and this terrible woman who was in a bad mood saw her across the street and pushed her hard down on the ground.
And the other Barbara, Barbara Bleier, who’s also in the cabaret, we were sitting in the outer lobby of her building. Happily a young man came along and found her and picked her up.
We were waiting for a car for Barbara Bleier to go home, and in walks Barbara Maier Gustern, her face covered in blood. We called an ambulance and the police came.
twi-ny: It was just a horrible, horrible thing.
ap: It was just this young woman who was in a bad mood, who comes from wealth. She just had an argument with her fiancé, who now of course is her ex-fiancé, and she was in a bad mood and she saw this woman across the street. She just crossed the street; they’d been in a little park on the block that Barbara Maier Gustern lived on, and the park had to be closed at 8:30, and our rehearsal ended at about 8:30. This woman got mad at the cop and so she was walking and she saw a lady walking across the street.
twi-ny: It was so random.
ap: It was terrible. I still haven’t gotten over it. The woman has been sentenced to eight or nine years.
twi-ny: You’ve been teaching at HB Studio now since 1968. With all the changes in theaters and technology and TV and streaming, are the students the same as they’ve always been or are they very different in their approach to theater these days?
ap: No. I basically teach what I learned from Uta Hagen and Herbert Berghof and Bobby Lewis. I was in a thing called the Lincoln Center Training Program, 1962–63. A whole lot of people auditioned and they picked thirty of us. The first day in September the producer, Bob White, had told us that at the end of the eight months, fifteen of us would be picked to go into the company, which was going to begin the following fall with Elia Kazan.
For a lot of the students, those eight months, which were for free, were very tense. I find I didn’t really care. I just was so happy to have the free training. When they picked the fifteen, one person they did not include was Frank Langella. I mean, I couldn’t follow the pattern of who they took and who they didn’t take. But it was a great eight months and Bobby Lewis was a great teacher, a great, great teacher. And the movement teacher was no less than Anna Sokolow.
twi-ny: Okay, so you have this history of working with amazing actors, directors, and teachers. Let’s talk about Orson’s Shadow, a play about theater, with Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Joan Plowright, and Kenneth Tynan. You were asked to write the play by Judith Mihalyi, René Auberjonois’s wife.
ap: That’s right.
twi-ny: Then he decided he didn’t want to do it.
ap: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. What happened was that he was all set to do it, and then I got an offer from the company I’m a member of in Chicago, Steppenwolf, to do it. It needed to be in a small theater. The play always needs to be done in a small theater. And they had a small theater available. They had a policy that it had to be performed by ensemble members, but they were willing to forego that. They said that we could do it in the small theater with René and with Alfred Molina, who was to play Orson.
But then René and Alfred were not available. So we went ahead. The artistic director at Steppenwolf at the time was a woman by the name of Martha Lavey. She got for me the director David Cromer. She said, Can I show him the script? And if he likes it, can you talk to him? He read it and liked it. I got on the phone with him and I liked him immediately. I said to Cromer, You cast it in Chicago with any actors you want.
As it happened, they weren’t any from Steppenwolf, but they were good Chicago actors. We did it there, and it was a big success. Ben Brantley, who was then the New York Times critic, came out for a round-up of Chicago theater, and he wrote a great deal in that round-up about Orson’s Shadow.
Then all kinds of New York producers got interested, but none of them particularly wanted Cromer as the director. It happened that at the time we did the show at Steppenwolf, my friend Cherry Jones was in a show that was on the way to New York. We would have breakfast a lot, and she said when she read the reviews, Look, they’re going to try to change the personnel. Don’t let them do it. She said, I’ve been involved with shows like that out of town. They’re a big success. And then when the New York production is being considered, they want to go with big names.
I held out for Cromer for four years. All these producers, they had other things in mind. After four years, I went one night to see a play by Tracy Letts at the Barrow Street Theatre, Bug. The producer who had a lease at the theater, Scott Morfee, was there when I was picking up my tickets; he came out from the box office, which was sort of his office.
He came into to the lobby and said, Tracy tells me you have a play. I said, Yeah. He said, Can I read it? So he read it. The run of the bug play had just begun, toward the beginning of 2004. He said, Well, I think this play of Tracy’s is going to run at least till the end of the year. Can you wait? I said, Yes, I can certainly wait. He said, Now, are you serious about this Cromer thing?
I said, Well, let me put it this way. If you don’t hire David Cromer to direct this play, I will sulk. He said, Oh, that scares the shit out of me. OK, Cromer it is. I said, I’d love to have the Chicago cast too, because among the perceptive things that Ben Brantley said is that it should be played by actors who are not known to the audience. It shouldn’t be stars playing stars. And it should be in a small theater, have an informal feeling. The only actor who was not able to come in from Chicago was the actor playing Kenneth Tynan, the critic. So Tracy took over that part. And Tracy, of course, he’s a rock star. It did us no harm that an actor that charismatic was playing a critic. It was quite well received. It opened very early in 2005 and closed on New Year’s Eve.
twi-ny: And now, of course, everybody’s clamoring to have David Cromer direct their show.
ap: Yeah. He often thanks me for this. And I said, Cromer, thank you for thanking me, but it wasn’t a great gesture I was making. It was raw self-interest. I mean, you were the director for the show.
twi-ny: He’s been doing shows at Barrow Street ever since.
ap: He did that for quite a few years. But then Scott, after a while, lost his lease. But by that point, Cromer was directing all over town. And of course, he directed The Band’s Visit.
twi-ny: And you were recently on Broadway with Tracy in The Minutes.
ap: Yeah, right. So I owe a great deal to Tracy Letts.
twi-ny: We all do.
ap: Exactly. He’s an amazing actor, an amazing playwright, an amazing guy.
twi-ny: And his wife is amazing as well.
ap: Oh, Carrie [Coon]. Yeah, absolutely.
twi-ny: So here you are now, bringing Orson’s Shadow back to New York for its twenty-fifth anniversary, and this is the first time in your career that you’re directing your own play.
ap: I decided as the rehearsal time approached that I didn’t want to be the only director of it. I wanted somebody else there too. I have a friend named David Schweizer, who directed the New York premiere of one of my other plays, Booth, about the Booth family. He directed the original New York production of that play with Frank Langella. He’s a terrific director, and he’s become a good friend over the years. So I asked Oberon, I said, Okay, I have a codirector, David Schweizer, and actually he’s the director. I sit around, I throw out the odd note to the actors and all that. And I have conversations with them. But in terms of what a director ordinarily does, it’s David Schweizer.
twi-ny: Why have you never directed any of your plays before?
ap: I like to see another director’s perspective.
twi-ny: That makes sense.
ap: And I don’t fully trust myself.
twi-ny: I’m always so impressed by the projects you take on, as actor or director. You take a lot of chances, you go to tiny theaters, in experimental works, famous works.
Austin Pendleton and Lynn Redgrave starred in Cy Howard’s 1972 comedy Every Little Crook and Nanny
ap: Let me tell you a story about Lynn Redgrave. I did a movie with her, a comedy, just after I made What’s Up, Doc? I had never met her before. It was called Every Little Crook and Nanny, with Lynn and me and Victor Mature and Paul Sand. So three comic actors, but the one who had the most sure grasp of comedy in the movie, and we all agreed on this, was Victor Mature, who was also a wonderful person.
twi-ny: He’s not known for his comic chops.
ap: No. I think the last two films he made employed him as a comedian. And you suddenly realize, the industry realized, Wait, we’ve been missing out on something. I mean, he gave a lot of wonderful performances. But anyway, he was a great guy, and so that’s how I knew Lynn.
A few years later, I directed her in a Chicago production of Misalliance, the Shaw play, with Lynn and Irene Worth and Bill Atherton and Donald Moffat. It was a huge hit in Chicago and there was thought of moving it to New York, among other people by Ted Mann at Circle in the Square. So one afternoon Lynn Redgrave and I had a meeting with Ted Mann about the possibility of that production coming to his theater.
That was the day, the afternoon of which we had this meeting, when I got what I hope will remain the worst review as an actor from the New York Times that I’ll ever have. It was a production of Waiting for Godot, which was particularly difficult because I had played the same part twenty years before when I was an undergraduate at Yale, and it was so successful. That’s what impelled me to come to New York and pursue this career.
It was directed by the assistant to Beckett, who had assisted Beckett in the German production, a very sweet guy by the name of Walter Asmus. He directed the way that Beckett apparently always directed actors, down to every little detail, and I totally froze up in those rehearsals. Walter Asmus was the soul of patience, but I opened catastrophically in it.
The day after it opened the review came out in the morning in the Times, which I heard was a disaster. I didn’t read it for a year but it was horrible and it was accurate.
[ed. note: The show ran at BAM in 1978 and starred Sam Waterston as Vladimir, Pendleton as Estragon, Michael Egan as Pozzo, and Milo O’Shea as Lucky.]
ap: So I had that meeting that afternoon with Lynn and Ted Mann, and after she said, Come to the Russian Tea Room, we have time before you have to go to Brooklyn. Let me buy you a bowl of soup.
My agent has me writing a memoir and it begins with this story.
We went to the Russian Tea Room and we ordered. She said, I read the review, and I thought, Oh. She said, You’re not going to be offered a professionally significant acting job for seven years. She was correct down to the number of years. But what you have to do in the meantime is go anywhere to act. So when you do get another opportunity, seven years from now . . .
I just started acting everywhere, in showcases, in attics. My good friend, who then ran the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Nikos Psacharopoulos, would have me up there and put me in plays. I just kept acting continually for seven years and then I finally got a part in a play on Broadway by the name of Doubles about four guys [Pendleton, John Cullum, Ron Leibman, and Tony Roberts] who meet every week or a month or something to play tennis.
twi-ny: I remember when my parents saw that. They came home and gave me the signed Playbill and said that they’d just seen naked men onstage.
ap: That’s right. Yeah. Lynn Redgrave came to the opening night party. She couldn’t see the show — she was in something else — but she came to the party just to make sure everything was all right.
She had said, In England, people like my father [Sir Michael Redgrave] or John [Gielgud] or Ralph [Richardson] would get reviews as bad as the one you got this morning.
In fact, I looked up some of those reviews in a book, a collection of reviews by Kenneth Tynan. And they were pretty awful. Lynn said, in London, those reviews are forgiven. It’s always assumed the actors will be on the London stage again the following fall. But New York doesn’t forgive a review like this. So it’ll be seven years.
twi-ny: So you’re keeping yourself busy, taking all the jobs you can.
ap: Yeah, right. So in 1969, I was in the movie Catch-22, and all my scenes were with Orson Welles.
twi-ny: You played his son-in-law.
ap: Yeah.
twi-ny: He was the brigadier general, and you were the sycophantic lt. col. who he yelled at all the time.
ap: That’s right. He was fascinating and delightful on the set, but he was also a son of a bitch. He was really trying to undercut the director, Mike Nichols; he went in front of the cast, and he would instruct Mike Nichols about comedy. I mean, what can I say?
twi-ny: Nichols and May.
ap: I had worked with Mike Nichols by this point twice, once in a stage production of The Little Foxes that he directed and once under his direction of Catch-22.
twi-ny: Essentially, Orson is in charge.
ap: He just took over all our scenes. We would rehearse them, and when we were about to shoot them Orson would announce to everyone in the scene, in front of Mike, that Mike didn’t understand comedy. He wanted to play it a different way. And Mike would say, Well, if we could just try it once or twice the way I asked. Orson would do that, but he would blow lines so the takes couldn’t be used.
twi-ny: Wow.
ap: So he murdered that movie because those scenes were the comic high points of the screenplay. The screenplay was by Buck Henry, so those scenes were really funny.
twi-ny: And Buck was in the movie as well.
ap: Yes, he was in those scenes.
twi-ny: So they were all ruined.
ap: Yeah. The movie was being shot in Mexico, kind of out in the desert. The press all came down, because it was really the most anticipated movie adapted from a novel [by Joseph Heller] since Gone with the Wind. And I made a few snide remarks.
Then, after the two weeks I was there shooting, I came back to New York. The talk on Orson had always been that he made Citizen Kane, and all the movies after that were a decline. Well, it was the days of the revival houses in New York, so I began to see some of those movies that came after Kane.
And I felt really bad because I thought, These are magnificent movies, like every single one of them.
twi-ny: One after another. The Lady from Shanghai.Touch of Evil.
ap:The Magnificent Ambersons. All the Shakespeare films. And they’re compromised, you know. So I felt bad. Then, almost thirty years after we were making Catch-22, I was shooting a film in LA, and Judith Auberjonois asked me over to the house for breakfast, and she said, In 1960, Orson Welles directed Laurence Olivier in a production of Rhinoceros by Ionesco, and by the time the play opened, Orson was no longer the director; write a play about it. It was clear that she wanted me to write the role of Olivier for her husband.
I thought, I can’t do this. But the night before, I was at Schweizer’s house in LA. He had been given two copies of the biography of Orson by Simon Callow, and he gave me one of them. That happened the night before I was called over to Judith and René’s.
A couple of days later, we went upstate. I was making another Jonathan Lynn film, Trial and Error. We were up in some small town, sitting in those big chairs outside. I looked down in the dust and there was a copy of Olivier’s autobiography. This is approaching karma here. It took me three years to figure out how to structure it. But once I figured it out, I wrote it real fast, and I sent it to Steppenwolf.
I once met Vivien Leigh. That was quite a haunting meeting we had.
twi-ny: What were the circumstances?
ap: Well, it was toward the end of the year I was in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, and I had already decided to leave. But Jerry Robbins would not let me leave. He said, No, if you leave the show, the word will get out why, and you won’t ever act again, and I want you to act for the rest of your life.
twi-ny: He didn’t often say a lot of nice things to people.
Austin Pendleton originated the role of the tailor Motel Kamzoil in Fiddler on the Roof
ap: No, and sometimes he didn’t say a lot of nice things to me. But he cast me again in Fiddler on the Roof, and then he cast me in two shows that he withdrew from before rehearsals began, a thing that he frequently did, and when he left them, I left them too. He cast me four times. He came to see almost everything that I acted in for years, and he would always comment, You’re hardly stuttering at all anymore. You’re not stuttering at all. I was reading his biography by Amanda Vaill, reading about his early years, and he stuttered.
twi-ny: Oh, isn’t that interesting. That must be part of why he wanted you to succeed.
ap: Yes, exactly. The psychology of stuttering is so interesting. As soon as Jerry found his capacities as a dancer and then almost immediately after that as a choreographer, it completely went away. They’re still trying to figure out the psychology of stuttering.
twi-ny: I mean, just think how a guy could actually deliver a State of the Union address, can make it an hour-plus on his feet giving a speech.
ap: Yes, Joe and I have a lot in common.
twi-ny: Here’s my last question.
ap: You can talk as long as you want.
twi-ny: Oh, well, okay, then I have a couple of other things that I will bring up. How do you imagine Orson, if he were alive, would react to your play?
ap: Well, I think the play treats him very sympathetically. I mean, who knows what Orson would think about it? I think he might like it. He was so impossible the two weeks [on Catch-22], but then, right at the end of the two weeks — among other things, by the way, he was incredibly superstitious. One of the superstitions is on a film, you don’t start a new scene on a Tuesday. There was a scene that Mike had to begin on a Tuesday; Orson spent the whole afternoon completely blowing his lines so none of the takes could be used. He was wildly superstitious.
But he came up to me at the end of the two weeks, as we were about to depart, and he was very kind, very, very nice.
twi-ny: Part of the inspiration in writing the play was that you felt bad about the snide remarks you had made about him on that press day.
ap: That’s right.
twi-ny: So you weren’t looking to take him down a notch.
ap: Not at all.
twi-ny: It wasn’t vindictive. It was really celebratory of him and what he had done, except for maybe blowing his lines on purpose and taking over for Mike Nichols.
ap: He wanted to have directed the film. He came out and said so.
twi-ny: The characters in Orson’s Shadow are well known, and most of them had been married multiple times and had had various affairs, including one going on during Rhinoceros. Meanwhile, you have been married to the same woman, Katina Cummings, since 1970. What’s the secret to being married for fifty-plus years in this business?
ap: The secret is about 89% of the time we get along fine, and the other 11% we fight.
twi-ny: It’s a good balance.
ap: Yeah, and that keeps the blood flowing.
twi-ny: That’s great. And I see that you now have the biggest smile you’ve had during this talk, when I mentioned your wife. So the two of you are still madly in love.
ap: Yeah, yeah, we get along fine. Her sister lives just a few blocks up the road, and I love her too.
twi-ny: Life is good.
ap: Our daughter is a surgeon, and her husband’s a doctor also. They have two little kids, each of whom has taken charge of the whole situation.
twi-ny: Going back to what Ethan Hawke said about you, I don’t think Marlon Brando ever had that.
ap: I’m not sure he ever wanted it.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
