Tag Archives: Saheem Ali

FREE SHAKESPEARE ON THE RADIO: RICHARD II

richard ii radio

Who: Barzin Akhavan, Sean Carvajal, Michael Bradley Cohen, Sanjit De Silva, Biko Eisen-Martin, Michael Gaston, Stephen McKinley Henderson, André Holland, Miriam A. Hyman, Merritt Janson, Elijah Jones, Dakin Matthews, Jacob Ming-Trent, Maria Mukuka, Lupita Nyong’o, Okwui Okpokwasili, Estelle Parsons, Tom Pecinka, Phylicia Rashad, Reza Salazar, Thom Sesma, Sathya Sridharan, John Douglas Thompson, Claire van der Boom, Natalie Woolams-Torres, Ja’Siah Young
What: Audio broadcast of Richard II over four consecutive nights
Where: WNYC 93.9 FM and AM 820
When: July 13-16, free (donations accepted), 8:00
Why: The Public Theater was originally set to present a rare production of Richard II from May 19 to June 21 at the Delacorte this season; the only other times Shakespeare in the Park tackled the first play in the Henriad were in 1961 with Gladys Vaughan, J. D. Cannon, and James Earl Jones and again in 1987 with Marian Seldes, Rocky Carroll, Tony Shalhoub, and Peter MacNicol in the title role. The pandemic lockdown changed those plans, so instead, the late-sixteenth-century play, known in full as The Life and Death of King Richard the Second, will be performed on the radio by an all-star cast, specifically adapted for this time of coronavirus and BLM protests against police brutality. “A fractured society. A man wrongfully murdered. The palpable threat of violence and revenge against a broken system. Revolution and regime change. This was Shakespeare’s backdrop for Richard II,” director Saheem Ali said in a statement. “I’m exceptionally proud of this production, recorded for public radio with a predominantly BIPOC ensemble. It’s my hope that listening to Shakespeare’s words, broadcast in the midst of a pandemic and an uprising, will have powerful resonance in our world.” The stellar cast includes André Holland as the king, Elijah Jones as Hotspur, Sean Carvajal as Gardner’s Man and Surrey, Michael Gaston as Northumberland, Stephen McKinley Henderson as Gardener, Miriam A. Hyman as Bollingbroke, Dakin Matthews as Gaunt, Okwui Okpokwasili as Willoughby and Abbot, Estelle Parsons as the Duchess of York, Phylicia Rashad as the Duchess of Gloucester, John Douglas Thompson as York, and Lupita Nyong’o as the narrator. For the production, the Public has teamed up with WNYC, which will stream the audio online and on the radio (93.9 FM and AM 820) in four hourlong parts, July 13-16 at 8:00.

The adapted script is available here, and you can follow Ambereen Dadabhoy’s nightly synopsis here. “What must the King do now? Must he submit? / The King shall do it. Must he be deposed? / The King shall be contented. Must he lose / The name of King? I’ God’s name, let it go,” the king says, in words that still sting today. “My gorgeous palace for a hermitage, / My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown, / My figured goblets for a dish of wood, / My scepter for a palmer’s walking staff, / My subjects for a pair of carved saints / And my large kingdom for a little grave, / A little, little grave, an obscure grave; / Aumerle, thou weep’st, my tender-hearted cousin! / We’ll make foul weather with despised tears; / Our sighs and they shall lodge the summer corn / And make a dearth in this revolting land.”

FIRES IN THE MIRROR

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 15, $40 – $75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

On August 19, 1991, seven-year-old Gavin Cato was struck and killed by a car driven by Yosef Lifsh in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The next day, riots broke out that pitted the black community against Orthodox Jews in a bloody battle that resulted in the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting student from Australia. A year later, Baltimore-born actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith staged Fires in the Mirror at the Public, a one-person show that explored the incendiary situation from multiple angles, consisting of verbatim dialogue taken from a series of interviews Smith conducted with more than one hundred people. With race still such a heated topic more than a quarter century later, the time is ripe for a revival; as part of her residency at the Signature, Smith has brought back the play, passing the torch to Michael Benjamin Washington, who will be performing the show, which opened tonight at the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, through December 15. Washington is heart-wrenching as he spends 110 uninterrupted minutes switching among more than two dozen men and women as racial issues, biases, anti-Semitism, and social justice take center stage and the events of August 19-21, 1991, unfold.

Washington portrays such public figures as writer Ntozake Shange, theater director George C. Wolfe, the Reverend Al Sharpton, activists Angela Davis and Sonny Carson, and author Letty Cottin Pogrebin as well as various rabbis and ministers, Crown Heights residents, and relatives of both Cato and Rosenbaum. He makes subtle costume changes to indicate each character, adding a bowtie or a necklace, putting on a jacket, or taking off a shirt. (The costumes are by Dede M. Ayite.) Similarly understated are his shifts in accent to identify different individual monologues, all of which sing with their own poetry. Each character is introduced by Hannah Wasileski’s projections, which bounce off the floor and onto the long mirror at the back of the stage. Each interview is titled: an anonymous Lubavitcher woman’s segment is called “Static” because she is trying to get a non-Jew to turn off her radio on Shabbos; Wolfe’s is “101 Dalmatians” because as a child he could not go to the movies to see the animated film because the theater was segregated; Rivkah Siegal’s is “Wigs” because she describes the rules for Orthodox wives’ hairstyles; and an anonymous young man’s is “Bad Boy” since he doesn’t believe that sixteen-year-old Lemrick Nelson could have killed Yankel Rosenbaum because Nelson was an athlete and thus cannot be bad.

Accusations are made, prejudices are revealed (on all sides), the mayor and the police are blamed, and belief systems are challenged and defended. In addition to tables, cabinets, and chairs, Arnulfo Maldonado’s set is backed by a large mirror in which the audience can see itself, implicating all of us in the conflict. Fluidly directed by Saheem Ali (Kill Move Paradise, Passage) to prevent narrative gaps, Fires in the Mirror offers a provocative look at who we were then and who we are now, anchored by a bravura performance by Washington (The Boys in the Band, La Cage aux Folles). Among her other one-person shows, Smith documented and dramatized the 1992 LA riots in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (which the Signature is remounting in spring 2020), took on the health-care crisis in Let Me Down Easy, and examined the school-to-prison pipeline in Notes from the Field. As this revival of Fires in the Mirror reveals yet again, Smith is a master at verbatim theater and at taking the nation’s temperature, while Ali and Washington prove the timeless universality of Smith’s work.

THE ROLLING STONE

The Rolling Stone explores the horrific treatment of homosexuals in Uganda (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 25, $92
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

“No news is good news,” Joe (James Udom) says near the beginning of Chris Urch’s wrenching drama The Rolling Stone, which continues at the Mitzi E. Newhouse through August 25. The play is named after a short-lived paper in Kampala, Uganda, which in 2010 outed LGBTQ people, identifying them so that they would then be arrested, beaten, and/or murdered. A gutsy James Udom is Joe, a priest waiting to hear if he will be named pastor of his local church, which is filled with gossipers; he lives with his younger siblings, Dembe (Ato Blankson-Wood) and Wummie (Latoya Edwards), who are both preparing for admission exams that will allow them to attend medical school in London. In the wake of their father’s recent death, leaving them orphans, all three must make sacrifices. Joe gets the job, but he is beholden to church leader Mama (Myra Lucretia Taylor), who has her own agenda. Dembe, who has been expected to marry Mama’s daughter, Naome (Adenike Thomas) — who mysteriously hasn’t uttered a sound in six months — is hiding his relationship with Sam (Robert Gilbert), a doctor whose father is Irish and mother Ugandan. And Wummie is forced to work as a cleaning woman when it turns out their father did not leave behind the money they thought and Joe, who is fiercely antigay, decides that only Dembe can go to London. But as news and gossip spread about the gay outings, the siblings clash with one another as well as the church.

Naome (Adenike Thomas) and Dembe (Ato Blankson-Wood) hope for a brighter future in The Rolling Stone at Lincoln Center (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

The horrific treatment of the LGBTQ community in Uganda has been well documented, in such films as Call Me Kuchu and the recent uproar over a fundraising campaign to open the country’s first LGBTQ center, which has been denounced by the government. The Rolling Stone focuses on the relationship between Dembe and Sam, which is problematic in that Blankson-Wood and Gilbert lack the chemistry necessary to lift the drama. The play works much better when director Saheem Ali (Fireflies, Nollywood Dreams) turns his attention on the siblings, especially once Wummie discovers Dembe’s secret, which she knows would turn Joe violently against him. Meanwhile, Naome’s silence is representative of the terror and hypocrisy experienced by Ugandans every day. Arnulfo Maldonado’s set consists of a wavy, weblike curtain in the back and a rectangular gray block that rises from below the stage to serve alternately as a rowboat, a bed, and a bench. “I hear two arrests have already been made,” Mama says, referring to another outing in the newspaper. “Not that I say anything. It’s not my place to say. I just humbly hope and pray. Pray for every living soul need prayer now.” But in a society where people are expected to turn in their brothers and sons, praying that homosexuals be harshly dealt with, there is little hope until systemic changes are made.

FIREFLIES

Reverend Charles Emmanuel Grace (Khris Davis) and his wife, Olivia (DeWanda Wise), take a hard look at their life in Fireflies (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 11, $45-$65
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

Donja R. Love’s Fireflies is a heartbreaking, eerily relevant drama about bigotry and hate, desire and passion. The second in the Afro-Queer playwright’s trilogy of the black experience in America — Sugar in Our Wounds dealt with slavery, while the forthcoming In the Middle takes place during the Black Lives Matter movement — Fireflies is set in the fall of 1963, at the rise of the civil rights movement. Reverend Charles Emmanuel Grace (Khris Davis) has just given a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, about the four black girls who were killed in the 16th St. Baptist Church bombing. (The preacher’s name, but not the character itself, was inspired by Harlem evangelist Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace, who died in 1960.) A big, bold man, Charles comes home to his wife, Olivia Grace (DeWanda Wise), who was just sneaking a smoke. Olivia is deeply troubled by what’s happening in the world, her body suddenly shuddering at certain moments. “You still seeing fire and hearing bombs in your head?” Charles asks, and she answers yes. It’s as if she can feel every tragedy as it happens. Meanwhile, the sky, which hovers in the background throughout the play, behind Arnulfo Maldonaldo’s note-perfect 1960s kitchen set, does indeed often become overcast in a bloodred color. And slowly, what appears to be a beautiful, natural love between husband and wife becomes something else as they talk about having a child and each reveals a dark secret, threatening their supposedly idyllic life.

A bloodred sky hovers over Donja R. Love’s Fireflies at the Atlantic (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Fireflies features terrific performances from Davis (The Royale, Sweat) and Wise (She’s Gotta Have It, Sunset Baby) as a couple struggling to preserve their family in times of crisis, troubles that Olivia can’t shake. “Last night I had a dream the sky wasn’t on fire anymore,” she says. “The sky was filled with . . . fireflies. . . . So I start to pray. I ask, what does it all mean? And I hear him. I hear God. His voice is real faint. I was struggling to hear Him. But I do. He says, ‘Each firefly is one of my colored kids flying home.’ That scare me even more because it was so many. I would much rather have fire. I’m used to that. I’m used to the bombings, and crosses burning, and all of that. I’m not used to seeing God’s children fly home.” That brief monologue captures the immense fear still felt by so many people of color and minorities, especially in light of the neverending shootings in churches, schools, and synagogues across America in the twenty-first century. Directed by Saheem Ali (Sugar in Our Wounds, Kill Move Paradise), the play, which continues at the Atlantic through November 11, features a final monologue that is far too preachy and melodramatic, laying things out too simply, and the scenes in the porch can be physically awkward and jarring. But throughout it all the blue sky keeps turning red, which it still seems to do more than fifty years later.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: KILL MOVE PARADISE

kill move paradise

IN PURSUIT OF BLACK JOY: KILL MOVE PARADISE
The National Black Theatre: Institute for Action Arts
2031 Fifth Ave. between 125th & 126th Sts. (National Black Theatre Way)
May 31 – June 2, $20; June 4-18, $35 ($25 with code RISE), June 18-25, $40
212-722-3800
www.nationalblacktheatre.org

Award-winning actor and writer James Ijames (The Brothers Size, White) makes his New York City debut with the ripped-from-the-headlines Kill Move Paradise, about the plight of four black men after they have been killed by racist acts and are now in an otherworldly place. The world premiere closes Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre’s forty-eighth season, which is themed “In Pursuit of Black Joy” and featured such other works as Harrison David Rivers’s Sweet and Craig ‘muMs’ Grant’s A Sucker Emcee. Inspired by recent events, the play, which explores the “All Lives Matter” controversy, stars Ryan Swain (A Negro Writer, Black Nativity) in his New York City stage debut, Donnell E. Smith (Time: The Kalief Browder Story, Ugly Is a Hard Pill), Clinton Lowe (Bamboo in Bushwick, The Hustle), and Sidiki Fofana (Most Dangerous Man in America, Children of Killers) and is directed by Saheem Ali (Nollywood Dreams, The Erlkings). Maruti Evans is the scenic designer, with lighting by Alan Edwards, sound by Palmer Hefferan, and costumes by Ntokozo Fuzunina Kunene. “We wanted to flip the narrative surrounding the oppressive tropes that keep us feeling helpless and stuck as a community,” National Black Theatre theatre arts director Jonathan McCrory said in a statement. “With Kill Move Paradise, we are seeking to inspire our community to remember the power of joy as a tool of resistance, a mechanism forged as our sacred birthright to gain freedom in the midst of oppression.”

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Kill Move Paradise runs May 31 to June 25 at Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre, and twi-ny has three pairs of tickets to give away for free. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and favorite sociopolitical play or movie to contest@twi-ny.com by Tuesday, May 30, at 3:00 pm to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; three winners will be selected at random.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: INNER VOICES

INNER VOICES consists of three poignant musical monologues featuring Hunter Foster, Alexandra Silber, and Arielle Jacobs

INNER VOICES: A MUSIC THEATER TRILOGY IN 90 MINUTES
30th Street Theater
259 West 30th St.
Through December 2, $20-$30
212-868-4444
www.premieresnyc.org
www.urbanstages.org

Billed as “Intimate explorations of courage, loss, and acceptance,” Inner Voices is a three-part musical theater journey featuring three poignant solo musical monologues. In Arlington, Alexandra Silber (Carousel, Master Class) plays a woman waiting for her husband to return home from war; the piece is directed by Jack Cummings III, with book and lyrics by Victor Lodato, music by Polly Pen, and music direction by Kenneth Gartman. In Nilo Cruz (book and lyrics) and Jim Bauer’s (music) Farhad or The Secret of Being, Arielle Jacobs (In the Heights) portrays a girl who was raised as a boy in Afghanistan and is now poised to become a girl again. And in Martin Moran (book and lyrics) and Joseph Thalken’s (music) Borrowed Dust, directed by Jonathan Butterell and with music direction by Paul Masse, Tony nominee Hunter Foster (Urinetown, Little Shop of Horrors) goes back to his childhood home following the death of his younger brother.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: Inner Voices is running at the 30th St. Theater through December 2, and twi-ny has four pairs of tickets to give away for free. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and all-time-favorite one-person musical show to contest@twi-ny.com by Monday, November 19, at 3:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; four winners will be selected at random.