As I sat watching the Signature Theatre Company’s wonderful new production of The First Breeze of Summer, it occurred to me that part of what’s so wonderful about it is that the show will help remind a whole generation of theatergoers that Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson weren’t the only playwrights who wrote significant plays about black people. We old-timers know that during its heyday back in the late 1960s through the mid-‘80s, the Negro Ensemble Company produced a succession of incredible plays that not only presented black stories to mainstream audiences but gave actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Phylicia Rashad, and Denzel Washington the kind of meaty roles that were seldom available to them elsewhere.
One of my closest friends worked for the company and so I got to see a lot of those shows. They ranged from what the director George Wolfe once called “last-mama-on-the-couch” family dramas to what-the-hell-was-that-about experimental works. I didn’t like them all but I loved seeing them and the opportunities they gave black artists. Now, Signature, which usually dedicates an entire season to the works of one playwright, is devoting this one to some of those NEC classics. And judging by The First Breeze of Summer, the opening production in the series, the plays are still affecting and the acting talent pool is just as deep.
The First Breeze of Summer, set largely in 1977 with flashbacks to the '20s and '30s, weaves together the stories of three generations in a working class family struggling in various ways to get ahead in a white world and to be true to themselves. Leslie Uggams leads the 14-member cast as the family matriarch who has secrets in her past and she’s terrific. But so is everyone else. Times may have changed but good stage roles are still hard to come by for black actors and the cast members, hungry for the chance to show what they can do, sink their teeth into these.
Most impressive may be Yaya DaCosta who plays the grandmother as a young woman in the flashbacks that form nearly half of the play. DaCosta’s previous acting experience is limited to a Lifetime movie, a part of on a soap opera, a couple of pilots for cable channels and a season on the TV show “America’s Next Top Model” but she’s definitely more than a pretty face. The same is true of Brandon and Jason Dirden, the real-life brothers who bring nuanced passion to the roles of the brothers in the show. More familiar faces like Marva Hicks as their mother and Brenda Pressley as their aunt also deliver. And the whole thing is held together by the perceptive direction of Ruben Santiago-Hudson. (Click here to see the “trailer” the company has posted on YouTube.)
I purposefully got tickets for one of the talk back nights. And I, along with the rest of those who stayed for the after-show discussion, was delighted when both Santiago-Hudson and the playwright Leslie Lee walked onstage to share their thoughts about the play. We were even more impressed when 12 of the 14 actors joined them. Lee declared this the definitive production of his semi-autobiographical play and he seemed both sincere and gratified when he said it.
Santiago-Hudson told funny stories about casting the play, including how he had worked with Jason Dirden in a play at the Kennedy Center and knew that he wanted him for the role of the naïve younger brother when he signed on to direct The Last Breeze of Summer. But, he says, Jason told him, “You should meet my brother, he’s the real actor in the family.” Reluctantly, Hudson agreed to see Brandon and then was so knocked out by him that he offered him the part of the older brother before the audition was over. Then, he said, Brandon told him, “You should meet my wife.” Sure enough, Crystal Anne Dickinson got the role of the older brother’s fiancée. “I’m sure glad they didn’t have an acting grandmother,” quipped Uggams.
Audiences seem happy about the whole thing. The theater was so full the night my sister, niece and I saw the show that people were literally sitting in the aisles. “If people are sitting on the steps, then you know the show is in demand,” the man behind me told his wife after they’d had climbed over the squatters to get to their seats. In the old days, NEC audiences were notorious for being vocal with their enthusiasm and it made me both shudder with annoyance and smile in remembrance when a woman got so wrapped up in one moment in the play that she couldn’t resist shouting out her concern.
The show’s limited run has already been extended to Oct. 19 but it can’t go any longer because the next play in the series, Home, is scheduled to begin previews Nov. 11. I’m already planning to see it. But what I’m also hoping is that I’ll get the chance to see the terrific actors from The Last Breeze of Summer in other parts worthy of their talent.
Is it me or is it the economy?
When I sat down this past weekend to start my September ritual of figuring out which new shows I most want to see, the pickings seemed paltrier than they did last year. In fact, four big musicals—revivals of Brigadoon, Godspell and for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf , plus the kind-of-new Harry Connick Jr. show, Nice Work if You Can Get It, drawn from the Gershwin songbook—dropped out before the new season even started. The producers of the first three admitted that they couldn’t dig up enough money to bring their shows in.
And that isn’t the only sign that times are tough. When the national mood is down, people—producers included—become less adventurous. New plays queued up to get on the boards last fall but there is only one (To Be Or Not to Be, an adaptation of a 1942 Jack Benny movie) opening on Broadway between now and the end of the year. And only four new musicals. Still, there are some promising shows to see both on Broadway and off. And as I read through the various Fall Previews in the papers, magazines and online, I could feel the buzz of anticipation that always rushes through me at the beginning of a new year of theatergoing.
So below is a list of a few of the shows that most intrigue me—not the ones I should see, or the ones that everyone else wants to see but just the ones that for one idiosyncratic reason or another grab me and that you may not have heard as much about.
FARRAGUT NORTH You’d think that Barak Obama and Sarah Palin would provide enough political drama (and comedy) for me during this election season but I’m intrigued by the Atlantic Theater Company’s new onstage drama about a young hot shot press secretary who gets caught up in a sex scandal during a presidential primary race. It’s written by a former aide to Howard Dean and stars John Gallagher Jr. who won a Tony for his portrayal of Moritz in Spring Awakening. Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater on West 20th Street is a little off the beaten track but I’ve usually found the journey there to be worthwhile. Previews for this show start on Oct. 22 and the run is scheduled to end on Nov. 29, by which time, of course, we’ll know who the real next President will be.
HOME The Signature Theatre Company is devoting its entire season to plays originally produced by the Negro Ensemble Company but Samm-Art Williams’ funny and wise bildungsroman about a North Carolina farm boy holds a special place in my heart because one of my friends was working for the company at the time of the original production and I remember the excitement and the sense of optimism about the future of black theater everyone there felt when the show became an unexpected hit and moved to Broadway. If the revival is anywhere near as good as the first production in the series, The First Breeze of Summer, then there may be cause for hope again. Previews begin at the Peter Norton Space on Nov. 11 and the show is scheduled to run through Jan. 4.
THE LANGUAGE OF TREES I’ve never heard of this show’s playwright Steven Levenson. And that’s precisely why I want to see his play. It’s part of the Roundabout Underground, the company’s new series that showcases the works of young playwrights at the 60-seat Black Box Theatre located in the basement of the Laura Pels Theatre on West 46th Street. Last year's terrific debut offering Speech & Debate told the stories of a trio of high school misfits. Levenson’s play takes on the gnarlier subject of the nation’s involvement in the Mideast through the story of a family whose husband and father is an American translator stationed in that war zone. Previews begin Oct. 4 and the run is scheduled through Dec. 14. And all tickets are just $20.
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS Frank Langella, who has won two Tonys in the last five years, can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned. If he decided to read footnotes from the Congressional Quarterly, I’d be there and I'd be prepared to be riveted. The fact that he’s going to star in a stage revival of one of my favorite historical movies—about Thomas More’s fateful refusal to break with the Catholic Church in support of Henry VIII’s decision to divorce his first wife and marry Ann Boleyn—is an extra treat. The Roundabout Theatre Company has scheduled a limited run at the American Airlines Theatre from Sept. 12 through Dec. 7.
PRAYER FOR MY ENEMY The war in Iraq isn’t the first subject that would come to mind when thinking about a new project for the sensational team that put together The Light in the Piazza at Lincoln Center three years ago. But playwright Craig Lucas, director Bartlett Sher and their Tony-winning leading lady Victoria Clark are back together again with a new play at Playwrights Horizon about how the war affects a young soldier and his family. Jonathan Groff, the other breakout star from Spring Awakening, plays the young man. Previews begin Nov. 14 for a run that is scheduled to close on Dec. 21.
ROAD SHOW O.K. So who doesn’t want to see the new Stephen Sondheim musical. But I’ve already put in my dues for this one. I saw this play about two brothers seeking their version of the American dream from the Alaska gold rush at the turn of the last century to the Florida real estate boom in the 1920s back in 1999 at the New York Theatre Workshop when it was called Wise Guys. Even with Nathan Lane and Victor Garber as the leads, it didn’t work. Then my husband K and I went down to the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2003 to see it when it was called Bounce and Richard Kind and Howard McGillin took over the parts. The show, while substantially rewritten, wasn’t much better. Now the latest version has a new name, new leads (Michael Cerveris and Alexander Gemignani) a rejiggered script and director John Doyle at the helm. Previews start at the Public Theater on Oct. 28 and the run is scheduled through Dec. 28. My buddy Bill and I already have our tickets.
ROMANTIC POETRY The provocative drama Doubt won John Patrick Shanley a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize three years ago but it was the delightfully whimsical movie “Moonstruck” that first introduced him to a wide public back in 1987. So I’m eager to see Shanley’s return to romantic comedy. This work, about a newlywed whose former husbands disapprove of her new mate, is a musical and Shanley, who’s done both the book and the lyrics, has hooked up with Henry Krieger who wrote the music for Dreamgirls and Side Show. The Manhattan Theater Club is presenting Romantic Poetry at its Stage I theater in City Center from Sept. 30 thru Dec. 14.
SHOGUN MACBETH One of the most visceral and sensual experiences I ever had in a movie theater was watching Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran,” the master Japanese filmmaker’s interpretation of the Lear story. It swept me away. I know that the Pan Asian Repertory Theater won’t be able to produce the cinematic sumptuousness of the movie but its production of the Macbeth story, set in the Japanese feudal period, does plan to juxtapose the classical Japanese theater techniques of Noh and Kyogen alongside Shakespeare's Elizabethan language. It’s scheduled for a very limited run at the Julia Miles Theater from Nov. 4 through Dec. 7.
Perhaps the biggest compliment you can pay an actor is to say—and mean it—that you can’t imagine anyone else in the role he or she is playing. Well I’m definitely saying that about Sahr Ngaujah, the charismatic and prodigiously talented star of the new musical Fela! that opened this week at the 37 Arts Theatre.
Ngaujah sings and dances with dervish intensity, nails all the jokes and drives home every dramatic moment. He also narrates the entire show (no one else has any lines) and seems to play almost every instrument in the band. Or if he’s only sidelining (which is what my musician husband K tells me is the term used to describe instrumental lip syncing) then he’s damn good at that too. Good enough that he alone makes Fela! worth the move to Broadway that the musical’s producers, who have reportedly invested some $1 million in the production, are clearly hoping it will make.
Fela! isn’t conventional Broadway material. It tells the complex story of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the Nigerian pop musician and political activist who challenged his country’s corrupt and repressive leaders. But a show about Fela always had one big thing going for it: the music. For Fela! is the world music equivalent of a jukebox musical and it’s filled with the intoxicating blend of jazz, funk and traditional African rhythms that form Afrobeat, the exuberant musical genre that Fela helped to create. It’s almost impossible to sit still while you’re listening to it. And in this production, you don’t have to. At times during the nearly three-hour show, Ngaujah invites the audience to stand up and dance and even offers instruction in how to do a few movements.
All the movements are created by the acclaimed modern dance choreographer Bill T. Jones, who deservedly won a Tony for his first Broadway show, Spring Awakening. This time out, Jones not only choreographed the hyperkinetic routines in Fela! but directed the show and co-wrote it along with Jim Lewis. And at the performance my sister Joanne and I attended, he also sat in the back row and led the cheers for the show. Jones is a phenomenally talented guy but he may be wearing too many hats here because the book could use a more experienced hand.
Granted, it has to cover a lot of material. Fela! tries to do it by presenting itself as a farewell performance that Fela is giving at his nightclub the Shrine in 1978, shortly after government thugs have killed his mother by throwing the 77-year year old woman (herself an ardent activist and feminist) out of a window. In between numbers, he tells the audience the story of his life—including his middle class upbringing, his student days in London, his discovery of the black power movement in the U.S., and the creation of the new musical form that fused his experiences into a sound that spread across Africa and won fans in Europe and the avant-garde corners of America too. Fela was talented and arrogant, defiantly controversial and ostentatiously sexual (he once married 27 women in one wedding ceremony). Although repeatedly persecuted by the government, he never left Nigeria and died there from AIDS complications in 1997.
The pre-opening publicity seemed eager to compare Fela! to last season’s cult hit Passing Strange, in which a narrator told the story of another young black man (this one a middle-class American) in a musical idiom (this time rock) not often heard on Broadway. But Fela! reminded me more of Paul Simon’s musical The Capeman, an innovative work by a heavyweight talent, filled with great music and slapdash storytelling.
Fela!, however, is loads more fun than The Capeman ever was. The entire theater at 37 Arts is decorated with folk-art murals evoking the Lagos of the ‘60s and ‘70s when Fela was at the height of his popularity. Video projections help tell his story and provide subtitles for the lyrics to his songs. The Brooklyn-based musical collective Antibalas, which specializes in Afrobeat, fills in for Fela’s band, playing almost non-stop—and terrifically—from the moment the audience enters until it exits. And the ensemble of well-buffed and seeming tireless dancers perform one dazzling—and often gravity-defying—dance number after another. (Click here to see an excerpt.)
It all adds up to an exhilarating and unexpectedly life-affirming experience. The show deserves to transfer to Broadway. But in case it doesn’t and you can’t get a seat to the current run which is scheduled to end on Sept. 21, then you might wander down to the subway stop at 42nd and 8th Avenue after the show. My husband K, who catches the train there after playing in Gypsy, reports that the Fela! cast members literally dance into the station each night and continue the merrymaking as they wait for trains to take them home.
No matter how you divide them, there are only 24 hours in a day. And as I’ve spent more and more of mine seeing plays, reading theater books and writing about all of it, something had to go. That something has been movies. Not watching DVDs at home but going to an actual movie theater right after a film has come out or, better yet, to a private screening room right before it’s been released. So it seemed as though the culture gods had smiled on me when I got an invitation to a screening of “Hamlet 2,” the new movie about a failed actor (played by the British comedian Steve Coogan) who pours his frustrated theatrical passion into his job as a high school drama teacher.
Alas, I forgot how much the gods enjoy making fun of us mere mortals. I squirmed all the way through “Hamlet 2.” I knew going in on that it was a satire. But so is “Waiting for Guffman,” one of my favorite movies about the theater. As it turned out, comparing the two is like saying that bologna and beefsteak are both red meat. Where “Guffman’s” humor was gentle and at times poignant, “Hamlet 2’”s jokes are ponderous and unfunny (the title refers to the teacher’s plan to produce a sequel to Hamlet for the school play). Where “Guffman” celebrated the indomitable spirit of theater people, “Hamlet 2” is condescending towards them.
In fact, I disliked “Hamlet 2” so much that I decided to keep my feelings to myself. Until I opened the New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section this past Sunday and saw a full-page ad, emblazoned with blurbs touting the movie as “Scathingly Funny!” “Blissfully Demented!” and The Summer’s Wittiest Hit.” Now, I know that movie companies have to push their product and that the word blurb is virtually synonymous with hyperbole. But I took this ad campaign personally because these blurbs were strategically placed a page away from the Theater Directory and so clearly aimed at my people — that is to say, you people.
That got my dander up and pushed me to take this defensive move. Heed this advice from one theater lover to another: skip this movie. Don’t even rent it. I’m not even putting in one of my usual links so that you click onto online excerpts from it because I don’t want to give this film any kind of support. “Hamlet 2” is a total waste of time and there simply aren’t enough hours in a theater lover’s day for it. Or in anyone else’s for that matter.
Around this time last year, The New York Times ran a series of mini-profiles about blue collar actors, the folks whose names seldom appear above the title, whose faces are often only vaguely familiar. Their tales of very hard work, relatively low pay but continuing devotion to their craft made a fitting Labor Day tribute, a reminder to us theater lovers that acting is a job as well as an art. And they still do. So in case you didn’t get a chance to read those pieces when I recommended them last year, you can do so now by clicking here.
Or, if you’re in the mood this Labor Day weekend for a more uplifting and entertaining view of the journeyman actor’s life, pick up a copy of “Letters from Backstage: The Adventures of a Touring Stage Actor,” an account of 18 months in the career of the actor Michael Kostroff as he crisscrossed the country in touring productions of The Producers (he played in the ensemble and understudied the role of Max Bialystock) and Les Misérables (he was the innkeeper Thénardier) from 2002 to 2004. Kostroff (that’s what his friends call him) is perhaps best known as the sleazy lawyer to the drug kingpins in the HBO series “The Wire” but he’s also a song and dance man who has survived in show business for over 20 years and the author of a no-nonsense advice column in Back Stage newspaper called “Working Actor” (click here to check it out.)
His book, as he explains in its preface, started off as emails to his friends and eventually morphed into stories about life on the road with a big traveling show. In samizdat fashion, the friends started forwarding his accounts to their friends, cast members began asking for copies and strangers even put in requests to get on his listserv. Finally, in 2005, Kostroff collected his reports into a slim 209-page valentine to show people.
This isn’t one of those air-the-dirty-linen tell-all books. The way Kostroff tells it everyone he works with is hugely talented on stage and good company off. Alas for those of us who relish back stage gossip, the one or two exceptions don’t get named and don’t get much ink either. But in between all the bonhomie, “Letters from Backstage” offers glimpses into what hard work acting can be. Like how touring companies perform eight shows a week and then often spend their day off hustling to the next city on the itinerary. Or like how traveling cast members often have to pack hot plates, lamps and even light bulbs to create some semblance of a homey environment as they move from one economy-priced hotel to another. Or like how these actors have to prove themselves over and over again in auditions for the next part no matter how good they were in the one before.
But Kostroff, who says he didn’t get his first paying job as an actor until he was 30, refuses to complain. Like so many stage actors, he has never appeared on Broadway and yet he works steadily and is grateful for that. “Being on the road isn’t always easy, and it isn’t always fun,” he writes. “But even with the ups and downs, this is a great job. Eight times a week, we get to entertain thousands of people. It’s a job I dreamed of. One which I’m fortunate to have.”
We theater lovers are fortunate too. Actors like Kostroff are the backbone o
f the theater, the ones we see in regional productions, national touring companies and big Broadway hits when the stars leave after the first or second season. “In our business, working at all is, in itself, an accomplishment,” Kostroff writes. It’s an accomplishment that deserves more recognition than it gets. Kostroff is currently appearing as Max Bialystock in a Gateway Playhouse production of The Producers that is playing in Patchogue, Long Island through Sept. 13. If you see it, give him an extra round of applause for me.
Unlike so many baby boomers, I can’t claim a special relationship with the musical Hair. I didn’t see the original production that opened in 1968 and played for 1,750 performances. I didn’t catch the 1977 revival that ran for just 43 performances either. Nor did I see the 2004 benefit concert with Raúl Esparza, Harvey Fierstein, Lillias White and RuPaul. I did rent the 1979 movie directed by Milos Forman but found myself wondering what the fuss was all about. And I walked out of the 2001 Encores! production of the show and totally missed the three anniversary performances that played in Central Park last year. Still, I jumped at the chance to see the Public Theater’s current production in the park when my friend Red Press, the show’s musical contractor, graciously offered to get me house seats.
The new production has gotten rave reviews. Cynics point out that the praise is coming primarily from baby boom-aged critics, eternally nostalgic for their youth. Still, people of all ages are lining up for hours to get tickets for each evening’s performance. Or, according to a recent piece in the New York Times, paying people to stand in line for them. (Click here to read the Times piece.) My sister told me that my niece Jennifer, who was born seven years after the original production closed, was dying to see the show and so I invited her to come with me.
After a tasty and thrifty dinner at Pinch: Pizza by the Inch on Columbus Avenue, where I had a custom made pizza of smoked mozzarella and hot sausage and Jennifer, already model-thin but paying extra attention to what she eats because her boyfriend is coming home from serving in Iraq, had a salad, we headed over to the outdoor Delacorte Theater in the park. The weather this time of year is fickle, with cool evenings often following even the balmiest days so I packed shawls—and we ended up being grateful that we had them. The audience was the usual patchwork quilt of New Yorkers and everyone—including me—seemed to be having a good time. But the moment the first notes of the opening song "Aquarius" sounded, the 50 and 60-year olds in the crowd began to act up: swaying in their seats, mouthing the words to the songs and sometimes even singing aloud.
Hair, as everyone knows, is plotless but centers around a “tribe” of hippies, trying to balance the lures of the sexual revolution, the emerging black power movement, the growing drug culture and rising antipathy towards the unpopular Vietnam War against the conservative ideals of their parents’ generation. It’s a comprehensive catalog of the major trends of its time. And the folks at the Public are taking every opportunity—including references in the Playbill notes and the pre-show turn-off-your-cell-phones announcement—to draw parallels with current events. Although what struck me is how different things are (the war in Iraq grinds on but there is no widespread anti-war movement as there was against the war in Vietnam; and what happened to all that peace and love the original Hair celebrated?).
But what eventually won me over was the music. Galt MacDermot’s tunes are delightfully infectious and Gerome Ragni and James Rado’s lyrics are equally joyful. Hair is arguably the last musical to have so many of its songs cross over onto mainstream culture--everyone from the rock group Three Dog Night to "American Idol's" Jennifer Hudson has recorded the ballad "Easy to Be Hard". My freshman college roommate played the album constantly and I developed a lingering familiarity with the songs even though I had no idea how they fit into the show.
All of the songs are exuberantly performed by the current young cast, lead at the performance we attended by Will Swenson as the charismatic leader of the tribe Berger, Christopher J. Hanke as his conflicted friend Claude, Caren Lyn Manuel as the passionately political Sheila, and Patina Renea Miller as the astrologically-guided earth mother Dionne. They all clearly loved pretending to be hippies, even if they didn’t totally capture the essence of the period. And the oldsters in the audience, even those who themselves never got closer to being hippies than wearing love beads and headbands, seemed to love what they were doing too. Everyone—the kids who discovered granola in the '60s and those who now pay $6 a bag for it at Whole Food—was clearly desperate to reclaim the optimism of that time.
The original production was famous for its nude scene, where the entire cast (with the now legendary exception of a young Diane Keaton) took all their clothes off. They do it in the current production too, although, of course, no one is scandalized now. Instead, the high point of the evening comes during the fully-clad encore of "Let the Sun Shine In" when audience members are invited to come on stage and dance with the cast. It's a prefab happening but so many people raced up to join in that I feared the stage might collapse. Eventually security guards had to turn people away. But there is already talk of moving the show, now extended in the park through Sept. 14, to Broadway so maybe they’ll get their chance then.
As much as I love seeing plays, I’m usually delighted when I learn that a show is just one act. Getting out early raises the odds of getting a table for an after-show dinner at a good restaurant. And one act means fewer people climbing over me as they head out to, and return from, a bathroom, cigarette or cell phone break during the intermission.
Apparently I’m not the only one who feels this way because producers are beginning to pick up on this growing preference, collapsing old three-act plays into two and commissioning shorter new works in which everything gets wrapped up in one. But, as my grandmother used to say, you’ve got to be careful what you wish for. I’ve seen two very appealing shows this month that suffered from trying to cram a full night’s worth of theater into half an evening’s amount of playing time.
A.R. Gurney’s Buffalo Gal, which I’ve read actually started off as a two-act piece, was whacked down to an anemic hour and forty intermissionless minutes by the time I saw it at Primary Stages. And then just this past week, my pal Bill and I caught The Alice Complex, an intriguing 75-minute piece by the playwright Peter Barr Nickowitz during its final performance in this year’s New York International Fringe Festival.
Inspired by a real life incident in which one of her students held the famous feminist writer and professor Germaine Greer hostage for a few hours back in 2000, The Alice Complex muses about relationships between women, the evolution of feminism and the responsibilities that artists and academics should bear for the works they create. Nickowitz, himself a professor of literature and cultural studies, is a smart writer and his characters sound like real people—better yet, each one sounds like a distinctive person.
Director Bill Oliver, whose program bio indicates more film work than stage experience, brings a nice cinematic flow to the action. And the talented actresses Lisa Banes and Xanthe Elbrick (a Tony-nominee for last year’s ill-fated Coram Boy) work hard, playing not only the main parts of the besieged professor and her disillusioned student, but portraying 9 other women, including influential figures in the main characters’ lives and, in a meta-twist, actors in a play similar to the one we’re watching as well as audience members who’ve seen the show.
The play has emerged as one of the hits of this year’s Fringe festival. But it has too many underdeveloped themes and unresolved storylines to declare it a true accomplishment. Instead The Alice Complex comes off as a promising outline rather than a fully developed work. Of course, this was my first Fringe show and so maybe it’s customary for the festival’s productions to be presented in embryonic form.
Whether that’s true or not, Nickowitz is a talent worth nurturing, which already seems to be happening. His program bio say he’s just been named the Harold Clurman Playwright-in-Residence at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. Good for him and good for us theater lovers too. Any guy who writes roles for women as potentially rich and complex as the ones he attempts here deserves encouragement.
He also deserves the ability to stretch out in longer works and the kind of theatergoers who won’t be rushing off to the next big thing or—chastising note to self—to grab a table at Orso.
As I sat watching the Signature Theatre Company’s wonderful new production of The First Breeze of Summer, it occurred to me that part of what’s so wonderful about it is that the show will help remind a whole generation of theatergoers that Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson weren’t the only playwrights who wrote significant plays about black people. We old-timers know that during its heyday back in the late 1960s through the mid-‘80s, the Negro Ensemble Company produced a succession of incredible plays that not only presented black stories to mainstream audiences but gave actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Phylicia Rashad, and Denzel Washington the kind of meaty roles that were seldom available to them elsewhere. 
