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lenbryant · 1 year ago

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#LongPost - Awesome news! The Geffen Playhouse now has a new Artistic Director. Great choice!

(LATimes) Playwright and ‘Moonlight’ screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney to lead Geffen Playhouse By Charles McNulty, Jessica Gelt Sept. 12, 2023 Photo: Tarell Alvin McCraney photographed on the stage of the Geffen Playhouse.

Playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney is the new artistic director of Geffen Playhouse, and is photographed on the stage of the theater. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Playwright and Academy Award-winning screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney has been named artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse. The appointment, which is effective immediately, places one of the most accomplished dramatists of his generation at the helm of the city’s most prominent Westside theater.

McCraney is best known for the Oscar-winning film “Moonlight,” which was adapted from his drama “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.” His hire represents the second major appointment of an artistic director of color in Los Angeles in recent months, following the announcement in April of Snehal Desai as the new leader of Center Theatre Group.

Filling the Geffen Playhouse’s top artistic job with a 42-year-old Black queer playwright is part of the epochal shift that has gained momentum in the American theater since the murder of George Floyd prompted a national reckoning on race. Theater companies have been taking a closer look at long-standing biases that have limited the range of their artistic programming and curtailed diversity in their executive ranks.

“There’s something happening right now where the folks who are leading the institutions are friends and colleagues, people I look up to,” McCraney said in an interview at the Geffen Playhouse, naming Desai and former Baltimore Center Stage artistic director Stephanie Ybarra, both of whom were his classmates at the Yale School of Drama. “It just felt selfish, sitting on the sidelines. I felt like you need to get in there to make a difference.”

McCraney has long made a difference in American theater, said friend and collaborator Oskar Eustis, artistic director of New York’s Public Theater. Eustis met McCraney after seeing his play “The Brothers Size” when McCraney was still a student at Yale School of Drama.

“It was just beautiful,” recalled Eustis. “We did something we’ve never done before or since. It was his thesis production, and we just picked up the entire production and brought it to the Public.”

“The Brothers Size” was part of autobiographically resonant trilogy “The Brother/Sister Plays,” co-produced by the McCarter Theatre and New York Public Theater in 2009, and marked McCraney’s entrance into the theater scene. Since then, said Eustis, McCraney has been a force of nature, making a name for himself not only as a playwright but as a screenwriter, actor, director and teacher.

His appointment comes at an inflection point for American theater, when organizations across the country are facing extreme financial, cultural and political headwinds, and leaders are struggling to find ways to build and maintain robust audiences and theatergoing communities.

A Black man dressed in black sits in front of red drapes. Playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney is the new artistic director of Westwood’s Geffen Playhouse, where he was photographed on Sept. 1, 2023. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) McCraney is fully cognizant of the multiple crises he will be asked to manage. The news of late has gone from bad to worse, with the temporary suspension of programming at the Mark Taper Forum, theater closures throughout the nation and widespread layoffs affecting even such premier venues as the Public Theater and Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where McCraney is an ensemble member.

The Geffen Playhouse hasn’t been impervious to the financial shocks that have battered the field — a combination of declining post-pandemic attendance, rising costs and the withdrawal of emergency government funding. But according to Gil Cates Jr., the Geffen’s executive director and chief executive, the theater has been able to weather the storm nonetheless. A consensus has arisen that the nonprofit theater business model is broken, but McCraney isn’t walking into an emergency situation — a rare luxury for a newly appointed artistic director.

“This is a very tough time,” Cates Jr. said in a conversation in the courtyard of the Geffen Playhouse, which was founded by his father, Gil Cates, in 1994. “I don’t take anything for granted. Looking around you see how you could get to a place with show cancellations and staff layoffs real quick. But we’re in a healthy place at the moment in large part because of the choices we made.”

The board of directors, Cates Jr. said, has encouraged an atmosphere of “healthy risk.” And that artistic investment has apparently paid off. The Geffen Stayhouse, the digital theater initiative that flourished during the COVID-19 pandemic, maintained a vital connection with existing audiences during the period of closure while expanding visibility for the Playhouse far beyond its usual radius.

Last season’s production of “The Inheritance,” the two-part Tony-winning gay epic drama by Matthew López, was one of the largest undertakings in Geffen Playhouse history — a sign that the theater was not allowing industry headwinds to deter its ambition. Audiences have appreciated the boldness. Cates Jr. said the Playhouse was already on the verge of meeting its subscription goal for the new fiscal year that began Sept. 1. He attributed this success to the investment in artistic programming made last season.

McCraney’s experience with Hollywood makes him uniquely poised to helm an L.A.-based institution, allowing him to tap into the riches of both the theater and the screen. “Moonlight” was directed by Barry Jenkins and earned Jenkins and McCraney an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. While not strictly autobiographical, the film reflects aspects of the playwright’s own story.

Like Chiron in “Moonlight,” McCraney grew up in the rough and tumble of Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood, a queer Black youth struggling to survive with his dignity intact. His mother suffered from addiction and died from AIDS-related complications when McCraney was 22.

The arts were more than recreation to him as a young man — they were his salvation. He attended New World School of the Arts in Miami and found an early mentor in Teo Castellanos, who directed an improv troupe that McCraney joined as a teen. Castellanos later welcomed him into D-Projects, a contemporary dance and theater company that looks at social issues through the lens of intercultural performance. McCraney remains a member of the company.

A graduate of the Theater School at DePaul University and the Yale School of Drama, where he received his M.F.A. in playwriting, McCraney has made teaching an integral part of his artistic life. He stepped down as co-chair of Yale’s playwriting program but maintains his title of Eugene O’Neill Professor in the Practice of Playwriting at what is now called the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University.

James Bundy, dean of the David Geffen School of Drama and artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre, praised McCraney by email: “Tarell is a world-class artist and a most inspiring collaborator. Having known him as a student, a field leader, and colleague, I have long recognized him as an exemplar of everything that is both wonderful and promising about the American theater. Like so many great writers, he is a deep listener and brilliant speaker. He is also a courageous and compassionate visionary, who will change Los Angeles artists and audiences just as he has changed so many of us who have been fortunate enough to know him and his work well. Lucky L.A.!”

McCraney, whom Eustis described as “one of the most important, talented and ambitious theater makers of the last 50 years,” initially captivated the theater world with the free-form lyricism and raw courage of “The Brother/Sister Plays.” His play “Choir Boy,” the story of a gifted queer Black youth finding his voice in a bullying prep-school environment, was produced at the Geffen Playhouse in 2014.

His association with the Playhouse continued with the announcement in February 2020 that a residency would be established for Cast Iron Entertainment, a cohort of artists that includes McCraney, Emmy winner Sterling K. Brown (“This Is Us”), Glenn Davis (“Billions”), Brian Tyree Henry (“Atlanta”), Jon Michael Hill (“Widows”) and André Holland (“Moonlight”). Plans were waylaid by the pandemic, but McCraney is intent on fulfilling the promise of this Geffen Playhouse-Cast Iron Entertainment union.

Miami is still McCraney’s spiritual home. He is looking for a place to live in Los Angeles, a city he knows well from his work as a screenwriter, and is expected to be full-time at the Geffen Playhouse by Dec. 1.

The creator of the coming-of-age TV drama series “David Makes Man,” McCraney calls himself a theater artist first, but one who enjoys extending his imagination into film and television. He was attracted to the Geffen Playhouse in part because of the unique place it occupies in Los Angeles’ cultural landscape.

Gil Cates, who died in 2011, founded the Geffen Playhouse in the backyard of the entertainment industry. A Hollywood macher who long served as a producer of the Academy Awards broadcast, he wanted the theater to be a place where movie and television artists with stage backgrounds could work alongside dedicated theater professionals. And this mission has been carried forward by his successors.

McCraney hopes to make this nexus available to a new generation of artists who feel a deep affinity for the stage and would like to be able to commute regularly between mediums in their hometown. He wants Los Angeles-based talent working in film and television not to feel as if they have to fly to New York to do a play or musical.

Saddened by the talent drain in his own town, he reflected, “I wish someone had said, ‘Hey, Miami artists, come home and do this work.’ Folks born and raised in L.A. shouldn’t have to go elsewhere to be theater artists.”

McCraney’s application was both surprising and alluring. Directors and creative producers, more than playwrights, are the go-to candidates for these positions. The reason for this isn’t rooted in ability so much as sensibility. Artistic director is to a large extent a management job. Writers can manage as well as anyone, but directors have experience running the show.

“This is a moment to be bold, inventive, to take risks, to have vision — and Tarell has all of that,” Cates Jr. said. “And it’s not like he’s coming in just looking for an artistic director job. This was the only artistic director job he applied for. That intrigued me.”

Matt Shakman, the Geffen Playhouse’s last artistic director, who succeeded Randall Arney in the role, had a burgeoning film career that inevitably divided his attention. Being an artistic director is an all-consuming responsibility, even more so in these straitened times. Signs of strain were apparent at the Geffen Playhouse in 2021 when playwright Dominique Morisseau pulled her play “Paradise Blue” a week after its West Coast premiere, stating that the Geffen had failed to act after learning of a situation in which Black women artists were being verbally abused and diminished.”

“The more hands-on a person can be in this job, the better it is for the theater,” Cates Jr. acknowledged. “Tarell knows that this isn’t a part-time gig at the Geffen. He’s committed to being here, to being in Los Angeles. He’s in tune with what the Geffen Playhouse needs and what the American theater needs.”

This passion to serve the American theater as it moves uncertainly through this difficult post-pandemic period while striving to fulfill its democratic promise has clearly inspired McCraney to redirect his focus.

“Democracy exists not so that we all feel the same about something but so that we can feel differently about something but choose to live together anyway,” he said. “I always thought that the theater should do that.”

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justforbooks · 3 months ago

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James Earl Jones

American actor hailed for his many classical roles whose voice became known to millions as that of Darth Vader in Star Wars

During the run of the 2011 revival of Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy in London, with Vanessa Redgrave, the actor James Earl Jones, who has died aged 93, was presented with an honorary Oscar by Ben Kingsley, with a link from the Wyndham’s theatre to the awards ceremony in Hollywood.

Glenn Close in Los Angeles said that Jones represented the “essence of truly great acting” and Kingsley spoke of his imposing physical presence, his 1,000-kilowatt smile, his basso profundo voice and his great stillness. Jones’s voice was known to millions as that of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars film trilogy and Mufasa in the 1994 Disney animation The Lion King, as well as being the signature sound of US TV news (“This is CNN”) for many years.

His status as the leading black actor of his generation was established with the Tony award he won in 1969 for his performance as the boxer Jack Jefferson (a fictional version of Jack Johnson) in Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope on Broadway, a role he repeated in Martin Ritt’s 1970 film, and which earned him an Oscar nomination.

On screen, Jones – as the fictional Douglass Dilman – played the first African-American president, in Joseph Sargent’s 1972 movie The Man, based on an Irving Wallace novel. His stage career was notable for encompassing great roles in the classical repertoire, such as King Lear, Othello, Hickey in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh and Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

He was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, the son of Robert Earl Jones, a minor actor, boxer, butler and chauffeur, and his wife Ruth (nee Connolly), a teacher, and was proud of claiming African and Irish ancestry. His father left home soon after he was born, and he was raised on a farm in Jackson, Michigan, by his maternal grandparents, John and Maggie Connolly. He spoke with a stutter, a problem he dealt with at Brown’s school in Brethren, Michigan, by reading poetry aloud.

On graduating from the University of Michigan, he served as a US Army Ranger in the Korean war. He began working as an actor and stage manager at the Ramsdell theatre in Manistee, Michigan, where he played his first Othello in 1955, an indication perhaps of his early power and presence.

The family had moved from the deep south to Michigan to find work, and now Jones went to New York to join his father in the theatre and to study at the American Theatre Wing with Lee Strasberg. He made his Broadway debut at the Cort theatre in 1958 in Dory Schary’s Sunrise at Campobello, a play about Franklin D Roosevelt.

He was soon a cornerstone of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare festival in Central Park, playing Caliban in The Tempest, Macduff in Macbeth and another Othello in the 1964 season. He also established a foothold in films, as Lt Lothar Zogg in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1963), a cold war satire in which Peter Sellers shone with brilliance in three separate roles.

The Great White Hope came to the Alvin theatre in New York from the Arena Stage in Washington, where Jones first unleashed his shattering, shaven-headed performance – he was described as chuckling like thunder, beating his chest and rolling his eyes – in a production by Edwin Sherin that exposed racism in the fight game at the very time of Muhammad Ali’s suspension from the ring on the grounds of his refusal to sign up for military service in the Vietnam war.

Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs (1970) was a response to Jean Genet’s The Blacks, in which Jones, who remained much more of an off-Broadway fixture than a Broadway star in this period, despite his eminence, played a westernised urban African man returning to his village for his father’s funeral. With Papp’s Public theatre, he featured in an all-black version of The Cherry Orchard in 1972, following with John Steinbeck’s Lennie in Of Mice and Men on Broadway and returning to Central Park as a stately King Lear in 1974.

When he played Paul Robeson on Broadway in the 1977-78 season, there was a kerfuffle over alleged misrepresentations in Robeson’s life, but Jones was supported in a letter to the newspapers signed by Edward Albee, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman and Richard Rodgers. He played his final Othello on Broadway in 1982, partnered by Christopher Plummer as Iago, and appeared in the same year in Master Harold and the Boys by Athol Fugard, a white South African playwright he often championed in New York.

In August Wilson’s Fences (1987), part of that writer’s cycle of the century “black experience” plays, he was described as an erupting volcano as a Pittsburgh garbage collector who had lost his dreams of a football career and was too old to play once the major leagues admitted black players. His character, Troy Maxson, is a classic of the modern repertoire, confined in a world of 1950s racism, and has since been played by Denzel Washington and Lenny Henry.

Jones’s film career was solid if not spectacular. Playing Sheikh Abdul, he joined a roll call of British comedy stars – Terry-Thomas, Irene Handl, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan and Peter Ustinov – in Marty Feldman’s The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977), in stark contrast to his (at first uncredited) Malcolm X in Ali’s own biopic, The Greatest (1977), with a screenplay by Ring Lardner. He also appeared in Peter Masterson’s Convicts (1991), a civil war drama; Jon Amiel’s Sommersby (1993), with Richard Gere and Jodie Foster; and Darrell Roodt’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1995), scripted by Ronald Harwood, in which he played a black South African pastor in conflict with his white landowning neighbour in the 40s.

In all these performances, Jones quietly carried his nation’s history on his shoulders. On stage, this sense could irradiate a performance such as that in his partnership with Leslie Uggams in the 2005 Broadway revival at the Cort of Ernest Thompson’s elegiac On Golden Pond; he and Uggams reinvented the film performances of Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn as an old couple in a Maine summer house.

He brought his Broadway Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to London in 2009, playing an electrifying scene with Adrian Lester as his broken sports star son, Brick, at the Novello theatre. The coarse, cancer-ridden big plantation owner was transformed into a rumbling, bear-like figure with a totally unexpected streak of benignity perhaps not entirely suited to the character. But that old voice still rolled through the stalls like a mellow mist, rich as molasses.

That benign streak paid off handsomely, though, in the London reprise of a deeply sentimental Broadway comedy (and Hollywood movie), Driving Miss Daisy, in which his partnership as a chauffeur to Redgrave (unlikely casting as a wealthy southern US Jewish widow, though she got the scantiness down to a tee) was a delightful two-step around the evolving issues of racial tension between 1948 and 1973.

So deep was this bond with Redgrave that he returned to London for a third time in 2013 to play Benedick to her Beatrice in Mark Rylance’s controversial Old Vic production of Much Ado About Nothing, the middle-aged banter of the romantically at-odds couple transformed into wistful, nostalgia for seniors.

His last appearance on Broadway was in a 2015 revival of DL Coburn’s The Gin Game, opposite Cicely Tyson. He was given a lifetime achievement Tony award in 2017, and the Cort theatre was renamed the James Earl Jones theatre in 2022.

Jones’s first marriage, to Julienne Marie (1968-72), ended in divorce. In 1982 he married Cecilia Hart with whom he had a son, Flynn. She died in 2016. He is survived by Flynn, also an actor, and a brother, Matthew.

🔔 James Earl Jones, actor, born 17 January 1931; died 9 September 2024

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