#Mandi Masden

[caroleditosti]

'Raisin in the Sun,' a Glorious, Triumphant Revival at the Public

Don't miss this incredible revival starring Tonya Pinkins at the Public Theater, with Robert O'Hara directing.

Mandi Masden, Tonya Pinkins, and Toussaint Battiste in The Public Theater revival of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Robert O’Hara (Joan Marcus). Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, aptly titled referencing the Langston Hughes’ poem, “A Dream Deferred,” is enjoying its fourth major New York City revival. It debuted on Broadway to great acclaim in 1959 and followed with two other Broadway…

[oldbaton]

So a raisin in the sun at the public.

It’s an absolutely brilliant play obviously. There’s so much that’s been said about it. I do think it could be cut a little. There are times where it meanders. But still- hits like a ton of bricks.

Tonya Pinkins is AMAZING in this. Just incredible work. Definitely putting what she’s learned in a life in the theatre on that stage. Mandi Masden and Paige Gilbert also do wonderful work as Ruth and Benetha. Francois Battiste is good but he wasn’t the best. His my fathers blood line didn’t land. But he was not ineffective! But when a role has that much potential, you notice when it isn’t reached- you know?

Robert O’Hara’s production is interesting. The production is very conventional… until it isn’t. He made 3 distinct choices that were unconventional. One of them paid off: the ending. The other two I did not care for.

It’s definitely an above average production! It’s very good. But it’s not extraordinary. Except for the ending and Tonya Pinkins acting the living hell out of that script.

[frontmezzjunkies]

Public Theater's Dynamic Raisin in the Sun Demolishes the Happy Ending

#frontmezzjunkies reviews: #LorraineHansberry's #ARaisinInTheSun @PublicTheaterNY directed by #RobertOHara with #TonyaPinkins #FrancoisBattiste #MandiMasden #PaigeGilbert #PublicTheater #offbroadway #playrevival

Mandi Masden, Tonya Pinkins, and Toussaint Battiste in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun at the Public Theater. Photo by Joan Marcus. The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: Public Theater’s Raisin in the Sun By Ross A Raisin in the Sun has been called “the greatest and most important American plays ever written.” This time that quote is coming directly from Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of…

[oftheflamingheart]

The things you find on Instagram

Here’s a leaked Episode Title for Season 2

Via Mandi Masden’s Instagram

The tablet screen says

“The Two Princes

Episode 203: The Play’s The Thing

Written by Kevin Christopher Snipes

Recording Draft: July 21, 2019”

EDIT: I FORGOT TO ADD THE CAPTION TEXT!

CRAZYTOOTH ALSO CONFIRMED!!!

[philomaela]

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act III Scene II

[cecily-said-gay-rights]

[oots-digitalmedia]

Queer Rep in The Two Princes

Title: The Two Princes

    Created and written by: Kevin Christopher Snipes

Status: Complete

    Cast: Noah Galvin, Ari'el Stachel, Alfredo Narciso, Mandi Masden, Samira Wiley, Wesley Taylor, Gideon Glick, CJ Wilson, Michelle Gomez, and Jonah Fields

    Queer Creators: Unknown

    Accessibility: No content warnings or transcripts available

Summary: SEASON 1: When Prince Rupert sets out to break the mysterious curse that’s destroying his kingdom, he’s ready to face whatever dastardly villain or vile monster stands in his way. What he isn’t prepared for are the bewildering new emotions he feels when he meets the handsome Amir, a rival prince on a quest to save his own realm. Forced to team up, the two princes soon discover that the only thing more difficult than saving their kingdoms is following their hearts.

Tags: multiple mlm characters, wlw character, multiple bisexual characters

Identity details under the break.

Check out our other queer podcast recommendations here.

Please feel free to offer suggestions and updates!

ID tags: Rupert: mlm, Amir: mlm, Joan: wlw, Lady Cecily: bisexual, Percy Jr: bisexual, Prince Darling: mlm,

Details and/or spoilers: Rupert & Amir marry

[cavehags]

okay cards on the table: this is a song from a podcast musical for children (three strikes in some people’s books, i know). but in addition to being the most sweetly gay-normative piece of media (and especially KIDS’ media) that i’ve ever come across in my life, the two princes also pulled off a version of “you need to calm down” that actually pretty much rules lmao

[dreamcastingbroadway]

Dreamcasting Broadway: LIFE SUCKS.

“I want to be loved...by everybody...all the time...no matter what.”

“But...that’s not possible.”

“Since when does that matter? We want what we want no matter why we want it.”

Dreamcasting Broaway: Life Sucks. (Sort of Adapted from ‘Uncle Vanya’ by Anton Chekhov)

Beanie Feldstein as Sonia

Brian Tyree Henry as Vanya

Condola Rashad as Ella

Carol Kane as Babs

Natasha Lyonne as Pickles

Pedro Pascal as Dr. Aster

Tracy Letts as The Professor

Harriet Watson as Standby (Sonia)

Mandi Masden as Standby (Ella, Pickles)

Michael Bryan French as Standby (Professor)

Sanjit de Silva as Standby (Vanya, Aster)

Susan Lawson-Reynolds as Standby (Babs) 

[larryland]

by Barbara Waldinger

What is the purpose of producing a classic play that has already been revived many times onstage and on film?  Some people say that it’s to give a new generation of theatregoers the opportunity to see an important work.  Others insist that it’s to give a director and his/her team of artists a chance to reinterpret the play.  But when a production feels as though it’s tinkering with a masterpiece in a failed attempt to update it, we fear a lack of trust in the original text.  Such is the case with Robert O’Hara’s staging of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, now running at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

A Raisin in the Sun debuted at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre sixty years ago—the first play by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway.  In a recent interview with The Berkshire Eagle, O’Hara reflected:  “I think all classic plays should be treated as new plays.  We’re not in 1959. . . If you want a museum piece, you can go to the museum. . . I’m looking at how we see this family in 2019.”  He added, however, that he thinks the play is brilliant and “If you dislike every choice we make in this play. . . it’s still powerful,” because neither the language nor the story has been changed.  He turns out to be right about that because despite O’Hara’s attempts to leave his personal stamp on this play, the humanity of Hansberry’s work endures.

The playwright’s theme is best expressed in Langston Hughes in his poem Dream Deferred, the first stanza of which provided her with the title of her play:

“What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?”

Each member of the Younger family, denizens of a cramped, cockroach-ridden apartment on Chicago’s Southside in the early 1950s, embraces a dream:  the matriarch, Lena Younger (S. Epatha Merkerson), a domestic worker who cleans houses, wants her children to get along and lead contented lives, preferably in a house with a yard that would accommodate them all comfortably.  Her son, the chauffeur Walter Lee (Francois Battiste), dreams of buying a liquor store that will lift him and his family out of poverty; Walter’s wife Ruth (Mandi Masden), a maid, desperately wants to move out of the “rat trap” they live in.  Lena’s daughter, Beneatha (Nikiya Mathis), a college student, is determined to attend medical school.  The arrival of Lena’s late husband’s $10,000 life insurance check serves as the inciting incident; whose dream, if any, will be fulfilled?

Hansberry’s beautifully written, well-made play introduced cultural and racial issues that African-Americans still face today.  Quoted in Steven Carter’s book, Hansberry’s Drama:  Commitment amid Complexity, the playwright said:  “from the moment the first curtain goes up until the Youngers make their decision at the end, the fact of racial oppression. . . is through the play.  It’s inescapable.  The reason these people are in a ghetto in America is because they are Negroes.  They are discriminated against brutally and horribly. . . The three generations of the Younger family depicted in the play differ in dreams, speech patterns, and religious, musical, and stylistic preferences. . . Yet they are unified in their heroic defiance of white hostility and threats. . . the test that [they] face is of their willingness to take potentially fatal risks to get out of an intolerable situation and to force change upon an oppressive system.”  Hansberry even provides Lena with a physical representation of that struggle:  a plant that has to fight for its life to attract a bit of light from the tiniest of windows.

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The choices O’Hara mentioned in his interview include the following:  combining three acts into two, eliminating the need for two intermissions, which is helpful in a play of this length; he also ramps up family arguments by directing his actors to talk over each other, resulting in our inability to distinguish what they are saying.  This is a disservice to the playwright’s words.  The director inserts an unnecessary character, Lena’s deceased husband, who goes uncredited in the program because he doesn’t appear in Hansberry’s script.  Underscoring the strong influence his memory has on the family, the ghost haunts several of the scenes in which Lena recalls the difficult life he led as he struggled to provide for his family.  Accompanying his mute appearance is a sound that might best be described as a whistling wind—could this be a visual and aural reference to the ancestors of the family, many of them slaves?  The use of a voice enhancement technique that serves as an echo chamber is also unsettling, as is the shock-inducing final tableau.  Although Hansberry’s text certainly did not ignore the problems that the Youngers would face if they moved into a house in a white neighborhood, O’Hara’s dark ending eliminates any sliver of hope.  Would the playwright approve?

The cast is spotty.  The very talented S. Epatha Merkerson, playing Lena (Mama) the powerful, religious head of the family, is miscast here.  In an interview with The Berkshire Eagle, she explains:  “I don’t have the girth that some of the women who have played this part have, but I don’t think that makes a difference in explaining who this woman is.”  It is not girth in the literal sense that is missing in her performance but the depth of Lena’s passion and hard-earned wisdom, born from a lifetime of suffering, that give her words the poetry and dignity of the mighty woman that Hansberry has created.  In this production, it is Mandi Masden’s Ruth who expresses that passion when she finally says goodbye to the miserable conditions in which the family lives, giving the act break the heft that it needs.  Nikiya Mathis is fine as Beneatha, whose journey to establish her identity leads her from a selfish dabbler to a woman who sees beyond her own needs.

Francois Battiste as Walter Lee, whose aspirations are frustrated at every turn, focuses on the negative aspects of the character—his drunkenness, his constant rage, his resentment, the inability to see the hurt he inflicts on the people who love him, which makes it hard for us to believe in him as Mama does.  Joseph Asagai (Joshua Echebiri) and George Murchison (Kyle Beltran) are Beneatha’s diametrically opposed boyfriends. Echebiri lights up the stage as a proud African whose mission is to help his people, hopefully with Beneatha at his side, while Beltran portrays an assimilationist who seeks to erase every trace of blackness in his and his girlfriend’s heritage. Warner Miller’s characterization of Bobo, Walter Lee’s partner in the liquor store investment, raises questions when he affects a lack of concern about the theft of their money.  Eboni Flowers is entertaining but distracting in her over-the-top caricature of a nosy, nonstop-talking neighbor.  Joe Goldammer, as the white community association representative who warns the family that segregation is the only way for the races to get along, offers a fast-talking interpretation that might have benefitted by a slower attempt to justify his argument.  Finally, young Owen Tabaka rounds out the cast as Travis, the son of Walter Lee and Ruth.

Scenic designer Clint Ramos had to figure out, not altogether successfully, how to construct a crowded, basically one-room apartment, while finding space for the actors to move, as well as fulfilling the difficult demands of the production’s ending.  Costume designer Alice Tavener’s costumes are colorful and beautiful to look at but seem too expensive for this poor family to afford.  Elisheba Ittoop’s sound design expresses the differing tastes of the characters, their backgrounds, and the various types of music popular in the time period, while Alex Jainchill’s lighting design, along with the music, helps to maintain the fluidity of the scenes.

Audience members who are not familiar with the play should not miss the opportunity to see Hansberry’s astute and timeless work, that neither age nor tinkering can diminish.  Imagine how prolific this playwright could have been if she had not lost her battle with cancer at the age of thirty-four, six years after A Raisin in the Sun opened.

  A Raisin in the Sun runs from June 25—July 13.  Tickets may be purchased online at wtfestival.org or call 413-458-3253.

Williamstown Theatre Festival presents A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry.  Directed by Robert O’Hara.  Cast:  Mandi Masden (Ruth Younger), Owen Tabaka (Travis Younger), Francois Battiste (Walter Lee Younger), Nikiya Mathis (Beneatha Younger), S. Epatha Merkerson (Lena Younger [Mama]), Joshua Echebiri (Joseph Asagai), Kyle Beltran (George Murchison), Eboni Flowers (Mrs. Johnson), Joe Goldammer (Karl Lindner), Warner Miller (Bobo).

Scenic Design:  Clint Ramos; Costume Design:  Alice Tavener; Lighting Design:  Alex Jainchill; Sound Design:  Elisheba Ittoop; Hair and Wig Design:  Elizabeth Printz; Co-Fight and Intimacy Directors:  Claire Warden and Judi Lewis Ockler; Dialect Coach:  Barbara Rubin; Production Stage Manager:  Stephen Ravet.

Running Time:  Two hours 50 minutes, including intermission.  Williamstown Theatre Festival, Mainstage, 1000 Main Street, Williamstown, MA., from June 25; closing July 13. https://wtfestival.org/

  REVIEW: “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Williamstown Theatre Festival by Barbara Waldinger What is the purpose of producing a classic play that has already been revived many times onstage and on film? 

[jmarksthespots]

[#BLACKTHEATER #PLAY] Their Eyes Were Watching God Presented by the Billie Holiday Theatre, Inc.  Directed by Tony Award-winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson Original music by Bill Sims, Jr.; and adapted by award-winning writer Arthur Yorinks Friday, May 12 @ 8pm | $65 ticket includes VIP seating for reading and access to post-show celebrity reception | $40 ticket includes general seating to reading Saturday, May 13 @ 2pm + 8pm | $40 ticket includes general seating | $30 student and senior citizens Billie Holiday Theatre, Inc. | 1368 Fulton St, Brooklyn, New York 11216  Admission: $40-65  For tickets, visit eventbrite.com/e/their-eyes-were-watching-god-an-80th-anniversary-theatrical-reading-tickets-33799605530  Facebook event page: facebook.com/events/647738155410220/

Join us for the first theatrical presentation in the newly-renovated Billie Holiday Theatre with the 80th Anniversary reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God helmed by the Tony Award-winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson who recently directed the critically acclaimed August Wilson’s Jitney on Broadway. Their Eyes is the epic tale of Janie Crawford, whose search for self takes her on a journey that stretches across decades. Told with haunting sympathy and piercing immediacy, audiences are taken on a journey through life and love. Read by an acclaimed cast of actors with original compositions performed live by Bill Sims, Jr., this seminal novel in the American literary canon prompted Alice Walker to say, “There is no book more important to me than this one.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God cast

Tony Award-winner Leslie Uggams (Roots, Hallelujah, Baby! on Broadway), Roslyn Ruff (Romeo and Juliet, Fences on Broadway),  Brandon Dirden (All the Way, Jitney on Broadway),  Harvy Blanks (Jitney on Broadway),  Ray Anthony Thomas (Jitney on Broadway),  Ebony Jo-Ann (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Gem of the Ocean on Broadway),  Elain R. Graham (While I Yet Live, Primary Stages),  Mandi Masden (Jitney on Broadway) and more.

[oftheflamingheart]

TTPP Season 2 Update Here

[philomaela]

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Act II Scene I // Act III Scene II

[cecily-said-gay-rights]

MANDI MASDEN AND SAMIRA WILEY HAVE BOTH BEEN CONFIRMED, WE POPPIN THE BIGGEST BOTTLES WHEN JECILY HAPPENS IN SEASON 2

[biofunmy]

Review: ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ Burns With New Fire

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The moment finally arrives — and you just knew it was coming — when Robert O’Hara burns a hole right through “A Raisin in the Sun.” It occurs well into the second half of Mr. O’Hara’s always absorbing revival of this watershed play, which opened Saturday on the Main Stage of the Williamstown Theater Festival, with a cast that includes a magnificent S. Epatha Merkerson.

This act of conflagration is made up of the most basic theatrical elements: a drum roll, a spotlight and a single actor. In the role of Walter Lee Younger, an African-American chauffeur from the South Side of Chicago who has just seen his hopes of self-advancement shattered once again, Francois Battiste is speaking unaltered lines from Lorraine Hansberry’s script.

But as the current rebel yell of a revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” on Broadway attests, familiar words from the past can take on unsettling new aspects through a simple shift of perspective. In this case, a speech — about the ugly necessity for black people to debase themselves in a white man’s world — that is usually spoken to the other characters on stage is hurled like a fireball into the audience.

It was a Saturday matinee in Williamstown when I saw the show, and that audience was mostly white and on the far side of middle age. When Walter says he’s “gonna put on a show for the man, just what he wants to see,” he pulls a program — easily identifiable as that for the very show in which he appears — out of his pants.

In other words, we aren’t just in Chicago in the late 1950s. We are also in 21st-century America, where a black actor is performing, for the entertainment of white theatergoers, one man’s rage with the exaggerated gestures of a vaudeville show.

“Yes, I’m talking to you,” Mr. Battiste’s Walter seems to be saying as he stares down the house, “and can you honestly tell me things have changed much during the past six decades?”

When it was announced that Mr. O’Hara would be directing Hansberry’s epochal 1959 drama, I braced myself for a head-on collision. As both a playwright (“Barbecue,” “Bootycandy”) and a director (Jeremy O. Harris’s sensational “Slave Play”), Mr. O’Hara specializes in confrontational, tradition-shredding work.

Hansberry’s “Raisin,” while radically daring in the Eisenhower era for putting a tale of contemporary black characters on Broadway, is conventional almost to a fault in its dramaturgy. It has been revived on Broadway twice in this century, with Sean Combs (in 2004) and Denzel Washington (2014) as Walter in solid, naturalistic productions, both directed by Kenny Leon. Surely, Mr. O’Hara wouldn’t be satisfied with letting a worthy old war horse follow its usual, dramatically satisfying course.

Yet, for the most part, this “Raisin” doesn’t dilute the old-fashioned strengths of the original, or interfere with the careful unfolding of its story about a Chicago family’s bid to move from a tenement apartment to a house in a white neighborhood. Mr. O’Hara (who wrote his own sequel to the play, the 2010 “The Etiquette of Vigilance”) clearly respects the achievement of “Raisin.”

In program notes, he writes about Hansberry’s prescience in exploring divisive topics that remain of vital relevance: racial assimilation, African heritage, the changing role of women, self-sabotage within African-American communities and the uneasy balance of power among the sexes and generations within the extended black family. This production is devised, above all, to make us listen with new intent to what Hansberry was saying.

Such an aim is in part realized, paradoxically, by rushing and overlapping much of the dialogue. In the frenzy and frustration that come from five individuals sharing a cramped and shabby apartment (rendered with claustrophobic decrepitude in Clint Ramos’s set, impeccably lighted by Alex Jainchill), the members of the Younger family often talk right over one another.

But when a single voice asserts itself, it resonates all the more clearly. That’s especially true when the speaker is Mr. Battiste or Ms. Merkerson, who plays Walter’s widowed mother, Lena. The play’s plot hinges on a battle of wills between these characters, over what to do with the $10,000 from a life insurance policy (taken out by Walter Lee Sr.) that has finally come into the Youngers’ hands.

In many productions of “Raisin,” the standoff between mother and son translates into a battle over which character will dominate the performance. In its 1959 debut (and in the 1961 film), it was Sidney Poitier’s intense, smoldering Walter. In the 2004 Broadway version, it was Phylicia Rashad’s formidable and folksy Lena.

Mr. Battiste and Ms. Merkerson, however, are beautifully matched, with a crackling trans-generational chemistry that allows neither mother nor son the last word. Wearing the flashy, sporty clothes of a barroom bantam (Alice Tavener did the costumes), Mr. Battiste finds the cancerous, painful insecurity within Walter’s strutting exhibitionism. He always seems on the cusp of both explosion and implosion.

Ms. Merkerson, a two-time Tony nominee and one of the finest American actresses working today, gives us not only Lena’s hard-won centeredness and conviction, but also the doubts, born of churning and changing times, now nibbling at her certainty. It’s a nigh-perfect, in-the-moment performance that makes this play credible even in scenes of mechanical contrivance.

The rest of the cast — which also includes a buoyant Nikiya Mathis as Walter’s politically minded sister, Beneatha, the excellent Joshua Echebiri as her Nigerian suitor and a penetratingly officious Joe Goldammer as the sole white character — isn’t all on the same level. Making Walter’s wife, Ruth (Mandi Masden), look like a meticulously groomed fashion model was a mistake, though her hunger to escape the squalor she’s living in feels undeniable and palpable.

You should know that Mr. O’Hara employs more than one interpolation in this production. The late Mr. Younger shows up as a silent, brooding ghost, rather like Hamlet’s father. And the production includes a blunt visual postscript about the future the Youngers can expect when (spoiler!) they move into their new home.

These additions, unlike Walter’s fourth-wall-breaking moment, feel superfluous, belaboring what could have been implicit in the acting. For me, the show’s most truly shocking scene comes when Lena finally erupts, in raging sorrow, at her beloved, much-indulged son. She acquires a pure physical strength here that bespeaks a hard, long lifetime of patience and stoicism.

Her vision of a world in which decades of sacrifices have been ruthlessly stripped of meaning may be only temporary. But as Ms. Merkerson defines it, Lena’s anguish for a life denied her sets off seismic tremors that make a 60-year-old play feel devastatingly of the present.

A Raisin in the Sun

Tickets Through July 13 at the Williamstown Theater Festival Main Stage, Williamstown, Mass.; 413-458-3200, wtfestival.org. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes.

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[emileyjain]

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