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ArtsSUNDAY&, APRIL 7, 2019St . SECTION E yle EZ EE

refusing to wait in the wings

PHOTOS BY MARK ABRAMSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A new era of African American playwrights is emerging — and taking on stories of race and privilege

BY PETER MARKS

ou can feel the earth shifting — in world of institutional theater: one play per the theater, at least — for a new season by a writer of color. “We used to call it generation of African American ‘the black slot,’ ” says Robert O’Hara, a playwrights. Not that pathways to director and playwright who made his debut acclaim hadn’t been forged by such in 1996 with “Insurrection: Holding History” luminariesY as Lorraine Hansberry, August at off-Broadway’s Public Theater. He has had Wilson and Ntozake Shange. Of late, though, his other plays, including “Bootycandy,” pro- an extraordinary new talent convergence is duced across the country ever since. Or, as riveting the contemporary American stage. Maria Manuela Goyanes, the new head of the Driven partly by a recognition that artists Woolly Mammoth Theatre, puts it: “Seeing of color often possess unique understandings just one black play in a season is not cool of resistance to reactionary forces, the invigo- anymore. The tokenism is not cool anymore.” rated attention to this group of gifted writers As a result, a bounty of stunningly provoca- has led to some remarkable productions, tive plays — some conventionally drawn, especially on the inexhaustibly charged sub- many others mold-breaking — are reaching ject of race. None of these increasingly the stages of New York and beyond with in-demand theater artists — dramatists Jack- powerful impact. To the ranks of such estab- ie Sibblies Drury, Aleshea Harris, Jeremy O. lished black dramatists as Pulitzer winners Harris, Jocelyn Bioh, Antoinette Nwandu and Lynn Nottage (“Sweat”) and Suzan-Lori Parks Jordan E. Cooper — are widely known beyond (“Topdog/Underdog”), MacArthur fellow rarefied circles. But in view of the blisteringly Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (“An Octoroon”) and vivid work they are creating, a broader Tarell Alvin McCraney, an Oscar winner for audience is within reach for any one of them. “Moonlight,” are other voices demanding a TOP: Jeremy O. Harris wrote the provocative “Slave Play” and “Daddy.” ABOVE: Jackie Collectively, they are helping to break fresh look at racial insensitivity and Ameri- Sibblies Drury’s play “Fairview” has appeared on many critics’ best-of-the-year lists. down a seemingly psychological limit in the SEE PLAYWRIGHTS ON E13

A stage daughter’s details INSIDE A shred of hope with the Shed Nicole , child of showbiz legends The center is the only reason to go to Hudson and , helps bring new FX series to life Yards, New York’s most hated new development

BY SARAH L. KAUFMAN some of the moments, either BY PHILIP KENNICOTT miserable, embarrassing tale of there’s something wrong with me urban gigantism and one-percen- , the daughter of or something wrong with the new york — Architecture critics ter excess. Designed by Diller obsessive, trailblazing director piece,” Fosse, 56, says of the series, have been almost unanimous in Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell and choreographer Bob Fosse and which premieres April 9. their hatred of New York ’s new Group, the Shed is meant to be legendary Broadway dancer Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon Hudson Yards development, a the cultural giveback that com- Gwen Verdon, grew up in rehears- turned putting on a show into an generic pop-up landscape of soul- pensates for the vulgar mess of al studios and smoke-filled edit- art, a neurosis and a way of life. less glass towers and high-end the larger Yards project. Looking ing rooms. Within those walls, she Nothing got in their way as they retail built over the a bit like a bubble-clad airplane watched her famous parents rein- created a new theatrical style out REVIEW wasteland of mid- hangar, it sits on the southern vent the entertainment industry of smoke, shadows and sexy, fine- town Manhattan’s edge of the Yards with two dis- while their personal lives fell to tuned dancing, in such Broadway west-side rail yard. Longtime tinct elements defining its archi- pieces. musicals as “,” “Pip- New Yorkers, and transplants tecture: a boxlike form projecting As a producer and creative con- pin” and “,” and the films with taste, are inclined to agree: out of the bottom of a high-rise sultant on the new FX series “Cabaret” and the semi-autobiog- It’s as ugly as Dubai, it reeks of residential tower, and a canopy “Fosse/Verdon,” which stars Sam raphical “All That Jazz.” greed and mammon, and it only with translucent plastic side pan- Rockwell and Michelle Williams, Nothing stopped them, not Meet the artist whose exacerbates the worst tendencies els, mounted on wheels and rails, Nicole Fosse has had to go Fosse’s pill habit, depression or E8 of a city that seems hellbent on that opens onto a public plaza. through it all over again: the lies, heart attacks. Not his revolving works hover in the sky erasing anything distinctive or When the extension canopy is lovers, drugs, breakdowns and the bedroom door or the collapse of MOVIES: ‘Made in Heaven’ offers a look humane in its built environment. open, it incorporates a huge vol- inexorable onrush of death. their marriage. (They separated behind big fat Indian weddings E12 But now comes the Shed, the ume of temporary space for per- “If I didn’t have trouble with SEE FOSSE ON E5 one bit of leavening in this whole SEE SHED ON E14 E8 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST . SUNDAY, APRIL 7, 2019 EZ EE E9

what are you working on? A series of conversations with artists about how they create

AT FAR LEFT: Echelman says her art was inspired by watching fishermen in India bundling their nets into mounds on the beach. She works with superstrong synthetic fibers.

EMA PETER/STUDIO ECHELMAN

TOP: “Skies Painted With Unnumbered Sparks,” shown in Vancouver, , in 2014, spanned 745 feet. MIDDLE: “She Changes,” a work suspended in 2005 in Porto, Portugal, has become an icon of the Portuguese waterfront.

ENRIQUE DIAZ /STUDIO ECHELMAN

LEFT: First lady Michelle Obama, second from right, and her guests admire “1.8 Renwick” in 2016. The installation is on permanent display at the Renwick Gallery.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

BRUCE PETSCHEK/CHARLES RIVER MEDIA GROUP

BY SEBASTIAN SMEE with the wind and change color respond, “You’re right, I’ll scrap entirely of soft materials, so it hurricanes and typhoons. In make you wonder about life! And then the crafting at night. it.” I also lift weights three billows with the wind. Hong Kong, we design for something, and the abstraction begins. It’s a different joy — a Janet Echelman has been re- Echelman, who works with mornings a week, which keeps typhoons, and in Seattle, we is the container — why it’s calm, meditative pleasure in defining public sculpture for 20 engineers and architects, has a Sky-high me sane. Q: Where will it be? designed for a half-inch of ice, relevant. crafting the details. Which years. Her soaring, rippling small but intensely busy studio A: Swooping down on a busy which is infrequent. But I patterns and colors . . . And sculptures — scaled to big city beside her home in Brookline, Q: Your work is so ambitious, street in one of the densest always design for the 100-year Q: So you’re going through then we braid them into twine, buildings — are made with Mass. Assistants sit at comput- and requires you to deal with so cities in the world — Hong event, the worst possible storm. these iterations on the which is then loomed into braided fiber and projected ers lining the walls, which are many practical considerations Kong. My sculpture attaches to We meet the same building computer . . . panels, which are hand- light. covered with images, diagrams sculptures and logistical challenges. How the facade of the historic codes as skyscrapers, but we use A: Yes, my studio has two full- trimmed and hand-knotted, A soft, voluminous net sculp- and quotations. A rudimentary do you keep that separate from, Peninsula Hotel. It’s nicknamed the time-honored craft of time architects who model the then attached to ropes which ture that Echelman installed in model of a streetscape in Bonn, but also integrated into, your “the Grande Dame of the East.” sailing, ropes and knots to do it. drape with gravity using our are hand-spliced. The craft is the Grand Salon at the Smithso- Germany — the setting for a creative thinking about the It’s all classical ornamentation custom software. I look at the extensive. nian American Art Museum’s major new work marking the actual design? and formality, and suddenly Q: When you’re in your studio, layering and transparency and Renwick Gallery in 2015 was a 250th anniversary of Beetho- weave life, A: Yeah, it’s hard to remain there will be this thing with playing with all these shapes the surprise of how it reveals Q: Where is this happening? huge hit, transforming idly curi- ven’s birth — covers one table. unperturbed. Working in the blazing color and slashing with ephemeral qualities, what itself as you move around it. I A: All across the U.S. We design ous viewers into dreamy-eyed More than a dozen gorgeous public realm forces me to fight straight lines, and the two [the makes you know one shape is see it as a human relationship. in Boston, develop our custom mystics. The same year, she sus- woven experiments are suspend- for what’s essential in my art, sculpture and the building] will working and another maybe I’m always asking, “Is this a software in San Francisco, do pended a vast, undulating, ed above head height, beneath a amidst endless practical begin to dance. isn’t? relationship that’s always our structural and aeronautical three-dimensional network be- skylight. magic into constraints. The payoff is art A: I work until I feel a spark, an revealing something new, one engineering in New York, San tween office towers over Boston’s Echelman, 53, spoke with us that can impact a place and Q: Tell me more. energy, in balance. And it takes you want to spend time with?” Francisco and Seattle, and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Green- recently as she was making the daily life. That’s worth the A: I want it to make people feel refinement. I might sketch 25 fabricate in Puget Sound. way. final adjustments on a work trade-off of absolute control I more alive. But there are versions of an idea until it stops Q: How much of all this can you Echelman sculptures — some commissioned by the Peninsula have with purely studio art. I’m practical challenges of what will being an object to look at and get a sense of from the Q: Why there? permanent, others temporary — Hotel for the opening of Art city blocks trying to bring a sense of work structurally, and what you becomes someplace I want to computer models? A: Because it’s a historic fishing have been installed at dozens of Basel Hong Kong, on view there wonder and delight to the city, are allowed to touch, because get lost in. A: We also make physical industry, with braiders and net- locations around the world, in- until June 21. and even — the word no one it’s a historically significant site. models, with string and wire, makers down the street from cluding Oxford Circus in Lon- This interview has been edited wants to use in art . . . The sculpture swoops more Q: Literally sketched up, in foam and wood. Different each other. I’ve been working don, Plaza Mayor in Madrid, for length and clarity. An artist known for her larger-than-life than a hundred feet toward the drawings? models serve different with the same families for 17 Dubai, Shanghai and Sydney. designs casts her net toward Hong Kong Q: Beauty? street. This creates a holding A: Yes, pen and watercolor purposes. At the concept stage, years — the looming factory is It all started during a spell in Q: What is your daily routine A: [laughs] That’s right! space for the tensioned drawings, but also digital, three- physical models and hand owned by the brother-in-law of India on a Fulbright scholarship, like? structural layer, which supports dimensional models in the sketches are better. I make a the braiding factory. when Echelman was inspired by A: When I first wake up is when Q: What are you working on the layers of billowing lacework. computer, so I can see its simple sketch, maybe two forms fishing nets on the beach. In a I have my best ideas. I jot notes now? And then the soft, translucent proportions within the site. The pressing against one another, Q: You seem to enjoy TED talk that has been translat- before I get out of bed. I make A: I’m making a new sculpture layers are allowed to move. details of my forms are often where color from one flows into collaborating. ed into 35 languages, she ex- the kids breakfast, we get them for my Earthtime series. It’s Wind becomes the inspired by scientific data sets, the other. The digital model is A: I started my life as an artist plained how, having been reject- off to school and my husband about seemingly fixed elements choreographer. the concrete truths of physics where we figure out how this collaborating with batik ed by seven art schools, she went and I enjoy a quiet coffee. I love of our lives, like the length of and microbiology. We know the idea takes form in a building or artisans and master from collaborating with Indian having a partner with a long, the day, that have been shifted Q: How much wind is likely in atoms are there . . . public space. calligraphers, and now I’m fishermen and Lithuanian lace- shared set of experiences, by unseen events too large or Hong Kong? collaborating with structural makers to suspending intricately whose professional life is complex to comprehend. It’s A: We’re near the water, and Q: Yet we can’t point at it. Q: What happens after the engineers and material engineered sculptures above unrelated to art. I need about interconnectedness. This gusts can exceed 68 miles per A: Right. But it needs to read as modeling? scientists. I love the wisdom in BRUCE PETSCHEK/CHARLES RIVER MEDIA GROUP some of the world’s most famous someone I trust who can say, newest one is called “Earthtime hour in a storm. My sculptures concrete and abstract A: So there’s the moment when a craft. And I love learning. Janet Echelman paints in her studio at her home in Brookline, Mass. She conceptualizes her sculptures public spaces, where they billow “That’s not your best,” and I can 1.26.” It’s a sculpture made are tensioned to withstand simultaneously. The data sets it’s right, when it breathes with [email protected] on paper, using pens and watercolors, then refines her work using 3-D modeling.