Month: January 2025

Theater Mirror’s Shelley Sackett Interviews Modern Dance Visionary Mark Morris

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The Mark Morris Dance Company in The Look of Love. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The Mark Morris Dance Group returns to Boston with Morris’ evening-length work, The Look of Love at Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre from January 23 through January 26. The piece is a wistful and heartfelt homage to the chart-topping hits of Burt Bacharach, a towering figure of popular music, newly arranged by jazz pianist, composer, and MMDG musical collaborator Ethan Iverson. Bacharach’s melodies and unique orchestrations soar with influences from jazz, rock, and Brazilian music. The stage comes alive in a powerful fusion of dance and music with an exceptional ensemble of vocals, piano, trumpet, bass, and drums, led by singer, actress, and Broadway star Marcy Harriell.

SAS: Is there an overarching philosophy or spirit that you bring to your choreography?

MM: I wouldn’t know. I’m the wrong person to ask. I have no philosophy. I mean I famously answered that in Brussels. ‘I make it up. You watch it. End of Philosophy.’

I meant it. It’s not a word thing. It’s a choreo-musical thing. It’s not a philosophy. It’s been my only job, and I‘ve been doing it for nearly 50 years. So, I’m not waiting to figure out what it is. It’s music and dance; that’s what I’m about. It’s vocal music a lot, and vocal music has lyrics. Whether it’s an opera or popular songs or whatever language, the music exists because of the text.

So in the case of Hal David and Burt Bacharach meets Dionne Warwick, that’s a fabulous, brilliant combination of those things, and then I do like I would with Schumann or Handel or anything, I work with the music on its own terms. It’s always the same, in that I’m always working from music.

SAS: So what was it about the Burt Bacharach music and oeuvre that appealed to you?

MM: What happens is that good music lasts, and all good art is relevant to the people who find it appealing. The idea that it’s popular music and, therefore, not valuable is just utter nonsense. All good art is relevant to the people who find it appealing. It isn’t just written for just one person, it’s written for everybody, and it’s written from a particular point of view.

A lot of popular music fades away. So whether you know who wrote it or not, whether you know the words or not, whether you like it or not, you recognize certain bits of Burt Bacharach when you hear it. His music has endured.

He wrote from a huge range of points of view and it was all amazing music. Why Burt Bacharach? Why anybody’s music? Why would I choreograph it? I like it. I can’t work with shitty music, and I only work with live music.

In talking with Ethan Iverson about 15 years ago about music we’d been familiar with our whole lives, actively or not, music that was ‘in the air,’ Burt Bacharach’s name came up, and we thought, ‘Well, sure. Let’s do this.’

Mark Morris

SAS: He wrote so many songs, how did you decide on the ones you chose and how did you decide on the order in which they appear?

MM: First of all, Ethan Iverson (who was my music director for a number of years long ago and whom I’d worked with before on “Pepperland,” the evening-length choreography and arrangement of Beatles music to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band album) and I listened to Burt’s music. We each picked our favorite songs. We also knew we didn’t want a whole bunch that were similar in style, tempo, or key.

In meeting with Burt, he gave us full approval and loose reins for the arrangements. When we got the rights, Ethan started arranging and I started choreographing. The very last thing was what order they would be in, and it went almost right up to opening night before we had the exact order because of the way I choreographed and the way they fit together according to key signature or rhythm or familiarity. I didn’t want it to be just a jukebox.

That’s the fun part, but it was a lot of hard work and we have now been performing it for a few years. It lives on and it’s really great.

SAS: What is The Look of Love about?

MM: The songs are all about love. Some are terribly sad, but many are upbeat. There’s optimism, but there’s also realism. They’re very profound songs. We don’t change the show performance to performance, but there are pockets of improvisation like there is in anything live, but it’s the same text and the same piece every night.

That’s why, if you go early (in the run), you can go back and see it again. That’s the live aspect of it, and there’s nothing better than that.

We haven’t been to Boston for six years! Covid was four and a half of them, but it’s been a while and we have an audience in Boston, we just haven’t been able to go for a long time, so we’re really happy to be back.

SAS: Your designer is the great fashion guru Isaac Mizrahi. How did that work?

MM: Isaac and I work together a lot. We’re very close friends. We’re both busy and we don’t work together that often. I knew that he was the right person for this, and so did he. We start with the music, which is how I start with everyone (lighting, design, costumes and music). I send Isaac the playlist of what I think is going to be the music long before we even start. He gives me some designs, and we talk about them and change them or not. It doesn’t start with a finished dance and then we add on to it. It’s pretty organic right from the starting gate.

That’s the way I like to work. It’s more thorough and it’s a collaboration. I’m in charge ultimately, but I listen and we participate or fight and it’s good. I don’t work with a lot of different people. I have a small roster of collaborators and it’s familiar in the sense that we don’t have to lie. We might say, ‘That’s the ugliest I’ve ever seen,’ or ‘That’s boring,’ or even, ‘That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.’ That happens too sometimes, and it’s nice.

It’s friendly, but we’re pretty honest.

SAS: A lot of these songs are hits from long ago that younger audience members might be totally unfamiliar with them. Any thoughts about that?

MM: If you go see the show because you’re curious, and you can afford a ticket, that’s great. There’s no lesson to be learned from the show. It’s been very successful, and not just with seniors who, unfortunately, start singing along. The musicians start to play “Alfie,” and everyone goes, ‘Ohhh….’

This music is part of American folk ways now. Bacharach is part of the American Songbook.

SAS: Do you plan to keep doing what you’re doing? What next creative itch are you looking to scratch?

MM: I’m working on several things already. It’s been a very difficult period for everybody. I have a piece that will be premiering in early April, so I’ve been working on that all the time we’re not on the road.

This is my only skill. I’m going to do it til I can’t. One thing, I’m making up dances for after I don’t choreograph, after I’m dead or incapacitated. It’s a project called “Dances for the Future.” I have several pieces that are in the can, as they say, they’ve been choreographed, there are designs and notations and we’re going to keep them until I can’t make up dances anymore and then we’ll release them one a year for as long as we can do that. It’ll be a world premiere out of boredom, which I think is a fabulous, morbid idea.

I’m also working on a piece called “Moon” for a small festival in April commissioned by the Kennedy Center and inspired by the Golden Record on the 1977 Voyager.

SAS: Anything else you want to riff on?

MM: The Look of Love is not performed all that frequently. We don’t tour it for six weeks to five cities, it’s 3-5 shows and then it might weeks or months before we do it again. We re-rehearse it and buff it up and it’s a bit different and more confident and swings better every time we bring it back. It doesn’t change, but the tone and the ease with which we can present it is reassuring; it means we are performing it more, and we’re getting back in the hang of it.

For a YouTube preview of The Look of Love, click here. For tickets and information, go to: https://www.globalartslive.org/events/list-events

Malpaso Dance Company Brings Its Hot Fusion of Cuban Dance, Music, and Spice to Boston’s Winter Wonderland

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Malpaso Dance Company. Photos by Robert Torres

By Shelley A. Sackett

With good reason, Malpaso Dance Company is one of Cuba’s most sought-after dance companies. Since its inception in 2012, the company of 11 dancers has served as global ambassadors of Cuban culture, heritage and artistry.

Celebrity Series brought the vibrant troupe back to Paramount Center’s Robert J. Orchard Stage for three performances. On opening night, there was as much excitement in the packed house as there would be on stage during the 90-minute performance.

The program of three dances opened with “Floor…y Ando,” a 2023 piece choreographed by Ephrat Asherie (who also designed the costumes) and set to music by Aldo López-Gavilán. Three male dancers stand on stage as the piano jazz solo begins and the house lights dim. Two stand upstage; the third is somewhat downstage on the opposite side. Manuel Da Silva’s spot-on lighting catches their white shirts and pants, arms and legs moving slowly.

As the solo dancer starts to move, the other two follow his lead as mirrored tandem images. The music shifts to a more upbeat tempo, and the dancers follow with short, rapid, fluid floor work. They bounce and roll with joyous abandon, and just as quickly, they’re on their feet, leaping and then shuffling, their sneakers squeaking across the stage.

All too quickly, it’s over and the dancers walk off-stage as they walked on, two audience-left, one audience-right.

The piece (loosely translated as “Floor..and Walking”) is Asherie’s tribute to the late Gus Solomons, Jr., an American dancer, choreographer, dance critic, and actor who was a leading figure in postmodern and experimental works. He also studied architecture at M.I.T. One of his most quoted statements is, “Architecture and dancing are exactly the same. You design using all the same elements — time, space and structure — except that in dance, time is not fixed.”

After a brief pause, the curtain opens on choreographer Ronald K. Brown’s “Why You Follow,” a 2014 piece set to hip-hop music that exemplifies the multicultural influences that make Cuba the unique artistic petri dish it is. The full company is dressed in simple costumes (Keiko Voltaire), each sporting a spot of red, either as a belt, shirt patch, or pant stripe. The effect is subtle and coherent.

The dancers celebrate the rhythms of the music by incorporating elements of salsa, samba and Bhangra. There is also a smattering of classical ballet and traditional jazz thrown into the mix. The pure, simple but never monotonous beat of the soundtrack (“Look at Africa” by Zap Mama; “En Route to Motherland” and others by Gordheaven & Juliano) has the dancers shaking their hips and the audience dancing in their seats.

The stage is set like a crowded club, and dancers appear as solos, pairs, and groups. Sometimes, the rush of figures feels like a conga line; other times, a single dancer’s graceful and impossibly supple body is the focus.

There is also a playful element in this piece, a funky, spunky confidence as the dancers circle the stage riding what could be stick horses that they slap with their long, graceful arms. This upbeat element is repeated throughout the piece, each time eliciting the same audience reaction of delight.

Clifton Taylor’s fire engine red lighting design mirrors the up-tempo and pulsation of the dancers and music, creating an electrifying performance that leaves the jubilant audience applauding wildly.

After a brief intermission, “A Dancing Island,” the evening’s longest and final piece, brings the full company back to dance to the music of Alejandro Falcón and Ted Nash & the Cubadentro Trio. Choreographed by Osnel Delgado in 2023, the piece is non-stop sparkle and fizz, a full-throated jamboree of thick, sultry, sassy and uniquely Afro-Cuban Music and dance.

The piece opens with the sound of wind and/or waves, the dancers bathed in hazy spotlights (Manuel Da Silva), clad in flirty costumes (Guido Gali) that are as revealing as they are cheerleader cute. The women even wear white knee socks and T-strap shoes, their sheer-ish tops looking like suspenders over tattoos.

“A Dancing Island” is more of a journey than a single theme, with dancers hanging upside down, then lying prone on the floor for one minute and reflecting the more somber tone of a single female acapella voice the next. There is also an intense intimacy as dancers pair and intertwine, barely touching yet presenting in perfect synchronicity. At one point, the house lights come up and a dancer slowly walks down the aisle to join his partner on stage, a poignant and creative touch.

Like Malpaso Dance Company itself, “A Dancing Island” casts a wide net, one the audience is delighted to be caught in. The only shame is that they were in Boston for such a short time. Be sure not to miss them the next time Celebrity Series brings them to town!

Celebrity Series of Boston presents Malpaso Dance Company. Executive Director and Co-Founder Fernando Sáez. Artistic Director and Co-Founder Osnal Delgado. At the Robert J. Orchard Stage, Paramount Center, January 17-18.

Lyric Stage’s ‘Crumbs from the Table of Joy’ Has A Tale to Tell  

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Cast of Lyric Stage’s ‘Crumbs From The Table Of Joy’. Photos: Mark S. Howard 
Thomika Marie Bridwell, Madison Margaret Clark, and Dominic Carter 

By Shelley A. Sackett

Luck

Sometimes a crumb falls
From the tables of joy,
Sometimes a bone
Is flung.

To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only heaven.

— Langston Hughes

James Mercer Langston Hughes, best known for his Harlem Renaissance Jazz Poetry, wrote “Luck” in 1947. The poem can be interpreted as a commentary on unfairness, deprivation, and the pursuit of love. It could also be read as a reminder of the injustices faced by Black Americans and other “have-nots’ who must bear witness to the overflowing bounty of the “haves” and hope they are in the right place at the right time to scoop up the discarded scraps.

Lynn Nottage’s 1995 play, ‘Crumbs from the Table of Joy,’ picks up Hughes’ theme and runs with it in a two-act work now in production at Lyric Stage. Fair warning to fans of Nottage’s later, brilliantly biting “Clyde’s,” and Pulitzer Prize-winning “Ruined” and “Sweat” — ‘Crumbs’ is far less absorbing and captivating. A nostalgic look in the rearview mirror, it is a good story but about as edgy as a Hallmark movie.

Set in 1950, “Crumbs” is a memory play about the Crumps, a “colored” family that migrates from Jim Crow Florida to Brooklyn. Although the country is recovering from World War II and the Civil Rights movement is gaining momentum, the discrimination and lack of opportunity that greets them in New York doesn’t differ significantly from what they left behind.

Ernestine Crump (Madison Margaret Clark), a 17-year-old who wears bobby socks and glasses, is the amiable, if hardly charismatic, narrator. She shows us around the cramped Brooklyn flat she shares with her father, Godfrey (a nuanced Dominic Carter) and her bouncy, lively 15-year-old sister Ermina (an engaging Catia).

Grief-stricken and psychologically undone by his wife Sandra’s death and faced with raising two motherless teenage girls on his own, Godfrey uprooted the family to follow the African American evangelist, Father Divine, his personal guru and religious savior. It turns out Brooklyn is the return address on Father Divine’s mail order catalog; his Peace Mission Movement is actually headquartered in Philadelphia.

Undaunted, Godfrey immerses himself in his faith in the belief that this will provide a fresh start and a better life for him and his daughters. He dons blinders and digs deeper into Father Divine’s strict religious teachings of celibacy, sobriety and solemnity on Sundays. Structure and strictures are his lifeline. Father Divine lets him know all will be O.K.

Catia, Bridwell, and Clark

He writes letter after letter to Father Divine, desperate for his advice and a glimmer of direct connection. Finally, the mission writes back, telling him to keep following the path and donate money. Godfrey bestows a church name on himself and his daughters and keeps a notebook into which he obsessively jots down questions he will ask Divine Father during his anticipated face-to-face.

Ernestine and Ermina don’t share this version of deliverance and choose a different escape route from reality. For them, joy is to be found in dreams and fantasy; in other words, at the movies.

Ernestine is also about to graduate from high school, the first Crump to reach that level of education and achievement. One day, a sewing pattern arrives in the mail for her. It turns out her mother had ordered it before she died. She sets up a sewing form in the living room, sewing the dress throughout the play as a reminder of her mother and a bridge between the world they left behind and the one in which they now live.

Just when it feels like the weight of Nottage’s sluggish, speech-heavy script (not helped by voice projection problems) might sink the ship before it gets out of the harbor, Sandra’s sister, Lily Ann Green (an outstanding Thomika Marie Bridwell), saves the day. She bursts into the apartment, riding a gale wind that fills the play’s sagging sails and keeps it afloat for the remainder of its almost two-and-one-half-hour running time.

Clark, Catia

Vivacious and uninvited, Lily is dressed in sunglasses, a fur coat and a well-tailored white suit. Red shoes and a cigarette are the perfect accessories. Lily is a non-conformist, an educated woman who lives in Harlem and hobnobs with revolutionaries and communists. Although she didn’t make it to her sister’s funeral, she is committed to moving in with Godfrey and helping raise her sister’s two girls.

She is also committed to raising hell, and although she and Godfrey share a past that she tries desperately to reignite, her antics send him scurrying away, leaving her more isolated than ever.

Lily drinks, cavorts, swears and doesn’t work. She is the unrequited yin to Godfrey’s yang of a consuming need for order and answers. Both are chasing salvation as they try to manage their grief and rage. After Lily goes too far one night, giving Godfrey a kiss which he miserably admits does tempt him, Godfrey disappears for three days, leaving Lily and the girls to fend for themselves.

He returns with Gerte (a terrific Bridgette Hayes), a white German refugee whom he met on the subway and introduces as his wife. He believes he is following Father Divine’s advice to move forward with his life. It’s unclear whether the girls are more unhappy that she’s white or that their father married so soon after their mother’s death. Lily sinks deeper into drinking, humiliated and devastated that Godfrey couldn’t/wouldn’t marry her instead.

Clueless about racial tensions in America but delighted to have found an American husband, Gerte’s one saving grace is the love for movies she shares with the girls. In her dreams, she hungers to be Marlene Dietrich, and the scenes that allow Hayes to channel that persona are a welcome respite and among the play’s most engaging.

Nottage plods on, addressing a myriad of social, political and emotional issues while keeping us in the loop as time marches on for the Crumps. Every member of the family eventually runs smack into the reality of how the color of their skin interferes with their pursuit of the American Dream. Change and revolution may be in the wings, but they are not here yet and they will be traveling hand-in-hand with pain and fear. In the meantime, each Crump must cope in their own way, through action, fantasies, faith and anesthetics.

Director Tasia A. Jones gives us a straightforward version of ‘Crumbs’ and, while Cristina Todesco’s set design and Eduardo Ramirez’s lighting design work well as the action hops from living room to subway car to Ernestine’s movie fantasies, the production lacks coherency, urgency, and intimacy. We want to understand Ernestine and what makes her tick, but her monologues, monotone, and static blocking keep us at arm’s length.

‘Crumbs’ is worth seeing for its solid ensemble and stand-out performances, its homage to the 1950s, and, most of all, for providing a reason to appreciate how far Lynn Nottage has traveled in her 30-year career.

‘Crumbs from The Table Of Joy.’ Written by Lynn Nottage. Directed by Tasia A. Jones. Sound Design by Aubrey Dube. Costume Design by Mikayla Reid. Scenic Design by Cristina Todesco. Lighting Design by Eduardo Ramirez. Produced by Lyric Stage at 140 Clarendon Street, 2nd Floor, Boston, through February 2nd.

For more information and tickets, visit: https://www.lyricstage.com/

Flight 1619 Finally Lifts Off in SpeakEasy/Front Porch’s Ambitious ‘Ain’t No Mo’

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Cast of SpeakEasy/Front Porch’s ‘Ain’t No Mo’ Photos: Nile Scott Studios
MaConnia Chesser, Kiera Prusmack, De’Lon Grant, Schanaya Barrows, and Dru Sky Berrian.

By Shelley A. Sackett

Jordan E. Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo is a complicated, uneven, scathing, audacious, and hilarious rollercoaster ride of a play. It covers a lot of ground, and Cooper dips his pen into the inkwell of every genre known to playwrights: from satire, allegory, fiction, and parody to tragedy and Shakespeare-worthy soliloquy.

Performed as a series of loosely connected vignettes that sometimes change at whiplash speed during 100 intermission-less minutes, this SpeakEasy Stage Company/Front Porch Arts Collective production is guaranteed to spark lively post-theater discussion.

Here’s the premise.

In 2016, with the election of Donald Trump and the end of Barack Obama’s presidency and its promise of Hope and Equality, African Americans descended from slaves are offered a one-way ticket “home” to Dakar, Senegal. A “dedicated observer of equal oppression,” African American Airlines’ Flight 1619 is in the house, or the White House to be more precise. Whether to stay and live life as it is in this country or leave on the “Reparations Flight” and start anew is each individual’s choice.

The government expects this will solve the problem of racism in America once and for all. Almost all eligible Blacks (millions) register to take advantage of the free flight.

What Cooper does with this simple premise, however, is staggering in terms of its brazenness and sheer creative genius. Director Dawn M. Simmons executes with full-throated flamboyance and exaggeration.

The six-actor ensemble switches into many roles easily, aided by Rachel Padula-Shufelt’s fabulous costume design and wig choices. Mac Young’s set design is both flexible and exacting, flowing smoothly between very different settings. Aja M. Jackson’s lighting design and Aubrey Dube’s sound design help create a unifying aesthetic for the show’s differing segments.

Cooper’s no-holds-barred approach is evidenced full blast even before the house lights are fully dimmed. The mild-mannered recording that announces where exits are and what to do in case of an emergency is suddenly interrupted by Peaches, the Flight 1619 airport gate attendant.

Grant Evan

“Ladies, gentleman, and those who don’t give a damn. Welcome yo ass to The Roberts Theater. Yessss, we in Boston, bitch! It’s ‘bout time to get this thing started, so I hope you had enough sense and shat before you sat,” she shouts into the sound system.

The rest of the play, which starts with the election of President Obama and ends with Flight 1619 taking off, traces the Black American experience with scenes Cooper chooses to exemplify that jumbled, complicated, painful journey. Like a book of loosely connected short stories, each scene functions independently, yet, taken together, they weave a single cloth.

What unites them is their characters’ reactions to news of the subsidized flight to Africa. Will they stay or leave? And, more importantly, why?

The action opens with “Book of Revelation,” a bang-up of a funeral led by Pastor Freeman (played with over-the-top verve by a terrific De’Lon Grant). It is November 4, 2008, and the Black community has gathered to celebrate Obama’s election and lay Brother Righttocomplain, the embodiment of protest and injustice, to rest.

“Ain’t no mo’ shot down dreams with its blood soaking the concrete,” Freeman bellows. “Ain’t no mo’ riots.”

Now that a Black president has been elected, the unrealistic assumption is that centuries of racism and discrimination will suddenly be reversed and a new era of promise will be escorted in.

The joy and celebration is short-lived. After this gospel-infused scene, the mood and time shifts to 2016 and the election of Trump. White backlash against black Americans and ginned-up fear and resentment will set the next agenda.

Between each plotted scene, we witness morsels of what Peaches (a scene-stealing non-binary Grant Evan) is dealing with as the sole check-in agent for Flight 1619. A larger-than-life drag queen who wears a hot pink wig, Kente scarf, and model airplane-adorned tiara; her role is the play’s only constant through a series of sketches and settings.

She checks in various passengers and offers counsel to those who are hesitant. She also prepares Miss Bag, a suitcase she claims holds “our entire story as a people in this country,” and encourages passengers to drop their stories in the bag so they may bring it to Africa. She warns those who stay behind will be subjected to “extreme racial transmogrification” by “The Powers That Be”: they will be turned into white people.

The audience comes to trust her voice and feel her frustration and angst as she single-handedly supervises boarding millions. She is the reliable narrator, part mother hen and part Greek chorus.

Dru Sky Berrian, MaConnia Chesser, Kiera Prusmack, and Schanaya Barrows

With “Circle of Life,” Cooper tackles the heartbreak of young lives ended by violence and police brutality and the unwillingness of Trisha (Dru Sky Berrian), pregnant by Damien (Grant), to bring a future victim into the world. “A better time is coming. We just have to wait for it,” Damien assures her. Despite his pleas, she is adamant. So are the million other women in line at the Sister Girl We Slay All Day Cause Beyonce Say Community Center, a clinic oasis in a country where abortions are no longer available. Trisha is Number 73,545.

“Real Baby Mamas of the South Side” is a parody of the Real Housewives franchise. This one focused on four black women pretending to have multiple baby daddies and an obsequious host who keeps the provocation flowing. One panelist isn’t even black but is “transracial,’ white Rachel dressed as black Rachonda, “choosing to be herself” and “living her truth” as a black woman.

Tracy, another panelist, breaks character and confronts her. “Race is not a choice. It’s a fact,” she states. Unlike the Rachondas of the world, her skin and the experiences that come with it are NOT optional.

Here, and at many other times, Cooper squanders an opportunity to dig deep into some meaty issues like exploitation, appropriation, stereotyping, ownership, protection of black culture and the tipping point between the humorous and the hateful. Instead, he takes the easy way out, letting the scene devolve into a catfight, leaving the audience unsatisfied and his craftsmanship in question.

In “Green” and “Untitled Prison Play,” Cooper makes his point with more clarity and self-discipline. Each scene features Maconnia Chesser, who anchors and elevates them. In “Green,” Cooper lampoons rich black families who – in this case literally — buried their blackness and partook in the material rewards of assimilation. They have no intention of going anywhere, certainly not to Africa. They have bought into the American Dream, despite its hefty price tag. This is now their America, too.

Chesser plays Black, the human personification of their family’s “blackness,” locked away in the basement by the family’s deceased patriarch for forty years while he became rich. Suddenly, she is set free. She has a lot to say. And she is pissed off.

“Now is the chance to learn who you really are,” she tells them. “I am your family’s black. Come on, we have a plane to catch.” Instead, they plead, threaten and eventually try to shove her back into the basement. No way is this Pandora going back into her box.

Again, the scene devolves into chaos and violence, and again, we are left unsure what point Cooper was trying to make and why.

In “Untitled Prison Play,” the play’s most moving scene, Chesser plays an inmate who can’t leave prison without signing for her possessions and who won’t sign until everything she had when first incarcerated is accounted for and returned. What she’s missing are her joy and a little piece of chaotic peace. Her name. Her place on earth. And, most of all, her smile. Her real smile.

But her choice is stark. Refuse to sign and return to her cell or leave and find herself some new stuff. Like Freedom.

Flight 1619 does finally takes off, but not before Peaches brings down the house with a lightning bolt monologue. There are even last-minute spoilers and pyrotechnics.

When Cooper started Ain’t No Mo, he was just a high school student. Its genesis was in reaction to an incident of police intimidation that rocked and changed him. Its Off-Broadway premiere happened when he was just 24 years old and three years later, Cooper became the youngest Black American to make his Broadway playwriting debut and the youngest Black American playwright ever nominated for a Tony Award. Ain’t No Mo garnered six nominations, including Best Drama, despite its closing after a mere three-week run.

To be sure, Cooper’s play is hardly flawless. It is dated and full of platitudes, pacing issues, and tiresome, gratuitous expletives. It is also in dire need of judicious breadth and length editing.

But Cooper’s pen is a magic wand as well, spinning a smart, confident and grand play out of an undisciplined galaxy of issues and ideas. And when the smoke clears and the stage finally quiets, we’re surprised by the number of important questions left rolling around in our minds, like party favors.

Kiera Prusmack and MaConnia Chesser

If Miss Bag is the “carrier of our entire story as a people in this country” — the music, art, culture, political ideas, and everything else Blacks have contributed to the American landscape — should it travel to a new destination? Will it reassimilate or hold its owners back, married to an old reality while trying to forge a new one?

When émigrés board a plane, for example, perhaps with just one bag, what do they leave behind? What does the country they leave lose? And after they leave, whose story is theirs to tell? What do we do when the story is over? Perhaps, most importantly, where does freedom fit in if its price is a future without a past?

And these questions are just for starters.

‘Ain’t No Mo’.’ Written by Jordan E. Cooper. Directed by Dawn M. Simmons. Co-produced by SpeakEasy Stage and Front Porch Arts Collective at the Calderwood Pavilion, 527 Tremont Street, through February 8.

For more information and to buy tickets, visit https://speakeasystage.com/shows/2025/01/aint-no-mo/

‘Every Brilliant Thing’ at Apollinaire Theatre Co. Delivers On Its Promise

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Cristhian Mancinas-Garcia and Parker Jennings in ‘Every Brilliant Thing’ at Apollinaire. Photos by Danielle Fauteux Jacques

By Shelley A. Sackett

A one-person show about suicide and depression that threatens random audience participation, runs for approximately 75 intermission-less minutes, and pledges to be funny and uplifting has a pretty high bar to clear. Yet, Apollinaire Theatre Company does just that with room to spare in its brilliant production of Every Brilliant Thing.

The play’s narrator, the irrepressible Parker Jennings (alternating the role with Cristhian Mancinas-Garcia, who also performs it in Spanish), is already standing in the middle of the stage when even the earliest audience member arrives. As if welcoming them into her own living room, she greets them warmly with an unaffected smile and a blue basket full of cards.

“I have a job for you all this evening,” she exclaims as she hands out the numbered cards with instructions to shout out what is written whenever she says that number.

Set in the round in an intimate black-box space that is furnished with comfortable salon-like seating, Jennings’ rapport with the audience is immediate and palpable. Upbeat jazz and full house lights heighten the sense of communal conversation. Before she has uttered her first line, she has us in the palm of her hand, making us feel like we’re here by design rather than happenstance.

“The list began after her first attempt,” she begins. “A list of everything brilliant about the world. Everything worth living for.”

The first call and response quickly follows. “Number One,” she says, and the person holding that card shouts out, “Ice cream.” Number two is water fights. Three is staying up past your bedtime and being allowed to watch TV. Any flicker of stage fright or self-consciousness has completely evaporated. We are in this together.

In an instant, Jennings the Narrator has morphed into the seven-year-old girl who, after learning that her mother attempted suicide, vows to make her mother feel better by making a list of everything that makes life worth living and sharing it with her. This coping exercise will see her through the next several decades and, by the end of the play, will number one million.

Her first encounter with death (“a loved one becoming an object”) and the first audience-supporting role (as the vet) occurs when she has to put down her beloved dog. Jennings’ improvisational chops and talent for putting the audience at ease are on full display. Other interactive roles will include her father, teacher, school counselor, and first love/wife.

Her second encounter with the idea of death occurs when her father picks her up from school after her mother’s first suicide attempt. He explains to the little girl that her mother is in the hospital because she is sad, because she couldn’t think of anything worth living for.

The precocious child intuits the concept of glimmers, the opposites of triggers. These are small experiences of pleasure that happen during simple, everyday activities. Noticing and appreciating them can cue your nervous system that you’re safe and can relax.

She devotes her life to crafting a list of every brilliant thing she can think of, first in an attempt to save her mother and later for herself, as she navigates her own journey of hills and valleys and, poignantly, fear that her mother’s mental illness tributary runs through her veins as well. As time moves on, the list becomes a sort of diary that reflects the texture of her everyday experiences.

“Things may not always get brilliant, but they get better,” she says. “We need to imagine a future better than the past because that’s what hope is and without hope, life isn’t worth living.”

Thanks to Joseph Lark-Riley’s carefully curated sound design, the significance of blues and jazz also runs deeply. These songs and artists link the Narrator to her vinyl-loving dad and tether her. Lyrics from “Drown In My Own Tears,” “I Love You Just the Way You Are” and “At Last” are more than toe-tapping background; they are placeholders and place setters that connect us to our narrator and her story. It’s no surprise that one of the items on her list is: “A song transporting you back to a moment in time.”

The tone and substance of Duncan Macmillan’s script (written with Johnny Donahoe, a British stand-up comedian who first played the role at the Ludlow Fringe Festival in 2013) covers a lot of ground. The Narrator’s ability to confront issues as heartwrenching as the guilt felt by children of suicides, social contagions, and the virulence of hard-wired, chronic depression with playfulness, insight, and unflinching honesty prevents the play from becoming mawkish, which easily could have happened if penned by a less skillful and empathetic playwright.

Danielle Fauteux Jacques wisely directs with a light touch, and Jennings shoulders the production with chipper verve and a storyteller’s charm. Yet, she also brings an emotional intelligence to her performance, the shadow of a veil that, when lifted, reveals the scars of underlying trauma. Most recently seen as Sarah in Apollinaire’s equally extraordinary “Touching the Void” last May, Jennings is an actress I would (and did) go out of my way to catch in any role she should take on. Her energy, authenticity and confidence are matched only by her raw talent.

As the play winds down, the Narrator’s list takes on a life of its own as an ersatz crowdsourced lifeline, publicly shared and collaboratively complied. Although the list couldn’t save her mother, it may just have prevented her from following in her footsteps. She leaves us collectively more open-hearted and open-minded with the balm of these parting words of benediction: “If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once having felt crushingly depressed, then you probably haven’t been paying attention.”

‘Every Brilliant Thing’. Written by Duncan Macmillan with Johnny Donahoe. Directed by Danielle Fauteux Jacques. Scenic and Sound Design by Joseph Lark-Riley. Lighting Design by Danielle Fauteux Jacques. Produced by Apollinaire Theatre Company at Chelsea Theatre Works, 189 Winnisimmet St, Chelsea, MA through January 19th.

For more information and to buy tickets, visit apollinairetheatre.com

Peabody Essex Museum showcases centuries-old Flemish art and artifacts

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Michaelina Wautier, “Everyone to His Taste,” circa 1650. Oil on canvas. © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp.

By Shelley A. Sackett

SALEM – Between the early 1400s and late 1600s, the area in Northern Belgium now known as Flanders was embroiled in war, plagues, and religious upheaval. Ruled by Spain, borders shifted regularly and the reigning Catholic archdukes tried to stem Protestant encroachment. Most Flemish art served religious or political purposes, created for royalty and clergy to hang in palaces and churches.

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem is showcasing the artistic renaissance of the period in “Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks,” a major exhibition of paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts on view through May 4.

Jewish life during this time was marked by its own history of persecution, expulsion, and ultimately, a muted religious freedom. Jews who had refused conversion to Christianity in Spain were expelled or killed by the Catholic monarchs during the Inquisition of 1492. Some fled to Portugal, where they were able to live as Marranos (also known as crypto-Jews, or Jews who converted to Christianity but secretly practiced Judaism). Many became merchants, trading in Iberian commodities.

Jews were drawn to the port city of Antwerp – then part of Portugal – a hub of international commerce. There, they played a key role in the city’s economy as non-citizens who could practice their trade, if not their religion.


By the 1600s, Flanders was flourishing, awash in the unprecedented wealth that global trade brought through ports such as Antwerp. Other major cosmopolitan cities, including Ghent and Bruges, became influential centers for a new bracket of business and intellectual elites. A modern civil society emerged, where a free market allowed all entrepreneurs to elevate themselves above their station and control their own fate.


Life was good for this rising middle class, and for the first time, Flemish artists and craftsmen had a new market for their works, one fueled by the tastes and appetites of these nouveau consumers rather than by the political needs of reigning royal and religious power.

These Flemish Renaissance painters radically changed European art and generated a booming commercial market, the first in European history. It is in homage to these artists that Peabody Essex Museum hosts this exhibition. Co-organized by the Denver Art Museum and the Phoebus Foundation in Antwerp – now in Belgium – it features rarely exhibited masterpieces by Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Hans Memling, Jan Gossaert, Jan Brueghel, Clara Peeters, Jacob Jordaens, Frans Francken, and Michaelina Wautier, among many others.

The extensive exhibit is carved into seven sections that break 300 years of tumultuous Flemish tumultuous history into discrete areas of intense focus. Wisely, the exhibit starts with “This Is Flanders,” geographically grounding the viewer. Maps and an introductory video are both helpful.

“God Is in the Details,” the largest section, displays devotional art earmarked for both private and public prayerful use. The Catholic Church was the biggest commissioner – and displayer – of these religious paintings. Pensive religious hymns echo through the gallery, complementing the display.

With “New Perspectives,” the subject matter and style shifts from the rigidly iconic and religious to richer, freer artistic compositions of landscapes, still lifes, and portraits that capture the personality of both subject and artist.

“Everyone to His Taste,” by Michaelina Wautier (circa 1650), is a luminescent painting of a boy trying to take an egg from another. It illustrates the proverb, “To each his fancy, but sharing is best.” Wautier is one of four female artists represented in the exhibit.

Innovations of all sorts are highlighted and heralded. Artistic and scientific inventions, such as oil painting and bird dissection, were invented in Flanders and influenced how artists depicted the body. As new genres emerged in the 1600s, Flanders became a center for experimentation by curious scientists, engineers, physicians, botanists, cartographers, and humanists.

“Fool in the Mirror” is a section full of whimsical, clever scenes that, while humorous and irreverent, caution Flanders’ wealthy citizens that although living a Dionysian life of excess may feel good, they should beware of crossing the ever-present line that would prevent them from getting into heaven. These cautionary messages hint at the importance – and challenge – of maintaining pious and humble lives in the face of such sudden immense wealth.

Jan Massijs, Rebus: The World Feeds Many Fools, about 1530. Oil on panel. © The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp

“Rebus: The World Feeds Many Fools” by Jan Massijs (circa 1530) is a showstopper in this section. It is also a rebus word puzzle the artist has challenged the viewer to solve. All the rage in the 1500s, a rebus is a device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. Massijs’s rebus has hints and even the answer displayed beside it.

The last section, “Cabinets of Wonder,” pays tribute to the collections of “curiosities” Flanders’s individuals amassed to both reflect their wealth and connections and also possess a microcosm of the world in miniature. PEM’s “Wünderkammer Gallery” evokes these 17th century cabinets, which are full of such seemingly random items as cauliflower coral, a skull-shaped pendant, and a stuffed ostrich. More than 100 objects hail from Africa, Australia, Brazil, China, Indonesia, and Japan.

A selection of natural and man-made wonders in the Saints, Sinners, Lovers, Fools cabinet of wonders at PEM

There are two omissions from the exhibit. One is deliberate and due in part to lack of space. Although Brussels was the principal center for tapestry weaving at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, a bias toward painting existed both then and in the collection on display at PEM.

The other omission is any mention of the crypto-Jews who fled the persecutions and expulsions in the Iberian Peninsula and the key roles they played in cultivating Antwerp’s economic preeminence by helping develop the important diamond, pearl, and commodities industries.