Category: Theater

When considering whether to take on his latest role, Ken Leung found himself consumed by “a nausea-inducing fear.”

“Not an intellectual fear — like, a physical thing,” he specifies. “And I was like, ’What is this? What’s going on?’… I think something in that means I’ve got to do it. You’re called by the play.”

The role in question was Basil, a salt truck driver in “Evanston Salt Costs Climbing.” Basil’s boisterous energy and sunny optimism run counter to his job of salting the roads during bone-chilling Chicago winters — and, as we learn later in the play, is a coping mechanism masking some inner demons. From playwright Will Arbery, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” the play follows Basil, his co-worker Peter (Jeb Kreager), their boss Jane Maiworm (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) and her daughter Jane Jr. (Rachel Sachnoff), through three consecutive winters.

Reading the play, Leung wasn’t sure what to make of it. On the page, the stage directions and character descriptions are sparse. It’s only as it unfolds that the darkly comedic play reveals itself to be about a lot of things, from the climate crisis to local government gridlock to depression and suicide.

Leung’s overwhelming fear of the play’s ambition kept calling out to him — and is still there in every performance. Directed by Danya Taymor and produced by the New Group, it’s running through Dec. 18 at the Pershing Square Signature Center in New York.

“Every day, I wake up and it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s a show day. How is this going to go?’ Even though we’ve done it for weeks, every performance is its own child,” Leung says. He returns to the metaphor throughout our conversation. “Every child is different and has different needs. So it’s to really be here with tonight’s child. And since it’s a child, it may pull different things out of you to care for it.”

“It’s never not scary,” he continued. “And then you think about it from the child’s point of view. Everyone is scared of me all the time. It’s like, ‘I just need someone to tell me a story. And everyone is scared.’ So when you think of it that way, you’re like, ‘There’s no thinking involved.’ It’s like, ‘OK, I’m going to jump off the cliff with you, especially since you chose me. Fuck it, whatever happens, let’s go.’”

You wouldn’t know there’s fear involved because there’s a confidence and boldness Leung brings to every role, big or small. It’s especially evident on the fantastic HBO drama “Industry,” where he stars as Eric Tao, a veteran stock trader at the London office of investment bank Pierpoint and a mentor (and sometimes-toxic boss) to young trader Harper Stern (Myha’la Herrold).

Listening to Leung talk about acting is a reminder of how seasoned he is, someone who is both clearly very present, but has also thought a lot about where he’s been and where he wants to go. At 52, he’s one of those actors who has made a career out of playing often small but memorable parts in big things, like his breakout role as Sang, the platinum blond-haired villain of 1998’s “Rush Hour.” You’ve probably seen him in something, maybe without even realizing it. He’s Jesse Eisenberg’s therapist in Noah Baumbach’s divorce dramedy “The Squid and the Whale,” and one of Clive Owen’s hostages in Spike Lee’s bank heist thriller “Inside Man.” He’s mastered the art of elevating seemingly minor characters, like on an episode of the final season of “The Sopranos” as Carter Chong, who befriends Junior (Dominic Chianese) when both are patients at a psychiatric facility. That part led to three seasons as Miles Straume on ABC’s “Lost,” among his dozens of film and TV credits over the last 30 years.

2022 has been a big year for him, with meatier roles befitting his long and rich career, like on “Industry” — and now with “Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,” his first time doing theater in 20 years.

“I didn’t know if I could. I was like, ‘Oh, do I have a screen mind now? Am I going to be able to do eight shows a week and keep it fresh and all this?’” Leung said. “But ultimately, I decided I wanted to be brave more than I was scared of it. So often, that is the thing that tells you that you should do something: If you have a strong feeling of it one way or the other. Sometimes, it’s fear. And so, those are the things, I think, you should think twice about moving away from. Maybe you should move towards it.”

The role first came about when Arbery, whom he had never met, reached out to him out of the blue. “He wrote this letter to me that was ... it didn’t feel like we didn’t know each other,” Leung remembers.

That ineffable sense of kinship is also part of the special sauce that coalesced into making “Industry.” The first time he met Herrold before filming the show’s first season, “it was like we were meeting again, it was like we knew each other. And there was a comfort. And one could ask, ‘Well then, what is that?’ And I don’t know. Some people you feel that with.”

It’s similar to the dynamic their characters share. Eric and Harper are bonded because they’re outsiders on several fronts: two Americans in London, and a Black woman and an Asian American man in a very white profession, both accustomed to being overlooked and underestimated. Watching their dynamic unfold and the way Leung and Herrold play it, their bond doesn’t need to be articulated — it just is.

“We try to explain it, and then we’re like, ‘Oh, well, it must be because they’re outsiders. Oh, well, it must be because they’re similarly marginalized’ — this and that, all this intellectual connecting of dots,” Leung said. “But sometimes, it’s just two people seeing themselves in each other or recognizing something. That first interview, I think Eric saw something of himself in her, in a way that he’s never seen and did not expect to. Maybe that’s part of it, too, the not expecting to, that makes you go: ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. I thought I had this all figured out. I didn’t.’”

In the last scene of the show’s electrifying Season 2 finale in September, Harper’s recklessness, including forging her college transcript, finally catches up with her. After Pierpoint’s HR department discovers the ethical breach, Eric is forced to fire her. In some ways, it felt like a shocking betrayal: Each of them had previously protected each other at various points, and Eric already knew about Harper’s fabricated credentials.

But when Leung read the script, Eric’s move didn’t come as a surprise. As the two ascend the elevator, a nervous Eric leads Harper into the meeting room where only he knows what’s about to happen, and he tells her: “I’m doing this for you.”

“He did it to protect her, which I wonder if that will … it must be addressed when we do Season 3,” Leung said, adding later that production on the new season is expected to begin next April.

It’s all a reminder that as much as you try to analyze something, sometimes it’s better to trust your intuition and let whatever’s already there lead you to the answer. For instance, in his initial approach to understanding Eric as a character, “I started off taking big swings.” (When I point out that, early in Season 1, Eric literally carries around a baseball bat on the trading floor, Leung laughs heartily. “I wasn’t thinking of that! But yes, that’s perfect! It’s actually more perfect than the way I had anticipated to say it.”)

To make up for his unfamiliarity with the world of finance, Leung thought he should read about it and talk to people familiar with that world. Eventually, he realized his character would not react that way.

“Eric is the one who says what’s what. So he’s the opposite of going, ‘I’m missing this. Where do I find it?’ He has everything,” Leung said. “So once that flipped, it helped me go in, and I was like, ‘You know what? I don’t know stuff because that stuff is not important. I don’t know stuff because I say I don’t need to know stuff.’”

Leung’s decisions about these roles found him, rather than the other way around. Similarly, it seems like acting found him. A native New Yorker born to Chinese immigrant parents, Leung recalls that as a kid, he had a penchant for performance, describing how he would give “little shows if we had visitors.” He also did a running bit of imitating a newscaster giving the weather report, to the delight of his dad. “He’d be like, ‘Do the news,’” Leung remembered. “I was a very performative child.”

In college at NYU, he fell into acting by happenstance. In a required course called Speech Communication, “we had to write skits and perform them,” Leung said. “I really loved that part, and a classmate noticed that I did. He was like, ‘Ah, you should take Intro to Acting.’”

When he signed up for the class the next semester, it was like finally finding the thing he didn’t even know he needed. “It’s almost like it raised me. It gave me a way to learn how to be a person: how to talk, how to feel things, how to have a person in front of you and what to do,” he said.

One day in class, he performed a scene from the movie “Ordinary People,” when Conrad (Timothy Hutton) goes on a date. “I had not gone on any dates prior to that. My first date was an acted date. I think that serves as a good kind of explanation for what I got out of it,” Leung said. “You don’t have to worry about the words — you’re given the words. You put all your heart and curiosity and attention into this, on how to be present with somebody else, under just all kinds of circumstances. And so I feel that it raised me in a way, it parented me in a way.”

“It’s not even something that I was like, ‘Oh, I’m interested in this, let me dabble in this.’ It was like, ‘I think I really need this as a person,’” he continued.

When it came time to tell his parents he had decided to be an actor, it didn’t even elicit a face-to-face conversation — reinforcing why he needed the emotional and visceral connection he got from acting. At first, he tried to break the news over dinner.

“Nothing. No acknowledgment that I even said something,” Leung recalled. “I think my dad walked out of the room and was pacing in a room where I couldn’t see him. That was the reaction. I was like, ‘OK, they need this explained to them a little bit. How else am I going to do that?’”

He wrote his parents a letter and left for a couple of days to “let them absorb the letter. And then I came back and it was late, everyone was presumably asleep. I was going to sneak back into my room. Then, I hear my dad’s voice: ‘I read your letter.’”

“It was never this,” he continued, pointing at our faces on our respective Zoom screens. “Never saw him. He had the conversation with me obscured in his room. That’s how we had the conversation. I just heard his voice, just talked to his voice. Actually, I didn’t do any talking. I was like, ‘I know what’s coming. I’m going to be rock solid. Say what you want.’ And my dad’s take was, ‘That’s great,’ but predictably — and not wrongly, now that I’m a parent — that you should have something to fall back on.”

At that moment, Leung needed to feel emotionally connected, understood and acknowledged. Instead, his dad wouldn’t even speak to him directly and seemed to dismiss acting as just “a hobby I found.”

“Maybe if he had acknowledged that a child needs to feel that they are heard first before they can take the next step — not even a child, just a person — you need to feel you’re seen first,” he continued. “And then, my mom came out afterwards crying, just crying, just crying. Didn’t even add anything to the conversation. Went to the bathroom, cried in the bathroom, came out, went back into the bedroom, still crying. Yeah, that’s how it went.”

Having found something that spoke so deeply to him, Leung was determined to make acting work “for as long as it will have me,” he said. “I didn’t even know what expectations to have. I mean, I said yes to whatever said yes to me.”

There was a lot of experimental theater and odd jobs, like approximating a French accent for a play about Thomas Jefferson and his French friend Pierre that Leung and his co-star performed for schoolkids — carrying a board that served as the scenery, which they would unfurl at each school. A turning point came in 1996, when he was cast in the play “Flipzoids” opposite Ching Valdes-Aran and Mia Katigbak, two veterans of New York’s Asian American theater community. Written by Ralph Peña, now the artistic director of the Ma-Yi Theater Company, it was a demanding piece, following three Filipino American characters of different generations grappling with questions about identity.

During its run, Leung had his audition for “Rush Hour.” He went with the same platinum blond hair required for his part in “Flipzoids,” which he suspects must have helped him land that big Hollywood break. The experience of being plunged directly into a massive movie taught Leung not to get hung up on Hollywood as “a big shiny object” but to just focus on the work, he said.

Getting cast on “The Sopranos” was another major career moment. “That was a turning point of trusting myself, I think, looking back, because I went into the audition — he’s in a mental institution, so I went in with a condition. And I remember getting the callback. They were like, ‘OK, that’s not at all what we were thinking about, but we loved that you went there,’” he said. “I think that gave me a kind of throwing caution to the wind-ness that served me from then on, a kind of trust.”

That self-confidence allowed him to rid himself of the “you’re just lucky to be there” mentality, an all-too-familiar feeling for Asian Americans in creative professions.

“The instinct, when ‘you’re lucky to be somewhere,’ is to fit in, to not upset the cart. There suddenly becomes a right and wrong way to do stuff. Everything that kills acting comes into play. Acting is not a polite profession. You have to take leaps off cliffs,” Leung said. “The very natural, almost unavoidable, inevitable instinct to do the right thing — I think it has taken our community, I don’t know how long it’s been, to shake ourselves out of that. I think we have now. Now, we’re saying, ‘Fuck you, we’ll do our own shit.’ And that was a journey to get here. Thankfully, we’re not there anymore.”

Like many Asian American actors, Leung has gotten a lot of unoriginal scripts over the years, with lazy tropes and barely any lines, like playing the “menacing triad boss” or “the information giver.” “There came a point where I didn’t want to do something anybody could do. Why ask me? This guy is just saying: ‘He went that way.’ Get anybody!” Leung said.

“To this day, once in a while, I will get a script that I swear I have read 20 years ago, word for word,” he continued. “It’s almost like they use computer software to spit out these scripts.”

Even now, with the success of “Industry,” he’s seeing the effects of Hollywood’s risk aversion again, getting offered variations of Eric. “You play something, you’re gonna get asked to do stuff that’s similar. That’s so annoying. Why would I just want to come now and take off my suit, walk into the next room and put on another suit? Why do I want to do that? You know why? Because it sells. Because we know people bought it in this room, we predict that people will buy it in that room,” he said. “Why are we in a creative field? We could sell things, make things, put them on shelves and sell them. Why do it in a profession that conjures our dreams and imagination? But yeah, it’s frustrating sometimes.”

Leung’s audition for “Industry” came during the crapshoot that is TV pilot season — he recalls it might have been one of multiple auditions he had on the same day. But unlike most of the pilot scripts he’d read, there was something distinctive there, a product of “Industry” creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s lived experiences as former bankers.

“It felt real. I think because of the nature of pilots, you’re not just telling a story. You’re trying to sell the story, and you want to capture interest fast. That’s the theory going in, anyway. And so, that results in scripts often that kind of skew that way and don’t feel so real. Characters are drawn with sharp, broad strokes because we want to know right away. And sometimes that’s fun and sometimes it’s pushing. It’s often pushing, actually,” Leung said. “And this script didn’t feel that way at all. This felt like you were dropped in the middle of a slice of something that was living. And that comes from Konrad and Mickey. They know this world.”

Throughout our conversation, there’s a theme of following whatever feeling is calling out to you and trusting your intuition — even, or maybe especially, when it’s hard. “You can’t mastermind a path in this profession. You don’t know enough. There’s just too many variables,” Leung said. “To hearken back to the play, go with that thing that you can’t explain. Lean into the mystical, lean into that which there’s no precedent for it.”

Every night on stage, Leung is leaning into that ineffable feeling. “Before every performance, I sit on the wings 10, 15 minutes before the play. I try to feel the audience coming in, feel just the energy in the room, and it grounds me, to a degree,” he said. “And if I start there, start with these specific people who came, the specific energy tonight, which is unlike last night or any other night, will never happen again, start there and then, OK, go here and it will take me.”

He’ll often pay attention to the audience’s laughs and silences, which can be totally different each night. At certain points, the play acknowledges the audience as a participant, whether we realize it or not.

“You are here, we are here with you. We’re talking about stuff that affects all of us. So let’s be in this room together with that,” Leung said. “Yes, we don’t know what it is. Yes, we don’t know what words to use for it. There’s no correct way to do it. Let’s just be in the room with the unknown and unknowable. See what happens. Maybe nothing will happen. But let’s see what happens.”

In Broadway’s “The Cottage,” Laura Bell Bundy plays a 1920s British woman who — through a series of saucy, sexy and deliberately melodramatic events — comes to realize that happiness can be found on her own and without the companionship of a man.

Much like her character, Bundy is relishing the excitement of kicking off a new chapter. “The Cottage” marks the Tony-nominated actor’s return to Broadway after 15 years and her first time on the New York stage in a straight play rather than a musical.

In 2021, Bundy moved back to the East Coast after a collective 13 years in Nashville and Los Angeles in hopes of making her pursuit of such theatrical stints less taxing on her husband, television producer Thom Hinkle, and their 4-year-old son, Huck.

And when she took her bow alongside “The Cottage” co-stars Lilli Cooper, Eric McCormack, Nehal Joshi, Alex Moffat and Dana Steingold for the first time at the Helen Hayes Theatre in July, she knew she’d made the right decision.

“This was a great way for me to see: Can I fit Broadway into my mom life? Does my mom life fit into Broadway? How does this work? It was a little experiment,” Bundy, whose credits include FX’s “Anger Management” as well as the stage adaptations of “Hairspray” and “Legally Blonde,” told HuffPost. “There’s been some adjustments I’ve had to make, and we’ve had to make as a family, but we’ve done it. I think we’ve figured it out.”

Written by Sandy Rustin, “The Cottage” follows Sylvia (played by Bundy), who is in the throes of post-coital bliss after enjoying a once-a-year rendezvous in the English countryside with Beau (McCormack), her married lover and, as it turns out, her brother-in-law.

On a whim, she decides to inform her husband, Clarke (Moffat), and Beau’s wife, Marjorie (Cooper), of their indiscretions. Unfortunately for Sylvia, Clarke and Marjorie have a few secrets of their own, as do Deirdre (Steingold) and Richard (Joshi), who are linked to the foursome in some unexpected ways.

Just how Sylvia works her way out of this conundrum shouldn’t be spoiled, but Bundy loved the “beautiful feminist message” her character’s actions relay.

Watch a clip from “The Cottage” below.

“Women are horny creatures in this, and no one is judging them,” she said. “Many people who will see this play aren’t ready for any messages about feminism and leave thinking, ‘I had so much fun,’ but they’ve learned something about how a woman sees herself in the world. They don’t know they’re eating their vegetables because it’s all chocolate-covered.”

As for Rustin, she knew she’d found a kindred spirit in Bundy — who, in 2020, released “Women of Tomorrow,” an album of songs depicting a fantasy future of the feminist movement — instantly.

The New Jersey-based playwright first wrote “The Cottage” a decade ago, in hopes of “exploring great female characters” in a Noël Coward and Oscar Wilde-style situational comedy she’d planned to star in as an actor. After a number of regional stagings, she began sharpening the play’s pro-feminist message ― and felt even more compelled to do so after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.

“Obviously our world has changed dramatically in the last 10 years,” she said. “After the 2016 election, I took another look, and I thought: ‘Yes, these women existed 100 years ago, but is what they wanted so different from what we want today?’ And I think the answer is no.”

She went on to note: “Much of the work that I’ve done in the past five to eight years has been finding subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, ways to weave in the strength of the female voice throughout this play and steep in the comedy of this era.”

Both Bundy and Rustin credit director and “comedy guru” Jason Alexander with keeping the play grounded in a sense of reality, despite its many farcical elements.

“We both have a love of broad comedy, so we understood each other well,” Bundy said of the “Seinfeld” veteran. “I trusted him, and I felt like I had the freedom to explore, and if I struggled with how to make something funny, he always knew how to solve it.”

Added Rustin: “He’s made a career out of studying comedy. So to have his perspective, and his experience in the rehearsal room was invaluable.”

At present, “The Cottage” is slated to run on Broadway through Oct. 29. After her final performance in the play, Bundy hopes to seek out “opportunities to do countless more plays and musicals” now that she’s proved both her musical and dramatic chops on stage.

Meanwhile, Rustin remains committed to “taking on new projects that help to advance the voice of women.” Previously, she adapted the board game-turned-cult film “Clue” and the romantic comedy “Mystic Pizza” for the stage, both of which have gone on to enjoy successful runs at a number of regional theaters across the country.

She’s also at work on another feminist farce titled “The Suffragette’s Murder” as well as the romantic comedy “Houston,” which will feature music by Grammy winner Edie Brickell.

Rustin’s ultimate goal as a playwright, she said, is to “make people feel happy in the theater and have a great night,” so she’ll be grateful if she continues to be able to do so with work that offers “wonderful roles for women” and embraces a “strong, female-centric” narrative.

“There’s a desire to sit in the theater, forget the past couple of years and just laugh,” she explained. “This play accomplishes all of those things, and it provides these comedic female actors with a playground in which they can have fun. That, to me, is a driving force in my work.”

It’s been centuries since Broadway’s grand opening, and yet so many productions this year seem entirely fresh ― even those that have been revived from the past. That’s because some tap into concepts and emotions that are both timeless and timely at once, while others are unafraid to talk directly to those formerly ignored.

And then there are the ones that do both at the same time. The revived “Death of a Salesman” reimagines a classic white family drama with Black people, and “How I Learned to Drive” is a critical reminder of a pre-#MeToo reckoning.

There were also striking Broadway debuts, like the awe-inspiring musical “A Strange Loop” and the expectation-defying “The Kite Runner,” which both took deeply personal stories of pain and triumph to stir something in each of us.

Each of the greatest productions of 2022 has given us an experience that only a Broadway outing can. It’s what makes them all incredible.

The very thought of a musical centered on the late Michael Jackson is already intriguing because he meant different things to different people: the King of Pop, a brother, a predator, a weirdo, a victim. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage ever-so-sensitively addresses each of these aspects of Jackson’s identity in a show that is as penetrating and complex as it is wildly entertaining. Anchored by Myles Frost’s textured, Tony Award-winning performance and set during Jackson’s 1992 “Dangerous” tour, “MJ: The Musical” delves into the interiority of an astoundingly talented man haunted by his own trauma and demons.

When we talk about achieving universality in the specific, this extraordinary musical by Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson is what we mean. Just google “fat, Black and queer musical” and you will only be directed to this one. It’s the autobiographical story of — you guessed it — a fat, Black and gay young man (Tony nominee Jaquel Spivey) who works as a Broadway usher with big dreams of becoming a working playwright. But in order to do so, he has to sort through some familiar inner thoughts, including self-loathing, worry, financial baggage, his “corporate niggatry” and his “inner white girl.” Six dazzling queer actors bring to life each of these extensions of the protagonist, grounding the story with emotive songs, hilarity and a narrative that sits in your soul long after you’ve watched it.

“for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf”

There’s a pride that leaps from each verse of Ntozake Shange’s seminal 1975 choreopoem “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf” that doesn’t get talked about enough. Tony-nominated director and choreographer Camille Brown taps into that for this exuberant Broadway revival filled with earnest expressions about everything that comes with being Black and a woman: the almost childlike joy, seemingly insurmountable trauma and sisterhood. It’s that last element that fills your heart as you watch each character, representing various aspects of a colorful whole, speak to you like a dear friend.

“Death of a Salesman”

Like other rare examples of a race-bent narrative that is actually good, director Miranda Cromwell’s “Death of a Salesman” just understands the assignment. Mining from Arthur Miller’s resonating 1949 play about a 1940s family man facing the desolation of both his career and bank account, with little to show for either, this sharp revival highlights Black experiences that we don’t see enough of on the Broadway stage. Those include the cracks in a Black family, the ruse of the American Dream for Black people and a Black son’s personal incapability of living up to his father’s vision of success. Led by a crushing pair of performances by Sharon D. Clarke and Wendell Pierce as the ill-fated parents, as well as Khris Davis and McKinley Belcher III as their sons, this production is simply unforgettable.

The best way to see Suzan Lori-Parks’ 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning play is knowing very little about it. And yet even if you have read or seen it before, you’ll still be surprised by the way humor is infused throughout this otherwise dramatic two-hander about a pair of doomed Black brothers remarkably portrayed by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins. They’re doomed only because the characters recognize too late that they’re living inside their own pitch-dark satire of Black life, a flawed perception of Black identity and an ephemeral hope of a three-card monte game. Complete with razor-sharp dialogue and engaging performances, “Topdog/Underdog” is exquisite.

Somehow director Giles Croft, with playwright Matthew Spangler, adapted Khaled Hosseini’s deeply complex and beloved 2003 novel and made it even more complicated on the Broadway stage — and it works. That’s in part because protagonist Amir is played as both a boy and an adult throughout two decades of his life by the same wonderful actor, Amir Arison, as is his childhood friend (Eric Sirakian). But even beyond that, “The Kite Runner” breathes new life into a heartbreaking and ultimately affirming story of a man coming to terms with a childhood decision that changed the course of a friendship in Afghanistan. It’s a narrative about morality and redemption, fear and forgiveness. And it reminds us that those paths are not always straightforward.

“How I Learned to Drive”

In the last five years since #MeToo catapulted into the mainstream, there’s been a lot of discussion around how often particularly screen narratives center the lives of sexual predators, with less detail around their survivors. That crucial fact is part of what makes this revival of Paula Vogel’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning play — with the same central cast members, Mary Louise Parker and David Morse — as vital as ever. It’s a story that follows a woman grappling with the memory and damage of her family member’s long-term predatory relationship with her. Delicately directed by Mark Brokaw, “How I Learned to Drive” is another play that is made even more visceral by an adult actor oscillating between the child and adult versions of her character. And it’s a powerful reckoning you least expect.

One of the most fascinating things about Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play is that its story hinges entirely in a state of conflict. It’s about a baseball star beloved by fans of “America’s favorite pastime,” most of whom turn their backs on him once he comes out as gay. His public announcement also overlaps with and effectively dismantles a pending multimillion-dollar deal. All the while, his teammates and even a close friend feel they must contend with the possibility of someone close to them checking them out in the shower room. Director Scott Ellis’ “Take Me Out,” with its protagonist now a Black man played by Jesse Williams in a Tony Award-nominated performance, pushes against multiple stereotypes of masculinity at once while also confronting the dark stain of betrayal on many levels.

There’s a gripping feeling that something bad is about to happen in almost every moment of “Skeleton Crew.” That’s not necessarily due to any sense of suspense. It’s because Dominique Morisseau’s 2016 play simmers with both regret and a depleting sense of optimism. That sounds like a downer, but it’s deeply human in this regard. Because it shines a light on those far outside the 1%: the Black working-class people at a Detroit auto factory that’s about to have its lights turned off for good. Only some of the characters in this production, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, know this is coming, though we get thoughtful reflections from each of them. Those include the expectant mother with big career aspirations (Chanté Adams), the man who sees no way out (Joshua Boone) and a queer gambler who struggles to repair a crucial relationship (Phylicia Rashad, in a Tony Award-nominated performance). You invest in the story of the “Skeleton Crew” because you think you know these characters. Or maybe you’re one of them. It just has a way of getting under your skin.

In “An Octoroon,” the character BJJ laments the plight of being a Black playwright.

“I can’t even wipe my ass without someone trying to accuse me of deconstructing the race problem in America,” he muses in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Obie Award-winning play.

Shortly after, an actor playing Dion Boucicault enters for a drunken tirade. Boucicault is a 19th-century Irishman who wrote “The Octoroon,” the play on which Jacobs-Jenkins’ work riffs.

“You people don’t even know who I am,” he slurs, “a fecking world-class famous fecking playwright.” He goes on to note that every “10 seconds you’re reviving some one a Shakespeare’s bullshits.”

While Boucicault isn’t the most pleasant or socially conscious messenger, he (and Jacobs-Jenkins) have a point. Each year, when American Theatre releases its list of the season’s Top 10 Most-Produced Plays and Top 20 Most-Produced Playwrights, William Shakespeare is “set aside” because he always comes out on top.

Certainly, neither Shakespeare nor Boucicault faced the same expectations that BJJ describes in his opening monologue. Even so, scholars and movements in Shakespeare studies are currently putting Shakespeare’s plays in conversation with systemic racial inequality in America. If the theater is, as playwrights like Jacobs-Jenkins hope, a space to catalyze political change as well as entertain, what role does Shakespeare’s centuries-old canon play in the theater’s relationship to racial justice movements today, if any? How might we read, produce and perform Shakespeare’s plays in ways that center Black lives?

Over the past two years, I’ve been exploring answers to these questions at William & Mary in my “Black Lives in Shakespeare” course. The class pairs five of his plays with work by contemporary Black playwrights whose plays very specifically think through transformative racial change. My students and I read these plays alongside Black scholars to explore the question of Shakespeare’s continued relevance to “whatever it is you learn from the theater,” as Jacobs-Jenkins says in the aforementioned monologue: “Sympathy? Compassion? Understanding?”

Black theater artists are — and have been for centuries — “helping Shakespeare speak,” so putting contemporary plays concerned with racial justice in direct conversation with Shakespeare in our classrooms, theaters and talkbacks continues this work.

The most obvious way to put Black playwrights in conversation with Shakespeare is to produce and teach adaptations. In my “Black Lives in Shakespeare” and “Black Playwrights” courses, I teach a unit on adaptations of “Othello” featuring Keith Hamilton Cobb’s “American Moor” and Toni Morrison’s “Desdemona.” As its starting point, for example, Morrison’s play takes Desdemona’s reference to her mother’s maid, Barbary — a name that means “foreigner” and suggests the coast of North Africa — and the willow song she died singing as powerful suggestions of a ghost that hovers in the margins of “Othello.” This ghost partakes in a legacy of derogatory icons of Black women, the “mammy” trope in particular, and the myth of a Black female servant who wholeheartedly cares for her master’s children.

“Myths are more than made-up stories,” scholar and activist Dorothy Roberts teaches us. “They are also firmly held beliefs that represent and attempt to explain what we perceive to be the truth. They can become more credible than reality, holding fast even in the face of airtight statistics and rational arguments to the contrary.”

Shakespeare’s canon is replete with these myths and figures, which often seem “more credible than reality,” and contemporary plays can help us see the work these figures do in our cultural imagination. “Desdemona” takes this myth and transforms it to illuminate a character often sidelined in stage productions of “Othello” — Barbary, whom Morrison renames Sa’ran.

In my scholarship and my teaching, I make it a point to attend to ghosts like Barbary in Shakespeare — and teaching him alongside plays by Black playwrights with more thematic overlaps, as opposed to direct adaptations, helps me to do so.

By teaching “The Merchant of Venice” with Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Venus,” I center the figure of an abused, impregnated Black woman, passed around from man to man, clown to clown — a figure at the heart of “Venus” who makes only a brief appearance in Shakespeare’s play. Parks’ play paints a picture of a fictionalized Sarah Baartman consumed by white society, handed over from one abuser to the next. A “Mother Showman” steals the Hottentot Venus’ tips after she performs in freak shows. A doctor reads off a catalog of her body parts during intermission, foreshadowing the experiments to come. Despite being studied by physicians in the service of gynecological knowledge, Baartman is forced to abort two children she conceives with the Baron Docteur (Parks’ nod to Georges Cuvier, a French scientist whose work bolstered scientific racism). Even the “Negro Resurrectionist” who accompanies Venus across time betrays her in the final scenes.

Similarly, in an exchange often cut from productions of “The Merchant of Venice,” Lorenzo, Shylock’s new Christian son-in-law, enters and interrupts an exchange between his wife, Jessica, who recently converted from Judaism to Christianity, and Launcelot, the clown, who is questioning this conversion. Jessica informs her husband about this line of questioning, and Lorenzo tells Launcelot he has no business telling his wife she’ll find “no mercy... in heaven,” since Launcelot himself has impregnated a Black woman.

“I shall answer that better to the commonwealth than you can the getting up of the Negro’s belly; the Moor is with child by you, Launcelot,” Lorenzo admonishes.

“It is much that the Moor should be more than reason; but if she be less than an honest woman, she is indeed more than I took her for,” Launcelot responds.

To center this pregnant, Black woman, who appears to be marginal in “The Merchant of Venice,” means a radical writing of the play, and of what scholars and theater practitioners have focused on. In one of the only extended considerations of this Black woman in scholarship on Shakespeare, Kim Hall argues that it “may be that this pregnant, unheard, unnamed, and unseen (at least by critics) Black woman is a silent symbol for the economic and racial politics of ‘The Merchant of Venice.’” And yet this exchange is often glossed over in classrooms, left out of productions. Putting Shakespeare in conversation with Parks brings “the Moor with child” into sharp focus, however. While she might be “unheard, unnamed, and unseen” in the world of the play, much like Parks’ Venus, she does not have to be marginalized in our world today.

The possibilities for putting Black playwrights in conversation with Shakespeare are truly endless: Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play” invented “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy.” It is described as “a radical therapy designed to help Black partners reengage intimately with white partners from whom they no longer receive sexual pleasure.” That idea makes the relationships between Black men and white women in “Othello” and “Titus Andronicus” read quite differently.

Harris’ play calls us to imagine productions and classroom discussions that hesitate to take Othello and Desdemona’s love for one another at face value, and to consider Desdemona’s persistent entreaties to come away to bed as a sign of possible fetishization of Othello’s sexuality.

When I read “Slave Play” in conversation with “Othello,” I wonder about Desdemona pitying Othello for the “dangers [he] had passed.” I think more deeply about Tamora’s “insatiate and luxurious” desire for Aaron the Moor in “Titus Andronicus.” Often in American literature, as Morrison teaches us in “Playing in the Dark” (1992), interracial relationships represent little more than “a bout of jungle fever.” By reading Harris in conversation with Shakespeare, it becomes clear how crucial it is to consider these historical touches across time. (I love the idea of falling in love with someone for the stories they tell, and I cherish Tamora’s imagined “golden slumber” with Aaron after their “pastimes are done.” These readings do not foreclose alternate takes on the play; they inform them.)

I also teach Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview” alongside “Titus Andronicus.” Though the plays were written centuries apart, and are very distinct, the characters Aaron and Keisha both fight back against the narratives assigned to them by white society. Aaron is far from a hero in “Titus Andronicus” — he sets the seeds for Lavinia’s rape, murders a nurse, cuts off Titus’ son’s hands and sends them back to him. But this violence is in response to the “white-limed walls” that enslave him, that work to fashion his son, whom he loves, a “loathsome toad.” Aaron resists the narratives told about him; he takes them and turns them on their head.

“Is black so base a hue?” Aaron asks the Nurse who describes his child as a “joyless, dismal, black, and sorrowful issue” ― “coal black is better than another hue.” In his closing monologue, Aaron speaks my favorite line of the play: “Why should wrath be mute and fury dumb? ... I am no baby.”

Similarly, Keisha finds herself trapped in the narratives white people have told about her — those who have told her “every story [she has] ever heard.” That she’ll become pregnant as a teenager, that her father is a cheater and gambler about to lose their house, that her mother is on drugs. None of this is true, yet Keisha finds herself unable to get out from under these stories until the play’s end, when she rejects Suze as her grandmother, refusing her suffocating care.

“I wanna take care of the baby,” Suze begs, to which Keisha responds, “There is No Baby.”

Drury’s capitalization of this statement emphasizes that Keisha is not pregnant, but also that, like Aaron, Keisha is no baby — she does not need Suze’s “loud self,” “loud eyes” and “loud guilt” caring for her. “Do I have to keep talking to them,” she asks audience members, referring to the play’s white viewers ― “only to them until I have used up every word?”

It’s probably true that Black playwrights often feel the same way about being in conversation with Shakespeare, his seemingly inescapable presence. But these plays I assign alongside Shakespeare place extraordinary faith in their respective audiences. They generate transformative conversations.

“We can stop the racism in theater and in our lives if we can make the space and time for learning and listening,” Hall notes in her introduction to “American Moor.”

It’s difficult to make this space and time, though, if we do not listen to what Black voices are telling us about Shakespeare’s plays, directly or indirectly. This is what contemporary Black playwrights have taught me — that Shakespeare is, in some ways, only as good as he speaks to this “American form,” as Cobb writes in “American Moor.”

These conceptual connections aren’t always evident, and putting these plays in conversation across centuries and landscapes isn’t easy. But as Cobb’s actor tells audiences: “God knows I ain’t easy... but no future worth the havin’ ever was.”