Category: Theater

Ron Simons, who left his job as an executive at Microsoft to pursue his dream of acting but later found his métier as a theatrical producer — one of the relatively few Black ones on Broadway — and won four Tony Awards, died on June 12. He was 63.

His death was announced by Simonsays Entertainment, his production company. A spokesman declined to say where he died or provide the cause of death.

Mr. Simons had been acting for about a decade, but was unhappy with the roles he was being offered, when he started producing in 2009. He believed that his experience as an actor and businessman would serve him well as a producer.

“I’ve found that many businesspeople can handle the question of financial viability but can’t judge a good story, so as an artist I also have that area of expertise,” he told DC Theater Arts in 2020. “Plus, even if it’s a good story, it has to be crafted to take it to the stage, so the leadership must understand how to get it there.”

“He was an actor who’d gone to business school, and there was a sense of humanity about him,” Cheryl Wiesenfeld, a producer of both shows, said in a phone interview. She added that Mr. Simons brought a critical asset to producing — money — but also “a zest, curiosity, intelligence and knowledge.”

In 2014, he won his third Tony, for best musical, for “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,” and three years later, he received his fourth, for best revival of a play, for “Jitney,” by August Wilson, about a storefront taxi company in a Black neighborhood in Pittsburgh.

“Jitney” underscored Mr. Simons’s mission to produce projects about underrepresented people and communities. It is one of 10 plays in Mr. Wilson’s American Century Cycle about the African American experience in the 20th century.

“In these political times, it is so, so important to share works of diverse voices,” Mr. Simons said in an interview with WAMC-FM in Albany, N.Y., in 2017. He added, “I think it’s really, really, really, really key that we uphold and promote and give voice to these diverse voices who are under siege right now and those who might not be directly under siege but who are ignored by mainstream entertainment and arts organizations.”

He also received Tony nominations for best musical as part of the team of producers of “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” in 2019, and for best revival, in 2022, of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf,” a series of monologues by Ntozake Shange about the experiences of Black women set to dance and song. He was a lead producer of the play with Nelle Nugent.

Mr. Simons understood that staging works about — and by — people of color is not easy, partly because there were few producers like him and because of the perception that stories about Black people are not commercial enough for Broadway.

“George Floyd didn’t have a voice, so we can be his voice and tell his story,” he told DC Theater Arts. “Storytelling grabs you by the heart, and through it we can engage, educate and maybe even change. That’s my dream. Also that more white producers and theater owners will produce and present more stories of color.”

Ronald Keith Simons was born on Nov. 30, 1960, in Detroit. He became interested in acting in high school and he joked in a TedxBroadway Talk in 2018 that his “star turn” was a small role as a sharecropper in a high school production of the musical “Finian’s Rainbow.”

He majored in English and information systems at Columbia College, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1982, and went to work as a software engineer at Hewlett-Packard. But it was not an easy decision. He wanted to act — he had applied to the Yale School of Drama (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University) — but knew that the profession was risky and that his mother and grandparents needed his financial help.

“I thought: ‘OK, one day. Not today,’” he recalled in an interview with the Microsoft Alumni Network, which noted that he left the company with a lot of stock options. “‘Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not even next year, but you will become an actor. You will become an artist and move into the entertainment space.’”

After three years at Hewlett-Packard, he was hired as an applications project manager by IntelliCorp, where he worked from 1985 to 1988, then moved to Microsoft in 1989 as a product manager, which he held through 1992. He also earned a master of business administration degree from Columbia Business School in 1989 and a master of fine arts from the University of Washington in 2001.

After leaving Microsoft, he acted around the country with the Classical Theater of Harlem, Seattle Repertory Theater, the Utah Shakespeare Festival and the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. He performed occasionally on television in programs like the “Law & Order” franchise and in films like “The Assassin” (2007) and “27 Dresses” (2008).

His first project as a producer was “Night Catches Us,” a 2010 film starring Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington about a former Black Panther who returns home to Philadelphia for his father’s funeral.

“I was really taken by the script because I had never seen a movie where the characters were two former Black Panthers,” he said in a 2015 interview with University of Washington Magazine.

He was initially an associate producer. But when the film’s lead financier dropped out, “I got a bunch of books on producing and I read them,” he said. He also played a role in the film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

From then on, Mr. Simons balanced producing films and stage works. He was an executive producer of films including “Gun Hill Road” (2011), about an ex-con who, after leaving prison, learns that his wife is estranged from him and that his son is undergoing a gender transition; “Blue Caprice” (2013), based on the terror unleashed by the Beltway sniper in the Washington area in 2002, and “Mother of George” (2013), about the culture clash of a Nigerian couple living in Brooklyn.

Mr. Simons’ other Broadway credits include a multiracial revival of Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” (2012), starring Blair Underwood and Nicole Ari Parker; “The Gin Game” (2015), with Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones as residents of a retirement home, and “Thoughts of a Colored Man” (2021), the playwright Keenan Scott II’s mosaic of speeches, poems and songs for seven performers of color.

Complete information about Mr. Simons’s survivors was not immediately available.

In 2016, Mr. Simons was a lead producer of “Turn Me Loose,” an Off Broadway play about Dick Gregory (played by Joe Morton), the groundbreaking Black comedian and civil rights activist.

Eric Falkenstein, one of the play’s three other lead producers, recalled Mr. Simons taking the stage after the opening night performance at the Westside Theater and saying that he was going to hand something to each of his white partners.

“Ron was truly a showman who had great presence,” Mr. Falkenstein said by phone. “He said: ‘This is your official Black card. You’re now a full member of the club.’”

Since Ford’s Theater reopened as an active theater in 1968, it has rarely been the scene of a dramatic re-enactment of Abraham Lincoln being shot to death there on April 14, 1865.

“Manhunt,” the Apple TV+ series, said it recently asked for permission and was turned down. Robert Redford considered it at one point but was dissuaded, an executive at the theater said. A 1971 docudrama by David Wolper did film critical scenes inside the theater.

The theater’s website explains the reasoning behind the resistance to such recreations.

In a posting titled, “Why Ford’s Theatre Doesn’t Stage Assassination Re-enactments,” the historian David McKenzie, who worked at the theater for nine years, wrote in 2021:

“For us at Ford’s, in the place where the tragedy actually happened, a re-enactment of the Lincoln assassination would take attention from the gravity of the event and its impact on our society at large,” adding that “it would focus attention instead on the macabre details of one night. It could prove kitschy, downplaying the event’s significance. It would also give John Wilkes Booth the prominence he desired in his quest to topple the United States government and preserve a system of white racial superiority.”

Paul Tetreault, the Washington theater’s veteran director, said that, despite the resolute tone of McKenzie’s posting, the rationale against such a re-enactment is not a formal policy, but more a matter of “common sense.”

“So the reality is,” he said, “there is nothing written that says no re-enactments. It’s just that it’s just respectful. You know, at Ford’s we have an obligation. We have an obligation to the facts. We have an obligation to truth, we have an obligation to, you know, be respectful and be reverential. This is a memorial site. It’s a national historical site.”

Tetreault said Robert Redford considered using the theater in his 2010 film “The Conspirator,” and even toured the space to mark camera angles.

“What I ended up saying was, ‘Quite honestly, I’m not sure it’s worth the cost, the extra costs, that you’re going to have to put into this project to shoot at Ford’s,’” Tetreault said. “And you know, Redford kind of agreed.”

Those costs would have included reimbursing the theater for the value of ticket sales in the event performances were canceled, Tetreault said, as well as daily charges from the National Park Service, which jointly operates the historic site. The filmmakers would pay up to $750 a day to use the site, plus salary and overtime costs for Park Service employees, such as those who would monitor the filming.

Redford, who could not be reached for comment, ultimately opted to recreate Ford’s Theater in a Georgia warehouse, but he held the premiere for his film at Ford’s.

Monica Beletsky, the showrunner for “Manhunt,” which recreates the 12-day search for Booth, said that her team and James Swanson, the author of the book on which the series is based, had hoped to film at the scene of the crime.

“I campaigned so hard to get in there,” Beletsky said, in part because of how difficult it was to find a comparable 19th-century theater. (Above-stage boxes, such as those at Ford’s, were often sacrificed when older theaters designed for stage acting were converted to cinemas.)

Tetreault said he had several conversations with Swanson, but warned him about the costs and logistical concerns, rather than telling him “no.”

A spokesman for the Park Service, Mike Litterst, said the agency had not received a “formal application” for on-site filming at the theater from the series.

Ford’s Theater was only open a few years before the assassination, and after the shooting it tried to continue to stage performances before shutting down in 1866. It languished for a century, first as a government warehouse and later as a shrine-like Lincoln museum. But in the 1960s Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Johnson, and Actors’ Equity, the union for stage performers and stage managers, pushed for a major restoration project, believing that an avowed lover of Shakespeare like Lincoln would be better honored with a working theater.

Restoring the theater without putting plays onstage “would make the space a monument to what John Wilkes Booth did, rather than a place to commemorate Lincoln,” McKenzie wrote in his blog post.

William F. McSweeny, a special assistant to Johnson who has served on the Ford’s board since the early 1970s, said that there has long been strong resistance to allowing re-enactments at the theater. His modus operandi as longtime board chair was, “never do anything that would be damaging to the name or memory of Lincoln.”

Today the theater offers actors the highest-paying regional contracts in Washington. A typical season includes an American history play, “A Christmas Carol” and a spring musical. About 650,000 people visit each year, and on most weekday mornings, hundreds see “One Destiny,” a one-act play where two actors share eyewitness accounts of the assassination.

One performer depicts an actor who starred in “Our American Cousin,” the play onstage when Lincoln was shot. The other portrays the theater operator Harry Ford. Together, they recall the night of April 14. Although a shot rings out and the lights in the presidential box dim, neither actor impersonates Booth or Lincoln.

“One Destiny” is one of several scripts set in the Civil War era that Tetreault commissioned since taking over Ford’s in 2004. He has also expanded the repertoire to include more 21st-century plays.

“Manhunt” went to great lengths to recreate the look of Ford’s Theater at the Miller Theater in Philadelphia, where its assassination scene was filmed. As would have been the case in Washington, Beletsky navigated restrictions to protect the historic structure. But it was worth it, the showrunner said, to end up with footage that conveys both Lincoln’s humanity and Booth’s depravity.

“The Lincoln assassination is one of those things that you know happened, and you’ve seen it in your mind, but I don’t know how much we’ve really sat with it, and thought about what happened and how horrific it was,” Beletsky said, emphasizing that Lincoln was shot while enjoying a popular comedy.

“He wasn’t able to defend himself,” she said. “He wasn’t ever able to speak again. And so I think living through that scene dramatically really has an effect on people. Hopefully we show what America lost by that crime being committed.”

A president losing grip with reality. Warnings of environmental disaster and apocalypse. An early reference to the Covid vaccine.

The Wooster Group’s revival of the deliriously trippy “Symphony of Rats,” a Richard Foreman play from 1988 that originally starred Kate Valk, who directs this production along with Elizabeth LeCompte, invites dark topical readings. It’s an election year, after all.

So why does this production feel so sweet and escapist?

For one thing, the vaudevillian madness onstage — which juxtaposes twee songs with violent video, highbrow with Hollywood, the mundane with the alien — does not build on its political subject matter. It’s only the surface of a far weirder, digressive production whose obsession is not with the real world but what is underneath. The President (a suitably intense Ari Fliakos) does not stand in for any specific politician, and can come off as an ordinary figure overwhelmed by events. In one of the show’s many dreamy lines, he says, “I seemed to have returned from a profound experience of elsewhereness.”

This is what it felt like to return from a new play by Richard Foreman, who stopped making new shows a decade ago. And for the theater fans who mourn his loss from the cultural landscape, this Wooster Group show operates like a delightful love letter, from one giant of experimental theater to another.

Foreman didn’t break traditional rules of narrative or character so much as invent his own. His surreal shows existed in their own meticulously realized world, whose distinctive designs were bisected by wires that turned the stage into a web. The mood was somehow both menacing and playful, its meaning ineffable and the overall effect entirely singular. Asked in a 2020 interview if he would ever make new work, he balked and then said exactly what you would want the éminence grise of the avant-garde to say: “We are living in decadent times, surrounded by nothing but trash.”

“Symphony” has hints of such flamboyant gloom. The President is presented as a puppet (even his bowel movements are performed with assistance), and the stage is filled with rodents — some small (look out for creepy props), others the size of the wonderful actor Jim Fletcher, whose sharp nails and dramatic flair project an otherworldly deadpan.

The dominant theme here isn’t these animals so much as alternative realities, whether it be an alien world, a “mirror mind,” a lozenge that when eaten takes you — “Alice in Wonderland” style — to a magical land.

That’s not even getting into Tornadoville. LeCompte, whose video-game-like production designs are consistently playful, nods to the Foreman aesthetic: the cluttered set, transparent panes, the wires. But the Wooster Group is more technologically and pop culture savvy. Yudam Hyung Seok Jeon’s video work is elaborate and abstract, with references to “Star Wars” or a John Cena movie, and a re-creation of a famously balletic scene from Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” is performed with grace by Fletcher and Fliakos.

There’s a conspiratorial streak in this play that this production doesn’t do much with, a darkness that goes underexplored. Its rodents do not seem to represent exploitation and corruption so much as the assumption that the world is too bizarre for realism, too cracked for happy endings or closure. At the end, Fletcher seems to address the need for some coherence, speaking into a microphone: “Is it possible that all of you out there were participating in a detective story?” Then he adds bluntly: “Here’s what happened.”

Don’t be fooled. What follows is a yarn complemented by a cooking show where we see the torso of a woman turn excrement into chocolate chip cookies — one of several gross-out moments aimed at the gut rather than the head. It’s a show that reminds us that just because art aims to disorient doesn’t mean that it is a puzzle to be solved.

Symphony of Rats
Through May 4 at the Performing Garage, Manhattan; thewoostergroup.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.

The financial crisis facing nonprofit theaters in America has captured the attention of Congress, where a group of Democratic lawmakers is introducing legislation that would direct $1 billion annually to the struggling industry for five years.

That money could be used for payroll and workforce development, as well as other expenses like rent, set-building and marketing. But the legislation, which lawmakers introduced on Tuesday, faces long odds at a time when a divided Congress — where Republicans control the House and Democrats lead the Senate — has had trouble agreeing on anything.

Nonprofit theaters around the country have reduced their programming and laid off workers to cope with rising expenses and smaller audiences since the coronavirus pandemic began. There are exceptions — some nonprofit theaters say they are thriving — but several companies, including New Repertory Theater in suburban Boston, Southern Rep Theater in New Orleans, and Book-It Repertory Theater in Seattle, have ceased or suspended operations in response to the crisis.

“It hasn’t been a recovery for the nonprofits — they’re really lagging compared to many other sectors in the economy, and it’s for a lot of reasons,” Senator Peter Welch of Vermont, one of the legislation’s sponsors, said in an interview. “So they do need help.”

Mr. Welch argued that the organizations merit government assistance because they strengthen communities and benefit local economies.

The legislation, which is called the Supporting Theater and the Arts to Galvanize the Economy (STAGE) Act of 2024, is also being sponsored by Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Jack Reed of Rhode Island. Representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon is sponsoring it in the House.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who is the majority leader and who led the fight to win government aid for performing arts organizations during the pandemic, is supportive of the proposed legislation and is also open to other ways to assist nonprofit theaters, according to a spokesman.

The pandemic aid package that Mr. Schumer championed serves as a precedent: In 2020, Congress passed the Save Our Stages Act, which led to a $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program that made money available to a wide array of commercial and nonprofit performing arts organizations.

Mr. Welch said the earlier aid program succeeded despite initial skepticism.

“With everything else that was going on, the expectation was this would die on the vine, but it didn’t — as this started getting momentum, there was excitement about being about to do something concrete,” he said.

The new legislation is narrower, benefiting only professional nonprofit theaters, and only those that have either seen a decline in revenues or that primarily serve historically underserved communities.

“This is a beginning,” Mr. Welch said. “There are obstacles, but let the effort begin.”