Upstairs Downstairs

Jon Michael Hill and and Namir Smallwood in Pass Over
Photo by Jeremy Daniel

Originally published in the Lincoln Center Theater Review
View this story online

MY FIRST LINCOLN CENTER THEATER show was The Light in the Piazza. I was a junior in college, and my friends and I took the Chinatown bus from Boston to spend one day in New York. Student rush tickets landed us in the orchestra of the Vivian Beaumont Theater, and by the end of the first act I was sobbing rapturous tears. The lush songs, the romantic story, the beautiful theater—it was all too much for a 21-year-old who dreamed of writing about Broadway musicals just like this one.

I've shed a few more tears at Lincoln Center Theater since then, in the Beaumont as well as its downstairs neighbor, the Mitzi E. Newhouse, and its upstairs pal the Claire Tow. New York is a city of contradictions and juxtapositions, so it's no surprise that when the final notes of a soaring love story reverberate in the Beaumont, a gritty drama (Sylvia Khoury's Power Strip) chronicles a Syrian refugee's struggles to survive in an overcrowded camp two floors above in the Claire Tow. On Broadway, Anna's ship sails into Siam, while off, a former convict skins cows at a slaughterhouse (Abe Koogler's Kill Floor). Both productions inspire tears.

"It's a kind of beautiful black box space to make stuff," said Lileana Blain-Cruz of the Claire Tow, where she made her Lincoln Center Theater debut directing Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' soul-searching familial drama War.

"Getting a chance to really experiment was exciting. I think it's kind of like letting playwrights find the uniqueness of their voice."

That search is taking place in the Claire Tow Theater, home to works programmed by LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater's initiative to feature emerging artists. Since its founding in 2009, pro­ductions by Ayad Akhtar, Young Jean Lee, and Martyna Majok have played to intimate audiences—first at the Duke on 42nd Street, before moving uptown to the Claire Tow in 2012. Led first by Artistic Director Paige Evans and since 2016 by Evan Cabnet, the LCT3 program has brought dozens of new artists to the stage. These writers' adventurous, daring work has gone on to win Tonys and Pulitzers, challenging and broadening the theater landscape beyond Lincoln Center Theater.

"I owe everything to that run. That started everything," said Ayad Akhtar, whose first produced play, Disgraced, immediately launched him to literary notoriety after opening at the Claire Tow in 2012.

Disgraced depicts a dinner party gone disastrously wrong as its well­ heeled guests engage in a heated discussion of politics and religion—the two topics one should never discus in polite society. Akhtar's play places them center stage, forcing audiences to watch and listen—no leaving the room to tend to appetizers or refill a drink.

The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, propelling Akhtar to fame and Disgraced to a Broadway run in 2014. It was the most-produced play of the 2015-16 season, the same time that Akhtar was the most-produced playwright in America.

"It was crazy. I don't know if that'll ever happen in my life again, and it was really extraordinary," said Akhtar, whose play The Who and the What ran at the Claire Tow in 2014, also exploring questions of identity and faith.

It was this success that drove Akhtar to write Junk, chronicling the financial fiascos of the 1980s, and it was Junk that sent him down two flights of stairs to the Vivian Beaumont Theater when it opened in 2017. Akhtar's work went from an audience of just over 100 seats to just over 1,000.

"What I decided was to take a big risk, and I'd been wanting to write a big play about finance. So I wrote a Shakespearean history about debt financing, and I patterned it on Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and I had a cast for a company of 17 actors like Shakespeare's company," Akhtar said. "It was a big play, and it needed a big space."

Opening a show about dishonest financial schemes in the midst of a tumultuous political climate was a risk, but Andre Bishop, Lincoln Center Theater's producing artistic director, had faith in the play and Akhtar had faith in Bishop.

Aasif Mandvi and Heidi Ambruster in Disgraced
Photo by Erin Baiano

"He's the most sophisticated theatergoer who has the most common man reaction as well," Akhtar said. "He's able to sort of combine those two things. He's seen so many plays, and he's been around so many great writers, and it's in his bones. Yet at the same time, he's never lost the capacity to respond to work as if he were just a common man off the street. I don't think you can do what he did at Lincoln Center Theater without understanding both sides of that equation."

Akhtar's next play, McNeal, will explore the timely topic of artificial intelligence when it opens at the Beaumont in 2024. While his writing explores divisive topics, he says the exploration of those topics is what brings people together.

"What's special about the theater is that when you gather a group of people together, inherently, something of a group consciousness comes into being," Akhtar said. ''There is a group experience, and it's a group experience that transcends the individual. The individuals, invariably-whether they accept it or not, whether they know it or not-are informed and affected by the group."

That shared experience was the mission of We're Gonna Die, Young Jean Lee's exploration of grief and pain that played the Claire Tow in 2014. Lee, an experimental playwright, director, filmmaker, and self-proclaimed weirdo, moved her series of monologues and songs, performed with her band Future Wife, to the Upper West Side following a run at Joe's Pub downtown.

"It was kind of like the hip space," Lee said of the Claire Tow. "I felt like that show was meant for those types of spaces—the kind of smaller, edgy, or more adventurous venue at a larger institution. So it felt like the Claire Tow was perfect for that show."

Inspired by the death of Lee's father, We're Gonna Die guides audiences through painful moments from Lee's past while offering a sense of community among personal grief. Concluding with an audience sing­along, the show was a unique addition to Lincoln Center Theater's lineup—and it sold out in thirty minutes.

"We wanted to make [the audience] cry, make them think about death for an hour, and make people uncomfortable," Lee said. "It was really trying to get down into the harder emotions and also to destroy preconceptions...For a lot of people that was an incredibly edgy show, because every story was depressing. There was not a single uplifting story in that whole thing. It was just unrelenting."

Known for art that defies categorization while pushing audiences beyond their comfort zones, Lee was the first Asian-American woman produced on Broadway when Straight White Men opened in 2018. Her current focus is on increasing attention on Korean American representation of actors and stories.

"I still think that there's a lot of difficulty with Asian American narratives, because Asian-American actors have been marginalized for so long," she said. "There's a real scarcity of people who have had sufficient experience and I think that is such a big challenge...It is so hard to get narratives through the system."

The intimacy of the Claire Tow encouraged a new kind of exchange when Freestyle Love Supreme performed there in 2014. Founded by Anthony Veneziale and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the improvisational hip-hop group came together to welcome more diversity into the improv community, which until then had been largely composed of white people.

"I think our show is both like a mirror and a window," Veneziale said. Working off of prompts from the audience, the performers spontaneously create raps, songs or skits. "People get to tell us the things that are on their mind—that's the window part. And then we get to sort of mirror back what we heard from them and how we take that to inspire each new song. They kind of get to see themselves reflected back in what it was they shouted through the window."

The opening of that window introduced a new audience to Freestyle Love Supreme, and it also brought the validation that came with performing at Lincoln Center Theater.

"Anytime you do something with Lincoln Center Theater, there's a bit of a stamp of approval, or at least something that says, 'We curated this experience in our facility.' For me, that's a dream I didn't think I could have in improv," Veneziale said. "We're typically in basements, or in back rooms, way below 34th Street, and you're lucky if 10 friends show up. If Lincoln Center Theater says, 'Hey, this has value and we're willing to put it into programming that we share with our patrons, who are in essence, the lifeblood of the theatergoing community in New York,' it carries a lot of weight with it."

Producing new works is always a risk, whether in a basement or on Broadway, and that risk has increased following the pandemic and industry shutdown. As theater rebuilds its audiences, support for the arts—and new work—is more vital than ever.

Saori Tsukada, Ashil Lee, Drae Campbell and Kaili Y. Turner in The Nosebleed
Photo by Julieta Cervantes

"The sense of competence in the sense of being at home at Lincoln Center Theater, feeling supported-it takes care of the shows that are happening inside of its walls," Blain-Cruz said. "As a director, that sense of focus, that sense of ability to share an idea and feel the whole team or whole building trying to realize it, is a wonderful support."

That care enables artists to experiment, especially emerging artists in early stages of their careers. Blain-Cruz first directed War in 2016 and has since directed in the Mitzi Newhouse and the Vivian Beaumont theaters. She was named a resident director in 2020.

"I think for directors who are starting out and are consistently looking for places that are going to give you a chance, having the Claire Tow is in some ways a signal that there's a space at Lincoln Center Theater for people who haven't had a chance before to kind of work at scale in New York City," Blain-Cruz said. "It feels like a lovely incubator. It's a chance to be uptown and still making some weird things I find delightful."

It's working at that scale that enables people to see how a story comes to life and how an audience reacts-in short, what works and what doesn't.

"I think that there's such a pressure now on artists," Blain-Cruz said. "Where's the room for the messiness? Where's the room for the 'failure'? It's so hard to put on a production that manages to have enough success at this point. But there has to be something like risk. I think that there has to be a way in which we have to get people excited about the unknown of new work."

During times of uncertainty, people often seek entertainment that comforts - a new installment in a franchise they love or a familiar story they know will end happily—instead of the unknown. Blain-Cruz said she understands that desire but encourages theatergoers to seek out original shows as well.

"Multiple things can coexist at once, but I think a variation is also what will be really thrilling," Blain­Cruz said. "Yes, you can go see that if you want that comfort, but yes, you can come out here when you want to be immersed in a world that is completely unfamiliar and that might give a vision of how the world could be."

For Blain-Cruz, that vision included a four-story slide in the Vivian Beaumont Theater. When directing a revival of The Skin of Our Teeth, Thorton Wilder's allegorical history of mankind, she embraced the large scale of the theater, filling it with a 15-foot dinosaur puppet and light-up roller coaster as well as the slide.

"I appreciated [Andre's] openness to not knowing what it could be," Blain-Cruz said of creating the production. "I appreciate that he'd be a steady base for the artists to kind of do their leaping into the unknown...I felt a kind of freedom to just do what I needed to do and if I had questions about a scene or how someone was reading, I knew I could get a clear and thoughtful answer."

Bishop, and Lincoln Center Theater, proved to be a steady base for Blain­ Cruz's vision for the show. When asked if any of the cast or crew rode down the slide during rehearsals, she said, "I was the first one."