In Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play, the final production of Fordham Theatres’ mainstage season, the answer for survivors of an apocalyptic event is an episode The Simpsons. In particular, the strangers bond over a retelling of Cape Feare, which first aired in October, 1993 and focuses on the family’s flight to escape the wrath of Sideshow Bob, a reoccurring character voiced by Kelsey Grammer.

Written by Anne Washburn, the play debuted in 2012, and enjoyed a three-month run at New York’s Playwright Horizons in 2013. Elizabeth Margid, head of directing at Fordham Theatre, saw it then with lighting and set design professor Chad McCarver, and was immediately smitten.

Each Act Like Its Own Play

Part of the appeal was the play’s unconventional format. The first act is set in an unspecified moment in the future after an event that has knocked out all power and plunged the country into chaos. The second act is seven years later, and the final act takes place 75 years after that.

“The first act is quite naturalistic, and the second starts to incorporate some elements of sit com acting and commercials, because the characters who meet in the first act form a theater that goes from remote outpost to remote outpost to perform Simpsons episodes. Seventy-five years later, we’re in a completely new theater company that’s turned this episode into a mythic, almost like Medieval pageant play,” she said.

Margid describes that final act as a “mash-up of Greek theater, Medieval pageant play, hip-hop, and music video.”

“It’s jaw-droppingly theatrical. And odd. And I was grabbed by the style, the form and the themes of the piece. I couldn’t predict what was going to happen next in this crazy piece, and I loved that. It was unlike anything I’ve seen before,” she said.

Reimagining Classics for Current Times

The material will be familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with the show, but hardcore Simpsons’ fans will be disappointed if they’re expecting a simple live-action re-enactment of Cape Feare. Because it’s set in a time when no one has access to television anymore, recollections are subject to characters’ memories.

“It’s a game of telephone over 75 years. So what you end up with is a memory of a memory of a memory of a memory. The theater company that creates this piece also decides to merge the plot elements with the apocalyptic disaster of the meltdown of nuclear plants that happened 75 years ago when the grid went down,” Margid said.

Just as works of art from the past are reinterpreted with current cultural concerns, so too is Cape Feare transformed into a mythic story about survival, going so far as to replace Sideshow Bob with Mr. Burns, another reoccurring character and owner of a nuclear power plant, as the main villain.

Channeling a Character’s Growth

Ella Stoller, a junior at Fordham College Lincoln Center who plays a survivor in the first two acts and a chorus member in the third, studied the play last year in a text analysis class. A big challenge for her is imagining how her character might evolve during the seven-year interlude between acts one and two. The stakes are much higher in the second, and yet at one point, the survivors take a break from rehearsing to debate how many cans of Diet Coke still exist.

“On the page, it’s this hilarious bit. Like, are they really gone? Who knows? But then you dig into it, and like there’s all the subtext about the different relationships and the fact that we’re in Oklahoma, it’s 3 p.m., we’re in a warehouse and it’s 90 degrees. And if we don’t get this show put together by the end of the night, our show tomorrow will fail and we won’t eat and we might not be safe or have a place to sleep,” she said.

To prepare for their roles, Margid also had two of Stoller’s colleagues watch the episode Homer the Heretic. While they faced the screen, she sat with her back to it, and was only allowed to turn around periodically to watch it, for ten second intervals. The point was to appreciate how fickle memory can be.

“Jenny and Matt got to watch the whole thing, so they had bigger chunks of it, but there were moments where I heard something that they hadn’t picked up on because they were watching it, so I got a word or a phrase or a sound effect that neither of them remembered. That drove forward our act,” she said.

Post Apocalyptic Fashion Trends

Staging is unique to the play as well, especially the clothes and masks used in the third act. Costume designer Siena Zoë Allen, FCLC ’15, worked with Margid in 2016 on the mainstage production of White People, and returned again to work with her alma mater.

Since there’s no way to know how much of society has been rebuilt 75 years later, it was decided that plastic—in the form of sheets, bags, bottles and wrappers—would be the backbone of their sartorial choices. Suffice to say, there are few manuals for making clothes with that material.

“If you iron a bunch of plastic bags to make a very long sheet of fabric and clothes, it doesn’t behave the way normal fabric should. When you put it on a body, it doesn’t bend, it doesn’t fold, it’s not graceful. So it’s been a very large learning process for all of us,” she said.

“It’s very different than fitting for a normal show, where if pants don’t fit, we can let them out with fabric that already exists. We are in charge of making the fabric, fitting the fabric, and making sure it matches the rest of what’s already been made. We can’t just start from scratch, so we do have to sort of adjust. It’s been fun.”

For Margid, the takeaway from the play is that art in general, and story-telling in particular, is not a luxury, but is in fact deeply entwined with the survival of the human spirit.

“At the absolute core of this piece, is a kind of Valentine to the power of theater to bind us together in dark times and to provide a place for collective emotion and reflection,” she said.

Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play, runs at Pope Auditorium April 10, 11, 12, 24, 25, 26 at 7:30 p.m. and April 27 at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available at the theatre website.

Known for his role as the chillingly cool and murderous Brother Mouzone in TV’s The Wire and for his numerous musical and straight roles on Broadway, such as Mafala Hatimbi in The Book of Mormon, Potts has been performing on stage and screen for more than 25 years.

But acting was never a sure bet for Potts. He said that when he decided to become an actor, his mother staged an intervention.

“I remember coming home from a summer job to find a dining room full of family and neighbors that my mother was dishing out food to. It was like an ambush. She said, ‘Sit down, we want to talk to you,’” recalled Potts. “There was a neighbor there who was a former Black Panther, she said, ‘Actor? Actor? Black people been acting all their lives; you need to do something that contributes.’”

Potts split his youth between summers in Brooklyn with his parents and the school year with his maternal grandparents in the small town of Wisacky, South Carolina. Both communities felt strongly that he should enter the professional class as a doctor or lawyer. When he got into Columbia College in New York City, however, his professors thought otherwise. One adviser told him that great black actors, singers, and writers do indeed make important contributions.

Though he may have diverged from what his elders wanted, he said his hometown of about 500 people influenced much of his education and artistry. With the church at the center of communal life, the call and response between the congregation and pastor stirred something that he carried with him to the theatre.

“Reverend Wright was an extraordinary preacher,” said Potts, recalling his church’s minister. “That man had this great bass baritone voice and he understood language and the music of it and the interplay of it. If you listen to gospel music or if you listen to Dr. King’s speeches, there’s the repetition of a phrase, the elaboration of it. It’s almost like classical music.”

Finding the music in his scripts became key to his craft. He noted that while Eugene O’Neill’s words captured the turn-of-the-century language of the New York denizens, so much of The Iceman Cometh relies on the actors understanding timing and “where the language lands and what words makes most sense in a sentence.”

Potts studied the great plays and literature in college, but the voices, he notices, were mostly those of European white men. It wasn’t until the gap between his bachelor’s and his master’s degrees, when he was in the Army Reserves, that he heard the voice of a black playwright that would change his life.

“I was watching the Tonys that year and it was the year that August Wilson’s Fences [the 1987 production]  was up for several Tonys, and I remember that great snippet of James Earl Jones and Courtney Vance,” he said of the play’s father-son climax. “That scene just blew my mind and awakened something again. I saw my life. I saw a piece that I understood. I recognized the characters. They sounded like people I grew up around.”

It was then that he decided to apply to Yale School of Drama—in secret.

“It was really one of these Hail Mary passes that was going to decide the course of my life,” he said. “I gave God an ultimatum: I said if I get in then this is what I’m meant to do.”

He would go on to graduate from Yale and perform in dozens of plays, movies, and on television. In addition to his role on The Wire, he’s also known for his role as Detective Maynard Gilbough on HBO’s True Detectives as well as recurring roles as Senator Fred Reynolds on Madam Secretary and as Sergeant Cole Draper on Law and Order. But his television work is informed by his work in the theater, he said, not the other way around. He has been lauded for his singing and acting on Broadway since 2005, where he has appeared in Lennon, Grey Gardens, and last year’s acclaimed production of Jitney, written by his theatrical hero, August Wilson. Much of what he’s learned on stage and screen, he plans to bring to Fordham students.

“I want students to learn as I have learned,” he said. “They need to ask, ‘How do you talk to people on stage?’” he said.

He said that too often actors perform and don’t listen. He described a far more empathetic approach to the craft rather than “showing off,” which he said he sees far too much of these days. Like the call and response between congregation and pastor, Potts said actors must connect with their audience. But most importantly, they must connect with each other.

“Directors love it when they see actors actually speaking to one another, actually having the conversation, as opposed to acting as if they’re having a conversation,” he said. “It’s absolutely vital to make that connection. Theater teaches you how to think deeply and listen. My hope is to impart that to these other young actors.”

Black Suns: An Astrophysics Adventure, also produced by award-winning cultural astronomer Jarita Holbrook, Ph.D., and Kelvin Phillips, follows scientists Alphonse Sterling of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Hakeem Oluseyi of the Florida Institute of Technology as they track the solar atmosphere during the May 20, 2012 annular solar eclipse and the Nov. 14, 2012 total solar eclipse. Holbrook, who appears in the film, is also the film’s narrator, and Phillips is the director.

“People don’t realize that there are many persons of color who are really interested in doing great things in the sciences, and are doing it in spite of their difficult backgrounds, multiple ‘noes,’ and a general lack of support,” she said. “These are stories that need to be told.”

The Common Language of Science

The documentary shows that, although Sterling and Oluseyi share some similarities, they come from different walks of life.

Before making his mark in astronomy, Oluseyi—a 2012 TED Global Fellow, and a frequent contributor to the Discovery Channel and National Geographic—faced poverty, homelessness, gang pressures, and other challenges. Jackson said the Florida Tech professor, who was raised by a single mother in the inner city, “beat all the odds” and went on to earn a doctorate in physics from Stanford University before working at the college. Today, on leave from Florida Tech, Oluseyi is serving as a Space Science Education Manager at NASA in Washington, D.C.

“[Sterling and Oluseyi] found their common language of science,” said Jackson. “Whether you’re interested in science or another subject, you have to understand that it’s not about where you came from. It’s about what you can do now, and how you can make it happen.”

Black Suns recounts the thrill of Sterling’s and Oluseyi’s pursuits of one of nature’s most captivating celestial events–eclipses–and the duo’s journeys to Japan and Australia to observe them. The documentary also sheds light on their personal journeys to becoming accomplished astrophysicists, and the obstacles they faced as minorities in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) field.

Watching the gifted black astrophysicists accomplish their goals on the big screen can inspire people of all races, ages, and backgrounds to reach for their dreams, Jackson said, despite the struggles they may face trying to get there.

“It’s important for young people of color to see people who look like them doing things that they couldn’t dream of—or maybe in some cases, were never told they could do,” she said.

Black Suns: An Astrophysics Adventure makes its world premiere at the 7th Annual Art of Brooklyn Film Festival on Friday, June 9 in Brooklyn, New York.

Football injuries have forced athletics departments to reconsider the dangers of the sport. How will schools adjust and what is the future of football?

According to USA Football, there has been a 27.7 percent drop in tackle football participation from 2010 to 2015 among children ages 6 to 14. This trend has led to a change of strategy among high school and college programs. For 2017, expect to see less hitting drills in practice, and less “honing of their craft” so that players can avoid injuries such as concussions.
Players who sustain concussions will also be out of active play longer due to new concussion protocols. This could impact financials, especially if a star player is injured. This is a scenario that can lead to less football and entertainment value, and possible drops in fan interest. Gate receipts, concession revenue, viewership, and social media activity may all be affected.
Expect to see a stronger kicking game in 2017, thanks to the fact that kickers now are not only former soccer players but former gaelic football and rugby players as well.

–Frances Petit, Ph.D., director, Gabelli School EMBA program and professor of business with concentration in sports marketing

Following the recent election, what you think the prospects are for start-ups and for small businesses?

Since Trump is a businessperson and an entrepreneur himself, I think he’s going to do a lot for small business. He’s going to focus on minimizing the tax and healthcare burdens on startups, which will give small business owners some breathing room (financially speaking). Another thing the Trump administration can (and likely will) do is vastly update the space where education and entrepreneurship collide. This would involve collaboration between the Department of Education and the Small Business Administration. Hopefully they will be able to do away with costly, outdated systems/processes and hone in on providing future-forward resources, support, and education for startups, the lifeblood of our economy. I am not only hopeful for the future of startups and small business under the Trump administration, I am excited that we will see some major restructuring that will benefit all of the innovators in this country.

Christine Janssen-Selvadurai, Ph.D., director of the entrepreneurship program in the Gabelli School of Business

Identity politics turned out to be polarizing in 2016. Are we facing more of the same?

In 2016, people on both right and left used code words which erased the complexity of people’s experiences. On the left, one can see this with the term “white privilege,” which has been used to dismiss the complaints of working class whites who have experienced downward mobility, and whose communities have been hit by drug epidemics. On the right, we see it with the term “illegals” as applied to undocumented immigrants. This erases the very real courage and sacrifice that many of the undocumented displayed in coming to America, and display every day in putting food on the table for their families. I would like to say that we will see less polarizing discourse in 2017, but I see no signs we have learned our lesson. I expect many more years of polarization and division before we come to our senses and recognize one another’s common humanity across lines of race, religion, and politics.

Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of history and African and African-American studies

Has Hamilton inspired a new era of Broadway theater?

With 11 Tony Awards from a record 16 nominations, Hamilton has influenced everything from nontraditional casting in the way it embraced black and Hispanic actors to play historically white figures to presidential politics, using the stage as a modern day soapbox (in a message to Vice-President-elect Pence during a post-election performance). Theatrical ventures in the future are also sure to take note of Hamilton’s fierce social media outreach: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s final curtain call was streamed live on Facebook and his avid use of twitter connected famously with the show’s super fan contingency. Also influential are its inventive offshoots–the Hamilton Mixtape (in which the show’s songs are re-vamped by some of today’s brightest stars) and the Ham4Ham stage door outings–so popular they brought traffic to a screeching halt near the Richard Rodgers Theatre. Hamilton has inevitably become the gold standard in its triumphant ability to connect with theater goers on stage and on line.

–Stefanie Bubnis, associate director of Fordham’s theatre program

What will a U.S. shift in relations with Taiwan mean?

There are two possibilities. First, if president-elect Trump simply got caught violating a longstanding diplomatic principle and is not serious about this–if Beijing is clear-eyed, it will keep its responses pretty minimal, let the storm die down, and business will go on as usual.
If Trump is serious, then he’s possibly using Taiwan (and even Russia) to build leverage against the Chinese, hoping to extract a better long-term “deal.” If that is the case, this could be the the beginning of a chain of confrontational stances that draw in greater American military and economic power.
Expect a test of China within the first 100 days of the new administration, or the reverse.  Both sides will have an interest in escalation to demonstrate commitment, resulting in increased conflict–especially in places like the South China Sea, Taiwan, and perhaps the Koreas–but probably not war.

Raymond Kuo, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science

Is fake news a fad, or here to stay?

Sadly, I don’t think “fake news” is going away anytime soon. Juicy and provocative headlines meant to induce “clicks” are often too good for readers to pass up.  But there will be some new initiatives to fight it in 2017. For instance, Facebook users will have the ability to flag fake news content, so that others will be able to see quickly that some posts may not be truthful.  But that’s only addressing part of the problem.  Another issue is that Americans are not as media literate as one might hope. People don’t always look closely at who is creating the content they enjoy, to see if the source is legitimate–and they should. This is why we focus on critical thinking skills and analysis from the very first class in all our communication and media studies majors–to create the well-trained, ethical, truth-seeking journalists that our democracy needs to serve its citizens.

Beth Knobel, Ph.D., professor of communication and media studies

With a new administration more open to fossil fuels, where do you see green energy going in 2017?

It is unlikely that U.S. coal production, consumption, and employment will reverse their downward trends in 2017. Both the market-driven replacement of coal by natural gas and an increased focus on the environmental and human health concerns associated with fossil-fuel combustion in the wake of the Paris Climate Agreement make it likely that coal has peaked in the U.S. Technological advances in batteries for electric vehicles, spurred by federal funding, may lead to increased market penetration for these products, as well as the potential for greater reliance on renewable energy in coming decades.

The incoming administration seems intent on relaxing existing federal pollution regulations and eager to promote increased extraction of natural resources from federally-owned lands in the West. Without counterbalancing action at the state level, this myopic perspective would increase the environmental and health risks from economic activity and energy production, and remove the United States from a position of leadership on the issue of climate change.

— Marc Conte, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics

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This past spring Henderson joined Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, and Viola Davis in the film version of August Wilson’s Fences, set to be released this December. The three starred in the 2010 Broadway production which won the Tony for Best Revival of a Play. He also starred in the Pulitzer Prize winning play Between Riverside and Crazy in 2015. He recently retired as a theater professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, a position he has held since 1987.

“As an actor you’re fortunate to have a tough schedule. That means you’re working,” said the veteran actor.

From playing opposite Washington in Fences in 2010 to a recurrent role as a judge on TV’s Law and Order to his role as a White House servant in the film Lincoln, Henderson has transcended the limitations of a single medium. He credits his experience in stage acting, however, with giving him the chops to do so.

“The theater is where acting began, so if you want to study the craft of acting you want to study the history of it,” said Henderson.

Henderson, a native of Kansas, has performed extensively both on and off Broadway. He studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts, Purdue University, and at the Juilliard School. He also studied with the late director and actor Lloyd Richards, the former dean of the Yale School of Drama.

When Henderson started out, he said that theater was about “consciousness raising” and about “being involved in the process of citizenship.” It’s a stance that he still holds to this day, he said.

“Theater is a great service to the public, to the community, and to society,” he said. “It allows us to commune in our humanness.”

Matthew Maguire, the theatre program’s director, introduced himself to the actor in 2006. At the time Henderson and director Israel Hicks were making the argument that it was time for the great plays of the African-American canon to be considered great American plays, said Maguire.

“It was from him that I got the idea to ask actors to play across ethnic lines in acting class,” said Maguire. “The actors of color have always played Shakespeare and Chekhov, but the white actors never play Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson. Now they do, thanks to Stephen.”

Maguire called Henderson a Sensei, a “teacher of teachers,” whose support was key in bringing the Fordham program forward when it came to racial issues in acting. Maguire said he had long ago asked his students to cross ethnic lines by playing roles of other races, which made some students uncomfortable. He said it wasn’t fully understood until Henderson told the students to prepare for the role as they would any other: through a close reading of the text.

“The larger sense of what it is to be a human being pervades his work as a teacher and an actor on the stage. He’s got this amazing balance of affirming students, but there’s no lack of rigor in his approach. As a teacher, he’s tough.”

Henderson said he is not a purist when it comes to teaching, and said he intends to pass on a variety of methods he’s learned over the years. But while he holds various methods of acting in high regard, he said good acting always refers back to the play and the audience.

“The work is text specific,” he said. “You’re examining a piece of dramatic literature, and the artist has to come up with a series of exercises on how to best to serve the play.”

“You start with the rules, but it’s not about the rules; it’s about the exceptions. What is right for you in this moment? It’s not a self-absorbed journey. It’s about the others in the room.

“It certainly isn’t just about entertainment. We may do it for the audience, but it’s always done on the art’s terms.”

“I admire actors so much. They bare their soul. They rip their skin open, take their heart out, and go like this—” said JoAnne Akalaitis, her hand outstretched. “Night after night after night. It’s amazing what they do.”

The significance of one’s own story is at the core of this year’s advanced acting class, thanks to the leadership of Akalaitis, the fifth Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre.

“I think the bottom line with acting is emotion,” said Akalaitis, an award-winning director. “What an actor uses is his or her imagination and personal history—especially that history—to invent their characters.”

A “giant in American theater,” as Fordham Theatre program Director Matthew Maguire described her, Akalaitis is the second director to be named to the chair, following Kenny Leon in 2014. Over her decades-long career, which includes five Obie Awards and a Drama Desk award for direction and sustained achievement, Akalaitis has become renowned both for her original work and for her reimagining of classic works by Euripides, Shakespeare, Beckett, and others.

Creating a character

In her class, Creating a Character, Akalaitis is helping Fordham acting students delve deep into their art. The students work together on scenes from plays, paying special attention to believability, honesty, understanding storyline, and being in touch with both one’s body and one’s emotions. To do this, actors must go back into their own past experiences. By drawing on real emotions, actors can truly empathize with their characters, rather than merely impersonating them.

“If you’re 18 years old, you’ve got 18 years to work with,” Akalaitis said. “A lot can happen in 18 years.”

Before becoming a director, Akalaitis spent 22 years as an actor. She studied with the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco, the Open Theater in New York, and with acting virtuoso Jerzy Grotowski. From Grotowski she gained her appreciation for the “medium” actors use to create their art: namely, their personal histories.

Eventually, though, Akalaitis realized that she did not want to spend her career relentlessly revisiting the past—nor did she like acting very much.

“I only liked rehearsal, not performing,” she said. “I was interested in the process, not in repetition.”

Still, her work as an actor became the foundation of her ethos as a director. Theater, she believes, is an “unlonely pursuit.” It is unique in the sense that it is a collaborative process. Each stakeholder in a play—from directors, to playwrights, to actors—has an equally important role in bringing the story to life.

It was this philosophy of collaboration that she had in mind when she founded the critically acclaimed Mabou Mines theater company in 1970 with her ex-husband, composer Philip Glass. Located in New York City’s East Village, the company is an artist-driven coalition dedicated to experimental theater.

“Actors could become writers, writers could become directors, directors could become designers,” she said of Mabou Mines, where she remains a mentor in the resident artist program. “We supported each other in a way that was very unusual. I didn’t ever have to ‘break into’ any [new undertaking]. It was there for me.”

Teaching the next generation of characters

Akalaitis has had scores of young actors under her tutelage. Before occupying the chair endowed by Fordham alumnus Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, Akalaitis has done workshops and taught at various universities, including Yale, Harvard, and her alma mater, the University of Chicago. She also holds two named professorships—the Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Flint Professor of Theater at Bard College and the Andrew Mellon Co-chair of the Directing Program at Juilliard.

“I like being in urban universities. It feels as if the world is passing through,” she said.

Her stint at Fordham marks her first experience at a Jesuit school (“Though, [in high school]I was an incredible fan of the St. Ignatius basketball team on the west side of Chicago,” she noted), and she says she can appreciate the differences.

“I’m impressed at the diversity here [at Fordham],” she said. “There’s a variety of types and styles and ways of thinking. It feeds into a very refreshing creative energy… And the camaraderie between students in the theatre program is inspiring.”

Meanwhile, Akalaitis is also working on a play she has called Bad News! i Was There…, a compilation of messenger speeches—the bearers of bad news—from classical plays.

It’s the sort of pursuit that she wouldn’t be able to turn down even she wanted to.

“Every once in a while I make these announcements that I’m giving up theater for good,” she said. “I call people and tell them I’m giving it up, but no one takes it that seriously.”

“So, [in the case of Bad News,]about two years ago I’d given it up again when someone from Poets House called and asked me to do something for the River to River Festival. I said, ‘No, I’m not in the theater anymore.’

“But then I had an idea for a new show.”

The play, Full of Grace, had a reading at the Pope Auditorium on Mon., Nov. 24, at Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus. Two-time Tony nominee Moises Kaufman led a dialogue with the actors and the creative team, Scott Barrow and Robert Choiniere. The evening was sponsored by the Department of Theology and the Fordham Theatre Program.

Bishop Sullivan reached out to Choiniere, a practicing Catholic, whose theater experience and connections seemed a natural fit to explore the difficult terrain. The result was a collaboration with Barrow that became an interview-based docudrama. Dozens of Catholics told them their tale. Clergy and lay people from around the country, from teenagers to octogenarians, discussed inclusion and exclusion, self-acceptance and shame.

“One of the perplexing questions this play asks is why do people make a choice to remain in a difficult situation,” said Choiniere.  “It’s really about the faith that holds them.”

The play represented an opportunity for Choiniere, a dramaturge and theologian, to bring together the two major aspects of his life. For Barrow, however, the play brought him a bit closer to spirituality. Raised as a Quaker, Barrow said that he and his wife are lapsed in the faith of their upbringing. Being immersed in the stories of the play changed him.

“It’s absolutely brought me closer to faith,” he said. “To hear anyone talk with passion about any subject helps you gain an appreciation for the subject.”

As a non-Catholic, Barrow provided an objective viewpoint from a purely theatrical perspective, asking Choiniere straightforward questions that helped shape the play.

“When these stories or interviews are on the page they lose their humanity,” said Barrow. “But theater is a live event. It brings life experience, especially when watching it with an impromptu community and having that experience together.”

But for Choiniere creative distance wasn’t really an option.

“What I learned from the project was the courage to talk about really difficult issues in a public way,” he said. “As a lay minister this was a scary project for me. There are potential consequences. But these are real Catholics and their stories need to be heard.”

You were still a student when you started working with Broadway producer Elizabeth McCann, LAW ’66. How did that happen?

Larry Sacharow [former director of the Fordham Theatre Program]was my adviser. He said, “If you want to be working in the business of theater, you need to work with Liz McCann.” She is a legend and has blazed so many trails for so many people. For the 10 years that I was in an office with her, Liz gave me this really broad perspective about the business. What she taught me, as a theater producer and as a human being, was priceless. She’s like my third grandmother.

Does success bring its own set of challenges?

Every year you are doing a new set of shows that present challenges in terms of how to sell tickets, how to establish an audience, how to work with the artists. The challenge for A Gentleman’s Guide now is how do we keep the spotlight on us as the sort of reigning champ? There’s no getting to that place where we can kick back and have some cocktails and just rake in the money.

Have theatergoers’ interests changed since you’ve been in the business?

They’ve definitely gotten smarter. The amount of content that we are producing is a lot. People have a big range of options. Normally there would be one or two A-list stars that would come to Broadway in a half-season. Now, this half-season alone, it’s Hugh Jackman, Bradley Cooper, Glenn Close, James Earl Jones. You don’t need to be an industry insider to hear about what’s happening so early on with a show anymore.

Is there a bigger risk with producing an original show versus a revival?

Oh, always. Original shows like A Gentleman’s Guide or Vanya and Sonia come with higher risk, but they also come with a reward, that you get to participate in the life of this show. At the same time, we did A Raisin in the Sun with Denzel Washington (FCLC ’77), and that was a huge success. If you have a known title or a known star, it helps build the machine easier.

What qualities should a successful producer possess?

A certain amount of levelheadedness and confidence. Even with an amazing director, an amazing design team, amazing writers, amazing actors, the producer has to be the one at the end of the day that says, “We’re going to do this show. I know we have to work on this, but we’ve got to do it.” So you have to be a risk taker.

How do you get a show from script to Broadway?

Obviously the goal for a lot of people is Broadway, but there are also many shows that don’t go to Broadway and have a great life in the regional theater circuit or in Chicago or off-Broadway. There’s no exact formula to it, and I think that’s what makes it exciting, because you can’t predict it.

What do you have in the works?

We have This Is Our Youth and A Delicate Balance. We’re working on Larry David’s Fish in the Dark, a play that he wrote and he’s going to star in. Then a production of David Hare’s Skylight with Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan, the Gentleman’s Guide tour, and hopefully some other things I wish I could tell you about.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Rachel Buttner.

– Rachel Buttner

“I’m sort of an instructor, doctor, teacher,” said theater director Kenny Leon, the newly appointed Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre in the Fordham University Theatre Program.

Coming off an extraordinarily busy year, Leon assumes his new position after winning the 2014 Tony Award for directing Washington in A Raisin in the Sun. A month later his groundbreaking Holler if Ya Hear Me, a musical featuring the lyrics of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, opened on Broadway. By summer’s end, he was acting opposite Phylicia Rashad in Same Time Next Year in Atlanta.

Rashad, an accomplished actress, was the first to hold the chair in 2011 and Leon is the first director named to the chair.

“I consider myself as a director, but I started out as an actor,” said Leon. “Every two or three years I act to remind myself about the process and what actors are going through.”

In Leon, students will have someone who can teach every aspect of the craft—and then some.

“I give life lessons and, at the same time, I give truth lessons about the stage,” he said.

In addition to serving 12 years as artistic director of Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre Company, Leon is the founder of the True Colors Theater Company, also in Atlanta. He has directed opera, television, and eight Broadway plays.

“What I love about directing is you get to work with every element of the production,” he said. “You have to have faith and trust in the choreographer, the music director, the actors, and the crew.”

Leon said he seeks out universal themes that transcend background or class. As an example, he pointed out the parallels between the plays of August Wilson and the lyrics of Tupac Shakur.

“Pac is the same as August, they’re just writing about different life experiences in different cities,” he said. “Doesn’t everybody love their mother? Doesn’t everybody want to buy their mother a pearl necklace? In many ways Holler if You Hear Me could be A Raisin in the Sun 50 years from now. They’re all just really about access to the American Dream.”

And while Leon said he’s unfamiliar with the Jesuit traditions, a prominent theme of social justice threads its way through much of his work.

“It’s about every American life having equal value,” he said. “If we value every life in our country, then we can’t respond differently to the economics of every community, to the education of every community, or the health care of every community.”

Leon praised his new chair’s benefactor, Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, with whom he shares a special bond: Besides starring in Leon’s Tony-winning production of A Raisin in the Sun, he also directed Washington in August Wilson’s Fences—for which Washington earned a best actor Tony. Calling Washington a “true theater beast” and an “American treasure,” the director said that Washington built the foundation of his career “centered on the world of theater.”

“Theater allows him to expand what he does in his film work, and that’s why he wants to come back to the stage every three or four years,” said Leon. “That’s the true litmus test: Not every film actor can do theater, but most of your great theater artists can do film.”

Although Leon does not consider himself to be a traditional teacher, he said that the chance to join the faculty at Fordham couldn’t have come at a better time, as he has been looking for opportunities to give back.

“I’m also really looking forward to what I’m going to get from the students,” he said. “I want to see what’s in their heads, what energizes them, what’s going to be the next story on Broadway. They’re going to tell me a lot.”

He said he hopes students will benefit from his own experience, and “not have to repeat the same mistakes.” Students, he said, could expect to learn how to break down, build, and maintain a character and “how you stand in truth.”

“It’ll be probably the rawest class they’ve ever had,” he said.

Leon’s experience with the young cast of Holler transformed rehearsals into something of a collaborative master class, with rappers, dancers, actors, and poets learning from each other, he said.

“You find the truth by working with the person you are opposite. I love that.”

And Leon himself has learned from the masters. He worked with August Wilson when the playwright wrote Radio Golf, the last play of The Pittsburgh Cycle, Wilson’s series of 10 plays depicting 10 decades of the African-American experience. For the show’s Broadway production, Leon asked Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mother, if he could use the rapper’s song “Me Against the World” for the show’s final scene.

“As an African-American artist, I’ll never forget the time I spent with August [Wilson] and to have seen the fulfillment of his completing the cycle of plays,” Leon said. “Then, to have reached out to Afeni Shakur and to be doing a show using Tupac’s words . . . you just look at Tupac’s words and realize he was in the same army as August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, and Shakespeare.”

Another life lesson Leon has to share is that talent can only take artists so far, he said. The rest is work. He noted that Washington often puts in 16-hour days.

“If he puts in 16 hours a day, I’ve got to work 16 hours a day. If he wants to talk at 2 in the morning, then I want to talk at 2 in the morning,” he said. “I try to tell young folks, ‘Maybe there’s someone more talented than you are, but no one should ever outwork you.’”

The annual reunion for Fordham College at Lincoln Center took place June 6 against a backdrop that signified the restless growth of the college over the past century: a new 22-story campus building that is on the cusp of opening to students.

“There’s so much happening, there’s so much excitement on this campus, and a large part of that excitement you can see if you just turn around,” said Robert R. Grimes, S.J., dean of the college, in remarks to alumni at Robert Moses Plaza, across from the new building.

The new structure, including undergraduate housing and a new facility for Fordham Law School, was one of several achievements that Father Grimes described at the event—blessed with balmy weather—that drew more than 550 alumni and guests to the Lincoln Center campus.

“There are so many things to be proud of at Fordham College at Lincoln Center,” Father Grimes said, including students’ prestigious fellowship awards, the mock trial team’s strong performance in regional competition, and “award after award” won by the college’s student newspaper, The Observer.

Two members of the college’s board of advisors presented Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, with a $1.65 million check representing this year’s alumni donations.

“I want to thank you for coming home. It is always a great grace and an honor to have you back,” Father McShane told the alumni.

The new structure was particularly impressive to alumni who hadn’t visited for a few years.

“Seeing the new building is incredible,” said Justin Brennan, FCLC ’01, a communications consultant in Washington, D.C., who was glad to see the project maintained the campus’s green space. His classmate Joel Johnstone, FCLC ’01, said “it’s a little surreal” to see the change.

“I just can’t believe the progress they’ve made with the campus,” said Johnstone, an actor who will play astronaut Gus Grissom in the ABC series Astronaut Wives Club.

Among the alumni was Beatrice Jane Maher, UGE ’45, who remembered the college’s more modest quarters at the Woolworth Building and at 302 Broadway, two places where Fordham made its home in Manhattan before moving to Lincoln Center in 1968.

She belonged to a close-knit class of 35 students, all female. “I loved it. I really did,” she said. “My mother, God bless her, she chose the college. She said, ‘You’re going to Fordham, and that’s it.’”

The reunion included a few enrichment events. George Drance, S.J., artist in residence in the theatre department, performed part of his new one-person show, *mark, which presents the Gospel of Mark through the eyes of a street artist.

Meanwhile, psychology and urban studies professor Harold Takooshian, Ph.D., delivered a talk—“Urban Studies Across Nations”—that included some findings about city life that may seem counterintuitive.

“Friendship thrives in the city,” since population density brings people into contact with more acquaintances, he said. While people in rural areas tend to care about each other more than they do in cities, he said, New York has moved more in that direction since the Sept. 11 attacks, becoming friendlier.

“Cities themselves are changing, just as human beings are changing,” he said.