Eric Grode

And the cagily mispronounced “abdomen” in “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” the one that rhymes with “home in”? That takes a bit more doing to translate properly — if it’s worth doing at all.

Ana Méndez-Oliver and David Paul confronted these and dozens of other linguistic puzzles over the summer as they worked on the titles for “Porgy and Bess,” which returned to the Metropolitan Opera’s repertory on Sept. 23. (It continues through Oct. 16, then comes back for another run in January.)

The company’s last staging of the opera closed in 1990, five years before the introduction of seatback titles. Unlike more common supertitles, which live above the stage, the Met’s system allows each operagoer to turn his or her screen on or off — or change the channel to another language. (The Met offers titles in English, Spanish, German and sometimes Italian.)

This has necessitated a team of translators, and a host of challenges: The screens only hold 72 characters, and the old-fashioned dot-matrix-style, all-caps format makes accents and diacritics difficult, which is one reason the Met doesn’t offer French titles.

“Porgy and Bess” brings its own set of obstacles. To depict the black denizens of Catfish Row, the opera’s coastal-Carolinas setting, the librettists, Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward, notoriously used an idiomatic English that was long referred to as “Negro dialect” — an especially uncomfortable strategy given that both writers were white. Charges of cultural appropriation have ebbed and flowed since the work’s premiere in 1935.

For many, the titles compound this unease: Hearing Bess give soaring voice to her newfound love can feel different from staring at the words “I’S YOUR WOMAN NOW.” When the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, presented the opera in 2016, it initially opted not to use titles for that reason.

“The language is so colloquial that it can feel dated,” Nigel Redden, Spoleto’s general director, said in an interview. “And those words become much more prominent with supertitles.” (Two performances in, however, complaints from audience members who had difficulty understanding the words prompted Redden to change course and add them.)

The discomfort over the written titles is part of the reason the Met got permission from the Gershwin estate to use the slightly modified set of English titles employed at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York, in 2017. These titles use what Paul Cremo, the Met’s dramaturg and the man in charge of its English-language titles, called “more standardized forms of words for easier reading.”

He and Redden both described the original lyrics as something of a pronunciation guide. “Todd Duncan and Anne Brown, the original Porgy and Bess, were classical singers and had to be coached to use this dialect,” Cremo said.

As for the other languages, successful translation can be a matter of swapping out one set of colloquialisms for another. For example, Méndez-Oliver said, “the lack of verb agreement doesn’t translate into Spanish. That’s not an error we make.”

Instead, she relied heavily on contractions and abbreviations:

The two contractions — “na’” for “nada” (“nothing”) and “pa’” for “para” (“for”) — are designed to maintain the tone of Gershwin’s lyric while still being comprehensible to a Spanish-language audience. Similarly, the rich daddy and good-looking mama of “Summertime” become a “rico pai” and “guapa mai” (contractions for “papi” and “mami”).

Paul faced a different set of challenges. “The number of German words that are vernacular enough that they don’t pull the viewer out of the story is much smaller,” he said.

Instead, he used what can be an additional hurdle — the use of formal versus informal address in German — to his advantage. “When a cop addresses one of the Catfish Row citizens, it shows that class difference even more clearly,” Paul said. “And so do the informal ways the members of the community then speak to the cops.”

All three Met Titles writers stressed the importance of being sparing with their text. “You can’t drown people with titles,” Méndez-Oliver said. “You want them watching and listening to the opera, not reading it.” (Before “Porgy,” she added, one of her biggest challenges was Nico Muhly’s 2013 opera “Two Boys,” whose text-message-laden libretto often gave her no choice on this front.)

And what about that droll but linguistically thorny “It Ain’t Necessarily So” lyric, in which the irreverent Sportin’ Life explains the biblical story of Jonah as follows:

Well, Méndez-Oliver swapped out “home” for “casa” and “abdomen” for “panza,” which translates as “belly.” And Paul gave up on the rhyme altogether:

(In English, “He made his home in the belly of this fish.”)

In other words, it can get complicated. But Paul said these sorts of note-by-note, syllable-by-syllable dilemmas come into play with all opera translations. He described his work as “translation and interpretation and adaptation all at once.” Seventy-two characters at a time.

This article originally appeared in

NEW YORK — “Happy dust,” the powdery white drug at the center of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” is rendered in Spanish as “perico,” and in German as “Schnee” — both maintaining the slanginess of the original. But “buckra,” a derogatory word for white men, becomes the more straightforward “blanco” and “die Weissen.”

Translating 'Porgy'? Get Ready to Sweat

To this day, classics like “Lysistrata,” “Tartuffe” and (as any Fox News viewer can attest) “Julius Caesar” can raise hackles centuries later. Here are several more plays that caused controversy — and frequently made sure to point that out in their ad campaigns.

Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1905)

“It’s much my best play,” George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “but it makes my blood run cold.” Temperatures ran a good bit higher during a protracted war of words in the press between one of the performers and the much-feared Anthony Comstock of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The profession in question was the running of a brothel, after all, and the cops busted up the first United States performance of this play. New York’s police commissioner supplied what would have been the perfect pull quote — “revolting, indecent and nauseating where it is not boring” — had he not canceled every subsequent performance.

God of Vengeance (1923)

The police may have been there at opening night for “Mrs. Warren,” but it wasn’t until Sholem Asch’s Yiddish drama — also about a brothel keeper and her daughter, and this time featuring a lesbian relationship — transferred uptown to the Apollo Theater that its producer, Harry Weinberger, and the cast members were indicted on charges of “an indecent, immoral and impure theatrical performance.” Weinberger, a well-known lawyer who had defended the likes of Emma Goldman, agreed to represent himself and the cast in the subsequent obscenity trial. Paula Vogel’s “Indecent” would dramatize the proceedings almost a century later.

Sex (1926)

Oh, to be a fly on the wall of the police wagon that hauled away the cast members of both “The Captive” and this lurid Mae West dramedy on the same night. “Sex” had been running for almost a year at that point and got a huge bump in publicity from this run-in, although West earned that publicity by serving a 10-day sentence at a Roosevelt Island workhouse. She then took the play on the road, armed with this “warning” in the advertisements: “If you cannot stand excitement — see your doctor before visiting Mae West in ‘Sex.’”

The Children’s Hour (1934)

As with “God of Vengeance” and “The Captive,” homosexuality was at issue in this Lillian Hellman drama. It was banned in Boston the following year, and the New York Drama Critics Circle sprang into existence in the wake of the Pulitzer Prize committee’s refusal to award Hellman. The play was so incendiary that Hellman not only removed any mention of lesbianism but even changed the title — to “These Three” — for the film version in 1936.

Hair (1968)

Drug use and irreverence toward the American flag had as much to do with the furor that rose around this “American tribal love-rock musical” as its famous — and famously brief — nude scene. Not one but two Supreme Court decisions weighed in on contested productions (including one in, you guessed it, Boston); the Apollo 13 astronauts made headlines by leaving at intermission; and members of the touring casts were issued an eight-page guide on how to handle the local police.

Jesus Christ Superstar (1971)

The “Hair” director Tom O’Horgan struck again with this freewheeling adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice concept album. But there’s a thin line between boisterous and blasphemous, and both Christians (who didn’t like seeing Judas as a protagonist) and Jews (who worried about the villainous depictions of Herod and Caiaphas) ended up protesting the work. Charges of impiety would also arise in later years over “The Book of Mormon,” “The Testament of Mary” and especially the Off Broadway play “Corpus Christi.”

Oh! Calcutta! (1971)

A few dimly lit seconds in “Hair” gave way to lots and lots of nudity a mere three years later in this revue with segments written by John Lennon, Jules Feiffer, Sam Shepard and (before he pulled the rights) Samuel Beckett. Since American audiences quickly adopted a been-there-seen-that attitude in the 1970s — “There is no more innocent show in town,” reported The New York Times critic Clive Barnes — the producers actively courted foreign audiences, spending about $35,000 a year solely on Japanese-language advertising for its long-running 1976 revival.

Miss Saigon (1991)

Just as “God of Vengeance” yielded its own dramatic adaptation in “Indecent,” this pop-opera “Madame Butterfly” update — which starred a heavily made-up Jonathan Pryce in the role of a Eurasian pimp called the Engineer — spawned David Henry Hwang’s “Yellowface.” The producers did away with Pryce’s makeup before the transfer from London, but it wasn’t enough to mollify the protesters who gathered outside the Broadway Theater. Every subsequent Engineer on Broadway and on national tours has been played by an actor of Asian heritage.

The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002)

Edward Albee’s plays have rankled everyone from Maoists (“Box and Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung”) to the Pulitzer Prize board (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”). But it wasn’t until this Tony Award-winning drama, in which Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruehl’s characters find themselves in a love triangle with the titular ruminant, that death threats started coming to the theater. “I wanted to write a play examining the limits of our tolerance,” Albee told The Hartford Courant, and he soon found out. He was nonplussed that a climactic father-son kiss proved too much for some audience members who had previously handled the vividly described (though not actually depicted) bestiality: “What are we, all Republicans or something?”

The _____ With the Hat (2011)

So many plays have tried employing profanity in their titles that The New York Times’ standards editor, Philip Corbett, finally had to weigh in with an explanation about all the hyphens and euphemisms put into service. But only Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Broadway debut brought this debate to Broadway, with a Playbill that bleeped just two of those 12 letters — and a website that offered the sound of Elaine Stritch lustily declaiming every _____ing word in the title.

From 'Sex' to 'Superstar,' 10 Plays That Caused a Stir

The marketing campaign for the Broadway-bound “Slave Play” is following the time-honored tradition of leaning into its controversy, with pull quotes like “Gaudily transgressive” and “Gruesomely sexy.” Assuming the transgressions and sexiness carry through to the Golden Theater, “Slave Play” will find itself part of a rich history of productions — many of them transfers from the more licentious lands of Off Broadway and London — that shocked audience members upon opening on Broadway.

In the space of less than an hour, these were just a few of the terms of endearment lobbed from the dimly lit seats of the Festival Theater, one of the three stages that make up the Shaw Festival campus in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.

Tech rehearsals — the millisecond-by-millisecond calibration of every lighting cue and sound effect — can sap the will of even the hardiest theater folk. But Kimberley Rampersad, the issuer of those kind words, wasn’t having it one recent afternoon. Not with the festival’s marquee event entrusted to her — on just her second time directing here.

A bronze statue of George Bernard Shaw may stand in the center of this bucolic town 20 miles north of Niagara Falls, but only two plays by the festival’s namesake are on offer in this year’s 11-play season.

Some would argue, however, that there are actually three Shaws in a 12-play season. Because one of the two — the one that Rampersad was overseeing — is the “glorious beast” (to use her phrase) known as “Man and Superman,” which took Shaw a decade to see mounted in its entirety. Rampersad had her work cut out for her.

The play’s 1905 premiere came minus its third act, an extended dream sequence known as “Don Juan in Hell,” in which four of the play’s characters morph into their 16th-century forebears. Several theater companies have embraced Act III’s blend of philosophical phantasmagoria and staged it on its own; others have jettisoned it and zipped ahead to the fourth and final act. Many others have taken one look at the published script (complete with a 58-page appendix devoted to the lead character’s “Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion”) and opted for “Pygmalion” instead.

The Shaw Festival, however, is all in — with a full six hours (including a lunch break) given over to Shaw’s musings on anarchy, proto-feminism, the Fabian Society and many, many, many other ideas. “Man and Superman” began last weekend and will be performed a total of 17 times through Oct. 5.

“‘Man and Superman’ is one of the reasons I took this job,” said Tim Carroll, who became artistic director of the festival in 2017. “I really think it’s one of the great things made by a human, right up there with (Bach’s) B minor Mass and ‘The Magic Flute.’ ”

But what human should direct it? Here Carroll’s decision-making process was informed by his own experience working for Mark Rylance at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London.

“Early in my time there, Mark approached me about what I wanted to do the following year, before he saw what I did,” Carroll recalled. “I asked him, ‘Don’t you want to see how this goes first?’ And he said, ‘I trust you.’

“I’ve been a freelancer most of my life, and I came here determined not to forget how that feels.”

Enter Rampersad, a midcareer dancer and choreographer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, who first came to the festival in 2015 to appear in both “Sweet Charity” and “Pygmalion.” (The use of repertory casting, a hallmark of the festival, means all 13 “Man and Superman” cast members are also appearing in “Cyrano de Bergerac” or Howard Barker’s scabrous play “Victory” — though never on the same day.)

She returned in 2017 as one of the festival’s intern directors, where she assisted Carroll on Shaw’s audience-friendly “Androcles and the Lion.” On the strength of this apprentice work, he asked her to direct the following season’s lunchtime one-act, “O’Flaherty V.C.,” also by Shaw. (He also cast her in “Grand Hotel” that year.)

Then, before “O’Flaherty” even opened, he followed Rylance’s example and offered her “Man and Superman.”

“She’s a first-class motivator and setter of example,” Carroll said. “And she clicked with Bernard Shaw right away, as I learned from ‘Androcles.’ ”

Rampersad, who began her shift to directing about a decade ago when she sensed the window for dancing jobs begin to shrink, said this connection to all things Shavian didn’t happen overnight. As she moved from performing Shaw to directing Shaw, she assigned herself a reading list of one play a week for several months. (“Man and Superman” took a bit longer, she admits.)

“He’s an industry,” she said of Shaw, “but he’s also a lens on the world. And every time we solve one of his mysteries in the rehearsal room, two new ones pop up.”

And then there’s the 80-minute mystery known as “Don Juan in Hell,” which many Shaw scholars have argued fares better as its own entity. Rampersad disagrees.

“It adds the magic to the play,” she said. “It adds the cosmos, which then gives real gravitas to Act IV. To me, it’s a golden thread that would be missing from this tapestry if it wasn’t there.”

Finding room for the magic but also the logic is where Rampersad’s gifts come to the forefront, said Sara Topham, who plays the enigmatic female lead in “Man and Superman.”

“Kim has an insatiable drive for explanation, which is vital for any director,” Topham said. “The only word I can think of to describe her is ‘extraordinary.’ ”

Topham’s co-star Gray Powell also commended Rampersad’s knack for making these idea-stuffed plays accessible to the audience. “The clarity of the arguments is the toughest thing about Shaw — they need to sound like real thoughts happening in real time,” he said. “And Kim really gets that.”

Carroll’s faith in her surfaced in another way this year: He and his associate artistic director, Kate Hennig, created the new position of intern artistic director. “Kate and I were looking at the Canadian theater landscape,” he said, “and we thought, ‘We really should be setting Kim up to land one of those big jobs.’ ”

She is automatically invited to every one of Carroll’s meetings — there are many — and the two meet at least once a week to discuss big-picture ideas as well as scheduling minutiae. (Not that her other skills have been forgotten: Rampersad will appear in the festival’s “Holiday Inn” this winter and then direct as well as choreograph “Gypsy” here in 2020.)

“It is an opportunity for me to learn what it means to hold spaces for other people,” she said of the new position. “The role of artistic director is where my art meets my politics.”

But first Rampersad needs to wrangle Shaw’s towering work — which she described as about “getting off on the rigor of being your best self and getting others to be their best selves” — up from hell and back to earth. And as she slips in and out of all (or at least a fair number) of those meetings, she said she returns to “Man and Superman” buoyed by her boss’s rallying cry, one that emphasizes both rigor and abandon.

“Tim’s like, ‘Go, go! Be excellent, but go!’ ”

Event information:

Through Dec. 22 in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario; shawfest.com.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/theater/shaw-festival-man-and-superman.html" id="eb3e169b-11fd-3715-a73e-08ce93227bdb">The New York Times</a>.

“Sweets.”

Once a Dancer, Now a Driven Director

MacDermot, who died Monday at the age of 89, had far less hair than his “Hair” co-creators, James Rado and Gerome Ragni. His was cut in a high-and-tight style that fit perfectly with his necktie and white dress shirt — and that completely clashed with his Dionysian collaborators.

But while he resembled a wallflower at the free-love orgy, MacDermot spent the next 50 years cultivating a reputation as one of the funkiest composers Broadway had ever seen. His layered, sinuous grooves were catnip for such rap legends as Busta Rhymes and J Dilla, who sampled his music. He spiced up Shakespeare in the 1971 musical “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (the show that won instead of “Follies”) and gave the 1970 proto-blaxploitation film “Cotton Comes to Harlem” a glut of wah-wah pedals.

Still, with its seemingly endless bounty of timeless songs, “Hair” remains the defining work in MacDermot’s career. Generations of musical theater composers have integrated rock music into their own scores with a freedom and stylistic flexibility that he helped make possible. Here several of those songwriters, along with a few other theater and hip-hop notables, share their memories and appreciations of MacDermot. These are edited excerpts from their comments.

David Yazbek, ‘The Band’s Visit’ composer:

There wasn’t a corny bone in his body. He was my kind of composer because he cherished the hook while also understanding how to serve the melody. Even when I was 8 years old, I looked at that picture of him next to Rado and Ragni on the album cover, and I said, “You know what? That’s the cool guy.” To me, that’s what a real musician looked like.

Bobbito Garcia, hip-hop DJ and author:

When sampling got big in hip-hop production, every producer was trying to position themselves as the most original when it came to beats. Galt had the naked drums, the isolated horns and bass lines: Everyone wanted those, especially after Pete Rock sampled him for Run-DMC’s “Down With the King.” I once got a ton of sealed Galt records at the store I had in the late ‘90s, Footwork, and (I) was selling them for, like, $75 apiece. Other record shops down the street would snatch them up and resell them for way more.

Cyndi Lauper, ‘Kinky Boots’ composer:

“Hair” paved the way for pop and rock music on Broadway. That musical opened the playing field and made room for different types of music and different types of composers. Without Galt, I don’t think anyone ever would have taken a chance on me and let me write for Broadway, and his legacy will last forever.

Betty Buckley, ‘Cats’ performer:

He was just the nicest, calmest, kindest man. When they were making the film of “Hair,” the music director was subletting my apartment, and they asked me to sing the first four lines in “Walking in Space.” I was supposed to get a credit for it but didn’t, and a lot of people don’t know that was me.

Jeanine Tesori, ‘Fun Home’ composer:

If you just read the lyric “Ripped open by metal explosion” (from the “Hair” song “3-5-0-0”), it sounds almost journalistic, with all sorts of numbers and data. But the way Galt set it gives it an emotional center. His melodies always imply the harmony behind them. Your ear just travels.

Bernard Purdie, drummer in original ‘Hair’ production:

We worked together for more than 50 years. We used to have breakfast every Friday for almost 10 years straight. Galt’s music was my music — he did everything that I wanted to do. I thought “Who is Silvia?” from “Two Gentlemen” was like heaven.

Jason Robert Brown, ‘The Bridges of Madison County’ composer:

What I truly responded to about his music was not that he was some kind of rock visionary (which he wasn’t), but that he was a jazz guy who had a large number of tools at his disposal and used them to create scores that bounced from style to style in completely authentic ways without being what I would pejoratively call “pastiche.” And I have to mention the bridge of “Easy to Be Hard,” when it pops up a step for “Do you only care about the bleeding crowd?”; it’s a thrilling bit of melody and harmony, unexpected and deeply satisfying.

Diane Paulus, director of 2009 Broadway revival:

He sat next to me for all the auditions of the first “Hair” concert in Central Park (in 2007). After each singer, he just had about three words for each singer: “She moved me.” “Didn’t move me.” There was nothing technical. It was purely visceral. That was how he responded to the music and responded to the singers, and you feel that in his music.

Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater:

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he had his pulse on the country. He knew what we wanted to hear, and he knew how to say it musically. He was also incredibly loyal to the people he worked with. At one point during the Broadway run of “Hair,” we came to difficulties with a musician Galt had a long working relationship with, and it got to where we were talking about firing him. Galt asked to meet me in my office, and he said, “I’m pulling the rights to this show and closing it if you fire him.” And he meant it. He would shut down a Broadway hit for the sake of someone he knew. That incentivized me to work things out.

Joe Iconis, ‘Be More Chill’ composer:

I remember hearing “Hair” on my parents’ vinyl and being slightly confused by it. It felt dangerous to me. But the bones of his music are classic theater. If you play his melodies on a piano, they sound like Golden Age musical theater songs. “Frank Mills” is so evocative and pure that it would work in any genre. It showed me that there’s a way to combine classic musical theater and cutting-edge rock ‘n’ roll.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/theater/galt-macdermot-hair-composer.html" id="93f3e38d-4287-3dbf-aace-eaa4d05309a4">The New York Times</a>.

'The Cool Guy': Pop and Theater Stars Celebrate the Composer of 'Hair'

To hip-hop artists, he was the supplier of endless beats and grooves. To Stephen Sondheim acolytes, he was the composer of the show that beat “Follies” for the Best Musical Tony Award. And to generations of musical theater fans, Galt MacDermot was the guy who looked out of place in a picture on the back of the “Hair” cast recording.

<h1>BALTIMORE — The seats are no more than 14 inches from the Everyman Theater stage here. There are two of them, and they each bear the name of Shawn Laken, an aspiring painter and filmmaker who would have turned 50 last year.</h1>

Shawn had never set foot in this theater, which is currently presenting “Everything Is Wonderful,” Chelsea Marcantel’s bruising story of rage and absolution within an Amish community. He died in 1988 in a car accident on a winding road near Bard College, where he was a junior. He was buried on what would have been his 20th birthday.

Sandy and Mark Laken, Shawn’s parents and the sponsors of this production, have spent a lot of time at Everyman recently. Opening night, Feb. 1, marked their fourth time seeing the play in a week. But a different couple sat in the front-row seats marked “In memory of Shawn Laken” that night. Sandy and Mark had moved a few rows back. They were, both literally and emotionally, too close to the work.

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“Everything is Wonderful” takes place in the aftermath of another car accident, one that kills two children in an Amish family. The father’s impulsive decision to invite the grief-stricken driver into their home dredges up a series of confrontations that test the community’s ability to forgive any and all acts if they are properly repented.

Marcantel said she came up with the idea for the play, which had its premiere in 2017 at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, after seeing a Werner Herzog documentary about a fatal car accident involving an Amish buggy.

The subject matter hadn’t occurred to Vincent Lancisi, Everyman’s artistic director, when he was explaining the theater’s finances to members of its board of directors. Like most theaters, Everyman — which has its own repertory company and relocated in 2013 to a converted vaudeville theater in downtown Baltimore’s arts district after an $18 million capital campaign — seeks sponsorship for its productions, typically to the tune of $10,000. And this year’s offerings by the likes of Oscar Wilde and Brian Friel had already found takers.

The only sponsor-free play left was “Everything Is Wonderful,” and when Lancisi mentioned it was a drama about forgiveness within an Amish community after a tragedy, Sandy Laken — a new board member — raised her hand and said, “Oh, we’ll do that.”

Minutes later, however, Lancisi remembered a conversation he had had with her a year or so before, where she had mentioned the death of her younger son. “So I called Sandy and said, ‘Listen, you should know a bit more about this show.'”

She and Mark Laken asked to read a copy of the script. Shortly thereafter, they called Lancisi back and said they were still in. “It was a no-brainer,” Sandy Laken said.

‘It has changed our lives’

Their involvement with “Everything Is Wonderful” has also spurred the Lakens — who have met with and counseled many other grieving parents in the decades since Shawn’s death — to take on another project. In response to the play’s message of forgiveness and reconciliation, Sandy and Mark Laken are searching for the man who they feel is responsible.

The details as to who this man might be are murky. The police record for that September night is gone, and more than three decades have blunted the memories of many involved. Everyone agrees that Shawn was driving a friend home that night on River Road. Everyone agrees that he swerved, crashed into a tree and died instantly.

The Lakens’ telling of that night includes two other cars. One was right behind Shawn, and its driver saw the accident. The other was coming the opposite way on the two-lane road, driving in a way that forced Shawn off the road.

Two Bard officials who were working there at the time — Leon Botstein, the school’s president, and Mark Primoff, its associate vice president of communications — remember this purely as a one-car accident. As it happens, Botstein had lost his own young daughter in a hit-and-run incident several years earlier, and both he and the Lakens recall this tragic coincidence as being helpful in the aftermath of Shawn’s death.

As the Lakens recall it, though, the driver of this other car — who was not a Bard student — surfaced a few days later. And they say Botstein offered them the opportunity to meet with him.

“We were so grief-struck and shocked that we chose not to,” Sandy Laken said. “Had we had more wisdom at the time, we would have.”

Why? “To tell him that we forgive him,” she said. “This play has taught me that.”

Neither of the two Bard officials can recall the possibility of such a meeting. “Nobody here is disputing anything that the Lakens said, because we have no reason to,” Primoff said. “But we have not been able to supply the details that would help give them the closure they want. And we have looked extensively.”

For his part, Botstein — who declined to press charges after his daughter was killed — speaks from experience about the harrowing questions he and the Lakens and every other person in their situation ask themselves.

“For every parent who loses a child, it’s very hard not to feel some responsibility. There’s always the counterfactual of ‘If only I had. ...’ You personalize it.”

In the wake of the emotions surfaced by “Everything Is Wonderful,” the Lakens have reached out to the passenger in Shawn’s car, who suffered only minor injuries, as well as the driver of the car behind them, in the hopes of finding threads that might lead them to this other driver. They have also asked Bard and the Dutchess County, New York, Police Department to assist in their search.

Regardless of what they learn, Sandy Laken said, “We know it was meant for us to be involved with this play. It has changed our lives.”

Mark is less effusive than his wife, but he echoed the power of this work. “People who see this play will start to think about forgiving others,” he said.

A reason to write plays

The night before “Everything Is Wonderful” opened, the Lakens met Marcantel for the first time and discussed their personal connection to it. She described this set of circumstances as something close to a miracle.

“You get a lot of signals from the universe that you should stop doing theater, that it doesn’t matter,” she said. “So it’s nice to get a thumbs-up from the universe like this.”

Lancisi said the Lakens had attended various rehearsals of “Everything Is Wonderful” but originally planned to save their first viewing until opening night. “She didn’t want to see it for the longest time,” he said of Sandy Laken. “She read it. She researched the hell out of it. But once we realized the emotional power of this play — for anyone, not just the Lakens — I said to my staff, ‘She’s got to come earlier. Otherwise she will melt on opening night.'”

So the Lakens came to the first preview. And again two nights later. And a third time.

In the process, they initiated a discussion that was severed 31 years earlier. “Once a child dies, there’s no subsequent conversation you can have with that child,” Botstein said. “That may be the hardest part.”

And so the Lakens wish instead to speak with another person, one who they believe was responsible for Shawn’s death. “I just want to say to him, ‘Tell me what happened,'” Mark said.

While that question lingers — not yet known, possibly unknowable — Sandy and Mark Laken hold hands in the dark night after night, watching six performers tell an eerily similar story with a bittersweet resolution that has eluded them.

They cry each time at the ending, as do many others in the audience. And the distance between art and life, between 1988 and 2019, between themselves and Shawn, collapses.

This article originally appeared in <a id="75f53e93-412a-43cf-8d67-ad3c22bc8d36" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/theater/everything-is-wonderful-laken-everyman.html">The New York Times</a>.

Behind a Play, a Real Tale of Forgiveness

Shawn had never set foot in this theater, which is currently presenting “Everything Is Wonderful,” Chelsea Marcantel’s bruising story of rage and absolution within an Amish community.

Behind a play, a real tale of forgiveness

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