The director Lear deBessonet, whose revival of the musical Ragtime on the Vivian Beaumont stage this month also marks her debut production as Lincoln Center Theater’s new artistic director, is no stranger to time travel. The first play she put on in New York City, mounted in a church basement in Gramercy Park when she was in her early 20s, was an original piece focusing on Jerusalem syndrome, a rare form of religious mania in which visitors to the Holy Land believe themselves to be living embodiments of figures from the Bible.
Seeking inspiration for Ragtime, which is set in the early 1900s and in locations in and around New York, deBessonet and I met on a brilliant late-summer morning outside the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In the play, Tateh (Brandon Uranowitz), an artist newly arrived from Eastern Europe, lives in a tenement near where the museum stands today.
DeBessonet and I had just stepped inside the museum, and my eyes were still adjusting to the dimly lit vestibule with its tin ceiling and worn wood banister, when the director noticed, high up on the still-sooty wall, a painted decoration: A luminous, small oval depicted a little house standing beside trees and fields beneath a clear blue sky.
“I wonder who painted that,” deBessonet said as we stared at this serene image, so at odds with what we imagined the crowded, airless tenement hallways of a century ago to be. As we soon learned, though, the artist was unknown—perhaps a tenant, hoping to trade their skill with a paintbrush for a discount on lodgings or to find relief, via art, in a pastoral vision of the American dream.
Ragtime offers its own vast and complex vision of the American dream—its enduring promise, along with the wounds and heartbreak of those who are denied it—during the turbulent first decades of the 20th century. Based upon the 1975 novel by E. L. Doctorow, its kaleidoscopic plot follows three families—a wealthy white family with one child, a fractured Black couple attempting to reunite around a new baby, and a Jewish immigrant widower and his young daughter—whose lives are upended by their encounters with each other and with real-life historical figures, including the anarchist Emma Goldman, the vaudeville sex symbol Evelyn Nesbit, and the civil rights leader Booker T. Washington.
The story opens in suburban New Rochelle, where Mother (Caissie Levy) is bidding adieu to Father (Colin Donnell), a fireworks manufacturer and amateur explorer setting off to join Admiral Peary on an Arctic expedition. As the explorers depart, their ship crosses paths with a “rag ship” approaching Ellis Island, carrying Tateh and his little girl (Tabitha Lawing). In the meantime, Mother’s prim, bourgeois existence is punctured when she finds an abandoned “Negro baby” in her garden and offers to shelter both the baby and Sarah (Nichelle Lewis), his desperate mother. Soon the baby’s father, Coalhouse Walker Jr. (Joshua Henry), a brilliant African American pianist who wooed Sarah with the “new music” of ragtime and then wronged her, comes driving up from Harlem every Sunday to try to win her back.
Is it any wonder that things go terribly awry? Terrence McNally’s original script for the 1998 Broadway production and Lynn Ahrens’s lyrics seem to anticipate the ill winds of our current political rhetoric: Admiral Peary speaks of people coming to the US from “cesspool” countries; banker J.P. Morgan counts himself among the men who can “make a country great”; as a new immigrant, Tateh keeps his daughter on a leash—he’s terrified of being separated from her. Throw in racism, celebrity worship, and police brutality, and you have the makings of a contemporary American tragedy.
But Stephen Flaherty’s epic score, which charts the characters’ transformations as they move from syncopated ragtime rhythms to jagged, jazzy discords and minor key dirges, with stirring ballads and notes of klezmer in the mix, also includes hints of a wide and generous Aaron Copland–esque American sound that contains seeds of longing and hope.
Upstairs at the Tenement Museum, deBessonet and I explored the circa-1902 apartment of Jennie and Harris Levine, a Russian Jewish couple who operated a garment factory while raising their five children in these three small rooms, where the director found inspiration for her sets in the Levines’ oxblood-colored armoire and pale blue printed wallpaper. Next door to the Levines, in an apartment still under restoration, I teared up at the sight of a few humble playthings that excavators had found there: four glass marbles and a tiny doll, no larger than a child’s finger, made of black metal. (Full disclosure: According to family lore, my late father had been born and grew up in a tenement just across the street, where he lived with his parents and six siblings in two narrow rooms.)
Over lunch just down the block at Russ Daughters Cafe—cold borscht for me; smoked salmon, eggs, and latkes for deBessonet—my enthusiastic companion talked about growing up in Baton Rouge, where she fell in love with directing early on, enlisting her younger sister, some neighborhood children, and the family dog in ad hoc performances. Today she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two young children, and in her spare time enjoys neighborhood potlucks, cheering at her son’s baseball games, and singing in a local choir.
She traced her specific interest in theater as a broadly collective endeavor—she founded and spent almost nine years running Public Works, an acclaimed arm of New York’s Public Theater in which community groups and professional actors mingle in large-scale productions—back to what she called the “theatrical texture” of her childhood environment, “the constant presence of things like Mardi Gras, football games, and church that have this level of pageantry, music, and color, and are intergenerational, and involve people from all walks of life.”
During her freshman year at the University of Virginia, deBessonet came up to New York to see the original Broadway production of Ragtime with a legendary cast including Brian Stokes Mitchell, Audra McDonald, Marin Mazzie, and an 11-year-old Lea Michele. (The musical garnered multiple Tony Awards, including for McDonald as Sarah, for McNally’s book, Ahrens’s lyrics, and Flaherty’s score.)
McDonald—who, when we spoke, was just coming off her widely lauded Broadway run as Momma Rose in Gypsy—remembers the start of that 1998 production. “I knew that I was part of something special from the very first workshop, where we heard ‘Wheels of a Dream,’ ” she says. “Something electric was happening in the room. We were coming to the end of a millennium and hoping that the show would help propel society forward in some way.”
For deBessonet, the show “had this epic quality around movements of people and history, but it also followed these deeply personal stories with such emotional intimacy,” she recalled. “And seeing what music does in the context of this show—how it makes the flesh-and-blood pain and dreams of history feel-able—was so revolutionary to me. I thought, That’s the kind of theater I want to make.”
She visited the city again during spring break of her senior year, when a chance encounter at LaGuardia Airport with Anne Bogart, an influential figure in experimental theater, landed her a temporary gig assisting Bogart and gave her the courage to move to New York. But directing, of course, can be hard to break into. “There are no auditions for directors,” deBessonet explained. “Who is going to hand you resources, people to work with, a space?” So she scrambled, working day jobs (including all-night sessions at an illegal poker club) while putting on plays in church cellars and on rooftops, eventually making a name for herself with her 2007 production of Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards at PS122. Still, the demographic narrowness of the audiences she was seeing shocked her.
Her community work, expressed most recently in One Nation/One Project—a collaboration between mayoral offices, health centers, and local artists in 18 cities across the US, all creating works to premiere on a single summer day last year—was inspired by the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s and its director, Hallie Flanagan, whom deBessonet said possessed “the most exciting vision of any historical figure in American theater—she believed that every person deserved to have the arts as part of their daily life.”
DeBessonet comes to Lincoln Center Theater after five years as the artistic director of Encores!, a series devoted to the staging of classic musicals at New York City Center, where her production of Ragtime debuted for two weeks last October, during the period surrounding the election. It was rapturously received, with both audiences and critics finding a deep emotional resonance, even beyond politics, in its characters’ ideals and disappointments.
In her role as Mother, Caissie Levy sings “Back to Before,” a poignant, proto-feminist ballad about love and change—“one of those iconic songs that speaks volumes about where we are as women, as people, as a society,” Levy told me.
Shaina Taub will also be reprising her role as Emma Goldman—the “activist doula,” as Taub describes her, who awakens the political consciousness of Mother’s troubled Younger Brother (Ben Levi Ross). Taub says that Goldman, who seemed to come alive in front of an audience, shared deBessonet’s convictions regarding the social role of theater. “She described her speeches as her ‘ecstatic song,’ and wrote a whole book about how theater was a powerful mirror to hold up to society.”
Ragtime’s 33 cast members, performing with a 28-piece orchestra, are a lot for any director to handle. But “run by a leader like Lear, who is so community-oriented, makes it a purposeful experience,” says Brandon Uranowitz, the Tony-winning actor who plays Tateh. “It feels like a community with a message.” For the actor, being part of such a large ensemble is “just like one big trust fall—they can’t exist without me, and I can’t exist without them.”
Far from serving as mere musical backdrop, the form that gives the play its name—ragtime—is central to its impact. “The way the music moves is almost like a question that America was asking itself at that time: How do we deal with these people, and who are we becoming?” says Joshua Henry, who, as the pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr., embodies some of the play’s most extreme transformations. For Henry, Coalhouse’s stirring, eleventh-hour ballad, “Make Them Hear You,” also addresses our fractured era. “In these complicated times,” he asks, “how do we see and hear each other?”
For deBessonet, the answer to these questions is motivated, above all, by a profound belief in the healing power of theater. “It comes from a release of truth,” she says. “It comes from the way we humans create sacred space when we put all our intention on listening and receiving a story together. Ragtime is an epic that has the full emotional spectrum: It’s a musical of ideas, passion, violence, romance, social movements, tragedy—and the hope that can be found in community and the pursuit of justice.”
In this story: hair, Miwako Urasugi; makeup, Marco Campos; tailor, Alanna Beneroff. Produced by Modem Creative.