Great NY tradition, TNC summer show

New City’s Annual Summer Street Theater Tour (8/3/24-9/17/24)

The Socialization of a Social Worker, or Justice in a Time of Need

Written and Directed by Crystal Field with Music Composed and Arranged by Peter Dizozza

(Photos by Jonathan Slaff)

How can we measure the worth of Theater for the New City? Where else on our aching planet can we gather to play so freely? For the better part of six decades, surviving against all odds within the belly of the corporate-culture beast, TNC has fomented the creation of dozens of world-premiere theatrical productions each year, largely under the leadership of Founding Executive and Artistic Director Crystal Field. Along the way, as part of its foundational mission, TNC has produced annual Summer Street Theater musicals, exuberant, community-created theatrical productions written and directed by Field, which tour parks and outdoor venues in all weather during August and September, offering free theater to New Yorkers in all five boroughs. Outrageous, outlandish, aerobic, and resolutely progressive, the Street Theater musicals amount to Lehrstücke for our times, plays that teach us how to nurture community through creative and compassionate presence in real time and space. The star athletes, fantasy action figures, and big-name artists that colonize our consciousness via mass media have nothing on the intrepid Street Theater performers in all their talent (raw and polished) and their scrappy humanity.

During an especially contentious election year when the guardrails surrounding speech at the RNC, the DNC, the candidates’ debates, and the mainstream press have hampered dialogue around existential issues facing voters, the cleansing breeze of this year’s Summer Street Theater musical, The Socialization of a Social Worker, or Justice in a Time of Need, rallied audiences to participate in our democracy. Calling out the “military-industrial complex” and insistently exercising free speech in all its compassionate diversity, the show modeled the clear-eyed, grass-roots forum lacking in mass-media electioneering. Through Field’s omnivorous worldview and mastery of the myriad languages of live theater, we collectively consider ways we can participate in our democracy, regardless of the sometimes daunting challenges we face in our daily lives.

In this performance, we see frequent public demonstrations of dissent, from anti-war protests to (most graphically) the deadly riots in and around the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Costume chameleon Terry Lee King commands the stage as the horned QAnon Shaman, while T. Scott Lilly, elevating the genre of Trump-impersonation to the level of George Grosz’s Weimar-era Expressionism, looks on through a commedia dell’arte mask munching a hamburger. Ben Harburg lends his enlightening voice and presence to his portrayal of multiple characters. Witness to it all, our titular social worker Paul Mann (played by Michael-David Gordon as the visionary inside the TNC-imagined Everyman) belts out in clarion gospel tones, “Dear God or Nature, show me a sign that we can still live on this earth, so I don’t have to walk alone.” TNC’s annual Summer Street Theater Tour is that sign.

Field both writes and directs the annual Street Theater musicals. By imparting techniques of acting and vocal production (garnered over years through her work with other historic greats of stage and screen), she elicits believable characterizations through an aesthetic exaggerated enough to wrangle the attention of any TNC audience, particularly a crowd gathered in an urban public space. Field’s early dance training at Juilliard transforms her choreographic vision of sculptural ensemble stage pictures-in-motion with large casts of diverse ages and abilities into fine art for the common people.  

The strains of live jazz from a six-piece orchestra, led with puckish verve by musical director Peter Dizozza at the piano, greet arriving audience members around 15 minutes before the play gets underway. Leading actor Michael-David Gordon croons “The best is yet to come,” segueing into “What’s Going On?” (“War is not the answer…”), and exits to the backstage area behind the portable platform, where cast members and props are partially visible to the audience. A sinewy young hoop dancer with a cropped natural hairstyle introduced simply as “Arley” takes the stage, keeping up to six hula hoops spinning on various limbs through a series of acrobatic stunts. Arley isn’t on the cast list, but he appears throughout the play as an antic factotum of sorts.

While every show is different, this production stands out for some other reasons. It’s TNC’s first Summer Street Theater Tour without long-time composer Joseph Vernon Banks, who wrote the music for eighteen Street Theater shows between 2003 and his death last November. This year the now annual pre-show memorial tribute choreographed and staged by the Terry Lee King (who also performs in the piece) commemorated Banks, as well as poet and author Laurel Hessing, Crystal Field’s sister who penned several socially engaged musicals directed by Field and died in 2017. In a protest of racism, the tribute included Sonia Massey and Javion Magee, two young African Americans who met violent deaths this year. Before each performance this summer, the cast danced individualized solos and wove together ensemble elements to the poignant pop strains of “MacArthur Park” and “One Sweet Day,” and Miriam Makeba’s celebratory “Pata Pata.” Actor Michael Sanders, a towering figure with long pewter-toned dreadlocks, raised a hand-painted placard bearing the names of the departed in silent tribute at the center of the concluding tableau.

A jazz riff from the orchestra ushers in the first scene as the stagehands spool the cranky (a long scroll of hand-painted scenery stretched between two tall dowels) until a backdrop depicting Jiji’s Hair and Nail Salon in Jackson Heights, Queens, rolls into place. Jiji, played by Jessy Ortiz, a soulful singer-actor with a voice like molten steel, leads a chorus of women hailing from every corner of the globe, in other words, archetypal denizens of one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the U.S. Like the choruses in classical theater they can be seen to represent the voice of the people—New Yorkers, Americans like us, kind at heart but overwhelmingly concerned with protecting and providing for ourselves and our families, fearful of the unknown. Field’s script treats these women with compassion. They sing of their children and their rational fears. A woman in a hijab, affectingly played by Street Theater veteran Allison Patrick, is distraught over a daughter trapped in war-torn Gaza. Another has a daughter held in a drug-related kidnaping in Mexico, and the daughter of another is destined for an arranged marriage. One’s child is fighting in Ukraine, and another’s is stuck on a submarine near Kuwait. The women are far from a monoculture. They live together in peace, but they sing of the constant fear drummed into them by mainstream news outlets like CNN and Fox.

“We are the U.S. It’s US. It’s US,” they sing.

They’re immigrants, but they don’t want the U.S. to admit any more newcomers, and they don’t want a homeless shelter anywhere near. They certainly don’t want the intake center they heard is coming to their neighborhood.

But today is May 15, Lily’s birthday, and fear takes a back seat to personal pampering in the salon, if only for a few hours. Jiji herself celebrates her newly hennaed hairdo, and the women also sing of the beauty treatments they want to receive at Jiji’s to help them get ready for Lily’s birthday party. In keeping with her annual Street Theater cameo appearance, Crystal Field plays Lily, dressed to the nines in a sparkling fascinator and red flapper attire. The vignette amounts to a few seconds of party revelry with the chorus of women, followed by a few consecutive freeze frames as the women exit the stage and social worker Paul Mann reappears, singing of the need for the new intake center.

His song showcases the ability of composer Peter Dizozza to channel Field’s stream-of-conscious socially and environmentally relevant poetics into compelling music for the masses. Paul Mann addresses the audience directly as if we ourselves were a team of essential workers at an orientation, teaching, guiding us to uphold the social contract in words we can imagine were spoken by workshop leaders in the preliminary stages of TNC’s Street Theater creation process—even exhorting delivery workers not to idle their trucks. Mann’s plea for collaboration reduces the starting points of the new intake center to two: a working bathroom and clean water. Human needs, like many TNC productions are simple, earthy, and universal.

By this point in the show, Field has reappeared in summer streetwear in her director’s chair at the side of the stage with her King Charles spaniel, Fanny, at her side. And Mann, in his current position as a social worker at Rikers Island, counsels a young detainee in an exit talk in words we can’t help applying to ourselves: “You are not the worst thing you've done. You are also not the best things you've done. You live in a space in between.” I’m reminded of the Malvina Reynolds song I’ve shared with English-language learners to practice antonyms, “Somewhere Between (the Good and the Evil),” as well as the checkered career of historic actor and educator Paul Mann who, like Field, worked with renowned director Elia Kazan.

We step into the shoes of the glowering youngster, played with fierce authenticity by Asher Cohen, as Mann sends him on his way with $70, a letter of introduction for the new intake center, and the words, “All of you are problems; all of you are also solutions.” It’s rare nowadays that our worldviews embrace dialectical inquiry in self-searching ways. With Crystal Field and the steadfast Fanny presiding, hypocrisy withers.

We follow Cohen’s young man out into the world, where winged actors double as stagehands, real-life angels that bring the bus stop he seeks (the Q32) onto the scene. He offers half his sandwich to a hungry runaway (Naomi Bohorguez) he meets waiting at the bus stop. The nonverbal child of about nine accepts the sandwich and scoots under the bench to hide when a police officer (Dan Kelley) appears and grills the young man. We learn that the young man’s arrestable offense was that he acted as a lookout, a non-violent crime that paints him more as a victim of circumstance than a menace to society (like the teen-aged Ella Fitzgerald, locked up for the same activity as we learned from Ella the Ungovernable, a musical that premiered last summer at TNC).

As the officer leaves, he lowers his guard, gently informing the young man that the next bus won’t arrive until 5:30 the following morning. The girl re-emerges from under the bench, having eaten the whole sandwich rather than just the half the young man offered her. She falls asleep nestled on the young man’s shoulder, as he tenderly grumbles: now he’s stuck with her, and she’s not even good company.

As the two sleep, a chorus of spirits of immigrants and migrants haunt the stage with exuberant national dances, singing of the struggles that brought them to New York at various times throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Channeling the unaffected pathos of the historic Yiddish music halls of the blocks surrounding Tompkins Park, Lola Lukas and Jessie Robin play two Jewish women who went through a pogrom in 1905 somewhere in Russian-speaking territories now encompassed by Ukraine and Belarus. JC Augustin, in the striped shirt and straw boater hat of a gondolier, sings longingly of northern Italian Alps dotted with edelweiss.

Terry Lee King, expertly maneuvering a flounced bomba dress made up in the fabric of a Puerto Rican flag, dances and sings in the style of the plena (Puerto Rico’s living newspaper) of migration to New York City in 1948 and work in the needle trades, ending in a duet with a Muppet-like coquí (the tiny tree frog that is Puerto Rico’s national animal). The finale of the phantom musical revue fills the stage with rousing Americana when a unionized Black worker (played by Michael Sanders) steps up as a square dance caller, weaving the tale of his migration from the rural south to industrial New York in 1934 into the calls of the square-dance figures of the ensemble hoedown.

The 5:30 a.m. Q32 bus arrives filled with women returning from Lily's all-night birthday party brimming with the details of their homespun parlor games and antics, including dancing on tables, playing charades, and writing a group poem. (Elders can teach tech-benumbed Gen Zers a thing or two about fun!) But worry underlies their revelry. The woman played by Allison Patrick, ever troubled behind her smile because her daughter is trapped in Gaza, suddenly collapses. The young man hands the runaway girl an icepack from the first-aid kit in his knapsack, and the little girl holds the icepack on the woman’s head, soothing her. The young man gives the stricken woman his only bottle of water. The woman revives and calls him a good kid, and all her friends chime in. He’s never heard that before. He glows.

But the gratitude of the chorus of Queens women changes to fear when they learn the young man has just been released from Riker's and is on his way to the new intake center. They sing their vociferous opposition to the center, channeling public opinion as they express the conflicting views on immigration they each harbor in their own hearts: We fear you, army of the unwashed! (Where is your humanity?) We see you bruised and bleeding. We fear you. We want to help you but we don't know how.

Embodying our internal contradictions and saving us from sentimentalizing our altruism, a disturbed man (played by comic master Mark Marcante) lurches onto the scene in a floral hospital gown with a flask of strong drink in hand and a toilet paper tail hanging out of the back of his clothes. Hurling invective against non-English-speaking migrants, he’s as fearful as he is fearsome. Is irrational fear a mental health issue? Can we turn the lens on ourselves? Marcante’s portrayal illustrates the need for work on core principles of the play: empathy and compassion. You don’t have to like everyone to love them and want to help them. What can we do?

One of the Queens women, played by Emily Pezzella, steps to the fore in a Brechtian breaking of frame, addressing the audience directly and asking for suggestions. How can we help? Spontaneous shouts (no audience plants needed in Tompkins Square Park!) ring out from the crowd:

“Support shelters!”

“Tax the rich!”

“Deal with the root causes of migration!”

“End U.S. imperialism and unjust sanctions!”

Around this point in a fairy tale, good deeds and courageous feats get rewarded with the granting of wishes. In TNC’s worldview, angels are all around us, and the pleasure of wishes granted comes when those wishes incorporate ongoing service to others—a foundation of happiness, as social workers and mental health providers of our day agree. And comedies end in unity, whether of individuals or communities. Needs are met and hurts assuaged. The young man needs a job, and Paul Mann hires him on the spot to help staff the new intake center. The mute runaway girl who soothed the ailing woman with ice similarly finds that her needs can be filled by those who need her too. The woman she helped is joined by her husband (played as a recurring presence throughout the show by the ever-versatile Terry Lee King in a black guayabera and jerry curls holding a swaddled baby in his arms). She of the daughter missing in Gaza joyfully invites the girl into her home, embracing her, and for the first time in the show the girl speaks aloud in a clear voice, “Thank you.”

TNC—a palpable presence for six decades—creates refreshing spaces to connect around home-grown culture and good works, to clear the suffocating hot air of this past summer’s conventions of the corporate-party duopoly, to triumph over the banality of the movie-retreads outnumbering original scripts on Broadway and blockbusters bloated with computer-generated excess streaming on flatscreens in homes everywhere. But we all need to do our part to keep community culture viable. Dan Kelley’s benevolent cop addresses us directly from center stage with a demand to get out to the ballot box. “Some think we can leave this planet and go to Mars,” he warns. “It ain't gonna happen!”

He continues with a shocking list of budget cuts that will take effect in the near future if we don’t rise up and make our votes count, including cuts to funding for theater. Of course TNC would prefer to do more than survive, would like to have enough to pay artists, staff, and operational costs by a comfortable margin. But TNC will keep making plays that deliver timely zingers to the powers that be notwithstanding cuts. As I once heard Bread and Puppet Theater Director Peter Schuman (who brings the Vermont troupe annually to TNC) remark, “TNC is a tough bug to kill.” Lytza Colon’s spectacular set pieces and props repurpose found objects and build the rest from scratch with boundless delight.

Joy Linscheid’s artistry and generous expertise coax sounds out of whatever equipment is at hand, sounds evocative of the neighborhood she and her family have had a hand in creating. As if to test TNC’s resilience, at the end of the closing Street Theater performance in Tompkins Park, the power to the sound system abruptly cuts out, and the indomitable cast finishes the finale of the last show of the 2024 season a cappella except for the drums (nailing four key changes as composer and bandleader Peter Dizozza would later point out). Paraphrasing radicals of another age who defeated a worldwide fascist threat that now looms anew, they sing, “Have you heard? Spread the word! The fascists aren’t gonna get in! Social workers of the world, (unite)!”

No TNC Street Theater Tour is complete without open-air barbecues on East 10th Street outside the Theater bookending the opening-day launch in early August and the closing performance at the onset of fall. Linked with an annual drag and variety show in honor of Street Theater writer-director Crystal Field and curated by Terry Lee King (who also performs in the show as the Legendary Amaz’n Grace), the closing-day festivities feed body and soul. As the slated performers—including other drag luminaries like Hortensia and drag newcomer Asher Cohen; vocalists Jessy Ortiz, Nelson Gonzalez, and Maria Lucena; and poet Ebonaya Smallwood—prepare, the Street Theater cast members warm up the room with a singalong. Projections of pop-culture karaoke videos on the back wall of TNC’s Cino Theater space alternate with live accompaniments by music director Dizozza at the piano. JC Augustin pulls me up to the mic to reprise a gender-swapping medley of songs from The Threepenny Opera, as people gather in the theater, their plates filled with farm-fresh foods from the potluck and the grill.

Theater for the New City’s Street Theater feeds folks, with Crystal Field leading the way, marking each milestone in the process with a feast. It’s a gift to be able to help annually on opening day, washing and chopping vegetables in a corner of the Dream Star Café in TNC’s lobby, with TNC Box Office Manager and actor Bill Bradford pitting olives and slicing tomatoes on the breadboard—and Crystal Field up to her elbows in organic greens, apple cider vinegar (with the mother in it), and mounds of coarsely-chopped garlic, making a salad, making theater.