Bubnis, who assumed the role last year, said it wasn’t really a hard call.

“As artists, our students are resilient and have the skill set to adjust and adapt accordingly. I felt it was important for our collective morale to forge ahead with the season. Our mainstage season is one of our anchors that we build our year upon and keeping it intact as everything around us was changing so rapidly was important to us,” she said.

“I wanted us to face the challenges of the semester head-on. That meant pushing through and finding solutions. Going off the grid is not what the spirit of the theatre and our program is about. The show must always go on,” she said, adding that most of the program’s classes are being offered in a hybrid online/in-person format.

And so, on Oct. 8 at 8 p.m., the department will kick off a season titled “Into the Unknown” with a virtual production of Jaclyn Backhaus’ Men on Boats. The show, which will be directed by Sarah Elizabeth Wansley, will run on Zoom for three nights, free of charge. It will be followed in November by a virtual production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. In the spring, productions of Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegría Hudes and Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins will follow.

Many of the theater program’s fall classes will revolve around the mainstage season, with professors using remote learning—and remote performances—as a way to explore important elements of acting and collaboration.

Connecting to Each Other Through Screens

Dawn Saito, an artist-in-residence who teaches Acting 1 and Movement for Actors, said she has had success on Zoom teaching the Laban movement analysis, a method and language used for describing, visualizing, interpreting, and documenting human movement.

“I have many exercises for opening up the body so the actor can transform into different characters, textures, and colors,” she said.

“They have enough room to be able to inhabit these images that I prompt them with.”

Scene work between two actors can be a challenge when a student is not in the same physical space as their partner, but that too can be overcome. During class, Saito sends students to breakout rooms, where they work together to listen and respond to each other.

In the exercise, one actor will move while the other remains frozen. The actor that is frozen will then respond to the movement of the one who is moving. After practicing with each other, they rejoin the larger group and share their progress. (To see movement pieces created by Saito’s students during quarantine last spring, click here.)

“A much as possible, I’m asking actors to radiate their energy, so that they’re connecting to their partners through the screen,” Saito said.

To create the appearance of action, students have practiced “handing” a cup of tea to one another by moving it toward the camera, and when they move their hand, the person on the other side will seemingly receive it. Because students are learning how to engage in their whole body, she isn’t worried that it’ll be difficult to transition back to in-person acting once the pandemic has subsided. In any case, actors have a primal need to be heard, she said, regardless of the platform.

“Art is necessary, especially in challenging times. People need an outlet, they need to see their stories told, and the cathartic process is healing,” she said.

Reflecting on Different Aspects of Theater

Michael Zampelli, S.J., an associate professor of theater who moved to Fordham this year from Santa Clara, is one of three professors teaching theater history this semester. His class which meets both online and in-person, focuses on the purpose of theater.

His class gives students a chance to reflect not only on what people thought of the theater historically and how it functions in society, but also what is happening to them right now, he said.

“It’s encouraging a sort of self-implicating reflection on what they do in a way that I don’t think would have been the case if we were doing this pre-Covid. Even though you hoped they were asking themselves questions like ‘How this is affecting me?’ and ‘How are we learning about how theater companies form?’—you could always have not gone down that road,” he said.

“Now it’s much harder to not go down that road, precisely because they’re responsible for generating theater during a time of great upheaval. The questions are not theoretical questions.”

Raekwon Fuller, a second-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, created this piece, which is meant to evoke what it feels like to be in Fuller’s universe, for Dawn Saito’s Movement for the Actor”class.

Learning to Speak the Same Language

Ntokozo Fuzunina Kunene, a designer who joined the faculty last year, has been teaching the class Theater Collaboration remotely from her native Johannesburg in South Africa. The class, which she co-teaches with acting program head Matthew Maguire, helps future directors, playwrights, designers, and actors speak to each other more effectively.

“I’m a costume designer, but I can’t necessarily think in terms of lighting, so I still want to make sure that I’m able to communicate with the light designer, because so much of our work impacts each other,” she said.

“When they say, ‘Oh, this is too bright,’ I need to be able to understand how to help reduce the brightness. Maybe something that the actor is wearing is too white. So how do we work together to combat that?”

To achieve that, the class is structured around productions that students from different theater tracks, such as acting and design, are invited to create independently based on prompts, which range from lengthy conversations that Kunene and Maguire record in advance to simple five-word poems.

Let’s Be More Limber

Clint Ramos, the head of the Design and Production track, changed the syllabi in his classes so that instead of working on several projects, students are focusing on one mainstage production for the whole semester.

Rather than adapting traditional theater to the current circumstances, he sees students innovating to create a new form. When you stage a production via Zoom, for instance, it’s worth investigating what it means to say that characters in a play are together in a specific room.

“Does it mean the actors are using the same background? The same lighting?” he said.

“For designers, that bridge already existed, because a lot of the designs are also created for film. This gave us an opportunity to lean in on that bridge. We’ve kind of overlooked this because we were so into live performance. We’re saying, let’s be more limber and see that you can do. The more limber the students become, the more possibilities they have for the future.”

Ramos has also enlisted five university theater programs in the Northeast for an online production stemming from themes in One Flea Spare, a 1995 play by Naomi Wallace set in a plague-ravaged London during the 17th century. Students are virtually attending classes at other universities and are collaborating with each other on works connected to the play. When it is finished, the recordings will live on a website hosted by Fordham.

Liliana Gutierrez, a second-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, created this piece, which is meant to evoke what it feels like to be in Gutierrez’ universe, for Dawn Saito’s Movement for the Actor class.

What Will ‘the Biz’ Look Like?

Theater is also big business, and that business is facing hard times; Broadway has been dark since March. Students who took Theater Management with Stephen Sosnowski, FCLC ’03, normally attended class at his office in Times Square. Sosnowski is senior vice president at SpotCo, where he has spearheaded advertising campaigns for more than 50 Broadway shows and cultural institutions.

His first remote class featured guest speaker Matt Ross, creator of the COVID-19 Theater Think Tank, which is working on processes for theaters to reopen safely. Sosnowski was reticent about the class at first but said he felt optimistic by the energy students brought to the meeting.

“I got a little emotional at the end of the class. These students coming to class; I’m in awe of them, frankly,” he said.

He admitted it’s impossible to predict with certainty what the industry will look like when it emerges from the pandemic. But he’s tried to provide a window into that future, through guest speakers such as Victoria Bailey, executive director of the Theater Development Fund; and Adam Siegal, managing director of Lincoln Center Theater.

“Everything I talk about is, ‘What was it like pre-March 12, and what do we think it’ll look like and what will the opportunity be like,’” he said.

“The key word is opportunity. I see this as a time where there’s a lot of opportunity to enact change. We can figure that out together.”

For a “backstage” tour of Men on Boats by senior Chloe Rice, visit the theatre department’s Instagram page.

And indeed, if you sign up for these classes, Jones, a member of the faculty since 2008, will artfully guide you through your paces in these aspects of stagecraft.

If, however, you visited the Connelly Theater, Joe’s Pub, or any of the myriad theaters where Jones has performed over the last decade, you’d have encountered a very different person: Jomama Jones.

Since her debut in 2011, Jomama, a radiant soul diva with her own distinct backstory and career, has been a vehicle for Jones to explore profound questions of race and gender. In 2011, the New York Times described Jomama’s performance as “glowing, making it hard not to surrender to this sequin-encrusted earth mother’s soulful embrace.” In 2015, Jones won a Doris Duke Artist Award, which featured a $225,000 unrestricted, multiyear grant, and this April, he was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In addition to critically acclaimed performance pieces such as Black Light, which he performed at the Public Theater and Greenwich House Theatre, and Duat which he performed at Soho Rep, Jones has also produced plays such as Phoenix Fabrik, Bel Canto, Ambient Love Rites, and Earthbirths, Jazz and Raven’s Wings, and five albums of original songs.

So what has Jomama been up to these days? In a new podcast, Fordham News tracked Daniel down to find out.

And in a bonus track, Jones explains what the term Afromystical means, and why it’s so important to understanding “Jomama Jones.”

Full transcription below

Patrick Verel: If you visit the Fordham Theater Program’s webpage, you’ll find classes with titles such as acting, theater history, flying solo, and young, gifted and black, all offered by one Daniel Alexander Jones. And indeed, if you sign up for these classes, Jones, a member of the faculty since 2008, will artfully guide you through your paces in these aspects of stagecraft. If however, you visited the Connolly Theater, Joe’s Pub, or any of the myriad theaters where Jones has performed over the last decade, you’d have encountered a very different person, Jomama Jones.

Since her debut in 2011, Jomama, a radiant soul diva with her own distinct backstory and career, has been a vehicle for Jones to explore profound questions of race and gender. In 2011 the New York Times described Jomama’s performance as quote, “Glowing, making it hard not to surrender to the sequin encrusted earth mothers soulful embrace.” And in 2015 Jones won a Doris Duke artist award, which featured a $225,000 unrestricted, multi-year grant.

So what has Jomama been up to these days? Fordham News tracked down Daniel to find out.

So when we met in 2013 you told me, and I quote, “I think terror and art go hand in hand. If you’re not scared, you’re not doing it right.” So 2019 must be a phenomenal time to make art, right?

Daniel Alexander Jones: Yes, indeed.

PV: Tell me about it. How is it making art in 2019?

DAJ: Yeah, well that that idea of fear and its relationship to creating is an important one in that. I think it’s always important to feel what I call a quickening. Like when your heart races a little bit fast. There are a lot of states of mind and states of being that can bring us to that place. Love can bring us to that place. Curiosity can bring us to that place. Fear can bring us to that place. But all of it is for me about getting beyond your comfort zone. The habits that you have, the ways that you are accustomed to doing things. And when you move past that and you get into that place where you get a little bit afraid, your instincts kick in in a different way. And I think you start to see things with more acuity and you start to listen with more specificity. And that means you’re paying attention. And if there has ever been a time in my adult life in the United States of America where we need to be paying attention, it’s now.

Using the arts to explore possibility is a real honor, but it’s also one of the most powerful places to be working because it is about accessing the imagination. And if we cannot imagine what comes next, we can’t manifest what comes next.

PV: Talk to me about Waves, which I understand is a book you’re working on. It’s a book of creative nonfiction and you’re doing live readings of now.

DAJ: For the last three summers I’ve been dedicating my time to crafting this manuscript. I finished it in late August and gave it to my editor who just gave me back my manuscript. So the remainder of this year is dedicated to getting back in there and refining it. But I set out to write and collect the work that I had done for theater performance, techs, plays, which largely had not been published. And a number of friends and colleagues who said, “Yo, you got to publish your stuff.” And I said, “All right, I’ll sit down and I’ll do this.” And as I looked at the different work that I’ve made over the last 25 years, I said, anybody coming to this work not having seen it firsthand or not knowing me, would not probably be able to put it in a context because it’s kind of all over the place, in a way that I’m happy with, but it taps into a number of different ways of making work and different styles.

So I said, let me write a little contextual essay so that it’ll frame this work. And when I sat down to write that essay, that essay exploded into its own project. What I recognized was that I had a deep need to write about lineage. To write about the artistic traditions out of which my own work comes, in which I participate, hopefully which I extend, and which for sure here at Fordham forms the basis of what I teach.

So that meant that I was writing this kind of hybrid of memoir stories about and kind of essays about the mentors that I had in the arts, most of whom were pretty extraordinary black women who came out of either or both the avant garde black American theater tradition and or queer theater traditions. And then also to write about what it meant to integrate the lessons that they taught me into everyday life and everyday practice.

PV: Who’s one that you would think would be good to mention for this?

DAJ: Yeah. I will mention one who actually, it’s very interesting, her name was Dr. Constance Berkeley. Dr. Berkeley was one of my professors in undergrad when I went to Vassar College. I write at length about her and the many lessons she taught me, and particularly about her ability to help me understand better what it means that we live in a society that is so deeply informed by racism, classism, a kind of cultural imperialism that erases the truths of all of our distinctions as human beings. And that’s everybody in the society. And what it means to engage that means that you have to become an extraordinary observer, an extraordinary listener, and someone who can ask really good questions. Because if you make a space where you ask the right kinds of questions, people can reveal the complexity and the nuance of who they are outside of these very rigid, binary and hierarchical systems.

Her argument was everybody is so much more than the categories that they were reduced to. Everybody. And it is our work to take the time and the energy to see one another and to be with one another in that nuanced way. It’s harder. It takes more courage, and it takes more time. And especially in a society where everything moves at such a clip and our assumptions become our certainties and those certainties become things that are a part of that comfort zone I was talking about. The way we can navigate the world, certain of who does this, what that is. You can’t be in the arts, I don’t think, and be true to the work if you’re not willing to engage uncertainty and discomfort and the unknown.

PV: Have you visited many places that might be a little more resistant to this kind of performance?

DAJ: Absolutely. Yeah, and I think that’s actually a very big part of what’s important about making this kind of work. With touring Jomama, we’ve had a number of experiences where we’ve been places that had never experienced anything like Jo and have maybe not experienced a show like a show that I make and there’s been a lot of power in that for all involved.

I’m thinking of one time in particular we brought one of the shows to rural Minnesota, to this town that was definitely the red part of the state. I think a lot of folks who came to the show had seen the poster and they thought Jomama was real, which she is, but they didn’t understand that there was a male identified person portraying this person. And it was intense. And you could see there was a moment of, oh my God. And some people had brought their children. There was a lot of, oh my goodness. And then on top of that, the kinds of things I was talking about were very challenging. What happened was that people stayed the course.

And I think because of what I was mentioning, that I’m really interested in the encounter, the experience of being in the space together. And as Dr. Berkeley taught me, I really want to see who you are and I want you to see who we are and be in the space together. There’s not a trick and I’m not here to attack or shame you. I’m here to be. To talk about these ideas. And my ideas may confront you. I may confront you, you may confront me. But if we can stay in the heat with one another, what might be possible? Because the typical thing to have happen is you get into those highly charged situations and people decamp to their certainty. And this I deal with as a professor all the time. It’s like how do you have a dialogue in a classroom where people’s ideas are so fixed? How do you have a conversation?

PV: Right. So in a way you actually bring your teaching experience to the stage.

DAJ: And vice versa.

PV: And vice versa.

DAJ: 100%. 100%.

PV: Now, you’ve made it clear, now that we’re talking about Jomama, that it’s not a drag act. She’s another side of you that’s every bit as real as Daniel. Was it hard to make that switch the first time?

DAJ: Mm-hmm. For me it wasn’t because the way that she came through, and the first time she actually came through for me it was in 1995 so it was, I was working on my very first full length performance piece. She appeared in a way that was very different than a character that I created. I’ve written dozens of characters in different pieces and performed them, but that wasn’t what this was. So for me it felt more like a kind of channeling, being a vessel for this energy, which led me to number of different traditions. There are spiritual traditions where you’d become a vessel for an energy that is outside of who you are. There are traditions of performance, masked theater traditions in particular that I’m thinking about in in Asia and Africa where the mask, the external identity has a story, has information, has a particular set of characteristics and you as the performer actually surrender yourself to that energy. You take it on and it moves through you, it takes over your body, it moves your body in a particular way. Very often there are dances or songs that the mask knows that come through your body. And that is a valid and millennia old way of working.

The place that can be difficult I think is in how people view what I’m doing. It’s much easier to say it’s a drag act. It’s more complicated to talk about it in this way because it means opening up a different set of questions about what performance is and what identity is. I really don’t claim authorship of Jomama Jones, which is an odd thing to say as a playwright and a creator. I claim that I’m in a relationship with this energy and I create the circumstances. It’s kind of like building a melodic structure or a chord structure for a song, but the song when you play it live is always different every time.

In the jazz tradition, Betty Carter said one time something, she said, “It’s not about the melody, it’s about something else, the song.” So we often know a song by humming the melody. We’re like, oh, this is a song I know and I might hum, but the song is actually bigger than that. It has to do with the interpretation. It has to do with the way that the musicians approach it on that particular day and the epiphanies that lie between the notes. And that’s my work on Jomama, is I can give you a frame, but when I’m letting her through, she’s going to do what she’s going to do. And I’m not authoring that in a conscious way.

Now someone may come and say, “Well, that’s a subconscious thing. You’re still doing it. You’re still Daniel.” Fine. You can say that. But I choose very consciously to view it as part of I think a very ancient way of working. And I’m interested always in a more practical way, PV, in the idea that there are many people inside of us. Many aspects to us. And what happens if we give ourselves more freedom to think about identity as a multiplicity and a process rather than a static and fixed location? That interests me tremendously. And I think it might actually be a balm for some of the difficulties we go through in our culture that increasingly seems to need a static, flattened identity in order to assimilate and process.

PV: Wow, this is so much more deeper on a psychological level than I even imagined.

DAJ: You know that’s how I roll. That’s why these people, they run out of my class.

PV: Meanwhile, when you mentioned a mask, the first thing that came to my mind was the Jim Carrey movie, The Mask, where he literally puts on the mask and then becomes—

DAJ: In the mask itself.

PV: The mask takes over and he takes it off and goes, “Whoa. What was that all about?”

DAJ: What was that all about? Yeah. Which is a really, that’s a very funny pop culture version of this thing that is thousands of years old. Which is amazing to think about that, and what does that ancient wisdom tell us? Because there were so many different cultures throughout the world that masked play was integral to their religious traditions.

PV: Yeah. So you’re picking up on a very, very old tradition here. Speaking of old traditions, you’re turning 50 in February. Can I say that?

DAJ: Now why you going to try to put all my business in the street? You can say that.

PV: Hey, I’m an old man now. I just turned 45.

DAJ: All right. That’s good. Young.

PV: I’m not that far behind.

DAJ: I’m your elder. Respect me.

PV: I’m not that far behind.

DAJ: I love it.

PV: Yeah. So you’ve obviously seen a lot of changes in, when it comes to attitudes about gender expression in this country. And I wonder, do you feel like you’ve changed as well?

DAJ: I have. And I’ve been so inspired by… One of the places I really feel always that I learn from my students. I know that’s a kind of cliché thing that people say and they’re like, “Oh, I learn from them as much as they learn from me.” I’m like, I don’t know that that’s true. I think we have different ways of exchanging. But I’ve been heartened by their clarity. That they no longer wish to reiterate a very limited set of definitions about what identity is. And in regards to gender, that there’s just this steadfast refusal to accept this binary idea.

It’s been interesting because I’ve witnessed in my life the ways that a gender binary has been integral to keeping a lot of the oppressive systems that aren’t explicitly about gender in place. A lot of the power dynamics, a lot of the hierarchies that it slips in. And even if it’s not the thing that you see, if you dig, you’re going to find that binary at work. So I mentioned my book Waves that I’m working on, and I mentioned these mentors. And it is not lost on me that most all of the people who shaped me were feminists, womanist thinkers, particularly coming out of black feminisms. And black feminisms implicitly challenge ideas about flattened identity and challenge ideas about singular ways of being in the world, and a binary. They break all those things open. They demand that you think more rigorously and feel and be more rigorously.

So I’ve changed because I’m starting to experience things that I felt either only I was going through or a very small group of people were going through, I’m starting to see as being very much discussed in the public. So it’s been a very interesting experience to let go of a lot of that sense of isolation and say, “Oh, I’m not alone in my experience of gender,” which has always been a very fluid thing.

Now, I haven’t felt the need to define myself because I think I’m always a little bit suspicious of definition in general, but what I’m clear about is that I can look back at my work for 25 years, I can look back at my life for almost 50 years and say that this idea of ‘the many inside the one’ has always been true for me. That there’s a fluidity and there’s a curiosity in some ways. I think if I can make one other provocative statement that when we are with one another, we bring different things out of one another. Whether that’s a one-on-one conversation, like what we’re having right now, a classroom setting, a collaborative environment, making art, a city, a political party, a nation. We can go to any scale, but we bring different things out of each other. So I also think identity is not only about who you are within, but how you are without. How you are in configuration with other people. That you change in relationship, or different aspects of you are highlighted or suppressed in relationship to the people that you’re around.

PV: What’s next for Jomama?

DAJ: Well, I am currently working on the first stages of a brand new project that I’m building with the Public Theater and New York Live Arts as partners right now, and it is going to be a kind of ceremonial ritual performance project and I’m going to be working on it all year. In the spring we’ll be doing a sharing at New York Live Arts in early May of the first phase of this material, some portion of it. And Jomama is in it as a central figure, but there are a lot of other people who are involved. I just got done with this incredible workshop week with Josh Quat, who’s one of my musical collaborators, and then three extraordinary folks, Ebony Noelle Golden, Alexis Pauline Gums, and Shango Daria Wallace, who are all culture makers, leaders, activists. We came together this week and explored some of the first phases of the core questions of the show, and it blew my mind. So I’m buzzing with all this stuff and going to go sequester myself, rewrite my book, and write this new piece for the rest of the year.

PV: You’ve got a lot of work cut out for you.

DAJ: I do. I do. But thank you so much for chatting with me. I’m very happy to be part of your podcast.

PV: Thank you.

Bonus Track:

Patrick Verel: What does the term Afromystical mean, and why is it so important to understand you and Jomama?

Daniel Alexander Jones: One of the threads running through black American culture, and I would say you can make this observation of Afrodiasporic culture, period, is the relationship between cultural production and what you might call the divine or the numinous; the sense of the mystery of being and how close it is to our embodied everyday experience.

Zora Neale Hurston once talked about this principle called the juke, and the juke is like the juke joint. And we’ve all seen the juke joint in movies about the blues and you know, it’s the shack off in the woods or on the water where people go and they have their party, and they go and listen to the blues, and they get a little tipsy and they dance together. And what she says is in that space, an elevation will happen; that there’s something from the collective gathering and the movement with the music, and the collective energy of the people all dedicated to this kind of celebratory experience that will open up an experience of the life force that is larger than what you walk around with everyday.

And I think you can look at that and you can think about how that threads itself through black music. You can think about how it threads itself through dance, Alvin Ailey. You can think about how it threads itself through popular dance. You can think about how it threads itself through even the kinds of performative conversations and demonstrations and people’s own sense of beauty walking through the world. And then there’s a correlation in the black American sacred tradition in the church where people get the Holy ghost, right? Where you see the divine comes through. You may have seen it with gospel music that it lifts, and you get that shimmer; that vibration where all of a sudden, it feels like God is present, the divine is present, however you want to want to name that thing.

So, I’ve always been aware that what interests me is that meeting place between what we can never know; The universe, our ontology that is rooted in our sense of what cosmology is. That is the site where the work really, really happens. There’s a lift, there’s a change, there’s a transformation.

PV: Do you feel like you’ve been able to achieve that lift?

DAJ: I have. I have. And actually, Jomama has. Daniel does from time to time. But it’s part of the work, and it’s a long tradition. It’s not something I’m making up, but it’s something I participate in in my own way.

We had it recently when we did our show in Boston and there was this moment where the room, and it’s hard to describe if you’re not a performer, but there’s a kind of melting that happens that you can perceive if you will, when you’re presence of an audience. Performing live in the way that I do that involves some improvisation. Everybody in that room, you sense their energy, you sense their intelligence, you sense their perception. And you can feel almost like a circuit; what’s closed and what’s open, how the energy is moving through the room. And paying attention to it, there will be a moment if it does turn, there’s a moment where everybody knows that it turns, and all of a sudden, the circuit works in a different way.

And that thing, it happened, there was one particular show I can think of when we were in Boston that it happened, and I would say over half of the audience started to cry at the same time. It was phenomenal, and all of us who were making the show kind of looked at each other like, “Oh, it turned. The thing—” And it was dramatic because we didn’t expect that to happen quite in that way. But it said to me that there was a place where the individuals making up that audience, and then the collective experience of that audience connected with the subject matter of the piece which in this piece, had a lot to do with race and violence and conflict and the soul. And given what’s going on in the country, it’s like those things can be very hard to talk about in a public space. And there can be a resistance. And if that resistance flips, which is part of the technology of making a work, you know? It can be a tremendously liberating moment.

And again, what happens after when people leave the theater, I have no control over that as an artist, none whatsoever. But I can make an invitation to say to folks, what would happen if we sat with these ideas in these experiences together, and that we making the piece, will hold the room in such a way as not to leave you exposed in a way that’s cruel, in a way that tricks you. Because I think that’s a big part of it too. People don’t … Why would I show you something if you’re going to trick me?

PV: Right.

DAJ: And that’s not how I roll.

PV: Yeah.

Jones, an associate professor of performing arts who heads the playwriting curriculum in the Fordham Theatre program, was one of nearly 3,000 scholars, artists, and writers in the United States and Canada who applied for the fellowship, which has been overseen by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for the past 94 years. Only 168 recipients were chosen.

The coveted awards, which vary in dollar amount by individual, are granted for use for six to 12 months, and carry no special conditions attached to them, allowing winners to spend funds in any manner they deem necessary to their work.

In a statement announcing his selection, the foundation noted that “energy” is Jones’ primary medium, drives his interdisciplinary practice, and supports his formal fluency and stylistic breadth. It praised his critically acclaimed performance pieces Black Light at the Public Theater and Greenwich House Theatre; Duat at Soho Rep; An Integrator’s Manual at La MaMa; and the Fusebox Festival, Radiate at Soho Rep, and Bright Now and Beyond at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre.

It also praised plays Jones has produced, such as Phoenix Fabrik, Bel Canto, Ambient Love Rites, and Earthbirths, Jazz and Raven’s Wings, as well as five albums of original songs he has composed as his alter ego, Jomama Jones.

“Daniel’s wildflower body of original work includes plays, performance pieces, recorded music, concerts, music theatre events, essays, and long-form improvisations. Jones consistently creates multi-dimensional experiences where bodies, minds, emotions, voices, and spirits conjoin, shimmer, and heal,” the foundation wrote.

“His roots reach deep into Black American and queer theatre and performance traditions. Jones is recognized as a key voice in the development of theatrical jazz and has made a significant contribution to black experimental theatre and performance.”

Since its establishment in 1925, the foundation has granted more than $360 million in fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, including Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, poets laureate, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Turing Award, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.

“Fordham’s theatre program is fortunate to have Daniel Alexander Jones on its faculty,” said director Matthew Maguire.

“Daniel sustains a high wire act of balancing a cutting-edge aesthetic with a deep well of compassion.”

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.

It wasn’t always so, though. When Archbishop John Hughes founded what was then St. John’s College in 1941, the school was a haven of sorts in a city that was hostile to Irish immigrants, like him.

This year, in honor of the University’s Dodransbicentennial celebration, Fordham Theatre will perform four plays on its main stage that feature characters who, like Archbishop Hughes, cope with displacement—by creating their own reality.

The four plays that will be staged at Pope Auditorium are:

Electric Baby by Stefanie Zadravec, directed by Pirronne Yousefzadeh
Oct. 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14
Cockfight by Peter Gil-Sheridan, FCLC ‘98, directed by Anna Brenner
Nov. 9, 10, 11, 17, 18, 19
The Luck of the Irish by Kirsten Greenidge, directed by Geoffrey Owens
Feb. 23, 24, 25, March 1, 2, 3
The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare, directed by George Drance, S.J.
April 5, 6, 7, 20, 21, 22

Theatre program director Matthew Maguire said that the four plays share a comic sensibility; this year, there are no tragedies in the repertoire.

“Since it’s Fordham’s celebratory year, we wanted to celebrate with comedy, but comedy with teeth, and comedy that would be meaningful,” he said.

As is custom, students played a large part in the selections, which were discussed at five forums last year. Maguire noted that Electric Baby was brought to his attention by a student who’d seen it performed at the Two River Theater in New Jersey. The play is about a Nigerian and a Romanian immigrant who shape the lives of the Americans around them.

In Cockfight, a character is displaced both in the literal sense, having fled from Cuba, and in the emotional sense as well, as a gay boy trying to come out in a world dominated by his father’s machismo.

Luck of the Irish is the story of a black family who moves into a white neighborhood through an arrangement with an Irish-American ghost-buyer. They, too, are both literally and emotionally displaced, because they are made to feel that they don’t belong.

And in the classic The Winter’s Tale, Hermione is driven from her home by her husband’s insane jealousy, and Perdita, their daughter, is abandoned in a foreign land at birth.

In addition to striving to bring quality roles to students, Maguire said he also strives to stage plays whose creators are available to collaborate. This season, playwrights Peter Gil-Sheridan and Stefanie Zadravec will be present for rehearsals. As a graduate of Fordham’s theatre program, Gil-Sheridan, who now heads the MFA Playwriting Program at Indiana University, is a true success story, said Maguire.

“Their presence influences the way our students are going to get work down the road, because they’ve been in the room with these working artists. They may think a good role is John Proctor in The Crucible, and of course it is, but for an actor, it’s even better if you get to step into a role for the first time with the playwright,” he said.

“A good role is one where you can change people’s lives. Social justice is what this school is all about, and so our season emanates a sense of social justice.”

The production marks a major off-Broadway success for Jenny Rachel Weiner, GSAS ’14, who was a member of the MFA program’s first graduating class. Her play Kingdom Come will kick off the 2016-17 season at Roundabout.

“This kind of accomplishment is extremely difficult,” said Elliott Fox, co-director of the Fordham/Primary Stages playwriting MFA program. “The field of playwriting is tenuous at best. There’s no way anyone, particularly an early-career writer, can guarantee that an established organization will take interest in her work.

Kingdom Come, which tells the story of two lonely women who venture into the world of online dating, will run from Oct. 7 through Dec. 18 at Roundabout’s Harold & Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre.

In addition, Weiner’s play Horse Girls, was recently picked up by Samuel French, the largest publisher of plays and musicals. Weiner wrote Horse Girls, a dark comedy surrounding the insecure and obsessive world of pre-teen girls, while she was a Fordham student.

“What’s remarkable about Jenny is that she’s self-motivated. She was able to take everything she’d learned both in the MFA program and prior to joining the program and begin to develop this relationship with Roundabout,” Fox said. “We [in the program]knew the potential Jenny had and we were excited about her talent.”

Now in its fourth year, the Fordham/Primary Stages MFA program offers emerging playwrights the opportunity to hone their skills in Fordham’s theater program while fostering professional relationships with Primary Stages, an award-winning off-Broadway theater company.

The program accepts only two students per class, allowing for a uniquely intimate learning experience, Fox said.

“It’s very personal for the writers so that they can create relationships with all of the amazing artists around them and not get lost in lecture halls or large symposia,” he said.

Next month, the theatre program will feature one-act plays by the MFA program’s current students—Taylor Gregory, whose play The Bungle is being directed by Sarna LaPine, and Edward Precht, whose play Salamander is being directed by theater alumnus Jacob Sexton, FCLC ’12.

The shows will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 4, 5, and 6 in the White Box Theatre at Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus.

JoAnne Akalaitis, an award-winning director and founder of the experimental theater company Mabou Mines, will join Fordham’s theatre program this fall as the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre.

“JoAnne is a giant in the American theatre,” said Matthew Maguire, director of the theatre program. “Her work with Mabou Mines was the finest work I saw in theater when I arrived in New York, and it transformed the way I saw the possibilities of the theater.”

Akalaitis’ decades-long career includes five Obie Awards for direction and sustained achievement. 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.

“Mabou Mines is one of the most important experimental theater companies in the United States, and it is still going strong,” Maguire said. She has also lent a radical perspective toward re-imagining classic works, including plays by Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Euripides, and Shakespeare.

She accepted this year’s chair after its initial holder, actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, withdrew this month due to an urgent health issue.

Akalaitis graduated from the University of Chicago in 1960 with a degree in philosophy, but later decided to pursue acting. She studied theater with the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, The Open Theater in New York, and with acting theorist Jerzy Grotowski in France.

She has directed at the American Repertory Theater, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the New York City Opera, Goodman Theatre, Harford Stage, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, the Guthrie Theater, and the Court Theatre in Chicago, where she was artist-in-residence.

She is the former artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, a position that she was appointed to by its founder, Joe Papp.

Papp said Akalaitis has “the most original mind in the theater today.”

“As a leader, she is independent. She doesn’t recognize boundaries and you can’t pigeonhole her. She has great drive. And she is very astute about how the theater is run.”

In addition to directing, Akalaitis has held several academic positions, including the Andrew Mellon Co-chair of the Directing Program at Juilliard and the Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Flint Professor of Theater at Bard College. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants, and a Pew Charitable Trusts National Theatre Artist Residency Program grant.

“We are thrilled that she is doing us the honor of joining us for a semester as the fifth Denzel Washington Chair,” Maguire said.