Sopan Deb

On the other hand, Busey, 75, still manages to surprise you. He came by The New York Times recently to discuss “Only Human,” a new off-Broadway musical in which Busey plays the role of God. The show, which begins previews Tuesday and opens Oct. 21 at Theater at St. Clements in Manhattan, is a contemporary workplace comedy featuring a showdown between Jesus and Lucifer, who battle over their new creation: Earth.

While this may seem like an odd fit, Busey said he hasn’t been as excited about a part since his Oscar-nominated title role in 1978’s “The Buddy Holly Story.” And why not? He has been a musician for decades, and counts several A-list musicians as friends, including Bonnie Raitt.

But Busey, who studied drama at Oklahoma State University, fell into acting and became a mainstay in television and film. Substance abuse and a serious motorcycle accident in 1988 derailed his life and career.

In the last 20 years, he’s received more attention for eccentric appearances on reality television shows like “Celebrity Apprentice” and “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.” In 2016, He did a two-week stint in the off-Broadway murder mystery “Perfect Crime.”

Busey discussed the new show and, really, whatever else he wanted, alongside his fiancé, Steffanie Sampson. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: You’ve played so many roles in film and television. Why does God in particular hold such meaning for you?

A: OK. On December 4, 1988, I went off a Harley-Davidson without a helmet. Hit my skull on the curb, split my skull off the side, knocked a hole that big, and I passed away after brain surgery and went to the other side. The spiritual realm. The supernatural, and was surrounded by angels. Angels were big balls of light. Not quite as big as a volleyball. They’re moving. They’re breathing. They’re shining. They’re all different colors. They were all around my essence.

And three of the angels — woop, woop, woop — came up to me, and I felt love, protection and trust like I have never felt on Earth. One of them talked to me in an androgynous voice and said, “What you’re doing is wonderful. You’re going in a great direction. But because of your responsibility to mankind, you need to look for help in the spiritual realm. You may come with us now, or you may return to your body and continue to your destiny. It’s your choice.”

Q: Do you feel that you were destined for this role?

Q: No, sorry. Destined.

A: I’m just kidding. I don’t know, but yes. Yes! I do know. Yes. Of course, yes. What happened, Jesse Murphy, the producer, he saw my book cover, and he saw the halo over my head. He said, “Ah ha! I found God.”

Q: Is doing theater fun for you?

A: If you can’t enjoy something, why do it? I enjoy everything in life. My motto is giving love with fun. And the word fun — F.U.N. — stands for Finally Understanding Nothing. And that’s fine.

Q: Give me a sense of how spiritual you are. Do you believe in God?

A: It’s not believing. It’s understanding the power that is here. The energy of the creator lives its essential point of existence. That’s where all life begins. And all life begins before time began. It’s a beautiful flow of loving energy that creates wonderful and beautiful things.

Q: You live in Malibu. Do you like New York?

A: I love New York. Oh my gosh. I’ve been all around the world making movies and doing tours. This city is the city that never sleeps. When it does, it sleeps with its eyes open because you don’t know it’s asleep when it is.

Q: What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?

A: I have some vitamins. Then I stretch. I put on a hearing aid. Put on my watch. This morning, I did great. You’ll be very happy to hear this. I took a shower. I got scrubbed down [points to Sampson]. Washed my own hair. All because I have a leader in my house that wears a dress and pants. Right there, Steffanie Sampson Busey.

Q: What haven’t you done yet that you’d like to try?

A: Music. Producing and write. Do music with my friends. Release it. And also direct a movie. Me in it. Jake in it. My 48-year-old son who is doing great. Has been since he’s five. He played my son in “Straight Time” with Dustin Hoffman. No acting required.

Q: Would you like to do more theater?

A: Oh yes. That’s how I started. I was playing football in high school, starting center. I was also very funny. Football team got together and said, “Busey, go out for the play.” I said, “What? I’m not doing that, man. I’d be a sissy.” “No, you’re funny. We dare you to go out for the play.” So I went out for the play. It was “South Pacific.” I got a part. People laughed at me. I loved it.

Q: Are you nervous for previews?

A: The word nervous is not in my vocabulary.

This article originally appeared in

NEW YORK — Describing an interview with Gary Busey is nearly impossible. On one hand, the experience is exactly what you might think: Frenetic. Unfocused. The works. His sentences are sprinkled with what he calls “Buseyisms”: acronyms he’s spelled out for decades that hint at his philosophy on life. B.I.B.L.E., for example, is “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth,” and partially the title of his memoir.

Gary Busey Is Playing God. Seriously.

Gene Roddenberry, creator of “Star Trek,” was an idealist. His vision for the future, as conveyed in the franchise’s many iterations, was a progressive utopia where racism and poverty were mostly eradicated in favor of a thirst for learning.

From there, you can draw a straight line to Booker’s 2020 presidential campaign which he has tried to define in terms of relentless optimism and an upbeat appeal to healing the nation’s divisions. Booker, 50, has been obsessed with “Star Trek” since a young age. His father, Cary Booker, one of the first black executives at IBM, introduced him to the original series after it had already gone off the air.

At his home in Newark recently, the younger Booker gleefully displayed some of his memorabilia, including a set of “Star Trek” PEZ dispensers and the “Star Trek Encyclopedia” from his bookcase. There is more in his Senate office. Take it from a Trekkie: That’s not casual fandom. Recently, Booker attended San Diego Comic-Con, and a picture of him beaming while flashing the Vulcan salute went viral. His girlfriend, actress Rosario Dawson, also adores the franchise.

Booker discussed his fandom, the political leanings of certain Star Trek captains and how the show has influenced his politics. The conversation has been condensed and edited.

Q: We only have a handful of subscribers from the Klingon home world, so we’re going to have to keep most of this in English.

Q: What did your father see in Trek?

“Star Trek” was more than just an escape. It was a portal to say the future is going to be different. It’s incredibly hopeful and a belief that we’re going to get beyond a lot of these lines. We’re going to unite as humanity. It’ll be a place where your virtue guides you, the highest of human aspirations. I think there’s something about that he found really powerful.

Q: Do you think you took it in differently as a person of color?

A: I took it in through that lens because I really believe that was the lens that compelled my father. My dad loved UFOs. When that television series “Project Blue Book” came out, that was another thing. He was fascinated by the universe and excited about it.

This idea that we as humans, where we are right now, are literally just not even at the foothills yet of the mountains of discovery that are out there. He was a man of infinite hope. “Star Trek” gave him that. It showed him that we are going to overcome so much of the stuff that rips at humanity now.

This I’ve never talked about. I had — they’re not dolls; they’re action figures. I had every “Star Trek” action figure you can imagine.

Q: You collected them?

A: You say collected them. Adults collect. Kids play. So for me, I played with them. My brother and I, as little kids, created whole universes of “Star Trek” on our own. This isn’t fan fiction. This is two young kids whose father was really excited about “Star Trek.” I still remember, I had multiple Spock and Kirk action figures, and I would dress them differently so they would be different characters. This is me as a young, young kid. First grade, second grade. My brother and I would create worlds, forts and spaceships.

Q: Your campaign, in many ways, is Gene Roddenberry’s ideal vision. It’s very optimistic. I look at the world we live in today. And it’s hard for me to see how we end up in the utopia Roddenberry envisioned hundreds of years from now. Do you find yourself struggling with that?

A: My parents were unflinching in telling my brother and I about the ugliness in the world. We would hear really rough stories of racism and bigotry. It’s almost as if my parents wanted my brother and I to have no illusions about how cruel the world could be. Yet, it was always told with an antidote to that, which was how good and virtuous the world is as well. Growing up with a story of, “This house you’re living in, people tried to stop you from being in this incredible home because of the color of your skin. But guess what? There were do-gooders that came and foiled that attempt.”

Q: You’ve said several times that you take after Picard.

A: He’s my favorite captain by far.

Q: Why are you so drawn to him over the other captains?

A: Besides his great haircut, I do love how profoundly intellectual he is and how reasoned and thoughtful. I was just rewatching the episode with him and Wesley Crusher, basically the one where Wesley is leaving and they get trapped and Picard is injured [Season 4’s “Final Mission]. He is incredibly affectionate toward him in a very restrained, British way. You could still see that he is still a nurturing leader. There’s something about his style that I’ve just found compelling.

Q: Is there a character in “Star Trek” that reminds you of Trump?

A: [Pause] Wow. I mean, the first thing that popped in my mind, which I’d have to think about — just the Ferengi in general.

Q: Quark?[The Ferengi bartender, mostly seen on the show “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” Ferengi are known for the relentless pursuit of profit over all else.]

A: I would definitely not say Quark because there was something about him — he showed some decency and kindness in many episodes.

When you ask me about Trump, what comes more to mind, is just this idea that he is a throwback to a lot of the things that my father would say our species has got to evolve out of.

Q: I’m going to read you a quote from Ted Cruz from when he ran for president in 2015. “I think it is quite likely that Kirk is a Republican and Picard is a Democrat.” Do you agree?

A: Kirk is from Iowa. It’s so hard for me to answer that question because in the same way, if you look back 50 years ago, blacks were Republicans. So I’m trying to think if you want to look at the classical ideas of the party. I really think where the Republican Party has jolted, that it is now the party of Trump, I definitely do not think either of them would be that.

Q: Your father passed away in 2013. If he was here right now, what’s the one episode you would watch with him?

A: There’s an episode of “The Next Generation,” [a show] he wasn’t as crazy about as I was. But one of my favorite episodes is a strange one because it’s not really a typical “Star Trek” episode. Season 5, Episode 25, “The Inner Light.” This really spoke to me. When I watched this, I was so one-dimensional in my life and so driven on this pathway. This came out before I became a professional.

Over the years, it spoke to me more and more. I was living this intense life: captain of a city [Booker was mayor of Newark from 2006 to 2013] and didn’t have a family life. “The Inner Light” is this moment where Picard gets some ship that sends a beam out and, literally, Picard is transported to another world and lives 40 years. He has a beautiful family and struggles and learns an instrument. It’s just this amazing whole life. And then he wakes up on the bridge. And he has lost all of that.

The reason why the probe was doing it was because a civilization was ending and they wanted people to not lose that civilization. He didn’t lose 40 years of his life, but he lived an entire lifetime.

The episode really broke me up. For my dad, who lived this incredible life, in the end, he fell into dementia. I think he started to lose perspective on the achievements of his life. In many ways, I was taught by him that we think life is about the big battle. The big election. The big win. But really, I think what my dad taught me — but I felt like he was losing perspective in the end — was that really, life is about the small moments. The everyday acts of human kindness.

There’s something beautiful about that episode that just talked about a life well lived.

How 'Star Trek' Pushed Cory Booker to Make It So

NEWARK, N.J. — In the month before officially becoming a presidential candidate, Sen. Cory Booker spent his nights rewatching all 172 episodes of “Star Trek: Voyager.”

The new Danny Boyle film, “Yesterday,” imagines a world without one of the most influential musical acts of all time, the Beatles. During a global blackout, Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), a middling songwriter, has a bike accident and is knocked unconscious. When he wakes up, he remembers the band, but no one else does.

But we never find out why a blackout causes the world to forget about the Beatles or why Jack remembers them.

It didn’t matter for the film’s primary screenwriter, Richard Curtis. Where many films go out of their way to justify elaborate or quirky premises, Curtis opted to focus only on the existential questions the story posed: How would the Beatles fare if they debuted in 2019? Are performances as important as compositions? And what about the ethics of claiming ownership of music that isn’t yours? Is it stealing if the band didn’t exist to begin with?

“You try and make it as logical as you can,” Curtis said in a phone interview. “But I think the problem is, if you really try and prove the point that something that can’t happen happened, you will tie yourself up in knots.”

This story got me thinking about other films whose plots are based on unique premises with minimal explanation. Since a lot of movie plots seem inexplicable, I came up with some arbitrary rules. Someone’s behavior cannot set the story in motion. (For instance, in the 2000 comedy “Family Man,” it’s implied that Don Cheadle’s character, Cash, causes the holiday ills that befall Nicolas Cage’s Jack Campbell.) The premise has to be almost entirely unexplained. So not “Big” (1988), because the story gets going with a wish, or “The Matrix” (1999), in which the origin story is explained by the characters. Superhero movies don’t count either.

I took a closer look at four such films, though honorable mentions should be given to “What Women Want” (2000), “Stranger Than Fiction” (2006) and “Being John Malkovich” (1999).

1993 ‘Groundhog Day’

Directed by Harold Ramis, the movie imagines the disgruntled weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray in his finest performance) living the same day over and over again in Punxsutawney,Pennsylvania.

We never learn why Connors keeps having to live the same day. It just happens, although there is some suggestion that the pattern is linked to Phil’s misanthropy. He eventually evolves from a bitter narcissist to a charitable, loving human being, all by going through the same motions everyday.

Danny Rubin came up with the original premise and wrote it on spec. Columbia Pictures, the studio behind the film, wanted to insert a reason Phil has to endure the punishment of not being able to get to tomorrow. Among the justifications Rubin and Ramis considered: a curse set by a woman whom Connors has wronged.

“It felt so arbitrary. And I thought, ‘Why do I have to do that at all?’ It’s just a waste of time,” Rubin said. “And I also realized the thing that excited me the most about the premise was that Phil was stuck having to deal with the day, he didn’t know how he got there. But he still has to deal with it.”

Rubin wrote scenes with the curse, but Ramis didn’t end up filming them. Sometimes, it’s best to disregard the studio’s notes.

1976 ‘Freaky Friday’

Ignore the 2003 version starring Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. The one we are concerned with is the 1976 original with Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster. The film’s story is based on a children’s novel by Mary Rodgers, who also wrote the screenplay.

In the movie, a mother and a teenage daughter find themselves swapping bodies for unclear reasons following an argument. It may seem like I’m breaking my own rule about behavior: Yes, both make a wish at the exact same time before the switch. But it’s not in the presence of anyone in particular. Certainly not a robotic fortuneteller, as in “Big,” so I feel this is fine.

The 2003 version may be best known now because it further established Lohan as a budding star. But in that film, written by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon, the swap is actually explained: It was a result of the consumption of fortune cookies.

2009 ‘The Invention of Lying’

This film received mixed reviews when it came out — many critics found it grating. But I’ll get on this hill and defend an ingenious premise from Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson, who wrote and directed the movie, which also starred Gervais.

The comic plays Mark Bellison, a screenwriter in a world where no one can tell a lie. Not white lies. Not big lies. Until Mark, somehow, manages to do it. Of course, he uses this to his advantage: winning money at a casino by saying he’s won when he hasn’t; withdrawing money he doesn’t have from bank accounts; keeping a police officer from arresting his friend for drunken driving.

However, the audience never learns why Mark develops the ability to lie. There is a fleeting look inside his brain, where he seemingly has been given the tool to do it, but really, not much else.

In actuality, there was a scene to explain the discrepancy. Robinson said in an email that they had shot an elaborate opening that took place in prehistoric times, in which a cave man (also played by Gervais) tells his tribe he killed a boar to impress them, when the boar had actually been killed by a falling boulder. It was the most expensive scene to shoot of the entire film, but it ended up on the cutting-room floor. Robinson and Gervais found it unnecessary.

“Ricky and I always felt we wanted to do the bare minimum necessary to explain the premise of the film, so we’d have as much time as possible for comedy and character,” Robinson said.

2017 ‘Colossal’

An explanation of this plot cannot do any justice to the premise of this movie. Written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo, it centers on a down-on-her-luck, unpredictable woman named Gloria (played by Anne Hathaway), who goes back to her hometown, where she strikes up a relationship with Oscar, a bartender she grew up with (Jason Sudeikis).

The two find that simply by being at a playground at a certain time, they have the ability to control a monster and robot that are terrorizing Seoul on the other side of the world. Eventually, Oscar turns villainous, and by proxy, so does the robot, causing a showdown with Gloria’s monster and putting the fate of millions of civilians at stake.

There is next to zero explanation as to how this was possible. You’re just supposed to enjoy the ride. (And I did.)

“The reason my characters have giant monster avatars is explained only emotionally,” Vigalondo said in an email. “A rational or scientific origin story would have worked if my movie was centered around the mystery of the monster’s appearance. In this case, the characters never try to solve the mystery. They are just affected by the consequences.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/movies/from-groundhog-day-to-yesterday-the-twists-we-cant-explain.html" id="7476e502-6618-3a76-a59d-59485cfe11d3">The New York Times</a>.

Most stories explore the basics: who, what, where, when and especially why. But some movies skip that last one.

From 'Groundhog Day' to 'Yesterday,' the Twists We Can't Explain

But Luhrmann couldn’t get the rights.

The film, starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, did mighty fine anyway. It grossed $180 million and racked up eight Oscar nominations, including best picture. It spawned a Stones-less soundtrack that went double platinum, and a risqué music video that gave cancan a pop culture makeover. Just try to get through this piece without singing “Giuchie, giuchie, ya-ya, da-da” to yourself.

Roughly 15 years later, Justin Levine, the 33-year-old music supervisor for the lush new Broadway adaptation of the movie, wanted to try again. He had to solve a creative problem: how the villainous Duke of Monroth, played by Tam Mutu, would meet the heroine, Satine, portrayed here by Karen Olivo.

Levine made obtaining the rights a personal point of pride. While on a trip to Germany, Levine set up his GarageBand editing software in a closet and recorded himself singing and playing demos of how the music might be used in the show, before sending them off to the Rolling Stones’ management. Carmen Pavlovic, the production’s lead producer, had already brought on board a former music executive with Stones connections to help with the whole process.

This time the answer was yes. The Duke now greets Satine with “Sympathy for the Devil,” a new addition to a very crowded song list in “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” the larger-than-life stage version of Luhrmann’s film.

If it all works right — and based on a tryout run in Boston and hot-selling early Broadway previews at the Hirschfeld Theater, the odds look good — the musical adaptation of Luhrmann’s film will give audiences the same rush as the movie did.

But the giddiness onstage is in contrast to the arduous negotiations it took getting there. “I have tried to come up with another example that is as complex and I can’t,” said Pavlovic.

And it started before a single word was written.

Supersizing the score

From the outset, “Moulin Rouge” was a jukebox musical with a difference.

The Moulin Rouge itself is a storied Parisian venue that has gone through many incarnations — cabaret, theater, music hall — since its founding in the late-19th century. The movie’s master stroke was to tell a tragic turn-of-the-century love story through alternate renditions of anachronistic pop songs.

Pavlovic, who runs Global Creatures, a Sydney-based theatrical production company, spent about six years securing the stage rights to the film, part of her company’s major move into stage musicals. Along with getting Luhrmann, a fellow Australian, to sign off, she had to persuade another screenwriter and even the Moulin Rouge itself, which had licensed its name and imagery.

And while the $28 million musical, with a book by John Logan and direction by Alex Timbers, doesn’t stint on the film’s lavish visual style, it made one other big commitment: More music. Much more.

As in the film, sometimes it’s an entire song. In other moments, it’s just a line. More than a third of the songs are mashed-up in one number.

“Lady Marmalade,” the most famous song from the movie, is in the show of course, and now given even more prominence. So are many other core numbers. But much of the music debuted after the film, giving the production a fresher, more contemporary feel.

The grand total: 70 songs credited to 161 writers.

Which meant that along with its recognizable Broadway stars like Olivo, Aaron Tveit and Danny Burstein, the musical’s key players would include the team in charge of song rights and clearances. Really.

A hotel room summit

First things first: How to retell the story of Christian, the wide-eyed writer, Satine, the dying courtesan, and their love-, sex- and absinthe-crazed bohemian world.

As filmmaker, Luhrmann had the luxury of quick cuts and dissolves to move things along. The musical has to tell a story in real time. And beyond that, the creators believed their production couldn’t simply mimic the movie — a common pitfall for the many shows adapted from beloved films.

“We felt very strongly that we had to create our own beast, with its own DNA,” said Logan, a Tony-winning playwright and screenwriter. “We couldn’t slavishly ape the movie because that would be very disappointing to everyone.”

In 2016, he and Levine gathered for a three-day summit in a Times Square hotel. Logan brought notecards outlining what he thought the story could look like. Levine brought a keyboard.

Both brought in songs they thought would serve the story and their characters.

That’s when the stage musical was born. But the question remained: Would they ever actually be able to use those songs?

Hire an expert

Using the wish list provided by Logan and Levine, Pavlovic set in motion the difficult work of getting to yes.

The source material on the list was vast and varied, from pop ballads like Elton John’s “Your Song” (featured in the film) to dance workouts written since, like OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” and Katy Perry’s “Firework.”

Pavlovic brought in Janet Billig Rich, a producer with a deep well of experience in the music industry, to help with the clearances. The show had to obtain what is called a “grand rights license” for each composition, which allows for music to be used in the context of a narrative. The permissions and costs vary depending on how much of an individual song is in the musical and for how long.

Contemporary pop songs are often written by committee, and many feature samples of material written by a whole other set of creators. “Moulin Rouge” had to get the approval of each of the composers and publishers who hold song rights — though not necessarily the performer who originated the material. For example, “Toxic,” a song recorded and released by Britney Spears on her 2003 album, “In the Zone,” did not require Spears’ permission to use in the show, but four songwriters had to give the thumbs up.

If that’s not confusing enough, sometimes a song might have multiple writers and publishers and the mix of publishers controlling the song is often different outside of the United States.

Each night the cast takes the stage, the 161 composers receive a royalty payment, which is proportional to how long a given song is in the show and based on a cut of revenue.

If a composer or a publisher demanded an exorbitant sum, the creative team was willing to improvise.

“Part of it was so much — coming into it — the producing team saying, ‘This is the deal: We’re willing to walk away. Not one song has to make the show,’ ” Billig Rich said. “And that to me was so badass.”

You can’t always get what you want

Near the beginning of the film, there’s a dance scene inside the club to a version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. You won’t see that in the musical, because Courtney Love, who was married to the band’s frontman, Kurt Cobain, wouldn’t allow it. She’s been developing her own Nirvana stage musical and owns the majority of the rights to Nirvana’s music.

Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” was a no because “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the Freddie Mercury biopic, was moving along, and the team behind the band’s estate didn’t want there to be conflict.

And then there’s the case of “Uptown Funk,” one of the biggest hits of the last decade, performed by Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson.

This was a song with 11 credited songwriters, meaning Pavlovic had to obtain approval from each one of them.

She did. All except for one: Mars.

About that mash-up

If there’s any scene that captures the spirit of the “Moulin Rouge” movie, it’s the “Elephant Love Medley,” a duet in which Christian (McGregor) and Satine (Kidman) trade off lines about their romance. Each line is from a different pop song.

In the musical it’s placed at a different moment — we won’t spoil it here — and forced the creative trio to make an adjustment.

Levine holed himself in his office for several days, spreading lyric sheets on the floor to piece together songs that might work. (Or, as he put it, he “grabbed the football and ran with it.”)

About 25 of the show’s 70 songs are featured in this number, performed by Tveit and Olivo.

The solution, Levine found, was for Olivo to answer Tveit’s ardor with “anti-love” songs, allowing their relationship to warm up much more slowly. So if you happen to hear a bit of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” that’s why.

Come what may

Even after “Moulin Rouge” opens on July 25, the musical challenges will continue.

A cast album seems inevitable, and Pavlovic and her team have already begun to clear a whole new set of hurdles. Each recorded track will be its own unique copyright — meaning the team is going back to all the individuals and publishers who own stakes in the music and asking permission to present the songs as they are specifically done in the show.

And if the show is produced internationally, song rights will have to be cleared for these territories. But no matter how complex, the 161 songwriters have every incentive to sign off.

“If this wins, you’re getting checks for the next couple decades,” Billig Rich said. “On a loss, if the show fails, you don’t have any association with it. The producers are the ones who lose millions.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/theater/moulin-rouge-musical-songs.html" id="491551e0-69ea-376f-a2a8-4a1705e57f0d">The New York Times</a>.

How Can 'Moulin Rouge! The Musical' Upstage the Movie? With 70 Songs

If Baz Luhrmann had his way, the music of the Rolling Stones would have been featured in his 2001 movie, the cult favorite “Moulin Rouge,” alongside David Bowie, Sting and Madonna.

<h1>No sport is more often used to tell the story of America than baseball. Yet Marcenia Lyle Stone, known as Toni, who became the first woman ever to play big-league professional baseball when she took the field as a second baseman for the Negro Leagues’ Indianapolis Clowns in 1953, has largely been relegated to a footnote in history: one in a long list of African American women who endured hardships, overcame discrimination and helped shape the nation only to be shoved aside, their contributions minimized.</h1>

But with a new off-Broadway play, “Toni Stone,” now in previews, playwright Lydia R. Diamond aims to correct the injustice that Stone isn’t as culturally ubiquitous as Robinson, Paige or Larry Doby, the first black player in the American League.

In fact, Diamond didn’t know about Stone, either, until she was recruited for the project by producer Samantha Barrie and the play’s director, Tony Award winner Pam MacKinnon.

“I sort of was offended and shocked that I had not heard of her,” Diamond said in an interview after a recent performance at the Laura Pels Theater. “I felt compelled.”

Diamond’s works have often explored class, gender and race. She broke out with an adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel “The Bluest Eye” in 2006. “Stick Fly” marked her Broadway debut in 2011; “Smart People,” in 2016, brought Tessa Thompson and Mahershala Ali to off-Broadway’s Second Stage Theater.

And MacKinnon described Diamond as the right person for this job: “She sneakily puts context and politics into her play worlds. But they are so character driven. And her characters are so smart.”

“Toni Stone,” which is being presented by the Roundabout Theater Company, isn’t the first play about the title character’s life: In 1996, Roger Nieboer’s “Tomboy Stone” ran at the History Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Stone grew up. (That was the same year Stone died at 75, leaving no immediate survivors.)

Diamond began her dive into baseball some four years ago, relying on the biography “Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone,” by Martha Ackmann, as source material.

In her reading, Diamond discovered a singularly focused and unapologetic woman, obsessive about baseball statistics, who spent her life defying gender stereotypes — even as she was surrounded by naysayers, including her own teammates, in the Jim Crow South.

“I have the privilege of being able to try to unpack and deconstruct the way I move through the world as a person of color,” Diamond said. “She didn’t have the time to sit down and pull apart the politics of her existence. She had a thing to do. And she did that thing.”

“A League of Their Own” told the story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Because it was for white women only, Stone couldn’t participate in it in the 1940s, so she played on amateur men’s teams instead.

She was 32 when Syd Pollock, the owner of the Clowns, signed her to help with ticket sales, at a time when integration in the Major Leagues cut into the stature of the Negro Leagues. Stone took the roster spot of another baseball player you’ve likely heard of: Hank Aaron, who had left for the Milwaukee Braves.

Stone had already developed her skills alongside boys and men on sandlots in St. Paul. While viewed as a novelty act, she did pull off one of the most difficult feats for any baseball player at the time: She got a hit off Paige, one of the greatest pitchers in history.

Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, said Stone’s career “deserves to be more than just a footnote in both baseball and in American history.”

He grouped her with Mamie Johnson (known as Peanut) and Connie Morgan, who followed her path into the Negro Leagues.

“I think it speaks to the inclusive nature of what the Negro Leagues represented,” Kendrick said. “Quite frankly, they didn’t care about what color she was. They didn’t care what gender you were. Can you play? Do you have something to offer?”

Playing Stone onstage, April Matthis has the challenge of reciting scads of statistics belonging to players Stone admired. The role originally belonged to Uzo Aduba, best known from “Orange Is the New Black,” who departed the production last year because of a scheduling conflict.

Matthis impressed the creative team when she filled in for Aduba at a workshop, and the role eventually was hers.

Like Diamond, Matthis had never heard of Stone and wasn’t much of a baseball fan. As part of her preparation, she listened to audio clips of an interview Stone did in the 1970s.

The production, which is partially sponsored by Major League Baseball and the Players Association, also organized a trip to a New York Mets game, where Robinson Cano, a former All-Star and a second baseman (like Stone), gave Matthis pointers on stances and positioning. There were also trips to take swings at the Chelsea Piers batting cages.

As the only woman who appears onstage, she is, in a small way, experiencing baseball the same way Stone did.

“I don’t have the same alliance that I would if there were another woman onstage with me,” Matthis explained over coffee before a recent matinee. “I’m in a different dressing room than they are. Toni couldn’t be in the locker room with the guys. She had to often change in the umpires’ rooms.”

Rather than follow a chronological arc, the play is more of a collage, depicting key moments and figures in Stone’s life. We learn that she excelled at figure skating at the urging of her mother, watch as she deals with racist and sexist taunts, and get to know about her marriage to a man several decades older.

Diamond said she felt an enormous responsibility to properly convey who Stone was.

“I want people to meet Toni Stone,” she said, "and for the play to have been worthy of what she represented.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/theater/toni-stone-baseball.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Even if you’ve never watched a single baseball game in your life, you’ve likely heard of Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige. And you’ve probably watched the 1992 movie “A League of Their Own,” which tells how the world’s first all-female baseball league came to be.

From second base to center stage

“It was actually kind of emotional when I walked in because I hadn’t seen it,” Youssef, 28, said last fall as he stood outside his faux-home, which was built in a Brooklyn studio. He added: “It doesn’t feel exactly like my house but the emotional correctness is totally there. It’s the right vibe.”

The house looks like many middle-class suburban homes: A living room, dining room, kitchen, all unremarkable.

But what is remarkable about “Ramy” isn’t that it significantly differs from other millennial coming-of-age stories. It’s that it doesn’t.

The comedy, which debuted April 19, tells the story of a young American Muslim grappling with his faith along with the usual array of 20-something pressures: romance, career aspirations, drugs, parents. It’s a simple formula, but after decades of Muslims being depicted on screen as terrorists and villains or otherwise pushed to the side, it’s practically revolutionary.

“On one level, it’s very clear that there’s nothing out like it,” Youssef said. “There’s this initial reaction that you have of: ‘Oh, man. I have a lot of responsibility. I have this responsibility to speak for my people.’ Then you start to make the thing and you’re like: ‘That’s an impossible goal. If I try to do that, it just won’t work.’”

He continued, “The more that I got into the process, I realized all I can do is really offer my singular point of view, and make sure that it’s as much me as possible, and that will speak to who we need to speak to.”

Portrayals of Muslims in Western pop culture have historically lacked nuance. If they’re depicted at all, it is usually as the bad guys — see “True Lies,” “24” and “Homeland,” among many other examples. Jack G. Shaheen, a professor and author who spent much of his life cataloging how Hollywood has stereotyped Muslims and Arabs, said before his death in 2017 that anti-Muslim prejudices on screen were as bad as they’ve ever been, which he cited as a contributing factor to a low view of Islam among Americans. In 2017, a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center showed a warming view of Muslims in the United States, but still the lowest among other religious groups in the survey, including Jews, Catholics, and evangelical Christians.

In 2010, broadcaster Katie Couric suggested a possible solution to change attitudes about Islam in the United States: “Maybe we need a Muslim version of ‘The Cosby Show.’” Aasif Mandvi, the former correspondent for “The Daily Show,” gave it a shot with a 2015 Funny or Die spoof called “Halal in the Family.”

But attempts to seriously address the issue have become more common in recent years. In 2017, in a widely hailed speech in the British House of Commons, actor Riz Ahmed spoke about the importance of on-screen representation.

“If we fail to represent, we are in danger of losing people to extremism,” Ahmed said.

After Ahmed’s speech gained publicity, Sadia Habib and Shaf Choudry, an academic and a tech consultant in Britain, created the Riz Test, the Muslim equivalent of the Bechdel Test, which set criteria for judging Muslim portrayals in film and television. (A representative for Ahmed said he was unavailable for comment.)

Among the categories: Are the characters “presented as irrationally angry?” or “talking about, the victim of, or the perpetrator of terrorism?”

“The general portrayal is obviously quite negative,” Habib said. “It almost serves to perpetuate this idea that Muslims are quite backward, culturally deficit, and you get quite a lot of contradictions.”

Recent projects that failed the test include the BBC hit “Bodyguard,” Amazon’s “Jack Ryan” and even the smash Marvel movie “Black Panther” where, in an early scene, a terrorist screams, “Wallahi, I will shoot her!” — Wallahi, in Arabic, means “I swear to Allah” — after the main character T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) goes to rescue Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o).

“The awareness that there was nothing like it was what pushed me to make it even more unique, because there’s never been a Muslim family show,” Youssef said. “I didn’t want to give the Muslim family the same treatment that is given to the Asian family show and the Hispanic family show. There are almost kind of tropes of how an immigrant family is treated on television, and I felt like, ‘No, this needs to go even further than that.’”

“All those things were driven by the reality that we have no other portrayal outside of the news,” he added.

In “Ramy” Youssef plays a version of himself embracing Islam. It’s not the only authentically Muslim story told in recent years: “The Big Sick,” the 2017 movie written by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, was nominated for an Oscar and told the story about Nanjiani and Gordon’s real-life romance.

The difference between “Ramy” and “The Big Sick” is that Nanjiani spent much of that story trying to run away from his faith, whereas Youssef fully welcomes religious aspects of Islam. And in the non-scripted realm, comedian Hasan Minhaj discusses his culture and faith with regularity on his Netflix show, “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj.”

If “Ramy” is not exactly a Muslim “Cosby Show” — this version is far more vulgar — Youssef, who also has a stand-up special debuting on HBO on June 29, can claim credit for acing the Riz Test.

“If that’s how it is, I have hopes for it,” Habib said. “It will change the narrative and it will maybe open the floodgates for more shows like this about Muslims.”

The Ramy of the show has to reconcile his faith with the demands of being a young adult in New Jersey. He said that while his character on the show wasn’t an exact replica of himself, “a lot of the rules that are in the show are kind of the ones that I do have for myself personally.” Most of his love interests early in the season are white and do not understand why he doesn’t drink or do drugs. He has deep conversations at his mosque about how to properly wash his feet and what his place is in the world. (Youssef doesn’t completely avoid caricatures in the show: His uncle, played by Laith Nakli, is cartoonishly homophobic and anti-Semitic.)

At the same time, “Ramy” explores many of the same issues as other contemporary shows about young adults trying to get by, like HBO’s “Girls” and “Insecure.” Along with the push-and-pull of his faith, Ramy contends with meddling relatives, selfish friends, dating woes and career struggles.

“I do believe in God,” Youssef said. “I realized that there was this void in entertainment of someone talking about that genuine construct. I have a bit about it I do all the time about how there’s Friday prayers, and then there’s Friday night, where it’s like: ‘No, I want to do both. I want to pray, and then, I also go out, and I have a girlfriend.’”

Born in Queens and raised mostly in Rutherford, New Jersey, Youssef began conceiving the show when he dropped out of Rutgers University at 20 and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. Being on the opposite coast of his family, he found more solace in Islam than he had ever found before.

During one of his first acting jobs, on Nickelodeon’s “See Dad Run,” the show was “shooting at Paramount Pictures and I remember praying at Paramount,” Youssef said. “I had this thought where I was like: ‘Who else has done this? Who has prayed on this lot?’”

His stand-up and acting career started taking off. (I have performed multiple stand-up shows with Youssef over the years.) Youssef began dabbling in comedy with a sketch group in high school and then stand-up in Los Angeles.He started touring with Jerrod Carmichael. In 2017, he landed his most high-profile appearance to date: a set on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” That same year, he pitched his own show to several outlets, including Hulu.

“For someone who was doing a show for the first time, he just knew what his show was,” Beatrice Springborn, Hulu’s vice president of original programming, said. “He also knew how to take his experience of being a first generation Muslim-American and make it feel like every millennial’s experience.”

Ramy Youssef was home, in a manner of speaking. The Egyptian-American stand-up comedian had just finished shooting several takes of a scene for his new Hulu show, “Ramy.” The set was a mock-up of his childhood New Jersey home and the scene took place inside the dining room. Pictures of Youssef and his sister were hanging on the wall.

Sopan Deb

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