Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at a performance of “An Enemy of the People,” which will feature an actor who disrupted the actual Broadway production. We’ll also look at the green light for the Gateway project under the Hudson River.
He figured that his role in the outburst had made him persona non grata on Broadway.
But this afternoon, Smith will appear on Broadway — in a manner of speaking — in a staging of “An Enemy of the People,” alongside a cast headlined by Bill Murray and Kathryn Erbe. Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, will also take part, even though he has never read the play and has said he would not look at the script before a late-afternoon rehearsal.
This production will not be the same one that Smith — a member of Extinction Rebellion, a decentralized group that has held climate change protests on Wall Street, at the U.S. Open and at the Metropolitan Opera — interrupted at Circle in the Square. This performance has been organized by Theater of War Productions, which highlights social issues by staging dramatic readings with celebrities.
Unlike the Circle in the Square version, this one will not have costumes, sets or a theater. It will take place outdoors, at the northern end of Times Square, on the red steps above the TKTS booth at West 47th Street. Bryan Doerries, the artistic director of Theater of War, cautioned Smith and other cast members at a rehearsal last week that the performance space is an unusual one: “We are in competition with a 65-foot-long hot dog and people dressed as Minnie Mouse and the Naked Cowboy.”
The New York Times critic Jesse Green, who reviewed the preview that Smith disrupted, observed that “An Enemy of the People” was itself “a protest already: a bitter satire of local politics that soon reveals itself as a slow-boil tragedy of human complacency.” Smith stood up during a noisy scene in which the character played by Jeremy Strong was facing an unruly crowd onstage.
When Smith rose from his seat and began shouting, some audience members apparently did not realize that it wasn’t just another moment in the show. Before long, according to Deadline.com, the actor Michael Imperioli shouted, “You need to leave. You’re interrupting.” Another member of the cast, David Patrick Kelly, shouted, “Write your own play!”
Then they pushed Smith and a couple of activists who had joined in the disruption up the stairs toward an exit.
Strong, who was nominated for a Tony Award as best actor, told The New York Times in April that the protest had been “difficult.” But “in retrospect, it was a gift,” he said, “because it underlined what the play was about.”
Smith said he had been “terrified that I was maybe casting my career under the bus,” adding that a climate-related festival he runs “was in the final rounds of consideration for major funding.” (Smith said he had also taken part in an Earth Day protest at The New York Times’s plant in College Point, Queens, where The Wall Street Journal and USA Today are also printed.)
Still, Smith said he reached out to Theater of War a couple of weeks after the disruption at Circle in the Square. “I thought there was no way they’re going to want to talk to us,” he said. “They partner with mega-places.”
But Doerries, a former New York City Public Artist in Residence, said that “the answer was instantaneously yes.”
Smith, 36, said that the performance would be his first in New York as an actor. He said he had worked professionally in theater for eight or nine years, mostly producing and writing scripts about climate change.
Williams, by contrast, said he had appeared in close to 100 Theater of War productions in the last eight years. Among them was “Antigone in Ferguson,” a drama conceived in honor of Michael Brown Jr., an unarmed Black teenager whom a white police officer shot to death in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. Another, during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, was a Zoom performance of “The Oedipus Project,” starring Oscar Isaac, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright and John Turturro.
“I’m actually an actor,” Williams said. “That was my first love.”
“Theater of War allows me to combine some passions in some pretty awesome spaces,” he said. “Not too many people get to perform in the middle of Times Square.”
He also said it would not matter that he had never read “An Enemy of the People.” “Part of the production, how they present,” he said, referring to Theater of War, “is the actors having minimal rehearsal and then going on and performing. It gives the people who participate permission to make mistakes.”
Weather
Expect sunshine with temperatures in the low 80s. For tonight, mostly clear with temperatures in the high 60s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended today and tomorrow (Shavuot).
The latest New York news
There’s no stopping Gateway now
“Barring some major, major, act-of-God catastrophe,” Senator Chuck Schumer said, “it’s all systems go.”
That was Schumer’s reaction to word that the Biden administration planned to provide a $6.88 billion grant for the long-delayed tunnel between New Jersey and Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. The money is the last piece in the financial puzzle for the long-delayed project, known as Gateway. It will take 11 years to complete.
The notification came in a letter to congressional leaders from Veronica Vanterpool, the acting administrator of the Federal Transit Administration. My colleague Patrick McGeehan writes that the letter gives the planners behind the huge project the green light to hire engineering and construction firms that can start boring through a cliff in North Bergen, N.J. — and under the Hudson River.
“This is the moment that has eluded this region for literally almost 30 years,” said Kris Kolluri, the chief executive of the Gateway Development Commission, the agency behind the project. “We are essentially at the point of no return.”
Regional officials thought they were at that point in 2010 when Chris Christie, a Republican who had just become the governor of New Jersey, canceled the project. Some transportation experts were reminded of Christie’s move when Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York said that she was putting a congestion pricing plan for drivers heading into Midtown Manhattan on an indefinite hold.
New York and New Jersey will put about $4 billion into the project. Last week the two states — along with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — agreed to borrow the money from the federal government, a standard practice for major infrastructure projects. But Schumer said that Gateway ran into opposition at the White House when Donald Trump was president.
“Trump put many roadblocks in the way of Gateway,” Schumer said. “He held it up for all four years that he was president.”
Last year Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation under President Biden, called the tunnel project “the largest and most significant infrastructure project” in the nation, and said that Gateway was in the same category as “cathedrals of our infrastructure” like the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam.
METROPOLITAN diary
Staten Island Ferry
Dear Diary:
For most of my adult life, I lived on Staten Island and commuted to Manhattan for various jobs in the financial district. Most days I drove my car to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal to catch the boat to Manhattan.
One day when I was driving to the terminal, I noticed a smell that seemed to be coming from the car’s engine compartment.
After parking and getting out of the vehicle, I leaned over the hood with my nose slightly against it to quickly check whether the smell was indeed coming from my car.
Not smelling anything, I began to walk toward the terminal. As I did, I heard a woman just behind me speak.