Artists Working In Uncommon Media

 

[Readers of Rick On Theater will know that I have an interest in the visual arts.  I’ve posted many articles, both by me and by others, including a number from published sources, on art from one perspective or another.  I’m often fascinated by innovative and experimental art, work that’s groundbreaking and daring—even if I don’t always like the results.  Just as I am with theater, I’m taken with artists who devise new ways to express themselves with new media or new techniques.

[Recently, I read two pieces in the New York Times’ monthly style magazine, T, about artists working with materials that are, not unique, but also not mainstream.  One works with cloth and thread, though he’s not a tapestry artist or a needlepointer.  The other’s a sculptor who work with lighted tubes of neon.  I say “works with” and not “works in” because he incorporates the neon tubes in his sculptures with other elements—though the tubes and the light they emit are the most dynamic components of the sculpture.

[In both cases, I hope, you’ll see what got my attention—and piqued my imagination.  Maybe these artists and their work will intrigue you a little, too.] 

“Out of Whole Cloth”
by Siddhartha Mitter 

[The article below was published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 27 September 2026.  It was posted to the paper’s website as “What Happens When a Painter Abandons Paint?” on 10 September 2026.]

Eric N. Mack has created a singular style of painting by forgoing paint altogether and using fabric instead.

The artist Eric N. Mack [b. 1987], known for his abstract fabric assemblages, works in a simple studio in an office building turned creative hub in Manhattan’s financial district. When I visited in early June, I found the room packed with textiles — piles of colorful remnants, gauzy lengths unrolled on the floor and racks of clothing, some of Mack’s own design. A heavy-duty Singer sewing machine held the center of a cluttered worktable. Out the window, we could see the South Street Seaport at a distance, the ship sails echoing Mack’s fabrics.

Mack, 39, identifies as a painter — and trained as one in art school at Cooper Union, and later at Yale. Back then, he was already challenging the norms of the field, painting onto unusual surfaces like blankets and drop cloths and setting them up as sculptures; for almost a decade now, he’s used fabric and thread, not paints and brushes, to make his marks. His assemblages can stretch over metal frames or hang off lines and free-standing armatures, or cascade in bright hues across, say, a museum atrium, making the space itself a sculpture of light. When we met in the studio, he was preparing his exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea that opens today [You Red The Shirt Off My Back, 10 September-24 October 2026]. Pinned to the wall were works he was making, including some for the show: Each was a kind of collage, joining small segments of many different shapes and patterns and materials, stitched and layered into irregular forms.

[Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art on Cooper Square in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

[Chelsea is a neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan. The area’s boundaries are roughly 14th Street to the south, the Hudson River to the west, 6th Avenue to the east, and 34th Street to the north. In the 1980s, the area began to attract restaurants and nightclubs and, in the ’90s. art galleries focusing on the most contemporary artists and works.]

One of a cohort of young Black artists to appear in the early 2010s with fresh ideas and cross-disciplinary tendencies, Mack received institutional recognition almost immediately, participating in an influential group show of emerging artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2012 [Fore, 11 November 2012-10 March 2013]. His work was in the 2019 Whitney Biennial [17 May-27 October 2019], and he had his first New York City solo exhibition that same year at the Brooklyn Museum [Lemme walk across the room, 11 January-4 August 2019]. He’s shown widely ever since.

[The Studio Museum is an African-American art museum in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. Founded in 1968, the museum collects, preserves, and interprets art created by African Americans, members of the African diaspora, and artists from the African continent.]

His fabric works join a lineage of conceptual experiments that are based on painting while also shedding the medium, in part or in full. Among his touchstones are figures like Sam Gilliam [1933-2022; see “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin” (26 June 2011) and “Sam Gilliam (1933-2022): A Personal Tribute” (2 July 2022)], the great Black abstractionist who began draping his painted, unstretched canvases in the late 1960s; Robert Rauschenberg [1925-2008], the protean assemblage figure who made textile works in the 1970s; even [Vladimirov Javacheff] Christo [1935–2020; Bulgarian] and Jeanne-Claude [Denat de Guillebon; 1935-2009; Moroccan-born French national], with their wrapped buildings and monuments. This fall, he will also appear in “Hard Art,” an intergenerational show of 44 artists at MoMA PS1 [Long Island City, Queens; 5 November 2026-8 March 2027] that traces the legacy of Black abstract painters, including Gilliam, Mary Lovelace O’Neal [American; 1942-2026], Joe Overstreet [American; 1933-2019] and more, across many media. (And a large-scale installation by Mack is on view at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky. [Rare Essence, 27 May-29 November 2026], responding to the building’s architecture, through Nov. 29.)

But Mack finds equal inspiration in street and high fashion, and in the histories of quilting and the domestic arts. How fabric is made and traded, and with whose labor; how it is worn on the body; how it is kept or reused: All this, for him, infuses the material down to the snippet. This concentrated potential keeps Mack trawling fabric and remnant shops, visiting markets and artisans on his travels and accepting the miscellaneous batches of fabric that friends think he might want to use. It has led him to focus his practice. Where he once employed different methods — readymades, ornamentation, photo transfer, magazine-page collage — he has pared his priorities to fabric, space and form. The result is a distinctive visual language, sensitive to fabric’s social and emotional life, how a remnant can marshal a memory; how a pattern comes with a story embedded in it. Unlike paint, Mack told me, fabric can “also talk about time and fragility.” He added: “I like that about textile. It’s something that I’ve wanted painting to be able to do, which is why I’ve conceptually fused them.”

At the studio, I asked Mack to guide me through one of his works in progress. Pinned to the wall (and still untitled), the piece involved several dozen elements: a dynamic assembly of strips and squares of many colors, patterns and textures. The total work possessed the rough proportions of a dress — albeit one bizarrely confected, and then deconstructed by some centrifugal energy. Mack pointed out a rectangular section near the work’s top. It had bands of narrow stripes in shades of red, blue and green. He got it, he said, on Chongming Island, an outer district of Shanghai in China’s Yangtze River Delta, where women have woven homespun cotton for centuries.

As we continued to look over the piece, alighting on other fabric segments, it became a map of the artist’s sources. A lace section, for example: “I got this in Turin in a secondhand shop,” Mack said. An Indian-style, paisleylike print was purchased at a market in Rome, a bit of burlap at an ordinary home and garden store. A swath of linen came from Emblem Weavers, one of the surviving traditional suppliers in Ireland. “They gave me a lot of remnants that I’m still working with,” he said. And the larger rectangle, slightly frayed with loose threads hanging, in a tartan pattern anchoring the bottom of the work? “There’s a punk shop I go to in the East Village,” Mack said. “If it has a grid on it, I’ll get it. It felt like it kind of balanced everything out.”

[The East Village is a neighborhood on the East Side of Lower Manhattan. It’s roughly defined as the area east of the Bowery and Third Avenue, south of 14th Street, north of Houston Street, and west of the East River. The area has undergone many changes since the early 19th century, and today it’s a center of avant-garde and experimental culture and arts, including the visual arts, theater, music, and writing.]

A grammar was emerging, one that relied on a combination of history and intuition. The work’s energy — and also its control — dwelt in its torqued internal geometry, the way Mack positioned the patterned fabric pieces slightly off kilter. The artist often leaves deliberate gaps in his compositions that he likens to oculi or breezeways — “like the work is beginning to unmake itself,” he said. In the jagged edges, he was exposing the vulnerability of the material.

At the same time, all the reference points and different histories seem to create something familiar, a kind of connection between the work and the viewer. “People ask me if the viewers can touch the work,” he said. “And my answer is always that I think the viewers already know what it feels like. Because so many of the fabrics are so ubiquitous, you already can imagine, which ends up being a kind of sensorial overlay.”

Clothing and style are fodder for experiments that have landed along the spectrum between fashion and art. He’s collaborated in the past with the London-based streetwear designer Kiko Kostadinov [Bulgarian; b. 1989] and with Grace Wales Bonner [English; b. 1990], now the creative director of Hermès men’s wear. (When we met, Mack was dressed unassumingly in jeans and a Supreme jacket.) At one point, he was making “outfit collages,” incorporating full clothing pieces — trousers, windbreakers — into his scrap-and-remnant assemblages. Though there are fewer overt explorations of fashion in his work now than earlier in his career, the possibilities lurk. While we were looking at the patchwork piece we had analyzed on the studio wall, he said, “I think it may need to be worn.”

Mack grew up just outside of Washington, D.C., and his parents both worked at the National Gallery of Art — his father in exhibition installation, with a specialty in plexiglass vitrines, and his mother in the gallery archives. The family identified so much with the museum that they chose his middle name, Nathaniel, for its alliteration with “national.”

Mack’s father also owned a clothing store, so his son would either accompany him to the museum, where he roamed the galleries and watched him clean the vitrines — “with his personal proprietary solution”— or help out at the shop. These formative experiences built his awareness of not just art and fashion but “how close they were at times,” he said. “What people were wearing on the street, how culture moved through fashion — there was this progress where I was like, ‘Oh, I’m seeing this in real time.’”

Outside was the Black D.C. of the 1990s, rhythmed by go-go music, the stubbornly regional dance genre epitomized by bands like Rare Essence, Trouble Funk and other hyperlocal acts. “It was an interesting kind of cultural specificity, and it had its own resistance,” he said. “It just had such a flavor and feeling — really Black, but also just complex.”

He’s titled works and shows after D.C. locations or bands. How these memories filter into his art is abstract. “Just as I’m preserving an old piece of fabric in the middle of these newer materials, or thinking about simultaneous contrast, there’re these moments of culture that I want to compress into the work.”

Equally in the air for Mack, who attended an arts program in high school, was the local fine-art legacy — notably the Washington Color School [see “The Washington School of Color” (21 September 2014)] painters of the 1950s and ’60s, who sought a language of color on canvas using acrylic and methods like shaping and soaking. This group, plus offshoots, included Kenneth Noland [1924-2010; see “Morris Louis” (15 February 2010) and “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin” (26 June 2011)], who cut canvases into sculpted shapes; Morris Louis [see “Morris Louis”], who poured color on large unstretched canvases; and Gilliam, as well as the great Black painter Alma Thomas [American; 1891-1978], known for the bold rhythms and patterns of her abstract paintings. All were influences on Mack, he said.

Shortly after high school, he visited a Gilliam retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art [Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective (15 October 2005-22 January 2006); see “Awake and Sing!, et al.” (3 April 2017) and “Sam Gilliam (1933-2022): A Personal Tribute” (2 July 2022)], followed by one of Louis in 2007 at the Hirshhorn Museum [Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited (20 September 2007-6 January 2008)]. Later, he said, he realized that “these were bookends — these are saying so much, and they’re local artists who, unlike go-go, were really able to penetrate. They’re in museums all over the world.”

[The Corcoran Gallery of Art was an art museum in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1869, the Gallery closed on 28 September 2014 due to a prolonged economic shortfall. Its art school and building transferred to George Washington University and its collection was distributed to other public museums and institutions in Washington, primarily the National Gallery and the American University Museum.

[The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum in Washington. Opened to the public in 1974, it’s part of the Smithsonian Institution and focuses on contemporary and modern art, mainly on the post-World War II period.]

Mack has “an almost encyclopedic knowledge of all these artists and movements,” said the artist Abigail DeVille [American; b. 1981], whom he befriended at Yale. “I’ll show him a picture of a work in progress and he’ll have immediate references.” The artist Tomashi Jackson [American; b. 1980], a friend since Cooper Union who showed alongside him in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, said that anywhere Mack went, he always looked for the library. “He is a good-faith participant in art-historical lineage,” Jackson said. “As a maker, and then inside of our inherent responsibility to give it back.”

In the late winter of 2019, while Mack was preparing for the Biennial and had installations up at the Brooklyn Museum and the Serpentine gallery in London, he participated in a fourth show that is perhaps the one that most impacted him as an artist, even though its material trace has been lost. For the Desert X outdoor biennial in California, he draped billowing lengths of cloth over the plaza of an abandoned gas station just outside the town of Mecca [California], by the Salton Sea. The fashion house Missoni donated fabric. He titled the work “Halter.”

[Desert X is a site-specific, contemporary art exhibition that is held in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. The inaugural Desert X was held in 2017, and subsequent exhibitions have been held every two years. Desert X 2027 will take place from 30 October 2027 through 7 May 2028 and will mark 10 years since the inaugural exhibition.

[The Salton Sea is a shallow, landlocked, highly saline endorheic lake in Riverside and Imperial counties in Southern California. An endorheic or terminal lake is a body of water that doesn’t flow into an ocean or a sea and maintains its water level only by evaporation.]

One month into the exhibition, the work disappeared, leaving only bits of fabric and rope, apparently burned, in circumstances that have never been resolved. Speaking at the time to ArtNews, Neville Wakefield [English curator, b. 1963], the exhibition’s artistic director, said there was little to be done: “The beauty of the piece was that it was extremely fragile, ephemeral, diaphanous work. The fact that it has succumbed to its own fragility might add to the narrative.” The loss strengthened Mack’s resolve. All his pieces since then, he told me, “come in a continuum where they’re answering for the absence of that work.”

From this perspective, the outdoor work Mack showed last year at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Upper Manhattan was cathartic for the artist. The piece, titled “Cartouche” [2025], part of “Fishers of Men,” Mack’s solo exhibition at the academy [27 September 2025-8 February 2026], addressed the peculiar architectural setting: The mannered Beaux-Arts complex of Audubon Terrace — the grand dream of an early 20th-century philanthropist — dead-ends at the rear facades of two prewar apartment buildings more typical of Washington Heights [neighborhood in the northern part of the borough of Manhattan], with their fire escapes and water towers. Against this backdrop, Mack strung two parallel ropes and attached between them a billowing textile collage that stayed up through most of the winter. “This exposure to the elements — and being braced by the architecture — was ideal,” Mack said. From earlier New York artists, he added, he’s come around to the idea that “the city is a collaborator.”

[Audubon Terrace is a cultural complex comprising eight buildings in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. Developed for several cultural institutions between 1904 and 1930, Audubon Terrace was commissioned by Archer Milton Huntington (1870-1955; philanthropist and scholar). The complex is designated a New York City landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

[The site was originally part of the estate of John James Audubon (1785-1851; French-American artist, entrepreneur, naturalist, explorer, and ornithologist), which was later developed into the Audubon Park district. The first buildings were completed in 1907 for the Hispanic Society of America and the American Numismatic Society. Additional buildings were designed for the American Academy of Arts and Letters (AAAL), the American Geographical Society (AGS), the Heye Foundation's Museum of the American Indian (MAI), and Our Lady of Esperanza Church.

[In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the AGS, ANS, and MAI moved out. (The Museum of the American Indian, now a New York satellite of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, is located downtown at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House at 1 Bowling Green.) Boricua College, the Hispanic Society, and AAAL took over the other three institutions’ buildings; Boricua College itself moved out during 2026.]

When I asked Mack’s old school friend DeVille about him, she’d replied with a poetic note. “I think of Eric’s work not only as an extension of the body but as an ancient technology of place making,” it read in part. “It’s carving out a space of memory, loss, whimsy, dreaming as a poem or song.”

In the studio, Mack put his aspirations differently: “I think the way that I break through is with this kind of public address. This relationship to freedom. Taking these knowable formats and introducing these worlds that I don’t see as disparate at all.”

[Siddhartha Mitter writes about art and creative communities in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere.  Previously he wrote regularly for the Village Voice and the Boston Globe and he was a reporter for WNYC Public Radio.]

*  *  *  *
“Afterglow”
by M. H. Miller

[This report was also from T: The New York Times Style Magazine of 27 September 2026.  It was posted on the website on 21 September 2026 under the title “He Grew Up Without Electricity. Then He Became Obsessed With Neon Lights.”]

In the 1960s, the artist Stephen Antonakos developed a spiritual relationship with neon. Today, his preserved SoHo home and studio is a testament to the material's mysteries.

One evening in the late 1950s in New York City, the artist Stephen Antonakos [Greek-born; 1926-2013] left his West 29th Street studio and began to walk downtown toward his apartment. As the story goes, at some point during this walk he had a near-religious epiphany after seeing a restaurant’s neon sign. Neon wouldn’t have been an unfamiliar sight for Antonakos, who worked in advertising by day and at night made exuberant sculptures out of found materials like pillows or empty sardine tins. Back then, it was still a part of the urban landscape, though by the early ’70s it would begin to be replaced by more affordable and practical LED lighting. Having lived in New York since the 1930s — except for two years in the Army during World War II, when he was stationed in the Philippines — Antonakos grew up around neon icons like Radio City Music Hall and Katz’s Delicatessen. But it was as if he were seeing neon for the first time: the intensity of its color, the way its glow called attention to itself. He’d later describe the moment as finding “what I didn’t know I was looking for.”

[Katz’s Delicatessen is a Jewish deli (but not kosher) at the corner of Houston and Ludlow Streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Since its founding in 1888, it has been popular among locals and tourists alike for its pastrami on rye, which is considered among New York’s best. In 2016, Zagat gave Katz’s a food rating of 4.5 out of 5, and ranked it as the number one deli in New York City.]

Neon is a natural element (number 10 on the periodic table) that was discovered by British chemists at the end of the 19th century. In 1910, the French engineer Georges Claude [1870-1960] patented sealed glass tubes that combined neon with an electric current. Claude planned to sell his invention as lamps, but their intensity proved more useful in advertising; in 1925, a Packard car dealership in Los Angeles was one of the first businesses to install a neon sign. In the 1960s, neon had a powerful influence over American contemporary art. In addition to Antonakos, artists who worked with the material included Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali (another Greek American, who went by the mononym Chryssa [1933-2013]), Dan Flavin [American; 1933-96] and Bruce Nauman [American; b. 1941].

But few artists explored neon with a deeper affection than Antonakos, who treated it less as a material than a medium unto itself. He was the subject of numerous gallery and museum shows and made more than 55 large-scale public neon works in places ranging from the facade of a Tel Aviv power plant to a terminal at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Yet the greatest showcase of his art is at his home and studio on West Broadway in SoHo, where he lived and worked from 1967 until his death, at age 86, in 2013. The loft, which can be visited by appointment, has since been preserved by the artist’s second wife, Naomi Spector Antonakos [b. 1938 or ’39], now 87, who was born in Massachusetts and worked for several of the New York galleries that represented her husband. The two married in 1972, and the couple raised their daughter, Evangelia [b. 1975], now the head of the department of math and computer science at Bronx Community College, there. (Antonakos had a son from his first marriage, also named Stephen, who died in 2020.) The family slept in bedrooms scattered around the space, none of which had walls that reached the ceiling in order to maintain a continuous flow. Antonakos worked in the northwest corner of the loft, using a utilitarian drafting table and a metal desk, a section of its surface covered by a blue neon rectangle under frosted glass.

[SoHo, short for “South of Houston Street,” is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. Formerly home to small factories, since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists’ lofts and art galleries and has also been known for its variety of shops ranging from trendy upscale boutiques to national and international chain store locations. Designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and declared a National Historic Landmark because many of the buildings incorporate cast-iron architectural elements.]

When he moved in, the 5,000-square-foot space was raw and virtually uninhabitable. There was no kitchen or even refrigerator. The bathroom was little more than a closet with a trough. SoHo, which had only recently acquired that name, was largely undeveloped, full of abandoned manufacturing spaces with high ceilings and large windows. Antonakos’s studio evolved alongside the neighborhood, where he and his wife became social fixtures, befriending other artists, including Robert Ryman [American; 1930-2019], Sol LeWitt [American; 1928-2007] and Richard Artschwager [American; 1923-2013]. The place came together, Naomi told me during a recent visit to the studio, based on “Stephen’s instinct. It’s very subtle and it’s just him.”

Antonakos was born in a village in southern Greece with no electricity, where natural light was taken seriously. “We can’t imagine the darkness,” Naomi said of her husband’s upbringing. “If there’s no moonlight, you cannot see your hand, much less your feet.” In interviews, Antonakos recalled how he’d sometimes lie awake in the early hours before dawn, waiting for the sun to arrive.

The center of his universe was the Greek Orthodox Church. “To enter the chapel was to enter another world,” he once wrote in an artist statement. “Being inside it was like being plunged deep inside my own feelings and finding a paradise at the same time.” When he was 4, his family (he was the youngest of four sons) moved to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Later, they lived in a Greek enclave in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, near another Orthodox church that became vital to him. He remained very religious throughout his life: Near his worktable, he covered a small section of the wall with religious items.

Some of this iconography appeared explicitly in his work, most famously in 1965’s “The Blue Neon Cross,” a modified crucifix bisecting four differently colored neon squares. But more often his pieces display an almost primordial sense of minimalism. In one area of the studio is a scalene triangle in green neon; in another is a board painted solid white and backlit by blue neon. These suggest a rare confidence that the [art] critic David Ebony [American; b. ca. 1954] has described as a “what you see is what you get approach.” The art historian Irving Sandler [American; 1925-2018] called Antonakos “essentially a classicist in the Constructivist tradition” — his forms have no symbolism or meaning outside of themselves. Antonakos himself once explained his working method as “I place things in space.”

In the 1970s, he began designing free-standing rooms that incorporated neon pieces, but his process was always simple and straightforward, even as his neon works grew very large. He’d draw detailed, to-scale renderings of neon installations in colored pencil on brown paper. These plans would be sent to Spectrum on Broadway, a neon sign maker in Woodside, Queens, that was his chosen fabricator.

As an artist, Antonakos seemed to have little interest in the answers to big questions. What fascinated him more were the questions themselves — and materials, like neon, that sometimes seemed to elude interpretation altogether. In 1971, when he was teaching briefly in California, he wrote to friends in New York, asking them to each send him a package. He didn’t know what he’d been sent and never intended to open the packages, preserving the mystery. “I do not want to tell people how to experience art, mine or anyone else’s,” he once said. “I simply want to try to find for myself ways of putting things together visually so that the possibility for a kind of higher consciousness may occur.”

[M. H. Miller is the features director for T Magazine.  He’s a prominent journalist and editor who writes extensively on contemporary art, culture, and the historical evolution of New York City’s art scenes.

[Before joining the New York Times, Miller built a robust career as a culture journalist and editor.  His writing has appeared across several major literary, news, and art publications such as the New York Observer, where he served as a reporter and senior editor; ARTnews, where he worked as an editor; the Guardian; the London Review of Books; Bookforum; the Village Voice; and NPR.]

Feminist Performance Art

 

[I’ve blogged a bit on performance art on Rick On Theater: “Lady Gaga: Artist For Our Time” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2011), “Performance Art, Part 1” (7 November 2013) and “Part 2” (10 November 2013), “Penny Arcade: Two Performances” (15 November 2013), “‘The Second Life of Performance’” by Katie Kitamura (10 January 2016), and “‘Art That Flows From a Will to Live’: Marina Abramović, Performance Artist” by Jessica Testa (7 September 2024). 

[The reason there’s not more is that, frankly, it’s not a subject about which I know a great deal.  (My appreciation of performance art is more for what its innovations and experimentation contribute to more conventional theater than for the live art itself that the artists make.) 

[However, when I read the article below on the revival, so to speak, of interest in the feminist performance artists of the late-middle 20th century, my attention was piqued.  I decided it was more than worth sharing with ROTters; I hope you’ll agree when you read it yourselves.] 

“THE RADICALS”
by Amanda Fortini

[The article below, published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 17 May 2026, was also posted on the Times website as “Is Yoko Ono Still Our Most Radical Artist?” on 30 April.]

A crop of recent exhibitions prove how feminist performance art from the 1960s and ’70s is more relevant than ever.

In March 1965, almost two years before she’d meet John Lennon [1940-80] and form their infamous alliance, Yoko Ono [b. 1933] staged “Cut Piece,” a groundbreaking work of performance art, at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. It was the third presentation of the work (the first two were staged in Kyoto and Tokyo in the summer of 1964), but this one was filmed by the documentarians David [1931-87] and Albert Maysles [1926-2015] and has thus been preserved for posterity as a nine-minute black-and-white film. Ono, then an avant-garde artist known for her involvement in the Fluxus movement, sits impassively onstage next to a pair of fabric shears. She is dressed in clothes of obvious quality (an elegant black sweater suit with pearl buttons, a silk slip underneath, fishnet pantyhose), which members of the audience, strangers to the artist, are invited to approach and snip off.

[A very brief bio of Yoko Ono: Ono, an artist, musician, activist, filmmaker, and performance artist, was born in Tokyo. Her father was a wealthy banker and, during Ono’s early years, was transferred to bank branches all over the world, including San Francisco (1933, two weeks before his daughter’s birth), New York City (1940), and Hanoi (1941).

[In 1945, after World War II, Ono’s father moved to Scarsdale, New York, but Ono remained in Japan until 1952, when she joined her family. She enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, where, among other subjects, she studied music composition. She became interested in twelve-tone music and then moved into the “avant-garde.”

[In the ’50s and ’60s, Ono lived an eventful life, including two marriages, the birth of a daughter, and exploration with music and art of a decidedly experimental nature. She exhibited and performed in several venues. She came to London in September 1966 and met John Lennon in November at an exhibit of her conceptual art. He was intrigued by her art, and in September 1967, Lennon, who was still married to his first wife at the time, sponsored her solo show at a London gallery.

[Lennon’s first marriage was terminated in November 1968, and he and Ono collaborated on a number of works during the last two years of the Beatles, 1969 and ’70, and attended many public protests against the war in Vietnam. The couple married in March 1969. They had formed the Plastic Ono Band in 1968 as an outlet for their collaborative work.

[Ono and Lennon moved to New York City to escape the press attention, especially the racial prejudice in the media directed at Ono, in August 1971. They initially settled in Greenwich Village, but moved to the Dakota Apartments on the Upper West Side on Central Park West, between 72nd and 73rd Streets, in 1973.

[On 8 December 1980, Lennon, returning home with Ono after a recording session, was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman (b. 1955), who remains in prison on a 20-years-to-life sentence.

[Ono continues to perform, exhibit, and release recordings. She appears for, promotes, and supports many charitable, artistic, and humanitarian works and organizations around the world. She also works to preserve her murdered husband and collaborator’s legacy, having funded the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan’s Central Park in his memory in 1981-85, along with other memorials to Lennon.

[In 2005, as keeper of the Lennon flame, Ono was actively involved as a primary consultant to Lennon, a musical about the post-Beatles life of the rock songwriter with music and lyrics by Lennon and book by Don Scardino (b. 1949; retired actor; television director and producer).

[Ono made the whole Lennon catalog available to Scardino. The gatekeeper to the Lennon legacy, Ono retained final script approval and required the Broadway producers to present the completed script to her live in workshop format.

[The show went into previews on 7 July 2005 at the Broadhurst Theatre, opened 14 August to negative reviews, and closed on 24 September after 42 previews and 49 regular performances.]

At first, the audience-perpetrators are reticent and even polite, cutting bits from her sleeves and collar and waistband, then setting the shears back on the stage, as Ono stares ahead unperturbed. Eventually, though, an overzealous man saunters up and begins slicing off Ono’s slip with gusto, first cutting directly between her breasts, then snipping the slip’s arm straps and finally slicing all the way around her waist to reveal her bra. The audience titters with nervous laughter (“Don’t get carried away,” a female voice admonishes), while the artist herself begins to look uncomfortable, biting her lip, her eyes darting around. Only when the man clips Ono’s bra straps does the audience protest. “Stop being such a dweeb!” a female voice yells, breaking the offender’s spell; others boo and hiss. “Cornball,” a male voice declares. Ono’s eyes tilt upward as though imploring the heavens for assistance; she crosses her arms over her chest. But she perseveres, and the film ends before the performance does.

“Cut Piece” — in its enactment of public violence, escalating sense of dread and implication of the audience as voyeurs — was a pivotal work of feminist art and would inspire numerous others: Among them were Carolee Schneemann’s [1939-2019] provocative “Interior Scroll” (1975), in which the artist pulled a scroll inscribed with an excerpt from her book “Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter” (“If you are a woman … they will almost never believe you really did it” [Tresspuss Press, 1976]) from her vagina; and Marina Abramović’s [b. 1946] “Rhythm 0” (1974), in which the audience was encouraged to interact with the artist using any of 72 objects set on a table (a rose, a feather, a whip, a gun) while Abramović stood still. “Rhythm 0,” like Ono’s piece, reverses the usual artist-audience dynamic. “Instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give,” Ono has said of “Cut Piece,” “the artist gives what the audience chooses to take.” Abramović, who had a loaded gun pointed at her, put it more bluntly: “What I learned was that . . . if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.”

Viewing “Cut Piece” now, what struck me is how genuinely unsettling it remains. I watched the short film once, then again, floored by how relevant, how prophetic, it feels in our own cultural moment, when many of the long-held gains of feminism, both legal and cultural, seem on the brink of being lost forever. The reality most people took for granted merely a few years ago — that men and women were inherently equal, and that as a society we were collectively striving to remedy the ways in which we weren’t paid or treated as such — is being peeled away with alarming speed. This atmosphere is surely one reason we are seeing a resurgence of interest in feminist performance art of the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, much of it difficult, aggressive and surprisingly radical — certainly for its era but even now.

In the past decade or so, the defining trend among curators has been to shine a light on artists who were previously “overlooked.” Various groups who were once misunderstood, neglected or ignored have been excavated and exhibited — artists of color, older women artists, women of Abstract Expressionism and so on (though “overlooked” is, of course, itself a deprecating term). The “rediscovery-industrial complex,” as it’s been wryly termed, has now reached female performance artists, arguably sidelined in their day not only for the confrontational radicalism of their work — what Schneemann called the “considered disregard for the comfort of the audience” [The Obscene Body Politic (Carolee Schneemann Foundation, 1991)] — but because their particular art form was not salable, collectible or tied to the market in any way.

Ono, who has a new exhibition, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” opening at the Broad museum in Los Angeles next month [23 May-11 October 2026], is at the center of this reassessment, but she’s not alone. In July, London’s Tate Modern, where the Ono show originated, will mount a significant retrospective [Ana Mendieta, 15 July 2026-17 January 2027] of the work of Ana Mendieta [b. 1948], the Cuban American multidisciplinary artist who died in 1985 at 36 years old. The exhibition picks up where this winter’s comprehensive show at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York [7 November 2025-17 January 2026], “Ana Mendieta: Back to the Source,” left off, examining her short but prolific career through early paintings, remastered films, late sculptures and site-specific interventions in natural landscapes, which Mendieta documented with slides, photographs or film.

[Ana Mendieta died on 8 September 1985 after falling from her 34th-floor apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village. She lived there with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre (1935-2024). The circumstances surrounding her death were the subject of controversy.

[Prior to her death, neighbors heard the couple arguing violently and, after Mendieta’s fall, to which there were no eyewitnesses, Andre had scratches all over his face.

[During three years of legal proceedings, Andre’s lawyer described Mendieta’s death as a possible accident or a suicide. After a nonjury trial, Andre was acquitted of second-degree murder in February 1988. The acquittal caused an uproar among feminists in the art world, and remains controversial.]

Also this spring, Abramović, now 79 and the most influential performance artist still working — for “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA in 2010 [14 March-31 May], she sat staring at museumgoers for roughly seven hours a day over two and a half months, and has generally made testing the limits of human endurance her artistic pursuit — is presenting new and old work at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice [Transforming Energy, 6 May-19 October 2026], the first living female artist to have a major solo exhibition there. And her “Balkan Erotic Epic,” a four-hour dancing and singing extravaganza that mines Balkan folklore, will have its North American premiere at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in December [8-20 December].

[Before New York City, Balkan Erotic Epic (Abramović was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in the Balkans) has played in Manchester, U.K. (début); Barcelona, Spain; Bochum, Germany; and Berlin, Germany. Following New York, the project is scheduled to travel to Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Paris, France.]

Last year, Karen Finley [b. 1956], 70, the artist known for covering her body in chocolate to point out the degradation of women [The Return of Chocolate-Smeared Woman, The Flea Theater, 17 June-4 July 1998] — but even more so for suing the National Endowment for the Arts for denying her funding over “decency standards,” a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court [National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, et al. (1998); co-plaintiffs: John Fleck (b. 1951), Holly Hughes (b. 1955), Tim Miller (b. 1958), and the National Association of Artists’ Organizations; decided against the artists] — had a solo show at Freight + Volume gallery in Lower Manhattan [More Desperate Than Ever, 17 May-5 July 2025]. Other female performance artists had posthumous exhibitions at various major galleries in New York and Los Angeles: Schneemann (who often used her body as what she described as “visual territory” in transgressive pieces exploring female sexuality), Lee Lozano [1930-99] (whose most famous performance was a satirical inversion of feminism in which the singular artist avoided speaking to other women for 28 years [Decide to Boycott Women, August 1971 until her death]) and Hannah Wilke [1940-93] (who made stark work documenting her nude body’s deterioration from cancer). Curators have made it their mission to rescue subversive feminist performance work from the purgatory where it’s long dwelled. At a time when manosphere podcasters extolling the virtues of female subservience are increasingly influential in public discourse, the constitutional right to abortion has been overturned and social media is rife with a kind of emboldened misogyny I thought we’d left in a bygone era, what could feel more apt than a group of pioneering feminist artists who confronted exasperatingly similar issues in their own lives?

There are perhaps no two artists who were as misunderstood in their prime, and who are more worthy of a critical re-evaluation now, than Ono and Mendieta, who have more in common than one might think. Both lived in the shadows of famous men, both existed between two cultures and both made conceptual work about gender, power, vulnerability, dislocation, connection, ritual and transformation — work that was deeply female in its sensibility, and that was about navigating the fraught space between the female self and the larger world.

The Broad’s Ono show, through drawings, films, conceptual art, music, performance pieces, installations, photographs and archival ephemera spanning seven decades, illuminates her immense contributions to culture — some explicitly feminist, some implicitly so. Putting a finer point on this feels like a necessary corrective, as her Beatles-adjacent celebrity has often eclipsed her art career. “She used her work and her music to communicate a lot of important feminist messages,” Connor Monahan, Ono’s studio director, told me. (Ono is 93 and no longer gives interviews.) “But in a way, I don’t really think that’s been digested in society.”

Ono, who was born in Tokyo in 1933 and received classical music training as a child in Japan, told her father — a classical pianist turned successful banker — that she hoped to be a composer. He replied there were no great female composers. Instead, she’d become the first woman to study philosophy at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, lasting only two semesters before moving to New York to attend Sarah Lawrence College for three years and eventually finding herself at the center of the heavily male downtown avant-garde art scene.

Ono was making her early work amid the first stirrings of second-wave feminism; the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, combined with the publication of Betty Friedan’s [1921-2006; American feminist writer and activist] “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, lit the kindling of widespread discontent among postwar American women. In the 1950s and early ’60s, women were expected to suit themselves up in the suffocating corset of domesticity. Until 1974, unmarried women were often required to have a male co-signer when applying for a bank loan or credit card. Abortion was only legal in a handful of states by 1970, and sexual harassment, though pervasive, did not yet have a name. It’s this unnamed menace, I’d argue, that Ono so cleverly countenances in “Cut Piece.”

Two of her short films from this period (both made in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade) address feminist ideas. In “Freedom,” Ono, whose face is out of the frame, attempts to wrest herself free of the purple bra she’s wearing while a score by Lennon drones on in the background. “Fly” zeros in on a fly crawling over the rolling landscape of a woman’s naked body. Is the woman sleeping? Dead? The ambiguity is intentional. “This whole idea of a male society was based on the fact that women shut up,” Ono has said, “but shutting up is death, in a way. So we were always kind of pretending to be dead.”

In Mendieta’s case, the death was all too real — she fell from the window of her 34th-floor Manhattan apartment; her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was subsequently tried for murder and acquitted. Frustratingly, her tragic end has become the salient fact of her biography. Helen Molesworth’s [b. 1966; curator of contemporary art] popular 2022 podcast, “Death of an Artist,” investigated Andre’s suspected involvement, along with the couple’s tumultuous eight-month marriage; the actress America Ferrera [b. 1984] has announced plans to executive produce and star in an upcoming limited-series adaptation of Robert Katz’s [1933-2010] luridly titled 1990 account of the incident, “Naked by the Window.” To a maddening degree, Mendieta gets treated like the Sylvia Plath [1932-63; American poet and author; known for the 1963 semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar] of the art world. Her aesthetic obsession with blood and death and burials, with tracing the outline of her body in her iconic “Silueta Series” — a leitmotif of hers that unmistakably evokes a chalked crime scene — is said to prophesy her own death. Yet finally, with these shows, Mendieta’s mystical, powerfully haunting art gets its due.

Born in Cuba in 1948, she was sent to America with her sister at the age of 12. Mendieta made her most important work between 1972 and 1985: on creek banks in Iowa, where she lived in an orphanage, a boarding school and a series of foster homes as a child, then later studied at the University of Iowa’s avant-garde Intermedia M.F.A. program; in Mexico, where she visited pre-Columbian archaeological sites in the early ’70s; during a series of trips back to Cuba in the early ’80s; and in New York City, where she moved in 1978 and was welcomed by a community of feminist artists.

Mendieta’s varied oeuvre — influenced by Afro-Cuban religious rituals, Indigenous goddesses and the idea that a universal energy animates all life — includes paintings; photographs; works on paper; films of her pieces shot on Super 8, 16 millimeter and video; and sculptures she made at the American Academy in Rome, where she had her own studio for the first time, in the two years before her death. At Marian Goodman, there were drawings on leaves and an installation of black candles arranged in the shape of her body — called “Ñañigo Burial” (1976) [Ñáñigo refers to a member of a historic, Afro-Cuban, all-male fraternal organization], the installation was created by Mendieta for her first opening in New York [November 1979 at the A.I.R. Gallery (SoHo); Siluetas series]; it was lit the day I visited. But her signature pieces are her “earth body” works, as she called them, which are perhaps best described as ephemeral sculptures that straddle performance art, body art and land art, which Mendieta created using natural elements (mud, fire, feathers, flowers, blood, water, gunpowder) to carve, mark, burn or otherwise manipulate the earth. In “Imágen de Yágul” (1973) [“Image of Yágul,” a pre-Columbian Zapotec (indigenous pre-Columbian civilization that flourished from ca. 700 BCE-1521 CE in the Valley of Oaxaca in southeastern Mexico) archaeological site and former city-state], for example, she integrates her body into the landscape, lying inside an ancient Zapotec tomb, her naked form obscured by a gauzy spray of flowers; in other works, she inscribes her corporeal outline into the landscape by igniting it with gunpowder, say, or setting it on fire. Mendieta staged many of her pieces privately, capturing them in arresting short films and photographs, which are artifacts in their own right — “the afterimage of primordial remembrances,” in her words. Mysterious and intimate, her earthworks make you feel like you are being let in on a secret.

Ono and Mendieta have something else in common: Their work, as well as that of nearly all the female performance artists of this era, was marginalized, demeaned or slighted. When she died, Mendieta had no formal gallery representation and did not receive an obituary in The New York Times, though the paper extensively covered her husband’s murder trial. Reviews of the albums Ono released with Lennon were harsh: “A little of it goes a long way. Too long,” wrote the Times critic Don Heckman [1934-2024; New York Times pop and jazz music critic, 1969-73] of Ono’s half of the couple’s dual 1970 “Plastic Ono Band” releases, dismissing it as “wailing vocal sounds.” Her visual art was ignored almost wholesale until the 21st century.

Surely a primary reason for this dismissal of both women is that their work focused heavily on the female body. The body is the performance artist’s vessel, of course, but first- and second-wave feminist art, especially in the ’70s, was also engaged in “a rethinking of how we represent the female body in all its forms,” as the critic Lauren Elkin [b. 1978; Franco-American cultural critic, essayist, novelist, and translator] writes in “Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art” (2023). Some artists made work that was in-your-face, like Wilke photographing a series of topless self-portraits in which she covered her torso and face with labia-shaped pieces of chewing gum that looked like tiny scars [S.O.S. – Starification Object Series, 1974]. These artists were, as Elkin puts it, “harness[ing] the power of repulsion” to make their point.

Others employed the body as a vehicle for interrogating themes of displacement and identity, which were particular concerns for Mendieta as an exile. “I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette),” she wrote in an artist statement in 1981. “My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.” In her work, this return often means merging with the earth, as she does in the 1974 film “Grass Breathing,” where she lies beneath the sod, visibly inhaling and exhaling, like someone who has been buried alive. The three-minute silent film is claustrophobic, uncomfortable, intense, but also meditative, peaceful and almost erotic, masterfully taking the viewer through the full arc of emotions.

For these artists, the body, rather than being “mute” and “almost exclusively . . . a mirror of masculine desire,” as the [art] critic Jan Avgikos wrote in 1997, was, as it is in life, a site of liberation, agency, eroticism, pain. In a 2011 talk, “Regarding Ana Mendieta,” Schneemann, who was friends with the younger artist, said, “We have forgotten the danger, the dangers of depicting the explicit sensuous female body, we have forgotten how much hatred and resistance that inspired — rage, envy, domination.”

Have we? In “Moffitt Building Piece” (1973), Mendieta poured cow blood and viscera on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building, then filmed passers-by, none of whom intervened. In “Rape Scene,” from the same year, she loosely re-enacted the aftermath of a female student’s rape and murder, inviting an audience into her apartment to witness her half-naked, smeared with animal blood and tied to a table. Ono and Lennon also made a film called “Rape” (1969), in which the camera relentlessly stalks an unsuspecting young woman; it incriminates viewers, just as Mendieta’s films do. Yet Ono’s most notable project in this vein is “Arising” (2013), for which she invited women to send stories of harm done to them simply because they were female, accompanied by a photo of only their eyes. Numerous testaments hung in the installation — a bracing reminder of the dark side of the universal female experience.

Is it fair, in the end, to group these female artists together under a feminist banner? Mendieta resisted any such identitarian designation — though her work was clearly invested in feminist themes, and justice for her death has become an article of feminist conviction. Schneemann was not fond of what she called “the confines of essentialist theory.” Lozano, in her absolute spurning of other women, was rejecting all categories imposed on her. Ono, for her part, cared about the plight of women, but the cause was a tributary that fed into her larger humanist aims. “I am a woman, and my experiences produce my works,” she said upon the debut of “Arising.” “To me, feminism should be about understanding women and their condition, about expressing who they are and what happened to them. If you put it this way, you see how feminism does not concern only women but everybody as humans. Also, men.” Although these artists didn’t always readily embrace the label, had they known how shockingly essential their art would remain over a distance of 40, 50, even 60 years, they might have seen it differently.

[Essentialism, which Schneemann rejected, is the belief that things have an underlying, unchanging nature that defines what they are. It argues, for example, that gender differences are fixed, natural, and biologically determined, rather than shaped by culture or history. This becomes a simplistic excuse for discrimination, intolerance, and inequity.]

[In 1992, I was approached by Drama Review editor Richard Schechner (b. 1934) to do a profile of The Shaliko Company for the planned series.  For the better part of a year, I shadowed company director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), attending rehearsals for the various productions he was directing. 

[The company’s main project at the time was the environmental production of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven—originally called Going to Iraq (and returned to that title after the 1992 staging)—and I attended most of the rehearsals.  The production, at Theater for the New City in Manhattan’s East Village, from 17 September to 11 October 1992.

[Malpede had been working on Going to Iraq/Blue Heaven during the build-up to Desert Storm, and her response to the Gulf war had compelled her to write about it.  The playwright was, however, already contemplating another occurrence as the base of the drama: the death of artist Ana Mendieta. 

[For Malpede, Mendieta’s fate is emblematic of the position of women artists in America, and she found herself struggling with this subject when war broke out in January 1991.  Aria, a sculptor who serves as the play’s central character, is a sort of avatar of Mendieta.

[(It’s interesting to note that the actress who played Aria in Blue Heaven, Rosalie Triana (aka: Rosalía Triana. 1946-2023), had portrayed Ana Mendieta in June or July 1992 in Madre Selva by Alma Sanchez (b. 1947; aka: Alma Villegas) at the Galerie Lelong—which showed Mendieta’s work.)

[There are three posts on Rick On Theater that cover Blue Heven/Going to Iraq, and one more that’s an interview of playwright Karen Malpede.  For those interested, these are: “‘As It Is in Heaven’” (25 March 2011), “Blue Heaven (Going to Iraq)” in “Some Women Writers from the Archives” (10 July 2019), “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq) – Part 1” (11 May 2020) and “Part 2” (14 May 2020), and “An Interview with Karen Malpede (1992)” (5 November 2014).

[Amanda Fortini has written for the New York Times (including contributing frequently to T), the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, the Paris Review, New York, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Slate, and Salon, among other publications.  She’s worked as an editor at Mirabella, the New York Review of Books, and Slate, and has been the William Kittredge Visiting Professor at the University of Montana.  

[Her essays have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Political Writing (PublicAffairs, 2008) and Best of Slate (Atlas Books, 2006), and she was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award in 2012.  After several semesters as a lecturer in journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s Greenspun College for Urban Affairs, Fortini has contributed articles and essays on Las Vegas, including several for the New Yorker, and an acclaimed cover story for California Sunday.]

On Broadway: Fake News

  

[New York Times culture correspondent Jesse Green is taking a look at what he finds is a new phenomenon on stages in the Western world.  It’s related to documentary theater, but has some intriguing differences, according to Green’s analysis. 

[As regular readers of Rick On Theater will have noticed, documentary theater is of special interest to me, and I have blogged on the subject quite a few times since I started ROT.  (Hence my inclination to post this article.)  Some of the previous posts on the blog regarding documentary theater are: “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama” (9 October 2009), “‘On The Real: Documentary Theatre’” (15 September 2017, 18 September 2017, 21 September 2017, 24 September 2017, and 27 September 2017), “Documentary and Investigative Theater” (10 September 2025).

[Below, there are a couple of embedded links to posts on ROT that touch on theater of fact or verbatim theater, variations on documentary plays.  I didn’t include them in the list here because they’re placed where Jesse Green’s article treats a closely related point, but also because those posts aren’t strictly about documentary theater.  Nonetheless, I urge interested ROTters to check them out.] 

“FAKE NEWS”
by Jesse Green

[The article republished below was originally seen in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 17 May 2026; it was also posted on the New York Times website as “On Broadway Stages, a New Kind of Fake News” on 12 May.  Author Green was the New York Times’ chief theater reviewer from 2020 until 2025.]

A new style of theater has emerged in which the characters and events are real — even when the dialogue isn’t. Or is it?

Recent plays are approaching the archival density of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Mark Rosenblatt’s [British; b. 1978] “Giant” [2024], about the children’s book author Roald Dahl [1916-90; British author of popular children’s literature and short stories, poet, and screenwriter], arrived on Broadway this season [23 March-28 June 2026] bristling with monstrous excerpts from published accounts of Dahl’s antisemitic screeds. Off Broadway earlier this year, the director Daniel Fish [b. 1967] devised “Fauci/Kramer” [sic; program and reviews have Kramer/Fauci at Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 11-21 February 2026] from the transcript of a brawlsome 1993 C-SPAN debate between the AIDS researcher Anthony Fauci [b. 1940; physician-scientist and immunologist; director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 1984-2022] and the AIDS activist Larry Kramer [1935-2020; playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist]. Last year’s “Liberation” [Laura Pels Theater (Roundabout Theatre; Off-Broadway), 20 February-30 March 2025; James Earl Jones Theater (Broadway), 28 October 2025-1 February 2026], by Bess Wohl [b. 1975], about the hopes and failures of second-wave feminism, is based partly on interviews with participants in real meetings of a 1970s consciousness-raising group. In 2024, Mario Correa’s [b. 1969 in Chile] “N/A” [Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, New York City, 27 June-4 August 2024] — the “N” for Nancy Pelosi; the “A” for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — offered ferocious, mile-a-minute yet totally imaginary depictions of private conversations between the two congresswomen.

I could go on: The 1933 obscenity case against James Joyce’s 1922 “Ulysses” [The United States vs Ulysses by Colin Murphy; premiered in Ireland in November 2023; U.S. premiere: JL Greene Theatre (Irish Arts Center; Off-Broadway), 30 April-1 Jun 2025], the secret back-channel negotiations behind the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords [Oslo by J. T. Rogers at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater (13 April-16 July 2017)], a woman’s taped recollections of being held captive for five months and an FBI transcript of another woman’s arrest for leaking classified information have all been remixed for recent drama [Is This a Room, conceived and directed by Tina Satter; premiered at The Kitchen on 4 January 2019; Off-Broadway premiere on 21 October 2019 at Vineyard Theatre; Lyceum Theatre, 11 October-27 November 2021]. And we in the audience have been left like reporters in darkened rooms to judge the resulting dialogue for ourselves. Is it real or does it just sound as if it might be?

This isn’t entirely new. Peter Morgan’s [British; b. 1963] 2006 play, “Frost/Nixon,” borrowed liberally from the British broadcast journalist David Frost’s [1939-2013] grilling of Richard M. Nixon [1913-1994; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74] in 1977. David Hare’s [English; b. 1947] 2004 play “Stuff Happens” featured another U.S. president, George W. Bush [b. 1946; 43rd President of the United States: 2001-09], conferring with members of his administration during the buildup to the 2003 Iraq war. (Some of the dialogue, not to mention the title, was drawn from the public record.) And since 2001, the Civilians, a Brooklyn-based “investigative theater” company, have been creating narratives from interviews conducted with evangelicals, porn workers, prisoners and politicians.

But then the line starts to dwindle. Other than the verbatim collages of Anna Deavere Smith [b. 1950] starting in the 1980s [see “Fires in the Mirror (Signature Theatre Company)”(12 December 2019)] and the occasional nostalgia act (like Hal Holbrook’s [1925-2021] “Mark Twain Tonight!” from 1954) or courtroom drama (like Jerome Lawrence [1915-2004] and Robert E. Lee’s [1918-1994] “Inherit the Wind” from 1955), 20th-century plays didn’t generally try to borrow, or simulate, the actual speech of historical figures. No evidence suggests that [William] Shakespeare [1564-1616] consulted 11th-century Scottish transcripts to create “Macbeth” some 600 years later. The Greeks kept the muses of theater and history distinct.

[In point of fact, the Greeks did, at least in one instance, combine history (as distinct from myth) and theater. The first known true history play, Aeschylus’ (ca. 525/524-ca. 456/455 BCE) The Persians (premiered 472 BCE). is based on actual events rather than myths. The oldest extant ancient Greek drama, the play focuses on the defeat of Xerxes’ (ca. 518-465 BCE; fourth Emperor of Persia: 486-465 BCE) navy at the Battle of Salamis (26 or 27 September 480 BCE) and the Persian reaction to the battle.]

So why are playwrights now so eager to eavesdrop on reality, offering audiences facts and quasi facts in the form of dialogue? It’s hardly the purpose, and rarely the case, that theater should profit by telling us what real people said. Drama has historically been considered a form of fiction or poetry. Yet as recent plays approach the feeling of reportage, what’s surprising isn’t that so many fail to convince but that several succeed, in the process inventing a new style befitting our time.

Take “Giant.” Set on a warm afternoon in the summer of 1983, it presents Dahl (John Lithgow) dealing with the repercussions of having made anti-Jewish comments in his review of a book about Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon. A lunch at his home with representatives of his British and American publishers has been organized to encourage him to walk back the comments before they affect sales of his own book “The Witches,” set to be published later that year. Instead, he doubles down, referring to the media, for example, as “a nasty little cabal of nasty fucking Jews” [Brian Appleyard, “The Master Storyteller,” The Independent (London, Eng.) 20 March 1990].

Hearing that line, one would like to take comfort in the idea of dialogue as fiction. But in “Giant,” one cannot. The worst of Dahl’s antisemitic comments are verbatim — and when not verbatim, close enough. “They control the media,” he said of Jews in a 1990 interview eight months before his death. “Jolly clever thing to do” [Hugo Williams, “The Big Friendly Giant and the Kids,” Independent (London) 18 March 1990]. Yet Rosenblatt writes in a preface to the script that the play is “never striving to be documentary.” The lunch with the publishers’ representatives is plausible but invented, and one character, the American, who’s Jewish [Jessie Stone, played on Broadway by Aya Cash], didn’t exist.

That’s why it makes good drama. The combination of direct quotation from published accounts and close approximations in fully imagined scenes creates a compound glue that’s stronger than its components. Having Dahl say awful things at home, in front of his fiancée and within earshot of his housekeeper and handyman, suggests more about his character than similar things he wrote for public consumption. His antisemitism isn’t just a sound bite, it’s embodied — and thus more absolute and complex.

The paradox recalls Marianne Moore’s [1887-1972; American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor] description of poetry as a form that presents “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” [“Poetry,” first published in Alfred Kreymborg, ed., Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse (N. L. Brown, 1920)]. Regarding “Giant,” the phrase “real toad” is especially apt. But in “Liberation,” it’s the garden that’s real: a feminist group in an Ohio gymnasium 50 years ago. I say “real” because Wohl based most of the play’s characters on women who were part of an actual consciousness-raising group from that era, and drew additional inspiration from her mother’s own circle of friends. What they say sounds real too. In their meetings, the women argue about how to respond to the unenlightened men in their lives (“I think you should kill him”), what the goal of feminism should be (“If we don’t take action, we have no group”) and whether it’s permissible for one character to open the top button of her blouse to get a promotion at work (“She has to get through the day somehow”). Eventually, the narrator figure, a semifictionalized stand-in for Wohl, has a debate with her late mother, who materializes to say the play has “some funny lines” but “you got most of it wrong.” That scene is heartbreaking, even if you know that Wohl’s mother is alive and attended the Broadway production eight times.

[Liberation was nominated for the 2026 Best Play Tony, though it didn’t win the award; however, it did win the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Off-Broadway, it won the 2025 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play, and it was nominated for the 2025 Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Play.]

The acknowledgment of the blurry space between quotation, paraphrase and guesswork — the subtitle is “A Memory Play About Things I Don’t Remember” — makes “Liberation” feel more accurate. “It has to do with the way theater rewards emotional truth over literal truth,” Wohl told me. “The invented dialogue is all in support of the emotional truths I’m investigating, which spring from tons of research and firsthand conversations.”

Wohl’s method, like Rosenblatt’s, works because, even if the dialogue sounds accurate and is sometimes verbatim, the playwrights take a freer hand with the characters, inventing some and compositing others. Notably less successful are those plays, like Stefano Massini’s [Italian; b. 1975] “The Lehman Trilogy,” which opened on Broadway in 2021, that work the other way around, putting fake speech into real mouths, in this case those of three generations of the American banking family. Even putting real dialogue in real mouths can be a problem, though: The historic political statements in “Stuff Happens” are never as convincing as what Hare invents because you cannot reach the depths of character with language designed specifically to be shallow.

Current events have rarely been theater’s forte. Catastrophes that once seemed epochal have over the past two decades merged into one continuous sludge. But it’s not just the pace of the events; it’s how we now encounter them. Social media and A.I. have flooded our field of attention with hot takes and chaotic imagery, leaving us to extract the truth on our own. We learned of the killings of George Floyd [1973-2020; African-American man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 25 May 2020], Renee Good [1988-2026; American woman fatally shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, 7 January 2026] and Alex Pretti [1988-2026; American intensive care nurse for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs shot and killed by two U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Minneapolis, 24 January 2026]  within hours, with disinformation, false narratives and even, in some cases, deepfake videos soon following.

What the English poet William Wordsworth [1770-1850] described as his poetic ideal in 1800 — “emotion recollected in tranquillity” [sic; British spelling] — was for almost 200 years drama’s watch cry as well. But with no tranquillity left in which to recollect emotion, it’s no wonder that playwrights have looked for workarounds. Many have discovered, or rediscovered, the way older crises can serve as analogues for newer ones: AIDS can speak to Covid, Dahl to the antisemitic tropes of today, second-wave feminism to third-wave and beyond. What’s new is that playwrights have begun leaning into the objective techniques of nonfiction to sidestep the noise of fake news.

The best works to emerge from this movement toward facts are those that nevertheless manage to exploit the expressive opportunities of fiction. It may have been Smith, in her verbatim plays, who provided the inspiration, paradoxically achieving the imaginative weight of pure invention while observing strict verbal fidelity. The potency of that approach was established by two of her works from the early 1990s: “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities” (about the riots [19-21 August 1991] following the death of a 7-year-old Black boy when a car driven by a Hasidic Jew struck him [19 August]) and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” (about the violence that ensued after police officers who attacked Rodney King [1965-2012; African-American victim of police brutality on 3 March 1991 in Los Angeles] were acquitted in state court). But their power also derived from Smith herself, who was usually the only performer onstage, filtering as many as 40 oppositional voices through her own singular lens. The filtering was itself the drama, making the point that any of us contain the possibility of all of us.

Smith’s achievement has been difficult to replicate in other formats, only partly because of her extraordinary mimetic skills. With a strong enough actor, like Michael Benjamin Washington [b. 1979] in the 2019 revival [see also link above] of “Fires,” the play remains overwhelming. But a 2021 Off Broadway revival of “Twilight,” which divided the play’s characters among several actors, dissipated much of its strength. That may be why interview-based dramas in her wake, like those devised by the Civilians and by Tectonic Theater Project (most recently “Here There Are Blueberries,” a 2022 play about the discovery of an album of concentration camp photographs), have inched toward more familiar territory with elaborate settings, projections and song [see also my reports in Rick On Theater on 26 May 2024, 29 May 2024, 1 June 2024, 4 June 2024, and 7 June 2024].

Now playwrights are fudging the line between transcription and transformation even further. Often enough, the result, like an A.I. image in which someone has extra fingers, doesn’t pass the most elementary smell test. But handled properly, the combination of “maybe real” and “Could it be?” and “OK, yes, this actually happened” feels strangely right for our time — and serves as good practice for life. When we can no longer trust what real people say, the fictional facts and factual fictions of plays like “Giant” and “Liberation” make for a new kind of realism. Like little else onstage, they feel true.

[Jesse Green is a culture correspondent for the New York Times.  He was previously the chief theater reviewer for the Times from 2020 until 2025, having been co-chief from 2017.  Previously, he was the theater reviewer at New York magazine.]