The World Financial Center is an absolute mess and I was angry and frustrated trying to get around what has to be the craziest construction project in the world when suddenly I found myself in the newly opened underground concourse of Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Center Transportation Hub and I cursed myself for ever complaining. It is mind-blowing in its beauty and will eventually lead to his masterpiece of a building, what I previously thought was his whale bone, but is, in fact, based on a boy releasing a peace dove, a spectacle of a building, in flight if you will, with a retractable roof that will open every September 11th.
She won the Emmy, Obie, Drama Desk, Screen Actors' Guild, SAG Lifetime Achievement and Kennedy Center Honors Awards. Out of her hundreds of performances from Cordelia in LEAR to Kate in SHREW to her Oscar nominated role at the age of 83 no less in AMERICAN GANGSTA, it is perhaps her legendary performance in A RAISIN IN THE SUN that is burnished in my brain whenever I invoke her name, that, and her epic relationship with fellow actor, poet, playwright, activist Ossie Davis. They did it all. Friends of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, they were at the very center of America's civil rights movement and did much to develop America's conscience through their own metier in the arts.
She was a NYC actress, through and through.
I remember her popping on to the big screen in Spike Lee''s DO THE RIGHT THING and thinking her breathtaking beauty was an inside job that radiated out of her and that we need not butcher ourselves with plastic surgery, but yield with grace to time the way she did. She taught us how to grow up by growing old like a good wine or a priceless violin.
We lost her at 91, a grand life, well lived, but it is raining outside early this morning in midtown Manhattan and that is exactly how I feel as I ruminate the loss.
I promised I'd reserve judgement on the Claire Tow Theatre, the experimental lab and off-off-Broadway space that is perched atop Eero Saarinen's glass and marbled temple of serenity called Lincoln Center Theatre, until it was finished. I was wary, I'll be honest. One doesn't improve Saarinen, who gave us the perfection of the St. Louis Arch.
I am happy to report however my hearty support for Hugh Hardy's somewhat industrial-looking rooftop space, a space of tubes and wood and of all things, grass, as though this was the very human spot of simple materials that gave birth to the art that might eventually be enshrined in the marble down below. In one building now exists a Broadway, an off-Broadway, and an off-off-Broadway theatre and given one routinely pays one- to three-hundred dollars for a ticket in the other major spaces at Lincoln Center, the $20.00 tickets at the Claire Tow do much to further the recent mandate by he artistic community to make all arts in NYC more egalitarian and accessible.
Lincoln Center is one of my favorite places in the world. And it just got even better.
