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JENNY HVAL MUSIC

THE MONTHLY GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

NEWS TO US

OCCUVERSARY

RETURN TO DEWEY 5 YEARS LATER COLUMN

HAMMING IT UP

JEFF ROSS COOKS THE NUMBERS

ARTS

OMAR ROBINSON

ACTORS’ SHAKESPEARE PROJECT’S ANTI-HAMLET

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VOL 18 + ISSUE 39

SEPTEMBER 29, 2016 - OCTOBER 6, 2016 EDITORIAL PUBLISHER + EDITOR Jeff lawrence NEWS + FEATURES EDITOR Chris Faraone ASSOCIATE MUSIC EDITOR Nina Corcoran ASSOCIATE FILM EDITOR Jake Mulligan ASSOCIATE ARTS EDITOR Christopher Ehlers COPY EDITOR Mitchell Dewar CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Emily Hopkins, Jason Pramas CONTRIBUTORS Nate Boroyan, Renan Fontes, Bill Hayduke, Emily Hopkins, Micaela Kimball, Jason Pramas, Dave Wedge INTERNS Becca DeGregorio, Anna Marketti

DESIGN CREATIVE DIRECTOR Tak Toyoshima COMICS Tim Chamberlain Pat Falco Patt Kelley

ADVERTISING FOR ADVERTISING INFORMATION sales@digpublishing.com

BUSINESS ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Marc Shepard SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER Jesse Weiss ADVISOR Joseph B. Darby III DigBoston, 242 East Berkeley St. 5th Floor Boston, MA 02118 Fax 617.849.5990 Phone 617.426.8942 digboston.com

HEADLINING THIS WEEK!

DEAR READER You may have seen an article or TV news snippet this week about how the Boston Redevelopment Authority re-branded itself as the Boston Planning and Development Agency. Don’t be fooled just because city officials are counting on it.

This name-changing charade is insulting, and only possible because so many residents either don’t know—or don’t give a damn—about how Boston is the last major metropolis in America with an urban renewal agency. This means that the city, through the BRA, has the extreme power to bypass standard protocol and dodge public scrutiny in making significant calls about, you guessed it, planning and development. For proof of why the agency is incapable of making important decisions, just consider that the BRA board itself approved the $670,000 expenditure for hiring the marketing wizards who cooked up the name Boston Planning and Development Agency.

The BRA and the administration of Mayor Marty Walsh would likely dispute this characterization of a nefarious enterprise, which shields the rich and powerful from scrutiny, as would the rich and powerful themselves—contractors, developers, and property owners, all of whom are handcuffed to the BRA matrix. But while they may argue that the moniker tweak is part of a larger reform effort to “re-envision the agency’s identity,” the only thing that really matters is that their entire campaign is nothing more than a hoodwink, and that they expect us to buy it.

Richard Lewis Curb Your Enthusiasm Sept 29-Oct 1

COMING SOON Shit-Faced Shakespeare Sat, Oct 1 @ 6 PM

Comic vs. Comic

CHRIS FARAONE, NEWS + FEATURES EDITOR

Boston’s best roasting competition Weds, Oct 5 @ 8 PM

OH, CRUEL WORLD

Special Engagement: Alexander Nezlobin This show will be spoken entirely in Russian Fri, Oct 7 @ 9:30 PM

ON THE COVER Jenny Hval shows us a bloody good time. Read all about it on page 16.

Photo by Jenny Berger Myhre.

©2016 DIGBOSTON IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY DIG PUBLISHING LLC. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION CAN BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT. DIG PUBLISHING LLC CANNOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS. ONE COPY OF DIGBOSTON IS AVAILABLE FREE TO MASSACHUSETTS RESIDENTS AND VISITORS EACH WEEK. ANYONE REMOVING PAPERS IN BULK WILL BE PROSECUTED ON THEFT CHARGES TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW.

Andrew Schulz MTV2’s Guy Code Oct 7+8

Trump Takes On… Boston!

Dear Traffic,

A side-splitting satire by the comedic masterminds behind Improv Asylum

You’re getting absolutely out of control. Worst than ever before. Worst than during the Big Dig, or so I’ve heard. Everywhere. On the highway. On side streets.

On wide-open roadways that used to be perfectly open but are now parking lots thanks to the nonstop construction everywhere. That’s right—as it turns out, construction and parking are one in the same problem, so fuck developers too, along with whoever gives them permission to rope off whole blocks at a time. Kind of makes me long for my old days riding the Red Line and sitting in the corner seat that inevitably has some kind of pee on the floor.

Oct 12-Nov 8

617.72.LAUGH | laughboston.com 425 Summer Street at the Westin Hotel in Boston’s Seaport District NEWS TO US

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NEWS US RETURN TO DEWEY SQUARE FEATURE

In 2011, thousands of New Englanders occupied an obscure slice of Boston and became leaders in a national movement against greed. Five years later, we asked some of those activists to reflect on their radical protest camp experiment.

BY CHRIS FARAONE AND THE BOSTON INSTITUTE FOR NONPROFIT JOURNALISM There’s yet to be a major motion picture about Occupy Wall Street. Perhaps there never will be. Nor was much attention paid two weeks ago to the five-year anniversary of the movement’s inception in Manhattan, while there’s unlikely to be very much media glow on Occupy Boston’s birthday this week, or to mark the days when hundreds of other encampments sprang up nationwide in 2011.

None of which changes the fact that hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of Americans participated in Occupy, each one of them outraged in some way or another over growing economic inequity. And so with the arbitrary but critical half-decade marker of the start of Occupy Boston—which lasted in encampment form at Dewey Square across from South Station for 70 days— upon us, we compiled an elaborate oral and pictorial history detailing what happened during those critical months (Check digboston.com for more photos from Occupy Boston). Asking more than a dozen participants to look back, our hope was to extract lessons, get the basic backstory straight once and for all, and see where some of the peaceniks have landed.

It should be clear that there is no way to account for even close to everything that happened in those radical autumnal times. Even some individual days were hard to get a grip around, with one particularly active 24-hour period seeing: volunteer stylists from Newbury Street visit Dewey to trim overgrown Occupy mops; a dramatic early morning drug-related arrest; two separate marches, each with several hundred people, unfold in different directions; a city health inspector show up to inspect the commissary—and give the food tent a surprising nod of approval, however temporary; and the birth of a child.

Despite the many facets and stages of the movement, even just locally, we tried our best to paint an accurate portrait, however abridged.*

THE SPARK

Allison Nevitt (Occupy Boston facilitator): All movements have something that sparks them, and I think Occupy was definitely sparked by the banking debacle—bankers getting away with destroying the lives of everyone else.

But when you attract people on a subject that attracts so many you are also going to start realizing how many things are connected to it.

Robin Jacks (Occupy Boston media): There were four people, including myself, who all kind of found each other on Twitter. That was maybe around the 25th [of September 2011]. It felt like it had been this really long time, but really Occupy [Wall Street] had only been happening for a week … There was a Facebook invite for our first meeting. I’m laughing thinking about it now because it’s so preposterous, but we were going to meet at the Bruegger’s Bagels in Downtown Crossing, which is like the size of a train car. We figured we’d meet there and maybe 10 people would show up. And then we were like, “No, that’s not going to work, we have to be somewhere outside.” … The invite [said] like 500 people were attending, so we said, “Let’s meet at the bandstand.

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Activists have done this for years. Let’s be part of that.”

Jay Kelly (Occupy Boston sign tent): I read about it in the Metro and went to check it out, and I wound up staying on … At the first planning meeting on the Common, there were like five breakout groups—I can remember one ended up being logistics, then media, food, medics …

Kade Crockford (Occupy Boston ally and privacy advocate): I was pleased that there were so many people out who wanted to do something … We broke into different groups, and people decided on where we wanted to march to, in addition to what place we wanted to take over, and the date on which we were going to have this march. Somebody proposed that we do it on the same day as the Right to the City march [against negligent lenders and for housing equity], and I thought that was a bad look—a bunch of white kids taking over that Right to the City march, which they had been planning for a long time. I tried to petition people to not do it.

Robin Jacks: We were calling for an occupation in the near future. I figured we would all meet up and in a few weeks, we’ll get a couple of people to put tents down, and maybe something would pick up, and if it didn’t we’d go home.

Nadeem Mazen (Occupy Boston media): At the [bandstand] meetings I had two things: one, if we don’t put in a ton of homework, we’re not going to do a good

job, and the other was if we don’t collect one another’s information, we’re going to lose out on all the great momentum that’s happening early.

Rene Perez (Occupy Boston logistics): I came to the second [general assembly] on the Common. I wanted to know what activists are up to these days—are they any good anymore? And when I showed up, holy shit dude, what I saw was a competence level unlike anything I had ever dreamed of. I had followed [the Arab Spring in] Egypt, and I had expected tech savvy people to be there, but more than that, people who had been protesting for 10 years, who had been doing the anti-globalization stuff, who knew how to run a meeting, who knew horizontal democracy—were there discussing media strategies.

Kade Crockford: In retrospect, it’s probably a good thing the march happened [on September 30]. The two groups marched together—Occupy joined the Right to the City march, and after that kept on going by continuing to Dewey Square. I think it worked out.

THE CALL

John Stephen Dwyer (Occupy Boston safety team): Five years ago I had one of those really bad jobs where you’re calling people up asking for donations—from an office in downtown Boston. I was sitting in that office one day and DEWEY SQUARE continued on pg. 6

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DEWEY SQUARE continued from pg. 4 I heard drums outside the window and I’m like, “What is that?” And there’s a parade going down the street from the Common, and it was Occupy and all the housing groups that were headed to Dewey Square. I had a second shift I was supposed to start, but this looked more fun and more interesting, so I just split and joined the throng and went down to Dewey Square. And I never went back to that job again.

but he’d be doing dishes almost every day. I only had a few interactions with him, but I remember one time he gave me this T-shirt from The Hempest that said “Occupy This” with a picture of the world on it … I never saw him on Facebook, never saw him again, but every time I hear someone say that nobody wanted to do dishes, I think, “No, that unsung hero did them.”

Jen Elias (Occupy Boston logistics): I went there one night by myself, got caught in the rain, and after that I was totally hooked. It was unlike anything I had ever been a part of at the time, and I needed it. I would come up on my days off from school, then I would come up every other day. My friends thought it was cool, but they weren’t as enamored of it as I was. I saw it as something that was bigger than myself. I didn’t really understand what was going on, and I wanted to.

Allison Nevitt: I was probably most recognized as a facilitator and someone who was trying to help us understand consensus and democracy.

Bil Lewis (Occupy Boston facilitator): There were times when it [felt] like you were practically breaking up a fight. You’d have people screaming at you that you are a Nazi and you are part of the reason the world is so fucked up, but somehow you have to deal with that. It happened all the time.

Patrick Doherty (Occupy Boston, various working groups): I had been at school at UMass Boston, and in the Army before that. I was in Iraq, served in Fallujah and Baghdad as a medic. Did security and combat missions. Then I got out and came home and went to school, and was in school until I heard about Occupy Boston. I had met a group called Iraq Veterans Against the War, and that had become my social circle. I was looking for a platform to express my grievances, and to just be pissed off at the government … There was a lot of energy. I just kind of got into that, dove in. It seemed like a welcome place, so I just stuck around.

Nadeem Mazen: Gaining and establishing consensus is hard. The beginning of Occupy helped me understand what I now call Ouija board democracy, which is if you can feel someone pushing too hard, you’re probably not going to reach consensus in a good way. But if everyone operates by the same rules, even if you disagree, you can find a way forward together.

John Ford (Occupy Boston library): I went on the night of the first mass arrest [October 10-11, 2011]. I went to New York prior to that. I had this sandwich board and I printed up the [Declaration of Occupy] and had it out there [in front of my bookstore] in Plymouth. I was like, “I have to take this into the suburbs. I have to stay here with it. It has to be bigger than just New York; it has to be bigger than just Boston. It has to go into the suburbs.” … And then I went to Boston on the night of the mass arrest, and I went back to my bookstore and was like, “I’m packing up.”

THE COPS

Lauren Chalas (Occupy Boston food tent): I told my boss that I was going back and forth to Occupy Boston, and she just didn’t even know what it was. I said, “It’s been all over the news,” and she was like, “I don’t watch the news, it makes me sad.”

THE CAMP

Robin Jacks: The three choices were: Boston Common, Post Office Square, and then Dewey Square, which is this very narrow but long triangle of space wedged in by South Station. Now it’s a super popular place for yuppies to go get their lunch, but at the time it was nothing.

Jay Kelly: The visual aesthetic of Occupy Boston was generally a shambles, but the [Greenway Wall] basically became an art gallery. Artists came, made their stuff and put it up there. Sometimes people would just duct-tape a piece of poster board to the wall. Other artists came with very intricate wheat pastes.

Lauren Chalas: Most of the stuff in the food tent got stolen one night. Somebody just kind of came in and took all of the peanut butter and jelly and whatever they could find. They really robbed it blind. After that, somebody was always sleeping in the food tent to guard the food … The dishwashing was just so gross. It was so cold, and nobody wanted to do it. The dishwashing system was just a perfect little microcosm of why Marxism can’t work.

Nobody wants to do dishes, ever. They would just pile up.

You could just walk around the camp and you would see dishes and half-eaten food all over the place.

John Ford: Every time I hear somebody say that nobody wanted to do dishes I always feel this twinge or pang of sadness because there was this one dude there who was so quiet and had his shit together, and he was covered in neck tattoos, headphones in and nose down, 6

THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY

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Jay Kelly: Relationships were pretty good in general to start, and as things went on people who were managing the camp became stressed, people who were living in the camp became stressed, and the police became a stressor on everybody.

Ayesha Kazmi (Occupy Boston ally, researcher, and journalist): [During the first raid] the first people [police] attacked were the Veterans For Peace. It was hard to watch. As somebody who has protested in this city many times, to see these riot cops beating them up and arresting them was shocking.

building, maintenance ... I have built a number of water systems and sinks for different outdoor events, including several music festivals. Using my knowledge and experience, materials purchased with donations made to Occupy Boston, and my own donated pump system and battery, I designed and built a portable temporary double sink system for use at Occupy Boston … to provide a safer and more sanitary way to wash our dishes and our hands.

Rene Perez: The [strategy was] call the press. Because the Boston police were suppressing us in a way that we couldn’t take a photo of. So we had to create a situation that you could take photos of, that you could take videos of, and show it in action.

John Ford: I only knew Andy for a year—he died the year after Occupy. It was sad … He served as a mentor and a friend and a guide to a lot of people.

Rene Perez: The story of Andy is heartbreaking. He had just shown up. He was the kind of person who really knew gear … a handyman … He was so many people’s favorite person. We used to call him Uncle Andy. He was this middle-aged guy who just took life by the balls and shook things out of you.

Jen Elias: His memorial service was really something else.

He had worked at the Middle East for a long time, and he built the air-conditioning vent system there. The Middle East catered the service. Everyone had really beautiful things to say about him.

Rene Perez: We only knew him for a few months, and it was devastating.

THE MEDIA

John Ford: There was a constant chatter about how to talk to the media … No matter who you were, you talked to the media at some point. It was inevitable.

Nadeem Mazen: I had this video of this [60-75-year-old man] being thrown to the ground. He was there with this group that was so honorable, and I remember I shopped it to these news networks and was told that they looked at the footage and it wasn’t that bad. The media really wasn’t interested.

Lauren Chalas: You realize just how bad reporters are when you go through something like that, because there were times I said something, or [John Ford] said something and the press would just get it wrong. They would get the person who said it wrong, or they would say John did something and he wasn’t even there.

Kade Crockford: We figured out a little about the human intelligence side of what’s going on with the Boston Police Department. And with surveillance. It was eyeopening to literally just look up in the sky and see that the spot we had chosen for this political encampment was probably one of the most highly surveilled spots in the City of Boston. Cameras just in a ring—the federal building on one corner, South Station, a major bank, and the highway running right by there, so Mass [Department of Transportation] cameras [too].

Allison Nevitt: The powers that be and people who don’t like it [criticized] [the movement] for being too vague, but there were actually a lot of particular points being made.

People like the idea of a single issue movement, but there’s no such thing. It’s a puzzle, everything shifts together.

THE SINK

Bil Lewis: Something that sticks out in my mind is the day the sink came in. Our hero showed up with this giant kitchen sink that he had rewired so it would automatically recycle the water and clean it so we can have clean dishes. An officer said, “No, you can not bring that in,” and so immediately about 200 of us or so came down and assembled around the kitchen sink and began to mic-check the [officer].

John Ford: Andy [Claude, who made the sink] was one of the most capable people ever. He had the leather jacket … and had a long pony tail. He was the dude; he was like [MacGyver] … It was a sink with a battery that had a pump, so it pumped fresh water from a bucket and it drained out into a grey water bucket that you could dump.

Andy Claude (Occupy Boston logistics, words taken from affidavit given to Suffolk Superior Court regarding the sink incident, December 2011): I used to work as the property manager for the House of Blues in Cambridge, and I have many skills in the area of carpentry, plumbing,

Dennis Trainor, Jr. (Independent media maker, director of American Autumn Occudoc): The contrast between the media that I was producing and what the mainstream media was producing was black and white. They were ignoring it. So I felt a sort of stewardship and responsibility to get out content as quickly as possible.

Jay Kelly: I used [my personal] Twitter account to amplify the voices of the people who were around me, and ended up connecting with Occupy activists across the country, many of whom I’m still in contact with today, and many of whom I am still friends with.

Dennis Trainor, Jr.: It was really important to have livestreamers at protests, and I’m sure that many lawsuits were won and settlements were awarded based on footage that was captured live streaming.

THE HURDLES

Jay Kelly: Some folks would take advantage of the kitchen and disrupt the GA, and there was substance abuse …

Jen Elias: There were weird times when I realized I wasn’t as aware of what was going on internally as I thought. I feel like I was warm and open to everyone I met and was just green in that way.

DEWEY SQUARE continued on pg. 8

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DEWEY SQUARE continued from pg. 6 Lauren Chalas: The camp was a perfect tent town, and people who are chronically homeless are often that way because they have extreme mental illness or extreme substance abuse problems … I remember one time a woman was just squatting down peeing just right in front of the medical tent, denying that she was peeing as it was happening. There were a lot of needles, just a lot of deranged stuff. It got really dark after a while.

Allison Nevitt: Occupations have historically been done by colonialist powers, so identifying with that— especially given that in some areas, the populations [of Occupy] were predominantly white, or ended up being predominately white because of the way tensions played out within groups—did lend itself to being problematic …

It really brought home a lot of the race relations work that needs to be done.

Ayesha Kazmi: There were definitely some uncomfortable topics that I wanted to see brought up as a Muslim minority. I saw things coming, and I knew how some people were going to be viewed in the eyes of law enforcement. I had spent time with activists in New York too, and I was also telling them that they should expect to be treated like terrorists, and that [law enforcement] was going to be violent.

Some were receptive.

As for the bulk of the movement, they might not have been ready to have some of these more difficult and deeper conversations, like how is society going to treat you when you look like this?

“Of course it’s humorous to come back here and just remember the day and what it looked like, but other than that it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a square where something great happened.”

Rene Perez: After about a week … I [sought out] a small group of people who I knew were dependable to come together and talk about how much money we were getting. We were getting so much money, and everyone was taking it, and there was no accountability. We had some bigger problems too, like all of this equipment disappearing from the media tent.

Lauren Chalas: I was a mess because I got what everyone was calling “Dewey Lung.” It was really really painful … I was really sick and I just couldn’t shake it. I only felt better when it was outside. As soon as I went back indoors I felt really sick again. A lot of people were sick. I think a lot of people forget just how sick everybody was.

THE BREAKUP

Jen Elias: The night of the [final] raid [on December 10, 2011] it was really emotional for me. Everything was just being cleared out, and I was just kind of off to the side watching it.

Dennis Trainor, Jr.: Was the occupation about occupying physical space? Was that the revolution? That we wanted to live in Zuccotti Park? Or in Dewey Square? No … So as fall began to go into winter, and as the occupations began to dismantle themselves or were dismantled by a coordinated effort that many say came straight from Obama’s administration, people said, “What was that all about?” And, “How is that going to translate into something else?” Going into the winter, that became even more difficult … and covering the movement without that iconic space became harder, because there was no symbol. Very quickly people became much less interested

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in Occupy. Comparatively speaking, by February of 2012, nobody gives a shit anymore.

John Ford: We went [to general assemblies] for months [after the Dewey Square camp was raided], until it was sad. And I went to tell them, “What you’re doing is not right. It doesn’t feel right to anyone who’s not here anymore. You’re using the name of something that should be able to die off with dignity.”

Patrick Doherty: I don’t know if there was really much of a plan, but we were doing what we felt like doing, and there was freedom to express ourselves … I wanted it to last, and I wanted to avoid confrontation because of that. It was therapeutic. People were really talking about stuff and having conversations in a way that I have never experienced before.

Rene Perez: Occupy Boston was full of people who never knew each other, and everyone was in some kind of way fucking crazy. Either because movements like this bring atypical people, wingnuts, people from all over the place, but also like just being there all the time, when you’re in a revolution moment, you’re really tired, you’re out of your mind, you’ve barely slept, everyone is super weird.

Robin Jacks: Time was very different during Occupy. It was two-and-a-half months, but it felt like a year. When it was over it was like a bad, bad, bad breakup with someone you had been with for years and years, but really it was only two-and-a-half months. I guess it was a whirlwind romance of a movement.

THE MEMORIES

Nadeem Mazen: When I see [Dewey Square] vibrant [now] I go, “Wow.” Elements for social engagement and civic engagement are still all here. When I’m here at night, there is that nostalgia for when we were all here and doing something cooperatively.

Bil Lewis: Of course it’s humorous to come back here and just remember the day and what it looked like, but other than that it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a square where something great happened.

John Dwyer: I’d go to some sort of drinky drinky event here. I’m not too dour for that. I teach in an after school program, so I’m usually priced out of that middle class stuff, but I’d go to that.

Kade Crockford: There was a lot more going on than just a conversation about economic inequality. I think a lot of time leftists are criticized for this … but one thing I thought that was great about Occupy Boston is there was a ton of stuff that is related to and maybe tangential to and maybe overlapping … that people were debating and protesting about and confronting very publicly there.

People talk about what it’s like to have intersectional politics, but I think it’s a lot more important to live your intersectional politics than to just be politically correct or something. These issues are obviously related. We live in one world, right?

Rene Perez: There wasn’t a lot of consciousness at the time about intersectional politics. A lot of people blame the demise of Occupy on identity politics, but I kind of blame people not knowing and not being with it. And not knowing about the oppression of all these types of people and what it means to build a movement, because people straight up couldn’t communicate with each other.

John Dwyer: The thing about [differentiating between] life before Occupy and life after Occupy—it is really accurate for a lot of people who were involved with it, and I know it doesn’t necessarily make sense to people who were outside of it, but it was kind of a boot camp experience for people, and it was really emotionally intense. We were living on top of each other for three months, dealing with crazy problems every single day.

Jay Kelly: The thing about Occupy is it was something people figured out along the way. There was no definitive Occupy solution throughout any of the camps, whether it was just in Boston, or the camps in Boston and New York, Florida, Oklahoma. Each franchise had their own ideas, and their own struggles. But the overriding issue was the class system, with the 1 percent and the 99 percent.

THE LEGACY

John Dwyer: I actually got into teaching through people I met at Occupy. It seems like a lot of people who were at Occupy, at least who were in prominent roles, especially if they were upper-middle class people, did get jobs, or living situations, or partners through Occupy. I was just working that crappy phone job, so it wasn’t hard for me to leave and reorient my plans.

Nadeem Mazen: In five years, it’s not that Occupy has dissipated. It’s that it has made its natural way into other change agents and leaders and pundits … through that Occupy’s message has been made effective. We took something that was abstract and we put it in the hands of every organizer as they go about their social change work … I ran [for Cambridge City Council in 2013] thinking I would lose … and we won by six votes. Everyone who voted made the difference. And in my second term I got the most votes. It was a testament to ground organizing, to grassroots efforts, and to a new conversation about social equity—things that have been off the agenda at the federal level for a long time.

Allison Nevitt: I feel like the strongest legacy is a public understanding of the 1 percent versus the 99 percent.

The numbers might be imperfect but the concept was so undiscussed before and embedded by the time [Occupy] was over. It was embedded enough that people were putting signs in their window saying, “We are the 99 Percent.” So when it was over we had started the recognition of the class war that’s been going on forever, we’re naming it, and we’re making people understand it.

For me [the shutting down of the encampment] was the start of something.

John Dwyer: My housemates are Occupy people, my friends who I was just at the Marshfield Fair with are Occupy people … The networks from Occupy have been useful for actual activist work in Boston. I think the Olympics would still be trying to come here if Occupy didn’t happen.

John Ford: I would hate to think that it was this generation’s revolutionary moment. I would like to think that it was a precursor. There’s been a rhetorical shift, which got me enough to get up and vote for [Bernie Sanders], who was speaking the rhetoric that drove the Occupy movement.

Lauren Chalas: But did it do anything besides that? I think it’s too early to tell. *One thing we know from the teachings of people’s historians like Howard Zinn, for whom the ongoing lecture series at Occupy Boston was named, is that the struggles of oppressed people are often forgotten. Considering the apparent impact of the movement on everything from the political dialogue to the countless schools and nonprofits at which former occupiers lend their talents, we wanted to ensure that these stories weren’t summarily dismissed.

In addition to the narrative herein, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism is also producing a podcast mini-series titled “Return to Dewey Square” to run all fall.

We hosted a pop-up newsroom in early September, and encourage more former occupiers to speak with us in the coming weeks. You can reach us at facebook/binjnetwork or email us at info@binjonline.org.

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COLUMN

SPIN MASTERS

Jeff Ross BPD roast cooks the facts

BY JAMARHL CRAWFORD @BLACKSTONIAN

ALLSTON: 180 Harvard Av.• 617 -779-7901 (Green Line @ Harvard) SOMERVILLE: 238 Elm St.• 617 (Red Line @ Davis Square) -629-5383 BUFFALOEXCHANGE.COM •

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Earlier this month, Comedy Central aired a special called “Jeff Ross Roasts Cops,” hosted by the Roast Master General himself, Jeff Ross. Ross is a comedian extraordinaire who is known for lowbrow, crude, sarcastic, biting humor. He’s also known to be particularly brutal during his infamous roasts, as it should be in the tradition of the Friars Club, Don Rickles, and other showbiz legends.

I like a joke as much as the next guy, and my own humor is often very crude.

Among my favorites: Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, Andrew Dice Clay, and George Carlin—trust me, I’m no puritanical prude. What’s not funny to me, however, is when a public institution—in this case, a city police department—essentially participates in a roast of the people it is supposed to serve.

Are they laughing with you? Or at you?

As advertised, the BPD roast was chock full of good ole boy knee-slappers.

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At first glance these may seem like predictable bush league cop jokes.

However, the underlying punchlines all accept and acknowledge oppression as par for the course. Cop-meets-donut joke? Donut hole shot in it? Chocolate donut? Hardy-Har-Har. This is particularly not funny in Boston, where the majority of people shot by the police are Black & Latino (unlike the national trends), combined with the fact that police are rarely, if ever found guilty of any wrongdoing or prosecuted.

There is also the ever-present BPD-as-good-guys narrative. BPD Commissioner William Evans proudly proclaims: “We got the best department in the country and they get it and they understand it is so important to earn the trust and the respect of the people that we police … I don’t think anyone does it better than the BPD … we are the model … President Obama recognized us as one of the top in the country.” Adds Ross: “I put it out there that I wanted to roast a major city police force and they all said no. Except one. Boston.

Because you got balls. And you’ve got a good reputation. There has not been an unarmed person shot here in 25 years.”

Ross is correct. It does take major balls to promote such a blatant lie. I can’t blame him; after all, he’s only a comedian, not a criminologist. Rather, I blame the the City of Boston and its police department, one or both of which apparently colluded with producers from Comedy Central.

Whatever the origin, the result was that misinformation was intentionally broadcast to a significantly large cable audience. In fact, excluding all controversial cases in question, there are at least four glaring cases in the past 25 years where the victims were innocent and unarmed and killed by Boston police.

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● 44-year-old Mark Joseph McMullen (2011), chased from Roxbury to Rockland against police protocol. ● ● 37-year-old Willie L. Murray Jr. (2002), killed after driving the wrong way down a street with no lights on. ● ● 25-year-old Eveline Barros-Cepeda (2002), killed 14 years ago this week after an officer fired into the trunk of a fleeing car. She was in the back seat. ● ● 75-year-old Rev. Accelyne Williams (1994), killed in a no-knock raid on the wrong apartment.

Too many of the jokes offer a “wink and a nod” to actual offenses committed by the BPD, and trivialize issues that are still being adjudicated in courts, like racial profiling, discrimination in hiring, and the treatment of Black officers. Ross quips, “Let’s be real, if Whitey Bulger’s name was Blacky Bulger they woulda’ caught him a lot sooner.” In a drive along scene, one cop asks, “So what do you guys wanna do?” Ross replies, “I don’t know… shoot somebody.”

Ross wasn’t alone in making cringe-worthy comments. Evans had an unfortunate slip of the tongue in proclaiming, “Cops are realizing that the good old days of the thin blue line are over.” Good old days? Really? Like when the “good” cops covered up for bad ones? Lucky for him, the commissioner’s assertion is soon after contradicted in another ride-along scene in which two rank-and-file officers, talking about bad apples, openly say, “We’re not gonna snitch you out.”

Jokes were also made about cops smoking marijuana, which is hypocritical considering the number of cannabis arrests of minorities before decriminalization, not to mention the pending federal court case regarding drug-testing of African-American officers. But the offense runs deeper than hypocrisy, and the gleeful way Ross jokes about casually shooting people. The overriding concern here is that the BPD once again proved itself masterful at misrepresenting facts, and of presenting officers in a positive media light.

Another recurring joke was the insane love affair between the BPD and the New England Patriots, and specifically Mr. America himself, Tom Brady. Ross asks what level of crime the quarterback could get away with in Boston. To which an officer gleefully replies, “I’d cover up Tom Brady’s murder!” Sounds cute, but it speaks to an unspoken rule that money and celebrity can earn you a get-outof-jail-free card. So if Brady was accused of a rape, or involved in a murder, like his former teammate Aaron Hernandez, there may be some levels of favoritism in play, or perhaps a cover up. Especially given the fact that the Patriots help raise millions annually for the Boston Police Foundation, which is a funding mechanism for surveillance equipment and training outside of the purview of the mayor, City Council, and taxpayers.

While Ross contributes to the heroworshipping and false narrative pushed by the BPD, he himself was a victim of it.

Prior to his taping in the Hub, the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association labeled the comedian a “cop hater,” and posted bulletins in all precincts and sent emails advising officers and detectives “not to engage with this gentlemen who apparently believes our profession is best suited as a punchline.” The letter continues: “Hollywood types too often inflame the passions of decent people as they seek publicity in times of tragedy. Shame on all of them.”

If a millionaire comedian working with a major cable network is thought to be a problem, and is attacked and subject to this sort of repression, what does he think happens to us plain old activists who are part of the poor, underserved communities these police are supposed to serve? Ross got but a small sampling of what police reform and criminal justice activists have been facing for decades.

Meanwhile, in his BPD performance, lines about racial profiling, police brutality, the killing of civilians, workplace discrimination, and homophobic slurs all got big laughs. One cadet revealed he is an openly gay officer, in a relationship with another officer, to which Ross retorted, “Do you go home and play cops and bottoms?” Which not only made the young cop visibly uncomfortable, but may have also violated state laws since the cadet’s employers put him in a compromising, humiliating situation. Another highpoint was when Ross and white BPD officers encountered a group of Black men, and Comedy Central had no problem casually broadcasting the word “nigger” several times—all to raucous laughter.

Laugh all you want, but also consider that while the department provides unfettered access to a comedian, Boston also fights tooth-and-nail against public scrutiny from the communities they serve. All this while the cops feign to want accountability and practice transparency. They can get berated by a comic during roll call, but they can’t receive critiques from residents in a similar manner.

They can participate in a comedy set, but can’t withstand the scrutiny of a neighborhood meeting. The BPD can take a joke, sure. It should just also be noted that they’re much less tolerant of reality.

“Let’s be real, if Whitey Bulger’s name was Blacky Bulger they woulda’ caught him a lot sooner.”

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HOPPED UP AND NOWHERE TO GO

Are craft brewers pining for more supply?

BY JEFF LAWRENCE

156 Highland Ave • Somerville, MA 617-285-0167 oncesomerville.com

  @oncesomerville /ONCEsomerville

In 2010, a Feasibility and Market Research Study for Commercial Hop Production in New England was prepared and released by the Rosalie J. Wilson Business Development Services and funded by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets and the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources.

Aside from the hideous wonk in that title, the reason you’ve never heard of it, nevermind read it, was because little ever came of it.

While there has been substantial growth among some local hop producers such as Four Star Farms in Northfield, which now produces seven varieties including Cascade and Centennial, and Blue Heron Organic Farm in Lincoln which most recently worked with Peak Organic to provide organic hops, the commercial production of hops in New England is for the most part still on paper, and despite these few success stories, the road has been arduous and remains a passionate but micro agronomy. While some local brewers are tapping into locally sourced ingredients, a vast majority of them still buy their ingredients, especially hops, on an ever increasingly volatile national and global market, and that’s not a good thing.

The larger brewers will dismiss the concern, and rightfully so, their buying power protects a steady supply of hops for years to a come. But as more and more small craft breweries spring up locally and beyond, the ability to shave off a portion of that supply, especially unique and specialty hop varieties, has created a landscape of winners and losers. Just this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the growing demand for hops has also created a potentially dire and unexpected problem for the industry; as brewers cut production to address shortfalls in the hop supply chain for these highly desirable specialty variations, growth has slowed overall, which in turn creates the potential for a glut in the hop market among some of the largest producers in the country. Which in turn impacts their expansion and growth, and ultimately price, which is why they are likely to slow production to address the problem. And thus it begins.

Which brings us back to that market research study. If Massachusetts and New England can start producing more viable Atlantic varieties and meet the growing demand, local brewers might be able to sustain their own growth while potentially creating a substantial new industry in the process. >> FOUR STAR FARMS, NORTHFIELD, MA / FOURSTARFARMS.COM >> BLUE HERON ORGANIC FARM, LINCOLN, MA / BLUEHERONFARMLINCOLN.COM 14

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MUSIC

THE AUSSIE WHO COULD

Julia Jacklin’s rise to fame

BY NINA CORCORAN @NINA_CORCORAN

MUSIC

BLOOD BITCH

The menstrual magic of Jenny Hval Blood is as complex as it is simple. It’s a romanticized color, the color of fear, the image of injury, the suggestion of intensity. It’s scary, and yet it’s beautiful even when only the smallest pinprick. In many ways, so is the work of Jenny Hval.

The Norwegian singer, composer, and writer looks into it all on her sixth album, Blood Bitch, to make connections most of us fail to interpret. Songs like “Female Vampire,” which takes its name from an old ‘70s horror film, pry into the dynamics of the liquid and what it means to find comfort with your own body. Then there’s others like “Ritual Awakening,” one that plays off fears and anxiety and the ways in which we quell both. Live, she pushes that art into a performative experience. Hval brings clowns onstage. She plays up the sexuality of a freshly-picked banana. She brings theater to life until the two seem to be one in the same.

“I wanted to make something where an urgency kept running into the next track, not as a concept album, but in the way that when you go to the cinema you feel captivated throughout,” she says when we discuss Blood Bitch over Skype, her European location allowing her to talk at ease instead of from the back of a car on tour. “I tried to make an album with themes and sound from various films. A scene where a car is driving and no other sound pours out, or a vampire chase scene where her victim’s pulse can be heard. The film opened up these multiple connections for me.” She is, of course, referring to these various images crystallizing into certain connections between horror themes, courage themes, and the role of blood. It’s an important overlap, one we choose to separate in an outdated fashion.

Because really, there’s a lot more to that red liquid than horror films project. For half of the world’s population, blood pours out of their body each month, signifying a healthy body and the role of copulation. For doctors, that pumping auburn signals that someone is still alive.

“Menstrual blood is the blood of life, but it’s also the blood of death,” says Hval. “The reason why you menstruate is because a potential life died inside of you, you know? You’re carrying out possibilities that weren’t. That must be the most powerful image of ourselves and the lives of ourselves. So why haven’t I seen more about blood beyond these cult horror films -- and why, even then, is blood so cleaned up?”

She pauses to reflect, and then picks up once more, talking with pauses between words. “Blood symbolizes death in a lot of ways, and then it becomes this taboo feared thing -- and things don’t become taboo unless they’re fascinating,” Hval continues. “I was drawn to the blood that’s okay, like in violence -- and the blood that’s not okay -- menstrual blood, sex blood -- and why we place them in those categories. Blood can symbolize numerous things while still being the exact same blood. At the end of the day, it all looks the same.”

The type of feminist power that lays in Blood Bitch is something bigger. Hval isn’t just singing about goop in a toilet or gashes in a Dracula’s throat. It’s an extension of art as a means of awareness. It’s balancing the field, and leveling our interpretation of various forms of blood in the process. It’s demanding attention for equality but also attention for an appreciation of life. Hval is sticking an IV into the world, turning to viewers, and shouting, “Look! Look at what we choose to ignore, but really, it’s magic in real time!” She’s the nurse who slips you the pill you never knew you needed.

“My aim is always to help people think a little bit differently, to arrive at a place where we can think about things less frequently that I think aren’t as important, like morals,” she says with a smile. “We need to lose the roles we play every day a little bit, and blood is a fluid image of that.” >> JENNY HVAL, OLGA BELL. TUE 10.4. GREAT SCOTT, 1222 COMM. AVE., ALLSTON. 10PM/21+/$15. GREATSCOTTBOSTON.COM

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PHOTO BY NICK MCKINLAY

Don’t call Julia Jacklin’s music country. The Australian singer-songwriter may mold styles and sing with a warble, but it’s not influenced

by Western musicians. “I feel like that label washes over some other parts of my music, and no one wants a label,” she laughs. “Though, I must admit I do enjoy some country tunes.”

Unlike most kids, Jacklin got her start in music through formal singing lessons, learning German, chords, opera, Italian, scales, and more.

It’s a regimented way to sing, and an even more regimented way to be introduced to music.

“I lived in a small town and that was the first teacher my mom looked up in the phone book,” she says. “When I began looking towards other musical styles, I didn’t see any option except to leave the city.”

Now, armed with autobiographical lyrics and a nostalgia-rooted indie folk sound, Jacklin’s all grown up, in part with some help from Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machines. “It’s taken time to get used to singing about myself onstage, but it makes it better than making up stories about someone else,” she says. “Well, most times. Singing about sex in front of your dad? Not the best feeling in the world.” She laughs.

Since Julia Jacklin finds a balance between the intimacy of honesty and the warmth of instrumental ease, her music grows into itself, rewarding repeat listens with familiar comforts.

However, now that she’s touring with a promotion team behind her, Jacklin can’t help but notice how different being a “musician” really is when you’re presenting an album to the industry that was never a product of that very industry to begin with.

Yet she handles it well. Julia Jacklin, much like her music, rises to fame with grace. It seems some of her childhood dreams may come true in a year or two. Others, like touring with Father John Misty, may happen even sooner than she thinks. It’s all possible when you’ve got a memorable voice and even more memorable tunes, both of which she wields with the charm of someone yet to be corrupted and the world is be better off because of it.

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FILM

A RECORD OF CONCERN

The latest nonfiction work by Spike Lee tracks protests at the University of Missouri

BY JAKE MULLIGAN @_JAKEMULLIGAN Each of Spike Lee’s journalism-style nonfiction films includes a sequence where a significant amount of people all say the same thing. It happens in Jim Brown: All-American [2002] when scores of the legend’s former teammates explain his penchant for standing up slowly after every tackle. It happens in When the Levees Broke [2006] when various residents of the New Orleans coast recall the loud booming sounds that accompanied the crumbling of those levees. And in 2 Fists Up [2016], it happens when students of color at the University of Missouri-Columbia recall the varying aggressions they’ve experienced on campus. Danielle Walker—who founded the “Racism Lives Here” movement, which preceded the more publicized protests organized by the Concerned Student 1950 collective on the same campus later in 2015—recalls an incident where white students placed cotton balls around the University’s Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center, and how the perpetrators were merely charged with littering. Ayanna Poole, a founding member of Concerned Student 1950, speaks about being kicked out of a frat party while racial slurs were simultaneously hurled her way. And Andrea Fulgium, another founding member, remembers the time that a white student changed seats so that he wouldn’t have to sit near her, nor any other black student. The film continues like this for several minutes, with a sizeable portion of the interview subjects each sharing related experiences. Copious documentaries in the interviews-and-archival-footage format play like sermons, normally as a result of didactic editorial strategies. The ones directed by Lee, which seem to let the content of the interviews dictate the narrative structure of the films themselves, achieve something different. You experience them as testimonials.

2 Fists Up was the leadoff film in the second season of Spike Lee’s ‘Lil Joints, an ESPN-backed series of short films which are currently available to stream at theundefeated.com. Of the ten mini-joints released to-date, Lee has directed three: first was Ray Allen /AKAJesus Shuttlesworth [2015], a 15-minute piece about the legacy of Lee’s self-described “seminal basketball film” He

Got Game [1998]; then The Greatest Catch Ever [2015], a 30-minute piece about the instantly-iconic catches made

by David Tyree and Odell Beckham for the New York Giants teams of 2008 and 2014; and most recently 2 Fists Up, which chronicles the Concerned Student 1950 movement at Mizzou, which initially gained media attention by way of founding member Jonathan Butler’s hunger strike, then received far more coverage when Butler was backed by a strike organized by the university’s football team, all of which eventually lead to the resignation of system president Tim Wolfe.

Also worth mentioning among this class of films is Mo’ne Davis: “I Throw Like a Girl” [2014], a short-form work that Lee directed for Chevrolet (you can find it on Youtube.) It set the rhythm for his first two entries in the ‘Lil Joints series. The pieces on Davis, Allen, and the Giants are all comprised of interviews with primary sources, much like Lee’s longer journalistic works. But they’re more informal in nature than those nonfiction studies—in these shorts, digressions are rare, the director’s voice interjects more often than we’re used to, and archival footage is kept to a minimum. These are testimonials, all the same, but they play more like conversations.

That’s why it’s worthwhile to separate the 58-minute 2 Fists Up from the pack. It’s more digressive than its Leedirected ‘Lil counterparts, more interested in historical backgrounds, and is altogether closer to feature-length works like All-American. Its title is surely as a reference to the iconic black-power salutes given by Tommie Smith and John Carlos during the 1968 Olympics, and that reference is surely to be taken as context for measuring the stance of the Mizzou football team.

Their refusal to play until a list of Concerned Student 1950’s demands were addressed—thus allowing Butler’s hunger strike to come to an end—is marked a relatively unprecedented occurrence. Lee’s subjects help him to investigate the sociological implications of the fact that it took a football team to force a school board to address the life-threatening situation of Butler’s strike, and they also allow him to relate it to other moments in

American history that rhyme with their movement. Some background is given on a player strike held in 1968 at San Jose State College—the alma matter of Smith and Carlos.

So male athletes give this film its name, and its ostensible newsworthiness. But black female activists grant it a focus. After a prologue consisting of footage related to the murders of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Trayvon Martin, the film defers to a conversation with Opal Tometi, one of the three female founders of the Black Lives Matter organization. That leads the film to protests in Ferguson, and then to a series of movements and collectives at Mizzou: first Walker’s “Racism Lives Here” protests, then a series of “MU for Mike Brown” demonstrations (started by three black women,) and then to Concerned Student 1950 (seven of its eleven founding members are women of color.) In a prologue to “The Spike Lee Brand,” a volume of academic criticism related to Lee’s documentary films, professor and author Mark A. Reid noted that the book “indicates how Lee’s documentaries show black agency through the community’s collective actions that demand legal and judicial changes.” That very quality is captured and documented yet again in 2 Fists Up—as another portrait of black women leading a liberation movement, it should maybe screen in future retrospectives of Lee’s work as a prologue to Chi-raq [2015].

At one point Lee has a number of female Concerned Student 1950 members face the frame, and recite the list of demands originated by the movement one-by-one. The technique emphasizes the voices and the faces as much as it does the demands themselves. These films become records of not just discontent, but also of diction.

Lee is decidedly profiling the movement from the side of these student-activists. There is essentially no opposition voiced against the means of Concerned Student 1950 throughout the film, which does stand in contrast to methods used in some of Lee’s other nonfiction works, where dissenting takes are cross-edited to create the experience of dialogue. But Lee finds a different contrast to illustrate. Another figure regularly heard from is interim president Michael Middleton, who replaced Wolfe after the resignation. Middleton represents the history of an earlier generation’s black student activism— he attended Mizzou under a music scholarship in the late 1960s, but left the band rather than play “Dixie” at every halftime. He would later become a co-founder of the Legion of Black Collegians, which exists to this day. And in their respective commentary, a clear division of methods emerges between the two generations: Middleton advises Concerned Students representatives to book a meeting with Wolfe in the time before he resigned, but they elect to force an impromptu conversation with him in a public location instead. He chooses to support the dismissal of Melissa Click, whose much-discussed confrontation with an unwanted photographer is mostly justified by the student activists. And he testifies that he would have taken legal action to save the life of Jonathan Butler in a worst-case scenario, while Butler claims that assurances were made to ensure no such event could occur. Like the best of Lee’s work, fiction or otherwise, 2 Fists Up operates from a dialectic method—one sustained by voices that demand hearing.

>> 2 FISTS UP IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE TO STREAM AT THEUNDEFEATED.COM. THE REST OF SPIKE LEE’S ‘LIL JOINTS CAN ALSO BE VIEWED AT THEUNDEFEATED.COM, OR CAN BE PURCHASED VIA VOD OUTLETS INCLUDING YOUTUBE AND AMAZON. MO’NE DAVIS: “I THROW LIKE A GIRL” IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE TO STREAM VIA YOUTUBE.

FILM EVENTS FRI 9.30

COOLIDGE AFTER MIDNIGHT PRESENTS THE OMEN [1976]

[Coolidge Corner Theatre.

290 Harvard St., Brookline.

Midnight/R/$11.25. coolidge.org]

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FRI 9.30

“PAM GRIER, SUPERSTAR!” CONTINUES AT THE HFA SHEBA, BABY [1975]

[Harvard Film Archive. 24 Quincy St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 9pm/PG/$7-9.

35mm. hcl.harvard.edu/ hfa]

DIGBOSTON.COM

SAT 10.1

CHRISTOPHER LEE AND NASTASSJA KINSKI IN TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER [1976]

[Coolidge Corner Theatre.

290 Harvard St., Brookline.

Midnight/R/$11.25. 35mm.]

MON 10.3

75TH ANNIVERSARY SCREENINGS OF JOHN HUSTON’S THE MALTESE FALCON [1941]

[Brattle Theatre. 40 Brattle St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge.

4:30, 7, and 9:30pm/NR/$911. 35mm. Screens through 10.6—see brattlefilm.org for showtimes.]

MON 10.3

WED 10.5

[Coolidge Corner Theatre.

290 Harvard St., Brookline.

7pm/NR/$11.25. 35mm.]

[Somerville Theatre. 55 Davis Square, Somerville.

7:30pm/NR/$10. Double feature w/ Requiem for a Heavyweight, which screens at 9:30pm. Both on 35mm. somervilletheatre. com]

ELIA KAZAN’S UNFORTUNATELY PRESCIENT A FACE IN THE CROWD [1957]

WILLIAM POWELL AND MYRNA LOY IN THE THIN MAN [1934]

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ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT

19

ARTS

NOT YOUR GRANDMA’S HAMLET Omar Robinson stars in ASP’s hotly anticipated Hamlet

BY CHRISTOPHER EHLERS @_CHRISEHLERS In what just might be the theatrical event of the fall, Actors’ Shakespeare Project kicks off its new season with Hamlet, which will be staged at the Church of the Covenant by the tremendously talented Doug Lockwood.

ASP resident actor Omar Robinson will be starring as Hamlet, so we asked him to give us a taste of what to expect from this production, the challenges of playing Hamlet, and why he considers himself to be the “anti-Hamlet.”

Will you be performing in the actual main part of the church?

Oh, yeah! All of it, actually. We have free reign of the whole sanctuary, which has been great. There’s all the aisle space, like five different aisles; there’s a beautiful organ that we’ll be playing; there’s the altar; the pulpit; a choir loft in the back. We’re playing with everything. It’s all ours.

What can we expect with this production? Are you guys doing anything different with time or place?

Setting-wise, traditional; we’re sticking to the end of 16th century. Our venue, the Church of the Covenant, definitely lends itself to that old school kind of appeal. It helps bring the grandiosity of the time and it kind of transports you.

Churches are creepy! It really lends itself to this play being a ghost story.

It really does! That’s the vibe we’re going to have throughout this. I mean, it’s a ghost story, and the time of year will lend itself to that too.

Hamlet is the role for a lot of actors. Has taking him on been intimidating at all?

I’ll be real with you – it’s funny because, like, it’s the role for a lot of people. It wasn’t for me, for a while. To be perfectly honest, because of the lack of visibility – there aren’t a lot of people that look like me playing Hamlet. For years it never crossed my mind. It was never on my radar until [director] Doug [Lockwood] and [artistic director] Allyn Burrows were like “You wanna be Hamlet?” and I was like “uh, okay.” I remember taking a good three seconds to be like “Do I really want to do this?” (laughs.) But then it turned into a very firm “yes” because of all the richness there is to mine out of this guy. It’s so complicated and so dense and he’s all over the place and I love that. I know that someone looking like me will tell it a different way. I’m super excited to bring my flavor to this.

What kind of flavor?

There was a joke that I started at rehearsal two days ago, I called myself the anti-Hamlet. Traditionally, compared to what I’ve seen, he’s very kind of morose and downtrodden; very smart, very aware, but there tends to be this air of heft to the character and I’ve been finding, strangely, a lot of levity, which fits with my personae very well. It’s been easier to slip into than I thought. I thought “Oh God, I can’t get into this dull, morose guys’ head, this deep thinker!” But there are different ways to tap into that. I’ve been finding it and it’s been really exciting, and, to go to your question, intimidating, absolutely.

Bring it on!

OMAR ROBINSON

Other than the dialogue, what’s the biggest challenge of Hamlet?

Acting-wise, I have no problem getting dirty, in most regards. (Ahem ahem.) But getting to the nasty parts of people; he goes to some really dark places and I enjoy that kind of stuff. It’s part of us all and I don’t tend to shy away from that part of people’s story. It has been a challenge because I have to tap into some really painful stuff to get into his mindset. That’s been the challenge, balancing that and finding the darker spots and really leaning into those. The more I lean in, the more amazing stuff happens.

What else should we know about this Hamlet?

Come see it. It’s really going to be special because it’s not your grandmas’ Hamlet, in part, because it’s your Hamlet.

(Laughs.) Every day in the room has been such a delight.

It’s been so alive from day one and I can feel that it’s going to be alive and different every single night we do it.

It’s going to be a special Hamlet.

>> HAMLET. 10.6 – 11.6 AT ACTORS’ SHAKESPEARE PROJECT AT THE CHURCH OF THE COVENANT, 67 NEWBURY ST., BOSTON. ACTORSSHAKESPEAREPROJECT.ORG

ARTS EVENTS PRE-BROADWAY ENGAGEMENT SIGNIFICANT OTHER

[SpeakEasy Stage, 527 Tremont St., Boston. Through 10.8. speakeasystage.com]

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MUST-SEE GAME CHANGER COMPANY

[The Lyric Stage, 140 Clarendon St., Boston. Through 10.9. lyricstage. com]

SONDHEIM MASTERPIECE SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE

[Huntington Theatre Company, 264 Huntington Ave., Boston. Through 10.16. huntingtontheatre.org]

INCREDIBLE RENAISSANCE SCULPTURE DELLA ROBBIA

[Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston.

Through 12.4. Mfa.org]

GORGEOUS NEW EXHIBITION BEYOND WORDS: ITALIAN RENAISSANCE BOOKS

[Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way, Boston.

Through 1.16. gardnermuseum.org]

PHOTO BY NUMI PRASARN

You are bubbling with enthusiasm when you talk about this! You must be excited.

I am. I really am, which surprises me. I really thought two weeks ago I’d be freaking out right now, but I feel good.

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DEPT. OF COMMERCE

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21

SAVAGE LOVE

WHAT'S FOR BREAKFAST

BY PATT KELLEY WHATS4BREAKFAST.COM

CHEATS

BY DAN SAVAGE @FAKEDANSAVAGE | MAIL@SAVAGELOVE.NET I am a 36-year-old Italian straight man. I love my girlfriend endlessly. One month ago, she told me she has thoughts about missing out on the things she didn’t get to do in her teens. She is 29 years old now. Also, she says she feels only a mild love for me now and is curious about other men.

Yesterday we met and cried and talked and made love and it felt like she still loves me passionately.

But she also told me she had sex with a stranger a week ago and she is going for one and a half months to Los Angeles on her own. Now I feel confused. I should hate her for what she did to me, I should tell her to fuck off, but I can’t do it.

I am so in love and I want to be together again after her trip. How do I exit this turmoil?

Pensive And Insecure Now You exit this turmoil by breaking up with your girlfriend.

She wants to get out there and do “things she didn’t get to do in her teens,” i.e., fuck other guys and most likely date other guys. This isn’t what you want, PAIN, you’ve made that clear to her, but she’s gonna fuck other guys anyway. You don’t have to pretend to hate her, PAIN, and you don’t have to tell her to fuck off. But you do have to tell her that it’s over—at least for now.

And once she goes, PAIN, don’t lie around tormenting yourself with mental images of all the things/men she’s doing in Los Angeles. Don’t put your life on hold—love life included—while she’s gone. You’re going to be single. So get out there, date other women, do some things/ women you haven’t done. If she wants to get back together when she returns, and if you still want to get back together with her, you can pick things up where you left off.

But you should act like it’s over while she’s gone, PAIN, because it most likely is.

savagelovecast.com On the Lovecast, Cheryl Strayed schools Dan on hiking sex: savagelovecast.com.

THE STRANGERER

BY PAT FALCO ILLFALCO.COM

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OUR VALUED CUSTOMERS

BY TIM CHAMBERLAIN OURVC.NET

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BOWERY BOSTON

For show announcements, giveaways, contests, and more, follow us on:

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Tickets for Royale, The Sinclair, and Great Scott can be purchased online at Ticketmaster.com or by phone at (800) 745-3000.

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