Detail from a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, on view at the Metropolitan Museum
“Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency…Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.”
–Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, The Rise of end times fascism (The Guardian, April 13, 2025)
Wise elders can actually be any age (Astra Taylor is only 45, Naomi Klein, 54) and their recent essay in The Guardian is a tour de force. (This is recommended reading in its entirety.) Like other Wise Ones who serve as my wayfinders–Heather Cox Richardson, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Hubbell, Anand Giridharadas, Joyce Vance, Wajahat Ali, inter alia—they keep me from capitulating in a discouraged, hopeless heap.
And these words, from Klein and Taylor, serve as a life line:
“To have a hope of combating the end times fascists…we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here.”
Unruly, open hearted, Earth loving faithfulness has many faces. Human artistic creativity is exquisitely 360 and a vital part of how we can touch into connection with the planet and its many residents. In spite of the war being waged on empathy (who would have guessed this deeply Christian concept would become an evangelical bête noire? See David French’s recent opinion, Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy in the New York Times) I celebrate its extraordinary conscious-raising power. Conscious empathy, like conscious compassion, does have boundaries. But it is an emotion at the heart of our resistance, and its absence is a death knell to humankind.
I have experienced this art-induced empathy many times over the last few weeks. Caspar David Friedrich’s mystical landscape paintings from the 19th century at the Met Museum in New York seem to channel the spiritual dimensionality of this world. This is a powerful notion rooted in German Romanticism, and one that is easily disregarded in a cynical, linear age. But I left the show carrying a higher vibration.
Jack Whitten’s sprawling, explosively expressive retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is a long overdue tribute to a gifted but underappreciated African American contemporary artist. A long time fan of his work, I now have a deeper respect for the tenacity of his commitment to humanity and to hope.
I also have seen several plays that boldly step out from a “trad white” cultural orientation to take us, with empathy, into a different landscape. While many are set in the familiar format of the family drama, these plays expand understanding and empathy.
Purpose, beautifully written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and now playing at the Hayes Theatre on Broadway, explores complex and compelling members of an exceptional family that just happens to be African American. No white people show up in this story, nor is there any mention of them. The absence of the all too common trope of racial tension was actually very gratifying. That isn’t the only story to be told.
Don’t Eat the Mangos, by Ricardo Pérez González, is another family drama, this one situated in Puerto Rico. As with Purpose, no white or American characters appear. (Mangos follows another stand out production at The Huntington that also tells its story without white characters and white culture—Mfoniso Udofia’s The Grove.) Mangos runs through April 27.
The world premiere of David Valdes’s The Great Reveal, now at Boston’s Lyric Stage, is yet another exploration of family dynamics. Rather than the cultural focus shift seen in Purpose and Mangos, this play deals with morphing fault lines that occur as gender identities shift. Also running through April 27.
I have one more theatrical production to recommend, one that ends this Sunday: Night Side Songs, now playing at Hibernian Hall in Nubian Square. It has been described as a “communal music-theater experience performed for—and with—an intimate audience,” and as a “genre-breaking theatrical kaleidoscope.” But these words fall way short of capturing what makes it so fresh and emotionally honest. The subject is illness and how it occupies a place in our lives, taking a cue from Susan Sontag’s phrase, “illness is the night side of life.” But by embracing a minimalist approach—and choosing to perform in bare bones, non-theater spaces—the gap between “on stage” and “in audience” melts away. This is life. My life. Your life. Our lives.
The music. The staging. The performers. The artful simplicity of the storytelling. This is an spectacular and yet simple tour de force by The Lazours (music and writing,) director Taibi Magar and every member of the team. I think I wept on and off through most of the 90-minute performance. I hope you can catch it before it closes.
All of these experiences were, for me, compassion expanding and empathy deepening. It felt aligned with the wise elder admonishment to build “an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here.”