The Conductor

For the second appearance of his newest play, The Conductor, Ishmael Reed has revived the Living Newspaper, a 1930s WPA theatrical form that was shut down by the Republican Party. This form gives the playwright the liberty to respond to current events by adding or deleting passages from the original script. Ishmael Reed belongs to a tradition dating to ancient times where writers challenge the official versions of events. In The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, he challenged the myth that slaveholder Alexander Hamilton was “an ardent abolitionist.” With The Slave Who Loved Caviar, he challenged the rumor that Jean-Michel Basquiat was a “primitive” whom Andy Warhol sought unsuccessfully to civilize. In The Conductor, Reed’s newest play, he tackles the corporate media’s interpretation of the recall of members of the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education in 2021-2022.