Community Theater

Ragtime—Lear deBessonet's debut production as artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater—offers a gripping and complex vision of the American dream that's eerily prescient.

- By Leslie Camhi

MELTING POT Members of the Ragtime cast in their costumes, including, FROM FAR LEFT, Colin Donnell (Father), Shaina Taub (Emma Goldman), Ben Levi Ross (Mother's Younger Brother), Nichelle Lewis (Sarah), Joshua Henry (Coalhouse Walker Jr.), Caissie Levy (Mother), John Clay III (Booker T. Washington), Brandon Uranowitz (Tateh), Anna Grace Barlow (Evelyn Nesbit), and Rodd Cyrus (Harry Houdini). Fashion Editor: Michael Philouze.

The director Lear deBessonet, whose revival of the musical Ragtime on the Vivian Beaumont stage this month also marks her debut production as Lincoln Center Theater's new artistic director, is no stranger to time travel. The first play she put on in New York City, mounted in a church basement in Gramercy Park when she was in her early 20s, was an original piece focusing on Jerusalem syndrome, a rare form of religious mania in which visitors to the Holy Land believe themselves to be living embodiments of figures from the Bible.

Seeking inspiration for Ragtime, which is set in the early 1900s and in locations in and around New York, deBessonet and I met on a brilliant late-summer morning outside the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In the play, Tateh (Brandon Uranowitz), an artist newly arrived from Eastern Europe, lives in a tenement near where the museum stands today.

DeBessonet and I had just stepped inside the museum, and my eyes were still adjusting to the dimly lit vestibule with its tin ceiling and worn wood banister, when the director noticed, high up on the still-sooty wall, a painted decoration: A luminous, small oval depicted a little house standing beside trees and fields beneath a clear blue sky.