How Kwame Kwei-Armah Conquered Broadway
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When he first read The Collaboration, Kwame Kwei-Armah was hooked instantly. “About 19 months ago, [producer] Eleanor Lloyd sent me the script, and I went, ‘Basquiat and Warhol? That’s interesting.’ I was in a cab on my way to an event and got there about 90 minutes late because I just stayed in the car to get to the end of the play.”
Nearly two years later, he’s still in its thrall. The Collaboration, which tells the story of the relationship between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol and is written by Anthony McCarten, had a lauded run earlier this year at London’s Young Vic Theatre, where Kwei-Armah is the artistic director—The Guardian called it “an ebullient production,” and Time Out said the play was “brilliantly acted, and indubitably well-researched”—and now a Manhattan Theatre Club production, starring Paul Bettany as Warhol and Jeremy Pope as Basquiat, as well as Erik Jensen and Krysta Rodriguez, has opened on Broadway. (A film version of the story was also shot earlier this year.)
What is it about a decades-old artistic rivalry and partnership that captivated Kwei-Armah? Seemingly, almost everything. “There was just something about these two iconic artists trying to find who the other is and see themselves in each other that I found really interesting,” he explains. “I'm at the age now that Andy was when this roughly happened. He's the establishment and I run a theater, so I'm seen as part of the establishment, and what's really interesting is that young artists and young directors come up to me all the time, going, ‘I'm going to take your crown,’ and I say, ‘I don't think I have a crown.’ It's interesting seeing yourself as the thing that some people define themself against.”
Crown or not, Kwei-Armah does have one of theater’s most powerful perches. As artistic director of the Young Vic Theatre, he’s a force behind some of London’s most influential works (including Mandela, running now, as well as productions of Best of Enemies—which will be broadcast as part of the 2023 National Theatre Live program in cinemas internationally on May 18—and Oklahoma! that both recently won Evening Standard Awards) and increasingly in the U.S., where he’s directing The Collaboration and producing the current hit revival of Death of a Salesman, which originated at the Young Vic Theatre before coming to Broadway. If cultural world domination seems imminent, he insists it isn’t by design.
“There is no grand master plan, there is only finding the work, doing the work to the best of your ability, and trying and be of service through the work,” he says. “It just so happens that we had a great season at the Young Vic, where four shows bounced into the West End or onto Broadway in one season, but there were other seasons when that didn't happen. My job is simply to try and do the work that serves.” For Kwei-Armah, who says his mother hoped he’d grow up to become a lawyer focused on social justice, theater is “my only weapon for trying to incrementally leave the world in a slightly better place than I met it.”
That work might begin with his colleagues. Jeremy Pope, who plays Basquiat in The Collaboration on Broadway—a role he originated in London and also plays in the film—says, “What isn’t there to love about Kwame? He’s such a source of light and has been one of the most special collaborators I’ve worked with. He’s a truth-seeker and a genius, and he cares for his artists and for the work. I’m grateful to have been on this journey with someone I can trust to help guide me to stronger storytelling. He reminds me how special this business can be when the right people come together, and it’s just magical.”
Kwei-Armah had a circuitous path to his current role. He’s worked as an actor (notably on the British series Casualty), a writer for stage and screen, and a musician, and before beginning at the Young Vic Theatre was the artistic director of the Center Stage Theater in Baltimore. In fact, it’s his time spent in the United States that in part drives his interest in what The Collaboration has to say.
Asked whether there’s a particular pressure for a Londoner to tell a story about two New York City heroes on Broadway, he says, “Does it keep me up at night? A little bit. There is both the arrogance of the foreigner and also the kind of objectivity that a foreigner might be able to bring to a story. I've lived in the United States for eight years and although that doesn't make me an American, it does allow me a small, amount of confidence that I think these are my heroes, too. That's a long way round of saying there is a level of nerves, and there should be. This is a New York story, but I don't know that my Britishness divorces me from having an emotional connection to it.”
It's also a story about creative energies combining, to which Kwei-Armah can certainly relate. His work at the Young Vic Theatre and on Broadway put him on speed dial for both established and emerging theatrical talent, and in other work he’s partnered with the likes of Michaela Cole and Spike Lee, with whom he’s writing a movie musical about the origins of Viagra. McCarten, who wrote The Collaboration (as well as this month’s Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody) says, “This play has been an incredibly rich partnership, especially because Kwame is such an open, magnanimous, loving person. What that does is create a sense of safety for people to try things out, and in matters of the heart you need that degree of security. We got this play on its feet and explored those moments of high emotion and challenged each other to go further with it. It’s what I always look for in any project I do; if you’re lucky you find people who help you see more in the writing than you did initially.”
The most striking partnership that Kwei-Armah might be forging, though, isn’t with another person, but with an idea. The Collaboration interrogates one of the art world’s most famous pairings, but it also celebrates the idea of pushing boundaries, of challenging what someone thinks he’s capable of doing, and of letting art forge connections that didn’t previously exist.
“I first came to New York when I was 15,” he says. “I was living with my cousin deep in the Bronx at the time, and the gritty New York that people talk about, I saw it and I lived it. Only for six weeks, but I was there. And so, in a way, when I was drawn to The Collaboration, it wasn’t as a piece of historical research, but a piece of ‘I was here in 1984.’ When they were doing this, I was walking these streets. Even now, I feel like dancing with the 1980s New York is dancing with my youth, and when I walk the streets—and I still walk up and down Broadway almost every time I come to New York—I look at the posters and the artists that are working and I go, ‘Oh, my God, these people are pushing the boundaries.’ I see the exact world of The Collaboration that we're trying to recreate on stage.”
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