Brandeis Magazine

Actor J. Bernard Calloway, MFA’00, returned to campus in October to offer encouragement and advice to current MFA acting students. Take every exercise seriously, he told his audience. “It’s easy for me to drop into a Caribbean accent because of the work I did here,” he said. “When you are tired and have nowhere to pull from, you have that technique.” Calloway originated the role of Delray in the Broadway musical “Memphis,” and appeared last fall alongside Bryan Cranston in the American Repertory Theater’s production of “All the Way,” a play about Lyndon Johnson’s first year as president, which begins a Broadway run in February.

Michael Kaiser ’75 has announced he is leaving his post as president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. In September, Kaiser will take the DeVos Institute of Arts Management, which he founded in 2001 at the Kennedy Center, to a new home at the University of Maryland, where he will become a faculty member. The DeVos Institute teaches management practices to professional arts administrators. Last August, Kaiser made news when his friend Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the U.S. Supreme Court justice, presided at his wedding to economist John Roberts. It was the first time a member of the highest court had conducted a same-sex marriage ceremony.

Esther Adler ’99, assistant curator in the Museum of Modern Art’s drawings and prints department, is the co-author of “American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe,” the catalog for a recent MoMA show by the same name that she co-curated. The exhibition featured works created between 1915-50 — mostly drawn from the museum’s own collection — including “Christina’s World,” by Andrew Wyeth; Edward Hopper’s “Night Windows”; and seminal works by such artists as Georgia O’Keeffe, Stuart Davis and Alfred Stieglitz.

Sarah Mead, professor of the practice of music at Brandeis, has written “Fantasia Sine Nomine” for five viols, recently published by PRB Productions as part of its contemporary consort series. Last November, Mead’s viol consort Nota Bene did a five-day residency at Brandeis, during which it visited undergraduate classes on art history, Shakespeare, Renaissance Italian literature and Cervantes.

Scott Edmiston, who heads Brandeis’ Office of the Arts, directed a critically acclaimed production of “Water by the Spoonful” that ran from October to November last year at the Lyric Stage Company in Boston. The characters in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Quiara Alegría Hudes — including an Iraq War veteran, a group of recovering crack addicts who frequent an online chat room, and the chat room’s moderator — are linked by their struggle to face their demons and find forgiveness. In its review, The Boston Globe praised Edmiston’s “nuanced understanding of the complexities at work within families.”

Joe Wardwell, assistant professor of painting at Brandeis, is one of 34 artists participating in the Boston/Como artistic and cultural exchange that began in Como, Italy, last summer and will move to Boston this year. An exhibition of works by the participants — half of whom are from the United States, half from Italy — is set up in public and private spaces in each city.