PREVIOUS SPREAD
DENÉE BENTON, 25, plays a lovelorn Russian aristocrat in the
War and Peace–inspired musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great
Comet of 1812. The show’s color-blind casting is fast becoming
a hallmark of the Hamilton age. “It’s telling a universal story of
love and loss and war and regret,” Benton says, “and I think
because of that you can put any person of any shade in it.”
E VA N O B L E Z A DA is only 21, yet she has already played
Eponine in Les Misérables in London and now brings her
clarion singing voice to the Broadway Theatre’s Miss Sai-
gon. “I’ve learned how necessary it is to have someone like
Denée expose the hidden talents of minority performers,” says
Noblezada, who is of Filipino and Mexican descent. “We work
our asses off to be seen on the same level as everyone else.”
BARRETT DOSS was all set to become a San Francisco
cheese monger six years ago, after a series of fruitless audi-
tions. Then Thomas Bradshaw—in whose 2007 one-act
Cleansed she had played a fourteen-year-old biracial skin-
head—cast her in his play Burning. Now, at 28, she is making
her Broadway-musical debut as Rita (played onscreen by An-
die MacDowell) in the stage adaptation of Groundhog Day.
L AURA DREYFUSS With heartbreaking tenderness, Drey-
fuss, 28, plays a soulful high school student struggling in a
relationship with the anxiety-ridden class geek (Ben Platt) in
the musical Dear Evan Hansen. She has appeared on Broad-
way in Hair and Once and is best known as Madison Mc-
Carthy on Glee. “Glee and Evan Hansen are fundamentally
the same idea: ‘Where do I belong?’ ” she says.
THIS SPREAD
CLARE BARRON’ s plays burn with an almost feral ur-
gency—coupled with an off-kilter humor—as they explore
the joys and terrors of faith, family, and the female body. Her
latest, Dance Nation, concerns a preteen dance troupe, played
by a cast ranging in age from twelve to 75. Barron, 31, depicts
the pagan ferocity beneath the girls’ skin. “I think we tend to
simplify what it was like to be that age,” she says.
LILEANA BLAIN-CRUZ, 33, mounted Suzan-Lori Parks’s The
Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World at
the Signature last fall. This month she returns with Domi-
nique Morisseau’s Pipeline, about the plight of an African-
American teacher and her son, at Lincoln Center Theater.
“Making theater right now—especially when it seems to be
speaking to the times—feels like a refuge,” she says.
LILA NEUGEBAUER, 31, directed four acclaimed plays in the
past few months—Miles for Mary, by her theater company,
the Mad Ones; Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves; Branden Ja-
cobs-Jenkins’s Everybody; and, most recently, Annie Baker’s
The Antipodes—with several more slated for next season. “I
hope I’m inviting people to investigate ideas that they might
normally take for granted about the way they live,” she says.
YOUNG JEAN LEE, 42, has for nearly fifteen years been
writing and staging genre-bending works that also manage
to be deliriously entertaining. Next season she’s making her
Broadway debut as a playwright—the first Asian-American
woman to do so—with the funny and mournful Straight
White Men. Her next play will be, she says, about “everything
that’s going on in the country right now.”