Latest news with #LilyAnn
San Francisco Chronicle
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
A case for ‘Crumbs From the Table of Joy' as a great American play
History doesn't happen in great sea changes above our heads. It's whether one Black family decides to migrate north. It's which stranger you let talk to you on the train. And in 'Crumbs From the Table of Joy,' it's which ideas and experiences a girl hears over the breakfast table in her humble Brooklyn apartment — and how they inflect what she sees as possible for herself. Lynn Nottage's 1995 play about a postwar Great Migration family, whose Aurora Theatre Company production opened Thursday, May 1, could have been written today. Grieving widower Godfrey (David Everett Moore) is in thrall to a charlatan spiritualist, making excuses whenever his great leader doesn't deliver on promises. Communist Party footsoldier Aunt Lily Ann (Asia Nicole Jackson), taking it upon herself to move in with her brother-in-law and take care of his girls, keeps urging the family to unshackle themselves from servile capitalist ideology. As for her own joblessness, she says, 'Nobody wants to hire a smart colored woman.' And when daughters Ernestine (Anna Marie Sharpe) and Ermina (Jamella Cross) suddenly get a new stepmother in Gerte (Carrie Paff), a white German expat scarred by wartime privation and chaos, the conversations between her and Lily Ann feel startlingly 2025. They play the oppression olympics. They debate Gerte's assertion that 'When I see you I see no color' and just how much the world will allow any person of color to achieve — professionally, romantically. But it's never philosophical or abstract; it's grounded in romantic jealousy and insecurity that tick like a time bomb. Elizabeth Carter's production can feel a little stagey and clumsy sometimes. Some monologues that are supposed to be devastating have all the humanity of a foghorn, and light cues practically galumph in and out. But watch Sharpe and Cross as the two sisters. In physical comedy, Cross — one of the Bay Area's rising stars — has the precision of a gymnast or a figure skater. Slithering away from the singeing clutches of Lily Ann's hot iron comb, she makes the inanimate object into an enemy snake; each fresh crackle of burning hair is an escalating battle in that war known to every child: between common sense and adults' incomprehensible whims. And Sharpe makes Ernestine the poetic, impressionable sort who gulps down experience with her eyes and lets it suffuse her being. As the play's narrator, she gives Nottage's intricate, redolent text an easy buoyancy, trotting out lines like 'I want to go someplace where folks don't come home sullied by anger' with a winsome earnestness that makes the highfalutin natural. If there's an old-fashioned discursiveness to the script — it's the kind of play that feels like it ends three times over — Nottage constructs such a multilayered, expansive world that she earns the right to linger on the theatrical equivalent of sustains and fermatas. Here, the microcosm and the macrocosm are the same: The question of whether social change comes from revolution or everyday individual choices somehow equates to one girl's choice between following the humdrum path her father has paved for her or imagining something more.
Express Tribune
14-04-2025
- Health
- Express Tribune
Influencer Lauren Cummings Johnson mourns 9-month-old daughter Lily Ann
Lifestyle influencer Lauren Cummings Johnson and her husband, Wilson Johnson, are mourning the death of their 9-month-old daughter, Lily Ann. The couple announced the heartbreaking news on Instagram, sharing that Lily passed away on Sunday, April 6. 'Our sweet Lily Ann went to be with Jesus… 9 months of love, joy, and sunshine in our home and hearts,' they wrote, alongside family photos. Expressing deep faith in their message, they added, 'His ways are higher and better than ours, even when we don't understand it.' While the cause of Lily's death was not disclosed, Lauren had previously revealed that her daughter was diagnosed with Citrullinemia Type 1 (CTLN1), a rare genetic condition that causes ammonia buildup due to an enzyme deficiency. Lily had been receiving hospice care at home since shortly after birth. Throughout her daughter's short life, Lauren regularly updated her followers with moments and milestones, including Lily's first Valentine's Day and the arrival of her first tooth. The Johnsons expressed gratitude to those who supported them during this journey. 'It was the honor of our lifetime to get to share her with the world,' they wrote. 'She was pure joy and sunshine.' Lily Ann will be laid to rest at a Nashville church on April 14. The Johnsons ended their tribute by thanking their daughter and their faith, saying, 'Thank you Jesus and thank you Lily Ann for changing our lives forever.'
