Postscript: Liz Swados (1951-2016)

It was always exciting to see, around town, those lovely posters by Paul Davis announcing a new production at the Public Theatre—“our” theatre, over on Lafayette Street, a place that promoted, before it was fashionable, color-blind casting, knowing that talent itself was not defined by race or gender but spirit. In 1980, the Davis poster showed a young actress named Meryl Streep in a piece called “Alice in Concert.” Its author was Elizabeth Swados, a name I recognized from another Public event a year before, when her adaptation of Michael Herr’s classic “Dispatches” premièred there.