An Eerily Prescient New ‘Ragtime’ Heads to Broadway

The director Lear deBessonet, whose revival of the musical Ragtime on the Vivian Beaumont stage this month also marks her debut production as Lincoln Center Theater’s new artistic director , is no stranger to time travel. The first play she put on in New York City, mounted in a church basement in Gramercy Park when she was in her early 20s, was an original piece focusing on Jerusalem syndrome, a rare form of religious mania in which visitors to the Holy Land believe themselves to be living embodiments of figures from the Bible.

Seeking inspiration for Ragtime, which is set in the early 1900s and in locations in and around New York, deBessonet and I met on a brilliant late-summer morning outside the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In the play, Tateh (Brandon