Last year and the year before, I drove from Keene to New York City to spend time with my Massachusetts grandchildren, who are now New Yorkers.

“No one drives to New York,” they told me, so I drove to Springfield, parked in the bus station garage, and arrived at the 31st Street and 8th Avenue bus station around 4 p.m. I walked to mid-town, and as I trudged along, I saw people of all varieties—tall (one at least seven feet), short, fat, thin, young, old, white and Black.

The timing of my trip was that I wanted to see an exhibit and a play, both about to close. The exhibit was the Whitney Museum’s “Edges of Ailey,” which ends on Feb. 9. My granddaughter is a member of the Whitney team that designs and mounts exhibits. On Saturday, Jan. 11, she came over from Brooklyn, where all young New Yorkers seem to live, and provided free admission and a guided tour.

The exhibit occupies the entire fifth floor – 18,000 square feet – with a whole wall of video footage of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performances going back to the 1970s. The dance company began in 1958 with an all-Black cast. It has been interracial since 1963.

In addition to the video, “Edges of Ailey” includes paintings, sculpture, documents, and archival materials tracing Alvin Ailey’s life, his influences and the development of his one-of-a-kind programs, including “Revelations.” It also includes red walls, a color chosen by my granddaughter.

That evening, four of us – my grandchildren, my grandson’s girlfriend and I – went to the Barrymore Theatre to see Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” He wrote much of it while in residence at the MacDowell Colony, now called MacDowell. The town is named Grovers’ Corners, but it’s really Peterborough.

James Whitmore played the role of Stage Manager at Peterborough Players in 2000. Jim Parsons did so in the Broadway production, which ended on Jan 19. Last August, Parsons and the entire cast took a five-hour bus ride from New York to “Our Town.”

Gus Kaikkonen, former artistic director of Peterborough Players, hosted them for lunch at the Peterborough Diner and took them on a guided tour—the post office, Town Hall, drug store, church, cemetery and other landmarks that are part of the Stage Manager’s opening monologue. They visited the MacDowell cabin where Wilder wrote much of the play and then did a reading in the main hall.

The original 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Our Town” had an all-white cast. The 28- member Broadway cast, like the 2021 Peterborough Players outdoor production and the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, is interracial. It’s “Diversity.”

The cast members belong to Actors’ Equity, the professional actors’ union whose goal is to ensure fairness in the theater business. It’s “Equity.”

The Stage Manager speaks directly to the audience, some of whom are seated on either side of the stage. It’s “Inclusion.”

I may forget how I got to New York or where I stayed, but I won’t forget seeing “Edges of Ailey” and “Our Town” on the same day. They turned out to be a perfect coupling, testimony to the values of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Joseph D. Steinfield lives in Keene and Jaffrey. He can be reached at joe@joesteinfield.com.