When it came time to send their twin boys to school, Szilárd Szabó and his husband opted for a private American educational institution rather than a public Hungarian one.

The choice was as much about giving their sons a strong, cosmopolitan education as it was about their family’s “two dad” dynamics.

“We wanted to have an environment where people are more open, where teachers are more open, and being gay is not a big issue,” shares Mr. Szabó, sipping espresso in a modern sunlit office near the Danube River. “We chose the bubble, the friendly and positive environment.”

Such an environment is becoming harder to find these days. Since 2020, the Hungarian Constitution stipulates that the “foundation of the family” is heterosexual marriage and bans the adoption of children by same-sex couples. And the government has been waging a relentless campaign against what it calls “LGBT” ideology in the run-up to parliamentary elections this weekend.

The April 3 vote coincides with a referendum nominally around school education on LGBTQ issues. Critics see the plebiscite as an effort to lock in bigoted legislation.

At the heart of the controversy is Hungary’s Child Protection Act. Passed in June 2021, the legislation stiffened penalties for pedophilia but also sneaked in last-minute amendments banning the promotion or portrayal of LGBTQ themes in education and media to minors.

The spirit of the law alarmed not only Hungary’s LGBTQ community but also the European Commission, which has launched legal challenges against both Hungary and Poland (which sparked controversy earlier with its “LGBT-free zones”). The two nations are at the center of a culture war pitting the more socially liberal West against an increasingly conservative East.

“It’s all part of a larger anti-gender and LGBT politics,” says Dorottya Redai. The author of the children’s book “Fairyland is for Everyone” previously ran a “getting to know LGBTQ people” program in schools.

“Christian fundamentalist groups are involved in it in the U.S.,” she says. “Russia is involved in it. Countries in Central Europe are involved in it. It is strongest in Hungary and Poland. But there is a broad picture that is important to see.

“In Poland and Hungary, it is not far-right groups on the fringe. It is the government,” she says. “That is why it has such a severe impact, because it becomes policy and legislation.”

“It is forbidden to answer”

Hungary’s right-wing government argues that sex education, including discussions on sexual orientation, is a parental responsibility. Those views paved the way for the problematic law, which activists say conflates pedophilia with membership in the LGBTQ community. Echoing the conservative rhetoric around Florida’s own Parental Rights in Education law, which critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, TV ads in Hungary suggest that young children are being taught about sex reassignment surgery over math at school.

“The Hungarian government proposes that citizens should have a chance to express their stance on the issues of gender propaganda,” Deputy Minister Balázs Orbán told parliament in November. ”We believe that we ... have to say no to LGBT propaganda in schools carried out with the help of NGOs and media, without parental consent.”

The law is so vaguely worded that the safest bet for teachers is silence, even if a student is clearly struggling. “If a a child asks a teacher about anything related to homosexuality or his or her gender issues, it is forbidden to answer,” says Anna Komjáthy, president of the Democratic Union of Teachers. “This is the big problem. Teachers have to decide whether they listen to their conscience and answer and help ... but they risk that a parent will report them.”

“It is very dangerous because children are left alone to confront their problems,” she adds. “There are only a few schools that have psychologists who can help them navigate such issues.”

High school head teacher Orsolya Eröss says more open and frank discussions are needed in the classroom. Even though the law has fueled an oppressive atmosphere, Ms. Eröss says she does not hold her back from delivering straightforward advice on matters of the heart to her teenage students.

Dominique Soguel

Head teacher Orsolya Eröss stands outside the high school where she teaches French and Portuguese in Budapest. She regrets that LGBTQ issues have been turned into a taboo topic, as many students struggle with questions of sexual identity and orientation in their teen years.

“Who you love is your private affair and it is your right to love whomever you want,” says Ms. Eröss, who teaches French and Portuguese in Budapest. “Life for [LGBTQ] people is difficult enough already. It is not good to make their lives even harder, to exclude them or make them feel that this is not a normal state.”

A political strategy

Activists find the echoes with Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda” law chilling. Luca Dudits of the Háttér Society, an LGBTQ rights organization, says the law is one of many steps taken by the government to dismantle progress won over decades. (Homosexuality was decriminalized in Hungary in 1961, a few years before Germany and the United Kingdom.) And it has emboldened people to carry out vigilante verbal and physical attacks, including one against a small girl and her grandfather because she wore a rainbow backpack.

“Since Fidesz came to power in 2010, they have been systematically eroding the rights and freedoms of LGBTQI people,” she says of the right-wing populist party led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In 2012, Hungary came ninth in advocacy group ILGA Europe’s ranking of the LGBTQ human rights situation across Europe. Now it has fallen to 28th among 49 European nations. “They have been quite outspoken about their distaste for LGBT people,” she says.

Mr. Orbán takes inspiration from hard-liners abroad, she says, but ultimately he cherry-picks issues he thinks will resonate with the Hungarian public and not trigger too much pushback.

“He didn’t just try to take, for example, the Polish model,” she says. “There is no police brutality against LGBTQI people because he knows that that is something that Hungarian people are really sensitive about. [And] he did not try to import the religious angle, because he knows that Hungarian people are not as religious as they are in Poland.”

The referendum would not cause any legal changes itself. But should it pass, Ms. Dudits worries Fidesz lawmakers will further tighten the screws on the LGBTQ community. A clear victory would allow the government to argue to the European Commission that its laws enjoy public support. And, because referendums are legally binding for three years, it would stop the opposition from changing course should they win the elections.

“Enemies that don’t exist”

Many argue the negative focus on the LGBTQ community is pure political strategy – like the rhetoric about migrants in past elections – rather than a sincere effort to protect Christian family values. Literary historian Krisztián Nyáry notes that even works in the government’s mandatory reading list, such as the poems of Sappho and passages of “The Iliad,” would require a basic conversation about homosexuality to be taught correctly. He made an anthology, “Not Compulsory – Forbidden Literature,” to illustrate the point.

Dominique Soguel

Hungarian literary historian Krisztián Nyáry poses for a photograph in his apartment in Budapest. Mr. Nyáry notes that same-sex love is a feature of many great literary works, some of which are even part of the government school curriculum.

“The referendum is a campaign tool, but at the same time it is discriminatory against 5 to 6% of Hungary society for no good reason,” says Mr. Nyáry, who is also the director of a major book publishing house in Budapest. “For the last 12 years, the government has been looking for enemies that don’t exist. When they don’t exist it is easier to fight against them. They create a topic so you don’t talk about anything else.”

Back in the 1990s, he recalls, the autobiographical novel of Hungarian Jewish writer György Faludy, “My Happy Days in Hell,” which addresses homosexual love, was a bestseller.

The mood has changed. In 2020, a far-right politician made a show of shredding Ms. Redai’s “Fairyland is for Everyone” because it depicted a lesbian Cinderella and a transgender dragon slayer – ironically boosting sales. And last year Mr. Nyáry’s bookshop chain was fined for selling a storybook featuring gay and lesbian parents, though a court revoked the fine this month.

“If you say to a parent, ‘You have to protect your children because they are in danger,’ [then] all parents will say ‘I have to protect my child,’” says Ms. Redai. “It is a smart way to attract voters.”

Brendan McDermid/Reuters

With the names of countries displayed on screen, voting starts in a special session of the United Nations General Assembly on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, at U.N. headquarters in New York, March 24, 2022. Nearly 50 states abstained or did not vote to condemn the invasion.

It is a compelling snapshot of the diplomatic jolt caused by Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine: the remarkable shoulder-to-shoulder unity among the United States and its European allies in opposition to the invasion.

But like all snapshots, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

It’s like a close-up that misses key details that would be captured by a wide-angle lens: in this case, the dozens of countries across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America that have been hedging their bets on the invasion and steering clear of unequivocal condemnation.

In a United Nations General Assembly vote this month, only four of 193 member states sided with Russia in voting “no” on a call for an end to the aggression: Belarus, Syria, Eritrea, and North Korea.

Nearly 50 states, though, most of them in the developing world, either abstained or stayed away altogether.

And a number of other countries – including Israel and the Gulf oil states, Brazil, and NATO member Turkey – clearly voted yes only reluctantly.

The Gulf States promptly spurned U.S. President Joe Biden’s call for them to pump more oil and help Western Europe wean itself from Russian energy supplies. Israel ruled out any military help for Ukraine and, like Turkey, sought to position itself as a potential mediator between Kyiv and Moscow. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro pointedly declined to criticize Mr. Putin even after his country’s “yes” at the U.N., proclaiming neutrality on the invasion.

Seth Wenig/AP

Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, listens to speakers during an emergency meeting of the General Assembly at U.N. headquarters, March 24, 2022.

How exactly all this will affect the shape of world politics when the war is over may partly depend on how it ends. But the number and variety, both regional and political, of the “don’t knows” suggest a far more complex arrangement than the straightforward battle between democracy and autocracy that President Biden wants to wage.

It also poses a challenge for Washington and its allies: how to engage, reach out, reassure, and, where possible, reinforce ties with these countries – especially since they include key regional powers like India, South Africa, and Brazil.  

Why the hesitancy to condemn Mr. Putin’s war?

There’s no single explanation, although a disproportionate number of the countries holding back are indeed undemocratic.

In some cases, the bet-hedging is down to Cold War-era ties with the Soviet Union, or current military and economic ties with President Putin’s Russia. In others, it’s a legacy of unresolved issues dating from Western colonial times or, in South America, historic resentment of U.S. policy. Other nations, such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia, are engaged in ongoing quarrels with Washington.

Yet more broadly, most of these countries seem to be looking toward a post-Ukraine-war world in which they figure they may be best off steering some kind of middle course between the U.S. with its democratic allies on the one hand, and Russia (and above all, China) on the other.

Even if Mr. Putin does emerge weakened from the war, both he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have spent recent years building economic, political, and security ties with the developing world.

American outreach to the Ukraine holdouts will probably come to the fore only once the fighting in Ukraine is over.

India is a prime example. Though ruled by an increasingly Hindu-nationalist government, it remains the world’s most populous democracy. The Biden administration had been making efforts to strengthen U.S.-Indian relations before the Ukraine invasion.

Manish Swarup/AP/File

Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi greet each other before meeting in New Delhi, Dec. 6, 2021. India is bracing for a disruption in Russian arms supplies following the invasion of Ukraine, and Mr. Modi's tightrope walk between Moscow and Washington could become more difficult.

Officials in Washington will be aware of Delhi’s desire not to burn diplomatic bridges with Moscow. Russia sells India both oil and half its weapons, and Moscow is seen as something of an insurance policy against further flare-ups on India’s border with China. But the U.S. will still hope to strengthen ties over the longer term.

South Africa may be viewed in similar terms: In its case, reluctance to denounce the invasion is due partly to the fact that veterans of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress still remember, and value, Soviet support during apartheid.

Brazil could prove more complicated: The Biden administration has so far largely cold-shouldered President Bolsonaro, seeing him as a populist soulmate of former President Donald Trump.

The Middle East, too, could present a thorny challenge: The Gulf countries’ hesitancy about lining up behind the U.S. on Ukraine, and Israel’s too, reflects their growing concern over Washington’s retreat from their region given its “tilt” toward Asia and its competition with China.

With Washington now having to add new European military, economic, and diplomatic demands to its China focus, it is hard to see how it might seriously re-engage in the Middle East.

Overall, the geopolitical scenario most likely to emerge amid what’s being seen as a “new Cold War” may turn out to involve a throwback to the original Cold War: the 120-strong Non-Aligned Movement of nations that were not formally aligned with either of the then-dominant superpowers.

One of its founding prime ministers: Jawaharlal Nehru of India.

Irakli Gedenidze/Reuters

Protesters, including Russian citizens, shout slogans in support of Ukraine during an anti-war rally in Tbilisi, Georgia, March 24, 2022.

On Tbilisi’s bustling Rustaveli Avenue, the voices of newly arrived Russians mingle with the sights and sounds of Georgia’s capital. They are among tens of thousands of Russians who have fled their homeland since President Vladimir Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine, part of an exodus led by the young and mobile who fear increased political repression and economic stagnation if they stay in Russia.

For young men like Constantine, a software developer who lived in Moscow, the war also carried the risk of being conscripted and sent to fight in Ukraine, where he has family ties. Like many Russian migrants he asked that his full name not be used because of the sensitivity of antiwar opinion in Russia.

“Once it began I knew I had to leave as I didn’t see anything good happening in Russia and we were becoming increasingly isolated from the world,” he says. “I also felt that there was a strong possibility that I would be drafted into the army and that was something I definitely didn’t want. ... I’ve never wanted to be a soldier or kill people; I’ve always wanted to create rather than to destroy.”

A former Soviet republic, Georgia offers visa-free access to Russians who find it relatively easy to adapt to a country where Russian TV and movies are popular and many older citizens speak fluent Russian. It offers a mild climate, an affordable cost of living, and political freedoms. That has made it a magnet for Russians for whom the invasion of Ukraine marked a point of no return after years of political repression.

Georgia also knows what it’s like to be invaded by Russia under Mr. Putin: In 2008, Georgia fought a brief war against Russian forces who continue to occupy around 20% of the country. Since last month, rallies have been held to oppose the invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, some Georgians look askance at a surge in Russian migrants, and their arrival has been blamed for rising apartment rents in Tbilisi.

A small bar close to Rustaveli Avenue has become a de facto welcome hub for arriving Russians looking to make friends and swap tips about their new sanctuary. The bar hums with accents from all corners of Russia, as newcomers fret about the repression at home.

Leo Jimmer, an activist and journalist from Siberia who worked for jailed opposition figure Alexei Navalny, has been here longer than most. He fled Russia in October in fear of being imprisoned himself amid a crackdown on Mr. Navalny’s political organizations.

“Tbilisi is my home now. It’s a great city with great people and I’m so thankful to Georgians for welcoming me here, it is my shelter,” he says.

On the wall of the bar is a large Ukrainian flag. Many of the young men and women gathered here wear badges with the blue and yellow of the flag, which are also worn by Georgians who express solidarity with Ukraine. 

Nikita, a former systems analyst in Moscow, says he no longer felt safe living in Russia. He already had a vacation booked in Armenia for the week after the war started, so he continued on to Georgia rather than go home. 

“I don’t agree with the Russian government. I didn’t vote for it and I’ve been protesting it since 2011 but it didn’t come to anything, but now it feels like we were back behind the Iron Curtain,” he says.

“Tbilisi is a great city. It is beautiful, very welcoming. I haven’t experienced any problems here at all and there is so much freedom.”

Natasha, a makeup artist from Saratov, agrees. “I came here because there is a lot of freedom here. There is no freedom in Russia, especially in Moscow. I decided to leave Russia because I hate Putin. When he started the war, I decided to leave because I didn’t want my taxes to fund something that I hate,” she says.

Pro-Kremlin customers not welcome

By some estimates, more than 20,000 Russians have fled to Georgia, which allows Russian citizens to stay for up to a year. That has led to a surge in demand for apartments in Tbilisi, particularly from Russians who work in tech and earn high salaries.

While many landlords are keen to cash in on the new arrivals, others are refusing to rent to anyone from Russia or Belarus as long as the war continues in Ukraine. Some business owners have put up signs telling customers with pro-Kremlin sympathies to stay away.

Dariya Zheniskkan, a Kazakh who owns a Tbilisi bar popular with Russians, says she’s had some run-ins with Georgians who resent the new arrivals.

“What people don’t understand is that the people who come here are the opposition, they are anti-Putin and they don’t support the war in Ukraine,” she says. And that’s why she’s welcoming them. “We really want to provide a place where people running from their country can feel at home for one evening.”

Alex Brandon/AP

Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson testifies during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 23, 2022. The hearings gave Judge Jackson an opportunity to put into practice advice she received from a stranger during college: "Persevere."

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak to a young man who will earn his master of divinity degree this May. Curious about the benefits of three years of theological education, I asked him what his most important takeaways were. He cited many, but the one that captured my heart was, lead with love. Those three words became the lens through which I watched the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. She embodied for me what it means to lead with love.

Leading with love is ancient wisdom, the basis for the best guidelines for human interactions I have ever found. Better known as the Beatitudes, these guidelines were not given to pacify the poor but restrain the privileged. When universally adhered to, they have great potential for ensuring justice and peace. They speak to humility, empathy, inner grit, and other virtues. They’re what love looks like when we treat others the way we’d like to be treated.

Leading with love sets a very high bar. It requires a person to remain poised, patient, and respectful when, in the case of Judge Jackson, she’s relentlessly interrupted, her judicial decisions are whittled down into politically charged buzzwords, and the questions posed to her run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous. 

Leading with love makes a person reluctant to talk about her faith, even though it’s obvious that she has it. Not faith as a mere set of beliefs, but faith that shapes how a person behaves. I saw in Judge Jackson a humility that knew not to rate her own piety on a scale of 1 to 10, as one senator asked her to do. She was self-aware enough to receive both positive and negative assessments of her lifework with a sense of peace. She handled exchanges that were demeaning with the strength of grace and the power of silence. To borrow a line from a Rudyard Kipling poem, she met “Triumph and Disaster / And treat[ed] those two impostors just the same.”

Confirmation hearings are long and exhausting ordeals. They wear on your emotions. Judge Jackson’s facial expressions and body language often gave away her frustration with a grinding process. But she was undergirded by years of support from family and friends, and an enduring admonition to “persevere.”

Persevere. That one word lifted Judge Jackson’s spirit on a day during her freshman year when she was feeling homesick and questioning her college choice. As she was walking across Harvard Yard, a Black woman she didn’t know was walking toward her. When they met, the woman leaned over and said, “Persevere.” And so Judge Jackson did, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University and cum laude from Harvard Law School. 

Susan Walsh/AP

Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson listens as Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee (front left) asks a question during Judge Jackson's confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 23, 2022.

I had wanted Judge Jackson to make it through the hearings without ever shedding a tear. Tears are often interpreted as a sign of weakness. But leading with love allows for the healthy expression of basic human emotions. Sen. Cory Booker’s shower of affirmations was too much to handle near the end of the grueling process. Tears swelled in Judge Jackson’s eyes and mine, too. Mine came from heartfelt solidarity with her and every Black woman – past, present, but hopefully none in the future – who has had to deal with unwarranted indignities. 

In our societal pecking order, Black women step up to the plate with two strikes against us – we are Black, and we are women. Then we’re thrown a series of screwballs, and against all odds, we sometimes have the blessed fortune to knock them out of the park. For many of us, when we’re reminded of what we have accomplished, our tears show the effect on our hearts, minds, and bodies of this empowering truth: We are loved. 

Leading with love isn’t easy. It calls for integrity, regardless of the potential personal cost. Judge Jackson once served as a federal public defender. That’s often not seen as the wisest career move for someone later nominated for the Supreme Court, since some may associate you with the people you defend. Yet, tasked with the responsibility to defend people accused of threatening the safety of our country, she offered them the best defense possible, which is what every defense attorney is to do. She took some heat for that during the hearings, but staying accountable to the Constitution and the law of our land is bedrock to our form of government. When you lead with love, you must be prepared for your good to be turned against you.

I am inspired by the singular honor and immense responsibility that will likely be placed on Judge Jackson, now that at least one Republican senator has offered her support. And I am proud of her demonstration of the heights where leading with love can take us. Our lives are not only measured by what we achieve, but also by the integrity we display on our way to great achievement. Love is the highest law.

While I have no aspirations to spend years earning another degree – in theology or law – I do see a need to study and embody the wisdom of the Beatitudes. It will be time well spent – not only for me, but for everyone who has to interact with me.

The Broadway show “Paradise Square” is a rarity this season: It’s an original musical – not a stage version of an existing movie property, like “Aladdin,” nor a jukebox musical based on a singer’s work such as “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.”

I caught “Paradise Square” in Chicago during its tryout run, ahead of the Broadway opening on April 3. I was especially excited to see the work of lead choreographer Bill T. Jones, a Tony-winning veteran of two Broadway shows, as well as the director of a contemporary dance company. I was intrigued by the big intentions of the musical: lots of spectacle, a large cast, and the promise of a good story. What I did not expect, as I watched the Civil War saga unfold, was the relevance of the subject matter, despite reaching back more than 150 years in American history.

The musical, set in 1863 in the gritty Five Points area of New York, follows the fortunes of two groups – a community of free Black people and an enclave of Irish immigrants. The people work alongside each other, gather at the Paradise Square saloon, and occasionally intermarry. These marriages across racial lines are only two components in a complicated plot that involves abolitionists, a newly arrived Irish immigrant, and a man who had escaped from slavery.

To grasp more of the history behind “Paradise Square,” I spoke by phone with director Moisés Kaufman and associate choreographer Gelan Lambert. I was also able to connect by email with Joaquina Kalukango, who plays the central character, Nelly, owner of the saloon.

© Kevin Berne/The Press Room

Joaquina Kalukango as Nelly, the owner of Paradise Square saloon, and Chilina Kennedy as her sister-in-law Annie, share a moment of solidarity.

“One of the most beautiful things about this story is that, way before we think of it, Americans had tried to come together,” Kaufman says. “It was the precursor of our desire to live in a community.”

The interwoven plotlines are brought to life by a splendid cast of 38 performers who showcase dance from both African and Irish traditions. “The dancing helps tell the story,” Kaufman says.

The choreography of Jones involves a fusion of cultural inspirations – from the rituals that enslaved Africans brought to America to Irish step dancing. Garrett Coleman and Jason Oremus play the lead Irish roles and created the Irish dancing on stage. We see the two groups gradually borrow from each other: The Irish performers bend and thrust their bodies in freer movements; the Black dancers find ways to vary their footwork from stomping to quicker, lighter stepping – a vibrant integration of different rhythms and a melding of one tradition into another that ultimately would lead to the new American form called tap.

“The people who came [to America] were seeing the dances of the others they met,” says Lambert. “I do believe they appropriated styles and they shared by watching and looking. ‘Appropriation’ means taking something and making it your own,” he adds. A dance-off, in which an escaped enslaved man and a young Irish immigrant compete to win a large sum of money, is a highlight of “Paradise Square.” 

© Kevin Berne/The Press Room

Regulars from the neighborhood gather at Nelly’s.

But beyond the roistering and friendly competition at Nelly’s tavern, a storm is brewing. A white politician views Nelly’s establishment as the place where white and Black people can come together, and he sets out to destroy it, in fear of the combined power of the two groups. “The African Americans and the Irish immigrants were considered dirt by the upper classes,” observes Kaufman, the director.

The wily politician successfully exploits the frustration and anger of a returning soldier, an Irish immigrant who can’t find work, by convincing him that free Black men have taken his job. This conflict, set against the background of citywide protests against a draft order by President Abraham Lincoln, touches off riots in Five Points. 

The parallels to our own time could not be clearer, despite being clothed in colorful period costumes and scenery. The musical underscores the point that, as in mid-19th century New York, the issues of racial injustice, class conflict, the plight of immigrants, and the struggle for equality continue to roil society. Like the blockbuster “Hamilton,” it reaches back into history to illuminate key areas where America has fallen short of its promise.

The music was composed by Jason Howland, with additions to the score by Larry Kirwan, the originator of the work, which began its life as the 2012 musical “Hard Times.” Howland incorporates elements of Civil War-era tunes by Stephen Foster such as “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races,” along with Irish dance music, patriotic anthems, and soaring power ballads. Foster, who lived for a time in Five Points, is also a character in the show. 

© Kevin Berne/The Press Room

John Dossett (center) portrays a politician who stirs up hatred between Irish immigrants and free Black people, driving a wedge between the two groups.

The two outstanding numbers are the dance competition and Nelly’s song after the riots are over, the scorching “Let It Burn” (sung by the powerfully voiced and expressive Kalukango). I found “Paradise Square” to be an enthralling spectacle of American history even though critical reactions in Chicago were mixed. Some reviewers suggested that the musical needs more work to sort out its cat’s cradle of plotlines. I agree, but I still think the show is a winner, in the manner of “Ragtime,” another period musical that was characterized by an uprising in the face of inequality and prejudice. 

One thing that can’t be diminished is the energy and urgency of its performances, especially that of Kalukango. Her Nelly is the moral and emotional center around which “Paradise Square” revolves. I asked her via email if there’s a happy ending to her character’s story. “Happy would not be the word I would use,” she wrote in reply. “What I will say is that her future is full of possibilities. Nelly is not the type to be defeated for too long, so the end is a reset for her. To start anew with a new dream.”

Iris Fanger is an arts journalist who writes on dance and theater. “Paradise Square” is in previews at the Barrymore Theatre in New York and opens on Broadway April 3. 

AP

A small child, who is part of a family who fled from Ukraine and has been taken in by a local family, shows a drawing she made in Chisinau, Moldova, March 7.

For many countries, Russia’s war on Ukraine has been an eye-opener about the need to correct their ways – none more so than the country of Moldova, Ukraine’s smallest neighbor. The landlocked nation of 4 million – one of Europe’s poorest – is now on a race to reform.

A week after the invasion, Moldova officially applied for European Union membership. “We want to ... be part of the free world,” said President Maia Sandu, who has since been invited to give a commencement speech at Harvard University in May.

Her reformist Party of Action and Solidarity has sped up yearlong efforts at curbing corruption and ensuring equality in public life. In mid-March, for example, the president sacked the head of the National Integrity Authority, an agency set up to fight corruption. Just four years ago, the EU declared Moldova a state captured by oligarchs. That designation helped lead to Ms. Sandu’s election in 2020 over a pro-Moscow opponent.

Most of all, knowing that Moldova might be next in Russia’s design to take former Soviet lands, its people have shown warm and welcoming hearts to fleeing Ukrainians.

With the influx of refugees, 1 in 8 children in Moldova are now Ukrainian. Per capita, the country has received the largest number of refugees from the war, or about 4% of its population. Most of them have been put up in some 50,000 private homes.

“We are the single most fragile neighbor of Ukraine,” Nicu Popescu, Moldova’s foreign minister, told Financial Times. “We are committed to making Moldova a safe place where people can find safety, and calm and dignity.”

For its efforts and fragility, Moldova will receive part of a $320 million initiative by the United States and EU aimed at building up the civic “resilience” of Ukraine’s democratic neighbors. The money is especially designed to counter “Moscow’s strategic corruption and kleptocracy.”

Since 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has controlled a breakaway region of Moldova called Transnistria with the presence of some 1,300 troops. That, along with Moldova’s high dependency on Russian fuel exports, makes its situation similar to Ukraine’s before the war. “To a great extent, this war has indeed united our people,” said the foreign minister.

For now, says Ms. Sandu, that unity is focused on quickly making Moldova “stronger,” one that will make it “a pole of stability and development in the region.”