Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll meet a 16-year-old who will appear in a production of “The Tempest” in Central Park starting on Sunday. We’ll also find out about a “survival guide” to New Haven released by the union that represents the police at Yale University.

Naomi Pierre has not read “The Tempest,” by Shakespeare.

A lot of other 16-year-olds probably haven’t read “The Tempest,” either.

But Pierre is to appear in the play at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park for a week, starting on Sunday.

The production is a musical, an adaptation with music and lyrics by Benjamin Velez. It is being staged by the Public Theater’s Public Works program, which brings professional actors together with performers from community organizations around the city for an annual end-of-summer production.

Pierre plays Miranda, the daughter of Prospero, a deposed royal whose enemies have descended on the enchanted island where they have been marooned for years. The Prospero in this production is Renée Elise Goldsberry, who originated the role of Angelica Schuyler Church in the musical “Hamilton.”

But it’s still “The Tempest.” Reading the original “would have been really good for me to do,” Pierre said, though she added that she had “a very good reason for not doing it.”

“I got the callback for the role about a week before going in for the audition,” she said. “There was no time for me to read the entire play along with school.” This was in May.

“What I did, I went to YouTube University and I watched this amazing lady explain to me ‘The Tempest’ in an hour video,” she said. “I got the context of the story line that way, and I watched a lot of videos on Miranda. Then I watched a couple of productions of ‘The Tempest.’”

And that was all. “I didn’t want to psych myself out before the audition, because I’m sure everyone did that,” she said. “I wanted to play the role in an authentic way, not a way that 12 other people played it, so I tried to stay away from copying other people.” She said she went into the audition thinking “Miranda’s this age” — 16, the age she is now. “These are her relationships, done. This is the story.”

Pierre is not a newcomer to the Public Works program: She has appeared in past productions through its community partnership with the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, in Brooklyn. When she was 10, she was cast as Little Jaques in “As You Like It.” “I closed out the show with a song” on the Delacorte stage alongside Shaina Taub, who played Jaques and also wrote the music and lyrics for that show, another adaptation of Shakespeare.

“That was, I’m sure you can imagine, a very surreal experience for a 10-year-old,” Pierre said. “The following year, we did a monthlong production of ‘Twelfth Night,’ and then I did ‘Hercules.’” That adaptation of the 1997 animated Disney film had a weeklong run in 2019.

Then the pandemic hit — “a horrible time,” she said, “because when you go summer after summer doing a show and then there’s no show for two years, this pattern that you had stops.”

Now she is talking about what she learned from YouTube and how she sees Miranda — and the romantic relationship that Prospero sets up.

“You see a lot of 20-year-olds playing a 16-year-old,” she said, “and it’s so inauthentic. What my take on this character is is she is not pretending to be in love. When people play this character, they think, ‘Oh, my gosh, high school, puppy love.’ But when you’re in high school and when you live through these experiences, when you argue with your parents, when you have a crush, it feels real. You’re not pretending for it to be real. You’re not acting like a teenager, you are a teenager. “

“Then when you get older, you can look back on that and go, ‘That was so stupid.’ But when you’re living in it, it doesn’t feel stupid, it feels real.”

Weather

Prepare for showers throughout the day, with temps in the high 70s. At night, showers are likely to persist, with temps dropping to the low 70s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Sept. 4 (Labor Day).

“Good luck,” the flier said, but not in the warm and welcoming way that arriving college students expect to hear it at this time of year.

The flier was distributed in New Haven, Conn., home to Yale University for more than 300 years. It said New Haven was crime-ridden. It advised Yale students to “remain on campus,” “avoid public transportation” and “stay off the streets after 8 p.m.” It also had a picture of the Grim Reaper.

The text made clear where the flier came from: the union that represents Yale’s campus police, which is renegotiating a contract. The union’s lawyer said the flier was not a tactic in the talks. He said the union just wanted a pamphlet that would stand out amid the deluge of papers that first-year students receive.

“And without a doubt,” he said, “their pamphlet stands out.”

In the days since the union handed it out, Yale administrators and New Haven police officials have been scrambling to calm new Yale students and their parents. Anthony Campbell, the chief of the Yale Police Department, said the flier could do real harm to campus safety — and to his department’s reputation.

The flier said that “murders have doubled, burglaries are up 33 percent and motor vehicle thefts are up 56 percent” in New Haven in the first seven months of the year.

The numbers were accurate. But Mayor Justin Elicker — who called the flier “an attack on New Haven” — said the figures were selective, misleading “and don’t present the full picture of what’s going on.” Violent crime has decreased by 29.2 percent since 2020, he said, and although homicides are up, shootings have dropped.

The flier strongly resembled pamphlets that public safety officers handed out to travelers arriving in New York City in 1975, when the city was in the depths of a fiscal crisis. “Welcome to Fear City,” those fliers read, as unions representing public safety officers tried to fight layoffs.

My colleague Amelia Nierenberg writes that incoming Yale students appeared skeptical of the police union’s message.

“Although New Haven can be a rough city, the contents on this flier are misleading,” Brice June, an 18-year-old first-year-student, he said in an Instagram message, “especially for someone who’s unfamiliar with the town.”

METROPOLITAN diary

Deep blue

Dear Diary:

I was walking on the Upper West Side one evening when I saw a woman standing and staring up at the sky.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said as I got closer.

I asked what she was referring to.

“The color of the sky,” she said.

I paused to look up at the deep blue of the evening sky. As I did, the woman walked away after taking the time to share with me the beauty I would not have noticed otherwise.

— Sangeeta Chowdhry

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Hannah Fidelman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.