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    ‘Six Characters’ Review: Making the Case Against a White-Centric Theater

    At Lincoln Center Theater, Phillip Howze’s daring new play offers a hefty critique but takes aim at more targets than it can accommodate. Nothing makes some theatergoers as skittish as the specter of audience participation. Toying with that apprehension, Phillip Howze has designed a pre-performance interaction for people coming to see his confrontational new play, “Six Characters,” at Lincoln Center Theater.As part of what his script calls the overture, each person entering the Claire Tow Theater is meant to be asked, “Would you like to participate?,” yet given no details on which to base their answer. The query turns out to provide a frame for “Six Characters.”A metatheatrical nod to Luigi Pirandello’s canonical 1921 drama, “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” Howze’s play is an indictment of the white-centric American theater and a warning about passivity in the face of looming fascism. Are you willing to participate in reshaping the theater and the country? “Six Characters” would like to know.Taking aim at more targets than it can accommodate, the play is scattershot but genuinely experimental and, as such, daring programming by Evan Cabnet, LCT3’s departing artistic director, who was recently named to the same role at Second Stage Theater. A principal theme — Black artists navigating overwhelmingly white traditions — is clear from the preshow and interstitial music: Italian opera sung by Black stars, including Leontyne Price and Pretty Yende.Dustin Wills’s production opens with a Director (Julian Robertson) alone on the bare stage, fumbling comically with lighting and ladders. He is the first of the play’s six Black characters: a Europhile whose elegant coat is from Italy, and who has a habit of bursting into Italian. (The set is by Wills, costumes by Montana Levi Blanco.)Scott plays a cleaner and Julian Robertson is the Director in Phillip Howze’s play, a metatheatrical nod to Luigi Pirandello’s canonical 1921 work.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Erica Ash of ‘Mad TV’ and ‘Survivor’s Remorse’ Dies at 46

    Erica Ash started out on sketch comedy shows in the 2000s before appearing in movies like “Scary Movie V” and the satirical reality show “Real Husbands of Hollywood.”Erica Ash, an actress and comedian known for her roles in the satirical reality show “Real Husbands of Hollywood” and on the sketch comedy show “Mad TV,” died on Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 46.The cause was cancer, her mother, Diann Ash, said in a statement on Monday.Ms. Ash began her career in the 2000s as a cast member on the sketch comedy shows “The Big Gay Sketch Show” and “Mad TV,” where she impersonated celebrities like Michelle Obama and Condoleezza Rice.She went on to appear in several dozen TV shows and films, including “Scary Movie V.” She landed a recurring role on BET’s “The Real Husbands of Hollywood,” a parody of reality TV shows that starred Kevin Hart.On Starz’s “Survivor’s Remorse,” a drama-comedy about a young basketball star’s rise to fame, she played the main character’s sister. Among her last projects, Ms. Ash appeared in the Netflix horror-comedy film, “We Have a Ghost.”Erica Chantal Ash was born on Sept. 19, 1977, in Florida, according to IMDb. She attended Emory University as a pre-medicine student, but pivoted to comedy and entertainment. In an interview in 2018 with Steve Harvey, she talked about taking a year off from studying medicine and becoming a backup singer for a Japanese band.She was popular on social media, where she spoke out on politics and posted videos of herself portraying funny characters.A list of survivors was not immediately available. More

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    ‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’ Puts a Teen on the Case

    Based on the book series by Holly Jackson, the Netflix series is a British murder mystery with a greener-than-usual detective.What teen girl doesn’t dream of solving her first murder? Of lovingly assembling her first crazy wall, sagely taping up photos of neighborhood murder-types in her bedroom? Of sleepovers that become interrogations? Of high-stress shenanigans that give way to romantic interludes, buoyant in a sea of independence? On “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder,” which arrives Thursday, on Netflix, the true investigation is into oneself.“Good Girl’s Guide,” based on the book series by Holly Jackson, follows Pip (Emma Myers, who plays Enid in “Wednesday”) and her pet obsession with a crime that happened five years ago — an apparent murder-suicide, though she’s not so sure. She still has vivid daydreams of the dead girl, of the seemingly doting boyfriend, of herself as a little(r) girl with a glancing connection to the older teenagers. Pip decides to combine her passions for academic achievement and for not letting things go and turn this investigation into a major school project.“I think sometimes I get fixated on something, and I can’t think of anything else … even things I care about the most,” she tells her bestie. Pip’s single-mindedness is a blessing and a curse, and while that’s a pretty played-out type of character on adult murder shows, it feels more appropriate here for a teen finding her way.The real intrigue of “Good Girl’s Guide” is not its mystery, really, but how much Pip truly does grow and change before our very eyes. She is seemingly approaching high school graduation, but in many scenes she could pass for 12; seeing her behind the wheel of a car genuinely startled me. Her quest to solve the case puts her in a lot of dicey scenarios — seedy, yeah, but also just too grown-up, and Myers’s luminous performance beautifully and poignantly synthesizes this blend of panic, regret, embarrassment, determination, courage, fear and stubbornness.Coming-of-age stories often use road trips as the mechanism of and the yardstick for maturing, and this often feels like a road-trip saga, only with suspects instead of pit stops. Pip is a late bloomer who feels left out of her friends’ crush chats, and she isn’t always aware of the obvious-to-others lurking sexual menace. Her pursuits cause her to grow and to grow up, not through miserable loss-of-innocence tragedies but rather through navigating the unfamiliar, through discovering what her interests and limits really are.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Two More New York Theaters to Share Space

    The prestigious downtown nonprofit Soho Rep will share space with Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan while figuring out a longer-term plan.In another indication of how postpandemic economics are rattling the nonprofit theater world, the prestigious Soho Rep is giving up its longtime home in TriBeCa and will instead share space with Playwrights Horizons, a Midtown theater company, while trying to figure out a longer-term plan.The move, prompted by real estate constraints as well as fiscal concerns, comes at the same time that another important New York nonprofit, Second Stage Theater, is leaving its Off Broadway home. That company is now planning to reside, at least temporarily, with Signature Theater, which in recent years has had more space than it can afford to program.The two decampments follow a 2022 decision by the Long Wharf Theater, in New Haven, Conn., to let go of its waterfront home and become itinerant.Taken together, the transitions are a reminder of the enormous stresses facing nonprofits, and suggest that revisiting real estate choices will become part of the solution for some.“If you look at the field-wide vulnerability, partnerships are a result of that,” said Eric Ting, one of Soho Rep’s three directors. “We look to each other for support and for strength.”Soho Rep, established in 1975, is small: Its current annual budget is about $2.8 million, it has just five full-time employees and since 1991 it has been presenting most of its work in a 65-seat TriBeCa space, making it an Off Off Broadway theater. But the company, committed to what it calls “radical theater makers,” punches way above its weight. It was the first to stage Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2019, as well as Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s “Public Obscenities,” which was a Pulitzer finalist this year. The theater has regularly introduced New York audiences to work by important, and often provocative, playwrights, including Sarah Kane, Aleshea Harris, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lucas Hnath.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How ‘House of the Dragon’ Turns Fiery Fantasy Into TV Reality

    For the “Game of Thrones” prequel series, the producers had to figure out how to make the title beasts believably bigger, badder and more prominent.At the risk of mixing medieval metaphors, dragons are a double-edged sword.For Ryan Condal, the co-creator and showrunner of HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” the creatures are key to the show’s magic, literally and figuratively.“They are the one fantasy element that we’ve allowed ourselves,” he said. “In our world, in this period, the magic is these dragons.”But they are also death incarnate. “It’s all metaphor, all allegory for nuclear conflict,” Condal said. “You take the city with an army if you want it to be standing afterward. You can’t do anything surgical with a dragon.”The ongoing second season of the “Game of Thrones” prequel has included more of these beautiful, terrible beasts than any other in the franchise, including spectacular air battles in the fourth episode, “The Red Dragon and the Gold.” Sunday’s installment, “The Red Sowing,” in which aspiring dragon riders claim new mounts — or die trying — was more grounded, but it presented the most complicated challenge yet.In interviews last week, Condal, the visual effects supervisor Dadi Einarsson and some of the actors charged with piloting the creatures onscreen explained how they brought it all to life.The test caseWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Baldwin’s ‘Blues for Mister Charlie,’ 60 Years After It Hit Broadway

    On the centennial of James Baldwin’s birth, a look at this revolutionary work that was a playwriting milestone for him.One day, in the spring of 1964, among the glittering theater marquees of Times Square, James Baldwin was en route to rehearsal for his new Broadway production, “Blues for Mister Charlie” — and he’d had a lot on his mind: Four little girls had been killed in a church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., just months earlier; the white producers of his play had been after him to soften the script, suggesting it might be inappropriate for Broadway. By the time he reached the theater, he was furious.David Leeming, Baldwin’s friend and biographer, recently recalled that day’s “horrible rehearsal,” in which Baldwin stormed in and climbed a ladder. Towering over the cast and crew, he went on a tirade, Leeming, 87, said in an interview, “essentially accusing them of failing to see his vision.”Besides cutting a swear word or two from the script, Baldwin did not waver, though not without fear — fear of the form and fear that he might not adequately portray the monstrosity and humanity of white Southern hate. The critics eventually weighed in, writing of his failure on both fronts, and struggles at the box office ensured the playwright’s debut on Broadway would be brief.When James Baldwin died in 1987 at the age of 63, he left a voluminous oeuvre. Deemed a “prophet” and a “witness,” he has experienced a revival in the past decade that quickened in 2024 — with reading guides, film screenings and symposiums — for the centennial of his birth on Aug. 2.His legacy is often most embraced through his essays and fiction, though another form may have better suited his artistry: the play.“He loved the connection, the immediate connection between the audience and the artist that occurred in the theater,” Leeming said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2, Episode 7 Recap: Soothing the Savage Beasts

    Not everyone gets to have a dragon. But maybe more people get to have dragons than everyone thought?Season 2, Episode 7: ‘The Red Sowing’Sometimes, in politics, a bold gamble in unprecedented times pays off. This is as true for the world of Westeros as it is for our own. The woman who wants to rule the realm staked it all on a long-odds play, and her odds came in.For several episodes, Queen Rhaenyra has been down one dragon. The formidable beast Meleys and her equally impressive rider, Princess Rhaenys, are dead. Prince Daemon’s war-hardened “Blood Wyrm,” Caraxes, is mired in his master’s endless quest to subdue the Riverlands. None of the mounts available to Team Black can possibly match Prince-Regent Aemond and his colossal creature, Vhagar, in battle, even when combined.On the advice of her counselor (with benefits?) Mysaria, Rhaenyra expands her search for potential dragon riders to the unrecognized descendants of her sprawling royal family — those born as commoners, outside of marriage. In a face-to-face meeting with the young shipwright Addam of Hull, revealed to be the new rider of the dragon Seasmoke, Rhaenyra has already learned that even those not of fully noble birth can ride a dragon. She doesn’t know that Addam is the son of Lord Corlys Velaryon, whose house has frequently intermarried with the Targaryens — and neither Addam nor Corlys tells her so — but since the young man’s mother was a commoner regardless, the point stands.When word of the search gets to King’s Landing through the usual back channels, Ulf and Hugh, two of the commoners we’ve been following all season, take the fateful trip to Dragonstone to test their mettle against monsters widely considered more god than animal. There, they learn the hard way that gambling is easier when you’re betting with someone else’s money.True, Rhaenyra talks about needing dragon riders to avoid bloodshed, not cause it. And she pushes back against her son Prince Jacaerys’s furious tirade against elevating lowborn part-Targaryen “mongrels” to the level of dragon rider. (In fairness to Jace, his shame about his own parentage, and his fear of becoming just another Targaryen-blooded bastard with a dragon and thus no more a claim to the throne than any other, play as much of a role as snobbery does here.)What Rhaenyra does not do is ask her potential dragon riders to proceed onto the barbecue grill — I’m sorry, the viewing platform — beneath Dragonstone to approach the mighty dragon Vermithor one at time. So what if the dragon keepers have gone on strike in protest of this “blasphemous” move? Surely the Black Queen is aware of best practices when it comes to large groups and hungry fire-breathing dinosaurs by this point in her life. I would call this a flaw in the writing, but the reckless disregard of even “good” Targaryens like Rhaenyra and Rhaenys for civilians caught in the crossfire of their boldness has been a through line of the series.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes’ and ‘House of the Dragon’

    HBO airs a new documentary. The “Game of Thrones” spinoff wraps up its second season.For those who still enjoy a cable subscription, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, July 29-August 4. Details and times are subject to change.Monday30 FOR 30: AMERICAN SON 7 p.m. on ESPN. In 1989, when Michael Chang was 17 years old, he won the French Open and became the youngest person to win a singles major. He was also the only Chinese American playing tennis at that level at the time. This documentary goes through Chang’s family history, his experience as a child of immigrants and his career in tennis.TuesdayJennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo in “30 Going on 30.”Barry Wetcher/Columbia Pictures13 GOING ON 30 (2004) 8 p.m. on Bravo. Now, being close to 30, I sometimes wish I were 13, but this movie is the opposite of that. It follows Jenna Rink (Jennifer Garner), a 13-year-old girl who wishes she could advance time and be an adult with a boyfriend. Part of her wish comes true, and she wakes up the next morning as a 30 year old. Along the way, she runs into her childhood friend Matt Flamhaff (Mark Ruffalo), and, of course, sparks fly. “As acted by Ms. Garner, the older Jenna has a coltish gawkiness that is never quite sublimated,” Elvis Mitchel wrote in his review for The New York Times. “She plays Jenna as someone who is secretly peeking inside her own head and can’t contain her giddiness.”WednesdayREAL CSI: MIAMI 9 p.m. on CBS. The scripted version of the show, which existed in the very extensive “CSI” universe, ended in 2012. But this reboot brings back the concept as a documentary series that follows real-life detectives in Miami. In the first season finale, the series examines the murder of Jill Halliburton Su, who was discovered her stabbed to death in her bathtub.ThursdaySIMONE BILES AT THE OLYMPICS GAMES 12:15 p.m. on NBC. During the 2020 Olympics, the gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from the finals because she had the “twisties,” a colloquial expression for when a gymnast feels lost in the air, making it difficult and dangerous to attempt a routine. But now, Biles is back and ready to perform in the women’s all-around finals, with events including vault, uneven bars and balance beam over the following days.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More