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    In ‘Food,’ Geoff Sobelle Explores the Extremes of Eating

    “I don’t want to tell people what to think,” the performance artist said of his latest show. “I just hope it tickles them and their curiosity.”It was a little before 6:30 on a recent weeknight, and the kitchen in Geoff Sobelle’s West Village home was in chaos. Two toddlers zoomed around on a ride-on truck and begged him to read from an “Alice in Wonderland” pop-up book. “In a minute,” Sobelle told his son as he stirred artichokes that were simmering on the stove. All the while, he talked to a reporter about his solo show, “Food,” which is running as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival through Nov. 18.“This is like a three-ring circus,” Sobelle, 47, said. He had invited me over for dinner with his family — his wife, Sophie Bortolussi, a longtime “Sleep No More” performer; and his two children, Louise, 4, and Elliott, 2 — or, as he wrote in an email, “my chaotic household as I try to get two toddlers to eat.”“It’s INSANE,” he’d added.Sobelle’s nightly domestic juggling act is akin to the intertwining, overlapping and colliding threads of audience participation, sleight-of-hand and physical comedy in “Food,” a plotless, absurdist “meditation on how and why we eat,” as he described it.During the 90-minute show, which Sobelle created with the magician Steve Cuiffo (“A Simulacrum”) and co-directed with Lee Sunday Evans, he traces the history of food from the days when buffalo roamed to the present. For the first 40 minutes, he embodies a waiter at a fine-dining establishment who takes orders from audience members seated around a massive white-clothed table, making a cherry pie and an apple appear on a silver platter as if by magic.“Food” is a satire of human greed, with Sobelle consuming, among many, many things, what one critic called “a concerning quantity of ranch.”Iain MastertonBut the show quickly devolves into a satire of human greed, with Sobelle consuming, at one previous performance — brace yourself — six apples, a bowl of cherry tomatoes, a bowl of lettuce, what one critic called “a concerning quantity of ranch,” a half-dozen asparagus stalks, five carrots, a raw onion, three bowls of rice, a 22-ounce rib-eye, a baked potato, a bowl of egg yolks, a bottle of wine, a fish, a cherry pie, another bottle of wine, a lit candle, a pack of cigarettes (gulped, not just smoked), four napkins, part of a phone and a few dollar bills.That’s about 9,000 calories in 15 minutes. And he does it twice on Saturdays.“Matinees are seriously rough,” said Sobelle, who performed the show at Arizona State University last month and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August. “I’m definitely still getting used to it.”How can he eat that much? Does he have to train like Joey Chestnut?“It’s like freestyle Olympic eating,” he said, as his wife burst into laughter. “You just have to do it.”That seems to be the theme of Sobelle’s life, whether it’s helping his son realize his dream of dressing up as both a fire truck and a car for Halloween or creating shows that push the boundary between absurd satire and purposeful meaninglessness.“The power of the shows is provoking something in the audience,” he said, “not tying a bow around the subject of food.”“Food” is the third in Sobelle’s series of participatory theater shows exploring the uncommonness of common themes. The first, “The Object Lesson” (2013), examined our relationship to everyday objects, and in the second, “Home” (2017), he raised a house onstage for a meditation on what makes a home; all three premiered at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.Though “we’ve been vegetarian on and off for years,” Sobelle said, he consumes beef in his show. “The character’s not vegetarian.”Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“I knew I wanted to play with the ritual of gathering around a table,” he said about “Food.” “And that lent itself to thinking about fine dining and the spaces where it happens. Especially places like BAM and the Edinburgh International Festival, because they’re kind of fancy.”He enlisted Cuiffo, a friend of more than 20 years whom he has collaborated with on a half-dozen shows, to help him create the magic tricks and physical comedy.“Geoff is really great at going deep on an idea, whether it’s an intellectual idea or a physical theater trick,” Cuiffo said in a recent phone conversation. “He’ll keep going at it until he finds these really funny or magical or poignant moments.”Like all his shows, “Food” is heavy on audience participation. Sobelle asks people to share memories evoked by the wine he serves, or to describe the last recipe they made. He lives for the unpredictability of each performance.“Sometimes it works like a charm, and sometimes I just work hard to make it look like it’s working like a charm, or sometimes it just doesn’t work,” he said. “But that’s the adventure.”Dinner was now ready (“Time to eat!” he called to the kids), and he and Bortolussi spooned roasted carrots, cauliflower and butternut squash into wooden serving bowls, which he ferried over to a table in front of giant mirror.“We’ve been vegetarian on and off for years,” he said. “It’s about sustainability.”But what about the steak that I watched him wolf down during a video recording of the show’s premiere last year?Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“If I’m working, I don’t have to be a vegetarian,” he said. “The character’s not vegetarian.”When he was 16 and living in Los Angeles, he said, he visited a school on a marginal farm in Vershire, Vt., where he harvested food that other students had planted. “That was pretty profound to understand where it was coming from, and that you were part of the process, instead of just going to the supermarket and getting something shrink-wrapped,” he said.But to be clear, he said, his show has no moral message.“I don’t want to tell people what to think,” he said. “I just hope it tickles them and their curiosity, and that it provokes something that they then want to go talk about at the bar or wherever their next destination is.”For the last part of the performance, Sobelle invites the audience to do just that sort of reflection, violently pulling away the tablecloth to reveal a field of dirt, on which he enacts a continuous scene with minimal dialogue that serves as a CliffsNotes of human cultivation and consumption.Absurd physical comedy has become a hallmark of shows created by Sobelle, who abandoned his childhood dream of becoming a doctor and a priest after seeing a production of “Cats” when he was 7 (“I wanted to be Rum Tum Tugger,” he said), to study English at Stanford, where he mounted what he called “experimental, D.I.Y. theater shows.”Sobelle and his wife, Sophie Bortolussi, prepared a meal of vegetables, including artichokes and aioli.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“Even my first experiences in high school with plays, I was more excited by the stuff beyond the script,” he said. “The things that were translated outside of the words, or in addition to the words.”After his freshman year, he spent a year abroad at the famed Jacques Lecoq school in Paris — Geoffrey Rush and Julie Taymor are alums — where he studied physical theater.“That was a real turning point,” said Sobelle, who counts Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton among his influences. “It was all about looking at theater before language.”The aspect of “Food” he enjoys most, he said, is the unpredictability of the performance. Sometimes an audience member eats the cherry pie he has set down. Sometimes a cellphone gets swept away when he removes the tablecloth. Sometimes audience members try to deconstruct the show in their responses to his prompts.“It’s not a play, but a performance,” he said, “one in which the audience plays just as big a role as me.”His son chose that moment to overturn a bowl of aioli, which Bortolussi rushed to mop up. Sobelle handed her a napkin. (“We always do at least one spill,” he said.)“OK,” he called to the kids. “Eating time is swiftly coming to a close.”That was fine with them: Elliott was snapping photos with a toy camera, and Louise was leafing through a French picture book.Sobelle sighed.“You don’t always get a cooperative audience,” he said. More

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    It Is Not Dead Yet! ‘Spamalot’ Returns to Broadway. (Cue the Coconuts.)

    The Monty Python-inspired show wants to give audiences a reason “to laugh and enjoy and be taken away by this lunacy, in the best way possible.”The terrifying knights still say “Ni!” The dead? Well, they are not quite dead yet. And King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table (not dawn, not dusk, not late afternoon, but knights) still trot around to the sounds of coconuts banging together.All that is to say: “Spamalot” is back on Broadway, and it is still quite silly.The silliness was on display last month during a rehearsal at the Gibney Studios in Manhattan. David Josefsberg, one of the show’s standby actors, was having difficulty staying in character as the incompetent warlock Tim the Enchanter. The scene required him to adopt an outrageous accent to warn the knights about a scary beast, which ends up being a rabbit. (And the rabbit ends up being quite homicidal!) But he couldn’t keep it together as members of the cast and crew giggled while watching from the sides of the room. The giggles were contagious, filling the room throughout the rehearsal, including when the knights had to vary the banging of the coconuts between “trot” and “not trot.”The actors have been breaking character “all the time,” Josh Rhodes, the show’s director and choreographer, said after the rehearsal.“It’s lonely trying to land jokes. It’s a lousy thing to do to repeat it over and over again to a dead room,” Rhodes said. “Right now we’re still crafting it. So you want the energy in the room to still be a little silly.”Rhodes has a personal connection to the show: His husband, Lee Wilkins, was a replacement swing in the original Broadway production, which opened in 2005. They married during the run. As King Arthur, James Monroe Iglehart is among a who’s who of Broadway notables in the cast: “I make a joke all the time that there are two kings on Broadway — Mufasa and me.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor the uninitiated, “Spamalot” is a Monty Python-inspired spoof adapted from that comedy troupe’s 1975 cult film, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” A sendup of King Arthur’s mythical quest for the Holy Grail, the movie was written by and starred the group’s members — John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Graham Chapman and Terry Jones. It was Idle who had the idea to adapt it as a Broadway musical. (“Spam” is a reference to a Python sketch.)Idle wrote the original book and lyrics, and wrote the music with John Du Prez. Mike Nichols directed, and Casey Nicholaw choreographed. It was a smash, winning the Tony Award for best musical and running for nearly four years. In The New York Times, Ben Brantley called the show “resplendently silly” and a “fitful, eager celebration of inanity.”At the time of that initial Broadway run, it had been decades since any truly new Python material — the 1983 film “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life” — and the musical, which has since had productions in the West End and international tours, exposed a new generation to the quintessential British brand of humor. The revival, which opens Nov. 16 at the St. James Theater, is in a similar position. The last meaningful Python collaboration was in 2014, when the group united for a series of shows at the O2 Arena in London. (Two members of the group have died: Chapman in 1989 and Jones in 2020.)Idle said he had “no idea” how Python’s brand of humor had continued to hold up today.“Python is portmanteau comedy,” Idle, 80, wrote in an email via a spokeswoman. “It has a bit of everything. People always found it funny but they didn’t always agree on which bits. I think it survives because it was written by its actors and acted by its writers. It is executive-free comedy.”This revival was the brainchild of the producer Jeffrey Finn, an executive at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Rhodes’s production of “Spamalot” had a critically well-received run there this past spring, and garnered enough of an audience response that Finn thought a Broadway production could overcome the ticket sale malaise that pervades the industry.“What I feel like we proved at the Kennedy Center is that the escapism and the joy in the theater that this show delivers is what I feel audiences are looking for now,” Finn said. “Because it’s a crazy, harsh world out there, and having two and a half hours just to laugh and enjoy and be taken away by this lunacy, in the best way possible, is just joyful.”“Spamalot” was adapted from the 1975 movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which satirizes the Arthurian legend. Columbia PicturesThe revival doesn’t update the book or music substantially, if at all, but the show does offer new staging, choreography and improv from a who’s who of Broadway notables, including James Monroe Iglehart (King Arthur), Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer (the Lady of the Lake), Ethan Slater (Prince Herbert) and Taran Killam (Lancelot).“Have you ever seen a person of color play the king? No,” said Iglehart, who originated the role of the Genie in the Broadway adaptation of “Aladdin.” (This is his first leading role on Broadway.) “I make a joke all the time that there are two kings on Broadway: Mufasa and me.”At the rehearsal, the run-through was chock-full of inside jokes about Broadway and references to current events. But ultimately the troupe’s material — exhibited in several films, a television show, tours and albums — is still the backbone of the show.Killam, the “Saturday Night Live” alum, called himself a “dyed-in-the-wool” Python fan and said that the “intelligent absurdist humor of Python is in my veins.” (Killam will be replaced by Alex Brightman in January. Brightman was in the Kennedy Center production, but the opening of the Broadway run conflicted with his current Broadway production, the play “The Shark Is Broken.”)“They were a true variety sketch group,” Killam said. “There were six different voices with different points of view and different objectives. So that brought such good balance. I think the sort of life spirit of their comedy is absurdity and certainly aiming that absurdity at social and economical structures of power, be it the monarchy or the church or banks or a class system. There is an intelligence about their absurdity.”The Python inclination to poke fun at institutions is present throughout “Spamalot,” as when God commands Arthur and his knights to find the Holy Grail. In response, a knight wonders why God himself — if he is all-knowing — doesn’t know where it is.The show’s director Josh Rhodes, center, flanked by the producer Jeffrey Finn, and the associate director Deidre Goodwin during rehearsals last month.Gregg Delman for The New York TimesThe biggest difference between “Holy Grail” and “Spamalot” is the Lady of the Lake character, who does not exist in the movie. The role has become a launching pad of sorts. Sara Ramirez won a best featured actress Tony for originating the role on Broadway. Hannah Waddingham, a star of the hit Apple show “Ted Lasso,” performed the part in the West End and was nominated for an Olivier.Kritzer, a theater veteran who last appeared on Broadway in “Beetlejuice,” wasn’t as familiar as Killam with the work of Monty Python, but she did see the original production with Ramirez.“I never thought of myself doing this role, simply for the fact that very tall women have played this part — and I am 5-foot-3,” Kritzer said. “Everyone’s like, ‘Oh my God, it’s perfect for you.’ And I was like, ‘Really?’ I always think of it as this tall person role. And then when I got into rehearsal, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is like my modern Carol Burnett showcase.’”In this version, Kritzer said, “they let us improvise a lot. I’m doing things that were never in the original, ever, ever. Musically and otherwise.”When Monty Python burst onto the scene in the 1960s, its brand of comedy was considered revolutionary. They broke the rules of traditional comedy at the time with unusually structured sketches that would routinely break the fourth wall, end abruptly and not rely on simple punchlines, not to mention Gilliam’s zany animations.Now, “Spamalot,” at least in 2023, is a safe comedy with an enduring fan base who devour all things Python. This was apparent at an early preview, when Killam emerged as one of the Knights of Ni. The crowd started chanting “Ni!” before Killam said a word, prompting Killam to gesture to the crowd as if to say, “You get it.”“Even in any of the comedies that I’ve done on Broadway, there’s always some like, ‘We’re going to learn something,’” Kritzer said. “We don’t really learn something in this. We just have a great time, and that’s OK.”As to whether this will be the last-ever newish Monty Python project, Idle responded, “We can only pray.” More

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    What’s on TV This Week: The Annual CMA Awards and ‘The Curse’

    The country music show airs for the 57th year. Showtime airs a new show with Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Nov. 6-Nov. 12. Details and times are subject to change.MondayFRIENDS MARATHON beginning at 10 p.m. on Nickelodeon. I can easily say that Chandler Bing is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time — so last week’s news of the death of Matthew Perry (the actor who portrayed him on “Friends”) was especially devastating. Though unexpected, shocking and heartbreaking, I am going to try to focus on Perry’s gift that keeps on giving. This sitcom marathon starts with “The One With the Baby on the Bus” (no explanation on this needed) and goes into the wee hours of the morning. Please read this next sentence in Chandler Bing’s iconic intonation: Could I be anymore thankful that this show exists?TuesdayBehind the scenes with Bobby Flay on his show “Beat Bobby Flay.”Evan Sung for The New York TimesBEAT BOBBY FLAY: HOLIDAY THROWDOWN 9 p.m. on Food. The chef Bobby Flay has been beating most people he goes up against on his long-running competition show and I am sure nothing is going to change during this holiday themed show (returning for a second season). The “Holiday Throwdown” spinoff starts with a Thanksgiving- episode, where Flay will compete against the chefs Darnell Ferguson and Bryan and Michael Voltaggio (who are brothers) to make the best Thanksgiving meal.STAND UP & SHOUT 9 p.m. on HBO. This is like the movie “Fame” for a modern era. Instead of taking place in the 1980s at New York High School of Performing Arts, this movie, a documentary, follows students at the Hill-Freedman World Academy who are taught how to write and produce original songs — and of course, perform them. It also touches on the positive effects that music education can have on a community.WednesdayTHE 57TH ANNUAL CMA AWARDS 8 p.m. on ABC. Grab your cowboy boots and get ready for performances of “Leave Me Again” (Kelsea Ballerini), “White Horse” (Chris Stapleton), “Where the Wild things Are” (Luke Combs), among others, as Country Music Awards presenters hand out honors for entertainer of the year, album of the year and more.REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE 8 p.m. on NBC. NBC’s Lester Holt, Kristen Welker and Hugh Hewitt are set to moderate the third Republican debate of this election cycle, broadcast live from Miami. As of the time of publication, Governor Ron DeSantis, former Governor Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, former Governor Chris Christie and Senator Tim Scott have qualified to participate. There are fewer candidates this time around as Republican National Committee has raised the threshold for qualifying in terms of both polling numbers and the number of donors.Xander Black, left, and Cecilia Aldarondo in “You Were My First Boyfriend.”via HBOYOU WERE MY FIRST BOYFRIEND 9 p.m. on HBO. In a style similar to the quirky “PEN15,” this documentary(ish) feature, shows the filmmaker Cecilia Aldarondo reliving some of the defining moments of her less than ideal teenage years through re-creations of scenes with herself and actors. She also tracks down old friends and enemies with the ultimate goal of self-acceptance.ThursdayHAIRSPRAY (1988) 9 p.m. on TCM. Though I can’t help but be partial to Zac Efron as Link Larkin in the 2007 edition of this film, I can appreciate the original as well. The movie follows the Baltimore teenager, Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake), who gets a big break in her dreams of stardom when she is hired onto “The Corny Collins Show.” She starts a romance with Link (in this case, Michael St. Gerard) and fights to integrate the show. John Waters directs in what may be one of his most tame productions (most of his other movies are rated X, but this is PG).FridayClaire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio in “William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.”Merrick Morton/20th Century FoxWILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S ROMEO AND JULIET (1996) 9 p.m. on TCM. This Baz Luhrmann rendition of the classic tale takes place far away from Europe and is instead set in the fictional Verona Beach, Calif., and the Capulets and the Montagues aren’t warring families, but rival gangs. The movie “invents a whole new vocabulary for a story of star-crossed young love,” Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review. “It calls for pink hair, screaming billboards, tabloid television stories, music-video editing and a little hot dog shack called Rosencrantzky’s on Verona Beach.”SaturdayALBERT BROOKS: DEFENDING MY LIFE 8 p.m. on HBO. Albert Brooks might be best known for the 1987 film “Broadcast News,” which earned him an Academy Award nomination, but his directing, acting and comedy career has been nothing if not diverse. From voice acting on “The Simpsons” and “Finding Nemo,” to his roles in “Drive” and “Taxi Driver,” Brooks has done a little bit of everything. This documentary features a look at Brooks’s career from the perspective of castmates, friends and family, as well as Brooks himself.SundayTHE CURSE 10 p.m. on Showtime. Are Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone a pair I really saw acting together? Not really. Am I here for it? Absolutely. This comedy follows husband and wife Asher (Fielder) and Whitney (Stone) as they struggle to conceive a baby under the shadow of a supposed curse — all of this happening as the couple star in a “Love It or List It”-type HGTV show. More

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    ‘For All Mankind’ Launches a Mission to Mars, With New Wrinkles

    For a show that has aged its characters over many decades, the biggest challenge is not sending people to Mars but making them look believable once they arrive.When Ed Baldwin lands on the moon in October 1971, he is in early middle age. His light brown hair swoops across his forehead. His clean-shaven face is ruddy and, excepting a divot between his eyebrows, unwrinkled. But space can really age a man. By 2003, on Mars, his hair has grayed and receded, and the wrinkles have multiplied and deepened. His skin is sallow, marked with age spots. His cheeks have sunk in.Ed, a highly decorated astronaut, is a central character of the Apple TV+ series “For All Mankind.” He is played by the Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman, who was a few years younger than Ed during the first season, which debuted in 2019. Kinnaman is now 43, but in the fourth season, which premieres on Nov. 10, Ed is in his 70s. Which meant that Kinnaman’s shooting days typically began before dawn, with four hours in the hair and makeup chair.This is one of the myriad hurdles and minor miracles of “For All Mankind,” a series that posits a world in which the space race never ended. From its painstaking aging process to its imagination of an alternative past and interplanetary future, “For All Mankind” is both quiet and wild in its ambitions, a work of science fiction that retains the texture of observable reality. And in this coming season, which shows characters first seen in their 20s now in their 60s and 70s, the crew has had to work harder than ever to achieve plausibility. Sure, you can send men and women to Mars. But can you make them look believable once they arrive?The new season largely unfolds on a base on Mars.Apple TV+“When we were pitching the show, we were like, ‘Oh, this is going to be so great,’” Ben Nedivi, one of the show’s three creators, said during a recent video call. “Now that we’re in Season 4, the challenge has been enormous.”Season 1 began in 1969, when — mild spoilers for the first three seasons follow — in the initial shift from our own timeline, the Russians first land a man on the moon. It ended in 1974, with American men and women having built a lunar base. Season 2, which took place in the ’80s, expanded on this base. Season 3, set in the 1990s, brought Americans, Russians and a lone surviving North Korean to Mars. Season 4 jumps forward another decade. Throughout, the remaining characters are played by the same actors. (The exceptions are characters who first appear as children.)“For All Mankind,” which Nedivi created with Matt Wolpert, his fellow showrunner, and Ronald D. Moore, was always intended as a generational show. Its goal was to take the space race from the 1960s to the present and perhaps beyond, showing exploration and advancement across lifetimes.Sometimes those lifetimes are short. “Space is an insanely dangerous place,” Wolpert said. Otherwise the show’s format requires its characters to age a decade between seasons, without the use of computer-generated effects. (The C.G.I. on “For All Mankind” is for asteroids and explosions, not hair loss.)“The amount of time that Ben and I spend talking about hair and makeup and aging is not something we anticipated,” Wolpert said.“It doesn’t hurt that we’re aging during the show,” added Nedivi, who is visibly grayer than he was when the show debuted. “Trust me, I feel like I’m aging double-time.”From top, Joel Kinnaman in the first, second and third seasons. The makeup artists tried to age the stars subtly.Apple TV+This illusionism began years ago, in the initial casting sessions. Nedivi and Wolpert were looking for actors who were somewhat older than their characters, with the thought that they could be aged down for Season 1 and up beginning in Season 3.During Season 1, the makeup department, led by Erin Koplow, used foundation to give the actors a youthful, dewy look, covering up wrinkles and any discoloration. For the women, makeup appropriate to the era was laid over that. Hair was given extra luster.In the second season, the actors were more or less left alone, though some were given small pieces of what Koplow calls “stretch and stipple,” a latex solution that gives the appearance of fine lines. (The actors are mostly in their 30s, which means they should have fine lines of their own. That’s between them and their dermatologists.)For Season 3 there was more stretch and stipple, more gray hair. Kinnaman, whose character is older than most in the show, was given prosthetic silicone pieces, which created deeper wrinkles. If dark circles or eye bags existed, they were left uncorrected or were even accentuated. And the actors learned to hold themselves differently, better reflecting sore backs and joint pain.Several critics reviewing Seasons 2 and 3 found these interventions insufficient. “The effort to age its stars is negligible at best,” a Vanity Fair writer wrote of the third season. But this was intentional, meant to reflect a natural, gradual process.“With women in particular, it’s really easy to go too far and to make them monstrous with aging,” Glen P. Griffin, who oversees makeup’s special effects and prosthetics, said. “So you have to be really, really subtle.”That subtlety can be thankless: The actors don’t enjoy it; the viewers don’t see it. Griffin and Koplow both described believable middle-age makeup as the hardest part of the job. But this nuance is necessary. Should characters survive, the hair and makeup teams will have to intervene further.Kinnaman’s shooting days typically began before dawn, with hours in the hair and makeup chair.Apple TV+Costuming also helps to age and situate the characters. As with the makeup, the period clothes are meant to murmur, not to shout.“It’s best if they’re not overtly loud,” said Esther M. Marquis, the costume designer for the third and fourth seasons. “There has to be space for the actor to be who their character is. I don’t want to crowd in.”As the characters have aged, the tailoring has changed. “Hollywood loves to get all trim and put together, and that’s not really our show,” Marquis said. The fit in subsequent seasons does not always flatter, suggesting maturity, even subtle weight gain.The few costume pieces that do fit and do shout are the spacesuits, each of which is custom-built. While the suits in the first season were closely modeled on NASA’s designs, by Season 2, Americans had established a permanent base on the moon, outpacing current technologies. For the third and fourth seasons, Marquis had to imagine a suit appropriate for Mars’s climate that could be made mostly from materials and methods available in 2003.“The suit that I was designing had to live in both worlds, a future world and a past world,” she said. “I didn’t want to get too far away from a 2003 reality.”But Marquis did give herself some license, dreaming up a textile that would lead to a slimmer and more pliant silhouette. Most real spacesuits are 14 layers thick. Marquis’s are slighter, as are the astronauts’ backpacks, which would struggle to hold both life support and backup life support systems.“There’s a lot of action in Season 4,” she said. “So the suits had to get lighter.” She noted that the real-world suit designers she had spoken to were also wrestling with the same question.Kinnaman and Casey W. Johnson in Season 3 of “For All Mankind.” In the new season, the spacesuits had to be lighter.Apple TV+The show’s depiction of a different Earth extends beyond crow’s feet and helmets. Its approach to alternate reality is typically subtle. A Mars landing is an admittedly big swing, yet most of the other timeline changes are more restrained. Ted Kennedy skips the Chappaquiddick party. John Lennon survives. Michael Jordan plays for a different team.In each subsequent season, the divergence from our world is greater, a butterfly effect enhanced by the technologies the space race of the show has yielded. Most significantly, the moon’s supply of helium-3 has been mined for cold fusion, effectively solving the climate crisis. (Unscientific viewers like me might have assumed that helium-3 was among the show’s inventions. It’s very real.)This reflects the show’s arguably less subtle message, that something profound was lost when America gave up the space race.“That longing is what inspired us,” Nedivi said. “The show presupposes the idea that actually going out into the unknown and learning more about the world will teach us more about who we are and what we’re capable of.”Since the series’s 2019 debut, the space race has coincidentally begun to run just a little faster. More private companies have launched rockets. The Artemis 3 mission, slated for 2025, plans to land a woman and a person of color on the moon, both for the first time. There is new interest in mining metal-rich asteroids, a Season 4 plot point and another example of the show’s science fiction edging closer to reality.“A lot of the technology that we highlight has become part of the conversation in the real timeline,” Wolpert said. “That’s one of the secret weapons of our show: It’s not about impossible stuff. Nothing in our show is impossible.”Nedivi said “For All Mankind” was intended as escapism, as entertainment. “But if we can encourage further space travel,” he said, somewhat grandly, “that would be a huge plus.”While the show can’t take credit for advancing exploration, it has made at least one contribution to the space program, a small stitch for mankind. Last year, Axiom Space, a private company contracted to supply the suits for the upcoming Artemis missions, contacted Marquis. It wanted her to create a spacesuit cover, a garment meant to cloak Axiom’s proprietary technology during a news conference.“There’s no way they can use it in space because it is black and colored,” Marquis said of the cover. “But it was a wonderful experience.”Axiom has since asked her to design flight suits that real astronauts will eventually wear. In tailoring the flight suits for those astronauts, at Axiom’s Houston headquarters, Marquis was struck with a feeling of déjà vu.“It’s very similar to fitting an actor,” she said. “That’s crazy, right?” More

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    Daniel Sloss on Russell Brand and Comedy About Dark Topics

    The Scottish standup went viral for being the sole comic to go on the record in support of Russell Brand’s accusers. He’s made a career of finding humor in “things that we should not be laughing at.”The Scottish comedian Daniel Sloss likes to flout conventional humor.His earliest Netflix special, “Dark,” in 2018, was about the death of his younger sister when he was 8. He also has material about disability (his sister had cerebral palsy), mental illness and sexual assault. “I think there’s ways for everything to be funny,” he said in a video interview this week, before quickly clarifying, “I don’t think everything should be joked about in every way.”Brutality on its own doesn’t make a good punchline, he said. “The art is making the audience laugh at things that we should not be laughing at.”Sloss, 33, was the only comedian to speak on the record, using his real name, in the Channel 4 documentary about Russell Brand and in the accompanying newspaper investigation which detail the sexual assault allegations made by four women against the British actor and comic. That Sloss was the only performer to acknowledge the comedy scene’s long-running rumors about Brand left him shaken, he said. (Brand has denied the allegations.)In his 2019 HBO special “X,” Sloss describes learning that a female friend of his was raped by another friend, part of a group of guys he had long been buddies with. The special — in which he mostly jokes about his own shortcomings — becomes an impassioned plea for all men to do more to call out and prevent misconduct. (He workshopped it with survivors of assault.) After the Brand investigation, clips from the show went viral.Sloss, who performs at the New York Comedy Festival on Friday, grew up in an erudite household: His mother is a scientist who consults for the U.N. around clean energy, and his father is a programmer who also designs robotics. He started performing in clubs at 17, quickly rising through the ranks at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to become an international touring star. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife and 21-month-old son, and now, much to his chagrin, does jokes about fatherhood.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.The way you talk about your upbringing, it seems like your family expressed love by roasting each other.Yeah. That’s just a very Scottish thing. The way you talk about yourself is self-deprecating. You have to take yourself down in Scotland, because if you don’t, society will do it for you. Tall poppy syndrome exists here — if you stick your head too far up and you’re too proud. I’ve been brought down by the Scottish public several times over my career.In his special “X,” Sloss talked about the sexual assault of a friend after getting her permission to discuss it. HBOYou found success early.I was marketable: young, white, accent. Arguably good looking. I was confident. And I was decent. But a lot of it was right moment, right time, given opportunities that other people deserved.How did you decide to turn to different material?I think it was my fourth Fringe show when I decided to do darker jokes, stuff that wouldn’t make it on television. And I think every day of that run, I watched about 15 or 20 people leave. That was never fun, but I was fine with it because I’m like, I stand behind everything I’m saying now. I will defend that this is funny.The best standup, for me, is the sort that makes you think. I remember the first time I saw Jim Jefferies do his gun control routine. It’s so funny, but it’s made me think profoundly about it. And I could see it making people in the audience think.You can get away with some of these things because people believe that you have a moral center.Yes. I think there’s something about being vulnerable to people — it’s honesty, and I think they see goodness in that.When I did “Dark,” the feedback was really good. I loved the silences. I loved the challenge of it. How am I going to make people laugh with the death of a 6-year-old disabled girl? How can you pull humor out of that? And the answer is the same way that my family pulled humor out of it. You don’t laugh at the tragedy itself. You acknowledge the tragedy. And while looking around it, you can find things to make fun of, because the most powerful thing in the world is to laugh in the face of death.You talk in “X” about learning the stats on how common, and underprosecuted, sexual assault and rape are after your friend, who gave you permission to discuss it, disclosed what happened to her. Did you wonder why more men don’t learn about that? What made you want to talk about it?Because me and the group of friends, we felt so stupid, man. He admitted it the second we confronted him — which blew our minds. Looking back, there were plenty of signs, which we chose to ignore, because we put it down to banter, like, “Hey, he’s just saying things that we all say.”Whenever “X” goes viral, I hate it, because it destroys the message of the show. They just take that 90-second clip, where it’s me yelling at men. You cannot make men learn anything if you yell at them. And that sucks. It would be so nice if yelling at men worked; we could fix all of the problems. But it never works.So I made sure the show is bringing men in. The whole point is that I’m a deeply flawed man. I have toxic traits; I’ve been toxic in the past. I am completely and utterly imperfect. But that doesn’t make me a predator. I believe most men are good, and I want them to listen to me.When we toured “X,” I was really expecting some backlash from men. I was expecting walkouts. And every single night, without fail, I got DMs, emails, messages from men, like, “I sat beside my wife, I sat beside my daughter, my sister, my girlfriend. And when you started talking, I didn’t realize how ignorant I had been, and I was mortified. And then after the show I spoke to the women in my life. They told me a story which broke my heart.” It was so many men just coming to the same realization as me.What did you make of the response to the Brand exposé and the fact that you were the only voice from the comedy world speaking in support of women?I didn’t know I was the only one. I’d seen the clip with me in it. But they hadn’t shown me the context [that no one else came forward]. Devastating. I’m still processing it. To be honest with you, I’m still angry.The focus should never have been about me, ever, at any point. The only reason was because I looked brave. And I was only brave by omission. I was only brave because other people were cowards.Let’s be honest: I did the bare minimum. I acknowledged a rumor that we had all heard. So that’s why I thought so many people would do the bare minimum. They didn’t, and then they just continued being like, “I wasn’t asked.” Well, you can still say something now. Like, just because you missed the starting pistol doesn’t mean you don’t finish the race. Join in!You’ve said that becoming a father has made you a better person and a worse comedian.Yes, but that’s true for everyone. I don’t know what it is. I think maybe it’s such a higher level of empathy than you had before that it actually blunts your edges. I mean, I like pushing boundaries. But before I would certainly say callous things just for the sake of saying callous things.I used to have a joke that would split the audience down the middle, and I loved that. And I now realize that it’s because the joke was about harm happening to children. Before I was a parent, I found the joke very, very funny. And now I don’t. And that makes me hate myself, because that means I’m a comedian who’s offended by one of his own jokes. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Sabbath’s Theater’ Review: John Turturro Embodies a Life and a Libido

    Though a tour de force for its actors, an Off Broadway adaptation of Philip Roth’s willfully obscene 1995 novel is too faithful to its source.John Turturro begins the New Group’s “Sabbath’s Theater” with his pants down. He ends it with his pants off. In between, he masturbates on his lover’s grave, wears a pair of pink panties on his head and lingers on an oncology ward discussing outré sexual practices. This suggests a work meant to shock or at the very least goose the viewer. But excepting the performances of Turturro and Elizabeth Marvel as Sabbath’s wives and lovers, the show, for all its full-frontal nudity, is strangely inert. Flaccid? Sure.“Sabbath’s Theater,” now playing at the Signature Center, is an adaptation of Philip Roth’s 1995 novel, which won the National Book Award. It’s the story of Mickey Sabbath (Turturro), a former avant-garde puppeteer who devotes his later decades to adultery and complaint. When his mistress, Drenka (Marvel), dies, Sabbath, suddenly unmoored, leaves his New England home and his marriage, seeking erotic adventure and possibly his death.Scabrous and willfully obscene, the novel is often read as an exemplar of Roth’s late-career efflorescence, a distillation of his preoccupations, libidinal and otherwise. Then again, there are dissenters like Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, who wrote that the book has “a static and claustrophobic air, resulting in a novel that’s sour instead of manic, nasty instead of funny, lugubrious instead of liberating.” Sabbath is one of Roth’s many navel-gazing heroes. Sabbath’s gaze, however, aims just a little lower.Elizabeth Marvel as Sabbath’s wives and lovers is glorious, enfleshing characters who might otherwise seem merely male projections, our critic writes.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe problem at the Signature Center — a frequent one for Roth’s characters — is one of fidelity. Here’s the twist: This adaptation, by Turturro, a longtime friend of Roth’s, and the journalist and memoirist Ariel Levy, is simply too faithful, too monogamous. There’s no cheating, no straying, barely a flirtation, which means that the transmutation from book to stage is incomplete. “We didn’t write anything,” Levy told The Times. “It’s only Roth’s writing. Including most of the stage directions. Because you can’t top it.”Maybe so. But novels aren’t plays. And prose isn’t dialogue. Words that live comfortably on the page turn awkward and overly formal in the mouths of the actors. This version, a monologue with interruptions, shifts constantly between dialogue and direct address, the better to maintain Roth’s language. In this container, the drama stagnates, weighed down by Sabbath’s solipsistic gripes. (The adapters, in one decisive excision, have stripped those gripes of racism.)In his youth, Sabbath tells us, he was a guerrilla provocateur, the mastermind of a company called Sabbath’s Indecent Theater. If only some of that formal anarchy had infused this production. Where are the puppets, the street theater tactics? Jo Bonney is a sensitive and inventive director, yet here invention fails her. She offers a mostly spare stage, neatly delineated by Jeff Croiter’s clever lighting design and Alex Basco Koch’s dull projections, and a steady march from scene to scene as Sabbath, already a self-described “degenerate,” degenerates further. Yet not too far.As Sabbath says, in the middle of the play and again at the end, “To everyone I have ever horrified, to the appalled who’d consider me a dangerous man, loathsome, degenerate and gross. Not at all! My failure is failing to have gone far enough!” Agreed. I am a highly shockable sort of person. Still I can’t say that I ever felt truly scandalized or even absolutely engaged, most likely because the characters and situations remain unreal, tethered to the page. A brief scene of Sabbath trying to pleasure himself with his arthritic fingers was at least funny.If “Sabbath’s Theater” offers a limited tour of the human psyche, it succeeds as a tour de force for Turturro and for Marvel, too. (Jason Kravits is perfectly capable in a number of roles, most of them thankless.) As Sabbath, Turturro is shifty, kinetic, with a bend in the knees and a shrug in the shoulders, ferocious in his loathing and desire. His performance is vivid, visceral in a way that transcends the prose. Marvel, who is never anything less than glorious, enfleshes characters who might otherwise seem merely male projections. In contrast to Turturro’s arm-waving defiance, she offers an effortless stillness and a great capacity for joy. Her characters are fully human and quietly life-affirming, counterparts to Sabbath’s peculiar death drive.“Sabbath’s Theater,” no longer a book and not quite a play, is best enjoyed as a celebration of its performers. But it’s never as unholy as it wants to be.Sabbath’s TheaterThrough Dec. 17 at the Signature Center, Manhattan; thenewgroup.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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    in Television

    Late Night Celebrates George Santos Sticking Around

    Jimmy Kimmel was selfishly thrilled that the House voted to keep the New York representative in office, saying Santos “will live to scam another day.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Santa Came Early for SantosRepresentative George Santos of New York will keep his seat after a Republican-led effort to expel him failed in the House on Wednesday.Late night hosts expressed their gratitude, with Jimmy Kimmel thrilled that Santos “will live to scam another day.”“It’s bittersweet because, on one hand, having a brazen liar like this in Congress is not great for the country or for his district back in New York. But, on the other hand, it’s so good for our monologue. I mean, it’s — it is solid gold, and I really want to thank everybody for keeping him around a little while longer.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You’re telling me, after all the corruption, the fraud, the money laundering, the identity theft, the fake volleyball, the mystery baby, the fake Hannah Montana, the fake Spider-Man, that Congress decided to not expel George Santos? Well, I have only one thing to say to you: Thank you! I need this. He may be a crazy criminal, but compared to all the other criminals, he’s fun!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Santos celebrated his stay of execution by going out to a nice dinner and charging it to some old lady’s credit card.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Trumps on Trial Edition)“Now, in Trump’s New York financial fraud trial, which is going on presently, the court is hearing testimony from Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric. Or as Trump calls them ‘The pretty one, the smart one, my favorite, Don Jr., and Eric.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I haven’t seen a more likable set of brothers on trial since the Menendez boys.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Both Don Jr. and Eric claim they couldn’t remember much about any of this stuff. Eric repeatedly said, ‘I don’t focus on the financial side of things.’ He said — and this was his real answer — he said, ‘I pour concrete.’ He said that several times, he said, ‘I’m not a money guy, I’m a construction guy.’ He’s a construction guy like the guy in the Village People is a construction guy. He owns a yellow hat.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s actually convenient that all of the Trumps have testified now ’cause they’re going to use the courtroom sketches for their holiday card.” — JIMMY FALLON“Then Eric Trump took the stand and also claimed ignorance. He had to — he was under oath.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Their father was not there to cheer his sons on. Donald Trump — really, Donald Trump not showing up to watch his kids testify in a fraud trial is the Trump family version of not showing up for their school play.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingOn his last night guest-hosting “The Daily Show,” Charlamagne Tha God spoke with Doug Melville, the author of “Invisible Generals,” about documenting the untold stories of America’s first Black generals.Also, Check This OutTracey Emin at her studio in Margate, England. “I think people weren’t sure that I was sincere,” she said. “And I hope now maybe they’ll see that I am.”Charlie Gates for The New York TimesArtist Tracey Emin returns to New York with her first solo show in seven years, “Lovers Grave.” More

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    Somewhat Guiltily, Ukrainians Miss Matthew Perry

    Even as the war’s devastation rages on, Ukrainians have found space to mourn an actor who brought them comfort and laughter.It was the middle of the night in Ukraine, and Natalia Sosnytska couldn’t sleep. So she opened the Instagram app on her phone — and saw that the actor Matthew Perry had died.She broke down in tears, she said, then immediately felt embarrassed.“We need to remember those dying here in Ukraine daily, but maybe also those who inspire us,” she said, trying to come to terms with her layered emotions.She was hardly alone. Mr. Perry’s death last Saturday resonated with the many Ukrainians who had watched “Friends,” which was shown on broadcast television in the country and was popular especially with younger people.On the day that Mr. Perry’s death was reported by Ukraine’s mainstream news outlets and discussed on social media, the news in Ukraine was difficult, as usual: Russia had bombed the southern city of Kherson, and nine Ukrainian civilians, including children, had been found shot to death in the occupied town of Volnovakha. Yet Ukrainians found space in their hearts for sadness about the death of an actor who had touched their lives.“It is almost the same age as Ukrainian independence,” Maryna Synhaivska, the deputy director of the Ukrinform news agency, said of “Friends,” which began in 1994, three years after Ukraine split from the Soviet Union.“I was growing up with him, same as many Ukrainians,” Ms. Synhaivska said of Mr. Perry and Chandler Bing, his character on the show. “I am senselessly saddened by this news, and I can say that tens of thousands of people read it.”The series’ success in Ukraine was partly down to the high quality of its translation. It was dubbed into Ukrainian rather than Russian, and linguists have highlighted how well its American slang was rendered. Ukrainian viewers were also able to watch each new episode almost at the same time as viewers in the United States.Ms. Sosnytska, who is 32, named a community center that she opened in 2017 for young people in her hometown, Kostiantynivka, in eastern Ukraine, after the show.The space was intended to be a place where like-minded people could get together and have fun, but they struggled to settle on a name they all liked. She had watched every season of “Friends” no less than 10 times, she said, and her friends liked it, too. So they called the center Druzi — “friends” in Ukrainian — and the sign on the building mimicked the show’s title font.The community center Druzi before the full scale invasion in Kostiantynivka, Donetsk region, Ukraine.via Natalia SosnytskaThese days, the city is near the front line, where life is highly dangerous, and the community center sits empty, surrounded by bomb craters.Ms. Sosnytska said that when she heard the news of Mr. Perry’s death, “I understood that I just need to watch one more time.”The series has been a source of solace for some Ukrainian fans during the many months of war.Anastasiya Nigmatulina, 28, a beautician in Vinnytsia, a city in central Ukraine, said she had watched the show over and over since the war started. “It helps me to feel better,” she said.Her husband is a soldier, and she worries about him often. He is home on leave now with her and their 5-year-old daughter, but will return to the front soon. There were many times when Ms. Nigmatulina “felt scared and stressed, but this series supported me,” she said.“And particularly Chandler Bing, played by Matthew Perry,” she added. “I feel like I lost a close friend.”“Friends” also helped some in the country learn Ukrainian, just as it has aided people around the world in learning English.“I talk and hear how I am using the words from specific episodes, from that brilliant Ukrainian translation we had,” said Yulia Po, 38, a Crimea native who grew up in a Russian-speaking environment and said she had learned Ukrainian thanks to “Friends.”As a 13-year-old coming home after school, she recalled, she would have just enough time to fry herself potatoes and get comfortable with a plate in front of the television before the show aired.She left Crimea after Russia occupied it in 2014, now refuses to speak Russian on principle, and has not been home or seen her parents since leaving, she said. “So I have a lot of emotions for this show,” Ms. Po said, adding, “Back then, when I escaped Crimea, I was depressed and I watched it and watched it, and it helped.”Last weekend, when she learned that Mr. Perry had died, she felt a slight sadness.“This is just a humane emotion to feel sad — there is always a space for it,” Ms. Po said. “He was with me for a long time and gave me many reasons to laugh.” More