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    Review: In Theresa Rebeck’s ‘Dig’, a Plant Shop Nurtures Weary Souls

    Theresa Rebeck’s play, a Primary Stages production at 59E59 Theaters, is a beautifully acted dramedy exploring the truth and warped perceptions of it.Amid the thriving greenery of an indie plant shop called Dig, two living organisms are only tenuously clinging to survival.One is a neglected wreck of withering vegetation brought in for emergency care. The other is a woman huddled in the corner, her hood up to block out the world. She’s here with her father, Lou, who nearly killed that plant. But as he bickers amusingly with his old friend Roger, the kindly grump who owns the store, she is too bone-weary to engage.Her name is Megan, and one of the worst misfortunes has blanketed her in grief: the death of her little boy in a notorious accident, which the whole country knows was all her fault. Total strangers despise her for it, yet no one is blaming Megan more mercilessly than she is herself. After a suicide attempt, she is living with her father in the Ohio town where she grew up. So far, it isn’t going great.“I embarrass him,” she tells Roger after Lou steps out. Pre-empting any argument to the contrary, she adds: “The truth is the truth and if you try to get around it, it will come after you and take you down.”The truth and poisonously warped perceptions of it are major themes in Theresa Rebeck’s new play “Dig,” at 59E59 Theaters, and we’ll get to that. First let’s pause to run down the list of off-putting subjects mentioned so far: death of a child, grief, suicide.But this intelligent, compassionate, beautifully acted dramedy — directed by the playwright for Primary Stages — is not a downer. Rebeck has spiked her script with comedy, and enlisted a cast as nimble with laugh lines as with prickliness and pain.As Megan, Andrea Syglowski has a coiled, almost feral rage that snaps its tight leash more than once. Just watch her go after Molly (Mary Bacon), a chatty customer who has been trying to figure out why Megan looks so familiar. When the penny drops, Megan turns on her with a scorching intensity.Alongside mourning and self-reproach, repentance is a motif in Megan’s life; she is forever apologizing. But humor can coexist with all that, and in this hope-filled, distinctly non-Pollyanna-ish play, she is very funny, too.Swiftly feeling more comfortable at Dig than in her father’s house — Roger (Jeffrey Bean), an absolute geek for plants, has a nurturing vibe — she finagles her way into an unpaid job there, and flourishes a bit. (The set is by Christopher and Justin Swader.) Everett (Greg Keller), the stoner who is the shop’s only other employee, sees her as a rival for Roger’s esteem. And Megan nearly worships Roger, which Everett truly does not get.“No offense, but you’re like a larva,” she says. “You know, you’re like something that’s not even a bug yet. So I don’t actually expect you to understand.”One of the judgiest gossips in town, Everett cloaks aggressive cruelty in the guise of honesty. But he has Keller’s charisma and comic chops, so the audience loves him. In an Act II scene between Megan and Everett, he is faced with a choice so morally appalling that a bad decision could change everything we’ve thought about him. I have never felt an audience silently will a character to do the right thing the way it did in that moment.Hypocrisy and sexist double standards are fundamental to what Rebeck is contemplating in “Dig,” as feminist a play as any of her others. She is examining not just parental guilt — Lou (Triney Sandoval) feels this, too, about Megan — but also deeply ingrained notions about the sanctity of motherhood in particular, and the censoriousness that failing at it brings.Everett and the many others eager to condemn Megan think they know the truth about her son’s death. Even Lou holds her responsible, but he ought to listen to himself.“She was always a screw-up,” he tells Roger, “but never in a million years would anyone have believed that she could do something so grotesque.”Did she, though? Megan has taken the blame, heaped it on herself. She believes to her core that she deserves it.She confessed to the police. And no one dug any further: It is the mother’s fault.DigThrough Oct. 22 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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    A Tiananmen Square Musical Worries About China’s Glare

    The original lead actor and director withdrew from the Phoenix production of a show about the 1989 pro-democracy protests, a topic that China aggressively censors.When it was announced that Zachary Noah Piser would be playing the lead role in “Tiananmen: A New Musical,” he happened to be on a concert tour of five Chinese cities with a group of Broadway actors.One day later, Piser, who played the title role in “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway last year, posted a short statement on Instagram, where most of his posts are bright and colorful.This one featured just seven words set against a blank white backdrop: “I have withdrawn from the musical Tiananmen.”“It was very odd to me because it was one statement, and it’s not usually how things like this happen in our business,” said Marc Oka, a cast member who found out about Piser’s departure through the Aug. 25 post, which had comments disabled.Those involved with the “Tiananmen” musical, which premieres at the Phoenix Theater Company next month, are well aware that China aggressively censors discussions of the Tiananmen protests, in which Chinese troops killed hundreds if not thousands of pro-democracy student activists.Jason Rose, the musical’s lead producer, said Piser’s manager told him — without providing details — that the actor felt pressure to leave the show and to post on Instagram. The manager, Dave Brenner, denied saying that.“It was a decision he had to make and it was not an easy one,” Brenner said of Piser, declining to comment on why the actor quit a day after the public casting announcement. Piser also declined to comment.Since the show, which follows the account of two Chinese students during the 50 days of protests at Tiananmen Square, was optioned by Rose’s Quixote Productions two years ago, some members of its cast have been worried about how the Chinese authorities might respond.It is unclear exactly why Piser, who is Chinese American, decided to leave the show he was set to star in. But the show’s original director and at least one other cast member dropped out, Rose said, because of fears about the safety of family members in China. The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.Darren Lee became the musical’s director after the first one dropped out because of concerns about his family’s safety.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe departures illustrate how frightening it can be for people with connections to China to bring attention to the 1989 protests in Beijing. The Chinese government continues to evade responsibility for the massacre and tries to eradicate any remembrance of the event — the brutal conclusion to weeks of demonstrations that had pierced the Communist Party’s facade of invincibility.“Even doing a regional production in Phoenix, Ariz., there is so much concern over the control and reach of the Chinese government that American actors are afraid to be involved in the show,” said Kennedy Kanagawa, who replaced Piser in “Tiananmen.”The show’s new director and choreographer, Darren Lee, who is Chinese American, said he accepted the job only after determining that he did not have direct relatives who might face retaliation from the Chinese government.“It was the first time where I’ve ever been in the position where I asked my parents whether or not they thought it was OK to take the show,” he said.“Tiananmen: A New Musical,” with a book by Scott Elmegreen and music and lyrics by Drew Fornarola, follows two fictional students at Beijing Normal University who are named after real students killed by the military. Initially, the students, Peiwen and XiaoLi, have contrasting perspectives on the protests, but they fall in love and witness history as tanks roll into the square and soldiers draw their guns.Chinese troops killed hundreds if not thousands of pro-democracy student activists during protests in 1989.Jeff Widener/Associated PressThe musical wrestles with the tension between the revolutionary act of remembering and the authoritarian attempts to erase history. In one of the closing scenes, set in the present day, XiaoXia, the sister of XiaoLi, lights a candle as part of a vigil remembering the protests. A soldier arrests her and snuffs out the flame.Earlier in the show, in a fictional monologue as his soldiers gun down protesters, Deng Xiaoping, China’s top leader at the time, says, “People will forget what we did here.”He adds: “At the edge of memory, who defines the truth? Me.”To this day, the Chinese government is vigilant about eliminating discussion of Tiananmen. The word remains one of the most censored topics in the country, second only to President Xi Jinping, said Xiao Qiang, an expert on censorship and China at the University of California, Berkeley.It does not matter, Xiao said, that this show is being staged at a regional theater.“Even the word ‘Tiananmen’ would generate fear in the Chinese government and that fear would generate a very repressive action,” he said.Within China, people who publicly discuss what happened at Tiananmen can face jail time or see their children prohibited from attending universities. In May, the activist Chen Siming was arrested by the Chinese authorities over a social media post paying tribute to Tiananmen, according to Human Rights Watch.Often the mere specter of danger is enough to muzzle any dissent, Xiao said.The cast of “Tiananmen” is entirely Asian American and Pacific Islander, but those who are not ethnically Chinese have less concern about their involvement. Kanagawa and Oka, who are both Japanese American, said they felt comfortable speaking about the show because neither has family ties to China.Potential consequences have been front of mind for other contributors. After Piser dropped out of the show, Rose said, some cast members grew more fearful and asked not to be featured in news releases or photographed.The cast has had daily conversations, Kanagawa said, about repercussions for participating in the show. Some fret about being banned from visiting China or having business contracts canceled. Others fear for the safety of their relatives.“People in China disappear still, and the idea of that being a family member is legitimately terrifying,” Kanagawa said.“Every person in the room has decided, for whatever reason — could be artistic, could be political, could be whatever — to be there,” Lee said.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe Phoenix Theater Company and Quixote Productions have a history of staging politically relevant productions, presenting a musical in 2020 called “¡Americano!,” about a young man who discovers he is an undocumented immigrant. But “Tiananmen,” which was shaped by Wu’er Kaixi, one of the real student protesters in Beijing, has produced a special set of challenges.“Every person in the room has decided, for whatever reason — could be artistic, could be political, could be whatever — to be there,” said Lee, the musical’s new director. “Everyone also understands that their comfort and their safety is paramount.”Rose said Piser and the theater company had worked cooperatively until the actor arrived in China on his concert tour. At that point, “everything changed,” Rose said.“I was always aware of the sensitivities, but frankly that’s what drew me to the show,” Rose said. “If this were 1954 or 1951, would Russia be dictating our arts scene?”“This is a show that needs to be told,” he added, “particularly because of the efforts to erase the bravery and courage from history.” More

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    A.I.-Scripted Stories, and a Counterpoint, Take the Stage Off Broadway

    “Prometheus Firebringer” and “Bioadapted” test the waters, while the abstract “Psychic Self Defense” is a warm and pulsing counterpoint.Seated behind a plain wooden table, the theater maker Annie Dorsen is not costumed to catch our gaze, or lit dramatically. In the performance-lecture that is her A.I.-focused show “Prometheus Firebringer,” at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, you might assume she’d be the boring part.Off to her right are her co-stars: a giant 3-D-printed mask of a human head with video screens for eyes, and a flock of smaller masks — faces that seem straight out of a horror film, with gaping black mouths and creepy blank eyes that are milky white windows to nonexistent souls.“It’s all made with A.I.,” Dorsen tells us. “Not what I’m saying. But the other stuff.” Jerking a casual thumb in their direction, she adds: “The masks. Their voices. What they say.”The flashy element of this production, presented by Theater for a New Audience, is a speculative version of a lost part of Aeschylus’ ancient Prometheus trilogy, created using artificial intelligence: GPT-3.5. Algorithms have been a tool in Dorsen’s work for more than a decade, but her latest piece coincides with an accelerating worry about the power of A.I. — even by some who have helped to build it — and a number of current and upcoming shows both use and scrutinize it. (Next month brings “Artificial Flavors” from the Civilians at 59E59 Theaters and “dSimon” by Simon Senn and Tammara Leites at the Crossing the Line Festival.)In the A.I.-focused show “Prometheus Firebringer,” at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, Annie Dorsen becomes her own Greek chorus, lamenting a 21st-century tragedy in the making.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs the audience settles in at “Prometheus Firebringer,” A.I.-scripted stories — or rather, variations on the same brief story — unfurl on a large electronic screen above the stage. Generated before each performance, the text at the show I saw told of “the god Zeus and the Titan Prometheus,” as one version phrased it, and a “chorus of human orphan children.”Mainly what you need to know for this show is the familiar beginning of the tale: Prometheus, a tricksy demigod, stole fire from Zeus and gave it to the grateful human race. How humans harness the technology at their disposal is the true subject of “Prometheus Firebringer,” in which Dorsen becomes her own Greek chorus, warning of, commenting on and lamenting a 21st-century tragedy that we are allowing to befall us.The 45-minute show, intercutting her brightly lighted talk with the moodily lit, robotic-sounding, speculative fragment of the trilogy, is less than riveting as a practical demonstration of A.I. The GPT-3.5 text at the performance I saw was blandly unremarkable, a technological party trick with ventriloquized masks. The playlet sans humans is remote and inert, inherently a simulacrum of drama.There’s a clumsiness to it, and a lack of clarity. I wondered at one point if the voice coming from the large mask had spoken the name Prometheus in error, like an amateur who says the character name before reading a line of dialogue.But Dorsen’s lecture is forcefully beneficial as an examination of our obeisance to technology: the cultural tendency to genuflect and acquiesce to it, reflecting a faith that it is not only superior to humans but also inevitably dominant over us. As if the tech lords were in charge of what we all become, no matter how the rest of us feel about it or what we lose.“One lesson of tragedy, then, is that we conspire with our fate,” Dorsen says.True though those words are, they are not hers. In a monologue sewn together entirely from borrowed scraps of other thinkers’ thoughts, the sentence is from the philosopher Simon Critchley’s 2019 book, “Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us.” It’s one of a legion of sources cited during the show, the author names and titles projected behind Dorsen as she speaks.This is form as provocation, courting the objection that she might as well be crawling the internet, gobbling up whatever is there and regurgitating it, dumbed down and plagiarized. But Dorsen is doing, however extremely, what artists have always done: gathering, sampling, synthesizing to create something wholly new.Susan Sontag, in “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003), is Dorsen’s source when she says that “even in the era of cybermodels, what the mind feels like is still as the ancients imagined it, an inner space — like a theater — in which we picture, and it is these pictures which allow us to remember.”Currently embodying that notion at Here, in Manhattan, is a show that feels like a warm and pulsing counterpoint to all things A.I.: Normandy Sherwood’s vividly trippy, richly theatrical “Psychic Self Defense.” Promotional materials describe it as part “live action screen saver,” but it is so much more a reverie.Normandy Sherwood’s nearly wordless show, “Psychic Self Defense,” at Here in Manhattan, is set within a proscenium where numerous curtains open, creating a lush symphony of textures, patterns, colors.Maria BaranovaNearly wordless, this is a primal dreamscape of a show, set within a proscenium where one curtain opens to reveal another and another and another, a lush symphony of textures, patterns, colors. Giant tassels with actors inside them have a dance, as if they have just wandered in from the castle in “Beauty and the Beast.” Miniatures of the proscenium set appear, and comic puppetry erupts inside them.Playful, silly, teasing, bizarre, this is a work so thrillingly human-made, from so deep in the infinite strangeness of the human mind, that its maverick creativity seems out of reach of the artificial. I hope it is, anyway.The depth of that reach is the concern of “Bioadapted,” Tjasa Ferme’s sleekly designed, thoughtfully assembled but ultimately overstuffed show at Culture Lab LIC in Long Island City, Queens.Like Dorsen, Ferme incorporates A.I. into the performance in ways that, deliberately or not, demonstrate its incompetence; a country song, generated with a few prompts from the audience, was easily the most nails-on-a-chalkboard country song I’ve ever heard. But “Bioadapted,” constructed from documentary and dramatic text, may get you thinking concretely about the ways A.I. can warp our perception of reality, surveil our very interiors, take what belongs to us.Both “Bioadapted” and “Prometheus Firebringer” ask audiences to consider what Dorsen — taking a line from the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s “The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism” (2019) — calls “the fundamental ethical question, the question of knowing whether this is the world we want.”Dorsen and Ferme are nudging us to abandon our passivity, curb the excesses of A.I. and create the society we want rather than submitting to some grim techno future that we assume is inevitable.“As long as there is time, there is time for care,” Dorsen says.She plucked that line from the Swedish writer Axel Andersson. And he’s right.Prometheus FirebringerThrough Oct. 1 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 45 minutes.Psychic Self DefenseThrough Sept. 30 at Here, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour.BioadaptedThrough Sept. 24 at Culture Lab LIC, Queens; transformatheatre.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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    Carole Rothman to End 45-Year Tenure at Second Stage Theater

    The nonprofit, a singular institution in New York’s theatrical ecosystem, has presented acclaimed works like “Between Riverside and Crazy” and “Next to Normal.”Carole Rothman, the president and artistic director of Second Stage Theater, will step down next spring after 45 years with the organization.The move is a major development in the world of New York’s large nonprofit theaters, several of which have leaders who have been in their jobs for three to five decades. Nationally, the field has experienced a much higher high level of turnover.Second Stage, which Rothman co-founded in 1979, is a singular institution in New York’s theatrical ecosystem. Established, as its name suggests, to stage revivals, it has long since added new plays to the mix, and focuses exclusively on work by living American writers. “No Brits. No Chekhov translations. No classics,” Rothman said in 2017.Second Stage is one of four nonprofits that operate theaters on Broadway: In 2015 the organization acquired the Helen Hayes Theater, which with about 600 seats is Broadway’s smallest house. Second Stage began programming at the Hayes in 2018, and last year its production of “Take Me Out” won the Tony Award for best play revival.Much of Second Stage’s work has been presented Off Broadway, in a former bank building in Times Square, as well as in a smaller theater on the Upper West Side. The company had a $25 million budget in fiscal 2022, according to an I.R.S. filing; Rothman’s total compensation was $369,000 that year.Rothman’s departure was announced on Wednesday not by Second Stage, but by a public relations firm representing her. That firm would not give more detail about the move, and said she would have no immediate comment beyond a written statement in which she said, in part: “I’m forever grateful to all the people who have helped make Second Stage the creative springboard it is today. I’m so proud of what we have accomplished together.”Asked for comment, the chairmen of the theater’s board, Terry Lindsay and Kevin Brockman, issued their own statement, saying: “Carole has been a driving force in American theater since founding Second Stage 45 years ago, and we’re all indebted to her for her vision, her leadership, and her unwavering commitment to championing new artistic voices and diverse new works. We look forward to the world-class productions Carole has programmed for the upcoming 45th anniversary season and to celebrating her remarkable achievements over the coming year.”The board has already formed a committee to search for Rothman’s successor, according to Tom D’Ambrosio, a Second Stage spokesman. The position is likely to be a desirable one given the organization’s strong track record and the opportunity to produce on Broadway.Under Rothman’s leadership, Second Stage has presented a slew of important shows, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays “Between Riverside and Crazy” by Stephen Adly Guirgis and “Water by the Spoonful” by Quiara Alegría Hudes and the Pulitzer-winning musical “Next to Normal” by Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt. The theater also presented a pre-Broadway production of “Dear Evan Hansen,” which went on to win the Tony Award for best musical and to enjoy significant commercial success.This fall, Second Stage plans a Broadway production of “Appropriate,” a play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins that will star Sarah Paulson, and next spring the company plans a Broadway production of “Mother Play,” a new drama by Paula Vogel, starring Celia Keenan-Bolger, Jessica Lange and Jim Parsons. More

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    Lying in Comedy Isn’t Always Wrong, but Hasan Minhaj Crossed a Line

    The stand-up’s penchant for making up stories goes beyond embellishment. When real people and real stakes are involved, a different standard applies.When I first heard that The New Yorker had published an exposé on the veracity of the stand-up comedy of Hasan Minhaj, I rolled my eyes.We’re fact-checking jokes now? Come on. Comedy is an art, not an op-ed. And honesty has always struck me as the most overrated virtue in comedy. But Clare Malone’s reporting in the piece is scrupulous and fair, if a little prosecutorial in its focus. It presents more questions than answers and should inspire some rethinking of the muddy relationship between comedy and truth.Digging into his last two specials, Malone reveals Hasan Minhaj as a comic who leans on fictions to make real-world arguments, putting himself closer to the center of news stories to make him seem more brave or wronged or in danger. To take one example, Minhaj says in “The King’s Jester” (2022) that after the government passed the Patriot Act in the wake of Sept. 11, an undercover F.B.I. informant named Brother Eric had infiltrated his childhood mosque and had dinner at his house. Minhaj recalls how he sniffed him out and, in a prank, asked about getting a pilot’s license, which led to a police officer throwing him against a car.The New Yorker found that there was such a man working in counterterrorism but that Minhaj never met him. Minhaj defended his fabrications as fibs in service to “emotional truth.” For someone in the running to be the next host of “The Daily Show,” that term sounds a little too much like Kellyanne Conway’s euphemism “alternative facts.”Amid plenty of critics online, Whoopi Goldberg was one of the few major figures who spoke up for Minhaj, saying on “The View” that embellishing in the name of a larger truth is what comics do. But here is where some more context would be helpful.Stand-up comedy was never expected to be factually accurate. Rodney Dangerfield, to be clear, got respect. In the setups for early jokes, Richard Pryor lied about having a Puerto Rican mother and living in a Jewish tenement. An old-school observational comic like Jerry Seinfeld has said all his comedy is made up, even his opinions.But in the past few decades, with the rise of “The Daily Show,” which has blurred lines between comedy and the news, as well as the proliferation of confessional solo shows that depend on dramatic revelations that dovetail nicely with jokes, the form has evolved and so have audiences’ assumptions. And they vary wildly depending on the artist.In Sebastian Maniscalco’s last special, “Is It Me?,” he told a story poking fun at a kid in his child’s class who identifies as a lion. Asked by The Daily Beast, he said that this wasn’t true, but that he used it because it puts “a mirror on society” — another kind of emotional truth. Minhaj’s inventions were part of the same tradition, one that deserves new scrutiny.Minhaj in “The King’s Jester.” Comics from Richard Pryor to Jerry Seinfeld to Sebastian Maniscalco have all invented details for their acts.Clifton Prescod/NetflixIt’s also important to point out that many current comics think seriously about their fictions, setting their own code. “I am quite strict about telling the truth,” Daniel Kitson once told me. “I am interested in engaging emotionally and I don’t want to be duplicitous.”In an interview with Taylor Tomlinson this year, she told me she cut a joke about being single after she started dating someone because even that minor white lie made her uncomfortable. Many other comics, like Kate Berlant, build unreliability into their acts. Others lie so overtly that it sets expectations. What’s tricky is that there is no one industry standard.The reality is that some comics have more leeway toying with the truth than others. All artists teach their audience how to view them, by the way they tell jokes, their style, the level of absurdity. What makes Hasan Minhaj such a troubling example is that his style, onstage and often off in interviews, suggested we should believe him.Minhaj is known for using visual aids the way a journalist would. He mixes clips of television news and photos from his life with a general tone of sincerity. The nature of his deceptions were peculiar. He didn’t invent stuff to make himself funnier. He did it to raise the stakes in the easiest, most self-regarding way possible. Lying in comedy isn’t necessarily wrong. But how you lie matters. Minhaj has told a story about his prom date reneging on the day of the dance because her parents didn’t want her seen in photos with a “brown boy.” He now admits to some untruths in this story, but not all, and left her perspective out. (The woman has said she and her family faced online threats for years.) This genre of fiction is a shortcut to sympathy, an unearned tug at the heartstrings. It’s not a capital crime, but it’s an unnecessary and risky one.Lies involving real people should add a new sense of obligation. The problem with only considering the standard of emotional truth is that it can blind you to the impact on the actual world outside your emotions. You could say that the emotional truth behind the Patriot Act was that the terrorism of Sept. 11 required extreme tactics to feel safe, but that doesn’t make the legislation right. The truth is usually more complex than the way you feel about it.Watching “The King’s Jester” now hits differently. In some ways, it’s more interesting than the first time I saw it, when it seemed mawkish. Some jokes, like his desperation for social media clout, seem like clues. And others come across as the work of a guilty conscience, like the moment when Minhaj faces the audience and says: “Everything here is built on trust.”This is the truth. Every comic has an unspoken pact with the audience. The one Seinfeld has is different from Minhaj’s, and part of the reason has nothing to do with their intentions. Whether or not critics like me think authenticity is important, it does matter to the audience. So does honesty. And comics understand that. It’s no accident that many of the political comedians working today, especially on television, employ researchers from traditional news sources. Getting facts right matters, especially when the comedy is about grave social issues.That’s not just because a comic’s credibility can take a hit. When stories told about racism, religious profiling or transgender identity are exposed as inventions, that can lead to doubt about the experiences of real people.Minhaj subbing in as a host on “The Daily Show.” Every comic has an unspoken pact with the audience.Matt Wilson/Comedy Central’s The Daily ShowWhen the storyteller Mike Daisey, making an argument about factory conditions in China, said he visited a sweatshop even though he hadn’t, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party used the resulting scandal to try to discredit all reporting by Western media. This kind of argument has only become more common. Look at Russell Brand’s defense against accusations of rape and grooming: He tried to discredit his accusers by saying you can’t trust the mainstream media.One of the most notable aspects of the Minhaj story is the lack of nuance in his response, the complete confidence he projects. It’s striking that he seemingly has no concerns about possibly deceiving some of his audience. His special is about his wife challenging him to take responsibility for how his words can negatively affect his family. One wonders if there will be any more introspection.In the summer, Minhaj interviewed President Barack Obama and began by bringing up his annual best-of lists, skeptically asking if he really consumes all of those books, albums and movies. When Obama said he did, Minhaj pushed back: “No, you didn’t.”Later on his podcast “Working It Out,” Mike Birbiglia asked Minhaj how he could be so bold with the ex-president. Minhaj said his question for Obama was “innocuous.” That seems like naïveté masquerading as savvy.If Obama admitted to lying about even something that inconsequential, it would be a global story. We live in a world where people have long peddled conspiracies about him and would jump on any deception as evidence of some broader scandal. There’s a temptation to respond to the onslaught of lies by thinking that the only way to fight back is to lie some more. But that has it wrong. To quote Minhaj, everything is built on trust.That trust operates differently for politicians and journalists than for artists, but it matters for us all. Treat it carelessly and the price can be steep. More

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    Something for Everyone, Even Cannibals, at the Philadelphia Fringe

    The festival presents a violent Shakespearean interaction with fruit, dance for neurodiverse and neurotypical audiences and showers of (play) money.There is a strange kind of hunger that can overtake you at a fringe festival: so much to devour and so little time to devour it. New York has been starved of a fringe since 2019, a loss even though the fringe that we had struggled to define itself. But an hour and a half away, the Philadelphia Fringe has endured. Originally a showier event, with a goal of attracting established, out-of-town stars, it has since refocused on local artists.During a recent weekend at the festival, which runs through Sunday, I swallowed an entirely reasonable number of shows, each of which felt appropriately fringe-y, flowing comfortably beyond the mainstream. Built for small, temporary stages, these shows validate fringe festivals as places of experiment, milieus to test and explore. Of the four that I saw, three were about appetite and the mess that appetite can make. And the last was less about hunger than it was about feeding its spectators, creating a nurturing, restful space for all.“Citrus Andronicus” is classic fringe — a cute idea, overstretched. A collision of toy theater, object theater and Elizabethan drama, it restages “Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare’s bloodiest play (which is saying something), using much of the produce section. In a space bedecked in a worrying amount of plastic sheeting, a college professor (Madeleine Claire Garcia) attempts to give a lecture entitled “Blistering Viscera: Revenge, Violent Tribalism, and the Subjugation of the Feminine in ‘Titus Andronicus’.” But she is repeatedly interrupted by two porters (Eli Lynn and Peter Smith), who are delivering boxes of fruit for the conference’s banquet. The professor can’t shush them, so she recruits them, replacing her lecture with a high-potassium plot summary. Many bananas are sacrificed.I’m enough of a weirdo that I might have preferred the original lecture. While the clowning, under the direction of Charlotte Northeast, is nimble, there are ultimately only so many things a person can legally do with a tangerine. Eventually, the professor also becomes infected by the pulpy, pithy madness, emphasizing how the desire for revenge, for violence, can poison us all. A few further ideas are introduced (the lights blink whenever the name of Aaron, one of Shakespeare’s rare Black characters, is spoken), but ultimately unexplored.Courtney Henry in “Rhythm Bath,” a performance installation designed for both neurotypical and neurodiverse audiences.Wide Eyed Studios“Citrus Andronicus” is presented by the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective, which has a mandate to make classical work more accessible. But bold, bloody “Titus” isn’t especially difficult and the goofy idea, however playfully executed, can’t sustain a full-length show. But what riches for the compost bin!Riches also animate “Make Bank,” a site-specific performance at Manufacturers’ National Bank. Audience members use an item plucked from a junk drawer to gain entry to the space, and that item can then be bartered for shells, corn husks, trinkets and yard sale detritus. A Mesopotamian spice bazaar is set up in one corner, a Dutch tulip market in another; a disembodied teller appears in a dark room; and a Meso-American deity resides next to the vault. Divided into groups, attendees assemble the items they have collected — by barter, gift or theft — into totemic sculptures while burlesque performers populate the space. One is (under)dressed as a Dutch maiden with windmill pasties, the other as a cow, presumably a cash cow. There is also a singalong to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.”If “Citrus Andronicus” suffers from too few ideas, “Make Bank,” directed by Terry Guerin, produced by Meg Saligman and devised by Dylan Smythe and Lillian Mae Ransijn, has perhaps too many, though these also entail themes of greed and waste. The atmosphere, however unfocused, is one of excess. Expect to be showered in paper money. The money is fake. The sense of abundance is real.So ostensibly are the facts of the effusive, floral “Rose: You Are Who You Eat.” John Jarboe, who uses she/her pronouns, begins this autobiographical solo show by gnawing fried chicken from a bucket. Then she confesses to a murder. Apparently, she absorbed a twin in utero, a phenomenon known as vanishing twin syndrome. But that twin, who would have been named Rose had she lived, didn’t really vanish. This piece, which Jarboe describes as a “support group for gender cannibals,” is a reckoning with identity and queerness.Jarboe has long believed that she ate Rose, but as she sings toward the end of the show, it “Turns out Rose ate me.”Produced by the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, with Emily Schreiner, as part of a rolling world premiere, and directed by MK Tuomanen, “Rose” is still in bud. A show about gender cannibals, adorned by tender, frisky music composed and performed by Emily Bate, Daniel de Jesús, Pax Ressler, Be Steadwell and Jarboe seems original enough. And Jarboe is an appealing performer. But as she acknowledges, the coming-out story is already a cliché. While certain moments are wholly unique, like Jarboe’s repurposing of a hockey jersey as a ball gown, others borrow overtly from artists like John Cameron Mitchell and Taylor Mac. The show seems to end twice before it actually concludes with a call-and-response section, which is then followed by a medley of covers: “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” and “Kiss From a Rose.” Some love, some pruning, and “Rose” should bloom.After so much fruit, money and flowers, so much wanting, so much appetite, it was restful to retreat into “Rhythm Bath.” A performance installation created by the choreographer Susan Marshall and the set designer Mimi Lien in conjunction with Temple University’s Institute on Disabilities, the dance piece is staged on an upper floor of Christ Church Neighborhood House. The ceiling is covered in white parachute fabric, which breathes in and out. Through holes in the fabric, glimpses of feathery, cobweb-like material can be seen, some of it lit with fiber optic filaments.The afternoon show I attended was a relaxed performance, as are all of their performances, designed for both neurotypical and neurodiverse audiences. The seating was flexible, the lighting (Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew) subdued and the sound (Dan Trueman and Jason Treuting, who also composed the music) kept to a reasonable volume. Spectators who found it too much could retreat to a darker room with a giant bean bag. That afternoon, as 10 dancers performed elegant versions of pedestrian movement — walking, standing, leaning — I saw two young women in the audience stand up and join in. Another spectator faced the wall. A fourth watched while wearing headphones and dark glasses. All seemed to be enjoying themselves.In contrast with the excesses of the other shows, this performance was simple, even restrained. The mood was meditative. It was, in its quiet way, the most nourishing thing I saw.Philadelphia FringeThrough Sept. 24 at sites around the city; phillyfringe.org. More

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    in Television

    Don’t Stop Believin’? Considering a TV Golden Age, 10 Years Later

    “Difficult Men,” Brett Martin’s book about the prestige TV boom, has been rereleased in a 10th-anniversary edition. In an interview, he reflects on how TV has changed since he wrote it.Tony Soprano, Don Draper and Omar Little glower from the cover of “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution,” Brett Martin’s canon-codifying 2013 book about the prestige TV boom of the 2000s. But as difficult and revolutionary as those fictional antiheroes were, the title just as well describes their brilliant, gnomic, sometimes cruel creators, like David Chase (“The Sopranos”), David Simon (“The Wire”) and Matthew Weiner (“Mad Men”).“Difficult Men,” whose 10th-anniversary edition was published in paperback this summer, is a history of the remarkable moment, starting nearly 25 years ago, when business imperatives and risk-taking executives empowered ornery writers with network experience and chips on their shoulders to create era-defining, artistically lasting programs.One of the book’s through lines was that these shows tended to revolve around men who resembled the way their creators saw themselves: as mavericks taking arms against bureaucratic inertia. It’s a theme that Martin, a New Orleans-based journalist, said he might de-emphasize today in favor of delving into the depth and richness of the characters.“The artistic triumph the original shows allowed,” Martin said earlier this month, “was to create all these real human stories and specific, idiosyncratic characters — which is more important than the easy antihero formulation.”The past decade has seen a societal reckoning with misconduct in the culture industries, including television. Some of the showrunner behavior Martin chronicled in his book — icing out disfavored writers, halting entire productions for petty personal whims, throwing tantrums — looks different now.In a new preface for the anniversary edition, Martin says that were he writing “Difficult Men” now, he would focus more on “the knotty question of how the same men who provided, in many ways, the most astute critiques of toxic male power that mainstream culture had ever seen could nevertheless end up confirming and recapitulating precisely the same dynamics in their own workplaces.”A 10th anniversary edition of “Difficult Men” was released this summer.Even in 2013, Martin held up counterexamples like the showrunners Alan Ball (“Six Feet Under”) and Vince Gilligan (“Breaking Bad”), who ran artistically successful programs while being, by all accounts, nice guys and good bosses.In other respects, 2013 turned out to be a convenient year for a book about this Golden Age of television. It was the year “Breaking Bad” ended and James Gandolfini, the “Sopranos” star, died. And it was the year that “House of Cards,” the first original series commissioned by Netflix, debuted. In a phone interview, Martin discussed why the shows he wrote about still hold up and how the emergence of streaming has affected prestige TV. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Was there one show that provoked you to write the book?It was “The Sopranos,” in both an abstract and a literal sense. I had been hired to write the official coffee table companion during the final season. I maybe outstayed my welcome, treated it like a real reporting job, was there for quite a long time and got a chance to peek behind the scenes. It was a revelation to me: the size of the operation, the ambition, the way people talked about their work — the sense of something very big being made. The number of times I had to explain what a showrunner was back then is, in and of itself, an indicator of what an alien world that was.It’s such a funny term.It just occurs to me what kind of a technical term “showrunner” is, how unromantic. It really is something that, like, the Teamsters would come up with. It’s so literal and so nonartistic: You keep things running. The term betrays the kind of factory mentality that applied to television at the time.Did you think of yourself as establishing a canon?It was very obvious what at least three of the four main shows that I was going to write about were, and most of the peripheral ones as well. In my original proposal, the fourth show was, actually, “Rescue Me” — which is a show whose first few seasons had been perhaps unfairly forgotten but felt very much in keeping with these other shows. It felt extremely daring in being one of the first shows where 9/11 was being treated in a fully rounded way. My first editor pushed me to include “Battlestar Galactica,” but it just really wasn’t my bag. And then “Breaking Bad” asserted itself as the book was being written and became very obviously the ending place. There were the other HBO shows, and “The Shield” was an important step as well, but there weren’t many examples I left out.Have any of the shows in the book not stood up as much as you expected?Quite the opposite: The shows you think might have been dated have proven riveting in ways they maybe weren’t even when they were on. The America of Tony Soprano, the America of Walter White and very much the America of “The Wire” has proved itself to be the dominant America in the past 20 years. “The Sopranos” became this huge pandemic rewatch, and I think it’s because it’s so recognizable: The themes — the rot at the center of America, the grift of American life, the anxiety Tony Soprano has — are all super familiar to us now.Younger generations have adopted “The Sopranos”; it appears in countless memes.It’s great entertainment. It had to be: It had to resemble entertaining network television in many ways. It was still operating as a Trojan horse. It had to be funny and human, and it had to be consumable because the high-art part, the ambition part, was something nobody was looking for.How did the men you wrote about respond to your book?I never heard a word from any of them except for Vince Gilligan, who wrote me a beautiful blurb on the back of the new edition. Not surprisingly, because the book ends making the point that one doesn’t have to be that difficult to create these wonderful shows.Few would be interested in defending some of the behavior you document. But does the fact that it happened during the creation of these really great series make any of it easier to accept?It’s hard for me to see how a lack of empathy for people who work for you is a necessary part of the creative process. I do think people’s feelings could get hurt in a very intense workplace, and I don’t think every hurt feeling is avoidable. But I do think one can maintain a basic level of decency — let alone avoid using your power destructively — and still create quality work. I believe it because I’ve seen the shows that prove it, and because I’m optimistic.There are women characters and characters of color in these shows, but the protagonists and the creators behind them are all white men. Does that taint the legacy of that era?It wasn’t a huge surprise that white men writing about white men dominated the first phase of this new world. But the door had been opened. “Orange Is the New Black” came out something like three weeks after my book. “Transparent” was soon after as well. What came after delivered on the promise, which is that all these other kinds of stories were going to be able to be told, and all these other kinds of voices were going to be empowered. “Atlanta” and “Reservation Dogs” are other deliveries on that promise.What effect did the rise of streaming platforms, with their hundreds of millions of subscribers, have on Hollywood’s appetite for ambitious TV?When the book was published, it was more important [to the producers of these early prestige series] to stand out and find the right kinds of viewers than to have the most. It made sense that that attitude moved from subscription cable to basic — in my book, it’s HBO to FX and AMC — and streaming seemed it would be another step in that. But it does seem as though every piece that I identified as being crucial to the invention of this new TV is now a flashpoint in the writers’ strike: shorter seasons, writer-producers, writers’ rooms. And it’s depressing. With all the stuff that looked great, the streamers saw there were opportunities for cost savings.Are there ways streaming made TV better for viewers?Oh, my God. Look how much work we got! So much that I can’t keep up — that I feel a constant sense of anxiety about missing things. Look how many new voices we got. That’s been the trade-off. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Swing State’ Review: All Is Not Well in Wisconsin

    Rebecca Gilman’s play, set in a rural farmhouse, sees an image of the decline of Americans’ interdependence in the death of wildflowers.It’s immediately clear what kind of flinty, progressive woman lives in the converted farmhouse depicted onstage in “Swing State,” the play by Rebecca Gilman that opened on Sunday at the Minetta Lane Theater. Well, not so much “depicted” as “duplicated.”You can just about sense the recycling bins beneath the working sink and the Obama memoirs in the book-filled sitting room of Todd Rosenthal’s cozy set, a throwback to the hyper-naturalistic style that has for decades dominated American social drama. Indeed, as the play begins, Peg Smith, whose name alone lets you know she’s plain and real, stands cracking eggs at her kitchen island to make the homeliest food ever devised: zucchini bread.But all is not well among the baskets, birdhouses and earthenware bowls. For one thing, there’s a container of human ashes on the counter. Peg (Mary Beth Fisher) has been a widow for a little more than a year, and not doing well. She and her husband had moved to this corner of rural Wisconsin to enjoy the ancient prairie taking up 48 of their 51 acres; without him — and this being the pandemic year of 2021, without much of anyone — her life feels joyless. She is considering, as the euphemism has it, “self-harm”: The knife with which she chops the zucchini can cut both ways.The prairie isn’t doing well either, abutted by commercial farms and subjected to the runoff of their agrochemicals. A young neighbor named Ryan (Bubba Weiler) sarcastically calls Peg a “ray of sunshine” as she rattles off a valedictory list of dying local species: bats, chorus frogs, whippoorwills, wildflowers, butterflies, nighthawks and the insects they feed on.The dying off, though real, is also, alas, a symbol. “Swing State,” as its title suggests, means to connect the land to its people: poorly stewarded and subject to dangerous fluctuations. Though Donald Trump is mentioned only once — Peg says she canceled her subscription to the local newspaper when it endorsed him — he is as much the target here as the agrochemicals. In the play’s cosmology, the debased politics of narcissism have polluted American life with the aggro-chemicals of overly heightened and disordered emotions. Democracy is a prairie.I don’t argue with that premise. Nor with Gilman’s craft; I’ve admired her since her first New York outing, the shocker “Spinning Into Butter,” in 2000. “Swing State”— frugal with themes, meticulous about motivation, minutely sensitive to the timing of revelations — could serve as a case study in dramatic construction.A young neighbor named Ryan (Bubba Weiler) sarcastically calls Peg a “ray of sunshine” as she rattles off a valedictory list of dying local species.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat, for me, is the problem. We have become very familiar with the workings of social-problem plays like this. If we see Peg staring nervously at the knife in the first minute, and by the second scene (out of seven) learn that a footlocker containing a Winchester rifle has been stolen from her barn, we may already discern the shape of the rest. That there are only three other characters — one of them Ryan, who has recently been released from prison — does not leave many doors open.Ryan and Peg are both outsiders, oddballs trying to survive in a system that puts a premium on conformity and offers little help, or hope of reform, to those who suffer or do wrong. They are classic lefty tropes: the do-gooder who is seen as a crackpot and the misunderstood young man who is seen as a threat. The two remaining characters — Kris Callahan Wisnefski, the town sheriff, and Dani Wisnefski, her niece and the newbie deputy — represent the over-reactive forces of conservative society, more interested in order than in goodness. Sheriff Kris (Kirsten Fitzgerald) immediately accuses Ryan of the theft and sets out to prove her prejudice. Dani (Anne E. Thompson) is eager to do right but is intimidated (and undertrained) by her barky aunt.In Robert Falls’s staging, imported from the Goodman Theater in Chicago and presented here by Audible, every collision is clearly tuned. The scenes snap into place like machine-tooled puzzle pieces, with lighting (by Eric Southern), costumes (by Evelyn Danner) and music (by Richard Woodbury) that all but feeds the audience its emotional cues. And though Gilman does much to complicate the characters’ motives with back story that’s elaborately layered into the dialogue — so elaborately that at one point a character is forced to ask, “Why are you telling me this?” — none except Peg seem quite believable.Fisher is able to absorb the complications into a rounded performance in which they feel surprising but not synthetic. She has more to work with, of course, as she is onstage for most of the play’s 105 minutes, but also more to build on, having been a Gilman regular, like Falls, for years. (In New York she played a stalking victim in Gilman’s “Boy Gets Girl” in 2001.) She seems to move through the variously depressed, angry, loving and resigned aspects of the character like a hawk gliding on thermals. You barely notice the turns.In the play overall, though, you do. And until a thrillingly staged climax that moves unusually fast, you usually foresee the corners with plenty of room to prepare. The result is a play that seems becalmed on its surface despite the powerful emotions underneath — not just the characters’ emotions but the author’s.Gilman, who now lives in the part of Wisconsin where the play is set, the so-called Driftless Area, is evidently passionate about the same things as Peg. She too has become a volunteer for the Prairie Enthusiasts, a group dedicated to protecting the Upper Midwest’s natural heritage. (In the play the group is called the Prairie Protectors or, more derisively, the Prairie Geeks.) And clearly Gilman is invested in her overarching metaphor, telling Laura Collins-Hughes in The New York Times that the human ecosystem, like the natural one, is “not a monoculture. It cannot thrive unless it’s as diverse as diverse can be.”If only she had dramatized that, I could be more of a full-throated warbler in praising the play. What “Swing State” actually dramatizes, sometimes movingly, is despair. Its action is driven less by any visible coarsening of America’s democratic ecosystem than by depression, alcoholism, spite and bad luck.If anything, it is about the “swing state” of individual emotion, regardless of politics. (Even the good liberal Peg is erratic and sometimes nasty.) Still, its message — because yes, there is a message in all plays featuring sinks with running water — applies to our personal as well as our national ecosystems: “You can’t give up even if you want to.”Swing StateThrough Oct. 28 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; swingstateplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More