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    in Theater

    In ‘The Great Privation,’ Fending Off the Body Snatchers

    Nia Akilah Robinson’s new play, for Soho Rep, digs into an ugly historical practice.In the middle of the night in autumn 1832, a mother and her teenage daughter stand guard beside a freshly filled grave. They are not certain they need to be there, but Missy Freeman, the newly widowed mother, suspects the rumors are true: that body snatchers, also known as resurrectionists, have been digging up Black corpses and stealing them away.When a young white man appears in the darkness, Missy knows he has come to disinter her husband, Moses, dead of cholera and laid to rest only that afternoon. With impeccable composure, she tells the grave robber, who is a medical student, that they are there to pray. He backs off, menacingly.“Be sure to not get caught by the police,” he says. “Ladies shouldn’t be out so late.”In Nia Akilah Robinson’s new play, “The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar),” Missy (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and her daughter, 16-year-old Charity (Clarissa Vickerie), will not be deterred from keeping vigil while Moses’s body decomposes.As Charity says: “We must make it to three days with Daddy untouched. Then the bad men won’t return.”Directed by Evren Odcikin for Soho Rep, “The Great Privation” rummages around in the tainted soil of the United States and pulls up some shameful old skeletons for inspection. From the start, though, a defiant light radiates through this tale, and comedy shares space with disquietude. Warm, dexterous central performances from Lucas-Perry and Vickerie (a graduate student at Juilliard making her Off Broadway debut) have a lot to do with that.Informed by the history of Black bodies being used without consent in medical research, the play takes place on the same plot of land two centuries apart. In the 1800s, it is the burial ground at the African Baptist Church in Philadelphia, not far from Jefferson Medical College. In our time, it is a sleep-away summer camp where Minnie Chillous (Lucas-Perry), née Freeman, and her daughter, Charity (Vickerie), happen to be working as counselors alongside the amusingly dramatic John (Miles G. Jackson) and their strait-laced supervisor, Cuffee (Holiday).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    Tony Hinchcliffe, the Trump Rally Comedian, Lands a Netflix Deal

    Hinchcliffe’s set at Madison Square Garden in October drew sharp criticism after he described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”The stand-up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe has landed a deal at Netflix months after angering people with his insults about Latinos and other minority groups at a New York rally when Donald J. Trump was running for president.The deal for three comedy specials under Hinchcliffe’s “Kill Tony” brand is part of an attempt by streaming services to appeal to Trump voters. Amazon Prime Video announced on Monday that several seasons of “The Apprentice,” the NBC reality show that bolstered Trump’s public profile in the early 2000s, would soon be available on the streaming service.Hinchcliffe’s specials will feature a mix of established comedians and surprise celebrity guests, Netflix said in a news release on Tuesday. The first special will be filmed at Comedy Mothership in Austin, Texas, and will arrive on the platform on April 7. Hinchcliffe will also receive his own stand-up special in the deal.Hinchcliffe is known for his “roast” style of comedy and his “Kill Tony” podcast, which is recorded live each week from Austin. He said in a statement that he was excited to share his show, which started with 12 audience members in 2013, with the world.“To think that I can pull a name out of a bucket and that person will be performing standup and an improvised interview on the largest streaming service in the world is both exciting and frightening,” Hinchcliffe said. “It’s the most spontaneous and improvised show that is out there and the creative freedom given to us by Netflix to keep the show in its pure form is a comedian’s dream.”Hinchcliffe was among the comedians who roasted the retired N.F.L. quarterback Tom Brady in a Netflix special last year that was viewed 13.8 million times in its first week on the streaming platform. His segment included homophobic remarks and comments about slavery.The comedian’s public profile grew even more in October after taking the stage at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, where he made insults and vulgar statements that leaned on offensive stereotypes about Jews, Latinos and African Americans. He received intense backlash after calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” drawing condemnation from celebrities like Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Lin-Manuel Miranda. More

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    Athol Fugard’s Plays Illustrated the Value of Every Human Life

    “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” and other works bear witness to forgotten lives and to the moral blindness and blinkered vision of the realities of apartheid South Africa.In early 2010, I was sitting at a communal table in a coffee shop in Cape Town, when I spotted a grizzled, bearded fellow who looked strangely familiar. It was Athol Fugard, South Africa’s foremost playwright and the great chronicler of his country’s apartheid past. There he was, sipping a cup of coffee like any ordinary person.I plucked up courage and approached him, murmuring something inarticulate about my admiration for his writing. “Hall-O,” Fugard said enthusiastically. “Join us. Have a coffee. Or a glass of wine.”By being determinedly local, Athol Fugard transcended the specifics of apartheid South Africa. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOne of the great things about Fugard, who died on Saturday, was that he was an ordinary person as well as an extraordinary one. He was wonderfully enthusiastic about people and their potential, ready to see the good in every situation, but also unafraid to confront the bad, both in others and himself. The famous scene in “‘Master Harold’ … and the Boys,” in which the young white protagonist spits in the face of his Black mentor, was, he freely confessed, drawn from his own life.As the theater critic Frank Rich noted in a 1982 New York Times review of the play, Fugard’s technique was to uncover moral imperatives “by burrowing deeply into the small, intimately observed details” of the fallible lives of his characters.My first encounter with Fugard’s work was in the early 1980s, when I saw a production of his 1972 play “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead,” written with Winston Ntshona and John Kani. It’s a bleakly comic tale of a man who assumes another identity and assigns his own to a corpse, in order to gain the coveted pass book that the South African authorities required as permission to work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    ‘Adolescence’ Is a Cacophonous, Gripping Mini-Series

    The emotionally complex new Netflix series, about a teenager accused of killing a classmate, doubles as a rich work of social critique.“Adolescence,” arriving Thursday, on Netflix, is a four-part mini-series about a 13-year-old accused of killing a classmate. So far, so Netflix. Its distinguishing features are its depressing realism and the fact that each episode is a continuous scene, which adds to the sense of panic and hurriedness.The show begins with the police storming the Miller family home to arrest the young son, Jamie (Owen Cooper), while his parents (Stephen Graham, Christine Tremarco) and sister (Amelie Pease) look on in horror and bafflement, crying and pleading. There is no break in the chaos. We stay with Jamie as he arrives at the police station, as he is fingerprinted and questioned, as the police take photos of his body while his father stands by in helpless horror.The show’s best episode, and one of the more fascinating hours of TV I’ve seen in a long time, is its third, a two-hander set seven months after the arrest. Jamie is in a juvenile detention facility, and a psychologist (Erin Doherty) is completing her independent evaluation to provide to the judge in his case. I watched this episode a few times, and it can land in different ways. Through one lens, she plays him like a piano, provoking a variety of emotional responses. Through another, she is a ship on his ocean, a witness to his tempestuousness but not its cause. The rhythm of the episode is the rhythm of Jamie’s audible breathing, and the toppled foosball table in the back corner is as upended as Jamie’s life.For better or worse, “Adolescence” evokes in the viewer the feelings of its characters: overstimulation, confusion, an increasingly powerful desire to tell everyone to sit down and be quiet for five dang seconds. Also sorrow, disbelief, a rending of the world and a surrender to never truly understanding — to not knowing, but … knowing.The performances here are superb, with varsity weeping and real sense of heft and verisimilitude. Is it a weird time to engage in recreational misery? When there’s so much free, ambient despair to go around? Yeah, probably, but “Adolescence” is not agony for agony’s sake. It uses its pain and shock as a side door into interesting questions and social critiques. It’s about a teen, but its ideas are adult.SIDE QUESTGraham, one of the creators of this series, and Doherty also star in “A Thousand Blows,” which is on Hulu. More

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    Netflix Is Gobbling Up World Literature. What Could Go Wrong?

    The streamer keeps mounting lavish adaptations of beloved novels — and making them all feel like just more Netflix.I’m thinking of a piece of filmed entertainment. It was adapted from a famous, internationally significant novel. It was blessed with lavish budgets, accomplished directors, ambitious visual design. A premiere was announced, ads were purchased, trailers were released — and then, one day, it was dumped onto a streaming service and almost immediately forgotten.Can you guess which one I’m thinking of? It could be “Pachinko,” or “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or “The Wheel of Time,” or any number of others. This past December, Netflix released over eight hours of television adapting somewhat less than half of Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 classic, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” It has, in fact, been Hoovering up the rights to major novels from around the world, spending millions to transform them into prestige programming. In the last year alone, there has been a film adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s novel “Pedro Paramo” (from Mexico), a mini-series of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa’s 1950s novel “The Leopard” (from Italy) and the first season of a version of Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem” (from China), which reportedly cost around $160 million to make.News that this was happening to “One Hundred Years of Solitude” might have shocked Márquez. He wrote for the movies and gave his blessing to multiple adaptations of his work, but the great Colombian writer never did sell the rights to “Solitude.” He thought its story, which follows the Buendia family over a century of history in the fictional city Macondo, would take 100 hours to tell properly; he also insisted it be filmed in Spanish. After his death in 2014, his widow held to these wishes; it was only in 2019, after the couple’s sons had become more involved in the estate, that Netflix acquired the rights. Márquez’s heirs would be executive producers. They negotiated for the show to be made in Colombia, and in Spanish.When the series was announced, though, Netflix sounded a more global note: “We know our members around the world love watching Spanish-language films and series,” said its vice president for Spanish-language programming. Netflix is available in more than 190 countries, and once a piece of original content enters its library — whether a Korean drama or a Latin American telenovela — it can be viewed most anywhere. The company seems to have pursued “Solitude” as an iteration of hits like “The Crown,” “Squid Game” and “Money Heist”: local productions that captivate international audiences through a combination of regional specificity and broad televisual legibility. The mini-series resembles the other things on Netflix more than it resembles anything in Márquez.The book is a natural candidate. It offers an imaginative evocation of Colombian history, rife with characters and love affairs and civil wars; it is also one of the best-known Spanish-language novels in the world, having sold some 50 million copies across nearly four dozen translations. Like “The Leopard” and “Pedro Paramo,” it has both national pedigree and international reputation, its title familiar enough to make viewers around the world pause over the Netflix tile. It is, in other words, valuable I.P. And that means it must now conform to the expectations of modern streaming: It must be adapted for frictionless international content consumption.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    In ‘Long Bright River,’ Amanda Seyfried Serves and Protects

    For Amanda Seyfried, the first day on set for “Long Bright River,” a limited series for Peacock, was awful. She stood under the lights in a mock-up of a police morgue, in her patrol cop uniform, unsure how to move or speak.“Every first day of work, I never know what the [expletive] I’m doing,” she told me later.Seyfried overprepares for most roles. She researches; she memorizes; she asks question after question. But then suddenly she’s on a soundstage somewhere, with the lights blazing and the cameras pointed at her face, and the terror rushes in. If she has an acting process, she said, “it’s all based on the fear that I’m not going to be good enough.”Seyfried, 39, was speaking on an icy February morning. We’d met for a late breakfast at a cafe on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near where Seyfried keeps an apartment. (She and her husband, the actor Thomas Sadoski, and their two children, spend most of their time on a farm upstate.) She was in town to shoot a Paul Feig movie, “The Housemaid,” and to promote “Long Bright River,” a moody eight-episode suspense series that premieres on March 13. She had recently wrapped “Ann Lee,” a historical musical by Mona Fastvold.Over more than two decades as an actor, Amanda Seyfried has moved from comedy and romance to more complex roles. Dana Scruggs for The New York TimesDoes this sound like a lot? It was. “I think I’m falling apart,” Seyfried said as she looked at the menu. She had recently injured her back on “The Housemaid” and was taking muscle relaxants.“I’m fine now,” she said. “I mean, I’m not. I’m struggling, but I’m walking.”Seyfried has been in the business for more than two decades, and has moved, gradually, from comedy (“Mean Girls”) and romance (“Mamma Mia”) to more complex roles. Her performance as the actress Marion Davies in the Netflix film “Mank” earned her an Oscar nomination, and she won an Emmy for her portrayal of the convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu mini-series, “The Dropout.” With those roles and those accolades secure, she has finally been recognized as a gifted dramatic actress.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    I’m Obsessed With Survival Shows. Could I Make It 10 Days in the Wilderness?

    On the first official day of my survivalism training, I realized a crucial error: I forgot to pack a spoon. I was mortified. I’d made sure to bring two knives, UV-blocking shirts, saltwater wading boots and paracord, but I had no utensil to eat with. In a low-key voice that I hope masked my embarrassment, I casually mentioned this oversight to my teacher, Amós Rodríguez.“Oh, that’s OK,” he replied cheerfully. “You can make one!” Rodríguez sprinted a few feet into the jungle, climbed a tree and bounced on a few branches to identify a limb that could be sacrificed for my purposes. Finding one, he broke it in half and tossed a segment at my feet. Our woodworking session would become my first lesson in the field. He called it the ABC’s of survival: Always Be Craftin’.He showed me a few simple techniques, and we sat down on overturned buckets to work. The sound of our knives scraping against bark was meditative. After about 15 minutes, Rodríguez had whittled his rough, splintered branch into an elegant instrument. He fished a coal from the fire and set it in the middle of the slender oval end that he’d produced, smoldering out the bowl of the spoon. It looked like something you would pay $45 for at an antiques market. My creation looked more like a drawing of a spoon, by a child who had never used one before. “Maybe,” Rodríguez observed politely, “you can use it like … a … chopstick?” It had more in common with a shovel, and because it was too big to fit in my mouth, that’s how I used it — bullying food until it reluctantly boarded the chunky head of the tool and then flinging it toward my face. That it barely worked didn’t matter: The ability to improvise, to create something out of nothing, was exhilarating in itself.Our 10-day survival intensive took place in Chetumal Bay, Mexico, and consisted of a series of skill-learning workshops — first at a small lodge and then in the field, out on a strip of land in the middle of the water. I arrived with a mix of despair and determination, tired of the alarming news notifications about everything: wildfires, school shootings, disastrous federal decisions, food recalls, extreme weather events. The constant doomerism online and the deteriorating social infrastructure offline — it all had put me into a kind of spiritual ketosis. Brushing up on my survival skills felt like one potential answer.The word “prepper” usually brings to mind a bearded white man in head-to-toe Realtree camo, anticipating the next civil war while hunkered in a bunker, surrounded by automatic weapons, pallets of Dude Wipes and dehydrated meals. But over the last few years, the idea has drifted in from the margins: People with all sorts of ideological backgrounds are making plans for confronting an uncertain future.I’ve seen the shift in my own social circles. Friends and acquaintances are securing large plots of land, getting gun licenses and training in CPR and the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association protocol, a regimen developed to help people recover from addiction. One woman I know relocated her family from Boston to New Zealand, telling me that she wanted to live in a place that was nonexistent on a geopolitical axis of influence — “a beautiful place,” she said, “to ride out the end of the world.” Late last year, a book called “A Navy Seal’s Bug-In Guide” was in heavy rotation on TikTok’s e-commerce platform; over the holidays, I spotted it at my mother’s house and flipped through its pages. One offered tips for explaining away your ownership of large quantities of canned goods: “My wife/husband just got into couponing.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Critic Whose Beat Is, on Occasion, a Laughing Matter

    Jason Zinoman started writing about comedy for The New York Times in 2011, when the world of stand-up and improv looked a little different.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Jason Zinoman, who has been the comedy columnist for The New York Times since 2011, stumbled into his role by accident.“It was just dumb luck,” said Zinoman, then a freelance theater critic for The Times who had just published a book on his longtime passion, the modern horror film. “But in retrospect, it makes sense to me: There are a lot of theatrical elements to comedy. And there’s a really fine line between horror and comedy.”Now, nearly 15 years after being approached with the offer to become a comedy critic for the paper, his beat has broadened: He joined The Times’s Culture desk full time in 2022 as a critic at large, covering movies, books, theater and of course, all things comedy. He has since written about naked stand-up comedy, Jewish artists wrestling with antisemitism and even the political power of former Vice President Kamala Harris’s laugh.“When I can find a theme that can tie together all these different cultural threads, that’s really satisfying,” said Zinoman, who has also written books about the comedians Dave Chappelle and David Letterman, whom he grew up watching on NBC.In a recent interview, Zinoman reflected on the evolution of comedy over the last decade. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.You are The Times’s comedy columnist, but you’ve also written about theater, film, politics and even sports. How would you describe your role as a critic at large?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More