Eliana Willis

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    In ‘Public Obscenities,’ the Transgender Activist Tashnuva Anan Makes Her New York Debut

    Tashnuva Anan Shishir, who became her country’s first transgender news anchor in 2021, is performing in “Public Obscenities” at Soho Rep.When Shayok Misha Chowdhury wrote the character of Shou for his new bilingual play, “Public Obscenities,” about a couple who interviews queer locals in Kolkata, India, he was “super worried” about casting the role. The performer would not only need to be of the appropriate gender but also a Bangla speaker with the right “linguistic fluency” to capture the character, who speaks “exuberantly and forthrightly and confidently,” he told me recently.Shou identifies as kothi, an Indian gender that encompasses a breadth of expressions, Chowdhury said. So he reached out to a friend for advice: Debanuj DasGupta, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is “very in the sort of Bangali queer and trans space.” After the professor mentioned Tashnuva Anan Shishir, Chowdhury searched her name online, and several questions came into his head: Is she even in New York? Would she be interested in auditioning?When he posted a casting call on Instagram, and Anan responded, a plan started to coalesce. She was in New York, performing in Queens, in “I Shakuntala,” a play by Golam Sarwar Harun and Gargi Mukherjee, a married couple who would also go on to star in “Public Obscenities.” Anan’s role was small, but she “stole the show,” Chowdhury said.After she auditioned for his play, it was practically unanimous, he said: “We have found the person.” While Shou doesn’t appear until 50 minutes into “Public Obscenities” — its run at Soho Rep (in a coproduction with the National Asian American Theater Company) has been extended through April 16 — the character has been among its most memorable.In “Public Obscenities,” Anan, center, plays a scene-stealing interview subject, our critic wrote in a review of Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s play.Julieta CervantesIn March 2021, Anan made history as the first transgender news anchor in Bangladesh. For three minutes, on International Women’s Day, she spoke on the air and was seen by millions of her compatriots. She went on to anchor occasionally for the network, Boishakhi TV, through November 2021.In December of that year, she came to New York, her first time in the United States. Her trip was primarily to receive care related to what she calls her transformation. And while here, professional opportunities have arisen: Last year she became the first transgender model from Bangladesh to walk in New York Fashion Week.Anan, 31, grew up in a conservative Muslim family and has had a grueling journey to this point. She has endured relentless harassment and survived suicide attempts; been shunned by family members, including her father; and lived penniless in a slum.“I really wanted to be an actress,” Anan, who performed in theater in South Asia and in a small Bangla film, “Kosai,” told me recently in a video interview. “People shouldn’t be considered by their gender. People should acknowledge their work. People should acknowledge their skill.” Being a news anchor in Bangladesh was eye-opening, she said, but it couldn’t quite open up the world for her like the United States could. “I was feeling that I have to swim. So I should swim in the ocean, not in a pond, not in a river. So if I can achieve, I can achieve. If not, then not.”Here are excerpts from our conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.“I had to pay a lot. I had to leave my family to prove my identity,” Anan said.Desmond Picotte for The New York TimesHow has life in New York been for you?It’s a lot of adaptation. I’m born and raised in a village, not a city. The city is highly competitive, but I like this competition. Being an activist, this is a great eye-opening for me to learning, to adapting to each other, to teaching how is the activism going on. When I was in Bangladesh, I was working in a national level. Now I’m in New York, and I’m working globally. I’m contributing internationally. So this is a good opportunity for me.You’ve shown remarkable perseverance. What gives you strength?For myself, that I believe: Do your own job. Just do hard work. There is no shortcut in life. Just believe in yourself. And just, first, inspire yourself. I have competition only with myself, because I’m trying to do a little bit better than yesterday.Why do you think Shou has been so memorable to audiences?Shou is intelligent, Shou is extra-talented, an extrovert, and Shou knows actually about this scenario: the situation of queer people, queer activism, especially in Kolkata, Bangladesh, Pakistan. So Shou is charming everyone. Shou is connected with everyone.Shou is very common character in South Asia because Shou is kind of a feminine guy, so Shou would like to wear femininity in her body or in their body. So this feminine guy represents South Asian queer community also.How do you see yourself in this character and how are you different?Tashnuva bold, Tashnuva sexy, Tashnuva brave, Tashnuva iconic — and the brand I created, I had to pay a lot. I had to leave my family to prove my identity. Shou is also powerful. Shou is also entertaining. Shou is also jolly. Shou is also friendly. Tashnuva is sometimes moody, because people can consider my self-esteem or people can consider my self-respect as an ego, but I had to maintain it. But Shou doesn’t have that; Shou is more friendly.When I get confirmation from my team, I was a little bit tense actually, because, see, I have long hair, and the show is going to put, like, a wig. Then I asked Misha, “Should I cut my hair? I can’t!”First time, when I watched myself with that wig, with proper costume, I was so low — believe me, I was so low. I didn’t feel well because still, then, I didn’t believe Shou. So I was trying to just discover what was going on. Now, I literally fall in love with that wig. Yeah, this is me, this is Shou.How has the reception been from South Asian audiences?Oh my God, they appreciate a lot. They were looking at their sorrows in front of them. They’re looking at their life in front of them, through Shou’s eyes. I got lots of messages from my friends — “Tashnuva, you’re doing really well because this is not doing acting, this is very natural.” I wanted to be a natural actor. I want to play a character that should be more natural, that should be believable. I really believe when I am doing something, people should believe.Last night, when I’m coming toward audience, a girl literally was crying, and she was from Bangladesh, and she born and raised here. She only heard me by social media, and this is the first time we get connected in person. And she was telling me, “Tashnuva, this is the story that we know but we couldn’t tell in front of people.”What’s next for you?I don’t like to say my dream because people are always critics. So I love to keep my dream inside. I am looking for opportunities to act more. So I think now, just now, after this project, I want to jump into another project. There I can play a more powerful character. There I can say another story. I don’t want to pursue any character that is very common.When I think about performance — light, camera, action — I love Broadway performance. Today and tomorrow, is my dream that I will perform in Broadway, or I will perform in a Hollywood film. When I start working, I just forget my every pain. I just forget everything. And this is the performance that inspired me a lot, that did a lot for me. More

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    ‘Yes, I Can Say That!’ Review: The Freedom to Offend

    The comedian Judy Gold’s new solo show at 59E59 Theaters is deliberately uncomfortable — and packed with laughs.The knuckle-dragging notion that women aren’t funny makes only a cameo in the comedian Judy Gold’s new solo show, “Yes, I Can Say That!” It’s tucked amid her homage to pioneering forebears like Totie Fields and Joan Rivers, who, Gold tells the audience, “said out loud what women whispered about when their husbands weren’t around.”The slur about unfunniness, she says, was handed down through generations of men “who did not want to see some brassy broad onstage making jokes about them and the part they played in their wives’ unhappiness.”Directed by BD Wong for Primary Stages, “Yes, I Can Say That!” is a deliberately uncomfortable, laugh-packed show seeded with stealth missiles like that one. Though Gold insists at the outset that a comedian’s only goal is to land the joke, this is not entirely true. As in her smart and impassioned book “Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble,” released in 2020, she wants at least as much to make us think.Onstage at 59E59 Theaters, Gold builds a vehement case for the vital importance of the freedom to offend in a healthy democratic society. For starters, she would like us to get over the kind of hair-trigger touchiness about language that leads to social media pile-ons, and focus on genuine threats.“They are taking away women’s rights, they are banning books, we have mass shootings, and people are furious if you mistakenly use the wrong pronoun,” she says. Then, urgently: “We had an insurrection, people!”As much as Gold is in favor of some general toughening up across the political spectrum, she’s not anti-sensitivity — “I [expletive] hate bullies,” she says — just anti-preciousness and anti-absurdity. What worries her is the freedom of expression that gets taken away when the freedom to outrage is banished.Written by Gold and Eddie Sarfaty, “Yes, I Can Say That!” interweaves a brief history of American comedy (Lenny Bruce is of course invoked) with Gold’s personal history, including comedy-club flashbacks, like the time she took rapid revenge on an M.C. who was witless enough to insult her just before she took the mic. She does some terrific impressions, including an uncanny Rudy Giuliani.What she doesn’t quite do is make palpable any current threat to comedians’ speech, so a moment when she explicitly frets about that — in the context of speaking truth to the president at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — feels like a relic of the previous presidency, when Gold wrote her book. The show’s argument could gain strength by paying just a little more attention to some of the other First Amendment issues currently in the headlines.Gold’s larger point is that the ugliness of the past isn’t as long ago as we like to think. She notes, unnervingly, that her birth in 1962 was just 17 years after the death camp at Auschwitz was liberated.“Hashtag ObjectsInMirrorAreCloserThanTheyAppear,” she says, almost as if it’s a throwaway line.She gets a laugh, but the joke is a warning.Yes, I Can Say That!Through April 16 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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    ‘Saturday Night Live’ Tackles the Trump Indictment

    The episode, hosted by Quinta Brunson, envisioned the former president going to unusual lengths to pay for his legal defense.Two days after Donald J. Trump was indicted in New York, marking the first time that a U.S. president, sitting or former, has faced criminal charges, “Saturday Night Live” envisioned Trump going to unusual lengths to pay for his legal defense by selling his own album of musical covers.“S.N.L.” also used its Weekend Update news segment to lampoon Trump’s legal predicament, as well as the reactions of his political supporters and rivals.This week’s broadcast, which was hosted by Quinta Brunson and featured the musical guest Lil Yachty, began with the show’s resident Trump impersonator, James Austin Johnson, addressing the audience directly.“Well, folks, it happened,” Johnson said as Trump. “I got indicted. Or as I spell it, indicated. Frankly, it’s time that I come clean. Admit that I broke the law and go quietly to prison.”He quickly added: “April Fool’s! That was a prank. I was doing a Jim from ‘Office.’”Johnson went on to pitch a satirical album titled “Now That’s What I Call My Legal Defense Fund,” purporting to offer his versions of hit pop songs.“I didn’t even sleep with Stormy Daniels, but in many ways I did,” Johnson said. “And isn’t it ironic that the first time I actually pay someone, they try to send me to jail?” He then sang a few bars of “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette.Later in the show, on Weekend Update, the anchor Colin Jost began the segment by announcing what he said was “great news for conservatives: New York Is finally cracking down on crime.”He continued, “Former President Donald Trump was indicted for his role in paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels. And the trial will be like a Stormy Daniels movie, because I’m deeply ashamed at how excited I am to watch it.”Given the unprecedented nature of the news events, there’s no exact blueprint for “S.N.L.” to follow here. The show made its debut a year after Nixon’s resignation, and in the time since, it has variously capitalized on or discounted other executive controversies depending on how near to airtime they occurred, as well as other factors in the cultural mix.In a Jan. 9, 1999, broadcast that aired a couple of weeks after the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Clinton, “S.N.L.” opened with a sketch that lampooned two Republican lawmakers who lost their posts during Clinton’s deepening sex scandal.In the sketch, Bob Livingston (Will Ferrell) and Newt Gingrich (Chris Parnell) meet at a bar and commiserate. “He lies about it, under oath,” Parnell laments. “Then we prosecute him and he’s still in the White House and we lose our jobs.”On that show’s Weekend Update, then-anchor Colin Quinn joked that Clinton should attend his own impeachment trial projecting confidence, “with a big-haired, tube-topped Ponderosa waitress with a Marlboro menthol hanging out of her mouth, just like, ‘Hey, what’s up, boys? Heard you talking about me. You don’t take me down — I take you down.’”Two decades later, in the first “S.N.L.” broadcast that followed the House’s vote to impeach President Trump for the first time, the show was more focused on the return of Eddie Murphy, a cast alumnus who had returned to host.That episode, on Dec. 21, 2019, opened with a parody of a Democratic presidential debate. On Weekend Update, Colin Jost delivered a somewhat time-sensitive joke about then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to not transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate.“Now we’re all in this weird limbo where no one knows exactly what’s going on,” Jost said. “There’s this cast of wild characters making fools of themselves, and everyone is thinking, please God, just let this end. So basically, it’s ‘Cats.’” (Again, it was 2019.)Both the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the House vote to impeach Trump for the second time took place during an “S.N.L.” hiatus. When the show returned on Jan. 30 of that year, Jost remarked on how distant these events already seemed in topical-comedy time.“Well, guys, a lot has happened since our last show,” he said on Weekend Update. “Some of it was good. The inauguration, that was nice. Christmas, I liked Christmas, and hey, now the terrorist watch list includes white people. So yay for diversity. Yay for diversity, it’s important to see yourself represented.”In this week’s opening sketch, Johnson sang duets with Don King (Kenan Thompson), Afroman (Devon Walker) and Donald Trump Jr. (Mikey Day). He went on to tell the audience, “Folks, if they can come for me, they can come for you too. Or in the case of Jan. 6, they can come for you and not for me. I like that one a little bit better.”Opening monologue of the weekBrunson, the creator and star of “Abbott Elementary,” used her first-ever “S.N.L.” monologue to take some apt potshots at “Friends” (“Instead of being about a group of friends, it’s about a group of teachers,” she said. “And instead of New York, it’s in Philadelphia. And instead of not having Black people, it does.”)Though Brunson lamented the fact that she’s now expected to solve any problems that come up in public schools, she also praised real-life teachers including her mother with a video assist from “my friend Barack,” also known as former President Obama.Fake commercial of the weekAt a time when true-crime documentaries about cults are providing the foundation of nearly every streaming TV library, “S.N.L.” added its own entry to this seemingly limitless trend.This fake filmed ad for a would-be Netflix mini-series chronicles another arcane American institution that demands total loyalty from its participants: being a bridesmaid. The ritual is described by talking heads played by Brunson, Heidi Gardner, Ego Nwodim and Sarah Sherman, who looks especially horrified as she recounts how a single text from a maid of honor — ending with a sparkle emoji — was enough to compel her to sell her car.Weekend Update jokes of the weekAfter rebounding from an April Fool’s prank in which Che had told the “S.N.L.” studio audience not to laugh at Jost’s jokes, the anchors continued to riff on the political response to a shooting attack at a Christian elementary school in Nashville.Che began:In the wake of the Nashville shooting, President Biden once again called on Congress to pass an assault weapons ban. Or, hear me out, stop-and-frisk for whites.Jost continued:Congressman Andy Ogles, who represents the district where the Nashville shooting took place, is being criticized for a Christmas card where he and his family are holding assault rifles. OK, even putting aside mass shooting, who are you psychos sending these cards to? If I received that in the mail, I would move. All that card tells you is, “I’m armed, I have terrible judgment and I know where you live.”Weekend Update desk character of the weekFollowing the news that the principal of a charter school in Florida was forced to resign after students there were shown Michelangelo’s David during a lesson on Renaissance art, Michael Longfellow could have responded in any number of ways.He could have appeared on Weekend Update playing an aggrieved parent or a student from the school. But instead, he chose to play David — not the biblical figure but the statue itself, for which Longfellow proudly went bare-chested with his face and body painted a marbly white. We applaud his commitment to the bit and we hope the coloring washes off in the shower. More

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    ‘Succession,’ Season 4, Episode 2 Recap: The Serious People

    Logan Roy does not care about any of your social norms, and he lacks the patience for apologies.Season 4, Episode 2: ‘Rehearsal’Here’s what you need to know about Logan Roy: He does not care about any of your social norms or niceties. In last week’s “Succession,” while his kids were stealthily trying to outbid him for Pierce Global Media, Logan did not bother to play their little games. He demanded that Tom call Shiv to find out what was what — and he did it in a room full of Waystar executives, so Tom could not say no. Logan never minds coming off as rude or presumptuous. Manners are a waste of time, which is a waste of money.This week, the younger Roys are at it again, weighing a pitch from the maverick Waystar board members Stewy Hosseini (Arian Moayed) and Sandi Furness (Hope Davis) to gum up the works with the impending GoJo sale. So what does Logan do? He does not wait patiently and politely to see what will happen — heavens, no. He crashes a karaoke party.Logan spends a lot of this episode in places no one wants him to be. Apparently, without telling anyone — except for maybe Kerry and Tom — Logan has made a plan for how to spend the rest of his life. Once Waystar is officially sold to GoJo, he is going to dedicate himself to “fixing” ATN, because the only part of his business that he has every really cared about is the news.He shows up unannounced at the ATN offices late one afternoon and starts “terrifyingly moseying” around, according to Greg. (“It’s like ‘Jaws’ if everyone in ‘Jaws’ worked for Jaws.”) Logan complains to Tom about how much everything costs, from the air conditioning bill for ATN’s new hangar-style bullpen to the fresh pizzas being stacked atop the unfinished cold pizzas in the break room. (“There’s a sog factor,” Greg weakly explains.)In a stirring and terrifying speech — delivered to the assembled employees from atop some boxes of printer paper — Logan proclaims his vision for ATN. A state-of-the-art election package with spiffy new graphics? Who cares? What Logan wants is for his team not just to report the news but to make it. He wants them to start giving the audience “something everyone knows but nobody says.” It is time, at last, for brutal honesty.So it is inevitable really that Logan ends his night facing some of that honesty himself from two of the people with the biggest grudges against him: Kendall and Shiv. (But not Roman. We will get back to that.)The showdown is set up by a couple of typically petty Logan moves. The kids are supposed to helicopter into New York City for Connor and Willa’s wedding rehearsal, but their father cancels their Waystar chopper privileges with no warning. This infuriates Shiv, who is already fuming because he advised Tom to tie up every notable divorce lawyer in New York, so that they are all “conflicted out” from handling her case — a classic Logan breakup move. (“I got Mommed,” Shiv grumbles.)The vibes are even worse in the city, where just as Kendall, Shiv and Roman are walking in late to the rehearsal dinner, Willa is ducking out. Connor explains that when his fiancée rose to give a speech, she said, “I can’t do this,” and then disappeared into the bathroom. Connor is now mopey and anxious, and tracking Willa’s whereabouts via a locator app on his phone. Roman, incapable of letting a prime opportunity to needle a loved one go unheeded, revels in describing what kind of decadent escapades Willa might be up to. (Connor, when the app shows Willa at an aquarium supply retailer: “Is that a drug thing?” Roman: “It is.”)To cheer Connor up, they indulge his longstanding dream to sing karaoke at a “real” bar “away from the Fancy Dans,” just like people do in the movies. But while Connor is in the middle of an impressively miserable version of Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” — an impressively miserable song — the kids get the alert that Logan is on his way.Because Logan knows everything — in this case, thanks to Connor — he knows his children are thinking about squeezing GoJo’s Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) for more money. He is also convinced that deep down, this is personal for them not business. He needs to give them something they want more than money: an apology.But an apology for what? Logan wants to limit his regrets to some of his minor recent obnoxiousness. But Kendall and Shiv, who have had enough of their father’s pretending to atone one day then going back to being awful the next, want him to acknowledge his biggest sins: ignoring Connor, hitting Roman, weaponizing Tom against Shiv, conspiring with the kids’ mother to push them out of Waystar … everything, basically.Logan sees no point to this, so he abruptly ends his family reconciliation time with a gentle but devastating kiss-off: “I love you, but you are not serious people.” Only after he leaves the karaoke bar does Logan start raging, ranting to Kerry about how in New York there are “rats as fat as skunks.” He then pivots back into Logan mode, deciding to cancel the board meeting and to meet with Mattson again, with every major Waystar player there except Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron). He wants to skip the procedural hoo-hah and settle this person to person.Shiv and Kendall seem almost giddy that they got to tell the old man off to his face — though later as they ride home separately, only Kendall is still smiling. And Roman?Well, it turns out Roman has been texting little “hey how are you” messages to his father for weeks. So after the karaoke fiasco, he drops by his dad’s home and immediately gets roped into the big Mattson plan. Logan needs “pirates” like Roman to lead his new ATN. “Smart people know what they are,” he tells his son.This is something Shiv and Kendall have missed, as they have been dragging Roman from one Logan-skewering plan after another and treating him like their mascot. They think their brother is the George Harrison of their band. But when pushed, Roman stares them down and straightens them out, proclaiming — with a confidence that should frighten them — “I’m John.”Due diligenceThe best running gag in this episode — just edging out how Kendall keeps pestering Roman with snackable bits of Buddhist philosophy — involves Kerry’s audition to become an ATN anchor. She has produced a terrible tape. (For some reason she keeps smiling at all times, even when reporting on a child abduction.) Tom, tasked with figuring out what to do about this, gravely tells Greg that the situation is “like Israel-Palestine, except harder and much more important,” before passing the buck and offering a step-by-step guide for how Greg should handle it. But when Greg tries to follow those steps, he botches it. His best attempt to soften the suggestion that her tape is awful is to say, “It can happen that they shoot weird, the cameras.”A serious question for serious people: Why do the Roy children even want to be in the news business? News is Logan’s passion. The children, based on all available evidence, seem baffled by its appeal. While watching some PGM programming and brainstorming about how to improve it, they sound completely lost. Shiv only knows they should “broaden out and stop over-indexing to college professors.” Kendall tosses out jargon like “from global-global to hyperlocal” but when he tries to clarify what he means all he can come up with is, “Every day: What is happening in Africa?” And as a bit of possible foreshadowing, Roman comes closest to imagining something like his dad might want when he proposes info-dumps in the day and “A Clockwork Orange” at night.The younger Roys do a lot in this episode to torpedo any sympathy viewers might be nurturing for them. When they follow Connor into one of his non-Fancy Dan bars (where he sighs, “Ah, America! I’ve missed you.”), Roman mutters, “Do you think they know how to make a vodka tonic?” while Shiv chuckles, “House red? Do I dare?” Later, Roman seems bemused and repulsed by the plastic menus listing basic pub food like wings. The Roys’ contempt oozes … and it stinks. More

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    Review: ‘True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times,’ by Robert Greenfield

    “True West” is a new biography of a playwright and actor who was laconic in person but spoke volumes in his work.TRUE WEST: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times, by Robert GreenfieldThe first rule of being Bob Dylan’s friend, it’s said, is to not talk about Bob Dylan. A similar code of omertà appears to apply to Sam Shepard, the playwright and actor, and it has held since his death in 2017. A lot of people have lined up to not talk to his latest biographer, mostly the same people who lined up to not talk to the previous ones.Robert Greenfield’s “True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times” is the fourth life of Shepard, after Ellen Oumano’s in 1986, Don Shewey’s in 1997 and John J. Winters’s in 2017. Greenfield has persuaded 38 people to submit to interviews, according to his source notes. It’s not a shameful number, but this isn’t Robert Caro supersleuthing.Judge a party not by who’s there, the old credo goes, but by who isn’t. The missing voices include those of O-Lan Jones, Shepard’s first wife; his longtime partner, Jessica Lange; his lovers Patti Smith and Brooke Adams and Joni Mitchell (her song “Coyote” is about him); and myriad friends and collaborators, including Terrence Malick, Keith Richards, Ed Harris, Peter Coyote, Wim Wenders, John Malkovich, T Bone Burnett, Diane Keaton, Ethan Hawke and Dylan himself, with whom Shepard, in “Brownsville Girl,” wrote the abiding lyric “Even the swap meets around here are getting pretty corrupt.”Greenfield’s book is faithful to Shepard’s life, while it skips like a stone along the surface. Shepard spent much time laying down cover, and tending to his own mythology. He gave a lot of interviews about hating to give interviews. Like Dylan, he was laconic in person while, in his work, he spilled words by the bucketful. Like Dylan, too, he threw out a million ideas and images and left them for others to try to pick up.Shepard reflexively lied about his life, so there’s a lot to untangle. He was so handsome, so fine and flinty and long-boned, that he was a shock to be around — he made people stupid, or teary, or angry or skin-starved, sometimes all at once. He mostly got away with wearing those John Deere hats and chewing on toothpicks and dispensing regular-fella observations such as “I learn more at the racetrack than from Shakespeare” and “I just stay in the movie business to feed my horses.” You wish the photo insert (why only one?) went on for a couple dozen pages.“True West” is the first biography of Shepard since his death, at 73, from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. His body was ambushed in other ways. His smoking caught up with him. He needed a stent for a blocked artery. He carried an oxygen machine.By his late 60s, the wheels were coming off. He got a second D.U.I. at 72. He rarely chose well, in terms of his acting roles, but did he need, near the end, to appear on the Discovery Channel series “Klondike”?Cover photograph by Bruce WeberGreenfield is a prolific journeyman biographer who has written the lives of Jerry Garcia, Bill Graham, Timothy Leary and Burt Bacharach, among others. His Shepard book lacks a certain density, and a critical sensibility, but it’s well organized and cleanly written. It neatly covers the bases.Richard Hell was born Richard Meyers, and Iggy Pop was Jim Osterberg. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott? He was really Elliot Adnopoz. When Sam Shepard arrived in Manhattan in 1963, at 19, he went by Steve Rogers, though his full name was Samuel Shepard Rogers III.His father was a B-54 Liberator pilot during World War II, whose drinking and macho, unruly moods informed the characters in some of Shepard’s best plays, including “Fool for Love” (1983). Shepard grew up in Southern California, in South Pasedena and then in Duarte, on an avocado ranch, though both his parents taught in exclusive high schools. He thought he might become a veterinarian. He began writing plays while in community college, before dropping out.Shepard knew Charles Mingus’s son, Charles Mingus III, in high school. The younger Mingus helped Shepard get a job busing tables at the Village Gate, a nightclub in Greenwich Village. Where did Shepard’s faculty for language come from? Greenfield can’t explain it. But the plays started pouring from him, dozens of them.Shepard’s early works, with titles like “Shaved Splits” and “Back Bog Beast Bait,” were hallucinatory cascades of rapid-fire assertion and they broke with nearly every convention. Everything Shepard wrote was stripped bare and a bit out of whack; Beckett and Pinter stood sentinel over his shoulders. Gone was any remnant of soggy humanism or stabs at Arthur Miller-like “depth.” His plays were staged at young downtown experimental theaters like Café La MaMa, Theatre Genesis and Caffe Cino.Sometimes he’d have a rock band onstage, an assault on the mock emotion of show tunes. Sometimes that band was the Holy Modal Rounders, with whom he played drums. (In 1968, at San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom, the Rounders opened for Pink Floyd.) Shepard was the person who convinced Patti Smith, a poet, to try standing in front of a loud and unruly group of musicians, to become a rock star.He won his first Obie Award in 1967 for “La Turista.” Elizabeth Hardwick reviewed it in The New York Review of Books and called it “a work of superlative interest.” He was 24 when Michelangelo Antonioni brought him to Rome to help write the screenplay for “Zabriskie Point.” Later that year, he lived in Keith Richards’s country manor while working on a screenplay for the Rolling Stones. He stayed at the Chateau Marmont while in Los Angeles and bought land in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, near Philip Glass and Robert Frank.Shepard in 2016.Chad Batka for The New York TimesShepard’s friends back in New York thought he was getting awfully full of himself. They tried on one opening night to kidnap him, as a kind of intervention. What they didn’t know was that he wasn’t yet in full flower. Between 1977 and 1985 he wrote his best and most mature work: plays including “Curse of the Starving Class,” “Buried Child,” “True West,” “Fool for Love” and “A Lie of the Mind,” many about disintegrating families. The stature of most of these has only grown. They still make you reinterpret your experience.He had that rare gift, among playwrights, for being able to articulate what’s unsaid right alongside what’s said. He hated to fly and wrote some of his plays while driving, pinning his papers to the steering wheel.Shepard’s fame peaked in 1983, when he appeared as the laconic West Virginia test pilot Chuck Yeager in Philip Kaufman’s film of Tom Wolfe’s best seller “The Right Stuff.” He received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor, losing to Jack Nicholson in “Terms of Endearment.”Greenfield rakes this material toward a series of tent-pole scenes. These include clashes with authority figures including Antonioni; Dylan, who made him feel square; the theater producer Joe Papp; and the director Robert Altman, who made a film of “Fool for Love.” The sections on Shepard’s time with Smith are lovely. They drifted in hairy-pitted love through the corridors of the Chelsea Hotel, a Robert Doisneau photograph come to bohemian life. Shepard was newly married to O-Lan Jones when he crashed into Smith. Jones knew, and he knew, that he was a hero-heel. The usual rules bent around him. In 1985 he told Newsweek about his early years in the city, “I rode everything with hair.”He met Lange on the set of the 1982 movie “Frances.” She was six years younger and had just had a child with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Though she and Shepard never married they were together for nearly three decades, much of that time spent on a 107-acre horse farm near Charlottesville, Va.Shepard’s later plays were not among his best, but such was his stature that audiences tended to feel that the failure was their own, for not fully appreciating them.Shepard’s is a hard life to screw up, and Greenfield doesn’t. His writing about the playwright’s final years is detailed and moving. Despite the D.U.I.s and the mediocre television shows, we glimpse his personal dignity. It was as if Shepard were following Shakespeare’s stage direction: “Keep some state in thy exit, and vanish.”TRUE WEST: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work and Times | By Robert Greenfield | Illustrated | 432 pp. | Crown | $30 More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘La Frontera’ and ‘The English Patient’

    This week we’re watching a docuseries about the U.S.-Mexico border, the Oscar-winning 1996 film starring Ralph Fiennes and lots more.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, April 3-9. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBill T. Jones, right, in “Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters.”Rosalynde LeBlancCAN YOU BRING IT: BILL T. JONES AND D-MAN IN THE WATERS 8 p.m. on WORLD. “AfroPop: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange,” a documentary series about life across the African diaspora, is kicking off a new season with an exploration of the legacy of the choreographer-director Bill T. Jones’s seminal ballet, “D-Man in the Waters.” At the height of the AIDS epidemic, the disease ravaged the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, taking the lives of its co-founder, Zane, and the dancer Demian “D-Man” Acquavella; this dance was inspired by a series of group improvisations as a reflection of the troupe’s struggles and losses. Through the intercutting of vintage recordings of the Jones/Zane company and present-day footage of students learning the ballet — Jones drops into rehearsals to offer feedback — the film is a “passionate and moving” exploration of the dance piece’s endurance, writes Glenn Kenny in his Critic’s Pick review for The New York Times.LA FRONTERA WITH PATI JINICH 9 p.m. on PBS. This award-winning docuseries featuring stories from the U.S.-Mexico border is back for a second season, with the show’s Emmy-nominated host and executive producer, the chef Pati Jinich, expanding her travels to the Mexican states of Baja California, Sonora and Chihuahua. In addition to showcasing the culture and cuisines of these areas, the series will also cover how timely issues like L.G.B.T.Q. rights, climate change and immigration play out in the regions.TuesdayMartin Smith, right, with Taliban officials in “America and the Taliban.”FRONTLINE (PBS)AMERICA AND THE TALIBAN 10 p.m. on PBS. This three-part documentary series from the award-winning producers and directors Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith (“In Search of Al Qaeda”) draws upon 20 years of reporting and new interviews with American and Taliban officials to tell the story of modern U.S.-Afghanistan relations. The series begins with the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City and follows the U.S.’s attempt to destroy Al Qaeda, ending with the Taliban’s 2021 takeover of Kabul.WednesdayGROWING BELUSHI 9 p.m. on DISCOVERY. The actor and comedian Jim Belushi (younger brother to the late actor comic John Belushi), his family and his team of farmers at Belushi’s Farm are back after building a cannabis business in southern Oregon from scratch in the first two seasons of the show. The third season follows Belushi and his crew as they work to turn their business into a national brand, documenting the high jinks and hiccups along the way — like a fire that destroys the farm’s barn, drying facility and half a million dollars’ worth of cannabis.ThursdayRalph Fiennes in “The English Patient.”Phil Bray/Miramax FilmsTHE ENGLISH PATIENT (1996) 5:15 p.m. on FLIXe. Based on the 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name by Michael Ondaatje, this Oscar-winning film is set in WWII-ravaged Italy in a bombed-out monastery, where a combat nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche), is caring for an amnesiac, English-accented burn patient (Ralph Fiennes), scarred beyond recognition. The film intersperses scenes of Hana’s budding love for Lt. Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh sapper in the British Indian Army, with the English patient’s flashbacks of his own tragic love affair. In her review for The Times, Janet Maslin described the movie as a “dreamlike, nonlinear tale” that “swoops gracefully from past to present, from one set of lovers to another, from the contours of the body to the topography of the desert sands.”FridayTHE LEGACY OF J DILLA 10 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. on FX. This feature from The New York Times Presents series is a portrait of the revered rap producer, J Dilla, who died in 2006 at the age of 32. Born in Detroit as James Dewitt Yancey, J Dilla was a prolific music producer who left an indelible mark on the hip-hop landscape through his original work and collaborations with artists like Erykah Badu, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest and D’Angelo. Through exclusive interviews with his family and those close to him, the documentary explores J Dilla’s life and why he has been celebrated far more since his death than during his life.SaturdayHumphrey Bogart, left, and Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.”AP FILE, via Associated PressCASABLANCA (1942) 8 p.m. on TCM. Set during World War II, this Academy Award-winning film focuses on Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American expatriate and the owner of Rick’s Café Américain, a shady but popular nightclub in Casablanca, Morocco. The film follows the dilemma that arises when the thief Guillermo Ugarte (Peter Lorre) gives Rick travel papers he plans to sell later, only to die in police custody before doing so. Now Rick must decide whether to give them to the woman who broke his heart, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), and her husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a Resistance leader escaping German officials. Bosley Crowther described the film as “a rich, suave, exciting and moving tale,” in his review for The Times.SundayFrom left, Weezer band members Brian Bell, Patrick Wilson, Rivers Cuomo and Scott Shriner at the “Grammy Salute to The Beach Boys” in Los Angeles.Sonja Flemming/CBSGOSPEL SUPERFEST EASTER JAM 5 p.m. on BET. Some of the biggest names in gospel music are coming together in Ohio to celebrate Easter Sunday. This worship and music event will feature performers such as Pastor Donnie McClurkin, Deitrick Haddon and Le’Andria Johnson.A GRAMMY SALUTE TO THE BEACH BOYS 8 p.m. on CBS. Members of the Beach Boys — Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, David Marks and Bruce Johnston — are featured guests at this event celebrating the group’s win of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. The tribute event at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles will feature live performances by Andy Grammer, Beck, Fall Out Boy, Weezer and John Legend, in addition to appearances by Tom Hanks, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and John Stamos. More

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    ‘Prima Facie’ and ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ Win Big at the Olivier Awards

    The Jodie Comer-starring legal drama won best new play at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys and an adaptation of ‘Totoro’ won six gongs — the most of any production.“Prima Facie,” a Broadway-bound play about a lawyer who represents men accused of assault, then is herself sexually assaulted, was the big winner on Sunday at the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The one-woman show, starring Jodie Comer and written by Suzie Miller, was named best new play during a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Comer was also named best actress for her performance at the West End’s Harold Pinter Theater.The awards come just days before “Prima Facie,” and Comer, transfer to New York. The show is scheduled to begin previews at the Golden Theater on Apr. 11.Its success at the Olivier Awards was perhaps unsurprising given that “Prima Facie” was a critical and commercial hit in London during its run last year. Matt Wolf, reviewing the play for The New York Times, said that Comer took a big risk making her West End debut in an “emotionally fraught solo play.” But, he added, “there’s no denying the visceral power of an evening that owes its sellout status to a theatrical neophyte who possesses the know-how of a seasoned pro.”“Prima Facie” beat stiff competition to the best new play title, including Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of “To Kill A Mockingbird” at the Gielgud Theater; “Patriots” at the Almeida — a timely look at President Vladimir V. Putin’s rise in Russia; and “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy” at the Royal Court, a tale of six young Black men in group therapy.Comer accepted her award, thanking “the sisterhood” who worked on the show, then giving a message to viewers online. “To any kids who haven’t been to drama school, who can’t afford to go to drama school, who’ve been rejected from drama school — don’t let anybody tell you that it is impossible,” she said.Although it won one of the night’s most coveted awards, “Prima Facie” was not the only big winner. “My Neighbour Totoro,” an adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 animated film, at the Barbican Theater in London, won six gongs — the most of any production — including best entertainment or comedy play, and the best director award for Phelim McDermott.The show, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, was a crowd-pleaser in London partly thanks to featuring several giant, fantastical puppets — including a furry Catbus that is part motor vehicle, part feline. Dominic Cavendish, reviewing the play in The Daily Telegraph, said those puppets were “worth the price of admission alone.”Other major winners included Paul Mescal, the Irish star, who was named best actor for his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Almeida Theater.Matt Wolf, in a review for The New York Times, wrote that “Mescal brings both swagger and sensitivity to the role, in the process stepping out of the long shadow cast over this part by its stage and screen originator, Marlon Brando.”The best new musical award went to “Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” a show at the National Theater in London about the intertwined lives of the residents of a housing complex. It triumphed over several higher-profile titles including “Tammy Faye,” about the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, featuring music by Elton John. More

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    Book Review: ‘Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation,’ by Nancy Schoenberger

    Playing Blanche DuBois is shattering, say the actresses featured in Nancy Schoenberger’s “Blanche.” But Tennessee Williams’s most indelible character is now a figure of sympathy.BLANCHE: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation, by Nancy SchoenbergerLast we saw of Blanche DuBois, the brittle antiheroine of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” she was being carted off to a state loony bin, uttering her famous line about relying on “the kindness of strangers” that can hardly be improved upon.So when Nancy Schoenberger, a biographer and poet, announced early in her new book, “Blanche,” that she planned to include a few sonnets written from the perspective of DuBois’s ill-fated, unseen young husband, as well as a hypothetical obituary in The Times-Picayune describing how her subject turned her life around after psychiatric treatment, I … yes, blanched.With rare exceptions, such as Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea” (a prequel to “Jane Eyre” that imagines the first Mrs. Rochester), messing with another writer’s characters tends to be tricky business. You have to love, for example, the sardonic headline The New York Times ran when it reviewed Susan Hill’s 1993 novel “Mrs. DeWinter,” a follow-up to Daphne du Maurier’s unimprovable “Rebecca”: “Still Dead After All These Years.”Was “Blanche” going to be a “Still Crazy After All These Years” situation? Or like the goofy-sounding off-off-Broadway attempt at a “Streetcar” sequel in 2006, wherein Blanche and Stella, her sister, were at least in passing represented by throw pillows?Fortunately not. Schoenberger, the author of books on the novelist-socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood and the Johns Wayne and Ford, has now written a lean but graceful character study of DuBois, giving Williams’s most indelible but also frequently misunderstood character her due.It seems incredible now that when “Streetcar” was first staged in 1947, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jessica Tandy, audiences sympathized with her antagonist and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski: the brutish factory-parts salesman most remembered for the muscles rippling over his “wife beater” T-shirt and his primordial bellow of “Hey, Stellllla!” (The sympathy was probably in part because young Marlon Brando’s performance was so dazzling.)Even before the #MeToo era, however, Kowalski was being re-evaluated as a domestic abuser, slut shamer and rapist. And as important a proponent of the play as Kazan, who also directed Vivien Leigh in the 1951 film, grew convinced, after his prolonged time with the material, of Blanche’s basic sanity.Schoenberger briefly explains her own fascination with “Streetcar”: Her parents were born in New Orleans, where the play is set, on either side of the Audubon Park Zoo, hearing the roar of the lions there. Her father was an itinerant naval officer — “so handsome in his white uniform!” writes the author, whose enthusiasm sometimes spills over endearingly into exclamation points — but she visited Louisiana often as a child, marveling at the Spanish moss and “dark scurrying cockroaches that seemed to lurk everywhere.” Her mother, a campus beauty queen in Baton Rouge, was an early fan of Williams’s work.If New Orleans and its “miasmal vapors” are pure nostalgia for Schoenberger, for Williams, a gay man who had been mocked as “Miss Nancy” by his cruel father, Cornelius, the sensual city was “liberation,” she notes. He was inspired more tragically by his sister Rose, whose erratic behavior, possibly exacerbated by Cornelius’s violations, led to her institutionalization and then lobotomization at age 26.The dysfunctional Williams family, chronicled extensively in more substantive books like John Lahr’s “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” moves to the background quite quickly in “Blanche,” though, as readers get acquainted with a series of prominent actresses who have played her, a couple of whom Schoenberger has interviewed, all of whom were haunted by their experience. She also relies heavily, though with a light touch, on previously published material, of which there is no shortage. Talking to a journalist about playing DuBois can resemble a particularly wrenching therapy session.For women and not a few drag queens, Blanche is considered one of the plummest roles in all of show business, though its psychological complexities can prove debilitating. “Like climbing Mount Everest,” NPR called it. (Cate Blanchett, naturally, has scaled Everest twice, playing Blanche both onstage and, in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” onscreen, in a modernized version for which she won an Oscar.) Jessica Lange and her partner, Sam Shepard — romantic couples often get oddly enmeshed in the production of “Streetcar” — believed it the equivalent of “Hamlet.” Rosemary Harris: “The loneliest part to live through that I’ve ever played on the stage.” Patricia Clarkson: “It destroys your life when you play that part, you never really recover from it, and everybody who’s ever done it knows.” Jemier Jenkins, one of a few Black women to play her, on the aftermath: “I was very actively trying to release, release, release.”Even the sturdy Ann-Margret found herself “twisted and shaking, confused, agitated, and staring ahead in a daze. I’d lost my grip on reality.” Most starkly Leigh, who turned out to have bipolar disorder, claimed that playing DuBois “tipped me into madness.” “Why has she entered our bloodstream?” wonders Schoenberger, a persuasive proponent of the play’s enduring importance despite its dated elements, most risibly that women hovering around 30 are past their prime. We have lived to see the antiquation of the word “nymphomaniac,” with which the critic Kenneth Tynan dismissed the character, and the reframing of prostitution as “sex work.” (DuBois’s seduction of a 17-year-old male student, regardless, keeps the mantle of moral ambiguity as settled around her shoulders as the “burden” of Belle Reve, the lost family estate, or one of her gossamer scarves.)Talking to Claire Bloom, who played the part on a London stage in 1974, Tennessee Williams once said he imagined Blanche persevering through her time in the asylum and ending up with a flower shop back in New Orleans; in her feminist faux-obit, Schoenberger gives her a co-ownership with Stella, who’s divorced Stanley. It’s a fanciful but satisfying little coda to this project, thankfully confined. (The sonnets, supposedly by Blanche’s doomed young groom, Allan Gray, are gilding the lily.)I’m not sure “Blanche,” which can waft and flit like the butterfly-like creature it chronicles, will satisfy true Williams junkies. But if you’re unfamiliar with this great American classic, or have perhaps let high-school memories of it lapse, this book is a hell of a gateway drug.BLANCHE: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation | By Nancy Schoenberger | Illustrated | 240 pp. | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | $30 More