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    How Richard Nelson’s ‘Our Life in Art’ Was Translated, Twice

    Richard Nelson seemed to have found the perfect home for his play “Our Life in Art.”He had written a show about the Moscow Art Theater’s 1923 tour of the United States with its director, Konstantin Stanislavski, and was planning to have a Russian translation presented by the company’s modern leader at a performance space that Stanislavski had built on the grounds of his family’s factory.What’s more, the Brooklyn Academy of Music was interested in bringing the production to New York, where Nelson is best known as the author of the “Rhinebeck Panorama,” a collection of a dozen intimate plays that document and dissect slices of American life and history through nothing more than dinner conversation.A major step toward the play’s premiere in Moscow came on Feb. 23, 2022, when the director, Sergei Zhenovach, read through it with his company. Everyone seemed enthusiastic about the project, but Nelson awoke the next day to a message that read, “Something awful has happened.”Russia had invaded Ukraine.“That was it,” Nelson recalled during a recent video interview. “The war cut all ties to Russian theater, so it was over.”“Our Life in Art,” Nelson’s play about a close-knit theater troupe of the past, is being performed by a close-knit French theater troupe of the present.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesThe war, and a fresh crackdown on dissent in Russia, made “Our Life in Art” all the more necessary. Its plot, which unfurls between Moscow Art Theater performances in Chicago, examines and questions how art is navigated within world events and politics. “The play has evolved into being about itself,” Nelson said. “What’s happened while trying to get the play on has now affected how it is seen. So many people I know in Russian theater and art — it’s just a very difficult time, and all of these issues are in the air.”In the air, and finally onstage. In the end, Nelson’s play about a close-knit troupe of the past was taken up by a close-knit troupe of the present: “Our Life in Art” found a new home at the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris, where it is running through March 2, translated into French by that company’s director, Ariane Mnouchkine.The production has put Nelson on the other end of work he has previously done translating Russian theater classics into English with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the power couple behind many Russian literature translations in print today. So, Nelson knows that the process is more than mapping one language onto another; as with the plays by his hero and aesthetic ancestor, Anton Chekhov, it also requires the preservation of a specific, crucial sensibility.In the works of both Chekhov and Nelson, the extraordinary emerges only from the ordinary. Revelations come not in speeches, but in passing comments. And, above all, in the spirit of verisimilitude, people have true conversations. Nelson’s characters speak to one another, not to the audience. He likes to tell actors that the performance “is the relationship you have with everyone else.”That’s a level of lived-in mastery rarely seen even in naturalistic theater. Not for nothing does Nelson tend to work with the same actors as a de facto company; Jay O. Sanders and Maryann Plunkett appeared in all the Rhinebeck plays, but as members of three different families. And Sanders starred in Nelson, Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”The translators got to know Nelson when he had mailed them a letter introducing himself and expressing interest in a collaboration. They later met in New York, during the release of their version of “War and Peace” about 15 years ago, and the three of them decided to embark on translating Russian theater, starting with Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country.”“He’s a man of very great integrity,” Volokhonsky said of Nelson, “and he has a gift for friendship.”The three quickly grew close, and built up their working relationship to translating all the major plays of Chekhov. “We would submit the text to him,” Pevear said, “and he would go through it and say, ‘My actors wouldn’t say that, what if we did it this way?’ That’s why we only wanted to do this work with a playwright. It’s not just about narrative.”So, when Nelson wrote “Our Life in Art” — a nod to Stanislavski’s book “My Life in Art” — in fall 2020, he recruited Volokhonsky to translate it. Originally, it had been planned for Lev Dodin, the artistic director of the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg, but he and Nelson had different visions for the play, about whether it should be understated or eruptive, and their collaboration ended on friendly terms. Next, the show was taken up by Sergei Zhenovach before he left the Moscow Art Theater, and by that point, Volokhonsky said, her work on the show was done; anything further would be refined in rehearsals. But those never came.“To have this luxury and this luck, where every day, for months and months, I am just able to focus on making theater without any other pressures or anything else going on, is a piece of profound fortune,” Nelson said of working with the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesAs the play lay dormant, Mnouchkine, who had seen Nelson’s work in New York, approached him about creating something for Théâtre du Soleil. He told her that he happened to have a show about an acting company, and sent it to her. She read “Our Life in Art” overnight and decided to mount it, with him directing, as he often does with productions of his plays in the United States.Mnouchkine translated the text quickly, she said, “while he was already rehearsing” with her actors, over a luxuriously long 10 weeks last spring. “I had to go quite fast, but I needed to have this very high-standard, delicate easiness, which seems easy to say but is not easy. And I wanted to have the same rhythm as Richard.”The translation was not without its complications. Nelson doesn’t speak French, and not everyone in the Théâtre du Soleil company speaks English. A translator was an essential intermediary. He would tell the actors what was happening in a scene, and if they responded, “That’s not quite what’s here in the text,” they would together work toward a more accurate turn of phrase. They talked through complicated idioms, untranslated figures of speech and, most difficult, the difference between pronouns, a nonissue in English: When should characters who are close but still colleagues address each another as the informal “tu” or the formal “vous”?It helps that, after more rehearsals this fall, Nelson had 14 weeks with the actors, and spent that time living in the company’s home, La Cartoucherie, in the bucolic Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris, seeing them behave as a true company. “There are no stage managers, there are no real designers,” he said. “The actors do everything: They clean toilets, they move furniture around. This is their home, and they own this.”The result may not have been an unequivocal success — in The New York Times, the critic Laura Cappelle found the play’s realistic conversations casual to the point of rendering historical context inaccessible — but Mnouchkine said she and her actors were “very pleased” to work with Nelson. For his part, he felt as if the most difficult translation, of his nothing-forced aesthetic, was achieved.“I’m really happy with where the play has landed,” Nelson said. “At a time when the American theater is in crisis, to have this luxury and this luck, where every day, for months and months, I am just able to focus on making theater without any other pressures or anything else going on, is a piece of profound fortune.” More

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    Stephen Colbert Is OK With Kicking Rudy Giuliani While He’s Down

    Colbert chided Giuliani after two former Georgia election workers won a $148 million judgment against him, then sued him again a few days later.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Kick Him While He’s DownTwo former Georgia election workers who were awarded $148 million after being defamed by Rudolph W. Giuliani sued him again on Monday after he continued to attack them.“Now, normally, I’d say don’t kick a man while he’s down, but in Rudy’s case, go for it,” Stephen Colbert said. “It’s much easier when he’s down there — he’s closer to your feet.”“After this enormous punishment for the damage he caused by lying continually about these two innocent women, I’m sure he’s learned his lesson — and he continues to repeat his false allegations the poll watchers interfered in the 2020 election. He’s done it outside the courthouse, on Newsmax, and on Steve Bannon’s podcast. He says it everywhere he goes. He even said it to his current roommates, two sea gulls on South Street Seaport.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The two Georgia election workers who won a $148 million verdict on Friday against Rudy Giuliani filed another lawsuit yesterday after Giuliani continued making false statements about them. Only Rudy could lose a $148 million lawsuit and say, ‘OK, double or nothing!’” — SETH MEYERS“Obviously, he needs money fast. I recommend he drill for oil in his skull.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (You Make Me Feel So Young Edition)“According to a new report, President Biden frequently tells aides and friends in private conversations that he feels ‘so much younger’ than his age. And I’m sure he does, but it doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence when you walk around going ‘Man, I feel 73!’” — SETH MEYERS“Yes, his campaign staff is worried when he overextends himself by working long hours or riding a bike or nodding too hard, excessive blinking.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Well, good for you, sir! You don’t look one day over — let’s change the subject. What were we talking about? I don’t remember.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingBradley Cooper could barely get through a story about his 30th high school reunion while laughing with Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightNicki Minaj will promote her new album, “Pink Friday 2,” on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutA reading party in Brooklyn. Lila Barth for The New York TimesReading Rhythms isn’t a book club — it’s a reading party held regularly in parks, bars, and on rooftops. More

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    ‘Fargo’ Season 5, Episode 6 Recap: Deadbeats and Broken Dreams

    This episode reflects that this season is about women carving out a place for themselves in a world where the best men are dim and the worst are abusive.Season 5, Episode 6: ‘The Tender Trap’To the many reversals of Coen character types in this season of “Fargo” — Dot as a lethally capable Jean Lundegaard from the movie, Roy as a malevolent Ed Tom Bell from “No Country for Old Men” — let’s add one more: Lars Olmstead, the layabout husband of Indira Olmstead, this season’s indebted, nonpregnant spin on Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson. Marge’s husband, Norm, has a dream, too. He paints a mallard for a competition to get on the 20-cent stamp. He loses to his friend, but gets on the three-cent stamp, which Marge celebrates in the film’s touching denouement.But unlike with Lars, Norm’s ambitions are a not a drag on his wife. On the contrary, he makes her eggs and gives the prowler a jump. They enjoy a lunchtime fricassee together. In the end, snuggled under a blanket against the howling cold of the rural Midwest, they look forward to their first child. If anything, it is Marge who experiences a bit of wanderlust when she leaves for the Twin Cities to investigate the case and puts on makeup to meet with an old classmate for drinks. Ol’ reliable Norm will always be there to support her, but perhaps Brainerd, Minn., and its brown-gray buffet casseroles aren’t enough for a sheriff of her impeccable instincts.Indira is too good for Lars; that much is clear. When he comes stumbling inside from another night sleeping in his garage of broken dreams, he rages at Indira for not supporting him like a proper wife. The scene isn’t remotely persuasive, because there has never been any suggestion of why these two were ever wedded in the first place. He is trying to bring about a traditional marriage where, based on all available evidence, one has never existed. He runs up debt as a jobless nincompoop who imagined himself first as a rock drummer and then as a PGA Tour pro, and she takes double-shifts at the police station to work down their debt and to supply her man-child with Frosted Flakes. His gall in this moment is unmitigated, and it is also unbelievable.Yet the crude engineering of this scene does feed into a larger theme of the episode and the series itself, which has become about united women carving out a place for themselves in a world where the best men are dim and the worst are thoughtless and abusive. Indira’s fight with her husband, who somehow expects her to exchange recipes like the other wives at the country club, serves as a catalyst for her to reconsider her position on Dot. Given what Indira has been able to piece together, Dot is no longer the cop-tasing miscreant in the back of her cruiser but an abuse victim who is scraping and clawing to maintain the happiness she went through hell to achieve. That’s a woman worth fighting for.Lorraine doesn’t come around to Indira’s line of thinking naturally, which is what makes her the most intriguing character on the show. Her instinct is to support guys like Roy Tillman, because she considers herself tough and unapologetic and tends to think of society in terms of winners and losers, many of whom owe her company money. When Indira slides a thick file detailing Dot/Nadine’s documented abuse by Roy, Lorraine pushes it away. “People who claim to be victims are the downfall of this country,” she says. In her mind, Dot is still the impostor who has married her only son.Yet Roy, for all his swaggering power plays, has made it easier for Lorraine to change her mind. He only knows one way to deal with women and that’s to assert his power over them, by his authority or by the back of his hand. There might have been an angle he could have taken to get Lorraine to help him get his ex-wife back and solve her own daughter-in-law problems in the process. But her distaste for Roy and her meeting with Indira have started to alter her thinking about Dot, who isn’t the type of “victim” she lives to harass with onerous consolidation deals or threats of litigation.In the framing scenes at the Tender Trap, the strip club that gives this episode its title, one small detail stands out. When Roy confronts Vivian Duggar, the mustachioed banker “with a girl’s name” who’s selling his business to Lorraine, he brings up the fact that he’s violating a dancer’s restraining order against him. The irony is pretty rich, given what we know about Roy’s treatment of women, but it brings these men into dramatic alignment. When Lorraine uses her power in the end to ruin Vivian’s life, it serves as a coming attraction for things to come. She’s still coming around to the idea of “victims” being legitimate, but she lives to flex.Jon Hamm, left, and Sam Spruell in “Fargo.”Michelle Faye/FX3-Cent StampsWith Scotty left alone with Lars all day, the only thing she has to eat are crackers at lunch. In Lars’s defense, it appears that adding milk to sugar cereal is the limit of his domestic skills.This season of “Fargo” has been violent like the others, but even a bullet to the wrong captive’s head has nothing on the shock of Roy slapping his current wife for nipping his ear during a haircut. Her terrified acceptance of his abuse is just as startling and makes you think about how Dot/Nadine’s life with him must have been.Roy’s decision to “pay the boogeyman” — Munch — doesn’t seem like it will solve much of anything. Gator seems to know that, but taunting an unkillable hit man isn’t such a great idea, either.“When he was a boy, my son wanted to be a ballerina. I told him the male of the species is called a ballerino, but he couldn’t be swayed.” Wayne’s father never goes anywhere without his vodka gimlets, it would appear.That’s a lovely piece of acting by Richa Moorjani as Indira when Wayne asks her, “Have you seen my wife? She was supposed to visit me today.” Dot and Wayne’s marriage may be a legal fraud that’s falling apart, but her eyes pool with envy over their partnership.“When a man digs a grave, he has to fill it. Otherwise, it’s just a hole.” It sounds a little like Noah Hawley wants to tackle a serialized version of “A Fistful of Dollars” next.Does Indira agree to work for Lorraine? She seems disinclined by nature to trade the sturdiness of applying the law to doing security detail for a rich woman she can’t trust, but $192,000 is a lot of debt. More

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    Amazon to Bring Warhammer 40,000 to the Screen, With Henry Cavill

    Games Workshop announced this week that the popular tabletop game will come to television and film in a deal with Amazon Studios.There’s big news this week for tiny warriors.Games Workshop, the company behind Warhammer 40,000, the wildly popular tabletop game with miniature figurines, announced on Monday that it had reached a deal with Amazon Studios to bring the game to life on television and film screens.The actor Henry Cavill, known for his roles in the “Superman” franchise and as the title character on Netflix’s fantasy series “The Witcher,” is set to appear on the show and be its executive producer.The two companies had signed an agreement last year to create television programs and movies based on the Warhammer franchise, and will now move forward bringing the game’s universe to life.“All we can tell you right now is that an elite band of screenwriters, each with their own particular passion for Warhammer, is being assembled,” Games Workshop said in a statement on their website.Warhammer 40,000 was released in 1987, and in the decades since has enchanted players as they take command of small but mighty warriors for “supremacy in the grim darkness of the far future,” according to the game’s core rule book.Two or more players place their hand-painted plastic models onto terrain set in the 41st millennium — the rule book recommends a dining table or a floor — and send them into battle among aliens and supernatural creatures.Henry Cavill, who plays Geralt of Rivia in the Netflix series “The Witcher,” will be executive producer of the new Amazon Studios project.Katalin Vermes/NetflixThe game has developed a significant fan base and detailed lore throughout the years, becoming Games Workshop’s most popular product. Hundreds of novels have expanded on the Warhammer universe and mythology. It also has video game spinoffs.Much of the passion for the game, though, comes before the battle begins. Games Workshop doesn’t sell ready-to-play models for Warhammer 40,000. Instead, players purchase parts to construct, and paint in details themselves for a personal touch.Cavill is himself a fan of the game.In 2021, the actor, who has been known to construct his own personal computers, discussed his Warhammer hobby on “The Graham Norton Show.”“You have to paint them,” Cavill said. “There’s the painting-modeling side of the hobby, and then there’s the gaming side of the hobby.”The game found a new legion of fans during the pandemic, including other actors and musicians ready to battle Cavill in the fictional dystopia.Studios have been taking notice of the trend, and capitalizing on growing interest with shows like the HBO Max series “The Last of Us,” which raked in bigger audiences than some of the network’s flagship shows.Amazon Studios has bet on fantasy franchises already, with “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” a prequel to the J.R.R. Tolkien novels. In 2021, the studio released “The Wheel of Time,” based on the book series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson.No details were given about anticipated release dates or the types of projects planned for the Warhammer franchise. Games Workshop said that it could be some time before the tiny warriors stand tall on a movie screen.“TV and Film production is a mammoth undertaking,” the company said. “It’s not unusual for projects to take two to three years from this point before something arrives onscreen. Still, things are now properly rolling.” More

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    Ralph Fiennes and David Tennant: Two Very Different ‘Macbeths’

    Ralph Fiennes and David Tennant take Shakespeare’s psychodrama along divergent paths in two simultaneously running shows.There is more than one way to tell a story. In England, two equally impressive new productions of “Macbeth” prove this, both featuring major stars in the title role and adopting strikingly different approaches to Shakespeare’s classic tale of hubris and betrayal.The first, starring Ralph Fiennes (“The Menu,” “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”), runs at the Depot, a cavernous converted warehouse on an industrial estate in Liverpool. Despite its grittily authentic set design and costumes, it is for the most part a conventional, realist treatment. The second, at the Donmar Warehouse, in London, and starring David Tennant (“Doctor Who,” “Des”), is a rather more high-concept affair, heavy on ambience and atmospherics.The leading men are, likewise, a study in contrasts: Fiennes’s Macbeth is a hulking, lugubrious presence, whereas Tennant’s is a gaunt, energetic bundle of angst.The Fiennes “Macbeth,” directed by Simon Godwin, runs through Dec. 20 at the Depot in Liverpool, before moving on to Edinburgh, London and Washington, D.C., in 2024. The makeshift playhouse features an immersive set: To get to their seats, theatergoers must file past a bleak, dusty landscape of rubble and burned-out cars, suggestive of a war zone. The stage set is an elegant geometric structure in forbidding gray, comprising a number of doors, balconies and stairways, representing the various Scottish castles in which much of the action unfolds. Thin, vertical streaks of blood gradually materialize on its walls as the story progresses.The plot will be familiar to many. Three clairvoyant witches tell Macbeth he will become King of Scotland. With further encouragement from Lady Macbeth (Indira Varma), he proceeds to murder the reigning monarch, Duncan (Keith Fleming), forcing his heirs into exile and taking the crown for himself. He has to carry out several more murders in order to cover his trail, and the guilt starts to consume him; Lady Macbeth urges him to man up, but her own conscience catches up with her in the form of somnambulistic terrors and, eventually, suicide.To get to their seats in Liverpool, theatergoers must file past a bleak, dusty landscape suggestive of war’s aftermath.Matt HumphreyIn this production, Macbeth and his male co-protagonists appear in 21st-century military fatigues; when we see them, intermittently, in civilian attire, it’s understatedly stylish contemporary get-up. (The costumes are by Frankie Bradshaw.) That stark juxtaposition drives home the brutal reality of strongman politics: The ruling class and the military elite are one. There are some deft visual effects — the disappearance of the three witches in puffs of smoke is particularly pleasing — and the acting is consistently strong. Ben Turner is a powerful Macduff, and Varma brings a subtle, darkly comic energy to Lady Macbeth during the famous scene in which Macbeth, confronted with the reproachful ghost of the murdered Banquo, has a meltdown in the middle of a dinner party.A markedly different aesthetic was on offer in the compact, intimate environs of the Donmar, where theatergoers were required to put on headphones upon entry. In this “Macbeth” — directed by Max Webster, featuring Cush Jumbo as Lady Macbeth and running through Feb. 10, 2024 — the actors wear discreet headsets and their speech is transmitted to the audience digitally.Another “Macbeth,” at the Donmar Warehouse, in London, through Feb. 10, 2024, features David Tennant in the title role, with set and costume design by Rosanna Vize.Marc BrennerI was predisposed to dismiss this as a gimmick, but was pleasantly surprised. The transmitted audio imbues the words with an added richness and immediacy — the deep aural texture of a radio play. The conceit comes into its own in the scenes featuring supernatural elements (the witches, Banquo’s ghost) and during Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness, when eerie vocal echoes are overlaid on the dialogue. At times, the sound alternates abruptly between the left and right earphones.The set and costume design, by Rosanna Vize, are strikingly abstract. With the exception of Lady Macbeth, who wears a white formfitting dress, the cast are clad in an austere uniform of gray or black tops — turtlenecks, vests or collarless jackets — with dark kilts and black Chelsea boots. The stage is a simple white rectangle, at the rear of which, in a boxed-off section behind a transparent screen, a small troupe of musicians provide the play’s soundtrack: a gorgeous blend of Gaelic song and religious chant, composed by Alasdair Macrae and featuring beautifully haunting vocals by the Scottish singer Kathleen MacInnes.Fiennes and Tennant are both outstanding talents, but very different in corporeal stature and bearing. Just a few months ago, Fiennes’s brother, Joseph, delivered a compelling turn as an England soccer coach in “Dear England,” at the National Theater, in London, and there were echoes of that performance here: a certain tentative, beard-stroking pensiveness and lumbering indecision. Ralph’s frame as Macbeth is bearlike, and his turmoil is a slow burn. (I was also reminded of the Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose ill-fated uprising against President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and subsequent demise, had shades of Shakespearean tragedy.)Tennant, left, and Cush Jumbo, who plays Lady Macbeth.Marc BrennerIn contrast, Tennant, with his slim-line physique and withdrawn, vaguely haunted-looking face, has a more expressive emotional energy that lends itself to treacherous intrigue and anguished remorse alike. He is frantic, almost from the get-go. An unlikelier warrior, perhaps, but a more convincing worrier.The truth, of course, is that “Macbeth” doesn’t really require too much jazzing up, because its themes resonate easily enough without embellishment. One is always struck, in particular, by the prescience of the play’s pointed depiction of machismo, long before “toxic masculinity” became a buzz-phrase. Almost every misdeed is incited with an appeal to virility, whether it’s Lady Macbeth goading her husband into going through with their murderous plan (“You will be so much more the man!”), or Macbeth using similar rhetoric to persuade his hit men to kill Banquo.A light touch is key. What these two productions get right is that they conjure just enough novelty, in their visual and aural landscapes, to freshen things up, while still ensuring that the text remains center stage — in all its timeless glory. More

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    Seth Meyers: Rudy Giuliani Has Really, Really Messed Up This Time

    The “Late Night” host ribbed Giuliani for being so far in debt that he’ll go bankrupt paying the $148 million he now owes two Georgia election workers.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Morally BankruptLast Friday, a jury ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay $148 million to two former Georgia election workers he was found guilty of defaming after the 2020 election.“Well, after marrying his cousin, giving a press conference at a landscaping company and almost masturbating in the Borat movie, Rudy Giuliani has finally slipped up,” Seth Meyers joked on Monday.“Instead of $48 million, they ordered him to pay $148 million. They basically took the maximum and put a one in front of it, which, if you ask me, is the funniest possible choice. They took one look at Rudy and said, ‘There’s no way he can afford to pay $48 million. So [expletive] it, let’s add another hundo.’” — SETH MEYERS“That’s right, a jury in Washington, D.C., last week ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay nearly $150 million in the defamation case brought against him by two Georgia election workers. OK, but he for sure doesn’t have that much money. You might as well order a dog to drive you to the airport. A lot of stress for the dog, but you’re not getting to the airport.” — SETH MEYERS“No one’s sure how much of this judgment Rudy will actually be able to pay because his net worth is unknown, although a financial statement acquired during discovery listed his personal assets as two empty Franzia boxes and a paper bag labeled ‘Backup teeth?’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He defaulted on a phone bill. He bounced a check for his neck removal surgery. He owes $1 million in unpaid parking tickets for parking his car inside the living room of his apartment. He missed a credit card payment for a locksmith he hired to get into his house, which he had locked himself out of, and then a second locksmith he hired to get him out of his house he had locked himself into. He also owes Blockbuster multiple copies of the film ‘Rudy’ after returning the ones he rented with himself edited into the footage.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Playing the Hits Edition)“It is Dec. 18, and it’s beginning to look a lot like fascism, thanks to Donald Trump.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This weekend in New Hampshire, former president Trump delivered an hour-and-a-half-long speech where he bashed immigrants, defended Jan. 6 rioters, and called Kim Jong Un ‘very nice.’ So he’s just playing the hits, you know what I’m saying? That’s how you do it. [imitating Trump] I’m not going to waste any of your time with the new stuff — here’s some classics. The surprise song tonight is ‘Wall.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump does the same material so much, people start yelling requests. They’re, like, ‘Do Inject Bleach!’”— JIMMY FALLON“Trump even points the mic to the crowd during some of the singalong parts. He’s like, ‘When I say witch hunt, you say rigged!’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon challenged two musicians from the audience to write original songs based on the made-up song titles “Texting With My Mittens On” and “North Pole Dancing.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightRufus and Martha Wainwright will perform a holiday-themed song by the singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This Out“I love that feeling of taking over a space,” said Carrie Coon, who plays an ambitious new-money matriarch in “The Gilded Age.” “It’s a really satisfying and rare feeling as a woman to have that.”Amy Harrity for The New York Times“The Gilded Age” star Carrie Coon has become a fan favorite as the ambitious wife of a railway tycoon on HBO’s historical drama. More

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    Review: Sarah Paulson Makes a Horrible Discovery in “Appropriate”

    Making a blistering Broadway debut, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2014 play about the legacies of hatred feels like a new work entirely.Think of the worst person you know: the kind who blabs people’s secrets, mocks their diction, dismisses their pain while making festivals of her own. Throw in a tendency toward casual antisemitic slurs, for which she thinks she has a free pass, and a “What’s the big deal?” approach to racism.Now add a deep wound and a wicked tongue and you’re almost partway to Antoinette Lafayette, the monster played by Sarah Paulson in the blistering revival of “Appropriate” that opened on Broadway on Monday. Recalling yet somehow outstripping the thrilling vileness of theatrical viragos like Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and Violet in “August: Osage County,” she is the burned-out core of a nuclear family reactor, taking no prisoners and taking no blame.But even in Paulson’s eye-opening, sinus-clearing performance, Toni, as she’s called, doesn’t sum up the outrageousness of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play, which has a deep wound and wicked tongue of its own. To get all the way to its sweet spot — and Lila Neugebauer’s production for Second Stage definitely gets there — you must further multiply Toni by her brothers, each awful in his own way.Bo (Corey Stoll) is passive and entitled, content to let others fail as long as he can’t be faulted. Frank (Michael Esper) is a serial screw-up, the rare person for whom statutory rape is not the worst thing on his résumé. At the heart of their grievances is greed — Bo’s for money, Frank’s for forgiveness and Toni’s for revenge.So when the three, accompanied by their assorted spouses, children, enablers and ghosts, gather in the grand dramatic tradition to dispose of their late father’s estate, you know things are going to explode. Indeed, as the curtain rises at the Helen Hayes Theater, it appears they already have. The Arkansas plantation house in which generations of the family have lived, in eyeshot of the cemetery where generations of their slaves are buried, is now a hellhole in spirit and fact. The once grand building is collapsing under the weight of centuries of evil and, more recently, decades of hoarding.Michael Esper, left, and Elle Fanning as an engaged couple in Second Stage Theater’s production of the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe two seemingly incompatible stories — the evil and the hoarding, one national, one domestic — come together in a way I don’t want to spoil; it’s part of the brilliance of the play that it lands its biggest surprises with satisfying thumps at exactly the right moments. Suffice to say that when horrible relics of the past, both the country’s and the family’s, are discovered in the clutter, they force the Lafayettes to re-examine the legacy of their father, supposedly once in line to be a Supreme Court justice but also, depending on whom you ask, a saint or a psychopath.To Toni he was “a thinker! A loving person!” Frank says he was bipolar and abusive. Bo is too avoidant to offer a strong opinion, but his wife, Rachael (Natalie Gold), makes up for that. To her there is no question the old man was an antisemite (she once overheard him refer to her as Bo’s “Jew wife”) and a racist. Even so, she has insisted on bringing the couple’s children — a petulant 13-year-old girl (Alyssa Emily Marvin) and a hyperactive 8-year-old boy (Lincoln Cohen, on the night I saw it, and, alternating in the role, Everett Sobers) — to experience their “roots” as part of “a little American history Southern tour-type thing.”It’s the kind of laugh line — there are also guffaws, cackles and strange gasp-giggle combos — that works because we think we know more than she does. But it’s also a stinger because, the play suggests, we may not. In “Appropriate,” the “little American history Southern tour-type thing” is meant for the audience, too.That history is of course full of horrors, not the golden past portrayed in works about the gracious days of juleps and spirituals. But neither is it, for Jacobs-Jenkins, as neatly political and singularly damning as when filtered through a progressive lens. Questioning whether racism and antisemitism are really the core sins of this particular family, “Appropriate” posits that the problem may instead be that they’re just personally hideous. And if that’s true, could it also be true that the various institutions of subjugation so rampant throughout human society are nothing more (or less) than convenient formats for the expression of hate hard-wired in our hearts?Cherry-picking some of the worst examples imaginable — the play also features Elle Fanning as Frank’s sententious, sage-smudging fiancée and Graham Campbell as Toni’s drug-dealing son — Jacobs-Jenkins makes a convincing if despairing case. That he does so largely through comedy and melodrama (with an astonishing coda of surrealism) makes “Appropriate” easier to enjoy than to understand. The grammatically two-faced title doesn’t help, but easy understanding is not what the author appears to be after.The director Lila Neugebauer accentuates the conflicts and alliances among the characters, our critic writes. The cast includes, from left, Natalie Gold, Stoll, Paulson, Fanning, Graham Campbell and, above, Alyssa Emily Marvin.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI have to admit that when I first saw it, at the Signature Theater in 2014, neither understanding nor enjoyment were forthcoming. Rereading my scathing review in light of what is obviously a rave today, I am forced to grapple with my own past, and the play’s. It would be easy to say that the difference between then and now is the heavy rewriting Jacobs-Jenkins has done in the interim. And certainly, comparing the two scripts, I see the clearer dramatic architecture and sharper point-of-view that a playwright in his prime, at 38, can impose. (I thought Jacobs-Jenkins’s most recent play, “The Comeuppance,” was one of the best of 2023.)It would also be easy to attribute the improvement to Neugebauer’s direction, which is so smart and swift for most of the play’s substantial length that you feel gripped by storytelling without being strangled by argument. Her staging, on a towering double-decker set by the design collective dots, is also nearly ideal, accentuating (with the help of Jane Cox’s painterly lighting) the conflicts and alliances among the characters. And the daredevil cast, instead of reveling in falling apart, focuses for as long as possible on keeping it together. We thus experience, in the force of that repression, just how awful human awfulness must be if human will cannot ultimately corral it.Though all those improvements are real, they do not fully explain why I’ve flipped for this revival. Perhaps this does: Playwrights who show us things we are reluctant to see may have to teach us, over time, how to see it. And we must be willing to have our eyes opened. I guess I’ve changed at least that much in 10 years of reviewing, and Jacobs-Jenkins is part of the reason.AppropriateThrough March 3 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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    ‘Lawmen: Bass Reeves’ Review: A Frontier Injustice

    David Oyelowo gives an unimpeachable performance, but Taylor Sheridan still hasn’t met a western that he can’t turn into an overheated melodrama.What we know, or have decided to accept, about the life of the deputy U.S. marshal Bass Reeves has more of the flavor of carnival legend than of scholarship. The Paramount+ series “Lawmen: Bass Reeves,” which concluded on Sunday, was based not on history books or biographies but on novels. The most prominent telling of his story so far was a dramatization of a dramatization.That kind of haziness leaves room for invention, and the tales that have settled around Reeves — a former slave credited with 3,000 arrests; a crack shot said to have killed 14 men in the line of duty — could be the basis for a new take on classic western action and adventure. The tales also suggest that the career Reeves carved out for himself, and the extreme success he found, would at least occasionally have caused him some excitement and joy. That is not where “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” ended up.David Oyelowo gave an unimpeachable performance as Reeves, focused and intense and emotionally true. And the show’s creator, Chad Feehan, and his directors, Christina Alexandra Voros and Damian Marcano, put onscreen a notably handsome and visually credible evocation of the American West in the 1870s. The show had texture — it gave a tactile pleasure throughout its eight episodes.But as it went along, it became less of a treat to watch and more of a chore. Its story of heroism against all odds had gun battles and frontier romance, but we were almost never allowed to simply enjoy them. And poor David Oyelowo appeared to be having less fun than anyone.It was to the show’s credit that it didn’t try to make Reeves a six-gun superman — he operated with guile and caution, letting other people’s carelessness and hotheadedness work for him, and he grimaced and cowered when under fire. But the show’s one-note insistence on his beleaguered nobility, even as his composure faded and his trigger finger got too itchy, was so continual and unmodulated that it flattened the character and drained the story of humor.Reeves’s arc in the early episodes, as he emerged from slavery, tried his hand at farming and then was recruited into the marshals’ service by a sympathetic judge (played by Donald Sutherland), had an urgent, realistic snap to it. But once he put on the badge, the show slowed and got down to its real business, which wasn’t dramatizing the exploits of an exceptional lawman under grueling circumstances.Lauren E. Banks as Jennie Reeves and Demi Singleton as her daughter Sally. The best moments in “Lawmen” were its domestic scenes.Emerson Miller/Paramount+The latter half of the season was, instead, about putting Reeves through a crisis of conscience over his enforcement of laws enacted and administered by the same white men who had once enslaved him. (The more interesting choice dramatically, and probably the one better supported by the historical record, would have been for him not to care.) And having established its seriousness, the show went big, inventing as its embodiment of racist evil an ex-Confederate Texas Ranger (played by Barry Pepper) who used Black prisoners as slave labor and, just to drive home his odiousness, quoted French Enlightenment drama.That “Lawmen” would undergo a mytho-melodramatic implosion is perhaps not surprising. It is in the purview of the executive producer Taylor Sheridan, who has shown a bent for gaseous mythologizing in westerns like “Yellowstone” and “1883.” And Feehan has a history with shows that privileged macho poetics over straightforward action, like “Ray Donovan,” “Banshee” and “Rectify.”The best moments in “Lawmen” were its domestic scenes, which ran in counterpoint to the alternately depressive and histrionic story of Reeves’s work. Reeves’s wife, Jennie, and his oldest daughter, Sally, who kept the farm running in his absence, were played with warmth and great feeling by Lauren E. Banks and Demi Singleton; as impressive as Oyelowo was, it was always a relief when the action shifted to the farm.And racism and racial oppression in the post-Reconstruction era were treated more cogently and dramatically in those scenes as well. The awakening of the pragmatic Jennie to the larger issues championed by her sister Esme (Joaquina Kalukango) was subtle and touching; by contrast, the closing scene of Reeves leading a column of Black prisoners to freedom bordered on camp.Sheridan’s track record as a producer has ticked up lately, with “Tulsa King” and “Special Ops: Lioness” and even the early episodes of “Lawmen.” But when he makes westerns, modern or historical, he always seems to be caught between two conflicting impulses. One is to make anti-westerns like those of the 1960s and ’70s, in which the clichés of the genre are exposed and debunked; the other is to make deluxe versions of the classically sentimental western, in which those same clichés are renewed and celebrated. There’s another choice, of course, which would be just to make a good western. More