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    In a Small Mountain Town, a Beloved Theater Company Prevails

    CREEDE, Colo. — Last summer, I stumbled onto one of the most singular — and joyful — experiences of my life: a small community, high in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, that has been sustaining a thriving professional theater company since 1966. And I did not even see the regular version of Creede Repertory Theater — because of the pandemic, it had put on a smaller season of down-to-basic productions on a makeshift outdoor stage.Not only were the people uncommonly nice and the shows good, but here was a place where theater was an integral part of the civic fabric. As soon as I left, I dreamed of returning.So there I was last month, on vacation. I wanted to introduce the region to my spouse, but I was also curious to see a normal season, done indoors and in repertory (meaning that the resident acting company alternates shows). And I was really looking forward to seeing Creede Rep’s reigning divas, Christy Brandt and Anne F. Butler, do “Steel Magnolias.” (Brandt’s first season was in 1973, and this is Butler’s 19th season.)John DiAntonio, the producing artistic director at Creede Rep, spoke of the additional expenses the company endured during a Covid-19 surge.Ramsay de Give for The New York Times“This company is founded on everybody working together,” said Kate Berry, the associate artistic director.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesNestled in the San Juan Mountains of Southern Colorado, Creede is a former mining town whose residents decided to start a theater festival after falling on hard times in the 1960s.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesWe came really close to that plan tanking.On July 18, I received an email from the theater informing me that all performances had been canceled because of a coronavirus outbreak. The shows would “return in full swing on Tuesday, July 26” — just two days before our arrival. Admittedly, my stress level was nothing compared to what those on the ground were experiencing.“I’m glad I’m not in charge,” Brandt said when I caught up with her in Creede. “Especially this summer.”Ironically, the very thing that has kept Creede Rep going for decades also helped fuel the Covid surge: “This company is founded on everybody working together,” Kate Berry, the associate artistic director, said. “This becomes your community and your friendship circle.”Berry and the producing artistic director, John DiAntonio, looked visibly weary when I met with them, maybe because they have had to solve one problem after another for months on end. Since some of the staff members live in shared accommodations, for example, isolating during the latest crisis was difficult. “The community really stepped up to help us in that regard,” DiAntonio said. “People went to guest rooms, apartment garage, hotels in South Fork,” he continued, referring to a town 25 minutes away. “Some of these were favors, but some were just additional expenses.”Anne F. Butler, left, with her dog Hercules, and Christy Brandt. The two actresses have been performing with the company for decades.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesEventually the shows resumed, with a mask requirement for audience members. (Keep in mind that Creede draws many visitors from states like Texas and Oklahoma, where mandates don’t go over well.) Brandt said that one night, before “Steel Magnolias,” a couple of women had yelled, in her recollection, “We wouldn’t have come to this stupid theater if we’d known we were going to have to wear a mask!” They ended up staying for the show, but not before screaming out choice expletives in the restroom, making sure everybody heard.But they have been in the minority. DiAntonio pointed out that most audience members had gone along. “These are folks that maybe haven’t worn a mask much in the last year, or ever,” he said, “but they’re like, ‘I’ve seen a show every year for 35 years, you bet I’m going to see one with my family this trip, and I’ll wear a mask if I have to.”Lavour Addison in “Sherwood: The Adventures of Robin Hood.”Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesThe biggest casualty was Marco Ramirez’s boxing drama “The Royale,” which was supposed to hold its technical rehearsals during the temporary shutdown. Things became so logistically complicated that the show had to be pushed to the 2023 season.At least I was able to catch five performances during my three-night stay, a minimarathon not uncommon among Creede Rep’s patrons.John Gress, 59, and Gwen Farnsworth, 56, from Boulder, Colo., were in town in 2017 to hike the nearby San Luis Peak, when they stumbled onto an unexpected sight. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, there’s a theater here. Let’s go!’” Farnsworth said. “And the play was so amazing. I immediately wanted to come back.” The couple’s return was delayed by the pandemic, but the pair made up for it by seeing four shows in a weekend; they even brought along Farnsworth’s 87-year-old mother and a 91-year-old friend.After a temporary shutdown because of a Covid-19 outbreak, the shows resumed with a mask requirement for audience members, which has mostly gone over well.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesPacking one’s schedule is a great reminder of the joys of rep theater. I watched Brandt play half of a genteel couple battling their neighbors in the Karen Zacarías comedy “Native Gardens” at a matinee, then smoothly switch to the witty Clairee from “Steel Magnolias” that evening. Butler was also excellent as the perpetually cranky Ouiser in that show, but she truly killed as Prince John in Ken Ludwig’s rambunctious “Sherwood: The Adventures of Robin Hood,” in which she delivered one flamboyant comic flourish after another.In other signs of a halting return to normal, Creede Rep’s Headwaters New Play Festival is back in person (Aug. 26-28), and the hope is that the actors in the Young Audience Outreach program will perform unmasked, unlike last year. (The latter initiative is expected to bring an original bilingual musical to rural and historically neglected schools in at least seven states.)Where the old normal is not welcome anymore, however, is in some work practices. Like many other companies, Creede Rep is reconsidering the way it makes theater: The company now has a free child care program, and it is trying to shrink the workweek — a challenge in the demanding rep format, but one dear to DiAntonio.“Our vision statement is ‘CRT will be a haven for artistic excellence, belonging and intrinsic joy,’” he said. “It’s that mountain up there in the distance that we’re working toward.” More

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    At Salzburg Festival, Directing Slow and Fast

    Thorsten Lensing takes years between shows; Ewelina Marciniak puts on several each season. Both theater makers are presenting new work in Austria.SALZBURG, Austria — The German director Thorsten Lensing has astonished and provoked for the past three decades, but he feels like one of theater’s best-kept secrets.In the fast-paced world of German theater, where hundreds of playhouses churn out productions by the dozen, Lensing develops his works gradually and in intensive collaboration with his actors and artistic team. His deliberate method makes him a rare practitioner of what might be called slow theater. A new Lensing staging is a big deal — and worth waiting for.“Crazy for Consolation,” which premiered this month at the Salzburg Festival, is only Lensing’s 16th production in 28 years. The previous one, in 2018, was a towering adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s epic novel “Infinite Jest”; before that he tackled works by Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and William Carlos Williams.Like “Infinite Jest,” “Crazy for Consolation” unfolds on a mostly empty stage. The four actors, all Lensing regulars, perform in front of, and on top of, a massive steel roller. With minimal props (a swinging rope, fizzing cans of beer, hundreds of walnuts raining down onto the stage), the play sketches a series of vignettes centered on the siblings Charlotte (Ursina Lardi) and Felix (Devid Striesow), who are orphaned at an early age and go through life processing (or failing to process) their trauma and grief.In the opening scene, sister and brother, aged 10 and 11, play their favorite game at the beach: pretending to be their dead parents. They kiss, lather each other with sun lotion and bark at their (imaginary) children not to swim too far out. A deep-sea diver (Sebastian Blomberg) surfaces and startles the children out of their fantasy world and into even stranger realms where books and dreams come to life. As the play’s narrative becomes increasingly surreal and fragmented, the actors inhabit a variety of roles, not all of them human.The production is full of unpredictable developments and arresting metamorphoses. The adult Felix, incapable of feeling pleasure or pain since his parents’ death, enters into a sexual relationship with an older man (André Jung) who tries to break through Felix’s protective shell. Charlotte, transformed into an octopus, confronts the deep-sea diver with a rancor-filled monologue about life as a cephalopod. What good are her nine brains and three hearts, she asks, when an octopus’s average life span is only four years?Ursina Lardi and Devid Striesow as unhappy siblings in “Crazy for Consolation.”Armin Smailovic/Salzburg FestivalIn this very talky play, Lensing and his actors tackle serious issues with a light touch. Even while examining grief and the craving for human connection, the production lands with ease, modesty and warmth. Throughout, the actors switch fluently between registers, from emotional rawness to slapstick to absurdist comedy, in performances that are closely observed, credible and moving.As a freelance director, Lensing works outside Germany’s subsidized theater system and relies on producing partners. “Crazy for Consolation” has no fewer than eight, including theaters and arts organizations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The show’s next stop, in late September, will be the Sophiensaele, in Berlin.The leisurely pace at which Lensing works is the main exception in the German theater landscape. It’s not unusual for in-demand theater makers to take on heavy workloads — and even the most gifted are likely to stumble from time to time.A contemporary update of“Iphigenia” at Salzburg caps an enormously productive year for the young Polish director Ewelina Marciniak. It’s a co-production with the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, where Marciniak has directed acclaimed adaptations of recent Polish novels, including the Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s “The Books of Jacob.” This year, Marciniak’s feminist deconstruction of Schiller’s “The Maid of Orleans” was invited to two of Germany’s most important theater festivals — Theatertreffen, in Berlin, and Radikal Jung, in Munich — and the director made her Deutsches Theater Berlin debut with a cheeky and energetic production of Goethe’s “Werther.”Yet I was disappointed that Marciniak’s Salzburg Festival debut lacked the freshness and verve of her earlier productions. The play, a reworking of Euripides and Goethe by the Polish writer Joanna Bednarczyk, strives to reinterpret the character of Iphigenia, whose father, the Greek king Agamemnon, sacrifices her to appease a vengeful goddess.In constructing her contemporary parable about victimhood, Bednarczyk draws on Soren Kierkegaard, the #MeToo movement and debates around cancel culture. The play’s excruciatingly long first half plays out as a dysfunctional family drama in which Iphigenia is a budding pianist in an intellectual household. She grows up surrounded by hotshots: her father, a professor of ethics who is about to publish his magnum opus; her mother, Clytemnestra, “the best actress in town”; and her uncle, Menelaus, “the best lawyer in town.” Her parents are dismissive of her boyfriend, the athletic Achilles, who is all muscle and no brains. And her aunt, Helen, is such a nymphomaniac that she needs to periodically be kept in isolation.“Iphigenia,” directed by Ewelina Marciniak. Krafft Angerer/Salzburger FestivalEarly in the production, Bednarczyk subjects us to a lengthy lecture drawn from Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” to establish the family’s intellectual credentials (and perhaps her own) and set up the play’s moral stakes. Shortly after, Agamemnon’s high-minded ethical ideas and his research into the psychology of perpetrators and victims are put to the test after Iphigenia makes a bombshell revelation: For the past decade, her uncle has been molesting her. Agamemnon insists on her silence to save face and protect his career.Agamemnon’s willingness to sweep the abuse under the rug should outrage, but Bednarczyk’s depiction of him as a spineless pseudo-intellectual makes it difficult to feel even a tremor of indignation. The father’s subsequent confrontation with Menelaus is so stilted and jumbled that it nearly derails the play. Only the scene where Clytemnestra counsels her daughter to grit her teeth and bear it is persuasive and sobering.The eight-person cast, drawn largely from the Thalia’s acting ensemble, is uniformly committed, but there’s only so much they can do with such weak dramatic material. The production’s final act, set 20 years later on an island where Iphigenia has fled, is full of poetic monologues and imagery, including a piano on fire in the middle of an onstage pool, but after slogging through the twisted soap opera of the first half, it’s difficult to focus on these scenes that seem to belong to a different production entirely.Part of what makes this “Iphigenia” so awkwardly unconvincing is that moral psychology is a poor substitute for the fury of the gods and the vicissitudes of fate. (Similar problems plagued Maja Zade’s recent version of “Oedipus” at the Schaubühne Berlin.) There have been more successful recent attempts to update the saga of the house of Atreus, the calamity-stricken clan at the center of “Iphigenia,” including a campy sitcom version, by Christopher Rüping, and Robert Icke’s straight-faced rewrite. For all their differences, though, neither of those stagings fully rejected the ancient Greek belief in deities who meddled in human affairs.It’s understandable that emerging directors like Marciniak want to make a splash by staging as many productions as they can each season, but maybe slowing down isn’t the worst thing in the world.Verrückt nach Trost. Directed by Thorsten Lensing. Sept. 30 through Oct. 9 at Sophiensaele Berlin.Iphigenia. Directed by Ewelina Marciniak. Salzburg Festival until Aug. 28; Sept. 22-25 at Thalia Theater Hamburg. More

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    With ‘As You Like It,’ Public Works Aims for a Reflection of Humanity

    The musical adaptation, part of Free Shakespeare in the Park, is a remounting of an acclaimed production that had a short run in 2017.Eric Pierre, a pastor who teaches fifth-grade English in the Bronx, has taken up an additional title this summer: royal duke. At least that’s the role he’s playing onstage in the Public Works production of “As You Like It.”He’s one of dozens of community members, ages 7 to 81 and from all five boroughs, performing alongside several professional actors in the 90-minute musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy. The show, now in previews, is set to open on Tuesday at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.Pierre plays the cruel Duke Frederick, who banishes his brother, among others, to the Forest of Arden in this tale of camouflage, love and self discovery.The role was not a natural fit for Pierre, who described the difficulty of channeling his nefarious character and trying to identify the pain associated with his quest for power. “We all have a Duke Fred inside of us,” said Pierre, 49, who, through his Public Works performances, has been able to join Equity, the professional actors’ union.The show’s composer and lyricist Shaina Taub, center, also stars as Jaques.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis production, a remounting of an acclaimed one that ran in 2017, is part of the Public Theater’s Public Works program, which has produced streamlined and musicalized versions of works — like “The Tempest” in 2013 and “Hercules” in 2019 — that feature amateur performers from eight partner groups, including the Fortune Society and Children’s Aid Society. These productions usually have a short run in September after the regular season of Shakespeare in the Park. But this one was scheduled to have a longer run during the summer of 2020, before being delayed by the pandemic. Now, it is finally onstage, through Sept. 11, as Public Works celebrates its 10th anniversary.Laurie Woolery, the director of the show and Public Works, called the diverse experiences and authenticity of the community cast members their secret sauce.“Theater is a reflection of humanity,” Woolery said, “and if we only reflect a portion of humanity, we aren’t doing our job as cultural workers and citizen artists. We need to be speaking to the world that we’re living in — and that includes everybody.”As the musical begins, families of twos and threes — made up of the community performers — walk on a stage filled with cherry blossom trees and a bridge illuminated by a violet-purple light. Shaina Taub, the show’s composer and lyricist, also appears onstage as an inquisitive yet cynical Jaques who provides a bird’s-eye view and additional context for audience members. As she sings “All the World’s a Stage,” her character contemplates the journeys of the young lovers Orlando and Rosalind (played by Ato Blankson-Wood and Rebecca Naomi Jones, well-known professional actors returning to the roles they played in the 2017 production) to their authentic selves as they shed their disguises.“A process of healing and growth is letting go of all those expectations of the role you’re supposed to play,” Taub said.Ato Blankson-Wood as Orlando, fighting a lion in the Forest of Arden.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe musical drives home themes of love and optimism, a message especially important amid social division, disease and unrest, Taub said.“Still, we’re going to get together and sing and dance on the stage of the Delacorte,” she added. “Still, we’re going to show up every day and tell the story and be kind to each other. It really feels like this beautiful act of resistance.”One of the other community performers, Lori Brown-Niang, who has also obtained an Equity card, has built a second family with Public Works over the last decade. She said she remembered feeling relieved when women from Domestic Workers United, a partner organization that uplifts and mobilizes domestic workers of color, watched over her young son, JonPaul Niang, as she rehearsed her speaking roles. In other instances, her son, whom she described as a “good mover,” worked with older cast members on the dance moves and continued rehearsals in their Bronx backyard.“Are we doing this?” Brown-Niang recalled having asked her son. “Yes, Mommy, we have to get used to singing and dancing outside.”In “As You Like It,” Brown-Niang and her son, now an 18-year-old Hostos Community College sophomore, are working together as puppeteers steering the head and front leg of a lion who challenges Orlando in the Forest of Arden.“It’s been a blessing to be able to raise my son, as a single mother, in this community,” she said.Nestor Eversley joined Public Works this year as a member of the Fortune Society, a partner organization that helps the formerly incarcerated re-enter society. Eversley, who was incarcerated for 17 years, became interested in the Public Works program after watching its 2019 production of “Hercules” and said he wondered what it would feel like to step onstage. (He admits underestimating the time commitment for rehearsals.)“In the streets, you have to be defensive, watch your back, all that kind of stuff,” Eversley said. “Here, it’s a different world.”In a pristine white suit, Eversley emerges as an older version of Orlando, marrying an older version of Rosalind. The two walk unified, showing off their defiant, timeless love, below a decorative arch.In the final number, the stage is bathed in a rainbow of colors, with cast members swaying while singing “Still I Will Love.” It’s a lively celebration and testament to the power of community strength and devotion.“Hopefully people leave the theater with their hearts a little more open,” Woolery said. More

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    This Season at La MaMa: Dance-Theater and a Puppet Rock Opera

    The experimental theater company’s 2022-23 season will showcase a packed lineup under the theme “Remake a World.”For its 61st season, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club will present more than 40 productions from eight countries, including the in-person stage debut of a pandemic-era virtual play, several puppetry productions and a dance-theater-music work.“This artistic community is coming out of a time of huge limitation, of deep questioning,” said Mia Yoo, the artistic director of La MaMa. With “Remake a World” as its theme, she said, the season asks, “What are the paradigm shifts that will help us reimagine?”The 2022-23 offerings include the return of the acclaimed 2021 large-scale puppet production “Lunch With Sonia” (March 16-26), which Laura Collins-Hughes, a New York Times theater critic, called “achingly beautiful”; the U.S. premiere of “Radio 477!” (March 9-19), a Yara Arts Group production inspired by songs by the Ukrainian composer Yuliy Meitus and adapted from the 1979 revue “Hello, This is Radio 477!”; and “Last Gasp: Recalibration” (Oct. 13-30), a version of a piece that the theater duo Split Britches created and recorded on Zoom and premiered digitally in 2020, which will have its live stage debut at the Ellen Stewart Theater.Also on the lineup after pandemic postponements is the world premiere of Elizabeth Swados’s musical “The Beautiful Lady” (dates to be announced). Directed by Anne Bogart, the poetry-heavy piece is set in an artists’ cafe during the Russian Revolution.Come winter, John Kelly will present a new dance-theater work, “Underneath the Skin” (Dec. 1-18), about the fantastical life of Samuel Steward, a gay novelist and tattoo artist, combining movement with Steward’s words, tattoo designs and illustrations.The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater will present “The Conference of the Birds” (Feb. 2-19), a rock opera about humans yearning to fly, as part of La MaMa’s February Puppet Slam.“Broken Theater” (April 20-30), by Bobbi Jene Smith — formerly a member of Batsheva Dance Company — considers a performer’s dissolving boundaries when an audience leaves.And the original home of La MaMa, at 74A East Fourth Street, where a multiyear $24 million renovation is underway, will open temporarily on Nov. 10 for a gala. Until the reopening, all La MaMa performances will be staged at 66 East Fourth Street, in the Ellen Stewart Theater and the Downstairs Theater.Attendees are no longer required to show proof of vaccination; masks, however, are required. For more information, visit lamama.org. More

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    Eldjarn and Das Are Stars at Home, but Not at Edinburgh Fringe

    Over 1,000 stand-ups play the Edinburgh Festival Fringe each year, hoping for a big break. Some are already huge names elsewhere.EDINBURGH — When Ari Eldjarn, one of Iceland’s most popular comedians, takes the stage in his native country, it’s usually to sold-out crowds. In the spring, he played 15 dates in a 1,000-capacity auditorium in Reykjavik. The total audience for the run was equivalent to over 10 percent of the city’s population.Yet at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Eldjarn, 40, has found himself in less celebrated surroundings: the fourth room of the Monkey Barrel Comedy Club. On a recent evening, there were about 50 people in that space for Eldjarn’s daily show, “Saga Class,” with three rows of empty seats at the back. The air conditioning whirred loudly, and the thud of dance music occasionally intruded from another show upstairs.“Can you hear me all right?” Eldjarn asked as he came onstage. “I hear myself really well,” he said, pointing to the venue’s main speaker, which was just feet from his head. “But I have no idea if the people at the back hear anything.” Eldjarn then introduced himself as an Icelandic comedian, getting one of his first laughs of the act. “I love being in Edinburgh,” he added, “because there are actually other comedians here.”Vir Das’s Edinburgh show, “Wanted,” is focused on a stir he caused in India with a monologue that examined the country’s paradoxes and divisions.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesThe Edinburgh Fringe has for decades been an event that stand-up comedians flock to, hoping to make it big. Hannah Gadsby, an Australian comedian, won the festival’s main comedy award in 2017 with “Nanette,” a show that went on to become a Netflix phenomenon the next year; previous nominees for that prize include Eddie Izzard, Bo Burnham and James Acaster. At this year’s Fringe, which runs through Aug. 29, more than 1,300 comedians are performing. Most are little known in Britain, and some have to drum up their own audiences by handing out fliers on the street. Yet among them are a handful of comedians, like Eldjarn, who are actually big stars in their homes countries.Also appearing at this year’s Fringe is Stian Blipp, a Norwegian TV star, and Vir Das, an Indian comedian who has 7.7 million Twitter followers and multiple Netflix specials to his name. In Edinburgh, Das is playing to just over 100 people a day, if his show sells out.After his recent show, Eldjarn discovered that audience members had left him just over £20, or about $24, in a tip bucket by the door. He then walked across the street to spend the money on burgers for himself and one of his daughters.“This is definitely like starting over again,” Eldjarn said. In Iceland, he could “just go confidently onstage, make stuff up and people will laugh,” he added. But in Edinburgh, he said, “you really need a lot of good material.”To make his show — which includes jokes about turning 40 and disliking vaping — Eldjarn said he had taken one of his Icelandic sets, deleted anything that would not translate to a British audience, then tried to “salvage as much as possible” as he translated it into English. He was tweaking the routine daily in Edinburgh to try to get bigger laughs, he added.Blipp, the Norwegian comic, said in a telephone interview that he was also nervous about performing in Edinburgh. “I feel like a little boy again,” he said, “like I’m doing a second debut.”Inside the Teviot Row House Student Union, a small Fringe venue for stand-up acts.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesThe Monkey Barrel Comedy Club, where Eldjarn is performing.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesYet not all of the international stars at this year’s fringe were anxious. Das, the Indian comedian, said being in Edinburgh was “very much a holiday, if I’m honest.” He said he was usually on the road so much that it was a luxury to spend a month in Scotland working on his next special and soaking up experiences that might inform future comedy routines.Das, 43, is an old hand at the festival. He first performed in 2011, he said, in a venue “at the back of a pool hall at the back of a video game arcade.” For most of that run, he got only three or four audience members a night, he recalled. Another year, he said he built an audience with the help of a unique take on handing out fliers: He printed the show details on fake bank notes and dropped them around the city.This year, Das was not using any gimmicks to promote his hourlong show, “Wanted,” which was mostly sold out. (It is playing in a 102-capacity basement venue — a far cry from his last tour dates in Mumbai, where he said he played 10 shows at the 1,109-seater Jamshed Bhabha Theater over five days.)“Wanted” is focused on a furor Das caused in India last year, after he posted a monologue online called “Two Indias” in which he examined the country’s paradoxes and divisions. Das said the monologue, which had been performed at a show in Washington, was a way of showing his love for India and calling for social unity, but some accused him of defaming the nation. A spokesman for the governing Bharatiya Janata Party filed an official complaint (Das said in his show that the police had decided not to take it forward, and had dismissed other complaints) and a prominent Bollywood actress accused Das on social media of engaging in “soft terrorism,” a comment widely picked up on Indian news media. In his Edinburgh show, Das said, “I remember thinking, ‘This is so insulting to actual terrorists.’”Das said he used to adjust his material for Edinburgh audiences, but does not do that anymore. Many in the audience were British Indians, who came to his show to hear what India was like today, Das said, whereas Western audiences wanted to learn something new about Indian life. “Strangely, it’s become more important to tell an authentically Indian story for both the Indian and Western audiences,” Das said.In India, Das plays theaters that hold more than 1,000 spectators. In Edinburgh, he’s performing at a 102-capacity venue.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesAt a recent show, Das walked into the sweaty basement to booming music, as if he were entering an arena. He drew immediate laughs by remarking on the racial mix of the crowd. “I see Indian people,” he said. “I see people sleeping with Indian people,” he added. “I see random locals who thought Vir Das was a German comedian and are now thinking, ‘This isn’t what we thought it’d be.’”Then, he told a few preliminary jokes to give latecomers a chance to arrive before he started his routine. “It takes a while to get British crowds warm, and Indian crowds in,” he explained. (In India, a warm-up act does this before he comes on.)When the show ended, Das posed for a group selfie with audience members outside the venue — a requisite of the star comic the world over. After a gig in India, Das said, he would typically jump in a car to his hotel like any other celebrity. But here, he simply walked off, carrying a backpack. Barely anyone gave him a second glance. More

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    Kate Berlant Can’t Hide Any Longer

    The experimental comic is known for freewheeling sets. Then Bo Burnham asked, “What if you actually tried to make something?” The transition has been hard.As soon as Kate Berlant walked offstage at the Elysian Theater in Los Angeles in May, she started spiraling. After months of workshop performances, her new solo show felt like a mess. The comic Tim Heidecker came backstage and told her he loved it. She didn’t look like she believed him.Over the next few minutes, Berlant, 35, speculated about what went wrong. Lack of focus? Not funny enough? Her sensibility not coming through? Her director, the comic Bo Burnham, had been emphasizing the same point: clarity, structure, clarity, structure. “I operate more with fragments,” she said, before her expressive face flattened: “I just don’t know what the show is.”Such anxiety is a normal part of the artistic process, but perhaps especially so for Berlant, whose show, titled “Kate,” is now in previews at the Connelly Theater in New York. After more than 15 years of improvisational, experimental stand-up, this is a departure: a play with a beginning, middle and end that tells a satirically formulaic story of a starry-eyed actress who moves to New York to make it big. This is real theater stuff, with props and multimedia and even a plot in which personal secrets are revealed.You may not know her name, but Berlant is influential in comedy circles, and her digressive style stands for everything that a scripted autobiographical play doesn’t. And she is having trouble wrapping her head around it. “It would be funny if this show is so bad,” Berlant said three days earlier in her Silver Lake apartment, her eyes lighting up, head swiveling, curls swinging, before pivoting into a parody of her rationalizing the flop. In the overly enunciated voice of the pretentious intellectual she had perfected in her stand-up, she said with a dismissive flip of her hand: “I don’t participate in the economy of distinction.” Then she cackled.In more than two decades as a critic of live performance, only a handful of times have I stumbled upon an artist so radically different, so thrillingly alien, that it scrambled my sense of the possible. Kate Berlant was one. It was at a sparsely attended stand-up show in 2013. Following a couple of setup-and-punchline craftsmen, her entrance felt less like the next act than an interruption. The first thing that stood out was her singularly silly physicality, herky-jerky, gesticulating clownishly, a parade of buffoonish confidence. Flamboyance baked into every gesture, her hyperarticulate monologues, which could also spiral, delivered stream of consciousness nonsense with the gravity of a religious epiphany.Berlant workshopped the show in Los Angeles, where she lives.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesWhat she did was not a performance of comedy so much as a narration of the experience of someone performing comedy. And while her cerebral-minded material had the sound of coherence, the music of a mind at work, its meaning fell apart upon scrutiny, which was part of the joke. Every time she began to tell you about herself, she either changed the subject, contradicted herself or, most often, criticized her own act, as if the commentary track infiltrated the show itself. The result had the ineffability of experimental theater yet the ingratiating gusto of showbiz, full of cross-eyed expressions and flirtations with the audience. Was it a satire of a certain brand of charismatic egghead? Maybe.She made me laugh hard, but it was difficult to figure out why. She resisted categorization, which made me try harder, perhaps an occupational hazard. The more I saw her, including the first time she did a half-hour set, I started noticing common themes: The performance in everyday life, the space between reality and artifice, confession and disguise. Even though she had no special or show, I wrote a column arguing that her elusiveness went against the grain of the dominant culture of prestige stand-up. Berlant seemed to be making a mockery of confessional comedy, emphasizing the artifice of her own performance, talking about herself but revealing nothing. Its title was “Keeping It Fake.”In fact, Berlant’s comedy grew organically, a product of studying experimental performance at New York University, improvising at open mics at night and bringing the academic language from one into the other. “I started taking these big ideas but abandoning them midsentence,” she told me. And when people laughed, she kept doing it.Offstage, warm and eager to joke, she really does speak with a certain academic cocktail-party flair. The more time spent with her, the less her stand-up seems like a character or a parody than a heightened version of herself. She says she might have been influenced by the language of the internet or her dad, an artist known for his mixed-media collages, but quickly contradicts herself: “It wasn’t a decision. It just happened.”Upon meeting a decade later, she recalled my review with a shudder. “It was the first time I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what I’m doing,’” she said, before explaining: “Stand-up is a person up there baring all, a direct channel to who I am. Authenticity. What I’m doing is devising this persona that’s hard to pin down. Resisting legibility.”Her comedy reflects her background studying experimental performance at New York University by day and performing at open mics by night. Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAvoiding the legible (not to mention listening to critics) can be risky. Over the next few years, Berlant’s reputation grew; she became especially beloved in comedy circles though never quite found a breakout vehicle. She did an episode of Netflix’s comedy show “The Characters,” made sketch series with her friend and frequent collaborator, John Early, and got cast in cameo roles in movies by Boots Riley and Quentin Tarantino.She became a cult comic, both in the sense of the level of her popularity, but also the intensity of her fans. Many younger comics seemed to borrow her mannerisms and style. One night in 2018, after seeing a bunch of comics doing that flamboyant Berlant-style narration, I wondered on Twitter about her impact, and Bo Burnham responded by calling her the “most influential/imitated comedian of a generation,” saying that even he “slipped into stealing Kate’s vibes without trying.”The Great ReadMore fascinating tales you can’t help reading all the way to the end.Elsie Eiler is the sole resident of Monowi, Neb., where she operates a tavern that serves as one of the last gathering places for the remaining residents of the county. What will happen once she’s gone?TikTok is flooded with health misinformation. Meet the medical experts fighting bogus science, one “stitch” at a time.Viewers of the Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building” know the Upper West Side apartment building as the Arconia. But it has a name — and a dramatic story — all its own.But her act could be rarefied. The comic Jacqueline Novak, a friend, recalls going to the Stand comedy club and watching Berlant’s act bomb but impress the club comic Rich Vos, who was hosting the show. “Rich is laughing and looking around at me with delight, astonishment and wonder,” Novak said. “He gets up there and says he’s never met her before, then scolds the crowd and says, ‘She’s a star.’”Another time, a show-business manager called Berlant, who grew up in Los Angeles with dreams of movie stardom, and said, “Have you ever thought of being more normal and doing jokes?” She didn’t know how to respond.Asked if she would be happy as an experimental artist, a niche star, she adopted the glamorous hard-boiled voice of the Hollywood studio era: “I want to be on billboards, baby.”She had a running joke with Early that her greatest fear was a documentary in which more famous people talk about how influential she is. She was starting to feel trapped by her act. And her confidence had faded after she shot a special in 2019, filmed in black and white by Burnham and produced by Jerrod Carmichael, that was shelved. (FX just announced it will air in the fall.)In the pandemic, Berlant stopped performing for the longest stretch of her career. She filmed the series reboot of “A League of Their Own” and started a podcast with Novak. But she felt the pull of stand-up and in December returned to the stage. Burnham attended the show and afterward administered some tough love. “He said, ‘This is great and you could do that forever, but what if you actually tried to make something?’” she said he told her.Berlant, third from left, in the new series “A League of Their Own.”Anne Marie Fox/Amazon PrimeThe comic, playing a character called Kate, tries to cry on cue in her new stage show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis comment stung. But Burnham — coming off the success of “Inside,” an acclaimed special that leveraged themes he had worked on for years in an ambitious new form — pushed her out of her comfort zone to craft something structured, narrative-driven, a little less elusive. “Story,” she said, “is not where I live.” (Burnham turned down interview requests.)What she came up with centered on a struggling, self-involved actress, Kate, putting on an autobiographical solo show, a vanity project. The character is trying to mine her personal pain for entertainment. Burnham and Berlant started watching solo shows and working with those tropes. At first, she was making fun of this form and imagining the unraveling of her show with a multitude of technical problems, including fights with a production guy rooted in real issues she once had.Like her previous work, it’s about the embarrassment of performing. But she isn’t narrating a character so much as playing one and digging into her own insecurities to do so. “I am realizing there is a larger joke about my anxiety about not having anything to say,” she said. “I don’t have anything to say. It’s the semiotics of theater without the content.”Since I saw her performance three months ago, she has added several monologues in which she breaks character and talks directly to the audience as she criticizes and apologizes for her own show. It more closely resembled her old standup but also the spiraling that she did in May. “I’ve allowed myself to have moments in my familiar language,” she said in July. “It needs to be fun for me.”She also added a scene about her character’s childhood trauma that clarified the central challenge that repeats itself in the show several times: her inability to cry on cue. After failing to do so in a high-stakes audition, she ends up trying to cry in a small theater show, like, well, the one Berlant is doing now. If that sounds as meta as a Charlie Kaufman script, she did watch “Adaptation” on the flight back from London, where she performed the show to sold-out crowds. The part in “Adaptation” that stood out to her was the advice from a screenwriting guru: “Wow them in the end and you got a hit.”The climax of Berlant’s show — her trying to cry for a camera on command one last time and telling the crowd out of desperation that no one is leaving until she does — had always played well. But the structure has been streamlined to more clearly build up to it. She fails to cry, again and again and again, a close-up on her face projected on the wall showcases her clownish expressions. It’s oddly suspenseful, a sequence that builds like a joke but isn’t merely played for laughs. Even though this is a moment marked by artifice and absurdity, Berlant really commits to the emotional performance in a way that’s different from anything she’s done before.Crying can be something of a trick for an actor. But the way it operates in this show now is also more fundamental. “I’m realizing that this has to change her,” Berlant told me, speaking of the character. The change is not in finding a trauma, but in her relationship to the show she is putting on. She discovers that making the audience happy, the audience in the room, is enough.Scenes in which she criticizes and apologizes for the show have been added to “Kate.” As she explained, “It needs to be fun for me.”Chantal Anderson for The New York Times“For me, Kate Berlant,” she said, shifting to talking about herself, “to have a show in New York that works and people like, that is enough.”In an East Village coffee shop a few days before previews start, Berlant sounded more confident than ever, assured of the intent of her show if still uneasy, especially about finding ways to stay present and alive as she says the same lines over and over. In the Connelly Theater, the show now cleverly introduces itself like a parody of a pretentious art installation, with a lobby decked out in comically self-serious photos of Berlant, including several paragraphs of a mission statement that gives cult-leader vibes. In the theater, a vast video screen shows a film that positions her in a long line of great acting gurus (Meisner, Strasberg, Berlant) after lovingly scrolling through her IMDb page. You can sense the slickly ironic Burnham touch in the framing of the play.Berlant said the show had the silly comedy of her standup but was more emotional, adding that audience members have told her they’ve cried watching her try to.As much as this new show is about making something with a clear narrative, she still clings to the power of obliqueness. “This is the question I’m still facing: How much clarity does there need to be?” she said. “My character is doing a vanity project. It’s convoluted and half-baked. Does it really matter how clear it is?”The transition from comic to scripted actor is tricky, especially for an improvisational artist who has always poked fun at and reveled in the embarrassment of being a performer. She describes this is as being much more vulnerable. “I created a style of performing to avoid work,” she said of her comedy career, in what may or may not be a joke. “But there’s effort all over this show.”She paused dramatically, with just enough self-consciousness to wink at her own actorly flourish: “I can’t hide.” More

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    Patina Miller Chooses High Drama

    The Tony-winning Broadway actor has made a career playing powerful women. Her latest is a drug queenpin inspired by 50 Cent’s mother in the newest “Power” series on Starz.At Screaming Mimi’s, an upscale vintage emporium just south of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, the store’s manager, Dani Cabot, held out a variety of belts: a wide band from Donna Karan, a minimalist cincher from Claude Montana and what Cabot described as a “high-drama Moschino moment.”The actress Patina Miller considered the options, but not for long. “I think we’re high drama,” she said. She clasped the gold buckle around her waist, smoothing the fabric of a Bill Blass tiger print skirt.Miller, 37, who broke out about a decade ago in the Broadway production of “Sister Act” and then won a Tony for her starring turn in “Pippin,” is no stranger to high drama. Or a tight fit. While promoting the second season of the Starz series “Power Book III: Raising Kanan,” which premiered on Aug. 14, she is also appearing nearly nightly as the Witch in the Broadway revival of “Into the Woods.” (In September, when she begins shooting the third season of “Raising Kanan,” she will stick with the musical through its latest extension, performing on the weekends only.)Still, she had sneaked away on a recent weekday afternoon to comb through the racks of luxury secondhand clothing, looking for inspiration for her “Raising Kanan” character, Raquel, and for herself.“It takes me hours to find anything,” she said, as she headed toward a rack of 1990s designer looks. “Sometimes I just like to look around at all the colors that I won’t wear.”She wears dazzling hues in “Into the Woods,” including a purple gown, complete with cape. In “Raising Kanan,” a prequel to the original “Power” series, Raquel, the mother of the title character, favors a more muted palette, mostly lustrous blacks and blood reds meant to convey her status as an early ’90s queenpin. (As an adult, Kanan was played in previous “Power” series by Curtis Jackson, better known as 50 Cent, who is an executive producer of the franchise and whose own mother inspired Raquel.)Miller, above center, plays the Witch in a Broadway production of “Into the Woods.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the prequel series “Power Book III: Raising Kanan,” Miller plays a drug queenpin in the ’90s. The series is inspired by 50 Cent’s upbringing in Jamaica, Queens.Cara Howe/StarzOn this afternoon, costumed only as herself, she had arrived in a swirl of muted earth tones — brown sandals, brown-and-blue sundress, blue straw hat, gold hoops. Medium drama.She held up a purple suit with a Muppet-y feel. “Definitely not,” she said.Sorting through the racks, she recalled her own acid-washed ’90s styles, modeled on the girl groups of the day, Salt-N-Pepa, TLC, En Vogue. Those same looks, she noted, have become fashionable again. “I just love how the things that were popular then keep coming back around,” she said, fingering a Geoffrey Beene blazer.Back then, in small-town South Carolina, Miller’s clothing came from Goodwill, which was what her single mother, a minister, could afford. With the money she saved on clothes, Miller’s mother paid for piano lessons and encouraged her daughter to sing in the church choir. (That encouragement helped her secure a spot at Carnegie Mellon’s theater program, which propelled her to Broadway, then onto shows like “Madam Secretary” and “Mercy Street.”)“This is a woman who had me at 15, who didn’t have her high school education, but she found a way to nurture me and invest in me,” Miller said. “I just come from really strong women.”Is she interested in strength and power herself? “I would be lying if I didn’t say, like, a little bit,” she said. “I want to have control of my life. I want to be as strong as I can.”“I just love how the things that were popular then keep coming back around,” Miller said about the ’90s-inspired styles that are currently in fashion. Sara Messinger for The New York TimesThis explains, at least in part, why she has made a career of playing strong women. The Witch can hex anyone in her radius. Raquel, an iron fist in a series of sumptuous leather jackets, refers proudly to herself as “the last bitch standing.” Both want to protect their children from the world, but the world — and the children — has other plans in mind. It would be easy enough to play either as a villain, but Miller prefers other choices.“They’re fighting for something; they’re fighting for their voice to be heard,” she said. “It’s more interesting to play the love,” she added.She retreated to the dressing room with an armful of hangers, emerging first in that Bill Blass skirt (“Ooh, dress up!” she said), topped with a grommet-studded Gianfranco Ferré blouse. The high-drama belt shifted the outfit into overdrive, so she switched out the blouse for a more restrained Calvin Klein shirt, adorned with bugle beads. She adjusted the hem of the skirt then pulled the waist lower.“The problem with me is my hips,” she said. Describing anything about Miller’s physique as a problem seems like a stretch. But sure.She asked for some shoes, but the store carried few size 10 pairs, and when Cabot brought her a pair of Ferragamo flats, Miller politely dismissed them as “a little bit church girl.” (She had enough of church girl looks in the actual ’90s.) In her bare feet, Miller made a Raq-like face in the mirror, eyes slit, mouth set.“Separately they’re both a vibe,” she said of the blouse and skirt. “And this belt, definitely a vibe.” But none of the vibes felt right for her, she decided. Next she tried a Missoni three-piece from the 1970s. “It’s not Raq,” she said as she slid on the coat. “But with my skin tone, perfect.” And yet the fit of the blouse was off. Back to the racks.Thrift shopping is a different proposition today for Miller, who shopped at Goodwill when she was young because it was what her single mother could afford. Sara Messinger for The New York TimesA Comme des Garçons blouse was too girlish, a white turtleneck too thick for summer. She tried on a leopard print Vivienne Westwood tunic, finished with the Donna Karan belt. It almost worked. A sea-green Halston caftan? “I’m so boring. I always go for the black,” she said. She tried on a jacket in palest pink. And then, in the men’s wear section, she found a black blazer, which Cabot styled with a gold collar, which made Miller look like a dance-floor queen.“Very, very Beyoncé,” Miller said, admiring herself in the mirror. “Totally Beyoncé on the horse. It’s a vibe, but not necessarily me.”She has been working, she said, to find the vulnerability within the powerful characters, she plays, and to find it within herself. “Because I think softness is a great thing, too,” she said. “It’s not bad to be soft. Black girls don’t get to do that. We always have to be strong, because that’s the best way we know. But when I see hardness, strongness on the page, I’m always like, What else can we say?”So from the rack she picked a softer item and a colorful one: a silk Karl Lagerfeld blouse in a rich shade of emerald.“That color would be amazing on you,” Cabot said.“Oh I know,” Miller replied.She decided to buy the blouse and the Donna Karan belt too. But Cabot, and the store owner, Laura Wills, surprised her, offering the blouse as a gift. “Come back and see us again!” Cabot said.“Absolutely,” Miller said as she paid for the belt.Back in her sundress, she stepped out onto 14th Street, where her own image, as Raq, looked back at her from a bus shelter. “I’m everywhere,” she said proudly. More

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    How Sharon Horgan Shaped a Monstrous Brother-in-Law

    John Paul, the compelling villain of Horgan’s new show “Bad Sisters,” was inspired by the TV tradition of “dangerous sexy men,” priests and a former president.“Bad Sisters,” now streaming on Apple TV+, opens with the funeral of John Paul Williams. The show’s ten hourlong episodes unfurl how he died, and whether his four sisters-in-law had a hand in that death.We soon discover that John Paul had long emotionally abused his wife and terrorized her sisters. The show — created by Sharon Horgan, Dave Finkel and Brett Baer — tells “a serious story about the damage that ripples outward from one angry and devious man,” Mike Hale wrote in his review for The New York Times.But, like Horgan’s previous show “Catastrophe,” “Bad Sisters” is also darkly funny. It’s adapted from the Belgian show “Clan,” which aired as “The Out-Laws” on British television in 2016. Horgan found the setup of four sisters trying (and failing) to kill their brother-in-law “inherently comical,” she said in a recent video interview, and she also related to the sisters’ strong ties, describing her own four siblings as having her back “no matter what.”Horgan — who also stars as the eldest sister, Eva — changed several aspects of the Belgian original: She cut the slapstick humor, brought down the collateral death count, fleshed out the sisters’ back stories and moved the story to Ireland.She also adapted the character of John Paul, played by Claes Bang, in several ways. To shape him into a fascinatingly horrible — and familiar — villain, Horgan drew on varied references from other TV shows, the Roman Catholic church and contemporary politics.Jean-Claude, from ‘Clan’Dirk Roofthooft plays the horrible brother-in-law in “Clan.”Caviar FilmsIn “Clan,” the dead brother-in-law is Jean-Claude Delcorps, played by Dirk Roofthooft. Horgan kept the sisters’ nickname for their brother-in-law: It’s “The Prick,” in “Bad Sisters” and “De Kloot” in “Clan,” which have the same connotation, though the Flemish version translates as “a testicle.” She did, however, change the character’s appearance, and thus, the way he navigates the world. In the original, Jean-Claude was “a bit of a gargoyle,” she said, but Bang’s John Paul is debonair and pays a lot of attention to his appearance — he’s what Horgan called “an attractive abuser.”John Paul is vain and arrogant, but outside of his own home, he’s often embarrassed or dismissed: In one episode we see him furiously trying, and failing, to keep up with his hiking group; throughout the series, he panders to his boss for a promotion while his co-workers talk about how vile he is.“I don’t know if it’s Shakespearean,” Horgan said, “but the idiot provides relief. I like that he was someone who was incredibly in control and dangerous, but at times, was also an ineffectual person.”A Scandinavian ColdnessHorgan always knew John Paul wouldn’t be fully Irish, she said, which creates immediate distance between him and the sisters. “You can’t really slot in, if it’s not your nationality,” she said of Irish culture.She specifically wanted the brother-in-law to be from Scandinavia, she said, so she could integrate the “sort of coldness and a sort of warmness at the same time” associated with that region into the character. Horgan said she wanted “Bad Sisters” to also nod to the gritty crime dramas countries like Denmark and Sweden are known for producing.Before all the episodes were written, she had cast Bang, a Danish actor, as John Paul. They discussed how to approach the character, and Bang wanted to lean into the character’s coldness, Horgan said.It proved difficult to find a Danish actress to play John Paul’s mother, Minna, and Horgan cast the Swedish actress Nina Norén in the role. Bang can also speak Swedish, and so John Paul became Swedish. Minna has a straightforwardness about her, reflected in the clean lines and classically Scandinavian design of her home, and how she delivers revelations about John Paul’s childhood.The Roman Catholic ChurchHorgan also made John Paul a strident Roman Catholic, who gives his daughter a pin of a 10-week-old fetus’ feet, the international anti-abortion symbol, before her confirmation.Growing up in Ireland, the Catholic Church played a large part in Horgan’s life, she said, adding that, historically, people in the church had sometimes performed evil acts under the guise of morality. In recent years, Catholic priests’ widespread child sexual abuse has been revealed in Ireland, as in the United States. In the twentieth century, orders of Catholic nuns in Ireland effectively incarcerated women and forced them to perform unpaid labor, in the Magdalene Laundries.“The church was more important than the individual,” Horgan said of both these atrocities. “The cover-up was more important than the victim.”She applied this conception of morality to John Paul, who sees himself as a soldier against sin, however hypocritical that may be. In Episode 3, he tricks one of the sisters, who’s having an affair, into sending him an intimate picture, which he then holds as leverage. What the sister is doing is wrong, Horgan said, but John Paul never questions his frequent porn watching or his refusal to have “an emotional relationship with his wife.”The ‘Dangerous Sexy Man’Alexander Skarsgard in “Big Little Lies.”HBOHorgan also drew on the TV tradition of “dangerous sexy men,” she said. In the HBO show “Big Little Lies,” Perry (played by Alexander Skarsgard) physically abuses his wife, is disliked by her friends and is eventually killed. He was “very attractive on the outside but also had a sexual danger,” Horgan said, which she also recognized in Don Draper from “Mad Men,” whose toxic version of masculinity Horgan called a “romanticization of control.”Horgan made John Paul frightening, like these characters, but also ineffectual. “I like the idea of him being, to a certain extent, a street angel and a house devil,” Horgan said. “These men get away with what they get away with because it’s often happening behind closed doors — they’re not walking around with signs on their head exuding danger. It’s always a shock, isn’t it?”Humanized MonstersIn “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) is evil, but also has moments of humanity.Sophie Giraud/HuluHorgan was also inspired by the characters of Aunt Lydia from “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Cersei Lannister from “Game of Thrones,” she said, in terms of how they command power, and how the temperature changes whenever they walk into a scene. Both “Handmaid’s Tale” and “Game of Thrones” also create moments in which the viewer is encouraged to empathize with Lydia or Cersei. “It makes a character more unnerving,” Horgan said. “You see these occasional moments of humanity, so you’ll forgive them — it’s how abusers operate.”With John Paul, his presence in a scene instantly introduces danger for the sisters, but we also see him cherish his daughter. “It’s not just a straight-up monster that you have to get away from; it’s far more subtle than that,” Horgan said.The Republican Party“I can’t say Trump was an influence,” Horgan said, “but he was so prevalent” when she was making the show. Former President Donald J. Trump “can appear less dangerous because he’s a clown and so weak and so vain,” she said, adding those qualities felt similar to John Paul’s. She also drew parallels between the brother-in-law and the British prime minister Boris Johnson, whom she said “gets away with so much by playing the buffoon.”John Paul systematically tries to take down others around him, based on what he judges to be wrong, while engaging in suspicious behavior of his own: lying to his boss, blackmailing his sister-in-law, falsely accusing a neighbor he dislikes of being a pedophile.In recent years, Horgan said, she has seen this kind of righteousness in the wider Republican Party. “There are other members of the G.O.P. who would seem a lot more frightening,” she said, “the ones who are clearly trying to restrict women’s freedom while, at the same time, having morally dubious behavior.” More