Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 88 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    The Outsize Genius of ‘I’m a Virgo’

    The giant teenager in Boots Riley’s new Amazon Prime series is among television’s boldest moves in a while.Brobdingnag is somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. On the map included in Volume II of his 1726 satire “Gulliver’s Travels,” Jonathan Swift depicts it as an enormous peninsula somewhere north of California. Brobdingnag is the land of the giants: When Gulliver is shipwrecked there, he finds a race of people nearly 60 feet tall, wise and moral, repulsed by his descriptions of a venal and warlike British society. The West Coast no longer teems with such gentle giants, but according to the writer, director and musician Boots Riley, there remains one well south of Brobdingnag, near the spot Swift designates P. Monterey — there’s a giant living in Oakland, Calif.Riley’s new Amazon Prime series, “I’m a Virgo,” is a Swiftian fable by way of Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, Alan Moore and Spike Lee. It is, centrally, the tale of Cootie, a once-in-a-generation giant who becomes both a folk hero and a public enemy. As someone tells him in an early episode, “People are always afraid, and you’re a 13-foot-tall Black man.” Cootie’s adoptive parents keep him as sheltered as they can; he grows up watching the action on his block via a periscope. He’s a learned giant — his father requires him to read 10 hours a day — but he’s also electrified by screens, parroting lines from his favorite reality-TV shows. (His mantra — “from that day forward, I knew nothing would stop me from achieving greatness” — is a quote from a “Bachelorette”-style program.) His parents, trying to persuade him to stay in the safety of the two-story apartment they’ve built, show him a scrapbook of giants throughout history, many Black, enslaved or lynched for their gigantism; he will, they clearly fear, be a too-visible man, a projection screen for the fears and desires of others. (This is not a fate reserved for giants alone.) But when Cootie finally leaves the house as a teenager, he falls in love with this world, in all its sublimity and stupidity. Hearing bass for the first time, thumping from a new friend’s trunk, he becomes an angry poet: “It moves through your body like waves,” he tells his parents. “And it sings to your bones.”Riley’s Oakland, like Swift’s own West Coast, is rendered surreal by allegory. It has a housing crisis, police violence and rolling blackouts, but it also has a community of people who shrink to Lilliputian pocket size (they wear receipts for clothes) and a fast-food worker named Flora who can work at a Flash-like hyperspeed. There’s also a rogue white comics artist called the Hero who exacts vigilante justice on his largely Black neighbors — but even the idea of the fascistic law-and-order superhero seems pedestrian here. This show is not subtle about its vision or its allegories. “As a young Black man,” Cootie says, repeating his parents’ warnings, “if you walk down the street, and the police see that you don’t have a job, they send you directly to jail.” His new friends all laugh at his credulousness until one replies, “Metaphorically, that’s how it goes.”One of Cootie’s first rebellions is his insistence on trying a Bing Bang Burger, whose comically unappealing commercials he sees constantly on TV. We’re shown slack-jawed observers making videos before we see Cootie himself, standing in line, hunched over, his back pressed against the fluorescent lights of the burger joint. The actor Jharrel Jerome shows us Cootie’s trepidation by always playing him small, tilting his head against his shoulder, collapsing his frame inward, his lips in an expectant pucker. But when he sees Flora, assembling burgers with blurry speed, there’s a moment of connection. Cootie expands as she hands him his order and calls him “big man.” He bumps into the exit sign on the way out.It is fastidiously, hilariously committed to the bit, constantly doubling down on the logistics of Cootie’s bigness.“I’m a Virgo” comes on the heels of a few ingenious experiments in TV surrealism, from “Atlanta” to “Undone” to the recent farce “Mrs. Davis.” Perhaps Amazon and Riley were emboldened by these examples or energized by the idea of transcending them, because this series has the courage of its confabulations. Its fantastical concept works in metaphor just the same way it works in fact, as it reminds us with proud bluntness. Drunk in the club, Cootie waxes poetic to his friend Felix: “Friends,” he says, “can help you feel the inside of yourself and the rest of the world at the same time.” Felix takes a minute to soak that in before he nods his head and responds, more or less, “Hey, bruh, that’s real.”Premium cable networks and streamers have long built their brands around boundary-pushing and risk, even as their prestige series often settle into safe, predictable formulas. Then there are properties like the ever-expanding Marvel Universe, which might once have used superheroes to dramatize truths about our own world but has now disappeared into its own multiverses, swallowed up by digital battles and green-screen vistas. “I’m a Virgo” is a visual and ideological counterpoint to all this. It uses the conceit of a 13-foot-tall Black man to reach for insights about race, class and injustice, and it is fastidiously, hilariously committed to the bit, constantly doubling down on the logistics of Cootie’s bigness. Plenty of series mess around with television’s narrative structures or genre conventions, but this show is willing to break the most basic visual conventions of how you put humans together onscreen.Its fantastical concept works in metaphor just the same way it works in fact.And so Cootie has to be as real as television can make him. Most of his scenes are filmed using elaborate forced-perspective shots and scale models, not green screens or CGI. You can feel the difference. Cootie tends to look as if the walls are closing in, because they are. The show’s ramshackle, claustrophobic genius can be thrilling. I remember being stunned watching Christopher Nolan depict the depths of a wormhole using only practical effects; my awe was not dissimilar watching Boots Riley figure out how to shoot a slapstick, ultimately pretty sexy love scene between a normal-size woman and a 13-foot-tall man without leaning on digital effects for every frame. We see Flora and Cootie largely in close-ups, Flora centered neatly in her frame while Cootie fills his to the edges. There are occasional two-shots that use dolls as stand-ins, but mostly the scene uses sound to keep the actors in contact. The scene occupies nearly half its episode, as they work to figure out how their act of love can even be consummated, and Riley figures how to show it to us, and we learn how to see it — but it’s sweet, not leering. Usually, in Riley’s frame, the giant man is the real thing, and the world around him is either distorted or built anew. With Flora, whose own strangeness the show also honors and protects, the world reimagines itself in relation to the giant.The visual gags exist alongside other spectacular fantasies. One of Cootie’s friends organizes a general strike to protest the inequities of the health care system. There’s a guerrilla attack on a power plant. A vigilante cop is converted to communism. (What’s a wilder pitch: that the power of argument persuades a law-and-order ideologue to abandon carceral capitalism or that one kid in Oakland turns out to be really, really tall?) Riley, himself an avowed communist, has always been an unabashedly political artist, but what’s radical here isn’t the politics alone; it’s what the politics free the show to do. “I’m a Virgo” makes the idea of tearing up systems of power feel less destructive than boundless, and it does this by tethering its political vision to a revolution in the way we see human bodies onscreen. Its narrative feels almost spontaneous, teeming with strange and unexpected life. Riley has made his radicalism feel verdant, generative, self-sustaining. In the land of the only living giant, that’s real.Opening illustration: Source photographs from Prime VideoPhillip Maciak is The New Republic’s TV critic and the author of the book “Avidly Reads Screen Time.” He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. More

  • 150 Shares169 Views

    in Television

    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Below the Belt’ and a Juneteenth celebration

    A new documentary from Hillary Clinton about living with endometriosis is on PBS, and a commemoration of Black survival and culture streams live on CNN and OWN.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, June 19-25. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBLACK POP: CELEBRATING THE POWER OF BLACK CULTURE 8 p.m. on E! The N.B.A. star Stephen Curry is an executive producer and the actress La La Anthony the narrator of this four-part docu-series exploring the influence of Black celebrities and entertainers on pop culture. With a spotlight on Black icons including Muhammad Ali, Serena Williams and Spike Lee, the series demonstrates how figures like these have shaped music, film and sports — and American culture at large.JUNETEENTH: A GLOBAL CELEBRATION FOR FREEDOM 8 p.m. on CNN and OWN. The second iteration of this commemorative celebration of Black culture and survival aims to educate and uplift viewers. The presentation includes preshow coverage of Black trailblazers and creators (beginning at 7 p.m.), and performances from artists like Miguel, Kirk Franklin, SWV, Davido, Coi Leray and Jodeci. The three-hour special will be streamed live from the Greek Theater in Los Angeles.TuesdayChristopher Lloyd, left, and Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future.”PhotofestBACK TO THE FUTURE (1985) 6 p.m. on AMC. Set in 1985, this Oscar-nominated film turned cult classic follows the teenage Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) after he is accidentally sent back in time, to the year 1955, and encounters his parents as high schoolers who haven’t fallen in love yet. After inadvertently causing his mother to fall for him instead, Marty must find a way to secure his future existence by bringing his parents together — while also figuring out how to get back to the year 1985. “In less resourceful hands, the idea might quickly have worn thin,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review of the film for The New York Times. But the film’s director, Robert Zemeckis (“Forrest Gump,” “The Polar Express”), she writes, “is able both to keep the story moving and to keep it from going too far,” concluding that “one of the most appealing things about ‘Back to the Future’ is its way of putting nostalgia gently in perspective.”WednesdayMike Ricker, left, and Eric Tumbarello in “LA Fire and Rescue.”Chris Haston/NBCLA FIRE & RESCUE 8 p.m. on NBC. This new docu-series from the producers of the fire and rescue squad drama “Chicago Fire” tells the real-life stories of members of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Through footage of rescues and interviews with firefighters, the series documents the lived experiences of those working on the front lines of California’s (and the nation’s) most populous county.CHINA’S CORPORATE SPY WAR 10 p.m. on CNBC. Featuring interviews with government officials and lawmakers, including the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, and the U.S. Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, as well as a number of intelligence experts, this hourlong documentary explores the world of economic espionage, focusing on China’s campaign to steal trade secrets from some of the biggest businesses in the United States. Reported by Eamon Javers, a veteran Washington correspondent and author of a book on corporate spying, the documentary argues that the campaign is more malicious than a desire for information in order to compete with American companies — maintaining that it’s rooted in China’s wish to destroy key businesses in its pursuit of global economic domination.BELOW THE BELT: THE LAST HEALTH TABOO 10 p.m. on PBS. Four women ranging in age and background share their stories in this feature-length documentary about the struggles of patients with endometriosis, a chronic condition that the World Health Organization has said affects 10 percent of women and girls. Hillary Clinton is one of the executive producers of the film, which explores how patients often fight to have their symptoms believed, diagnosed and treated in a broken healthcare system.ThursdayAnthony Anderson, left, and his mother, Doris Hancox, in “Trippin’ With Anthony Anderson and Mama Doris.”Simone Padovani/E! EntertainmentTRIPPIN’ WITH ANTHONY ANDERSON AND MAMA DORIS 10 p.m. on E! In this eight-episode mini-series, the Emmy Award-nominated actor Anthony Anderson (“Black-ish,” “Law & Order”) takes his mother, Doris Hancox, on a six-week vacation through England, France and Italy. The mother-son duo navigate new cultures, and their clashing personalities, in a series of adventures — like walking in African Fashion Week and hunting for truffle — as their relationship deepens.FridayTauba Auerbach in “Art in the Twenty-First Century: Bodies of Knowledge.” Art21ART IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE 10 p.m. on PBS. This Peabody Award-winning series about contemporary visual art follows a group of 12 artists who share their thoughts and creative processes while painting, designing and sculpting pieces of artwork inspired by the current moment. The second episode of Season 11 — which premiered in April — focuses on the artists Anicka Yi, Tauba Auerbach, Hank Willis Thomas, and the Guerrilla Girls as they explore the concepts of truth and historical record through art.SaturdayMarlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.”Turner NetworksON THE WATERFRONT (1954) 8 p.m. on TCM. Inspired by a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles by Malcolm Johnson on terrorism and racketeering on New York’s waterfront, written for The New York Sun in 1948, this Academy Award-winning crime drama focuses on union violence and corruption among a group of longshoremen in Hoboken, N.J. The film stars Marlon Brando (who won Best Actor for his role) as Terry Malloy, a boxer turned dock worker who becomes embroiled in the murder of his colleague Joey (Ben Wagner). With the rest of the longshoreman afraid to speak out after rumors spread that Joey was killed because he planned to testify against their corrupt boss and the union, the film follows Brando’s Malloy as he wrestles with how to move forward. A review in The Times described the drama as “an uncommonly powerful, exciting and imaginative use of the screen by gifted professionals.”Sunday2023 BET AWARDS 8 p.m. on BET. Streaming live from Los Angeles, the BET Awards — an annual ceremony that celebrates the work of Black artists and athletes — will commemorate hip-hop’s 50th anniversary with a lineup of hip-hop performances spanning decades and styles. Featured artists include Fat Joe, Soulja Boy, DJ Unk, E-40, and Lil Uzi Vert, among many others. More

  • 150 Shares119 Views

    in Theater

    ‘The Light in the Piazza’ Through an Asian American Lens at Encores!

    A new Encores! staging of the 2005 musical, starring Ruthie Ann Miles, considers what it is like to feel like an outsider, at home and abroad.Inside a New York City Center studio, at a rehearsal for the Encores! revival of “The Light in the Piazza,” two young lovers in 1950s Italy were meeting for the first time.“This is my mother, Margaret Johnson,” Clara, a suddenly smitten American tourist, said to Fabrizio, a local Italian.“Johnson,” Fabrizio repeated, connecting the name to a then-popular Hollywood star. “Van Johnson?!”“Yes!” Clara enthused.“You are — relative?” Fabrizio asked.“No, no,” the mother, Margaret, cut in.And then, so too, did the director, Chay Yew. He turned to Ruthie Ann Miles, the Tony-winning actress playing Margaret, with a note.“Van Johnson is white,” Yew said, gesturing at his own Asian face.The group nodded. They started the scene again, and when Miles got to her line, she drew out the “noooo” while encircling her own Asian face with her finger to make the contrast exceedingly clear to the lovestruck Fabrizio.The move sent onlookers into a fit of laughter.“In the great works of art, there are ways to find more life between sentences and scenes,” said Chay Yew, who is directing the Encores! production.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNothing in the book, music or lyrics of this Tony Award-winning 2005 Broadway musical has been changed in the revival, which opens on Wednesday for a short run. But the casting of Asian American actresses in two of the main roles has reframed the musical to emphasize its exploration of the otherness — an otherness that some Asian Americans often feel in the United States and elsewhere. Without revisions, that point of view will have to come through in Yew’s direction and the actors’ interpretations.When Miles (“The King and I”) agreed to play Margaret, Yew began thinking about homing in on her background as a Korean American to further explore the experience of feeling like an outsider. The spike in anti-Asian violence during the pandemic, Yew said, was still very much front of mind.“No matter how Asian American you are, you’re always going to be the perpetual foreigner. The face that we wear,” Yew said, “always makes you feel that you do not belong in this country.“So I was interested in, well, what does it really mean to explore the outsider status in this particular musical?” Yew, a playwright and director of shows like “Cambodian Rock Band,” added. “It actually helps open up the music a little bit more. I think in the great works of art, there are ways to find more life between sentences and scenes.”“The Light in the Piazza,” which originally starred Victoria Clark as Margaret and Kelli O’Hara as Clara, tracks a woman and her daughter on vacation in Italy. Love is at its heart: Clara (Anna Zavelson) falls for Fabrizio (James D. Gish); Margaret wants to disrupt the romance to protect her daughter, who suffered a brain injury as a child that renders her childlike even as an adult; and Margaret herself is stuck in a seemingly loveless marriage to a husband who stayed at home in North Carolina.It is the Johnsons’ status as tourists — outsiders in a foreign land — that allows preoccupations with Clara’s disability to fade, her love to blossom and Margaret’s perspective to shift such that she can begin to let her daughter go. In leaving home, both women, in a sense, find themselves.Nothing in the book, music or lyrics of “The Light in the Piazza” has been changed in the revival, which opens on Wednesday at City Center.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFor Asian Americans, determining exactly what and where feels like home can be tricky. Clint Ramos, who designed the set with Miguel Urbino and is part of the Encores! leadership team, recalled having seen the show 10 times during its original run. He had moved to New York from the Philippines, and the idea of becoming totally immersed in a new place — and loving it — resonated. “Every time was ugly crying,” he said of seeing the musical.Miles was at the top of the Encores! list for the role of Margaret. (In his 2005 review of the show, Ben Brantley wrote that the character “qualifies as a blessing for those in search of signs of intelligent life in the American musical.”) They felt Miles “was virtuosic enough to actually handle the score, but also such an excellent actor,” Ramos said.With the role cast, Yew and Miles studied the history of Korean immigration and determined, for subtext, that Miles’s Margaret could have come to the United States in the early 1900s to study art and learn English, then met her white husband, settled in the South and eventually had a child.Miles, who has been juggling this show with her Tony-nominated role as the beggar woman in the Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd,” was born in the United States, then spent a few years as a young child in South Korea before returning to the U.S. with her mother. She recalled learning English while growing up in Hawaii as her Korean language skills diminished and becoming frustrated with her mother’s stubborn accent and lack of concern, unlike her friends’ parents, about things like having nice clothes. Over time, she said she even developed a sort of bitterness toward her mother.“And so I carry all of these stories and these ideas with me when we’re building Margaret,” she said.Zavelson, who graduated from high school last year and is making her professional New York debut in the musical, has always wanted to sing the score, but said she had never seen someone who looked like her play the role of Clara. Zavelson said she is Japanese American and Jewish.Anna Zavelson, as Clara, above with Gish, who plays Fabrizio, said she never “pictured myself being able to sing that role” because it’s usually filled by a white actress. Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“I don’t think that I had pictured myself being able to sing that role,” Zavelson said, because Clara has usually been played by a white actress. “Growing up, I think every kid is like, ‘Wouldn’t that be fun if I did this?’ But once you get to middle school, high school, and start to realize that you’re perceived differently by certain people, I think a lot of me was kind of like, ‘Oh, well, I’ll let that role die.’”“But seeing that Ruthie was attached to it just kind of lit something inside of me,” she continued. “I’m from Texas and Margaret and Clara are from North Carolina. So it’s not the same geographically, but having a Southern Asian American with a last name like Johnson isn’t actually that far from me.”And despite the effects of Clara’s injury, she is a generally upbeat, optimistic young woman who is warmly embraced by Fabrizio’s family, Zavelson said.So although the actors were still exploring their characters during rehearsals last week, Zavelson said she suspected many of the race-conscious nuances layered into the performance would manifest through Margaret, and the mother-daughter interactions between Clara and Margaret. To what extent does Margaret have an internalized fear of racism that makes her more hesitant to embrace Fabrizio and his family? How have her experiences as an immigrant toughened her? And how does that toughness play out in Margaret’s interactions with Clara?Exactly how to integrate the feeling of racial otherness into the show was also an ongoing challenge for the cast.“Maybe it’s slight racism from other people in Italy, whether it’s a gesture or a look,” Miles said.Miles also saw “The Light in the Piazza” on Broadway, and said she immediately noticed the “sweeping orchestration and beautiful vocals and this really human story of love and grief and regret.”But as she has played back the music in the years since, it speaks to her differently.It is no secret, she said, that she and her husband, Jonathan Blumenstein, have endured tragedy. In 2018, their daughter, Abigail, 5, was killed, and Miles herself critically injured when they were struck by a car while walking in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Miles was pregnant at the time, and two months later, near her due date, lost the baby.“I really feel the ways that Margaret tries to be strong and wants to let everybody know that she is in control and everything is OK,” Miles said. “But then what happens when the doors are closed?”When Margaret finally allows herself to be vulnerable for the audience, she continued, it could become a way for her personally “to finally take a breath and show perhaps a little bit more of the true me.”“Hopefully it’s not until the end of the show,” she added. “Because I won’t recover.” More

  • 113 Shares179 Views

    in Television

    Samantha Irby Says It’s OK to Hate Your Body

    As far as descriptions of writers go, “humorist” has an old-fashioned, almost quaint ring to it, the literary equivalent of haberdasher or lamplighter. But across four book-length collections — the newest is the best seller “Quietly Hostile” — Samantha Irby has always brought scabrously honest, never pat and, it must be said, operatically scatological vivacity […] More

  • 163 Shares119 Views

    in Theater

    L.A.’s Center Theater Group Lays Off Staff and Halts Work on One Stage

    With box office revenues, subscriptions and donations all down since the pandemic, the theater said it would pause production on one of its three stages, the Mark Taper Forum.In the face of what is described as a “crisis unlike any other in our 56-year history,” the Center Theater Group, a flagship of the Los Angeles theater world, announced a series of sharp cutbacks Thursday to deal with drops in revenue and attendance and said that it would suspend productions at one of its three stages, the Mark Taper Forum.The theater said it would lay off 10 percent of its 200-person work force.In a note to patrons, the theater said it “continues to feel the aftereffects of the pandemic and has been struggling to balance ever-increasing production costs with significantly reduced ticket revenue and donations that remain behind 2019 levels.” Theater officials said the organization posted an $8 million shortfall for the 2022-23 fiscal year and a $7 million shortfall the year before, much of which had been covered by federal pandemic assistance that is now ending.The 736-seat Taper, a semicircular amphitheater that has been a showpiece for innovative productions — “Slave Play” recently enjoyed a mostly sold-out run here — will suspend productions beginning this July and at least through the 2023-2024 season.And the theater is postponing a world premiere that had been set to open there this August, “Fake It Until You Make It” by Larissa FastHorse. As a result, the final production at the Taper for this season will be “A Transparent Musical,” a world premiere based on the television show “Transparent,” about the patriarch of a Los Angeles family coming out as transgender.The Los Angeles organization becomes the latest arts organization in the country — from regional theaters to symphony orchestras to opera houses — to grapple with a drop-off in attendance in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.The center, which has a long record of championing new and innovative work, has been struggling to redefine its mission and regain its financial footing since reopening after the pandemic. The group is made up of three theaters: the Taper, the Ahmanson, and the Kirk Douglas Theater. The Ahmanson and the Taper are part of the Music Center complex in downtown Los Angeles; the Kirk Douglas is in Culver City.Season subscriptions at the Taper are 35 percent below what they were before the pandemic shutdown began; subscriptions at the group’s main theater, the Ahmanson, are down 42 percent. Its longtime artistic director, Michael Ritchie, stepped down in December 2021, six months before the expiration of his contract. He was replaced by Snehal Desai, the producing artistic director of East West Players, who will step into his new role this summer. He will take the helm at a reduced institution.“We didn’t think that it would happen this fast or this dramatically — before he got in the door,” said Brett Webster, a spokesman for the center. “He did go in knowing this was a possibility.”The Taper is particularly admired here because of its relatively intimate feel and its willingness to take on new productions, sometimes to acclaim, and sometimes not.“Pausing season programming at the Taper is a difficult but necessary decision that will impact artists and audiences; and is particularly painful for the talented and committed CTG staff who have dedicated so much to bringing great theater to L.A.,” the theater said.The Center Theater Group has a long and distinguished history here, the site of such pathbreaking productions as “Angels in America” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” the Anna Deavere Smith play. More

  • 88 Shares189 Views

    in Television

    A Few of Andrew Koji’s Favorite Things

    The star of the Max martial-arts drama “Warrior” starts his days with meditation and Morning Pages, and powers down with PlayStation.In November, Andrew Koji wrapped the third season of “Warrior,” the martial-arts television drama inspired by the writings of Bruce Lee. He’s still recovering.At 35, he’s “just past the peak age of an athlete,” he said, massaging his upper arm during a video call from London, “and I am feeling it.”In “Warrior,” which begins airing June 29 on Max, Koji plays a Chinese immigrant whose search for his sister forces him into the role of hatchet man for a gang.After he finished work on Season 2, Cinemax, which produced the first two seasons, canceled the show, the pandemic hit and his gut told him that “Snake Eyes,” his 2021 G.I. Joe movie, wasn’t going to be good.“I was like, ‘This is it — my time has come, my career’s over and the world is ending,’” he said. “A little bit dramatic there.”Then he landed a part in the Brad Pitt movie “Bullet Train,” playing an alcoholic father intent on avenging his son’s death. And “Warrior” was picked up by Max for a third season.“I’ve got more options now,” he said, “but I’m definitely not in that position where I’m getting great scripts sent to me. I’m still having to hustle and figure out the next move and be smart.”Koji’s list of cultural essentials is more categorical than specific, like a book in his hand and a poem in his head. “I try to live my life as non-materialistically or attached to things as possible,” he said. “But it did make me think, ‘What are the things that I do need?’”These are edited excerpts from our conversation.1MeditationMeditation is the start of my day and something I always take with me. It has helped me through tough times. I believe it helps entering the state of “flow” for creativity and helps us sit through and deal with negative and challenging states of mind.2Pen and PaperI need this wherever I go. I journal for my own sanity and use a similar practice of the “Morning Pages” from “The Artist’s Way.” I write ideas, thoughts, images, things I want to develop. For every character I play, I create a notebook with back stories, inner monologues, abstract ideas, and add to it over time.3Poetry From MemoryIf I’m not on a job, I like to keep my brain sharp by memorizing a speech, a poem or a passage that I connect with. The last one was Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.” Before that it was a passage from a Taoist book about how insignificant we are in the vastness of the cosmos, yet how we should still strive to be a better part of it.4ExerciseTraining has become a big part of my life again after almost 10 years of more unhealthy and self-destructive habits during my early struggling acting years. It helps me avoid or work through negative states. Anything that can take me out of my head and into the body — training with weights, the punching bag, Brazilian jiu-jitsu or yoga.5TeachersIf we don’t keep learning throughout our lives, I think we stagnate. I’ll always look to study as much as I can between work, studying with a Japanese language tutor, meditation teachers, martial-art teachers or any subject that helps inspire me creatively and think differently about something. I studied film and theater in college, and I remember my drama teacher at the time saying, “You should never become an actor.” Then I found a class at the Actors’ Temple, and a great teacher called Tom Radcliffe opened my eyes to maybe I could be doing this, that I had the potential to be a good actor.6Nonfiction“Man’s Search for Meaning,” Bruce Lee’s “Striking Thoughts,” “Hardcore Zen,” “The Road Less Traveled.” “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” is what I’m reading now. Older books that remind me why we do what we do on a deeper level I find helpful in this increasingly superficial modern western world.7Traveling in JapanKyoto is one of my favorite places — exploring temples, disconnecting from technology, going off the beaten path. One of my favorite trails so far was the Kumano Kodo, an ancient pilgrimage route.8American and Japanese ClassicsPop and more modern music I can take or leave. But Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Frank Sinatra, Joe Hisaishi and Shigeru Umebayashi — any music that evokes or moves my soul, rather than being light and catchy, can help inspire some creative thought.9Stand-up ComedyDave Chappelle, Bill Hicks, Jim Jefferies — I used to have a habit of taking life incredibly seriously, and I need to remember to laugh and find humor in things that annoy or upset me. Stand-up comedy is such an incredible and primal craft form. I’ll usually try and find a comedy show or stand-up night when I’m in a new city.10PlayStationLast but not least, an indulgence. Watching TV and films gets my gears turning too much, but PlayStation helps me switch off my brain. More

  • 88 Shares119 Views

    in Theater

    A Stage Musical About Belfast’s Punk Oasis

    Of all the streets to open a record store, one nicknamed Bomb Alley might not have been optimal. Then again this was Belfast in 1977, when the nationalistic, sectarian violence known as the Troubles made retail perilous pretty much everywhere.The situation did not deter Terri Hooley, who welcomed warring Protestants and Catholics to the shop he had optimistically called Good Vibrations.“It was like a little oasis in a sea of madness,” Hooley, 74, said in a recent video conversation from Belfast.The story of a lone man bridging warring communities is the kind of feel-good tale you can easily imagine as a movie, and lo and behold, it became one: “Good Vibrations” (2012), starring Richard Dormer (“Game of Thrones,” “Fortitude”) as Hooley. Colin Carberry and Glenn Patterson then adapted their own screenplay into a stage musical for Belfast’s Lyric Theater, whose most recent production of the show is running at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan until July 16.The show, in which members of the cast take turns playing in the onstage band, follows the odyssey of Hooley (played by Glen Wallace) as he started the shop then a label that released early singles by the Undertones and the Outcasts. It also portrays the toll his obsession took on his marriage to the poet Ruth Carr (Jayne Wisener).“It actually helps you understand what Northern Ireland is now, what Northern Ireland had been,” the musical’s director, Des Kennedy, said. “It’s a real snapshot of that conflict without being about the conflict.”Hooley discovered the power of music at a young age. “My history starts in 1965 in the Maritime Hotel with Van Morrison and Them,” he said, mentioning one of the biggest stars to ever come out of Northern Ireland. “The ’60s were very colorful for me. Then the Troubles came, and the 1970s were black and white, and horrific.”Glen Wallace, center, as Terri Hooley in the musical “Good Vibrations” at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHis solution was to create a place that would welcome all. “Terri is a true radical,” Patterson said via video from Belfast. “He really believes in the power of transformation, about betterment, about enjoyment, about living to your full potential.”Hooley, a fan of Hank Williams and the Shangri-Las, was at first confounded by punk, but he quickly embraced the scene, which was blowing up in Belfast just as it was in London or New York.The movement, however, had a different resonance in Northern Ireland.“So much of the emphasis then was on what you couldn’t do,” Carberry said of Belfast in a joint chat with Patterson. “You can’t go to that school, you can’t live on that street, you can’t support that football team, you can’t have that friend, you can’t go out with that person — it was all about narrowing options.“Punk music,” he continued, “was about opening up options: Expand your record collection, expand your group of friends and ultimately expand how you look at the world.”Eventually, Hooley decided to expand beyond the store. Remembering great Northern Irish bands in the 1960s who had never made it to the studio, he didn’t want the new generation to be similarly erased.So he started the Good Vibrations label to help preserve the legacy of bands like the Outcasts, Rudi, Protex and most notably the Undertones, who were based 70 miles away in Derry. A couple of the best scenes in “Good Vibrations” actually revolve around the Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks,” which was so clearly an instant classic that the taste-making BBC DJ John Peel played it twice in a row during a 1978 broadcast.A scene from the film “Good Vibrations,” with Richard Dormer, right, as Terri Hooley.Cinematic Collection /Alamy Stock PhotoLike many of the Northern Irish punk songs, “Teenage Kicks” celebrated the headiness of being young, rather than spewing out bile: Those kids didn’t have to sing about aggression — they were living it.“Across the years, people were trying to avoid talking about politics in Northern Ireland,” said the show’s music director, Katie Richardson, who is 34. “Young people were like, ‘We’re sick of this, we want to talk about love, we want to talk about the positive things.’ For me and my generation of musicians, it was the same: Nobody wanted to talk about the Troubles.”Not that love was doing all that great in Hooley’s own home: His passion for music came at a cost to his relationship with Ruth. “The night that Terri’s first daughter was born, he wasn’t at the hospital; he was at a Siouxsie Sioux gig in Belfast, hanging out backstage,” Kennedy said. The show does find a bit more room for Ruth as a poet, and for the couple’s friends Dave and Marilyn Hyndman (Darren Franklin and Cat Barter).As Northern Ireland recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement that ended the Troubles, Carberry noted that the commemorations largely focused on the leaders at the negotiation table, to the detriment of the groups and individuals who had tried so hard to make a difference on a smaller scale.“In a way, ‘Good Vibrations’ is a celebration of those people,” Carberry said. “This is a story about ordinary people who tried to live a different way, and tried to help others live a different way.” More

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in Theater

    Review: In ‘The Doctor,’ a Rare Case of Physician, Harm Thyself

    Robert Icke’s surgery on a 1912 play about the disease of antisemitism turns it into a riveting debate about identity. But at what cost to the patient?After attempting an abortion at home, a 14-year-old girl lies dying of sepsis at the Elizabeth Institute. No one questions her treatment there; by the time she was admitted, it was too late to save her. But when Ruth Wolff, the Institute’s head doctor, refuses to let a priest perform last rites because it would cause “an unpeaceful death,” ignorance amplified by social media turns a medical decision into a maelstrom. Soon the web is saying Wolff assaulted the priest and killed the girl.Yet it is not simply a question of tweets and misinformation. Wolff is a Jew.So far, the plot of “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s adaptation of the 1912 play “Professor Bernhardi” by Arthur Schnitzler, aligns closely with the original, except that Bernhardi is a Viennese man in 1900 and Wolff a British woman today. Yet ultimately the two works could not be more different. The production that opened on Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory, directed by Icke and starring Juliet Stevenson, is less the exercise in Shavian moral argument that Schnitzler rather airily called a comedy than a tragic thought experiment about the failure of identity politics.The thought experiment runs like this: If everyone represents only the group they belong to, instead of an overarching humanity, and if those groups get sliced finer and finer, what hope can there be for a common language, let alone a common achievement? Wolff’s medical ethics are gibberish to a person of faith, as a politician’s equivocation is nonsense to her. When an online petition states that “Christian patients need Christian doctors” it comes close to suggesting a system in which no one can be a doctor at all — and indeed, soon enough, Wolff is forced to resign.That conundrum, honed to a sharp edge in the plotty first act, gets a satirical round table treatment in the second, when Icke puts Wolff before a panel of extreme antagonists on a portentous television program called “Take the Debate.” Faced with an anti-abortion lawyer, a “CreationVoice” activist, a post-colonial academic and a researcher of unconscious bias, Wolff, despite her excellence, gets eaten alive.Attacking identity from every direction, Icke moves bravely into the danger zone of heightened sensitivity and calls for cancellation, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut I have left out a fifth panelist: “a specialist in the study of Jewish culture.” He seems to feel that Wolff, a “cultural” Jew, is somehow not Jewish enough.I felt that way about “The Doctor.” Not because of Icke’s and Stevenson’s faith, whatever it may or may not be; as I don’t believe in matching Christian patients to Christian doctors (nor in a similar matching of critics to plays), I likewise don’t want to limit portrayals of a culture or religion only to its adherents. But it soon became clear to me that, unlike “Professor Bernhardi,” written by a Jew, “The Doctor” is not very serious about antisemitism. How could it be, when the sentimental attachment to identity of any sort is precisely its boogeyman?Icke develops the idea very cleverly. His casting across race and gender ensures that you will be forced to re-evaluate your reactions when you discover, quite belatedly in some cases, that the characters are not as they may look. Is the interaction between a Jewish doctor and a priest with a Scottish accent different when you assume the priest to be white (because the actor is) than when you later learn he is Black? Does it matter whether Wolff’s partner, named Charlie and dressed indeterminately, is a man or woman?Attacking identity from every direction, Icke moves bravely into the danger zone of heightened sensitivity and calls for cancellation. Perhaps he goes too far in stacking the deck: Though some of Wolff’s antagonists, especially the girl’s yahoo of a father, make clearly antisemitic remarks, Wolff herself is almost worse. Not merely complacently sure of herself, like Bernhardi, she is, in Stevenson’s unflinching performance, a completely unsympathetic blowhard. However well done, the success of that interpretation backfires: As she howls, insults and snaps her fingers at underlings so relentlessly you begin to wonder whether her enemies are right, even if for the wrong reason.That’s in line with Icke’s generally over-caffeinated production, which includes a needlessly rotating turntable set (by Hildegard Bechtler), a scrape-your-nerves sound design (by Tom Gibbons) and a drum kit accompaniment from an aerie above the action (performed by Hannah Ledwidge) as if the breakneck story needed additional propulsion.Stevenson and Juliet Garricks, whose drama mainly unfolds offstage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt probably needs less. Its themes, constantly broadening, also thin out. Wolff’s transgender friend, Sami (Matilda Tucker), seems to exist only to be betrayed; the drama of Charlie (Juliet Garricks) occurs mostly offstage.And in the end, antisemitism gets dropped completely. A long final scene, lovely in itself, allows the priest who was at the center of the problem in the first place (John Mackay) to confess and be absolved. Not Wolff. She is asked to re-evaluate her hubris, examine her hidden bias and accept her fallen state with humility. The Jew-baiting of everyone else is, if not excused, forgotten, which is much the same thing.This has been a season of Jews blamed or blaming themselves for the emotional, physical and indeed genocidal violence against them. Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” seems to argue that the assimilated Jewry of Vienna (among whom Schnitzler was a star) should have seen the Holocaust coming and bought a ticket out. In the musical “Parade,” it is not enough that Leo Frank is lynched; to make him fully human he must be transfigured by love. (He’s dead either way.) And now “The Doctor” subjects its main character to antisemitic dog whistles but, in the end, sees her downfall as her own fault and an opportunity for growth.Well, that’s drama, and all three shows are riveting. No question they are also timely; Icke may even be warning us with that alarming drum kit that time is short. That might explain why his version of the Elizabeth Institute is not a general teaching hospital, as in the original, but a facility dedicated to the study of Alzheimer’s disease. Though it doesn’t make much medical sense for a girl with sepsis to be treated there, it does make sense for the play. Wolff describes Alzheimer’s as “a fire burning hot on the top” — scorching a path down through the brain from the newest to the earliest memories.You need only glance at the news to know what Icke means. As the memory of the unity and selflessness that once saved the world is all but burned through, how will we remember to never forget?The DoctorThrough Aug. 19 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More