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    Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Paula Vogel Are Broadway Bound

    Second Stage, a nonprofit with a focus on living American dramatists, said it will present works by the playwrights on Broadway this season.Second Stage, a nonprofit theater that focuses on work by living American writers, said it will present a well-known piece by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and a new work by Paula Vogel on Broadway this season.This fall, the company plans to stage “Appropriate,” Jacobs-Jenkins’s play about a family gathering in Arkansas disrupted by the discovery of a photo album filled with disturbing images.The play was staged in 2014 at the Signature Theater Company, an Off Broadway nonprofit. Ben Brantley, then The Times’s chief theater critic, praised it as “remarkable and devious.”The new production, which is to begin performances in November and open in December at the Helen Hayes Theater, is to be directed by Lila Neugebauer (“The Waverly Gallery”). Jacobs-Jenkins, a 2016 recipient of the so-called “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, is a two-time Pulitzer finalist, for “Gloria” and “Everybody,” and is also the author of “The Comeuppance,” now running at the Signature Theater in Manhattan. “Appropriate” will be the first play he has written to be staged on Broadway, although he contributed material to a recent Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.”Next spring, Second Stage plans to present a new play, not yet titled, by Vogel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “How I Learned to Drive.” That play, to begin performances in March and open in April at the Hayes, is to be directed by Tina Landau, and is a family drama set in suburban Washington in 1962. Vogel is also the author of “Indecent,” which was produced on Broadway in 2017.Second Stage said that this fall it would also present an Off Broadway production of Jen Silverman’s new play, “Spain,” which is set in 1936, and concerns two filmmakers making a K.G.B.-backed movie about the Spanish Civil War. The production is to be directed by Tyne Rafaeli and to run at the Tony Kiser Theater beginning in November. More

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    Glenda Jackson, Oscar-Winning Actress Turned Politician, Dies at 87

    Ms. Jackson was a two-time Oscar winner who walked away from a successful acting career to become a member of the British Parliament, before then returning to the stage.Glenda Jackson, the two-time Oscar winner who renounced a successful film and stage career in her 50s to become a member of the British Parliament, then returned to the stage at 80 as the title character in “King Lear,” died on Thursday at her home in Blackheath, London. She was 87.Her death was confirmed by Lionel Larner, her longtime agent, who said that she died after a brief illness.On both stage and screen, Ms. Jackson demonstrated that passion, pain, humor, anger, affection and much else were within her range. “I like to take risks,” she told The New York Times in 1971, “and I want those risks to be larger than the confines of a structure that’s simply meant to entertain.”By then she had won both acclaim and notoriety for performances in which she had bared herself physically and emotionally, notably as a ferocious Charlotte Corday in Peter Brook’s production of Peter Weiss’s “Marat/Sade,” and as Tchaikovsky’s tormented wife in Ken Russell’s film “The Music Lovers.”And she had won her first best actress Oscar, for playing the wayward Gudrun Brangwen in Ken Russell’s “Women in Love” (1969); her second was for her portrayal of the cool divorcée Vickie Allessio in “A Touch of Class” (1973).Ms. Jackson pivoted to politics in 1992, and was elected as the member of Parliament representing the London constituency of Hampstead and Highgate for the Labour Party. After the party took control of government in 1997, she became a junior minister of transport, only to resign the post two years later before a failed attempt to become mayor of London.She did not run for re-election in 2015, declaring herself too old, and soon returned to acting.Throughout her career, Ms. Jackson displayed an emotional power that sometimes became terrifying, and a voice that could rise from a purr to a rasp of fury or contempt, although her slight physique suggested both an inner and outer vulnerability.Her notable roles on the big screen included her depiction of the troubled poet Stevie Smith in Hugh Whitemore’s “Stevie” (1978) and as the needy divorcée Alex Greville in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971). On Broadway, she won praise as the neurotic Nina Leeds in O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude” in 1985 and a best actress Tony for her role as A, a woman over 90 facing mortality, in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” in 2018.Glenda Jackson as King Lear in the play “King Lear” at the Cort Theater in 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara Krulwich/The New York TimesMany of Ms. Jackson’s performances provoked shock and awe with their boldness, none more so than her “Lear” in 2016. Though she had a reputation as a dauntingly confident actress, she admitted to having attacks of agonizing nerves before going onstage, and at London’s Old Vic, these were particularly acute.“I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was arrogance or just insanity,” she recalled of preparing for the most demanding of male roles in what she called “the greatest play ever written.” Her performance after 23 years away from the theater drew wide acclaim.“You’re barely aware of her being a woman playing a man,” Christopher Hart wrote in The Sunday Times of London. “It simply isn’t an issue.”Glenda May Jackson was born on May 9, 1936, in Birkenhead, near Liverpool in northwest England, the eldest of four daughters of Harry, a bricklayer, and Joan, a house cleaner and barmaid.Soon after her birth her parents moved to the nearby town of Hoylake, where home was a tiny workman’s house with an outdoor toilet, a cold water tap and a tin tub for a bath. The war increased the family’s privations. “We used to eat candle wax as an alternative to chewing gum,” she remembered. “The big treat was a pennyworth of peanut butter.”With her father called into the Navy, Glenda became increasingly crucial to an all-female household, something that explained, she said, both her defiant feminism and her “bossy streak.” She also proved bright and diligent, winning a scholarship to West Kirby County Grammar School for Girls. But she did not flourish there and left at 16. She was, she recalled, undisciplined and unhappy, “the archetypal fat and spotty teenager.”She was working at a pharmacy store and performing onstage as a member of a local theater group when, in 1954, she won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, which had begun to encourage the enrollment of working-class students, including Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole. (Ms. Jackson remained convinced that she was plain, even ugly — a belief later reinforced by the academy’s principal, who told her that she could become only a character actress and “shouldn’t expect to work much before you’re 40.”)The schooling prepared her for what became six years in provincial repertory.In 1958 she married Roy Hodges, a fellow actor. Regional stage work meant periods of unemployment, odd jobs and poverty for the couple, and Ms. Jackson later admitted that she had shoplifted food and other essentials that she could conceal under her coat.Her big break came in 1964, when the director Mr. Brook brought her into an experimental group he was assembling for the recently formed Royal Shakespeare Company. He later recalled her as “a very curious figure — a hidden, shy and yet aggressive, badly dressed girl who seemed resentful of everything.” But in an audition, she had left him mesmerized by “the sudden plunges she took and by her intensity.”Mr. Brook cast her in “Marat/Sade,” which transferred to Broadway in 1967, leading to a Tony nomination for Ms. Jackson’s Charlotte Corday.But she disliked the experience, which, she said, left the company “in hysterics — people twitching, slobber running down their chins, screaming from nerves and exhaustion.” Nor did she enjoy the three years she spent with the R.S.C., though her roles included a sharp, shrewd Ophelia in Peter Hall’s revival of “Hamlet” and several characters in Mr. Brook’s anti-Vietnam War show, “US.” She was not, she decided, a company woman.Such did her reputation as a “difficult” actress begin. She was regarded as aloof and egoistic, and could be contemptuous of actors she found lacking in commitment, bellicose in rehearsal rooms and unafraid of challenging eminent directors. Gary Oldman, who starred with her in Robert David MacDonald’s play “Summit Conference” in 1982, called her “a nightmare.”Yet Trevor Nunn, who wrangled with her in rehearsals, later called her “direct, uncomplicated, honest, very alive.”“Of all the actors I’ve worked with, she has a capacity for work that’s phenomenal,” Mr. Nunn said. “There’s an immense power of concentration, a great deal of attack, thrust, determination.”Motivated in part by her dislike of Hollywood glitz, Ms. Jackson did not attend either of the Academy Award ceremonies for which she was honored as best actress.What mattered more, she said, was “the blood, sweat and tears” of creating a role. For her Emmy-winning performance in the television serial “Elizabeth R” (1971), she learned to ride sidesaddle and to play the virginals, and mastered archery and calligraphy. She also shaved her head — all to add authenticity as her queen evolved from youth to crabbed old age.Subsequent stage roles included Cleopatra in Mr. Brook’s revival of “Antony and Cleopatra” for the R.S.C. in 1978, Racine’s Phèdre at the Old Vic in 1984, Lady Macbeth in a disappointing “Macbeth” on Broadway in 1988, and the title character in Brecht’s “Mother Courage” in 1990.Though she won awards for “Stevie,” including one for best actress from the New York Film Critics Circle, and received good reviews for her work in the television movie “The Patricia Neal Story” (1981) and Robert Altman’s “Beyond Therapy” (1987), her later screen work was generally less successful.With characteristic candor she was often withering about her own efforts, calling her performances in the film version of Terence Rattigan’s play “Bequest to the Nation” (released as “The Nelson Affair” in 1973) and as Bernhardt in the movie “The Incredible Sarah” (1976) “ghastly” and “lousy,” respectively.She brought that candor to Parliament in 1992, when she declared, “Why should I stay in the theater to play the Nurse in ‘Romeo and Juliet’?”Most scripts she had been sent were poor, she said, and contemporary dramatists were not writing good roles for women. Moreover, she said, she had a hatred of a Conservative government which, inspired by “that dreadful woman Margaret Thatcher,” seemed to be dismembering the welfare state the Labour Party had created after the war.In Parliament, Ms. Jackson took an interest in homelessness, housing, women’s rights, disability issues and, especially, transportation. After resigning from her transport post, she was a Labour backbencher, joining those who opposed Britain’s part in the Iraq war in 2003, declaring herself “deeply, deeply ashamed” of her government and calling for Prime Minister Tony Blair’s resignation.Ms. Jackson and Mr. Hodges divorced in 1976. In later years she shared a London house with her only child, the political journalist Dan Hodges, and his wife and children. She preferred, she said, to remain unmarried, explaining that “men are awfully hard work for very little reward.”Ms. Jackson also shunned the trappings of celebrity, dressing inexpensively, using public transportation and relegating her Oscars to the attic. She was, she admitted, a solitary person with not many friends.But she did perhaps fulfill her own ambition: “If I have my health and strength, I’m going to be the most appalling old lady,” she said. “I’m going to boss everyone about, make people stand up for me when I come into a room, and generally capitalize on all the hypocrisy that society shows towards the old.”Emma Bubola More

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    Bill Cosby Accused of Sexual Assault in Nevada by Nine Women

    The entertainer, who was released from prison in 2021 after a conviction was overturned, now faces lawsuits in states where the statutes of limitations have changed.Nine women accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault in a Nevada lawsuit on Wednesday, less than two months after the state changed its statute of limitations for civil cases involving that crime.The women said in the lawsuit that the assaults took place in Nevada between 1979 and 1992, some in Mr. Cosby’s hotel suite in Las Vegas. They said that Mr. Cosby, now 85, had drugged or attempted to drug each of them before the assaults.A spokesman for Mr. Cosby, Andrew Wyatt, could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday night. He told NBC News that the plaintiffs in the case were motivated by “addiction to massive amounts of media attention and greed.”The lawsuit is the latest of several to accuse the entertainer of being a sexual predator. He was convicted of sexual assault in a Pennsylvania court in 2018 and began serving a three- to 10-year sentence.Mr. Cosby was released in 2021 after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his conviction on the grounds that prosecutors had violated his rights by reneging on a promise not to charge him. Mr. Wyatt described the court’s reversal at the time as a victory for both Black America and women.But accusations of sexual misconduct have continued to trail Mr. Cosby, who starred for years in “The Cosby Show,” a mainstay of American television in the 1980s and early 1990s. And he now faces several new lawsuits in states where the laws governing statutes of limitations have recently changed.In California last year, a jury sided with Judy Huth, who had accused Mr. Cosby of sexually assaulting her in 1975 at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, when she was 16. She was awarded $500,000.Mr. Cosby was also sued in Los Angeles this month by Victoria Valentino, a former Playboy model who accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her in that city in 1969, after she and a friend met him for a meal in a restaurant.The California cases were possible because state law has been changed since 2020 to extend, then temporarily lift, the statute of limitations for sexual assault filings in civil courts.A similar process in New Jersey allowed Lili Bernard, an actor and visual artist, to sue Mr. Cosby in 2021, accusing him of drugging and sexually assaulting her at a hotel in Atlantic City in 1990.In Nevada, the state legislature passed a law in May that revised provisions around some civil cases involving sexual assault. The law allows people who were 18 or older when a sexual assault allegedly occurred to file civil lawsuits. Older state laws had already allowed people who were under 18 at the time of an alleged sexual assault to bring such cases.Some of the nine women who filed the lawsuit on Wednesday have been involved in legal action against Mr. Cosby in other states.One is Ms. Bernard, a former guest star on “The Cosby Show.” Another is Janice Dickinson, a model who appeared as a witness during Mr. Cosby’s Pennsylvania trial, testifying that he had drugged and sexually assaulted her in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 1982. “Every state should follow Nevada’s lead and eliminate the statute of limitations for sexual assault,” said Lisa Bloom, a lawyer who represented Ms. Dickinson in the Pennsylvania case. “I applaud the courage of these women for demanding justice against Bill Cosby.” More

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    ‘A Simulacrum’ Review: A Magic Show in the Making, and Unmaking

    The magician Steve Cuiffo and the playwright Lucas Hnath try to find the reality beneath the illusions in this Atlantic Theater Company production.Magicians often get a bad rap. After all, it’s a profession necessarily defined by deception.But what are some of these untruths in magic, and what are they meant to obscure? That’s what the playwright Lucas Hnath and the magician Steve Cuiffo explore in “A Simulacrum,” a kind of deconstructed magic show that attempts to find the reality beneath the illusions.At the start of “A Simulacrum,” directed by Hnath and produced by Atlantic Theater Company, Cuiffo strolls onstage to one of two large folding tables that are positioned perpendicular to each other. He puts down his drink and pops a tape into a cassette recorder.It’s Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021, at an East Village rehearsal studio, where Hnath and Cuiffo are workshopping a possible show. Rather, this production is a re-creation of that Aug. 10 workshop. (An author’s note in the script calls it a “stage documentary.”) Hnath is the unseen interviewer; his parts, questioning Cuiffo’s methods and history with magic, are culled from over 50 hours of workshops and interviews between them, and played aloud — presumably via the recorder. Cuiffo performs his tricks in person and acts out his side of the conversation, which has been taken verbatim from these workshops.The second act of the show, which was commissioned by the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, replicates a workshop Hnath and Cuiffo had three months after the first, during which Hnath challenges Cuiffo to devise new tricks with a set of criteria that negate or undercut the illusion, polish and showmanship that typically define magic shows. The third act, based on another workshop a year later, reveals Cuiffo’s creations.Cuiffo makes it clear that this show presents “presentational magic,” not “personal magic” — that is, the staging is more one-sided, absent the transactional element that comes with audience participation. It’s just an aside, but it epitomizes how the show moves, from a more traditional magic show format, with disappearing coins and autonomous cards that jump and flip on and around his person, to something more intimate.Hnath’s blunt interrogations (“Where is Steve in this?”) and matter-of-fact reactions (“That’s it?” he asks after Cuiffo performs a card trick that took him 14 years to master), though sometimes difficult to hear with the tape’s poor sound quality, reveal an incisive thinker. That should be no surprise to those familiar with his work, like “The Thin Place,” a kind of ghost story, and “Dana H.,” another simulacrum involving a real, harrowing story about Hnath’s mother that is lip-synced to a recording of her recounting the experience. (It remains one of the most unforgettable experiences I’ve had in a theater.) And yet, at times this production too explicitly spells out his conceit, as when Hnath questions how much of Cuiffo’s magic is mimicry, each trick being a variation of a theme — yes, a simulacrum.Ultimately this is a show with an intentionally self-defeating concept: One that breaks down the artifice of an art form by employing another art form that uses a similar kind of artifice to reveal some aspect of humanity. But there’s an occasional tediousness to this behind-the-scenes, making-of endeavor, and a few moments of built-in dissatisfaction, as when Cuiffo has to perform tricks that he knows won’t work.An engaging performer, Cuiffo subverts the splashy style that many professional magicians are known for; he’s low-key, grounded in both his gestures and his manner of speech. And the difficulty of what he’s doing shouldn’t be understated: He’s not just repeating his part of the dialogue but replicating his pauses, cadence, emphases naturally and in sync with Hnath’s audio.As carefully considered as this production is, with Louisa Thompson’s modest scenic design (two tables, an office-window backdrop) and Hnath’s cerebral direction, ultimately there is still the sense that something is missing: a deeper interrogation of Cuiffo and Hnath himself, something even more personal. We never get the full reveal.What magic and theater have in common is the wonder, the spectacle that ironically sends you back to your reality with a new outlook. But maintaining the magic while showing your hand? That’s the trick this show hasn’t quite yet mastered.A SimulacrumThrough July 2 at Atlantic Stage 2, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    ‘Come for Me’ Review: Catherine Cohen’s T.M.I. Comedy Set

    In her autobiographical new show with songs, Catherine Cohen delivers a heightened version of millennial oversharing and confidence run amok.Attending Catherine Cohen’s new show “Come for Me” is like being swept up by a tornado, or maybe watching “Fast & Furious: The Vaudeville Years.” The pace of her new comedy show is so unrelenting that by the time you catch your breath after a joke, three more have zipped by. Filming sex with her boyfriend? Listening to true-crime podcasts? Freezing her eggs? Entire acts have been built on less. But in “Come for Me,” the follow-up to last year’s “The Twist…? She’s Gorgeous,” Cohen spends just a few minutes on each, if that, and moves on.As for the musical numbers — for she is that modern rarity, a singing comedian — they pack more delicious hooks than most pop albums do.It’s a great tease: Cohen suggests that she has enough material to go on for days, but chooses to give us only an hour’s worth.Even Cohen’s trademark meta annotations, like announcing “bridge!” in the middle of a number, are delivered breathlessly. She holds dramatic poses — leaning seductively against a wall, for example — but only briefly. In the middle of songs at last Friday’s show at Joe’s Pub, she commanded members of the crowd to “uncross your arms!” but did not pause for a reaction, smoothly segueing from singing to demanding and back to singing. (In contrast, the loopy absurdism of Ikechukwu Ufomadu’s 30-minute opening set benefited from his slow, deliberate formality.)This is par for the course for Cohen, who taunts us only as a way to spice up her real subject: herself, or rather the act of revealing herself. She mocks the postures of our confessional era while reveling in them.The Catherine Cohen we meet onstage is a fabulous, relentlessly bouncy narcissist for whom too much information is never enough. The set includes gleeful accounts of her sex life with her boyfriend (and the people they have been inviting to partake) in which self-deprecation and gloating fuse into a heightened version — or is it? — of millennial oversharing and confidence run amok. “Dating me,” she crows, “is what critics and fans alike have described as an immersive experience.”“Come for Me” is simultaneously more graphic and sweeter than her previous show, but it also gives off floral notes of doubt and vulnerability. The first song, “The Void,” suggests, without being remotely maudlin, a fumbling need to fill an emptiness, while the closing number, “Good Not Bad,” playfully subverts its cheery melody. Happily, this slight expansion of Cohen’s emotional palette — echoed by her musical one, since she’s now backed by a three-piece band rather than just a pianist — has not hindered her sunny, gonzo vitality. More, here, is more.Come for MeThrough June 30 at Joe’s Pub, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    William Jackson Harper Needed to Do ‘Primary Trust’

    The longtime New York actor explains why his character in Eboni Booth’s play about a lonely bookstore worker is closer to him than any other he’s taken on.When Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” begins, William Jackson Harper stands alone onstage. His weight shifts from foot to foot; his fingers knead the air. He is smiling, but that smile looks as though it comes from a place of pain.Harper (“The Good Place,” “Love Life”) plays Kenneth, a 38-year-old bookstore employee unmoored when the store closes. A play about loss, loneliness and the hope of connection, “Primary Trust,” which runs through July 2 at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theater, is also a shrewd and gentle vehicle for Harper’s particular gifts — vulnerability, thoughtfulness, emotional lability. There are few actors who can better convey the awkwardness, the messiness and the unanticipated joy of being alive.On a recent Monday morning, at a colorful cafe near his home in Brooklyn, Harper, 43, provided an offstage illustration. His matcha had slopped onto one of his tan suede loafers. “I’ve ruined these shoes,” he said as he studied the green stain. And then, after a pause, “Or maybe I’ll just look like a painter.”Harper and April Matthis in the play “Primary Trust” at the Laura Pels Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHarper, who spent a dozen years Off and Off Off Broadway before making the move to television, tends to get nervous in interviews. And he was nervous here, too — the veins in his forehead were pulsing. But he persevered. He is an artist who wears his heart on his sleeve. And under it, too: On his left arm was a tattoo of the cottonwood tree that stood in his grandmother’s yard. (“It reminds me of a time when everybody was alive,” he said.) Over tea he discussed the appeal of returning to theater and the lessons that the play can offer. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When did you know that you wanted to be an actor?My mom made me take these theater classes in middle school. Because I was pretty shy. My mom was like, “We’ve got to work on that.” So I started taking these theater classes. Acting was the only thing that I was actually pretty good at.Did it make you less shy?Maybe it made me better at pretending. And I felt there was finally some place to put my feelings. I didn’t really have an outlet. Being loud and being onstage expelled some of the stuff that was bugging me.You spent a decade working in New York theater. But I understand that before you booked “The Good Place,” you almost quit acting?I was doing OK. I had some really good roles in some really good projects. Stuff that I was proud of. Like getting to do “All the Way” on Broadway. Doing “Placebo” at Playwrights Horizons, the “Total Bent” at the Public. But God forbid my mom gets sick. God forbid I get really sick. Just the uncertainty of the day-to-day, month-to-month, paycheck to paycheck nature of it was a little too much. Like, I’m in my mid 30s. I’d like to be just a little more stable. So I was like, I don’t think I want to do this anymore.Harper and Kristen Bell in NBC’s “The Good Place.”Colleen Hayes/NBCHow did TV feel different?There’s no rehearsal, which is wild, you just memorize your lines and then you go. And it’s a hell of a lot harder to keep your concentration because people are in the room with you — people looking at the monitors five feet away. You can’t suspend your disbelief at all. And since there is no audience reaction, you’re just like, Am I doing OK? But they pay you way better. They also feed you, which is amazing. And the fact that you get to do stuff over and over and over again is kind of nice. Because eventually through that repetition, something unlocks.Why do you keep coming back to theater?I just love it. I also feel like it expands my tool kit when it comes to just being an actor, because when you want something to change and you want something to go differently, it means that you have to shift your thinking and open yourself up. And I like being in charge of the whole ride. Once I’m doing a run of a play and just getting to stay in it, rather than only doing a minute at a time and then resetting, it’s easier to feel like I’m fully inhabiting a character. Because there’s no start and stop, you just go.How did “Primary Trust” come to you?Eboni and I had done some shows together, hung out socially. She was doing a workshop at the Roundabout and was like, “Hey, would you want to do this?” She sent me the script, and I had an emotional reaction to it immediately. The character of Kenneth is closer to me as a person than anyone I’ve played. And there’s things that character says that I’ve said in my life. That’s never happened to me before. I needed to do this play. I just needed to, I was going to be upset if I didn’t. Because I really felt like I just understood this character really, really deeply.“The character of Kenneth is closer to me as a person than anyone I’ve played,” Harper said. “There’s things that character says that I’ve said in my life.”Olivia Galli for The New York TimesWho is Kenneth?Kenneth is a 38-year-old who’s led a very small, isolated life out of self-preservation. He loses his job and has to be open to people in a way that he isn’t ready for. It’s all brand-new to him. This is a guy who found a way to make things work and to not get hurt. Now he has to risk really getting hurt and really making a mess.How did you find your way into Kenneth?Him being a foster child feels like a significant piece of things. I didn’t want to go asking people, Hey, do you know anyone who was raised in foster care? That would have felt really terrible and callous. But I watched a lot of documentaries about people that had been in the foster system. Then there’s a big traumatic loss early on in his life that shapes how he moves through the world. I lost my dad when I was really young. And there’s a thing Kenneth says about this one babysitter who tries to tell him that everything is going to be OK. He hates that. And I hate it, too. I’m like, “No! You don’t know that, the worst can happen.” Leaning into those feelings that I’ve had for a long time, that helped. Then there is the discomfort that I have just moving through the world, just going ahead and letting it be out there.Well, I’m skeptical of artists who are comfortable.I was just thinking about that on my run: People who feel certain and comfortable all the time, I’m like, Oh, man, what knowledge are you unencumbered by? Like, wow, it must be so nice to just not know and not care.Is there a lesson in this play?One is that you don’t know what people are carrying around. So be nice, be kind. And it shows that even if everything’s not OK, it might be OK. I know that sounds goofy. But as much as there’s a chance that things could all go to [expletive], there’s just as much of a chance it could work out. More

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    ‘The Fully Monty’ Returns After 25 Years, as a TV Show

    A new series on Hulu and FX reunites the feel-good British film’s characters and its writer, 25 years later and in another age of austerity.“‘The Full Monty’ is Sheffield, and Sheffield is ‘The Full Monty,’” said the actor Robert Carlyle in a recent video interview.When the feel-good feature was released in 1997, the film put the former mining town in the north of England and Carlyle, its lead, in the spotlight. Made on a budget of about $3 million, “The Full Monty” garnered more than $250 million at the global box office; at the time, The New York Times declared the film “by far the biggest success at Fox Searchlight Pictures.”Written by Simon Beaufoy, the film followed a group of unemployed steelworkers in Sheffield, including Carlyle’s Gaz and his best friend Dave (Mark Addy), as they attempted to raise money and wrest back control of their lives by performing a strip show for the town’s women.Now, a new eight-part TV series, premiering Wednesday on FX and Hulu, returns to Sheffield 25 years later, in another period of austerity and economic downturn. Co-written by Beaufoy — with Alice Nutter, a screenwriter and former member of the music group Chumbawamba — the show reunites the film’s original cast, including Carlyle, Addy, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Barber and Lesley Sharp.“If they left it any longer, I think we may have all been dead,” deadpanned Carlyle, 62.“The Full Monty” was Addy’s debut film performance, and led to roles in “A Knight’s Tale” and Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood,” and, later, in HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” Carlyle had been best known for playing Begbie in Danny Boyle’s 1996 film “Trainspotting.” He also collaborated with the director on “The Beach,” “28 Weeks Later” and “T2 Trainspotting.”In a recent video interview, with Carlyle calling from New York and Addy joining from his home in Yorkshire, north England, the pair discussed the parallels between “The Full Monty” film and the TV reboot, and why it felt like the right time to revisit their characters. Below are edited excerpts from that conversation.From left, Addy and Carlyle in the show, which picks up the characters’ lives in Sheffield, 25 years after the events in the film. Ben Blackall/FXWhat was Beaufoy’s pitch for getting the gang back together?MARK ADDY I remember getting an email from Simon checking whether I’d have any interest in being part of a state-of-the-nation drama seen through the prism of characters that we’ve met 25 years ago. How have they fared in the intervening years? He was interested in looking at the N.H.S., Britain’s public health care service, the care system, education — all aspects of our society — in the same way he did with “The Full Monty.”ROBERT CARLYLE There are a lot of things that are precarious at the moment in the country. Conservative rule, austerity — people have been chipped away at, and so has the infrastructure of the country. That’s as good a reason as any to do something which reflects people’s current experiences.What’s changed for Gaz and Dave in the intervening years?CARLYLE From Gaz’s perspective, I don’t think a lot’s changed. It’s still pretty much a hand-to-mouth existence for him. He does a variety of jobs to survive.ADDY Dave and Jean, who’s played by Sharp, have moved to a slightly nicer area of Sheffield, but they’re struggling in their own way.“The Full Monty” film explored how several issues affected the characters’ masculinity. In the first episode of the series, Gerald (Wilkinson) questions what he’s “allowed” to say these days. What identity issues are the characters grappling with in the show?ADDY Our generation is struggling to know how to address a person. You’re worried you’re going to offend somebody by misgendering them completely innocently. But that has come from a place of more acceptance and tolerance. It’s a problem that’s been thrown up by an improvement.CARLYLE Everyone has to be respectful of gender pronouns and stuff like that. It’s easy to be dismissive, but it’s important. The way that I look at it, it’s not much to be asked to call someone “they” or whatever they want to be called.One of the last great “isms” that seems to be up for grabs is ageism. Hopefully the show addresses that a little. Just because you get to your 60s, you’re not worthless.With Barber’s character, Horse, who is now in his 70s, you see how the welfare system that failed younger men is now failing an older generation.From left, Horse (Barber), Gaz (Carlyle) and Dave (Addy). In the show, the characters navigate another period of austerity and economic downturn in Britain. Ben Blackall/FXCARLYLE The whole Horse arc is tragic. There’s a moment I loved, you know when he goes to the supermarket? He’s got the packet of sausages and he’s slapping it against the self-checkout scanner. He says, “Where are all the checkout girls? They’ve all gone.” He’s trying to put money into that machine and the guy says, “Use a card.” But he hasn’t got a card. That’s something you don’t see on TV.At times, the show is also unapologetically silly. Why did a sense of lightness feel like the right approach?CARLYLE It’s what Simon Beaufoy does brilliantly. You can’t escape the politics in “The Full Monty,” but he’s able to balance that with humor. There’s no way any of these characters are self-pitying. It’s vital for it to have upbeat moments.ADDY It’s about how life goes on, the human spirit will hopefully see people through. The silliness tempers the tragedy.CARLYLE If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. And who wants to sit about crying all the time?Why do you think the show found a home on FX and Hulu in the United States, and on Disney+ in Britain, rather than on a British TV network like the BBC or Channel 4?CARLYLE I know it was offered to them. They weren’t interested. When I was told it was going to be Disney+ and FX, I was really surprised. This film had gone down in history as one of the biggest-grossing British independent films of all time. No one in Britain wants to stick some money into this?The film was released in a specific cultural moment in Britain in 1997. How important was that to its success?ADDY Massively.CARLYLE Tony Blair, his Labour government, Britpop. The whole explosion of popular culture. We were lucky, Mark and I, to be in the center of that.ADDY It was like, the worst of times are behind us, and things are going to get better.‌CARLYLE It rode along on the wave of optimism that prevailed at the tail end of the ’90s. But of course, that lasted about three days. Now, we’re back to where we’d been.The original film, released in 1997, was made on a budget of about $3 million, and garnered more than $250 million at the global box office.How did “The Full Monty” shape both your careers?ADDY I hadn’t done a film before. I’d done a lot of theater and was starting to make my way in the TV world. It changed everything for me. I remember Bobby saying at the time, this could do for you what “Trainspotting” did for me.CARLYLE “The Full Monty,” my God, who could have predicted that? It opened up a lot of opportunities across the pond. “The Full Monty” has been like a vast, warm shadow that’s followed me through my whole career.How do you feel about the fact that Gaz and Dave keep their clothes on this time?ADDY Relieved.CARLYLE Absolutely delighted, as I’m sure the audience will be. When Simon got in touch, the second line of the email said, “By the way, there won’t be any stripping.” More

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    Danny McBride Keeps It Righteous

    The party started early. Like, 10:30 a.m., still-drinking-lousy-hotel-coffee early. It was late March, a warm and overcast coastal morning, and all I knew of the day’s schedule was that Danny McBride, the creator and star of the HBO comedy “The Righteous Gemstones,” planned to swing by with a driver who would take us to an oyster farm, located somewhere among the islands and salt marshes of South Carolina Lowcountry.I did not expect him to arrive in a fully stocked party bus with several of his closest associates, including his longtime collaborator David Gordon Green, though in retrospect perhaps I should have. While reporting a different story two months earlier, I had met Walton Goggins, who plays the oily televangelist Uncle Baby Billy in “Gemstones.” When I told him that I was going down to Charleston to see McBride, who lives and produces the series in the area, Goggins responded, “I hope you like tequila.”As an icebreaker, I shared this anecdote with McBride. On cue, his wife, Gia, an art director, furnished a bottle of Código 1530. “This is George Strait’s tequila!” McBride beamed, and a look ping-ponged around the bus that asked, “Too early?”It was not too early. As we raised candy-colored plastic shot glasses in the glow of two TV screens made to look like aquariums, I decided to stash my notebook for a while: Day 1 of my visit would be less about taking notes than about taking in the life McBride has made for himself since moving here from Los Angeles.McBride does little press, so getting to know him was, of course, the goal. When “Gemstones” returns on Sunday for Season 3, it brings back what has been the most Danny McBride of his creative efforts. It is his third HBO series — following the cult-favorite baseball comedy “Eastbound and Down” (2009-13) and the deranged public school comedy “Vice Principals” (2016-17) — and he created it alone. It sets a new personal benchmark for creative cursing and comic male nudity, which was already high.McBride created “The Righteous Gemstones” and stars as Jesse, the eldest son in a family of televangelists. (With Walton Goggins.)Jake Giles Netter/HBOMcBride’s characters offer “a funny and deeply complex view of men in general, especially men in America,” said his “Gemstones” co-star Edi Patterson. (With Adam Devine.)Jake Giles Netter/HBOIt is also his most Southern show. Both previous HBO series were set down South, but “Gemstones” is the first since he and his production company, Rough House Pictures, which he shares with Green and another longtime collaborator, Jody Hill, moved from Los Angeles to Charleston in 2017. It’s a true hometown production.Of McBride’s various creations, his most beloved have been Southerners who embody a flamboyantly American brand of male chauvinism, and Jesse Gemstone is no exception. The eldest son in a dysfunctional family of rich televangelists, Jesse vies perhaps only with the hard-partying narcissist Kenny Powers of “Eastbound” for McBride’s biggest blowhard, a high bar.It is the kind of satire that comes from a deep place of knowing. The kind whose execution appears so effortless that its target might not realize it is satire.“I know probably not his whole audience sees it the way I do — they’ll think, like, ‘Oh, I’m exactly like Kenny Powers,’ or whatever — but I think that’s part of the fun and part of the appeal,” said Edi Patterson, who plays Jesse’s unhinged sister, Judy, and is a “Gemstones” writer. “It’s such a funny and deeply complex view of men in general, especially men in America.”But “Gemstones” has also seen McBride, 46, broadening his creative range. He oversees every script, directs episodes. Its cast is a true ensemble, and its many characters and subplots have enabled him to explore new kinds of stories and relationships, some with tear-jerking sensitivity.Friends and colleagues reliably describe him as genuine, inclusive, a deep thinker. But more than many screen stars he is both blessed and dogged by fans who sometimes have trouble remembering he is not his boorish characters.I wondered whether the lines ever blurred for him, and whether the fan confusion chafed. The answer to both, he insisted, was no. He had left Hollywood and built a tight creative community 2,500 miles away for many reasons, and one of them seemed to be to preserve his integrity of self.“You can think I’m whatever, and if it makes you like the show more because you think that’s me, go for it,” he said the next day as we toured the “Gemstones” studios, located at a mall, inside a former Sears. “I would rather people not know what my deal is than clearly have an understanding of where the line is drawn.”“I don’t see myself as some alpha, and so I feel like there’s something inherently that makes me laugh about trying to present myself like an alpha,” McBride said.Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesFunny enough, comedy is not McBride’s favorite genre — he prefers horror and reality TV — nor is it something he always pursued.Early on, he also didn’t imagine himself on camera. He wanted to write and direct. Raised Baptist, mostly in Fredericksburg, Va., he went to film school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, in Winston-Salem, where he met Green; Hill; John Carcieri, another writer for “Gemstones”; and Ben Best, who created “Eastbound” with Hill and McBride and died in 2021. The film school was tiny, and then only two years old.“Everybody in that school was a misfit or a reject,” Green said. Their group bonded over one another’s VHS collections and found creative kinship and freedom. “It was all just a bunch of kids that kind of were trying to figure it out,” he said.Green was the first to make a splash after college with the critically lauded indie film “George Washington” (2000). After a main cast member of his next feature, “All the Real Girls” (2003), bailed a week into shooting, Green called “the funniest guy I know,” McBride, who was doing below-the-line postproduction work in Los Angeles.McBride asked his boss for time off, was denied, then quit and drove to North Carolina, where Green was shooting. The film debuted to rapturous reviews.Still, McBride’s break came a few years later with “The Foot Fist Way” (2008). Directed by Hill and written by Hill, Best and McBride, the film starred McBride as a Southern strip-mall taekwondo instructor whose ego grossly outstrips his skills. Copies circulated after its 2006 Sundance debut, landing eventually with Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, then producing partners, who got it into theaters. “Eastbound,” which McKay and Ferrell executive produced, soon followed.“With comedy, one of the tricks is knowing how you come off just physically,” McKay said. “And Danny knows he comes off like a guy who, if you cut him off in the parking lot of a Sam’s Club, would key your car while you’re in there shopping.”McBride said he was always satirizing a certain kind of guy he grew up with, a kind of guy he was not. He seemed amused by the outward contradiction.“I don’t see myself as some alpha, and so I feel like there’s something inherently that makes me laugh about trying to present myself like an alpha,” McBride said over lunch on Day 2 at a restaurant near his home. (McBride lives on an island near Charleston, and he had driven us there in his golf cart.)“They’re all just sort of dudes that I think have subscribed to this antiquated way of what the rules are, like what a dude’s supposed to be,” he added. “They’ve committed to it, and then the reality of it isn’t adding up to the illusion.”“Danny knows he comes off like a guy who, if you cut him off in the parking lot of a Sam’s Club, would key your car while you’re in there shopping,” Adam McKay, a past collaborator, said.Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesMcBride and I talked a lot about masculinity, about fathers and sons. It is a central theme of “Gemstones” — and the Bible, he noted — with its “Succession”-like story about a powerful megachurch pastor (John Goodman) and his three feckless children. (Adam Devine plays the younger brother, Kelvin.) McBride’s own father left when he was young, and he hasn’t seen him since high school. But he insisted he isn’t resentful.“I like how my life turned out,” said McBride, himself a father of two. “Him exiting from our life is probably part of what enabled me to be able to go on and do the things that I did.” The biggest effect it had on his life, he said, was to make him more determined to be a supportive parent.McBride loves his characters and the South in the complex, sometimes ruthless way of familial love. On the surface, “Gemstones” picks some easy marks — megachurches, new money, homoerotic jocks; Season 3 promises monster trucks and militias — but soft targets can be tougher to nail. What allows for authenticity is affection, however complicated.“That’s the tightrope,” he said. “A lot of times I see, when things in the South are presented, it’s always such a boring take.”Back on Day 1, after we all spilled out of the party bus, we wound up on a muddy oyster skiff off Wadmalaw Island, several shots down, pulling salty Sea Cloud oysters straight from their floating cages. Still, having only just met McBride, it was hard not to wonder how much of the day’s events were a show put on for the benefit of a reporter — a good-time performance by a performer who plays characters who are constantly performing.I asked everyone I talked to about him afterward; they all insisted I shouldn’t flatter myself.“I want you to feel really special right now, but that’s kind of Danny,” said Cassidy Freeman, who plays Jesse’s beleaguered wife, Amber. When McBride is the ringmaster, “everyone’s invited,” she added. Hill called him “the fun coordinator of our group.”Cassidy Freeman, who plays the wife of McBride’s character in “Gemstones,” described him as an inveterate host.Jake Giles Netter/HBOWhen I reported back to Goggins, he put it this way: “He’s certainly not doing that as a way to impress you.” Whoever shows up, McBride “just rolls out the red carpet.”McBride seems to find community wherever he goes. Otherwise, he imports it. Green moved from Austin to Charleston. Rough House’s president, Brandon James, who was on the boat, moved with McBride from Los Angeles. As of last month, Hill was preparing to move there with his pregnant wife. For a time, the country singer Sturgill Simpson was in the Charleston crew. He’s in Season 3.It seems like creative utopia. The region’s lower production costs have made it easier for Rough House to develop an array of dream projects, relying on local crews fed and ferried by local businesses. Green’s 2018 “Halloween” sequel, which McBride helped write, was an early example. Green’s first film in their “Exorcist” sequel trilogy, for which McBride has a story credit, is scheduled for October.“I think what they’re doing is going to now become the norm with what’s changing here in Hollywood and the way commercial entertainment is made,” McKay said. “I think stuff is going to go hyperlocal, and I think it’s going to be really cool.”Dare to dream. For now, McBride seems genuinely grateful to have found a way to keep poking fun at things with his closest friends — to keep the party going.“Ultimately it’s really just trying to entertain people and give them something funny to laugh at,” he said. “It makes us laugh. And so we assume hopefully it will make other people laugh, too.” More