Eliana Willis

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    Avignon Festival Gets Its Buzz Back

    With striking premieres in the main program and enchanting discoveries on the supplementary Fringe, the eminent event in European theater is flourishing after some difficult years.AVIGNON, France — After two years of pandemic-related disruption, the Avignon Festival is well and truly back. As the event, a longtime highlight on the European theater calendar, got underway here last week, there were familiar sights everywhere. All around the small city center, buzzing crowds filled the streets, while blasé regulars zigzagged between performers handing out fliers for some 1,570 Fringe productions.That’s 500 more shows than last year, when the open-access Fringe — known as “le Off,” and running in parallel with the Avignon Festival’s official program, “le In” — attempted to find its feet again after the 2020 edition was canceled. While coronavirus cases are rising again this month in France, even masks have been few and far between in the Avignon heat.In the “In” lineup, one world premiere captured the boisterous mood better than any other. “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop at the Belgian playhouse NTGent, is loud, preposterous and extremely entertaining — if a little troubling. It requires superhuman feats from a group of musicians, dressed like sports competitors, who are alternately cheered on and screamed down by performers cast as zealous fans, in front of a mumbling referee.A double bassist plays his instrument horizontally while doing ab crunches; one of his colleagues must jump up and down to reach a keyboard set above his head. A metronome sets the often wild tempo for the production’s “one song,” composed by Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, which the group performs on a loop. It could hardly be more literal: Its opening lines are “Run for your life/’Til you die.”The cast in “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival Near the end of the performance I saw, the physical extremes that Warlop pushes her cast to execute became a little too real. A violinist who plays on a high beam, sometimes balancing on one leg, became disoriented after jumping off the beam and hit her head hard against it. Despite the concussion risk, she climbed back up and kept going, her face tight with pain.When the show ended with much of the cast collapsed from exhaustion, the instant standing ovation for the show was more than earned, yet it also felt like “The Hunger Games” for theater aficionados. Still, it is a classic Avignon production: ripe for debate long into the night.Other productions from the official lineup were less invigorating, but together they made for a respectable lap of honor for the Avignon Festival’s departing artistic leader, the French writer and director Olivier Py. His eight-year tenure has felt muddled, with quarrels about the event’s dearth of female directors and several ill-conceived premieres on Avignon’s biggest stages.That was especially true of productions at the open-air Cour d’Honneur, a majestic stage inside the city’s Papal Palace. This summer, however, Py corrected course with a high-profile and thought-provoking show, Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Black Monk.”“The Black Monk” was first staged at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany, in January, yet much has happened since. A message against a red backdrop during the play’s curtain calls at Avignon — “Stop War” — was a reminder of the conflict in Ukraine and Serebrennikov’s status as a high-profile Russian dissident, who was put under house arrest in Moscow in 2017 and prevented from traveling outside his native country for five years.Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Black Monk.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival Not that war features in “The Black Monk,” which is based on an 1894 short story by Anton Chekhov. Despite its scale — four parts, a running time of nearly three hours and an expanded cast of 22 in Avignon — it is more personal than political in nature, and mainly focused on the descent of one man, Kovrin, into delusion and megalomania.Each part of the show focuses on a single character’s perspective. First there is Yegor, Kovrin’s childhood guardian; then Tanya, Yegor’s daughter, who marries Kovrin. He makes for a terrible husband, unsurprisingly, and in the third and fourth parts, his recurring hallucination — a black monk — takes over the stage as well as Kovrin’s mind.At the midway point, the structure starts to feel repetitive, and a few people walked out as a result. Yet Serebrennikov wisely pivots to a more operatic approach in the second half with a large chorus of singers and dancers, all in black monk’s cowls. The result aptly fills the expansive Cour d’Honneur stage and testifies to Serebrennikov’s obvious craft and passion for the characters, although the choreography remains too generic to fully carry the piece to its intended destination.On other stages, the mood was also bleak, as it often has been under Py. “Iphigenia,” staged at Avignon’s opera house, sneaked in a nod to Py’s successor, the Portuguese writer and director Thiago Rodrigues. The director, Anne Théron, opted for Rodrigues’s 2015 retelling of the myth of Iphigenia, sacrificed by the Greeks in exchange for the wind needed to carry them across the sea to Troy. It is a delicate, evocative version, told by characters who remember — or refuse to remember — the story even as it happens, as if the tragedy was bound to happen over and over again.Bashar Murkus’s “Milk.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon FestivalChild sacrifice also features in Bashar Murkus’s “Milk,” albeit in a very different context. Murkus, a young Palestinian director based in Haifa, took maternal milk as a central metaphor for this wordless work about mourning mothers. The women onstage cradle mannequins, slowly then frenetically; milk flows from the fake breasts they wear, ultimately filling the stage. The result is full of arresting tableaux, despite a subpar musical score.For vibrant, energetic theater, however, the best bet remains to delve into the motley Fringe offerings. This year, for instance, nine companies from the French island of Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, banded together to present an invigorating mini-series of shows.David Erudel and Lolita Tergémina in “The Game of Love and Chance,” directed by Tergémina.Sébastien MarchalOne company, Sakidi, is performing Marivaux’s “The Game of Love and Chance,” a classic 18th-century French comedy, in the Creole language spoken on Réunion (with subtitles). Réunion Creole is very rarely heard on French stages, and this vivacious production by Lolita Tergémina, at the Chapelle du Verbe Incarné theater, suggests that is a shame. Since the language is heavily influenced by French, a lot of it is understandable without the subtitles, and the translation is full of images that make Marivaux feel fresh again.New French plays often come to Avignon for a trial run, too, and at a theater called 11, the playwright Jean-Christophe Dollé has landed a hit with “Phone Me.” This well-crafted intergenerational story revolves around what now feels like a 20th-century artifact, the phone booth. There are three onstage along with three central characters — a member of the French Resistance during World War II and her son and granddaughter, in the 1980s and 1990s — whose secrets converge in this unlikely setting.Amal Allaoui, left, and Alice Trocellier in “Tales of the Fairies,” directed by Aurore Evain.Mirza DurakovicAmong 1,570 shows, there is a special kind of delight in happening upon a gem like “Phone Me,” or “Tales of the Fairies,” a bright, family-friendly production at the Espace Alya. The director and scholar Aurore Evain is part of a French movement aiming to reclaim the legacy of forgotten female artists, and in Avignon, she has revived two fairy tales by the 17th-century writer Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy.On a pocket-size stage, at lunchtime on a Monday, Evain’s three actors and musicians brought a demanding queen, a kind prince and some very helpful animals to whimsical life. Call it a sprinkle of vintage Avignon fairy dust: There was certainly some in the air.Avignon Festival. Various venues, through July 26.Off d’Avignon. Various venues, through July 30. More

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    Janeane Garofalo Never Sold Out. What a Relief.

    That concept might be the reason her trailblazing stand-up career has been overshadowed; it may also be the reason she’s still so sharp, our critic argues.On a rainy Wednesday night in Brooklyn, after an introduction with a minimum of fanfare, Janeane Garofalo walked onstage at the Eastville Comedy Club and looked out at a dozen people so scattered that calling them a crowd seems like a stretch. She spotted one man by himself who had attended a show of hers a few days earlier and happily pointed him out.Third on a bill filled with young unknowns, Garofalo, 57, settled into her set with supreme comfort, wandering into multiple tangents and digging into self-deprecation. “When someone tells me I can’t do something,” she said, holding the pause with precision timing honed over three and half decades of telling jokes, “I’m grateful.”It was a humble setting to see one of the most consequential comics of the past half century. Garofalo is a pioneer and Generation X icon who for a few years, it was reasonable to argue, meant for stand-up what Kurt Cobain did for music. The only moment during the set that hinted at her legacy came when Garofalo walked out of the spotlight and into the audience. The couple in the front row, already laughing, sat up a little straighter.Later in the set, she turned to her career. “The ’90s were good, but then it dipped,” Garofalo said, adding dryly that she now realized that comedy was not her forte. “You know what is? Filibustering.”Janeane Garofalo performs constantly in New York on bills with other comics, though you might not know it because she has little to no public profile. She’s not on Twitter, Instagram or any social media. She has no website or podcast, hasn’t done a special in years and doesn’t even have a computer, smartphone or email address. She turned down interviews with me twice. If you want to see her perform — and I recommend it — you have to search her out and sit in the room with her. I periodically stumble across her in a show and it always comes as a happy surprise from another time, like discovering a storied zine that only a few people still knew existed.As she made jokes about refusing to go to the doctor and her inability to apply herself, a cringeworthy thought occurred to me: Is this what not selling out looks like?I always found that pejorative phrase ridiculous: Selling out. Isn’t that the goal? It never made sense to me that a band stunk as soon as it signed with a major label. Or that artists should be shamed for making money to pay the rent. But as the stigmatization of selling out has faded over the past few decades, so vanished from the conversation that you rarely hear it used without sarcasm, I confess that I miss it. Something useful has been lost.In his shrewd new book “The Nineties,” Chuck Klosterman argues that nothing defined that decade more than the concept of selling out. To illustrate, he focuses on “Reality Bites,” now considered the quintessential Generation X movie. It also happens to feature Janeane Garofalo as a jaded eye-roller who delivers quips like “Evian is naïve spelled backwards.”The movie centers on an aspiring filmmaker played by Winona Ryder who is pursued by a responsible corporate striver (Ben Stiller, the film’s director) and a caddish poet who hates the right things (Ethan Hawke). She chooses Hawke. Klosterman writes that while Hawke’s character seems irresponsible to boomers and toxic to millennials, he was the right choice for Generation X. For them, and only them, Klosterman argues, “an authentic jerk was preferable to a likable sellout.”“Reality Bites” was released when I was in college, and most people I knew didn’t root for either of Winona Ryder’s options so much as against the movie, sensing a cynical attempt to capture the youth market, a major studio romanticizing indie credibility. Stiller screened it on campuses across the country, and at my school, he was received with hostility at the postshow Q. and A. One student questioned the filmmakers for mocking corporate greed while taking product-placement money from the Gap and R.J. Reynolds. Stiller bristled, saying it cost money to make a movie.In promoting “Reality Bites,” Garofalo took a cannier approach. Appearing on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” she short-circuited complaints about hypocrisy by criticizing Universal Pictures for trying to market “Reality Bites” as a Generation X story. It’s not, she said, dismissing the term as a buzzword, which was how I saw it at the time, too, and telling the flummoxed Letterman that she was uncomfortable following the script mapped out with his producers for their conversation. She sold the movie perfectly by performing contempt for selling a movie.The partnership between Stiller and Garofalo is an even better representation of the 1990s divide on selling out than “Reality Bites.” They dated briefly and worked together throughout the decade, starring on TV shows and appearing in movies, co-hosting the MTV Movie Awards and co-writing a self-help spoof, “Feel This Book.” Stiller was a bigger star, but Garofalo had more cachet. (On Entertainment Weekly’s 1997 list of the 50 Funniest People Alive, she came in 39th, five spots ahead of him.) While his fame has grown, her seismic significance to comedy has been forgotten enough to make a refresher necessary.Just as the 1980s comedy boom was going bust, Garofalo — along with Colin Quinn, Dana Gould and Alan Gelfant — put on a show at a bookstore in Hollywood that became a weekly magnet for talented young stand-ups looking beyond conventional club comedy. Stiller performed there and used some of the comics on his breakthrough television series, “The Ben Stiller Show.” So did David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, who met through Garofalo and went on to make another sketch comedy landmark, “Mr. Show.”This bookstore was one of the centers of a blossoming new comedy scene. Some called it alternative comedy, others balked at that term. The cool move was to embrace it ironically as Garofalo did in one of her early television appearances. When the host of “The Dennis Miller Show” made a joke about her Doc Martens, she deadpanned: “I’m the alternative queen.”Garofalo didn’t just help shift the comedy scene away from clubs. Her style represented a sea change from the polished, tight and desperately relatable bits ready-made to translate into a sitcom or a late-night appearance. In jean shorts and tights, she inched stand-up closer to the eccentric solo show, where a sharply honed point of view mattered more than accessible setups and hard punch lines. Her humor leaned on stories and a political sensibility, refracted through a culturally savvy lens. She fiercely skewered the fashion industry for giving women body image issues and fashionistas later pushed back by putting her on worst-dressed lists. Her jokes scoffed at cliché (“I don’t even speak during sex for fear of sounding trite”), and she dropped references in televised sets that not everyone would get (Antigone, Sub Pop Records) and continually teased the crowd.On her 1995 HBO half-hour, she walked onstage to applause that she immediately mocked: “You just did that because this is on television.” In the beloved “Larry Sanders Show” and the cult movie “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” she played sarcastic (and now very meme-able) misanthropes, becoming the rare comic who represented something larger in the culture. Original writers for “Friends” and MTV’s “Daria” have cited Garofalo as an inspiration for characters for their shows. In his recent memoir “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,” Odenkirk argues that Garofalo’s early stand-up anticipated much of the ambitious work in our current scene. “Janeane was the spark of the big bang, of a comedy reinvention that still resonates.”Garofalo, with Chris Farley, left, and George Clooney, during her short tenure on “Saturday Night Live.”Alan Singer/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesWhereas Stiller shifted into blockbuster movies in the 1990s, Garofalo ran into choppier waters in the mainstream in ways that now seem clearly sexist. Her stint at “Saturday Night Live” was chronicled in an infamous New York magazine piece that included scenes of Al Franken yelling at her, Adam Sandler giving her the silent treatment and a writer unleashing his wrath after she called a sketch sexist. She compared her treatment there to “fraternity hazing” and didn’t last a full season. When it came to the big screen, she dismissed her one major leading role, a female Cyrano in “The Truth About Cats and Dogs,” as “not my kind of movie.”It’s hard to say if these experiences changed her view on establishment success or confirmed it. But at the end of the decade, in her book with Stiller, she gave this advice: “Being popular and well liked is not in your best interest,” before adding, “If you behave in a manner pleasing to most, then you are probably doing something wrong. The masses have never been arbiters of the sublime, and they often fail to recognize the truly great individual. Taking into account the public’s regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent on you to not fit in.”When The Times did a story on the new generation of alt comics in 1997, Stiller recalled that when Garofalo had a bit that killed, she would not repeat it out of fear of being hack. “It’s almost like she was going too far the other way, because she didn’t want to be accepted,” he said. Odenkirk hit similar notes discussing her in “We Killed,” an oral history about women in comedy: “Anything successful is something she’s not interested in,” he said. “That’s not a good thing in the long run.”That may be true if the goal is conventional Hollywood success. But what if you actually believed the 1990s discourse about selling out? Or short of that, just internalized it? Then some skepticism about success makes sense. And why not? Only a fool thinks the funniest comics are the most popular or that deeply respected ones don’t remain obscure. Moreover, it’s entirely reasonable to look at the state of popular culture and just roll your eyes.There has always been something off-putting about self-righteousness over selling out. Indie music snobs are easy to parody. And obsession with credibility can paralyze artists. “Nothing was more inadvertently detrimental to the Gen X psyche” than anxiety over selling out, Klosterman wrote, expressing a view darker than my own, so alert to cost that it gives short shrift to the benefits.Though it can seem otherwise, the ’90s critique of selling out was not only used to sneer. Besides directing a bit of shame at product placement, the most valuable thing it did was provide a powerful vision of making it that didn’t rely on money and popularity. A close read of early issues of The Baffler, a small, influential journal that at its inception that decade was something of a think tank for the dangers of selling out, offered hints at a positive ideal. It could be found in zines, indie music labels, offline.This utopian view of a culture independent of corporate interference was defiantly local, uncompromising and wary of fame. Today, when everyone is trying to go viral and artists are judged by the most soulless Internet metrics, the value of an alternative seems more important than ever. The current stand-up of Janeane Garofalo fits in nicely.Speaking of Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk once explained, “Anything successful is something she’s not interested in.”Roberto Ricciuti/Getty ImagesThat doesn’t mean she sees it that way. Her current comedy is filled with self-deprecating jokes about her failures, flaws, projects that didn’t get picked up. After the ’90s, she helped start Air America, the influential liberal radio station that collapsed but not before giving early platforms to Rachel Maddow and Marc Maron. She has taken scores of acting jobs in film and television, but they have little bearing on the one constant: her stand-up, the rare form where you can have near total control over your art.We live in an age of dumb demographic stereotypes. Millennials, we’re told, are entitled snowflakes and boomers are selfish egotists. Describing huge groups of people in a few traits is absurd, but that doesn’t mean those reductionist ideas don’t shape us. The water in which you swim matters. I was reminded of this at a birthday party for my daughter’s friend. A dad my age told me of being in a band in the ’90s that signed to a major label and how he still talks to his therapist about selling out. Back then I never identified with Generation X, but now I do. When I watch “Reality Bites” today, not only do I like it more, but I can find something to relate to in every character, too.In movies and plays from the 1990s (“Clerks,” Eric Bogosian’s “subUrbia”), the slacker could be a goofy kind of hero. Compare that with the ethos today summed up by Bo Burnham in his special “Inside,” which features his song “Welcome to the Internet.” The refrain goes: “Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime/anything and everything all of the time.”Garofalo’s stand-up always made apathy and boredom look cool, glamorous and, most important, sensible. About boomers, she joked: “They got married and worked hard so their kids didn’t have to, and guess what, we don’t.” There’s a performance in this, of course, since she has always worked hard, but the hustle and grind has never been her brand, to use a word she probably wouldn’t.Garofalo isn’t that different today than she was three decades ago, less likely to skewer those who promulgate unrealistic body standards than to confess her own. Her hair is longer, more tangled, but her clothes remain darkly colored, rumpled. “I’m not ready for Eileen Fisher,” she said in characteristic deadpan. “I can’t cross that Rubicon.”Her affect remains wry, offhanded; she walks onstage holding papers and uses references more highbrow than your typical joke slinger, but she is also often disarmingly personal and self-loathing.The main impression you get from her act is of a restlessness that is physical, as she roams into the crowd, but also intellectual, as she repeatedly entertains new ideas, following them down rabbit holes even at the expense of the joke. There is a real excitement and unpredictability about her sets that can be captured only in live performance. She never tells a joke the same way twice. Her comedy always seems resolutely present, frequently vulnerable, challenging and delighting her audience in equal measure.It would be easy to see Garofalo performing with comics half her age to a sparse Brooklyn crowd as a portrait of decline. But to my Generation X eyes, it looks like a kind of triumph. More

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    ‘Mister Miss America’ Review: A Fight for the Crown

    The first male contestant in his small-town beauty pageant is determined to win hearts, minds and the crown, in this solo play from the writer and performer Neil D’Astolfo.A boy forced to dim his flame discovers a local beauty pageant that sets off a spark in him again. For gay men of a certain stripe who make icons of tenacious pop divas and glamorous grandes dames, it’s a tale as old as Broadway. The self-proclaimed unicorn is now an unlikely contender in that contest, but he’s determined to win both the crown and the hearts of the town’s residents.In “Mister Miss America,” which opened on Monday night at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the writer and performer Neil D’Astolfo takes us behind the scenes and into the Southern-fried confidence of Derek Tyler Taylor, a flamboyant and fast-tongued trailblazer. Derek, in his mid-20s, is the first male contestant in an old-fashioned Virginia pageant, and though the rules have been bent just enough to let him compete, the extent of his welcome remains uncertain.D’Astolfo turns the audience into Derek’s confessor and personal cheering squad, as the other beauty queen hopefuls in this solo play, produced by All For One Theater, are talked about but not seen. He enters his dressing room shrieking with excitement, but it soon becomes clear that not everyone is as thrilled with Derek’s participation.If a beauty pageant is just a dog show for people, this one is “tops-to-bottoms full of bitches,” quips Derek, who works as an assistant manager at a Petco. His competitors include a top-seeded rival whose bigotry and ultimate hypocrisy represent the obstacles in the way of the sashaying hero’s journey.Derek’s brashness is, of course, a cover for the hurt of rejection. His mom at least stopped throwing things at him when he learned to bottle himself up, he jokes. Like any savvy pageant participant, Derek is poised and in control even as he reveals the bruises beneath his bravado. In a menagerie of toy canines, Derek is a wolf in a sapphire tuxedo with the voracious will of Patti LuPone devouring “Rose’s Turn.”Derek’s elaborate obsession with LuPone, like many of the gay cultural touchstones in “Mister Miss America,” is not exactly original territory. Indeed, as much as Derek cuts a rebellious figure on the small-town stage, his allusions and affinities as a gay man are down-the-middle, almost to the point of cliché.Still, D’Astolfo’s writing crackles with delightful turns of phrase that slip by almost before they register. “Hand to Gaga, I didn’t know it would be such a fuss to enter this here competition,” he swears. But could anyone this fabulous be an abomination? “No way, Mary J!”D’Astolfo is also an immensely likable performer. As Derek, he is haughty but vulnerable, an unselfconscious and assured storyteller, whether tearing into his adversaries or recalling an ill-fated bus trip to see LuPone perform in “Gypsy.” He can land a punchline with his eyes alone.Under the direction of Tony Speciale, the production flips easily between backstage confessionals and the showdown out front, where Derek’s talent is the beloved gay art of lip-syncing. Lighting by Travis McHale does scene transporting work on an uncluttered gray set by the designer Se Hyun Oh, while costumes by Hunter Kaczorowski, sparkling on a rack to the side, lend Derek do-it-yourself flash and flair.As up-to-the-minute as D’Astolfo’s pop references may be, there’s a retro quality to both the setting and the character that feels a step behind the times. If a country boy were looking for inspiration, the only beauty pageant of any relevance he would find on TV in the past decade is one made especially for people like him and hosted by RuPaul.Turning trauma into opulent self-presentation has long been a favored form of queer artists, and it’s more popular than ever. The global “Drag Race” franchise has turned the act of defying gender norms through polished performance and the excavation of personal hardship into mainstream entertainment. That means there’s plenty of appetite for a show like “Mister Miss America” — and that it has a lot more to measure up to than a backwater dog and pony show.Mister Miss AmericaThrough Aug. 7 at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Manhattan; afo.nyc. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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    The Saga of a World War II Ancestor of Miss Piggy, Bert and Yoda

    Long before Frank Oz brought many Muppets to life, his father, an amateur Dutch puppeteer, made a Hitler marionette as an act of defiance. He buried it during the war.The puppet stands 20 inches tall, hand-painted and carved out of wood, its uniform tattered and torn. But for all it has endured over more than 80 years — buried in a backyard in Belgium at the outset of World War II, dug up after the war and taken on a nine-day cross-Atlantic journey, stored and almost forgotten in an attic in Oakland, Calif. — it remains, with its black toothbrush mustache and right arm raised in a Nazi salute, immediately and chillingly recognizable.It is a depiction of Hitler, hand-carved and painted in the late 1930s by an amateur Dutch puppeteer, Isidore (Mike) Oznowicz, and clothed by his Flemish wife, Frances, as they lived in prewar Belgium.The Hitler marionette, an instrument of parody and defiance, offers an intriguing glimpse into the strong puppetry tradition in the family of the man who retrieved it from that attic: Frank Oz, one of its creators’ sons, who went on to become one of the 20th century’s best-known puppeteers, bringing Cookie Monster, Bert, Miss Piggy and others to life through his collaborations with Jim Henson, and later becoming a force in the Star Wars movies, giving voice to Yoda. The marionette will be shown publicly for the first time later this month at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.Oz’s father was drawn to puppetry from the day when, as an 11-year-old boy, he passed a street show of outsize, colorful Sicilian puppets in Antwerp. “As a youngster, I was interested in things three-dimensional,” Oznowicz told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. After they arrived in Oakland in 1951, Oz’s parents founded the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild, and the family living room became a gathering spot for puppet makers and enthusiasts from across the region. Oz learned how to string puppets from his father, and as a teenager, he earned $25 an hour doing puppet shows, and served as an apprentice puppeteer at Children’s Fairyland, an amusement park.Mike and Frances Oznowicz at a puppet fair in Children’s Fairyland in 1956.via the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild and Children’s Fairyland ArchivesBut Oz — who parlayed his successes in puppetry into a long career as an actor and a director — was never drawn to carrying on the family tradition.“It was a great training ground for me until I hit 18 and I said, I’m done with this, I don’t want to be a puppeteer,” Oz, 78, said in a recent interview as he sat on a bench in Riverside Park in New York. “I never wanted to be a puppeteer. I want to be a journalist, actually.”It was a chance encounter with Henson, whom he met at a puppeteer’s convention when he was still a teenager, that changed the course of his life.“I really don’t care about puppets,” Oz said, under the mist of a light June rain. “I really don’t. And never did. And Jim showed me how to be successful. Then I became successful at the very thing that I didn’t initially want, but the joy was working with Jim and the Muppets.”Oz was startled when he came across the puppet years ago in the attic of his family home in Oakland — “I thought, ‘Oh My God.’” He brought it to New York where he displayed it, along with seven marionette heads carved by his father, in a museum case in his apartment on the Upper West Side.The puppet, the carved heads and a video interview Frank conducted with his father before his death in 1998, will be shown at “Oz is for Oznowicz: A Puppet Family’s History,” opening at the Contemporary Jewish Museum on July 21. (Frank’s nom-de-Hollywood is “Oz,” but his legal name remains Oznowicz.)“I never wanted to be a puppeteer,” Frank Oz said. He parlayed his successes with puppets into a long career as an actor and a director.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe exhibition tracks the remarkable story of this puppet and how Isidore, who was Jewish and was born in Amsterdam, and Frances, who was Catholic, fled Antwerp in 1940 as the Nazis advanced and bombs exploded across Belgium. At the urging of Frances’s mother, who was fearful that they would be captured with such a defiant marionette as they tried to outrace the Nazis, they buried the puppet in their backyard.“He and Mom made a pact that when the bombs landed in Antwerp — and they were expecting that — they’d be ready go to,” said Ronald Oznowicz, 80, who is Frank’s older brother. “They had their bikes ready and their food ready. They had a whole plan and the object was to get to England.”Isidore and Frances traveled through southern France, Spain, Morocco and Portugal — the tale of their journey is recounted in the video interview — before settling in England, where Frank and Ronald were born.The family returned to Antwerp after the war and dug up the puppet. It was another five years before they obtained a visa and came to the United States. The puppet came with them. (A third child, Jenny, was born after they settled in the United States.)“I have to tell you: This is a son’s remembrance,” Oz said. “My parents left Belgium in time. But sadly, half of his family was killed in the gas chambers because they didn’t leave. My father never really liked to talk about it. It was too difficult for him.”“All these stories of my mother and father, they were just fairy tales to me,” he said.Indeed, much of this story is murky, as it reconstructs the life of the parents of one of the men so instrumental in making the Muppets beloved: Isidore was, by day, a window trimmer and sign painter, and Frances became a dressmaker. It is not exactly clear how — or even if — the Hitler puppet was used in performances.An old photograph of the Hitler marionette, which was buried in a backyard in Belgium at the outset of World War II, dug up after the war and taken on a nine-day cross-Atlantic journey, stored and almost forgotten in an attic in Oakland, Calif.via Frank Oznowicz, Jenny Oznowicz and Ronald Oznowicz; Jason MadellaThis exhibit came to be because of happenstance. “The Jim Henson Exhibition: Imagination Unlimited,” which was first shown at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, was set to move this summer to The Contemporary Jewish Museum, and the institution, in keeping with its mission, was looking for ways to place the exhibition in some sort of Jewish context.“I was aware that Frank Oz was Jewish and wondered if there was any kind of story that Frank would want to tell here,” said Heidi Rabben, the senior curator of the museum. Karen Falk, the head archivist for the Henson collection, told her about the puppet that Oz had retrieved from his parents’ attic, and Rabben asked Oz if she could borrow it for this exhibit.“It was such an incredibly inspiring story about resilience and resistance,” Rabben said. “That is what we are interested in: What are the ways we can share stories of the Holocaust? We have limited information and it’s very selective based on what our parents and grandparents chose to share. How do we make sure we never forget?”The two exhibits will overlap for a few weeks; the Henson exhibit closes in mid-August.The Hitler puppet is the centerpiece of “Oz is for Oznowicz.” The mustache, the hair and the eyebrows are painted black; Isidore carved the mustache so that it protrudes from the puppet. A Nazi arm band is strapped around the left arm. No effort was made to refurbish the Hitler puppet or any of the heads; they are being presented the way Frank found them. The marionette’s right leg is exposed because of a tear in the uniform.Given its subject matter and the sensitivities of a museum dedicated to addressing questions of Jewish history, “Oz is for Oznowicz,” contains a warning for attendees: “This exhibition contains a marionette of Adolf Hitler that may be disturbing for some viewers. Our intention in displaying this object is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the objects and firsthand stories of those who experienced its persecution, and to encourage conversation and education about the ongoing horrors of antisemitism and authoritarianism today.”Isidore’s sons remember him as a man of pointed humor with a strong political sensibility, and said it was in character for him to use humor and parody for political effect. But once they made it back to the United States, and embarked on lives as immigrants in a new country, they tried to put that chapter of their lives behind them.After their meeting at a convention of the National Puppeteers of America, Jim Henson asked Frank Oz to come to New York and work part-time with him for six months in 1963. He stayed with Henson until 1986.Oz said he jumped at the chance to lend his parents’ work to the Henson exhibition.“I want to show how people can express themselves in a positive way during a war — and make fun of people through other means,” he said. “I just want to honor my parents. I want to people to see how lucky we are right now, even in the terrible situation we are in right now.” More

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    Bidding Farewell to His Theatrical Flock

    In a 34-year run at New York Theater Workshop, James C. Nicola held that directors and writers are equal partners — and helped send “Rent” and “Hadestown” to Broadway.The Tony Awards ceremony had just wrapped up at Radio City Music Hall, and it was time for the parties. But for one honoree, James C. Nicola, the longtime artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, there would be no stop-off for toasts at the Plaza Hotel or after-midnight carousing at Tavern on the Green.Instead, he headed to a nearby parking garage, and settled behind the wheel of a rental van for the 40-minute ride back to the dorms at Adelphi University on Long Island, where he’d be sleeping that night. As far as he was concerned, there was no other choice: He had pickup duty at 10 a.m. for a group of young artists arriving by train for one of the summer workshops that have been a hallmark of his 34-year tenure at one of Off Broadway’s most beloved theaters.It’s not those gatherings that led the Tony committee to give Nicola a special honor. Or at least not fully. It’s also that his 199-seat East Village theater spawned the Tony-winning best musicals “Rent,” “Once” and “Hadestown.” That the recent hot-button plays “What the Constitution Means to Me”and “Slave Play” ran there. And that the theater’s support made a crucial difference to the careers of such writers as Tony Kushner, Lisa Kron and Doug Wright; the directors Rachel Chavkin, Lileana Blain-Cruz and Sam Gold; and many others.Nicola, center, with fellow Tony honorees Eileen Rivera and Ashruf “Osh” Ghanimah at the Tony Honors cocktail party in early June.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Tony came as a bonus after Nicola announced last year that he was stepping down, the first of the very long-serving artistic leaders of major nonprofit New York theaters to do so. And while he acknowledged that the theater-world reckoning over the whiteness of its leadership persuaded him it was time to leave, he departed on July 10 with what seems to be an unblemished record.At 72, his gait has slowed. But his ice-blue eyes still blaze when he gets animated about his affection for anagrams or who might star with Daniel Radcliffe later this year in “Merrily We Roll Along,” part of the last Workshop season he programmed. (The freelance director Patricia McGregor, a Black woman who has had an ongoing connection to the theater, is succeeding him in the top job.)Nicola spent five years working as a casting associate at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Public Theater). Comparisons with Papp and the far-larger Public are inevitably imprecise. But in his own less grandiose, more self-effacing way, Nicola is among the handful of artistic directors to make the biggest artistic impact on the New York theater world since — a magnet for iconoclastic talents who also helped develop a passel of shows with enormous commercial appeal.Jonathan Larson’s “Rent” was part of New York Theater Workshop’s 1995-96 season, a pivotal time for the theater. The cast included, from left: Jesse L. Martin, Adam Pascal, Wilson Heredia, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Rodney Hicks and Anthony Rapp.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNicola at the theater in 1997. A son of the 1960s, he once imagined he’d be a Baptist minister.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore personally, he is one of the last of his kind: a son of the ’60s who imagined he’d be a Baptist minister and made a brick-and-mortar building into a flock and a chosen family.In a video acceptance speech for the Tony, Nicola put it this way: “Our community has aspired to be a sanctuary for a certain species of artist — theatermakers who embrace their divinity, who understand their sacred obligation to lead and inspire us.”And in one of several recent conversations that included breaks between work-in-progress readings at Adelphi and lunch at a favorite Hell’s Kitchen diner, he stood firm in his conviction that idealism is the fuel that kept him going, and that bringing people together to be challenged is the goal.“Nothing makes me angrier than to be called a gatekeeper,” he said.He added: “Nothing makes me happier than to be mad when I leave the theater.”RACHEL CHAVKIN HAD BEEN inviting Nicola and his then-associate artistic director, Linda Chapman, to take in her work since she was an M.F.A. student at Columbia University. After seeing “Three Pianos,” a rambunctious reimagining of Franz Schubert as the center of a drunken posse of musicians and fans, Nicola asked Chavkin and Alec Duffy, one of her collaborators on the show, to his denlike office on the second floor of the East Village building that abuts the theater.“I think he opened by saying ‘I think that’s one of the best pieces of theater I’ve ever seen,’” she recalled in a recent phone call. “Our jaws dropped.”Programming “Three Pianos” into the Workshop’s 2010-11 season was a career-changer for Chavkin, who, while continuing to do avant-garde work with the troupe known as the TEAM, also helped to shape the boundary-busting Broadway musicals “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” and “Hadestown.” (She is co-directing at the Workshop again next season, while aiming another musical, “Lempicka,” for Broadway.)Like Chavkin, the now Tony-winning director Sam Gold earned his union card directing at the Workshop, in 2007. He still recalls Nicola’s support when he wanted to hire a scenic designer with opera-world credits to build what would be an ambitious set for Betty Shamieh’s play “The Black Eyed.”“It’s the kind of thing that a director on their first job doesn’t get to do,” Gold said. “Jim would say, ‘I don’t want to limit your imagination.’”And the commitment went beyond a single show — part of Nicola’s belief that directors are equal partners with playwrights in an American theater system that tends to privilege the latter.David Oyelowo, left, and Daniel Craig in Sam Gold’s 2016 production of “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Over the years,” Gold said, “I’ve had very few people genuinely see me as an artist — who can relate one show to another, as someone with a lifelong project.”Whitney White, who was Gold’s assistant on the 2016 Workshop production of “Othello” that starred Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo, speaks of Nicola as a presence in her life, not just a champion of her work. (White directed Aleshea Harris’s play “On Sugarland” at the Workshop this spring.)“I’ve spoken to him about men and love and theater and everything,” she said. “It’s a fully furnished table.”That’s not easy to find, even in nonprofit theaters that don’t have to obsess over the bottom line. “It’s a different style of artistic directorship — that you’re in community, in dialogue, not just a blip,” she added.NICOLA GREW UP OUTSIDE HARTFORD, Conn., gay and closeted, the oldest of four brothers in a middle-class family. In high school and then for a while at Tufts University, he took private singing lessons, imagining a career in opera or choral music. A year studying abroad took him to the Royal Court Theater in London, where he got interested in directing.Eventually, it helped lead him to the writing of the British experimentalist Caryl Churchill, a Royal Court favorite, whose work he helped champion at the New York Shakespeare Festival and at Arena Stage, in Washington, D.C., where he had a one-year directing fellowship that turned into seven more years as a producing associate.What became New York Theater Workshop had been presenting work around Manhattan for nearly a decade when Nicola raised his hand for the top job. In conversations with Stephen Graham, its founder and current board member, he learned that the theater, which was already funding fellowships for directors, was hungry to have a bigger public profile.“They wanted to change the form,” Nicola said. “What better could I hear?”Under Nicola, the theater staged Churchill’s work eight times, more than any other writer. But no figure is more associated with his tenure than the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove. After seeing his work in Europe, Nicola brought him to direct in the United States for the first time, adapting Eugene O’Neill’s unfinished play “More Stately Mansions,” in 1997.Two years later, his deconstruction of the Tennessee Williams classic “A Streetcar Named Desire” — Blanche, Stanley and Stella each spend stage time in the bathtub — heralded the van Hove/Workshop alliance as one of the most exciting (and divisive) destinations in New York theater.During Nicola’s reign the theater presented eight van Hove productions, capped in 2015 with “Lazarus,” a rock musical with a book by Enda Walsh and songs, new and old, by David Bowie, who was secretly battling cancer during its creation and died during its run.Ivo van Hove has directed eight productions at the Workshop, including the 2015 production of David Bowie and Enda Walsh’s “Lazarus,” with Michael C. Hall and Sophia Anne Caruso.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe circumstances had echoes of “Rent” — a show the theater began developing four years into Nicola’s tenure that had its final dress rehearsal at the Workshop on Jan. 25, 1996. That night its creator, Jonathan Larson, suddenly died of an aortic aneurysm.The “Rent” story — 12 years on Broadway, the Pulitzer Prize, productions all over the world — is show business canon. Royalties from that and other Broadway transfers helped boost the theater’s annual budget from $400,000 to $10 million in the Nicola era. But as he talked about “Rent” and “Lazarus,” Nicola hinted at the ways they might have turned out had tragedy not struck, their creators wrested from the process of art-making too soon.“Lazarus,” which was sped into production and where only van Hove knew of Bowie’s precarious health, was among the most challenging experiences of Nicola’s time at the Workshop. But he pinpoints his darkest days to 2006, when a planned staging of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” a solo play about an American demonstrator for Palestinian rights who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer, was pulled.Kushner and Harold Pinter, among others, accused the theater of capitulating to political pressure; the theater maintained it was only delaying the production, which originated at the Royal Court in London. Nicola had to return from Italy to defuse the situation, which he called a “misunderstanding that was threatening to the very heart of the institution.” (“Rachel Corrie” ended up running at another theater.)More recently, debates over representation in the theater world have encouraged in him a greater self-awareness. He pointed to Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” which was championed by his theater and by notable white male critics. He later came to learn that many Black women felt otherwise.“There are impulses that I have that feel like good and positive ones, and then learn that my response is not universal,” Nicola said.“It’s really good to think about the risks and possible outcomes,” he added, “but also not be intimidated by not being able to predict. To not retreat, not get cautious or conservative.”FINISH A 34-YEAR TERM running a major theater and the hosannas will come fast and furious.Besides the Tony, Nicola was celebrated at the Workshop’s annual gala, which had a diner theme in honor of his affection for humble food. There were speeches and a musical performance from some original “Rent” cast members, a drag queen and, for a finale, four veteran stage actresses enacting a “scene” from “The Golden Girls,” a Nicola favorite.“My gratitude to the theater was giving me a sense that the world was bigger,” Nicola said, reflecting on his career. Erik Tanner for The New York TimesWeeks later, several hundred friends and associates surprised him at the theater with a reading of Moss Hart’s backstage comedy “Light Up the Sky,” the last play he had directed at Arena Stage, with a cast that included the playwrights Lucas Hnath, Dael Orlandersmith and Kron; the performer Penny Arcade; and the producers Jeffrey Seller and Jordan Roth. (“I have lived this play my entire adult life,” a grateful Nicola said later.)Uptown and downtown, artful and kitschy — it’s an increasingly illusory divide that Nicola, who soaked up the work of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, has managed to happily bridge, personally and professionally.“He’ll be talking one minute about [the French director] Ariane Mnouchkine and the next he’ll be doing an Ethel Merman impression,” said Wright, whose Grand Guignol-ish Marquis de Sade play, “Quills,” was, along with “Rent,” in the 1995-96 season that brought a new level of starshine to the theater.Nicola proudly cops to being a musical-theater show queen, quoting “Funny Girl” in his gala acceptance speech and later pointing to a lyric from (shocking!) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” as explaining his mission: “We taught the world new ways to dream.”The “director in me” decided he needed a ritual way to bring closure to his time at the theater. So he and friends rode the Circle Line on the Fourth of July. “When I board the boat I will be leaving my old life and when I get off it, I will be entering my new life,” he said beforehand.As to what’s next, all he can propose is “opening myself up to new adventures.”In the meantime, he’s taken to writing letters of thanks, sending them into the world without knowing who will (or won’t) respond.One went to the theater department at Tufts.Another to the Little Theater of Manchester, Conn., where he appeared onstage as the Mock Turtle in “Alice in Wonderland,” and was first dazzled by the art of telling a story to an audience in public.“My gratitude to the theater was giving me a sense that the world was bigger — that there were many other possibilities,” he said. “To that 12- or 13-year-old boy, this is everything he aspired to. It happened.” More

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    Phoebe Robinson Is Trash, and She’s Fine With It

    Robinson created and stars in “Everything’s Trash,” a new series that “is a celebration of people who aren’t in a rush to change who they are,” she said.“Everyone is trash,” Phoebe Robinson explained. “We all have our great qualities, but we also have flaws. Sometimes they’re lovable. Sometimes they’re not. And it’s OK.”This was a on a recent summer morning and Robinson — a writer and performer best-known for her essay collections and the podcast-turned-HBO-show “2 Dope Queens” — was sermonizing in between sips of lemonade at a coffee shop in Downtown Brooklyn. She had arrived a few minutes late. (Lateness, she would later explain, is one of her trashiest qualities.) Around the corner stood a blue Bigbelly garbage can ornamented with her image, an ad for her new show, “Everything’s Trash,” which debuts Wednesday on Freeform. Robinson stars as Phoebe, a podcast host facing down adulthood with pluck and hedonism while her very together older brother (Jordan Carlos) runs for state office.Robinson, 37, adapted the show from her 2018 collection, “Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay.” If creating, producing, writing for and starring in a show sounds like a lot of jobs, I should also note that this is the second show from Robinson’s production company, Tiny Reparations; that she runs a publishing imprint of the same name; and that she recently published a third essay collection. She also debuted her first standup special, “Sorry, Harriet Tubman,” last fall on HBO Max. Really, it’s enough to make a person want to go back to bed.In “Everything’s Trash,” Robinson stars as a podcaster stumbling toward adulthood.Giovanni Rufino/FreeformOn this morning, she greeted the day in sequined sandals, pants that matched the lemonade and a crinkly black jacket. (A Hefty bag, but make it fashion.) Under that jacket was a cropped T from U2’s “The Joshua Tree” tour. (Robinson is on record as loving U2 maybe more than anyone alive.) Over that lemonade, Robinson, exuberant and focused, discussed exploiting her young adulthood for laughs and whether she is still trash. Spoiler: “Of course I’m still trash!” she said.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The book is based on the events and missteps of your late 20s and early 30s. How close does the show hew to your actual life?It’s a healthy combination of writers’ room and real life. My brother really is a state rep. But I would not hook up with his political rival. That’s not my vibe. We wanted to have fun with it — the times when I was crazy broke and running around, hustling. The whole wear-and-return thing? I did that for years. I would get a cute outfit for an event. And then I would be like: “OK, no one spill on me. No one sweat. Because I’m going to return this later.” We just mix it all up together. TV Phoebe is certainly messier than I ever was. She’s smart and funny and lovable, but she operates with whatever feels good in the moment. I like to believe I’m a bit more mindful than that. She’s just living her life.When I think of comedies about young women being trash, I think of “Girls” or “Broad City.” Have Black women felt as free to be trash?We know that the answer is no. But there are a lot of great shows out there — “Insecure,” “Abbott Elementary,” hopefully my show — that show people just living their lives. I didn’t create this show thinking about respectability politics. It wasn’t even a topic of discussion. We really just wanted to make a show that was hilarious and honest, and based on stuff that’s happened to the writers in the room. I will always fight for the right to be silly, to be messy, to make mistakes. I don’t want us to get to a place where we aren’t showing characters being human.You were a podcaster, and your character podcasts, too. Is the podcast in the show a version of “2 Dope Queens” or your other show, “Sooo Many White Guys”?It’s invented for the show. But this idea of, “Yeah, I have a podcast that’s successful and I don’t have any money in the bank,” that’s ripped from the headlines, as they say on “Law & Order.” I really just wanted to have fun with it. I love podcasting so much; it’s such a great medium. It’s oversaturated now, so I’m glad that I was able to do it when I did.You’ve joked about being a “melanated Carrie Bradshaw.” But on “And Just Like That,” Carrie Bradshaw has a podcast now. So is she actually the white you?She’s doing her thing. I’m doing my thing. But when I saw that, I was like, Oh, that’s a cute evolution for her character and also feels true to life that she would — I love that I’m talking about her like she’s a real person — that she would be a podcaster now.“I will always fight for the right to be silly, to be messy, to make mistakes,” Robinson said.Donavon Smallwood for The New York TimesA lot of shows that are set in New York aren’t made in New York. This one is. And Brooklyn looks great in it. Why was that important?I’ve been here since I moved out at 17 to go to college, and I really fought for the show to be shot here. Initially, there was some discussion of like, “Maybe we could do it in L.A. on soundstages …” and I was like: “No, no, no. New York is in its DNA.” I’ve lived in Crown Heights, Kensington, Clinton Hill, all those areas. I love all those areas. I want to show actual Brooklyn, not just the parts that have been gentrified.Is there a message you want people to take away from the show?I just want people to embrace where they’re at. We’re always so focused on, Oh, I have to get this next thing and I need to improve in this way. This is a celebration of people who aren’t in a rush to change who they are. They’re just like: “OK, this is who I am. This is my truth. This is my journey.” I hope that when people watch, they laugh a lot, but then maybe apply a little bit of that to themselves.You’re going to see different kinds of Blackness, you’re going to see beautiful Brooklyn, you’re going to see people make mistakes and try to figure [expletive] out and hopefully get more things right than wrong. People just get so down on themselves because they think they’re not doing enough or they’re failing in some way. And I’m like, You’re doing fine.One of the things I really fought for: I didn’t want it to be like, Oh, Phoebe’s so messy, and then by the end, she’s going to settle down, move to Connecticut, have kids. I don’t know how her journey is going to end, and she doesn’t either, and I think that’s OK.I look at you now: You have a production company, a publishing imprint, an apartment with color-coordinated bookshelves, a Peloton. Are you still trash?A Peloton doesn’t make you Mother Teresa. Come on! I’m always 10 to 15 minutes late for stuff. I can be stubborn. I can be forgetful sometimes. Of course I’m trash. Listen, everyone’s trash. M.L.K. Jr. was trash. Let’s be real. He was great. He did a lot of great things. He was also trash. More

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    Adam Scott on His First Emmy Nomination for ‘Severance’

    Scott earned first Emmy nomination on Tuesday, for best actor in drama for “Severance.”To stay afloat and avoid disappointment, Adam Scott said he doesn’t anticipate big nominations. It’s a healthier state of mind, he said, and he’s become accustomed to not hearing his name called.“I did not think I was going to be nominated,” he said. “I was just trying to focus on everyone else and take a walk and put it out of my head.”After learning he received an Emmy nomination for best actor in the Apple TV+ drama “Severance,” Scott said it was an honor to be named next to actors like Brian Cox, nominated for “Succession,” and Jason Bateman, nominated for “Ozark.”“Severance,” which is also nominated for best drama, presents an eerie picture of workplace culture in which employees of an enigmatic, vaguely sinister corporation named Lumon Industries undergo a surgical procedure that severs their work memories from their personal memories, in an effort to keep company secrets confidential. Scott plays Mark Scout, who after losing his wife, Gemma (played by Dichen Lachman), in a car accident, substitutes monotonous shifts pocketing numbers into digital boxes at Lumon for proper healing.In a phone interview on Tuesday, Scott discussed the show’s cliffhanger ending and how he used a personal loss to build his character. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Where were you when you first heard of the nomination?I was in the middle of walking the dogs when I got the phone call and was surprised and just couldn’t be more flattered and honored. It was really a unique feeling, to say the least.Why do you think the show was so successful?It’s a good question because when we were making it, we, if not daily, very often would stop and look at each other and just be like, “This is really [expletive] weird. Is anyone going to connect with it?” We didn’t know, and then we would just kind of shrug our shoulders and put our heads down and keep going.What were the most challenging scenes for you to film?I was going through a grieving process, because my mom had died before I went out to New York. I walked into that apartment and realized I wasn’t done grieving at all, because my family kind of cushioned me from this at home. And that’s what love is for in a lot of ways, is to help you through a process like that, and we were locked down in Los Angeles so I was able to kind of make it through. But then I got to New York six months later, closed the door and I was by myself and I realized immediately I was not done absorbing this loss. The show was right there, and so I processed my grief through the show.What does “Severance” hope to teach about how to cope with grief?For outtie Mark, that’s what the season was about: grief, and how is he going to handle it? And is he going to handle it? Or is he going to continue pushing it away? And I was asking myself the same question. So, I decided to deal with it, but deal with it along with Mark.There’s a scene where I’m on the side of the road where my wife had a car accident in the show, and we just happened to shoot that scene on the one-year anniversary of my mom passing away. It was just a sheer coincidence. But I was kind of carrying it around with me all day and trying not to kind of zero in on it. It really, again, helped me with my grieving process.What does the show aim to tell viewers about how to manage what happens at work and what happens at home, particularly amid a pandemic when many people have had to work remotely?Work is something that you do to achieve one thing or another. A job is a place where you go, if you can define it like that, and I think people started re-evaluating their relationship with those things. I think we all found out that home and your life, and your life at work, they all started to blend into sort of one thing.How did the cast and the director Ben Stiller compose the last moments of the season finale?The moment where I call Mrs. Selvig “Ms. Cobel” accidentally — while we were shooting, I remember saying to Patricia [Arquette] and Ben, “OK if we have them, if they care at this point in the final episode, if we’ve laid the bread crumbs properly, this moment is going to be so fun and so huge.”But that’s a delicate process, getting to the point where that actually has impact. It’s not easy to put it all together so that actually happens. It could just as easily be a shrug if you’re not invested in the characters or the story or whatever. So, hearing that people threw things at their television or got up and walked out of the room or just screamed at the end of Episode 9 is delightful. We really had no idea if anyone would care. More

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    Sydney Sweeney Scores Two Emmy Nods, for ‘Euphoria’ and ‘The White Lotus’

    Sweeney discussed her first two Emmy nominations as well as some of the controversy surrounding her “Euphoria” character, Cassie.Sydney Sweeney was leaving a fitting when she found out she was nominated for two Emmys Tuesday. Speechless, the first person she called was her mother.“There weren’t many words,” Sweeney said. “It was more of crying and saying how proud she was.”The 24-year-old actress earned nominations for two HBO shows: “The White Lotus,” for supporting actress in a limited series, and “Euphoria,” for supporting actress in a drama. She attributes her success in the shows to creating elaborate books for each character that include their individual back stories and emotional memories.“I’m able to just jump into who they are, and I know how they will react to something because of what has happened in their past,” she said. “I’m able to flesh out these fully vivid characters because I’ve given them life through the work that I put into it.”As Cassie in Season 2 of “Euphoria,” her character sacrifices her friendship with Maddy (played by Alexa Demie), and employs intensive beauty routines and country-music inspired wardrobes to win over Nate (Jacob Elordi), Maddy’s ex-boyfriend. (Zendaya, who plays the troubled Rue, was nominated again for best actress in a drama.)Sweeney’s character Olivia on “The White Lotus” had it easier, vacationing with her friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady), and passing scathing judgments at a luxury resort. The limited series racked up 20 nominations, including five just in the best supporting actress category.In a phone interview, Sweeney discussed the thrill of her first Emmy nominations and what she hopes viewers will gain from Cassie’s transformative arc. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.How did you feel when you heard that you received two nominations?I was definitely in shock, because I was not expecting to get nominated, especially not for two awards. I appreciate the characters that I get to play, so the fact that people have been touched by my character — that’s what means so much to me. It’s an amazing feeling, and I’m very appreciative.Cassie underwent a significant transformation in “Euphoria” last season, going from a sympathetic character to a more questionable one as she complicates her friendship with Maddy by falling for Nate. What was that metamorphosis like for you?It was a fun challenge. I was also very nervous, because I know that Maddy’s character is such a force and people love her. You don’t want to cross Maddy, and Cassie crossed Maddy. So I was a little nervous to see how people would react.Olivia, in “The White Lotus,” was a much more comic role. Was that challenging?I was a little scared because I’ve never done something on the more comedic side, and I was going to be surrounded by such comedic geniuses. But whenever I’m scared, that means I’m going to be challenged. I’m going to try and push myself even further. So I was really excited to be surrounded by these people.Some viewers complained that “Euphoria” hypersexualized Cassie last season. What did you make of that criticism, and what do you hope people take away from the character?I hope people can look deeper inside of Cassie and see the struggles and the trauma that she has gone through, and why she is who she is. Because there’s a reason behind all of it. Does she want to put herself out there all the time? No. She does it because that’s what she thinks other people want from her, and that’s the only way that she’s going to be able to get what she wants from people.I think that shows how women feel and how they’re treated today. I hope that it raises awareness for others, and they’re more aware of how we’re being perceived, how young girls are being raised. And there’s a double side, because I also think there’s strength behind how she feels when she is naked or she’s showing her body. She communicates that way and there’s a beauty, there’s a strength and there’s a sadness with all of it. I hope people can see that. More