More stories

  • in

    Tim Robinson and the Golden Age of Cringe Comedy

    Tim Robinson loves spicy food.This minor fact is one of the major things I learned at my very awkward dinner interview with Robinson and Zach Kanin, creators of the cult Netflix comedy series “I Think You Should Leave.” Robinson ordered drunken spaghetti with tofu — spicy — and, almost immediately, the spaghetti started to make his voice hoarse. He insisted, however, that this had nothing to do with the spice — in fact, he said, his food wasn’t spicy enough. I asked our server if she could go spicier. She brought out a whole dish of special chiles. Robinson spooned them enthusiastically over his noodles.As I watched Robinson eat big red bites of his meal, I imagined a comedy sketch in which a man (played by Tim Robinson) gets himself out of an awkward dinner with a journalist (played by someone who looks exactly like me) by loading his food with increasingly hot peppers until he begins to lose control of his body. The sketch would end with him being wheeled away on a stretcher, on the brink of death — twitching, covered in filth, weeping — but also smiling.That would actually be a fairly tame premise for “I Think You Should Leave.” The show specializes in ratcheting mildly tricky social situations up to unbearable levels of cringe. It drives the good old vehicles of sketch comedy (corporate meetings, commercial parodies, game-show spoofs) into newly excruciating territory. If that sounds unpleasant, it often is — but it is also hilarious and bold and surprisingly poetic and addictive. Most of the sketches are short, and therefore easy to binge, which means that if they happen to vibrate on your comedy wavelength you will find yourself bingeing and rebingeing them until your favorite lines get stuck in your head for days, like music, and you end up talking almost exclusively in Tim Robinson references (“It’s interesting, the ghosts”) until your family asks if you might please stop soon.Over its first two seasons, “I.T.Y.S.L.” inspired a giddy and devoted following that spread memes and merch across the internet. Even if you’ve never seen an episode, you have probably encountered stray images from the show in the daily slush of content we all drink from our screens. You may have seen Robinson on Instagram, grinning in a hot-dog costume, standing next to a hot-dog-shaped car that has crashed into a storefront, saying, “We’re tryin’ to find the guy who did this and give him a spanking.” Or on TikTok, squinting his eyes and shouting, in a strange strangled voice that sounds almost too agitated to get out of his throat: “You SURE about that? YOU SURE ABOUT THAT???”NetflixAt the Thai restaurant, over dinner, Robinson was not shouting. In person, he is shy, mild, polite, sincere. He’s from Michigan, and he has a salt-of-the-earth Midwestern vibe. He speaks reverently about his family. He loves being a dad, he told me, and his kids are great kids (he has two, 12 and 13), and his wife, who was once his high school sweetheart, is an electrical engineer for Chrysler. “She’s smart,” he said, with feeling.It was strange to watch this man, whose face I had studied through so many violent comic contortions, in a subdued real-life setting. Robinson’s face is both anonymous and one of a kind. He has a big flaring dolphin fin of a nose; small, deep-set eyes that sit in little pools of shade; a warm, gaptoothed smile. His resting expression is bland, sweet, harmless — he looks, most of the time, like an absolutely standard middle-aged white guy who might be sitting next to you at an airport or a marketing conference. Someone you would feel perfectly comfortable asking to watch your stuff if you had to get up to go to the bathroom.But when Robinson activates that face, all kinds of amazing things happen. Tiny microexpressions ripple across it at high speed. He seems to have extra muscles in his forehead, because he can knit the space between his eyebrows into lumpy little mountain ranges of confusion, skepticism or disappointment. His quiet mouth gets very wide and loud. And his voice does things I’ve never heard a human voice do. It puffs up, squishes down, turns itself inside out. He can chew on his voice like a cow chews its cud.NetflixRobinson has mentioned in interviews that he has anxiety. I asked him if he still struggles with it.“Yeah,” he said, solemnly. “It gets worse. It gets worse, the older I get.”I had been warned that Robinson is deeply uncomfortable doing media. He dislikes, especially, being asked to analyze his comedy. That night, he and Kanin were exhausted. It was April, and they were nearing the end of the marathon process of finishing Season 3, basically living in the editing room, watching sketches over and over, trying to cut the material ruthlessly down to its essence. Their deadline was uncomfortably close; a writers’ strike was looming. They had no idea what day of the week it was. Netflix P.R. had very clearly forced them to meet with me against their will. (They agreed, after many weeks of pressure, to an 8 p.m. dinner at a restaurant that closed at 9.) They were friendly, but in the way you might be friendly to a dentist who is about to extract your wisdom teeth.I tried my favorite icebreaker question: “What is your very first memory?”Robinson said he couldn’t remember one. Neither could Kanin.“How many alternate titles did you guys have before you settled on ‘I Think You Should Leave’?” I asked.“That’s a great question,” Robinson said.“We had a lot,” Kanin said.“What were some of them?” I asked.They couldn’t remember.That’s how it went the whole time. Our conversation never took off. And the topic we kept returning to, the thing that flowed most naturally, was our small talk about spicy food.“Hey, that’s something good for the interview,” Robinson said.“That could be the headline,” Kanin said. “TIM ROBINSON LIKES IT SPICY.”Robinson spooned more chiles onto his noodles.“That’s the thing about spice,” he said. “It’s addicting.”Soon, mercifully, the restaurant closed, and we said goodbye, and they went off to do more late-night editing.Over the past 20 years, American culture has been gorging itself nearly to death on cringe comedy. “The Office”, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Veep,” “The Rehearsal.” What is this deep hunger? Why, in an era of polarization, widespread humiliation and literal insurrection — in a nation full of so much real-life cringing — would we want to watch people simulating social discomfort? It hurts enough, these days, just to exist.I think it’s for the same reason, actually, that we enjoy eating spicy food: what scientists call “benign masochism.” In a harsh world, it can be soothing to microdose shots of controlled pain. Comforting, to touch the scary parts of life without putting ourselves in real danger. Humor has always served this function; it allows us to express threatening things in safe ways. Cringe comedy is like social chile powder: a way to feel the burn without getting burned.And so we take pleasure watching Larry David saunter around instigating petty grievances, testing the boundaries of our social rules like a velociraptor systematically testing the electric fences in “Jurassic Park.” Or Nathan Fielder, with his laptop on its holster, robotically plotting flow charts, conducting experiments to try to determine, once and for all, what is and is not allowed.Because it’s tricky, being a person in a society. You have your needs, your wants, your whims, your dreams, your appetites, your fantasies, your frustrations. But — unless you are a castaway or a sociopath — you have to square those things with the needs of some larger group. More likely, multiple groups. Which means you must follow the rules. What rules? So many rules! Laws, norms, mores, superstitions, sentence structures, traffic signals — vast, overlapping codes, written and unwritten, silent and spoken, logical and arbitrary, local and global, tiny and huge, ancient and new. Some rules are rigid (stop signs), while others are flexible (yield signs) — and it’s your job to know the difference. Not to mention that the rules are never fixed: With every step you take, with every threshold you cross, the rule-cloud will shift around you. It can change based on the color of your skin, the sound of your voice, your haircut, your accent, your passport. Sometimes even the thoughts you supposedly have in your head.“I.T.Y.S.L.” is obsessed with rules. Its characters argue, like lawyers, over everything: whether you’re allowed to schedule a meeting during lunch (no), whether celebrity impersonators are allowed to slap party guests (at certain price points, yes), whether you’re allowed to swear during a late-night adults-only ghost tour (it’s complicated).Robinson understands a nasty little paradox about rules: The more you believe in them — the more conscientious you are — the more time you will spend agonizing, worrying, wondering if you are doing things right.This obsession makes “I Think You Should Leave” the perfect comedy for our overheated cultural moment. The 21st-century United States is, infamously, a preschool classroom of public argumentation. Our one true national pastime has become litigating the rules, at high volume, in good or neutral or very bad faith. “Norms,” a concept previously confined to psychology textbooks, has become a front-page concern. Donald Trump’s whole political existence seems like some kind of performance-art stunt about rule-breaking. The panics over “cancel culture” and the “woke mob” — these are symptoms of a fragmented society wondering if, in a time of flux, it still meaningfully shares social rules. Every time we wander out into the public square, we risk ending up screaming, or screamed at, red-faced, in tears.“I Think You Should Leave” makes comedy, relentlessly, out of moments when the social rules break down. When things stick, grind and break.Almost always, sketches start quietly. The show reproduces, with loving accuracy, our small-talk, our polite jokes — the way groups use humor to defuse social tensions. A woman, holding her friend’s new baby, says to her partner, teasingly: “Maybe we could have another.” To which he responds, with a nervous grin: “Uh, let’s talk about that later.” Men at a poker game trade jokes about their wives. (“Trust me, my wife has nothing to complain about — unless you’re talking about every little thing I’ve ever done!”)A lot of “I.T.Y.S.L.” sketches seem to start with a little thought experiment: What would happen if someone took this throwaway joke literally and seriously? How would it warp social reality if these anodyne little pleasantries were actually brought center stage — if someone ignored all the rules we are supposed to intuitively understand?This is the premise of one of the show’s best sketches, a sketch I’ve memorized so deeply I can hardly even see it anymore. A man at a party is allowed to hold a baby, which cries as soon as it nestles into his arms. “It’s not a big deal,” he says, good-naturedly. “I guess he just doesn’t like me.” That’s a classic, lukewarm, tension-defusing witticism, and everyone smiles politely. But Robinson has invented a guy who takes this absolutely seriously, who becomes obsessed with explaining to everyone, at the top of his lungs and at great length, precisely why the baby doesn’t like him — because it knows, somehow, that he “used to be a piece of [expletive].” Gradually, the man hijacks the entire party with obsessive explanations of all the many ways he used to be reprehensible — “slicked-back hair, white bathing suit, sloppy steaks, white couch.” And he insists, over and over, that “people can change.” The reasoning is absurd, and yet he is so sure and persistent and literal that it becomes a kind of social contagion. By the end of the party, everyone has come over to his side — including the baby, who smiles at him.Robinson is a genius at stepping into these in-between social spaces — chitchat, reassuring smiles — and zeroing in on the tension at the heart of it all. Then he will isolate that tension, extract it and inflate it like a balloon until it fills the whole room, until it fills the whole universe. He is a virtuoso of social discomfort.NetflixTim Robinson grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. His mother worked for Chrysler. As a kid, he disliked school. He had no idea what he was going to do with his life. But then he went to a show that changed his life: a traveling troupe from Second City, the famous Chicago comedy group. Immediately, Robinson thought: Oh. This is what I want to do. So he did.The comic actor Sam Richardson, who also grew up in Detroit, told me he first saw Robinson perform in a suburban bowling alley. “I was like: This guy is the funniest dude in the world,” he said. “His cadence is so specifically his own. You can’t teach it. It’s incredibly human. It’s human beyond human.” Robinson quickly became a star in the local scene — Richardson said he was, hands down, the best improv comic he’d ever seen. “Hands down,” he repeated. “Like, all hands go down. I’ve never seen Tim flounder in a scene. We all flounder. But he could always just find the ball and dunk it. It was incredible.”Robinson’s talent propelled him out of Detroit to Chicago, after he joined Second City — and then eventually to New York, where he signed on as a cast member of “Saturday Night Live.” There is a clip that sometimes circulates on social media of Robinson, in a bit part on a forgettable “S.N.L.” sketch, making the host, Kevin Hart, break out laughing over and over. Although none of Robinson’s lines are particularly funny, he has an instant presence and charisma. He doesn’t even have to say anything; he just embodies some species of funniness that no one else can touch. It would have been easy to imagine him blooming into his generation’s Will Ferrell or Kristen Wiig.NBCBut it was not to be. Robinson’s sensibility was too specific and weird. His anxiety was crippling. His sketches kept being cut.“Tim would call me every Sunday morning and just be so broken down,” Richardson told me. “He’d say things like, ‘Maybe I’m not funny.’ He was grossly unhappy.” Richardson went to an “S.N.L.” taping once, during the holidays, and he remembers Robinson standing backstage in a Santa costume, beside himself with excitement because one of his sketches was scheduled to get on the air. Then, at the last second, it was cut. Robinson was crushed.Robinson was dropped from the “S.N.L.” cast after just one season. But he didn’t leave. Instead, he joined the writing staff. And this is when everything started to change. He found a comedy-writing soul mate in Zach Kanin, another staff writer, who was his polar opposite in terms of background (well-connected East Coast family, Harvard Lampoon, New Yorker cartoonist) but had exactly the same sense of humor. Robinson and Kanin shared an office and became a power duo. Although plenty of their sketches never made it to the air, they were always a hit at table reads. They were the cool guys, the artists. They just needed their own vehicle.It took a while to happen. Netflix let them make an episode of the anthology sketch show “The Characters” — and it was wild and foul and brilliant, the standout episode of the season. For Comedy Central, Kanin and Robinson made a sweet, kooky sitcom called “Detroiters,” co-starring Sam Richardson. That gained a cult following but was canceled after two seasons.This all led, eventually, to “I Think You Should Leave”: the full, shocking, unapologetic flowering of their weirdo comic vision.“I.T.Y.S.L.” creates, with shocking efficiency, a whole comic universe. There are so many sketches I’d like to describe. The one in which a prank-show host has an existential breakdown at the mall because his costume is too heavy. (He is pretending to be “Karl Havoc,” a huge guy in a wacky vest who messes with people in the food court — but he ends up just standing there, frozen, hulking and dead-eyed, muttering to his producer: “I don’t even want to be around anymore.”). There’s the sketch in which a man at a restaurant won’t admit he’s choking because he doesn’t want to look dumb in front of the celebrity who is sitting at his table. But the brilliance of these sketches never comes from the premise alone. Instead it’s in the rhythms, in the gymnastics of Robinson’s face and — especially — in the strange poetic writing. The way language glops out of everyone’s mouth like soft-serve ice cream. “I can’t know how to hear any more about tables!” a driver’s ed teacher yells at his students, after they won’t stop peppering him with questions about the bizarre centrality of tables in his instructional videos. “And now you’re in more in trouble than me unfortunately,” a man says to a co-worker who’s lost his temper.“It always feels like improv, when you’re watching the show, but it is not,” Akiva Schaffer, one of the show’s directors, told me. Robinson and Kanin are meticulous about their scripts — everything that feels slightly “off” is written exactly that way. That odd driver’s-ed-sketch sentence, Kanin told me, came from something his young daughter said. In fact, many of the show’s men, when they are agitated, speak like children: their words forced out by the pressure of need, right on the edge of coherence. Robinson shared a memory from his childhood. Once, when he was a kid, his family moved to a new house, and he and his brothers went out to play in the backyard. A boy next door stared at them, so they stared back — until, finally, agitated, the boy yelled: “Stop keep looking at me!”Robinson’s comedy is, as my wife has put it, “very male.” (She is, to be clear, a fan.) There’s a lot of yelling and nasty language and juvenile behavior. There are colorful synonyms for poop (“mud pie,” “absolute paint job”). When a man’s ego is threatened, the whole universe seems to hang in the balance.But it would be a mistake to confuse Robinson’s comedy with the usual “very male” comedy: the archetypal bad boy, swinging his id around, railing against P.C. culture and his nagging wife, preaching that the rules are stupid, that society is a scam and a cage, that we should follow our desires and never negotiate and certainly never apologize.Robinson’s comedy is doing something much more interesting. This is comedy of the superego. It understands that every moment of human life requires a negotiation with rules — and that this is hard, and stressful, and there are so many ways it can go wrong. But the negotiation is also vital. The rules, after all, are holding some pretty destructive forces back.One of my favorite things about “I.T.Y.S.L.” is all the crying. Robinson’s characters cry while driving and at parties and in the middle of work meetings — after, say, a man chokes on a hot dog he’s been secretly eating out of his sleeve, or after the boss makes him take off his ridiculous hat. One man tries to defuse a tense situation by doing a whole zany “Blues Brothers”-style dance — but it backfires, making everything worse, and so he pulls off his sunglasses to reveal a puffy wet red face.When a Tim Robinson character cries, it is a result of an epic struggle for selfhood — a Greco-Roman wrestling match between the man’s public persona (confident, respected, “normal”) and the private, vulnerable self that he alone secretly knows. Those two selves collide, like plates on a fault line, and what gushes out are all the molten emotions the man has spent his whole life stuffing down. His terror of vulnerability leads to an eruption of vulnerability. It is hilarious and troubling but also touching. You want to shun the man and yet you also want to hug him — until you want to shun him again. (Almost inevitably, while the tears are still flowing, Robinson’s character will double and triple down on whatever got him in trouble in the first place.)Netflix“These guys are really having a hard time,” Schaffer told me. He said Robinson and Kanin’s extremely meticulous scripts originally contained zero crying, but it arose naturally during filming. “We would do three takes and I’d be like: ‘Oh, this guy should start holding back tears,’” Schaffer said. Then, sketch after sketch, they’d realize: “Wait a minute, this guy seems like he might be getting teary, too. We started joking: Should every character be crying by the end?”Robinson’s tears come out in a variety of ways. Sometimes his eyes just get big and wet — as in one sketch, when a man gets caught after secretly complaining to the waiter that his otherwise wonderful date has been eating all the best bites of their “fully loaded nachos.” (“Just say the restaurant has a rule,” he pleads with the waiter. “One person can’t just eat all the fully loaded ones.”) Sometimes a single tear comes trickling down his cheek — as when an office worker can’t reciprocate when his co-workers are sharing viral videos. What is clear, in each case, is that the tears are coming from an extremely deep place, like the purest artesian well water. Something is being squeezed out of these men, under tremendous pressure — some kind of sacred male pain-juice.This is a big part of what sets “I.T.Y.S.L.” apart from other cringe comedy. Despite its loudness and brashness, it is somehow fundamentally touching and vulnerable and sad. Its tenderness keeps it bearable. Robinson’s characters are rarely proud of their antisocial behavior. They want, desperately, to follow the rules. They are searching, as hard as they can, for the elusive balance between self-interest and the interests of the group. They just can’t seem to find it. The pain of that leaks out of their eyes. And then, before long, the screaming begins.Opening illustration: Source photograph by Atiba Jefferson/NetflixSam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine. He has written about rhinos, pencils, poets, water parks, basketball, weight loss and the new Studio Ghibli theme park in Japan. Lola Dupre is a collage artist and an illustrator currently based near Glasgow, Scotland. Working with paper and scissors, she references the Dada art movement and is influenced by modern digital-image manipulations. More

  • in

    Padma Lakshmi Is Leaving ‘Top Chef’ After Its 20th Season

    The host said she wanted to concentrate on her new show, “Taste the Nation,” her writing and “other creative pursuits.”Padma Lakshmi announced on Friday that she was leaving the Bravo reality-competition juggernaut “Top Chef,” which she has hosted for 19 of the show’s 20 seasons, calling it a “difficult decision” made “after much soul-searching.”“I am extremely proud to have been part of building such a successful show and of the impact it has had in the worlds of television and food,” Lakshmi, who also serves as an executive producer on the show, said in a statement posted on her social media accounts.“Many of the cast and crew are like family to me, and I will miss working alongside them dearly,” she continued. “I feel it’s time to move on and need to make space for ‘Taste the Nation,’ my books and other creative pursuits. I am deeply thankful to all of you for so many years of love and support.”Lakshmi did not immediately responded to a request for comment on Friday. In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, she discussed why she had decided to go on the show in the early days of reality television. “I liked how serious they were about the food,” she said. “It wasn’t about the cat fights and lowest common denominator.”At the time, she said, she figured that if nothing else, “Top Chef” would at least expose her to an audience of potential book buyers who did not yet know her work. “We had no evidence that this would be a huge pop culture phenomenon,” she said.Since 2006, the original “Top Chef” — there have been numerous international adaptations and spinoffs since — has traveled across the United States, filming seasons in Boston, New Orleans, Kentucky and Colorado, among other places. Each season brings together up-and-coming chefs who compete against one another in the hopes of winning cash prizes (and acclaim in the food world) and avoiding elimination — and the dreaded order to “please pack your knives and go.”Next week, Bravo will air the finale of Season 20 of “Top Chef.” The season, titled “World All-Stars,” has been based in London, and brought together winners, finalists and memorable competitors from “Top Chef” adaptations from around the world.In a statement to The Times, the food writer Gail Simmons, Lakshmi’s co-star and fellow judge on “Top Chef” (along with the restaurateur Tom Colicchio), said she is “so grateful for all the knowledge she shared and for the friendship that saw us through countless milestones both on and off camera.”“I could not have asked for a better host and partner in the job,” Simmons went on. “I’ll always admire her work ethic and how she paved the way for so many women and people of color across the many industries she touches. She is an important person not just in my career, but in my personal life, and will remain so. There’s no denying her impact on our show and she will be missed in our future ‘Top Chef’ adventures.”Colicchio did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Officials at NBCUniversal and Magical Elves, the production company for “Top Chef,” praised and thanked Lakshmi in statements which suggested that they planned to continue the program. “We will miss her on set at the judges’ table and as an executive producer, but we will remain forever grateful for her unwavering dedication to connecting with our cheftestants and Bravo’s viewers alike,” Casey Kriley and Jo Sharon, the co-chief executives of Magical Elves, said in a statement.Lakshmi, 52, an Indian-born model, author and activist, has been praised for imbuing the reality show with grace and humor, becoming the undeniable face of the franchise.Last month, Lakshmi’s other television show, “Taste the Nation,” aired its second season, on Hulu. On it, she travels the United States, exploring what it means to cook and eat in America.Also last month, she was featured in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, posing in a gold-coin bikini. “This is me,” she wrote alongside a video of the photo shoot that she’d posted on Instagram. “I wouldn’t go back to my 20s if you paid me all the money in the world.”Her first cookbook, “Easy Exotic,” was published in 1999. Since then, she has released several other books, including “Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet”; a memoir, “Love, Loss and What We Ate”; a reference guide called “The Encyclopedia of Spices and Herbs”; and a children’s book, “Tomatoes for Neela.”Brett Anderson More

  • in

    For Her New Play, Tori Sampson Revisited Her ‘Black Power Household’

    “This Land Was Made,” at the Vineyard Theater, is rooted in the playwright’s personal connection to a political movement’s awakening.The narrator of “This Land Was Made,” the playwright Tori Sampson’s speculative account of the Black Panther Party’s powder-keg origins, is an aspiring writer named Sassy. “Consider me your time-traveling griot,” she tells the audience with wry buoyanc‌y, evoking the West African tradition of storytellers who propagated endangered legacies.The play, which opens on Sunday at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, is an act of oral history rooted in Sampson’s personal connection to the political awakening at its center. “Sassy is not me,” Sampson made clear during a recent interview off the courtyard of the Marlton Hotel, a short walk from the theater.“The Black Panthers were like family to her,” Sampson said of her mother, who was orphaned at the age of 3 and raised by an aunt who was a member of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s. She would accompany her aunt to meetings, where activists became like kin and their reverence for Blackness a guiding principle.Sampson’s mother, Wanda Louise Thompson, went on to raise the playwright and her sisters (her twin and an older sister) in a “Black Power household,” first in Boston and then in North Carolina, where they were taught, with some militancy, to value Black beauty and culture. (When her twin sister wanted a Britney Spears poster, for example, their mother insisted that two posters of Black artists go up alongside it.)Antoinette Crowe-Legacy as Sassy and Julian Elijah Martinez as Huey P. Newton in the play “This Land Was Made” at the Vineyard Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut orphanhood was also to be part of Sampson’s inheritance; she was 13 when her mother died of a pulmonary embolism, and she and her twin sister, whom Sampson calls “my lifeline and compass,” became wards of the state. After a year of moving between foster homes, the twins petitioned to attend an all-Black boarding school in Mississippi, where their independence was contingent on high achievement.“I’m trying to connect who I am with my past,” said Sampson, 34, who lives in Los Angeles and has written for the streaming TV series “Citadel” and “Hunters.” She has only recently begun to process that her experience as an orphan is integral to her work. “I was always yearning to understand what it would look like to have a family,” Sampson said. “My imagination would run wild making up stories.”That impulse reverberates through “This Land Was Made,” which is set inside a Bay Area tavern with soul food simmering in the back kitchen. “I wanted to write a story where Huey P. Newton walks into a bar and changes the lives of the people there forever,” Sampson said of the Black Panther Party co-founder. She got the idea for the play, a blend of historical fiction and sitcom conventions, when she learned that Newton’s rise to prominence began with an unsolved mystery.The facts in the murky case are these: In 1967, Newton and a friend were pulled over during a traffic stop in Oakland, Calif., in which Newton took a bullet to the stomach and a police officer was fatally shot. ‌Newton was charged and later convicted of voluntary manslaughter. (His conviction was eventually overturned‌.) Rallies ‌to “Free Huey” helped set off the Black Power movement.Sampson, right, with Kathleen Cleaver, a retired law professor and former communications secretary for the Black Panther Party, at Yale in February 2017. via Tori SampsonSo, if Newton didn’t pull the trigger, Sampson thought, who did? And what might Newton’s influence have been on his neighbors before his activism grew to an international scale? In the play, Sassy, Sampson’s narrator, claims to have heard the truth through the grapevine. “This Land Was Made” then unfolds as both a comedy and a call to action.Sampson said her taste for humor that bends toward social justice also comes from her mother. Though Thompson didn’t let her kids watch much television (only “The Cosby Show” for an hour a day), she adored “All in the Family” and considered its skewering of bigotry the height of the form. That show’s creator, Norman Lear, remains an inspiration for Sampson, who likes to wind up her characters and set them loose to elicit eye-opening laughs.“Tori has a particular tempo in mind for each character and how the ensemble builds together musically,” the play’s director, Taylor Reynolds, said of Sampson’s ear for dialogue. In fact, both women said the production was deep into tech rehearsals before Sampson watched the play with her eyes open.“Let them be loud and wrong,” Sampson said of her Lear-inspired ethos. “Just give them conviction and don’t hold them back.”Adam Greenfield, the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, where Sampson’s play “If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka” was presented in 2019, said her work demonstrates an “unrelenting investigation of identity that feels both global but also very personal.” A sharp and riotous sendup of ‌Eurocentric beauty standards, “If Pretty Hurts” is punctuated with fourth-wall-breaking monologues and draws on Sampson’s personal experience to interrogate the body-image pressures faced by Black women. (The New York Times critic Jesse Green called the play “an auspicious professional playwriting debut.”)While more grounded in the conventions of realism, “This Land Was Made” demonstrates Sampson’s fascination with how social constructs shape imbalances of power. (Sampson earned a ‌bachelor’s degree in sociology from Ball State University.) The play’s Oakland residents argue about colorism, assimilation and the fallacies of trusting the system, embodying the tensions that propelled Newton’s broader ideologies about Blackness.Sampson, who also writes for TV, has various projects in the works. “My life has never been a box,” she said, “so my mind doesn’t work that way.”Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesBut Sampson, who began “This Land Was Made” in 2014, during her second year at what is now called the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, also aims to render the civil rights movement in America on a human scale.“I wanted to talk about the lowercase-p Panthers, as people,” Sampson said, in addition to exploring their role in striking up political currents that continue to reverberate. As violent incidents at the hands of the police have gained visibility over the past decade, often captured on video during traffic stops like the one Sampson imagines onstage, the consequences of failing to recognize the humanity of Black people have only grown.Conversations with former Black Panthers were also crucial to Sampson’s research process, more and less serendipitously. She spoke to Ed Bullins, the renowned playwright and the party’s onetime minister of culture, with permission from his wife, while he was in the hospital in 2014. (Sampson’s godfather happened to be his doctor.) “Make sure you remember those were some funny cats,” Bullins, who died in 2021, told Sampson of the party’s co-founders, Newton and Bobby Seale.The playwright ‌also interviewed Kathleen Cleaver, the first woman to hold a leadership position in the party, after Cleaver, now a retired law professor, spoke at Yale.If it’s true what Sassy says, that “every great story is about journeying to find home,” it follows that Sampson’s work will continue to venture in many directions. She is developing a play about a nerdy comedian who embarks on a superhero quest to regain her Black card after she mispronounces Tupac Shakur’s name during sex. (“It’s a lot,” she said.)‌ And she will directly address her orphan experience for the first time in an animated series called “How to Succeed Without Parents.”“It’s always going to look different,” Sampson said of her idea of home. “My life has never been a box, so my mind doesn’t work that way.” More

  • in

    “The Motive and the Cue” Asks What Makes a Great Performance

    “The Motive and the Cue,” a new play in London, imagines fraught behind-the-scenes maneuvering by John Gielgud, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor during rehearsals for a classic Broadway production.“The classicist who wants to be modern, meeting the modernist who wants to be classical.” So says Elizabeth Taylor, summing up the fractious encounter between the revered Shakespearian actor John Gielgud, and her new husband, the actor Richard Burton. It’s 1964, Taylor and Burton are the most famous couple in the world, and Burton is rehearsing the role of Hamlet for a Broadway production that Gielgud is directing.It’s not going well.That’s the setting for “The Motive and the Cue,” a new play directed by Sam Mendes, written by Jack Thorne, and starring Mark Gatiss as Gielgud, Johnny Flynn as Burton and Tuppence Middleton as Taylor.The play, which opened to enthusiastic reviews in May and runs through July 15 at the National Theater, in London, was an idea born out of the pandemic, said Caro Newling, a co-founder with Mendes of Neal Street Productions, which developed the show.Newling said that, during the first coronavirus lockdown of 2020, Mendes was thinking about why theater mattered, and what went into creating great performances. When they were discussing those questions, she added, Mendes recalled reading a copy of “Letters From an Actor,” an account of the 1964 “Hamlet,” by William Redfield, who played Guildenstern in the production. “Suddenly, bang, this idea shot out,” Newling said.A 1964 photograph shows Richard Burton, left, and John Gielgud in a rehearsal for “Hamlet.”Getty ImagesThe idea was a play based on the fraught relationship between the rambunctious, hard-drinking Burton and the repressed, elegant Gielgud during rehearsals for “Hamlet,” with the added combustible element of a sidelined, glamorous Taylor, sitting out her honeymoon in a hotel suite.Newling and Mendes started researching, and discovered another out-of-print book: “John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet,” a fly-on-the-wall account by Richard Sterne, an ensemble actor who smuggled a tape recorder into the rehearsal room.Mendes called Thorne, the playwright behind the stage blockbuster “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and the television series “His Dark Materials,” and suggested the rehearsal dynamics might provide fruitful material.Initially unsure, Thorne found a focus by “understanding the position that Gielgud was in at the time. He wasn’t being loved by the public, treasured by the profession. His great rival Laurence Olivier was running the National Theater and a new kind of modern theater was dominating the West End. He took the Broadway job because he didn’t have other offers.”“Hamlet,” had been a defining role for Gielgud, who had played the part over 300 times. For the Broadway “Hamlet,” he came up with the idea — daring at the time — of doing the play as if it were a rehearsal run-through, in ordinary clothes. In “The Motive and the Cue,” Burton tries to stamp his brash personality on Hamlet, while the classicist Gielgud wants something more sensitively attuned to Burton’s deeper emotions.The cast of “The Motive and the Cue.” Jack Thorne, who wrote the play, said it was about “why we do what we do, what it feels like, and what it costs.”Mark Douet“What’s interesting is that Burton is getting it wrong, sort of on purpose, trying to show Gielgud that it must be modern,” said Flynn, who lived as a teenager in Wales, where Burton is a national hero. “I had a picture of him playing Hamlet on the door of my house for about 15 years,” Flynn said. “It felt eerie that now, I was playing him, playing Hamlet.”The irony of the Burton-Gielgud conflict, he added, was that Burton idolized Gielgud, and was desperate to be regarded as a serious actor. “He is incredibly successful, but deep down, he fears he has drifted into complacency, is not doing something valuable with his art,” Flynn said.The set, designed by Es Devlin, uses expanding and contracting scrims to create seamless transitions between the “Hamlet” rehearsals, a pink hotel suite in which Taylor and Burton throw glamorous parties for the cast and the scenes of more intimate encounters. One of these is between Gielgud and Taylor, who provides the psychological insight that allows the director to find a way to Burton.Middleton, who plays Taylor, said, “Elisabeth is the voice of reason, one of the wisest characters in the play.”“She completely understood Burton’s obsession with conquering Hamlet, and why it was so difficult for him.,” she added. “It was important to me to show she wasn’t this chaotic, floozy character she is sometimes seen as.”Tuppence Middleton as Elizabeth Taylor in “The Motive and the Cue.” The play is set shortly after Taylor’s marriage to Richard Burton.Mark DouetMuch of the play is concerned with how to play Hamlet: The breakthrough moment for Burton happens when he can connect his painful past to the character’s motivations. “This is what actors have to do when they strip themselves down to play a role,” Thorne said.In the end, the 1964 production was a triumph, running for 136 performances; “The Motive and the Cue” has been a hit, too. It is currently playing to sold-out houses and its popularity suggests that the play’s central ideas — theater as a community and a crucible of emotional connection between actors and audience — have resonated after the enforced closures of the last few years.“It’s about fathers and sons, classicism and modernity, the clash of these forces,” Thorne said. “But I hope it’s also about why we do what we do, what it feels like and what it costs.” More

  • in

    American Airlines Theater on Broadway to Be Renamed for Todd Haimes

    Roundabout Theater Company’s flagship theater will honor Haimes, the transformational leader who died in April.Roundabout Theater Company, the nonprofit with the biggest footprint on Broadway, has decided to rename its flagship theater, which currently bears the name American Airlines, in honor of its recently deceased and transformational leader, Todd Haimes.The theater, on West 42nd Street, is a 740-seat house that opened in 1918 as the Selwyn. It was renamed for American Airlines in 2000, when Roundabout assumed operations and raised money by making a sponsorship agreement with the airline.The airline’s naming rights expire in early 2024, according to a spokesman for Roundabout, and the nonprofit’s board decided to rename the building for Haimes, who had an extraordinary impact on the company: He joined Roundabout as managing director in 1983 and reversed its flagging fortunes; he held a variety of titles over the years, and at his death in April he was both artistic director and chief executive.Roundabout, now one of the largest nonprofit theaters in the United States, has five performance spaces in Midtown Manhattan: three Broadway houses, including the Stephen Sondheim and Studio 54 as well as the American Airlines Theater, plus the Laura Pels Theater, which is an Off Broadway venue, and the Roundabout Underground black box theater, which is Off Off Broadway, both at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center.On Thursday night, the lights of all Broadway marquees were dimmed in Haimes’s honor. Another ceremony will be held next spring to dedicate the Todd Haimes Theater.American Airlines did not respond to a request for comment. More

  • in

    Review: In ‘Grey House,’ Broadway Gets an Expert Haunting

    A new play about a sisterhood of sorrows brings something scary to the stage, but is delivering shocks and icks enough?Four strange girls, somewhere between 12 and 200 years old, live in an isolated cabin in the woods. Don’t they always?Marlow (Sophia Anne Caruso) is the alpha, bossing the others around — and also bossing the stranded outsiders, because of course there are stranded outsiders in a play that trades on the tropes of a million horror tales. In “Grey House,” the prime trope is coy creepiness. Of the small knife she occasionally brandishes, Marlow, who gives Wednesday Addams vibes, comfortingly says, “If I put it in your eye, it wouldn’t even hit your brain.”Good to know — and basically true of the play itself.“Grey House,” at the Lyceum Theater, is certainly an in-your-face assault, more in the manner of John Carpenter movies than anything seen onstage since the age of melodrama. It is so expertly assembled from spare parts by the playwright Levi Holloway and the director Joe Mantello that you may not notice, between the jump scares and the shivery pauses, how little it has on its mind. Something about cycles of abuse? The legacy of misogyny? Sure, let’s go with that.But mostly let’s go with the freak-out fun of the four telekinetic weirdos and their den mother, Raleigh, played by Laurie Metcalf in a stringy salt-and-pepper wig that’s almost as frightening as she is. Raleigh is not very maternal; Marlow says she is their mother “sometimes.” Other than feeding them and untangling their tresses as if weeding a garden, she generally leaves them to their own devices.At the start of the play, those devices include some kind of gas-mask contraption that an ethereal deaf girl named Bernie (Millicent Simmonds) is making. (Hint: It’s not a gas mask.) What Squirrel (Colby Kipnes) is making is even worse: a kind of tapestry of innards. (She is presumably called Squirrel because of her tendency to gnaw things like phone cords that if left un-gnawed would short-circuit the plot.)Luckily, the fourth girl, A1656 (Alyssa Emily Marvin), is just making nice. She translates for Bernie and, when the outsiders arrive, calms them with good humor. Explaining her name, she admits that it may be unusual but “it’s no A1655.”The outsiders, a childless couple, need calming because they’ve just wrecked their car on a requisitely dark and snowy mountain road. Max (Tatiana Maslany) was driving; swerving to hit a deer, she hit it anyway. The accident has left Henry (Paul Sparks) with his ankle mangled, or maybe his leg or maybe his soul — it’s a restless manglement, moving through him as the play’s 95 minutes tick by. In any case, Raleigh splints him up, and the girls give him moonshine as an anesthetic.Well, not really moonshine.“Grey House,” which comes to Broadway from Chicago, where it had its world premiere at A Red Orchid Theater in 2019, keeps its secrets as quiet as its shocks are conspicuous. Only gradually do we get any sense of how the marriage of Max and Henry was crashing even before the accident, or why the coven of girls, if not their minder, has such an interest in helping it come apart completely. By the time we do begin to put together a possible explanatory scheme, it’s too late to matter; the trappings of horror, if not any meaningful horror beneath, have scared the bejesus out of the psychological drama.From left, Sophia Anne Caruso, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Millicent Simmonds in “Grey House” at the Lyceum Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least those trappings are superb. Though I’ve left undescribed the two other humans (at least I think they are humans) who fill out the cast, it gives nothing away to discuss the even-more-prominent title character. As designed by Scott Pask and lit by Natasha Katz, and especially as given voice by the sound designer, Tom Gibbons, the house seems to be the repository of feelings and history that everyone else is mostly sidestepping. It moans while they tease.That teasing quality, though sometimes charming — and often, if you are a scaredy-cat, a relief from the hard-core jolts — is the giveaway that “Grey House” should not be taken too seriously, regardless of its allusions to real-world horror of the past and present. (Yes, the Holocaust gets a hat tip.) We know too much about the rules of the genre, how information and staging will be manipulated to scare and delight us, to give much credence to anything deeper. In that way, “Grey House” is like a jukebox musical, squishing familiar arias — gore, ghosts, what have you — into a chic and enjoyable if mostly empty new container.Letting go of meaning in the theater in favor of sensation is a big ask today. The ambition of playwrights to speak directly to our times through emotional naturalism has largely wiped horror, mystery and their ilk from our stages. One of the last such plays to appear on Broadway was an adaptation of Stephen King’s “Misery” in 2015, starring Bruce Willis as an author of mystery novels and, as the psychotic fan who nearly nurses him to death, once again the great Laurie Metcalf.So another thing that has to be said for “Grey House” is that it has given artists who want to explore the opportunities and particular language of an unfashionable form a rare chance to do so. Metcalf and the rest of the cast turn that opportunity into a meal; by investing in its clichés without condescension, they do much to de-cliché them.But what makes the effort meaningful to artists — Holloway began thinking about the story after a family tragedy — may not make it meaningful to us. And though the theater is already a kind of haunted house, filled with odd beings and strange noises, horror may simply work better in a less live medium. When Max and Henry show up at the cabin, unaware that anyone is there, they look around at the spooky surroundings, listen to the wind howling, and somehow find it all so familiar.“I’ve seen this movie,” Henry says. Which is the problem exactly.Grey HouseAt the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; greyhousebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

  • in

    ‘Prayer for the French Republic’ Heads to Broadway

    The play, which is scheduled to open in January, joins a string of Broadway shows that confront antisemitism in the U.S. and abroad.Joshua Harmon’s “Prayer for the French Republic,” a play about a family grappling with contemporary and historical antisemitism in France, will transfer to Broadway this winter.The play will be produced by the nonprofit Manhattan Theater Club, which last year presented the play’s first run Off Broadway. The production will be directed by David Cromer, who also directed it Off Broadway; it will be staged at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, with previews beginning Dec. 19 and the opening scheduled for Jan. 9.Casting has not been announced.The production comes as concerns about antisemitism have been on the rise in the United States and beyond. Last season featured two shows about antisemitism — the play “Leopoldstadt,” about a Viennese family before, during, and after the Holocaust, and the musical “Parade,” about the lynching of a Jewish businessman in Georgia — both of which are leading contenders for Tony Awards this spring. And this season will include “Harmony,” a musical about a vocal group that runs afoul of the Nazis in early 20th-century Germany.“Prayer for the French Republic” will be Harmon’s second play on Broadway; his poignant singleness comedy, “Significant Other,” had a run in 2017 at the Booth Theater. But Harmon is probably best known for another comedy, “Bad Jews,” which was widely staged around the country.The play has a relatively large cast — MTC listed a company of 16 actors Off Broadway — and a three-hour running time, making it costly to produce on Broadway at a time when many theater nonprofits are struggling financially. This production is being financed in part by the Roy Cockrum Foundation, which was established by a Powerball-winning theater lover who supports ambitious work by nonprofits.Also this week, MTC announced that it has appointed a new executive director, Chris Jennings, to succeed the outgoing executive producer Barry Grove. Jennings is currently executive director of the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington. He will work alongside MTC’s artistic director, Lynne Meadow, who last year notched her 50th anniversary with the company. More

  • in

    New York Public Library Acquires George C. Wolfe’s Archives

    More than 50 boxes of ephemera from the playwright and director’s career include notes on “Angels in America” and research for “Jelly’s Last Jam.”When the playwright and director George C. Wolfe moved to New York City in his 20s, he got a job at an archive for Black cultural history, where his work saving newspaper articles and maintaining records fueled a habit of preserving his own ephemera.“It activated this sort of curiosity-slash-obsession about who gets remembered, what gets saved, what gets valued and what doesn’t,” Wolfe said recently.On Thursday, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired more than 50 boxes of material from throughout Wolfe’s career, during which he became one of the most sought-after theater directors in the country. His productions, including “Angels in America” and “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” garnered multiple Tony Awards, and he’s credited with revolutionizing the Public Theater over a decade as its producer.Working scripts, correspondence with theatrical figures such as Tony Kushner (with whom Wolfe worked closely on “Angels in America”) and photographs from throughout his career were purchased for an undisclosed amount. The archive also includes his research for historically driven productions, including for “Shuffle Along,” which Wolfe wrote based on the events surrounding the 1921 musical — a rare all-Black production at the time — and “Jelly’s Last Jam,” a musical about the life of the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, which is being revived next year as part of the Encores! series at New York City Center.Wolfe, 68, who directed “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” for film, cautions that the act of establishing the archive should not communicate that his career is waning. Rather, he views the process as making room for new stories, and — more practically speaking — making space in his home.“They were taking over,” he said of the boxes, “so I let them win.”Wolfe recalled that some of his saved materials included audition forms with his assessments of actors, notes from Kushner on Part 1 of “Angels,” and a scrapbook from his 1986 Off Broadway play “The Colored Museum,” which helped him gain national recognition as a playwright. Some items he said he decided not to part with just yet, including a note from Joseph Papp, the founder and longtime leader of the Public Theater, which Wolfe took over a couple years after Papp’s death, producing Broadway-bound shows such as “Caroline, or Change,” “Take Me Out” and “Topdog/Underdog.” (All three have had recent Broadway revivals.)Doug Reside, the theater curator for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, has sought to persuade artists like Wolfe to begin transferring their collections earlier than they might have expected because of complexities around saving digital material that may be stored on machines that are quickly becoming obsolete. This became a priority for Reside when he was a researcher at the Library of Congress working on the archives of Jonathan Larson, the “Rent” playwright and lyricist, whose three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks were a challenge to salvage.“It has become really important to start preserving this history as close to the moment of creation as possible,” Reside said.Wolfe’s own career spans a period of rapid technological development: He wrote and directed his first play, “Up for Grabs,” in 1975, and directed his most recent Broadway production in 2019. The archives include handwritten letters and telegrams Wolfe received with feedback about shows. Further down the technological timeline, there’s a DVD with a preview of Act 2 of “Shuffle Along,” as well as email printouts related to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”“It’s telling the stories of the shows that I worked on,” Wolfe said of the collection, “but embedded in that, it’s telling the story of those times.”Wolfe has not yet agreed to transfer his digital archives to the library, but he said that he would consider doing so in the future. The collection will be accessible in about a year in the special collections reading room of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. More