More stories

  • in

    In Broadway’s ‘Grey House,’ Something Nightmarish This Way Comes

    Levi Holloway on his psychological thriller starring Laurie Metcalf: “It wears the jacket of horror. But I think it’s more heart than horror.”When it comes to plays that inspire fear, unsettle the audience or display horrific intensity, only a handful come to mind. Martin McDonagh’s gruesome “The Pillowman” is one. Tracy Letts came up with two: the gleefully nasty thriller “Killer Joe” and the paranoia tale “Bug.”This certainly makes Levi Holloway’s “Grey House,” now in previews at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater, an oddity. The premise is classic horror: Stranded in a blizzard, a couple (Tatiana Maslany and Paul Sparks) end up in an eerie house filled with rather unusual children and their minder (Laurie Metcalf).“It wears the jacket of horror,” Holloway said of his play, which premiered in Chicago in 2019. “But I think it’s more heart than horror.”Paul Sparks, center, as a stranded traveler who finds shelter in a house occupied by, clockwise from left: Colby Kipnes, Sophia Anne Caruso, Eamon Patrick O’Connell, Millicent Simmonds and Alyssa Emily Marvin in “Grey House.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe genre may be scarce onstage but none of the major players here are strangers to works investigating disturbing tensions or the boundaries of reality. Metcalf and Sparks share a Stephen King connection: she starred in “Misery” on Broadway, and he was in Season 2 of Hulu’s “Castle Rock,” which is set in King’s fictional universe. Maslany’s virtuosic portrayal of numerous clones in the series “Orphan Black” earned her an Emmy Award. Millicent Simmonds played Emily Blunt’s daughter, Regan, in “A Quiet Place” and “A Quiet Place Part 2,” while Sophia Anne Caruso played Lydia in the “Beetlejuice” musical on Broadway and starred in the Netflix fantasy film “The School for Good and Evil.”Even the director, Joe Mantello, has partaken, putting on his actor’s cap to play a reporter in “American Horror Story: NYC.”During a series of interviews that took place in the Lyceum’s appropriately atmospheric basement lounge, members of the show’s cast and creative team discussed what horror means to them, and the particular challenges and rewards of “Grey House,” which opens on May 30. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.Levi HollowayWhen Holloway was 5, his father took him to see “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in a movie theater. “The skin was taken off of me,” Holloway said, “I was so scared.”Undeterred, his father eventually bought him a subscription to the horror film magazine Fangoria, so young Levi could understand the mechanics of fear. To encourage his kid to read, Dad gave him books by Stephen King, starting with “The Stand.”As a playwright, he has embraced horror partly out of genuine love (he mentioned John Carpenter’s “The Thing” as a favorite, and don’t get him started on why “The Exorcist III” is the best of the series) but also as a way to process a major trauma: In 2016, his twin sister was killed at the age of 35. “It was so meaningless and pointless, and such a baffling event that it got me thinking about the why of it,” he said.“I started thinking about predestination and fate and how no matter what direction we’re going, we’re going to end up where we have to be,” Holloway continued. “So I wanted to write about that, and I wanted to write about grief, where you put it and the house that holds it.”Caruso, left, and Metcalf, who plays a minder of a group of children, in the play, directed by Joe Mantello.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSophia Anne Caruso“Mind games, manipulation, psychological thrillers in general are the scariest genre of quote horror to me,” Caruso said. “And I think that this play definitely sits in the ‘psychological thriller’ section of horror.”The young actress has her issues with the genre, in which she sees women as often losing power. “But throughout this story, we are holding a lot of power without people directly realizing it,” she said of the play’s women. (Well, maybe not all of them.)“What I love about my character is I feel like she’s always one step ahead,” Caruso said of her role, which makes the most of the actress’s gift for sardonic delivery. “She knows exactly where we’re going but she doesn’t show it, and that’s a fun frustration to play with.”Joe MantelloBefore rehearsals began, Mantello watched “The Shining,” in which he saw parallels with Holloway’s play. “It’s a psychological thriller and, yes, there are elements of gore in it, but I think it was the isolation of that family in a very wintry landscape,” he said of the Stanley Kubrick film. “And some presence that is altering the trajectory of their lives.”As one of Broadway’s most in-demand directors, Mantello is used to figuring out exacting scripts, but he initially found the one for “Grey House” to be elusive. So he asked Holloway what animated the play’s inner logic. “I think that it’s important in this genre that this world has a particular set of rules, this house has a particular set of rules,” Mantello said. “Though the audience may not ever completely comprehend exactly what those rules are, we all have to be crystal-clear about them and adhere to them.”The “grey house” is not just a physical place, either: it seems to connect to a generalized anxiety that feels very modern, even though the show is set in 1977. “I feel that the world is in an incredibly dangerous place right now, and I’m very connected to the idea of people in peril,” Mantello said. Laughing, he added, “In this particular case, the danger is seemingly benign children, mysterious children.”“Leading the audience through the laughs into where we’re headed is a real fun actors’ path to take,” said Metcalf, above right, with Holloway at the Lyceum Theater.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesLaurie Metcalf“The thing that shook me the most was ‘The Exorcist,’” Metcalf said of her earliest encounters with horror films. “I think I was in my early teens and that did me in for horror for the next 50-something years.”And now here she is, starring in “Grey House.” Metcalf was drawn by the prospect of working again with Mantello, her frequent collaborator, and she was curious as to how he would handle a script that, she admitted, she did not “completely understand” the first time she read it. “I knew that Joe saw something in it that I wanted to be in the room to discover also,” she said.The show has to balance a tricky combination of dark wit and unsettling atmosphere. “The audience is going to teach us that piece of the puzzle — their reactions will definitely tell us a lot,” Metcalf said of how the comedy and horror genres thrive on viewers’ feedback. “We’ll learn how far we can go with the humor and the thrills.”She added, “I had the same feeling in ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane,’ which is horrific and funny,” Metcalf said, referring to performing in the Steppenwolf production of Martin McDonagh’s play, back in 1999. “Leading the audience through the laughs into where we’re headed is a real fun actors’ path to take.”Millicent SimmondsAs Caruso pointed out, genre cinema, especially horror, can be a fraught place for women. For Simmonds, who is deaf, there is an additional layer. “It’s rare to see Deaf people who actually have that kind of power and agency to navigate a world,” she said of her character, through an interpreter. “They’re often portrayed as victims, a pity creature, somebody to help. When I read the script,” she added, “it was about just a person, not necessarily that they’re a Deaf person.”Simmonds said that in general she has a hard time dealing with spiders and graphic violence in films, and cited Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” as having affected her “because you don’t know what’s real and what’s not” — something that also applies to “Grey House.”Cagey, like her colleagues, about discussing the play in detail, Simmonds allowed that she sees it as a maternal story. “It investigates this question of what is a mother,” she said. “What does a mother mean to each of us? What do you need to sacrifice to be a mother? How do you raise a family?”Paul SparksLike Mantello, Sparks connected the show to a larger sense of dread that is haunting our society, a sense that our world is unsettled. “There’s a lot of things that we can’t control and things that we don’t understand, and things that aren’t what we think they are,” he said. “All that stuff is in this play.”The actor pointed out that “Grey House” uses a major horror trope, the cabin in the woods. But Holloway spins it in a novel way, inserting a cryptic side to the story that made Sparks want to pick it apart, and decode it.But he hopes audiences show some restraint in how much they share after seeing it. “I’ve been really going out of my way to not tell people anything about what’s going on,” he said. “These actors, these kids — I think people are not going to know what to expect. And it’s not even going to be close to anything they can imagine.“I think you’re going to be shocked,” he added. “I really do.” More

  • in

    ‘Ted Lasso,’ Season 3, Episode 10 Recap: The Rich Are Different

    How quickly can a story line end? Very quickly.Season 3, Episode 10: ‘International Break’Do you remember when you were young and — at least if you were like me — you frequently misjudged how much space you had on a line to write what you intended, resulting in smaller and smaller, tightly squeezed letters as you approached the edge of the page? I feel as though that is where we find ourselves now in “Ted Lasso,” with just two episodes left in what is still theoretically the show’s last season.This week’s episode answered two of the show’s principal remaining questions — regarding Nate’s fate with West Ham and the future of Roy and Keeley — but so abruptly you could almost imagine you’d missed a scene or two along the way. This level of concision may have been necessary in part because the episode spent much of its hour-plus running time on two new and completely unnecessary story lines, two redemption arcs for tertiary characters, a fair amount of moping and a genuinely bizarre conception of how rich business owners make decisions. Even as we near the page’s edge, to put it another way, we’re still adding more words. The remaining ones will almost certainly have to be scrawled very small.First off, the story lines that did not move forward meaningfully: After focusing on Ted’s relationship with his son, Henry, and ex-wife, Michelle, two episodes ago, we have a second consecutive episode that has no interest in that subplot. Likewise, no news on Rebecca’s presumably upcoming familial developments — at least, unless a plastic Army man is saying more than I hope he is. But more on that later. Let’s start with the least important developments and work our way up.International break and Edwin Akufo’s proposalBoth of this week’s new subplots felt less like continuations of the season’s arc than like clogs that we needed to work through before getting to the real story.International breaks, as the name suggests, are weekends when national soccer leagues skip their matches in order for their top players to participate in FIFA-sponsored, nation versus nation competition. There have presumably been several of these in the three seasons of AFC Richmond play we have watched, although I can’t remember any mention of them before this episode.But now it is, for an episode at least, a Big Deal. Who will be selected to represent their native countries? Jamie for England, Van Damme (formerly Zoreaux) for Canada, Dani for Mexico, Bumbercatch for Switzerland and Colin for Wales. But no Sam for Nigeria? Not even after an episode-opening commentary singling him out as crucial to the team’s current 10-game winning streak?There appear to be two purposes to this subplot. The first is to set up the idea that joyous, loving Dani Rojas becomes a cruel competitor the moment he is on an opposing team. This entails some of the broad humor that has never been the show’s forte. (Remember Led Tasso? This is basically the same gag, with Dani substituted for Ted.) And it’s another idea that comes out of nowhere: I can’t recall Dani rejoicing in his efforts to injure the goalies for, say, West Ham, Manchester United, or any of his other Premier League opponents.The second purpose of the international break subplot is to help set up the Edwin Akufo subplot: The reason Sam wasn’t chosen to play is that Akufo, the unpleasant billionaire introduced back in Episode 11 of Season 2, bribed the Nigerian government $20 million not to select him. But that’s not all! He also plans to open another Nigerian-cuisine restaurant 20 meters away from Sam’s! And to deny Sam customers by personally calling and making reservations he doesn’t intend to keep using a variety of silly accents! I feel confident in saying this is not how billionaires — not even thin-skinned ones — spend their time.Toheeb Jimoh, left, and Phil Dunster in “Ted Lasso.”Apple TV+I’d like to stop there, but alas there’s more. Akufo is also planning to create a “super league” of exceptional teams that will compete only against each other and thus can charge more for tickets than typical matches. The details are unimportant, apart from the fact that this would theoretically make the team owners vastly more money while pricing average fans out of attendance. Color me cynical, but I’m confident that if it were this easy for rich team owners to make themselves richer it would already have happened.It’s a complicated setup to enable Rebecca, at a meeting of team owners, to stand up for everyday fans. Which is a setup for her to remind Rupert why he loved her and cause him to try to kiss her. Which is a setup for her to get over her longstanding obsession with beating Rupert on the pitch. Have I wasted your time with this lengthy explanation? Apologies, but that’s pretty much how I felt by the time this subplot was over.NateDepending on whom you ask, Nate has either been fired from managing Rupert’s West Ham squad or has quit. Either way, you’ll notice the past tense. We don’t actually see Nate quitting or getting fired, which would have been, I suspect, a very interesting scene had they bothered to film it. Instead, we go from the beginning (Nate belatedly realizing that Rupert is a bad man at the club last week) to the end (Nate being mopily unemployed) without any of the actual drama of a confrontation. It won’t be the only time this episode that “Ted Lasso” skips from start to finish without bothering with the messy “how did this happen?” part.Instead, we get Nate moping in his own bed, and then moping in his childhood bed at his parent’s place and then playing a violin (has this been mentioned before?) so that his dad can hear him and have a scene in which he shows that he’s not quite as crummy a father as he had appeared to be. We don’t even have any nice scenes with Jade this week, because she’s headed off to Poland to help her family screw in light bulbs, a joke that sadly may be the high point of this dreary story line. I’d like to say more, but I’m not sure what else there is to say.KJPRMy prediction last episode that Keeley’s breakup with her girlfriend/financier Jack would be forgotten without consequences proved incorrect. In fact, Jack has abruptly pulled all of the funding for Keeley’s firm, KJPR, and Keeley needs to be out of the office within 48 hours.For those keeping track, this is the third apparent instance in this episode in which a fabulously rich person has made a business decision based entirely on personal pique: Akufo spending a fortune to keep Sam off the Nigerian team (and opening a competing restaurant!); Rupert firing (or at least quickly accepting his resignation of) Nate, his by all accounts exceptionally talented and successful manager; and now Jack pulling the plug on KJPR. It’s a peculiar imagining of the way rich people typically make business decisions.But at least the show takes pains to show that rich people also make dubious business decisions based on sheer generosity. Following the owners’ meeting in which Rebecca decides against profit based on an appreciation of the fans — and persuades the other owners to do the same! — she decides to save Keeley’s firm by financing it herself.A couple of quick thoughts: First, if Keeley is in fact the P.R. whiz we keep hearing her to be — without ever seeing any evidence of this — couldn’t she, you know, find financing from someone who wasn’t a friend taking pity on her? Or has the fact that she takes many vacations, hires completely unqualified friends and never seems to do any work finally caught up with her? And second, has Keeley learned anything about mixing business and intimacy from her experience with Jack? If there is a Season 4 of the show, I half-expect Rebecca to pull her funding the next time Keeley fails to answer her texts.But at least we get to see Barbara redeemed after Keeley buys her a snow globe.Keeley and RoyWell, that was easy. Roy runs into Phoebe’s teacher — yay, Phoebe, genuinely and always — and she says he seemed “stuck” the last time they spoke, which evidently serves to immediately unstick him. Really? This wisp of a scene rather than, say, the powerful and spot-on lecture that Rebecca offered last week?But evidently that five-letter word is all it takes to make Roy want to get back together with Keeley, and his subsequent letter is all it takes to make Keeley want to get back together with Roy. There’s no conversation or negotiation, no working through what went wrong last time.Actually, I’m being unfair. There may have been such interactions. “Ted Lasso” just made the borderline unconscionable decision not to show them. We go from the two of them awkwardly standing in the doorway to a semi-clad Roy comfortably re-ensconced at Keeley’s.It’s precisely the same jump from the beginning to the end that we saw with Nate and Rupert, without any of that tricky middle part where people actually speak to one another. For that matter it’s the same nonchalance with which we moved from early signs of trouble between Roy and Keeley at the end of last season to the two of them already split up this season. If the show didn’t bother to show us the actual breakup, why should it show us the actual reconciliation? As someone who was rooting as hard for Keeley and Roy as anyone, I was astonished at how little emotional weight their reunion had.I know I’m quite down on this episode, and I know that many readers will like it more than I did — as was the case the last time I was substantially disappointed. Which is fine! The world don’t move to the beat of just one drum. But to be clear, especially for new readers: My disappointment is not because I dislike the show or any such nonsense. It’s because I like it enough to hold it to a high standard.Juno Temple in “Ted Lasso.”Apple TV+Here’s hoping that there are better things to come in the final two episodes, no matter how small the handwriting needs to be.Odd and endsI have always been in the camp that presumes Rebecca and her Dutch fella will get together by season’s end. (Why else show us the little girl’s room on the houseboat?) I now fear that, given the whole rush-to-the-end quality of this episode, their next meeting will also be abrupt — him showing up in London or her showing up at the houseboat with “happy ending” all but written on the screen. I for one was hoping to see them spend some time together again. But we’ll always have Amsterdam.Unless, of course, those predicting a Rebecca-Ted romance are right, which I dearly hope they are not. But Rebecca playing with the green matchbook and the green Army man together has me appropriately worried.Don’t even get me started on the odd and awkward hallway meeting between Rebecca and Sam.Wait, Rupert has already split up with Ms. Kakes before Rebecca got a chance to expose his affair? Boo! And did I hear correctly that her replacement is a Ms. Bread? I guess this makes Rupert a reverse Marie Antoinette.It’s a bizarre idea that Akufo, no matter how rich, could throw food on a variety of other very-rich folks without facing their rage, lawsuits and possible assault charges.I love Higgins’s delightfully dark take on Willy Wonka.Jamie’s evolution into the best guy ever continues. He’s the first to commiserate with Sam when the latter isn’t chosen for Nigeria and then he wears Sam’s number on the pitch. And his Uncle’s Day gift to newly minted best friend Roy — thank you, Phoebe! — is perfect.Speaking of: Roy wearing Phoebe’s tie-dye shirt to work was fine. But it would have been funnier if he’d worn the shirt Jamie gave him, even if it entailed a meeting with H.R.Sixty quid for a snow globe? That’s $75! Keeley may be the worst bargain-shopper ever. More

  • in

    ‘King James’ Review: We’ll Always Have LeBron

    Two men’s kindred obsession with a basketball player is the scaffold for Rajiv Joseph’s examination of male friendship at the Manhattan Theater Club.It takes a while to figure out if Rajiv Joseph’s latest play, “King James” — centered on two fans of the N.B.A. legend LeBron James — is actually about basketball.This coproduction between Steppenwolf Theater, in Chicago, and Center Theater Group, in Los Angeles, arrives at the Manhattan Theater Club after runs in both of those cities. Similarly, like an imperfect play on the court, the plot travels quite a bit before making its shot. But with two emotionally precise performances agilely directed by Kenny Leon, Joseph’s latest rebounds from its initial inertia, revealing a touching examination of male friendship and the powerful social currents beneath it.In 2004, Matt (Chris Perfetti), a Cleveland bartender, is trying to unload his season tickets to the Cavaliers’ home games after a bad investment leaves him needing cash fast. Despite not knowing how to check for texts on his Motorola Razr — one of the production’s clever pleasures is the way Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen’s sound design and Todd Rosenthal’s scenic design trace time through evolving cellphones and ringtones — he manages to arrange a meet-up with Shawn (Glenn Davis), a fledgling writer who’s just sold his first story.Shawn offers Matt much less than the asking price, but, sensing a kindred devotion to the team’s then-rookie LeBron James, the two strike a deal and strike up a friendship — a wobbly one that the story checks in on over the course of James’ career. In 2010, when James left for the Miami Heat, a decision the friends see as treason, even as Shawn considers his own move. In 2014, with James’s prodigal return to the Cavs — news which Matt, now working at his family’s furniture store following another financial mistake, takes with more contempt than Shawn might like. And in 2016, with the team’s first championship win, worlds away from the friendship’s Bush-era beginnings.A two-hander will almost always let the meat (be it sports, play dates or Idina Menzel obsessions) fall off as its thematic bones reveal themselves and, across those four scenes, James eventually takes his place as the catalyst for the duo’s deeper bond. But, however well acted, the interactions Joseph creates for them during the first act (2004 and 2010) are just a little too slight in their significance, leaving most of the show’s heft to the sturdier second act.The inclusion of Khloe Janel as a D.J. — posted up by the audience, away from the stage — playing requisite jock jams and period-appropriate Usher hits during transitions, hypes up the love of the game but obscures the play’s core. Luckily, the perfectly cast Davis and Perfetti, whose physicality keenly conveys the toll of time passing, are intensely watchable, whether they’re discussing foul shots or failed ambitions.At first, it doesn’t seem relevant to mention that Shawn is Black and Matt is white, because Joseph excels at letting this distinction inform the characters in a play where race doesn’t factor much, until it does. For the most part, Matt’s casual use of Black lingo can be chalked up to awkward passes at the basketball culture to which he wants to belong. And his pontifications on what he views as “the problems with America” — which he proposes are not reflected in professional basketball — are mostly just the vaguely righteous rumblings of an angry young white guy.When tension does bubble up, during the play’s final encounter, it appears inevitable and is astutely observed without feeling writerly, showcasing Joseph’s mastery over the way everyday conversation can belie or reveal social realities. His work here is a strong analysis of friendship dynamics built along, but not hinged upon, the issues that divide them. King JamesThrough June 18 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

  • in

    Bill Saluga, a Memorable Comedic Wiseguy, Is Dead at 85

    He played many characters in his career, but he was best known by far for the one who said, “You doesn’t have to call me Johnson.”Raymond J. Johnson Jr. was a wiseguy, dressed in a zoot suit and a wide-brimmed fedora and waving a cigar in his right hand.When someone mentioned his name, the shtick took off.“Ohhhh, you doesn’t have to call me Johnson,” he would say. “My name is Raymond J. Johnson Jr. Now, you can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay, or you can call me Johnny, or you can call me Sonny, or you can call me Junie, or you can call me Ray Jay, or you can call me R.J. Or you can call me R.J.J. Or you can call me R.J.J. Jr.“But you doesn’t have to call me Johnson.”And you can call his creator Bill Saluga, a diminutive comedian with a thick mustache who came up with Johnson while a member of the Ace Trucking Company, an improvisational sketch troupe whose most famous alumnus is Fred Willard. Mr. Saluga also played Johnson on various television series; on a disco record (“Dancin’ Johnson”); and, most memorably, in commercials for Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light beer.In 1979, at the peak of Mr. Saluga’s fame as a comedic one-hit wonder, Tom Shales of The Washington Post wrote that “now everybody and his brother are doing Saluga impressions throughout this very impressionable land of ours. He’s right up there with Steve Martin’s wild and crazy guy and Robin Williams’s madcap Mork.”Bob Dylan played off Mr. Saluga’s Johnsonian wordplay, and his own name change, in his 1979 song “Gotta Serve Somebody.” He sang, in part:You may call me Terry, you may call me TimmyYou may call me Bobby, you may call me ZimmyYou may call me R.J., you may call me RayYou may call me anything but no matter what you sayYou’re gonna have to serve somebodyMr. Saluga died of cardiopulmonary arrest on March 28 in a hospice in Los Angeles, his nephew, Scott Saluga, said. He was 85 and had been living in Burbank.The Tribune Chronicle, a newspaper in Warren, Ohio, near Youngstown, where Mr. Saluga was born, first reported his death on April 8. But it did not become widely known until Hollywood trade publications published obituaries this month.William Saluga was born on Sept. 16, 1937. When Billy, as his friends called him, was 10, his father, Joseph, was killed in an accident while working at the Republic Steel mill, and his mother, Helen (Yavorsky) Saluga, started working as a bookkeeper.Billy was a class clown and a cheerleader in high school. After two years in the Navy, he became a performer. In the early and mid-1960s he was seen on a local TV station, with a sketch comedy group called the Thimble Theater and at the Youngstown Playhouse, where, for seven years, he played roles in numerous productions, including “Inherit the Wind” and “Guys and Dolls.”In 1968, he became the talent coordinator for the comedian Steve Allen’s interview and entertainment show. “If you have a special or unusual talent,” a newspaper ad for the show read, “television needs you. Call Bill Saluga. 469-9011.”In 1969, after replacing a member of the Ace Trucking Company, he created the Johnson character during a man-on-the-street sketch with Mr. Willard at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, It became part of the troupe’s repertoire until he left in 1976. By then, the group had made numerous appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”Mr. Saluga appeared from 1976 to 1977 on the comedian Redd Foxx’s variety show and a comedy and variety series hosted by the comedian David Steinberg, on both of which he played Raymond J. Johnson. For the Steinberg show, he also portrayed a New York street guy named Vinnie de Milo.“Billy was always doing Ray J.,” Mr. Steinberg, said by email. “He was relentless with it. I would say, ‘Mr. Johnson,’ and Billy would be off.” He added: “He did it everywhere. At parties. His timing and delivery were so funny every time.”The character, with a delivery based in part on the con man Kingfish from the sitcom “Amos ‘n Andy,” appealed to Anheuser-Busch, which hoped to use him to distinguish Natural Light from a rival beer, Miller Lite. In 1978, the company teamed Mr. Saluga with Norm Crosby, the malaprop comedian, for a commercial set in a bar.When a customer asks for an Anheuser-Busch Natural Light, Mr. Crosby counsels him to say, “Just say ‘Natural,’” which propels Mr. Saluga to say: “See, you doesn’t have to call it Anheuser-Busch Natural Light. And you doesn’t have to call it Anheuser Natural. And you doesn’t have to call it Busch Natural. Just say ‘Natural.’” And when Mr. Crosby says, “Johnson’s right,” Mr. Saluga says, “Ohhhh, you can call me Ray or you can call me Jay. … ”The pair would go on to do a second spot. Eric Brenner, a friend of Mr. Saluga’s, said in a phone interview that Mr. Saluga had earned significant money in residuals from the two commercials, probably the most he made in his career.For the next 40 years, he took regular acting jobs — including a hostile ticket taker at an opera house in a 1992 episode of “Seinfeld” and Louis Lewis, the comedian Richard Lewis’s fictional cousin, in three episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in 2005 — as well as reprising Raymond J. Johnson on the animated TV series “The Simpsons” (2002) and “King of the Hill” (2010). “He played outrageous characters onstage, but offstage he was very reserved,” said Bill Minkin, a friend and fellow comedian. “It was that Midwest down-home thing.”No immediate family members survive.Mr. Saluga did not mind being known primarily as Raymond J. Johnson. In fact, he said, it gave him an agreeable anonymity when he stepped out of character.“I would sit in restaurants and hear the people behind me in the booth talking about me, and I was right there,” he said on “Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast” in 2017. “They didn’t know who I was, which was great.” More

  • in

    ‘Succession’ Season 4, Episode 8 Recap: The Will of Some People

    It’s election night in America. Stay away from the bodega sushi.Season 4, Episode 8: ‘America Decides’The day before Logan Roy died, he delivered a fiery call to arms to his ATN staff, letting them know what he expected from the network going forward. The speech was an angrier variation of the populist spiel he had given many times before, in which he insisted that the news should always be frank and unpretentious. He wanted his anchors to tell their viewers “truthful” things they had never heard anyone say before on television. He wanted ATN to be, in a word, “spicy.”Throughout this week’s action-packed, nerve-shredding episode of “Succession,” Logan’s kids argue a lot about what the old man would want them to do, as the presidential race between the Republican Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk) and the Democrat Daniel Jimenez (Elliot Villar) comes down to a couple of battleground states. The big sticking point is Milwaukee, where a fire at a vote-counting facility has destroyed enough ballots to tilt Wisconsin from blue to red.How would Logan have handled this? Would he have maintained the policy of “no brass on the battlefield” and left all of ATN’s messaging to the Decision Desk data-nerds? Or would he have seized the opportunity offered by Mencken to Roman, to shape the narrative such that the Mencken camp (and by extension the Roys) are the night’s big winners?To ask what Logan would do, though, is to miss the real crux of the issue. It was clear from Logan’s defenses of ATN that he didn’t care whether his network broadcast the facts. He preferred “the truth” — which has a more flexible definition, depending on who is doing the telling.On this election night, up in ATN’s executive offices, there are two competing truths, represented by the Jimenez supporter Shiv and the Mencken backer Roman. Every time Shiv tries to turn the conversation to things like Menckenite obstructionists in “victory vans,” Roman shouts, “False flag!” and rebrands the ominous vehicles as “fun buses.” The Roys are at an impasse.Roman has a decided advantage, given that ATN already has what Tom calls a “unique perspective” on the news. While the other networks are suggesting that Mencken goons may have burned the Milwaukee votes, ATN floats theories like “electrical failure.” (Roman would prefer to go with “Antifa fire bombing.”) At one point, ATN’s Tucker Carlson-like anchor Mark Ravenhead (Zack Robidas) delivers a rant during the network’s purportedly neutral coverage, attacking leftists for trying to turn the fire to their political advantage.Roman also has Kendall and Tom on his side, to a degree. Kendall is hesitant because he is no Mencken fan. When he mentions to Roman that he fears what a Mencken administration might mean for his adopted daughter, Sophie, his brother mocks him for caring about the ideals of American pluralism. Roman compares their whole argument to when they were kids, when Kendall would play the sober-minded big brother in order to get chicken for dinner, while the whinier Roman wanted steak.Kendall asks, “Because we had so much chicken when you were a kid, we have to elect a fascist?” And although he is being facetious, those kinds of lingering slights are what guides the decision-making this night.As for Tom, he is under pressure to quiet his critics by delivering big ratings for ATN’s election coverage. To get there, he endures glitchy touch-screens and a steady stream of Roys entering the newsroom’s forbidden areas. Tom remains inclined to side with Roman, perhaps because that puts him at odds with Shiv, whom he has not forgiven for their vicious argument at the tailgate party. Even when she tries to win him back by finally telling him that she is pregnant with his child, he stings her by asking if she is lying, as another “tactic.”Shiv has a rough time overall on election night. As the evening nightmarishly shifts Mencken’s way, she has a heart-to-heart with Kendall — in a reflection of the touching Season 2 scene in which he confided to her that he would never be Logan’s choice to run the company. Here, he listens to Shiv’s argument that ATN could slow the Mencken momentum. Their Decision Desk guru, Darwin (Adam Godley), knows from historical data and exit polling where the Milwaukee votes would have gone. They could put Darwin on camera and let him explain why ATN won’t project a winner in Wisconsin.But two things get in the way. The first is that Kendall really wants the next president to kill the GoJo deal, which Roman insists Mencken will do. So Kendall asks Shiv to take one more shot at persuading her ex-lover Nate to get Jimenez to make that same promise. Instead, she merely pretends to make the call and then lies to Kendall, saying that the Jimenez people are open to considering his proposal. This sets up the second impediment: when Kendall calls Nate to iterate more clearly what Shiv claims to have said.There is some phenomenal staging in this episode, a lot of which involves people passing phones back and forth — and at one point even holding one phone up to another so that the people on the lines can speak to each other. But the best phone sequence is Kendall’s call to Nate, which plays out mostly unheard on the other side of one of ATN’s enormous office windows, as Shiv looks on with dread. After Kendall gets the word from Nate that Shiv never called him, he walks over to talk to Greg, who Shiv knows is aware of her consultations with Matsson.Kendall, feeling betrayed by the sibling he trusts most, spits some icy words in Shiv’s direction and then tells Tom to make the call for Mencken. ATN really is about to help elevate an authoritarian to America’s most powerful public office because one spoiled brother is in a snit.Although this episode is incredibly entertaining, it does cut uncomfortably closer to real-world politics than is typical for “Succession.” This show always features characters and ideas inspired by real political figures, but the creator Jesse Armstrong uses these mainly as the backdrop to the Roys’ family drama — and as a way of satirizing generally the blinded arrogance of the powerful. Here though, the way the election plays out is so much like the specific circumstances of 2016 and 2020 that it might stir up bad memories for anyone who sweated and fretted through those nights.That’s ‌OK, though because while Roman may “ironically” make racist comments in the newsroom and may assure Shiv that “nothing happens” when terrible people take power, Armstrong is showing here that the pettiness of the Roys and their ilk does have repercussions. Everything for this family is about banking a win in the moment, regardless of whether it might later turn into a loss. That’s what their father taught them: Take what you can, when you can, and let someone else clean up after.So as the evening ends — with ATN having called Wisconsin and the presidency for Mencken, without having let Darwin explain that this is all just “pending” — Roman sums up what happened in terms Logan Roy would have understood.“We just made a night of good TV.”Due diligenceTom has a bad election night, too, ending with Greg handing him his phone and saying, “A lot of very important people want to scream at you.” This is a great episode though for fans of the sicko Tom-Greg dynamic. Not willing to entrust the “Gregging” he needs to anyone other than Greg, Tom keeps his lanky lackey close at hand, relying on him for everything from a quick bump of cocaine (Tom: “This is not a thing. It’s not going in a book.”) to double-shot coffees. Tom lays out a doomsday scenario in which Greg fails to keep him from getting drowsy, Tom miscalls the results in Colorado, China invades Taiwan, the world blows up and “We’re back to amoeba.”One of Tom’s non-Greg assistants makes the mistake of bringing bodega sushi into the office, which Tom nixes (“Tonight my digestive system is basically part of the Constitution!”) but Greg sloppily eats, ultimately leading to a stray smear of Wasabi ending up in Darwin’s eyes. Greg makes matters worse by pouring lemon La Croix onto the affected area. (“It’s not that lemony!” he insists.) True to Tom’s dire warnings, it is while Darwin is briefly incapacitated by foodstuffs that the Roys start making the decision to call the election for Mencken.Once Connor learns he lost Kentucky (“Alas Kentucky, Willa … alas vanity”), he scrambles to appease Mencken, offering to “concede in his direction.” So we get the wonderful spectacle of Connor delivering a peppery kiss-off speech in front of a sign bearing his campaign slogan: “Enough Already!”Just because ATN declared Mencken the winner doesn’t mean the election is over. The mess in Milwaukee needs to be resolved; and it could all end with Wisconsin flipping to Jimenez. In other words: Once again on “Succession,” a big deal remains unclosed. More

  • in

    On HBO’s ‘Succession,’ if You’re Eating Food, You’re Losing

    When it comes to the high-powered Roy dynasty, food is for the weak and striving.Autumn light filters through the treetops of Central Park West, streaming into Jean-Georges, giving the gray banquettes a matte, silver gleam. The space is plain, severe in its neutrality, undeniably grand and hushed. Each table, though in clear view of the others, is luxuriously cocooned by space, almost private.It’s the ideal place, really, for the Roy children — the scions of the Waystar Royco media empire on HBO’s “Succession” — to discuss their father’s funeral arrangements.The conversation is brisk, and though they chose Jean-Georges as their meeting spot, they don’t eat the food. They leave the pastries — the dark, oversize canelés and fruit-studded buns — along with the platter of fanned, cut fruit, completely untouched. They get up from their seats without so much as unraveling a napkin or dirtying a plate. The slight, feathered mark of Shiv’s nude lipstick on a coffee cup is the only trace of their presence.It’s not unusual for the Roys to avoid eating. From Logan’s humiliating game of “Boar on the Floor” to the menacing box of doughnuts he sends his children when they try to meet in secret, the food on “Succession” has always been deliciously toxic, dissonant and loaded — a clear line into the family’s trauma and power dynamics.But in the final season, things are especially warped and grim. It’s as if the show has stepped into its Ozempic era and real power can only be found in the total absence of appetite. For those with meaningful status in “Succession,” food doesn’t exist for pleasure or nourishment — it barely exists at all. If a character does have a nibble, no matter how small, it tends to be a red flag.At a business retreat in Norway, Tom Wambsgans, right, passes on the buffet.Graeme Hunter/HBOTom Wambsgans, Siobhan Roy’s husband, didn’t come from money, but married into this super-rich family, and has carefully studied their patterns and prerogatives. He is hyper-aware of the contradictions and intricacies of America’s unspoken upper-class etiquette — and often the first to criticize a faux pas.“She’s wolfing all the canapés like a famished warthog,” Tom tells cousin Greg, clocking the inappropriate date Greg brought along to Logan’s birthday lunch. Because what could be more plebeian, what could signify her being any more out of place, than actually eating the food?Not long after, at Logan’s wake, Tom misjudges his position and nominates himself to take over as interim chief executive for the company. If it wasn’t already clear he’d made a terrible mistake, it is when Tom pops a fish taco into his mouth. As he’s powerless, chewing, Karl imagines how the board might see him: “You’re a clumsy interloper and no one trusts you. The only guy pulling for you is dead, and now you’re just married to the ex-boss’s daughter, who doesn’t even like you.”By the time the Waystar team flies to Norway to finalize the sale of the company to Lukas Mattson, the billionaire chief executive of GoJo, Tom sees hospitality as pure gastro-hostility. As Waystar’s senior executives pile their plates with food at a buffet, he’s careful not to be seen eating breakfast at all. “Ambush!” he calls out cheerfully to his colleagues. “You took the bait, fattened for the kill.”And Tom’s not wrong. A GoJo executive comments on the portion size, too: “Hey, easy buddy, leave some for us.” The Waystar team’s desire for breakfast pastries isn’t the only thing that now feels embarrassing — the Americans are overdressed for the countryside, anxious for the deal to go through, fearful of losing their jobs. Their hunger, their appetite, their keenness, it’s a squishy surplus of vulnerability.As Season 4 opens, Logan is competing with his children to buy Pierce Global Media, and escapes his own birthday party in a huff to visit Nectar, a Greek-owned coffee shop on Madison Avenue. (For Town & Country, Charlotte Druckman wrote about this excursion as its own kind of power move.)In a rare moment of vulnerability, we see Logan eating. But first, he insists to his bodyguard, Colin, who is on the clock, that Colin is his best friend, that human beings are merely economic units in the market, that he isn’t sure what happens when we die. Emotionally, he’s a mess.“Nothing tastes like it used to, does it?” Logan says wistfully. “Nothing’s the same as it was.”Connor Roy and Willa Ferreyra hosted their rehearsal dinner at the Grill, a classic Midtown power-lunching spot. It ends up predictably miserable.Macall B. Polay/HBOIn the episode that aired on Sunday, the family reaches the heights of both their incompetence and their power. Election Day in the newsroom was already tense for Tom without the Roy siblings stomping around, sliding notes directly to TV anchors, pushing their agendas on his top voting analyst, scrolling through Twitter, reframing the headlines because, well, the right-wing candidate asked them to. Tom loses his temper when Greg approves cheap sushi as his lunch.It’s not much of a power move — it is not, for example, Logan telling the staff to scrape an entire over-the-top steak and lobster dinner for the family into the trash, then order pizza instead — but it’s the only move that Tom, who has lost control of the newsroom, who never had any control over in the first place, has left. He will allow the election results to be nudged and massaged, the newsroom to be compromised and swayed. He will allow the world to burn, but look, he is above the sushi. He will not touch the sushi.Greg, on the other hand, is happy to dig into his “bodega sushi” as the siblings pressure Darwin, ATN’s election analyst, to call the election before he’s ready. It’s a devastating and hilarious sequence. “This isn’t actually a numbers thing,” says Roman. “I’m just going to say we’re good and that’s on me.” “You can’t make the call ’til I make the call,” says Darwin, angrily.But a moment later, Darwin has given up all sense of editorial integrity and is punished for it, as he accidentally smears wasabi from Greg’s sushi into his own eyes. Greg, in a bumbling, misguided effort to help, pours stinging, lemon-flavored LaCroix right into the wound.It’s as if he didn’t know there’s no making things better with food — there is only making things worse.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

  • in

    I’m a Couples Therapist. Something New Is Happening in Relationships.

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmOne afternoon in 2020, early in the pandemic, I met Syl’violet and Matthew for a virtual session. Young, idealistic, deeply in love, they were also prone to dramatic fights. In this session Syl’violet, a vivacious essayist and spoken-word poet, was trying to describe the ways she felt Matthew, a measured medical student, was trying to control her, in this case by trying to dissuade her from buying a slushy. He thought they should keep to a tight budget until after he became a doctor and achieved financial stability. Then she could have “all the slushies you want later.” Syl’violet found his reasoning maddening, especially since he seemed to imply she was reckless.On the face of it, the fight seemed insignificant, but then an exchange took place that changed the tenor of the argument, connecting us to the underlying roots of the issue. “I have trouble envisioning that finish line,” Syl’violet exclaimed, tearing up, “because the plan that he’s talking about? My life has always been: The plan never works. You can do all the right things, you can obey all the right rules and get [expletive].” For a moment, Matthew continued to try to reason with her and convince her of his sound financial strategy. “I know that sounds very conceited, cocky,” he said, to which Syl’violet whipped back: “No! It sounds privileged!” She described her family’s relationship to money; they’d had nothing but trauma for generations. Syl’violet resented Matthew’s pride in his plan. “A privileged setting gave you access to all these things,” she said. “You’re taking ownership over it like, ‘I did it according to plan,’ as if, like, if other people did it according to plan, it would work out.”With the mention of the word “privilege,” Matthew came around to realizing they were talking about forces larger than themselves. Each of them was African American, but he came from a financially stable family; his parents, a firefighter and a bank manager, followed a middle-class trajectory and did well. “Let me rephrase,” Matthew said carefully, signaling to Syl’violet that he could see how his certainty about his future reflected his class background: “I recognize that if it wasn’t for my parents’ credit score, my loans to get — OK — so, I get that.” As the relevance of class and race came into focus, Syl’violet’s rage transformed into deep sorrow, generations of poverty weighing heavily on her. “I cannot stop thinking that we’re going to go bankrupt.” She worried that they might even be evicted. “I wish I could believe what you believe,” she told Matthew. He replied, his voice growing tender: “We have the same life now.” He looked at her, exuding care. “We have to live with the idea, the thinking, the viewpoint, that we’re going to die old together.”Syl’violet and MatthewDina Litovksy for The New York TimesOne of the most difficult challenges for couples is getting them to see beyond their own entrenched perspectives, to acknowledge a partner’s radical otherness and appreciate difference and sovereignty. People talk a good game about their efforts, but it’s quite a difficult psychological task. To be truly open to your partner’s experience, you must relinquish your conviction in the righteousness of your own position; this requires humility and the courage to tolerate uncertainty. Coming to see the working of implicit biases on us, grasping that our views are contingent on, let’s say, our gender, class background or skin color, is a humbling lesson. It pushes us beyond assuming sameness, opening up the possibility of seeing our partner’s point of view.I’ve been working as a psychologist seeing individuals and couples since the mid-1990s, and in the past eight years, I’ve witnessed a tremendous change in the kinds of conversations couples can have. Not long ago, if I would ask a couple about the ways class or race played out between them, I’d typically be met with an awkward shrug and a change of topic. But recent events have reshaped the national conversation on power, privilege, gender norms, whiteness and systemic racism. Together these ideas have pushed us to think, talk, argue and become aware of the many implicit biases we all carry about our identities, unconscious assumptions that privilege some and inflict harm on others. These insights have also made it easier for people to realize there may be plenty of other unconscious assumptions undergirding their positions. I’ve been surprised and excited by the impact of this new understanding, and it has all made my work as a couples therapist easier.There has, of course, been ferocious pushback against many of these ideas, claims that they are divisive or exclusionary. #MeToo, B.L.M. and trans rights have been weaponized in service of the culture wars dominating the media. But in my practice, I’ve found that engaging with these progressive movements has led to deep changes in our psyches. My patients, regardless of political affiliation, are incorporating the messages of social movements into the very structure of their being. New words make new thoughts and feelings possible. As a collective we appear to be coming around to the idea that bigger social forces run through us, animating us and pitting us against one another, whatever our conscious intentions. To invert a truism, the political is personal.Some five years ago I started working on a documentary series called “Couples Therapy,” created by the filmmakers Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg and Eli Despres and airing on Showtime, that chronicles 18 to 20 weeks of therapy with couples who courageously volunteer to have their sessions filmed. (The couples in this essay were filmed for the show, which makes it possible for me to write about them; only some of those who are filmed end up on air.) We are now several seasons in. I was drawn to the project knowing that the directors were committed to an honest, vérité portrayal of therapy, and to looking at the social factors that thread through people’s lives and relationships.I am also trained as a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis is about exploring unconscious motivations behind thoughts or actions. It allows people to gain access to how early experiences — vicissitudes of attachment and trauma — have shaped them, and to expand their capacity for thought and feeling. For couples, I incorporate systems thinking, a practice that focuses on the system — a couple, say or a family — and interprets how each individual unconsciously behaves in ways that serve the system as a whole.But what we mean by “unconsciously” is an ongoing debate. Freud was known in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for his singular focus on the private, interior world. In particular, he wrote about the epic battle between unconscious drives and forces of civilization. Traditional psychoanalysis has mostly focused on early scenes between the young and their caregivers as shaping the psyche, leaving the sociopolitical context to other disciplines. I am of a later theoretical school that, rather than seeing civilization in conflict with the self, sees the social contract, our relationship to the collectives we belong to, as nested in the deepest corners of our unconscious. For me, psychoanalytic exploration is just as much about our deep ethical dilemmas regarding how to live with one another, and our environment, as it is about early family dramas; my patients’ repressed experiences with the ghosts of their country’s history are as interesting as with their mothers.Over the years, I’ve come to see that one of the most pernicious issues couples struggle with is working through wrongdoing and blame. The claim “You hurt me” often sends couples spiraling. People want to feel like good and lovable beings; their intentions make perfect sense to themselves, and they hate being interpreted as selfish. In psychoanalytic jargon we often say, “No one likes being the ‘bad object.’” In fact, there are few things people resist more than being held responsible for causing harm. It immediately threatens to overwhelm the “offender” with shame (Am I a bad person?) and guilt (Have I caused irreparable damage? Should I be punished?). Yet serious hurt that goes unacknowledged leads to the accumulation of resentment and a deadening of the relationship.Our ongoing national conversations about systemic biases have made it easier for couples to acknowledge wrongdoings by easing people into the idea of unconscious complicity. Accepting that you are part of a complex social system and implicated in its biases no matter what you tell yourself can also help you accept that in other aspects of your life, you are partly governed by unconscious forces you do not necessarily recognize. In Freudian terms, the ego is not a master in its own house. In other words, to know if you’ve caused harm, it is not enough to ask yourself, “Did I intend to hurt the other?”; you may need to listen to the feedback of others. These insights can have ripple effects beyond an awareness of specific biases, becoming relevant in many aspects of our lives — in our relationships with partners or children, in reviewing our life history. As my friend Nick described it: “Everything about me was raised to believe I am not racist or privileged, but in recent years I realize how easy certain things have always been for me simply because I’m white. I am humbled. And that has changed the way Rebecca and I talk with each other.”One of the most difficult challenges for couples is getting them to see beyond their own entrenched perspectives, to acknowledge a partner’s radical otherness.A shift in our vocabularies has also played a role. Language tends to evolve to better accommodate experiences of the dominant social group, leaving other experiences obscured from collective understanding, and thus silently perpetuating bias and harm. When these gaps are filled by new concepts, social change can follow. The expanding lexicon around bias and privilege includes terms like “white fragility” or “white tears,” referring to white people’s defensive refusal to fully engage with accountability; other phrases like “virtue signaling,” being “a Karen” or “performative allyship” underline the difference between honest and fake engagement with questions of ethics, morality and responsibility. These terms have implications beyond race, and I’ve seen them work their way into the therapy room. They’ve helped couples see the difference between the wish to receive forgiveness and assurance of your goodness and actual concern for the one you offended. Analysts call this distinction the difference between guilt and guiltiness. Guilt entails feeling bad for having harmed another; guiltiness is the preoccupation with yourself — whether you are or aren’t guilty. This preoccupation is all about warding off shame, which blocks concern for others.Questions of guilt hovered over another couple I worked with. He had recently cheated on his wife. They were generally deeply supportive of each other, but after she found out about his transgression, she was terribly upset and also confused. Their attempts to talk about what happened were halting. #MeToo rhetoric was woven into their discussions, functioning as a superego, shaping and inhibiting what they could even think. She said that she felt that the lessons of the movement were telling her not to forgive but to leave him — “Especially now, if a woman is being wronged, you get out.” It was hard for her to know how she actually felt about it all. Early on, he couldn’t separate remorse from fear. He was terrified of getting into trouble, and guiltiness prevailed. His voice was hushed while he scrutinized me intently, worried about how he would be perceived: “There are a lot of men in this business right now who have taken positions of power and use them to have sex with people.”They were both white and understood their privilege and were apologetic about it. She often undid her own complaints — “I levitate out” — by having the thought, “Oh, poor cis white woman.” He was uncomfortable, too. He talked about reading the news “about another Black or brown person being killed. And it’s just like I feel a little — well, I feel guilty, to be honest, to be sitting here.” The lessons of the Black Lives Matter movement initially can provoke such paralyzing guilt and shame that people become defensive and stop fully thinking. Yet over time, I’ve found, the ideas can inspire deep psychological work, pushing people to reckon with the harm that has been done, the question of whom should be implicated, and the difference between virtue signaling and deeper concerns. These are tough and important lessons that can carry over into intimate relationships. In this case, the husband described a new understanding about the ways he exercised power at work: “Hold on. Have I been an ally? Has it just been optics?” These insights extended even to his way of speaking about his transgression. He had been rationalizing his behavior by saying that his wife was not giving him the attention he needed. But moving beyond what the couple called “optics,” now he was asking himself for a more thorough accounting of what his cheating was really about, and how it affected his wife. He explained how lonely he was if she traveled; he felt left behind and discarded, a feeling deeply familiar to him from early childhood. Acknowledging his vulnerability was hard for him, but it opened up a series of honest conversations between them. “I convinced myself she does not desire me,” he said. “I’m not the popular guy. I’m not the strong guy.” He linked those feelings to insecurities he felt as a teenager, when he suffered chronic teasing from kids at school for being perceived as effeminate.This new, nondefensive way of talking made it possible for her to understand how his transgression hit her where she felt most insecure, and he could see it, generating remorse and forgiveness between them. She described how it had become easier for both of them to “check” themselves for their impact on the other person, and quickly “notice or apologize.” In one session she said, smiling: “You were a jerk to me yesterday, and then you apologized a couple hours later. You recognized that you took out your frustration there on me because I was an easy target.” He realized that he stopped skimming over ways he caused others pain: “I actually was just thinking therapy and the Black Lives Matter movement have made me keenly aware of the words that just came out of my mouth, and the understanding that she reacted adversely to that, instead of me just going, ‘We move on, because that’s awkward.’ There’s a need now to address it.” He continued: “ ‘Did I just upset you? What did I do to just upset you?’”Couples work always goes back to the challenge of otherness. Differences can show up around philosophical questions like what is important to devote a life to, or whether it is ethical to have babies with a climate crisis looming; or it can be closer to home, like whether having a sexual fantasy about a person who is not your partner is acceptable; or even as seemingly trivial as the correct way to load a dishwasher. Whatever the issue, differences can become a point of crisis in the relationship. Immediately the question of who is right, who gets their way or who has a better handle on reality pops up. Narcissistic vulnerabilities about self-worth appear, which then trigger an impulse to devalue the other. Partners try to resolve such impasses by digging in and working hard to convince the other of their own position, becoming further polarized.The challenge of otherness may be easiest to see when we think of racial differences. This was certainly true for James and Michelle. Michelle was a calm, gentle, somewhat reserved African American social worker, and James, at the time a police officer, was a slight, wiry white man whose face did not reveal much feeling. They came in with classic conflicts around division of labor and differing parenting styles, and then the pandemic hit. Quarantined, working remotely and home-schooling their 3-year-old son, they started fighting about Covid protocols. Michelle was aware of the way that Covid was devastating Black communities and wanted to be careful. James, along with his fellow police officers and his conservative parents, thought the concern was overblown. Discussion about how race shaped James and Michelle’s experiences and ideas routinely dead-ended. If Michelle tried to bring up the topic, James would insist, “I don’t see color,” and say he didn’t know what she was talking about. In our sessions, Michelle sounded hopeless: She wanted him to understand how traumatizing Covid had been for Black people. But she was frustrated by his inability to acknowledge real difference, as if everyone was the same race. “He’s of the mind-set that ‘I don’t see color.’” She continued setting out his thinking: “ ‘I don’t want to hear what you have to say because that’s not how I think.’” That point of view “obviously angers me,” she said. James would shrug, expressionless. Michelle was describing the infuriating experience of trying to break through a barrier: Her husband wasn’t consciously aware that whiteness was a perspective that was constricting what he could imagine or comprehend.After George Floyd was murdered and protests of all kinds erupted across the country, the dynamic between James and Michelle started to shift. Psychoanalysts are often interested in people’s fantasies, the scenarios running under the hood of conscious thought that express hidden desires and fears. When I asked James and Michelle about theirs, they shared apocalyptic ones: Each was imagining a full-on race war. Michelle imagined loss of all contact and trust between Black people and white people. James, who seemed uncharacteristically tense, saw himself on one side of a divide and was envisioning an “all-out physical combat.” “With whom?” I asked. “With anybody outside of this household. Anybody that tries to come and take anything from us because they’re struggling to survive and they start looting to feed their family, they’re now coming to my house.” Yet over time, as the conversation about Black lives continued, his own identifications became more complex and nuanced. He still felt loyalty to his fellow police officers and his conservative family, but he became aware that those feelings were now in tension with Michelle’s beliefs and what he was witnessing on the news about police violence against Black men and loud public demand for police reform.Michelle and James with their son.Dina Litovksy for The New York TimesJames’s changing internal landscape was reflected in his clear distress about “the all-out chaos that a large conflict can bring if we’re further divided in this country. You wouldn’t know who to trust from place to place.” Not knowing whom to trust also meant he could no longer trust his old belief system — in which it was clear who was “good” and who was “bad.” This disruption was creating new concerns and fantasies. Rather than fearing looters, he now feared polarization: “Michelle might be able to seek refuge somewhere where I might get shunned, or vice versa.” He was terrified that they wouldn’t be able to keep their young child safe.Interestingly, engaging with the question of systemic racism did not polarize Michelle and James but rather helped them do the important psychological work that I doubt I, as their therapist, could have inspired in them on my own. Something began to shift inside James, and he was no longer assuming sameness. He was no longer imposing his version of reality on Michelle, but rather “mentalizing” — understanding his and her mental states as separate and different subjective experiences: thoughts, feelings, beliefs and desires. In a meaningful moment he said, “I know it hits her harder than it does me.” I was moved to hear James plainly state: “We can never truly know what each other goes through because we’re not each other. So all we can do is be in as much understanding as possible.” He also recognized that he felt less defensive, “because she’s not directly attacking me.” And he saw a way for the two of them to remain connected, despite their difference. “We could get into a debate or an argument and be on opposite sides of the spectrum, completely juxtaposed, and manage to come through it and learn something about another perspective.”Michelle, who often described herself as guarded, also began to drop her defensive posture. She was looking at him fondly, her voice warmer. “These are things that I never really heard him fully articulate, particularly about his insecurities and feeling caught in the middle. That’s helpful for me to hear, because it makes me more conscious and aware of how he’s feeling.” For the first time, they were each entertaining multiple perspectives. Love is ultimately measured by people’s capacity to see and care about the other person as they are; succeeding in this effort is how people in relationships grow.Dr. Orna Guralnik is a clinical psychologist, a psychoanalyst and an academic who serves on the faculty of the N.Y.U. postdoctoral program in psychoanalysis, teaching a course in identity and politics and psychoanalysis with culture in mind. She is also the therapist on the Showtime documentary series “Couples Therapy.” Her writing centers on the intersection of psychoanalysis, dissociation and cultural studies. Dina Litovsky is a Ukrainian-born photographer who moved to New York in 1991. In 2020, she won the Nannen Prize, Germany’s foremost award for documentary photography. More

  • in

    Tony Awards Broadcast Can Proceed After Striking Writers’ Union Agrees

    The Tony Awards, a key marketing opportunity for Broadway, can go ahead in an altered form after the striking screenwriters’ union said it would not picket this year’s broadcast.This year’s Tony Awards ceremony, which had been in doubt ever since Hollywood’s screenwriters went on strike earlier this month, will proceed as scheduled in an altered form after the writers’ union said Monday night that it would not picket the show.“As they have stood by us, we stand with our fellow workers on Broadway who are impacted by our strike,” the Writers Guild of America, which represents screenwriters, said in a statement late Monday.A disruption could have been damaging to Broadway, which sees the televised ceremony as a key marketing opportunity, particularly now, when audiences have yet to return to prepandemic levels. Several nominated shows have been operating at a loss, holding on in the hopes that a Tony win — or even exposure on the broadcast — could boost sales.The union made it clear that the broadcast, which is scheduled to air on CBS on June 11, would be different from past ceremonies.“Tony Awards Productions (a joint venture of the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing) has communicated with us that they are altering this year’s show to conform with specific requests from the W.G.A., and therefore the W.G.A. will not be picketing the show,” the union said in a statement. “Responsibility for having to make changes to the format of the 2023 Tony Awards rests squarely on the shoulders of Paramount/CBS and their allies. They continue to refuse to negotiate a fair contract for the writers represented by the W.G.A.”The union did not detail what those differences would be, and the Tony Awards administrators did not have any immediate comment. But a person familiar with the plan, who was granted anonymity to speak about conditions that are not yet public, said the revised broadcast would include the presentation of key awards and live performances of songs from Broadway shows, but that it would not feature any scripted material by screenwriters in its opening number or comedic patter.The Tony Awards agreed that they would not use any part of a draft script that had been written before the screenwriters’ strike began, said the person.It was not immediately clear what role, if any, Ariana DeBose will play in the unscripted show. The Oscar-winning, Broadway-loving actress had hosted the awards ceremony last year, and had agreed to host again this year.It became clear immediately after the screenwriters went on strike that the labor disruption could affect the Tony Awards, because the awards ceremony is televised (by CBS) and live-streamed (by Paramount+) and ordinarily features a script written by screenwriters.Broadway is a heavily unionized industry, and unionized theater workers like actors and musicians were not going to participate in an awards ceremony being protested by another labor union. Tony Awards administrators, aware of those concerns, asked the W.G.A. for a waiver that would have allowed its writers to work on the show, given the dire straits of the theater industry; on Friday, the W.G.A. denied that request, and on Monday night it reiterated that denial, saying that the guild “will not negotiate an interim agreement or a waiver for the Tony Awards.”But Tony Awards administrators did not give up, and asked the guild if, even without a waiver to allow screenwriters to work on the show, it would allow the broadcast to proceed without writers as long as it meets certain conditions.Prominent theater artists who work on Broadway and are allied with the writers guild also spoke up on behalf of the Tonys, arguing that forcing the show off the air would be devastating to the art form and to the many arts workers it employs. The combination of the lobbying efforts and the new conditions appears to have prompted the guild to say Monday night that it would not picket the broadcast.The striking screenwriters have argued that their wages have stagnated and working conditions have deteriorated despite the fact that television production has exploded over the last decade. Negotiations between the major Hollywood studios — represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers — and the W.G.A. broke down three weeks ago. Roughly 11,500 writers went on strike beginning on May 2.Over the last two weeks, the writers have assembled picket lines outside the major studios in Los Angeles and production sound stages in New York. But the writers have also gone farther afield, with some taking to picket outside productions in more far-flung locales like Maplewood, N.J., Chicago and Philadelphia.The threat of demonstrations forced Netflix to cancel a major in-person showcase for advertisers, which was scheduled for Wednesday, and to turn it into a virtual format instead. The company also canceled an appearance for Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, at the PEN America Literary Gala on Thursday.CBS has been broadcasting the Tonys since the 1970s, making it one of the longest continuous relationships between a single broadcaster and an awards show. CBS has a deal to broadcast the show through 2026. Because of the Tonys’s relatively low viewership, it has long been more of a prestige play for the network than a significant profit maker. More