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    Len Goodman, Judge of ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ Dies at 78

    Mr. Goodman, who was also a longtime judge on the British show “Strictly Come Dancing,” was known for his wry humor and colorful phrases and delivery.LONDON — Len Goodman, a former British exhibition dance champion who was a longtime judge on the BBC reality show “Strictly Come Dancing,” as well as its American spinoff, “Dancing With the Stars,” died on Saturday in a hospice in Kent, England. He was 78.The cause was bone cancer, his agent, Jackie Gill, said on Monday. Mr. Goodman, who had been working until up to a few weeks ago, was with his wife, Sue Barrett, and his son, James, when he died, Ms. Gill added.Mr. Goodman was the head judge on the BBC show “Strictly Come Dancing” for over a decade until 2016. From 2005 until last year, he also judged the U.S. version, ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars,” where he was known for addressing contestants with wry humor, charm and colorful phrases, as well as a distinctive delivery that included the way he would announce the score of “se-VEN!”“He retained his sense of humor during his illness and dealt with it with great dignity,” said Ms. Gill. “He was always a true gentleman. He loved his work and never took anything for granted.”Leonard Gordon Goodman was born in Bethnal Green, London, his agent said. He moved to Blackfen, then in Kent, England, and now part of London, when he was 6 and attended Westwood Secondary Modern School. He started dancing when he was 19, relatively late in life for someone who later becomes a professional, according to Ms. Gill.Mr. Goodman went on to have a successful career as a dancer, winning Dual of the Giants, the British Rising Stars, the British Exhibition Championships (four times) and the World Exhibition Championships. He then opened the Goodman Academy, a dance school in Dartford, England.His first marriage, which ended in divorce, was to Cherry Kingston, a dancer, in 1972. He then had his son, James, with his partner Lesley. In 2012, he married Sue Barrett.In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Goodman is survived by his two grandchildren.Mr. Goodman, right, shakes hands with the then-Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace in 2018.John Stillwell/Press Association, via Associated Press More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Tom Jones’ and ‘Couples Therapy’

    PBS’s literary adaptation series tackles Henry Fielding’s classic, and the Showtime docuseries returns with Dr. Orna Guralnik and a new group of couples.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, April 24-30. Details and times are subject to change.MondayWhoopi Goldberg in “The Color Purple.”Warner Bros.THE COLOR PURPLE (1985) 8 p.m. on TCM. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Alice Walker, this Academy Award-nominated film by the director Steven Spielberg follows Celie (Whoopi Goldberg), a Black woman from the American South over the course of 40 years during the early 20th century. The film explores themes of domestic violence, poverty, racism and sexism, as well as love, friendship and resilience. In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin noted that the film glosses over some of the grittier aspects of the novel, but still tells Celie’s story with a sense of “momentum, warmth and staying power.”TuesdayFrom left, Demi Singleton, Will Smith and Saniyya Sidney in “King Richard.”Warner Bros.KING RICHARD (2021) 5:35 p.m. on HBO2e. This Academy Award-nominated film by the director Reinaldo Marcus Green is an emotional yet buoyant look at the rise of the young tennis stars Serena (Demi Singleton) and Venus Williams (Saniyya Sidney). Will Smith, who won a best actor Oscar for this role, plays the girls’ father, Richard Williams, who had plans to catapult his daughters to success even before they were born. A.O. Scott declared the film “a sports drama that is also an appealing, socially alert story of perseverance and the up-by-the-bootstraps pursuit of excellence,” in his review for The Times. “It’s a winner.”WednesdayCHASING CARBON ZERO 9 p.m. on PBS. This new episode from the documentary series NOVA takes a look at the science behind the technology that could help the U.S. reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Through interviews with scientists, engineers and change makers in the environmental sector, the episode examines the country’s current excessive emissions, before identifying the existing technologies and processes that could slash emissions in half by 2030.AWKWAFINA IS NORA FROM QUEENS 10:30 p.m. on COMEDY. This comedy series starring the rapper and Golden Globe-winning actress Awkwafina as the show’s titular character is back for its third season. The show follows Awkwafina’s Nora Lum, who lives with her father and grandmother, as she navigates coming into her own. The series is based on Awkwafina’s own upbringing in New York City.Thursday(RE) SOLVED 9 p.m. on VICE. This new true crime series takes a second look at some of the most controversial celebrity deaths. Through examinations of police reports and their own sleuthing, professional investigators and armchair detectives re-examine and investigate the causes of death of Hollywood figures such as Bob Saget, Prince and Anna Nicole Smith.100 DAYS TO INDY 9 p.m. on The CW. A new docuseries about the world of open-wheel car racing, also known as Indy car racing, brings viewers on the journeys of racing teams and NTT IndyCar Series drivers as they train to compete in the Indianapolis 500 — a 500-mile race considered to be the sport’s premier competition. This six-part series premieres 100 days before the race and is directed by the Emmy-winning director and producer Patrick Dimon.FridayDr. Orna Guralnik in “Couples Therapy.”SHOWTIMECOUPLES THERAPY 8 p.m. on SHOWTIME. Returning for the second installment of its third season after a yearlong hiatus, this docuseries follows the real-life therapy sessions of couples as they hash out their intimacy issues with Dr. Orna Guralnik, a psychologist and couples therapist. The Times critic Margaret Lyons described the viewing experience as “equal parts insight and voyeurism.” This installment features four new couples navigating topics including polyamory, Mormonism and infidelity.From left, Mark Whitfield, Lizz Wright and Linda May Han Oh in “International Jazz Day from the United Nations.”Steve MundingerINTERNATIONAL JAZZ DAY FROM THE UNITED NATIONS 10 p.m. on PBS. Premiering two days before International Jazz Day, this one-hour television special from the United Nations is a celebratory nod to the history and evolution of jazz. Acclaimed artists will perform original songs and interpretations of classics, with a cast ranging from the legends David Sanborn, Herbie Hancock and Marcus Miller, to modern favorites including Gregory Porter, Joey Alexander and Lizz Wright. The blues singer Shemekia Copeland will open the program with her social justice anthem “Walk Until I Ride,” and a full-cast rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine” will close out the night.SaturdayDavid Bowie in “Moonage Daydream.”David Bowie Estate/HBOMOONAGE DAYDREAM 8 p.m. on HBO. The Emmy award-winning filmmaker Brett Morgen’s ode to the singer-songwriter David Bowie is “less a biography than a séance,” A.O. Scott writes in his review for The Times. With the entire contents of Bowie’s archives at his disposal, Morgen weaves together snippets of Bowie’s own narration with never-before-seen footage and music to produce an ethereal “portrait of the artist as a thoughtful, lucky man.”SundayTIME100: THE WORLD’S MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE 7 p.m. on ABC. To celebrate this year’s TIME100 list of the World’s Most Influential People, the global media brand is holding a gala event at New York City’s Lincoln Center. The event will be hosted by the actress Jennifer Coolidge, an honoree from this year’s list, and will feature performances from other honorees, including Doja Cat and Lea Michele.TOM JONES 9 p.m. on PBS. Mid-18th-century England comes alive in this retelling of the classic Henry Fielding novel from PBS’s “Masterpiece,” a literary adaptation series. Told in four parts, the series follows Tom (Solly McLeod), a man of humble beginnings and uncertain parentage, and the sweet, seemingly unattainable heiress Sophia (Sophie Wilde) as they forge a forbidden romance despite their class differences and the tireless meddling of the seductress Lady Bellaston (Hannah Waddingham). More

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    Review: In ‘Prima Facie,’ Jodie Comer Makes the Case

    The “Killing Eve” star has a spectacular Broadway debut in a play that puts sexual assault jurisprudence on trial.The neon image of a louche Lady Justice, in an electric blue robe and a hot pink mask, greets the audience at the Golden Theater as if the place were a strip joint for lawyers.In a way it is, at least while “Prima Facie,” which opened on Sunday, is playing there. Over the course of the one-woman, 100-minute play, we watch a barrister — the story takes place in England — remove every piece of psychological armor from the women she cross-examines in sexual assault cases, then see the same armor stripped from her when she becomes a victim herself.The play, by Suzie Miller, won all sorts of awards in Australia and Britain. It’s easy to see why. Its star, Jodie Comer, late of “Killing Eve,” gives a performance of tremendous skill and improbable stamina, especially considering it is her first stage appearance. The production, directed by Justin Martin, is chic and accessible, with design flourishes, by now de rigueur, to underline the idea that it is a Big Event. And the reform of sexual assault jurisprudence that the play advocates could hardly be more convincingly argued or worthy of our attention.But the underlining and the advocacy do something odd to the drama: They make it disappear.Not at first. When we meet Tessa Ensler she’s a complex and theatrical character, a “thoroughbred,” “primed for the race,” with “every muscle pumped.” She’s also, in Comer’s interpretation, funny, sexy and self-deflating, bloviating in bars and flirting with associates. She is not beneath the arrogance of pedigree: “Top law school, top city, top marks, top people.” When she bellows drunkenly that “innocent until proven guilty” is the bedrock of civilized society, you see that she also uses it as a free pass for her own dodgy behavior. At one point she throws a piece of trash into the audience.Thoroughbred she may be, but we soon meet a different incarnation of Tessa: a refugee from the working class, never able to return to it comfortably. Visiting her chilly mother in Liverpool, she becomes a girl in want of kindness and not getting much. (Her older brother is violent.) The posh accent she uses in court seems to erode before our ears, revealing the peculiar early-Beatles twang of her (and Comer’s) native Scouse dialect. (“Says” is not pronounced “sez” but “saze.”) She dashes back to London before she can get hurt.The dashing is not just Tessa’s M.O. but the production’s. With its expressionistic sound (lots of pumped-up heartbeats by Ben and Max Ringham) and sudden slashes of harsh light (by Natasha Chivers), Martin’s busy staging is at pains to help Comer fill the vast space alone. She doesn’t need it; she solves the one-actor problem with her own resourcefulness, handily playing all sides of conversations that sometimes involve several people. And when she must be both a third-person reporter of a remembered event and a first-person participant in it, she makes the echo meaningful by using it to specify the content. The laugh she lets out after saying “We laugh” is a very particular and complicated kind.Comer delivers a complex portrayal, our critic writes, going from a high-powered barrister to a defenseless victim.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, Martin has her constantly running about, moving tables, jumping on those tables to declaim in court, shouting over music, fiddling with her clothing and juggling props. Some of this stage business helps provide character insight that might go missing in the absence of other actors: When approached by a senior trial lawyer interested in offering her a job, Tessa tries to hide her Victoria’s Secret shopping bag. But much of it feels pro forma.In any case, the bustle comes to a halt halfway through. Now we meet a third Tessa, this one the victim of a rape she knows she will have trouble proving to the law’s satisfaction. She was drunk; she had previously consented to have sex with the man; she couldn’t shout no because he covered her mouth to the point that she could hardly breathe.She now enters the legal system as a complainant, not a defender: “Same court, no armor,” she says. Comer’s portrayal of that defenselessness is devastating: Mousy and short-circuited, the gloss gone from her hair, she looks small in her clothes and alone in the world. Her voice has shriveled. Even Miriam Buether’s set — sky-high shelves of case files — abandons her, rising into the flies.Yet this is also where the play abandons itself. Not its argument, of course. As Tessa suffers the same kind of cross-examination she has visited on other women in the name of “testing the case” impartially, it becomes painfully clear that finding truth, let alone justice, in such situations is all but impossible. More than that, the system of adjudicating consent is diabolical, a manmade trap to disable women from proving anything and thus, in effect, a second rape.Miriam Buether’s set features sky-high shelves of case files.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf only the play allowed us simply to feel this. But as Tessa speaks to the courtroom despite being warned by the judge to stop, Miller, the playwright, herself a former criminal defense lawyer, likewise breaks free from the dramatic frame to let her. The lights come up on the audience. The text, now delivered straight out, becomes an oration, a summation. For reasons that seem more wishful and political than characterological, Tessa gets her voice back.One-person, multicharacter stories often fail to develop suspense and momentum, but Miller has structured this one precisely. Details we learn casually in the first half return menacingly in the second. The abandonment of that structure in the play’s final third is likewise precise, and many will value the disruption prima facie — at first glance.But for me the change undid the previous work of emotional engagement in favor of flat-out persuasion on a subject with which few in the audience would be likely to disagree. As Tessa’s speech ran on, repeating ideas that had already been dramatized, I began to feel pummeled, as if by a politician.Enlightening and enraging theatergoers in the hope of changing the world is not, of course, a violation of dramatic policy. That Tessa’s last name honors Eve Ensler, now known as V, ought to have been a clue to Miller’s intentions. V’s 1996 play “The Vagina Monologues” broke with dramatic forms (which, after all, were formalized and popularized by men) to make a difference well beyond them. I also thought of Larry Kramer, whose plays were pleas: agitprop and artistry pulped into something new. Thinking of works like theirs, and a singular performance like Comer’s, I won’t belabor the compromises of “Prima Facie.” Especially if, in the long run, it wins its case.Prima FacieThrough June 18 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; primafacieplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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    Todd Haimes, 66, Who Rebuilt the Roundabout Theater Company, Dies

    After rescuing the company from bankruptcy, he turned it into a major player on Broadway and one of the largest nonprofit theater companies in the country.Todd Haimes, who rescued New York’s Roundabout Theater Company from bankruptcy and built it into one of the largest nonprofit theaters in America, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 66.A spokesman, Matt Polk, said his death, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was caused by complications of osteosarcoma. Mr. Haimes had lived with the cancer since 2002, when he was diagnosed with sarcoma of the jaw.As the artistic director and chief executive at Roundabout, Mr. Haimes had an extraordinarily long and effective tenure. He led the nonprofit company for four decades, turning it into a major player on Broadway, where it now runs three of the 41 theaters.Roundabout has focused on classics and revivals but has also been a supporter of new work. Under Mr. Haimes’s leadership, it excelled on both fronts, winning 11 Tony Awards for plays and musicals it produced and nurturing the careers of contemporary American writers, including Stephen Karam, Joshua Harmon and Selina Fillinger.Among Roundabout’s biggest successes during his tenure was a 1998 revival of “Cabaret,” originally starring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson, that survived a bumpy start (a construction accident interrupted performances for four weeks) and then ran for nearly six years. It returned a decade later for a one-year reprise.There were many other triumphs, including a 2020 revival of “A Soldier’s Play” that is now touring the country. Both productions won Tony Awards.Catalyzed by America’s social unrest over racial inequality in 2020, Mr. Haimes led Roundabout in an effort to unearth lost gems written by artists of color. One result was an acclaimed Broadway production of the Black playwright Alice Childress’s 1955 backstage drama, “Trouble in Mind.” It had never made it to Broadway because Ms. Childress had refused to soften the show’s ending to make it less challenging for white theatergoers.Mr. Haimes joined Roundabout in 1983 as managing director. He was just 26, and the company, founded in 1965 and saddled with debt, was operating in rented space in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. At one particularly desperate point he used his own credit card to keep the company afloat. But a few weeks after he arrived, the board of directors voted to shut it down.A board member subsequently donated enough money to buy the company some time, and Mr. Haimes engineered a turnabout — cutting the staff, reducing expenses, improving marketing and, over time, expanding the audience with measures such as early weekday curtain times to attract an after-work crowd, special events for singles and gay theatergoers, and discounts for children. In 2016, he became the first presenter to allow the livestreaming of a performance of a Broadway show, a much-praised revival of “She Loves Me.”Mr. Haimes, right, with Gene Feist, Roundabout’s artistic director, in the theater in 1986. “I have no desire to be on stage, but I get a tingle just being around one,” he said.Jack Manning/The New York TimesBernard Todd Haimes was born on May 7, 1956, in Manhattan to Herman and Helaine Haimes. His father was a lawyer, his mother a homemaker.His onstage life was exceedingly brief: In elementary school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he wore a dress to play the title role in a production of “Mary Poppins.” He later claimed that he had landed the part because he was the only child who could pronounce “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. at Yale. Before arriving at Roundabout, he was general manager of the Hartman Theater Company in Stamford and managing director of the Westport Country Playhouse, both in Connecticut.“I had no desire to trade stocks and bonds, and making Nivea cream wouldn’t turn me on,” he told The New York Times in 1986. “I’ve loved the theater all my life. I have no desire to be onstage, but I get a tingle just being around one, ever since I worked on the stage crew for ‘How to Succeed in Business’ on Broadway when I was in 10th grade.”He became producing director of Roundabout in 1989 and added the title of chief executive in 2015.“The advantage of my background is that all of my artistic decisions are being informed by management concerns,” Mr. Haimes said in 2004. “No one’s ever going to accuse me of being a crazy artist. The disadvantage is the same: that perhaps there are brilliant things other people could accomplish that I just can’t.”He is survived by his wife, Jeanne-Marie (Christman) Haimes; two children, Dr. Hilary Haimes and Andrew Haimes; two stepdaughters, Julia and Kiki Baron; and four grandchildren. His first two marriages, to Dr. Alison Haimes and Tamar Climan, ended in divorce.Mr. Haimes led Roundabout’s move to Broadway in 1991, when he began presenting work in the Criterion Center, which no longer exists. The move was a turning point for the company. “Because of the Tony Award eligibility,” he said, “we will have a tremendous advantage when it comes to obtaining the rights to plays, securing directors and attracting distinguished actors.”In 2000, he moved the company into the renamed American Airlines Theater, which is now Roundabout’s flagship house. It has since also acquired the theater at Studio 54 and assumed operations of the theater now known as the Stephen Sondheim.Among the Tony-winning shows produced by Roundabout during Mr. Haimes’s tenure were revivals of the plays “Anna Christie” and “A View From the Bridge” and of the musicals “Nine,” “Assassins,” “The Pajama Game” and “Anything Goes.” Roundabout was also among the producers of Tony-winning productions of two new plays, “Side Man” and “The Humans.”The company now runs five theaters, all in Midtown Manhattan, including the three Broadway houses, an Off Broadway theater and an Off Off Broadway black-box space that it developed to give a platform to emerging playwrights.Over the years there have also been flops and budget deficits, and some critics have suggested that Roundabout was overextended. Its enormous real estate footprint became a financial challenge that the company addressed partly by renting out some of its Broadway venues to commercial producers. The company made a significant amount of money, for example, by renting out the Sondheim for five years to the producers of “Beautiful,” the Carole King biomusical.Mr. Haimes was one of a handful of leaders of nonprofit theater companies in New York whose decades-long tenures have raised eyebrows among those who want more turnover. He held onto the Roundabout job even when he took another one, as artistic director of the deeply troubled Toronto theater company Livent, in 1998; that company collapsed, and Mr. Haimes stayed at Roundabout.Roundabout’s size — 150 employees and a $50 million annual budget — has given it the ability to support significant endeavors offstage. It operates education and training programs, including school partnerships that serve more than 4,000 students each year and a partnership with the stagehands union to train theater technicians.But like many nonprofits, it has not yet fully rebounded from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Roundabout staged one show on Broadway this season, a revival of “1776.”Mr. Haimes, who was often content to remain in the background, was a well-liked and enthusiastic figure in the industry. He was active in both the Broadway and the Off Broadway communities, serving on numerous committees, and over the years he taught at Yale and Brooklyn College.But he remained a businessman and a booster at heart.“Basically I’m incredibly insecure and don’t take myself seriously as an artist,” he said in a 1998 interview. “But somehow my taste seems to match up with what the public wants.” More

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    Barry Humphries, a.k.a. Dame Edna, Is Dead at 89

    Bewigged, bejeweled and bejowled, Mr. Humphries’s creation was one of the longest-lived characters ever channeled by a single performer.Oh, Possums, Dame Edna is no more.To be unflinchingly precise, Barry Humphries, the Australian-born actor and comic who for almost seven decades brought that divine doyenne of divadom, Dame Edna Everage, to delirious, dotty, disdainful Dadaist life, died on Saturday in Sydney. He was 89.His death was confirmed by the hospital where he had spent several days after undergoing hip surgery. In a tribute message posted on Twitter, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia praised Mr. Humphries as “a great wit, satirist, writer and an absolute one-of-kind.”A stiletto-heeled, stiletto-tongued persona who might well have been the spawn of a ménage à quatre involving Oscar Wilde, Salvador Dalí, Auntie Mame and Miss Piggy, Dame Edna was not so much a character as a cultural phenomenon, a force of nature trafficking in wicked, sequined commentary on the nature of fame.For generations after the day she first sprang to life on the Melbourne stage, Dame Edna reigned, bewigged, bejeweled and bejowled, one of the longest-lived characters to be channeled by a single performer. She toured worldwide in a series of solo stage shows and was ubiquitous on television in the United States, Britain, Australia and elsewhere.A master improviser (many of Dame Edna’s most stinging barbs were ad-libbed) with a face like taffy, Mr. Humphries was widely esteemed as one of the world’s foremost theatrical clowns.“I’ve only seen one man have power over an audience like that,” the theater critic John Lahr told him, after watching Dame Edna night after night in London. “My father.” Mr. Lahr’s father was the great stage and cinematic clown Bert Lahr.Mr. Humphries conceived Edna in 1955 as Mrs. Norm Everage, typical Australian housewife. “Everage,” after all, is Australian for “average.”Housewife, Superstar, National TreasureBut Edna soon became a case study in exorbitant amour propre, lampooning suburban pretensions, political correctness and the cult of celebrity, and acquiring a damehood along the way. A “housewife-superstar,” she called herself, upgrading the title in later years to “megastar” and, still later, to “gigastar.”Mr. Humphries, wearing a hat in the shape of the Sydney Opera House, in 1976.Wesley/Getty ImagesIn Britain, where Mr. Humphries had long made his home, Dame Edna was considered a national treasure, a paragon of performance art long before the term was coined.In the United States, she starred in a three-episode series, “Dame Edna’s Hollywood,” a mock celebrity talk show broadcast on NBC in the early 1990s, and was a frequent guest on actual talk shows.She performed several times on Broadway, winning Mr. Humphries a special Tony Award, as well as Drama Desk and Theater World Awards, for “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” his 1999 one-person show.In her stage and TV shows, written largely by Mr. Humphries, Dame Edna typically made her entrance tottering down a grand staircase (Mr. Humphries was more than six feet tall) in a tsunami of sequins, her hair a bouffant violet cloud (she was “a natural wisteria,” she liked to say), her evening gown slit to the thigh to reveal Mr. Humphries’s surprisingly good legs, her body awash in jewels, her eyes agape behind sprawling rhinestone glasses (“face furniture,” she called them).Addressing the audience, she delivered her signature greeting, “Hellooooo, Possums!”By turns tender and astringent, Dame Edna called audience members “possums” often. She also called them other things, as when, leaning across the footlights, she would address a woman in the front row in a confiding, carrying voice: “I know, dear. I used to make my own clothes, too.”Mr. Humphries with the English actress Joan Plowright at the Lyric Theater in London.Evening Standard/Getty ImagesPerformances concluded with Dame Edna flinging hundreds of gladioli into the crowd, no mean feat aerodynamically. “Wave your gladdies, Possums!” she exhorted audience members who caught them, and the evening would end, to music, with a mass valedictory swaying.Between the “Hellooooo” and the gladdies, Dame Edna’s audiences were treated to a confessional monologue deliciously akin to finding oneself stranded in a hall of vanity mirrors.There was commentary on her husband and children (“I made a decision: I put my family last”); her beauty regimen (“Good self-esteem is very important. I look in the mirror and say, ‘Edna, you are gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous’”); and the constellation of luminaries who routinely sought her counsel, among them Queen Elizabeth II and her family. (“I’ve had to change my telephone number several times to stop them ringing me.”)Dame Edna’s TV shows were often graced by actual celebrity guests, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charlton Heston, Sean Connery, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall.They came in for no less of a drubbing than the audience did, starting with the inaugural affront, the affixing of immense name tags to their lapels — for eclipsed by the light of gigastardom so close at hand, who among us would not be reduced to anonymity?“Chuck,” Mr. Heston’s name tag read. Ms. Gabor received two: a “Zsa” for the right shoulder and a “Zsa” for the left.A few pleasantries were exchanged before Dame Edna moved in for the kill.Mr. Humphries as Dame Edna in 1978. She referred to him as “my manager” and accused him of embezzling her fortune.John Minihan/Evening Standard, via Getty ImagesMr. Humphries as himself in 1978. He always spoke of Dame Edna in the third person.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“You’ve had nine hits this year,” she purred fawningly at the singer-songwriter Michael Bolton on one of her British TV shows. “On your website.”Turning to the audience after delivering a particularly poisonous insult, she would ooze, “I mean that in the most caring way.”Those guests who emerged relatively unscathed had the savvy to take Dame Edna at face value and interact with her as though she were real. The moment he donned those rhinestone glasses, Mr. Humphries often said, Dame Edna became real to him too, an entirely separate law unto herself.‘I Wish I’d Thought of That’“I’m, as it were, in the wings, and she’s onstage,” he explained in a 2015 interview with Australian television. “And every now and then she says something extremely funny, and I stand there and think, ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’”But the truly funny thing, Possums, is that when Mr. Humphries first brought Dame Edna to life, he intended her to last only a week or so. What was more, she was meant to have been played by the distinguished actress Zoe Caldwell.Mr. Humphries created a string of other characters over the years, notably the boorish, bibulous Australian cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson. But it was Dame Edna, the outlandish aunt who engenders adoration and mortification in equal measure, who captivated the public utterly — despite the fact that in later years, her mortification-inducing lines sometimes landed her, and her creator, in trouble.So fully did Mr. Humphries animate Edna that he was at continued pains to point out that he was neither a female impersonator in the conventional sense nor a cross-dresser in any sense.“Mr. Humphries, do you ever have to take your children aside and explain to them why you like to wear women’s clothes?,” an American interviewer once asked him.“If I were an actor playing Hamlet,” he replied, “would I have to take my children aside and say I wasn’t really Danish?’”By all accounts far more erudite than Dame Edna — he was an accomplished painter, bibliophile and art collector — Mr. Humphries, in a sustained act of self-protection, always spoke of her in the third person.She did likewise. “My manager,” she disdainfully called him. (She also called Mr. Humphries “a money-grubbing little slug” and accused him of embezzling her fortune. He did, it must be said, cash a great many of her checks.)But as dismissive of her creator as Dame Edna was, she rallied to his aid when he very likely needed her most: after years of alcoholism culminated in stays in psychiatric hospitals and at least one brush with the law.Mr. Humphries at the Booth Theater on Broadway in 1999 in “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” for which he won a special Tony Award, as well as Drama Desk and Theater World Awards.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘I Hated Her’John Barry Humphries was born in Kew, a Melbourne suburb, on Feb. 17, 1934. His father, Eric, was a prosperous builder; his mother, Louisa, was a homemaker.From his earliest childhood in Camberwell, a more exclusive suburb, he felt oppressed by the bourgeois conformism that enveloped his parents and their circle, and depressed by his mother’s cold suburban propriety.Dame Edna was a response to those forces.“I invented Edna because I hated her,” Mr. Humphries was quoted as saying in Mr. Lahr’s book “Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage With Barry Humphries” (1992). “I poured out my hatred of the standards of the little people of their generation.”Dame Edna emerged when the young Mr. Humphries, under the sway of Dadaism, was performing with a repertory company based at the University of Melbourne; he had dropped out of the university two years before.On long bus tours, he entertained his colleagues with the character of Mrs. Norm Everage — born Edna May Beazley in Wagga Wagga, Australia, sometime in the 1930s — an ordinary housewife who had found sudden acclaim after winning a nationwide competition, the Lovely Mother Quest.Unthinkable as it seems, Edna was dowdy then, given to mousy brown hair and pillbox hats. But she was already in full command of the arsenal of bourgeois bigotries that would be a hallmark of her later self.For a revue by the company in December 1955, Mr. Humphries wrote a part for Edna, earmarked for Ms. Caldwell, an Australian contemporary. But when she proved too busy to oblige, he donned a dress and played it himself. After Edna proved a hit with Melbourne audiences, he performed the character elsewhere in the country.By the end of the 1950s, hoping to make a career as a serious actor, Mr. Humphries had moved to London, where Edna met with little enthusiasm and was largely shelved. (She blamed Mr. Humphries ever after for her lack of early success there.)Mr. Humphries played Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker, in the original West End production of the musical “Oliver!” in 1960, and reprised the role when the show came to Broadway in 1963.But though he worked steadily during the ’60s, he was also in the fierce grip of alcoholism. Stays in psychiatric hospitals, he later said, were of no avail.His nadir came in 1970, when he awoke in a Melbourne gutter to find himself under arrest.With a doctor’s help, Mr. Humphries became sober soon afterward; he did not take a drink for the rest of his life. He dusted off Dame Edna and, little by little, de-dowdified her. By the late ’70s, with celebrity culture in full throttle, she had given him international renown and unremitting employment.Edna did not seduce every critic. Reviewing her first New York stage show, the Off Broadway production “Housewife! Superstar!!,” in The New York Times in 1977, Richard Eder called it “abysmal.”Nor did Edna’s resolute lack of political correctness always stand her, or Mr. Humphries, in good stead. In February 2003, writing an advice column as Dame Edna in Vanity Fair, he replied to a reader’s query about whether to learn Spanish.“Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to?” Dame Edna’s characteristically caustic response read. “The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German, where there are at least a few books worth reading, or, if you’re American, try English.”A public furor ensued, led by the Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek, who appeared on the magazine’s cover that month. Vanity Fair discontinued Dame Edna’s column not long afterward.In an interview with The Times in 2004, Mr. Humphries was unrepentant.“The people I offended were minorities with no sense of humor, I fear,” he said. “When you have to explain the nature of satire to somebody, you’re fighting a losing battle.”Mr. Humphries drew further ire after a 2016 interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph in which he denounced political correctness as a “new puritanism.” In the same interview, he described males who transition to female as “mutilated” men, and Caitlyn Jenner in particular as “a publicity-seeking ratbag.”Sailing Above the FrayDame Edna, for her part, appeared to sail imperviously through. She returned to Broadway in 2004 for the well-received show “Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance” and in 2010 with “All About Me,” a revue that also starred the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein.Mr. Humphries was back on Broadway as Dame Edna in 2010 with “All About Me,” a revue that also starred the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs herself — it was she, and not Mr. Humphries, who was credited — Dame Edna played the recurring character Claire Otoms (the name is an anagram for “a sitcom role”), an outré lawyer, on the Fox TV series “Ally McBeal.”Under his own name, Mr. Humphries appeared as the Great Goblin in “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012); as the voice of Bruce, the great white shark, in “Finding Nemo” (2003); and in other pictures.Mr. Humphries’s books include the memoirs “More Please” (1992) and “My Life as Me” (2002) and the novel “Women in the Background” (1995). He was named a Commander of the British Empire in 2007.Dame Edna also wrote several books, among them “Dame Edna’s Bedside Companion” (1983) and the memoir “My Gorgeous Life” (1989).Mr. Humphries’s first marriage, to Brenda Wright, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Rosalind Tong, and his third, to Diane Millstead. He had two daughters, Tessa and Emily, from his marriage to Ms. Tong, and two sons, Oscar and Rupert, from his marriage to Ms. Millstead.The Sydney Morning Herald reported that his survivors include his wife of 30 years, Lizzie Spender, the daughter of the British poet Stephen Spender, as well as his children and 10 grandchildren.Mr. Humphries had returned to Australia late last year for Christmas.Dame Edna’s husband, Norm, a chronic invalid “whose prostate,” she often lamented, “has been hanging over me for years,” died long ago. Her survivors include an adored son, Kenny, who designed all her gowns; a less adored son, Bruce; and a despised daughter, the wayward Valmai. (“She steals things. Puts them in her pantyhose. Particularly frozen chickens when she’s in a supermarket.”)Another daughter, Lois, was abducted as an infant by a “rogue koala,” a subject Dame Edna could bring herself to discuss with interviewers only rarely.Though the child was never seen again, to the end of her life Dame Edna never gave up hope she would be found.“I’m looking,” she told NPR in 2015. “Every time I pass a eucalyptus tree I look up.”Constant Meheut contributed reporting. More

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    ‘Beef’ Creator, Ali Wong and Steven Yeun Address David Choe Assault Story

    The creator and stars of the new Netflix series said they accepted David Choe’s contention that he had fabricated the detailed story he told on a 2014 podcast about coercing a masseuse into sex.The creator and two stars of the new Netflix series “Beef” addressed a brewing controversy on Friday about another actor on the show who said on a podcast in 2014 that he had sexually assaulted a masseuse, comments now recirculating on social media.David Choe, an actor and artist, has long said that he made up the incident he recounted on his podcast, an assertion that the show’s creator, Lee Sung Jin, and its lead actors, Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, backed up in a statement.“The story David Choe fabricated nine years ago is undeniably hurtful and extremely disturbing,” said Lee, Yeun and Wong, who are also executive producers on “Beef.” “We do not condone this story in any way, and we understand why this has been so upsetting and triggering.”They added, “We’re aware David has apologized in the past for making up this horrific story, and we’ve seen him put in the work to get the mental health support he needed over the last decade to better himself and learn from his mistakes.”Netflix confirmed the authenticity of the statement, which was made exclusively to Vanity Fair, but declined to comment. Choe and representatives for Lee, Yeun and Wong did not immediately respond to requests for comment.On a 2014 episode of a podcast that Choe co-hosted, he talked about engaging in what he called “rape-y behavior” when he coerced a masseuse into oral sex. He later said that the story was made up.“I never raped anyone,” he told The New York Times two years ago.The clip from his podcast has recirculated on social media since the premiere of “Beef” this month. The show stars Yeun and Wong as Angelenos who get into a road-rage conflict that ripples into the rest of their lives, and Choe appears in seven episodes as the cousin of Yeun’s character.The 10-episode season has received praise from critics and was the service’s second-most-watched English-language show this week, according to Netflix.Choe hosted a four-episode limited series on FX and Hulu in 2021 and has appeared in other shows sporadically, including in one episode of “The Mandalorian.” “Beef” is his first substantial acting role.Choe gained broad recognition in 2012, after an initial public offering appeared to make him a multimillionaire.Several years earlier, the entrepreneur Sean Parker had asked Choe to paint murals in the Palo Alto, Calif., offices of an internet start-up. Parker offered him $60,000 or stock in the nascent company, Choe has said, which is how Choe wound up a very early shareholder in Facebook, which is now called Meta. More

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    Rachel Weisz, ‘Dead Ringers’ and the Glorious Horrors of Pregnancy

    The first episode of the new female-fronted television adaptation of David Cronenberg’s 1988 psychological thriller, “Dead Ringers,” splices together footage of four live births with shocking forthrightness. A plastic-gloved hand grips the bloody head of a newborn and tugs it from the birth canal as another cradles it from below; a baby is pulled briskly out using a pair of elongated metal forceps clasped around its skull; a scalpel is drawn sharply through the surface of a prepped and sterilized abdomen during an emergency cesarean section; hands are thrust inside and a small body is lifted up. “Why are you wearing my vagina like it’s a [expletive] glove?” shouts one patient at the doctors working busily out of view.The montage is a feverish, pugilistic sequence of grunts and cries that presents modern obstetrics as a high-volume industry, an assembly line made up mostly of soft, fleshy parts and powered by adrenaline. When at last the twin gynecologists who are the focal point of the series (both played with startling acuity by Rachel Weisz) are able to pause and rest for a moment in the quiet of an empty hospital room, I couldn’t help letting out my own sigh of vicarious exhaustion.In the television world, babies are a convenient way to reinvigorate stale interpersonal dynamics, or a point of narrative pressure that forces characters to make dramatic choices. But births, in all their beauty and gore, are rare. We’re used to a certain sleight of hand, carefully placed cuts and scenes where fresh-looking mothers in hospital gowns hold clean, swaddled infants in their arms. Real birthing is something more radical: Pregnancy involves a terraforming of the body that might appear terrifying if you were to see it at time-lapse speed. Inside a pregnant body, the volume of blood can increase by at least a third: It swells the hands and limbs; fluid accumulates in some tissue, like the legs, causing it to bloat like an oversaturated sponge. Soaked in hormones that relax the tendons and ligaments, the joints in the pelvis loosen and the shape of the foot is remolded under greater weight. During labor, the pelvic floor, which helps to hold organs in place, can stretch or tear permanently, causing them to resettle in unfamiliar ways.Thinking about all this puts birth in a different generic register depending on how it is framed and depicted. Having a child might be a blessing or a difficulty within the tropes of a domestic drama, but the actual mechanics of bringing that child into the world verge on body horror, the genre perhaps best typified by the films of David Cronenberg. He made his reputation as a horror auteur with movies like his 1986 remake of “The Fly,” in which a scientist accidentally fuses his DNA with that of a common housefly. In his worlds, familiar physiology is bent into strange new shapes, showing us that the seeming fixity of our bodies is only a soothing illusion.Weisz had been fascinated by both Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers,” which she saw in the theater in 1988, and the real-life story of the Marcus brothers (renamed Mantle in the film), twin gynecologists who, having withdrawn from public view, were found dead in the apartment they shared in New York City in 1975, their messy lodgings strewn with bottles of opioids and barbiturates. These “miracle workers” who specialized in helping barren women conceive and give birth, met an end that cast doubt on the infallible authority of doctors. The story cut to one of the insoluble tensions in reproductive care: that the individual assigned to work so intimately with your hopes and fears and physiology is essentially a complete stranger — maybe even a dangerous one.Amazon Prime VideoRachel Weisz plays twin gynecologists in “Dead Ringers,” a new series based on David Cronenberg’s 1988 thriller.Niko Tavernise/Amazon Prime VideoCronenberg’s film played up the psychic conjunction of the twins, a monstrous codependency that functions perfectly until, suddenly, it does not. Weisz’s new adaptation is less claustrophobic, less a psychological study than a psychosexual thriller in the vein of some of her favorite films in the genre, “Bad Timing” (1980) and “Don’t Look Now” (1973), in which the externalizing of the characters’ private desires and fears rearranges the world itself. Beverly and Elliot — one a nurturing obstetrician, the other driven by an insatiable appetite for food, sex and biomedical research — are working to open a slick, hyper-modern birthing center and seek funding from an ultrawealthy investor. Beverly’s goal is “to change the way women give birth, forever,” but Elliot’s is something more fluid — she wants to continue her illicit laboratory work growing fetuses in artificial wombs, but most of all she wants to make her twin sister’s dream a reality. They negotiate, in alternating agreement and opposition, the contradictory drives toward individuation and the need for others, repulsion and love.What “Dead Ringers” manages to get on the screen feels, in terms of television, urgent and new. It publicizes bodily processes long held in a secretive personal space, making them available for discussion. Together with her collaborators, Weisz — who is an executive producer on the show as well as its star — has summoned a discordant vision of female experience: the grisly, unsettling and unexpectedly beautiful fact that birthing is a life-altering event rather than a collective fantasy.In February, I spoke with Weisz over Zoom from her home in upstate New York. She wore a plain shirt and thick glasses of crystal-clear acrylic that gave her the look of the most stylish professor on a comp-lit dissertation committee. Weisz radiates the poise that was the signature of her early career, looking impassive until something unexpected grabs her attention and she breaks into a warm smile. As we spoke, her bearing made me search myself continually for something pleasing to say. Dark-haired, heavy-browed and possessed of an intent gaze, she still has the features of the fresh-faced English rose who stepped into the spotlight in Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Stealing Beauty.” The face holds more emotion now, and has a greater capacity to convey softness or threat or an ambiguous sort of danger lying beneath its placid surface.In recent years, as Weisz has moved into a more boundary-pushing phase of her career, you can see her cracking the beautiful, cultivated exterior to reveal moments of vulnerability and even ugliness that touch the viewer at a visceral level. These characters — like the power-obsessed Lady Sarah of Yorgos Lanthimos’s “The Favourite,” or the willful and transgressive Ronit Krushka of “Disobedience” — are women of appetite who evoke curiosity rather than simple admiration. Watching these performances, you have the feeling that something instinctive and utterly convincing has roared to life within Weisz. Her performance as the driven, obsessive Mantle twins is an extension of this movement toward playing women who don’t represent some ideal, but are instead embodied, desirous beings struggling to negotiate the weight of that desire.We’re used to a certain sleight of hand, carefully placed cuts and scenes where fresh-looking mothers in hospital gowns hold clean, swaddled infants in their arms. Real birthing is something more radical.When Weisz proposed a gender-flipped version of “Dead Ringers” to a producer at Annapurna Pictures, she was intrigued by the intricately enmeshed personalities of the twins, the way they negotiated their fraught obsession with each other. “It just seemed a very fertile ground,” Weisz explained. “A twisted, codependent relationship between identical twins, whatever their gender, who are brilliant in their careers.” Unlike Jeremy Irons’s diametrically opposed siblings in the Cronenberg film, whose complementary personalities could seem to form a single person, Weisz’s are intricately enmeshed: Though Beverly is introverted, she’s hardly passive, and pursues both her love affairs and the mission of creating a more humane, women-directed way of birthing with quiet focus. Elliot curbs her own scientific imagination, her appetite for grander interventions like eliminating menopause or aging, in service of what she perceives to be Beverly’s needs. Weisz fills the dual roles of Beverly and Elliot with her own raw, organic power, guiding patients through labor with quick, steady hands and a tone that’s firm almost to the point of coldness.But some of the most affecting moments in the series come when she’s tapping into maternal vulnerability, as when she portrays Beverly’s discovering that she’s had another miscarriage, the latest in a gutting series. The camera hovers over her hand holding a bloody piece of toilet paper in a shot that is almost from a first-person perspective. The effect for me, as a viewer, was the opposite of an out-of-body experience: It was a sight that I had only experienced in my own life, and for a moment my mind raced through the consequences that it implied — was I menstruating, had I forgotten to take my pill, was there something deeply wrong inside of me? You could say that the series normalizes these physiological processes by showing them onscreen, but they are already normal — they’re just the unseen part of the iceberg that is having a body.Weisz’s experience as a parent — she’s a devoted mother of two who had her second child in 2018 at age 48 — has gone hand in hand with her decisions to explore these looser, rawer, less polished characters with their unusual thirsts and hungers. When I asked her about her own experience with birthing, what she remembered most intensely was the horrifying tales of deliveries gone wrong that others seemed eager to tell her. “The one thing I did notice the first time I was pregnant was the amount of times people came to me to tell me terrible stories, some terrible things that happened,” Weisz said. In response, she actively sought out accounts of positive outcomes, to get a sense of all the possibilities, all the branching pathways. She gravitated toward Ina May Gaskin, a midwife and prolific author who pioneered techniques for low-intervention birth and home birthing. In the then-male-dominated field of obstetrics, Gaskin was the first midwife to have a procedure named after her — the Gaskin maneuver, adapted from the practice of Guatemalan midwives, in which turning a woman from her back onto her hands and knees helps to ease the baby’s shoulder through the birth canal. Just as Gaskin pushed for women to be able to give birth outside the specialized medical environment of the hospital, a common refrain throughout the show is the idea that pregnancy is not a disease, and pregnant women are not sick. “You don’t have to possibly be cured,” Weisz said, paraphrasing Beverly. “There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just a natural part of life.”Weisz, a producer and an actor, has moved into a more boundary-pushing phase of her career. Thea Traff for The New York Times“Dead Ringers” is a sort of antidote to this culture of pressurized, overdetermined moralizing over the ways that women choose to navigate the experience of pregnancy — or at least a temporary anesthetic. Though it engages with important issues about reproductive technology and birthing, it also seeks out a deliciously profane set of possibilities. The notion of the nuclear family could be retooled, could mean a pair of identical twin sisters raising the offspring of an ex-lover’s brother, or an uncanny Southern Gothic brood of perpetually pregnant daughters, headed up by a pontificating patriarch obsessed with the eminent gynecologist J. Marion Sims, who conducted experimental anesthesia-free surgical operations on enslaved women. Breeding could be a house of horrors, or a laboratory of startlingly new kinds of tenderness, as in a scene in which Beverly’s lover, Genevieve, a TV star who was once her patient, delivers an erotic monologue about how she wants to impregnate her. Under the existing laws of biology and anatomy, the fantasy is impossible, but only narrowly so: In the world the twins want to create, desire can meet reality in dark, mischievous, complex ways.To bring that vision to life, Weisz collaborated with the screenwriter and award-winning playwright Alice Birch, whose play “Anatomy of a Suicide,” an exploration of mental illness as experienced by three generations of women within a single family, was performed at the Atlantic Theater Company across a stage divided into three sections. “She’s so brilliant at creating all those levels of complexity where you’re, hopefully, in a state of pleasure, being entertained and you can’t tell what’s right or wrong,” Weisz explained. “It simply isn’t clear.”Soon after meeting, they began riffing on topics such as the French performance artist Sophie Calle and imagining the twins’ parents — ordinary anorak-wearing Brits — standing in the rain gazing at the magnificent birthing center created by their terrifying daughters. In the end they agreed that the Mantle twins’ new gender changed “everything and nothing.” Though their anatomy allowed for plot points that the male Mantles would never have encountered, the twisted specificity of their entanglement is in a moral and psychological world all their own.In Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers,” the twins’ female patients are little more than loci for the projection of male fantasies and fears. The mutated women Beverly hallucinates signal his alienation from the female bodies that are the site of his work. Unsurprisingly, the consequence of swapping the gender of the story’s protagonists is a more robust interest in women and pregnancy — the deliveries, miscarriages, the intense and intractable particularity of each patient’s reproductive situation. “It just, I suppose, happened as a result of the doctors having the same bodies as their patients,” Weisz said. “They weren’t ‘other’ to them.” Women in Weisz’s series are what they are — complex, self-destructive, occasionally destructive of others — and the horror comes directly from their actions, from whom they can’t help being. The most graphic and upsetting moments of the series foreground routine obstetric procedures that are rarely viewed outside their specialized audience — C-sections, vaginal births, the movements and turnings of infants beneath the skin of the mother’s stomach — which brings up the question of why we as viewers are so insulated from the realities of reproduction. Horrific to whom? Disturbing for what reason? And whom does it serve to make birthing so opaque, so secretive?As Weisz and Birch’s vision began to take shape, Birch gathered a writers’ room made up of eight women. Weisz sat in on writing sessions, and there were occasional visitors: midwives, gynecologists, endocrinologists and embryologists who gave their thoughts on what needed to change in the way we view and support birthing. Under lockdown and Zooming in from various locations — some had moved back in with their parents; another became pregnant during the writing sessions while living on a boat off the coast of Cornwall — the writers shared stories and experiences of their own. Even amid discussions about the dystopian state of modern reproductive care, there was a distinctly utopian imagination at work. “How do we unthink what we think of as normal, and how do we make unmysterious what is still inherently mysterious?” asked Lileana Blain-Cruz, a director who participated in the writers’ room as a dramaturg. “It becomes a philosophical question — not just of the mystery of it, but of how systems inhibit progress and thinking.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesThe writers’ room was intent on directing the viewer’s attention away from the debate over how a pregnant body should be, and toward the more open-ended question of how pregnancy could be: There could be soothing depictions of natural landscapes, soft silicon instruments, rigorously tailored personalized care. There could be gene editing, immortal wombs, eternally youthful skin and freshly grafted ovarian tissue. There’s an argument to be made that it’s impossible to talk about improving reproductive outcomes without talking about abortion rights; that it’s discriminatory to talk about fixing the way women give birth without addressing the high maternal mortality rates of Black and Native American patients; that it’s anachronistic to talk about pregnancy as though it were a thing experienced only by cis women — this show engages only tangentially with these topics. Instead, it takes hold of contemporary debates over medical ethics and class inequities in reproductive care, and treats them as playground equipment, as the terrain on which psychological dramas of a wild and unpredictable nature can be played out. As the arc of the show grows increasingly macabre, some of the portentous weight of birthing — the need to make the perfect choices, to give birth in an ideal and aspirational way — gives way to a wicked sense of fun.So much of the anxiety around reproduction in the United States has to do with the contradiction of being dependent and isolated at once: dependent on a health care system that must be paid for privately; dependent on a political apparatus outside your control that can force you to give birth while denying any resources or care to the baby that is born; isolated by the moral codes and prescriptions that circulate in the media and among the people in our lives. We often approach pregnancy with a hunger for clean, clear answers — the exact week at which a pregnant body should no longer be allowed caffeine or soft cheese, or the moment at which a bundle of cells becomes a legally protected human being — but living matter resists these attempts at containment.The womb is itself a paradoxical thing. In preparing for pregnancy, an entirely new organ, the placenta, is created. It infiltrates the uterine blood vessels and grows over 150 miles of capillaries to provide nutrients and oxygen to the developing fetus before it is unceremoniously expelled from the womb during birthing. But the placenta’s origin blurs the distinction between host body and fetus: Though it originates from cells in the outer layer of the embryo that burrow their way into the womb using a combination of digestive enzymes, substances that trigger suicide in target cells and by impersonating the host’s blood vessels, it is built in part from motherly resources. One’s self mingles with another across a semiporous border. By drawing boundaries, we lose sight of our radical interrelation.Alexandra Kleeman is a professor at the New School and a Guggenheim fellow in literature. Her newest novel is “Something New Under the Sun.” Thea Traff is a photographer and photo editor based in New York who frequently contributes to The Times. Her work focuses on human emotion conveyed through facial expressions and body movement. More

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    ‘Indian Matchmaking,’ It’s Time to Break Up

    The Netflix dating show claims that tradition can find love where modernity has failed. But all it does is reinforce age-old prejudices.“In India we don’t say ‘arranged marriage.’ There is ‘marriage’ and then ‘love marriage.’” Of all the platitudes — and she spouts a lot of them — issued forth by Sima Taparia, the self-anointed top matchmaker of Mumbai and breakout star of Netflix’s “Indian Matchmaking,” none land more true than this one. It’s not as if finding husbands and wives for unpaired offspring hasn’t been a fixation of anxious parents across centuries and civilizations, even if in Europe and the United States, love may have finally entered the chat and stayed long enough to become unexceptional. But for older generations in India, parents’ finding spouses for their children has been the norm for so long that the idea of those same adult children’s marrying for “love” is still alien enough for it to occupy an entirely separate category — now a reality-TV show.“Indian Matchmaking,” whose third season premiered on April 21, follows the immaculately coifed, highlighted and bejeweled Taparia as she steamrolls through the lives of unhappily single men and women of Indian origin mostly living in America. She promises to find them the spouses of their dreams, as long as they don’t dream for too much. The cast varies (with some fan favorites and villains occasionally brought back) but most are seemingly well-off young people, urbane and cosmopolitan, who run their own businesses and attend boutique workout classes. This season’s standouts include an emergency-room doctor named Vikash, whose god complex extends to referring to himself in the third person as Vivacious Vikash and performing solo dances to Hindi songs at his friends’ weddings (and allowing video of himself doing so to be broadcast on the show); he wants a tall Hindi-speaking girl because he’s really attached to Indian “culture.” There’s Bobby, the over-energetic teacher who performs a math-themed rap that ends with him snarling “mathematics, boiii” at the screen. Arti from Miami lists weekly visits to Costco as her hobby.The activities that these aspirant matchees choose for the dates they go on (wine tastings, yoga with baby goats) are straight out of gentrified Williamsburg. Interspersed in between these scenes are cameos from their stony-faced parents, astrologers dispensing sex advice, face readers, tarot-card readers and Taparia’s own peremptory admonishments reminding them that they’re never getting everything they want in a partner, so they better start lowering their expectations now.She promises to find them the spouses of their dreams, as long as they don’t dream for too much.That she has not yet made a single match resulting in marriage over the course of two seasons and 16 episodes has deterred neither Taparia herself nor the makers of the show from continuing this Sisyphean journey into a third. She is not one to suffer from impostor syndrome or even, apparently, introspection, so her matchmaking methodology remains resolutely unchanged. The only big departure this time around is the expansion of her hunting grounds to Britain, where she commences her reign of terror in London by telling a 35-year-old divorcee named Priya that she “should not be so much picky.”To people like me, who grew up in this third-party matchmaking milieu, Sima Taparia or Sima Aunty (a nickname she gives herself) is just that — an aunty, an archetype we’ve known and avoided all our lives: the obnoxious and overbearing relative, neighbor or acquaintance with zero sense of boundaries. But to the global audiences who eagerly lapped up “Indian Matchmaking” during the early months of the pandemic, Taparia was a delightful novelty, in one moment tossing bon mots of conjugal wisdom with the serenity of an all-knowing sibyl (“You will only get 60 to 70 percent of what you want; you will never get 100 percent”) and in the next moment ordering a female client to get rid of her “high standards” with the brusqueness of a guidance counselor breaking it to an overzealous student that they’re not getting into Harvard.In India, the business of parents seeking brides and grooms for their children is a cruel and cutthroat one, having originated as a way to preserve caste endogamy.Throughout history, the coming together of two people in matrimony (holy or otherwise) has never been just about the union itself — it is the broader institution that reveals the deepest anxieties (financial, religious or racial) undergirding a society. “Indian Matchmaking” bills itself as just any other show about the caprices of trying to find love in a hostile world. It is predicated on the idea that seeking the help of someone as quaintly old-fashioned as a matchmaker is superior to the travails of dating online, where one must undergo far worse indignities like being ghosted or breadcrumbed. Here, at least, relationship expectations are mutual, and after all, what is a “biodata” (a curiously-named document Taparia uses in her practice) if not the same exaggerated dating-app profile but in résumé form and with fewer wince-inducing mentions about loving tacos and pizza.But in India, the business of parents seeking brides and grooms for their children is a cruel and cutthroat one, having originated as a way to preserve caste endogamy, and it continues to be fraught with violence from every side, a reality that is at odds with the show’s portrayal of the process as a decorous, civilized exchange that takes place over tea and manners. The most pernicious aspects are hidden behind a flimsy veneer of fabricated gentility, apparent in the many euphemistic phrases in which Taparia, the singles she is matching and their parents communicate. The show’s title itself reads like an awkward, faux-anthropological translation, when in reality, the Indian here in “Indian Matchmaking” is merely a stand-in for outrageously wealthy, landed upper-caste Hindus (with an exception here and there).Caste, one of the most malicious forces still dictating India’s social fabric, is gingerly intimated by low-voiced mumblings of “same community.” Openly declaring that you want to marry someone filthy rich would be uncouth, so the words “good family, good upbringing” are uttered frequently. Women cannot afford to be “picky.” Women have to be “flexible.” They must also learn how to “compromise.” My personal favorite of these, though, is “adjust,” one of the hardest-working euphemisms in Indian English, whose meaning linguistically can range from the squeezed addition of a third backside on a bus seat meant to fit only two, to a man’s parents’ demanding that the girl foredoomed to marry their son give up her professional career to pursue full-time daughter-in-law activities. Curiously enough, the men are spared the brunt of such exhortations.“In marriage, every desire becomes a decision,” remarked Susan Sontag in 1956, a strikingly trenchant line that I recalled when watching the show’s participants being quizzed about their “criteria” for a potential spouse. Initially, they start out reciting millennial-speak straight out of the 2012 twee-internet era: the desire for someone “kind” with a “sense of humor.” But upon further prodding, out come tumbling the real demands, the decisions that display that their modernity hasn’t yet overcome the inherited prejudices that govern this entire phenomenon. Costco-obsessed Arti cannot help mentioning that her father would have really, really, really loved for her to marry someone from her “community.” Vivacious Vikash, meanwhile, for all his insistence on Indian “culture,” forgot to specify that he wanted a Hindi-speaking girl from America (a “same community” of its own) and not the “very Indian” woman with the Indian accent that Sima Aunty found for him.Source photographs: NetflixIva Dixit is a staff editor at the magazine. Her previous articles include an appreciation of eating raw red onions and an exploration into the continued popularity of “Emily in Paris.” More