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    ‘Daddy’ Review: Deeper Into the Internet’s Darkest Corners

    In Marion Siéfert’s much-anticipated new show, the French director explores the dynamics of online grooming.The French stage director Marion Siéfert has her finger on the pulse of our digital lives. In “2 or 3 Things I Know About You,” she playfully tackled oversharing on Facebook, before turning to the perils of online streaming in “_jeanne_dark_” — a show that fell foul of Instagram’s moderation policies when it was relayed live on the platform.With “Daddy,” a sharp, no-holds-barred new production at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, in Paris, Siéfert has ventured even further into the internet’s dark corners. In it, a 13-year-old is groomed online by an older man and gets lost in a virtual reality game that exploits teenage girls for profit.It also marks a new stage in Siéfert’s career. “Daddy” is her first big-budget production for a major playhouse, and one of the Paris season’s most anticipated premieres. So Siéfert is swinging much bigger, on every level: larger cast, more atmospheric sets and a somewhat indulgent running time of three and a half hours. Yet her biting originality remains intact.Reality is no match for screen entertainment in “Daddy.” The central character, Mara, is a quiet teenager from southern France. A subtly written scene, early on, introduces her family: Her parents, a nurse and a security guard, are too exhausted by their poorly paid jobs to devote much attention to their daughters. It’s no surprise that whenever she can, Mara escapes to the brighter landscape of online gaming.In an unnamed video game, she joins Julien, a smooth-talking 27-year-old who is her frequent online partner in crime. The easy intimacy they have built is showcased through a spectacular video sequence: On a screen the size of the Odéon’s stage, we see a 3-D game designed by the video artist Antoine Briot in which Mara and Julien’s avatars who shoot at enemies with assault rifles before hopping on fluorescent skateboards.Throughout, we hear Mara and Julien banter over their headsets. “You’re the most badass girl in this game,” Julien says.The groundwork is laid for the abusive dynamic that ensues. When they first meet outside the game, on a video call, Mara confides in Julien that she dreams of being an actress. He compliments her, and tells her about “Daddy” — a new game that allows players, Julien says, to become avatars sponsored by sugar daddies, and showcase their talents to a “fan base.”Peres, right, has appeared in several French television shows and movies; Houel is a newcomer to professional acting.Mathieu BareyreSiéfert has a knack for assembling captivatingly unconventional actors, and just as “_jeanne_dark_” was tailor-made for Helena de Laurens, a shape-shifter unafraid to lean into grotesque physicality, “Daddy” owes much to its two central performers. As Mara, the 15-year-old Lila Houel, who came to the production with limited stage experience, is coarsely candid in these early scenes, with turns of phrase that emphasize the character’s working-class background. Opposite her, Louis Peres, best known as a screen actor, is a startling tech-generation descendant of Christian Bale in “American Psycho”: clean-cut, in control, smoothly scary.Siéfert’s smartest move is to leave video and special effects behind once the two enter the game world of “Daddy.” The virtual space becomes a sinister, near-empty stage dotted with what look like snow mounds, where Mara encounters other preyed-upon young women.The rules of “Daddy” aren’t wholly clear. Men invest so teenage girls can perform routines that earn them points with fans. Houel, for instance, interprets a scene from the movie “Interview with the Vampire”; the sparkling Jennifer Gold, who plays the game’s reigning star Jessica, delivers cabaret-style numbers, including Marilyn Monroe’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” from the 1960 film “Let’s Make Love.”The points and the fans are never shown — Siéfert keeps things deliberately vague. The focus is on the dynamics of child abuse, and the erosion of Mara’s individuality and willpower by Julien. While some scenes of verbal and physical violence are troubling enough to make you fear for Houel’s mental health, she rises to the occasion with astonishing sang-froid, quietly haunted then seething in the second act.Siéfert co-wrote “Daddy” with Matthieu Bareyre, and some of the points they make don’t need so much time to come across: Cuts would be welcome. Yet “Daddy” speaks to the zeitgeist and the lives of teenagers today with a mix of ease and critical distance that few stage directors can match.And even at 11:30 p.m., one final scene had the audience sitting up and leaning forward. After a bloody narrative twist, the back wall of the stage slid away to reveal the street outside, and a performer staggered out of the game into the Odéon’s leafy neighborhood — while a few passers-by stopped, puzzled, to peek at the action onstage. In Siéfert’s theater, the real and the virtual keep colliding in invigorating ways.DaddyThrough May 26 at the Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris; theatre-odeon.eu. More

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    Before Taylor Swift or David Bowie, There Was Sarah Bernhardt

    A centenary exhibition in Paris honors the French actress who invented the concept of the global star.In the 19th and early 20th century, everyone worshiped at the altar of Sarah Bernhardt. She was a stage actress at a time when the theater was the equivalent of a stadium, a global celebrity who ushered in the very concept.Born in Paris in 1844, Bernhardt was a sickly child whose mother preferred to ignore her. As an adult, she insisted on standing out. She captivated theatergoers with her hypnotic voice (Victor Hugo ‌‌called it “golden”) and her bombastic performance style. ‌No role, no métier, was too ambitious: She was a writer, painter, sculptor, director, entrepreneur and philanthropist, too. The ‌‌newspapers amplified the legend of the “Divine Sarah,” as did the sundry artists and writers who counted her as their muse.The fanaticism surrounding her was comparable to that inspired by the Beatles or Taylor Swift; her devotees made shrines and gathered below her hotel window; reporters tracked her movements like proto-paparazzi.A 1910 self-portrait by Sarah Bernhardt. As well as an actor and painter, Bernhardt was a sculptor, director, entrepreneur and philanthropist.RMN-Grand Palais, via Art ResourceBernhardt may have been an object of extraordinary fascination, but nothing about her was passive. She played for the camera, generating her public image on her own terms with dynamism and feverish originality. Bernhardt created herself relentlessly — filling her memoirs with tall tales about her origins, living her life on a scale that matched the epics in which she starred — as an act of resistance. Only she would define her, and even now, 100 years after her death in 1923, she dares us to try and pin her down.This roguish quality of Bernhardt’s is what drew me to a 1910 self-portrait that can be seen in the exhibition, “Sarah Bernhardt: And the Woman Created the Star,” running through Aug. 27 at the Petit Palais in Paris. It’s an oil painting of the actress as a clown, smiling slyly. Bernhardt went on to play another clown in Jean Richepin’s 1883 play “Pierrot the Murderer” — a famous photograph of the actress in her Pierrot get-up is on display in the exhibition — but the self-portrait struck me as a statement of purpose.In the 19th century, the clown was something like a poet, walking the line between reality and fiction and imagining an alternative to the status quo. It’s no wonder that Bernhardt saw herself in such a figure. On and offstage, her showmanship placed her in opposition to the everywoman bound by the strictures of France’s Third Republic.A installation view of “Sarah Bernhardt: And the Woman Created the Star.” In the foreground is the costume Bernhardt wore in Victorien Sardou’s play “Théodora,” in 1884.Petit Palais; Photo by Gautier DeblondeBernhardt dazzled because she was free. “She did whatever she wanted and didn’t care what others thought,” said Annick Lemoine, the director of the Petit Palais and one of the co-curators of the Bernhardt exhibition. “She loved men and women. She traveled the world. She had a son out of wedlock and raised him the way she wanted to. She had no fear.”At 18, Bernhardt joined the prestigious company of the Comédie Française theater, in Paris, but she wouldn’t stay long. A spat broke out between a veteran actress and the feisty newcomer, which led to Bernhardt’s dismissal — yet another upheaval in the young woman’s already tumultuous life. Her father was out of the picture and her mother, a Parisian courtesan, had shuttled her daughter around France — to a boarding school, a countryside nursery, a nunnery.Bernhardt, it seems, became accustomed to the hustle, and not long after she was kicked out of the Comédie Française she broke out in an 1868 revival of “Kean” by Alexandre Dumas. From ingénue to full-fledged luminary, she tackled gutsy parts like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Hamlet — characters she inhabited, like a wild spirit, rather than merely played. She took her greatest hits on the road and performed for audiences around Europe and the United States.Known for her over-the-top death scenes, Bernhardt had a flair for melodrama, and in her private life, too, she was eccentric with a taste for the macabre. One of her many hats was adorned with a taxidermized bat and she had a photograph taken of herself in a coffin playing dead.A photo portrait of Bernhardt by Otto Wegener around 1899 or 1900, with her bat hat.BnFThose are among the more than 100 objects from private collections and public institutions around the world on display at the Petit Palais, along with artworks by and about Bernhardt, her stage costumes, personal belongings, advertising campaigns, photographs, clips from silent films and phonograph recordings of her voice. (Naturally, she was among the first to exploit the era’s new technologies for self-promotion.)Bernhardt’s greatest roles resembled the personas of David Bowie. She didn’t bring, say, the Empress Théodora or the doomed singer Floria Tosca to life so much as she absorbed them into her own. Passing through a room in the exhibition dedicated to her theater characters is like encountering the bat-cave where she stores the suits and props for her alter egos. In the latter half of her career, bored by the tragic female roles that were her claim to fame, she played teenagers and men — and some teenage boys — as a woman well into her middle age.“Bernhardt was someone who demanded the right to be extraordinary,” said the American playwright Theresa Rebeck in a video interview. Rebeck’s play “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” which premiered on Broadway in 2018, looks at the backstage drama surrounding the actress’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s drama. When Hamlet, a neurotic depressive in most productions, was given the Bernhardt treatment in 1899, the character paradoxically appeared steelier and more overtly masculine than usual, irking traditionalist critics and teasing queer ideas about the fluid nature of identity. “People think that I completely reimagined the history of that staging for the play,” added Rebeck, “but I really didn’t change that much.”Rebeck said she was inspired to write about Bernhardt after visiting the Alphonse Mucha Museum in Prague, home to the towering posters of the actress that have become synonymous with the curvilinear designs of Art Nouveau. In 1894, Bernhardt ‌had ‌commissioned illustrations from a studio to promote ‌her latest play, “Gismonda,” but the first round of mock-ups was not up to snuff. She demanded new versions, stat, which gave the unknown Mucha, one of the company’s minor employees, his big break.Posters depicting Bernhardt by Jean-Michel Liébaux, André-Georges Dréville and François Flameng on display at the Petit Palais.Petit Palais; Photo by Gautier DeblondeMucha went on to design several more posters for Bernhardt’s shows; these lofty works, which depict her like a pagan icon, are also on show at the Petit Palais. Dozens of other artists rendered her likeness: she’s angelic against a golden backdrop in a painting by Jules Masson; a coy mistress in a full-body-length portrait by Georges Clairin. She’s a topless geisha in one sketch, a cartoonish chimera in another.A pioneering self-brander, Bernhardt would have certainly intuited the power of social media. But unlike the influencers of today, many seemingly hellbent on conjuring an illusion of authenticity, she refused to be anything but larger-than-life. That’s why, like Keanu Reeves or Nicolas Cage, she always played a heightened version of herself. The tension between her irrepressible individuality and dramatic skill produced something rare: stardom.Sarah Bernhardt: And the Woman Created the StarThrough Aug. 27 at the Petit Palais, in Paris; petitpalias.fr. More

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    ‘The Habit of Art’ Review: Theater of the Creative Drive

    A play within a play about W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten structures this sex-spiked comedy for the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan.The poet W.H. Auden is expecting a rent boy, not a journalist. So when he opens the door to his home in Oxford, England, to let the much younger man in, it takes a while to clear up the confusion. Once the visitor has explained that he is not there to take off his pants, he commences an interview.“Are you writing?” he asks the poet.“Am I dead?” Auden ripostes. “I work. I have the habit of art.”Such a smooth, substantial-sounding phrase — a bulwark against others’ intrusive questions and Auden’s own self-doubt. Still, he is telling the truth.In Alan Bennett’s delectably smart, gently moving, sex-spiked comedy “The Habit of Art,” the year is 1972 and Auden is nearing the end of his life. Suspecting that God has rescinded his genius, he keeps writing anyway.“I have to work, or else who am I?” he says.All this, by the way, is part of the play within the play in the excellent production that the Brits Off Broadway festival has brought to 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. “The Habit of Art” is partially about an imagined meeting between Auden and his old friend, the composer Benjamin Britten. But Bennett frames it with a band of theater people finding their way through a script that tells this story — or, as he wrote in his diary in 2009, the year “The Habit of Art” made its premiere: “a group of differently fractured people coming together to present something whole.”Directed by Philip Franks for the Original Theater Company, “The Habit of Art” takes place in a dingy rehearsal hall (the set is by Adrian Linford) where a company is rehearsing a new play. The absent director has left in charge the savvy, ego-soothing stage manager (a wonderfully brisk Veronica Roberts), while the playwright (Robert Mountford) fends for himself, trying to shield his script from tinkerers who would make cuts or additions.The actor Fitz (Matthew Kelly) is a terrible snob, his dignity affronted by playing Auden — a role that requires him to be stained, stinky, squalid: a great man in unglamorous decline. Henry (Stephen Boxer), as the self-contained Britten, at least gets to look civilized.In the play within the play, the composer pays Auden a visit, seeking his help, though they haven’t seen each other in decades. Britten is writing “Death in Venice” — an opera about an older man obsessed with a beautiful boy, a theme that echoes in “The Habit of Art” — and it’s not going well.“I came because I feel so lonely,” Britten says.“Of course it’s lonely,” Auden reassures him. “It’s new. What do you expect?”That’s the voice of long experience speaking — Auden in his twilight, yes, and also Bennett, who this week turned 89. The playwright knows too that, in his chosen medium, a creator’s isolation eventually gives way to collaboration: maybe maddening, bickersome and chaotic, but at least not solitary.Such is the nature of theater. Such are the habits of that particular art.The Habit of ArtThrough May 28 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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    British Spies, Japanese Teens and a German Cop’s Wild Ride

    Recent international series of note include “A Spy Among Friends” on MGM+ and “Sam: A Saxon” on Hulu.It has been a quiet season for international television on American screens — nothing has grabbed attention on a “Squid Game” or “Downton Abbey” scale. But barely a day goes by, in the streaming age, without an interesting series washing up from some foreign shore. Here are four recent shows worth tracking down, from an elegant British thriller to a Chinese dramedy about a demon god and an immortal warrior who meet cute on the mortal plane.‘A Spy Among Friends’Alexander Cary, a writer and executive producer on “Homeland,” wrote this six-episode spy thriller as a leisurely, literate, three- or four-dimensional game of chess. Based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Ben Macintyre, it tells the story of Kim Philby (and the other high-level Soviet spies known as the Cambridge Five) by focusing on a set of intertwined sparring matches: Philby’s with his friend and MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliott, sent to Beirut to bring the disgraced Philby home; Elliott’s with a (fictional) agent, Lily Thomas, assigned to interrogate him when he returns to London alone; and Elliott and Thomas’s with the MI6 hierarchy once he brings her around to his side.Made for the British streaming service ITVX and available here on MGM+ and Prime Video, “A Spy Among Friends” is smart, complicated (at times overly so) and saturated in a particular Cold War blend of tragic romanticism and kitchen-sink class politics. What makes it stand out, though, is its casting. Anna Maxwell Martin and Guy Pearce are excellent as Thomas and Philby, and Damian Lewis is outstanding as Elliott, the colorless spy’s spy whose skills and motives are in question until the end. Tightly controlled yet somehow relaxed, Lewis gives a performance in which the coldblooded manipulator and the sentimentally loyal bro coexist at every moment.Malick Bauer is an East German policeman tossed around by history in “Sam: A Saxon” on Hulu.Stephan Burchadt/Disney‘Sam: A Saxon’As triumph-of-the-spirit stories go, “Sam: A Saxon” is notably low on triumph. Sam Meffire, the subject of this German biographical mini-series from Hulu, grew up in Dresden, both acutely aware of how his skin color set him apart and fiercely loyal to his East German homeland; shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, he became the country’s first policeman of African descent. His life since then — he’s only 52 — has been a carnival ride that no screenwriter would be likely to dream up: first a poster boy in a national ad campaign designed to humanize the police, and then a fugitive fleeing to Africa to avoid arrest for armed robbery.Jörg Winger, a creator and the showrunner of “Sam,” was also a creator of “Deutschland 83” and its sequels, and the shows share a knack for embedding engaging characters in real-world events in a way that feels both credible and suspenseful. In this dramatized telling, Meffire, played by the imposing actor Malick Bauer, is a true believer who finds himself continually and perversely acted upon by history. He is tossed about by the fall of Communism, and by the ravages of capitalism, racist nationalism and crime that the collapse unleashes. “Sam: A Saxon” stands firm against streaming-video bloat: Its seven episodes barely contain the story it sets out to tell.“Skip and Loafer” presents an expressionistic depiction of the life of a high-school girl.Misaki Takamatsu,KODANSHA/”Skip and Loafer” Production Committee‘Skip and Loafer’This sweet, lightly sentimental slice-of-life anime, halfway through its 12-episode season on Crunchyroll (and available for purchase on Prime Video), is an example of something that Japanese animation provides more consistently than American live-action TV: a comic, even expressionistic depiction of high-school life that still feels unforced and natural. Mitsumi, the star student of her small seaside town, moves to Tokyo to attend an elite prep school. Ferociously single-minded, very impressed with herself and determined to take her new school by storm, she’s also a quick-to-embarrass country bumpkin, a classic setup for teenage comedy.An early scene of Mitsumi’s childhood friends chasing after her departing train is a ruse, a poke at the conventions of this sort of story in traditional anime and Studio Ghibli-style films. And the bending of perspectives continues: While Mitsumi runs a gantlet of welcoming ceremonies, classroom presentations and karaoke parties in Tokyo, we and everyone around her — new friends, old friends and family — can see the anxieties and mortifications that she thinks she is hiding. The show (whose cryptic title, taken from the manga on which the anime is based, probably alludes to Mitsumi and her slacker crush, Sousuke) is a lighthearted essay on loneliness and the life-or-death nature of every decision a 15-year-old makes.In “Till the End of the Moon,” Luo Yunxi and Bai Lu play characters who are entangled across time and space.Rakuten Viki‘Till the End of the Moon’While a demon god is in the process of destroying the world, the resolute mystical warrior Li Susu (Bai Lu) is sent back in time 500 years to find the demon while he is still in mortal form and kill him. Arriving in the kingdom of Sheng, she discovers that she is in the body of a headstrong, very poorly behaved princess who is married to — do I have to spell it out?“Till the End of the Moon,” which is 35 episodes into its 40-episode run on Rakuten Viki, was a major hit in China, where it wrapped up this week; its premiere reportedly drew the highest numbers in three years for a xianxia (immortal heroes) drama. It’s an excellent example of the Chinese streaming-video industry’s capacity for making slickly disposable, highly enjoyable entertainment that combines elements of costume drama and special-effects-laden fantasy action with a healthy portion of romantic comedy. The humor will largely translate for a Western viewer, and Luo Yunxi (“My Sunshine,” “Ashes of Love”), who plays both the annihilating god and the possibly sympathetic human prince, is a hypnotic camera subject. More

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    Striking Writers Are Worried About A.I. Viewers Should Be, Too.

    A.I. screenwriting, a point of contention in the Writers Guild strike, may not yet be ready for prime time. But streaming algorithms and derivative programming have prepared the way for it.Television loves a good sentient-machine story, from “Battlestar Galactica” to “Westworld” to “Mrs. Davis.” With the Writers Guild of America strike, that premise has broken the fourth wall. The robots are here, and the humans are racing to defend against them, or to ally with them.Among the many issues in the strike is the union’s aim to “regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies,” at a time when the ability of chatbots to auto-generate all manner of writing is growing exponentially.In essence, writers are asking the studios for guardrails against being replaced by A.I., having their work used to train A.I. or being hired to punch up A.I.-generated scripts at a fraction of their former pay rates.The big-ticket items in the strike involve, broadly, how the streaming model has disrupted the ways TV writers have made a living. But it’s the A.I. question that has captured imaginations, understandably so. Hollywood loves robot stories because they make us confront what distinguishes us as human. And when it comes to distinguishing features, the ability to conjure imaginary worlds is simply sexier than the opposable thumb.So the prospect of A.I. screenwriting has become potent, both as threat and rallying cry. Detractors of the striking writers taunted them on social media that software was going to horse-and-buggy their livelihoods. Striking WGA members workshopped A.I. jokes on their picket signs, like “ChatGPT doesn’t have childhood trauma.” (Well, it doesn’t have its own. It has Sylvia Plath’s, and that of any other former unhappy child whose writing survives in machine-readable form.)But it shouldn’t surprise anyone if the TV business wants to leave open the option of relying on machine-generated entertainment. In a way, it already does.Not in the way the WGA fears — not yet. Even the most by-the-numbers scripted drama you watch today was not written by a computer program. But it might have been recommended to you by one.Algorithms, the force behind your streaming-TV “For You” menu, are in the business of noticing what you like and matching you with acceptable-enough versions of it. To many, this is indeed acceptable enough: More than 80 percent of viewing on Netflix is driven by the recommendation engine.In order to make those matches, the algorithm needs a lot of content. Not necessarily brilliant, unique, nothing-like-it content, but familiar, reliable, plenty-of-things-like-it content. Which, as it happens, is what A.I. is best at.The debate over A.I. in screenwriting is often simplified as, “Could a chatbot write the next ‘Twin Peaks’?” No, at least for now. Nor would anyone necessarily want it to. The bulk of TV production has no interest in generating the next “Twin Peaks” — that is, a wild, confounding creative risk. It is interested in more reboots, more procedurals, more things similar to what you just watched.TV has always relied on formula, not necessarily in a bad way. It iterates, it churns out slight variations on a theme, it provides comfort. That’s what has long made strictly formatted shows like “Law & Order” such reliable, relaxing prime-time companions. That’s also what could make them among the first candidates for A.I. screenwriting.Large language models like ChatGPT work by digesting vast quantities of existing text, identifying patterns and responding to prompts by mimicking what they’ve learned. The more done-to-death a TV idea is, the greater the corpus of text available on it.And, well, there are a lot of “Law & Order” scripts, a lot of superhero plots, a lot of dystopian thrillers. How many writers-contract cycles before you can simply drop the “Harry Potter” novels into the Scriptonator 3000 and let it spit out a multiseason series?In the perceptive words of “Mrs. Davis,” the wildly human comedic thriller about an all-powerful A.I., “Algorithms love clichés.” And there’s a direct line between the unoriginality of the business — things TV critics complain about, like reboots and intellectual-property adaptations and plain old derivative stories — and the ease with which entertainment could become bloated by machine-generated mediocrity.After all, if studios treat writers like machines, asking for more remakes and clones — and if viewers are satisfied with that — it’s easy to imagine the bean counters wanting to skip the middle-human and simply use a program that never dreamed of becoming the next Phoebe Waller-Bridge.And one could reasonably ask, why not? Why not leave the formulas to machines and rely on people only for more innovative work? Beyond the human cost of unemployment, though, there’s an entire ecosystem in which writers come up, often through precisely those workmanlike shows, to learn the ropes.Highly formatted shows like “Law & Order” could be among the early candidates for A.I.-generated scripts. NBCThose same writers may be able to use A.I. tools productively; the WGA is calling for guardrails, not a ban. And the immediate threat of A.I. to writers’ careers may be overstated, as you know if you’ve ever tried to get ChatGPT to tell you a joke. (It’s a big fan of cornball “Why did the …” and “What do you call a …” constructions.) Some speculations, like the director Joe Russo’s musing that A.I. some day might be able to whip up a rom-com starring your avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s, feel like science fiction.But science fiction has a way of becoming science fact. A year ago, ChatGPT wasn’t even available to the public. The last time the writers went on strike, in 2007, one of the sticking points involved streaming media, then a niche business involving things like iTunes downloads. Today, streaming has swallowed the industry.The potential rise of A.I. has workplace implications for writers, but it’s not only a labor issue. We, too, have a stake in the war with the storybots. A culture that is fed entirely by regurgitating existing ideas is a stagnant one. We need invention, experimentation and, yes, failure, in order to advance and evolve. The logical conclusion of an algorithmicized, “more like what you just watched” entertainment industry is a popular culture that just … stops.Maybe someday A.I. will be capable of genuine invention. It’s also possible that what “invention” means for advanced A.I. will be different from anything we’re used to — it might be wondrous or weird or incomprehensible. At that point, there’s a whole discussion we can have about what “creativity” actually means and whether it is by definition limited to humans.But what we do know is that, in this timeline, it is a human skill to create a story that surprises, challenges, frustrates, discovers ideas that did not exist before. Whether we care about that — whether we value it over an unlimited supply of reliable, good-enough menu options — is, for now, still our choice. More

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    Whose Queen? Netflix and Egypt Spar Over an African Cleopatra.

    Egyptians say the influential streaming service is dragging an ancient queen into a modern, and decidedly Western, debate — about Black representation in Hollywood — in which she has no real place.On this much, at least, everyone can agree: Cleopatra was a formidable queen of ancient Egypt, the last of the Macedonian Greek dynasty founded by Alexander the Great, who went on to even greater posthumous fame as a seductress, immortalized by Shakespeare and Hollywood.Beyond that, many of the details are fuzzy — which is how one of the world’s dominant streaming services ended up in an imbroglio with modern-day Egypt recently, called out by online commenters and even the Egyptian government for casting a Black actress to play Cleopatra in the Netflix docudrama series “African Queens,” which airs on Wednesday.Soon after the show’s trailer appeared last month, Netflix was forced to disable comments as they turned into a hostile, and occasionally racist, pile on. Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, the government agency in charge of heritage, declared the show a “falsification of Egyptian history.” A popular television host accused Netflix of trying to “take over our Egyptian culture.” An Egyptian lawyer filed a complaint demanding that the streaming service be shut down in the country.For the show’s makers, the four episodes about Cleopatra were a chance to celebrate one of history’s most famous women as an African ruler, one they portray as Black. But for many Egyptians and historians, that portrayal is at best a misreading, and at worst a negation, of Egyptian history.Despite her Macedonian Greek lineage, the producers of the show say question marks in her family tree leave room for the possibility that her mother was of another background: The identities of Cleopatra’s mother and grandmother are unknown, leading some experts to argue that she was at least partly Indigenous Egyptian.“We don’t often get to see or hear stories about Black queens, and that was really important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community to be able to know those stories because there are tons of them,” Jada Pinkett Smith, who produced “African Queens,” said in a Netflix-sponsored article about the show.Cleopatra was descended from a line of Macedonian Greek kings who ruled Egypt from 323 B.C. to 30 B.C., when it was annexed by Rome, and many scholars say she likely had little, if any, non-Greek blood. The Ptolemies — as all the dynasty’s kings were called — tended to marry their own sisters or other relatives, leaving few openings for new blood, though there is some evidence that she had a Persian ancestor, according to scholars.A sculpture of Cleopatra in the workshop of the Egyptian artist Ibrahim Salah in Giza in 2020.Mohamed Hossam/EPA, via Shutterstock“Statues of Queen Cleopatra confirm that she had Hellenistic (Greek) features, distinguished by light skin, a drawn-out nose and thin lips,” Egypt’s government said on Twitter on April 30.Modern battles over Cleopatra’s heritage and skin color have erupted time after time, finding fresh fuel with each new Hollywood casting, from Elizabeth Taylor, who played her in 1963, to Angelina Jolie, Lady Gaga and Gal Gadot, all recent contenders to portray her in various projects.Netflix’s casting of Adele James, a biracial British actress, is a reflection of Western arguments over Black representation in Hollywood and whether history is too dominated by white narratives that revolve around European primacy.But it stirred up a very different debate in Egypt, where many view identity and race through another lens. For many Egyptians, the question is whether Egyptians and their ancient ancestors — geographical location notwithstanding — are African.“Why do some people need Cleopatra to be white?” the show’s director, Tina Gharavi, wrote in a piece defending the casting in Variety last month. “Perhaps it’s not just that I’ve directed a series that portrays Cleopatra as Black, but that I have asked Egyptians to see themselves as Africans, and they are furious at me for that.”Egypt sits on the northeast corner of Africa. Its relationship with the continent, however, is deeply ambivalent.Today, it holds membership in the African Union and other continental groups. But in Greek and Roman times, historians say, Egypt was seen as a major player in the Mediterranean world, the gateway to Africa, rather than fully African.Since Arabs conquered Egypt in the seventh century, bringing the Arabic language and Islam with them, Egyptians have shared more cultural, religious and linguistic ties with the predominantly Arab and Muslim Middle East and North Africa than with the rest of Africa.Elizabeth Taylor during the filming of the movie “Cleopatra” in Rome.Associated PressThe ancestors of today’s Egyptians include not only Arabs and native Egyptians, but also Nubians, Greeks, Romans, Turks, Circassians, Albanians, Western Europeans and other conquerors, traders, slaves and immigrants who landed in Egypt at various points over the last two millenniums.For all its diversity, Egyptian society often prizes light skin and looks down on darker-skinned Egyptians. But many Egyptians and historians say the racist slurs hurled online at Ms. James, while abhorrent, distract from the real issue. The show is dragging an ancient queen into the middle of contemporary Western debates in which she has no real place, they argue.“How can someone who’s not even from my country claim my heritage just because of their skin color?” said Yasmin El Shazly, an Egyptologist and the deputy director for research and programs at the American Research Center in Egypt.Ancient Egypt and its wonders have long been a trophy in Western culture wars. In 1987, Martin Bernal’s book “Black Athena” argued that European historians had erased Egyptian contributions to ancient Greek culture. Though many scholars agree that much of the evidence it cited was flawed at best, the book became one of the canonical texts of Afrocentrism, a cultural and political movement that, among other things, seeks to counter ingrained ideas about the supposed inferiority of African civilizations.According to some Afrocentrists, ancient Egypt was the Black African civilization that birthed not only African history and culture, but also world civilization until Europeans plundered its technologies, ideas and culture. The pyramids and the pharaohs became sources of pride for these Afrocentrists — and Cleopatra, for all her Greek blood, a potential heroine of the movement.“Cleopatra reacted to the phenomena of oppression and exploitation as a Black woman would,” according to the Hamilton College classicist Shelley Haley, a professor of Africana and an expert on Cleopatra who consulted on the Netflix show. She argued that Cleopatra’s potentially mixed background made her a person of color: “Hence we embrace her as sister.”A still from “Queen Cleopatra,” which stars Adele James.NetflixThis kind of thinking frustrates many Egyptians, historians and Egyptologists. Egyptians, too, are fiercely proud of the pyramids and the pharaohs, even if they are two millenniums removed, and they would like Afrocentrists who hold such views to back off.For many Egyptians, the pharaohs — whose skin color and ancestry are still a matter of scientific debate — were Egyptian, not African. The Black American comedian Kevin Hart was forced to cancel a planned show in Egypt in February after an uproar over his past comments that the pharaohs were Black Africans.It does not help that some Afrocentrists hold that modern-day Egyptians descend from Arab invaders who displaced the Black Africans of ancient Egypt, a theory many Egyptians consider both offensive and inaccurate.“An African-American who’s never been to Egypt saying that ‘this is our heritage and modern Egyptians are these Arab invaders’ is very insulting,” Ms. El Shazly said.Some historians say the modern fixation on whether Cleopatra looked more like Elizabeth Taylor or Ms. James would have felt alien to the ancients.In Cleopatra’s time, Alexandria, the capital of her kingdom, was a cosmopolitan port city bustling with Greeks, Jews, ethnic Egyptians and people from all over who, the Cambridge University historian David Abulafia said, largely saw themselves as part of the Hellenistic world. They identified by culture and religion, he said, not by skin color.“Race is a modern construct of identity politics that’s been imposed on our past,” said Monica Hanna, an Egyptian Egyptologist. “This use and abuse of the past for modern agendas will just hurt everyone, because it’ll give a distorted image of the past.”Though Egyptian critics of the show have denied any racist motives, some Egyptian commentators say their society’s internalized racism and inferiority complexes turned up the volume of the Cleopatra outcry.Unable to take pride in modern-day Egypt’s political repression and cratering economy, some Egyptians “link their identities to ancient glories” or attempt to signal their superiority to the rest of Africa by emphasizing their European roots, said the Egyptian writer AbdelRahman ElGendy.Seizing the chance to whip up Egyptian pride, government-owned media dedicated airtime on three different evening talk shows recently to slamming “African Queens.”The same day, a government-owned media conglomerate announced that it would produce its own Cleopatra documentary. Its film, it pointedly noted, would be based on the “utmost levels” of research and accuracy. More

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    ‘Ted Lasso,’ Season 3, Episode 9 Recap: Colin’s Moment

    This week brought a return to form as the series shed some of the subplots that had been bogging down the story in recent episodes.Season, 3, Episode 9: ‘La Locker Room Aux Folles’For anyone doubting the adage that less is sometimes more, I offer the example of this episode of “Ted Lasso.” While it’s not what I would describe as remarkable, or even especially memorable, it has a nice rhythm to it, in part because it tackles fewer unrelated story lines. The aggressive jumps from subplot to subplot, many involving new or peripheral characters are less in evidence — Keeley’s professional and romantic dalliances with, respectively, Shandy and Jack, had been particular offenders — and their absence is a welcome break.Speaking of Jack, it appears that particular subplot has already run its highly unnecessary course. I cited most of my objections last week. But even I’m a little taken aback at how casually the show has discarded a once semi-central story line. Keeley and Jack had one fight, Jack slammed the door like Nora in “A Doll’s House” and now (unlike Nora) she has relocated to Argentina. What does this mean for her financing of Keeley’s business? If past discarded subplots are any clue — remember the momentarily club-threatening dispute with Dubai Air? — absolutely nothing. Still, for the record: Good riddance, and on to what still matters.ColinAnyone wondering about this episode’s central theme had to do no more than read the all-too-specific title. It’s a reference to “La Cage Aux Folles,” the play about a gay couple that was later adapted into a French film, an American film and a hit Broadway musical. For anyone who missed the episode title, we helpfully open to the strains of the musical’s prelude, as the AFC Richmond squad goes through a beautifully choreographed practice (sorry, training) that culminates, after several pinpoint passes, in a goal by Isaac. The team has been playing incredibly since last we saw them, and will soon find themselves on an eight-game winning streak! (Has anyone else noticed that Richmond seems to alternate between long winning and losing streaks without ever being, you know, average?) Spirits are high.Well, all spirits save one. When Colin congratulates Isaac on his shot, the latter merely scowls back. Later, Isaac refuses Colin’s invitation to get a beer with a curt, angry “No.” Next, before the game with Brighton & Hove Albion — I’m with Ted; sounds like a law firm — Isaac leaves Colin’s attempted fist-bump un-bumped. And finally, he lays into Colin after an error on the field, before charging furiously into the stands to confront an abusive fan.There are two possibilities here. Either Isaac is angry that Colin is gay — a fact he discovered accidentally last episode — or he is angry that Colin never told him. I think I speak for most if not all regular viewers of “Ted Lasso” when I say there was never any doubt in my mind which would be the case. This was a plot twist that was (forgive the phrase) straight as an arrow.But that doesn’t mean it was an ineffective one. Colin’s announcement to the team is not merely the setup for a nice Lasso lesson of the kind we’ve seen fewer of this season, it’s the setup for Colin’s own comeback: “Coach, did you just compare being gay to being a Denver Broncos fan?”Billy Harris, who plays Colin, has been excellent throughout the past few episodes, and never more than in this one, in which he repeatedly displays a deft comic touch. After explaining to Trent that this was the “second-best way” his revelation to the team could have gone, he describes what would have been the best way. And let me tell you: I would’ve been first in line to buy that copy of Oprah’s magazine.Don’t even get me started on Colin’s final conversation with Isaac, after both have laid their cards on the table. These are two friends having a hilarious conversation neither one envisioned, but one for which they are both finally ready.Is it a bit of a stretch that a men’s professional sports team would harbor zero outspoken homophobes? Probably. But given that we have just three episodes to go, it’s almost certainly for the best.Nate (and Jade and Rupert)It’s a pleasant surprise, for us as well as Nate, when Jade stops by his office bearing lunch. But several items of West Ham merch later, storm clouds roll in. By which I mean, of course, Rupert.The turtle-necked Lucifer proceeds to offer a brief yet comprehensive master class in his personal art of seduction: the offhand compliment about Jade’s smile, the display of his “amateur dialectologist” party trick, the intimation she might be out of Nate’s league. None of it is too strong or obvious. Rupert is testing and assessing, displaying his well-rehearsed charm in doses small enough to see what might stick.Jade is having none of it, just as she was unimpressed by Nate’s attempts at a “wunderkind” persona at A Taste of Athens. Her immediate response to Rupert’s visit — “He seems very wealthy” — may be the most delightful cutting-down-to-size he has inspired to date. And when Nate explains that his boss is “actually really decent,” Jade responds with the eternal half-smile of the person who knows better.When we next see Nate and Rupert, the scene is staged almost like a horror movie. As Nate sketches plays on his whiteboard, Rupert appears behind him in the doorway to lurk for a moment, silent and unseen. Just listen to the ominous music: If this were a different show, Rupert would be holding a machete. But his jabs are more subtle: ostentatiously forgetting Jade’s name, helping himself to Nate’s baklava without invitation.The smiling face of evil: Anthony Head in “Ted Lasso.”Apple TV+Later, Rupert invites Nate out for a drink without Jade, a “guy’s night.” It’s a phrase that evidently means different things to different guys, as Nate discovers when he shows up to find Rupert happily ensconced with two beautiful women. “The girls will be joining us,” he explains, to absolutely no one’s surprise but Nate’s. One can almost see the scales falling from his eyes; it’s like watching a glacier calving.Nate makes his excuses and instead heads to Jade’s apartment where, in a lovely touch, they do not kiss but merely hold each other for a moment. Nate has passed life’s test, but he has failed Rupert’s. We will learn soon enough whether or not there are consequences.RoyAsk and ye shall receive. I was pretty hard on the show’s treatment of Roy last week. And, behold, we’re granted, for the first time in a while, reason to be optimistic about him, courtesy of some long-overdue tough love from Rebecca. (That line in Episode 6 regarding Keeley’s whereabouts — She’s “somewhere that believes they deserve her” — was merely a warm-up.)After some characteristic Roy grousing, Rebecca sits him down to discuss his skipping the news conference he was supposed to be giving. “Is that the plan for the rest of your life? You’re just going to walk away from everything the second it isn’t fun or easy?” she demands. And no, she’s definitely not just talking about the news conference. For good measure, she adds, “Get out of your own way, man!”And for the remainder of the episode he pretty much does. When Isaac storms out of the locker room, it’s Roy — you will recall he helped turn Isaac into a strong team captain last season — who offers support while withholding questions and judgment alike. And at a surprise makeup news conference, he explains Isaac’s rushing into the stands with a story that can only be described as Lassoean. There’s hope for Roy yet.Which of course means there’s hope for Roy and Keeley yet. Maybe. Last episode, it seemed like a Keeley-Jamie reunion was more likely. Or perhaps neither will take place. Maybe Rebecca will adopt Keeley: After all, she’s already playing a fairly maternal role and the psychic, as discussed, merely said that Rebecca would “have a family” and “be a mother.” Two central plotlines solved with one unexpected twist! Which brings me to …The ticking clockWe are now 31 episodes into the 34 episodes of “Ted Lasso” that will, to the best of our current knowledge, ever be broadcast. Even if the showrunners ultimately relent and offer a Season 4, they have been adamant that three seasons were all they intended and will conclude the story they intended to tell.Which means we have three episodes in which to determine Rebecca’s romantic/parental status, Keeley’s romantic status (likely but not necessarily involving Roy or Jamie), Ted’s parental/geographic status, and the status of Nate’s soul. If Ted leaves, who will be Richmond’s new coach? Will the team be relegated — or win the Premier League championship?And those are just some of the big questions. The smaller ones — will Rebecca ever use her knowledge of Rupert’s affair with Ms. Kakes against him? Will we ever see the wonderful Phoebe again? — are too numerous to catalog. Buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy few weeks.Odds and endsAnother episode gone by without any sign of Rebecca’s marvelous Dutch love interest. At this point, I think this is both good and bad news. Bad, because presuming he shows up, their arc will be rushed by definition. Good, because I sincerely doubt there’s time to introduce another potential love interest. Though there’s always the Keeley adoption option, I suppose.In that early training, a near-perfect Beardism: “I haven’t seen 22 dudes have this good a time on grass since I saw the Grateful Dead jamming with the Black Crowes and Phish.”The joy in Nate’s voice when he introduces Jade to Rupert as his “girlfriend.” He practically sings the word.Speaking of singing, the episode ends as it began, with “La Cage Aux Folles,” in this case the song “I Am What I Am.”After all the focus on Michelle and Jake’s potential matrimonial status last episode — and Ted’s existential concern about the topic — our Ted/Henry/Michelle quota is limited to a single parent-teacher phone conference. And as much as the idea of being on the teacher end of that call frightens me, Ted’s “We’d better go let Ledbetter go” was pretty clever.If Coach Beard really had to start a trans-Atlantic beef over rock guitarists at his news conference, I wish he’d picked a better champion than Joe Walsh. Although it did set up a nice line about “the guy from Cream.”Ted: “That’s what that lady from the American ‘Office’ said.” Speaks for itself. More

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    John Roland, Durable Anchor at Fox Flagship in N.Y., Dies at 81

    For a quarter-century, he was the face of the kinetic 10 p.m. news program that typically beat its rivals in the ratings.John Roland, the Emmy Award-winning anchor of the 10 p.m. newscast on Fox’s flagship station and a dependable fixture on local television news in New York for 35 years, died on Sunday in North Miami Beach, Fla. He was 81.The cause was complications of a stroke, his wife, Zayda Galasso, said.While Fox 5’s nightly newscast began with the ominous query, “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?” Mr. Roland was a reassuring presence during the quarter-century that he anchored the weeknight program, from 1979, when he succeeded Bill Jorgensen, who was lured to WPIX-TV, until just before he retired in 2004. The program typically topped the ratings at that hour for TV news.“John was very likable, not a formidable presence like Bill Jorgensen,” Ted Kavanagh, the station’s news director from 1968 to 1974, said in an email. “He was more a Jimmy Stewart type. An American Everyman that somehow finds himself thrust into the limelight and makes a surprisingly strong impression.”One of Mr. Roland’s co-anchors, Judy Licht Della Femina, who described herself as “the first female anchor in Channel 5’s history,” said, “Back when it had a pretty gritty, testosterone-laden newsroom, John was there to protect me. He looked out for me.”John Roland Gingher Jr. was born in Pittsburgh on Nov. 25, 1941, to John and Marian Gingher. His father was a foundry inspector.After graduating from California State University at Long Beach in 1964, Mr. Roland began his career in broadcasting as a researcher for NBC News in Los Angeles in 1966 and abbreviated his name.As a reporter for KTTV, a Metromedia station there, he covered Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 and the trial of Charles Manson, who was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy in 1971 for the deaths of seven people, including the film actress Sharon Tate.In 1969, Mr. Roland was hired as a political reporter by Metromedia’s sister station, WNEW in New York (now Fox’s WNYW). He also worked as a weekend anchor and produced a cooking feature before being promoted to weeknight anchor.In 1983, Mr. Roland made news when he disarmed one of three robbers who tried to hold up a restaurant on East 67th Street in Manhattan opposite Fox’s broadcast center. He shot one with the robber’s own gun, but was hit over the head with a pistol. He needed 36 stitches to close the wound.In 1986, he became a partner in an Upper East Side restaurant, Marcello, which was awarded two stars in a review by Bryan Miller of The New York Times.Mr. Roland was briefly suspended in 1988 after a heated on-air interview with Joyce Brown, a mentally ill homeless woman whose involuntary commitment to a mental hospital for treatment had been successfully challenged by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Roland had encountered Ms. Brown, who also went by the name Billie Boggs, before her incarceration; she had lived in front of a hot air vent near the television station.The interview grew combative when Mr. Roland challenged Ms. Brown’s assertion that she had never needed any hospital care; he cited her behavior in the streets that he had witnessed and found offensive. The station was flooded with complaints, as well as calls of support for Mr. Roland.He was suspended, a spokesman for the station said, because during the interview “his emotions prevailed over objectivity.” He later apologized on the air and in a phone call to Ms. Brown and said his interview had been “very insensitive.”Mr. Roland won two local Emmy Awards, in 1976-77 as a writer on the Sunday 10 p.m. news, and in 1981-82, which he shared with colleagues on the weeknight news broadcast.He appeared as an anchor in the films “Hero at Large” (1980), “Eyewitness” (1981) and “The Object of My Affection” (1998), and as himself in “The Scout” (1994).Mr. Roland was married four times. In addition to Ms. Galasso, he is survived by a brother, Ronald; a stepdaughter, Natasha; and a step-granddaughter.He left the 10 p.m. slot in 2003, anchoring newscasts at 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. until he retired in 2004.“I want to thank you for inviting me into your home for all these years,” he said from the anchor desk on his last broadcast. “It’s an invitation I never took for granted and always considered an honor.” More