Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 138 Shares169 Views

    in Television

    King Charles’s Coronation: A British TV Spectacle for the Digital Age

    King Charles III’s coronation will be disseminated across numerous platforms to a less sympathetic public than when his mother was crowned in 1953.The mystique around the British royal family — so essential to the nation’s acceptance of its hereditary and privileged first monarchy — has always drawn its power from a blend of secrecy and symbolism that combine in impeccably choreographed spectacle.On Saturday, the regal alchemy will be conjured anew at King Charles III’s coronation at Westminster Abbey in London. The spectacle has been years in the planning, not simply as an event in its own right, but also as a moment in history intimately entwined with its onscreen projection around Britain and across the globe.The coronation will be the first since Charles’s mother, Elizabeth II, who died in September, was crowned in June 1953. Hers was the first coronation to be transmitted live and in full at a time when televisual broadcasting was still a novelty, and it initiated a long era of increasingly close coordination between Buckingham Palace and the BBC, Britain’s public broadcaster.Areas for the media to use during Charles’s coronation have been erected in front of Buckingham Palace. The event will be projected around Britain and across the globe.Press Association via AP ImagesAnti-royalists have complained bitterly that, as Graham Smith, the head of a campaigning organization called Republic, said in a recent statement: “The BBC routinely misrepresents the monarchy and public opinion. They suggest the nation is celebrating major events when that simply isn’t the case.”While the BBC rejects these claims of partiality, there is little doubt that as digital technology has advanced over many years, the broadcaster’s royal coverage has become ever more sophisticated and comprehensive. The medium, in other words, has facilitated a kind of blanket coverage of a message that would not have been possible in the 1950s.In 1953, the queen’s coronation unfolded in a nation in thrall to a newfangled miracle called television. British baby boomers, many of them small children at the time, like to recall that television in those days meant a small black-and-white screen in a large wooden cabinet broadcasting a single channel. The British establishment — including its nobles and priests, as well as the BBC — wielded exclusive control of the monochrome footage that would mold a generation’s memory of the event.Makeshift antennae were thrown up on hilltops to link the various parts of the British Isles to the central broadcast unit in London. In the presatellite, predigital era, British Royal Air Force bombers flew raw film of the coronation across the Atlantic for broadcast on American networks.In New York in 1953, crowds gathered around televisions broadcasting the queen’s coronation. British Royal Air Force bombers flew raw film of the event across the Atlantic for American networks.Getty ImagesSome members of the British hierarchy wished to keep cameras out of the inner sanctum of Westminster Abbey, where the queen was crowned. “The world would have been a happier place if television had never been discovered,” the Most Rev. Geoffrey F. Fisher, then the archbishop of Canterbury, who presided over the queen’s coronation, was quoted as saying.Even today, King Charles has resolved to follow his mother’s example by banning cameras from what is considered the most sacred part of the coronation service, in which he is anointed with what is called the oil of chrism.But much else has changed. When Elizabeth was crowned, “Britain was marked by extreme deference,” Vernon Bogdanor, a constitutional expert at King’s College, London, said in a recent interview. “The monarchy was thought to be magical and untouchable.”Since then, the royal House of Windsor has changed radically from “a magical monarchy to a public service monarchy,” Bogdanor said, and “is judged by whether it contributes to society, and if it doesn’t, people won’t have it.” King Charles, he added, seems “well aware of that.”For the king, a helter-skelter technological revolution has transformed every smartphone owner into a pocket cinematographer, hooked to a multiplex world of apps and platforms, uploads and downloads. Where his mother’s crowning bathed the monarchy in uncontested splendor, Charles’s challenge is to focus a much more diffuse spotlight.While Elizabeth’s coronation required only around 20 cameras, Charles’s crowning is set to be broadcast on the BBC’s hi-definition iPlayer streaming service, alongside television coverage. In advance of the coronation, other television offerings — including a soap opera, a sewing program and a show usually devoted to rural life — will be broadcast with coronation-themed episodes “to mark history with an unparalleled breadth of programs,” said Charlotte Moore, the BBC’s chief content officer. Regional affiliates of the BBC, its many radio channels and rival commercial television broadcasters will also have programming on regal matters.With her sparing television addresses and her tight adherence to the royal script, the queen seemed to generally balance the monarchy’s need for visibility with its enduring aversion to scrutiny. But the rest of her family has fared very differently onscreen.“The public eye is grown more unforgiving, its gaze, like its judgments, more relentless,” Catherine Mayer wrote in “Charles: The Heart of a King,” a biography updated last year after its initial publication in 2015. “Even so, if the Windsors wish to see the biggest dangers to the survival of the monarchy, they need only look in the mirror.”From left, Queen Mother Elizabeth, her grandson Prince Charles and his aunt Princess Margaret at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Charles was 4 at the time.Intercontinentale, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSince the mid-1990s, when the estranged Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, gave television interviews to seek sympathy for their divergent versions of their marital woes, culminating in divorce in 1996, efforts by members of the royal family to advance their agendas on television have proved ambiguous at best.In 2019, Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth’s second son after Charles, gave a lengthy television interview to try to rebut accusations related to his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The interview set off a public relations disaster, leading to Prince Andrew’s withdrawal from public life.Then, in March 2021, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry appeared in a joint interview with Oprah Winfrey, screened in the United States and then in Britain, after their decision to live in California and step back from their roles as senior royals. The interview touched on a range of topics including mental health issues, intimations of racism in the House of Windsor, and the couple’s sense of dislocation, betrayal and vulnerability.But cumulatively, the airing of grievances, like Prince Andrew’s litany of self-exculpation before it, bolstered the sense of a dysfunctional and anachronistic institution held in place by a fickle mix of public tolerance, inherited privilege and fabled wealth. In the run-up to the coronation, one question eagerly pursued by British newspapers was whether Harry would attend the most important public event in his father’s life on May 6. The answer: he would, but without Meghan and their two children.For Charles, the recent redrawing of the media landscape and the public mood offer perils that were barely dreamed of when his mother was crowned.Charles and his son Prince Harry in 2019. After much speculation in the British press, it was announced that Harry would indeed attend the coronation, but without his wife, Meghan Markle, and their two children.Samir Hussein/WireImage, via Getty Images“Because the royals have ended up co-opted into the culture wars,”‌ Mayer, the author, said‌ in an interview, “one word out of place — and, let’s face it, that’s a family that specializes in words out of place ‌ — will have gone round the world and back in a way it never would have before.”‌ More

  • 113 Shares189 Views

    in Television

    Judith Miller, ‘Antiques Roadshow’ Mainstay, Is Dead at 71

    Known for her many guidebooks, she helped determine what was trash and what was treasure on the BBC series that inspired the American show.Judith Miller, the author of popular antiques price guides and a member of the team of appraisers who determined what was trash and what was treasure on “Antiques Roadshow,” the beloved long-running BBC program that inspired the American series of the same name, died on April 8 in North London. She was 71.Her husband, John Wainwright, confirmed the death, in a hospital. He did not specify the cause, saying only that she died after a short illness.Ms. Miller, known to the British news media as the queen of collectibles, was often buttonholed on the street by Britons eager to share their back stories of Great-Aunt So-and-So’s bibelots, and at antiques fairs, where many attendees clutched fresh copies of “Miller’s Antiques Handbook & Price Guide” or “Miller’s Collectibles Handbook,” the twin bibles of the antiques and collecting world. Once, Mr. Wainwright recalled, at the reception for his mother’s funeral, a woman approached Ms. Miller and pulled a plate out from under her coat, wondering what it might be worth. (He did not know the woman, he hastened to add.)Ms. Miller’s books, updated regularly, are encyclopedic in their range and eclectic in their categories. They describe thousands of objects — the current antiques edition lists more than 8,000 — each illustrated by a sumptuous color photograph. There were the usual suspects, like Royal Doulton Art Deco teacups and saucers, Meissen pottery, Murano glass and pages of Scandinavian ceramics. But Ms. Miller also covered the world of material and popular culture, including a signed photograph of Whoopi Goldberg; a letter from Lyndon B. Johnson on White House stationery; a first edition of William S. Burroughs’s novel “Naked Lunch”; ’60s-era Barbies; and British utility clothing from the ’40s. There was also Inuit art, Swinging Sixties fashion, ’50s-era Ferragamo shoes, James Bond books, baseball cards, soccer jerseys and what was described as the world’s smallest pen, 1.5 inches long, made by Waterman in 1914.Riffling through a Miller’s collectibles guide is delicious social history, an intriguing romp through the decades. A reader could learn, for example, that a plastic box purse from the 1940s in bright, jaunty colors took its shape from the telephone cables that were used because of the shortages of other materials in the years after World War II.Ms. Miller’s books are encyclopedic, describing thousands of objects, each illustrated by a sumptuous color photograph. The current edition of her antiques guide lists more than 8,000.Mitchell BeazleyA mild-mannered woman who spoke with a soft Scottish burr, Ms. Miller was the expert in charge of “miscellaneous and ceramics” on “Antiques Roadshow,” which began in 1979 and she joined in 2007. (The American version first aired in 1997.) One of the treasures she was most proud of identifying was a collection of British Art Deco transport posters by the French artist Jean Dupas, which was brought to the show by a man who had paid 50 pence for them at a yard sale when he was a boy in the 1970s. Ms. Miller estimated their value at more than 30,000 pounds (nearly $40,000).“That was a very well-spent 50 p,” she told the man, who responded with British understatement: “Wow. Gosh.”Her other favorite discoveries, The Guardian reported, included a stash of 2,000 18th-century shoe buckles and a toilet seat used by Winston Churchill.Ms. Miller was a history student at the University of Edinburgh when she began buying cheap antique plates from local junk shops to brighten up the walls of her student digs. Intrigued by their history, she began to research and collect in earnest.With her first husband, Martin Miller, she wrote the first “Miller’s Antiques Price Guide.” Published in 1979, it was an instant success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. After the couple divorced in the early 1990s, Ms. Miller continued to produce books on collectibles and antiques; she had completed more than 100 at her death.Her own collecting ranged from 15th-century porcelain to midcentury modern furniture. She was addicted to auctions, she told The Telegraph: “I get sweaty palms, my heart starts beating faster, and I start glaring at anyone bidding against me.”She loved costume jewelry, as well as pieces by the Danish silversmith Georg Jensen and chairs, which she bought in abundance. She was agnostic with regard to period and preferred buying single chairs to buying sets. Her favorites included an 18th-century ladder-back chair, an Arne Jacobsen piece from 1955 and a Queen Anne chair from 1710. When Ms. Miller set out on an antiques expedition, Mr. Wainwright invariably sent her off with these words:“Repeat after me: We do not need one more single chair.”Judith Henderson Cairns was born on Sept. 16, 1951, in Galashiels, Scotland. Her father, Andrew Cairns, was a wool buyer, and her mother, Bertha (Henderson) Cairns, was a homemaker.Judith grew up in an antiques-free household; she always said that her parents were part of the “Formica generation” and had paid to have their parents’ things carted away after their deaths. She had planned to be a history teacher, but in 1974 she took a job as an editorial assistant at Mr. Miller’s publishing company.After they married in 1978, the Millers embarked on a career of publishing and house flipping; they would move 12 times in 16 years. In 1985 they bought Chilston Park, an enormous estate in Kent, England, with no running water or electricity, where they lived for a time with their two young daughters before turning it into a luxury hotel.In addition to Mr. Wainwright, her partner since the early 1990s, Ms. Miller is survived by her daughters, Cara and Kristy Miller; her son, Tom Wainwright; and four grandchildren.Ms. Miller’s own collection ranged from 15th-century porcelain to midcentury modern furniture. She was addicted to auctions, at which she once said her heart “starts beating faster.”Andrew CrowleyCara Miller has been working on “The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder,” the first in a series of mystery novels to be published next year for which Judith Miller was both consultant and inspiration. At one point Cara asked her mother the crucial question: “What antique would you kill for?” Her answer, as Cara recalled by email, was “Of course for an antique for someone to kill over I suppose it would have to be worth a vast amount — a Ming vase, a Fabergé egg — but that’s not nearly as interesting as what item we love and why we love it. So often the value is in the story behind it and what that story means to us.”In 2020, Ms. Miller told Fiona Bruce, the host of “Antiques Roadshow,” her own story of an object she particularly valued.It was a late-19th-century cranberry glass claret jug. It had belonged, Ms. Miller said, to her great-aunt Lizzie, who had been a downstairs maid at a grand house in Scotland and had married the footman. The jug was a wedding present from the lady of the house. The footman died in the trenches during World War I, and Lizzie never remarried.“To her, this was her most precious object,” Ms. Miller said. “We used to go see her twice a week, and if I was a very, very good girl I was allowed to pick it up.”When Great-Aunt Lizzie died, she left the piece to Ms. Miller.“I think on a good day it’s worth about 40 quid” ($50), she told Ms. Bruce. “But you can’t put a value on the memories.” More

  • 113 Shares189 Views

    in Theater

    Nataki Garrett to Step Down at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

    Garrett began her tenure at the organization in August 2019, and plans to depart at the end of this month.Nataki Garrett, the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is stepping down after a tumultuous period that concluded with a financial crisis so severe that the nonprofit theater warned that it was unclear whether it would be able to finish this year’s season.One of the most prominent women of color to lead an American theater, Garrett began her tenure in August 2019. She plans to resign effective May 31; the decision was reported on Friday by American Theater magazine, and then announced by the theater.Garrett has encountered a series of crises during her time at the helm of the organization, which has been one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious nonprofit theaters. Based in the southern Oregon town of Ashland, it is a destination theater, meaning most of its audience travels to get there, and it stages much of its work during the summer; before the pandemic, it had been attracting 400,000 patrons annually.Garrett faced not only the coronavirus pandemic, which forced the theater, like most others, to shutter in 2020, but also the impact of climate change, which has particularly affected the Oregon Shakespeare Festival because it has repeatedly been forced to cancel performances when smoke from wildfires has worsened air quality.She has also received pushback to her programming, which some longtime theater patrons objected to as overly left-leaning, and she hired security personnel after receiving death threats.The organization has experienced considerable turnover during her tenure — some of the leaders she brought in to help run the festival have since left — and in January she took on the title of interim executive artistic director after David Schmitz, who Garrett had hired as executive director, departed amid a leadership shake-up. Last month the company began a $2.5 million fund-raising campaign with the dire tagline: “Save Our Season. Save OSF.”Garrett declined, through a spokeswoman, to be interviewed, but issued a statement saying, in part: “We are at an inflection point in our industry, where outdated business models must evolve in order for our theaters to survive. But these challenges also pose great opportunities — to rebuild in a way that reflects where we are today and where we want to be in the future — with actors, staff, audiences, and artistic leaders who reflect the richness of our country’s diversity. This is what excites me. This is the work I came to do.”The company said in a statement that a board member, the playwright Octavio Solis, “will be stepping in to help oversee and support the artistic leadership team during this transitional phase.”The theater currently has two shows running, a production of “Romeo & Juliet,” directed by Garrett, which is described on the company’s website as exploring “the financial and class divisions of our current time,” as well as a production of “Rent.”The theater’s board chairwoman, Diane Yu, said in an interview that the fund-raising campaign is going well and that she is optimistic that this season’s other shows, including productions of “Twelfth Night” and “The Three Musketeers,” will go forward; the theater has canceled its holiday show, and Yu said what happens next year remains unclear, but that “the board is focused on keeping this theater viable — it’s important for the region and it’s important for the American theater.” More

  • 125 Shares189 Views

    in Theater

    Laura Pels, Devoted Supporter of Nonprofit Theater, Dies at 92

    She led a foundation that underwrote productions for numerous theater groups, as well as playwrights like Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller.Laura Pels, a leading benefactor of nonprofit theater through the Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater, which has helped a multitude of companies stage plays in New York City and beyond, died on Wednesday at a hospital near her home in Manhattan. She was 92.The cause was complications of Covid-19, her daughter Juliette J. Meeus said.Ms. Pels took control of the foundation that now bears her name in a divorce settlement with the media executive Donald A. Pels.“I decided that I was going to do exactly what I wanted with it: help the theater,” she told Playbill in 1995.She did just that, diligently guiding the foundation from the 1990s until recently.“She was incredibly involved and ‘hands on,’” Hal Witt, the foundation’s former executive director and a member of the board, wrote in an email, adding that Ms. Pels had “read all of the scripts that were submitted for funding.”There were rules: Productions had to be run by accredited nonprofit theaters; a full script, along with a 500-word statement, had to be submitted; and musicals need not apply.Ms. Pels forged relationships with leading playwrights like Arthur Miller, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter, Mr. Witt said, and with artistic directors like André Bishop at Lincoln Center Theater, James Houghton at Signature Theater and Todd Haimes at the Roundabout Theater Company.Mr. Haimes, who saved the Roundabout from bankruptcy (and who died last month at 66), said in 1995 that “as traditional sources of funding are drying up, a person like Laura who will sponsor productions makes a huge difference to nonprofit theaters like ours.”He added, “The fact that Laura is a creative person who can come up with her own projects and yet doesn’t tell us how to run the company is the nicest combination one could ask for in a supporter.”Jack Brister, the foundation’s treasurer, said in an email that during his 20 years with the foundation it had granted more than $5 million to nonprofit theaters in the United States.Josette Jeanne Bernard was born on May 1, 1931, in Saint-Vivien-de-Monségur, a village near Bordeaux, France. Her parents, Raymond and Jeanne Yvette (Dauvignac) Bernard, were schoolteachers.She grew up near Bordeaux and then studied mime and acting in Paris, before she decided that the stage was not for her. (Her daughter Juliette said her mother changed her name to Laura in her 20s because she disliked Josette.)At 25, she moved to London to study English and met Adolphe Meeus, a translator for the United Nations. They married in 1956.After living for a time in Ethiopia, the couple moved to New York City and divorced in the mid-1960s.She married Mr. Pels in 1965. A communications executive, he took control of Lin Broadcasting in 1969 and served as its chairman and president for the next 20 years.Starting in the early 1980s, Mr. Pels invested heavily in cellular communications, buying up licenses from the Federal Communications Commission that became increasingly valuable as cellphone use spread. In 1989, McCaw Cellular bought a controlling interest in Lin in a deal valued at more than $3 billion. Mr. Pels’s personal profit was estimated at nearly $175 million (more than $420 million in today’s money).Not long after, The New Yorker reported that Ms. Pels and her husband had donated more than $1 million to help the actor Tony Randall start the National Actors Theater, originally out of the Belasco Theater on Broadway, to present affordable shows by playwrights like Ibsen, Chekhov and Miller.The Pelses filed for divorce in 1993, and Ms. Pels became the foundation’s leader. (Mr. Pels died in 2014.)The foundation also funded Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. And it provided educational grants to up-and-coming artists at institutions like the Juilliard School and the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.For many years Ms. Pels owned an apartment in Paris and Le Théâtre de L’Atelier in the city’s Montmartre neighborhood, which she ran with her daughter Juliette. In New York, she endowed an annual $10,000 cash prize for midcareer American playwrights for PEN America.In addition to Juliette, she is survived by another daughter, Valerie A. Pels; a son, Laurence, who is on the foundation’s board; and four grandchildren.In 1995, Roundabout staged a production of Mr. Pinter’s “Moonlight” at a newly opened 399-seat venue on West 46th Street, the Laura Pels Theater.“I thought it was an honor I didn’t deserve,” Ms. Pels said at the time. “But I realized that giving up a little anonymity could have a positive impact on the work I want to do.” More

  • 113 Shares179 Views

    in Theater

    Review: In ‘Dimanche,’ a Climate Emergency Comes to Stay

    Tornadoes whoosh dinner from the table and a shark swims through a flooded living room in a clown show that brings the environmental crisis home.A clown show and a climate tragedy, “Dimanche,” a collaboration between the Belgian companies Focus and Chaliwaté, makes a comedy of the climate crisis. Absurd and nearly wordless, the brisk 75-minute show at BAM Fisher is composed of a series of vignettes. Each is a devastating example of the climate emergency, expressed playfully — with toys, puppetry, acrobatics and nifty practical effects. “Dimanche” succeeds, in its macabre, elliptical way, in bringing the issue home, with tornadoes whooshing dinner from the table and a shark swimming through a flooded living room. The catastrophe, it’s here, there, everywhere already.The play, written and directed by Julie Tenret, Sicaire Durieux and Sandrine Heyraud, who also star, begins somewhere in the Arctic Circle. As “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” plays, a three-person camera crew bump along in their van, eager to capture footage of a glacier calving. The shoot almost immediately goes awry and the crew shrinks to two. A similar disaster befalls an expertly puppeteered polar bear and her cub. (Although given that polar bears are prodigious swimmers, this sequence seems more melodramatic than likely.)In the third sequence, set in an ordinary home, the problem of warming has traveled south. A husband and wife and his mother (another remarkable puppet) swelter in their living room as several fans blow ineffectually. The heat then grows so terrible that the very furniture begins to melt, like the clocks in Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory,” imagery as disturbing as it is delightful. These moves between the camera crew, the natural world and the domestic space repeat as first a tornado and then a tsunami threaten. There are more Paul Simon songs, too. Our illusion of control over the environment, it’s slip sliding away.Simon’s lyrics aside, words are sparse in this production and entirely untranslated. (What spoken language there is, it’s in Bulgarian.) The title, the French word for Sunday, is never explained, though it suggests the late-in-the-day nature of the catastrophe. Gorgeously realized and sneakily terrifying, the play moves restively from the silly to the dreadful and back and forth again. I was told that “Dimanche” was appropriate for school-age children. This will depend on how much your children enjoy the violent, weather-related deaths that end most sequences.Is clowning, however ghastly, an appropriate response to the climate crisis? We are in our current predicament, with worse to come, because too few people have taken it seriously. But some of the current remedies (carbon offsets, tax breaks for corporations who dabble in green energy) can feel like a game, so a playful approach makes a kind of sense. I am someone who tries — recycling, composting, buying secondhand, buying less, turning off lights and appliances fanatically — even as I know how little any of my trying matters. Which can lead, on darker nights, to feelings of despair. “Dimanche” — ingenious, horrifying — suggests an alternative: Sometimes, you just have to laugh.DimancheThrough May 13 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

  • 100 Shares99 Views

    in Television

    ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 6 Recap: Little One

    Teen Shauna goes into labor. Adult Shauna goes into the police interrogation room.Season 2, Episode 6: ‘Qui’“Yellowjackets” often favors the disturbing over the tragic. And for a moment it appears that’s how the long-awaited birth of Teen Shauna’s child is going to go. Shauna wakes up to find that the boy is gone from his crib beside her. She stumbles out of bed, disoriented, and sees her teammates in a huddle, blood dripping from their mouths.“Are they going to eat the baby?” is a question I had heard floated from viewers this season, and it makes sense that that would be the expectation. It’s the most upsetting thing that could possibly happen — or at least it’s what you would think would be the most upsetting thing that could possibly happen. This week’s episode, titled “Qui,” challenges that with a bait-and-switch scenario that swaps out the gruesome for the mournful.It turns out the nightmare of the Yellowjackets feasting on Shauna’s child is just that: A nightmare. When she awakes, her friends are gathered around her. Her baby never made it. “Why can’t you hear him cry?” Shauna weeps, trying to convince the others that her vision was real as they slowly back away.Sophie Nélisse’s sobs burrow under your bones as she cradles the corpse. Because horror has become de rigueur on this series, Nélisse’s portrayal of Shauna’s sorrow hits harder. It was easy to guess that Shauna’s baby wasn’t going to survive. After all, he doesn’t exist in the present timeline, and his chances of surviving the winter wilderness were probably slim. But the revelation that he was stillborn, directed skillfully by the filmmaker Liz Garbus, allows the viewer to experience a raft of emotions that make the final revelation all the more heartbreaking.Immediately, Shauna’s labor is not going smoothly. Misty, still reeling from Crystal’s death, is too panicked to occupy the role she so relishes of the helpful savior. Lottie, meanwhile, is gathering her followers for offerings on an animal skull. The placenta emerges first. The baby is late. As the team chants, ‘We hear the wilderness and it hears us,’ the screen fades to black on Shauna’s anguished face.Then there is a glimmer of hope. Misty places the child in Shauna’s arms as the Elliott Smith song “Pitseleh,” starts to play. It’s a track that takes its name from a Yiddish word for “little one,” but it is also, as is typical for Smith, a sad song about love lost and a relationship that was never meant to be. It sounds like a lullaby, but in context it’s an omen.Shauna’s fantasy of her baby is just realistic enough to fool the audience. Malnourished, she can’t get the boy to latch onto her breast. He cries and cries and is seemingly soothed only when Lottie comes along, offering up her own milk, a detail that begins to indicate that something here is off. When Shauna finally gets her child to breastfeed, there is sweet relief. “It’s you and me kid,” she says. “It’s you and me against the whole world.”But then that maternal happiness is shattered. The tea Natalie has brought her seems to have knocked her out, and she awakens to discover the horrific image of her progeny turned into food. But that’s yet another trick of the mind. The baby never made it.This week’s episode resets the season. The 1990s plotline offers up two events the audience has been anticipating: The birth and the death of Shauna’s child. Now, the remaining three episodes of Season 2 must contend with how Shauna reckons with the loss and how the rest of the Yellowjackets deal with her immeasurable pain. (I’m still not ruling out the possibility that the baby will be eaten. If nothing else, I assume the placenta will provide some nutrients.)In the present day, this installment finally brought the surviving women all back together, each of them making the pilgrimage to Lottie’s community. Given the magnitude of what is happening in the wilderness, the dramas of the 2020s feel like filler to get to the big reunion.Misty arrives at the commune, where she halfheartedly participates in a drum circle. Her initial goal is still to rescue Natalie, but she ends up beckoning more Yellowjackets to this place. This time there are better eats, however. “It’s a bunch of granola losers, but the food is great and the B.O. factor is surprisingly low,” Misty tells Taissa, who decides to meet her. Van drives her, and despite her skepticism and plans to immediately leave, ends up getting out of the car when she sees Lottie.On the journey over, Taissa calls Shauna, who is being interrogated by the cops. Jeff picks up and hears Tai’s pitch on the trip. In the station, Callie thinks she has an angle with Kevyn Tan, telling him that she had sex with Saracusa so any evidence he collects will be inadmissible. But Adult Shauna finds herself in a more vulnerable spot. Saracusa’s line of questioning hits a nerve, and Shauna starts to spill about how she never really wanted to be a mom.The conflicted, occasionally dispassionate way she describes her relationship to motherhood stands in opposition to Teen Shauna’s desperation. Still, her stream of consciousness confession — which seems in Melanie Lynskey’s portrayal at least partially calculated — leads to her admitting that she did have an affair with Adam Martin, which means she’s screwed.When she returns to Jeff and her minivan, he encourages her to go meet up with Tai and Van at Lottie’s.So now they are all back together. Natalie, who has found something resembling real friendship with Lisa; Misty, still scheming; Van, pushing away her problems; Taissa, trying to reckon with her second personality; and Shauna, evading the police. They stand in one line as Lottie, clothed in a blue robe turns to them. In an overhead shot we see that the gulf between Lottie and the other Yellowjackets forms the shape of that pesky symbol from the wilderness. The layout of Lottie’s camp isn’t arbitrary. Instead, it’s beckoning the darkness.During her meeting with her psychiatrist, Lottie explains that she isn’t worried that she is ill, she is worried that she never was ill, that all of the terrors she experienced were very much real and now they are re-emerging. The past has now arrived on her land in the form of these five women. Even if they are seeking peace, it’s hard to imagine that’s what they are bringing with them.More to chew onAnother great Jeff moment: Listening to N.W.A. outside the police station, trying his best to seem tough.The purple fashion options that Lottie’s community provides for newcomers are truly cute. Misty’s coat, for one.I’m still wondering where the Ben flashbacks are going to lead.That said, Ben freaking out over the birth, explaining that he only hit play on a tape during health class is pretty great.Long live the 14th Gilly.I’m rooting for the friendship between Lisa and Natalie — something genuine in this messy world. More

  • 88 Shares129 Views

    in Theater

    ‘shadow/land’ Review: What the Storm Washes Away

    In the play, at the Public Theater, a mother and daughter endure the devastation of Hurricane Katrina inside the bar that connects them to their pasts.There are mothers who will tell you, no matter the circumstance, exactly what’s what. Even as the sky crashes down, they’ll judge your evacuation outfit and then remind you who’s to thank that you’re still standing on two feet. In Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s “shadow/land,” which opened on Thursday at the Public Theater, that unfiltered candor is both a loving reflex and the lifeline for an endangered legacy.It’s 2005 and Hurricane Katrina is bearing down on Central City in New Orleans, but Magalee (Lizan Mitchell) has forgotten her purse inside the bar that’s belonged to her family for generations, where she and her daughter Ruth (Joniece Abbott-Pratt) dally just long enough to get trapped by the storm. Ruth is ready to cast off the club, named shadow/land, like an albatross; she wants “a bottomless, sweepin joy” that she’s not getting from tending bar, or from her husband, who’s already sheltering in the Superdome with their teenage daughter.As mother and daughter unknowingly await disaster, Magalee urges Ruth not to sell the club, though it’s a husk of what it was in its heyday. In half-lucid reveries, the 80-year-old Magalee recalls its geneology, reaching back to tenuous boom times for Black enterprise. Ruth knows the story well enough to join her mother’s refrain in a kind of call-and-response. “Learn how to desire what you already got,” Magalee bluntly says of her daughter’s hard-won inheritance.Of course, what they already have is about to be drowned in oil-black water. It’s a collision course that Dickerson-Despenza and the director Candis C. Jones render in 90 dread-filled, soul-seeking minutes, zooming in on the devastation of lives otherwise seen by outsiders only from a drone-footage distance. Behind the bar, a wall of black-and-white photos chronicle Magalee and Ruth’s ancestors, as floodwaters gurgle up through the floor and leave their survivors stranded on the bar top (set design is by Jason Ardizzone-West).As in her play “Cullud Wattah,” which explores the fallout of the Flint, Mich., water crisis, Dickerson-Despenza dramatizes the consequences of environmental racism and its disproportionate impact on Black women. “shadow/land,” which the Public Theater produced as an audio play in 2021, is a poetic excavation of memory, tracing the ripple effects of triumphs and trauma through generations. Magalee also remembers, for example, when the authorities blew up a levy that flooded poor Black neighborhoods when she was a girl. Katrina’s wrath would also hit Black residents hardest, and its aftermath reverberated long after the water receded.Dickerson-Despenza’s language is rich in lyricism and figurative association, with annotated influences in the text that include Adrienne Rich and Zora Neale Hurston. And her dialogue calls attention to, among other things, colorism, queerness and the cultural imperialism of New Orleans tourism. It may be that the play tries to take on too much, feeling at times more like a treatise than a character-driven drama, but that’s partly because so much is in danger of being lost. (“shadow/land” is her first in a planned 10-play cycle about Katrina.)Of the expressive tools that “shadow/land” deploys, the cast is the most immediate and legible. A third character, known as the grand marshal, (Christine Shepard) haunts the show’s periphery, snapping limbs in tailored and shimmering Creole finery, interjecting verse that illuminates the allure of the city’s native eroticism and proximity to death. (The movement director is Jill M. Vallery and the costumes are by Azalea Fairley.)Abbott-Pratt and Mitchell are challenged with playing characters who are held captive not only by society, but by the script, which is somewhat weighed down by the exposition inherent to oral histories. But they embody the push and pull of a mother-daughter bond with captivating ease and grace. At once imperious and fragile, Mitchell’s Magalee may not remember what she ate for breakfast, but she will never let Ruth forget the importance of honoring their predecessors, the sacrifices they made and the gifts they left behind. Who else will share their stories when the evidence gets washed away?shadow/landThrough May 28 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More