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    ‘S.N.L.’ Brings Donald Trump to the Last Supper for Easter Weekend

    In an episode hosted by Molly Shannon, the former president, as played by James Austin Johnson, compared his recent indictment to the persecution of Jesus.What started out looking like an almost reverential treatment — at least by “Saturday Night Live” standards — of the Easter holiday quickly gave way to a satirical monologue from former President Donald J. Trump, comparing his own recent indictment on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records to the victimization of Jesus.This weekend’s “S.N.L.” broadcast, hosted by Molly Shannon and featuring the Jonas Brothers as musical guests, began with a recreation of the Last Supper, performed by its cast and featuring Mikey Day as Jesus.“Alas, one of you will betray me,” Day told the other cast members playing the Disciples, adding: “Though I have committed no crime, I will be arrested, tried and found guilty.”Enter James Austin Johnson, in his recurring role as Trump. “Sound familiar?” Johnson said, taking over the scene. “A famous, wonderful man, arrested for no reason at all. If you haven’t put it together, folks, I’m comparing myself to Jesus, again. And what better time than on his birthday, Easter.”Johnson continued, “As we speak, I am being persecuted on a level the likes of which the world has never seen, even worse than the late, great Jesus.” He pointed to other ways in which he felt he was comparable to Jesus, if not superior: “He rose from the dead on the third day,” Johnson said. “I would have done it faster. Possibly two days. I think we could have done it a lot faster. He had a good mind for business. Water into wine — pure profit. And he had big, big rallies just like me.”Similarly, Johnson said a lot of his followers got into trouble too: “All because I told them exactly what Jesus would have said, ‘Get very violent and start a war.’”The holiday, Johnson said, had him excited to hide Easter eggs. “I have many beautiful eggs from my time at the White House,” he said. “And now the Department of Justice is saying: ‘Where are the eggs? We need the eggs back.’ But I hid them. They’re my eggs. They’re my eggs to take, OK?”As he wrapped up, Johnson struck one more comparison: “Just like Jesus, all I did was be friendly to a sex worker, and now they want to put me in jail,” he said.Visiting alumna of the weekReturning to host “S.N.L.” for only the second time since she left the program in 2001 (the first time was in 2007), Shannon was in no hurry to revisit the revered sketch characters she portrayed during her time on the show. If you waited until nearly the end of the night, though, you at last got this segment in which her high-kickin’ dancer Sally O’Malley returned to become a choreographer for the Jonas Brothers. (The JoBros eventually shed their breakaway outfits to reveal they were wearing O’Malley-esque red dresses, too.)Earlier in the night, Shannon’s less heralded stand-up comic character Jeannie Darcy got an ad for her own, low-energy Netflix special. And a video segment from the Please Don’t Destroy team paid tribute to Shannon’s convivial energy by imagining her as the unlikely protagonist of a video game (which Shannon herself tries to play).Weekend Update jokes of the weekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on Trump’s indictment.Jost began:The Wall Street Journal is calling on Russia to release one of their journalists, who was arrested on espionage charges. And I might have the perfect idea for a prisoner swap. [His screen shows a photograph of Trump in court.] Former President Trump was arraigned on Tuesday, and a photographer released this photo of Trump in the courtroom. And I don’t like that he’s flanked by an O.J. amount of lawyers. Because that tells me he’s definitely guilty and that he’s definitely getting away with it.He continued:Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina, a.k.a. Phony Soprano, said he doesn’t think Trump is going to get a fair trial in Manhattan, and I agree. Even the courtroom sketch artist seems to hate him. I thought Trump looked perfectly nice. He had blended his foundation. Stapled down his hair. But then he drew him like the mud monster from Scooby-Doo.Che picked up the thread:After his arraignment, Donald Trump spoke to supporters at Mar-a-Lago and said there was a very dark cloud over our beloved country. Which is also what he used to call Obama. Insiders are saying that since Donald Trump’s indictment, his daughter Ivanka has been absent and his other daughter Tiffany is trying to take her place by his side. Just as soon as she gets through security.Weekend Update character of the weekMining the latest developments in the conflict between Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and the Walt Disney Company, Bowen Yang appeared at the Weekend Update desk as Jafar, the antagonist from Disney’s animated musical “Aladdin.”Affecting a very respectable Jonathan Freeman impersonation, Yang said that DeSantis was “an amateur” when it came to villainy: “He has no rizz, no spark, no drip.” Still, Yang said the governor was “plenty evil,” adding, “I mean, banning Rosa Parks in schools? I’m a dark sorcerer and even I was like, Jesus, dude, it’s Rosa Parks.”But if DeSantis wants to keep gay people out of Disney and its theme parks, Yang said, “That carpet has flown, know what I mean?” Besides, Yang added: “There’s already a Disney World where nothing gay happens. It’s called Six Flags.”Fake advertisement of the weekYou had to hang in there until the end of the episode to catch this, but it was worth staying up for: a fake commercial for a service called CNZen that is partly a news source and partly a meditation app — but one that’s intended for stressed-out people who have made hatred of Trump the basis of their entire personalities.When needed, the app serves its users salient details about Trump’s indictment and gentle voice-overs from CNN talent (and The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, played by Shannon). If you find yourself feeling lethargic at any time of day, Sarah Sherman as a whispery, wide-eyed Wolf Blitzer will either lull you to sleep or startle you back to full attention. More

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    How Will ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ Write Notts County’s Story?

    Notts County is having one of the most remarkable seasons in its long history. It might even win the league. But you don’t get to star in someone else’s drama.NOTTINGHAM, England — The irony of it all, really, is that Notts County would make a terrific subject for a documentary.The elevator pitch is simple. After more than a decade of financial strife and rolling existential crises — featuring both a convicted fraudster and fictional Gulf investment — the oldest professional soccer club in the world puts together a record-shattering campaign, one that promises to restore the team to something close to its former glory.The casting is rich and compelling. There is a fallen Premier League prodigy searching for a home, a virtuoso Portuguese playmaker who has never seen an opponent he cannot nutmeg, and a 26-year-old striker experiencing such an absurd hot streak that he was, at one point, being compared to Erling Haaland. Tasked with shaping them into a team is a manager whose adventurous, accomplished approach is still just a little unorthodox in the mud-spattered lower reaches of English professional soccer. But the results are spectacular.In a division that is competitive to the point of arbitrary, the team loses only twice all season. It has scored more than 100 goals, and it’s on course to break the league’s points record with four games left. It might yet win the title. Plenty of shows have been commissioned on less.That is the story of Notts County’s season, but that does not mean it is the story that will be told. Millions of viewers will, in all likelihood, come to think of the club as an antagonist: an obstacle to be overcome, a threat to be parried, a challenge to be met. And that means one of the most remarkable campaigns in Notts County’s long and occasionally illustrious history will be relegated to a supporting role in someone else’s story.Notts County will enter Monday’s game tied with Wrexham on points. But only one of them can win the league.Mary Turner for The New York TimesTwo Teams, One NarrativeA few weeks ago, the producers of “Welcome to Wrexham” — the FX documentary following the takeover and attempted revival of the Welsh town’s forlorn soccer team by the actors and entrepreneurs Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney — made contact with executives at Notts County. Out of courtesy, they said, they wanted to establish how much the club wanted to feature in the show’s second season.It is hard to see how Notts County will not play a prominent role. For months, it and Wrexham have been locked in a breathless race to escape the National League, the fifth tier of English soccer. There is only one automatic promotion slot available — bringing with it a guaranteed return to the ranks of the Football League — and neither side has blinked in its pursuit of it.The pace has been eye-watering. Both are expected to end the season with more points than the division has ever seen. Their nearest rival is 25 points adrift. Each has fed off the other’s refusal to wilt. “We’ve been pushing each other,” said Connell Rawlinson, the Notts County captain. (He was born in Wrexham, and still lives close by: add that to the list of subplots.) “If Wrexham didn’t have us and we didn’t have them, would either of us be as good as we are?”Strictly speaking, Wrexham has long had the edge. Its squad is deeper, and more expensive. It has an extra game to play, as well as the home-field advantage when it meets Notts County on Monday evening, a match with the air of a ready-made season finale.In public, Notts County’s manager, Luke Williams, has done what he can to prepare the club — the fans, the executives, his players — for disappointment. “It’s not that we’re not clear,” he said after watching his side pick apart yet another opponent in late March. “It’s that we’re not even close. We need a two-loss swing.” One of those defeats duly arrived on Friday — Wrexham lost at Halifax — but it still held that crucial game in hand.In private, Williams acknowledges that the prospect of being forced to go through the National League’s somewhat arcane and distinctly treacherous playoff system in search of a second chance at promotion “haunts” him. “I haven’t slept since Christmas,” he said.Mary Turner for The New York TimesNotts County, founded in 1862, is the oldest professional soccer club in the world. Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe players have reacted slightly differently. “I’d rather be part of doing something like this, having that pressure and that stress, than sitting in mid-table with nothing to compete for,” Rawlinson said. “I’m sure the Wrexham team and the fans are enjoying it, too.” He paused, at that point, and thought about the truth of that statement. “Well, maybe not the fans, so much.”That graciousness is fairly typical of relations between the clubs. Given the intensity of their title race — and the stakes involved — it might be expected for a sporting rivalry to metastasize into an outright hostility, particularly given the advantages at Wrexham’s disposal.It is the Welsh club, after all, that can call on TikTok and Expedia as sponsors, and McElhenney, Reynolds and his wife, Blake Lively, as regular guests. Notts County’s stardust extends no further than the singer Jake Bugg, born in Nottingham, who sponsors the club’s away jerseys.That financial primacy has a real-world impact. When Wrexham was short of a goalkeeper, it coaxed Ben Foster, a former England international, out of retirement. Notts County had to recall a 19-year-old from a loan at a club two divisions below.For the most part, though, there is no sense of outrage or oppression. Instead, Rawlinson, said, there is a recognition that both teams are “steeped in history, and that neither club should be where they are.”“The publicity Wrexham has brought has been great for the division as a whole,” he said. “There are a lot of eyes on these games now.”There will be far more, though, who encounter them not as contemporaneous sporting events but as something else: a small part of a broader narrative, one that is packaged and polished and consumed on a delay of several months, once the conclusion is known.“I was coming out of a game a few weeks ago, when we’d just got to 97 points,” said Tom Wagstaff, a founder of the Notts County Talk YouTube channel. “As annoying as it is that we’re not clear at the top, it is incredible to be involved in something like this. I genuinely think it’s the best title race the league has ever seen. But I don’t know if that is how it will be perceived.”“The publicity Wrexham has brought has been great for the division as a whole,” Notts County’s captain said. “There are a lot of eyes on these games now.”Mary Turner for The New York TimesEnd GameThe framing, after all, is not in Notts County’s hands. The act of making television, after all, involves not simply telling a story but choosing which aspects of that story should be accentuated. Documentaries necessarily have a perspective. And that perspective changes the way a story is not only told, but understood.Nobody in Nottingham is particularly worried that “Welcome to Wrexham” will cast Notts County as the bad guys, the villains of the story of this season. Nobody at the club seems especially offended at the idea that the show might present the team backed by Hollywood money as in some way “plucky.”But they know that, however the season ends, far more people will watch the documentary than follow the National League in real time. For those viewers, Notts County’s story will not be a stand-alone achievement, a thing that happened in its own right and with its own meaning, but rather something that exists solely as it pertains to its effect on Wrexham. Its meaning will be contorted and confused and to some extent lost. It will not be consumed as sport at all, not really. It will just be part of the plot.In that, perhaps, there is a solace. “Really, we’ve done them a favor,” said George Vizard, Wagstaff’s co-presenter on YouTube. “If it wasn’t for us, they’d have won it weeks ago. And for the show, it must be better to win it like this than it would be if they had won it at a canter.” The story will, in the end, be about Wrexham. But it will be thanks to Notts County that there is now a much better story to tell. More

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    Laura Benanti Describes Performing Concert Through a Miscarriage

    The Tony Award-winning actress said in an Instagram post that she had decided to share the news to remind people “that there is no shame in this kind of loss.”Laura Benanti, the Tony Award-winning stage and screen actress, performed a concert for about 2,000 people on a cruise ship despite being in the middle of having a miscarriage, she wrote in a post on Instagram.“If it had been our first loss, or even our second, I likely wouldn’t have been able to go on,” she wrote in the post on Wednesday. “But unfortunately, I am not a stranger to the pain and emptiness of losing a pregnancy. It is a path I have walked before, hand in hand with my husband.”Benanti, who has performed on Broadway since the late 1990s and won a Tony for a featured role in “Gypsy,” was aboard a Broadway-themed cruise coming back to New York from Bermuda, where she had planned to perform songs from musicals she had appeared in, including “The Sound of Music,” “She Loves Me” and “My Fair Lady.” She realized on Sunday that she was having the miscarriage, she wrote, but decided to go onstage the next day.Benanti has two children with her husband, Patrick Brown.“My husband and I are heartbroken but we will move through this together as we, and so many others, have done before,” she wrote in the post. “I share all of this, not to garner sympathy or attention, but to remind the many people and families who have and will suffer in this way that there is no shame in this kind of loss.” More

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    Harry Lorayne, Dazzling Master of Total Recall, Is Dead at 96

    A memory expert and magician who was a favorite guest of Johnny Carson’s, he astonished audiences by reeling off the names of hundreds of people he had only just met.Harry Lorayne, who parlayed a childhood reading disability and the brutal punishment it engendered into an international career as a memory expert, summoning the names of roomfuls of strangers in a single sitting, rattling off entire small-town telephone books and telling astonished audiences what was written on any page of a given issue of Time magazine, died on Friday in Newburyport, Mass. He was 96.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his publicist, Skye Wentworth, who did not specify a cause. He had lived in Newburyport, north of Boston.Fleet of mind and fleet of mouth, Mr. Lorayne was a sought-after guest on television shows and a particular favorite of Johnny Carson’s, appearing on “The Tonight Show” some two dozen times.Mr. Lorayne had begun his professional life as a sleight-of-hand artist and well into old age was considered one of the foremost card magicians in the country. As both magician and mnemonist, he was a direct, gleeful scion of the 19th-century midway pitchman and the 20th-century borscht belt tummler.By the 1960s, Mr. Lorayne was best known for holding audiences rapt with feats of memory that bordered on the elephantine. Such feats were born, he explained in interviews and in his many books, of a system of learned associations — call them surrealist visual puns — that seemed equal parts Ivan Pavlov and Salvador Dalí.Mr. Lorayne demonstrated his act on the night of July 23, 1958, when, in his first big break, he appeared on the TV game show “I’ve Got a Secret.”While the host, Garry Moore, was introducing members of the show’s panel, Mr. Lorayne was at work in the studio audience, soliciting the names of its members.He was then called onstage. Mr. Moore asked the audience members who had given Mr. Lorayne their names to stand. Hundreds did.“That’s Mr. Saar,” Mr. Lorayne began, pointing to a man in the balcony. (The transcriptions here are phonetic.)“Mr. Stinson,” he continued in his rapid-fire New Yorkese, gathering speed. “Miss Graf. Mrs. Graf. Miss Finkelstein. If I can see correctly, I believe that’s the Harpin family: Mr. and Mrs. Harpin; there was Dorothy Harpin and Esther Harpin. Mrs. Pollock. And way in the corner — it’s a little dark there — but I believe that’s Mrs. Stern.”And so it went, through scores of names, each impeccably recalled.How did he do it? “You have to take the name, make it mean something and then associate it to one outstanding feature on the person’s face,” he explained, indicating a man in the audience named Theus.“I thought of the United States: ‘the U.S.,’” Mr. Lorayne continued. “It’s spelled T-H-E-U-S. And I picked out his character lines, from the nose down to the corner of the lip, and just drew a map of the United States there.”Absent the time constraints of television, Mr. Lorayne often said, he could handily memorize the names of 500, or even a thousand, people in a single outing. Over the years, he said, he had met and recalled the names of more than 20 million people.To naysayers who contended that he routinely seeded his audiences with friends, Mr. Lorayne’s reply was unimpeachable: “Who’s got 500 friends?”Nor, as the skeptics sometimes suggested, was Mr. Lorayne a mnemonic freak, endowed with a preternaturally good memory. He was born with quite ordinary powers of recall, he often said, and that was precisely the point. Memory, he maintained, was a faculty akin to a muscle that could be trained and strengthened.Mr. Lorayne did not claim to have invented the mnemonic system that was his stock in trade: As he readily acknowledged, it harked back to classical antiquity. But he was among the first people in the modern era to recognize its use as entertainment, and to parlay it into a highly successful business.Mr. Lorayne ran a memory-training school in New York during the 1960s. via Skye WentworthAt the height of his renown, Mr. Lorayne traveled the country demonstrating his prowess on theater stages, at trade shows and in corporate training seminars. During the 1960s, he ran a memory-training school in New York. In later years, he starred in TV infomercials for his home memory-improvement system. His scores of books were translated into many languages.He was awash in celebrity friends, many of whom were reported to use his techniques. Among them were Anne Bancroft, who spoke of using Mr. Lorayne’s methods to learn lines, and the New York Knicks star — and memory expert in his own right — Jerry Lucas, with whom Mr. Lorayne wrote “The Memory Book” (1974), a New York Times best seller.For many years Mr. Lorayne lived in a gracious townhouse at 62 Jane Street in the West Village of Manhattan. (In sly tribute, his friend Mel Brooks planned to give that address as the home of the playwright Franz Liebkind in his 1967 film, “The Producers.” After Mr. Lorayne’s wife, Renée, objected that the moviegoing public would be banging on their door day and night, Mr. Brooks changed it to the fictional 100 West Jane Street.)Mr. Lorayne’s attainments are all the more noteworthy in light of the fact that he grew up in poverty, struggled academically as a result of undiagnosed dyslexia and concluded his formal education after only a single year of high school.Mr. Lorayne in 1986. As a boy he had an epiphany: If only he could learn to memorize, he realized, his problems with dyslexia would end and he’d avoid his father’s wrath over poor school grades. Stuart William MacGladrie/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesHe was born on May 4, 1926, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Benjamin and Clara (Bendel) Ratzer. His father was a garment cutter.The family was poor — beyond poor, Mr. Lorayne often said.“They were professional poor people,” he told an interviewer, invoking his parents. “I remember having a potato for dinner.”Benjamin Ratzer was a violent man, and whenever young Harry brought home failing grades on an exam — and because of his dyslexia, he often did — his father beat him.One day, Harry had an epiphany. If only he could learn to memorize, he realized, his problems would end. At the library, he found a shelf of dusty books on memory training, some dating to the 18th century. Most were beyond him, but he fought his way through.Using elementary versions of the techniques he would later employ professionally, he began earning perfect marks.“My father stopped hitting me for my grades,” Mr. Lorayne told The Chicago Tribune in 1988. “He hit me for other things.”When Harry was 12, his father, plagued by illness, died by suicide. Soon afterward, Harry left high school to work a series of odd jobs.“I was a Lower East Side ‘dese, dem and dose’ kid with no money, no prospects, no education, no nothing,” Mr. Lorayne wrote in a self-published memoir, “Before I Forget” (2013).He did not yet conceive of memory as a marketable skill: His professional aspirations lay in magic. As a child, he had watched, entranced, as neighborhood men did card tricks in Hamilton Fish Park, on the Lower East Side. He stole milk bottles, recouped the deposits, bought his first deck of cards and began to practice.He embarked on his magic career in the 1940s, adapting his stage name from the middle name of his wife, Renée Lorraine Lefkowitz, whom he married in 1948. He performed on local television in the early 1950s and did close-up magic at Billy Reed’s Little Club on East 55th Street.The actor Victor Jory, a keen amateur magician, visited the club often to catch Mr. Lorayne’s act. One night, performing at Mr. Jory’s table, Mr. Lorayne realized he had exhausted his vast repertoire of card tricks. Seeking to keep Mr. Jory entertained, he idly tossed off a stunt in which he recalled the location of all 52 cards in a shuffled deck.Mr. Jory raved so much about the feat, Mr. Lorayne wrote, that he realized his future lay in memory. He made it his act, beginning at Catskill hotels.Mr. Lorayne wrote a batch of books, including this one as well as “The Memory Book” (with the basketball star Jerry Lucas), “How to Develop a Super Power Memory,” “Miracle Math” and, his last one, “And Finally!”The bizarre visual associations at the heart of Mr. Lorayne’s system were good not only for remembering names and faces but also, he explained, for memorizing numbers, learning foreign-language vocabulary and the like. The more surreal the association, he said, the more tenacious its hold in the mind.“Take the French word for watermelon, which is ‘pastèque,’” he told the Australian newspaper The Sunday Mail in 1986. “When I wanted to learn this I visualized myself playing cards and saying, ‘Pass the deck; pass deck.’”It was essential to note, he added, that “I am playing cards with a watermelon. I ask the watermelon to pass the deck.”Mr. Lorayne’s wife, who assisted in his stage act for two decades, died in 2014. His survivors include a son, Robert, and a granddaughter.Mr. Lorayne in the early 1990s. He continued to perform as a magician throughout his career, but it was for his feats of memorization that he was, fittingly, remembered. via Skye WentworthHis other books include “How to Develop a Super Power Memory,” “Miracle Math” and “Ageless Memory.” In 2018, at the age of 92, he published his last book, “And Finally!”Throughout his career, Mr. Lorayne continued to ply the magician’s trade, for many years publishing Apocalypse, a magic magazine, and producing books and videos on card magic.But it was as a memory expert that he remained, fittingly, remembered, though his most important act of recall was one that audiences never saw.Before every performance, Mr. Lorayne, out of sight in the wings, would discreetly check to make sure his trousers were zipped.It was not merely a question of propriety, but also of credibility. For the man often billed as the world’s foremost memory expert to face an audience with fly unheeded, he explained, would be the poorest professional advertisement of all.Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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    ‘Smart’ Review: A.I. in the Living Room

    Three women seeking companionship turn to an Alexa-like digital presence in this family drama at Ensemble Studio Theater.Artificial intelligence has lately proven that it can write Hollywood screenplays, ace the bar exam and maybe even develop a twisted crush. Jenny, the Alexa-like device in “Smart,” which opened on Thursday at Ensemble Studio Theater, asks philosophical questions about A.I. that by now feel consolingly benign, like whether it can replace the care we owe one another or fulfill our need for love.The short and perhaps obvious answer is no. Jenny, as conceived by the playwright Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, functions as a home health aide that Elaine (Kea Trevett) sets up for her mother, Ruth (Christine Farrell), a widow who has suffered a stroke and increasingly stumbles over her words. Ruth’s skepticism thaws once she gets Jenny to play her favorite musician (the Brazilian artist Antônio Carlos Jobim) and order her favorite candy (Werther’s Originals). The insomniac Elaine also warms up: As she adds groceries to Instacart and composes texts to her ex in the middle of the night, Elaine talks to Jenny (voiced by Sherz Aletaha) like a much-needed companion.Ruth’s home is crowded with relics of the past, including her late husband’s worn-out sofa, where she occasionally talks to him, and yesterday’s dishes and trash (the set design is by Yi-Hsuan (Ant) Ma). Jenny’s glowing orb is a lone marker of the present tense. The future is there with them, too: Gabby (Francesca Fernandez), a programmer working to improve Jenny’s language skills, is listening remotely, her desk nestled in among the clutter. The boundaries between them further collapse when Gabby turns up in person, drawn to what she’s heard and seeking mutual connection.A.I. powers up the plot of “Smart,” which traces the fraught and imprecise networks of memory, obligation and necessity that bind parents and children (Gabby often talks to her own ailing father on the phone). Later, it pivots to capture the sparks that fly between new lovers. The production, co-presented by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which supports the intersection of arts and science, is ably directed by Matt Dickson on the compact stage and well acted by members of the small cast, particularly Ferrell, as the fog surrounding Ruth thickens and engulfs her. But the play feels like a composite of disparate parts that’s missing an engine.Beyond demonstrating that a smart speaker is no substitute for family, and an especially creepy way for a lonely software engineer to initiate an affair, “Smart” doesn’t mine fresh insight about what it means for relationships to be mediated by technology. Nor does the play resolve the conceit it takes two acts to set up, of a romance built on deception, despite promising its revelation as the primary source of narrative momentum. Even tech that seems mundane is worth deeper scrutiny, but here that examination detracts from the possibility of more cohesive and compelling human drama.SmartThrough April 23 at Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan; ensemblestudiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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    ‘I’ve Lost a Lot of Flesh and Bone,’ Jeremy Renner Says, Recalling Snow Plow Accident

    The actor, who sustained more than 30 broken bones when a 14,000-pound plow ran him over in January, described his arduous recovery in an interview with ABC News.The actor Jeremy Renner, who was severely injured on Jan. 1 when a heavy snow plow ran over him, said in a TV interview on Thursday night that the truck had hit him as he was trying to save his nephew, an accident that broke more than 30 of his bones and upended his life.Mr. Renner, an Oscar-nominated actor who is perhaps best known for his role as Hawkeye in the Marvel Avengers movie and TV franchise, spoke publicly at length about his frightening experience and arduous recovery for the first time in an interview with ABC News.“I’ve lost a lot of flesh and bone in this experience,” Mr. Renner told the journalist Diane Sawyer. “But I’ve been refueled and refilled with love and titanium.”In the interview, Mr. Renner appeared to still be in shock over what had occurred to him and struggled to hold back tears at times as he recalled details after the accident, like the moment he told his family from the hospital in sign language, “I’m sorry.”As he lay in the hospital, Mr. Renner, who has since been released, said he would wonder: “What’s my body look like? Am I just going to be like a spine and a brain like a science experiment?” While in critical condition, Mr. Renner said, he wrote a goodbye note to his family on his phone.The network also posted clips before the broadcast that showed different phases of his recovery, including Mr. Renner in a wheelchair doing leg exercises. A video posted on Twitter shows him in recovery doing an exercise that helps him regain the strength to walk. Another video from Jan. 5 shows Mr. Renner in the hospital, his face swollen and bruised.On Jan. 1, Mr. Renner, 52, was using his snow plow, which weighs more than 14,000 pounds, to tow his car on a snowed-in private road near his home in Reno, Nev., the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office said in a news conference. A family member had been driving the car and had gotten stuck.After they successfully towed the car, Mr. Renner got off the plow, which then began to roll, the sheriff’s office said. Mr. Renner had tried to get back into the plow’s driver’s seat to stop the rolling vehicle, but he was run over, the sheriff’s office said.In the ABC News interview, Mr. Renner said that when he made a dangerous leap to get back in the driver’s seat, the fast-moving tracks had pushed him forward — and the weight of the steel tracks had crushed him. He recalled screaming during that moment, “Not today,” using an expletive.There was no snow that could have cushioned part of the blow, he said, just icy asphalt under him and the rolling plow on top. The machine crushed his toes, legs and chest. Even one of his eyes was severely injured and bulged out of its socket.“I believe I could see my eye with my other eye,” Mr. Renner said.ABC News noted that he appeared to have skirted the wheels, the heaviest part of the plow, during the accident.Mr. Renner struggled to fully capture the extent of the pain, saying that “it felt like someone took the wind out of you” and that it had seemed as if his soul was in agony.Mr. Renner said he would put himself through the experience again because the plow had been “going right at my nephew,” who is 27 years old.The nephew, who was not injured, said in the ABC News interview that he had seen “a pool of blood” coming from his uncle’s head.The nephew tracked down a neighbor and asked for help. That neighbor called 911.In a recording of that 911 call, the neighbor can be heard saying of Mr. Renner, “He’s been crushed.”In the background of that call, Mr. Renner can be heard moaning as the man who contacted 911 says, “There’s a lot of blood over here,” and tells Mr. Renner: “Keep breathing, man, keep fighting. Hang in there, brother.”Eventually, gusty winds paused long enough to allow a helicopter to land near the site of the accident and fly Mr. Renner to a hospital.There, Mr. Renner and his family learned the full extent of his injuries: dozens of broken bones, including eight ribs, his right knee and ankle and right shoulder; a collapsed lung; and his liver pierced by a rib bone.His rib cage was rebuilt with metal. His eye socket was put back together with metallic plates. And a titanium rod and screws were placed in his leg.Doctors interviewed by ABC News said that Mr. Renner’s good physical shape and health had probably helped him survive. About 10 weeks after the accident, Mr. Renner is beginning to regain enough strength to walk with a cane.When asked in the interview if he sees the same face when looking in the mirror, Mr. Renner replied, “I see a lucky man.” More

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    In ‘Hamnet,’ Shakespeare’s Wife Takes the Stage, at Last

    A Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s hit novel gives voice and agency to a historical character we know little about.Of the numerous puzzles about William Shakespeare, those concerning his love life are the most tantalizing. Why did he marry a local woman, Anne Hathaway, have three children with her, then decamp to London for a life in the theater? What was their relationship really like? And why do we know so little about Anne herself, whom one scholar has called a “wife-shaped void” in the playwright’s story?This year, the 400th anniversary’s of Anne death, might be the year we finally hear about this other Shakespeare. A volume of celebratory poems, “Anne-thology,” is being published later this month. A small bust of her has been unveiled at Holy Trinity church in Stratford-upon-Avon, where her body has lain next to her husband’s since 1623. And, most strikingly, a Royal Shakespeare Company production devoted to her story opens next Wednesday at the company’s Swan Theater in the town.Tom Varey and Madeleine Mantock as William and Agnes, the characters based on Shakespeare and Hathaway.Manuel Harlan“It’s about time,” said Erica Whyman, the show’s director, in an interview after a recent rehearsal. “This is her town; she was born just outside Stratford and lived here all her life, as far as we know. She deserves to be back here.”The play, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling 2020 novel “Hamnet,” is named for the Shakespeares’ only son, who died at age 11 in 1596, for reasons unknown. His father apparently began work on the death-haunted “Hamlet” not long afterward, something that has driven biographers into frenzies of Freudian speculation.But in the script, which has been adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti, there is little doubt who is the star: Shakespeare’s wife, the mother of his children and the head of his household, who brims with spirit and practical intelligence, and runs rings around her partner and everyone else. In the play’s first scene, we see the 17-year-old William gawkily trying to woo her while she flies a pet hawk. (She, too, will never be tamed, we surmise.) Later, we see her industriously baking bread and mixing folk remedies while he dreams of poetry and the theater.Erica Whyman, who is directing “Hamnet,” is the acting artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times“She’s so alive,” said Madeleine Mantock, who plays the role based on Anne for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “She has all this knowledge, all this capability.”O’Farrell explained in a phone interview that she first encountered Shakespeare’s wife at college, after becoming curious about the playwright’s family — something historians have often neglected. “Shakespeare’s domestic life, if you want to call it that, just never came into the picture,” Anne least of all, she said. “And the more I read, the more derailed I was about her and the way she’s been treated. She’s been sidelined, in fact worse than sidelined — vilified.”Shakespeare was just 18 when he married Anne in 1582; she was 26 and pregnant. Historians have speculated that theirs was a shotgun wedding which Shakespeare entered into with gritted teeth. That he left Stratford-upon-Avon to begin his theatrical career after the birth of Hamnet and his twin sister, Judith, a few years later has added fuel to speculation that the Shakespeares had a loveless marriage. The playwright made only occasional treks back to his hometown until his last years. Signing his will with a shaking hand before his death in 1616, he left Anne his “second-best” bed — something that’s been interpreted as an insult. “Even among quite respected biographers, she’s cast as an illiterate, cradle-snatching peasant who lured this boy genius into marriage,” O’Farrell said. “But I couldn’t find a single shred of evidence for that.”Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, a former farmhouse in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare’s wife grew up.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesThe town is on the river Avon, about 90 miles northwest of London.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesDepictions of Shakespeare characters on a wall in Stratford-upon-Avon. Each year, millions of tourists come to see the town where the playwright was born and died.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesThe fact that she’s most often referred to by her maiden name, “Hathaway,” speaks volumes, O’Farrell added. “It’s like we don’t want to let her near him.”And speaking of names, “Anne” might not even be the right one, O’Farrell said. In one surviving document, she referred to as “Agnes,” the form adopted in the novel and the play. “The fact that we’ve possibly been calling her by the wrong name for nearly 500 years seems completely symptomatic,” O’Farrell added.Paul Edmondson, the head of research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, said that the story of Shakespeare’s wife was likely complex and compelling. While little evidence of her personality survives — we don’t even have a portrait — the facts we know point to a shrewd, capable woman who managed a large house, was responsible for significant amounts of money and land, and possibly ran a brewing business on the side. In addition, of course, she raised a family for a husband who was mostly away working, as many men in England were at the time.“She’s running the household, she’s a co-earner, and she’s also keeping an eye on his investments in the town. She was his equal in many ways,” Edmondson said.And that “second-best” bed? Edmondson said that it could have been the marriage bed, filled with intimate memories; its mention in the will “might also have been a legal understanding,” guaranteeing her residential rights after his death.In the novel, Anne/Agnes might not be able to write — women rarely received formal education at the time — but her husband does encourage her to read. And, crucially, William’s departure for London isn’t framed as abandonment, but his wife’s idea. “She realizes he needs more,” said Mantock, the actress. “She wants to encourage him to be who he needs to be.”Mantock and Ajani Cabey, as Hamnet. Background from left: Hannah McPake, Frankie Hastings and Elizabeth Rider.Manuel HarlanIn fact, it is only Hamnet’s untimely death that threatens to tear the couple apart; in the play, Agnes is left to pick up the pieces and hold the family together, while William escapes back to London and buries himself in work. It is only when Agnes attends an early performance of “Hamlet” that she realizes that he has transmuted his grief into drama.The novel’s success has had some real-life impacts in Stratford-upon-Avon, too. At Holy Trinity church, volunteers who tend to the Shakespeare family graves said that many more visitors now ask after her, as well as him. Last summer, O’Farrell presided over a ceremony for the planting of a pair of trees in the churchyard — one commemorating Hamnet, the other Judith.“I find that incredibly moving, actually,” O’Farrell said. “And the fact that she and the children are being brought to life onstage in the town.”For Mantock, simply being in Stratford, walking its streets and seeing the places that Anne knew was both poetic and potent, she said. “I know that what I’m doing is not real,” she added. “Of course I know that. But I feel there’s this real person there everywhere I go.”Mantock said playing her role in Anne Hathaway’s hometown was both poetic and potent.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesHamnetAt the Swan Theater, in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, through June 17, then at the Garrick Theater, in London, from Sept. 30 through Jan. 6; rsc.org. More

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    ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 3 Recap: Hunger Games

    Adult Shauna tries to fill the gaping hole inside. Teen Misty gives an interesting monologue.Season 2, Episode 3: ‘Digestif’This week’s episode of “Yellowjackets” is a tale of two monologues.First, we have adult Shauna, pointing a gun at a carjacker to get her minivan back. “Have you ever peeled the skin off a human corpse?” she asks. “It’s not as easy as you might think. It’s really stuck on us, skin.”As she speaks, her eyes blaze with hunger. Maybe not quite a hunger for flesh, but the memory of that hunger is being funneled into her desire for something thrilling in her current life. She wants to kill, even if she doesn’t want to eat. “My hand wasn’t shaking because I was afraid,” she explains, countering the man’s earlier assumptions. “It was shaking because of how badly I wanted to do this.”Melanie Lynskey is phenomenal in the scene, her face a mixture of excitement and arousal. You can just about see the saliva forming around her lips as she contemplates (or resists) pulling the trigger. It’s not about the minivan or her daughter’s childhood toy inside. She has a blood lust. The threat is the closest she can come to getting what will satisfy her.And then there’s young Misty, in the woods, performing at Shauna’s depressing, post-cannibalism baby shower. Having tasted (and digested) the forbidden flesh, she, too, is looking for another way to fill her emptiness. Encouraged by her new friend Crystal, Misty decides to give Shauna the gift of theater, doing her best Sally Field in “Steel Magnolias” for her skeptical teammates.It’s a weird choice. “Did she really choose a scene about a dead daughter?” Tai wonders out loud. Misty squeals: “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. I can jog all the way to Texas and back but my daughter can’t,” invoking the sorrow of a woman who lost her child. Despite the initial skepticism, by the time Misty finishes, the other girls erupt in applause. Misty smiles. She is also being satiated in a way. Finally, she is getting more of that attention she so desires.Cleverly titled “Digestif,” this episode is shockingly less about the guilt of consuming Jackie’s corpse than one might think. Other than Taissa, who ate while technically asleep, the rest of the survivors have grimly come to terms with their actions. Natalie elects to bring what’s left of Jackie to the plane so she can be buried with the crash victims when the ground thaws. In her weariness, Natalie actually envies Jackie — “Way to make everyone jealous of you one last time,” she says — who will not have to endure the rest of the winter.There’s a bit of awkward discomfort regarding their cannibalism among the others, but also satisfaction. Misty and Crystal gab about how it wasn’t all that bad, and Crystal — that oddball — confesses it wasn’t the first time she had eaten a person. “I actually absorbed my identical twin in the womb,” she says. These two are giddy as if they had just shoplifted from the mall. The transgression is exciting rather than disturbing.The one person who remains hungry is Coach Scott, a.k.a. Ben, who didn’t partake and has now entered a fugue state, where he relives memories, or perhaps near-memories, of his time with an ex-boyfriend. At first, these scenes seem like straight flashbacks. Ben is resistant to committing to a relationship with Paul (​​François Arnaud) for fear of being outed. “You always say those girls are vicious little monsters,” Paul says, challenging Ben’s desire to stay with the team. Little did either of them know just how vicious the girls could be.But the more these sequences progress, the more they begin to seem like an alternate timeline, with Ben envisioning what would have happened if he hadn’t gotten on that plane. The moments between Ben and Paul are a little static. They feel like they come from another show, in which the dialogue and the actions are blunter. I started to wonder if that was an intentional choice by the showrunners. Before Ben descends into these fantasy memories, we see and hear the fuzz and sound of vintage TV static. He’s playing back these scenes as if rewinding a VCR. They have the schmaltz of a prime-time soap or a cheesy movie.Even just three hours into the new season, we can start to divide the Yellowjackets into who is aware of their own reality and who is not. Taissa — in the past and in the present — is not. In the ’90s, she follows the lead of the “man with no eyes” into the wilderness at night, not in possession of her own body. The current day Taissa is feeling that same force taking hold. With her wife in the hospital after the car accident Taissa caused, the shadow self is growing stronger, appearing in a bathroom mirror, contorting Taissa’s face.Something similar is happening to grown-up Lottie, who runs an entire enterprise on being in touch with one’s emotions but finds herself getting lost in her own head. Her latest hallucination comes courtesy of the bees she keeps on her commune. She has a vision of these creatures as dead, their hive filled with bloody honey. Lottie clearly identifies with the queen bee, and now she is besieged by an image of the hive’s demise, one that may foretell her own. She hears a voice say what sounds like “Il veut de sang,” French for “He wants blood,” before snapping out of the hallucination.On the other side of the spectrum are Shauna and Misty. Shauna is in full control of her faculties when she takes it upon herself to reclaim her family’s car, and Misty is still on the hunt for Natalie, now ensconced with Lottie. Now, however, Misty has an accomplice. Meet the brilliantly named Walter Tattersall, played by Elijah Wood, another message web sleuth who offers to help Misty in her investigation.Their interrogation of the doltish Randy (Jeff Holman) leads to some amusing “Cyrano”-like high jinks — even though Misty detests “Cyrano” — and Walter seems pleasant enough. Still, it’s hard to say whether he can be trusted. He comes clean, explaining that he didn’t bring his mother to the nursing home in order get Misty’s attention. Instead, he just recruited a random old lady. Misty is befuddled.“Maybe I’m just a bored Moriarty looking for his Sherlock,” he says.Wood has such an easy, cheery demeanor that you almost think he meant to say Watson, Sherlock’s partner. But no, he invokes Moriarty, Sherlock’s greatest foe. What is his game plan here? Or is “Moriarty” actually the perfect reference for the kind of person who performs a monologue about a dead daughter at a baby shower?More to chew on:Jeff is so wonderfully characterized as a huge dork. He thinks strawberry lube is for “bisexuals and Goths.” His idea of a spontaneous trip is to go to Colonial Williamsburg and churn butter. Oh Jeff, you silly, naïve loser.Once again, this show is expertly deploying Tori Amos. This time it’s “Bells for Her,” a song about the dissolution of a female friendship. “Can’t stop what’s coming,” Amos sings. “Can’t stop what’s on its way.”The symbol the Yellowjackets find in the woods is getting quite a workout. In the ’90s, Taissa is drawn to it in her sleep, finding it carved into a tree. In the present, she draws it on her wife. Past Lottie embroiders it on a baby blanket for Shauna, which may or may not have triggered a mass bird death around their cabin. Are we getting closer to finding out who or what it is?Travis determines that Ben is acting “weird.” At risk of sounding like a teenager: Duh, dude. More