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    Leah McSweeney of ‘Real Housewives’ Takes a Cold Plunge

    The reality TV star and clothing designer has a new memoir about her drug-fueled partying days.“Oh my God, this is insane,” said Leah McSweeney, the reality TV star. “I might die. You might have to call. …” Her voice cut off as her head slipped below the water. It bobbed back up a second later as Ms. McSweeney fled the frigid plunge pool and reached for a towel. “I was honestly afraid you would have to call an ambulance.”­­­This was on a recent afternoon at Wall Street Bath, a Russian bathhouse behind scaffolding, in a basement, on the fringes of the financial district in Manhattan. Ms. McSweeney, 39, a star of the latter seasons of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” has been a regular patron for nearly a decade, enjoying the sauna, the shvitz, the treatments. In the 12th season of “RHONY,” she brought her moneyed co-stars to the spa. Ramona Singer called it “rustic.”But, as Ms. McSweeney told the camera, “This is my oasis for relaxation and detoxing.”Now that Ms. McSweeney is sober, she has fewer toxins to dispose of, but on this breezy spring afternoon, a few weeks after the publication of her first book, “Chaos Theory: Finding Meaning in the Madness, One Bad Decision at a Time,” she returned to steam, sweat and calm herself down.“It’s so nice to be able to disconnect,” she said. “It’s probably good to work that part of your brain.”Ms. McSweeney with Dorinda Medley, left, in a scene from “The Real Housewives of New York City.”NBC, via Getty ImagesAfter signing a waiver, she made her way down to a no-frills locker room, which smelled worryingly of feet. Trading her jeans and black bodysuit for a coral string bikini, she slid into lavender slides and a matching robe from her sleepwear line, Happy Place.She began downstairs, in a hot tub next to a large pool. “Moby used to have ragers here,” she said with a twinge of nostalgia. “My daughter learned how to swim here.”Gingerly, she lowered herself into the hot tub; the water looked less than crystalline. “Me and my sister joke that you can probably get pregnant if you go in here,” Ms. McSweeney said. An employee turned on the bubbles. A mosaic mermaid cavorted above.After a 10-minute warm-up, she entered the shvitz, a wet sauna, deserted except for a middle-age man, his skin the pink of a cooked lobster. Ms. McSweeney arranged herself on the bench and began to sweat.“I like the way I feel after I sweat,” she said. “I don’t enjoy sweating itself.” After a few minutes, she got up and doused herself with a bucket of cold water. She shvitzed again. And doused again. More men entered. One told her to smile more. Her studs had begun to burn her ears, as did the chai necklace on her chest, which she bought to celebrate her conversion to Judaism. She left.Next up was the infrared sauna, though it smelled of something worse than feet. “Is that cedar or some really stinky guy?” she said. She left less than a minute later, entering the dry sauna, with a temperature set to 190 degrees. Two men were already in there, beating each other with oak leaves. Ms. McSweeney sat atop her towel, her skin peaching and pinking.“There’s something about this experience that’s uncomfortable,” she said. “You push yourself to the limit. How high up in the sauna can you go?”“I can’t believe I’m just telling people that I had a crystal meth addiction,” Ms. McSweeney said. Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesJoining a famously contentious reality show is a way of testing limits, too. She was surprised that the Bravo producers were interested in her. She lived downtown. She was a generation younger than most of the other cast members. She lacked their financial resources. Still, she couldn’t refuse. “I’m a sensation seeker, an adventure seeker,” she said. “There was no way I was saying no.”She mostly enjoyed her first season, even if it included a drunken episode involving tiki torches and some gossip at her expense that prompted her indelible declaration, “Don’t talk about my vagina and don’t talk about my mental health!” Yet she made friends — Dorinda Medley and Tinsley Mortimer, chiefly.The publicity for her femme street wear line, Married to the Mob, didn’t hurt either.But her second season, which aired in last year, felt different. And not only because she had quit drinking, a decision motivated by how she saw herself onscreen. “The show is a good mirror,” she said.Returning sober and, in the middle of the pandemic, with her grandmother dying, she struggled to deliver. “The producers were like, ‘Leah, lighten up,’” she said. “I just couldn’t. I’m so new to it. The other women are good at compartmentalizing. I can’t turn that part of myself off.”She persevered and when the season finished, with the fate of “RHONY” undetermined, she began to write her book, which details her mental health struggles and a history of substance abuse. The first version was exceptionally raw. And even after working with an editor, the book remains raw.“I can’t believe I’m just telling people that I had a crystal meth addiction,” Ms. McSweeney said, describing a period in her teenage years when she went in and out of rehab. “This is not something that I talk about openly. It happened a long time ago. It’s kind of a world away. To open up about it was scary.”Scary, but also apparently healing. “I think it just got me in touch with myself,” she said. “I had kind of lost myself.”Ms. McSweeney had no problem finding herself at the spa. After maxing out at 10 minutes in the sauna, she threw herself into the ice-cold plunge pool, then recovered with a warm shower, which left her feeling serene, floaty. “You’re aligning your body mind and soul,” she said.In the brightly lit restaurant, back in her robe, she relaxed with a ginger juice and a bowl of vegetarian borscht. Hurricane Leah, a nickname that became the title of a “RHONY” episode, had been downgraded to a light drizzle. Wall Street Bath had done its work. More

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    A Darker ‘Borgen’ Returns, and Heads to Greenland

    ILULISSAT, Greenland — From the top floor of a hotel here the view of Disko Bay, a vast inlet in western Greenland dotted with icebergs, was captivating.But as the Danish actor Sidse Babett Knudsen stared out the window at what appeared to be a frozen ghost city glinting in the early September sun, she looked more pained than enthralled. Knudsen was in Greenland to shoot scenes for a new season of “Borgen,” the acclaimed series that seemingly came to an end nearly a decade ago.In the intervening years, her character Birgitte Nyborg, Denmark’s first female prime minister, has undergone some changes that were making Knudsen uneasy. “She goes bad places,” the actor said of the revived Birgitte. “Which intellectually is interesting, but is actually a bit hard to do because I feel this incredible responsibility to take care of her.”Sidse Babett Knudsen was initially wary of reviving her beloved “Borgen” character, Birgitte Nyborg.Mike Kollöffel/NetflixThat dilemma of beloved characters going bad places is at the heart of the fourth season of “Borgen,” which, after a long hiatus and a February debut on Danish public television, begins streaming on Netflix on June 2. In its fundamentals, the show is unchanged: It still navigates a surprisingly engaging path through politics’ thicket, and it still focuses on the double bind that women in positions of power face in their public and private lives.But now the stakes are higher: instead of episodic stories of interparty sparring, this “Borgen” follows a single plotline across the entire season: Large reserves of oil are discovered in Greenland, and geopolitical tensions erupt around issues of sovereignty, climate change and decolonization. And all this among characters who themselves have grown not merely older, but darker: less “West Wing,” more “House of Cards.”When “Borgen” aired what seemed like its final episode on Danish television in 2013, the show was already on its way to becoming an international hit; eventually syndicated in 70 countries, it would launch Hollywood careers for several of its stars, including Knudsen, Birgitte Hjort Sorensen and Pilou Asbaek.Knudsen’s immensely likable portrayal of a political idealist who was both a determined leader and a vulnerable woman (the first episode famously had her struggling to fit into the suit she planned to wear to an important debate) may even have helped audiences accept the idea of a female prime minister; Denmark elected its first, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a year after “Borgen” debuted in 2010. But it also turned Birgitte into a feminist icon globally. “I was in London once,” Knudsen said. “And a woman came up to me and told me that she had something on her refrigerator that said, ‘What would Birgitte Nyborg do?’”Filming in Greenland took place in August and September 2021, and the production had to contend with many logistical difficulties.Mike Kolloffel/NetflixFor all its popularity, the show was never intended to last more than its original three seasons, and Knudsen was initially reluctant, she said, to do a fourth, believing fans would inevitably be disappointed. She was won over by the trajectory for the new season presented by the show’s creator and screenwriter, Adam Price, and her affection for her character.Several other key actors, including Hjort Sorensen, who plays the journalist Katrine Fonsmark, also came back. “What’s brilliant,” Hjort Sorensen said, “is that 10 years have passed, both in real time and for the characters. So when I read the first script, it felt like finding old friends on Facebook: Oh, this is what you’ve been doing!”In the new season, Katrine returns to journalism and becomes head of a newsroom, only to discover that the traits that served her well earlier in her career — her relentlessness and uncompromising nature — make her an unsympathetic boss. “I definitely struggled with my vanity on her behalf,” Hjort Sorensen said. But she also welcomed the chance to explore a character who’s come to understand with age “that the world is less black and white.”Birgitte, now the foreign minister, also compromises on her ideals. “She’s faced with a choice: Are you going to leave the scene gracefully, or are you going to remain in the game?” Price said. “Knowing that remaining in the game means that your hands will be very dirty.” The real action of this “Borgen” happens on the massive, ice-covered island of Greenland, 5,000 miles from Copenhagen. When oil is discovered there, it falls to Birgitte to not only navigate the competing interests of the United States, China and Russia but, even more trickily, to negotiate with the Greenlandic government over its extraction.Everything the production needed for filming was shipped to Greenland by boat from Denmark.Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York TimesGreenland is an autonomous region of the kingdom of Denmark, from which it receives an annual grant.Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York TimesThe harbor in Ilulissat, a town of less than 5,000 people.Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times“Borgen” has always winked at real-life political events, and here, too, the corollaries resonate. An autonomous region of the kingdom of Denmark, Greenland has power over several policy areas, but still depends heavily on the Danish government for its operating expenses; an annual grant of more than $600 million comprises about 20 percent of Greenlandic gross domestic product. On the show and in real life, the discovery of valuable natural resources in Greenland could offer a path for ending the country’s dependence on Denmark.Focusing the new season on that arc brought immense challenges. The logistics were daunting: Filming took place in August and September 2021, when Greenland’s strict coronavirus policies had reduced the already sparse number of international flights. Greenland has no roads to connect its settlements, and everything needed for the several weeks of shooting in Ilulissat, Greenland’s third largest city, and Nuuk, the capital, had to be shipped from Copenhagen by boat. This included a full-sized prop submarine and the crates of chemical hand warmers that would keep the team from freezing on set.Even more delicate was the task of representing a country and a people still very much in the process of decolonization. “We have this huge history together,” Price said of the tensions that drew him to the season’s story line. “There’s so much guilt, and there’s so much an undercurrent of anger.”But as a Danish production making a story about Greenlanders, “Borgen” ran the risk of replicating historical patterns. “We are so used to being represented by others,” Nivi Pedersen, an actor who plays the Greenlandic premier’s attaché in the series and is also a documentary filmmaker, said. “And we are only just now starting to tell our own stories, both inward to ourselves and out to the rest of the world.”Nivi Pedersen, who plays the Greenlandic premier’s attaché in the series, said Greenlanders are “only just now starting to tell our own stories.”Mike Kollöffel/NetflixPrice admits that in early drafts, “some of the Greenlandic characters bordered on cliché, because I didn’t know better.” He tried to counteract that with deep research and by giving Greenland “as many voices as possible in the show,” he said. In addition to hiring the novelist Niviaq Korneliussen to handle the translation of the Greenlandic dialogue, the directorial team was influenced by a research trip organized by the prominent local businessman Svend Hardenberg, who said he tried to introduce the team to the real Greenland.While production was underway, the show’s Greenlandic actors expressed concern in interviews that certain cultural elements they considered important for authenticity — the local accents that would make a character’s origins immediately obvious to other Greenlanders; the deeply-ingrained codes that would keep another from making a public outburst — were not being accurately represented. And since the show premiered, reviews in the Greenlandic press have been mixed. “It quickly becomes a caricatured depiction of a beautiful land with noble people who are submissive,” wrote the newspaper Sermitsiaq.But both Danes and Greenlanders involved in the production expect the season to open their audience’s eyes in important ways. “I think it will have an impact on how others see the relationship between Danes and Greenlanders, and maybe on how the Danes perceive themselves,” Hardenberg said. “That’s the wonderful thing about a vehicle like ‘Borgen,’” Price agreed. “We can actually inform and entertain at the same time.”Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York TimesCarsten Snejbjerg for The New York TimesIlulissat looks out over Disko Bay, where the icebergs can look like a frozen ghost city.Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York TimesThat the new season does so in tones darker than previous ones feels like an honest reflection of the last decade. Months after her time in Ilulissat, Knudsen was no longer wondering if she had made the right decision in returning to “Borgen.” Like the others, she felt hopeful that the show would help raise awareness about Denmark’s relationship with Greenland, and she said she felt permanently altered by her encounters with those spectacular icebergs in Disko Bay.Asked what she thought that woman in London would feel about Birgitte now, who the actor portrays again with skillful nuance, Knudsen smiled with the adorable wrinkling of her nose for which her character is known.“There might not be so much advice on her refrigerator from Birgitte Nyborg,” she said. “But I hope she finds the journey interesting.” More

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    A Starry ‘Into the Woods’ Will Play Broadway This Summer

    The fairy-tale musical, with songs by Stephen Sondheim, will feature Sara Bareilles and a cast of much admired theater performers.A production of “Into the Woods” that garnered ecstatic reviews during a sold-out two-week run at New York City Center this month will transfer to Broadway this summer.The Broadway production, scheduled to run for just eight weeks, will again feature the singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife and Gavin Creel as a prince, but the other lead roles will be played by newcomers to the production — including Patina Miller, a Tony winner for “Pippin,” as the Witch; Brian d’Arcy James (“Something Rotten!”) as the Baker; Phillipa Soo (“Hamilton”) as Cinderella; and Joshua Henry (“Carousel”) as the other prince.“When things don’t make sense anymore, this is the show that holds our hand,” Jordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters and the production’s lead producer, said. “That’s why it resonated so profoundly deeply, and why we need to allow more people to have that experience.”“Into the Woods,” which first opened on Broadway in 1987, is one of the great collaborations between the songwriter Stephen Sondheim, who died last fall, and the book writer James Lapine. The show, a cautionary mash-up of various fairy tales, is widely staged, both professionally and at schools, and in 2014 Disney released a film adaptation.This new production, which began as part of the Encores! program at City Center, will start performances June 28 and open July 10 at the St. James Theater. It is again directed by Lear deBessonet, the Encores! artistic director. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Alexis Soloski declared the City Center production “glorious,” and many other critics agreed.The Encores! cast featured several performers who are not joining the Broadway production because of filming commitments, including Heather Headley, who played the Witch; Denée Benton, who played Cinderella; and Neil Patrick Harris, who played the Baker.The Broadway run will be produced by Jujamcyn, Roth, and City Center, as well as Hunter Arnold, Nicole Eisenberg, Michael Cassel Group, Jessica R. Jenen, Daryl Roth, ShowTown Productions, and Armstrong, Gold & Ross.Jordan Roth said that the physical production would be the same as at City Center, with an onstage orchestra and minimal sets and costumes. “The simplicity and poetry of this production delivered this story right to our hearts,” he said.A New York City Center production of “Sunday in the Park With George,” also written by Sondheim and Lapine, followed a similar path to Broadway. That production, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, had a four-performance run at City Center in 2016, followed by a 10-week run on Broadway in 2017. More

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    Jurnee Smollett: ‘The Past Few Years Have Been Heartbreaking’

    The “Lovecraft Country” star has faced setbacks but emerged with new projects, including the Netflix movie “Spiderhead.”Jurnee Smollett learned she had received a best actress Emmy nomination for her starring role on the HBO series “Lovecraft Country” when she was in the hair and makeup trailer for another project, the coming Netflix film “Lou.”“I started screaming,” she recalled. “I was screaming, and crying.”That joy was tempered somewhat when she heard that her first Emmy nomination — one of 18 for the critically acclaimed series — was also the first time two Black leads from the same drama series had been nominated in the same year. “I thought, it can’t be,” she said. “We’re still making firsts, in 2021? It was sobering, I’m not going to lie.”That first season of “Lovecraft Country,” a horror drama which featured monsters of all sorts, from tentacled demons to racist cops, looked to be the start of something big — until it wasn’t. A much-anticipated second season never came to pass. Meanwhile, Smollett’s life, going back to the death of her father in 2015 after years of estrangement, has been beset by sadness and setbacks.“The past few years have been heartbreaking,” she admitted.But Smollett never stopped working, even in the midst of the pandemic. Among her forthcoming projects are “Lou,” a female-led thriller co-starring Allison Janney, and “The Burial,” a courtroom dramedy in which Smollett and Jamie Foxx square off as rival attorneys. She’s also preparing to reprise her role as Black Canary, the chanteuse superhero with pipes of steel she played in the 2020 film “Birds of Prey.”Courtney B. Vance, left, and Jonathan Majors with Jurnee Smollett in “Lovecraft Country.”Eli Joshua Ade/HBOAnd then there’s “Spiderhead,” a sci-fi thriller based on a 2010 short story by George Saunders, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel “Lincoln in the Bardo.” In the film, which premieres June 17, Steve Abnesti, the overseer of an eerily cushy island prison, is conducting drug-fueled psychological experiments on his charges, which include Jeff, a convict serving time for involuntary manslaughter, and Lizzy, a fellow convict who harbors her own dark secret.Chris Hemsworth (the “Thor” franchise) plays the unctuous overseer, while Miles Teller (“Whiplash”) and Smollett play his two primary lab rats. “For a drama like this, a character-driven film where you’re really only talking about three characters, you need to have some heavy hitters,” said the director, Joseph Kosinski, who also directed Teller in the upcoming “Top Gun: Maverick.”“Spiderhead” was shot in Australia in 2020, during the pandemic. Like the controversial Milgram experiment of the early 1960s, in which subjects were ordered by lab coat-wearing “scientists” to administer what they thought were painful electric shocks to other study participants, Jeff and Lizzy are urged to administer drugs with names like Verbaluce (instant verbosity!) and Darkenfloxx (pain beyond imagining!) to each other — you know, for science. (Smooth soundtrack jams from Chuck Mangione and the Doobie Brothers accompany the action.)“Jurnee and Miles make a good on-screen couple for this because they can both play damaged,” Kosinski said.The movie forced Smollett to question what she herself might do under similar circumstances. Would she administer excruciatingly painful drugs to somebody, say, Miles Teller, if someone like Chris Hemsworth asked her to? “I believe, in the comfort of my home, that I would say no,” she said.In a video interview this month, Smollett, 35, looked back on an acting career that has spanned three decades, from sitcoms to feature films, with detours on the stage. “I’ve done this so long,” she said with a laugh. She talked about everything from childhood crushes (“Paul Newman, Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes”) to motherhood (“It’s true what they say, that it’s your heart living outside of your body”), to how she got her name.That name. Her parents, Smollett explained, both had names starting with J, so they decided all six of their children should, too. Smollett’s brother Jojo thinks “Jurnee” might be a play on Sojourner Truth, the 19th-century abolitionist, but Smollett’s mother has a different story.“My mom was in labor for two hours, and I fell asleep in the middle of coming down the birth canal,” Jurnee Smollett said. “And my mom kept saying, ‘This little girl’s a trip.’ I guess I wasn’t ready to come out, and so she said I took her on a journey.”Smollett’s earliest memories have been on sets and stages. At 3, she played Debbie Allen’s daughter — and Diahann Carroll’s granddaughter — on a pilot for an unsold series, “Sunday in Paris.” At 4, she was cast as Denise Frazer, Michelle Tanner’s pal, on the long-running sitcom “Full House.” The young actress resisted the persistent siren call of the Disney Channel.“I was blessed because I wasn’t a child star,” Smollett said. “I was a kid who acted.”Smollett with Miles Teller in “Spiderhead.”NetflixFilm roles soon followed. In 1996, she appeared in the first of them, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Jack,” alongside Robin Williams. “Robin Williams taught me how to improv when I was 8 years old,” she said. At 11, she was starring alongside Samuel L. Jackson in “Eve’s Bayou,” which also featured Carroll — Smollett’s second role with the pioneering actress before she had even hit her teens. “We were old pals by then,” she said.Over the years, she has shared the stage of the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles with Cicely Tyson in a 2014 revival of “The Trip to Bountiful,” and played Angela Bassett’s daughter (the 2001 TV movie “Ruby’s Bucket of Blood”) and Denzel Washington’s pupil (“The Great Debaters”). That 2007 drama “was like taking a master class,” she said.In 2018, Smollett was cast in “Lovecraft Country.” For her role as Leti Lewis, a young Black woman traveling through segregated 1950s America, Smollett drew inspiration from her maternal grandmother, who died before Smollett was born but whom the actress described as “always this mystical figure in our household.”“One of my teachers pointed out to me this idea of blood memory,” she said. “Having that Black and Jewish ancestry, I come from survivors. It’s part of our DNA. My grandmother was a survivor, and her spirit is what I called upon when I approached Leti.”Family has played a major role in Smollett’s life over the past several years. In 2015, her father, whom she had been estranged from for most of her life, died, only two years after reconnecting with Smollett and the rest of her family. “We reunited at my sister’s wedding,” she said. “It was the first time I had seen him in years. It was such a healing moment for my entire family.”Four years later, her brother Jussie Smollett told police he had been the victim of a racist attack and was later charged with filing a false police report; in the end, her brother was sentenced to 150 days in county jail. Smollett declined to talk about the situation, but “it’s no secret how heartbroken my family is,” she said.“I am so close to Jussie,” she added. “I love that man so much. He’s always been there for me, as all my siblings have. If I didn’t have my family, if I didn’t have my mom and my siblings, I don’t know where I’d be.”And then in 2020, as the pandemic set in, Smollett filed for divorce from her husband, the musician Josiah Bell, after nearly 10 years of marriage. The two had a child together, Hunter, now 5. When asked what it’s like being a mom, Smollett clarified, “A single working mom!”She explained: “It’s the biggest blessing and the biggest challenge, simultaneously. But I’m lucky I’m in a situation in which, as a working mom, I’m able to bring him with me wherever I go. I know not all moms have that benefit.”In the coming years, Smollett hopes to be doing more producing. “‘Lou’ was the first film I produced, and I definitely see myself stepping more into that role,” she said. “I hope to usher more unique voices and filmmakers who are creating inclusive stories, centering folks who aren’t normally centered in these types of stories.”Even so, Smollett isn’t giving up acting any time soon. “I’m very excited about the slate of films we have coming down the pipeline,” she said. “They’re dream roles.”Those include the Black Canary movie, which is being written by the “Lovecraft Country” creator Misha Green. “Jurnee shows up on the day, and she has thought about 900 different ways to approach her character,” said Green, who also worked with the actress on the series “Underground.”Yet even as Smollett looks forward, she’s trying to appreciate the present, if even just a bit. “I’m trying to find a balance between enjoying the now, because that’s something I struggle with, and always looking to the future,” she said. “I’m always like, OK, been there, done that. What’s next?” More

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    A Theatrical Neophyte With the Know-How of a Pro

    Jodie Comer, from the TV series “Killing Eve,” makes a thrilling stage debut in “Prima Facie” on London’s West End.LONDON — If you’re going to venture onstage for the first time, a nearly two-hour, emotionally fraught solo play without a break might not seem the best place to start. But the TV actress Jodie Comer, better known as the assassin Villanelle in the Emmy-winning series “Killing Eve,” has taken to the West End in just such a play, “Prima Facie” by Suzie Miller, with gleaming-eyed assurance.First seen in 2019 in the writer’s native Australia, “Prima Facie” is at the Harold Pinter Theater through June 18 — though it will presumably have more life as long as its star chooses to stick with it. “House Full” signs have marked out Comer as the box-office equal of such theatrical heavy hitters as Mark Rylance in “Jerusalem,” the Jez Butterworth masterwork playing just streets away.Comer is cool and commanding as a defense lawyer named Tessa who discovers, at considerable personal cost, the limitations of the law. Assaulted on a night out by a colleague whom she brings to trial, Tessa soon finds herself confronting a legal system whose strictures even a mind as shrewd and sharp as hers cannot overcome. The second half devolves into an angry broadside, but you can only commend the impulses behind a play that wants to educate as well as entertain: Audience members are handed leaflets on the way out to raise awareness about sexual consent.Justin Martin’s busy staging finds Comer leaping onto the furniture and engulfed by a brief onstage rainstorm, to keep a potentially static monologue interesting to the eye: A chair at one point becomes a toilet bowl into which Tessa is sick, and a crucial costume change is done in full view of the audience.Comer plays to all levels of the theater, often sweeping her gaze upward as if to enlist us as her jury. And though she speaks the text at breakneck speed, there’s no denying the visceral power of an evening that owes its sellout status to a theatrical neophyte who possesses the know-how of a seasoned pro.Nicola Walker in Emlyn Williams’s “The Corn Is Green,” directed by Dominic Cooke at the National Theater.Johan PerssonThe director Dominic Cooke’s revival of “The Corn Is Green,” by contrast, is a large-scale production featuring a male ensemble of lusty-voiced Welsh coal miners. But the star attraction is Nicola Walker, a 2013 Olivier Award winner whose gathering TV acclaim since is surely attracting audiences to the National’s Lyttelton auditorium, through June 11: She headlines the legal drama “The Split,” which started its third and final season on the BBC last month.Walker plays the crusading teacher Miss Moffat in “The Corn Is Green,” a 1938 play by Emlyn Williams that draws from that Welshman’s singular path toward literary self-confidence and success. A brisk, no-nonsense Englishwoman, Miss Moffat has arrived in a rural Welsh mining village at the start of the 20th century to bring literacy to a community of colliers distinguished, she’s quick to point out, by their smell. (Their daily routine is hot and sweaty.) One of these begrimed youngsters, Morgan (the charismatic Iwan Davies), displays an aptitude for the life of the mind and not just the mines, and Miss Moffat leads him toward a scholarship to Oxford that the feisty lad at times resists. Morgan is disinclined, at least at first, to be the “little pit pony” that his keen teacher would have him be, though he soon realizes that education makes an entirely new life possible.The play’s journey is preordained, and some of the bumps on the way are because of Williams, who pushes Miss Moffat in a direction — not to be revealed here — that doesn’t entirely jibe with her character. But Cooke enlivens a time-honored tale by involving Williams directly as his play’s narrator (played by Gareth David-Lloyd), setting the scene and monitoring events throughout. And a vigorous Walker invests the peppery spinster at its inspirational center with a fiercely beating heart. Morgan is better for having met her, as are we.Change hovers less happily over “Middle,” the beautifully acted new play from David Eldridge running in the National’s smallest auditorium, the Dorfman, through June 18. A two-hander about a couple in crisis, the play returns to the stage another fine actress, Claire Rushbrook, who is better known for work on film and TV. (Her credits include “Doctor Who” and “Whitechapel,” two well-known British series, and the wonderful Mike Leigh film “Secrets and Lies.”)Daniel Ryan and Claire Rushbrook in David Eldridge’s “Middle,” directed by Polly Findlay at the National Theater.Johan PerssonRushbrook’s Maggie has been married for 16 years to Gary (Daniel Ryan), and the two have an 8-year-old daughter who is in bed upstairs when a sleepless Maggie enters the kitchen before dawn to inform her husband that she’s not sure she still loves him. What ensues is a reckoning across 100 minutes (no intermission) in which the pair, both nearing 50, figure out where they are heading next.Gary’s response, at least at first, is to keep things light, but that doesn’t last. By the end, tears have been shed and crockery smashed on the way to a movingly ambivalent finish. Life doesn’t always allow for tidy closure and nor does “Middle,” which suggests that muddling through is sometimes the only option. Will Maggie leave Gary for John, a policeman with whom she has gone on a date to Tate Modern? She may not know herself, and Rushbrook communicates an uncertainty that is immediately raw. Her eventual breakdown scene feels lived from within.Ryan does well, too, countering his wife’s truth-telling by saying he finds “complete honesty” overrated: He’d rather make jokes than discuss dissatisfactions that are no less real than his wife’s. (Among other things, he wanted a second child, and she did not.) Where Maggie speaks what’s on her mind openly, Gary hides his feelings behind a smoke screen of banter.Polly Findlay’s production keeps us guessing, and the emotional swerves are skillfully navigated throughout. As with Comer and Walker in their plays, “Middle” offers an actress at the top of her game forsaking the screen for the in-the-moment excitement only found onstage.Prima Facie. Directed by Justin Martin. Harold Pinter Theater, through June 18; NTLive broadcast on July 21.The Corn Is Green. Directed by Dominic Cooke. National Theater, through June 11.Middle. Directed by Polly Findlay. National Theater, through June 18. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Mother Courage’ Review: Selling Her Wares Amid the Havoc of War

    Irondale Ensemble’s adaptation of Brecht’s antiwar epic captures some of its spirit but lacks any real philosophical or political heft.There’s no virtue in war. But there is profit — for those ruthless enough to get it.So preaches Bertolt Brecht in his play “Mother Courage and Her Children,” a new adaptation of which is now running as part of Irondale Ensemble’s Brecht in Exile series. This production, directed and adapted by Jim Niesen, using John Willett’s classic translation, captures some of the spirit of Brecht’s cynical war fable but none of the philosophical or political heft.Mother Courage (an appropriately brusque Vicky Gilmore, in a knit hat, leather jacket and combat boots), traveling with her three children, is selling goods from a cart during the Thirty Years’ War. There’s Eilif (Nolan Kennedy), her pugnacious elder son who’s recruited as a soldier; Swiss Cheese (Terry Greiss), her honest but dimwitted younger son who becomes an army paymaster; and Kattrin (Jacqueline Joncas), her mute daughter. While peddling her wares over the course of several years, this mother and her family meet soldiers, a cook, a chaplain, a prostitute and a spy, and ultimately her children become direct or indirect casualties of the war she aimed to get rich on.“Mother Courage” is being produced and staged by Irondale at its space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a former Sunday school auditorium with chipped walls and giant plaques announcing the Beatitudes, which would have worked for this no-frills play if it weren’t undermined by what precedes it. Before the show, which has been marketed as an immersive experience, audience members can have a drink in the makeshift lobby set up with picnic tables; beer and soft pretzels, courtesy of DSK Brooklyn, are served from a cart in the corner. It’s meant to recall a biergarten, but is more a gimmick than an actual part of the show.In other words, it looks and feels like any other hipster hangout in Brooklyn.In his staging, Niesen retains Brecht’s title cards, the expository bits of narrative announcing what will transpire in each of the 12 scenes in this tedious two-and-a-half-hour epic.There are songs, too, as in Brecht’s original text — exegetic tunes that the characters break into — set to new music by Sam Day Harmet, who performs here with Erica Mancini and Stephen LaRosa. The score — incorporating banjo, guitar, drums, accordion and a synthesizer — begins with a war march before shooting into different genres, from bluegrass to ’80s synth pop and garage rock.The music’s too chic and eccentric for the production and the actors, who perform on, in and around an unsightly two-level scaffolding structure draped with blankets and curtains (scenic design is by Ken Rothchild).As for the actors: How can they be critiqued when Brecht wrote an unsentimental play with characters who aren’t meant to be empathized with, who don’t appeal to our hearts but our minds? Of the show’s central brood, the women are most memorable — Gilmore’s despicable Mother Courage and Joncas’s skittish Kattrin, who communicates through a series of fearsome croaks. The rest of the cast — all of whom play several characters — appear most comfortable when they tap into the production’s absurd sense of humor, such as Stephen Cross’s indulgent performance as a clucking, mischievous capon and Michael-David Gordon’s huffing and griping as a weary prostitute named Yvette. Many of the performances feel lethargic, and the cast awkwardly hiccups through the dialogue of even the smallest bits of improvised comedy.Niesen’s direction flattens an already challenging work of theater that, despite its influence, didn’t quite catch on in the United States, where agitprop and other kinds of homiletic plays are less popular. This “Mother Courage” feels like pedagogy encased in a bubble, isolated from, say, an overseas war — not to mention the political warmongering and consumptive capitalism in our own country.This production then reads as an indelicate transcription, because Brecht may be stone cold, but that doesn’t mean his work lacks spark. The spark of revolution, that is — though Brecht pioneered the Lehrstück, or “learning play,” his aim wasn’t just to educate but to incite audiences to make change in their society. He wanted his plays to “knock them into shape,” Brecht wrote. Unfortunately, this “Mother Courage” fails to pack a punch.Mother Courage and Her ChildrenThrough June 5 at Irondale, Brooklyn; irondale.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    in Theater

    ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ Review: A Life Too Simplified

    This New York City Children’s Theater adaptation of Maya Angelou’s celebrated memoir faces the challenge of faithfully telling a story that encompasses a great deal of pain.They were such tiny little kids to put on a train by themselves from Southern California to rural Arkansas — Maya Angelou only 3, her big brother, Bailey, all of 4. Each wore a wrist tag spelling out who they were, where they were headed and who would take care of them there.It was the early 1930s, their parents were splitting up and the children were off to live with their grandmother Annie Henderson in a town called Stamps, where she owned a general store.“The store was my favorite place to be,” the grown-up Maya says in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” a new play adapted by Idris Goodwin and Janna Segal from Angelou’s memoir of the same name.For most of a decade in her young life — long before she became a famous poet or received a Tony Award nomination for acting in a Broadway show that ran for one performance — it was a place where she was safe, and loved. And in Khalia Davis’s production for New York City Children’s Theater, it is the place to which she returns, stepping back into that empty store and unfurling her memories as monologue.The Maya (Cherrye J. Davis) of this oversimplified play is in her 40s, just as Angelou was when the book came out in 1969 and became a best seller. In the decades since then, it has been a frequent target for book banners — because of its visceral depictions of everyday hatred and brutal violence in the virulently racist Jim Crow South, and for its frank discussion of rape and sexual abuse.With those elements in mind, New York City Children’s Theater recommends its production, at Theater Row, for ages 16 and up. Still, it is a difficult piece to translate to the stage; while a book can be read in private and put down at any point, the audience at a play can’t stop the action if it becomes too intense. There is also the challenge of faithfully telling a story that encompasses a great deal of pain — along with humor and joy and tender affection — without reducing it to a Black trauma narrative.In both script and staging, this 55-minute show feels foiled by all of that, its characters and incidents too briefly sketched to gather the necessary force and weight.There are moments of vividness in Maya’s recollections, like crowding around the radio to hear the boxer Joe Louis fight for a championship — the thrill of his victory for Black listeners, and the danger underneath: “It wouldn’t do for a Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world.”But the production, and Davis’s performance, have an insistently perky gloss that reads as condescending, while the script sometimes trims details to the point of dumbing down.When Maya speaks of the vitalizing effect of books on her young self, she likens the escape they offered to “a chance to exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead or a hot cup of tea and milk.” In the memoir, Angelou’s words are “a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist.” Can that really be too sophisticated for a teenage audience, especially in talking about the awakening of a writer’s mind?The play is gentle yet unambiguous in recalling Maya’s rape at age 8 by her mother’s boyfriend. There, too, though, the editing feels off, condensing discrete episodes of sexual abuse in a way that acknowledges the child’s pleasure at being held by this man yet elides mention of the physical pain he caused, which Angelou describes in the memoir as a “breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart.”From the cheerful outfit (by Rodrigo Hernandez Martinez) that the grown-up Maya wears and the ease she has in her body, we are reassured from the very start of the show that she came through even the worst of her childhood ultimately OK. But in paring her story down rather than distilling it, this play never manages to convey a sense of the whole of her.I Know Why the Caged Bird SingsThrough June 5 at Theater Row, Manhattan; nycchildrenstheater.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

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    in Television

    Josh Duggar Is Sentenced to 12 Years for Downloading Images of Child Sex Abuse

    Mr. Duggar, 34, a former star of the TLC reality show “19 Kids and Counting,” was convicted in December after he tried to covertly download graphic images to his computer in Arkansas.Josh Duggar, a onetime star of the TLC reality show “19 Kids and Counting,” about a large family guided by conservative Christian values, was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison on Wednesday for downloading child sexual abuse imagery.The sentencing, in U.S. District Court in Fayetteville, Ark., concluded Mr. Duggar’s downfall from the eldest sibling on one of the most popular cable reality shows to a convicted criminal, capping a reversal that began with his arrest in April 2021.Prosecutors said that, in May 2019, Mr. Duggar installed a password-protected partition on the hard drive of his desktop computer at his used-car lot in Springdale, Ark., to avoid software that detects explicit images of children.Mr. Duggar, 34, who is married with seven children, downloaded around 600 photographs and seven videos of violent child sexual abuse, according to a sentencing memorandum filed this month by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Arkansas.He was caught after a Little Rock police detective found an I.P. address that had been sharing child sexual abuse material, according to a memorandum opinion filed by Judge Timothy L. Brooks in August 2021. The detective sent the information to an agent from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who later tracked the I.P. address to Mr. Duggar, Judge Brooks wrote.A jury deliberated for two days before finding Mr. Duggar guilty in December of one count of receiving child pornography and one count of possessing child pornography. Each charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.Prosecutors had asked for a 20-year sentence while Mr. Duggar’s lawyers asked for five years. He was sentenced to 12 years and seven months.On Wednesday, Judge Brooks vacated the charge of child pornography possession, one of Mr. Duggar’s lawyers, Justin K. Gelfand, said.Mr. Gelfand added that he and the rest of Mr. Duggar’s defense team were grateful that the judge had dismissed the charge. “We look forward to continuing the fight on appeal,” he said in a statement after the sentencing.The U.S. attorney’s office did not immediately respond to emails or phone calls on Wednesday.On Tuesday, Judge Brooks denied a request that Mr. Duggar’s lawyers filed in January asking that he be acquitted or receive a new trial. The lawyers argued that, among other things, the prosecutors had not disclosed certain evidence in a timely manner.From 2008 to 2015, Mr. Duggar and his siblings starred with their parents in “19 Kids and Counting,” a reality show following the family’s life in Arkansas. TLC canceled the show after In Touch Weekly reported on a 2006 police report that said Mr. Duggar had molested several girls when he was a teenager.Representatives for Discovery, the company that owns TLC, did not immediately return emails or phone calls on Wednesday.Mr. Duggar was not charged in connection with those earlier allegations, for which the statute of limitations had passed. Mr. Duggar’s parents told Fox News in 2015 that four of the five girls he molested were his sisters.His parents said they had sent him to counseling and had him talk to the police.He apologized at the time in a statement to People magazine, saying, “As a young teenager, I acted inexcusably for which I am extremely sorry.”Mr. Duggar also resigned from his position as the director of the lobbying arm of the conservative Family Research Council. More