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    At 91, Adrienne Kennedy Is Finally on Broadway. What Took So Long?

    THE PLAYWRIGHT ADRIENNE Kennedy will make her Broadway debut this month at the age of 91, with “Ohio State Murders” (1992), a play she tried for years to commit to paper. “I couldn’t do it,” she recalls. It was 1989, and she’d been commissioned by the Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland, her hometown, to write about her experience as an undergraduate, decades ago, at Ohio State University. She was about to return her advance. And then, she says, “I just happened to be in the earthquake.”Small and unassuming — she’s 5 foot 1 — with a voice that evokes the singsong politesse of Hollywood’s golden age, Kennedy has a winking sense of humor that might seem incongruous with her body of work, which is often described as dark, difficult and abstract. (In 2018, the New Yorker critic Hilton Als called her oeuvre “a long and startling fugue, composed of language that is impactful and impacted but ever-moving, ever-shifting.”) Kennedy herself is a shape-shifter: In her 10th decade, she’s still full of giddy, nervous energy, her moods and memories changing as fast as the tonal jump-cuts in her plays. On this October morning, she delivers “I just happened to be in the earthquake” with the rhythm of “I just happened to be in the neighborhood.” A moment from now, she’ll recall the way Ginger Rogers wore her hair in “Kitty Foyle,” the 1940 melodrama that was one of her mother’s favorite films; earlier, she was mooning over Frank Sinatra in “Higher and Higher” (1944): “I still want to marry Frank Sinatra,” she says, sitting amid various curios — a bust of Caesar, a West African djembe drum — in her 61-year-old writer son Adam’s home in Williamsburg, Va., where she’s lived for the past decade, along with his wife, Renee, and their four children. “It doesn’t go away. Why? Why is that?” Since her theatrical debut with “Funnyhouse of a Negro” Off Broadway in 1964, at 32, Kennedy has addressed the heart- and head sickness of racism, the confusion of sex and gender and the illusion of the self with incantatory paradoxes, visceral symbols, sidelong pop-culture references and violent contradictions. “Funnyhouse,” the first of more than 20 plays she’s written over six decades, is set inside the collapsing consciousness of a young Black woman, Negro Sarah, struggling with self-division and battling self-destruction. She agonizes over her racially mixed parentage and finds herself split into dueling avatars: Sarah is also England’s Queen Victoria is also the assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba is also Jesus (“a hunchback, yellow-skinned dwarf dressed in white rags,” as the script says) is also the Duchess of Hapsburg (perhaps with notes of Bette Davis playing the Empress Carlota of Mexico in 1939’s “Juarez”). All of them are losing their hair in clumps. Skin color and hair texture, perpetually racialized, are here deployed to evoke the horrors of the body, often to comedic effect: “I have something I must show you,” the jumpy duchess says to Jesus, closing the shutters before lifting her headpiece to reveal that, as the stage directions explain, “her baldness is identical to Jesus’s.’” Moments before, a severed head, also bald, plummeted from the rafters.A still from New York theater La MaMa’s 1976 production of “A Rat’s Mass,” featuring (from left) the actors Nancy Heikin and Lucille Johnson.Amnon Ben Nomis, courtesy of the La MaMa Archive/Ellen Stewart Private CollectionThis, in the midst of America’s civil rights movement, was Kennedy’s answer to the corrosion of racism: grotesquerie, absurdity, horror and heart, layered with rapid transitions and discursions. The play “was so controversial,” she says now. “Certain people thought it was just perfect: That’s what kept it alive. Other people thought that I took drugs, that I hated Black people, [that] I hated white people.” That slippery dramatic style made the playwright sui generis for over a half-century; her earthquake reference feels like the kind of dry joke you’d find in one of her plays. Except it’s not rhetorical: Kennedy really was in the deadly Loma Prieta earthquake, which destroyed part of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge in 1989. Then 58, she was teaching playwriting at Stanford, where she hid in a closet and thought she was going to die. Over the days that followed, navigating the Palo Alto campus amid aftershocks, Kennedy passed sorority row and the university’s Lake Lagunita. They both reminded her of Ohio State. Suddenly, it was as if her alma mater had returned to her, with all the hidden traps and secret deadfalls it held for its few students of color. (When she matriculated in 1949, she says, fewer than 250 of the school’s 20,000 or so students were Black, which is consistent with other estimates from the time, although the school didn’t measure racial demographics back then.)She flew home from California to New York, to her West 89th Street apartment — dense with books, memorabilia, the chunky ’40s Philco radio she’d listened to with her family back in Ohio — and wrote a script that blended elements of film noir, meta-true crime, audience direct address and Surrealist misdirection: “The geography made me anxious,” says the narrator of “Ohio State Murders” as she wanders the campus. “The zigzagged streets beyond the Oval were regions of Law, Medicine, Mirror Lake, the Greek theater, the lawn behind the dorm where the white girls sunned. The ravine that would be the scene of the murder and Mrs. Tyler’s boardinghouse in the Negro district.” Many of Kennedy’s plays have been published and anthologized over the years, including “Funnyhouse of a Negro” (1969).Samuel French, Inc., Archives and Special Collections, Amherst CollegeThe story is about a bookish Black girl, in love with English literature (and the emotionally indecipherable white professor teaching it) at a predominantly white university in 1949, losing her childhood illusions — and then, in a gothic twist, losing much more. Like most of Kennedy’s work, the play is a kind of scrapbook, just like the one her mother, Etta Hawkins, kept, which she’d often show her daughter. Many nights, while washing the dishes, Kennedy’s mother would tell her daughter about her nightmares. Kennedy learned never to throw a violent dream away, to save everything, to draw primarily from herself. (She had a younger brother, Cornell Wallace — named after their father, Cornell Wallace “C.W.” Hawkins — who was seriously injured in a car accident in his 20s and died in 1972.) Remembering the process of writing the Ohio script, she says, “It just came out. In about two days. And I was very upset.“It wasn’t pleasant,” she adds. “And then I called up [Great Lakes] and said, ‘I have a play.’”THAT PLAY OPENS at the James Earl Jones Theater on Dec. 8, directed by one Tony winner, Kenny Leon, and starring another, Audra McDonald, as Kennedy’s avatar Suzanne Alexander. (The “Alexander Plays,” a four-work cycle within her larger corpus, track the life and letters of a middle-class Black writer-professor navigating racism, sexism and her own hallucinatory nostalgia.) Reviewing a 2007 Off Broadway production of it for The New York Times, the critic Charles Isherwood wrote that Kennedy “is surely one of the finest living American playwrights, and perhaps the most underappreciated.” It’s taken more than three decades to arrive on Broadway. But it’s taken its creator, who broke out amid (if not always within) the ’60s-era theater of revolution, much longer. She has a theory as to why: “It’s because I’m a Black woman.”Kennedy on her wedding day in 1953 at her Cleveland home. To the left are her then husband, Joseph Kennedy, and his parents, Leon and Cara Kennedy. To the right are her father, Cornell Wallace “C. W.” Hawkins; her brother, Cornell Wallace Hawkins Jr.; and her mother, Etta Hawkins.Courtesy of Adrienne KennedyKennedy’s journey began in wartime Cleveland, where she was raised by an exacting schoolteacher (Etta’s daily exhortation, Kennedy says, was “don’t you let those little white kids do better than you”) and C.W., a Morehouse man who headed the local branch of the Y.M.C.A. and became a fulcrum of the Black community. The Hawkins’ neighborhood, Glenville — full of ambitious European immigrants fleeing Hitler and middle-class Southern Blacks fleeing Jim Crow — produced the creators of the first “Superman” comic (1938), the “Inherit the Wind” (1955) co-writer Jerome Lawrence and the celebrated midcentury printmaker John Morning, among many others. At school, Kennedy won prizes, became class president — and at one point, she says, saved a white student’s life after he used a racial slur against a Black classmate. But she didn’t feel truly othered until she attended college in nearby Columbus, where the white girls in her dorm made their contempt for their Black classmates clear and the professors “didn’t see us as people,” she says. Once, after she’d turned in an essay on George Bernard Shaw, a professor kept her after class to accuse her of plagiarism: “It was inconceivable to him that this tiny [Black] girl in a pink sweater could write.”Ohio State was discouraging for the high-achieving student but perversely nourishing to the young artist. It’s also where she met her husband — Joseph Kennedy, five years her senior, who would later help establish the Africa development nonprofit Africare — with whom she moved to Manhattan a few years after graduation. There, she balanced writing and motherhood: She and Joseph had two sons, Adam and Joseph Jr., now a 68-year-old musician, and after they divorced in 1966, they remained close until her husband’s death two years ago. It was while accompanying him on a work trip to Ghana in 1960 that the fever dream of “Funnyhouse” came to her. When she returned to America, she used a draft of it to apply to Edward Albee’s playwriting workshop at New York’s Circle in the Square Theater and was accepted. Two years later, Albee produced the first staging of “Funnyhouse” himself at a small theater downtown.A program from La MaMa’s 1969 staging of “A Rat’s Mass.”Courtesy of the La MaMa Archive/Ellen Stewart Private CollectionWith Albee’s imprimatur, she became an immediate sensation. Kennedy was invited to join the Actors Studio, then run by Lee Strasberg, and she and John Lennon discussed collaborating on a stage adaptation of his 1964 nonsense book, “In His Own Write.” (The dissolution of their would-be partnership is chronicled in her 2008 bio-play, “Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles?,” co-written with Adam, who remembers meeting the rock star as a child.) She won her first Obie Award in 1964, for “Funnyhouse,” sharing the spotlight with Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), author of the landmark play “Dutchman,” which also won an Obie that year, and the founding father of the Black Arts Movement, the famous organization comprising a polymathic group of politically motivated African American artists. The B.A.M. members, who were overwhelmingly male, were known for making confrontational work; they and their acolytes viewed hers — insistently introspective, often self-lacerating — with suspicion. To some, her output was “apparently less overtly connected to ‘the struggle,’ ” says Werner Sollors, an African American studies professor at Harvard. But Kennedy, who says, “It does not interest me to summarize the state of any of the arts,” has always drawn on influences less political and more personal, notably her own childhood memories and the treacherous persistence of the past. Her references and obsessions have been the same since the beginning: Old Hollywood, the Greek tragedies and the turn-of-the-20th-century Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, whose “Blood Wedding,” a formative work for her, lasted less than a month on Broadway in 1935.It bothered some in the movement, Kennedy still suspects, that “this girl” — here, a quick cut to anger, as she channels the belittling voice of her detractors — was getting attention for writing ugly things that weren’t about pride or uplift or the politics of the moment. “A big tension that merits mention is her relationship to Blackness,” says the playwright and actor Eisa Davis, who studied under Kennedy in the early ’90s. “She’s very unsparing about revealing her own inner workings, and the illness of what racism does to a psyche.” This comes across intensely in “Funnyhouse,” particularly in a scene where the character Lumumba says: “It is also my [N-word] dream for my friends to eat their meals on white glass tables and to live in rooms with European antiques, photographs of Roman ruins. … My friends will be white. … My white friends, like myself, will be shrewd intellectuals and anxious for death.” He then adds: “Anyone’s death.” That last line, delivered by a Pan-African leader murdered by Western colonizers, is a dark joke rendered in an unexpected place: witty graffiti scrawled on a great ruin. “She’ll find a beautiful, humorous moment, and then a devastatingly evil, horrible moment. But they’re right next to each other,” says Leon, her Broadway director. “She’s like a drum major. We’re always chasing her.” Kennedy, photographed in 1970 with one of her two sons, Adam, with whom she currently lives.Jack Robinson (Tear Sheet), courtesy of Adrienne KennedyFor years, it seemed, no one could quite keep up. In 1969, after she had an Off Off Broadway hit at La MaMa called “A Rat’s Mass” — about two half-rodent siblings who long for a white baby — she began to feel misunderstood by the culture and its gatekeepers: “Adrienne Kennedy, she’s crazy,” was how she read the response to “Cities in Bezique,” a wild Surrealist diptych about sexual assault that was her second major production. Some “people walked out,” Kennedy says. “So I really didn’t like the theater, not at all.” It was even worse after the American playwright Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf” made it to Broadway in 1976, when Kennedy’s own work was hardly being produced. “I felt left behind,” she wrote in an email. “I knew my time had passed.” She’s had just one major New York production in the past decade: “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box,” a well-reviewed play about an interracial relationship in the South that she completed at 86, which premiered in 2018 at Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center.But, as audiences drifted, the era’s progressive academics increasingly responded to her fractal approach. After being studied, interpreted and decrypted, “I came to see myself differently,” she says, which fueled both her writing and academic career for subsequent decades. “Adrienne was embraced by scholars,” says Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard historian and literary critic, “almost exactly [at the time] when feminist and post-structural writers and critics were turning to [Zora Neale] Hurston’s rich experiments in Black Modernism to explore the contours of Black postmodernism.” Universities began offering her jobs; after some four decades teaching playwriting at Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Berkeley, she’s remained close with dozens of her former students (myself included). “She’s just such a writer, in any form,” says the actor Natalie Portman. Even Kennedy’s emails are disobedient. A restless correspondent, she’s known to send early morning messages with punctuation that conjure a voice and style unambiguously her own:I.  Used yellow pads. For. Years.  And yearsI like IPAD because it reminds me ofMy. Old typewriterBut honest ScottAll the dots are errorsScript for Kennedy’s “Ohio State Murders” (1998).Samuel French, Inc., Archives and Special Collections, Amherst CollegeSUCCESSIVE GENERATIONS OF playwrights — particularly Black ones — have picked up on that unique, uncompromising voice. The actor and stage docudramatist Anna Deavere Smith, 72, says she was forever changed by Kennedy’s 1976 anti-pastiche “A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White” — in which white Hollywood icons channel a Black woman’s family trauma — directed by Joseph Chaikin at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976. “In those personae of white movie stars, she’s injecting a Black narrative,” she says. “What’s important there is how she handled identity: It’s not all meshed together. That was, for me, a groundbreaking thing to witness.” She credits the playwright with freeing her from the constraints of naturalism and linearity: “The world is a fragmented place … it’s not beginning, middle, end. I was so happy to have that verified for me.” While Smith was able to see a live production, many others encountered Kennedy’s work mostly on the page. That’s how she became a “waymaker,” says Suzan-Lori Parks, 59, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning “Topdog/Underdog” (2001) is also being revived by Leon on Broadway this season. “This world wants certain kinds of folk spoken about in certain ways,” she says. “The marketplace doesn’t want us getting too deep.” And yet Kennedy remains a lodestar for a rising generation of Black absurdists — among them 33-year-old Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play,” 2018), 37-year-old Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins (“An Octoroon,” 2014) and Jackie Sibblies Drury (whose 2018 “Fairview” won a Pulitzer) — all of whose work seems more influenced by her anarchic collages and genre mash-ups than by, say, Lorraine Hansberry’s realism or August Wilson’s expressionism. Harris first read “Funnyhouse” in his Virginia high school’s rehearsal room. He remembers thinking: “ ‘A play can look like this? A play can sound like this?’ I’d seen Buñuel, I’d read Beckett, but I’d never seen those influences applied to a Black person [in a play].” A few years later, he mounted a production of “Movie Star” in his college dorm room. “Her great champions were always there,” he says, “but not in the seats of power.” KENNEDY’S ARRIVAL ON Broadway began with a reading. In June 2021, the producer Jeffrey Richards developed a streaming event to aid the Actors Fund, a New York nonprofit. Performance spaces were all but closed, and theater artists were looking for opportunities, so Leon agreed to direct over Zoom, and McDonald signed on to play Suzanne Alexander. McDonald, who had trained as an opera singer, hadn’t read Kennedy’s work in school, and found herself enraptured by the script. (“Abyss, bespattered, cureless, misfortune, enemy, alien host, battle groups fated to fall on the field today,” chants Suzanne, close to madness near the play’s end, transforming her English literature lessons into a kind of funeral rite.) Once the event was over, the actor says, “I turned off my computer, I couldn’t move. Gutted. Like a fish.” Not long after, Richards planned a Broadway run.For McDonald, the production has been its own kind of education. “Adrienne is forever and always a teacher,” the actor says. “I’ll get an email that says, ‘Audra, you need to read this book,’ or, ‘I want you to watch this particular interpretation of “Jane Eyre.” ’” These lessons have influenced McDonald to the point that she doesn’t just want to bring Kennedy’s work to Broadway; she wants to conjure the playwright herself in her portrayal of Suzanne Alexander. “She has her own rhythm,” McDonald tells me over the phone, and suddenly it’s like I’m talking to Kennedy — that trademark lilt. “Even where her voice sits, you know, and then she gets a little — not lost in the thought,” McDonald continues, “but she’s still emotionally tied to all of it, which I find so moving. I want to be able to capture that. I want to be able to bring Adrienne.” But the question remains: Will she come? At 91, Kennedy’s not sure she can travel to New York for the opening. Perhaps the next generation will take it from here. In recent years, she’s corresponded with Harris; when he got engaged in October, his fiancé, the television executive Arvand Khosravi, asked Kennedy to write a surprise inscription on the inside of his ring: “Happiness. Is. To Me. Greatest Thing,” it says, her syntax intact. Throughout the pandemic, the two writers had discussed a co-production — a double billing of one of her plays, and a new play from Harris about her influence on him, his grief over his grandmother’s death and his suspicion of the theater industrial complex.Who knows when that might happen. Kennedy mostly stays at home these days and, this late in life, doesn’t expect the recognition she’s been denied. (She won’t even allow herself to be photographed.) “I’ve been around a long time,” she tells me. “Playwrights aren’t icons.” It makes me think of some advice she’d sent me years ago, after I’d had a little success in the theater:You. Have. Done.   The work.Pull.  Away. From the scene.                  Assoon as youCan.Crowds of people can. Kill you. More

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    Stephen Colbert Asks Santa to Put Mike Lindell in Charge of the G.O.P.

    “Dear Santa, I have been a very good boy this year,” Colbert said to his Christmas Wish Cam about the MyPillow C.E.O.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.All I Want For ChristmasEarlier this week, Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, announced his campaign to become chair of the Republican National Committee.“Sorry, I just need a moment,” Stephen Colbert said on Thursday night, turning to his Christmas Wish Cam.“Dear Santa, I have been a very good boy this year. I just want one thing for Christmas: Please put the screamy mustache man in charge of the Republican Party.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But despite Lindell’s MAGA loyalty, the former president has not yet publicly supported his bid. Wow. he hasn’t said anything supportive? But Lindell’s been like a son to — oh, yeah. All right. That makes sense.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But I’m a bit worried here, because an R.N.C. election pitting Lindell against incumbent Ronna McDaniel could tear the party apart between MyPillow MAGA crazies and traditional conservatives, which is why I propose a compromise candidate, someone right down the middle: Pillow. He’s got everything the Republicans want — he’s white, and he’s square.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Early Bird Special Edition)“Today, President Biden hosted French President Emmanuel Macron for the first White House state dinner in more than three years. Yep, the French like to eat late, so Biden was like, ‘Got it, 4:30 it is.’” — JIMMY FALLON“The Bidens hosted the French president and his wife for the first official state dinner. Biden does state dinners a little differently than former presidents — they happen at 4 o’clock, and then everybody goes to bed.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“A state dinner at the White House. I wonder if they serve French food or, as Macron calls it, food.” — JAMES CORDEN“This is a landmark event between the United States and France. They’ve finally started negotiations to get Emily out of Paris.” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Jimmy Kimmel Live” special correspondent Jake Byrd riled up fans at a recent Herschel Walker rally in Georgia before speaking with the Senate candidate himself.Also, Check This OutEmma Corrin and Jack O’Connell star in the latest version of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”NetflixThe new Netflix adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” stays faithful to the novel. More

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    Stream These 13 Movies Before They Leave Netflix This Month

    The end of the year brings the end of many licensing agreements for streaming services, so load up your queues now.The end of the year brings the end of many licensing agreements for streaming services, and this month is no exception. We’ll see the departure of a mix of Oscar winners, comedy franchises, indie dramas and action extravaganzas from Netflix in the U.S. So load up your queues now, lest you miss your last chance at these gems. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Fast Color’ (Dec. 10)The ubiquity and (especially as of late) mediocrity of the mainstream superhero movie is particularly galling when reflecting on the commercial indifference with which Julia Hart’s superhero story was received in 2018. Then again, Hart’s wise and wonderful screenplay (co-written with her husband, Jordan Horowitz, who also produces) doesn’t simply deploy the familiar beats and conflicts; this is a character-driven indie drama that just so happens to concern characters with superhuman powers, and that grapples with the real-world implications of their abilities. Lorraine Toussaint is mighty as the patriarch of the family at the story’s center; Gugu Mbatha-Raw is quietly excellent as her troubled daughter.Stream it here.‘The Danish Girl’ (Dec. 15)Tom Hooper’s adaptation of the novel by David Ebershoff was unsurprisingly controversial upon its 2015 release, dealing, as it does, with the true story of the Danish painter Lili Elbe, one of the first people known to have undergone sexual reassignment surgery. But Hooper’s adaptation was criticized for its historical inaccuracies and approach to the material, as well as for centering the narrative on Gerda Wegener, Elbe’s cisgender partner. Those claims are valid, but the film is still worth seeing, primarily for the achievements of its actors. Eddie Redmayne resists the urge to overplay as Elbe, while Alicia Vikander is extraordinary as Wegener; she won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for the role and deserved it.Stream it here.‘A Little Princess’ (Dec. 31)When the director Alfonso Cuarón landed the high-profile assignment of taking over the “Harry Potter” film franchise for its third entry, “The Prisoner of Azkaban,” eyebrows raised across Hollywood — after all, at that point he was best known for helming the NC-17 erotic road trip drama “Y Tu Mamá También.” But the “Potter” gig made complete sense to those who’d seen his 1995 adaptation of this classic children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Taking understandable liberties with the source material, he weaves a tapestry of magic and pathos out of the story of Sara Crewe, who finds her life of privilege turned upside down when her father sends her to a girls’ boarding school.Stream it here.‘Blood Diamond’ (Dec. 31)Quick quiz: Leonardo DiCaprio was nominated for the Oscar for best actor for “The Departed” (2006), right? Wrong. He was nominated that year, but it was for a different film: Edward Zwick’s sharp-edged action-drama, set during the Sierra Leone Civil War, starring DiCaprio as a smuggler and mercenary whose initial interest in the conflict is purely monetary. That changes, however, as he joins forces with a fisherman (Djimon Hounsou, also nominated for an Oscar) whose discovery of a giant diamond has put him in the sights of a local warlord. The narrative is predictable, sure. But DiCaprio, Hounsou and Jennifer Connelly, another co-star, are acting up a storm, and Zwick shows his usual adeptness at staging big action sequences.Stream it here.‘Blow’ (Dec. 31)It would be easy to dismiss this 2001 crime drama as “Goodfellas” Lite — it’s based on the true story of a cocaine kingpin, telling the thrilling story of his rise and fall in a jittery, hyperkinetic style, and features a stellar ensemble cast. But as Scorsese cosplay goes, it’s lively and entertaining. The director, the late Ted Demme (“The Ref”), knows when to turn up the heat and when to let it simmer; the screenplay (by the veteran scribes David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes) is detail-oriented and fascinating; and Johnny Depp turns in one of his best performances as George Jung, who made a fortune running drugs for Pablo Escobar. Ray Liotta even turns up as George’s father, an explicit “Goodfellas” shout-out that plays like a blessing on the project.Stream it here.‘Blue Jasmine’ (Dec. 31)Woody Allen’s last great movie, this 2013 comedy-drama won Cate Blanchett an Oscar for best actress, and Andrew Dice Clay the best reviews of his career as a bitter and estranged family member. Blanchett stars as Jasmine, once a rich socialite in New York City, whose husband (Alec Baldwin) fell from grace in a Bernie Madoff-style scandal; she finds herself living in San Francisco with her sister (the wonderful Sally Hawkins) and her working-class boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale, borderline feral). The echoes of “A Streetcar Named Desire” are unmistakable, and undoubtedly intentional; as he did with his Ingmar Bergman riffs, Allen is not just quoting an iconic work but putting his story and characters in conversation with it, and the results are both thoughtful and thrilling.Stream it here.‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (Dec. 31)True to form, Stanley Kubrick’s final film — unveiled four months after his death in 1999 — confounded audiences and critics upon its release, only to grow in reputation and estimation in the ensuing years. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, then still real-life spouses, star as a wealthy Manhattan couple who find their seemingly idyllic marriage rocked by her confessions of desire for a passing stranger. Blind with jealousy, he journeys into the New York night, searching for an illicit affair but stumbling upon something far more insidious. Moody, odd and darkly funny, it boasts one of the greatest closing lines in all of cinema.Stream it here.‘Men in Black’ I / II / 3 (Dec. 31)Barry Sonnenfeld’s original 1997 “Men in Black” remains one of the great popcorn movies — a witty, briskly-paced treat that manages to both send up big-budget, effects-heavy extravaganzas, and simultaneously work as one. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are a pitch-perfect matchup of wisecracking cool and stone-faced professionalism, an oddball buddy movie pairing for the books. Their 2002 follow-up can’t match the laughs or energy of the original, but it’s still a hoot, with Rosario Dawson a welcome addition to the cast. And the final installment, released a decade later, draws on a time-travel plot that primarily serves as a showcase for Josh Brolin’s flawless impression of his “No Country For Old Men” co-star Jones. But it’s such a delicious piece of mimicry, you don’t really mind.Stream “Men in Black” here, “Men in Black II” here and “Men in Black 3” here.‘National Lampoon’s Vacation’ / ‘European Vacation’ (Dec. 31)Chevy Chase was floundering badly in the movies — his early films, after leaving “Saturday Night Live” only one year into its run, included such undistinguished efforts as “Modern Problems,” “Under the Rainbow” and “Oh! Heavenly Dog” — when he finally landed his ideal film role. Working from a screenplay by the up-and-coming screenwriter John Hughes (with uncredited contributions by Chase and the director Harold Ramis), the actor was terrific as Clark Griswold, a Chicago suburb-dweller who only wants the perfect cross-country vacation for himself and his family. The film was so successful that Chase (and co-star Beverly D’Angelo) came back three years later to escort his brood across Europe, with similarly silly results.Stream “Vacation” here and “European Vacation” here.‘Point Break’ (Dec. 31)Kathryn Bigelow was still an all-but-unknown genre filmmaker, and Keanu Reeves was still best known for playing Ted in the “Bill & Ted” movies, when they teamed up with Patrick Swayze — then hot off his starring role in the surprise hit “Ghost” — for this tense action drama. The screenplay by W. Peter Iliff (with uncredited rewrites by Bigelow and her then-husband, James Cameron) wasn’t the freshest of stuff, even in 1991: an FBI agent (Reeves) goes undercover in a group of surfer bank robbers and finds himself in too deep with the group’s charismatic leader (Swayze). But Bigelow’s energetic direction keeps things moving at such a hearty clip, the familiarity barely matters; her action beats are furiously paced, her female gaze gives welcome dimension to the testosterone-heavy proceedings and the central dynamic is wonderfully thorny.Stream it here.ALSO LEAVING: “A Clockwork Orange,” “Casino Royale,” “Chocolat,” “I Love You, Man,” “Police Academy,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” (all Dec. 31). More

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    Dramatizing the Story of a Gay Mid-Century Tattoo Artist Who Was So Much More

    “Underneath the Skin,” a theater piece by John Kelly, meditates on the life of Samuel Steward, who always lived boldly when others dared not.You might not expect a show about a man who wrote for the Illinois Dental Journal to come with a warning about “nudity, graphic images and adult themes.” But Samuel Steward, the subject of John Kelly’s “Underneath the Skin,” which begins previews at La MaMa on Thursday, may well be one of the wildest figures to ever prowl the outer reaches of American literature.Steward was an academic and a tattoo artist, a friend of Gertrude Stein’s who had trysts with Rudolph Valentino and Thornton Wilder, and such a meticulous documentarian of his own sex life that his extensive records, which included a detailed “Stud File,” were catnip to a certain Alfred C. Kinsey.“With this one, I just had to go for the gusto,” Kelly, 63, said of the piece, which he wrote, designed, directed and stars in. (Three other actors play various characters, and Lola Pashalinski appears on video as Stein.) “I’m at the point where I want to say ‘Screw you’ to everything, in a good way, and kind of puncture through a membrane of whatever’s left of propriety in my life.”Steward, who died at 84 in 1993, realized he was gay when he was quite young, and he steadfastly remained true to himself in an era less than hospitable to his kind. Even as society became more accepting, he was an outlier.This made him an ideal subject for Kelly, a polymathic visual artist, writer and performer with a decades-long history of creating shows about such real-life figures as Egon Schiele, Joni Mitchell, Caravaggio and the cross-dressing trapeze artist Barbette, each of whom he turned into characters in dance-theater fantasias. But even compared to those subjects, Steward led an extraordinary life — Justin Spring’s biography, “Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade,” which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2010, is an eye-popping, mind-blowing page-turner.John Kelly in “Underneath the Skin” at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club. The show is designed as a series of vignettes pulled from many stages of Steward’s life.Albie Mitchell“Underneath the Skin” guides us through Steward’s early years and sexual adventures, his trips to Europe in the 1930s, where he met Stein, Thomas Mann and Lord Alfred Douglas. (The show also elegantly brings to life its subject’s taste for group sex.)Feeling stifled by his American milieu’s oppressive propriety, Steward embraced a new creative outlet in the early 1950s. “He became enamored with tattoo culture, the underworld aspect of it, the sexy aspect of it, the human-contact aspect of it,” Kelly said.Steward started practicing tattooing on Chicago’s Skid Row, often applying his skills (in more ways than one) on sailors from the nearby Great Lakes training station; eventually he resettled in Berkeley, Calif., where he counted the local Hells Angels among his clients. That his canvasses included both the scandalous director Kenneth Anger (who had the word “Lucifer” tattooed across his chest) and Frederick IX, King of Denmark (whom he invited to drop into his shop), is a testimony to the range of people Steward encountered. Those extremes are reflected in a life where the literati rubbed elbows with rough trade, and violence was a frequent occurrence — sometimes consensual (this sadomasochism aficionado titled his general-interest column in the Illinois Dental Journal “The Victim’s Viewpoint”) and sometimes not.Kelly has created shows about such real-life figures as Egon Schiele, Joni Mitchell and the cross-dressing trapeze artist Barbette, each of whom he turned into characters in dance-theater fantasias.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesThrough it all, Steward never stopped writing: There was the Stud File (the subject of a Museum of Sex exhibition, “Obscene Diary,” in 2011) but also a detailed journal, essays, fiction. After a “legitimate” novel tanked in 1936, he went on to publish, under the name Phil Andros, erotic pulp fiction. Walking over to a low table in his living room, Kelly picked up some Andros books, including “The Boys in Blue” and “Greek Ways,” that he had managed to procure. “They were very expensive,” he said with a sigh.Steward’s punctilious, frank documentation of his sexual adventures was one of the things that appealed to Kelly, himself a diarist whose decades-long practice fueled his 2018 “live memoir” of a show “Time No Line.” But despite the abundance of biographical material, the new piece, which was first presented at N.Y.U. Skirball in 2019, is not a straightforward retelling. “Samuel Steward touched every single aspect of gay male sexuality over the course of the 20th century, and his life demanded to be theatricalized in some form, and obviously not in an episodic manner,” said Jay Wegman, the director of N.Y.U. Skirball, who commissioned the show. “John’s interpretation is more a meditation on his life.”The show is designed as a series of vignettes pulled from many stages of Steward’s life, sometimes re-enacting scenes he had described in his diary. To properly channel him, Kelly immersed himself in primary sources. “I wanted to find as many of his actual words as I could,” he said. “I had to find his voice, see photographs of him at different points in his life, see his drawings, see his tattoo designs, and develop a sense of his trajectory. What kind of flesh do you put on the bones? That’s a recipe of movement, of design, of video, of music.”For him, “Underneath the Skin” is a semaphore that signals a presence now too easy to forget. “I’m trying, in a polite way, to shove this story down people’s throats — meaning the 20th-century history of gay and lesbian and trans people who found ways of having a life when there were so many risks,” he said. “What makes him unique is the fact that his ephemera comes down to us so we have actual proof, so to speak, of his existence.”The specifics of Steward’s life can feel remote today, yet one thing still resonates loudly — his formidable will to be true to himself, and to connect. “Even when he’s musing on mortality and old age at the end of the piece, there’s still these images that come in the video of that quest for contact,” Kelly said. “It’s human nature: We need to make contact, we need to find warmth.” More

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    Does Broadway Need Another ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Musical? Pat Benatar Says Yes.

    BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Romeo, devastated and bereft, gazed over Juliet’s lifeless body, lying atop a table in a rehearsal studio at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts here. But rather than offer a farewell soliloquy before taking his own life, in this adaptation of the Shakespeare play, Romeo broke into song, the lyrics familiar to any rock music fan who grew up in 1980s.We belong to the lightWe belong to the thunderWe belong to the sound of the wordsWe’ve both fallen under.Sitting behind a table as she observed this first full rehearsal, Pat Benatar, who sang “We Belong”— a touchstone of the MTV era that reached No. 5 on the Billboard chart in 1984 — stopped taking notes and began to cry. When the run-through was finished, Benatar turned to her husband and musical partner, Neil Giraldo. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m going to have to go fix my mascara.”Khamary Rose as Romeo and Kay Sibal as Juliet during rehearsals of “Invincible,” which uses Benatar’s rock anthems from the 1980s to drive the narrative of Shakespeare’s 16th-century story.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesThe story of “Romeo and Juliet” has been presented in countless ways over the years, most recently as the jukebox musical “& Juliet,” with songs by Max Martin, which opened on Broadway this month. The Benatar-Giraldo version, “Invincible — The Musical,” is five years in the making, the result of a circuitous route that includes two competing ideas for a Benatar-inspired play, a cease-and-desist order, and a reconciliation that created an alliance between a television showrunner-playwright and the singer whom he idolized as a boy growing up in Southern California.Bradley Bredeweg, the creator and showrunner of “The Fosters,” wrote the book for “Invincible,” which molds together Benatar and Shakespeare, using rock anthems from the 1980s to drive the narrative of a story written in the 16th century. In previews now at the Wallis, it is scheduled to open on Dec. 2 and run through Dec. 18.The show’s creative team, from left: the musicians Neil Giraldo and Benatar; Tiffany Nichole Greene, the director; and Bradley Bredeweg, the book writer.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesEven with the reimagining of the play, the tragic tale of these two young lovers is as moving as ever, so it was hardly a surprise that Benatar began crying. But it was more than the tragedy of their tale; she had just watched, often mouthing along to the words, a celebration of the career she and her husband have built at arenas and concert halls over the decades, sung by actors who were not even born when their first big hit, “Heartbreaker,” reached the top of the charts.“You have to understand,” Benatar, 69, said as she headed out for a Sunday morning rehearsal. “I’m the only person who has sung these songs for 43 years. I can’t wrap my head around it.”“I didn’t think I was going to live past 45,” she said, remarking on the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, “so I’m pretty delighted to be here.”Rose and Sibal as Romeo and Juliet. The show began preview performances last weekend.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesThat said, the opening of “& Juliet” in New York makes for an unfortunate coincidence of timing for Benatar, Giraldo and Bredeweg, who are hoping their show will also go to Broadway — not that they profess any worry about the competition arriving at the Stephen Sondheim Theater after a successful run on London’s West End. “This is not a jukebox musical,” Giraldo, 66, said of their version, which includes 28 Benatar songs. “Wouldn’t do that. This isn’t ‘Jersey Girls.’”It almost didn’t happen. Bredeweg, 46, who was surrounded by Benatar music at his home, in the car and at malls when he was younger, came up with the idea when he was driving to San Francisco from Los Angeles. He had just reread “Romeo and Juliet” and popped a greatest-hits Benatar album into the CD player. “One song after another, they kept coming — ‘Heartbreaker,’ ‘We Live for Love,’” he said. “I started to realize that they are all the songs — if you line that up into the perfect order, they line up with the play we all know. These songs were almost written for this beloved story.”Kelsey Lee Smith, center, and other ensemble members during rehearsals.Roger Kisby for The New York Times“That night I get to my cousin’s house and I said I need an hour before I go to dinner, and locked up myself in a room and came up with the first outline of what became ‘Invincible.’”After writing the musical, Bredeweg convinced the Rockwell Table & Stage, a theater in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles that has since closed, to let him stage it there. The early version, known as “Love Is a Battlefield,” ran for six months, selling out on many nights.Unbeknown to Bredeweg, Benatar and Giraldo had been working in New York on their own show, using their songs to tell the tale of the challenges of being musicians who were romantically involved and confronting the music industry. “For many years, people kept saying, ‘You should do a story of your life. People don’t know the professional side, they don’t know about how the secret partnership works,’” Giraldo said. “It’s not all wine and roses.”They caught wind of Bredeweg’s show, and sent their manager to see it — and quickly realized the implications of the conflict. “We sent a cease-and-desist letter,” Benatar said. “He didn’t have the permissions. We felt, ‘Let’s just stop this right now.’ We felt really bad, but we had to do it.”The show includes 28 Benatar songs, and a book by Bredeweg, the showrunner for “The Fosters.” Roger Kisby for The New York TimesBredeweg was floored. “It was the scariest letter I have ever seen,” he said. “We shut it down.”As time went on, Benatar and Giraldo grew increasingly skeptical about the prospect of building a jukebox show based on their own lives. “Whether you like them or not, these shows are not timeless: They have a shelf life,” said Benatar, who this year was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “You get to a point where you’ve had enough you.”Intrigued by what they had heard about the show in Los Angeles, they asked Bredeweg to come east and talk about a possible collaboration. He joined them on their tour bus as it rolled through Connecticut.“When I heard that our songs lined up to tell the story lyrically of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ I thought, ‘Now, wait a second: That sounds like a damn good idea,’” Benatar said. “Especially when he showed me using ‘We Live for Love’ for the balcony scene.”“He’s such a generous guy,” she said. “Even though we shut down his production, he was such a generous guy.”Josh Strobl and Rose practicing choreography.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesThe concept of a Benatar-Shakespeare mash-up is certainly adventurous and gave some people pause — including the woman who is now directing the show. “When I first came along, I was like, who knows? This is such a wild card — maybe it will work, maybe it won’t,” said Tiffany Nichole Greene, the director. “I thought, if we agree, great; if not, I get to meet Pat Benatar.”The more Bredeweg researched Benatar and Giraldo’s career, the more he was convinced that he could put their music in service of his play, without its having the forced feeling of a jukebox musical — in no small part because of the two musicians themselves. “Everyone used to say they were considered the Romeo and Juliet of the rock ’n’ roll industry,” he said of the couple. “Everyone tried to break them up at every step along the way.”The show is also an unusual production for a theater like the Wallis, known more for plays and classical music, and reflects its struggles as it rebuilds an audience after pandemic losses. Coy Middlebrook, the acting chief artistic officer, said the Wallis was hoping a new audience would be drawn by the promise of an innovative production powered by the music of two known rock celebrities.Some of the ensemble members during a recent rehearsal of the show, which promotes peace in a divided world.Roger Kisby for The New York Times“Much of our music until this point has been classical programming,” Middlebrook said. “This was an opportunity for us to move into the pop-rock genre. We are all still coming back and building back. It’s a challenge. We knew this might be an opportunity to get people to come out of their homes.”Benatar and Giraldo have been at every rehearsal, sitting with Bredeweg, discussing tweaks and changes between breaks. Though based on “Romeo and Juliet,” this play is told mostly in modern English. The story has a number of twists on what Shakespeare wrote; for example, the matriarchs of the Capulets and Montagues are central figures in this version.Be that as it may, the question remains: Is Broadway hungering for two jukebox musicals based on “Romeo and Juliet”?“The only thing that relates to this being a jukebox musical is that these songs were once played on a jukebox,” Benatar said. “I love that it is dueling ‘Romeo and Juliets.’ It’s amazing.” More

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    In Paris, First-Person Trauma Jumps from Page to Stage

    Several intimate literary accounts of pain and suffering have been adapted for the theater recently — with varying success.PARIS — When Vanessa Springora’s memoir, “Consent,” was published in 2020, it was the start of an overdue reckoning with child sexual abuse in France. Now the book has made its way to the stage, in a Paris production by Sébastien Davis that captures its raw impact yet lacks, at times, the clarity of purpose that Springora found in her writing.It’s not for lack of star power. For this monologue, Davis has cast Ludivine Sagnier, a movie actress who is a household name in France. She has rarely appeared in theater productions: Her last stage role was a decade ago, in Christophe Honoré’s “Nouveau Roman.”On the smaller second stage of the Espace Cardin, Sagnier looks increasingly assured as “Consent” unfolds. The production tracks the book closely, with some cuts. Springora’s troubled family background sets the scene for her encounter, at 13, with Gabriel Matzneff, then a famous author in his 50s who advocated for pedophilia in broad daylight and wrote extensively about his sexual encounters with teens. For two years, in the mid-1980s, he trapped Springora in a controlling sexual relationship, to which plenty of adults — and even the French police — turned a blind eye.In recent years, trauma memoirs have increasingly found a home in French playhouses. The works of Édouard Louis, now fodder for a wide range of international productions, are a prime example; later this season, one of Annie Ernaux’s most recent autobiographical books, “A Girl’s Story,” about her traumatic first sexual experience, is due for an adaptation at the Comédie-Française.While not innately theatrical — first-person narratives lend themselves to monologues, but not much else — these personal accounts of abusive situations tap into the cultural mood and offer neat emotional arcs. A one-woman show like “Consent” is also relatively cheap to produce and tour, no small advantage in straitened times for the arts.The set of “Consent.”Christophe Raynaud de LageAnd “Consent” is a story worth telling onstage. A proportion of audience members at any given performance will have lived through the permissive years Springora revisits: In the wake of the student uprisings of May 1968, the mantra “It’s forbidden to forbid” was taken literally by many French intellectuals. Sexual relations between minors and adults shouldn’t be criminalized, thinkers including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir argued. “Consent” is an indictment not just of Matzneff, but of the culture that allowed pedophiles to operate freely, and Sagnier is especially convincing when she brings it to life. With hints of dark humor, she mimics the men who surrounded the teenage Springora. There is her stepfather, who kisses her on the lips after announcing that he is separating from her mother, and the philosopher Emil Cioran, a friend of Matzneff’s, who explains to her just how “lucky” she is to be his child muse.Sagnier takes longer to settle into the role of Springora herself. Early on, when she talks about Springora’s absent father, her delivery falls somewhat flat, and isn’t helped by the heavy-handed live drums that are the musical accompaniment throughout. In a pink tank top and a white tracksuit, her hair in a ponytail, she looks like an overly gauche teenager. This staging choice starts to pay off when Springora and Matzneff meet, because it is so far removed from Matzneff’s idealization of Springora as a youthful “goddess.” As Sagnier lies on the shimmering black sheets of an onstage bed, the absurdity of their budding sexual relationship is clear.As Springora grows older, this traumatized child evidently remains within. The scene in which Sagnier wonders if she was “the accomplice of a pedophile,” because she outwardly “consented” to the relationship, is genuinely upsetting.Yet Davis intersperses “Consent” with fussy attempts at representing Springora’s fraying sense of self, as Matzneff creates a fictionalized version of her through his writing. A semi-opaque screen forms the backdrop of the production, and at several points, Sagnier is required to strip to her underwear and assume a puppetlike pose as she delivers lines in silhouette.The handful of scenes in which Sagnier acts out sex acts — opening and closing her legs suggestively, or thrusting while sitting on a chair — are equally odd when sexual exploitation is the driving theme. Davis’s heart is certainly in the right place, but avoiding any hint of sexualization would have been a cautious, sensitive choice, especially for a male director telling this story.Dominique Blanc in “Pain” at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, directed by Patrice Chéreau and Thierry Thieû Niang.Simon GosselinThere are also more subtle adaptations of first-person trauma tales playing in Paris. At the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, the actress Dominique Blanc has revived “Pain,” a production created for her in 2008 by the towering French director Patrice Chéreau, who died nearly a decade ago.While productions regularly outlive their creators in opera or in dance, it happens much more rarely in contemporary theater, and “Pain” is a welcome opportunity for younger theatergoers to acquaint themselves with Chéreau’s dramatic work. The production was based on a 1985 book of the same name, in which the French author Marguerite Duras gives an unvarnished account of her long wait for her husband’s return from a Nazi concentration camp, at the end of World War II.Blanc, a highly regarded artist, took a short leave of absence from the Comédie-Française to recreate “Pain” with Chéreau’s former assistant, Thierry Thieû Niang, and the result hasn’t aged. A wooden table and a few chairs provide the setting. Blanc sits with her back to the audience at the start of the show, her shoulders sinking before a word is spoken, and recreates Duras’s anguished routine — and the agonizing weeks that her husband, the writer Robert Antelme, spent close to death after his return — so starkly, so plainly, that not a single hand movement feels out of place.Yuming Hey, right, and Nicolas Martel in “Herculine Barbin: Archaeology of a Revolution,” directed by Catherine Marnas at the Théâtre 14.Pierre PlanchenaultWhile “Consent” and “Pain” draw on well-known literary works, “Herculine Barbin: Archaeology of a Revolution,” at the Théâtre 14, introduces a memoirist few in France know. Herculine Barbin, later known as Abel Barbin, was the first recognized intersex person in the country, after a 19th-century court decided in 1860 that they had been wrongly assigned a female identity at birth.The director Catherine Marnas relies on the account Barbin left of their life to recreate the events that led to their death by suicide, in 1969, in a funereal yet often compelling production. Marnas was especially inspired to cast Yuming Hey, a nonbinary actor, as the play’s central figure.Wrapped in white sheets that act variously as a shroud and period clothes, Hey cuts a quietly melancholy figure as Barbin, an outcast who struggled to leave being a woman behind in a society unequipped to understand that transition. Some accounts of trauma are probably best left to literature, but “Herculine Barbin” feels as if it earned its turn onstage.Le Consentement. Directed by Sébastien Davis. Théâtre de la Ville/Espace Cardin, on tour and at Théâtre de la Ville/Les Abbesses from Feb. 28 to March 1.La Douleur. Directed by Patrice Chéreau and Thierry Thieû Niang. Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, through Dec. 11.Herculine Barbin: Archéologie d’une Révolution. Directed by Catherine Marnas. Théâtre 14, through Dec. 3. More

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    Stephen Colbert Is Conflicted Over Oath Keepers Leader’s Conviction

    Colbert said he felt “pretty darn good” about Stewart Rhodes’s verdict: “and I feel a little bad about that, because the thing I feel great about is somebody else going to prison.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Lock Him Up!A jury convicted the Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes of seditious conspiracy on Tuesday, for his participation in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday night that he was conflicted about feeling “pretty darn good” about the news, adding “and I feel a little bad about that, because the thing I feel great about is somebody else going to prison.”“Rhodes was also found guilty of other bad stuff, which is why he is now facing a maximum of 60 years in prison. That’s a long time, baby. That’s a long stretch. On the bright side, by 2082, the hip new look might be steampunk cowboy pirate.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, when you hear the name ‘Oath Keepers,’ you know, and that eye patch, it makes Rhodes sort of seem like a heroic freedom rebel. In reality, he’s a disbarred Yale law grad who wears an eye patch after accidentally shooting himself in the face with his own gun. Oops-a-karma!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s embarrassing, is what it is. That’s like finding out Rambo wears that headband to cover up his ‘live, laugh, love’ tattoo.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This conviction, make no mistake, is a huge deal. It marks the very first time that a jury has decided that the Jan. 6 violence was the product of an organized conspiracy. Well, yeah! I watched it — it sure seemed organized. I don’t remember any headlines that said, ‘Capitol Meet-Cute Gets Out of Hand.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Rhodes is such a scumbag, even his estranged wife chimed in, saying that the conviction is the first time Rhodes has ever faced consequences. Damn! Damn! That is what you call ‘winning the breakup.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (It’s Lit Edition)“December is minutes away from happening, and they got the holidays started in our nation’s capitol tonight. The president and first lady took part in the 100th lighting of the National Christmas Tree. Tonight, thousands of Americans gathered outside the White House to watch an old man flip a light switch.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The tree, it’s 27 feet tall. They did not chop it down. It is a live white fir tree, it was planted last October, after the previous National Christmas Tree was removed in May of 2021 because it had a fungal disease — the second time that year that a fungus had to be removed from the White House.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Wednesday’s “Tonight Show,” Dolly Parton addressed rumors of a secret unreleased song not be released until 2045.What We’re Excited About on Thursday Night“Stranger Things” star Dave Harbour will talk about his new film, “Violent Night,” on Thursday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutChristine McVie of Fleetwood Mac performing at Madison Square Garden in 2014.Charles Sykes/Invision, via Associated PressHere’s a playlist of the 12 best, and best-remembered, songs of Christine McVie, the Fleetwood Mac singer, songwriter and keyboardist who died on Wednesday at 79. More

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    Judge Declares Mistrial in Danny Masterson Rape Case

    A jury in Los Angeles said it was deadlocked on the three charges against the actor known for his role in “That ’70s Show.”A judge on Wednesday declared a mistrial in the rape case against Danny Masterson after a jury said it was deadlocked on charges that the actor raped three women at his home in the Hollywood Hills in the early 2000s, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said.Known for his roles in the sitcom “That ’70s Show” and the Netflix comedy “The Ranch,” Masterson, 46, was fired in 2017 amid sexual assault allegations.The jury could not reach a decision on the three charges of forcible rape that the actor faces in Los Angeles County Superior Court. If convicted, Masterson could face 45 years to life in prison.Opening arguments in the case began on Oct. 18. Deliberations began on Nov. 15 and reached a deadlock three days later, jurors told the judge, who instructed the jury to continue deliberating after a weeklong break for Thanksgiving. When the court met again on Monday, two jurors with Covid-19 were dismissed and replaced with two alternates, resetting the deliberations, The Associated Press reported.The district attorney’s office said in a statement on Wednesday that “we will now consider our next steps as it relates to prosecuting this case.”“While we are disappointed with the outcome in this trial, we thank the jurors for their service,” the statement said. “We also want to give our heartfelt appreciation to the victims for bravely stepping forward and recounting their harrowing experiences.”Masterson’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Masterson’s case involved accusations by two of the women that the Church of Scientology, to which they and Masterson belonged, discouraged them from reporting the rapes to law enforcement. The church strongly denied that it pressures victims.Philip Cohen, who represented Masterson in the trial, had sought to limit discussion of Scientology in court, telling the judge in October that it would unfairly bias the jury and force the defense to fight a “war on two fronts,” The Los Angeles Times reported.But the judge, Charlaine F. Olmedo, found that Scientology was relevant to the case, and that the women could testify about their belief that church policy discouraged them from reporting the accusations to law enforcement, The Times reported.According to a trial brief filed by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, Masterson raped a woman, identified only as Jen B., in April 2003 after she went to his house to pick up keys and he gave her a red vodka drink. About 20 or 30 minutes later, she felt “very disoriented,” the brief states.According to the brief, Masterson raped her after she regained consciousness on his bed. She reached for his hair to try to pull him off and tried to push a pillow into his face, it states. When Masterson heard a man yelling in the house, he pulled a gun from his night stand and told her not to move or “say anything,” adding expletives, the document states.The trial brief says that Masterson raped a second woman, identified only as Christina B., who had been in a relationship with him and had lived with him for six years.In November 2001, the document says, she awoke to Masterson “having sex with her” and told him to stop. “I fought back,” she said, according to the document. “I tried pushing him off me and saying, ‘No, I don’t want to have sex with you.’” She also pulled his hair, and he hit her, the document states.In December 2001, she had one or two glasses of wine at a restaurant with Masterson and woke up naked in her bed the next morning, feeling that it hurt to sit down or go to the bathroom, the brief states. She said she went downstairs and confronted Masterson, and he acknowledged having sex with her while she was unconscious, the document states.The brief says that Masterson raped a third woman, identified only as N. Trout, who occasionally saw him at parties and gatherings and, like him, was in the Celebrity Centre branch of Scientology.Sometime between October and December of 2003, she went to his house, where he handed her a glass of wine and told her to take off her clothes and get in his hot tub, where “everything started becoming blank,” the brief states. He assaulted her in the shower and on a bed, the document states. She told him, “No, I don’t want to do this,” according to the document.Two of the women spoke to officials in the Church of Scientology about the assaults, according to the brief.Jen B., after seeking the church’s permission, verbally and in writing, to report the rape, received a written response from the church’s international chief justice that cited a 1965 policy letter regarding “suppressive acts,” the brief states.To her, the response signaled that if she were to report a fellow Scientologist to the police, “I would be declared a suppressive person, and I would be out of my family and friends and everything I have,” the brief states. Still, she reported the rape to law enforcement in June 2004, the document states.The woman identified as Christina B. said that when she reported the rape to the church’s “ethics officer” or “master at arms,” the officer told her, “You can’t rape someone that you’re in a relationship with” and “Don’t say that word again,” the document states.The officer showed her “policies and things in the Ethics Book about high crimes in Scientology.” One of them was “reporting another Scientologist to law enforcement,” she said, according to the brief.She understood that, if she went to the police, “the church would have ultimately destroyed” her and declared her a “suppressive person,” the document states.The woman identified as N. Trout told her mother and best friend about the rape, but not the church, the brief states.“If you have a legal situation with another member of the church, you may not handle it externally from the church, and it’s very explicit,” she said, according to the brief. She added that she “felt sufficiently intimidated by the repercussions.”In an in an emailed statement on Oct. 21, the church accused prosecutors of injecting Scientology into the trial and misrepresenting its doctrines and beliefs “to stir up passion and prejudice in the uninformed.”“The church does not discourage anyone from reporting any alleged crime nor tell anyone not to report any alleged criminal conduct,” it said in the statement. “The church has no policy prohibiting or discouraging members from reporting criminal conduct of Scientologists, or of anyone, to law enforcement. Quite the opposite. Church policy explicitly demands Scientologists abide by all laws of the land.” More