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    TikToker Lands the Role of a Lifetime: Playing Dead on TV

    Every day for nearly a year, Josh Nalley posted TikToks of himself playing dead in the hopes of being cast in a television series or movie. Then “CSI: Vegas” reached out.The Otter Creek Outdoor Recreation Area, near Louisville, Ky., is Josh Nalley’s favorite place to play dead.This time of year is especially “creepy,” he said. The shuttered campground’s derelict buildings and the fallen leaves scattered on the ground make for an ideal filming location.Over the past year, Mr. Nalley has posted a daily TikTok of himself playing dead in the hopes of being cast as a corpse in a television series or movie. He’s lain prone along the banks of rivers and streams near his home in Kentucky; had his three dogs lick his face as he propped himself up against a tree; slumped in a car; floated in pools; draped himself over doorways and splattered himself across sidewalks.Mr. Nalley always included a caption tallying the number of days “of playing un-alive until I’m cast in a move or TV show as an un-alive body.”By mid-July, and about 200 videos later, “CSI: Vegas” took note. On Nov. 3, Mr. Nalley, 42, will appear on an episode of the forensic crime drama on CBS. The Courier-Journal of Louisville reported Mr. Nalley’s big, dead-guy break.“I was just having fun on the internet,” Mr. Nalley said. He never expected his campaign to actually catch on. He said he developed the concept “out of boredom.”

    @living_dead_josh #CloseYourRings #foryoupage #fyp ♬ Ruff Ryders’ Anthem (Re-Recorded / Remastered) – DMX “I was spending a lot of time on TikTok and trying to figure out what I could do to get on TikTok and maybe get in a movie with as little effort as I thought would be possible,” he said.Jason Tracey, the showrunner for “CSI: Vegas,” said Mr. Nalley was the perfect person to play “body in the background of the morgue.”“Nobody has done a more thorough job of auditioning for a nonspeaking role, maybe in the history of television,” Mr. Tracey said. “After 321 pictures or so, he hit his stride and it was time to get called up to the big leagues.”Mr. Nalley is not a big crime genre fan. In fact, he doesn’t watch much television at all. But he was a fan of the original “CSI.”He lives in Elizabethtown, Ky., and works as a restaurant manager in the next town over. He usually films multiple videos on his days off at nearby parks, like Bernheim Forest and Saunders Springs, or in his backyard, and posts them throughout the week. Sometimes he’ll even record outside the restaurant where he works.“A desolate, empty parking lot is always a good place to dump a big body,” he said.More often than not he films the videos using his phone and a tripod, but every once in a while he engages the help of friends of family. Mr. Nalley’s method is simple: He takes a couple of big breaths and then holds his breath for about 25 seconds and tries to stay as still as possible. That can prove difficult when a rock is digging into his side on the ground.“You want to move but you’re like, ‘No, just hold it for a little big longer,’” he said he tells himself.If he’s playing dead sitting up, Mr. Nalley will usually have his eyes open so viewers can see his face. If he’s lying down, his eyes are typically closed because “half my face is usually pressed into the ground.”While Mr. Nalley’s intentions are comedic in nature, TikTok does not always agree. He uses the term “un-alive” instead of “dead” and has moved away from gory makeup like fake blood and bullet wounds to avoid running afoul of the platform’s content moderators. (He’s been placed on probation with TikTok several times, he said.) Even Mr. Nalley’s handle, living_dead_josh, was crafted with TikTok’s algorithms in mind.He tries to capture TikTok trends of the moment and adds music to lighten the mood, including Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and the “Peanuts” theme song for a Thanksgiving post. One of his favorite videos is from Christmas, when he usually gets together with friends for pizza and beer. Last year, they all played dead together.

    @living_dead_josh #fyp #foryoupage ♬ It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas – Michael Bublé “I love that one because they’re family to me, they were all in it.” Mr. Nalley said.More than 200 videos later, producers at CBS emailed him about a role on “CSI: Vegas.” He didn’t believe it at first, but after an exchange of several emails, the studio flew him to Los Angeles over the summer. Mr. Nalley announced his new gig on Sept. 15, in video No. 321, in a caption over footage of him splayed out on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next to the star of Marg Helgenberger, a longtime “CSI” actress.

    @living_dead_josh Tune in to the Season 2 premiere September 29th @csicbs #csivegas #cbs #dreamcometrue #goals #fyp #foryoupage ♬ Who Are You – The Who The job required him to sit through two hours of makeup to make it appear as if an autopsy had been completed on his character. Over the course of five hours of filming, Mr. Nalley’s instructions were simple and familiar: “Take a deep breath and look dead,” he recalled.Mr. Tracey, the “CSI” showrunner, said the show and the job of a crime scene investigator “can be unrelentingly grim,” and producers try to find “gallows humor in the profession and in the history of the franchise.”Mr. Nalley’s quiet presence “was a nice way to keep it light on set that day.”“We often have dummies down in the morgue,” Mr. Tracey said. “The cast was as surprised as anyone else to have a breathing corpse next to them.”But he did have some half-serious notes for the aspiring dead body.“Honestly I would have liked to see a little less breathing, but we can fix that in post,” Mr. Tracey said. He offered an insider tip: “Most people don’t know you’re not supposed to move your eyes at all. The trick is to find a spot and focus even though they’re closed.”Mr. Nalley said he wasn’t sure what would be next for his career — perhaps another television show or a movie, maybe even one with the filmmaker and actor Kevin Smith, he mused. “I always like his movies and I think we have the same sense of humor,” Mr. Nalley said. “That would be awesome, even just a cameo.”But for now, he’ll keep posting his daily TikToks for his about 120,000 followers.“I hope they laugh, honestly,” he said. “I hope they chuckle, and I hope that inspires somebody to be perseverant.” More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Wonders Why Trump Would Talk to Bob Woodward

    “Why are you agreeing to do 20 interviews on tape with the guy who took down Richard Nixon with tapes? With tapes!” Kimmel said on Tuesday.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.A Regular ChatterboxThe journalist Bob Woodward released hours of content from his interviews with former President Donald Trump in a new audiobook, “The Trump Tapes.”“According to Woodward, Trump would call him randomly at unexpected hours to talk while he was president,” Jimmy Kimmel said. “Because there is nothing he likes doing more than talking about himself — it’s his version of phone sex.”“One of the things he talks about is explaining Covid to his son, Barron, who was 13 at the time. He told Barron he wished he’d known about Covid two months earlier, so he could have stopped it, which is also what he told Ivana about Don Jr.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Why are you agreeing to do 20 interviews on tape with the guy who took down Richard Nixon with tapes? With tapes! The emperor has no brain.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Just Dropped Edition)“Kanye West had another bad day. You know how Kanye said he could say antisemitic stuff and Adidas cannot drop him? Well, today, Adidas dropped him.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Today, Adidas finally ended their massive deal with Kanye West after his antisemitism controversy. To which I say, ‘Ye!’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“No one wants to work with Kanye — even New Balance thinks he’s unbalanced.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingZedd and Maren Morris performed their song “Make You Say” on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightElizabeth Banks will promote her new film “Call Jane” on Wednesday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutRyan Condal on the set of “House of the Dragon.” The first season of the “Game of Thrones” prequel ended on Sunday.Ollie Upton/HBOThe “House of the Dragon” showrunner Ryan Condal was surprised by the warm reception given to Season 1 of the first “Game of Thrones” spinoff. More

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    Review: This Time, ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ Really Does Explode

    Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic ends on a note of cautious optimism. Its latest incarnation, at the Public Theater, does not.Leaving his recent “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” aside, Robert O’Hara doesn’t typically direct revivals; nor, leaving Shakespeare aside, does the Public Theater typically produce them. Yet on Tuesday the Public opened O’Hara’s take on Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun”: not merely a revival but a further “exploration” of an earlier production of a 1959 classic that is arguably as well known today as it was epochal when it debuted.How, then, to make it new? Apparently, on the evidence of this staging, by furiously underlining its subtleties and downplaying its conventional strengths, a reversal of standard procedure that produces a sometimes stunning, sometimes stunted result.It’s not as if the play needed help to feel relevant; like all great works it has proved itself incessantly timely. In telling the story of the Youngers, a Black family aiming to move from a “rat trap” tenement on Chicago’s South Side to a house in a working-class white neighborhood, it both reports on and anticipates the racist backlash to upward mobility that has been a blight on American life since Reconstruction. And in dramatizing the effects of that backlash on Walter Lee, the feckless dreamer of the family, it offers a piercing psychological portrait of Black manhood in distress.As was customary in her time, Hansberry prioritizes the real estate plot, wrapping Walter Lee’s personal drama (and that of his mother, wife, sister and son) in its ultimately hopeful arms. Beginning with the indignities of “ghetto-itus” — there are just two bedrooms for the three generations and a bathroom shared with neighbors down the hall — the play ends with them all moving out. Even the feeble houseplant, symbolically undernourished in the light-deprived apartment, is promised a new life.O’Hara signals from the start (and reiterates throughout) that he will flip the focus, at the same time broadening and darkening it. His production begins not, as written, with Ruth Younger (Mandi Masden) making breakfast, but with Walter Lee (Francois Battiste) carrying their sleeping son, Travis, from the dim recesses of the apartment to his bed on the living room sofa. It’s a haunting image that suggests the way the father’s hopes, and perhaps his failures, may be borne into the future — a future O’Hara and the scenic designer, Clint Ramos, literalize in a devastating coup de théâtre at the end.Francois Battiste as Walter Lee, right, with his son Toussaint Battiste as Travis, has no difficulty filling the additional space created by O’Hara’s interpretation of the role, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn between, no matter how judiciously Hansberry has distributed the play’s attention among the main characters — including the matriarch, Lena (Tonya Pinkins), and her daughter, Beneatha (Paige Gilbert) — O’Hara concentrates his prodigious theatrical imagination on Walter Lee.Battiste, among the most compelling stage actors today, has no difficulty filling the additional space created by that interpretation, making the character more alarming than usual but no less believable. Even when O’Hara has him step completely out of the frame of the play, turning what is already a horrifying speech (“O, yassuh boss! Yassssuh, Great white Father!”) into a brutal moment of minstrelsy, Battiste manages not to rip the skin of the role.But some of O’Hara’s other attempts to muscle in on Hansberry’s naturalism are less successful. Reaching not just forward but also backward along the family’s male line, he transfers some of the dialogue normally assigned to Lena to the ghost of her husband, who wanders atmospherically in and out of the action, looking unmoored. (The spectral lighting is by Alex Jainchill.) Also unmoored: a passage of postcoital pillow talk for Walter Lee and Ruth, created by turning dialogue that’s usually spoken live into a recorded voice-over. We hear the moans of their lovemaking too.Rather than creating the impression of buried fondness in their marriage, as it evidently means to do, the interpolation pushes the affection offstage. That’s a problem throughout. O’Hara directs most of the family scenes as overlapping free-for-alls, creating a generalized impression of dysfunction and very little of attachment. (Most of the funny and trenchant detail is lost in the noise.) At times I had the feeling that O’Hara, impatient with Hansberry’s occasionally laborious dramaturgy, had spun all the dials to the extreme right: volume, contrast, hue.Yet that was not the case in the earlier version of this revival seen at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2019. Led more equally by Battiste’s Walter Lee and S. Epatha Merkerson’s Lena, that “Raisin” was just as daring but less cartoonish. And though the current cast is very good generally, it’s noticeable that the comic material is handled most deftly, with standout performances from the piquant Gilbert and, as a nosy neighbor, Perri Gaffney.Gilbert as Beneatha and John Clay III as one of Beneatha’s suitors, the Nigerian idealist Joseph Asagai.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRather, the problem seems to be that O’Hara’s continued exploration has escaped Hansberry’s orbit, leaving some of the graver characters stranded in the thin air between her style and his. As Lena, Pinkins, ordinarily capable of astonishing depth and power, is largely hampered by too much directorial business, including the sudden onset of a ferocious palsy no one onstage seems to notice. And where the script famously has her slap her daughter for blasphemy, O’Hara has her go much further, leaving Beneatha flat on the floor.Despite his similar approach to the play overall, it never stays down for long. It can’t; it has too much internal energy and direction for any single misstep, including Hansberry’s, to throw the whole thing off track. Beneatha’s choice between two suitors — a preppy conformist (Mister Fitzgerald) and a Nigerian idealist (John Clay III) — is fully engaging no matter how creaky the setup is. And though the scene in which a representative of the Youngers’s new neighborhood (Jesse Pennington) comes to “welcome” them with veiled threats is very nearly twirling-mustache melodrama, it’s nevertheless one of the highlights of American theater.In that sense, O’Hara — who aside from his brilliant direction of contemporary works like “Slave Play” and “BLKS” is a mordant comic playwright himself — is right to reimagine the genre expectations of “Raisin.” It’s what we do with all classics, not because they require it but because they can handle it. And if his pessimism about American racism is somewhat at odds with Hansberry’s cautious optimism, well, he’s had 60 more years of history to support his point. That the play is so prescient does not mean that its story is over. It means that, sadly, it never is.A Raisin in the SunThrough Nov. 20 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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    ‘Montag’ Review: A Dark Hymn to Female Friendship

    Not quite a comedy and not quite a thriller, Kate Tarker’s play is an antic study of two women preparing for a game (or possibly an attack).In a basement apartment somewhere in Germany, Faith (Ariana Venturi) chain smokes cigarettes and drinks endless cups of coffee. Novella (Nadine Malouf) chomps her way through a bag of spicy chips. They argue, they dance, they try on clubwear, they play anxious games. Like lots of characters in lots of plays before them, they are waiting. But not for God or liberation or even a gentleman caller, not exactly. They are waiting for the man who is coming to kill them.This is the trap laid by Kate Tarker’s antic, frantic “Montag,” at Soho Rep, directed by Dustin Wills. Not quite a comedy and not quite a tragedy, sometimes a thriller and often something more bizarre, the play is a hymn to female friendship and, in harsher music, a study of the threat of intimate partner violence. No place, the show intimates, is safe. Not the kitchen table, not the stage.It takes time to figure all of this out, which may signal confidence in the audience on the part of Wills and Tarker, or brash unconcern. Lisa Laratta’s set, a box inside Soho Rep’s already petite stage, is an abstract rendering of a living room; Masha Tsimring’s lights suggest a perpetual midnight. Details about where we are and when we are and the contours of the women’s relationship are kept similarly shadowed. It’s exciting, in a way, this theater as jigsaw, and there’s satisfaction as each piece snaps together. But the murk of these early scenes can also feel like feints until the rules of the game come clear. Or nearly clear. Are these women’s sports and rehearsals preparations to meet death or to cheat it?There’s a realistic drama lurking inside “Montag,” a story of how a Turkish sex worker and an American military operative became friends, how they moved in together, whether this caused any ructions back on the base. That’s a drama I wouldn’t mind seeing, and it might have more geopolitical resonance, which this version gestures toward and then dismisses. But Tarker doesn’t trust that story, or she dreams bigger and weirder. Both, maybe. (The German setting, Novella’s job and the murderous inclinations of her common-law husband also indicate a dialogue with Büchner’s “Woyzeck,” a classic of German proto-expressionism.)Certainly “Montag” is more tethered to reality than Tarker’s previous play, the Alfred Jarry-ish farce “Thunderbodies.” Yet only in its late moments, when the two-character piece expands, careening into operatic hallucination, does it take on weight. The play makes sense as dreams make sense. When life feels like a nightmare, Wills’s production suggests, it should move like a nightmare, too.Malouf, always a welcome presence, infuses Novella with an unvarnished sensuality and a party-at-the-end-of-the-world abandon, born of having nothing left to lose. Novella can seem indolent, unconcerned, until she begins to scream. Venturi’s Faith holds herself more tightly, a jittery presence still trying to juggle odds, plans and probabilities even when logic has clearly failed. The less said about the characters played by Jacob Orr and Dane Suarez, an operatic tenor, the better, though they are played finely.If “Montag” conveys a stylistic restlessness, that puts it in good company. Two weeks ago, Sarah Benson, an artistic director of Soho Rep for the past 15 years, announced that she would step down at the close of this current season. Meropi Peponides, at Soho Rep since 2014, will depart as well. Under Benson’s tenure, the company has continued as a home for formal experimentation and audacious swings. In “Montag,” not all of those swings connect. But how wonderful that Soho Rep has made a space where artists can take them.MontagThrough Nov. 13 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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    How a Pro-Nazi Camp on Long Island Inspired a New Play

    YAPHANK, N.Y. — On a Sunday afternoon earlier this month, the playwright Bess Wohl stood on the shores of a lake in this Long Island hamlet about 60 miles from Manhattan. She admired the surface pleasures of the scene — the water, the leaves, a sky the blue of a faded Tiffany’s box, an obliging swan.“But I also see history,” she said. “I see what happened here.”What happened here was a summer camp, operated in the 1930s by the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization. Its teenage participants swam, hiked, competed in archery and went to dances, all the while absorbing Nazi ideology.“On the surface,” said Arnie Bernstein, the author of a book on the German American Bund, “it was like any other camp, except it was filled with swastikas.”The flower beds and rose bushes, he noted, were planted in swastika patterns. And there are photos of the camp of rallies that look like smaller, more rustic versions of Nuremberg.The camp finally closed in 1941, not long after the United States entered World War II. And the town erased it from memory. At the lake the local historical society sponsored a display board, detailing the history of Yaphank. The 1930s and Camp Siegfried were elided.Wohl has salvaged that history in “Camp Siegfried,” an intimate two-character play directed by David Cromer. It’s in previews now, and opens on Nov. 15 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater. Over the course of a summer, a nameless boy, 17, and a girl, 16, fall in and out of what isn’t exactly love. It’s a play about seduction, Wohl believes — by bodies, by beliefs, by stories.The entrance to the camp.Bettmann, via Getty Images Former camp grounds in Yaphank. “If we’re going to live up to the moral imperative of ‘never again,’ we have to look at these stories, we have to tell these stories and we have to learn from them,” the playwright Bess Wohl said.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesShe learned about Camp Siegfried about two years ago, during the first summer of the pandemic. She and her husband, the public relations executive Steven Rubenstein, had booked an Airbnb in nearby Bellport. One morning, while Googling area attractions that she could visit with her three young daughters, Wohl stumbled on a site that gave the history of the camp and then she stumbled further, finding photos and archival film.“I was like, this can’t have happened right in my backyard,” she said. “It honestly seemed like a mistake at first, that these pictures were pictures of America.”This was an anxious summer, with both the coronavirus and President Trump’s re-election campaign raging. Wohl found herself driving, alone, through the private roads of what had once been the camp and the nearby bungalow community, with streets named for Hitler, Goebbels, Goering. (Those names have long been changed, but a restrictive housing covenant, which allowed only buyers who could prove German ancestry, stood until 2017.) On those drives, she was looking for evidence of what this place had been and how its past had been.On that Sunday in October, we took a similar drive, past Bach Court and Schiller Court, past signs that announced the community as private and the roads as having no outlet. There were no swastikas anymore. American flags and Trump flags had replaced the Nazi ones. A handful of buildings and bungalows from the 1930s remained. Otherwise the community looked aggressively normal, if strangely deserted, which had been Wohl’s experience.“What shocked me the most was how mundane and pretty and sort of regular everything seemed,” she said. “It’s part of what prompted me to write the play, because if we’re going to live up to the moral imperative of ‘never again,’ we have to look at these stories, we have to tell these stories and we have to learn from them.”For much of its running time, “Camp Siegfried” resembles a romantic drama, a coming-of-age story. That’s a queasy proposition, considering the play’s setting. In this boy-meets-girl, the girl lives on Hitler Street. Wohl — who has Jewish ancestry, a Jewish husband and is raising her daughters in the Jewish faith — is mindful of this, anxious even.“I find her very nervous about these risks,” Cromer, who is also Jewish, said during a phone interview, “beautifully nervous and not self-congratulatory about them at all. But that doesn’t stop her from taking them. It is difficult for her not to take these big risks. And then she executes them with rigor and thoroughness and depth. She does irresponsible things really responsibly.”Back in the 1930s: Adolf Hitler Street ran through Camp Siegfried.Bettmann, via Getty Images And now: Streets named for Hitler, Goebbels and Goering have long been changed, but a restrictive housing covenant, which allowed only buyers who could prove German ancestry, stood until 2017.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWohl’s theater has always involved a certain amount of risk, of contradiction. Her plays often begin as thought experiments or personal dares. Could you write a play (“Small Mouth Sounds”) that is largely silent? Could you write a play (“Make Believe”) with a first act populated exclusively by children? What about a musical (“Pretty Filthy”) about the porn industry? Or a show (“Grand Horizons”) about the sexual and romantic lives of retirees?“She always goes just to the left of where you think she’s going to land on something,” said Leigh Silverman, who has directed two of Wohl’s plays, the Tony-nominated “Grand Horizons” and the early comedy “American Hero.” “She’s always going to embrace the weird, she’s always going to embrace the strange choice. She’s always going to keep pushing herself to do something different. She refuses to repeat the same genre, the same idea.”Recently, she has further expanded her command of genre and medium, writing and directing the psychological horror film “Baby Ruby,” slated for release next year by Magnolia Pictures; writing for the forthcoming Apple TV+ climate change anthology series, “Extrapolations”; and adapting “The Children’s Hour,” a 1934 play by Lillian Hellman, for television.Yet there are continuities among these works. Most of them operate with ample surface charm. (Wohl — funny, frazzled, wildly incisive, with a doll-like prettiness — operates that way, too.) “Small Mouth Sounds,” to take one example, is screamingly funny. But the screaming is the point. An author’s note that begins the play reads: “Everyone in the play is in some kind of agony. In this way they are not unlike the rest of us.”Rachel Chavkin, who directed “Small Mouth Sounds,” saw Wohl herself in that note. “I always think about Bess talking about the most tragic thing, and her heart simultaneously breaking as she’s laughing,” Chavkin said. “She’s holding the tragedy and the comedy in equal measure.”Luke Thallon and Patsy Ferran in a version of the play in London at the Old Vic in 2021.Manuel Harlan Wohl didn’t disagree. She likes to write plays and characters that arrive in familiar containers. “And then I lift the lid and there’s just nothing but agony,” she said. “The humor in my plays comes from deep, deep agony. Like really deep agony. That’s the rub that interests me.”This dual register — charm on top, existential anguish all the way down — attracts actors to her work. “That’s all you hope for,” said Samantha Mathis, who starred in “Make Believe.” “Comedy comes from extremes of emotion. So you just have to tap into the extremity of pain that these people are in and the truth of what she’s talking about, which is how excruciating it can be to be a human being sometimes.”Brad Heberlee, who has known Wohl since their days as actors at the Yale School of Drama and has starred in three of her plays, echoed this. “Her writing requires actors to bring their entire humanity,” he said. “The only way it can live is if you attach yourself to the depth of pain these people have, the truth of that.”Both of the “Camp Siegfried” characters are in deep pain — and really, what teenager isn’t? — which becomes more evident as the play goes on. “Camp Siegfried” balances sympathy for them with a horror of their situation and the hope that they may yet escape it.Wohl wrote the first draft swiftly, intuitively, in snatched moments during the summer of 2020, in a sweltering room at the top of the rental house while her children slept or watched “CoComelon.” A version of this draft was staged in London at the Old Vic in 2021. The critic for The Independent described it as “a consummately clever and insightful piece about the frightening psychological appeal of fascism.”“Telling these stories is a way of bearing witness and saying we have to pay attention,” Wohl said.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAfter that, Wohl wrote a new draft, with six characters, and then another, which shrank it back down to a two-hander, its central couple now deepened, the camp around them more convincingly imagined. The trick, she felt, was to balance the ordinariness and seeming wholesomeness of the setting — the swimming, the cookouts — with the genocidal ideas that circulated there. That moral danger had to be apparent, but not immediately. Indoctrination doesn’t usually happen all at once.“They don’t say to you, Hey, do you want to, like, kill an entire race of people?” Wohl said. “They say, You want to feel good, don’t you? You want to be part of a community? You love your country? You want to be a good person?” Indoctrination is stealthy, and so the play is stealthy, too, seducing the audience as the characters are seduced and then helping the viewers to shake off that seduction.“Camp Siegfried” joins several other current shows — “This Beautiful Future,” “Remember This,” “Leopoldstadt” — in exploring the roots and devastations of Nazism. But those plays all concern what happened in Europe. “Camp Siegfried” is local, set less than an hour’s drive from Second Stage, which makes the play a more precarious prospect here than in its London staging.“This is a deeply American play. It’s about America,” she said. “It feels very alive to do it right here.”Cromer wasn’t sure how American audiences would receive the play and its characters. “I’m scared if they love them,” he said. “If they hate them, I worry about that.”Yet “Camp Siegfried,” he thought, was worth the worry. Wohl believes that almost any play about this time and these events would be. Because if we know our history, maybe we won’t repeat it. Maybe we’ll have fewer genocides, insurrections, groundless invasions. Maybe not. But it’s the job of artists to try.In the parked car that same afternoon, Wohl looked out at what had been Hitler Street. “Telling these stories is a way of bearing witness and saying we have to pay attention,” she said. “Just keep telling and telling and telling the story. That’s how you keep it alive.” More

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    James Corden and the Dangers of Likability

    No one knows what an egg yolk omelet is, but we all know that TV hosts should be relatable. Or should they? That didn’t do Ellen DeGeneres any favors.Not since Humpty Dumpty has an egg made such a mess.Last night, one week and countless news cycles after he was scolded for obnoxiously complaining about an omelet order at the Manhattan restaurant Balthazar, James Corden went on his talk show to do the kind of damage control once reserved for offensive remarks or acts of adultery.You knew it was serious because instead of telling jokes, he started by twice showing shots of his elderly parents in the audience, a classic humanizing gesture. Then he got down to the business of confession, adopting a grave face while expressing deep regrets about his terrible behavior to the wait staff.“I made a sarcastic, rude comment,” he said, adding that he understood and respected the difficulties of being a server, while not being quite able to resist sneaking in that the breakfast order was messed up no less than three times, including via a dish that would have inflamed his wife’s allergies. But no matter, ahem; back to the taking full responsibility. “It was an unnecessary comment,” he said with feeling. “It was ungracious.”This is hopefully the final chapter of an absurd and inadvertently revealing melodrama. Call it James and the Giant Breach. It began when Keith McNally, the owner of Balthazar, barred Corden from his restaurant in an Instagram post that was deliciously long on specifics (“Get us another round of drinks this second,” it said Corden demanded) and insults (McNally called Corden a “tiny cretin of a man”).According to a manager report posted on McNally’s Instagram, Corden, host of “The Late Late Show,” became enraged after his wife ordered an egg yolk omelet, only to receive egg white mixed with the yolk. After demanding a new dish, and receiving a second try mistakenly replacing salad with home fries, Corden reportedly erupted: “You can’t do your job! Maybe I should go into the kitchen and cook the omelet myself!”Corden acknowledged his restaurant behavior was “ungracious” on “The Late Late Show.”CBSThis is the entitled stuff of a villain from a John Hughes movie. It’s obviously bad behavior. As a former busboy, I understand the white-hot rage about it. And yet, what followed was a bit much. Corden was denounced on the internet as if he were a war criminal, his actions reported on by countless media outlets, his transgressions detailed in explainers and called out in thought pieces. Then came the devil’s advocates. Restaurant owners defended Corden in The New York Post, saying he had been lovely to them, leaving generous tips and singing with bartenders, never once pelting a sous chef with a pastry.An Omelet of ContentionJames Corden, the host of “The Late Late Show,” has found himself in the middle of a controversy over rude behavior toward the staff at a restaurant.An ‘Abusive’ Customer: Corden was accused of berating the staff of Balthazar in New York City over an error with an omelet order, among other things. The story prompted criticism of the TV host on social media.Damage Control: Here is how Corden addressed the situation on “The Late Late Show.”Dangers of Likability: One reason the controversy took off is that Corden “doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would humiliate a waiter over an egg,” our critic writes.Gossip on the Menu: Corden’s omelet, made exclusively with egg yolks, was not the only food tied to a celebrity in recent weeks. A certain salad dressing was also on everyone’s mind.This was followed by the first apology, and the rescinding of the ban. Like a generous priest, McNally, whose long history of aggressive behavior in public feuds didn’t seem to make many question how reliable a narrator of events he was, wrote a second post forgiving the star, adding that “I strongly believe in second chances.” Ahh, yes, sweet providence.Not so fast. Extending his misery — and that of the publicity team at CBS — Corden told The Times on Thursday that he actually did nothing wrong, which led to another tart response from McNally before Corden reversed course into a full-throated mea culpa for the cameras.It was all just another day on the internet-driven media, where the demands of algorithms lead to celebrity justice meted out on a regular basis. Yet as with many such brouhahas, it provides clues to soft spots in the culture, to the fragilities that were already there. The backdrop is that Corden, who plans on stepping down from his show next year, is part of a late-night landscape that is going through a transition if not a crisis. Not long after he announced he would be leaving, Trevor Noah somewhat abruptly declared he was ending his run on “The Daily Show.” (The latest rumor is he’ll be replaced by a committee of hosts.)Ratings for late-night talk shows have been declining for years. There is a growing sense that such invariably topical programs are a poor fit on streaming services. With the networks fading in relevance, there are also whispers of more dramatic shifts to lineups, including the storied NBC institutions of “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”We are in a moment when viewers are questioning what we want these shows to be and what makes for a successful host. For some network executives in the past decade, the answer is clearly likability. They have emphasized performers the audience can relate to, a star who, to use the phrase that used to be a political litmus test in the pre-Trump era, you would want to have a beer with. James Corden was that bloke.Often described as seeming to come out of nowhere (otherwise known as England), he presented himself as an ordinary guy, self-deprecating, quick to laugh, eager to please. His signature bit, “Carpool Karaoke,” pulled off the feat of making pop superstars also seem down to earth and relatable, making for charming television and great promotion. Talk-show perfection.Corden is not actually ordinary at all. He is a famous actor and gifted Broadway star. As it happens, he earned the late-night job in no small part because of his Tony-winning performance in the hit play “One Man, Two Guvnors,” and his latest drama could be seen as a callback to that show’s comic high point, where his down-on-his-luck character desperately tries to help an inept waiter. But his talk-show persona, like that of the forever boyish Jimmy Fallon, did not rest on his comic and musical talents, but on how he exploits them to seem like a garden-variety sweetheart.Corden with Nicki Minaj on his signature “Carpool Karaoke,” which makes pop stars seem down to earth.CBSWhat’s clear these days is that this edifice of ingratiation is shaky. Bank too much on it not crumbling at your peril. Just look at Ellen DeGeneres, whose reputation for wholesome kindness was used against her by the end of her talk-show run. The amount of testimony from employees that ran contrary to this image became much too incongruous for the public not to start tuning her out. DeGeneres is a brilliant comedian, but that was not her central drawing card toward the end of her career, a problem no publicist could fix.One reason this minor controversy about Corden took off is that on television, he doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would humiliate a waiter over an egg. More like a guy who would make a bad pun about eggs to be endearing.Likability has always been important in talk-show hosts, but balanced by other virtues like creativity, funniness, political or even journalistic insight, the ability to connect emotionally. Johnny Carson was far too remote to be considered relatable, and David Letterman developed a reputation for meanness that, whether earned or not, was part of his appeal to some fans. Even Craig Ferguson, Corden’s predecessor, relied on a certain roguish charm. The more politically minded hosts like John Oliver or Meyers would not be helped by a scandal over yelling at a maître d’, but I doubt it would cause such a fuss.The truth is that the rich and famous have been rude to servers forever. This is not a good thing, but it also hasn’t been big news until recently. Now social media gives every restaurateur, nanny, production designer and eavesdropper a platform that could reach a global audience. This makes it much harder for a celebrity to control his or her image, and almost impossible to maintain a pristine reputation. Being known as a nice person can be dangerous.John Mulaney is currently touring with a stand-up show about this exact theme. “Likability is a jail,” he says. Of course, unlikability can be one, too. Maybe the smart move for a talk-show host is to strike a balance so that public persona matches up as closely as possible to private self. And if you somehow can’t show respect to the people handling your food, tip exceptionally well. More

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    ‘A Little Life’ Review: A Collage of Unrelenting Torment

    Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling novel comes to the BAM stage, and raises the question: How much suffering can the protagonist (and the audience) endure?Pain is something most characters try to outrun — or that results, with some logic, from their actions. But in “A Little Life,” a bold and brutal adaptation of the novel by Hanya Yanagihara now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it is the unyielding system of logic around which an entire play is built. The question is not why a man has suffered, but how much. The answer, it spoils nothing to say, is a lot.Conceived and directed by Ivo van Hove and adapted by Koen Tachelet, “A Little Life” is a kind of endurance test. As a doctor tells Jude, the melodrama’s human punching bag of a protagonist, “Only you know how much pain you can tolerate.”Those who’ve read the 2015 best seller know that the threshold required here is extremely high. Initially a chronicle of four male friends coming up in New York City, the story grows progressively darker as the gruesome details of Jude’s traumatic childhood are revealed. The novel was greeted with widespread acclaim, heralded by The Atlantic as “The Great Gay Novel” and pored over in tear-flooded book clubs. (Yanagihara is the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.) But its reputation has since become more divisive, with critics who consider its torment of Jude to be manipulative and excessive.A character study that descends into misery on the page is an aesthetic experience suited to the form — you can put down a book whenever you want. But there are only so many times you can look away over the course of a four-hour show. A degree of remove, at least, is provided for those who don’t speak Dutch. (This production, which originated at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, where van Hove is the artistic director, is performed with English supertitles.)Yanagihara’s immersion into the lives and minds of her characters (nearly all of them men) gets reordered and distilled here into abbreviated art openings, dinner parties and strobe-lit nights on the town. Slow-motion tracking shots of eerily empty Manhattan streets appear at either side of a sprawling crimson rug, visual cues for context and dread (van Hove’s longtime partner and collaborator, Jan Versweyveld, designed the set, lighting and video). Everyday furnishings (a bathroom sink, a working kitchen, an artist’s studio) are placed in contrast with the grandeur of the space (several rows of onstage seating trick the eye into a sense of intimacy).From left: Heijmans, Majd Mardo, Nasr and Edwin Jonker in the play, which originated at International Theater Amsterdam in 2018.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe men address their thoughts and circumstances to the audience and to one another, in a collage of reflections and exposition. There’s JB (Majd Mardo), the saucy and promising artist for whom Jude is a favorite portrait subject and sometime object of resentment; Malcolm (Edwin Jonker), minimally sketched as the architect who designs all of Jude’s dwellings; and Willem (Maarten Heijmans), whose friendship with Jude consumes much of the novel and suffers the most here from being rendered in shorthand, particularly when their relationship takes an unbelievable turn toward romance.And, of course, there’s Jude (Ramsey Nasr), a magician whose “sole trick is concealment,” according to his doctor (Bart Slegers). Jude is stubbornly elusive even throughout the novel’s 720 pages, less of a character than an amalgam of scars and cipher for the attention of others. Onstage, that disappearing act presents a conundrum. It is grueling to watch Jude use a razor to slice open his forearms a second, and then a third time, blood soaking his clothes. By the play’s third hour he looks like a walking murder scene. Flashbacks to the sexual abuse he experienced as a child, at the hands of a priest and then a doctor, and by a lover in the present (all played by Hans Kesting), are harrowing and unflinching, even as van Hove’s staging is sensitive and not overly explicit.Undoubtedly an argument could be made for facing mankind’s capacity for violence, even in an abstract, philosophical sense. But when does cruelty as a dramatic focal point in itself turn excessive, or at least cease to be compelling? (You might ask roughly a third of the audience members, who walked out by the end of intermission.) Of course, we instinctively recoil at the harm enacted on Jude; it is inhumane in the purest sense — no one should ever have to endure it. But these scenes might actually feel emotionally wrenching, too, were his character more than the sum of his grisly mistreatment.Whittle the story down to its major incidents, and what’s left is a series of escalating debasements until Jude all but disintegrates. This plays out onstage with a level of luridness. More time and attention are paid to Jude’s suffering than to anything else, including the relationships that we are presumably meant to invest in, and that might have been used to reveal more about Jude. It’s a problem in the book as well, but becomes rather stark onstage, as when Willem insists on beginning a sexual relationship with Jude that feels unearned and like another form of punishment.Nasr plays Jude’s agony and frustration to operatic heights, with the bracing screams and the running in circles of a man who wants nothing more than to escape his own body. It’s a marathon performance that manages to lend human form to what is essentially a pileup of impossible burdens. Of the four friends, Mardo’s JB makes the liveliest case for a person with interests other than Jude, a rare glimpse at a world beyond Jude’s quicksand orbit.But if there is an obvious conduit for empathy, it’s Harold (Jacob Derwig), Jude’s mentor and eventual adoptive father. Because a parent’s love is meant to be unconditional, the concern he expresses for Jude with moving insight makes the most sense of anyone’s. (No one talks about the tiny bit of relief that a parent feels, he says, when their worst fears are realized.) Ana (Marieke Heebink), the social worker who rehabilitated Jude as a teenager, pops up as a persistent voice in his mind and an unexpected narrative compass. She is the play’s sole key to forward momentum, encouraging Jude to reveal himself by way of the terrors he’s experienced.There is an absurdity to the bleakness of “A Little Life,” a sense that real life only rarely reaches such abominable depths. It’s a mechanism of great tragedy that it offers such cold comfort. After all that Jude has endured, how bad could death be?A Little LifeThrough Oct. 29 at the Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 4 hours 10 minutes. More

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    London Theatergoers Are on the Edge of His Seats

    One family firm supplies seating for most of the West End’s theaters, from flexible new spaces to Victorian treasures. Its chief designer reveals some tricks and traps of the trade.LONDON — Earlier this month, during the first performance at the West End’s newest theater, @sohoplace, the audience repeatedly cheered the actors performing “Marvellous,” a comedy about a British eccentric. At one point, several hundred theatergoers even applauded a technician who came on to clean the floor.But there was one person key to the evening whom no one cheered, whooped or even politely clapped. And Andrew Simpson, the designer of the theater’s seats, was happier that way.“If a seat’s good, you don’t notice it,” he said. “You only notice it when it’s bad.” In the world of theater seating, he added, “No news is good news.”Simpson, 62, is in a position to know. He is the lead designer at Kirwin & Simpson, a family firm his grandfather founded that started out patching upholstery in a local movie house during World War II and now supplies the seats for most West End theaters. (It works with some in New York, too, including the Hudson Theater and St. Ann’s Warehouse.)Andrew Simpson, Kirwin & Simpson’s lead designer (and the grandson of the company’s founder) at the firm’s headquarters in Grays, England.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThe West End is challenging territory for a seating designer. Many of the London theaters Simpson caters for are Victorian jewel-boxes: tight, ornate spaces built with more attention to gradations of social class than to comfort.Originally, according to David Wilmore of Theatresearch, a company that restores historic theaters in Britain, they would have had a few front rows of luxurious armchairs — known as fauteuils — for their wealthiest patrons. Everyone else sat on wooden benches. When middle-class visitors were finally accorded seats, Wilmore said, theaters preserved their old sightlines by forcing the sitters bolt upright — “part of that Victorian strictness in all areas: ‘You jolly well better sit up and listen!’”That won’t do for seats that now often cost hundreds of dollars to occupy.A recent tour of Kirwin & Simpson’s works in Grays, a working-class town east of London, included a room filled with rolls of multicolored cloth and a shed where five men were busy screwing, stapling and gluing sleek maroon seats for the forthcoming Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York. One warehouse is filled with emergency replacements, so that if a seat rips at, say, the Victoria Palace Theater — the London home of “Hamilton” — a new, perfectly matching one can be installed within hours.Each theater needs many types of seats. The new, 602-capacity @sohoplace has 12 types, according to Simpson, all removable to allow different styles of staging, but some tricky older spaces require far more.A seat that Kirwin & Simpson designed for @sohoplace, a West End theater that opened this month.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThere are high chairs with built-in footrests, to give a clear view from the back of Victorian balconies where front-row patrons would once have sat directly on a low step. There are chairs with wide backs, but smaller seats, designed to fit perfectly into tight curves, and others with hinged armrests that can be raised so wheelchair users to slip into them. And there may be any number of things in between. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Theater Royal, Drury Lane, has over 160 different designs, with widths and angles tweaked to ensure the best view.The seats themselves have become less cluttered over time, losing accessories like ashtrays and wire cages for men to store their top hats. But in the most cramped spaces, Simpson still sometimes employs an illusion. Short armrests make a narrow aisle feel wider, he said, because visitors don’t have to squeeze past them to get to their places, and they are then less inclined to start thinking about how little legroom they have. “It’s all psychology,” he added.It similarly helped if the show was a hit. “If the stuff onstage is really good,” he said, “then people don’t mind what they’re sitting on. If it’s anything less than that, then the surroundings come into focus, shall we say.”The Sondheim Theater in London, which has a capacity of more than 1,000. The seats are by Kirwin & Simpson.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesInside the Kirwin & Simpson workshop.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesEven with the good will of a good show, it can be tough to accommodate theatergoers of varying shapes, sizes and tastes. Nica Burns, the chief executive of Nimax Theaters, the company behind @sohoplace, said she wanted the seats in all her venues to be comfortable for short people like her (she’s 5 foot 2 inches), who don’t want their feet to dangle in midair, and for tall people like her 6 foot 3 inch husband. While the theater was being designed, she kept two Kirwin & Simpson seats in her office and asked visitors try them. But, she said, “you’ll never find a seat that suits everybody.”One demand that Simpson hears increasingly is for wider seats. Last year, Sofie Hagen, a popular comedian, began a campaign on Twitter, urging theaters to publish details of seat widths on their websites, to help larger people like her decide if they wanted to attend. “The amount of times I’ve gone to see a musical only to be in constant, excruciating pain,” Hagen wrote. “Once I had to leave before the show even started because the seat was too narrow.”Hagen said in a telephone interview that every venue on her current British tour had agreed to display details of the width of their seats and she hoped more would follow. “If theaters had signs up saying ‘Fat people are not welcome,’ people would be like, ‘What?’,” she said, “but that’s subliminally the message we’re being told.”At @sohoplace, some dozen seats at the orchestra level and balcony discreetly offer an extra three inches of width, on top of the standard 20 or so. Simpson, the designer, said that during a test event he had happily shared one with his 27-year-old son.For some, however, a big seat might be a little too much comfort. Seats that leave theatergoers “practically rubbing shoulders with one another” make for more of a communal experience, Wilmore, the theater restorer, said.An original cast-iron row end from the Victoria Palace Theater, in Kirwin & Simpson’s workshop.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesMichael Billington, who resigned in 2019 after nearly 50 years as The Guardian’s chief theater critic, said he felt “a degree of austerity” helped keep audiences awake. For example, Shakespeare’s Globe in London has both Elizabethan-style standing space and backless wooden benches: Billington described those benches as “a form of terror,” but added that he certainly paid attention whenever he sat on one.The new seats at @sohoplace drew typically mixed reviews from some of their first paying users. In interviews with a dozen audience members at the recent “Marvellous” performance, seven were glowing. John Yee, 22, visiting from Canada and sitting in the balcony, said they were “comfy as hell.”Josh Townsend, who had a spot in the orchestra level, said he was 6 foot 2 and often struggled with seats that lacked legroom, yet @sohoplace’s were “really good.” The week before, he had watched “Dear Evan Hansen” in London’s Noël Coward Theater — whose seats are also by Kirwin & Simpson — and his legs were jammed against the seat in front. This was a huge improvement, he said.But though she had loved the show, Ayesha Girach, 26, a doctor, said the seats were so hard they were “probably the most uncomfortable” she had ever sat in. She then praised those at the Gillian Lynne Theater, just a few blocks away, where she’d recently seen “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” “Those were really comfy,” she said. They were Kirwin & Simpson seats, too. More