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    ‘The Piano Lesson’ Review: August Wilson’s Phantom Notes

    John David Washington, Danielle Brooks and Samuel L. Jackson star in the first Broadway revival of Wilson’s haunting family drama set in 1936.Four Black men gathered around a kitchen table exuberantly sing a work song (“When you marry, don’t marry no farming man, hoh-ah,” they holler, clapping and stomping their feet), a Black woman girds herself with her grief for the husband and father she lost to the anger of white men, and siblings fight over a seemingly haunted family heirloom that tells a story of generational trauma and loss. These circumstances are more than enough to raise the dead.Or at least they are in the Charles household, in the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” which opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.First staged in 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theater, “The Piano Lesson” made its Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr three years later. That year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama — one of two Wilson won for his American Century Cycle, a collection of 10 plays, one for each decade of the 20th century, depicting African American life.In “The Piano Lesson,” it’s Pittsburgh, 1936, in the house of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), an old railroad worker who is now a train cook. His niece, Berniece (Danielle Brooks), and her 11-year-old daughter, Maretha (played by Jurnee Swan at the performance I saw), live with him in what is, in Beowulf Boritt’s too on-the-nose scenic design, a skeletal facsimile of a house — just beams and planks, some of which don’t even connect. Though there’s not much to the house — a love seat, a tiny kitchen with an ice box — there is an ornately carved piano that commands attention, despite its place in the far corner of the living room.It’s an august instrument with a knotty history, linking the Charles family to their enslaved ancestors and the white family that owned them. Each panel is covered with figures representing the Charleses; even the piano’s front legs are elaborately sculpted.From left, Ray Fisher, Washington, Brooks, Trai Byers, Jurnee Swan and Samuel L. Jackson. The elaborately carved piano is covered with figures of the Charles family.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBerniece’s brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), has traveled up north from Mississippi with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) planning to cash it in for a plot of land and in the process hoping to transform an artifact of their family’s past struggles into a path to a better future. But Berniece refuses to give up the piano and all the bloody history it represents. To complicate matters, the piano is haunted by a recently dead member of the white family that once owned generations of the Charleses.Wilson’s usual signatures are here, including the somber subject matter related to Black disenfranchisement, prejudice, history and trauma — paired with witty, casual dialogue and flights into the surreal. Wilson makes poetry out of the mundane minutiae of daily African American life without forgetting how the past is present, alive and immediate like the melody of a song played by a piano that seems to have sprung to life.And yet even among Wilson’s outstanding and occasionally surreal plays, “The Piano Lesson,” both a family drama and a ghost story, stands out as one of the odder works. It’s a mix of themes and tones, both concrete and ethereal, ghoulish and comedic, but the imbalanced direction here, by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, overemphasizes the horror too literally; it works best on a metaphorical level.The performances are, in almost every case, engaging. Michael Potts, the veteran stage and screen actor who has appeared in other Wilson works, including the 2017 Broadway revival of “Jitney” and the 2020 film adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” is perfection as Doaker’s brother Wining Boy, an itinerant musician who can never seem to hold onto a dollar.As the surviving Charles brothers, Potts and Jackson (who played Boy Willie in the original 1987 production) have a breezy rapport: They joke, drink and reminisce like a couple of cads retired from most — but not all — of their wayward ways. Wining Boy remains a smooth scammer, and Doaker is an even-tempered dispenser of wisdom. Trai Byers, as Avery, a new reverend who’s enamored with Berniece, takes on his character’s highfalutin sermonizing with comedic aloofness, and April Matthis makes a brief, though memorable, appearance as a minor character with some big-city attitude. As the simpleton Lymon, Fisher occasionally goes too hokey, especially when it comes to his Southern drawl, but is endearing nonetheless with his dopey physicality and witless expressions.From left: Potts, Fisher, Jackson and Washington singing an old work song from their time as sharecroppers.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFisher is a great contrast to Washington’s downright feverish performance as Boy Willie. He speaks in a hot spitfire of stubborn refusals, denials and lofty aspirations, convinced that he can put a price tag on his family’s past and use the money to build a future where he is equal to the white men who owned his ancestors and still hold power over him and his family.Washington, in a revelatory stage debut, is a blaze of energy lighting every scene he’s in. Brooks, who was a delight in “The Color Purple” and “Much Ado About Nothing,” as well as in her TV roles in “Orange is the New Black” and “Peacemaker,” isn’t as radiant a presence as in her other outings. Though she has a few standout moments, she, like her character, too often fades into the background, overshadowed by the extensive history and myths in the play.Despite Wilson’s eloquent writing, “The Piano Lesson,” at nearly three hours, drags on. The repetitive dialogue, especially in the second act, evokes a nagging sensation of déjà vu. The spooky shifts in lighting (by Japhy Weideman) and Boritt’s broken home, like a metaphor brought to life, leave nothing to the imagination.While in this production the play’s supernatural elements come across like anomalies, on the page they aren’t; the characters aren’t all that shocked by the eerie, odd occurrences and in fact continue on with their lives as usual. What haunts the Charles household is what haunts Black America every day — the living history of racial violence and pervasive inequality. Part of what’s missing in this mostly entertaining but often underwhelming “Piano Lesson” is the sense that this is a reality we’ve lived ourselves. Who hasn’t heard the melody of a ghost’s song in the middle of the night?The Piano LessonThrough Jan. 15 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; pianolessonplay.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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    Eugenio Derbez Believes in Job Proposals, Not Job Applications

    The star of the Apple TV+ series “Acapulco” on standing up for dogs, Mexican vs. Marvel cinema and finding respect.In the Apple TV+ series “Acapulco,” the middle-aged Maximo tells his nephew the story of his rise from poverty in Mexico to riches in Malibu, thanks to the job he took in his early 20s at a prestigious resort in Acapulco. The Maximo of the 1980s is played by Enrique Arrizon, while the Maximo with the mansion and the jet is played by Eugenio Derbez, long a major screen star in Mexico.Unlike Maximo, Derbez says the pivotal moment in his career came not in his 20s, but in his 50s. He’d spent almost a decade trying to break into the U.S. film and TV market and had some success, landing roles in the Adam Sandler movie “Jack and Jill” and Rob Schneider’s short-lived CBS series “Rob.” But it didn’t create the momentum he’d hoped for, so he decided to return to Mexico to finally finish the script he’d been tinkering with: “Instructions Not Included,” about a man whose onetime lover hands him a daughter she claims is his.Derbez was the co-writer, director and star of the Spanish-language film, and when it became an enormous hit, it “changed my life in every way.” The doors to Hollywood opened, he changed his mind about having a child with his wife (he already had three grown kids) and he moved to the United States. In the years since, he has made inroads with U.S. audiences, thanks to starring roles in films like “How to Be a Latin Lover,” a supporting role in the Academy Award-winning “CODA,” as well as the Spanish/English-language comedy “Acapulco.”“I took a leap of faith, and nine years later here I am in the true prime of my career, working in another country, in another office, in another language, with a new home and a new production company,” he said in a recent video interview. “I’m happy to have taken a second chance in my life, even though I was 52.”In the second season of “Acapulco,” which premieres on Oct. 21, the elder Maximo brings his nephew to the city where his story started. Here, Derbez revisits the Acapulco of his own youth, the movie that moved him into the business and breaks down the difference between Mexican and Marvel films. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Acapulco, Mexico I spent my childhood summers in Acapulco and some of my best memories as a kid are from my time there. It’s where I learned to do things like the belly roll — where you move your stomach in and out in a wormlike motion. When I was 15, I had my very first trip with my girlfriend — parents included, by the way — to Acapulco. I have always had a strong connection to the beautiful, amazing city.2. 1957 Cadillac My dad was a great car lover. The very first car in the family was a red, convertible 1957 Cadillac. It’s the car my dad drove my mom in on their first date. It’s the first car I ever drove, at 8 years old — I couldn’t even reach the pedals, so I sat on my dad’s lap. I talked my dad out of selling it because I wanted to drive it when I got older. I still have the car today.3. “The Last Snows of Spring” My mom and I used to go to the movie theater every weekend. We would always watch at least two films — sometimes three or four. One day in 1973, she took me to see an Italian film called “The Last Snows of Spring.” You can’t imagine how much I cried. The emotions I felt were so intense. That day I told my mom: This is what I want to do.4. Dogs When I was 10, my sister asked me if I wanted to have a puppy, and I was like, Eh, yeah, maybe, whatever. She asked me to cry with her so that our parents would buy us a puppy. My parents got us a boxer that awoke my love for animals. By the age of 15, I was rescuing dogs from the freeway in Mexico. To this day, I’m an animal activist. I can’t stand any kind of animal cruelty.5. Job Proposals, Not Job Applications When people ask me for advice, I always tell them not to ask for a job, but bring a job proposal. For many years, I thought the right thing to do was to ask for a job. After so many rejections and my career going nowhere, one day I decided to change my approach. I met a writer who was very smart and we wrote a script for a show and we brought it to a network. For the first time, instead of asking for a job, I brought a proposal. After years of feeling ignored, they treated me differently — with respect. And that’s how I got my first opportunity to star on TV, with the show “Al Derecho y al Derbez.”6. Fatherhood, Round 2 I became a dad when I was 23, and one kid quickly turned into three. I was just a kid myself, raising three kids while struggling to make a living and have a career, so the amount of time I spent with them was very limited. In my 50s, 22 years after I had my last child, my wife and I decided to have a child. When my daughter was born, I realized it was the universe giving me another chance to make things right and fix all the mistakes I made when I was younger. I have enjoyed every diaper, every sleepless night and every vomit.7. Prince In 2006, I was in L.A. developing a project with Salma Hayek. After working all day long at her house, she said, “Prince just called and invited me to dinner — do you want to come?” I didn’t know much about Prince. During dinner at his mansion, he only said a few words, but he went through multiple outfit changes. After dinner, we went to a party. Later, back at his house, he played a private concert for the three of us. I started learning more about him after that night and became a huge fan. He was a genius.8. Fisher’s There’s an amazing restaurant in Mexico City, and a few other locations, called Fisher’s. It’s not Mexican food. It’s seafood done in a very unique way. The craziest dishes. They’re so delicious, and you wouldn’t try them anywhere else. I love that.9. Mexican Cinema The difference between cinema in the U.S. and Mexico is money. In the U.S., you can be entertained by Marvel movies, because even when the story and the plot are not strong, the special effects and everything else are amazing. In Mexico, we don’t have the budget for that. So, you have to be really creative. You have to be a really good writer and have original stories. That’s why filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón are so creative. They come from Mexico, a country where there’s no money and we have to make movies with nothing.10. Michel Franco There’s an interesting Mexican director named Michel Franco who has a very raw approach. His movies I would compare to “Parasite,” but in Spanish. Start with “Después de Lucía” (“After Lucia”), and watch it until the end. Until the very last minute. Powerful. More

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    Review: In ‘Peerless,’ Elite College Admissions Are Something Wicked

    The playwright Jiehae Park’s sly and polished adaptation of “Macbeth” transports the characters from the Scottish heath to the halls of a Midwestern high school.Toil and trouble? That’s how you brew a witch’s charm — and gain admission to elite schools. M has perfect SATs, a zillion Advanced Placement credits and extracurricular activities for days, but her application to her dream college has been rejected. So what’s a girl and her scheming sister to do? Commit murder. Maybe more than one.These are the broad outlines of “Peerless,” the playwright Jiehae Park’s sly and polished adaptation of “Macbeth,” which is being presented by Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters. Transported from the Scottish heath to the halls of a Midwestern high school, “Peerless” places the tragedy’s moral quandaries into the mouths and miniskirts of M (Sasha Diamond), a senior, and L (Shannon Tyo), her twin. L is a junior, having stayed back a year to increase their chances of getting into what they refer to only as “The College,” which accepts only one student from their school per year. But those plans go awry when The College accepts their classmate D (Benny Wayne Sully) instead. D has a lower G.P.A., but he is Native American. Though M is a girl and Asian American — “double minority,” as she puts it acidly — she believes that D outranks her in terms of racialized admissions policies.From left, Diamond, Benny Wayne Sully, and Tyo. The play is content to absorb the themes of “Macbeth” without providing corollaries for each of its plot points.James LeynseSmartly — because Park is very smart — the play is content to absorb the themes of “Macbeth” without providing corollaries for each of its plot points. There’s no Birnam Wood here, no spots to out. Macbeth’s bestie, Banquo, is now BF (Anthony Cason), M’s barely there boyfriend. Instead of the three witches and Hecate, there’s only a single classmate known as Dirty Girl (Marié Botha, delightful), costumed by Amanda Gladu in a witchy black trench coat. The set, by Kristen Robinson, shows a school hallway at an angle, with cutouts for a living room and a bed, as needed, while Mextly Couzin’s flashing, deep-hued lights nudge the environment toward the uncanny.In place of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, Park writes in sharp, staccato rhythms, with short lines that drive through the scenes a few syllables at a time. The actors, under Margot Bordelon’s direction, tear through them like so many high-carb snacks. (This is a feature of the adaptation: Who needs a dagger when you have a victim with a tree-nut allergy?) They’re having a very good time. In the case of Sully’s manic, excitable D, arguably too good of a time. Bordelon gives her young cast the trust and space to show what they can do, which, in a homecoming scene, includes some very silly dance moves.Not every part of “Peerless” works. There’s a lot of talk about M and L’s twinness and their ability to switch places, but Tyo, excellent in “The Chinese Lady” and nicely malign here, and Diamond, a fine actor last seen in “Once Upon a (korean) Time,” look very little alike. And as Park spends a lot less time than Shakespeare probing psychology and motive, the characterizations come across as thin.At times, the production suggests a richer and spikier play about the ways in which members of Gen Z rehearse, perform and weaponize identity, and about the sacrifices that we make in the present to secure an increasingly insecure future. There are arguments — fruitful, if undigested — about prejudice, both external and internalized. But “Peerless,” nasty and glossy, lives mostly on its impish surface. It’s something wicked, certainly. It could be much more.PeerlessThrough Nov. 6 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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    ‘Dodi & Diana’ Review: Two Relationships, Linked in the Stars

    A husband and wife who may be the “astrological doubles” of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed head toward a crisis in this new play by Kareem Fahmy.In an expensive hotel room touched with old-fashioned elegance, a husband and wife growing ever antsier in each other’s company keep the floor-length drapes drawn against the City of Light. It is the tail end of August 2022, they are New Yorkers spending just three days in Paris, but the astrologer who prescribed the trip has ordered them to remain inside.“Stay in the room with the curtains shut until Jupiter completes its transit,” he told them. “No communication with the outside world. No email. No phones. No TV.”Jason, an investment banker with a disciple’s faith in his planetary adviser, is anxiously eager to follow the instructions, though he makes an exception for chatting up the bellhop, who he’s hoping will bring him some drugs. Samira, Jason’s actor wife, is semi-willing to obey the rules, but not to the extent of ignoring her phone, which she uses on the sly, trading messages with her rep about a career-changing new screen role.She is understandably skeptical of the notion that she and Jason are “the astrological doubles of Diana Spencer and Dodi Fayed” — though that is apparently why they have been sent to the Ritz Paris, where they are awaiting a convergence in the 72 hours before the 25th anniversary of the Paris car crash that killed the Princess of Wales and her boyfriend, the son of the hotel’s owner.In “Dodi & Diana,” Kareem Fahmy’s new two-hander at Here, car crash is the rather crass operative metaphor — as in, Samira and Jason’s relationship of seven years is headed for a smashup. From the start, it’s evident that something is badly wrong with the would-be intimacy between them, and it becomes increasingly clear that they have very different dreams.For one thing, Jason (Peter Mark Kendall) wants loads of babies, and Samira (Rosaline Elbay) wants to keep building toward stardom while she’s still young enough to get the gigs. Already she’s reached the stage where she’s a little bit famous, and recently she and Jason endured an excruciating episode with the tabloids — a private horror involving him that made lurid headlines only because of her nascent celebrity.“The more famous you get,” he says, “the more our lives become a minefield.”Directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt for her company, Colt Coeur, “Dodi & Diana” is a sort of pre-mortem of a relationship — a much longer romance than the princess and Fayed enjoyed, yet with assorted elements in common: not just fame and wealth, seductive even at sub-stratospheric levels, but also race, bigotry and otherness. Fayed was born in Alexandria, Egypt; Samira in the United States, to Egyptian immigrant parents. She and Jason, who is white and Canadian, never have found a comfortable, trusting way to live with their racial and cultural differences.As characters, Diana and Dodi exist for most of the play in voice-over, between scenes, when lighting (by Eric Norbury) and sound design (by Hidenori Nakajo) evoke their visit to Paris in August 1997: the pop of flashbulbs, the sweep of headlights, the roar of engines going too fast.Eventually, Diana (Elbay) and Dodi (Kendall) materialize — glamorously, aside from a jarring clip in her hair — in the hotel room. (The set is by Alexander Woodward, the costumes by Dina El-Aziz.) It’s the high point of the play, partly because of a question that the persecuted Dodi asks Diana — about the paparazzi, or the British people, or both: “Do you intend to defend me to them?” Shades of Sussexes to come.Any parallel between the play’s two couples is forced, though. One relationship is intrinsically compelling, even in this imagined version of it, while the other has too little heft to hold our interest. Whether Samira and Jason stay together is a question without urgency.So the car-crash metaphor feels unseemly — borrowed from the horrific deaths of real people, but for what?Dodi & DianaThrough Oct. 29 at Here, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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    Two Soho Rep Directors to Leave at End of 2022-23 Season

    Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, who have directed the company with Cynthia Flowers since 2019, will depart to focus more on their own creative output.Soho Rep, the 65-seat Off Off Broadway theater in Lower Manhattan that has long been a home for experimental, formally inventive work, will see a leadership change as Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, two of its three directors, step down at the end of the 2022-23 season.Both Benson and Peponides, who have led the theater alongside Cynthia Flowers since a shared directorship was put into place in 2019, said they were leaving Soho Rep in part to focus more on their own creative work. Benson said she wanted to do more directing, while Peponides said she planned to dedicate more time to Radical Evolution, a producing collective she co-founded in 2011 that focuses on exploring the complexities of the mixed-identity existence.“It came time to make a choice about where to devote my time and energy,” Peponides said. “Doing both was becoming trickier and trickier.”A search committee, led by Soho Rep’s board chair, Victoria Meakin, and the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, has been formed to appoint two new directors, Soho Rep said. Peponides and Benson will remain in their roles through the end of the season next summer.Benson, 44, has been with the theater for 15 years, serving as artistic director from 2007 until 2019, when Soho Rep adopted the shared leadership model. During her tenure, she directed the world premieres of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s searing comedy-drama “Fairview,” a co-commission by Soho Rep that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Jacobs-Jenkins’s formally inventive comedy “An Octoroon”; and Lucas Hnath’s black comedy “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney.”Peponides, 38, started at the theater as a producer in 2014, producing 18 new plays over her eight years and overseeing Soho Rep’s writer-director lab that is led by the playwrights William Burke and Drury.Under Benson, Peponides and Flowers’s leadership, Soho Rep has worked to improve pay equity through Project Number One, a job creation program developed early in the pandemic that brings artists into the organization each season as salaried staff members with benefits. Two of the three plays in the theater’s 2022-23 season, “Public Obscenities” by Shayok Misha Chowdhury and “The Whitney Album” by Jillian Walker, were written by artists who were in the first class of Project Number One.“We had three world premiere commissions in this year’s season,” Peponides said. “A huge part of the work Sarah and I have been seeding over the past several years is now coming to fruition, so this felt like the moment to step aside and hand it over while it was in great shape.” More

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    Stand-Up Sets Where You Can Choose Your Own Adventure

    Two specials let audiences click to determine which jokes they hear. It’s both an innovative way to add meaning and a further fragmenting of the culture.In his new special, the comic Danny Jolles grouses about the magician David Blaine, famous for stunts like burying himself alive or holding his breath for 17 minutes. Jolles describes him as an insufferable psychopath: “At some point we have to take a stand. He’s not doing magic. He’s just trying to kill himself.”You only see this quip if you click the phrase “I hate David Blaine” that pops up onscreen at the start of his bit. If you choose the alternative, “I love David Blaine,” then you get Jolles praising Blaine as the greatest living human and bemoaning those who take him for granted. “Everyone’s like, What is David Blaine doing today? The impossible. And everyone just moved on.”Jolles’s “You Choose” is part of an adventurous new trend toward interactivity in specials, with the potential to be the most dystopian comedy innovation since the laugh track. Such a high-tech development is not as bizarrely futuristic as the hologram of Keenan Thompson that performed at the Laugh Factory in Chicago last weekend, but it could be more consequential.In his 2019 Netflix special “Lobby Baby,” Seth Meyers tiptoed into giving viewers control over the final edit, allowing them the option of clicking a box and skipping over political material. But two new specials — the one by Jolles, which premiered Thursday on YouTube, and Vishnu Akella’s “For You,” which became available on his site over the summer — are more comprehensive experiments.Vishnu Akella’s special “For You” digs into viewers’ pop culture knowledge and demographics for its interactive approach.Every time Jolles introduces a subject, two choices appear at the bottom of the screen. Which one you take dictates the joke in a way that enables you to avoid opinions you might disagree with. Akella uses a similar device, though it asks less about your opinions than your knowledge of references or your demographic. As a result, boomers will get different punch lines (not to mention larger fonts) than millennials will.These specials are the culmination of two worrying hallmarks of the culture today: how fragmentation incentivizes pandering to niches or fandoms, and the cheap, double-edged appeal of interactivity, a useful artistic tool that often becomes a crassly commercial one. These comics are not only aware of all this, but they also adopt the posture of a skeptic more than an evangelist. Their specials are sly enough to satirize themselves.As is so often the case, David Letterman got there first. In the early 1980s, he often simultaneously spoofed and exploited the overhyping of technological innovation, particularly in themed episodes like “the custom-made show,” written by Chris Elliott and Matt Wickline. It began with a populist introduction: Letterman said he was taking power away from network executives and giving it to the people, letting them decide everything from what he would wear to the order of guests. The studio audience’s response to multiple-choice questions, recorded by an “applause meter,” was the key metric. Of course, the crowd’s choices gave Letterman a chance to sarcastically marvel about the wonders of democracy.It’s asking too much of these young comics to display Letterman’s light touch, but also, our current internet age demands a blunter tone. This reveals itself less in the onstage jokes by Akella than in what comes in between — the questions for the viewer and the onscreen text that riffs on them. If you click on Gen Z when asked about your age, the script will ridicule you for easily giving up data to TikTok.Akella tells subtle jokes that mock the stupidity of generational stereotypes while emphasizing the illusion of choice. At one point, he gives you the option to cancel him if his joke offends you, but if you click on the box to do it, he questions the entire framework of “cancel culture.” This is smart stuff, the form perfectly integrated into the content.His fundamental theme is how social media pigeonholes us and mines our data, a condescending phenomenon that treats us less like human beings than abstractions made up of marketable information. Before the closer, a message informed me that it was removing references I wouldn’t get and adding “palatable jokes about race so you can feel like an ally.” Onstage, Akella tells us he feels sad that his generation is being treated like lab rats, and I believe him. There’s a sense of constraint and even anxiety about his stand-up persona. His voice only becomes comically vivid in the impersonal text onscreen.Phillip OrtizJolles is a more experienced performer, and his first special, also released on YouTube, displayed an endearing puppyish charm. His new, pricklier show deconstructs that persona, telling the audience right from the start how he ingratiates himself, before asking them how they want their takes delivered.In her fascinating recent New Yorker article on the choose-your-own-adventure books, Leslie Jamison made the case for a sympathetic reading of their appeal rooted in the freedom to go back and change course, or as she put it, “the revocability of it all.”Jolles taps into this by making it easy for the viewer to rewind bits to see alternative versions (much more so than Akella). But he also pointedly creates polar opposite perspectives. These contrasting views are clearly designed to make a point, but doing so shoehorns him into an argumentative posture that doesn’t always fit his comedy.In taking an extreme position, Jolles can seem like he’s doing a bad Bill Burr impression. Usually, one of his takes is funnier than the other. Is that the one he actually believes? I’m not sure, though I suspect that deep down he’s a die-hard David Blaine fan.Jolles isn’t trying to appeal to both sides, but to show how comedians manufacture opinions to fit the joke — that everything is performance. He says he supports transgender rights, then undercuts himself by saying he knows that position will get applause. He illustrates how artists manipulate audiences with camera trickery and mentions that he doesn’t like outrage over comments made many years ago. None of this is real, he says, before adding, “Why would you trust me?”He’s onto something. Comedy audiences overestimate authenticity, a trait easily faked. But there’s also a touch of the juvenile Holden Caulfield rolling his eyes about phonies here.If comedians adjust material to make a better joke, does that invalidate everything they say? If art relies on dishonesty, does that mean there’s no truth to be found in it? This is the kind of casual nihilism that crosses comedic genres, showing up in the misanthropic cynicism of Tim Dillon and the artful irony of Bo Burnham. It’s often its own kind of pandering.To answer the question posed by Jolles, people trust comedians for all kinds of reasons, but primarily because jokes, well told, are powerful. They can lighten a day or destroy your confidence. They express taboo thoughts, offer insights and reveal the world, even when built on fabrications. The comic Rich Hall struck a sensible balance when he wrote in his new memoir, “All jokes are manipulative, and audiences laugh when you reach a truthful kernel with the lie.”Even if you don’t reach it, trying matters. So does the kind of ambition behind those attempts. The sturdiest connections built with audiences don’t occur when you give them exactly what they want, but something they didn’t know they wanted. There’s no stopping technology, but for artists to use it well, they must look beyond the screen. Deep down, people like to be challenged. And in the long run, the audience trusts comics when comics trust the audience. More

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    ‘House of the Dragon’: Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke on Forgiveness and Favorite Drinks

    In a joint interview, Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke talked about the forces that drive their characters apart — and pull them together.This interview includes spoilers for the first eight episodes of “House of the Dragon.”By the time Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke debuted, in the sixth episode, in HBO’s fantasy smash “House of the Dragon,” you had seen them before. Well, their characters, anyway.D’Arcy and Cooke play Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and Queen Alicent Hightower, childhood friends driven apart by a power struggle over who will inherit the Iron Throne from King Viserys (Paddy Considine), Rhaenyra’s father and Alicent’s husband.But because of the story’s unusual structure — the show covers decades in its first season, during which Rhaenyra and Alicent grow up and have children of their own — their roles were played by the younger performers Milly Alcock and Emily Carey in the first five episodes. As the time for the cast switch-over drew closer, D’Arcy grew more and more nervous.“I found that bit the most pressurized point of the whole job so far,” D’Arcy said during a conference call from London earlier this week. “The audience only gets to meet you in a state of grief, having just lost the person they spent five hours with. The closer we got to inflicting that on people, the more stressed I felt.”Cooke looks at it a bit differently. “Those were the halcyon days,” she said. “We weren’t confronted with millions and millions of people watching our performances week after week. Usually, you do a film, it comes out, it goes away.”“No one watches it!” D’Arcy chimed in, prompting raucous laughter from both actors — a common occurrence in the conversation.“No one watches it” is certainly not a problem faced by “Dragon,” a “Game of Thrones” prequel that has thus far has lived up to the blockbuster success of its predecessor. The complicated relationship between D’Arcy’s and Cooke’s characters is the primary engine of the story, and that centrality, along with a series of charming promotional videos and appearances, has made the actors among the show’s most popular performers. Even D’Arcy’s favorite drink order — “a Negroni Sbagliato with prosecco in it” — now has its own online fan base.Return to Westeros in ‘House of the Dragon’HBO’s long-awaited “Game of Thrones” prequel series is here.The Princess and the Queen: Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke, who play the grown-up versions of Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower, talked about the forces that drive their characters apart — and pull them together.A Man’s Decline: By the eighth episode of the season, Viserys no longer looks like a proud Targaryen king. Paddy Considine discussed the character’s transformation and its meaning.The New Littlefinger?: Larys Strong, a shadowy character, burns bright as a major player in the show. Here’s his back story.A Rogue Prince: Daemon Targaryen, portrayed by Matt Smith, is an agent of chaos. But “he’s got a strange moral compass of his own,” the actor said.Seeing how well the two actors get along, it is easy to forget that they play bitter enemies. At the end of the show’s most recent episode, there was a hint that the cold war between their characters might finally thaw. But given the dying king’s garbled prophecy and the patriarchal system that seems determined to divide Rhaenyra and Alicent, their renewed peace appears to be in peril.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Rhaenyra and Alicent have been estranged for the duration of your time on the show, but there’s a moment near the end of this week’s episode when their former closeness seems to have been rekindled.OLIVIA COOKE Even in fury, there is still a desire to be as close to one another as possible. They’ve not seen each other for such a long time, since Alicent attacked Rhaenyra [during Episode 7]. Alicent has been alone in that castle with all these men, and she’s probably been festering and thinking about that for a very, very long time.EMMA D’ARCY We had an amazing conversation, in advance of shooting the episode, about it being sort of set in a hospice [for the dying King Viserys]. Proximity to death can alter your chain of priorities; it offers a canvas for forgiveness where there wasn’t one previously. Going in, we really wanted to make sure that that moment at the end felt honest, that we could buy that these two people get there. It’s not an “all is forgiven” moment, but it’s a gesture to forgiveness.COOKE They’re really seeing each other for the first time since they were children — probably since the first time Rhaenyra found out that Alicent was marrying her dad. It’s unification in grief, and recognizing each other’s inner child in this loss.It feels like a small moment of freedom for two characters who’ve been forced into their roles by the men in their lives.COOKE These characters are being watched all the time. They’re always operating under the constraints of this straitjacket and learning how to maneuver within it. In this episode, it’s about taking chances and jumping on an opportunity Alicent may never get again — desperation for a friend and ally.D’ARCY It’s no coincidence that the male figures with power within this court have created conditions where Alicent and Rhaenyra’s relationship becomes untenable. It’s no coincidence that patriarchal structures look to divide and conquer strong female relationships. They would be the ultimate allies because there’s no one else who can truly understand what it is to be the oppressed party. Patriarchal structural oppression operates in such a multiplicitous and slimy way. That understanding can’t be conjured in someone who doesn’t live through it.In a scene earlier this season, Alicent physically attacked Rhaenyra. “Even in fury, there is still a desire to be as close to one another as possible,” Cooke said.HBOMilly and Emily have discussed the possible presence of a sublimated romantic or sexual spark between Rhaenyra and Alicent. Does that motivate the characters, even as adults?COOKE I don’t know if Alicent knows what it feels like to feel those things now. There’s layers and layers of repression; sexuality and lust are probably a prehistoric, sedimentary layer by now. From Alicent’s point of view, I don’t think she’s that self-aware, in terms of what she’s feeling, to know what’s propelling her to reach out to Rhaenyra again.D’ARCY That sort of erotic energy is very present in their early relationship. I think Rhaenyra is primarily motivated by a deep desire to be known and seen. The hurt and pain is so dominant that I don’t know if there’s a space, at this point, for a conscious interaction with sexual lust, but she definitely yearns for the old physical intimacy that they shared. It’s different from what she shares with her current husband and her children. A different form of contact.Olivia, I’ve seen a lot of debate over the end of this episode, when Viserys mistakes Alicent for Rhaenyra and tells her about his ancestor Aegon the Conqueror’s prophecy of a messianic “Prince That Was Promised.” She mistakenly believes Viserys is referring to their son, Aegon. Does she fully believe it, or is she hearing what she wants to hear?COOKE We spoke a lot about this. There was a massive amount of relief when Alicent told Rhaenyra, “You will make a great queen.” She’s so over the fighting and having this ball of bitterness and anxiety in her stomach: Just let it go, Rhaenyra is the heir, this is fine.When Viserys says that, I genuinely think she thinks he’s talking about Aegon, her son. And I think she’s furious. She’s like, “After all that?” But Viserys is on his deathbed; that’s what he requested, and so she must follow it through. Whether that’s unconscious wishful thinking, I don’t know, but that’s how I played it.Emma, this is shifting gears pretty dramatically, but there’s a video clip of you telling Olivia that your favorite drink is “a Negroni Sbagliato with prosecco in it” that went viral on TikTok and Twitter and inspired a number of articles. Is this something you’re aware of?D’ARCY I thought it’d be quite funny to be drinking one right now, but I’m not. [Laughs.] I keep thinking I should tell my mum that I’ve become a meme in the hope that she’ll be happy for me, but I’d have to explain what a meme is, and I’ve decided it’s too much effort.I feel so embarrassed. Because in those interviews, when we’ve been at it for six hours, I’m honestly only trying to make Olivia laugh.COOKE [Laughs.] Is that right?D’ARCY No, I’m obviously doing Campari’s next campaign.COOKE I’d be like, “Ten million pounds, please!”Speaking not as your characters but as yourselves: Whom would you side with? Alicent or Rhaenyra?COOKE It’s funny: The whole point of this story is that these two women have been split apart and people have been forced to take sides. Now the whole internet is doing the exact same thing, even though “House of the Dragon” is supposed to be a cautionary tale. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t pit either of them against each other. [Pause.] But yeah, probably Rhaenyra. [Both laugh.]D’ARCY I don’t know the answer to that. I’m married to my uncle. Who’s to say? More

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    Dark Clouds Over London Stages

    Productions of “John Gabriel Borkman” and “Blues for an Alabama Sky” conjure bleak atmospheres in two playhouses.LONDON — Loss and defeat hang heavy over two recent London theater openings: They are entirely different in content but share an emphasis on despair.In “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” the American play from Pearl Cleage now in a revelatory production at the National Theater, inhabitants of 1930s New York yearn for a better, kinder life elsewhere. (The show runs through Nov. 5.) The Bridge Theater revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “John Gabriel Borkman,” on view until Nov. 26, gives us a title character who speaks excitedly of the “new life” he seeks, though his attempts to forge a fresh start lead only to death.Of the two shows, “Blues” is especially powerful, in what must be the staging of a playwright’s dreams: a starry production at a prestigious playhouse from a director, the fast-rising Lynette Linton, fully attuned to the work’s soulful rhythms. Premiered in Atlanta in 1995 and revived there in 2015, the play focuses on three people sharing adjacent Harlem apartments in a building that, in Frankie Bradshaw’s expansive design, reaches the full height of the auditorium.The neediest of the trio is Angel (Samira Wiley), a nightclub singer who has lost her job and her boyfriend, and has taken seriously to the bottle. “What kind of dreams am I going to have?” she asks her roommate, Guy (Giles Terera), a gay costume designer whom Angel calls “Big Daddy.” (The play often recalls Tennessee Williams, and you can easily see Angel as a Black variant on Maggie the Cat and also Blanche DuBois.)Guy’s response is to look toward Paris, a city that is home to the expatriate Black entertainer Josephine Baker: If that legendary American-born performer can find her way in Europe, so can Guy. Early on, he raises a champagne glass from Manhattan to the new career that surely awaits him designing for the Folies Bergère. That events don’t necessarily turn out as people hope is a given. Fate deals Angel an entirely separate hand, and Guy’s reveries about La Bakaire, as he refers to Baker, are pulled up short by racism and homophobia closer to home.Adekoluejo’s character in “Blues for an Alabama Sky” is on the front line of a nascent American abortion rights movement.Marc BrennerAcross the hall from Angel and Guy lives the more practical Delia (the wonderful Ronke Adekoluejo), who offers to teach Angel to type: Secretarial skills will provide useful employment while Angel, reeling from her dismissal from her nighttime job, gets back on her feet.As sensible and focused as her neighbors are mercurial, Delia, in her indrawn way, is a pioneer. She is on the front line of a nascent American abortion rights movement and is working to open a clinic nearby. “I’m not trying to make a revolution,” she says. “I’m just trying to give women in Harlem the chance to plan their families.”Complicating matters are the men who come into these women’s lives. Delia enters into a relationship with Sam (a warmhearted Sule Rimi), a doctor who supports her quest for female empowerment but would really rather take her out for a night on the town. Angel, in turn, catches the eye of the churchgoing Leland (Osy Ikhile), an Alabama native who offers care and comfort but doesn’t have much time for the flamboyant effeminacy of Angel’s beloved Guy.Will Angel forsake her deep friendship for romance? Wiley, a Juilliard-trained actress and established TV name, expertly catches the shifting moods of a restless soul who is of two minds about the virtues of domesticity; she also lends a terrific singing voice to those snatches of the blues that punctuate the production. Terera is in full command as the changeable Guy, a dreamer who is flighty one minute, fully alert the next, and who knows all too well that his sexuality is viewed as an “abomination.”Guy sees the world around him as “tawdry and tainted” and can’t wait to sail first-class to freedom in France, although we never find out if his wishes are fulfilled. We’re left wishing a gentler future for the play’s central characters, whose openheartedness may, with luck, see them through the obstacles that lie in their way.It’s difficult to think quite so generously about John Gabriel Borkman, the disgraced former bank chief executive who gives Ibsen’s 1896 play its title. But Lucinda Coxon’s vigorous new version, presented without intermission in a fleet staging by Nicholas Hytner, invests the title character with a fantasy life that borders on madness. Back home after serving a five-year prison sentence for fraud, he spends his time rehearsing past grievances and rhapsodizing about rebuilding his life.Simon Russell Beale and Lia Williams in “John Gabriel Borkman” at the Bridge Theater.Manuel HarlanIt’s possible in the production’s spartan contemporary setting — Borkman’s wife, Gunhild (a blistering Clare Higgins), is watching daytime TV as the play begins — to see the title character as a Nordic variant of Bernie Madoff, or other moneymen who met a grievous end. Rich in rhetoric, Borkman compares himself to “a great wounded eagle watching the vultures scavenge my plans.”In fact, as the character is played by the great Simon Russell Beale (a Tony winner in June for “The Lehman Trilogy”), I was reminded of Shakespeare’s Lear, a onetime role for Beale. There’s a Shakespearean grandeur to the deluded Borkman as he staggers shaggy-haired into the snow, speechifying to the night sky like Lear cast out into the storm.And just as Lear recognizes too late the depth of his youngest daughter’s love, Borkman comes belatedly to an awareness that it was his sister-in-law Ella (a coolly furious Lia Williams) who loved him fully. The two face off in the upper floor of the Borkman house in a prolonged confrontation that is the highlight of the play. “You killed love in me. Can you even understand what I’m saying to you?” Ella says in an emotional outburst that Borkman dismisses as “hysterics.”The Borkmans’ son, Erhart (Sebastian de Souza), is a student who has taken up with a flamboyantly dressed older woman, Fanny (Ony Uhiara), much to the chagrin of his family. Fanny speaks of whisking the young man off to Rome with the same enthusiasm that Guy, in “Blues,” speaks tantalizingly of Paris: Anything, you get the feeling, would be preferable to the wintry drear that is their daily lot.“Be happy!” Ella says when she wishes Erhart farewell, “as happy as you can!” In Ibsen’s compellingly grim world, that’s probably not very happy at all.Blues for an Alabama Sky. Directed by Lynette Linton. National Theater, through Nov. 5.John Gabriel Borkman. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through Nov. 26. More