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    Broken Women, Made Whole Onstage

    In Kornel Mundruczo’s “Pieces of a Woman” and an Annie Ernaux adaptation, “Memory of a Girl,” stage directors explore post-traumatic psychology and the workings of mental recall.HAMBURG, Germany — Anyone who saw the 2020 film “Pieces of a Woman,” on Netflix or the big screen, will not soon forget its 22-minute single-take opening scene of a home birth. For those who haven’t yet seen Kornel Mundruczo’s movie, I won’t be revealing too much by saying that things take a turn for the worse in that technically dazzling sequence.The effect is remarkably similar to what Mundruczo, a Hungarian director, put onstage for the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw in his 2018 production of “Pieces of a Woman,” which was recently performed at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. (The piece is in TR Warszawa’s repertory and will next tour to Naples, Italy, in March.) The birth takes place largely behind closed doors, and the audience watches a live video feed that is projected onto the front of the closed set. As in the film, Mundruczo gives us the birth in a single, heart-stopping shot, with no cuts to enable the audience to catch its breath.While comparisons between films and the plays they are based on have their limits, the stage version is altogether richer, more intimate and more fully imagined than the one onscreen.The play’s author, Kata Weber, who is Mundruczo’s wife, treats the harrowing birth as a prologue to a magisterially drawn-out dinner. Clocking in at close to two hours, it’s a family meal that feels like a one-act drama in its own right.Magdalena Kuta as the stern foster mother in “Pieces of a Woman”.Natalia KabanowIt’s been six months since the tragic evening that opens the play, and the grieving woman and her husband show up for roast duck and painful revelations. Unlike the film, which was a vehicle for its star, Vanessa Kirby (who won the best actress prize at the Venice Film Festival as well as an Oscar nod), the stage version is less a character study than a portrait of the ways that relationships among parents, children, siblings and partners fray in the aftermath of a tragedy.In the main role, Maja, Justyna Wasilewska, is emotionally naked and intense in her grief, yet also full of dazzling wit and vivacity. But Mundruczo surrounds her with six actors whose extraordinary performances make this a true ensemble piece. There is Dobromir Dymecki as Maja’s charming engineer husband, Lars, who, afraid to confront his grief head-on, lapses into immaturity and inappropriate behavior. There is Magdalena Kuta as Maja’s stern foster mother, who has invited a lawyer relative (Marta Scislowicz, who is more cautious than calculating) in hopes of convincing Maja to take legal action against the midwife. For all the sharp words, machinations and recriminations, the extended scene is neither somber nor bleak. Instead, the serious themes are shot through with humor, pathos and ironic reversals that bring to mind Chekhov or Bergman. When Maja and her competitive stepsister (Agnieszka Zulewska) twirl around the dining room with gymnastic ribbons to the 1980s Italian pop hit “Felicità,” the exuberant moment provides a sort of wordless catharsis. Although Maja has suffered an unimaginable blow, we understand that she’s far from broken: not because she’s moved on, but because she has the fortitude to own her pain. Defiantly, she recognizes her loss, yet refuses to be defined by it.The determination to acknowledge and understand past trauma as a way of moving on from it also animates the work of Annie Ernaux. This French writer has been setting her life down on the page for nearly five decades, in both autobiographical fiction and memoir. Her 2016 coming-of-age memoir “A Girl’s Story” appeared in English in 2020 and introduced American readers to her precise and incandescent style.Dobromir Dymecki (at window), Marta Scislowicz (seen from the back), Agnieszka Zulewska and Magdalena Kuta in “Pieces of a Woman.”Natalia KabanowA new chamber adaptation of the novel at the Residenztheater in Munich, “Erinnerung eines Mädchens” (“Memory of a Girl,” as per the book’s title in German and in French), is directed by the young Italian Silvia Costa, who distributes passages taken verbatim from Ernaux’s memoir among three performers from the theater’s permanent acting ensemble.Sibylle Canonica, Juliane Köhler and Charlotte Schwab each bring slightly different readings to the text and to Ernaux’s half-century-old recollections. The play begins in 1958, when the 18-year-old Annie Duchesne takes a job as a counselor at a summer camp and has her first sexual experiences, including a messy encounter with the older head counselor, with whom she falls in love. Although the tone is often cool and dispassionate, the effect is poetic and intimate as Ernaux investigates the storehouse of her memories with directness, honesty and analytic rigor.The trio of middle-aged actresses whom Costa enlists to narrate Ernaux’s reminiscences suggest not so much a splintering of the self as a multiplication of consciousness. Canonica, Köhler and Schwab move about the intimate black box of the Residenztheater’s smaller stage, the Marstall, performing a near-continuous series of actions. Some, like the frequent costume changes, clearly suggest fluid transitions between time periods and locations; others, such as elaborate rituals involving screens, mirrors, glasses of milk, rocks, string, dirt and clay figures of body parts, hint at the mysterious mechanisms of memory. The production’s powerful coda, in which the actresses enter a hidden photo lab and print a portrait of the young Ernaux (it’s featured on the book’s cover in the United States), suggests that mental recall works like a darkroom where the past can be developed, enlarged and fixed. The staging is delicate, but with a solid structure and rhythm that usher the viewer through the brisk 80-minute production. The way that Costa makes a spoken word performance flow gently and organically is impressive. One of the few missteps is Ayumi Paul’s jarring original score, which occasionally overwhelms the subdued emotions onstage and makes it hard to hear the actresses.From left, Charlotte Schwab, Sibylle Canonica and Juliane Köhler in “Memory of a Girl” at the Residenztheater in Munich.Sandra ThenWatching this show put me in mind of one of the Residenztheater’s best recent productions, Bastian Kraft’s reimagining of “Lulu,” in which Frank Wedekind’s antiheroine was brought to life by three actresses, including Köhler and Schwab. That multiplication made sense, in part, because of the myriad archetypes of womanhood that the character embodies.By contrast, it is difficult to know what the multiple casting in “Memory of a Girl” is meant to convey. It could simply be that Costa wanted to take advantage of the excellent actresses at her disposal. But I wonder if there was a deeper purpose to the way that the director divided the role beyond providing a more dynamic way of bringing the book to the stage than entrusting the text to a single performer.“Am I to dissolve the girl of 1958 and the woman of 2014 into a single ‘I’?” Ernaux wonders in “Memory of a Girl.” The interrogation of a splintered or dissociated consciousness may appear to be uniquely suited to the art of writing. Yet Costa, like Mundruzco, finds eminently theatrical means to make us understand a woman who is broken and made whole again.Pieces of a Woman. Directed by Kornel Mundruzco. In repertory at TR Warszawa in Warsaw.Memory of a Girl. Directed by Silvia Costa. Through Dec. 28 at the Residenztheater Munich. More

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    Late Night Celebrates the QAnon Shaman’s 41-Month Prison Sentence

    “That’s nearly three and a half years, so with good behavior, he could be out in time to storm the Capitol in 2024,” Stephen Colbert joked on Wednesday.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.ShamanticsJacob Chansley, better known as the QAnon Shaman, was sentenced to 41 months for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.“That’s nearly three and a half years, so with good behavior, he could be out in time to storm the Capitol in 2024,” Stephen Colbert joked on Wednesday night.“He apologized for storming the Capitol and said he often looks in the mirror and tells himself, ‘You really messed up, royally.’ Maybe if he’d taken a look in the mirror sooner, he would have noticed he had a dead raccoon on his head.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Not only did Chansley commit the crime of looking like an idiot — he is one.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Right now, he’s trying to use an antler to lift the keys off a guard’s belt.” — JIMMY FALLON“Apparently, it’s hard to find a jury of his peers the same day there’s a Renaissance fair.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Crypto Edition)“Starting Christmas Day, Staples Center will be known as Crypto.com Arena, which doesn’t sound creepy at all.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Crypto, the most confusing thing a venue has been named since Houston’s The Plot of ‘Inception’ Stadium.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But a lot of people around here don’t like the new name at all. You know you’re in a weird spot when fans are like, ‘We have to go back to when it was named after an office supply chain!’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s a bad name, but thankfully, Crypto.com still isn’t the worst-named arena in sports. That honor belongs to the New Orleans Pelicans’ Smoothie King Center.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“So, look for the Lakers to be up by 20, then back down by 40, then up by 10,000, then back to zero.” — SETH MEYERS“Generations of fans have grown up with the Staples Center. For my younger viewers, that name refers to the Staples office supply company. An office is something you used to go to for meetings, which are like very boring in-person emails. Oh, emails are long texts with more words, and words are faceless emojis that remind you you’re a relic of the past and the future no longer belongs to you. Go Cryptos!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s not like Staples is a sacred name from the ancestors — it’s a store where you buy 50 packs of binders even though you only need one.” — TREVOR NOAH“True story, we almost called our youngest daughter Crypto.com. Crypto.com Corden. Crypto.com Jennifer Corden.” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingDulcé Sloan looked into the history of historically Black college and university marching bands on Wednesday’s “The Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightHalle Berry will appear on Thursday’s “Daily Show” to promote her new film, “Bruised.”Also, Check This OutAdele’s “30,” due Friday, is the follow-up to her blockbuster “25,” an album that sold nearly 3.4 million copies in a single week in the United States. Getty ImagesAdele’s first new album in six years faces a changing music industry, but she’s always been an exception to the rule. More

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    Review: Three Generations Awaiting Justice in ‘Cullud Wattah’

    Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s play follows one family of women affected by the water crisis in Flint, Mich.Water can be a force for life or death. That the municipal supply of Flint, Mich., is slowly killing three generations of Black women living under one roof isn’t a dramatic revelation, but the grim, yearslong reality embodied in Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s “Cullud Wattah.”In a haunting and eye-opening production, directed by Candis C. Jones and which opened on Wednesday at the Public Theater, the playwright excavates the human costs behind familiar and devastating headlines.“Lead in thuh wattah,” five actors sing as the show opens. A riff on the spiritual “Wade in the Water” aligns present-day woes with Black traditions of perseverance. Emerging from the darkened periphery with jugs in hand, they recount the circumstances of the crisis like morbid poetry: When the city switched its water supply, who is responsible, how tea began to smell of sewage and rashes spread across their bodies.Urgency in the face of deadliness, “Cullud Wattah” points out, is not afforded to Black communities on the margins. The setting is November 2016, 939 days since Flint had clean water, and the repercussions continue to cascade.Marion (Crystal Dickinson) is a third-generation union assembly worker at General Motors, the city’s flagship employer. Her pregnant sister, Ainee (Andrea Patterson), is in recovery from crack addiction. The slight but indomitable Big Ma (Lizan Mitchell) keeps everyone in line, including Marion’s daughters, Reesee (Lauren F. Walker), a queer freethinking teenager with spiritual ties to the continent, and a sly 9-year-old named Plum (played by the adult actress Alicia Pilgrim), who has been undergoing treatment for leukemia.Out of both love and necessity, the women support and care for one another. Marion adjusts Plum’s wig before her first day back at school. Ainee applies lip liner to her sister when tremors in Marion’s hands flare up, from illness or nerves about dating again after her husband’s death.The set design, by Adam Rigg, suggests a house stripped to its raw wood foundations, with hundreds of bottles of murky water lined up and suspended in the air, one for each day it continues to flow from the tap. Bottles of clean water sit atop the refrigerator. (A filter promised by the city should arrive any day now.) The lighting design, by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, is anxious and spectral, while Kara Harmon’s costumes lend the women an everyday earthiness.From left, Mitchell, Patterson and Dickinson in the play, which, our critic writes, excels most when generating heat from familial conflict.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow many bottles of water are needed to do things that most people take for granted — washing Thanksgiving vegetables, for example (26) — is the kind of granular detail the play brings into focus.The plot stirs around the effect that toxins have had on the family, both internally and externally. “We all marked,” says Ainee, who walks in the house one day with a flier containing information about a class-action suit. Marion’s job at GM, and a potential promotion to management, means she would risk their livelihood if she were to get involved — the moral compromise of capitalism and the weight of personal responsibility coming to a head.Dickerson-Despenza’s lyrical prose is laced with humor, and she creates lively and warmhearted characters. Which makes it all the more enraging to watch them struggle against a steady poisoning. Her narrative mode is one of querying the past, not so much to expose fresh facts as to ensure that what should already be known is also deeply felt.While the playwright generates affecting emotion throughout, a fair portion of the dialogue is used to deliver exposition and impassioned proclamations about the impact of contaminated water, even when characters are relating to each other. Jones’ fluid and intimate direction mostly keeps the text from feeling too bogged down in these details.“Cullud Wattah” excels most when generating heat from familial conflict. Performances by the winning ensemble members are nimbly attuned to the language of mothers and sisters, from knowing shrugs and sideways glances to the straight-on withering glares. And in the hands of Dickinson and Patterson, fireworks light up the story at its climax, when long-silenced resentments finally detonate in the sort of blaze that only arises from love.Inseparable as real-world calamity has become from the realm of art, Dickerson-Despenza’s “Cullud Wattah” is especially suited to a moment of environmental unrest. After the play comes to an abrupt end, the cast stands in silence before leaving the stage. They don’t return for a bow, as if this had not been a performance but a call to account.Cullud WattahThrough Dec. 12 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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    ‘Diana, the Musical’ Review: Exploiting the People’s Princess

    The tabloid press and the monarchy used the Princess of Wales for their own purposes, and now a new Broadway show does the same.“Was there ever a greater tabloid tale?”Sung by a pack of slithering paparazzi amid an explosion of flashbulbs, so begins “Diana, the Musical,” which seems to exist to answer the question. Digging deep into the celebrity-bio-musical barrel, there to squabble for pre-eminence with pop divas and Jersey boys, it may well win the prize as the tawdriest and least excusable wholesaling of a supposedly true story ever to belt its way to Broadway.I doubt that was the intention behind the show, which opened on Wednesday at the Longacre Theater after somehow surviving two disasters: the pandemic, which knocked it down in March 2020; and a filmed version for Netflix (“the year’s most hysterically awful hate-watch,” wrote The Guardian) that did much the same thing earlier this fall. Still, it’s worth asking, as the poor woman’s corpse is forced to rise again, what its authors could possibly have been thinking.The cynical answer, as always, is money. The Princess of Wales, in her short life and long death, has been dragooned into any number of commercial entertainments, including memoirs by her household staff, thinly sourced biographies, a multiseason story line on “The Crown” and, most recently, the movie “Spencer.” Whether middlebrow or low, these works reshape Diana to their own needs, borrowing her familiar, eventful yet unknowable story to sell mere gossip as relatable real-life tragedy.But at least none of those involved any of the following, as “Diana” counterfactually does: the title character getting jiggy with Mstislav Rostropovich to an electrified version of Bach’s first cello suite; Barbara Cartland, the romance novelist, lasciviously pawing Diana’s lover James Hewitt as he arrives half-naked on a horse; a man with AIDS consenting to have his photo taken with the princess by singing, “I may be unwell, but I’m handsome as hell”; and a sort of boxing match between the rivals for Prince Charles’s affections set to the words: “It’s the thrilla in Manila but with Diana and Camilla!”I wish propriety would allow me to tell you as well about the song in which Diana and her butler, Paul Burrell, choose the low-cut, off-the-shoulder “revenge” dress she wears in response to Charles’s 1994 interview blaming the failure of their marriage on her. Only for turning a common vulgarity into an uncommon one could the number be regarded as clever.Yet these are merely the most extractable of the horrors that “Diana,” as directed by Christopher Ashley, has on display. The real problem is intrinsic, arising from the choice to tell the story in song at all. Musicals, like laws, are often compared to sausages: You don’t want to know what goes into them. In this case, you don’t want to know what comes out, either; if you care about Diana as a human being, or dignity as a concept, you will find this treatment of her life both aesthetically and morally mortifying.Granted, the authors did not make it easy on themselves. In choosing to cover the entire arc of her fame — from 1980 to ’96, with an epilogue about her death tacked on — they probably doomed themselves to the narrative scrawniness that makes the show so twitchy. (“Spencer” limits itself to three days in 1991.) Roughly, and I do mean roughly, Joe DiPietro’s book touches on Diana’s rise from meek kindergarten helper to surprise candidate for what one song calls “the worst job in England,” to fairy-tale bride, to scorned wife, to doting mother, to England’s favorite royal, to unfaithful wretch, to carousing divorcée, to martyrdom and points beyond.De Waal, who sings in most of the musical’s numbers.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOnce you add songs into the mix — and Diana (Jeanna de Waal) sings in 17 of them — there’s no time for coherence, let alone subtlety. De Waal is left to embody each new incarnation of the character as quickly and superficially as she swaps William Ivey Long’s trick costumes, which could tell the story better on their own. They are, at any rate, wittier and sparklier than the score; with music by David Bryan of Bon Jovi, and lyrics by Bryan and DiPietro, the songs are cold and crass — and so, not surprisingly, their Diana is, too.This is not just a matter of de Waal’s bravura yet resolutely unthrilling performance, but also of the framing. In her introductory number, looking back on her life from some point presumably after the divorce but before her death, Diana suggests that it was tactically valuable to be “underestimated” — a word that doesn’t scan as a lyric no matter how mercilessly the songwriters flog it. It doesn’t scan as an idea either; rather, it sets up Diana as a kind of English Evita, a schemer who triumphed, which is bizarre on both counts.Indeed, there is something seriously wrong with a Diana story whose most believable and sympathetic character is Camilla Parker Bowles. But other than the degrading “thrilla” scene, Camilla is mercifully underwritten, allowing Erin Davie room to find something human in her that the real Camilla never could.Roe Hartrampf as Prince Charles and Erin Davie as Camilla Parker Bowles, who comes off as the most believable and sympathetic character in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe other two central players have no such room. Roe Hartrampf’s Charles is basically a Prince of Wails, complaining bitterly and at the top of his voice for the entire show; Judy Kaye’s already one-note battleship of a performance as Queen Elizabeth II is further undercut by her popping up occasionally as Cartland — Diana’s step-grandmother — for supposed comic relief.Choices like these suggest that the authors simply did not know what tone to take and so took every one they could think of. Wanting us to engage with the story seriously, they nevertheless ham it up with randy grannies and cheesy catfights. Seeking to cover 16 years in little more than two hours, they condense or flat-out fictionalize with a wink. In this context, it counts as a kind of discretion that the portrait of Burrell as a trusted confidant (and dress wrangler) neglects to mention that he was later prosecuted for stealing from the princess’s estate — a case hastily dropped after the Queen interceded — and, for an encore, wrote a tacky best-selling memoir.Ashley’s staging follows suit, going for grandeur but, in its haste, reaching only the clamminess of farce. (The chilly sets are by David Zinn.) And in Kelly Devine’s bizarrely noncontextual choreography, the ensemble — whether representing palace flunkies, Knightsbridge snobs or worshipful Dianaphiles — performs the same frenzied gymnastics.Musicals are difficult and expensive. No one says they have to be serious, too. “The Cher Show” and “Jersey Boys,” among many others, would have been much better with less drummed-up significance. Nor will an insufficiency of craft and proportion necessarily sully a modest, invented tale like the one told in “Memphis,” the 2010 Tony Award winner from the “Diana” creative team.But if you decide to write a musical about a real woman, known worldwide, who died tragically while still a young mother, something more rigorous is demanded. “Diana,” though, is lazy and thus neither entertaining nor insightful; though audiences talk back to it at will, it’s not even campy fun. It’s just exploitative, doing to the Princess of Wales pretty much what the tabloid press — let alone the monarchy — did to her in the first place.Diana, the MusicalAt the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; thedianamusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    ‘The Antelope Party’ Review: Friendship Is Magic, With Exceptions

    Paranoia takes root among five friends who fear their “My Little Pony” role playing game is being targeted in this new play at the Wild Project.Eric John Meyer’s “The Antelope Party,” a presentation of the Dutch Kills Theater Company that had its New York premiere recently at the Wild Project, uses a classic movie thriller structure to explore the potential real-world dangers of wish-fulfillment fantasy groups.But is the kind of harm that befalls the Rust Belt Bronies Meet Up Group for Adult Fans of “My Little Pony” unique, or can it happen to any collective?These bronies and pegasisters — as adult fans of the franchise are known — gather regularly with the hushed secrecy of political subversives at the Western Pennsylvania home of their genial host, Ben (Edward Mawere), some time in the 2010s. Those who have answered Ben’s online call for a role-playing game include Maggie (Lindsley Howard), a young woman who lives with her protective father; the aloof 20-or-30-somethings Doug (Quinn Franzen) and Rachel (Caitlin Morris); and Shawn (Will Dagger), who joined after his revelatory AMFE (After My First Episode) moment.One night, Maggie makes a misstep. Dressed in full-on Pony attire, something the group’s members usually avoid to dodge harassment, she is picked up by members of a neighborhood watch on her way to Ben’s apartment. That same night Jean (Anna Ishida, appropriately baffled) shows up at Ben’s place, but soon realizes she has mistaken the group for another — 9/11 truthers like herself — and is promptly shown out. These incidents set the Rust Belt Bronies on a paranoid spiral, which is made worse when they discover that the neighborhood watch is actually a group called the Antelope Party, whose mission is to rid the country of homeless people, street kids and other “wild dogs.”The shift is a bit of bait-and-switch: Instead of examining the intricacies of “My Little Pony” fandom, “The Antelope Party” has more in common with sociopolitical films like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in which suspicions about the mysterious “outsider” stoke fears among a particular group of people. Meyer explores these dynamics, and how people gain power in social groups: Is it granted, won by force or is it more unpredictable?From left, Dagger, Quinn Franzen, Anna Ishida, Mawere and Morris in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe ensemble members are convincing in their portrayal of vulnerability. Dagger’s wimpy Shawn is a believable beta male whose desperation for social standing leads him to dark places, and Howard’s Maggie is perfect as the peppy type whose “daddy’s girl” veil hides a sinister reality. The charismatic Mawere is intensely watchable as Ben, a host who is eager to please.In her direction of the cast, Jess Chayes leans into the characters’ cautiousness in social settings by smartly avoiding to stage action when none is called for, though the play never feels sluggish. And Yu-Hsuan Chen’s clever one-room set — the walls fold in and out to create spaces outside of the group’s meeting spot — emphasizes their precarious hold on this made-up world.As in her work on WP Theater’s “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,” another pessimistic tale of a group’s descent into chaos, Chen shows an innate understanding of the intimacy of small spaces, and of how the clutter strewn about amounts to an intensely personal ecosystem. Here, Ben’s fuzzy neon pillows and “My Little Pony” throw blankets are paraphernalia that can be quickly hidden, should a judgmental outsider arrive.By taking various precautions — part childish desire to protect their cool little club, part survival response to actual danger — the group believes itself impervious to outside forces. But “The Antelope Party” crafts a clever little awakening for them, and anyone who shares their belief that there is safety in numbers.The Antelope PartyThrough Nov. 21 at Wild Project, Manhattan; theantelope.party, Running time: 2 hours. More

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    Ed Bullins, Leading Playwright of the Black Arts Movement, Dies at 86

    He wrote not for white or middle-class audiences, but for the strivers, hustlers and quiet sufferers whose struggles he sought to capture in searing works.Ed Bullins, who was among the most significant Black playwrights of the 20th century and a leading voice in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Saturday at his home in Roxbury, Mass. He was 86.His wife, Marva Sparks, said the cause was complications of dementia.Over a 55-year career in which he produced nearly 100 plays, Mr. Bullins sought to reflect the Black urban experience unmitigated by the expectations of traditional theater. Most of his work appeared in Black theaters in Harlem and Oakland, Calif., and perhaps for that reason he never reached the heights of acclaim that greeted peers like August Wilson, whose plays appeared on Broadway and were adapted for the screen (and who often credited Mr. Bullins as an influence).That was fine with Mr. Bullins. He often said that he wrote not for white or middle-class audiences but for the strivers, hustlers and quiet sufferers whose struggles he sought to capture in searing works like “In the Wine Time” (1968) and “The Taking of Miss Janie” (1975).“He was able to get the grass roots to come to his plays,” the writer Ishmael Reed said in an interview. “He was a Black playwright who spoke to the values of the urban experience. Some of those people had probably never seen a play before.”Though Mr. Bullins was a careful student of white playwrights like Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, he rejected many of their conventions, pursuing a loose, rapid style that drew equally on avant-garde jazz and television — two forms that he felt put him closer to the register of his intended audiences.He won three Obie Awards and two Guggenheim grants, and in 1975 the New York Drama Critics’ Circle named “The Taking of Miss Janie” the best American play of the year.Not everyone was enamored of his work. Some critics, including some in the Black press, believed he focused too heavily on the violence and criminality he saw in working-class Black life, and reflected it too brutally — “The Taking of Miss Janie,” for instance, opens and closes with a rape scene.But most critics, especially in the establishment, came to respect Mr. Bullins as an artist who was both passionately true to his source material and nuanced enough in his vision to avoid becoming doctrinaire.“He tackled subjects that on the surface were very specific to the Black experience,” the playwright Richard Wesley said in an interview. “But Ed was also very much committed to showing the humanity of his characters, and in doing that he became accessible to audiences beyond the Black community.”Genia Morgan, left, and Alia Chapman in a 2006 production of Mr. Bullins’s “The Taking of Miss Janie,” which was named the best American play of the year by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle in 1975.Gerry GoodsteinEdward Artie Bullins was born on July 7, 1935, in Philadelphia and grew up on the city’s North Side. His father, Edward Bullins, left home when Ed was still a small child, and he was raised by his mother, Bertha Marie (Queen) Bullins, who worked for the city government.Though he did well in school, he gravitated toward the North Side’s rough street life. He joined a gang, lost two front teeth in one fight and was stabbed in the heart during another.Mr. Bullins dropped out of school in 1952 and joined the Navy. He served most of the next three years as an ensign aboard the aircraft carrier Midway, where he won a lightweight boxing championship.He returned to Philadelphia in 1955 and, three years later, moved to Los Angeles. He attended night school to earn a high school equivalency diploma, then attended Los Angeles City College, where he started a magazine, Citadel, and wrote short stories for it.In 1962 he married the poet Pat Cooks. She accused him of threatening her with violence, and they divorced in 1966. (She later remarried and took the surname Parker.)Mr. Bullins’s later marriage, to Trixie Bullins, ended in divorce. Along with his third wife, he is survived by his sons, Ronald and Sun Ra; his daughters, Diane Bullins, Patricia Oden and Catherine Room; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Four other children, Ameena, Darlene, Donald and Eddie Jr., died before him.Restless and unhappy with his work in Los Angeles, Mr. Bullins moved in 1964 to San Francisco, where he plugged into a growing community of Black writers. He also switched from writing prose to writing plays — in part, he said, because he was lazy, but also because he felt that the theater gave him more direct access to the everyday Black experience.His first play, “How Do You Do,” an absurdist one-act encounter between a middle-class Black couple and a working-class Black man, was produced in 1965 to favorable reviews. But he remained unsure of his decision to write plays until a few months later, when he saw a dual production of “The Dutchman” and “The Slave,” two plays by Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, a leading figure of the Black Arts Movement.“I said to myself, I must be on the right track,” Mr. Bullins told The New Yorker in 1973. “I could see that an experienced playwright like Jones was dealing with these same qualities and conditions of Black life that moved me.”In 1967, Mr. Bullins became artist in residence at the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem. The work he produced, mostly there, over the six years represented the peak of his career.The Black Arts Movement, then still primarily an East Coast phenomenon, was a loose affiliation of novelists, playwrights and poets whose work sought to reflect the modern Black experience on its own terms — written and produced by Black people in Black spaces for Black audiences.Mr. Bullins had found his community and, through it, his voice. He fell in with a circle of Bay Area writers, actors and activists, who began performing his work in bars and coffeehouses.Among them was Eldridge Cleaver, who, after his release from prison in 1966, used some of the proceeds from his memoir “Soul on Ice” to found Black House, an arts and community center in San Francisco, with Mr. Bullins as its chief artist in residence.Black House also became the city’s headquarters for the Black Panther Party, founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. Mr. Bullins became the party’s minister of culture.But his role in the Black Panthers was short-lived. The party, from his perspective at least, saw art solely as a weapon, and he chafed at Mr. Seale’s insistence that he create didactic, often explicitly Marxist plays. He also grew frustrated over the party’s interest in building a coalition with radical white allies, when what he sought was a movement wholly independent of white culture.“I have no Messianic urge,” he told The New York Times in 1975. “Every other street corner has somebody telling you Christ or Mao is the answer. You can take any Ism you want and be saved by it. If you’re part of some movement and it fulfills you, that’s cool, but I like to look at it all.”He left the party in late 1966, just before Black House shut down.Mr. Bullins considered moving to Europe or South America, but he changed his mind when Robert Macbeth, the founder of the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem, invited him to be the artist in residence there.He arrived in New York in 1967, and the next six years of work, mostly at the New Lafayette Theater, represented the peak of his career. The theater was a complete package: a 14-member acting troupe, 14 musicians, several playwrights and directors, and an affiliated art gallery, the Weusi Artist Collective, that produced sets.Mr. Bullins also led workshops for aspiring playwrights, many of whom, like Mr. Wesley, went on to become significant voices among the next generation of Black theater artists.Kim Sullivan and Shirleen Quigley in the New Federal Theater’s 2013 production of “In the Wine Time.”Gerry GoodsteinA year after arriving, he completed “In the Wine Time,” his first full-length play and the first of a series he called his “Twentieth Century Cycle” — 20 plays that told the story of postwar urban life through a set of friends. In 1971 he won his first Obie, for “The Fabulous Miss Marie” and “In New England Winter.”He left the New Lafayette Theater in 1973, shortly before it closed for lack of funding. His work in the 1970s appeared in the New Federal Theater, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, the Public Theater and elsewhere.In 1972 he got into a war of words with the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, which was putting on his play “The Duplex.” Though he had initially endorsed the production, he later said in an interview that “the original Black intentions” of the play had been “thwarted” and “its artistic integrity stomped on,” turning it into a “minstrel show.”He traded attacks with the producer, Jules Irving, and the director, Gilbert Moses, in The Times and elsewhere, but in the end the play went on. It received mixed reviews.That episode, fairly or not, gave Mr. Bullins a reputation for being hard to work with, one of the reasons he cited for returning to the West Coast in the 1980s. He continued to write plays, but he also produced work by others, including Mr. Reed, at his Bullins Memorial Theater in Oakland, named for his son Eddie Jr., who died in a car crash in 1978.Mr. Bullins returned to school, receiving a bachelor’s degree in English from the San Francisco campus of Antioch University in 1989 and a master’s in fine arts in playwriting from San Francisco State University in 1994.Mr. Bullins in 1999, when he was a professor in the theater department at Northeastern University in Boston.Wendy Maeda/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesThe next year he moved to Boston, where he became a professor in the theater department at Northeastern University. He retired in 2012.By then he had long since changed his mind about his audience, in large part because he and others in the Black Arts Movement had succeeded in their mission to build a Black cultural canon.“Of course Black writers can write for all audiences,” he told The Times in 1982. “My feeling is that the question of whether Black theater should appeal to whites was more valid a decade ago. Since then, Black theater has taken off in all directions.” More

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    Late Night Shares Juicy Passages From 'Betrayal'

    Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers reported some of the most interesting items from Jonathan Karl’s new book.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.Best of ‘Betrayal’Jonathan Karl’s “Betrayal” was published on Tuesday, and late night shared a few of that book’s juicier items regarding former President Trump and Jan. 6, including some tidbits about Michael Flynn and his call for the military to stop Joe Biden from taking office.“Remember, this was a former general making a call to the military demanding they support a fascist coup. What is wrong with him? It’s 2021 — just text!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“According to a new book, former Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller purposely offered, then presented, Trump extreme military scenarios in the final week of his presidency to prevent him from choosing to attack Iran. Unfortunately, he opted for the craziest one — attacking the U.S.” — SETH MEYERS“After the election, [Sidney] Powell contacted a Pentagon official to push the claim that the C.I.A. director had been hurt and taken into custody in Germany while ‘on a secret mission to destroy evidence of voter fraud on a computer server that belonged to a company named Scytl.’ Where did Powell get this urgent news? From a false conspiracy theory that had been gaining steam among QAnon followers. Oh, yeah, that theory is definitely steaming.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Antique Roadshow Edition)“Yesterday, President Biden signed his bipartisan infrastructure bill into law, and to tell everyone about it today, he kicked off a road show to showcase the benefits of the bill. It’s like ‘The Antiques Road Show’ if the road was the antique.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And, guys, why do they have to sign the bill in public? I mean, I know this is important legislation, but as a spectator sport, it’s pretty boring. Where’s the drama? ‘Ooh, maybe the pen will run out of ink!’” — TREVOR NOAH“Also, why are they even having a bill-signing celebration? Passing laws is their job. Nobody else gets to do that at their job. Like, after you make photocopies for your boss at the office, you don’t get to pose for pictures while shaking hands: [imitating boss] ‘I didn’t think you could get it double-sided. Well done, Billy, well done.’” — TREVOR NOAH“During the signing ceremony yesterday for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, President Biden twice referred to Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema as ‘Kristen.’ And that’s the worst thing you can call her besides a Democrat — she hates that.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon showed off pets that pack suitcases and chug beers better than he can.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightAdam Driver, a “House of Gucci” star, will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutLisa Law/Apple TV+ Todd Haynes’s “The Velvet Underground” is a deep dive on the New York demimonde that birthed the band, and also a reflection on the cinema and art of the day. More

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    ‘Medicine’ Review: One Dose Reality, Two Doses Absurdity

    Domhnall Gleeson is surrounded by an eccentric cast of characters in Enda Walsh’s surreal play at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Mary, a woman dressed as an old man. Another Mary, a woman in a lobster suit. John Kane, a nervous mental patient in blue pajamas. And a nameless drummer who never speaks. These eccentric characters come together in Enda Walsh’s often baffling yet always arresting new play, “Medicine,” a presentation of Landmark Productions and the Galway International Arts Festival that opened at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Tuesday.John (Domhnall Gleeson) wanders onto the set, a drab room with the look of a community center hall (design by Jamie Vartan). It’s a mess — the aftermath of a staff party, with streamers and balloons — and John is concerned about it. He putters around, fidgeting and picking things up haphazardly.He’s preparing for the arrival of the two Marys (Aoife Duffin and Clare Barrett) and the drummer (Sean Carpio). They’re there at the institution to run through a script of John’s life, presumably as a kind of drama therapy.Once they arrive and their routine gets underway, the Marys don different costumes and lip sync a recording of dialogue from the people in John’s life, beginning with his parents on the day he was born. As John narrates, the Marys interrupt, to share notes and perform random dances while the drummer scores the scenes. But as John’s story unfolds, he becomes increasingly frazzled.Walsh, a celebrated playwright and director whose enigmatic works include “Grief Is the Thing with Feathers,” “Arlington” and “Rooms,” also writes and directs this play, which feels like a psychosexual absurdist fantasy. How long has John been here? What parts of this are real? Walsh is less concerned with providing answers than he is with making us sit with John’s mounting sense of desolation and shame. In this way, the work resembles a poem or an interpretive dance, resonating with symbols and gestures and feelings, and the rest is for the audience to puzzle through.Aoife Duffin as one of the Marys.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesJohn recounts abuse by his parents and peers when he was a child, and maltreatment at the hands of a worker at the institution. He scrutinizes his mother’s negligence and overt sexuality, and conflates his budding erotic desires as a teen with his yearning for maternal love and attention. All the while the narcissistic Lobster Mary (or Mary 2, as the script calls her) controls the performance: She harasses Mary 1 and bullies John.If that weren’t Freudian enough, Walsh plants recurring images and themes throughout, implying connections between John’s version of his past and the present moment with the actors.What the two Marys are doing here is its own theater — a production that Mary 1 starts to suspect is cruel. As they step into and out of the personalities in John’s life, the lights shift with Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” playing. (Adam Silverman handles the mercurial lighting.)Barrett gives a menacing performance as Mary 2, who embodies some of the more brutal characters in John’s tale and aims her own shots of hostility at Mary 1 (Duffin, who appeared as Ophelia opposite Ruth Negga in “Hamlet” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2020). Duffin’s Mary is empathetic, so much so that she inhabits John’s story, and at some point the voice-over of a character she’s playing overlaps with her voice as she speaks the same lines. The language here — which Walsh writes with aureate poeticism, full of vivid imagery and pointed symbolism — is what gives the show its melancholic beauty.Clare Barrett as the other Mary.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThen there’s Gleeson himself, with his impressive performance. He is a chameleonic TV and film star (“Harry Potter,” “Star Wars,” “Run”) who can convey anything from a villainous sneer to a sensitive whimper with his entire physical bearing. Despite his height, Gleeson seems to wilt like a flower in want of sun. He nervously shuffles around the stage or gets worked into a frenzy — huffing and flailing with explosive bravado, seamlessly accompanied by Carpio’s percussion. (Helen Atkinson handily controls the layered sound design.)There could easily be more Gleeson — and by that I mean more of John’s perspective, because we get only snapshots of his life. By the end, John reasserts that he’s “not like other people” and belongs in the institution. It seems John is a victim of a kind of manipulation; the drama therapy isn’t to help him but to gaslight him into believing he mustn’t ever try to seek freedom. Beneath all the oddities of Walsh’s script is a criticism of the ways in which society fails the mentally ill.It’s unclear whether Walsh is also indicting theater — this is, after all, a play in which a play is used toward devious ends. So perhaps “Medicine” is simply a work of fanciful mysteries. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter. The emotional core of the show is always prevalent.By the end, John’s dejection feels as familiar as a phantom pain. He may still be within the same sad four walls where he began, but Walsh’s production transforms the space from one of isolation into one of empathy that even the audience can share. Because ultimately, a couple of doses of human connection is the best medicine anyone can ask for.MedicineThrough Dec. 5 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More