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    ‘Los Otros’ Review: A Slow-Burning Tale of Melancholy

    Michael John LaChiusa’s delicate new musical starts in Depression-era California and follows two people across six decades.There are musicals that hit you over the head with the instant familiarity of pop songs, or with the thrill of anthems belted to the back of the rear mezzanine. Michael John LaChiusa does not go for any of that, though he came close in 2000 with the jaggedly jazzy, underestimated “The Wild Party,” his most recent Broadway outing as a composer and lyricist.But even for someone who habitually shies away from demonstrative show tunes — or, as his detractors might acidly argue, anything labeled “fun” — the intimate “Los Otros,” opening at A.R.T./New York Theaters, is more an art-song cycle than a musical. It simmers so gently it never reaches a satisfying boil.This sense of a letdown has largely to do with the structure devised by Ellen Fitzhugh (“Grind”), who wrote the book and lyrics: We are led to expect a bigger payoff than the one we end up getting, which is compounded by Noah Himmelstein’s sober direction.The two characters, Carlos (Caesar Samayoa, who was in the original Broadway cast of “Come From Away”) and Lillian (Luba Mason, last seen in “Girl From the North Country”), take turns telling their respective stories, so most of the production consists of short, self-contained solo scenes. When one actor takes center stage, the other waits on the side. Then they switch places in a process repeated a few times over the course of the show, as though they are in a relay race — or rather a relay amble, considering the deliberate pacing.Carlos and Lillian, portrayed with sensitive restraint by Samayoa and Mason, don’t directly interact most of the time, but their tales share some elements: They are set in Southern California and involve the coexistence of the white and Mexican communities. Naturally, we assume these two people are connected in some way — the narrative device would be pointless otherwise — so it’s hard not to ponder, as the show goes on, how Fitzhugh is going to bring them together.Carlos’s story begins in 1933, when he and his mother travel from Mexico to California. We watch as he crosses the decades and discover his sexuality on the way. “One time something happens with Paco and me,” Carlos says. “Then we make it happen many times.” He also becomes an accountant, which, luckily for the audience, does not involve any kind of awakening worth singing about.Most of the life stages Carlos guides us through sync up with big events: a hurricane that hit Mexico during the journey to the United States; the summer of Paco coinciding with the end of World War II; domesticity unfurling with the O.J. Simpson trial in the background in 1995.Lillian’s side of the show, on the other hand, remains tethered to small-cap history, like her making it as a waitress with two daughters. She is often adrift, with failed marriages, an increasing reliance on alcohol and a desperate search for connection — one of them with a teenage boy in a scene that briefly teeters on discomfort before a bittersweet twist. If Lillian’s sections feel more poignant than Carlos’s, it might be because they are loosely drawn from Fitzhugh’s own experience.Mason and Samayoa’s characters take turns telling their respective stories, so most of the production consists of short, self-contained solos.Russ RowlandThe musical has been retooled extensively since it first came to life, as the solo “Tres Niñas,” in the 2008 edition of the Inner Voices series at Premieres, a company that helps develop new musical theater. In the current version, it’s LaChiusa’s score that makes the biggest impression — I would love to hear it with a bigger band than the three-piece here. The composer, as usual, delicately evokes the past without going into full-blown pastiches. Lillian’s first song starts by perfectly evoking the harmonies of its 1952 setting, and Carlos’s reminiscence about picking plums in the 1940s reflects that decade’s swing.In the nearly 30 years since the opening of his first major productions, “First Lady Suite” and “Hello Again,” LaChiusa (who usually writes his own lyrics) has become a musical-theater artist whose modernist style, which has been improperly criticized as not being melodic, has earned more admiration than box-office love.It is an unfair state of affairs — his finest work of the past couple of decades, “Queen of the Mist,” from 2011, was deeply affecting and deserves a greater reputation. At the same time, LaChiusa’s forte is melancholy, which is much harder to monetize than big drama or big comedy. In that regard, “Los Otros” is yet another illustration of his singular talent.Los OtrosThrough Oct. 8 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; premieresnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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    Ars Nova Introduces a Name Your Price Ticketing Model

    For its upcoming season, audiences can pay what they wish. Tickets will start at $5 and increase in $5 increments up to $100 per ticket.The Off Broadway incubator Ars Nova will allow audience members to pay what they wish for theater tickets in a new initiative called “What’s Ars Is Yours: Name Your Price,” the company announced on Wednesday.“It’s not income based, it’s not age based, there’s no demographic basis,” said Renee Blinkwolt, the producing executive director of Ars Nova. “It’s just radically accessible — the doors are wide open to any and everyone to pay what they will.”Beginning on Oct. 6, theatergoers can choose their ticket price for any Ars Nova show at its base on West 54th Street in Hell’s Kitchen — as well as the company’s two productions at Greenwich House — for its 2022-23 season. Tickets will start at $5 and increase in $5 increments up to $100 per ticket.Ars Nova’s Off Broadway season includes the world premiere of “Hound Dog” (Oct. 6-Nov. 5), in which a young musician returns to her hometown, Ankara, Turkey, to look after her widowed father, and the world premiere of “(pray)” (March 9-April 15), a choreopoem that follows the form of a Sunday Baptist Church service while transporting audiences to an ancestral forest.Tickets to Ars Nova’s most recent production, “Oratorio for Living Things,” started at $35 and went up to $95 for premium seats. In a time of persistent drops in attendance, removing the financial barrier could be the extra incentive that gets people to the theater.Talks around a name-your-own price model started around this time last year, Blinkwolt said, knowing that audiences might feel nervous returning to in-person performances. After a year of planning and debating, the company is introducing the initiative for its 20th-anniversary season — and second in-person season since the start of the pandemic — during “a time of great change and transition,” Blinkwolt said.The pay-what-you-wish tickets idea is, of course, nothing new. For instance, in 2013, the Forum Theater in Silver Spring, Md., instituted “Forum for All,” under which patrons could attend performances for as little as 25 cents. And in 2017, the Off Broadway play “Afterglow” offered 10 pay-what-you-wish tickets to some performances at the Loft at the Davenport Theater.Still, having that ticketing for an entire season could signal a new standard in arts accessibility in New York City. Ars Nova says it will treat the effort as a learning experiment, with plans to assess the financial impact at the end of the year along with evaluating if the model succeeded in motivating attendance and diversifying the demographics of the audience.“My hope is that people are curious about it, they’re excited about it, and they build back that habit of getting together with friends, enjoying each other’s company in real time and space and taking in a show,” Blinkwolt said. More

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    Review: Finding Community in ‘As You Like It’

    This shimmering Shakespeare adaptation at the Delacorte Theater retains the outline of the original, while making space for songs. You don’t have to sing along, though you may want to.The Forest of Arden is where you head when the city won’t hold you. When laws are unjust, when custom constricts, when institutions squeeze and shrink you, here, at last, is space to breathe and to be. Manhattan razed its woodlands long ago, of course. (A lone stand of trees, in Inwood Hill Park, remains.) But on a summer night, in Central Park, squint a little and you can imagine a forest here — the refuge, the bounty, the hush.You won’t have to squint hard at “As You Like It,” the shimmering Shakespeare adaptation at the Delacorte Theater, courtesy of Public Works. Adapted by Laurie Woolery, who directs, and the singer-songwriter Shaina Taub, who provides the music and lyrics, this easeful, intentional show bestows the pleasures typical of a Shakespeare comedy — adventure, disguise, multiple marriages, pentameter for days. And, in just 90 minutes, it unites its dozens of actors and its hundreds of audience members as citizens of the same joyful community.Taub and Woolery’s adaptation retains the outline of the original, while shortening and tightening the talkier bits, making space for songs. Rosalind (Rebecca Naomi Jones), the daughter of the exiled Duke Senior (Darius De Haas), falls instantly for Orlando (Ato Blankson-Wood), the younger son of a dead nobleman. Threatened by the current Duke (Eric Pierre), they flee, with friends and servants, to the Forest of Arden, where Duke Senior has formed an alternate, more egalitarian court.Taub has cast herself as Jaques, the emo philosopher, who opens the show with the limpid ballad, “All the World’s a Stage,” singing: “All the world’s a stage/And everybody’s in the show/Nobody’s a pro.”These lyrics do a lot of work, work that transcends paraphrase. “As You Like It” is a production of Public Works, a division of the Public Theater that partners with community groups. So the song serves as a kind of pre-emptive apology, an acknowledgment of amateurism. Yet the lines function as an invitation, too, an inducement to imagine yourself as part of the show, to join in its creation. A big ask? Maybe. On a breeze-soothed evening, with the city quieted and the lights aglow, it won’t feel that way. And for those who blench and tremble at the thought of audience participation, take a breath. You don’t even have to sing along, though you may want to.I first saw “As You Like It” during a short run at the Delacorte Theater in the summer of 2017, after the travel bans had been instituted, but before the widespread adoption of the Trump administration’s family separation policy. All scrolling felt like doom scrolling then; to open the morning paper was to start the day with some fresh horror. Things could — and did — get worse. I remember experiencing the show, profoundly and with some tears, as a temporary respite.From left, Idania Quezada, Christopher M. Ramirez and Rebecca Naomi Jones in the Public Works adaptation of “As You Like It” at the Delacorte Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo revisit it now, when disaster seems less immediate, is to relax into the brisk pleasure of the work. Jones, an actress with a voice of steel and sweetness, like a knife baked into a birthday cake, is a dynamic Rosalind. And if you admired Blankson-Wood in “Slave Play,” you will enjoy his playful turn here, as in the exuberant R&B number, “Will U Be My Bride.” But the show’s success owes less to any individual performer than to the generous and sociable whole. Taub’s lyrics are simple, but it takes effort to write lines that feel effortless. The same goes for Sonya Tayeh’s fluid choreography, restaged by Billy Griffin and achievable for all kinds of bodies, and Woolery’s insouciant use of stage space.The stage itself has an oddly flimsy set, by Myung Hee Cho, a turntable dotted with trees that don’t look a lot like trees. But Emilio Sosa’s costumes and Isabella Byrd’s lights provide happy splashes of color. James Ortiz designed the deer puppets; if they lack the emotional heft of the cow he designed for the current revival of “Into the Woods,” well, you can’t have everything. That “Into the Woods” revival is directed by Lear deBessonet, who inaugurated Public Works, which Woolery now leads. Small wonder then, but wonder all the same, that the two most joyous shows in New York right now, the two most engaged with questions of community and duty and care, have this shared maternity.If “As You Like It” succeeds as entertainment — and it does, fluently, enough to make you wonder if Shakespeare in the Park should stick to comedies and musicals and maybe the occasional romance — it articulates and answers graver concerns. There is a persistent fear in American politics that to grant freedom is to invite anarchy. “As You Like It” offers another possibility. There is no rule of law in the Forest of Arden. But rather than descend into riot, its inhabitants practice mutual aid. They live in harmony, figuratively and — when De Haas swoops over and around the melody — literally.This confirms Woolery and Taub’s adaptation as a kind of thought experiment: What might happen if a community were free to determine its own best principles and practices? Because “As You Like It” swells its cast with the members of partner organizations — Domestic Workers United, Military Resilience Foundation and Children’s Aid, among them — the show is also proof of concept. There is hierarchy here, of course. The direction is by Woolery alone and the folks with Equity cards occupy the prime roles. (To put the lie to Taub’s lyrics, somebody’s a pro.)But if the theater were really made welcoming and accessible to all, this is what it might manifest — a stage bursting with performers diverse in age, race, size, habit and circumstance, an audience distributed across a similar spectrum. “As You Like It” offers that rare thing — a New York theater that looks like the city itself and feels like a promise of what the city, at its best, could be.What a feat that is. And what a gift. So go ahead. Wait in line and then walk to the theater through the canopy of trees. Shelter here awhile.As You Like ItThrough Sept. 11 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    The Many Violations of the Violent Birth Scene

    Does the gory surprise C-section in “House of the Dragon” represent a grim historical reality, an urgent political statement or a worn cultural cliché?“Are you sure you want to watch this?” my husband asked as we cued up the “House of the Dragon” premiere last week.We had both seen the online warnings that the “Game of Thrones” prequel kicked off with a “grisly,” “brutal” and “gory medieval C-section.” I had undergone a cesarean section a couple of years ago, during the birth of my son, and now I was again pregnant and preparing for the possibility of a second surgery. But yes, I was sure I wanted to watch it.I was, I guess, curious about what the most horrific interpretation of the procedure might look like. I’m still thinking about the scene — not because it is so violent, but because its violence is framed as so profound. Like so many depictions of pregnancy, its visceral and emotional possibilities are largely obscured by a tangle of clichés posturing as insight.King’s Landing, after all, is not a subtle place. At the top of the episode, an uncomfortably pregnant Queen Aemma foreshadows her fate: “The childbed is our battlefield,” she tells her daughter, Princess Rhaenyra. “We must learn to face it with a stiff lip.” Meanwhile, her husband, King Viserys, is ominously confident that this pregnancy, after a run of miscarriages and stillbirths, will finally produce a male heir.Instead, the queen’s labor reaches a dangerous impasse. The grand maester informs the king that the baby is in a breech position, and that “it sometimes becomes necessary for the father to make an impossible choice” — to “sacrifice one or to lose them both.” Viserys approves the surgical removal of the baby without Aemma’s knowledge or consent. As birth attendants restrain their desperate, confused queen, the grand maester slices into her belly. The queen dies, and her baby dies soon after.Throughout the violent birth scene, the queen is shot from seemingly every angle; no perspective on her pregnant body goes unseen.Ollie Upton/HBOWhat is the meaning of this gruesome spectacle? George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” the book on which “House of the Dragon” is based, has the queen die in childbirth in an unspecified manner; only in the show does it become a murder by way of a rogue belly slicing. In a series of interviews, Miguel Sapochnik, one of the showrunners and the episode’s director, exhaustively explained the resonance of the choice. The scene — intercut with a bloody jousting tournament mounted by the king in premature celebration — was designed to be “a distillation of the experience of men and the experience of women” in Westeros, Sapochnik said. But it was also meant to reveal “parallels to our own past and present,” he added. It represents the grimness of childbirth in the medieval era, from which Martin’s fantasy world draws, when “giving birth was violence”; but it also represents the grimness of childbirth in post-Roe America, when the scene reads as “more timely and impactful than ever.”“Anxious not to get it wrong,” eager “not to shy away” but also “not to sensationalize,” the creative team — the episode was written, directed and edited by men — enlisted two midwives to advise on set and innumerable women to screen the sequence before it aired. The scene, Sapochnik promised, was just the beginning of a whole season of portentous births, each seeded with additional gender commentary. The theme of this birth, he explained, was “torture.”The sheer violence of the scene didn’t shock me. (Earlier in the episode, a character slices off a man’s penis and tosses it atop a pushcart piled with various severed appendages — violent spectacle is a major element of the show.) But the implied profundity of the violence struck me as faintly ridiculous. The loading of meaning onto the queen’s death felt like an attempt to sidestep the criticism that dogged “Game of Thrones” — that it indulged in senseless violence against women. But the imposition of sense on such violence can also feel unsatisfying, as the female character’s interiority is subsumed into the creators’ effort to make a statement.The showrunners intercut the childbirth scene with the cartoonish violence of the jousting to make points about both the past and the present.Ollie Upton/HBOThe scene creaks under the weight of so many signifiers. The queen is shot from seemingly every angle; no perspective on her pregnant body goes unseen. We see her moaning in the background, tangled in bedclothes. We zoom close on her delirious face in gauzy light, evoking the softness of a maternity shoot. Often we see her from above, as if we are peering down on her in a surgical theater. Or we spy her from beyond her rounded stomach, as if we are attendants assisting in the delivery. We look down upon her as she is cut open, drained of blood and stuffed with reaching hands.As the scene wears on, the camera itself seems moved by cowardice. It retreats further and further from the queen’s perspective, assuming a remote and clinical gaze. Often it looks away entirely, focusing instead on the cartoonish gore of the jousting,which comes to stand in for the violence of the birth. The queen’s screams are silenced, overlaid with the sounds of a roaring tournament crowd and the outlandish squishing of skulls and brains. In its desperation for meaning, the scene does become senseless.Being pregnant can feel like passing from the physical world into the world of signs. Pregnancy is weighted with so much metaphorical significance that it is even a metaphor for significance — pregnant with meaning. But I’m not pregnant with meaning; I’m just pregnant. And so I watch depictions of pregnancy and birth from my own removed position, curious what my experience signifies to other people, and what it is supposed to say about our culture and politics.The “House of the Dragon” C-section is neither historically accurate (the mother’s life was valued over that of the fetus in much medieval teaching, as Rebecca Onion detailed in Slate) nor particularly of the moment (post-Roe, many women are begging doctors for surgical interventions in their pregnancies). But it does access a persistent cliché: The C-section is a birth choice loaded with stigma, as Leslie Jamison noted in an essay on the procedure last year. It is coded as “both miraculous and suspect, simultaneously a deus ex machina and a tyrannical intervention” — the antithesis of a “natural birth.”This construction voids the mother’s role in childbirth, ceding it to a patriarchal medical establishment. The riddle from “Macbeth” — which posits that because Macduff was “untimely ripped” from his mother’s womb, he is not “of woman born” — persists. On-screen pregnancies still rarely end in C-sections. When they do, they are the stuff of horror. As the film critic Violet LeVoit has argued, the vaginal birth is framed as the climactic final struggle of the hero’s pregnancy journey. A C-section, then, renders our hero a victim — and a failure.None of this coincides with my own experience. I didn’t feel bad for having a C-section, or feel that I didn’t truly “give birth” to my son; I felt that my doctors and I did what was medically necessary to deliver him safely. And yet I feel nagged by this imposed narrative, and I am reminded of it whenever I see a birth scene shot from above, as the “House of the Dragon” one often is.Birth was, for me, an overwhelmingly sensory experience, not a visual one. During labor, I couldn’t see past my own abdomen. My strongest memory of the surgery, which the hospital shielded from my view with a raised blue tarp, is of the uncanny release of pressure in my anesthetized body when the baby was removed. As it was happening, a doctor asked if I wanted her to photograph the moment, and I impulsively agreed, thinking that I could always delete the image if I couldn’t stomach it. When I look at the photo now, I recognize my son’s features emerging from the bloodied edges of my body, but I don’t recognize the point of view. It is as if I am reliving another person’s memory, not my own.So no, the depiction of violence in birth does not bother me. But the bird’s-eye view of it does. The camera’s insistence on its lofty perspective, on looking down on the birthing woman’s full body from a spectator’s remove — that strikes me as the real violation. In those jarring shots, the depiction of male violence becomes indistinguishable from the male gaze.Maybe future “House of the Dragon” births will resonate with my own feelings about childbirth. And I’m sure other parents, bringing their own experiences to the episode, left it with different interpretations. But that is the trouble with trying to distill the entire “experience of women” into a scene — the idea is absurd, even in a fantasy world. More

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    Laura Linney to Return to Broadway in New David Auburn Play

    “Summer, 1976,” about a friendship between two women in Ohio, will open next spring at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Laura Linney will return to Broadway next spring, in a new play by David Auburn about a friendship that arises between two women during America’s bicentennial.The play, called “Summer, 1976,” will be presented at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater by the Manhattan Theater Club, or M.T.C., which is one of four nonprofit organizations with Broadway houses. M.T.C. had previously announced plans to stage the play this fall, Off Broadway, but on Tuesday announced that Linney had agreed to lead the cast and that the production would now be delayed to spring and moved to Broadway.Linney, 58, is well known for her work on film (“The Savages”) and television (“Ozark”); she has won four Emmy Awards and has been nominated for three Academy Awards.She has returned often to the stage, performing in 12 previous Broadway productions, and has been nominated five times for Tony Awards. Her most recent Broadway role was in early 2020, just before the pandemic closed theaters, when she starred in the solo play “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” which was also produced by M.T.C.Auburn, the playwright, is best known as the author of “Proof,” which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in drama, as well as the Tony Award for best play. That play was also produced on Broadway by M.T.C.“Summer, 1976” will be directed by Daniel Sullivan, who won a Tony for directing “Proof,” and who also directed Auburn’s 2012 Broadway play, “The Columnist.” Sullivan has directed Broadway productions featuring Linney three times previously, including most recently a 2017 revival of “The Little Foxes.”M.T.C. said that previews for “Summer, 1976” would begin April 4; it did not announce an opening date or other members of the cast. The organization described the new play as about an unexpected friendship between two Ohio women, “a fiercely iconoclastic artist and single mom” played by Linney, and “a free-spirited yet naïve young housewife.” The characters “navigate motherhood, ambition and intimacy, and help each other discover their own independence.” More

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    Gabriel Byrne’s ‘Walking With Ghosts’ Is Heading to Broadway

    The play, adapted from his memoir of the same name, will run for 75 performances starting in October.To Gabriel Byrne, his play “Walking With Ghosts,” adapted from his memoir of the same name, doesn’t refer to haunting phantoms but the lost people and places that we carry within us.“Who we are now is the result of what we were,” Byrne said in a video interview.In this autobiographical solo show, he tackles identity as an immigrant separated from his Irish homeland, along with memories of love and failure as people age. The play, directed by Lonny Price, will begin performances in October on Broadway at the Music Box Theater.The show premiered in January at the Gaiety Theater in Dublin and will continue from Sept. 7 to Sept. 16 in London’s Apollo Theater before it begins 75 performances in New York.Byrne described the feeling of returning to the New York City stage as a soup of nerves and excitement. As both a writer of and performer in the show, he said he wants the message surrounding the human experience to be and feel universal.He makes reference to what it means to be an immigrant and to be home.“As soon as you leave your place of belonging, in a strange way, you don’t belong anywhere else,” Byrne said.Although Byrne lives in Rockport, Maine, he grew up outside Dublin, in Walkinstown, the oldest of six. He left Ireland at age 11 to enroll in a Catholic seminary in England, but renounced his faith after he said he was sexually abused by a priest.He later joined an acting troupe in college. Byrne was most recently on the New York City stage as James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in 2016. He played a survivor in a BBC adaptation of H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” in 2019.Lonny Price first directed Byrne in the New York Philharmonic’s “Camelot” in 2008. Impressed with Byrne’s performance, Price, who directed “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” and “Sunset Boulevard,” said he was thrilled to work alongside Byrne again, as the actor embodies the friends, teachers, religious figures and family members that influenced his life.“I think the play has a kind of healing quality to it where people look at their own lives and find peace,” Price said.Byrne said that in the play, he aims to provoke the audience into thinking about their lives, their parents and their decisions.“My own belief is that every single person has an extraordinary story to tell and what I’ve done is I’ve put mine down, not because I want people to think or look at my life,” he said. “I want people to look at their own.” More

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    Ayo Edebiri and Her Dog Gromit Go to the Bookstore

    A morning out in Los Angeles with the surprise star of “The Bear” and her Chihuahua mix.LOS ANGELES — Ayo Edebiri has an arresting screen presence because she doesn’t look like she’s acting. In “The Bear,” the frenetic restaurant drama that has been one of the most talked-about shows of the summer, she is usually the calm at the center of the storm.In real life, she’s the same — unassuming, unshowy — and she speaks in an even tone. In other words, she’s not the kind of person who will break into a series of practiced anecdotes when a reporter shows up.On a hot day in Los Angeles, she was standing outside her apartment complex in the Los Feliz neighborhood, waiting for her puppy, Gromit, to do his business. She then picked up what he had left in the grass with a biodegradable green baggy. She looked around for a trash can but couldn’t find one, so she ended up tucking the baggy into her canvas tote.Gromit is a small dog with black and white hair. He is part Chihuahua, part minikin and part terrier, Ms. Edebiri said, adding that she knows the mix because she had his DNA tested.“He’s a melting pot,” she said. “I think he’s the American dream.”Ms. Edebiri, whose first name means joy in Yoruba, grew up in Boston, where she sang in a church choir and appeared in plays put on by the congregation. At 26, after a few years of writing for television and working as a stand-up comic and podcaster, she finds herself becoming known as an actress.“I love doing the show,” she said of “The Bear.” “Even when we were making it, we all felt like it was really special and an honor to do. But also because of that, I think there was this fear that people wouldn’t get it.”Ms. Edebiri plays the sous-chef Sydney Adamu on the critically acclaimed show “The Bear.” FXPeople got it. And they responded to her character, the even-keeled sous-chef Sydney Adamu, a kind of stand-in for every unflappable Gen Z-er who suspects that they might have a better idea of how to run a workplace than their chaotic boss.Gromit started moving toward some broken glass in the street. “That’s glass,” Ms. Edebiri said in her calm voice. “We are not doing that, dude.” She gave the leash the gentlest of tugs, and Gromit heeded her command.Before “The Bear,” Ms. Edebiri liked to make roast chicken for friends. While preparing for her role, she took courses at the Institute of Culinary Education in Pasadena and shadowed several chefs in Chicago and New York. And, yes, she learned how to prepare the cola braised ribs that become an obsession for her character.“I made it a lot,” she said. “There was a lot of practicing. It needs to look real. And if we’re practicing it, you might as well make it taste real.”Ms. Edebiri with Gromit near her home.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesIn addition to her work on “The Bear,” she played Hattie on the AppleTV+ show “Dickinson.” She also provides the voice for Missy Foreman-Greenwald, a biracial girl feeling her way through puberty, on the animated Netflix series “Big Mouth.” So far in her acting career, the characters she plays seem to deal with anxiety by putting on a brave front, and they share a quiet confidence.“I don’t have to dig too deep to access that anxiety,” she said.For a time, she said, she was ready to accept that she didn’t have what it takes to be a performer.“I remember singing in the choir and doing plays, and my god-mom, she was like, ‘You know what? This may not be your gift,’” Ms. Edebiri recalled with a laugh. “She was like, ‘You’re good, but this might not be for you.’ I was like, ‘For sure.’”She changed her mind during middle school and high school, she said, when she started doing improv. After that, she went to New York University with the aim of becoming a teacher, only to realize it wasn’t for her. At the behest of some college friends, she started doing stand-up.“I was definitely nervous about the idea of performing alone,” she said. “I didn’t like being onstage and was very nervous at first.”Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesAfter a few years spent working in writers’ rooms Ms. Edebiri became known for her work in front of the camera.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesAfter graduation, she moved to Los Angeles and wrote for the NBC sitcom “Sunnyside,” the FX series “What We Do in the Shadows” and “Dickinson.” Leaving the comfort of the writers’ room to go in front of the camera was a big adjustment, she said.“It’s weird,” she said. “I look like this, so I might as well look like this. I don’t want to be self-mythologizing, but I do feel like, growing up, on TV, there weren’t a lot of young Black women who I felt actually looked like me or people I knew, or were allowed to have imperfections.”“There’s a lot of Black women on TV in the media,” she continued, “and I feel like we look different, but we also still look like ourselves. I feel like that’s important and beautiful.”She went into Bru, an airy coffee shop, and ordered a lavender lemonade with sparkling water. When asked what she has learned from her various roles, she demurred. “This is like an actress question,” she said. “I’m not used to answering questions like an actor.”Gromit gets V.I.P. treatment at Skylight Books.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesSoon, Ms. Edebiri and Gromit walked into the Skylight Bookstore, an indie shop with a huge ficus tree surrounded by walnut colored shelves. She came across “The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories” by the late Finnish writer, illustrator and comic book author Tove Jansson. She tapped the cover with her index finger, ornamented with a rustic gold signet ring that reads “Libra.”“She rules,” Ms. Edebiri said, picking up the book. “She’s like this incredible lesbian that made the Moomin comics.”As she moved toward the checkout area, Ms. Edebiri was asked if she would like to go back in time and give her younger self some words of advice.“I don’t think I would say anything, because that messes with the rules of time travel,” she said. “Everything you learn is in the time and in the season that you’re supposed to.”Near the cash register, she spotted a cookbook, “Black Food: Stories, Art and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora,” edited by Bryant Terry. She set Gromit on top of the checkout table — along with the Tove Jansson book — before she squatted down to open the cookbook.Ms. Edebiri and Gromit on a recent morning in Los Angeles.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesWhile she flipped through its pages, her dog was becoming a star of the store. He wagged his tail on the makeshift stage, ears pointed upward, as three store employees fussed over him, petting him and giving his ears a scratch. After Ms. Edebiri set the cookbook near the cash register, one of the workers started reading to Gromit from the Jansson book.“He is loving it,” Ms. Edebiri said with a laugh. More

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    Sarah Steele, of ‘The Good Fight,’ on Finding Love in Brooklyn

    The actress, who plays Marissa Gold on the legal drama, fell hard for her new Brooklyn Heights co-op — and for her new partner, a lawyer.During her 20s, like countless other New Yorkers in that age group, Sarah Steele “bopped around apartments that mostly, you know, weren’t so nice,” she said.Ms. Steele’s résumé of rentals includes studio apartments in Prospect Heights and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as well as a diminutive one-bedroom in Williamsburg that she shared with a longtime (now ex) boyfriend.A few years ago, when a college roommate went through a breakup of her own, “I saw it as an opportunity to live with an old friend. We moved in together in October of 2019, so we did the whole pandemic together basically watching ‘Sex and the City,’” said Ms. Steele, now 33, who plays the fearless secretary turned P.I. turned lawyer Marissa Gold on the Paramount+ legal drama “The Good Fight.” Its sixth and final season begins Sept. 8.The two-bedroom apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was a strange place: The oversized bathroom with its Jacuzzi and red light seemed to have been conceived with Russian oligarchs in mind. And it was a strange, troublous time.“I haven’t talked about this publicly much, but I had cancer,” Ms. Steele said. “I had a sarcoma in my leg — which, you know, knock on wood, I’m cancer-free now — but I had to have surgery and couldn’t walk for the first, like, two months we were in the apartment.”Sarah Steele, 33Occupation: ActorHome sweet home: “A couple of months ago, there was a really, really long, hard day on ‘The Good Fight,’ where I didn’t get home until like 3:00 in the morning or something. I put my bag down and starting sobbing with gratitude that I have this place.”She continued: “We were like, ‘We are due for some good luck.’ And my roommate got up one day and said, ‘We are both going to find amazing love while we’re in this apartment.’”Sure enough, two months later, both found “incredible partners,” Ms. Steele said. Then, in the summer of 2021, she found an incredible co-op in Brooklyn Heights. And barely a week ago, her incredible partner, Sean Patrick Smith, a lawyer, moved in with her.Sarah Steele, who plays Marissa Gold on the Paramount+ series “The Good Fight,” lives in a two-bedroom co-op on the fifth floor of a walk-up building in Brooklyn Heights. “I walked in and fell completely in love,” she said. Regan Wood for The New York TimesThere are two love stories to unpack here, and one quite stunning coincidence.Love story No. 1 involves the apartment: a light-filled, two-bedroom walk-up with a wall of casement windows in the living room, two decorative fireplaces, a kitchen with a skylight, and a washer and dryer (no more lugging sacks of dirty clothes to the laundromat). But the most persuasive selling point was the array of built-in bookcases. “I was an English major, and I’m totally book-obsessed and so is my partner,” Ms. Steele said.“I walked in and I was like, ‘I really want to buy this place,’” she said. “I asked my parents to come look at it, because I was like, ‘I can’t tell if I’ve just gone insane and can’t see what’s problematic,’ because it is a fifth-floor walk-up. But then my parents came and they were like, ‘Nope, you’re not insane. Get it right now.’”Love story No. 2 stars Mr. Smith, whom Ms. Steele met on Tinder. On their first date, the two learned they were from the same neighborhood outside of Philadelphia. But there was another, far more rom-com-ready real estate connection: The house Ms. Steele grew up in had previously been owned by Mr. Smith’s grandmother, who turned it into a day care center after raising 10 children there.“The plates look like they’re trying to escape,” she said of the wall display in the kitchen.Regan Wood for The New York Times“Through talking to Sean, I was like, ‘Wait, are you talking about this house in Philly where I grew up?’ I was like, ‘Wait, I know your family!’” Ms. Steele recalled. “I told him, ‘I was like 5 years old and putting on a little concert for your grandmother.’”Among Mr. Smith’s contributions to the ornamentation of his new home: a portrait of said grandmother with a background that Ms. Steele recognized as the first floor of her parents’ house. The painting now hangs over the fireplace in the living room.The apartment represents Ms. Steele’s first stab at serious nesting. “Before, it was like, ‘I know I’ll only be here for a couple of years,’” she said. “And when that’s true, you don’t want to buy crazy expensive furniture, because who knows if it’s going to fit in your next place.”A bit at sea, she enlisted the aid of Adam Charlap Hyman, a designer and artist. Their first conversation went something like this:Mr. Charlap Hyman: Could you tell me some things you like in other people’s houses?Ms. Steele: I really like when people hang up Christmas lights all year long.Mr. Charlap Hyman: We’re not doing that.Ms. Steele: OK. Well, I really like tie-dye.Mr. Charlap Hyman: No.The built-in bookcases were a big selling point for Ms. Steele.Regan Wood for The New York TimesBut Mr. Charlap Hyman took note of the bohemian aesthetic his client was after and offered up a version that was, as he put it, classier, with an adroit deployment of patterns on the sofa and on a pair of recently acquired stools. The two had a meeting of the minds about a custom-made daybed under the living room windows (perfect!) and an arrangement of pottery plates on a wall in the kitchen. “They’re awesome,” said Ms. Steele, who independently elected to go with beaded curtains to conceal the washer-dryer unit.“I grew up with a beaded curtain in front of my childhood bedroom,” she said. “But they were pink and plastic, and from Hot Topic.”Star-struck bargain hunters hit pay dirt this past weekend: Ms. Steele and Mr. Smith had a stoop sale to divest themselves of duplicate pots, pans and other kitchenware. But the couple have seamlessly commingled their books, their art (much of it covers the walls of the second bedroom) and their greenery.“But I’m a plant killer,” Ms. Steele confided. “All the ones that look good are Sean’s.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More