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    A Theatrical Neophyte With the Know-How of a Pro

    Jodie Comer, from the TV series “Killing Eve,” makes a thrilling stage debut in “Prima Facie” on London’s West End.LONDON — If you’re going to venture onstage for the first time, a nearly two-hour, emotionally fraught solo play without a break might not seem the best place to start. But the TV actress Jodie Comer, better known as the assassin Villanelle in the Emmy-winning series “Killing Eve,” has taken to the West End in just such a play, “Prima Facie” by Suzie Miller, with gleaming-eyed assurance.First seen in 2019 in the writer’s native Australia, “Prima Facie” is at the Harold Pinter Theater through June 18 — though it will presumably have more life as long as its star chooses to stick with it. “House Full” signs have marked out Comer as the box-office equal of such theatrical heavy hitters as Mark Rylance in “Jerusalem,” the Jez Butterworth masterwork playing just streets away.Comer is cool and commanding as a defense lawyer named Tessa who discovers, at considerable personal cost, the limitations of the law. Assaulted on a night out by a colleague whom she brings to trial, Tessa soon finds herself confronting a legal system whose strictures even a mind as shrewd and sharp as hers cannot overcome. The second half devolves into an angry broadside, but you can only commend the impulses behind a play that wants to educate as well as entertain: Audience members are handed leaflets on the way out to raise awareness about sexual consent.Justin Martin’s busy staging finds Comer leaping onto the furniture and engulfed by a brief onstage rainstorm, to keep a potentially static monologue interesting to the eye: A chair at one point becomes a toilet bowl into which Tessa is sick, and a crucial costume change is done in full view of the audience.Comer plays to all levels of the theater, often sweeping her gaze upward as if to enlist us as her jury. And though she speaks the text at breakneck speed, there’s no denying the visceral power of an evening that owes its sellout status to a theatrical neophyte who possesses the know-how of a seasoned pro.Nicola Walker in Emlyn Williams’s “The Corn Is Green,” directed by Dominic Cooke at the National Theater.Johan PerssonThe director Dominic Cooke’s revival of “The Corn Is Green,” by contrast, is a large-scale production featuring a male ensemble of lusty-voiced Welsh coal miners. But the star attraction is Nicola Walker, a 2013 Olivier Award winner whose gathering TV acclaim since is surely attracting audiences to the National’s Lyttelton auditorium, through June 11: She headlines the legal drama “The Split,” which started its third and final season on the BBC last month.Walker plays the crusading teacher Miss Moffat in “The Corn Is Green,” a 1938 play by Emlyn Williams that draws from that Welshman’s singular path toward literary self-confidence and success. A brisk, no-nonsense Englishwoman, Miss Moffat has arrived in a rural Welsh mining village at the start of the 20th century to bring literacy to a community of colliers distinguished, she’s quick to point out, by their smell. (Their daily routine is hot and sweaty.) One of these begrimed youngsters, Morgan (the charismatic Iwan Davies), displays an aptitude for the life of the mind and not just the mines, and Miss Moffat leads him toward a scholarship to Oxford that the feisty lad at times resists. Morgan is disinclined, at least at first, to be the “little pit pony” that his keen teacher would have him be, though he soon realizes that education makes an entirely new life possible.The play’s journey is preordained, and some of the bumps on the way are because of Williams, who pushes Miss Moffat in a direction — not to be revealed here — that doesn’t entirely jibe with her character. But Cooke enlivens a time-honored tale by involving Williams directly as his play’s narrator (played by Gareth David-Lloyd), setting the scene and monitoring events throughout. And a vigorous Walker invests the peppery spinster at its inspirational center with a fiercely beating heart. Morgan is better for having met her, as are we.Change hovers less happily over “Middle,” the beautifully acted new play from David Eldridge running in the National’s smallest auditorium, the Dorfman, through June 18. A two-hander about a couple in crisis, the play returns to the stage another fine actress, Claire Rushbrook, who is better known for work on film and TV. (Her credits include “Doctor Who” and “Whitechapel,” two well-known British series, and the wonderful Mike Leigh film “Secrets and Lies.”)Daniel Ryan and Claire Rushbrook in David Eldridge’s “Middle,” directed by Polly Findlay at the National Theater.Johan PerssonRushbrook’s Maggie has been married for 16 years to Gary (Daniel Ryan), and the two have an 8-year-old daughter who is in bed upstairs when a sleepless Maggie enters the kitchen before dawn to inform her husband that she’s not sure she still loves him. What ensues is a reckoning across 100 minutes (no intermission) in which the pair, both nearing 50, figure out where they are heading next.Gary’s response, at least at first, is to keep things light, but that doesn’t last. By the end, tears have been shed and crockery smashed on the way to a movingly ambivalent finish. Life doesn’t always allow for tidy closure and nor does “Middle,” which suggests that muddling through is sometimes the only option. Will Maggie leave Gary for John, a policeman with whom she has gone on a date to Tate Modern? She may not know herself, and Rushbrook communicates an uncertainty that is immediately raw. Her eventual breakdown scene feels lived from within.Ryan does well, too, countering his wife’s truth-telling by saying he finds “complete honesty” overrated: He’d rather make jokes than discuss dissatisfactions that are no less real than his wife’s. (Among other things, he wanted a second child, and she did not.) Where Maggie speaks what’s on her mind openly, Gary hides his feelings behind a smoke screen of banter.Polly Findlay’s production keeps us guessing, and the emotional swerves are skillfully navigated throughout. As with Comer and Walker in their plays, “Middle” offers an actress at the top of her game forsaking the screen for the in-the-moment excitement only found onstage.Prima Facie. Directed by Justin Martin. Harold Pinter Theater, through June 18; NTLive broadcast on July 21.The Corn Is Green. Directed by Dominic Cooke. National Theater, through June 11.Middle. Directed by Polly Findlay. National Theater, through June 18. More

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    ‘Mother Courage’ Review: Selling Her Wares Amid the Havoc of War

    Irondale Ensemble’s adaptation of Brecht’s antiwar epic captures some of its spirit but lacks any real philosophical or political heft.There’s no virtue in war. But there is profit — for those ruthless enough to get it.So preaches Bertolt Brecht in his play “Mother Courage and Her Children,” a new adaptation of which is now running as part of Irondale Ensemble’s Brecht in Exile series. This production, directed and adapted by Jim Niesen, using John Willett’s classic translation, captures some of the spirit of Brecht’s cynical war fable but none of the philosophical or political heft.Mother Courage (an appropriately brusque Vicky Gilmore, in a knit hat, leather jacket and combat boots), traveling with her three children, is selling goods from a cart during the Thirty Years’ War. There’s Eilif (Nolan Kennedy), her pugnacious elder son who’s recruited as a soldier; Swiss Cheese (Terry Greiss), her honest but dimwitted younger son who becomes an army paymaster; and Kattrin (Jacqueline Joncas), her mute daughter. While peddling her wares over the course of several years, this mother and her family meet soldiers, a cook, a chaplain, a prostitute and a spy, and ultimately her children become direct or indirect casualties of the war she aimed to get rich on.“Mother Courage” is being produced and staged by Irondale at its space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a former Sunday school auditorium with chipped walls and giant plaques announcing the Beatitudes, which would have worked for this no-frills play if it weren’t undermined by what precedes it. Before the show, which has been marketed as an immersive experience, audience members can have a drink in the makeshift lobby set up with picnic tables; beer and soft pretzels, courtesy of DSK Brooklyn, are served from a cart in the corner. It’s meant to recall a biergarten, but is more a gimmick than an actual part of the show.In other words, it looks and feels like any other hipster hangout in Brooklyn.In his staging, Niesen retains Brecht’s title cards, the expository bits of narrative announcing what will transpire in each of the 12 scenes in this tedious two-and-a-half-hour epic.There are songs, too, as in Brecht’s original text — exegetic tunes that the characters break into — set to new music by Sam Day Harmet, who performs here with Erica Mancini and Stephen LaRosa. The score — incorporating banjo, guitar, drums, accordion and a synthesizer — begins with a war march before shooting into different genres, from bluegrass to ’80s synth pop and garage rock.The music’s too chic and eccentric for the production and the actors, who perform on, in and around an unsightly two-level scaffolding structure draped with blankets and curtains (scenic design is by Ken Rothchild).As for the actors: How can they be critiqued when Brecht wrote an unsentimental play with characters who aren’t meant to be empathized with, who don’t appeal to our hearts but our minds? Of the show’s central brood, the women are most memorable — Gilmore’s despicable Mother Courage and Joncas’s skittish Kattrin, who communicates through a series of fearsome croaks. The rest of the cast — all of whom play several characters — appear most comfortable when they tap into the production’s absurd sense of humor, such as Stephen Cross’s indulgent performance as a clucking, mischievous capon and Michael-David Gordon’s huffing and griping as a weary prostitute named Yvette. Many of the performances feel lethargic, and the cast awkwardly hiccups through the dialogue of even the smallest bits of improvised comedy.Niesen’s direction flattens an already challenging work of theater that, despite its influence, didn’t quite catch on in the United States, where agitprop and other kinds of homiletic plays are less popular. This “Mother Courage” feels like pedagogy encased in a bubble, isolated from, say, an overseas war — not to mention the political warmongering and consumptive capitalism in our own country.This production then reads as an indelicate transcription, because Brecht may be stone cold, but that doesn’t mean his work lacks spark. The spark of revolution, that is — though Brecht pioneered the Lehrstück, or “learning play,” his aim wasn’t just to educate but to incite audiences to make change in their society. He wanted his plays to “knock them into shape,” Brecht wrote. Unfortunately, this “Mother Courage” fails to pack a punch.Mother Courage and Her ChildrenThrough June 5 at Irondale, Brooklyn; irondale.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ Review: A Life Too Simplified

    This New York City Children’s Theater adaptation of Maya Angelou’s celebrated memoir faces the challenge of faithfully telling a story that encompasses a great deal of pain.They were such tiny little kids to put on a train by themselves from Southern California to rural Arkansas — Maya Angelou only 3, her big brother, Bailey, all of 4. Each wore a wrist tag spelling out who they were, where they were headed and who would take care of them there.It was the early 1930s, their parents were splitting up and the children were off to live with their grandmother Annie Henderson in a town called Stamps, where she owned a general store.“The store was my favorite place to be,” the grown-up Maya says in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” a new play adapted by Idris Goodwin and Janna Segal from Angelou’s memoir of the same name.For most of a decade in her young life — long before she became a famous poet or received a Tony Award nomination for acting in a Broadway show that ran for one performance — it was a place where she was safe, and loved. And in Khalia Davis’s production for New York City Children’s Theater, it is the place to which she returns, stepping back into that empty store and unfurling her memories as monologue.The Maya (Cherrye J. Davis) of this oversimplified play is in her 40s, just as Angelou was when the book came out in 1969 and became a best seller. In the decades since then, it has been a frequent target for book banners — because of its visceral depictions of everyday hatred and brutal violence in the virulently racist Jim Crow South, and for its frank discussion of rape and sexual abuse.With those elements in mind, New York City Children’s Theater recommends its production, at Theater Row, for ages 16 and up. Still, it is a difficult piece to translate to the stage; while a book can be read in private and put down at any point, the audience at a play can’t stop the action if it becomes too intense. There is also the challenge of faithfully telling a story that encompasses a great deal of pain — along with humor and joy and tender affection — without reducing it to a Black trauma narrative.In both script and staging, this 55-minute show feels foiled by all of that, its characters and incidents too briefly sketched to gather the necessary force and weight.There are moments of vividness in Maya’s recollections, like crowding around the radio to hear the boxer Joe Louis fight for a championship — the thrill of his victory for Black listeners, and the danger underneath: “It wouldn’t do for a Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world.”But the production, and Davis’s performance, have an insistently perky gloss that reads as condescending, while the script sometimes trims details to the point of dumbing down.When Maya speaks of the vitalizing effect of books on her young self, she likens the escape they offered to “a chance to exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead or a hot cup of tea and milk.” In the memoir, Angelou’s words are “a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist.” Can that really be too sophisticated for a teenage audience, especially in talking about the awakening of a writer’s mind?The play is gentle yet unambiguous in recalling Maya’s rape at age 8 by her mother’s boyfriend. There, too, though, the editing feels off, condensing discrete episodes of sexual abuse in a way that acknowledges the child’s pleasure at being held by this man yet elides mention of the physical pain he caused, which Angelou describes in the memoir as a “breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart.”From the cheerful outfit (by Rodrigo Hernandez Martinez) that the grown-up Maya wears and the ease she has in her body, we are reassured from the very start of the show that she came through even the worst of her childhood ultimately OK. But in paring her story down rather than distilling it, this play never manages to convey a sense of the whole of her.I Know Why the Caged Bird SingsThrough June 5 at Theater Row, Manhattan; nycchildrenstheater.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

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    Josh Duggar Is Sentenced to 12 Years for Downloading Images of Child Sex Abuse

    Mr. Duggar, 34, a former star of the TLC reality show “19 Kids and Counting,” was convicted in December after he tried to covertly download graphic images to his computer in Arkansas.Josh Duggar, a onetime star of the TLC reality show “19 Kids and Counting,” about a large family guided by conservative Christian values, was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison on Wednesday for downloading child sexual abuse imagery.The sentencing, in U.S. District Court in Fayetteville, Ark., concluded Mr. Duggar’s downfall from the eldest sibling on one of the most popular cable reality shows to a convicted criminal, capping a reversal that began with his arrest in April 2021.Prosecutors said that, in May 2019, Mr. Duggar installed a password-protected partition on the hard drive of his desktop computer at his used-car lot in Springdale, Ark., to avoid software that detects explicit images of children.Mr. Duggar, 34, who is married with seven children, downloaded around 600 photographs and seven videos of violent child sexual abuse, according to a sentencing memorandum filed this month by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Arkansas.He was caught after a Little Rock police detective found an I.P. address that had been sharing child sexual abuse material, according to a memorandum opinion filed by Judge Timothy L. Brooks in August 2021. The detective sent the information to an agent from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who later tracked the I.P. address to Mr. Duggar, Judge Brooks wrote.A jury deliberated for two days before finding Mr. Duggar guilty in December of one count of receiving child pornography and one count of possessing child pornography. Each charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.Prosecutors had asked for a 20-year sentence while Mr. Duggar’s lawyers asked for five years. He was sentenced to 12 years and seven months.On Wednesday, Judge Brooks vacated the charge of child pornography possession, one of Mr. Duggar’s lawyers, Justin K. Gelfand, said.Mr. Gelfand added that he and the rest of Mr. Duggar’s defense team were grateful that the judge had dismissed the charge. “We look forward to continuing the fight on appeal,” he said in a statement after the sentencing.The U.S. attorney’s office did not immediately respond to emails or phone calls on Wednesday.On Tuesday, Judge Brooks denied a request that Mr. Duggar’s lawyers filed in January asking that he be acquitted or receive a new trial. The lawyers argued that, among other things, the prosecutors had not disclosed certain evidence in a timely manner.From 2008 to 2015, Mr. Duggar and his siblings starred with their parents in “19 Kids and Counting,” a reality show following the family’s life in Arkansas. TLC canceled the show after In Touch Weekly reported on a 2006 police report that said Mr. Duggar had molested several girls when he was a teenager.Representatives for Discovery, the company that owns TLC, did not immediately return emails or phone calls on Wednesday.Mr. Duggar was not charged in connection with those earlier allegations, for which the statute of limitations had passed. Mr. Duggar’s parents told Fox News in 2015 that four of the five girls he molested were his sisters.His parents said they had sent him to counseling and had him talk to the police.He apologized at the time in a statement to People magazine, saying, “As a young teenager, I acted inexcusably for which I am extremely sorry.”Mr. Duggar also resigned from his position as the director of the lobbying arm of the conservative Family Research Council. More

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    New York Theater Workshop Names Patricia McGregor as Artistic Director

    The freelance director will succeed James Nicola, who has led the Off Broadway nonprofit since 1988.Patricia McGregor, a freelance director who has worked Off Broadway and around the country, has been named the next artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, a midsize nonprofit with an outsize track record of producing important work.McGregor, 44, will succeed James C. Nicola, who has served as the theater’s artistic director since 1988. Nicola, 71, announced last year that he would step down this summer; he is being honored next month with a special Tony Award in recognition of his successful tenure.New York Theater Workshop, founded in 1979 and located in the East Village, has a long track record of discovering, developing and supporting new plays and musicals, but it will forever be known as the birthplace of one huge hit, “Rent,” which opened there in 1996 and, after transferring to Broadway, spun off royalties for years that helped the theater flourish.The theater has had several other notable Broadway transfers, including the Tony-winning musicals “Once” and “Hadestown,” as well as the acclaimed plays “Slave Play” and “What the Constitution Means to Me.” It has also staged a large volume of adventurous work that has remained downtown; among the artists who have worked there often are the writers Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill and Mfoniso Udofia and the directors Ivo van Hove, Sam Gold, Lileana Blain-Cruz and Rachel Chavkin. (Chavkin was one of two leaders of the artistic director search committee.)McGregor has been affiliated with New York Theater Workshop as a “usual suspect,” which is the theater’s term for artists with whom it maintains an ongoing connection. She plans to assume the artistic director position in August; Nicola has programmed next season, including revivals of “Merrily We Roll Along” starring Daniel Radcliffe and “Three Sisters” starring Greta Gerwig and Oscar Isaac. McGregor will choose the programming starting in the fall of 2023.And what will her programming look like? “Visceral, relevant, challenging, joyful, delightful,” she said. “And really looking at fusions of form.”Her directing career has focused on new American plays, but she said she also has an affection for classics (she directed a mobile unit production of “Hamlet” for the Public Theater in 2016) and musicals (she worked as an associate director of “Fela!” on Broadway). Among her New York credits was a 2012 production of Katori Hall’s “Hurt Village” at Signature Theater; she is currently finishing work on three projects, including an oratorio about gentrification, called “Place,” at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Old Globe in San Diego, and her first feature film, “1660 Vine,” about social media influencers.McGregor was born in St. Croix, the largest of the United States Virgin Islands, and moved frequently as a child, living in Hawaii, California, Illinois and Florida. Her father, who is from St. Croix, is a fisherman and engineer who served in the Navy, and her mother, born in England, is an artist, teacher and union organizer; when she assumes her new role McGregor will become one of only a handful of Black women serving as artistic directors of nonprofit theaters in New York City.“I have a pretty broad range of lived experiences racially, economically and geographically,” she said. “I think a lot about the Workshop being both hyperlocal in its roots and international in its reach, and that feels very aligned with my lived experience and appetite to know about and engage with the world.”McGregor said she embraced theater as a middle school student in Florida, where she first encountered Shakespeare in a theater class. “I loved it,” she said. “I had seen a production of ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in this terrible-acoustics auditorium, and there was something both athletic and magical. I said, ‘I can tap into this.’”She studied theater at Southern Methodist University in Texas, and then studied directing at the Yale School of Drama. She lived in New York off and on for 16 years; she has spent the last seven years in California, and now lives in San Diego, where her husband, Freedome Bradley-Ballentine, is an associate artistic director at the Old Globe; they have two young children.Working with her sister, Paloma, she co-founded an organization called Angela’s Pulse to produce performance work that highlights stories about Black people. She has also worked with Arts in the Armed Forces, an organization founded by the actors Adam Driver and Joanne Tucker.“My mom said, ‘What tools do you have to build the world that you want?’” she said in an interview. “And the tool that I have is being an artist and being a community builder through art.”New York Theater Workshop has a staff of about 45 people and an annual budget projected at $10 million next year. The organization has three buildings on East 4th Street, including a 199-seat mainstage theater and a smaller venue that can accommodate up to 74 patrons.McGregor said she views the leadership transition as a “baton pass,” noting that she already knows many people who work at the organization. She said among her priorities will be broadening the theater’s audience. “If there’s one thing I want to revolutionize, it’s that point of accessibility and welcoming,” she said. “It’s not a quick ‘We send you a flier and you come to the show.’ It’s a long-term process.” More

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    The Pitfalls of Oven-Ready TV

    Prestige shows like “Winning Time” love to dramatize the real people at the heart of recent-ish events. It doesn’t always go well.It’s May 1980 at the Forum in Los Angeles, and the crowd is in a frenzy as the rookie Magic Johnson and the legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar lead the Lakers to their first N.B.A. championship in eight years. This is the setting for the recently completed first season of HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,” which dives into its subject matter with brio. Helmed by the ubiquitous Adam McKay — director of “The Big Short,” “Don’t Look Up” and a parade of successful film comedies — “Winning Time” is an antic chronicle of the Lakers’ highly eventful 1979-80 season, with main characters that include not just Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar but other Lakers titans like the coach Pat Riley and the owner Jerry Buss. Its 10-episode arc is fast and fun, full of on-court magnetism and off-court machismo, and it all actually happened. Sort of.Many of the people depicted in the show will be familiar to basketball-loving viewers, and that’s part of the appeal: There is a giddy thrill in watching the origin stories of icons still in the public consciousness. And for those who lived through this total blast of a Lakers season, it has to be unbelievably fun reliving it on HBO. But while the acknowledged source material for “Winning Time” is the longtime reporter Jeff Pearlman’s 2014 book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s,” the process of adapting it seems to have been as freewheeling as the team’s run-and-gun offense. This is most apparent in the show’s treatment of the Hall of Fame guard turned coach turned legendary league executive Jerry West.West’s character on “Winning Time” is a doozy. As played by the Australian actor Jason Clarke, he is a basketball savant with serious rage issues, prone to throwing trophies, breaking golf clubs and drinking to excess. It’s a humorous and not completely unsympathetic portrait. At one point in the show, just after Buss, the new team owner, has given his staff a motivational speech, West makes a grandiose public display of quitting his job as head coach, completely souring the vibe. Eventually West returns to the office without much explanation. Reinstalled as a sort of omniscient consultant on a highly informal basis, he remains a profane, hair-trigger wild card through the rest of the season.There is a giddy thrill in watching the origin stories of icons still in the public consciousness.But the West in “Winning Time” doesn’t square with the real Jerry West’s recollections, or with the recollections of many others who were part of the Lakers organization at the time. When West recently asked HBO for a retraction and an apology, several figures from the show, including Abdul-Jabbar (who also objected to his own portrayal) and the former Forum executive Claire Rothman, were quick to take his side. They maintain that West was not a yeller and not erratic in his work and that they never saw him drinking in his office. And while it’s always possible that time and friendship have softened everyone’s memories, it’s notable that West’s more outrageous moments on the show aren’t in Pearlman’s book. In response to West’s criticism, HBO released a statement saying that “Winning Time” is “based on extensive factual research and reliable sourcing,” but that it is “not a documentary.”You could say the same for a lot of shows these days. From the latest iteration of “The Staircase,” dramatizing a mysterious death in North Carolina that was chronicled in a 2004 documentary, to “WeCrashed,” about the failed start-up WeWork, to “Pam & Tommy,” which reimagines Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s marriage and sex tape, contemporary television is awash in semi-fictionalized accounts of recent-ish events. These shows elide the logistical and cost concerns associated with telling a new story from scratch by falling back on a prefabricated narrative. The reason for this boomlet — call it Oven-Ready TV — is the same reason Hollywood churns out superhero movies: It’s seen as a safe form of intellectual property to invest in. “Everything’s expensive to make, and everyone wants to keep their job,” the journalist turned true-crime TV writer Bruce Bennett told me. “If you walk in the door pitching something that’s been done in some other medium or arena, there’s a built-in sense of safety and familiarity for the development and production people who have to pay for the thing.”The most prominent recent example of this phenomenon is “The Dropout,” Hulu’s arch dramatization of the rise and fall of the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, which followed the 2018 book “Bad Blood,” a raft of overlapping podcasts and an HBO documentary by Alex Gibney called “The Inventor.” Watching the dramatization back-to-back with Gibney’s film, it’s striking how much stranger Holmes seems in real life when compared with Amanda Seyfried’s excellent, humanizing portrayal. Where “Winning Time” uses West’s character to amp up the drama, “The Dropout” seems to tone Holmes down for its own purposes — making her more likable, more sympathetic. It’s an understandable narrative decision, but also a curious one, given how easy it is to observe the real Holmes in so many venues and notice the glaring difference. (Another recent example, “Inventing Anna,” made many journalists’ eyes roll for its inauthentic portrayal of the reporting process and life at New York magazine.)‘If you walk in the door pitching something that’s been done in some other medium or arena, there’s a built-in sense of safety and familiarity.’But what do any of these shows owe to the people they are depicting, and to the viewer who spends many, many hours with characters they might reasonably expect to be something like the real thing? West, a victim of child poverty and domestic violence, has been painfully candid about the adverse circumstances that shaped him and his desperate bouts with anxiety and depression. He wrote about this in his 2011 autobiography, “West By West: My Charmed, Tormented Life,” and a beautiful Sports Illustrated feature that same year went even further in chronicling West’s struggles with self-loathing and suicidal thoughts.The producers of “Winning Time” are clearly familiar with this part of West’s story — at one point in the show, he lies catatonic in a dark room for days — which makes the decision to render him a fool even stranger. Perhaps McKay’s taste for clownish characterization explains it. The director made his bones with gloriously absurd fare like “Talladega Nights” and “Anchorman,” but even his more topical films are full of outsize satirical portrayals. As one critic wrote about McKay’s version of Dick Cheney in “Vice,” “McKay seems to think we can’t be trusted to grasp what he sees as Cheney’s Machiavellian villainy unless he spells it out in cartoon language.”The West in “Winning Time” is certainly a cartoon. Now that the series has been greenlit for a second season, it will be interesting to see whether the showrunners take West’s pushback and deep love for the Lakers into account as they develop his character and lay out his coming achievements. These include five championships in the 1980s and the signing of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, setting off another Lakers dynasty in the ’90s. Perhaps in future episodes a more nuanced West will emerge. Or maybe, just as in the Showtime era that “Winning Time” reanimates, the mandate to entertain will always prevail.Source photographs: Warrick Page/HBOElizabeth Nelson is a journalist and singer-songwriter based in Washington. Her band, the Paranoid Style, will release its new LP, “For Executive Meeting,” in August on the Bar/None Records label. More

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    ‘Islander’ Review: Two Young Women Lost and Found at Sea

    This gentle musical, a hit at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, combines Scottish folklore and live looping technology.The island of Kinnan is grievously underpopulated. The school has closed. The last farm struggles. The mainland calls to anyone with the wherewithal to move. But in “Islander,” a gentle new musical that arrives after runs at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and at London’s Southwark Playhouse, that population seems to swell. Using live looping technology, its two young performers, Kirsty Findlay and Bethany Tennick, aided by the sound designers Sam Kusnetz and Kevin Sweetser, double and redouble their voices until Playhouse 46 reverberates with bright sound.The premise of “Islander” is a little mystical, a little misty, a little silly. If you can put your cynicism on hold for an hour and a half, it offers a sweet-natured portrait of characters trying to hold onto a sense of place and home in a threatened world. (A petite and more woo-woo “Come From Away?” Sure.) Drawing on Scotch-Irish folk tradition — selkies, merpeople — the musical tells the story of an island split in two. Some occupants took to the land; others turned to the sea. That division remains until two teenagers meet on a beach.Each actress plays about 10 characters (humans, nonhumans, whales), but Tennick typically appears as Eilidh, the island’s last remaining child, a sensitive 15-year-old who lives with her grandmother, and Findlay most often plays Arran, a young woman (or is she?) who washes ashore one morning. United by a beached whale calf, they fall into a quick-blooming friendship that helps each of them recover from past losses and face down new ones.Conceived and directed by Amy Draper, the musical has songs by Finn Anderson and a book by Stewart Melton. The music borrows from folk and pop, with just a whiff of electronica and maybe some whale song, too. It is often beautiful, especially when Findlay and Tennick twine their echoing voices, though the lyrics are mostly generic, with evocations of light and dark and land and sea and song. Melton’s book is livelier, relying on regional Scottish dialect. There are a few earthy elements — a running joke about a garden gnome, an islander’s late-term pregnancy — that help to balance the more fanciful aspects. This mythical world could feel more dimensional and specific, but that’s not really the way of myth. Here, the creators have flavored it with a modicum of ecology, though the emphasis is ultimately less on global climate than on small instances of mutual care and communion.The physical production is spare, with the audience ringing a bare stage (Hahnji Jang, who also designed the costumes, is credited with environmental design) lit with oddly blinding lights (Simon Wilkinson). I saw at least one woman holding a program up to her face, shielding her eyes from the glare. And yet, the overall effect of the show is atmospheric rather than narrative. “Islander” is, as the kids say, a mood.Who better to magnify that mood than Tennick and Findlay? Tennick, with her wild wavy hair and patched cardigan, brings real feeling to Eilidh, who resents her mother moving to the mainland for work. And Findlay, spruce in a blue jumpsuit, grounds Arran’s fable-like qualities in legible emotion. When they stand, on a diagonal, and sing into twinned microphones, their golden voices fill the room and this blank, low-ceilinged space feels crowded with life.IslanderAt Playhouse 46, Manhattan; islandermusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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    Review: In ‘California,’ a Road Trip and a Detour Into Darkness

    The playwright Trish Harnetiaux’s new show, set entirely in a car, follows a family of travelers. It bravely, if not entirely satisfyingly, explores alternate realities.Long ago, in a time before cellphones and overhead video players, a family road trip meant engaging in conversation, listening to the radio together or possibly sitting in more or less companionable silence for hours on end. A road trip could be a bonding experience, or it could become a contemplation of existential boredom.“California,” the playwright Trish Harnetiaux’s new show, bravely, if not entirely satisfyingly, ventures into this setup: Not only does it take place entirely in a car, it also ponders the possibility of a multiverse folding into coexisting realities.Or something. “California” is like a maddening Google Map offering confusing routes from starting point A to destination infinity.The show follows a family of five traveling the 1,300 miles from Spokane, Wash., to Huntington Beach, Calif. “My dad was confident we could drive it in one shot,” says Lizzie (played by Mallory Portnoy, Gertie in Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!”). “No stopping.”Lizzie, who is 13 at the time of the trip, is flanked by 14-year-old Tucker (Ethan Dubin) and 17-year-old Rob (Jordan Bellow) in the back seat. The siblings take turns commenting on the action, and at first it seems as if Harnetiaux is setting up a conventionally amusing memory play peppered with nostalgic details: Rob wears guyliner and a Cure T-shirt; the mother (Annie Henk) consults a paper map, before falling asleep underneath it; the father (Pete Simpson), in his plaid shirt, looks like a Trad Dad doll.“California” is certainly amusing, though not conventional, neither of which comes as a surprise from Harnetiaux. She displayed a flair for the dryly surreal in “Tin Cat Shoes” (2018), which was presented, as this new show is, as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks series (“What the Constitution Means to Me,” “Tumacho”). And her very funny multipart podcast play, “The MS Phoenix Rising,” featured an experimental director trying to stage Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist one-act “The Chairs” aboard a cruise ship.“California” is a particularly good showcase for non sequiturs and dream logic, as when Mom starts humming nonsense words and Lizzie says, “Mom, that’s not, like, a song.”“It could be,” her mother replies.But as with “The Chairs,” which Ionesco described as a “tragic farce,” the show takes on a darker tone as unreliable narrators bend memory and reality into an ominous tangle of confusing chronologies and alternate possibilities. The ground is constantly shifting away from both the characters and the viewers.Will Davis’s production is best when conjuring an ominous mood constantly overshadowed by death — foretold, remembered, alluded to, imagined. It can be the passing of one of the characters. Or it can be the mass deaths of nuclear Armageddon; the road trippers drive by the Hanford nuclear plant, created as part of the Manhattan Project. And the car, evoked with just chairs and the lighting designer Oona Curley’s atmospheric cues, becomes a claustrophobic enclosure traveling across space as well as time.Yet these elements do not jell, and it often feels as if Harnetiaux has an unsure grasp on what she is trying to say, or how to say it. Modern expressions, for example, pop up during the period scenes: Dad remembers that some of his college friends “had Big Halloween Energy” and admonishes his kids to “be better.” Whether these are mistakes, a clue that the reminiscing siblings are projecting into the past or just easy laugh lines, the result is distracting. And the show’s very slipperiness turns against itself: Being hard to pinpoint can be allusively mysterious, or it can come across like obfuscation.CaliforniaThrough May 31 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More