Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 100 Shares159 Views

    in Television

    Late Night Celebrates One Year of President Biden

    “A year ago, Biden pledged to address Covid, the economy, climate change and racial injustice. And good news — after 12 months of tireless effort, we’re all getting three free masks,” Jimmy Fallon said.Welcome to the 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.One Long YearThursday marked the end of President Biden’s first year in the White House.“When asked what he’s learned, Biden said, ‘Being vice president was a hell of a lot more fun,’” Jimmy Fallon joked.“President Biden said yesterday that his first year in office has been ‘a year of challenges,’ but he’d rather focus on the positives, like your Covid test.” — SETH MEYERS“It seems like just yesterday our democracy was being held hostage by a cabal of obstructionists who didn’t want every vote counted. Oh, wait, that was yesterday.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“A year ago, Biden pledged to address Covid, the economy, climate change and racial injustice. And good news — after 12 months of tireless effort, we’re all getting three free masks.” — JIMMY FALLON“President Biden yesterday held a 1 hour 51 minute press conference. It was the first thing Americans actually wished Joe Manchin had stopped.” — SETH MEYERS“A lot of people are disappointed with President Biden. His approval rating just reached a new low after his press conference yesterday. The press conference was a success in that he went nearly two hours without having to pee.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He promised no malarkey, but lawyers made him change it to ‘produced in a facility that also processes malarkey.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Unvoting Voting Edition)“Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema believe so strongly in the power of voting that they use their vote to block voting rights for the entire country. They were unvoting voting by voting.” — TREVOR NOAH“I mean, say what you will about the Democrats, but never has a party been on a hotter streak of getting absolutely nothing done.” — JAMES CORDEN“The big takeaway is the people you voted for, voted to make it harder for you to vote.” — JAMES CORDEN“Republicans want to add restrictions to voting because they are worried about voter fraud, even though it’s almost completely nonexistent, voter fraud. Hey, you know what? You guys believe climate change is nonexistent, right? How about coming up with some restrictions for that? Let’s compromise on this.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You can’t compromise with the side that’s doing the damage. When you’re putting out a fire, you don’t call the Fire Department and the arsonist, and see what they can work out together.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingJames Corden talked with Rachel Brosnahan and Ed Helms about the celebrities they are frequently mistaken for on Thursday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutImages from the Barbed-Wire Kisses panel at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.Sandria Miller for Sundance InstituteThis year’s Sundance marks 30 years since the festival held its first panel on New Queer Cinema, a sea change for L.G.B.T.Q. film. More

  • 150 Shares199 Views

    in Theater

    Review: In ‘Whisper House,’ the Living Are the Pawns of the Dead

    A lighthouse keeper, the nephew living with her and a Japanese employee are on alert for U-boats and graver threats in this chamber musical set in 1942.The ghosts, at least, are having fun.Sunken eyed, in moldering Jazz Age whites, they slink and shimmy around 59E59 Theater’s petite stage — about the size of a backyard swimming pool — luring characters to their various dooms. There are only four living characters and a limited supply of calamity, but still these spirits put in overtime. In Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrow’s pocket Gothic, “Whisper House,” the ghosts (Alex Boniello and Molly Hager) deliver 12 of the 14 songs, each a hymn to a wicked hereafter.“It’s good to be a ghost,” they sing. “It’s better to be dead.”A chamber musical planted in Maine’s stony soil in the early 1940s, “Whisper House” had its world premiere in 2010 at the Old Globe in San Diego and played London in 2017. It has spent the past couple of years in a kind of limbo, having clocked a single 59E59 performance before the 2020 theater shutdown. It returns, tentatively, in a moment of renewed anxiety and upgraded face masks.The show, about the fear of the unknown and the trust that love requires, can feel indefinite, too. Directed by Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the cherished theater company the Civilians, it has mood for days. (All credit to Jorge Arroyo and Jeff Croiter’s sepulchral lights and a surfeit of stage fog.) And the music haunts prettily. When the ghosts are singing, anyway. But none of the living characters feel precisely real and the book scenes totter under the weight of metaphor.“Whisper House” opens with a boy named Christopher (Wyatt Cirbus, who looks as if he has never seen the sun), a near-orphan sent away to live with his aunt, Lily, a lighthouse keeper in coastal Maine.Lily (Samantha Mathis) has a Japanese employee, Yasuhiro (James Yaegashi), and a nodding friendship with the local sheriff, Charles (Jeb Brown). This is 1942. Roosevelt’s executive order and the threat of nearby U-boats mean that Yasuhiro has to go. But he wants to stay and Lily wants that, too. The ghosts, with Christopher as their pawn, have other ideas.That sets the lighthouse table for tragedy. But the trouble with the story, conceived with Keith Powell, is that you have to abandon psychology to make it happen. Would a woman with Lily’s stoic good sense trust a traumatized child with a secret? Would Yasuhiro try to bribe him? The more you think about the living characters, the flimsier they seem. If your ghosts are your most substantial creation, what has gone wrong?“We don’t believe in you,” the ghosts sing to the living. They have a point. The plot also absolutely depends on ignoring the wet and the weather.Wyatt Cirbus, left, and Samantha Mathis as the nephew and aunt in the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut the music is mostly lovely, if unvaried. As in Sheik’s score for “Spring Awakening,” it melds pop balladry with folk and it carries his very particular mix of romanticism and cynicism. (Sheik has a reputation for one-hit wonders, but this ignores some fine if piecemeal work over the years, as well as his lush Gullah-inflected score for “The Secret Life of Bees.”) The lyrics, co-written with Jarrow (“SpongeBob SquarePants the Musical”), are clever for the ghosts and pallid for everyone else, freighting Yasuhiro with the awkward solo “The Art of Being Unseen.” That neither Yaegashi, always a welcome presence, or Mathis, stuck with a costume-party Katharine Hepburn accent, are vocal powerhouses probably doesn’t help. The orchestrations, credited to Sheik, Jason Hart, Simon Hale and Wiley DeWeese, contain some fine surprises, like the bright blare of a horn. The choreography, from Billy Bustamante, mostly seems an afterthought.If the show spends about 85 of its 90 minutes inclining toward tragedy, its creators have something gentler in mind. The ultimate theme of “Whisper House” is that we must love another or die, a comforting thesis in a moment that demands — in every auditorium — so much mutual faith and care. Then again, there are the paired, smirking ghosts to imply the contrary. Turns out you can love another and die.Whisper HouseThrough Feb. 6 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Television

    At Sundance, Two Films Look at Abortion and the Jane Collective

    In the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, a Chicago group helped thousands of women obtain the procedure safely. A documentary and a feature tell their story.Judith Arcana was 27 and recently separated from her husband when she began driving women surreptitiously for safe — but illegal — abortions. The year was 1970, she was an out-of-work teacher on the South Side of Chicago, and she was spending her days counseling women in need.“I don’t think we were crazy,” said Arcana, now 78. “I don’t think we were stupid. I think that we had found something that was so important, so useful in the lives of women and girls.”“We were radicalized in the arena of women’s bodies,” she said. “We knew that what we were doing was good work in the world. And we knew that it was illegal.”Arcana was part of the Jane Collective, a disparate, rotating group of women who ensured safe abortions for thousands of women in Chicago between 1968 and 1973. Despite the law, women were still getting abortions. But they were often performing them on themselves and winding up in the hospital, or paying the mob with no guarantee of survival.During these years, because of Arcana and other women, if you lived in Chicago and needed help, you could call a number and talk with a woman who would offer a safer alternative. Members of the collective provided counseling and arranged the procedures, which they eventually administered — 11,000 all told during that period. But then in 1972, Arcana and six other members of the group were arrested, each charged with 11 counts of abortion or conspiracy to commit an abortion with a possible 10-year sentence for each charge. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision issued in 1973, saved them all.Mugshots of members of the Jane Collective who were arrested in 1972. HBONow, close to 50 years later, members of the collective are sharing their stories in a pair of movies at the Sundance Film Festival, which begins Thursday: the HBO documentary “The Janes”; and a fictionalized account titled “Call Jane,” starring Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver, and looking for distribution.The movies are debuting at a particularly crucial time for abortion rights. The Supreme Court heard arguments in December over the legality of a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks; it is expected to issue a decision this summer. Should the court uphold the law, the ruling would be at odds with Roe v. Wade, which declared abortion a constitutional right and forbade states from banning the procedure before fetal viability (23 weeks). The Sundance filmmakers make no secret that they support abortion rights but say they want their work to show the complexity of the subject.In “Call Jane,” Banks plays Joy, a mother and housewife who seeks out an illegal abortion after learning that her pregnancy is life-threatening — her attempt to secure one legally having been denied by an all-male hospital board. The movie’s director, Phyllis Nagy (whose credits include the screenplay for “Carol”), said she wished she could show it to the Supreme Court’s conservative justices. “I would sit there and say, ‘Now, talk to me,’ and it wouldn’t make any difference, probably,” she said. “But artists need to start having the kinds of political conversations with society that aren’t didactic,” she added. “Nothing else has worked.”Elizabeth Banks in “Call Jane,” about a woman trying to terminate a life-threatening pregnancy. Wilson Webb, via Sundance InstituteThe makers of “The Janes” hope those with differing views will allow themselves a look at life before Roe v. Wade. “This is a glimpse at history; I don’t think it’s an advocacy film,” said Tia Lessin, who directed with Emma Pildes, whose father used to be married to Arcana. Arcana’s son, Daniel, and Pildes are producers on the film. Lessin added, “It’s a real life story about what happened and the lengths that women went to to have abortions and to enable other women to have abortions.”“Do I hope that people’s takeaway will be ‘let’s not go back there’? Sure. But I really hope it moves people to engage in conversation. Love the film, hate the film,” she said before Pildes jumped in: “Talk about the issue.”And there is plenty to discuss.The Jane Collective was formed when a college student, Heather Booth, now 76, received a desperate call from a friend looking for an abortion. Booth, active in the civil rights movement, found a doctor willing to help and passed along the information. “I made what I thought was a one-time arrangement,” she said in an interview. Soon another woman called. Then another. Booth found herself negotiating fees and learning the intricacies of the procedure so she could counsel women. After a few years, Booth, by then a mother working on her graduate degree at the University of Chicago, recruited others to fulfill the growing need.“I was working full time. The number of calls were increasing. It was certainly too much for one person,” she added.Marie Leaner, now 80, was raised Roman Catholic and taught to believe that abortion was a sin. At a community center on the West Side of Chicago, she ran a program for teenage mothers. “I just thought it was atrocious that these women didn’t want to carry the babies but they felt this was their punishment for being in love or being sexually involved with someone,” she recalled. “I decided I wanted to do something about it.”She offered up her apartment for the procedures and occasionally held the hands of the women who came through. As one of the few Black women in the group, she said, “I knew that Black and brown people wouldn’t partake of the service if they couldn’t see themselves involved in it.”The State of Abortion in the U.S.Card 1 of 5Abortion at the Supreme Court. More

  • 125 Shares179 Views

    in Television

    A New Coalition Amplifies Disability Culture in the Music Industry

    RAMPD, an organization of professional disabled musicians, will push for accessibility in the music industry, including adding visible ramps to awards show stages.For the singer, songwriter and producer Lachi, the acronym was everything.She helped start the organization that would become RAMPD — Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities — in July 2021, but it was a few months earlier, after moderating a panel for the Recording Academy about disability inclusion, that she came up with the name.“After that aired, musicians with disabilities were coming out of the woodwork and following me on Instagram, DMing me going, ‘What are we going to do? Are you going to lead this charge? What’s next?’” Lachi said in an interview. “Everyone was energized. And that’s when the spark came, of the acronym.”RAMPD, which Lachi co-founded with the singer-songwriter and violinist Gaelynn Lea, alongside a dozen or so founding members, works to amplify disability culture and advocate for accessibility in the music business. One of its main goals, fittingly, is to make accessibility ramps visible on TV during awards shows to help normalize disability in the entertainment industry.The coalition’s kickoff will be a virtual event at 5 p.m. on Friday, with opening and closing remarks live from the Grammy Museum Experience at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J. (The Grammy Awards, originally scheduled for Jan. 31, have been pushed back to April 3.) Adrian Anantawan, a classical violinist; Eliza Hull, an indie rock singer-songwriter; and Molly Joyce, an organist and songwriter, will perform, alongside other disabled musicians, and professional membership applications for the group will open.“Our professional membership have awards, have toured, have worked with big names, are big names themselves,” said Lachi, who is based in New York. “And we’re not here to make folks feel warm and gushy. We’re not here to get handouts. We’re here to get gigs. We’re here to get on stages, we’re here to get paid.”“Disability isn’t ‘despite this, they did this,’” said the singer-songwriter and violinist Gaelynn Lea, a RAMPD co-founder. “It’s more like, ‘because of their identity as a disabled artist, you are enjoying this art in this form.’” Paul VienneauIn October, RAMPD partnered with the inaugural Wavy Awards for an event celebrating women, L.G.B.T.Q. artists, nonbinary musicians, artists of color, performers who identify as having a disability and allies. The organization advised the show on American Sign Language interpretation, captioning, audio description and ensuring the inclusion of people with disabilities on-camera and behind the scenes.Perhaps Lachi’s favorite part, though, was promoting the use of what she calls “self description,” known widely as visual description, which is added as audio to television programs and movies to help people with low vision and people who are blind, like herself.“My name is Lachi, she/her, Black girl, cornrows,” she said as an example. “So that’s what I go by. And that’s all it is.”She underscored how racism, sexism and homophobia compound the discrimination disabled people face. “It’s paramount for folks to recognize that disability has color, that disability has gender, that disability has sexual preference and that disability is not straight, white, middle-America male,” she said.Lea, who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta and is based in Minnesota, pointed out that she wouldn’t make the same music — which won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016 — if not for her life experience.“Disability isn’t ‘despite this, they did this,’” she said in an interview. “It’s more like, ‘because of their identity as a disabled artist, you are enjoying this art in this form.’”She added, “Disability culture and the movement that we’re starting I think really is actually up there in terms of cultural shifts with all the other diversity movements we’re talking about.”Through the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council in Duluth, Minn., Lea received the Arts Ecosystem Grant, which will allow RAMPD to build a membership database of professional disabled artists — something that never existed until now. RAMPD also recently secured a fiscal sponsor, Accessible Festivals, a nonprofit organization that will help manage RAMPD’s grants and donations, and allow for the group to grow beyond Lachi and Lea.“We want to see more leaders emerge out of this and people recognize them in the community, because sometimes it feels like I get asked to do so many events, and it’s partly because I feel like people don’t know anyone else to ask,” Lea said. “That’s something that we have to fix.” More

  • 88 Shares179 Views

    in Television

    Michael Schur’s Unending Quest to Be Perfect

    The comedy writer, known for shows like “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place,” has a surprising new project: a book about moral philosophy that explores how to be a good person.Several years ago, Michael Schur was stuck in Los Angeles traffic when he went into a philosophical tailspin. As he watched other drivers use the emergency lane to escape the gridlock, he started fuming about people who put their desires above everyone else’s, then wondered if such minor ethical lapses even matter.What started as a flash of irritation yielded an idea: What if there were a cosmic point system that tallied our good and bad behavior, and ranked people accordingly? From then on, when Schur saw drivers misbehaving, he would comfort himself by imagining them losing 15 points on their moral score cards.That fantasy helped shape the premise for Schur’s television series, “The Good Place,” a metaphysical comedy set in an afterlife where people are assigned to the Good Place or Bad Place based on their ethical ranking. The show, which starred Kristen Bell as a pathologically selfish pharmaceutical saleswoman accidentally sent to the Good Place, posed complex thought experiments and explored moral principles from philosophers like Aristotle and Kant, all in the framework of a 22-minute sitcom.“The Good Place” ran for four seasons on NBC and was a commercial and critical success. But when the final season aired in 2020, Schur, who’s also known for his work on comedies like “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” felt unsatisfied.“I had this nagging feeling, like I wasn’t done talking about it,” Schur said in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife J.J. Philbin, their children William and Ivy, their dogs Henry and Louisa, and a guinea pig named Coco. “I didn’t want to try to do another TV show on the same topic, because that just seemed weird. I’m not sure there’s another TV show that’s explicitly about moral philosophy that anyone would be interested in.”So, in a somewhat surprising pivot, he decided to write a book about ethics.Schur’s debut, “How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question,” which Simon & Schuster will release on Tuesday, is likely the first book about moral philosophy to feature endorsements from Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Ted Danson and Mindy Kaling. Jeff McMahan, a philosophy professor at Oxford, called it “an enjoyably boisterous guide to the moral life.”From ‘How to Be Perfect’Listen to an audiobook excerpt from “How to Be Perfect,” featuring Michael Schur along with Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Ted Danson and D’Arcy Carden, stars of his TV show “The Good Place.”In about 300 pages, Schur covers some 2,500 years of Western philosophical thought, breaking down concepts like virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism and contractualism, analyzing principles espoused by Aristotle (“a good salesman, and he gets us all excited about his pitch”), Kant (“a pretty rigid dude”) and Camus (“a stone-cold hottie”), and examining arguments from contemporary philosophers like Judith Thomson, Peter Singer, T.M. Scanlon and Johann Broodryk. He raises quandaries that are easy calls (“Should I Punch My Friend in the Face for No Reason?”) along with more challenging thought experiments like the Trolley Problem (“Should I Let This Runaway Trolley I’m Driving Kill Five People, or Should I Pull a Lever and Deliberately Kill One (Different) Person?”) and fraught issues like whether it’s wrong to enjoy art and literature created by people who behave reprehensibly.As a philosophical layman taking on some of the most profound questions humans have pondered, Schur is, naturally, nervous about how the book will be received. “I’m terrified of people who know what they’re talking about reading it and saying, ‘You fool,’” he said. “That’s my greatest fear right now, is that someone is going to read it and out loud, alone in his or her office, say the words, ‘You fool.’”“How to Be Perfect” is out on Jan. 25.At the same time, he felt that as a comedy writer, he could bring a unique lens to the subject.“The smartest people who ever lived have been working really hard for thousands of years to try to explain to us how we can be better people, and how we can improve ourselves, but they wrote so complicatedly and densely and opaquely that no one wants to engage with it,” Schur said. “It’s like a chef had come up with a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that were both delicious and also helped you lose weight, but the recipe was 600 pages long and written in German, and no one read it. And I thought, if we could just translate that to, like, a human language, this would be very helpful.”In some ways, the topic felt unavoidable. Schur, 46, has been preoccupied with how to be a good person for as long as he can remember.“I have been interested-in-slash-obsessed with the concept of ethics my whole life,” he said. “There have been moments when I’ve confronted something about my own behavior, where I realized I was behaving in a ethically questionable way, or had wandered into some complicated situation, that seemed like I would be better equipped to handle it if I knew what the hell I was talking about, ethically speaking.”Writing a book about the quest for ethical perfection, Schur risked coming across as unbearably pedantic or worse, sanctimonious, but he grounds his overviews of abstract doctrines in self-deprecating digressions. He confesses he still has books by Woody Allen on his shelves and hasn’t been able to renounce him even after allegations of sexual abuse came to light. He describes the self-loathing he would feel whenever he left a tip at Starbucks but paused to make sure that the barista saw him do it. He agonizes over his privileged status as an educated, affluent white man, worries that his hybrid car is still bad for the environment and frets that the money he spends on baseball tickets and other luxuries could have gone to people in need. (He’s donating his earnings from the book to several charities and nonprofits, he said.)Born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised in Connecticut in a casually Unitarian family, Schur has had a charmed career that he attributes to a series of lucky accidents, beginning with the day he stayed home sick from school and his mom let him watch Allen’s movie “Sleeper.” At Harvard, where he majored in English, he joined the Lampoon, a comedy magazine that has served as a pipeline for TV writers, and those connections helped him land a job as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” in 1998.He was later hired as a writer for “The Office,” and around the third season, he signed an overall deal with NBCUniversal. He went on to cocreate “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” both wholesome workplace comedies. When the network gave him free rein to make a show about anything he wanted, he pitched “The Good Place.”Early on, he ran into a problem: He didn’t know much about moral philosophy. So he started a self-taught course in ethics, reading works by Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Bentham, Rawls and others, and devouring academic papers he found online.When he found concepts to be impenetrable, he sought out professionals. He asked Pamela Hieronymi, a philosophy professor at U.C.L.A, to be an adviser for the show, and she gave lectures in the writers room and guided writers through conundrums like the Trolley Problem. “He wants it to be digestible, but he doesn’t want to water it down,” she said of Schur.Schur also brought on the philosopher Todd May as a consultant after reading his book, “Death.” Schur would sometimes send May an urgent email with a “philosophical emergency” when he was worried he had bungled some ethical nuance.“He is extraordinarily precise, and it’s really important to him to get the theories right,” said May, who also advised Schur on his book.Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper and Ted Danson in a scene from “The Good Place” that explored the Trolley Problem.Colleen Hayes/NBCThe production sometimes felt more like a grad-school philosophy seminar than a sitcom set. William Jackson Harper, who played a conflicted philosophy professor on “The Good Place,” recalled having conversations with Schur about thorny variations on the Trolley Problem that made his head spin. Bell, who studied the long document that Schur prepared outlining different ethical theories that the show covered, remembers having a discussion with Schur about whether it was OK to eat almonds.“There aren’t a lot of people that have a commitment to examining their role in the world as deeply as he does,” she said.Danson, who played an immortal being and bureaucrat who operates the Good Place, said Schur brought seriousness and intensity to the set, an atmosphere that was unusual for a show that also trafficked in bathroom humor and physical comedy. “I don’t think there’s a casual bone in his body,” Danson said.After creating a show that seemed to defy the boundaries of a sitcom, blending heady concepts with extreme silliness, Schur felt he had discovered a winning formula that he could deploy in a book. He sold “How to Be Perfect” to Simon & Schuster in early 2020, just before the pandemic arrived and shut down much of the entertainment industry.As its release approaches, Schur is aware that he faces higher expectations than most debut authors. “I wanted the book to be conversational and engaging and funny enough so that people who had watched ‘The Good Place’ or anything else I’ve ever done felt like the same guy was talking to them, and I also wanted anyone who knows anything about philosophy to read it and think, like, hey, not bad,” he said.He’s somewhat reassured by the fact that “The Good Place” was so well received, suggesting that there’s an audience for goofy riffs on ethics, and said he’s gotten positive responses from friends and colleagues who loved the show and the dilemmas it raised.“And if they were lying, then that’s their problem,” Schur added, “because they’ve been unethical.” More

  • 75 Shares169 Views

    in Theater

    When Britney Came to Brecht’s House

    The Berliner Ensemble, once known for reverent productions of plays by its founder, Bertolt Brecht, has come roaring into a new decade.BERLIN — In August, the Berliner Ensemble started its season with a bang: a new production of “The Threepenny Opera” that was both an artistic triumph and a box-office smash.Since then, the theater, founded by Bertolt Brecht in what was once East Berlin, has been on a winning streak. This is quite a turnaround for a company that, until recently, was considered tame and even old-fashioned.Yet as of this season, the Berliner Ensemble is perhaps this city’s most consistently exciting playhouse, a place where repertory staples and new works are invigorated by extraordinary actors and innovative directors. Over a single weekend this month, I took in three very different new productions, out of a whopping 20 premieres planned for the season.Along with the new “Threepenny Opera,” the clearest indication of the course that the theater has charted was Christina Tscharyiski’s new version of Brecht’s “The Mother,” a Lehrstück, or “learning play,” from 1932 that the playwright intended to awaken both class consciousness and critical thinking about workers’ struggles.Tscharyiski expands on Brecht’s discussion of the exploitation and dehumanization of the proletariat by adding fresh texts that boldly bring the work into the 21st century. The six actors, playing a variety of roles, hold forth on capitalism’s relationship to feminism and digitization. If this sounds pedantic, I assure you that it is anything but.The production is subtitled “Instructions for a Revolution,” and its nimble players deliver their speeches with manifesto-like zeal. Yet there’s nothing dry or plodding about the production’s forays into theory, especially not with the backing of a rock band performing Hanns Eisler’s original music. And there’s nothing stiff about the eye-popping production, thanks to Janina Audick’s cheeky and colorful set, bare but for a few well-chosen signs and props, and Verena Dengler’s eclectic patchwork costumes.The ensemble in “The Mother — Instructions for a Revolution,” directed by Christina Tscharyiski.JR Berliner EnsembleTscharyiski, a young Austrian director, is the latest in a series of inventive artists who have been invited by the Berliner Ensemble’s artistic director, Oliver Reese, to establish a “new Brecht tradition at the house,” as he told The New York Times in August. In recent seasons, Reese has enlisted a number of progressive theatermakers to help remove the mothballs from a number of Brecht’s plays at the house, which has had a longstanding tradition of effective, if dated, stagings.This is Reese’s fifth season running Brecht’s old house, and the first under his leadership when the Berliner Ensemble has truly gained definition and focus.Beyond engaging distinctive young directors like Tscharyiski, who also oversaw a staggeringly wild production of Elfriede Jelinek’s “Schwarzwasser” earlier this season, and Ersan Mondtag, who has applied his neo-Expressionist gloss to works by Wagner and Brecht, the Berliner Ensemble’s current success is due largely to its troupe of 27 full-time actors, one of the largest in Germany’s theater system. Reese has made a point of casting shows from the company’s acting reserve. Four out of the six actors performing in “The Mother” belonged to the company’s ensemble. I encountered a dozen more house actors the following evening in Mateja Koleznik’s broodingly atmospheric production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” in which no fewer than a dozen ensemble members are part of the sizable cast.Miller’s allegory of the McCarthy witch hunts plays out on a fixed set whose wood panels and green tiles suggest the hallway of a Soviet-era school gymnasium or courthouse. In a program note, Koleznik writes that she conceived of the play’s setting not as Salem, Mass., in 1692 or America in 1953, but rather a “retro future dystopia” that recalls “The Handmaid’s Tale.”Her production achieves a remarkably effective mood of gothic menace, thanks largely to Raimund Orfeo Voigt’s handsome yet confining set, Ana Savic-Gecan’s severe costumes and Rainer Casper’s chiaroscuro lighting. Then there is Michael Gumpinger’s sinister music, chanted by a five-woman chorus credited as “the girls of Salem.” Clad in green schoolgirl uniforms, they loll in chairs, balance upside down and hang from doorways like acrobatic Balthus models.Having effectively established its horror atmosphere, however, the production has little to say about the play itself. Most of the actors, locked into the prison of this claustrophobic production, seem on their own when it comes to embodying Miller’s characters and their thorny relationships. Yet two ensemble members of different generations steal the show.Lili Epply in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” directed by Mateja Koleznik.Matthias HornBettina Hoppe, 47, makes for a tightly coiled Elisabeth Proctor. With modesty and restraint, she breathes convincing life into her pious character, whose fortitude and inner pain are the emotional core of the production. As her rival, Abigail Williams, the Proctors’ former maid and the ringleader of the “bewitched” girls, Lili Epply, 27, a new ensemble member, deftly shifts between the character’s various states — girlish, seductive, defensive, vindictive, and drunk on power — without ever hamming things up.After the vast panorama of “The Crucible,” with its 21 performers onstage, the focus narrowed again for the most unexpected entry of the weekend: “It’s Britney, Bitch,” a one-woman show for the actress Sina Martens, directed by Lena Brasch, that is both a homage to the pop star and a plea that we take Spears seriously. Ultimately, Marten presents the singer as more of a badass than a victim: “‘Toxic’ was way earlier than your ‘toxic masculinity,’” runs one memorable line.Alone onstage in the Werkraum, the company’s tiny supplementary venue, Martens sings, dances and even crawls her way through the 70-minute evening, donning a long blond Barbie wig or bald cap to slip in and out of the pop star’s skin. The dialogue is drawn from both Spears’s statements in court and freshly composed texts by four writers.One is an imagined missive — in language reminiscent of Kafka’s “Letter to His Father” — to Jamie Spears, who controlled much of his daughter’s personal and professional life during a 14-year conservatorship that was dissolved this past November. At other times, Martens grapples with Spears’s double role as a model of female empowerment and a symbol of a crassly sexist culture, reflecting on the news media’s fixation with her breasts and virginity. Why is it so difficult, Martens ponders in one monologue, for society to take female suffering seriously? “Janis Joplin didn’t die from melancholy,” she says. “Janis Joplin died from heroin.”Breaking up all the talk are arrangements of several Spears hits in all but unrecognizable versions by Friederike Bernhardt that turn the pop chartbusters into gloomy cabaret ballads. At the end of the evening, Martens appears in a red jumpsuit like the one Spears famously wore in the music video for “Oops … I Did It Again” to dance the original choreography while lip-syncing along with the pop anthem. Through their mandated masks, the compulsorily vaccinated audience members, sitting shoulder to shoulder, cheered Martens on. Like the Berliner Ensemble’s other new productions I attended, “It’s Britney, Bitch” was sold out: no mean feat in normal times, but little short of miraculous during the pandemic’s latest surge.Die Mutter — Anleitung für eine Revolution. Directed by Christina Tscharyiski. Berliner Ensemble. Through Feb. 11.Hexenjagd. Directed by Mateja Koleznik. Berliner Ensemble. In repertory.It’s Britney, Bitch. Directed by Lena Brasch. Berliner Ensemble. Through Feb. 27. More

  • 113 Shares119 Views

    in Television

    Sari or Lehenga: Difference Between the Traditional Indian Garments

    Worn at weddings, festive occasions and most recently on an episode of the “Sex and the City” reboot, these traditional Indian garments are not the same.When the sixth episode of “And Just Like That,” the reboot of “Sex and the City,” aired earlier this month, it garnered a lot of attention from the South Asian community. Named after the Hindu festival Diwali, the episode used the celebration as a plot point and provoked strong reactions to a faux pas that is now being called sari-gate.In one scene, Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, and Seema Patel, a real estate broker played by the Indian-British actress Sarita Choudhury, are shown buying outfits for a Diwali party at what Ms. Bradshaw calls a “sari shop.” After the episode aired, many viewers pointed out that the store was actually stocked with Indian garments beyond the sari, and that Ms. Bradshaw ultimately bought a lehenga, a three-piece garment worn at Indian weddings and celebrations.In the episode, Seema Patel, who is played by Sarita Choudhury, takes Ms. Bradshaw shopping for a Diwali party at what Ms. Bradshaw calls a “sari shop.” Some viewers noted that the show did not seem to point out the difference between a sari and a lehenga.HBO MaxLater in the episode, Ms. Patel and her mother are seen wearing saris, which consist of an uncut piece of fabric that’s wrapped around the body and draped over a shoulder, along with complimenting blouses. But the script never makes an effort to distinguish between their saris and Ms. Bradshaw’s lehenga, an oversight that disappointed some viewers who were otherwise heartened to see Indian culture and fashion enjoy prime real estate on a mainstream TV show.In an Instagram post shared the day after the episode aired, Imran Amed, the founder and CEO of Business of Fashion said “I think it’s really cool” that Ms. Bradshaw wanted to wear Indian clothes to the Diwali party. “The issue is that there are now millions of people out there who think what Carrie is wearing is a sari,” said Mr. Amed, who lives in London. “It’s not.”The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.What’s in a name, really? In this case, centuries of cultural history.The lehenga (or ghagra) is believed to have emerged in popularity around the 10th century, during the Mughal reign over India, and is more predominant in northern India.“The lehenga set is typically made of three elements — the voluminous floor-length skirt called the lehenga; the blouse or choli, often like a crop top; and a dupatta or stole-like drape,” said Divyak D’Souza, a stylist in Mumbai and the host of the Indian edition of “Say Yes To The Dress,” a reality TV show.Ms. Bradshaw’s much-discussed lehenga is a burgundy skirt and midnight-blue blouse ensemble from the spring-summer 2020 collection of Falguni Shane Peacock, a line founded by husband-and-wife designers Falguni Peacock and Shane Peacock. The ornate ensemble, made at the designers’ atelier in Mumbai, features colorful embroidery and gold thread accents on a jacquard fabric, and also comes with a matching tulle net dupatta that Ms. Bradshaw does not wear in the episode.“The motifs on the lehenga feature architectural domes, inspired by the palaces of Udaipur, Rajasthan,” said Ms. Peacock, whose brand enjoys popularity with several celebrities of the diaspora — its lehengas were also recently worn by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Mindy Kaling for Diwali celebrations in 2021. Mr. Peacock added that he and his wife approach their lehengas almost like gowns, which also makes them a hit with a younger crowd.The sari is an even older garment. K.H. Radharaman, the creative director of Advaya, a brand that is known for its technical innovations of the sari, said that the drape has a rich history. “The sari is one of the oldest surviving garments in human history, with its origins going back to the Indus Valley civilization.”A sari from Advaya, a brand that is known for its technical innovations of the traditional drape. via Advaya“The nature of our ceremonies has changed, but the sari has stayed constant,” said Mr. Radharaman, who lives in Bengaluru. “It represents centuries of continuity in thought, tying us to our past and its traditions.”Saris, he said, are paired with a stitched blouse and mostly worn by women, though some men also wear them. “The commonly depicted way of wearing one is that it’s wrapped around the waist down in concentric pleats, while the extended part — the pallu or tail piece — is thrown over the left shoulder,” said Mr. Radharaman. More contemporary ways to style a sari include wearing it with a tailored jacket, crisp white shirt or even a cape.In its undiluted form, the sari is a textile that assumes the form of a wearer, which means there are as many ways to drape it as there are communities in India.“Every region has its own sari and corresponding visual design vocabulary, with motifs and techniques whose lineage and origin are steeped in history or mythology,” Mr. Radharaman said. “It is deeply symbolic of the culture of both the wearer and its maker — thus representing different cultural sensibilities in a way few garments around the world can.”Between it and the lehenga, is one more popular or more appropriate for certain occasions than the other? In a country as culturally diverse as India, it’s hard to generalize, as both have been part of Indians’ collective sartorial lexicon for centuries (alongside other garments like anarkalis, kurtas and shararas to name a few). Every community has its own mandate on their preferred silhouette or drape for festivities, though Mr. D’Souza said the lehenga is often a choice when an event calls for more formal dressing.“The sari is common garb for many Indian women even for everyday wear,” he said. “The lehenga, in comparison, tends to be brought out more for festive occasions and weddings; seen on both the bride or the guests.”A lehenga’s “colors and surface ornamentation are often linked to the bride’s cultural context,” added Mr. D’Souza, who noted that not every version is spice-colored or high on bling and floral patterns. “The silhouette has evolved immensely. Many designers are taking a modernist approach; experimenting with traditional weaves, contemporary updates and modern styling.” More

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    Jimmy Kimmel Not Surprised by Trump Fraud Allegations

    “The walls appear to be closing in on Trump — big, beautiful walls,” Kimmel said, as new details emerged from an investigation into the ex-president’s family business.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.‘Male Pattern Fraudness’Late-night hosts were not surprised to hear that New York State’s attorney general, Letitia James, is accusing Donald Trump’s family business of repeatedly misrepresenting the value of its assets.“One year ago today, Donald Trump was still in the White House, throwing chicken nuggets at the TV, and one year from today, he could be in jail,” Jimmy Kimmel said.“According to documents filed by the attorney general in New York last night, they’ve uncovered evidence that indicates the Trump Organization repeatedly engaged in ‘fraudulent or misleading’ practices. The walls appear to be closing in on Trump — big, beautiful walls.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“James says that her office has uncovered significant evidence that the former president fraudulently valued multiple assets, including his own private residence. He claimed the triplex apartment was 30,000 square feet in size, but the actual size was just under 11,000 square feet. Yeah, that’s no surprise — he’s known for falsely tripling the size of his assets.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“You know how when people are shocked, they spit out their water? When I heard Donald Trump exaggerated the value of his assets for the purposes of lying to banks and the I.R.S., it was so the reverse of shocking, I sucked the water back into my mouth.” — SETH MEYERS“But this is nice, they’re interviewing Donald Jr., Ivanka, and have already talked to Eric, making this the first time Tiffany was happy to be excluded.” — JAMES CORDEN“But it’s a fairly straightforward case. To find fraud in a business, you just have to look for the signs — particularly the signs at the top of the building that say ‘Trump’ on them — and you will find it there. There is where you will find his male pattern fraudness.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I mean, at the same time, Donald Trump does not give a [expletive]. Let’s be honest: This dude will brag about himself even if it gets him in trouble. I bet when a cop asks him if he knows how fast he was going, he’s like, ‘Yeah, I do, 400 billion miles a second, the fastest anyone has ever gone. I was so fast. So fast.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (How Long Was It? Edition)“President Biden today gave his first press conference in a long time, and it went on for a long time. It may be still going, I don’t know.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It comes one day before his presidency hits the one-year mark, and he used the opportunity to highlight his administration’s key successes — successes such as vaccinating millions of Americans, low unemployment, and casually hooking up with Pete Davidson.” — JAMES CORDEN“And this was smart: to make Biden look good, they had the C.D.C. director go out first and open for him.” — JIMMY FALLON“The press conference kicked off at 4 p.m. You can tell it was really important for Biden because that’s right in the middle of dinner.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, it was his first formal press conference at the White House since March of last year. In Biden’s defense, that one just wrapped up a few days ago.” — JIMMY FALLON“For almost two hours, Biden took question after question about Russia, Covid, voter rights. He really got into why Denny’s breakfast menu is so sticky all the time.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The president took a lot of questions, too many questions. You know how at the end of most press conferences, the reporters are yelling ‘Mr. President, Mr. President!’? At the end of this one, they were like, ‘Goodbye. We’re good. We got plenty.’” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Wednesday’s “Tonight Show,” Christine Baranski said fans who mistake her for her sophisticated characters wouldn’t believe how loud she gets when watching the Buffalo Bills.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightTwitter legend Dionne Warwick will pop by Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutSince the Trump mask incident, Griffin has been trying to make her way back, brushing up against obstacles like partisan rage, sexism, pill addiction, lung cancer and her own reputation.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesKathy Griffin’s career hasn’t recovered from a 2017 Trump joke, and now she’s hoping to find her way back onto the D-list. More