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    In a Double Bill, the Avant-Garde Meets a Very Good Girl

    Excellent performances, including one by a well-behaved dog, warm up two experimental plays upstate.CHATHAM, N.Y. — There is nothing less avant-garde than a dog. Put one onstage and the artiest notions immediately dissolve into Instagram moments.Or at least that was my experience with a play called “The Art of Theater,” running through Sunday on a double bill with one called “With My Own Hands” at PS21 in this Hudson Valley town. “The Art of Theater” stars Jim Fletcher — a stalwart of the New York avant-garde scene — and Delia, a local newcomer best known (according to her owners) as “a smart if goofy black Labbish sort of beast.”You don’t have to be W.C. Fields to know who wipes the floor with whom.Even without canine competition, the avant-garde has been having a hard time of late. By “of late” I mean both the last several decades and the last two years. The political, aesthetic and social disruptions that have often bred theatrical experimentalism can just as easily suppress it; take a look at the plight of the Belarus Free Theater, banned by the Lukashenko government in its home country, forced into exile and now seeking a new base in Europe.But the Covid pandemic has done even more than dictators to push avant-garde theater off the map. In New York, the three big January showcases of experimental work were once again radically curtailed: the Exponential Festival retreating to online production; Prototype and the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival folding entirely.Well, almost entirely. “The Art of Theater” and “With My Own Hands,” both by the French playwright, director and choreographer Pascal Rambert, survived the Under the Radar cancellation at this supercool avant-garde hothouse in Columbia County.And supercool it was on Saturday afternoon — just 4 degrees outside — when, despite free hot toddies and cocoa, an audience of about 25 sat not just masked but variously scarved, coated and hatted as the program began in PS21’s black box theater.“With My Own Hands,” which came first, is not exactly a warming experience. This 1993 specimen of the classic avant-garde — if that isn’t a paradox — consists of an intense, disturbing and mostly impenetrable 45-minute monologue delivered at breakneck speed by a character bent on suicide. At least that’s what I think was going on; the script, mimicking the disorderly and pressurized output of a mind in fatal distress, speeds right past pauses and punctation as it twists multiple points of view into a furious screed:“M. says to me you’re getting on everyone’s nerves you smother anyone’s slightest desire to listen stop bawling someday I won’t stand for it anymore and I’ll lock you up pants down in a dark room facing yourself facing myself I write to Hans facing myself here I am facing myself while the bombs come down around me I sunbathe here.”Ismaïl ibn Conner in “With My Own Hands.”Steven Taylor As a technical matter, speech like that cannot be easy to perform, but Ismaïl ibn Conner, under the playwright’s direction, shapes each clause, no matter how bewilderingly it butts up against others, into razor-edged shards of anguish. Grandiosity, paranoia and pathos flicker like pages in a flipbook, sometimes (in Nicholas Elliott’s suitably grim translation) coalescing into memorably awful images. “Tear all the memory wires out of your head,” the character begs himself, or perhaps the audience.But if the actor’s grasp on the character is astonishing, the character’s grasp on the audience — as is too often the case with the avant-garde — is weak. To make up for it, the playwright eventually brings out the gun you’ve been expecting all along.In a way, a gun onstage is not unlike a dog: It rips the fabric of theatrical artifice, replacing it with its own kind of drama. A gun’s drama, though, is usually dull, with only two possible outcomes: It gets used or it doesn’t. But as “With My Own Hands” transitioned (cleverly) into “The Art of Theater” — a 30-minute monologue from 2007, in which an actor played by Fletcher muses aloud to his dog about acting — it was the dog’s drama that took on living dimension.Not just because the script invests her with human intelligence. (“Theater is low,” the actor instructs. “Speak low. And if you bark — bark low.”) Rather, Delia, a 4-year-old rescue with a sweetheart face and very good manners, can’t help insisting on the canine kind of intelligence. Though she generally sits and listens as required, there is no suppressing her brilliant improvisational skills. Do I smell peanut butter? Let’s get some! Was that a noise in the audience? Let’s investigate! She is less the straight man in the actor’s tale than he is in hers.Fletcher, best known to New York playgoers as Jay Gatsby in the Elevator Repair Service production of “Gatz,” speaks beautifully and never barks. Still, I didn’t find the actual text of “The Art of Theater” — again translated by Elliott and directed by Rambert — very fascinating. The actor’s thoughts about his art, and the theater types he usually works with, are unsurprising except when occasionally off-putting.“I never liked old women,” he says. “Old women are so boring.”But the contrast Rambert draws between this self-involved sourpuss and a good girl like Delia is a brilliant way of making you think about performance. Not just what it costs the performer — though it’s poignantly true, as he says, that “as an actor you have understood that you are a dog and that you will be abandoned.” In that sense, all people are at the mercy of masters; even the character in “With My Own Hands” is “a man trapped in a dog’s body.”A dog is not trapped in a dog’s body, though. She is her body. She doesn’t have actorly affectations or a good side to turn to the light. She is simply happy to make her people happy; in a way, that’s her job, and Delia is very good at it. When, late in the play, Fletcher picks her up in his arms for a slow dance, she licks his face as they sway.On a very cold day in a rather cold genre, that was finally warmth enough. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: Michelle Obama and ‘Billions’

    A conversation with Michelle Obama airs on BET. And Showtime’s “Billions” begins a new season.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Jan. 17-23. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBET HER PRESENTS … BECOMING: MICHELLE OBAMA IN CONVERSATION 7 p.m. on BET. Michelle Obama joins the stage to discuss some themes from her acclaimed 2018 memoir, “Becoming,” with students from about 20 colleges. Obama will speak on topical issues such as diversity and inclusion on college campuses and students’ mental wellness. The program will be moderated by Yara Shahidi.TuesdaySTORAGE WARS 9:30 p.m. on A&E. To bid, buy or sell? That is the question. The unbridled auction battles of “Storage Wars” return in the show’s 300th episode. The married auctioneer hosts, Dan and Laura Dotson, lead buyers through unpredictable storage units in hopes of hitting the jackpot rather than uncovering abandoned junk.PHILADELPHIA (1993) 8 p.m. on Showtime. If you’re looking for a quality classic, look no further. Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks), a gay man with AIDS, is fired from his Philadelphia law firm because of his illness. He struggles to find a lawyer who will represent him in court. Joe Miller (Denzel Washington) is the only attorney willing to take on his case; the two team up to fight his wrongful dismissal. “Philadelphia” was one of the first Hollywood movies to take the AIDS epidemic seriously. The film “mostly succeeds in being forceful, impassioned and moving, sometimes even rising to the full range of emotion that its subject warrants,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The New York Times.WednesdaySandra Bullock and Quinton Aaron in “The Blind Side.”Ralph Nelson/Warner Bros.THE BLIND SIDE (2009) 7 p.m. on FX. This film, adapted from the nonfiction book “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game,” by Michael Lewis, is likely to pull at heartstrings. It’s an atypical Cinderella story that follows a young African American man named Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) who transcends a poverty-stricken childhood and becomes a N.F.L. lineman with the help of a wealthy, white evangelical couple (Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw). Bullock won her only Academy Award for best actress for her performance, as well as a Screen Actors Guild award and a Golden Globe. The movie “plays this story straight down the middle, shedding nuance and complication in favor of maximum uplift,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times.THE PRICE IS RIGHT AT NIGHT 8 p.m. on CBS. Drew Carey hosts CBS’s one-hour spinoff special of the extremely long-running game show “The Price Is Right.” The hosts of “The Talk” play alongside contestants for the hunger-relief charity Feeding America.ThursdayCommon in “Let the World See.”ABC NewsLET THE WORLD SEE: SAY HIS NAME 10:30 p.m. on ABC. This limited docuseries will follow the powerful quest for justice that Mamie Till Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, embarked on after her son’s vicious 1955 murder. Till Mobley’s activism, which included the decision to give her son an open-casket funeral, helped galvanize the civil rights movement. The series includes interviews with Till Mobley and Emmett Till’s cousins, along with the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., Michelle Obama, the former F.B.I. agent Lent Rice, the activist and recording artist Common and more. Jay-Z and Will Smith are among the series’s executive producers.FridaySTARS ON STAGE FROM WESTPORT COUNTRY PLAYHOUSE: BRANDON VICTOR DIXON 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The Tony-, Emmy- and Grammy-nominated Broadway star Brandon Victor Dixon is the performer for this final installment of a three-part PBS concert special, filmed at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut. Dixon sings both classic and contemporary songs. Previous installments of this series, including episodes with the singer-songwriter Shoshana Bean and the Tony-winning performer Gavin Creel, are available on the PBS website.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    Melanie Lynskey on That Chilling ‘Yellowjackets’ Finale

    The actress discussed her character’s cool under pressure, her favorite fan theories and one thing she insisted to writers that Shauna would never do.This interview contains major spoilers from the season finale of “Yellowjackets.”Melanie Lynskey and I are going to talk about the tragic final twist in the “Yellowjackets” season finale in a moment. But first, I’m still reeling from the opening minutes.Shauna, with an electric carving knife, in the bathtub?“I know, right?” said Lynskey, 44, who plays the adult version of Shauna on Showtime’s buzzy psychological horror series “Yellowjackets,” about a high school girls soccer team that becomes stranded in the wilderness after a plane crash in 1996. We’ve seen just enough to know that their time in the woods didn’t end well, especially not for those who wound up literally butchered and eaten by the survivors. But it’s pretty clear that surviving — which is to say, having been reduced to murder and cannibalism — took a toll as well.Case in point: the relative calm with which the adult Shauna, in the present day, dismembers her new boyfriend … to hide the evidence of having accidentally stabbed him to death with a different, nonelectric knife.“There are moments with this character when we have to remember that she’s operating on Autopilot,” Lynskey said of Shauna. “There’s a problem, and she’s just like, OK, let me get through this part of the problem until another problem arises. She’s just trying to keep one foot in front of the other.”Lynskey, a New Zealand actress whose Kiwi twang morphs into a flawless American accent on “Yellowjackets,” was calling from her daughter’s bedroom last week in Atlanta (“I’m hiding,” she explained), the city where she’s shooting the coming Hulu series “Candy.” In that series, she plays a woman on the other end of a blade: Betty Gore, a Wylie, Tex., woman who was murdered with an ax by her best friend, Candy Montgomery, in 1980.Lynskey as Shauna with Warren Kole, who plays Shauna’s husband, Jeff. “She’s scared to look too closely at ‘Who is this person I’m with?,’” Lynksey said of her character’s decision to marry him.  Kailey Schwerman/Showtime“I like things with a little bit of darkness,” Lynskey said. “I like seeing how normal people can get to a desperate point.”Lynskey’s high-profile roles in “Yellowjackets,” for which she earned a Critics Choice Award nomination, and in Adam McKay’s star-studded apocalyptic Netflix satire, “Don’t Look Up,” are the latest successes in a career that, in recent years, has included major roles in the HBO series “Togetherness” (2015-16); in Macon Blair’s 2017 critically beloved film, “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore”; and in the FX on Hulu historical series “Mrs. America” (2020).But although the parts and the budgets keep getting bigger, the roles are still the kind she loves to play: real women, wrinkles, curves and all.“A lot of women out there look like me,” Lynskey said of Shauna’s come-as-you-are appearance. “That was really important to me.”In an interview, she discussed her favorite fan theories, Shauna’s uncanny resolve and the one thing she told the writers her character would never do. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.First things first: Where does Shauna find the resolve to chop up her lover’s body in a bathtub? We even see it when she’s in the wilderness in high school, volunteering to slit the deer’s throat.I’m hoping that we meet members of her family so we can see why she is who she is. She seems like a completely self-sufficient person even before she’s stranded in this situation. I think there’s something inside her that’s a little bit scary even to her, but it feels like the most honest part of herself.It’s not just young Shauna who butchers animals — as an adult, she guts a rabbit in the kitchen. Are you squeamish when it comes to blood?I’m a vegetarian — I haven’t eaten meat since I was 10 years old. I didn’t want to have to do that with a real rabbit, so they made me this crazy prop rabbit — it was all magnets, sticking pieces together. It looked so real!How else are you like and not like Shauna?She’s able to switch into a cold, calculating veneer that I don’t know if I have — I guess I must, because it can come out of me. But she’s also someone who has a great capacity for love, so we’re alike in that way. She’s a lot more confident than I am, but she still has moments of self-doubt, which can lead her to make some of her biggest mistakes.What about when it comes to survival skills?If I’m going anywhere, I have to read every single TripAdvisor and Yelp review just to make sure the hotel is going to be as nice as I need it to be. I’m very particular, very princess-y. When I was a child, I went to nature camp for a few days, and the entire thing was torture. At the end of it, everyone in the class had to write a letter to the person who impressed them the most, and I got every letter because people were like: “You got through it. You cried the entire time, but somehow, you did it.”The director Ariel Kleiman with Lynskey and Peter Gadiot during production of the series. Gadiot plays Shauna’s lover, whose affair with her becomes complicated by a kitchen knife. Michael Courtney/ShowtimeLet’s talk about Jeff (Warren Kole). Why does Shauna stay with him?Before the wilderness, there was chemistry, and they really liked each other, but Shauna felt like it was temporary. And then she came back from this experience with a ton of survivor’s guilt. But she’s not dealing with any of it — she’s just stuffing it all down, and she feels like the responsible thing to do is to now marry Jeff. She’s scared to look too closely at “Who is this person I’m with?” in case she has to do something difficult. It’s a similar situation with Adam [the former lover in the bathtub, played by Peter Gadiot], where she just kind of jumps into things. She’s so scared of finding out something she doesn’t want to know that she just lets things happen to her.How much did you know about Shauna’s character going into the series?The writers had told me what happened to Jackie [Ella Purnell], because when she started appearing in front of me in flashbacks, I said I needed to know specifics. And I knew the trajectory of the Adam relationship. I knew the trajectory of the Jeff relationship and that he was the blackmailer. I think sometimes writers are scared that if an actor has all the information, they’re going to give things away in their performance, but it’s helpful for me to have so I can do something layered that’s fun for people to go back and watch.Such as?When Jeff and I are driving back from brunch with Jackie’s parents [in Episode 6], we’re talking about Jackie, and I say, “Do you wish you had ended up with her?” And he says, “No, I was just the high school boyfriend.” We’d never had a conversation about that, and that’s something he knew Jackie had said because he read Shauna’s journals. And so I was able to react to that moment like, That’s a bit interesting. I don’t know why he said that or how he knows that.To clarify, Jackie is for sure dead — she’s not pulling a Van?As far as I know. I don’t see how she comes back from [freezing to death]. [Laughs.] And I think Ella’s contract was always just a year.A slew of fan theories about Shauna have cropped up on social media. Do you have any favorites?It was so interesting to me that nobody was like, “What if Adam just likes her?” Part of it is that it’s a mystery show, and he’s a suspicious character. And part of it is that it’s an unconventional relationship where he’s more conventionally attractive than me, he’s younger than me, he’s thinner than me. So it’s very hard for people to accept that that might just be a relationship that they’re witnessing. And then there were some theories that were just so nuts — so many people were like, “He’s Shauna’s wilderness baby.” I wish I could remember all the crazy ones. “He’s Jackie” was a funny one.What kind of input do you have into your character?It’s not often, but there are times when I read something and am just like, “This doesn’t feel real to me.” When I was about to go on a date with Adam, they had me stealing a pair of my daughter’s underwear — like a thong — to wear. And I just was like, “Guys, first of all, as a mother, no.” That’s so gross. I know that Shauna doesn’t have boundaries, but that’s, like, a step too far. And, realistically, they wouldn’t fit me. There’s no woman in the world that’s going to watch that scene and be like, “I believe that she’s comfortably wearing those underpants.” But they’re very good about listening to me!Have they told you anything about Season 2?I know they haven’t even gotten into the writers’ room yet, so I want to give them a minute. But I definitely want to ask questions. I really think I probably drive them crazy. More

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    Now Is the Winter of Broadway’s Discontent

    Curtains are rising again after the Omicron surge caused widespread cancellations, but attendance has fallen steeply. Nine shows are closing, at least temporarily.The reopening of Broadway last summer, following the longest shutdown in history, provided a jolt of energy to a city ready for a rebound: Bruce Springsteen and block parties, eager audiences and enthusiastic actors.But the Omicron variant that has barreled into the city, sending coronavirus case counts soaring, is now battering Broadway, leaving the industry facing an unexpected and enormous setback on its road back from the pandemic.In December, so many theater workers tested positive for the coronavirus that, on some nights, half of all shows were canceled — in a few troublesome instances after audiences were already in their seats.Now, producers have figured out how to keep shows running, thanks mainly to a small army of replacement workers filling in for infected colleagues. Heroic stories abound: When the two girls who alternate as the young lioness Nala in “The Lion King” were both out one night, a 10-year-old boy who usually plays the cub Simba went on in the role, saving the performance.Broadway shows have been using social media to remind potential ticket-buyers that performances are still happening. The revival of “Company” is among many using the hashtag #BroadwayIsOpen.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesBut there’s a new problem: Audiences are vanishing.During the week that ended Jan. 9, just 62 percent of seats were occupied. That’s the lowest attendance has been since a week in 2003 when musicians went on strike, and it’s a precipitous drop from the January before the pandemic, when 94 percent of seats were filled during the first week after the holidays.The casualty list is growing. Over the last month, nine shows have decided to close their doors, at least temporarily. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a huge hit before the pandemic, announced last week that it would close until June; on Sunday “Ain’t Too Proud,” a successful jukebox musical about the Temptations, closed for good.Box-office grosses are falling off a cliff. The all-important Christmas and New Year’s weeks, which producers count on each year to fatten their coffers in anticipation of the lean weeks that follow, generated just $40 million this season, down from $99 million before the pandemic. Requests for ticket refunds are now so high that on some days some shows have negative wraps, meaning they are giving back more money than they are taking in.“This is the worst I have ever experienced,” said Jack Viertel, a longtime executive at Jujamcyn Theaters, which operates five Broadway houses.Over the long run, industry leaders say, there is every reason to remain bullish about Broadway. Until the pandemic, the industry had been enjoying a sustained boom, fueled by a rebound in the popularity of musicals and by New York’s gargantuan growth as a tourist destination. And this downturn might not last long: There is some evidence that the Omicron surge may be peaking, at least in some parts of the country, including New York.The musical “Ain’t Too Proud,” about the Temptations, was a hit before the pandemic, but decided to close after coronavirus cases forced the show to cancel multiple performances over the holidays.  An Rong Xu for The New York TimesBut before it eases, the slump will cost investors tens of millions of dollars, and will push theater workers back into unemployment, as dwindling attendance forces productions without abundant reserves to close. And the distress is not just financial: Artists spend years developing shows before they get to Broadway, so a premature closing is a crushing blow.“It’s harrowing, and there will be a lot of damage done,” Mr. Viertel said. “Some shows will be put out of business permanently, and this will be career ending for some individuals.”Dominique Morisseau, the playwright who wrote the book for “Ain’t Too Proud,” and whose new play, “Skeleton Crew,” is now in previews following two virus-related delays, called this moment “extremely painful.” “My play is about plants shutting down during the auto industry collapse, and factory workers wondering every day, ‘Is it shutting down?’” she said. “Now that’s how we’re coming to work.”The Broadway League, which represents producers, has asked labor unions to consider pay cuts to help shows survive this rough patch. At one point, in a step previously reported by The Daily Beast, the League asked workers to accept half-pay when Covid-19 forced performance cancellations; there have also been discussions about offering lower pay for scaled-back performance calendars.“We’re doing everything we can to keep as many shows open as possible,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, citing safety protocols and marketing efforts as well as labor discussions.The talks stalled as unions sought more financial information.A revival of “The Music Man” canceled multiple performances just days after starting previews when both of its stars tested positive for the coronavirus, but it is now up and running again.An Rong Xu for The New York Times“It’s fair to say that all the unions recognize that shows remaining open is important — that represents jobs for actors and stage managers and everyone else who makes a living in the live theater,” said Kate Shindle, the president of Actors’ Equity. But Ms. Shindle noted that Broadway shows had received tens of millions of dollars in federal aid last year, and that the industry is no longer even disclosing weekly box-office grosses for individual shows, as it did before the pandemic. “Pretty universally, the unions’ response has been that if you want us to make financial concessions, we need financial transparency,” she said.Meanwhile, shows are collapsing. There are always closings in January, a soft time of year for Broadway, but this season a crush of announcements started in December, usually one of the most lucrative months. The musicals “Ain’t Too Proud,” “Diana,” “Flying Over Sunset,” “Jagged Little Pill” and “Waitress,” as well as the play “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” all decided to close earlier than planned after Omicron hit. And three other shows, including “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Girl From the North Country” as well as “Mockingbird,” said they would close for a few months and then attempt to reopen.“If it means that shows get to come back, hooray,” said Jenn Gambatese, the lead actress in “Mrs. Doubtfire.” “The alternative was, run another week and buh-bye.”More and more theaters are now dark. By next Sunday, there will be only 19 shows running in the 41 Broadway theaters. Cast and crew members from shuttered productions are trying to figure out whether they even worked enough weeks to qualify for unemployment; those who do will get less assistance than they did earlier in the pandemic, because the maximum weekly benefit in New York is now $504, down from $1,104 when the federal government was offering a supplement.This is a good time for bargain hunters: Discounts are available for many shows at the TKTS booth, and NYC & Company’s annual Broadway Week, which offers 2-for-1 tickets to most shows, has been extended to 27 days. An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThe surviving shows seem to have figured out how to avert the cancellations that bedeviled the industry last month.One reason: So many workers have already tested positive, and are now back at work (and, notably, no performers are known to have been hospitalized during this latest round). More important: Productions have trained and hired additional replacement workers, including for crew members.Playbills are regularly stuffed with cast-change inserts. One night, Keenan Scott II, the playwright of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” kept his show afloat by going on to replace an actor who tested positive. “Come From Away” saved a performance by deploying eight swings, including alumni and a touring performer who had never worked on Broadway. At “Wicked,” a longtime understudy who had left Broadway to become a software engineer in Chicago returned and performed as Elphaba.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4Omicron in retreat. More

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    Paul Carter Harrison, Whose Ideas Shaped Black Theater, Dies at 85

    In his essays and plays, he provided a framework that linked playwrights like August Wilson to African rituals and mythologies.Paul Carter Harrison, a playwright and scholar who in books, essays and award-winning plays provided a theoretical structure for the Black performing arts, linking works by writers like August Wilson to a deeply rooted structure of African ritual and myth, died on Dec. 27 in Atlanta. He was 85.His daughter, Fonteyn Harrison, confirmed the death, at a retirement home, but said the cause had not been determined.In plays like “The Great MacDaddy” and books like “The Drama of the Nommo: Black Theatre in the African Continuum,” both in 1973, Mr. Harrison went beyond the social and political realism of many of his contemporaries, demonstrating how Black American culture is — and, he said, must be — rooted in African tradition, even as it mixed with white, Eurocentric traditions.“The Great MacDaddy,” for example, is on the surface a paraphrased retelling of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” with the hero setting off across the country to find his father’s secret moonshine recipe. But it is also, and more fundamentally, informed by West African myths about a leader being tested — by demons, by departed elders — to prove himself worthy.“He was always interested in what he called the deep structures of Black life,” Sandra Richards, an emerita professor of theater at Northwestern University, said in an interview. “And for him, those deep structures have to do with ritual and myth.”Though “The Great MacDaddy” won him an Obie Award, Mr. Harrison was equally well known, if not better known, for his theoretical work. Starting in the late 1960s, when he was a professor of theater at Howard University in Washington, he strove to give Black theater an intellectual construct akin to what already existed for Greek theater or Shakespeare.His career was, he said in a 2002 interview, “a continuous preoccupation with trying to retrieve out of this particular experience we call the American experience some traces of our Africanness in the work that we do.”He argued that those myths and rituals were then evoked through aspects of performance, like rhythm and body movement — whether onstage, in church or in everyday life.“He talked about Black performance traditions such as Carnival, which are rooted in rhythm, drums and movement,” said Omiyemi (Artisia) Green, a professor of theater and Africana studies at the College of William & Mary. “You see these kind of elements moving in the Black church as well. All of these things, that movement working together with the language working together with the drums, these things conjure the presence of spirit.”Melvin Van Peebles joined the cast onstage when the Classical Theater of Harlem staged his “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” in 2004. Mr. Harrison had helped conceive the show, which was first presented in Sacramento in 1970 and later seen on Broadway.Michael Nagle for The New York TimesMr. Harrison went on to identify and promote those writers and directors who he felt were already engaged in a similar project, among them Melvin Van Peebles, whose Tony-nominated musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” Mr. Harrison helped conceive, and especially August Wilson, a close friend and intellectual compatriot, whose work he believed came closest to aligning contemporary Black arts with its African roots.“More so that anyone else, Paul Carter Harrison was intimately familiar with what was in August Wilson’s toolbox,” Sandra L. Shannon, an emerita professor of English at Howard and the president of the August Wilson Society, said in an interview.Mr. Harrison wrote a series of anthologies highlighting the work of like-minded playwrights and scholars. And while never combative, he could be vocal in his criticism of Black playwrights and directors he felt were operating too close to the white idiom.“African American art runs the risk of losing its uniqueness and soulfulness if it fails to relate the past to the present,” he wrote in “Kuntu Drama: Plays of the African Continuum” (1974).The problem, he argued, was that the Black theater struggled within the confines of the larger, white-dominated culture industry, which tended to ignore authentic expressions of African cultural forms while pouring money on sanitized tellings of the African American experience.To make room, he supported Black theater groups like the New Federal Theater and the Negro Ensemble Company, and he mentored actors and scholars who he felt understood his vision, among them the actress Phylicia Rashad, who studied under him at Howard, and Talvin Wilks, a professor of theater at the University of Minnesota.Mr. Harrison mentored actors and scholars who he felt understood his vision, among them the actress Phylicia Rashad, who studied under him at Howard University.Elijah Nouvelage/Invision, via Associated Press“He was essential in building those relationships and those connections, and was always trying to affirm an understanding of the lineage and the role that any generation could play inside of that,” Professor Wilks said. “He showed that we were all connected through these African diasporic traditions and connections, whether we understood that or not.”Paul Carter Harrison was born on March 1, 1936, in Manhattan. When he was 7, his father, Paul Randolph Harrison, died. His mother, Thelma Inez (Carter) Harrison, worked for the New York City government.He fell in love with the theater early, taking in plays by Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. But while he admired those white playwrights, he said, they left him cold. More compelling for him were the rhythms of gospel music, storefront chatter and Black political rhetoric, through all of which ran what he called a “mythopoetic” thread unspooled over centuries.He enrolled in New York University, having already fallen in love with the jazz clubs around its Greenwich Village campus. But when he decided to pursue a career in psychology, he transferred to Indiana University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1957.He returned to New York to get a doctorate in psychology at the New School for Social Research. He completed a master’s degree in 1962, but by then he had rediscovered his love of theater, and took a year off to write.He moved to Spain, then the Netherlands, where he fell in with a circle of writers and artists, including the actress Ria Vroemen, whom he married in 1963. They separated in 1968 and later divorced.Along with his daughter, he is survived by his second wife, Wanda Malone, and a grandson.Mr. Harrison was prolific, writing plays, essays and movie scripts, and in 1968 Howard invited him to join its theater department. He arrived for his interview just days after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which set off unrest, including looting and burning, on the streets just outside the university’s gates.Inside them, he found a student body already putting the heady ideas of Black thinkers like Stokely Carmichael and Amiri Baraka into action. The Black Arts Movement was transforming wide swaths of literature and performance, and Mr. Harrison was eager to be a part.Inspired, he began writing essays that tried to give an intellectual framework to what he was seeing onstage. Already well versed in European traditions, he explored African myths and rituals, identified their vitality in art forms like jazz, and advocated for a new generation of artists to embed them within their own work.He also shook up the Howard theater scene. The department, he said in a 2002 interview, had mostly put on plays by white writers. He insisted on replacing classical works with plays by Black writers, including himself — a position that soon brought him in conflict with the department chair.Mr. Harrison quit in 1970 and planned to return to Europe. But he received an offer to teach at California State University, Sacramento, a job that would get him close to the vibrant Black arts scene in the Bay Area, and he accepted.He later taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and at Columbia College Chicago, where he remained until he retired in 2002.By then, Mr. Harrison had become something of an intellectual father figure for a generation of Black writers, directors and performers, who flocked to hear him speak. Unlike them, however, he shunned the spotlight, preferring to be known through his work.“I’ve never been an actor,” he said in a 1997 interview. “I’m principally a playwright. I like anonymity. I’m a good deal more reserved.” More

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    John Bowman, Comedy Writer With a Knack for Crossing Over, Dies at 64

    A white writer who left a corporate job, he became known for working on series with Black stars like Keenen Ivory Wayans and Martin Lawrence.John Bowman, a white television comedy writer and producer who left the corporate world to find success on Black-centered shows like “In Living Color” and “Martin,” died on Dec. 28 at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 64.His wife, Shannon Gaughan Bowman, said the cause was dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle.Mr. Bowman’s work consisted primarily of writing for and running comedy series. But he also made an important contribution later in his career as a labor leader, helping unionized TV and movie writers get a cut of streaming revenues long before services like Netflix and Hulu changed viewing habits and grabbed tens of millions of subscribers.Mr. Bowman had been a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” as had his wife, when he joined the staff of the Fox sketch show “In Living Color” in 1990.“In Living Color,” created by the Black comedian and actor Keenen Ivory Wayans, brought an African American hip-hop sensibility to network television. Mr. Bowman was one of the show’s first white writers and became head writer in its second season.“He got Keenen, and Keenen got him,” Ms. Gaughan Bowman said in a phone interview.Mr. Bowman had said that Mr. Wayans did not want his show’s writers to bring an overtly political or racial point of view to their work.“Sometimes the white writers would come up with a hard-hitting thing that took a racial attitude,” Mr. Bowman was quoted as saying in the book “Homey Don’t Play That! The Story of ‘In Living Color’ and the Black Comedy Revolution” (2018), by David Peisner, “and Keenen would say, ‘No, no. That may be politically correct but it’s not funny. All you’re doing is trying to incite people, you’re not trying to make them laugh.’”Among the more memorable “In Living Color” sketches Mr. Bowman worked on was “Men on Football,” part a live episode that Fox used to counterprogram against the Super Bowl halftime show in 1992. The sketch, a variation on the regular feature “Men on Film,” featured Mr. Wayans and David Alan Grier as flamboyantly gay reviewers playfully employing double and triple entendres to discuss football.Later that year, Mr. Bowman left “In Living Color” to create “Martin,” also for Fox, with Martin Lawrence and Topper Carew. The show gave Mr. Lawrence, who played a talk-show host in Detroit, a showcase for the arrogant but goofy persona he had perfected as a stand-up comedian.Keenen Ivory Wayans, left, and Damon Wayans in “Do-It-Yourself Milli Vanilli Kit,” a sketch from the first season of “In Living Color.” Mr. Bowman was one of the show’s first white writers and became head writer in its second season.20th Century Fox/Courtesy Everett CollectionMr. Bowman, who was the showrunner for the series, “understood my vision,” Mr. Lawrence said in a statement after Mr. Bowman’s death, adding, “There wasn’t anything too big or too small that could faze him, which made working together a great experience.”Mr. Bowman recalled that Fox’s censors were tough on “Martin” in its first season, which began in the fall of 1992, and that the show suffered for it.“The language on this show is more uncompromisingly Black than it is on any other show,” he told Entertainment Weekly that year. “But you find yourself in the most absurd discussions with censors. I think we’re all frustrated.”Mr. Bowman tapped into his time on “In Living Color” when he teamed with Matt Wickline to create “The Show,” a short-lived 1996 sitcom about a white writer working on a Black series. He was later the showrunner for two other series with Black stars: “The Hughleys,” with D.L.Hughley, and “Cedric the Entertainer Presents,” of which he was also a creator.Ms. Gaughan Bowman said that her husband “liked Black comedy and culture.”“He liked the way Black comedians used language,” she added. “He didn’t want to run ‘Everybody Loves Raymond.’”John Frederick Bowman was born on Sept. 28, 1957, in Milwaukee. His father, William, was a lawyer, and his mother, Loretta (Murphy) Bowman, was a homemaker.White attending Harvard as an undergraduate, Mr. Bowman was an editor at The Harvard Lampoon. He graduated from Harvard Business School in 1985 and became an executive at PepsiCo, based in Purchase, N.Y., before deciding that what he really wanted to do was work in comedy.At the time, his wife was writing for “Saturday Night Live.”“I told Jim that my husband wasn’t happy at PepsiCo and he wanted to do this,” Ms. Gaughan Bowman said, referring to Jim Downey, the longtime “S.N.L.” head writer.It was a big leap from a corporate job to the “S.N.L.” writers’ room, but Mr. Downey, a former president of The Lampoon, had mined the magazine for writers and was familiar with Mr. Bowman through his writing and through mutual friends. He asked Mr. Bowman to submit sketches; he was hired a year later.“He had the best dry sense of humor of almost anyone I’ve ever worked with,” Mr. Downey said by phone. In his only season with the show, Mr. Bowman shared a 1989 Emmy Award with the rest of the writing staff.He went on to be the showrunner in the mid-1990s for “Murphy Brown,” starring Candice Bergen.In addition to his wife, Mr. Bowman is survived by his daughter, Courtney Bowman Brady; his sons, Nicholas, Alec, Jesse and John Jr.; a sister, Susan Bowman; and two brothers, William and James.Mr. Bowman, center, leaving the Writers Guild of America West offices in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 2008 after voting to end a strike by Hollywood writers. He was chairman of the union’s negotiating committee.David McNew/Getty ImagesFrom 2007 to 2008 — when he was working on his final series, “Frank TV,” starring the impressionist Frank Caliendo — Mr. Bowman was chairman of the negotiating committee of the Writers Guild of America West during its 100-day strike against TV and movie producers. During the strike, he talked individually to top studio executives about the union’s position on giving writers a percentage of revenues from what would come to be called streaming — a demand that was ultimately met in a deal struck with production companies.“A lot of it was explaining to people like Les Moonves” — then the chief executive of CBS — “that if they didn’t make money, they didn’t have to pay us anything,” Patric Verrone, who was the writers guild’s president at the time, said in an interview. Referring to Mr. Bowman, he added: “He was a rock. We stood on him and when we needed him, we threw him at things.”Mr. Bowman later taught comedy writing at the University of Southern California. More

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    One Indelible Scene: When the Show Must Go on in ‘Drive My Car’

    Through a staging of “Uncle Vanya,” the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi creates an intimacy for his characters that lets the artifice of cinema fall away.I’m going to talk about how the movie ends, but I’m not going to spoil it.The plot of “Drive My Car” doesn’t really work that way in any case. Adapted by Ryusuke Hamaguchi (working with Takamasa Oe) from a novella by Haruki Murakami, the film is an adventure of gentle turns and an occasional swerve, with big surprises and small revelations scattered like scenery on a long road trip. You may be startled at how quickly it all goes by; the movie lasts almost three hours, but the time passes easily.A brief, tactful summary may be in order, a kind of Google Maps précis of the route. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a Tokyo theater director and actor, is married to Oto (Reika Kirishima), an actress, who is having an affair with a younger colleague. The couple had a young daughter who died some years before, and when Oto dies suddenly, she leaves Yusuke paralyzed with grief. Or so we surmise. He has a tendency to camouflage his feelings behind a facade of calm, punctuating his habitual reticence with an occasional flash of irritation or sardonic humor.He keeps working, taking up a residency at a Hiroshima arts center, where he will direct an experimental production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” I don’t think I can spoil that one either. The great works are like that, and one of the marvels of “Drive My Car” is the way it illuminates and refreshes a sturdy old classic, deriving some of its own power, novelty and mystery from Chekhov’s well-thumbed text.A little bit more about “Drive My Car,” though. In Hiroshima, Yusuke is assigned a chauffeur, Misaki (Toko Miura), who shuttles him to rehearsals, errands and social engagements in his beloved red Saab. Like Yusuke, she has suffered a terrible loss, and their shared grief — or rather, their common state of raw, lonely, unacknowledged anguish — becomes the foundation of a delicate and improbable friendship.Unacknowledged anguish underlies the relationship between the characters played by Nishijima and Toko Miura.Sideshow and Janus FilmsThe story of that bond culminates in an intensely emotional scene in a snowy field — tears are shed, and Yusuke at last gives voice to his hitherto unarticulated pain — that would surely be an Oscar-night showstopper. (And if the academy has the good sense to nominate “Drive My Car” for best picture and Nishijima and Miura for acting, maybe it will be). But what I want to talk about is what happens next.Which is that the show goes on. As the “Uncle Vanya” opening night approaches, we have been privy to some backstage intrigue and immersed in Yusuke’s unusual approach to the play. The cast includes actors from various countries, all of them speaking Chekhov’s dialogue in their native languages, including Mandarin, Japanese, Tagalog and Korean Sign Language. Once an audience is present, supertitles are projected on a screen behind the stage. The English-language viewer, already reading subtitles, learns to listen for the tones and rhythms of the different languages, including the swish and tap of signing hands.That may sound forbiddingly cerebral, like the kind of high-concept aesthetic undertaking that tends to be more interesting in theory than in practice. It turns out to be the opposite. “Uncle Vanya,” a play about how hard it is to hold onto a sense of what matters in life, has rarely felt more vital or immediate, as if it had not been written in the 1890s but rather lived in front of our eyes.Yusuke, white powder sprinkled in his hair and a mustache pasted to his lip, is playing the title role, a 47-year-old man driven almost to madness — almost to murder — by unrequited yearning and existential disappointment. His appearance onstage is an unexpected development, the payoff of a subplot that I will leave to you to discover.“Uncle Vanya” being performed in a scene from “Drive My Car.” Sideshow and Janus FilmsYusuke has stayed away from acting since Oto’s death, and as “Uncle Vanya” unfolds, the shock to his system seems apparent. After Vanya’s Act III rant about his squandered prospects and bitter regrets — “If I’d lived normally, I might have been another Schopenhauer or Dostoyevsky!” — he steadies himself against a table in the wings, seeming to struggle for breath and composure.Perhaps Vanya’s plight reminds him of his own, or perhaps the demands of acting are too much to bear. The first Russian production of “Uncle Vanya” was directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky, the progenitor of Method acting, in which the actor plumbs his own experience to locate the emotional truth of the character. Knowing what we know about Yusuke — having seen him weeping in the snow in the previous scene — it’s easy to grasp why he would be overcome by Vanya’s torment.But he’s also a professional, and the scene proceeds briskly through a montage of the performance. We see the onstage action from the side, then on a video monitor in the green room, observing the movement of props and bodies rather than absorbing the movement of Chekhov’s drama. The film seems to be settling into a muted denouement.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    Bridget Everett Shows Off Her Softer Side in 'Somebody Somewhere'

    Sometimes Bridget Everett, the actress, comedian and self-proclaimed “cabaret wildebeest,” wonders what would have happened if she had never left Kansas. She has a pretty good idea.“I’d probably live in Kansas City, or Lawrence,” she said. “I would probably work in a restaurant and have two D.U.I.s and sit on the couch a lot in my underwear.”This was on a Monday afternoon in mid-December at John Brown BBQ, a purveyor of Kansas City-style barbecue in Queens, which is to say the closest that a person can get to Kansas within the New York City limits. (Not very close, as it turns out, though Everett said that the sides were delicious.) She was joined by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, the creators of “Somebody Somewhere,” a wistful Kansas-set half-hour comedy that arrives Sunday on HBO.Everett, 49, stars as Sam, a woman whose biography parallels her own, to a point. After years of bartending in a big city, Sam has returned to her hometown. She has a soul-eating job at an educational testing center and various family obligations — a father (Mike Hagerty) with a struggling farm, a mother (Jane Brody) with addiction issues, and a sister (Mary Catherine Garrison) with a wobbly marriage and an Instagrammable approach to evangelical Christianity. Sam sits on the couch a lot in her underwear.Then she meets Joel (Jeff Hiller), another testing center employee, who remembers her from her high school-choir glory days. He introduces her to a band of outsiders and misfits who meet weekly for what they call “choir practice,” a louche and joyful open mic night in an abandoned mall. And slowly, like some late-season wildflower who rips open her T-shirt after an impassioned version of “Piece of My Heart,” Sam begins to bloom.Danny McCarthy and Everett in “Somebody Somewhere.” The series is set in Everett’s hometown of Manhattan, Kan.HBOFor those who have experienced Everett onstage — in plunging, nipple-freeing dresses and with an approach to crowd work that violates most decency clauses — her presence as Sam will come as a surprise. She sings in only some of the episodes. Her wardrobe leans toward flannel. She sits on no one’s face.“If you’re used to seeing the wildebeest onstage, you’re going to be like, ‘Where is she?’” Everett said of her work on the show. “But I hope that people can settle into the sort of softer side of Bridget.”“I also think they’re going to be shocked to see me in a bra,” she added. “That’s really going to rattle some people.”Unhurried in its pacing, gentle in its tone and generally sympathetic to the vagaries of human behavior, “Somebody Somewhere” is not necessarily the show you might expect from pairing Everett with Bos and Thureen, founders of the avant-garde theater collective the Debate Society.But each has strong roots in the Midwest — Everett in Manhattan, Kan., where the show is set; Bos in Evanston, Ill.; Thureen in East Grand Forks, Minn. Which may explain why the producer Carolyn Strauss, who had first worked with Everett on “Love You More,” a pilot for Amazon, connected them.“That’s how she found us,” Thureen joked. “She was like, ‘Oh, they’re Midwestern.’”Strauss, a former top executive at HBO, had helped to arrange Everett’s deal with the network. She wanted a project that traded on more than Everett’s outrageousness, that also acknowledged the shyer, more guarded woman that she is in her offstage life.The creators Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen loosely based the series on Everett’s life.Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“There’s many different sides to her,” said Strauss, an executive producer on the series. “There’s just something about Bridget that really connects to all the parts of people — the good parts, the bad parts, the wounded parts, the healed-over parts.”With this prompt, Bos and Thureen, writing partners who have worked on “High Maintenance” and “Mozart in the Jungle,” pitched a show that drew on Everett’s real life — Kansas upbringing, unholy pipes, a mother who drinks, a sister who died young — and then imagined how this woman might express herself in a place that didn’t seem to welcome her heart or her gifts.“They threw in the dead sister, and I was sold,” Everett said.There are plenty of stories about small-town kids who come to the city with a dollar and a dream, and make good. There are plenty more about big-city transplants finding happiness only when they return home. That first story is more or less Everett’s, though it took decades of restaurant work and a lot of sozzled karaoke nights before she had anything that could be called a career. The second one is arguably Sam’s, though its comedy of chosen family is tinged with heartbreak. The show’s bittersweet message is that it’s never too late to find yourself, whenever and wherever you are.“We didn’t want to do a snarky show,” Everett said. “We wanted to do a nice show. Like a hug, you know?”HBO approved a pilot late in 2018. Everett and Jay Duplass, a director and executive producer on the show, took a research trip to Manhattan, Kan., so Duplass could meet her family, walk its not-so-mean streets and soak up what Everett suggested were its passive-aggressive vibes. Bos and Thureen wrote the script, interpolating some of Everett’s real experiences and a few verbatim quotes.Murray Hill, left, and Jeff Hiller are among the New York theater veterans in “Somebody Somewhere.” “It is a show that I hadn’t ever seen before,” Hiller said.HBODuplass — a creator of HBO’s “Togetherness” and a star of Amazon’s “Transparent” — shot the pilot in October 2019, mostly in Lockport, Ill., a city just southwest of Chicago. He aimed for a kind of documentary realism, he said. “How we could have done this wrong,” he said, “was to make everybody just jack up their quirkiness and undermine the underlying tragedy that’s also going on with each of these people.”But isn’t the show supposed to be a comedy? “In our mind, we are making a drama that happens to be funny,” he said.A seven-episode series was greenlit early in 2020, then paused when the pandemic began. Plans were made to resume shooting in September, but as case numbers rose, the producers pushed production again. The cast and crew arrived in Lockport this spring and shot as quickly as they could, sometimes locking down a scene in only two or three takes.Most of the cast, Everett included, had never played roles this substantial. Hagerty, who recurred on “Friends,” has perhaps the most credits, but no one is what you would call famous. So the shoot was late-bloomer central. “That made the set really fun,” Bos said. “It was a set for people who really wanted to be there.”In the past, film and TV shoots had unnerved Everett, often to the point of intestinal discomfort. But here she finally felt at ease. “It’s because I lived with the project for so long,” she said. “And we built it together — I knew I couldn’t get fired. That’s the main thing: Like, what were they going to do? Replace me with Kathy Bates?”Other actors felt this comfort, too. Hiller has often played small roles on TV, mostly waiters and, as he put it, “mean gay customer service representatives.” No show had ever wanted so much of him.“It is a show that I hadn’t ever seen before,” he said, speaking by telephone. “You don’t have to be gorgeous and perfect; you can be imperfect and queer and weird and too large. It’s nice.”Everett describes her stage persona as a “cabaret wildebeest.” For “Somebody Somewhere,” she said, “I hope that people can settle into the sort of softer side of Bridget.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDuring the shoot, he lived with Everett and the cabaret legend Murray Hill in a rented house that Hill, who plays a soil scientist named Fred Rococo, described as “this ridiculous, Russian supper club, drug den of a mansion.” Hiller would sometimes count the number of pride flags in town: one.“There were times when we would be in the grocery store and get some looks,” Hiller said. “There’s a certain muting one has to do when one goes into slightly less benevolent spaces for the cabaret queers of the world.”But that was OK, because the cabaret queers had each other. Speaking by telephone, Hill, a drag king superstar, recalled growing up within a conservative New England community and feeling a sense of belonging only once he moved to New York and discovered cabaret. “Chosen family,” he said. “That’s how I’ve survived. That’s how Bridget’s survived. So a lot of those themes are in the show.”For Everett, success has always felt like an accident, albeit an accident resulting from years of survival jobs, very late nights and hard work. “Somebody Somewhere” suggests that even if this accident hadn’t happened, even if she had never made it in New York, she would have made a life for herself anyway. Which is a kind of consolation. Starring in an HBO show at 49? That’s consolation, too. And she is glad, she said, that it didn’t happen earlier.“If I had been successful in my 20s, I’d be in prison,” she said. “There’s no question. For some people, it takes a little longer to step into your stride. I feel like it makes it sweeter, in a way. And if it doesn’t work out, then I know I’m going to be OK.” More