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    Artistically in Sync, and Reunited for ‘The Merchant of Venice’

    Arin Arbus and John Douglas Thompson are collaborating on their fifth play, a Theater for a New Audience production that begins previews Saturday.More than 25 years later, John Douglas Thompson still remembers the summer heat that made him sweat beneath his costume. He remembers lines, too, that have been stored in his brain ever since — like the “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech, in which his character, the moneylender Shylock, asserts his own humanity.And then there was the spit. Each performance of “The Merchant of Venice,” on an outdoor stage at Shakespeare & Company, in western Massachusetts, started with Thompson walking past his fellow cast members while they spat at him, in character: Christians displaying their contempt for a Jew. It felt horrible — he remembers that as well — but it did lock him into the experience of the man he was playing.“I’d, you know, wipe it off,” Thompson said. “And I just had to keep going. I had to suffer that.”He was still training as an actor then, in 1994; his Shylock was part of a student production by the company. But he has long since established himself as “one of the most commanding classical actors around,” as the critic Ben Brantley once called him. And Shylock, it turns out, is a role that Thompson wanted to revisit.His performance — in a Theater for a New Audience production, starting previews on Saturday at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn — appears to be, according to the theater’s research, the first time a Black actor has played the role on a professional stage in New York City. It is also Thompson’s fifth play with the director Arin Arbus, a collaboration that started with her acclaimed “Othello” in 2009.Thompson with Nate Miller, center left, and Maurice Jones (center with hat) during a rehearsal of “The Merchant of Venice.”Amir Hamja for The New York TimesThat show was her professional debut, and she’d had to persuade him to play the title role. He risked it partly because, in his experience, white men directing that tragedy “tend to zero in on Iago and really leave the Black actor playing Othello to fend for themselves,” he said, whereas “the female director being a minority, as the Black actor playing Othello is also a minority, there’s just a connection there.”By now — after also starring in Arbus’s productions of “Macbeth,” Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and Strindberg’s “The Father,” all for Theater for a New Audience — he says that hers are precisely the “careful hands” he needs to help him shape a role as complex as Shylock in a play as controversial as “The Merchant of Venice.”In a joint interview on a January afternoon at a rehearsal space in downtown Manhattan, Thompson, 58, and Arbus, 43, were easy together behind their face masks. Filling in the blanks in each other’s sentences, they seemed artistically in sync in a way that felt organic, not rehearsed. Arbus observed that they argue well — an underrated skill.“I hope to one day be her muse,” Thompson said, and she laughed delightedly.“The Merchant of Venice” is one of those Shakespeare plays that defy easy classification. Technically it’s a comedy, ending sans blood bath and with couples reunited. Yet there is heartbreak in it, not least because Shylock’s beloved daughter, Jessica, betrays and deserts him. And Shylock, like Othello, is an outsider in his own society.Enduringly divisive, the play bristles with bigotry: the antisemitism that is aimed at Shylock, who over the centuries has often been portrayed in ugly caricature; and the anti-Blackness that Portia, the principal character and Shylock’s courtroom nemesis, spouts repeatedly.Arbus working with Alfredo Narciso, seated, and Sanjit De Silva, right. (In the background are Varín Ayala, left, and  Nate Miller.)Amir Hamja for The New York Times“People have issues with this play just on the page,” said Arbus, who, like Thompson, views Shakespeare as depicting bigotry, not endorsing it. She was on staff at Theater for a New Audience when it staged its last production of the play, starring F. Murray Abraham and directed by Darko Tresnjak. It was the only time Arbus has known the theater to get hate mail.The idea for a new production of “Merchant” came from Thompson, whom she described as an actor with “an enormous intellectual appetite and an enormous emotional appetite.”He also has some shiny recent credits in high-profile prestige TV series. Last year, he played Chief Carter, the boss of Kate Winslet’s title character, in the HBO hit “Mare of Easttown”; currently, he can be seen as Arthur Scott, the father of Denée Benton’s character and the husband of Audra McDonald’s, in Julian Fellowes’s HBO glam-o-drama, “The Gilded Age.”Plans for this “Merchant” were already afoot when the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 sparked a racial reckoning. Ask Thompson whether his exploration of the character has changed since then, and he mentions the wider lens on hatred that his depiction — of a Jewish Shylock who is also a Black Shylock — will open up at a time of ever more belligerent public expression of antisemitism and anti-Blackness.He speaks, too, about the buildup of daily indignities and humiliations that Shylock endures before he gets a chance to exact revenge — when Antonio, the contemptuous merchant of the title, fails to repay a loan on time, and Shylock demands as penalty the pound of flesh that their contract stipulates.“What is it that drives someone to say, ‘No more’?” Thompson asked. “How does one who has been discriminated against horribly and treated horribly, how does that person get agency for themselves in a world that refuses, wants to keep them as a second-class or no-class citizen?”Thompson wants to examine why Shylock abandons rationality, insists on a moral wrong and then — this is the sticking point — refuses to relent.What’s fascinating about Shakespeare’s poetry, Douglas said, “is when you let it go with someone of a different culture, of a different race, of a different gender and allow them to be themselves in that language, it’s beautiful.”Amir Hamja for The New York Times“What Shylock is up against is so much bigger than him,” he said. “And I think that’s where the irrationality comes in: ‘I can’t take it anymore.’”Thompson is, of course, not the first Black American to play Shylock in a professional production. That distinction probably goes to the 19th-century Shakespearean Ira Aldridge, though he had to leave New York for Europe to do it.In contemporary times, Paul Butler played the role for the director Peter Sellars in Chicago in 1994, and Johnny Lee Davenport at Milwaukee Shakespeare in 2005.Arbus’s staging — a coproduction with Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C., where it will run in the spring — surrounds Thompson with a racially diverse cast. In consultation with the scholar Ayanna Thompson, a specialist in issues of race in Shakespeare, Arbus said she asked the actors “to bring their backgrounds into the characters that they’re playing.”And in contrast with much American theater in recent decades, which in using colorblind casting has sought to teach playgoers to look past race, Arbus says she intends her audiences to see it, and to think about it.To John Douglas Thompson, their “full-bodied, color-conscious, diverse production is a clarion call,” a way of debunking even unconscious biases on the part of audience members and asserting that Shakespeare’s words belong to more than just a narrow slice of the populace.“The most fascinating thing about this poetry,” he said, meaning all of Shakespeare, “is when you let it go with someone of a different culture, of a different race, of a different gender and allow them to be themselves in that language, it’s beautiful. And I think it’s educational. Then you can learn about people, you know, you really can.”A Shakespeare evangelist through and through, Thompson considers the plays “a birthright,” and likens them to “mother’s milk.”At home in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, he has five to 10 copies of each of Shakespeare’s plays, he said — and 15 separate editions of “The Merchant of Venice,” lately placed strategically around his prewar apartment, so that one is never more than an arm’s length away.Arbus says that part of what makes Thompson so compelling onstage is that “he’s very sensitive to the language, very sensitive to other actors.”Amir Hamja for The New York Times“It’s a one-bedroom kind of loft,” he said, “but everywhere there’s a chair or a table, I just want to have it, because I don’t want to go searching for the script, you know what I mean?”It helps to immerse himself that way, and he likes that each version has different scholars’ notes, with possibly slightly varied text. He has even more copies of “Othello” — 16 or 17, he thinks.Arbus, applauding the wisdom of keeping multiple editions, cited a version of “Othello” whose editor had reassigned one of Desdemona’s lines to Emilia, and in the process done away with a key to Desdemona’s character.“You see?” Thompson marveled. “That is fascinating. From a line.”Later, by phone, Arbus would say that part of what makes Thompson so compelling onstage is that “his nerves are closer to his skin than many people’s are, in that he’s very sensitive to the language, very sensitive to other actors.”“It’s these big stories that I feel satisfy his soul in a way that maybe nothing else does,” she said.But that afternoon in the rehearsal space, Thompson was talking about trust — about how he would probably say yes to doing another Shakespeare play with Arbus even before she told him which one she had in mind.“I mean, she may say, ‘OK, it’s going to be a comedy,’” he said. “And I hate comedies. I would still do it.”Rising ever so slightly to his bait, Arbus didn’t mention a title, just a potential role, as distant from Shylock and “The Merchant of Venice” as Shakespeare could be — the weaver-turned-ass in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”“Bottom, Bottom, Bottom,” she said.“I’d say OK,” Thompson said. “I’ll do it with Arin.” More

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    ‘Dr. Semmelweis’ and ‘The Glow’ Reviews: Tales From the Asylum

    Two new plays offer very different experiences of the sanitarium, one starring Mark Rylance and the other spotlighting a fast-rising actress.LONDON — “Wash your hands! Wash your hands!” That plea has sounded the world over in recent years, and it lends a topical potency to “Dr. Semmelweis,” running through Feb. 19 at the Bristol Old Vic, a beautiful 18th-century playhouse in southwest England.Its urgent speaker is the titular medic, a Hungarian-born doctor in 19th-century Vienna who pioneered antisepsis only to die in 1865, at age 47. It was left to subsequent physicians like Joseph Lister to pick up his work.The play tells the time-honored tale of a man against the system, in this case a visionary whose desire to reverse a high mortality rate among young mothers comes up against a largely heedless establishment. Worthy of Ibsen and chronicled before in a Howard Sackler play that circled Broadway but never got there, Semmelweis’s story here emerges as a star vehicle for Mark Rylance. The much-laureled actor (three Tonys and an Oscar) co-wrote the play with Stephen Brown.The director, Tom Morris, runs the venerable Bristol venue and has given Semmelweis’s too-short life a busy, bustling production that includes actors spilling from Ti Green’s turntable set into the auditorium on occasion, with musicians and dancers on hand to amplify the discordant emotions of the piece. The dancers, choreographed by Antonia Franceschi, give swirling physical expression to Semmelweis’s increasingly disordered mind and to the mothers who lost their lives to hygienic neglect. The Salomé string quartet weaves among the events, playing snatches of Schubert and lending a high-art sheen to some grave subject matter.If all this sounds like a lot of embellishment, it’s fair to say that the first act in particular feels as if stage business is being used to disguise some fairly boilerplate writing. The play begins at the end, with Semmelweis in Hungary recalling, alongside his calm-seeming wife, Maria (Thalissa Teixeira), a climate of contamination in Vienna that did irreparable damage to the doctor’s psyche.How can a vaunted “city of new ideas” not be more responsive to the investigations of a young maverick who comes upon the disinfectant potential of chlorine? This grocer’s son has determined that death rates at the world’s largest hospital — as Vienna General then was — are three times higher at the doctors’ clinic than at that of the midwives. “Cadaveric particles” are posited as the culprit, passed on by unclean hands from the autopsy room to the delivery ward and turning the hospital into a de facto slaughterhouse.Rylance’s character in “Dr. Semmelweis” is, in time-honored fashion, a visionary whose desire to reverse a high mortality rate among young mothers comes up against a largely heedless establishment.Geraint LewisThe locals aren’t having it. “Nuts by name, nuts by nature,” one of Semmelweis’s colleagues remarks dismissively, referring to this upstart’s first name, Ignaz. Never mind that the insult doesn’t make a whole lot of sense given that these people were probably not speaking English.After the intermission, the baldfaced, expository nature of the writing continues. If Semmelweis is right, we’re told, “the entire future of medicine will be changed.” There’s a line, too, about the possible efficacy of bleach that draws thumping parallels to one of the more, um, peculiar proposals to defeat the current pandemic.Through it all, Rylance is a springy physical presence. He brings a stammering restlessness to the role of a radical thinker whose thoughts at times outpace his words. You have to smile when this protean actor — acclaimed across TV and film, but devoted first and foremost to the stage — speaks in passing about “not wanting to waste time in the theater either,” and it’s nice to find among the supporting cast such fellow theater stalwarts as Alan Williams, in stern form as the obstetrician Johann Klein, Semmelweis’s nemesis.More than anything, “Dr. Semmelweis” whets the appetite for Rylance’s return to the London stage in April, reprising his seismic performance in the Jez Butterworth play “Jerusalem,” first seen at the Royal Court in 2009. That same London address, an important one for new writing, is currently hosting an Alistair McDowall play, “The Glow,” that really is nuts, albeit intriguingly so.The title character of “Dr. Semmelweiss” died unappreciated in an asylum, and McDowall’s time-traveling drama begins in one two years earlier, with a dimly lit figure fearfully inhabiting a windowless cell. That figure, a woman (Ria Zmitrowicz), is then glimpsed in any number of settings and centuries, ranging from the 1300s, in the company of a warriorlike personage (Tadhg Murphy) who might have wandered in from “Game of Thrones,” to 343 A.D. and forward to the 1970s and beyond.From left, Ria Zmitrowicz and Rakie Ayola in “The Glow” at the Royal Court Theater in London.Manuel HarlanWhat in heaven’s name is going on? You might ask McDowall the same of his 2016 play for the Royal Court, “X,” which was set on Pluto.Shouty and apocalyptic only to turn rapturously poetic in its closing monologue, “The Glow” is best viewed as a sensory experience in which lighting and sound conjoin with the writer’s freewheeling imagination to summon up a lonely and difficult world that nonetheless allows for the warmth of the title. The intermission, only 40 minutes or so in, gives audiences ample time to ponder what they have seen.The more literal theatergoer will be driven to distraction by the play’s apparently willful opacity, but that in itself tracks with the experimental bent of a theater defined in part by the playwright Caryl Churchill, whose own inquisitiveness and disregard for convention may have offered a beacon for McDowall.For myself, I have to commend the full-throttle production of Vicky Featherstone, the Court’s artistic director, in tandem with a design team in which Jessica Hung Han Yun’s mercurial lighting reigns supreme. Fisayo Akinade and Rakie Ayola offer sterling support as more recognizable participants in a world to which Zmitrowicz’s initially mute woman has a hesitant relationship. Seen first as a spiritualist medium — yes, you read that right — Ayola also gets to display a lovely singing voice.With the mysterious spectral figure at the play’s center, McDowall has offered a gift to Zmitrowicz, a fast-rising actress who has come to attention of late largely at the Almeida. Alternately sullen and feverish, indrawn yet eloquent, this performer rivets our attention throughout, even when the play she inhabits is ricocheting every which way around her.Dr. Semmelweis. Directed by Tom Morris. Bristol Old Vic, through Feb. 19.The Glow. Directed by Vicky Featherstone. Royal Court Theater, through March 5. More

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    Late Night Comments on the Washington Commanders

    The hosts didn’t think much of the N.F.L. team’s long-awaited new name. Jimmy Kimmel pointed out that it’s also the name of the president’s dog.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.Command PerformanceThe Washington Football Team, formerly known as the Redskins, announced its new name and logo on Wednesday, rebranding as the Washington Commanders.“And just like that, she made racism disappear!” Jimmy Kimmel joked of the team’s co-owner Tanya Snyder, who handled the unveiling of the new uniforms.“The ‘W’ stands for ‘Why did it take you two years to come up with this?’” — JIMMY KIMMEL on the team’s new logo“‘The Commanders’ kind of sounds like an action movie where Dolph Lungren and Sylvester Stallone join forces to defend their assisted living facility.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s the Washington Commanders. That really feels like a waste of a drumroll.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“‘Commanders’ might be the only name more generic than ‘Football Team.’ I was hoping for something fun and new, like ‘The Washington Balloons’ or ‘The Fightin’ Dolly Partons.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Interestingly, the franchise now shares a name with President Biden’s dog, who is also named Commander. Good thing they didn’t name it after Trump’s dog. ‘The Washington Pences’ — it doesn’t have the same ring to it.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The Washington Football Team announced today that it officially changed its name to the Washington Commanders, as in ‘Rams 37, Commanders 3.’” — SETH MEYERS“I mean, call them whatever you want, they haven’t been able to command a winning season since Obama was in office.” — JAMES CORDEN“To give you an idea of how fans reacted, shortly after the announcement, this is true, the word ‘terrible’ trended on Twitter, which is surprising, considering how Twitter is normally so welcoming and so positive.” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Six More Years of Winter Edition)“This morning, all eyes were on Gobbler’s Knob, which I can’t believe I can say on CBS.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Today was Groundhog Day, and Punxsutawney Phil says we’ve got about six or seven winters left.” — SETH MEYERS“That is so unfair, because if Africans were doing [expletive] like this and you heard that we pulled animals out of the ground? Like, there are villages in Africa where people wear animal skins, and if I tried to explain that Americans use groundhogs to predict the weather, they would be like, ‘But why not just use the satellite data?’” — TREVOR NOAH“Yeah, that’s right, we spend all year telling people to trust science, then ask a large rodent to predict the weather.” — JIMMY FALLON“You know, they could just flip a coin, but coins aren’t known carriers of rabies and hepatitis, so it’s more fun to go with the groundhog.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I was thinking, actually, about Feb. 2, 2020 — two years ago exactly. We still hadn’t had a single Covid death in the United States. Exactly six weeks later, the whole country was in lockdown, six weeks to the day. But how could we have known this was coming? Who, on Feb. 2, could possibly have predicted what would happen in exactly six weeks?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And by the way, we looked into it — the Farmers’ Almanac calls the few animals who hibernate in winter ‘the seven sleepers.’ You want to know who two of the seven sleepers are? Groundhogs and bats.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Daily Show” correspondent Roy Wood Jr. profiled the creator of Proud Puffs — the “Jackie Robinson of breakfast cereal” — for this week’s Black in Business.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightNicki Minaj will appear on Thursday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutA depiction of the Anderson-Lee wedding (featuring Lily James and Sebastian Stan) in “Pam & Tommy.” In real life, the couple met, fell in love and were married in the course of four days.Erin Simkin/HuluHulu’s “Pam & Tommy” is a picaresque romp through the history of the stolen sex tape that changed pop culture. More

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    Sara Ramirez Is Not Che Diaz

    Ramirez doesn’t really relate to Che, the most polarizing character in “And Just Like That.” But the actor is “really proud of the representation that we’ve created.”During a much-discussed “comedy concert” in “And Just Like That …,” HBO’s “Sex and the City” sequel series, the much-discussed character Che Diaz recounts the story of coming out to family members.“I stood up in the living room and I was like, ‘Family, I love you, and just want you to know that I am queer and nonbinary and bisexual,’” Che tells the audience with a serious face, before breaking into a wide smile. “And they were like: ‘That’s nice, can you move? You’re blocking the game.’”The bit was similar to how Sara Ramirez, the actor who plays Che (and who, like Che, is nonbinary and uses they/them singular pronouns), came out to their family as bisexual — except a “Harry Potter” movie was on the television instead of sports.The writers for “And Just Like That …” did not take much else from Ramirez’s life, the actor said in a recent interview. Aside from the character’s hairdo (a sleek undercut) and ethnic background (Mexican and Irish American), “I don’t recognize myself in Che,” Ramirez said.A cocky, fast-talking comic who employs Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) on a podcast about gender and sex, Che is often a conduit for the show’s original girl group (minus one) to learn about the newfangled cultural practices of New York City’s younger progressives: pronouns, sex positivity and shotgunning weed, to name a few. Most important, Che prompts Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) to explore her sexuality.The show, which will release its season finale on Thursday, has been criticized for its heavy-handed treatment of identity issues and for the occasional clumsiness of its efforts to diversify the overwhelmingly white, straight original series. (Maya Phillips, a critic for The New York Times, called those attempts “commendable but shallow.”)Che has taught the show’s original characters about modern progressive mores and been central to Miranda’s (Cynthia Nixon) sexual awakening.Craig Blankenhorn/HBO MaxChe has been a popular target of such complaints. One critic, writing in Them, a L.G.B.T.Q. news and culture website, said the character read as a “caricature” meant to “garner Diversity Wins.” The Daily Beast went further, calling Che “unhinged” and “the worst character on TV.” On social media, viewers groaned at Che’s “woke moment!” button, a podcast prop, and at the sometimes stilted dialogue. (“DM me if you wanna chill again soon, OK?” Che tells Miranda in a pivotal scene.)Others have defended the character, arguing for the importance of a nonbinary person in the show and questioning why so many were piling on Che, in particular. “People have a real problem with non-gender-conforming individuals,” the performer Lea DeLaria told The New York Post, adding: “I don’t think it’s the show’s fault. I think it’s the audience’s fault.”Speaking over video chat from New York, Ramirez, 46, said they have grown accustomed to playing roles that spark criticism and debate. For example, the sexuality of Dr. Callie Torres, the hard-charging orthopedic surgeon Ramirez played on Shonda Rhimes’s medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy” from 2006-16, was energetically dissected by the show’s fans.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.Ramirez — who was born in Mazatlán, Mexico, and was sent to live in the United States at 7 after their parents’ divorce — graduated from Juilliard in 1997 and quickly landed roles in theater (the Broadway musical “The Capeman”), film (the rom-com “You’ve Got Mail”) and television (the soap opera “As the World Turns”). Ramirez joined “Grey’s” not long after winning a Tony Award, in 2005, for playing the Lady of the Lake in the Broadway production of “Spamalot.”It wasn’t until after Ramirez left “Grey’s” that they came out publicly as bisexual and then, four years later, as nonbinary. In an interview, the actor discussed the appeal of the original “Sex and the City,” viewers’ reactions to Che Diaz and the pressure of coming out on TV before doing so in real life. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You were in your early 20s when “Sex and the City” premiered, in 1998. What were your impressions of the show?I had just graduated from Juilliard. I was working professionally as an actor and falling in love with New York. So it was a perfect show. I appreciated the focus on friendships, the power of friendships and the power of personal purpose and also sexual empowerment for women.Your first high-profile TV role, Callie Torres on “Grey’s Anatomy,” exhibited a similar sense of purpose and empowerment. Did you relate to that character?I was really excited to take on a role that was very empowered, strong, but also extremely sensitive and vulnerable. I related to that due to my own upbringing and some of the trauma that I overcame. I developed a very hard shell, and I’m also extremely sensitive at the same time.Ramirez, with Ellen Pompeo, was on “Grey’s Anatomy” from 2006-16.Adam Taylor/ABCHow did Callie come to explore her sexuality in the show? Did your own experiences play a role?I knew I was bisexual from a younger age, from my teens, and it was an incremental discovery process. So living with that truth about myself was one thing; it was another thing to be working in television and slowly becoming more well known. So on the one hand, I felt a sense of pressure to come out publicly. On the other hand, I wondered if creatively I could have an impact by infusing the character I was playing with a more expansive sexuality.Were you nervous about pitching that plotline to Shonda Rhimes, the creator?I think it was a mix of comfortability with Shonda and nervousness, mixed with excitement about the unknown. If she says no, it would be disappointing — but on some level, a relief. If she says yes, it’s excitement and terror that we may get it wrong.What do you mean by getting it wrong?Just failing the community — portraying someone in a way that would be harmful to the community, that would be seen as inaccurate somehow. I think that comes with an internalization of bi-antagonism. I was conditioned to believe that there was only one way to be queer at that time.Do you remember getting feedback from viewers on the path that Callie ultimately followed?Social media hadn’t taken off when we first started exploring that journey for Callie [in fall 2007], and the only thing available were chat rooms, online forums or comments on websites. I did check it out a few times, and it was a mix of different opinions, which is great in a sense, because you want people to have opinions. I think it’s a good thing to get people talking. But I learned that it’s not a good idea to look into any of those because the opinions are vast, and as an artist, I have to protect my process.You didn’t come out publicly until after you left the show. What was it like to play a bisexual character on television but to still be struggling with whether or not to be open about your own sexuality?It was incredibly stressful. There was a lot of anxiety that I lived with — and I happened to be married to a cisgender man. Living the life of a bisexual person in real life but deep down knowing that there would be all kinds of judgments around my own sexuality was really hard to live with while portraying somebody who is in the process of becoming empowered around being with women. It was a real interesting time.“We have built a character who is a human being, who is imperfect, who’s complex, who is not here to be liked, who’s not here for anybody’s approval,” Ramirez said.Craig Blankenhorn/HBO MaxThere is less overlap between you and Che Diaz. Have you been paying attention to the criticism of the character, or have you tried to separate yourself from it?I’m very aware of the hate that exists online, but I have to protect my own mental health and my own artistry. And that’s way more important to me because I’m a real human being. I’m really proud of the representation that we’ve created. We have built a character who is a human being, who is imperfect, who’s complex, who is not here to be liked, who’s not here for anybody’s approval. They’re here to be themselves.I’m also not in control of the writing. I welcome the passion that folks are bringing to the table around this representation. But in real life, there are a lot of different human beings who show up to the table, speaking truth to power in myriad ways. And they all land differently with different people. And Che Diaz has their own audience that they speak to who really get a kick out of what they’re doing.How do you think Che would respond to this criticism?Michael Patrick King [the showrunner of “And Just Like That …”] and the writers’ room would probably answer that best since they wrote the character of Che Diaz. I imagine Che would have something very witty and silly and funny as a rebuttal; something that ultimately reminds everyone that they are human; something with a sprinkling of self-deprecation, because I think they know they’re a narcissist. And maybe just a little reminder that no one’s perfect. More

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    Review: In ‘Prayer for the French Republic,’ Echoes of the Past

    Joshua Harmon’s ambitious new play toggles between a contemporary Jewish family facing growing antisemitism and their relatives during World War II.The well of naïve young Americans being schooled in life, love, politics and croissants by effortlessly worldly French people is in no danger of running dry. The latest addition to this cohort is 20-year-old Molly, a New Yorker who has just met her distant cousins in Paris.Thankfully it is they, not sweet, passive Molly, who are the subjects of “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s ambitious and maddening, thought-provoking and schematic new play, directed by David Cromer at Manhattan Theater Club.At the very beginning, the matriarch, Marcelle Salomon Benhamou (an excellent Betsy Aidem), painstakingly explains her family’s genealogical ties to Molly (Molly Ranson). They are so complicated that Marcelle has to repeat them for the young woman’s benefit, and of course the audience’s as well. Even then, it takes much of the play’s three-hour running time and some toggling between 2016-17 and 1944-46 for the connections and their consequences to sink in.Harmon (“Significant Other,” “Admissions”) has set himself quite a challenge because Molly has arrived at a critical juncture for Marcelle; her husband, Charles (Jeff Seymour); and their 20-something children, Daniel (Yair Ben-Dor) and Elodie (Francis Benhamou). Daniel, who wears a kipa, has come home with a bloodied face after an antisemitic aggression. It is just another example of what Charles feels is an increasingly scary climate for Jews in France, a last straw that makes him want to move to Israel.Betsy Aidem, left, and Richard Topol as siblings in Joshua Harmon’s play, a Manhattan Theater Club production.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“It’s the suitcase, or the coffin,” he says, referring to his ancestors’ forced wandering as he may be about to emulate it. (One of the play’s most fascinating aspects, though an underexplored one, is how these characters represent two strands of French Judaism: Marcelle’s Ashkenazi ancestors have been rooted in France for centuries, while Charles’s are Sephardic Jews who lived in North Africa for generations before relocating from Algeria in the 1960s.)The Benhamous have spirited arguments that have the urgency of life-or-death decisions: Should they stay or should they go? What does it mean to be Jewish in France? (The play’s title refers to a prayer that has been said in French synagogues since the early 19th century.)Some of the show’s concerns, including the temptation of appeasement via assimilation — a position embodied by Marcelle’s brother, Patrick (Richard Topol) — echo those Harmon explored, in a much more comic vein, in his blistering debut, “Bad Jews,” from 2012. That show was dominated by a hurricane-like character named Daphna, and she now has a marginally milder-mannered relative in Elodie, who injects volatile energy every time she opens her mouth.Incidentally, Ranson was also in “Bad Jews” and once again finds herself on the receiving end of impassioned, and often wickedly funny, tirades and put-downs that have the biting rhythm of New York Jewish humor rather than a French sensibility. (A faux pas: The Benhamous buy croissants in an American-type cardboard box rather than the paper bags used in French boulangeries.)From left: Nancy Robinette, Kenneth Tigar, Peyton Lusk and Ari Brand in one of the scenes from the end of World War II.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAll of this would be enough to pack any story, but Harmon also transports us to the end of World War II for several scenes with Marcelle and Patrick’s older relatives — their grandparents, Irma and Adolphe Salomon (Nancy Robinette and Kenneth Tigar, both heart-wrenching), have somehow managed to survive in occupied Paris and held on to their piano store.The two narratives progressively start bleeding into each other, with Marcelle and Patrick’s father, Pierre (Peyton Lusk in the 1940s, Pierre Epstein in the 2010s), embodying the link, both literal and metaphorical, between past and present.Cromer, a technically astute and emotionally sensitive director, handles the back and forth as well as you might expect — he puts a stage turntable to evocative, if perhaps a little clichéd, use, for example. Still, it’s not hard to feel the show’s tension slacken when we leave the Benhamous. The play’s finale aims for the lofty and falls terribly short, but it does represent the family’s tragedy: they want to be part of a country that may never fully accept them.Prayer for the French RepublicThrough Feb. 27 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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    in Theater

    Danai Gurira Will Star as Richard III at Shakespeare in the Park

    The actress, known for “The Walking Dead” and “Black Panther,” will headline a return to semi-normal for the annual festival, which will also present “As You Like It.”The Public Theater, anticipating a semi-normal summer this year, is planning two full-scale productions for Free Shakespeare in the Park, including a run of “Richard III” starring Danai Gurira in the title role.The annual festival, ordinarily a highlight of summer in New York, took place via radio in 2020 (the play was “Richard II”), and then last year featured a single, small-cast show before a reduced-capacity audience (it was called “Merry Wives” — even the title was abbreviated) as the theater tried to adapt to shifting safety protocols necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic.Both pivots won praise, but this summer the Public is ready to go big again, with a two-show season and full-capacity audiences. “Richard III” will feature a cast of about two dozen, and it will be followed by a reprise of the Public’s 2017 production of “As You Like It,” which, by featuring New Yorkers from all five boroughs alongside professional actors, will have a cast of several hundred.“Last summer was a lifesaver, and this summer is going to be a huge shot of energy,” Oskar Eustis, the Public’s ebullient artistic director, pledged in an interview. “We are planning to have a full summer and to produce in as large and vibrant a scale as we ever have.”Of course, the pandemic’s not over, and there will be rules. At the moment, the Public is still planning to require patrons to show proof of vaccination, including a booster shot for those who are eligible, and to require mask wearing by patrons. Also, Eustis said the goal will be to keep both productions short enough that they can be performed without an intermission, which means some serious trimming for “Richard III,” originally one of Shakespeare’s longest plays.The production of “Richard III” will be directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”), who is no stranger to trimming — his halved production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is now running at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater downtown.Eustis said that he and O’Hara chose “Richard III” because it has not been seen at Shakespeare in the Park for many years, and because it felt relevant.“Let’s just say that ‘Richard III’ is the artistic work that for the first time really examined a political figure who utterly committed to the big lie — whose entire career is based on telling blatant falsehoods and somehow getting away with it,” Eustis said. “The idea that showmanship, devoid of content, has become a powerful political force makes it very germane for this moment.”Gurira, Eustis said, was an obvious choice to star: Best known for “The Walking Dead” and “Black Panther,” she is also an accomplished playwright (“Eclipsed”), a member of the Public’s board and a Shakespeare in the Park alumna (“Measure for Measure”).“She is a great actress who has become super-famous without people necessarily seeing the work she’s greatest at,” Eustis said. “Richard III is a spectacularly theatrical and rich character to play, and somebody with her ferocity and intelligence is going to make a spectacular Richard.”Darius de Haas, center, as a banished duke with a welcoming message in the 2017 Public Works production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd what will it mean to have a woman play Richard? “We are not going to re-gender the role, but what that means exactly we won’t know until we’re doing run-throughs,” Eustis said. “I know where we’re starting, but that doesn’t mean we know where we’re ending.”“Richard III” has been staged at Shakespeare in the Park four times previously, most recently in 1990, starring Denzel Washington.This summer’s production of “As You Like It” is a remounting of a production that had a short run in 2017, staged as part of the theater’s Public Works program, which integrates amateur performers from throughout New York City into musical adaptations of Shakespeare plays. In the years since it was created at the Public, this adaptation has been staged 35 times in school, community and professional theaters, including at the Dallas Theater Center, Seattle Repertory Theater, and the National Theater in London. The Public had hoped to give it a full run in 2020, but the pandemic prevented that.This “As You Like It” was adapted by Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery; Taub wrote the music and lyrics, and Woolery is the director, with choreography by Sonya Tayeh (“Moulin Rouge!”). As with the earlier version, this summer’s production will feature Darius de Haas, Joel Perez and Taub.The dates for the two productions, as well as the full casts, will be announced later.Shakespeare in the Park has since 1962 been staged at the 1,830-seat Delacorte Theater in Central Park, and last week the city Landmarks Preservation Commission approved plans for a $77 million renovation of the theater. Construction is expected to begin this fall, after the summer season ends; Eustis said that he is hopeful that construction can be phased and contained to off-season periods, so that Shakespeare in the Park can continue without further interruptions. More

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    in Television

    ‘An Environmentalist With a Gun’: Inside Steven Rinella’s Hunting Empire

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.There’s an episode of ‘‘MeatEater,’’ the hunting reality show on Netflix, in which the New York Mets first baseman Pete Alonso shoots a mule deer. After he watches it stumble, then fall dead on the ground — this is in the San Juan Mountains of Southern Colorado — he puts his head in his hand. “I think my grandpa is really proud,” he says, his voice shaky with adrenaline and emotion; his grandfather, who died a few years earlier, took him hunting and fishing as a boy. Then he turns to Steven Rinella, the lanky 47-year-old star of the show. “Thank you, Steve,” he says.“It’s very emotional stuff, man,” Rinella replies.While butchering the deer, Rinella carves out chunks of white fat from behind the animal’s eyeballs. “Put a little smidge of that in your mouth,” Rinella says. Alonso, looking a little nervous, does. “You getting it?” Rinella asks. “Raw dough?” The final third of the 30-minute show, like most episodes, is devoted to preparing and eating meat. Rinella changes out of his camouflage and takes on the role of wild-game chef. “Venison makes such a refreshing, invigorating meal,” he says in voice-over narration as he and Alonso grind up the deer’s right front shoulder before they grill burgers that they devour on camera.Rinella is arguably the country’s most famous hunter. The final episodes of his show’s 10th season will become available on Netflix in early February. (The first six seasons ran on the Sportsman Channel, a fishing-and-hunting cable channel.) He’s the founder of a rapidly growing lifestyle brand, also called MeatEater, whose tagline is “your link to the food chain”; in addition to its ever-expanding roster of hunting, fishing and culinary podcasts and YouTube shows, his company sells clothing and equipment and serves as a clearinghouse for all manner of advice, tutorials, videos and posts, ranging from a recipe for olive-stuffed venison roast to stories with titles like “Mother Punches Mountain Lion to Save Son” and “The Best Hunting Boots for Every Season” and “Should Hunters Be Concerned About Deer With Covid-19?” Rinella is the author of six books and has a contract with Penguin Random House to write five more, including a parenting book forthcoming in May. In three years, MeatEater has grown to 120 employees from 10, and its revenue has more than tripled. Blue-winged teals. The recreational pursuit of a small fraction of species sustains the conservation of many others.Natalie Ivis for The New York TimesTo be a hunting celebrity in America in 2022 is to sit at the center of a particularly messy tangle, where any number of controversies are constantly snarled together: over guns, meat, animal rights and trophy-hunting; over the urban-rural divide, the use of public lands, the very way we think about wild animals and wild places in this country. For years, Rinella has talked, written about and modeled hunting in ways that connect with all kinds of people — and not just hunters, who make up about 4 percent of Americans and tend to be more politically conservative. You won’t see him grinning over dead elephants. He eats what he kills, which makes the whole enterprise more, well, palatable to a lot more people, especially those among the 95 percent of the population who eat meat. In surveys, more than 70 percent of Americans say they approve of regulated hunting; the percentage is even higher when getting food is the explicit goal. “One of the best things that Steve and MeatEater have done is to introduce people to hunting through food,” Land Tawney, the president and chief executive of a national nonprofit called Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, told me. “It’s not just about killing things and high-fiving.”The focus on cooking has allowed Rinella to build something of an apolitical island, a place where a Republican duck hunter might share interests with a liberal Chez Panisse-trained chef in Berkeley (I know one who watches the show with her kids). But as his profile has risen, so, too, has the intensity of the pervasive culture-war polemics that make such a refuge increasingly rare, and possibly untenable. After the Chernin Group, an investment firm named after its founder Peter Chernin, a Hollywood producer and the former president of News Corporation, first invested in MeatEater in 2018, the conservative website The Federalist published an article titled “Anti-Gun Democrat’s Purchase of ‘MeatEater’ Could Pose Big Problems for Hunter-Focused Company.” (The Chernin Group now owns a majority stake in the company.) More recently, Donald Trump Jr. and several of his hunting buddies started a publishing platform and podcasting business called Field Ethos, whose website and Instagram account have taken aim at MeatEater. One post, for example, lumps MeatEater among hunting and conservation organizations that are “OK with shotguns for hunting and bolt-action rifles as long as they don’t hold too many rounds, but they aren’t cool with anything that goes against the D.N.C.’s official position.” For Field Ethos, food is explicitly not hunting’s main goal. Its chief operating officer is quoted on a website called HuntingLife.com as saying, “At our core we are about embracing toxic masculinity and rejecting the woke, P.C. culture.”Such antagonisms aside, though, it’s a fortuitous time to be selling the hunter lifestyle. Until very recently, the percentage of the population that hunts has been in a decades-long free fall, prompting headlines like this one from the BBC in 2019: “Are U.S. Hunters Becoming an Endangered Species?” Then the pandemic hit, communal indoor activities shut down and Americans poured into the outdoors — crowding national parks, reserving campsites, hitting the road in R.V.s and camper vans. People bought and borrowed guns, bows and fishing poles and set out, while socially distanced, into waters and wilderness. Sales of fishing licenses spiked. Nationally, the number of people getting hunting licenses started climbing, too, particularly for new hunters. California had 43,000 first-time hunters in 2020. When I called the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to ask about hunting participation in 2020, the guy I talked to whistled and said, “What a whirlwind.” Data suggest that the demographic of these new hunters and anglers is younger, more urban, more female and possibly less white — a notable shift, considering that 97 percent of hunters in the U.S. are white, and 90 percent are men. Rinella’s efforts to speak to the broad spectrum of outdoors people can at times seem acrobatic; guests on his podcast have included the Fox News host Tucker Carlson as well as the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, and Rue Mapp, the chief executive of Outdoor Afro, a nonprofit that connects the Black community with nature and conservation. Maybe we are all on Rinella’s island, fishing and hunting and cooking over the campfire together. Maybe, even as we disagree about so much, we can find some shred of mutuality out in the wild.Steven Rinella (left) and companions after an early-morning hunt in Louisiana on the marsh south of Bayou Dularge.Natalie Ivis for The New York TimesMy family might be considered a part of this wave of newcomers. When the shutdowns first began, my husband and I started fishing with our two sons, then 3 and 6. Things got serious fast. We found a motorboat to rent and, whenever we could, ditched our cramped urban home for the open waters of San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Instead of children’s shows, the boys started asking to watch “catch and cook” videos — a phrase that brings up some 130,000 results on YouTube. The narrative arc of these videos is timeless, the stuff of cave paintings, really: Protagonists go out seeking fish, they catch fish, they eat fish.The Great ReadMore fascinating tales you can’t help but read all the way to the end.He was in witness protection, but his old life in Harlem kept calling. Going home eventually got him killed.His world was radically altered by “Jackass.” But now, Jason Acuña — better known as Wee Man — has harnessed his fame to live the life of his dreams.Quitting is contagious. When one employee leaves, the departure signals to others that it might be time to take stock of their options.We stumbled into a few episodes of “MeatEater,” too, and watched, without the kids, surprised to see hunting programming with Anthony Bourdainian qualities. (It turns out the show’s first producer and cinematographer also shot and produced Bourdain’s shows.) If Rinella didn’t create the hunt-kill-eat video genre, “MeatEater” has certainly had a very big hand in popularizing it. On YouTube, the boys and I navigated past the weirder stuff — videos of bikini-clad women suggestively reeling in grouper in Florida, say — and found a few content creators we all liked, including Kimi Werner, who features footage of her free-dive spearfishing off the coast of Hawaii, after which she prepares delicious-looking fish dishes with her toddler. (Werner has since signed up with MeatEater to contribute videos and posts to its website and social media platforms.) At bedtime, the boys would cuddle up in their pajamas to listen to readings about fish behavior from a bulky guidebook called “Certainly More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast: A Postmodern Experience,” written by Milton S. Love, an impressively quirky marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.We caught and ate some sea creatures, including massive, pancake-like slabs of halibut pulled up from the bottom of the bay; a few grouchy Dungeness crabs; some bulgy-eyed rockfish; and one exquisitely teal-colored lingcod. But most of the time we caught nothing — and just reveled in the trying. We chatted up old men in bait shops for tips. We contemplated how we might lure in these elusive, scaly beings. It all felt something like having a crush. Anthropologists who study hunters and anglers write about this experience as a kind of interspecies empathy, in which the hunter takes on the “double perspective” of both predator and prey. I could see this in my older son, Oscar; there was little doubt he wanted to catch fish, but it’s possible, especially in those early months of the pandemic, that what he wanted more was to be a fish. Inside a houseboat where Rinella and the chef Jean-Paul Bourgeois prepared ducks for an episode of “MeatEater.”Natalie Ivis for The New York TimesWhen I showed up at MeatEater’s headquarters in Bozeman, Mont., in late October, I wasn’t sure whether my family’s recent forays as active predators — rather than, say, grocery-store meat procurers — conferred upon me a sort of insider status. But fishing felt like one thing, and hunting with guns felt like quite another. At first, the offices looked like those of any Silicon Valley start-up: the familiar open floor plans, clusters of standing desks, ergonomic office chairs, lots of fleece-wearing young white men with facial hair. Then I noticed the animals: a black bear skin draped over the railing on the central stairway with head and claws intact; an imposingly shaggy buffalo pelt nearby; a taxidermied jack-rabbit head (with some tacked-on antlers, to make a “jackalope”) mounted to the wall. Everywhere I looked there were vaguely intimidating skulls and other bones that I couldn’t begin to recognize.The recording studio on the ground floor was packed with a cross-talking assemblage of guests, a producer and a sound engineer; they were getting ready to record an episode of the “MeatEater” podcast, a weekly chat show that typically runs two-plus hours and receives 2.5 million downloads a month, mostly from major metropolitan centers like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver and Minneapolis. Rinella was describing a recent experience on the road. “We ended up in a tiki bar in Nashville talking to the waitress about opossums,” he said. This waitress had apparently found a baby opossum, fed and raised it and was now posting photos of it on social media. Someone asked Rinella about his own pet raccoons — growing up, he and his brothers had three, all rescued from chimneys or attics. “It’s actually illegal to keep a raccoon,” Rinella claimed before the group. (The rules on this are complicated and vary by state.) “It’s the property of the state; it’s wildlife.” One of the on-air guests, a photographer, jumped in: “I had a pet crow that acted like a dog.”The podcast producer interrupted to remind everyone to silence their cellphones, and the engineer pressed a button to begin recording. Rinella started by introducing his guests. “You can go watch Tracy on Netflix hunting turkeys,” he said, waving at Tracy Crane, the company’s chief marketing officer, who spent most of her career as a marketing executive at J. Crew in New York City and, later, at Beautycounter in Los Angeles. “And crying,” she added. In my hotel room the night before, I watched the “MeatEater” episode from Season 8 in which Rinella takes Crane hunting for the first time. She has never shot a gun before; he shows her how. When she finally kills a turkey on camera, she weeps. Now, three years later, nearly all the meat she eats is wild game, mostly killed by her and her husband. Rinella can have this proselytizing effect on people; among his other notable hunting converts are the comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan, who also learned to shoot and hunt on a “MeatEater” episode.The podcast conversation pinballed wildly. They discussed that time Rinella ate parasite-infected bear meat and got toxoplasmosis; whether animals can get PTSD; hearing loss from gunshots; the music of Gordon Lightfoot; boat-ramp etiquette; a man who swallowed a live, spiky fish to impress his children. “All right, Clay, this is my favorite news article to come out in six months,” Rinella said, turning to Clay Newcomb, one of the company’s recent breakout stars, who dove into a story about how ancient footprints found in New Mexico led scientists to conclude that humans were present in the area earlier than previously thought, dating back some 23,000 years to the Ice Age. Archaeology fascinates Rinella: For him, these ancient people with their arrows and clubs and leather shoes prove that hunting is integral to who we are as a species. “That Ötzi dude they found in the Italian Alps had some sweet boots made out of three different kinds of hides,” Rinella said. Newcomb had flown to Bozeman from Arkansas to talk about archaeology on the podcast because he was making a three-part series on the topic for his own MeatEater podcast, “Bear Grease.” When Newcomb was hired in 2020, he was the owner, editor and publisher of Bear Hunting magazine, a glossy print publication with about 6,000 subscribers. The first episode of “Bear Grease” debuted in April. The podcast now gets more than 600,000 downloads per month. It turns out a lot of people want to hear stories from a guy who cooks his meals in rendered bear fat, calls himself a hillbilly and can rattle off a recipe for bear-grease beard oil.It’s hard to know where all the pent-up desire for man-versus-nature tales comes from, but this particular narrative impulse is clearly wedged deep in our national psyche. The American literary canon is full of men with weapons and creatures pursued — Herman Melville’s whale, William Faulkner’s bear. Even now, when so few hunt, we watch television shows like the Discovery Channel’s “Naked and Afraid,” featuring nude hungry people desperately trying to snare animals and catch fish with their hands. Our politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, go out to be photographed in camouflage, rifle in hand, snatching at a bit of that all-American hunter mythology.We’ve been at this story so long, it’s hard to tell what is authentic and what is pageantry. In 1831, when the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville set out on his nine-month tour of the United States that would produce the seminal study of American political life “Democracy in America,” he wrote in a surprised tone in his journal about the rise of the hunter and storyteller Davy Crockett, who served Tennessee as a member of Congress: “Two years ago the inhabitants of the district of which Memphis is the capital sent to the House of Representatives an individual who has had no education, can read with difficulty, has no property, no fixed residence, but passes his life hunting, selling his game to live, and dwelling continuously in the woods.”The interest in these Hunter Man stories can seem like posturing, like frontier nostalgia or prepper fantasies — and there’s some of that — but it is also true that the ability to hunt and trap and forage for food is a profound part of the identity of this place and its people. During her confirmation hearing, Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous Secretary of the Interior, who is also a hunter, was questioned repeatedly about hunting opportunities on public lands. “I’m a Pueblo woman,” she answered. “We’ve been hunting wild game for centuries.”Theodore Roosevelt designated 230 million acres as public land, creating 150 national forests, 51 bird sanctuaries and five national parks, in no small part because of his love of hunting.Natalie Ivis for The New York TimesHunting and fishing stories are Rinella’s way of sending out a kind of plea. “I want my work to inspire people to think about the things that they love, to learn about the things that they love and to find it in them to advocate on behalf of the things that they love,” he told me. For Rinella, that thing is the outdoors; he describes himself as “an environmentalist with a gun.” In practical terms, this mostly means raising money for organizations working to protect habitats for fish and game species and urging his followers to get involved in conservation efforts, as he did in a recent Instagram post encouraging people to contact the U.S. Forest Service and tell it to reinstate the so-called roadless rule that restricts road-building and industrial activity in Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska, which was exempted from the rule by the Trump administration in 2020. He sits on the board of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a nonprofit that lobbies policymakers to put more money toward restoring wetlands, defending the Clean Water Act and halting the sale of public land. The opportunity for an angler to catch a trout, or a hunter to shoot an elk, is predicated on preserving the ecosystems that sustain those creatures. It took European settlers in this country hundreds of years to figure that out; it took Rinella a while, too. In the early 1990s at Rinella’s high school in rural western Michigan, he and his friends started a club they called HATE, an acronym for Hunters Against Teenage Environmentalists. They made T-shirts with HATE emblazoned across the chest and threw a raucous wild-game-and-beer party they called a “HATE Bash.” In Rinella’s teenage mind, anyone who wanted to save the environment was anti-hunting, and he, in turn, was vehemently anti-them. His love for his family and friends was inseparable from his love of hunting, whether he was reeling in bluegill from the nearby pond with his two older brothers, trapping muskrats and beavers in icy lakes with friends or shooting squirrels out of oak trees with his dad. “I still have that HATE shirt in my closet to remind me,” Rinella told me. We were sitting in his backyard at the home he shares with his wife, Katie, and their three young children in an upscale neighborhood in Bozeman. The leaves on the aspen tree out front had gone riotously golden, and the branches were festooned with dozens of antlers and animal bones strung up like Christmas-tree ornaments. Rinella is away from home a lot, following the hunting seasons like some kind of migratory superpredator, often with cinematographers in tow. In November, he hunted black-tailed deer and caught shrimp in Alaska and then white-tailed deer in Nebraska; in December, he shot ducks in Louisiana. January means hunting Coues deer in Mexico; February, the piglike javelina in Arizona; March, Osceola turkeys and cobia fishing in Florida; April, wild turkeys in Mexico, Wisconsin and Michigan; May, black bears back in Montana. Summer means bowfishing and spearfishing in Florida and Louisiana; fall means moose in Alaska and elk in Colorado. His fans are constantly stopping him in airports.After graduating from high school, Rinella was set on becoming a commercial fur trapper, selling muskrat, beaver, mink, fox and raccoon pelts to be made into fur coats and hats. But things didn’t go as planned. Fur prices were falling. He supplemented his meager earnings by cutting and selling firewood and picking up graveyard shifts at a nearby green-bean-processing plant. Later, he’d get an M.F.A. in creative-nonfiction writing at the University of Montana and realize that his experiences as a scrappy, working-class kid who wanted nothing more than to be outside gave him a unique voice as a storyteller, on the page and eventually on the screen. But in those years after high school, he was still a fledgling fur trapper going into debt. One day one of his older brothers — both of them lifelong hunters who were by then studying wildlife biology in college — gave him a dog-eared paperback copy of Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac.” “That was the beginning of my conservation awakening,” Rinella told me.Most people read Leopold as belonging to the pantheon of American environmental writers, with the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson and John Muir. Rinella reads Leopold as a fellow hunter. Leopold, his wife and his children all hunted, often with bows, and he derived many insights about the natural world and humans’ place in it from hunting. “A Sand County Almanac” was published in 1949 and has since sold more than two million copies and been translated into 14 languages. In one of the book’s essays, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold describes shooting a wolf and her pups in Arizona’s Apache National Forest when he was a 22-year-old forest ranger, a standard practice at a time when the government was busy trying to eradicate wolves and other predators. Leopold watched the wolf’s eyes go dead. “I was young then and full of trigger-itch,” he writes. “I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf, nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” Watching the wolf die certainly didn’t stop Leopold from hunting. And reading about it didn’t stop Rinella from hunting, either, but it did force him to grapple with America’s ignoble past when it came to the slaughter of its wild animals. “I had no idea that we’d killed all the deer, and the turkeys and the ducks and then brought them back,” he told me. “Without knowing all that, I never thought to apply any kind of reverence toward wildlife; it was just there.”When European settlers arrived in the New World, they quickly set about killing animals with a similarly prodigal mind-set. They hunted for food, fur, hides and, in the case of buffalo, as part of a genocidal strategy to starve Indigenous inhabitants and claim the land. Before white people landed, some 50 million bison roamed North America; by 1889, there were just 1,000 left.The precolonial population of white-tailed deer crashed from an estimated 62 million animals to as few as 300,000. The Canada goose disappeared almost entirely. Wealthy hunters noticed the decline in species they were keen to hunt and, in the interest of maintaining free-roaming prey, set about trying to protect these animals and their landscapes. In 1887, more than a decade before Theodore Roosevelt became president, he founded the Boone & Crockett Club, America’s first conservation organization. Membership was restricted to 100 men who had each shot at least three different megafaunas from a list that included bear, bison, caribou, cougar and moose. These elite sportsmen were instrumental in passing the nation’s first wildlife-protection laws, starting with the Lacey Act of 1900, which made the interstate trafficking of illegally harvested wildlife a federal crime.As president, Roosevelt went on to designate 230 million acres as public land, creating 150 national forests, 51 bird sanctuaries and five national parks, in no small part because of his love of hunting. In 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt, influenced by the earlier conservation work of his cousin, whom he admired, signed the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act, also known as the Pittman-Robertson Act, a federal tax on guns and ammunition. A similar federal tax was later placed on fishing equipment. For more than 80 years, that money has made up the bulk of states’ conservation budgets, supplemented by sales of hunting and fishing licenses. Spend any amount of time among hunters, or even state wildlife biologists, and you’ll inevitably hear the claim that “hunting is conservation.”Tony Wasley, president of the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies and director of the Nevada Department of Wildlife, explained to me what that actually means. “We have to take care of 895 commonly occurring species in Nevada based on funding that comes from people’s desire to recreationally pursue 8 percent of those species,” he said. His email signature: “Support Nevada’s Wildlife … Buy a Hunting and Fishing License.”The pandemic has been a boon to conservation funding. Over the past two years, Americans have gone on an unprecedented gun-and-ammunition buying spree, spurred by some combination of a global pandemic, months of Black Lives Matter protests, a contested presidential election and a mob-led assault on the U.S. Capitol. The federal government is on track later this month to send state fish-and-wildlife agencies the largest distribution of gun-and-ammunition excise taxes ever. (The states divvied up $1 billion last year in taxes collected from the sale of firearms and archery and fishing equipment.)But a system that requires more people to buy more guns and ammunition to save monarch butterflies or tricolor blackbirds isn’t a system designed to address 21st-century problems. The conservation model paid for by hunters and anglers and gun buyers has successfully brought back once-scarce game species like white-tailed deer and wild turkeys, but it is woefully inadequate to protect the birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians and insects facing the twin threats of habitat loss and climate change. Congress is currently considering a bill called the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act that would drastically change conservation funding by sending an additional $1.4 billion a year to state and tribal wildlife-habitat conservation programs to shore up the 12,000 mostly nongame species that states have already identified as being at risk. First introduced in 2017 by Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, and Representative Jeff Fortenberry, a Nebraska Republican, the bill appears to have broad, bipartisan support.Rinella doesn’t shy away from America’s ignoble past when it came to the slaughter of its wild animals. “I had no idea that we’d killed all the deer, and the turkeys and the ducks and then brought them back,” he says.Natalie Ivis for The New York Times“If it looks like I’m getting ready to shoot, put your fingers in your ears,” Rinella told me in the middle of a cattle pasture in northwest Nebraska. It was mid-November, and I had come to watch the taping of a future “MeatEater” episode at the peak of the white-tailed deer rut. Rinella, Newcomb the bear hunter, two hunting guides, three cameramen and two producers would be filming more than eight hours a day for six days. The afternoon I arrived, the group split in two: Newcomb went one way, and Rinella went another, carrying the only visible gun, a .30-caliber rifle slung over one shoulder, barrel pointed toward the sky. When he’s talking, Rinella talks a lot. When he’s hunting, he’s remarkably quiet, wordlessly loping over the terrain. Keeping pace beside him that day was a 28-year-old hunting guide named Jordan Budd, her blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. She leads hunting trips on this 7,500-acre stretch of tallgrass prairie where her family raises black Angus cattle. These two, the onscreen talent, wore lavalier microphones hidden under their camouflage. Close behind them trailed two videographers with cameras recording.The deer-stalking started in the dark every day and went until late morning; after a midday break, the hunters would head out again until after dark. One evening was spent walking quietly on a hill above a creek, periodically hunkering down, trying to disappear into the grass, while staring through binoculars and spotting scopes. Hunters call this technique spot-and-stalk, the goal being to see an animal before it sees you. “How much more legal light?” Rinella whispered. State regulations allow deer hunters to go 30 minutes past sunset but no further, and the sun was already a red smear on the horizon. Rinella took two plastic, knobby disks from his backpack and started clacking them together to simulate the sound of two bucks locking antlers (male deer can be lured in by the promise of a fight). Budd pulled her iPhone from her pocket, screen aglow with a text from Newcomb’s group, which had set up about a mile south of us: “Got one,” it read.By the time Rinella’s group reached the dead deer, the sky had gone dark enough to see the first stars. An inner circle of hunters flanked by cameramen stood around the buck, which was lying on its side in the back of a pickup truck. “He’s thin, man,” Rinella said, running his hand down the buck’s rib cage the way you’d pet a sleeping dog. Illuminated by the headlights of two pickup trucks, the hunters pulled the deer’s body down into the dirt and deftly slit open its underbelly from anus to sternum. After slicing through the muscle, Newcomb tugged the innards out, extracting the heart, a fistful of maroon-colored flesh ragged on one side where the bullet went through.“You want to keep the heart, Steve?” Newcomb asked.“Yeah,” Rinella said, as if the answer should be obvious; he would eat it.A producer tucked the heart into a Ziploc bag. They heaved the carcass back into the truck bed, and everyone piled into the cab and drove away, leaving behind a gleaming gut pile for the coyotes.The next day, Newcomb, Budd and the team’s “wilderness production assistant” drove the buck into Rushville, Neb., the nearest town, where it was checked in by a state employee at an ad hoc office at the Pump & Pantry, a gas station crowded with men in camouflage, some in baseball caps stitched with “Save the Habitat, Save the Hunt.” Back at the ranch, cameras on, the hunters strung the deer up in an ash tree by its hind legs and set about cutting off slabs of meat and vacuum-sealing them in plastic bags to be frozen and carried home on the plane in insulated carry-on bags. Later, the crew would take out the audio equipment and record a “MeatEater” podcast episode from the hunting cabin in which they discussed the hunt, layering one type of storytelling on top of another. Newcomb felt bad that he had shot the deer and Rinella hadn’t; Rinella is the star, the central focus, and the crew is deferential to him in that way people are to celebrities. “I call the buck Steve’s buck,” Newcomb says on the podcast.“That’s a good name for it,” Rinella replies.After three days of predawn mornings trailing the camo-clad, distracted by the monochromatic beauty of the unfamiliar prairie landscape, hoping to see an antlered deer and also relieved when we didn’t, I drove north toward the nearest airport in Rapid City, S.D., thinking about that bloody heart. I don’t want to be a hunter. I’m trying to eat less meat, not more. But for many people, hunting and fishing are a means to that visceral appreciation — let’s call it love — of the natural world that makes a person want to act to protect it. That feeling is big, an expansive common ground that needs to be filled with as many people as can be mustered, whether they get there armed with shotguns or birding binoculars or bright pink, Barbie-branded children’s fishing poles. After all, we, too, are animals reliant on imperiled ecosystems. Save the habitat, save ourselves.Malia Wollan is a contributing writer and the Tip columnist for the magazine. She is based in Oakland, Calif., and directs several reporting fellowships at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Natalie Ivis is a photographer who focuses on personal narratives as well as human intervention and interaction with nature. She currently lives in New Haven, Conn., where she attends the Yale photography M.F.A. program. More

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    Late Night Talks Tom Brady’s Retirement

    “You know you’ve been around a long time when you debuted the same year as ‘The Thong Song,’” Jimmy Fallon joked on Tuesday.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.Bye-Bye, BradyQuarterback Tom Brady officially announced his retirement from the N.F.L. on Tuesday, writing on Instagram that other things require his attention.“Man, when they said everyone is quitting their jobs during the pandemic, they meant everybody,” Jimmy Fallon joked.“Other things that require my attention? That’s a weird reason to retire. It sounds like he’s got, like, household chores: ‘I’ve loved playing in the N.F.L. but I’ve got 20 years of laundry piling up, so, it’s time to call it quits.’” — TREVOR NOAH“What he’s accomplished is amazing: 22 years in the league, seven Super Bowl victories, five M.V.P. trophies, and all while eating just one almond a day.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“A quarterback retiring at 44 is like the rest of us retiring from our jobs at 95.”— JIMMY KIMMEL“Brady’s now in his mid-40s, jobless and has no real traditional work experience, so he’s going to fit right in in Florida.” — JAMES CORDEN“So Tom Brady did a lot for the Patriots and for Tampa and the sport of football, but he’s also done a lot for goats. You know, people don’t mention, before they were associated with him, they were like the twelfth-most popular farm animal.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Now, if we’re being honest, this retirement isn’t a surprise to anyone, right? What is surprising is that at 44 years old, this dude was still dominating the N.F.L. Think about it: the N.F.L., where people car accident each other for a living, and this guy was doing that in his 40s. Most people I know in their 40s are, like, ‘Ah! Ah! My back hurts — I think I slept too long.’” — TREVOR NOAH“But this is amazing. Brady is walking away with the most Super Bowl appearances, wins and M.V.P.s. It’s strange to say, but he’s basically the N.F.L.’s Meryl Streep.” — JIMMY FALLON“And now that he’s put up his cleats, the question is, was Tom Brady the best football player of all time? Some people say yes because he holds all the records and won the most Super Bowls. Other people say, ‘No, because he didn’t do that for my team!’ So it will be a big debate for a while.’”— TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Shredded Edition)“So you know how Trump had to hand over all his records related to Jan. 6? Well, when the documents, when they finally handed them over — they were forced to — many of them had been torn into pieces and had to be taped back together. They’d been personally ripped up by Trump. The National Archive didn’t explain how they know they were ripped up by Trump. My guess is tiny little barbecue sauce fingerprints.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Sounds like during the pandemic, the people at the National Archives also got into puzzles.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, it violates the Presidential Records Act to tear up official documents, but the former president had a very good reason: He was afraid of going to jail.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Trump had such a habit of ripping up important documents, they had to hire people whose job was to tape them back together. I love that Robert Mueller couldn’t get him, but Trump might finally get brought down by a roll of Scotch tape.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“According to White House advisers, he once ate a sensitive document. He would have eaten more sensitive documents, but he ran out of ranch.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingTrevor Noah and the “Daily Show” correspondent Ronny Chieng dug into the hot trend of green burials.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightMartha Stewart will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutA scene from “Marry Me,” featuring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson as her love interest.Universal PicturesJennifer Lopez is back on the big screen with the romantic comedy “Marry Me.” More