Eliana Willis

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    Athletes Go Super Saiyan for Anime

    Young professional athletes are increasingly broadcasting their obsession with anime like “Pokémon” and “Naruto,” upending preconceptions about kinds of fandom.Instead of talking about football after he joined the New Orleans Saints, Jamaal Williams introduced himself to reporters last year with a dialogue on “Pokémon,” prompted by the foxlike character Eevee perched on his head.In homage to “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” the mixed-martial artist Israel Adesanya has boldly nicknamed himself the Last Stylebender.And the sprinter Noah Lyles, to celebrate his Olympic gold medal in the 100-meter dash this summer, cupped his hands forward as if generating the “Kamehameha,” an energy-blast attack from “Dragon Ball Z.”High-profile athletes are increasingly broadcasting their fascination with anime, creating a fraternity inside locker rooms as they lovingly dissect favorite animated Japanese shows and films. In the process, they are upending preconceptions about different kinds of fandom and outdated labels that seek to define and divide jocks and geeks.“There’s more nerds out here that can ball out and like anime,” said Williams, 29, who has worn an anime helmet visor and gently corrected a reporter who mispronounced “Pokèmon.” “You don’t have to be the stereotype where all we do is rap or play ball.”The N.F.L. player Jamaal Williams, wearing an Eevee hat, is happy to talk about Pokémon with reporters.New Orleans SaintsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Working on a Sri Lankan-Australian Epic, He Learned His Family’s Past

    As the acclaimed “Counting and Cracking” makes its North American debut, the playwright describes the work as “my soul on a plate.”The playwright S. Shakthidharan has lived in Australia since he was a toddler, but when he speaks of his homeland, he means Sri Lanka.That’s where he was born, where he spent his first birthday, where his ancestors were rooted. Then in 1983, the South Asian nation descended into what would become a 26-year civil war. His family, part of the country’s Tamil minority, had the means to flee to safety. So they did, going to India, Singapore and finally Australia, in 1984.“I do think of Sri Lanka as my homeland, but I think of Australia as my home,” he said the other day, his accent redolent of Sydney, where he grew up. “I think I carry the two simultaneously. Sri Lanka lives somewhere in my chest. Always. Wherever I am.”He was saying this in New York, after a rehearsal of his epic play, “Counting and Cracking,” in which the personal and political are inextricably entwined. Jet lag had a hold of him, but he was game to talk about the show, which has a largely South Asian cast of 19 and a running time of three and a half hours (intermissions included).Shiv Palekar, center, and other performers at N.Y.U. Skirball. Multiple trips to Sri Lanka and India were involved in assembling the cast.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAn autobiographically infused hit in Australia, where it had its premiere in 2019, it is now in previews at N.Y.U. Skirball in Greenwich Village. Produced by Belvoir St Theater and Kurinji, and presented by the Public Theater and N.Y.U. Skirball, it’s a multigenerational saga about a Sri Lankan-Australian family and the dangerous fragmenting of a society that can drive people to leave their beloved country and risk trying to forge a new life elsewhere.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Kara Young Is Charming in Rom-Com ‘Table 17’ Following Her Tony Win

    The Tony winner leads a top-notch cast in Zhailon Levingston’s alluringly designed production of Douglas Lyons’s hopeful new play.There are certain anxieties you learn to live with as an avid follower of New York theater, and one of them is this: the most extraordinary artists making work for the stage might at any second be whisked off to the more lucrative world of TV and film, never to return.I have had this simmering worry about Kara Young for a few years, and ever since she won a Tony Award in June for her impeccable comic performance in “Purlie Victorious,” the threat level has seemed high. As the fall season begins, though, we are still in luck.Off Broadway, at MCC Theater, Young is channeling her extraordinary charm, and her silent-screen-star expressiveness, into a new romantic comedy, Douglas Lyons’s “Table 17.” An 85-minute romp, it wears its belief in true love — and in theater — rather fetchingly on its archly posed sleeve.Young plays the restlessly single Jada, who tossed her therapist’s cautious advice about her former fiancé out the window the instant he called and invited her to dinner. It’s been seven years since they met at a nightclub and two years since their painful split. Of course she doesn’t want him back — unless he admits to wanting her back, in which case she would be willing to concede, eventually, that the longing is intensely mutual.“From our first silly night on the dance floor, he had me,” she reminisces to the audience as she tries on one possible outfit for their reunion. “And I just knew I had found my person.”Disclaimer to rom-com haters: “Table 17” is not for you. It is, however, for a lot of us — fans of the genre and anyone to whom theater of late has felt more arduous than entertaining. This is a play that wants you to have an amusing, untaxing evening out, and everything about Zhailon Levingston’s alluringly designed production, with its top-notch cast of three, is calibrated in service of that aim.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Fifteen-Love’ Is a Tense Tennis Drama

    A British import on Sundance Now, the series balances sports sudsiness with prickly, fraught drama about sex, maturity, consent and power.Ella Lily Hyland and Aidan Turner in a scene from “Fifteen-Love.”Rob Youngson/Sundance NowJustine (Ella Lily Hyland) was a promising tennis player in her teens, and the French Open seemed like it would be her breakthrough tournament. But a gnarly wrist injury and an total emotional breakdown derailed her. Now she’s in her early 20s, working as a physical therapist at her old tennis academy, stewing in self-loathing and coming to terms with the fact that her coach, Glenn (Aidan Turner), assaulted and manipulated her. Part of her wants to leave that in the past, but when Glenn re-emerges at the club, coaching other teen girls, she can’t.“Fifteen-Love,” a British import on Sundance Now, balances sports sudsiness with prickly, fraught drama about sex, maturity, consent and power. Justine has great instincts but terrible impulses; she knows Glenn preyed on her, but there’s no real mechanism for justice or restitution. Some people in her life believe her; some don’t. But worst of all are the ones, like her mother, who mostly believe her but think what happened is no big deal — always a victim, they say. In Justine’s eyes, though, she never got to be a victim at all.Hyland’s performance here is mesmerizing but grounded, showing us how in some ways Justine grew up too fast, and in others she hasn’t grown up at all. She is angry and can be self-destructive, and the show shines in its argument scenes. Tennis players know how to volley. “You used to be on my side,” Justine spits at her best friend and fellow player. “No,” says the friend. “I was in your shadow.”Over its six episodes, “Fifteen-Love” loses steam, especially when it kicks into thriller mode toward the end. More characters does not always mean more story, and the show is most interesting when it is narrowly focused, probing the dynamic between Justine and Glenn. It’s not as pat as just victim and abuser — where do the other feelings go?Even as the plot sags, the specifics still land. In one scene, Justine and a comrade comb through years of possibly incriminating emails, looking for leads on other victims. What should they search for? “Sexual?” the friend suggests. “Inappropriate?” Justine instead types in “emotional.”So far four episodes are available, with new installments arriving Thursdays. More

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    Taylor Frankie Paul and the Story Behind ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’

    A new Hulu series will explore a cheating scandal — and its aftermath — that rocked the world of Mormon social media influencers.In the summer of 2022, the world of Mormon influencers was rocked by a scandal that even their most dedicated followers did not see coming. Taylor Frankie Paul, a married TikTok influencer and mother of two, announced in a TikTok livestream that she and her husband had decided to get a divorce after “soft swinging” with other Mormon couples in their Salt Lake City-area friend group.The public admission prompted denials from Ms. Paul’s friend group, cheating accusations and even more shocking revelations, all of which have followed the so-called #MomTok influencers ever since.Now, the scandal and its aftermath have been documented for a new reality series for Hulu — the aptly titled “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” — which premieres on Friday. Here’s what you need to know about the women, and the scandal, at the heart of the series.OK, what is #MomTok?“I created MomTok,” Ms. Paul, 30, declares in the trailer for the show.MomTok is a nickname for a loose collection of popular young Mormon influencers who post TikTok videos of themselves dancing, lip syncing and behaving in ways you wouldn’t necessarily expect religious women to behave. But that’s part of the point: Ms. Paul and her friends, including Mayci Neeley, Mikayla Mathews and Whitney Leavitt, say that MomTok is about subverting expectations of how Mormon wives and mothers should act.“We are trying to change the stigma of the gender roles in the Mormon culture,” Ms. Neeley says in the trailer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    15 Shows to See on Stages Around the U.S. This Fall

    Matthew Broderick stars in “Babbitt” in Washington, D.C., and five companies nationwide will stage Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer-winning play “Primary Trust.”For theater companies across the United States, the start of the new season finds them still in a time of uncertainty, with audiences not yet returned to prepandemic levels. It makes sense, then, that a lot of fall programming favors the cozily familiar: revivals of known quantities and fresh takes on classic tales. This list skews more toward the adventure of wholly new work — but it’s peppered with tempting adaptations, too.‘COLD CASE’ An Inupiaq woman from a Native village in Alaska battles to retrieve her aunt’s body from an Anchorage morgue in this new play by Cathy Tagnak Rexford (HBO’s “True Detective: Night Country”). The script won the Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award, whose previous winners include Sanaz Toossi’s “Wish You Were Here.” DeLanna Studi directs. (Sept. 6-22 in Juneau, Alaska, and Oct. 11-20 in Anchorage; Perseverance Theater)‘PRELUDE TO A KISS A MUSICAL’ Rita and Peter are young, beautiful and headlong in love when an old stranger supernaturally swaps bodies with her: his soul in Rita’s, hers in his. Craig Lucas’s 1988 fable of a play, which became a 1992 rom-com movie, now morphs into a musical, with a score by Daniel Messé (Lucas’s collaborator on “Amélie,” the musical) and Sean Hartley. Kenneth Ferrone directs. (Sept. 10-Oct. 19; Milwaukee Repertory Theater)Jonathan Gillard Daly, left, and Chris McCarrell in “Prelude to a Kiss a Musical,” which premieres in September at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.Don Rebar‘PRIMARY TRUST’ Eboni Booth’s graceful, aching, gently funny play about a lonely man quietly slipping through the cracks of a small American town won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for drama. This fall, productions are cropping up across the country, including at Signature Theater in Arlington, Va. (Sept. 10-Oct. 20); Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass. (Sept. 18-Oct. 13); La Jolla Playhouse in La Jolla, Calif., where Knud Adams, who staged the premiere Off Broadway, directs (Sept. 24-Oct. 20); the Goodman Theater in Chicago (Oct. 5-Nov. 3); and Seattle Repertory Theater (Oct. 24-Nov. 24).‘OH HAPPY DAY!’ The playwright Jordan E. Cooper joins forces again with the director Stevie Walker-Webb, who staged Cooper’s wild sketch satire “Ain’t No Mo’” on Broadway. This new comedy, a reimagining of the story of Noah’s Ark, has original music by the gospel songwriter Donald Lawrence and stars Cooper as an estranged son arriving unexpectedly at a family barbecue in Mississippi. (Sept. 19-Oct. 13; Baltimore Center Stage)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    28 Broadway and Off Broadway Shows to See This Fall

    New York stages are welcoming Robert Downey Jr., Adam Driver, Audra McDonald and more this season.New York City stages are gearing up for a starry fall, with Robert Downey Jr. making his Broadway debut, Marisa Tomei and Jane Krakowski doing new plays, Adam Driver and Kenneth Branagh leading revivals, and Audra McDonald and Nicole Scherzinger stepping into two of the juiciest roles that musical theater has to offer. The overall abundance — on and Off Broadway — is cheering: Even away from the sparkle of celebrity, there are plenty of tempting shows by plenty of artists we’d be lucky to be in the room with.Broadway‘McNEAL’ Robert Downey Jr. makes his Broadway debut in this new drama by the Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar (“Disgraced”), playing an esteemed novelist with a potentially dicey interest in artificial intelligence. This Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, has a cast that includes Andrea Martin and Ruthie Ann Miles; Downey appears both live onstage and in a two-dimensional “metahuman digital likeness.” (Sept. 5-Nov. 24, Vivian Beaumont Theater)‘THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA’ Jez Butterworth and Sam Mendes had a hit with their last Broadway collaboration, “The Ferryman.” Now they’ve teamed up for this time-toggling Butterworth play about four English sisters whose mother raised them in the 1950s to have showbiz dreams, and who return home in the 1970s as she is dying. Laura Donnelly, a star of “The Ferryman,” leads the capacious cast. (Sept. 11-Dec. 8, Broadhurst Theater)Laura Donnelly, at the piano, leads the cast of Jez Butterworth’s “The Hills of California.”Mark Douet‘YELLOW FACE’ David Henry Hwang’s 2007 satire stars Daniel Dae Kim (“Lost”) as a fictional version of the playwright, navigating anti-Asian racism in the theater and culture, while — whoops — mistakenly casting a white actor in an Asian role. In 2018, The New York Times named this comedy one of the 25 best American plays of the previous 25 years. Leigh Silverman directs this Roundabout Theater staging. (Sept. 13-Nov. 24, Todd Haimes Theater)‘OUR TOWN’ Kenny Leon brings Thornton Wilder’s microcosmic drama back to Broadway, starring Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”) as the Stage Manager. Zoey Deutch and Ephraim Sykes play the young lovers, Emily Webb and George Gibbs, with Richard Thomas and Katie Holmes as Mr. and Mrs. Webb; Billy Eugene Jones and Michelle Wilson as Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs; and Julie Halston as Mrs. Soames. (Sept. 17-Jan. 19, Barrymore Theater)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    27 TV Shows to Watch This Fall

    A “WandaVision” spinoff, Colin Farrell in “The Penguin” and Alfonso Cuarón’s “Disclaimer” are among the season’s tantalizing offerings.The fall television season is short on blockbuster titles — a “Star Wars” extension, “Skeleton Crew,” from Disney+, and perhaps HBO’s as-yet-unscheduled “Dune: Prophecy.” But there is plenty that’s of interest, including Alfonso Cuarón’s return to television with “Disclaimer” on Apple TV+, Colin Farrell’s incarnation of the Penguin for HBO and Kathryn Hahn’s reboot of her “WandaVision” character in “Agatha All Along” for Disney+. There will also be new seasons of offbeat but proven comedies like “Bad Sisters” on Apple TV+, “Somebody Somewhere” on HBO and “What We Do in the Shadows,” which, unlike its vampire heroes, will perish after its sixth season on FX. Here are 25 shows to keep an eye out for this fall, in chronological order; all dates are subject to change.September‘THE OLD MAN’ In Season 2 of this melancholy spy thriller, Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow return as former C.I.A. colleagues and improbable action buddies — the two actors’ average age is 76, and Lithgow’s character once hired a hit man to kill Bridges’s. (With 76-year-old Kathy Bates starring in CBS’s “Matlock” reboot, it’s a good season for septuagenarians.) (FX, Sept. 12)‘HOW TO DIE ALONE’ The actress and writer Natasha Rothwell (“Insecure,” “White Lotus”) created and stars in this wistful comedy about a lonely airport worker whose life changes after a near-death experience involving an armoire and crab Rangoon. (Hulu, Sept. 13)Natasha Rothwell plays a lonely airport worker in the comedy “How to Die Alone,” which premieres on Hulu in September.Lindsay Sarazin/Disney‘AGATHA ALL ALONG’ Kathryn Hahn returns to her “WandaVision” character in this Marvel spinoff series. The witch Agatha Harkness, stripped of her powers, hits the road and forms a new coven; the cast includes Joe Locke of “Heartstopper,” Sasheer Zamata, Debra Jo Rupp and Aubrey Plaza. (Disney+, Sept. 18)‘THE PENGUIN’ Colin Farrell covers himself in silicone once again to play the waddling gangster Oswald Cobblepot, a.k.a. the Penguin, a role he first essayed in Matt Reeves’s 2022 film “The Batman.” Reeves is an executive producer of this mini-series, and Lauren LeFranc (“Impulse,” “Chuck”) is writer and showrunner. (HBO, Sept. 19)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More