Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 113 Shares179 Views

    in Theater

    Review: Theater Professors Are Under the Gun in ‘Preparedness’

    In this workplace comedy, beleaguered colleagues struggle to come together for an active-shooter training exercise.Theater people and academics share two traits: They are convinced of their calling’s moral importance to the world, which can provide a feeling of superiority, but they also often feel misunderstood and beleaguered, which makes them defensive. As members of a university’s theater department, the characters in Hillary Miller’s new comedy “Preparedness” — presented by the Bushwick Starr and HERE — belong to both constituencies, which means that their shoulders slump under boulder-size chips.That wariness is warranted, though, as their department is under attack from the university’s brass, which wants not just to cut their budget, but eliminate the program altogether.Figurative and literal survival become entangled when an irrepressibly chirpy H.R. representative, Kath (Alison Cimmet), turns up in the department’s shabby — and decidedly not chic — conference-slash-break room. If the teachers undergo state-mandated training on how to handle a potential mass shooting, they will have a better chance of surviving both a gunman and the dean’s delete button.An assistant professor in the English department at Queens College and the author of books on theater, Miller is fluent in academia’s quirks and jargon, as well as interdepartmental rivalries — don’t get the theater professors started on their brethren in film and digital tech. She also nails bureaucracies’ love for acronyms, deployed here in a dizzying alphabet soup that includes MeRP (Mutual Respect Pledge), ACOST (Active Campus Operations Shooter Training) and GOHOHOF (Get Out, Hide Out, Help Out, Fight), as well as references to “FERPP requests” and “FULAP forms.”Miller and the director Kristjan Thor neatly sketch certain types that turn up in pretty much every group of educators. Most memorable are the beleaguered chairman, Jeff (Lou Liberatore), doing his darnedest to save his department, and Laurette (the wonderful Nora Cole, master of the haughty side eye), a grande dame prone to statement shawls and imbued with the authority that comes from charisma, experience and lofty ideals about her vocation. “We’re theater artists,” she says. “We create sacred spaces for a living!”Just as familiar is the high-strung, humorless Haydée García-Shelton (Tracy Hazas), who seems to have a hard time gelling with her colleagues — she casually informs them that she got married over the weekend, as if it were no big deal — and shows disdain for musicals and their fans. “If you ask these people about my work, they’ll pretend to care, and then they’ll go right back to pushing their GoFundMe for bouffant wigs,” she says. One guess as to who will eventually use pepper spray.Getting this motley bunch to agree on anything, especially an administrative injunction perceived as an imposition, is akin to herding cats — real ones, unlike Cat Blanchett, the department’s new robotic “Resilience Mascot,” a gesture meant to help improve the sinking morale.Liberatore (with Hazas at right) shows off the department’s “Resilience Mascot,” a robot named Cat Blanchett.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesUltimately, though, Miller can’t resolve a central issue: Some of the professors’ refusal to undergo training is mystifying. It’s easy to understand resistance to H.R., but a quick training session that both covers a very real concern — mass shootings in schools — and saves your funding feels like a gimme. And yet they bicker.Having painted herself into a corner, Miller can’t figure out how to end the play. So she gives Laurette, who is retiring, the last word in the form of an address to her students. It is a good speech, and a dodge.PreparednessThrough Dec. 11 at HERE Arts Center, Manhattan; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

  • 138 Shares179 Views

    in Theater

    Review: In ‘Nollywood Dreams,’ a Star and an Industry Are Born

    Jocelyn Bioh’s new comedy about making movies in Nigeria throws some side-eye on Hollywood as well.Producing more than 1,000 movies a year each, Bollywood, India’s Hindi film industry, and Nollywood, the Nigerian version, have long outpaced the California dream-makers who think they rule the world in Hollywood.It is against this shift in the shaping of global culture that “Nollywood Dreams,” a giddy if wobbly comedy by Jocelyn Bioh, plays out.But the template is pure MGM: Our sweet heroine, Ayamma Okafor (Sandra Okuboyejo), works, along with her tart sister Dede (Nana Mensah), in their parents’ travel agency in Lagos. When the rising film director Gbenga Ezie (Charlie Hudson III) announces open auditions for the title role in his latest project, “The Comfort Zone” — yes, there’s a title role — Ayamma sees a chance to “be like the women in all of those Hollywood films I spent my life watching” and become a star herself.There are complications, of course, but this being a 90-minute comedy, not many. Gbenga has all but promised the role of Comfort to his former lover, Fayola Ogunleye (Emana Rachelle), a somewhat tarnished star known as “the Nigerian Halle Berry with Tina Turner Legs.” And what of Wale Owusu (Ade Otukoya), Nigeria’s “Sexiest Man Born,” slated to play the hero in the movie and perhaps in Ayamma’s life as well? What, indeed!If this sounds more like a soap opera than a film, that’s because Nollywood in the early 1990s, when the play is set, was still in its artistic infancy. (Bioh writes in an introduction to the script that movies of that period, which she watched as a child, were low budget, “shot with very limited takes” and heavily dependent on improvisation.) Half the fun of Saheem Ali’s staging for MCC Theater, which opened on Thursday night, is in seeing how those drawbacks, when borrowed by West Africans, become selling points of a new aesthetic.Or perhaps an old one: “Nollywood Dreams” is spirited and casual, with the knockabout rhythms and narrative shortcuts of Hollywood in its early years, before flickers became films. On Arnulfo Maldonado’s shape-shifting set, the action cuts between three locations: the travel agency, Gbenga’s office and a television studio where the beloved talk-show host Adenikeh, “the Nigerian Oprah Winfrey,” conveniently interviews the other characters so they can provide bald updates on the plot.Sandra Okuboyejo, left, and Nana Mensah as sisters in the play, a production of MCC Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs played by the one-named actor Abena, who was a lovely Anne Page in Bioh’s adaptation of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” this summer, Adenikeh exemplifies the play’s twinned pleasures. While translating Oprah’s American mannerisms into florid Nigerian ones, she also offers a warped fun-house reflection on the original. That’s a neat double flip Bioh sticks throughout the play: In having her characters worship American brands (Steven Spielberg, “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” N.Y.U.) she pokes gentle fun at both.That’s by now a Bioh trademark. “School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play,” a hit for MCC in 2017, wrings all possible laughs (and a few impossible ones) out of its Ghanaian variation on familiar mean-girl tropes — while also offering, underneath the genre trappings, a critique of American cultural imperialism. “Merry Wives” is similarly complex, finding doubles for Shakespeare’s characters among the African diasporic community of South Harlem.If “Nollywood Dreams” is not quite as successful as those previous works, it’s at least in part because Bioh set out to keep the new play as light as possible. Like Gbenga, told by producers in the United States to “write movies about what they assumed was my experience” — which is to say, war and poverty — she was determined in “Nollywood Dreams” to focus on what’s “funny and wild and silly.” In a recent profile in The New York Times, she recalled a literary manager who despite admiring the play expressed surprise at its happy characters; hadn’t she read about Boko Haram?I am grateful that Bioh declined to interpolate that Nigerian terrorist group into the action. Too few playwrights have a gift for comedy, and she is the rare one who not only provides zingers but also the structures in which they make sense.A play about the enjoyable makeshiftness of early Nollywood films therefore gets an enjoyably makeshift treatment: Form follows dysfunction. Ali’s direction emphasizes color and comfort over snap and discipline. (Dede Ayite’s costumes nail all four.) The downside is occasional bagginess, as in the overlong audition scenes; “The Comfort Zone,” a love triangle in which a man must choose between his haughty American wife and his humble Nigerian sweetheart, is so deliberately bad that we cannot register, as we’re evidently meant to, Ayamma’s skill in performing it.Ade Otukoya as the magnetic leading man Wale and Abena as a beloved talk-show host known as the “Nigerian Oprah Winfrey.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut then Ayamma is the only character not forcibly enlisted in Bioh’s fun-at-all-costs agenda; Okuboyejo grounds her with warmth and common sense. The others are all over-the-over-the-top caricatures, hardly distinguishable from those in the films they make. (Even in movies, people are rarely as magnetically smooth as Otukoya’s Wale, who can seduce just by draping his arm on a couch.) To bring the point home, Bioh buttons the play with a spoof trailer for “The Comfort Zone” that’s both sincere and hilarious, a kiss and a kiss-off.Fair enough, but the best comedy nevertheless plants its feet in the same ground as tragedy. “Nollywood Dreams” evidently means to do so as well; Bioh sees in “The Comfort Zone” the “sad duality” of a country in which people have the choice to “live like the rich” by participating in the unjustness of society “or suffer like the poor” by refusing. “There is,” she writes, “no middle.”How “The Comfort Zone” — let alone the play that contains it — represents that idea I was unable to fathom. As subtext it’s in any case too sub to provide adequate ballast for the comedy. If only against the high standard of “School Girls,” that makes “Nollywood Dreams” feel slightly unmoored — which wouldn’t matter if American comedy were more like Nigerian film. In that case there would be 999 more productions like it, coming soon to a theater near you.Nollywood DreamsThrough Nov. 28 at the MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

  • 163 Shares169 Views

    in Television

    ‘I Don’t Know What a Carrie Is’: Candace Bushnell Works It Out Onstage

    The writer maps her life in a one-woman show, “Is There Still Sex in the City?,” beginning previews this weekend at the Daryl Roth Theater.I must tell you that after a long day of rehearsal in five-inch heels and a photo shoot at which she had posed atop, bestride and semi-supine on a corner banquette, Candace Bushnell, the woman who made the cosmopolitan the most famous drink of pre-Y2K New York, slipped into a chair in the gallery of the Carlyle Hotel and ordered an unglamorous pot of Earl Grey tea. With slices of lemon to soothe her throat.Bushnell, 62, broke out in the mid ’90s as a sex and relationship columnist for The New York Observer, centering her columns on a character named Carrie Bradshaw, a chic stand-in for Bushnell herself. She collected those pieces into a spiky 1996 book, “Sex and the City,” autofiction before it was cool. HBO premiered a series adaptation two years later. It ran for six seasons. Two movies followed, as did licensed fragrances, bus tours and candy.Bushnell’s life diverged from Carrie’s. She turned her talents to fiction. Her marriage to the ballet dancer Charles Askegard, whom she nicknamed Mr. Bigger, ended in divorce. After fleeing Manhattan for the Hamptons and despairing of dating, she wrote another novel, “Is There Still Sex in the City?”I couldn’t help but wonder: Has Bushnell adapted that novel into a one-woman show? She has. In “Is There Still Sex in the City?,” which begins previews at the Daryl Roth Theater on Saturday, Bushnell makes her stage debut, tracing her life — like a fever chart plotted in tasteful pink lipstick — from her Connecticut childhood to her party girl pinnacle to marriage, divorce and beyond. Is this fiction, autofiction, memoir?Bushnell at a rehearsal for “Is There Still Sex in the City?” in Midtown Manhattan. She hired an acting coach and a voice coach, and is doing Pilates to build up her core strength for the show. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m not trying to play a character,” she told me. “But I have a feeling that maybe I am a character. Like kind of naturally.”Bushnell arrived at the Carlyle, a few blocks from her Upper East Side apartment, in a sensible gray sweater dress and a fresh pair of absolutely senseless shoes — red satin Manolo Blahniks with diamanté buckles — that she walked in with impossible ease. (A line I’d heard during the rehearsal for the show earlier that day: “Do I have a shoe obsession like Carrie Bradshaw? No. Carrie Bradshaw has a shoe obsession because of me.”) In person, she has the wide-set eyes and porcelain poise of a Meissen figurine and conversation as polished as the Carlyle’s silverware.As a child in Glastonbury, Conn., Bushnell acted sporadically, though she spent most of her free time scribbling short stories and riding her horses. When she moved to New York at 19 — “wild and full of philosophies,” she said — she flirted with acting (that’s her frisky verb), studying at HB Studio.“I didn’t think I was really very good at it, which I probably shouldn’t say,” she said.Besides, she never loved it the way that she loved writing. “I really felt like, I’ve got to be a writer, or I’m going to die,” she said. So she wrote, signing away the theatrical rights to each new book. But a few years ago, when apportioning the rights to “Is There Still Sex in the City?,” she decided to hold onto the theatrical rights for herself.She wasn’t sure what to do with them. But then she met a talent manager, Marc Johnston, at the Carlyle, which Bushnell seems to treat as a bonus living room. He had helped to create a touring show for his client, the composer and accidental reality TV star David Foster. He thought that he could do the same for her.So again she wrote, this time in monologue form, repurposing stories from her books, her life, her lecture tours. That first draft ran about 200 pages. To shape up the script, Johnston and his fellow producer, Robyn Goodman, introduced Bushnell to the director and choreographer Lorin Latarro.“I have that aspect of my personality where I’ll put in hours and hours and hours into something just to try to make it better,” she said of preparing for the role.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn June, the show had a tryout at Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Penn. Set in a near-replica of Bushnell’s apartment, which includes her actual sofa, her actual carpet and her actual poodles, it unfurls as a chatty girl’s night.And though Bushnell is a practiced hostess, those first performances were unnerving. “It was like, Oh, God, this is really acting,” Bushnell said. Gradually the script shortened and Bushnell relaxed and improved.“She’s really miraculous,” Goodman told me in a phone interview. “She was determined to understand acting and she’s done it.”Understanding meant hiring an acting coach and a voice coach, and committing to Pilates three times a week to build up her core strength for the show. Which is to say that Bushnell takes the work of rehearsal and performance seriously — hence the afternoon Earl Grey — comparing it to the dressage drills she practiced as a girl, repeating the same small moves over and over until she gets them right.“I have that aspect of my personality where I’ll put in hours and hours and hours into something just to try to make it better,” she said.I joked that this made her seem not entirely like a Carrie. “I don’t even know what a Carrie is,” she said.HBO is busy reviving Carrie with a new series, “And Just Like That…,” which follows most of the original “Sex and the City” characters into their 50s, but Bushnell is not involved. In several places, her stage show emphasizes differences between Bushnell and Carrie, but those differences pertain to matters of men and fashion, not ideology or temperament. Carrie is flighty; Bushnell has her feet, if not her heels, firmly on the ground. While Carrie’s story ultimately became a romance, Bushnell maintains extreme ambivalence about romantic relationships.Bushnell in red satin Manolo Blahniks with diamanté buckles. “Carrie Bradshaw has a shoe obsession because of me,” she quips in her one-woman show. Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesHer feminism, which lurks at the margins of her books, emerges cogently and unashamedly in conversation. She speaks persuasively about the deforming effects of patriarchal power and the need for, as she put it, an equality of “mind, body and earning potential” — a nice surprise from a woman once known for table dancing at Da Silvano.A Page Six darling, Bushnell has rarely received much credit for her politics, her obvious intelligence, her psychological acuity. (Let’s just say that when I read her most recent book I found a few pages that described my foundered marriage so entirely that I had to text them to half a dozen friends and then lie down for a while.) And this is just ever so slightly on purpose.She recalled that as a child, angry about the inequities of gender, her father sat her down and told her that while she had ideas that people would need to hear, no one would listen if she yelled them. “So I learned very early on to coat everything in a candy-colored, sugarcoated message. Because that’s how you move society,” she said.Latarro, during a pre-rehearsal chat, agreed. “She writes feminism in a way that makes it palatable for a lot of women who have internalized misogyny and a lot of men who think everybody looks great in their sexy dresses.”The stage show, rich in quip and pop song snippet, is candy-colored, too — a chocolate martini with a sugared rim. Bushnell is recognizably herself, at least in the hour of rehearsal I saw, but buffed and glossed: a person repurposed as a fun and fabulous character. I asked her why she hadn’t attempted something sharper, more bitter. Earlier drafts had darker elements, she said. But those were cut.“The message that I’m delivering is probably risky enough as it is. I sit there and say, ‘I’m not married, I don’t have kids. And I’m grateful.’”Not that she wants to bother her audience with too many messages, which is probably why the producers have created a post-show nightspot, the Candi Bar, in the basement of the Daryl Roth.“Cosmos all night!” Johnston had enthused in a phone interview.Bushnell, as she drank her tea, put it more practically. “People just want to feel good,” she said. “And I want to give them a good time.” More

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Theater

    A Rare ‘Othello’ Puts the Spotlight on Race

    With a Black-led production of Shakespeare’s play, an Austrian theater hopes to jump-start a conversation about racism and the need for diversity on the country’s stages.ST. PÖLTEN, Austria — “Speak of me as I am,” Othello urges in the wrenching final scene of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Yet for centuries, those words — a plea for accurate representation — were spoken, by and large, by white actors.Nicholas Monu, who stars in a new production of “Othello,” running through Dec. 4 at the Landestheater Niederösterreich here, is pretty sure that he is only the second Black performer to play the role in Austrian theater history. The last time was nearly 170 years ago, in 1853, when the pioneering African-American actor Ira Aldridge held Viennese audiences spellbound as the Moor of Venice.As directed by the young Black British director Rikki Henry, this new “Othello” breaks ground in a country where artists of color remain a rarity onstage.The majority of Austria’s population of around nine million is white and was born here, although the percentage of foreigners and people with migration backgrounds has been rising steadily in recent years. Like its larger and more ethnically varied neighbor Germany, Austria has a robust system of state-funded theaters that employ full-time acting ensembles; these, like the country at large, are overwhelmingly white.From left: Michael Scherff, Tim Breyvogel, Laura Laufenberg, Nicholas Monu, Marthe Lola Deutschmann, and Tilman Rose in “Othello” at the Landestheater Niederösterreich.Alexi PelekanosWith its new “Othello,” the Landestheater is jump-starting a conversation about racism in Austrian society and the need for diversity on the country’s stages. According to the theater, there has never been a German-language production of “Othello” with both a Black director and star before, and it seems significant that the first is taking place not in a major cultural metropolis, but in St. Pölten, a small city 40 miles outside Vienna.“It’s often said that innovation comes from the provinces,” Marie Rötzer, the Landestheater’s artistic director since 2016, said in an interview. Recently, her playhouse has been punching above its weight, with productions including a stellar 2019 staging of the Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek’s allegory of the Trump presidency, “Am Königsweg,” and a 2020 “Hamlet” that was Henry’s house debut, and which won a Netroy, the prestigious Austrian theater award.“With this ‘Othello,’ we’re addressing wounds,” said the Landestheater’s director, Marie Rötzer. “The wounds of racism, hostility towards refugees, xenophobia and the isolationism that you often find in Austria.” David Payr for The New York TimesAlthough Shakespeare has long been venerated in the German-speaking world, “Othello” is a comparative rarity on its theater programs.“Normally, nobody here wants to touch it,” said Tim Breyvogel, the German actor who plays Iago, in an interview after a recent matinee performance. In the wrong hands, he said, an “Othello” production can legitimize stereotypes about Black men. And then there’s the issue of casting, he added: Even in Austria, most theaters now realize that presenting the title role in blackface was unacceptable.Rötzer said she knew her theater’s “Othello” must have a Black actor in the title role. After Henry’s success with “Hamlet,” she approached him about directing the show. Henry and Monu’s experiences as Black men helped the theater to “develop an awareness about how to treat topics that are part of the Black community,” she said.“With this ‘Othello,’ we’re addressing wounds: the wounds of racism, hostility towards refugees, xenophobia and the isolationism that you often find in Austria,” Rötzer said.Henry, 33, said in an interview that it was “a challenge to try to work out what the story would now tell in Austria — because, of course, race relations are different in Austria than they are in England.”Monu, left, and Tim Breyvogel, playing Iago. The production is set in the world of professional boxing.Alexi PelekanosHis strikingly contemporary production is set in the world of professional boxing, where Othello is a heavyweight prizefighter. “My idea was of someone who was incredibly lonely and someone who was isolated,” Henry said.That sense of exclusion and alienation, the director said, was something that everyone, regardless of their skin color, could relate to. The boxing frame also helped to motivate Iago’s machinations and reveal the character’s racism, he added. “Iago’s manipulations and reasonings became more alive, because boxing is so competitive and relies on intrigue,” Henry said.The Black Lives Matter movement was heating up as he worked on the show last year, but Henry said he was careful not to take the production in an overtly political direction. “We didn’t want to say to the audience, ‘You’re racist!’” Henry said. “Theater isn’t supposed to be accusing anyone. It’s supposed to be supporting and maybe ennobling them in some way.”Rikki Henry, the production’s British director, said it was “a challenge to try to work out what the story would now tell in Austria,” adding, “race relations are different in Austria than they are in England.”Michael Obex“Maybe it just sparks some interesting questions that you haven’t asked before, like, ‘How do I treat that brown person who delivers my mail every morning?’” he added.Monu, 56, who was born in Nigeria but lives in Salzburg, Austria, said that racism in Austrian society largely lay beneath the surface. “People don’t give it a lot of thought. There hasn’t been that journey that America has been forced to make, because of slavery, Jim Crow, etc. — or that Germany has been forced to make, because of the Second World War,” he said.“It’s not an aggressive form of racism,” he added. “You’re just not taken seriously or not seen as on quite the same level as a human being.”Monu, who began his acting career in England, is a former ensemble member of two of the most significant theaters in the German-speaking world: the Schaubühne in Berlin and the Burgtheater in Vienna. Yet despite having benefited from the ensemble system, he said it would need updating if it hoped to reflect the increasingly multiethnic reality of Europe today.Europe’s ensemble system, in which theaters have a troupe of permanent actors, was “a fantastic system, designed for brothers like this,” said Monu, right, referring to Breyvogel, left.David Payr for The New York Times“It’s a fantastic system, designed for brothers like this,” he said, gesturing toward Breyvogel, who sat next to him during the interview, “to be able to go from here to Berlin to Vienna, and be able to fit straight in, because the system is pretty much the same everywhere.”In order for things to change, Austrian theater administrators and audiences will need to become more familiar with seeing actors of color and hearing different accents onstage, Monu said. He saw some encouraging signs, he added: When he joined the Burgtheater in the early 2000s, he was the only Black actor in the ensemble; today, there are three.“If you’re going to be truly diverse, then you’ve got to open up your doors towards people who don’t sound like you, look like you,” Monu said. “Sometimes the journey’s going to be unpleasant or uncomfortable.”Monu said he hoped that this “Othello” might inspire local audiences take that journey. “I can try my best to touch as many people as I can, just by saying, ‘Hey, you know what, I’m the first Black guy you’ve ever seen onstage — and speaking German.’” More

  • 150 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    Prison Won’t Be a Riot for the QAnon Shaman, Jimmy Kimmel Says

    “Prosecutors are recommending 51 months behind bars, after which, he will be remanded into the custody of ‘Dancing With the Stars,’” Kimmel joked.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.Dancing With the InsurrectionistOn Thursday night, Jimmy Kimmel joked that Jacob Chansley, “the infamous insurrectionist” known as the QAnon Shaman who took part in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, “is probably not gonna be storming anything any time soon.”This week, prosecutors suggested that Chansley be sentenced to more than four years in prison for his role in the incursion, which would be the most severe punishment yet for a participant.“Prosecutors are recommending 51 months behind bars, after which he will be remanded into the custody of ‘Dancing With the Stars.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Weird to think the QAnon Shaman could get four years in prison when the guy who encouraged him to do it could get four more years in the White House.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And also, can we stop calling him a shaman now? I mean, that would make half the fans at the Buffalo Bills game shamans too.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I support a four-year prison sentence for any adult wearing a costume.” — JAMES CORDEN“They’re asking for three years for the riot, and an extra year because he used to be in an improv group.” — JAMES CORDEN“He may be going to prison for years. Even worse, they’re also making a movie about all of this: ‘The Shaman-Shank Redemption.’” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Thank You for Your Service Edition)“It is Veterans Day here in the United States, the day on which we honor the men and women who served and fought in wars to defend our country so the rest of us can fight on Facebook.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The closest most of us have come to a war zone is shopping on Black Friday at T.J. Maxx.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yup, the only people who have seen more combat than you guys are flight attendants on Southwest.” — JIMMY FALLON“I remember telling my dad that I thought a life in uniform might be right for me, so he went out and got me a job application for Pizza Hut.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Daily Show” correspondent Desi Lydic put the spotlight on female veterans throughout “hist-HER-y.”Also, Check This OutJulia Child and a fridge friend in an archival image, as seen in the documentary “Julia,” directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West. Paul Child/Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University/Sony Pictures ClassicsA new documentary about Julia Child explores her influence on how Americans cook and eat. More

  • 113 Shares149 Views

    in Theater

    On Paris Stages, Black Directors Forge a New Course

    Representation for dramatic artists of color is improving, but few Black creators get to be their own bosses. Two recent productions show what France’s mainstream theater is missing.PARIS — On a recent Sunday evening, Paris played host to a theater troupe that had come a long way. The Grand Théâtre Itinérant de Guyane traveled from French Guiana, nestled north of Brazil on the Atlantic coast of South America, with its latest production: “Bernarda Alba From Yana,” staged by the company’s director, Odile Pedro Leal.Yana, here, means Guiana. In this shrewd adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba,” the repressed sisters at the heart of the Spanish play speak Creole and dream of men who farm sugar cane. And for the first time I can recall in over a decade of theatergoing in Paris, the audience around me was predominantly Black — a situation that shouldn’t be so rare in such a racially diverse city.Yet “Bernarda Alba From Yana” was performed only once, and not in a major Paris playhouse. Instead, it was presented at the Maurice Ravel Conservatory, a training institution, as part of Le Mois Kréyol (Creole Month), a festival dedicated to promoting artists from France’s numerous overseas territories, which include once colonized islands and regions dotted around the world, from the Pacific to the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean.Since these territories are home to many people of color, Le Mois Kréyol, which was created in 2017 by the Caribbean-born choreographer Chantal Loïal, also celebrates French Blackness — and is a reminder of what the country’s mainstream theater is missing. Broadway’s power players signed a sweeping diversity pact in August; in France, overseas theatermakers and their peers of African origin remain shut out of leadership positions.Of France’s five national theaters and 38 “national dramatic centers,” none has a Black director — not even the national dramatic center in La Réunion, a multicultural French island near Madagascar. Although representation is slowly improving onstage, with more diverse drama school cohorts and regular instances of colorblind casting, it has yet to translate to Black creators being their own bosses.The dancer and activist Josephine Baker, who will be interred in the Panthéon, France’s storied tomb of heroes, on Nov. 30, is the subject of two productions this winter; neither of them is directed by a Black artist. Just this season, the lives of Nelson Mandela and Angela Davis made it to the stage in similar fashion; and in a country that prides itself on being colorblind, asking why Black directors weren’t considered is taboo.From left, Irène Bicep, Jean-Marc Lucret and Ophélie Joh in “Bernarda Alba From Yana.”Peggy FarguesAll of these shows may turn out to be good, but “Bernarda Alba From Yana” and a new production by the Guinea-born playwright Hakim Bah, “Out of Sweat” (“À Bout de Sueurs”), point to a richer way forward. It was obvious that both were steeped in an intimate knowledge of the cultures at hand. The acting palette also departed from French norms to embrace local accents, which tend to be erased elsewhere in favor of a “neutral” delivery, as well as a greater range of body language.In Pedro Leal’s hands, this makes “Bernarda Alba” a warmer proposition than usual. In lieu of the strait-laced grief often associated with García Lorca’s play, in “Bernarda Alba From Yana,” the women sing and dance through their pain. The mourning scene for Bernarda’s second husband, early in the play, is a vivid ritual, set to a Guianese song: The matriarch’s five daughters assemble around her, chanting, clapping and writhing on the floor. Later, two of the sisters, bored by the complete isolation that the domineering Bernarda has forced on them, shimmy and sway their hips in a dance-off.In that scene and elsewhere, Sarah Jean-Baptiste makes a mercurial Adela, and there is a delightful sense of mischief to many of the actors’ performances. Micheline Dieye and Pedro Leal shine as the family’s willful servants, as does Jean-Marc Lucret in a cross-dressing take on the role of Martirio. Far from altering the play’s dynamics, the contrast between the characters’ impetuous physicality and the atmosphere of repression is made all the more acute.Pedro Leal made subtle tweaks to the text to emphasize the Guianese setting. (García Lorca’s frequent references to heat offer built-in help.) Creole is so rarely heard onstage that it’s a treat to listen to performers getting lines in the language, with enough context that their meaning is clear to non-Creole speakers. Since French was imposed as the official language on many overseas territories, there is something slightly meta about hearing Bernarda (Maïté Vauclin) repeatedly berating her daughters when she hears them slipping into Creole, with the angry demand: “French in my house!”The set was presumably designed for ease of touring: curtains, some wire fence and a few seats, including a crescent-shaped Saramaka stool, must do the job from start to finish. Nevertheless, “Bernarda Alba From Yana” is a milestone for such a young company. While Pedro Leal has worked as a director in mainland France and in Guiana since the 1990s, the Grand Théâtre Itinérant de Guyane was founded only in 2017, and it is now supported by public funding. It is a part of French culture, and deserves to be seen.From left, Diarietou Keita, Vhan Olsen Dombo and Claudia Mongumu in “Out of Sweat,” directed by Hakim Bah and Diane Chavelet.Raphaël KesslerThe same could be said of the work of Bah, 34, who lives alternately in France and Guinea, where he co-founded a theater festival, Univers des Mots (Universe of Words). Bah’s plays have earned him several distinctions; “Out of Sweat,” the latest, won the 2019 Laurent Terzieff-Pascale de Boysson prize, which comes with a spot in the lineup at the Lucernaire theater.The pandemic delayed the premiere twice, but “Out of Sweat,” directed by Bah and Diane Chavelet, has now found its way to the smallest of the Lucernaire’s three stages. It is masterfully, economically built around just a handful of scenes and characters, who are from an unspecified African country. Fifi, who has immigrated to France, returns home for a fleeting visit. There, she convinces Binta, an old friend saddled with an unfaithful husband, to seduce a Frenchman online, in the hope of securing a better future.Even though the end of the play was inspired by a real-life tragedy, Bah’s approach is more poetic than realistic. What drives “Out of Sweat” is the inner logic and musicality of each scene. When Fifi and Binta are reunited, they repeat each other’s names again and again, with a mix of surprise, growing recognition and suspicion, truncating sentences in ways that build up to an intriguing rhythm.Diarietou Keita (Fifi) and Claudia Mongumu (Binta) play up both the comedy and the pathos in their relationship with vivid physicality. As Binta’s unfaithful husband, Bachir, on the other hand, Vhan Olsen Dombo is withdrawn, then suddenly destructive. In a monologue set in an airport lounge, his performance morphs into spoken word and ends in stomping and piercing cries of frustration, his pace closely mirrored by a live guitarist and electronic musician accompanying the action, Victor Pitoiset.Yet even when their behavior is extreme, all the characters in “Out of Sweat” feel rooted in a nuanced understanding of the two worlds they inhabit. Like Pedro Leal and her company, Bah is obviously ready for bigger stages. When will French theater give them, and other Black directors, a permanent seat at the table?Le Mois Kréyol. Festival directed by Chantal Loïal. Further productions around France through Nov. 28.À Bout de Sueurs. Directed by Hakim Bah and Diane Chavelet. Le Lucernaire, through Dec. 5. More

  • 113 Shares189 Views

    in Television

    Christopher Walken Destroys Banksy Painting on BBC Comedy Show

    A genuine painting by Banksy, the street artist whose work has sold for millions, was gone in seconds as the actor painted over the artwork as a gag on the show.With a few swipes of a paint roller, the actor Christopher Walken wiped away a real Banksy painting from the side of a building in England on an episode of BBC’s “The Outlaws” that aired Wednesday night.Though Banksy’s work has fetched millions of dollars at auction, Mr. Walken unceremoniously painted over the artwork on the comedy-drama series, which is set in Banksy’s hometown, Bristol.A spokesperson from Big Talk Productions, the show’s production company, confirmed that the artwork was “an original Banksy,” and that Mr. Walken painted over it during filming, “ultimately destroying it.”Mr. Walken plays Frank on the BBC comedy show “The Outlaws.” Stephane De Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe production company offered no more details, and a representative for Banksy did not respond to a request for comment.Banksy, a street artist and one of the world’s most expensive artists, has rigidly maintained his anonymity. He has often manipulated the news media with stunts, notably in 2018 when a painting self-destructed moments after it was sold for $1.4 million at auction. That painting, retitled “Love is in the Bin,” was recently resold by Sotheby’s in London for $25.4 million, a record for the artist.Big Talk/Four EyesIn the BBC show, directed by and starring the comedian Stephen Merchant, Mr. Walken’s character, Frank, is ordered to perform community service. He and several other characters don high-visibility vests as they clean up graffiti from a wall on the side of a building in Bristol.Mr. Walken’s character, fulfilling his duties, knocks over a board leaning against the wall, revealing a painted black-and-white rat and two canisters, recognizable in Banksy’s style even if the word “BANKSY” weren’t spray-painted on the wall in orange.“Look at this rat I found,” he says to his supervisor, played by Jessica Gunning, who, thoroughly uninterested, spends her supervision reading with her back turned to the wall.Big Talk/Four EyesAfter he explains it was a graffiti rat, not a real one, she responds: “Council said paint over any graffiti, so crack on.”“It’s awfully good,” he protests.“Less debating, more painting,” she shoots back.Mr. Walken shrugs, and then the camera zooms tightly on the artwork as he covers it entirely with six strokes.The BBC did not immediately put a clip of the scene on YouTube, but it made the episode available to watch on its iPlayer service for those in Britain. More

  • 138 Shares129 Views

    in Theater

    Zadie Smith’s First Play Brings Chaucer to Her Beloved Northwest London

    Two decades into her career, the writer’s stage debut is “The Wife of Willesden,” an adaptation of the Wife of Bath’s tale set and staged in the British capital.LONDON — Zadie Smith grew up around the corner from the Kiln Theater, which sits on the bustling Kilburn High Road in Northwest London. She took drama classes at the theater as a child and remembers when a fire caused significant damage to the building more than 30 years ago.Now, her relationship with the theater has become even more intertwined, with the Kiln’s staging of Smith’s first play, “The Wife of Willesden,” which runs until Jan. 15.“It’s very moving, if I allow myself to think about it very much — which I don’t, we don’t have time,” Smith, 46, said in a recent interview at the theater. “We’ve got work to do.”“The Wife of Willesden” — which opens on Thursday — is an adaptation of the Wife of Bath’s tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales,” transposing the prologue and tale into a love letter to contemporary London (Willesden is an area neighboring the theater).The author of numerous essays and five novels — many of which, like “NW” and her debut, “White Teeth” are also set in northwestern London — Smith is a newcomer to playwriting.“Doing this is really, genuinely new, having colleagues and stuff, wearing a lanyard,” Smith said, laughing, during a lunch break from rehearsals. “This is a new part of my life.”Indhu Rubasingham, the show’s director, said that she had entered the creative partnership with Smith with some trepidation. When Smith is writing a novel, “She’s on her own. She doesn’t have to check in with anyone,” said Rubasingham, who is also the theater’s artistic director. “I was like, ‘Oh God, this is going to be a whole different experience, how is she going to take it?’”As it turned out, “She’s been incredibly collaborative, really,” Rubasingham said.“The Wife of Willesden” is not the first time that Smith has explored different forms of writing. This year, she released a children’s book, “Weirdo,” co-written with her husband, Nick Laird, a novelist and poet, and she appeared as a songwriter and background vocalist on “91,” the lead track of Jack Antonoff’s most recent Bleachers album.The play weaves together several threads from Smith’s life. It was written as part of the celebrations for the local district of Brent’s designation as the “London Borough of Culture 2020” — a project established three years ago by the capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, that awards money to an area of the city to put on a yearlong program of cultural events.Smith described watching the actors rehearse as “even more enjoyable” than the writing process.Marc BrennerPerkins, center, with other cast members during a rehearsal of “The Wife of Willesden” in October.Marc BrennerSmith, who sat in on the first few weeks of rehearsals, described watching the actors as “even more enjoyable” than the writing process.“It’s genuinely been lovely seeing the actors,” she said. “I hear voices, but it’s different when people have bodies attached and they add so much.”Writing the play itself, Smith said, was like “really interesting homework.” She remembered having to translate Chaucer into contemporary English during her studies at Cambridge University.“So I’ve done it before, but I’ve never done it in a way that was enjoyable for me or anyone else,” she said, laughing.“The Canterbury Tales,” written by Chaucer in about the late 14th century, is a collection of 24 stories told by a group of pilgrims during their journey to Canterbury Cathedral, 60 miles east of London.One of the pilgrims is called Alyson, or the Wife of Bath. In her tale’s prologue, she reveals that she has been married five times, and she shares her beliefs on femininity and sexuality, critiquing the value that medieval society placed on virginity.“I’ve always liked the Wife of Bath, I read it in college,” Smith said. “Just incredible energy in this character, just so wild. I like writing women like that.”Smith wanted to maintain as many Chaucerian elements as possible in her adaptation, she said, and the contours of the story remain the same, while the play’s dialogue is written in verse couplets.She chose to do this rather than writing a new play because she views literature as a “long channel of writers talking to each other across generations, across countries, across epochs,” she said. She was also guided by her “perverse” love of a challenge.“Restraint is what makes you creative,” Smith said. “You’re forced to go this way and that. That, to me, is real creativity.”But “The Wife of Willesden” also made crucial departures from Chaucer’s text. The pilgrimage, in Smith’s retelling, is a pub crawl, and her “pilgrims” reflect the diversity of contemporary London. Instead of Chaucer’s knight, merchant and monk, Smith has characters you might see walking down Kilburn High Road, including a Nigerian pastor and a Polish bailiff.From left, Perkins, Rubasingham and Smith. “She’s been incredibly collaborative, really,” Rubasingham said of Smith.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesSmith translated Chaucer’s Middle English into a vernacular she has called “North Weezian,” and her “Wife of Willesden” is Alvita, a Jamaican-born British woman in her mid-50s who adorns herself in fake gold chains, wears fake Jimmy Choo heels and speaks in a mixture of London slang and patois. Her tale takes the form of Jamaican folklore, set in the 18th century. Like her progenitor, Alvita has also been married five times and isn’t afraid to speak her mind.In a back and forth with her religious Auntie P about sex and religion, Alvita tells her: “It’s true Paul said / He didn’t want us having sex for fun — / But it weren’t like: commandment number one. / Auntie, what you call laws I call advice.”Referring to her character, Clare Perkins, who plays Alvita, said, “She’s striving for personal happiness.”“She’s always reinventing herself and she’s always right there, in the middle of her life,” Perkins added.The transformation of Alyson of Bath into Alvita of Northwest London was not, for Smith, a significant leap. In her introduction to the script, which was published by Penguin this month, she wrote “Alyson’s voice — brash, honest, cheeky, salacious, outrageous, unapologetic — is one I’ve heard and loved all my life: in the flats, at school, in the playgrounds of my childhood and then the pubs of my maturity.”Smith doesn’t seem to overthink the prominence of Northwest London in her work. “If you grew up close to the streets, it just means something to you,” Smith said. “It was never an intention when I started, but there’s just something about the neighborhood. It really entertains me.”While the play is in one sense a celebration of the setting, for Rubasingham, it’s also about acknowledging the hardships that the area has endured during the pandemic.Covid-19 hit Brent particularly hard. At one point during the pandemic, the borough had the highest coronavirus death rate in England and Wales, as well as the highest number of furloughed workers.Rubasingham said that the pandemic had exacerbated the existing fault lines in society around class and race. For her, the play is “also about saying we need to put these people, these characters, this world, on the main stage,” she said.The play’s existence is also something of a happy accident. When Brent won its bid to become borough of culture, Smith agreed to contribute a piece of work. She initially envisaged a short monologue that might be performed by a local actress or published in a magazine.But a news release was sent out saying that she was writing a play, so “then I had to write a play,” Smith said. And while it was “amazing fun,” she said she didn’t believe that she would ever write another.“This is the one and only,” she said. More