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    ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ at 50: What Was the Buzz?

    It was the spring of 1970, and Yvonne Elliman, an 18-year-old singer and guitarist from Hawaii, had just finished performing at a London nightclub when a breathless young man rushed the stage.“You’re my Mary Magdalene!” a wide-eyed, 22-year-old Andrew Lloyd Webber announced.“I thought he meant the mother of God,” Elliman, now 69, said in a recent phone conversation, explaining that she had been unfamiliar with the biblical story. “He was like, ‘No, no, no, no, it’s not the mother, it’s the whore.’”They had a laugh, and she went on to sing the part in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the seminal rock opera by Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, for the concept album, the first arena tour, the original Broadway production and the feature film.The musical, which opened 50 years ago on Oct. 12, 1971, turned the story of one of history’s most notorious executions into a splashy spectacle. In doing so, it married rock and musical theater, ushering in Broadway’s British invasion of the 1970s and 1980s and paving the way for shows like “Les Misérables” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”But the nearly 90-minute concept album came first in 1970, because, as Lloyd Webber recalled recently to The Telegraph, no producer wanted to put “the worst idea in history” onstage.“We never knew how it was ever going to get staged,” Lloyd Webber, 73, said in a recent phone conversation. “So it wasn’t a collection of rock tracks or something put together. It had to be read to you and you could understand — the dramatic context of the whole thing had to be the recording.”Jeff Fenholt in the Broadway production. The rock opera portrays Jesus as simply a man, who loses his temper, doubts God and gets caught up in his own celebrity.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesThough the album fizzled in England, the rock opera with a full orchestra and gospel choir took off in America, climbing to No. 1 on the Billboard charts by February 1971. A year after its release, the initial album had sold 2.5 million copies in the United States.“We were staggered by the success,” Rice, 76, the show’s lyricist, said in a video call from his home in Buckinghamshire, England. “MCA let us make a single — two unknown guys — with a huge orchestra and a rock section. And with rather a controversial title. And it worked.”A national concert tour followed in 1971, and audiences packed stadiums to hear Elliman (Mary Magdalene), Carl Anderson (Judas) and Jeff Fenholt (Jesus) belt out hits like “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” “Heaven on Their Minds” and “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say).”“It was crazy,” Elliman said. “I was asked to go to a hospital and put my hands on a girl who’d been in a car accident. I didn’t know what to say — I held her hand and sat with her. But a few weeks later, her parents wrote to me that she got better immediately after me seeing her.”Broadway OpeningAndrew Lloyd Webber was 23 and Tim Rice was 26 when their show opened on Broadway on Oct. 12, 1971, at the Mark Hellinger Theater on 51st Street.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesAt last, they got the green light: Broadway.Tom O’Horgan (“Hair”) was tapped to direct after Lloyd Webber missed a telegram from the director Hal Prince, who had expressed interest. “The one person I’d have loved to have seen do it would have been Hal Prince,” Lloyd Webber said in the interview. “Would it have turned out differently? Would it have been good? I don’t know.”The show, which narrates the last seven days of Jesus’s life through the eyes of one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, opened at the Mark Hellinger Theater on 51st Street to an audience that included Lloyd Webber, 23, and Rice, 26. But in a joint interview with The New York Times later that month, both men practically disowned their director.“Let’s just say that we don’t think this production is the definitive one,” said Lloyd Webber, who in later years would call O’Horgan’s $700,000 staging a “brash and vulgar interpretation” and opening night “probably the worst night of my life.”Reviews were mixed. Dick Brukenfield of The Village Voice praised Lloyd Webber’s “energetic music” but noted that the ocular dazzle — the sets included a large special-effects “chrysalis,” a bridge of bones, and a giant set of dentures — distracted from the story. “It looks like a record that’s been reproduced onstage with visual filler by Tom O’Horgan,” he wrote.The New York Times critic Clive Barnes panned the production, writing that it “rather resembled one’s first sight of the Empire State Building. Not at all uninteresting, but somewhat unsurprising and of minimal artistic value.”Cries of “Blasphemy!”Opening night attracted crowds of leaflet-bearing Christian and Jewish protesters, who regarded what The New York Times writer Guy Flatley called “the strutting, mincing, twitching, grinding, souped‐up ‘Superstar’” as theatrical sacrilege.“Going into the theater it’d be ‘Blasphemy! Blasphemy!’” said Ben Vereen, now 75, who played Judas.Lloyd Webber added: “I’m not convinced that Robert Stigwood, our producer, might not have actually orchestrated one or two of them. I think it might have had a much rougher ride today than it did then.”Rice and Lloyd Webber were accused of denying the divinity of Christ and making a hero of Judas, who is the unambiguous villain in the New Testament. Jewish leaders were alarmed that the musical made it appear as if Jews were responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion, which they feared would fan antisemitism.“We were criticized for leaving out the Resurrection,” Rice said. “But that was not part of our story because, by then, Judas was dead. And his story was over.”Conservative Christians were also startled by the sexual overtones between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who finds herself falling in love with him.“I’d get evil letters from people who said they wanted to kill Mary so Yvonne could come out again,” Elliman said.But Rice is clear: There was never an affair in the “Superstar” story line.“I would imagine he would have been a very attractive man and yet not somebody who was out looking for a girlfriend,” he said. “He was somebody who was charismatic and powerful. And, and this woman is slightly afraid of that, maybe afraid of what her own feelings are.”Jesus and JudasBen Vereen, center, played Judas. The character was inspired by the Bob Dylan lyric “Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?” from the song “With God on Our Side.”Bettmann, via Getty ImagesJesus Christ, played by Jeff Fenholt, loses his temper, doubts God and gets a bit caught up in his own celebrity. He’s simply Jesus, the man, with all the attendant problems and failings.“He could feel pain,” Rice said. “If he was only a god, then things like a crucifixion, which is a horrible, horrible torture and death, wouldn’t really be a problem. If he’s a man, whether or not he’s a god, he has to suffer. He has to have doubts.”Those doubts are most on display in the “Gethsemane” rock scream, in which Jesus pleads — with a wailing G above high C — for God to let this cup pass from him.“We wanted to have a rock tenor who contrasted with the voice of Judas,” Lloyd Webber said.Vereen, who was cast as Judas, was nominated for a Tony Award for the role. He said the biblical account of the relationship between Jesus and Judas left him room for interpretation.“Jesus never wrote the book, and Judas never wrote the book,” he said. “All we hear is the hearsay of these men from the disciples in the Gospels.”Inspired by the Bob Dylan lyric “Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?” from the 1964 song “With God on Our Side,” Rice set out to humanize the New Testament’s unambiguous villain.“I thought, well, ‘This is a very good character, which I can expand from what’s in the Bible, because there isn’t very much in the Bible,’” Rice said. “He was a human being. He had good points and bad points. He had strengths and weaknesses.”At first, Vereen said, he struggled to understand his character’s motivation. Then, after combing through the Bible, he came up with a theory.“Hypothetically speaking, maybe Judas really loved Jesus more than any of the other disciples and wanted him to be the hero that ruled the country,” Vereen said. “And he felt that if he betrayed him, the Israelites would rebel and put Jesus in the role.”A Musical Radio PlayYvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene. She was one of the few actors to not only perform on the concept album, but also to appear in the Broadway show and the movie.Rolls Press/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesBecause the show began as what Lloyd Webber calls a musical radio play, meant to be listened to straight through for 90 minutes without any visuals “on a turntable, in those days,” he said, he had to come up with strategies to keep the listener’s attention.“A lot of that has to do with how you plant themes and how you deal with them,” he said. “My idea for the overture was to introduce every ingredient that I could think of within the musical palette we were going to hear through the rest of the recording.”And then those themes recur, one by one, as when the whole of the overture is mirrored in the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate, or when a song reappears with a twist, like “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” To Mary Magdalene it’s a love song about Jesus; when it returns as a motif sung by Judas as a lament, the lyrics change: “He’s not a king, he’s just the same/As anyone I know/He scares me so.”“Judas understood Jesus, and he obviously was clearly obsessed and loved him,” Lloyd Webber said. “And then at the same time, you’ve got this woman, who was also, if you follow the Bible, clearly very, very much in love with him.”And then, of course, there’s the musical’s oddball track.Herod, Paul Ainsley’s glitter-flecked, platform-sandaled drag queen, commands the son of God to “Prove to me that you’re no fool/walk across my swimming pool” in “King Herod’s Song (Try It and See).” The bouncy ragtime number serves as comic relief after Jesus’s gut-wrenching “Gethsemane” aria.“It’s taking a conventional showbiz number and making it something really very, very nasty,” Lloyd Webber said. “When Herod turns around and says, ‘Get out of my life!,’ that’s a number that’s gone wrong.”Rice said: “Musically, I think it’s a brilliant stroke on Andrew’s part. Just as everything’s getting heavier and heavier and heavier, and suddenly you have a very catchy melody. We wanted people to almost be misled into thinking, ‘Oh, well, you know, maybe it’s going to be a happy ending.’”The Show’s LegacyWith $1.2 million in advance sales, the Broadway show sold out almost every performance for the first six weeks. But the hype quickly dimmed. It ran for 711 performances in all and failed to win a Tony Award despite five nominations, including one for best score.But the musical’s legacy has endured, spawning three Broadway revivals (in 1977, 2000 and 2012), a 2012 Lloyd Webber-produced televised competition series to cast the titular role for a British arena tour, a 2018 televised NBC production that starred John Legend as Jesus and resulted in Emmy wins for Rice and Lloyd Webber — and now the 50th anniversary American tour, interrupted by the pandemic, that resumed performances in Seattle late last month.“51 years since the album came out … blimey!” Rice said.Lloyd Webber, looking back, said, “Everything I was doing was all instinct.” He added, “Yes, I’d had some amateur productions, but we’d never had anything in the professional theater — and I don’t know whether that would have influenced us for good or bad.”He thought for a second.“Without sounding immodest” — he chuckled — “it’s actually rather good.” More

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    How to Play Drunk

    It’s one of the hardest feats of performance. Find the right balance between subtlety and audience expectations.“Acting drunk convincingly is about the hardest thing you can do,” says D.W. Brown, 60, an acting coach based in Santa Monica, Calif., who has worked with both film and stage actors. There are famous film scenes for which actors are said to have drunk alcohol, but getting intoxicated for real is ill advised, especially for stage actors, who perform the same scene day after day. Figure out how to fake it instead, which will require practiced motor-skill impairment and discernible psychological shifts.Alcohol relaxes the body. “Shake it out, get very loose,” Brown says. Sometimes it helps to start by spinning yourself into dizziness and noting what it feels like to stand or walk when your balance is off-kilter. When he’s working with actors on a scene, Brown will often have them start by acting more drunk than what’s required and then dialing it back and trying to conceal it, just as tipsy people do. “You’re trying to fight off that disequilibrium,” Brown says. Be particularly deliberate about actions a sober person would do with ease, like buttoning a shirt or counting out money.Find the right level of intoxication. “Subtlety is a tremendous mark of virtuosity,” Brown says. Still, you have to meet what Brown calls “audience expectation.” If drunkenness is written into a scene, the audience wants to see you sufficiently soused. On an inebriation scale of one to 10, Brown says most scenes call for a seven or eight. In order for the audience to register you as drunk, he says, “you need to slur more than most drunk people would in the wild.” Consider the type of drinker your character is. Brown helps actors choose from his taxonomy of archetypes: aloof drunk, happy drunk, maudlin drunk and angry drunk. Usually, you’ll want to stick to one type unless something in the scene triggers a switch — like, say, a kiss, or the mention of someone’s name. Note that alcohol blunts reactions, creating a kind of emotional sogginess. “For an angry drunk, you want a generalized foulness and misanthropy, as opposed to a pointed rage,” Brown says.A drunken scene might be comical, but that humor should not come from an actor mocking his or her character. Your job is to embody a character, not judge it. “Never think you’re better than anybody you’re playing,” Brown says. More

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    Seth Meyers Muses on Trump’s Weekend Iowa Rally

    The host said that seeing the former president speak was like “watching an open-mic night at the senior center.”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.Far From the Madding CrowdDonald Trump held a rally in Iowa on Saturday, but Seth Meyers found the crowd lacking enthusiasm for the former president’s routine.“And you can tell Trump was waiting for a crowd reaction, too. I mean, look at him — it’s like watching an open-mic night at the senior center,” Meyers said on Monday night.“He treated supporters to an hour and 43 minutes of bitching about the election he lost and how he didn’t lose it, and how he didn’t concede because it was stolen from him, and all that stupid nonsense that runs on a loop in his brain.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Wow, and I was worried about bringing audiences back. I never thought I’d say this, but maybe you should go into lockdown. You know, remote shows might be better for you. You could borrow my attic.” — SETH MEYERS“Also, I love the cutaways to sullen Trump fans just standing there in silence like tourists watching one of those gold statue guys in Times Square: [Imitating tourist] ‘So is he going to, like, do something?’” — SETH MEYERSBut if the Iowa rally wasn’t his crowd, Jimmy Kimmel joked about the protesters on Jan. 6 who were. Kimmel reported that Jonathan Karl’s new Trump tell-all, “Betrayal,” details Trump’s bragging about the size of the crowd that stormed the capitol.“Of course, he was. Is there anything this guy won’t brag about? It’s like bragging about the size of your tumor. It’s not good.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Size matters so much to him. It’s almost as if he’s insecure about something.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Someday he’ll be looking up from the bowels of hell, elbowing his buddy, Jeffrey Epstein, saying, ‘Can you even believe how many people are dancing on my grave right now?’” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Mutually Exclusive Edition)“Happy Indigenous Peoples’ or Columbus Day, depending on which cable news channel you watch.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Today was Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Now, of course, some people still call it Columbus Day, and to those people, I say: ‘How you getting back to Jersey? Path train?’” — SETH MEYERS“It’s weird to celebrate these on the same day. It’s like celebrating herpes on Valentine’s Day — they don’t really go together.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He was never here, and yet, we named a whole city in Ohio after him.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Tonight Show” guests Chelsea Handler and Finn Wolfhard faced off in a game of True Confessions.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightPhoebe Bridgers will perform on Tuesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutJonathan Kent, the new Superman, who is the son of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, shares an unexpected kiss with his friend Jay.John Timms/DC ComicsThe new Superman (son of Clark Kent and Lois Lane) comes out as bisexual in a forthcoming DC comic book. More

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    ‘Is This a Room’ Review: A Transcript Becomes a Thrilling Thriller

    Beneath the dry words of an F.B.I. interview, a new play unearths a world of interior terror.Short of grocery lists, raw transcripts may be the most boring things ever written. With their halts and hesitations and dust bunnies of fuzzy logic, they beg to be thoroughly tidied before use, and disposed of quickly after.Nevertheless, a 65-minute verbatim transcript has now become the basis for one of the thrillingest thrillers ever to hit Broadway. “Is This a Room,” which opened on Monday at the Lyceum Theater, turns the ums and stutters and bizarre non sequiturs of recorded speech into astonishing — and astonishingly emotional — theater.How does mind-numbing banality become heart-racing excitement? In “Is This a Room,” the transcript is only the starting point. More salient is the way the production, conceived and directed by Tina Satter, views the document through an expressionistic lens, allowing Emily Davis, in a heartbreaking performance, to make words into windows on a world of interior terror.Davis plays the ironically named (yet quite real) Reality Winner, who on June 3, 2017, returning from some Saturday chores, finds F.B.I. men waiting outside the barely furnished house she rents in Augusta, Ga. They have come, one of them tells her, “about, uh, possible mishandling of classified information.”“Oh my goodness,” she replies. “Okay.”At first you believe her when she insists she has “no idea” what the agents are referring to. In cutoff denim shorts, a white button-down shirt and yellow high-tops that perfectly replicate what Winner wore that day — the costumes are by Enver Chakartash — she seems like a teenager. She often sounds like one too, with a hiccuppy delivery and an excuse-my-existence upspeak.But she is 25, keeps three guns and, as she later confirms, has top-secret clearance with a local military contractor, where she works as a linguist specializing in Farsi, Dari and Pashto.If those languages of South and Central Asia make you think Winner has mishandled documents about the war in Afghanistan, that’s a red herring — or rather, a pink one; wherever the F.B.I. transcript redacts information as sensitive, as it does when the specific subject of the leak is discussed, the stage lights blink pink for a moment. A scary “Law & Order”-style thunk may also jolt you from your seat.Pink lighting punctuates moments when pieces of the actual F.B.I. transcript have been redacted. Becca Blackwell, left, portrays the third agent alongside Cobbs and Simpson. Davis is at right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe superb lighting (by Thomas Dunn) and sound (by Lee Kinney and Sanae Yamada) are just two weapons in Satter’s arsenal of disorienting effects. Aiming, as she recently told The New York Times, to imagine what “Reality is feeling second by second,” she avoids naturalism, which would hide those feelings — there’s barely a set — in favor of an almost sculptural abstraction, increasing and abating tension by the shaping and massing of bodies in space.So as the interview zips along, and Winner, a CrossFit aficionado, realizes she has been caught in an action she can barely justify even to herself, we watch as she seems to decompose muscle by muscle. Her hands wring and flop, her hips give way and finally her torso drops perpendicular to the floor so her tears drip down as if from a leaky showerhead.It’s hard not to cry with her, especially when “Is This a Room,” named for a strange question asked by one of the agents, gets you there without gimmicks. It does not present Winner as a lefty firebrand or a noble whistle-blower but as a maddeningly squirmy, fed-up desk jockey.Nor are the agents demonized. Pete Simpson as the smiley one, Will Cobbs as the wary one and Becca Blackwell as a hilariously oblivious “unknown male” all excel at mitigating their implicit menace with varieties of insouciance. Still, their glad-handing and good ol’ boy chivalry barely disguise their own nervousness; they are just as lost in their absurd script as Winner is in hers, whether huddling in a pack as if to man up or getting right in her face with small talk.Yet has small talk ever seemed so big? Though at least half of the transcript finds the men aimlessly — almost flirtatiously — gabbing with Winner about their own CrossFit experiences and pets they have known, eventually they can’t help revealing a subtext too deep and cold for words. That subtext concerns gender, and part of the fear you feel for Winner comes from the unequal distribution of the sexes. She feels it too: When she offers the information that her dog and cat, both female, “don’t like men,” she adds, in a joke that curdles instantly, “Starting to see a trend here.”Davis (with Simpson) delivers a heartbreaking performance as a linguist who received a five-year prison sentence for leaking documents.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIndeed. Winner, who later admitted guilt in a plea bargain, was the first person sentenced under the Espionage Act after President Trump cracked down on leaks upon entering office. According to a Times report, hers was the longest sentence — more than five years — “ever imposed in federal court for an unauthorized release of government information to the media.” And even though she was granted an early release this June for “exemplary behavior,” she is still prohibited from making public statements or appearances.Plays based on transcripts would seem to face a similar prohibition, their verbatim nature acting as a hard brake on editorial indulgence. (Another transcript-based play, “Dana H.,” by Lucas Hnath, opens next week at the Lyceum, where it will run on an alternating schedule with “Is This a Room.”) Yet in practice, such works are sometimes richer than fiction, if not in words then in implication.For me, the implications of “Is This a Room” are clear. The documents Winner leaked to a publication called The Intercept contained proof of Russian interference in the 2016 election, interference President Trump was at pains to deny. However wrong her actions, I find it difficult not to connect the dots between her excessive punishment and Mr. Trump’s many other attempts to shame and silence women, whether Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll or Christine Blasey Ford.Far from mitigating the play’s power, such hindsight deepens it; it’s a story that can’t be spoiled. Even if you saw “Is This a Room” when Satter’s company, Half Straddle, premiered it Off Off Broadway at the Kitchen in January 2019, or at the Vineyard Theater later that year, its drama would not be diminished now.That’s because, to the extent it is a mystery, the question is not what Winner did but what doing it did to her. “Is This a Room” asks whether it’s possible to live in a lawless world without becoming lawless ourselves. Is there a room for that? The answer, I’m afraid, is not in the transcript.Is This a RoomThrough Jan. 16 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan; thelyceumplays.com. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More

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    Maryann Plunkett Says Goodbye to Her Lives in Rhinebeck

    She has portrayed three characters over the course of the 12 plays in Richard Nelson’s “Rhinebeck Panorama.” A decade later, it’s time to move on.Talking with the actress Maryann Plunkett recently, it was hard to know, at times, whether she was speaking as herself or Barbara, Mary or Kate — the three characters she has played over the course of Richard Nelson’s “Rhinebeck Panorama” cycle.Plunkett, 68, has, after all, spent a lot of time immersed in Nelson’s created world: She and her husband, Jay O. Sanders, have appeared in each of the Rhinebeck cycle’s 12 plays. And when the final installment, “What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad,” closed on Sunday, she ended an 11-year journey that documented the lives of three families in upstate New York.There were the Apples, who lived through and reminisced about epochal moments in American history, such as Sept. 11, and came together on Zoom during the pandemic lockdown. Then came the Gabriels, whom Nelson visited three times during the 2016 presidential election year. And after that, the Michaels, an artistic family facing the death of its matriarch, a luminary of modern dance.Along with her husband, Jay O. Sanders, Plunkett has performed in each of the 12 Rhinebeck plays.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesPlunkett, right, hugging her fellow cast member Rita Wolf before “What Happened?”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesPlunkett made her Broadway debut in 1983, replacing Carrie Fisher (herself replacing Amanda Plummer) in “Agnes of God,” and opened the musical “Me and My Girl” as the lead three years later. But while she had established herself as a New York treasure, seeing Plunkett in Nelson’s plays, with their profoundly humane intertwining of politics and family relationships, felt revelatory. Over the years, you could see the most subtle emotions float on her face; she would draw the audience in without appearing to be acting at all.Barbara, Nelson said, is “sort of the heart” of the Apple family. “And that’s very much something that comes out of Maryann just naturally,” he added. “She’s an extraordinarily truthful actor, and because of that each time it’s alive, it’s fresh, it’s real. And it’s present, it’s immediate.”With the conclusion of the “Rhinebeck Panorama,” Plunkett is taking on other projects, including a new musical in development and the Kelly Reichardt film “Showing Up,” in which she plays Michelle Williams’s mother.None of that, though, makes leaving her Rhinebeck characters any easier. In a video interview from her home in Manhattan ahead of the last performance, Plunkett talked Apples and pimentos, a certain election night and moving on. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.The “Rhinebeck Panorama,” Plunkett said, “has been the experience of my lifetime.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThere are similarities among the three women you have played in the cycle, yet they are not the same people at all. How did you work it out with Richard Nelson?His writing is so specific, without giving you directions on how to do it, that you would just go: “Oh, only Barbara would say this,” or “Kate would never say this.” So it’s very clear without being obvious that, yeah, this is Barbara’s soul, this is Mary’s soul, this is Kate’s soul. I mean, who gets a chance to do a project like this in their lives? Not a lot of people. And to do it with your husband? What a gift that we have been given.And you never played a couple in the cycle.[laughs] No! We were brothers and sisters, then he was my brother-in-law, and in this one I’m the widow of his ex-wife. It was very easy to play brother and sister because we really like each other, and we’re playful with each other. I suppose in a strange way maybe you don’t want to play lovers or something because people might go “Oh, they have no chemistry together.” That would be really embarrassing.The characters all feel real, and lived in. Did anything particularly resonate with you?My mom died three weeks before our first read-through of the first Apple play. She had dementia, and I spent a lot of time with her. Uncle Benjamin, in the Apple plays, had a stroke. It wasn’t dementia, but it manifested itself in things that are similar to dementia, and I felt a great closeness. The yearning maybe was for my own mother, with the protectiveness and responsibility toward him. So much so that after the final performance of the fourth play I said to John DeVries, who played Benjamin, “I feel like I’m having to say goodbye to my mother again.”“Richard’s characters feel deeply, but they are strong people and they will survive, you know,” Plunkett said. “They will move forward.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThe conclusion of the Gabriels trilogy, “Women of a Certain Age,” takes place on election night 2016. What was it like to do the show, at the Public Theater, that specific evening?After the play they had a reception downstairs, and they had monitors all around the lobby. I was looking at Richard, and I said, “Oh come on, how bad can it be?” And he said, “Don’t look” [laughs]. And this pall fell over the crowd. My son and his girlfriend were there, it was only the second election they had ever voted in. The next night we were, mercifully, off. When we came back on Thursday, the audience was so somber. Things that used to be a laugh line — it was just these sounds of grief.Food has played a central part in the shows. In the Gabriels plays, you even had to cook in real time. Was it hard to focus on your lines?There was a lot to prepare: Slicing a sausage or an onion, and some things had to be in the oven by a certain time. Of course I’m not looking at a timer, it had to be in by a certain line. It’s almost like music: There is a rhythm. This one [“What Happened?”] is the first play where I have nothing to do, preparing or serving the dinner, and during rehearsal it was weird for me. “Can I do this?” “No, you can’t come in and start cooking; this isn’t your home.”Sanders, left, with Plunkett and Nelson. The trio have worked together on the Rhinebeck plays for over a decade.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesWhat has it been like to spend 11 years on this project?It has been the experience of my lifetime. Our son was in high school, and now he’s 27 years old. My mom had just died, my dad had died three and a half years before the first play. It’s crazy. When we did the 9/11 one, “Sweet and Sad,” you could tell when there were people in the audience who had perhaps lost someone because you would feel the grief. And some nights in this one, when I’m talking about Rose’s death and say it was the virus, sometimes you will hear reactions [makes a gasping sound]. And it’s very hard to just stay focused.What is it like to face down the last performance?I have to say to myself, “We’re going to do a tour” [laughs]. I can’t be self-indulgent and go “Oh my God, it’s over, poor me!” The other day during the show, I got emotional so I picked up the jar of pimentos on the table, and that grounded me. I held on to them until I finished that section. Richard’s characters feel deeply, but they are strong people and they will survive, you know. They will move forward.It looked like he was done with the Apples after four plays, but then he wrote three more for Zoom. Is the “Rhinebeck Panorama” really finished?Sad as I am to say that, yes, I believe it is. It’s this decade, in this country, and in the lives of these three families. And the decade is over, plus one. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Succession’

    A new series from Ava DuVernay debuts on NBC. And the third season of “Succession” begins on HBO.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Oct. 11-17. Details and times are subject to change.MondayNINE TO FIVE (1980) 10 p.m. on TCM. Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin play secretaries who revolt against their revolting chauvinist of a boss (Dabney Coleman) in this classic office satire. When the New York Times critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott included the film in their Weekend Watch column last year, they called it “a feminist lark with laughs, crude comedy, wafts of pot smoke and a catchy anthem written by Parton.”TuesdayCHUCKY 10 p.m. on Syfy and USA Network. How much of an origin story can a child doll have? Plenty, if that doll contains the soul of an adult serial killer. Chucky, the spooky doll first introduced in “Child’s Play,” the cult 1988 horror movie, gets his latest refresh in this new TV series. Unlike the 2019 big-screen rethink with Aubrey Plaza, which added an ostensibly brainy artificial-intelligence angle to the killer-doll tale, this new series has the original “Child’s Play” creator Don Mancini as its showrunner — so it should offer some more old-school scares. Syfy is debuting “Chucky” alongside another classically minded horror series, DAY OF THE DEAD, based on the 1985 George A. Romero film of the same name. The first episode of that series will air at 11 p.m. on Syfy and USA Network.A NIGHT IN THE ACADEMY MUSEUM 10 p.m. on ABC. Perhaps mercifully, this hourlong special has no relation to the “Night at the Museum” movies. Instead, the program gives a preview of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the newly opened museum in Los Angeles that displays a history of Hollywood as seen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Tom Hanks and Laura Dern, both members of the museum’s board of trustees, will host the broadcast.WednesdayCMT ARTISTS OF THE YEAR 9 p.m. on CMT. Chris Stapleton, Gabby Barrett, Kane Brown, Kelsea Ballerini, Luke Combs, Mickey Guyton and Randy Travis are the honorees at this year’s CMT Artists of the Year event, an annual celebration of country music. Wednesday’s broadcast is slated to include performances from Barrett, Brown and Combs alongside other artists, including Yola, who will perform with Guyton.ThursdayKara Hayward in “Moonrise Kingdom.”Focus FeaturesMOONRISE KINGDOM (2012) 8:15 p.m. on HBO. Wes Anderson is set to return to theaters next week with “The French Dispatch,” his latest cinematic diorama. In the meantime, consider revisiting “Moonrise Kingdom,” Anderson’s tale of two 12-year-olds who run off into the wilderness together, and eventually reach a dreamy paradise. The film shows the pair’s adventure “with a beautifully coordinated admixture of droll humor, deadpan and slapstick,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. The messy humanity of Anderson’s characters, she wrote, is “rarely more deeply felt than in ‘Moonrise Kingdom,’” despite the fact that the film takes place in one of Anderson’s tidy, idiosyncratic realms. “Sometimes they’re called dollhouse worlds,” Dargis wrote, “though, truly, they feel more authentic than many screen realities.”FridayHOME SWEET HOME 8 p.m. on NBC. Home exchanges, the proto-Airbnb setup in which the members of one household swap places with those in another city as a means of traveling for cheap, can be a ripe source for drama. Ask most anyone who’s done one and you’ll likely hear tales of oddities found stashed away behind the Fritos in kitchen cabinets, or plumbing challenges, or any of the other bumps that can emerge when one family’s lifestyle is transplanted into a home set up for another’s. But you’ll also probably hear about the transcendent experience of essentially stepping into someone else’s life. The latter element is the focus of this unscripted series from the filmmaker Ava DuVernay. Each episode follows two families who swap houses for one week. The pairings are intended to set up each family for revelations about identity, and to challenge potential assumptions about race, religion, gender and other issues.LA FRONTERA WITH PATI JINICH 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The chef and TV host Pati Jinich has long presented food as a tool of diplomacy. “In my kitchen, the border experience is an inspiration,” she said in a 2018 episode of her PBS series “Pati’s Mexican Table.” Her new travel series, “La Frontera,” expands on that notion; it focuses on food in border towns in Mexico and the southern United States, including El Paso and Juarez.ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) 11:45 p.m. on TCM. Bette Davis plays an aging Broadway star whose life is derailed by a young fan (Anne Baxter) in this drama. The film won several Oscars, including two for the writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who got statues for both his direction and his screenplay. (The film also won best picture.) The work of Mankiewicz’s screenwriter brother, Herman, will be on display on TCM earlier in the night in CITIZEN KANE (1941), which will air at 9:30.SaturdayTHOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. The active malevolence of two assassins is dwarfed by the passive lethality of a wildfire in this thriller from the writer-director Taylor Sheridan. The story centers on a smoke jumper, played by Angelina Jolie, whose path crosses with that of a boy (Finn Little) who is being tailed by killers (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult). They’re out to silence him because of a secret he learned from his forensic accountant father (Jake Weber). The pursuit takes them all through the Montana wilderness; it kicks into gear when the forest is set ablaze.SundayJeremy Strong in “Succession.”David M. Russell/HBOSUCCESSION 9 p.m. on HBO. The third season of HBO’s grotesquely lavish satirical drama “Succession” will arrive on Sunday night after being delayed a year by the pandemic. The delay presumably gave viewers some extra time to catch their breath after the gasp of a Season 2 finale, which once again cleaved the fictional members of the Roy family — wardens of a media empire — into warring camps. Don’t expect the time off to have lessened the tension. More

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    Review: In ‘Chicken & Biscuits,’ a Sweet but Dated Comedic Recipe

    Squabbling siblings, familiar stereotypes and a chorus of amens: A new play aims for the pleasures of Broadway’s traditional family sitcoms.“Why we gotta wear black, huh? We already Black!”So grouses Beverly, the kind of woman who features aquamarine hair and a peek-a-boo push-up bra at a funeral.To be specific: her father’s funeral. “We should be honoring my Daddy in style, color!” she proclaims. Certainly the deceased — the late pastor of a church in New Haven, Conn. — has complied; he’s heading to the Pearly Gates in a canary yellow tie.“Canary yellow was his favorite,” Beverly explains. “And he wore it like a pimp!”As I sat alternately laughing and cringing in the audience of “Chicken & Biscuits,” a play by Douglas Lyons that opened on Sunday at Circle in the Square Theater, I couldn’t help thinking that Beverly was voicing more than a personal, sartorial truth. In her impatience with tragedy, her gaudy antics and her beeline for fun, she was also delivering what may be the play’s mission statement. This family comedy, with its cheek and secrets and eulogies and amens, wants to offer audiences living in bad times an old-fashioned good one.Whether it succeeds for you will depend largely on your taste for Broadway comedies of a type that otherwise went out of style a few decades ago. These were supposedly heartwarming domestic stories in which “ethnic” families like the Italian American Geminianis in “Gemini” and the Jewish Chamberses in “Norman, Is That You?” aired dirty laundry (typically involving a gay son) while reaffirming the notion that love conquers all, among kin no less than country.Sidestepping the traffic of somber, formally inventive new plays about Black life, “Chicken & Biscuits” eagerly boards that rickety old bus. To start, there are the requisite squabbling siblings: Beverly (Ebony Marshall-Oliver) and her sister, Baneatta (Cleo King), representing opposite ends of the bawdy-to-churchy continuum. Beverly resents Baneatta’s attitude of superiority; Baneatta, whose tenured professorship seems to be in Disapproval Studies, scorns Beverly’s down-market outfits and outlook.Lewis plays a pastor hoping to prove himself, while also trying to help his wife, played by King, navigate her family’s complicated dynamics at a funeral.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTheirs is but one of the thin and mild conflicts that the production, directed by Zhailon Levingston, stirs mightily to bring to a boil. On the day of the funeral, Baneatta’s husband, Reginald, will be delivering the eulogy, hoping to prove himself a suitable successor to his father-in-law in the pulpit. (With Norm Lewis in the role, could there ever be any doubt?) Reginald is also hoping that family hysteria will not overtake family healing in the process.Apparently, he has not met his family, or even his own children: the tightly wound, high-achieving, 30-something Simone (Alana Raquel Bowers) and her younger brother, Kenny (Devere Rogers), a struggling actor and the de rigueur gay son. Each comes factory supplied with a pressing problem. Simone has recently been dumped by her fiancé, who took up with a white woman instead. Kenny’s problem is also white: Logan Leibowitz, the Jewish boyfriend (and fellow struggling actor) he has brought to the funeral unannounced.Though Simone repeatedly refers to the couple, with a smirk, as “thespians,” and Baneatta simply ignores the interloper, no one disapproves of Kenny’s gayness deeply enough to prevent a happy hug of an ending. All of the characters’ characteristics are red herrings, and usually stale ones at that. Beverly’s outrageousness recalls that of innumerable stock characters from Tyler Perry’s plays, Black sitcoms of the 1970s and Chitlin’ Circuit farces. Logan (Michael Urie) is a gay stereotype so flittery he cannot follow the service; as he flips madly through the Bible, he asks, “Where’s Corinthians? Is this in alphabetical order?”You will detect in Logan and Beverly — and in Beverly’s sarcastic Gen Z daughter, La’Trice (Aigner Mizzelle) — a kind of equal opportunity minstrelsy. In some ways, trotting out laughable stereotypes of a modern Black family and its white appendages seems almost daring on Broadway today. One of the highlights of Levingston’s production, which can otherwise feel bloated at two hours, comes when Simone, apologizing for her kneejerk hostility toward Logan, says, “Since the breakup, it’s been real hard for me not to see red when I see white people.” Levingston lets this moment sit a good long time, waiting for the (mostly white) audience to get the joke.In their performances, Marshall-Oliver, from left, Urie and Aigner Mizzelle evoke outrageous stock characters of the deep — and recent — past.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSuch insight and provocation is otherwise rare in “Chicken & Biscuits.” So is any real tension. Whether the family will accept Logan, whether the sisters will reconcile, whether the mystery guest at the funeral (NaTasha Yvette Williams) will be explained are barely even questions; they’re more like a packing list. In that sense, the play feels dramatically complacent and underdeveloped, suggesting that its trip to Broadway after a pandemic-foreshortened run at the Queens Theater in 2020 might have benefited from a stop along the way.Yet it’s at least a little unfair to look at a family comedy that way. Lyons, an actor himself before turning to playwriting — this is his Broadway debut as an author, and Levingston’s as a director — is operating here in a different tradition from most contemporary fare, which is built on ideas and argumentation.“Chicken & Biscuits” is built on sensation, more like a musical or even an opera. In the long scene of the funeral itself, the eulogies by several family members function as arias, delivered in the old-school park-and-bark style. They are not concerned with forwarding the action so much as bringing aural pleasure, and indeed Lewis’s satire of a preacherly stemwinder, with drawn out vowels and pounced-on syncopations, is more than halfway to song.In any case, Lyons is more interested in the family’s moment-by-moment byplay — its laugh track and tear track — than in drawing realistic character portraits or scoring sociological points. The cast, including five actors also making their Broadway debuts, for the most part fills in the characters’ outlines confidently. As for sociological points, you could hardly say more in a treatise than Dede Ayite does with the costumes and Nikiya Mathis with the wigs.So if “Chicken & Biscuits” isn’t a profound work, that doesn’t mean it’s pointless. Its gravy is just another name for schmaltz. Thinking back, as a Jew, on the Jewish families that Broadway audiences learned to love in not-very-sophisticated, high-cholesterol comedies, I have to admit that even as I alternately laughed and cringed at their caricatures, I felt relieved of the more pernicious problem of otherness.Representation matters. I see many great and necessary new works about the problem of Blackness in a racist society — or rather, the problem of whiteness. They are filled with anguish and unfunny funerals. What I rarely get to see are works about Black American life that are defiantly not problem plays. Their sunniness is just as necessary, however garish the aquamarine and pimped-out the corpse.Chicken & BiscuitsThrough Jan. 2 at Circle in the Square Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, chickenandbiscuitsbway.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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    This Bill Cosby Juror is Lobbying for a Clear Legal Definition of Consent

    Stunned by what she learned about the law during deliberations in the sex assault case, Cheryl Carmel is lobbying for consent to have a clear definition: a positive, unequivocal “yes.”Some jurors were stunned during deliberations in Bill Cosby’s 2018 trial on sexual assault charges when they asked the judge for the legal definition of consent.He told them there was none under Pennsylvania law.“He said you, as reasonable people, have to come up with your own definition,” said Cheryl Carmel, who was the jury forewoman.Mr. Cosby had been charged with administering an intoxicant to a woman, Andrea Constand, and then penetrating her without her consent. Ms. Constand had come to his home outside Philadelphia and accepted wine and pills that she said she thought were herbal medicine.Though Mr. Cosby described the sexual encounter in 2004 as consensual, Ms. Constand said she was too intoxicated to physically or verbally resist.“Here was a sexual assault case and there was no definition,” Ms. Carmel recalled in a recent interview. “It just boggled my mind.”Since the trial ended, Ms. Carmel has been working to address what she and many others view as a critical gap in the law, joining an effort to get Pennsylvania to define consent as an affirmative act, one that emphasizes that the absence of “no” does not constitute permission.Mr. Cosby was found guilty of sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, right, but his conviction was later overturned on due process grounds.Corey Perrine/Associated PressIt is an unusual quest for a former juror, most of whom, researchers say, seldom engage in activism precipitated by their experience during a trial. But Ms. Carmel is determined.“This is a problem throughout the United States, that this is not defined,” she said. “There has to be something that can be done to correct this, to ensure that future jurors can more efficiently do the job they need to do.”Many states in America lack definitions of consent in their criminal laws governing sexual assault. Of those that do, some characterize consent as the absence of an objection — that if you didn’t somehow physically or verbally communicate “no,” and were not unconscious or otherwise incapacitated, then you consented.Activists like Ms. Carmel believe that laws should require a “yes” signal to establish consent.Efforts are now underway to add or refine a definition of consent in several states, such as New York, Vermont and Utah. They are an outgrowth, experts say, of a #MeToo era reckoning that has already led to initiatives — some more successful than others — to extend or eliminate statutes of limitations in sexual assault cases and to restrict nondisclosure agreements that can silence victims in sexual harassment lawsuits.“We are in a moment of flux where we are seeing an effort to catch criminal law up to the current cultural understanding of consent,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former prosecutor who teaches at Northwestern University and is an expert on laws regarding sexual assault.Many of those advocating change say the laws should clearly define consent to mean a positive, unequivocal “yes,” an agreement that is indicated verbally or through some other action that is freely given and informed. By this definition, someone who assented to sex but was being coerced, or deceived, could not have actually consented.The proposals roughly mirror regulations already in place in a small number of states like Wisconsin, and at many colleges, where consent in sexual encounters has long been a front-burner issue.Dawn Dunning, who testified at Harvey Weinstein’s trial in New York, has also been involved in efforts to introduce an affirmative definition of consent in sexual assault cases.  Richard Drew/Associated PressIn New York, supporters of the change include Dawn Dunning, an actress who accused Harvey Weinstein at his trial of sexually assaulting her. Without a solid definition of consent, she said in an interview, “It’s just a gray area, which is the last thing you want when you are talking about sexual assault.”In Utah, critics of the current law cite sections like one that says sexual assault is “without consent” when “the actor knows the victim is unconscious.”Professor Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah and former federal judge, said the state’s language puts too much weight on proving that the defendant knew there was no consent. “What if a guy says, ‘It was 50:50, I was not sure,’” the professor asked. “In Utah that means you are not guilty of rape.”Specifics vary from place to place, but only a handful of U.S. states now define consent as requiring an affirmative act — a freely given agreement in words or actions. As efforts to expand that number proceed, debates continue about how far the reach of the law should extend into sexual encounters.While proponents of change applaud all efforts to further delineate consent, and eliminate confusion, others question whether it is practical to legislate that every step in a sexual encounter requires an affirmative yes, or to criminalize behaviors where miscommunications and simple misunderstandings, not aggression, are to blame.“The language of sex is complicated,” said Abbe Smith, professor of law at Georgetown. “The criminal law is too blunt an instrument.”Such concerns were raised during an unsuccessful effort to introduce affirmative language into the American Law Institute’s latest reworking of its model penal code, considered a blueprint for state laws.Mr. Cosby had contended that his sexual encounter with Ms. Constand was consensual, but she said she was unable to consent, or resist, because of the impact of wine and pills he gave to her. Matt Rourke/Associated PressIn the Cosby case, the question of consent arose as the panel deliberated inside the Montgomery County courthouse, using a chart on an easel to record the main points of its discussion.In a civil deposition, Mr. Cosby had said he had not asked for permission verbally when he put his hand on Ms. Constand’s midriff during their encounter at his home outside Philadelphia one evening in early 2004. “I don’t hear her say anything,” he said. “And I don’t feel her say anything. And so I continue and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection. I am not stopped.”According to Ms. Constand’s testimony she was passive and, because of the intoxicants, unable to move, or fight him off, or even understand properly what was happening to her.Some jurors, according to two who were present, wondered aloud whether, if Ms. Constand did not say no, did that constitute consent?When the judge could not provide a legal definition, Ms. Carmel, 62, stepped forward as forewoman. She had a bit of background in the subject because she works in cybersecurity and privacy for an emergency notifications company. At the time, she was helping her company meet new European data protection regulations that require companies to obtain the positive consent of people visiting their websites before using their personal information.She told her fellow jurors how the data protection rules say that consent must be freely given by a clear affirmative act, be specific, informed and unambiguous, and that it can be withdrawn.“By providing that kind of framework it helped everybody get over the hump of ‘She didn’t say no,’ ” Ms. Carmel said. “It helped the conversation move on.”Another former Cosby juror, Dianne Scelza, agreed. “It was important for us to come to some sort of understanding of what it meant and how it played into the verdict,” she said.Mr. Cosby was convicted in 2018 after the jury decided that Ms. Constand had not consented to his actions. Earlier this year the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction, ruling that prosecutors had violated Mr. Cosby’s due process rights. He was released from prison in June.After the trial, Ms. Carmel was approached by Joyce Short, founder of the Consent Awareness Network, who is trying to get affirmative definitions introduced into states’ laws. She had read about the problems the Cosby jury had with consent and Ms. Carmel’s approach as forewoman.Ms. Carmel said she was able to help focus the Cosby jury’s discussion on consent because, in her work, she had been exposed to the definition used in European data protection regulations. Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesSince then, Ms. Carmel has met several times with local legislators, lobbying on behalf of a bill to define consent that activists plan to introduce into the Pennsylvania legislature.“I recognized it was important to bring Cheryl to the meetings with the legislators because she could really explain,” said Ms. Short. “Their jaws dropped, literally.”Senator Katie Muth, a rape survivor who is supporting the bill, said: “Having a definition in the law makes one less painful step if you do come forward.”But even proponents of the legislation predict it will be difficult to win passage.“This is going to be a really slow process because of the nuances,” said Jennifer Storm, a former victim advocate for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and author of several books on sexual assault. “It’s not that easy to define consent. It’s way too nuanced for that. Sex is nuanced.”Ms. Carmel, though, said she is patient. After she retires next month, she said she hopes to devote more time to what she says has become her passion — refining the law in Pennsylvania and maybe in other states.“How can we make it easier for people like me to be a juror, to listen to what a judge has to say, to listen to the evidence and come to a reasonable decision?” she said. “I want to make sure other jurors get all of the tools they could possibly use.” More