Eliana Willis

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    Digital Be Damned! Welcome to Shows You Can Touch and Feel.

    Fuzzy puppet sheep. A light cutting through the haze. Hand-designed dreamscapes. There’s plenty to savor in the slow return of pixel-free theater.Striding across the plaza at Lincoln Center on a Saturday afternoon, past the bronze Henry Moore figure reclining in the reflecting pool, a man and a woman debated the sheep on the hill. Up ahead, off to their left, a small woolly flock had gathered.He was sure that they were actual animals, these five grown sheep and one darling lamb, each with its own shepherd in head-to-toe black. She argued the opposite, and was correct: These were life-size puppets, their shepherds puppeteers, and this was a pop-up performance. Under one of those broad-brimmed hats, maneuvering a long-lashed, tan-faced sheep named the Shredder, was the puppeteer Basil Twist.Yet with theater beginning its cautious tiptoe back from the sterility of the screen to the vitality (or so we hope) of in-person performance, these puppet sheep had a kind of realness that I’ve craved. As they gamboled about a fenced-off oasis of genuine grass that covers the sloping roof of a darkened upscale restaurant, their casual, nameless show was some of the truest theater I’d seen in many months.Because they were there, and so was I, and there wasn’t a pixel in sight.Theater, real theater, is an art form that we’re meant to show up for, meeting it in physical space with our physical selves. We take in the sights and scents and sounds as they happen; we note the feel of the air and the ground beneath our feet. Theater is a dialogue between artists and audience that’s also a ritual for the senses — which, after such a surfeit of digital drama, are primed to tingle.Admittedly, I had fallen in love with Twist’s charming creatures online, streaming his pandemic production of “Titon et l’Aurore,” which he had directed and designed for the Opéra Comique in Paris — a show so resplendent with puppet sheep that some were stacked into towers, and others floated through the sky.The Shredder and the rest of the gang at Lincoln Center — Splinter, Machete, Bertha, Fang and the baby, Mower — were modeled on their Parisian counterparts, with rattan skeletons and woolen coats made from wigs, whose white curls fluttered in the breeze.While a critic grew fond of the sheep puppets in an online performance, that was no match for getting close to them in person.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOn their patch of pasture, otherwise known as the Illumination Lawn (not to be confused with Mimi Lien’s nearby synthetic lawn installation, “The Green,” which is essentially set design as public art), they were like an apparition reflected in the vast glass front of Lincoln Center Theater.Toddlers were enchanted, determined to stroke Mower’s face, which the lamb’s playful puppeteer, Juanita Cardenas, warmly allowed. Spying the flock, passing dogs barked, jumped back or, if they were terribly brave, strained close to investigate.There was no plot to the performance, and barely any choreography, but it was chance-encounter magic nonetheless: puppets made by human hands and operated by artists exchanging energy — and even eye contact — with their audience.Which didn’t stop some adults who filtered through the plaza from wondering what was going on, and whether there was some deep meaning that eluded them.“Just a little herd of sheep on the hill, for the sweetness of it,” Twist said afterward, standing at one end of the reflecting pool with the Shredder in his arms.Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting design proves to be an emotional highlight of “Blindness.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTHE FIRST LIVE SHOW I saw when theater started returning this spring was “Blindness,” which is arguably neither live nor a show. The only actor’s voice is recorded — Juliet Stevenson, whisper-close through our headphones.But we, the audience, are live: distanced yet gathered nonetheless at the Daryl Roth Theater, off Union Square, to experience a work of art together. The thing that most moved me about it could never have happened on a screen.I’d wondered since the start of the shutdown how lighting designers would ever use haze again without freaking the audience out, since the nature of haze is to make the air visible, which makes us think about what we’re breathing, which in the past year-plus has been a very scary thing. I’d worried a little about whether it might freak me out.But there came a point in “Blindness” when the lighting designer, Jessica Hung Han Yun, broke the pitch-blackness with a soft and gorgeous beam of illumination angling through the air. As I gazed at it, I realized that the theater had been filling with haze while we were submerged in darkness, that through our masks we’d already been breathing it.And so I sat there, headphones clapped to my ears, and felt tears trickle down my cheeks — because it hadn’t unsettled me, because it felt safe and because, wow, had I missed great lighting design.IT’S SO EASY, gazing into a screen, to lose awareness of your own body. In-person theater doesn’t let that happen — and this early in the industry restart, that is double-edged.To go to a small show called “Persou” — directed by Ellpetha Tsivicos at the Cell, a performance space in Chelsea — I signed a lengthy Covid liability waiver “on behalf of myself and all of my heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns,” whoever those might be.Once there, I realized that even masked and fully vaccinated, in a well-ventilated room, I am not wild about the idea of standing close to strangers for a long stretch of time. Also, I will actively resist if you try to get me to dance as part of your show — though that was true even before the pandemic.I don’t regret going, though. A four-piece band played music from Cyprus and Greece that I could have listened to all night, and we spent a brief but lovely part of the performance in the incense-scented back garden, under the moon and a tall, spreading tree.And I’m pretty sure I will remember for a long time the stroller-pushing woman who walked by with her little boy as the audience waited outside, preshow, on West 23rd Street. Swearing, she muttered that we were taking up the whole sidewalk, which was a valid gripe. We are out of practice at sharing collective space.THERE ARE SENSATIONS you don’t realize you miss until you encounter them again. Like the paint-wood-adhesive smell of a freshly made set, which is part of what I loved about “A Dozen Dreams,” the En Garde Arts production at the downtown mall Brookfield Place. It’s a show that can feel, with its lack of actors, pleasingly like a walk-through of an installation.“You are the actor,” each audience member is told through headphones, at the start of a trek through 12 disparate sets belonging to 12 short plays by women, each of whom speaks her own text on the recording.Solo or in pairs, we find ourselves in Ellen McLaughlin’s “The First Line,” with its maquette scale and cracked theatricality; in Martyna Majok’s “Pandemic Dreams,” which is eerily and unambiguously a nightmare; in Rehana Lew Mirza’s “The Death of Dreams,” whose color-saturated intensity and interlocking pieces reminded me of the imagery in my own pandemic dreams.A couple of sets include video of the playwrights speaking their text, and I wish they didn’t. When I see an on-screen performance in an in-person show now, a part of me just shuts down — a reaction to online theater, but probably I have always been like this. In art museums, I look for the signature on a canvas, because to me that’s proof that a human was there. Similarly, I want my theater handmade.To a gratifying extent, “A Dozen Dreams” provides that. Irina Kruzhilina, who did the visual and environment design, and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, who did the lighting, offer us something we haven’t had much of lately. We are bodily immersed in this show, and very, very far from the lonely, make-do experience of streaming theater.FIVE DAYS after I watched Twist and his band of puppeteers frolic with their sheep, I was sitting under the trees at Lincoln Center, looking out over the reflecting pool. It was early evening, and chilly shadows had crept over most of the plaza. But up at the top of the Illumination Lawn, a slice of sunlight beckoned, and I went toward it.As I stepped onto the grass, I noticed something curious on the stairs, where the flock had milled about to meet the public: a fuzzy white curl, caught on some blades of green.This remnant of puppet sheep — surely that’s what it was — filled me with disproportionate joy. Off I paced across the lawn, scanning the ground like Mare of Easttown searching for forensic evidence. The grass was scattered with it: tiny puffs of puppet wool, physical artifacts of a performance that had happened live, in 3-D, in front of an audience that was close enough to touch.Call me a traditionalist if you like, but no digital trail will ever compete with that. More

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    Where Oscar Wilde Once Slept (in Prison Garb)

    Activists are trying to preserve the prison he was sent to after his conviction for “indecency,” saying his life is an important part of Britain’s history.READING, England —-The metal stairway creaks and groans underfoot on the way to cell C. 3.3, a bare oblong room of painted brick behind a large and forbidding prison door.It was here that Oscar Wilde was incarcerated for around 18 months in the late 19th century because of his homosexuality, and this was the inspiration for his grimly realistic portrayal of life behind bars, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”“You feel goose bumps going in there,” said Matt Rodda, a lawmaker representing part of this town, around 40 miles west of London, who compared the prison — closed on health and safety grounds in 2013 — to a time capsule.But few have seen the prison, which is rarely opened to the public, and moves to turn it into a public space have reached an impasse.Last month a 2.6 million pound bid — the equivalent of $3.7 million — from the municipality, Reading Council, to buy and convert the prison into a museum and arts center was rejected as too low by the government, which owns the property.Several movie stars, including the Reading-born actress Kate Winslet, support plans to open the site as — seemingly — does the street artist Banksy, one of whose murals is said to appear on one of the prison walls.“It’s got tremendous potential,” said Karen Rowland, a councilor in Reading with special responsibility for cultural issues, who is originally from New York and thinks the location is of importance not only as an artistic and cultural asset.Matt Rodda MP, the Labour Party member of parliament for Reading East (R), and Heritage consultant Karen Rowland (L), at the site of the Victorian jail and the ancient Reading Abbey.Mary Turner for The New York Times“Doubling that with LGBTQ+ interest, and having come from living right next to Stonewall in New York City, I know the value and the importance of a national heritage site for that community,” she said, referring to the Greenwich Village bar in New York credited as the starting place of the gay rights movement.The town of Reading proved to be an important place in the life of Oscar Wilde, a celebrated literary figure until 1895, when he was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel in London and subsequently convicted of “gross indecency.” When he was transferred from a prison in London to Reading Gaol, it was supposed to be an improvement in his conditions. But prison rules still forbade most social interaction, the food was appalling and the sanitation worse.For an aesthete and sybarite like Wilde, incarceration was a crushing change of fortune depicted vividly in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” which he wrote after his release. It recounts the fate of an inmate who was hanged in the prison grounds.“Each narrow cell in which we dwellIs a foul and dark latrine,And the fetid breath of living DeathChokes up each grated screen,And all, but Lust, is turned to dustIn Humanity’s machine”Gyles Brandreth, a writer, broadcaster, actor and former lawmaker who is honorary president of the Oscar Wilde Society, said the prison symbolized Wilde’s place in global literary, cultural and social history and needed to be saved.“There are not many literary figures whose life as well as their work plays a part in the national story, and indeed in the international story,” he said. “We are fascinated by his rise and by his fall and, because of the extraordinary change in attitudes to homosexuality over the century, he also has a place in social history. What we get in Reading Gaol is that transition from triumph to tragedy.”The Oscar Wilde gate outside the perimeter wall of the Victorian jail in Reading, England.Mary Turner for The New York TimesWilde’s situation in jail eventually improved when a new prison governor granted him access to more books and to writing paper. With that he was able to complete “De Profundis,” a lengthy letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, that included some more optimistic messages.“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me,” he wrote, citing his plank bed, loathsome food, hard labor, the “dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame.”He added, “There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualizing of the soul.”In that spirit, those seeking to convert the jail believe that Reading, too, can turn the suffering of its former prisoners to something beneficial to the public. Local campaigners include Toby Davies, artistic director of the RABBLE Theatre, which in 2016 performed a play about the trial of Oscar Wilde in the chapel of the prison.“It was extraordinary, it will live with me for ever,” he said. “It’s a cliché, but it really does get in your blood, it is so dark and miserable — it feels like The Shawshank Redemption when you are in there. But as a result, there is something massively positive that comes out of that, that you think this is an opportunity for good.”Toby Davies, the artistic director of the RABBLE Theatre, which performed a play about Wilde’s trial at the prison in 2016.Mary Turner for The New York TimesReading Council’s bid for the site also aims to show off other aspects of the history of a town that was the burial place of King Henry I in 1136 but is arguably better known to most Britons for its big rail station.Tony Page, the deputy leader of Reading Council, said its plan would focus on arts and culture, accentuate the history of the jail — where Irish Republican prisoners were also held in the early 20th century — but also draw visitors to a neighboring site where King Henry I is buried.The precise location of the tomb has not been identified; it might be under a parking lot, as happened with Richard III in Leicester. Reading Abbey was largely destroyed in the 16th century and parts of it have been built over, though many ruins remain.Mr. Page, of Reading Council, said the Ministry of Justice, which owns Reading Prison, appeared to want around double the council’s bid for the site. That, he said, was unrealistic because it was based on prepandemic valuations and incorrect assumptions, made in an unsuccessful private sector bid, that planning laws would permit significant housing to be constructed on the site.Reading Council’s current proposal includes a much smaller amount of home-building and a boutique hotel, to help finance the conversion of the prison into a museum and arts center.Given that the site is costing the government around £250,000 a year to mothball, Mr. Page is frustrated that the ministry plans to put the site back on sale rather than enter into talks with him.Tony Page, the deputy leader of Reading Council, at Reading Civic Center.Mary Turner for The New York TimesIn a statement, the ministry said that “following discussions with the Council, the prison will be put back on the property market. Any sale will seek the best value for taxpayers and be reinvested into the justice system, while ensuring planning requirements for the historic site are met.”Campaigners have not given up yet, however. Mr. Rodda, the local lawmaker, wants a meeting with the government and said he hoped that other finance, perhaps from crowd funding, could top up the council’s bid.Like some others he is unenthusiastic about the council’s plans to build a boutique hotel on the site of a prison where many suffered and some died. Mr. Davies, the theater director, feels the same, though he thinks that it might be a price worth paying to transform a symbol of brutal penal servitude into one of culture and opportunity.That, he added, would be “an extraordinarily positive message from a town that has been associated with a train station, and shopping, and not much more.” More

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    How ViacomCBS's Content Deals Cost U.S. Taxpayers $4 Billion

    A new report details ViacomCBS’s use of a labyrinthine tax shelter to sell rights to its shows and films overseas.Dismissed by critics and devoured by fans, “Transformers: Age of Extinction” was the top box office film in 2014, bringing in $1.1 billion, with more than three-quarters of those dollars coming from overseas. More

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    ‘chekhovOS /an experimental game/’ Review: Life on a Merry-Go-Round

    This ingenious interactive show finds the Russian playwright’s characters plotting against their creator.What if fictional characters were stuck in an infernal, hopeless time loop, a cross between “No Exit” and being on hold with Delta Air Lines? You can imagine that the siblings in “Three Sisters” would like the opportunity to stop talking about going to Moscow and finally — finally! — do it.Such is the premise of the Arlekin Players Theater’s ingenious interactive show “chekhovOS/an experimental game/,” which takes place in a virtual realm where the Russian playwright’s characters rise up against their creator (portrayed by Mikhail Baryshnikov).“We are tired of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov’s plays being performed, and we are tired of being perpetually unhappy in his world,” they tell the audience. “We beg of you … let us move on.”The theatergoers, who are watching on Zoom, can vote to set Vanya and company free or can, for example, decide that this time around, the cherry orchard will not be cut down.Or can they? More on this later. (A review about a meta hybrid of theater and gaming can’t be expected to be entirely linear.)This conceit could fit a number of writers and texts (“Pick 1 for ‘to be,’ 2 for ‘not to be’”), but the Chekhoverse is a perfect setting to tackle issues of agency, or lack thereof, because the characters are so often in a rut, paralyzed by forces of their own making: They pine, hesitate and waffle, deprived of options by wistful regrets and elusive daydreams.The Boston company Arlekin Players and the director Igor Golyak had already come up with one of the virtual era’s most acclaimed productions with last year’s “State vs. Natasha Banina,” but “chekhovOS” — part of the 2021 International Online Theater Festival — is a leap forward in storytelling and execution.The previous show’s lead, Darya Denisova, returns as the only live actor, portraying Natasha, who in “Three Sisters” is married to the siblings’ brother. (The other live performer, introduced as “a fish called Olga,” does not contribute much and does not appear frustrated by having to swim aimlessly in a glass bowl.)In segments written by Tom Abernathy, Natasha serves as host, introducing situations and dramatis personae, and interacting with the audience. Occasionally, Baryshnikov turns up (in a recording) to read some of Chekhov’s letters in subtitled Russian.The audience votes on which play it wishes to see. At a recent show, it was “The Cherry Orchard,” presented in taped chunks and set in a stylish digital netherworld. There is a good chance you’ll end up seeing it, too (Natasha even jokes about it), just as the Chekhov characters are unable to deviate from their prescribed paths. This adds another layer to the idea of fiction as a deterministic software.The show’s master stroke is that the scenes from the play are a lot better than they needed to be. Anna Baryshnikov (Mikhail’s daughter, and currently in the Apple TV+ series “Dickinson”) is a revelation as the young Varya, but the main draw is Jessica Hecht as the impoverished orchard owner, Ranevskaya. Hecht, who is simply unable to give a conventional performance in anything, often looks up in space; the character is distracted, dreamy, maybe not entirely there. Whether you are new to “The Cherry Orchard” or have seen it a half-dozen times, this take is intriguing, absorbing. It left me wanting more, preferably live.And so, as in other devised, self-contained universes that keep you coming back for more, like a casino or an Apple device, Chekhov has the last word.chekhovOS /an experimental game/Through June 24; zerogravity.art More

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    Broadway’s Rebound Advances Again: ‘Pass Over’ Is to Start in August

    The acclaimed drama by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu is planning to start performances nearly a month before the big musicals begin.The return of Broadway is gaining steam.The producers of “Pass Over,” a bracing play about two Black men trapped on a street corner, announced Tuesday that they plan to begin performances on Broadway on Aug. 4, advancing the industry’s planned restart by nearly a month.The producers, who include the playwright, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, cited the improving public health situation in explaining their plan.“Every single day it feels like New York specifically, and Times Square in a focused way, is coming back to life, and I want our show to be part of that,” Nwandu said. “I want our show to be a very visible and very instrumental part of leading that charge, and so after we had done our due diligence and I knew that it was a safe thing to do, I said yes.”Broadway has been closed since March 12, 2020, and resumption plans have shifted several times. Three juggernauts, “Hamilton,” “The Lion King” and “Wicked,” chose the initial restart date — Sept. 14 — and then “Hadestown” chose Sept. 2. “Pass Over” now has the earliest performance date announced thus far, but it remains possible that another show could begin even sooner.A critically acclaimed riff on “Waiting for Godot” that also includes echoes of the Book of Exodus, “Pass Over” has some characteristics that make it easier to stage in this era of Covid-19 safety concerns: The cast consists of three actors, and the show runs an intermission-free 85 minutes. The play is also timely: The two leads are immobilized by their fear of dying at the hands of the police, a concern that has been much a part of the American conversation over the past year.Directed by Danya Taymor, the play was staged in 2017 at Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, and Spike Lee filmed that production for Amazon Prime Video. Taymor also directed a 2018 production at Lincoln Center Theater and will direct the Broadway run. The Lincoln Center cast will transfer to Broadway, including Jon Michael Hill (a Tony nominee for “Superior Donuts”), Namir Smallwood and Gabriel Ebert (a Tony winner for “Matilda”).Nwandu is planning to rewrite the play’s ending for Broadway. In the earlier productions, one of the two main characters died, but she said last month that “nobody needs to see that theatrically rendered anymore,” and she is working on an alternate ending with a healing tone.The play, capitalized for $2.7 million, will have previews throughout August and early September before opening on Sept. 12 at the August Wilson Theater; it is scheduled to run until Oct. 10.The producers said they expect to perform to full capacity audiences — an anticipated 1,190 seats, during previews as well as post-opening — and they will consult with health authorities and labor unions before determining which safety protocols will be in place. They said they will seek to make the play accessible to those who are not regular theatergoers by holding back some tickets from those immediately put on sale while seeking ways to make them available to new audiences.It is relatively rare to stage a serious play on Broadway in August, a time of year when the audience traditionally has been dominated by tourists. But the play’s lead producer, Matt Ross, said he was not concerned about that.“Our industry has long been plagued with traditional wisdom, and I’m not saying all of it is untrue, but it prevents a lot of great work from being done,” he said.“This is not about opening early, opening first, or anything like that,” Ross added. “It was about, ‘How soon can we bring this story, which I feel is really vital, to audiences?’ and ‘How soon can we employ people in a way that is safe and responsible?’ We feel that this is the right time for us.” More

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    Maureen Dowd Talks 'Mare of Easttown' With Kate Winslet

    Philly’s a tough town.If there’s a quintessential story about the City of Brotherly Love, it’s this one: In 2015, when Canadian researchers developed a child-sized hitchhiking robot with a big smile and yellow wellies, the hitchbot made it across Europe and halfway down the East Coast, offering friendly small talk to anyone it encountered. Then it got to Philadelphia, where it was promptly torn limb from limb and left in an alley.Residents have pelted Santa with snowballs and hurled batteries and beer at their own quarterback. They flip cars and set things on fire even when they win the Super Bowl and World Series.The unloved cousin of Boston and New York is often overlooked by Hollywood. The accent is so tricky to replicate, most actors won’t go near it. (Even Rocky didn’t even have a proper Philly twang.)So it’s funny, then, that it took a Brit with an elegant voice, creamy complexion and sunny outlook to parachute into the Philly burbs and totally nail the look, feel, sound and salty attitude of the denizens of Delaware County, or Delco, as it’s known.Fierce in flannel: Ms. Winslet doing some interrogating on “Mare of Easttown.” Michele K. Short/HBOKate Winslet gets emotional talking about the end of her HBO limited series, “Mare of Easttown,” which scored its own “Saturday Night Live” skit and found a fan in the self-described Philly girl in the White House, Jill Biden. (“You don’t screw around with a Philly girl,” Joe Biden said of his wife last year, after she blocked an anti-dairy activist who bum-rushed him at a campaign stop.)Ms. Winslet has said, in the past, that it’s hard for an actor to tell what will wow audiences while you’re shooting, that sometimes you think you’re doing great work and then it turns out to be “a limp biscuit.”Mare Sheehan is anything but a limp biscuit. The police detective exists in a cloud of vape smoke, trysts, flannel, Rolling Rock and Jameson shots — “a very hot grandma,” as Guy Pearce’s character calls her, sparring with a mother (Jean Smart) who loves drinking Manhattans.Ms. Winslet said that she has been bowled over by how audiences have fallen “in love with this wildly flawed, messy, broken, fragmented, difficult woman. I loved her marks and her scars and her faults and her flaws and the fact that she has no off switch, no stop button. She just knows ‘Go.’”“Not only did I have to hide myself in the character completely, but I had to hide this story, carry the secret,” she said. “I kept it hidden since 2018 when I first read the scripts. My job was to take them on this horrendous journey and hope to God that they’d be prepared to come into the attic with me at the end. It has been agony, agony, agony. You can see I’m still like … ” She sounds as if she might cry — something she would never let Mare do — then pulls herself together and lets fly one of her frequent, merry F-bombs. “I can’t deal with it. It’s ridiculous.”When your dog matches your hair (note also what appears to be a beer-tab necklace).Jamie Hawkesworth for The New York Times‘Bad Jeans’ and CheesesteakThe show is a murder mystery with many motifs: grief, the opioid crisis, small-town life. Ms. Winslet, a mother of three, sees it from this perspective: “It’s about mothers protecting their children at all costs, and the lengths that a parent will go to in order to protect their children,” she said. About the finale’s twist ending, she adds, “Oh God, it’s just unbelievable, it’s heartbreaking.”Underneath Mare’s facade, she said, “is a woman who is so entrenched in grief for her son that she has not processed, and as she shares it, as she talks about it with a therapist, she will crack. She doesn’t want affection. She doesn’t want to be loved. And she doesn’t want to be cared for because if she has to experience those things, it makes her feel vulnerable, and if she feels vulnerable, then she can’t be strong anymore, and she can’t carry on.”Ms. Winslet is known for what one producer called her “insane work ethic.” She prepares elaborate back stories for her characters, and she said she prepped more for Mare than any other role in her life. (But she is not Daniel Day-Winslet; she is said to be fun once the shooting wraps for the day.)She was Zooming in from her house on the south coast of England, curled up with bare feet, her blond mane looking much glossier than Mare’s. She’s wearing an old white Calypso T-shirt, a couple of gold necklaces and some black Sweaty Betty pants.The actress often saves something from her sets, and she shifted her camera to show off the sign from the Easttown police station she has hung on a wall. She kept Mare’s jacket and badge, too.She has been harking back to her breakout role as another strong, but more upper crust, Philly girl: Rose DeWitt Bukater. “It’s like ‘Titanic’ again,” she said, chuckling. “I’m on the side of buses again! It’s like going back in time 24 years where I’m walking down the street and people are nudging and pointing and whispering again.” When the actress was on a bike ride in England recently, a woman ran up to stroke her arm and offer all her theories about whodunit.Her heart went on: the famous shot with Mr. DiCaprio in “Titanic.”CBS, via Getty ImagesMs. Winslet said she knows people are saying, “Oh my God, how can she let herself look so unglamorous?” When Craig Zobel, the director, assured her he would cut “a bulgy bit of belly” in her sex scene with Guy Pearce, she told him, “Don’t you dare!” She also sent the show’s promo poster back twice because it was too retouched. “They were like ‘Kate, really, you can’t,’ and I’m like ‘Guys, I know how many lines I have by the side of my eye, please put them all back.’”She said she balked when she saw an early cut in which her ordinarily luminous skin looked too good. “We tried to light it to make it look not nice,” she said.She continued: “Listen, I hope that in playing Mare as a middle-aged woman — I will be 46 in October — I guess that’s why people have connected with this character in the way that they have done because there are clearly no filters. She’s a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life and where she comes from. I think we’re starved of that a bit.“In episode one, she’s having sex on a couch. I said to my husband, ‘Am I OK with that? Is it all right that I’m playing a middle-aged woman who is a grandmother who does really make a habit of having one-night stands?’ He’s like, ‘Kate, it’s great. Let her do it.’”In moments of doubt, she tortured herself and her assistant director, wondering about other actresses — “three real people were haunting my mind, I will not name them” — who might have done a better job.The show’s costume designer did recon in Wawa, finding inspiration for Mare’s flannel, inexpensive T-shirts, Ocean City sweatshirts and “bad jeans,” as Ms. Winslet said.“Whenever we’d find something unflattering,” Ms. Winslet recalled, “we’d be jumping up and down like, ‘Yes! We’re wearing this.’”She would leave her clothes in a crumpled pile on the floor of her trailer after filming “and they would stay in a rumpled up ball overnight. We were not washing and drying and hanging those clothes. Never.”They filled in her shapely eyebrows to give her face a heavier look, and left the sunspots and imperfections. “We’re so used to seeing this stuff airbrushed away,” she said.She wanted Mare to reflect the burdens she carried, a physical and emotional “heftiness.” She borrowed a Peloton to work out at night to make her thighs more muscular. “There’s a sloppiness to her, and there’s a looseness to how she sits and how she walks and just how she holds herself,” she said. “Her body posture is totally different to mine. I actually stand quite upright.”In one peak-Mare scene, she comes home and scarfs down a cheesesteak that her mother has gotten her, without taking off her jacket, still clutching her police files. “This is so clearly a woman who does not cook, doesn’t care about what she puts into her mouth, also probably forgets to eat, so that when she does eat, she’s so starving, she doesn’t even care what it is that she’s shoveling in,” she said.Her father, Roger, also an actor, helped inform this bit. “My dad actually reminds me quite a lot of Mare, to be honest. He was slightly the inspiration,” she said. “He basically moves like Mare and eats like Mare. Well, he does eat with his mouth full. We do tell him all the time, ‘Dad!’ He’s going to be so mad I just said that.”Visiting the BadlandsAnd yet, Ms. Winslet, a vegetarian, could only get into character so much. She sheepishly confessed to a Philly sacrilege: The show’s hoagies contained no meat and, most shockingly, no onions. “I felt really, really bad because I know onions are a very important part of a hoagie,” she said, “but because we had so many hours of filming scenes with all of this food, it basically wasn’t fair on the crew to have all this stinky onion food on our tiny set all day long.” (She said she was aware of the existence of scrapple but did not try it.)“Her body posture is totally different to mine,” Ms. Winslet said of the character. “I actually stand quite upright.”Jamie Hawkesworth for The New York TimesEven with the counterfeit hoagies, locals are thrilled with Ms. Winslet’s metamorphosis. They even named a hoagie after Mare.Shawn McCreesh, who works with me at The Times and grew up, like the first lady, in a nearby town very similar to Easttown, spotted someone he recognized from back home on the show. Patsy Meck, who plays the woman working the desk at the police station, said that Ms. Winslet was “genuinely who you would want her to be — she was so real.” Ms. Meck, whose three grandchildren were extras on the show, said that it was “amazing” to see Ms. Winslet “walk off set, sit down and talk to me in a deep British accent, then pop right back on set and start talking like the rest of us.”Ms. Winslet said she had to change the way the muscles in her face moved — often in freezing weather — in order to emulate Philly’s mid-Atlantic dialect, with its selectively elongated vowels and smushed consonants. “Look, when you’ve done Polish-Armenian and German,” she said, referring to her accents in “Steve Jobs” and her Oscar-winning turn as a Nazi in “The Reader,” “frankly, I thought, ‘Delaware County, oh, it’ll be fine. The vowel sounds a little bit different, but it’ll be fine.’ Honestly, it was just so hard.”Still, mastering the sound wasn’t the hardest part. Stepping into the shoes of a mother raising a child with severe mental health issues, as Mare did, was. (Mare’s son, Kevin, had struggled with depression and addiction before taking his own life.) Ms. Winslet met with parents who had been through it all, and worked with a grief counselor.“There’s that moment,” she recalled, “when the therapist says to Mare, ‘Did he frighten you?’ and she just says, ‘Sometimes.’ A huge admission for Mare to even say out loud, ‘My son scared me.’ Of course, you see it in that flashback when Carrie and Kevin take Mare’s money for drugs in the bathroom.” She said the detective strives to fix everything else because she could not fix Kevin.In order to truly understand the opioid epidemic, how its many tendrils can wrap around a place like Easttown, she went to what Philadelphians call “the badlands” — the North Philly neighborhood of Kensington and its open-air drug markets. “We would go in an undercovery type of car and just drive around a lot,” she said.“I remember seeing — and actually it broke my heart — a man with the most beautiful face and a beard. You could see there was a soul right there. He had been amputated from the knee down on his right leg, and he was injecting into the toes of the other foot.“People are fighting for their sliver of life there. I would see people in these teeny-tiny houses, and they would be not just sweeping their front stoop but sweeping the pavement and the guttering in front of their home. Sometimes, for some people, that’s as much as they can do to keep their pride, to keep a feeling of something that is theirs and that is intact.”What did the dark heart of America’s opioid crisis look like to a Brit? “I have to be honest,” she said, “I was really staggered that there aren’t more of those support networks in place to help with people. In this country, we do definitely have better support networks for people in crises like that, we absolutely do.”‘Faces Are Beautiful’Ms. Winslet has been known to warn young actors on a set not to confuse social media fame with the hard work of acting.“I have certainly heard, twice, of certain actors being cast in roles because they have more followers,” she said. “I’ve actually heard people say, ‘She’s not who we wanted to cast, but she has more followers.’ I almost don’t know what to say. It’s so sad and so extraordinarily wrong. I think the danger is not just for young actors but younger people in general now. I think it makes you less present in your real life. Everyone is constantly taking photographs of their food and photographing themselves with filters.”She leans her face close to the camera, and noted her lack of filters, with an expletive.“What worries me is that faces are beautiful. Faces that change, that move, are beautiful faces, but we’ve stopped learning how to love those faces because we keep covering them up with filters now because of social media and anyone can photoshop themselves, and airbrush themselves, and so they do. In general, I would say I feel for this generation because I don’t see it stopping, I don’t see or feel it changing, and that just makes me sad because I hope that they aren’t missing out on being present in real life and not reaching for unattainable ideals.”The actress is so famous for disrobing in movies that her IMDb profile says her trademark is her “voluptuous figure.” But she says nude scenes may be in her past.“I think my days are getting a little bit numbered of doing nudity,” she said. “I’m just not that comfortable doing it anymore. It’s not even really an age thing, actually. There comes a point where people are going to go, ‘Oh, here she goes again.’” She jokes that it’s not fair to camera operators to have to work to get the best angles as her body changes.Ms. Winslet has a daughter, Mia, 20, with her first husband, Jim Threapleton, a director whom she met on the set of “Hideous Kinky.” She has a son, Joe, 17, with Sam Mendes, her second husband. And she also has a son, Bear, 7, with her current husband, who has gone back to his original name, Edward Abel Smith, from his playful pseudonym, Ned Rocknroll.“He added ‘Winslet’ as one of his middle names, just simply because the children have Winslet,” the actress said. “When we’re all traveling together, to all have that name on the passport makes life easier.” (Bear’s middle name is Blaze, after the fire that Kate and Ned escaped that burned down the British Virgin Islands home of Richard Branson, her husband’s uncle.)“He’s the superhot, superhuman, stay-at-home dad,” she said of her husband, as she smiled happily. “He looks after us, especially me. I said to him earlier, like, ‘Neddy, could you do something for me?’ He just went, ‘Anything.’” She swoons, noting that his long hair now gives him the look of “an ocean warrior.”She breaks into song, crooning that they go together like “shama lama ding dong.” “He is an absolutely extraordinary life partner,” she said. “I’m so, so, so lucky. For a man who is severely dyslexic, as he is, he’s great at testing me on lines. It’s so hard for him to read out loud, but he still does it.”She added that “He didn’t particularly plan on meeting and marrying a woman who is in the public eye and therefore having been so judged.” She finds it amusing that, instead of being rock ’n’ roll, he’s very Zen. “He’s vegan, does yoga, breath work and cold water swims.”Ms. Winslet grew up in Reading, west of London, in a modest house and worked slicing ham in a deli when she was young. “I came from a small community not dissimilar to Easttown in the sense that there were paper-thin walls,” she said. “You could hear the neighbors rowing through the wall. You could hear the verbal grenades that were being hurled at one another.”She said her father had called to tell her he loved an episode of “Mare,” then added his usual caution: “But you know, babes, don’t rest on your laurels. You’re only as good as your last gig.”Jamie Hawkesworth for The New York TimesConfirm or DenyMaureen Dowd: Bob Iger approached you about making “Titanic II” for Disney Plus.Kate Winslet: No, never did, and I never would.You pocketed a few things before you jumped ship from the set of “Titanic.”People stole the White Star Line cups and saucers. I was good. I did take a pair of Rose’s earrings, but somewhere I lost one.Like Mare, you have a gloriously filthy mouth in real life.(Laughs.) True, yes.You can’t stop reading about Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.What? No! I’ve never read about Jennifer in my life. What are these questions?“Hideous Kinky” was neither hideous nor kinky.I don’t even know how to answer these questions.You keep your Oscar on the back of your toilet.I don’t actually know where the Oscar is at the moment. I think it’s possibly in my son’s bedroom. But it was on the back of the toilet for a long time, yes.You lived in New York for 10 years and never once went to Philly.That’s true.You’ve incorporated the Philly slang word “jawn” into your vocabulary.John, as in a man’s name?You went to Rita’s for wooder ice.No, I didn’t go to Rita’s.This role is the first time you held a gun, and you didn’t like it.True.In John Turturro’s “Romance & Cigarettes,” you simulated sex with James Gandolfini bouncing on an exercise ball.I had ripped all the ligaments on the left side of my foot. I’m nursing my son. As I’m bouncing on that ball, I’m actually bouncing using one foot with my leg in the cast improvising at three o’clock in the morning. We were in hysterics. Oh, God, I loved Jimmy Gandolfini so much. He was just so wonderful, so insecure and just so honest.Guy Pearce washes cans in the dishwasher before he puts them in the recycling can.That is true. More

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    Lance Loud Was an Early Reality Star. He Was Also a Gay Punk Pioneer.

    Loud was part of “An American Family” in 1973, but his wild band, Mumps, never signed a record deal. Now their songs are being released on the 20th anniversary of his death.On February 20, 1973, Lance Loud earned a place in musical history that, at the time, nearly stopped his career cold.That night, he appeared with his band, Loud!, on “The Dick Cavett Show” as part of an evening devoted to “An American Family,” the PBS program credited as TV’s first reality show. The cinéma vérité series, which featured the entire Loud clan, both riveted and appalled the nation with two revelations: the collapse of the parents’ marriage right on camera, and their eldest son, 20-year-old Lance, making his gay identity extravagantly clear. It was a profoundly rare declaration in that era of television, and by performing on Cavett, Lance led what was likely the first rock group with openly gay members to appear on a major commercial network.“We never considered ourselves a ‘gay band,’” said Kristian Hoffman, Lance’s best friend, who wrote most of the group’s music. “We were a band.” But Loud! did have a broader identity challenge. “They saw us as this joke band from television,” Hoffman recalled from his home in Los Angeles. “No one took us seriously.”At least, not at the start. But once the punk scene began, and Loud! morphed into the band Mumps, the group dovetailed perfectly with “the new culture of shock,” as Hoffman put it. Fans clamored for its Technicolor mix of glam-rock and operatic pop, which smashed together influences from Sparks, Roxy Music and the Kinks, crowned by Loud’s hyperbolic singing.The Loud family, the subject of the PBS reality show “An American Family.” Clockwise from top: Kevin, Lance, Michele, Pat, Delilah, Grant and Bill.John Dominis/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty ImagesIn 1975, Mumps became one of the first bands to play CBGB, opening for Television. They went on to become staples at that club, as well as at Max’s Kansas City, and toured the United States, even opening some shows for Cheap Trick and Van Halen. “They were one of the most interesting bands ever to perform at CBGBs,” the Talking Heads’ drummer Chris Frantz wrote in an email. “Their music was a unique mix of sweet and naughty.”Yet, in their six years together (with a lineup that shifted a few times), Mumps never earned an album deal, managing to issue just two indie singles.Now, nearly five decades later, in a music industry teeming with out L.G.B.T.Q. acts, Mumps are getting another shot. On Friday, the label Omnivore Recordings, known for releasing rare material from artists like Buck Owens and Alex Chilton, is releasing “Rock & Roll This, Rock & Roll That,” a 23-song compilation of the band’s work that’s the first to feature material from Loud! The release also marks a sad milestone: the 20th anniversary of Lance’s death of complications from hepatitis C.The roots of Loud! began at Santa Barbara High School, where Hoffman first met Loud in art class. “I was the teacher’s pet, and Lance was the funniest guy in the room,” said Hoffman, who played keyboards in the band.He cited Pat Loud — the family’s matriarch, who died in January at 94 — as the group’s first cheerleader: “The family had all these musical instruments laying around in the garage, and she encouraged everyone to get in there and play.” Two bands came out of the Loud household: the one seen on the PBS show featuring sons Grant and Kevin, the other led by Lance. “They had the skill,” Hoffman quipped. “We had the will.”(They also had the chutzpah. After Hoffman and Loud attended the notorious Altamont festival in 1969, where they saw the Rolling Stones perform the not-yet-recorded song “Brown Sugar,” they not only started playing it in their sets, they took credit for writing it.)Lance Loud, left, with his parents on “The Dick Cavett Show.”ABC Photo Archives/ABC, via Getty ImagesOnce “An American Family” became a sensation and the invitation came from Cavett, Pat agreed only if her children’s bands could play. But as Hoffman recalled, the performance was met by the studio audience “with a profound silence.”To complicate matters, Loud was still reeling from bruising press, including a lengthy New York Times article published two days earlier that referred to his “flamboyant, leechlike homosexuality,” and went on to call him “the evil flower of the Loud family,” who lives in a world of “backward genders.” Hoffman said that the unflagging support of both men’s families made them both fully confident in their sexuality and gave them strength to persevere.The band was buoyed by its nascent talent, including the drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, who went on to play in the Patti Smith Group; and an agile guitarist, Rob Duprey, who later worked with Iggy Pop. As their frontman, Loud proved so energetic, his sweat became a feature of their show. “He could actually aim it at someone,” Hoffman said. “And because CBGBs was so crowded, they couldn’t get away.”The hip label Bomp Records released their debut single, “I Like to Be Clean,” a wry anti-sex anthem, and Mumps snagged Sparks’ manager, Joseph Fleury. Yet, when Fleury pitched A&M Records on both Mumps and another band he handled, the Dickies, the label snapped up only one, telling the manager, “We don’t want ‘the gay band.’”“Those were the exact words,” Hoffman said, noting the irony that at a time when ostensibly straight rock stars were rewarded for gay affectations, actual gay people were punished for them. “Freddie Mercury had to pretend to be straight to be a rock star,” Hoffman said incredulously. “Freddie Mercury!”Loud executing a headstand onstage at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco with Mumps in 1979.Ruby Ray/Getty ImagesMumps songs never featured gay love scenarios, preferring sardonic observations and satirical exaggerations. Their second single, “Rock & Roll This, Rock & Roll That,” sent up the slogan-like salutes to the genre in song titles that, by then, had become a groaning cliché. “That was specifically written when Lou Reed titled his album ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Animal,’” Hoffman said. “How desperate must he have been to align himself with some trope in its death throes to sell a record?”An intrigued Sire Records commissioned some demos from Mumps but ultimately passed. At the same time, other artists recognized Mumps’ rarity and worth. “The caliber of their musicianship was high,” said Clem Burke, the drummer for Blondie, who shared many bills with Mumps. “They were energetic and fun and probably smarter than most of the other bands on the scene. In fact, they may have been too smart for their own good.”What impressed Rufus Wainwright most was that Mumps “followed no creed,” he said. “It wasn’t exactly punk or musical theater, but it had aspects of both. And they managed to put the dramatic flair of opera into a rock band. Plus, Lance was so sexy.”Still, the eccentricity of the music, with its fitful chord progressions and askew melodies, could be daunting for audiences to fathom and for Loud to sing. “I wrote songs that didn’t always play to Lance’s strength,” Hoffman admitted. “But he was one of the greatest frontmen of all time.”Mumps’ lack of success led to their 1979 split, after which Hoffman worked with artists including Klaus Nomi and James Chance, while Loud sustained a successful career in music journalism. (He contributed regularly to the magazines Details and Interview.) The two stayed best friends until Loud’s 2001 death. Now Hoffman is proud their music may finally reach a wider audience.“We were out of our time back then,” he said. “If we came up now, who knows?” More

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    What’s on TV This Week: Kennedy Center Honors and Remembering the Tulsa Massacre

    The Kennedy Center recognizes Dick Van Dyke, Debbie Allen, Joan Baez, Garth Brooks and Midori. And several networks air programs recognizing the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa massacre.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, May 31-June 6. Details and times are subject to change. More