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    A Ferocious Paul Mescal Stars in a Brutal ‘Streetcar’

    Desire comes a distant second to violence in a Brooklyn revival of the Tennessee Williams classic.“The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay.”Not bloody likely.Those stage directions from Tennessee Williams’s published script for “A Streetcar Named Desire” may amount to a mission statement and an artist’s credo but, 78 years after the play’s debut, they are no longer marching orders.At any rate, no one follows them. The New Orleans neighborhood in which Williams set the action — called Elysian Fields, no less — has for decades been radically reimagined: as a shoe box, a hangar, a manga, a loo. In his New York Times review, Ben Brantley called that last one, directed by Ivo van Hove, “A Bathtub Named Desire.”Now Rebecca Frecknall, whose Broadway production of “Cabaret” is no one’s idea of subtle, takes up the cudgel. In the revival of “Streetcar” that opened Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a transfer from London starring the ferocious Paul Mescal, she literalizes the idea of brutal relocation. You will not find a tender blue sky or even a white building, let alone any lyricism, on Madeleine Girling’s square, wood-plank set. Elevated on concrete blocks, in the gritty dark of the Harvey Theater, she makes the world of Stanley and Stella Kowalski — and of their frail interloper, Blanche DuBois — look like a boxing ring.There is some justice in that: Stanley is, after all, Williams’s half-despised, half-beloved icon of a brute. He enters the first scene bearing a package of bloody meat, which he throws at Stella to cook — a gesture she finds briefly annoying but that also turns her on. No less than her husband, she looks forward to making what he calls “noise in the night” and getting “the colored lights going.” That’s his kind of lyricism. And when Blanche, Stella’s impoverished older sister, arrives in desperation for an indefinite stay, we see its flip side as he sets out to destroy her because he can.In Anjana Vasan’s excellent performance as Stella, our critic writes, we sense her love for her sister, even more than the usual weak-tea toleration.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    Meghan Sussex? Even Meghan Markle’s Last Name Inspires Debates.

    The Duchess of Sussex caused a stir on “With Love, Meghan” when she said Sussex was her last name. But does that break from royal tradition?In “Romeo and Juliet,” the star-crossed heroine asks: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.”People far less infatuated have wrestled with this concept for hundreds of years: How much should a name signify, and does it actually affect what or who a person is?Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, would like a word.In her new Netflix series, “With Love, Meghan,” the duchess, who is married to Prince Harry, told the actress Mindy Kaling that her last name was Sussex, correcting Ms. Kaling, who had referred to her by a more familiar name: Meghan Markle.“It’s so funny, too, that you keep saying Meghan Markle,” Meghan said in the second episode of the series, which premiered last week. “You know I’m Sussex now.”Meghan cited the importance of sharing a last name with her children.“I didn’t know how meaningful it would be to me but it just means so much to go, ‘This is our family name, our little family name,’” she said.Ms. Kaling, who initially seemed surprised, replied, “Well, now I know and I love it.”It’s understandable that Meghan, whose representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment, insists on usage of what she feels is the correct form of her name. But as with most Meghan-related news, the clip quickly made waves online as people took to social media to criticize her. Some commenters thought she was being pretentious, and others called her out for seemingly having confused her royal house with the family’s surname.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    In ‘The Great Privation,’ Fending Off the Body Snatchers

    Nia Akilah Robinson’s new play, for Soho Rep, digs into an ugly historical practice.In the middle of the night in autumn 1832, a mother and her teenage daughter stand guard beside a freshly filled grave. They are not certain they need to be there, but Missy Freeman, the newly widowed mother, suspects the rumors are true: that body snatchers, also known as resurrectionists, have been digging up Black corpses and stealing them away.When a young white man appears in the darkness, Missy knows he has come to disinter her husband, Moses, dead of cholera and laid to rest only that afternoon. With impeccable composure, she tells the grave robber, who is a medical student, that they are there to pray. He backs off, menacingly.“Be sure to not get caught by the police,” he says. “Ladies shouldn’t be out so late.”In Nia Akilah Robinson’s new play, “The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar),” Missy (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and her daughter, 16-year-old Charity (Clarissa Vickerie), will not be deterred from keeping vigil while Moses’s body decomposes.As Charity says: “We must make it to three days with Daddy untouched. Then the bad men won’t return.”Directed by Evren Odcikin for Soho Rep, “The Great Privation” rummages around in the tainted soil of the United States and pulls up some shameful old skeletons for inspection. From the start, though, a defiant light radiates through this tale, and comedy shares space with disquietude. Warm, dexterous central performances from Lucas-Perry and Vickerie (a graduate student at Juilliard making her Off Broadway debut) have a lot to do with that.Informed by the history of Black bodies being used without consent in medical research, the play takes place on the same plot of land two centuries apart. In the 1800s, it is the burial ground at the African Baptist Church in Philadelphia, not far from Jefferson Medical College. In our time, it is a sleep-away summer camp where Minnie Chillous (Lucas-Perry), née Freeman, and her daughter, Charity (Vickerie), happen to be working as counselors alongside the amusingly dramatic John (Miles G. Jackson) and their strait-laced supervisor, Cuffee (Holiday).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Tony Hinchcliffe, the Trump Rally Comedian, Lands a Netflix Deal

    Hinchcliffe’s set at Madison Square Garden in October drew sharp criticism after he described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”The stand-up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe has landed a deal at Netflix months after angering people with his insults about Latinos and other minority groups at a New York rally when Donald J. Trump was running for president.The deal for three comedy specials under Hinchcliffe’s “Kill Tony” brand is part of an attempt by streaming services to appeal to Trump voters. Amazon Prime Video announced on Monday that several seasons of “The Apprentice,” the NBC reality show that bolstered Trump’s public profile in the early 2000s, would soon be available on the streaming service.Hinchcliffe’s specials will feature a mix of established comedians and surprise celebrity guests, Netflix said in a news release on Tuesday. The first special will be filmed at Comedy Mothership in Austin, Texas, and will arrive on the platform on April 7. Hinchcliffe will also receive his own stand-up special in the deal.Hinchcliffe is known for his “roast” style of comedy and his “Kill Tony” podcast, which is recorded live each week from Austin. He said in a statement that he was excited to share his show, which started with 12 audience members in 2013, with the world.“To think that I can pull a name out of a bucket and that person will be performing standup and an improvised interview on the largest streaming service in the world is both exciting and frightening,” Hinchcliffe said. “It’s the most spontaneous and improvised show that is out there and the creative freedom given to us by Netflix to keep the show in its pure form is a comedian’s dream.”Hinchcliffe was among the comedians who roasted the retired N.F.L. quarterback Tom Brady in a Netflix special last year that was viewed 13.8 million times in its first week on the streaming platform. His segment included homophobic remarks and comments about slavery.The comedian’s public profile grew even more in October after taking the stage at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, where he made insults and vulgar statements that leaned on offensive stereotypes about Jews, Latinos and African Americans. He received intense backlash after calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” drawing condemnation from celebrities like Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Lin-Manuel Miranda. More

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    Athol Fugard’s Plays Illustrated the Value of Every Human Life

    “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” and other works bear witness to forgotten lives and to the moral blindness and blinkered vision of the realities of apartheid South Africa.In early 2010, I was sitting at a communal table in a coffee shop in Cape Town, when I spotted a grizzled, bearded fellow who looked strangely familiar. It was Athol Fugard, South Africa’s foremost playwright and the great chronicler of his country’s apartheid past. There he was, sipping a cup of coffee like any ordinary person.I plucked up courage and approached him, murmuring something inarticulate about my admiration for his writing. “Hall-O,” Fugard said enthusiastically. “Join us. Have a coffee. Or a glass of wine.”By being determinedly local, Athol Fugard transcended the specifics of apartheid South Africa. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOne of the great things about Fugard, who died on Saturday, was that he was an ordinary person as well as an extraordinary one. He was wonderfully enthusiastic about people and their potential, ready to see the good in every situation, but also unafraid to confront the bad, both in others and himself. The famous scene in “‘Master Harold’ … and the Boys,” in which the young white protagonist spits in the face of his Black mentor, was, he freely confessed, drawn from his own life.As the theater critic Frank Rich noted in a 1982 New York Times review of the play, Fugard’s technique was to uncover moral imperatives “by burrowing deeply into the small, intimately observed details” of the fallible lives of his characters.My first encounter with Fugard’s work was in the early 1980s, when I saw a production of his 1972 play “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead,” written with Winston Ntshona and John Kani. It’s a bleakly comic tale of a man who assumes another identity and assigns his own to a corpse, in order to gain the coveted pass book that the South African authorities required as permission to work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    ‘Adolescence’ Is a Cacophonous, Gripping Mini-Series

    The emotionally complex new Netflix series, about a teenager accused of killing a classmate, doubles as a rich work of social critique.“Adolescence,” arriving Thursday, on Netflix, is a four-part mini-series about a 13-year-old accused of killing a classmate. So far, so Netflix. Its distinguishing features are its depressing realism and the fact that each episode is a continuous scene, which adds to the sense of panic and hurriedness.The show begins with the police storming the Miller family home to arrest the young son, Jamie (Owen Cooper), while his parents (Stephen Graham, Christine Tremarco) and sister (Amelie Pease) look on in horror and bafflement, crying and pleading. There is no break in the chaos. We stay with Jamie as he arrives at the police station, as he is fingerprinted and questioned, as the police take photos of his body while his father stands by in helpless horror.The show’s best episode, and one of the more fascinating hours of TV I’ve seen in a long time, is its third, a two-hander set seven months after the arrest. Jamie is in a juvenile detention facility, and a psychologist (Erin Doherty) is completing her independent evaluation to provide to the judge in his case. I watched this episode a few times, and it can land in different ways. Through one lens, she plays him like a piano, provoking a variety of emotional responses. Through another, she is a ship on his ocean, a witness to his tempestuousness but not its cause. The rhythm of the episode is the rhythm of Jamie’s audible breathing, and the toppled foosball table in the back corner is as upended as Jamie’s life.For better or worse, “Adolescence” evokes in the viewer the feelings of its characters: overstimulation, confusion, an increasingly powerful desire to tell everyone to sit down and be quiet for five dang seconds. Also sorrow, disbelief, a rending of the world and a surrender to never truly understanding — to not knowing, but … knowing.The performances here are superb, with varsity weeping and real sense of heft and verisimilitude. Is it a weird time to engage in recreational misery? When there’s so much free, ambient despair to go around? Yeah, probably, but “Adolescence” is not agony for agony’s sake. It uses its pain and shock as a side door into interesting questions and social critiques. It’s about a teen, but its ideas are adult.SIDE QUESTGraham, one of the creators of this series, and Doherty also star in “A Thousand Blows,” which is on Hulu. More

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    Netflix Is Gobbling Up World Literature. What Could Go Wrong?

    The streamer keeps mounting lavish adaptations of beloved novels — and making them all feel like just more Netflix.I’m thinking of a piece of filmed entertainment. It was adapted from a famous, internationally significant novel. It was blessed with lavish budgets, accomplished directors, ambitious visual design. A premiere was announced, ads were purchased, trailers were released — and then, one day, it was dumped onto a streaming service and almost immediately forgotten.Can you guess which one I’m thinking of? It could be “Pachinko,” or “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or “The Wheel of Time,” or any number of others. This past December, Netflix released over eight hours of television adapting somewhat less than half of Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 classic, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” It has, in fact, been Hoovering up the rights to major novels from around the world, spending millions to transform them into prestige programming. In the last year alone, there has been a film adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s novel “Pedro Paramo” (from Mexico), a mini-series of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa’s 1950s novel “The Leopard” (from Italy) and the first season of a version of Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem” (from China), which reportedly cost around $160 million to make.News that this was happening to “One Hundred Years of Solitude” might have shocked Márquez. He wrote for the movies and gave his blessing to multiple adaptations of his work, but the great Colombian writer never did sell the rights to “Solitude.” He thought its story, which follows the Buendia family over a century of history in the fictional city Macondo, would take 100 hours to tell properly; he also insisted it be filmed in Spanish. After his death in 2014, his widow held to these wishes; it was only in 2019, after the couple’s sons had become more involved in the estate, that Netflix acquired the rights. Márquez’s heirs would be executive producers. They negotiated for the show to be made in Colombia, and in Spanish.When the series was announced, though, Netflix sounded a more global note: “We know our members around the world love watching Spanish-language films and series,” said its vice president for Spanish-language programming. Netflix is available in more than 190 countries, and once a piece of original content enters its library — whether a Korean drama or a Latin American telenovela — it can be viewed most anywhere. The company seems to have pursued “Solitude” as an iteration of hits like “The Crown,” “Squid Game” and “Money Heist”: local productions that captivate international audiences through a combination of regional specificity and broad televisual legibility. The mini-series resembles the other things on Netflix more than it resembles anything in Márquez.The book is a natural candidate. It offers an imaginative evocation of Colombian history, rife with characters and love affairs and civil wars; it is also one of the best-known Spanish-language novels in the world, having sold some 50 million copies across nearly four dozen translations. Like “The Leopard” and “Pedro Paramo,” it has both national pedigree and international reputation, its title familiar enough to make viewers around the world pause over the Netflix tile. It is, in other words, valuable I.P. And that means it must now conform to the expectations of modern streaming: It must be adapted for frictionless international content consumption.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    In ‘Long Bright River,’ Amanda Seyfried Serves and Protects

    For Amanda Seyfried, the first day on set for “Long Bright River,” a limited series for Peacock, was awful. She stood under the lights in a mock-up of a police morgue, in her patrol cop uniform, unsure how to move or speak.“Every first day of work, I never know what the [expletive] I’m doing,” she told me later.Seyfried overprepares for most roles. She researches; she memorizes; she asks question after question. But then suddenly she’s on a soundstage somewhere, with the lights blazing and the cameras pointed at her face, and the terror rushes in. If she has an acting process, she said, “it’s all based on the fear that I’m not going to be good enough.”Seyfried, 39, was speaking on an icy February morning. We’d met for a late breakfast at a cafe on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near where Seyfried keeps an apartment. (She and her husband, the actor Thomas Sadoski, and their two children, spend most of their time on a farm upstate.) She was in town to shoot a Paul Feig movie, “The Housemaid,” and to promote “Long Bright River,” a moody eight-episode suspense series that premieres on March 13. She had recently wrapped “Ann Lee,” a historical musical by Mona Fastvold.Over more than two decades as an actor, Amanda Seyfried has moved from comedy and romance to more complex roles. Dana Scruggs for The New York TimesDoes this sound like a lot? It was. “I think I’m falling apart,” Seyfried said as she looked at the menu. She had recently injured her back on “The Housemaid” and was taking muscle relaxants.“I’m fine now,” she said. “I mean, I’m not. I’m struggling, but I’m walking.”Seyfried has been in the business for more than two decades, and has moved, gradually, from comedy (“Mean Girls”) and romance (“Mamma Mia”) to more complex roles. Her performance as the actress Marion Davies in the Netflix film “Mank” earned her an Oscar nomination, and she won an Emmy for her portrayal of the convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu mini-series, “The Dropout.” With those roles and those accolades secure, she has finally been recognized as a gifted dramatic actress.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More