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      Book Review: ‘Up With the Sun,’ by Thomas Mallon

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      In his name-dropping novel “Up With the Sun,” Thomas Mallon fictionalizes the minor career and tabloid murder of the Broadway actor Dick Kallman.UP WITH THE SUN, by Thomas MallonAlfred Hitchcock liked to talk about the MacGuffin, a plot device of great interest to the characters onscreen that keeps the story moving along, yet turns out to be of little consequence. “In crook stories it is almost always the necklace,” he said, “and in spy stories it is most always the papers.” (Famous MacGuffins: Rosebud, from “Citizen Kane”; the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction”; the Maltese Falcon.)In Thomas Mallon’s nostalgic new showbiz novel “Up With the Sun,” the MacGuffin is a fraternity pin: a prop from a real, if forgotten, 1951 Broadway musical called “Seventeen,” worn by an actor who was a success in it (and not much else): Dick Kallman. Kallman presses a fine-jewelry version on his cast crush, the male lead, who refuses the gift. The pin will also pop up as a tie clip worn in friendship; a token of love on a lapel; a tool of sadomasochistic sex; and — most Hitchcockishly — an object of value sought by murderous thieves. Mallon specializes in animating imagined versions of historical figures, and ambitiously so; he recently wrapped up a Washington trilogy about three different Republican presidencies. Unlike Nixon or Reagan or George W. Bush, Kallman clears the bar of “historical” only because the internet, as they used to say of elephants, never forgets. In 1975, his acting career on the rocks, Kallman was quoted in The New York Times’s fashion column advising women to wear terry-cloth dresses designed by a business partner. The next time he was mentioned, five years later on the front page of the paper’s Metropolitan report at age 46, was not because he’d switched to dealing art and antiques. It was because he and a “business assistant” 20 years his junior had been killed in cold blood while in various states of undress in a luxury apartment off Central Park.Mallon swipes the story of Kallman’s short life and shocking end and runs with it like Cary Grant under the crop duster in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (where the MacGuffin was the government microfilm hidden in a Tarascan warrior statue). Grant doesn’t make a physical cameo in “Up With the Sun” — even in death, he’s maybe too major for this, a book that’s about making one’s peace with minorness.But many other celebrities of all gradations do, including Grant’s ex-wife Dyan Cannon, her ring finger smashed into a piece of scenery after Kallman felt she was upstaging him on the tour of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” “You sick bastard,” she hisses at him when he’s seat-filling at the Golden Globes years later.The recreated Cannon is onto something: In Mallon’s well-researched imagining, Kallman is, if not a sociopath, a doomed cipher on whom “ambition stuck out like a cowlick or a horn, fatal to an audience’s complete belief in almost any character he was playing.” He’s good-looking, like “a less perfect Tony Curtis,” but has a belligerent, possibly misogynistic streak that puts off casting directors and colleagues.In a short-lived TV show, “Hank,” he plays an orphan sneaking college classes (the novel’s title is taken from a lyric in Johnny Mercer’s theme song). It’s canceled after he becomes what his agent calls “the first person in history to be the subject of a takedown profile in TV Guide.”“Did he have a soul?” wonders Lucie Arnaz, Lucy and Desi’s daughter, in whose workshop Kallman unfruitfully participated. One pit musician imagines the actor beating the female lead of “Seventeen” to death with her parasol.His foil is that production’s (so far as I can tell wholly fictional) pianist Matt Liannetto, whose story Mallon counterposes to Kallman’s in alternating chapters rendered in sans-serif typeface. A divorced father who’s slowly emerging from the closet, Liannetto is also, in his way, doomed — a cough, diminished appetite and night sweats hint why — but morally secure, a walking indictment of fame. “I’d been glad to be quite good at the little thing I did,” he thinks, comparing himself to Salieri in “Amadeus,” “rather than mediocre at something bigger that I tried to do.”As a drive down the highway of old-style entertainment (theater, movies, books, music, TV) — with gossip columns on the shoulder — “Up With the Sun” is an unqualified success. It’s replete with amusing walk-ons, most notably the underused actress Dolores Gray, Kallman’s partner in a décor concern called Possessions of Prominence; with knowing, affectionate references (Hal Hastings! “They’re Playing Our Song”! Manhattan Plaza!); and with sidelong observations of cultural change.Kallman, for example, hates “A Chorus Line,” disgusted by the “backstage sweat-stink and poor-me agonizing put out in front of the audience. No more hitting your mark with a big grin and singing, full-out, a joyful lyric.” Liannetto, more deeply as is his wont, mourns the “eternal orbits” of an analog watch. We time-travel to Judy Garland’s 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall and Billy Rose’s funeral. Who could ask for anything more?A coherent crime story, maybe. The man convicted IRL of Kallman’s killing, Charles Lonnie Grosso — whatever happened to him, I found myself wondering, tilting inexorably back toward fact. The perpetrators here are given other names, and so many stock characters tromp through in the investigation and courtroom scenes — a Columbo-like detective, a “no-nonsense” judge — it’s hard to understand the particulars or why the main character met his untimely end, other than getting mixed up with a bad drug crowd. The murder was lurid; the motive seems mundane and not fully explained, and Liannetto’s relationship with a police assistant a little too neat.What he and the antihero Kallman have in common is that they’re both “throwbacks,” he soliloquizes. “All my life I’ve loved the past as a place that can keep you safe from the present, an inert world, sleeping and finished, that can’t push you around.”“Up With the Sun” raises the drapes on a weird corner of this past, rousing and rummaging through. We’re left rubbing our eyes.UP WITH THE SUN | By Thomas Mallon | Illustrated | 353 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28 More

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      Screen Time: A Film Star Captivates, and a Writer Is Surveilled

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      David Greenspan gives a wild ride of a performance in “On Set With Theda Bara,” and marionettes star in Vaclav Havel’s play “Audience.”The performance space at the Brick, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is already veiled in haze when the audience arrives. A long table draped in black runs down the center of the room, lit by sconces and hanging lamps, their soft glow reflected in mirrored walls at either end.There’s a ghostly, expectant feel to it all, as if we’ve entered an alternate plane where specters might be summoned. You wouldn’t be surprised if a séance broke out. Somewhere in the middle of the swirling phantasmagoria that is the play “On Set With Theda Bara,” indeed one will.A certain channeling of spirits, though, begins as soon as the performance does. The actor David Greenspan takes his place at the head of the table, with the audience seated on either side, and becomes the glamorous silent-film star Theda Bara, or a version of her. Identity is slippery in this play, as it was for the actress, who started out as Theodosia Goodman from Ohio but was marketed by Hollywood, under her screen name, as an exoticized Arab.Obsession with her is the gossamer string that binds Theda to the other characters in this campy, comic solo show: Detective Finale, a gay 21st-century gumshoe looking for his missing child; Ulysses, a movie-theater organist enthralled with Theda ever since one of her films aroused him to distraction at the keyboard; and Iras, Finale’s genderqueer 16-year-old, who would become Theda Bara if only that were possible.“The Theda I want to be is like — transgressive but unproblematic, know what I mean?” Iras says. “Like minus the appropriation and stuff.”Greenspan, a virtuoso of multicharacter solo shows, gives a wild ride of a performance, fleet-footed and mercurial but capable of great stillness, too. Stalking, twirling and dancing through the space, even treading on the tabletop, he is quite something to behold, with Stacey Derosier’s lighting finely calibrated to his every move. (The set is by Frank J. Oliva.)Written by Joey Merlo, directed by Jack Serio and presented by the Exponential Festival, this play collides periods and period styles along with storytelling genres. It’s part noir, part vampire tale; a vampire — a predatory woman — was one of Theda’s most famous roles.Like any decent vampire, Theda is undead: 138 years old, by Iras’s calculation, but still looking — Iras tells her when they meet — just as she always did onscreen. Holed up with Ulysses, Theda watches clips from her old movies on YouTube, which she pronounces, adorably, as YouTubah.“Things are strange here,” Ulysses says, and he could easily be speaking of the play. “Reality seems to move about. You’ll be in one place one minute and in another the next. And it’s not only the place that moves but time as well.”In a whipsaw-changeable show that employs just a single costume (by Avery Reed) and almost zero props, it’s not always clear which character is speaking — and the protean Theda has more than one voice. That periodic smudginess is less bothersome than you’d think, though.Only at the very end does the play turn too murky to work. Until then, Greenspan renders it entirely fascinating.Vit Horejs and Theresa Linnihan in “Audience,” a production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater that is set in a brewery, at La MaMa.Jonathan Slaff“Audience,” a puppet version of an autobiographical Vaclav Havel play at La MaMa, in the East Village, has the opposite trouble: a lively finish, but a glacially paced staging whose intriguing aim is never close to realized.Directed by Vit Horejs, who performs it with Theresa Linnihan, this production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater is set in a brewery, where a playwright works, rolling barrels. A brewmaster-informant chats him up, hoping for scraps of intel.Two large projection screens are suspended over the playing space. (Production design is by Alan Barnes Netherton.) One screen displays live, black-and-white video from multiple cameras aimed at parts of the stage, to suggest the oppression of constant surveillance. The other shows color close-ups of the performance.In Horejs’s English translation, it’s a very talky two-hander, but the marionettes (by Linnihan, Milos Kasal and Jakub “Kuba” Krejci) don’t have moving facial features, which makes for unfortunately static close-ups. The acting, alas, does not captivate, so the spying never feels real enough to make the surveillance images meaningful.There is a smart video prelude to the performance, though: a sleek newsreel (by Suzanna Halsey) that gives a quick and clever Czech history lesson to contextualize the play. Bit of a disappointment, what follows.On Set With Theda BaraThrough Wednesday at the Brick, Brooklyn; theexponentialfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes.AudienceThrough Feb. 19 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Charles Kimbrough, Actor Best Known for ‘Murphy Brown,’ Dies at 86

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      In a career that included a Tony nomination for “Company,” he specialized in playing uptight characters, notably Candice Bergen’s stuffy straight man.Charles Kimbrough, an actor known for his patrician looks and stately bearing who was nominated for an Emmy Award for portraying a comically rigid news anchor on the hit sitcom “Murphy Brown,” died on Jan. 11 in Culver City, Calif. He was 86.His son, John Kimbrough, confirmed the death.After decades of stage work in New York, including a Tony Award-nominated performance in the original 1970 Broadway production of the Steven Sondheim musical “Company,” Mr. Kimbrough finally got his first taste of mainstream fame alongside Candice Bergen on “Murphy Brown,” the popular series set in a television newsroom that ran for 10 seasons on CBS starting in 1988. (He reprised his character for three episodes of the 2018 reboot.)As Jim Dial, Mr. Kimbrough artfully toyed with the wooden archetype of a 1980s newsman, with his lacquered helmet of hair, Walter Cronkite-like air of seriousness and old-boy swagger (he lovingly referred to Ms. Bergen’s investigative reporter character as “Slugger”).The cast of “Murphy Brown,” from left: Faith Ford, Candice Bergen, Mr. Kimbrough, Grant Shaud and Joe Regalbuto.Byron J. Cohen/CBSHis rigid, pompous manner made him the ideal straight man for the show’s ever-topical plotlines. In one 1997 episode, Jim is tasked with finding marijuana for Murphy, who is seeking to ease the symptoms of her chemotherapy. “Wow, look at all of this, you must have spent a fortune,” Murphy exclaims as she holds aloft a large plastic bag of cannabis. “Damn right I did!” Jim responds. “Nickel bag, my Aunt Sally.”It was hardly the first role that allowed him to explore fussy or priggish characters. In the 2012 Broadway revival of “Harvey,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1944 play about a man (played by Jim Parsons) who ends up in an sanitarium because of his friendship with a six-foot-tall imaginary rabbit, Mr. Kimbrough played the exacting psychiatrist who is obsessed with the image of his institution.Mr. Kimbrough received strong reviews for his performance in the 1995 production of A.R. Gurney’s “Sylvia” at the Manhattan Theater Club. He played Greg, a middle-class husband struggling with midlife crisis, a wobbly career and his marriage to Kate (Blythe Danner), which grows more complicated after he brings home a new dog, Sylvia, played in very human form by Sarah Jessica Parker.Not that Mr. Kimbrough ever sought to play stiffs. “Unfortunately, I’m really good at playing jackasses of one kind or another,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2012. “I’ve always been slightly self-conscious as an actor, and I guess that sometimes reads as pomposity.”Mr. Kimbrough with Tracee Chimo, left, and Jessica Hecht in the 2012 production of “Harvey” at Studio 54.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Starting when I was 30,” he continued, “I somehow gave off an impression at an audition that had them mentally put me in a three-piece suit or put an attaché case in my hand. If there was a stiff-guy part, the director would brighten up when I came in. That wasn’t the response I wanted. I was in anguish.”It was not always so. As a younger actor, “he played a wide variety of characters who were much more dynamic,” John Kimbrough said in a phone interview. “Some of my earliest memories are of watching him in ‘Candide’” — a 1974 production of the Leonard Bernstein musical, in which Clive Barnes of The New York Times described Mr. Kimbrough’s performance as “brilliant” — “he played five different characters, and he was a dynamo, jumping in and out of costume changes.”That was not his only kinetic performance. As Mr. Kimbrough put it in a 2002 interview with Newsday: “When I first came to New York I’d played these sweaty, physical guys who bounded all over the stage. I didn’t do a show when I wasn’t soaking wet at the end.”Even so, he had a natural feel for playing emotionally repressed characters, in part because of his own family background.“He came from a buttoned-up Midwestern family, and so he had grown up with people very much like the characters he played,” his son said. “They felt very deeply, but kept it hidden beneath a facade of manners and propriety. Somehow he was able to communicate that feeling to audiences, even as the guys he played were keeping it all inside.”Charles Mayberry Kimbrough was born on May 23, 1936, in St. Paul, Minn., the older of two children of Charles and Emily (Raudenbush) Kimbrough. When he was a young child, the family moved to Highland Park, Ill., near Chicago, where his father sold commercial heating equipment.A lover of music, particularly opera, Mr. Kimbrough majored in music and theater at Indiana University and later received a master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama.Moving to New York, he endured the typical struggles of a young actor until he got his big break as Harry, a hard-drinking husband fighting off the lure of the bottle, in the Harold Prince production of “Company,” the celebrated Sondheim musical about a single man, his girlfriends and the couples he knows as they navigate the complexities of loneliness and love in New York City.In a roundabout way, Mr. Kimbrough found love himself through the production, albeit three decades later. In 2002, years after his divorce in 1991 from his first wife, Mary Jane (Wilson) Kimbrough, an actress he had met at Yale, he married Beth Howland, who had played alongside him in “Company” as an anxiety-ridden bride, and who later found fame as Vera, the flighty diner waitress, on the long-running sitcom “Alice,” which debuted in 1976.Ms. Howland died in 2016. In addition to his son, Mr. Kimbrough is survived by a sister, Linda Kimbrough, and a stepdaughter, Holly Howland.Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Kimbrough continued to work steadily, appearing on television shows like “Kojak” and in films like “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” (1979), with Alan Alda, while also paying the bills as a wholesome American in television spots for Imperial margarine and Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs.But it was only with “Murphy Brown,” his son said, that he found the degree of fame where fans recognized him on the street. And his success allowed him to make peace with being typecast as stodgy.He came to realize that “stuffiness is not dullness,” Mr. Kimbrough told Newsday. “And that gave me a new lease on life.” More

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      Review: From Lil Buck, History and a Chance to Flash Some Brilliance

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      “Memphis Jookin’: The Show,” which presents jookin “in the world it comes from,” is sincere entertainment, packed with talent and heart.“This is going to be very educational for a lot of y’all,” Lil Buck said at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater on Thursday.He was speaking before the New York premiere of “Memphis Jookin’: The Show,” which he conceived, produced, helped choreograph and stars in.Buck, also known as Charles Riley, is the biggest star of jookin, the Memphis-born street dance. He’s probably the only jookin specialist that most people have heard of. And because of how Buck became famous — dancing to classical music, collaborating with Yo-Yo Ma and ballet companies — many of those people might have misconceptions about the dance.Hence this show, which seeks, in Buck’s words, to present jookin “in the world it comes from.” And to do so in the form of a 90-minute, touring theatrical production, with a plot and dialogue. Such street-to-stage transpositions can, and usually do, go wrong in a hundred ways. With more skill and care than originality, “Memphis Jookin’” mainly avoids the pitfalls. It’s sincere entertainment, packed with talent and heart. And, yes, it’s educational, too.The story, serviceably if sometimes clunkily written by Ameenah Kaplan and Malcolm Barrett, follows JJ (the manic Dai’Vian Washington), a Memphis kid who decides to document the jookin scene with his dad’s camcorder. He goes to the Crystal Palace roller rink — an important location in jookin history and Buck’s biography — where his friend DJ Fly (Bradley Davis) is on the turntables. There we see a loosely staged scene of jookin in situ: little bursts of dancing that sometimes flare up into fights.This narrative setup also allows DJ Fly to give JJ (and us) a history lesson about the development of the underground hip-hop music that goes with jookin (ably supplied by Marshall and Parker Mulherin and Young Jai). As he explains how changing technology allowed DJs to play with speed and rhythm, the lessons are illustrated with dancing that enjoyably demonstrates parallel development.Throughout the show, the choreography (by Buck, Terran Noir Gary and Marico Flake) and the direction (by Amy Campion) work together to make points, flash some brilliance and keep things moving. A dance battle escalates into a generational confrontation when Buck arrives like a new-kid-in-town gunslinger to challenge the old-school champ Double OG (Flake, well known in urban dance circles as Dr. Rico).It’s a smart use of the always affable Buck, acknowledging that his dancing is on another level. The otherworldly gliding in sneakers, the toe-tip balances that splay riskily and recover: He effortlessly pushes everything a little further. Double OG (a gruffly witty dancer who seems to be gracefully scraping schmutz from his shoes) admits defeat by resorting to violence. JJ and DJ Fly have to restore the peace.Lil Buck in “Memphis Jookin,’” which he conceived, produced, helped choreograph and stars in.Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesThis narrative turn is typical of the show’s dramaturgy, obvious but effective. JJ brings everyone together by showing them what he has recorded on his camera, scenes now danced by cast members as others pretend to watch the camcorder playback. What might have seemed like nothing much when we saw JJ filming the first Crystal Palace scene is now revealed, with some fast forwarding, to be quite wonderful: a trio of whiz kids, a boy-girl romance. We see Double OG teaching another cast member, Cameron Sykes, the basics of jookin, starting with the foundational gangsta walk, and Sykes manages the trick of pretending to be clumsy so he can transform into a marvel.Then JJ’s camera and the documentary premise pay off again, this time with interviews. On the rear wall, we see video of one of the dancers (well edited by Joe Mulherin), telling his or her story, while onstage that dancer expresses the story through jookin. Elise Landrum sweetly explains how dance is therapy, how it’s kept her sane. Dra’em Hines talks about learning to dance from his father and how the other cast members supported him when his father died.Buck tells some of his story, too, acting out his inspirations, including Crystal Palace dancers and Michael Jackson. The crux of his tale is a crisis, when a mentor told him that his dancing was “cool but not gangsta enough.” What he learned, he says, is that jookin wasn’t about skills and tricks; it was about expressing pain, love, joy, who you are.His aspiration, he adds, is for people to recognize jookin as a “fine art.” The dancing — not just his, but everyone’s — makes its own case: inventive, expressive, impressive, hard-won. But the narrative points to goals other than respect or prestige. At the end, JJ uploads his footage to YouTube and watches in astonished triumph as his views and subscribers rocket into the millions.During the post-show discussion, Flake was more frank about the show’s purpose — saying, in effect, that yes, jookin is art but artists need money. Landrum, in her interview segment, expressed delight in “getting paid to do what I like.” What these dancers need is a way to be professional without being Lil Buck. And this show that Lil Buck has made for and with them and taken on tour could be the answer.Memphis Jookin’: The ShowThrough Friday at the Rose Theater, Lincoln Center; lincolncenter.org. More

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      ‘Endgame’ Review: A Laugh at the Apocalypse?

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      There’s plenty of pleasure to be found at the end of the world in the Irish Repertory Theater production of Samuel Beckett’s play.The dog is a small, stuffed toy, pathetic and adorable all at once. A sewing project in progress, he has a patchwork coat, three legs so far — and zero genitals, because those are going to be the finishing touch.Hamm, the volatile, unseeing tyrant in Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame,” has ordered the creation of this cloth companion: one more creature to shrink from him in the dreary, age-worn room that is his realm.“Can he stand?” Hamm asks.Placed on the floor by Hamm’s much-abused attendant, Clov, the pup promptly falls over — right on his snout at the performance I saw the other afternoon at Irish Repertory Theater. It’s the silliest bit of slapstick, and (with a vital assist from Deirdre Brennan, who made the dog) it works just as well as it must have when Beckett dreamed it up in the 1950s. You can almost feel the playwright, a great fan of physical comedy, winking from beyond the grave.It’s not the only time you get that sense in this revival, starring the Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson as Hamm and the actor-clown Bill Irwin, a Beckett aficionado, as Clov. When Clov points his telescope at the audience and tells Hamm, “I see a multitude in transports of joy,” that’s Beckett having a little joke with us.Joy is hardly the operative word, of course, in this post-apocalyptic play about the direness of the human condition. But pleasure? There’s plenty of that to be found in Ciaran O’Reilly’s main-stage production, whose requisite grimness is edged with the gorgeousness of performances that are sly, vivid and pulsingly alive.On a set by Charlie Corcoran, this “Endgame” looks just as the playwright meticulously specifies: the bare room with two meager windows so high up that a ladder is needed to reach them; the armchair on wheels, in which Hamm, who cannot walk, spends his days; the two trash cans off to the side, in which his parents live.Around Hamm’s neck hangs a whistle, and when he blows it to summon the beaten-down Clov, it is piercingly shrill — a sound to cut through far more noise and distance than ever separate them. Really, a dulcet bell would do. But this is how Hamm prefers to punctuate the dreary sameness of his days: with bursts of unprovoked aggression that send Clov scrambling to placate him.“Why do you stay with me?” Hamm asks — a fair question, as he is capricious and cruel.“Why do you keep me?” Clov counters.“There’s no one else,” Hamm says.“There’s nowhere else,” Clov replies.They can’t go on. They go on.Likewise Hamm’s parents, Nagg (an endearing Joe Grifasi) and Nell (an exquisite Patrice Johnson Chevannes). They pop up from their respective garbage cans to bicker, joke and flirt with each other, though they’re just too far apart to share a smooch. They laugh raucously at the memory of the accident that claimed their legs and reminisce dreamily about a boat ride they enjoyed in Italy. Whatever bleak horror they’re enduring now, pain is old hat to them, and they did know beauty once.“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that,” Nell says.It’s one of the play’s most famous lines. Still, is it accurate?Amid the bleak horror of the play, Hamm’s parents, played by Patrice Johnson Chevannes, left, and Joe Grifasi, happily reminisce about the days when they still had their legs.Sara KrulwichClov is miserable, but that’s not what makes him comical as he hauls his stiff-legged body up and down his ladder. Dressed in calico-cat colors by the costume designer Orla Long, and looking like he’s stepped out of a Vermeer canvas that’s browned with age, he has the manner of a captive sprite and a physicality that is pure clown. His muttering rebelliousness is clownish, too.And Hamm, seated in a chair that’s as much a throne as the one Thompson occupied when he played the title role in “The Emperor Jones” at Irish Rep, is funny because he’s ridiculous, vain and at ease with his own disgustingness. The grossest comic line in “Endgame” — a joke that feels like a nod to Beckett’s luxuriantly crude friend James Joyce — belongs to Hamm. What fun it is to watch Thompson, so often cast in somber roles, land it impeccably.This is not to say that the play is a laugh riot. In 1956, as Beckett was writing it, he described it as “Rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw, more inhuman than ‘Godot.’”All true, yet in the humor he built into that text, he left more space for humanness than the play’s reputation suggests. Despair is the dominant note, but where there is laughter there is hope. This is not sheer nihilism.“We’re not beginning to, to, mean something?” Hamm asks.“Mean something! You and I, mean something!” Clov says, and breaks into a smile. “Ah, that’s a good one!”EndgameThrough March 12 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      She Went Viral Mocking Trump. Now Sarah Cooper Is Taking on a New Role.

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      She is making her professional stage debut in the Off Broadway drama “The Wanderers,” and fulfilling a childhood dream. “It’s transformative,” she said.Way back in 2020, when Donald Trump was still in office and many Americans were stuck at home, Sarah Cooper became Internet-famous in a most idiosyncratic way: by lip-syncing some of the president’s more inartful musings.Using tools she had at hand — her wit, her phone — she built an enormous audience for her short-form videos mocking Trump’s remarks on everything from the coronavirus to crustaceans.The exercise was a bit of a lark, and a bit of a coping mechanism. But for Cooper, an actor-writer-comedian who had had little luck breaking into the entertainment world, it was also a game-changer: She finally signed with an agent (at William Morris Endeavor, one of the biggest talent agencies); she starred in her own Netflix special (“Everything’s Fine,” created with Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph); she adapted one of her books, “How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings,” into a pilot (it did not get picked up, but was still “an amazing experience”); and she shot a Jerry Seinfeld film (“Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story,” currently in postproduction).Now, at age 45, she is at last doing the thing she has dreamed of since she was a child: performing in a play. She is making her professional stage debut in “The Wanderers,” a drama by Anna Ziegler that is in previews Off Broadway at the Roundabout Theater Company, with the actress Katie Holmes also in the cast.Cooper, who last performed in theater as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, has had a circuitous path back. Born in Jamaica, she immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was 3, and at first found little family enthusiasm for her artistic aspirations. “They didn’t think that I’d be able to support myself as an actress,” she said, “which, you know, they had a good point.”At college she switched her major from theater to economics; after graduating, she worked in tech design. At 30, she quit to try her hand at acting; when that wasn’t going well, she turned to standup comedy, “and then,” she says, “I went broke.”She wound up managing a design team at Google, but quit that to write. And then came the pandemic, the videos, and all that followed.“Those videos absolutely changed my life,” she said during a recent interview at her apartment high above Downtown Brooklyn, overlooking the Statue of Liberty. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Cooper is playing a woman who is struggling with her identity as a mother, a wife and a writer in Anna Ziegler’s “The Wanderers,” a Roundabout Theater Company production that is now in previews.Tim Barber for The New York TimesWhat is “The Wanderers” about?“The Wanderers” is about two couples. One couple is very much an arranged marriage, in the Orthodox Jewish community, and the other couple is not arranged. On the surface, it looks like one couple has all of these freedoms and the other one doesn’t. And yet the struggles are very similar between the two.Tell me about your role.I play Sophie, and I am half-Jewish/half-Black. I had a huge failure earlier in my career, but my husband is very successful. When we meet Sophie, it’s about 10 years into their marriage, and she is struggling with her identity as a mother and a wife, and how that is affecting her longing to be a writer. And she’s really feeling distant from her husband.You had a marriage end during the pandemic. How does taking this role resonate for you?It’s very personal: I’m a writer as well; I have a lot of impostor syndrome as well; I question my talent on a nightly basis. I just relate to this character so much.It’s been three years since your first Trump video, which you called “How to Medical.” How do you see that chapter of your life?Right afterward I was very scared of just being known as the Trump Girl, and felt like I wanted to distance myself from it. But I meet people who just come up to me and they just go, “You made me laugh when it was so hard to laugh.” It’s just made me appreciate it a lot more. Those videos helped so many people, and they also helped me. So I’m thankful for it now, even though I know that if I die right now, my obituary would have the name Donald Trump in it, which is not great, but what are you going to do?Do you ever feel tempted to do it again?People ask me to do it all the time, and I have no desire. I like the idea that it exposed the meaninglessness of his words, but I think now that it’s been exposed, there’s nothing left to really do with it.And you’re not going to turn it into a cycle with other characters?I’ve noticed I am very good at lip syncing, so I’ll never say never. But right now I’m really enjoying acting, which is really what my childhood dream was.So what is it like, being in a play?We did a table read, and table reads are always very scary because you think if you do it wrong, you’re going to get fired immediately. And then we moved very quickly to getting on our feet in the rehearsal space for four weeks, which was such a gift. And then you get on that stage, and the lights hit you, and you’re in a costume, and you’re looking at this man who is just this actor but now he’s your husband — it’s transformative. Oddly I feel it’s where exactly I need to be and where exactly I belong.What are you learning?I’m working on my voice, mainly. I’m learning to breathe while I’m speaking, learning how to project, learning about my diaphragm, doing morning and afternoon exercises. I have to say the name of a Philip Roth book, “Sabbath’s Theater,” so all I do every day is say “Sabbath’s Theater,” “Sabbath’s Theater,” “Sabbath’s Theater.” It’s not that easy. I got a lot of opportunities by not using my voice, and so now I really have to figure out what that means to use my voice.Have you been seeing theater?I have seen “Take Me Out” four times. I just love that play. Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Jesse Williams are so great. And masculine vulnerability is just wonderful to watch. I also saw “Tina” twice — I see a play and I have to go see it again. I don’t know what I will see next but if I love it I will see it multiple times.I’m having a hard time figuring out the overlap between “Tina” and “Take Me Out.”Well they both start with T! Actually, I don’t know what it is. With “Tina,” it was the contrast between that forward-facing, “I’m doing this amazing performance; I’m making you happy; I’m making you dance” and then, a second later, “I’m beaten by my husband.” Showing how those two things could be happening at the same time — this awful, awful struggle and this amazing performance — that was incredible to watch. And also, Adrienne Warren — her voice and her presence was just so amazing.So what do you hope is next for you?I am writing a memoir that’s coming out in October. And I want to tell stories. That’s really what I want to do, and whether that’s through writing, through acting, through standup, I want to be able to do whatever it takes to tell stories.Why a memoir?My very first book was “100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings,” and I look back now and realize that a lot of that was inspired by my father, because my father always looks very smart. My memoir is about embracing looking foolish. The more foolish I can allow myself to look, the better, because that’s exposing who I am more, and not conforming to what I think people want to see.Do you miss Trump?In 2020, he said some brilliantly stupid things. You can’t write that stuff. The stuff that he said, it was gold. So I don’t want him back, but making those videos was a lot of fun. More

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      Nonbinary “& Juliet” Performer Opts Out of Gendered Tony Awards

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      Justin David Sullivan of “& Juliet” decided to abstain from consideration and urged awards shows to “expand their reach.”A principal performer in the new Broadway musical “& Juliet” has withdrawn from consideration for the Tony Awards rather than compete in a gendered category, shining a renewed spotlight on the question of whether major awards should continue to have separate categories for men and women.The performer, Justin David Sullivan, is trans nonbinary and uses the pronouns he, she and they. In the pop-song-fueled musical, which imagines an alternative to “Romeo and Juliet” in which Juliet does not die, Sullivan plays May, one of Juliet’s best friends. May — an adolescent, like Juliet — is still figuring things out.The Tony Awards, like the Oscars and the Emmys, have separate acting categories for men and for women. The Grammy Awards eliminated many gendered categories as part of a consolidation in 2012, and the Obie Awards, which honor Off and Off Off Broadway work, have long had nongendered categories.Sullivan, whose performance has been generally well-received, was among many people who could have been nominated as a featured performer in a musical. But those categories, like all the Tony acting categories, are gendered, and by opting out of the contest altogether, Sullivan puts public pressure on the awards.“I felt I had no choice but to abstain from being considered for a nomination this season,” Sullivan said in a statement on Wednesday. “I hope that award shows across the industry will expand their reach to be able to honor and award people of all gender identities.”The Tony Awards have accepted Sullivan’s position, meaning that Sullivan will not appear on the list of Tony-eligible performers considered by nominators at the end of the season. “Per Justin David Sullivan’s request to the Tony Administration Committee, they opted to withdraw themselves from eligibility,” Tony Award Productions said in a statement.Sullivan is not the first nonbinary performer to make such a move. Asia Kate Dillon, who played Malcolm in a production of “Macbeth” last season, asked not to be considered in either the actor or actress categories. That move did not become public at the time but was confirmed by a Tony Awards spokeswoman on Wednesday.This season, there will be at least one Tony-eligible nonbinary performer: J. Harrison Ghee, who stars in the new musical “Some Like It Hot,” will be considered for possible nomination in the leading actor category, the Tony Awards administration committee said on Wednesday. The committee, which determines eligibility categories for shows and artists, was following a request from the show’s producers.Ghee, whose performance has drawn strong reviews and who is considered likely to receive a Tony nomination, plays a musician who initially identifies as male but starts dressing as a woman to escape the mob, and by the end of the show has a more fluid identity.“I’m not going to put myself on this pedestal like, ‘I need it to change today,’” Ghee told The Daily Beast in a recent interview when asked about this season’s Tony Awards categories. “I never go into things expecting to be the person that changes everything. I’m just showing up and meeting the moment.”Tony Awards administrators have quietly been talking about whether to change the gendered nature of their acting awards — awards for designers and directors are not gendered — but it is not clear if, when or how they might do so. There has long been concern that such a change would make it even harder for performers to win the industry’s top honor.“We recognize that the current acting categories are not fully inclusive, and we are currently in discussion about how to best adjust them to address this,” Tony Award Productions said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we are still in process on this and our rules do not allow us to make changes once a season has begun. We are working thoughtfully to ensure that no member of our community feels excluded on the basis of gender identity in future seasons.”The Outer Critics Circle, which grants awards for work both on and Off Broadway, said this year that it would eliminate gendered categories. Several regional theater award competitions, including the Helen Hayes Awards in Washington, the Barrymore Awards in Philadelphia and the Jeff Awards in Chicago, have eliminated gender-specific awards categories. More

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      ‘Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons’ Review: A Thought Exercise, Without Deep Thoughts

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      On London’s West End, Aidan Turner and Jenna Coleman star in a lightly dystopian comedy that succeeds as a portrait of a troubled couple, but falls short as political satire. The delightfully titled “Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons” is a high-concept romantic comedy on themes of language and communication. Its protagonists, Oliver and Bernadette, are your typical slightly mismatched couple: He’s an idealistic musician, she’s a sensible lawyer; he thinks she’s too careerist, but she reckons he’s just insecure because she earns more than him. Their differences are brought into focus when the government brings in a new law that forbids all citizens from speaking more than 140 words per day. How could any couple survive in such conditions? The so-called “Hush Law” threatens the basis of their closeness, forcing them to water down their conversation to a meager daily quota. But whereas Oliver is affronted and joins a protest movement to try to get the rule repealed, Bernadette, whose instincts are conservative, is initially complacent about its ramifications. Their relationship may or may not be unraveling.This lively debut, by the young British playwright Sam Steiner, enjoyed modest success on the independent circuit a few years ago. It premiered at the Warwick Arts Center in 2015 before moving on to the Edinburgh Fringe festival the following year — and is now enjoying a rather more high-profile second wind at the Harold Pinter Theater in London’s West End, directed by Josie Rourke and running through March 18. The production’s co-stars Aidan Turner and Jenna Coleman are relatively big names in British showbiz thanks to roles in the TV series “Poldark” and “Doctor Who.” As Oliver, Turner is sympathetic as the quintessential artsy dreamer — a little self-absorbed, but his heart’s in the right place; Coleman’s Bernadette is prim and sharp, very much the yin to his yang. Together they present a charming and relatable portrait of long-in-the-tooth coupledom, flitting between estrangement and tenderness.Superficially, “Lemons” lends itself to political interpretation. Britain’s government recently proposed a new law that would give the police more powers to break up protests, which it is trying to steer it through Parliament. Against this backdrop, it is tempting to read the scenario portrayed here as a none-too-subtle metaphor for creeping authoritarianism. But the play’s central conceit is too flimsy for political satire. We are told almost nothing about why the Hush Law was introduced, except that the government tried to justify it with benevolent talk of “well-being” and “overstimulation.” The audience must suspend its skepticism — how on earth would it be enforced? — and just go with it. In truth, it’s not so much a dystopia as a thought exercise.Turner and Coleman are relatively big names in British showbiz thanks to roles in the TV series “Poldark” and “Doctor Who.” Johan PerssonSteiner was fresh out of college when “Lemons” first did the rounds in 2015, and there are moments that give it away as early work. When Oliver declares that he finds life under the new restrictions “Orwellian,” it feels like the playwright is holding our hand. As for that 140-word limit, it seems to be a nod to Twitter, which had a 140-character limit before it was doubled to 280, in 2017. But it’s far from clear what connection Steiner is drawing between social media and government suppression of free speech. The concept is a bit muddled, to say the least.The play’s strength is in its playful riffs on language, as Oliver and Bernadette adapt to the new regime of state-enforced quietude. They experiment with Morse code, and coin portmanteaus to save on their daily word quota. (‘Sort of’ becomes ‘sorf’; ‘I love you’ becomes ‘lovou’.) This alters the texture of the dialogue as the couple look to economize their word count. Soul-searching discussions that had been long and involved must be resumed in near-monosyllabic tones. This constraint forces a stripping-down of language at the very point when emotion is most heightened, and the words should be flowing most freely. On the question of whether she wants to have children, the hitherto voluble Bernadette is reduced to a halting staccato, sounding not unlike a telegram: ‘Yes. No. Painful, scary … Time off. Lose cases. Position. Salary maybe.” It’s an intriguing literary experiment that just about justifies the slightly contrived setup.“Lemons” is an unusual twist on a fairly commonplace narrative: the age-old story of a couple whose intimacy has tipped into over familiarity, weighed down by the accumulation of petty resentments and a waning sex life, deciding whether to stick or twist. It is well executed, with smart dialogue — Steiner has a good ear for the rhythms of bickering couples — and disarmingly kooky humor. It would be churlish to dwell on the fact that its core ingredients are inescapably cliché, with characters representing little more than a series of stock traits in binary opposition: pragmatist/dreamer, right wing/left-wing, etc. This is good, clean fun — neither terribly profound nor terribly clever, but entertaining nonetheless.Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons LemonsThrough March 18, at he Harold Pinter Theater, in London; thelemonsplay.co.uk. More