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      ‘Thanksgiving Play’ by Larissa FastHorse Comes to Broadway

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      As Larissa FastHorse worked with the Broadway cast of “The Thanksgiving Play,” which centers on four white people trying to put on a “culturally sensitive” holiday production, one of the actors, Katie Finneran, spoke up in a rehearsal with a suggestion: Perhaps she could drop a swear word during one of her more exasperated lines?“I’m the drama teacher!” Finneran’s character exclaims as her plan to make a socially progressive elementary school play begins to fall apart.FastHorse politely declined. From the work’s conception in 2015, she had intended it to be curse-free, in the hopes of finally having a widely produced play. Her other work — including the play “What Would Crazy Horse Do?” — involved Native American characters, leading producers to call them “uncastable.”So, FastHorse wrote one with white characters, while still focusing on contemporary Indigenous issues. If the play were littered with profanity, FastHorse decided, some theater producers or audiences might reject it.Larissa FastHorse instructs children dressed as turkeys on their choreography for the films, which were made at a school in Brooklyn. In the play, the films are shown between scenes.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“Being from the Midwest, there are people who won’t go to a play with swearing,” said FastHorse, who grew up in South Dakota. “And those are some of the people I want to reach.”Her gambit worked. After “The Thanksgiving Play” had its Off Broadway debut in 2018, it became one of the most produced plays in America, as it found homes at universities, community theaters and regional groups. In 2021, a streamed version starred Keanu Reeves, Bobby Cannavale, Alia Shawkat and Heidi Schreck as the quartet of bumbling thespians. FastHorse has even heard from people who have read the play aloud on Thanksgiving with their families, turning the activity into a yearly tradition.Now, “The Thanksgiving Play” has made it to Broadway, where it is in previews and is set to open on April 20 at the Helen Hayes Theater. This production, directed by Rachel Chavkin, includes a multimedia element not seen in the Off Broadway version: a series of filmed scenes, featuring children who act out cutesy Thanksgiving pageantry — think feathers and pilgrim attire — while also giving voice to some of the casual brutality with which white American culture has long portrayed Native Americans.In one of the films, older children dressed as pilgrims pretend to shoot down younger children dressed as turkeys. (Lux Haac designed the costumes.) The adults instructed the turkeys to “take a nap” when it was their turn to fall.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesFastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, will be among the first Native American artists to have their work on Broadway. It’s the kind of achievement that the theater world likes to applaud, while perhaps also cringing at the fact that it has taken this long.The play’s skewering of the performative progressivism of the white theater world adds another layer. Its central characters tie themselves in knots trying to stage a play for Native American Heritage Month without actually including any Native Americans. They fret over fulfilling the requirements of a grant, sweat over gender stereotypes, debate the merits of colorblind casting and employ terminology like “white allies” and “emotional space.” To make this production even more of the moment, FastHorse added an exchange about pronoun sharing and references to the “post-B.L.M.” world.“Even though it does openly poke fun at a lot of the folks that I work with who are more on the liberal side,” FastHorse said, “I was really trying to make it so everybody can kind of see each other.”The play’s avatar for the more conservative audience members is a newcomer named Alicia (played by D’Arcy Carden), a hired actress who is unfamiliar with the language of social progressivism.What distinguishes Alicia is a complete lack of concern about so-called political correctness. The others are eager to prove themselves as “enlightened white allies,” including the loudly vegan drama teacher (Finneran), her yoga-loving boyfriend (Scott Foley) and a know-it-all history teacher (Chris Sullivan) who likes to preface his insights with, “Actually …”Rachel Chavkin, the director of the Broadway production, with some of her young actors ahead of filming. Chavkin envisioned this video as embodying the “colonialist narrative” that many American students are taught.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesOn Broadway, as in many industries, the anxiety around screwing up was magnified three years ago, after the murder of George Floyd prompted a wider reflection on racism and inequity in myriad industries and fields. In the theater world, that re-evaluation led to the publication of “We See You, White American Theater,” a document calling for an elevation of works by playwrights of color and more people of color in leadership positions, among other demands.So when FastHorse asked Chavkin, the Tony-winning director of “Hadestown,” to oversee the Broadway run of “The Thanksgiving Play,” Chavkin first wanted to make sure that the playwright wouldn’t prefer a person of color to direct.FastHorse said she wanted someone on the creative team — otherwise made up of people of color — who understood what it was like to be a “well-meaning liberal white person.” In other words, someone who has felt the urge to say all the right things and appear as progressive as possible.“She said, ‘I need your expertise,’” Chavkin recalled.FASTHORSE, 51, has had a winding path to Broadway. She started out as a professional ballet dancer, before an injury led her toward film and television. After she became exhausted by that industry’s handling of Native American issues, she switched to theater, where she observed that people tended to be more open to doing the work necessary for sensitive and accurate portrayals, she said.Around the same time that she started writing “The Thanksgiving Play,” she co-founded a consulting firm called Indigenous Direction that began advising arts groups on Indigenous issues.From left, Henrik Carlson, Ruhaan Gokhale and Christopher Szabo prepare for their scene. The adults directing them explained that they were demonstrating the troubling way that Thanksgiving has been discussed in schools.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesAlong with Ty Defoe, an artist from the Oneida and Ojibwe Nations, FastHorse began working with an important company in Thanksgiving — Macy’s — on a question not unlike the one at the center of her play: How could they make it so the Thanksgiving Day Parade, a celebration of colonialism to many Native Americans, was not causing continued harm?Under FastHorse and Defoe’s counsel, the 2020 parade included a Wampanoag blessing and a land acknowledgment recognizing that Manhattan is part of Lenapehoking, or the land of the Lenape people. Last year’s parade added a float designed in consultation with Wampanoag artists and clan mothers.Macy’s also agreed to make a cosmetic — but, to the consultants, important — change: Tom Turkey lost his belt-buckle hat, and in its place appeared a top hat. He is no longer portrayed as a pilgrim, Defoe said, but a “show turkey.” A Macy’s spokeswoman said the change was part of their “re-evaluation of potentially upsetting symbolism.”On Broadway, it is perhaps unsurprising that the process of staging a play about white people discussing Native American representation can start to mimic the script itself.“We’ve had a lot of questions: a lot of questions about Larissa’s life experiences, a lot of questions about what she wants to accomplish,” said Sullivan, who portrays the history teacher. “I’m coming awake to all of the things I didn’t even realize I needed to be thinking about.”There tends to be some guilt, FastHorse said, in the rehearsal room over a lack of knowledge of the horrors perpetrated against Native Americans, including the Pequot Massacre in 1637, which figures prominently in the show.Though it is first and foremost a comedy, the play does not shy away from violent imagery and rhetoric, even when the actors involved are children.TO FILM THE VIDEOS, which are shown between the live scenes, Chavkin and FastHorse gathered two dozen children and teenagers in February inside the auditorium of the St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf in Brooklyn. Some were dressed as flamboyant turkeys and others wore stereotypical pilgrim costumes, with belt-buckle hats and wooden guns.For the New York City-based elementary and middle school students dressed as pilgrims for the video, Thanksgiving pageants are an unfamiliar relic of history.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe vision, Chavkin said, was to chart the course of how young people are taught to understand Thanksgiving, from 5- and 6-year-olds singing a silly song involving pumpkin patches and teepees, to high schoolers discussing the 1997 police crackdown on a march of Native Americans in Plymouth, Mass.“You watch young people move through the educational system,” Chavkin said. “What we’re trying to do over the course of these four films is make that arc really palpable, starting with sort of obediently following a very nationalist, colonialist narrative.”In one scene, four Indigenous children, some flown in from across the country, perform a punk rock version of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” complete with a dummy of Theodore Roosevelt with a plastic saber stuck in him.Of course, if you’re asking 12-year-olds to sing part of “Ten Little Indians,” a 19th-century nursery rhyme that includes disturbing lyrics involving the death of Native Americans, you need to explain why.FastHorse told the children before filming that she had found these lyrics (including the couplet, “Two little Indians foolin’ with a gun …. One shot t’other and then there was one”) in a student activity posted online for teachers.“We want adults to be aware that this isn’t OK,” FastHorse told them. “The song actually exists and is still being put out into the world.”The young actors nodded that they understood. For them, as elementary and middle school students in New York City, Thanksgiving pageants are an unfamiliar relic of history. These days, they said, their teachers mostly avoid the subject. More

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      Review: ‘Berlusconi: A New Musical’ Is Hammy and Hamstrung

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      The show, in London, skewers its protagonist through maximalist kitsch, but it comes with a tone of finger-wagging moralism that’s no fun.When we first meet Silvio Berlusconi, the title character in “Berlusconi: A New Musical,” the former populist prime minister of Italy is awaiting the verdict of a tax fraud trial in 2012. But this is not some courtroom drama about white-collar crime: The case is merely a framing device for a more comprehensive indictment of Berlusconi’s life and character.As he awaits his fate, a succession of women reproach the beleaguered media mogul in song: The state prosecutor, Ilda (Sally Ann Triplett), enumerates his alleged sexual and financial wrongdoings; his ex-wife Veronica (Emma Hatton) laments his many infidelities; Fama (Jenny Fitzpatrick), a TV reporter who had a relationship with him during the early stages of her career, tells her story, as does Bella (Natalie Kassanga), a young woman whom he seduced at one of his notorious “Bunga Bunga” parties; and his mother (Susan Fay) chides him from beyond the grave — “I raised you to be good!”Running at the Southwark Playhouse, in London, through April 29, “Berlusconi: A New Musical” is a maximalist kitsch cabaret that carries a serious message about power and hubris. Written by Ricky Simmonds and Simon Vaughan, it skewers its protagonist for the vacuous cynicism of his political demagogy, as well as his considerable personal shortcomings. But it is also hamstrung by its earnestness, with a tone of finger-wagging moralism that is the antithesis of fun.Sebastien Torkia performs the title role with a smirking, camp swagger. It feels like an amusingly counterintuitive rendering of the famously macho womanizer, until we recall that Berlusconi was a cruise ship crooner in the 1960s; in Torkia’s rendering, he still is. The music comprises a broad repertoire of finger-clicking ditties and soaring power ballads. But there’s a shift in tone for Bella’s segment, which deals with sexual exploitation: The director James Grieve and the choreographer Rebecca Howell render it in an appropriately sensitive and solemn manner, though the timbre of this sequence sails dangerously close to gooey melodrama, and may strike some as patronizing. This is tricky terrain.From left: Emma Hatton, Jenny Fitzpatrick, Torkia and Sally Ann Triplett. Throughout the show, a succession of women reproach Berlusconi in song.Nick RutterThere are some smart touches with the set design, by Lucy Osborne. The stage is filled by a steep staircase representing the courtroom steps, cleverly opening up the space for the performers to caper on multiple levels. Fitzpatrick delivers the standout vocal performance as Fama, whose parts are addressed to a camcorder synced up to the big screen in the back, as well as smaller TVs on either side. She appears onscreen in real time, complete with news graphics and captions that vividly evoke the psychological stress of personal drama played out in the media glare.Like many a puffed-up strongman, the figure of Berlusconi is ripe for satire. But Simmonds and Vaughan, the show’s writers, haven’t made the most of the comic potential in his vanity and libidinousness. The gags — including a dig at his penchant for facial filler and a somewhat puerile riff on the supposed homoeroticism of his friendship with Vladimir Putin — are mildly funny but not exactly sidesplitting.The show also suffers slightly from a lack of narrative thrust. Since everything is being chewed over in retrospect, we don’t get a sense of a personal journey unfolding. Torkia’s Berlusconi only really has two registers: the arrogant bluster that is his default mode (“I am the Jesus Christ of politics!”), and occasional moments of fretful self-doubt. After the first hour, these registers start to wear thin.With lyrics featuring pointed allusions to Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, “Berlusconi: A New Musical” is clearly trying to speak to the moment, channeling a long and distinguished tradition of lampooning demagogues that dates back to Charlie Chaplin. But the discourse on populism is saturated, to put it mildly, and this production would probably have felt more urgent about seven years ago: Its core insights, about the symbiosis between personal immorality and the corruption of the body politic, are almost self-evident by now.Either way, the point is labored. By the closing number, which urged theatergoers to “Be careful who you vote for,” the message was pretty clear. Insufficiently trenchant as satire, and not quite hilarious enough as entertainment, “Berlusconi: A New Musical” is caught between two stools. It’s a moderately enjoyable romp, but not much more. More

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      In ‘Public Obscenities,’ the Transgender Activist Tashnuva Anan Makes Her New York Debut

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      Tashnuva Anan Shishir, who became her country’s first transgender news anchor in 2021, is performing in “Public Obscenities” at Soho Rep.When Shayok Misha Chowdhury wrote the character of Shou for his new bilingual play, “Public Obscenities,” about a couple who interviews queer locals in Kolkata, India, he was “super worried” about casting the role. The performer would not only need to be of the appropriate gender but also a Bangla speaker with the right “linguistic fluency” to capture the character, who speaks “exuberantly and forthrightly and confidently,” he told me recently.Shou identifies as kothi, an Indian gender that encompasses a breadth of expressions, Chowdhury said. So he reached out to a friend for advice: Debanuj DasGupta, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is “very in the sort of Bangali queer and trans space.” After the professor mentioned Tashnuva Anan Shishir, Chowdhury searched her name online, and several questions came into his head: Is she even in New York? Would she be interested in auditioning?When he posted a casting call on Instagram, and Anan responded, a plan started to coalesce. She was in New York, performing in Queens, in “I Shakuntala,” a play by Golam Sarwar Harun and Gargi Mukherjee, a married couple who would also go on to star in “Public Obscenities.” Anan’s role was small, but she “stole the show,” Chowdhury said.After she auditioned for his play, it was practically unanimous, he said: “We have found the person.” While Shou doesn’t appear until 50 minutes into “Public Obscenities” — its run at Soho Rep (in a coproduction with the National Asian American Theater Company) has been extended through April 16 — the character has been among its most memorable.In “Public Obscenities,” Anan, center, plays a scene-stealing interview subject, our critic wrote in a review of Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s play.Julieta CervantesIn March 2021, Anan made history as the first transgender news anchor in Bangladesh. For three minutes, on International Women’s Day, she spoke on the air and was seen by millions of her compatriots. She went on to anchor occasionally for the network, Boishakhi TV, through November 2021.In December of that year, she came to New York, her first time in the United States. Her trip was primarily to receive care related to what she calls her transformation. And while here, professional opportunities have arisen: Last year she became the first transgender model from Bangladesh to walk in New York Fashion Week.Anan, 31, grew up in a conservative Muslim family and has had a grueling journey to this point. She has endured relentless harassment and survived suicide attempts; been shunned by family members, including her father; and lived penniless in a slum.“I really wanted to be an actress,” Anan, who performed in theater in South Asia and in a small Bangla film, “Kosai,” told me recently in a video interview. “People shouldn’t be considered by their gender. People should acknowledge their work. People should acknowledge their skill.” Being a news anchor in Bangladesh was eye-opening, she said, but it couldn’t quite open up the world for her like the United States could. “I was feeling that I have to swim. So I should swim in the ocean, not in a pond, not in a river. So if I can achieve, I can achieve. If not, then not.”Here are excerpts from our conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.“I had to pay a lot. I had to leave my family to prove my identity,” Anan said.Desmond Picotte for The New York TimesHow has life in New York been for you?It’s a lot of adaptation. I’m born and raised in a village, not a city. The city is highly competitive, but I like this competition. Being an activist, this is a great eye-opening for me to learning, to adapting to each other, to teaching how is the activism going on. When I was in Bangladesh, I was working in a national level. Now I’m in New York, and I’m working globally. I’m contributing internationally. So this is a good opportunity for me.You’ve shown remarkable perseverance. What gives you strength?For myself, that I believe: Do your own job. Just do hard work. There is no shortcut in life. Just believe in yourself. And just, first, inspire yourself. I have competition only with myself, because I’m trying to do a little bit better than yesterday.Why do you think Shou has been so memorable to audiences?Shou is intelligent, Shou is extra-talented, an extrovert, and Shou knows actually about this scenario: the situation of queer people, queer activism, especially in Kolkata, Bangladesh, Pakistan. So Shou is charming everyone. Shou is connected with everyone.Shou is very common character in South Asia because Shou is kind of a feminine guy, so Shou would like to wear femininity in her body or in their body. So this feminine guy represents South Asian queer community also.How do you see yourself in this character and how are you different?Tashnuva bold, Tashnuva sexy, Tashnuva brave, Tashnuva iconic — and the brand I created, I had to pay a lot. I had to leave my family to prove my identity. Shou is also powerful. Shou is also entertaining. Shou is also jolly. Shou is also friendly. Tashnuva is sometimes moody, because people can consider my self-esteem or people can consider my self-respect as an ego, but I had to maintain it. But Shou doesn’t have that; Shou is more friendly.When I get confirmation from my team, I was a little bit tense actually, because, see, I have long hair, and the show is going to put, like, a wig. Then I asked Misha, “Should I cut my hair? I can’t!”First time, when I watched myself with that wig, with proper costume, I was so low — believe me, I was so low. I didn’t feel well because still, then, I didn’t believe Shou. So I was trying to just discover what was going on. Now, I literally fall in love with that wig. Yeah, this is me, this is Shou.How has the reception been from South Asian audiences?Oh my God, they appreciate a lot. They were looking at their sorrows in front of them. They’re looking at their life in front of them, through Shou’s eyes. I got lots of messages from my friends — “Tashnuva, you’re doing really well because this is not doing acting, this is very natural.” I wanted to be a natural actor. I want to play a character that should be more natural, that should be believable. I really believe when I am doing something, people should believe.Last night, when I’m coming toward audience, a girl literally was crying, and she was from Bangladesh, and she born and raised here. She only heard me by social media, and this is the first time we get connected in person. And she was telling me, “Tashnuva, this is the story that we know but we couldn’t tell in front of people.”What’s next for you?I don’t like to say my dream because people are always critics. So I love to keep my dream inside. I am looking for opportunities to act more. So I think now, just now, after this project, I want to jump into another project. There I can play a more powerful character. There I can say another story. I don’t want to pursue any character that is very common.When I think about performance — light, camera, action — I love Broadway performance. Today and tomorrow, is my dream that I will perform in Broadway, or I will perform in a Hollywood film. When I start working, I just forget my every pain. I just forget everything. And this is the performance that inspired me a lot, that did a lot for me. More

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      ‘Yes, I Can Say That!’ Review: The Freedom to Offend

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      The comedian Judy Gold’s new solo show at 59E59 Theaters is deliberately uncomfortable — and packed with laughs.The knuckle-dragging notion that women aren’t funny makes only a cameo in the comedian Judy Gold’s new solo show, “Yes, I Can Say That!” It’s tucked amid her homage to pioneering forebears like Totie Fields and Joan Rivers, who, Gold tells the audience, “said out loud what women whispered about when their husbands weren’t around.”The slur about unfunniness, she says, was handed down through generations of men “who did not want to see some brassy broad onstage making jokes about them and the part they played in their wives’ unhappiness.”Directed by BD Wong for Primary Stages, “Yes, I Can Say That!” is a deliberately uncomfortable, laugh-packed show seeded with stealth missiles like that one. Though Gold insists at the outset that a comedian’s only goal is to land the joke, this is not entirely true. As in her smart and impassioned book “Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble,” released in 2020, she wants at least as much to make us think.Onstage at 59E59 Theaters, Gold builds a vehement case for the vital importance of the freedom to offend in a healthy democratic society. For starters, she would like us to get over the kind of hair-trigger touchiness about language that leads to social media pile-ons, and focus on genuine threats.“They are taking away women’s rights, they are banning books, we have mass shootings, and people are furious if you mistakenly use the wrong pronoun,” she says. Then, urgently: “We had an insurrection, people!”As much as Gold is in favor of some general toughening up across the political spectrum, she’s not anti-sensitivity — “I [expletive] hate bullies,” she says — just anti-preciousness and anti-absurdity. What worries her is the freedom of expression that gets taken away when the freedom to outrage is banished.Written by Gold and Eddie Sarfaty, “Yes, I Can Say That!” interweaves a brief history of American comedy (Lenny Bruce is of course invoked) with Gold’s personal history, including comedy-club flashbacks, like the time she took rapid revenge on an M.C. who was witless enough to insult her just before she took the mic. She does some terrific impressions, including an uncanny Rudy Giuliani.What she doesn’t quite do is make palpable any current threat to comedians’ speech, so a moment when she explicitly frets about that — in the context of speaking truth to the president at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — feels like a relic of the previous presidency, when Gold wrote her book. The show’s argument could gain strength by paying just a little more attention to some of the other First Amendment issues currently in the headlines.Gold’s larger point is that the ugliness of the past isn’t as long ago as we like to think. She notes, unnervingly, that her birth in 1962 was just 17 years after the death camp at Auschwitz was liberated.“Hashtag ObjectsInMirrorAreCloserThanTheyAppear,” she says, almost as if it’s a throwaway line.She gets a laugh, but the joke is a warning.Yes, I Can Say That!Through April 16 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times,’ by Robert Greenfield

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      “True West” is a new biography of a playwright and actor who was laconic in person but spoke volumes in his work.TRUE WEST: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times, by Robert GreenfieldThe first rule of being Bob Dylan’s friend, it’s said, is to not talk about Bob Dylan. A similar code of omertà appears to apply to Sam Shepard, the playwright and actor, and it has held since his death in 2017. A lot of people have lined up to not talk to his latest biographer, mostly the same people who lined up to not talk to the previous ones.Robert Greenfield’s “True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times” is the fourth life of Shepard, after Ellen Oumano’s in 1986, Don Shewey’s in 1997 and John J. Winters’s in 2017. Greenfield has persuaded 38 people to submit to interviews, according to his source notes. It’s not a shameful number, but this isn’t Robert Caro supersleuthing.Judge a party not by who’s there, the old credo goes, but by who isn’t. The missing voices include those of O-Lan Jones, Shepard’s first wife; his longtime partner, Jessica Lange; his lovers Patti Smith and Brooke Adams and Joni Mitchell (her song “Coyote” is about him); and myriad friends and collaborators, including Terrence Malick, Keith Richards, Ed Harris, Peter Coyote, Wim Wenders, John Malkovich, T Bone Burnett, Diane Keaton, Ethan Hawke and Dylan himself, with whom Shepard, in “Brownsville Girl,” wrote the abiding lyric “Even the swap meets around here are getting pretty corrupt.”Greenfield’s book is faithful to Shepard’s life, while it skips like a stone along the surface. Shepard spent much time laying down cover, and tending to his own mythology. He gave a lot of interviews about hating to give interviews. Like Dylan, he was laconic in person while, in his work, he spilled words by the bucketful. Like Dylan, too, he threw out a million ideas and images and left them for others to try to pick up.Shepard reflexively lied about his life, so there’s a lot to untangle. He was so handsome, so fine and flinty and long-boned, that he was a shock to be around — he made people stupid, or teary, or angry or skin-starved, sometimes all at once. He mostly got away with wearing those John Deere hats and chewing on toothpicks and dispensing regular-fella observations such as “I learn more at the racetrack than from Shakespeare” and “I just stay in the movie business to feed my horses.” You wish the photo insert (why only one?) went on for a couple dozen pages.“True West” is the first biography of Shepard since his death, at 73, from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. His body was ambushed in other ways. His smoking caught up with him. He needed a stent for a blocked artery. He carried an oxygen machine.By his late 60s, the wheels were coming off. He got a second D.U.I. at 72. He rarely chose well, in terms of his acting roles, but did he need, near the end, to appear on the Discovery Channel series “Klondike”?Cover photograph by Bruce WeberGreenfield is a prolific journeyman biographer who has written the lives of Jerry Garcia, Bill Graham, Timothy Leary and Burt Bacharach, among others. His Shepard book lacks a certain density, and a critical sensibility, but it’s well organized and cleanly written. It neatly covers the bases.Richard Hell was born Richard Meyers, and Iggy Pop was Jim Osterberg. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott? He was really Elliot Adnopoz. When Sam Shepard arrived in Manhattan in 1963, at 19, he went by Steve Rogers, though his full name was Samuel Shepard Rogers III.His father was a B-54 Liberator pilot during World War II, whose drinking and macho, unruly moods informed the characters in some of Shepard’s best plays, including “Fool for Love” (1983). Shepard grew up in Southern California, in South Pasedena and then in Duarte, on an avocado ranch, though both his parents taught in exclusive high schools. He thought he might become a veterinarian. He began writing plays while in community college, before dropping out.Shepard knew Charles Mingus’s son, Charles Mingus III, in high school. The younger Mingus helped Shepard get a job busing tables at the Village Gate, a nightclub in Greenwich Village. Where did Shepard’s faculty for language come from? Greenfield can’t explain it. But the plays started pouring from him, dozens of them.Shepard’s early works, with titles like “Shaved Splits” and “Back Bog Beast Bait,” were hallucinatory cascades of rapid-fire assertion and they broke with nearly every convention. Everything Shepard wrote was stripped bare and a bit out of whack; Beckett and Pinter stood sentinel over his shoulders. Gone was any remnant of soggy humanism or stabs at Arthur Miller-like “depth.” His plays were staged at young downtown experimental theaters like Café La MaMa, Theatre Genesis and Caffe Cino.Sometimes he’d have a rock band onstage, an assault on the mock emotion of show tunes. Sometimes that band was the Holy Modal Rounders, with whom he played drums. (In 1968, at San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom, the Rounders opened for Pink Floyd.) Shepard was the person who convinced Patti Smith, a poet, to try standing in front of a loud and unruly group of musicians, to become a rock star.He won his first Obie Award in 1967 for “La Turista.” Elizabeth Hardwick reviewed it in The New York Review of Books and called it “a work of superlative interest.” He was 24 when Michelangelo Antonioni brought him to Rome to help write the screenplay for “Zabriskie Point.” Later that year, he lived in Keith Richards’s country manor while working on a screenplay for the Rolling Stones. He stayed at the Chateau Marmont while in Los Angeles and bought land in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, near Philip Glass and Robert Frank.Shepard in 2016.Chad Batka for The New York TimesShepard’s friends back in New York thought he was getting awfully full of himself. They tried on one opening night to kidnap him, as a kind of intervention. What they didn’t know was that he wasn’t yet in full flower. Between 1977 and 1985 he wrote his best and most mature work: plays including “Curse of the Starving Class,” “Buried Child,” “True West,” “Fool for Love” and “A Lie of the Mind,” many about disintegrating families. The stature of most of these has only grown. They still make you reinterpret your experience.He had that rare gift, among playwrights, for being able to articulate what’s unsaid right alongside what’s said. He hated to fly and wrote some of his plays while driving, pinning his papers to the steering wheel.Shepard’s fame peaked in 1983, when he appeared as the laconic West Virginia test pilot Chuck Yeager in Philip Kaufman’s film of Tom Wolfe’s best seller “The Right Stuff.” He received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor, losing to Jack Nicholson in “Terms of Endearment.”Greenfield rakes this material toward a series of tent-pole scenes. These include clashes with authority figures including Antonioni; Dylan, who made him feel square; the theater producer Joe Papp; and the director Robert Altman, who made a film of “Fool for Love.” The sections on Shepard’s time with Smith are lovely. They drifted in hairy-pitted love through the corridors of the Chelsea Hotel, a Robert Doisneau photograph come to bohemian life. Shepard was newly married to O-Lan Jones when he crashed into Smith. Jones knew, and he knew, that he was a hero-heel. The usual rules bent around him. In 1985 he told Newsweek about his early years in the city, “I rode everything with hair.”He met Lange on the set of the 1982 movie “Frances.” She was six years younger and had just had a child with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Though she and Shepard never married they were together for nearly three decades, much of that time spent on a 107-acre horse farm near Charlottesville, Va.Shepard’s later plays were not among his best, but such was his stature that audiences tended to feel that the failure was their own, for not fully appreciating them.Shepard’s is a hard life to screw up, and Greenfield doesn’t. His writing about the playwright’s final years is detailed and moving. Despite the D.U.I.s and the mediocre television shows, we glimpse his personal dignity. It was as if Shepard were following Shakespeare’s stage direction: “Keep some state in thy exit, and vanish.”TRUE WEST: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work and Times | By Robert Greenfield | Illustrated | 432 pp. | Crown | $30 More

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      ‘Prima Facie’ and ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ Win Big at the Olivier Awards

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      The Jodie Comer-starring legal drama won best new play at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys and an adaptation of ‘Totoro’ won six gongs — the most of any production.“Prima Facie,” a Broadway-bound play about a lawyer who represents men accused of assault, then is herself sexually assaulted, was the big winner on Sunday at the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The one-woman show, starring Jodie Comer and written by Suzie Miller, was named best new play during a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Comer was also named best actress for her performance at the West End’s Harold Pinter Theater.The awards come just days before “Prima Facie,” and Comer, transfer to New York. The show is scheduled to begin previews at the Golden Theater on Apr. 11.Its success at the Olivier Awards was perhaps unsurprising given that “Prima Facie” was a critical and commercial hit in London during its run last year. Matt Wolf, reviewing the play for The New York Times, said that Comer took a big risk making her West End debut in an “emotionally fraught solo play.” But, he added, “there’s no denying the visceral power of an evening that owes its sellout status to a theatrical neophyte who possesses the know-how of a seasoned pro.”“Prima Facie” beat stiff competition to the best new play title, including Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of “To Kill A Mockingbird” at the Gielgud Theater; “Patriots” at the Almeida — a timely look at President Vladimir V. Putin’s rise in Russia; and “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy” at the Royal Court, a tale of six young Black men in group therapy.Comer accepted her award, thanking “the sisterhood” who worked on the show, then giving a message to viewers online. “To any kids who haven’t been to drama school, who can’t afford to go to drama school, who’ve been rejected from drama school — don’t let anybody tell you that it is impossible,” she said.Although it won one of the night’s most coveted awards, “Prima Facie” was not the only big winner. “My Neighbour Totoro,” an adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 animated film, at the Barbican Theater in London, won six gongs — the most of any production — including best entertainment or comedy play, and the best director award for Phelim McDermott.The show, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, was a crowd-pleaser in London partly thanks to featuring several giant, fantastical puppets — including a furry Catbus that is part motor vehicle, part feline. Dominic Cavendish, reviewing the play in The Daily Telegraph, said those puppets were “worth the price of admission alone.”Other major winners included Paul Mescal, the Irish star, who was named best actor for his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Almeida Theater.Matt Wolf, in a review for The New York Times, wrote that “Mescal brings both swagger and sensitivity to the role, in the process stepping out of the long shadow cast over this part by its stage and screen originator, Marlon Brando.”The best new musical award went to “Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” a show at the National Theater in London about the intertwined lives of the residents of a housing complex. It triumphed over several higher-profile titles including “Tammy Faye,” about the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, featuring music by Elton John. More

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      Book Review: ‘Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation,’ by Nancy Schoenberger

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      Playing Blanche DuBois is shattering, say the actresses featured in Nancy Schoenberger’s “Blanche.” But Tennessee Williams’s most indelible character is now a figure of sympathy.BLANCHE: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation, by Nancy SchoenbergerLast we saw of Blanche DuBois, the brittle antiheroine of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” she was being carted off to a state loony bin, uttering her famous line about relying on “the kindness of strangers” that can hardly be improved upon.So when Nancy Schoenberger, a biographer and poet, announced early in her new book, “Blanche,” that she planned to include a few sonnets written from the perspective of DuBois’s ill-fated, unseen young husband, as well as a hypothetical obituary in The Times-Picayune describing how her subject turned her life around after psychiatric treatment, I … yes, blanched.With rare exceptions, such as Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea” (a prequel to “Jane Eyre” that imagines the first Mrs. Rochester), messing with another writer’s characters tends to be tricky business. You have to love, for example, the sardonic headline The New York Times ran when it reviewed Susan Hill’s 1993 novel “Mrs. DeWinter,” a follow-up to Daphne du Maurier’s unimprovable “Rebecca”: “Still Dead After All These Years.”Was “Blanche” going to be a “Still Crazy After All These Years” situation? Or like the goofy-sounding off-off-Broadway attempt at a “Streetcar” sequel in 2006, wherein Blanche and Stella, her sister, were at least in passing represented by throw pillows?Fortunately not. Schoenberger, the author of books on the novelist-socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood and the Johns Wayne and Ford, has now written a lean but graceful character study of DuBois, giving Williams’s most indelible but also frequently misunderstood character her due.It seems incredible now that when “Streetcar” was first staged in 1947, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jessica Tandy, audiences sympathized with her antagonist and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski: the brutish factory-parts salesman most remembered for the muscles rippling over his “wife beater” T-shirt and his primordial bellow of “Hey, Stellllla!” (The sympathy was probably in part because young Marlon Brando’s performance was so dazzling.)Even before the #MeToo era, however, Kowalski was being re-evaluated as a domestic abuser, slut shamer and rapist. And as important a proponent of the play as Kazan, who also directed Vivien Leigh in the 1951 film, grew convinced, after his prolonged time with the material, of Blanche’s basic sanity.Schoenberger briefly explains her own fascination with “Streetcar”: Her parents were born in New Orleans, where the play is set, on either side of the Audubon Park Zoo, hearing the roar of the lions there. Her father was an itinerant naval officer — “so handsome in his white uniform!” writes the author, whose enthusiasm sometimes spills over endearingly into exclamation points — but she visited Louisiana often as a child, marveling at the Spanish moss and “dark scurrying cockroaches that seemed to lurk everywhere.” Her mother, a campus beauty queen in Baton Rouge, was an early fan of Williams’s work.If New Orleans and its “miasmal vapors” are pure nostalgia for Schoenberger, for Williams, a gay man who had been mocked as “Miss Nancy” by his cruel father, Cornelius, the sensual city was “liberation,” she notes. He was inspired more tragically by his sister Rose, whose erratic behavior, possibly exacerbated by Cornelius’s violations, led to her institutionalization and then lobotomization at age 26.The dysfunctional Williams family, chronicled extensively in more substantive books like John Lahr’s “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” moves to the background quite quickly in “Blanche,” though, as readers get acquainted with a series of prominent actresses who have played her, a couple of whom Schoenberger has interviewed, all of whom were haunted by their experience. She also relies heavily, though with a light touch, on previously published material, of which there is no shortage. Talking to a journalist about playing DuBois can resemble a particularly wrenching therapy session.For women and not a few drag queens, Blanche is considered one of the plummest roles in all of show business, though its psychological complexities can prove debilitating. “Like climbing Mount Everest,” NPR called it. (Cate Blanchett, naturally, has scaled Everest twice, playing Blanche both onstage and, in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” onscreen, in a modernized version for which she won an Oscar.) Jessica Lange and her partner, Sam Shepard — romantic couples often get oddly enmeshed in the production of “Streetcar” — believed it the equivalent of “Hamlet.” Rosemary Harris: “The loneliest part to live through that I’ve ever played on the stage.” Patricia Clarkson: “It destroys your life when you play that part, you never really recover from it, and everybody who’s ever done it knows.” Jemier Jenkins, one of a few Black women to play her, on the aftermath: “I was very actively trying to release, release, release.”Even the sturdy Ann-Margret found herself “twisted and shaking, confused, agitated, and staring ahead in a daze. I’d lost my grip on reality.” Most starkly Leigh, who turned out to have bipolar disorder, claimed that playing DuBois “tipped me into madness.” “Why has she entered our bloodstream?” wonders Schoenberger, a persuasive proponent of the play’s enduring importance despite its dated elements, most risibly that women hovering around 30 are past their prime. We have lived to see the antiquation of the word “nymphomaniac,” with which the critic Kenneth Tynan dismissed the character, and the reframing of prostitution as “sex work.” (DuBois’s seduction of a 17-year-old male student, regardless, keeps the mantle of moral ambiguity as settled around her shoulders as the “burden” of Belle Reve, the lost family estate, or one of her gossamer scarves.)Talking to Claire Bloom, who played the part on a London stage in 1974, Tennessee Williams once said he imagined Blanche persevering through her time in the asylum and ending up with a flower shop back in New Orleans; in her feminist faux-obit, Schoenberger gives her a co-ownership with Stella, who’s divorced Stanley. It’s a fanciful but satisfying little coda to this project, thankfully confined. (The sonnets, supposedly by Blanche’s doomed young groom, Allan Gray, are gilding the lily.)I’m not sure “Blanche,” which can waft and flit like the butterfly-like creature it chronicles, will satisfy true Williams junkies. But if you’re unfamiliar with this great American classic, or have perhaps let high-school memories of it lapse, this book is a hell of a gateway drug.BLANCHE: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation | By Nancy Schoenberger | Illustrated | 240 pp. | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | $30 More