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      With ‘Letters From Max’ Onstage, Sarah Ruhl Again Mourns a Poet’s Death

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      Through dialogue, poetry and ritual, the playwright revisits her correspondence with her former student, who died at the age of 25.About 10 minutes into “Letters From Max, a Ritual,” Sarah Ruhl’s new play about her epistolary friendship with the poet Max Ritvo, something akin to a sacred rite takes place: The lights dim, a spotlight illuminates center stage, and the actor portraying Ritvo walks toward a winged tattoo artist. For a few moments, they circle each other. Then the tattoo artist-angel removes the hospital gown that the poet is wearing and lifts him with grace. With a miming gesture, he offers a compact mirror to Ritvo so he might examine the birds newly adorning his back.“It’s dope,” Ritvo says of the tattoo, looking over his shoulder. “I really love it in this light.”But that quiet exchange was not dreamed up by Ruhl. It is actually a scene from a play that Ritvo wrote for Ruhl when he was a student at Yale in 2012, four years before he died of cancer at the age of 25. (After each surgery, he would acquire a new tattoo of a bird.) Before handing in the project, he told Ruhl, “I am adamant that something extravagant and silent happen.”With the Signature Theater production of “Letters From Max,” his desire for the work is now being realized in a way he might not have imagined.Ruhl’s play, adapted from a book she compiled of their correspondence during Ritvo’s chemotherapy, boils down to a single, yearslong conversation about poetry, love, mortality, the afterlife and soup. But this is not a traditional play. Poems and live music are interspersed between the dialogue, which comes from the letters, texts and voice mail messages they exchanged.Edelman, right, as a tattoo artist-angel, helping Pais remove his hospital gown in the play. The two actors alternate in the role of Max.Ye Fan for The New York Times“I don’t think of this play as ‘show business,’” Ruhl said in an interview, “but instead an encounter for the audience.” She hopes viewers will “bring their own grief or their own need for communal sadness,” she said, adding that the theater has been a place for catharsis dating back to the Greeks. “We’ve all been through so much in the last two years.”Though Ruhl feels her own grief in this production, which opens on Feb. 27, she has also found joy in sharing Ritvo’s work, and in seeing it move people the same way he did. “He was such a present, joyful person who made everyone around him laugh,” she said. There are other small tributes to Ritvo, too: A song he composed recurs throughout, and the titles of his poems are projected in his handwriting above the stage.There were no plans to adapt “Letters From Max” upon the book’s 2018 publication. But as Ruhl read sections at events — often with an actor reading Ritvo’s words — people asked, “Is this going to be a play?”Before distilling the 309-page book into a two-hour stage production, Ruhl consulted Ritvo’s literary executor, the poet Elizabeth Metzger.“She asked me long ago, ‘Do you think Max would want this?’” Metzger recalled, adding that she was “very, very certain that Max would.” For Ruhl, finding “the bones” within hundreds of pages of correspondence became a process of trial and error.She realized the first act is “about a teacher and a student getting to know each other and forming a friendship,” she said, “that would then reverse the teacher-student relationship” in the second act, which opens with a dialectic on the afterlife. “I was trying to offer Max a comforting view of the afterlife when he was afraid of death,” Ruhl said. “And he ultimately said, ‘Thank you. But no.’”Kate Whoriskey, who directed the New York production of Ruhl’s previous epistolary play, “Dear Elizabeth,” also about two poets exchanging letters, signed on to direct, and the actress Jessica Hecht was game to portray Ruhl, her longtime friend and collaborator. But casting Ritvo introduced a unique challenge. “I’m definitely sensitive to the fact that he had a huge reach and people are still in mourning,” Ruhl said.She said she was moved during auditions. “It was actually beautiful to see Max’s language inside a young person’s body again,” Ruhl said. Ruhl and Whoriskey liked the idea of a third body onstage — similar to the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” — who might “care-take the space” by delivering soup and poems to Ruhl and Ritvo. When the actors Ben Edelman and Zane Pais read for the role of Ritvo, Ruhl said, the team believed they “could do beautifully in both roles” by alternating nights. It turned out that Edelman plays the piano and Pais plays the guitar, so each composed music to perform while the other recites Ritvo’s poetry.“There’s some mystery, and it’s beyond words,” Ruhl said of the duality. “But it’s something about the spirit and the body, and the observer and the observed.” Not to mention, as Ruhl writes in the program note, the actors’ interchangeability demonstrates that Ritvo’s spirit and legacy is “bigger than any one actor.”“Max was many himself,” Metzger said. “Every time he read a poem, he read it differently, because he allowed the moment of the poem and the moment he was reading to merge.”When rehearsals began, Metzger texted Ruhl some guidance for the actors: “Reading the letters, the character is coming to face death,” she wrote, but “reading the poems, the character is not dying but being born, coming to life!” Metzger hoped the actors might “capture the shock of Max’s performance style, even the strange wild aliveness of the poems on the page.”Ritvo’s mother, Riva Ariella Ritvo, has been “an incredibly staunch supporter,” Edelman said, calling a video meeting she had with the cast members “one of the most intense experiences of my life.”He and Pais didn’t study Ritvo’s mannerisms. Instead, they aimed to embody his work. “Neither of us are trying to do an impersonation of Max at all,” Pais said.Hecht and Pais onstage during rehearsals at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Marsha Ginsberg’s spare set includes a white zoetrope that rotates to reveal scenes inside Max Ritvo’s childhood home, hospital rooms and a theater.Ye Fan for The New York TimesTo foreground the writing, the scenic designer Marsha Ginsberg kept the stage spare. The sole set piece is a white zoetrope that rotates to reveal scenes inside Ritvo’s childhood home, hospital rooms and the 13th Street Repertory Theater, where he accepted the 2014 Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America while wearing a pink kimono. At one point, during a silent sequence, the outside of the zoetrope becomes the window of an Amtrak quiet car. “We were trying to create a world where imaginative scapes could happen,” Whoriskey said. “So that a poem happens, and then suddenly, you’re seeing skeletons across a bridge, or a poem happens, and you’re seeing the shimmering of water.”Hecht didn’t work through the emotional arc of Ruhl’s character until the week before previews began. Though it’s easy to cry on command, she said, “I felt embarrassed to do that before we lived through the play for a while, and I really felt the weight of that story and that person coming into our lives.”For the past 30 years, Ruhl said, she has carried on an “intense” dialogue on life and art with Paula Vogel, her former professor. “When I met Max, it felt like he was one of those people that I would have that kind of dialogue with, had he lived that long,” she said. “It’s a comet-like thing. You might only meet those people once every … how often do comets circle?” Perhaps Ritvo made such an impact because he valued relationships. “He’s not a poet who just went inward and was exploring his own self and soul. It was always about talking to another person in a room,” Metzger said. “It was happening all the time, these little births and deaths of just being with a person in a room. I think that’s why he had so much intimacy with so many people. I’ve never met someone with as capacious of a soul.”When Ruhl attended the first preview performance of “Letters From Max, a Ritual” earlier this month, she could finally observe “how the humor landed,” how the emotional beats played out, and how Ritvo’s poetry “theatrically holds an audience.”But it wasn’t until intermission that the project came full circle. As part of the play’s “ritual,” she said, audience members sat at tables in the lobby to write letters to loved ones. A young woman approached Ruhl with an envelope addressed to her. The playwright opened it and drew out a note reading: “I have incurable brain cancer. And this production gave me hope.” More

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      BAFTAs Make Changes for Better Representation Among Nominees

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      Three years after an all-white lineup of actors was nominated, this year’s group is more diverse.LONDON — In January 2020, the performers shortlisted for the British Academy Film Awards were announced. All 20 actors on the list were white. Never mind that, five years earlier, an all-white actor lineup at the Academy Awards had sparked a global backlash, and given rise to the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) was taking the same path.Criticism was instant, and it continued at the awards ceremony the following month. “Not for the first time in the last few years, we find ourselves talking again about the need to do more to ensure diversity in the sector and in the awards process,” said Prince William, the president of BAFTA, as he introduced the event’s final award at the Royal Albert Hall. “That simply cannot be right in this day and age.”Joaquin Phoenix went further, as he collected his award for best actor for “Joker.” “I think that we send a very clear message to people of color that you are not welcome here,” he said. It was, he added, “the obligation of the people that have created, and perpetuate and benefit from, a system of oppression to be the ones that dismantle it. So that’s on us.”BAFTA’s reaction was immediate, and comprehensive. As the world descended into lockdown in the early months of the pandemic, the British academy seized the opportunity to consult about 400 people, including industry-group representatives, directors, actors, and screenwriters, as well as academics and union leaders.By September, a review was out with more than 120 changes. Among them: adding at least 1,000 new voting BAFTA members, with a focus on underrepresented groups; publishing a longlist in all categories, with voters obliged to see all longlisted films in the categories they are voting for; and demanding that there be as many women as men on the best director longlist.Three years on, the diversity among nominees has improved. Ten of the 24 nominees in the four performance categories are ethnically diverse. The multiverse story about a Chinese American immigrant family, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” starring Michelle Yeoh, has 10 nominations. And the only criticism raised by this year’s shortlist is that only one woman has been nominated in the best director category — Gina Prince-Bythewood for her movie “The Woman King.”Gina Prince-Bythewood was nominated for best director for her movie “The Woman King,” the only woman nominated in that category.Erik Carter for The New York TimesThe awards have “increased visibility of Black and brown people and people of color” in all categories, and they have also “sustained conversations” on the theme of diversity and inclusivity, said Clive Nwonka, an associate professor of film, culture and society at University College London, who was one of the many people consulted by BAFTA in its review.Mr. Nwonka welcomed the review, describing it as “extensive,” and said it reflected “a recognition that there needs to be some kind of radical change.”Yet he noted that it would take five or six years to get a full sense of the review’s impact, and that in the meantime, discriminatory attitudes and practices remained just as ingrained as they were everywhere else.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.The entertainment world “parades the idea that what happens in the industry is separate and distinct from the rest of the society,” Mr. Nwonka said. Yet the same systemic racism prevails in the film world as it does when a person of color is “walking down the street.”The BAFTA review was spearheaded by the organization’s chair Krishnendu Majumdar, a film and television producer who was previously BAFTA’s deputy chair, and who steps down from the board in June.BAFTA’s aim is “to level the playing field: We want more films to be watched, and a diverse range of films to be evaluated,” Mr. Majumdar said in an interview at the British academy’s headquarters on London’s Piccadilly. “And it has to be on merit.”The review threw up a number of findings. Actors of color spoke of “exclusion” and “racism,” which Mr. Majumdar said he had experienced firsthand. For actors with disabilities or from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, the outlook was possibly worse, he said, recalling the “horrific” stories that those performers had told of experiencing invisibility and discrimination.Still, the professionals polled in the review made one thing clear: They wanted no quotas and no “tokenism” — no separate category for female directors, for instance. They “just wanted their work to be seen,” Mr. Majumdar said.All in all, the problem “starts at the top” of the British film industry, Mr. Majumdar said, because there isn’t “the diversity of voices” and “the diversity of thought” in boardrooms and among decision makers and program commissioners. He concluded: “We’re moving toward a fairer system.”Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s film, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” about a Chinese American immigrant family, received 10 nominations.Allyson RiggsMichelle Yeoh, front, with Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan, has been nominated for best actress for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”Allyson Riggs/A24, via Associated PressJane Millichip, the BAFTA chief executive who took over in July, promised that the review process would be ongoing and constant. “Every year, we will reassess. Every year, we will look again,” she said. “This is not a perfect full stop.”She said that to get rid of “unconscious bias,” BAFTA voters were being encouraged to watch videos aimed at “broadening the mind-set” and making sure that they weren’t “unintentionally making systemic assumptions.” The academy was striving for “empathy,” she added, and “asking people to put themselves in someone else’s shoes.”Since 2020, there are signs of progress, and not just in the acting category.The best director and best picture winners in the last two years were women: Chloé Zhao for “Nomadland” in 2021, and Jane Campion for “The Power of the Dog” in 2022. In the half-century before, there had only ever been six female nominees in the director category, and one winner — Kathryn Bigelow in 2010 for “The Hurt Locker.”As BAFTA pointed out, there might have been more than one shortlisted women director this year, were it not for the fact that more than twice as many men as women submitted films to be considered for the best director category. In other words, there was a much bigger male talent pool for the voters to choose from.What does Britain’s leading actors’ union think of this year’s nominations?Ian Manborde, the equality and diversity officer of the Equity union — which represents 47,000 creative professionals and the majority of actors in Britain — was among those consulted by BAFTA in its review.“Quite clearly, there’s been some change if you look at the lineup now,” he said in an interview. Yet he added that the review was “not a one-off exercise: It’s a constant process.”He said some of Equity’s biggest concerns were around disability and social class — more specifically, how to prevent performers from being discriminated against on those grounds.In the end, Mr. Manborde said, the awards system was just “one feature” of a global industry that determined what stories were told, who commissioned and created them, and who got the opportunity to portray them. And that industry was far from equal, he said.“True diversity in the awards system will only exist when there’s greater diversity at the other end,” Mr. Manborde said — meaning “who gets to decide what stories are told.” More

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      Raquel Welch, Actress and ’60s Sex Symbol, Is Dead at 82

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      Beginning with a doeskin bikini in “One Million Years B.C.,” she built a celebrated show business career around sex appeal and, sometimes, a comic touch.Raquel Welch, the voluptuous movie actress who became the 1960s’ first major American sex symbol and maintained that image for a half-century in show business, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 82.Her death was confirmed by her son, Damon Welch. No cause was given.Ms. Welch’s Hollywood success began as much with a poster as with the film it publicized. Starring in “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) as a Pleistocene-era cave woman, she posed in a rocky prehistoric landscape, wearing a tattered doeskin bikini, and grabbed the spotlight by the throat with her defiant, alert-to-everything, take-no-prisoners stance and her dancer’s body. She was 26. It had been four years since Marilyn Monroe’s death, and the industry needed a goddess.Camille Paglia, the feminist critic, described the poster photograph as “the indelible image of a woman as queen of nature.” Ms. Welch, she went on, was “a lioness — fierce, passionate and dangerously physical.”Ms. Welch played a Pleistocene-era cave woman in the 1966 movie that skyrocketed her to fame.Universal History Archive/UIG, via Getty ImagesHer Hollywood success began as much with this poster as with the film it publicized.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesWhen Playboy in 1998 named the 100 sexiest female stars of the 20th century, Ms. Welch came in third — right after Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Brigitte Bardot was fourth.The critics were often unkind. Throughout her career, Ms. Welch was publicly admired more for her anatomy than for her dramatic abilities. She even called her 2010 book, a memoir and self-help guide, “Beyond the Cleavage.”But when she had a chance to show off her comic abilities, they were kinder. Ms. Welch won a Golden Globe for her role in Richard Lester’s 1973 adaptation of “The Three Musketeers”; her character was a hopelessly klutzy 17th-century Frenchwoman, torn between two lives — as a landlord’s wife and the queen’s seamstress.Despite a career based largely on sex appeal, Ms. Welch repeatedly refused to appear nude onscreen. “Personally, I always hated feeling so exposed and vulnerable” in love scenes, she wrote in her memoir, noting that even when she appeared in a prestigious Merchant Ivory film (“The Wild Party,” 1975), the filmmakers, those acclaimed arbiters of art-house taste, pressured her to do a nude bedroom scene, to no avail.Ms. Welch won a Golden Globe for her role in Richard Lester’s 1973 adaptation of “The Three Musketeers.”Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty Images“I’ve definitely used my body and sex appeal to advantage in my work, but always within limits,” she said. But, she added, “I reserve some things for my private life, and they are not for sale.”Jo-Raquel Tejada was born in Chicago on Sept. 5, 1940, the oldest of three children of Armando Carlos Tejada, a Bolivian-born aeronautical engineer, and Josephine Sarah (Hall) Tejada, an American of English descent. They had met as students at the University of Illinois.When Raquel was 2, the family moved to Southern California for her father’s work in the war effort. At 7, encouraged by her mother, she enrolled at San Diego Junior Theater, where her only early disappointment was being cast in her first play as a boy. She began ballet classes the same year and continued to study dance for a decade.After graduating from La Jolla High School in San Diego, where her nickname was Rocky, she received a scholarship — thanks to success in local beauty pageants — to study theater at San Diego State College. But she dropped out at 19 to marry her high school boyfriend, James Wesley Welch. Because of her local celebrity, she landed a job as the “weather girl” on KFMB, a San Diego television station.Ms. Welch and Stephen Boyd in “Fantastic Voyage” (1966).20th Century Fox/Everett CollectionThe birth of her two children complicated her career plans, but she soon left her husband — “the most painful decision of my entire life,” she called it — and moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. (They divorced in 1964.)She had hoped to move to New York instead, she recalled. But the trip would have been prohibitively expensive, and, anyway, she didn’t own a winter coat.It was not long before she had a contract with a major studio, 20th Century Fox. She had early hopes of making her big-screen debut in a James Bond movie; the producer Albert R. Broccoli wanted her for “Thunderball.” But that dream was quashed when she was cast in “Fantastic Voyage” (1966), a science fiction film about scientists reduced to microscopic size to travel inside a diseased human body. Then came “One Million Years B.C.,” and that did it.“There’s a certain thing about that white-hot moment of first fame that is just pure pain,” Ms. Welch said in an interview with Cigar Aficionado magazine in 2001. “It’s just not comfortable. I felt like I was supposed to be perfect. And because everybody was looking at me so hard, I felt there was so much to prove.”She appeared in some two dozen films over the next decade, perhaps most notably “Myra Breckinridge” (1970), based on Gore Vidal’s campy novel, in which she played a glamorous transgender woman, and “The Last of Sheila” (1973), a semi-campy murder mystery with a luxury-yacht setting and a script by Stephen Sondheim.Ms. Welch as a transgender woman in a scene from the 1973 movie “Myra Breckinridge.” At right is the film critic and sometime actor Rex Reed. Some of her most memorable roles were small ones. In “Bedazzled” (1967), Stanley Donen’s Faustian fantasy with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, she played Lust, one of the Seven Deadly Sins; in “The Magic Christian” (1969), with Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, her character’s name was Mistress of the Whip.Ms. Welch had love scenes with the former football star Jim Brown in “100 Rifles” (1969), a western set in Mexico. She followed “The Three Musketeers” with its 1974 sequel, but those films never led to the sophisticated comedy opportunities she had hoped for. (She did, however, have a memorable chance to display her comedic side years later, when she played herself in a 1997 episode of “Seinfeld.”)After “Mother, Jugs and Speed” (1976), a farce about ambulance drivers (which also starred Bill Cosby and Harvey Keitel), her screen acting was limited mostly to television guest appearances.But she had already discovered the joys of stage work. Inspired after seeing Frank Sinatra’s nightclub act, Ms. Welch made her club debut, singing and dancing, at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1973. Eight years later she made her Broadway debut, hired as a two-week vacation replacement for Lauren Bacall in the hit musical “Woman of the Year.” Her reviews were so admiring (Mel Gussow’s in The New York Times ended by writing, “One hopes that Miss Welch will soon find a musical of her own”) that she returned the next year for a six-month stint in the role.“The first minute I stepped out on that stage and the people began applauding,” she told The Times later, “I just knew I’d beaten every bad rap that people had hung on me.” She returned to Broadway in 1997, replacing Julie Andrews for seven weeks in “Victor/Victoria.”Ms. Welch was a presenter at the 2010 Tony Awards ceremony at Radio City Music Hall in New York. She appeared on Broadway twice, in “Woman of the Year” and “Victor/Victoria.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn 1987, Ms Welch published “The Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness Program,” which included exercises based on the principles of hatha yoga. She released a companion video with the same title.Few thought of Ms. Welch as a Latina actress, but she embraced that identity late in her career, starring as a melodramatic Mexican American aunt on “American Family,” a PBS series (2002). She learned to speak Spanish in her 60s; her father had not allowed the language to be spoken at home when she was growing up.Her last film was “How to Be a Latin Lover” (2017), a comic drama about an aging gigolo, played by Eugenio Derbez. She played his new target — a disarming, too-glamorous-to-be-true grandmother. Her final television appearances were on “Date My Dad” (2017), a Canadian American series, in a recurring role as the leading man’s Mexican mother-in-law.Ms. Welch was married and divorced four times. After Mr. Welch, her husbands were Patrick Curtis (1969-72), a producer; André Weinfeld (1980-90), a French director and producer; and Richard Palmer (1999-2008), a restaurateur.In addition to her son, Ms. Welch is survived by her daughter, Tahnee Welch, and a brother, Jimmy Tejada.In her late 70s, Ms. Welch was still followed by photographers, and reporters were still commenting on her appearance. In 2001, she answered questions about fashion and style in an interview with The Los Angeles Times.“Style has to have substance,” she said. “It has to have fire.” Praising synergy, instinct, imagination and attitude over trendiness and fashion-magazine dictates, she concluded, “It’s about being yourself on purpose.”Michael Levenson More

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      Hari Nef and Parker Posey: Two ‘It’ Girls Whose ‘Humanity Peeks Through’

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      In a pairing that seems almost predestined, the actresses are sharing a stage in “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” a contemporary riff on Chekhov.In a show-business world full of square pegs and round holes, Parker Posey and Hari Nef are 12-sided dice.Posey, 54, has forged an unclassifiable career since her days as the “it” girl of 1990s independent cinema — mirrored in her oddball 2018 book, “You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir.” She has created a series of indelible characters in Christopher Guest comedies, including “Best in Show,” but has also memorably brought her off-kilter rhythms to high-profile gigs like the flamboyant assistant district attorney Freda Black in the HBO Max mini-series “The Staircase” and the scheming Dr. Smith on the Netflix reboot of “Lost in Space.”As for Nef, 30, she landed the recurring role of Gittel in the Amazon series “Transparent” days after graduating from Columbia University, in 2015. The first openly transgender woman to receive a worldwide modeling contract, Nef also writes for various magazines, appeared in the Off Broadway play “Des Moines” in December, and has a couple of big projects arriving later this year: Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” movie and the HBO series “The Idol” in which she’ll appear alongside the Weeknd and Lily-Rose Depp.From left, Daniel Oreskes, Posey, Amy Stiller and Nef in the New Group’s production of “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” which follows a group of theater friends who retreat to a house in the Catskills.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn a meeting that seems almost predestined, the pair are now sharing a stage in Thomas Bradshaw’s “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY,” a New Group production in previews at the Pershing Square Signature Center. (It is scheduled to open Feb. 28 and run through March 26.) A contemporary riff on Chekhov set in the Catskills, the play renames the charismatic, brittle actress Irina Arkadina as Irene (Posey), while the moody, romantic Masha has become Sasha (Nef).“They’re iconic in who they are and what they bring to their work,” the play’s director, Scott Elliott, said of Nef and Posey during a phone call. “They’re able to bring themselves to the parts so there’s very little separation between the actor and the role. Their humanity peeks through.”This quality helps explain why both New York-based actresses have a similar ability to connect with a character’s pathos, while also deploying unerring comic timing: Posey’s turns in those Guest films are pitch-perfect, while Nef was praised by Ben Brantley, in his review of Jeremy O. Harris’s play “‘Daddy,’” for delivering “the production’s sharpest satirical performance.”On Being Transgender in AmericaG.O.P.’s Anti-Transgender Push: Republican state lawmakers are pushing more sweeping anti-transgender bills than ever before, including bans on transition care for young adults up to 26.At School: Educators are facing new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students change their name, pronouns or gender expression at school.Feeling Unsafe: Intimidation and violence against gay and transgender Americans has spread this year — driven heavily, extremism experts say, by increasingly inflammatory political messaging.Puberty Blockers: These drugs can ease anguish among young transgender people and buy time to weigh options. But concerns are growing about their long-term effects.Naturally, there are generational differences. In a chat following a rehearsal, in January, Nef mused about taking Posey to a rave while Posey reminisced about visiting classic ballroom dance halls in Berlin. And yet they connect. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“I want to be known for what I do as an actor,” said Nef, who also appeared this winter in the Off Broadway play “Des Moines.” Josefina Santos for The New York TimesWhat did you know of each other before “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY”?PARKER POSEY Hari Nef — oh, she was in “Transparent.” I remembered exactly what a performance that was and how much she lit up a scene. She changed the temperature of the room. I don’t keep up with a lot of things. I don’t have a lot of social media — I forgot my Instagram password a while ago and I tried to sign on a few times with the password I thought I remembered. But of course it was the wrong password.HARI NEF I knew so much about your work. “Party Girl” is a favorite, but I’d also seen you on “Search Party,” the whole gamut. A friend of mine said that you in “The House of Yes” is probably one of the greatest screen performances he’s ever seen. And he doesn’t play.POSEY When we met for the first read-through, Thomas said, “I’ve just got to tell you, ‘The House of Yes’ was a big inspiration for me and my writing.” That [script] was Wendy MacLeod’s Yale thesis. I didn’t know that playwriting can be so subversive.NEF I was always so attracted to you and your work because you were glamorous and you were dramatic and you were cool and you were distinctive and uncompromising, but not in a way that was obvious or traditional. You are beautiful and talented, that is obvious and traditional, but you always did things your way. I knew that if I was going to make a career as an actor, much less as an actress, I would have to do things non-traditionally. I didn’t have anyone quite exactly like me to look to so I looked at your work and I looked at Tilda [Swinton] and Chloë [Sevigny].POSEY I got lucky because at a time in the culture, you could do Off Broadway and afford your $700 a month apartment. And you could do independent movies: “It’s only 22 days, yeah, I’ll do that one.” It was kind of punk rock or like being in a band. Everyone was hanging out together and it was very organic. It was a little pocket of time that didn’t last that long.NEF I’ve been able to spend my entire fall and winter doing Off Broadway shows because I did Fashion Week before this and that visibility brings other opportunities. You can get paid three, four, five times what I’m going to make for both these plays combined by going to one dinner and being photographed there in an outfit. I post images of the films I like on Instagram not just because I find them inspiring and beautiful — I do — but it’s me going, “I want to be in movies like this.”POSEY You’re having the best of both worlds because to be online and have a social media presence is kind of to be your own magazine. I need to learn. But that time is a different time; it is your generation’s time right now.NEF You’re literally from the last moment where it was possible to be cool. Looking at that capital-C definition of cool all the way back to Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, there’s talent, there’s glamour, there’s drive, there’s darkness. But there’s also a mystery and a specificity, and you lose that mystery and specificity by existing online. Because of the money thing and the rent thing, it has become essentially untenable to be cool, to be mysterious, to have that allure being an indie legend.Do you think it’s one thing to be perceived as cool and another to be taken seriously as an actor?NEF So much of my entry into this industry and this practice was around “Transparent.” I was riding on this flotilla of discourse about things that had nothing to do with what I could do as an actor. I thought I had to sing for my supper just for a seat at the table. Maybe I was right, to a certain extent, but it became like, “Do I really want people to know me by what I say or what I am or what my private medical history is?” No, I want to be known for what I do as an actor.POSEY Cool is when there’s something original or unexpected, or seems to have some kind of luck around it. Which your appearing on that show was: the unexpected, something new, something fresh. And that is not orchestrated — that’s luck. I see that now. I look at life and the path of an actor as having that luck. And I think that’s very enviable.NEF I’ve been very lucky. I remain lucky. The play I did before “Daddy” was my senior thesis in college: I played Arkadina in “The Seagull.” I had gone through what I had gone through in college and I never thought that I would get to go onstage to do Chekhov, much less play her. I knew that I probably wouldn’t be able to play a role like that again for many, many years — not because of age but because of the size and the heft of the role. I haven’t played a role like Arkadina since then, but I’m back doing “The Seagull” and that is more than was promised to me at that moment in history.“It’s interesting to observe how quick people are to villainize strong women,” Posey said of her character, Irene, a showbiz mom in “The Seagull/Woodstock, NY.” “The misogyny is on fire, still.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesParker, what drew you to Arkadina/Irene?POSEY What attracted me the most to this part was the narcissistic mother, and the power that a mother has over her son. And she’s a showbiz mom, someone with a lot of heart and theatricality and all that. I’m so lucky as a middle-aged woman to be playing this part. It’s interesting to observe how quick people are to villainize strong women, how fun it is to see the worst. People love to call someone a bitch. I mean, the misogyny is on fire, still.NEF I play a lot of bitches.Why do you think that is?NEF Well, I’m no ingénue. I write, and a lot of the bitches I’ve played are also writers, thinkers. Smart. “Bitch” is often a fill-in for intelligent, for articulate, for opinionated, queer, not conventionally feminine or not conventionally beautiful. I think the “Barbie” stuff happened because I didn’t play bitchy and I didn’t play dumb and I didn’t play plastic in the audition.POSEY Having been cast as a female Dr. Smith, that was such a coup, I was so grateful for that gig. If you can live in Hollywood, it’s a lot easier to get cast and be a part of that world. But I wanted to walk around and see other people.NEF What is your relationship to the word “scene-stealer”? It’s the word that really follows me. It’s not a bad thing: It means I’m doing good work in small roles.POSEY That is a character actor making strong choices. When you have a small role in something big, you have to fill it in a certain way, and that’s its own thing.NEF If you’re a bold flavor — which I know I am — it’s more intuitive for people to see you as seasoning to the steak. I’d like to be the steak someday, but I know I have to earn it. So many of your iconic roles have been supporting and I’m wondering if you ever felt minimized by it.POSEY [long pause] Your 20s are really intense and then the culture changes and you’re, like, “Where am I going to fit in? I’m going to be in ‘Blade: Trinity’ playing a vampire? Never thought I’d see the day but yeah, I want to work and that’ll be interesting.” And then it’s the 40s. It’s heartbreaking when you become aware of just how intensely male-dominated our stories are, especially when you mature as a person and as a woman.NEF The shifts in the culture are by and large cosmetic when it comes to power and who gets the green light and who gets the sign-off for studio things. I can’t control the way I’m cast or how people see me.POSEY But you can see and acknowledge where you are. You’re in the mix. We’re so lucky to do what we love to do. A lot of people don’t.NEF That’s the bottom line of gratitude right now. This sounds corny but every day I’m so grateful to be here with you, to be here with everyone, to work through this winter onstage. It’s not guaranteed for anyone, much less someone like me or you. More

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      A Silent Film Classic Marks Its Centennial

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      “Safety Last!,” the 1923 Harold Lloyd movie best known for the dangerous scene, marks its centennial.It is one of the most enduring images from the silent film era, and arguably the movie stunt that led to the cliffhanging, skyscraper-loving action hero of today: the actor Harold Lloyd dangling from the hands of a clock on the side of an office building.The film, “Safety Last!,” released in April 1923, was in many ways Lloyd’s zenith as a major Hollywood star. He is said to have come up with the idea of dangling from the side of a building after seeing a man scale one in Los Angeles.But Lloyd wanted the stunt to be even more outrageous on film. Enter the clock.“Harold was such a realist, and every scenario in his movies had to be a real event or a real situation for a person to be in,” his granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd, 71, said during a recent video interview from her Los Angeles home. “The clock was another tool on the side of the building to perpetuate the stunt. He thought, ‘I can really play off of that.’”And play he did. Lloyd’s character, The Boy, thinks up the idea of scaling a department store to win $1,000 offered by its manager to increase business — and hopes the stunt also will help him win The Girl. He begins his ascent, battling a flock of pigeons, a swinging window and a friend named Limpy inside the building who becomes as much of a danger as a helper.As The Boy pauses on a window ledge, a buffoonish moment with Limpy causes him to fall back, saved only by grabbing the clock’s hands, which were conveniently positioned at 2:45 (when the longer minute hand is parallel to the ground).Timely News and Features About Watches Rolex Resales: The watch giant has started its own certified pre-owned program, which many in the industry say will change the secondhand market forever. Casio G-Shock, at Home: A visit to the factory in Japan where most of these chunky and durable watches are made. Is That Watch Cardboard? Using humble materials, a Hong Kong artist makes his own versions of high-end Swiss timepieces to have “a bit more fun.” What Are You Wearing? A new European Union regulation is expected to change the industry’s longstanding culture of secrecy. More on Watches: Stories on trends and issues in the industry.For filming, according to Ms. Lloyd, a safety net was constructed on a roof about one floor below the action, though the scene was shot to look as though there was a sheer drop to the bustling streets far below. (Reports at the time said many in the audience covered their eyes or even fainted, and ambulances were parked outside some movie theaters.)The Boy holds on, even as the clock dial tilts down and he is left hanging from the minute hand. There are a few failed attempts and a lot of slapstick, but, with the help of a rope, he finally makes it to the roof where The Girl is waiting with a kiss.“The 1920s was an era of stunts, from planes to climbing buildings,” said Steven K. Hill, a curator at the UCLA Film & Television Archive in Los Angeles, which has been instrumental in saving and restoring hundreds of silent films, including a collaboration with the Criterion Collection on “Safety Last!” in 2012.“Part of its appeal is that he’s not dressed like a construction worker,” Mr. Hill said. “He wears a straw hat and glasses and is well dressed. It can be seen as an image of his need for upward mobility.”The Boy certainly is in pursuit of money — but for love. “The subplot in all of his movies was always about getting the girl,” Ms. Lloyd said. “Harold was really a romantic lead.”Not only did The Boy get The Girl in “Safety Last!,” but Lloyd and the actress, Mildred Davis, were married shortly before the film was released. They stayed married until her death in 1969; Lloyd died in 1971. The couple had three children (Ms. Lloyd’s mother was Gloria, the eldest).What makes the clock stunt even more impressive, Ms. Lloyd said, is that her grandfather was hanging on with only eight fingers. In 1919 he had lost part of his right index finger, his entire right thumb and part of his palm when he attempted to light a cigarette from the fuse of what he thought was a prop bomb for a publicity photo. But the bomb exploded, temporarily blinding him and putting him in the hospital for about two weeks. For years he wore a prosthetic glove to mask the injury in movies, but not in his personal life.“I remember as a girl that he always wore a Rolex watch, but because he only had three fingers on his right hand, he would have to get someone to buckle the watch on his left hand,” Ms. Lloyd recalled. “Years later, he had a custom-made Rolex that was made of white gold and had a white face with silver numerals. And it didn’t have a clasp. It had a flexible watch band so that he didn’t have to ask anyone to help him.”Harold Lloyd with his granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd, at Greenacres, the family estate in Beverly Hills, Calif. She said she grew up around clocks thanks to her grandfather. “We had a lot of clocks in our house, including a jade clock in his den,” she said.via Suzanne LloydLloyd’s fondness for clocks was evident to Ms. Lloyd as she grew up at Greenacres, her grandparents’ famous 44-room mansion in Beverly Hills, Calif. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 and is now owned by the billionaire financier Ron Burkle (who also purchased Neverland, Michael Jackson’s California estate, in 2020).“We had a lot of clocks in our house, including a jade clock in his den,” she said. “I remember once going watch shopping with him in Montreux, Switzerland, around 1961. He bought me a little blue watch with filigree that I wore on a chain around my neck. He later bought me a Cartier Tank watch when I was 18.”Lloyd’s love of clocks might have been about making sure everything — and everyone — ran on time.“Harold was always punctual, and my mom was constantly late,” Ms. Lloyd said with a laugh. “He bought several watches for her and adjusted the hands, and sometimes changed the time on the clock in her bedroom.”“Harold would always say, ‘Move that clock up in Glo’s room to get her here on time,’” she said. “It worked!” More

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      Amrit Kaur of ‘Sex Lives of College Girls’ Runs on ‘Super Soul Sunday’ Podcasts

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      The actress, one of the stars of the HBO Max comedy, wakes up with elaborate chai rituals and unwinds with “90 Day Fiancé” episodes.Amrit Kaur was glowing. “It’s like I’m doing a Pantene Pro-V ad,” the actress, freshly coifed, said with a flip of her shorter new ’do on a video call from her home in Toronto.She had gotten too attached to her long hair, she said, “so it’s like, chop it all off.”Kaur was also fresh off the buzz of Season 2 of the HBO Max comedy “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” in which she plays an eye-on-the-prize aspiring comedy writer trying to navigate messy campus romances and cringe-worthy social climbing. The series, which has been renewed for a third season, has taught her “how to become funny,” she said.This year, Kaur pivots from college calamities on TV to a mother-daughter story on film. Tentatively titled “Me, My Mom & Sharmila,” it focuses on a Pakistani Muslim woman and her Canadian-born daughter, who come of age in different eras but share an obsession with Bollywood. Kaur, who is also Canadian, plays the daughter as well as the mother in her youth, which at times has meant shooting one character in the morning and the other in the evening.“I got to stretch myself artistically and learn a new language,” she said of Urdu. “It’s very vulnerable.” The film will make the festival rounds in the coming months, headed for release later this year or early 2024.On a cold winter day after her return from filming in Pakistan, Kaur talked about her elaborate chai fixings, a return to her faith and escapism in reality TV. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Morning RitualsI wake up after being mean to my alarm a couple of times. Finally, by the third time, I’m like, fine, you’re right, I should start my day. I do morning pages, which is stream-of-consciousness writing. The days I need to do it the most are the days I resist. Then I’ll get up and listen to Japji Sahib, which is a morning prayer, and then I have my chai. I have a cupboard in my kitchen just for chai spices. Every day I wake up, and I’m like, what do I want today? What does cardamom go well with? Do I want fennel seeds? Do I want ginger? That’s really nice. Some people have that with coffee. For me, it’s chai.2Acting ClassI’ve been studying at the Lonsdale Smith Studio in Toronto for six years now, continuously. I take classes, even while on set, every Sunday. When I’m not on set, I’ll take class a couple of times a week. It’s a religious place for me. Acting class in many ways was my first religion. In Pakistan, I took class from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., virtually.3A Special Piece of PaperI have this paper, which you’re supposed to keep in your pocket, but I keep it in my bra so that it’s closer to my heart. The paper holds an exercise we did in acting class where you write down three things that are true of yourself that you don’t wish to be true. The whole idea is to come to terms with and face the parts of myself that hurt the most, or that I don’t like, to come into consciousness of who I truly am.4SikhismI aspire to be far more in touch with my faith. I think it’s in my nature to be quite devoted; it’s in the bones of who I am. When I found out I’d be going to Pakistan, there were so many messages that I needed to go on a pilgrimage. I went first to Nankana Sahib on the border of India and Pakistan, which is the birthplace of Guru Nanak, the creator of Sikhism. People who are Muslim and Hindu still go to show him respect, and I think that is so telling. I stayed overnight, spoke to the priest and learned so much about my culture and my history.5Gift-givingI’ve never been a gift giver. I love it now. I’ve always had a dream of giving my mother a beautiful gold jewelry set — and it’s now off my dream list. One of the questions I asked the priest was, “What is the purpose of money?” And he said, “It’s about giving it away.”6Artistic VisionOne of my dreams is to create a school in Hoshiarpur, the city where my dad is from in India, for girls who don’t have the opportunity to study. My artistic vision is to be part of a future where girls are not living in oppression and to be part of relaying that message. I’m going to be doubling down on writing and creating my own material to inspire women and girls to be their true selves, to be big and bold in the world.7International TravelIn the last year I’ve been to New York, California, Nova Scotia, Italy, Istanbul, Karachi, Lahore and more. I’m really lucky and grateful that I’ve been able to travel. The dream is to be an international artist, and I’m working toward that, telling stories and working with artists in different parts of the world.8‘Super Soul Sunday’I religiously listen to “Super Soul Sunday,” Oprah’s podcast, when I’m running. All these thoughts are going through my head, and I’m like, “I’m going to get through it, I’m going to run through it. Yes, Oprah, tell me!” It’s so powerful to run through the wind and listen to all of these people who have so much insight into life.9WhatsAppWhatsApp is a very Indian thing, I think. I use it so much that now all my Canadian friends are on it. It’s just so much easier because I travel so often. And I love looking at people’s faces. I’m a very big video caller.10Reality TVI love to watch “90 Day Fiancé,” “Too Hot to Handle” and other trashy shows. When I’m on vacation, that’s my favorite thing to do, just lying down on my couch with my best friend, getting all the chocolate on Uber Eats, watching all of these people behave so badly and not having to think. More

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      Sandra Seacat, Much Admired Acting Coach, Dies at 86

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      She helped Laura Dern, Marlo Thomas, Mickey Rourke and many others overcome fears, find their characters and discover “the joy of acting.”Sandra Seacat, who had a modest career as an actress and a formidable one as an acting coach, putting her own spin on techniques she had learned under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio to help Laura Dern, Marlo Thomas, Mickey Rourke and numerous other stars achieve some of their best performances, died on Jan. 17 in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 86.Her husband, Thurn Hoffman, said the cause was primary biliary cholangitis, an autoimmune disease.Ms. Seacat joined the Actors Studio in the early 1960s, when Mr. Strasberg was the artistic director and imparting the rehearsal and acting techniques often called simply the Method. Before long she began leading classes, and her reputation as an acting coach started to grow.By the early 1980s she was applying the psychiatrist Carl Jung’s theories about dreams and the unconscious to her coaching, helping students use their dreams to illuminate their own feelings and the characters they were developing, a technique called “dream work.”“The artist is a shaman, a wounded healer,” Ms. Seacat said in a 2015 video interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “We have wounds that we want to bring forth through the material. It’s joyful, it’s painful, but not painful in a bad way. And when you do that you also heal people in the audience.”Actors who worked with her echoed that sense.“The work was our bond,” Marlo Thomas, for whom Ms. Seacat was a coach, teacher and mentor for more than 40 years, said by email. “She taught me to seek the truth in myself, to heal my wounds and those of the audience. She changed me as a human being, teaching me to cast off my protective armor and see the world as a baby might see it, feeling and experiencing it for the first time.”Ms. Thomas’s career had for years been defined by her role in the 1960s sitcom “That Girl,” but Ms. Seacat helped her branch out, leading to more substantial parts and an Emmy Award for outstanding lead actress for her role as a woman who had spent years in a mental institution in the television movie “Nobody’s Child” (1986).Peggy Lipton had also achieved some 1960s TV fame, as one of the stars of the crime show “The Mod Squad,” but she then stepped away from acting for years to raise her children. By the late 1980s she was thinking about returning, but, she told The Los Angeles Times in 1993, “it was very scary.”She joined one of Ms. Seacat’s classes, nervous at first. “I used to sit under the table near the door,” she said, “so if she ever called on me I could get out.”But, she said, Ms. Seacat eventually helped her break through the fear. Ms. Lipton, who died in 2019, went on to accumulate dozens more TV and film credits, most memorably as the diner owner Norma Jennings on the trendy series “Twin Peaks” and its sequels.Mickey Rourke had done little acting — he had been an amateur boxer — before he arrived in New York in the 1970s and eventually began working with Ms. Seacat. He has often credited her with helping him to get serious about the craft of acting, leading to attention-getting roles in the 1980s in “Body Heat,” “Rumble Fish,” “Angel Heart” and other movies. She was responsible for “channeling all it was that was messing me up into something creative and challenging,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1984.Younger stars also benefited from her coaching, among them Andrew Garfield, who played the title character in “The Amazing Spider-Man” (2012) and its sequel and earned an Emmy nomination for his lead role in the mini-series “Under the Banner of Heaven” last year (in which Ms. Seacat played his character’s mother).“She was a revolutionary, a culture-changing teacher of acting and storytelling,” Mr. Garfield said in a statement. “She is a beacon for all of us of what a life of deep meaning and beauty can look like.”Ms. Seacat and the actress Laura Dern in an undated photo. “Sandra gave me the greatest gift an actor could ever ask for,” Ms. Dern said. “Sandra gave me the joy of acting.”Katie Jones/Variety, via Penske Media, via Getty ImagesSandra Diane Seacat was born on Oct. 2, 1936, in Greensburg, Kan., in the midst of the Dust Bowl, to Russell and Lois (Cronic) Seacat.After graduating from Northwestern University, Ms. Seacat moved to New York and began her acting career. In 1959 she married Arthur Kaufman, and some of her early credits are under the name Sandra Kaufman.Once she was admitted to the Actors Studio — she said she auditioned while pregnant — she appeared in various productions, including “Three Sisters” on Broadway in 1964, in which she had a small role. She had small roles in two other Broadway productions as well, “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1973 and “Sly Fox” in 1976.Ms. Seacat also took occasional roles on television and in films throughout her career. She directed one feature film, the 1990 comedy “In the Spirit,” which had a star-studded cast that included Ms. Thomas, Olympia Dukakis, Elaine May, Melanie Griffith and Peter Falk.“‘In the Spirit’ is a flat-out New York comedy, with all of the pluses and minuses that go with that territory,” Bob Strauss wrote in his review in The Los Angeles Daily News. “Director Sandra Seacat, one of the industry’s most respected acting coaches, lets her cast get away with Method murder. But the performers’ mannered joy is also infectious; even when the jokes don’t work, you smile along just to feel part of the party.”Ms. Seacat’s marriage to Mr. Kaufman ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Michael Ebert. She married Mr. Hoffman in 1982. In addition to him, she is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Greta, and a sister, Serena Seacat.The long list of other stars Ms. Seacat worked with includes Jessica Lange, Rachel Ward, Ryan Gosling and Laura Dern.“Sandra gave me the greatest gift an actor could ever ask for, which was beyond a method or a craft or anything anybody talks about,” Ms. Dern said in the 2015 Hollywood Reporter video. “Sandra gave me the joy of acting.” More

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      Cody Longo, ‘Days of Our Lives’ Actor, Dies at 34

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      Mr. Longo died in his sleep, likely from accidental alcohol poisoning, at his Austin, Texas, home on Wednesday, his representative said.Cody Longo, an actor known for his roles in the television series “Hollywood Heights” and “Days of Our Lives,” was found dead on Wednesday at his home in Austin, Texas. He was 34.He died in his sleep, likely from accidental alcohol poisoning, his representative, Alex Gittelson, said. Mr. Gittelson said that Mr. Longo had struggled with alcohol addiction for several years, but he believed that Mr. Longo had recently been sober.Mr. Longo was a singer, songwriter, musician and music producer and served as a music supervisor and executive producer on film and television projects. He released his first EP, “Atmosphere,” in 2012 and the single “She Said” in 2013.Mr. Longo starred in episodes of “Days of Our Lives” as Nicholas Alamain in 2011 and in the Nick at Nite drama “Hollywood Heights” as Eddie Duran, a music superstar, in 2012.In 2016, he had roles on the ABC series “Nashville,” “Secrets and Lies” and “The Catch.” Mr. Longo starred in the pilot for “Santa Cruz” on Fox and in the ABC Family teen drama “Make It or Break It.” He also appeared in the movies “High School” and “Piranha 3D” in 2010.Mr. Longo was born in Colorado on March 4, 1988, and studied psychology and film at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began acting professionally in 2009, according to his website.“He had taken some time away from acting to pursue his music career and spend more time with his family in Nashville,” Mr. Gittelson said, “but we had kept in touch regularly and he was excited to get back into acting this year.”Mr. Longo is survived by his wife, Stephanie, and three children, Lyla, Elijah and Noah. More