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    Reflections on Star Quality From a Golden Age of ‘Junk TV’

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    In a new memoir, a longtime casting director revels in memories of a bygone Hollywood, matching actors with the roles that made them stars.Stop to consider the movie and TV characters that are most permanently seared into the American psyche, and their impact is rarely a function of screen time. Usually, the effect on audiences is immediate: Think Tim Curry’s first appearance in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” or Stockard Channing breezing into Rydell High alongside her fellow Pink Ladies.Whether they were memorable because of their abrasiveness (Danny DeVito in “Taxi”), their rebellious streak (Ms. Channing in “Grease”) or their ability to solve a crisis with a slice of cheesecake (the titular golden girls of “The Golden Girls”), every actor who eventually went on to make Hollywood history first had to clear the hurdle of a casting department. And for many of the biggest movies and TV shows of the last half century, Joel Thurm was a central part of those teams, handpicking the actors whose performances would resonate for decades to come.In his newly released memoir, “Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season: Confessions of a Casting Director,” Mr. Thurm, 80, details what he saw in stars like John Travolta, whom he cast in “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.”“I knew he wasn’t Vinnie Barbarino,” Mr. Thurm said of managing to look past the actor’s biggest role to date, on the ABC sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter.”Being able to spot the je ne sais quoi that many refer to as star quality is a skill, one that Mr. Thurm has capitalized on throughout his 35-year career.“The best example I have is when someone walks into a room and has something special that you haven’t seen in other people,” Mr. Thurm said in an interview this week. “Are they astoundingly beautiful? Are they so incredibly good-looking? They could be bad-looking! It’s individual; you can’t really explain it.”Mr. Thurm had a hand in casting some of the biggest hits of film and TV, including “The Love Boat,” “The Golden Girls,” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Airplane!”Charles Sykes/Getty ImagesThat “it” factor is the common denominator among all the stars who go on to become household names, according to Mr. Thurm, who said he had seen it immediately in Farrah Fawcett when she auditioned for the role of a stewardess on “The Bob Newhart Show.” She didn’t get the part, but Mr. Thurm said he had known “there was something special about her.” He also instantly saw it in a 17-year-old John Travolta when he met him in New York.“He had a presence, and you can feel it,” Mr. Thurm said. “They had that little extra something.”At the time, Mr. Travolta was most popular for his role on “Welcome Back, Kotter,” and producers would not move ahead with “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” a TV movie, unless a big star signed on to the project, Mr. Thurm said. He spent a lot of time with Mr. Travolta’s manager sitting on his “back deck getting melanoma and reading scripts,” Mr. Thurm said. When the script came up, they both lobbied Mr. Travolta, who agreed to sign on. Mr. Thurm later cast Mr. Travolta in “Grease,” and the rest is Hollywood history.Mr. Thurm, who retired from a full-time casting position with NBC in 1990, hasn’t kept especially close tabs on the stars of today, but he does know enough to recognize that they tend to skew young.“They’re all 12-year-olds,” he said. “I have only seen them once they are already stars. Ariana Grande, she’s already a star.”Whether or not star quality has changed since Mr. Thurm started his career, Hollywood itself certainly has. In addition to snippets of back-room scenes detailing how some of TV’s most beloved characters came to appear on some of America’s favorite sitcoms, “Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season” is also filled with personal anecdotes that would — at minimum — raise eyebrows in a world reshaped by the #MeToo movement.It’s difficult — painful, even — to imagine a world in which Tim Curry never put on the chunky pearl necklace of Dr. Frank-N-Furter. In that sense, the most essential duty of a casting director is to save us all from what might not have been.United Archives/Getty ImagesAs a gay man living in Hollywood in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, Mr. Thurm often found himself in situations that almost certainly wouldn’t fly today — like massaging the actor Robert Reed’s back after he had to undergo several hair treatments for his role “The Boy in The Plastic Bubble.”“I started to rub his back, then I rubbed, you know, started rubbing a little lower,” Mr. Thurm said of Mr. Reed, best known for playing Mike Brady in “The Brady Bunch.” “He was just miserable on the set because he was not used to not being the center of attention.”In his memoir, Mr. Thurm also details an encounter with his teenage idol, Rock Hudson. At a party with other gay men in Hollywood, Mr. Hudson motioned to Mr. Thurm to follow him to a room upstairs.“I was so anxious and nervous that my body below the waist could not cooperate,” Mr. Thurm wrote.It was a moment he has never forgotten.“I saw every single movie that he ever did and so even to find myself at that party, I thought was amazing,” Mr. Thurm said. “This is my introduction to Hollywood.”Besides detailing his sexcapades, Mr. Thurm also takes full accountability for “the damage you may have suffered while watching David Hasselhoff,” he wrote. He initially cast Mr. Hasselhoff as Snapper Foster on “The Young and the Restless” in 1975. He later cast him in “Knight Rider” — a high-water mark in what he described as an era of “junk TV” — after a contentious standoff with producers, who originally wanted Laurence Olivier. (“Yes, David Hasselhoff and Laurence Olivier on the same list,” he wrote.)The memoir is not just about Mr. Thurm’s dealings in Hollywood but his upbringing: growing up on a kosher milk farm in East New York. Attending Hunter College in Manhattan when it was nearly an all-girls school. Hanging out in Greenwich Village in its bohemian heyday. Flunking out of college and traveling through Italy in his early 20s.“To me, it was just my experiences — you know, growth going through life and growing up,” Mr. Thurm said. “I have no regrets. Nobody died.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Reckoning,’ by V (formerly Eve Ensler)

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      Writing now as V, the creator of “The Vagina Monologues” tackles racism, colonialism and sexual violence in a raw and free-associative collection.RECKONING, by V (formerly Eve Ensler)Way before #MeToo — not that it’s a contest — there was Eve Ensler, shouting all the way up into the cheap seats. Her breakthrough 1996 play, “The Vagina Monologues,” eventually performed by a rotating cast of celebrities, amplified stories of rape and abuse and helped de-taboo the female anatomy. Two years after that success she founded V-Day, which has raised piles of money to fight violence against women and girls around the world: Galentine, with gravitas.The writer identifies so strongly with the letter “V” that she has taken it as her new name, she announces in a characteristically raw and free-associative memoir, “Reckoning.” This is a gesture that seems — like most of what she has done in a long career — both performative and potent. “V” stands for “vagina,” “V” stands for “victory,” “V” stands for “peace” (we’ll forget about the canned vegetable drink and the old NBC series about aliens wearing human masks), and for Generation Y on social media, a “V” hand signal has become as popular as the thumbs up was for boomers, the former Ensler’s generation. “I am older now,” she laments. “Irrelevant in the cult/ure of youth, followers and TikTok.”“When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple,” the English poet Jenny Joseph wrote (to her eventual consternation), and on the back cover of “Reckoning” its rechristened author stands in a fuchsia caftan, raising arms in a V-shape to a rainbowed, sunsetted sky. A little cornball maybe, like a motivational desk calendar in a mall gift shop, but having survived incest, alcoholism, uterine cancer and the occasional mixed review, V, who will turn 70 in May, just Does. Not. Care. She has plenty of fuchsia left to give.For those familiar with Ensler’s work, much of “Reckoning” will feel like a jagged replay of her core stories; amply represented are transcripts of speeches she’s delivered at the conferences and forums where she’s become an honored guest, or pieces previously published in places like The Guardian. She processed her experience fighting cancer in a previous, more humorous memoir, “In the Body of the World” (2013), which was also made into a stage show, and the post-9/11 world in “Insecure at Last” (2006).Now she is examining a term that has become ubiquitous to the point of cliché in American discourse since the murder of George Floyd. For V, as before, the political is intensely personal.Her father’s horrific molestations, which began when she was 5, are further detailed; in what is perhaps the consummate therapy exercise, she expands on the apology she wrote on his behalf in another book. She reveals more of her mother’s complicity by indifference — “I needed her milky breasts. I got cigarette smoke instead” — and her posthumous bequeathal of a musty brown envelope (“Does pain have a smell?” V wonders) with a picture inside of the author as a baby, mysteriously bruised and bloodied. “I spent an entire childhood ducking, fists permanently raised like a boxer, quick but never fast enough, darting, panicked, frenetic, unbearably anxious,” she remembers. “My body was never my body.”In apparent refutation of the patriarchy V wants passionately to upend, “Reckoning” obeys no conventional chronology or form. It’s collaged together with concepts — the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, for example, is linked to birds falling from the skies in 2020 — and exhibits a woman drawn inexorably, as if in repetition compulsion, to sites of even worse suffering than her youth. It’s a kind of Choose Your Own Abomination, from Covid to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt to Congo, where the author has done humanitarian work and tells of murdered infants and children, repeated rape and even forced cannibalism.“How do I convey these stories of atrocities without your shutting down, quickly turning the page or feeling too disturbed?” she wonders in an essay that was originally written for Glamour. Contemplating the ISIS sex market, she imagines “crates of AK-47s, falling from the skies” and “breasted warriors rising in armies for life.”I think V underestimates herself; the jump-cut style she’s refined for decades is actually perfectly suited to people who get their news from TikTok, and her rhythmic singling out of particular words — which she calls “trains traveling through a lush countryside”— presaged hashtag activism.Along the long highway of her argument here, that readers should wake the heck up to injustice and suffering, poems pop up, like little rest stops. “Think of your luxuries, your cell phones/as corpses,” she writes of the mass rapes that occur near coltan mines, which are tapped to manufacture electronic devices. In a section that graphically recalls how AIDS ravaged friends and colleagues, she promises Richard Royal, a collaborator on a magazine called Central Park, that she will not write a poem about the budding trees; he hated pathetic fallacy and echoed Adorno that there is no poetry since Auschwitz. So after his death, in winking homage, she versifies instead his medical woes.“One is always failing at writing,” V acknowledges, in a sentiment any writer understands. And indeed “Reckoning” is, if not a failure, kind of a bloody mess, but defiantly, provocatively, maybe intentionally so. It exhorts readers to confront the worst and ugliest, pleads for progress and peace, and provokes admiration for its resilient, activist author. V shall overcome, someday.RECKONING | By V (formerly Eve Ensler) | Illustrated | 272 pp. | Bloomsbury | $28 More

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      Book Review: ‘Roald Dahl, Teller of the Unexpected’ by Matthew Dennison

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      “Teller of the Unexpected,” an elegant new biography, sidesteps the ugly side of the children’s book author while capturing his grandiose, tragedy-specked life.ROALD DAHL, TELLER OF THE UNEXPECTED: A Biography, by Matthew DennisonMany young readers who love the prodigious oeuvre of Roald Dahl can nonetheless cite at least one thing within it that gives them the ick. For me it was Mr. Twit’s beard in “The Twits” (1980), so ungroomed it might contain “a piece of maggoty green cheese or a mouldy old cornflake or even the slimy tail of a tinned sardine.” When millennial men in Brooklyn started growing big, bushy beards, my inner child dived under the table in horror.The ickiest thing about the life of Dahl, who died in 1990, was his well-documented antisemitism, capped by a 1983 comment about Jews to The New Statesman, in which he declared that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” (That it’s custom for observant Jewish men to wear beards makes me even more uneasy about the demonized Mr. Twit.) The Dahl estate has posted an apology for his behavior on its website — linked discreetly under a Quentin Blake illustration of the author in a pink cardigan, looking beneficent and cuddly.Looking back, there were plenty of other oh-no-he-didn’t moments in the literature. The Oompa-Loompas of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” were originally African pygmies — Dahl called the actors who played them wearing orange makeup and green wigs in the 1971 movie “dirty old dwarfs.” And a rapey 1965 story for Playboy, “Bitch,” transformed its adult male protagonist into a “gigantic perpendicular penis, seven feet tall and as handsome as they come,” as if James and his famous peach had grown up and gone horribly wrong.But none of this is lingered on in Matthew Dennison’s elegant but somewhat glancing new biography of Dahl, subtitled “Teller of the Unexpected.” His subject has sold more books around the world than is possible to count. Netflix bought The Roald Dahl Story Co. in 2021 for a reported $1 billion; “Matilda” alone is movie, musical and multiple memes. Roald Dahl — not mere author but high-yielding content farm — may simply be too big to cancel.His own story has already inspired two major biographies, from which Dennison draws: one authorized, by Donald Sturrock, who also edited Dahl’s letters to his beloved mother, Sofie Magdalene; one not, by Jeremy Treglown. All of these accounts stand as necessary supplements to Dahl’s lyrical but selectively truthful autobiographical writing; Dennison notes his tendency toward “mythomania.” He figured unfavorably in “As I Am,” the memoir by his first wife, the actress Patricia Neal, whom he nursed aggressively (some would say sadistically) back to health after a stroke and then left for their friend, Felicity “Liccy” Crosland; and in a roman à clef by their daughter, Tessa. The first Mr. and Mrs. Dahl were rendered in softer focus mourning the death from measles encephalitis of Tessa’s older sister, at only 7, in the recent movie “To Olivia.”As Dennison reminds us, Roald — born in Wales, of Norwegian parentage — also lost a sister when she was 7, to appendicitis, and his father soon after. Backing into writing after a stint at the Asiatic Petroleum Company, his macabre voice and flights into fantasy were clearly engendered by brushes with death and violence.He had been caned at boarding school and, enlisting in the Royal Air Force, was burned and maimed when his Gloster Gladiator plane crashed in the Egyptian desert. After his baby son Theo’s skull was crushed after a taxi hit his pram, Dahl developed a cerebral shunt with a pediatric neurosurgeon and toymaker, like the Wonka figure he was simultaneously creating on the page. Then came Neal’s medical crisis, while pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy, and her rehabilitation, reenacted in a memorable 1981 TV movie, in which she was played by Glenda Jackson, and Roald by Dirk Bogarde. (Exploring Dahl’s personal and professional entanglements, you’ll tumble down an IMDB hole deeper than the giants’ in “The BFG.”)The author of previous books on Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame, Dennison recaps most of these extraordinary events without fuss, riffling carefully through letters, diaries and other volumes, from the looks of his endnotes, but conducting no fresh interviews; there are no new revelations that I can discern, but instead refined interpretation. From the Dahl legacy, chocolate and bile and personality sloshing messily in all directions, he molds a digestive biscuit.“Teller of the Unexpected” is maybe best capturing its 6-foot-5-plus subject as a swashbuckler: zooming around school grounds on a motorcycle or parachuting metaphorically into power centers like Washington, D.C., or Hollywood, where Dahl was courted by Walt Disney himself to develop a movie about gremlins — devilish creatures with horns and long tails blamed for R.A.F. mishaps. (Gremlins would go on to appear in plenty of movies, including a 1983 “Twilight Zone” sequence startrng the Dahl look-alike John Lithgow, but this would not turn out to be one of the writer’s many lucrative franchises.) Encouraged early in his career by C.S. Forester and Hemingway, he was notoriously abrasive to his editors and had affairs with older and married women, complaining to a friend of Clare Boothe Luce’s voracious sexual appetite. In Dennison’s telling, Dahl’s contradictions are beautifully illustrated but not particularly interrogated: He is here charitable but cruel; arrogant and desperate for acclaim; a self-declared man of action whose livelihood was language. He was an aesthete who cared deeply about his surroundings, early on collecting birds’ eggs in drawers lined with pink cotton wool and growing up to appreciate the finer things: painting, wine, the great composers. Long before it was fashionable, he made himself a man cave, a “writing hut” steps from his family cottage, whose name, Gipsy House, also offends 2023 ears.And I think he would have liked Dennison’s writing style, lush but clipped, with such phrases as “the ubiquity of caprice” and “buoyant with slang,” full of a reader’s zest. This is not a potted biography, but it is a politely pruned one, idealism washing over the ick.ROALD DAHL, TELLER OF THE UNEXPECTED: A Biography | By Matthew Dennison | 272 pp. | Illustrated | Pegasus Books | $27.95 More

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      in Television

      Netflix's ‘The Lying Life of Adults’ Depicts Ferrante’s Naples

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      A new adaptation of the novel “The Lying Life of Adults” features formidable female protagonists and an Italy with distinct social classes.Like the novel by Elena Ferrante on which it is based, the opening line of Netflix’s “The Lying Life of Adults” is spoken by the precocious teenage protagonist, Giovanna, who is listening at the door while her parents talk about her.“Before leaving home, my father told my mother that I was ugly,” Giovanna says, adding forlornly that he had compared her to his estranged sister Vittoria, an insult so vile that it prompted Giovanna’s mother to counter: “Don’t say that. She is a monster.”Thus the viewer is introduced to Giovanna (Giordana Marengo) and Vittoria (Valeria Golino), fitting new entries in the pseudonymous Italian author’s rich stable of formidable female protagonists. Brought to life onscreen in a recent six-episode adaptation of Ferrante’s 2019 novel, they are as complex and contradictory as Lila and Lenù, the protagonists of Ferrante’s four best-selling novels chronicling their friendship, a version of which appeared in HBO’s “My Brilliant Friend.”In “The Lying Life of Adults,” too, Naples provides a socially textured setting for this coming-of-age story, which propels Giovanna from the innocence of childhood into the world of adults’ complex and contradictory compromises. Set in the mid-1990s, the series underscores the slippery social standing of Italian girls, and women, seeking to find a footing in a world where men call the shots.The show is “rightly” Ferrante’s world, according to Domenico Procacci, the chief executive of Fandango, an Italian entertainment company that produced “Lying Life” for Netflix, who spoke at a news conference presenting the series in Rome last month. Fandango also co-produced “My Brilliant Friend” with HBO, RAI, the Italian national broadcaster, and others.From left, Giovanna (Marengo), Angela (Rossella Gamba) and Beniamino (Antonio Corvino) in the series. The girls begin experimenting with the freedoms offered by Naples.Eduardo Castaldo/NetflixIn “Lying Life,” Giovanna navigates two distinct Neapolitan neighborhoods so drastically diverse that it is hard to believe they belong to the same city. She lives in the Rione Alto, an upper-middle-class neighborhood mostly developed in the 1960s and ’70s capping the Vomero hill with breathtaking views of the Gulf of Naples. “Outside of the Vomero, the city scarcely belonged to me,” Giovanna says in the novel.Inside the World of Elena FerranteThe mysterious Italian writer has won international attention with her intimate representations of Neapolitan life, womanhood and friendship. Beginner’s Guide: New to Elena Ferrante’s work? Here’s a breakdown of her most important writing.English-Language Translator: The work of Ann Goldstein has helped catapult Ferrante to global fame. Humility is a hallmark of her approach.‘My Brilliant Friend’: The HBO series based on Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels is a testament to the elusive writer’s ability to create inscrutable characters.‘The Lying Life of Adults’: The novel, which was published in English in 2020 and is now being adapted into a TV series by Netflix, is “a more vulnerable performance, less tightly woven and deliberately plotted,” our critic writes.But in her determination to meet her aunt, Giovanna opens her world to the lower city neighborhood that her father, Andrea (Alessandro Preziosi) escaped, but that Vittoria still inhabits: a run-down district called Pascone in the novel, which was shot in the formerly industrial rough-and-tumble Poggioreale neighborhood.“I don’t think there is any city in Italy where the differences between social classes are as evident as Naples, and at times where this difference counts so little,” Francesco Piccolo, one of the show’s four screenwriters, said at the news conference. In the series, viewers who do not speak Italian might miss the fact that the contrast is underscored by the difference in the Neapolitan dialect spoken between the two neighborhoods. In the wealthy Vomero, the dialect is spoken “for pleasure, for fun,” Piccolo said, while in the other, it is “a totally emotional dialect.”Getting Vittoria right, her movements as well as her dialect, weighed on Golino, who may be best remembered by American audiences for her star turn in the films “Rain Man” and “Hot Shots!” She, too, grew up in the Vomero neighborhood, on “the good side of the tracks,” she said in a telephone interview, and confessed to never having seen the “Naples of Vittoria,” to the point that she “had to go find it, understand it.”A voice coach taught what was to her essentially a new language. “Even though I am Neapolitan, I had never spoken in that way,” Golino said. “It was a sound that I had heard in the city, but it was never part of my world.” To embody the earthy bawdiness of Vittoria “was difficult,” the actress said. “I had to study the words, a way of moving, a way of inhabiting space,” which was foreign to her. “So I spent a lot of time in Naples, which is my city, but Naples is made of many layers,” she said.Golino, center, was nervous about getting the character of Vittoria right. “I had to study the words, a way of moving, a way of inhabiting space,” the actor said.Eduardo Castaldo/NetflixIn turn, Marengo, 19, who made her screen debut as Giovanna after being selected from among 3,000 girls auditioning for the role, said Golino had nurtured her throughout the series. “She gave me a lot of advice,” Marengo said, and the two created a strong bond that Marengo thought was apparent on screen, she said in a telephone interview.“We really helped each other,” Golino said. “We were both in the same state of mind. She because it was her first time, I because I was constantly afraid of making a mistake.”Marengo said she had felt the responsibility of portraying the protagonist of a story that evolves entirely from Giovanna’s perspective. “At first, I was anxious that I wouldn’t be able to make it,” she said. But the director and the crew made sure she did not feel that responsibility, “and that really calmed me down,” she said.In the novel, Giovanna’s inward gaze is even more pronounced. But Edoardo De Angelis, the show’s director, said transposing that inner rumination into visual form was a natural extension of Ferrante’s writing.“Every single word contains an evocation that suggests and invokes a multitude of images,” De Angelis said in a telephone interview. “The words always suggested the path to take because Ferrante’s evocations are always very concrete, even if they begin with an interior thought.”De Angelis’s Naples involves a cacophony of colors and sounds, the underground music scene in the city’s avant-garde community centers and the nostalgia of summer festivals hosted by Italy’s once-powerful Communist Party.Ferrante, the famously elusive author who has never officially made her identity public, has a screenwriting credit, and De Angelis, who is also credited with writing the script with Piccolo and Laura Paolucci, said that correspondence with Ferrante had involved “many letters to find a common language.”In transposing the novel to television, the story also took an unexpected turn, a plot twist that is not in the novel but that Ferrante signed off on, De Angelis said: She was well aware that moving from the pages to the screen “was an occasion to express elements that were only suggested and left to the imagination in the novel,” while on the screen, “the imagination becomes image,” offering the possibility of “more radical choices.”These radical choices open new avenues, and the episodes end with a series of unresolved questions to be answered, perhaps, in a possible sequel. (To this reader, the ending of the novel also suggested that a second book could follow.)Just as Golino worried about doing the character of Vittoria justice, “our series aims to show the authenticity of Italy, even outside of stereotypes,” Eleonora Andreatta, affectionately known as “Tinny,” the vice president of Italian originals at Netflix, said at the news conference. She also worked on the “My Brilliant Friend” series in her previous job at RAI.“Portraying a character that is not edifying, in which you draw out the human, the real human that makes mistakes,” and who was “disobedient” was one of the reasons that she had accepted the role, “even though it frightened me,” Golino said in the telephone interview.“A good actor doesn’t have to be a good liar, but usually they are,” she said at the news conference, eliciting laughs. “If they have to tell a lie, a good actor tells it very well.” More

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      in Theater

      At Under the Radar, Theater That Jumps Right Off the Page

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      Literary influences suffuse this year’s festival of avant-garde performance. Artists from six shows share the stories that inspired them.“A story,” the director Yngvild Aspeli said, “is something that makes us connect to each other, something that manages to go beyond time or cultural difference.”Theater, even in its more experimental corners, has long been in the business of telling stories. At this year’s Under the Radar festival, the Public Theater’s annual survey of avant-garde theater and performance in New York, some of these stories may seem familiar. Half a dozen of the main works are deliberately in dialogue with literary classics and ephemera, from sources as diverse as Mark Twain’s satirical monologues, James Joyce’s erotic letters, the Epic of Gilgamesh and “Antigone.”“I’m interested in the contemporary as the ancient comes through it,” Mark Russell, who founded and programs the festival, said. “And I was very moved by these primal theater impulses and primal texts.”Running through Jan. 22 at the Public and five partner venues, this is the first iteration of Under the Radar since 2020. The 2022 festival was canceled just weeks before opening because of an upsurge in Covid-19 cases. Though somewhat less international than in years past (an acknowledgment of the difficulty and expense of obtaining visas for artists), it still represents a substantial array of narrative, style and tone. Aspeli’s piece, for example, an adaptation of “Moby-Dick,” is performed by 50 puppets and an underwater orchestra.Annie Saunders and Jesse Saler in “Our Country.”Gema GalianaNot all of these projects were conceived during the pandemic, but even those dreamed up before it seem intent on finding language — textual and visual — to apply to this uncertain cultural moment. Much of that language happens to be literary, and it centers on themes of isolation and community. While several of the programmed works survey grief and loss, others offer alternatives, such as friendship and pleasure. Some do both.“Perhaps in a moment where we’re in crisis, we can use this past poetics to bring us joy and relief and connection,” said Rachel Mars, the creator of the performance piece “Your Sexts.” (The show has a longer title, but it is, like many sexts, unprintable.)The New York Times spoke to artists associated with six of this year’s shows about the literary works that inspired them and how the pages of the past speak to the present. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.‘Our Country’Inspiration: Sophocles’ “Antigone”Annie Saunders, co-creator and performer: As a person who struggles with self-belief, I’m interested in “Antigone,” in the idea of believing in yourself that much. The other thing that really interests me is the brother-sister dynamic, having a brother who you feel you have to save. My brother has a criminal history. He’s actually great now. But for many, many years, that was the dynamic. I spent a few days with my brother in the summer of 2016 and made about 10 hours of tape of us talking to each other about “Antigone,” our childhood, criminality, the law. That became a major part of the show.“Antigone” is an anchor. I always come back to that core story dealing with fundamental human themes about right and wrong, self-belief, familial obligation. These are core human experiences.‘Otto Frank’Inspiration: “The Diary of Anne Frank”Roger Guenveur Smith, creator and performer: I was invited to a theater festival in Amsterdam. I went to the Anne Frank House. I was very inspired and very moved. I’m always trying to bring the past into the present moment. The idea that Otto Frank should come to know his daughter through that diary, especially having lost her the way that he lost her, must have been an extraordinarily daunting exercise. I thought that would be something worth pursuing, because of this ongoing crisis that we’re still engaged in.The fundamental challenge is: How does a man reverse the natural order of things and create a memorial for his daughter? To simultaneously serve the living and the dead is the great challenge for Otto Frank and for many of us, who are in the current moment, dealing with loss.‘Your Sexts’Inspiration: The erotic letters of James Joyce, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, etc.Rachel Mars, creator and performer: I was on a residency. Brexit had just happened. It took the wind out of my sails creatively. Then Scott Sheppard [the writer and performer] was like, “I have something to cheer you up.” He read me this James Joyce 1909 letter. I was bowled over by the explicitness, the poetics, the imagery, how much it was all about butts. It was super life-affirming.I began this search for who else was writing these letters. I worked with two sexologists. It was obviously more difficult to find the women and the queer women, because history, but it was easier than I thought. There’s an illicitness to it, definitely. It does feel like opening a crack into people’s private lives. But there’s this sanctity to it, a kind of respect.‘KLII’Inspiration: Mark Twain’s “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” Patrice Lumumba’s independence speechKaneza Schaal, creator, co-director and performer: My practice is about remembering. Today, we look at a figure like Leopold [the Belgian king who presided over atrocities in his administration of the Congo Free State] with mock horror, his atrocities stun and outrage. But there are new Leopolds every day. For me, this was a way of exorcising this evil. I’m interested in looking inward and looking outward, exorcising these catastrophic figures and catastrophic events.Christopher Myers, co-director and designer: Mark Twain was interested in the Congo, and he understood the relationship between the oppression of Africans there and the oppression of Africans at home. This text of Mark Twain was in line with the internationalism and cross-cultural, cross-pollination that has inspired so many anticolonial causes. It’s about seeing not only the histories of these specific texts, but also how these texts bump up against each other. One of the things that theater does really well is allow you to rub a text against other texts.‘Moby Dick’Inspiration: Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick”Yngvild Aspeli, director and puppet maker: This story, even though it’s an old story, it touches on these things that go beyond time. Out on the sea hunting a whale with a harpoon, or lost in our cyber world, human beings are still tackling the same issues. We use this older story as a mirror, a prism.Our inner struggles are somehow always the same, the questions are the same: the complexity of being human, how we struggle with our inner demons, how we try to figure out our place in society, existential questions of life and death and everything that lies in between. The mysteries of life.‘King Gilgamesh & the Man of the Wild’Inspiration: the Epic of GilgameshAhmed Moneka, creator and performer: I’m from Iraq, born in Baghdad. I grew up with this myth. I was exiled. I ended up in Toronto. Jesse became my first friend in the theater scene. The parallel to that is the relationship between Gilgamesh and his best friend Enkidu.Jesse LaVercombe, creator and performer: We’re toggling between this contemporary story and this totally ancient, sometimes cartoonish, sometimes tragic epic.Seth Bockley, creator and director: I didn’t want to just riff on the themes. I wanted that story retold. There’s something sacred about that. We need each other to get through the world. That’s the Gilgamesh and Enkidu story. More

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      in Television

      Good Fantasy Writing Is Pure Magic

      by

      All too often clunky dialogue breaks the spell of CGI-heavy TV epics. To be reminded what language can do by itself, try E.R. Eddison’s novel “The Worm Ouroboros.As I watched last fall’s showdown of TV’s big-money epic fantasy franchises, I was wincingly reminded that language is the most underrated special effect. Unforced errors of word choice — loose talk of “focus” and “stress” in HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” for example — kept pulling me down from my fantasy high and into the diction of emails from human resources. Case in point: “I have pursued this foe since before the first sunrise bloodied the sky,” says the elf warrior-princess Galadriel in Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.” “It would take longer than your lifetime even to speak the names of those they have taken from me.” She’s adrift on a life raft with a mysterious stranger after a sea-monster attack, and certain dark intimations suggest that eldritch evil draws nigh. So far, so OK, but then her speech reaches its climax: “So letting it lie is not an option.”Clangalang! Descending from a tagline fashioned by writers of the movie “Apollo 13” from something a NASA flight director said, “X is not an option” has become a staple of business-speak and coach-talk. The writers of Galadriel’s speech couldn’t have killed the buzz any deader if they’d followed up with, “I’m all about laserlike focus 24-7 on getting some closure on this whole Sauron thing.” It galls me that Hollywood spends zillions on C.G.I. dragons and cities and hosts on the march, but then from sheer tin-eared laziness or a misplaced desire for “relatability,” allows their wondrous spell to be undone by script screw-ups that any half-competent swords-and-sorcery writer — or reader — could fix overnight for a hundred bucks and a six-pack.With the limitless budget afforded by Eddison’s language, I can outspend even the most obscenely expensive production a thousandfold in my head.To be reminded what language all by itself can do, try E.R. Eddison’s novel “The Worm Ouroboros,” first published in 1922. At some point in the 1970s, I bought a plump Ballantine paperback edition for a dime or two in a used bookstore on the South Side of Chicago. I read it in a fugue state of mounting joy on my way home from school on the Jeffery 6 bus, as I walked from the bus stop to my house, and straight on into the night. Visions filled my head — King Gorice conjuring amid his alembics and grammaries in the Iron Tower of Carcë; wet sands gleaming with the lights of the besieged seaside castle of Owlswick — as I gorged on Eddison’s sentences. The words themselves, even more than the scenes they described, pulsed with possibility and invitation.“The Worm” ranks among the greatest epic fantasies of all time, keeping company with pound-for-pounders like the “Iliad” and the King James Bible, mostly on the strength of its diction, which resembles 16th-century English. So put aside for the moment the story it tells of a great war between the righteous Demons and the nefarious but far more interesting Witches, and put aside as well its characters, world-thinking, action set pieces and the like. They’re all gorgeous, though some readers claim to have trouble with trivial quirks like the merely gestured-at setting on Mercury; the framing device of a traveler from Earth who disappears after a few pages; or the naming of various peoples as Demons, Witches and Goblins. None of that matters anywhere near as much as the language Eddison concocted to take you somewhere extraordinary and keep you gloriously, deliriously there.The novel features the requisite euphonious place names (Zajë Zaculo, the Straits of Melikaphkhaz, Thremnir’s Heugh), swordplay (“Nor had they greater satisfaction that went against Lord Juss, who mowed at them with great swashing blows, beheading some and hewing some asunder in the midst, till they were fain to keep clear of his reaping”) and sorcery (“ ‘Abase thee and serve me, worm of the pit’”). But the book is at its best when characters just go about their daily business. They eat: “When the Lord Corund knew of a surety that he held them of Demonland shut up in Eshgrar Ogo, he let dight supper in his tent, and made a surfeit of venison pasties and heath-cocks and lobsters from the lakes.” They gossip: “ ‘Truly this foreign madam with her loose and wanton ways doth scandal the whole land for us.’” They look up at the sky: “A great wind moaning out of the hueless west tore the clouds as a ragged garment, revealing the lonely moon that fled naked betwixt them.”Hollywood keeps promising that further advances in computer-generated imagery will produce ever-braver new worlds of immersive experience. But our most enduringly potent fantasies consist of words, and part of their potency lies in inviting your imagination to do the work. The more work it does, the more capable it gets. If you had a choice between taking either J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” books or their movie adaptations to the proverbial desert island, which would you choose? Would you take the Old Testament or the Charlton Heston version of it? The films would rapidly become spectacles you’d seen too many times, but you could keep coming back to the books and finding further dimensions, fresh visions, novel experiences in their language-generated imagery.I’m not eager to see a movie version of “The Worm.” With the limitless budget afforded by Eddison’s language, I can outspend even the most obscenely expensive production a thousandfold in my head. His prose can exalt anything into the stuff of epic fantasy, even the contents of a chamber pot: “A bucketful took Corund in the mouth, befouling all his great beard, so that he gave back spitting. And he and his, standing close beneath the wall, and little expecting so sudden and ill an answer, fared shamefully, being all well soused and bemerded with filth and lye.” I wouldn’t trade “bemerded” for all the special-effects magic in this world or any other.Carlo Rotella is a professor of English at Boston College and the author of “The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood” (University of Chicago Press, 2019). More