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      in Theater

      Why Black Satire Is the Art Form for Our Absurd Age

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      Black American novelists, filmmakers and other writers are using comedy to reveal — and combat — our era’s disturbing political realities.LAST SPRING, DURING the Broadway revival of “Appropriate” (2013), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s sardonic drama about white family members returning to their ancestral plantation home in southeast Arkansas to bury their father, a rare moment of cross-racial candor transpired — not onstage but in the audience. In the third act, Bo, the middle-aged older brother played by Corey Stoll, unleashes a rant about the burdens of whiteness in 21st-century America. Even a passing acquaintance with the work of Jacobs-Jenkins, who’s a queer Black man, would condition theatergoers to understand the outburst as satirical exposure of a threadbare fallacy of racial innocence. “You want me to go back in time and spank my great-great-grandparents?” Bo says. “Or should I lynch myself? You people just need to say what it is you want me to do and move on! I didn’t enslave anybody! I didn’t lynch anybody!” The speech usually leaves audiences squirming. On this night, however, one person clapped.“They were clapping in earnest,” says Jacobs-Jenkins, as if Bo were “someone who’s genuinely out here now just telling his story — you know, ‘Found his letters and read each one out loud!’” Before the playwright, actors and audience could fully register what was happening, a voice called out from the darkened auditorium: “Are you serious right now?” For Jacobs-Jenkins, 40, the whole thing was a delicious disruption. “Part of what the work is doing is exposing these fissures inside of a community — these feelings that we’re encouraged, as we are with most conversations about race in our country, to nurse in private.” At its best, Jacobs-Jenkins says, the theater can become a space to “risk learning something we didn’t anticipate” about one another.Satire is the art of risk. It relies, after all, on an audience comprehending a meaning that runs counter to what the text reads, the screen shows or the comedian says. In this regard, it’s vulnerable to misinterpretation and to deliberate distortion. When that satire concerns race and when the audience is as diverse and as divided as the United States is today, those risks compound. Why hazard satire’s indirection when even the most straightforward language — the term “woke,” for instance, or the seemingly incontrovertible good of “equity” — is manipulated and weaponized against its original ends? Yet perhaps these are the conditions that demand satire most of all, meeting absurdity with absurdity.I spoke with Jacobs-Jenkins, whose new political family drama “Purpose” is now on Broadway, 10 days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, the same week that Trump gave a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in which he, among other things, called for renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” acquiring Greenland from Denmark and welcoming Canada as the 51st state. The way Jacobs-Jenkins sees it, “this is probably going to be one of the most difficult moments in recent memory to be an American, but it’s also going to be kind of the funniest — because come on! I think the question of this time will be: ‘Are you serious right now?’” The Black American satirical tradition, with its roots in the unfathomable dehumanization of slavery and the persistent pressures of racial discrimination, offers equipment by which all of us might better endure and even combat our lacerating realities.From left: the writer-director-actor Jordan Peele, the novelist Paul Beatty and the playwright Lynn Nottage.From left: Vivien Killilea/Getty for Imdb; Alex Welsh for The New York Times; Bryan Derballa for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Chelsea Handler at 50: Still Hustling and Dreaming of Margaritas

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      The comedian Chelsea Handler is unapologetic in her latest book, “I’ll Have What She’s Having.” Well, of course, she is. She’s Chelsea Handler, and that’s always kind of been her thing.There are many of the stories you would expect from the former host of the E! show “Chelsea Lately” in her seventh book, which came out last month, such as confronting rudeness in men, shamelessly propositioning Andrew Cuomo for sex when he was governor of New York and ruthlessly pushing out a business partner for a lemonade stand. (She was 10 at the time.)But Handler also weaves in more life advice, a healthy dose of cheerleading (both for the reader and herself) and insights gained from therapy and various breakups.The book includes chapters about her very public relationship with the comedian Jo Koy, but fans looking for the details of the breakup will be disappointed: She doesn’t say much, and mostly speaks well of Koy. A sign of growth, she says.“While I am sure that is of interest to people, I will no longer throw someone I once loved under a bus,” Handler writes. “My sharing what exactly went wrong in our relationship would negate all the work I have done on myself while also creating a headline I don’t want to create.”The main takeaways: She’s 50. She’s hustling. There’s a Netflix special coming later this month, and a residency in Las Vegas. And she’s sure of herself. That’s all she needs, and she’s finally realized it. In an interview, Handler discussed the new book and the newish Chelsea.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Interview: Tori Amos on Her Children’s Book and Her Reading Life

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      What inspires the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter? Her first picture book, “Tori and the Muses,” offers an answer. In an email interview, she shared how her gently rebellious mother made her a reader. SCOTT HELLERWhat books are on your night stand?“Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power Through the Ways of Animals,” by Jamie Sams and David Carson. It’s an interactive book and card set where you can pull a card and read about the healing properties that each animal embodies as it relates to mind, body and spirit. Jamie Sams was of Indigenous heritage, and I feel like some of it was passed down to her as a gift she has channeled for us all.How do you organize your books?Let’s put it this way: Being a librarian is a fantasy of mine. In my album “Tales of a Librarian,” I’m dressed in different imagined librarian costumes, and in the liner notes the tracks are organized by the Dewey Decimal System. My own little libraries don’t have a system, but I have dreams of one! What kind of reader were you as a child?My reading was all inspired by my mother, Mary. My father, a pastor, believed that she was reading me Bible stories. But what she was doing, and I’m convinced this was her rebellion — her Methodist minister’s wife rebellion, because it was difficult to rebel, especially as a minister’s wife in the late ’60s if you wanted to stay married and accepted by the parishioners and society at large — was reading to me from the collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s works. What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?“Growing Up,” by Russell Baker, which I got a few years ago from my friend Mary Ellen Bobb. I’d never heard of Baker and I couldn’t put the book down. The way he could tell the story of his life made me feel like I knew everybody in it by the time I finished. I grew up in Baltimore and he put the city in a different light for me: more like a shining city on a hill.What’s the last great book you read?I’m rereading “Landmarks,” by Robert Macfarlane. The way this man writes about landscapes, particularly in the U.K., makes the wild tracks and the sea roads come alive.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Television

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

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

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      in Music

      How Do You Preserve a Vanishing Music Scene?

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      Five recent books collect photographs, memories and ephemera from the hardcore band Agnostic Front, the mysterious dance artist Aphex Twin, the rap collective Odd Future and more.Memories fade. Documentation disappears. Scenes vanish.When you’re busy creating a world, you don’t always think about how to preserve it for history. So old fliers and magazines get brittle and crumble, photos get lost, publications go out of business and websites get deleted. It falls to archivists — sometimes from a scene itself, and sometimes an avid follower — to fight that slipperiness. Each of these worthy and memorable books is the product of such work. What’s most startling is that the worlds they rescue are of the surprisingly recent past. Which means that even in this age of hyperdocumentation and rapid technological advancement, evanescence is always a threat.Roger Miret with Todd Huber, ‘Agnostic Front — With Time: The Roger Miret Archives’Roger Miret and Todd Huber; via American Made KustomThe early years of Agnostic Front, the scene-shaping New York hardcore band, were chaos incarnate: a Lower East Side life of ramshackle apartments, rumbles on the street and birthing an explosive, aggravated, pugnacious new sound. Somehow, amid all this, the frontman Roger Miret — who was picked to join the band thanks to his ferocious behavior in the pit — managed to hold on to everything. “Agnostic Front — With Time: The Roger Miret Archives” is part photo essay, and part documentation of ephemera primarily from the band’s tumultuous breakout period from 1982-86.There are oodles of fliers from bills shared with Reagan Youth, Murphy’s Law, Suicidal Tendencies, Youth of Today and more. Some were scrawled by hand and some pasted pastiche-style; some featured illustrated skinheads in suspenders, tight pants and stomper boots; and some memorably gory ones were mailed in from an Oxnard, Calif., illustrator named Chuy.Miret’s collection also includes margarine-yellow T-shirts, test presses of the band’s earliest recordings and show announcements from the Village Voice listings pages. And brief personal recollections from Miret and his bandmates capture the mayhem of the time: getting shows shut down by the police, then slapping stickers on their cars; and assembling copies of the debut Agnostic Front EP by hand, cutting covers from a large roll one by one and gluing them to order after shows.‘Liquid Sky’via Emperor Go!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Jake Heggie’s Adaptation of ‘Moby Dick’ Comes to the Metropolitan Opera

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      Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s 2010 adaptation of Melville’s unruly novel opens this week at the Metropolitan Opera.When “Moby Dick” opens at the Metropolitan Opera this week, audiences will experience a deeply American story of unchecked ambition, fomented grievances and a self-destructive desire for revenge.Based on Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, the opera delivers an economical and resolute retelling of the fateful tale of the Pequod, a ship in pursuit of a vengeful white whale. The libretto, by Gene Scheer, hits the book’s main conflicts without losing track of the action. The score, by Jake Heggie, is graceful and propulsive. The opera’s ending is certain and clear.It’s probably fair to say that more people know the story of the white whale from parodies or synopses than from reading “Moby Dick.” But an adaptation is not just a summary of the book’s major events. A society obsessed with efficiencies can be overly focused on directness.Skillful though it is, the opera, which had its premiere in Houston in 2010, has a kind of scrubbed and airless storytelling that leaves the singularity of the novel behind. This is the sort of adaptation that audiences have long responded to — a simplification of the book’s billowy structure to emphasize its plot. But can a tidy adaptation truly represent this unruly book, with its dramas born of endless uncertainties? Or is the purpose of adaptation something different?The tenor Brandon Jovanovich, center, sings Captain Ahab at a dress rehearsal of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “Moby Dick,” which opens on Monday night.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA composer decides what aspects of the narrative can be told through music, while a librettist shapes the story through words that can be thrown out into the air by way of song. An aria reveals a character’s singularity and ambition. Characters sing them to announce what they want and what lengths they must pursue to get it. Each creative turn adds distance from the book.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Joseph Wambaugh, Author With a Cop’s-Eye View, Is Dead at 88

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      In novels like “The Glitter Dome” and nonfiction works like “The Onion Field,” he took a harsh, unglamorous look at the realities of law enforcement.Joseph Wambaugh, the master storyteller of police dramas, whose books, films and television tales powerfully caught the hard psychic realities of lonely street cops and flawed detectives trapped in a seedy world of greed and senseless brutality, died on Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 88. The cause was esophageal cancer, said Janene Gant, a longtime family friend.In “The Glitter Dome,” Officers Gibson Hand and Buckmore Phipps consider it a joy “to kill people and do other good police work.” In “The Black Marble,” Sgt. Natalie Zimmerman and Sgt. A.M. Valnikov are in love, but it can’t last. In “The Onion Field,” his first work of nonfiction, Mr. Wambaugh wrote of what happened to Officer Karl Hettinger when his partner was slain by thugs: He suffered impotence, nightmares and suicidal thoughts, and his body shrunk.Mr. Wambaugh was blunt about the hidden costs of the job: broken marriages, nervous breakdowns, suicides.Before Mr. Wambaugh’s era as a writer, which began in 1971, police dramas like the television series “Dragnet” were implausible stories about clean-cut heroes doing good. He shattered the mold with portraits of officers as complex, profane, violent and fallible, sliding quickly from rookie illusions of idealism into the streetwise cynicism of veterans, who might have feared death but who feared their own emotions even more.Readers discovered an intimacy with Wambaugh’s cops, taking in the gallows humor, the boredom and sudden dangers; being privy to a partner’s bigotry and cruelty, but tagging along for the action and a share of the fatalism about the job — the inevitability of a murder, a rape or a child molested tonight — and then moving on to another sunset shift out of Hollywood Station.Mr. Wambaugh in 1972, the year after his first novel, “The New Centurions,” was published. He wrote it on the job while working as a police officer.Jill Krementz, all rights reservedWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Ione Skye Was an Enigma in Her 1990s Heyday. Now She’d Like a Word.

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      When Ione Skye was in middle school in the early 1980s, a group of popular, mean girls she calls “the Aprils” brought her — shy, bookish, not yet famous — into their intimidating fold. She was surprised they even knew her name.“Part of me wanted to punch the girls’ smug faces,” she writes in her memoir “Say Everything,” due out from Gallery Books on March 4. Another part of her, though, “burned with excitement.”Those preteen memories, which she wrote down, felt important. Cinematic, even. “My own story captured my imagination,” Skye told me during a video interview from Los Angeles. “I had a big ego, I guess.”For almost 40 years, since Skye made her film debut at 15 alongside Keanu Reeves, Crispin Glover and Dennis Hopper in the teen crime drama “River’s Edge,” her name has been associated with powerful people, mostly men. There’s her father, the Scottish folk singer Donovan, whose early abandonment of Skye, her mother and brother, connects her experiences from “Girlhood,” as the first section of the book is called, to “Womanhood,” the second.Ione Skye with John Cusack in the 1989 movie “Say Anything.”20th Century FoxThere’s her relationship with the Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis, which started when she was 16. There’s her marriage to Adam Horovitz, better known as Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys, which ended in divorce after Skye (“I was a serial cheater,” she writes) rediscovered her bisexuality and embarked on a series of affairs with women, including Jenny Shimizu, Ingrid Casares and Alice Temple. She’s now a mother of two and has been married to Ben Lee, a musician, since 2008. They live in Los Angeles but just spent the last year in Sydney.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More