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      in Movies

      In ‘Dangerous Liaisons,’ Alice Englert and Nicholas Denton Play the Game

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      In a decadent new Starz drama, the two actors play young versions of literature’s most poisoned and poisonous power couple.It could never work between them, Alice Englert insisted on a recent afternoon, lounging in a corner banquette at Ladurée, a French spot in Lower Manhattan. In a relationship this toxic, she said, they would have no choice but to ruin each other, slowly or all at once.Nicholas Denton, sitting beside her, draped an arm around her shoulders. “That’s the game of it,” he said, grinning.The game is power. The field is pre-revolutionary France. And the contestants are the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, arguably literature’s most poisoned and poisonous power couple. Or not quite. Not yet. In “Dangerous Liaisons,” a decadent drama that debuts on Starz on Sunday, Englert and Denton play much younger versions of the characters introduced by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in the epistolary 1782 novel.In the book, these characters are aristocrats, with decades of conniving and debauchery underneath their wigs and powder, who conspire to corrupt a chaste woman. In the show, they are barely out of puberty, seducers in their youth. Even before its premiere, the series has already been renewed.The couple — lovers who treat each other with anything but love — have fascinated readers and audiences for two centuries and counting, popping up in plays, operas, ballets, radio plays and movies, including the 1988 Stephen Frears film, starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich. All of which makes reinventing them a very tall order. The height of the wigs alone!But Englert and Denton were willing to try. “We’re both quite rough and tumble,” Denton said. “We’re willing to get on the floor in this garb and try and really knock this out and go to hell for it.”A television version of “Dangerous Liaisons” has been in development for nearly a decade, under the partial auspices of Colin Callender, a distinguished producer. Christopher Hampton, who wrote the screenplay for Frears’s film and the stage adaptation that is often revived on Broadway, was attached at one point. Then he wasn’t. When the writer Harriet Warner came on, she went looking for a fresh way into the material and she found it in one of the novel’s letters, which seemed to imply that the Marquise hadn’t been born into nobility, that she had clawed her way into it. She shared that insight with Callender.“The interesting thing was, how did these characters become who they were?” Callender explained in a recent interview.Warner began to devise some answers. Earlier younger riffs on “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” like “Cruel Intentions” (1999) and a recent French film adaptation, moved the story into modern high schools. But Warner decided to keep to the period of the novel, more or less, while aging the Marquise down into Camille, a sex worker, and Valmont into Pascal, a mapmaker exiled from the aristocracy. First they go to bed. And then they go to war.The series found a fresh way into the story through one of the letters in the epistolary novel, which seemed to imply that the Marquise hadn’t been born into nobility.Dusan Martincek/StarzWith that decision made and scripts written, casting could begin. The producers saw about 200 actors for each role. Denton (“The Glitch”), 30, an Australian actor, went through at least a half-dozen auditions and tests, beginning early in 2020. At times, in quarantine, his sister had to read the steamier scenes with him. “Disgusting,” he said. “Bless her soul.”Englert (“Top of the Lake,” “Ratched”), 28, also from Australia and the daughter of the filmmaker Jane Campion, put herself on tape later, toward the end of 2020. With the pandemic in full swing, the two of them couldn’t meet for a chemistry read. (Though Denton had met with other actresses, a plexiglass barrier between them.) So they had their joint audition in separate hotel rooms on Zoom, trying to steam up their relative screens.“It was so funny,” Englert said.Apparently it was more than just funny. “It was better than you could have imagined,” Warner said during a recent phone call. “You just knew they were going to elevate each other and escalate the drama and yet keep all this wonderful raw energy of the fact that they are still kind of unsullied by the industry.”Denton and Englert met in person a few months later, in the spring of 2021, on set in Prague. Englert had just emerged from hair and makeup with a temporary wig balanced precariously on her head. (“I was dreaming that I looked like a flat-chested version of Dolly Parton,” she said.) Wary of Covid-19 protocols, they patted each other on their respective shoulders. A few days later, they were rolling around the rehearsal room floor together. A few days after that, they were filming one of Pascal and Camille’s incendiary fights.“I actually cried at the end of that day,” Englert said, as they started in on fresh coffees to combat jet lag, “just from knowing that we were going to go on such an odyssey.” The constricting costumes — “they just hurt sometimes,” Englert said — may have moved her to tears, too.They were dressed more comfortably that afternoon, if still in the louche spirit of the series. Englert’s pink silk dress was rumpled; Denton’s shirt was unbuttoned well below the sternum. They had an ease with each other — an air of comfort and kindness rather than sexual tension. If six months in and out of love and war and some very silly white foundation can’t make you friends, probably nothing can.Denton, snuggled up to Englert in the banquette, praised the ferocity with which she attacked their scenes. “You have an effortlessness, but also an intensity,” he said. “Which is a very beautiful contrast.”Englert said that she had trusted Denton almost immediately. There was a moment, at the beginning of the shoot, when she had tried to present herself to him in the best possible light, when she tried to hold onto some vanity.“Then that absolutely died,” she said. “And it was so beautiful to let it rot with you so quickly.”“You have an effortlessness, but also an intensity,” Denton said to Englert. “Which is a very beautiful contrast.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesWith vanity flown, they could gleefully recounted receiving vitamin B shots — “in our bums!” Denton said — to make it through the shoot. They did, however, demur from telling what both referred to ominously as “the fart story.”The sex scenes could have made for more mortifying stories. But the actors worked closely with the show’s intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien, to make them feel safe and liberating. “It was actually a really good bonding thing,” Denton said. And with sex out of the way — lots of it, especially in the first episode — they could navigate the riskier contours of Camille and Pascal’s relationship.“What’s always appealed to me about ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ is that the fantasy of the love is shattered,” Englert said. She was speaking to the novel. Though it’s true of the show, too. “It’s in pieces from the beginning,” she continued.Denton saw it just the same. “It’s so refreshing to watch something that doesn’t get glossed over,” he said, “that doesn’t become a glossy Disney version of what love is. Because I don’t think that’s what love is. Love is elusive, dangerous, corrupt.”The goal of the series was to keep the period details as accurate as possible while ensuring that the emotional atmosphere felt urgent and contemporary. Otherwise it might read as just another polite costume drama, however luxe the costumes. You had to see the real people underneath the corsetry.For Denton and Englert, that meant bringing their own hearts to the roles. It also meant a lot of pretending, because they harbor a shared belief that perhaps they aren’t quite as sexy or as lethal as their characters.“We’re betas pretending to be alphas,” Denton said.Englert agreed. “We’re exceedingly embarrassed all the time,” she said. “But it’s how we go. We enjoy it.”Englert had eaten all the passion fruit macarons, but Denton smiled at his friend anyway. “Alice always says, ‘We’re just Aussies in cossies,’” he said. More

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      in Theater

      How Her Ancestors Reignited Her Return to Theater

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      Quiara Alegría Hudes is back with a new work, an Off Broadway production of “My Broken Language,” adapted from her 2021 memoir.In 2018, the playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes announced that she would be taking a pause from the theater. The art form she loved so much had become a source of heartbreak: She was tired of the industry’s lack of cultural diversity, the disinterest those in power had in changing the status quo and the anxiety she felt leading up to opening night (the unexpected hiccups, the uncertainty of how a work would be received by critics and audience members).When it came to producing works by playwrights of color, she began to feel as if her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Water by the Spoonful,” about a Puerto Rican war veteran recently returned from Iraq, and “In the Heights,” her Tony-winning musical with Lin-Manuel Miranda, were exceptions more often than the rule. During the 2018-2019 season, for example, only three writers of color had their work produced on Broadway.In order to heal, Hudes went on an inner retreat. Turning to her memories, she sought out the people who taught her how to tend to her body and spirit. This soulful journey resulted in “My Broken Language,” an impressionistic coming-of-age memoir published in 2021 that detailed the shame she felt over being fluent in her Jewish father’s native English, but not her Puerto Rican mother’s Spanish. It was that same sense of incompleteness that led her to take a break from the theater.While recording the audiobook, Hudes noted her prose sometimes had the rhythm of a monologue. “It was the one-woman play,” she said. That realization, combined with her wanting to step up as a community leader, ignited her desire to return to theater — despite the heartbreak. “Let me get some real bodies and spirits on this,” she recalled thinking during our video chat. Now, Hudes’s stage adaptation of her book, also called “My Broken Language,” is running at Signature Theater through Nov. 27.From left, Samora la Perdida (seated), Zabryna Guevara, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Yani Marin and Marilyn Torres in “My Broken Language.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesOnstage, she is embodied by five people, including one of her frequent collaborators, Daphne Rubin-Vega, all of whom play different shades of the author. Hudes, now 45, had moments of not recognizing the person on the page. She made peace with it by realizing, “it was all the identities of mine, but it was also all the identities of all the women who raised me and who I love.” “My Broken Language,” in all its forms, is also partly a celebration of her ancestors, and how often unintentionally they inspired her to become a writer. “Our archive is in us and of us,” she wrote in the script for the play. On a practical level, in tune with changing what once made her turn away from the theater, Hudes wanted to ensure the production contributes to moving the industry forward in terms of representation in casting. In the script, she insists, “these are Philly Rican roles” for Latina actors.Born and raised in Philadelphia, Hudes comes from a long line of Puerto Rican women who excelled at building community and developing strong spiritual values. Her mother, Virginia Sanchez, who features prominently in the book and the play, is a renowned santera, who instilled love and respect for their Taína-Lukumí-Boricua legacy, as well as a fascination with words. One of Sanchez’s favorite possessions is a 19th-century Spanish dictionary that she uses to search for words people may have forgotten.“The book smells like our elders, it has its own soul,” Sanchez said over a video call, “it contains one of our identities.” In spite of her daughter’s “broken language,” Sanchez said she believes “Quiara always had a gift for words, she knows how to transform her experiences into a form of teaching.”Bill Heck and Liza Colón-Zayas in “Water by the Spoonful,” which had its New York premiere in 2013 at Second Stage Theater.Karli Cadel for The New York TimesLin-Manuel Miranda, center left, and Karen Olivo in the musical “In the Heights” at the Richard Rodgers Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIndeed, the playwright extracts wisdom from experiences she had growing up, such as seeing her mother possessed by a spirit. “To do that literally onstage would be vulgar,” Hudes explained. So she transformed her memories into words and then into physical movements that would make sense onstage with the help of the choreographer Ebony Williams. The goal is to create actions that evoke the feeling of being in between universes.The play also marks Hudes’s directorial debut. She describes the work of a director as one of “community care,” and compares it to a gardener choosing the seeds, planting them, and then nurturing them toward excellence. “Directing is the process,” she said.“Her rehearsal room feels like home,” said Samora la Perdida, who plays one of Hudes’ alter egos, describing “walls decorated with altars to our ancestors, tables with guava and cheese empanadas from her favorite spot in Washington Heights, a stereo blasting Frankie Ruiz.”Of Hudes, Rubin-Vega added, “She leads with openhearted professionalism.”Rethinking the meaning of community and how to affect it is what led Hudes to resume her theater work. After publishing her memoir, she discovered a new community in a world of readers who reacted emotionally to her stories and reminded her of her purpose.“Quiara is giving our community the opportunity to talk about the raw pain we’ve inherited, not only as women or immigrants but as people,” Sanchez said. “My daughter is a keeper of our lineage, a witness of our experience.”Although they work in different fields, Hudes said she believes she and her mother have overlapping journeys. “We break through the vines with our machetes, finding our own way, sharing strategies and celebrating triumphs,” Hudes added.“Quiara accepted her tongue for what it was in order to create a language of her own,” la Perdida said, “a language that shamelessly dances with both her Latina roots and Western canon influences. A language with the rhythms of Chopin and Juan Luis Guerra, inspired by the poetic prose of both Shakespeare and José Rivera.”After five years away, Hudes said she is enjoying the various pleasures that come with working in the theater again, like being in a room full of Latino artists, her community. She finds it to be utterly therapeutic. “I often crunch up in my seat, kind of like a ball, and then pop up, it’s so much fun to live all these old habits again,” she said. More

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      in Movies

      Julie Powell, Food Writer Known for ‘Julie & Julia,’ Dies at 49

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      She documented her attempt to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in a popular blog that became a best-selling book and a hit movie.Julie Powell, the writer whose decision to spend a year cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” led to the popular food blog, the Julie/Julia Project, a movie starring Meryl Streep and a new following for Mrs. Child in the final years of her life, died on Oct. 26 at her home in Olivebridge, in upstate New York. She was 49.Her husband, Eric Powell, said the cause was cardiac arrest.Ms. Powell narrated her struggles in the kitchen in a funny, lacerating voice that struck a nerve with a rising generation of disaffected contemporaries.The Julie/Julia Project became a popular model for other blogs, replicated by fans of the cooks Ina Garten, Thomas Keller and Dorie Greenspan, and helped build the vast modern audience for home cooking on social media.In 2002, Ms. Powell was an aspiring writer working at a low-level administrative job in Lower Manhattan. She was about to turn 30 and had no real career prospects. It was, she said in an interview with The New York Times, “one of those panicked, backed-into-a-corner kind of moments.”To lend structure to her days, she set out to cook all 524 recipes from her mother’s well-worn copy of Mrs. Child’s 1961 classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.” But as an untrained cook who lived in a small Long Island City loft, she found the road to be long, sweaty and bumpy.In a blog for Salon.com that she called the Julie/Julia Project, she wrote long updates, punctuated by vodka gimlets and filled with entertaining, profane tirades about the difficulties of finding ingredients, the minor disappointments of adult life and the bigger challenges of finding purpose as a member of Generation X.Before the year was up, Salon reported that the blog had about 400,000 total page views, as well as several thousand regular readers who hung on the drama of whether Ms. Powell would actually finish in time.Blogging made it possible for Ms. Powell to reach readers on a relatively new platform and in a new kind of direct language. “We have a medium where we can type in the snarky comments we used to just say out loud to our friends,” she said in a 2009 interview.Those comments were posted just as popular interest in food, cooking and chefs was rising. Ms. Powell’s self-deprecating style became a bridge from the authority of food writers like Mrs. Child, James Beard and M.F.K. Fisher to the accessibility of Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson.Just weeks before Ms. Powell’s self-imposed deadline was up, Amanda Hesser, a founder of the website Food52 who was then a reporter for The Times, wrote about her project, and interest exploded.The Julie/Julia Project upended food writing, Ms. Hesser said in an email. “I’d never read anyone like her,” she wrote. “Her writing was so fresh, spirited — sometimes crude! — and so gloriously unmoored to any tradition.”Ms. Powell inspired other amateur food writers to begin cooking their way through cookbooks and made professional food writers realize “they’d been stuck in the mud of conformity,” Ms. Hesser said. “The internet democratized food writing, and Julie was the new school’s first distinctive voice.”The writer Deb Perelman, who started her food blog (now called Smitten Kitchen) in 2003, said: “She wrote about food in a really human voice that sounded like people I knew. She communicated that you could write about food even without going to culinary school, without much experience, and in a real-life kitchen.”Little, Brown & Company turned the blog into a book, “Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.” Although some critics wrote that it lacked literary heft, it went on to sell more than a million copies, mostly under the title given to the paperback: “Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.”Amy Adams as Ms. Powell in front of a photo of Meryl Streep as Mrs. Child in a scene from “Julie & Julia.”Columbia Pictures, via AlamySales spiked after the popular 2009 movie “Julie & Julia,” Nora Ephron’s last work as a writer and director, which starred Ms. Streep as Mrs. Child; Stanley Tucci as her husband, Paul; and Amy Adams as Ms. Powell.Ms. Powell “was happy for the story to be Nora Ephron’s story,” said Mr. Powell, a deputy editor at Archaeology magazine. “It did kind of sand down the quirky and the spiky and a lot of the things everyone knew her for and loved her for. And she was OK with that.”The film’s success also lifted Mrs. Child’s book to the best-seller list for the first time.Mrs. Child never saw the film — she died in 2004 — but she was familiar with Ms. Powell’s project.Russ Parsons, a former Los Angeles Times food editor who was among the first to report on the blog, sent Mrs. Child, then in her 90s, some excerpts. She took the project as an affront, not the self-deprecating romp that Ms. Powell intended, and told Mr. Parsons that she and others had tested and retested the recipes so they would be accessible to cooks of all skill levels.“I don’t understand how she could have problems with them,” he recalled her telling him. “She just must not be much of a cook.”Ms. Powell in her apartment in 2005, chopping leeks to make Ms. Child’s recipe for potato leek soup.Henny Ray Abrams/Associated PressJulie Foster was born on April 20, 1973, in Austin, Texas, to John and Kay Foster. Her father was a lawyer. Her mother stayed home to care for her and her brother, Jordon, and then went back to college for a master’s degree in design from the University of Texas.Ms. Powell graduated from Amherst College in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in theater and fiction writing.As a child, her brother said, Ms. Powell was both bookish and dramatic.“She loved to be onstage, and loved just being over the top and having everyone watch her,” he said. And, he added, she was “the most experimental and sophisticated cook among us, and we were all people who cooked.”She met the man who would become her husband when they were playing the romantic leads in a high school production of the Arthur Miller play “All My Sons.” They married in 1998.Ms. Powell’s second book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession,” published in 2009, dived deeply into their relationship, which sometimes flourished and sometimes faltered. She described in detail her struggle with an extramarital affair she had and, later, one her husband had. This time, the food connection was darker: She juxtaposed her apprenticeship as a butcher with a dissection of her moods and the marriage.Without the sauciness and celebrity connection of her first book, “Cleaving” was not as well received, and although Ms. Powell continued writing, it was her last book.“She had so much talent and emotional intelligence,” said Judy Clain, editor in chief of Little, Brown, who was Ms. Powell’s editor. “I only wish she could have found the next thing.”After years splitting time between Long Island City and a cozy house in the Catskill Mountains that she purchased in 2008, the couple moved upstate permanently in 2018. In addition to her husband and her brother, Ms. Powell is survived by her parents.Ms. Powell, who was politically candid and a staunch advocate for animals, maintained her lively voice on social media, a natural extension for the quirky and direct voice she honed as an early blogger. On Twitter, she posted pointed commentary, mixed in with mundane bits of daily life. As ever, she made her feelings public, whether she was depressed, frustrated or excited.Mr. Powell, her husband, once said to her: “You hate everyone and you love everyone. That is your gift!” She turned it into her Twitter bio. More

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      in Music

      Steve Keene Made 300,000 Paintings in a Home Full of Easels

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      The artist’s studio and living space, created with his wife, Starling Keene, an architect, houses a one-man assembly line of affordable art — enough to fill a new book.When the artist Steve Keene and his wife, Starling Keene, an architect, spent $140,000 on a dilapidated former auto body shop to live in, in Brooklyn in 1996, it was understood that he would use most of it for his studio space. His brightly painted works are typically not large, but they are numerous: Over the last 30 years, he says, he’s created more than 300,000.Sold them, too — most for $10 or less apiece. His images, with visible brushstrokes on plywood panels that he cuts himself, are done in rapid-fire multiples: lo-fi renderings of album covers, presidents, streetscapes and pastorals inspired by discount art books from the Strand, sometimes with a lyric or funny non sequitur on top — “just to kind of slow you down, to look at it,” he said. He spends upward of eight hours a day painting, up to 120 canvases at a time, 52 weeks a year. (He doesn’t like to take vacations.) When the Keenes moved into the building, in Greenpoint, they built a nest for themselves in the back, a lofted area with a dorm-room fridge. The rest was easels.Now, at 65, Steve Keene may still be New York’s most prolific painter, and certainly the one most beloved in ’90s indie-rock circles. A college radio D.J. in his native Virginia, he got his start showcasing his paintings in scuzzy bars during his favorite bands’ sets, and did album art and commissions for groups like Pavement, Silver Jews and the Apples in Stereo. He earned an M.F.A. in printmaking at Yale, perfected his sense of primary color as a commercial silk screener in New York — a job he hated, he said, “though half of what I do is kind of based on that” — and eventually attracted collectors like the restaurateur David Chang, who hung a 12-foot Keene at Momofuku in Toronto. His prodigious output and enduring D.I.Y. ethos is cataloged, for the first time, in “The Steve Keene Art Book,” out this month.Keene’s paintings are rapid-fire multiples, executed with visible brushstrokes on plywood. Most are sold for $10 or less apiece.Lila Barth for The New York Times“This is a 30-year affordable art experiment that he’s been undertaking,” said Daniel Efram, who produced the new “Steve Keene Art Book.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesIn essays and commentary by Shepard Fairey, the downtown gallerist Leo Fitzpatrick, the artist Ryan McGinness and the musician Chan Marshall (Cat Power), it makes the case for Keene as a cultural signifier, a subversive success — an artist who, though he has shown in galleries, art fairs and museums, still sells (and packages, and ships, via UPS) his work entirely himself, prizing accessibility above all.“To me, one of the things that has cemented his importance is, here’s an artist who has a full understanding of the traditional art world, but chooses a pathway that is about directly making art and sustenance in a very modest way,” said Daniel Efram, a photographer and the Apples in Stereo’s manager, who produced the book. “This is a 30-year affordable art experiment that he’s been undertaking. It’s dramatic, it’s joyful and it’s created a community of fans that are very loyal.”Thanks to a recent influx of attention, Keene’s website, where he sells bundles of paintings for $70, has been overwhelmed with orders. Efram, who has known him since the ’90s, crowdsourced the book, borrowing hundreds of pieces from around the U.S. to photograph. “People see his work and they smile,” he said. “I think because it’s vibrant — and because it’s a really good deal.”Fairey, the street art star, said he owned more than half a dozen Keenes, and called him an inspiration. “He’s mixing gestural or impressionistic mark-making with pop and underground imagery in an assembly line that yields repetition with variation,” Fairey wrote in an email. “He’s like a folk hero Warhol.”Lo-fi renderings of album covers are a frequent Keene subject.Lila Barth for The New York TimesWhat has enabled Keene’s grand-scale, low-priced career — besides the foresight to acquire a 90-foot-long home studio early on — is Starling Keene, 63, the director of architecture for the city’s Department of Design and Construction, an agency responsible for helping to actually build New York. It’s more logistics than glamour: Her favorite project lately is a giant fuel yard and administrative depot for the Department of Transportation.In previous roles, she has also created a mansion in the hills for a Hollywood heavyweight and helped erect Little Island, the Hudson River park, as a partner in Standard Architects. (The British firm Heatherwick “designed it,” she said, “but we had to make it work.”)When I visited the Keene household, I asked about her own architectural style. After mulling it over for a while, she called it “industrial hermit crab.”“Because I do love an existing space, and then reacting to it, more than almost anything else,” she explained. “The willingness to constantly change — I do love that, too.”The Keenes’ thrifty fluidity is on ample display in their home. As the couple raised two daughters, now college age, Steve’s studio had to shrink, and they encircled it with a backyard-style chain-link fence that he affectionately calls “the cage.” It was inspired by the 2001 Frank Gehry exhibition at the Guggenheim — in Gehry’s early projects, the architect used the outdoor material “as color on a facade, because it changes the light,” Steve said.Also, Starling added, “We did need a way to separate the toddlers” from the paint-splattered studio.Keene with his wife, Starling, the director of architecture for the city’s Department of Design and Construction. “She’s a better artist than me, a better painter and a better everything else,” Steve said.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIn the last dozen years, guided by Starling’s design and engineering know-how — “My claim to fame is, I taught Steve trigonometry in one day,” she said — Steve has also built just about every stitch of their furniture, most of it white and curlicued. Made entirely of interlocking wood pieces like a jigsaw puzzle, it doubles as stairs, storage and artistic display, not to mention hiding spot (or launchpad) for their four cats and two dogs.“Star’s always trusted me visually,” Steve said, looking at his wife. “She’s always trusted me when I wanted to do things — like, I remember calling you up and I said, ‘Is it OK? I took out the bathroom ceiling.’”In January, they will celebrate their 40th anniversary.Steve’s exhibitions often involve him doing live painting, and the couple’s latest thrill is in crafting custom-made displays for each setting, from just a rough sketch — they are so conversant in each other’s drawing style that, Steve said, “people don’t like to play Pictionary with us.”“I couldn’t do this without her,” he added, of his work. “I’m very artsy and she’s super logical. I mean, she’s a better artist than me, a better painter and a better everything else.” (Starling has lately been engrossed in fiber arts, making an abstract weaving inspired by the Citi tower in Queens, in the fog.) “When I run into any kind of problem, she solves it.”The Keenes’ D.I.Y. couch: floor pillows covered in a blanket on a platform of wooden canvases.Lila Barth for The New York TimesGuided by Starling’s engineering know-how, Steve has built nearly every piece of their furniture.Lila Barth for The New York TimesAn aluminum foil chandelier Steve created years ago for a daughter’s fourth birthday party still hangs in the space.Lila Barth for The New York TimesTheir artistic inclination to repurpose materials collides, frequently, with domesticity: an aluminum foil chandelier that Steve made for a daughter’s fourth birthday party is still up; plastic grocery baskets serve as drawers in their closet — an ingeniously constructed space, like an inverted boat, with a scalloped trellis that also supports their loft bed. “It’s like being inside a little cloud,” Starling said.The couch — constructed from floor pillows she stitched, and covered in a serape-style blanket — rests on a platform made of hundreds of large wooden canvases. They’re a new, engraved style that Steve developed in the last decade and has hardly exhibited yet.“He rarely likes to do things that other people ask him,” Efram said. “He has to feel it, and I really respect that.” The Keenes seemed surprised to find that, at a recent exhibition that Efram curated in Brooklyn, he was able to sell some larger Keene pieces for substantially more than normal — they were $150.Over the years, Starling said, they have wondered whether they could make more money from Steve’s paintings. But he likes to price them low so they’re “irresistible,” she said. And besides, the art world hustle has never interested him.“He doesn’t want to even think about, like, is somebody going to think one is good and one is bad,” she said, “which is why he makes so many.”He allowed Efram to produce the book on the condition that he didn’t have to get heavily involved. “I still haven’t really sat down and looked at it, page by page,” Steve said. “It’s just overwhelming. It’s wild that it’s a static thing, it doesn’t change.”As much as his work is about an iterative process, it’s also revitalizing to him with every brush stroke, he said. “I think the reason why I have so much energy to do this, it’s because every week it’s new — stuff goes to UPS, I don’t see it, so I need more work.”“Everybody has these rituals,” he added. “Making art for me became that system of losing yourself, or finding infinity. Or something.”“Or something!” Starling repeated, and they laughed together. More

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      in Movies

      John Jay Osborn Jr., Author of ‘The Paper Chase,’ Dies at 77

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      His 1971 novel became a movie, with John Houseman giving an award-winning performance as the imperious Professor Kingsfield, and later a television series.John Jay Osborn Jr., who while attending Harvard Law School wrote “The Paper Chase,” a 1971 novel following the tense relationship between an earnest student and his imperious contract law professor that was made into a feature film and then a television series, died on Oct. 19 at his home in San Francisco. He was 77.His daughter, Meredith Osborn, said the cause was squamous cell cancer.“The Paper Chase,” Mr. Osborn’s best-known book, tells the story of two antagonists: Kingsfield, an austere, curmudgeonly Harvard elder, and Hart, an industrious first-year student from the Midwest who is trying to survive the cutthroat intellectual world of an elite law school.“For days I sit in that damn class,” Hart says to his girlfriend, who is Kinsgfield’s daughter, late in the novel. “Then I read his books in the library and I abstract the cases he’s chosen. I know everything about him. The stripe of his ties. How many suits he has. He’s like the air or the wind. He’s everywhere. You can say you don’t care, but he’s there anyway, pounding his mind into mine. He screws around with my life.”Although Mr. Osborn said that Kingsfield was a composite of several of his law professors, Martha Minow, a former dean of the law school, said in an email, “I do know that some now long-gone law professors here vied over who was the real model for Kingsfield.”When “The Paper Chase” was made into a film in 1973, Kingsfield was played by John Houseman, who was a longtime theater, film and television producer and a former colleague of Orson Welles’s but had only occasionally acted, and Hart was portrayed by Timothy Bottoms. Mr. Houseman won the Academy Award for best supporting actor.In the movie, which was written and directed by James Bridges, Kingsfield famously tells his class: “You teach yourself the law but I train your mind. You come in here with a skull full of mush. You leave thinking like a lawyer.”Mr. Houseman reprised his role in the series that ran, first on CBS and later on Showtime, between 1978 and 1986. James Stephens took on the role of Hart.“The Paper Chase” was a reflection of Mr. Osborn’s experiences at Harvard Law amid an era of fervent student protests over the Vietnam War.The school “did not have the flexibility to allow individuals to express themselves,” he wrote in the Harvard Law Bulletin in 2003. “It did not allow for reciprocity between faculty and students. In short, it really had no desire to be loved, or even to be respected.”“The Paper Chase” started as a required third-year writing project. Because it was a work of fiction, Mr. Osborn used it to hedge against following the career path to a major Wall Street firm that Harvard Law was preparing him for.“It was an attempt to create more options for myself, a new story with a new ending,” he wrote in 2011 in the preface to the 40th-anniversary edition of the book.He went outside the law school to find an adviser, William Alfred, a Harvard English literature professor who was also a poet and playwright. Ms. Osborn recalled her father saying that Mr. Alfred was effusive about the first rough draft but suggested some changes.When he made the fixes, she said, Mr. Alfred told him: “Thank goodness. It was terrible when you first gave it to me. Now it’s a lot better and it’s got a lot of promise.”A year after Mr. Osborn’s graduation in 1970, Houghton Mifflin published “The Paper Chase.”Reviewing “The Paper Chase” in The Philadelphia Inquirer, David Appel wrote that it was written in a “lean, forthright manner” that “captured the urgency and immediacy of the law school experience.”For the rest of his career, Mr. Osborn would balance writing novels, as well as television and film scripts, with teaching law — even, like Kingsfield, contract law.20th Century Fox, via Everett CollectionJohn Jay Osborn Jr. was born on Aug. 5, 1945, in Boston. His father was a doctor and an inventor of one of the first heart-lung machines. His mother, Ann (Kidder) Osborn, was an abstract painter. The Osborns are descendants of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad baron.In 1967, Mr. Osborn graduated from Harvard College, where he had met Emilie Sisson, a student at Radcliffe College, whom he married in 1968.“As a jaded graduate of Harvard College,” he wrote in 2011 of his law school experience, “all I wanted was not to be browbeaten (and I was).”After Harvard Law, Mr. Osborn clerked in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., for Judge Max Rosenn of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He then worked for about a year as an associate at the white-shoe law firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler in Manhattan.He left for postgraduate work at Yale Law School, then taught law, first at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and then at the University of Miami School of Law. At about the same time, he was writing novels: “The Only Thing I’ve Done Wrong” (1977), a family drama, and “The Associates” (1979), about life at a Wall Street law firm.A sitcom based on “The Associates,” starring Martin Short, Alley Mills and Wilfrid Hyde-White, made its debut in 1979. But it lasted only 13 episodes.Between 1978 and 1988, Mr. Osborn was credited with writing 14 episodes of “The Paper Chase” and one episode apiece of “L.A. Law” and “Spenser: For Hire.” In that period, he also wrote his fourth novel, “The Man Who Owned New York” (1981), about a lawyer trying to recover $3 million missing from the estate of his firm’s biggest client.In the 1990s, he became a private estate planner and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and then at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where he taught contract law until his retirement in 2016.His approach to teaching contract law was quite different from Kingsfield’s. The balance of power, he wrote, rested with the students, not the professor. He said that in his first class of each semester, he stood at the lectern until the students were totally silent.“I explain to them that I’m not going to call on anyone,” he wrote in 2011. “They will have to volunteer to talk. Why am I not going to just call on students? I am not clairvoyant like their other professors. I have no idea which students have something to contribute to the discussion. Therefore I’m going to have to rely on them to tell when they have something to say.”Two years after his retirement, he published his final novel, “Listen to the Marriage” (2018), set entirely in the office of a marriage counselor.In addition to his daughter, who graduated from Harvard Law in 2006, Mr. Osborn is survived by his wife, a retired doctor; his sons, Samuel and Frederick; six grandchildren; his brothers, Oliver, Joseph and Ed; and his sisters, Mimi Oliver, Cindi Garvie and Anne Weiser-Truchan.At the end of Mr. Osborn’s novel, Hart stops Kingsfield on campus to tell him how much his class had meant to him.“Good,” Kingsfield says. “That’s fine.” And, as the professor starts to smile, he asks, coldly, “What was your name?”“Hart, Mr. Hart,” Hart says.“Well, thank you, Mr. Hart,” Kingsfield says.Mr. Osborn, who was a technical adviser for the “Paper Chase” film, recalled that at their first meeting, Mr. Houseman asked him if Kingsfield really knew Hart’s name.“Of course he had to know it,” Mr. Osborn told SFGate.com in 2003. “But I think the ambiguity was important, and Houseman understood that.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘A Little Life’ Review: A Collage of Unrelenting Torment

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      Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling novel comes to the BAM stage, and raises the question: How much suffering can the protagonist (and the audience) endure?Pain is something most characters try to outrun — or that results, with some logic, from their actions. But in “A Little Life,” a bold and brutal adaptation of the novel by Hanya Yanagihara now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it is the unyielding system of logic around which an entire play is built. The question is not why a man has suffered, but how much. The answer, it spoils nothing to say, is a lot.Conceived and directed by Ivo van Hove and adapted by Koen Tachelet, “A Little Life” is a kind of endurance test. As a doctor tells Jude, the melodrama’s human punching bag of a protagonist, “Only you know how much pain you can tolerate.”Those who’ve read the 2015 best seller know that the threshold required here is extremely high. Initially a chronicle of four male friends coming up in New York City, the story grows progressively darker as the gruesome details of Jude’s traumatic childhood are revealed. The novel was greeted with widespread acclaim, heralded by The Atlantic as “The Great Gay Novel” and pored over in tear-flooded book clubs. (Yanagihara is the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.) But its reputation has since become more divisive, with critics who consider its torment of Jude to be manipulative and excessive.A character study that descends into misery on the page is an aesthetic experience suited to the form — you can put down a book whenever you want. But there are only so many times you can look away over the course of a four-hour show. A degree of remove, at least, is provided for those who don’t speak Dutch. (This production, which originated at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, where van Hove is the artistic director, is performed with English supertitles.)Yanagihara’s immersion into the lives and minds of her characters (nearly all of them men) gets reordered and distilled here into abbreviated art openings, dinner parties and strobe-lit nights on the town. Slow-motion tracking shots of eerily empty Manhattan streets appear at either side of a sprawling crimson rug, visual cues for context and dread (van Hove’s longtime partner and collaborator, Jan Versweyveld, designed the set, lighting and video). Everyday furnishings (a bathroom sink, a working kitchen, an artist’s studio) are placed in contrast with the grandeur of the space (several rows of onstage seating trick the eye into a sense of intimacy).From left: Heijmans, Majd Mardo, Nasr and Edwin Jonker in the play, which originated at International Theater Amsterdam in 2018.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe men address their thoughts and circumstances to the audience and to one another, in a collage of reflections and exposition. There’s JB (Majd Mardo), the saucy and promising artist for whom Jude is a favorite portrait subject and sometime object of resentment; Malcolm (Edwin Jonker), minimally sketched as the architect who designs all of Jude’s dwellings; and Willem (Maarten Heijmans), whose friendship with Jude consumes much of the novel and suffers the most here from being rendered in shorthand, particularly when their relationship takes an unbelievable turn toward romance.And, of course, there’s Jude (Ramsey Nasr), a magician whose “sole trick is concealment,” according to his doctor (Bart Slegers). Jude is stubbornly elusive even throughout the novel’s 720 pages, less of a character than an amalgam of scars and cipher for the attention of others. Onstage, that disappearing act presents a conundrum. It is grueling to watch Jude use a razor to slice open his forearms a second, and then a third time, blood soaking his clothes. By the play’s third hour he looks like a walking murder scene. Flashbacks to the sexual abuse he experienced as a child, at the hands of a priest and then a doctor, and by a lover in the present (all played by Hans Kesting), are harrowing and unflinching, even as van Hove’s staging is sensitive and not overly explicit.Undoubtedly an argument could be made for facing mankind’s capacity for violence, even in an abstract, philosophical sense. But when does cruelty as a dramatic focal point in itself turn excessive, or at least cease to be compelling? (You might ask roughly a third of the audience members, who walked out by the end of intermission.) Of course, we instinctively recoil at the harm enacted on Jude; it is inhumane in the purest sense — no one should ever have to endure it. But these scenes might actually feel emotionally wrenching, too, were his character more than the sum of his grisly mistreatment.Whittle the story down to its major incidents, and what’s left is a series of escalating debasements until Jude all but disintegrates. This plays out onstage with a level of luridness. More time and attention are paid to Jude’s suffering than to anything else, including the relationships that we are presumably meant to invest in, and that might have been used to reveal more about Jude. It’s a problem in the book as well, but becomes rather stark onstage, as when Willem insists on beginning a sexual relationship with Jude that feels unearned and like another form of punishment.Nasr plays Jude’s agony and frustration to operatic heights, with the bracing screams and the running in circles of a man who wants nothing more than to escape his own body. It’s a marathon performance that manages to lend human form to what is essentially a pileup of impossible burdens. Of the four friends, Mardo’s JB makes the liveliest case for a person with interests other than Jude, a rare glimpse at a world beyond Jude’s quicksand orbit.But if there is an obvious conduit for empathy, it’s Harold (Jacob Derwig), Jude’s mentor and eventual adoptive father. Because a parent’s love is meant to be unconditional, the concern he expresses for Jude with moving insight makes the most sense of anyone’s. (No one talks about the tiny bit of relief that a parent feels, he says, when their worst fears are realized.) Ana (Marieke Heebink), the social worker who rehabilitated Jude as a teenager, pops up as a persistent voice in his mind and an unexpected narrative compass. She is the play’s sole key to forward momentum, encouraging Jude to reveal himself by way of the terrors he’s experienced.There is an absurdity to the bleakness of “A Little Life,” a sense that real life only rarely reaches such abominable depths. It’s a mechanism of great tragedy that it offers such cold comfort. After all that Jude has endured, how bad could death be?A Little LifeThrough Oct. 29 at the Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 4 hours 10 minutes. More

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      in Television

      The One Where Matthew Perry Writes an Addiction Memoir

      by

      BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — When I pictured Matthew Perry, the actor frequently known as Chandler Bing, I saw him on the tangerine couch at Central Perk or seated on one of the twin recliners in the apartment he shared with Joey Tribbiani.In September, after arriving at his 6,300-square-foot rental house and being ushered through a driveway gate by his sober companion, I sat across from Perry, who perched on a white couch in a white living room, a world away from “Friends,” the NBC sitcom that aired for 10 seasons and catapulted all six of its stars into fame, fortune and infinite memes. Instead of the foosball table where Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross gathered, nudging each other through the first chapters of adulthood, Perry, 53, had a red felt pool table that looked untouched. There was plenty of light in the house, but not a lot of warmth.I have watched every episode of “Friends” three times — in prime time, on VHS and on Netflix — but I’m not sure I would have recognized Perry if I’d seen him on the street. If he was an ebullient terrier in those 1990s-era Must See TV days — as memorable for his full-body comedy as he was for the inflection that made “Can you BE any more [insert adjective]” the new “Gag me with a spoon” — he now seemed more like an apprehensive bulldog, with the forehead furrows to match.As his former co-star Lisa Kudrow confesses in the foreword to his memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” the first question people ask about “Friends” is often “How’s Matthew Perry doing?”Perry answers that question in the book, which Flatiron will publish on Nov. 1, by starkly chronicling his decades-long cage match with drinking and drug use. His addiction led to a medical odyssey in 2018 that included pneumonia, an exploded colon, a brief stint on life support, two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag, more than a dozen stomach surgeries, and the realization that, by the time he was 49, he had spent more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober living facilities.Most of this is covered in the prologue. At one point, he writes in a parenthetical, “Please note: for the next few paragraphs, this book will be a biography rather than a memoir because I was no longer there.”The book is full of painful revelations, including one about short-lived, alcohol-induced erectile dysfunction, and another in which Perry describes carrying his top teeth to the dentist in a baggie in his jeans pocket. (He bit into a slice of peanut butter toast and they fell out, he writes: “Yes, all of them.”)Perry said he had a moment after he recorded his audiobook when he thought, “Oh my God, what a terrible life this person has had!” Then he realized, “Wait a minute, it’s me! I’m talking about me.”Quietly and then, as he relaxed, at a volume that allowed me to stop worrying about my recording device, Perry settled into the conversation about his substance abuse. It started with Budweiser and Andrès Baby Duck wine when he was 14, then ballooned to include vodka by the quart, Vicodin, Xanax and OxyContin. He drew the line at heroin, a choice he credits with saving his life.“I would fake back injuries. I would fake migraine headaches. I had eight doctors going at the same time,” Perry said. “I would wake up and have to get 55 Vicodin that day, and figure out how to do it. When you’re a drug addict, it’s all math. I go to this place, and I need to take three. And then I go to this place, and I’m going to take five because I’m going to be there longer. It’s exhausting but you have to do it or you get very, very sick. I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer; I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It no longer is.”Perry said he had been clean for 18 months, which means that he was newly drug- and alcohol-free when the “Friends” reunion aired in May 2021.“I’ve probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober,” he estimated.Most addicts don’t have Perry’s resources. But they have what he called “the gift of anonymity,” while his bleakest moments have been photographed, chronicled and occasionally mocked. For the record, Perry isn’t a huge fan of secrecy as it pertains to Alcoholics Anonymous, where he sponsors three members. He explained: “It suggests that there’s a stigma and that we have to hide. This is not a popular opinion, by the way.”Perry’s demeanor brightened when we talked about pickleball, his latest obsession. He built a court at the house he’s moving into in the Palisades. He plays with friends and hired pros. He said, “I thought it would be a good idea, to pump myself up, to play pickleball before this interview, but basically I’m about to fall asleep in your lap.”So what inspired him to write a book?After his extended stay in a Los Angeles hospital, Perry started tapping out his life story on the Notes app on his phone. When he hit 110 pages, he showed them to his manager, who told him to keep going. He worked at his dining room table for about two hours a day, no more: “It was hard to face all this stuff.”Perry has written for television (“The Odd Couple,” “Mr. Sunshine”) before but, “writing a book I had not really thought of before,” he said. “Whenever I bumped into something that I didn’t really want to share, I would think of the people that I would be helping, and it would keep me going.”Over the course of the next hour, Perry returned to the idea of helping fellow addicts 15 times. The dedication at the front of the book reads: “For all of the sufferers out there. You know who you are.”He said: “It’s still a day-to-day process of getting better. Every day. It doesn’t end because I did this.”“I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center,” Perry writes.Danny Feld/Warner Bros.The memoir came together without a ghostwriter, which is rare for household-name authors. Megan Lynch, the senior vice president and publisher at Flatiron, said of the proposal she read last year: “There was a real voice to it. It was clear that he was going to share intimate details not just about his time on the show but about his entire life, and that felt revelatory. I’m not working on an assembly line of books by celebrities and it’s something as an editor I want to be very choosy about. For me, this really rose to a level that I do not ordinarily see.”Lynch, who watched “Friends” when she was 14 and credits it with providing a vision for a future life in New York City, added, “Unlike any celebrity that I think anyone has ever worked with, Matthew turned in his manuscript ahead of the deadline.”Although Perry hopes that “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” will eventually be shelved in the self-help section of bookstores, “Friends” fans will find poignant nuggets in its pages. Perry writes gratefully and glowingly of the 10 seasons he and his co-stars worked together, earning $1 million per episode at their peak.He recalls the time Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer and said, “in a kind of weird but loving way,” that the group knew he was drinking again. “‘We can smell it,’” she said — and, he writes, “the plural ‘we’ hits me like a sledgehammer.” Another time, the cast confronted him in his dressing room.Perry also drops a sad bombshell about his onscreen wedding: “I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center — at the height of my highest point in ‘Friends,’ the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician.”In a phone interview, Kudrow said: “It’s a hideous disease, and he has a tough version of it. What’s not changing is his will to keep going, keep fighting and keep living.”She added: “I love Matthew a lot. We’re part of a family. I’m basically ending this with ‘I’ll be there for you’ [the ‘Friends’ theme song], but it’s true. I’ll always be there for him.”Perry’s childhood friends Christopher and Brian Murray echoed this sentiment. “He’s gone through more than any human being I know and he’s come out on the good side of it,” said Brian, the older of the two brothers who have known Perry since first grade. Riding bikes around their rural corner of Ottawa, the trio would belt out the theme song from “The Rockford Files” and rib one another in the cadence that Perry later immortalized on “Friends.”“A lot of it was tough to understand,” Christopher said. “You wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Fundamentally, his personality and his heart are absolutely in the same place they were when he was a kid.”“Alcohol really did save me for a while,” Perry said. “Then it didn’t. It’s like your best friend turns to you and goes, Now I’m going to kill you. And then you raise your hand and say, I need help here.”Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesFailed relationships were among the hardest things to write about, Perry said (“I’m lonely, but there’s a couple of people on the payroll to keep me safe”), though he hopes to marry and have children in the future. “I think I’d be a great father,” he said.Eighteen years after “Friends” aired its last episode, Perry is tickled by its staying power, and its popularity among the children of its original viewers. “There are 15-year-old people wandering around, seeing me and wondering why I look so old,” he said.When I mentioned I’d seen a young woman in my hotel gym wearing a “Friends” sweatshirt — you rarely see merch from, say, “E.R.,” which capped off NBC’s Thursday night lineup in the ’90s — he laughed. “You should set me up with that girl,” he said. “Just say, I know this guy, he’s as single as they come.”Perry’s candid, darkly funny book now earns him an honorary folding chair — and shelf space — beside David Carr, Caroline Knapp, Leslie Jamison, Nic Sheff, Sarah Hepola and other authors who have explored the minute-to-minute, tooth-and-nail skirmish of recovery.“There is a hell,” Perry writes. “Don’t let anyone tell you different. I’ve been there; it exists; end of discussion.”He said, “Now I feel better because it’s out. It’s out on a piece of paper. The ‘why’ I’m still alive is definitely in the area of helping people.” More

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      in Movies

      Review: In This ‘Wuthering Heights,’ Music, Moors and Untamed Spirits

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      Emma Rice’s glorious stage adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel is a feat of storytelling, with a singing and dancing chorus embodying the moors.With a whip in one hand and a wind-bent tree in the other, the barefoot girl makes a taunting entrance, radiating caprice like some malicious sprite. This is Catherine Earnshaw, wild thing of Wuthering Heights, and if she is faintly ridiculous in her menace, it is menace nonetheless.Landing a first impression that distills the essence of a character is a rare art, and one of many things that the quick-witted, nimble-bodied company of Wise Children’s wondrous “Wuthering Heights” does exceptionally well. Adapted by the British director Emma Rice from Emily Brontë’s 19th-century novel, this music-filled version is an embrace, an envelopment: a feat of storytelling that wraps itself around the audience, pulling us into its silliness and sorrow.As besotted with the gale-tossed Yorkshire moors as Catherine and her tormented Heathcliff ever were, it makes that landscape a playground of the imagination, pausing every so often to ensure — in a friendly, tongue-in-cheek fashion — that we’re following along. Because as a baffled stranger says, when he bumbles into this multi-household, multigenerational saga, “Everyone’s related, all the names sound the same.”Well, yes, but this is a show so devoted to clarity that it helps us keep track of each fresh death (and goodness, these people die at an alarming rate) by chalking that character’s name on a blackboard the size of a small tombstone and walking it slowly across the stage. That’s also our clue that the next time we see the actor whose character has died, that cast member will most likely be playing someone else — possibly the dead person’s child.Also, the moors in this production at St. Ann’s Warehouse, performed last winter at the National Theater in London, are not just the locale, which Vicki Mortimer’s rough wooden set suggests mainly with the low gray clouds moving past on an upstage screen. (Video design is by Simon Baker.) The moors are embodied, too, by a chorus that sings, dances and possesses opinions — particularly the Leader of the Yorkshire Moors (a wonderful Nandi Bhebhe), who wears a headdress of brambly magnificence and takes on some of the vital background-providing function that the old family retainer Ellen has in the novel.Anyway, no need to brush up on your Brontë. You’ll be fine.Foreground from left: Liam Tamne, Tama Phethean and McCormick.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the heart of it all are Catherine and Heathcliff, two halves of the same soul who are just scamps when her father finds little Heathcliff parentless on the Liverpool docks and brings him home to join the family at Wuthering Heights. Catherine’s older brother, Hindley, takes an instant loathing to the newcomer and treats him viciously, feeling his birthright threatened by the presence of this boy whose skin is darker than his.“Gypsy,” Hindley calls Heathcliff, and pummels him whenever he gets the chance.For Catherine, Heathcliff is a best friend and partner in mischief. Their youngest selves are played initially by puppets, then seamlessly succeeded by the adult actors Lucy McCormick and Liam Tamne, who bring a roiling chemistry to what will become Catherine and Heathcliff’s desperate mutual obsession. But as they gambol about the moors in those early years, it’s the joy they take in each other, and the freedom they feel together, that forms a bond so unbreakable it transcends death.Like the other inhabitants of Wuthering Heights and the neighboring estate Thrushcross Grange — home of the laughably effete Linton siblings, Edgar (Sam Archer) and Isabella (Katy Owen, the show’s brilliant comic powerhouse) — Catherine and Heathcliff are formed and deformed by their environment, a place where it’s easy to be solitary, to nurse a grudge, to wreak revenge.As beastly as Catherine generally is, and as enormous as her eventual betrayal of Heathcliff is, it’s the men who, beginning as boys, do great violence to one another, both physical and psychic, and spend their lives perpetuating it. Heathcliff, of course, is the prime example, growing from an ingenuous child into a glowering adult who spins all the considerable evil ever done to him — much of it based on race and class — into justification for his long game of retribution.From left: McCormick, Tamne, Phethean and Katy Owen, a font of mirth in a variety of characters.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet Rice — a longtime St. Ann’s favorite for productions including “Brief Encounter” and “Tristan & Yseult” — makes certain that this beguiling “Wuthering Heights” is no carnival of gloom. Owen, especially, is a font of mirth, not only as Isabella but also as her extravagantly spoiled son, Little Linton, a creature so enfeebled by his cosseted upbringing that he’s practically boneless. Frances (Eleanor Sutton), the fragile nitwit who has the poor taste to marry Catherine’s brother, Hindley (Tama Phethean), is also a delicious source of comedy — as are assorted bitey dogs: puppets made of skulls on scythes.Hindley has kindness solely for Frances, and when she dies he crumbles squalidly. Yet as cruel and falling-down drunk as Phethean is as Hindley, he is equally gentle — which is not to say saintly — as Hindley’s son, Hareton, who has been beaten down by both his father and Heathcliff, but chooses not to emulate them by targeting victims of his own. It is a gorgeous performance, its agility and tenderness of a piece with this production’s.Stalked by Catherine’s perambulating ghost, and infused with live music by Ian Ross that feels somehow like earth and air, this is a show with a gloriously untamed spirit. On this first stop on its American tour, it is better — deeper and sexier — than the excellent version I saw in London early this year.At nearly three hours, including the intermission, it asks an investment of time that’s absolutely worth it. I, for one, want to go again.Wuthering HeightsThrough Nov. 6 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More