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      in Television

      Ralph Macchio Will Always Be ‘The Karate Kid.’ He’s Finally Fine With That.

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      His new memoir, “Waxing On,” sees the ’80s star making peace with the role that has brought him back into circulation thanks to “Cobra Kai.”Playing Daniel LaRusso in “The Karate Kid” made Ralph Macchio famous for life. For decades, people have been telling him where they were when they saw the 1984 popcorn flick or how its underdog story affected them.Such all-encompassing fame, however, came with a downside.As he tried to move on in his acting career, he couldn’t quite leave the role behind. Sometimes, he said, he even felt stifled by it, no longer the freewheeling but vulnerable 22-year-old whose character in the movie learned the importance of balance, in life and in martial arts.Nearly four decades later, he has written a memoir, “Waxing On: The Karate Kid and Me,” about the making of the movie, and how it has shaped — and continues to shape — his life.The book is reassuringly free of scandal or self-destructive behavior, but there’s a palpable ambivalence that runs through its 241 pages, though ultimately the tone bends toward optimism.Macchio as Daniel LaRusso in the first film, a hit that spawned two sequels.Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionHaving wrapped his fifth season reprising the role in “Cobra Kai,” Netflix’s surprisingly popular sequel series, Macchio seems to have made peace with, and even embraced, what he calls “the wonderful gift.”Looking back, he writes, the original film is “a prime example of when Hollywood gets it all right. It teaches and inspires through pure entertainment.”On a sunny rooftop terrace in Lower Manhattan one recent morning, Macchio — a not at all 60-looking 60, even with his sunglasses off — displayed the natural relatability that has been a hallmark of his career. It’s something he shares with Daniel LaRusso, “the every-kid next door,” he explained, who “had no business winning anything.”Growing up on Long Island, Macchio would watch MGM movie musicals with his mom. Soon enough, he was taking tap-dancing lessons in between Little League games and working Saturdays with his dad. (His brother took more to the family laundromat and pump-truck businesses.)Along with roles in school plays and dance recitals, Macchio started auditioning for commercials, leading to two Bubble Yum spots. After his first movie, “Up the Academy,” and a one-season stint on ABC’s “Eight Is Enough,” he landed the career-changing role of the “lost puppy” Johnny Cade, opposite his fellow teen idols C. Thomas Howell and Matt Dillon, in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Outsiders.”Back home, Macchio, then 21, got called for another audition. The screenplay was based on an article about a bullied kid who learned martial arts for self-defense. It was set to be directed by John G. Avildsen, who had made the underdog classic “Rocky.”“I recall connecting to the father-and-son elements and heart in the story right off the bat,” Macchio writes of his first reading of the screenplay. But he “found some of the high school story line characters a bit corny and stereotyped.”One other thing bothered him: the title. He thought it sounded ridiculous. “I mean, can you imagine?” he writes. “If I ever did get this part and the movie hit, I would have to carry this label for the rest of my life!”Macchio, right, with C. Thomas Howell in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film “The Outsiders.”Warner Home VideoTo Robert Mark Kamen, who wrote the movie’s screenplay, Macchio was the natural choice: He mixed a “pugnacious attitude” with emotional vulnerability.“He was sharp. He was smart,” Kamen said in a phone interview. “And if he got in a fight, he had nothing to back it up but being a wise guy. It was exactly who the character was.”Then the ’80s started tilting toward the ’90s. Macchio felt he was aging out of the character, but the character wasn’t aging out of him — at least as far as the entertainment industry was concerned.In 1986, with “The Karate Kid Part II” in theaters and a third movie on the horizon, Macchio got a chance to stretch, as the struggling son of the drug dealer played by Robert De Niro in the Broadway drama “Cuba and His Teddy Bear.”“It was all moving pretty fast,” he recalled in the interview. “I just wish I soaked it in a little more. Here I am, toe to toe with De Niro every night.”In a phone interview, De Niro said he admired Macchio’s levelheadedness and work ethic. It was “easy to like him personally, and then also relate to him in what we were doing,” he said. “We had something already to work off.”Macchio with Burt Young, left, and Robert DeNiro in a scene from the play “Cuba and His Teddy Bear.”Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsBut behind the scenes, Macchio’s personal frustrations were mounting — moments that are among the book’s most revealing.One night the famed film director Sidney Lumet was in the audience. Backstage after the performance, Lumet said he was planning a film to be called “Running on Empty,” and was interested in him playing “a significant role” in it, Macchio recalls in the book.The problem was that the time Lumet was slated to shoot “Running on Empty” for one studio directly conflicted with the production schedule for “The Karate Kid Part III” at another.“The ‘Running on Empty’ ship was set to sail,” Macchio writes, “and I was consigned back to my original port of call.” (River Phoenix was nominated for an Oscar in the part.)On another night, Warren Beatty was the surprise visitor to Macchio’s dressing room. The young actor shared his frustrations; Beatty counseled him, suggesting he find balance between his commercial successes and his other ambitions. “Don’t look down on those movies,” Macchio writes, recalling what Beatty said. “You need that as much as you want this (meaning the De Niro play).”One bright spot was his being cast in 1992’s “My Cousin Vinny,” alongside Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei. Macchio’s daughter was born that same year, and his son would arrive three years later.In “Cobra Kai,” Macchio plays a grown Daniel LaRusso, who meets up again with a former nemesis, portrayed by Yuji Okumoto.NetflixStill, he writes of the ’90s, when “planning the growth of our family on Long Island … my career had little to no growth of its own. The future was looming and unknown, and the unknown was daunting to me.”His agents floated the idea of doing a television series, but the development deal only led to a few episodes, never to be aired. Macchio then turned to making short films and writing screenplays.“I would draw from the lessons that I had learned from the Avildsens and Coppolas of the world,” he writes. “I kept myself creatively fulfilled and thriving during those leaner acting years. I was finding the balance in work and family.”Then, in 2018, came “Cobra Kai,” the vision of the creators Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald and Hayden Schlossberg.Macchio would play Daniel LaRusso once again, except this time he’d be a middle-aged family man, though still open to a rivalry with Johnny Lawrence and the Cobra Kai dojo, albeit one with a bit more complexity this time.Signing Macchio on took some persuading.“I understood where I fit in the construct of ‘Cobra Kai’ and the storytelling,” he said. “If the show bombed and tanked, I’d probably say, you know, I was right. I was worried about that. … But everything happened right.”“The future was looming and unknown, and the unknown was daunting to me,” Macchio writes of his post- “Karate Kid” fortunes. Nearly three decades later came “Cobra Kai.”Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesThe new series, he said, understands what made “The Karate Kid” such a favorite: “Fathers and sons, bullying, redemption, overcoming the obstacles, finding your way, falling forward, skinning your knees, scraping your hands, getting up, figuring it out.”In the book, Macchio acknowledges that in “Cobra Kai” “the tone at times is different,” but “a common ground it shares with the movie is in its heart.” It’s that kind of emotional openness the screenwriter, Kamen, saw in the actor decades ago. After the interview was over, Macchio stepped into the elevator, heading to the building’s lobby. Others got in as well. One recognized him, and asked for a picture.“I’m just the elevator guy,” he said, with a grin. More

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      in Theater

      Exploring James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry’s Friendship

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      The acclaimed writers are communing once again in productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” and “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.James Baldwin recalled first meeting Lorraine Hansberry in 1958 at the Actors Studio in Manhattan after a workshop production of “Giovanni’s Room,” a play based on his novel of the same name. The “biggest names in American theater” were there, he noted, and gave their critiques of the play. But then he locked eyes with a woman yet-unknown to the theater establishment who articulated a full appreciation of him and his work. Of that encounter, Baldwin wrote: “She talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten.”For the next seven years, Hansberry and Baldwin would continue to find moments of deep understanding, forging a relationship even though they often did not live in the same place. But their storied friendship was cut short by Hansberry’s untimely death at the age of 34 in 1965.This fall the two writers are communing once again at the Public Theater and, perhaps, finishing a few conversations, with productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” created by and co-produced with the Elevator Repair Service, and a revival of Hansberry’s classic play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara.From left: John Clay III, Paige Gilbert and Tonya Pinkins in Robert O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” running through Oct. 23, presents a re-enactment of a 1965 debate between Baldwin, the writer and civil rights activist, and William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative founder of National Review. The two men argued the motion, “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.”The play provides a historical touch point for our fractious political present. The director John Collins said: “I think there are several ways to frame why you should listen to those you disagree with, and sometimes it is because one should allow for the possibilities that the people you don’t agree with might have something intelligent and worthwhile to say. The other reason, though, is to really understand the seriousness, and sometimes the danger, of these other arguments.”Drawing verbatim from the debate transcript, the play ends with an imagined conversation between Baldwin and Hansberry that was inspired by a 1961 discussion about Black Americans in culture. (In addition to Baldwin and Hansberry, the other participants included the essayist and publisher Emile Capouya, the journalist and social commentator Nat Hentoff, the poet Langston Hughes and the writer and critic Alfred Kazin.) While they focused primarily on the question of Black writers in American literature, they also considered the status of Black Americans.On the subject of crafting Black characters, Baldwin explained, “Faulkner has never sat in a Negro kitchen while the Negroes were talking about him, but we have been sitting around for generations, in kitchens and everywhere else, while everybody talks about us, and this creates a very great difference.”Hansberry confirmed, “Which is a different relationship, because the employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house.” She continued as Baldwin and the rest of the room erupted in laughter, “We have been washing everybody’s underwear for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean.” The recording captures Baldwin and Hansberry’s intimacy and the joy they felt in each other’s company.Imani Perry, the Princeton University professor whose books include “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry,” describes theirs as “an intimate intellectual companionship. They are both deeply concerned with Black life and regular Black folks’ lives, and also think about the politics of race and its depiction in the public arena.”“He trusted her artistically, which is a big deal, for someone who is his junior, younger than him, and also when they became friends, he had a larger visible platform,” Perry said of Baldwin, who was 34 when he met a 28-year-old Hansberry. “It was a beautifully intimate friendship. It’s the kind of thing that I think every person who’s either an artist or intellectual, and certainly a person who’s both, yearns for.”Greig Sargeant as James Baldwin and Daphne Gaines as Lorraine Hansberry in the Elevator Repair Service’s production of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” at the Public Theater.Richard Termine for The New York TimesGreig Sargeant, who plays Baldwin and conceived the play, notes that Elevator Repair Service wanted to show the public and private Baldwin. “We did some research,” he said, “and one of the things that we found was that article ‘Sweet Lorraine,’” the essay Baldwin wrote to eulogize his dear friend. In writing the last scene of the play, Sargeant and April Matthis, who originated the Hansberry role, consulted numerous essays, interviews and speeches. Baldwin and Hansberry “sharpen each other by having these debates,” Matthis said, “and it’s always loving, and it’s all meant to hold each other to account with so much love.”The Public Theater’s fall season also includes a revival of Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a Black family’s struggles to achieve their dreams within the constraints of a segregated America. The drama, directed by Robert O’Hara and opening on Oct. 19, centers on the Youngers and their decision to buy a house in a white neighborhood in Chicago. It emphasizes the impact of desegregation.To drive home this point, O’Hara decided to include a scene with a neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, that is usually cut from productions. “We know where they’re moving in many ways is more dangerous than where they were living,” he said. “I love the scene where Mrs. Johnson says she’s for ‘people pushing out.’ And then she says, but you might get bombed. She’s a harbinger of what the Youngers will face in suburban white America.”Ahead of the play’s historic premiere on Broadway (it was the first written by a Black woman to be produced there), Hansberry and Baldwin reunited in Philadelphia for its run at the Walnut Street Theater. Sargeant noted, “I read an article once where Baldwin said that the great thing about going to see ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ was that he had never seen so many Black people in the audience,” because “Black people ignored the theater because the theater ignored them.”“So now the good thing about being in 2022,” he added, “is that we have an institution that is making an effort to make positive changes for the future, having us both there at the same time, highlighting the relationship between Baldwin and Hansberry.”One hears in both O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” a longing for missed conversations. “Baldwin” offers trenchant examinations of the American condition, and “Raisin” questions the American dream. “Lorraine Hansberry had this incredible, fantastic, lightning bolt of a play, and then she died so early,” O’Hara said. She did not live to see the Black power movement, or the queer women of color who led third-wave feminism. O’Hara continued, “Imagine what she would have been able to do if she were able to dream longer with us, and that’s what’s exciting, we can now acknowledge her queerness.”Producing the play in 2022, O’Hara anticipates the impact of the civil rights movement in the late 20th century, a period that Baldwin lived through and wrote about. He continued, “Doing it downtown, we can investigate some of the more difficult crevices.”The production takes on substance abuse, depression, sexism, classism, and the virulent racism that shaped mid-20th-century American society and continues to inform our own. O’Hara said his take on the American classic draws from his general approach to making art. “I live by this tenet as an artist and a human being that I will not be limited by your imagination,” he said. “Because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean that it’s unimaginable.” Similar to Baldwin and Hansberry’s exchanges, O’Hara said, “I bring a cavalcade of interesting and exciting people around me to push me into the future.”He noted the enduring importance of Hansberry’s classic and, similar to “Baldwin and Buckley,” how it anticipates our present. “I think of it as a tragedy in hindsight,” O’Hara said. “There’s uplift in the play of them wanting to move out of where they are. But I don’t want us to get lost in the glorious ending. They are moving into the white suburbs in 1959 Chicago. I just think about King saying that Chicago was more dangerous and more racist than the South.”These two works feature questions not only about the status of America but also the theater by remembering two iconic American artists. Baldwin and Hansberry challenge, as O’Hara noted, the idea that “there’s one type of Black story. There’s one type of reality that fits Blackness.” The story contains many more chapters waiting to be written. More

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      in Television

      Penn Jillette Lives on Hot Baths and Cold Watermelon

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      The magician and author of the new novel, “Random,” says whether he’s writing fiction or doing tricks, he’s always telling a story.Penn Jillette keeps files on his computer for magic tricks and others for fiction, but he keeps them together and the distinction between them is not always clear. He once wrote a short story, for example, that his longtime partner, Teller, thought would make a good magic trick, so they turned it into a bit called King of Animal Traps.“The first thing I wanted to be was a writer,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I think if you got either Teller or I to be completely honest, we would probably tell you that what we’re doing in the Penn & Teller show is writing.”Jillette’s latest novel, “Random,” is about a young man who inherits his father’s crushing debt to a loan shark and turns to dice — and other dangerous measures — to dig himself out. That the dice bring him luck sends him a new philosophy of leaning decisions both big and small up to chance.Whether he’s writing a novel or writing a bit, Jillette said, he’s always trying to tell a story.“My happiest moments are Teller and I getting together and figuring out what we want to say, what we’re feeling with a trick, with a bit, and to figure out how to do that,” he said. “Now, I don’t want to lie and say I don’t love being onstage — I love it, and I love the applause, and I love the laughs — that is the thing I like most in the world, other than putting the stuff together that I’m going to put onstage. Writing fiction feels like very much the same thing.”Here, the author, magician and co-star of the CW’s “Penn & Teller: Fool Us,” talks about how he takes his watermelon, why he prefers skepticism to cynicism and how he convinced Teller to pay for half his new bass. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Too Hot Baths Every night I take a bath that’s so hot that I come very close to passing out — and I use scented oil, the whole thing is done as girly as possible. And I read on my Kindle. I’m trying to learn Spanish, so I read Spanish for at least a half an hour, and then I read in English for another half an hour.2. Too Cold Watermelon I lost a lot of weight a few years ago. One of the ways I keep the weight off is by eating watermelon. It seems you can eat more watermelon than any other food and it still feels good and it still tastes good. The secret is cutting it up and getting it super cold so that it almost hurts your teeth.3. Lava Lamps I always go back and forth: Am I a beatnik? Am I a hippie? I know I’m one of the two, and I know that no alcohol gets in the way of me being a beatnik, and no drugs get in the way of me being a hippie. I think I own 20 lava lamps. They’re in every room of my house. And I like to look at them and pretend, even though I’ve never been high, that I am high.4. Tony Fitzpatrick I study music rather extensively because it’s unnatural to me. And that is what fascinates me about it. I’m very bad with visual stuff, too, so I have artwork all over my house to try to drill it into my head why it’s beautiful. One of my favorite artists is Tony Fitzpatrick out of Chicago. I have his etching up all over the house.5. Ray Brown There are so many great bass players, but Ray Brown had that sound and that solidity and that power. He’s an inspiration and he’s one of my ways into jazz. I love his recording of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” with fellow bassists John Clayton and Christian McBride.6. Skepticism, Not Cynicism I have fought my whole life to not be cynical, but to be skeptical. You could have many minutes of arguments between me and Bill Maher over why cynicism is bad and skepticism is good. Cynicism is attributing the worst motives to people. Skepticism is looking for the truth.7. Tiny Tim On a wall in my home, I have Tiny Tim’s costume that he wore for most of his career, the ukulele that he played for most of his career and his shoes. I love the fact that a person came along who was so honest that cynicism could not live within him. Some of the most cynical people who have ever lived — Bing Crosby, Johnny Carson, John Lennon, Howard Stern, Frank Sinatra — in the presence of Tiny Tim, they completely broke down.8. Word Processors I wanted to be a writer so badly. My mom taught me to type and I was a very good typist, but I still made mistakes and I’m a really bad speller. I finally bought a computer after Teller and I had our show Off Broadway, and within 24 hours of getting a computer, I wrote two stories that were published. I am sitting in front of the most powerful computer Mac has to offer — I could edit “Avatar” on it — but 95 percent of what I do is word processing.9. Paul Toenniges Double Bass I play the bass for an hour before Penn & Teller shows. A very good bass player named Alex Frank told me I was better than the bass I was playing. He found a bass for me that was made by a man named Paul Toenniges. He said it was very expensive but also the best bass he’d ever played — it had been owned by the late bassist Dave Stone. I emailed Teller to see if he thought I should buy it. Because the way our taxes are structured, he’d pay for half of it. The email came back within a minute and said: “We never economize on our tools. Buy it.” I hadn’t even told him the price.10. Bob Dylan I think it is possible that I’ve listened to Bob Dylan every day for the past 52 years. Bob Dylan is something we encounter very rarely, which is incredible skill, coupled with a wildness of spirit. All you’ve got to do is see a Paul McCartney concert and a Bob Dylan concert. Paul McCartney, you know exactly what you’re going to get. Bob Dylan? You have no idea. More

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      in Music

      ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’: Bringing Loretta Lynn’s Story to Life

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      The 1976 book (and its 1980 film adaptation) helped the world see the country star’s remarkable resilience. The writer who worked by her side remembers his one-of-a-kind collaborator.When I was helping Loretta Lynn with her book, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” I hung around backstage while she performed. Sometimes she would call me out onstage and introduce me — “Here’s George, he’s my writer.” (In her Appalachian twang, it came out “rah-ter.”)I like to profess that I was not so much her writer as her stenographer. She would chatter away, whatever was on her mind, and usually it was pertinent, part of the emerging autobiography. She was a songwriter, who saw life in snappy couplets, most of them taken from her head-of-the-holler upbringing and later her tumultuous marriage with Oliver Vanetta Lynn Jr. (His nickname, Mooney, came from his past delivering moonshine, and maybe sipping some of the product.)I had never written a book with somebody else, but I used my reporting and writing skills, with considerable help from Loretta’s memory and storytelling talents in the verbal Appalachian tradition. We’d do most of the talking in her motel, when she summoned me sometime before noon, and she usually had her own agenda. Tucked into the motel bed, sometimes she would be focused on something that had gone right or wrong in the show the night before, or family matters. But she was usually businesslike, respectful of the visitor.One day she wanted to talk about her late father, Melvin (Ted) Webb, who loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt for helping Appalachian people in the Depression. “Daddy thought he hung the moon,” she said. Then she would say, “George, you write a few things about FDR.” Yes, ma’am.She accepted me into her world. She knew I was a New York Times national correspondent based in Louisville, Ky., covering Appalachia. I wore jeans, had a beard and hair near my shoulders, and loved the ham and biscuits her fans sent into the bus. I had been introduced to country music in summers way upstate New York, where you could get the radio station WWVA — Hank Williams or Kitty Wells — clear as a bell from West Virginia.The writer’s wife, Marianne Vecsey, pushed for the book’s cover to feature a photo of Lynn in a high-neck Victorian dress.J.P. Roth CollectionBut I first heard Loretta in 1967, in the good old days when New York City had a country station. One day it played “Sweet Thang,” her duet with Ernest Tubb. It was written by Nat Stuckey, but pretty much told the story of Loretta and Mooney’s life.The man sings how he “slipped out of the house about sundown,” and his wife traces him down to the bar, “yellin’ loud enough to wake the dead.” Then Loretta sings, in an ominous feline yowl: “Well … has anybody here seen Sweet Thang?” The heart and soul of country music — cheatin’ songs. Or, at least his and hers. Even coming from the radio or the jukebox, her voice cut through the ozone, every inflection proclaiming, “This lady is different.”Now, in 1970 I was moving to Loretta Lynn’s home state of Kentucky. I started at the Times as a sportswriter but leaped at the offer from great Times editors Gene Roberts and Dave Jones to go cover Appalachia, I had read the book “Night Comes to the Cumberlands” by the activist lawyer Harry Caudill of Whitesburg, Ky., not far from Loretta’s Van Lear, and I wanted to follow up on Caudill’s visions.On Dec. 30, 1970, I happened to be an hour away from the horrible coal-mine explosion in Hyden. A few months later, I learned that Loretta Lynn had taken her band off the road to play a concert in Louisville for the benefit of the Hyden survivors.In the fall of 1972, I arranged an interview with Loretta in Nashville the morning after she became the first woman to win entertainer of the year at the Country Music Awards. By now country music was fused into my internal mission — telling the story of the mountains, the people, the language, the beliefs. I wanted to do right for Appalachia.The first interview was like all the ones that followed, except that she was exhausted from the awards ceremony and getting up early to be on a morning TV show. But she had time for me, a stranger. Her manager David Skepner often said, “Loretta never met a stranger,” which I would see over and over again.Loretta escorted me into her world — “mah rah-ter, George” — and I began to feel at home.I became friendly with Skepner, a Beverly Hills guy, now living in Nashville, who doubled as her bodyguard. As a city boy, I had to get used to him depositing his big iron on the windowsill when we were sitting in Loretta’s room. (“David, could you put your ball cap over the pistol, and point it toward the window?” I would ask.)I became friendly with the fans, so many of them women — particularly the Johnson sisters from Colorado, a three-person fan club — Loudilla was the leader; Kay was the heart; and Loretta Johnson was the gall.One time at a picnic, Loretta Johnson was dishing out pie, pecan, I think it was, and when I said please, she slopped it into the palm of my hand. Laughs all around. For many years, Loretta Lynn would bring up the look on my face as I lapped up the bits of pecan pie. My initiation. Welcome to the country.Mooney Lynn was my linchpin, caring for their twins at the ranch but sometimes back on the road. I liked him immensely, but then again, I wasn’t married to him. One day, sitting around their motel room, I asked Mooney and Loretta about his image, the source for the songs Loretta wrote and sang.I can still picture Mooney saying, “Hell’s bells, if it’s true, write it.”That day, the book got even better.(They never told me that Loretta had lopped three years off her age when she started performing. She said she had been 13 when she got married, when in fact she had been 16. It came out long after the book and the paperback and the movie. I never got to ask why they made her sound so young.)One other thing about the book: my wife, Marianne Vecsey, an artist, had seen a glamour photo of Loretta in a long, high-neck, frilly, white Victorian dress, and she told Bernard Geis, the publisher, that any woman would want to look at that photo. The editors, being guys, dawdled a bit, but eventually put the color photo on the front cover.When the book came out, the editors heard reports that ladies who lunch — on Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue or Michigan Ave. — were picking up the book, and buying it, and buying it.Loretta and Mooney trusted me to get it right. I was her “rah-ter,” but the pretty lady in the frilly dress had put herself into the project the way she wrote songs. It’s her book. More

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      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘The Whalebone Theatre,’ by Joanna Quinn

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      Joanna Quinn’s “The Whalebone Theatre” breathlessly follows a trio of British youngsters from frolics on the beach to service and spycraft.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE, by Joanna QuinnWhales loom large not just in the ocean but in landlocked imaginations: these mysterious mammals, gentle but fearsome, threatened and threatening, almost unfathomably enormous. So like us with their warm blood and communication skills, and yet so not.You might never have cracked Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and still use the phrase “great white whale” to mean an obsessive but elusive goal. The massive model in the Museum of Natural History was immortalized further by Noah Baumbach in “The Squid and the Whale.” Don’t forget Carvel’s Fudgie, the ’70s sheet cake that won’t quit. And one of the most appealing characters in Lidia Yuknavitch’s recent novel “Thrust” was the wearily maternal whale who helped out the human protagonist.The 60-foot-long, seven-foot-tall creature that appears in Joanna Quinn’s first novel, “The Whalebone Theatre,” is, alas, D.O.A., found beached on the coast of Dorset, England, by a 12-year-old named Cristabel, with the all-too-apt surname Seagrave. She quickly pierces her discovery with a homemade flagpole fluttering with the family coat of arms and shouts, “A mighty leviathan, I have claimed it,” to amused fishermen in the vicinity.Taking up toy weapons and disdainful of marriage plots, Cristabel is outlined in the endearing if slightly stock shape of unconventional heroine. Having wondered, “Why aren’t there interesting girls in the stories?” while being read the “Iliad” by Maudie, the kitchen maid who for a time shares her attic bedroom, she is determined, perhaps a little overdetermined, to write her own.She and her younger half sibling, Flossie (nicknamed “the Veg” for an indelicate countenance), and cousin Digby, whom she treasures as a brother, circumvent the laws about “fishes royal” belonging to the king, and will make of the whale skeleton a giant play space: to stage actual plays, the greatest hits of Shakespeare’s catalog, with help from the bohemian adults visiting Chilcombe, the estate where they live. Quinn has said in interviews she got the idea of the skeleton set from a Kate Bush concert.She is being eagerly interviewed because “The Whalebone Theatre,” a generous slab of historical fiction cut from the same crumbling stone as Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “The Cazalet Chronicles,” is a big hit in England. Centered on imperiled aristocracy during the well-trod period of 1919-45, it’s also been compared (inevitably, and to Quinn’s dismay) to “Downton Abbey,” Chilcombe being almost a character in its own right. I was reminded further, at least during its delightful first third, of Dodie Smith’s cult classic “I Capture the Castle” and of a lesser-known work by the prolific children’s book author Noel Streatfeild, “The Growing Summer,” in which four siblings are sent to live with their eccentric aunt in Ireland.Shimmeringly if sometimes a little preciously, Quinn depicts the strange, resourceful magic that can be conjured by a cluster of children when they’re neglected by selfish adults. Overseen by a vague French governess, they educate themselves with books stolen from the study, by eavesdropping from cloakrooms on drunken dinner parties and by running around with young “savages” they encounter scuttling naked around the shore, the progeny of Taras, a daring Russian artist.We first meet Cristabel when she is just 3, finding the taste of snow “disappointingly nothingy.” Her mother died in childbirth and her new stepmother, Rosalind, is vain, beautiful and cold like the snow, though not evil. Her stolid father, Jasper — still mourning his late wife, who haunts the ancestral pile like a more benign Rebecca de Winter — will soon be dead as well, tumbled from a horse (of course), his dashing younger brother, Willoughby, stepping easily into his shoes.The new couple will entertain a parade of international visitors of which Taras is the most vivid and voluble, enjoying boozy picnics by the sea and shopping expeditions — at least until it’s time to fight the Nazis. “We don’t have a choice,” Willoughby tells Rosalind, crackling his newspaper, when the doted-upon Digby enlists. “Surely they had a choice. They always had a choice,” she thinks, suspended in the recent past. “They chose extravagantly and at length. Fabrics, perfumes, tables in restaurants.”On atmospherics, “The Whalebone Theatre” is absolute aces, to borrow the patois of the Americans who drop in for cultural contrast, new-moneyed and loud. Reading it is like plunging into a tub of clotted cream while (or whilst) enrobed in silk eau-de-Nil beach pajamas. You’ll immediately want to change your font to Garamond and start saying things like “Toodle-pip, darlings!” The weather, whether misty or stormy, dappling sunshine or “moonlight falling through the window like an invitation,” is consistently impressive.Quinn is an energetic narrative seamstress. Into her giant tapestry she stitches in letters, lists, scrapbook entries, dramatic dialogue, Maudie’s sexually adventuresome diary entries and the occasional piece of concrete poetry. All of this is lovely and unforced.The novel begins to veer off the rails, however, when a grown Cristabel, “sick of pushing tiddlywinks about” as a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, becomes a secret agent, wrestling down an SS officer with the sudden physical dexterity of Angelina Jolie in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” The theater of childhood has become, yes, the theater of war. Flossie joins the Women’s Land Army, remaining at Chilcombe, where the finances have become predictably shaky, skinny-dipping with a German prisoner of war as vegetables fill their onetime proscenium. Maudie writes of sleeping with a Black soldier who plays her Billie Holiday (“he calls me a tall drink of water, but he is a river and I will lay myself along him”). Like many characters, even the older principals, even the poor whale, he is just passing through.Gorgeous and a little breathless, with luscious food scenes from beginning to end — enough cake and pudding for a thousand Carvels — “The Whalebone Theatre” could have been tighter corseted. But Quinn’s imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold, boding more commanding work to come.THE WHALEBONE THEATRE | By Joanna Quinn | 576 pp. | Knopf | $29 More

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      In ‘Joyce’s Women,’ 2 Great Irish Writers Square Up

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      Edna O’Brien’s latest stage work, at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, imagines the inner lives of important female figures around James Joyce.DUBLIN — Toward the end of “Joyce’s Women,” the Irish writer Edna O’Brien’s ninth work for the stage, handwritten letters rain down from the ceiling and the scene is interrupted by anonymous voices. One calls James Joyce’s writing “beyond human comprehension.” Another labels it “ejaculatory smut.” Finally a man’s voice, unseen, disembodied, asks a question: “Who owns James Joyce?”Running through Oct. 15 at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, the play addresses the personal life of an author banned in his time but celebrated today, whose works are synonymous with Dublin, but who fled the city as a young man. It’s the product of O’Brien’s lifelong fascination with Joyce, her “ultimate hero” and the subject of her 1999 biography, “James Joyce.”In “Joyce’s Women,” we see the author through the eyes of the women who were his inspiration and his support network, including his lifelong partner, Nora Barnacle; his daughter, Lucia; and his patron, Harriet Weaver. They wait for news of Joyce from a hospital in Zurich; with the writer on his deathbed, the play weaves together scenes from a life marked by ambition and poverty, creativity and madness, attempting to capture what O’Brien called “the enormity of James Joyce’s personal and imaginative life.”Hulme-Beaman on top of Brid Ni Neachtain, who plays Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle, in rehearsal.Ellius Grace for The New York TimesRegarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Joyce’s works continue to be widely read (“Dubliners,” his 1914 short story collection), widely attempted (“Ulysses,” his 700-plus-page epic of Dublin life) and widely speculated-upon (“Finnegans Wake,” the cryptic behemoth that was his final novel). The play brings Joycean language to life with music as well as the spoken word.“What I felt with Joyce, as I had never felt with another writer,” O’Brien said in an interview, was that “for all the boundaries he has broken, through language, he also speaks very truly, at least to me. There is always, without it being too demonstrative, an emotional pulse, an emotional engine behind what he says.”This year is the centennial of “Ulysses,” and many events, in Ireland and abroad, were clustered around Bloomsday, June 16, the date on which the novel unfolds. Nearing the end of this Joyce year, O’Brien’s dreamlike, reflective play is like a theatrical wake after the festivities. “This is one great writer squaring up to another,” said Conall Morrison, the director of “Joyce’s Women,” after a day of rehearsals at the Abbey Theater. “It is also, to a lesser extent, self-referential. It’s Edna’s meditation on the creative process, and the cost involved — the cost to the writer, and everyone around the writer.”Like Joyce, O’Brien has lived in literary exile. Her debut novel, “The Country Girls,” was the subject of a national scandal when it was published in 1960. It was banned in Ireland for its depictions of sex and female sexuality, as were its sequels, “The Lonely Girl” and “Girls in Their Married Bliss.” In 2015, President Michael D. Higgins issued a formal apology to O’Brien on behalf of the nation, and O’Brien was made a Saoi of Aosdana, the highest honor for an Irish artist.Left to right: Caitríona McLaughlin, the Abbey Theater’s artistic director; Edna O’Brien, who wrote “Joyce’s Women”; and Mark O’Brien, the theater’s executive director.Ste Murray“I think the fact that Edna O’Brien has chosen to write this, and that she’s someone whose genius has cost her throughout her life, makes for a fascinating prism to view this play through,” said Ali White, who plays Harriet Weaver. “What has been her own experience with success, failure, fame, notoriety and being banned?”In recent decades, plays, films, fiction and graphic novels have explored the lives of Joyce’s female family members, occasionally positioning them as each other’s rivals. Annabel Abbs’s novel “The Joyce Girl” (2016) is a fictionalized account of the life of Lucia, in which she is cast as Joyce’s muse and Nora’s adversary; Nuala O’Connor’s novel “Nora” (2021) is more sympathetic to its heroine.“There is this cottage industry of plays and novels and so on about Joyce’s family members,” said Sam Slote, a professor of Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin who has edited five books on Joyce. “What’s interesting is that the works are sacrosanct, but the contemporary imagination of artists is on the life of Joyce and his family members.”Little has survived of Lucia’s own voice; her nephew, Stephen Joyce, announced in 1988 that he had destroyed the letters she wrote to her family. Joyce’s famously pornographic “dirty letters” to Nora were published in 1975, but her side of the correspondence has never surfaced. Faced with these blank patches, “Joyce’s Women” imagines each character’s point of view, and allows them to narrate different sides of the same story. Nora is embattled, but resolute. Lucia drifts between fact and fiction. Later they are joined by Miss Weaver, the tireless activist and financial backer who funded Joyce’s lifestyle and helped secure his legacy.“While their allegiances, claims and counter claims differed,” O’Brien said, “I did not want to write a wrangling, bitter play, a relentless toll of enmity, accusation and intrigue. These women were crucial both in his life and in his work.”Sabine Dargent’s set design of “Joyce’s Women,” under construction in September.Ellius Grace for The New York TimesOne scene, incorporating dance, captures the rapport between Joyce (Stephen Hogan) and Lucia (Genevieve Hulme-Beaman). Then a screen unfurls across the stage, and a film is projected onto it that shows Lucia’s descent into psychosis. “She crept into her father’s work and her father’s psyche,” O’Brien said. “She adopted some of his more idiosyncratic words and, though doctors warned of alarming schisms in her behavior, Joyce believed that she was a genius, both of them being only a transparent leaf away from madness.”Another scene features May Joyce, the writer’s mother. An early supporter of his writing, May is believed to have had 15 pregnancies — 10 children survived — before her early death at the age of 44. Summoned home from Paris by telegram as she was dying, Joyce refused to pray at her bedside alongside other family members and wrote, in a letter to Nora, that when he saw her in her coffin, “I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim.”Joyce abandoned the Catholic church as a teenager; he wrote to Nora that his aim was to “make open war on it in what I write and say and do,” and they eloped in defiance of Ireland’s religious culture. Yet his work is haunted by a distinctly Catholic sense of guilt. “Catholic religion was embedded in Joyce’s thinking, not only by the church but by the long-suffering May,” O’Brien said. “His mother’s effect on him was deep but remained unfinished.” This early bond inspired a lifelong relationship to women split between reverence and torment: Joyce visited brothels from age 14, but found, in Nora, a partner who was as much a mother figure as a free spirit. “It was carnal love,” O’Brien said, “but also he saw within her a melancholy and an ancient knowledge that answered his deeper needs.”Stephen Hogan as James Joyce. The production features projected visuals and incorporates dance.Ros KavanaghIn a rehearsal in September, White (as Weaver) and Hogan (as Joyce) ran through a scene depicting the writer’s final hours. Joyce, wearing his familiar waistcoat and circular glasses, lay on a hospital bed and drifted in and out of lucidity. He sang an Irish rebel song, “The Sean-Bhean Bhocht,” then raged at Weaver, his patron, who had told him that he was wasting his genius on “Finnegans Wake,” the enigmatic dream-novel that took Joyce 17 years to complete. Weaver knelt at his bedside and asked for forgiveness.Weaver, who was raised a Quaker, and who later joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, bankrolled Joyce with an estimated equivalent of over $1.7 million today. “It became almost like her religion to support these people,” White said later of Weaver, who also quietly funded writers including T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. Joyce’s charisma was “such that he entranced people, even if they weren’t getting much in return,” she added.“Joyce’s Women” dismisses present-day debate about separating art from the artist, arguing that to draw a line between Joyce’s life and his works would be impossible. Slote, the professor, quoted a line from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in which Joyce says a writer is “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.” Slote said this was “a good capsule description; the artist takes their experience and refracts it, and turns it into something else.”The play explores that process in all its complexity. “He loved these women, not as muses but as beings who answered to the longings and anguish of his inner life,” O’Brien said. Yet Joyce’s greatest loyalty was to his work. “That’s where the writer really lives, and belongs,” O’Brien said. “With their words.” More

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      What’s So Frightening About Identical Twins?

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      “The Silent Twins,” a new film starring Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance, sets out to show the complexity of twinship onscreen.Growing up in England and Wales in the 1970s, the identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons spoke to each other all the time. They chattered and laughed, and whispered. They were prolific readers and wrote stories that showed great creative promise. They had ambitions to become famous authors.But throughout their childhood, they had experienced racist bullying at school, which became particularly bad in Haverfordwest, where they and their brother were the only Black students. They became selectively mute, a condition generally caused by severe anxiety. Eventually, they rarely spoke to anyone but each other.Later in their teenage years, this behavior, alongside incidents of petty theft and arson, would ultimately lead them to Broadmoor, one of the most notorious psychiatric hospitals in Britain, for nearly 12 years.Only one of them truly left the institution — Jennifer died of inflammation of the heart on the day of their release, at 29.Marjorie Wallace, the investigative journalist who first reported on the story of the twins in the 1980s and campaigned for their release from Broadmoor, wrote about them in her 1986 book, “The Silent Twins.”“I loved their sense of humor,” Wallace said. “Very ironic, very perceptive. They saw the funny side of everything, as well as the tragic.” She first met the twins when she was working as a journalist for The Sunday Times. Although they didn’t engage with her at first, she convinced them to speak to her by reading their writings: from Jennifer, for example, a novel titled “Discomania,” and from June, a novel titled “The Pepsi- Cola Addict,” alongside diaries and other texts.Wallace quickly realized that June and Jennifer had incredibly rich, complex worlds under the surface of their silence. “It’s a bit like deep-sea diving,” she said. “And you suddenly come across this Technicolor world that they wrote.”Over the years, June and Jennifer’s story has been used to sustain ongoing narratives about the dangers of twins that are often seen in films and on television. Think of the creepy twins in “The Shining,” for example, or a recent Netflix hit, “Echoes” (which presents its lead twin characters, who swap lives once a year unbeknown to their family and friends, as borderline psychopathic), where tropes of fascination, intrigue, fetish and horror abound.Leah Mondesir Simmons and Eva-Arianna Baxter in “The Silent Twins.”Jakub Kijowski/Focus Features“The Silent Twins,” a new movie about June and Jennifer starring Letitia Wright (“Black Panther”) and Tamara Lawrance (“Kindred”) as the teenage and adult twins, aims to buck this trend.Directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska (“The Lure”), the film hopes to capture the rich, tragic palette of the twins’ lives. It makes clever use of stop motion animation and original music inspired by their writings.“I wanted to tell this from their point of view, from the inside,” Smoczynska said. “And just to introduce them as beautiful, sensitive, very funny, intelligent sisters.” She was drawn to the story having grown up among a “constellation” of her mother’s sisters in Poland.“Their story has many, many layers; for me, it’s one of the most beautiful love stories, because it’s very dynamic,” she added. “And it ends with the act of love. That’s what June said after Jennifer died. That her sister sacrificed herself for her and freed her.”She spent weeks reading and discussing Wallace’s book and the sisters’ diaries, novels and poetry, alongside the cast and crew. “That’s why this movie is not only one genre,” Smoczynska said. “You have both psychological drama and fantastical elements because the same was in their writings. They were very complex in terms of form, and their descriptions.” Now, some of the twins’ novels and other writings are set to be professionally published for the first time.Wallace said it was a calculated choice to work with Andrea Seigel, who wrote the screenplay, and Smoczynska, who she felt would do justice to her reporting. “There have been many, many people who have come to me with synopses and scripts,” Wallace said. “One of them was about two white girls in Mississippi who were drug addicts and went to crazy raves.” Wallace worked as a consultant and co-producer on the film and is still close with June, who Wallace says gave her blessing to the film but is intent on living a private life.While Wallace said the new film is “not entirely maybe what I would have done” (she wrote the screenplay for the original BBC adaptation of her book in 1986), she described Wright and Lawrance’s portrayal of June and Jennifer as “remarkable.” “At some points in watching the film, I honestly thought I was back in Broadmoor,” she said, ‌highlighting a phrase June used while imagining that institution: “My sister and I, as vulnerable as flowers in hell.”Alongside reframing June and Jennifer’s lives and paying tribute to their acts of creativity, Wallace hopes that the film will have an impact on the portrayal of twins on film and TV in general.Lisa and Louise Burns in the 1980 film “The Shining,” directed by Stanley Kubrick.Warner Bros. Entertainment“If you look at the old movies, and in fact, any current movies, they either make twins out as evil killers or freaks,” said Wallace. “Or they make them comic, or they use their identical image to be able to manipulate and play havoc.”“It’s extraordinary that I haven’t really seen a film about twins which has represented the complexity and the depth of the love, the hate, the way of finding your own identity when you’re looking in the mirror all the time to see an identical person there,” she said. “Until now, maybe, with this current movie.”Joe Garrity, a filmmaker (and twin), said Wallace’s book was a “really foundational” text for him in learning about the range of twin relationships. His award-winning 2016 short film, “Twinsburg” tells the story of a pair of twins attending the (very real) annual Twins Day Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, and grapples with the idea that, though they were raised to be inseparable, they have fundamental differences.“The more we can have depictions that examine those internalized identities that are given to us from others, the better,” he added. “The more people will feel seen and heard, even non-twins.”Lawrance and Wright, who are producers on “The Silent Twins,” became incredibly close during the course of the filming, staying up all night talking and planning their scenes, and even moving in next door to each other. Lawrance felt deep empathy for the sisters and said she knows what it’s like to feel voiceless because of her race and gender. “I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, as a Black woman, there have been many times in which I have felt isolated within an institution that was so much bigger than me.”For Wright, who was brought onto the project first and already knew of June and Jennifer’s story, she said it was important that she and Lawrance had creative control behind the scenes as the only Black women on the production team.The director “understood early on that she doesn’t have all the answers, she’s not a Black woman, so she was willing to listen, she was willing to learn from me and Tamara,” Wright said in an interview. “And immediately I told her, if I’m going to join this project, whoever’s going to play my twin, we have to have a seat at the table, we have to be executive producers or producers: pick one. We have to have a say because this is our story.”Lawrance and Wright worked intensively with movement and voice coaches to attempt to replicate the sisters’ behavior and appearance onscreen, despite looking nothing alike. They also spent a lot of time considering the differences in their characters. Wright views June as a “caged bird,” with the maturity to understand that the twins’ way of life couldn’t last forever, but had deep love and loyalty toward her sister.Lawrance thinks that Jennifer was more insecure than June, which made her slightly more obsessive. “Watching the documentary and reading the book, I really felt for Jennifer, because I felt like media coverage of the past depicts her as the evil twin,” she said. “The one that is possessing June.”Looking back, Lawrance saw how their differences came between them. “In her diaries, she writes, ‘I’ve got this scar on my nose. My sister is so beautiful.’ The admiration of the other was extreme, but also her finding her intolerable was also very extreme. There’s this amazing quote in her diary, where she says: ‘Cain killed Abel. No twin should forget that.’”Phil Garrity, left, and Joe Garrity in the film “Twinsburg,” directed by Joe Garrity.Drew DorseyJust as the stories of twins in mythology stretch back thousands of years, that film and TV will continue to be fascinated with twins is inevitable: Coming movies featuring twins include the horror “Goodnight Mommy,” and a comedy musical inspired by “The Parent Trap.” Could “The Silent Twins” have a small but lasting impact on their portrayal?Smoczynska reflected that after a screening, a mother came up to her, very moved, and said that she had gained a much greater understanding of her twins.“This is the reason why you make the movies,” Smoczynska said. “So that somebody can find himself or herself and understand life, and heal.” More

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      Opening Old Wounds as the Man Who Warned About the Holocaust

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      In the solo play “Remember This,” David Strathairn portrays Jan Karski, a witness to the Nazi genocide during World War II.The actor David Strathairn would rather you didn’t read this. He has his reasons.They’re not so much specific to his Off Broadway project — “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” the solo play he’s starring in for Theater for a New Audience — as they are rooted in the general principle of preserving some mystery for audience members who haven’t yet seen a show. He prefers to keep his art pristine.“If you have the facts before you have the emotive experience, it’s a different process,” Strathairn, 73, was saying the other day in a dressing room at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where “Remember This” is in previews.By the time he made that point, he had been speaking for nearly an hour — about Karski, a member of the Polish Underground during World War II who warned the Allies to no avail of the Holocaust in progress, and about the play, in whose successive iterations Strathairn has portrayed Karski since 2014.Did Strathairn, then, take exception to his interview about the show even as he was giving it?“Kind of yeah,” he said, smiling behind his face mask and meaning it anyway. “I kind of do. Just, objectively speaking, I find that it diminishes the magic of the experience if they know too much coming in. They have preconceptions.”Strathairn — whose most cherished credits include the films “Nightmare Alley,” “Nomadland,” “Lincoln” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” for which he received a best actor Academy Award nomination — also takes issue with critics who, as he put it, “lay the patient out on the table and you see every organ, every tumor.”Which doesn’t mean that Strathairn, who is currently on movie screens in an Atticus Finch-style role in “Where the Crawdads Sing” and was last seen on Broadway in 2012 opposite Jessica Chastain in “The Heiress,” is broadly anti-journalism.“There are things in the world that absolutely need to be outed, revealed, that need that transparency,” he said. “I don’t think the creative arts does.”So, a warning: Facts ahead. There’s zero chance, though, of this article spoiling everything about “Remember This,” let alone everything about Karski. There simply isn’t the space.Even if there were, Karski himself — who died in 2000 and was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012 — knew how abstract a thing can seem when it is imparted as a story, and how unignorably potent when it is experienced firsthand.Strathairn, left, with the play’s writers, Derek Goldman, center, and Clark Young during rehearsals for Theater for a New Audience’s production of “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski.”Emon Hassan for The New York TimesHours into “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s colossal 1985 documentary about the Holocaust, an urbane, silver-haired man sits before the camera in suit and tie, gathering his courage to tell a story. This is Karski. He takes a breath.“Now I go back 35 years,” he begins, a strong Polish accent flavoring his words. But almost instantly his poise crumbles, and he begins to weep; the memories he is being asked to tap are too excruciating.“No. I don’t go back,” Karski says. As the camera watches, he flees the room.To Strathairn, who saw the nine-hour-plus “Shoah” in a single stretch when it was first released, that “microscopic moment” in the movie is “the portal into 35 years of silence.” In the theater’s dressing room, glasses perched atop his head, he traced a timeline of Karski’s life on the tabletop — events that, in Strathairn’s mind, are all contained somehow in that brief, tormented bit of film.At the start of the timeline, Karski’s childhood, when his Roman Catholic mother taught him to tell her when he saw “bad Catholic boys” throwing dead rats at Jews, so she could do something about it. Next his late 20s, in German-occupied Poland, when Jewish leaders sneaked him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration camp, so that he could tell the world what he’d seen happening there. Then the many postwar years when, having written a book about his experiences, he no longer spoke of them, even as he taught for decades in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Last, the chapter that began in the late 1970s, when Lanzmann convinced him that it was his responsibility to bear witness again for “Shoah” — which, after that initial loss of nerve, Karski did, and kept doing elsewhere.“Remember This,” which opens on Thursday in Brooklyn and is scheduled to run through Oct. 9, was created as a multicharacter piece at Georgetown for a centennial celebration in 2014 of Karski’s birth. Written by Derek Goldman, the artistic director of the university’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, and one of his former students, Clark Young, who graduated in 2009, it was initially titled “My Report to the World,” a phrase borrowed from the subtitle of Karski’s best-selling 1944 war memoir, “Story of a Secret State.”That book and E. Thomas Wood’s 1994 biography, “Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust,” were among the source materials for “Remember This,” alongside “Shoah” and other oral histories. The playwrights’ research also drew on the memories of people who knew Karski at Georgetown — and, in one case, Young said, at a local dentist’s office.In its ensemble form, the play traveled to Warsaw in 2014, and New York in 2015. Reshaped into a solo piece, it went to London in early 2020, and last year to Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Goldman, who directs the play, said that its current form allows Karski to stir “the moral conscience” as he talks to his students — that is, the audience — about his life and what he saw of the Holocaust.“Karski, I think, was that kind of teacher, who wanted to offer students access to the most elemental questions, because he had been grappling with them his whole life,” Goldman said. “‘How is this possible?’ ‘What does it mean to know?’ ‘What is a nation and what is a government if it can turn away from this?’”Goldman, 52, and Young, 35, both spoke of the failure that Karski felt when his eyewitness account of the Nazi slaughter, which he delivered in person to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among numerous influential others, did not stop the Holocaust.“In many ways,” Young said, “I see him as someone who internalized a sense of failure that wasn’t his to hold. He was holding failures of nation states and individuals in power.”If that terrible sense of a vital mission not accomplished was part of Karski’s trauma, Strathairn observed that we can only speculate about the reasons for his decades of silence.“He never said why,” Strathairn said, and turned contemplative as he noted older generations’ sometimes overwhelming impulse to shield the younger from pain.“Do we impart horror upon our children? Or do we want to protect them?” he asked. “In many ways, we protect them from things that are part of life. We protect them from seeing us dying. We protect them from our grief, and we protect them from our fears. We don’t want to burden them with those things. And is that in service of their maturation, or is it not?“For me,” he continued, “that’s a teeter-totter. ‘I don’t want to talk about the war.’ ‘I don’t want my kid to think that the world is horrible and people did this to each other.’ ‘No, I’m going to stay on the sunny side of the street.’ Or do we prepare the next generation for the possibilities? Do we give them the awareness that this could happen again? In order to prevent that, you have to know what it was.”Onstage as Jan Karski, opening old wounds for his students to see, he is telling them what it was: barbarity. More