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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

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      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

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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