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      Ed Bullins, Leading Playwright of the Black Arts Movement, Dies at 86

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      He wrote not for white or middle-class audiences, but for the strivers, hustlers and quiet sufferers whose struggles he sought to capture in searing works.Ed Bullins, who was among the most significant Black playwrights of the 20th century and a leading voice in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Saturday at his home in Roxbury, Mass. He was 86.His wife, Marva Sparks, said the cause was complications of dementia.Over a 55-year career in which he produced nearly 100 plays, Mr. Bullins sought to reflect the Black urban experience unmitigated by the expectations of traditional theater. Most of his work appeared in Black theaters in Harlem and Oakland, Calif., and perhaps for that reason he never reached the heights of acclaim that greeted peers like August Wilson, whose plays appeared on Broadway and were adapted for the screen (and who often credited Mr. Bullins as an influence).That was fine with Mr. Bullins. He often said that he wrote not for white or middle-class audiences but for the strivers, hustlers and quiet sufferers whose struggles he sought to capture in searing works like “In the Wine Time” (1968) and “The Taking of Miss Janie” (1975).“He was able to get the grass roots to come to his plays,” the writer Ishmael Reed said in an interview. “He was a Black playwright who spoke to the values of the urban experience. Some of those people had probably never seen a play before.”Though Mr. Bullins was a careful student of white playwrights like Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, he rejected many of their conventions, pursuing a loose, rapid style that drew equally on avant-garde jazz and television — two forms that he felt put him closer to the register of his intended audiences.He won three Obie Awards and two Guggenheim grants, and in 1975 the New York Drama Critics’ Circle named “The Taking of Miss Janie” the best American play of the year.Not everyone was enamored of his work. Some critics, including some in the Black press, believed he focused too heavily on the violence and criminality he saw in working-class Black life, and reflected it too brutally — “The Taking of Miss Janie,” for instance, opens and closes with a rape scene.But most critics, especially in the establishment, came to respect Mr. Bullins as an artist who was both passionately true to his source material and nuanced enough in his vision to avoid becoming doctrinaire.“He tackled subjects that on the surface were very specific to the Black experience,” the playwright Richard Wesley said in an interview. “But Ed was also very much committed to showing the humanity of his characters, and in doing that he became accessible to audiences beyond the Black community.”Genia Morgan, left, and Alia Chapman in a 2006 production of Mr. Bullins’s “The Taking of Miss Janie,” which was named the best American play of the year by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle in 1975.Gerry GoodsteinEdward Artie Bullins was born on July 7, 1935, in Philadelphia and grew up on the city’s North Side. His father, Edward Bullins, left home when Ed was still a small child, and he was raised by his mother, Bertha Marie (Queen) Bullins, who worked for the city government.Though he did well in school, he gravitated toward the North Side’s rough street life. He joined a gang, lost two front teeth in one fight and was stabbed in the heart during another.Mr. Bullins dropped out of school in 1952 and joined the Navy. He served most of the next three years as an ensign aboard the aircraft carrier Midway, where he won a lightweight boxing championship.He returned to Philadelphia in 1955 and, three years later, moved to Los Angeles. He attended night school to earn a high school equivalency diploma, then attended Los Angeles City College, where he started a magazine, Citadel, and wrote short stories for it.In 1962 he married the poet Pat Cooks. She accused him of threatening her with violence, and they divorced in 1966. (She later remarried and took the surname Parker.)Mr. Bullins’s later marriage, to Trixie Bullins, ended in divorce. Along with his third wife, he is survived by his sons, Ronald and Sun Ra; his daughters, Diane Bullins, Patricia Oden and Catherine Room; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Four other children, Ameena, Darlene, Donald and Eddie Jr., died before him.Restless and unhappy with his work in Los Angeles, Mr. Bullins moved in 1964 to San Francisco, where he plugged into a growing community of Black writers. He also switched from writing prose to writing plays — in part, he said, because he was lazy, but also because he felt that the theater gave him more direct access to the everyday Black experience.His first play, “How Do You Do,” an absurdist one-act encounter between a middle-class Black couple and a working-class Black man, was produced in 1965 to favorable reviews. But he remained unsure of his decision to write plays until a few months later, when he saw a dual production of “The Dutchman” and “The Slave,” two plays by Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, a leading figure of the Black Arts Movement.“I said to myself, I must be on the right track,” Mr. Bullins told The New Yorker in 1973. “I could see that an experienced playwright like Jones was dealing with these same qualities and conditions of Black life that moved me.”In 1967, Mr. Bullins became artist in residence at the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem. The work he produced, mostly there, over the six years represented the peak of his career.The Black Arts Movement, then still primarily an East Coast phenomenon, was a loose affiliation of novelists, playwrights and poets whose work sought to reflect the modern Black experience on its own terms — written and produced by Black people in Black spaces for Black audiences.Mr. Bullins had found his community and, through it, his voice. He fell in with a circle of Bay Area writers, actors and activists, who began performing his work in bars and coffeehouses.Among them was Eldridge Cleaver, who, after his release from prison in 1966, used some of the proceeds from his memoir “Soul on Ice” to found Black House, an arts and community center in San Francisco, with Mr. Bullins as its chief artist in residence.Black House also became the city’s headquarters for the Black Panther Party, founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. Mr. Bullins became the party’s minister of culture.But his role in the Black Panthers was short-lived. The party, from his perspective at least, saw art solely as a weapon, and he chafed at Mr. Seale’s insistence that he create didactic, often explicitly Marxist plays. He also grew frustrated over the party’s interest in building a coalition with radical white allies, when what he sought was a movement wholly independent of white culture.“I have no Messianic urge,” he told The New York Times in 1975. “Every other street corner has somebody telling you Christ or Mao is the answer. You can take any Ism you want and be saved by it. If you’re part of some movement and it fulfills you, that’s cool, but I like to look at it all.”He left the party in late 1966, just before Black House shut down.Mr. Bullins considered moving to Europe or South America, but he changed his mind when Robert Macbeth, the founder of the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem, invited him to be the artist in residence there.He arrived in New York in 1967, and the next six years of work, mostly at the New Lafayette Theater, represented the peak of his career. The theater was a complete package: a 14-member acting troupe, 14 musicians, several playwrights and directors, and an affiliated art gallery, the Weusi Artist Collective, that produced sets.Mr. Bullins also led workshops for aspiring playwrights, many of whom, like Mr. Wesley, went on to become significant voices among the next generation of Black theater artists.Kim Sullivan and Shirleen Quigley in the New Federal Theater’s 2013 production of “In the Wine Time.”Gerry GoodsteinA year after arriving, he completed “In the Wine Time,” his first full-length play and the first of a series he called his “Twentieth Century Cycle” — 20 plays that told the story of postwar urban life through a set of friends. In 1971 he won his first Obie, for “The Fabulous Miss Marie” and “In New England Winter.”He left the New Lafayette Theater in 1973, shortly before it closed for lack of funding. His work in the 1970s appeared in the New Federal Theater, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, the Public Theater and elsewhere.In 1972 he got into a war of words with the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, which was putting on his play “The Duplex.” Though he had initially endorsed the production, he later said in an interview that “the original Black intentions” of the play had been “thwarted” and “its artistic integrity stomped on,” turning it into a “minstrel show.”He traded attacks with the producer, Jules Irving, and the director, Gilbert Moses, in The Times and elsewhere, but in the end the play went on. It received mixed reviews.That episode, fairly or not, gave Mr. Bullins a reputation for being hard to work with, one of the reasons he cited for returning to the West Coast in the 1980s. He continued to write plays, but he also produced work by others, including Mr. Reed, at his Bullins Memorial Theater in Oakland, named for his son Eddie Jr., who died in a car crash in 1978.Mr. Bullins returned to school, receiving a bachelor’s degree in English from the San Francisco campus of Antioch University in 1989 and a master’s in fine arts in playwriting from San Francisco State University in 1994.Mr. Bullins in 1999, when he was a professor in the theater department at Northeastern University in Boston.Wendy Maeda/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesThe next year he moved to Boston, where he became a professor in the theater department at Northeastern University. He retired in 2012.By then he had long since changed his mind about his audience, in large part because he and others in the Black Arts Movement had succeeded in their mission to build a Black cultural canon.“Of course Black writers can write for all audiences,” he told The Times in 1982. “My feeling is that the question of whether Black theater should appeal to whites was more valid a decade ago. Since then, Black theater has taken off in all directions.” More

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      Maureen Cleave, Pop Journalist and Beatles Confidante, Dies at 87

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      Ms. Cleave’s interview with John Lennon, in which he said the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” drew worldwide attention.Maureen Cleave, a British journalist who was one of the first music writers to introduce readers to the Beatles, and who recorded John Lennon’s famous observation that the band was “more popular than Jesus,” died on Nov. 6 at her home in Aldeburgh, England. She was 87.Her daughter Dora Nichols confirmed her death. She did not give a cause but said Ms. Cleave had Alzheimer’s disease.When Ms. Cleave began writing the column “Disc Date” for The London Evening Standard in 1961, serious writing about pop music was in its infancy. She helped raise its profile, in columns that featured conversations with luminaries including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the Rolling Stones. She became a marquee byline; in 1976, The Standard called her “the writer who gets people to talk about themselves in the way no other writer can match.”But she was best known for her regular reporting on the Beatles, with whom she had a warm relationship, and whom she described affectionately in the newspaper’s pages. Her piece headlined “The Year of the Beatles,” published in The Standard in 1963, was one of the first major newspaper articles about the band.“Their behavior ranges from the preposterous, farcical and impossible to the kindly, thoughtful and polite,” Ms. Cleave wrote. “You are outraged, diverted and charmed. You are never, ever bored.”Her biggest moment stemmed from an interview with Lennon published in March 1966, in which she delved into his thoughts on organized religion. “Christianity will go,” he said. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first — rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.”Readers, and the rest of the British press, paid little notice. But in July, a month before the Beatles began a tour of the United States, the American magazine Datebook reprinted the interview and provoked a frenzy.Lennon’s remark, which came to be widely known as a claim that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus,” prompted demonstrations and drew the ire of many American Christians. Lennon was accused of blasphemy — as, by extension, was Ms. Cleave.A Baptist pastor in Cleveland threatened excommunication for members of his parish who attended a Beatles concert. The Ku Klux Klan protested Lennon’s remarks. The Vatican issued a statement condemning the comparison.Lennon apologized — albeit reluctantly — at a news conference during the American tour, under pressure from the band’s manager, Brian Epstein.Paul McCartney said in the multimedia release “The Beatles Anthology” that Ms. Cleave was one of the band’s go-to journalists. “Maureen was interesting and easy to talk to,” he said. Lennon, he added, “made the unfortunate mistake of talking very freely because Maureen was someone we knew very well, to whom we would just talk straight from the shoulder.”Lennon’s line made it into The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.The 1966 American tour, fraught with protests and the lingering fear of violence, was the Beatles’ last.Maureen Diana Cleave was born on Oct. 20, 1934, in India, which was part of the British Empire at the time.Her father, Maj. John Cleave, was a British officer stationed in India. Her mother, Isabella Mary Fraser Browne, was a homemaker. She had two sisters.Ms. Cleave attended high school in her mother’s native Ireland after the family returned there.After graduating from St. Anne’s College at Oxford in 1957, Ms. Cleave found a job at The Evening Standard as a secretary.An avid fan of pop music, she pitched a column on the subject to the paper’s editors. That idea became “Disc Date.” She traveled to Liverpool in 1963 to see the Beatles in person.She married Francis Nichols, an Oxford classmate, in 1966, and they later moved to his ancestral home at Lawford Hall in Essex. He died in 2015. Her survivors include their daughters, Dora and Sadie Nichols; their son, Bertie Nichols; and three grandchildren.After the Beatles broke up in 1970, Ms. Cleave continued covering the music scene for The Evening Standard. In a series of articles in the 1970s under the rubric “Maureen Cleave’s Guide to the Young,” she explained the hippie movement to Standard readers and explored the Hells Angels, among other topics.Ms. Cleave was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, after collapsing on a London Underground platform in 1992. She documented her experience with the ailment in The Standard the next year. “The medical profession lagged behind in M.E. awareness,” she wrote; “because there is no test, ergo it doesn’t exist.”“Apart from having it, I knew little about it myself,” she added. She saw homeopathic doctors as well as traditional practitioners in an effort to manage her condition.Among the other topics she explored was women’s fitness. She also wrote profiles of painters, writers and philanthropists.But she also continued publishing reflections on her time with the Beatles. In 2005, she wrote a piece for The Daily Telegraph tied to what would have been John Lennon’s 65th birthday.“Charisma rarely survives the aging process,” she wrote, “but, killed in the prime of life, Lennon remains a very powerful absence.” More

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      Terence Wilson, Key Part of Reggae Band UB40, Dies at 64

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      As Astro with a popular racially diverse British group, he added rap vocals to hits like “Red Red Wine.” As Terence Wilson, a.k.a. Astro, told the story, he and his reggae band, UB40, didn’t even know whose song they were covering when they decided to record what became perhaps their biggest hit. They’d been smitten by a ska version of the song “Red Red Wine,” which was recorded by Tony Tribe in 1969.The seven-inch vinyl carried the credit “N. Diamond,” Mr. Wilson said, and he and his bandmates assumed that it referred to a Jamaican artist named Negus Diamond.“You could’ve knocked us out with a feather when we found out it was actually Neil Diamond,” he told Billboard in 2018.The song was included on UB40’s 1983 album of covers, “Labour of Love,” and a pared-down version released as a single became a modest hit. Then, five years later, the longer version became an even bigger hit. Ali Campbell is the main vocalist on both, but the longer version includes Mr. Wilson’s distinctive toasting, or rapped vocals, which begin, “Red red wine, you make me feel so fine; you keep me rocking all of the time.”How popular did that rendition become? So popular that Mr. Diamond took to performing the song — which he’d originally rendered as a glum ballad — with a catchy reggae beat and including a toasting section in which he imitated Mr. Wilson’s cadence. “Red red wine you make me feel so fine, hear it on the radio all of the time,” Mr. Diamond sang in Buffalo in 1989. “I don’t care if the words are all wrong; I don’t care ’cause they’re playing my song!”Mr. Wilson died on Nov. 6, Mr. Campbell announced on social media. He was 64. No cause of death was given, and the posts did not say where he died.Mr. Wilson joined Mr. Campbell and six others in UB40 in 1978 in Birmingham, England. None had extensive music backgrounds, but they developed their own sound and style; Mr. Wilson was the toaster, trumpeter and percussionist.The eight were a racially diverse group, unusual for the reggae genre, most of whose stars were Black; Mr. Wilson was one of two Black members. But they were united by one thing when they came together: All were unemployed. The group’s name came from a bit of government paperwork, Unemployment Benefit Form 40.Soon UB40 was famous and touring the world. Interviewed in 2005 by The Dominion Post of New Zealand on the occasion of the release of the group’s 23rd album, Mr. Wilson put his change in fortunes simply: “It is like winning the lottery every week.”Terence Wilson was born on June 24, 1957, in Birmingham. His nickname came long before he thought of being in a reggae group.“As a kid I used to run round with four or five other kids wearing these Doc Martin boots,” he told The Dominion Post, “and the actual model name was Astronauts.”Mr. Wilson was an out-of-work cook when he joined the band, which had already begun rehearsing, in 1978. He and the others bucked the trend of the moment — punk — and instead tried making the music they listened to and loved.“We knew we had something fresh that hadn’t been heard before,” Mr. Campbell told The Honolulu Star-Advertiser in 2019.Starting out by playing clubs, the band by 1980 was opening for the Pretenders on tour, raising its profile considerably, especially in Britain. Chrissie Hynde, the Pretenders’ vocalist, had heard the band and become a champion; in 1985 she was a guest on another of the group’s best-known songs, a cover of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe.”Much of the group’s popularity rested on covers — among its other biggest hits was its version of a song made famous by Elvis Presley, “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” released in 1993. But the band also recorded original material, much of it with a political edge. An early signature song, in 1981, was called “One in Ten,” the title referring to unemployment statistics.Mr. Campbell split from the original group in 2008 in a dispute over management. Mickey Virtue, the keyboardist, joined him soon after, and Mr. Wilson joined them in 2013; they continued to perform as UB40 Featuring Ali, Astro and Mickey. (Another group continued on as UB40.) Mr. Virtue left the splinter group in 2018, but Mr. Wilson and Mr. Campbell continued to perform and record.Information on Mr. Wilson’s survivors was not immediately available.Although the original UB40 lineup eventually fractured, Mr. Wilson said his musical goals remained constant.“We’re still on our same mission, which is to popularize reggae music around the world,” he told The Dayton Daily News in 2017, when he and Mr. Campbell brought their version of UB40 to the Rose Music Center in Huber Heights, Ohio. “We’re all pleased the genre is now an international language everybody understands.“It’s played around the world, and not everybody has English as their first language,” he continued. “They don’t necessarily understand what’s being said, but everybody understands a good bass line and a drum beat. I think a bass line can say more than 1,000 words ever could.” More

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      Graeme Edge, Drummer and Co-Founder of the Moody Blues, Dies at 80

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      Many of their songs incorporated his spoken-word poetry, making them pioneers in the prog-rock movement of the late-1960s and ’70s.Graeme Edge, the drummer and co-founder of the British band the Moody Blues, for whom he wrote many of the spoken-word poems that, appended to songs like “Nights in White Satin,” made the group a pioneer in the progressive rock movement of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Thursday at his home in Bradenton, Fla. He was 80.Rilla Fleming, his partner, said the cause was metastatic cancer.The Moody Blues first gained attention as part of the British Invasion that dominated the American rock scene in the mid-1960s. Their repertoire originally consisted largely of R&B covers, but by their second album, “Days of Future Passed” (1967), they had developed the blend of orchestral and rock music that would make them famous.“In the late 1960s we became the group that Graeme always wanted it to be, and he was called upon to be a poet as well as a drummer,” Justin Hayward, the band’s lead singer, wrote in a statement on the Moody Blues website after Mr. Edge’s death. “He delivered that beautifully and brilliantly, while creating an atmosphere and setting that the music would never have achieved without his words.”Mr. Edge’s mesmerizing drumming and introspective poetry were a big part of the group’s success. The Moody Blues are probably best remembered for “Nights in White Satin” (1967), a darkly ruminative song that ends, in the original album version, with “Late Lament,” written by Mr. Edge and read by the keyboardist Mike Pinder. (It was missing from the shorter version released for radio.)Though Mr. Pinder’s sonorous baritone and the poem’s opening lines — “Breathe deep the gathering gloom” — make the poem sound melancholy, even foreboding, it was meant to be uplifting, Mr. Edge said.“I think it’s the joy, the spirit that makes it,” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2018. “It’s a young boy discovering that he loves somebody for the first time, and he just wants to shout it out from the hills — and shout it out again!”“Nights in White Satin” was not originally a hit, but it reached the Top 10 when it was rereleased in 1972. (Their only other Top 10 singles were their first hit, “Go Now!,” in 1964, and the up-tempo “Your Wildest Dreams” in 1986.) It came to be regarded as a musical landmark — one of the first to emerge from the burgeoning prog-rock movement, which also included bands like Pink Floyd, Genesis and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.The Moody Blues had other hits in the late 1960s and early ’70s, including “Tuesday Afternoon,” “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band)” and “Ride My See-Saw,” before going on hiatus from 1974 to 1977. During that time, Mr. Edge sailed around the world in his 70-foot yacht and released several solo albums.The band found a second wind in the 1980s, when it set aside its prog-rock past and embraced a synthesizer-driven pop sound. They released their last album, “December,” in 2003, but continued to tour regularly afterward.“I never get tired of playing the hits,” Mr. Edge told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2008. “You have a duty. You play ‘Nights in White Satin’ for them. You’ve got to play ‘I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band),’ and you’ve got to play ‘Tuesday Afternoon’ and you’ve got to play ‘Question.’ It’s your duty, and their right.”Mr. Edge at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in 2018, when the Moody Blues were inducted. David Richard/Associated PressGraeme Charles Edge was born on March 30, 1941, in Rochester, a city in southeastern England. When he was 3 his family moved to Birmingham, where he grew up.He came from a musical family: His mother, a classically trained pianist, worked in a movie theater playing the accompaniment to silent films, and his father was a music-hall singer, as were his paternal grandfather and great-grandfather.Mr. Edge’s two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Fleming, he is survived by his daughter, Samantha Edge; his son, Matthew; and five grandchildren.When he was about 10, he heard Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Ten Little Indians” on the radio and immediately fell in love with rock ’n’ roll. Though he trained to be a draftsman, his first job was managing an R&B band in Birmingham.When that band’s drummer quit unexpectedly, Mr. Edge was hired as a temporary replacement. He had never played drums before, but he learned quickly, and when the band hired another drummer, he bought his own kit and decided to become a musician.He founded and played in several bands before he and four other musicians — Denny Laine, Ray Thomas, Clint Warwick and Mr. Pinder — formed the MB Five in 1964. They soon renamed themselves the Moody Blues.Their first hit was “Go Now!” a cover of an R&B song originally recorded by Bessie Banks. But Mr. Edge worried that playing other people’s songs would take them only so far. After Mr. Laine and Mr. Warwick left and Mr. Hayward and John Lodge joined, the band decided to take a new approach.They were big admirers of the Beatles’ use of an orchestra on some of their songs, and they decided to develop a sound that blended rock with classical instrumentation. Though they later recorded and toured with an orchestra, their first efforts employed a mellotron, an analog antecedent to the electronic synthesizer.The resulting sweep of strings and horns that played through their songs, along with Mr. Edge’s poetry, gave the Moody Blues a reputation as a thinking person’s rock band, among the earliest exponents of what came to be called art-rock.“We used to think that we were aiming at the head and the heart, rather than the groin,” Mr. Edge told The South Bend Tribune in Indiana in 2006.The Moody Blues have sold more than 70 million albums and in 2018 were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Fittingly for a song from a band once known for its covers, “Nights in White Satin” has been covered more than 140 times.Clint Warwick died in 2004. Ray Thomas died in 2018.Mr. Edge suffered a stroke in 2016 and retired from touring in 2019, but he remained an official member of the band until his death — the only remaining member of the original quintet, formed almost 60 years earlier. More

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      Jonathan Reynolds, Playwright and Food Columnist, Dies at 79

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      His plays tended to parody American institutions. His food writing tended to be full of humor.Jonathan Reynolds, who in a wide-ranging career wrote successful plays, helped write a famously bad movie, turned out lively articles on how to cook the perfect turkey and all manner of other food-related subjects, and combined his love of food and his way with words in an unusual stage show, died on Oct. 27 in Englewood, N.J. He was 79.His family said in a statement that the cause of death, at the Actors Fund Home, was organ failure.After Mr. Reynolds tried — but disliked — acting (“I had less influence than the stage manager and most of the stagehands,” he once complained), he turned to playwriting and had quick success. A pair of his one-act comedies — “Rubbers,” satirizing the New York State legislative process, and “Yanks 3, Detroit 0, Top of the Seventh,” about an over-the-hill pitcher — ran for months in 1975 when they were staged at the American Place Theater in New York, directed by Alan Arkin.Demand was high enough that the theater, a subscription-only house, opened sales up to single-ticket buyers for the first time in its 11-year history.Mr. Reynolds’s plays tended to lampoon American institutions, whether government or the national pastime or, as in “Tunnel Fever” in 1979, academia.“I don’t think of my plays as comedies,” he told The New York Times when that play was about to open at American Place. “I think about what characters would do in a situation, and I don’t try to make it funny. It just comes out that way.”His biggest success as a playwright may have been “Geniuses,” a satire on the movie business that was staged at Playwrights Horizons in 1982. It was inspired by the three months he spent on location in the Philippines with the director Francis Ford Coppola while Mr. Coppola was shooting “Apocalypse Now.” Mr. Reynolds was there taking notes for a possible book about the making of the movie, and possibly to contribute to the script. The book never came about, and his contribution to the script ended up being a single line of dialogue. But the play, riding rave reviews, was a hit.“The author speaks with an authority to match his acerbity,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review in The New York Times, comparing him to the humorist S.J. Perelman.“Among other things,” Mr. Gussow added, “‘Geniuses’ is an insidious act of movie criticism. Make no mistake: Beneath the japery, there is a warning: Movies can be injurious to your health; keep them out of the reach of children-directors.”Mr. Reynolds would soon have his first film credit, for writing “Micki + Maude,” a 1984 comedy directed by Blake Edwards and starring Dudley Moore as a man with two wives, played by Amy Irving and Ann Reinking. Vincent Canby, reviewing the film in The Times, said that it was “never less than a delight” and that Mr. Reynolds “has an ear for ultra-high-frequency lunacies that escape the rest of us.”His next Hollywood experience, though, was not received so warmly. He was the screenwriter who adapted a story by Bill Cosby into a secret-agent comedy called “Leonard Part 6.” The movie, which starred Mr. Cosby and was released in 1987, came out so poorly that Mr. Cosby himself denounced it. In The Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel called it “the year’s worst film involving a major star.” Others have put it on lists of the worst movies ever made.His screenplay for the comedy “Switching Channels” (1988) also drew less-than-rave reviews. But Mr. Reynolds, who would earn only two more writing credits for movies (“My Stepmother Is an Alien” in 1988 and “The Distinguished Gentleman” in 1992), shrugged off the criticism, considering himself more playwright than screenwriter anyway.“It hurt for about a day,” he told Newsday in 1988. “And then I thought, ‘Well, I’m not really part of it so it doesn’t really bother me.’”Mr. Reynolds in 1997 at the American Place Theater on the set of his play “Stonewall Jackson’s House,” which took on the liberal biases of the theater world.James Estrin/The New York TimesMr. Reynolds continued to write plays, several of which, like “Stonewall Jackson’s House” (1997) and “Girls in Trouble” (2010), took on the liberal biases of the theater world and much of the theater audience. But at one point he tried something completely different: He began writing a column on food for The New York Times Magazine.His column first appeared in 2000, and he continued to write it for about five years. It was a job that, as he put it, just “fell from the sky” (aided by a recommendation from his friend Frank Rich, the newspaper’s drama critic at the time).“I didn’t go to any cooking school,” he told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2002, “and I didn’t spend time with a great chef in his kitchen for years in France.”But he did enjoy cooking, and for years he had been making diary entries about meals he had prepared or eaten and menus he had perused. He filled his columns not just with recipes and cooking tips but with anecdotes and humor. For instance, in March 2000 he offered a solution of sorts to the age-old problem with turkeys: that cooking the bird’s drumsticks and thighs thoroughly enough tended to leave the white meat dry.“For those with successful Nasdaq portfolios,” he wrote, “it’s simple: Buy two turkeys and cook one for the white meat and the other for the dark, then discard the overcooked white of one and the undercooked dark of the other.”For everyone else, he offered a solution that involved basting and assorted dos and don’ts. In 2006 he collected his cooking observations in a book, “Wrestling With Gravy: A Life, With Food.”Jonathan Randolph Reynolds was born on Feb. 13, 1942, in Fort Smith, Ark., to Donald Worthington Reynolds, founder of the Donrey Media Group, and Edith (Remick) Reynolds.He earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at Denison University in Ohio in 1965 and studied for a time at the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art. Back in New York, he was the understudy for the Rosencrantz role in the Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in 1967 before embarking on his writing career. Before his 1975 playwriting breakthrough, he was on the staffs of David Frost’s and Dick Cavett’s television shows.At his death Mr. Reynolds lived in Manhattan and in Garrison, N.Y.His marriage in 1978 to Charlotte Kirk ended in divorce in 1998. In 2004 he married the Tony Award-winning set designer Heidi Ettinger, who survives him, along with two sons from his marriage to Ms. Kirk, Edward and Frank Reynolds; three stepsons, North, Nash and Dodge Landesman; and two grandchildren.In 2003 Ms. Ettinger had the challenge of creating the set for a one-man show that marked Mr. Reynolds’s return to acting after a long layoff. It was called “Dinner With Demons,” and in it Mr. Reynolds cooked a full dinner, including deep-frying a turkey, while relating assorted anecdotes. That required putting a functioning kitchen onstage at the Second Stage Theater in Midtown.Legal restrictions meant the audience did not get to eat the meal; the backstage crew was the beneficiary. Mr. Reynolds told The Times that the hardest part of executing the show was making sure the dialogue and the cooking ended at the same time.“It was a lot of trial and error,” he said. “In rehearsals, the apple pancake got burned every other time.” More

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      Don Maddox, Last Survivor of a Pioneering Country Band, Dies at 98

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      In the 1940s, he joined with his three brothers and his sister, Rose, to make exuberant music that anticipated rockabilly and rock ’n’ roll.Don Maddox, the last surviving member of the Maddox Brothers & Rose, a lively sibling band that helped give rise to West Coast honky-tonk, rockabilly and early rock ’n’ roll, died on Sept. 12 in an adult care facility in Medford, Ore. He was 98.His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by his wife of 11 years, Barbara Harvey-Maddox, who said he had been suffering from dementia.Hailed in the 1940s and ’50s as America’s “most colorful hillbilly band,” the Maddox Brothers & Rose were renowned for their exuberant fusion of barnyard twang and gutbucket R&B, as well as for their uproarious antics onstage. The fringed, embroidered costumes they wore — designed by the Hollywood rodeo tailor Nathan Turk — were equally dazzling, a harbinger of the Western resplendence sported by Buck Owens in the 1960s and later by Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers.Mr. Owens’s lean, hard-driving Bakersfield sound owed a debt to the Maddoxes’ rollicking hillbilly boogie, propelled as it was by the instinctive thwacking by Mr. Maddox’s eldest brother, Fred, on upright bass. The early rockabilly of Elvis Presley was also influenced, notably in the slapping technique of his bass player, Bill Black, who idolized Fred Maddox.The Maddox sound “was born from that slap bass,” Mr. Maddox said of his brother Fred’s style in an interview for Ken Burns’s multipart PBS documentary “Country Music” in 2019. “Fred didn’t know what the notes were. He just slapped it for rhythm.“We didn’t call it ‘rockabilly,’” Mr. Maddox went on. “We called it ‘Okie boogie.’”Mr. Maddox played fiddle, in a sawing down-home mode, and provided backing vocals; his sister, Rose, was the lead vocalist. The other members were his older brothers Cliff and Cal on guitars and his younger brother, Henry, on mandolin.Rose Maddox died in 1998, Cliff in 1949, Cal in 1968, Henry in 1974 and Fred in 1992.The account of how the Maddoxes made it to California rivaled the story of their rise within the ranks of West Coast country music — a Depression-era narrative as emblematic as “The Grapes of Wrath.”In 1933, forced by drought to abandon their life of subsistence farming in rural Alabama, Mr. Maddox and his family — his sharecropper parents, Charlie and Lula (Smith) Maddox, and his five siblings — headed west, hitchhiking and riding in the boxcars of freight trains in search of a better life. Mr. Maddox was 10.The family picked fruit in migrant labor camps in California, where they squatted in the large concrete drainage cylinders found in construction yards in the industrial part of Oakland known as “Pipe City.”Quickly fed up with their hardscrabble life, Fred Maddox persuaded the owner of a furniture store to sponsor regular performances by him and his brothers on a radio station in Modesto. The only proviso was that the band, which at the time included only Fred, Cliff and Cal, feature a female singer, a role fulfilled with preternatural command by the 11-year-old Rose.Two years later, having changed their name from the Alabama Outlaws to the Maddox Brothers & Rose, the group won a competition at the California State Fair that included a two-year contract to perform on radio shows broadcast on KFBK in Sacramento. The next year, Mr. Maddox joined the band — managed, with the strictest of discipline, by the siblings’ mother, known as Mama Maddox.Don Maddox in performance at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in 2013. He had come out of retirement a year earlier after many years as a cattle rancher.Erika Goldring/Getty ImagesDon Maddox was born Kenneth Chalmer Maddox on Dec. 7, 1922, in Boaz, Ala., in the foothills of Appalachia.As a member of the family band from 1940 on, he toured with his siblings and appeared on the popular recordings they made for the Four Star and Columbia labels in the 1940s and ’50s, including their waltzing rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer.”Other hits, like “Whoa Sailor,” “(Pay Me) Alimony” and “Hangover Blues,” were sung from his sister’s perspective and exuded not just womanly independence and pluck but an incipient feminist consciousness as well.In 1956, after more than a decade of success touring and recording (interrupted only by the military service of Mr. Maddox and his brothers), the act broke up. Rose hired Cal as her accompanist and pursued a solo career. The remaining brothers went on without them, only to call it quits two years later — because, according to Don Maddox, they lacked the talent to make a go of it on their own.For his part, Mr. Maddox went back to school to study agriculture and bought a 300-acre ranch in Ashland, Ore., where he raised Angus cattle for more than five decades.In 2012, Mr. Maddox came out of retirement to participate in an exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville commemorating the Bakersfield sound that he and his siblings had helped establish. He went on to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, on the singer Marty Stuart’s television show and at festivals, including a headlining engagement in Las Vegas.His wife is his only immediate survivor. His previous wife, Nila Bussey Maddox, died in 2002.Besides playing the fiddle and singing backing vocals with his siblings, Mr. Maddox provided the comedic impetus for the group’s gag-laden stage show, particularly through his “Don Juan” persona.“I was shy around girls, so I took Don Juan as a stage name because the Sons of the Pioneers had a song called ‘Don Juan of Mexico,’” he said in a 2008 interview with The Mail Tribune of Medford.“I thought that if I learned that song, the girls would think I was a Don Juan and talk to me. Of course, it didn’t work.” More

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      Dean Stockwell, Child Actor Turned ‘Quantum Leap’ Star, Dies at 85

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      He appeared alongside Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly when he was not yet 10. He later had signature roles in movies like “Married to the Mob” and “Blue Velvet.”Dean Stockwell, who began his seven-decade acting career as a child in the 1940s and later had key roles in films including “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 1962 and “Blue Velvet” in 1986, while also making his mark in television, most notably as the cigar-smoking Al Calavicci on the hit science fiction series “Quantum Leap,” died on Sunday. He was 85.His death was confirmed by Jay Schwartz, a family spokesman, who did not say where Mr. Stockwell died or specify a cause.Mr. Stockwell had a hot-and-cold relationship with acting that caused him to leave show business for years at a time. But he nonetheless amassed more than 200 film and television acting credits from 1945 to 2015, as well as occasional stage roles.As a child he appeared alongside some of the biggest stars of the day, including Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in “Anchors Aweigh” in 1945, when he was not yet 10. But while many child stars don’t make the transition to adult careers, Mr. Stockwell was blessed with angular, rugged good looks as a young man and a distinguished maturity later, attributes that made him suitable for all sorts of roles.Several times Mr. Stockwell lost interest in the profession that he had been all but born into, escaping to work on railroads and in real estate and, in the 1960s, to immerse himself in the counterculture. He also enjoyed several career revivals, notably in the 1980s, when he was cast in career-defining roles in movies like Wim Wenders’s “Paris, Texas,” David Lynch’s “Dune” and “Blue Velvet” (as the menacing and eccentric henchman of a drug dealer played by Dennis Hopper), and Jonathan Demme’s “Married to the Mob,” in which his performance as a mob boss earned him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.Mr. Stockwell as an eccentric criminal in David Lynch’s film “Blue Velvet,” from 1986.De Laurentiis Entertainment GroupAs the son of actors — his father, Harry Stockwell, and his mother, Elizabeth Veronica, appeared onstage and in films together, and Harry Stockwell provided the voice of Prince Charming in Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” — Mr. Stockwell had little semblance of a typical childhood before he began acting.He first appeared on Broadway in 1943, at age 7, in “The Innocent Voyage.” (His older brother, the actor Guy Stockwell, who died in 2002, was also in the cast.) He was recruited by a Hollywood talent scout, and his movie career began in 1945, when he appeared in “The Valley of Decision,” with Gregory Peck and Greer Garson, and in “Anchors Aweigh.”Mr. Stockwell was immediately praised for his skill, winning a special award at the Golden Globes for “Gentleman’s Agreement” in 1947. Reviewing the movie “Kim” in 1950, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times praised his performance as “delightfully sturdy and sound,” adding, “Little Dean shows a real tenderness.” Other Times reviews of his performances as a child called his work “touching,” “commendable” and “cozy.”Robert Dean Stockwell was born on March 5, 1936, in Los Angeles. His parents divorced when he was 6, and he spent most of his childhood with his mother and brother. He would later say that he looked up to directors and leading actors on the set as father figures.He would appear in 19 films before he turned 16, at which point he quit acting for the first time. Withdrawn as a child, he took little pleasure in acting, seeing it as an obligation foisted upon him by others, he said in an interview with Turner Classic Movies in 1995.“If it had been up to me, I would have been out of it by the time I was 10,” he said.After graduating from high school at 16 — as a child actor, he received three hours of schooling while working — Mr. Stockwell realized he had little training to do anything else. He flitted from one odd job to the next before reluctantly returning to acting in 1956, when he was 20.Mr. Stockwell, left, with Scott Bakula on the set of “Quantum Leap” in 1989.Ron Tom/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesOne of his biggest roles in his 20s was alongside Jason Robards, Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson in the 1962 film version of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in which he played the younger son, Edmund Tyrone. He, Mr. Robards and Mr. Richardson shared an acting award at the Cannes Film Festival.Other notable roles in that period included “Compulsion” (1959), a fictionalized version of a well-known murder case, in which he and Bradford Dillman played the killers of a young boy; and “Sons and Lovers” (1960), based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence.Later in the 1960s, Mr. Stockwell found comfort in the counterculture movement and the hippie ethos.“My career was doing well, but I wasn’t getting anything out of it personally,” he told The Times in 1988. “What I was looking for I was finding in another place, which was in that revolution. The ’60s allowed me to live my childhood as an adult. That kind of freedom, imagination and creativity that arose all around was like a childhood to me.”After a few years off, he returned to acting, only to learn that his time away had led Hollywood casting agents to forget him. For about a dozen frustrating years, he struggled to land roles, appearing in fringe films and performing in dinner theater.“I even heard about a casting meeting where the producer said, ‘We need a Dean Stockwell type,’” he told The Times in 1988. “Meanwhile, I couldn’t even get arrested.”He quit acting again in the early 1980s, moving to New Mexico to sell real estate. His next comeback would be his most successful, beginning a decade of his most critically acclaimed work.In 1988, he was acclaimed, and Oscar-nominated, for his performance in “Married to the Mob.” The next year, he was cast in “Quantum Leap.”That show, seen on NBC from 1989 to 1993, starred Scott Bakula as Sam Beckett, a scientist who, because of a botched time-travel experiment, spends his days and nights being thrown back in time to assume other people’s identities. Mr. Stockwell portrayed Adm. Al Calavicci, described by John J. O’Connor of The Times in a 1989 review as “Sam’s wiseguy colleague, who hangs around the edges of each episode, setting the scene and commenting on the action.” Mr. Stockwell, Mr. O’Connor wrote, was “Mr. Bakula’s indispensable co-star.”Mr. Stockwell was nominated four times for an Emmy Award for best supporting actor in a drama series for his work on “Quantum Leap.” He never won an Emmy, but he did win a Golden Globe in 1990.He is survived by his wife, Joy Stockwell, and two children, Austin and Sophie Stockwell.In a 1987 interview with The Times, Mr. Stockwell said that his approach as an actor hadn’t changed since he was a child.“I haven’t changed in the least,” he said. “My way of working is still the same as it was in the beginning: totally intuitive and instinctive.“But as you live your life,” he added, “you compile so many millions of experiences and bits of information that you become a richer vessel as a person. You draw on more experience.”Neil Genzlinger contributed reporting. More

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      Marília Mendonça, Brazilian Pop Singer, Dies in Plane Crash at 26

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      Ms. Mendonça, who was a social media sensation with millions of followers, was iconic in a type of Brazilian country music called sertanejo.Marília Mendonça, one of the most popular Brazilian pop singers who was known as “The Queen of Suffering” for her angst-filled ballads, was killed on Friday in a small plane crash in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. She was 26.The singer’s press office confirmed Ms. Mendonça’s death and said her producer, Henrique Ribeiro; her uncle who was also her assistant, Abicieli Silveira Dias Filho; and the pilot and co-pilot of the plane were also killed.The plane had been headed from the city of Goiania to Caratinga, where Ms. Mendonça was to have performed in a concert on Friday night. There was no immediate word on the circumstances leading up to the crash. The authorities said they were investigating.Ms. Mendonça was iconic in a type of Brazilian country music called sertanejo, a popular genre in Brazil. Her legions of fans found power in her song lyrics, which implored women to reject bad and abusive relationships, and told the stories of flawed characters.Ms. Mendonça was a social media sensation, with 7.8 million followers on Twitter, 22 million on YouTube and more than 38 million on Instagram.The plane had been headed to Caratinga, where Ms. Mendonça was to have performed on Friday night. Minas Gerais Civil Police, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBrazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, said on Twitter, “The whole country receives in shock the news of the death of the young country singer Marília Mendonça, one of the greatest artists of her generation, whom, with her unique voice, charisma and music won the affection and admiration of all of us.”Anitta, a funk singer popular in Brazil, said on Twitter: “I just found out. I can’t believe it.”Some in Brazil’s cosmopolitan circles had scorned Ms. Mendonça’s country ballads as “‘brega,’ or corny music,” NPR reported in 2019.“Sentimental or not, her songs offer a woman’s perspective that hasn’t been heard much in sertanejo’s machismo culture, and it’s made Mendonça the leading voice of a new subgenre called ‘feminejo’ — music by and for women,” NPR said.Ana Ionova contributed reporting. More