Homosexuality and Bisexuality

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Jerrod Carmichael Comes Out in ‘Rothaniel,’ but It’s About More

      by

      In “Rothaniel” on HBO, the stand-up grapples with secrets that defined his upbringing, the toll silence has taken and the price he’s paying to break it.In his 2014 debut special, “Love at the Store,” the stand-up comic Jerrod Carmichael offered advice to gay people about the right time to come out of the closet. “Save it until you need it,” he said, quipping: “I would come out of the closet when a friend asked me to move.”It’s one of many of his old jokes that hit differently after “Rothaniel,” a riveting new special from Carmichael who, sitting onstage at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York, reveals that he is gay, has been lying about it for years and wants to now tell the truth. Coming out of the closet will be the headline, especially in a stand-up scene historically rife with homophobia, but the most fascinating, charged material in this hour (premiering at 9 p.m. Friday on HBO) grapples with the roots of his silence — and the price of breaking it.Stylishly directed by Bo Burnham, who staged Carmichael’s last special, “8,” with similar idiosyncrasy, “Rothaniel” begins with a street-level shot looking up at snow falling, then follows Carmichael walking toward the club, but from so far away that you can’t make him out. As a director of specials, Burnham specializes in claustrophobic close-ups, which he employs here too, but he begins at a distance.As soon as Carmichael starts talking, you realize that he has kept us at one, too — until this reintroduction. While he has the same charming smile and supremely relaxed conversational style, he sounds different here: melancholy, earnest and poetic, direct. He’s now sitting, encouraging the crowd to talk back, speaking in an intimate tone, leveling with us and himself. Those old provocative stand-up premises only hinted at this new man, especially when they dug into family matters. “I want to talk about secrets,” he says early on here. “I felt like I was birthed into them.”This is a work about the complexity and ubiquity of secrets. It’s a word he has used before in similar ways. In his last special, he looked at a white woman in the front row who came with a Black boyfriend and said: “If his grandma were alive, you would be a secret.”Now he isn’t joking. Or he isn’t only joking. This special doesn’t feel like stand-up but it is. Carmichael is masterful at disguising punch lines in a thought so as not to interrupt its flow. The jokes are ultimately ornamental, decorating the emotional core: a story told through confessions. The initial one reveals that his first name is actually his middle name. The special’s title is a reference to his real one, a conflation of two of the names of his grandfathers. He explains in detail how much he hated the name, how he bribed yearbook editors in school to change it and got the bank to remove it from cards. It’s one of many biographical moments that illustrate how he developed the tools for the closet, how to live with things that, as he put it, “exist but don’t exist.”Much of this has to do with family history, which he has always talked about in his work but glancingly. Now he is blunt, detailing lives that also held secrets people knew but didn’t at the same time. Carmichael is alert to how pervasive they are, showing us the normal ones we don’t think much about. For example, he digs into the irony that we all are a product of our parents having sex, but none of us can stand to talk with our parents about sex.Carmichael is an incredibly poised, even chilly performer, comfortable in silences, seemingly unflappable. But what he does in this special is deconstruct this persona, reveal it as a useful mask, even an inherited one. He doesn’t just show us the roots of this façade, but also why he clung to it — and what it cost him. Some of this, like his explanation of why he smiles so much, is brutally frank. Other times it’s really funny. Being in the closet, he says, made him overcompensate: “Sometimes we’re making out,” he says about a boyfriend, “and just whisper ‘no homo’ to each other.”The heart of this show is about the painful tension between family ties and personal growth, and the most searing segments focus on his relationship with his mother. Her reaction to his sexuality, rooted in her faith, leaves him cold. The fact that he has such love for her, that he describes himself as an echo of her in some ways, makes this even more poignant. This special, which at its climax finds its star hunched in a nearly fetal posture, hits jarring notes that have never been matched in this form.It’s not just emotionally raw, but present and immediate in a way that a polished joke will never be. In one remarkable moment toward the end, he looks directly at the camera, and I physically turned away, as if it were so private that it would be impolite to watch.Art this uncomfortable tends to have rough edges, and this special does, too. But it’s artfully presented, almost to a fault. Burnham and Carmichael are such slickly skillful and assured artists that it can be hard to believe them when they get messy. Carmichael isn’t trying to tell an uplifting story so much as a real one, and “Rothaniel” does not build to a tidy resolution. It’s raw, and you might have some questions.I would recommend watching Carmichael’s lovely little 2019 documentary, “Home Videos” (also on HBO Max), shot in his hometown Winston-Salem, N.C., that features a conversation with his mother to give her some equal time. You can see the warmth between them, and his role as a needling son, asking her if she ever did cocaine or slept with a woman. When she says no, he tosses out abruptly that he hooked up with men. In a later interview, he downplayed the comment as just something he said in the moment.His mother has her story, too, though this special isn’t about that. Earlier this week, Carmichael performed at Union Hall in Brooklyn to prepare for hosting “Saturday Night Live” this weekend, an episode that will be surely dominated by bits about the Academy Awards. He joked that he was the least famous person to ever host “S.N.L.” and that all you had to do to get the gig was come out of the closet. He said he hadn’t talked to his mother in months though he once did every day.Once again, he was sitting, chatting with the crowd less than delivering a set, and seemed to be seeking something in the moment, a real experience, albeit one that could help him build a monologue. Carmichael asked the audience what he should talk about on Saturday. Someone yelled gas prices. “I’ve been rich too long,” he retorted.Another person mentioned the feud between Kanye West and Pete Davidson. Carmichael said he knew both of them through discussions about mental health and suicide. “But now,” he joked, “every time I hear about either of them I want to kill myself.”But when someone mentioned possibly doing a song, Carmichael shook his head, saying that was not in his performer’s tool kit. “I wish I was an entertainer,” he said. “My skill is I’m not afraid and I have a pocket full of matches.” More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Disney Says It Hopes Florida Anti-LGBTQ Law Is ‘Struck Down’

      by

      Moments after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bill into law on Monday, Disney released a statement condemning it and saying that its “goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down by the courts.” Disney employs roughly 80,000 people in the Orlando area.Labeled by opponents as “Don’t Say Gay,” the law restricts classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also gives parents an option to sue a school district if they think the policy has been violated.This month, Disney was criticized by many of its employees for refusing to take a public stand against the legislation, leading to a series of moves from the company’s chief executive, Bob Chapek. Mr. Chapek broke the company’s silence and stated Disney’s opposition; apologized repeatedly; paused political giving in Florida pending a review; and created a task force to develop an action plan for Disney to be a more positive force for the L.G.B.T.Q. community, including through its content for families. He is going on a listening tour at Disney workplaces, both domestically and overseas, this week.On March 9, Mr. Chapek told shareholders at Disney’s annual meeting that he had called Mr. DeSantis to “express our disappointment and concern” about the bill. “The governor heard our concerns, and agreed to meet with me and L.G.B.T.Q.+ members of our senior team in Florida as a way to address them,” he said.Mr. DeSantis responded with defiance, promptly deriding the company as “Woke Disney” in a fund-raising email to supporters. On Monday, as he signed the bill, Mr. DeSantis said: “I don’t care what Hollywood says. I don’t care what big corporations say. Here I stand. I’m not backing down.”The hosts of the Academy Awards on Sunday made fun of the legislation during their opening stand-up routine.In its statement on Monday, Disney added that it was committed to the national and state organizations working to overturn the law. “We are dedicated to standing up for the rights and safety of L.G.B.T.Q.+ members of the Disney family,” the company said, “as well as the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community in Florida and across the country.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Ariana DeBose Becomes the Second Latina to Win an Acting Oscar

      by

      Ariana DeBose won the Oscar for best supporting actress for her role as Anita in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of “West Side Story.” It is her first Academy Award. The outcome was expected but historic nonetheless as the 31-year-old actress becomes only the second Latina to nab an Oscar. The first one was Rita Moreno, who won in 1962 for the same role in the original film version. DeBose is also the first openly queer star to win an acting Oscar.DeBose beat out Jessie Buckley (“The Lost Daughter”), Judi Dench (“Belfast”), Kirsten Dunst (“The Power of the Dog”) and Aunjanue Ellis (“King Richard”). In accepting the award, DeBose made reference to being a queer woman of color and said:Imagine this little girl in the back seat of a white Ford Focus. Look into her eyes. You see a queer — openly queer — woman of color, an Afro-Latina, who found her strength in life through art, and that’s what I believe we are here to celebrate. So to anybody who has ever questioned your identity — ever, ever, ever, — or you find yourself living in the gray spaces, I promise you this: There is indeed a place for us.DeBose also nabbed statues at the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the British Academy Film Awards for her magnetic performance as an America-loving seamstress who adores both Bernardo and his younger sister, Maria. The actress-singer-dancer has also been nominated for a Tony for her role as Donna Summer in the short-lived musical “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.”DeBose will next be seen in Matthew Vaughn’s spy movie, “Argylle,” for Apple TV+. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Warhol-mania: Why the Famed Pop Artist Is Everywhere Again

      by

      Andy Warhol is currently the subject of a Netflix documentary series, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and multiple theatrical works.Andy Warhol left behind a lot of self portraits.There was the black-and-white shot from a photo booth strip, from 1963, in which he wore dark black shades and a cool expression. In 1981, he took a Polaroid of himself in drag, with a platinum blond bob and bold red lips. Five years later, he screen-printed his face, with bright red acrylic paint, onto a black background. These and other images of the Pop Art master rank among his best-known works.But one of his most telling self portraits wasn’t a portrait at all, in a conventional sense. Between 1976 and 1987, the artist regularly dictated his thoughts, fears, feelings and opinions — about art, himself and his world — over the phone to his friend and collaborator Pat Hackett. In 1989, two years after his death, Hackett published “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” a transcribed, edited and condensed version of their phone calls.And now, more than three decades later, “The Andy Warhol Diaries” has come to Netflix as a bittersweet documentary series directed by Andrew Rossi. In a video interview, the director pointed out that Warhol had intended for the book to be published after he died.“It does seem like there’s some message which maybe he himself didn’t even understand,” Rossi said. “There’s an open invitation to interpret it as there is with any of his artwork — because I do view the diaries as another self portrait in his oeuvre.”Warhol’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death, in 1987. His fascination with branding and celebrity, as well as the famous dictum often attributed to him — “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” — are if anything even more relevant in the age of social media and reality TV.“There’s a reason why ‘Warholian’ remains a description,” Rossi said. “He’s one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric.”But if Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is — onscreen, onstage, in museums and in the streets. Earlier this month, Ryan Raftery returned to Joe’s Pub with the biting celebrity bio-musical “The Trial of Andy Warhol.” Anthony McCarten’s new play in London, “The Collaboration” — which centers on the relationship between Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat — is already being adapted for the big screen. The Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol: Revelation” investigates his Catholic upbringing. And starting Friday, Bated Breath Theater Company will bring the theatrical walking tour production “Chasing Andy Warhol” to the streets of the East Village.“The Andy Warhol Diaries” delves into Warhol’s relationship with Jon Gould, a Paramount executive.Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixTogether, the works create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human beneath the white wig. Even as he created an indelible, internationally famous identity, this child of Carpatho Rusyn immigrants, Ondrej and Julia Warhola, grappled with his faith (Byzantine Catholic) and his sexual orientation (gay, but never quite as out as many of his contemporaries) — areas that both “The Andy Warhol Diaries” and “Andy Warhol: Revelation” explore in particular.A significant portion of the Netflix series examines Warhol’s romantic relationships. It delves into Warhol’s struggles to show his love for his first long-term partner, an interior designer named Jed Johnson. Later comes the preppy Paramount executive Jon Gould, whom Warhol showered with affection but who eventually died of AIDS.The Enduring Legacy of Andy WarholThe artist’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death in 1987.Warhol-mania: If Andy Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is: onscreen, in museums and in the streets.A Play: In “The Collaboration,” Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope give memorable performances as Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.A Book: “Warhol” by Blake Gopnik, the first true biography of the artist, reveals a narrative that gets more complex the more closely you look.A Musical: “Andy,” Gus Van Sant’s Warhol-inspired stage debut, may be the movie director’s oddest tribute to date.An Exhibition: “Andy Warhol: Revelation” at the Brooklyn Museum shows how Catholicism seeped into the Pop master’s work.Jessica Beck, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, was interviewed in the documentary series. Rossi found her through her work on the 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again,” for which she wrote an essay titled “Warhol’s Confession: Love, Faith and AIDS.”“There are these moments when he’s doubting himself, when he is questioning what it is to be successful, what it is to be getting older, what it is to be in love,” she said. “That’s one of the strengths of what the series reveals, is that there’s a human that’s behind this mythical story.”Beck pointed to pieces of Warhol’s “Last Supper” series, some of which are currently on view in “Andy Warhol: Revelation.” She referenced one painting in particular, “The Last Supper (Be a Somebody With a Body),” which fuses an image of Jesus Christ with that of a bodybuilder, a symbol of health and masculinity. Beck said the work reflects Warhol’s reactions to the AIDS epidemic.“When you have these two things juxtaposed, you have this real expression of ideas around mourning and suffering, but also forgiveness,” she said.“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” at the Brooklyn Museum, pays special attention to the artist’s faith.Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /
      Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photograph by Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” which opened in November and runs until June 19, is broken into seven sections that move visitors from the artist’s immigrant upbringing and the roots of his religion through the different phases of his life and career, with a particular focus on the tension between his faith and his queer identity.“This is beyond soup cans and Marilyn,” said José Carlos Diaz, the chief curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, referring to a few of Warhol’s Pop Art hits. Diaz first put on “Revelation” at the Warhol museum before bringing it to Brooklyn.Carmen Hermo, an associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum, organized the New York presentation of “Revelation.” Both she and Diaz are the children of immigrants, like Warhol, and she speculated that this part of the artist’s background helped to account for his famed work ethic and his fierce drive to create the best version of himself.Diaz said, “For me, he lives the American dream,” adding that more nuanced, relatable perspectives on the artist were finally “surpassing this mythological Warhol with the big glasses, big wig.”Warhol is “one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric,” said Andrew Rossi, the director of “The Andy Warhol Diaries.”Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixAcross the East River, Mara Lieberman, the executive artistic director of Bated Breath Theater Company, is using her fair share of glasses and wigs. Beginning Friday, Lieberman will direct “Chasing Andy Warhol,” a theatrical tour through the East Village in which multiple actors play the artist simultaneously, alluding to his love for repeated images and various personas.One scene depicts something that happened on a trip Warhol took to Hawaii with the production designer Charles Lisanby, with whom he was in love at the time. A couple of days after arriving at the hotel, Lisanby brought another man back to the room, and Warhol exploded, hurt — an event that has been described in biographies of the artist.Warhol has said that he later realized the power of saying “so what” in response to painful life events, an insight he detailed in his book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” It is, Lieberman said, “his greatest coping strategy.”This attitude was a key ingredient — along with his ideas about identity, technology, celebrity and more — in Warhol’s “highly stylized, constructed, brilliantly strategized brand,” Lieberman said.“Andy liked to take life and put a frame around it and say, ‘Look, that’s art,’” she said. “We go out in the streets of New York, and we put a frame around things and say, ‘Look, that’s art.’” More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      After ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ Jesse Williams Takes the Stage

      by

      The former “Grey’s Anatomy” star is making his Broadway debut in “Take Me Out.” For that, he said, “I needed to go into a very unknown place.”Jesse Williams will be the first tell you — certainly, he was the first to tell me — that he has no formal theater training and little practice. There’s an Edward Albee play in the hazy past and a one-act opposite Zosia Mamet. That’s pretty much it.When I met him, on a recent weekday afternoon at Spring Place, a ritzy club and co-working space in TriBeCa, he joked that he was probably the least experienced theater actor I had ever interviewed.But on April 4, the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out” will open at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater with Williams, a familiar TV presence from his decade-plus run on “Grey’s Anatomy.” Which means that he is learning on the job: what “upstage” means, whether to hold for a laugh, how to use his whole body in a scene and not just the torso on up, as is the norm on television.“I’m not even wearing pants in half of those scenes,” he said of his time on “Grey’s.” (I think he was kidding?)In “Take Me Out,” which is set in the mid-1990s, Williams, 40, plays Darren Lemming, a superstar baseball player who comes out as gay. It’s a play about race, class, sexuality, sport and living a life in the public eye. Williams’s Darren stands — in batter’s crouch — at the intersection of these competing themes. “I’m here to just learn and get my butt kicked,” he said, using a stronger word than “butt.”Patrick J. Adams, left, and Williams in the play, which is in previews and scheduled to open on April 4.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWilliams grew up in Chicago, the eldest child of a white mother, a potter, and a Black father, a factory worker who later became a teacher. When Williams hit junior high school, his parents, now divorced, moved the family to a majority white neighborhood in suburban Massachusetts, where he experienced casual, and less casual, racism. Baseball, which he played on school teams and with his father, remained a constant.He graduated from prep school — he had moved on to soccer and lacrosse by then — and enrolled at Temple University, double majoring in African American studies and film and media arts. School, like most things, came easy to him. He would often write his papers the night before, high on marijuana, just to see if he could get away with it. Still, he excelled.Scouted as a model, he shot some commercials during college. But he never took that too seriously. The artists in his family were visual artists, not performers. And acting didn’t seem as creative, as generative, as stimulating. In 2006, having worked as a teacher, a paralegal and a political organizer and an activist with several grassroots organizations, he decided to apply to law school. Or maybe film school. But first he reached out to his old commercial agent, a move he chalked up to a “quarter-life crisis.”Four days later, in an example of the effortlessness that has defined his professional life, he booked an episode of “Law & Order.” He appeared in a few movies and shows, including a brief arc on the teen comedy “Greek” as a character aptly nicknamed the Hotness Monster. Then, in 2009, he was hired onto the medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy,” where he spent 12 years as Jackson Avery, the dynamic, gym-ripped plastic surgeon.Here is the comment that Shonda Rhimes, who created “Grey’s,” gave about a key scene: “We felt that having a shirtless Jackson Avery would be a benefit to society.”What he lacked in formal training, he made up for in his eagerness to master the craft. “He was always watching everybody’s artistry and learning from it,” said Krista Vernoff, a “Grey’s” showrunner.His colleague Sarah Drew, who played his longtime love interest, echoed that. “There’s nobody that worked as hard as he did,” she said. “Nobody.”Ellen Pompeo, another co-star, who said that she lived to mess with him, added: “He’s handsome. Girls always like that.”Fair enough. Williams, whom I watched first in rehearsal and then a few days later across that Spring Place table, is good-looking in a way that seems almost uncanny, with a grin that could melt permafrost. In person, he projects confidence — cockiness, almost — shot through with self-scrutiny and the occasional flash of humility. Colleagues described his keen intellect, instantly legible in the quickness and charm of his conversation.“Can an actor cross the footlights? I thought, I bet he can,” the director Scott Ellis said of offering Williams the lead role in “Take Me Out” after seeing him on “Grey’s Anatomy.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times“Yes, he really does look like that,” Vernoff told me. “And yes, he is really smart. And really, really talented.”Which explains why, a few years ago, the director Scott Ellis offered him the role of Darren. Ellis had wanted to revive “Take Me Out,” which received the Tony Award for best play in 2003. But first he had to find a biracial leading man (Darren’s race is a crucial element of the play) of overwhelming charisma who could also pass as a Hall-of-Fame-level player. Having seen Williams on “Grey’s,” Ellis suspected that he could command a Broadway stage.“It’s always that question,” Ellis said, speaking on a rehearsal break. “Can an actor cross the footlights? I thought, I bet he can.”Williams turned Ellis down. His schedule on “Grey’s” — as an actor and occasional director — didn’t allow a Broadway run. The play itself, with its rhythmic, cerebral dialogue and its nude scene, scared him. But the offer nagged at him. And as his work on “Grey’s” began to feel, in his words, “increasingly safe, protected, insulated,” that fear became part of the appeal.“I knew that as I designed my exit, the next thing I did had to be terrifying. I needed to get out of my comfort zone, I needed to go into a very unknown place,” he said. “Take Me Out” provided it.REHEARSALS BEGAN in February 2020 and halted, as all Broadway did, that March. Williams spent the intervening months at home in Los Angeles, teaching the rudiments of baseball to his two children — he shares custody with his former wife, Aryn Drake-Lee — and intensifying his activism, particularly his support of the Black Lives Matter movement.Williams sits on the board of the Advancement Project, an advocacy group devoted to civil rights. “He is deeply committed to racial justice,” said Judith Browne Dianis, its executive director. “He’s not one of the celebs or influencers that does things for his brand purposes. It’s deep in his soul.”Williams does little for brand purposes. And he doesn’t seem to know how to phone it in. “I swing through the ball,” he said, describing his approach to each new project. He didn’t seem to register the sports metaphor.Williams spent 12 years playing the plastic surgeon Jackson Avery on the medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy.” Williams, above center, with some of his co-stars, from left: Robert Baker, Kevin McKidd, Sandra Oh and Sara Ramirez.Randy Holmes/ABCWhen rehearsals began again, almost two years later, he swung through, supplementing run-throughs with voice lessons; personal training; breath work, where he learned about the diaphragm; physical therapy, to heal several torn ligaments in his foot. (Mini golf has its dangers.)“I’m taking the preparation really seriously, because every single syllable is totally brand-new,” he said.Because he lacks training — “I’m not really an actor,” he reminded me, “I didn’t go to acting school” — he fills his characters out with lived experience. In some ways, his experiences paralleled Darren’s.For example, they share a similar focus and drive. “I win,” he said, using more sports metaphors. “I hustle hard. I jump way bigger than I am. And I figure it out.”And he relates to the frictionless way that Darren has moved through his life. The play describes Darren as “something special: A Black man who you could imagine had never suffered.” And that isn’t true of Williams personally, but it’s true enough professionally.“I’ve related to a self-awareness of ease in my life, a self-awareness that the way I look or perform, based on the standards in our society, grants me access,” he said. “I can relate to how it can lull you to sleep, ease.”He has asked himself why Darren chooses to come out as gay. Is it an act of self-determination or a kind of self-sabotage, a way to complicate that ease?Of course, those same questions also apply to a TV actor choosing to lead a Broadway play. “There’s a lot of spillage,” Williams said. “A lot of overlap.” Which means that the role is also a way for Williams to explore some of his own contradictions, like what it means to be a deep thinker admired for his body, to be a Black celebrity in majority white spaces, to live both a public life and a private one.Williams on embracing the play’s locker room nude scenes: “I’m here to do things I’ve never done before. It’ll be fine.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesHe is trying to embrace those contradictions fully and candidly, which also means embracing the play’s locker room nude scenes. He was somewhat resistant at first, asking Ellis about alternatives — a towel bar, maybe? But he has since committed to it, although when he spoke, he admitted that he had yet to try it.“I’m here to do things I’ve never done before,” he said. “I have got one life, as far as I know. It’ll be fine.”But of course his life is not exactly Darren’s, particularly when it comes to sexuality. Darren is gay. And Williams, as a number of tabloids will happily tell you, is straight. While Broadway has largely decided against racial impersonation, when it comes to matters of sexuality, gender and disability conversations around which actors should play which roles remain ongoing.Ellis, who is openly gay, said that an actor’s sexuality pertains less than other factors. “Do they have empathy?” he said rhetorically. “Do I feel that they can understand what this character is going through? That’s all that matters.”That isn’t exactly all that matters to Williams, who has taken these questions to heart. “If there’s anybody in the gay community that thinks that role should be played by a gay person, they have an argument,” he said. “They absolutely have an argument.”And still, he wanted his at-bat. “I really wanted the challenge of trying to do my best at the role,” he said.For Jesse Tyler Ferguson (“Modern Family”), the openly gay actor who plays opposite Williams, that’s enough. “He’s asking very thoughtful questions in the process and doing the work that truly great actors do,” Ferguson said. “I’ve completely fallen in love with his version of Darren.”I watched a scene of that Darren — the shower scene, rehearsed clothed — on a recent weekday morning. Williams looked like a ballplayer, rubbing pain cream into his ankle, swinging a bat like he’d been born with it. He looked like a stage actor, too, communicating danger and an almost feline grace as Darren approached another character.Patrick J. Adams (“Suits”), a longtime stage actor, described how quickly Williams had adapted to the rhythms of theater. “He’s just taking it in kind of instantly, almost frustratingly, to be perfectly honest,” Adams said. “Like, How is this so easy for you?”Williams makes it look easy. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t working hard.“The last thing I want is to be the shiny rich TV guy that thinks he can just show up and do something, because that’s just absolutely not how I feel,” he said. “I’m just here to learn.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      'Great Freedom': Film Traces Long Shadow of Anti-Gay Law in Germany

      by

      A new film traces the many decades it took to abolish Paragraph 175, a measure criminalizing sex between men that was strengthened by the Nazis.BERLIN — A turning point arrives for Viktor and Hans, the central characters in the new film “Great Freedom,” when Viktor sees the concentration camp tattoo on Hans’s arm.It’s 1945, and Viktor has already forcibly thrown Hans out of the cell they share in a German prison after learning that Hans was jailed for having sex with men. But when Viktor, an ice block of a man with a murder conviction, discovers the tattooed number, he offers to give Hans a new design to cover up the past.“They put you from a concentration camp into the slammer? Seriously?” Victor (Georg Friedrich) stammers in disbelief, more to himself than to Hans (Franz Rogowski).The fictional character of Hans, liberated from a Nazi concentration camp at the end of World War II only to be sent directly to prison, is based on a chilling and often overlooked chapter in German postwar history.Hans is repeatedly arrested under Paragraph 175, a law criminalizing sex between men that the Nazis expanded just a couple of years into their regime, and which was kept on the books for decades after.The law was used, sometimes with elaborate sting operations, to convict up to 50,000 gay men in West Germany between 1945 and 1994 — roughly as many as were arrested during the decade in which the Nazis used it.“For gay men, the Nazi era did not end in 1945,” said Peter Rehberg, the archivist of Schwules Museum, a gay cultural institution in Berlin.When Sebastian Meise, the director of “Great Freedom,” read about the men who went from the concentration camps to prison because of their sexuality, it “really changed my understanding of history,” he said in a telephone interview from Vienna. The discovery set him off on an eight-year project that resulted in “Great Freedom,” which was Austria’s submission to the international feature category at this year’s Oscars.Modern Germany has been praised for its efforts to keep the dreadful memory of the Holocaust present for the generations born after what Hannah Arendt called the “break in civilization.” The Nazi era is a mandatory part of school history curriculums, for example, and many schoolchildren and police cadets are obliged to visit former concentration camps. But for many decades, postwar Germany’s treatment of gay men was also neither liberal nor progressive.In 1935, the Nazis strengthened Germany’s law criminalizing homosexuality, which was originally introduced in the 1870s. This allowed the regime to criminalize not just gay sex, but almost any behavior that could be seen to run afoul of heterosexual norms, including looking at another man. While East Germany had a slightly less restrictive version on its books, West Germany kept the strict Nazi legislation until 1969, when it was first reformed.Peter Bermbach at his home in Paris. He left West Germany in 1960 after being imprisoned under Paragraph 175. Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesFor West Germans like Peter Bermbach, Paragraph 175 cast a long shadow over the postwar decades.In his senior year of high school in West Germany in the late 1940s, he was overheard turning down a date with another boy. School officials did not just suspend him, they also reported him to the police.“It was the typical German sense of order and justice of the time,” said Bermbach, now 90, in a telephone interview.The second time, he didn’t get off as easily. At 29, with a Ph.D. and a job in a publishing house, he was caught putting his arm around a 17-year-old at a public pool. Bermbach spent four weeks in jail and was fined 5,000 marks — a hefty sum at the time.After he paid off the fine, he became one of the thousands of gay and bisexual men who fled Paragraph 175. He moved to Paris in 1960 in search of more freedoms.Meise and his writing partner Thomas Reider collected many stories from Bermbach’s generation of gay men during the six years they spent researching and writing the script for “Great Freedom,” visiting the archives at the Schwules Museum and the Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation, which collects interviews with men affected by the law.Still, Paragraph 175 did not stop gay culture from evolving in Western Germany; the German title of the film, “Grosse Freiheit,” is a nod to a venerable gay bar in Berlin where the penultimate scene takes place. But it did push many aspects of gay life underground, according to Klaus Schumann, 84. He remembered Berlin police pulling up in large vans in front of bars known to be gay hot spots in the late ’40s and ’50s. No one was criminally charged, he said, but everyone, including staff, were taken to the local police station to to be identified.“It was basically a way to keep control over people,” Schuman said.Hans (Franz Rogowski) first arrives at the prison in 1945 after being held in a Nazi concentration camp.MUBI“Great Freedom” traces Hans’s many stints behind bars, where he was labeled a “175,” jumping between 1945 and 1969. To help mark that time shift, Rogowski lost more than 25 pounds during filming, to make himself appear younger (the later scenes were filmed first). Shooting in an abandoned prison close to Magdeburg in the former East Germany, Meise captures the slow course of incarcerated time, as well as social change.“I would be very pleased if it was taken as a universal story,” Meise said of his film. “It’s so hard to disentangle the history and the current politics because it’s so virulent.” Meise noted that the issue is far from being a purely historical one, as there seem to be new pushes to reinforce heterosexual norms in places like some U.S. schools.For the men whose lives were affected by Paragraph 175, much has changed. After he settled in Paris, Bermbach built a career as a journalist and filmmaker. Last year he wrote an autobiography, and later this month the high school that kicked him out more than seven decades ago has invited him to visit and read from the book.“Honestly, I don’t really care,” Barmbach said of going back to the place that once expelled him. “As for being denounced for being homosexual, I’ve long forgotten about that.”After Paragraph 175 was reformed in 1969 and again in 1973, the last vestige of it was taken off the books in 1994. In 2017, a year after Meise started writing “Great Freedom,” the German parliament said anyone charged under the law would have their record expunged. It also agreed to offer a meager settlement to those who applied.Of the 50,000 men who might have eligible, only 317 had applied by last summer. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      In Chinese Version of ‘Friends,’ Ross’s Lesbian Ex-Wife Goes Missing

      by

      The popular show has become the latest target of China’s censorship campaign. The awkward cuts have not been missed by fans of the show in the country.HONG KONG — The wildly popular sitcom “Friends” is back on China’s best-known streaming services, but with some big changes to the script.In the latest Chinese version, when Ross tells his parents he has split from his wife, he doesn’t explain the reason: She is a lesbian living with another woman, is now pregnant and plans to raise the baby with her partner. Instead, the scene simply cuts to his parents’ stunned faces, and the plotline ends there.There are other, more subtle changes to the show, too.Joey’s suggestion of a trip to a strip club is translated in Chinese subtitles as “going out to have fun.” When Paul the Wine Guy tells Monica, “I haven’t been able to, uh, perform sexually,” the subtitle says that he has been in “low spirits.” A lament by Rachel that she is more “turned on” by a gravy boat than her fiancé is translated as Rachel being more “happy to see” tableware.The changes have prompted biting commentary on social media from the show’s many Chinese superfans, who mocked the prudishness of censors and said the alterations reinforced gender stereotypes.“Friends” is the latest example of foreign entertainment being rewritten in China, as the country embraces more traditional gender roles under its leader, Xi Jinping. Officials have gone so far as to ban portrayals of effeminate men on television.Even before the regulations went into effect in September, Chinese censors had already been hard at work. In the Chinese version of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the Queen biopic, a crucial scene in which Freddie Mercury, the band’s lead singer, tells his fiancée that he is gay was removed.The Communist Party wields enormous power over the entertainment business, bending it to produce the narratives it wants to promote. In January, censors changed the end of the movie “Fight Club,” replacing a scene in which a series of buildings were destroyed with a message saying the effort had been thwarted by police, although the original version was soon restored after a massive outcry. That move came after a much anticipated “Friends” reunion episode last year was missing cameos from Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and BTS when it aired in China because those celebrities had at some point offended the country’s leaders.“Friends” is hugely popular in China, where at one point many major cities had look-alikes of Central Perk, the cafe that was a gathering point for the show’s characters. Viewers in China had been able watch the show in an uncensored format over the past decade, but fans of the show are now limited to an officially edited version that is streamed on multiple platforms.Superfans have been quick to point out omissions or changes in censored episodes and debated the reasons for the cuts.The hashtag #FriendsDeleted was viewed more than 54 million times on the Chinese social media site Weibo over the weekend, according to a CNN report. By Monday, it had been removed.“Mostly they don’t want the women in their own country to be awakened,” one person wrote on Chinese social media. “They don’t want them to know women can love women. Otherwise who will help the men to carry on the family line.”Another commentator pointed out that the writers of “Friends” helped to normalize the L.G.B.T.Q. community with the episode. “And this is something that ‘Friends’ managed to do in 1994,” they wrote, questioning why homosexuality was being censored in China decades later.Only the first season of “Friends” was made available through online streaming platforms in China earlier this month, and many viewers in the country were already joking about what other scenes would be removed as future episodes become available.One person wondered how the censors would handle the season in which Phoebe becomes a surrogate mother to her brother. Another quipped that they were willing to bet the equivalent of $15 that the episode in which Monica, Chandler and Rachel discuss seven parts of a woman’s body for pleasure would be deleted.“I bet 100 yuan,” the person wrote on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform. “That ‘Seven Seven Seven’ is absolutely deleted.”Cao Li More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Taylor Mac Explores the Philosophy of the Hang

      by

      What kind of a party do you throw when you’re about to die? It’s an especially morbid question these days. But in “The Hang,” a new opera from the performer Taylor Mac, the answer involves equal parts philosophy and décor.The show, written with the composer Matt Ray, is about the death of Socrates, who after being convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and sentenced to death by hemlock, spent his final hours talking about virtue with his friends. And a few songs into a recent run-through of the production at the HERE Arts Center in downtown Manhattan, Mac — in a purple tulle robe and appropriately Socratic pandemic beard — started dragging out giant beanbag chairs while a bar took shape in the corner of the stage.“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,” Mac sang, as the eight-piece band leaned into a groove, “I’m in it for the hang.”Mac with cast members of “The Hang,” which takes the form of a gathering of “radical fairies” who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates. Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThat’s something of a credo for Mac, whose work, including the epic “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” celebrates community and connection through a radical queer lens. And “The Hang,” created with some of Mac’s longtime collaborators, puts those themes onstage again, in a phantasmagorical, hard-to-summarize mix.The show, which runs 105 minutes without an intermission, takes the form of a gathering of “radical fairies,” who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates. There’s plenty of wailing, but also queer romps, ancient Greek in-jokes, a comic monologue in the style of Noël Coward and a meditative number sung in a lavatory.And yes, there’s talk of virtue — not in the sense of starchy purity (to say the least), but the Socratic sense of knowledge and ceaseless questioning, which for Mac is not just a matter of logical argument, or even words.From left, Trebien Pollard, El Beh and Queen Esther. Mac’s longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle designed the costumes.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“One angle I wanted to go with in this show was to say there’s more,” Mac said in a video interview. “The Socratic questions can also be expressed physically, aesthetically and sonically.”“The Hang,” which began previews Thursday and runs through Feb. 20, may seem like a riposte to the pandemic, which shut down not just theater but also, for a time, most nonvirtual hanging out. (The opera, which is being produced by HERE, was originally set to have its premiere earlier this month as part of the Prototype Festival, which was canceled because of the Omicron surge.)The show was inspired by Plato’s “Apology,” an account of the trial of Socrates. It was so relevant, Mac said, to the way conversations about virtue today “are being manipulated to end curiosity.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut Mac said the idea began germinating several years ago, as a “palate cleanser” after “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” a sprawling meditation on American history through 246 songs, which Mac performed as a 24-hour marathon in 2016 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.The initial impulse was to make a solo theater piece based on Plato’s “Apology,” an account of the trial of Socrates, which Mac had recently read for the first time. “I wanted to do something simple,” Mac said. “And it was also so relevant to what’s been going on — the conversation about justice and virtue, and how those things were being manipulated to end curiosity.”The jazz vocalist Kat Edmonson was persuaded to join the production. It’s her first stage role.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut nothing with Mac, a self-described maximalist, stays simple, or small. In late 2019, “The Hang” had turned into an ensemble piece, and he sent a preliminary script to Ray, who had arranged the songs in “A 24-Decade History.”Ray, who has played jazz since he was a child, said his sonic entry point was a wailing saxophone, which became the sound of the poison, played in the show by a trio that sometimes roams the stage, as if spreading it. “I just started hearing this sound in my head,” he said. As Mac kept emailing him lyrics (in no particular order), Ray composed what became the show’s 26 songs, drawing on New Orleans jazz, swing, soul jazz, touches of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and other influences, though he hesitated to affix any firm labels. “I don’t like to write things that are an impression,” Ray said. “I just wrote the things I like to play.”Trebien Pollard applying makeup before a dress rehearsal.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMac describes the show as a kind of “fever-dream prayer,” an idea that’s literalized by the set, created by the costume designer Machine Dazzle, another longtime collaborator. He’s the one who suggested that the action was actually set inside Socrates’ body, complete with a fabric-draped proscenium as the rib cage.The vibe is wild and messy excess, though Dazzle said the pandemic had subtly affected his approach to costuming, and not just because the price of tulle had doubled.“People are different from the way they were two years ago,” he said. “You can tell they’ve been thinking. They’re in their head more.”Early in the 2020 pandemic lockdown, the core creative team started having virtual hangs twice a month, to talk about the show (and what they missed about seeing each other in person). The first workshop was held in October 2020, in a tent in a plaza in downtown Brooklyn.The show’s choreographer Chanon Judson.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe director Niegel Smith.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Machine Dazzle, the scenic and costume designer.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Matt Ray, the composer and music director.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Niegel Smith, the director, said the casting was about “curating friendship,” as well as artistry. The company of nine performers and eight musicians (who are choreographed into the show) are a mix of veterans of previous Mac projects and new collaborators, including the jazz vocalists Kat Edmonson and Queen Esther and the Broadway veteran Kenneth Ard (“Cats,” “Starlight Express,” “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”).Ard had already left theater when the pandemic hit, and was working as a corporate chef. He moved to San Francisco during the lockdown, but came back to New York to audition at the recommendation of Dazzle, a friend.“I was tired of the commercial theater thing, but I hadn’t experienced really artistic theater, as I feel this is,” he said in a video interview. “Matt Ray’s score just blew me away. I just thought, I have to sing these songs.”Wesley Garlington during rehearsals.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesEdmonson was recruited by Ray, with whom she has performed at Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center and elsewhere. It’s her first stage role and, in the song “Virtue,” a chance for some serious scatting, something she has only recently added to her own live shows. “It’s kind of a new thing for me,” she said. “It’s so much fun.”The physical demands of “The Hang” aren’t quite as extreme as those of Mac’s last play, “The Fre,” which put the actors — and the audience — in a giant ball pit. (The play, directed by Smith, was still in previews at the Flea when the pandemic hit.)Still, at the recent rehearsal for “The Hang,” the performer El Beh’s big skirt festooned with Medusa heads kept knocking over the urn where the cast members burn their mock-Socratic beards during “OK Boomer,” a riff on cultural ephemerality. And there was strategizing over the best way to flop onto a giant pouf during an extremely up-tempo philosophical dialogue called “The Ephemeral.”“I wanted to find out, can we be as theatrical as possible, can we bring the queer culture into it,” Mac said of approaching the work.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Chanon Judson, the choreographer, described the movement, like so much of the show, as a collage. “I really like to scan the room and sponge in everyone’s idiosyncratic ways of being in the space,” she said.In Plato’s “Apology,” the downfall of Socrates is blamed on Aristophanes, who in his play “The Clouds” had ridiculed Socrates as a charlatan, helping to turn public opinion against him. “The Hang” certainly gets its digs at Aristophanes. But in Mac’s retelling, if Socrates has a foil, it’s Plato himself, who lurks around the action, taking it all down on an ancient Greek stenograph.Plato was famously critical of theatricality, condemning drama as a form of lying that manipulates the public, with sometimes dangerous consequences. It’s an idea “The Hang” turns inside out.“I wanted to find out, can we be as theatrical as possible, can we bring the queer culture into it, and find a way to express a truth rather than a lie?” Mac said. “You can’t hide when you sing. You can try to, but you always end up telling some kind of truth about who you are.” More