Subterms
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The comedian’s latest HBO special, which explores family secrets and sexual orientation, is as much a therapy session as a stand-up show.Of all that’s remarkable about Jerrod Carmichael’s latest comedy hour — the storied intimacy of the venue (the Blue Note Jazz Club), the spectral aptness of the lighting (kind of blue), the titanic silences, dental work that would thrill any neat freak — two aspects of this HBO special are especially exceptional. One is a matter of carriage. Carmichael is a stand-up comedian. But all he does in this new show is sit. The opening long shot follows him in the snow, headed toward the Blue Note, where he removes his coat and hat and promptly takes a seat upon the stage before a modest, expectant, engaged gathering of what Carmichael wants to feel is a family and what I can only call community support, because winter isn’t all he braves. For one thing, his long body is on a metal folding chair.Maybe these people have assembled for what they think is a typical Carmichael show — penetrating observations about being alive. They get those. But under the direction of Bo Burnham and a promise that there’s much to discuss, Carmichael goes deeper this time. “I need you,” he says. His theme is secrets. He’s kept his birth name one, more or less. His sexual orientation, too. The show gets its title from secret No. 1: “Rothaniel.” Secret No. 2 is trickier. Carmichael does some ruminating about the men in his family and their double lives — a family of whole other families. He maintained both his father’s secret and his own from his mother. So it’s also a show about shame.The secrecy had become a way of life. As had the shame. They’d been eating at him. And now — with cool humor, a masterfully straight face, disbelief that he’s doing this, disbelief that’s he actually gay — he’s rethinking what it might have cost and, by extension, how it feels to be that much closer to free.Through all of this, Carmichael’s in complete control of his digressive mind. In the middle of recounting a scheme to prepare his mother to learn about his father’s betrayal, he throws in a bit about being disappointed anytime his hibachi restaurant dinners are performed by anybody other than a Japanese chef. He feigns wonder that no one expects a gay child: “Look at his cheeks. I bet he’s going to be a top!”For most of the show, his legs are apart. Not a detail I’d mention in something with enough close-ups of its star to qualify as portraiture. But with about 20 minutes left, I’d noticed something that struck me, at least, as profound: Carmichael’s legs had gone from spread to crossed.Bo Burnham directed “Rothaniel,” in which Carmichael performs at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York.HBOOrdinarily, one might argue that this sort of adjustment was a sign of discomfort. It hit me as discomfort’s opposite. Carmichael is funny about what a shock he finds his homosexuality to be. That myth that hard dudes from the ’hood don’t succumb to gayness — he’d subscribed to it. But by the time he’s sitting there in one of this country’s primo landmarks of improvisation, innovation and artistic introspection — of incandescence and intensity — Carmichael no longer seemed to be doing a routine. He appeared to be thinking aloud, doing a kind of jazz, playing quietly through the changes, and all of that. The mere crossing of legs felt like a deeply felt gesture of relaxation — of release. The people in that room are witnessing his masculinity shift from shield to sponge.Well, they’re more than witnessing it. These people are here to help. Carmichael had come to them with stories that are still unfolding around and within him. He’s already told his devoutly Christian mother and doesn’t know, for instance, whether she’ll ever warm to this part of him. His candor here certainly elevates the degree of that difficulty. Why, he wonders, is she so cold? And some unidentified person in the ambient dark of the Blue Note asks, why not give her a little time to absorb his revelation? He considers that. Earlier, he absorbs a different spectator’s crack timing after he tells the room that he’s not hiding anything and someone blurts out: “But your name.” “Whoa,” he says. “Now you guys are too much like my family.”I watched this show on HBO Max in the wake of the clash at the Oscars. And the intimacy here between this audience and this comedian differs from the national shock therapy from a few weeks before. This was group therapy, a session as much as a show, but also a dinner party. The evening was as much about his biological family and this live, makeshift one as it was his professional kin. I didn’t need Carmichael to make that connection. It was there in what he wore.Eddie Murphy sported a red leather suit in the 1983 concert movie “Delirious.”HBO/Everett CollectionThat was the evening’s other remarkable detail. It’s just a red, long-sleeve polo sweater that he wears with a pair of gold chains, black loafers and dark slacks that are all but tucked into a pair of creamy-looking socks. He looks simultaneously ready for bed, the office and “The Santa Clause 5.” It’s soft, this sweater, light as a T-shirt and maybe a size too big, yet it hangs on his svelte frame like it’s on sale somewhere chic. You want one. But who’s going to wear it better, or more evocatively?The sweater’s the color of outfits his forefathers donned, in 1983, doing standup at and near their zeniths. Richard Pryor spends “Here & Now” in a drab green suit whose pants karate-belt in the front. The red shirt he pairs it with has two white buttons; the shoes match. The vibe here breaks radically from Carmichael’s. Pryor has to contend with a rowdy New Orleans audience that he enjoys taming. The interruptions never stop. And Pryor expertly, hilariously, fields so many incoming two-cent interjections that he’s as much a fountain as a superstar.But what Carmichael’s red shirt really brought to mind was Eddie Murphy’s red leather suit in “Delirious.” Murphy has the jacket unzipped to his navel, inviting you to take in the chained medallion that decorates his hairless chest. A black disco belt hangs unlooped so that the metallic arrowhead tip sits down at his crotch and doubles as a penis. It’s pure ostentation, as if a Ferrari had at last gotten its wish to become Rick James. Murphy prowls the stage like a lion — and mauls like one, too. “Faggots” are his opening move. He fearfully imagines servicing a gay Mr. T and acts out what kind of lovers the best buds on “The Honeymooners” would make. There’s more. But also less, judging, at least, from the stupendous droop of my mouth.I must have watched “Delirious” a dozen times before I was 10. I knew what my deal was and that “faggot” seemed to sum up and toxify it. I remember finding the middle section, about Murphy being little, a riot. (It still is, in part because he’d located something about the moments of joy in poor, Black childhoods that felt true for lots of other children.)The umbrage taken over “Delirious,” in some sense, is settled. Murphy earnestly atoned for his homophobic arias 26 years ago and called that material “ignorant” in 2019. But a memory’s a memory. And mostly what I remember is the suit, the red of it, the fire, the warning, the alarm: Don’t be like Mr. T in Eddie Murphy’s porno. And yet, it was never lost on me that, in a sense, all Murphy’s doing in this bit is offering a literal description of the sex men can have with each other. But in 1983, at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, the alleged grossness of that intercourse — of gay people — is a rambunctious given. Murphy plugs his electric bewilderment into a packed concert hall’s socket. He presents his targets in their regular, manly personas — growling, gruff, goofy. He was 22 at the time, and what brings down the house during this spree of jokes is a panic about a virus of gayness and how it could infect someone as certifiably macho as Mr. T, a man awash in feathers, gold and vests.I DON’T KNOW how many times Carmichael has watched “Delirious.” I don’t know if he’s ever seen it, although the odds feel high that he has. (In his special, Carmichael permits us to laugh at the idea that his lips could be locked with another man’s while they whisper “no homo” to each other, in a state of prophylactic denial. The irony still blows him away.)Either way, his choosing such a passionate red for his televised coming-out sounded a different alarm for me. Murphy’s live-in-concert repulsion fantasias belie a tenderness that resides at the core of some of his work. To watch the early scenes between him and James Russo that set up the plot of “Beverly Hills Cop” is to wonder if the movie knows it’s a love story.Carmichael’s show makes the news because of the tender artistry at its core, but also because that repulsion remains pervasive enough in the culture — of comedy, of sports, of pop music, politics and movies — that the gay major-league baseball drama “Take Me Out” is somehow back on Broadway two decades after it opened, making its protagonist the country’s only openly gay professional baseball player. Again.Carmichael is 35, more than a dozen years older than Murphy in “Delirious.” He couldn’t have done this show at 22. Not with this much poise and self-fluency. Not with this much quiet. That sweater would have been wearing him. Now, it’s a garment of happiness and love, control and comfort. He is living up there in that sweater. (As remarkable: The armpits remain dry, and there’s no detectable undershirt, either. Has anyone ever left the Blue Note stage as sweatlessly?) The sweater’s also a tasteful rejoinder to Murphy’s high-voltage tastelessness, to the infernal scourge of inherited shame, a traffic sign of truth that says, “This has to stop.” More
Studios are signing up consultants to help make sure their movies or shows don’t raise any cultural red flags.In the summer of 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd spurred a racial reckoning in America, Carri Twigg’s phone kept ringing.Ms. Twigg, a founding partner of a production company named Culture House, was asked over and over again if she could take a look at a television or movie script and raise any red flags, particularly on race.Culture House, which employs mostly women of color, had traditionally specialized in documentaries. But after a few months of fielding the requests about scripts, they decided to make a business of it: They opened a new division dedicated solely to consulting work.“The frequency of the check-ins was not slowing down,” Ms. Twigg said. “It was like, oh, we need to make this a real thing that we offer consistently — and get paid for.”Though the company has been consulting for a little more than a year — for clients like Paramount Pictures, MTV and Disney — that work now accounts for 30 percent of Culture House’s revenue.Culture House is hardly alone. In recent years, entertainment executives have vowed to make a genuine commitment to diversity, but are still routinely criticized for falling short. To signal that they are taking steps to address the issue, Hollywood studios have signed contracts with numerous companies and nonprofits to help them avoid the reputational damage that comes with having a movie or an episode of a TV show face accusations of bias.“When a great idea is there and then it’s only talked about because of the social implications, that must be heartbreaking for creators who spend years on something,” Ms. Twigg said. “To get it into the world and the only thing anyone wants to talk about are the ways it came up short. So we’re trying to help make that not happen.”On Being Transgender in AmericaElite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.Transgender Youth: A photographer documented the lives of transgender youth. She shared some thoughts on what she saw.Remote Work: Remote work during the pandemic offered some people an opportunity to move forward with a transition. They are now preparing to return to the office.Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.The consulting work runs the gamut of a production. The consulting companies sometimes are asked about casting decisions as well as marketing plans. And they may also read scripts to search for examples of bias and to scrutinize how characters are positioned in a story.“It’s not only about what characters say, it’s also about when they don’t speak,” Ms. Twigg said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, there’s not enough agency for this character, you’re using this character as an ornament, you’re going to get dinged for that.’”When a consulting firm is on retainer, it can also come with a guaranteed check every month from a studio. And it’s a revenue stream developed only recently.Michelle K. Sugihara, the executive director of Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, a nonprofit.Tracy Nguyen for The New York Times“It really exploded in the last two years or so,” said Michelle K. Sugihara, the executive director of Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, a nonprofit. The group, called CAPE, is on retainer to some of the biggest Hollywood studios, including Netflix, Paramount, Warner Bros., Amazon, Sony and A24.Of the 100 projects that CAPE has consulted on, Ms. Sugihara said, roughly 80 percent have come since 2020, and they “really increased” after the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2021. “That really ramped up attention on our community,” she said.Ms. Sugihara said her group could be actively involved throughout the production process. In one example, she said she told a studio that all of the actors playing the heroes in an upcoming scripted project appeared to be light-skinned East Asian people whereas the villains were portrayed by darker-skinned East Asian actors.“That’s a red flag,” she said. “And we should talk about how those images may be harmful. Sometimes it’s just things that people aren’t even conscious about until you point it out.”Ms. Sugihara would not mention the name of the project or the studio behind it. In interviews, many cited nondisclosure agreements with the studios and a reluctance to embarrass a filmmaker as reasons they could not divulge specifics.Studios such as Paramount Pictures have been hiring consulting firms like Culture House and CAPE.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesSarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organization, said her group had been doing consulting work informally for years with the networks and studios. Finally, she decided to start charging the studios for their labor — work that she compared to “billable hours.”“Here we were consulting with all these content creators across Hollywood and not being compensated,” said Ms. Ellis, the organization’s president since 2013. “When I started at GLAAD we couldn’t pay our bills. And meanwhile here we are with the biggest studios and networks in the world, helping them tell stories that were hits. And I said this doesn’t make sense.”In 2018, she created the GLAAD Media Institute — if the networks or studios wanted any help in the future, they’d have to become a paying member of the institute.Initially, there was some pushback but the networks and studios would eventually come around. In 2018, there were zero members of the GLAAD Media Institute. By the end of 2021, that number had swelled to 58, with nearly every major studio and network in Hollywood now a paying member.Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, the advocacy organization, at its office in Manhattan.Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesScott Turner Schofield, who has spent some time working as a consultant for GLAAD, has also been advising networks and studios on how to accurately depict transgender people for years. But he said the work had increased so significantly in recent years that he was brought on board as an executive producer for a forthcoming horror movie produced by Blumhouse.“I’ve gone from someone who was a part-time consultant — barely eking by — to being an executive producer,” he said.Those interviewed said that it was a win-win arrangement between the consultancies and the studios.“The studios at the end of the day, they want to produce content but they want to make money,” said Rashad Robinson, the president of the advocacy organization Color of Change. “Making money can be impeded because of poor decisions and not having the right people at the table. So the studios are going to want to seek that.”He did caution, however, that simply bringing on consultants was not an adequate substitute for the structural change that many advocates want to see in Hollywood.“This doesn’t change the rules with who gets to produce content and who gets to make the final decisions of what gets on the air,” he said. “It’s fine to bring folks in from the outside but that in the end is insufficient to the fact that across the entertainment industry there is still a problem in terms of not enough Black and brown people with power in the executive ranks.”Still, the burgeoning field of cultural consultancy work may be here to stay. Ms. Twigg, who helped found Culture House with Raeshem Nijhon and Nicole Galovski, said that the volume of requests she was getting was “illustrative of how seriously it’s being taken, and how comprehensively it’s being brought into the fabric of doing business.”“From a business standpoint, it’s a way for us to capitalize on the expertise that we have gathered as people of color who have been alive in America for 30 or 40 years,” she said. More
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
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
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
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
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
