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    ‘Mary Jane’ Review: When Parenting Means Intensive Care

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    Amy Herzog’s heartbreaker arrives on Broadway with Rachel McAdams as the alarmingly upbeat mother of a fearfully sick child.Soon after Alex was born at 25 weeks, with multiple catastrophic disorders, Mary Jane’s husband, unable to cope, fled their marriage. Still, she hopes he “finds some peace, I really do.”She also thinks kindly of her boss, who means to accommodate her but pretty much fails to. “It’s daily moral agony for her,” Mary Jane marvels. “It’s really something to behold.”Mary Jane’s own moral agony is likewise something to behold. She feels guilty about putting the super of her Queens building, where she shares a junior one-bedroom with Alex, in a difficult position by removing the window guards. “It’s just that he loves looking out the windows, especially when he’s sick and I can’t take him outside?” she explains in upspeak.“It’s the law,” the not-unkind super replies — though Alex, now 2, can barely sit up, let alone reach the sill.“You’re an excellent superintendent,” Mary Jane says. She is the embodiment of apologizing for living.That, at its heart, is the condition that Amy Herzog’s steel-trap play “Mary Jane” explores: The death of the self in the love for one’s child. As with Alex, so for his mother: There is no cure.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      The Composer Julia Wolfe Focuses on Climate in ‘unEarth’

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      Julia Wolfe’s latest in a series of increasingly political, oratorio-like works, “unEarth,” premieres this week at the New York Philharmonic.Julia Wolfe, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and co-founder of Bang on a Can, has a way with words.In “Anthracite Fields,” the coal-dark highlight of a series of folklike, oratorio-adjacent works in which Wolfe, 64, has been putting American injustices under her unsparing sonic microscope, she lists the men named John with single-syllable surnames who can be found on an index of Pennsylvania mining accidents — a litany hundreds of Johns long.Her memorial to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster, “Fire in my mouth,” concludes with an ethereal incantation of the 146 workers who died, their names drifting in sound, as if into the smoke of history. “Her Story,” a reflection on women’s rights, quotes some of the choicest insults that were spat at suffragists a century ago, as if to ask whether they sound familiar today.Now comes “unEarth,” a confrontation with climate change that premieres on Thursday at the New York Philharmonic, with Jaap van Zweden leading the soprano Else Torp, the men of the Crossing and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, in a staging by the director Anne Kauffman. It starts, and ends, with words sung by the children who helped write them.Wolfe’s “Fire in my mouth” at David Geffen Hall in 2019.Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times“Of course, it’s so important for everyone but particularly poignant for younger people,” Wolfe said of the climate crisis in a recent interview. “A lot of the leadership right now, a lot of the feisty leadership is coming from young people, particularly from young women.”The texts that Wolfe uses in “unEarth” have a sense of literary adventure familiar from her earlier oratorios. She read widely to research it, and noted the influence of such writers as Sami Grover, Peter Wohlleben and Elizabeth Kolbert, a friend. The libretto draws on Emily Dickinson and the book of Genesis; in the second movement of three, “Forest,” the word tree is translated into myriad languages, which she pounds into a celebration of all things arboreal, backed by conga drums.“She is always taking kernels of text that have a lot of resonance in the stories of the world we live in,” Donald Nally, the conductor of the Crossing, said of Wolfe. “Honestly, at some point, you start to stop thinking about the words and you drift off into larger ideas.”Many of Wolfe’s compositions — another, an orchestral work called “Pretty,” will premiere at the Berlin Philharmonic next week, under its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, a Wolfe admirer — have had political themes. But the larger ideas of “unEarth” are more directly delivered than those of any of her other socially conscious but primarily historical oratorios, dating back to “Steel Hammer” more than a decade ago.The impulse to speak plainly comes not just from the subject matter, but from Wolfe’s chosen collaborators. When she decided to involve the Young People’s Chorus in the work, as she had in “Fire,” she sought the input of its singers; she and Kauffman asked its conductors to lead the choristers in discussions about the climate crisis, and recorded them.“Something that I remember is everybody agreeing on this sense of urgency,” Ryoko Leyh, 16, said of the conversations she took part in. “Everybody was saying something like ‘I’m scared,’ or ‘I’m always thinking about it, it’s always on my mind and making me anxious.’ So I feel like we all had different ideas of what is actually going on and what we can do to stop climate change, but we all had that collective sense of dread.”The children of the chorus come from all kinds of educational backgrounds, said Francisco J. Núñez, its artistic director. For many of them, the discussions were a learning opportunity; some were as young as 8.“It really made me think on how impactful learning about climate change and global warming itself can be on the young population,” Irene Cunto, 12, said, “because at the end, we’ll be the ones that’s facing it.”Wolfe’s works in this vein have grown increasingly political. “I can be poetic, poetic, poetic,” she said, “but then at a certain point it’s like, what are we doing here?”Amrita Stuetzle for The New York TimesThe process was instructive for Wolfe, too. She was amazed at the subtlety of the conversations, and decided to use parts of them in the piece. It begins with a quotation of one of the most junior participants, who saw global warming as “like a monster devouring the Earth.” The work ends with another quotation, this time of an older singer, as their phrase “hope requires action” is chanted like a mantra, before the chorus and the soprano demand that the audience “act,” with an insistent, if fearful and minor-key, final crescendo.“We just feel powerless because of this idea that we’ve inherited all these problems and now it’s our responsibility to fix everything,” Leyh said, pointing to the importance of the chorus singing words its members have written themselves. “It’s like we’re being given a platform that we don’t usually have, literally, to say what we want to say in a way that we know is going to be heard.”Making the Young People’s Chorus the voice of hope in “unEarth,” and ensuring that the audience would have to look at them “in the face,” as Wolfe put it, offered the composer something of a way through the dilemmas involved in creating explicitly political art, a challenge that climate-conscious composers are finding becomes more acute as catastrophes grow. Wolfe said that she was trying not to be too didactic, but that she was content with her solution in the final movement, “Fix It,” which lists a number of ways in which individuals can make a difference — Meatless Mondays, No Mow May — as well as broader policy concepts, like “reforestation” and “solarification.”“I can be poetic, poetic, poetic,” Wolfe said, “but then at a certain point it’s like, what are we doing here?”The Philharmonic commissioned “unEarth” after the success of “Fire in my mouth” four years ago, and is presenting it on the first of two programs that make up “Earth,” a climate mini-festival. The second program, next week, includes the belated local premiere of John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” which debuted in Seattle five years ago.“In the end, music is about emotion,” said Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic, “and Julia is able to combine, in that way that we cannot quite explain, a combination of beauty and emotion. It carries an even stronger message as a result.”Each of Wolfe’s oratorios has offered a different answer to the question of where the balance of poetry and politics lies, though she sees a progression through them. “Anthracite Fields” was not exactly shy about its views — it sets a speech by John L. Lewis, the militant leader of the United Mine Workers — but, as one listener pointed out to her, it does not explicitly mention protest. “Fire,” partly as a consequence, has an entire, thumping movement called “Protest.” “Her Story” is more of an inquiry into change than an indictment of the past, but as Wolfe put it, “it’s a little sassier.”“UnEarth,” though, includes lines like “the house is on fire,” and “clean up your corporation.” It goes further, and with good reason.“The others were more reflective. ‘Who were we?’ ‘Who are we?’” Wolfe said. “And this is like: ‘Guess what. We have to do something.’” More

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      in Theater

      Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan to Star in Hansberry Revival

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      “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” a rarely revived play by Lorraine Hansberry, will be presented at BAM starting in February.Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan will star in a rare revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” starting in February at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.The play, about a pair of bohemian artists struggling to preserve their marriage at a time of political upheaval, was first staged on Broadway in 1964, five years after the arrival of Hansberry’s far better known work, “A Raisin in the Sun.” In 2018, writing in The New York Times Book Review, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins called “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” “a shattering study of liberal self-delusion and whiteness as an existential crisis” and declared the play “criminally neglected.”The revival, which is scheduled to begin performances Feb. 4 and to open Feb. 23, will be directed by Anne Kauffman, who previously directed it in 2016 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Reviewing that production for The Chicago Tribune, the critic Chris Jones called the play “a masterpiece lost in plain sight” and “a drama so infused with emotional intelligence, linguistic treasures and the human conditions of dread and longing that it keeps you bolt-upright in your seat for nearly three hours.”The artistic director of BAM, David Binder, said he read “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” while he was working as the lead producer of a 2004 Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” He and Kauffman have been talking about mounting a New York production ever since.Isaac and Brosnahan are best known for their work onscreen — he for “Star Wars” sequels (he played Poe Dameron) and she for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (she plays the title character). But both have stage credits as well; Isaac played Hamlet at the Public Theater in 2017, and Brosnahan played Desdemona in a production of “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop in 2016.Before the pandemic, Isaac had been planning to appear in a new production of “Three Sisters,” directed by Sam Gold at New York Theater Workshop. That production, which has been repeatedly postponed, now appears on the theater’s website as part of the current season, but with no date, and the note, “We are working hard to confirm the cast for the 2023 production of ‘Three Sisters’ and we hope that the full original cast will be available to continue on with the production.” (Representatives for Isaac and New York Theater Workshop offered no further details.)Hansberry died in 1965, at the age of 34, and in recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in her life and work, with productions and books, a documentary and even a sculpture that is touring the country. A new revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara, is now in previews at the Public Theater. More

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      in Television

      Review: Sarah Silverman’s ‘Bedwetter’ Musical Has Sprung a Leak

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      The comedian’s memoir was funny. But when the new show based on it tries for something deeper, it sinks into bathos.Zingy, 10-year-old Sarah Silverman (Zoe Glick) isn’t a natural fit for the town of Bedford, N.H., where sour, flinty fatalism is the norm. “May all your dreams come true,” one local says at a birthday party. “Mine did not.”The Silvermans, who anchor the new musical “The Bedwetter,” are defiantly nonconformist: all id, all the time. Sarah’s lately divorced father, the proprietor of Crazy Donny’s Factory Outlet (Darren Goldstein), encourages her to wow her new classmates with the dirty jokes he’s taught her. Dipso Nana (Bebe Neuwirth) thinks Sarah’s bartending skills are a better bet to impress. And if Sarah’s mother, Beth Ann (Caissie Levy), expresses herself by spending days in bed watching old movies, Sarah, taking the family’s let-it-all-out mojo perhaps too far, does so by wetting hers at night.Still, she is cheerfully resigned to being a misfit, taking no offense even when her sister, Laura (Emily Zimmerman), wanting nothing to do with her in public, sings a song called “I Don’t Know This Person.” And to beat her new fifth-grade classmates to the punch, Sarah pre-emptively tells them, in “I Couldn’t Agree More,” that she’s “eww-y” and “Jewy.” Not only are her arms “so hairy,” but “You should see my back.”The musical depicts one year in the life of 10-year-old Sarah, who quickly manages to make frenemies of three new classmates.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSatisfying as the standup rhythm is, “The Bedwetter,” which opened Tuesday at the Linda Gross Theater, is sometimes, like its title character, a bit of a misfit. Based on the real Sarah Silverman’s 2010 memoir, subtitled “Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee,” it works best when it aims for the comic highs of that charming if gangly book. As long as it sticks close to young Sarah’s resilience as she tries to make friends without revealing her mortifying condition, “The Bedwetter,” an Atlantic Theater Company production, is a potty-mouthed pleasure. But in jimmying the original into a more serious musical format as it proceeds, it achieves only a middling geniality.It starts out promisingly enough, establishing the main characters efficiently and with good humor. The songs, with music by Adam Schlesinger and lyrics by Schlesinger and Silverman, have the cheesy irreverence and synth-y disposability of period television jingles — the period being the early 1980s. Donny’s numbers, performed with schlubby insouciance by Goldstein, are a highlight, including one, whose refrain can’t be printed here, that explains how he knows all the other girls’ mothers. Perhaps you can imagine what rhymes with “along.”But a little of that sound goes a long way, just as Silverman’s naïve inappropriateness, so effective in her standup, works only the first few times onstage. When Sarah, introducing herself to her class, mentions a brother who died, her reflex not to seem piteous makes her explanation weirdly funny: “He was just like a baby, so it wasn’t sad or anything.” But when that death — and a lot of other dark material — comes to the forefront, the laughs wear thin.If such moments don’t feel out of place in Silverman’s memoir, that’s in part because its episodic narrative leaps froglike through 40 years of her life, quickly dispensing with even the most disturbing events. And though it makes sense that the musical’s authors would narrow the focus and shorten the time span, the book by Joshua Harmon (“Bad Jews”) and Silverman overreaches; in attempting to backfill the story with drama to justify the addition of songs, they put too much pressure on the one year it depicts.That’s the year in which Sarah arrives at McKelvie Middle School, manages to make frenemies of three classmates and, at the end of the first act, in an unconvincing scene involving diapers, finds the one thing she had hoped to keep private revealed. The second act deals with Sarah’s resulting depression — a state uncomfortably reminiscent of Beth Ann’s — as well as Nana’s mortality and a minor character’s suicide.The music, and especially the lyrics, cannot support this turn toward “Fun Home” territory. (In her black wig, Glick, a very talented 14-year-old, looks like she’s already playing the young lead in that show.) What works well in the lighter material — like the earwormy title song, which sounds like “Day Tripper” being covered by the Partridge Family — feels flimsy in the heavier material, especially Beth Ann’s overdramatic arias. (Levy sings them beautifully, though.) As a result, the show seems to spring a leak, losing all its giddy energy as it sinks into the serious.That’s a shame — the more so because Schlesinger, having died from Covid-19 complications in 2020, was not able to finish developing the musical with his collaborators. (The songwriter David Yazbek joined the team as a “creative consultant.”) Schlesinger’s songs for the 2008 stage version of “Cry-Baby” (written with David Javerbaum), as well as his experience in the pop-rock band Fountains of Wayne, demonstrated a quick ear for neat hooks but not yet the kind of complexity needed to carry theatrical emotion. And his lyrics with Silverman too often wander in search of a rhyme, then, sighting one in the distance, botch it.Glick, outnumbered by her meds, in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMuch of this might have been improved had Schlesinger lived. And much could still have been camouflaged by a strong staging. But “The Bedwetter” doesn’t get that, at least in this incarnation; the usually acute director Anne Kauffman, working on an awkward set by Laura Jellinek, seems to be going for a middle-school aesthetic to match its milieu. Even at two hours, the show feels needlessly elongated by switchovers from one vague locale to another — and by numbers, including one about Xanax, that extend well past their welcome.About that Xanax: It’s a bizarre omission in the musical that it does not highlight, as the book clearly does, the role the massive over-prescription of that drug played in Sarah’s depression. (By age 14 she was taking 16 pills a day.) Perhaps this was a choice to make the drama more emotional than pharmaceutical but, in any case, it further burdens what is already a weak plot about a weak bladder. But then many of the show’s choices, like the promotion of a Miss New Hampshire character (Ashley Blanchet, suitably lovely) from cameo to mascot, seem similarly random. That’s true of Silverman’s comedy in general, built as it is on apparently aleatory mismatches of tone and content.If that kind of randomness can be a convincing aesthetic in some art forms, I’ve never seen it work in musicals, where “that seems weird enough to work” never does. A show that operates on that principle may still hit a few highs; Neuwirth, dry and suave, certainly knows how to find them. The song in which she tells Sarah, warmly but practically, “You’re beautiful — to me,” is one of the few serious numbers that lands. Too often the rest of “The Bedwetter,” at least when aiming for tears, feels merely wet.The BedwetterThrough July 3 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      in Movies

      Sarah Silverman on Her Family Show About Divorce and Depression

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      “Everything’s couched with hard jokes, but it’s also vulnerable,” the comic said of “The Bedwetter,” her new musical comedy.When the comedian Sarah Silverman was maybe 8, her father gave her a joke book. This was no childhood compendium of riddles and rhymes. It was a collection of “tasteless” humor, and on the very first page, she recalled, it contained a zinger about Little Red Riding Hood getting it on with the Big Bad Wolf.As a child, Silverman was mystified by these punch lines. As an adult, she said, “I went, oh my God, what is wrong with my father?” And then she wrote the whole bit into “The Bedwetter,” the new Off Broadway musical based on her memoir of the same name. It’s one of many R-rated episodes that were inspired by her beloved dad, who taught her to swear when she was 3, unwittingly setting her on the path to becoming a comic.The family life she has memorialized onstage was short on boundaries and weighted with despair. “The Bedwetter,” which begins previews April 30 at the Linda Gross Theater, centers on a 10-year-old Silverman, who suffered from the embarrassing condition of the title. It deals frankly with divorce and depression — but it’s a raucous comedy.“Everything’s couched with hard jokes, but it’s also vulnerable, and sad,” she said. “I really hope people bring their kids.”Silverman and cast members in their Times Square rehearsal studio, preparing the show (again) after a two-year pandemic delay.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAn Atlantic Theater Company production originally scheduled for the spring of 2020, the show lost one of its original creators, the musician and Emmy-winning TV and stage composer Adam Schlesinger, who died from complications of the coronavirus on April 1, 2020. His death and the two-year pandemic delay deepened the meaning of the production, its creators said, even as it sharpened the jokes. Seeing the show through became a mission for some of his collaborators.And it arrives as Silverman, 51, has reached an unexpectedly beneficent phase of her career, and a new level of maturity in her personal life. As the cultural lines around “appropriate” humor are repeatedly redrawn, she is one of the few performers who has, seemingly genuinely, all but renounced the early work that put her on the map.For decades a convulsive and taboo-busting top comic, she has transformed into a still bitingly funny and progressive feminist voice who advocates for earnest connection (even with Republicans). With a huge, cross-generational network of comedy friends and a pandemic-era podcast that doles out gentle advice, she’s become an unlikely moral center of the comedy community: a Gen X Mr. Rogers, with a topknot ponytail and a profane streak.“Sarah’s secret weapon is her big heart,” said the filmmaker Adam McKay, a friend and a producer of her 2017 Hulu series “I Love You, America.” Erin Simkin/Hulu“She’s able to take audiences into shadowy, tricky places because we all trust her and know she’s a force for good,” said the filmmaker Adam McKay, a friend and a producer of “I Love You, America,” the 2017 Hulu series that showcased her efforts at bridge-building humor. “Sarah’s secret weapon is her big heart.”The confluence of darkness, dark humor and love is the key to “The Bedwetter,” which began when Schlesinger, the witty Fountains of Wayne power pop bassist, read Silverman’s 2010 best-selling memoir, and decided that chapter headings like “My Nana Was Great but Now She’s Dead” and “Hymen, Goodbyemen,” were the seeds of great comic songs. Silverman and Schlesinger began working on the project a decade ago, becoming friends in the process. “We started going to this piano bar karaoke every other Friday,” she said, noting that she still can’t strike the standing get-together from her calendar.Some of the reference materials for the show in the rehearsal space.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesPhotographs of Silverman and her family from the ’70s and ’80s.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesShe was speaking over lunch recently at a bustling restaurant near Union Square. She’d arrived on foot and alone, looking not AARP age but like the early ’90s N.Y.U. student she once was, in jeans, a Santana ringer tee and a backpack. (“I always say, you should live well below your means — you don’t need a purse, get a backpack.”) Her conversation was generously detailed and inquisitive; she acted out her stories, but not enough to draw much attention in the room. Almost no personal detail was too embarrassing to share, anyway. “I learned disassociation at a very young age, as a bedwetter who had to go to sleepover camp,” she said.Having known that abject social terror — she wet the bed well into her teens — Silverman leans into compassion. She even had empathy for a guy at Comic-Con who, years back, suddenly punched her in the face while wearing a Hulk fist. “I could tell he just didn’t know what to do with all his feelings.”But she also knows how to cackle her way out of the depths. She mentioned a friend’s death. “Suicide, I think, is sometimes so — ” Silverman began, when she clocked the waitress dropping by our table.“So whimsical!” she concluded, in purposeful earshot. “I don’t know, it’s the one thing you really should put off till tomorrow, every time.”When the pandemic cut off her stand-up tours, she started a weekly podcast, and professed surprise about the number of callers in real need, with problems both personal (depression) and cultural. “Are we Jewish?” asked one woman, befuddled by her family history. “Being Jewish is a state of mind!” Silverman replied. (One of her three sisters is a rabbi, but Silverman herself is not religious.)Silverman in the Times Square rehearsal space. “Sincerely confronting one’s darkness in the same space as making light of it was a formative example for me,” the actress Ilana Glazer said of Silverman’s work.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“I thought it would be silly and dumb, and then I’d talk politics,” she said of the podcast. “Then I get people so earnest, and — I’m my mother — I think I can help. But so much of the time I’m talking out of my ass; just the classic someone-who-does-a-lot-of-therapy thinking they’re a therapist.”Still, she added, there “are just things I’ve learned, because I’ve lived a long time, and I’m curious.”HER INFLUENCE IS WIDELY FELT. “I look up to Sarah,” the actress and writer Ilana Glazer (“Broad City”) wrote in an email. “She can hold the nuances of the big picture, socially, historically, personally — and process those complexities spontaneously” in her work. Silverman is not the only comic to reveal her struggles, but she may be the most honest. “The idea of sincerely confronting one’s darkness in the same space as making light of it,” Glazer wrote, “was a formative example for me.”Silverman has dipped into dramatic roles (she played a lesbian who died in childbirth on the Showtime series “Masters of Sex”) but mostly has a side career as the funny, smart friend in movies; she’ll next host “Stupid Pet Tricks,” a takeoff on the old Letterman bit, as a variety series for TBS. And after a decade of condo-tower living in Los Angeles, she just bought her first home, to the relief of friends like Chelsea Handler.“I ran over to take a look at it, concerned she bought a one-bedroom bungalow tucked underneath the Griffith Observatory,” Handler, the comedian and author, wrote in an email. “When I saw she had bought herself a big-girl house, I thought, well, there we go, she’s accepted adulthood.” Silverman’s boyfriend of nearly two years, Rory Albanese, the showrunner for Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” has moved in; the first time she’s cohabitated with a partner in over a decade, and the very first time on her own turf.For a musical about a bedwetter, you need a bed. It’s a central piece of the set for the show, which begins previews April 30 at the Linda Gross Theater.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSilverman, who said she has been on Zoloft since 1994, is open about her mental health. She was clinically depressed as a kid and, back when doctor’s orders were rarely questioned, was prescribed a dosage of Xanax that would hobble a SoundCloud rapper. Also, her first psychiatrist hanged himself. It’s all in the musical, along with her mother’s debilitating depression which, in the show, leaves her largely bed-bound. (But remember, it’s a comedy!)The Covid shutdown and Schlesinger’s death came as the musical’s creators were in New York, ready to start rehearsals for their imminent run. Instead they began gathering on Zoom to check in. Eventually, they brought in as a creative consultant the musician and composer David Yazbek, a Tony winner for best original score for “The Band’s Visit” and a nominee for “Tootsie.”At that point, there was a surreal and palpable sense that someone was missing, Yazbek said. “Being able to laugh was not just sort of healing and important, but actually kind of vital — for us, I’m not even talking about any audiences.”That sentiment did go in the show, buoyed by Silverman’s own experience with loss. Her mother, Beth Ann, who recovered from depression and went on to become a successful theater director in New Hampshire, died in 2015; as did the 30-year-old writer Harris Wittels, who worked on “The Sarah Silverman Program,” her Comedy Central series; and Garry Shandling, the comedian and a mentor, in 2016.That year, Silverman suffered a near miss of her own, when she had a rare case of epiglottitis, a swollen abscess around her windpipe, and was rushed into emergency surgery. After her discharge, in withdrawal from pain meds, “I was chemically suicidal,” she said; she had not been given her anti-depressants during the hospital stay.“It will be familiar to so many people,” Silverman said about how the musical explores the emotions raised by divorce.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesGoing through these traumas and emerging laughing, “I don’t think a lot of people do that with such finesse,” said Anne Kauffman, the director of “The Bedwetter.”IN THEIR TIMES SQUARE rehearsal studio, there were inspo pictures of the Silverman family circa the ’70s and ’80s; Sarah inherited her eyebrows from her dad, Donald, who owned a discount clothing store. The cast, which includes Darren Goldstein and Caissie Levy as the Silvermans and Bebe Neuwirth as Nana, cycled through a kaleidoscope of anger, anxiety and silliness. It was very funny. Ganged up on by some fifth-grade mean girls, who taunt her with “You’re short and dark and strange and ooey,” Zoe Glick, who plays Silverman, is enthusiastically self-deprecating: “I couldn’t agree more!” she sings cheerfully. “I’m the type of kid that’s too Jewy to ignore.”The music is as sticky as the best pop song — Schlesinger’s touch. Both Yazbek and Henry Aronson, the musical director, said they tried to channel him as they finished the project. He worked in a Beatles pop tradition, Aronson said, “a certain deceptive simplicity, harmonically.”Silverman, taking notes at a table, popped up to sub for an absent actor, sweetly singing a jingle for “Crazy Donny’s Warehouse (for Your Messy Divorce).” If it was initially bizarre to watch her family’s emotional upheaval recreated — her parents split when she was around 7 — “I’m also so thrilled, because I feel like it will be familiar to so many people,” she said.Kauffman, the director, said Silverman has illuminated her history — “What was your mom like in this moment? Would your dad have cracked a joke?” — with what works dramaturgically. “She just has this incredible memory and ability to articulate exactly what she was experiencing, which is like a director’s dream. Her as a 10 year old is very viscerally present.”And she punches up the jokes. When Glick was doing a scene that involved making fart noises, Silverman advised her: “Point to your mouth, to really focus” on the body part it’s standing in for, she told her, in less PG language. “It will be funny.”Silverman has moved on from the incendiary language she used at the beginning of her career. “It’s so funny what a burden some people feel it is, to have to change,” she said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesA word — OK, a paragraph — about farts (and also a sentence I never expected to write in The New York Times). If you thought Silverman might’ve outgrown her affinity for juvenile, scatological humor after a half-century, you’d be wrong. “She has an inability not to laugh if you fart,” Yazbek said. During rehearsal, I caught her giving Joshua Harmon (“Bad Jews,” “Prayer for the French Republic”), who wrote the book with her, a demo in fart noise technique, her hands cupped around her mouth.She has never not wanted to be a performer, said her sister Laura Silverman, who recalled that when she had friends over as a kid, Sarah would pop out of a closet, doing costumed characters, to entertain them.And her family was supportive in creative ways. “I would pick up the phone and call the operator and have her sing ‘Tomorrow,’ from ‘Annie,’” said Laura, an actor and writer. “I would say, I didn’t want her to be scared to sing or perform in front of anyone, at any time.” When Silverman, as a very young child, unleashed the string of curse words that her father taught her — a cherub with inky curtain bangs, working blue — “I would get this wild approval from adults, despite themselves,” she said. “It felt so good, made my arms itch with glee, and I became addicted to that.”Only when she wrote her memoir did she connect the dots between that feeling and her comedy: “So much of my standup, especially early on, was shock, shock, shock,” she said, “and totally trash.” She used racist epithets, misguidedly, to prove a point, which she now says she regrets — she’s gladly left that language behind. “It’s so funny what a burden some people feel it is, to have to change,” she said.The only word that Silverman whispered, in our three hour lunch, was “menopause.”When pressed — no, pleaded with — she said she would write about that topic, though she’s still working out the terms. (“There is not a female word for emasculating, but that’s what menopause is.”) But talking about her body and her needs, is “how I learned to be vulnerable and honest,” she said. “It’s an incredible revelation some people don’t even realize they can do. The truth! It’s really wild.” More

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      Sarah Silverman on ‘The Bedwetter,’ Her New Musical Comedy

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      “Everything’s couched with hard jokes, but it’s also vulnerable,” the comic said of “The Bedwetter,” her new musical comedy.When the comedian Sarah Silverman was maybe 8, her father gave her a joke book. This was no childhood compendium of riddles and rhymes. It was a collection of “tasteless” humor, and on the very first page, she recalled, it contained a zinger about Little Red Riding Hood getting it on with the Big Bad Wolf.As a child, Silverman was mystified by these punch lines. As an adult, she said, “I went, oh my God, what is wrong with my father?” And then she wrote the whole bit into “The Bedwetter,” the new Off Broadway musical based on her memoir of the same name. It’s one of many R-rated episodes that were inspired by her beloved dad, who taught her to swear when she was 3, unwittingly setting her on the path to becoming a comic.The family life she has memorialized onstage was short on boundaries and weighted with despair. “The Bedwetter,” which begins previews April 30 at the Linda Gross Theater, centers on a 10-year-old Silverman, who suffered from the embarrassing condition of the title. It deals frankly with divorce and depression — but it’s a raucous comedy.“Everything’s couched with hard jokes, but it’s also vulnerable, and sad,” she said. “I really hope people bring their kids.”Silverman and cast members in their Times Square rehearsal studio, preparing the show (again) after a two-year pandemic delay.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAn Atlantic Theater Company production originally scheduled for the spring of 2020, the show lost one of its original creators, the musician and Emmy-winning TV and stage composer Adam Schlesinger, who died from complications of the coronavirus on April 1, 2020. His death and the two-year pandemic delay deepened the meaning of the production, its creators said, even as it sharpened the jokes. Seeing the show through became a mission for some of his collaborators.And it arrives as Silverman, 51, has reached an unexpectedly beneficent phase of her career, and a new level of maturity in her personal life. As the cultural lines around “appropriate” humor are repeatedly redrawn, she is one of the few performers who has, seemingly genuinely, all but renounced the early work that put her on the map.For decades a convulsive and taboo-busting top comic, she has transformed into a still bitingly funny and progressive feminist voice who advocates for earnest connection (even with Republicans). With a huge, cross-generational network of comedy friends and a pandemic-era podcast that doles out gentle advice, she’s become an unlikely moral center of the comedy community: a Gen X Mr. Rogers, with a topknot ponytail and a profane streak.“Sarah’s secret weapon is her big heart,” said the filmmaker Adam McKay, a friend and a producer of her 2017 Hulu series “I Love You, America.” Erin Simkin/Hulu“She’s able to take audiences into shadowy, tricky places because we all trust her and know she’s a force for good,” said the filmmaker Adam McKay, a friend and a producer of “I Love You, America,” the 2017 Hulu series that showcased her efforts at bridge-building humor. “Sarah’s secret weapon is her big heart.”Inside Sarah Silverman’s WorldThe convulsive and taboo-busting comic has transformed over time into a still bitingly funny and progressive feminist voice.‘The Bedwetter’: Sarah Silverman’s new musical, based on her 2010 memoir, deals with divorce and depression, but it’s a raucous comedy.Defining Moment: When A.O. Scott, our film critic, panned her comedy in 2005, it hit Silverman hard. Years later, they revisited that episode.Talking Politics: In her late-night talk show, “I Love You, America,” she experimented with the limits of political comedy in the Trump era.‘I Smile Back’: Silverman stretched in an unfamiliar direction by playing a suburban mom in the harrowing drama. Here is what she said of that role.The confluence of darkness, dark humor and love is the key to “The Bedwetter,” which began when Schlesinger, the witty Fountains of Wayne power pop bassist, read Silverman’s 2010 best-selling memoir, and decided that chapter headings like “My Nana Was Great but Now She’s Dead” and “Hymen, Goodbyemen,” were the seeds of great comic songs. Silverman and Schlesinger began working on the project a decade ago, becoming friends in the process. “We started going to this piano bar karaoke every other Friday,” she said, noting that she still can’t strike the standing get-together from her calendar.Some of the reference materials for the show in the rehearsal space.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesPhotographs of Silverman and her family from the ’70s and ’80s.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesShe was speaking over lunch recently at a bustling restaurant near Union Square. She’d arrived on foot and alone, looking not AARP age but like the early ’90s N.Y.U. student she once was, in jeans, a Santana ringer tee and a backpack. (“I always say, you should live well below your means — you don’t need a purse, get a backpack.”) Her conversation was generously detailed and inquisitive; she acted out her stories, but not enough to draw much attention in the room. Almost no personal detail was too embarrassing to share, anyway. “I learned disassociation at a very young age, as a bedwetter who had to go to sleepover camp,” she said.Having known that abject social terror — she wet the bed well into her teens — Silverman leans into compassion. She even had empathy for a guy at Comic-Con who, years back, suddenly punched her in the face while wearing a Hulk fist. “I could tell he just didn’t know what to do with all his feelings.”But she also knows how to cackle her way out of the depths. She mentioned a friend’s death. “Suicide, I think, is sometimes so — ” Silverman began, when she clocked the waitress dropping by our table.“So whimsical!” she concluded, in purposeful earshot. “I don’t know, it’s the one thing you really should put off till tomorrow, every time.”When the pandemic cut off her stand-up tours, she started a weekly podcast, and professed surprise about the number of callers in real need, with problems both personal (depression) and cultural. “Are we Jewish?” asked one woman, befuddled by her family history. “Being Jewish is a state of mind!” Silverman replied. (One of her three sisters is a rabbi, but Silverman herself is not religious.)Silverman in the Times Square rehearsal space. “Sincerely confronting one’s darkness in the same space as making light of it was a formative example for me,” the actress Ilana Glazer said of Silverman’s work.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“I thought it would be silly and dumb, and then I’d talk politics,” she said of the podcast. “Then I get people so earnest, and — I’m my mother — I think I can help. But so much of the time I’m talking out of my ass; just the classic someone-who-does-a-lot-of-therapy thinking they’re a therapist.”Still, she added, there “are just things I’ve learned, because I’ve lived a long time, and I’m curious.”HER INFLUENCE IS WIDELY FELT. “I look up to Sarah,” the actress and writer Ilana Glazer (“Broad City”) wrote in an email. “She can hold the nuances of the big picture, socially, historically, personally — and process those complexities spontaneously” in her work. Silverman is not the only comic to reveal her struggles, but she may be the most honest. “The idea of sincerely confronting one’s darkness in the same space as making light of it,” Glazer wrote, “was a formative example for me.”Silverman has dipped into dramatic roles (she played a lesbian who died in childbirth on the Showtime series “Masters of Sex”) but mostly has a side career as the funny, smart friend in movies; she’ll next host “Stupid Pet Tricks,” a takeoff on the old Letterman bit, as a variety series for TBS. And after a decade of condo-tower living in Los Angeles, she just bought her first home, to the relief of friends like Chelsea Handler.“I ran over to take a look at it, concerned she bought a one-bedroom bungalow tucked underneath the Griffith Observatory,” Handler, the comedian and author, wrote in an email. “When I saw she had bought herself a big-girl house, I thought, well, there we go, she’s accepted adulthood.” Silverman’s boyfriend of nearly two years, Rory Albanese, the showrunner for Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” has moved in; the first time she’s cohabitated with a partner in over a decade, and the very first time on her own turf.For a musical about a bedwetter, you need a bed. It’s a central piece of the set for the show, which begins previews April 30 at the Linda Gross Theater.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSilverman, who said she has been on Zoloft since 1994, is open about her mental health. She was clinically depressed as a kid and, back when doctor’s orders were rarely questioned, was prescribed a dosage of Xanax that would hobble a SoundCloud rapper. Also, her first psychiatrist hanged himself. It’s all in the musical, along with her mother’s debilitating depression which, in the show, leaves her largely bed-bound. (But remember, it’s a comedy!)The Covid shutdown and Schlesinger’s death came as the musical’s creators were in New York, ready to start rehearsals for their imminent run. Instead they began gathering on Zoom to check in. Eventually, they brought in as a creative consultant the musician and composer David Yazbek, a Tony winner for best original score for “The Band’s Visit” and a nominee for “Tootsie.”At that point, there was a surreal and palpable sense that someone was missing, Yazbek said. “Being able to laugh was not just sort of healing and important, but actually kind of vital — for us, I’m not even talking about any audiences.”That sentiment did go in the show, buoyed by Silverman’s own experience with loss. Her mother, Beth Ann, who recovered from depression and went on to become a successful theater director in New Hampshire, died in 2015; as did the 30-year-old writer Harris Wittels, who worked on “The Sarah Silverman Program,” her Comedy Central series; and Garry Shandling, the comedian and a mentor, in 2016.That year, Silverman suffered a near miss of her own, when she had a rare case of epiglottitis, a swollen abscess around her windpipe, and was rushed into emergency surgery. After her discharge, in withdrawal from pain meds, “I was chemically suicidal,” she said; she had not been given her anti-depressants during the hospital stay.“It will be familiar to so many people,” Silverman said about how the musical explores the emotions raised by divorce.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesGoing through these traumas and emerging laughing, “I don’t think a lot of people do that with such finesse,” said Anne Kauffman, the director of “The Bedwetter.”IN THEIR TIMES SQUARE rehearsal studio, there were inspo pictures of the Silverman family circa the ’70s and ’80s; Sarah inherited her eyebrows from her dad, Donald, who owned a discount clothing store. The cast, which includes Darren Goldstein and Caissie Levy as the Silvermans and Bebe Neuwirth as Nana, cycled through a kaleidoscope of anger, anxiety and silliness. It was very funny. Ganged up on by some fifth-grade mean girls, who taunt her with “You’re short and dark and strange and ooey,” Zoe Glick, who plays Silverman, is enthusiastically self-deprecating: “I couldn’t agree more!” she sings cheerfully. “I’m the type of kid that’s too Jewy to ignore.”The music is as sticky as the best pop song — Schlesinger’s touch. Both Yazbek and Henry Aronson, the musical director, said they tried to channel him as they finished the project. He worked in a Beatles pop tradition, Aronson said, “a certain deceptive simplicity, harmonically.”Silverman, taking notes at a table, popped up to sub for an absent actor, sweetly singing a jingle for “Crazy Donny’s Warehouse (for Your Messy Divorce).” If it was initially bizarre to watch her family’s emotional upheaval recreated — her parents split when she was around 7 — “I’m also so thrilled, because I feel like it will be familiar to so many people,” she said.Kauffman, the director, said Silverman has illuminated her history — “What was your mom like in this moment? Would your dad have cracked a joke?” — with what works dramaturgically. “She just has this incredible memory and ability to articulate exactly what she was experiencing, which is like a director’s dream. Her as a 10 year old is very viscerally present.”And she punches up the jokes. When Glick was doing a scene that involved making fart noises, Silverman advised her: “Point to your mouth, to really focus” on the body part it’s standing in for, she told her, in less PG language. “It will be funny.”Silverman has moved on from the incendiary language she used at the beginning of her career. “It’s so funny what a burden some people feel it is, to have to change,” she said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesA word — OK, a paragraph — about farts (and also a sentence I never expected to write in The New York Times). If you thought Silverman might’ve outgrown her affinity for juvenile, scatological humor after a half-century, you’d be wrong. “She has an inability not to laugh if you fart,” Yazbek said. During rehearsal, I caught her giving Joshua Harmon (“Bad Jews,” “Prayer for the French Republic”), who wrote the book with her, a demo in fart noise technique, her hands cupped around her mouth.She has never not wanted to be a performer, said her sister Laura Silverman, who recalled that when she had friends over as a kid, Sarah would pop out of a closet, doing costumed characters, to entertain them.And her family was supportive in creative ways. “I would pick up the phone and call the operator and have her sing ‘Tomorrow,’ from ‘Annie,’” said Laura, an actor and writer. “I would say, I didn’t want her to be scared to sing or perform in front of anyone, at any time.” When Silverman, as a very young child, unleashed the string of curse words that her father taught her — a cherub with inky curtain bangs, working blue — “I would get this wild approval from adults, despite themselves,” she said. “It felt so good, made my arms itch with glee, and I became addicted to that.”Only when she wrote her memoir did she connect the dots between that feeling and her comedy: “So much of my standup, especially early on, was shock, shock, shock,” she said, “and totally trash.” She used racist epithets, misguidedly, to prove a point, which she now says she regrets — she’s gladly left that language behind. “It’s so funny what a burden some people feel it is, to have to change,” she said.The only word that Silverman whispered, in our three hour lunch, was “menopause.”When pressed — no, pleaded with — she said she would write about that topic, though she’s still working out the terms. (“There is not a female word for emasculating, but that’s what menopause is.”) But talking about her body and her needs, is “how I learned to be vulnerable and honest,” she said. “It’s an incredible revelation some people don’t even realize they can do. The truth! It’s really wild.” More