More stories

  • in

    Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and Its Insight Into Grief, Family and Gender

    For one critic, every encounter with this Shakespeare play deepens her understanding of its insights into grief, family and gender.A few weeks ago two friends and I were talking about our obsessions. One had been sleepless all week, playing the new Zelda video game with few breaks. The other revealed that she was deep into Taylor Swift. I said I had so many fandoms that I didn’t know if I could name a favorite.My Swiftie friend quickly set me straight. “We already know your main fandom,” she said. “Hamlet.”It’s true. If you look at my bookshelves, the art on my walls, even the art on my skin, you’ll find anime references and mythological figures, lines from Eliot and Chekhov and illustrations from Borges and Gorey stories. But none of these interests enjoys a prominence as great as the one afforded “Hamlet” in my home — and on my body, where the majority of my tattoos, by far, are inspired by the play.My friends know well that I’ve seen numerous productions of the work, recite Hamlet’s monologues to myself, even put Kenneth Branagh or Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” on in the background as I clean my apartment. For me, the text’s themes — about death, duality, gender, family — deepen each time I read, see or hear “Hamlet,” and as I grow older, new insights are revealed about the characters and the language.I first read “Hamlet” in high school, as an artsy poetry-writing teenager who found death a fascinating, albeit abstract, concept. I imagined the young prince — witty, privileged yet tortured, and forever trapped in his own head — as kin. He was less a lofty figure of English literature than the emo kid I crushed on, abandoning his math homework to read Dante’s “Inferno” as angsty pop punk played in the background.When I watched Michael Almereyda’s 2000 “Hamlet” film soon after, it did little to disabuse me of this notion. Taking place in New York City, with Ethan Hawke playing a hipster film student who’s heir to the “Denmark Corporation,” this “Hamlet” was contemporary, rife with irony. Watching Hamlet offer the great existential query of “to be or not to be” while strolling the “action movie” aisles of a Blockbuster store, I learned that even tragedy can contain a hearty dose of comedy.When I reread the play for a class on Shakespeare’s tragedies a few years later, I became fixated on one line in particular: “The rest is silence.” With these four words, Hamlet’s last ones in the play, the prince is acknowledging his final breath, but also perhaps breaking the fourth wall, announcing the end of the play like Prospero at the end of “The Tempest.” Or maybe Hamlet is offering us the line in consolation: After five acts of musing on death, he can assure us that death is simple, and it’s quiet. This line is now tattooed on my right arm.In Branagh’s 1996 “Hamlet” film, an unabridged adaptation that paired inspired direction with refined performances and respect for the text, Branagh wheezes out the words, his eyes glassy and staring into the distance. “Silence” lands after a pause, as though he’s listening to the deafening silence of all of humanity that’s preceded him.Clockwise from top left: Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in the 1948 film, Ethan Hawke in the 2000 film, Kenneth Branagh in his 1996 film, Ato Blankson-Wood (with Solea Pfeiffer as Ophelia) in the 2023 Shakespeare in the Park production, Ruth Negga in the 2020 production at St. Ann’s Workshop, and Billy Eugene Jones, left, and Marcel Spears in 2022 Public Theater production of “Fat Ham.”From Olivier’s fervent philosophizing Dane in the 1948 film to David Tennant’s lithe, boyish interpretation in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production, there’s a reason that Prince Hamlet remains one of the most coveted roles an actor, especially a young man of a certain age and celebrity, can take on. “Hamlet” is, after all, a man’s play.In Hawke’s “Hamlet” and Mel Gibson’s visceral, sensually charged 1990 “Hamlet” I first realized how often directors use the female characters as stand-ins for fatalistic, taboo love. (Which is why I also savor gender-crossed Hamlets, whether in the form of the theater pioneer Sarah Bernhardt in 1899 or Ruth Negga in 2020.) Queen Gertrude is either stupid, selfish or promiscuous, blinded by her untamed lust. Many productions opt for a physical staging of Act III, Scene 4, when Hamlet accosts his mother in her bedchamber. Hawke’s Hamlet grabs his mother in a black robe, then presses her against a set of closet doors. Gibson’s deranged Hamlet also fights and clutches at Gertrude, as did Andrew Scott’s in the 2017 London production by Robert Icke. Thomas Ostermeier’s wild “Hamlet” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last year emphasized Gertrude’s sexuality to an extreme, having her slink and shimmy as though overwhelmed with sexual energy. The text implies that a woman too free with her affections digs her own grave.That includes, of course, Hamlet’s eternally damned love interest, Ophelia (memorialized on my right forearm with a skull and pansy). I used to dismiss her as a frail female stereotype, and have craved a production or adaptation that could give this character agency — any kind of agency — within the space of her grieving, her madness and her death.Kenny Leon’s otherwise underwhelming “Hamlet” at the Delacorte this summer did just that. Solea Pfeiffer played an Ophelia who matched Hamlet in wit and sass, who spoke with a knowingness and rage that lifted the character from her 17th-century home into the present.This duality in Ophelia — between sincerity and performance, raving madness and clear, articulated rage — is welcome. It’s a duality that many directors literalize in their productions overall, some using mirrors as nods to Hamlet’s constant reflections at the expense of action, others turning to hint at the divide between presentation and truth.But as much as “Hamlet” can serve as a character study, for me the story extends far beyond a production’s conceptualization of a lost prince with a splintered ego. This is a story that begins and ends with grief.I have a tattoo for Hamlet and his dear, departed father — a jeweled sword piercing a cracked skull in a crown. Having lost my dad almost a decade ago, I’m familiar with the feeling of being haunted by a father who may not be a literal king but perhaps just a patriarch taking the same cheap shots from the afterlife, like Pap in James Ijames’s “Fat Ham.” In the play, a Black, queer take on “Hamlet” in conversation with Shakespeare’s original text, Hamlet is not just tied to his father through a sense of filial obligation but also through guilt, regret, shame. In Pap I saw my own father’s flaws — the spite, the prejudice, the toxic masculinity. It made me wonder how much of Hamlet’s grief is for his father, and how much for the stability his father symbolized.Lately I’ve been listening with more regularity to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue, that great conference with death that feels as germane to the English language — our rhetoric, our poetry, our elocution, our linguistic imagination — as soil to the Earth. In the span of about a week this summer, I lost a grandmother, and a dear friend shared that his cancer had returned. Having buried both her parents in the past two years, my mother has been talking more about funeral arrangements and where our family would like to spend our post-mortem days. I, on the other hand, take less stock in the expensive ceremonies and planning around death. I don’t plan to make a show of my finale; like Hamlet, I wonder what it will even mean — in that everlasting sleep, who knows what dreams will come?I didn’t fall in love with “Hamlet” because of its action and intrigue; I love the play because it lets me reconnect with the spaces where death has brushed my life. “Hamlet” helps me sit with my own existential fears, all packaged in words of wit and elegance. Because I’m convinced now that if you let Shakespeare in, his voice becomes the one bellowing from the backstage of your life. More

  • in

    Ruth Negga Thinks Lady Macbeth Is Misunderstood

    The actress, nominated for a Tony Award for her magnetic performance in “Macbeth,” is drawn to female characters who challenge the status quo.Ruth Negga dazzles onstage. Not just because, as Lady Macbeth, she briefly wears a gold metallic gown in Sam Gold’s otherwise fairly casual staging of “Macbeth” at the Longacre Theater. But, rather, it’s because she infuses her character, and her marriage to Macbeth (Daniel Craig), with such intensity, urgency and vitality that I found myself missing her when she came to her inevitable end.Negga was nominated for a Tony Award for best performance by a leading actress in a play, which recognizes both her powerful stage presence and the gender parity that Gold’s revival sought to achieve. “Like a feral cat, she can seem quicksilver and weightless or, when enraged, menacing and bristly and twice her size,” Jesse Green wrote of Negga’s performance in a review in The Times.Even if Lady Macbeth appears in substantially fewer scenes than her husband, her cunning mind — and Negga’s command of Shakespeare’s verse — leave an indelible imprint. “Her language is very fertile, it’s very fecund and it’s very sensual,” Negga said last week in a video interview. “I think a lot of people associate that with darkness as well. But that’s another layer that I think this character has been burdened and muddied with.”Negga, left, with Amber Gray in the revival. “She’s not evil,” Negga said of Lady Macbeth. “It’s this archetype that chases her: the deadly villainess, the villain behind the man.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNegga, who plays the mysterious, seductive, blonde-haired Clare in the movie “Passing,” and the real-life civil rights activist Mildred Loving in “Loving,” is drawn to characters who try to circumvent the social circumstances into which they were born. Negga sees Clare, Loving and now Lady Macbeth as paying a price for such transgressions because they are either running out of time or, in the case of Loving, ahead of hers.Born in Ethiopia to an Ethiopian father and an Irish mother, and raised in Ireland and England, Negga, 40, spoke from her place in New York about the significance of seeing “Macbeth” as a love story, and why she finds the role of Lady to be liberating. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.You were playing Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse right before everything shut down in March 2020. How has coming back to the stage, on Broadway with a different Shakespeare play, been for you?Revisiting the Tragedy of ‘Macbeth’Shakespeare’s tale of a man who, step by step, cedes his soul to his darkest impulses continues to inspire new interpretations. On Stage: Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga star in Sam Gold’s take on the play. Despite its star power, the production feels oddly uneasy, our critic writes. Onscreen: In the “Tragedy of Macbeth,” Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand embody a toxic power couple with mastery. Break a Leg: Shakespeare’s play is known for the rituals and superstitions tied to it. How does the supernatural retain its hold on the theater world?My isolation was book ended by two Shakespeare plays, which is really interesting because I hadn’t actually been onstage for 10 years before that. I didn’t realize how much I missed it. I think those two years of being so separate from people just compounded that feeling of “connect, connect.” It’s such a personal, visceral experience for the person playing onstage and the person receiving that performance. Because it’s so immediate and in the now, and it’s happening live, that kind of energetic exchange can only happen at that moment. It’s so weird — that’s why I love it.How did playing Hamlet prepare you for Lady Macbeth?I was approaching 40, playing this young man who was just entering his exploration of his adulthood and his place in the world, and I was guided by this moment of internal discovery and complete honesty. Hamlet is a truth-teller but he’s also a truth searcher, and for good or bad, and I think to his chagrin sometimes, nothing but the truth will do. That’s a very hard place to be, but it’s also where amazing transformation can happen. [The role] really tests your mettle, your physical and vocal stamina, and also what you’re willing to lay bare. And since everything’s laid bare, you can’t really hide anywhere. To be honest, anything’s a relief after Hamlet.With Lady Macbeth, was it hard to know what motivated her?Even before I started rehearsals I was like, “What’s all this jazz about her being evil?” She’s not evil, it’s this archetype that chases her: the deadly villainess, the villain behind the man. That’s what she’s become known for, and she’s been robbed of any idiosyncrasy or personality. But whereas we rail against [Macbeth] for his procrastination, I think she could have done a bit more thinking things through. But the thing is, time wasn’t on her side. This is what happens when you just have all these ideas and they seem great and you’re really getting things going and you don’t have much time. I mean she makes one bad mistake when you think about it.Which is?Well, I personally don’t think you need to kill people to get ahead! But I don’t come to a character trying to justify them, that’s not my job. I’m not interested in that. But very few people act from a core of badness or evilness. I loved her desire to be alive, to reach for things, to strive, and I was so excited to play someone who has such clear ideas of what they think they deserve, especially a woman. And when you realize that your desires and your ambitions are restricted by the status quo, one has to think quickly on one’s feet. They have to become quick and mercurial. That’s what she has a talent for. There’s a self-awareness there that I think makes her similar to Hamlet.Daniel Craig, left, stars as Macbeth. “There’s very much an awareness that this is a marriage of equals and respect, and I loved that,” Negga said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe chemistry between Macbeth and Lady is so palpable onstage. Was that important to you?When I read this script, I thought, “Wow, this dies on whether you believe that they love each other or not. This is key.” Their relationship is the backdrop or the environment of this play; that’s what their action is born out of. But there’s also a love there that is very robust. You feel like they both draw strength from that union in a very equal, balanced way. And that was something that was important for me to not let be put to the side, or laid to waste or watered down in any way. There’s very much an awareness that this is a marriage of equals and respect, and I loved that.Marriage is central to some of your other characters, like Clare in “Passing” and Mildred in “Loving,” whose marriages to white men challenge the status quo.To me race is in the foreground, the background, the present, and it’s not something I have had to chase or I’ve had to ignore. It’s with me, it’s in me, it’s who I am. So stories about race and stories written by people of color, Americans of color, have always piqued my interest. How do people go through the world as a person of color with the structures and limitations that have been imposed by society? And how does the status quo come up against your personal desire and ambition? And how do you live the life that you want as best you can within these structures that are telling you, “No.”In “Macbeth,” the other characters are casually dressed, but at one point, Lady is wearing a gold gown. Why?That was really important to me and to Suttirat [Larlarb], our amazing costume designer. I think we both fell in love with Lady. My heart spills over with joy when I see women, any type of woman, just embrace who they are. And for me, her femininity is important because I was familiar with this idea that she could seem like this sexless, austere, bloodless, lustless sort of shell. That just doesn’t chime with the Lady on the page, so I wanted her to have no shame, be lusty and alive, and really enjoy her sexuality and her femininity, and not be frightened to stand out from the crowd.Is there another Shakespeare character that you long to play?I remember in college I used to do the Queen Margaret speeches [from “Richard III”]. They’re great because they’re deadly, speeches that are powerful and about power. It’s extraordinary that Shakespeare gave them to her. What I love about him, he doesn’t make his women saints. He gives you complexity. He’s not presenting a Lady Macbeth we can hate; he’s presenting a woman that we can see ourselves in, and a woman overwhelmed by grief. She has a great catharsis and a great internal reckoning. And I feel for her deeply. More

  • in

    ‘Macbeth’ Review: Something Wonky This Way Comes

    Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga star in Sam Gold’s oddly uneasy take on the Scottish play.Macbeth, the character, is full of compunction, as well he should be, having murdered a king to get to his throne.But why should “Macbeth,” the play, be just as uneasy about its authority? Despite the star power of Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, the overthought production that opened on Thursday at the Longacre Theater seems unsure of its welcome, as if a classic that has enjoyed nearly 50 Broadway revivals since 1768 might no longer find an audience willing to meet it halfway.I could understand that attitude if we were talking about the utterly unlovable “Troilus and Cressida.” But “Macbeth” is the most instantly accessible of Shakespeare’s tragedies: violent, elemental, familiar, short. No matter which way the story is bent, it maintains its recognizable human core of ambition and regret. Directors can emphasize its witchy aura, its bloodthirsty politics, its marital drama or critique of masculinity without endangering its essential stageworthiness.But this relentlessly analytical production, directed by Sam Gold, takes even that last quality apart, offering not so much “Macbeth” as a private inquest into it. To signal that, as the audience enters, it begins with the curtain half up, only timidly exposing the play to view. On a nearly empty black stage, the cast of 14 is milling about in what look like street clothes, seeming to make food at a communal table as if this were dinner theater, or not theater at all.Gold then softens the transition from real life to drama by having Michael Patrick Thornton, who otherwise plays Lennox and one of the assassins, deliver an amusingly potted prologue like a Catskills tummler. His largely improvised spiel explains the play’s origins in a time of plague — around 1605 — and under the influence of King James’s obsession with the supernatural.Revisiting the Tragedy of ‘Macbeth’Shakespeare’s tale of a man who, step by step, cedes his soul to his darkest impulses continues to inspire new interpretations. On Stage: Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga star in Sam Gold’s take on the play. Despite its star power, the production feels oddly uneasy, our critic writes. Onscreen: In the “Tragedy of Macbeth,” Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand embody a toxic power couple with mastery. Break a Leg: Shakespeare’s play is known for the rituals and superstitions tied to it. How does the supernatural retain its hold on the theater world? Beyond ‘Macbeth’: This spring, there’s an abundance of Shakespearean productions in New York City. Here is a look at some of them. Good information. How did generations of theatergoers get along without it?Craig, center, with Negga, left, and, sliding out from underneath the table, the ghost of Banquo (played by Amber Gray).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf you’ve seen enough of Gold’s Shakespeare — whether excellent (“Othello” at New York Theater Workshop, starring Craig and David Oyelowo) or inexplicable (“King Lear” on Broadway, starring Glenda Jackson) or in between (“Hamlet” at the Public Theater, starring Oscar Isaac) — you’ll know that he does not make idle or showy choices. His experimentation is always purposeful, even if, as here, it’s sometimes hard to know what that purpose is. For at least the first half-hour of “Macbeth” I thought he was trying to demystify the play by placing it in more familiar contexts.That kitchen, for instance. Or the scenes set in what looks like someone’s TV room. (The “thrones” in Christine Jones’s set are raspberry-upholstered chair-and-a-halfs.) At other times it seems we’re at a high-school pep rally; when Scotland’s mortal enemy, Norway, is mentioned, Gold has the cast mutter “Boo!” as if at an opposing basketball team.I’m not sure the play benefits from demystifying, though. Macbeth is no ordinary man, nor Lady Macbeth an ordinary woman. Their ambition and regret are extreme, and both alter extremely during the action. At first, when the witches tell Macbeth he will one day rule Scotland, he is horrified by the thought of what that means for the people in his way. But his wife is electrified; with her courage making up for his qualms, he kills Duncan (Paul Lazar) and takes the crown.That’s supposed to be the end of it but of course is not. As logic and a developing taste for blood demand, Macbeth now kills his comrade Banquo (Amber Gray). Though he goes mad with guilt, seeing ghosts over dinner and retribution in dreams, he nevertheless massacres the family of the suspicious Macduff (Grantham Coleman). It’s the macho Lady Macbeth who eventually quails and collapses; sucking renewed manliness from her death, Macbeth all but dares the world to incite his own.Negga, left, with Gray in the play. Like a feral cat, Negga can seem quicksilver and weightless or menacing and bristly, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCraig, and especially Negga, hit these marks clearly. We see how their characters’ chemistry and symbiosis allow each to fill the gaps of the other, at first for their mutual gain and then to their detriment. Craig is at his best in physicalizing Macbeth’s transitions; you can see in his bearing the effects of flattery and finery on his balloon personality. Had it not been inflated it would never have burst.Negga, unrecognizable both emotionally and bodily as the actor who played Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2020, is wonderfully physical, too; like a feral cat, she can seem quicksilver and weightless or, when enraged, menacing and bristly and twice her size. (The superb costumes by Suttirat Larlarb contribute to the effect, nearly telling the story on their own.) But Negga is also extraordinary with the verse, one of the few cast members who not only makes its meaning clear but also projects that meaning past the conceptual firewall Gold has erected.Though the production too often feels as if it were designed for the company’s own edification — an endless rehearsal rather than a Broadway revival — it is not without its outward-facing qualities, especially after the initial throat-clearing. There are beautiful, quietly observed moments: a glance between Craig and Negga, for instance, that says more about marriage than some entire plays on the subject. There are smaller characters crystallized in a flash: Lazar’s Duncan dainty and handsy, Maria Dizzia’s Lady Macduff heartbreakingly resolute.But the top note here is gore, the more so because most other notes are muted. We see slit throats, amputated legs, huge spouts of blood and, for good measure, a gun. Even that cozy food table from the start of the show turns out to be the witches’ workshop, where they brew their disgusting potions — some involving human body parts pulverized as if by Julia Child with an industrial stick blender.Craig, our critic writes, is at his best in physicalizing Macbeth’s transitions; you can see in his bearing the effects of flattery. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAll this is accompanied by effects that put yet another demystifying frame on the action, this one not from life or theater but from movies. The fog at the Longacre is thicker than in “Casablanca.” The foreboding aural effects (sound design by Mikaal Sulaiman) recall slasher flicks; the screeching violins (music by Gaelynn Lea) more specifically reference Bernard Herrmann’s score for “Psycho.”Perhaps to help us, or the cast, come down from all this, Gold concludes the show by having Bobbi MacKenzie, who otherwise plays a witch, sing a song by Lea called “Perfect” as the company slurps at what I hope to God is soup. The moment is lovely and would be fitting if this were, say, the finale of “Pippin.”Still, at the end of an often brutal Broadway season that was rightly concerned with harm and heartlessness — in which many shows, including this one, were bedeviled by illness and delays — I liked Gold’s showing us that in times of distress and violence people should remember to care for one another. If it has nothing to do with “Macbeth,” it has plenty to do with us.MacbethThrough July 10 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; macbethbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

  • in

    ‘Macbeth’ performances on Broadway pause after Daniel Craig tests positive for the coronavirus.

    The show, which just began previews on Tuesday, hopes to resume on April 8.Daniel Craig, who is starring in the title role of a new Broadway production of “Macbeth,” tested positive for the coronavirus on Saturday, forcing the show to cancel most of next week’s performances.The show, which just began previews on Tuesday and is scheduled to open April 28, had already canceled Friday night’s performance, citing another positive coronavirus test among cast members, when on Saturday it canceled both the matinee and an evening performance, citing Mr. Craig’s positive test. Then, late Saturday night, the production said that it was canceling all performances until April 8 “due to the detection of a limited number of positive covid test results within the company.”Coronavirus cases have recently been rising in New York City, and several Broadway performers have tested positive. In most instances, shows have been able to turn to understudies to keep going, but because “Macbeth” had just begun performances, it had not yet fully rehearsed the understudies.All Broadway actors — in fact, all workers in Broadway theaters — are required to be fully vaccinated. Broadway also currently requires that ticket holders be fully vaccinated and wear masks except when eating and drinking; on Friday, the theater owners and operators said that those rules would remain in place at least through April 30, and that they would decide by April 15 whether to retain, alter or drop the audience protocols after the end of the month.“Macbeth,” of course, is a well-known and much-loved tragedy by William Shakespeare, and this revival has been one of the most anticipated productions of the spring on Broadway. Mr. Craig, who is fresh off his long run playing James Bond on film, had repeatedly said he wanted to be part of Broadway’s efforts to rebound after the industry’s long pandemic shutdown.Mr. Craig is starring opposite Ruth Negga, as Lady Macbeth, in the production, which is directed by Sam Gold. The show does not have much leeway — it is already scheduled to be the last production to open this season, and its opening night is on the final day when shows can open to qualify for this year’s Tony Awards. More

  • in

    The Best Actors of 2021

    HonorSwinton Byrne

    in ‘The Souvenir Part II’

    In both parts of Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical films, Honor Swinton Byrne faces a double challenge. As Julie Harte, she is portraying a version of the director, and frequently sharing the screen with her own mother, the formidable Tilda Swinton, who plays Julie’s genteel mother. “The Souvenir” is the two-part story of a young artist’s development, and Swinton Byrne’s confidence in her powers seems to grow alongside Julie’s.

    In both parts of Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical films, Honor Swinton Byrne faces a double challenge. As Julie Harte, she is portraying a version of the director, and frequently sharing the screen with her own mother, the formidable Tilda Swinton, who plays Julie’s genteel mother. “The Souvenir” is the two-part story of a young artist’s development, and Swinton Byrne’s confidence in her powers seems to grow alongside Julie’s. More

  • in

    The Real Surprise of ‘Passing’: A Focus on Black Women’s Inner Lives

    By making the lesbian attraction between the main characters more explicit, the drama moves beyond mainstream Hollywood’s white gaze.Midway through the new drama “Passing,” Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson), the light-brown-skinned, upper-middle-class protagonist, offers a unique insight into her psyche when she says to her friend Hugh, “We’re, all of us, passing for something or the other,” and adds, “Aren’t we?”Until now, Irene has successfully maintained her cover as both a respectable wife and proud African American woman. But when Hugh (Bill Camp) challenges her by asking why she does not pass for white like her biracial childhood friend, Clare Kendry (Ruth Negga), her response is a revelation, startling me almost as much as it did him.“Who’s to say I am not?” she snaps back.In that moment, I realized that what I had considered the B-plot of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, “Passing,” had risen to the surface in the writer-director Rebecca Hall’s adaptation, giving us a narrative that remains all too rare in Hollywood today: the interior world of a Black woman’s mind.When I teach Larsen’s novel to my undergraduate students, I usually start with the obvious: its racial plot and the ways in which Clare finds refuge from racism by identifying as white, only to be tragically alienated from her Black family and community.But I mainly teach “Passing” through what I think is the novel’s real central conflict: same-sex female desire and the paranoia that begins to overtake Irene, and for that matter Larsen’s story line, as a result of her unconsummated relationship with Clare. In a 1986 essay on Larsen’s novel, the critic Deborah E. McDowell explained why this longing had to appear secondary to the emphasis on race. “The idea of bringing a sexual attraction between two women to full expression,” she wrote, was “too dangerous of a move” in 1929. Instead, “Larsen enveloped the subplot of Irene’s developing if unnamed and unacknowledged desire for Clare in the safe and familiar plot of racial passing.”Rather than explore the ways that Irene comes into her sexuality, racial passing — at the height of segregation in America — was considered a far more urgent and thus more conventional theme than that of Black women’s inner lives. As a consequence, Larsen’s novel ended up passing, too, eventually taking “the form of the act it implies,” McDowell concluded.Visually, Hall compensates for the novel’s restraint through stolen glances, flirtatious phrases, and lingering touches and kisses between Clare and Irene. As Irene’s tension mounts, the film externalizes it through other symbols: a loudly ticking grandfather clock, a pot of water boiling over and even her breaking a teapot at a midday social in her home. In these hints, we see both Irene’s desire to break free from the illusion of middle-class domesticity and heterosexuality that she performs, as well as the threat that Clare’s presence poses to Irene’s sense of control.But, to externalize Irene’s internal thoughts and her sublimated identity, the movie makes what is suggested in the novel far more explicit. For example, Irene’s confession to Hugh never actually happens in the book. Hall opted to amp up that moment, she explained in a video for Vanity Fair, because she wanted “to highlight the latent homosexuality and power dynamics” underlying their shared secret.But for all that movie does so very well — its subtle swing jazz score; its beautiful black-and-white montages evocative of the photographers Gordon Parks and Carrie Mae Weems; and the delightful cat-and-mouse performances by Thompson and Negga — it deliberately limits how much access we have to Irene. Such restrictions, after having a glimpse of Irene’s full personality, further reminded me of how few stories about African American female sexuality and subjectivity have been told on the big screen.In other words, at this moment, when Black artists are being celebrated and validated as never before, what does it mean to invest in films that fully move us beyond a racist or sexist gaze and into their innermost thoughts?Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

  • in

    The Secret Toll of Racial Ambiguity

    When Rebecca Hall read Nella Larsen’s groundbreaking 1929 novel, “Passing,” over a decade ago, she felt an intense, immediate attachment to it. The story seemed to clarify so much that was mysterious about her own identity — the unnameable gaps in her family history that shaped her life in their very absence, the way a sinkhole in the road distorts the path of traffic blocks away.The novel follows Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two light-skinned Black women who grew up in the same Chicago neighborhood and shared a friendship complicated by differences in class and social status. When Clare’s father died, she was sent off to live with white relatives, while Irene went on to become firmly ensconced in the vibrant Black artistic and cultural community of 1920s Harlem, wife to a Black doctor and mother to two dark-skinned young boys. One day, while passing for convenience on the rooftop restaurant of a whites-only hotel, Irene is recognized by a beautiful blond woman, who turns out to be Clare — who now not only lives her life as a white woman but is also mother to a white-passing daughter and married to a bigoted man who has no clue about her mixed-race heritage. The friends’ reunion crackles with tension, charged with curiosity, envy and longing.When Clare asks Irene if she has ever thought about passing in a more permanent way herself, Irene responds disdainfully: “No. Why should I?” She adds, “You see, Clare, I’ve everything I want.” And maybe it’s true that the respectable, high-status life Irene has built in Harlem encompasses everything a serious woman, committed to lifting up her race, should want. But Clare’s sudden presence begins to raise a sense of dangerous possibility within Irene — one of unacknowledged desires and dissatisfactions. When she sees the ease with which Clare re-enters and ingratiates herself within Black society, it threatens Irene’s feeling of real, authentic belonging.Raised in England within the elite circles of classical theater, Hall, who is 39, had her first introduction to the concept of racial “passing” in the pages of Larsen’s novel. “I was spending time in America, and I knew that there had been vague, but I mean really vague, talk about my mother’s ethnicity,” Hall explained over the phone this spring. Her voice is calm and poised, with a warm polish to it, and she tends to speak in composed paragraphs. Over the year that we had corresponded, Hall hadn’t been acting much and had instead spent time writing screenplays from the Hudson Valley home that she shares with her daughter and her husband, the actor Morgan Spector. “Sometimes she would intimate that maybe there was African American ancestry, or sometimes she would intimate that there was Indigenous ancestry. But she didn’t really know; it wasn’t available to her.”Hall grew up steeped in performance: Her father, Sir Peter Hall, was known for founding the Royal Shakespeare Company and serving as the director of the Royal National Theater for many years, and possessed what she describes as a preternatural ability to know when and how an actor could be gently pushed into an even better performance. Her mother, Maria Ewing, an American raised in Detroit, is one of opera’s most celebrated sopranos, famous for her daring portrayal of Salome in Richard Strauss’s production, in which she followed the Oscar Wilde-penned stage directions to the letter and went nude onstage.After her parents divorced in 1990, Hall lived for many years with her mother in a manor in the English countryside, where she remembers rooms filled with the sound of jazz on vinyl, her mother making herself at home in the relative isolation and remoteness of an adopted country. “I was sort of brought up to believe that I was this — all of which is true, by the way — privileged, upper-middle-class, sort of bohemian well-educated white girl from a very prestigious family background,” Hall said. “And that was sort of where it stopped. And when I asked questions to my mother about her background in Detroit and her family,” Hall said, her voice low and firm, “she left it with an ‘I don’t want to dwell on the past.’”Until a friend pointed her to Nella Larsen’s “Passing,” Hall had no way of naming her intuition that these gaps in her family history were narratively charged — but reading it was a “gut punch.” “I felt deeply challenged and confused,” Hall recalled. “And the only way I could actually process it, for me, was to sit down and adapt it. I didn’t, at the time, think, I’m going to adapt it, because I know it’s going to make a killer film and I’m going to direct it. I really didn’t. It was sort of personal and quiet, and I did it in 10 days.” Then she stowed it away in a drawer for the better part of a decade.Margot Hand, a friend and a producer of “Passing,” the film that was eventually made from that screenplay and that opens theatrically in the United States on Oct. 27 and streams on Netflix beginning on Nov. 10, remembers watching Hall on the set of “Permission,” a film they were both involved in, and noticing how knowledgeable she was about the setup and composition of the shots. When she asked Hall whether she had ever considered directing, she replied that there was only one movie she could imagine herself making as her first film: an adaptation of a novel from the 1920s, based on a screenplay she wrote years earlier. Hand told me that the version of the screenplay that was used in filming is essentially identical to the one Hall showed her years ago — one of those rare artistic impulses that emerges whole and intact, like an egg.As Hall began to consider turning the script into her first directed feature, she knew that much of her vision for the film was nonnegotiable: It had to be shot in black and white, an unpopular choice from the perspective of studios, because black and white can be a harder sell in foreign markets. It had to be shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio that was the default for celluloid film in the 1920s and ’30s but that has since been replaced by wider proportions. And it had to have Black women cast in the lead roles of Irene and Clare — another sticking point in a moment when white actors still command the most star power and box-office revenue. Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga signed on early and stayed attached through the years it took to gather the financing for the film, an unusual vote of confidence that Hall credits with the film’s eventually being made.“It’s a big undertaking to have this be your debut, and it’s still so hard as a female filmmaker to get something made,” Thompson explained to me over the phone. “To know that she would trust me with that, because so much would hinge on my performance, really was such a gift to me.”Hall was insistent: To film in black and white was a way of honoring the films that she was raised on, which starred strong female leads like Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis and Myrna Loy. And casting Black actors allowed her to conjure the fantasy of a “lost noir film” that might have had a Black actress in a leading role, while nodding to a lineage of films like “Imitation of Life” (1934). Starring the Black actress Fredi Washington, the film is the story of a daughter who breaks her mother’s heart by deciding to pass as white. Some Southern audiences were scandalized by it because Washington’s light skin, combined with the ambiguity of the black-and-white cinematography, made it impossible for them to discern whether the actress was truly Black or truly white.Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson in ‘‘Passing.’’NetflixBut each of these compositional choices also functions to amplify the internal tension of the narrative, to pressurize the pull of Irene and Clare’s relationship. In black and white, the viewer becomes hyperattuned to the shades of gray that form the bulk of the visual image, an anxious gatekeeper perceiving similarity and difference at the same time. In the unconventionally narrowed screen, the two women’s bodies are continually in relation, one occluding, the other hidden, the distance between them always palpable. As Hall says, the framing “forces the face literally into the center of the frame, constantly. And so it constantly says, loud and clear, that this is a movie about faces and how we see them and watch them being seen.” In this aspect ratio, she adds, “there’s no room for escape.” For her, the project has been one of self-discovery and self-reckoning: “I’d say that the whole journey from that day when I sat down to write this to now has been a way of me processing and understanding my family better,” Hall says. “It was a bit of an exploration and also something I felt compelled to do for reasons I had no language for.”For the first half of my own life, I had no language for the sensation of precarious contingency that went along with my multiracial face, a product of a Taiwanese mother who immigrated in the 1980s and an American father with German ancestry. My childhood spanned the 1990s, when multicultural was an aesthetic, a party free of bad vibes. On TV, in the video for Michael Jackson’s “Black or White,” faces of different races morphed into one another, smiling hugely as they lip-synced the words. In elementary school in central New Jersey, I was asked once a year to bring in a “favorite recipe that shows your heritage” to add to a gradewide cookbook — I turned in the same recipe every time, for pork-and-cabbage dumplings — and on Veterans Day to wear some traditional Taiwanese apparel while sitting on a float that rolled through the park behind my house. Culture was to be celebrated, and as with a good buffet, you could have as much as you wanted, all piled together.If culture was additive, race was a place for optimism, insofar as its projected irrelevance would free the nation of the problems it had caused. Multiracial people were one mechanism through which that liberation would be accomplished: Their existence, and their acceptance and success in America, would be evidence that the country had left behind the violence and inequity of its past. If the nation couldn’t achieve racial equality through the political process, then citizens could do it themselves by creating a new kind of person.Being a symbol of racial and cultural optimism is a strange sign to live under. Your beauty signifies the rightness of the coming transition, its aesthetic balance; your flexibility, empathy and intermingled whiteness comfort those who fear the loss of place or privilege in the coming demographic shift. You are a bridge between the genes of your mother and the genes of your father, a bridge between their cultures — a bridge being a structure that others can use to cross something hazardous. You are a link between past and present that somehow carries forward none of the old grudges.But in the classroom and on the playground, my racial ambiguity didn’t feel like something to celebrate. At some times, I felt illegible and unseen; at others, I felt that my inharmonious features — the unusual shape of my eyes, my odd accent and the gaps in my knowledge of either culture — were bizarrely visible. Other children and some adults asked about me, speculated about me, tried to puzzle through my racial and cultural identity. And in the estrangement I felt in the towns we moved to, surrounded mostly by white people and sensing my mother’s own melancholia at being stranded far from her home country and the languages she was most comfortable living in, I found little in my racial identity that I could use as an anchor.One day when I was 16, alone in the school library during lunch hour, I came upon “Passing” and, like Hall, found it strangely, alarmingly moving. It gave shape and language to the racial ambivalence I experienced that was difficult to place within the optimistic rhetoric that surrounded me. The precarity that Clare and Irene live with, one walking a tightrope between two worlds designated as incommensurable and the other clutching at the apparent safety of a singular, grounded identity, spoke to my own fear of a catastrophic mobility, the feeling that if I didn’t find some way to root myself firmly to one world or the other, I might never find a way to belong anywhere. Texts are always haunted by the unseen — in basic terms, they work to conjure in the mind what they can only point at in words — but this entire book was fueled by invisible, scarcely apprehended drives that seemed to come from society, that spectral presence that moves us all in difficult-to-identify ways.As I read George Hutchinson’s “In Search of Nella Larsen,” the most comprehensive biography of the writer, I found a life that encompassed, at different times, the public-facing dutifulness of Irene Redfield and the lonesome, destructive freedom of Clare Kendry. A mysterious and remote figure who left inconsistent traces in the public record, Larsen struggled all her life to find her place among the categories available to her. The daughter of a white Danish seamstress and a Black cook from the Danish West Indies, Larsen spent her early years in an interracial sliver of Chicago where all kinds of people commingled in saloons and brothels, far from the buttoned-up neighborhoods of elite white and elite Black society. When her mother married another white immigrant from Denmark and gave birth to her second daughter, Larsen’s skin tone prevented the family from establishing themselves in one of the newer, less precarious neighborhoods dominated by working-class white immigrants. After years of tension navigating an increasingly segregated city, her mother sent her to study at an elite, all-Black teacher-training program in Tennessee, where she was expelled after a year, probably for violating the dress code. She returned to Denmark, where she lived for a time as a child.With her Scandinavian roots and little direct connection to the legacy of slavery that defined much of the African American experience, and because she came from a poor background, Larsen never felt fully at home in elite all-Black social circles. After she went to nursing school and became the first Black librarian to attend the New York Public Library’s prestigious library school, her first publications were selections of Danish children’s games and songs. The novelist Walter White, part of the literary community she had begun to associate with, encouraged her to write a novel, and eventually, she wrote two: the quasi-autobiographical “Quicksand” and her second and last published novel, “Passing.” She became one of the most celebrated — and maligned — writers of the Harlem Renaissance, insisting on a social circle that included the controversial white author Carl Van Vechten, whose writings had been deemed exploitative by many Black critics.In her work, Larsen complicated traditional notions of morality or race loyalty. She sometimes wrote about white people, as in the unpublished domestic thriller set in Boston that she wrote and rewrote in her last years as a working writer, as if trying to prove that colored people could enter the minds and lives of white people. After years of disappointments — her physicist husband was having an affair with a white co-worker, and one after another the manuscripts she submitted were rejected by publishers — Larsen retreated. Without telling the remnants of her literary circle, she moved to a different apartment down the block and became unreachable to her friends and colleagues. She quietly returned to nursing and died in the company of colleagues who had little idea that she had been a writer at all.The unusual shape of Larsen’s story, riddled with holes and obscurities, has led many to misread her. When her work was rediscovered in the 1980s and 1990s and began to appear on syllabuses, biographers claimed she had embellished her Danish heritage in order to distance herself from African American culture and present herself as European, and therefore more sophisticated. Other critics suggested that she left her literary life in order to begin passing as white. In reality, the proof of her connection to Denmark only required more care and effort to unearth, and though she once boasted in a letter to friends of having managed to have lunch in an upscale whites-only Southern restaurant, Hutchinson argues that she never tried to pass in any deeper, more deliberate way. But the misinterpretations of Larsen and her work point to her predicament: Even as she attained significant success as a writer, she left too few traces on paper to ensure that she would be read accurately. She remained enigmatic, illegible to most.In early August, I took a ride share, a ferry and a public bus to a quiet corner of Martha’s Vineyard to meet Hall at the first in-person festival event she had attended in over a year and a half. Though “Passing” had found distribution and been featured at the Sundance Film Festival, the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival would be the first place where an audience gathered to watch and discuss it together. It was the weekend of Barack Obama’s much-publicized 60th-birthday party, a celebration that would have brought hundreds of guests to the Vineyard, before it was scaled down amid right-wing criticism and Covid concerns. I walked past rows of newly painted and neatly hedged houses that looked out onto a still, grassy bay where over 400 years earlier an English explorer from Bristol anchored, traded with the native Wampanoag people and “enjoyed terrifying them with the sound of his cannon,” according to a 1923 book on the history of the island.Hall appeared on the wraparound porch of her bayside hotel in a dark button-up shirt and slim pants — casual, but in a different way from the bright whites and pale colors that covered much of the island. Hall had recently taken part in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS series, “Finding Your Roots” (the episode will air next year), and filled in some of the lacunas in her family history that had made elements of her own life feel incomplete or difficult to comprehend. She had shown a version of her film to her mother, sparking conversations that they weren’t able to have in the decades preceding. And “Passing” had been sold to Netflix for almost $17 million, a deal that would guarantee the film the sort of broad audience and promotional support rarely given to intricate, demanding art foregrounding Black women.The process of funding the film had been long and difficult — multiple studios offered Hall funding if she agreed to film in color, but she turned those offers down. Many months ago, Hall felt resigned to the idea that the film would always be a niche artifact, telling herself: “If I have to make it for nothing and it sells for nothing and nobody ever sees it, then so be it. This is the film that I want to make.” She now felt “a bit smug,” and a bit shocked, at the idea that art had won out.Hall’s adaptation cuts to the quick of the novel and transfers the shifting, unsettling quality of Larsen’s text back onto the viewer’s shoulders. The film delves into the gray zone of seeing, priming the viewer to become aware of the way his or her own perception is positioned and constructed. Under the intensive, focused gaze of the film’s long shots, Thompson and Negga deliver performances dense with desire and repulsion. Thompson plays Irene with turbulent restraint, her silences heavy and her speech shaped and structured by unseen constraints, while Negga’s Clare is dazzling and appetitive — her mobility, and the zest with which she transgresses boundaries of race and class, expose the falseness of the racial categories upheld by white and Black alike.The film feels timeless, closer kin to the moody, claustrophobic psychological landscape of Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” or the taut, covert romance of Todd Haynes’s “Carol” than to other films that depict the same period. In this way, though set with care and historical fidelity in the 1920s, it’s not a film about the past or even about the social conditions of Larsen’s America, but about the way choices made during Larsen’s time reverberate through succeeding generations. It highlights the psychic afterlife of racial trauma — the quiet holes pressed into the psyche by self-denial.Like some long-limbed people, Hall has a tendency to fold herself up on the furniture in a disarming way, tucking her feet beneath her on the wicker sofa as she held a cup of green tea that I never saw her drink from. The researchers on “Finding Your Roots,” she told me, traced her mother’s side of the family tree as far back as her great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. She learned that her great-grandfather, whose name was John William Ewing, was born into slavery but found government work post-abolition in Washington, and even gave the toast for Frederick Douglass at a banquet in his honor. Her great-grandmother was a free woman of color, descended from one of only 5,000 Black men who fought on the side of the rebels during the Revolutionary War. But against the background of so much lineage lost and recovered was the discovery of the exact point at which the narrative had broken. “The revelation,” she said, “was that it was just my grandfather who passed — just that one act that erased a huge amount of history, including some stuff that’s really extraordinary.” She spoke carefully, pausing often. “The irony is his father was a race man. His father was someone who wanted to uplift.”I pointed out how rare it was for a person to have the chance to make a decision that so rapidly shifts the path of his descendants, a complex, psychological decision that erased anyone’s ability to find out why he made it. Hall nodded. “And if you know that it happened, it passes on a legacy that’s” — she trailed off, searching for the right term — “so confused, you know? Because if you’re the child of the parent, and you believe them to be doing the right thing, or hiding something by living in secret, then your obligation to the parent is to do what they do.” When I asked if her mother ever told stories about her own father that might shed light on why he chose to pass, or what his experience was like afterward, she told me that her grandfather was an artist and a musician, and this is part of what made them close — her mother learned to sing from imitating records in the basement of the family house. She left home soon after he died when she was 16, Hall said, gaining admission to the Cleveland Institute of Music against the odds and later moving to the Barbizon Hotel in New York, and eventually to Europe, where she sang in Salzburg, in Milan, in London.Hall didn’t know if her grandfather was a sort of anchor for her mother, whether his death caused her to leave home. But her mother did talk, Hall said, about an event that was very disturbing for her. “Her father was driving her home from somewhere. And they got out of the car, and there was a neighbor who my mom described as having a long yellow braid on one side. She was a white lady who had always been very nice to them. But as they were getting out of the car, this woman just turned around and said, ‘Why don’t you die?’” The woman added a toxic racial epithet. “And worse, that was not long before he died.” Her mother was very confused. She would tell this story, Hall said, but mostly avoided speaking about that time. I find myself haunted by it. I include it here even though I’m not sure what exactly the story signifies. What had happened to transform the neighbor’s view of her grandfather? Had her grandfather’s history of passing come to the surface, however carefully he hid it? In the end, it’s a narrative with a deep hole at its center, one that mirrors others in Hall’s family, a break in the telling that can’t be filled in through any amount of genealogical research or archival work.At the start of the golden hour, I made my way across the island to a reception on the deck of a waterfront restaurant, a celebration of the screening that would happen in a couple of short hours. Guests were already there, piling plates with beet salad and seafood. The atmosphere was warm and easy. When Hall and Spector appeared, a line formed in front of them, and I listened from nearby as they traded thanks with producers and attendees. A woman with straightened black hair, who appeared to be in her 50s or 60s, approached. She thanked them for coming and then added that the film was meaningful to her because her aunts lived their lives passing as white. “Because they passed and we didn’t, they didn’t want to be seen with us,” she explained.Hall’s film has cracked open a public conversation about colorism, privilege and secrets. On Twitter, people are sharing stories and black-and-white photographs of a grandmother’s cousins who moved out of state, great-aunts who sneaked back to see their family in secret, relatives who lost their jobs when co-workers informed management about their identities: a public airing of what in Hall’s family was once closely held. Recently one of her mother’s sisters reached out: She said that they never really had language to understand the hidden context that shaped their family, and she thanked her for giving it to them.Other responses pointed to the ways that racial categories continue to shape our collective thinking. When the trailer for the film debuted on social media, it prompted a deluge of tweets. Some shared memes featuring the movie title alongside photos of multiracial celebrities like Rashida Jones, Maya Rudolph and Thandiwe Newton — the implication being that these lighter-skinned actresses would be a better fit for the roles or that they were continuing to benefit from the ability to pass as white in Hollywood and beyond. That so much of the discussion circulated around Thompson’s and Negga’s ability to successfully pass as white felt surreal, a return to a type of racial scrutiny that seems antithetical to the project of both the book and its adaptation. One Twitter user explained that in Larsen’s day, passing did not necessarily mean persuading others that you were white, only persuading them that you were “not-Black.” Another suggested that the director was trying to heighten tensions with the casting, reminding the viewers at all times of the possibility that the characters would be found out.From right: Rebecca Hall, Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson on the set of “Passing.”Emily V. Aragones/Netflix“There’s a real irony in this, in that the people who can really pass like me are challenged sometimes about whether they’re really, truly Black,” Mat Johnson, an African American novelist of mixed descent, told me over the phone. “So we have this paradox where some of the same people who would be like ‘Well, he’s not really Black,’ or ‘She’s not really Black,’ also feel real ownership about the idea of passing being a part of the African American experience. It’s interesting because even that discussion is about who owns the story of passing.”“Passing” is re-entering the culture at a moment when being multiracial is viewed in a more sober, realistic light than it was when I was growing up. In recent works like Johnson’s graphic novel “Incognegro,” Danzy Senna’s “New People” and Brit Bennett’s best-selling “The Vanishing Half,” authors have rewritten the literary tropes of Black passing to probe its blind spots and challenge the notion that the color line has been erased within American society. If earlier notions of a cohesive “mixed race” identity failed to materialize, who could be surprised? No grand unifying theory of multiraciality can account for the multiple, highly specific ways in which individuals reconcile their own hybrid backgrounds, or for the particular way in which Blackness resists assimilation into both whiteness and the middle ground of the mixed.“I’ve seen Black people around me getting interested in their family history start to do their research and realize that to be Black in America necessarily means having some non-Black ancestry,” Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of the novel “Libertie,” told me in a recent conversation. “Genetically, many of us have about 25 percent white DNA within us. To be Black, this thing that we say is readable and defined as necessarily separate from whiteness, literally usually means for most of us that we are, in fact, intertwined with it,” she said. “Hopefully what that will do is force people to have more complicated discussions about what it means to share all of this DNA when we still have this system set up to reward those who are closest or closer to whiteness.”Over the past 10 years or so, I’ve noticed more people bypassing the conundrum of what it means to be racially mixed in order to define themselves in terms of who they feel themselves to be, how they lay claim to their cultures, how they themselves conceptualize racial boundaries. Many choose to identify as wholly Asian, or wholly Black, or to identify as multiple full identities rather than fractions of a diminishing whole. You could say that there are potentially as many racial identities as there are racial stories, and the more fulfilling work is to dwell in these stories rather than in their categorization. In the end, narrative may the best tool we have for binding together the disparate elements that make up the self.Alexandra Kleeman is a professor at the New School and the author of two novels, “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine” and “Something New Under the Sun.” Carly Zavala is a photographer who was born in Venezuela and is based in Brooklyn. She was a nurse for 15 years and is known for her play with light and shadow to create emotive and moody images. More

  • in

    Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga Will Star in 'Macbeth' on Broadway

    Ruth Negga will co-star as Lady Macbeth in a production directed by Sam Gold and scheduled to open next April.Daniel Craig is veering from James Bond to Shakespeare.The 53-year-old actor, who has said that his tenure as Bond will come to an end with the release of “No Time to Die,” on Oct. 8, plans to return to Broadway next spring to star in the title role of “Macbeth.”Famous for his film career, especially as the rakish spy, Craig is also an accomplished stage actor.He has starred in two previous Broadway plays, the 2009 production of “A Steady Rain” and a 2013 revival of “Betrayal.” And he played the villainous Iago in a 2016 Off Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop, opposite David Oyelowo in the title role. (“Gritty brilliance,” the New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote of Craig’s performance.)In the “Macbeth” production, Ruth Negga will play his wife, Lady Macbeth. Negga, known for the TV show “Preacher” and the film “Loving,” last year played the title role in “Hamlet” (yes, a woman played Hamlet; Negga had also previously played Ophelia) in an Off Broadway production at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Ruth Negga will play Lady Macbeth.Nina Prommer/EPA, via ShutterstockThe lead producer for the Broadway production will be Barbara Broccoli, who has a long collaboration with Craig: She and her brother produce the Bond films, and they also co-produced “A Steady Rain” and supported the nonprofit “Othello” production.Broccoli said she had been talking with Craig about Macbeth for several years, ever since he expressed an interest in playing the role.“I’m thrilled that it’s coming after Bond, because, obviously, after 16 years of working with this man, the thought of it all coming to an end has been really difficult to take,” she said. “And so it’s really heartwarming for me that we’re going to be working on something else so soon after the wrapping up of his James Bond cycle.”Broccoli said that she and Craig also thought it was important to stage the play this season, as Broadway seeks to recover after a long shutdown prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.“It’s been a horrendous 18 months for everyone, and live theater has been damaged tremendously,” she said. “He really wants to come back and be on the stage and encourage people to come back to Broadway — it’s important to all of us from a cultural point of view and from a social point of view.”“Macbeth” is scheduled to run for 15 weeks, beginning previews March 29 and opening April 28 at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater. The production is to be directed by Sam Gold, who also directed the Off Broadway “Othello” in which Craig appeared, and who in 2019 directed a Broadway revival of “King Lear.” The production will feature original music by Gaelynn Lea.There have been 47 previous Broadway productions of “Macbeth,” according to the Internet Broadway Database; the most recent was in 2013, starring Ethan Hawke and Anne-Marie Duff.Broccoli is also the lead producer of “Sing Street,” a musical that was scheduled to begin performances on Broadway in March 2020, but never did because of the pandemic. She said she still plans to bring the show to Broadway, but was not ready to say when. “We love the show,” she said, “and we’re trying to figure out the best way to bring it back.” More