Perfetti, Chris

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    How Chris Perfetti of ‘Abbott Elementary’ Spends His Sundays

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    On his weeks off from shooting the ABC sitcom, the actor unwinds by whipping up “the biggest salad ever” and seeking out a Sunday-night show.For the actor Chris Perfetti, who lives in a fifth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn Heights, every day is leg day.“It’s worth it for the view,” said Mr. Perfetti, 35, who portrays the sixth-grade teacher Jacob Hill on “Abbott Elementary,” Quinta Brunson’s public school mockumentary set in Philadelphia. The fourth season premiered this month.Mr. Perfetti, a longtime New York theater actor who broke out on the show in 2021, still considers Brooklyn home, though he is also in Los Angeles six months of the year shooting “Abbott.” (He recently bought a 100-year-old cottage in the woods in Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon neighborhood, though he said he has no plans to give up his Brooklyn one-bedroom, where he lives on the building’s top floor.)“I definitely miss New York when I’m in L.A. more than I miss L.A. when I’m in New York,” said Mr. Perfetti, who was born in Rochester, N.Y.He studied drama at the State University of New York at Purchase in Westchester County and spent his weekends taking Metro-North trains into Manhattan to see shows.“I pretty much jet back here as soon as they call cut on ‘Abbott,’” he said.LATE START I wake up before noon, but not by much. “Abbott” requires me to wake up in the wee, wee dark hours of the morning — I’m usually up at 4:30 or 5:30 a.m. to be on set. That requires an alarm every day, so on the days when I’m not shooting, I let my body get as much sleep as I can.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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      A Queer Mountain Lion Leaps From the Page to the Little Island Stage

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      Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, “Open Throat,” narrated by an animal in peril in the Hollywood Hills, is adapted for a staged reading.The concept behind Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, “Open Throat,” is an eyebrow-raising one: It’s a story about overdevelopment and climate change narrated by a mountain lion who muses on the lives of hikers and loved ones.Hoke was loosely inspired by the mountain lion known as P-22 whose regular sightings in the hills surrounding Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign, successful crossing of two freeways and eventual death captured the public’s attention in 2022. In “Open Throat,” according to the book’s publisher, the animal identifies as queer, and uses they and them pronouns.The book is “what fiction should be,” the novelist Marie-Helene Bertino wrote in her review for The New York Times, and it made several end-of-year best-of lists and awards shortlists.With an internal monologue that has poetically broken stanzas and a fluid sense of time and reality, “Open Throat” does not immediately call for theatrical adaptation. Yet a staged version of the work is premiering Wednesday as part of Little Island’s ambitious summer series of live performances at its outdoor amphitheater.The narration is divided among three performers, including Chris Perfetti, who is holding the book, and Calvin Leon Smith. “I think the beauty of it, and the reason we’re intentionally having three different voices, is making it universal,” Perfetti said.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“It reads beautifully,” Zack Winokur, Little Island’s producing artistic director, said of the book. “The way it’s placed on the page is visually interesting. The way the voice exists is not like anything else. I kept thinking that it being so voice-driven would make an amazing show, and I didn’t know how to do it, which is the greatest thing in the world.”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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      ‘King James’ Review: We’ll Always Have LeBron

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      Two men’s kindred obsession with a basketball player is the scaffold for Rajiv Joseph’s examination of male friendship at the Manhattan Theater Club.It takes a while to figure out if Rajiv Joseph’s latest play, “King James” — centered on two fans of the N.B.A. legend LeBron James — is actually about basketball.This coproduction between Steppenwolf Theater, in Chicago, and Center Theater Group, in Los Angeles, arrives at the Manhattan Theater Club after runs in both of those cities. Similarly, like an imperfect play on the court, the plot travels quite a bit before making its shot. But with two emotionally precise performances agilely directed by Kenny Leon, Joseph’s latest rebounds from its initial inertia, revealing a touching examination of male friendship and the powerful social currents beneath it.In 2004, Matt (Chris Perfetti), a Cleveland bartender, is trying to unload his season tickets to the Cavaliers’ home games after a bad investment leaves him needing cash fast. Despite not knowing how to check for texts on his Motorola Razr — one of the production’s clever pleasures is the way Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen’s sound design and Todd Rosenthal’s scenic design trace time through evolving cellphones and ringtones — he manages to arrange a meet-up with Shawn (Glenn Davis), a fledgling writer who’s just sold his first story.Shawn offers Matt much less than the asking price, but, sensing a kindred devotion to the team’s then-rookie LeBron James, the two strike a deal and strike up a friendship — a wobbly one that the story checks in on over the course of James’ career. In 2010, when James left for the Miami Heat, a decision the friends see as treason, even as Shawn considers his own move. In 2014, with James’s prodigal return to the Cavs — news which Matt, now working at his family’s furniture store following another financial mistake, takes with more contempt than Shawn might like. And in 2016, with the team’s first championship win, worlds away from the friendship’s Bush-era beginnings.A two-hander will almost always let the meat (be it sports, play dates or Idina Menzel obsessions) fall off as its thematic bones reveal themselves and, across those four scenes, James eventually takes his place as the catalyst for the duo’s deeper bond. But, however well acted, the interactions Joseph creates for them during the first act (2004 and 2010) are just a little too slight in their significance, leaving most of the show’s heft to the sturdier second act.The inclusion of Khloe Janel as a D.J. — posted up by the audience, away from the stage — playing requisite jock jams and period-appropriate Usher hits during transitions, hypes up the love of the game but obscures the play’s core. Luckily, the perfectly cast Davis and Perfetti, whose physicality keenly conveys the toll of time passing, are intensely watchable, whether they’re discussing foul shots or failed ambitions.At first, it doesn’t seem relevant to mention that Shawn is Black and Matt is white, because Joseph excels at letting this distinction inform the characters in a play where race doesn’t factor much, until it does. For the most part, Matt’s casual use of Black lingo can be chalked up to awkward passes at the basketball culture to which he wants to belong. And his pontifications on what he views as “the problems with America” — which he proposes are not reflected in professional basketball — are mostly just the vaguely righteous rumblings of an angry young white guy.When tension does bubble up, during the play’s final encounter, it appears inevitable and is astutely observed without feeling writerly, showcasing Joseph’s mastery over the way everyday conversation can belie or reveal social realities. His work here is a strong analysis of friendship dynamics built along, but not hinged upon, the issues that divide them. King JamesThrough June 18 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      LeBron Fandom, and the Making of a Friendship in ‘King James’

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      Rajiv Joseph’s new play, which chronicles the bond between two LeBron James fans over 12 years, is having its world premiere at Steppenwolf in Chicago.CHICAGO — When the actor Glenn Davis talks about his new play, “King James,” he gets some variation on this question: “So, are you playing LeBron James?”Not quite.“I’m 5-10,” Davis said, laughing. “He’s 6-9.”And there’s also this: James, the basketball superstar who broke hearts in Cleveland when he left to play for Miami 12 years ago, is not the protagonist of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James.” Rather, the play, which is having its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theater Company here, tracks the friendship between two young men in Cleveland, Shawn (played by Davis) and Matt (Chris Perfetti of “Abbott Elementary”), over a dozen years.Told in four quarters that span James’s rookie season to his championship season with Cleveland in 2016, “King James,” directed by Kenny Leon, explores how fandom can create a lifelong connection between two people who otherwise have little in common.“Rajiv’s first draft had a lot of basketball in it,” said Davis, 40, a longtime friend of Joseph’s and for whom the role of Shawn was written. “But as each new draft came in, the specifics about basketball began to disappear because Rajiv wanted to make sure this play was about friendship.”“Sometimes a love of the game is the only way people who have difficulty expressing their feelings are able to articulate them,” said Rajiv Joseph, the playwright.Lyndon French for The New York TimesKenny Leon is directing his first Steppenwolf production, and said he’s cherishing the opportunity to help develop Joseph’s work.Lyndon French for The New York TimesThe play, which is in previews and will open March 13, was originally slated for Steppenwolf’s 2019-20 season before the pandemic forced its postponement. It now arrives at the same time as several basketball-themed TV projects, including Adam McKay’s HBO mini-series “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,” about the team led by Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the 1980s, and the upcoming Apple TV+ documentary mini-series “They Call Me Magic,” about Johnson’s life on and off the court.In “King James,” Joseph uses James’s career as a window to examine the emotional nature of fandom, and how it can facilitate relationships and increased openness among people, particularly young men.“At least in the sort of heteronormative world in which I grew up, it was a struggle for young American men to communicate emotion,” Joseph, 47, said over coffee at Steppenwolf’s Front Bar before a recent rehearsal. “Sometimes a love of the game is the only way people who have difficulty expressing their feelings are able to articulate them.”Growing up in Cleveland in the 1980s and ’90s, Joseph was surrounded by passionate sports fans.“We were a Cleveland family — we watched the Cavs, we watched the Indians, we watched the Browns,” he said. “And all of our moods fluctuated accordingly.”In the play, LeBron James’s infamous “Decision” announcement looms large for two fans of the Cavaliers.Lyndon French for The New York TimesHe began writing “King James” in the summer of 2017, a year after James had led the Cavaliers to the championship, making them the first Cleveland team to win a major championship in 52 years. He drew from his experience as a Cleveland native inundated with the reactions of friends and family to “The Decision” — a live prime-time special in 2010 in which James, a free agent after seven seasons with the Cavaliers, announced he was leaving his hometown team to “take my talents to South Beach,” as James infamously put it.“I thought this would be an interesting way of exploring my own relationship with LeBron,” said Joseph, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2010 for his play “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.” (He previously collaborated with Davis on that production, which ran on Broadway in 2011.) “This play is a sort of alchemy of stories I’ve heard, conversations I’ve had with people and the general sense of being a young person in Cleveland Heights and those heightened emotions that come out when you start arguing about sports.”The cast and creative team of “King James” had widely varying basketball knowledge — and loyalties. Davis, who was a high school basketball player in the Chicago area but gave up the sport to pursue a theater career, is a lifelong Bulls fan. Leon, who grew up in Florida, has been a Los Angeles Lakers fan for 35 years. Perfetti, 33, who is from upstate New York, grew up in a home “where there was always some sports game on television,” but he didn’t begin following basketball seriously until about six months ago.They watched James’s announcement together — which was Perfetti’s first time seeing it. But, for Joseph and Davis, the special was a reminder of a milestone moment in the basketball world, one in which every fan remembers where they were and what they were doing when they found out.“It was traumatic,” Joseph said. “But when you watch LeBron from then, you realize he was such a different person than he is now — like we all are. If any of us look back at when we were 25, I bet we’d kind of wince at some of the things we did and said.”“Rajiv reminds me of August,” Leon (above left, with Joseph) said, referring to August Wilson. “Even if I’m hating a moment, he can embrace that and go down the hall and rewrite it.”Lyndon French for The New York TimesThis is Leon’s first time directing at the Steppenwolf Theater. When he was contacted last October, Leon, a Tony-winning director whose most recent Broadway production was “A Soldier’s Play” in 2020, already had about a half-dozen projects in the works, including upcoming Broadway productions of Adrienne Kennedy’s “The Ohio State Murders,” starring Audra McDonald, and a revival of “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death,” Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 musical. (Leon, 66, is also the co-founder and artistic director emeritus of True Colors Theater Company, which is based in Atlanta.)But he said he jumped at the chance to oversee the production after its previous director, Anna D. Shapiro, resigned as the Steppenwolf’s artistic director in August. (Davis and Audrey Francis, both Steppenwolf ensemble members, replaced Shapiro as artistic directors.)“You don’t get a lot of opportunities to work with a living playwright on a new play that you think is beautiful and will have a great life,” Leon said as he nursed a cocktail after a rehearsal late last month. “The last time was when I worked with August Wilson on his last play, “Radio Golf,” leading up to the Broadway production [which opened in 2007].”The value of having Joseph in the room for rehearsals, Leon said, was that if he didn’t understand a character’s motivations for doing something, he could ask.“A lot of Rajiv reminds me of August,” Leon said. “I can tell him what I feel. Even if I’m hating a moment, he can embrace that and go down the hall and rewrite it.”And there were plenty of nips, tweaks and tucks to the script in the month leading up to the first performance. It was especially helpful, Joseph said, to have Perfetti’s perspective as an N.B.A. outsider in a play with some deeply insider references. (The Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s use of Comic Sans font in his letter to Cleveland fans after James’s departure, in which he lambasted James for his “disloyalty,” gets a shout.)“There’s lots of lines in the play where he was like, ‘Why am I saying this?’,” Joseph said of Perfetti. “And some of those lines were cut because of that.”“King James” plays out in four quarters, from LeBron James’s rookie year to his championship season with Cleveland in 2016. After Chicago, the play will have a run in Los Angeles.Lyndon French for The New York TimesBut audience members don’t need to be basketball fans to understand the larger points. The play’s first quarter, for instance, ends with Matt and Shawn — who to that point had been strangers — making plans to attend a season of Cavaliers games together. The action then picks up six and a half years later, when the two men are best friends.“With my best friend, the first and second quarter in our relationship feels like it went by that quickly,” Davis said. “That’s how it happens, you know?”Though Matt is white and Shawn is Black, Joseph decided not to make race a focal point of the show — at least, not right away. It eventually factors into their reactions to James’s return to Cleveland in the third quarter, but Joseph said that, having grown up in the diverse suburb of Cleveland Heights — where the play takes place — it “just made sense to me, before I even knew what the play would be about, that it would be a Black guy and a white guy.”“I didn’t anticipate any kind of racial tension in the play,” he said. “But the more I thought about what I was writing about, it just comes out and you allow for the story that wants to be told.”Following its five-week run here, “King James,” commissioned by Steppenwolf and the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles, will transfer to the Mark Taper Forum there in June, with Davis and Perfetti reprising their roles, and Leon again as director. Both Leon and Joseph are hoping for an eventual Broadway transfer, too.It will be special, everyone involved agrees, to present the show in the city where James currently plays. But Leon said it’s important to remember that “80 percent of the audience will be the same,” referring to the audience members who will not be passionate fans of the local team. “We’re going to try to strike those universal chords,” he said. “That’s what makes the play work. Somebody has to be able to say ‘Oh, that’s how I treat my friend’ or ‘That’s how it was when I didn’t see my mother for 10 years.’”Joseph, who has never met James, said he would be “thrilled” if James were to see the show during its Los Angeles run, which will coincide with the N.B.A. finals.“But, on the other hand, I hope he can’t come because he’s still playing,” he said. More