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      in Theater

      ‘The Piano Lesson’ Review: August Wilson’s Phantom Notes

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      John David Washington, Danielle Brooks and Samuel L. Jackson star in the first Broadway revival of Wilson’s haunting family drama set in 1936.Four Black men gathered around a kitchen table exuberantly sing a work song (“When you marry, don’t marry no farming man, hoh-ah,” they holler, clapping and stomping their feet), a Black woman girds herself with her grief for the husband and father she lost to the anger of white men, and siblings fight over a seemingly haunted family heirloom that tells a story of generational trauma and loss. These circumstances are more than enough to raise the dead.Or at least they are in the Charles household, in the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” which opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.First staged in 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theater, “The Piano Lesson” made its Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr three years later. That year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama — one of two Wilson won for his American Century Cycle, a collection of 10 plays, one for each decade of the 20th century, depicting African American life.In “The Piano Lesson,” it’s Pittsburgh, 1936, in the house of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), an old railroad worker who is now a train cook. His niece, Berniece (Danielle Brooks), and her 11-year-old daughter, Maretha (played by Jurnee Swan at the performance I saw), live with him in what is, in Beowulf Boritt’s too on-the-nose scenic design, a skeletal facsimile of a house — just beams and planks, some of which don’t even connect. Though there’s not much to the house — a love seat, a tiny kitchen with an ice box — there is an ornately carved piano that commands attention, despite its place in the far corner of the living room.It’s an august instrument with a knotty history, linking the Charles family to their enslaved ancestors and the white family that owned them. Each panel is covered with figures representing the Charleses; even the piano’s front legs are elaborately sculpted.From left, Ray Fisher, Washington, Brooks, Trai Byers, Jurnee Swan and Samuel L. Jackson. The elaborately carved piano is covered with figures of the Charles family.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBerniece’s brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), has traveled up north from Mississippi with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) planning to cash it in for a plot of land and in the process hoping to transform an artifact of their family’s past struggles into a path to a better future. But Berniece refuses to give up the piano and all the bloody history it represents. To complicate matters, the piano is haunted by a recently dead member of the white family that once owned generations of the Charleses.Wilson’s usual signatures are here, including the somber subject matter related to Black disenfranchisement, prejudice, history and trauma — paired with witty, casual dialogue and flights into the surreal. Wilson makes poetry out of the mundane minutiae of daily African American life without forgetting how the past is present, alive and immediate like the melody of a song played by a piano that seems to have sprung to life.And yet even among Wilson’s outstanding and occasionally surreal plays, “The Piano Lesson,” both a family drama and a ghost story, stands out as one of the odder works. It’s a mix of themes and tones, both concrete and ethereal, ghoulish and comedic, but the imbalanced direction here, by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, overemphasizes the horror too literally; it works best on a metaphorical level.The performances are, in almost every case, engaging. Michael Potts, the veteran stage and screen actor who has appeared in other Wilson works, including the 2017 Broadway revival of “Jitney” and the 2020 film adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” is perfection as Doaker’s brother Wining Boy, an itinerant musician who can never seem to hold onto a dollar.As the surviving Charles brothers, Potts and Jackson (who played Boy Willie in the original 1987 production) have a breezy rapport: They joke, drink and reminisce like a couple of cads retired from most — but not all — of their wayward ways. Wining Boy remains a smooth scammer, and Doaker is an even-tempered dispenser of wisdom. Trai Byers, as Avery, a new reverend who’s enamored with Berniece, takes on his character’s highfalutin sermonizing with comedic aloofness, and April Matthis makes a brief, though memorable, appearance as a minor character with some big-city attitude. As the simpleton Lymon, Fisher occasionally goes too hokey, especially when it comes to his Southern drawl, but is endearing nonetheless with his dopey physicality and witless expressions.From left: Potts, Fisher, Jackson and Washington singing an old work song from their time as sharecroppers.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFisher is a great contrast to Washington’s downright feverish performance as Boy Willie. He speaks in a hot spitfire of stubborn refusals, denials and lofty aspirations, convinced that he can put a price tag on his family’s past and use the money to build a future where he is equal to the white men who owned his ancestors and still hold power over him and his family.Washington, in a revelatory stage debut, is a blaze of energy lighting every scene he’s in. Brooks, who was a delight in “The Color Purple” and “Much Ado About Nothing,” as well as in her TV roles in “Orange is the New Black” and “Peacemaker,” isn’t as radiant a presence as in her other outings. Though she has a few standout moments, she, like her character, too often fades into the background, overshadowed by the extensive history and myths in the play.Despite Wilson’s eloquent writing, “The Piano Lesson,” at nearly three hours, drags on. The repetitive dialogue, especially in the second act, evokes a nagging sensation of déjà vu. The spooky shifts in lighting (by Japhy Weideman) and Boritt’s broken home, like a metaphor brought to life, leave nothing to the imagination.While in this production the play’s supernatural elements come across like anomalies, on the page they aren’t; the characters aren’t all that shocked by the eerie, odd occurrences and in fact continue on with their lives as usual. What haunts the Charles household is what haunts Black America every day — the living history of racial violence and pervasive inequality. Part of what’s missing in this mostly entertaining but often underwhelming “Piano Lesson” is the sense that this is a reality we’ve lived ourselves. Who hasn’t heard the melody of a ghost’s song in the middle of the night?The Piano LessonThrough Jan. 15 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; pianolessonplay.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      in Movies

      American Culture Is Trash Culture

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.No kid needs to watch a movie about a Manhattan prostitute who kills one of her johns. But I did, once, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Not because I was on the Death Star or Krypton, but because I’d been plunked down in a drama whose opening sounds are rattling chains and the chattering of Black women’s voices. “La di da di,” somebody intones. OK, I thought, something’s off. The camera inches downward to survey an array of latte, caramel, coffee and chestnut skin, leaning, lying on the floor, in sundresses and hot pants, languishing. Somewhere, a liquid trickles. A toilet just flushed, and the colors here would match the ring around the bowl. The shot keeps going until it hits a logical barrier: jailhouse bars. Then a guard calls out a bunch of names, and bodies rise, form a line to head up a set of stairs toward a light. Gutierrez, Luna. Washington, Tyra. Jones, Arabella. The top of somebody’s head makes an expectant pivot toward the guard: Call mine. When he gets to Kirk, Claudia, the movie matches the name with a face: Barbra Streisand’s. Our murderer and prostitute. The drabness of it all emits a … a sheen, as if the grime had a halo — her. I vaguely sensed that Streisand’s casting triggered the movie’s offness. I’d never seen such an innately glamorous person give herself over to the sordid, seedy, salacious approach of a movie like this — a movie with the nerve to call itself “Nuts” — and do it with this much lewdness and vaudeville. Why flirt with Richard Dreyfuss, her brand-new, court-appointed lawyer, when she can just flash him? The wrongness of that felt ludicrously right.“Nuts” (1987).Warner Bros., via Everett CollectionI was 11 when “Nuts” came out, and it helped lead me into a committed relationship with a certain category of movie. The people in them seemed loonier, lustier, louder than we’re supposed to be. Their eyes were wild; their makeup ran. They had hair we were meant to know was a wig, because it was impossible hair. The paint chips for these movies might read: “wanton,” “lust,” “paramedic,” “weak bladder,” “mattress,” “steamy,” “do not cross,” “pilot light,” “them drawls,” “brazen,” “lit cig,” “urinal cake,” “Crisco,” “bust.” In being honest about this volatile, unkempt, uncouth, indecorous, obnoxious, senseless, malicious, unhinged and therefore utterly uninhibited side of ourselves, a certain kind of movie can make an X-ray of what else it is besides a story about some characters. It can identify the mess. I didn’t have a name for any of this until Pauline Kael gave me one. Perverse pleasure is the experience she was circling when she wrote “Trash, Art, and the Movies” for Harper’s in 1969. The essay clocks in at just under 15,000 words and doesn’t get to the word “trash” until past the halfway point. But her antennae had picked up on some primal, intangible signal of moviegoing ecstasy that felt ancillary to (if not the opposite of) art and separate from the basics of storytelling. She surmised that the joy of going to the movies arose from “meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.” And when you meet them, “you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies” — movies that behave badly.The piece is a jeremiad against good taste and Hollywood conservatism. Kael is basically saying, Why bother with something classy or dignified when you can have a movie as “crudely made as ‘Wild in the Streets’” — a satire from 1968 about a young, white rock star who’s elected president and the wave of fascist chaos he surfs — that’s “slammed together with spit and hysteria and opportunism”? Its anarchic informality, its cut-rate hilarity made it “an unartistic movie,” and three cheers for that. “Wild in the Streets” (1968).Everett CollectionKael leaves no doubt about what she likes and is steamed when she doesn’t get it, when she’s served foie gras when what she came for is Spam. Her verdict was that the satisfaction trash offers is what Americans really want from the movies. What I sensed as a kid and what I’ve learned as an adult is that it’s not just that trash is what we want; it’s that it’s who we are. Kael worried that Hollywood was going to forget this truth. Half a century later, her worry has come true. The thrill-seeking, sensation-oriented approach to all kinds of art (movies, literature, music, painting, sculpture, cartoons) culminated in two decades of what got called the culture wars: conservative and Christian outfits angling to ban what offended them, concerned parents worried Prince would start a masturbation craze. To paraphrase the thinking: There are children here, on Earth; how can we let them coexist with all of this filth? We clashed over taste, almost nightly, in the press, at town halls, on every talk show we had. And that just made the filth stink better. But a trash-induced combat fatigue must have set in, because it vanished.In the past 20 years, our pop art has lost some crucial pleasure node. It has popped less often, less brightly. The trash urge is now the superhero urge, and the crusades don’t necessarily entail a cape. They’re moral. A meaningful swath of American movies has turned itself over to justice, commenting on real-world debates not as entertainment but as discourse: cancellation, abuse of power, civil rights-era tragedy in new movies like “Tár,” “She Said” and “Till,” movies with women at their core and — in the case of the latter two, anyway — dignity for a spine. I get it. How long have the movies exploited, ignored, mocked all kinds of groups? Now we’re in the grip of a corrective spirit. The gutters are getting a power wash. The trash urge gave American movies its musk, its fun, its hickies, its exercise — in action and horror and thrillers, in the disaster movie, in just about anything that had the brass to cast Shelley Winters or Faye Dunaway, and the brains, if you think about it, to hire Jodie Foster. It stressed the id in idea. By the end of the 1960s when Kael named it, trash was on the verge of ubiquity, a genre of its own, in stuff like “Slaves,” from 1969, which has Dionne Warwick cavorting with her white enslaver (Stephen Boyd) and the strapping field hand (Ossie Davis) he just paid top dollar for. It’s fully evident during the 1970s, in the hunger and violence of the so-called blaxploitation era, and in “The French Connection” and “Carrie”; in “Mahogany,” a melodrama with Diana Ross as a runway model preyed upon by a fashion photographer (Anthony Perkins, turning his “Psycho” serial killer part into a paying job); and “Eyes of Laura Mars,” a slasher film with Dunaway as a fashion photographer who, somehow, can envision what a serial killer sees. “Mahogany” (1975).Everett CollectionA good work of trash knows we came for crackups and meltdowns, for drunken stupor and orgasmic ecstasy, for psychosis and putrification, for lunatic blasphemy, like, say, the moment in “The Exorcist” when little Regan MacNeil, possessed by the demon Pazuzu, jams a crucifix into her vagina like she’s trying to open a wine cask. (A good work of trash also knows we’ve come to see a demon named Pazuzu.) In the ’80s and ’90s, trash’s lurid energies found homes in the erotic thriller and the macho massacring of Eastwood, Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Seagal and, later, some of the underworld scuzz that one hack after another used in an attempt to be crowned the next Quentin Tarantino. Trash was winning Academy Awards. It was good box-office. Sometimes, trash was even deemed prestige moviemaking. I mean, in 1992, when best picture went to “The Silence of the Lambs” over Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” we were witnessing tabloid trash lose to trash with a Michelin star.Trash tends to operate in defense of itself. Someone’s usually being investigated; something is usually being adjudicated, purged, censored, cast out. And no one filmmaker has flourished more in its defense than John Waters. His dozen or so comedies declare war on middle-class philistines. His extremes goad us to pursue our own. Officially, Waters is from Baltimore, but he might as well have sprung from Kael’s vexed rhapsody in Harper’s. His second feature opened a month after it was published. He called it “Mondo Trasho.” His last, from 2004, opens with a shot of the Mid-Atlantic’s tastiest pork-waste delicacy: scrapple. That one he titled “A Dirty Shame.” In 25 years, Waters managed to show the unshowable and the speak the verboten, through the invention of absurd fetishes (not licking feet but stomping them), as satire, as farce, as education. His third feature, “Multiple Maniacs,” has a kind of carnival barker outside a tent crying, “Real, actual filth!” Inside, a woman makes out with a bike seat, and two men treat a lady’s underarms like an ice cream cone. Waters arrived during the heyday of adult movie theaters and the birth of the movie rating system. The difference between an XXX-rated movie and one of Waters’s is a matter of ideology. His movies don’t promise to turn you on; they’re an argument for the infinite ways a person could be turned on. He restages the culture wars within his vibrantly polarized Baltimore. Exhibitionism vs. repression. Bent vs. straight. Libertine vs. conservative. Who else would think to use indecorousness to condemn racially segregated TV dance shows the way he does in “Hairspray” (1988)? Who else would make racism the fetish — and do that while ensuring that even the white dancing is good?“Pink Flamingos” (1972).Everett CollectionFor more than 20 years, Waters worked with his friend Harris Glenn Milstead, who performed in drag as Divine. Her career had an arc, starting in anarchic vulgarity — “Get this table soaking wet!” she commands in “Pink Flamingoes,” from 1972 — and cresting with domestic melancholy. It didn’t matter whether Milstead was playing a post-Manson-family cult leader (“Flamingoes”) or a housewife (“Polyester”; “Hairspray”), Divine’s gender functioned as a matter of fact and seeded a delicious irony. Her bothness — her Divinity — always eluded the censors’ sensors. The big scandal in “Polyester” is that Divine’s philandering husband operates a chain of porn palaces, not that he’s married to (let alone cheating on) Divine. I saw her in “Hairspray” the year after I first watched “Nuts.” There was a quavering kink at play that even a kid could detect. Divine wasn’t hiding. She was a big girl. You couldn’t miss her. The idea that she was safe in Waters’s world — that she was normal — blew me away. I felt let in on a joke, privy to a star’s open secret, sensitive to some poignantly ordinary wrongness.Like its winky twin, camp, trash tends to be a queer, female, colored zone — even when its practitioners include William Friedkin, David Lynch, Oliver Stone and, in his way, Martin Scorsese. All the homophobia and racism and misogyny that undergirds the wider world exists in trash too. But their toxicities are inverted and exaggerated, mocked and tested, turned upside-down. Oppressed? Condemned? Be free in trash! Curious? Come, get your answers here! These movies are a paradise of the unbidden, the maligned, the maniacal, the hopelessly, outrageously, unfortunately true — everything Waters commanded. He’s the Moses of the mode: Let my people grope.The most crucial thing about trash, the source of its pleasure and its power, isn’t just how lurid-looking and hormonal it can be; it’s not just about measuring the lengths it’ll go to. What all great trash needs is what Barbra Streisand exudes in “Nuts.” What it needs is shamelessness. Trash means never having to say you’re sorry. It knows that fig leaves are for figs. But that un-self-consciousness, that sense of nonapology, that trash pride — it started to seep from our popular culture right around the time that Bill Clinton promised that he and Monica Lewinsky didn’t have “sexual relations” — “sexual relations” being the trash equivalent of the lights coming up at the old singles bar. “Sexual relations” crashed the country into John Waters territory. Here we were, debating discharge, laughing at the suggestion that Lewinsky wasn’t hot enough to bring the nation to its knees. The trash of it all did seem to provide bizarre pleasure. We delighted in our disgust. Even the people who were talking about how disgusting it all was wouldn’t shut up about it. We got to be part of a sex drama that upstaged the erotic fictional trash the movies used to give us almost every week. From what I can recall of that era, two of the last works of full-throated trash were “Wild Things,” an overripe crime thriller in which two chicks turn the tables on two dudes, and the book of Ken Starr’s report on Clinton’s affair. Some kind of moral transference had taken place. It was a bigger hit than “Wild Things.” The report begged us to sniff the liaison’s particulars, then whacked our noses. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. So the shame set in. Not long after we sank into the quagmire of the contested 2000 presidential elections, the Sept. 11 attacks happened, and the nation seemed to wonder aloud whether we’d ever feel anything good again. Irony — the dominant tonal mode of a whole generation — had lost its currency. Earnestness replaced it. The country went to war, and the wars never ended. Amid all that conflict, a Black family moved into the White House, leaving the country to figure out how to manage the paranoia and complacency their tenancy dredged up. It makes sense that the Hollywood superhero era began in 2000. With the country in too many messes, a series of allegories arrived about the vicissitudes of power, leadership and venality. These are movies that, increasingly, were less concerned with individual identity and autonomy, more concerned with collective action, and tasked with homeland security, patrolling the border separating wrong from right. The hero virus spread. Just look at the “Fast & Furious” series: It started as a tale of car thieves; now the crooks are saving the world. These movies are predicated upon a certain amount of visual chaos and are comfortable with trauma as long as it goes unplumbed. But for all of the bureaucratic, interstellar darkness, there’s scant human desire, despite the signals being sent by the tight, rubbery costumes — no lust, no petty transgression. If you see a gutter in one of these movies, it probably leads to a state-of-the-art crime-fighting cave. The job here is to remove stains, to take out the trash. But what would happen if Spider-Man tweaked Dr. Strange’s nipples? Our culture has always been at its most pure when it’s in the gutter, when it’s conflating divine and ugly, beauty and base. Blackface minstrelsy, ragtime, jazz: Somebody was always on hand to cry debasement (not unjustly in minstrelsy’s case). But the crude truth of trash is that we like it — to cry over, to cringe and laugh at — even when we say we don’t. The gutter is where our popular culture began, and the gaminess lurking there is our truest guise.So really what I mean when I say trash vanished is that it vanished from movies. But trash is a persistent, consumptive force that’ll set up shop in any eager host. And its shamelessness went and found a new home, in American politics. Donald Trump is trash’s Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, this life-size, seemingly contained thing that a freak accident of slime and ghosts turns into a menacing 10-story engorgement. All that’s pleasurable about trash when it’s tucked away in a movie seems catastrophically vulgar spilled out on the lawns of Pennsylvania Avenue. I won’t enumerate how. We’d be here all day with talk of spray tans and improbable hair, of “pee tapes” and “covfefe,” of “birtherism,” bleach and Billy Bush. But I have to mention two scenes that anybody good at trash could’ve written. One took place that summer evening in 2020, when Trump wanted to go for an evening jaunt from the White House to St. John’s Church and have his picture taken. He timed his walk to the height of international protests in support of Black life after a seismic spate of Black deaths. Trump and his attorney general were reported to have ordered law enforcement and the Secret Service to clear a path for the president, and the pathway included peaceful protests (although a review by the Inspector General’s Office determined that the U.S. Park Police cleared the area so that a contractor could install “antiscale fencing”). Violence and tear gas ensued nonetheless, although the White House disputed the use of either and claimed that the protesters threw frozen water bottles at police officers. Anyway, on their own, those incidents are not what constitute trash; on their own, they’re just the outrages of civil disobedience. It’s the backdrop the violence provides once Trump arrives at St. John’s for his picture. For one thing, the church was fire-damaged during the protests and is boarded up. So the site has a touch of blight.Then there’s the Bible he brought with him. When it’s time to brandish it for the camera, he appears to fumble with it, then weigh it, as if either its heft or lightness has caught him by surprise. After seeming to determine that he does indeed possess the strength to handle it, he raises his right arm. And after all the gas and spray and roughing-up, after the graffitied demands for justice that he passes on his way, he doesn’t put any triumph into the image or his few accompanying words. (Actually: Is he pouting?) He ignores a question about what just went down with the protesters, then summons some of his staff and cabinet to stand alongside him. And boy, do they seem confused. Then he shushes the press. I supposed, in this administration, that it all could have passed for a run-of-the-mill fiasco. But there was still a problem — with the Bible. Something viscerally off, something deeply “Wild in the Streets” and trash-true about the way he held it aloft in front of an ailing church, as if his hand had been placed upon it. He looked under oath, and the Bible was testifying against him.President Donald Trump in front of St. John’s Church, Washington, 2020.Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse, via Getty ImagesThe other scene took place in the Oval Office on Feb. 28, 2017, and it was also immortalized in a photo. Trump had been in office about a month, and his staff had invited the leaders of the country’s historically Black colleges to gather at the White House for a listening session — on the last day of Black History Month. There was, alas, a problem. The education secretary, Betsy DeVos, released a lengthy statement lauding the H.B.C.U. system. It read in part that Black colleges “are real pioneers when it comes to school choice. They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality.” This is like the power company congratulating water for finding its way through a dam. The statement dropped the same day as the visit; and the press office’s “listening session” turned into — surprise! — a photo opportunity with the president. But that’s not what anybody remembers about that meeting. What everybody remembers is the white lady kneeling on the sofa. The configuration of the image — which Brendan Smialowski captured and which was published by AFP-Getty — is simple. More than 30 men and women (but mostly men) stand around the president’s desk. The president is smiling, with his fingers pressed together in front of him. No one looks more pleased to be there than he does. The photo’s not a marvel of composition, not obviously anyway. But right down the center of the frame runs a path straight to Trump, cleared, it would seem, by the presidential seal woven into the carpet. No one’s standing on it. It and the president are the only objects unobscured by other people. Normally, that uncluttered pathway might be what you noticed. But there’s a white lady, in a crimson dress, on the sofa that parallels the pathway, kneeling. The woman is Kellyanne Conway, one of the president’s counselors at the time, and not only are her knees on the sofa, they’re visible, as are her lower thighs, spread slightly. She’s seemingly unaware of anybody else in the room. She certainly isn’t looking at them, because she’s contentedly swiping at her phone. That’s the whole picture. But really, it’s just the start. Kellyanne Conway, on sofa, at an Oval Office event, 2017.Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse, via Getty ImagesConway’s also the only other fully visible white person. Nobody’s in her way. This might feel like a story of America. And that would make it something out of trash, out of some — or possibly, any — blaxploitation movie. “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” “Shaft,” “Super Fly,” “Hammer,” “Dolemite.” Here on that sofa is the white woman in those movies, waiting for, strung out on, Black male attention. She’s the brunette in bed next to Priest the first time we see him in “Super Fly.” She’s that white lady hanging all over Richard Roundtree in “Shaft.” Hers is a position of power, sure. But it’s also a position of effrontery. These important Black people have been assembled by an important white person — for what, if you’re the white person, is an important optics opportunity. Those movies couldn’t have known that 40 years after they went out of style, there would still be Kellyanne Conway, knees planted into a couch, ignoring or pretending not to notice the Black assembly behind her, evoking four centuries of terrible history and troublesome entertainment without ever having to own or being asked to understand what she’d evoked — without even having to hear a director cry, “Action!”“Shaft” (1971).Everett CollectionIn life, trash obscures what, in art, trash releases. In politics, it’s a sideshow, the antithesis of the people’s business. It seduces, distracts, disarms us. One reason the movies have taken up so much injustice is to alert us to the trash in our lives, to inveigh against it, to indict it: Have we no shame? American movies do now. Waters hasn’t made one in 18 years. Fig leaves are clogging the gutter. It’s tempting to argue that trash migrated to the reality-television universe, whose Big Bang happened when “Survivor” landed in 2000. My feelings remain mixed: Sorta yes, mostly no. It was clear almost immediately that reality’s stars — chefs, bounty hunters, drag queens, bachelorettes, housewives, stage moms, Big Brothers, Kardashians, Chrisleys — knew how to be trash. But if trash is a national processing mechanism, a fabricated realm of underlying truth, then reality television, at this point, is too processed. Nothing it conveys is ever an accident. Real trash can’t help itself. It refuses to. I suppose that’s why, after pro wrestling and “The Apprentice,” Trump had to escape from trash TV. It wasn’t real enough.It’s not as if I can’t detect any screen trash these days, but its signal isn’t nearly as strong as it was 30 years ago. Still, somebody out there knows that our art needs to wrest it back, to take the trash in.Trash is right there coating the streaming CBS show “Evil” and at the heart — or spleen, really — of the one season we got of HBO’s dyspeptic race fantasia “Lovecraft Country.” We have trash to thank for the scene in “The Woman King” in which Viola Davis ragefully empties a basket of human heads at the feet of her nemesis. It’s there in almost anything Ryan Murphy or Shonda Rhimes puts on TV. It’s in the moment, for instance, when Davis sits before a vanity, on “How to Get Away with Murder” (which hailed from Rhimes’s emotional grindhouse) and removes not only her jewelry, eyelashes and makeup but also her wig: It felt like trash as a religious offering. Murphy has created a new series about Jeffrey Dahmer, the men he murdered (most of whom were gay or Black or both) and a Black woman’s experience of the sound and odor of his predations from her apartment next door. It’s high urinal cake — unasked for, yet distressingly aware of the way those murders are essentially as American gothic as trash comes.Lee Daniels might know trash better than anybody making movies right now, and that’s why his work means so much to me. “Precious,” “The Paperboy,” “The Butler,” Fox’s “Empire” — this is stuff that understands the gutter of us. Even when I don’t think the work works, the smoked cigarette of it feels right anyway. Take “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” from last year.“The United States vs. Billie Holiday” (2021).Takashi Seida/Hulu, via Everett CollectionDoes a movie about Billie need her to have sex with a G-man who was disguised as a G.I.? Especially if we don’t know that she ever did any such thing? Need — probably not. But look, the people responsible for this movie disagree. They went and made the F.B.I. agent sexy. Like, marcelled-hair-biceps-abs-and-two-facial-expressions sexy. The stakes didn’t warrant raising: The movie is about Holiday’s commitment to performing the anti-lynching chestnut “Strange Fruit” over the government’s objections. But somebody did think the steaks could use some sizzle. So the movie has Billie kick it with this guy, who keeps trying to get her locked up for drug possession, then pays her flirty visits (“even in prison, you’re beautiful”). It’s the sort of movie that opens with one of this country’s most storied singers sitting down for a radio interview with a tangy white gossip whose name is Reginald Lord Devine and whose shirt has at least one mustard splotch. It’s the kind of movie in which an effeminate, occasionally toupéed, sometimes balding, sometimes bald confidant handles her costumes and personally assists her, while a big, one-eyed pal provides hair care and sound advice. It’s she who, after one of Holiday’s pooches gets a grand, cathedral funeral, admonishes Holiday, through sobs: “Billie, I told you, you can’t let Chiquita eat off your plate. That’s why she cho-oh-oh-oh-ked.” It’s a movie in which, for most of the running time, the camera seems to bob like buoy or a toy boat, and the lighting seems emitted from a bottle of Wesson. Yes, this is the sort of movie that won’t give you the Billie Holiday story straight when it can give it to you gay, crooked and inside-out, when it can savor the shots of the spoons that cook her heroin and juxtapose her singing “Solitude” with a shot of her sitting, negligéed, on a toilet. When Lord Devine asks another nosy question (“Someone tells me” — [Insinuating Pause No. 1]. “You are very tight” [Insinuating Pause No. 2]. “With Tallulah Bankhead.”), the toupéed-balding-bald assistant leans in and says, “Lil’ bitch, you got one more time to ask more one more smartass question. … ” It’s the sort of movie in which Holiday’s future husband runs into her in the park and she is, indeed, out with Bankhead, and he’s with a blonde, and he tells her, “How bout we ditch these snow bunnies and go get into some Black [expletive].” “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” is the sort of movie biography that respects its subject, just not in any conventional Hollywood way. It prefers stains to stained glass, saltiness to saintliness. Its irreverence is a form of reverence. It’s a movie that doesn’t care about the achievement of cinematic greatness — or, frankly, even very-goodness. It’s after an alternative honesty.Holiday’s drug use is a pretext for both the F.B.I. and Daniels. Her crime isn’t heroin. It’s singing “Strange Fruit,” a song written by a white Jew that tells on America, that tells a truth about America. Its central metaphor is appalling: Lynched bodies, burned, hanging from trees, look perversely like nature. They belong to Black men, hunted on suspicion of, say, lust for a white woman, for looking at her. For less. So a mob catches them, chops them up, sets them aflame, hangs them from a tree and takes pictures. The F.B.I. didn’t want Holiday singing a song about that, because that song is too much for American ears. That song is a work of trash. More

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      in Theater

      Charles Fuller, Pulitzer Winner for ‘A Soldier’s Play,’ Dies at 83

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      He was the second Black playwright to win the award and later adapted the play into an Oscar-nominated film, “A Soldier’s Story.”Charles Fuller, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982 for “A Soldier’s Play,” which finally made it to Broadway 38 years later, in a production that earned two Tony Awards, died on Monday in Toronto. He was 83.His wife, Claire Prieto-Fuller, confirmed the death.Mr. Fuller was only the second Black playwright to win the Pulitzer for drama. (Charles Edward Gordone won in 1970 for “No Place to Be Somebody.”) His plays often examined racism and sometimes drew on his background as an Army veteran. Both of those elements were evident in “A Soldier’s Play,” which was Mr. Fuller’s reimagining of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and centered on the murder of a Black Army sergeant and the search for the culprit.The play was first staged in 1981 by the Negro Ensemble Company with a cast that included Denzel Washington. Frank Rich, in his review in The New York Times, called it “a relentless investigation into the complex, sometimes cryptic pathology of hate” and praised Mr. Fuller’s delineation of both the Black and the white characters.“Mr. Fuller demands that his Black characters find the courage to break out of their suicidal, fratricidal cycle,” Mr. Rich wrote, “just as he demands that whites end the injustices that have locked his Black characters into the nightmare.”Hollywood came calling. A 1984 film version, retitled “A Soldier’s Story” and directed by Norman Jewison, had a cast that included Mr. Washington, Howard E. Rollins Jr., David Alan Grier, Wings Hauser, Adolph Caesar and Patti LaBelle. It received three Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Fuller’s screenplay.Denzel Washington, left, and Charles Brown in 1981 in Mr. Fuller’s acclaimed play “A Soldier’s Play,” staged by the Negro Ensemble Company in New York.Bert AndrewsIn “A Soldier’s Play” and his other works, Mr. Fuller strove to serve up not idealized Black characters but ones who reflected reality.“In the ’60s and early ’70s, Black plays were directed at whites,” Mr. Fuller told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, when the Negro Ensemble Company’s production of “A Soldier’s Play” was staged in San Diego. “They were primarily confrontational pieces, whose major concern was to address racism and white-Black relationships in this country. Now we are much more concerned with examining ourselves, with looking at our own situations — historically in many instances. We are seeing characters who are more complex, ones who have bad qualities as well as good ones.”“A Soldier’s Play,” he told The Times in 2020, drew in part on his upbringing in a tough neighborhood of North Philadelphia.“I grew up in a project in a neighborhood where people shot each other, where gangs fought each other,” he said. “Not white people — Black people, where the idea of who was the best, toughest, was part of life. We have a history that’s different than a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t cheat on each other, kill each other, love each other, marry each other, do all that, things that, really, people anywhere in the world do.”Kenny Leon (with microphone), who directed a 2020 revival of “A Soldier’s Play” on Broadway, addressed Mr. Fuller, third from left, onstage after a performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCharles H. Fuller Jr. was born on March 5, 1939, in Philadelphia. His father was a printer, and his mother, Lillian Teresa Fuller, was a homemaker and foster mother. He was a student at Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia when he attended his first play, a production performed in Yiddish at the Walnut Theater.“I didn’t understand a word,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1977, but somehow it sparked his interest in becoming a playwright.He studied for two years at Villanova University and then joined the Army, where his postings included Japan and South Korea. After four years, he returned to Philadelphia, taking night classes at LaSalle College (now University) while working as a city housing inspector.In 1968, he and some friends founded the Afro-American Arts Theater in Philadelphia, but they had no playwrights, so Mr. Fuller gave it a try.One result was his first staged play, “The Village: A Party,” about a racially mixed utopia, which was produced in 1968 at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.“What the evening proves,” Ernest Albrecht wrote in a review in The Home News of New Brunswick, N.J., “is that the theater is not Fuller’s bag.”But Mr. Fuller kept at it. In the 1970s he relocated to New York, where the Negro Ensemble Company in 1974 staged his drama “In the Deepest Part of Sleep” and opened its 10th-anniversary season in 1976 with another of his plays, “The Brownsville Raid,” based on a 1906 incident in Texas in which Black soldiers were accused of a shooting. Walter Kerr, writing in The Times, praised Mr. Fuller for not making the play a simple story of racial injustice.“Mr. Fuller is interested in human slipperiness, and his skill with self‐serving, only slightly shady evasions of duty helps turn the play into the interesting conundrum it is,” Mr. Kerr wrote.Although he set out as a playwright to examine difficult questions, Mr. Fuller did so with a certain degree of optimism about the future of the United States.“America has an opportunity, with all its technology, to develop the first sensible society in history,” he said in the 1977 interview with The Inquirer. “It could provide all its people with some rational way to live together while still glorying in their cultural diversity.”By the late 1980s, though, he had tired of New York and moved to Toronto, where he was living at his death. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, David; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.“A Soldier’s Play” was finally produced on Broadway in 2020 by the Roundabout Theater with a cast that included Mr. Grier and Blair Underwood. It was eligible to win the best-revival Tony even though it had never been produced on Broadway previously — the more familiar prerequisite for the category — because, under Tony rules, it was by 2020 considered “a classic.” Mr. Grier himself won a Tony for best actor in a featured role in a play.“It has been my greatest honor to perform his words on both stage and screen,” Mr. Grier said of Mr. Fuller on Twitter, adding that “his genius will be missed.” More

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      in Movies

      Whoopi Goldberg Will Not Shut Up Thank You Very Much

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.On a recent summer afternoon, Whoopi Goldberg led me to her backyard so I could see her plants. Goldberg, a native New Yorker, lives in New Jersey, in a gated community previously inhabited by Thomas Edison and the Colgate family, of toothpaste fame, which means her garden is measured not in yards but in acres. In the greenhouse there was a pineapple plant, grown from cutting off the top of the fruit; around the corner were the vegetables — tomatoes, green peppers, eggplants. Not that she eats them, she said, but they’re nice to have around. In one corner of the yard, flowers in Crayola shades grew next to a small sign: Emma’s Garden, named for her mother. Clusters of grapes dripped from gnarled vines, and garden gnomes stood watch all over the place. As we meandered, I joked that I felt as if I were in the Garden of Eden, and I asked her if she ever felt like God. “Well, yeah,” she responded matter-of-factly, “but I’ve played God so often that it’s sort of understandable that I would.” As with the Lord herself, Goldberg appears to everyone in a different way. Someone who has found her through “The Color Purple” or “Ghost” or “Sister Act,” her three best-known films, believes her to be a bona fide movie star with hazardous levels of charm. A person who recognizes her from the list of 17 people who have an EGOT — an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony — probably knows that her roles swing from the very good to the shockingly bad, her résumé stacked with weighty achievements but even more blunders. A person who thinks: Whoopi Goldberg? You mean that surly lady on my TV in the morning? That is a regular watcher of “The View,” the daytime talk show that Goldberg has moderated for 15 years. And the person who considers Goldberg an unrecognized genius who has managed a one-of-a-kind, first-of-its-sort, decades-long career with dreadlocks on her head, no eyebrows on her face and her foot in her mouth? She knows Goldberg has actually played God only twice, but isn’t about to correct her. Though Goldberg, somewhat famously, loves living alone — a 2016 interview with her, published in this magazine, went viral for Goldberg’s assertion that, after three marriages, she knows she doesn’t “want somebody in my house” — she had rare houseguests that June afternoon. Alex Martin Dean, her daughter, and Dean’s children streamed in and out of the kitchen, draping themselves over one another as they stood around the kitchen island, bare except for a box of Popeyes and a script for “Harlem,” the Amazon TV show in which Goldberg has a small role. One of the grandchildren, Amara Skye, who had recently completed her celebrity-relative tour of duty and filmed a reality show, waved hello. (Called “Claim to Fame,” it was a show in which 12 relatives of celebrities moved into a house and had to guess their opponents’ family connections.) Skye’s daughter, Goldberg’s great-grandchild, Charli Rose, was around somewhere, watching TV. Tom Leonardis, the president of Goldberg’s production company, milled between rooms, finalizing travel plans. Despite indications toward cliché (have you heard the one about the old unmarried woman who lives alone with her cat?), Goldberg is perennially cuddly. Her skin is smooth, her cheeks juicy like a baby’s, even at 66. She lives every day like the Sabbath: When she’s not working, she told me, she sits around her mansion, moving from one room to another. Those rooms have the overstuffed charm of an antiques shop but the orderliness of the Met, with a dash of celebrity-bus-tour glamour. In the foyer stands a bowling pin painted with the image of Deloris Van Cartier, her character in “Sister Act”; a white grand piano covered in framed family portraits dominates her living room. On each floor of her house, there is a different photograph of Goldberg with the Dalai Lama. As we ate lunch in the kitchen, our plates laid atop a spotless white tablecloth with the Seven Dwarfs chasing one another around the trim, our backs pressed against the face of a cowboy embossed into the chair. A Kit-Kat clock shifted its eyes and tail toward me, while a genteelly dressed Black family encouraged me to “Choose Pepsi!” Over Goldberg’s right shoulder, I could see a panel from one of the late-19th-century Darktown Comics depicting a “coon club hunt.” “Uh,” I stammered, taking it all in. Little black sambos hanging on the walls watched us eat our mozzarella. “Have you always had these decorations?”Goldberg dipped her fork into her rice. “I love it because I don’t ever want to forget what it looked like, and what it is,” she said. Though she quit smoking 10 years ago, her voice is enticingly gritty, gravel topped with whipped cream. “We can do a better job, but this was the norm.” When I said that, for some people, it was still the norm, she replied: “In the past, I could understand, because they didn’t know any better. But people are willfully ignorant now.” Throughout her career, Goldberg has taken it upon herself — whether as a comic, or a social critic on “The View,” or the author of “Is It Just Me? Or Is It Nuts Out There?,” her ode to public civility, or even a producer of films like the forthcoming “Till,” about what happened after Mamie Till decided to send her son away for the summer — to temper that ignorance. In a September screening for the film, in which Goldberg plays Mamie’s mother, she spoke to the necessity of telling these stories: “You can’t get pissed off when people are stupid when you have the ability to make them smarter.” ‘I don’t think anybody had ever said or led me to believe that I could be part of this country that I was living in.’Which makes things all the more thorny when she says something out of pocket or just plain wrong. This is undoubtedly one way people come to Goldberg, through the controversies that flare up over comments she makes. The most recent one unfolded this winter, during an episode of “The View” about a school board’s decision to ban the book “Maus,” when she claimed that the Holocaust was not really about race because both Germans and Jews were white; she tried to apologize but ended up doubling down on the comments during an appearance that evening on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” (The next day, she apologized on “The View” and was suspended from the show for two weeks.) Goldberg told me that she initially thought my interview request was a joke, or a grave misunderstanding. Then she thought about how long she’d been working — “Till” is the 100th or so film she has appeared in over 35 years — and figured that was probably worth something. She’s not wrong. But perhaps even more impressive is that her career has endured despite her habit of making people uncomfortable. Goldberg has always said what is on her mind, and this elicits a special frisson: Will it be wild and thought-provoking or wild and offensive? Most celebrities feed us bland platitudes and workshopped comments. Goldberg has never held anything back. She knows that this is part of her legacy, but also what it can cost her. When I arrived and asked her how she was doing, she replied simply, “Nobody’s mad at me today.”Goldberg has never wanted to be called “African American.” When she became famous, one of her first controversial positions was rejecting the label. To her, the prefix denotes an unnecessary difference, a verbal “where are you really from?” In her second book, 1997’s cheekily titled “Book,” she writes:I refuse to be labeled an African American. When you tell the story of this country, I’m part of the fabric. Black people, stop trying to identify elsewhere. This is yours. People in the South got their legs chewed off, got hit with [expletive] fire hoses, got their children blown up, got yanked, burned, hanged and sliced so that you wouldn’t have to pretend you were from someplace else. So that you wouldn’t have to say, “No, I’m not entitled to this.” Well, [expletive] that. You’re entitled to all of it. Take it. It’s ours. With her fame came the pressure of representation, the weight of a race on her back. But the flip side of Goldberg’s venerated authenticity is a rejection of respectability. Her preternatural confidence, and an unshakable sense of belonging, were there from the very beginning.Goldberg was born Caryn Johnson in New York City in the fall of 1955. She grew up in Manhattan in what is now known as the Chelsea-Elliott Houses with her older brother, Clyde, and mother, Emma. The three were very close. (Emma died in 2010; Clyde died five years later.) In “Book,” she writes that her childhood was largely sheltered from racism; the civil rights movement “didn’t resonate the way it did in the rest of the country. There was no place that was restricted to me.” The families in her housing development were uniformly poor, but diverse in races and ethnicities, making it the sort of place where you had to know a few words in multiple languages to ask if a friend could come out to play, and where if you were caught acting up, somebody’s mother would deal with you until your own mother got home. As a kid, Goldberg performed in community theater and spent hours gorging on old movies with stars like Carole Lombard and Bette Davis. But her primary interests were otherwise books and sports. (“The subtle art of being a girl evaded me,” she told Roger Ebert in 1985.) One day, John F. Kennedy campaigned in her neighborhood. People from all over the city came to watch him speak, but Goldberg took the matter quite personally: The future president of the United States cared about her. Later, when she heard his Inaugural Address — “ask not what your country can do for you” — she realized that he was speaking to her too. “That was the first time I thought, Oh, I’m part of this,” she said. “Because I don’t think anybody had ever said or led me to believe that I could be part of this country that I was living in.” After struggling through school — her test scores were so low that teachers told her she was intellectually disabled — she dropped out of high school after one year. (As an adult, she was diagnosed with dyslexia.) Her mother, a Head Start teacher, cut her a deal: She could leave school, but she would have to participate in some sort of cultural enrichment, “just to keep my mind juicy.” Goldberg cobbled together her own education: going to the American Museum of Natural History and learning about the solar system and paleontology, or heading to the New York Public Library for an exhibit on Lewis Carroll and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Her mother would quiz her when she got home.Goldberg in 1985.Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis/VCG via Getty ImagesBefore she turned 25, Goldberg had become addicted to drugs, gotten clean, married her drug counselor, given birth to her daughter, Alex, and divorced. After her marriage ended, Goldberg and Alex moved to San Diego. She earned money working as bricklayer and a morgue beautician, and she found some success in repertory theater and improv groups. It was there that she became Whoopi Goldberg, a name that combined her radical embrace of flatulence and an alleged Jewish ancestor. (In a 2006 episode of a genealogy show hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Goldberg was not shown to have one.) Eventually, she and Alex moved to Berkeley, where Goldberg started to develop characters for something more ambitious.“The Spook Show,” equal parts Lenny Bruce and Moms Mabley, premiered soon afterward. In it, Goldberg transformed into different characters — a Jamaican nurse, a surfer chick, a woman with a physical disability — each given a monologue laced with surprising, if occasionally unsubtle, wisdom. She put the innermost thoughts of her characters on display, introducing her audience to the sorts of people they didn’t know but probably passed every day. After some local success, Goldberg and her partner at the time took the show on a short tour of the United States and Europe before she parked it at the Dance Theater Workshop in Manhattan. The show was a word-of-mouth phenomenon, and Goldberg went from performing in front of only a handful of audience members to packed houses that included many celebrities. One evening, the director Mike Nichols found Goldberg backstage and, with tears in his eyes, told her he would produce anything she wanted. It was one of the great before-and-afters of her life: Nichols moved the show to Broadway, where he produced it and looked after her, helping her forge connections in the theater community. Goldberg eventually turned the show into her first comedy album, which won a Grammy in 1986.In 1984, Steven Spielberg, just off “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.,” was looking to cast the lead role for his next film and asked Goldberg to perform “The Spook Show” at his personal theater in Los Angeles for him and a few friends. Backstage, Goldberg peeked around the curtain and saw Michael Jackson. Soon after, Spielberg offered her the lead role of Celie, a downtrodden woman who has to learn her own strength, in “The Color Purple.”A critical and commercial success, the film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including a best-actress nomination for Goldberg. Roger Ebert, who named it the year’s best film, called Goldberg’s role “one of the most amazing debut performances in movie history.” But even after this triumph, the film industry didn’t quite know what to do with her. Was she the next Eddie Murphy (wily and cunning, in films like “The Associate” or “Burglar”) or a Black woman hired to teach white people important lessons (“Clara’s Heart”) or the person to call when Shelley Long was unavailable (“Jumpin’ Jack Flash”)? She had been tasked with spit-shining the junk given to her — in “Theodore Rex,” a film she was contractually obligated to complete, she played a detective assigned to an investigation with a dinosaur — but she still became a punchline: The comedian Sam Kinison joked in an interview that Whoopi Goldberg is what happens when “a nation is afraid to hurt a person’s feelings.” Goldberg in “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1986).Everett Collection“Clara’s Heart” (1988).Everett CollectionIt wasn’t just that she was Black and a woman; it was that no one knew exactly what kind of woman she was. Dreadlocks, Jewish last name, old-man clothes, a smile that could blow out an electrical grid. Did she have sex appeal, and what would the industry do with her if she didn’t? Worse: What would it do with her if she did? Even in her turns as a romantic lead in films like “Made in America” or “Fatal Beauty,” where she played opposite white men, her characters always stayed chaste.Soon after the success of the “The Color Purple,” Goldberg learned of a forthcoming adaptation of “The Princess Bride” and wanted to audition for the title role. She was laughed away. The matter came up in a 1997 Playboy interview: “I said: ‘But the book is about a princess who doesn’t look like anybody else, who has a very different attitude. So why not me?’ It hurt my feelings because I thought, Are you telling me that because you think I couldn’t be a princess that all these other doors are going to slam too? Basically, yes. So I took the stuff that nobody seemed to have a problem with me doing.”Goldberg says she couldn’t get an audition for “Ghost” until the film’s star, Patrick Swayze, threatened to pull out unless she was given a chance. She went on to win an Oscar for her performance as the psychic Oda Mae Brown. Lost somewhere in the confusion about what to think about Goldberg was her actual talent, especially when paired with material that treated her as more than a visual gag, the humor rooted in the mere fact of her presence. The 1990 drama “The Long Walk Home,” released around the same time as “Ghost,” is a hidden gem in Goldberg’s oeuvre. She plays a maid who, during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., has to walk to and from her job. Gone is the sass and the racial bewilderment required of many of her post-“Color Purple” roles, and what’s left is a soft-shelled tenderness, her face — the subject of so much derision — conveying a steady sense of hope even amid the dramatic violence.In “Book,” Goldberg wonders about whether such a role could promote stereotypes. When she filmed “The Long Walk Home,” she fell into the trap of contemporary confidence: She briefly believed that she would’ve made different choices if she had grown up in the South during the civil rights era. But she started talking to the Black women who worked as nannies and maids at that time, and they sobered her up. “ ‘You wouldn’t have done it any differently,’” one of the women told her. “ ‘When we were coming up, if you made any noise, they’d hang you.’” Goldberg realized that she didn’t know her own history well enough if she could fantasize about alternatives. These women became her heroes. She writes: “They held their breath and their tongue until the world caught up to what was right. They kept the family together — theirs, and the upper-class white families they were working for. And they survived. So what the hell was wrong with playing them? Nothing. Nothing.” Goldberg took over the lead role in “Sister Act,” the fish-out-of-water comedy about a lounge singer forced to hide out in a nunnery, after Bette Midler, for whom the role was originally written, turned it down. It was a smash success, and the rapidly made sequel, “Sister Act 2” (1993), briefly made Goldberg the highest-paid woman in Hollywood, at a reported $7 million. But the fulfilling roles were still scarce. Goldberg worked steadily — occasionally appearing in schlock but always appearing in something. She M.C.ed the Grammys once and the Oscars four times, her humor inflected with just enough severity so viewers could never quite relax. (In 1994, at the Oscars: “Lorena Bobbitt, please meet Bob Dole.”) She had an ingenious short-lived talk show and a few stand-up specials on HBO that skewered Black anxiety and white nonsense. With Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, she repeatedly hosted the “Comic Relief” telethons to raise money for the homeless, the motley crew of comic do-gooders becoming incredibly close friends in the process. She was political and unafraid to be insolent where it counted, unmoved by expectation or custom. Crystal told me that once, Senator Edward M. Kennedy invited the trio to Washington for lunch to discuss federal aid on homelessness. Williams and Crystal arrived in suits, but “Whoopi was in a baseball-uniform top that said, in script across it, ‘Balls.’ And Ted Kennedy said, ‘Is that a team?’ And she said, ‘No, it’s a plea.’” Williams and Crystal grabbed each other’s hands under the table. (Kennedy laughed.)Goldberg with Billy Crystal and Robin Williams at a “Comic Relief” telethon in 1986.Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesAnd then suddenly the work was gone. To this day, she is convinced that something she said had finally damned her, making people hesitate to send her scripts. Fifteen years after winning an Oscar, she was hosting the Universal Studios Hollywood theme-park tour.Despite her two-week suspension from “The View” early this year or, say, the outrage after Ted Danson, her boyfriend at the time, wore blackface to a roast of her in 1993, Goldberg thinks she has really been canceled only once. In 2004, she and a bunch of other celebrities gave remarks at a fund-raiser for John Kerry, then running to be the Democratic presidential nominee. Everyone took potshots at the incumbent: Meryl Streep wondered “which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our president’s personal savior, would have personally dropped on the sleeping families of Baghdad.” Chevy Chase got a round of cheers for saying, “Clinton plays the sax, John plays the guitar and Bush’s a liar.” John Leguizamo quipped: “Latins for Republicans? It’s like roaches for Raid.” Amid all this, Goldberg told a joke herself. The next day, a reporter named Deborah Orin published an article in The New York Post with the headline “DIRTY TRICK: LEWD WHOOPI BASHED BUSH.” The story referred to Goldberg’s remarks as an “X-rated rant full of sexual innuendos against President Bush.” Orin continued covering the story closely, as Republicans insisted that Democrats release the recording of the monologue that “turned Bush’s name into a crude sexual joke.” As other outlets picked up the story, more performers were also called out, but the focus and furor were trained squarely on Goldberg, then a darling of the Democratic Party and a close friend of the Clintons’. Goldberg’s career went dark. SlimFast, the diet-in-a-can brand for whom Goldberg had been the spokeswoman, dropped her. Friends stopped associating with her in public. She was disinvited from the Democratic National Convention. But the worst part of all? Nobody ever printed the joke.“You know why they couldn’t print what I said?” Goldberg asked me. “Because I didn’t say anything that was bad.”It was a sweaty August afternoon, and we were at her summer home on the coast of Sardinia, in Italy, eating at a table topped by a lazy susan as wide as a hula hoop. The property has two houses: one for Goldberg (remember: “I don’t want somebody in my house”) and one for guests. She decided to buy the place after spending a single night, waking up to the sight of the sun pulling itself from the horizon over the Tyrrhenian Sea. Goldberg is an avid real estate browser; she refers to it as her porn. When I first met her, I asked which was her favorite: Zillow? Realtor.com? “Christie’s,” she replied. She took a beat, then without energy or interest, recited part of the joke as she remembered it: “I love bush. Somebody’s giving bush a bad name. So let’s take him out and everybody get out and vote.” Her eyes flicked over to me, and the monotone switched off. “I might’ve said, ‘[Expletive] — so get out there and [expletive] vote.’ But to hear them talk about it, I was disgusting.”Over the course of reporting this story, the magazine’s research department dug up the actual text of her joke, and it was as tame as she remembered it; There wasn’t even any cursing. “When Bush comes to shove, don’t whine,” she told the crowd. “Vote Kerry. And that’s why I’m here tonight. Because I love bush. But someone’s giving bush a bad name. Someone has tarnished the name of bush. Someone has waged war, someone has deliberately misled the country, someone has attempted to amend the Constitution, all in the name of bush. The bush I know and cherish would never do such things. My bush is smarter than that. And if my bush is smarter than that, you can understand just how dumb I think that other bush is.” She closed by saying, “Vote your heart and mind, and keep bush where it belongs,” pointing at her crotch.Hearing her riff read back to her, Goldberg said, gave her something she had wanted for 20 years: proof. Her remarks weren’t obscene — at least, no more than anyone else’s. She wasn’t crazy in her self-defense and insistence that she hadn’t done anything wrong. The only thing she was guilty of was being funny, and then unfairly maligned.In Sardinia, I asked her whether she thought the quick drop was just the way Hollywood worked, or was perhaps unique to anything about her. “Well, it’s unique to me, because I didn’t say any of the shit that they have accused me of saying,” she said. It’s not that she didn’t want to be called out for her actions; she just wanted to be called out accurately. “I mean, I did stuff” — her character on her short-lived sitcom “Whoopi” had a cardboard cutout of Bush that she routinely kicked down the stairs — “but I didn’t do what they said I did. And I will take anything that you’re mad at that I actually did. But you cannot accuse me of shit I didn’t do.” Here’s a small offering of things Goldberg has actually said, all over the past few years on “The View”: to let the football player Ray Rice defend himself against his wife (“I’m sorry, if you hit somebody, you cannot be sure you are not going to be hit back”), to cut Rachel Dolezal some slack (“If she wants to be Black, she can be Black”), to be crystal clear on the criminal charges against Roman Polanski (“I know it wasn’t rape-rape. It was something else, but I don’t believe it was rape.”). So yes, some of the backlash is warranted. Her otherwise generous and typically mainstream sensibilities — racism is bad, people should be kind — get gummed up. She has spent so much time avoiding becoming a role model that she seems to have forgotten the weight of her words, especially when standing at a pulpit before millions. She’s not always as precise as she should be — better if she had said “forcible rape,” or had noted that her understanding of race is not definitive — and her own cancellation in 2004 has made her almost too skeptical of judging other people. But she knows what it’s like to be misunderstood before you’ve even had a chance to explain yourself, and she is willing to be a dam against the tide of swift public opinion.‘She makes it look so easy, but I imagine that it has cost more than we would imagine.’“There’s a wider range of topics that she tackles every day, but the fearlessness and the fierceness hasn’t changed,” Crystal told me. “The compassion that she has for people, alongside the acerbic quality to intelligently go after people and sometimes make mistakes. She’s on the edge a lot, which is a wonderful place to be. She doesn’t back down.”Few among us could expertly navigate having to speak on topics as varied as “Miami School Board Rejects Sex-Ed Textbooks” to “Guest Brings Eggs to a Vegan Wedding” every weekday morning, for years, with a bunch of people hired to appeal to a different demographic from the one you’re in, and not end up on the wrong side of a comment. Her thoughts can be maddening in their simplicity, but expressing unvarnished thoughts is also increasingly rare. She’s not trolling; she’s just trying to stay true to herself, even when the moment demands that it’s better for her not to.In Italy, Goldberg told me that she had heard people describe her as an “O.G.,” but she didn’t know what it meant. I explained that it stood for “original gangsta.” “OK, well, that is true,” she allowed. “Everything I am saying and everything I’m telling you about myself should allow people to understand that I am an original gangsta, because gangstas just don’t care what you think.”The B-plot of a 2009 episode of “30 Rock” finds Tracy Jordan, a buffoonish comedic actor longing to be taken seriously, aiming for an EGOT. Jordan, played by Tracy Morgan, seeks advice from Goldberg, the first Black person with an EGOT. Goldberg won a Tony Award in 2002 for producing the musical “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” the 1991 best-supporting-actress Oscar for “Ghost” and a Grammy in 1986 for her comedy album. In the episode, when Jordan reacts with derision to learning that in 2009 Goldberg won a daytime Emmy for hosting a talk show, not a prime-time Emmy, she shrugs him off: “Girl’s gotta eat.”Previously, the EGOT achievement was an esoteric industry joke, a long-forgotten goal once set by Philip Michael Thomas, a star of “Miami Vice,” in interviews. Thomas was so committed that he had the letters engraved on a pendant that he wore around his neck, holding the goal close to his heart. (He has yet to win any of the awards.) But as the designation took hold in pop culture — after the episode, news organizations began to refer to it — a reverence for Goldberg crept in with it, as if people could finally understand her aptitude now that there was a yardstick with which to do so. In one of our conversations, I asked Goldberg what people misunderstood about her. Over her entire career, she responded, even now, people are shocked to find out that she’s actually talented: that she writes books and produces films, that she owns businesses, that she possesses any dramatic skill, that she’s not a daffy pothead who moves without intention or foresight, that her career did not come about solely through luck or by playing off white guilt. Even with the EGOT designation, and a peer group too small to fill the roster of a hockey team, some people continue not to take her seriously. She told me she wasn’t sure why, but we both knew the litany of possibilities, the problems people have had with her from the beginning.I noted how frustrating it must feel to have been underestimated for so long. “That’s a good way to put it,” she said, chuckling. Then she turned solemn, as if she were taking in what I said. “That’s a good way to put it.” On the set of “The View” in 2009.Steve Fenn/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty ImagesWhen it comes to Goldberg’s peers, I think less of comedians and actors than I do music artists: women like Tina Turner and Donna Summer and Missy Elliott, who had clear visions to cut uncharted paths but were stymied by people who didn’t think they looked the part. About Elliott, the cultural critic Hilton Als wrote, in 1997, that the rapper-producer was one of the New Negroes, which he defines as “a woman who considers her marginal status a form of freedom, and a challenge — she takes the little she has been given and transforms it into something complex, outrageous and ultimately fashionable.”If enough people tell you that they have no idea what to make of you, no idea where you fit, next to that pain of rejection grows a thrill: If you’ve already discounted me, why limit myself? I like to think of Goldberg as a trickster: a person who eludes category by shifting unpredictably, upending expectation each time. She pushes up against social boundaries, turning them inside out and shaking out the dust. Take something as simple as her hair: Despite decades of complaints (and the ensuing ill-fitting wigs she has had to wear), she has never changed it, never opted for something more feminine, confident in the relationship between her sexuality and her androgynous appearance, even if the industry hasn’t been. “What fascinates me beyond the phenomenon of Whoopi’s persona is the way she has embraced the mainstream while remaining so radically herself,” the writer Ottessa Moshfegh wrote to me in an email. Her novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” featured Goldberg as a near-deity. “To me it’s very hopeful to see a consummate artist take the stage with such optimism and honesty. She makes it look so easy, but I imagine that it has cost more than we would imagine.”In my early 20s, I would take the B train from Prospect Park to the Upper West Side, where I would unleash my myriad anxieties on a junior therapist, because she was all I could afford at the time. She was beautiful and confident and told me she learned English by watching episodes of “Friends,” but the thing I hated most about her was that all she ever seemed to tell me was that I was normal. That wasn’t what I needed to hear. In fact, it was offensive. I had never aimed for normalcy, a land for middle children and people who knew how to drive — I liked feeling different from everyone else, and I had felt that way as long as I could remember. What I wanted was to feel OK about those differences, to feel their power instead of their weight.Assimilation is a grieving process: losing the very essence of you for the comfort of acceptance. That Goldberg has refused makes her a role model (even if she would hate that) for going against convention and relishing it. This summer, the comedian Jo Koy appeared on “The View” and was so thrilled to meet Goldberg that he cried on air. As a child, he stumbled across one of her specials on HBO and was transfixed by this woman who looked like nobody else in comedy. “You watch Whoopi, and you go, Oh, OK, you can be yourself,” he told me. Goldberg didn’t give us permission to be weird, but she made it look impossibly cool. The actress Mary-Louise Parker, who co-starred with Goldberg in “Boys on the Side” in 1995, has remained close with her. We talked on the phone for an hour. (“I know it sounds like I’m laying it on,” she said of Goldberg’s generosity. “But she was — she was in my son’s short film.”) Parker avoids social media and all celebrity news coverage, so I filled her in on some of Goldberg’s controversies over the past few decades. She was unmoved by other people’s opinions. “If a person has never done anything that offends anyone, or that nowadays in society you have to apologize for them, they are not being authentic,” she said. Abandoning herself would cause an almost physical pain for somebody like Goldberg. “The two are not compatible.”In Sardinia, Goldberg and I sat down to eat dinner with Leonardis, her business partner, who was staying in the guesthouse for a few days before visiting his fiancé in Bologna, and Paolo Alberti, a friend of theirs. Though the conversation leaned sophisticated — Leonardis and Alberti were going over every detail of a recent Dolce & Gabbana presentation — Goldberg punctuated it with short bits, animating whatever might be at her fingertips with funny voices and scenarios. When a gravy dish with tiny clay feet ended up in Goldberg’s hands, it came alive, arguing with her about where it belonged, telling her it could get its damn self to somebody else’s plate. After a fly landed in her drink, she gave us its inner monologues, compressing her voice into a squeak: Now the fly is donning his swim camp and getting ready for some exercise. Our companions, obviously used to this, laughed along, but I found myself totally enchanted. Goldberg didn’t give us permission to be weird, but she made it look impossibly cool. Ruth Ossai for The New York TimesAs the fly started doing laps in her prosecco — perhaps training for the Olympics — the phone rang: Alex called to tell her that Olivia Newton-John had died.Out of respect, Goldberg told her Alexa to play the soundtrack from “Grease,” explaining that it is her daughter’s favorite movie, hence the emergency call. Once, when Alex was young, Goldberg got John Travolta to meet them at Disneyland as a surprise. In her seat, Goldberg started re-enacting the dance moves from “Greased Lightnin’.” Leonardis and Alberti had returned to discussing fashion, so I had no choice but to join her, the two of us wordlessly dragging our pointer fingers toward an invisible audience, pumping each arm up and to the side. The next morning, news about Issey Miyake’s death broke moments after we had been talking about him. We were all disoriented by the coincidence, but Goldberg was clearly affected — she loved his clothes, which is why we were talking about him in the first place. And then it set in: Newton-John is one, Miyake is two. … “It’s always three,” Leonardis said. All eyes turned to Goldberg. “I’m not getting on the plane, I’m not getting in the car, I’m not getting on the Segway, I’m not doing anything today,” she responded.But eating, she decided, was safe, so we had one last lunch. While the groundskeepers, a married couple, tittered around, their golden retriever amused himself with an extremely squeaky ball. Goldberg took the bait: She became the dog. Her voice high and goofy, dog-Whoopi breathlessly recounted the pleasures of having balls on your face, then advocated playing with balls in general. Somehow it came out that Alberti had never seen the viral video of Eartha Kitt responding to the idea that relationships require “compromise,” so somebody pulled it up on a phone. Goldberg relished the rancor with which Kitt repeated the word, which was about a dozen disgusted times in under three minutes. “If a man came into your life, wouldn’t you want to compromise?” an off-screen interviewer asks Kitt. Her face twists into bewilderment and disgust. “A man comes into my life,” she responds, “and I have to compromise? You must think about that one again.” She laughs wickedly. Goldberg was pleased as punch. She reminded me of a kid encouraged to make their own fun, one who could find amusement with any toy. And away she went: Goldberg started her Kitt-themed variety hour. She taught us a bit of Kitt’s history — did you know that her two most popular hits, “C’est Si Bon” and “Santa Baby,” were released in the same year? — and did a rendition of “C’est Si Bon,” her voice in a different register of smokiness. And then she went back to the video itself, which goes viral every few years as a paean to independence, a rejection of the idea that an institution — that anything, really — can force you to conform to external expectations. Goldberg replayed it, this time folding her hand into a puppet, performing as earnestly as she would onstage. Her commitment made it feel real. “Compromise? What is compromising?” she made her hand say. “Compromising for what? Compromising for what reason? To compromise? For what?”Hair by Issac Poleon. Makeup by Mata Marielle.Ruth Ossai is a Nigerian British photographer whose work celebrates identity, particularly Nigerian identity, and culture. More

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      in Theater

      A Bollywood Favorite Is Remade for the Stage, Raising Eyebrows

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      Some have taken issue with the reframing of the musical, which now focuses on the love story of an Indian American woman and a white American man.SAN DIEGO — It is one of the most successful Bollywood movies of all time. Though released in 1995, it still plays daily at a movie theater in Mumbai. Its songs are a mainstay at weddings. Its lead actors became Bollywood superstars. And now “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge,” or “DDLJ,” has hit the stage.“Come Fall in Love — The DDLJ Musical” is currently in previews at the Old Globe here before a planned Broadway run. Fans of the film had been abuzz after producers announced the stage adaptation last fall, but when the show’s cast was revealed this summer, social media lit up with criticism. The news that a white actor, Austin Colby, would play the role of Rog, who was known as Raj in the film and played by the Indian star Shah Rukh Khan, led many fans of the movie to accuse the musical of whitewashing.The show’s creators say they want to tell the story of two cultures coming together. But critics of the casting decision see a missed opportunity. Amid increasing demands for more inclusive hiring and storytelling in the entertainment industry, South Asians are still underrepresented onstage and onscreen.“Just when you think we are moving on wards & upwards we are right back to square one,” Andy Kumar, an India-based performer known as VJ Andy, wrote in a tweet. “Why can’t our stories be told as they are? Without a white wash??” On Instagram, negative comments were sprinkled among the responses to Colby’s excited post about his casting. “Haven’t y’all colonized enough,” one user wrote. Another commented: “It is embarrassing that as a white man you are willingly stealing opportunities from men of color. This isn’t something to be proud of.”The chef Vikas Khanna, who was born in India and lives in New York, has also expressed his disapproval on social media. “They took away a star from us,” Khanna said during a video call. “All these guys would have gone in for auditions and the parents would have been: ‘My God, my boy is going to be Raj!’” More on IndiaA Predator’s Return: Scientists are bringing cheetahs back to India to see whether the animal’s population there can be restored after being hunted into extinction.Economic Trends: As global economic growth slows sharply, with many major economies gripped with worries of recession, India has been a conspicuous exception as its economy continues to grow.An Electric Vehicle Push: India’s success with two- and three-wheeled electric vehicles that sell for as little as $1,000 could be a template for other developing countries.Keeping the Milk Flowing: Indian scientists are getting creative in an effort to help the country’s dairy producers, and animals, adapt in a hotter world.“Doing this, you’re making our kids feel less than,” he added. “Let’s not move back. We’ve worked really hard to be on the stage.”“DDLJ” was one of the first Indian films to center on a love story between nonresident Indians (known as N.R.I.s), a reflection of the large numbers who were emigrating. It focuses on two young N.R.I.s living in London — the party boy Raj (Khan) is rich, entitled and Western, quite the opposite of the old-fashioned Simran (Kajol) and her hardworking traditional father, who says to Raj in the film: “You call yourself an Indian? You give India a bad name.” But when Simran ‌returns to India for her‌ arranged marriage, Raj and Simran try to persuade her father‌‌ to let their love conquer all. In addition to the central love story, the movie also resonates because of its focus on love of country and family.The film “touched a nerve” with N.R.I.s who were “navigating between two or three cultures,” Rajinder Dudrah, a professor at the Birmingham Institute of Media and English, explained in an interview. Individuals were having to grapple with the tension between Indian tradition and Western ideas just as this movie was highlighting them. “The idea of ‘dil hai Hindustani,’ the heart is Indian,” was also conveyed in the film, Dudrah added, “meaning that no matter where in the world you were, if you were of Indian descent, you had an attachment to India.”Narayan, with ensemble members, in the musical, which has nods to the film and a similar narrative arc.Jim CoxWhile there are nods to the film — pigeons, fields of mustard flowers, a mandolin cameo — and the narrative arc remains, this “DDLJ” is decidedly American. Raj has been transformed into Roger (or Rog), and the leads now live in Massachusetts, meeting as Harvard students in Cambridge. Aditya Chopra, who directed the movie, is also directing the stage show; the book and lyrics are by Nell Benjamin, who wrote screen-to-stage adaptations of “Legally Blonde” and “Mean Girls.”In August, Chopra posted a statement on Instagram explaining his original vision for the film involved a white male lead. (Apparently his first choice was Tom Cruise.)‌ “The most powerful way to depict a country’s culture and values is to see it from the perspective of someone who does not belong to the same culture,” Chopra wrote, explaining his goal is to showcase Indian culture to a global audience. “That is the starting point of ‘Come Fall in Love,’ the story of Indian Simran, her culture and heritage through the eyes of American Roger.”In an interview earlier this month, Benjamin said she was not surprised by the reaction “given the lack of representation” in the theater, but the uproar was still unsettling. “I was distressed that people thought that Adi [Chopra] or me or anyone would want to whitewash this movie,” she explained. “That would suggest that ‘Oh, well, when we do it, she’s going to fall in love with this guy because he’s better than the options.’ That’s not the story. I believe people who come to see the show will get that.”The musical’s writers stressed that the production still showcased a predominantly South Asian cast, including Shoba Narayan, who plays Simran, and a production spokeswoman said that South Asians represented more than 50 percent of cast members.Benjamin said the creators had considered writing the male lead as an Indian American or a half-Indian man but believed it would have been an “easy choice” that wouldn’t have worked as well. “If you don’t excavate it, you don’t add value to it,” she said, adding that Chopra “is perfectly capable of doing the exact movie as a musical, developing it in Mumbai and then renting a theater in New York, but that’s not what we wanted to do together.”Not everyone was critical of the direction the stage musical has taken. The Bollywood screenwriter Shibani Bathija (“My Name Is Khan,” “Fanaa”) saw the advantages in changing the lead’s ethnicity to make the story work for a general audience. “I think having him be South Asian would be more problematic, because where is all this objection coming from,” she said, referring to the family’s disapproval of the central couple’s relationship. The United States focuses less on caste and class differences than India or Britain, she said, so the possible differences between two South Asians would not be as apparent to an American audience. “If you hadn’t watched the film, you wouldn’t get it,” she said. “There would need to be another level of explanation that maybe wouldn’t serve the creative.”The musical’s composers, Vishal Dadlani and Shekhar Ravjiani, known as Vishal & Shekhar, also disagreed with the criticism. Ravjiani said they were proud to represent India through the musical, for which they have created an 18-song score. (The two did not write the film’s original songs, which have become classics, and only a few melodies from the movie are briefly heard in the musical.) Dadlani reiterated that Chopra wanted to tell this specific story and that it was “ridiculous” to say that “just because you’re an Indian filmmaker, you should write the story differently.”“It’s not about color, it’s not about white or brown,” Dadlani added. “It’s about a boy who’s in love with a girl and whose family is different than the girl’s family.”However, Benjamin, interviewed separately, thought of color as a storytelling tool. She explained that in her view, “with the change to Rog, you’re talking about color” and discussed how Roger’s “whiteness” gave him privilege, making things easy for him, until he faced Simran’s father.Despite the criticism of the show, among the three dozen or so audience members interviewed in San Diego, the response was mostly positive — from those familiar with the film and those who weren’t.One of the few dissenting voices was Shebani Patel, who flew in from San Francisco to see the show: “I was not pleased with the casting. I don’t hate the show, but it’s not our show.” More

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      in Music

       ’1776’ Musical Returns to Broadway With a Diverse Twist

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      A revival of the classic musical offers a fresh twist on the founding for the post-“Hamilton” era.“Our contribution to the history of the production is our bodies, our physical selves,” Crystal Lucas-Perry said of the Broadway revival of “1776,” and its cast of female, nonbinary and trans actors. Clockwise from top left: Sav Souza, Lucas-Perry, Elizabeth A. Davis, Carolee Carmello, Patrena Murray and Oneika Phillips.Camila Falquez for The New York TimesHow do you solve a problem like America?For the creators of the musical “1776,” the answer was to wrap it in jaunty tunes, 18th-century double entendres and enough twisty dialogue to make a dramatization of the debate over the Declaration of Independence feel like a thriller.Premiering on Broadway in 1969, the musical ran for 1,217 performances, won the Tony Award for best musical and, over the last 50-plus years, has left more than a few critics scratching their heads over how such a resolutely square show won over Vietnam-era America.But 1776 isn’t what it used to be. In 2022, a touchstone of national identity has become a culture-war hot potato. And “1776,” which arrives this month on Broadway in a new revival for Roundabout Theater Company, isn’t the same either.The revival, directed by Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus, has the familiar rousing melodies (in new, rock-infused arrangements), star-spangled color scheme and corny dad jokes. But they’re delivered by a racially diverse cast of women, nonbinary and trans actors, whose embodiment, Paulus said, wakes the language up.“I want the audience to hold that dual reality, of what the founders were, but also a company of actors in 2022, who never would have been allowed inside Independence Hall,” Paulus said in a video interview last month, after the show concluded its pre-Broadway run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where she is artistic director.The idea, she said, using a phrase that has become something of a mantra for the show, “is to hold history as a predicament, rather than an affirming myth.”Announced in 2019, the revival may initially have seemed to be riding the post-“Hamilton” vogue for all things Founders, while doing that show’s inclusive casting one better. But the two-year pandemic delay — which saw nationwide racial-justice protests, a bitterly contested presidential election and the Jan. 6 insurrection — have only heightened the stakes.“The deeper you get into it, the more poetry, the more stuff, exists inside of it,” Page said, in a separate video interview.At bottom, “1776,” he said, is “about a clandestine meeting of people who desperately want to change the world.”Then again, “1776” was never the whitewashed retro-patriotic celebration it is often remembered as. For all its traditionalist guys-in-powdered-wigs look, the show — with songs by Sherman Edwards, a history teacher turned Brill Building tunesmith, and a book by the playwright Peter Stone — was as politically pointed in its time as “Hamilton” (and perhaps, some argue, more so).Written ahead of the Bicentennial, it was meant to humanize the founders — “Demigods? We’re men, no more, no less,” Benjamin Franklin declares — while also challenging what the authors described as the “jingoistic” history they had learned in school.Sara Porkalob, center left, Lucas-Perry and Davis in the production during its pre-Broadway run at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.Evan Zimmerman for Murphy MadeThere was the bite of songs like “Momma, Look Sharp,” a denunciation of the carnage of war that might have been sung by a G.I. on Hamburger Hill. And there was “Molasses to Rum,” a chilling call-out of freedom-espousing New England’s complicity in the profits of slavery.The production even stirred its own mini-controversy: When cast members were invited to perform the show at the Nixon White House, they were asked to cut “Cool, Cool Considerate Men,” a satirical minuet of money-loving conservatives who move “ever to the right, never to the left.” (They refused.)“I continue to be surprised when I meet people who say, ‘Oh, 1776! It’s my favorite musical. It’s just what our country needs!” Paulus said. “I keep thinking, what are they talking about?”But then, when the touring production company NETworks first suggested the show to her in February 2019 as a possible revival, she knew little about it, except that it had beaten out “Hair” (which she had directed a Broadway revival of in 2009) for the Tony. “I had a vague assumption it was a kind of a celebratory look at American history,” she said.When she read the book, on a long plane ride, she said, she “almost fell out of the airplane.”In particular, she was struck by the dramatic climax: the debate over Thomas Jefferson’s fiery denunciation of the slave trade, which was ultimately cut from the Declaration, to secure unanimous approval.Even talking about it now, Paulus still sounds incredulous. “I was unaware of that crossing out,” she said. “How could I not know?”“That began my journey into the show,” she continued. “I had to reckon with my own experience of American history.”A 2016 Encores! concert staging in New York had already used some racially diverse casting. Paulus said she was told off the bat that the estate would be open to an all-female cast, but she emphasized that the production takes a less “binary” view of gender.There was a first reading in New York in August 2019, with the principal actors, including Crystal Lucas-Perry as the irascible and obstinate John Adams, leader of the “independency” faction. By early March 2020, the show was fully cast, with an opening in Cambridge set for that May, to be followed by a national tour and then a Broadway run.Instead, they retreated to Zoom, like the rest of American theater. Without the pressure to stage the show, Paulus said, they could go deep in American history, including meetings with various scholars like the political theorist Danielle Allen and the historians Vincent Brown, Jane Kamensky and Annette Gordon-Reed.With the approval of the creators’ estates, the show includes a (wordless) depiction of a 14-year-old Robert Hemings, Jefferson’s enslaved bodyservant (and brother to Sally Hemings), inspired by Gordon-Reed’s scholarship. It also adds a long excerpt from Abigail Adams’s famous letter advising John to “remember the ladies.”While the gender-flipped casting may be the show’s claim to “firstness,” the core of the production is a grappling with race.Even before the murder of George Floyd, Paulus said, discussions around race within the company were “very raw.” Then came the protests, and the roiling conversation on racism, representation and hierarchy in the theater set off by the “We See You, White American Theater” open letter.In September 2020, the American Repertory Theater announced a set of initial antiracism commitments. When it came to “1776,” she said, the conversations prompted by the protests “impacted everything about our process.”Paulus said she first met Page (whose long résumé as a choreographer includes extensive collaborations with Beyoncé) in 2017, when he was starting the M.F.A. program in directing at Columbia. He was initially hired as the show’s choreographer, in 2019. In the summer of 2020, he also became co-director.“I felt that the most powerful and honest reflection of our collaboration,” Paulus said, was to be “coequals.”Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus directed the production, which starts previews at the American Airlines Theater on Sept. 16 and opens Oct. 6.Matthew MurphyThe George Floyd moment, Page agreed, “changed everything” about the show. The team, including the set designer Scott Pask, had already started moving away from the original scenic designs, which Page described as attempting to land the show too much “in the world of realism.”“We came together and said, this doesn’t feel right anymore,” he said. “We started asking, when you break it all the way down to the core, what is this piece about?“These were men who were attempting to make a change inside the world,” he continued. “Who cares about the chair they sat in, and are we getting it right?”The production, with its spare, Brecht-influenced design, is set not in Independence Hall in 1776, but onstage in 2022, where it’s performed by a company of actors from the present who arrive in street clothes, with no fanfare, before putting on their 18th-century(ish) waistcoats and period-appropriate shoes.(One performer also puts on a beaded necklace — seemingly a nod at the fact, mentioned in Stone and Edward’s original authors note, that Native American leaders would often appear before the Continental Congress, as leaders of independent nations.)Page, whose other recent directing credits include this summer’s revival of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” at Barrington Stage Company, also cited the importance of an “affinity space” for Black cast members, which helped guide the show’s exploration of race.“With the other cast members, the main thing we communicated was, ‘You’re going to feel some things,’” Page said. “What the Black cast members asked was to leave your fragility at the door.”In a group interview with four of the show’s founding “fathers,” Elizabeth A. Davis, who plays Jefferson, recalled a video meeting in which cast members presented their family trees, as part of an exploration of how personal and national history intersect. She said she could still remember exactly where she was sitting — “in my grandmother’s old room, in the middle of Texas” — as Black colleagues described hitting the so-called slavery wall, beyond which ancestry can be hard to trace.“It was a profound moment for me,” she said. “It was understanding something not just intellectually, but viscerally and cellularly.”Lucas-Perry nodded. “I remember saying, ‘I feel a little without,’” she said.The 2020 protests, Lucas-Perry said, contributed to a “hyper-awareness” of the way the casting altered the meaning of the text, and the importance of a production using diverse bodies “just because it can.”“Our contribution to the history of the production is our bodies, our physical selves,” she said. “We were looking for ways of taking advantage of moments where you can dig deeper into what it means to be other.”“Momma, Look Sharp” lands differently sung by a Black woman (the big-voiced Salome B. Smith, as a courier bringing news from the front) to another Black woman, after the founding “fathers” have left the room. (The courier’s piercing “Momma!,” Page said, echoes Floyd’s cry as he gasped for air.)But the show’s dark heart is the silky and sinister “Molasses to Rum.” Traditionally, it’s presented as a vocal tour de force (see John Cullum’s stentorian baritone in the 1972 movie), and critics have often paid more attention to the singing than the chilling substance of the song.In their staging of the song (sung by Sara Porkalob), Page and Paulus force the audience to consider the enslaved people who form one corner of the Triangle Trade not as abstractions, but as real bodies, massed in a wordless chorus that includes the Black actors who play Adams, Franklin and John Hancock. (The sometimes defiant choreography, Page said, reprises some gestures from “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men.”)Carolee Carmello, who is joining the Broadway production as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania (one of the cool, conservative men), played Abigail Adams in the 1997 Broadway revival, which had a white cast. She had heard “Molasses” hundreds of times, but wasn’t prepared for seeing it in the new production.“The understanding of what they’re actually arguing about is extremely powerful,” she said.Lucas-Perry said the song “feels like it goes on forever” — “and it did go on forever,” she added, referring to slavery. “I’m not going to lie,” she said of the scene. “There’s not a night where it doesn’t hit me.”“Hamilton” was fundamentally celebratory, reflective of the liberal optimism of Obama-era America, and the feeling that the arc of history was bending its way. Page and Paulus’s “1776,” for all its humor and exuberance, is darker and more uncertain.But neither show is the last word on the founding, or on the Declaration, a document that might be seen as the ultimate American classic: time-bound and flawed, but also profound and visionary — and requiring continual revival and reinterpretation, by a perpetually changing cast of Americans, to stay alive.Page summed up the heart of 1776, and “1776,” crisply: “How do we self-proclaim our presence in the world?” More

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      A ‘Virtual Rapper’ Was Fired. Questions About Art and Tech Remain.

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      Young people are increasingly at ease consuming culture via digital avatars or made with artificial intelligence. Should the same moral guidelines and laws apply to those works?The story of FN Meka — a fictitious character billed as the first musical artist partly powered by artificial intelligence to be signed by a major record label — might seem like a bizarre one-off. In August, Capitol Records dropped FN Meka, whose look, outlaw persona and suggestive lyrics were inspired by real-life music stars like Travis Scott, 6ix9ine and Lil Pump, amid criticism that the project trafficked in stereotypes.But to seasoned observers of technology in pop music and the debate over cultural appropriation, the rise and fall of this so-called robot rapper, whose songs were actually written and voiced by humans, has raised important questions that are not going away anytime soon.Last month alone, an A.I. artwork won a prize in Colorado and a computer program improvised a classical music solo in real time in New York City. From DALL-E 2, the technology that creates visual art on command, to Hatsune Miku, a Japanese software that does something similar for music, the arts world may be on the precipice of a sea change in how its products are created.And young people feel increasingly at ease consuming culture via digital avatars like FN Meka. It has already been happening in hip-hop: A hologram of the rapper Tupac Shakur, who died in 1996, performed at a music festival in 2012; Travis Scott gave a concert through his avatar in the video game Fortnite in 2020; and Snoop Dogg and Eminem rapped as their digital selves and their Bored Ape avatars in a metaverse performance at the MTV Video Music Awards last month.In this brave new world, do fake characters based on real people amount to unseemly borrowing, even theft, or just the kind of homage that has always defined pop music? Even when artificial intelligence does help write music, should the humans behind it be accountable for the machine-created lyrics? And as far as race is concerned, how do the rules of cultural appropriation work when the person doing the appropriating is not a human being with a unique cultural background but a fictitious identity backed by an anonymous, multiracial collective?“A lot of our moral intuitions and codes as humans may have evolved for a context where we have discrete human actors,” said Ziv Epstein, a Ph.D. student at the M.I.T. Media Lab who studies the intersection of humans and technology. “These emerging technologies require new legal frameworks and research to understand how we reason about them.”From left: The Tupac Shakur hologram, Travis Scott in Fortnite and Snoop Dogg at the Video Music Awards.From left: Christopher Polk/Getty Images; via YouTube; MTVFor FN Meka’s critics, the presence of more Black people or people of color in the rooms where the character was conceived, designed and promoted may have helped prevent the negative stereotypes that they say it furthered. Industry Blackout, a nonprofit advocacy group, said FN Meka “insulted” Black culture and leeched off the sounds, looks and life experiences of real Black artists. Capitol seemed to agree when it apologized for its “insensitivity” in a statement.To the critics, FN Meka’s (exaggerated) debt to A.I. and its exclusively digital existence had the effect of absolving the people who were really calling the shots. “There are humans behind technology,” said Sinead Bovell, a futurist and the founder of WAYE, an organization that educates young people about technology. “When we disconnect the two, that’s where we could potentially risk harm for different marginalized groups.“What concerns me about the world of avatars,” she added, “is we have a situation where people can create and profit off the ethnic group an avatar represents without being a part of that ethnic group.”In pop music generally and especially in hip-hop, the culture most likely to be exploited is Black culture, said Imani Mosley, a professor of musicology at the University of Florida.“There’s so much overlap between digital culture and Gen Z culture and Black culture, to the point where a lot of people don’t necessarily recognize that a lot of things Gen Z says are pulled from African American vernacular,” she said. “To interact with that culture, to be a part of that discourse, is to use certain digital and cultural markers, and if you don’t have access to that discourse because you’re not Black, one way to do that is to hide one’s own ethnicity behind the curtain of the internet.”For some, though, vilifying FN Meka’s creators raised the specter of artistic censorship.James O. Young, a professor of philosophy at the University of Victoria who studies cultural appropriation in art, acknowledged there is a long tradition in music of placing a premium on the artist’s lived experience. Young quoted the famous line attributed to the jazz legend Charlie Parker: “If you didn’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”But recently the consensus has moved toward sanctioning only art that arises out of lived experience, to the detriment of both art and political solidarity, Young argued. He pointed to an episode five years ago in which a white artist was pilloried for painting the Black civil rights martyr Emmett Till’s corpse.“One of the claims is, ‘This is digital blackface,’” Young said of FN Meka. “Maybe it is.” But he advocated for balanced examination, rather than swift reaction. “You’ve got to be very careful: I don’t think you want to claim that all representations of Black people are somehow morally offensive.”The broader impoverishment highlighted by both sides of this debate is a lack of language and concepts for discussing art that is not, or not entirely, made by people.Epstein, of the M.I.T. Media Lab, cited the thinking of Aaron Hertzmann, a scientist at Adobe Research. In a paper called “Can Computers Make Art?,” Hertzmann argued that at the moment art can be made only by humans, who are the only ones capable of interacting socially with other humans. In this understanding, machine learning is a tool; the artist behind a drawing made by DALL-E or the similar program Midjourney is not the software, but the person who gave it instructions.However, Hertzmann allowed, “Someday, better A.I. could come to be viewed as true social agents.”Meanwhile, as culture is increasingly mediated through the digital realm, questions of how to account for all of the other people who directly or indirectly touched that art will multiply, undermining the conventional notion of the artist as expressing her indivisible perspective.Some art is now the result of “a complex and diffuse system of many human actors and computational processes interacting,” Epstein said. “If you generate a DALL-E 2 image, is that your artwork?” he added. “Can you be the social agent of that? Or are they scaffolded by other humans?”A final question is deceptively profound: Does it even matter who, or what, composes the song, paints the painting, writes the book? Metaverse avatars and A.I. programs are intrinsically derivative: They are all but guaranteed to be riffs on already existing artists and their works.Anthony Martini, a co-founder of Factory New, the virtual music company that created FN Meka, stands firmly on one side of that debate: “If you’re mad about the lyrical content because it supposedly was A.I.,” he said, “why not be mad about the lyrical content in general?” More

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      Kane Brown Didn’t Fit the Country Music Mold. So He Made His Own.

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      Prejudice has followed the biracial singer from his earliest days as a performer. Now a proven hitmaker in a range of styles, he’s releasing his third album, “Different Man.”Kane Brown recently hosted a fellow country singer at his Nashville home, then paused to collect himself. “After he left,” Brown recalled, “I was like, Randy Travis really just came over and ate barbecue at my house.”The two first met at a radio station in 2016, when Travis, a Country Music Hall of Famer, surprised Brown, then a largely unknown 23-year-old, midway through a startlingly mature cover of his own 2002 hit “Three Wooden Crosses.” “I have not only become a fan of his voice, his style and talent, but of his heart, his passion and his character,” Travis wrote in an email. “If you listen to the stories his songs tell, you will understand his journey.”Earning the respect and friendship of an anointed country hero like Travis would be significant for any rising talent. But for Brown, who’s grown into a reliable hitmaker in the genre while regularly fending off gripes about whether he — a biracial man who regularly steps across stylistic borders and has worked with collaborators as diverse as Khalid, Marshmello and Becky G — even belongs among its ranks, the co-sign is especially meaningful.“It’s all the validation I need,” said Brown, now 28, as he sat on the terrace of his room at a Soho hotel last month, chewing a lump of tobacco and looking back on his path from a childhood marked by poverty and racism to America’s biggest stages.For anyone inclined to nitpick Brown’s country credentials, his third album — “Different Man,” out Friday — includes a handful of obvious targets: “See You Like I Do,” which sounds like a lost boy-band classic; “Thank God,” a touching folk-pop duet between the singer and his wife, Katelyn; and “Grand,” where Brown slips effortlessly into post-Drake R&B, chronicling life at the top and affirming that he always keeps “it trilly with the fans.”“I released ‘Grand,’ and there’s so many comments that are saying, ‘This isn’t country.’ It’s like, ‘No [expletive],’” Brown said with a mock fed-up chuckle. “I wasn’t trying to make this country.”At last, Brown said, he is done trying to micromanage his public perception. “When I first came in, with how I look — tattoos, biracial, all that stuff — I was already getting perceived as a rapper, and it kept going on for years,” ‌Brown‌ ‌said. So, he reasoned, “I might as well just take on that role.”As willing as he is to step outside country’s boundaries, Brown maintains a deep loyalty to the genre. Much of “Different Man” feels determinedly traditional: “Bury Me in Georgia,” a stomping ode to Brown’s rural Southern roots; “Pop’s Last Name,” the singer’s tender tribute to the maternal grandfather who helped raise him; and “Like I Love Country Music,” a playful, fiddle-accented romp that shows off Brown’s baritone twang and shouts out many of his key influences, including Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and George Jones.Brown’s eclectic approach mirrors his own development as a fan. Moving frequently around northern Georgia and southern Tennessee with his single mother, Brown listened exclusively to country, mainly the ’90s staples she loved, like Tim McGraw, Sugarland and Shania Twain. In middle school, he branched out, checking out everything from Usher and Sisqó to AC/DC and Kid Rock. He even went through a brief pop-punk phase. “Oh, yeah, with the Vans and the skinny jeans,” Brown said. “I had my eyebrows pierced; I had my ears gauged.”Around junior year of high school, Brown started noticing country coming back into vogue. “‘Cruise’ by Florida Georgia Line had just come out,” he recalled, referring to the 2012 bro-country smash, “and you couldn’t escape that song.” He dove back into the genre, taking in work by other artists then on the ascent. Chris Young became his gold standard, thanks to his sturdy songcraft and similar baritone range.“When I found out about him, I studied every song, from his first album all the way down to what he has now,” Brown said in his deep drawl, “and that’s where I found myself wanting to sing.”Brown battled long odds to realize his dream. When he was young, he and his mother endured bouts of homelessness, often living in their car. (As Brown mentions in “Pop’s Last Name,” his father has been incarcerated since 1996; he said he visited him twice as a teenager but they had not stayed in touch.) Later on, he saw friends and relatives fall into severe drug addiction. There was one year, he said, “where I had six or seven of my friends overdose.”Brown played sports and worked a steady string of retail jobs but stayed focused on music. Inspired by his middle-school friend Lauren Alaina — with whom he’d later notch his first country No. 1, the 2017 duet “What Ifs” — he tried out for singing shows and eventually made the cut for “The X Factor.” He quit when the producers tried to funnel him into a boy band and started posting country covers to Facebook. Some went viral, as did “Used to Love You Sober,” a tear-in-your-beer original that he self-released in 2015. Soon, Brown had a deal with RCA Records Nashville.He started scoring country-chart hits and eventually teamed up with his early idol Young, on the 2021 single “Famous Friends,” one of Brown’s 21 songs to reach Billboard’s Hot 100. But his path to country success has been marked by very different obstacles than that of his white heroes. As a child, Brown only learned he was half Black when schoolmates started labeling him with a racial slur, and when he got up to sing at a high school talent show, he endured similar barrages.Now speaking as one of the few Black marquee names in country, along with Darius Rucker, Mickey Guyton and Jimmie Allen, Brown says racism is still a daily reality for him. “Even today, I walked in somewhere and they were like, ‘Oh, my God, you did so good on ‘Dancing With the Stars,’” he said. “I’m like, ‘That wasn’t me; that was Jimmie Allen. That’s the other Black guy.’”The plight of Black artists in country, and the genre’s deep-seated history of racism, is now the subject of a very public conversation, which accelerated last year when the country star Morgan Wallen was filmed using a racial slur. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Brown released “Worldwide Beautiful,” a call for unity, but he still feels constant pressure to act as a spokesman. “I guarantee you every artist probably got asked about it,” he said of the Wallen incident. But, he added, when he, Allen or Guyton were asked the question, it “was completely different than when they asked somebody else,” he said. “It’s like, they want an answer.”After staying quiet until now, he’s ready to give his take. “This is the first time I’ve ever even talked about this, but I personally know Morgan,” Brown said of Wallen, who helped write one track on his 2016 debut. “I texted him that day. I told him he shouldn’t have said it, but also knowing Morgan, I knew that he didn’t mean it in the way that the world thought that he meant it.” He’s quick to add that if he’d detected racist maliciousness in the remark, he would have taken action. “I think if it was in a different context,” he said, “I probably would have been fighting.”Brown is optimistic about country’s turn toward greater inclusivity, and ‌he recently signed the Black songwriter Levon Gray — a writer on his recent single “One Mississippi” — to a publishing deal. But he knows he’ll always have his detractors. Looking ahead to the album’s release, he’s focusing on the allies he can count on: artists who have his back, like Travis and Young; and the support system he shouts out on “Grand,” whether that’s the fans who have been helping him sell out basketball arenas nationwide on his recent Blessed & Free Tour, or his wife and two young daughters.“I used to always be nervous about what people were going to think, and I was kind of scared — I didn’t want people to think that I was leaving country music because that’s my heart,” Brown said. “But now, it’s just to the point where it’s like, I’m a dad now, two kids; I care what they think. So I’m just not that scared kid anymore.” More