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    Confusion in Hollywood as Some Productions Are Allowed to Continue

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    The striking actors’ union is granting waivers to some projects not affiliated with the major studios, but questions persist about who qualifies and why.When you’re making an independent film every second counts. Ash Avildsen had six days of filming left on his low-budget biopic “Queen of the Ring” — including a climactic scene involving a majority of his cast — when the actors’ union went on strike on July 14.The production, in Louisville, Ky., shut down immediately. If Mr. Avildsen could not receive an interim waiver from SAG-AFTRA, as the union is known, to continue filming, the project was likely to fall apart. The logistical and financial challenges of sending the cast and crew home and then trying to assemble them again after a strike would be too much for the shoestring production.“It was maniacally stressful,” said Mr. Avildsen, who wrote and directed the film, about Mildred Burke, who became a dominating figure in women’s wrestling in the 1930s. “We could maybe have lasted another day waiting, but after two or three days it would have been a house of cards falling down.”“Queen of the Ring” was granted the waiver, one of more than 160 the union has handed out in the past three weeks. To get one, projects must have no affiliation with the studios the actors are striking against and the companies involved must comply with the most recent contract demands the union presented to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios.Recipients of the waivers have ranged from under-the-radar projects like Mr. Avildsen’s to higher-profile films like A24’s “Mother Mary,” starring Anne Hathaway, and Hammerstone’s “Flight Risk,” directed by Mel Gibson and featuring Mark Wahlberg.For the union, granting the waivers serves three purposes: It allows companies not affiliated with the studio alliance to keep working; actors and other crew members to remain employed when so much of Hollywood has ground to a halt; and major studios to see examples of productions operating while acceding to the union’s latest demands, including higher pay for the actors and increased contributions to the union’s health and pension fund.“Here are independent producers, who generally have less resources than the studios and streamers, who are saying, ‘Yeah, we can make productions under these terms, and we want to and we’re going to if you let us,’” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union’s lead negotiator, said in an interview.But the agreements are also causing confusion and consternation around Hollywood. Some wonder about the propriety of working on a production when so many in the industry — the writers have been on strike since May — are walking the picket lines. For instance, Viola Davis was granted an interim waiver for an upcoming film she was set to star in and produce. But she declined, saying in a statement, “I do not feel that it would be appropriate for this production to move forward during the strike.”Viola Davis turned down a waiver, saying she didn’t feel it was appropriate to work on a production during the strike.Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe actress and comedian Sarah Silverman criticized the interim agreements in an Instagram post. She said that she had declined to work on an independent movie because of the strike, and suggested that she found the waivers counterproductive to the union’s goals.Ms. Silverman said she wasn’t sure if she should be “mad at these movie stars making these indie movies that are obviously going to go to streaming” or upset with “SAG for making this interim deal for these indie movies” during the strike.After meeting with the union’s leadership, the actress said in a follow-up post that she was happy the waivers allowed some crews to continue working, but that she still questioned the validity of granting waivers to projects with big movie stars and loose affiliations with companies that are part of the studio alliance. The alliance declined to comment for this article.One project that drew grumbles in some quarters when it received a waiver was the AppleTV+ show “Tehran.” The show, filming its third season, employs union actors, but an Israeli company oversees the production, which is shooting in Greece. That situation has created a gray zone, Mr. Crabtree-Ireland said, even though Apple, a member of the alliance, is financing the operation.Mr. Crabtree-Ireland called the approval of “Tehran” “outside the norm.”“We have to be mindful that not every country’s law lines up with labor law from the United States,” he said.An Israeli company oversees production of the AppleTV+ show “Tehran,” which is shooting on location in Greece. That situation has created a gray zone, opening the door for a waiver. Apple TV+That has not helped clear up the matter for many in Hollywood. Even when the waivers are granted, there are some — like Ms. Davis — who wonder if accepting them is akin to crossing the picket line.“What’s confusing to us is what should we be doing?” asked Paul Scanlan, chief executive of Legion M, an independent production company that crowdsources funding for many of its projects, some of which await word on interim agreements. “The messaging isn’t clear. There are some people saying, ‘Oh, these interim agreements are bad,’ but then SAG is saying: ‘No, they’re good. They’re part of our strategy.’He added: “We’re sensitive to how we’re perceived in the marketplace, and we don’t want to be one of those companies that is perceived as doing an end run around the strike because that’s absolutely not our intention.”Honoring the interim agreement does raise an independent production’s costs. According to one independent financier, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the strikes have the industry on edge, production budgets can increase by 8 to 10 percent, significant for independent films that already count every penny.There is also the question of timing. Interim agreements can, as in the case of Mr. Avildsen, help a film finish production. But they can also be granted to completed projects to allow actors to promote their films, including at festivals, where they might end up securing a distribution deal with a company that the union is striking against and that has not yet agreed to a new contract. And that could get complicated.“Let’s say we sign an interim agreement,” Mr. Scanlan said. “I do think it makes it harder for Netflix to buy something that has already agreed to terms that maybe they haven’t agreed to yet.”For Mr. Avildsen, he’s still basking in the relief that his movie was able to complete production. The idea that overcoming that hurdle may ultimately imperil “Queen of the Ring” from finding distribution is a scenario he’s not yet ready to grapple with.“It’s a scary thing to think about,” he said. “If by this time next year, when we are ready to release it, if they’re still in their joust, that would be a big drag.” More

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      Five Stand-Up Specials for Memorial Day Weekend

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      Wanda Sykes, Sarah Silverman, Lewis Black, Zarna Garg and Greg Warren each deliver very funny hours worth your time.Zarna Garg, ‘One in a Billion’(Amazon Prime)Most comedy about the American immigrant family is related from the point of view of the assimilated son or daughter poking fun at the clueless, thick-accented parents. The beauty of our current moment is the many new perspectives on old jokes. In the fertile scene of South Asian comedians, Zarna Garg represents something fresh: the revenge of the Indian mom. She’s heard the jokes about the closed-minded Indian parents forcing their children to go to medical school. Now she fires back forcefully, with enough panache to subvert stereotypes even as she’s fully embracing them. Her ethnic and religious humor (she makes a convincing case for Hindu being the most chill religion) is unapologetically old-fashioned: quick setups, rapid-fire punchlines, her name in giant letters on the set behind her. There’s a genuine warmth behind the slickness. You believe her extreme pride in her daughter going to Stanford just as much as her operatic horror at the fact that she’s studying ceramics. Garg has the kind of presence that powers network sitcoms. Of the recent spate of specials produced by Amazon Prime, tentatively tiptoeing into competition with Netflix, hers is the best.Sarah Silverman, ‘Someone You Love’(Max)Have you ever wondered if porn ruined the Catholic schoolgirl uniform? Or about the relationship between Judaism and diarrhea? Or the many sexual sounds that go into the term “moral compass”? It will not surprise anyone that Sarah Silverman has. These are only some of the scatological and sexual premises she summons up in her new hour (debuting Saturday). Silverman is 52 but looks and sounds just like that virtuosic comic who rocketed to fame in the 1990s. She has evolved, of course, and the virtue of doing so is one of the themes of her characteristically funny special, but it plays a minor role next to bits about masturbation and Hitler. While she’s known for juvenile gags and political humor, what’s also essential to her comedy, and on full display here, is how distinctively loopy she can be. As influential as she has been, no other comic quite captures this aspect. She has one randomly charming bit about how when she comes home, she says hello in a booming voice over and over. “Sparkle peanut,” she tells herself before going onstage, right before an introduction by Mel Brooks, a spiritual forefather.She’s shambling and casual. Sometimes too much so. Did she need to keep in the part where she singled out a guy for leaving his seat, disrupting the flow of a joke? But her special is bracketed by two fun sketches: a final song about bad breath performed with incongruous and committed elegance, and an opening scene with her (fictional) children backstage. She thanks the woman standing next to them, says she has been amazing and adds: “Everyone said, ‘Don’t get a hot nanny.’” Then she pauses for an uncomfortably long silence.Wanda Sykes, ‘I’m an Entertainer’(Netflix)My favorite punchline in the latest special by Wanda Sykes is the title: “I’m an Entertainer.” It sounds banal or direct, but in the context of the joke, which involves her awakening sexuality (she came out as a lesbian after sleeping with men for years), it hits you with a jolt that is surprising and a little unsettling. That’s Sykes at her best. As it happens, Sykes is an old-school entertainer. She can act, improvise, do sketches, host awards shows and whatever else without losing her signature snap. In her stand-up specials, she tends to stick to a recipe consisting of a chunk of sharply topical liberal jokes (hit or miss), some personal bits about amusing tension with her cigarette-wielding French wife and white kids (solidly funny) and a few tense wild cards. Then for the crowd-pleaser, she brings on Esther, the roll of stomach fat she named after the “Good Times” star Esther Rolle. Mouthy, no-nonsense, up for some fun, Esther always gets laughs. But we learn in this new hour that Sykes is considering removing her breasts on the advice of her doctor, who suggested building new ones from tissue from her gut. (Sykes doesn’t explain why.) In other words, Esther is moving neighborhoods and will be close enough to her neck that Sykes worries about getting strangled.Greg Warren, ‘The Salesman’(YouTube)With the kind of puffed-chest intensity you tend to see in high school football coaches and motivational speakers, Greg Warren brags that he was “a big deal in the peanut butter game.” He worked in sales for Jif and shot this hour in Lexington, Ky., because that’s where the company made its products. Maybe he really was a big deal moving jars. Who knows? But after this special, he owns this nutty spread, comedically. Directed by Nate Bargatze, a clean comic of a far mellower temperament, Warren trash-talks rival brands (look out, Peter Pan), does on-brand crowd work (“What kind of peanut butter do you eat?”) and gets political in discussing how Smucker’s bought his old employer. It now owns peanut butter and jelly, he tells us, before adding with a mix of gravity and anxiety, “If they ever get ahold of bread.” By the end, Warren has made another sale: He has done for peanut butter what Jerry Seinfeld did for Pop-Tarts and Jim Gaffigan did for Hot Pockets.Lewis Black, ‘Tragically, I Need You’(YouTube)If a stand-up can tap into or channel the fury of an audience, he can light up a room. But maintaining that anger is tricky. It can curdle into shtick or just wear out its welcome. Lewis Black’s great gift is that behind that dyspeptic front, you could detect a thoughtful, introspective side, a little damaged perhaps. He shows us more of that vulnerable side here, in part because the isolation of the pandemic put him in a reflective mood. The title refers to the audience. Along with swinging sharp political elbows, in defense of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, say, Black beats himself up over past relationships and sings the praises of companionship. He talks about his failed career as a playwright, bringing up theater because “I like to feel the interest of the audience leave the room.” More

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

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

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      Sarah Silverman on Her Family Show About Divorce and Depression

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

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

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

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      in Movies

      Is It Funny for the Jews?

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      Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.In the climactic scene of the musical “Caroline, or Change,” an 8-year-old Jewish boy, Noah, and his African American maid, Caroline, living in the Jim Crow South, get into a heated fight and end up trading ugly insults. Noah says he hopes a bomb kills all Black people, and Caroline responds that all Jews will go to hell.It’s always a charged moment, but there was something peculiarly unsettling about it the night I saw the recent Broadway revival. For while there was silence after Noah’s hateful outburst, what followed Caroline’s comment was something I did not expect: laughter. Nervous giggling in uncomfortable moments can be a coping mechanism. And that wasn’t the audience reaction every night. But in a radio interview, Sharon D Clarke, who played the title character, said that at the majority of shows, there was laughter. She was disturbed by it but couldn’t explain it.I found it jarring because I thought I could. Of course it’s impossible to get inside the heads of theatergoers, but as a Jewish person, I recognized this laughter. Who would buy a ticket to a Broadway show and chuckle at the eternal damnation of Jewish people other than Jews?There is a long, rich Jewish tradition of grappling with antisemitism by laughing at it. This has produced a vast amount of great comedy, from Mel Brooks turning Nazis into musical theater buffoons in “The Producers” to Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as Borat, leading the denizens of a Southern bar in singing, “Throw the Jew down the well.” There is a sensibility behind these jokes that I grew up around and have long embraced.Adam Makké as Noah and Sharon D Clarke as Caroline in the recent Broadway revival of “Caroline, or Change.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSome artists argue that making light of prejudice, or turning purveyors of it into absurdities, robs hatred of power. I’ve been persuaded by that idea, and like many secular types, a Jewish sense of humor is more integral to my identity than any religious observance. It’s also a source of pride. A resilient comic sensibility that finds joy in dark places is one of the greatest Jewish legacies — as is an ability to laugh at ourselves.Those hung up on the question of whether the latest news is good for the Jews always seemed not only hopelessly ineffective but also tedious. Scolds from the Anti-Defamation League, alert to the damage done by every Jewish stereotype, will never end an ancient prejudice, but they could ruin a good time. And yet, as a critic engaging with a chaotic and constantly changing culture, in an online world that seems somehow both more outraged by and tolerant of hate speech, I am increasingly uncomfortable with this kind of condescension. It’s too glib. And that has made me look closer at the disturbing rise in antisemitism today, Jewish culture and identity, and the implications of what we find funny.THERE’S BEEN GROWING PUSHBACK in the last year from some Jews about double standards in the cultural conversation. Take the increasingly politicized issue of casting, which has inspired considerable controversy. We have never been more sensitive to issues of whitewashing, appropriation and representation. Think of Scarlett Johansson being hired for an Asian role. But when gentiles are cast as Golda Meir or Mrs. Maisel or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there is little blowback. The superb indie comedy “Shiva Baby” tackles explicitly Jewish themes, but the fact that the lead is played by a Catholic stand-up, Rachel Sennott, barely raised an eyebrow.On her podcast, Sarah Silverman has spoken passionately about how Jewish characters are regularly played by gentile actors, specifically lamenting the lack of meaty roles for women. “The pattern in film is just undeniable,” she said, “and the pattern is — if the Jewish woman character is courageous or deserves love, she is never played by a Jew.”Gentile performers playing Jewish characters include, from left, Felicity Jones in “On the Basis of Sex,” Rachel Sennott in “Shiva Baby” and Rachel Brosnahan in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”Photographs by Jonathan Wenk/Focus Features; Utopia; Nicole Rivelli/Amazon Prime VideoShe delivered this sharp monologue with an ambivalence that also resonated with me. Acting requires an empathetic leap of imagination. Like Silverman, I know that great performers of any religion can and have brilliantly played Jews, and it’s easier to pass as Jewish than, say, African American. But is experience as a Jewish person irrelevant to playing Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” (as Alfred Molina, who was raised Catholic, did on Broadway) or to embodying Joan Rivers in a biopic? (Before the project fell apart, the gentile Kathryn Hahn was slated to play her.) I think it matters. When a gentile plays a Jew, the results are often more affected, the mannerisms pronounced, which can often mean the difference between someone playing Jewish vs. inhabiting a Jewish character.In his book “Jews Don’t Count,” the British comic David Baddiel argues that casting is one of many issues in contemporary discourse that illustrate how antisemitism is far more acceptable than other forms of bigotry. One need only point to the career of Mel Gibson to find evidence. Part of the reason, Baddiel explains, is that at a time when we are particularly sensitive to power imbalances, what distinguishes antisemitism is that the bigot imagines Jewish people as both low status (rats, venal) and high status (running the banks, part of a globalist conspiracy).Jewish people have clearly been tremendously successful in Hollywood, on Broadway and in comedy, among other artistic pursuits, but that doesn’t erase the specific discriminatory shadow hovering behind their rise. Silverman points to the number of famous Jews who have changed their names. “If Winona Ryder had stayed Winona Horowitz, would she have starred in ‘The Age of Innocence’?” Silverman has asked. “She wouldn’t.”Behind the discussion of gentiles in Jewish roles is the long history of Hollywood anxiety that a work will be “too Jewish,” words that have haunted Jewish artists for generations. The first time Jerry Seinfeld appeared on a sitcom, on “Benson” in 1980, he played a courier trying to sell a joke for the governor to use in a speech. When one flopped (“Did you hear about the rabbi who bought himself a ranch? Called it the Bar Mitzvah”), he asked: “Too Jewish?” Nine years later, a Jewish NBC executive dismissed the pilot for “Seinfeld” as “too New York, too Jewish,” and while it was picked up, the network ordered only four episodes.In the most memorable joke of his breakthrough 1986 Broadway comedy, “The World According to Me,” the comic Jackie Mason said, “You know what’s going to happen after this show: The gentiles are going to say, ‘It’s a hit.’ And the Jews are going to say, ‘Too Jewish.’” Mason delivers this cheerfully, but there’s a bristling undercurrent, a finger wag about self-loathing.Jackie Mason’s accent reflected a bold refusal to assimilate.Mario Ruiz/Getty ImagesMason has always been a kind of guilty pleasure for me. Compared with my favorite comics, he seemed impossibly old-fashioned, not just in his borscht belt rhythms, but also in having bits centered on how fundamentally alien gentiles were to Jews. But listening to him again more recently, I detected a defiance that was, in its own way, radical, even countercultural. His accent itself, which if anything got thicker as he got older, represented a bold refusal to assimilate. The Jewish artists who found mainstream success didn’t sound like him.And when he died last year, with a modest amount of media attention paid to his legacy, it made me wonder about the obstacle course of Jewish success in a country where we are a tiny minority. But I also thought about the role played by Jewish people measuring the degree of acceptable Jewishness, the kind Mason was talking about in his show.WHEN REPRESENTATION IN CULTURE is discussed today, what’s often emphasized is how valuable it can be when children from minority groups see or hear someone like them and how that can expand their horizons. I have never felt this was an issue for me, because there seemed to be an abundance of Jewish people in the arts. Sure, some changed their names or played down their background, but we could tell. I never questioned the idea that Jews had been well represented in popular culture until I read Jeremy Dauber’s book “Jewish Comedy: A Serious History” and learned that not one leading character on prime-time television clearly identified as Jewish from 1954 to 1972 and again from 1978 to 1987.That came as a surprise and made me reconsider my 1980s childhood diet of pop culture. Back then, this mainly consisted of the offerings of three television networks, along with the occasional PG movie. This was the era of “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties,” and I couldn’t think of a single Jewish character on a show I watched until I became a teenager. But a major shift for Jewish representation took place in 1989. That’s when “Seinfeld,” “Anything but Love” with Richard Lewis and “Chicken Soup” with Mason all premiered. (It’s also the year of “When Harry Met Sally.”) What’s striking about this influx of Jewish characters is that only one kind was allowed: A male stand-up with a gentile love interest.“Seinfeld,” left, and “When Harry Met Sally” typified the ’80s pairings of Jewish funny guys and gentile women.Monty Brinton/NBC, via Getty Images; Columbia PicturesIn order to not be too Jewish in the popular culture of my youth, you had to be a funny man interested in someone from another background. For a funny Jewish woman, you had to wait until “The Nanny.”How much did it matter that as a boy I saw no Jewish couples on television? I’m not certain — draw your own conclusions about the fact that I married a non-Jew.But one thing I surely developed as a young Jewish culture vulture were the tools to enjoy work by antisemites. The most formative artists I loved as a kid, from Roald Dahl to Ice Cube to H.P. Lovecraft, have track records of hateful comments toward Jews. I knew this even then.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Atlantic Theater Company Announces a Premiere-Packed Season

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      Five works will debut from August to April, including Sarah Silverman’s musical “The Bedwetter” and an adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo.”Atlantic Theater Company will spring back to life this summer with an ambitious five-premiere season. The theater’s Off Broadway productions, announced Tuesday, include Sarah Silverman’s musical “The Bedwetter,” an adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo” and a new play by Ngozi Anyanwu.Anyanwu, a playwright-actor whose work “The Homecoming Queen” was staged there in 2018, returns in August with “The Last of the Love Letters.” Patricia McGregor will direct. The play is about two people wrestling with “the thing they love most” and questioning “whether to stick it out or to leave it behind,” according to the theater.The musical adaptation of “Kimberly Akimbo,” with music by Jeanine Tesori, will debut 20 years after Lindsay-Abaire’s play was first produced at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif. It tells the story of a teenage girl with a condition that has left her with the health and appearance of a 72-year-old. In his 2003 review of the Manhattan Theater Club production of the dark comedy, Ben Brantley called it “haunting and hilarious.”Silverman’s show, based on her 2010 memoir, will arrive in 2022, nearly two years after it had originally been scheduled to receive its world premiere. The company noted that Adam Schlesinger, who wrote the music and collaborated with Silverman on the lyrics, will not be present when the cast takes its first bows next April. He died in 2020 of Covid-19 complications.The second half of the season will also feature “SHHHHH,” a new play by Clare Barron, which she will direct and perform in, and Sanaz Toossi’s “English,” about four adult students in Iran preparing for a language test.More information about the season is available at atlantictheater.org. More