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      Review: ‘Madwomen of the West’ Is Comedy as Comfort Food

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      In Sandra Tsing Loh’s zany play, the stage is star-studded but familiarity alone can’t sustain this story about a group of old college friends.There comes a moment when a show tells you exactly who its audience is. In “Madwomen of the West,” a nostalgic new comedy by Sandra Tsing Loh with a cast of baby boomer screen stars, that moment is a singalong.The song is “Love Is All Around,” the theme from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” When Marilu Henner led the crowd in singing it mid-scene on a Saturday afternoon at the Actors Temple Theater, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, there was no hesitation. Practically the whole room joined in, the lyrics lodged in people’s heads since the 1970s.If only “Madwomen” as a whole worked so seamlessly. But the shaggy script is in desperate need of trimming and shaping, while Thomas Caruso’s production is so stiff that a reading might have succeeded better than a full staging.None of that cancels out the comfort-food appeal of a play about a group of women who have been friends since college, portrayed by actors in their 70s who have been familiar for decades on TV and in film: Caroline Aaron (recently Shirley Maisel on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”); Brooke Adams (“Days of Heaven”); Melanie Mayron (“Thirtysomething”); and Henner (“Taxi,” of course).The setting is “the birthday brunch from hell” that the acerbic Marilyn (Aaron) hosts at the Los Angeles home of the wealthy Jules (Adams) for the bummed-out Claudia (Mayron). Long out of contact, Zoey (Henner), their actress turned wellness-guru pal, unexpectedly joins the party, too.Each is liberal, feminist and struggling somehow: money, marriage, parenthood, career. All are grappling with the ways that the world, and the gender binary that shaped so much of their experience, have changed.Zanily meta-theatrical, “Madwomen” does much breaking of the fourth wall and blurring of the line between actor and character. And Loh, known for her 2014 memoir, “The Madwoman in the Volvo,” makes room for each of her stars to have some drama — most rewardingly Aaron (a veteran of Loh’s stage adaptation of the memoir) in a verbal symphony of a confession, and Adams in a kinetic outburst of rage.Will you believe the characters as friends? No, and you may wish that the actors had had more time to settle into their roles. Will you regret having to sit through some of the staler bits of political dialogue? Yes, unless you can’t get enough of Gloria Steinem quotations and Hillary versus Bernie partisanship.Will you laugh anyway? I did, three times: at Marilyn’s sharp line about the electoral college; Jules’s appreciation of her own drunken math; and Marilyn’s mortified reaction to Zoey’s evocative use of an anatomical term.“Madwomen” isn’t nearly as convivial as it wants to be. But it does have one virtue that shouldn’t be remarkable, yet is. It never condescends to older women — characters, actors or audience members.Madwomen of the WestThrough Dec. 31 at the Actors Temple Theater, Manhattan; actorstempletheatre.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Revisits His ‘Illusion of Suffering’ on Broadway

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      As with so many family reunion plays, the squabbling Lafayette siblings in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate” dislodge their share of skeletons from the closets of their childhood home, a former plantation in southern Arkansas. But here those secrets, hovering over everything and everyone, may be actual skeletons, and worse. The increasingly unsettling revelations power what The New York Times’s Ben Brantley called a “very fine, subversively original new play” at its Off Broadway premiere in 2014 at the Signature Theater.So subversive and so original that it took almost a decade to reach Broadway. Jacobs-Jenkins, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient whose works include bold reimaginings of “The Octoroon” and the 15th-century play “Everyman,” got there a bit earlier when he contributed original material to a 2022 revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Second Stage’s production of “Appropriate,” which is in previews at the Helen Hayes Theater and opens on Dec. 18, is his first original work on Broadway after nearly a half-dozen New York productions.As it happens, two of the three actors playing the siblings had their own shared history. Sarah Paulson (“American Horror Story”) and Corey Stoll (“Billions”) were a year apart at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York, but they didn’t work together until Stoll briefly joined the cast of the Paulson-led TV series “Ratched” in 2020. (She fantasized about sawing his leg off during sex, he squashed a leech with his bare hand, and she tried to boil him alive in a hydrotherapy tub — all in the span of two episodes.)The two actors joined Jacobs-Jenkins and the director, Lila Neugebauer (“The Waverly Gallery,” Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Everybody”), backstage at the Helen Hayes last month to discuss catharsis, sibling rivalry and the tyranny of stage directions. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Michael Esper, Stoll, Natalie Gold and Paulson in the Broadway production at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLila didn’t direct “Appropriate” Off Broadway, but the two of you have been in each other’s orbit for a while.BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS We actually met at the Humana Festival, where the show premiered in 2013.LILA NEUGEBAUER I was there with a different play.JACOBS-JENKINS Shortly after “Appropriate” happened at the Signature, Lila directed a production of it at Juilliard. I just knew instantly that she had grasped something about the undercurrents and the essential energies of the play.Sarah and Corey, when did you come on board?SARAH PAULSON I read the play in September of 2021. I hadn’t read anything as complicated and deep and funny in a very, very long time, and I said yes almost immediately.COREY STOLL Right in the depth of the pandemic, my agent sent me a stack of plays. It was like: “Since you’re not doing anything, I just want you to read all these plays.” And this one was so clearly the one to do.One character alludes to “the universality of suffering,” but there’s suffering and then there’s suffering. You’ve got these three siblings and all the bad things they’ve done, even criminal things …PAULSON It’s not me who’s done the criminal things. Write that down.STOLL Sarah is a real advocate for her character. You [to Paulson] cannot stand people talking ill of her.PAULSON It’s easy to do when a person isn’t thinking critically or deeply about who she is.My point is that these actions pale in comparison to the suffering inflicted on the play’s Black characters, whom we never meet. It feels almost like that line of dialogue is trying to level a playing field that ought not be leveled. Am I reading too much into the text?JACOBS-JENKINS When I wrote it, I was really interested in this writer named Dion Boucicault. He has this essay, “The Art of Dramatic Composition,” where he says the sole purpose of everything in the theater is to create an illusion of suffering that then creates something cathartic in the audience. I believe that everyone onstage is suffering. They all believe they are suffering. But how do we judge — how can we judge — someone else as suffering or not? I think that’s one of the games that the play is trying to get us to play.Have these ideas also evolved for you, Lila, now that you have directed “Appropriate” twice?NEUGEBAUER The first time, the play struck me on more theoretical terms. Now I feel more of an invitation to have complicated feelings about these characters. Every character has done something that someone in the audience or someone onstage might feel is questionable or strange or other. Every person walking the planet is the star of their own lives. Therefore, it feels like the thing that’s happening to them is the most significant thing that could ever be happening to anyone.“The play does a lot of that work in terms of how to create the sibling dynamic,” said Paulson, center, with Alyssa Emily Marvin, left, and Esper.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe presence of siblings can be a pretty quick reminder that there are other people in the world. Is it hard creating that rapport?PAULSON It doesn’t hurt that we know each other and have worked together, but I would argue that the play does a lot of that work in terms of how to create the sibling dynamic.STOLL There’s a momentum to the arguments between these two. At first, it just seems like these are two people who despise each other. Then you get to the second act where the whole play downshifts a bit, and we can find an intimacy. Even though that conflict is still very hot, and there is still a whole lifetime of resentment, that intimacy is there.PAULSON And I want to stress that we are missing Michael Esper, the third end of the triangle, who is wonderful.I remember Larissa FastHorse said “The Thanksgiving Play,” with its all-white Broadway cast, was a response to what she had been told about who was castable. Young Jean Lee has written great works, and “Straight White Men” was the one to reach Broadway. Now “Appropriate” has an all-white cast. Does this say anything about the American theater today?JACOBS-JENKINS There’s a phenomenon that’s been written about in academia called the “white life novel.” “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin is an example. Zora Neale Hurston has a book called “Seraph on the Suwanee.” It’s this thing where Black writers or Black-identified writers will write one thing that’s all white people. I think this is often an experiment in trying to get the viewer or even an industry to own its own blind spots.I’ve talked a lot about reading The Times’s review of “Stick Fly” by Lydia Diamond, which is an amazing family drama that was critiqued for not being enough about race and class in America and for being melodramatic. And then an equally wonderful play by Tracy Letts called “August: Osage County” was praised for being familiar by the same critic. There was no mention of the way that I think Tracy was actually engaging in very smart ways with whiteness and Indigenous presence. That double standard was very informative to me as a young writer who is constantly asked to do articles for The Times about Black drama.Honestly, everybody onstage is a political statement. Nobody’s a neutral body. And until you can talk about that, there’s nothing to pat ourselves on the back about as an art form in terms of how we do or don’t deal with these issues. I love Tennessee Williams. I love “The Piano Lesson” by August Wilson. No one calls “The Piano Lesson” a family drama. They call it about the Black experience in America. No one ever talks about “A Raisin in the Sun” as one of our best family dramas. I want to be able to love and own these things equally. And I feel like even this question is part of that continuum of things I have to address that no one else has to address when we make work in America.Can I ask about the stage directions in the script? They are ——JACOBS-JENKINS Chaos.They do sometimes go on for a page and a half. It reminded me of reading Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams.JACOBS-JENKINS When I started writing this, I was drunk on Williams and O’Neill. The reading experience is different than the experience of seeing the piece in a theatrical space. Your task as a playwright is to light up the things inside of people that lead them to the most electric choice. And that’s just as true for the reader. You’re trying to inspire the reader to bring more than just something schematic or familiar to the script.And when the script reaches the three of you, do you see those directions as marching orders?PAULSON It depends. Most of the plays I’ve done have been by people like Tennessee Williams or Lanford Wilson, people who were already dead. I’ll read a Williams stage direction and think, “Is that what Laurette Taylor did? Because I definitely want to do that if she did it.” For me, they can be incredibly evocative and other times they feel almost directorial.STOLL I tend to bristle against them in film and television because I think they’re often overprescribed, but here I’ve found them to be really helpful. Look, I’m happy with any help I can get.“At first, it just seems like these are two people who despise each other. Then you get to the second act where the whole play downshifts a bit, and we can find an intimacy,” Stoll said of the characters that he and Paulson portray. Erik Tanner for The New York TimesHow about you, Lila? If they can be overly directorial, where does that leave you?NEUGEBAUER This is a bit of a spoiler, but there’s a bunch of information in the script about what might happen at the end of the play. I feel that the writer is spell casting with that text. He is giving me and the designers this spectacular provocation to use our imaginations, to make that spell manifest. It’s within the power of our theatrical machinery to show pretty much anything, but everything that happens onstage also has emotional information. It’s not just a literal event.In other words, Branden, I don’t think they’re listening to you.JACOBS-JENKINS Actors love to say, “The first thing I do is cross out all the stage directions.” And I’m like, “If we’re in the erasure business, I just take my delete button and now you have nothing to say.”A lot has happened in the 10 years since “Appropriate” premiered. How has that affected either the play itself or the way you think it will be received?JACOBS-JENKINS We definitely didn’t transfer to Broadway 10 years ago. So that’s a sign that something has shifted, maybe? The play was originally set in 2011, and there was a big debate about whether to update it. I didn’t think I could, because these people would look like true idiots if they had not paid attention to what everyone else has paid attention to since then.NEUGEBAUER I do think there has been a semi-mainstreaming of a certain degree of race consciousness in America that would make the events in this play not quite make sense if it were set in 2023. My suspicion is that audiences will bring a somewhat more nuanced vocabulary to it now. They have a different tool kit. And that’s going to be very interesting. More

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      Review: In ‘Translations,’ What’s Lost When Language Is Looted

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      An exquisite revival of Brian Friel’s 1980 play at the Irish Repertory Theater is the first of three there by the Irish author.A drunken philosopher alights on what may be his pinnacle argument: That we are shaped not by the facts of history, but by our imagination of it. “We must never cease renewing those images,” he says, or we’ll stop living.That thirsty scholar is Hugh (Seán McGinley), who runs one of Ireland’s clandestine (and illegal) hedge-schools, teaching a rustic assembly of adult pupils out of his dilapidated shanty. “Translations,” from 1980, is the first play in the Friel Project, a season of three works at the Irish Repertory Theater. A modest yet exquisite revival directed by Doug Hughes, it makes a rigorous case not only for Brian Friel’s pre-eminence as an interpreter of Irish national identity, but for the vitality of art in deciphering life.It’s 1833 in Friel’s fictional small town, Ballybeg, where a sweet, putrid smell rising from the potato fields forebodes famine and an ingress of redcoats threatens to blight the local heritage. A rebellion in 1798 led not to independence but to forced union with Britain in the United Kingdom. And now, British soldiers, including the listless romantic Lieutenant Yolland (Raffi Barsoumian), are mapping the countryside and anglicizing Irish place-names. One of Hugh’s two sons, Owen (Seth Numrich), has become not just a translator, but a champion for the “King’s good English,” more enthused about the endeavor than even Yolland. The actors lend the fraternity between these young men an energy and curiosity that emphasizes the consequences of what they’re doing: renaming a homeland out from under its inhabitants’ feet.Yolland is the one who hesitates, though not on moral grounds: A hapless son of empire, he fetishizes feeling like an outsider, growing sweet on the sound of Irish vowels and even sweeter on Maire (Mary Wiseman), a milkmaid with her sights set on America. Their giddy, headlong infatuation is fueled by mutual incomprehension, before a sharp turn whose potentially tragic fallout Wiseman plays with affecting transparency.Friel’s shrewd spin on the pastoral drama is grounded in the convictions of these carefully drawn characters. But the play also confronts soaring questions about the nature of language — how it connects people to their homes (the trodden-earth set is by Charlie Corcoran) and to one another, and what happens when a native tongue is erased.Owen Campbell delivers a quieter register of heartbreak as Hugh’s humbler son, Manus, whose dream of preserving homegrown education, with Maire at his side, becomes another colonial casualty. Embodying extreme ends of the communicative spectrum are Sarah (Erin Wilhelmi), a presumed mute who struggles to articulate her name, and Jimmy Jack (John Keating), a disheveled bookworm who waxes at length in Greek and Latin about his crush on Athene, the goddess of wisdom.Dressed in clay-colored peasant garb by Alejo Vietti, and tenderly lit by Michael Gottlieb, each of these characters is illustrated with a Rembrandt-like specificity. As their portraits make clear, it’s essential to keep reimagining the plight of those consumed by imperial appetites. Doing so may lead to deeper understanding among us.TranslationsThrough Dec. 31 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘How to Dance in Ohio,’ Making Autism Sing

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      A musical about seven autistic young adults, played by seven autistic young actors, breaks new ground on Broadway.It would have been enough of a first for a Broadway musical to tell a respectful or even vaguely authentic story about autistic people. On the rare occasions we have seen such characters represented in commercial productions, they have mostly been objects of pity, mockery or fear.So it is a welcome change that the seven autistic characters in “How to Dance in Ohio” are presented, without condescension, as young adults a lot like most others, albeit with unusual gifts and challenges. That they are also played by autistic performers makes the feel-good show, which opened on Sunday at the Belasco Theater, more than a first: It’s a milestone.With all that groundbreaking, perhaps it is no surprise that the production is otherwise very conventional, sometimes dispiritingly so. Just as the characters struggle to conform to the expectations of a neurotypical world, you feel the musical doing a similar thing, looking to traditional models (like “The Prom”) instead of offbeat ones (like “Kimberly Akimbo”) that would be a better fit. And though the result is sometimes uplifting, the uplift comes at the expense of the depth and complexity the show might have achieved were it not so intent on cheerful persuasion.Certainly in its brightness it is nothing like its source material, a 2015 documentary also called “How to Dance in Ohio.” Set at Amigo Family Counseling, a real Columbus mental health center for autistic people, the film, by Alexandra Shiva, highlights the experiences of several clients preparing for a spring formal. Over about 16 weeks, they practice specific applications of the life skills Dr. Emilio Amigo and his staff have been teaching them more generally, whether those skills are social (how to ask for a date), emotional (how to deal with rejection) or physical (how to do the Wobble).The documentary’s tone is objective and thus often dour. Not all its stories are happy: We see some clients struggle to speak, let alone dance. Even for the others, the excitement of the event is countered by fear — both theirs and their parents’, whose faces have been worn by years of worry. By not making the obstacles seem easily surmountable, the movie respects everyone’s hard work, regardless of success.The musical, directed by Sammi Cannold, features a cast of young actors who are all making their Broadway debuts.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo replicate that approach, however truthful, would be a big downer — and, for a commercial show, a fool’s errand. So the musical, directed by Sammi Cannold, instead starts from an assumption of ability and excellence. The young actors, all making their Broadway debuts, are highly skilled, sparkly cute and perfectly comfortable holding the stage.That makes their characters seem perfectly comfortable too. When best friends Caroline (Amelia Fei) and Jessica (Ashley Wool) go to Macy’s with their mothers to buy twirly gowns, you feel that they don’t need, as in the movie, constant assistance and reassurance — just a credit card. And though Tommy, a superhero fan preparing for his driving test, tells us he has “trouble making facial expressions,” the evidence of Conor Tague’s performance says otherwise. His facial expressions, like those of any good actor, would be legible from the back of the Belasco.Lacking the movie’s fundamental contrast of hopes and abilities, the show, by Rebekah Greer Melocik (book and lyrics) and Jacob Yandura (music), focuses on flimsier conflicts. Jessica doesn’t like Caroline’s (unseen) boyfriend, who’s too possessive. Remy (Desmond Luis Edwards) gets some hostile comments on his YouTube cosplay channel. Drew (Liam Pearce) is concerned about attending the prominent university that accepts him. (He’s an engineering savant.) Mel (Imani Russell) has trouble handling criticism once promoted to Head of Reptiles at the local Paws and Claws.Only Marideth (Madison Kopec) retains some of the complexity of the real character she’s based on, at least as seen in the film. When upset by social situations she cannot handle, she may freeze in fear or race out of the room, often into the comfort of the alternative universes she visits on her computer or the real-world facts she collects compulsively. (“You have more bones in your feet than in the rest of your body combined.”) This outlook is beautifully established in “Unlikely Animals,” a number that, like many of the show’s songs, has a thoughtful and poetic (and on-the-nose) hook. “Australia is a lesson,” she sings, “in what isolation and distance can do.”Even so, “How to Dance in Ohio” does not permit much doubt that Marideth and the others will have fun at the formal and achieve at least moderate independence beyond it. To take up the slack, the authors have displaced the story’s crisis onto Dr. Amigo (Caesar Samayoa) himself. An anodyne and often peripheral figure in the movie, he here makes a series of peremptory and bizarre missteps that, in the doldrums of the second act, alienate him from his clients, their parents and, for good measure, his own daughter, Ashley (Cristina Sastre), who works at the clinic and likewise blunders in her dealings with Mel. We are meant to understand that it’s not the autistic characters who need to change but the neurotypical ones.Foreground from left: Wool as Jessica, Desmond Luis Edwards as Remy and Caesar Samayoa as Dr. Emilio Amigo (Caesar Samayoa), who runs a mental health center for autistic people.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFair enough, but that story, warmly acted if clumsily executed in a series of impossible hairpin turns, isn’t as distinctive or compelling as the one the movie tells.This being a musical, the compensation is meant to be in the songs, and there is much about Yandura’s music and Melocik’s lyrics to admire. The opening, “Today Is,” in which we meet the clients as they build their lives from bits of memorized routines, is cleverly set to scale-like phrases reminiscent of piano exercises. The expected number at Macy’s turns out to be not for Caroline and Jessica but for their mothers, with the touching refrain “I want to see a picture of my daughter getting ready for the dance.” Throughout, the phrase “how to,” sung by almost everyone as they stumble their way forward — “how to set clear boundaries,” “how to manage long-term grief” — suggests that people have more in common than their different kinds of wiring might suggest.But stepping too hard on the dramatic accelerator, the book strips its gears as it goes along, often resorting to advocacy jargon (“nothing about us without us”) and flat-out cheerleading. Nor can the minimal production do much to deliver the oomph it clearly wants as the story reaches for a Broadway ending.Perhaps it’s enough that “How to Dance in Ohio” offers solace and encouragement in a mild, conventional package. (There are cool-down spaces for those who need them, as one of the actors explains in welcoming the audience.) Doing sweet, reparative work for any part of humanity means doing sweet, reparative work for it all.How to Dance in OhioAt the Belasco Theater, Manhattan; howtodanceinohiomusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. More

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      24 Things That Stuck With Us in 2023

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      Films, TV shows, albums, books, art and A.I.-generated SpongeBob performances that reporters, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.Art‘Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick’“October’s Gone…Goodnight,” by Barkley HendricksClark Hodgin for The New York TimesAt the Frick, where Barkley Hendricks’s shimmering ’70s portraits are hanging, posthumously, in the museum’s first solo show by a Black artist, I kept thinking about that Langston Hughes poem: What does happen to a dream deferred? Hendricks didn’t live to see his subjects, with their plentiful Afros and bell-bottom cool, leaping, communing, strolling across the walls of an institution he frequented. But after quietly railing at the omission, I realized the exhibition is actually about Hendricks taking his rightful place — a kind of insistence that a dream, rather than fossilizing, can go on forever. REBECCA THOMASTheater‘The Engagement Party’Given the heaviness of the current news cycle, I was grateful for the respite of Samuel Baum’s confection of a play, “The Engagement Party“ at the Geffen Playhouse. With sharp writing, a first-rate cast and elegant scenery, who says theater isn’t alive and well in Los Angeles? ROBIN POGREBINRap Albums‘Michael’ by Killer MikeIt’s dangerous for an artist to invite André 3000 for a feature, such are his prodigious talent and penchant for outshining anyone on a track. Killer Mike stays with André 3000 on “Scientists & Engineers” and, dare I say, even delivers the better verse, a standout on his well-balanced album, “Michael.” JONATHAN ABRAMSContemporary ArtRagnar Kjartansson at the Louisiana Museum of Modern ArtBefore a trip to Scandinavia, I heard from several people that the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, north of Copenhagen, was their favorite museum in the world. After five hours on the grounds, I understood why. Beyond a robust children’s area and the meditative sculpture gardens, I was transfixed by an exhibition on the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who uses repetition to examine human emotions, motives and desires. JASON M. BAILEYHip-Hop ReunionsThe DA.I.S.Y. Experience at Webster HallDe La Soul’s pioneering rap peers, including KRS-One, Chuck D, DJ Red Alert, Q-Tip, Common and Queen Latifah, all showed up at Webster Hall in March to buoy the remaining members of the group, Maseo and Posdnuos, as they celebrated the long-awaited streaming release of their catalog, just weeks after the death of Trugoy the Dove. Part catalog retrospective, part homegoing celebration, the night was a warm act of community crystallized, for me, in a single gesture: Late in the night, as Posdnuos rapped onstage, a grinning Busta Rhymes clasped him from behind in a hug I haven’t forgotten since. ELENA BERGERONTV‘Fellow Travelers’Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey in “Fellow Travelers.”Ben Mark Holzberg/Showtime“Fellow Travelers” bounces between the perils of McCarthy era Washington and the advent of AIDS in the 1980s, examining the country through the lens of the relationship between a finely chiseled, roguish diplomat and the naïve, morally tortured younger man who loves him over three decades. Created by Ron Nyswaner and based on a novel by Thomas Mallon (the book makes a perfect companion piece to the show), it is a political thriller/sizzling romance/slice of history worth waiting up for to catch each new episode as it drops. HELEN T. VERONGOSFolk Albums‘The Greater Wings’ by Julie ByrneJulie Byrne’s third album is earthy and otherworldly at once; a mournful, healing dispatch from somewhere between heaven and the dew-glazed grass around a freshly dug grave. “I want to be whole enough to risk again,” she sings, as synthesizer tones and harp strings melt behind her. GABE COHNCultural Juggernaut‘Barbie’Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in “Barbie.”Warner Bros. PicturesNo one can say “Barbie” was overlooked in 2023, but was it really among the best? Absolutely. It featured a sharp script, even sharper performances, at least three great songs as well as a brilliantly directed showstopping dance sequence. And in a dumpster fire of a year, it brought joy back to the multiplex. STEPHANIE GOODMANTheater‘Stereophonic’David Adjmi’s play, set almost entirely in a Northern California recording studio in 1976, follows a Fleetwood Mac-inspired band as they lay down tracks for a new album. Sexy, savage and sneakily heartbreaking, it explores the intricacies of communal creation and the sacrifices that art demands and invites. ALEXIS SOLOSKIStreaming K-Drama‘Queenmaker’This South Korean Netflix drama follows Hwang Do-hee (Kim Hee-ae), a former fixer for a corrupt family conglomerate in Seoul who decides to put her might behind the mayoral campaign of a frazzled human-rights lawyer, Oh Kyung-sook (Moon So-ri). Netflix has been investing in K-dramas for a reason. “Queenmaker” presents some delicious commentary on class and entitlement at a time of increasingly visible economic inequality in Korea and in the United States. KATHLEEN MASSARANonfiction‘Status and Culture’“Status and Culture” by W. David Marx I finished W. David Marx’s book “Status and Culture” early in the year, and afterward its point of view about taste and trend cycles felt like it applied to — well, just about everything. If you’re interested in why people (including you!) like the things they like, and why culture in the internet age feels stuck in place, read this. DAVID RENARDAnimated Film‘The Boy and the Heron’We’re lucky to be alive in a time when Hayao Miyazaki is still making hand-drawn animated films. With “The Boy and the Heron,” we have the privilege of following him into another dream world, and there are scenes and sequences so achingly gorgeous they brought me up short. BARBARA CHAIExperimental Theater‘ha ha ha ha ha ha ha’At this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, I saw, at 1:30 in the morning, a clown called Julia Masli try to solve her audience’s problems — everything from feeling too hot to being a hypochondriac. It was madcap, but by the show’s euphoric finish, involving a heartbroken audience member being forced to crowd surf to boost their mood, I’d started thinking Masli was better than any therapist and most other comedians. ALEX MARSHALLSeconds after the Opera Ends‘Dead Man Walking’Ryan McKinny, center, as Joseph De Rocher and above in a video in “Dead Man Walking” at the Metropolitan Opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI still remember the silence during the final moments of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “Dead Man Walking.” To be in such a huge space with so many people, in utter silence — thinking back, I was relieved no one’s phone had rung. LAURA O’NEILLHorror-Comedy‘M3gan’I’m a sucker for art that reflects my greatest fears — bonus points if doused in satire — maybe because it’s evidence that my anxieties aren’t mine alone or maybe because there’s no better way to exorcise dread than to discuss it. Top of my list is the prospect of humanity being conquered by robots (hence my fixation on, say, the “Terminator” movies and “2001: A Space Odyssey”), and in 2023, artificial intelligence seemed to go from peripheral conversations about a future menace to an imminent threat that industry leaders warned may pose a “risk of extinction.” Enter “M3gan,” about a TikTok-dancing, baby-sitting cyborg that managed to be both extraordinary camp and chilling cautionary tale about what could happen when we outsource human emotional care to humanoids who can’t exactly care at all. MAYA SALAMBroadway Revivals‘Parade’Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” is one of my favorite shows, so when I saw his musical “Parade” was returning to Broadway, I knew I had to see it. I didn’t know much about it going in, but I was eager to hear Brown’s wonderfully rhythmic piano phrases live. What I didn’t bank on was a gripping story from the past whose themes still resonate. Micaela Diamond’s powerful singing of “You Don’t Know This Man” was unforgettable — the tragedy with which she imbued every note gave me chills. JENNIFER LEDBURYArtificial IntelligencePlankton SingsA.I.’s depiction in culture this year was almost universally sinister: stealing jobs, spreading misinformation, antagonizing Ethan Hunt. It seems like bad news for humanity, except in one very particular application — generating cover versions of songs sung by cartoon characters. The breakout star of this genre was Plankton from “SpongeBob SquarePants.” He crushes “Even Flow,” he nails “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” but he really shines on “Born to Run.” You’re laughing during the first verse, but by the time he tells Wendy he’ll love her with all the madness in his soul, you really believe. DAVID MALITZOld-School Sci Fi‘2001: A Space Odyssey’In August, I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey,” for just the second time, in 70-millimeter projection at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Afterward, I texted a friend: “Is it just the greatest movie ever made?” MARC TRACYMagic‘Asi Wind’s Inner Circle’My job as the theater reporter comes with an occupational hazard: Everyone I meet asks me what show they (or their mother-in-law, or their neighbor, or some random co-worker) should go see. And throughout this year, my answer has been Asi Wind, a smooth-talking Israeli American magician who has been holed up in a Greenwich Village church gymnasium, astonishing audiences with close-up card trickery and mind-blowing mind reading. His run at the Gym at Judson is to end in mid-January after 444 performances; catch it if you can. MICHAEL PAULSONPodcasts‘The Diary of a CEO’Steven Bartlett is the host of “The Diary of a CEO.” It is not an exaggeration to say that the “Diary of a CEO” podcast has changed my life this year. The host Steven Bartlett poses engaging questions to some of the world’s finest thought leaders, with answers that can truly transform the way you think and the way you take action; all for free, with invaluable results. MEKADO MURPHYIndie Albums‘The Record’ by boygeniusThe boygenius album “The Record,” the full-length debut of the indie supergroup, landed, for me, like a geyser in a parched landscape. Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus were all singular talents whom I’d loved individually, but the way they rode their vocal harmonies through discord, on lyrics and guitar, lashed with humor and vulnerability — I couldn’t get enough. “I want to you to hear my story,” they sing, “and be a part of it.” Ladies, you got it. MELENA RYZIKOne TV Episode‘Long, Long Time’ From ‘The Last of Us’How did a zombie show based on a video game bring me to tears? Episode 3 of HBO’s “The Last of Us” reveals how love can survive and even thrive in the worst of times. The show’s sudden detour away from the violence and infected masses to focus on the life that Bill and Frank have built together is a poignant reminder of what really matters. ROBIN KAWAKAMI`Theater‘Sad Boys in Harpy Land’Alexandra Tatarsky in her solo show “Sad Boys in Harpy Land” at Playwrights Horizon.Chelcie ParryIn this brilliant, semi-autobiographical solo performance, Alexandra Tatarsky plays “a young Jewish woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree.” “Sad Boys in Harpy Land” is a demented clown show/unhinged cabaret/deranged improv, but also a fearless exploration of self-loathing that will stick with me for a very. Long. Time. TALA SAFIEFilm‘Past Lives’The closing scene of “Past Lives” is really just two people, standing on the street, waiting for a cab, in silence. But the two people have a long, intertwined history, the cab is coming to whisk one of them away and it is hard to imagine a heavier silence. The goodbye breaks Greta Lee’s character, sums up this subtle, deeply affecting film and has stayed with me all year. MATT STEVENS More

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      Mentalist Mayhem in ‘Mind Mangler’ and Other New Magic Shows

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      There is something for everyone, even the kids, in “Mind Mangler,” “The Magician” and “Mario the Maker Magician.”Are most minds worth the read? I can picture my personal table of contents on most evenings: anxieties, petty grievances, errands to run. It’s not exactly scintillating. Want a few frazzled paragraphs on whether we need milk? Great. Start skimming.But some of us must invite and enjoy this perusal. Because mentalism acts, such as those perfected by Derren Brown, Derek DelGaudio or Scott Silven, remain popular. So popular that Mischief theater company, the creators of blissfully inane comedies like “The Play That Goes Wrong” and “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” can spoof the form in “Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic Illusion” at New World Stages in Manhattan.Created by Mischief’s cheerfully unusual suspects, Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, “Mind Mangler” begins in the way of many mind-reading shows: ominous music, flickering lights, an invitation to write a secret on a piece of paper. On one side of the stage, a locked box dangles. On the other, a safe stands — audience members are invited to guess its four-digit combination. Then with some fanfare and a very large gold medallion necklace, Lewis, the Mangler of the title, arrives.Bestriding the stage with the growl of a lion shaking off last night’s Ambien dose, the Mangler vows that we will be “delighted, astounded and amazed.” Promise or empty threat? As Mischief fans can predict (and the Mangler most likely can’t), the first few tricks, parodies of subliminal suggestion and neurolinguistics programming, don’t go well. The Mangler flounders. He flails. He flops. Other tricks are absolute face plants, especially those relying on an audience stooge, his roommate, Steve (Sayer), who wobbles under the stage lights like an animate Jell-O salad. That Steve wears a shirt emblazoned with the words “Audience Member” doesn’t exactly sell the deception.Mischief specializes in trampling the boundary between offstage and onstage, reality and make believe. In its oeuvre, the private lives of actors, directors and stagehands become public with hilarious, disastrous results. Here, under Hannah Sharkey’s giddy, amused direction, the Mangler is revealed as a grandiose idiot in the midst of a messy divorce, with Steve as his sole, rickety support. As premises go, this one is too flimsy to shoulder the show’s two hours. Still, there’s pleasure in Lewis’s tetchy, improvised crowd work and in Sayer’s gibbering terror — not so much a deer in the headlights as a deer already under the wheels.Yet as the show goes on (a few gentle spoilers follow), something surprising happens: The tricks start to work. While the Mangler remains the butt of nearly every joke, the jokes come off. Rubik’s Cubes cooperate. Metal bends. Unless (as at the matinee I attended) a teenager decides to mess with him, secrets are unveiled. The piece builds to a rousing, grisly finale, and further delights spring from that locked box, which spends the show, as the Mangler says, “like me at the New York Magic Society, suspended until further notice.”Dan White delivers an elegant, polished performance in “The Magician,” at Fotografiska on Park Avenue South in Manhattan.via theory11Mentalism fans may find these final delights familiar, particularly if they have seen Dan White’s “The Magician,” an elegant, polished performance, directed by Jonathan Bayme and Blake Vogt and held in a loftlike space atop Fotografiska on Park Avenue South. Ascend past a delightful exhibition of pet photos, and you will find a room of cafe tables and chairs. The stage is empty. And then, after a blinding flash, White is there.White, in a fussy three-piece suit ornamented with a watch chain, commands these few square feet with dapper authority. He assures his viewers that this is “a magic show unlike any you’ve ever seen.” Which isn’t really true. But if none of White’s tricks are new, he does put a distinct spin on them, a debonair torque. His tools are commonplace, but in his hands — or without his hands ever touching them — they feel novel and distinct. No matter how impossible it might seem to guess a number, a word, a birthday (my god, the birthday!), White accomplishes it all. Sometimes he’ll appear to put a foot or a flourish wrong, but these flubs are deliberate and never diminish White’s urbane effortlessness. Serious-minded and nimble-fingered, he knows how to build dramatic tension and also how to puncture it with a self-deprecating joke. He can relax even the most jittery viewers.White’s audience, lubricated by several rounds of pricey cocktails, lost their minds at each reveal. Some of the tricks are revealed in stages, which meant that they could lose them again and again. The only trick that went awry (at least for me, and I was sober) was one that I was asked to perform myself, using a handful of halved playing cards. Magic, I would argue, isn’t easy for everyone.The children’s magician Mario Marchese is in residency at SoHo Playhouse with the show “Mario the Maker Magician.” He reminds kids that “with a little curiosity and imagination, you can create magic.”Daniel EdenMario Marchese might disagree with me. A superb children’s magician, Marchese is in residency at SoHo Playhouse with “Mario the Maker Magician.” Shaggy-haired, wild-eyed and excitable, he contends that a person can make magic out of anyone and anything. “My job today,” he tells his height-challenged crowd, “is to take the things that you call boring and remind you that with a little curiosity and imagination, you can create magic.”True to his word, he conjures wonder from a tape measure, a pizza box, a handkerchief, soup cans and torn paper. He makes his own robots and also his own inflatables, though at the performance I attended, one was rapidly deflating. As a mother of young children, I have seen many, many kids’ magicians. He is very likely the best, delighting in their participation, never talking down to them.Have you spent much time with elementary schoolers? Unruly and distractible, they are rarely capable of sustained attention. Marchese held them in the palms of his deft hands. The children, onstage and in the seats, were rapt throughout, following along diligently, responding enthusiastically.Marchese seemed to know just what they wanted, just what they needed, just what would thrill them most. Almost as if he could read their minds.Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic IllusionThrough March 3 at New World Stages, Manhattan; mindmanglernyc.com.The MagicianThrough Jan. 20 at Fotografiska, Manhattan; themagicianonline.com.Mario the Maker MagicianThrough Dec. 30 at SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan; sohoplayhouse.com. More

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      ’Linie 1’ Captures the Soul of Berlin

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      “Linie 1” has been running since 1986 and just celebrated its 2,000th performance. Its cast of kooky dreamers and misfits still capture something special about Berlin.On April 30, 1986, “Linie 1” (“Line 1”), a rock musical set in Berlin’s subway, premiered at a 367-seat theater in what was then West Berlin. In a rave review of the show, the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel praised the show, about a small-town girl who arrives in Berlin in search of her rocker boyfriend, as both “cosmopolitan and exportable.”“The German musical has emancipated itself from its American role models in a clever, mature and very Berlin way,” the paper’s critic, Hellmut Kotschenreuther, wrote.“Linie 1,” which was written by Volker Ludwig, has remained a Berlin fixture ever since, and it regularly sells out at the GRIPS Theater, the independent playhouse where it has run for the last four decades and where, last week, the show celebrated its 2,000th performance.It’s not hard to see why “Linie 1” has been so well-loved and durable. Natalie, the show’s naïve protagonist, resembles Dorothy from the “Wizard of Oz.” But her Yellow Brick Road is the grimy U1 subway, or U-Bahn, line, which she rides back and forth between the districts of Charlottenburg and Kreuzberg.While searching for the Berlin musician who passed through her West German town and knocked her up, Nathalie meets drunks, prostitutes, drug addicts and other colorful characters in the big, bad city. There’s very little plot in this revue-like evening for 11 spirited performers. Many of them resemble quick-change artists as they fly in and out of Mascha Schubert’s fabulously retro costumes — neon tracksuits, jean jackets, leggings, nylon ski jackets — to inhabit the show’s 80 roles.The protagonist of “Linie 1,” Natalie (Helena Charlotte Sigal), has traveled to Berlin from her small town to look for her rocker boyfriend, Johnny.David Baltzer/BildbuehneThe performance that I attended a little over a month ago (number 1,994) was delayed by a half-hour because Dietrich Lehmann, who has been a cast member since the 1986 premiere, arrived late: He had forgotten he was performing that evening. While Lehmann got into costume, the audience grabbed beers and snacks at the bar. No one showed the slightest irritation at the delay.When the show finally got underway, the crowd was fired up, applauding their favorite sketches and characters, or singing along. (One singalong number simply lists the stops of the U1.) It was a level of audience involvement I haven’t experienced outside of “The Rocky Horror Show.”Birger Heymann’s score, performed by five musicians (billed as the “No Ticket” band) is infectious and very ‘80s, with prominent saxophone, synthesizer and drums. But some of the most upbeat numbers deal with urban alienation, missed connections, insecurity and loneliness. Even at their most rocking and tuneful, the songs are often laced with vulgarity and shot through with anger.One of the showstoppers is “Wilmersdorfer Witwen,” a beer-hall march sung by fur-clad widows (four men in drag) spending their pensions from their long-dead Nazi husbands at West Berlin’s signature department store, KaDeWe. They see themselves as the defenders of an older Berlin and lament the good old days before the city was invaded by Turks, communists and squatters.“With God and the press on our side / Our city will soon be wiped clean / Just like 50 years ago,” they sing in a grotesquely caustic cabaret number. (Dietrich, the actor who arrived late, played one of the Nazi widows, as well as a racist man and a homeless drunk.)According to the theater, over 600,000 people have seen “Linie 1” at the GRIPS. The show has toured in Dublin, Jerusalem and Mumbai (as well as a 1988 stop at the Pepsico Summerfare arts festival in Purchase, N.Y.), and local productions have popped up around the globe, often in translation: throughout Europe and in Canada, Brazil and South Korea, often in versions adapted for local audiences. According to the GRIPS, “Linie 1” has been seen by more than 3 million people worldwide.By some cosmic coincidence, a few days after the Berlin production of “Linie 1” surpassed the 2,000 performance mark, the city’s public transportation service, the B.V.G., premiered a musical of its very own. “Tarifzone Liebe” (“Fare Zone Love”), a glitzy, hourlong show played two performances at the Admiralspalast, a theater nearly five times larger than the GRIPS. (It was also livestreamed on YouTube.)In what has got to rank as one of the nuttiest P.R. stunts in recent memory, the B.V.G. commissioned “Tarifzone Liebe” to win the affection of locals, who love to complain about Berlin’s transit network. Interest in the show was sky-high, and tickets sold out fast. This approach to turning I.P. into art, or at least entertainment, is similar to the one Mattel took with Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster “Barbie”: create something witty and self-deprecating about your product to increase brand visibility.The musical was developed by the commercial music producer Not A Machine (and its composers Fabian Reifarth and Kolja Bustorf) and the result is a very slick, Broadway-style product that befits the promotional nature of the show but is bewilderingly at odds with the B.V.G.’s track record of dysfunction.“Tarifzone Liebe” (“Fare Zone Love”) is a P.R. stunt commissioned by Berlin’s transport authority to win the affection of locals.Isa Foltin/Getty Images for BVGThe polished production was a far cry from the endearing scrappiness of “Linie 1.” And whereas “Linie 1” does not shy away from serious themes, or from exploring Berlin’s dark side, “Tarifzone Liebe” was a spectacle-driven revue whose catchy yet generic songs were punctuated by short scenes featuring puns and word play that would make the creators of Broadway’s super-corny musical “Shucked” blush. It was also extremely sappy; at one point in “Tarifzone Liebe,” two characters croon about “A one-way ticket to love and happiness.”As fun and good-natured as it was, the show proved little, except that Berlin’s transportation authority has a great sense of humor about itself. “Tarifzone Liebe,” which features a subway, streetcar and bus as characters, ended up being a love letter to the B.V.G., rather than the city it serves.What’s remarkable about “Linie 1,” nearly 40 years after its premiere, is how much of the show’s depiction of Berlin still rings true. The city is no longer divided, punk is dead and there are few Nazi widows left, and yet the Berlin of “Linie 1” is still shockingly familiar. Although it is a time capsule is many ways, the musical still captures Berlin’s abrasive charm, and its kooky cast of dreamers and misfits remains recognizable.Like with the city itself, you are won over by the show’s rough-around-the-edges quality, its lack of sentimentality and its anything-goes ethos. Musical theater isn’t a genre associated with incisive urban and social commentary, but “Linie 1” feels like one of the very few musicals that channels the soul of a city. More

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      Jon Fosse Wants to Say the Unsayable

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      When the Nobel Prize-winning author Jon Fosse was 7 years old, he had an accident that would shape his writing life.At home one day on his family’s small farm in Strandebarm, a village amid Norway’s western fjords, Fosse was carrying a bottle of fruit juice when he slipped on ice in the yard. As he hit the ground, the bottle smashed and a shard of glass slashed an artery in his wrist.Fosse’s parents rushed him to a doctor and, in the car, Fosse recalled recently, he had an out of body experience. “I saw myself from outside,” Fosse said in an interview. He assumed he was about to die, but he was also aware of a “kind of shimmering light,” he said.“Everything was very peaceful,” Fosse said: He felt “no sadness,” but rather a sense that there was “a beauty, a beauty to everything.”Fosse said that this childhood brush with death had influenced all his literary work: fiction, plays and poetry, for which he will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in a ceremony on Sunday.The perspective he gained in the moment of his accident, Fosse explained, made its way into his writing: “I often say that there are two languages: The words that I wrote, the words you can understand, and behind that, there’s a silent language.” And it’s in that “silent language,” he added, that the real meaning may lie.In a lecture in Stockholm on Thursday, a ritual that all Nobel laureates observe before getting their awards, Fosse expanded a little on the idea of a silent language. “It is only in the silence that you can hear God’s voice,” he said. “Maybe.”To Fosse’s fans the spiritual and existential dimensions are a major part of the appeal. Anders Olsson, the chair of the Nobel committee that awarded Fosse the prize, said that Fosse’s work induced feelings and questions in readers “that ultimately exist beyond language.” The “deep sense of the inexpressible” in Fosse’s plays and novels leads readers “ever deeper into the experience of the divine,” Olsson said.Last month’s announcement that Fosse had won might have surprised some American readers. Fosse (pronounced FOSS-eh) only recently came to prominence in the English-speaking world with books that include “Septology,” a seven-part opus told in part as a stream of consciousness from the mind of an aging painter. Last year, sections of “Septology” were nominated for the National Book Award and the International Booker Prize. “A Shining,” a novella about a man lost in a snowy forest who is comforted by a mysterious light, was published in Britain on the day of the Nobel announcement, and in the United States afterward.Yet on continental Europe, Fosse had been a star for decades, less for his novels than for his plays, which have been compared to those of Samuel Beckett and Henrik Ibsen and staged at some of the most prestigious playhouses.Fosse’s books on display in an Oslo bookstore. His work only gained recent recognition in the English-speaking world.Thomas Ekström for The New York TimesSarah Cameron Sunde, an artist based in the United States who has translated Fosse’s plays into English and directed several of them in New York, said that the American audience’s lack of recognition for Fosse could be explained, perhaps, by his frequently morbid subject matter: His writing often features characters wracked by loneliness, desperate for connection and contemplating the end, and many of his plays involve suicide. “Everyone is very afraid of death over here,” she said.In a two-hour interview in Oslo last week, Fosse, 64, said that as a child he didn’t intend to become a writer. His father ran the family’s small farm and managed the village store, and his mother was a homemaker. In his youth, Fosse recalled, he was more interested in rock music than in reading. He grew out his hair, which he still wears in a ponytail, and played guitar — badly, he said — with bands at school dances.But at age 14, for reasons he said he couldn’t explain, he “stopped playing, and even stopped listening to music,” and instead focused on writing poems and stories. His writing was rhythmic, filled with repetition, he said, as if he were trying to maintain a connection to his musical past. “It has been like that for 40 years,” Fosse said.His early books, including his 1983 debut, “Raudt, Svart” (in English, “Red, Black”), were “filled with pain,” Fosse said, often featuring characters trapped in moments of indecision. His second novel, “Stengd Gitar” (“Closed Guitar”), for instance, is about a woman who accidentally locks herself out of her apartment while her baby sleeps inside, then agonizes over what to do next.At the time he was writing these early books, during his 20s, Fosse was an atheist and surrounded by people who were equally irreligious. He taught at a writing academy in the city of Bergen, in Norway, where his circle included “intellectuals, students and young artists” who were committed communists and thought that art and literature should be political. (Karl Ove Knausgaard was one of his students.)But Fosse didn’t agree. “Literature ought to be engaged in itself,” he said, rather than trying to achieve a political, social or even religious goal.As he wrote more, Fosse said, the process itself led him to begin to question his atheism. He never planned a story or a poem in advance — but when the words just tumbled out, he started to wonder where it all came from. He began exploring religion, including attending Quaker meetings, and “a kind of reconciliation, or peace,” came into his writing, he said.Cecilie Seiness, Fosse’s editor for the past decade at Det Norske Samlaget, a Norwegian publisher, said that his interest in religion went beyond his own personal conviction. In the 1990s, Seiness said, Fosse briefly published a literary journal “about bringing God into writing, in opposition to the political writing of the time.” Yet Fosse’s novels and plays were never didactic, she added. “It’s not trying to convert you, absolutely not,” Seiness said. “It’s just about being open to the mysteries of life.”“I often say that there are two languages,” Fosse said. “The words that I wrote, the words you can understand, and behind that, there’s a silent language.” Thomas Ekström for The New York TimesDespite his prolific output — often, a book a year — Fosse’s career only really took off in the mid-1990s when he pivoted to the theater. Soon, he was winning major awards for his stark plays, including “I Am the Wind,” whose two characters are simply called “The One” and “The Other,” and “Deathvariations,” about an estranged couple confronting their daughter’s suicide.Milo Rau, one of Europe’s most acclaimed theater directors, said that in the early 2000s, the theater world in some parts of Europe was gripped by “Fosse hype.” “The theater scene was overwhelmed by his spirituality, minimalism, seriousness, melancholy,” Rau said. Fosse’s plays “felt completely new and out of time,” he added.Fosse said he drank to cope with the demands of a globe-trotting theatrical life, and the alcohol eventually took over. At one point in 2012, he said, he was drinking a bottle of vodka a day, and barely eating. He collapsed with alcohol poisoning and had to spend several weeks in a hospital.As a son drove him home from that enforced convalescence, Fosse said, he told himself, “It’s enough, Jon,” and never drank again. Soon after, he also converted to Catholicism. Attending mass, Fosse said, “can take you out of yourself somewhere, to another place.” The feeling was similar to the one he got when writing — or drinking, he added.A year after his collapse, Fosse began to be talked up as a Nobel Prize contender, though he did not become a laureate for another decade. By the time of the announcement, he had long completed “Septology,” the multipart novel, at points romantic, at others existential, in which the main character, Asle, a painter, looks back on experiences that are remarkably similar to some in Fosse’s life.At one point in the doorstop of a novel, which the Nobel committee called Fosse’s “magnum opus,” Asle recalls a childhood accident in which he slips in a farmyard and slashes an artery. In the book’s repetitive style, Asle describes the incident, in which he finds himself surrounded by a “glinting shining transparent yellow dust and he’s not scared, he feels something like happiness.”But then he stops picturing the scene. He can’t think about that moment anymore, Asle says. “It’s better to put it in my pictures as best I can.” More