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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

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      Review: In ‘The Salvagers,’ a Battered Family Finds Strength

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      Harrison David Rivers’s new drama, featuring a strong cast, is having its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theater.Harrison David Rivers’s merciful new drama, “The Salvagers,” is not a romance, but it emphatically is a love story: about a furious, heartsick young actor and his imperfect parents, steadfastly trying to help him heal.At 23, Boseman Salvage Jr. hadn’t meant to end up back in snowy Chicago, where he grew up and where his parents split while he was away at college. He certainly hadn’t meant to move in with his father, whom he loathes with a smoldering, adolescent contempt. But after an episode that Boseman Sr. refers to, obliquely, as “your cry for help,” Boseman Jr. came home.In Mikael Burke’s world-premiere production at Yale Repertory Theater, Taylor A. Blackman makes a blistering young Boseman — self-hating, self-harming and horribly lost, but with such a huge chip on his shoulder that hostility could easily be all his father sees.Yet Boseman Sr., played by the rock-solid Julian Elijah Martinez, is stability itself. He is not the soul of patience — who could be, with such a tetchy grown kid around the house? — but he is not going anywhere. And he will nudge his son about taking his pills, and cook multicourse meals for him night after night, for as long as it takes to nurture him back to mental health. (The suggestion of a domestic interior, with a glacial mountain of snow hulking over it, is by B Entsminger.)A significant detail about Boseman Sr., a locksmith, and Nedra (Toni Martin), his postal worker ex-wife: He was only 14 and she just 16 when they had Boseman Jr. But their son’s torments have their roots elsewhere, tangled in notions of filial inheritance and parental expectation — as if, by virtue of sharing his father’s name, he is meant to be a duplicate of him. In which case being gay, which Boseman Jr. cannot admit, would count in his own mind as a failure.The doting, extroverted Nedra, who can recite her son’s “King Lear” audition monologue in unison with him — his “Hamlet,” too — already sees her child for who he is. When he tells her he’s met a woman, she blurts her surprise: “Your person’s a she?”That would be Paulina (Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew), the least organically written of the principal characters. Blackman and Bartholomew never find even a friend-crush energy for the relationship, the script’s single over-engineered strand.Far more magnetic is the tiptoe tumble into love between Boseman Sr. and Elinor (McKenzie Chinn), a substitute teacher whom he meets when she locks herself out of her apartment. Martinez and Chinn have an appealing chemistry, and Chinn manages the delicate task of keeping Elinor sympathetic even when she vastly oversteps, revealing secrets that require Boseman Jr. to rethink his own history.Rivers pushes too hard at times, as when characters twice voice confusion about the practicalities of two people in the same family having the same name — not exactly unheard-of.What he does with tremendous dexterity, though, is show us a family, battered by pain, that through devotion and forgiveness declines to rupture. There is good that the Salvages can restore, all of them, by tending to one another and letting themselves be tended to.The SalvagersThrough Dec. 16 at Yale Repertory Theater, New Haven, Conn.; yalerep.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      ‘Our Life in Art’ Review: Stanislavski’s Work and Times

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      In Paris, a new production from Richard Nelson imagines a day on tour with Konstantin Stanislavski’s theater company in 1923, but misses the historical context.What do you know about the Russian theater director Konstantin Stanislavski? If your answer doesn’t go much further than “He designed a method for training actors,” you are much like the audience members who were recently mystified by parts of “Our Life in Art,” a highly anticipated collaboration between the American playwright and director Richard Nelson and Théâtre du Soleil, in Paris.Its title is a nod to “My Life in Art,” an autobiography by Stanislavski that first came out in English in the 1920s. The “Our” refers to the renowned company he co-founded, the Moscow Art Theater, which, in 1923, embarked on a lengthy tour of the United States. In this new play, presented in collaboration with the multidisciplinary Festival d’Automne, Nelson imagines a day the company spent between performances in Chicago.Onstage, Stanislavski and his 10-person ensemble — who mostly use Russian nicknames for each other — bicker, eat dinner and talk about Russia and the United States. There are oblique references to the 1917 Russian Revolution and its aftermath; to Anton Chekhov, whose plays the Moscow Art Theater championed; and to the impact the tour and Stanislavski’s theories had on American art.But it takes much of the play to even establish that one of the characters was Chekhov’s wife. The complex historical context to “Our Life in Art” is rarely addressed head-on, and won’t necessarily be obvious to Parisian theatergoers, most of whom are also encountering Nelson’s work for the first time. While he is a prominent figure in American theater, with several dozens plays to his name (including a recent 12-part project, “Rhinebeck Panorama”), this is the first production Nelson has directed in French.The sense that “Our Life in Art” wasn’t meant for its current audience is appropriate. Nelson originally intended for the play to be performed in Russia. He made several trips to the country, in 2020 and 2021, to start work on a production there, Nelson explains in a playbill interview.Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine upended these plans. Not long afterward, the Théâtre du Soleil — one of France’s top theater companies, led by the renowned director Ariane Mnouchkine — came calling, and Nelson offered “Our Life in Art” to the company.Before the performance started, Mnouchkine explained that there were donation boxes in the hall to raise money for humanitarian relief in Ukraine. In the playbill, Nelson also said that the war had “added another dimension to the play, a feeling of powerlessness.”On opening night, there was a palpable sense of curiosity at La Cartoucherie, the company’s home in Vincennes, a Paris suburb. Mnouchkine has personally overseen nearly every production performed by the Théâtre du Soleil since 1964, and Nelson is only the third outside director to work with the troupe in 59 years. The last was Robert Lepage, from Canada, whose 2018 work “Kanata — Episode 1 — The Controversy” brought, well, controversy.The Théâtre du Soleil tends to overhaul its own venue for every new production, and “Our Life in Art” is no exception. Instead of the usual auditorium, the play is staged in a narrow space flanked by audience members on both sides. (The seating, akin to tiered pews, is exceptionally uncomfortable.)This allows Nelson, who often works in the round, to create a new level of intimacy with the actors. Whereas Mnouchkine likes sweeping, large-scale tableaux, Nelson prefers to zoom in on smaller situations and conversations.Around a large table, a couple, Nina and Vassily, trade barbs about Vassily’s cheating tendencies. Pyotr, a younger actor, is reprimanded for drinking too much and playing Lopakhin, a central character in Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” too coarsely. Masha, another company member, cooks pelmeni, Russian dumplings, for a celebratory dinner, during which everyone toasts the 25th anniversary of the Moscow Art Theater.Like the company onstage, the Théâtre du Soleil is an ensemble theater, with a permanent troupe of actors and a singular vision, sustained over decades. Its players have a different kind of rapport than freelancers: When the characters sit down to eat together, their banter feels entirely natural. Nelson brings out a welcome new side of them, more casual than Mnouchkine’s directing style.“Our Life in Art” really shines when Nelson plays up the contrast between the artists’ lives and the ideological pressure they were under in the Soviet Union. The play is book-ended by two letters Stanislavski wrote to Stalin in the 1930s, read onstage by the actor Arman Saribekyan. In them, Stanislavski praises “the great Communist Party” and the “spring of life” it supposedly brought to Russian art. “That’s why I love my homeland,” he says.Saribekyan explains that Stanislavski signed the letters under duress, and that their sentiment is purposely at odds with the restrained, laconic director we witness in the play, as performed by Maurice Durozier. Stanislavski grew up in an affluent family under the czars before adjusting to the communist system after the Revolution, and Nelson touches on the “re-education” that Stanislavski had to endure.There is a sense, in “Our Life In Art,” that Stanislavski and his touring actors are trapped between ruthless American businessmen — who rig the contracts to put all the financial risk on the company — and the looming threat of being deemed unpatriotic when they go home. The artists’ interactions with Russian émigrés in the United States are reported as suspicious in the Soviet press, and clippings are sent to the company as a warning of sorts.In scenes like these, art and ideology collide. At one point, Stanislavski makes a speech about the players’ shared craft, their ability to zoom in on gestures and create art through verisimilitude, rather than through ideas. This is also what Nelson does in “Our Life in Art,” but that means that many things — from the politics of the time to shifting expectations of theater in Soviet Russia — go unexplained. Making them more accessible would only enhance the experience.Our Life in ArtThrough March 3, 2024 at the Théâtre du Soleil, Paris; theatre-du-soleil.fr. More

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      ‘Manahatta’ Review: Tracing the Blood-Soaked Roots of American Capitalism

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      Straddling the 17th and early 21st centuries, Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play at the Public Theater examines the exploitation of the Lenape by Dutch settlers.Acknowledgments that New York was once home to the Lenape people have become a familiar refrain at arts venues. In “Manahatta,” the playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle undertakes a vital investigation of that willfully forgotten history so often rendered in shorthand. Now open at the Public Theater, just a few subway stops away from Wall Street, Nagle’s play traces the origins of American finance and the follies of its bottomless appetite for capital to the exploitation of the Lenape by the city’s Dutch settlers.The Lenape people have been so forcefully expelled from their Northeastern homelands that the descendants Nagle depicts, beginning in 2002, live in what is now Oklahoma. Jane (Elizabeth Frances), an MIT and Stanford graduate, is interviewing for an entry-level Wall Street job when her father dies on an operating table. By the time she returns home, her sister Debra (Rainbow Dickerson) and their mother Bobbie (a delightfully dry Sheila Tousey) are preparing for his funeral, and Bobbie is stuck with medical bills because the Indian Health Service, a government agency responsible for providing health services to Native peoples, has refused payment.Intercut with this family drama are fable-like scenes set in 17th-century Manahatta, where West India Company traders barter with the Lenape for furs coveted by the women they left behind in the Old World. The ensemble of seven actors appear in both timelines, including Enrico Nassi, who plays Luke, Jane’s childhood friend and would-be sweetheart, and Se-ket-tu-may-qua, an emissary who communicates with the Dutch and teaches Le-le-wa’-you, a Lenape woman also played by Frances, to speak their foreign tongue. Back in Manhattan, Jane is learning the sort of blustery talk necessary to chart her climb through the corporate ranks.First developed at the Public in 2014, when Nagle was a member of its Emerging Writers Group, “Manahatta” premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2018. Its purview is promising and ambitious: In addition to the blood-soaked roots of American capitalism, Nagle addresses the erasure of Native languages through forced assimilation, and the irrevocable impacts of Western violence, religion and consumer currency on Native culture.But the concept of homeownership, in the modern sense of subprime mortgages and the more ancient one of who can lay claims to land, forms the strongest throughline: The Dutch dupe a Lenape elder, played by Tousey, into selling them Manahatta for a song, while Michael (David Kelly), who is both the local pastor and a banker, helps Bobbie take out a loan against her house. Jane, though not without her misgivings, is meanwhile helping to manufacture the 2008 financial crisis, by selling mortgage-backed securities — it turns out she works for Lehman Brothers.Sheila Tousey, center, with ensemble members, all of whom appear in both timelines.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDirected by Laurie Woolery, the production shifts seamlessly between the alternating time periods and locales, on a wilderness-meets-boardroom set by Marcelo Martínez García, and with particular help from Lux Haac’s costumes, whose fusion of fabrics and styles (a pinstripe pilgrim silhouette, for example) accomplish an impressive narrative arc on their own.The play draws direct, and at times reductive, parallels between the past and recent present. Jane’s bigwig bosses, played by Joe Tapper and Jeffrey King, are flat, greedy villains, figured as heirs to the deceptive, and ultimately murderous, founders of the market system (Tapper’s Dutch trader, at least, demonstrates some measure of humanity). But the white bad guys’ lack of complexity, though a missed opportunity, isn’t the most pressing problem.The Native characters, too, are almost exclusively products of circumstance, reacting to the systems that oppress them rather than approaching life with innate motivations. That defensive posture is understandable in the colonial context, but when Jane is asked why she wants to work on Wall Street, her only answer is because she has overcome obstacles to get there. Jane’s professional trajectory is rather one piece of Nagle’s grand design, which feels undersynthesized throughout much of the show’s 105-minute running time until it reaches a too-obvious conclusion.Even if this corrective account does not feel convincingly yoked to the drama onstage, an urgent significance to the facts is laid out in “Manahatta.” Nagle notes in the script that the play is a work of fiction, though it’s based on real events and was written in consultation with Lenape elders, whose ancestors are often evoked before curtains rise on New York stages. We would all do well to remember what they have lost.ManahattaThrough Dec. 23 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      Off Broadway, a Vital Part of New York Theater, Feels the Squeeze

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      The small theaters that help make the city a theater capital are cutting back as they struggle to recover from the pandemic.New York’s nonprofit Signature Theater has three modern performance spaces designed by the starchitect Frank Gehry, a long history of cultivating and championing major playwrights like Edward Albee and Lynn Nottage, and a board chaired by the Hollywood star Edward Norton.What Signature doesn’t have this fall are plays. The company, a mainstay of the Off Broadway scene, closed its most recent production in July and is not set to start its next show until the end of January.Even as Broadway claws its way back from the coronavirus pandemic, New York’s sprawling network of smaller theaters, many of them noncommercial in both tax status and taste, is struggling.“This is the hardest season yet,” said Casey York, the president of the Off-Broadway League, citing the combined effects of smaller audiences, shifting philanthropic patterns, rising wages and costs, and labor shortages at a time when the emergency government assistance that helped many theaters stay afloat through the lengthy pandemic shutdown has largely run out. “There is an incredible squeeze.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More