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      in Theater

      Asked to Adapt a Classic Play, This Writer Rethought Her Life

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      As she sought the truth for her characters on the page, Mara Vélez Meléndez’s real self began to emerge. Now she’s making her Off Broadway debut.In 2018, as part of a masters program in playwriting at Hunter College in Manhattan, Mara Vélez Meléndez was given a life-changing assignment: adapt a classic play. She chose “John Gabriel Borkman,” a rarely revived late Ibsen play about an ambitious banker, and in her reworking, the characters became members of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, created in 2016 by the U.S. federal government to resolve the island’s debt crisis.The resulting work, “Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members,” recently opened at Soho Rep in Manhattan. But when Vélez Meléndez, now 29, embarked on the project, she knew little about the board, or “la junta” as it’s known colloquially in her native Puerto Rico, other than that a large percentage of the population was against its unelected power to oversee the island’s budget.Working against the clock — “I had one week until the deadline,” she recalled — the playwright hit a wall. No amount of research helped her understand who the board members were or why they were appointed by the Obama administration. The board’s mission — to put the island on a path to sustainable economic growth — has led to fiscal austerity and criticism that it has taken away the island’s sovereignty, effectively creating a modern colonialism.“Puerto Rico es la isla que se repite (is the repeating island),” Vélez Meléndez said, alluding to the Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo and his seminal reflection on the interminable colonial impositions laid upon Caribbean islands since Columbus’s arrival. “We’re always going back to the same thing,” she added.Christine Carmela, left, as Lolita and Samora la Perdida, who plays outlandish versions of the board members.Julieta CervantesIntrigued by the lack of information on the board members, Vélez Meléndez wrote a play that employs what she called a queer lens to investigate how “Puerto Rico was turned into a neoliberal playground.” (The play, a coproduction of Soho Rep and the Sol Project, is running through June 19.)Every trace of Ibsen disappeared in the process. It’s all Vélez Meléndez now. The play takes place in the office reception of “la junta,” a liminal space that conveys the timeless vacuousness of bureaucratic hellscapes. Lolita (Christine Carmela), a trans woman, arrives with one mission: “to decolonize the island of Puerto Rico.”On Being Transgender in AmericaPhalloplasty: The surgery, used to construct a penis, has grown more popular among transgender men. But with a steep rate of complications, it remains a controversial procedure.Elite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.Transgender Youth: A photographer documented the lives of transgender youth. She shared some thoughts on what she saw.Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.Throughout the play, Lolita meets various characters, including a Nuyorican receptionist whose gender identity is unresolved and outlandish versions of board members (all played by Samora la Perdida). They not only fail to take Lolita seriously but try to convince her that they know more about her needs than she does.The playwright realized in trying to decolonize Puerto Rico, she was also learning how to decolonize gender identity, including her own. When she started writing the play, Vélez Meléndez had not yet begun to transition and identified as “cis, queer, question mark,” believing she didn’t have the right label to give herself.“I’m a political writer whose plays aren’t about politics,” Vélez Meléndez said.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesGrowing up in Puerto Rico, she had learned that being queer meant she had to like men, “but I never wanted to be around them,” she says laughing. She began writing for pleasure while pursuing a double major in journalism and theater at the University of Puerto Rico. “I wasn’t dating and really didn’t like sports,” she explained, so she found solace and unexpected joy in the works of Beckett and Ionesco.This in turn led to an interest in modern theater, including works like “An Octoroon” by her future Hunter professor Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. One of her mentors, the Puerto Rican playwright and performer Sylvia Bofill, suggested she should write her own plays.Upon moving to New York City for grad school in 2017, Vélez Meléndez found that gay and transgender people were everywhere. “There were trans girls on the subway, lesbian couples holding hands in the street, everything felt like a possibility,” she said. Soon, she added, she found a safe space among fellow theater-makers and new friends who allowed her to experiment with her gender expression in ways that would have seemed forbidden in Puerto Rico. Once she sat down to write, her sister had begun transitioning, and Vélez Meléndez wanted to include a trans character as a homage.Originally, it wasn’t Lolita who was trans but the receptionist character. Lolita is inspired by the real-life Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón, who, in 1954, led an attack in the U.S. Capitol, which resulted in the wounding of several members of Congress. Writing scenes in which Lolita talks to the receptionist about decolonization made the playwright feel horrible.“It’s the TERF-iest I’ve ever been with myself,” she explained, using an acronym for “trans exclusionary radical feminists,” a term used to describe feminists who are transphobic. “Here I was telling this trans character they have to decolonize themselves when they had done it years ago.”Dissatisfied with the draft she presented at Hunter, Vélez Meléndez said she was shocked by the encouragement she received from her classmates and professor. Jacobs-Jenkins then introduced her to the director David Mendizábal, overseeing the Soho Rep production, who helped the play take a turn by asking, “what if it was Lolita who was trans instead?”Suddenly, as Vélez Meléndez was able to identify more with her lead character and her pleas, the play took on a life of its own. “It was a beautiful journey to witness,” Mendizábal said, “the truth of these two characters emerged on the page as she was emerging more and more in real life.” It was around this time that Soho Rep first showed interest in producing the play, but then the pandemic happened.This forced period of isolation allowed the young playwright to open up her spectrum of presentation. She started wearing more dresses and skirts, fully shaved her facial hair for the first time since high school, and when she tried on a crop top, she realized she looked like the kind of girls she crushed on. “Seeing myself in one of those women I was attracted to I knew that I could love myself,” she said.One day at the post office, when a clerk referred to her as “ma’am” everything clicked. “It kept clicking through the play,” she explained, recalling the effect this had on Lolita’s agency as well. Last July, she came out to her partner by saying, “I’m not trying to copy my sister, but I think this is happening.”“This was a case where the play was just writing itself. I was writing it, writing me, writing itself,” she added.With the newfound confidence she discovered during her transition, as well as the joy and elation of making her Off Broadway debut, Vélez Meléndez is looking forward to spending her summer working on a batch of new plays. “I’m going to write about my experience as a trans girl from the diaspora,” she explained. “I’m a political writer whose plays aren’t about politics.”Although she didn’t uncover much about how the oversight board works, writing “Notes on a Killing” allowed Vélez Meléndez to realize “there are many things we need to decolonize within ourselves before we actually get to start the country we dreamed of.” That in itself feels like the ultimate kind of political awakening, a revolution in the making. More

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      in Music

      Mahmood and Blanco’s Eurovision Song Shows Italy’s L.G.B.T.Q. Progress

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      The love song, and its video showing the artist Mahmood embracing another man, has been well received in a nation with a spotty history on L.G.B.T.Q. rights.MILAN — In February, the artists Mahmood and Blanco turned to each other onstage at Italy’s national song competition and sang, “I’d like to love you, but I’m always wrong.” It was the refrain of “Brividi” (translated as “Chills”), a song about the vulnerability of love, as experienced by all people — regardless of gender, identity or sexuality.When the song won at that competition, the Sanremo contest, and became Italy’s entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, the unexpected happened: There wasn’t much pushback.The two after winning the Sanremo music contest in Italy in February.Ettore Ferrari/EPA, via ShutterstockThere was some grumbling from a socially conservative politician about what he called L.G.B.T. “domination” at the contest, and disdain that Mahmood performed one evening wearing a garter, but Alessandro Mahmoud, known as Mahmood, had been expecting a bigger response, he said in a recent interview.When the musician — who was born in Italy to an Italian mother and an Egyptian father — won the national song contest in 2019, anti-immigration comments followed. But this year, even those polemics normally trumpeted by conservative politicians did not flare up. The 29-year-old artist saw the muted criticism for “Brividi” as a sign that “something has happened in Italian society.”Italy has long been influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, which for generations considered homosexuality as a taboo topic to be either ignored or shunned. In a 2005 text approved by Benedict XVI, who was pope at the time, homosexuality was described as “not a sin” but essentially “an intrinsic moral evil.”L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Italy have advanced after decades of campaigning, but some legal challenges remain. Same-sex civil unions were legalized in 2016, years after other European countries, but same-sex marriage is not legal, nor can someone in a same-sex civil union legally adopt his or her partner’s biological child.On Being Transgender in AmericaPhalloplasty: The surgery, used to construct a penis, has grown more popular among transgender men. But with a steep rate of complications, it remains a controversial procedure.Elite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.Transgender Youth: A photographer documented the lives of transgender youth. She shared some thoughts on what she saw.Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.So when two men sang a love song, clearly engaging with each other, as part of a cherished national competition, it was a first. The track “normalizes what should have always been normal,” Mahmood said.The song’s video more explicitly shows Mahmood tenderly embracing a man, while Blanco sings to a woman. A video of the song on Mahmood’s official YouTube page has been viewed more than 55 million times.Italian society’s approach to sexuality is changing. “Sexual orientation no longer has any importance, nor is it important to label oneself anymore,” said Aldo Cazzullo, a columnist in the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera. In the 1950s and 1960s, many gay people in Italy were not open about their sexuality, Cazzullo said. This was followed by an era of coming out and empowerment, and “now there’s no longer the need to say anything,” he said. He pointed out that two of Italy’s southern regions had voted to elect gay men as regional presidents.Mahmood said that although his songs speak volumes about who he is, he doesn’t define his sexuality: “It makes no sense to make distinctions anymore.”Blanco, the stage name of Riccardo Fabbriconi, 19, said that his “generation is much more open” and that people his age no longer thought in terms of gender identity. In just two years, he has gone from posting videos “singing in my underwear in my bedroom,” he said, to a multicity Italian summer tour that sold out in 72 hours.And Blanco said he also saw Italy as being “more open in general — I hope.”A recent headline in the newspaper La Stampa in Turin captured this sentiment: “Blanco, son of the fluid century, his generation will save us.”“My generation is much more open,” said Blanco, 19, left. Mahmood, 29, says he doesn’t define his sexuality.Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York TimesOn Tuesday evening, the Italian hosts for the Eurovision Song Contest semifinal broadcast included Cristiano Malgioglio, a songwriter and popular television personality also known for his outlandish couture, who riffed on his love life. Speaking of the five countries that automatically get into the final — Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Britain — he quipped, “I have a boyfriend in every nation.” He was a host last year, too.Eurovision has always “had a large L.G.B.T.Q. element in its fandom,” said Catherine Baker, a historian at the University of Hull who has written about the competition. After significant rulings by the European Court of Human Rights in the late 1990s and the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, which banned discrimination against people on the grounds of sexual orientation, “Europe became associated with the idea of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and symbolically that had an impact on Eurovision, even if it wasn’t organized by the European Union,” Baker said.The competition has also long been a trailblazer when it comes to L.G.B.T.Q. representation onstage, featuring artists like Iceland’s Paul Oscar, Israel’s Dana International and Finland’s Saara Aalto over the years.L.G.B.T.Q. people face openly hostile environments in several European countries, including Poland, Hungary and Russia. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the powerful head of the Russian Orthodox Church, recently justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by claiming that it was part of a struggle against ideals imposed by liberal foreigners that included gay pride parades.Franco Grillini, a prominent Italian L.G.B.T.Q. rights activist, said a song like “Brividi” would once have been “unimaginable” at a festival that normally has Italians glued to their television screens.In the past, homosexuality could also hurt a musical career in Italy, he said, citing the case of Umberto Bindi, a talented, gay singer-songwriter who caused a scandal in Sanremo in 1961 by wearing a pinkie ring (then a presumed sign of homosexuality). He never got the recognition he deserved because “he was brutally discriminated” against, Grillini said.But democracies have a way of righting wrongs, according to Angelo Pezzana, another L.G.B.T.Q. rights activist. “It’s always been like this. Remember that not a century ago, women went to jail for the right to vote,” he said. In Italy, women only got the right to vote in 1945. The Mahmood-Blanco duet “was a sign that things had changed in a positive way,” he said.The track “normalizes what should have always been normal,” Mahmood said of the Eurovision song.Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York TimesThat said, Italy’s record on equal rights for L.G.B.T.Q. people remains spotty. Apart from not having fair representation when it comes to marriage and adoption, in October, the Senate rejected a bill meant to make violence against L.G.B.T.Q. people a hate crime, a label that would have meant harsher penalties. Critics blamed the lack of consensus both on political bickering as well as on Vatican interference, given that a few months earlier the Vatican had openly opposed the bill, saying it infringed upon guaranteed religious liberties.“Italy is still profoundly linked to the Vatican, which conditions Parliament,” said Grillini, who was a lawmaker for seven years.Even under Pope Francis, the message has been mixed. Shortly after his election in 2013, Francis said, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” and he has continued to encourage the church to be more welcoming toward the L.G.B.T.Q. faithful. But since then, the Vatican has rejected the notion that gender identity can be fluid, and it has reaffirmed its opposition to same-sex marriage.But at least at the Sanremo contest, old prejudices didn’t seem to apply.“All my songs speak of my way of experiencing love and sex,” Mahmood said. “The least an artist can do is give an example.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘A Strange Loop’ Star L Morgan Lee on Her Trailblazing Tony Nomination

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      L Morgan Lee made theater history on Monday, becoming what production officials described as the first openly transgender performer to be nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as a featured actress in “A Strange Loop.”Lee’s Tony nod was one of 11 for the musical, which opened April 26 and is a meta-work about a Black gay writer trying to make art while being distracted by his intrusive thoughts. Lee plays one of those thoughts — “Thought 1.”In a telephone interview on Monday hours after learning of her nomination, Lee, who made her Broadway debut in the musical, said she found her nomination “overwhelming.”“I know of many trans and nonbinary and gender-expansive people who are out here trying to be seen and trying to put stories out into the world,” she said. “Having this happen today helps more people know that it’s possible.”Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.This was your Broadway debut. Tell me about what it was like to see your name on the screen this morning with a Tony nomination.I’m still trying to wrap my head around the importance of a Black trans woman in a principal role on a Broadway stage, period. And the importance of that, especially in a time when so many of us are simply fighting for our basic well being. So to be able to be part of a story that is challenging the form in so many ways — challenging what people have known Broadway to be — it’s a gift.It is all bigger than me. I’m really excited about what will happen after these steps. I’m very excited about who is in the audience that will see this show or my performance or now this nomination and know that it is possible for them to pursue theater.What does it say to you that a show that describes itself as a “big, Black, and queer-ass Great American Musical” can be the big winner of this morning’s nominations?I would like to say that it means that there is hope. I’m careful with the word change, because in order for us to be in the type of world and space we want to be in, it’s not as much about change as much as it is about growth. You’re not going to suddenly get rid of all the people who don’t agree with you. But we do need to figure out how to make space so that all of our stories can actually be told.To that point, for anyone out there who says “Hey, this got 11 nominations — I’m interested — but I’m not sure this musical is for me,” what would you tell them?Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

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      in Movies

      Helping Hollywood Avoid Claims of Bias Is Now a Growing Business

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      Studios are signing up consultants to help make sure their movies or shows don’t raise any cultural red flags.In the summer of 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd spurred a racial reckoning in America, Carri Twigg’s phone kept ringing.Ms. Twigg, a founding partner of a production company named Culture House, was asked over and over again if she could take a look at a television or movie script and raise any red flags, particularly on race.Culture House, which employs mostly women of color, had traditionally specialized in documentaries. But after a few months of fielding the requests about scripts, they decided to make a business of it: They opened a new division dedicated solely to consulting work.“The frequency of the check-ins was not slowing down,” Ms. Twigg said. “It was like, oh, we need to make this a real thing that we offer consistently — and get paid for.”Though the company has been consulting for a little more than a year — for clients like Paramount Pictures, MTV and Disney — that work now accounts for 30 percent of Culture House’s revenue.Culture House is hardly alone. In recent years, entertainment executives have vowed to make a genuine commitment to diversity, but are still routinely criticized for falling short. To signal that they are taking steps to address the issue, Hollywood studios have signed contracts with numerous companies and nonprofits to help them avoid the reputational damage that comes with having a movie or an episode of a TV show face accusations of bias.“When a great idea is there and then it’s only talked about because of the social implications, that must be heartbreaking for creators who spend years on something,” Ms. Twigg said. “To get it into the world and the only thing anyone wants to talk about are the ways it came up short. So we’re trying to help make that not happen.”On Being Transgender in AmericaElite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.Transgender Youth: A photographer documented the lives of transgender youth. She shared some thoughts on what she saw.Remote Work: Remote work during the pandemic offered some people an opportunity to move forward with a transition. They are now preparing to return to the office.Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.The consulting work runs the gamut of a production. The consulting companies sometimes are asked about casting decisions as well as marketing plans. And they may also read scripts to search for examples of bias and to scrutinize how characters are positioned in a story.“It’s not only about what characters say, it’s also about when they don’t speak,” Ms. Twigg said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, there’s not enough agency for this character, you’re using this character as an ornament, you’re going to get dinged for that.’”When a consulting firm is on retainer, it can also come with a guaranteed check every month from a studio. And it’s a revenue stream developed only recently.Michelle K. Sugihara, the executive director of Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, a nonprofit.Tracy Nguyen for The New York Times“It really exploded in the last two years or so,” said Michelle K. Sugihara, the executive director of Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, a nonprofit. The group, called CAPE, is on retainer to some of the biggest Hollywood studios, including Netflix, Paramount, Warner Bros., Amazon, Sony and A24.Of the 100 projects that CAPE has consulted on, Ms. Sugihara said, roughly 80 percent have come since 2020, and they “really increased” after the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2021. “That really ramped up attention on our community,” she said.Ms. Sugihara said her group could be actively involved throughout the production process. In one example, she said she told a studio that all of the actors playing the heroes in an upcoming scripted project appeared to be light-skinned East Asian people whereas the villains were portrayed by darker-skinned East Asian actors.“That’s a red flag,” she said. “And we should talk about how those images may be harmful. Sometimes it’s just things that people aren’t even conscious about until you point it out.”Ms. Sugihara would not mention the name of the project or the studio behind it. In interviews, many cited nondisclosure agreements with the studios and a reluctance to embarrass a filmmaker as reasons they could not divulge specifics.Studios such as Paramount Pictures have been hiring consulting firms like Culture House and CAPE.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesSarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organization, said her group had been doing consulting work informally for years with the networks and studios. Finally, she decided to start charging the studios for their labor — work that she compared to “billable hours.”“Here we were consulting with all these content creators across Hollywood and not being compensated,” said Ms. Ellis, the organization’s president since 2013. “When I started at GLAAD we couldn’t pay our bills. And meanwhile here we are with the biggest studios and networks in the world, helping them tell stories that were hits. And I said this doesn’t make sense.”In 2018, she created the GLAAD Media Institute — if the networks or studios wanted any help in the future, they’d have to become a paying member of the institute.Initially, there was some pushback but the networks and studios would eventually come around. In 2018, there were zero members of the GLAAD Media Institute. By the end of 2021, that number had swelled to 58, with nearly every major studio and network in Hollywood now a paying member.Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, the advocacy organization, at its office in Manhattan.Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesScott Turner Schofield, who has spent some time working as a consultant for GLAAD, has also been advising networks and studios on how to accurately depict transgender people for years. But he said the work had increased so significantly in recent years that he was brought on board as an executive producer for a forthcoming horror movie produced by Blumhouse.“I’ve gone from someone who was a part-time consultant — barely eking by — to being an executive producer,” he said.Those interviewed said that it was a win-win arrangement between the consultancies and the studios.“The studios at the end of the day, they want to produce content but they want to make money,” said Rashad Robinson, the president of the advocacy organization Color of Change. “Making money can be impeded because of poor decisions and not having the right people at the table. So the studios are going to want to seek that.”He did caution, however, that simply bringing on consultants was not an adequate substitute for the structural change that many advocates want to see in Hollywood.“This doesn’t change the rules with who gets to produce content and who gets to make the final decisions of what gets on the air,” he said. “It’s fine to bring folks in from the outside but that in the end is insufficient to the fact that across the entertainment industry there is still a problem in terms of not enough Black and brown people with power in the executive ranks.”Still, the burgeoning field of cultural consultancy work may be here to stay. Ms. Twigg, who helped found Culture House with Raeshem Nijhon and Nicole Galovski, said that the volume of requests she was getting was “illustrative of how seriously it’s being taken, and how comprehensively it’s being brought into the fabric of doing business.”“From a business standpoint, it’s a way for us to capitalize on the expertise that we have gathered as people of color who have been alive in America for 30 or 40 years,” she said. More

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      in Television

      Isabel Torres, Actress Known for ‘Veneno’ on HBO Max, Dies at 52

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      Ms. Torres was one of three transgender performers to play Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez, a beloved Spanish television personality, in the eight-part streaming series.Isabel Torres, the Spanish actress best known for playing the transgender singer and television personality Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez in the HBO Max series “Veneno,” died on Friday. She was 52.Ms. Torres’s family confirmed her death in a statement on her official Instagram account. The statement did not specify a cause or say where she died.In recent years, Ms. Torres had documented her treatments for lung cancer on Instagram. In November, she shared a video in which she said she had been told she had only about two months to live.“Let’s see if I get over it,” she said. “And if not,” she added, “what are we going to do? Life is like that.” She said the video would be her last, though she continued to post photographs for several weeks.Ms. Torres had acted sporadically since the mid-1990s before she found her largest audience in 2020 in “Veneno,” as one of three transgender performers who portrayed Ms. Rodríguez, a transgender singer and television personality. In the show, Ms. Rodríguez, who was known as “La Veneno” (“The Poison”), rises to fame after being interviewed by a television journalist in a park in Madrid where she had been working as a prostitute. She becomes a fixture on Spanish television and the most prominent transgender person in the country before her death in 2016 at 52.“Veneno” is based on the book “Listen! Not a Whore, Not a Saint: The Memories of La Veneno” by the journalist Valeria Vegas. Created and directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, the series debuted on the Spanish streaming platform Atresplayer Premium in 2020 and was then picked up by HBO Max.Ms. Torres was the oldest of the three actors who played Ms. Rodríguez in the eight-part series. In one Instagram post, Ms. Torres said it was the role of a lifetime, adding that she had gained weight to transform herself for it.For her performance, she won an Ondas Award for best actress in a television series.Ms. Torres was born on July 14, 1969, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in the Canary Islands, according to imdb.com.In 1996, she became the first Canarian woman to have her gender legally changed on her identification, according to the Spanish news outlet Las Provincias.In 2005, she became the first transgender woman to be a candidate for the title of Las Palmas Carnival Queen, Las Provincias reported. Last year, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria honored her as its “favorite daughter.”Information about her survivors was not immediately available.In an interview with The Advocate last year, Ms. Torres said that she was surprised to discover how much she had in common with Ms. Rodríguez when she was cast in “Veneno,” and that she had seized on those similarities to shape her performance.“I think in it there was a lot of me, and in her there was a lot of all of us,” she said. “I never thought we would have a lot of similarities, and at the end, after seeing the character, learning her story, and learning to love her through her wounds, I understood that we share a lot in common.” More

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      in Television

      Amy Schneider on Her Whirlwind ‘Jeopardy!’ Run

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      She seemed unstoppable, but on Wednesday, it happened. After 40 wins, Amy Schneider, the “Jeopardy!” champion whose information recall often seemed faster than a search engine, was defeated.Schneider ended with the second longest streak in the history of the game and $1.4 million in total winnings. She was beat by Rhone Talsma, a 29-year-old librarian from Chicago, who answered the Final Jeopardy clue correctly when Schneider did not. His face after his win was one of absolute shock. (He said in an interview Wednesday that he had thought defeat was inevitable because of Schneider’s record.)Schneider, 42, an engineering manager who lives in Oakland, Calif., has been through a whirlwind couple of months, fulfilling a longtime dream of being on the show and contending with becoming a public figure as she rocketed to game-show fame.As a transgender woman, she dealt with bigotry online, responding to it graciously on social media; she also received a stream of encouragement and affirmation from those thrilled to see a transgender person succeed so mightily on television.In an interview on Wednesday, she spoke about her final game and what her run on “Jeopardy!” has meant to her. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Do you have one overwhelming emotion right now, or is it a mix of them?It’s definitely a mix. A lot of it is emotions that I had at the time, but the one that’s really different is that my fans on Twitter and everything are going to be sad. And it bums me out.Take me back to the beginning of this game. Do you remember how you were feeling?You know, I had a feeling about that day, some reason. You wouldn’t really think so from looking at the scores of the last week, but once I passed Matt Amodio, there was this like motivation — I could feel it slip. You know, Ken’s record still seems so far away. And the fatigue of this taping was really starting to add up. I couldn’t explain it even to myself, but I just could feel that something was slipping a little bit, however much I tried to fight it.Read More About ‘Jeopardy!’A New Legend: Her dazzling 40-game run is over, but Amy Schneider reached historic milestones for money won and consecutive victories.On a Roll: Schneider’s long streak is not a one-off: The show has seen an unusual trend of big winners lately. But why?Hosting Duo: Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik are sharing the role this season, putting an end to the speculation around the job — for now.A Rattled TV Institution: Replacing the late Alex Trebek has been an ongoing saga for the show. Here’s how the messy succession unfolded.How many games had you played that day?This was the third. It was right after lunch. And another thing I did kind of have a feeling about was Rhone. Ken would often say how, when he was eventually defeated, it was the person who was just friendly and wanted to hang out, wasn’t intimidated by him. That was definitely true of Rhone. And he was also really a fun guy to hang out with. And I was like, well, if it had to be someone, I’m glad it was him.What was the turning point of that game?There was one clue that both of us knew the answer to, and he beat me on the buzzer and then that gave him the Daily Double. And he — I think quite correctly — made the bold move and bet everything to really go for the win and it paid off for him. And once he had gotten that Daily Double, I knew that, at the very least, it was going to come down to Final Jeopardy.Walk me through that Final Jeopardy. How are you feeling about the category (Countries of the World)?I felt great about the category. Geography has always been a strong subject of mine. And then the clue came up, and it just wasn’t coming to me. And it was very frustrating.[The clue: The only nation in the world whose name in English ends in an “H,” it’s also one of the 10 most populous.]I remember my mind, as it was hopping through the world. I was like, “India; no. Pakistan; no. Nepal; no.” And then it just moved on and I was right there by Bangladesh and I didn’t get it.A lot of times during this run you’ve been totally secure going into Final Jeopardy. So this was kind of unusual, right?Yeah, it had happened a few times before, but not anytime recently. And so I’d sort of forgotten what that fear was like and that kind of pressure.How did it feel sinking in that it was over?I mean, it was tough. Playing “Jeopardy!” has been the most fun I’ve ever had and I didn’t want it to end. I knew it would some time, but it was tough to realize that the moment was finally there. That said, there was some relief as well. One of the first thoughts I had was, well, I don’t have to come up with any more anecdotes. And it had been a lot, going out of town every week, and it was just nice to be like, OK, I can just get back to my normal life with Genevieve [Schneider’s girlfriend].I can only imagine how mentally and emotionally taxing it was. Describe how you felt after a day taping five games.Just done. I would call Genevieve and let her know what happened and then go back either to the hotel room or the airport, depending what day it was, and just like sit there, lie there and just do nothing. Not think, not read on my phone, just like nothing for like an hour every time.What did you learn from this experience, first in terms of trivia, and then in terms of your life and who you are?Well, definitely Bangladesh. I can tell you that. It’s mainly around some of the stuff I missed. Like the Field Museum the other day [the correct response to Final Jeopardy] — that was frustrating.And in terms of your life more broadly?I think the main thing that I got out of this was being OK with myself, how I look, how I present to the world. I’ve been openly trans for a little under five years now, and there’s still definitely lingering worry and dysphoria and things like that.Just to get so much positive feedback, so much support and so much acceptance, it enabled me — by the end of it — to look at myself on TV and be like, “Oh, you know, she’s pretty, she’s fun, what a likable person.” And I’ve never been able to see myself that way before.What kind of feedback have you heard from transgender “Jeopardy!” fans or just transgender people in general who have reached out to you?Just a ton of support. That’s been really great and really meaningful. I think that just as great, just as meaningful, has been hearing from parents, grandparents, loved ones of trans people and hearing either that they understand their trans loved ones better, or, a lot of times too, that I’ve eased their fears for their trans loved ones, seeing that trans people can succeed and they’re not going to be as limited as maybe they feared that they would be. More

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      in Music

      Taylor Mac Explores the Philosophy of the Hang

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      What kind of a party do you throw when you’re about to die? It’s an especially morbid question these days. But in “The Hang,” a new opera from the performer Taylor Mac, the answer involves equal parts philosophy and décor.The show, written with the composer Matt Ray, is about the death of Socrates, who after being convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and sentenced to death by hemlock, spent his final hours talking about virtue with his friends. And a few songs into a recent run-through of the production at the HERE Arts Center in downtown Manhattan, Mac — in a purple tulle robe and appropriately Socratic pandemic beard — started dragging out giant beanbag chairs while a bar took shape in the corner of the stage.“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,” Mac sang, as the eight-piece band leaned into a groove, “I’m in it for the hang.”Mac with cast members of “The Hang,” which takes the form of a gathering of “radical fairies” who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates. Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThat’s something of a credo for Mac, whose work, including the epic “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” celebrates community and connection through a radical queer lens. And “The Hang,” created with some of Mac’s longtime collaborators, puts those themes onstage again, in a phantasmagorical, hard-to-summarize mix.The show, which runs 105 minutes without an intermission, takes the form of a gathering of “radical fairies,” who come together each year to mourn, and re-enact, the death of Socrates. There’s plenty of wailing, but also queer romps, ancient Greek in-jokes, a comic monologue in the style of Noël Coward and a meditative number sung in a lavatory.And yes, there’s talk of virtue — not in the sense of starchy purity (to say the least), but the Socratic sense of knowledge and ceaseless questioning, which for Mac is not just a matter of logical argument, or even words.From left, Trebien Pollard, El Beh and Queen Esther. Mac’s longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle designed the costumes.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“One angle I wanted to go with in this show was to say there’s more,” Mac said in a video interview. “The Socratic questions can also be expressed physically, aesthetically and sonically.”“The Hang,” which began previews Thursday and runs through Feb. 20, may seem like a riposte to the pandemic, which shut down not just theater but also, for a time, most nonvirtual hanging out. (The opera, which is being produced by HERE, was originally set to have its premiere earlier this month as part of the Prototype Festival, which was canceled because of the Omicron surge.)The show was inspired by Plato’s “Apology,” an account of the trial of Socrates. It was so relevant, Mac said, to the way conversations about virtue today “are being manipulated to end curiosity.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut Mac said the idea began germinating several years ago, as a “palate cleanser” after “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” a sprawling meditation on American history through 246 songs, which Mac performed as a 24-hour marathon in 2016 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.The initial impulse was to make a solo theater piece based on Plato’s “Apology,” an account of the trial of Socrates, which Mac had recently read for the first time. “I wanted to do something simple,” Mac said. “And it was also so relevant to what’s been going on — the conversation about justice and virtue, and how those things were being manipulated to end curiosity.”The jazz vocalist Kat Edmonson was persuaded to join the production. It’s her first stage role.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBut nothing with Mac, a self-described maximalist, stays simple, or small. In late 2019, “The Hang” had turned into an ensemble piece, and he sent a preliminary script to Ray, who had arranged the songs in “A 24-Decade History.”Ray, who has played jazz since he was a child, said his sonic entry point was a wailing saxophone, which became the sound of the poison, played in the show by a trio that sometimes roams the stage, as if spreading it. “I just started hearing this sound in my head,” he said. As Mac kept emailing him lyrics (in no particular order), Ray composed what became the show’s 26 songs, drawing on New Orleans jazz, swing, soul jazz, touches of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and other influences, though he hesitated to affix any firm labels. “I don’t like to write things that are an impression,” Ray said. “I just wrote the things I like to play.”Trebien Pollard applying makeup before a dress rehearsal.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMac describes the show as a kind of “fever-dream prayer,” an idea that’s literalized by the set, created by the costume designer Machine Dazzle, another longtime collaborator. He’s the one who suggested that the action was actually set inside Socrates’ body, complete with a fabric-draped proscenium as the rib cage.The vibe is wild and messy excess, though Dazzle said the pandemic had subtly affected his approach to costuming, and not just because the price of tulle had doubled.“People are different from the way they were two years ago,” he said. “You can tell they’ve been thinking. They’re in their head more.”Early in the 2020 pandemic lockdown, the core creative team started having virtual hangs twice a month, to talk about the show (and what they missed about seeing each other in person). The first workshop was held in October 2020, in a tent in a plaza in downtown Brooklyn.The show’s choreographer Chanon Judson.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe director Niegel Smith.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Machine Dazzle, the scenic and costume designer.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Matt Ray, the composer and music director.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Niegel Smith, the director, said the casting was about “curating friendship,” as well as artistry. The company of nine performers and eight musicians (who are choreographed into the show) are a mix of veterans of previous Mac projects and new collaborators, including the jazz vocalists Kat Edmonson and Queen Esther and the Broadway veteran Kenneth Ard (“Cats,” “Starlight Express,” “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”).Ard had already left theater when the pandemic hit, and was working as a corporate chef. He moved to San Francisco during the lockdown, but came back to New York to audition at the recommendation of Dazzle, a friend.“I was tired of the commercial theater thing, but I hadn’t experienced really artistic theater, as I feel this is,” he said in a video interview. “Matt Ray’s score just blew me away. I just thought, I have to sing these songs.”Wesley Garlington during rehearsals.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesEdmonson was recruited by Ray, with whom she has performed at Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center and elsewhere. It’s her first stage role and, in the song “Virtue,” a chance for some serious scatting, something she has only recently added to her own live shows. “It’s kind of a new thing for me,” she said. “It’s so much fun.”The physical demands of “The Hang” aren’t quite as extreme as those of Mac’s last play, “The Fre,” which put the actors — and the audience — in a giant ball pit. (The play, directed by Smith, was still in previews at the Flea when the pandemic hit.)Still, at the recent rehearsal for “The Hang,” the performer El Beh’s big skirt festooned with Medusa heads kept knocking over the urn where the cast members burn their mock-Socratic beards during “OK Boomer,” a riff on cultural ephemerality. And there was strategizing over the best way to flop onto a giant pouf during an extremely up-tempo philosophical dialogue called “The Ephemeral.”“I wanted to find out, can we be as theatrical as possible, can we bring the queer culture into it,” Mac said of approaching the work.Justin J Wee for The New York Times Chanon Judson, the choreographer, described the movement, like so much of the show, as a collage. “I really like to scan the room and sponge in everyone’s idiosyncratic ways of being in the space,” she said.In Plato’s “Apology,” the downfall of Socrates is blamed on Aristophanes, who in his play “The Clouds” had ridiculed Socrates as a charlatan, helping to turn public opinion against him. “The Hang” certainly gets its digs at Aristophanes. But in Mac’s retelling, if Socrates has a foil, it’s Plato himself, who lurks around the action, taking it all down on an ancient Greek stenograph.Plato was famously critical of theatricality, condemning drama as a form of lying that manipulates the public, with sometimes dangerous consequences. It’s an idea “The Hang” turns inside out.“I wanted to find out, can we be as theatrical as possible, can we bring the queer culture into it, and find a way to express a truth rather than a lie?” Mac said. “You can’t hide when you sing. You can try to, but you always end up telling some kind of truth about who you are.” More

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      in Television

      Amy Schneider Wins the Most Consecutive ‘Jeopardy!’ Games of Any Female Contestant

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      Ms. Schneider won her 21st “Jeopardy!” game in a row, bringing her total earnings to $806,000.When Amy Schneider was an eighth grader in Dayton, Ohio, her fellow students voted her most likely to appear on “Jeopardy!”They underestimated her.On Wednesday, Ms. Schneider, 42, an engineering manager from Oakland, Calif., became the first woman in the show’s history to achieve 21 consecutive wins, surpassing Julia Collins, who had set the record of 20 wins in 2014.“I never dreamed of matching Julia’s streak,” Ms. Schneider wrote on Twitter. “It’s hard to say how I felt: proud, dazed, happy, numb, all those things.”In an interview on Thursday, Ms. Schneider said that when she was not concentrating on the answers, she was thinking about whether she might beat Ms. Collins’s record.“I could pretend that I didn’t have my eye on the various leaderboards at that point, but I was definitely aware,” she said. “I knew what was at stake.”The episodes were filmed in September and October, but Ms. Schneider did not make her television debut until Nov. 17. After each episode, she went on Twitter to write colorful play-by-play accounts of her wins or to post updates about her cat, Meep.This week, when she notched her 20th win, she described how she had nearly missed her chance to tie Ms. Collins’s record when one of her fellow contestants, Josette Curtis, began gaining on her.“Josette, a registered dietitian, went on a bit of a run in the Vitamin category, and all of a sudden my shot at a runaway was in doubt,” Ms. Schneider wrote. “And if Josette found the last Daily Double, she could potentially take the lead!”In the end, Ms. Schneider handily won that game and the following episode.Her 21st win came when she correctly identified the ship that Officer Charles Lightoller had boarded on April 15, 1912.Her answer, “What is the Carpathia?” — the ship that rescued the roughly 700 surviving crew members and passengers of the Titanic — brought her total prize money to $806,000, the fifth highest amount won by any “Jeopardy!” contestant and the highest amount won by a female contestant in the show’s history.Ms. Schneider holds the No. 4 spot overall on the list of “Jeopardy!” contestants with consecutive wins. No. 1 on that list is Ken Jennings, now a “Jeopardy!” co-host, who won 74 consecutive games in 2014. Ms. Schneider was congratulated by previous winners like Larissa Kelly, who appeared on the show in 2008 and 2009 when she was a graduate student and who once held the record for highest-earning female contestant.“Well, it was fun to hold a Jeopardy! record for a few years,” Ms. Kelly wrote on Twitter. “But it’s been even more fun to watch @Jeopardamy set new standards for excellence, on the show and off.”Ms. Schneider, a transgender woman, lives in Oakland with her girlfriend, Genevieve.As a child, she watched “Jeopardy!” with her parents, she said, and dreamed of being a contestant one day. She read voraciously and absorbed trivia. In grade school, she participated in geography bee competitions and made it to the top 10 in Ohio in 1992.“I got a National Geographic atlas for that,” Ms. Schneider said.When the opportunity to appear on “Jeopardy!” arose, she said, she felt unsure about how to discuss her gender identity.In the end, she decided to acknowledge it simply — by wearing a pin bearing the trans pride flag during an episode.The decision, Ms. Schneider said, was in part inspired by Kate Freeman, who wore a similar pin in December 2020 when she became what many believe was the first openly transgender woman to win on “Jeopardy!”“It was something that I wanted to get out there and to show my pride in while not making it the focus of what I was doing there,” Ms. Schneider said. “Because I was just there to answer trivia questions and win money.”Ms. Schneider’s record has brought positive attention to the long-running quiz show after it was rocked by drama over who would permanently succeed Alex Trebek, the host for more than 36 years.Mr. Trebek died in November 2020 of pancreatic cancer. He was 80.Over the summer, Sony Pictures Entertainment, which produces the show, announced that Mike Richards, an executive producer on the show, would be the permanent host. The decision disappointed “Jeopardy!” fans who had become invested in a series of celebrity guest hosts the show appeared to be auditioning to replace Mr. Trebek.The show then had to contend with the fallout from a report by The Ringer that revealed offensive comments Mr. Richards had made about women on a podcast in 2014. Mr. Richards resigned as host and executive producer shortly after the report was published.Sony later announced that it would keep Mr. Jennings and Mayim Bialik, a sitcom actress, as its hosts.Ms. Schneider is not allowed to say how far she got on the show. The next episode, in which she competed against Nate Levy, a script coordinator from Los Angeles, and Sarah Wrase, an accountant from Monroe, Mich., was scheduled to air on Thursday.Ms. Schneider said her advice for anyone who wanted to replicate her success was “just be curious.”She added: “The way to know a lot of stuff is to want to know a lot of stuff.”Kitty Bennett More