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      in Theater

      When the Wig Is a Character: Backstage at Jocelyn Bioh’s New Play

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      The styles in “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” in previews on Broadway, require a wig designer, several braiders, some synthetic hair and lots of patience.Known for her amusing scripts and plaited hairstyles, Jocelyn Bioh can count only three times when she was without braids. “There’s a real freedom in getting your braids done,” she said. “Then you don’t have to worry about your hair for the next few weeks.”The playwright’s lifelong commitment to interwoven hairdos inspired “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” a Broadway comedy about a day in the life of a hair braiding salon. It’s most likely the first Broadway play to shine a spotlight on Black women’s hair, and what it takes to style it.Set in Central Harlem, around 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue (where many of these salons are clustered), “Jaja’s” presents a spirited group of West African hair stylists as their designs take shape and they juggle the uncertainties and perplexities of their new lives here. Because these women are rarely part of conversations about immigration, Bioh felt it was important for audiences to hear their stories.In writing the play, Bioh (“Nollywood Dreams,” “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play”) sought to put a face to something that was likely to be unfamiliar to many theatergoers. “I want to take them into this really unique, funny, crazy, exciting, in some ways mundane space that holds women who all have incredible stories,” said Bioh, a native New Yorker whose parents emigrated from Ghana. “That’s what I’m trying to unpack in my play. What’s the other? What’s in the other?”A mock-up of the wig, one of the play’s more colorful hair designs.Alongside the comedy and drama, “Jaja’s” features a multitude of strand mastery, as Bioh and the director Whitney White (“Our Dear Dead Drug Lord”) were determined to show a range of hairdos coming to life onstage. To pull this off, most of these styles are executed in real time with a little stage magic courtesy of wigs constructed by the hair and wig designer Nikiya Mathis. Cast members, who braid hair onstage, practiced during rehearsals on wigs she designed for the performance.“There are so many moving pieces to the show that involve hair, and it’s not just me backstage,” Mathis said. “It’s also the actors onstage, it’s what Jocelyn has written, and it’s what Whitney will be helping us to reveal.”“Part of that,” she continued, “is going to be the magic of figuring out how we’re going to construct the wigs and how to potentially take them apart.”The show is running about 90 minutes, without an intermission, yet these hairstyles can take anywhere from a couple of hours to a whole day to complete. There’s also the art of the craft. Creating a single braid starts with a cluster of hair: fingertips planted against the scalp, grasped at the roots of three sectioned tufts, deftly and repeatedly crocheted until a pattern emerges. The options are endless. The humble braid can stand alone, of course, but when woven loosely, it becomes the box braid. Woven against the scalp, it becomes the cornrow. Woven infinitesimally, it becomes the micro.Building wigs that mimic these looks is labor intensive, and audiences are just beginning to see how the production, in previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, pulls it off. This summer we followed along on the assembly and design of one of the flashier styles, a wig known as Jaja’s Strawberry-Swirl Knotless Afro-Pop Bob, worn by the actress Kalyne Coleman in the show.Sew, Braid, Dye: One Wig, Many HandsThe wig-making process begins when a gallon-size poly bag is fitted on the actor’s head to make a mold. Once the measurements are taken and the hairline is drawn, the bag is removed, and the mold is filled with polyester fiber and placed on a canvas wig block. Lace is secured to the frame, which serves as the wig’s foundation, and finally strands of hair are sewn in one by one.The show’s hair and wig designer, Nikiya Mathis, dyes the wigs in a solution of water and semi-permanent color. The more saturated the water is with dye, the deeper the pigment. She then agitates the hair to ensure all the strands attain the desired hue.The hair design team builds the look together, with each stylist completing one braid at a time. Human hair is woven into the lace infrastructure, then small pieces of synthetic hair are added to give each braid length and fullness. More synthetic hair is bunched and teased at the ends of each braid to create volume for the puff.Before the fitting, Kalyne Coleman’s real hair was braided into cornrows, which sit close to her head, so that the wig would fit over it easily. Then a stocking cap is placed over her head and secured with pins. The wig is then applied, and baby hair is pulled out. The edges are curled with gel to complete the look. More

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      in Music

      Gloria Coates, Composer Who Defied Conventions, Dies at 89

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      A Wisconsin native, she was among the most prolific female composers of symphonies, 17 in all, finding particular prominence in Europe, where she lived.Gloria Coates, an adventurous composer who wrote symphonies — she was one of the few women to do so — as well as other works, pieces that were seldom performed in her home country, the United States, but found audiences in Europe, where she lived much of her professional life, died on Aug. 19 in Munich. She was 89.Her daughter, Alexandra Coates, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Ms. Coates composed 17 symphonies, along with numerous works for small ensembles and voice. In 1999, when she was working on her 11th symphony, the composer and critic Kyle Gann wrote in The New York Times that “Ms. Coates’s symphonies are dark and sensuous, and distinguished by an imaginative use of orchestral glissandos (gradual rather than stepwise changes of pitch, like slow sirens), which culminate powerfully in drawn-out crescendos.”The glissando continued to be her calling card, Mr. Gann said this week by email.“Gloria owned the orchestral glissando the way van Gogh said he owed the sunflower,” he said. “The slow pitch slides that run across the surfaces of her symphonies and string quartets can be difficult for the performers to coordinate, which has probably made musicians less willing to present her music. But they make it absolutely distinctive and recognizable. And underneath those glissandos there is often a clear discipline of canons, palindromes and other simple musical structures.”“The effect,” he added, “is often like a painting of a beautiful edifice on which rain has impressionistically smeared the surface.”Ms. Coates first came to wide attention when her “Music on Open Strings” was performed by the Polish Chamber Orchestra at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music in 1978. Her work has since received only occasional bursts of attention in the United States — as in 1989, when her “Music on Abstract Lines” was given its world premiere at the New Music America festival in Brooklyn; and in 2002, when New World Records released the first recording of her works on an American label; and in 2019, when “Music on Open Strings” was performed at Zankel Hall in Manhattan by the American Composers Orchestra.In 2021, Edition Peters announced that it would begin publishing her works.Ms. Coates said her music “sometimes is melodic, but often derived from structures of microtones melted together.”“It is a way of thinking of music not as separate tones on a scale, as we have for centuries,” she told The Wausau Daily Herald of Wisconsin, her hometown newspaper, in 2021, “but as sounds gliding through time and space which have their own laws and still have roots in the historical musical tradition.”In 2005, the Crash Ensemble performed her Sixth String Quartet (1999) in Dublin.“Bleak and ascetic, strange and disturbing as her music may be, it’s also got a purity that makes it peculiarly compelling,” The Irish Times wrote then. “It’s not music that’s ever likely to leave even a single listener indifferent.”Ms. Coates and the conductor George Manahan in 2019 at Zankel Hall in New York City, where the American Composers Orchestra performed her “Music on Open Strings.”Jennifer TaylorGloria Ann Kannenberg was born on Oct. 10, 1933, in Wausau. Her father, Roland, was a state senator, and her mother, Natalina (Corso) Kannenberg, worked in weapons manufacturing during World War II and was later a nurse’s assistant.Gloria showed musical inclinations early.“The children in the 5-year-old kindergarten have a rhythm band,” The Wausau Daily Herald reported in early 1939. “Thomas Evenson, Jack Luedtke and Gloria Kannenberg brought drums from home.”By then she was also proficient on the toy piano. By 12 she was creating her own often unconventional music. In 1951, a composition of hers won an “excellent” rating in a national junior composers’ competition. But teachers and contest judges sometimes discouraged her more audacious departures from tradition.She told The Irish Times in 2005 that a key moment in her development came when, as a teenager, she attended a question-and-answer with the Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin, who would become a mentor. He told her that it was more important to follow her instincts than to follow predetermined rules.After graduating from high school in Wausau, she studied music and drama for a time at Monticello College in Illinois. She later studied at other institutions, including the Cooper Union in New York and Louisiana State University, which she attended after marrying Francis Mitchell Coates Jr. in 1959 and settling for a time in Baton Rouge. She earned a master’s degree in composition there.She continued her studies in New York, but after her marriage ended in divorce in 1969, she, her daughter and their dachshund boarded a ship for Europe. Ms. Coates, who had studied voice as well as composition, settled in Munich and for a time pursued a career singing opera. But fate intervened.“When I was 7,” Alexandra Coates said by email, “she was hit by another skiing student and was paralyzed in the upper back.”Ms. Coates gave up singing and focused on painting, another interest, along with music. She told The Irish Times that in the early 1970s, amid the terrorist attacks at the Olympics in Munich and the violence of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Munich building where she was living was thought to be a possible terrorist target. She moved her music manuscripts out of the building but continued to live there. (Her daughter was living with her father in the United States.) She was, she said, sending a sort of subliminal message to herself.“It was not until several months later that I realized that that music was so important, it was more important than my life,” she said.From then on, music became her primary focus. For years Ms. Coates curated a series in Germany devoted to American contemporary music. Her own compositional output covered a wide range. Her daughter said that for a time Ms. Coates held a job giving tours of the Dachau concentration camp to members of the U.S. Army. Among the works those tours inspired was her “Voices of Women in Wartime,” a setting of writings by women under various circumstances during World War II.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Coates is survived by a brother, Philip Kannenberg; a sister, Natalie Tackett; and a grandson.If her work wasn’t often heard in the United States, critics and other writers admired her originality. Simon Cummings, who writes the contemporary music blog 5:4, said by email that Ms. Coates had set herself apart from other out-of-the-mainstream composers as “one who doesn’t merely surprise or amuse you when you encounter their music for the first time, but who completely knocks you off your feet, and moves you very deeply and powerfully, even if, at the time, you’re not really sure why you’re experiencing such a strong reaction.”In 2014, the Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed called Ms. Coates simply “our last maverick.” More

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      in Music

      Are We Finally Ready to Take Tammy Wynette Seriously?

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      The unsung godmother of so-called “sad girl” music — and one of pop’s most wrenching chroniclers of feminized pain — has long been misunderstood.Earlier this month, at a concert in Arkansas, Lana Del Rey covered a song she’d never played live before: Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man.”The performance made headlines, even if most of the accompanying articles held “Stand by Your Man” — an exhaustively debated cultural Rorschach test about badly behaved men and the women who put up with them — and Wynette herself at arm’s length.People magazine called the original song “polarizing.” The website Stereogum referred to Wynette’s track as “controversial.” Rolling Stone noted that Del Rey “didn’t introduce the song or offer commentary on her intentions,” as if simply paying tribute to Wynette couldn’t have been enough of an intention. That article referred to Wynette’s 1968 hit as “a tune many considered an affront to the feminist movement of the late ’60s,” then linked to the publication’s recently revised list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, on which “Stand by Your Man” ranked No. 473.It was just another Rorschach test: Even 25 years after her death, nobody knows quite what to make of Tammy Wynette.Born Virginia Wynette Pugh in 1942, Wynette had a resonantly sad voice and a life story to match. Married at 17; divorced with three children by 23; in and out of disappointing and sometimes abusive relationships (most famously with her frequent duet partner, George Jones); a sufferer of chronic health problems and bizarre, unexplained acts of violence; gone too soon when she died in her sleep in 1998, at age 55.She was also, perhaps because of these experiences, one of the most wrenching chroniclers of feminized pain that popular music has ever known.Wynette and George Jones onstage in 1980 in Chicago. The couple’s tumultuous relationship was chronicled in the recent series “George & Tammy.”Kirk West/Getty ImagesIn recent years, Dolly Parton has been canonized into an untouchable pop-cultural saint, and Loretta Lynn, rightly remembered as a feisty country pioneer when she died last year at 90, enjoyed a late-career renaissance collaborating with younger rock and alt-country artists. But Wynette’s legacy has become more complicated, perhaps because her tumultuous life and storied career have too often been conflated with the flattest and most literal reading of her signature song.Notoriously, when rumors of Bill Clinton’s infidelity surfaced during his 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton told a reporter, “I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” But was that ever what Wynette was actually advocating? (For one thing, Wynette was also known for singing one of the most famous songs about divorce.) A recent prestige-TV series and an incisive new book of music criticism offer their own answers, and varied ways to think about Wynette in a modern context.Late last year, Showtime aired the long-gestating “George & Tammy,” in which Jessica Chastain gives a steely, fearless performance as Wynette. (Her work earned an Emmy nomination, and she’s currently the betting favorite to win.) With Michael Shannon playing a convincingly unhinged, charismatic and ultimately contrite Jones, the series encompasses the six years of the couple’s troubled marriage and decades of their closely entwined careers.Jessica Chastain as Wynette and Michael Shannon as Jones in “George & Tammy.”Dana Hawley/Showtime, via Associated PressAs strong as the lead performances are, the series suffers from small anachronisms and fictitious dramatizations — no, Wynette was not in the studio when Jones finally nailed the vocal take of his heartbreaking late-career weepie “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” at least not physically — and it too often scripts Wynette reciting retrofitted platitudes that overexplain the era’s obvious sexism. (“If a girl singer got drunk like you boys do, they would toss her out of Nashville so fast,” she says to Jones, who is eating a raw potato in an attempt to alleviate a hangover.) But “George & Tammy” is most obviously marred by its answer to the classic music biopic conundrum: to lip-sync (and risk looking unserious) or to sing (and inevitably fall short of the source material)?Chastain tackles the songs herself, and though her pipes are decent, her performances never quite transcend honky-tonk bar karaoke. Watching the series, you miss the specific and elusive magic of Wynette’s own voice, making clear how easy it is to take for granted. As with the many lackluster and overly literal covers of “Stand by Your Man” that have been recorded over the years, the power of Wynette’s vocals and the emotional intelligence of her interpretations are somehow easier to appreciate in absentia.And what a voice it was: emotionally weighty but swooping and nimble, downright kaleidoscopic in its melancholy. “The thing about Wynette’s voice,” writes the critic Steacy Easton in a slim but thoughtful new book, “Why Tammy Wynette Matters,” “is that, often, how it catches and breaks, even how it twangs, are marks of domestic melodrama in her performance.”In prose that occasionally veers toward the academic but mostly stays succinctly readable, Easton effectively makes the case that Wynette is underappreciated and worthy of a serious critical reappraisal. The musician has long had a few strikes working against her. As Clinton’s curt 1992 dismissal attests, the women Wynette sang about and embodied in her songs often seemed at odds with second-wave feminism. She often sang about the sorts of people and situations that aren’t usually championed in a culture that devalues women’s work and doesn’t treat their perspectives seriously. Easton notes, astutely, that Wynette’s songs often depicted “failures of the domestic,” and that “Wynette’s best work is about when the most private failures become public scandals.”That intuitive toggling between the private and the public gets at why Wynette’s is one of the saddest voices ever put to tape. Its sadness comes not from rawness or feral inhibition, but from the constant, self-conscious mediation between how the singer is feeling and how she must present herself to the world.It’s that brimming-but-never-spilling-over quality that so many women, mothers and queer people have learned to use as a survival strategy. (Easton, who is trans and nonbinary, provides a refreshing perspective on Wynette and gender: “The idea of putting on your womanhood has a tender resonance,” they write.) It’s knowing exactly how to fold a napkin to dab your mascara so no one knows you’ve been crying. Or, as Reba McEntire sings in an affecting 2019 ballad called “Tammy Wynette Kind of Pain,” it’s when “you don’t want him to see you crying, so you’re crying in the rain.” It’s also, in some cases, about the sacrifice of swallowing that pain to protect a child’s feelings — about spelling out “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” rather than explaining what it means.Despite her cultural association with standing by her man, Wynette actually divorced four times. In Ken Burns’s 2019 documentary “Country Music,” the singer-songwriter Jeannie Seely notes the irony that while Lynn’s songs often embodied the persona of the feisty woman ready to kick her man to the curb, she was the one who stood by her man for his entire life. Seely mused, of Wynette and Lynn, “I always kind of thought they wrote each other’s songs.”Wynette on her tour bus in 1971. Al Clayton/Getty ImagesOnstage in Arkansas, a state abutting Wynette’s own Mississippi birthplace, Del Rey put her into yet another modern context — perhaps one that made the most sense yet. I’ve often considered Wynette to be an unrecognized godmother of so-called “sad girl” music, that somewhat nebulous aesthetic that initially flourished on the microblogging website Tumblr, and of which Del Rey has become an unofficial icon. While there’s something explicitly womanly about Wynette’s sadness — “this ain’t no little girl heartache,” McEntire sings in her definition of “Tammy Wynette pain” — Del Rey’s cover brings Wynette’s music to a generation and a type of listener less inclined to dismiss the expression of feminine pain as weakness. As the critic and artist Audrey Wollen once said of her playfully defined “Sad Girl Theory,” “there is an entire lineage of women who consciously disrupted the status quo through enacting their own sorrow.” Which sounds like yet another way of talking about that Tammy Wynette kind of pain.That type of subversion pervades Wynette’s exquisite and deeply felt performance of “Stand by Your Man,” too — a performance that no one has come close to topping. The Chicks play it too perky; Lyle Lovett’s version is winkingly smarmy; Carla Bruni’s cover … well … exists. Del Rey, though, seems to understand something about the song’s tension and dynamism, its paradoxical earnest irony. But even an eerie A.I. recording speculating what it might sound like if “Del Rey” recorded a “studio version” of “Stand by Your Man” can’t quite fathom the song’s murky depths as well as Wynette could. Again, the voice you miss is distinctly hers.Maybe I am able to come to it with less baggage than I may have had I lived through the particular culture war it spawned in 1968, but I do not listen to this song — or, for that matter, Wynette’s devastating 1967 breakout hit “I Don’t Want to Play House” — and hear a ringing endorsement of heterosexual monogamy, female submission and male supremacy. I hear a quavering teardrop of a voice acknowledge and sing like she means it, “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.” And then I hear her issuing one of the most zinging backhanded compliments in the history of patriarchy: “If you love him, oh be proud of him/’cause after all, he’s just a man.” More

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      in Movies

      Overlooked No More: Chick Strand, Pioneering Experimental Filmmaker

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      Often turning her lens on women, she emerged as one of independent cinema’s fiercest proponents on the West Coast.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In Chick Strand’s 1979 film “Soft Fiction,” five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories, including one who describes being molested by her grandfather. As she talks, images of her performing household activities like cooking breakfast appear in splintered frames and enigmatic shapes.“It is a film about women who win,” Strand explained in a 1998 interview with the conceptual artist Kate Haug for the journal Wide Angle. “It is not about women who were victims or who had survived.”“They carry on,” she added, and by doing so they become “more potent, more powerful, more of themselves.”In “Femme Experimentale,” a research paper based on her interviews with several pioneering female filmmakers, Haug wrote that Strand’s “experimental techniques” in that 55-minute film disrupted “the visual codes of documentary film” with its “poetic transitions between narrators.”“Soft Fiction,” which is regularly screened in university film programs, retrospectives and museums around the world, was one of dozens of movies made by Strand, an experimental filmmaker who often trained her lens on women. Among the others were “Anselmo and the Women” and “Fake Fruit Factory,” both from 1986.Strand was a late bloomer by the standards of her day: She didn’t make her first film until she was 34. But she would go on to have momentous impact on the West Coast’s experimental film movement.A still from Strand’s film “Fake Fruit Factory” (1986), about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.Canyon Cinema Foundation“She rejects the classification of ‘feminist artist,’” the film scholar Gene Youngblood told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 1999, when some of Strand’s films were being shown at the College of Santa Fe. “And yet she has produced some of the most memorable portraits of female characters in the history of cinema.”Though she never achieved the same level of fame as contemporaries like Barbara Hammer and Shirley Clarke, scholars say her work was just as groundbreaking.Chick Strand was born Mildred Totman on Dec. 3, 1931, in Berkeley, Calif., to Russel and Eleanor Totman. Her father was a bank teller, her mother a homemaker. (Chick was a nickname given to her by her father).She first developed an interest in film while studying anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. By then she had already dabbled in photography.In the 1960s, inspired by the growing free speech movement, Strand began hosting makeshift screenings in her backyard with her first husband, Paul Anderson Strand, an artist, and the experimental film impresario Bruce Baillie. These “happenings,” as they called them, were intended to showcase highly personal, often esoteric audiovisual experiments among friends. As word spread, they quickly became carnivalesque productions, with Strand, Baillie and other regulars dressing in costumes and performing live while the films were shown to an increasingly large group of strangers.A still from Strand’s “Soft Fiction” (1979), in which five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories.Canyon Cinema FoundationIn 1961, she founded The Canyon Cinemanews, a journal for local filmmakers that Stanford University called “the main organ of the independent filmmaking community” when it purchased the journal’s archives in 2010. The journal offered what it described as “a cornucopia of announcements, letters, classifieds, how-to information, call-outs and more” for local filmmakers who lacked access to Hollywood.In 1966, the same year she began studying ethnography at the University of California, Los Angeles (and the same year her son, Eric, was born), Strand presented a three-minute short, “Angel Blue Sweet Wings,” at the New York Film Festival. The film captured the luminous, psychedelically colored landscape of Strand’s second home, in Mexico, through a roaming, almost dancing camera, with the faces of her friends collaged seamlessly over fuzzy bodies, plants and mountains. It was described as “an experimental film poem in celebration of life and visions” by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.In 1967, Strand helped start the Canyon Cinema collective with Baillie and the filmmakers Lawrence C. Jordan, Robert Nelson, Lenny Lipton and Ben Van Meter. The organization — part pop-up cinematheque, part artists’ cooperative — distributed experimental films by now-famous directors like Hammer, Clarke and Peggy Ahwesh. Canyon Cinema later became a full-time nonprofit, with many of its members’ works incorporated into the National Film Registry.By then Strand and her second husband, Neon Park, the artist known for his imaginative album covers, were splitting their time between California and Mexico. In Mexico, she began to explore assemblage and ethnography more formally in her art, resulting in several works now considered landmarks of West Coast cinema, including “Fake Fruit Factory,” about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.“I’d be tripping over the rocks and speaking this terrible Spanish,” Strand told L.A. Weekly in 2006. “But I was so incredibly interested, and people really responded.”Strand with her second husband, the artist Neon Park. They split their time between homes in California and Mexico.Canyon Cinema FoundationStrand then delved into what would become perhaps her best-known work: a 20-year trilogy of ethnographic films on the life of Anselmo Aguascalientes, a poor Mexican Indian tuba player. The first of these, “Anselmo” (1967), about his music, “represents an early example of Chick Strand’s abiding interest in documenting people, objects, animals and events through a heightened and poetic subjectivity, while at the same time using assemblage techniques that allow her to incorporate disparate, sometimes jarring elements,” Maria Pramaggiore, a professor of media studies at Maynooth University in Ireland, wrote in an essay, “Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnography,” published in the book “Women’s Experimental Cinema” (2007).The techniques used in “Anselmo” — and later in “Cosas de Mi Vida” (1976), about Anselmo’s life, and “Anselmo and the Women,” about his wife and mistress — would, Pramaggiore noted, become hallmarks of Strand’s documentary practice.Another key work, “Kristallnacht” (1979), was more technical, using the whites and blacks of 16-millimeter film negatives to craft a luminous existential tribute to Anne Frank. In that film, reflections play across shots of women swimming in a pool of water, sparking glimmers in the chiaroscuro darkness of each inverted image.Throughout her filmmaking career, Strand taught at the film arts program at Occidental College in Los Angeles, ultimately becoming the program’s director. She retired in 1996 but continued to produce groundbreaking experiments in film in her twilight years. As she told L.A. Weekly a decade into retirement: “I’m very satisfied creating works of art. I can’t seem to keep my mind from doing this, from painting or planning new films. It’s just what I love to do.”Strand died of cancer on July 11, 2009, at 77. But she lived long enough to see 350 of her personal items permanently entered into the Motion Picture Academy’s Film Archive in 2007. More

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      in Theater

      Tina Howe, Playwright Best Known for ‘Coastal Disturbances,’ Dies at 85

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      She mixed insight and absurdity in a vast body of work that also included “Painting Churches” and “Pride’s Crossing,” both of which were Pulitzer finalists.Tina Howe, who in plays that could be extravagant productions or small-cast gems zeroed in on the humor, heartache and solidity of her characters’ lives, particularly the female ones, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 85.Her family said the cause was complications of a broken hip sustained in a recent fall.Ms. Howe was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama, for “Painting Churches” in 1984 and “Pride’s Crossing” in 1997. Her “Coastal Disturbances” had a 350-performance run on Broadway in 1987 and was nominated for the Tony Award for best play.In the foreword to a 1984 collection of her plays “Museum,” “The Art of Dining” and “Painting Churches,” she described those three works this way, a summary that applies to much of her output:“They share an absorption with the making and consuming of art, a fascination with food, a tendency to veer off into the primitive and neurotic, and of course a hopeless infatuation with the sight gag.”Her plays also generally share another attribute: They have multidimensional female characters of a type that were not often seen when she started out in the 1970s. As she told an interviewer in 2004 on the CUNY TV program “Women in Theater,” in those years many artistic directors were men who were interested only in plays in which female characters were victims. It was harder, she said, to get support for a play that featured “a strong woman, a sexy woman, a smart woman.”A scene from a 2012 production of Ms. Howe’s play “Painting Churches,” with Kate Turnbull, left, and Kathleen Chalfant.Carol RoseggSome of her plays were sprawling creations, like “Museum,” which, set in the gallery of a major art museum, had a cast of almost 50 when it premiered in 1976 at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater. “Coastal Disturbances,” as Ms. Howe described it in the preface to a 1989 collection, takes place on “a beach complete with heaving ocean and 20 tons of sand.”“I seem to go out of my way to make putting them on as hard as possible,” she wrote of those types of play.But she also wrote more intimate works, one of which, “Painting Churches,” took her career to a new level when it had its premiere at Second Stage in Manhattan in 1983. The play has just three characters: a married couple and their artist daughter, who as the play progresses paints her parents’ portrait, with truths about the family revealed as she goes about the task. Ms. Howe described it as a sort of reverse image of “Museum,” in which characters talk about art; in “Painting Churches,” the characters become art.Frank Rich, reviewing the production in The New York Times, invoked a line spoken by the father late in the play.“‘The whole thing shimmers,’ he says, in a line of art criticism that can also serve as an apt description of Miss Howe’s lovely play,” Mr. Rich wrote.After its run at Second Stage, the production moved to another Midtown theater and ran for months more.Annette Bening in the central role of Ms. Howe’s “Coastal Disturbances,” which opened Off Broadway in 1986.Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts“Coastal Disturbances” also opened at Second Stage, in 1986, and it, too, drew raves. That play is about four generations of vacationers gathered on a beach, though this is merely the premise.“It was really about the anguish of love and the ache of love and the exhilaration and the heartbreak and the joy,” Annette Bening, who played the central role, a photographer named Holly who has a relationship with a lifeguard, said in a phone interview.Ms. Bening, who earned a Tony nomination after the play moved to Broadway, was new to New York and largely unknown at the time. Holly, she said, was a thinly veiled version of Ms. Howe herself, which meant that she and Ms. Howe developed a bond.“She was incredibly incisive and hard-core intelligent,” Ms. Bening said, “and her plays reflected all of that.”Mr. Rich, reviewing “Coastal Disturbances,” called it “distinctly the creation of a female sensibility, but its beautiful, isolated private beach generously illuminates the intimate landscape that is shared by women and men.”“Coastal Disturbances” showed Ms. Howe’s flair for absurdity. In one scene, Ms. Bening was buried up to her neck in sand by the lifeguard (played by Tim Daly) while relating a somewhat erotic fantasy involving anthropomorphized dolphins.Cherry Jones, left, and Julia McIlvaine in a scene from Ms. Howe’s “Pride’s Crossing,” at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in 1997.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the introduction to a 2010 collection of her plays, Ms. Howe explained her penchant for wacky scenes.“I came of age during the heyday of Absurdism when it was the fellas who were shaking up perceptions of what was stage worthy — Pirandello, Genet, Ionesco, Beckett and Albee,” she wrote. “Their artistry and daring were thrilling as they scrambled logic and language, but where were their female counterparts, shaking up what was stage worthy for us? Since I was a hopelessly unevolved feminist with no ax to grind, who better to take on the challenge than me?”Mabel Davis Howe was born on Nov. 21, 1937, in Manhattan to Quincy and Mary (Post) Howe. (She was called Tina from childhood and made it her legal name when she turned 18, her son, Eben Levy, said.) Her father, an author, journalist and broadcast commentator, worked for CBS radio and ABC television. Her mother was an amateur artist who exhibited on Long Island.Marx Brothers movies were among Ms. Howe’s childhood passions and influenced her playwriting.“The whole point was to keep piling excess upon excess,” she wrote in the 1989 collection. “Why shouldn’t it be the same in the theater?”While she was attending Sarah Lawrence College, the actress Jane Alexander, a friend and fellow student, directed one of Ms. Howe’s first plays, “Closing Time.” Ms. Howe graduated in 1959 and then spent a year in Paris.“The most profound thing that happened to me that year was seeing ‘The Bald Soprano’ by Ionesco,” she told The Times in 1983. “That exploded me all over the place.”Ms. Howe in 2017 with her husband, Norman Levy, in their home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShe married Norman Levy, a teacher and writer, in 1961 and accompanied him to Maine and Wisconsin while he finished his degrees. In 1967, when Mr. Levy got a job teaching at the State University of New York at Albany (now the University at Albany), the couple moved to Kinderhook, N.Y., where Ms. Howe made a start working on plays in earnest.In 1970, her play “The Nest,” which she described as a “funny, erotic play about women and how fierce and pathetic they are when dealing with men,” received a production at the Mercury Theater on East 13th Street in Manhattan. That the first sentence of Clive Barnes’s review in The Times didn’t kill her fledgling career was something of a miracle.“It is always rash to use superlatives,” Mr. Barnes wrote, “but it does most forcibly occur to me that ‘The Nest,’ which boldly calls itself a play and even more boldly opened last night at the Mercury Theater, must be on any reasonable short list of the worst plays I have ever seen.”Ms. Howe, though, kept at it, drawing attention not only for “Museum” but also for “The Art of Dining” (staged at the Public Theater in 1979) and other plays. In 1983 she won an Obie Award for her recent works. Numerous other awards followed.Among her most successful plays after “Coastal Disturbances” was “Pride’s Crossing,” in which a 90-year-old swimmer looks back on her life. That piece was staged at Lincoln Center in 1997.“Old women have great power,’‘ Ms. Howe said at the time. “Magic is afoot with them. A lot of times they are not on this earth; their thoughts are in never-never land. But in with the magic and the dreaming is that anger that old women have. I wanted to put that voice, that fever, that sort of animal yelp of self-preservation on the stage.”André Bishop, producing artistic director at Lincoln Center Theater, recalled a playwright with a unique style.“Tina was a deliciously idiosyncratic writer whose playful wit and sense of the absurd infused all her work,” he said in a statement. “She was delightful, as were the plays written in her highly distinctive voice.”Ms. Howe and Mr. Levy settled in Manhattan in 1973 and had most recently lived in the Bronx. Mr. Levy died last year. In addition to her son, Ms. Howe is survived by a daughter, Dara Rebell, and three grandchildren.In an Instagram post yesterday, the playwright Sarah Ruhl called Ms. Howe both a friend and a mentor.“One of the last times I visited her,” Ms. Ruhl wrote, “she said: ‘I still want to write. Women are still an undiscovered country.’”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      Feminist Stories Are Being Set to a Pop Beat. But Are They Empowering?

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      Our critics debate how well shows like “Six,” “& Juliet” and “Once Upon a One More Time” engage with the inner worlds of women onstage.During the first act of “Once Upon a One More Time,” the Broadway jukebox musical that grooves to the Britney Spears oeuvre, a fairy godmother arrives with a present for Cinderella. A gown? No. Glass slippers? No. Cin has enough already. Instead, her godmother gifts her a copy of Betty Friedan’s 1963 best seller, “The Feminine Mystique.”It’s a clumsy gesture in the show, which plans to close next month. (Feminist thought has advanced in 60 years!) And arguably emblematic of a recent spate of Broadway musicals that set feminism to a pop beat, including “Six,” a zippy modern retelling of the lives of Henry VIII’s six wives; “& Juliet,” whose protagonist, miraculously alive, embarks on a girls’ trip of self-discovery; and “Bad Cinderella” (now closed), a chaotic rejiggering of the classic fairy tale. Aimed at girls and women (historically the majority of Broadway ticket buyers), these shows may be sincere attempts to engage with women’s issues — or they’re hollow efforts to capitalize on calls for change. Empty political gestures on Broadway? To quote a song used in two of these shows: “Oops! … I did it again.”On a recent morning, Laura Collins-Hughes, contributing theater critic and reporter; Salamishah Tillet, critic at large; and Lindsay Zoladz, pop music critic, gathered to debate facts and fairy tales. They discussed how narrowly these shows define empowerment, if they define it at all, and why Prince Charming gets the best song. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The recent musicals “Six,” “& Juliet,” “Bad Cinderella” and “Once Upon a One More Time” take female empowerment as their central theme. Are these shows actually empowering or legibly feminist?LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES I wouldn’t say any of them are feminist.SALAMISHAH TILLET Some are empowering, others are not. “Six” is partly feminist, because it shows the impact of King Henry VIII’s misogyny. With the exception of Anne Boleyn, most of his wives have been relegated to the margins. My 11-year-old daughter really loved that these women finally reclaimed their stories and did it with style! But I felt like I was at a fun pop concert rather than at a big Broadway musical.COLLINS-HUGHES “Six” drives me completely up the wall. It wants to have a good time in the neighborhood of spousal murder and abandonment, singing “I don’t need your love.” As if Henry’s love had anything to do with it. As if abuse is what a man’s love for a woman looks like.Lauren Zakrin, second from left, as Little Mermaid gets her voice back upon reading “The Feminine Mystique” in “Once Upon a One More Time.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLINDSAY ZOLADZ I like “Six,” but probably for the reason Salamishah doesn’t — it’s basically a pop concert. I do think the overarching problem with these musicals is the way they fail to define terms, presenting “empowerment” and “feminism” as given, unexamined virtues. Instead of the marriage proposal that supposedly leads to the happily ever after, it’s … empowerment ever after? “Once Upon a One More Time” provided the clearest distillation of the trend. Cinderella’s “feminist awakening” is spurred by her fairy godmother giving her “The Feminine Mystique.” Seriously. The book is treated like a magical talisman throughout the rest of the show, but its actual content is never engaged with. That seems beyond the show’s grasp. Though the book is on sale for $20 in the lobby gift shop.TILLET I gasped when she discovered the book.ZOLADZ Not in a good way, I’m guessing.Doesn’t Cinderella know that women’s studies syllabuses have moved on?TILLET Or that Friedan was heavily criticized for her bourgeois feminism back in the day? Is it weird that we are still locating the beginnings of feminism exclusively in the sexual liberation of straight, white, middle-class, stay-at-home 1950s wives? But that’s an ongoing problem, not just on Broadway.Why do you think we’re seeing these shows now? Is it a cynical attempt to appeal to female ticket buyers or something more organic?TILLET These shows, despite their best intentions, seem limited by their source material. There was a lot of Cinderella this year! The publicity appeal of anything Cinderella is obvious, so for Broadway theaters struggling to get audiences back into the theater, of course it is a ploy.From left: Justin David Sullivan, Melanie La Barrie, Lorna Courtney and Betsy Wolfe in “& Juliet.” With its thoughtful casting of a Black Juliet and the nonbinary character May, the show enables us to see Shakespeare differently, one critic said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCOLLINS-HUGHES “Bad Cinderella” could have been so much more than it was. It is a messy show, it’s always been a messy show, but in London it was actually fun. It had a bit of substance to it. And magic. The feminism, which was so clear and so dramatically propulsive in the London version, was wiped away for Broadway.I took my daughter to “Bad Cinderella” and afterward we had a conversation about the show’s messaging, which was confused at best. Is it asking too much of a musical to also have great messages?COLLINS-HUGHES This question makes me think we all live in fear of that riposte that often greets girls and women who won’t laugh along at a joke that’s not funny: “Where’s your sense of humor?” It’s perfectly legitimate to recoil from a show whose message bugs you, and all the more if it’s at odds with its girl-power, you-be-you marketing.And yet if a show is successful enough in other ways, the messaging may not matter. That was my delighted experience of “& Juliet.”TILLET This was definitely my favorite pop feminist musical of the year. I was genuinely intrigued by the conceit of what happens if Juliet doesn’t die. What life does she make for herself beyond the formula prescribed for her? The musical opens up possibilities for her as a protagonist. And with its thoughtful casting of Lorna Courtney as a Black Juliet and Justin David Sullivan as the nonbinary character, May, it enables us to see Shakespeare differently, too.COLLINS-HUGHES When it has a top-notch cast, “& Juliet” is a blast. But I am baffled that people perceive it as feminist. It really is not.ZOLADZ Say more!COLLINS-HUGHES I don’t mean that it’s anti-feminist, but I don’t think it’s particularly female-centered — not on Juliet, nor on Anne Hathaway [Shakespeare’s wife], who gets one of the subplots.“Bad Cinderella,” starring Linedy Genao, had a brief run this spring. “The feminism, which was so clear and so dramatically propulsive in the London version, was wiped away for Broadway,” one critic said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith the exception of “Six,” these shows are largely created by men. Does that explain anything?COLLINS-HUGHES Of course. It’s not that men can’t and don’t write women well or can’t imagine women’s lives. And it’s certainly not that artists should stick to writing only about people just like them. But they are writing from the outside. That can come with a lot of blind spots and a lot of misapprehensions.All of these musicals use a pop vernacular, “Bad Cinderella” somewhat less so. Is pop, particularly pop written and produced by men, a useful form for feminist discourse?ZOLADZ Something I’ve been thinking about regarding “Once Upon a One More Time” and especially “& Juliet,” which uses the songs of the massive millennial hitmaker Max Martin, is the lyrical limitation of a lot of modern pop music. Martin and the generation of pop architects who followed him treat lyrics almost as an afterthought. Martin has referred to his method of songwriting as “melodic math.” “& Juliet” was fun and more cleverly written than “Once Upon a One More Time,” but a lot of that had to do with the ironic distance between the lyrics themselves and the winking, metatextual way the characters employed them — like when “I Want It That Way,” by the Backstreet Boys, becomes not so much a love song as a narration of an argument between Shakespeare and his wife, who have conflicting opinions about how his latest play should end.TILLET I hated a lot of those pop songs and found them anti-feminist when they originally came out, but when I sang along with the “& Juliet” audience and my tween daughter, I found that they aged better than I had expected. Or maybe, because I’m now middle-age, I’m mistaking nostalgia for progress.COLLINS-HUGHES Inattention to lyrics is a limitation of jukebox musicals, but it doesn’t hold for original pop songs, which can be whatever the writer makes them. It would help, though, if more of the songwriters getting musicals produced were women.ZOLADZ I generally pay more attention to pop music than Broadway musicals, so I found the sound of these shows to be quite striking. Modern pop’s influence is everywhere, especially in a show like “Six,” which is full of electronic beats, hip-hop cadences and direct nods to artists like Beyoncé and Ariana Grande. Is that a trend you have observed over time? And given that this is such a golden age for female pop stars, do you think that crossover appeal has something to do with the rise of these empowerment musicals?COLLINS-HUGHES Musically, “Hamilton” changed Broadway, but it is very much a guy story. Having proved the hunger for modern pop musicals, it left a lot of room for female artists to fill.Do these shows do that filling?COLLINS-HUGHES Musically? Sometimes. But in terms of storytelling, generally no. There are such blinders on imagination, and there’s such an aversion to nuance. It’s a question of whom you’re trying to please. The perception of risk is about displeasing men, not the women and girls who might want to see smart, muscular new musicals.Megan Hilty, left, and Shoshana Bean in “Wicked,” which is partly about a girl learning to harness the power of her outrage to fight against injustice in the world.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDoes the success of the Barbie movie, directed and co-written by a woman, with its several song and dance numbers, point a way forward?COLLINS-HUGHES Absolutely, if the idea is to give the best numbers to the guys.ZOLADZ And the charisma! That’s what ultimately sank “Once Upon a One More Time” for me: Cinderella was often the least compelling character onstage. Juliet didn’t fare much better. I don’t know if blandly “empowered” female characters are the answer. Too often it just feels like a shortcut. Writing flawed, idiosyncratic and more interesting female characters seems like a worthier goal, but most of these shows don’t want to take the risk.TILLET If song choice in a musical is any indication of narrative priorities, “Once Upon a One More Time” had difficulty sustaining its attention on Cinderella and her awakening. Prince Charming got “Oops! … I Did It Again” and her stepmother had “Toxic.” When I watched “Barbie,” I realized how seductive patriarchy is onscreen or onstage, even when we say we are trying to smash it. Why do the Kens get that massive and amazing dance scene?COLLINS-HUGHES A story about or aimed at women is so seldom deemed interesting enough on its own. But Hollywood, like commercial theater, is often in the business of blandification. And who’s blander than Ken? I’d like to think audiences want more than that.These recent shows define empowerment narrowly, restricting it to questions of romantic and sexual relationships with men rather than any broader political awakenings. Why can’t these stories dream bigger or attempt something more intersectional?TILLET I do think a lot of these producers feel that they are being intersectional, simply through casting. But while I appreciate so much more diversity onstage, it is still not enough. The musicals would really have to try to dismantle various forms of oppression at once. That takes nuance, patience and a really radical imagination. An older musical, “The Color Purple,” was successful at this, which brings us back to the strength of the source material, Alice Walker’s novel, and then a sizable female team behind its Broadway staging. It is an understatement to say that the evolution of Celie, who endured such abuse and trauma, is far more compelling than Cinderella’s!ZOLADZ What I find missing from a lot of contemporary art about female empowerment is the way it focuses on the attainment of power and then stops there. What about stories about how easily power can corrupt those who have it? Yes, even women!COLLINS-HUGHES This is a thing that “Wicked” imagines. And two decades on, it’s still packing houses and making loads of money. That show is partly about a girl learning to harness the power of her outrage to fight against injustice in the world.TILLET I’ve seen “Wicked” twice recently. The depth of the storytelling — when the villain and heroine aren’t what they seem — it is just so good. Is it feminist? Maybe. Does it reveal the power and heartbreak of female friendship as the ultimate love story? Very much so. For that alone, it provides a wonderful model for how to really revel in the inner worlds of women onstage. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Barbie’ Debuts in Saudi Arabia, Sparking Delight, and Anger

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      Denounced in some Middle Eastern countries for undermining traditional gender norms, the hit movie is finding an audience in Saudi Arabia, illustrating the region’s shifting political landscape.On Friday night, Mohammed al-Sayed donned a pale pink shirt and denim overalls to join a friend at a movie theater in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, where the men settled in to watch a film about a doll on a mission to dismantle the patriarchy.Similar scenes played out across the conservative Islamic kingdom last weekend, as women painted their nails pink, tied pink bows in their hair and draped pink floor-length abayas over their shoulders for the regional debut of the movie, “Barbie.” While critics across the Middle East have called for the film to be banned for undermining traditional gender norms, many Saudis ignored them.They watched as the movie imagined a matriarchal society of Barbie dolls where men are eye candy. They laughed when a male character asked, “I’m a man with no power; does that make me a woman?” They snapped their fingers in delight as a mother delivered a monologue about the strictures of stereotypical femininity. Then, they emerged from the darkened theaters to contemplate what it all meant.“The message is that you are enough — whatever you are,” said Mr. al-Sayed, 21, echoing the Ken doll’s revelation.“We saw ourselves,” said Mr. al-Sayed’s friend, Nawaf al-Dossary, 20, wearing a matching pink shirt.Watching Barbie’s search for identity and meaning, Mr. al-Sayed said he was reminded of the fraught period when he started college and wasn’t sure of his place in the world. He said he believed that the movie had important lessons for men as well as women.“I felt like my mom should see the film,” he said.“All of our families — all families,” Mr. al-Dossary said, laughing.That this was happening in Saudi Arabia — one of the most male-dominated countries in the world — was mind-boggling to many in the Middle East. When “Barbie” opened on Thursday in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, it arrived suddenly and overwhelmingly. Moviegoers rushed to prepare Barbie-pink outfits. Some theaters scheduled more than 15 showings a day.Moviegoers wore pink during a screening of “Barbie” in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Thursday.Ali Haider/EPA, via ShutterstockA snide headline in the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat declared that Saudi cinemas had become “havens for Gulf citizens escaping from harsh restrictions” — a twist in a country whose people once had to drive to Bahrain to watch movies.Eight years ago, there were no movie theaters in the Saudi kingdom, let alone any showing films about patriarchy. Women were barred from driving. The religious police roamed the streets, enforcing gender segregation and shouting at women to cover up from head to toe in black.Since he rose to power, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 37, has done away with many of those restrictions while simultaneously increasing political repression, imprisoning conservative religious clerics, leftist activists, critical businessmen and members of his own family.Even now, despite sweeping social changes, Saudi Arabia remains a state built around patriarchy. By law, the kingdom’s ruler must be a male member of the royal family, and while several women have ascended to high-ranking positions, all of Prince Mohammed’s cabinet members and closest advisers are men. Saudi women may be pouring into the work force and traveling to outer space, but they still need approval from a male guardian to marry. And gay and transgender Saudis face deep-seated discrimination, and sometimes arrest.So as word spread through the kingdom that “Barbie” would debut on a delayed schedule — a sign that government censors were most likely deliberating over it — many Saudis thought the movie would be banned, or at least heavily censored. Bolstering their expectations was the fact that neighboring Kuwait banned the film last week.Lebanon’s culture minister, Muhammad Al-Murtada, also called for the film to be banned, saying that it violated local values by “promoting homosexuality” and “raising doubts about the necessity of marriage and building a family.” It is unclear if the government will follow his recommendation.Even in Arab nations that have allowed the film to be shown, it has faced intense criticism. The Bahraini preacher Hassan al-Husseini shared a video with one million Instagram followers calling the movie a Trojan horse for “corrupt agendas.”Even while Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has done away with many social restrictions in Saudi Arabia, he has increased political repression.Pool photo by Ludovic MarinAnd in Saudi Arabia, not everyone is receptive to the film. To the entrepreneur Wafa Alrushaid, who suggested that the film be banned in her country, its messages are a “distortion of feminism.”“I’m a liberal person who has called for freedom for 30 years, so this isn’t about customs and traditions, but the values of humanity and reason,” she told The New York Times. The film, she argued, excessively victimizes women and vilifies men, and she objected to the fact that a transgender actress had played one of the Barbies.“This film is a conspiracy against families and the world’s children,” Ms. Alrushaid, 48, declared.Many Arab critics of the movie expressed views similar to those of some American politicians and right-wing figures who have castigated the film as anti-male. The tussle in the Middle East over the movie illustrates how battles that sometimes echo the so-called U.S. culture wars are playing out on a different landscape.The animated film “Lightyear,” which showed two female characters kissing, was banned in several countries in the region last year. And six Gulf Arab countries issued an unusual statement last year demanding that Netflix remove content that violates “Islamic and societal values and principles,” threatening to take legal action.In Kuwait, religious conservatives have become more vocal in recent years, Gulf analysts say, broadcasting views that many Saudis would be hesitant to express in public now, fearing repercussions from the government.“Banning the movie ‘Barbie’ fits into a larger tilt to the right that’s increasingly felt in Kuwait,” said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University. “Islamist and conservative forces in Kuwait are relishing in these culture wars to prove their ascendancy.”Some Kuwaitis expressed astonishment that they would have to travel to the Saudi kingdom to watch the movie. Many pointed out the irony that Kuwait and Lebanon, despite objecting to the film, had long provided greater freedom of expression than many other Arab countries.Streaming out of movie theaters in Riyadh, people who watched “Barbie” seemed to leave with their own understanding.Lining up for “Barbie” in Dubai. Many Arab critics of the movie have expressed views similar to those of some American right-wing figures who have castigated the film as anti-male.Ali Haider/EPA, via ShutterstockYara Mohammed, 26, said that she had enjoyed the movie, dismissing the Kuwaiti ban as “drama.”“Even if kids saw it, it’s so normal,” she said.To Abrar Saad, 28, the message was simply that “the world doesn’t work without Ken or Barbie; they need to complete each other.”But to teenage girls like Aljohara and Ghada — who were accompanied by an adult and asked to be identified only by their first names because of their ages — the film felt deeper.“The idea was pretty realistic,” said Aljohara, 14, wearing a hot pink shirt underneath her black abaya. She said she liked that the film ended with a type of equality between men and women.“But it wasn’t nice that it ended with equality,” interjected Ghada, 16. “Because I feel like equality is a little bit wrong; I feel like it’s better for there to be equity because there are things a boy can’t do but you can do them.”Asked if they ever thought they would watch such a movie in Saudi Arabia, both exclaimed, with laughter: “No!”“I was expecting them to censor a lot of scenes,” Ghada said.In fact, it did not appear censors had cut anything major. A scene in which Barbie declares that she has no vagina and Ken no penis remained, as well as a scene with the transgender actress. The Arabic subtitles were rendered faithfully — including the word patriarchy.Hwaida Saad More

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      in Music

      The Future of Rap Is Female

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      The Future of Rap Is Female As their male counterparts turn depressive and paranoid, it’s the women who are having all the fun. Aug. 9, 2023 Like American men in general, our top male rappers appear to be in crisis: overwhelmed, confused, struggling to embody so many contradictory ideals. As a result, the art is […] More