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    Paulette Jiles, 82, Dies; Novelist Evoked the West in ‘News of the World’

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    A poet and memoirist as well, she drew a wide readership with her historical fiction, notably with a Civil War-era tale that was adapted for a movie starring Tom Hanks.Paulette Jiles, a horse-riding poet who wrote historical novels that evoked the grit and natural grandeur of the 19th-century American West, notably in “News of the World,” in which a Civil War veteran and a 10-year-old girl embark on a 400-mile journey in search of the girl’s relatives, died on July 8 in San Antonio. She was 82.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her step-granddaughter, Faith Elaine Lowry, who said the cause was gastric complications. Ms. Jiles disclosed in a blog post in June that she had been diagnosed with “some kind of nonalcoholic cirrhosis of the liver.”Ms. Jiles published six books of poetry, two memoirs and nine novels. Together, more than a million copies of her works have been sold in the United States, according to BookScan, a sales tracking system.Her novels drew inspiration from Civil War-era history and from her own horseback trail rides through Missouri and the Southwest as she explored the region’s fraught past in granular and seemingly lived-in detail, often through long, perilous journeys that her characters undertake.Her writing coupled extensive research with austere prose, snappy dialogue and textured characters who reappear from book to book, offering continuity to devoted readers.One character, based on a real historical figure, is the rugged and honorable Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, the Civil War veteran from “News of the World” (2016) who makes a living keeping a frontier public informed by reading aloud to them from newspapers. He becomes roped into a wildly hazardous journey from Wichita Falls, Texas, to San Antonio to return a stoic German girl to her relatives after she is recaptured by U.S. soldiers from the Kiowa tribe.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      An Indispensable Theater Incubator Faces a Troubled Future

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      On a sun-kissed summer day at the Connecticut shore, some 200 people huddled in a darkened room. They had come to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., to hear “Dead Girl Quinceañera,” a new play by Phanésia Pharel. The story of a Miami teenager who goes missing during her own birthday party, the play was performed by four young actresses, their scripts propped atop metal music stands.When Pharel, a playwright newly sprung from graduate school, arrived at the O’Neill a week before, the play was much shorter. It lacked an ending. But she had since found one. After the reading, she floated back into the afternoon on an artist’s high. “It’s a dream,” she said of her time at the center. “It’s a little bit of a utopia.”Pharel and three colleagues are the newest members of the National Playwrights Conference, which the O’Neill has hosted annually (barring a brief pandemic hiccup), since 1966. It is perhaps the country’s premiere spot for play development, its alumni functioning as a who’s who of American theater in the last half century.John Guare was among the first cohort, with “The House of Blue Leaves.” Those who followed him include August Wilson, Wendy Wasserstein, David Henry Hwang, Beth Henley, Samuel D. Hunter, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Dominique Morisseau, Jeremy O. Harris. (Musical theater alumni include Jeanine Tesori, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Robert Lopez.) Celine Song, another alum, sets a scene from her recent film, “The Materialists,” at the center.Actors rehearse a season from “Dead Girl Quinceañera,” a new play by Phanésia Pharel (seated in a yellow dress).Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThe actors performing work by participants of the National Playwrights Conference, which the O’Neill has hosted annually (barring a brief pandemic hiccup), since 1966.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesLula Britos, center, an actor.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Richard Greenberg, Playwright Whose ‘Take Me Out’ Won a Tony, Dies at 67

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      More than 30 of his plays were produced on Broadway and off. Many of them dealt with the manners and mores of New York’s upper middle class.Richard Greenberg, who won frequent praise as the American Noël Coward for his sharp-witted plays about the manners and mores of urbane, sometimes smug New Yorkers, and who received a Tony Award in 2003 for “Take Me Out,” his play about a gay baseball player, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 67.His sister-in-law, Janet Kain Greenberg, said the cause of his death, in a hospice, was cancer.A child of the middle-class Long Island suburbs, Mr. Greenberg rose to theater fame in the 1980s with a string of scripts that delved into the interior lives of the people he knew best: young, upwardly mobile urban professionals — yuppies, in the parlance of the time.Works like “Eastern Standard” (1987) and “The American Plan” (1990), two of his first major plays, were incisive and biting, but never cruel. His goal was to examine the bourgeoisie, but never to épater them.From left, Kieran Campion, Lily Rabe, Brenda Pressley, Mercedes Ruehl and Austin Lysy in the Broadway revival of Mr. Greenberg’s “The American Plan” in 2009.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHaving once aspired to be an architect himself, he used that profession as both an identity for many of his characters and an unspoken metaphor in his plays: How do the relationships we build on love and family and friendship bear up over time and under the stress of imperfect, if caustically funny, partners?“We’re always trying to make a cogent story out of our existence,” Mr. Greenberg told Princeton Alumni Weekly in 2016, “and people in my plays often feel they have the story, but almost invariably they’re wrong.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Ronald Ribman, 92, Dies; His Plays Mined the Absurdity of Existence

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      He set his frequently neurotic characters in bleak, morally ambiguous situations where laughter, as he put it, “is a measure of the sickness of society.”Two men are on the rooftop garden of a hospital in Manhattan. One is an Armenian grocer. He has cancer and a big mouth. The other is an art dealer, a self-loathing Holocaust survivor who also has cancer and is tired of his own voice. In between medical procedures, they bicker about the quagmire of the past.“You came out a big winner,” the grocer says.“Because I survived?” the art dealer says. “It doesn’t feel like a triumph.”“That’s because nothing we ever do feels like a triumph, because the mind’s a piece of garbage,” the grocer replies. “It’s never happy with what we do for it. I once took my mind down to Barbados for two weeks, and you know what it said to me? ‘You should have taken us to Jamaica!’”The verbal jousting took place in “Cold Storage,” a 1977 play staged at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway and written by Ronald Ribman, a mordantly funny playwright whose frequently surreal works grappled with God’s impatience, the past’s invasion of the present and, as he once put it, “a person’s right to fail as a human being.”Mr. Ribman’s “Cold Storage,” staged on Broadway in 1977, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. PlaybillIn “Harry, Noon and Night,” a 1965 Off Broadway production set in postwar Munich, Dustin Hoffman played a gay Nazi with a hunchback who quarrels with his roommate, a disturbed American painter who believes a caterpillar gave him syphilis. “The Journey of the Fifth Horse” (1966), also Off Broadway, was based in part on Ivan Turgenev’s short story “The Diary of a Superfluous Man,” and starred Mr. Hoffman as an editor at a publishing house who rejects a posthumous memoir by a 19th-century landowner who died friendless and broke. In “The Poison Tree” (1973), inmates and guards battle over the moral high ground in prison.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Diana Oh, Passionate Voice for Queer Liberation in Theater, Dies at 38

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      Mx. Oh’s politically provocative and often playful works, including the Off Broadway production “{my lingerie play},” asserted the right to be oneself while having fun.Diana Oh, a glitter-dusted experimental artist-activist whose theater works intertwined political provocation with profound compassion in rituals of communion with audiences, died on June 17 at their home in Brooklyn. Mx. Oh, who used the pronouns they and them, was 38.The death was confirmed by Mx. Oh’s brother Han Bin Oh, who said the cause was suicide.A playwright, actor, singer-songwriter and musician, Mx. Oh created art that didn’t fit neatly into categories. Mx. Oh was best known for the outraged yet disarmingly gentle Off Broadway show “{my lingerie play},” a music-filled protest against male sexual violence; it was performed in a series of 10 installations around New York City.A concert-like play — with Mx. Oh singing at its center — “{my lingerie play}” percolated with an angry awareness of the ways restrictive gender norms and society’s policing of sexual desire can leave whole groups vulnerable. It was an emphatic and loving assertion of the right to be oneself without worrying about abuse.“I was born a woman, to immigrant parents,” Mx. Oh said in the show. “That’s when my body became political. That’s when I became an artist.”Mx. Oh’s Infinite Love Party, which the Bushwick Starr theater in Brooklyn produced in 2019, was not a show but rather a structured celebration with a sleepover option. It was a handmade experience, including music and aerial silks, designed to welcome queer people, people of color and their allies.Mx. Oh in The Infinite Love Party, which was not a show but rather a structured celebration with music.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMx. Oh in 2019 during The Infinite Love Party, which had a sleepover option.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Terry Louise Fisher, a Creator of ‘L.A. Law,’ Dies at 79

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      She channeled her experiences — and frustrations — as a Los Angeles prosecutor into an award-winning career as a television writer and producer.Terry Louise Fisher, who channeled her experience as a Los Angeles prosecutor into an Emmy Award-winning television career as a writer and producer for “Cagney & Lacey,” the groundbreaking female-oriented police procedural, and a creator, with Steven Bochco, of the sleek drama “L.A. Law,” died on June 10 in Laguna Hills, Calif. She was 79.Her death was confirmed in a social media post by Mark Zev Hochberg, a family member. He did not cite a cause.Ms. Fisher was best known for her work on shows about cops and lawyers, and she certainly knew the terrain. Before turning her attention to the small screen, she worked as a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles for two and a half years.She quickly grew disillusioned with a revolving-door criminal justice system that seemed to her to boil down to a jousting match between opposing lawyers, with little regard for guilt or innocence.In a 1986 interview with The San Francisco Examiner, she recalled being handed an almost certain victory in an otherwise weak case involving a knife killing because of an oversight by the defense: “I felt really challenged, and my adrenaline was pumping. I realized I could win this case. And I slept on it. I went, ‘My God, has winning become more important than justice?’”Her unflinching view of the system informed her tenure in television. In 1983, she began writing for “Cagney & Lacey,” bringing depth and realism to a CBS series that shook up the traditional knuckles-and-nightsticks cop-show genre by focusing on two female New York City police detectives, Christine Cagney (Sharon Gless) and Mary Beth Lacey (Tyne Daly).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      How Do You Adapt James Baldwin? Very Carefully.

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      His works have been slow to come to stage and screen. But a new production of the novel “Giovanni’s Room” shows how rewarding it can be when done right.Few writers turn out their career-defining work on the first try. But that was James Baldwin with his 1953 debut novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” The semi-autobiographical book, about a day in the life of a Black teen whose stepfather is a minister of a Harlem Pentecostal church, was received by critics with glowing praise. Today it remains lauded as one of the great novels of modern American literature.Baldwin’s second novel, “Giovanni’s Room,” was quite a different story — literally and figuratively. A thematic departure from its predecessor, the novel was about two gay white men: David, a closeted American man, who falls in love with Giovanni, an Italian bartender, in Paris. In the book Baldwin unpacks motifs related to masculinity and queerness, classism and American exceptionalism all through sparkling dialogue and robust, deeply ruminative prose.Though now considered a significant work of the 20th-century queer literary canon, “Giovanni’s Room” didn’t share the immediate adoration and popularity of its predecessor. In fact, it was rejected by his publisher, Knopf, when first submitted. “We think that publishing this book, not because of its subject but because of its failure, will set the wrong kind of cachet on your writing and estrange many of your readers,” the editor Henry Carlisle wrote in a letter to Baldwin in 1955. But Dial Press published the book in 1958, and almost immediately Baldwin had further plans for it.First there was the stage. In 1958 he produced a dramatization of “Giovanni’s Room” for the Actors Studio starring the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar as Giovanni. The play didn’t make it to Broadway, but Baldwin intended to return “Giovanni’s Room” to the stage, or even adapt it to film. He insisted on creative control, which hindered some potential efforts from other artists.James Baldwin in 1973.Jack Manning/The New York TimesIn the late ’70s he collaborated with the South African filmmaker Michael Raeburn on a screenplay, with hopes of big names like Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando taking part. The project never got off the ground, though; Baldwin’s literary agent requested $100,000 for the book option, which the writer couldn’t afford.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      Did That Clint Eastwood Interview Happen? Yes, Kind Of.

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      Eastwood, 95, accused a small Austrian publication of running a “phony” Q. and A. with him. It turns out the quotes were aggregated from previous interviews.Clint Eastwood had a lot to say in the interview with Kurier, a small Austrian publication.Or did he?The truth seems to be somewhere in the middle after Eastwood, the 95-year-old actor and director, accused the paper of running a “phony” question-and-answer featuring a conversation he did not have.The interview, first published on May 30, included Eastwood’s thoughts on the state of Hollywood, his age and his drive to continue working.On Monday, Eastwood disputed the interview all together.And on Tuesday, the publication responded by saying that while the quotes were real, they were not from a continuous Q. and A. interview, but rather aggregated from a series of interviews conducted in front of a group of reporters. It said that the reporter should have made that clear.The conclusion to the confusing saga came after a few choice quotes ricocheted around the internet.Eastwood said in the interview that “there’s no reason why a man can’t improve with age.”When asked about the women in his life, he said he was not concerned with age differences.“Although I’ve always been older than my wives at some point, I feel just as young as they do, at least mentally,” he said. “And physically, I’m still doing well, so hopefully no one will have to worry about me in that regard for a long time to come.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Billy Woods Is Scary Good at Rapping

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      His 12th solo album, “Golliwog,” arrives at a peak in his career as a verbally inventive, independent hip-hop artist. It’s also full of horror stories.When Billy Woods was a child, he was afraid of lots of things.Born in Washington, D.C., but raised in Zimbabwe, where his father was a member of Robert Mugabe’s revolutionary government, the boy who would grow into one of his generation’s beloved underground rappers was frightened by a storage room under the stairs in his family’s house. At night, he imagined that something was beneath his bed, and if his closet door was ajar, that was cause for alarm too. He was scared of apartheid South Africa, which bordered Zimbabwe to the south, and the soldiers he encountered at roadblocks. Sometimes he was scared of his parents.“I didn’t grow up around reasonable people,” he said in a recent interview, a charged understatement about a childhood tumbled by history.Woods typically plans his solo projects around a particular conceit or theme, and “Golliwog,” his 12th, which was released last week, is a collection of horror stories. Some are darkly comic, others decidedly less so. They draw on his youthful experiences and contemporary geopolitical terrors, as well as more mundane adult concerns, like romance and renting in modern-day New York, where he has lived on and off since 1995.“Golliwog” arrives at a peak in his decades-long career as an independent artist, carrying on a local tradition of proudly trend-resistant, verbally inventive hip-hop that includes acts like MF Doom, the Juggaknots and Company Flow. All of Woods’s solo music is available through Backwoodz Studios, the label he founded in 2002, which also releases the work of like-minded artists including his frequent collaborator, Elucid; together the pair record as Armand Hammer.“Something that my mother always was stressing was that if you wanted to do art, you couldn’t expect to pay your bills with it,” Woods said. He is in his late 40s now, the father of two children, and noted that “for most of my adult life I have been hustling to make ends meet.” He refuses to own a car, and up until 2018, lived with roommates to save money.Woods started releasing solo LPs in 2003. Billy Woods, which he styles in lowercase letters, is not his real name; he avoids showing his face in photographs.Griffin Lotz/Rolling Stone, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More