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    Pennsylvania School Board Reinstates Gay Author’s Speech Amid Backlash

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    The Cumberland Valley School Board reversed its decision to cancel Maulik Pancholy’s speech at a middle school next month after many community members said the actor had been discriminated against because of his sexuality.Less than two weeks after a Pennsylvania school board unanimously voted to cancel a gay author’s anti-bullying speech at a middle school, the board voted Wednesday night to reverse its decision and reinstate the event amid pressure from parents, students and administrators.The 5-to-4 vote by the Cumberland Valley School District’s board came in front of scores of community members who packed a high school auditorium and, for several hours, chastised the board for having canceled the event featuring the actor and author Maulik Pancholy over what they said were homophobic concerns.Bud Shaffner, a board member who had come under fire for introducing the motion at the April 15 meeting to cancel the speech, apologized for his comments about Mr. Pancholy’s “lifestyle.” He later introduced the motion to reinstate the speech and voted for it.“I will accept the blame because of the insensitive word I spoke on April 15,” he said at the beginning of Wednesday’s meeting. “I fully understand the interpretation of my poor word choice.”Many community members who spoke during the public comment period of Wednesday’s meeting rejected the contention by some board members that Mr. Pancholy’s speech had been canceled over concerns about what they called his “political activism.”“To claim that Maulik Pancholy is a political activist and use that as a justification to cancel his event is an excuse that the public sees through,” one person told the board.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

      Peter Morgan Turns His Pen From ‘The Crown’ to the Kremlin

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      His new play “Patriots,” now on Broadway, follows Putin’s rise to power and the Russian oligarchs who mistakenly thought he’d be their puppet.Going from Princess Diana, a lovely icon who generated waves of sympathy, to Vladimir Putin, an icy villain who generates waves of disdain, might be difficult for some writers.Not Peter Morgan.After pulling back the curtain on the British royal family for six seasons of “The Crown,” Morgan was keen to move on. He had an idea for a play about the oligarchs who, in the 1990s, helped propel an obscure Putin to power and then had to watch as their Frankenstein changed the course of Russian history in a disastrous way.The resulting drama, “Patriots,” which opens on Broadway on April 22, offered Morgan a different way to approach recent history, and a new challenge: switching from the royals, who are household names but not ultimately very powerful, to oligarchs, who are super powerful but not generally household names.Morgan enjoys writing about the vilified, giving them a fighting chance. In “Patriots,” he creates a jigsaw of four Russian men, their fates intertwining in the post-Soviet era, who represent a Byzantine spectrum of moral values.“It’s just a delicious combination of characters,” Morgan, 60, told me, in an interview at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Times Square. “There’s a sort of violence, whereas in ‘The Crown,’ there’s this politeness and there’s repression, and it’s very female. There’s something very male, very violent about this play. It felt like a natural thing to do, having spent so much time in the one world to go into another world just to relax a little.”Will Keen, left, as Vladimir Putin and Michael Stuhlbarg as Boris Berezovsky in “Patriots,” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/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

      Video Games Are a Playwright’s Muse, Not Her Hobby

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      In Bekah Brunstetter’s new play “The Game,” women withhold sex from their partners who are obsessed with a Fortnite-like game. Her previous work includes “The Oregon Trail.”The writer Bekah Brunstetter is decidedly not a video game aficionado. Her personality type — “psychotically obsessed with productivity,” as she put it — has sealed off all gaming rabbit holes for the past 25 years.And yet Brunstetter, perhaps best known for her television work on “This Is Us” and the book for the current Broadway adaptation of “The Notebook,” has now written not one but two plays about the ways that video games can hinder or facilitate human connection.“The Game,” which is currently having its world premiere, is about a fictionalized version of Fortnite Battle Royale, a third-person shooter where each round ends with only one survivor. It comes seven years after Brunstetter’s “The Oregon Trail,” inspired by the game that condemned countless 1990s middle schoolers to an array of awful deaths (cholera, dysentery, snake bites, etc.) as they tried to replicate the grueling 19th-century passage west from Independence, Mo.In “The Oregon Trail,” Brunstetter paralleled the modern-day struggles of a young woman with the higher-stakes perils of her video game counterpart. With “The Game,” she is taking the outsider perspective, focusing on a support group of wives who decide to withhold sex to get their partners off Fortnite — or The Game, as it is called here. (The play is a very loose adaptation of “Lysistrata,” the ancient Greek comedy in which the sex strike is designed to end the Peloponnesian War.)Brunstetter, 41, spoke over a video call about “The Game” the day after its final dress rehearsal at Playmakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, N.C. She discussed the two plays, her learning curve and the TV show that might lure her back into the world of gaming.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Megan Ketch and Lucas Dixon in “The Game,” in which a group of women try to get their partners to stop playing a video game that resembles Fortnite.HuthPhoto, via PlayMakers Repertory CompanyWe 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 Shares115 Views

      in Theater

      Trevor Griffiths, Marxist Writer for Stage and Screen, Dies at 88

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      For him, “art played a particular role in social change,” the director Mehmet Ergen said. “Everything was political.”Trevor Griffiths, a prolific and avowedly Marxist writer for stage and screen most widely known for his play “Comedians,” which was staged in London and on Broadway, died on March 29 at his home in Yorkshire, England. He was 88.His agent, Nicki Stoddart, said the cause was heart failure.An important figure on the English left, Mr. Griffiths conjoined the political with the personal and expressed that affinity across a wide range of topics, whether connected to British party politics or comparable upheavals abroad.He was at his most visible during the decade or so from 1975 onward. That period encompassed the premiere of “Comedians” in Nottingham, England, in 1975, as well as its New York premiere in 1976 — it was his only Broadway play — and his lone foray into Hollywood, as a collaborator with Warren Beatty on his screenplay for the much-admired movie “Reds” (1981).Laurence Olivier, right, with Gawn Grainger in a scene from Mr. Griffith’s play “The Party” (1973) at the Old Vic Theater in London. It was Olivier’s last stage role.via Everett CollectionHis plays granted Laurence Olivier his last stage role, in the National Theater premiere of “The Party” (1973) — an anatomy of the British left set against the backdrop of the 1968 political tumult in Paris — and offered early opportunities for budding talents like Jonathan Pryce, who won a Tony for “Comedians,” and Kevin Spacey and Gary Oldman, who starred in the American and British premieres of the play “Real Dreams” in the 1980s.“Comedians,” set in Manchester among the hopefuls in a night comedy class, has had various notable revivals over the years — among them a 2003 Off Broadway production, with Raúl Esparza inheriting Mr. Pryce’s career-defining role, and one at London’s Lyric Hammersmith in 2009, David Dawson playing the same role.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

      Christopher Durang, Playwright Who Mixed High Art and Low Humor, Dies at 75

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      In a career spanning more than 40 years, he established himself as a hyperliterate jester and an anarchic clown.Christopher Durang, a Tony Award-winning playwright and a master satirist, died on Tuesday night at his home in Pipersville, Pa., in Bucks County. He was 75.His agent, Patrick Herold, said the cause was complications of aphasia. In 2016, Mr. Durang was found to have a rare form of dementia, logopenic primary progressive aphasia. The diagnosis was made public in 2022.An acid, impish writer, Mr. Durang never met a classic (“The Brothers Karamazov,” “The Glass Menagerie,” “Snow White”) that he couldn’t skewer. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he established himself as a hyperliterate jester and an anarchic clown. Regarding subject and theme, he pogoed from sex to metaphysics to serial killers to psychology, and he had a way of collapsing high art and jokes that aimed much lower.“He’s so scaldingly funny,” the actress Sigourney Weaver, a friend and collaborator since she met Mr. Durang at the Yale School of Drama, said in an interview. “You laugh with horror at what’s going on and your sheer inability to do anything about it.”But even in his most uproarious work — like his early play, the sex and psychoanalysis farce “Beyond Therapy,” or his late hit “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a delirious homage to Chekhov — there was often a strong undertow of melancholy.Mark Alhadeff and Cynthia Darlow in a 2014 production of Mr. Durang’s “Beyond Therapy” at the Actors Company Theater in New York.Marielle SolanWe 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 Movies

      ‘Romancing the Stone’ and Its Screenwriter’s Tragic Tale

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      Diane Thomas was a waitress when she made headlines for the script sale of what would become a box office smash. But the Cinderella story had a sad ending.Each day, before her waitressing shift began, Diane Thomas would plop herself onto the floor of her tiny Malibu studio apartment, in front of a low-slung desk, and begin typing. Throughout late 1978 and early 1979, she worked daily, hours on end, conjuring the tale of Joan Chase, a mousy romance novelist suddenly thrust into a life-or-death adventure.“I wanted to write about a woman who became her own heroine,” Thomas would offer of her inspiration. “The notion that we can be whatever we imagine ourselves to be interested me.”Forty years ago, Thomas’s story, “Romancing the Stone” — and its heroine, renamed Joan Wilder — reached big screens, becoming one of the top box office hits of 1984 and an enduring classic, owing to a perfectly measured blend of action, comedy and romance. “It’s still the most well-rounded script I’ve ever read,” Michael Douglas, the film’s producer and co-star, said in an interview. “In many ways, it was a reflection of Diane — she wasn’t quite as shy as Joan Wilder, but she poured a lot of herself into this story of a writer who experiences a metamorphosis.”During a golden era of action-adventure pictures, the novice Thomas turned the genre on its head. “A woman being the impetus for that kind of movie hadn’t been done, certainly not in that way,” said Kathleen Turner, who played Wilder. “I mean, the girls in those types of movies were just that — they were always sidekicks or scenery.”Thomas’s friends, like her fellow writer Betty Spence, said the sweep of the story — which moved from the posh Upper West Side of Manhattan to the raw jungles of South America — was the product of a fertile imagination. “Diane was a pure storyteller,” Spence said. “She could sit there and spin a tale out of nothing, and it would have a perfect beginning, middle and end.”When Thomas sold her script in the summer of 1979, she went from minimum-wage worker to one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood. It was the start of a meteoric career that would include a pair of major movie hits and multiple projects with Steven Spielberg. Yet “Romancing the Stone” would be the only film to ever bear a Thomas writing credit because her life was tragically cut short.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

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Logan Lerman Honors Two Families in ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’

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      In this Hulu adaptation of a Holocaust novel, Lerman plays a character inspired by two different grandfathers: the author’s and his own.Logan Lerman has been an actor for more than two decades, starting at age 5, and he’s been sent a number of scripts about the Holocaust. They read as exploitative to him.“That’s always rubbed me the wrong way,” he said. “I’m like, ‘No, that doesn’t feel right.’”But the story of the Shoah he now stars in, “We Were the Lucky Ones,” felt different to the performer best known for his work in films like “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” (2012) and “Fury” (2014).Based on the novel of the same title by Georgia Hunter, the eight-episode series premieres Thursday on Hulu. It tracks the members of the Kurc family as they are dispersed throughout Eastern Europe, where they live, and elsewhere when the Nazis invade. Lerman, 32, stars as Addy Kurc, a musician who has been living in Paris and finds himself unable to get home to Radom, Poland. His journey takes him to Casablanca and eventually Rio de Janeiro, all while he is unaware of the fates of his beloved siblings and parents. As the title would imply, this is less a story of loss than it is of survival.While Hunter’s book is fictional, the Kurcs are named for and based on her maternal grandfather’s family, and their sagas were derived from her extensive research into their experiences. A co-executive producer of the series, she shared that background with Lerman as he set out to play Addy, who is based on her grandfather. But the actor reached into his own personal history as well, channeling his own grandfather, who was also a Jewish refugee during World War II. The result is a performance that combines both family histories, paying tribute to Hunter and Lerman’s ancestry in the process.“I also wanted to do it for the reason that I was like, ‘Oh I want to show my grandfather this,’” Lerman said in a video call.Joey King and Lerman in “We Were the Lucky Ones,” adapted from Georgia Hunter’s best-selling novel.HuluWe 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 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      David Seidler, Oscar-Winning Writer of ‘The King’s Speech,’ Dies at 86

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      He drew on his own painful experiences with a stutter in depicting King George VI’s struggles to overcome his impediment and rally Britain in World War II.David Seidler, a screenwriter whose Oscar-winning script for “The King’s Speech” — about King George VI conquering a stutter to rally Britain at the outset of World War II — drew on his own painful experience with a childhood stammer, died on Saturday on a fly-fishing trip in New Zealand. He was 86 and lived in Santa Fe, N.M.His manager, Jeff Aghassi, disclosed the death in a statement but did not cite a cause. “David was in the place he loved most in the world — New Zealand — doing what gave him the greatest peace, which was fly-fishing,” Mr. Aghassi said. “If given the chance, it is exactly as he would have scripted it.”On winning the Academy Award for best original screenplay for “The King’s Speech” (2010), Mr. Seidler said from the Hollywood stage that he was accepting on behalf of all stutterers. “We have a voice; we have been heard,’’ he said.The movie, a historical drama in the form of a buddy picture about an afflicted future monarch (Colin Firth) and his talented but unlicensed speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush), was a commercial and critical success. It also won Oscars for best picture, best director (Tom Hooper) and best actor (Mr. Firth).Colin Firth in the 2010 film “The King’s Speech.” Mr. Seidler’s script centered on George VI’s struggle to overcome his stutter as he prepared to speak to his beleaguered nation during wartime.Laurie Sparham/The Weinstein CompanyMr. Seidler, who was born in England but emigrated with his family to the United States as a child during World War II, spent much of his career writing little-noticed television projects, including soap operas, a biopic of the Partridge Family singers and the TV movie “Onassis: The Richest Man in the World” (1988), written with a longtime co-writer, Jacqueline Feather. That same year, he broke onto the big screen as a co-writer (with Arnold Schulman) of “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” about the automobile inventor Preston Tucker, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.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 Movies

      David Bordwell, Scholar Who Demystified Filmmaking, Dies at 76

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      Roger Ebert called him “our best writer on the cinema.” His scholarship focused on how movies work.David Bordwell, a film studies scholar whose immersive, accessible writing transcended the corridors of academia and illuminated the mechanics of moviemaking to a generation of cinephiles and filmmakers, died on Feb. 29 at his home in Madison, Wis. He was 76.The cause was interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, said his wife, Kristin Thompson, a prominent film scholar who frequently collaborated with him.Dr. Bordwell taught at the University of Wisconsin for 30 years and wrote or co-wrote more than 20 books, including “Film Art: An Introduction” (1979), a textbook written with his wife that is widely used in film studies programs. After retiring in 2004, he and Dr. Thompson analyzed movies on his blog at davidbordwell.net and in videos for the Criterion Channel.Hailed as “our best writer on the cinema” by Roger Ebert, Dr. Bordwell’s film analysis avoided ivory tower theories on the social and political undertones of movies in favor of clear, frame-by-frame examinations of scene structure, shot angles and other elements of filmmaking.In a blog post about “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s 2010 film about the founding of Facebook, he analyzed the facial expressions of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (played by Andrew Garfield) during a scene when Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) blindsides him.Dr. Bordwell used a single frame that he cropped into several images.In the first image, only Eduardo’s eyes are visible. “Certainly they give us information — about the direction the person is looking, about a certain state of alertness,” Dr. Bordwell wrote. “The lids aren’t lifted to suggest surprise or fear, but I think you’d agree that no specific emotion seems to emerge from the eyes alone.”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