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      in Movies

      Barbra Streisand Is Ready to Tell All. Pull Up a Seat.

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      Maybe it’s her grandkids, maybe it’s being 81, but Barbra Streisand is open to new stuff. Take sharing. Well, take sharing herself. “My Name Is Barbra,” her first memoir, is upon us. It’s 970 pages and billows with doubt, anger, ardor, hurt, pride, persuasion, glory and Yiddish. I don’t know that any artist has done more sharing.And yet, last month, after lunch at her home in Malibu, Calif., Streisand shared something else, a treasure she guards almost as much she’s guarded the details of her life. And that’s dessert. There’s a lot in this book — tales of film and television shoots, clashes and bonds with collaborators, a whole chapter on Don Johnson (it’s short) and another called “Politics,” her unwavering preference for big blends of the masculine and the feminine. But food is so ubiquitous that it’s practically a love of Streisand’s life, especially ice cream.So when it’s time for dessert at Streisand’s, despite any choice you’re offered, there’s truly only one option. And that’s McConnell’s Brazilian Coffee ice cream. She writes about it with an orgasmic zeal comparable only, perhaps, to her stated zests for Modigliani and Sondheim. How much does Streisand love Brazilian Coffee? In the book, she’s in the middle of a sad story about a dinner with her buddy Marlon Brando at Quincy Jones’s place, when she interrupts herself to rhapsodize over its flavor and reminisce on the lengths she has gone to get some. So I wanted to have what she’s having.“Okaaayyyy,” Streisand said. She gave her longtime assistant, Renata Buser, a deep, knowing look.“We’ll trade. You give a good review.”Panic, panic, panic. Stammer, stammer, stammer.She was grinning. Buser was smiling.“I love to laugh right now,” said Streisand, who said she’s been in a funk over the state of the planet.Buser agreed: “You really needed a laugh.”But Streisand wasn’t entirely kidding — well, about the good review she was. But not about the ice cream.See, sometimes, they explained, like two girls talking about an ornate but dire piece of cafeteria gossip, there’s a situation with how available it is. (Basically, McConnell’s sometimes takes Brazilian Coffee off the market, leaving Turkish Coffee and sometimes just … “Coffee.”) When she gets her hands on some, she all but password-protects it. “My husband happens to like Turkish Coffee. Thank God,” Streisand says of the actor James Brolin, her spouse of 25 years. “So he doesn’t take my stash.”To be clear: They’re not the same?“Noooo,” Streisand and Buser said together. Streisand was shrugging that “are you serious right now?” shrug: “Turkey is not Brazil.”It goes on like this for another minute until something crucial suddenly occurs to Streisand.“Are you a fan of coffee ice cream?”Crickets …She didn’t have time for this. “We have vanilla.” More kidding. “I’ll give you a scoop — well, how about half a scoop? He’ll have half a scoop. I’ll take the other half.”Eventually, Buser arrives with a bowl, and I get it.If Loro Piana made dessert, this is how it would taste, like money. Buser had lodged Streisand’s demiscoop inside a wafer cone just the way she likes. Mine was gone in about 90 seconds. Streisand, though — she made the eating of this ounce of ice cream a discreet aria of bliss. Little nibbles of cone, then one spin around her mouth. Nibble, nibble, spin. I’ve seen one other person make love to a dessert this way, and she gave birth to me. Otherwise, no one will ever quite have what they’re having.THIS MEMOIR OF STREISAND’S encompasses her girlhood in working-class Brooklyn in the 1940s, her big break on Broadway in “Funny Girl” in 1964, a movie career that made her the biggest actress of the 1970s, her popular albums and top-rated TV specials, the awards, the snubs, her hangups, terrors and passions, her close girlfriends, the men she’s loved and, yes, the foods she might adore more. “My Name Is Barbra” is explanatory and ruminative and enlightening. It’s shake-your-head funny and hand-to-mouth surprising. The lady who wrote it is in touch with herself, loves being herself. Yet she disliked memoir-writing’s ostensible point. “I’ve been through therapy many, many years ago, trying to figure these things out,” she told me. “And I got bored with that. Trying to get things out. I really didn’t want to relive my life.”Streisand in her dressing room when she starred in the 1964 Broadway musical “Funny Girl.”John Orris/The New York TimesWriting the book forced Streisand not only to relive it, but to do the synthesizing between the present and the past. For instance, she frequently reckons with how losing her father at a young age and living for decades with her mother’s glass-half-empty approach to maternity set her up for a journey of approval.Those 970 pages also turn the book into a piece of exercise equipment. Streisand doesn’t like the heft. “I wanted two volumes,” she said. “Who wants to hold a heavy book like that in their hands?”Rick Kot, an executive editor at Viking who oversaw production on the book, told me, “Publishing books in two volumes is difficult just as a commercial venture. And nobody seems to have any issue with how long” Streisand’s is.The bigness of it makes literal the career it contains. Streisand is poring over, pouring out, her life. She’s feeling her way through it, remembering, sometimes Googling as she types. It’s not a book you inhale, per se. (Unless, of course, you’ve got a pressing lunch date with the author.) Nor does it inspire the “five takeaways” treatment that juicy new memoirs by Britney Spears and Jada Pinkett Smith have. Not that there weren’t requests for spicier material. Streisand said that Christine Pittel, her editor, told her “that I had to leave some blood on the page.” So feelings are more deeply plumbed; names are named.And she did do some hemming and hawing. “I was very late in delivering the book,” she said. “I think I was supposed to deliver it in two years.” It took her 10. And as she went, she thought about her legacy. “If you want to read about me in 20 years or 50 years, whatever it is — if there’s still a world — these are my words. These are my thoughts.” She also considered those other Streisand titles, the ones by other people. “Hopefully, you don’t have to look at too many books written about me. You know, whenever I was told about what they said, certain things, I thought, like, who are they talking about?”There are takeaways. But they’re too chronic to qualify as “current.” Mostly, they involve Streisand’s hunger for work and her endless quest to maintain control over it. Singing and acting made her famous. This insistence on perfection made her notorious. Sexism and chauvinism are on display throughout the book. But what becomes apparent is that the woman who has a “directed by” credit on just three films (“Yentl,” “The Prince of Tides” and “The Mirror Has Two Faces”) had been a director from the very start of her career. Here is the book’s grand revelation — for a reader but for the author, too. “I didn’t know about it,” she said, of this proclivity for management, planning, vision, authority and obeying her instincts. “But writing the book, I discovered it. Basically, I was doing that, you know, when I was 19 years old — or even showing my mother how to smoke.”Streisand is unsparing about the treachery she faced at work, collaborating with men. Sydney Chaplin (one of Charlie’s kids) played the original Nick Arnstein during her “Funny Girl” Broadway run; they shared a flirtation that Chaplin wanted to consummate and that Streisand wanted to keep professional. (For one thing, she was married to Elliott Gould.) So, she writes, Chaplin did a number on her. In front of live audiences, he’d lean in to whisper put-downs and profanity. When it came time to shoot “Hello, Dolly!,” Streisand couldn’t understand why her co-star Walter Matthau and their director, Gene Kelly (yes, the Gene Kelly) were so hostile toward her. She confronts Matthau, and he confesses: “You hurt my friend,” meaning Chaplin, his poker buddy. Throughout her career, she’s up against what one surly camera operator, on the set of “The Prince of Tides,” boasts is a boys’ club.That’s the sort of blood that gives this book its power — not the prospect of a bluntly louche Brando and a doting Pierre Trudeau being honest-to-God soul mates, not whatever her byzantine thing with Jon Peters was about. It’s that Barbra Streisand endured a parade of harsh workplaces yet never stopped trying to make the best work. That experience with Chaplin left her with lifelong stage fright. But what if it also helped sharpen her volition to get things — in the studio, on a film set, before a show — exactly, possibly obsessively, right?“When I was younger, I think they had a preconception, you know, because maybe I was aloof or something, because I was a singer but I wanted to be an actress. And then as an actress, I wanted to be a director,” she said to me. “In other words, take another step. Be the actress as well as the singer. To me, it was so much easier to look at the whole. But even when I was an actress, I would care about the whole.” Like that scene in Sydney Pollack’s “The Way We Were,” from 1973, where Streisand touches Robert Redford’s hair while he’s sleeping, a personal choice she made by instinct.Over and over again — with TV specials, live concerts, musical arrangements — she was executing ideas. The execution earned her a permanent reputation. And she knows it. In the book, she tells a story about making some staging suggestions for her 1980 Grammys performance with Neil Diamond and muses, “This kind of incident may be why I’m called ‘difficult.’”Streisand directed and starred in “Yentl” (1983) with Mandy Patinkin and Amy Irving.Hulton Archive/Getty Images“Difficult” is in the work. Streisand’s characters constitute this cocktail of “mercurial” and “determined” with a couple squirts of “feral.” They’re multitaskers, consumed with both busyness and learning how to do something. She was perfect for romantic comedies during second-wave feminism: Her drive drove men nuts. My favorite performance from this ’70s run of hers is in “The Main Event,” a frothy, filthy, solidly funny screwball hit from 1979. She’s in high expressive form and at peak curls, playing Hillary Kramer, a fragrance mogul forced to sell her company after her accountant runs off with all her money. But she discovers a surprise asset: a terrible boxer, Eddie “Kid Natural” Scanlon (Ryan O’Neal), whose career she tries to turn around. The movie, which Howard Zieff directed, sums up the Streisand experience: her tenacity; her outrageous comfort as both a comedic actor and as a version of herself; her exasperation with men who exploit her and count her out.Eddie doesn’t want to work with Hillary and bets that the sight of his battered face will disgust her right out of boxing management. The violence of boxing does send Hillary vomiting during the drive home from one of his fights. What it doesn’t do is deter her. “I hope this taught you a lesson,” says Whitman Mayo, who plays Eddie’s pal and trainer, Percy. “It has,” Streisand says. “Get him in shape.”The two men share a sinking feeling, seemingly typical when it comes to Streisand. “She’s not giving up, Percy,” Eddie says to his trainer, who must concur: “That’s a problem.” People who’ve negotiated with her probably recognize the look of worry and fatigued resignation on O’Neal’s face. He’s going to lose.It’s reasonable to suspect that Tom Rothman, the head of Sony Pictures, knows the feeling. When the company was planning to release an anniversary edition of “The Way We Were” this year, Streisand argued for him to include two scenes that, she was pained to discover, had been omitted from the original. For Rothman, the trouble with granting Streisand her wish was that, as “a filmmaker’s executive,” as he put it in an interview, he didn’t want to change anything without Pollack’s input. But Pollack’s been dead for 15 years. They agreed to release two versions: Pollack’s and, essentially, Streisand’s extended cut.This, she writes, is a triumph of her relentlessness. “The word she uses in the book, that’s 100 percent accurate,” Rothman told me. “She’s relentless.” Her being right about the scenes didn’t matter to his bottom line, which required him to do justice to Pollack’s memory while assuaging Streisand’s worries over creative injustice. “She would say: ‘This is better, this is better! This is why it’s good!’ And I would say: ‘But Sydney Pollack didn’t want it!’”The reason Rothman wanted to land at a happy solution was because of the person he was negotiating with. “Barbra broke a lot of not just artistic boundaries but boundaries for female artists in the movie business, in Hollywood, in terms of taking control of her career,” he said. “I have boundless respect for her.”“If you want to read about me in 20 years or 50 years, whatever it is — if there’s still a world — these are my words,” Streisand said. “These are my thoughts.”Harry Benson/Express, via Getty Images)Streisand’s boundlessness, her capaciousness — the lack of precedent for her whole-enchilada ambitions, the daffiness, the sexiness, the talent, orchestration, passion, originality; her persistence and indefatigability; the outfits; the hair — were a watershed. She was always adapting, if not to what was cool or “current,” per se, then certainly to whom she felt she was at a given moment. “You know me,” she writes, late in the book. “I’m the version queen.”The line is straight from Streisand to Madonna, Janet Jackson, Jennifer Lopez, Queen Latifah, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift — version queens of different kingdoms. That’s just a list of the obvious people who followed her into showbiz and makes no mention of the less famous folks whom Streisand inspired into a thousand other achievements. She’s “to thine own self be true” in neon. This might be the real Streisand Effect. And now she can take a step back and appreciate it.“That gives me real joy, that I affected some people into doing what they wanted to do,” Streisand said. “That I gave them some sort of courage. Or if they felt different, you know, I was somebody who felt different. That’s a reward for me. That makes me feel great.”THIS HOME OF STREISAND’S has been called a compound. But even with the ocean overlook, it’s too rustic, cozy and deceptively modest for the geologic or ego-logical footprint that “compound” connotes. There’s an active farm and enough rose varieties to hijack a flower show. It’s neither Xanadu nor Neverland Ranch. There’s some reality to Streisand’s place, some soul.This is to say that paintings are everywhere, outside the bathroom, up the main staircase, in the bathroom. There are oils by John Singer Sargent and Thomas Hart Benton, portraits by Ammi Phillips and Mary Cassatt. A wall holds one of Gilbert Stuart’s George Washingtons. She loves Klimt and adores Tamara de Lempicka and Modigliani, adores them with an awe the world reserves for her. Some of the paintings are by Streisand, including a portrait of Sammie, her late Coton de Tulear, whose fur is affixed to the canvas. One, her son, Jason Gould, did.Streisand’s fans know what’s on her property and the labor she personally devoted to realizing it — that there’s a mill with a functioning waterwheel, that she’s dedicated a room to her collection of dolls and that another’s maintained for the display and storage of her stage and screen costumes. They’d know because, in 2010, Streisand put it all in a book called “My Passion for Design.” Nevertheless, people have concluded that Streisand lives at her own personal Grove. They’ll ask: Are you going to see the mall? But there is no mall to see. Nothing’s for sale, nothing is open to the public.Streisand at home in 2018.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesLess known is how it might feel to stand here, in a living room at Streisand’s house, to gaze over her shoulder at the ocean and stop yourself from saying out loud, “On a clear day you really can see forever.” It’s strange to move from the bulk of her book to the lightness of the woman who wrote it, to the one-of-a-kind incandescence that’s kept her a star. No memoir can quite contain that. An odd effect of that stardom is how that person can start to seem an uncanny sort of familiar. One of the mightiest, most Olympic performers we Americans have ever experienced, is, on a Tuesday at lunchtime — and I mean this from the bottom of my heart — just some lady. The one behind you at a Gelson’s, maybe, who might notice the cottage cheese in your cart and get moony over how creamy it is. (“I love going to the supermarket,” she told me.)After lunch, Streisand was ready to relax and needed to stretch her back, which lately has been acting up. Relaxing meant letting loose her three Cotons de Tulear, dogs as white as snowflakes, whiter in fact, like bleached teeth. It meant retreating to the family room. So off I went down a wallpapered hallway paneled with more framed art and into another section of the house that felt different from the airs of presentation and preservation that typify the rest of the home. The kitchen was here, for one thing. For another, hunched over a round table was James Brolin. Streisand calls him Jim, and Jim was in a T-shirt and sweatpants, cross-referencing information on an iPad with what he was writing on a sheet of paper. He was jotting down film titles to watch later for movie night. They had just had a Scorsese marathon.There’s life all over the property. But here in the family room is where everybody lives, including that portrait of Sammie, which, at the moment, was propped up on the floor because “I don’t have any places to hang anything anymore,” she said. This way she can see it from the sofa while she watches TV. This part of the house seems like the only place where anything gets strewn. “It’s not that orderly,” she told me. “Meaning, I have the things I need around me.” Like her pets, like Jim. “It’s a playroom. We watch TV, we have the dogs on our laps. It’s more disordered.”It felt, in many ways, like a secret, the comfy chaos of this zone feeling preferable to the control on display everywhere else. Streisand seemed at home here because she was. She took a seat and proceeded to ply the dogs, Fanny and Sammie’s lab-bred clones, Scarlet and Violet, with a treat. They looked up at her with expectant patience. I’ve seen scores of dogs anticipate a treat. It’s as if Streisand’s had heard about the bonkers approach of those other dogs and zigged, sitting patiently as Streisand doled a morsel or two to each. Even she seemed impressed. Here is another of stardom’s odd effects. Without us, it’s Tuesday. More

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      in Theater

      Searching for Brian Friel, and His Mythical Ballybeg

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      Irish Repertory Theater’s season-long survey of the playwright’s work prompted our reporter to seek out the Irish town that inspired the imaginary site of so many of his plays.Up a steep and grassy windblown hill, in the top row of what’s known as the new graveyard, the playwright Brian Friel lies buried under a dark, glossy slab etched with an image of a St. Brigid’s cross, a traditional Irish symbol woven from rushes.This little cemetery in a remote northwest corner of Ireland has a sweeping view of valley, hills and tiny town: Glenties, County Donegal, which in a way is a curious choice for Friel’s final resting place. It isn’t where he was born, in 1929; that was Omagh, across the nearby border with Northern Ireland. It isn’t where he died, in 2015; that was Greencastle, quite a bit farther north in County Donegal, on the sea.But it is, arguably, a place he spent a lot of time in his head. Glenties (population 927 in 2022) is his mother’s hometown, where he would go during childhood summers. Not a son of the town but a grandson, he became, as the New York Times critic Mel Gussow asserted in a 1991 profile, “a writer on a level with Sean O’Casey and John Millington Synge,” two of the most esteemed Irish playwrights in the canon.What claim to fame Glenties has, and what brush with Hollywood, is because of Friel. In his writing, he transformed it into a place called Ballybeg: the site of many of his plays, including the most famous, “Dancing at Lughnasa” (1990), which is inspired by his mother and aunts, and dedicated “In memory of those five brave Glenties women.”At St. Connell’s Museum, a homely repository of area history around the corner from Main Street, material about Friel includes news clippings of his funeral and old show posters.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe grave of the Irish playwright Brian Friel overlooks the western Irish town of Glenties.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesOff Broadway this season, Irish Repertory Theater’s Friel Project will revive three of his Ballybeg plays, starting with “Translations” (1980), about a 19th-century British colonialist project to Anglicize Ireland, directed by the Tony Award winner Doug Hughes and running through Dec. 3. It will be followed in January by “Aristocrats” (1979), set amid a once-grand Catholic family in Chekhovian decline, directed by Charlotte Moore, Irish Rep’s artistic director; and in March by “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” (1964), in which a young man prepares to leave Ballybeg for the United States, directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, Irish Rep’s producing director.After Friel died, the critic Michael Billington called him “the finest Irish dramatist of his generation,” citing a body of work that examined “exile and emigration, the political Troubles of Northern Ireland [and] the subjective nature of memory.” All of it, he pronounced, was “bound together by his passion for language, his belief in the ritualistic nature of theater and his breadth of understanding.”In a phone interview, O’Reilly said that “if there was such a thing as a poet laureate of the Irish Rep, it would be Brian Friel”: an intellectually curious, deeply empathetic playwright who probed the makeup of Irish identity. As profoundly as Friel fathomed small-town Irish life, he also recognized the urge to escape it — or in O’Reilly’s words: “Let me get the hell out.”“In so many of his plays, it’s about the departure from it and the need to break beyond it,” said O’Reilly, who was 19 when he left his hometown, even tinier than Glenties, in County Cavan.A current view of Main Street, which is pocked with vacant storefronts.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesA photograph on display at St. Connell’s Museum shows Main Street in 1912.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesOf course, the true Ballybeg — whose name in Irish, Baile Beag, means “small town” — exists only in Friel’s plays. Still, you can hear echoes of Glenties in those plays, and echoes of those plays in Glenties.And if you go there looking for him, as I did in late September, you will find him — even if the post office where his mother is said to have worked is long gone, succeeded by a branch tucked efficiently inside the Costcutter supermarket, on an unbusy Main Street pocked with vacant storefronts.I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast at one end of the road, near the electric vehicle charging point that communicates loud and clear that Glenties is a 21st-century town. At the other is a hotel whose website commemorates the occasion, 25 years ago, when Meryl Streep, star of the film adaptation of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” slept there “on the night of the local premiere.” In between, a creative arts center and a gift shop both have Lughnasa — “the feast day of the pagan god, Lugh,” as the narrator of Friel’s play explains, and a harvest festival — in their names.With a dozen Broadway productions in his lifetime, most of them Ballybeg plays (including “Faith Healer,” from 1979, in which a pivotal, sinister event occurs on the outskirts of town), Friel was not given to sentimentalizing rusticity.A peat bog in the hills and mountains surrounding the town.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesBut outsiders have a tendency in that direction, as a Ballybeg woman says in Friel’s comedy “The Communication Cord” (1982): “You know the way strangers get queer notions about a place like this; and foreigners is the worst.”Yet when a visitor remarks, in “Give Me Your Answer, Do!” (1997), “The view up that valley is breathtaking,” he could easily be talking about Glenties, whose name in Irish, Na Gleannta, means “the glens.”The town has stunning vistas of the Blue Stack Mountains that hem it in — and make driving there from Dublin, as I did, an adventure, fraught with the risk of toppling off some narrow, winding road into a patch of gorgeous scenery.Phillip Rodgers, owner of Roddy’s Bar, shares a drink with his patrons.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesA 2008 photo of the “The Laurels,” the old family home where Friel’s grandparents, mother and aunts once lived. Mary Ita BoyleA local resident sells bread at a weekly street market.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesFOR MORE THAN 50 YEARS, starting in the 1890s, a railway stopped in Glenties. I learned that at St. Connell’s Museum, a homely repository of area history just around the corner from Main Street. Its collection of Friel material tends toward news clippings (more Meryl) and old show posters (like the one that informs you that both Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea were in the original cast of “Translations,” in Derry).There is also the text of a cheeky piece that Friel wrote for The Irish Times in 1959, ribbing Glenties for its second consecutive win of the national Tidy Towns contest. “My mother’s people were MacLoones,” he notes, wryly claiming “direct descent” from that “mecca of tidiness.”An early-20th-century photograph at St. Connell’s Museum shows a train traveling in western Ireland.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe family home was not far from where the railway station used to be, where Friel’s grandfather was the station master.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe cottage where the family lived, the home of the impecunious sisters who inspired “Dancing at Lughnasa,” is in Glenties — close to where the railway station used to be, where Friel’s grandfather had been the station master. The Brian Friel Trust, which reportedly has plans for a cultural center elsewhere in town, owns the house.From the road, the path to the old family home passes under a low canopy of branches. Then, in a clearing, there it is, looking grimy and forlorn, with moss-carpeted stairs and a gold-lettered plaque beside the door. “‘The Laurels,’” it says, which is the house’s name. “Unveiled by Brian Friel, Meryl Streep and Sophie Thompson. 24th September 1998.”Sheep are free to graze the rolling hills.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesAnd this is where the soft glow of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” a memory play set in imaginary Ballybeg in 1936, collides hard with a reality that is too earthbound, too bleak, too untouched by poetry. But also — maybe because of the plaque, and the gloom — more like an exhibit than a remnant of history.“Translations” (in which, somewhat mind-bendingly, a character from Ballybeg mentions Glenties in conversation) takes place a century earlier, in 1833, as the British are mapping all of Ireland and rewriting every Irish place name into English. It’s more than a decade before the Great Famine, but jobs are scarce — a theme that runs through Friel’s plays — and a fear of blighted crops is making some locals nervous.“Sweet God,” another scoffs in response, “did the potatoes ever fail in Baile Beag? Well, did they ever — ever? Never!”If you go simply by the sign on Main Street in Glenties, with its arrow pointing vaguely north, you will never find the town’s famine graveyard. If you consult Google Maps, it will tell you that the place is “temporarily closed.” Not so.The famine graveyard has a single marker, inscribed in Irish: a 20th-century monument to the dead buried there beginning in 1846. That’s the year after the failure of potato crops started the Great Famine.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesMichael, who now lives in Australia, was visiting family in Glenties. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesWhen I pulled up behind the group of houses where my GPS said it was, a man in a purple sweater instantly emerged to find out why I was there. Then he moved a metal barricade away from the graveyard entrance — “It’s just a makeshift thing,” he said — and let me in. The bright green grass was so soft under my feet that I said so, and the man said it probably should have been farmland all those years ago. Down the hill, sheep were grazing.The graveyard has only a single marker, inscribed in Irish: a 20th-century monument to the dead buried there beginning in 1846. That’s the year after the failure of potato crops started the Great Famine, making poverty a scourge in rural Ireland. Sickness spread among the desperate poor at the Glenties workhouse. Inmates who perished were interred out back.So much covered-over misery, such an alluringly pastoral setting: This felt like Friel to me.I got back in the car and headed to the Atlantic Ocean, about eight miles away, where the island of Inishkeel and its medieval monastic ruins lie not far across the water from Narin/Portnoo Beach. At low tide, you can walk to it on an exposed sandbar, but you will need to keep careful watch of the time if you don’t want to get trapped there, and heed a sign, fixed to a gate on the island, that warns, surreally: “Beware of the bull.” (I saw no bull.)The island of Inisheel in the distance. A sandbar that is exposed during low tide connects Narin/Portnoo Beach and Inishkeel.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThere is a wildness and a timelessness to Inishkeel. A rugged desolation, too, even though all you have to do is face the far shore to see the houses on the mainland, and wind turbines spinning in the hills beyond: a side-by-side coexistence of the eerie ancient and the unsettled now that is very Friel.Glenties doesn’t have a coastline, but Ballybeg does, with at least one island off it: in “The Gentle Island” (1971), called Inishkeen; in “Wonderful Tennessee” (1993), called Oilean Draiochta, which is translated in the play as Island of Mystery. Neither island is tidal like Inishkeel — you need a boat to get to them — but each shares a bit of the real island’s past.In those plays, Friel taps into the primal, the mythic, the spiritual. And maybe it was just the gray and chill the day I was there, and the tiny needles of rain that stung my face. But on that marvelous, rock-strewn island, all of those forces seemed entirely conjurable — somewhere off beautiful Ballybeg, County Donegal. More

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      in Music

      Rock Brynner, 76, Son of Hollywood Royalty Who Cut His Own Path, Dies

      by

      The only male child of the actor Yul Brynner, he built a peripatetic career as a writer, historian, novelist, playwright — and roadie for the Band.Rock Brynner, whose life as a road manager for the Band, bodyguard for Muhammad Ali, farmer, pilot, street performer, novelist and professor of constitutional history overshadowed what, for a lesser mortal, might be a more than sufficient laurel on which to rest — he was the son of the actor Yul Brynner — died on Oct. 13 in Salisbury, Conn. He was 76.Maria Cuomo Cole, a close friend, said the cause of his death, in a hospice, was complications of multiple myeloma.Like many children of the rich and famous, Mr. Brynner led a charmed life. His father, a Russian émigré, was best known for his starring role in both the stage and screen versions of the musical “The King and I,” and later played lead Hollywood roles as a gunfighter, a Russian general and, in “The Ten Commandments,” Pharaoh Rameses II. A-list glamour encircled the son: Liza Minnelli was a lifelong friend from childhood; Elizabeth Taylor came to all his parties. The French poet and playwright Jean Cocteau was his godfather.But Rock Brynner did more with his silver spoon than most. A gifted student, he attended Yale, Trinity College Dublin and Columbia, where he received a doctorate in American history in 1993 before teaching for over a decade at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.In between his stints on campus, he shifted in and out of various milieus and demimondes. He wrote a one-man play based on Cocteau’s addiction memoir, “Opium,” which he performed briefly on Broadway in 1970. Afterward he traveled around Europe as a mime, a period in which he struggled with his own drug and alcohol problems — a theme that fueled his first novel, “The Ballad of Habit and Accident” (1981).Mr. Brynner, left, with his father, the actor Yul Brynner, and the entrepreneur Isaac Tigrett at the opening of the Hard Rock Cafe in Manhattan in March 1984. When Mr. Tigrett opened the restaurant, he hired the younger Mr. Brynner to be the manager.Mitchell Tapper/Associated PressMr. Brynner had a penchant for falling into celebrity orbits. While still in Europe he joined the entourage of Muhammad Ali, who was on something of a world tour after being stripped of his heavyweight championship title over his antiwar stance. Ali called him his “bodyguard,” even though Mr. Brynner was much shorter and slighter than the deposed champ.“Who’d ever have thunk,” Mr. Brynner recalled Ali joking, “that the son of the pharaoh of Egypt would be protecting a little Black boy from Louisville?”Mr. Brynner was no mere hanger-on: He worked as Ali’s press liaison, and it was in part thanks to him, and his connections in Dublin, that Ali was able to fight a high-profile bout against Al “Blue” Lewis in that city in 1972.After returning to the United States and largely sobering up, Mr. Brynner made friends with Robbie Robertson, the guitarist and chief songwriter for the Band, and for a time drove the group’s tour bus.When Mr. Robertson expressed interest in making a rock documentary, Mr. Brynner, by his account, put him in touch with another friend, the director Martin Scorsese. The result, in 1978, was “The Last Waltz,” widely considered one of the best concert documentaries ever made.Mr. Brynner rarely stayed in a single role for long. One day in the early 1970s he was hanging out at a London hotel bar when he met an entrepreneur named Isaac Tigrett, who had an idea for a rock ’n’ roll-themed restaurant.The two became close friends, and Mr. Brynner and his father became early investors in the Hard Rock Cafe, founded by Mr. Tigrett and Peter Morton, whose father had started the Morton’s steakhouse chain. When Mr. Tigrett expanded to New York in 1984, he hired Mr. Brynner as manager. The restaurant was, for a time, the place to see and be seen in Manhattan, and Mr. Brynner proved more than capable of handling all the boldfaced names angling for a table.“He grew up with celebrities, traveled with celebrities,” Mr. Tigrett said in a phone interview. “He knew this scene well.”Mr. Brynner with Liza Minnelli during a party at a Manhattan restaurant in 1981. They had been friends since childhood.Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesMr. Brynner managed to stay at the Hard Rock Cafe for a year before becoming restless once more. He had always wanted to own a plane, he told Mr. Tigrett. He and his father used their profits from the restaurant to open a charter air service, based at a small airport in Danbury, Conn., not far from the Westchester farm where Rock was now living in a guesthouse, free of charge in exchange for working its small field of vegetables.By the mid-1980s, with his wild days behind him, Mr. Brynner returned to his intellectual pursuits. He wrote a biography of his father, “Yul: The Man Who Would Be King” (1989), while completing his doctorate in American history at Columbia, with a specialty in constitutional history.The biography, which appeared four years after Yul Brynner’s death at 65, exploded certain myths that his father had told about himself (he did not, as he claimed, descend from Roma stock). But it also painted a portrait of a complicated man, whose immense ego sometimes got in the way of his genuine love for his only son — and of how that son struggled under the weight.“It is a study of how a son models himself on his father,” Rock Brynner said in a 1991 radio interview, “and then must distance himself later in life.”Yul Brynner Jr. was born on Dec. 23, 1946, in Manhattan. His father, still a struggling actor, was away in California looking for stage work, while his mother, Virginia Gilmore — who would also achieve cinematic fame — kept house in a small apartment on East 38th Street, above a dry cleaner’s.There was no question what the boy’s first name would be: “In our family,” Yul Brynner Sr. said, “Yul is not just a name. It is a title.” But he also gave his son the nickname Rock, after the boxer Rocky Graziano, in a bid to toughen him up for the rough streets of New York.Rock lived a wandering childhood, following his father’s career from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles and, finally, to Switzerland, where he attended the International School of Geneva, a famed boarding school.He enrolled at Yale, but after a year transferred to Trinity College Dublin — in part because, he later said, he was enthralled with the work of Samuel Beckett, whom he had met, and that of James Joyce, who might be one of the few 20th-century notables whom he did not.He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1969 and received a master’s in the same subject, also from Trinity, in 1972.Mr. Brynner’s marriage to Linda Ridgway, in 1973, ended in divorce. He married Elisabeth Coleman in 1978; they also later divorced. He is survived by his sisters, Victoria, Mia and Melody Brynner and Lark Bryner, who uses the original spelling of the family name.Mr. Brynner explored his family’s Eastern Russian roots in a 2006 book.via Distinct PressAfter receiving his doctorate, Mr. Brynner taught at Marist and at Western Connecticut State University. He also continued to write. Along with another novel, “The Doomsday Report” (1998), a prophetic satire about climate change, he wrote about the controversial drug thalidomide (“Dark Remedy: The Impact of Thalidomide and Its Revival as a Vital Medicine,” 2001); his family’s roots in eastern Russia (“Empire and Odyssey: The Brynners in Far East Russia and Beyond,” 2006); and, with Andrew Cuomo, the brother of Maria Cuomo Cole, who was governor of New York at the time, state water policy (“Natural Power: The New York Power Authority’s Origins and Path to Clean Energy,” 2016).Thanks to his research on eastern Russia, the State Department sent Mr. Brynner on several lecture tours in the region. There he paid tribute to his family by helping open a Brynner museum and unveil a statue of his father in Vladivostok, where the elder Mr. Brynner was born.“Yes, it’s difficult for the children of iconic figures to establish independent identities,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “But with all the suffering in this world, I wouldn’t shed too many tears for those who had privileged youths.” More

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      How ‘Sabbath’s Theater,’ Philip Roth’s Raunchiest Book, Made It to the Stage

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      For their adaptation of “Sabbath’s Theater,” John Turturro and Ariel Levy sought to preserve “the nasty side of existence” evoked in the book.For John Turturro, it was time to honor Philip Roth. Turturro, the veteran actor, had been friends with the novelist for nearly a quarter-century when Roth died in 2018 at 85. They first met, Turturro recalled, after Roth saw his performance in the 1994 film “Quiz Show” and picked him to star in a one-man stage adaptation of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Roth’s 1969 best seller about a young man with a penchant for self-pleasure.That play never got beyond readings. Plans for other works had similar fates. Two years after Roth’s death, Turturro appeared in the HBO mini-series “The Plot Against America,” David Simon and Ed Burns’s adaptation of Roth’s 2004 alternate-history novel.Still, Turturro said, he felt he wanted to “complete the conversation.” Now he’s starring in the New Group’s production of “Sabbath’s Theater,” Roth’s 1995 novel about a lascivious 64-year-old ex-puppeteer named Mickey Sabbath, which is in previews at Pershing Square Signature Theater. The book, a National Book Award winner regarded both as maybe Roth’s greatest novel and his black sheep, is certainly his raunchiest and most transgressive. (What Alexander Portnoy does with a piece of liver, Sabbath does at his lover’s grave.)Those familiar with the story might reasonably wonder: Why, out of all of Roth’s nearly 30 works of fiction, has John Turturro elected to embody the most estranging, the most irredeemable, the quite simply filthiest character in Roth’s canon?Turturro is also starring as the title character. “I was not afraid of it,” he said of the divisive protagonist. “I don’t have to be the hero.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“He’s like a stand-up comedian. That lends itself to the theater,” Turturro, 66, said of the Roth who wrote “Sabbath’s Theater.” “When he’s on a rant you go from Lorena Bobbitt to Mussolini to Ibsen to Macbeth, all in the same breath.”There were other reasons, too. Turturro was attracted to the novel’s house style: Its manic, sarcastic, abasing observations, largely written in the third person but never far from Sabbath’s perspective, seemed made for the theater.As Sabbath, Turturro is onstage virtually the entire play, speaking for much of that time and cycling through emotions like excitement and pity, desire and tenderness, depression and optimism.“You let the whole creature out,” Ariel Levy, the New Yorker staff writer with whom Turturro adapted the script, told Turturro during a joint interview, quoting from “Sabbath’s Theater.” She added: “And that’s what [Roth] sensed about you.”Turturro replied: “I was not afraid of it. I don’t have to be the hero.”Not having to be the hero is an important qualification for the actor playing Mickey Sabbath. His exploits include an obscenity arrest, a phone-sex scandal and compulsive lecherousness — up to and including stealing his friend’s college-aged daughter’s underwear from her childhood bedroom. Judith Thurman, the New Yorker staff writer and close friend of Roth’s, said “Sabbath’s Theater” was Roth’s favorite of his own books, the one he chose to read from at his 80th birthday celebration.“It is his most impious book, in a lifetime of impiety,” said Thurman, adding: “I think he would have been delighted that Ari and John had the nerve to do this. Nerve was one of the qualities in an artist that he most admired.”Roth at home in New York City, a few months before he died in 2018.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesThe 1995 novel is a National Book Award winner and regarded as one of Roth’s greatest.For both Turturro and Levy, Sabbath’s offensiveness, his audacity, his utter lack of embarrassment alchemized into Roth’s most life-affirming book, one that finds the protagonist recalling all the people and things he has loved and lost — his brother, his mother, his first wife, his vocation (his fingers are now arthritic), his longtime mistress. As Sabbath puts it in the play (in one of many lines of third-person narration transposed to Sabbath’s voice): “For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can’t beat the nasty side of existence.”The production, directed by Jo Bonney, leans into the novel’s frank depictions of unbounded lust, gleeful disloyalty and bodily functions. It is, at times, almost a gross-out comedy. Yet the story’s undertones of grief also attracted Turturro and Levy. Turturro read Roth’s memoir of his father’s death, “Patrimony: A True Story,” after his own father died and identified profoundly with it. Levy’s 2017 memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply,” recounted a miscarriage, and she said that while working on the play she thought of her husband’s having lost a brother while a young man, as Sabbath does.“We did this workshop in London at the National Theater, and somebody there asked, ‘Why now?’” Levy said. “And John said, ‘Because we’re all going to die.’ And that’s it. The depth and the death, grief and being haunted and sometimes feeling the dead are as real to you as the living.”The conventions of theater permit Sabbath’s many ghosts to haunt him not just in his mind’s eye but physically on the stage. In one scene, a nightgown represents the corpse of a mother mourned by her daughter, Sabbath’s first wife, Nikki; Sabbath, feet away, is simultaneously in the present tense with another character and conjuring the memory of Nikki, who herself disappeared decades earlier.“The ghosts of Mickey’s loved ones are more real to him than the living,” Bonney said. Enacting the novel’s fragmented nature by jumping back and forth in time was crucial to its dramatic success, she added. “We’re taking people on this ride of the mind as opposed to a regularly plotted story.”Such staging was revelatory to Levy, 49, who had never worked professionally in theater. “When you’re just writing, all you have is words, words, words, words, words,” Levy said. By contrast, she added, in theater, “you have other things going into the storytelling, like the way a person’s body is or their voice.”PERHAPS THE GHOST foremost summoned by the production is Roth’s. Turturro’s lanky frame is the opposite of Sabbath’s, but it echoes Roth’s, and the actor acknowledged that his Sabbath is partly a gloss on the novelist.“He definitely has a Philip-like quality — dark, antic, hectic, comic at the same time,” said Thurman, who saw a reading of the play in 2021 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.Turturro with Jason Kravits, left, and Elizabeth Marvel in the show, scheduled to run through Dec. 17 at the Pershing Square Signature Center.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWhen it came time to seek a writing partner for the script, Turturro said it was important to find someone who would be faithful to Roth’s language.“I was thinking about playwrights,” Turturro said, “but then I was thinking, ‘Would they want to come in and rewrite Philip’s work?’”Instead Turturro pitched Hilton Als, a longtime theater critic who is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Als suggested Levy. By then it was the spring of 2020, so Levy and Turturro met over Skype and got to work.“We didn’t write anything,” Levy said. “It’s only Roth’s writing. Including most of the stage directions. Because you can’t top it.”During rehearsals last month, Levy, considering how a scene should be blocked, grabbed her pummeled copy of the novel, found the original rendering and consulted it like scripture.One challenge was turning the novel’s stream of consciousness into scenes with characters, along with soliloquy-like asides from Sabbath.“We didn’t say, ‘Oh, let’s do this as a pushback against the oppressions of the moment,’” Levy said. “But is there a little bit of a thrill in all that? Sure, absolutely.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTheir script stipulates that the 16 characters besides Sabbath be played by just two actors. In this production, Jason Kravits portrays Sabbath’s put-together, respectable friend Norman Cowan as well as his 100-year-old cousin, Fish; Elizabeth Marvel plays his mistress, his wives and his mother.Turturro said the decision was inspired by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s 1943 film “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” in which Deborah Kerr plays three characters. “You know that thing in life where people seem like iterations of each other?” Levy said. “One actress being all these women makes so much sense.”Alongside Turturro’s Sabbath, the signature performance might be Marvel’s turn as Drenka Balich, Sabbath’s 52-year-old Croatian mistress. A mother and a lover, a force of life and sex, Drenka has long been Exhibit A for those defending Roth from charges of misogyny in his depictions of women.“Drenka is such a heroine on so many levels,” Levy said, “so interesting and complicated and older, just a combination of traits you don’t see flipped together. You see it in life, but you don’t get to see it onstage, on the screen.”Is 2023 ready for Mickey Sabbath? If so-called cancel culture — which Roth forecast in “Sabbath’s Theater” and, more directly, in “The Human Stain” (2000) — were to come for any Roth novel, it would surely be this one.“We didn’t say, ‘Oh, let’s do this as a pushback against the oppressions of the moment,’” Levy said. “But is there a little bit of a thrill in all that? Sure, absolutely.”In a Yale Review essay published this year and partly titled “in praise of filth,” the novelist Garth Greenwell wrote that he “can’t imagine a book like ‘Sabbath’s Theater’ being published today, certainly not by anyone save a writer of Roth’s stature.” Yet to Greenwell it is precisely the novel’s depiction of various repellent activities that lends the novel its moral force. “By repeatedly tempting us to pass judgment on Sabbath,” Greenwell added, “Roth’s novel reminds us how much more a person is than their worst acts.”Turturro wants theatergoers to make their own judgments. “My job is to keep the audience awake,” he said. “Whatever you think, you think.”Levy added: “It’s not a good play to bring your grandma to. Although, it depends on your grandma. My grandma would have loved it. She was dirty. She was really dirty.” More

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      After Outcry, Writers Guild Tries to Explain Silence on Hamas Attack

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      Facing mounting pressure from more than 300 Hollywood screenwriters questioning why it had not publicly condemned the Hamas attack on Israel this month, the Writers Guild of America West sent a letter to its members on Tuesday that sought to explain its silence while also calling the attack “an abomination.”The letter, signed by the guild’s leadership and viewed by The New York Times, said the reason the union had not issued a statement after the attack on Oct. 7 was not “because we are paralyzed by factionalism or masking hateful views” but rather because “we are American labor leaders, aware of our limitations and humbled by the magnitude of this conflict.”The guild’s letter acknowledged that it had publicly commented on other situations “which could be characterized as beyond our scope,” but that it had not made any statement following, for instance, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.“It can be an imprecise science for a labor union to pick and choose where it weighs in on both domestic and world affairs,” said the letter, which was signed by the president, Meredith Stiehm; the vice president, Michele Mulroney; and Betsy Thomas, the secretary-treasurer.Still, they added, “We understand this has caused tremendous pain and for that we are truly sorry.”(The west and east branches of the W.G.A. are affiliated unions with separate leadership that together represent more than 11,000 writers.)On Oct. 15, a group of screenwriters sent an open letter to the guild asking why it had not publicly denounced the attack on Israel, noting the union had made public statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and the #MeToo reckoning. They also noted that other major Hollywood unions had issued statements condemning the attack.The letter has now been signed by more than 300 writers, including Jerry Seinfeld, Eric Roth (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) and Amy Sherman-Palladino (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”). Some Jewish screenwriters had begun to question whether they should remain part of an organization that they felt did not support them.Ms. Stiehm’s initial reply to the open letter was an email to inquiring members saying that the lack of response was because “the board’s viewpoints are varied, and we found consensus out of reach.”The letter on Tuesday, which said the guild’s leadership was “horrified by the atrocities committed by Hamas,” was an attempt to stem the outrage. “I really appreciate this statement,” said the screenwriter Howard Gordon (“24” and “Homeland”), who added in an interview that the silence from the guild had prompted responses from both Jewish and non-Jewish members ranging from rage to fear to the desire to resign from the organization.“I hope this letter goes a long way to sort of calming some of it down,” said Mr. Gordon, who signed the open letter to the guild. “Hopefully something constructive comes out of this, which is an acknowledgment of how we combat and confront and talk about antisemitism.”For Dan Gordon, however, the apology came too late. Mr. Gordon, 76, sent a letter Tuesday morning resigning his membership in the organization, calling its silence “appalling.”“It is corrosive to me as a writer and repugnant to every fiber of my being as a person of conscience,” wrote Mr. Gordon, who has no relation to Howard Gordon and is best known for “The Hurricane” and “Wyatt Earp.” “I am resigning my membership not because I wish to work on nonunion projects, nor cross any picket line, but because I no longer wish to be a fellow traveler with those who hide behind the fetid veil of a morally bankrupt wokeism and stand silent in the face of unadulterated evil.”Mr. Gordon’s latest film, “Irena’s Vow” — about a young Polish-Catholic woman during World War II who hid 12 Jews in the basement of a German officer’s house without his knowledge for almost a year — debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.He will change his guild membership status to “financial core,” according to his letter. Under that designation, he will still receive the contract benefits earned by the guild but he will no longer be able to vote or attend any guild meetings. The designation is irreversible and viewed by the guild as an act of disloyalty. The W.G.A. maintains an online list of members who have chosen this status, with a reminder that “Fi-Core is forever.”Mr. Gordon called Tuesday’s letter from the guild “pusillanimous” and faulted it for not calling for a release of the hostages.“I don’t retract anything I said,” he added in an interview. “If one cannot condemn, clearly, and without reservation, what Hamas perpetrated, one’s moral compass is absent, not broken.” More

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      Writers Guild Faces Backlash for Not Condemning Hamas Attack

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      A union leader told members that the board’s viewpoints were varied and that a consensus could not be reached.Just weeks after the Writers Guild of America displayed solidarity by ending a monthslong strike and voting overwhelmingly in favor of a new contract with the major entertainment companies, the union is being roiled by a fight over its lack of a public statement condemning the Hamas attack on Israel.On Oct. 15, eight days after the attack, a group of screenwriters signed an open letter to the Writers Guild asking why it had not issued a statement condemning the attack. They noted that other major Hollywood unions had issued such statements. The letter now has more than 300 signers, including Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Sherman-Palladino (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) and Gideon Raff (“Homeland”).It questioned why the Writers Guild had previously made public remarks in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and #MeToo reckoning but remained silent “when terrorists invaded Israel to murder, rape and kidnap Jews.”On Friday, 75 members of the guild took part in a Zoom meeting to discuss what to do about the silence. Options included withholding dues until the guild leadership convenes a proper conversation on the issue with its membership, according to a person who attended the discussion and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of its delicate nature. Other members are considering resigning from the guild by filing for financial core status, in which they would pay reduced dues and still receive the contractual benefits of the collective bargaining agreement.Later Friday, Meredith Stiehm, the president of the Writers Guild of America West, sent an email to members who had inquired about the lack of a response. “Like the membership itself, the board’s viewpoints are varied, and we found consensus out of reach,” she wrote in the letter, which was viewed by The New York Times. “For these reasons, we have decided not to comment publicly.”Calls to the union on Monday were not returned.Jewish leaders have encouraged Hollywood’s biggest voices to speak out in favor of Israel.“When celebrities speak out, it sends an important message to their tens of millions of followers that this is the right side to be on,” Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote in an opinion piece published in The Hollywood Reporter.“In light of how distorting social media algorithms can present the world,” he added, “it’s even more important for these voices to cut through.”The writers’ union is not the only Hollywood organization dealing with fallout.On Sunday, Creative Artists Agency announced to its employees that Maha Dakhil, the highest-ranking female agent in the motion picture group, had resigned from the company’s internal board and was stepping away from her leadership role within the motion picture group after posting inflammatory remarks on Instagram that accused Israel of committing genocide.Ms. Dakhil has apologized for her comments. According to an email sent by the agency’s chief executive, Bryan Lourd, which was reviewed by The Times, she will continue to represent her clients, who include Natalie Portman, Tom Cruise and Reese Witherspoon. More

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      Vincent Patrick, Chronicler of Hustlers and Mobsters, Dies at 88

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      A novelist and screenwriter, he wrote “The Pope of Greenwich Village” and “Family Business” and brought them both to the big screen.Vincent Patrick, an author and screenwriter who set pins at a bowling alley, peddled Bibles door to door and helped start a mechanical engineering firm before finding critical success with his first novel, “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” at 44, died on Oct. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia, his son Richard said.The son of a Bronx pool-hall owner and numbers runner, Mr. Patrick was raised in a milieu sprinkled with the grifters, hustlers and mobsters who would eventually become characters in his novels, which also included “Family Business” (1985) and “Smoke Screen” (1999).In manner and accent, Mr. Patrick seemed like a character he might have dreamed up himself. A 1999 profile in The Los Angeles Times noted that “his voice has that subterranean rumble of an accent, a sound that good character actors try to emulate when playing retired cops or tough but fair patriarchs.”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of Charlie, the down-on-his-luck night manager of a Manhattan saloon, whose cousin Paulie sucks him and a locksmith friend into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.“The connective thread is the sad state of their lives, their disenchantment and the curse of being dreamers,” Joe Flaherty wrote in a review in The New York Times. The novel, he added, “mines territory rarely encountered in fiction and, in the vernacular of his tough, streetwise characters, delivers a sweetheart of a book.”“Family Business,” the tale of three generations of hustlers from an ethnically mixed New York family, also explored the psychological allure of the big score. Jessie McMullen, the con-man grandfather; Vito, his son, who is in the wholesale meat business; and Adam, his M.I.T.-educated grandson, all find themselves drawn into a risky caper to swipe a plant cell from a California laboratory and sell it to a rival genetic engineering company.“Mr. Patrick could have drawn these characters with broad strokes, concentrating on the heist, and still have come up with a decent thriller,” Arthur Krystal wrote in The Times. “Instead he chose to provide them with interesting lives and, in the cases of Vito and Adam, with the intelligence and self-doubts of men uncomfortable with their moral upbringing.”Mr. Patrick himself was quoted by The Times: “There’s a colorfulness about their value systems that makes them attractive to a writer,” he said, “a willingness to take risks and an ability to meet life sort of head-on and wrestle with it and not retreat into a very secure position.”Some critics were less kind to the feature film versions of both books, which Mr. Patrick himself adapted. “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts, was “less a story than a display of acting mannerisms,” the critic Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.Reviewing “Family Business” (1989), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick, Mr. Canby found a paucity of wit. He also found the idea that three actors so physically dissimilar could be blood relatives to be a stretch.Still, Mr. Patrick understood the compromises required to make it in Hollywood, his son Richard said in a phone interview. His father, he said convinced the producer Scott Rudin that he would not treat his novels as sacrosanct works of literature, telling him, “I have no compunction at all about cannibalizing my own work in order to bring it to the big screen.’”“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of a down-on-his-luck saloon night manager who gets sucked into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.Seaview BooksVincent Francis Patrick was born on Jan. 19, 1935, in the Bronx, the middle of three children of Vincent and Angela (Hunt) Patrick. His mother was a legal secretary. Growing up, he dreamed of being a writer, and he churned out short stories during his teens.School, however, was another matter. He chafed at the strict discipline at the Roman Catholic schools he attended, and he dropped out of Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx after his junior year. In order to make ends meet, he set pins at a Bronx bowling alley before taking a job selling Bibles door to door in Bronx apartment buildings.As he recounted in a 1999 performance at the storytelling series staged by the Moth, he abandoned the job after watching his sales partner persuade a housewife to raid her 7-year-old daughter’s piggy bank for the $7 down payment on a fancy leather-embossed Bible. “I didn’t know yet who I was,” he told the audience. “But I knew who I was not.”In 1954 he married Carole Unger, and the couple had two sons. With a family to support, Mr. Patrick earned his high school diploma and put himself through New York University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He and a partner then started a successful firm that designed, among other things, an assembly line for caskets.By his mid-30s, however, the call of a literary career had become too loud to ignore, so he left engineering to take another stab at writing professionally. “I wasn’t really happy, and I knew if I didn’t begin to write something, it wasn’t going to be written,” he told People magazine in 1979.Mr. Patrick hammered out a draft of his first book while working as a bartender at an Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, where his son said he drew inspiration by rubbing elbows with the underworld types from Little Italy who would hang out there.From left, Mickey Rourke, Daryl Hannah and Eric Roberts in the film version of “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), for which Mr. Patrick wrote the screenplay.MGM, via Everett CollectionWhile he was initially drawn to screenwriting as a means to adapt his own work, Richard Patrick said, it soon became a successful side career. Among other projects, he contributed to the script for “The Devil’s Own” (1997), starring Harrison Ford as a police officer and Brad Pitt as an Irish Republican Army member hiding out in Staten Island, and wrote the two-part television movie “To Serve and Protect” (1999).He was also hired to write early treatments for “Beverly Hills Cop” and “The Godfather III,” although both projects ended up in other hands.In addition to his son Richard, Mr. Patrick is survived by his wife; another son, Glen; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.Hollywood, Mr. Patrick once said, was both a fabled land of opportunity and a trap. “Once you start,” he told The Los Angeles Times, “it’s hard to get out.” Discussing his third novel, “Smoke Screen,” a thriller involving international terrorism and a deadly virus, he admitted that his screenwriting work had slowed his literary output.“Yeah, this is my third novel in 20 years,” he said. “But I think when you look at it, from the point of sheer craft, I’ve gotten better. And that’s because, Hollywood or not, I write every day. It’s different writing, but it all boils down to plot and characters.” More

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      Echo Brown, Young Adult Author and Performer, Dies at 39

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      A one-woman show that used her date with a white hipster to talk about life, race, love and sex, led an editor to sign her to write two novels.Echo Brown, a late blooming storyteller who mined her life to create a one-woman show about Black female identity and two autobiographical young adult novels in which she used magical realism to help convey her reality, died on Sept. 16 in Cleveland. She was 39.Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her friend Cathy Mao, who said the cause had not yet been determined. But Ms. Brown was diagnosed with lupus in about 2015, leading eventually to kidney failure, Ms. Mao said by phone. A live kidney donor had been cleared for a transplant, which was expected to take place early next year.Ms. Brown, who grew up in poverty in Cleveland and graduated from Dartmouth College, had no professional stage experience when her serio-comic show, “Black Virgins Are Not for Hipsters,” made its debut in 2015. It told her autobiographical story, through multiple voices, about dating a white hipster, including wondering what his reaction to her dark skin would be, and the sex, love, depression and childhood trauma she experienced.“It’s very revealing, and I felt very vulnerable doing it,” she told The Oakland Tribune in 2015, adding, “It’s as if you get onstage and share your deepest, darkest secrets. Putting my sexuality out there in front of people can make me feel very exposed.”The show was successfully staged in theaters in the Bay Area; she also performed it in Chicago, Cleveland, Dublin and Berlin.Robert Hurwitt, the theater critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, called Ms. Brown “an instantly attractive and engaging performer” who “has us eating out of her hand well before she gets everyone up and dancing to illustrate (with a little help from Beyoncé) why Black women shouldn’t dance with white men until at least after marriage.”And the writer Alice Walker said on her blog in 2016, “What I can say is that not since early Whoopi Goldberg and early and late Anna Deavere Smith have I been so moved by a performer’s narrative.”When “Black Virgins” was mentioned in a profile of Ms. Brown in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 2017, Jessica Anderson, an editor at Christy Ottaviano Books, an imprint of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, took notice.“I reached out blindly to see if she would turn her attention to writing for a young adult audience,” Ms. Anderson said in a phone interview. “She wasn’t familiar with young adult or children’s literature. I sent her some books, and she had an immediate sense of what her storytelling should be.”The result was “Black Girl Unlimited” (2020), a novel that Ms. Brown tells through the lens of her young self as a wizard who deals with a fire in her family’s cramped apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration, sexual assault and her mother’s overdose.Ms. Brown’s first novel presents her young self as a wizard and carries readers through events like a fire in her family’s apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration and her sexual assault. Macmillan“Brown’s greatest gift is evoking intimacy,” Karen Valby wrote in her review in The New York Times, “and as she delicately but firmly snatches the reader’s attention, we are allowed to see this girl of multitudes and her neighborhood of contradictions in full and specific detail.”Ms. Brown’s second book was “The Chosen One: A First-Generation Ivy League Odyssey” (2022), a coming-of-age story that uses supernatural elements like twisting portals on walls to depict her disorienting and stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Ms. Brown’s second novel focuses on her stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Christy Ottaviano BooksPublishers Weekly praised Ms. Brown for the way she ruminated on her “independence, fear of failure and mental health” with “vigor alongside themes of healing, forgiveness and the human need to be and feel loved.”Echo Unique Ladadrian Brown was born on April 10, 1984, in Cleveland. She was reared by her mother, April Brown, and her stepfather, Edward Trueitt, whom she regarded as her father. Her father, Edward Littlejohn, was not in her life. During high school she lived for a while with one of her teachers.Ms. Brown thought that Dartmouth, with its prestige and stately campus, would represent a “promised land” to her and be “the birth of my becoming,” she said in a TEDx talk in 2017.But early on she heard voices from a speeding truck shout the N-word at her.“They weren’t students, they probably weren’t affiliated with Dartmouth in any way, but it was enough to shatter me,” she said. The incident taught her a lesson: “There are no promised lands in this world for marginalized people, those of us who fall outside the category of normal.”She graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in political science — she was the first college graduate in her family — and was hired as an investigator with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent oversight agency of the New York City Police Department. She left after two years, believing that “we didn’t have the power to do the work that was necessary,” she told the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.She worked as a legal secretary and briefly attended the Columbia Journalism School. She became depressed, started to study yoga and meditation, and moved to Oakland in 2011. While there, she was hired as a program manager at Challenge Day, a group that holds workshops at schools aimed at building bonds among teenagers.Her job included telling students about her life, which helped her find her voice.“I found that I could drop people into emotion and pull them out with humor,” she said in the Dartmouth magazine article. “That’s where I learned I was a good storyteller and wondered, ‘Where can I go to tell more stories?’”She began taking classes in solo performing with David Ford at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco. At first, she wrote comic scenes, then created more serious ones.“It was clear that she was someone who was ready for this, and she had a very easy time getting the words off the pages as a performer,” Mr. Ford said. “There was something miraculous about her.”In addition to her mother and stepfather, Ms. Brown is survived by her brother Edward. Her brother Demetrius died in 2020.Ms. Brown’s latest project was a collaboration with the actor, producer and director Tyler Perry on a novel, “A Jazzman’s Blues.” It is based on a 2022 Netflix film of the same name that Mr. Perry directed from a script that he wrote in 1995, about an ill-fated romance between teenagers (the young man becomes a jazz musician) in rural Georgia that takes place largely in the late 1930s and ’40s. It is to be published early next year.Ms. Anderson said the project came about because, as Ms. Brown got sicker, “it was too energy-consuming for her to work on her own material. So she was looking for a more creative partnership. and this came about through her agent.” More