Writing and Writers

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Michael Feingold, Forceful Drama Critic, Dies at 77

      by

      For decades he wrote about theater in The Village Voice, but he also was a dramaturge and a Tony-nominated translator.Michael Feingold, whose learned writing about the theater was a fixture of The Village Voice for decades, and who was also a dramaturge, a translator and a Tony Award-nominated lyricist and adapter, died on Nov. 21 in Manhattan. He was 77.Daniel Pardo, one of his executors, confirmed the death, in a hospital. He said Mr. Feingold had had a longstanding heart condition.Mr. Feingold had an encyclopedic knowledge of plays and musicals, which he drew upon as he sized up productions, beginning in the early 1970s and continuing until recently. He did not pull punches, even if his target was a venerable veteran.He once dismissed Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose music is often said to be derivative, with this line: “Webber’s music isn’t so painful to hear, if you don’t mind its being so soiled from previous use.”In 2003 he assessed Neil Simon’s last produced play, “Rose’s Dilemma,” saying that it “doesn’t mean anything to anybody and doesn’t reveal any understanding, on its author’s part, of how plays are written.” Mr. Simon at that point had won multiple Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Theatrical trends did not impress Mr. Feingold either, especially Broadway’s late-20th-century fixation on big-budget musicals that, as he once put it, were about “large, mechanized objects” rather than characters. His 1991 takedown of Cameron Mackintosh’s production of “Miss Saigon,” which ran on Broadway for 10 years and was famed for its onstage helicopter, was part of theatrical lore.“Every civilization gets the theater it deserves, and we get ‘Miss Saigon,’ which means we can now say definitively that our civilization is over,” Mr. Feingold wrote. “After this, I see no way out but an aggressive clearance program: All the Broadway theaters must be demolished, without regard for their size, history or landmark status.”He went on to list other things that needed to be done away with, including the staff of The New York Times (where the critic Frank Rich had praised the show). Also, he said, “Cameron Mackintosh and his production staff should be slowly beaten to death with blunt instruments; this year’s Pulitzer Prize judges in drama could be used for the job.” Those judges had, weeks earlier, given the drama Pulitzer to Mr. Simon for “Lost in Yonkers.”But Mr. Feingold was not a critic who would just sit and snipe. He was active in creating for the theater himself, even while writing criticism for The Voice.He translated numerous European works for the American stage, especially those of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. His adaptation of the Brecht-Weill collaboration “Happy End” even made Broadway in 1977, with Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd in the cast. He shared Tony nominations for the book and for the score. He earned another Broadway credit in 1989 for his translation of another Brecht-Weill work, “Threepenny Opera.” His translation earned some favorable comments, but critics trashed the show, which featured the rock star Sting.Mr. Feingold spent time as literary manager for the Yale Repertory Theater, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., roles in which he would read scripts and often help shape ones that were accepted for production. The theater historian Jeffrey Sweet, in his book “The O’Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater” (2014), recounted the role played by Mr. Feingold in propelling the career of August Wilson.In 1982, when Mr. Wilson was still largely unknown, he brought his play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” to the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., where Mr. Feingold was doing dramaturgy. The first reading of the piece, directed by William Partlan, lasted more than four hours. Mr. Partlan and Mr. Feingold talked Mr. Wilson through the necessary trimming.“Cutting was a torment to him,” Mr. Feingold said in an interview for the book. “Cutting was always a terrible struggle for August because every word was blood.”Another reading was held, and this time the play was 90 minutes shorter. Mr. Rich, the Times critic, was in the audience and was impressed. His enthusiastic write-up in The Times jump-started Mr. Wilson’s career.“While there’s nothing novel about rich language in the theater,” Mr. Rich wrote, “it is quite unusual in 1982 to find a playwright who is willing to stake his claim to the stage not with stories or moral platitudes, but with the beauty and meaning of torrents of words.”Mr. Feingold wrote for The Voice from 1971 to 2013, when he became a victim of downsizing (though he would return later in a limited capacity). Robert Simonson, reporting on that dismissal in Playbill, said that Mr. Feingold’s writing was known for “erudition and understanding of theater history, both ancient and modern, and how current plays fit in with that continuum.”Mr. Feingold, right, in 2015 at the Obie Awards with, from left, the costume designer William Ivey Long, the performer Lea DeLaria and Heather Hitchens, the president of the American Theater Wing. Mr. Feingold was often a judge for the Obies, and he received one of his own in 2020.Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for American Theater WingMr. Feingold was born on May 5, 1945, in Chicago. His mother, Elsie (Silver) Feingold, taught piano, and his father, Bernard, managed a tannery.Michael grew up in Chicago and Highland Park, Ill., where the family moved when he was in high school. The Highland Park high school he attended had a drama club where, as he put it in an interview with the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project in 2018, “I did some inept acting and some slightly less inept directing.”He became further interested in theater at Columbia University, where he earned a degree in English and comparative literature in 1966. He had taken a senior seminar from Robert Brustein, who was then known primarily for his theater criticism, and in the fall of 1965 asked if Mr. Brustein would write him a recommendation to support his application to the Yale School of Drama. After Christmas break, he asked if Mr. Brustein had remembered to do so.“He smiled mysteriously and said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’” Mr. Feingold said in the oral history. “And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Read The Times tomorrow.’”The next day the newspaper reported that Mr. Brustein had just been named dean of Yale Drama.“So he wrote the recommendation and then he accepted it,” Mr. Feingold said, “feeling that he should take his own advice.”Mr. Feingold had wanted to study playwriting at Yale, and he did, but Mr. Brustein steered him toward criticism as well. He began writing for The Voice, and in 1983 he was named its chief drama critic.Mr. Feingold, who lived in Manhattan and who leaves no immediate survivors, was often a judge for the Obie Awards, which recognize Off Broadway work. In 2020 he received one of his own, a special citation recognizing “his extraordinary service to the theater.”He was, above all, a champion of theater that is bold and challenging. In 1993 he was the editor of “Grove New American Theater,” a play collection that included work by Karen Finley, Mac Wellman and other cutting-edge writers.In the introduction to that book, he lamented the cyclical nature of American theater: a period of innovation, then stagnation, repeated endlessly, stunting growth.“If the theater doesn’t grow up, the American public doesn’t grow up either,” he wrote. “Instead, it gets hotted up, every 20 years or so, over the same issues — sex, politics and religion — the three matters that art, according to some strangely permanent lunatic fringe of American opinion, must never be allowed to deal with, at least not in any open manner.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Mood’ Is a Genre-Bending Show About Social Media and Sex Work

      by

      “Mood,” a BBC America series created by Nicôle Lecky, blends music, comedy and gritty realism to explore the opportunities and risks for young women online.LONDON — A few years ago, Nicôle Lecky was shown a website that attempted to expose the personal details of women on Instagram because of their involvement in sex work. Lecky’s reaction was “instinctive,” she said in a recent interview, adding that it was one of those things that, as a writer, “you just feel compelled to write about.”She briefly thought about the dramatic potential of looking at who built the site, Lecky said, but her mind quickly turned to the subjects of their disdain — the women themselves. “That’s whose story I really want to engage with,” she noted.In a flurry, Lecky, now 32, wrote the first draft of “Superhoe,” an 85-minute one-woman show that she performed at the Royal Court Theater in London in 2019. That story has made its way onscreen with “Mood,” a sleek six-episode series that premieres Sunday on BBC America.Lecky plays the 25-year-old Sasha, brokenhearted and struggling, both financially and psychologically. She is soon drawn into the orbit of Carly (Lara Peake), a seemingly archetypal influencer, clad in athleisure and flush with cash, before falling into the dopamine loop of social media and, ultimately, sex work — first through videos on DailyFans, the show’s version of OnlyFans, and eventually through escorting.Carly (Lara Peake), left, invites Sasha (Nicôle Lecky) into her apparently glamorous world.Natalie Seery/BBC StudiosThrough Sasha’s trajectory, Lecky — who, as well as writing and executive producing the show, also helped create music for it — explores the gray area between empowerment and exploitation. As part of the production process, she spoke to women about their experiences of sex work, which produced complex feelings in her, she said.“If you are financially secure, and you’re happy and healthy, and you want to go and be a sex worker, go for it,” Lecky said, before underlining that some of the women she had spoken to wanted a different life. “I talk a lot about choice and if you have the choice,” she added. “And if you don’t, I think you should be able to live in a world where you don’t have to make money solely from having sex.”F., a 29-year-old who works in the sex industry, was among those who spoke to Lecky. She requested to be identified only by her first initial to protect her privacy. In a phone interview, she said that she appreciated the show’s depiction of “elements of the good and bad” of the industry, while showing that sex work attracted a variety of people. “You’ve got some of the girls that are lawyers and have fantastic professions,” F. said. “Everyone does this.”“A lot of people don’t understand or don’t want to understand why girls do it,” she added.Sex work is a central tenet of the show, but so too is a study of how that industry intersects with race and class. Sasha is often fetishized — her alias is “Lexi Caramel,” the “Caramel” a racialized addition by Carly. While on a job, another Black escort warns Sasha that they have to play by different rules than their white counterparts, adding that Sasha needs to be careful not to end up “damaged or dead.”Again and again, Sasha is shown operating in a world that ends up hardening her. Lecky likens Sasha to “someone you might see at a bus stop screaming on the phone and you think, ‘Oh my God, they’re a handful,’ but you don’t know their story.”“Sasha, to me, was very much based on the girls I went to school with,” she added.Lecky in a London studio last month. As well as writing and executive producing “Mood,” she also helped create music for the show.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesLecky grew up in East London, the daughter of a mental-health nurse and an electrician who formerly worked as a D.J. She loved performing and attended weekend acting classes, she said, and that led to small acting roles and writing jobs as a teenager.She also enjoyed history and politics, she added, and had aspirations to work for the United Nations. She enrolled in a multidisciplinary course at King’s College London to study global conflict, but found it tough to balance her university obligations with her auditions. A producer then suggested that she go to drama school, something that she said she had not considered before. She left college and headed to the Mountview Academy of Theater Arts in London.After graduating, she took jobs as a restaurant hostess and, at one point, retrained in event management, all while continuing to cut her teeth in TV writers’ rooms, onscreen and with places on writer-training initiatives. Those experiences, she said, made her realize that she needed to keep writing, and “Superhoe” came out of that desire to create.Lisa Walters, a producer on “Mood,” recalled being sent “Superhoe” when she was working at Channel 4, one of Britain’s public broadcasters. “I’d read lots of scripts in my role, and it’s always really exciting when you pick one up and you just feel instantly drawn to it,” she said. “Nicôle does have a sort of unapologetic style in her writing where it’s very raw, very real, and it’s authentic.”“Mood,” so called because Sasha expresses her mood, or vibe, through song throughout the show, is also unusual in being a mix of drama, musical and comedy. In one moment, viewers are taken into the depths of gritty realism; in the next, glimpses of Sasha’s internal world emerge through songs and surreal transformations to the world around her, like a family home suddenly turning into a jazz lounge.Lecky has performed songs from the show on radio in Britain. The soundtrack is available to stream.Natalie Seery/BBC StudiosDespite this singular feel, the similarity between Lecky’s rise and that of other female British writers has drawn comparisons. When “Mood” premiered this year in Britain, the news media cited Michaela Coel and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who also rose to prominence with buzzy one-woman plays, as reference points.Lecky, however, said that she tried to be “blinkered” and to stay focused on her own career. Coel and Waller-Bridge have been supportive, but “I just think everyone’s in their own lane,” she said.In attracting the BBC to adapt “Superhoe” for the screen, it helped that the play had already enjoyed success. As Fiona Campbell, a commissioner at the broadcaster, acknowledged: “We knew it was a very fresh, very well received” piece.Walters, the producer, said that the BBC had “wholeheartedly put their trust in Nicôle in order to realize her vision. They believed in what she had to say.” Walters added that it was “huge” for the broadcaster to allow a new talent to realize her vision exactly how she wanted it to be.Praise for Lecky’s drive is common among those she’s worked with. “Her work ethic is like none I’ve ever seen,” Walters noted. “She worked very, very hard and didn’t leave anything to chance.”“I talk a lot about choice and if you have the choice,” Lecky said. “And if you don’t, I think you should be able to live in a world where you don’t have to make money solely from having sex.”Ellie Smith for The New York TimesLecky frames her ambition as one of contours rather than specifics. “I don’t know if I know exactly where I want to go, but maybe I know where I don’t want to go,” she said.In the spirit of Sasha, she added: “I kind of do think that if you grow up without very much, you get very used to being like, ‘Well, I’ll just do it.’ You kind of make things work.” More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      How Her Ancestors Reignited Her Return to Theater

      by

      Quiara Alegría Hudes is back with a new work, an Off Broadway production of “My Broken Language,” adapted from her 2021 memoir.In 2018, the playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes announced that she would be taking a pause from the theater. The art form she loved so much had become a source of heartbreak: She was tired of the industry’s lack of cultural diversity, the disinterest those in power had in changing the status quo and the anxiety she felt leading up to opening night (the unexpected hiccups, the uncertainty of how a work would be received by critics and audience members).When it came to producing works by playwrights of color, she began to feel as if her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Water by the Spoonful,” about a Puerto Rican war veteran recently returned from Iraq, and “In the Heights,” her Tony-winning musical with Lin-Manuel Miranda, were exceptions more often than the rule. During the 2018-2019 season, for example, only three writers of color had their work produced on Broadway.In order to heal, Hudes went on an inner retreat. Turning to her memories, she sought out the people who taught her how to tend to her body and spirit. This soulful journey resulted in “My Broken Language,” an impressionistic coming-of-age memoir published in 2021 that detailed the shame she felt over being fluent in her Jewish father’s native English, but not her Puerto Rican mother’s Spanish. It was that same sense of incompleteness that led her to take a break from the theater.While recording the audiobook, Hudes noted her prose sometimes had the rhythm of a monologue. “It was the one-woman play,” she said. That realization, combined with her wanting to step up as a community leader, ignited her desire to return to theater — despite the heartbreak. “Let me get some real bodies and spirits on this,” she recalled thinking during our video chat. Now, Hudes’s stage adaptation of her book, also called “My Broken Language,” is running at Signature Theater through Nov. 27.From left, Samora la Perdida (seated), Zabryna Guevara, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Yani Marin and Marilyn Torres in “My Broken Language.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesOnstage, she is embodied by five people, including one of her frequent collaborators, Daphne Rubin-Vega, all of whom play different shades of the author. Hudes, now 45, had moments of not recognizing the person on the page. She made peace with it by realizing, “it was all the identities of mine, but it was also all the identities of all the women who raised me and who I love.” “My Broken Language,” in all its forms, is also partly a celebration of her ancestors, and how often unintentionally they inspired her to become a writer. “Our archive is in us and of us,” she wrote in the script for the play. On a practical level, in tune with changing what once made her turn away from the theater, Hudes wanted to ensure the production contributes to moving the industry forward in terms of representation in casting. In the script, she insists, “these are Philly Rican roles” for Latina actors.Born and raised in Philadelphia, Hudes comes from a long line of Puerto Rican women who excelled at building community and developing strong spiritual values. Her mother, Virginia Sanchez, who features prominently in the book and the play, is a renowned santera, who instilled love and respect for their Taína-Lukumí-Boricua legacy, as well as a fascination with words. One of Sanchez’s favorite possessions is a 19th-century Spanish dictionary that she uses to search for words people may have forgotten.“The book smells like our elders, it has its own soul,” Sanchez said over a video call, “it contains one of our identities.” In spite of her daughter’s “broken language,” Sanchez said she believes “Quiara always had a gift for words, she knows how to transform her experiences into a form of teaching.”Bill Heck and Liza Colón-Zayas in “Water by the Spoonful,” which had its New York premiere in 2013 at Second Stage Theater.Karli Cadel for The New York TimesLin-Manuel Miranda, center left, and Karen Olivo in the musical “In the Heights” at the Richard Rodgers Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIndeed, the playwright extracts wisdom from experiences she had growing up, such as seeing her mother possessed by a spirit. “To do that literally onstage would be vulgar,” Hudes explained. So she transformed her memories into words and then into physical movements that would make sense onstage with the help of the choreographer Ebony Williams. The goal is to create actions that evoke the feeling of being in between universes.The play also marks Hudes’s directorial debut. She describes the work of a director as one of “community care,” and compares it to a gardener choosing the seeds, planting them, and then nurturing them toward excellence. “Directing is the process,” she said.“Her rehearsal room feels like home,” said Samora la Perdida, who plays one of Hudes’ alter egos, describing “walls decorated with altars to our ancestors, tables with guava and cheese empanadas from her favorite spot in Washington Heights, a stereo blasting Frankie Ruiz.”Of Hudes, Rubin-Vega added, “She leads with openhearted professionalism.”Rethinking the meaning of community and how to affect it is what led Hudes to resume her theater work. After publishing her memoir, she discovered a new community in a world of readers who reacted emotionally to her stories and reminded her of her purpose.“Quiara is giving our community the opportunity to talk about the raw pain we’ve inherited, not only as women or immigrants but as people,” Sanchez said. “My daughter is a keeper of our lineage, a witness of our experience.”Although they work in different fields, Hudes said she believes she and her mother have overlapping journeys. “We break through the vines with our machetes, finding our own way, sharing strategies and celebrating triumphs,” Hudes added.“Quiara accepted her tongue for what it was in order to create a language of her own,” la Perdida said, “a language that shamelessly dances with both her Latina roots and Western canon influences. A language with the rhythms of Chopin and Juan Luis Guerra, inspired by the poetic prose of both Shakespeare and José Rivera.”After five years away, Hudes said she is enjoying the various pleasures that come with working in the theater again, like being in a room full of Latino artists, her community. She finds it to be utterly therapeutic. “I often crunch up in my seat, kind of like a ball, and then pop up, it’s so much fun to live all these old habits again,” she said. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ Gets Joan Didion’s Intention Just Right

      by

      A play based on the writer’s memoir about the death of her husband, in its first New York revival, goes small to powerful effect.The timeline of loss was mercilessly fast. On Dec. 30, 2003, Joan Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died mid-conversation at the dinner table in their apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. In late August 2005, their grown-up only child, Quintana, died, less suddenly.Even mid-devastation, Didion did what writers do: observe and chronicle. First came her crystalline memoir of grief for Dunne, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a best seller when it was published in October 2005, only weeks after their long-ailing daughter’s death. “Blue Nights,” Didion’s memoir of mourning Quintana, was that book’s counterpart, released in 2011.In between, with a rapidity that’s startling, Didion’s stage adaptation of “The Year of Magical Thinking” arrived on Broadway, in March 2007. A monologue directed by David Hare and produced by Scott Rudin, among others, it starred Vanessa Redgrave as Didion. This was a prestige cultural event: tasteful, literary, remote. Presumably, remote was not the goal.The scale of it was all out of whack — not the script, which Didion imbued with a soul-baring directness, but the production. The memoir’s starkly personal story, so intimate as a reading experience, was told now before a crowd of hundreds. We, the audience, were asked to accept one famous artist — the sturdy, statuesque Redgrave — as the stand-in for a highly recognizable other, the diminutive Didion, who was in her early 70s then, with a fragility about her. It was all too large. It did not capture the essence of the book.How thrilling, then, that the first New York revival of “The Year of Magical Thinking” does. Directed by Jonathan Silverstein, this Keen Company production goes small, and in doing so, gets the play sublimely right.Rejecting the distancing formality of a traditional theater setting, it is being performed around the city in living rooms and community spaces whose seating capacity ranges from 12 to 35. Its star is the esteemed Off Broadway actor Kathleen Chalfant, in what may be her best-matched role since Vivian Bearing in “Wit,” more than 20 years ago.The performance I saw took place in a private townhouse on the Upper East Side, about a dozen blocks from where Didion lived. Chalfant seated herself in front of a stone fireplace and slipped into the story of Didion’s discombobulated year, which started on a cozy evening, when, as was their habit, Didion and Dunne had a fire in their fireplace.“Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night,” Chalfant-as-Didion said with a lightness of touch calibrated just right for the room, where we sat on comfortable chairs drawn in a circle, seemingly secure from the menace of the world.Didion and Dunne weren’t safe that night, of course, and neither are we in the long run. As she warns, “Life changes in the instant.” Her play means to gird us for when we, too, find ourselves plunged into grief for someone whose death we cannot bring ourselves to absorb.“The details will be different, but it will happen to you,” she says. “That’s what I’m here to tell you.”The play is a report back from an emotional abyss, yet for all its intensity, it isn’t grim or overwrought. It’s rigorously self-scrutinizing, dryly self-mocking, fairly stunned — somehow both unsentimental and consumed with love.Didion remembers her trauma-scrambled brain wanting to fend off an obituary for Dunne in The Los Angeles Times, because maybe on Pacific Time, he was still alive. She remembers “just playing along,” for quite a while, with the idea that he was dead.What she doesn’t remember — like precisely when the ambulance arrived at their apartment, or how long the E.M.T.s stayed — she fills in with research, because this is the kind of person she is: a woman with a razor-sharp intellect who armors herself with knowledge. Someone seemingly too firmly in control to become unmoored.Vivian Bearing, the dying professor in “Wit,” is that way, too, which is part of the brilliance of casting Chalfant here. She doesn’t physically resemble Didion, and she’s not attempting an impersonation. But her Didion has that same sharp cerebral quality and that same destabilized vulnerability, along with a subtle, charismatic warmth.Didion, who died in December, wanted so badly to protect her little family. She couldn’t, but she could alert the rest of us.“Life changes in the instant,” she says again. “The ordinary instant.”The Year of Magical ThinkingThrough Nov. 20 in various spaces around New York City (addresses will be shared with ticket holders on the morning of the performance); keencompany.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More