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      in Movies

      Writers Guild Awards Keep up Momentum for ‘CODA,’ ‘Don’t Look Up’

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      The victories are good news for those films’ Oscar chances: The best picture winner usually also picks up a screenplay trophy.A sudden Oscar front-runner and a dark-horse contender took top honors at the Writers Guild Awards on Sunday night, as the heartwarmer “CODA” and the satirical “Don’t Look Up” prevailed in the adapted and original screenplay categories, respectively.“This is real, legitimate excitement,” the writer-director of “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay, said in a pretaped speech. Though several awards shows have returned to in-person gatherings, the WGA ceremony was virtual, and nominees were asked to send in their acceptance speeches ahead of time. Only the winner’s was played during the ceremony.Several major films were ineligible for the WGAs this year because they were not written under a bargaining agreement with the WGA or its sister guilds. So “Belfast” and “The Worst Person in the World” (in the original-screenplay category) and “The Power of the Dog” and “The Lost Daughter” (in the adapted category) were not in the running. And because that significantly whittled down the pool of big contenders, most pundits expected the writer-director Sian Heder’s “CODA,” based on the 2014 French film “La Famille Bélier,” would prevail with the Writers Guild, though “Don’t Look Up” still faced stiff competition from Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza.”Can the WGA victors also win their Oscar races now that “Belfast” has lost its awards mojo and the surging “CODA” beat “The Power of the Dog” at this weekend’s influential Producers Guild Awards? In a recent screenplay contest at the BAFTAs, “CODA” pulled out another surprise win over “The Power of the Dog,” its biggest best-picture rival. Since the path to the top Oscar almost always winds through the screenplay categories, an adapted-screenplay win for “CODA” on Oscar night could foreshadow the film’s ultimate fate.And though “Don’t Look Up” has a tougher path to the best-picture Oscar, with no notable awards-season wins until now, the WGA victory at least suggests that the original-screenplay race will remain one to watch.Here are some of the other WGA winners:Documentary: “Exposing Muybridge”Drama series: “Succession”Comedy series: “Hacks”New series: “Hacks”Original long-form series: “Mare of Easttown”Adapted long-form series: “Maid” More

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      in Theater

      Margaret Atwood and Others Confront Grief in ‘The Nurse Antigone’

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      A dramatic reading by Theater of War Productions will include the author and practicing nurses who have held the front line of the pandemic.It was a tragedy — an ancient Greek tragedy — that brought together three nurses on a Zoom call one night last week.Charlaine Lasse, 55, had rushed home to Bowie, Md., after a 12-hour shift at Johns Hopkins Hospital, propping open her laptop as soon as she got to her dining room table. Also on the call were Amy Smith, 52, a nurse practitioner at Northwell Health-GoHealth Urgent Care in New York who was winding down for the night, and Aliki Argiropoulos, 26, a registered nurse in Baltimore who was studying for an exam.After a few technical hiccups and brief introductions, they slipped into character, pretending to be elders in the city of Thebes.“Oh, Light of the Sun, / more beautiful and / radiant than any rays / that have ever graced / this seven-gated city!” Argiropoulos said, kicking things off.The three women were preparing for “The Nurse Antigone,” a dramatic reading of a translation of Sophocles’ “Antigone” that is to be presented on Zoom on Thursday by Theater of War Productions. It will include famous names like the actors Bill Camp (“The Queen’s Gambit,” “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”) and Taylor Schilling (“Orange Is the New Black”). The nurses will make up the chorus, though they have no professional acting experience — a fact that they share with one other famous co-star: the author Margaret Atwood.Bryan Doerries, a founder of Theater of War Productions, said he wanted to present a play that specifically shined a light on the grief and anguish of nurses who have held the front line of the pandemic for the last two years. And “Antigone,” he added, touched on many of the themes that nurses around the world would be familiar with today. In the story, Antigone is determined to properly bury her brother — Polynices, the son of the former, disgraced king Oedipus — even though his burial has been forbidden by a decree from the new king, Creon. When she goes ahead and does what she thinks is right anyway, she is ordered to be buried alive.“It’s a play about not being able to live up to your own standards of care and about deferred grief, which I think is the moral injury of the pandemic,” Doerries explained. “It’s an injury that has been visited upon nurses, not just because they lost their own because of their profession, but because they were also proxy family members for people in isolation.”Clockwise from top left, Amy Smith, Charlaine Lasse and Aliki Argiropoulos.Theater of War ProductionsWhile most of the professional actors in this play have worked with Doerries on earlier projects, the addition of Atwood, who is portraying the blind prophet Tiresias, a character that pops up in several of Sophocles’ tragedies first as a man and then as a woman, was a fresh, last-minute addition. When the role opened up, Doerries said he turned to Atwood, who knows a thing or two about prophetic work. Her work, like “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “just seems so prescient,” he said. “One could see a Gilead easily emerging from the current climate.”It wasn’t a hard sell. She responded to Doerries over email. “You want me to play an old, blind transgender prophet? That’s a dream come true!” he recalled her writing.“We have a great admiration for nurses, and you just say yes to these things,” Atwood said later, during a call from her home in Toronto. “It’s like giving blood — you don’t say, ‘Well, on the one hand … and on the other.’”The actors, both professional and nonprofessional, will not be wearing costumes (an attempt by Doerries to keep things unpolished and raw) — except for Atwood, who is the only one who needs some indicator that her character is blind. Days before the performance, she was contemplating a hooded cape that covered most of her face and possibly a pair of skeleton gloves.The reading, which will be performed virtually and is the first in a yearlong initiative of 12 performances in collaboration with different nursing organizations around the country, comes about two years after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. It’s a crisis that has left frontline medical workers so exhausted and traumatized that they are quitting their jobs in droves. And a recent survey of thousands of nurses by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses found that 66 percent considered leaving their posts because of their experiences during the pandemic.“Nurses talk about how in the beginning everybody was clapping and cheering and calling us heroes,” said Cynda Rushton, a leader in clinical ethics who teaches at Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, who helped Doerries recruit nurses for the play. “But then as time has gone on and you think about the social unrest, the political divide, the anger that has developed in response to the pandemic, nurses — as the people who are closest to the patient — have been the recipient of that anger or that violence and frustration.”Theater of War Productions was founded in 2008 to take community-based performances of Greek tragedies to military bases, hospitals and other venues to help active service members and veterans, as well as their spouses and other military-adjacent workers, process and share war trauma. In the 14 years since its founding, the group has expanded its mission beyond military circles to other communities in crisis: the homeless, the incarcerated and survivors of addiction, abuse, natural disaster or racial violence.During the pandemic — as people across socioeconomic, racial and geographic lines were thrust into crisis, grief, isolation and sickness — Theater of War Productions pivoted to performances on Zoom, many exploring the “moral suffering of frontline health care workers,” Doerries said.Bryan Doerries, center bottom, with, clockwise from top left: Marjolaine Goldsmith, Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Nyasha Hatendi and Frankie Faison in a reading Sophocles’ works in 2021.Theater of War ProductionsIn May 2020, the group presented a virtual reading of “Oedipus the King,” starring Oscar Isaac as Oedipus, as well as Frances McDormand, John Turturro and Jeffrey Wright. More than 15,000 people tuned in that night, Doerries said.For that production, Doerries worked with Rushton to find professionals to act in the virtual productions and participate in the post-performance panels. But the pandemic series has mostly centered on physicians. After that first performance on Zoom, Rushton proposed focusing solely on nurses.“I just kept at it like a little chihuahua on your heels, saying, ‘Bryan, the nurses! The nurses!’ We have to find a way to give voice to that experience.”After the “Antigone” reading, which will be broadcast live to groups of gathered nurses across the country, the actors will be removed from the screen. Lasse, Smith and Argiropoulos will remain to participate in a discussion with three other nurses and to engage with the audience.Smith, who works in emergency medical care, had worked with Doerries in February as a panelist. Returning as an actor, she said, felt like an opportunity to finally process some of the emotions and themes that she and nurses across the world have been too busy to tackle. “A lot of us, especially in nursing, have to keep moving,” Smith said. “There’s no time to stop and say, ‘Hey, let’s reflect on what just happened.’”“Hopefully, the play is healing for people,” she said. More

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      in Television

      Samuel L. Jackson and Walter Mosley Team Up for a Sci-Fi Fable

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      In a joint interview, the actor and writer discuss “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” their “fairy tale” about an old man negotiating dementia and family drama with the help of a wonder drug.Samuel L. Jackson made his name in the movies, Walter Mosley in literature. But when it was time for these two arts legends to collaborate, they knew television was the only medium that would work.“The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” a new limited series starring Jackson and written by Mosley, based on his 2010 novel, tells the story of an elderly Atlanta man with dementia and a family that wants his savings. Just when it looks like all Ptolemy has left is to count his remaining days, two people alter the course of his life. One is Robyn (Dominique Fishback), a teenage family friend who decides Ptolemy is worth taking care of. The other is a neurologist (Walton Goggins) working on a new drug that will bring back Ptolemy’s cognizance — but only for a short time, after which he’ll be worse off than ever (shades of the Daniel Keyes novel “Flowers for Algernon” and its film adaptation, “Charly”).In the series, Jackson’s title character reclaims his life with the help of a young caretaker played by Dominique Fishback.Hopper Stone/Apple TV+In his newfound lucidity, Ptolemy comes to terms with events and people from his past, including the one true love of his life, a beauty named Sensia (Cynthia Kaye McWilliams), and Coydog (Damon Gupton), a childhood mentor who left behind an unusual inheritance. As these figures come and go from his mind, Ptolemy also takes it upon himself to solve the murder of a beloved nephew (Omar Benson Miller), a task appropriate to Mosley’s bread-and-butter turf of crime fiction.Jackson and Mosley were also executive producers on the series, which premieres Friday on Apple TV+. The project was personal for both of them: Each has had loved ones who suffered from dementia. During a freewheeling video interview — Jackson was in London (where he’s filming the Marvel mini-series “Secret Invasion”), Mosley in Los Angeles — they discussed the fairy tale quality of “Ptolemy,” why television was the best option for the project, and how the story jumped across the country from Los Angeles to Atlanta, among other subjects. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“It’s a fairy tale,” Jackson said of his new series. “In reality, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s or dementia, but we get one, however momentarily.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesWho is Ptolemy Grey?WALTER MOSLEY He’s all of us everywhere. This is a destination that either we reach ourselves in our own experience, or with people that we know and love and live with, as far as aging, dementia and death. These things impact everybody’s lives. It’s a great thing to have Sam taking it on and bringing it to a neighborhood that other people don’t seem to think about very much.SAMUEL L. JACKSON As based in reality as we want it to be, he’s actually at the center of a fable. He’s this mythical character that Walter created who has a real-life problem at the beginning, but Walter allows us to circle back and see a life well lived. It’s a fairy tale. In reality, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s or dementia, but we get one, however momentarily, that allows him to be clear about everything that’s happened in his life, in a flash.How does the series address the experience of dementia?MOSLEY A lot of people will see somebody who’s experiencing dementia or Alzheimer’s, and they think, ‘They’re crazy.’ But in reality, there’s something really going on in there, no matter how far gone they are. We allow an audience to identify not only with the character that Sam’s playing, but with our own lives. That was what the book meant to me, to be able to do that.JACKSON Those of us who have had to deal with that know that when those people are sitting there, they may not answer your questions or be present for what you want them to be present for, because they’re busy inhabiting something else that gives them solace in the lost space that they’re in, or that we think they’re in. But they may not be lost at all. They just don’t bother with what you are trying to put on.I talked to my mom when she had dementia and she’d be like, “You’re disturbing me. Stop asking me things that I’m supposed to know the answer to, or you think that I know the answer to, or that I don’t want to be engaged in right now.” When she wanted to engage, she engaged. So this story touched me in a real place.“This is a destination that either we reach ourselves in our own experience, or with people that we know and love and live with, as far as aging, dementia and death,” Mosley said.Erik Carter for The New York TimesAnd through the story, you get to invent a cure, albeit a temporary one.MOSLEY That’s the great thing about imaginative creativity. You look at Jules Verne: He’s the guy who invented the [electric] submarine, who invented the rocket to the moon. He invented all of this stuff in his imagination, and of course, it’s stuff we wanted. I was reading the newspaper yesterday, and they said umbilical cord stem cells have cured a woman of AIDS. This one woman is cured, and they did it from umbilical cord stem cells. If you put the possibility out there, lots of people are going to be thinking about it.Walter, you’ve worked in television quite a bit by now, including as an executive producer on the crime drama “Snowfall.” Sam, you have mostly stuck to movies. What made TV the right medium to tell the story of Ptolemy?MOSLEY Television has the potential to do some amazing things that are good for drama, good for actors, and good for an audience to be able to understand and identify with characters who have real arcs of change. We’re coming up on our final season of “Snowfall,” and we’re going to get to see how things are going to work out or fall apart. That’s what’s been fun.JACKSON There’s a great satisfaction for me to have a character development that allows an audience to go back and say, “OK, that’s where he started. Oh, that’s why he’s this guy. Oh, that’s why he treats women this way.” We watched movies for a very long time before we realized something like “Roots” could come along and be a mini-series. All of a sudden, boom, there’s “Roots,” and you go, “[expletive], that’s the way to tell the story.”The novel takes place in Los Angeles, but the series takes place in Atlanta. Why the move?JACKSON Georgia has better tax breaks.MOSLEY Yes, it wasn’t feasible to do it in L.A. First, we were going to go to Atlanta and try to make Atlanta look like L.A. But Atlanta doesn’t look like L.A.JACKSON There’s not one palm tree in Atlanta.Did setting the series in Atlanta add anything thematically?JACKSON There are certain elements of Atlanta that are historically indigenous to telling a story like this. Anybody who’s lived in any place that’s full of Black people will recognize this. How many white people are in this story? There’s the doctor, and the nurse. A lot of people are going to look at this and go, “Where are the white people?” You didn’t encounter them unless you had to when I was growing up in the South. In Atlanta, they had Black insurance companies, they had Black newspapers. Everything you needed, you could get in the Black community. You didn’t have to go outside of it.MOSLEY I really do think that all of those things are trace elements that impacted the making of the series, with the actors and the crew just being in Atlanta. We would tell the story anywhere we were, but making it in Atlanta was in itself an experience, and that experience had to impart some of its history to the series.Let’s talk a little about the collaboration between you two. Walter, why was it important to have Sam onboard for this?MOSLEY Sam is a great actor, but that’s just a very small part of the answer to your question. I wrote the book 13 years ago. Sam knew the book better than I did. He’d say, “No, no. Don’t you remember? You did this,” and I’d say, “Oh, yeah. OK.” He’s also an executive producer, and his commitment to the book and getting it made is why we got it made. When I was shopping it, people would say, “Sam Jackson doesn’t do television.” Well you’re right, but he’s going to do this. His commitment to it, his talent in doing it, his willingness to play a very different kind of role than he usually does and to make that work so beautifully — it was really great.Sam, what is it about Walter’s work that pulls you in?JACKSON Walter is a very feet-on-the-ground kind of guy that understands and knows his characters and knows the environment that those characters are in. Environment is very important when you’re a reader. I read a lot, two or three books at a time. Descriptions and character development are very important things, no matter what, and Walter has a command of those things that a lot of writers don’t. I read bad novels along with good ones, but I always know that I’m going to get something very satisfying when I’m reading a Walter Mosley book. More

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      in Theater

      Julianne Hough and Vanessa Williams to Star in Broadway Farce 'POTUS'

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      “POTUS,” by Selina Fillinger, will star Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams and Rachel Dratch are among the stars of “POTUS” on Broadway.Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images, Caitlin Ochs/Reuters, Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Add one more curveball to this unusual Broadway spring: a political comedy by a 28-year-old writer whose previous New York production took place in a 62-seat basement theater.The new play has a mouthful of a title — “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” — and is a farce about a group of women doing damage control for a problematic president.Selina Fillinger, the playwright, is working with the Broadway veteran Susan Stroman, who will direct. The cast will include Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Previews are scheduled to begin April 14 and the opening date is set for May 9, which will most likely make it part of the next Broadway season, not the current one, if the Tony Awards stick to an expected late April opening deadline for eligibility for this season’s awards. The “POTUS” run, at the Shubert Theater, is limited, and scheduled to end Aug. 14.Fillinger, an Oregon native who has been working in Los Angeles as a writer on “The Morning Show,” said she started “POTUS” six years ago. (POTUS is an acronym for president of the United States.)“For years we’ve had this endless cycle of headlines about powerful men abusing their power, and each time I was fascinated by the women orbiting the men and enabling them,” she said in an interview. “The more I started to think about these women, the farce started to write itself.”And is the show about a particular president, such as, say, the last one?“It is an amalgamation of many men in power,” she said. “I set it in the White House because that’s the highest office in the land, but you could set it in any company and any institution and many homes.”Fillinger’s previous work, “Something Clean,” was staged by Roundabout Underground in 2019 and was praised by the New York Times critic Ben Brantley as “a beautifully observed, richly compassionate new drama.”Fillinger said there is some thematic overlap between “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” which was about a mother grappling with her son’s conviction for sexual assault. Her first play, “Faceless,” was about an American jihadist.“I think I am interested in complicity,” she said. “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” she noted, “are both centered on somebody who is never seen onstage, and that is because I am interested in who we give airtime to, and who we don’t give airtime to, and flipping the switch on that.”Stroman, who over the last 30 years has won five Tony Awards for choreography and direction, including both categories for “The Producers,” is best known for musicals. This will be her first time helming a play on Broadway; Off Broadway she directed a Colman Domingo drama, “Dot,” in 2016.In an interview, Stroman said an agent sent her the “POTUS” script, and she was immediately interested. “It’s very funny, and it has an important message within the comedy. At some point there’s a reckoning about what it’s like to keep these people in power who are not worthy.”The play’s lead producers are four companies: Seaview, led by Greg Nobile; 51 Entertainment, founded by Lynette Howell Taylor; Glass Half Full Productions, managed by Gareth Lake; and Level Forward, co-founded by Abigail Disney. The production is permitted to raise up to $6.75 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but a spokeswoman said the play’s actual capitalization would be $5.9 million. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Writing a Trauma Play Makes Me Want to Dry Heave’

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      The playwright Sanaz Toossi on her two comedies about Iranian women, both debuting this season: “English” and “Wish You Were Here.”“Writing a play is a terribly embarrassing thing,” Sanaz Toossi said. “The only way you get to the finish line is if you genuinely love what you’re writing about. I guess I love writing about Iranian women.”Toossi, who completed an M.F.A. in dramatic writing at New York University in 2018, is making a double debut this spring, with “English,” in previews now and set to run through March 13 at the Atlantic Theater Company, and “Wish You Were Here,” which is scheduled to begin previews on April 13 at Playwrights Horizons. Both plays are set in Karaj, Iran — “Wish You Were Here” in the late 1970s and ’80s, “English” in the present — in classrooms and living rooms mostly populated by women.“I feel like your relationships with other women are the most profound and the most devastating of your life,” she said on a recent freezing morning at a diner near the Atlantic. Toossi had dressed against the cold in layered scarves and sweaters. Around her neck hung a gold necklace. The pendant? Her own name in Farsi.“I’m a basic Iranian girl,” she joked.Toossi, 30, grew up in Orange County, Calif., the only child of Iranian immigrants. She fulfilled a pre-law major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was accepted to several law schools. Somehow she couldn’t make herself go. Instead she began writing plays, which she hid from her parents. (Her mother, sensing Toossi had a secret, assumed she was pregnant.) Those first plays were terrible, Toossi said. But then she began writing about the people she knew — Iranians and Iranian Americans — and the plays got better.From left, Tala Ashe, Hadi Tabbal, Marjan Neshat, Ava Lalezarzadeh and Pooya Mohseni in “English,” set in a class for English-language learners.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow she writes comedies, which are also, arguably, tragedies. “English,” copresented with the Roundabout Theater Company, and set in a class for English-language learners, explores the ways in which language and identity intertwine. “Wish You Were Here,” written as a gift to her mother, follows a group of friends through the upheavals of the Iran-Iraq War. Both plays interrogate the losses — real and symbolic — that come when characters can’t fully express themselves.“Sometimes I’m talked about as a writer who writes political content,” she said. “It just means that I write Middle Eastern people. And those people have not been on our stages very often.”Over coffee and eggs, Toossi — anxious, glamorous — discussed language, representation and the comic potential of bleeding onto the furniture. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Were you raised speaking Farsi?We were not the Iranians who were like, “We’re in America now.” I grew up naturally bilingual. I’m a writer now. I make my living in the English language. And my Farsi gets worse every year. It’s painful for me. I wonder if my kids will know Farsi. I did work with a Farsi tutor. I went in thinking, I’ve got this. You’re going to love me. She goes, “Your grammar is very bad.” I was like, OK, that’s great. Tear me a new one, girl.These two plays are about Middle Eastern characters. Is that typical of your work?The family drama I’ve just finished, it’s about Southern Californian Iranians. Everything else has been set in Iran. What happens if I show up with a play about three white girls? Will anyone want to do it? Even if it’s really good? Sometimes I worry that I am the right kind of Middle Eastern. When the Muslim ban [Donald J. Trump’s 2017 executive order that at first barred nationals from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering America] was enacted, I felt a shift. Middle Eastern artists have been knocking at the door for a really long time. People finally started listening.So you worry about being pigeonholed?If all that ever gets produced of my work is just my stories about Middle Eastern people, I don’t think I would ever be upset. But there’s always the worry that I am in the person-of-color slot in a season. It starts to feel a little icky. I don’t know that I’ll ever stop writing about Middle Eastern people until it doesn’t feel special. It feels special right now to have — especially in “Wish You Were Here” — these Iranian girls onstage. It’s a little bit about politics, but it’s mostly about them trying not to period on a couch. Maybe that won’t feel special in 30 years, and that’s fine, too.You have said that “Wish You Were Here” is for your mother. Whom is “English” for?“English” is for me. I had to write it. I wrote it as my thesis. I was really angry that year. After the travel ban, I white-knuckled it for two years, and I wrote “English” because I was furious with the anti-immigrant rhetoric. I just wanted to scream into the void a little bit. It’s a huge thing to learn a different language, a huge thing to give up that ability to fully express yourself, even if you have a full command over language.I was about to graduate. I wanted to be a writer, and it also probably came out of my own insecurities that I would never actually have the words to say what I wanted.What does it mean to present these plays to mostly white, mostly American audiences?The most meaningful responses for me have been the first-generation Middle Eastern kids who come to see “English.” I feel like they’re totally in it with me. Our white audiences, it’s tricky. There is laughter sometimes where I do not think there should be laughter. The accents get laughs. And it’s really uncomfortable some nights. I think the play takes care of it in a way. The pain is so real at the end of the play that I don’t think anybody’s laughing. But it is not easy.Why have you written these plays as comedies?I’m not a political writer. I’m not a public intellectual. I am, at my core, someone who loves a cheap laugh. I would fling myself off this booth to make you laugh.Both “English” and “Wish You Were Here” are sad. “Wish You Were Here” is more obviously sad. But writing a trauma play makes me want to dry heave. I just think it’s so flattening. It doesn’t help people see us as three-dimensional. I just can’t do it. And I don’t think it’s truthful. I don’t think that’s how life works.Politics come into the room, and you’re still trying to make your best friend laugh, or you’re still annoyed that you perioded on the couch — it’s all happening at once. Do people think that Middle Eastern women are huddled under a chador, like, bemoaning our oppressions? Pain looks different than how we think it looks and also joy is always there. Kindness is always there. There’s so much laughter through it. More

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      in Movies

      Sarah Polley Is OK With Oversharing

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      In her new essay collection, “Run Towards the Danger,” the actress and filmmaker examines intensely personal stories she’s still sorting out for herself.It’s been more than six years since Sarah Polley was struck on the head by a fire extinguisher, one that was unwisely hung over a lost-and-found box at her local community center, leaving her with a debilitating concussion.When its symptoms were at their worst, Polley, the preternaturally poised actor (“The Sweet Hereafter”) and filmmaker of probing dramas (“Away From Her,” “Take This Waltz”) could not concentrate on her family or her screenwriting. She suffered headaches and nausea, brought on by everyday levels of light and sound.But over a period of nearly four years, she recuperated, emerging with restored focus — and with an upgraded philosophical outlook that has infused nearly every aspect of her life.“When people say, ‘Are you better?,’ I’m like, I’m better than I was before the concussion,” she said last month, almost in disbelief at her own words.Her newfound perspective arises from her work with a doctor who instructed her not to retreat from the activities that triggered her symptoms but to seek them out and embrace the discomfort they caused.That guidance provides the title for Polley’s first book, “Run Towards the Danger,” a collection of autobiographical essays that Penguin Press will release on March 1.“Run Towards the Danger” is out next month.The essays often link moments from her childhood, adolescence and adulthood, spanning her experiences as an artist and entertainer, a mother, a daughter and a woman. What they have in common, she said, is that they chronicle events “from the past that have been fundamentally changed by my relationship to them in the present.”“They were things I didn’t talk about, because I didn’t know what the stories even were,” Polley, 43, added. “Part of this is figuring out, what the hell happened?”That includes her account of the concussion and her recovery, and while that accident was not her inspiration for writing “Run Towards the Danger” — “It’s a bit messier and more complex than that” — Polley said the book’s contents were informed by the paradigm-shifting worldview her treatment yielded and its exhortation to confront sources of pain.“The thing that will get you better is moving towards the things you’re avoiding,” she said. “But it’s kind of exhilarating, realizing that whatever story you’ve been telling about yourself — and everyone tells those stories — isn’t you. That got exploded for me as this prison I was living in.”On a Saturday morning this past January, Polley was speaking in a video interview from her home in Toronto. She sat in a brightly lit room, undaunted by the prospect of staring into a computer monitor for an hour or so and putting herself under a microscope.“I thrive on too-intimate conversations with people,” she said. “I don’t have this need for secrecy around almost every part of my life.”In its first chapter, “Run Towards the Danger” offers a melancholy reflection on Polley’s teenage struggles with scoliosis, her body horror juxtaposed with several anxious, frustrating months spent playing the lead in a Stratford Festival production of “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” Her mother died of cancer when Polley was 11; her father sank into a depression and by age 14 the author had left home to move in with an older brother’s ex-girlfriend and largely figure out the world for herself.This entry, titled “Alice, Collapsing,” is one that Polley said she’d made multiple attempts at completing since she was 19. “That essay’s written by four different people,” she said.Polley also revisits her work as a child actor in an essay called “Mad Genius,” about the making of Terry Gilliam’s 1988 fantasy “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.” That film, for which she was cast at the age of 8 to play the Baron’s young companion, Sally Salt, left her deeply traumatized.Sarah Polley, center, was 8 when she played Sally Salt in “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.”Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionFor one battle scene, she was repeatedly made to run a terrifying gauntlet of explosives and debris. She jammed cotton balls into her ears to drown out the noise. Another action sequence sent her to the hospital when a detonation startled a horse, causing it to thrust an explosive device in Polley’s direction.In the essay, Polley reproduces an email exchange she had with Gilliam several years later, writing to him that “i was pretty furious at you for a lot of years,” though she says “the adults who should have been there to protect me were my parents, not you.” (Gilliam replies with an apology for the chaotic film shoot, writing, “Although things might have seemed to be dangerous, they weren’t.”)Yet a few pages later, Polley finds herself regretting that she absolved Gilliam too easily, having bought into the archetype of “the out-of-control white male genius”: “It’s so pervasive, this idea that genius can’t come without trouble, that it has paved the way for countless abuses,” she writes.To this day, Polley told me her emotions surrounding “Baron Munchausen” are not easily categorized.“Was it worth my feeling like my life was at risk and people didn’t care enough about it?” she said. “Probably not.” But when she contemplates Gilliam, “it doesn’t help me particularly to think of him as a villain.” (A press representative for Gilliam said he was unavailable for comment.)In another chapter, “The Woman Who Stayed Silent,” Polley revisits what she used to call “a funny party story about my worst date ever” with Jian Ghomeshi, the musician and former CBC radio host who in 2016 was acquitted of five charges related to sexual assault.Describing the episode now without euphemism, Polley says that when she was 16 and Ghomeshi was 28, she left his apartment after he became violent during a sexual encounter in which he ignored her pleas to stop hurting her.Polley writes that, as other charges mounted against Ghomeshi in this era before the #MeToo movement, she was dissuaded from coming forward by friends, lawyers and other experts who warned that her memory and sexual history would be subjected to merciless cross-examination. Her subsequent interactions with Ghomeshi — friendly radio interviews and playful emails in the years that followed — could be used to undermine her credibility and attack her character.But after years of reconsideration, Polley said during our interview, “I felt a deep, ethical obligation, especially to the women who came forward in that case, to tell that story, and a deep haunting that I wasn’t able to tell it sooner.” (Ghomeshi didn’t respond to requests for comment sent to Roqe Media, where he hosts a podcast and serves as chief executive.)“I feel a relief in finally just standing up,” she said. “But I’ll always wonder if it’s just too little too late. That’s always going to be with me.”Polley is hardly a novice when it comes to untangling knotty personal narratives in front of an audience. She previously directed the 2012 documentary “Stories We Tell,” which used interviews with her family members and re-enactments to reveal that her own birth had been the result of her mother’s affair with a man who was not the father who raised her.Polley in a scene from her 2012 documentary “Stories We Tell.” Roadside AttractionsJohn Buchan, Polley’s brother and an on-camera subject in “Stories We Tell,” said in an interview that he had some hesitation about entrusting so much family history to her for that film.“I’m very open and I don’t have a lot of secrets, but who doesn’t have some?” Buchan said. “I’m indiscreet about myself sometimes. It’s different if somebody else is indiscreet about you.”But Polley’s choice to share herself in “Run Towards the Danger” did not make him anxious in the same way, and he praised her for taking the risk and acknowledging her own vulnerability.“She’s an artist,” he said. “You can’t be an artist unless you put yourself into it. You’re not just borrowing from yourself — you’re putting yourself on the line.”The filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who directed Polley in his movies “Exotica” and “The Sweet Hereafter,” said that not even his long friendship and past collaborations with her had fully prepared him for what he read in early drafts of her book.“As a director, you have conversations with your actors and you get to know things about their lives,” Egoyan said. “To be reintroduced to her world with such detail and such a brilliant sense of self-observation, so many years later, was really shocking.”Though Polley did not express misgivings about the films she made with him, Egoyan said he still felt guilty for her tenuous relationship to her past acting work.“In a strange way, I contributed to that,” he said. “I was hiring her as an actress. As generous as she’s been, I’m also part of that weird conspiracy against her ability to grow up normally.”(Polley responded in an email, “I had transformative, beautiful experiences working on Atom’s films. And I think the ship bearing my chance at a normal childhood/transition to adulthood had sailed long before I met Atom.”)“I thrive on too-intimate conversations with people,” Polley said. “I don’t have this need for secrecy around almost every part of my life.”Jamie Campbell for The New York TimesThe author Margaret Atwood, a longtime friend who also read drafts of “Run Towards the Danger,” said that she has seen Polley strive for greater honesty in her work and in her life.“I think actors are trained to go to the emotion in them that is most suitable for their character at that moment,” Atwood said. “But being candid doesn’t mean that you always know what the truth is. Being candid can also mean, I’ve got no idea. Did I really feel that? What was really going on?”While Polley was recuperating from her concussion, Atwood said she held the rights to her novel “Alias Grace” — a book that Polley first asked her if she could adapt when she was 17 — so that she could complete a TV mini-series based on it.During her recovery, Polley gave up her screenwriting duties on a film version of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” which instead was written and directed by Greta Gerwig. (Polley writes in the book that she saw Gerwig’s film, calling it “beautifully realized.”)Polley was in the midst of another film project, an adaptation of Miriam Toews’s novel “Women Talking” that she wrote and directed, when the pandemic forced its temporary suspension. This at least afforded her the time to finish the essays in “Run Towards the Danger” while her three children slept or her husband looked after them.(Polley said that she is still editing “Women Talking” and that she completed its production last summer without a single headache: “If I could get through that with three small children, I think it’s a pretty hopeful prognosis.”)Now, as she waits for a wider world to discover the sides of herself she reveals in “Run Towards the Danger,” Polley said that her sharing these stories doesn’t necessarily mean she is done with them — or that they are done with her, either.“There is just this messiness to the human experience that’s extraordinarily inconvenient if you’re trying to tell one story about it,” she said. “As I get older, I’m realizing it’s OK for stories to be messy or go down circuitous paths that don’t lead anywhere.”She added, “We create these clean narratives to make sense of our basically bewildering lives. Hopefully, over time, we can loosen our iron grip and let other complexities in.” More

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      How Jonathan Larson Taught Me to Become a Better Critic

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      In the film version of “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” about a composer who dreams of Broadway, a “Rent” die-hard discovers more to love in musical theater.I watched “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” Netflix’s film adaptation of the Jonathan Larson musical, four and a half times in the span of three weeks. I’ve listened to the soundtrack three times, with the exception of the opening song, “30/90.” That I’ve listened to at least a dozen times.When you replay a song that often, whole verses start to inscribe themselves into your memory. You begin to see beneath the surface, unearthing the bones of the music: a key change, a tempo shift, a bluesy bass line that sashays in and is gone in an instant.When I talk about Larson’s work, I get romantic. That’s been the case since I was 15, thanks to his Pulitzer Prize winning musical “Rent,” and now, thanks to “Tick, Tick … Boom!” But there’s a vital difference in the way I engaged with his work then versus now: Then, it was as a fan just beginning to discover an art form that would shape her personal and professional life; now, it’s as a critic who better understands the possibilities of musical theater.But I still have a ways to go — I’m continually learning how to be a better fan and critic of the theater, and 26 years after his death, Jonathan Larson is my unlikely mentor.Larson, left, with the director Michael Greif before the final dress rehearsal of Larson’s breakthrough show “Rent.”Sara Krulwich/TheNew York Times“Tick, Tick … Boom!,” Larson’s precursor to “Rent,” is a musical about the playwright’s attempts to get his dystopian rock musical, “Superbia,” produced. His ambitions and anxieties create tension with his girlfriend and his best friend, whom he pushes to the sidelines.Though Larson’s show stars a composer named Jon and is, in large parts, autobiographical, the film — written by Steven Levenson and directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda — bridges the gap between the writer and his work, making Larson himself the protagonist. We shift back and forth between his staged production of “Tick, Tick … Boom!” and the correlating events in his life.The film casts an affectionate eye on Larson’s life and legacy. Larson (Andrew Garfield, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for the role) is an innocently aloof artist and yet also intimately present, transparent to the audience through his songs, which seem to erupt from the top of his head in an effervescent gust of rhythm.Garfield bounces across the screen with the energy of a child on a trampoline; his downright kinetic performance is a flutter and flush of gestures, limbs jerking and flailing in all directions. In some scenes, Larson stops to consider a thought or a phrase; his head cocks to the side and his jaw relaxes open, just slightly, as though to make room for new lyrics to fly out. It’s kooky. And endearing.As is the world Miranda builds: a bespoke version of 1990 New York City for theater nerds, where André De Shields strolls in as a haughty patron at the Moondance Diner, where Bernadette Peters is having her coffee and where three of the original “Rent” cast members (Adam Pascal, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Wilson Jermaine Heredia) are bums singing on the street.That I even recognize so many of those faces is because of Larson.The original cast of “Rent,” which went on to a long Broadway run. Several of the performers show up in “Tick, Tick … Boom!”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’ve already written about my love for “Rent,” a love I share with my mother — how it provided a Bohemian fantasy that could be the repository of my teenage insecurities, anxieties, rages and woes. I also discovered the musical around the time I was taking baby steps toward becoming a critic, writing arts pieces for my high school newspaper.Larson taught me that the constellation of notes in a score has space enough to hold immense grief and irrepressible delights. That a musical doesn’t have to be breezy and carefree, nor campy and dated. It could be bold and contemporary — even tragic. Or as strange and subversive — “Rent” is full of sex and drugs, bonkers performance art and mentions of B.D.S.M. — as any form of art.The musical, I came to appreciate, has a nested structure: The book is the spine, and each song in the score contains its own micro-narrative, its own voice, conveyed through music.I still love “Rent” like I did when I was 15, but as my affections for it have aged, they’ve taken on the sepia tone of nostalgia.I’m not the same person I was a teenager — thankfully. I’ll raise a glass to la vie boheme but won’t stay out with the eclectic crowd at the Life Cafe for quite as long.Watching the “Tick, Tick … Boom!” movie for the first time, I immediately fell hard for “30/90,” which felt adapted from my own experience. Long before I became a critic, I was an artist, and I’ve always worked under a self-imposed sense of urgency; when I was a kid, I expected to be a famous poet, journalist and novelist by the time I was 25.When I turned 30, in the middle of our first pandemic summer, I had a monthlong existential crisis. Hitting that milestone age, as Larson sings in “30/90,” means “you’re no longer the ingénue.” I still fret needlessly about time and mortality, clinging to the same clichéd, self-important worries about one’s legacy that so many artists do, Larson included.Garfield, as Larson, struggles with anxiety about not fulfilling his creative dreams at an early enough age. Macall Polay/NetflixAt some point, as I rewatched the film after an anxious and depressed afternoon, I recalled how I used to do the same with “Rent.” Again Larson helps, not just in those joyless moments of mental panic but also in the moments of joy, when I sing along to the new film’s “Boho Days” while preparing dinner, shimmying over the kitchen counter.This is love.But I must admit that “Tick, Tick … Boom!” gave me pause when Larson’s work is being workshopped by Stephen Sondheim and a theater critic. Sondheim recognizes the potential in Larson and in the piece, while the critic quickly dismisses it. Seeing the critic’s closed-mindedness and pretentious posturing, I wondered: Have I done that? Have I failed a work of art in this same way?Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Kenneth H. Brown, Playwright Best Known for ‘The Brig,’ Dies at 85

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      He drew on his own experiences in the Marines to depict brutality within the corps, drawing acclaim Off Off Broadway.Kenneth H. Brown, a New York playwright whose acclaimed 1963 Off Off Broadway play “The Brig,” based on his experiences as a Marine, portrayed dehumanization inside a military prison during the Korean War, died on Feb. 5 at a hospice in Queens. He was 85. A friend, the performance artist and writer Penny Arcade, said the cause was cancer.After growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s as something of a street tough, Mr. Brown, eager to serve his country, enlisted in the Marines at 18. But stationed in Japan, he found himself rattled by military life and was thrown into the brig for insubordination.There, by his account, he was humiliated and abused. Guards called him “maggot”; he was punched in the gut for even minor infractions. Mornings started with garbage-can lids being banged on bunk beds, and he and his fellow inmates were ordered to jog around their claustrophobic quarters for hours until they were breathless.“I was always in trouble in the Marines,” he said in an interview with the Lower East Side Biography Project. “I went to the brig twice. The first time I did 25 days.” Of his military service, he said, “By the time I got out, I was a complete pacifist.”Back in New York, Mr. Brown worked as a bartender and studied at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill. In his spare time he wrote “The Brig,” a hyper-realistic play depicting a grueling day in the life of 10 imprisoned Marines and the guards who brutalize them.Mr. Brown, left, with Judith Malina and Julian Beck, founders of the Manhattan avant-garde troupe the Living Theater, in 1964. The company had given “The Brig” its premiere.Mr. Brown didn’t have any theater connections. But through a friend his manuscript made its way to the Living Theater, the revered avant-garde repertory company founded in the 1940s by Julian Beck and Judith Malina. They were captivated by “The Brig” and decided to produce it.“I was a guy from the neighborhood,” Mr. Brown said. “I never met people like Julian and Judith.”“The Brig” made waves when it opened in 1963 at the Living Theater in Greenwich Village.“If what happens on the stage of the Living Theater is a true representation of conditions in the brig, the president or his secretary of defense ought to order an investigation,” Howard Taubman wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Mr. Brown’s obsessive script does not spare a detail of the devastating indictment.”The play won three Obie Awards and toured Europe. Jonas Mekas directed a film version.“The Brig” became one of the Living Theater’s great successes, but it also became inextricably linked to the company because of its anarchic last performance there. During the play’s run, the authorities shut down the playhouse for delinquent taxes, but the cast and an audience broke into the padlocked theater for one final show.“The play accomplished what I wanted it to accomplish,” Mr. Brown said. “It revealed the horror of this condition, and it revealed it very clearly not through commenting on it, but doing it. Actually performing the ritual of sadism that was the Marine Corps.”A scene from the film version of “The Brig,” directed by Jonas Mekas, in 1964Harvard Film ArchiveKenneth Howard Brown was born in Brooklyn on March, 9, 1936, to Kenneth and Helen (Bella) Brown. His mother was a bank officer, his father a police officer.Growing up in the Bay Ridge section, Ken was known to brawl with youths in the neighborhood. But he also wrote poems and short stories in his teens while attending the Jesuit-run Brooklyn Prep.After the success of “The Brig,” Mr. Brown enjoyed the life of a celebrated young playwright. “I was off and running, with grants and fellowships, teaching jobs and jaunts to faraway places,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1986. “Maybe I could make a go of it in the rarefied atmosphere of literature.”But “by the time the smoke cleared,” he continued, “I was broke.”He went back to tending bar. He worked at Bradley’s, a jazz club on University Place, and helped run Phebe’s, a Bowery haunt for the downtown theater crowd. In an essay published in the Times in 1972, he wryly addressed the realities of a writer’s life in the city:“That’s right, I’m the guy who wrote ‘The Brig.’ What am I doing here running this restaurant? Well, I’ve got to pay the rent, you know. No, I can’t get any fellowships and grants. I’ve had them all, and nobody will renew them until I make theater history again. Oh, yes, you have to do it again and again.”But Mr. Brown kept writing. In 1970, he published “The Narrows,” an autobiographical novel about high schoolers growing up in Bay Ridge in the 1950s. “Nightlight,” a drama set in a bleak city apartment, was staged in 1973. “Hitler’s Analyst,” a novel about a Park Avenue psychiatrist who treats a couple who believe they are Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, was published in 2000.Mr. Brown grew old in Bay Ridge, living in a rent-controlled apartment passed down to him by his parents, and for years he headed into Manhattan to tend bar. He kept busy writing a sequel to “The Great Gatsby” titled “Carraway,” based on the character who narrates the Fitzgerald novel. (Information on survivors was not immediately available.)In 2007, long after the Living Theater’s playhouse was closed and years after the company began moving from place to place, it settled into a new home on the Lower East Side. To Mr. Brown’s surprise, he received a call from Ms. Judith Malina, then 80, who told him that “The Brig” would be the inaugural production.The play’s revival was widely publicized, and Mr. Brown savored the triumph. But as Americans were still reckoning with reports of torture at the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the revival was starkly timely. The coincidence wasn’t lost on Mr. Brown.“‘The Brig’ has always been relevant,” he said in an interview in 2010. “I guess as long as there’s war and as long as there’s a military and especially as long as one questions the ethical right to wage war.”“It’s going to stay relevant,” he added, “until there’s peace throughout the world.” More