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      Wilbur Smith, Best-Selling Author of Swashbuckling Novels, Dies at 88

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      His books were full of lovers, dysfunctional families, pirates and hunters, and set in locations from ancient Egypt to colonial Africa. They sold in the millions.Wilbur Smith, a former accountant whose novels featuring lionhearted heroes, covetous family dynasties, steamy lovers, coldblooded pirates and big-game hunters were said to have sold some 140 million copies in 30 languages, died on Saturday at his home in Cape Town. He was 88.His death was announced on his website. No cause was specified.Over more than five decades, Mr. Smith’s historical thrillers and adventure novels, which often spanned several generations and several continents, became a popular franchise of series and sequels.Reviewing his book “The Diamond Hunters” in The New York Times Book Review in 1972, Martin Levin wrote that “the potpourri Wilbur Smith has assembled is rife with lifelong misunderstandings, undying hates, unbelievably nefarious schemes and nick‐of‐time rescues — delivered with the deadpan sincerity of the pulp greats.”Raised on a 30,000-acre cattle ranch in what was then the British protectorate of Rhodesia (and is now Zambia), Mr. Smith was a bookish boy whose strict father discouraged reading (“I don’t think he ever read a book in his life, including mine,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2007) but went on to draft plots on official paper he lifted from his work at the government’s Inland Revenue Service.He completed his first manuscript in 1962. Twenty publishers sent telegrams rejecting it. He revised and reduced it, embracing the advice of Charles Pick, the deputy managing director of the publishing house Heinemann, to tell a story that drew more fully on his own experience. “Write only about those things you know well,” Mr. Smith said Mr. Pick advised.Inspired by the life of his grandfather, who was lured by the Witwatersrand gold rush of the 1880s and fought in the Zulu wars, and by his own upbringing on his father’s ranch, Mr. Smith wrote “When the Lion Feeds,” which was published in 1964.It became the first in a successful series of what Stephen King in 2006 praised as “swashbuckling novels of Africa” in which “the bodices rip and the blood flows.” Subsequent decades would bring other series, based in Southern Africa and ancient Egypt.“I wrote about hunting and gold mining and carousing and women,” Mr. Smith said.Mr. Smith’s “When the Lion Feeds” (1964) was initially rejected by 20 publishers but went on to become the first in a successful series of what Stephen King praised as “swashbuckling novels of Africa.” Bentley Archive/Popperfoto via Getty ImagesHe set other books in locales ranging from Antarctica to the Indian Ocean. “Wild Justice” (1979), one of the first of his books to become a best seller in the United States (where it was published as “The Delta Decision”), was the story of the hijacking of a plane off the Seychelles — one of many places Mr. Smith called home. (He also had homes in London, Cape Town, Switzerland and Malta.)Wilbur Addison Smith was born on Jan. 9, 1933, in Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia (now Kabwe, Zambia). He was named for Wilbur Wright, the aviation pioneer. His father, Herbert, was a rancher who became a sheet metal worker. His mother, Elfreda, was a painter who encouraged his reading.He contracted cerebral malaria when he was 18 months old. “It probably helped me,” he said later, “because I think you have to be slightly crazy to try to earn a living from writing.” He caught polio when he was a teenager, which resulted in a weakened right leg.When he was 8, his father gave him a .22-caliber Remington rifle. “I shot my first animal shortly afterward and my father ritually smeared the animal’s blood on my face,” he wrote in his memoir, “On Leopard Rock: A Life of Adventures” (2018). “The blood was the mark of emerging manhood. I refused to bathe for days afterward.”He attended Michaelhouse, a private boys’ school in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands of South Africa. He started a student newspaper there, but he hated school.“Michaelhouse was a debilitating experience,” he later recalled. “There was no respect for the pupils. The teachers were brutal, the prefects beat us, and the senior boys bullied us. It was a cycle of violence that kept perpetuating itself.” Reading and writing, he said, became his refuge.“I couldn’t sing nor dance nor wield a paintbrush worth a damn,” he told the Australian website Booktopia in 2012, “but I could weave a pretty tale.”He said that he had originally wanted to write about social conditions in South Africa as a journalist, but that his father nudged him toward what he thought was a more stable profession. After graduating from Rhodes University in Grahamstown (now Makhanda), South Africa, with a Bachelor of Commerce degree in 1954, he worked for the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company for four years, then joined his father’s sheet metal manufacturing business. When that company faltered, he became a government tax assessor.He married Anne Rennie in 1957. They divorced in 1962 after having two children: a son, Shaun, and a daughter, Christian. He married Jewell Slabbart in 1964; they had a son, Lawrence, before that marriage also ended in divorce. In 1971, he married Danielle Thomas; she died in 1999. The next year he married Mokhiniso Rakhimova, who was 39 years his junior and whom he met in a London bookstore. He adopted her son, Dieter Schmidt, from a previous marriage. Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.From left, Roger Moore, Barbara Parkins and Lee Marvin in “Shout at the Devil” (1976), based on a book by Mr. Smith.American International PicturesA few of Mr. Smith’s books have been adapted into films, including “Shout at the Devil” (1976), which starred Lee Marvin and Roger Moore.Mr. Smith had his detractors, who saw some of his writing as glorifying colonialism and furthering racial and gender stereotypes. And he was not always a favorite of critics.He maintained, as he told the Australian publication The Age, that he paid little attention. “The snootiness of critics is so silly,” he said. “They’re judging Great Danes against Pekingese. I’m not writing that literature — I’ve never set out to write it. I’m writing stories.”“Now, when I sit down to write the first page of a novel, I never give a thought to who will eventually read it,” he is quoted on his website, recalling the advice of his first publisher, Mr. Pick: “He said, ‘Don’t talk about your books with anybody, even me, until they are written.’ Until it is written, a book is merely smoke on the wind.”Later in his career, Mr. Smith was churning out two books annually, with the help of a stable of co-authors.“For the past few years,” he said when he announced the collaboration, “my fans have made it very clear that they would like to read my novels and revisit my family of characters faster than I can write them.” More

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      in Theater

      Ed Bullins, Leading Playwright of the Black Arts Movement, Dies at 86

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      He wrote not for white or middle-class audiences, but for the strivers, hustlers and quiet sufferers whose struggles he sought to capture in searing works.Ed Bullins, who was among the most significant Black playwrights of the 20th century and a leading voice in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Saturday at his home in Roxbury, Mass. He was 86.His wife, Marva Sparks, said the cause was complications of dementia.Over a 55-year career in which he produced nearly 100 plays, Mr. Bullins sought to reflect the Black urban experience unmitigated by the expectations of traditional theater. Most of his work appeared in Black theaters in Harlem and Oakland, Calif., and perhaps for that reason he never reached the heights of acclaim that greeted peers like August Wilson, whose plays appeared on Broadway and were adapted for the screen (and who often credited Mr. Bullins as an influence).That was fine with Mr. Bullins. He often said that he wrote not for white or middle-class audiences but for the strivers, hustlers and quiet sufferers whose struggles he sought to capture in searing works like “In the Wine Time” (1968) and “The Taking of Miss Janie” (1975).“He was able to get the grass roots to come to his plays,” the writer Ishmael Reed said in an interview. “He was a Black playwright who spoke to the values of the urban experience. Some of those people had probably never seen a play before.”Though Mr. Bullins was a careful student of white playwrights like Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, he rejected many of their conventions, pursuing a loose, rapid style that drew equally on avant-garde jazz and television — two forms that he felt put him closer to the register of his intended audiences.He won three Obie Awards and two Guggenheim grants, and in 1975 the New York Drama Critics’ Circle named “The Taking of Miss Janie” the best American play of the year.Not everyone was enamored of his work. Some critics, including some in the Black press, believed he focused too heavily on the violence and criminality he saw in working-class Black life, and reflected it too brutally — “The Taking of Miss Janie,” for instance, opens and closes with a rape scene.But most critics, especially in the establishment, came to respect Mr. Bullins as an artist who was both passionately true to his source material and nuanced enough in his vision to avoid becoming doctrinaire.“He tackled subjects that on the surface were very specific to the Black experience,” the playwright Richard Wesley said in an interview. “But Ed was also very much committed to showing the humanity of his characters, and in doing that he became accessible to audiences beyond the Black community.”Genia Morgan, left, and Alia Chapman in a 2006 production of Mr. Bullins’s “The Taking of Miss Janie,” which was named the best American play of the year by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle in 1975.Gerry GoodsteinEdward Artie Bullins was born on July 7, 1935, in Philadelphia and grew up on the city’s North Side. His father, Edward Bullins, left home when Ed was still a small child, and he was raised by his mother, Bertha Marie (Queen) Bullins, who worked for the city government.Though he did well in school, he gravitated toward the North Side’s rough street life. He joined a gang, lost two front teeth in one fight and was stabbed in the heart during another.Mr. Bullins dropped out of school in 1952 and joined the Navy. He served most of the next three years as an ensign aboard the aircraft carrier Midway, where he won a lightweight boxing championship.He returned to Philadelphia in 1955 and, three years later, moved to Los Angeles. He attended night school to earn a high school equivalency diploma, then attended Los Angeles City College, where he started a magazine, Citadel, and wrote short stories for it.In 1962 he married the poet Pat Cooks. She accused him of threatening her with violence, and they divorced in 1966. (She later remarried and took the surname Parker.)Mr. Bullins’s later marriage, to Trixie Bullins, ended in divorce. Along with his third wife, he is survived by his sons, Ronald and Sun Ra; his daughters, Diane Bullins, Patricia Oden and Catherine Room; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Four other children, Ameena, Darlene, Donald and Eddie Jr., died before him.Restless and unhappy with his work in Los Angeles, Mr. Bullins moved in 1964 to San Francisco, where he plugged into a growing community of Black writers. He also switched from writing prose to writing plays — in part, he said, because he was lazy, but also because he felt that the theater gave him more direct access to the everyday Black experience.His first play, “How Do You Do,” an absurdist one-act encounter between a middle-class Black couple and a working-class Black man, was produced in 1965 to favorable reviews. But he remained unsure of his decision to write plays until a few months later, when he saw a dual production of “The Dutchman” and “The Slave,” two plays by Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, a leading figure of the Black Arts Movement.“I said to myself, I must be on the right track,” Mr. Bullins told The New Yorker in 1973. “I could see that an experienced playwright like Jones was dealing with these same qualities and conditions of Black life that moved me.”In 1967, Mr. Bullins became artist in residence at the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem. The work he produced, mostly there, over the six years represented the peak of his career.The Black Arts Movement, then still primarily an East Coast phenomenon, was a loose affiliation of novelists, playwrights and poets whose work sought to reflect the modern Black experience on its own terms — written and produced by Black people in Black spaces for Black audiences.Mr. Bullins had found his community and, through it, his voice. He fell in with a circle of Bay Area writers, actors and activists, who began performing his work in bars and coffeehouses.Among them was Eldridge Cleaver, who, after his release from prison in 1966, used some of the proceeds from his memoir “Soul on Ice” to found Black House, an arts and community center in San Francisco, with Mr. Bullins as its chief artist in residence.Black House also became the city’s headquarters for the Black Panther Party, founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. Mr. Bullins became the party’s minister of culture.But his role in the Black Panthers was short-lived. The party, from his perspective at least, saw art solely as a weapon, and he chafed at Mr. Seale’s insistence that he create didactic, often explicitly Marxist plays. He also grew frustrated over the party’s interest in building a coalition with radical white allies, when what he sought was a movement wholly independent of white culture.“I have no Messianic urge,” he told The New York Times in 1975. “Every other street corner has somebody telling you Christ or Mao is the answer. You can take any Ism you want and be saved by it. If you’re part of some movement and it fulfills you, that’s cool, but I like to look at it all.”He left the party in late 1966, just before Black House shut down.Mr. Bullins considered moving to Europe or South America, but he changed his mind when Robert Macbeth, the founder of the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem, invited him to be the artist in residence there.He arrived in New York in 1967, and the next six years of work, mostly at the New Lafayette Theater, represented the peak of his career. The theater was a complete package: a 14-member acting troupe, 14 musicians, several playwrights and directors, and an affiliated art gallery, the Weusi Artist Collective, that produced sets.Mr. Bullins also led workshops for aspiring playwrights, many of whom, like Mr. Wesley, went on to become significant voices among the next generation of Black theater artists.Kim Sullivan and Shirleen Quigley in the New Federal Theater’s 2013 production of “In the Wine Time.”Gerry GoodsteinA year after arriving, he completed “In the Wine Time,” his first full-length play and the first of a series he called his “Twentieth Century Cycle” — 20 plays that told the story of postwar urban life through a set of friends. In 1971 he won his first Obie, for “The Fabulous Miss Marie” and “In New England Winter.”He left the New Lafayette Theater in 1973, shortly before it closed for lack of funding. His work in the 1970s appeared in the New Federal Theater, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, the Public Theater and elsewhere.In 1972 he got into a war of words with the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, which was putting on his play “The Duplex.” Though he had initially endorsed the production, he later said in an interview that “the original Black intentions” of the play had been “thwarted” and “its artistic integrity stomped on,” turning it into a “minstrel show.”He traded attacks with the producer, Jules Irving, and the director, Gilbert Moses, in The Times and elsewhere, but in the end the play went on. It received mixed reviews.That episode, fairly or not, gave Mr. Bullins a reputation for being hard to work with, one of the reasons he cited for returning to the West Coast in the 1980s. He continued to write plays, but he also produced work by others, including Mr. Reed, at his Bullins Memorial Theater in Oakland, named for his son Eddie Jr., who died in a car crash in 1978.Mr. Bullins returned to school, receiving a bachelor’s degree in English from the San Francisco campus of Antioch University in 1989 and a master’s in fine arts in playwriting from San Francisco State University in 1994.Mr. Bullins in 1999, when he was a professor in the theater department at Northeastern University in Boston.Wendy Maeda/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesThe next year he moved to Boston, where he became a professor in the theater department at Northeastern University. He retired in 2012.By then he had long since changed his mind about his audience, in large part because he and others in the Black Arts Movement had succeeded in their mission to build a Black cultural canon.“Of course Black writers can write for all audiences,” he told The Times in 1982. “My feeling is that the question of whether Black theater should appeal to whites was more valid a decade ago. Since then, Black theater has taken off in all directions.” More

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      Jonathan Reynolds, Playwright and Food Columnist, Dies at 79

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      His plays tended to parody American institutions. His food writing tended to be full of humor.Jonathan Reynolds, who in a wide-ranging career wrote successful plays, helped write a famously bad movie, turned out lively articles on how to cook the perfect turkey and all manner of other food-related subjects, and combined his love of food and his way with words in an unusual stage show, died on Oct. 27 in Englewood, N.J. He was 79.His family said in a statement that the cause of death, at the Actors Fund Home, was organ failure.After Mr. Reynolds tried — but disliked — acting (“I had less influence than the stage manager and most of the stagehands,” he once complained), he turned to playwriting and had quick success. A pair of his one-act comedies — “Rubbers,” satirizing the New York State legislative process, and “Yanks 3, Detroit 0, Top of the Seventh,” about an over-the-hill pitcher — ran for months in 1975 when they were staged at the American Place Theater in New York, directed by Alan Arkin.Demand was high enough that the theater, a subscription-only house, opened sales up to single-ticket buyers for the first time in its 11-year history.Mr. Reynolds’s plays tended to lampoon American institutions, whether government or the national pastime or, as in “Tunnel Fever” in 1979, academia.“I don’t think of my plays as comedies,” he told The New York Times when that play was about to open at American Place. “I think about what characters would do in a situation, and I don’t try to make it funny. It just comes out that way.”His biggest success as a playwright may have been “Geniuses,” a satire on the movie business that was staged at Playwrights Horizons in 1982. It was inspired by the three months he spent on location in the Philippines with the director Francis Ford Coppola while Mr. Coppola was shooting “Apocalypse Now.” Mr. Reynolds was there taking notes for a possible book about the making of the movie, and possibly to contribute to the script. The book never came about, and his contribution to the script ended up being a single line of dialogue. But the play, riding rave reviews, was a hit.“The author speaks with an authority to match his acerbity,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review in The New York Times, comparing him to the humorist S.J. Perelman.“Among other things,” Mr. Gussow added, “‘Geniuses’ is an insidious act of movie criticism. Make no mistake: Beneath the japery, there is a warning: Movies can be injurious to your health; keep them out of the reach of children-directors.”Mr. Reynolds would soon have his first film credit, for writing “Micki + Maude,” a 1984 comedy directed by Blake Edwards and starring Dudley Moore as a man with two wives, played by Amy Irving and Ann Reinking. Vincent Canby, reviewing the film in The Times, said that it was “never less than a delight” and that Mr. Reynolds “has an ear for ultra-high-frequency lunacies that escape the rest of us.”His next Hollywood experience, though, was not received so warmly. He was the screenwriter who adapted a story by Bill Cosby into a secret-agent comedy called “Leonard Part 6.” The movie, which starred Mr. Cosby and was released in 1987, came out so poorly that Mr. Cosby himself denounced it. In The Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel called it “the year’s worst film involving a major star.” Others have put it on lists of the worst movies ever made.His screenplay for the comedy “Switching Channels” (1988) also drew less-than-rave reviews. But Mr. Reynolds, who would earn only two more writing credits for movies (“My Stepmother Is an Alien” in 1988 and “The Distinguished Gentleman” in 1992), shrugged off the criticism, considering himself more playwright than screenwriter anyway.“It hurt for about a day,” he told Newsday in 1988. “And then I thought, ‘Well, I’m not really part of it so it doesn’t really bother me.’”Mr. Reynolds in 1997 at the American Place Theater on the set of his play “Stonewall Jackson’s House,” which took on the liberal biases of the theater world.James Estrin/The New York TimesMr. Reynolds continued to write plays, several of which, like “Stonewall Jackson’s House” (1997) and “Girls in Trouble” (2010), took on the liberal biases of the theater world and much of the theater audience. But at one point he tried something completely different: He began writing a column on food for The New York Times Magazine.His column first appeared in 2000, and he continued to write it for about five years. It was a job that, as he put it, just “fell from the sky” (aided by a recommendation from his friend Frank Rich, the newspaper’s drama critic at the time).“I didn’t go to any cooking school,” he told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2002, “and I didn’t spend time with a great chef in his kitchen for years in France.”But he did enjoy cooking, and for years he had been making diary entries about meals he had prepared or eaten and menus he had perused. He filled his columns not just with recipes and cooking tips but with anecdotes and humor. For instance, in March 2000 he offered a solution of sorts to the age-old problem with turkeys: that cooking the bird’s drumsticks and thighs thoroughly enough tended to leave the white meat dry.“For those with successful Nasdaq portfolios,” he wrote, “it’s simple: Buy two turkeys and cook one for the white meat and the other for the dark, then discard the overcooked white of one and the undercooked dark of the other.”For everyone else, he offered a solution that involved basting and assorted dos and don’ts. In 2006 he collected his cooking observations in a book, “Wrestling With Gravy: A Life, With Food.”Jonathan Randolph Reynolds was born on Feb. 13, 1942, in Fort Smith, Ark., to Donald Worthington Reynolds, founder of the Donrey Media Group, and Edith (Remick) Reynolds.He earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at Denison University in Ohio in 1965 and studied for a time at the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art. Back in New York, he was the understudy for the Rosencrantz role in the Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in 1967 before embarking on his writing career. Before his 1975 playwriting breakthrough, he was on the staffs of David Frost’s and Dick Cavett’s television shows.At his death Mr. Reynolds lived in Manhattan and in Garrison, N.Y.His marriage in 1978 to Charlotte Kirk ended in divorce in 1998. In 2004 he married the Tony Award-winning set designer Heidi Ettinger, who survives him, along with two sons from his marriage to Ms. Kirk, Edward and Frank Reynolds; three stepsons, North, Nash and Dodge Landesman; and two grandchildren.In 2003 Ms. Ettinger had the challenge of creating the set for a one-man show that marked Mr. Reynolds’s return to acting after a long layoff. It was called “Dinner With Demons,” and in it Mr. Reynolds cooked a full dinner, including deep-frying a turkey, while relating assorted anecdotes. That required putting a functioning kitchen onstage at the Second Stage Theater in Midtown.Legal restrictions meant the audience did not get to eat the meal; the backstage crew was the beneficiary. Mr. Reynolds told The Times that the hardest part of executing the show was making sure the dialogue and the cooking ended at the same time.“It was a lot of trial and error,” he said. “In rehearsals, the apple pancake got burned every other time.” More

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      in Theater

      Zadie Smith’s First Play Brings Chaucer to Her Beloved Northwest London

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      Two decades into her career, the writer’s stage debut is “The Wife of Willesden,” an adaptation of the Wife of Bath’s tale set and staged in the British capital.LONDON — Zadie Smith grew up around the corner from the Kiln Theater, which sits on the bustling Kilburn High Road in Northwest London. She took drama classes at the theater as a child and remembers when a fire caused significant damage to the building more than 30 years ago.Now, her relationship with the theater has become even more intertwined, with the Kiln’s staging of Smith’s first play, “The Wife of Willesden,” which runs until Jan. 15.“It’s very moving, if I allow myself to think about it very much — which I don’t, we don’t have time,” Smith, 46, said in a recent interview at the theater. “We’ve got work to do.”“The Wife of Willesden” — which opens on Thursday — is an adaptation of the Wife of Bath’s tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales,” transposing the prologue and tale into a love letter to contemporary London (Willesden is an area neighboring the theater).The author of numerous essays and five novels — many of which, like “NW” and her debut, “White Teeth” are also set in northwestern London — Smith is a newcomer to playwriting.“Doing this is really, genuinely new, having colleagues and stuff, wearing a lanyard,” Smith said, laughing, during a lunch break from rehearsals. “This is a new part of my life.”Indhu Rubasingham, the show’s director, said that she had entered the creative partnership with Smith with some trepidation. When Smith is writing a novel, “She’s on her own. She doesn’t have to check in with anyone,” said Rubasingham, who is also the theater’s artistic director. “I was like, ‘Oh God, this is going to be a whole different experience, how is she going to take it?’”As it turned out, “She’s been incredibly collaborative, really,” Rubasingham said.“The Wife of Willesden” is not the first time that Smith has explored different forms of writing. This year, she released a children’s book, “Weirdo,” co-written with her husband, Nick Laird, a novelist and poet, and she appeared as a songwriter and background vocalist on “91,” the lead track of Jack Antonoff’s most recent Bleachers album.The play weaves together several threads from Smith’s life. It was written as part of the celebrations for the local district of Brent’s designation as the “London Borough of Culture 2020” — a project established three years ago by the capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, that awards money to an area of the city to put on a yearlong program of cultural events.Smith described watching the actors rehearse as “even more enjoyable” than the writing process.Marc BrennerPerkins, center, with other cast members during a rehearsal of “The Wife of Willesden” in October.Marc BrennerSmith, who sat in on the first few weeks of rehearsals, described watching the actors as “even more enjoyable” than the writing process.“It’s genuinely been lovely seeing the actors,” she said. “I hear voices, but it’s different when people have bodies attached and they add so much.”Writing the play itself, Smith said, was like “really interesting homework.” She remembered having to translate Chaucer into contemporary English during her studies at Cambridge University.“So I’ve done it before, but I’ve never done it in a way that was enjoyable for me or anyone else,” she said, laughing.“The Canterbury Tales,” written by Chaucer in about the late 14th century, is a collection of 24 stories told by a group of pilgrims during their journey to Canterbury Cathedral, 60 miles east of London.One of the pilgrims is called Alyson, or the Wife of Bath. In her tale’s prologue, she reveals that she has been married five times, and she shares her beliefs on femininity and sexuality, critiquing the value that medieval society placed on virginity.“I’ve always liked the Wife of Bath, I read it in college,” Smith said. “Just incredible energy in this character, just so wild. I like writing women like that.”Smith wanted to maintain as many Chaucerian elements as possible in her adaptation, she said, and the contours of the story remain the same, while the play’s dialogue is written in verse couplets.She chose to do this rather than writing a new play because she views literature as a “long channel of writers talking to each other across generations, across countries, across epochs,” she said. She was also guided by her “perverse” love of a challenge.“Restraint is what makes you creative,” Smith said. “You’re forced to go this way and that. That, to me, is real creativity.”But “The Wife of Willesden” also made crucial departures from Chaucer’s text. The pilgrimage, in Smith’s retelling, is a pub crawl, and her “pilgrims” reflect the diversity of contemporary London. Instead of Chaucer’s knight, merchant and monk, Smith has characters you might see walking down Kilburn High Road, including a Nigerian pastor and a Polish bailiff.From left, Perkins, Rubasingham and Smith. “She’s been incredibly collaborative, really,” Rubasingham said of Smith.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesSmith translated Chaucer’s Middle English into a vernacular she has called “North Weezian,” and her “Wife of Willesden” is Alvita, a Jamaican-born British woman in her mid-50s who adorns herself in fake gold chains, wears fake Jimmy Choo heels and speaks in a mixture of London slang and patois. Her tale takes the form of Jamaican folklore, set in the 18th century. Like her progenitor, Alvita has also been married five times and isn’t afraid to speak her mind.In a back and forth with her religious Auntie P about sex and religion, Alvita tells her: “It’s true Paul said / He didn’t want us having sex for fun — / But it weren’t like: commandment number one. / Auntie, what you call laws I call advice.”Referring to her character, Clare Perkins, who plays Alvita, said, “She’s striving for personal happiness.”“She’s always reinventing herself and she’s always right there, in the middle of her life,” Perkins added.The transformation of Alyson of Bath into Alvita of Northwest London was not, for Smith, a significant leap. In her introduction to the script, which was published by Penguin this month, she wrote “Alyson’s voice — brash, honest, cheeky, salacious, outrageous, unapologetic — is one I’ve heard and loved all my life: in the flats, at school, in the playgrounds of my childhood and then the pubs of my maturity.”Smith doesn’t seem to overthink the prominence of Northwest London in her work. “If you grew up close to the streets, it just means something to you,” Smith said. “It was never an intention when I started, but there’s just something about the neighborhood. It really entertains me.”While the play is in one sense a celebration of the setting, for Rubasingham, it’s also about acknowledging the hardships that the area has endured during the pandemic.Covid-19 hit Brent particularly hard. At one point during the pandemic, the borough had the highest coronavirus death rate in England and Wales, as well as the highest number of furloughed workers.Rubasingham said that the pandemic had exacerbated the existing fault lines in society around class and race. For her, the play is “also about saying we need to put these people, these characters, this world, on the main stage,” she said.The play’s existence is also something of a happy accident. When Brent won its bid to become borough of culture, Smith agreed to contribute a piece of work. She initially envisaged a short monologue that might be performed by a local actress or published in a magazine.But a news release was sent out saying that she was writing a play, so “then I had to write a play,” Smith said. And while it was “amazing fun,” she said she didn’t believe that she would ever write another.“This is the one and only,” she said. More

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      in Music

      How an Artist Listens to the Voices in His Head

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      The singer and songwriter Josh Ritter’s musical work is often praised for its imaginative and deeply considered lyrics. His first novel, “Bright’s Passage” (2011), started as a song before Ritter transformed it.For his second novel, “The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All,” he was inspired by the history of Idaho, where he grew up. It’s narrated by Weldon Applegate, a 99-year-old man remembering back to his teenage years, when the long line of lumberjacks in his family seemed like it might be petering out.The novel is a tall tale laced with humor and salty language, delivered by Weldon in a classically folksy manner. (His father was “so poor he could barely afford to whistle a tune.”) Below, Ritter talks about the irascible Weldon, the history of timber towns, the characters in his head and more.When did you first get the idea to write this book?About seven years ago, living in Woodstock, N.Y. I’ve always been really interested in myth, and particularly American myth, because you can get such big ideas into small spaces.I was sitting on the floor with my daughter, Beatrix, who was very young at the time, and I just noticed the floorboards in this house, which were immense. Each one looked like a supper table. I was thinking of the people who took down those trees and moved them, and how they had turned them into these incredible floorboards. I’ve never really read a story about lumberjacks, and I grew up around lots of timber towns. So my mind went from those floorboards to those towns in northern Idaho where I was a boy, and from there the idea was just so plain: I had to write a lumberjack tall tale..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}I started working on it, but I was touring a lot, on the road with my family, raising a little kid. I picked up the novel and put it down a bunch of times in that period.Josh Ritter, whose new novel is “The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All.”Laura WilsonWhat’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?When I was growing up, the woods had emptied out some. There wasn’t the kind of influx of people from all over the world. What I learned in my research was that back just a hundred years ago, it was hopping. Around that area, there were the silver mines, there was timber, fishing, all the agriculture. Huge labor disputes. To walk down the streets of one of these towns now and imagine back, it was a profound experience to learn about that period.And for me personally, as a writer I’ve worried that there’s a store of characters or a store of songs in my head, and when I get through those I won’t have anymore. I’ve fought with that in my music so much. When I started to work with Weldon Applegate and let his voice out, I realized that there was a well there — a spring rather than a cistern. There’s something that’s continually creative, that made me feel like: OK, I have all the characters up there, they will always come. I just have to listen for them.In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?I wrote many drafts of this book, maybe 15 or so, and with each draft there was time in between. It developed as I put it down and stepped away from it. I think of it like painters stepping away from the canvas to get a view. With a novel, you have to put it down and forget that you wrote some of it.What I noticed is that Weldon is a much more sympathetic character than he started out as. When I started writing him, he was not only cantankerous, he was a real hard-ass. Over time, he had changed. He’d gotten a little bit more humane; there was a sweetness there that was really surprising, and I was charmed by it.There’s a book — I think it’s Flann O’Brien’s “At Swim-Two-Birds,” I read it so long ago — where the author’s characters come alive and do stuff while he’s asleep. There’s that element to writing, which is so beautiful. Sometimes with songs or stories, I really do think that you end up following them, they’re like a strong dog on a leash. You follow along and pretend that’s what you meant the whole time.What creative person (not a writer) has influenced you and your work?I have two that are very important to me. The creative heroes I’m always on the lookout for are people who make big changes in their art and continually change. And they manage to have families and lives that aren’t consumed by their art. Their art doesn’t eat them up. They manage to feed the fire without getting burned. One of those people is Tom Waits. He’s done an amazing job of always finding new ways to express himself and communicate with the world.The closer, even more personal one, is my own mom. She was a neuroscientist, and a major force for me in envisioning what it was to have a life where you loved what you did and worked on it as a joyful activity. And my mom loved Tom Waits.Persuade someone to read the novel in 50 words or fewer.Moonshine, avalanches, witches, devils, murder, piano players, mobile homes, old injuries and lightning strikes. More

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      in Theater

      Alice Childress Finally Gets to Make ‘Trouble’ on Broadway

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      Wiletta Mayer walks into the theater already knowing how things will go. Smartly dressed, attractive and middle-aged (don’t ask for a number, because “a woman that’ll tell her age will tell anything”), she is a veteran actress who’s played maids and mammies and knows how to cater to white directors and producers. You can call it “Uncle Tomming.” Or you can call it plain common sense. Either way, it’s a living.Until enough is enough.Alice Childress created Wiletta Mayer, the protagonist of her 1955 play, “Trouble in Mind,” to paint a realistic portrait of what it was to be Black in the theater industry. Or to be more accurate: She wanted to portray what it is to be Black in theater, because 66 years later, as the play opens on Broadway in a Roundabout Theater Company production, the words Childress wrote remain just as relevant.And yet this author and play, a comedy-drama about an interracial cast rehearsing an anti-lynching play written by a white author and led by a white director, haven’t gotten their proper due in the decades since its premiere. Childress was supposed to be the first Black female playwright on Broadway, with a play critiquing the racism and misogyny of the theater industry.Thanks to interfering white theatermakers and a Broadway unwelcoming to challenging Black art, things didn’t turn out as planned. But the content of the play, and its troubled production history, prove how rightly “Trouble in Mind” and its author should be celebrated as part of the canon.From left: Chuck Cooper, LaChanze, Danielle Campbell and Michael Zegen in “Trouble in Mind,” which will have its long-awaited Broadway opening night this month.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the play, Wiletta arrives for her part in “Chaos in Belleville” alongside a young Black actor named John; an older Black actor named Sheldon; a younger Black actress named Millie; and two white actors, Judy, a well-meaning yet naïve Yale graduate, and Bill, a neurotic character actor. The play within the play is about a Black man who dares to vote and is killed for it.During rehearsals Wiletta tries to give the newcomer John tips on how to survive as a Black actor in the business, but her own advice fails when the white director, Al Manners, pushes her to perpetuate stereotypes.It’s a familiar scenario, one Childress encountered herself as a young actress in the 1944 Broadway production of “Anna Lucasta.” She based Wiletta on the character actress Georgia Burke, who appeared with her in that production. Like Wiletta, Burke had also done her fair share of mammy roles, and she would later appear in the original Broadway “Porgy and Bess.”Burke had problems with the director of “Anna Lucasta,” but Childress knew her to complain only to her fellow Black actors; when it came to white directors and producers she kept quiet for the sake of her career.In “Trouble in Mind,” Childress wrote a version of Burke who finally had to speak up.“Darling, don’t think. You’re great until you start thinking,” Al Manners says to Wiletta during rehearsals. That kind of condescending treatment may have been par for the course for Black theater performers. Childress, however, was uncompromising.“She was a woman of amazing integrity,” said Kathy Perkins, Childress’s friend and the editor of a major anthology of her plays. (She is also the lighting designer for Roundabout’s production.) “She hated the saying ‘ahead of your time.’ Her thing was that people aren’t ahead of their time; they’re just choked during their time, they’re not allowed to do what they should be doing.”Childress, at left, with actors rehearsing the premiere of “Trouble in Mind” in 1955.Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsIt’s this integrity — or, more accurately, the times choking a great writer of integrity — that cost Childress Broadway. In an ironic echo of the play’s plot, Childress found herself at odds with the would-be director when “Trouble in Mind” was slated for its Off Broadway premiere. Unwilling to budge, she took over as co-director, along with the actress Clarice Taylor, who starred as Wiletta.The play premiered on Nov. 5, 1955, at the Greenwich Mews Theater, and ran for 91 performances.But that version isn’t the version we know today.The white producers were concerned about the play’s ending, which they thought was too negative. According to Perkins, as a relatively new playwright Childress was intimidated by these experienced producers.And then there was the rest of the cast and crew to think about. Childress was a fierce advocate for unions and workers’ rights, and feared that pulling the play would cost everyone their jobs. So she conceded, providing an ending of reconciliation and racial harmony, even though she maintained that it was unrealistic.The New York Times praised the play as “a fresh, lively and cutting satire” — except for the ending. Childress always regretted the change, and said she’d never compromise her artistic integrity again. So when “Trouble in Mind” was optioned for Broadway with the happy ending and a new title (“So Early Monday Morning”), Childress refused. She would have been the first Black female playwright to see her work there; instead, that honor would go to Lorraine Hansberry four years later, for “A Raisin in the Sun.”Childress, who died in 1994, never had the financial success nor popular recognition that her work merited in her lifetime. It’s unfortunate because her plays are works of merit. Many of her works, like “Florence” (1949), “Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White” (1966) and “Wine in the Wilderness” (1969), are confrontational without being pandering or preachy. Not simply about race, they are also about gender and class and artistry, and challenge their audiences to look at their own prejudices and misconceptions. (Theater for a New Audience is reviving “Wedding Band,” a tale of interracial love set amid the 1918 flu pandemic, Off Broadway this spring.)And they’re clever. The meta structure of “Trouble in Mind” makes Childress’s satire especially poignant; it’s both explicitly biting and subtly searing.Childress, at right, with James Broderick and Ruby Dee, the stars of the 1972 production of her play “Wedding Band.” Theater for a New Audience will present a revival in 2022.Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesOne reason Childress is often left out of conversations about the American canon is her style. In an essay in “The Cambridge Companion to African-American Theater,” the historian and dramaturge Adrienne Macki Braconi calls Childress a “transitional” writer, unheralded because her work reflects “the conventions of dramatic realism.”“Critics often overlook their subtle variations on the form, including such innovations as bold thematic content; assertive, complex female characters; and a focus on lower-class and middle-class blacks,” Macki Braconi wrote of Childress and the writer Eulalie Spence.Sandra Shannon, a scholar of Black theater and emeritus professor of African-American literature at Howard University, maintained that Childress’s blend of naturalistic dialogue and social commentary put her “at the top of her game” among playwrights in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Her plays, Shannon said, “raise awareness, stop short of just getting out and marching in the streets.”And La Vinia Delois Jennings, the author of the 1995 book “Alice Childress” and a distinguished professor in the humanities at the University of Tennessee, pointed out the “dynamism” of Childress’s works, which so often feature Black women taking agency. The stereotypical trope of the angry Black woman gets turned on its head, Jennings said, proving that anger can be “liberating — a force that brings about change.”But for all of Childress’s dynamism, it still took over 60 years to get her work to a Broadway stage.A 1950 portrait of Alice Childress, painted by Alice Neel, was included in a recent Metropolitan Museum of Art show.The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner; The Collection of Art BerlinerCharles Randolph-Wright, who will be directing the Broadway production, said he’s been eyeing this play for the big stage for more than a decade.On June 20, 2011, a nonprofit called Project1Voice hosted an event in which 19 theaters across the country did readings of “Trouble in Mind.” Randolph-Wright directed a Roundabout reading at the American Airlines Theater, which included André De Shields, Leslie Uggams, Bill Irwin and LaChanze, who will be starring as Wiletta in the full production at the same Broadway venue.“I’ll never forget everyone coming up to me saying, ‘Did you rewrite this?’ and I was like, ‘No, she wrote this in 1955.’ And they said, ‘But you tweaked it —’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t touch one thing,” Randolph-Wright explained.After all, theater insiders and outsiders are still loudly calling for improved representation more than a half-century later.“There’s been a false sense of progress. That progress has been in fits and starts,” Shannon said. “The same issues that Childress deals with, or dealt with in the 1950s with ‘Trouble in Mind,’ have always been bubbling beneath the surface. They’ve never gone away.”In one scene in the play, Manners says, “I want truth. What is truth? Truth is simply whatever you can bring yourself to believe, that is all. You must have integrity about your work.”Though the statement comes from a flawed character, the sentiment is Childress all the way. Perkins said that at the end of the day, Childress wouldn’t say she was writing for white audiences or Black audiences; she only wrote for herself, and she concerned herself first and foremost with the truth, whatever form that would take.Randolph-Wright said he thinks of John Lewis when he approaches the play. “It is ‘good trouble,’ ” he said, referring to the call to action made famous by the activist and congressman. “It agitates, it illuminates, it makes you laugh, it’s entertaining.”But he hopes this production will only be the beginning — that audiences will learn more about Childress’s work, and that she and other Black writers will get greater recognition for their contributions to the art form. Because this moment — after Black Lives Matter and “We See You, White American Theater,” and when seven new Broadway plays this fall are by Black writers — is perfect for Childress, but also for Spence and Ed Bullins and Angelina Weld Grimké and other Black playwrights past and present.So will change really come this time around? The version of “Trouble in Mind” that’s finally arriving on Broadway ends inconclusively, not optimistically. The ending Childress’s producers rejected back in 1955 seems right for right now. More

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      in Movies

      Paul Newman Will Tell His Own Story, 14 Years After His Death

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      Knopf plans to publish a book next year based on hours of recordings the movie star left behind, as well as interviews with family, friends and associates.Decades ago, the actor and philanthropist Paul Newman, frustrated by all the unauthorized biographies and coverage of his life, recorded his own oral history, leaving behind transcripts that for years were forgotten in the basement laundry room of his house in Connecticut.Now his family has decided to turn those transcripts into a memoir, which will be published by Knopf next fall.“What he recorded, and in essence what he wrote, was so honest and revealing,” said Peter Gethers, an editor-at-large at Knopf who will edit the book, which does not yet have a title. “It showed this extraordinary arc, a guy who was very, very flawed at the beginning of his life and as a young man, but who, as he got older, turned into the Paul Newman we want him to be.”Newman — known for his blue eyes and 50-year acting career in movies such as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Hud” and “Cool Hand Luke” — died in 2008 at age 83.The book began more than 30 years ago as an oral history project put together by one of Newman’s closest friends, the screenwriter Stewart Stern. Stern, whose 1968 film “Rachel, Rachel,” was directed by Newman and starred his wife, Joanne Woodward, spent several years interviewing people from all corners of Newman’s life, including his children, his ex-wife Jacqueline Witte, close friends, and actors and directors who worked with him. This produced thousands of pages of transcripts and convinced Newman he should do his own version. Stern peppered him with questions, Gethers said, and they created recordings that are a mix of interview and Newman speaking without prompts..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The recordings, completed about 10 years before his death, describe Newman’s early life, including his difficult relationship with his parents, as well as his troubles with drinking, his shortcomings as a husband in his first marriage, and his flaws as a parent. It is candid about his sorrow when his son, Scott, died of a drug and alcohol overdose at 28.One of several photos of Newman and his family that will appear in his forthcoming memoir.via KnopfThe book also delves into Newman’s insecurity in his younger years, exploring his jealousy of peers like James Dean and Marlon Brando when they were all working in Hollywood.“He said that his mother did not so much think of him as flesh and blood, but as a decoration,” Gethers said. “He says that if he was not a pretty child, she never would have paid attention to him at all. It’s a devastating thing to read, and clearly forms so much of his life and his insecurity about being an actor.”The memoir will also cover his marriage to Woodward, which Gethers called “remarkably loving, affectionate and sexy,” as well as his acting career and racecar driving.The book was purchased at auction this spring, Gethers said. It will be about 80 percent memoir, with the remaining part based on the recordings Stern made with people close to Newman. It will also include previously unreleased family photographs.The transcripts were given to Knopf, which was then charged with turning it into a book. (After the publisher bought it, more transcripts were found in a storage unit in Connecticut, in a banker’s box marked “PLN / HISTORY,” Gethers said.) Stern died in 2015, so Newman’s daughters are participating in the editing process, in essence as an author would, approving changes and drafts.Gethers himself is the author of 13 books and several screenplays, and has produced movies and television shows. He said that while wooing the Newman family during the bidding process, he told them that his father, a TV writer and producer, wrote one of Newman’s earliest starring roles in 1956 on a show called “Rag Jungle.” Gethers also mentioned that he had two cats named for Newman roles: Harper and Hud. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Maybe I Do Have a Story to Tell’: Kal Penn on His Memoir

      by

      Starring in the buddy stoner comedy “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” is good material for a memoir. One might think that serving as a staffer in Barack Obama’s White House is good material for another memoir, by a different person. But the actor Kal Penn writes about both experiences in “You Can’t Be Serious,” which Gallery Books will publish on Tuesday.The book has attracted early attention for its most personal detail: Penn is gay, and engaged to Josh, his partner of 11 years. Their relationship is conveyed in one chapter that is mostly about their earliest dates, during which they seemed comically mismatched.Penn also writes about growing up in suburban New Jersey and fully catching the acting bug while performing in a middle-school staging of “The Wiz.” He is candid about his fight against the entertainment industry’s tendency to cast actors of color in stereotypical roles. And he recounts the “sabbatical” he took after establishing a Hollywood career to campaign for Obama and then serve in the public engagement arm of his administration.Below, Penn talks about finding the story he wanted to tell, the self-loathing he first felt while writing it and the filmmaker who inspired his career.When did you first get the idea to write this book?The first idea, which I rejected, came the day I left the White House. My manager called me. I describe him in the book as like every character from the TV show “Entourage” in one person. Heart of gold but also a lion..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}And he said, “You need to write a book. I’ll set you up with meetings.” I said, “Dan, what am I going to write a book about?” He said, “There aren’t many actors who have been in politics.” I said, “The governor is literally Arnold Schwarzenegger.” And the reason I took the sabbatical was not to write a book. I don’t like the optics of that and, more importantly, I don’t have a story to tell.Later I thought, maybe I do have a story to tell: I’d love to write a book for the 20-year-old version of me. There was never a book that said, “This is how you navigate the entertainment industry as a young man of color.” And I’ve met a lot of people who were told they’re crazy for having multiple passions. We’re in a society that just doesn’t encourage that kind of thing. So I thought maybe my experiences might make somebody smile or feel a little more connected, and I had a chance to put it together and write it during the pandemic.What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?There was a point three months into writing it when I felt the kind of self-loathing that I haven’t felt since middle school. I texted a bunch of my writer friends, and they all either said, “Yeah, buddy, welcome to being an author,” or “Why do you think so many of us drink so much Scotch?” Just a sea of those types of responses.Up until that point, I’d written fiction, essentially scripts and characters. It’s very different when you’re creating a character or a plotline: That’s not you, you can take a break from it. With this process, it’s “Oh my God, there’s no escaping my own brain.” I was not prepared for it.In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?I was sure that I wanted to share two stories: one about my parents and their upbringing; and the story of how Josh and I met. He showed up with an 18-pack of Coors and turned my TV from “SpongeBob” to NASCAR. I thought, “This guy’s leaving here in 40 minutes with 16 beers.” So the fact that we’re together 11 years later is funny because so many people have stories of dates that went awry but now they’re married and have kids.In the book’s outline, there was no ending. I always struggled with that. I thought there was going to have to be some kind of a positive wrap-up, a story of triumph after years of typecasting and racism. And then “Sunnyside” happened. I sold this show after I had already started writing the book. There’s a chapter I write about how it’s truly my dream show: a big network [NBC], a diverse, patriotic comedy that would hopefully bring people together and make them laugh.And then it slowly unraveled. With everything else in the book, I have the perspective of time. This was still raw. I ended up putting it as the last real chapter because it’s a perfect example of how much has changed and how much has yet to change.We often think of goals as: Everything has now been fixed, so end of story. In reality, everything is a constant mess of back and forth.What creative person who isn’t a writer has influenced you and your work?I always say Mira Nair, and I would have said this years ago, before this book was ever on the table. Her second film, “Mississippi Masala,” came out when I was in eighth grade. It was the first time I’d seen South Asian characters onscreen that weren’t stereotypes or cartoon characters.They were deeply flawed, deeply interesting humans. They make love, they have financial problems. And that happened around the time “The Wiz” happened, so she was one of the people who inspired me to pursue a career in the arts.So when I got a chance to work with her on “The Namesake,” it meant a lot to me. And “The Namesake,” the novel — Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing was introduced to me by John Cho, from “Harold & Kumar.” All of those influences intersecting are very meaningful to me.Persuade someone to read “You Can’t Be Serious” in 50 words or fewer.If you want to feel like you’re having a beer with somebody who smoked weed with a fake president and served a real one, whose grandparents marched with Gandhi and whose parents certainly didn’t move to America for him to slide off a naked woman’s back in his first film. More