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      in Theater

      On London Stages, Brevity Reigns Supreme

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      A new work by Caryl Churchill, the final installment in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell saga and a Larry Kramer play deploy their running times with varied success.LONDON — Theatrical convention has never mattered to Caryl Churchill, the questing English playwright who at 83 continues to display a maverick intelligence. “What If If Only,” her new play for her longtime home, the Royal Court, runs only 20 minutes — which is six minutes longer than was widely reported when the three-performer drama was first announced.But Churchill manages to communicate so much about love and loss and the possibility — just maybe — of a brighter tomorrow that the play, on view through Oct. 23, seems utterly complete. Theatergoers could add value by combining this premiere with the British debut of the American writer Aleshea Harris’s blistering (and 90-minute) “Is God Is,” also playing on the Court’s main stage.The text of Churchill’s play gives its characters names like “Someone” and “Future,” but the director James Macdonald’s ever-spry production cuts through any potential opacity. You understand in an instant the inconsolable despondency of John Heffernan, playing (superbly) a man in a one-sided conversation with someone dear to him who has died; a reference at the outset to painting an apple calls to mind Magritte, whose surrealism Churchill echoes.Jasmine Nyenya, left, and John Heffernan in Caryl Churchill’s “What If If Only,” directed by James Macdonald, at the Royal Court Theater.Johan PerssonHeffernan is visited in his bereavement by a beaming Linda Bassett, a mainstay of Churchill’s work here playing one of several versions of the future in a hypothetical multiverse that evokes the recently revived “Constellations,” a play that was first seen at the Court. Bassett reappears later, this time known only as “Present” and promising a reality that, “of course,” contains war — what reality doesn’t, she asks — alongside “nice things” like “movies and trees and people who love each other.” Are those verities enough in themselves to provide comfort? “What If If Only” isn’t sure, preferring not to traffic in certainty but in the mystery of existence that Churchill has once again marked out as her magisterially realized terrain.Events, by contrast, couldn’t be more linear in “The Mirror and the Light,” the third and final installment in the saga of the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell, as filtered through the beady eye of the novelist Hilary Mantel. The first two books in her trilogy were adapted into a pair of plays that ran in the U.K. and on Broadway, and this third play, at the Gielgud Theater through Jan. 23, presumably has Broadway in its sights as well. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.Whereas “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” were adapted for the stage by a seasoned playwright, Mike Poulton, the completion of the triptych has been whittled down for theatrical consumption by Mantel herself, in collaboration with her leading man, Ben Miles, reprising the role of Cromwell. Both are first-time playwrights working with a skilled director, Jeremy Herrin, who has staged all three plays.The result is a lot of filleting for a book in excess of 700 pages, and you often feel as if you’ve boarded a speeding train that is racing through its narrative stops. Keen-eyed playgoers might want to supplement this show with a visit to the popular musical “Six,” which chronicles Henry VIII’s much-married life from the ladies’ perspectives: Equal time seems only fair.This non-singing account of the story begins at the end, which is to say with Cromwell not far from his beheading in 1540. We then rewind to allow for a speedy recap illustrating how Henry VIII’s once crucial aide-de-camp reached this baleful state. No doubt in an effort to avert musty history’s cramping the theatrical mood, characters’ relationships to one another are neatly laid out, leavened where possible with jokey repartee. Dream sequences bring in such ghostly personages as Cardinal Wolsey (a droll Tony Turner) and Cromwell’s father, Walter (Liam Smith).The aim is presumably a modern-day equivalent of the history play cycle of which Shakespeare was the master, as makes sense for a drama presented on the West End in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The problem is a narrative compression so extreme that the story barely has time to breathe, paired with an ensemble overly prone to shouting: Nicholas Boulton’s blustery Duke of Suffolk is on particular overdrive throughout.Things improve with Nathaniel Parker’s increasingly irascible Henry VIII, who is seen changing wives — scarcely has he married the ill-fated Jane Seymour (Olivia Marcus) before he’s on to Anna of Cleves (a cool-seeming Rosanna Adams) — while Miles’s Cromwell watches from the sidelines, too often this time a supporting player in his own story. Christopher Oram won a Tony in 2015 for his costumes for the two-part “Wolf Hall,” and his work here similarly suggests a Holbein portrait or two come to life.For sheer illumination, however, it’s left to Jessica Hung Han Yun’s elegant lighting to sear the stage, lending intrigue and import even when the hurtlingly superficial play has careered off course.Ben Daniels, left, and Dino Fetscher in Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” directed by Dominic Cooke at the National Theater.Helen MaybanksA grievous chapter from our own recent history is on view through Nov. 6 on the Olivier stage of the National Theater, where the protean director Dominic Cooke (“Follies,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) has revived the AIDS-era drama “The Normal Heart.” This is the first major production of Larry Kramer’s momentous 1985 play since its pioneering author died last year.Kramer’s crusading spirit lives on in the impassioned Ned Weeks (the English actor Ben Daniels, in fiery, wiry form), the author’s obvious alter ego, who is seen galvanizing a reluctant New York community (The New York Times included) about the peril posed by AIDS in the early years of that pandemic. The production employs a peculiar Brechtian device that has each scene introduced by the actors in their own accents before they morph into their characters: All that does is illustrate the difficulty some of the cast has with the American sounds required.Still, there’s no denying the roiling fury of a wordy play running close to three hours that now as then works as both a call to arms and a requiem: a testament to the durability of people under siege as well as to their fragility. “There’s so much death around,” says Ned, a remark that Churchill’s “Someone” would himself surely recognize, even as both characters find themselves in plays that pulsate with life.Liz Carr in “The Normal Heart.” The production is the first major presentation of the momentous 1985 play since Kramer died last year.Helen MaybanksWhat If If Only. Directed by James Macdonald. Royal Court Theater, through Oct. 23.The Mirror and the Light. Directed by Jeremy Herrin. Gielgud Theater, through Jan. 23.The Normal Heart. Directed by Dominic Cooke. National Theater, through Nov. 6. More

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      in Television

      For Sutton Foster, Crochet Is a Survival Tactic

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      Sutton Foster is finishing up a 15-week run at the Barbican as Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” a role for which she won a Tony a decade ago, and she is preparing to return to Broadway later this year to co-star with Hugh Jackman in “The Music Man.”But before we got into all that, she wanted to show off a washcloth.“They didn’t have any washcloths here in the flat,” Foster said during a video interview from London last month, “so I was like, ‘Well, I’ll make some!’” She plans to give them as Christmas presents.When she isn’t performing onstage or onscreen (recently as one of the stars of the television series “Younger”), there is a decent chance that Foster is crocheting, cross-stitching, baking, drawing or gardening, hobbies she explores in her new essay collection, “Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life,” which Grand Central will release on Tuesday.The chapters are craft-themed, but this book is not all about Mod Podge and Jo-Ann Fabrics. Foster, 46, writes about how keeping her hands busy has helped her cope with the stress and pressure of her career and the ups and downs of a life in which she didn’t always get what she needed from her family, loved ones or colleagues.“Hooked” is out on Oct. 12.“Anxiety runs in my family — in me,” she writes. “I am the daughter of an agoraphobic mother. I make a living as a performer. It’s complicated. And yet, if I’m feeling anxious or overwhelmed, I crochet, or collage, or cross-stitch. These hobbies have literally preserved my sanity through some of the darkest periods of my life.”There are light moments, like when we learn that Foster crocheted an octopus toilet-paper-roll cover as a wedding gift for her “Younger” co-star Hilary Duff. But these are balanced with heavier revelations, such as when Foster writes about the baskets she cross-stitched for her mother as a means of escaping toxic cast dynamics early in her career.She opens up about snowman-shaped holiday cookies she baked with the family of her first husband, Christian Borle, and the floral blanket she pieced together, one “granny square” at a time, when that marriage ended. She describes drawing interconnected circles with paint pens while undergoing fertility treatments, and the striped baby blanket she crocheted while waiting for her daughter’s birth mother to go into labor.Foster taught herself how to crochet when she was 19, and estimates that she has eight to 10 projects going at a time. She has a yarn dealer who shipped three boxes of Lion Brand supplies to London, then flew over to see “Anything Goes.” (You know what a big deal this is if you’ve ever been a novice in a certain kind of a yarn store, where customers tend to be sorted into varsity, junior varsity and invisible.) Sometimes Foster works from a book or consults YouTube for assistance, but she also creates her own designs.Foster said she has crafted many evenings of song, so she brought the same approach to writing her book: “You’re taking a reader on a journey, like taking an audience on a journey.”Ellie Smith for The New York TimesGrowing up in Georgia and, later, Michigan, Foster got her start, like many thespians of her generation, in a community production of “Annie.” After performing in national tours of “Grease” and “Les Misérables,” she appeared in Broadway productions of both shows, as well as “Annie” and “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” In 2002, she won her first Tony for “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”Like her perennially cheerful “Younger” character, Liza Miller, Foster was a bundle of can-do energy and enthusiasm, until our conversation turned to her mother. Then she spoke slowly, eyes closed, choosing each word painstakingly.Helen Foster’s health began to decline when Sutton and her brother, Hunter, were teenagers. She had a fraught relationship with Sutton and stopped speaking to Hunter for close to a decade; the siblings’ connection with their father suffered as a result. Since Helen Foster’s death in 2013, Sutton and Hunter have enjoyed a new chapter with the man known as Papa Bob, and “Hooked” includes his tips for growing the perfect tomato. (No. 9: “Pick the tomatoes when they’re near ripe but not quite ripe, so others can grow.”)“Crafting was the way I could tell my mother’s story that felt most authentic to me,” Foster said. “A way to weave, pun intended, all the facets of my life together in a way that felt true to me today.”In the book, she takes readers inside the squalid house in Florida where her mother spent her final years. “I flipped on the light and gasped,” she writes. “All of her windows had been blacked out with black garbage bags, secured to the walls with duct tape.” Her mother had been bedridden for months, refusing to seek medical treatment: “That explained the bedpan and pee pads on the floor next to her bed.”In “Younger,” Foster plays a 40-year-old empty-nester who lands an entry-level publishing job — and a whole new life — by pretending to be a millennial.Nicole Rivelli/CBS“It was mental illness that was never treated, never dealt with,” Hunter Foster said in a phone interview. After mentioning that he spends as much time as possible outside, he added, “I don’t allow myself to sleep past a certain time because my mom stayed in bed half the day.”His and his sister’s relationship with their mother is likely to surprise some readers, Sutton Foster said. “It’s a part of our story that people don’t know. It’s this underbelly: my mother’s illness and protecting her and being afraid of her. No one talked about it, and there’s this freedom now.”Behind her on the wall was a framed poster that said “Breathe.”Foster wrote “Hooked” with Liz Welch, who has collaborated on best sellers by Malala Yousafzai, Elaine Welteroth and Shaun King. “Sutton is a Broadway musical actress, my mother was a Broadway musical actress. Sutton’s an adoptive mother, I’m an adoptive mother. Honestly, I think we’d be friends anyway,” Welch said. “Crochet was the perfect metaphor for holding oneself together, taking all these different threads of her incredibly interesting, not-what-you’d-expect life.”Suzanne O’Neill, a vice president and executive editor at Grand Central, said: “One thing that’s very hard for people who are writing memoirs to do is to excavate their stories, and Sutton was game for it, even if there were moments that were hard. She wanted the book to be excellent. She dove into it. It was a piece of art for her, and she worked really hard to make it the book it is.”In “Hooked,” Foster recalls being 16, mesmerized as her idol, Patti LuPone, belted out “Being Alive” on TV. “There was something simultaneously terrifying and thrilling about her confidence,” she writes. Her mother, who had recently stopped driving and grocery-shopping, said, “You can do that.”Foster, center, won a Tony for her performance in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShe later met LuPone, who also played Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” and LuPone inspired one of Foster’s favorite collages: a colorful confection of craft paper on plywood, spelling out BADASS.“She’s a beautiful creature,” LuPone said of Foster. “She exudes a very positive light. We’re drawn to tortured souls, just to find out why they’re tortured. And we’re also drawn to the light, and the light is much more nourishing. You see somebody onstage that makes you feel better. That’s Sutton.”Foster is set to open “The Music Man” in December, playing Marian Paroo opposite Jackman as Harold Hill. But before she embarks on more soul-soothing craft projects backstage at the Winter Garden Theater, she will have time to settle into the Orange County farmhouse she moved into last spring with her husband, Ted Griffin, a screenwriter, and their 4-year-old daughter, Emily.She plans to bring at least one piece of her past into this next phase of life: a cross-stitched scene depicting baskets of various shapes and sizes that she made for her mother. For years, the piece hung in the front hallway of her parents’ house and was a stabilizing presence during difficult visits.Foster recently collected the baskets from her father’s basement. “I have them now,” she said. “They’ll go in the new house.” More

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      in Theater

      An Acclaimed Playwright on Masks and the Return to the Stage

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      Sarah Ruhl, after a long struggle living with Bell’s palsy, knows the feeling of being masked among the unmasked.In the theater, we smile. We smile because the show must go on. We smile, to quote Nat King Cole, even when our hearts are breaking. Unless we are performers in a tragedy, we put on some glitter and we sail out into the night, toward the theater district. Even writers, the least performative of the lot, smile. I didn’t want to be an opaque, judging playwright at auditions; I wanted to mirror the actors’ joy, or sadness, and partake of the strange communion between performers and their first audience. I never expected that one day, during a pandemic, we would all come to the theater masked.About a decade ago, I was nominated for a Tony Award for my play “In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play.” I was thrilled with the news, but you wouldn’t have known it from looking at my face. A month earlier, after giving birth to twins, I’d been diagnosed with Bell’s palsy, a paralysis of the seventh cranial nerve. I quite literally could not smile. When I went to a photo shoot to celebrate the Tony nominees, a phalanx of photographers shouted at me, “Smile!” When I tried and failed, one photographer looked up from his camera at me and said, “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you smile for your Tony Award?”“No,” I said, “my face is paralyzed.” Chagrined, he quietly took my photo and the next dazzler in line on the red carpet stepped forward.FOR MOST people with Bell’s palsy, relief comes relatively quickly, the vast majority recovering their smiles in three months. But for the unlucky minority that I was in, there was a slow and uncertain path to moving facial muscles again, and for years, an unfamiliar person stared back at me in the mirror.I was, to overuse a metaphor, masked, even to myself. I felt lucky to be a playwright rather than an actor, whose canvas is his or her face. But, at least before the pandemic, I was around actors constantly, and longed to mirror their expressions in a rehearsal room. I didn’t want to be only an opaque judging playwright at auditions; I wanted to inhabit the actors’ joy, or sadness, and partake of the strange communion between performers and their first audience. I never expected that one day, during a pandemic, we would all come to the theater masked.After my diagnosis, the doctor told me I’d most likely be better in only a couple of months. The realization that one is dealing with a chronic condition rather than a temporary one is painful. I know how dislocating, and disappointing that can be. Denial is one method of grappling with an in-between state, and I used it well for many years. But looking in the mirror, unmasked, is another method, which I finally tried, in the form of writing about my experience.I resisted writing about Bell’s palsy for many years because it seemed to belong to the land of the private, the disappointing, rather than the narrative structure I was used to — which has a catharsis in the third act. But I decided that the disappointing, and the chronic, was worth investigating, partly because it’s so often invisible in a culture that prefers neat arcs.The chronic illness narrative is one that many of us would rather not wrap our minds around. Our cultural preference is, I think, for an illness narrative that offers a complete return to health in the last chapter — an apotheosis — the chronic condition banished to the shadows. But there are so many illnesses that offer an incomplete recovery, and give us, instead, a messy in-between state of being to contend with, whether we’re talking about paralysis, pandemics, or even social upheavals. A neat resolution, a neat return to the old person, the old status quo, is often not possible. In certain cases, a return to what came before is not even desirable.AS WE COME BACK to the theater with our masks on, I find myself thinking about covered-up smiles. When I went to “Pass Over,” my first Broadway show after 18 months of longing, the performers were unmasked in every sense of the word. They revealed themselves with all the bravery demanded by the beautiful and honest language of Antoinette Nwandu’s extraordinary play. In a sharp reversal of Greek antiquity, the audience was masked and the performers were not.Greek masks in ancient theater were both practical and ritualistic; they allowed performers to change roles and genders, and also to let an immortal howl out of a face that became more than mortal with artifice. From African masks in theater and dance, to Tibetan masks in ceremonial traditions, to commedia dell’arte masks in 15th-century Italy, masks were thought to unleash an almost supernatural power in the actor. But masked theater in the West is now rare, and the particular genius of most New York actors is they can make us believe that they are revealing themselves fully while they are in fact masked by a role. So, two weeks ago, we in the audience sat in actual masks, in reverent silence, seeing the actors’ naked faces once again, feeling the incredible warmth of communal theater.Finally being together again in an audience felt miraculous, and also — if I am being completely honest — a little strange, and unfamiliar. There was a time many of us thought we’d hunker down for a couple months, perhaps learn a new hobby or two, and come back neatly to doing what we’d been doing before. In my case, that was writing plays and being in a rehearsal room. I know I’m not the only one in the theater community who feels oddly dislocated now; the quarantine itself was awful but had a glacial clarity about it; at least one knew what to do — one stayed put. Now that theater, dance and music (our secular New York City worship rituals) are back, there is celebration, and, I find, a sense of floating oddly — in a landscape that should feel like home.If I thought there would be a knife-edged clarity to the return to the theater, as though I could walk in the door of my childhood home and pick up right where I left off, the warm mug still on the table where I left it — I was mistaken. The liquid in the mug needs to be warmed. The mirrors need to be dusted. Can we still recognize our faces in those same mirrors we’ve been accustomed to using, to confirm our identities in the eyes of the people we trust and work with?I SUSPECT that, behind our masks right now, some of us don’t even feel ready to smile yet. How to return to life after a long illness as an individual, or as a theater community, or as a body politic, especially when there is not a clear return to health? And how to acknowledge the losses, the transformations, the seismic gaps?When I ran into colleagues at the theater recently, most of whom I hadn’t seen in 18 months, all of us masked, partially revealed, the simple question, “How are you?” hovered with new weight. I didn’t know who, in the last year and a half, had had a marriage break up; or a teenager going through a mental health crisis; or lost a parent, an aunt, a cousin, a spouse; who was suffering from long Covid; who might not be able to afford paying the rent. So to ask “How are you?” no longer felt like small talk. We relied on our eyes above our masks to make connections. And then the theater darkened, the curtain went up, and we reveled in the unmasked actors giving us their full-throated artistry. If actors have always been avatars for what we cannot express, they seemed even more so now.I think we all want to come back into our old rehearsal rooms, studios, and offices with confidence and gleaming smiles; but for some of us, right now, a half-smile is a more accurate expression of our emotional states. We are learning to be a work in progress together again. Unfinished, masked, and hopeful. As we slowly take our masks off in the coming months, let us be tender with one another. Let us be patient as we relearn the beautiful, and once automatic, act of smiling face to face.Sarah Ruhl is a playwright, essayist and poet living in Brooklyn. Her new book is “Smile: The Story of a Face,” published by Simon & Schuster. More

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      in Movies

      The Married Couple Behind the Dreamy Feminist Action Film ‘Mayday’

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      The writer and director Karen Cinorre and the cinematographer Sam Levy met in a college film class over 20 years ago. More recently, they collaborated on Cinorre’s first feature.When the cinematographer Sam Levy and the writer and director Karen Cinorre, who are now married forty-somethings, first met — in a film class as undergrads at Brown — he was struck by the fact that “she’d read all these interesting texts about magic, mediums and optical tricks you could play with the camera,” he says. “She was very studious and disciplined about it, and I loved that about her.”The couple’s living room is decorated with art made by friends, and with vintage wallpaper that Cinorre hand-painted.Blaine Davis“I was a really curious seeker,” confirms Cinorre, who primarily studied semiotics, physics and dance, but who ultimately landed in film. “I realized,” she says, “that the palette for filmmaking had so much of what I love — the science, the optics, the movement, the sound,” which together can enact an alchemy all their own. Not that she’s actively thinking about all of these elements as she goes. “For me, you just do it — I’m trying to express something almost in the subconscious,” she says. “It’s like having a divining rod, seeking a way to express the thing you’re feeling.”Levy prints his photos at home, laying them out on the floor to see patterns. Pictured here are 17-by-22-inch images on Fibre Rag paper, and the accordion of portrait images is from his favorite photo book, “Mesdames les Bodhisattva à Tokyo” (2013), by the photographer Papa-Chat Yokokawa.Blaine DavisLevy, she says, who took to the camera in high school, has a different and more deliberate approach — “he strips film to its most essential and powerful parts” — something that was apparent, and fascinating to her, from the start. The pair kept in touch after that first class together, which was taught by the avant-garde filmmaker and artist Leslie Thornton, and their romance bloomed shortly after they graduated and moved to New York. They married in 2000, just as they were beginning to build their respective careers. Cinorre edited and produced for Thornton; produced and curated multimedia installations; created films for opera productions; and worked as a set decorator and as a stylist, most notably for Isabella Rossellini’s experimental “Green Porno” short film series (2008), in which Cinorre also appears as an amorous snail. All the while, she was writing and directing her own shorts. One of them, “Plume” (2010), centers on a young boy lost in a sandstorm who is saved by an ostrich, which leaves him caught between the human and animal realms. “My artistic inclinations are to mysterious things — I’m interested in the territory of the sublime,” she says.Another view of the couple’s studio, where Cinorre wrote and edited “Mayday.”Blaine DavisAt the same time, Levy was making a name for himself. He shot music videos for Beck and Vampire Weekend and became a frequent collaborator of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, serving as the director of photography on Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” (2012), shot entirely in black and white, and “While We’re Young” (2015) and, later, for Gerwig’s Oscar-winning “Lady Bird” (2017). His lean, naturalistic approach belies a meticulous attention to detail that gives the films he works on a rich, lived-in aesthetic. Levy also shot nearly all of Cinorre’s shorts, and the couple would occasionally end up on the same set for other productions (as was the case with “Green Porno”). “We learned we really loved being on set together, spending 15 hours a day together making things,” says Levy. “When I would get a feature for someone else and leave home, it just reinforced the idea that we should be doing this together.”The shot list for “Mayday” — Cinorre and Levy worked together to break down every scripted scene into individual shots.Blaine DavisIn 2018, after an idea of Cinorre’s that had been percolating for over a decade took shape — “Sam, who’d seen the script in progress, was the one to point out that it should be a feature,” says Cinorre — they got their chance. The story — of what would become “Mayday,” which stars Grace Van Patten, Mia Goth, Havana Rose Liu and Juliette Lewis and hits theaters and all major video-on-demand platforms Friday — follows Ana (Van Patten), a put-upon young waitress who is transported to a lush and sparsely populated island in a dreamy other world. A war is on, but she finds refuge with a band of young women led by the seemingly unflappable Marsha (Goth). Soon, Ana learns, the women are bent on vengeance against all men, whom they lure to their deaths, often by impersonating damsels in distress via radio transmissions. In time, though, the feminist revenge fantasy gives way to something else, as Ana comes to see herself and her previous life in a different light.Levy and Cinorre on the set of “Mayday” in Croatia.Tjaša KalkanCinorre cites “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865), “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) and the ancient myth of the sirens as reference points for the story, which, she says, “felt like a bit of a fugue.” To figure out the film’s overall aesthetic, which has an appropriately gauzy, hypnotic quality, the couple searched for visual inspiration together. They went to live dance performances, including those done by the Belgian troupe Rosas and the Israeli company Batsheva, to help achieve a sense of grace and kineticism in the film (which has a darkly playful musical number in which Ana dances with a cadre of spry soldiers). The couple also browsed the shelves at Manhattan’s Dashwood Books, looking for images of women in action, which proved hard to find. Still, “a lot of Japanese photographers, like Rinko Kawauchi, spoke to us — something about the mystery and the color,” says Levy, who says his aim for “Mayday” was to “defy gravity.”A still from the film, which follows a band of women living on a strange island.Tjaša Kalkan/Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. “It’s a big movie for a first feature — it needed a lot of muscle to get off the ground, and it was reassuring to have someone so encouraging,” Cinorre says of working with Levy, which turned out to be as natural as they both expected. “The thing I’m always trying to develop with a director is this shorthand for communicating and a visual language,” says Levy. “You kind of have to become the same person — your brains have to meld and you finish each other’s sentences.” This was something he and Cinorre could already do, though the two are careful about maintaining at least some boundaries between work and life. “We take what we do so seriously that we have to not take ourselves too seriously,” says Levy. “We’re playful and silly and ridiculous with each other, so then we can bring that energy to set, which makes the process of filmmaking a real joy.”Hair by Corey Tuttle for Exclusive Artists. Makeup by Pearl Xu More

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      in Music

      Author of 'My Monticello' on Writing a Debut Book With Buzz

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      “It’s Never Too Late” is a series that tells the stories of people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.Jocelyn Nicole Johnson has been a public school art teacher for 20 years, but she is not in her elementary classroom this fall in Charlottesville, Va. Her debut collection, “My Monticello” — five short stories and the book’s title novella — will be published on Oct. 5. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead has called “My Monticello” “nimble, knowing, and electrifying,” and Esquire named “My Monticello,” published by Henry Holt, one of the best books of the fall, writing that it “announces the arrival of an electric new literary voice.”To top that off, Netflix plans to turn the book’s title novella into a film. In the novella, which is set in the near future, a young woman who is descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and a band of largely Black and brown survivors take refuge from marauding white supremacists in Monticello, Jefferson’s homestead. The book is extraordinary for another reason. Ms. Johnson is 50 years old, not the average age of your typical debut author. To be more blunt, the publishing industry is viewed by some trade observers as too often fetishizing young writers, so while 50 is considered relatively young in many circles, for a first-time author to find her way onto the grand stage is a rarity.The author, who lives in Charlottesville with her husband, a software engineer and photographer, and their 15-year-old son, is excited for the book to be out in the world but she is also a little nervous. “As an art teacher I can tell myself the kind of things that I would absolutely tell my students,” she said. “You made something, but it’s not you.” (The following interview has been edited and condensed.)When did you first start writing?Writing and art were my main interests from a very early age. I recently found this book that I wrote in the fourth grade. We had to write a story, illustrate it and bind it, and mine was called “Prom Queen.” It has a lot of vengeance in it, which surprised me. Then, when I was a teenager, I read “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton, that rough coming-of-age story. And I learned that Hinton was published when she was 18 years old, so I decided to write a novel, and I did it. I wrote a book at age 16. I still have copies of that book in a drawer.Ms. Johnson says her book, “My Monticello,” is partially inspired by the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally that took place in Charlottesville, Va., where she lives. Matt Eich for The New York TimesWhen were you first published?After I was a teenager, I put the idea of publishing a book on the back burner until much later in life. But I did like writing — I wrote that whole time — I just wasn’t making steps toward publishing my work when I was younger.In 2017 I submitted a short story about a college professor secretly using his son for a research experiment regarding racism, “Control Negro,” to Guernica, and I was delighted when I learned that they were going to publish it. Then it was tweeted about by Roxane Gay, who went on to select it for Best American Short Stories, a prestigious annual collection which she guest edited that year. I would say that was the true beginning of this book, my debut, “My Monticello,” which will make me a 50-year-old literary debutante.Tell us about your life before this book?I have taught public school art for 20 years. Anyone who has taught public school will know that it is a very robust job. A very time consuming job. It is a job you really commit to.I was kind of the Mr. Rogers of teachers: standing at my door with a chime and a cardigan, welcoming this very broad and diverse group of students that we have here in Charlottesville into my classroom.What would you consider the first step you took toward publishing this collection?I had a moment after I published “Control Negro” where I realized how that story and other stories I was working on were connected. And that was through this idea of place, through this idea of Virginia. And through the lenses of racial and environmental anxiety. So that’s when I realized that I wanted to publish a collection.How did you find the courage and strength to take that initial step?The first step that led to this book — reaching out — came naturally to me because I had been sending my work out for so many years. So I had the habit of trying. I had the habit of persistence and trying — without a lot of expectation, which I think is a nice place to be in. A familiarity with rejection.Do you remember your first reaction when you found out you sold the collection? That it was going to be published?I was at home teaching virtually, because of the pandemic. It was June 2020 — the end of the 2020 school year.It was really exciting but also a little terrifying. A lot of writers, myself included, are introverts. And you work really hard to make your book be in the world, but there’s also a vulnerability that comes with that. So I sat in that moment, and then I took a walk around the block with my husband and we debriefed. Because we could see our lives changing. I had to decide whether I was going to keep teaching. Eventually I decided, between the book deal and the pandemic, to take a break from the classroom.Ms. Johnson is pictured with glimpses of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s homestead, which is the setting of her title novella. Her words of wisdom? “Embrace rejection and find your people.”Matt Eich for The New York TimesWhat were the biggest challenges in your journey to publication?I enjoy writing, but it’s not all enjoyable. You can see what you want it to be, but it takes a lot of time and experience — and luck — to get your writing to where you want it to be. You often fail. You come against your own limitations.I was writing about things that mattered a lot to me. Things that were difficult for our community here in Charlottesville. The collection is partially inspired by the deadly Unite the Right rally that took place here, as well as this country’s troubled histories going back to the time of the founding fathers. I wanted to make sure I did the best I could to be honest about my perspective. To write something that was hopefully useful and engaging to people.Do you wish you had done this book sooner or do you feel it was right on time?I am so pleased that this book is my debut. It incorporates so much more of my lived experience and my life and my aspirations and my hopes.What are your future plans?Apparently I’m going to write a second book — because I am under contract to write a second book. I’ve told myself so many times throughout the course of my life, “I think I’ll take a break from writing.” But I’m always writing. So I’m looking forward to what comes next and how I manage my expectations again as I set out. Because every book is it’s own project.What would you tell people who feel stuck and want to make a change?Try something small. Do something differently that’s manageable. But start. That’s what I would tell students. You have to start somewhere. Find support. Find community. And start small.Has this experience made you a different person?I think we’re constantly changing, and I think we should change. I’m a different person now than the teacher who greeted students at her door, or even different than the person who wrote “My Monticello.” And that’s exciting.Is there anything else you’d like to share about the trajectory that got you here?People help you all along the way. Even those people who don’t say, “Yes.” Your first book doesn’t get published. And your second book doesn’t get published. Maybe your third doesn’t. But that creates the conditions, in a way, for what happens next. The difficulties along the way make it more satisfying in the end.What lessons can people learn from your experience?Embrace rejection and find your people.We’re looking for people who decide that it’s never too late to switch gears, change their life and pursue dreams. Should we talk to you or someone you know? Share your story here. More

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      in Movies

      Lena Waithe, Gillian Flynn to Become Book Publishers With Zando

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      The two women are joining Zando, an independent publishing company founded last year that plans to work with authors and sell books in unconventional ways.When Gillian Flynn submitted her novel “Gone Girl” to her publisher, Crown, she wasn’t sure what executives would make of the story’s twists and its churlish, unreliable female narrator.“We knew it was weird and complex and risky,” said Molly Stern, who was publisher of Crown at the time. “We also knew that it was a masterpiece.”“Gone Girl” became a blockbuster, selling millions of copies, inspiring a film adaptation starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike and creating a booming market for psychological thrillers featuring unstable women.Now Flynn and Stern, who left Crown three years ago, are teaming up again. Flynn is joining Zando, the publishing company that Stern started last year — not as a writer, but as a publisher with her own imprint, Gillian Flynn Books. Flynn will acquire and publish fiction as well as narrative nonfiction and true crime. (Her next novel, which she is currently writing, will be published by Penguin Random House.)“The industry is a harder place to break into. Everyone wants something that feels like a sure thing,” Flynn said in an interview. “What attracted me was that ability to give people what I got, which was a chance in the market. So now I get a chance to champion writers who are a little bit different.”“What attracted me was that ability to give people what I got, which was a chance in the market,” said the “Gone Girl” author Gillian Flynn, who is starting the imprint Gillian Flynn Books.Lawrence Agyei for The New York TimesAlong with Flynn, Zando has brought on the screenwriter, producer and actor Lena Waithe, who will start an imprint dedicated to publishing “emerging and underrepresented voices,” including memoirs, young adult titles and literary fiction. As the company’s first founding publishing partners, Flynn and Waithe will each acquire and publish four to six books over a three-year period, and will be involved in marketing and promoting the books to their own fan bases.Flynn and Waithe both have built considerable followings and shown themselves to be versatile in different mediums. In addition to writing the screen adaptation of “Gone Girl,” Flynn was an executive producer on the adaptation of her 2006 novel, “Sharp Objects” and was the creator and showrunner of the TV show “Utopia.”Waithe is also a Hollywood powerhouse. After winning acclaim for her work as a writer and actor on “Master of None,” becoming the first Black woman to win an Emmy for comedy writing, Waithe wrote and produced the movie “Queen & Slim” and created the television series “The Chi” and “Twenties.”Stern and Waithe met in 2017, when Stern asked if she wanted to work on a book.“Molly was trying to get me to write a book, and I just didn’t want to,” Waithe said in an interview.She was more enthusiastic about the possibility of publishing other people’s books. When Stern asked her about working with Zando, Waithe developed the idea for an imprint, Hillman Grad Books, which she will lead with Rishi Rajani and Naomi Funabashi, executives at Waithe’s production company, Hillman Grad.“Our mission is to introduce people to authors they may not have otherwise heard of,” Waithe said.At a moment of accelerating consolidation in the publishing industry, Zando, an independent company, is something of an outlier. It will likely publish fewer than 30 titles a year and invest heavily in marketing those books, rather than acquiring many more and hoping a few break out, as most corporate publishing houses do.“I’m hoping we can have a force multiplier effect on books that would have sold modestly or wouldn’t have been a priority at a large publishing house,” Stern said. “Now there will be air around them.”“Our mission is to introduce people to authors they may not have otherwise heard of,” Lena Waithe said of her imprint, Hillman Grad Books.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesLike Hollywood studios, mainstream corporate publishers are increasingly reliant on blockbusters to drive profits, and have grown more risk averse when it comes to promoting new writers. Those authors are struggling more than ever to find their audience in today’s algorithm-driven marketplace, which favors recognizable brands and books that are already selling.Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager and Emma Watson can provide boosts through their book clubs, but those kinds of plugs are the publicity equivalent of lightning strikes — powerful but rare. Zando’s model attempts to reverse-engineer the process by recruiting cultural influencers to select the books.To combat what she called a “crisis” of discoverability, Stern is bringing on high-profile publishing partners, which will include businesses and brands as well as celebrities, to promote books to their own fans and customers. Zando’s partners will get a cut of the profits, though Stern declined to say how much.Zando received a significant start-up investment from Sister, an independent global studio founded in 2019 by the media executive Elisabeth Murdoch, the film industry executive Stacey Snider and the producer Jane Featherstone. Zando’s print books will be distributed by Two Rivers, a distributor run by Ingram, but Zando also plans to experiment with unconventional channels like direct to consumer sales.In addition to its imprints, Zando has its own editorial team making acquisitions. Its first batch of books, due out next spring, is heavy on fiction, including “The Odyssey,” a novel by Lara Williams that takes on consumer capitalism; Steve Almond’s debut novel, “All the Secrets of the World,” set in 1980s Sacramento; and Samantha Allen’s “Patricia Wants to Cuddle,” about contestants on a dating TV show, which is billed as a “queer Grendel for the Instagram era.” More

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      in Television

      Irma Kalish, TV Writer Who Tackled Social Issues, Dies at 96

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      A female trailblazer in the TV industry, she and her husband took on topics like rape and abortion in writing for sitcoms like “All in the Family” and “Maude.”Irma Kalish, a television writer who tackled abortion, rape and other provocative issues in many of the biggest comedy hits of the 1960s and beyond as she helped usher women into the writer’s room, died on Sept. 3 in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 96. Her death, at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home, was attributed to complications of pneumonia, her son, Bruce Kalish, a television producer, said.Ms. Kalish’s work in television comedy broke the mold for female writers. What women there were in the industry around midcentury had mostly been expected to write tear-jerking dramas, but beginning in the early 1960s Ms. Kalish made her mark in comedy, notably writing for Norman Lear’s caustic, socially conscious sitcoms “All in the Family” and its spinoff “Maude” in the ’70s.She did much of her writing in partnership with her husband, Austin Kalish. They shared offices at studios around Los Angeles, usually working at facing desks producing alternating drafts of scripts.“When I became a writer, I was one of the very first woman comedy writers and later producers,” Ms. Kalish said in an oral history for the Writers Guild Foundation in 2010. She added, referring to her husband by his nickname, “One producer actually thought that I must not be writing — I must be just doing the typing, and Rocky was doing the writing.”To combat sexism in the industry, she said, “I just became one of the guys.”Ms. Kalish moderated an event sponsored by the Writers Guild in Los Angeles. She made a mark writing for Norman Lear’s topical sitcoms “All in the Family” and “Maude.”  Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times via GettyWriting for “Maude,” Ms. Kalish and her husband, who died in 2016, worked on the contentious two-part episode “Maude’s Dilemma” (1972), in which the title character, a strong-minded suburban wife and grandmother in her late 40s (played by Bea Arthur), had an abortion. When it was broadcast, Roe v. Wade had just been argued in the United States Supreme Court and would be decided within months, making abortion legal nationwide. Controversy over the episode rose swiftly; dozens of CBS affiliates declined to show it.Mr. and Ms. Kalish earned a “story by” credit, and Susan Harris was credited as the script writer; Mr. Kalish said in an interview in 2012 that he and Ms. Kalish had come up with the idea for the episode.Lynne Joyrich, a professor in the modern culture and media department at Brown University, called the episode a watershed moment for women’s issues onscreen. “Maude’s Dilemma” and episodes like it, she said, demonstrated “the way in which the everyday is also political.”The Kalishs’ takes on social issues also found their way into “All in the Family.” One episode centered on Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton), the wife of the bigoted Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), weathering a breast cancer scare. Another focused on the couple’s daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers), as the victim of a rape attempt.The topical scripts “elevated us in the eyes of the business,” Mr. Kalish said in a joint interview with Ms. Kalish for the Archive of American Television conducted in 2012.Mr. and Ms. Kalish were executive producers of another 1970s hit sitcom, “Good Times,” about a Black family in a Chicago housing project, and continued to write for that program and numerous others.Ms. Kalish’s career spanned decades, beginning in the mid-1950s, and included writing credits for more than three dozen shows, many that would make up a pantheon of baby boomers’ favorite sitcoms, among them “The Patty Duke Show,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “My Favorite Martian,” “F Troop,” “My Three Sons” and “Family Affair.” She also had producing credits on some 16 shows, including “The Facts of Life” and “Valerie.”Ms. Kalish’s work laid a track for other female sitcom writers to follow. As she said to the comedian Amy Poehler in an interview in 2013 for Ms. Poehler’s Web series, “Smart Girls at the Party,” “You are a descendant of mine, so to speak.”Ms. Poehler, beaming, agreed.Irma May Ginsberg was born on Oct. 6, 1924, in Manhattan. Her mother, Lillian (Cutler) Ginsberg, was a homemaker. Her father, Nathan Ginsberg, was a business investor.Irma attended Julia Richman High School on the Upper East Side and went on to Syracuse University, where she studied journalism and graduated in 1945. She married Mr. Kalish, the brother of a childhood friend, in 1948 after corresponding with him while he was stationed in Bangor, Maine, during World War II.After the couple moved to Los Angeles, Mr. Kalish became a comedy writer for radio and television. Ms. Kalish worked as an editor for a pulp magazine called “Western Romance” before leaving to stay home with their two children. Her first writing credit, on the dramatic series “The Millionaire,” came in 1955.She joined the Writers Guild in 1964 and began writing with her husband more consistently. The Writer’s Guild Foundation, in their “The Writer Speaks” video series, called them “one of the more successful sitcom-writer-couples of the 20th century.”Ms. Kalish was active in the Writers Guild of America West chapter and in Women in Film, an advocacy group, serving as its president.The couple’s last television credit was in 1998, for the comedy series “The Famous Jett Jackson,” which was produced by their son, Bruce. They wrote a script dealing with ageism.Along with her son, she is survived by her sister and only sibling, Harriet Alef; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Her daughter, Nancy Biederman, died in 2016. In the interview with the Archive of American Television, Ms. Kalish expressed her desire to be known as her own person, not just Austin Kalish’s wife and writing partner.“Sure, God made man before woman,” she said, “but then you always do a first draft before you make a final masterpiece.” More

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      in Theater

      Jean-Claude van Itallie, ‘America Hurrah’ Playwright, Dies at 85

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      He was a central figure in the experimental theater movement for decades. His best-known work, a trilogy of one-acts, opened in 1966 and ran for more than 630 performances.Jean-Claude van Itallie, a playwright, director and performer who was a mainstay of the experimental theater world and who was especially known for “America Hurrah,” a form-bending trio of one-acts that opened in 1966 in the East Village and ran for more than 630 performances, died on Sept. 9 in Manhattan. He was 85.His brother, Michael, said the cause was pneumonia.Beginning in the late 1950s, Mr. van Itallie immersed himself in the vibrant Off Off Broadway scene, where playwrights and performers were challenging theatrical conventions. He joined Joseph Chaikin’s newly formed Open Theater in 1963, and his first produced play, “War,” was staged in the West Village. He was a favorite of Ellen Stewart, who had founded La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in 1961.Mr. van Itallie’s early works, including components of what became “America Hurrah,” were generally performed in lofts and other small spaces, but for the full-fledged production of “America Hurrah,” in November 1966, he moved up to the Pocket Theater on Third Avenue. The work caused a sensation.“I think you’ll be neglecting a whisper in the wind if you don’t look in on ‘America Hurrah,’” Walter Kerr began his rave review in The New York Times. “There’s something afoot here.”The first play in the trilogy, “Interview,” looked at the dehumanizing process of job hunting. In the second, “TV,” a commentary on mass media’s ability to trivialize, three people in a television ratings company watch a variety of shows; gradually the ones they’re watching take over the stage, and the three “real” people are absorbed into them.The third piece was “Motel,” which was first performed in 1965 at La MaMa E.T.C. and which the script describes as “a masque for three dolls.” (Robert Wilson, still early in his groundbreaking career, designed the original set.) Writing about a London production of “America Hurrah” for The Times in 1967, Charles Marowitz called it “a short but stunning masterpiece.”In it, a monstrous doll, the “Motel-keeper,” presides over a motel room and emits a stream of increasingly arcane patter. Two other dolls arrive at the room and proceed to trash it, scrawling vulgar graffiti on the wall and eventually dismantling the Motel-keeper.In 1993, when the Dobama Theater in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, mounted a revival of “America Hurrah,” Marianne Evett, theater critic for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, reflected on its original impact.“When it opened,” she wrote, “it rocketed to fame, announcing that a new kind of American theater had arrived — deliberately experimental, savagely funny, politically aware and critical of standard American life, its institutions and values.”Mr. van Itallie continued making new work for more than half a century, and also founded Shantigar, a retreat in western Massachusetts, where he nurtured aspiring theater artists. Just two years ago, La MaMa staged the premiere of his new play, “The Fat Lady Sings,” about an evangelical family.“Jean-Claude van Itallie was an artist who was constantly questioning and digging into the deeper realms of our human existence and spirit,” Mia Yoo, artistic director of La MaMa, said by email. “In this moment of change it is artists like Jean-Claude whom we must look to.”Mr. van Itallie in 1999 in his one-man show, “War, Sex and Dreams,” at La Mama E.T.C. It related his childhood escape from the Nazis, his life as a gay man and how he coped with sudden fame in the 1960s. Peter MacDonald/La MamaJean-Claude van Itallie was born on May 25, 1936, in Brussels to Hugo and Marthe (Levy) van Itallie. The family left Belgium as the Nazis advanced on the country in 1940, and by the end of the year they had reached the United States. They settled in Great Neck, on Long Island. Hugo van Itallie had been a stockbroker in Brussels and resumed that career on Wall Street.Jean-Claude’s parents spoke French at home, something that influenced his later approach to theater, he said.“I had the good fortune to grow up in a couple of languages,” he said, “and I think that makes you realize that no single language contains reality, that words are always an approximation of reality, that language and even thought are perspectives on reality, not reality itself.”He was active in the drama club at Great Neck High School and in student productions at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he spent his senior year. In 1954, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he continued to study theater and wrote his first one-act plays before graduating in 1958. His honors thesis was titled “The Pessimism of Jean Anouilh,” the French dramatist.Mr. van Itallie settled in Greenwich Village. He worked for several years adapting and writing scripts for television, particularly for “Look Up and Live,” a Sunday morning anthology program on religious themes broadcast on CBS. It was a period when many TV shows had corporate sponsors that had to be appeased, but his wasn’t one of them; “Look Up and Live” gave the writers a measure of freedom.“All you had to do was please God and CBS,” he said.He was continuing to write plays on his own. “Motel,” the third piece of the “America Hurrah” trilogy, was actually the first to be written, in 1961 or ’62.“I was about three years out of Harvard, living in Greenwich Village and knocking on the door of Broadway theater,” he told The Plain Dealer decades later. “And I wasn’t getting in. I think that ‘Motel’ grew out of my anger — partly at that situation, but probably a much deeper anger at the way my mind had been conventionalized and conditioned. It just rose up out of me.”The success of “America Hurrah” in New York spawned other productions, though they sometimes ran into resistance, including in London, where the graffiti scrawled in “Motel” offended censors. In Mobile, Ala., a production by the University of South Alabama at a city-owned theater in 1968 was shut down by the mayor, Lambert C. Mims, after two performances.“It is filth, pure and simple,” the mayor said, “and I think it is a crying shame that Alabama taxpayers’ money has been used to produce such degrading trash.”Among Mr. van Itallie’s other works with Open Theater was “The Serpent,” a collaborative piece inspired by the book of Genesis that he shaped into a script. It was first performed in Rome during a European tour in 1968 and later staged in New York.In the 1970s Mr. van Itallie became known for translations.“I did my work as a playwright backwards,” he once said, “creating new theatrical forms in the ’60s, and in the ’70s going back to study masters like Chekhov.”Later still he did some acting, including performing a one-man autobiographical play called “War, Sex and Dreams,” which related his childhood escape from the Nazis, his life as a gay man and how he coped with sudden fame in the 1960s. D.J.R. Bruckner reviewed a performance of the work at the Cafe at La MaMa in 1999 for The Times, calling it the “often amusing and often sad confession of a man in his 60s whose heart is lonely and who teases one into wondering what, despite his remarkable candor, he is leaving out.”Mr. van Itallie split his time between a home in Manhattan and the farm in Rowe, Mass., which is home to his Shantigar Foundation. In addition to his brother, he is survived by his stepmother, Christine van Itallie.In remembering Mr. van Itallie, Ms. Yoo called to mind her predecessor, Ms. Stewart, who died in 2011.“I think of Ellen Stewart and him looking down at us and insisting that we move and make change,” she said. More