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      Michaela Coel Puts Herself Together in ‘Misfits’

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      The book, adapted from a speech by the creator and star of “I May Destroy You,” codifies her efforts to achieve transparency in her work and in her life.The city of Edinburgh was the epicenter of a powerful energy pulse on Aug. 22, 2018 — not the kind that precise scientific equipment can detect, but one whose ripples would be felt by sensitive human instruments in the weeks and months that followed.That evening, Michaela Coel, a rising British TV star, was invited to address her colleagues at the prestigious Edinburgh International Television Festival. Speaking to a few thousand industry peers in a lecture hall and countless more viewers watching her online, she shared stories from her ascent, a narrative that was by turns wryly comic and devastating.Coel talked about growing up a member of one of only four Black families in a public housing complex in East London. She described her time at drama school, where a teacher called her a racial slur during an acting exercise. She discussed her surprise, after achieving some professional success, at being sent a gift bag that contained “dry shampoo, tanning lotion and a foundation even Kim Kardashian was too dark for.” She recounted how she had gone out for a drink one night and later realized she had been drugged and sexually assaulted.She spoke of resilience gained from a life spent “having to climb ladders with no stable ground beneath you,” and she classified herself as a misfit, defined in part as someone who “doesn’t climb in pursuit of safety or profit, she climbs to tell stories.”Three years later, Coel — now 33 and the celebrated creator and star of the HBO comedy-drama “I May Destroy You” — regards this speech as a satisfying moment of personal unburdening.As she said in a video interview a few weeks ago, “We go in and out of working with people and we never quite know who they are, and no one ever quite knows who you are. There’s something quite liberating about just letting everybody know.”A misfit, Coel said during her 2018 speech, “doesn’t climb in pursuit of safety or profit, she climbs to tell stories.”Ken Jack/Corbis via Getty ImagesWith its explicit calls for greater transparency, Coel’s address (known formally as the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture) resonated across the entertainment industry and provided a narrative and thematic foundation for “I May Destroy You.” Next month, the speech will be published by Henry Holt & Co. as a book titled “Misfits: A Personal Manifesto.”To an audience that is still discovering Coel, her life and her work, “Misfits” may seem like an artifact preserving the moment that its author became the fullest version of herself.But to Coel, it represents a particularly validating episode in a career where she has always felt empowered to speak her mind.“I’ve always been annoying people about these things,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t know where I got the cheek to be like this. But from the beginning, there’s always been a story where Michaela was pushing and saying, ‘There’s something wrong here.’”To this day, Coel is relentlessly candid about the choices that go into her work, even when it comes to the decision to call “Misfits” a “manifesto,” which she said was foisted upon her by her publishers.As she explained, “I was like, ‘But it’s so small, it’s not really a book.’ They were like, ‘A book is a binding of papers.’ OK, fine, can we call it an essay book? ‘Mmm, no.’”Coel’s book “Misfits” is out on Sept. 7.She was more circumspect about discussing where on the planet she was while we had our video conversation. Despite a report in Variety that Coel had joined the cast of the Marvel superhero sequel “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” she said, “I’m in America. I don’t know why I’m here. I have a feeling that I’m not supposed to say.” (A spokesman for Marvel declined to comment.)The actor Paapa Essiedu, a co-star on “I May Destroy You” and a longtime friend of Coel’s, said that since their time together as students at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he had known Coel to be a courageous, forthright person.“Her voice was always very clear,” Essiedu said. “She always felt like she was unperturbed by what was expected of her, and she was able to think and speak independently.”Even so, Essiedu said, “Remember that she is just a normal person,” who talks trash with her friends “and can be funny and can be really annoying. Her day-to-day life is not her espousing how to make the world a better place.”In the speech, Coel described frustrations she had endured on her breakthrough comedy series, “Chewing Gum,” which ran on the E4 channel in Britain and on Netflix in America. She spoke about crying into an unpurchased pair of tights at a drugstore following a phone call where she it was suggested that she would have to hire co-writers to help her on the series.She also talked about turning down an offer to make “I May Destroy You” with Netflix when the streaming service declined to let her keep any ownership rights for the series. (In the lecture, she told this story with an allegorical flair, imagining it as a negotiation with a fictional stepmother she called “No-Face Netanya.”)“I don’t know where I got the cheek to be like this,” Coel said. “But from the beginning, there’s always been a story where Michaela was pushing and saying, ‘There’s something wrong here.’”Wulf Bradley for The New York TimesAmy Gravitt, an executive vice president at HBO who oversees its original comedy programming, said that she was moved by Coel’s lecture when she watched it online.“There was so much that she said in that speech that resonated as a woman working in this industry,” said Gravitt, who first met with Coel in 2017 following the success of “Chewing Gum.”“When she talked about her desire to see another person’s point of view represented onscreen, that resonated deeply with me as a programmer,” Gravitt said.Far from feeling reluctant to work with someone so outspoken, Gravitt said, “I feel like I only want to work with people who feel comfortable speaking their mind.”Coel ultimately ended up making “I May Destroy You” for HBO and the BBC. When I asked her if Netflix must cry itself to sleep every night for losing out on the show, she answered, “Well, melatonin works a charm.”A press representative for Netflix said in a statement said, “Michaela is an incredibly talented artist who we were thrilled to work with on ‘Black Mirror’ and ‘Black Earth Rising’ among others, and who we hope to work with again in the future.”Coel said she never hesitated to tell her lecture audience about having been sexually assaulted. “I never had that thing where I kept it to myself and was afraid to say it because of what people thought,” she said. “And because I never had that incubation period for shame and guilt to make a home inside of me, it never did.”Talking about the assault now was like “looking at a scar,” she said.“I look at the scar, and it’s like, whoa, that happened,” Coel said. “But now I’m alive to look at this scar, which means that I’ve come around the bend.”At the time she gave the lecture, Coel was already writing what would become “I May Destroy You,” in which her character, a young writer named Arabella, is served a spiked drink and sexually assaulted.“I May Destroy You” is up for nine Emmys, including outstanding lead actress.HBO, via Associated PressTo this day, Coel said, she encounters people who are fans of the show but do not realize it is based on her experience. Other viewers approach her, over social media and in person, to tell her about their own traumas. “I’ve cried with strangers on the street,” she said.“I May Destroy You” became a pandemic-era staple when it ran last spring and summer, and it has inspired its fans in other ways.In February, the series received no nominations for Golden Globes, prompting an outcry from its audience. Deborah Copaken, an author and memoirist (“Ladyparts”) who was a writer on the first season of the gauzy Netflix comedy “Emily in Paris,” wrote in an essay for The Guardian that the snub “is not only wrong, it’s what is wrong with everything.”In an interview, Copaken praised Coel for putting “people on the screen you’ve never seen on TV except as extras or others,” in a series that encompassed topics such as sexual consent and the assimilation of immigrants.“It doesn’t do the thing of making people who aren’t white and Western into paragons of virtue,” Copaken said. “These are interesting people with messy lives. At every turn, it challenges viewers’ assumptions.”Coel herself said she was too enchanted with the broader reaction to her series to worry about the Golden Globes controversy. “I was on this cloud of gratitude,” she said, “and I could hear there was something happening. I was like, guys, I don’t know how to come down from the cloud and deal with this.” Last month, “I May Destroy You” was nominated for nine Emmy Awards, including limited or anthology series. Coel and Essiedu both received nominations as actors, and Coel was also nominated as a director and as a writer on the series.Now Coel faces the happy challenge of figuring out a follow-up to “I May Destroy You,” and she is emphatic that the series has concluded.“To me, it’s very clearly finished, isn’t it?” she said. “Imagine if there was a Season 2? I just think guys, come on, it’s done. Unless somebody has this amazing idea for Season 2 that doesn’t destroy Season 1, for me it is closed and finished.”Coel said she faced no external pressures to deliver her next project. “HBO and BBC were very kind,” she said. “They said, ‘Hey, Michaela, you’ve done a great thing for us. You can just chill out, take as long as you need.’ But I’m not like that.”She quickly pointed her camera at a whiteboard on which she had started to map out a new story arc, but she turned the camera back at herself before any words were legible. She would say no more about the new series except that the BBC had committed to making it.Viewers of “I May Destroy You” sometimes approach Coel, over social media and in person, to tell her about their own traumas. “I’ve cried with strangers on the street,” she said.Wulf Bradley for The New York Times(Gravitt, the HBO executive, said that her network was “in the early stages of talking to Michaela and the BBC and various artists who are all a part of the team of ‘I May Destroy You,’ and excited at the prospect of having this new project to work on together.”)Essiedu said that Coel had not been changed much by reaching a new echelon of fame, and that she remained an artist who was motivated more by the work more than by the celebrity.“She deserves the credits and the plaudits,” he said. “She’s not going to shy away from that, which is something that us Brits are very good at doing. She’s maybe a bit more like you Americans in that approach.”But having twice experienced the satisfaction of feeling that her viewers truly and fully received what she was saying — with her MacTaggart lecture, and with “I May Destroy You” — Coel said she could hardly ask for much more.“As a writer, sometimes I’m fraught, I’m frazzled,” she said. “I’m trying to be clear, piece by piece, and the audience valued me and listened to me.”With a mixture of relief and delight, she exclaimed, “The way that people listen to me in this life! All I’ve learned is to be heard.” More

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      Tom T. Hall, Country Music’s ‘Storyteller,’ Is Dead at 85

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      Mr. Hall, who wrote hits like “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” helped to imbue country lyrics with newfound depth and insight in the 1960s and ’70s.Tom T. Hall, a country singer and songwriter known for wry, socially conscious hit songs like “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” died on Friday at his home in Franklin, Tenn. He was 85.His death was confirmed by a director at the Williamson Memorial Funeral Home in Franklin.Known to his fans and fellow musicians as “the Storyteller,” Mr. Hall was among a small circle of Nashville songwriters, including Kris Kristofferson, Roger Miller and others, who imbued country lyrics with newfound depth and insight in the 1960s and ’70s. As his nickname suggests, he was a skilled narrator, although he told his stories less through the unfurling of linear plots than through the presentation of one-sided conversations or interior monologues that invited listeners into the lives of his often conflicted protagonists.“Homecoming,” his 1969 Top 10 country hit, portrays a singer who has been away from home so long — and is so wrapped up in his own celebrity — that he hardly knows his own people anymore.“I’m sorry that I couldn’t be there with you all when Mama passed away/I was on the road and when they came and told me it was just too late,” Mr. Hall sings in an unadorned baritone, assuming the role of the young entertainer during an overdue visit to his widowed father. Permitting his listeners to hear only the son’s portion of the dialogue, Mr. Hall refrains from passing judgment on the man, only to have him betray his self-absorption with one halfhearted apology after another.“I didn’t make judgments,” Mr. Hall once said in an interview. “I let the listener make judgments. When I got to the end of the story, if it had a moral, I let the listener find it.”Mr. Hall and his band arriving from Nashville for a sold-out tour of Australia in 1971.Antonin Cermak/Fairfax Media via Getty Images“Harper Valley P.T.A.,” which reached No. 1 in 1968 on both the country and the pop singles charts for the singer Jeannie C. Riley, was part allegory and part small-town morality play. Written amid mounting tensions over civil rights, women’s liberation and the war in Vietnam, the song pits an indomitable young widow against the two-faced authorities at her daughter’s school, unmasking petty hypocrisy and prejudice while at the same time giving voice to the nation’s larger social unrest. (The song gained sufficient traction within the pop mainstream to inspire a movie and a TV series of the same name.)Several of Mr. Hall’s other compositions also became major hits for his fellow artists, including “(Margie’s at) The Lincoln Park Inn,” a Top 10 country single for Bobby Bare in 1969, and “Hello Vietnam,” a No. 1 country hit for Johnnie Wright in 1965. “Hello Vietnam,” which featured backing vocals from Mr. Wright’s wife, Kitty Wells, was later used as the opening theme for the movie “Full Metal Jacket.”Mk/Associated PressAs a performer, Mr. Hall placed 21 singles in the country Top 10, most of them on Mercury Records. The most successful were “I Love,” “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” and “A Week in a Country Jail.” Each spent two weeks at No. 1 on the country chart; the sentimental “I Love,” Mr. Hall’s only crossover hit as a recording artist, also reached the pop Top 20 in 1973.Backed by lean, uncluttered arrangements typically played by first-call Nashville session musicians, Mr. Hall’s songs were both straightforward and closely observed, forcing listeners to look at the world, and their preconceived notions about it, in a new light. Concerned with everyday lives and struggles, Mr. Hall’s concise, understated tales had the impact of well-wrought short stories. (He also wrote two volumes of short fiction and two novels.)Thomas Hall — he added the middle initial T to his name when he embarked on his career as a performer — was born on May 25, 1936, near Olive Hill, Ky. His father, Virgil, worked in a brick manufacturing plant and was also a preacher. His mother, Della, died when he was an adolescent. When he was 15, Mr. Hall dropped out of school to work in a garment factory to help support the family after his father was injured in a hunting accident.One of eight children, he began playing guitar and writing songs and poetry as a young boy. Floyd Carter, a local musician and raconteur, was an early influence, as well as the man Mr. Hall later memorialized in song as the colorful Clayton Delaney.Mr. Hall, center, performing with Ralph Stanley, left and Don Rigsby in Ashland, Ky., in 2003. Mr. Hall and his wife and songwriting partner, Iris Lawrence Hall, were given a Distinguished Achievement Award by the International Bluegrass Music Association the next year.John Flavell/The Independent, via Associated PressMr. Hall formed the Kentucky Travelers, a bluegrass band that played at local gatherings and on the radio, while doing factory work as a teenager. He joined the Army in 1957; while stationed in Germany, he performed humorous material on the Armed Forces Radio Network, before returning to the United States three years later and enrolling in Roanoke College in Virginia to study literature on the G.I. Bill.He moved to Nashville in 1964 and signed a recording contract with Mercury shortly after the Cajun singer Jimmy C. Newman had a Top 10 country hit with his song “D.J. for a Day.”In Mr. Hall’s career as a recording artist, which spanned more than two decades, he placed a total of 54 singles on the country charts. He also released more than three dozen albums, including two bluegrass projects: “The Magnificent Music Machine,” a 1976 collaboration with Bill Monroe, and “The Storyteller and the Banjoman” (1982), with Earl Scruggs.Mr. Hall joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry in 1971 and won a Grammy Award for best album notes for the 1972 compilation “Tom T. Hall’s Greatest Hits.” He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1978 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008. In the early 1980s, he hosted the syndicated television series “Pop! Goes the Country.”His songs continued to be recorded by mainstream country artists well into the 1990s, most notably “Little Bitty,” which reached the top of the country chart for Alan Jackson in 1996.Mr. Hall is survived by his son, Dean; a sister, Betty Kiser; and a brother, Larry. His wife of 46 years, Iris Lawrence Hall, known to most as Miss Dixie, died in 2015.The Halls did not have children of their own (Mr. Hall’s son is from a previous marriage), but Fox Hollow, their 67-acre farm and recording studio south of Nashville, was a haven for aspiring young singers and songwriters.Bluegrass was the couple’s passion during their final years together; for their many contributions to the idiom, including the numerous songs they wrote in that style, they were honored with a Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2004.“He didn’t like taking 35 dogs to a show, and he wouldn’t play golf with me because I was good,” Ms. Hall, a dog lover and animal rights activist, told The New York Times in 2008, explaining why the couple spent much of their retirement writing songs. “But songwriting was something we could do together.” More

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      in Movies

      Lisa Joy on ‘Reminiscence,’ ‘Westworld’ and the Lure of Techno-Noir

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      The writer-director says she is obsessed with time. One way to have more of it is “to create whole new timelines and dimensions.”In her first writers’ room, Lisa Joy was politely pulled aside and told she didn’t need to work so hard. After all, born in New Jersey to British-Taiwanese parents, she was just a diversity hire.The experience did little to stifle Joy’s ambitions or work ethic. In 2013, while expecting her first child, she wrote the screenplay for “Reminiscence,” a tech-noir thriller, and began developing the cerebral sci-fi “Westworld” for HBO with her husband, the “Memento” screenwriter Jonathan Nolan.After three seasons of the show — the fourth is on the way — Joy stepped up to direct “Reminiscence” herself. In the film, debuting Aug. 20 on HBO Max and in theaters, Hugh Jackman plays a private investigator who taps into clients’ memories but becomes torturously fixated on his own. It’s a story about the pull of the past set in the future, in a Miami that has succumbed to rising waters and is populated by people who have turned nocturnal to escape the searing heat of the day.In a recent video call, Joy spoke from her office in Los Angeles about being a perpetual outsider, current events imitating science fiction, and her partnership with Nolan. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.You wrote “Reminiscence” while pregnant. It does feel like the work of someone at a turning point — looking back while looking ahead.My main goal was to write something that entertained me while I was puking with morning sickness! Certainly it was a very dramatic moment. My husband was working a lot, I was at home with the dogs. I had a lot of time to contemplate my life. At the same time, my grandfather passed away. So there was loss as well as new beginnings. Sorting through his belongings was what really started my meditation on loss, and memory, and the way our memories start to fade.Rebecca Ferguson, left, and Hugh Jackman in “Reminiscence.”Warner Bros.Looking at the level of detail in your screenplay, I wonder if to some extent you had mentally directed it already?When I write, I imagine the characters talking, I design the room, I block the scene in my head. I kind of transcribe the movie I’m already looking at. So when other directors were pitching their ideas, I realized that none of the visions aligned with my own. I wanted it to have the spirit of an independent film, to take some more risks, tell a story that wasn’t in a clear genre.And Hugh Jackman in the lead role?The second I even contemplated directing it, I knew Hugh was the right leading man. I wanted to show a hero unraveling, questioning his own memories and coming to understand a more nuanced version of the world. Hugh has that soulfulness. And he can also kick a lot of ass.A lot of ass-kicking along with a lot of mind-bending.And romance. I wanted to have all those elements in the film. Because life is like that. The polarity of film is frustrating for me. “This is an art-house film. This is a popcorn film.” I think that underestimates audiences.You started out writing in comedy, on the series “Pushing Daisies.” When did you feel the gravitational pull toward science fiction?I’ve always liked stories that tackle great, big timeless themes. It’s just where my curiosity took me. When I first went around trying to pitch “Reminiscence” — I was heavily pregnant — people would look at me and think, what the hell is wrong with you? Why are you writing this mysterious, dark, violent, sexy thing? Do a rom-com! People didn’t expect me to do huge, ambitious, world-building things as a junior writer.Why set the film at some unspecified time in the future?Stories are more universal when you don’t stick a pin in it. And when I first started contemplating this world, it was nothing like the world we live in now. I didn’t think reality would catch up to science fiction so quickly. And then, right about when the trailer dropped, there were photos of the walls they’re building in Miami. I think it was the front page of The New York Times. They looked exactly like our set designs. There are also scenes of upheaval and rioting in the streets in the movie, and political and socioeconomic unrest. There was a moment when people were like, this is too far-fetched. And then the next week riots broke out.Joy said she’s obsessed with time:  “Maybe one way to have more of it is to live in multiple worlds every day, to create whole new timelines and dimensions.”Tracy Nguyen for The New York Times“Westworld” premiered around the time of #MeToo, and the treatment of the androids in the show seemed to speak to that movement. Were you conscious of drawing on your own experiences in the industry?None of my work is explicitly confessional, but at the same time, we are who we are. I had just come off a staff that was all-male [USA’s “Burn Notice”]. I wanted to take back my story in the only way I knew how. Which was to write.It’s not like I have some gift of prophecy. We live in this world. And we need to find a way to survive it. For me, acknowledging the cage you’re within is a way to break out of it. And it’s not just women — it’s anyone who’s felt trapped or been subjected to cruelty.You’ve said you’ve felt like an outsider for much of your life.I was born in America, but my mom is Asian, my dad is British. Hollywood was as far away as the moon when I was a kid. There’s always been a feeling of displacement. But almost everybody has that. That’s part of the human condition: to feel bereft from the currents rushing around us. And it’s one of the things that you can explore in fiction without being didactic or presumptuous about another person’s specific experience. And hopefully form a connection.You were working as a consultant in finance and tech before Hollywood called — in the middle of a presentation you were giving, is that right?It was kind of an abrupt change! I’ve always loved writing, but in the beginning, trying to be a writer was impossible. I had college debt, I had financial obligations. I worked in corporate jobs, but the whole time, I kept writing. Not because I had any expectation of being a working writer, but because it made me happy.But working in another field for 10 years before becoming a paid writer — that’s not wasted time. When you’re a producer, it helps to be able to know how money works. Everything is a language. Math is a language. Computer science is a language. I spend a lot of time trying to be conversational in as many as possible.Jackman plays a private investigator who taps into client’s memories.Warner Bros.There was even some Pythagorean problem-solving on your film set, wasn’t there?It was for this complicated scene where Hugh is looking at a hologram of a memory of Hugh looking at a hologram of a memory. I called it a Hugh turducken.Is it true a friend introduced you to Jonathan because you had a similar verbose email-writing style.[Laughs] It’s true. We met at the premiere of “Memento.” I didn’t expect to meet my future husband on the red carpet the second I stepped on it. I was skeptical of him. Hollywood has a reputation — not entirely unwarranted. But we became friends. We were pen pals for a long time.You ended up married and being collaborators. I’ve seen you describe creating a fictional world together as “romantic.”I remember when we wrapped the finale of the first season. We had built Sweetwater [the town in “Westworld”] in Santa Clarita. It was a magical thing — you could walk those streets. The world in our head had manifested. Along with a child. We took a golf cart, and the sun was rising in the distance. And we drove through the center of Sweetwater, with our baby on my lap.I am obsessed with time. There’s never enough of it, especially with the ones you love. And maybe one way to have more of it is to live in multiple worlds every day, to create whole new timelines and dimensions. More

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      Dolly Parton and James Patterson Are Working On a Novel, 'Run, Rose, Run'

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      “Run, Rose, Run” is set for publication in 2022, along with a Parton album whose 12 new songs were inspired by the book.In February 2020, James Patterson flew to Nashville to visit Dolly Parton.She was a fan of his “Alex Cross” thrillers, and he had a proposal for her: Would she work with him on a novel about an aspiring country singer who goes to Nashville to seek her fortune and escape her past? More

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      in Television

      Ashley Nicole Black Is Competing Against Herself for an Emmy

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      The comedian was nominated twice in the same Emmy category for her television writing. She’s just getting started.At first, Ashley Nicole Black didn’t get why people kept sending her the meme of Spider-Man pointing at an identical Spider-Man, an image often used to joke about situations in which two incredibly similar people face off.But when someone Photoshopped Ms. Black’s face onto both Spider-Mans, it clicked. The 2021 Emmy Awards nominations had just been announced, and Ms. Black, 36, had been nominated twice in the same category.She was competing against herself.Ms. Black was nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series for “The Amber Ruffin Show” and “A Black Lady Sketch Show.” Two other people have been nominated twice in this category in the past five years: John Mulaney and Seth Meyers, both in 2019.I CANT WITH YALL 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 https://t.co/YE7gBnqjw0— Ashley Nicole Black (@ashleyn1cole) July 14, 2021
      “I feel like that kid still, who’s on the side of the playground, who nobody’s noticed,” Ms. Black said in a recent video interview. But that’s just impostor syndrome talking. Ms. Black has been nominated for an Emmy eight times: twice for writing for a variety special and six times for writing for a variety series. She also won once, in 2017, for her work on “Not the White House Correspondents Dinner” with Samantha Bee.Ms. Black has written for many critically acclaimed series and shows, including “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” “Ted Lasso” and “Bless This Mess.” Although “A Black Lady Sketch Show” is Ms. Black’s first time as a series regular, she was a correspondent on “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” and acted in “Drunk History” and the 2014 film “An American Education.”Robin Thede, the creator of “A Black Lady Sketch Show” on HBO — which was also nominated this year as an Outstanding Variety Sketch Series, and twice for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series (Yvette Nicole Brown and Issa Rae) — sees Ms. Black as “a force of nature and of comedy.”“I have been lucky enough to work with her as a writer and performer and know firsthand how ridiculously good she is at both,” Ms. Thede wrote in an email. “She’s truly a powerhouse who will leave an indelible mark on this industry.”Ms. Black described herself as “someone who’s observing what’s going on in the world, and trying to reflect it back to people.” “To me,” she said, “that’s art.”She is from a family of musicians, so singing in an ensemble, she said — whether it was musical theater or show choir — meant learning to breathe with others and sound like one voice. This set her up for the moment she found improv comedy, because she already knew how to collaborate — and how not to steal a scene. “I was, I think, picking up all the pieces I needed to get where I was going,” she said.After graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2007, she began a Ph.D. program in performance studies at Northwestern University. She hated it and was anxious all the time, she said, so her parents bought her an improv class at the Second City comedy club in nearby Chicago to blow off steam.When she took a comedy writing class there, a teacher pulled her aside to let her know she was a writer.“People had been telling me, ‘You should try this. You should try this,’ and I had been uncomfortably trying it,” Ms. Black said. “But ‘you’re a writer’? I was like, ‘yes.’ I completely shifted my view of myself to be a writer first. And that was when everything started to fall into place.”Chicago, Ms. Black said, is the best place in the world to learn comedy writing. There’s an “emotionality” she found in Chicago that she values in many of her collaborators, including Ms. Bee and Ms. Ruffin.“What attracted me to Sam and Amber is that they’re admitting to you that they live in the world,” she said. “And they might be upset about it, and they might be angry about it, and they might cry about it on camera, because they’re not removed from it. They’re a part of it.”This is the “good stuff” of comedy, in Ms. Black’s eyes: The stuff that happens when characters have feelings, and when they’re flawed. People who have been to therapy and have their lives together aren’t nearly as fun to embody, she said. A good example of a character who embodies that tension: Ashley’s perfectionistic alter ego on “A Black Lady Sketch Show.”In the show, Ms. Black plays a woman (also named Ashley) who is a bossy know-it-all. She is trying for total control, and in the process, irritating her friends. “I am not like that and take great pains not to be,” Ms. Black said, “but it’s so much fun to play.”“All day, you have anxiety. You’re trying to make sure everyone around you is comfortable,” she said of real life. “You’re thinking about what you say and what you do and how it affects people. And then, when you get to play those characters who aren’t that way, it’s so freeing.”Ms. Black said she tends to be quiet and a little shy, and that she used to worry that not being “on” all the time might disappoint people. “But I’ve sort of released feeling bad about that,” she said, “because I just try to be present and have honest experiences.”During the pandemic, those experiences included spending time with her family in Los Angeles, being a hardworking dog mom to Gordi the Sato and watching every Marvel movie ever made. “I just wanted to watch good guys win some things,” she said.Right now she’s evaluating what she wants to do next and what percentage of her time she wants to spend on each thing. Ms. Ruffin wrote in an email about Ms. Black, “she’s gone from ‘a writer’ to ‘theeeee writer.’” But Ms. Black is still hoping for a 70-30 or 60-40 writing to acting split, she said.For now, “It really made me so happy that people — oh my gosh, I’m getting emotional — care what I’m doing,” she said. “So I’m just really grateful that anybody noticed that I was working so hard.” More

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      in Music

      Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, Rock Journalist, Dies at 75

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      She took the music seriously at a time when not many writers did. Among her books was a memoir of her life with one of its biggest stars, Jim Morrison.Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, who wrote about rock when music journalists were just beginning to take it seriously, and through her work met Jim Morrison, frontman of the Doors, with whom she said she had a marriage of sorts, died on July 23. She was 75.Her death was announced on the Facebook page of Lizard Queen Press, a publishing enterprise that she founded and that published her recent books. The announcement did not give a cause or say where she died.In the late 1960s, originally as Patricia Kennely (she later changed the spelling of her last name and, in 1979, added “Morrison”), she was a writer for and then editor of Jazz & Pop, a small but well-regarded magazine. She interviewed Morrison in 1969, and when they shook hands there was “a visible shower of bright blue sparks flying in all directions,” she wrote in a 1992 memoir, “Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison.” They soon became romantically involved.Ms. Kennealy-Morrison practiced Celtic paganism; on her Facebook page she described herself as “Author, ex-rock critic, Dame Templar, Celtic witch, ex-go-go dancer, Lizard Queen. Not in that order.” (“Lizard Queen” was a reference to a line from a Jim Morrison poem, in which he wrote, “I am the Lizard King.”) In 1970 she and Morrison exchanged vows in a “handfasting ceremony” that involved drops of their own blood.She said her book “Strange Days” (also the title of the Doors’ second album, from 1967) was a response to the 1991 movie “The Doors.” Oliver Stone, who directed the film, had consulted her on it, and she even played the Wicca priestess who presides over the handfasting. (Val Kilmer played Morrison; Kathleen Quinlan played Ms. Kennealy-Morrison.) But she said she was outraged by the film when she saw it at a screening, feeling that it trivialized the ceremony, did not give enough prominence to her relationship with Morrison, and misrepresented him.Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison and Kathleen Quinlan as Ms. Kennealy-Morrison in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” (1991). Ms. Kennealy was not a fan of the film.Alamy“If Oliver had been at that screening, we would never have had to worry about his movie ‘JFK,’” she told The Daily Mail of London in 1992, referring to Mr. Stone’s next film. “I would have killed him.”Critics said the book was just an attempt to gain attention and usurp the place in the Morrison mythos of Pamela Courson, another of his love interests, who called herself his common-law wife. Morrison died in 1971 in Paris at 27; Ms. Courson, who was with him at the time, died a few years later, also at 27. Drugs were suspected in both deaths.In her book, Ms. Kennealy-Morrison blamed Ms. Courson for Morrison’s death, in a bathtub in his apartment. “She fed heroin to the man she claimed to love, leaving him dying while she nodded out,” she wrote.In late October 2010, on the eve of Samhain, a Celtic religious festival that inspired Halloween, Ms. Kennealy-Morrison spoke to The Daily News in New York about her plans for marking the occasion.“I will place a light in the window to guide the souls in the night,” she said. “I will have food, pork and apples in Celtic tradition for the ancestors from the other world. I will talk to my beloved dead, including my father and grandmother. It will be a joyful and deeply holy occasion. Jim usually shows up. And when he does, I will celebrate Samhain, the new Celtic year, with my husband.”Patricia Kennely was born on March 4, 1946, in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island. In 1963 she enrolled at St. Bonaventure University, a Franciscan institution in Allegany, N.Y., to study journalism. That’s where she discovered the Celtic religion.“They had an amazing library on the subject at St. Bonaventure’s, I guess operating on the principle of ‘Know thy enemy,’” she told The Daily News.She transferred to Harpur College in Binghamton, N.Y., after two years and earned an English degree in 1967. While there she discovered the political activism that was brewing on campuses across the nation. She also discovered rock music, and one 1966 album in particular.“It was called ‘Jefferson Airplane Takes Off,’” she wrote in “Rock Chick: A Girl and Her Music,” a 2013 compilation of her Jazz & Pop writings. “And so did I.”While in college she earned extra money as a go-go dancer at nightclubs.“Scorning the white boots and pastel-microdress go-go-girl template that was prevalent across the land, I went Dark Side,” she wrote, “wearing a black leather-look fringed bikini, black fishnets and black knee-high boots.”“I looked like Zorro’s kinky girlfriend,” she added.Ms. Kennealy-Morrison said her book “Strange Days” was a response to Oliver Stone’s movie. Critics said it was an attempt to gain attention and usurp another love interest’s place in the Morrison mythos.After graduating, she landed a job as an editorial assistant at Crowell-Collier & Macmillan Publishing in Manhattan. She saw the first cover of Jazz & Pop magazine on a newsstand in 1967 (it had been founded as Jazz magazine in 1962 by Pauline Rivelli, who in 1967 broadened it into rock coverage and renamed it) and began lobbying for a job there. She was hired as an editorial assistant in early 1968. By the end of that year she had been named editor. The magazine was one of several that came along about the same time that took the music more seriously than the fanzines of the era. (Rolling Stone was founded in 1967.)Ms. Kennealy-Morrison’s pieces set the tone for Jazz & Pop. In the April 1970 issue, she wrote about the influence that religions of various kinds were having on music. She thought, for instance, that the band Coven was invoking black magic in dangerous ways. “Black magic is NOT merely an interesting new wrinkle for the PR crowd to play with, or a hot new ad copy slant,” she cautioned.Three months later she blasted rock fans as not being selective enough and not applying their intellects to what they were hearing.“How many excruciating guitar solos, how many organ solos that were so boring your legs started to hurt, how many meaningless vocal improvisations, have we all sat through?” she wrote. “And at the conclusions of all of these various monuments to rock ego, how many standing ovations have we bestowed?”Steve Hochman, a music journalist who was also a friend, wrote of her influence in a Facebook post noting her death.“As a writer and editor of Jazz & Pop magazine,” he wrote, “she helped establish the then-embryonic realm at a time when few thought of pop music as worthy of such critical attention.”Jazz & Pop went out of business in 1971.Ms. Kennealy-Morrison’s survivors include two brothers, Kevin and Timothy Kennely. A sister, Regina Kennely, died in March.Beginning in the mid-1980s, Ms. Kennealy-Morrison wrote a series of fantasy novels, collectively known as “The Keltiad,” which drew on Celtic legends and mythology. More recently, under the name Patricia Morrison, she wrote mysteries with musical themes, drawing on her time in the rock world. Among the titles are “Scareway to Heaven: Murder at the Fillmore East” and “Daydream Bereaver: Murder on the Good Ship Rock & Roll.” More

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      in Television

      Cecily Strong Is Starting a New Conversation

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      The “Saturday Night Live” star shares the story of her pandemic experience and a life touched by grief in “This Will All Be Over Soon.”RHINEBECK, N.Y. — It’s hard to think of Cecily Strong and not be reminded of the effusive television characters she plays. If you’re a “Saturday Night Live” fan, you immediately conjure up her exuberant performance as a soused Jeanine Pirro crooning “My Way” while she dunks herself in a tank of wine. Or if you’ve been watching her on the Apple TV+ musical comedy “Schmigadoon!,” you think of her belting out modern-day show tunes praising the pleasures of corn pudding or smooching with a suitor. More

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      in Theater

      Onstage, the Pen Is Usually Duller Than the Sword

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      Plays about writers, including “Mr. Fullerton,” a new potboiler probing Edith Wharton’s love life, too often undermine the real brilliance of their subjects.GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — Writing is boring. I should know. I just spent a half-hour revising that first sentence.Playwrights nevertheless like to write about writers, perhaps because of their shared tolerance for tedium. Yet beyond that, what is there really to say? Anything that fleshes out the person beneath the words tends to diminish the artistry; anything that sticks to the unfiltered words is dull.Or so it seems to me from shows made about writers I treasure. Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, E.M. Forster, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison have all been put through the dramatic wringer recently, many of them emerging as wet rags.The latest to become something of a drip in the process is Edith Wharton. To be fair, it’s clear that in writing “Mr. Fullerton” — a play about Wharton, Henry James and their mutual inamorato, Morton Fullerton — Anne Undeland was as besotted as I am by the steely author of classic novels including “The Age of Innocence,” “Ethan Frome” and “The House of Mirth.”It’s also true that Wharton had an eventful existence away from her pens and notebooks, including the extramarital affair with Undeland’s title character and the quasi-pornography she secretly wrote later. But from the play — and I might argue from any play — you could never guess that a brilliant person was living Wharton’s brilliant life.“Mr. Fullerton,” which was given its premiere last week by Great Barrington Public Theater, introduces the novelist, in her mid-40s, as a buttoned-up spinster; though she has been married for two decades, her marriage is sexless, childless and nearly loveless. After being seduced in 1907 by Fullerton, a somewhat younger and caddish journalist, she opens herself to passion while, the play implies, closing herself to art. The first thing we see in the Great Barrington production, which runs through Sunday, is the Paris apartment Wharton (Dana M. Harrison) rents from the Vanderbilts; the writing desk is under a dust cover but the big brass bed gleams with promise.I will not attempt to prosecute a play deliberately written as a fantasia for its factual improbabilities. (That said: I can’t really see Wharton flipping pages of fresh prose all over the room for her maid, Posy, to pick up and paginate — even if she was known to leave papers to be sorted by her secretary.) My problem with “Mr. Fullerton” has to do with its fictional improbabilities. Fullerton, in real life apparently a magnetic, equal opportunity Lothario — James called him “magically tactile” — is written here (and played by Marcus Kearns accordingly) as more of a puppy than a hound, making campy references to Wharton by her childhood name, Pussy Jones, and proleptically quoting Mae West. When he ghosts her, you’re relieved.Harrison, with Glenn Barrett as Henry James, in “Mr. Fullerton.”Tristan Wilson/Great Barrington Public TheaterWell, no one cares about Fullerton anyway, but the portraits of Wharton and James (Glenn Barrett) as giggling, snarking, gobsmacked adolescents undermine their enormous stature as writers, which the play nevertheless depends on as the foundation of its interest. I wouldn’t have minded that with James, whose fussbudget pomposity is always worth some deflation.But keep your satirical hands off my Edith! Her achievement is in many ways greater than James’s, given the hostility to women writers of her vintage; certainly, she outsold him. More than that, her actual feelings about the Fullerton affair speak to a far greater seriousness and acuity than the play can dramatize. Though she vacillated on whether her brief experience of physical passion helped her as a human being — she wrote that Fullerton woke her “from a long lethargy” in which “all one side of me was asleep” but also that her life was “better before” she knew him — there’s no confusion from a literary standpoint. Coming out of the affair she produced “Ethan Frome.”That superlatively grim novel provides “Mr. Fullerton” with one of its best moments, which the playwright sets up perfectly. When a newspaper reports that a high school girl back home has been killed in a sledding accident, Posy (Myka Plunkett) immediately bursts into tears and explains that the girl is the daughter who “could have been” hers. Instead, she was the child of a man Posy once loved but rejected because being in service to Wharton offered a better life.Though Posy is an invention, readers of “Ethan Frome” will immediately recognize the story of the sledding accident from the climax of the novel. In this, Undeland and “Mr. Fullerton” get something very right about writing: the ruthlessness of a writer’s thievery, robbing reality (even someone else’s) for material.It’s that ruthlessness that is otherwise missing here, and also in other basically sympathetic portraits of literary artists. In Sarah Ruhl’s play “Dear Elizabeth,” based on Bishop’s correspondence with Lowell, the poets simply read at each other, which is sometimes lovely but almost never dramatic. In Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance,” E.M. Forster is reduced to a gentle grandpa to new generations of gay men. The opposite problem undoes Poe in several plays about him, including one called “Red-Eye to Havre de Grace”: He is so exhaustingly mad that you cannot imagine his having the spare energy to find even one rhyme for “nevermore,” let alone 18.Reggie D. White as James Baldwin and Crystal Dickinson as Nikki Giovanni in an episode of “Lessons in Survival,” a series of historical re-enactments produced by the Vineyard Theater.via The Vineyard TheaterIn all these works, the actors, designers and directors have conspired to support the portraiture with approximately accurate accents, diction, costumes and hairstyles. “Mr. Fullerton” also has the amusing verisimilitude of being produced, on the campus of Bard College at Simon’s Rock here, just 13 miles south of Wharton’s grand home, the Mount, in Lenox. (A line about the late arrival of spring in the Berkshires received a knowing chuckle the night I attended.) But in the end, all those details are unimportant, and maybe even distracting — or at least Mr. Fullerton’s mustache was.I say that thinking that the best portrait of writers I’ve seen in a theatrical production recently involved no such imitation. The opposite, really. In “Lessons in Survival,” a series of historical re-enactments conceived and performed by the multigenerational members of the Commissary collective and produced by the Vineyard Theater last year, there was no attempt whatever to match the physical characteristics of the actors, or even their gender, with those of the writers they played: Baldwin, Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou and others. Nor was sonic verisimilitude attempted; it didn’t need to be because the actors lip-synced the writers’ recorded words while embodying them in their expressions and postures.It was that disjuncture, that refusal to locate genius within the limitations of the body, that made the episodes so effective and convincing. Leaving affairs and drinking problems out of the picture, they honored what really makes writers dramatic: their muscly ideas, duking it out in words.Mr. FullertonThrough Sunday at the Daniel Arts Center, Great Barrington, Mass. greatbarringtonpublictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More