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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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      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

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      When Matt and Ben Met Nicole: How They Came to Write ‘The Last Duel’

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      For their first writing reunion since “Good Will Hunting,” Ben Affleck and Matt Damon collaborated with the writer-director Nicole Holofcener on a period drama.It’s been nearly 25 years since Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote and starred in “Good Will Hunting,” and cemented the kind of Hollywood partnership where one name is rarely spoken without the other.But for their first writing reunion since then, “The Last Duel,” the men didn’t want just another version of The Matt and Ben Show. What they did want for this historical drama about a woman who was raped, and the men who refuse to believe her, was a female collaborator. And so they sought out the writer-director Nicole Holofcener, celebrated for her nuanced observations of thorny contemporary women in movies like “Enough Said” and “Friends With Money.”“The Last Duel,” directed by Ridley Scott, based on Eric Jager’s 2004 book and in theaters Oct. 15, depicts France’s final officially sanctioned trial by combat: In 1386, Jean de Carrouges, a knight, and his friend-turned-rival, Jacques Le Gris, a squire, are ordered to fight to the death after Carrouges’s wife, Marguerite, accuses Le Gris of raping her, and he denies it. Whoever survives will be proclaimed the winner as a sign of divine providence. Should Carrouges lose, Marguerite will be burned at the stake for perjury.The film, set amid the brutality of the Hundred Years’ War, is divided into three chapters — the “truth” according to Carrouges (played by Damon), Le Gris (Adam Driver) and finally, Marguerite (Jodie Comer). Damon and Affleck wrote the male perspectives, while Holofcener wrote Marguerite’s.“The heaviest lift in the architecture of this screenplay was the third act, because that world of women had to be almost invented and imagined out of whole cloth,” Damon said. “The men were very fastidious about taking notes about what they were up to at the time. But nobody was really talking about what was happening with the women, because they didn’t even have personhood.”“This is an adaptation of a book that we read,” he added, “but Nicole’s part is kind of an original screenplay.”Ben Affleck, left, Nicole Holofcener and Damon. Affleck sent her some pages he and Damon had written. “They weren’t good,” Holofcener said, “but they were good enough for me to say, ‘I want to work with these guys.’”From left: Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times; Dan MacMedan/Getty Images; Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesOn a spirited video call in late August — Damon in Brooklyn, Affleck and Holofcener in Los Angeles — the three discussed the intricacies of their collaboration and of portraying sexual assault during a violent period when women were little more than chattel. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Let’s start at the beginning. Matt, it’s December 2018 and you’ve just read Jager’s book. What happened next?MATT DAMON Ridley and I had been looking for something to do together since “The Martian,” and we’d had a few near misses. So I sent it to Ridley, and he loved it. In March 2019, Ben came over for dinner, and he took the book that night and called me at 7 the next morning and said, “Let’s do this.” And that was how we set off to writing. But very quickly, through a bunch of different conversations we were having with a bunch of people, we decided that it would serve the story best if we found the best female writer we could to write the female perspective.NICOLE HOLOFCENER [Dryly] Plus, Ridley and I have been looking for something to do together for years.DAMON [Laughs] Oh, now I’m an [expletive]. Oh, God.HOLOFCENER No — no. Am I making fun of you? I didn’t mean that. I was just thinking about how different my sensibility is from Ridley’s. That’s all.DAMON Yeah, yeah. Well, Nicole was our dream writer and our first choice. And thank God she said yes. And she said yes in large part because Ben, behind my back, sent her about 10 or 15 pages that we hadn’t shown anybody. And I was so embarrassed, like professionally embarrassed, that he sent them to Nicole Holofcener.HOLOFCENER They weren’t good, but they were good enough for me to say, “I want to work with these guys.”DAMON I think they were bad enough that she was like, “Oh, these guys need help.”HOLOFCENER Bad enough so that I wasn’t intimidated to be able to write for medieval language, at least in English. But they’re so talented, and I was immediately very flattered. The only hesitation I had was, “Can I come out of my own little world and write about something like this?” And as soon as I started and I got their support, I found that I could do it.Jodie Comer as a 14th-century woman who accuses a squire of raping her.Patrick Redmond/20th Century StudiosSo why three chapters?BEN AFFLECK Very quickly, we recognized that the film has a clear point of view on who’s telling the truth. And that this incredibly heroic character, Marguerite de Carrouges, had this story that deserved to be told. It was evident that it was going to be an exploration of the dynamics of power, roots of misogyny and survival in medieval France. It had all the elements of what makes a story really great to tell — the idea of an unreliable narrator, a second unreliable narrator and then a kind of reveal of what happened through the eyes of a character who was both the hero and whose humanity was denied and ignored.HOLOFCENER But also, you get the fact that it wasn’t black and white to the men, and it was so black and white to the woman about what happened. So, the male point of views offer this perspective of male delusion.Nicole, Marguerite wasn’t nearly as fleshed out in the book. How did you go about creating her world?HOLOFCENER I did research about what women were like then and what they had to put up with. I gave her a friend to be able to talk to. I knew that she would have to take over the estate when he was away fighting. So I read up, “Well, what did they do?” Took care of the animals and the horses and the harvesting. And I really tried to imagine just how awful it was for her and how she dealt with the awfulness. Her life was pretty bad being married to Jean de Carrouges and so when she was violated, she had nothing to lose, really. I mean, she was going to suffer. She had the potential of suffering dearly and dying, but at that point she was just tired of having no voice.How do three writers keep things straight?AFFLECK Once the script got close to a completed stage, then it got passed around, emailed. In fact, one of the biggest challenges was the maddening technological aspects of keeping up with various versions — that they had included everyone else’s changes.HOLOFCENER We kept working off the wrong drafts. It was like: “Wait a minute. I took that line out two months ago. Why is it still there?” We’re not the most technically savvy.DAMON We had one of those moments where I think we’d done half a day on one of these things and we’re realizing, “Oh no, this is the wrong draft,” and then you have to try to go through and figure out what you’ve done.HOLOFCENER Matt doesn’t even have a laptop. So don’t get me started.How did you make sure you were portraying Marguerite’s rape accurately without exploiting it?AFFLECK We were especially sensitive and careful to really listen and do research, whether it was consulting with RAINN [an organization that helps victims of rape, abuse and incest], survivors of assault, historical experts, women’s groups, and trying to allow all of those other experiences to inform the story and make it as authentic as possible.HOLOFCENER I think that those organizations really, really wanted to make sure we were making it clear what the truth was — that this is not “he said, she said.” This is not ambivalent.AFFLECK We had questions like: “Are we whitewashing if we don’t show the emotional toll and the severity of this? To what extent does it become too much? And where do you feel the bounds of tastes are?”HOLOFCENER A lot of it was about how often do we see the rape and how long is it? How long do we have to suffer through this? That was a topic of conversation. And so we took their notes seriously and did a lot of trimming. We had to show some scenes twice, but it was necessary. We had to see the rape twice, as disturbing as it was to watch.Damon and Comer in “The Last Duel.” The writers had to decide how much of the attack to show given that it would be repeated to show different perspectives.20th Century StudiosWhat choices did you make to either stick with or depart from the book?DAMON The biggest departure is the rape scene. Marguerite de Carrouges, what she said in court and over and over again to an ever-widening group of people and eventually all of France, was that Jacques Le Gris entered her home with another man, Adam Louvel. We have in the movie Louvel coming in, but then Le Gris tells him to leave. In Marguerite’s actual testimony, the rape was much more brutal. She was tied down and gagged. She almost choked to death. And Louvel was in the room.HOLOFCENER [Le Gris] told himself he loved her.AFFLECK What was fascinating was the degree to which this behavior and attitude toward women was so thorough and pervasive, and the vestigial aspects that are still with us today. That’s really powerful. What we have hoped is people will look at it and go: “Have I always understood how my actions were being perceived by others? Have I always recognized other people’s reality, truth, perspective, in the course of my behavior?” And maybe reflect on that.Ben, I understood that you were originally going to portray Le Gris. And then you decided to play the libertine Count Pierre d’Alençon instead of facing off against Matt onscreen. Why?HOLOFCENER He came to his senses.AFFLECK What happened truly is that —DAMON We heard Adam Driver was interested. [Everyone laughs.] More

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      Richard Nelson’s New Play Closes a Chapter of Theater History

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      “What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad” is the 12th and final installment in the quiet yet sweeping “Rhinebeck Panorama.”A character named Kate tells a story, of a story told to her, about a man attending a play. The actors are all deaf, and they rest their cheeks and chins on a big table, which stretches out to the audience, to feel the vibration of a spinning top. From his seat, the man leans in and puts his forehead on the surface.“He wants to share in what the characters are feeling,” Kate says. “He wants to be at that table too.”Kate’s monologue is delivered almost in passing — no one onstage even responds to it — yet it reflects, in just a few lines, the mission and magic of Richard Nelson’s decade-long, 12-play project called the “Rhinebeck Panorama,” which concludes with “What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad,” opening Sept. 8 at Hunter College’s Frederick Loewe Theater.These works, written and directed by Nelson — and realized with aesthetic unity by a consistent creative team and a de facto acting company — contain the four Apple Family plays, which feature a family gathering in Rhinebeck, N.Y., on days that happen to be of national significance; the Gabriels trilogy, about another Rhinebeck household that we visit at three points during the 2016 election year; three pandemic Zoom plays that revisit the Apples as they talk through collective trauma in real time; and a two-part exploration of the Michaels, an artistic family on the verge, then the other side, of immense loss.Charlotte Bydwell in one of several dance scenes in “What Happened?,” which takes place after the death of a dance luminary.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlong the way, Nelson has established a style of theater that has its roots in Chekhov: not naturalistic or realistic, but, as Nelson said in a recent interview, an attempt at verisimilitude. Through the dozen plays he makes a case — in our cultural moment of polarized absolutes — for questioning, nuance and, above all, conversation as a way to connect people, process the unknown and ultimately be in the world.“Centuries from now, when people want to know what a certain class of person lived like in America, they’ll go to Richard’s plays,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which produced nearly all of the panorama. “The characters are individual, yet they capture the shape of our time.”The plot of each Rhinebeck play couldn’t be more simple: A family prepares or eats dinner. Conversations are discursive, guided more by the timeline of the meal than anything else; but within them are sprawling and subterranean dramas that reveal themselves through ordinary discussion rather than traditional theatricality. Conflicts are rare — raised voices, even rarer.If the series has a broad arc, it is in how the characters relate not just to time, but to place: the Apples find a home in Rhinebeck, while the Gabriels are pushed out of it and, the Michaels, by the end, are assembling around a table in France.“Rhinebeck is a complicated place, as all places are,” said Nelson, who has lived in the Hudson Valley town since the early 1980s. “You take something small, and you just look at it enough, and you see all the pieces and all the things.”The plays have all been set on the days when they open. But despite that specificity of time and location — and a milieu of predominantly white, educated people — they have achieved broad resonance, including international adaptations and imitations. And by being presented in the round in small spaces, they also elicit the intimacy of a private gathering.From left, Jay O. Sanders, Nelson and Maryann Plunkett — whom Nelson called “the beating heart” of the Rhinebeck plays.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJay O. Sanders, who along with his wife, Maryann Plunkett — “the beating heart” of the panorama, as Nelson called her — has starred in all 12 plays, recalled asking a question during “The Gabriels” that was promptly answered by a man in the audience who, like the one in Kate’s story, seemingly wanted to join them at the table.But that is the effect of Nelson’s style, in which no arguments are made and people represent nothing; as Sanders said, “The drama of just living is enough.” In a note for “What Happened?” Nelson includes a telling quote from a hero of his, the early-20th-century theater artist Harley Granville-Barker:One is tempted to imagine a play — to be written in desperate defiance of Aristotle — from which doing would be eliminated altogether, in which nothing but being would be left. The task set the actors would be to interest their audience in what the characters were, quite apart from anything they might do.Easier imagined than done. Nelson said that any time he has written a line that sounds like him or his beliefs, it gets cut. “The truth,” he added, “comes from the characters speaking to another character, and not for the audience to overhear.”In rehearsals, actors are directed to talk as they would at home, not to project as they typically would. They are aware, at all times, of where they are directing their questions or lines. In real life, Nelson said, rarely does someone speak to an entire room; so his characters don’t either.“It’s very unusual,” Sanders said. “And it takes a lot of courage.”The plays have flashes of prescience and recognition. You can, for example, trace former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s career through the seven Apple plays, which open in media res with an expletive and mention of his name. The first installment of “The Gabriels,” from early March 2016, includes the now-haunting line, “Don’t you feel something really bad is going to happen?”At times, though, Nelson’s characters — and perhaps Nelson himself — have been unequipped to deal with history in the making. The Apples gathered on Zoom in early July 2020, amid the upheaval of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the theater industry, platitudes reigned; but in Rhinebeck, a group of white people didn’t really know how to talk about it.Their not thoroughly engaging with Black Lives Matter frustrated some in the moment, including The New York Times’s critic, Jesse Green. But that wouldn’t fit Nelson’s approach to theater. Instead, the Apples ask questions with no answers, and are quietly saddened by a world that might be passing them by.“What you don’t want to do is make an argument,” Nelson said. “I don’t think my characters are confident about what’s going on. Everybody has their own journey.”Plunkett and Sanders, center, seen here in the 2011 play “Sweet and Sad,” have acted in the entire “Rhinebeck Panorama.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat tension arises again in “What Happened?” — “I don’t know” is a common line — the first of the staged Rhinebeck plays not to be produced by the Public. (Presented by Hunter Theater Project, it is being underwritten by a single donor, Susie Sainsbury. The second two Zoom plays were also independently produced.)There are no bad feelings between Nelson and the Public; the separation was a matter of logistics. “He was not going to let a pandemic slow him down,” Eustis said of Nelson. “It was sad for me that for the first time, I couldn’t keep up with him. So on a level it breaks my heart that this is not at the Public.”Nelson felt that “What Happened?” couldn’t wait any longer. He had written a version last year for a live theater season that never came, with politics on his mind as the election approached. But he rewrote it to open now, as live theater re-emerges in New York. Gone are any mentions of the current or former president; instead the loss presaged by the first play in 2019 — the matriarch, a modern dance luminary named Rose Michael, has cancer — permeates its sequel.That, in addition to the setting of Angers, France, makes for a departure from the panorama. “What Happened?” may be a mirror of the present, with characters regularly sanitizing their hands and sharing how they passed time in lockdown, but its preoccupations are also comparatively abstract: the loss of life, of youth, of work.And of Rhinebeck itself. Plunkett said that during a recent rehearsal it hit her: “I found myself tearing up. This specific place that we resided in and explored for a decade — not many people have gotten to do that, and I’m very fortunate. You realize how short a decade is.”Nelson may return to Rhinebeck in the future — he has written a television series of Chekhov stories set there in the present — but for now “What Happened?” is the last time he is bringing a family together at a dinner table to weave, as the critic Ben Brantley once wrote, “momentous history in the fabric of the quotidian.”The audience is, as always, invited to the table. “We’re living in a moment of confusion, tragedy and loss, but together,” Nelson said. “We are not alone.” More