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Curious about creativity, she chronicled the lives of Agnes de Mille, Jacqueline du Pré, Samuel Goldwyn and Stan Kenton.Carol Easton, whose curiosity about creativity inspired her to write biographies of four prominent figures in the arts — Stan Kenton, Samuel Goldwyn, Jacqueline du Pré and Agnes de Mille — died on June 17 at her home in Venice, Calif. She was 87. More
She contributed to the movies of her husband, Bernardo Bertolucci, but occasionally made her own, including “Triumph of Love.”Clare Peploe, a director and screenwriter who liked to merge genres in her own films, and who also made significant contributions to some of the movies of her husband, the celebrated filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, died on June 24 in Rome. She was 79.The cause was cancer, said Alessandra Bracaglia, her assistant.As a director, Ms. Peploe made a quick impact with her first effort, a comic short called “Couples and Robbers,” about newlyweds who commit a robbery, which she wrote with Ernie Eban; it was nominated for the short-subject Oscar in 1981.“In this comedy-thriller she has demonstrated that in her very first film she is a talent to be reckoned with,” Richard Roud wrote in The Guardian Weekly when the film played at the Berlin Film Festival in 1982. “The casting and direction of actors is superb. If someone doesn’t finance a feature film by her, it will be a great shame.”Ms. Peploe, though, found financing to be a struggle, especially since her films defied easy categorization, and when she did set a project in motion, she worked at a deliberate pace. As a result, her oeuvre was limited. Her first feature, “High Season,” wasn’t released until 1987, and there would be only two others, “Rough Magic” in 1995 and “Triumph of Love” in 2001.She had a knack for attracting well-known actors to her projects. “High Season,” a comic indictment of gauche tourists, starred Jacqueline Bisset, Irene Papas and Kenneth Branagh, among others. “Rough Magic” featured Bridget Fonda as a magician’s assistant on the run in Mexico and Russell Crowe as a man hired to track her down.“Triumph of Love,” her most well-received feature, was her take on an 18th-century stage comedy by Pierre de Marivaux and had a cast that included Mira Sorvino, Ben Kingsley, Fiona Shaw and Rachael Stirling.Mira Sorvino and Jay Rodan in a scene from “Triumph of Love,” Ms. Peploe’s most well-received feature.Sundance ChannelAll these films were hard to pigeonhole. “High Season” was both a commentary on what tourism does to an ancient Greek village and a “Midsummer Night’s Dream”-style romantic fantasy. “Rough Magic,” The Independent of Britain said, “veers from Saturday morning serial-style thrills to Buñuelian surrealism to light noir, with dashes of Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks here and there.”“Clare Peploe’s films as director are distinguished by an uncommon combination of madcap narrative intricacy, sophisticated battles of the sexes, picturesque locations and artistic self-consciousness,” Susan Felleman, a professor of art history and film and media studies at the University of South Carolina’s School of Visual Art and Design, said by email. “They’re screwball comedies for the art-house set.”When she wasn’t directing films, Ms. Peploe was sometimes writing them. Her first film credit was as one of several screenwriters on Michelangelo Antonioni’s film about rebellious American youths, “Zabriskie Point” (1970), although she played down her contribution, describing her role as “the umpteenth assistant” on the film.“I wasn’t really a writer on it, I was a researcher on it,” she said. (She was useful because she was fluent in English.) She shared screenwriting credit on Mr. Bertolucci’s films “Luna” in 1979 and “Besieged” in 1998.When she was directing, though, she generally banned her famous husband from the set.“He makes people nervous,” she told The Independent in 1996.Clare Frances Katherine Peploe was born on Oct. 20, 1941, in Tanga, in northeastern Tanzania. Her father, William, was a British civil servant who became an art dealer and director of the Lefevre Gallery in London, and her mother, Clotilde (Brewster) Peploe, was an artist.She had an exotic early life: growing up and attending schools in Kenya, London, Italy and Paris, picking up several languages and acquiring a worldly outlook. Living in a variety of cultures, she told The Record of New Jersey in 1997, “you learn to see everything — an historical event, a war, a wedding ceremony, whatever — in so many different ways.”Ms. Peploe in 2001 with her husband, the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci. She made significant contributions to a number of his movies.Pierre-Philippe Marcou/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesShe met Mr. Antonioni in the late 1960s and worked with him on “Zabriskie Point.” She first met Mr. Bertolucci in 1970 at a screening of his film “The Spider’s Stratagem,” and they met several times afterward, bonding over their shared love of Jean-Luc Godard. She served as a second assistant director on “1900,” Mr. Bertolucci’s 1976 drama of class struggle, and before the end of the decade they had married.Ms. Peploe said that, counterintuitively, being associated with her husband didn’t help her with the nuts-and-bolts aspects of her own filmmaking like obtaining financing.“In fact,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1988, “I recently realized that many of the problems I encountered had to do with being married to him. I naïvely assumed that people didn’t care about that sort of thing and just saw me as being me, but I now see there’s a certain envy you encounter, an attitude of ‘she doesn’t need our help — look who she’s married to.’”Creatively, however, they complemented each other, she said.“Over the years Bernardo often asked me to help him with ideas for his films, and I always surprised myself with the cinematic, Bertolucci-like ideas I’d come up with,” she said. “He had a sort of Svengali effect on me and has been instrumental in helping me come into my own as a filmmaker.”Mr. Bertolucci died in 2018. Ms. Peploe, who lived in Rome, is survived by a brother, Mark Peploe, who shared a screenwriting Oscar with Mr. Bertolucci for the 1987 film “The Last Emperor.” More
She wrote more than 40 telenovelas, the American soap opera’s addictive cousin, and was one of the most celebrated names in Spanish-language television.Delia Fiallo, the Cuban-born television writer known throughout Latin America as the “mother of the telenovela,” the addictively melodramatic Spanish-language cousin to the American soap opera, died on Tuesday at her home in Coral Gables, Fla. She was 96.Her daughter Delia Betancourt confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Every fan of the genre knew what to expect: Gypsy maidens. Wicked stepmothers. Wealthy, handsome male heirs. Amnesia, fictional illnesses, mistaken identities, misplaced babies. And at the center of it all, a young and beautiful woman who was often an orphan, but always from a humble background, and with whom the well-born young man would fall madly in love — though the couple would be thwarted through all sorts of swirling Shakespearean complications (murder, faked pregnancies, love triangles, those conniving stepmothers) before coming together in a happy ending, 200 or so episodes later. (American soap operas go on forever, with an unending cast of characters. The telenovela works itself out in under a year, with a finite cast of characters. Mostly, they end happily.)“The essential theme of a novela is the story of a love that is obstructed,” Ms. Fiallo told Variety in 1996. “A couple meet, fall in love, suffer obstacles in being able to fulfill that love and at the end reach happiness.” She added, “If you don’t make the public cry, you won’t achieve anything.”Ms. Fiallo was a master of that operatic, weepy form. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, she wrote more than 40 telenovelas, most of which were produced in Venezuela and then adapted (often by Ms. Fiallo herself) and televised all over the world (and continued to be shown long after her last original drama, a blockbuster called “Cristal,” first aired in 1985). In Bosnia, pirated versions of “Kassandra” — which she adapted from a show originally called “Peregrina,” about a Gypsy maiden who falls in love with, well, you know — were so popular that when the series went off the air in 1998 it caused an international incident. The State Department intervened, pleading with the distributor of the series to donate all 150 episodes to maintain the peace in a small Bosnian town riven by political factions but united over its love of the show.“I want my ‘Kassandra,’” The New York Times reported at the time, “became a complaint of many ordinary Bosnians.”While Ms. Fiallo’s Cinderella stories were global successes, it was in the Americas that they resonated the most.In the United States, three generations of Latin American families often wept together in a nightly ritual that’s hard to imagine today. “You watched what your family watched, every day for weeks and months,” said Ana Sofía Peláez, the Cuban American writer and activist, whose fluency in Spanish came in large part from sobbing with her Cuban-born grandfather through years of Fiallo dramas like “Cristal,” “Esmerelda” and “Topacio.” She recalled both of them losing it when Luis (the wealthy stepson of the head of a modeling agency that is the plot pivot of “Cristal”) sang “Mi Vida Eres Tu” — “You Are My Life” — to his beloved Cristal (the orphaned model whose ruthless boss turns out to be her biological mother).“The essential theme of a novela is the story of a love that is obstructed,” Ms. Fiallo once said. “If you don’t make the public cry, you won’t achieve anything.”Leila Macor/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“My grandfather and I were raised in different countries,” Ms. Pelaez said. “We had different frames of reference. But we found the same things romantic, and we were transported by those stories together.“We were all in,” she continued. “It was a shared experience that I didn’t appreciate at the time but I value so much today. It was a pan-Latin experience. Her shows were Venezuelan. But my parents would say proudly, ‘Of course, pero es Cubana’: She is a Cuban writer.”Delia Fiallo was born on July 4, 1924, in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, the only child of Felix Fiallo de la Cruz, a doctor, and Maria Ruiz. The family moved often, from small country town to small country town, and Delia, shy and bookish, began writing stories to combat her loneliness.She majored in philosophy at the University of Havana, and in 1948, the year she graduated, won a prestigious literary prize for one of her short stories. She edited a magazine for the Cuban Ministry of Education, worked in public relations and wrote radionovelas — the precursor to the telenovelas that arrived with television in Cuba in the 1950s — all at the same time, before turning to the form that would make her famous.In Cuba before the revolution, that form flourished thanks to the sponsorship of companies like Colgate-Palmolive, said June Carolyn Erlick, the editor of ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America, and the author of “Telenovelas in Pan-Latino Context,” (2018). Writers like Ms. Fiallo honed its central themes: “Love, sex, death, the usual.”Ms. Fiallo met her future husband, Bernardo Pascual, the director of a radio station and a television actor, when they were both working in radio. They married in 1952. (Their daughter Delia said it was love at first sight, just like in one of her stories: “She told herself, ‘That man is going to be mine, ese hombre va a ser mío.’”) After the couple moved to Miami in 1966, Mr. Pascual worked in construction and then started a company that built parking garages. “The family joke is that in exile Bernardo passed from the arts to the concrete,” Ms. Fiallo told The Miami Herald in 1987.Ms. Fiallo first tried to sell her scripts in Puerto Rico, for $15 an episode, but Venezuelan broadcasters offered her four times as much; to prepare, she immersed herself in the culture of Venezuela, a country she barely knew, by reading novels and interviewing Venezuelan exchange students in Miami to learn the local idioms.She took her themes from the news, but also from romance classics like “Wuthering Heights.” She often tackled social issues — rape, divorce, addiction — which meant often butting heads with the censors. A late-1960s drama, “Rosario,” a sympathetic exploration of the trauma of divorce, was suspended for a time by the Venezuelan government. In 1984, the government threatened to cancel “Leonela” if Ms. Fiallo didn’t kill off one of its characters, a woman who was a drug addict.“Some friends say I could have chosen a more literary genre,” Ms. Fiallo told The Miami Herald. “But this is what I feel most comfortable with. You can touch more people this way than with any book. Novelas are full of emotions, and emotions are the common denominator of humanity.”In the late 1980s, as many as 100 million viewers in the Americas and Europe tuned in to watch episodes of Ms. Fiallo’s shows. Her fans were devoted to her characters and their odysseys, and they often called her at home — her phone number was listed — to discuss plot lines. One fan, claiming she did not have long to live, begged Ms. Fiallo to reveal one story’s ending.“The fans are passionate about the characters,” she said in 1987. “I would be embarrassed to have my number not listed. I don’t think it would be quite fair.”In addition to her daughter Ms. Betancourt, Ms. Fiallo is survived by three other daughters, Jacqueline Gonzalez, Maria Monzon and Diana Cuevas; a son, Bernardo Pascual; 13 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Pascual died in 2019.“I consider myself successful if I can deliver to viewers a world of fantasy, even if only for an hour,” Ms. Fiallo told The Miami Herald in 1993. “Everyone is young at heart. Illusions don’t fade with time, and it is beautiful to rekindle a love affair, even if it’s not your own.” More
The series, about a Vietnam War hospital, was just one vehicle for him in his writing career to explore war and its aftershocks.John Sacret Young, a writer and producer who was behind the television series “China Beach,” set at a Vietnam War military hospital, and whose work often explored the psychological wounds of war, died on June 3 at his home in Brentwood, Calif. He was 75.The cause was brain cancer, his wife, Claudia Sloan, said.Mr. Young was the executive producer of “China Beach,” which recounted the experiences of several women at an evacuation hospital on ABC from 1988 to 1991. He created the show with William Broyles Jr., a former editor at Newsweek who had served in Vietnam and went on to write the screenplay for Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13” (1995).Mr. Young was later a writer and producer of the Aaron Sorkin’s series “The West Wing” (1999-2006) and co-executive producer and writer of the Netflix series “Firefly Lane,” which was released in February.“China Beach” drew comparisons to “M*A*S*H,” particularly when it came to their settings: one in a military hospital in Korea, the other in Vietnam. But where “M*A*S*H” was part comedy, part drama in mostly half-hour installments, “China Beach” took a fully dramatic approach in hourlong episodes. It drew praise for its well-drawn characters, particularly that of Colleen McMurphy, an Army nurse played by Dana Delany.With a cast (many headed for stardom) that also included Tom Sizemore, Kathy Bates, Helen Hunt, Don Cheadle and Marg Helgenberger, “China Beach” won the 1990 Golden Globe Award for best drama, beating out contenders like “L.A. Law” and “Murder, She Wrote.” It also launched the careers of Ms. Delany and Ms. Helgenberger, who went on to a leading role in “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”Though the show was not a major ratings hit, “China Beach” earned praise for its writing and period-appropriate score, featuring a theme song by Diana Ross and the Supremes.In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2013, on the occasion of the show’s 25th anniversary, Mr. Young called the Vietnam War “a story of our generation” and said that choosing to focus on women felt “crucial, interesting and relevant.”The New York Times television critic John J. O’Connor wrote in 1991 that “the series sensitively tapped into national terrain that remains difficult.” The year before, he lauded the show for avoiding the clichés of prime time television in favor of something “inventive, imaginative, adventurous.”Much of Mr. Young’s work — in books, television and movies — explore the impact of war. In addition to “China Beach,” he wrote the mini-series “A Rumor of War” (1980), which adapted Philip Caputo’s celebrated memoir of his time in the Marines Corps in Vietnam and the emotional devastation that followed; “Thanks of a Grateful Nation” (1998), a television movie set in the aftermath of the Gulf War; and the theatrical release “Romero” (1989), starring Raul Julia, which addressed the civil and religious upheaval leading to the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero in El Salvador.Vietnam was also a prevailing theme in a memoir by Mr. Young, “Remains: Non-Viewable” (2005), which centered on the death of his cousin Doug Young in combat in Vietnam and its emotional fallout.The memoir focused on a culture of New England stoicism that, he wrote, prevented his family from processing their loss.“There was a shoe to drop,” Mr. Young wrote in the book, “the actuality, the coming of the coffin, and that would happen soon enough; but in the waiting there was a free fall of silence, an odd decorum, and the postponement of a free fall of emotion that could not be measured.”Mr. Young told NPR in 2005 that though his family had actually been able to view his cousin’s remains, the title, read another way, suggested how they had “looked at that war after it was over and said, ‘Remains non-viewable.’”A scene from a 1989 episode of “China Beach.” The series drew comparisons to “M*A*S*H,” without the comedy. Walt Disney Television via Getty ImagesJohn Sacret Young was born on May 24, 1946, in Montclair, N.J., to Bill and Peggy (Klotz) Young. His mother was a homemaker, and his father worked for the Public Service Electric and Gas Company in Newark. John was the youngest of four siblings.He attended College High School in Montclair and earned a bachelor’s degree in religion at Princeton, graduating in 1969. Ms. Sloan said he chose to study religion primarily because the program allowed him to write a novel as his senior thesis.He married Jeannette Penick in 1973. After their divorce, he married Ms. Sloan in 2010. Along with his wife, Mr. Young is survived by two sons, John and Riley; two daughters, Jeannette and Julia; a brother, Mason; and three grandchildren.His first big break came with “Police Story” (1973-1987), a crime drama for which he began as a researcher and eventually wrote three episodes. To add verisimilitude to his scripts, Mr. Young embedded himself in the Los Angeles Police Department, Ms. Sloan said.Mr. Young spoke at a ceremony for the Humanitas Prize for film and television writers in 2020. Much of his work centered on the impact of war on combatants and society.Gregg Deguire/Getty ImagesAmong his other credits was the movie “Testament” (1983), starring Jane Alexander, about a suburban family’s struggles after a nuclear attack.Over his career, Mr. Young received seven Emmy nominations. An avid art collector, he also wrote “Pieces of Glass: An Artoire” (2016). The book functions as a memoir, his life as seen through the lens of art as he considers how artists, from Vermeer to Rothko, had affected him.Mr. Young opened “Remains: Non-Viewable” with a reflection on storytelling, the art form that defined much of his life and career.“Call up a story: a writer makes them up and sets them down,” he wrote, “but it is what we all do to make shape of our days.” More
The director deftly constructs a dialogue between Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.Merging two biographies is a solid way to enliven the often-tedious genre of the literary documentary. But the connections drawn in “Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation” are sufficiently instructive that watching and listening to these writers is also, in a way, like hearing one author in stereo.The director Lisa Immordino Vreeland uses the friendship between Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams to construct a dialogue between them, using the writing and appearances they left behind. Jim Parsons reads Capote’s words in voice-over and Zachary Quinto reads Williams’s. (There is a lengthy list of sources at the end; all credit to a documentary that shows its work.) For the visuals, Vreeland relies principally on archival material. Her most striking conceit is to show the writers in separate but parallel interviews with David Frost.We hear the Southern-born authors on their writing habits, on how autobiography inflects their narratives, on their homosexuality and on substance abuse. They express disappointment with films adapted from their work: Williams felt the censorship was so heavy you often needed to see the stage version for comprehension. Capote says Paramount “double-crossed” him by casting Audrey Hepburn (whom he nevertheless praises) instead of Marilyn Monroe in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”There is some bite in stories of their rivalry. (Capote apparently stung Williams with his description of a Williams-like character in his unfinished novel “Answered Prayers.”) “An Intimate Conversation” never quite digs beyond the cultivated personas of either author — a drawback of the archival format. But for anyone invested in the writers, it offers a vivid sketch.Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate ConversationNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters and in virtual cinemas through Kino Marquee. More
LOS ANGELES — Amanda Kloots is not surprised that she’s famous.You don’t move to New York from Ohio at 18, go to countless thanks-but-no-thanks auditions, dust yourself off again and again, or practice tap dance nightly on your small apartment bathroom floor in case a spot in the ensemble for “42nd Street” or the Rockettes opens because you think you are best suited to a life of quiet anonymity. More
By staging Kathleen Collins’s rich psychological portraits of Black women, a theatrical group aims to enlighten, heal and inspire.“No one is going to mythologize my life,” the playwright and filmmaker Kathleen Collins said in 1984 to a group of film students at Howard University. “No one is going to refuse me the right to explore my experiences of life as normal experiences.”Collins’s insistence on portraying the ordinariness of African American women’s lives rather than reproducing the Hollywood narratives that pathologized or mythologized them is resonating with a new generation of Black women artists who have recently discovered Collins and her work. Part of what makes Collins’s writing so appealing is her attention to the complex internal struggles and external journeys, of what Elizabeth Alexander calls those “Bohemian Black women” who often work as artists and academics, and have a robust intellectual life. Because she renders them with such care and imbues them with such vulnerability, her characters have heightened insights and are aware that they are both liberated and alienated by their knowledge of how others see and stereotype them.Such rich psychological portraits of Black women are what originally drew Afrofemononomy, a group of Black femme theater artists, to Collins’s plays. In addition to adapting that Howard University speech into a monologue, they are also performing “Begin the Beguine,” a quartet of Collins’s one-acts that have never been produced before.Over the past two weekends, under a program titled “Work the Roots,” Afrofemononomy performed the title play “Begin the Beguine,” about the actress Ruby Dee and her son, the blues guitarist Guy Davis, as well as “The Healing,” “The Reading” and “Remembrance” at various locations in New York City (from a lawn in Harlem to a park in Bedford-Stuyvesant). On Saturday, May 29, they will present the premiere of a mixed-media installation called “Gold Taste” that is a response to “The Essentialisn’t,” a theatrical work by one of the group’s members, Eisa Davis. The piece will be available for viewing until June 27 at Performance Space New York’s Keith Haring Theater.Jennifer Harrison Newman dances with audience members as part of the performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe debut of Collins’s plays is part of a continuing resurrection of her works after her death from breast cancer in 1988 at the age of 46. Largely because of her daughter Nina Lorez Collins’s commitment to preserving her mother’s legacy, we are now able to access the gifts of Collins’s ambitions and archive, including the theatrical release in 2015 of her 1982 film, “Losing Ground”; the publication of her short story collection “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” in 2016; and, in 2019, the arrival of “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” a mélange of her short stories, plays, diary entries and film scripts.Davis, an actress and playwright recently seen in HBO’s “Mare of Easttown,” first became acquainted with Collins’s writing when she was asked to do a public reading of Collins’s short stories at the Brooklyn Public Library in 2017. But, she now realizes, Collins has been with her a lot longer. “She is a literary foremother for me that has just been under my nose all this time,” Davis said. “When Nina first gave me these plays, I was like, ‘Kathleen Collins, Kathleen Collins, Kathleen Collins,’ and then I looked at my bookshelf and I found ‘9 Plays by Black Women,’ an anthology from the 1980s, and her ‘The Brothers’ in there. It’s the only play of hers that was ever produced, [a production of the Women’s Project, now WP Theater] at American Place Theater.”A line from Collins’s play “Remembrance” on a wall at Performance Space New York reads, “Last night, I dreamt I danced in the image of God.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOnce she read Collins’s other plays, she immediately shared them with her friends and other Black female theater artists with whom she frequently collaborated in the most quotidian of ways: over dinner, on museum trips and visits to the beach, via texts, after seeing plays together, and, in the past year, over Zoom. By 2019, their casual interest in Collins’s plays turned into the more concrete idea of staging and sharing them with the broader public.“In a lot of ways, this was an attempt to take the model of our friendship and then apply it to the conditions under which we collaborate,” Davis said.The director Lileana Blain-Cruz (“Marys Seacole”) said learning about Collins’s plays enabled her to take different risks. For the project, she has thoughtfully transformed Collins’s “The Reading,” a 30-minute play that anticipated our conversations about racial microaggressions today. Set in a Black psychic’s waiting room, a tense conversation ensues between Marguerite (Kara Young), a Black fashion designer, and Helen (Amelia Workman), a white romance novelist. As Helen tries to assert her entitlement, Marguerite pushes back, and eventually denies Helen an opportunity to take up the space that she, as a white woman, feels obligated to inhabit.Amelia Workman in “The Reading.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAudience members at the performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFood, books and more were on display.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“For me, the celebration and the exploration collectively around Kathleen Collins’s work is another way of seeing each other before we even knew how to see each other in existence and collectivity,” she said. “That, for me, is really moving because I was like, ‘Oh, this is somebody that I should have known.’” She added, “Now I get to discover, and I don’t have to discover alone.”In addition to the moving performance by individual actors, these plays, which were not open to critics to review, were made even more engaging because of the casting and staging. Collins wrote “The Healing” and “The Reading” with white characters but because Afrofemononomy cast from within their group, they provided a space in which Black actresses were always front and center. This gesture was intensified by the intimacy of their set. At the end of “The Reading,” the audience was led by the actress Jennifer Harrison Newman to dance with the cast, an invitation that turned the luminescent installation and graffiti scrawled wall that read “Last night, I dreamt I danced in the image of God” (a line from another Collins play in the quartet) into a communal party celebrating Black women’s creativity.April Matthis, left, and Stacey Karen Robinson perform “Begin the Beguine,” by Kathleen Collins, at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 in Manhattan. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy inviting us to these tender moments in which Collins’s Black female characters pull back their layers, the performances themselves transport both those fictional characters and this real-life Black cast far beyond the strict racial and gender categories that envelop them and us.“These are stories about the interior lives of Black women,” Nina Lorez Collins told me. “One of the reasons I like the “Begin the Beguine” is because it is about race, but it is also not. It’s really about the interior life of this artist, this young woman. And I just don’t think we’ve seen anything like it.” As avant-garde as Collins’s characters were in her time, they still remain singular today, giving us rare social insights into how we can navigate our unique moment of slowly returning to each other, to public spaces, and ultimately, live, in-person performances. In the foreword to “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” the fiction writer Danielle Evans described Collins as “a master of the moments when the interior becomes the exterior, when all pretense drops away.”This blurring between our inner selves and the identities projected back onto Black women was at the heart of Afrofemononomy’s take on “Remembrance,” described as “a kind of personal séance.” Under the directorial consultation of Jackie Sibblies Drury (“Fairview”) and featuring Davis as The Woman and Kaneza Schaal as Collins talking to the Howard students, this becomes a conversation between two Black women who, while each giving their own monologue — one taking place in a bathroom, the other at a lectern — end up, at times, dissolving into each other. All the while they demand the audience see Black women in public with the same clarity that we see ourselves in private.April Matthis and Stacey Karen Robinson performed “Begin the Beguine” at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 in Manhattan. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut such revelations and reversal of gazes will also be critical to large swaths of the American theater community that is still grappling with debates about inclusion, equity and white gatekeepers as it seeks to attend to the harm of racism, and institutionalize the healing that Collins’s vision offers for her Black characters and for the Black female theater artists who embody them.After spending two weeks performing, and a couple of years studying Collins, Afrofemononomy decided to close with Davis’s music theater piece “The Essentialisn’t” in the group installation “Gold Taste,” and reimagine a much earlier moment when the Harlem Renaissance writers W.E.B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen debated racial representations in their era. It begins with the ever vexed question, “Can You Be Black and Not Perform?”Extending Collins’s legacy to Davis, the Afrofemononomy member Kaneza Schaal said, “Eisa is [also] sitting on a trove of plays she has written. And it is up to us, to see to it, that our own daughters are not the first people to produce that work.” She continued, “It is urgent to address Davis and Collins simultaneously. The intellectual harmony Eisa creates with her foremothers is astounding, and yet another extension of this fabric.”The Essentialisn’t: Gold Taste installationMay 29-June 27 at Performance Space New York, 150 First Avenue; performancespacenewyork.org. More
Jia Zhangke’s documentary illuminates a vast and complicated history in a series of intimate conversations.The films of Jia Zhangke, documentary and fictional, zoom in on the granular details of individual lives. At the same time, they are chapters in the single, unimaginably complicated story of China’s transformation in the decades since the 1949 revolution. Jia, who was born in 1970, tends to dwell in the recent past, and to circle back to Shanxi, the part of northern China where he grew up, but he’s also attentive to the continuities of history and geography, the connections between generations and places.His latest documentary, “Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue,” is intimate and specific, consisting mainly of interviews with three writers — Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua and Liang Hong — associated with Shanxi. They reminisce about their families and careers, and also about their sometimes wrenching, sometimes exhilarating experiences during the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution in the ’60s and ’70s, and later periods of urbanization and capitalist expansion. Colleagues, neighbors and family members, listed as “witnesses” in the end credits, contribute their own anecdotes and insights. The movie is an affecting group portrait and also a complex and subtle piece of literary criticism.Watching it, I wished I was more familiar with the work of its subjects. Some of it has been translated into English, notably Jia Pingwa’s “Ruined City” and Yu’s “To Live,” which was the basis for Zhang Yimou’s acclaimed 1994 film. But Jia Zhangke’s patient listening and the elegant clarity of the movie’s structure — it advances in roughly chronological order, divided into short sections that explain where it’s going — make it accessible to the curious as well as illuminating to the already knowledgeable.More than that, “Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue” demystifies historical episodes that are often presented, at least in the West, as abstractions, and personalizes large-scale events. Politics hovers over the writers’ lives, but their sense of national and regional history is filtered through work, family and landscape. Jia Pingwa recalls the hardship that his father, a teacher, suffered during the Cultural Revolution. Yu talks about his career transition from dentist to novelist. Liang delves into painful recollections of her mother’s illness and her sister’s marriage. Between the lines of their conversations with the unseen director you can intuit the elusive larger story — about the evolution of a poor, rural corner of an emerging global superpower — that is both his subject and theirs.Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns BlueNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More
