Writing and Writers

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Tom Stoppard’ Tells of an Enormous Life Spent in Constant Motion

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBooks of The Times‘Tom Stoppard’ Tells of an Enormous Life Spent in Constant MotionThe playwright Tom Stoppard during an interview in New York City, 1972.Credit…William E. Sauro/The New York TimesFeb. 15, 2021Updated 6:49 p.m. ETThe Czech-born Jewish playwright Tom Stoppard arrived in England with his family in 1946, when he was 8. They’d managed to flee Czechoslovakia ahead of the Nazis, and had spent years in Singapore and in India. He’d later call himself a “bounced Czech.”Stoppard took to England, his adopted country. He was impressed with its values, especially free speech. He was as impressed by one of its sports: cricket.He played in school (Stoppard skipped college) and, once he’d found success in the theater, on Harold Pinter’s team in London, the Gaieties. Their rival was a team from The Guardian newspaper. Pinter was an ogre on the pitch. He presided, Stoppard said, “like a 1930s master from a prep school.” Stoppard was the wicket-keeper, stylish in enormous bright red Slazenger gloves.Stoppard is not an autobiographical playwright. But his obsession with cricket led to one of the great moments in his work. His play “The Real Thing” (1982) is about theater, relationships and politics — one character is an actress, another tries to help free a Scottish soldier imprisoned for burning a memorial wreath during a protest. The play includes what’s become known as the cricket-bat speech, of which here is an excerpt:“This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel 200 yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly … (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.)”The way the cricket bat taps a ball, and makes it sail an improbable distance, becomes, in Stoppard’s hands, a metaphor for writing. No living playwright has so regularly made that beautiful (clucks his tongue to make the noise) sound.Credit….[ Read Charles McGrath’s profile of Hermione Lee. ]The adjective “Stoppardian” — to employ elegant wit while addressing philosophical concerns — entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978. His plays are trees in which he climbs out, precariously, onto every limb. These trees are swaying. There’s electricity in the air, as before a summer thunderstorm.Stoppard’s best-known plays include “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “The Real Thing,” “Arcadia” and “The Coast of Utopia.” (His most recent, “Leopoldstadt,” is closed, for now, because of Covid-19.) He co-wrote the screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love,” and has written or worked on dozens of other movie scripts. He’s written a novel and flurries of scripts for radio and television.Now 83, he’s led an enormous life. In the astute and authoritative new biography, “Tom Stoppard: A Life,” Hermione Lee wrestles it all onto the page. At times you sense she is chasing a fox through a forest. Stoppard is constantly in motion — jetting back and forth across the Atlantic, looking after the many revivals of his plays, keeping the plates spinning, agitating on behalf of dissidents, artists and political prisoners in Eastern Europe, delivering lectures, accepting awards, touching up scripts, giving lavish parties, maintaining friendships with Pinter, Vaclav Havel, Steven Spielberg, Mick Jagger and others. It’s been a charmed life, lived by a charming man. Tall, dashing, large-eyed, shaggy-haired; to women Stoppard’s been a walking stimulus package.There’s been one previous biography of Stoppard, by Ira Nadel, published in 2002. Lee says that Stoppard “didn’t read it.” She must be taking his word.Lee is an important biographer who has written scrupulous lives of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather and Penelope Fitzgerald. Her Stoppard book is estimable but wincingly long; it sometimes rides low in the water. The sections that detail Stoppard’s research for his plays can seem endless, as if Lee has dragged us into the library with him and given us a stubby pencil. Like a lot of us during the pandemic, “Tom Stoppard: A Life” could stand to lose 15 percent of its body weight.Lee owns a sharp spade, but don’t come here for dirt. Stoppard has long been a tabloid fixture in England; the spotlight on his relationships sometimes became a searchlight. But Lee makes the case that people, even his ex-wives, of which there are two, find him a decent sort. He’s remained loyal to old friends. He’s a family man who kept his office door open to his children. He kept the same agent and publisher for decades.The biographer Hermione Lee, whose new book is a life of the playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard.Credit…John CairnsHow did he get it all done? I’m with Antonia Fraser, who wrote in “Must You Go?,” a memoir of her years with Pinter, that she loves to hear the details of a writer’s craft, “as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer.”First of all, Stoppard does a landslide of topical research before he begins to write. Second, he needs cigarettes. Lee says he lined up matches on his desk sometimes, and told himself he wouldn’t stop writing until he’d lit 12. He doesn’t drink much; that has helped. Although he has had spacious offices in which to work, he prefers to write at the kitchen table, late into the night, after everyone else has gone to bed.He will obsessively listen to one song while working. He wrote one of his first plays to Leadbelly’s “Ol’ Riley.” He listened to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues” while writing “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” and John Lennon’s “Mother” while writing the play “Jumpers.”He liked to have breakfast every morning with his family (he has four children), along with a pile of newspapers. When does he sleep? Lee mentions an occasional nap at sunset.Lee tracks the arc of Stoppard’s politics over time. Most people turn to the right as they age; Stoppard went the other way. One reason this book entertains is that Stoppard has had an opinion about almost everything, and usually these opinions are witty.He thinks, for example, that art arises from difficulty and talent. “Skill without imagination,” one of his characters says, “is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” (The character’s name is Donner, and Stoppard has said: “Donner is me.”)Stoppard is a maniacal reader who collects first editions of writers he admires. Asked on the BBC radio show “Desert Island Discs” in 1984 to choose the one book he’d bring to a desert island, he replied: Dante’s “Inferno” in a dual Italian/English version, so he could learn a language while reading a favorite. His idea of a good death, he’s said, would be to have a bookshelf fall on him, killing him instantly, while reading.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      In ‘Tom Stoppard,’ Hermione Lee Takes On a New Challenge: a Living Subject

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn ‘Tom Stoppard,’ Hermione Lee Takes On a New Challenge: a Living SubjectThe acclaimed biographer’s life of the widely admired playwright and screenwriter follows her works about Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and others.The biographer Hermione Lee, whose new life of Tom Stoppard will be published on Feb. 23.Credit…Jamie MuirFeb. 13, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETEvery other year, at a botanical garden in the Chelsea neighborhood of London, the playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard throws a lavish, all-day party for his many friends and their families. There are bands, puppets, jugglers, stilt-walkers, staggering amounts of food and drink. Among the hundreds attending in 2013 were the biographer Hermione Lee, who was at the time also the very busy president of Oxford’s Wolfson College, and her friend Julian Barnes, the novelist. As they were leaving, Barnes recalled recently, Stoppard ambled up and asked Lee if she had any interest in writing his life.“Why me?” she said, taken aback.“Because I want it to be read,” he replied.That Stoppard wanted a biography at all was a surprise. He used to be hostile to the whole idea. In his play “Indian Ink,” a character calls biography “the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong,” and in “The Invention of Love,” Stoppard has Oscar Wilde describe biography as “the mesh through which our real life escapes.”Stoppard came around, Lee thinks, because he knew a biography was probably going to get written anyway, and because at the time he asked her he was entering into what she calls the “tidying up” phase of his life — approaching 80, moving house, beginning a new marriage. And in choosing Lee, though she is too modest to say so, he wasn’t taking any chances. Lee’s “Tom Stoppard: A Life” came out in England last October (Alfred A. Knopf will publish it here on Feb. 23), and at the time Stefan Collini wrote in The Guardian, “It seems unfair that a man of such outrageous gifts should also have been allowed to magic up the perfect biographer to write his life.”Lee, or to be formal, Dame Hermione (she was awarded the title in 2013 for “services to literary scholarship”) is a leading member of that generation of British writers — it also includes Richard Holmes, Michael Holroyd, Jenny Uglow and Claire Tomalin — who have brought an infusion of style and imagination to the art of literary biography. She is probably most famous for her 1997 life of Virginia Woolf, which upended much of the received wisdom about Woolf and demonstrated that there was much more to say than that she was a depressive in a cardigan wading into a river. In similar fashion, her 2007 biography of Edith Wharton rescued Wharton from her snobbish, old-fashioned reputation and reimagined her as a modern.Lee said yes to Stoppard, of course. How do you say no to someone so famous for charm? And then, as she recalled over Zoom last fall from her house in Oxford, she immediately thought to herself, “Oh my God, what have I done?”The playwright Tom Stoppard in New York, 1967.Credit…William E. Sauro/The New York Times Stoppard outside of New York’s Lincoln Center Theater, 2018.Credit…Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesLee, who turns 73 later this month, did not set out to become a biographer. She grew up in London in a house filled with music and books, and became a “culture hound,” she once told The Paris Review, the kind of teenager who would rather listen to Bartok than Elvis. She read all the time, but mostly novels, and had little or no interest in the lives of the people who wrote them.When her dreams of being an actress didn’t pan out, she became an academic, studying at Oxford, where she eventually became the first woman in the prestigious role of Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature. In the 1980s, though, she became uncomfortable with what was happening to the teaching of literature. “I think I was very ill-equipped to take on structuralism and deconstruction and French critical theory,” she explained. “I didn’t really buy the death of the author, and I think I went toward biography, perhaps not terribly consciously, as a sort of resistance.”Lee’s previous subjects — besides Woolf and Wharton, she also wrote about Willa Cather and Penelope Fitzgerald — were all novelists, all female and all dead. Stoppard, obviously, was none of those things. He was also someone both fortunate and beloved, with hundreds and hundreds of friends and admirers, all protective of him. “She always has a natural and healthy anxiety,” Barnes said. “‘Can I do it?’ But this time I think there was also: ‘Will he like it?’”Lee was not a theater person. But she was an avid playgoer, at least, and had acted a bit when she was young. So she felt reasonably confident about handling that part of Stoppard’s life, though in the end writing about the plays themselves required a tremendous amount of homework. Nor was Stoppard’s being male something she worried a lot about. “Maybe I should have,” she said, “but I didn’t feel that in writing about a man I was entering into some strange, uncharted territory.”By far the hardest part of writing the life of Stoppard, she said, was that Stoppard, now 83, was still living it. How do you end such a book? She originally thought she might conclude with Stoppard’s 80th birthday, in July 2017. But in 2020, he finished “Leopoldstadt,” a series of three plays that are his most personal and emotional, touching on his Jewish heritage, and practically as soon as it opened the run was ended — for the time being, anyway — by the coronavirus. So instead, Lee’s book ends with a vanishing — Stoppard’s recollection of a famous outdoor production of “The Tempest” in which Ariel seems to run across water and then disappears into the dark.Lee worked on the book for seven years, interviewing not just Stoppard but more than 100 of his friends and colleagues. “I’m sure there were times when he said, ‘Oh, the hell with this,’ and ‘Crikey, she’s being thorough — she’s excavating my whole life,’” she said. “I think what happens is you don’t see it coming, really. You agree to be interviewed and you’re obliging about material and all that, but what you don’t imagine is that this person is going to be talking to practically everyone you know, and that inevitably every one of those people will ring you up and tell you.” Only when Lee was well along in her research did Stoppard trust her with what became her two most crucial sources: the almost weekly letters he wrote to his mother until her death, in 1996, and a journal he kept for his son Ed.Hermione Lee worked on her new biography of Tom Stoppard for seven years, interviewing not just Stoppard but more than 100 of his friends and colleagues.Credit…Tom PilstonLee is sure that when Stoppard finally read the book, he inwardly groaned. Because there was so much to read — 834 pages, including notes — and because there were things that must have embarrassed him and that he wished had been left out. But he asked for only one change: that she not reveal the name of an actor who had been fired from the revival of one of his plays. “I was very impressed by that,” Lee said of Stoppard’s minimal demand. “And of course I agreed.”Most of Lee’s biographies have a shape related to their subject. Her life of Woolf is Woolfian, formally experimental and arranged thematically rather than chronologically. It begins with a question asked by Woolf herself: “My God, how does one write a biography?” Her biography of Wharton resembles a Wharton novel, with a lot of richly furnished rooms: the French room, the Italian room, the Henry James room. And her life of Penelope Fitzgerald is shorter and sparer than the others — like Fitzgerald, who was elusive and a little mysterious, a great writer of concealment.Lee’s life of Stoppard starts with a chapter called “First Acts,” and is divided into five parts. But in the beginning it reads less like a play than a boy’s adventure story, with 2-year-old Tomas Straussler fleeing with his parents and brother from their native Czechoslovakia to Singapore in 1939. When that city falls to the Japanese, they flee again, this time to India, with the father dying on the way, and remain there until 1945, when Mrs. Straussler meets and marries Major Kenneth Stoppard. A year later, the family is living in Nottinghamshire and, overnight, Tomas has become an Englishman — the luckiest thing, he always said, that ever happened to him.Lee’s 97-year-old father read that part of the book before he died and told her that it wasn’t written in her usual style. “He was always my sternest critic,” she said, and added, laughing, “I could never work out whether this was a compliment or a criticism. The plan, anyway, was that I really wanted this part to come along and whoosh. You get on the journey and away you go.”The rest of the book describes a life of extraordinary busyness, with Stoppard not just writing (and rewriting and rewriting) his plays but serving on committees, plunging himself into the politics of Eastern Europe, working for Hollywood — and not just on the movies we know as his, like “Shakespeare in Love” and “Empire of the Sun.” He also did work — uncredited but handsomely paid — on such unlikely projects as “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “Sleepy Hollow” and “102 Dalmatians.” There are stretches in the book when he takes the Concorde back and forth across the Atlantic as if it were a cab.To judge from the British reviews, some readers picked up “Tom Stoppard: A Life” just for the gossip: the parties; the friends; the hobnobbing with the likes of Prince Charles, Princess Margaret, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Mick Jagger and David Bowie; the three marriages; the love affairs, including a not-so-secret one with Sinead Cusack, the wife of Jeremy Irons. There were others who skipped that stuff and wanted to read instead all about the influence of Isaiah Berlin on “The Coast of Utopia.”“I suppose I always felt it was a sort of double narrative,” Lee said. “I’d rather be boring than faulty. I could well imagine people saying, ‘Do you really have to go on about the plays at such length?’ I wanted to make people feel they were reading the plays as they were reading the book, as it were, or watching them again. I was also trying to do a service to myself, getting these plays clear in my head and trying to understand how they worked in his life at the time.”Over the years, Lee has thought a lot about biography, and even about how much, paradoxically, she would resist the idea of anyone writing her life. In her brief book “Biography: A Very Short Introduction,” a sort of biography of biography, she argues that in some ways the form has evolved less than we think, and that the same questions keep coming up about the responsibilities and limitations of the form. “I’m perfectly aware that there are many things we can’t know,” she said. “I’m sure in Tom’s case there are one or two affairs that I don’t know about, that nobody knows about. And maybe nobody ever will know. I like that, actually.”She added that she already had a new subject in mind — “just a glint in my eye, though, and too soon to be talking about it.” But she did volunteer three clues. Not a man. Not a playwright. And, yes, dead.Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Jean-Claude Carrière, 89, Dies; Prolific Writer of Screenplays and More

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJean-Claude Carrière, 89, Dies; Prolific Writer of Screenplays and MoreHe was a favorite of Luis Buñuel and other top filmmakers. He also had a fruitful collaboration with the stage director Peter Brook.Jean-Claude Carrière in 1999. He had more than 150 film and television writing credits and also wrote books and plays.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 11, 2021Jean-Claude Carrière, an author, playwright and screenwriter who collaborated with the director Luis Buñuel on a string of important films and went on to work on scores of other movies, among them Philip Kaufman’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1988), died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 89.The death was confirmed by his daughter Kiara Carrière. No cause was given.Mr. Carrière had barely started in the movie business when he met Buñuel, the Spanish-born director, in 1963 (although he had already won a short-subject Oscar for a 1962 comedy he made with Pierre Étaix, “Happy Anniversary”).“At the time, he was looking for a young French screenwriter who knew the French countryside well,” Mr. Carrière recalled in a 1983 interview with the writer Jason Weiss.“I was a beginner,” he said. “I had gone to Cannes, and he was seeing various screenwriters there. I had lunch with him, we got along well, and three weeks later he chose me and I left for Madrid. Since then I haven’t stopped.”His first project with Buñuel was “Diary of a Chambermaid” (1964), for which the two adapted the Octave Mirbeau novel of the same name. Mr. Carrière continued to work with Buñuel for the rest of the director’s career, including on his last feature, “That Obscure Object of Desire,” in 1977. (Buñuel died in 1983.)Fernando Rey and Carole Bouquet in a scene from the 1977 film “That Obscure Object of Desire,” the last of Mr. Carrière’s many collaborations with Luis Buñuel.“Quite often the screenwriter has to guess what exactly the film is that the director wants to make,” Mr. Carrière told Interview magazine in 2015. “Sometimes the director doesn’t even know himself. You have to help him find the right thing. That was the case with Buñuel. At the beginning, he was looking around in many different directions, and finally when we went the right way, we felt it.”Mr. Carrière also collaborated with other top filmmakers, including Jacques Deray (on the 1969 movie “The Swimming Pool” and more) and Louis Malle (on the 1967 film “The Thief of Paris” and others). In the 1970s one of his greatest successes was as a writer of Volker Schlondorff’s “The Tin Drum” (1979), which was adapted from the Günter Grass novel about a boy who, in the midst of the gathering chaos that led to World War II, decides not to grow up; it won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.In the 1980s he wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Daniel Vigne’s “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1982), Andrzej Wajda’s “Danton” (1983), Milos Forman’s “Valmont” (1989) and numerous other movies. Among the most recent of his more than 150 film and television credits were “The Artist and the Model,” a 2012 drama directed by Fernando Trueba, and “At Eternity’s Gate,” a 2018 film about Vincent van Gogh directed by Julian Schnabel.In 2014 Mr. Carrière received an honorary Oscar for his body of work. The citation said that his “elegantly crafted screenplays elevate the art of screenwriting to the level of literature.”The prolific Mr. Carrière also wrote books and plays, often collaborating with the stage director Peter Brook. His interests knew no bounds.With Mr. Brook he created “The Mahabharata,” a nine-hour stage version of the Sanskrit epic, which was staged at the Avignon Theater Festival in France in 1985 and then made into a film. He once wrote a book with the Dalai Lama (“The Power of Buddhism,” 1996). He wrote a novel called “Please, Mr. Einstein” that, as Dennis Overbye wrote in a 2006 review in The New York Times, “touches down lightly and charmingly on some of the thorniest philosophical consequences of Einstein’s genius and, by extension, the scientific preoccupations of the 20th century — the nature of reality, the fate of causality, the comprehensibility of nature, the limits of the mind.”His was deliberately ever curious.“People say I am very dispersed,” he told The Guardian in 1994. “But I say that to pass from one subject to another, from one country to another, is what keeps me alive, keeps me alert.”A scene from Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), one of three films for which Mr. Carrière was nominated for a writing Oscar.Credit…Rialto Pictures/StudiocanalJean-Claude Carrière was born on Sept. 17, 1931, in Colombières-sur-Orb in southern France, into a family of vintners. As World War II was ending in 1945, his father, who had a heart condition that was making it difficult for him to work the land, took a job at a cousin’s cafe near Paris. There Jean-Claude had access to better schools and could indulge more fully in the passion for writing that had, as he put it, “imposed itself on me” since he was a young boy.In his mid-20s he published a novel, “Le Lézard.” It caught the attention of the comic actor and director Jacques Tati, who provided Mr. Carrière with a sort of backward entry into his career: Mr. Tati hired him to write novels based on some of his movies. He also introduced him to the process of making and editing a film.He and Mr. Étaix jointly wrote and directed “Happy Anniversary,” a comic short about a couple trying to celebrate their anniversary. Mr. Carrière was surprised by the Oscar.“I came to the office and the producer was jumping out of joy: ‘We have the Oscar! We have the Oscar!,’” he told Interview. “I asked, ‘But what is the Oscar?’ I didn’t know.”His family background benefited him in his fateful meeting with Buñuel the next year.“The first question he asked me when we sat down together at the table — and it’s not a light or frivolous question; the way he looked at me I sensed that it was a deep and important question — was, ‘Do you drink wine?’” he told Mr. Weiss.“A negative response would have definitely disqualified me,” he continued. “So I said, ‘Not only do I drink wine, but I produce it. I’m from a family of vintners.’”Their bond thus sealed, Buñuel and Mr. Carrière went on to collaborate not only on “Diary of a Chambermaid” but also on “Belle de Jour” (1967), “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) and other films.In 1971 Mr. Carrière was among the writers on Mr. Forman’s “Taking Off,” a comedy about parents searching for a runaway daughter that received good notices. The same was not true of the next Carrière-Forman partnership, a Broadway production of Mr. Carrière’s two-character play “The Little Black Book,” with Mr. Forman directing. When it opened in April 1972, Clive Barnes, reviewing in The Times, called it “a foolish little play without either wit or humanity.” It closed after seven performances.Mr. Carrière in 2001. He received an honorary Oscar in 2014 for his “elegantly crafted screenplays,” which the citation said “elevate the art of screenwriting to the level of literature.”Credit…Jean-Pierre Muller/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHis only other Broadway effort was better received. It was “La Tragedie de Carmen,” which he, Marius Constant and Mr. Brook adapted from the Bizet opera, with Mr. Brook directing. It opened in November 1983 and ran for 187 performances.Mr. Carrière was nominated for writing Oscars for “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” “That Obscure Object of Desire” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Brook once explained what made Mr. Carrière such an in-demand writer, whether the job was creating original material, adapting a novel or opera, or reining in an epic poem.“Like a great actor, or a great cameraman, he adapts himself to different people he works with,” Mr. Brook told The Times in 1988. “He’s open to all shifts caused by the material changing, and yet he brings to it a very powerful and consistent point of view.”Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Working in TV, Jen Silverman Wrote a Novel. About Theater.

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWorking in TV, Jen Silverman Wrote a Novel. About Theater.“We Play Ourselves” finds a struggling playwright exiled to Los Angeles and obsessing over New York. Then she meets the manipulative filmmaker next door.“The book began as a love letter to the theater,” Jen Silverman said of her debut novel. “But it’s a love letter where you know the dark side.”Credit…Zackary Canepari for The New York TimesFeb. 10, 2021“Theater only feels like an accomplishment if you’re part of the cult,” a character in Jen Silverman’s new novel, “We Play Ourselves,” says. “The rest of the world thinks we’re all wasting our best years.”The book’s flailing heroine, Cass, an emerging playwright, flees New York after a disastrous opening night. At loose ends in Los Angeles, she drifts toward an unscrupulous filmmaker and the teenage girls in her orbit. Like much of Silverman’s writing, the book balances what Silverman’s colleague, the showrunner Lauren Morelli, praised as a “razor-sharp absurdism alongside a deep reverence for humanity.”Silverman (“The Moors,” “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties”) started the novel in 2018, having temporarily moved to Los Angeles for a stint in Morelli’s “Tales of the City” writers’ room. Most days, she would arrive at her office an hour or two early and sit at her desk, trying to translate theater’s ephemerality into prose. She thinks she could only write the novel, her first, because theater felt so distant, which acted as a kind of deprogramming.“The book began as a love letter to the theater,” she said during a recent video call. “But it’s a love letter where you know the dark side. It’s not an idealized love.”Dana Delany, left, and Chaunté Wayans in Silverman’s “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties,” which had an Off Broadway run in 2018.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn addition to plays, teleplays and now novels, Silverman also writes poems, essays and short stories. (She denies being prolific, which is funny.) Across genres, her style is mutable, her word choice precise, her interest piqued by tales of transformation and how people do and don’t resist it. The director Mike Donahue, a frequent collaborator, said that he admires her work because he never knows the form it will take. “It’s always an entirely new world to try to crack and a new language to understand,” he said.Speaking from the Upper Manhattan apartment that she shares with her partner, the set designer Dane Laffrey, Silverman discussed art, autobiography and what it means for the book to arrive in a world without theater. “It’s hard because I want so desperately to be back in a theater,” she said. “But when I think about hearing somebody three rows behind me cough, like, I feel this cold panic.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How’s your pandemic going?It’s the best pandemic I’ve ever had. I’ve been working on the book. I got galleys for it in April. It felt a little crazy, because the world was on fire and I’m trying to decide between a semicolon and a comma. And I’ve been reading a lot. That’s saving my sanity. Maybe.How did this book come about?I had been writing a different book. But something about being in L.A. and being plunged into a different medium, I longed for theater, like in a visceral, full-body way. And I found that when I would sit down to write, I would just start writing about theater. I ended up calling my editor and saying, “I’m writing a completely different novel. I hope that’s OK.”Do you think that people outside the theater understand theater?What everybody understands is the desire to be transported outside yourself, the desire to experience something larger than you, the desire to be deeply moved. Everybody wants to feel magic in their lives.How autobiographical is the novel?The part that feels really aligned with my personal experience is the way that theater became something so much larger than a career, that it took the place of a spiritual life. Cass longs for it and needs it in a way that was a really personal, active thing for me. But there are a lot of divergences and one of them is Cass’s hunger for visibility and acknowledgment and her desire to be famous. Attention makes me really nervous, to be honest. So I found it really interesting to follow a character who desperately wants to be a public figure and whose sense of self is constructed around what is being said about her.Silverman started the book while working in the writers’ room for the Netflix reboot of “Tales of the City.”Credit…Zackary Canepari for The New York TimesYou’ve written an intense opening night scene. What are opening nights like for you?Like a particular ritual or ceremony that we’ve all agreed to participate in. From the gathering of the crowds to the party. Then there’s a judgment that’s going to come down and what will that judgment be? Depending on whether you’re a writer who reads reviews, that judgment can feel different, but it’s like running a gauntlet.Are the parties fun at least?I’m shy. Crowds scare me. I was not cut out for like a life of extroverts. I try to bring a friend who is an extrovert, and then just watch them thrive in this company of humans.Do you read reviews?I’ve gone back and forth. There was a time when I was like, “I’m not going to read reviews.” Then I was like, “No, there’s a lot to learn, I don’t have to agree with it. But I should learn.” At this point, there are a set of critics that I find really smart, thoughtful, nuanced, complex. I don’t always agree with them. They don’t always say good things about me. But I always want to know what they’re saying.In the novel, the theater world is rife with professional jealousy. Is that your experience?The arts economy in the U.S. is defined by scarcity, because we don’t have government funding. Institutions don’t have a lot of support beyond ticket sales. If you are a woman, queer, an artist of color, it’s very clear that there is a slot and the people who are your community, your collaborators, your family, are also being positioned as your competitors. I don’t think that is good for the arts. I don’t think that is good for the culture.Still, the book makes theater seem very sexy. Is it?It can be. What interests me is that it’s a really intimate place. No matter your role, you are performing essentially a mind meld in a really rarefied, intensified environment. Some of my closest friends, people who are family, are people I met doing shows.Cass has a nemesis in Tara-Jean, a younger playwright. And she falls for a TV star and an elegant director. Are these based on real people? Did you worry that readers would think so?I did have a moment of real anxiety about it. It is very much fiction. I had theater friends read it. A few of them actually called me after and they were like, “I didn’t know you knew this person.” But each of them had a different person. I’ve heard five different theories for who Tara-Jean is.What does it mean to have this novel arrive in a world largely without theater?I have no idea. I thought it was a different world that the novel was going to be entering. For myself, I have dreams almost every other night about theater. Sometimes it’s my play; most of the time it’s somebody else’s play. Sometimes the dream is really good. And sometimes, I have this feeling of like, “Wait a minute, aren’t we in a pandemic? Where’s my mask?” But because my longing for theater is such a big part of my life, I’ve been really enjoying reading about theater. I hope that this book can be that for other people.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Beyond ‘Black Panther’: Afrofuturism Is Booming in Comics

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBeyond ‘Black Panther’: Afrofuturism Is Booming in ComicsA bumper crop of graphic novels and comic books melds African culture and science fiction, with influences as wide-ranging as space travel, Caribbean folklore and Janelle Monáe.“Hardears,” set on a mythical version of Barbados, is among the titles coming from Megascope this year.Credit…Abrams BooksFeb. 7, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWhen Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, it struck the author and illustrator John Jennings as so unprecedented, such a break from American history, that it was like an event from some far-flung future.“Before then, the only time you would see a president who was Black was in a science-fiction movie,” he said in a phone interview last month. Jennings compared it to the sorts of imaginative leaps one finds in the most forward-thinking works categorized as “Afrofuturist.”This year, fans of Afrofuturism will see a bumper crop of comics and graphic novels, including the first offerings of a new imprint devoted to Black speculative fiction and reissues of Afrofuturist titles from comic-book houses like DC and Dark Horse.Afrofuturism, whether in novels, films or music, imagines worlds and futures where the African diaspora and sci-fi intersect. The term was coined by the writer Mark Dery in 1993 and has since been applied to the novels of Octavia Butler (“Kindred”), the musical stylings of the jazz composer Sun Ra and more recently films such as “Get Out” and “Black Panther,” which presented a gorgeously rendered vision of the technologically advanced, vibranium-powered nation of Wakanda.“Afrofuturism isn’t new,” said Ytasha L. Womack, a cultural critic and the author of “Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture,” a primer and history of the movement and aesthetic. “But the plethora of comics and graphic novels that are available is certainly a new experience.”Graphic novels published in January included “After the Rain,” an adaptation of a short story by the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, and “Infinitum,” a tale of African kings and space battles by the New York-based artist Tim Fielder.For “Infinitum,” released by the HarperCollins imprint Amistad, the artist Tim Fielder created Aja Oba, an African king cursed with eternal life. Credit…Harper CollinsThis month marks the long-awaited return of the “Black Panther” comics written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which the National Book Award-winning author began in 2016, as well as the latest installment of “Far Sector,” a series written by N.K. Jemisin and inspired by the actor and musician Janelle Monáe, about the first Black woman to become a member of the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps.Even older works are getting new looks. Black superheroes from the ’90s-era comic company Milestone — including Icon, a space alien who crash lands on Earth in 1839 and takes the form of an African-American man — are finding new readers on DC Universe Infinite, a subscription service that launched in January. Meanwhile, the Oregon-based publisher Dark Horse plans to release the comics of the Nigerian-born writer Roye Okupe, who previously self-published them, including his Afrofuturistic series “E.X.O.,” a superhero tale set in 2025 Nigeria.Comics are particularly well suited for Afrofuturism, Womack said. Many Afrofuturistic narratives are nonlinear, something that comics, with their ability to move and stack panels to play with notions of time, can convey. Comic artists can also employ visual elements such as images from the Black Arts Movement, or figures from Yoruba and Igbo mythology, in ways that aren’t available to prose writers.“Afrofuturism is constantly moving into the future and back into the past, even with the visual references they’re making,” Womack said.John Jennings is the founder and curator of Megascope, a publishing imprint “dedicated to showcasing speculative works by and about people of color.”Credit…Jamil Baldwin for The New York Times“After the Rain” marks the launch of Megascope, an imprint of the publisher Abrams “dedicated to showcasing speculative works by and about people of color.” Its advisory board includes the scholar and author Henry Louis Gates Jr.“Afrofuturism is the catchall,” Jennings, the imprint’s founder and curator, said. “It’s really Black speculative fiction. But that’s sort of a mouthful. I just don’t want people to think that Megascope is only Afrofuturist. We’re dropping horror books, crime fiction, historical fiction.”Okorafor, the author of the imprint’s leadoff title, “After the Rain,” considers her work “Africanfuturism,” a term she coined to describe a subcategory of science fiction similar to Afrofuturism, but more deeply rooted in African culture and history than in the African-American experience. “Nnedi is a very hot author right now,” Jennings said, “so I thought it would be a great kickoff.”In April, the imprint will publish “Hardears,” a fantasy-adventure story set on Jouvert Island, a version of Barbados populated by mythical creatures — giant “moongazers” and shape-shifting “soucouyants” — drawn from Caribbean folklore. “Black Star,” a cat-and-mouse tale of two astronauts stranded on a desolate planet, comes out in May.“After the Rain,” adapted from a short story by Nnedi Okorafor, was published in January.Credit…Abrams BooksA professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside, Jennings has devoted much of his career to Afrofuturism, writing scholarly works about it and leading panels devoted to Afrofuturist comics. He has worked with the artist Stacey Robinson, as the duo “Black Kirby,” to reimagine the work of the Marvel artist Jack Kirby through an African-American lens: for example, “The Unkillable Buck,” based on “The Incredible Hulk.”To Jennings, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an Afrofuturist. “The mountaintop that Dr. King spoke about does not exist in this universe,” Jennings said. “It’s an imaginary construct of what the future could be.”For “Infinitum,” released by the HarperCollins imprint Amistad, Fielder created Aja Oba, a powerful African king cursed with eternal life. Oba travels from Africa to the United States and beyond, witnessing Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, the rise of American slavery, the civil rights movement and (spoiler alert) the death of our solar system.Despite the fleet of spaceships on the cover, much of Fielder’s narrative is set in history. “Afrofuturists do not have the privilege, like general futurists, of just looking forward constantly,” Fielder said. “There’s so much of our work that was ignored, discarded or destroyed that, as an Afrofuturist, I’m forced to work on projects that are based in the past.”“Black Star,” a cat-and-mouse tale of two astronauts stranded on a desolate planet, comes out in May.Credit…Abrams BooksFielder’s immortal hero is also a response to the longstanding cinematic trope of Black men dying before the final credits roll. One of his strongest childhood memories was watching the Black hero’s untimely end in the 1968 horror movie “Night of the Living Dead.” “The white guys are all losing it, and it’s the one brother who keeps his wits about him,” he said. “And then he’s killed. I never forgot that.”“Infinitum” has a distinctly cinematic feel — Fielder’s influences include the “Star Wars” artist Ralph McQuarrie — and the shared references and influences between comic books and movies are likely to continue. After Coates restarts (and ends, after three issues) his run on “Black Panther,” Marvel Studios is expected to release “Black Panther II,” while over at Disney, producers are working with the comic-book company Kugali on “Iwaju,” an animated series set in a futuristic Lagos.Perhaps more than anything, Afrofuturist comics are a means of staking a racially inclusive claim on a multitude of futures. “And just because it’s about a Black subject doesn’t mean it’s just for Black people,” Jennings said. “I love Daredevil, but Marvel would never say: ‘Oh, you know what? This is just for white, poor Irish-American people.’ These stories are for everyone.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Allan Burns, a Creator of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Dies at 85

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAllan Burns, a Creator of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Dies at 85He won Emmys for his work on that show and helped create the spinoffs “Rhoda” and “Lou Grant.” Among his other creations was the cereal mascot Cap’n Crunch.Allan Burns in 2016. He was involved in the creation of TV shows ranging from the acclaimed “Mary Tyler Moore Show” to the much-mocked “My Mother the Car.”Credit…Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesFeb. 3, 2021Updated 4:52 p.m. ETAllan Burns, a leading television writer in the 1970s and ’80s who helped create the groundbreaking hit sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and its dramatic spinoff, “Lou Grant,” died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.His son Matthew said the causes were Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia.“Allan’s range was like nobody’s,” James L. Brooks, his partner in creating Ms. Moore’s series, said in a phone interview. “I don’t think you ever get an absurdist, a legitimate humorist and a feeling person in one package.”In 1969, Mr. Burns and Mr. Brooks were working on “Room 222,” a comedy-drama series set in a Los Angeles high school, when Grant Tinker, Ms. Moore’s husband, asked them to create a series for her. Their first concept was that she play a divorced woman who worked as a reporter for a gossip columnist.“We ran it past Mary and Grant and they absolutely loved it,” Mr. Burns said in an interview for the Television Academy in 2004.But Mr. Burns said that during a meeting he and Mr. Brooks attended at CBS headquarters in Manhattan, a research executive told them there were four things American audiences “won’t tolerate”: New Yorkers, Jews, divorced people and men with mustaches.“What do you do with that?” Mr. Burns said in the interview. “We were dismissed.”Mr. Burns and Mr. Brooks quickly turned the series’ setting into a TV newsroom and Ms. Moore’s character, Mary Richards, into a woman who had never been married and had just ended a long-term relationship.Ed Asner and Mary Tyler Moore in the first episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which Mr. Burns created with James L. Brooks. They later developed the spinoff series “Lou Grant” for Mr. Asner.Credit…CBS, via Getty Images“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — set largely at WJM-TV in Minneapolis and in Mary Richards’s apartment — was praised for Ms. Moore’s portrayal of a single working woman, and for its writing. The series ran from 1970 to 1977 and won 29 Emmy Awards; Mr. Burns shared in five of them.“Allan could channel the character of Mary Richards,” Mr. Brooks said. “He gave us a sense of her by the way he talked about her.”Mr. Burns and Mr. Brooks twice spun off shows from “Mary Tyler Moore” for MTM Enterprises, Ms. Moore and Mr. Tinker’s production company. “Rhoda” followed the ups and downs of Mary’s best friend after she moved back to New York. In “Lou Grant,” which began in 1977, Mary Richards’s tough-yet-comedic newsroom boss, played by Ed Asner, became the determined city editor of a Los Angeles newspaper.In the late 1970s, Mr. Burns started branching out into films. He wrote the screenplay for “A Little Romance” (1979), starring Laurence Olivier and Diane Lane, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and for “Butch and Sundance: The Early Days” (1979), a prequel to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969). He also wrote and directed “Just Between Friends” (1986), with Ms. Moore, Ted Danson and Christine Lahti. It was his only film as a director.Mr. Burns directing Christine Lahti in “Just Between Friends” (1986), which he wrote and directed. It was his only film as a director.Credit…Orion, via Everett CollectionAnd he continued to develop sitcoms. In the 1980s, he created or helped create three short-lived comedy series: “The Duck Factory,” which starred Jim Carrey as an animator; “Eisenhower and Lutz” about a shiftless lawyer played by Scott Bakula, and “FM,” set in a public radio station.In his review of “Eisenhower and Lutz,” John O’Connor of The New York Times wrote of Mr. Burns, “He cannot only whip up generous batches of clever dialogue but is also extremely clever with staging bits of comic business.”Allan Pennington Burns was born on May 18, 1935, in Baltimore. His father, Donald, was a lawyer. His mother, Paulene (Dobbling) Burns, was a homemaker who became a secretary after her husband died when Allan was 9. Three years after that, she and Allan moved to Hawaii, where his older brother, Donald Jr., was stationed at Pearl Harbor.While attending Punahou School in Honolulu, Allan contributed cartoons to The Honolulu Star-Advertiser. He used his drawing talent while studying architecture at the University of Oregon. He dropped out during his sophomore year in 1956 and moved to Los Angeles, where he was hired as a page at NBC and later became a story analyst. After being laid off, he began writing and illustrating greeting cards while trying to find work at an animation studio.He found a job at Jay Ward Productions, which produced “Rocky and His Friends,” the satirical cartoon series about the adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (more formally, Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose). Mr. Burns appeared unannounced at Mr. Ward’s office on Sunset Boulevard, toting his portfolio of greeting cards. Mr. Ward leafed through the cards, chuckled and quickly hired him.Mr. Burns wrote for the moose, the squirrel and other characters on “The Bullwinkle Show.” He also developed the character Cap’n Crunch for Quaker Oats, which had hired Mr. Ward’s company to create a mascot for a new cereal. After he and his colleague Chris Hayward left Mr. Ward in 1963, they created “My Mother the Car,” a sitcom that starred Jerry Van Dyke, with Ann Sothern as the voice of his mother, who has been reincarnated as a vintage Porter automobile and speaks only to him. A notable flop considered by some to be one of TV’s worst shows, it was canceled after one season.In 1967 and 1968, Mr. Burns and Mr. Hayward worked on the only season of the sitcom “He & She,” in which the married couple Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss played a comic book artist and his wife, a social worker. Mr. Burns shared his first Emmy with Mr. Hayward for one episode.After “He & She” was canceled, its producer, Leonard Stern, brought them to the espionage parody, “Get Smart,” another series he produced, then in its fourth season. “Room 222” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” soon followed.In addition to his son Matthew, Mr. Burns is survived by his wife, Joan (Bailey) Burns; another son, Eric; and five grandchildren.Mr. Asner, who worked for Mr. Burns on both “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Lou Grant,” recalled him in an interview as a gentlemanly boss.“He was a guide and mentor, and I loved him,” he said. “Jim Brooks was the bouncing-off-the-walls part of the team, and Allan was the stabilizer.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 75 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      The Many Lives of Steven Yeun

      by

      Credit…Emily Shur for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexFeatureThe Many Lives of Steven YeunIn his new film, “Minari,” the “Walking Dead” star explores the complex layers of the immigrant experience.Credit…Emily Shur for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyFeb. 3, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETListen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.When I was growing up in the ’90s, the only Asian-American writer I knew was Amy Tan. Her thick paperbacks, “The Joy Luck Club” and “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” were on everyone’s bookshelves. I, of course, hated Amy Tan because I considered myself a hard-edged thinker. Her books, which were mostly about industrious, dignified immigrants, embodied a type of minstrelsy in which the Asian-American writer gives the white audience bits of tossed-off Oriental wisdom — “Isn’t hate merely the result of wounded love?” — or a few parables about gold and black tigers or what have you. If I had been asked back then what I planned to write about, I might have gestured toward the Beatniks or cutting down trees in the woods or heroin or jazz, but the only concrete pledge I could have given you was, “I will not write ‘The Joy Luck Club.’”In graduate school, while in an M.F.A. program, I would walk to the bookstore and wander among the fiction shelves, wondering where my novel would fit. This was embarrassing and vain, and although I was certainly both those things, I stage-managed my reverie with some measure of self-aware detachment, performing at being a broke, unpublished author fantasizing about his bright future. In a similar spirit, I would look around for Asian authors who were not Amy Tan. There were also Maxine Hong Kingston and Chang-Rae Lee, but I saw few others. I knew I was supposed to have some feelings about the dearth of published Asian authors, but nothing really came to me. Maybe there just weren’t many Asian people trying to write novels, or maybe they were bad at it. The tug-of-war between my intellect, which was telling me that I might be in for some rough times in publishing, and my American ambition, which was feeding me some version of a sneaker ad — Just Do It — was never much of a contest. The world would yield to me.I was 23 and typing out a novel about a young Korean man who had a brother with Down syndrome whom he cast in various public-service announcements about tolerance. There were parts that were supposed to be a direct parody of “Life Goes On,” the ABC drama that starred Chris Burke as Corky Thatcher. I thought this was very edgy and funny, but I also mixed in occasional ruminations about Koreanness and the burdens of an immigrant childhood. My workshop professor at the time was known as a leader in the field of experimental fiction. One day, he said something about my work that has stuck with me. “This novel will almost certainly be published because it’s about a life we don’t hear about too often,” I recall him saying. “But what we need to do is figure out a way to elevate it so that it’s not just a telling of the way things are for a certain type of person.”Declarations like these were quite common in the workshop. Delivered with great gravity, they drew a line between those of us who had serious literary ambitions and those who just wanted to tell our life stories to the world for a six-figure advance and readings at the 92nd Street Y.I took this professor’s class because I wanted to write difficult, literary fiction. I also considered myself a tough student who could handle criticism. But this particular comment collapsed a barrier in my brain, one that had held back conflicting, shameful thoughts about identity. On a pragmatic level, I was happy to hear that my novel would be published. (It wasn’t.) But his dismissal derailed my confidence that I would break free from Chang-Rae Lee, Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. If this bizarre book I had written could be regarded only as an “immigrant narrative,” would I ever be anything other than a race writer? Did I have any control over how the world would see me and my work?I felt humiliated, of course, but he raised some issues that I have spent the last 20 years thinking about. What, exactly, is a typical immigrant story? And is the transcription of a person’s traumas and “truth” — which in literary terms usually means explaining all the nuances of the immigrant struggle to a presumed white, upper-middle-class audience — the only thing that qualifies as “literature”? And if not, what then clears the bar? And if you consciously try to write the exact sort of work that might appeal to serious literary types, aren’t you just tap dancing for those who never wanted you around in the first place? I never bothered asking this professor, because I was too embarrassed. He means nothing to me now, but since that class, I have never really been able to put these spiraling questions to rest.Please believe me. I am not trying to identify some incident of bias or racism that took place in my creative-writing program. This professor didn’t mean to be cruel with his comment, and his intentions, I’m sure, were to try to better my writing. Nor do I wish to make a point about white privilege and access to Mount Parnassus. I only want to chart the neuroses that result from realizing that your work will almost certainly be read as an outgrowth of your identity, along with the rage, doubt and ambition this brings on.The problem is that the anxieties never go away. Every capitulation to the “white gaze” comes with shame; every stand you take for authenticity triggers its own questions about what constitutes authenticity. And once you feel comfortable with the integrity of your work, someone says something that flips everything around, and you’re right back staring at your own lying face.Credit…Emily Shur for The New York TimesSteven Yeun has a beautiful Zoom face. His laptop camera points slightly up toward his chin, which accents his sharp cheekbones and delicate nose. My face, by comparison, looks like a russet potato with eye slits scooped out with a spoon. By a visual code most Koreans know, Yeun’s pale skin and delicate features connote cosmopolitanism, while my dark, mushier features evoke the rural peasantry. This isn’t a problem, but I did catch myself staring disapprovingly at my image for an embarrassing amount of time during our calls.This was early December, and we were supposed to talk about Yeun’s latest starring role, in “Minari,” a film written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung about a Korean immigrant family that takes up farming in rural Arkansas. Yeun lives in Los Angeles, and the county had just issued a blanket stay-at-home order. We talked about the usual things: his early moves, from Seoul to Saskatchewan to suburban Michigan; his parents, who were shopkeepers in Detroit; his American childhood, which was mostly spent in the Korean church; his acting career, which now includes a seven-year run on “The Walking Dead” — one of the most popular shows in the history of TV — and starring roles in a pair of films by Korean directors, “Okja” and the critically lauded “Burning.”But our conversations kept circling back to this prismatic neurosis, in which you worry about every version of how other people see you. Yeun had been deep in it, especially for this particular role. One of his concerns was the Korean accent he had put on for the film.Yeun with Yeri Han in “Minari” (2020).Credit…Josh Ethan Johnson/A24“I’ll be honest with you,” Yeun said. “I’m still justifying the accent in my own head. I’m sure I’m going to get a lot of people giving me [expletive] about it, saying, ‘That’s not what a Korean dad accent sounds like.’ But the accent I did is how I remember my dad talking. It’s nuanced; it’s a little different, and it has its own twang and inflections. At the start, I kept trying to mimic the standard Korean ahjussi accent, and it felt fraudulent. And I’m OK with it, because this was the accent I chose for this character as opposed to servicing this collective understanding of what a Korean accent is traditionally supposed to sound like.”There’s something I’ve realized over the past decade of writing about race and Asian immigrants. Not everybody cares about our obsessing over belonging and not-belonging and displacement. That presents a problem for writers, artists and filmmakers: Do you take what is in some ways the easiest path and simply cast Asian actors in traditional roles without talking about that choice — a form of colorblindness that merely puts Asian faces on white archetypes? Or do you try your best to document the neuroses because you feel them within yourself — and while you understand that there are certainly worse forms of oppression in this country, there’s some personal or, perhaps, therapeutic value in expressing yourself in front of an audience? But who is the audience? And is there any real value to the narcissistic self-expression of an upwardly mobile immigrant who has nothing else to worry about?There are no easy answers to these questions, but I don’t see them as the invented problems of the immigrant figure who ascends to international stardom, or even to a regular gig writing about Asian-Americans. Should we ignore them because nobody else really cares about them?“Sometimes I wonder if the Asian-American experience is what it’s like when you’re thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you,” Yeun said.And so we talked through that. To start, there’s the whole setup behind the article you’re reading right now, which involves me, a Korean-American writer, assigned to profile a Korean-American actor with the idea that I may be able to excavate some deep, epigenetic code we share and present it to the audience of The New York Times Magazine.“Weird question, but do you even want to talk about all this Korean stuff?” I asked Yeun.“What do you mean?” he replied earnestly. There’s a practiced calm in Yeun’s voice when he speaks, but underlying it is a manic, yet ultimately charming, energy. Almost like a lid trying its very best to stay on top of a bubbling pot.“There must be some part of you that saw a Korean writer was going to be writing a profile of you and knew where all this was going. That we’d be talking about Korean stuff. Isn’t there some part of you that wants to not just be seen as some Korean guy? Like maybe you’d rather just talk about the craft of acting or something?”“Well, as long as we can talk about this stuff on a real level, I don’t mind it,” he said, providing a neat answer to an annoying question. “I get what you’re worried about, though. There’s been some times when an Asian person comes to talk to me or photographs me and I can just tell that all they’re trying to do is fit into some conception of what they think white audiences want out of an Asian-on-Asian thing.” He added: “And that’s even more offensive!”“Horrible,” I said. “I don’t even know if I want to ask you about this stuff. Not because it’s too sensitive, but I also feel compelled to ask you to do it because of the implied nature of the assignment: Hey, Korean, tell us about another Korean.”“I think it’ll be OK,” Yeun said. “Or at least it’ll be therapeutic in some way.”Our talks, I admit, were therapeutic, at least for me. Yeun and I are both immigrants, born in Seoul and then raised in mostly white neighborhoods. But Yeun, in many ways, is much more Korean than I. His father, the second of five sons, worked as an architect in Seoul. During a business trip to Minnesota, he fell in love with the natural beauty of the area and the idea of owning land there, after which he began making preparations to move to that part of the world. At the time, the mayor of Regina, Saskatchewan, had started a program to recruit Korean immigrants. Yeun’s father sold his house in Seoul — homeownership was an uncommon luxury back then — gathered up his family and eventually got on a plane.Yeun, lower right.Credit…From Steven Yeun“I got to show you this photo from back then,” Yeun told me at the start of one of our talks. It’s a kindergarten class picture from the Ruth M. Buck School in Regina. Yeun, his hair in a bowl cut, is seated at the end of the front row, wearing fresh white shoes and a decidedly immigrant-kid sweatshirt. All the other kids line up shoulder to shoulder. Yeun sits a few inches away from his classmates.“You look miserable,” I said.“Totally!” he said. We had been discussing his family’s moves. After a year in Regina, Yeun’s family relocated to Taylor, Mich., where an uncle had opened a clothing store. This uncle started out in America as a runner for cargo ships — when they docked in New York City, he ran on board and offered to fetch things offshore for the crew. At some point, he began selling jeans out of his car on the side. One day, he said to his wife, while holding a map of the United States in front of them, “Wherever my spit goes is where we’ll move.”The spit landed on Michigan, and that’s where the uncle started his small business. The Yeun family followed him there. Young Steven was placed in a new school. He spoke no English and had to be dragged into the classroom. “My parents say that I came home one day and asked them what does ‘don’t cry’ mean,” Yeun said. “So they think those were the first English words I learned because I was hearing it at school all the time.”Yeun remembers being a happy kid in Korea who wandered around shopping centers and stole away from home to play video games in a nearby arcade. “The family put me on this pedestal,” Yeun said. “I was a cute kid with pale skin and light brown hair, and everyone was proud of that. Then we moved to Regina, and I went from feeling that attention to all of a sudden coming to the middle of nowhere and being pulled kicking and screaming into kindergarten.“I’ve looked at this photo so many times,” Yeun said. “If you look at photos of me in Korea, I’m like joyful, man. So happy, like flipping my yellow bucket hat upside down.” Or hanging out with a friend, he added. “And then you see this photo, and I look so terrified.”The family eventually moved up the river to Troy, a Detroit suburb, when Yeun was in fifth grade. His parents opened a beauty-supply store for Black customers in the city and joined one of the several Korean churches in the area. That’s where Yeun spent most of his time — playing sports with kids from church and attending Sunday school.“When I was in school, I was playing within a persona,” Yeun said. “I’m going to be quieter, nicer, friendlier. But when I’m at church, I’m going to be me. When I’m at home, I’m going to be me. And sometimes I think I was putting up such a mask and a wall when I was at school that I had no patience for anything when I was at home.” He let his emotions “build up into this constant anger.”In Detroit at the time, there were just enough Koreans to fill a few church congregations and run a handful of Asian grocery stores. But it wasn’t like Los Angeles or Queens, where the enclave can contain your entire life — where you grow up around your kind, you go to school with your kind, you play youth sports with your kind, you end up dating and marrying your kind. “I remember when I first went to L.A. and saw these totally free Korean dudes,” Yeun said. “They weren’t weighted down with all that same self-consciousness. They even walked differently.”Those were the divisions in his life: quiet and unassuming Steven at school; confident Steven at church, playing in the band and holding his own on the sports fields. And for most of his childhood and his young adulthood, Yeun didn’t overthink these divisions. He existed in both spaces at once.[embedded content]“My perception of race was pretty stunted,” Yeun said. “I was shielded from really understanding what was happening.” He knew, for example, that his parents ran a store that sold beauty products to Black customers in what at the time was a high-crime area in downtown Detroit, but his parents said little about their experience. Today Yeun knows all about the history of the Korean middleman class in Black neighborhoods, but the aphasia of his youth speaks to a difficult, oftentimes obscured reality of immigrant life in America. The first-generation parents start selling beauty products because they met someone at church who runs the supply chains. They then get a loan from an intra-Korean lending group and open up shop. Three decades pass, and nobody’s given much reflection to anything beyond raising the kids and paying the bills. The kids will eventually be able to process their American career through whatever idiom they pick up, whether patriotic pride in entrepreneurship or learned shame for the exploitation they determine took place. Most likely, they will feel both at the same time.After graduating from Kalamazoo College, where he performed in an improv group, Yeun hedged his bets. When he expressed interest in acting, his extended family and friends would suggest he consider moving to Korea, following the path of dozens of gyopos — the Korean word for Koreans who grow up abroad — in film and music who saw no opportunity for themselves in America. But he also applied for a job at Teach for America and prepared to take the LSAT and MCAT. When the teaching job didn’t come through, Yeun moved to Chicago to make the rounds on the comedy/improv circuits for a few years. He moved to Los Angeles when he was 25. Two church friends from Michigan had rented out a condo in Koreatown. Yeun moved in with them and set out on the audition circuit.Five months after arriving in Hollywood, he tried out for the role of Glenn Rhee on “The Walking Dead.” He had just been turned down for a sitcom role — for what he calls a “plucky assistant” — and wasn’t expecting much. To his shock, he got the job.Yeun as Glenn Rhee in Season 6 of “The Walking Dead” (2016).Credit…Gene Page/AMC The success of “The Walking Dead” catapulted Yeun into an odd place. Now he was one of the most recognizable Asian-American actors in the country, perhaps even the world, but the speed of his success and his relatively short time in Hollywood meant that he skipped over the crises of identity, authenticity and frustration that are the birthright of the Asian-American actor.He also took on a strange new role as an inspirational sex symbol for young Asian men, not for his own exploits but for Glenn’s ongoing relationship with a white woman named Maggie, played by Lauren Cohan. An Asian man dating a white woman on the most popular show on TV was seen as not only a marker of progress but also a permission slip for white women to maybe start dating more of us. Yeun understood the excitement but wasn’t sure what to make of the fuss. Should he be proud? Or did he even want that sort of attention at all? “I went through the same journey that I’m sure most Asian-American men go through,” Yeun said, referring to the typical rejections and emasculations that befall so many of us. “It’s just so paper-thin — you’re asking Asian men to be validated by whiteness, and you’re basically saying that I can only feel like a man if I’m with a white woman, which is just a terrible thing to think.”Fair or not, Glenn Rhee, and by extension Yeun, was touted as the Great Asian Hope, the Jeremy Lin of dating white women on TV. “I still get emails from Asian dudes to this day,” Yeun said. “And they’ll say something like, ‘Thank you so much, you’re the first one of us to ever do this.’”Watching his career from afar, especially after “The Walking Dead,” when he branched out into auteur films like Bong Joon Ho’s “Okja” (2017), Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” (2018) and, most notably, Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning” (2018), it seemed as if Yeun was on a different track than other established actors like John Cho, Daniel Dae Kim, Margaret Cho or Sandra Oh. They were all identifiably Asian-American — their roles required the acknowledgment that people who looked like them might also be heading to White Castle or working in a Seattle hospital. Yeun, by contrast, felt as if he came out of some new mold of race and representation, an immigrant actor who could simply just be a success, both in Hollywood and abroad. There was an effortlessness to his career that seemed unencumbered by lengthy conversations about the importance of seeing Asian faces on the screen or the never-ending squabbles about casting white actors in Asian roles.“Do you think some of your success came from the fact that you kind of stumbled into this life-changing role after five months in L.A. and didn’t have to really dwell on all the limitations?” I asked Yeun.He said he had also felt this self-doubt during his career — the feeling of helplessness that comes with realizing that nobody who looks like you has done the things you want to do. “It’s painful to feel that aware,” he said. But he also said he thought there were ways in which that hypersensitivity could become its own prison. “You can lock yourself into those patterns, and then all of a sudden you can’t even see outside of it,” he said. “You don’t see how you might be able to break through the system.” Then he added: “If I see a door is cracked open, I just want to see what’s behind that thing. And I just go through it. And I get burned a lot, too, but whatever.”In late September of 2017, Yeun flew to Korea to film “Burning,” a psychological thriller about a young, struggling writer named Lee Jongsu who falls in love with Shin Haemi, a woman from the same rural village. At the start of the film, Haemi asks Jongsu to look after her cat before she travels to Africa. When she returns, she’s accompanied by Yeun’s character, a shifty playboy named Ben. Lee Chang-dong, the film’s director, doesn’t reveal much about Ben, but we know that he’s rich, doesn’t really have a job that he can explain and seems to exist in a cosmopolitan, aggressively Western layer of the Korean elite. But Ben, despite his Americanized name, is not a gyopo. He is a full-blooded Korean sociopath. “I think Lee Chang-dong thought my body will do one type of acting while my words did another type of acting,” Yeun said. “And that disconnect would create this strange, unimaginable character.”Unlike many Asian immigrants his age, who respond to their parents in English when they talk in their native language, Yeun had always spoken Korean in the home. He was already fluent enough, but Lee wanted that dissonance — the Korean character flowing through a famous American body — to be fully actualized. The five months Yeun spent shooting the film in Seoul allowed him to imagine what life would be like if his parents had never immigrated to North America, or perhaps if he had decided to pull up stakes and pursue a career in Korean film. He certainly wouldn’t have been the first do this — Korean dramas, movies and K-pop have their fair share of gyopos.But his time in Seoul convinced him that America was his home. Early during his stay there, he saw a director friend’s childhood photo on Instagram. He was dressed in a karate costume and wore a shirt emblazoned with the Japanese Rising Sun flag, which in Korea is comparable to the Confederate flag in the United States. Impulsively, Yeun liked the photo, which set off a maelstrom of outrage. In the end, he was forced to issue an apology. This was unpleasant, but Yeun also realized that a life and career in Korea wouldn’t actually break him out of the prismatic neurosis.“When I’m here in America, I can feel this constant protest, like, I’m not just a Korean person, I’m an American person. And then you go over to Korea and they only look at you as an American, or, if you’re lucky, like a Korean person that might have lost their way or is disconnected from their whole thing. That’s true, but I’m also a version of a Korean person. You know what I mean? Like, I can’t change my DNA. I have the same epigenetic information passed down through the blood we share. Do I know all the same things as Koreans who grew up in Korea? No, because I don’t live there and because I’m not indoctrinated by that society.”[embedded content]Yeun paused. I told him this was more or less what my father said when I told him I wanted to move to Korea during the early days of the pandemic. The people he and my mother left in 1979 would never accept me, my daughter or my wife. Yeun and I talked about it for a bit, and he conceded that perhaps being a famous movie star might intensify these dynamics. We were both sure that most Korean people would not have the time or the bandwidth to care deeply about the gyopos in their midst, but we also agreed that we, the gyopos, would always be questioning what people were thinking.I told Yeun that I had been struck by what he said about how being Asian-American meant that you were constantly thinking about everyone else, but nobody was ever thinking about you. But maybe his kids might be able to grow up without this debilitating awareness?“I don’t want to eliminate all of that questioning for them,” Yeun said. “But I hope they’ll be more unlocked than me and less traumatized. But for me, the [expletive] nature of that statement is that it implies a lack of agency about it, like our brains are just hard-wired to consider others. I think that’s probably still true of me and our generation, but I don’t think it’s, like, fate.”I’m familiar with what he’s talking about. It feels like a light but constant tinnitus; you’re aware that it’s there, but you also figure out ways to tune it out and just kind of get on with your life. I know, for example, that being a “race writer” comes with assumptions about the true literary value of your work, which then makes you want to write about anything else, which then raises those recurring questions about who is steering the ship. All that is exhausting and counterproductive. Better to just be Amy Tan and accept the country and your role in it for what they are. Today I write almost entirely about race and identity, although not exactly by choice. My job — even what you’re reading now — is part of my career of explaining Asian-Americans to white people. It’s fine. But even if it weren’t, what am I going to do about it?When the trailer for “Minari” appeared online this past fall, I texted the link to a Korean friend. She said she wasn’t sure she could watch the film because those two minutes seemed almost too accurate, too close to some memories she had left interred. When I went online to read others’ reactions, I saw similar responses, not only from Asian-Americans but also from Latino and Black immigrants as well. I understood where they were coming from. The trailer suggested an intimacy that made me deeply uncomfortable. Yeun plays a struggling young father who reminded me of a version of my own father that I had shelved away. What was life like for him as a young immigrant with two children? I witnessed his frustrations, of course, but I can only see them today through an inoculating hindsight that tells me that while our situation might have presented us with difficulties, our struggles matter less than other struggles. This might be a sensible tack for me to take — I speak perfect English and live comfortably — but it has wiped away the memories of my father when we arrived stateside. What was he thinking?At its core, “Minari” is a straightforward and exceedingly honest movie about a Korean-American immigrant family that moves from Los Angeles to Arkansas. Jacob Yi, the patriarch played by Yeun, grows tired of his work as a chicken sexer, a job that mostly entails taking baskets of newborn chicks and sorting them by gender. He wants to start a big farm that will supply produce to the thousands of Koreans who are immigrating to the United States. Jacob’s wife, Monica, played by Yeri Han, has reservations about her husband’s ambitions, but she goes along as he sows, irrigates and plows a cursed plot of land.Yeun’s character is a departure from any of his previous roles. But Yeun also sees it as the culminating point in his career to date. If he never had to hone his Korean for “Burning,” for example, he might not have been able to passably play a native Korean speaker struggling with his English. It also presented Yeun with an opportunity to reflect on his own father.“My dad had a tough time, I think.” Yeun said. “As the patriarch, I’m sure he had to go out and touch the world a little bit more, which made him very distrusting of people. As a Korean man, it had to be hard to come from a collectivist country that, you know, predicates your worth on who you are and what position you hold, to a place that also has those types of hierarchies but you just don’t know what they are.”Yeun continued: “He got really frustrated. He couldn’t trust the system to acknowledge him. I remember we were at a Murray’s auto shop, and he tried to return a hose that didn’t work for his car. And they wouldn’t let him return it.” The people at the store told him they didn’t sell that product, and Yeun’s father was sure they were lying. “And he couldn’t speak the language so well. So, he made a huge scene, instead, and threw the hose on the ground. And then I just remember as a kid being like, Well, my dad freaked out in this Murray’s auto shop.”Jacob Yi spends much of “Minari” in a state of quiet rage. He doesn’t understand why his crops aren’t growing; he doesn’t understand why Monica wants to move back to Los Angeles or why she might want to be around more Korean people. He doesn’t understand why his family doesn’t fully and enthusiastically support his farm dreams.“Minari” premiered at Sundance and took home the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and an audience award. Yeun’s father sat next to him during the screening, which unnerved Yeun. “There’s such a rift between generations because of the communication barrier, and because of a cultural barrier,” he said. But with this film, what he and the director were trying to tell their parents was: “I’m a father. And now I understand what you had to go through.”Yeun began to tear up as he told this to me. “Every time I talk about it, I’m just, like, crying about it, you know? Because I think my dad felt seen.” And, Yeun added, his father “was able to communicate that back to me through a look.” They started to close the gap. “That took 36 years to bridge.”“We, the second generation, are pretty indoctrinated,” Yeun told me. “The American gaze is also part of us, where we remember our parents, and collectively talk about our parents in the ways that we saw them from our vantage point.” He went on: “Most families are stymied from ever even touching those deep emotional things together.”Credit…Emily Shur for The New York Times“Minari” is loosely autobiographical, as most quiet immigrant films are. The director, Lee Isaac Chung, grew up in Arkansas, where his parents worked as chicken sexers. But Chung wanted to avoid projecting the child’s gaze onto his parents. While the film stars a young boy named David, played by Alan Kim and presumably modeled on Chung, his film mostly seems unconcerned with his childhood perspective and how he feels about his place in the rural South. This was intentional. “I felt like I needed to get it away from the memoir and autobiography space,” Chung told me. “I didn’t want to bring attention to myself in the directing. I didn’t want to work out my daddy issues in the script.” Jacob and Monica, Chung said, are just familiar movie characters, not embodiments of how he feels about Asian-American identity. We don’t get an impassioned speech from Jacob about race and dignity and shared humanity.I don’t think it’s possible to get to this unvarnished, honest place without first untangling everything that might make you lie about your parents. “Minari,” in other words, is not what I call dignity porn, the type of story that takes the life of a seemingly oppressed person, excavates all the differences compared with the dominant culture and then seeks to hold these up in a soft, humanizing light. Look, the dignity porno will say: Kimchi isn’t weird. Ergo, we are as human as you. “I didn’t want it to feel like a story that makes us feel bad for Jacob or impressed with his life,” Chung said. “I was aware of what the expectations for a film like this might be, and my only hope was to subvert them a bit.”Chung continued: “Explaining myself to white people isn’t something I want to do.” He wanted to make something that would show his daughter their family’s American roots. “Something that got at spiritual matters and what it means to be a human being. What it means to be a man. What it feels like to be a failure.”Most dignity porn centers on some racist episode that shatters the lives of the protagonists. Chung’s movie does include white people and some scenes of racial discomfort, but he does not vilify anyone, nor does he try to make some statement about how racism or xenophobia or any other form of oppression weigh down the lives of these striving people. The white boy who stares at David in church ultimately becomes his friend. There’s no scene of redemption or mutual understanding — in the worst of the quiet immigrant films, these reckonings come when the white person realizes that he does, in fact, see the other as human — only the inevitability of two boys in proximity eventually growing to like each other. And Chung’s light touch in these scenes, without the tears or hysterics, resembles the way so many new immigrants experience racism. Often, you might not even know it’s happening. And even if you do, you lack the time and the context to turn it into a crying matter.While watching the film, I was reminded of watching “The Simpsons” with my father as he gamely tried to follow the show’s thicket of references. “I don’t understand the humor,” he told me once with great disappointment. “I haven’t seen these movies they’re talking about.”This was how my parents experienced so many aspects of American life. They mostly couldn’t pick up on what their children might call “microaggressions” or any of the veiled comments and exclusions. They generally kept the faith — rightfully, I believe — that a majority of the people who asked questions about where they were from, or what they ate, or told them about a great Korean-barbecue restaurant they had visited, were acting out of curiosity, even kindness. This, of course, did not mean our lives were free from prejudice, but rather that part of the immigrant optimism about the new country comes out of a deep unfamiliarity with the subtle ways people let it be known that the immigrants’ dreams aren’t particularly welcome. We children are aware of all this, of course, because we are American.[embedded content]Why is it so hard for us to see them without first laundering them through our own need for identity, belonging and progress? My parents arrived in Oregon in 1979, bought a used Dodge Dart Swinger and immediately began hiking around the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. I see this period in the soft, sun-glazed light of the old Japanese camera they lugged around. Every summit vista, every shot of the lodge at Yellowstone, every poorly composed photo of the apartment where I would spend the first two years of my life looks as if it were bathed in honey. These images float, pleasantly, and suggest a happier time before I show up as a fat-cheeked, almost formless baby. “Minari,” which is set in the 1980s, is shot in a similar light, with the same American cars and the same lack of comprehension: We don’t know exactly why we are here, but here we are. But while my fantasies about my parents at my age are rooted in a need to see them as happy and ambitious, Chung’s film, as animated through Yeun’s acting, shows them for who they were. Perhaps that’s the only way out — to paint the picture of our parents before our memories of ourselves arrive; to show them as strangers to us, before the context settled in. And if we can strip them down and see them without the weight of identity and its spiraling neuroses, perhaps we can also see a better version of ourselves.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Resident Artists Are Named

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyKehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Resident Artists Are NamedMembers of the global group share the painter’s passion for using art to explore social change.Kehinde Wiley at the Black Rock artist residence he founded in Dakar, Senegal, in 2019. It is welcoming its second group of artists, filmmakers and writers from around the world. Hilary Balu’s “Voyage vers Mars 5,” explores the flight of populations to other continents.Credit…Jane Hahn for The New York TimesFeb. 2, 2021Updated 2:59 p.m. ETA Congolese painter whose art reflects how globalization and consumerism have transformed African society. A Nigerian-American filmmaker whose work focuses on cultures and experiences of Africans and the diaspora. A visual activist from Texas who forces her viewers to confront issues that are deemed difficult to tackle.These are among the 16 artists selected for the 2021 residency at Black Rock Senegal, the seaside studio in the West African capital city of Dakar belonging to Kehinde Wiley, the painter best known for his portrait of former President Barack Obama.The artists, who will spend several weeks at the lavish studio along a volcanic-rock-lined shore, express themselves in a variety of formats and come from across the globe. But many in this year’s group share Wiley’s passion for using art to explore social change.His most recent works include the stained glass fresco of breakdancers in the Moynihan Train Hall and his “Rumors of War” statue in Richmond, Va. — a Black man with ponytailed dreadlocks on horseback in the style of monuments to Confederate war generals. Wiley is not part of the Black Rock selection committee, which aims to consider the class of artists as a whole and tries to pick a diverse group of residents, including personal identities and nationalities and the medium they work in.Among the residents is Hilary Balu, from Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, whose recent brightly colored yet sorrowful series “Voyage vers Mars” explores the tragedy of contemporary migration — in this case the flight of a population to another continent, like astronauts leaving a destroyed earth for another planet.Hilary Balu’s “Voyage vers Mars 5,” explores the flight of populations to other continents.Credit…MAGNIN-AAbbesi Akhamie, who lives in Washington, is a Nigerian-American writer, director and producer whose latest short film, ​“The Couple Next Door” from last year, premiered at the Aspen Shortsfest and won the Audience Choice Award at the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival.Irene Antonia Diane Reece from Houston uses her family archives as a form of activism and liberation, with some of her work exploring family history and racial identity.Other residents include Delali Ayivor, a Ghanaian-American writer; Mbali Dhlamini, a multidisciplinary artist, and Arinze Ifeakandu, a Nigerian writer who recently graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and writes about queer male intimacy. The residents will each spend several weeks at a time in the studio, with coronavirus restrictions in place, in staggered stages, beginning this month.Some might overlap with Wiley, who has spent much of the past year in Dakar, using the global pandemic as an opportunity to pause and paint, sometimes working with Black Rock residents who have helped him in his work.“I’m learning to view, discuss, and critique art that often depicts the Black body from a range of perspectives that span the globe,” Wiley said in an email exchange. “There’s an unending variety of rubrics through which artists are pushing the possibilities of representation.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More