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      Behind ‘Oppenheimer,’ a Prizewinning Biography 25 Years in the Making

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      Martin Sherwin struck the deal and dove into the research. But it was only when Kai Bird joined as a collaborator that “American Prometheus” came to be.Martin Sherwin was hardly your classic blocked writer. Outgoing, funny, and athletic, he is described by those who knew him as the opposite of neurotic.But by the late 1990s, he had to admit he was stuck. Sherwin, a history professor and the author of one previous book, had agreed to write a full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer two decades earlier. Now he wondered if he would ever finish it. He’d done plenty of research — an extraordinary amount, actually, amassing some 50,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, letters, diaries, declassified documents and F.B.I. dossiers, stored in seemingly endless boxes in his basement, attic and office. But he’d barely written a word.Sherwin had originally tried to turn the project down, his wife remembered, telling his editor, Angus Cameron, that he didn’t think he was seasoned enough to take on such a consequential subject as Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb. But Cameron, who had published Sherwin’s first book at Knopf — and who, like Oppenheimer, had been a victim of McCarthyism — insisted.So on March 13, 1980, Sherwin signed a $70,000 contract with Knopf for the project. Paid half to get started, he expected to finish it in five years.In the end, the book took 25 years to write — and Sherwin didn’t do it alone.When Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” is released on July 21, it will be the first time many younger Americans encounter the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But that film stands on the shoulders of the exhaustive and exhilarating 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning biography called “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” co-written by Sherwin and Kai Bird.Knopf published this masterwork in 2005. But it was only thanks to a rare collaboration between two indefatigable writers — and a deep friendship, built around a shared dedication to the art of biography as a life’s work — that “American Prometheus” got done at all.Cillian Murphy, center, as the title character in “Oppenheimer,” which was written and directed by Christopher Nolan.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures, via Associated PressOPPENHEIMER would have been a daunting subject for any biographer.A public intellectual with a flair for the dramatic, he directed the top-secret lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, taking the atomic bomb from theoretical possibility to terrifying reality in an impossibly short timeline. Later he emerged as a kind of philosopher king of the postwar nuclear era, publicly opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb and becoming a symbol both of America’s technological genius and of its conscience.That stance made Oppenheimer a target in the McCarthy era, spurring his enemies to paint him as a Communist sympathizer. He was stripped of his security clearance during a 1954 hearing convened by the Atomic Energy Commission. He lived the rest of his life diminished, and died at 62 in 1967, in Princeton, New Jersey.When Sherwin began interviewing people there who had known him, he was taken aback by the intensity of their feelings. Physicists, and the widows of physicists, were still angry for the casual neglect Oppenheimer had shown to his family.Yet after Sherwin moved his own family to Boston for a job at Tufts University, he and his wife Susan met Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists, who admitted with embarrassment that their years working under Oppenheimer on the bomb were some of the happiest of their lives.Among the scores of people Sherwin also interviewed were Haakon Chevalier, Oppenheimer’s onetime best friend whose Communist ties in part formed the basis of the inquisition against him, and Edward Teller, whose testimony at the 1954 hearing helped end his career.Published in 2005, the book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for biography.Naum Kazhdan/The New York TimesOppenheimer’s son Peter refused a formal interview, so Sherwin brought his family to the Pecos Wilderness near Santa Fe, saddled up a horse and rode to the Oppenheimers’ rustic cabin, wrangling a chance to talk to the scientist’s son as the two men built a fence. “Marty never thought he was a great interviewer,” said Susan Sherwin, who accompanied him on many research trips, and survives him. But he had a knack for connecting with people.Sherwin’s deadline came and went. His editor retired, and he did his best to avoid his new one. There was always another person to interview, or another document to read.The unfinished book became a running joke in the Sherwin household.“We had this New Yorker cartoon on our refrigerator my entire childhood,” his son Alex remembered. “It’s a guy at a typewriter, and he’s surrounded by stacks of papers. His wife is in the distance, in the threshold of the door to his office. And he says, ‘Finish it? Why would I want to finish it?’”KAI BIRD, A FORMER associate editor at The Nation, needed a job. It was 1999, and while Bird had written a couple of modestly successful biographies, as a 48-year-old historian without a Ph.D. he was underqualified for a tenure-track university position and overqualified for nearly everything else. His wife, Susan Goldmark, who held a lucrative job at the World Bank, was getting tired of being the main breadwinner.Bird was unsuccessfully applying for jobs at newspapers when he heard from an old friend. Sherwin took Bird out to dinner, and suggested they join forces on Oppenheimer.They had known each other for years, and their friendship had solidified in the mid-1990s, when Bird included Sherwin’s essays in a volume about the controversy surrounding a planned Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb.A 1957 photo of Oppenheimer at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study.John Rooney/Associated PressBut there was one complication. “My first book started out as a collaboration with my best friend,” the writer Max Holland, Bird said, “and eight years later ended in divorce.” Things broke down, in part, over disagreements about how much research was enough.The episode had been painful. Never again, his wife reminded him.“I told Marty, ‘No, I can’t. I like you too much,’ ” Bird said.So began a yearlong charm campaign to convince Bird, but especially Goldmark, that this time would be different. “I was watching very carefully, looking at them interacting and finishing each other’s sentences the way couples sometimes do,” she recalled. “They were both so cute.”Finally, with everyone on board, Gail Ross, Bird’s agent, negotiated a new contract with Knopf, which agreed to pay the pair an additional $290,000 to finish the book.Sherwin cautioned Bird that there were gaps in his research. But soon “untold numbers of boxes” started showing up at Bird’s home, according to his wife. As Bird began to sift through everything, he recognized how painstakingly detailed and dizzyingly broad Sherwin’s research was. “There were no gaps,” Bird remembered.It was time to write. Bird started at the beginning.“I wrote a draft of the early childhood years,” he said, “and Marty took it and rewrote it.” Sherwin sent the revision back to Bird, who was impressed. “He knew exactly what was missing in the anecdotes,” Bird said.Kai Bird, left, and Martin J. Sherwin in 2006, showing off a copy of their long-in-the-making book “American Prometheus.”Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressTheir process took shape: Bird would pore over the research, synthesize it, and produce a draft which he’d send to Sherwin, who would recognize what was missing, edit and rewrite, and return the copy to Bird. Soon Sherwin was drafting as well. “We wrote furiously for four years,” Bird said.Sherwin always knew that the hearing that stripped Oppenheimer of his clearance would be the “epicenter” of the biography, Bird said. They argued about what the evidence might suggest, but never about style, process, or the shape of the book itself. “It became,” Susan Sherwin said, “almost a magical thing.”By fall 2004, nearly 25 years after Knopf committed to the project, the manuscript was almost ready. Bird and Sherwin’s editor Ann Close vetoed “Oppie,” the pair’s working title. A scramble ensued, until something came to Goldmark late at night: “Prometheus … fire … the bomb is this fire. And you could put ‘American’ there.’ ”Bird dismissed “American Prometheus” as too obscure, until Sherwin called the next morning to tell him that a friend, the biographer Ronald Steel, had suggested the same title over dinner the night before. “I’m in big trouble,” said Bird. His wife felt vindicated.Bird said that his collaborator would have been pleased by “Oppenheimer.” Michael Avedon/AugustOn April 5, 2005, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” was published to enormous acclaim. The Boston Globe raved that it “stands as an Everest among the mountains of books on the bomb project and Oppenheimer, and is an achievement not likely to be surpassed or equaled.”Among its numerous accolades was the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Bird always thought the book had an outside shot at the prize, but Sherwin had been skeptical. “He always thought I was an incorrigible optimist. So he was genuinely astonished,” Bird would later say. “He was, in fact, sweetly elated.”BY THE TIME the collaborators learned in September 2021 that Christopher Nolan planned to turn “American Prometheus” into a film, Marty Sherwin was dying of cancer.The pair had read several unmade scripts based on their book over the years, so Sherwin was doubtful of its chances in Hollywood. He was too sick to join, but Bird and Goldmark met Nolan at a boutique hotel in Greenwich Village. Bird reported to Sherwin in person afterward that, with Nolan as writer and director, their work was in good hands.“Oppenheimer’s story is one of the most dramatic and complex that I’ve ever encountered,” Nolan said recently. “I don’t think I ever would have taken this on without Kai and Martin’s book.” (Anticipation for the movie has put the biography on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction paperbacks.)A still from the movie shows Murphy at Los Alamos, where one of the authors got to visit the set.Universal PicturesOn Oct. 6, 2021, Bird received word that his friend had died at the age of 84.Sherwin “would have been deeply pleased,” by the film’s accuracy, Bird said after seeing the film for the first time. “I think he would have appreciated what an artistic achievement it is.”He recalled the day he and his wife spent a few hours on the film’s set in Los Alamos. The crew was filming in Oppenheimer’s original cabin, now painstakingly restored. Bird watched Cillian Murphy do take after take as Oppenheimer, astonished at the actor’s resemblance to the subject he’d spent years studying.Finally, there was a break in filming, and Murphy walked over to introduce himself. As the actor approached — dressed in Oppenheimer’s brown, baggy 1940s-era suit and wide tie — Bird couldn’t help himself.“Dr. Oppenheimer!” he shouted. “I’ve been waiting decades to meet you!”Bird said Murphy just laughed. “We’ve all been reading your book,” the actor told him. “It’s mandatory reading around here.” More

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      Review: ‘In the Company of Rose’ Is a Pleasant Portrait

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      When the theater and film director James Lapine first met Rose Styron, he knew her as William Styron’s widow. He learned there was a lot more to her.In 2014, the film and theater director James Lapine was invited to a Martha’s Vineyard lunch with the writer Rose Styron, the widow of the novelist William Styron (“The Confessions of Nat Turner,” “Sophie’s Choice”). At the lunch, Lapine proceeded to record an impromptu interview with Rose. Unlike lesser mortals, Lapine (a protean force in American arts who wrote the book for and directed Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” among other things) has the means to spin a feature film out of such an encounter.Composed of archival footage and interviews done with more polished equipment over the years, “In the Company of Rose” is a pleasant portrait of an admittedly rarefied world, but one that doesn’t transcend its vanity-project origins. Perhaps it doesn’t intend to. As Lapine, who narrates the film, admits, “I’ve often jumped into projects without really knowing what I was doing.” In her account of her life, Rose, too, seems to have moved forward without too much calculation. She recalls being unimpressed by Styron at a reading for his first novel, “Lie Down In Darkness,” they only clicked later, in Rome, where Rose was studying and William was living on a fellowship.Rose is kind, cheerful, frank, and she has a knack for telling stories laden with famous figures without sounding as if she’s name-dropping. She typed Styron’s work for nearly a decade. On becoming interested in human rights, she traveled for Amnesty International. She says that she and her husband resembled a stereotypically 1950s American couple, and that they managed their marriage “mainly by not talking about things, instead of talking about them.” But when Styron had depression in the 1980s she was a stalwart helpmate in his recovery, and encouraged him to write “Darkness Visible,” the memoir that has become one of his best known works. As existences in rarefied worlds go, this one plays as well-lived.In the Company of RoseNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Cormac McCarthy, Author of ‘The Road’ and ‘No Country for Old Men,’ Dead at 89

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      “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” were among his acclaimed books that explore a bleak world of violence and outsiders.Cormac McCarthy, the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of “All the Pretty Horses” and the apocalyptic minimalism of “The Road,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89. Knopf, his publisher, said in a statement that his son John had confirmed the death. Mr. McCarthy’s fiction took a dark view of the human condition and was often macabre. He decorated his novels with scalpings, beheadings, arson, rape, incest, necrophilia and cannibalism. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told The New York Times magazine in 1992 in a rare interview. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”His characters were outsiders, like him. He lived quietly and determinately outside the literary mainstream. While not quite as reclusive as Thomas Pynchon, Mr. McCarthy gave no readings and no blurbs for the jackets of other writers’ books. He never committed journalism or taught writing. He granted only a handful of interviews.The mainstream, however, eventually came to him. “All the Pretty Horses,” a reflective western that cut against the grain of his previous work, won a National Book Award in 1992, and “The Road” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Both were made into films, as was Mr. McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men,” which won the Academy Award for best picture in 2008.Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in the 2007 film adaptation of “No Country for Old Men,” which won the Academy Award for best picture.Richard Foreman/Miramax Films and Paramount VantageThat film, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, gave the world the indelible image of Javier Bardem as Mr. McCarthy’s nihilistic hit man Anton Chigurh, dispatching his victims with a pneumatic bolt gun meant for cattle.Mr. McCarthy had in recent years been discussed as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, and called Mr. McCarthy’s novel “Blood Meridian” (1985), a bad dream of a Western, “the greatest single book since Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying.’”Saul Bellow noted Mr. McCarthy’s “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.”Acclaim for Mr. McCarthy’s work was not universal, however. Some critics found his novels portentous and self-consciously masculine. There are few notable women in his work.Writing in The New Yorker in 2005, James Wood praised Mr. McCarthy as “a colossally gifted writer” and “one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner.”But Mr. Wood accused Mr. McCarthy of writing sentences that sometimes veered “close to nonsense,” of “appearing to relish the violence he so lavishly records,” and of being hostile to intellectual consciousness.The language and tone of Mr. McCarthy’s novels changed markedly over the decades. Among academics and Mr. McCarthy’s legion of obsessive readers, the essential question about his oeuvre has long been: What’s better, early McCarthy or late?Mr. McCarthy in 1965 when he published his first novel, “The Orchard Keeper.” It was a bleak fable set in the Appalachian South.Joe BlackwellHis first four novels — “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), “Outer Dark” (1968), “Child of God” (1973) and “Suttree” (1979) — are bleak fables, set in the Appalachian South, related in tangled prose that owes an acknowledged debt to William Faulkner. Indeed, the editor of Mr. McCarthy’s first five books, Albert Erskine, of Random House, had been Faulkner’s last editor.These early novels could be carnivalesque in their humor. In “Suttree,” for example, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field. The farmer sues, alleging bestiality, but the man later brags, “My lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast.”Mr. McCarthy’s later period began in earnest with “All the Pretty Horses,” the first volume in his Border Trilogy, which includes the novels “The Crossing” (1994) and “Cities of the Plain” (1998). These novels put on display his powerful and intuitive sense of the American landscape. His prose was now rich but austere, shorn of most punctuation. It owed more to Hemingway than to Faulkner. The location in his fiction had shifted as well, to the desert Southwest.The elegiac quality of “All the Pretty Horses,” with its existential cowboys, surprised some of his admirers. One of Mr. McCarthy’s friends, the novelist Leslie Garrett, was quoted as remarking about it, “Cormac finally has succeeded in writing a book that won’t offend anybody.”“All the Pretty Horses” attracted a vast audience, and was made into a film in 2000 starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz. It was not merely Mr. McCarthy’s first best seller; it was his first novel to sell many copies at all. None of his previous books had by then sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover.“All the Pretty Horses,” a reflective Western, won a National Book Award in 1992 and was adapted for film in 2000.Matt Damon in a scene from the 2000 film “All the Pretty Horses.” The book was Mr. McCarthy’s first best seller.Van Redin/Columbia – TriStar, via Getty ImagesEarly Life in TennesseeHe was born Charles McCarthy on July 20, 1933, in Providence, R.I., the third of six children and the oldest son born to Charles J. and the Gladys (McGrail) McCarthy. Within a few years the family moved to Knoxville, Tenn., where Mr. McCarthy’s father, who had graduated from Yale Law School, worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority.According to one account, Mr. McCarthy adopted the name Cormac, a family nickname, to avoid associations with Charlie McCarthy, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy. By another account, given on a website devoted to Mr. McCarthy, he renamed himself Cormac after an Irish king. Still another has it that Mr. McCarthy’s family had legally changed his name to the Gaelic equivalent of “son of Charles.”The McCarthy family was affluent for Knoxville, its large white house staffed with maids. The young Mr. McCarthy was drawn, however, to the city’s seedier side. “I felt earlier on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen,” he told the Times Magazine. “I hated school from the day I set foot in it.”He attended Knoxville’s Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee, where he studied physics and engineering in 1951 and 1952. He joined the Air Force in 1953 and served four years, several of them stationed in Alaska. To quell his boredom, he said, “I read a lot of books very quickly.”Mr. McCarthy returned to the University of Tennessee from 1957 to 1959. He learned that he had a knack for language, he once said, after a professor asked him read a collection of 18th-century essays and repunctuate them for a textbook. He began to publish short stories in the student literary magazine. He never graduated, however, and he moved to Chicago, where he worked in an auto-parts warehouse while writing his first novel.He sent the manuscript of that novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” to Random House, he said, because “it was the only publisher I’d heard of.”Reviewing “The Orchard Keeper” in The Times in 1965, Orville Prescott called it “impressive” but noted that Mr. McCarthy deployed “so many of Faulkner’s literary devices and mannerisms that he half-submerges his own talents beneath a flood of imitation.”Mr. McCarthy wrote for many years in relative obscurity and privation. After his first marriage, to a fellow University of Tennessee student named Lee Holleman, ended in divorce, he married Anne DeLisle, an English pop singer, in 1966. The couple lived for nearly eight years in a dairy barn outside Knoxville.“We lived in total poverty,” Ms. DeLisle once said. “We were bathing in the lake.” She added: “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”Mr. McCarthy’s second novel, “Outer Dark,” was about a woman who bears her brother’s baby; he leaves it in the woods to die. Guy Davenport, writing in The Times Book Review in 1968, praised its language as “compounded of Appalachian phrases as plain and as functional as an ax.”His third novel, “Child of God,” was about a cave-dwelling mass murderer and necrophiliac. Reviewing it at length in The New Yorker, the author and child psychiatrist Robert Coles called Mr. McCarthy a “novelist of religious feeling” and likened him to the classical Greek dramatists.Mr. McCarthy moved to El Paso in 1976 after separating from Ms. DeLisle. The couple later divorced. The settings of his novels soon changed as well.His last of his early novels to be set in the South, “Suttree” (1979), was his most autobiographical. It is set among the fringe characters who populated Knoxville’s waterfront, a milieu he knew intimately. “I was always attracted to people who enjoyed a perilous lifestyle,” Mr. McCarthy once said.Mr. McCarthy in 1979, the year “Suttree” was published. In the book, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field.Dan MooreSome saw the novel as a farewell to his raucous old life. He stopped drinking before the novel was published. “The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,” he said. “If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.”Mr. McCarthy was briefly living in a motel in Knoxville when he learned, in 1981, that he had won a MacArthur fellowship. (In praise of his many mailing addresses, he commented: “Three moves is as good as a fire.”)‘A Legion of Horribles’The MacArthur money gave him the time to write “Blood Meridian,” which many critics feel is his finest book. A surreal and blood-drenched anti-western about a gang of scalp hunters and outlaws in Texas and Mexico, the book features among its central characters a crazed, hairless, brilliant, seven-foot tall albino judge who put many readers in mind of Melville’s Captain Ahab.The book delineated what he called “a legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners.”After the retirement of Mr. Erskine, his longtime editor, Mr. McCarthy moved from Random House to Alfred A. Knopf and acquired a new editor, Gary Fisketjon, who also worked with Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, among other writers. It was before the release of “All the Pretty Horses” in 1992 that Mr. McCarthy agreed to talk to The Times Magazine for his first major interview.The author of the article, Richard B. Woodward, noted at the time that Mr. McCarthy “cuts his own hair, eats his meals off a hot plate or in cafeterias and does his wash at the Laundromat.”In that interview, Mr. McCarthy named the “good writers” as Melville, Dostoyevsky and Faulkner, a list that omitted writers who, as he put it, don’t “deal with issues of life and death.” About Proust and Henry James, he commented: “I don’t understand them. To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange.”“All the Pretty Horses” is a gritty but often romantic narrative about a young man named John Grady Cole who, evicted in 1950 from the Texas ranch where he grew up, heads for Mexico on horseback along with his best friend. The book sold nearly 200,000 copies within six months.The next two books in the Border Trilogy also sold well, although some critics were not as taken with them. “It’s axiomatic in publishing,” Mr. Fisketjon said in a 1995 interview, “that the thrill of discovery is followed by a backlash.”Mr. McCarthy for many years maintained an office at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit scientific research center founded in 1984 by the particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others. He moved from El Paso to live nearby. He enjoyed the company of scientists and sometimes volunteered to help copy-edit science books, shearing them of things like exclamation points and semicolons, which he found extraneous.“People ask me, ‘Why are you interested in physics?’,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile. “But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity.” He would drive to the institute after dropping John, his young son, off at school.Mr. McCarthy published his stripped-down existential thriller “No Country For Old Men” in 2005. The next year he published “The Road,” a grueling novel about a father and son’s struggle to survive in a postapocalyptic landscape.“The Road” a grueling novel about a father and son’s struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007.The novel is dedicated to his son.“I think about John all the time and what the world’s going to be like,” Mr. McCarthy told Rolling Stone. “If the family situation was different, I could see taking John and going to New Zealand. It’s a civilized place. ”In the same interview, Mr. McCarthy said he had never voted: “Poets shouldn’t vote.”Writing Till the EndMr. McCarthy sold his archives, 98 boxes of letters, drafts, notes and unpublished work, to Texas State University in 2008 for $2 million. A year later, the Olivetti typewriter on which he’d written each of his novels sold at auction for $254,500. He immediately began working on a new Olivetti, the same model, purchased for less than $20.The Olivetti manual typewriter on which Mr. McCarthy typed all of his novels from 1958 to 2009, the year it sold at auction for $254,500.Christie’s, via Associated PressIn 2012, Mr. McCarthy wrote a screenplay, “The Counselor,” about a lawyer in the Southwest who falls into the drug business. Ridley Scott adapted it for a film in 2013 starring Michael Fassbender and Cameron Diaz.Mr. McCarthy was married for a third time, to Jennifer Winkley, in 1998, when he was 64 and she was 32. The marriage ended in divorce in 2006. In addition to his son John, from Mr. McCarthy’s third marriage, he is survived by another son, Chase, from his first marriage; two sisters, Barbara Ann McCooe and Maryellen Jaques; a brother, Dennis; and two grandchildren. His first wife, Ms. Holleman, died in 2009.Late in 2022, Mr. McCarthy released a pair of ambitious linked novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” to mostly adulatory reviews. “The Passenger” is about a racecar driver turned salvage diver named Bobby Western — he somewhat resembles Mr. McCarthy in his taciturnity, his Knoxville childhood and his fondness for New Orleans and its nightlife — who sees things he should not see. Before long he is pursued not only by G-men but, it can seem, also by all the ghosts of the 20th century. It’s a novel of ideas — about mathematics, the nature of knowledge, the importance of fast cars — that slips into pretentiousness at times but also contains flatulence jokes.The title of the second novel, “Stella Maris,” refers to a psychiatric hospital in Black River Falls, Wis. That is where 20-year-old Alicia Western, a doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, has checked herself in because she’s been hallucinating. Central among her visions is the Thalidomide Kid, a shambolic dwarf with flippers and a bent sense of humor. Alicia is carrying a plastic bag stuffed with $40,000, which she tries to give away to the receptionist. Alicia also happens to be Bobby’s sister. Their father was a physicist on the Manhattan Project.Shortly before Mr. McCarthy’s death, it was announced that he had been at work on a screenplay for a film adaptation of “Blood Meridian,” to be directed by John Hillcoat, who directed the film of Mr. McCarthy’s “The Road.”In 2007, Mr. McCarthy took part in one of the most unlikely cultural collisions of the new century when he agreed to be interviewed on daytime television by Oprah Winfrey. She had chosen “The Road” for her book club.He seemed uncomfortable in the spotlight. “I don’t think it’s good for your head,” he told Ms. Winfrey about being interviewed. “You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.”Alex Traub More

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      Ama Ata Aidoo, Groundbreaking Ghanaian Writer, Dies at 81

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      A playwright, novelist and poet, she was a leading African writer who explored the complexities faced by modern women living in the shadow of colonialism.Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian playwright, author and activist who was hailed as one of Africa’s leading literary lights as well as one of its most influential feminists, died on Wednesday. She was 81.Her family said in a statement that she died after a brief illness. The statement did not specify the cause or where she died.In a wide-ranging career that included writing plays, novels and short stories, stints on multiple university faculties and, briefly, a position as a cabinet minister in Ghana, Ms. Aidoo established herself as a major voice of post-colonial Africa.Her breakthrough play, “The Dilemma of a Ghost,” published in 1965, explored the cultural dislocations experienced by a Ghanaian student who returns home after studying abroad and by those of his Black American wife, who must confront the legacies of colonialism and slavery. It was one of several of Ms. Aidoo’s works that became staples in West African schools.Throughout her literary career, Ms. Aidoo sought to illuminate the paradoxes faced by modern African women, still burdened by the legacies of colonialism. She rejected what she described as the “Western perception that the African female is a downtrodden wretch.”Her novel “Changes: A Love Story,” which won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book, Africa, portrays the psychic and cultural dilemmas faced by Esi, an educated, career-focused woman in Accra, Ghana’s capital, who leaves her husband after he rapes her and lands in a polygamous relationship with a wealthy man.In this work and many others, Ms. Aidoo chronicled the fight by African women for recognition and equality, a fight, she contended, that was inextricable from the long shadow of colonialism.“Our Sister Killjoy” was Ms. Aidoo’s debut novel.Her landmark debut novel, “Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections From a Black-Eyed Squint” (1977), recounted the experiences of Sissie, a young Ghanaian woman who travels to Europe on a scholarship to better herself, as such a move was traditionally described, with a Western education. In Germany and England, she comes face to face with the dominance of white values, including Western notions of success, among fellow African expatriates.As a Fulbright scholar who spent years as an expatriate herself, including stints as a writer in residence at the University of Richmond in Virginia and as a visiting professor in the Africana studies department at Brown University, Ms. Aidoo too experienced feelings of cultural dislocation.“I have always felt uncomfortable living abroad: racism, the cold, the weather, the food, the people,” she said in a 2003 interview published by the University of Alicante in Spain. “I also felt some kind of patriotic sense of guilt. Something like, Oh, my dear! Look at all the problems we have at home. What am I doing here?”Whatever her feelings about life abroad, she was welcomed in Western literary circles. A 1997 article in The New York Times recounted how her appearance at a New York University conference for female writers of African descent “was greeted with the kind of reverence reserved for heads of state.”Although she never rose to hold that title, she had been Ghana’s minister of education, an appointment she accepted in 1982 with the goal of making education free for all. She resigned after 18 months when she realized the many barriers she would have to overcome to achieve that goal.Ms. Aidoo’s novel “Changes: A Love Story” won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book, Africa.After moving to Zimbabwe in 1983, Ms. Aidoo developed curriculums for the country’s Ministry of Education. She also made her mark in the nonprofit sphere, founding the Mbaasem Foundation in 2000 to support African women writers.She was a major Pan-Africanist voice, arguing for unity among African countries and for their continued liberation. She spoke with fury about the centuries of exploitation of the continent’s natural resources and people.“Since we met you people 500 years ago, now look at us,” she said in an interview with a French journalist in 1987, later sampled in the 2020 song “Monsters You Made” by the Nigerian Afrobeats star Burna Boy. “We’ve given everything, you are still taking. I mean where will the whole Western world be without us Africans? Our cocoa, timber, gold, diamond, platinum.”“Everything you have is us,” she continued. “I am not saying it. It’s a fact. And in return for all these, what have we got? Nothing.”Christina Ama Ata Aidoo and her twin brother, Kwame Ata, were born on March 23, 1942, in the Fanti village of Abeadzi Kyiakor, in a central region of Ghana then known by its colonial name, the Gold Coast.Her father, Nana Yaw Fama, was a chief of the village who built its first school, and her mother was Maame Abba Abasema. Information about Ms. Aidoo’s survivors was not immediately available.Her grandfather had been imprisoned and tortured by the British, a fact she later invoked when describing herself as “coming from a long line of fighters.”She said she had felt a literary calling from an early age. “At the age of 15,” she said, “a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how, I replied that I wanted to be a poet.”Four years later, she won a short story contest. On seeing her story published by the newspaper that sponsored the competition, she said, “I had articulated a dream.” More

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      Hollywood Directors Reach Deal With Studios as Writers’ Strike Continues

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      The tentative agreement includes improvements in wages and guardrails around artificial intelligence.The union that represents thousands of movie and television directors reached a tentative agreement with the Hollywood studios on a three-year contract early Sunday morning, a deal that ensures labor peace with one major guild as the writers’ strike enters its sixth week.The Directors Guild of America announced in a statement overnight that it had made “unprecedented gains,” including improvements in wages and streaming residuals (a type of royalty), as well as guardrails around artificial intelligence.“We have concluded a truly historic deal,” Jon Avnet, the chair of the D.G.A.’s negotiating committee, said in the statement. “It provides significant improvements for every director, assistant director, unit production manager, associate director and stage manager in our guild.”The deal prevents the doomsday Hollywood scenario of three major unions striking simultaneously. On Wednesday, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, will begin negotiations for a new contract with SAG-AFTRA, the guild that represents actors; their current agreement expires on June 30. SAG-AFTRA is in the process of collecting a strike authorization vote.The entertainment industry will be looking closely at what the directors’ deal — and the actors’ negotiations — will mean for the Writers Guild of America, the union that represents the writers. More than 11,000 writers went on strike in early May, bringing many Hollywood productions to a halt.Over the last month, the writers have enjoyed a wave of solidarity from other unions that W.G.A. leaders have said they have not seen in generations. Whether a directors’ deal — or a possible actors’ deal later this month — undercuts that solidarity is now an open question.W.G.A. leaders had been signaling to writers late last week that a deal with the directors could be in the offing, a strategy that it said was part of the studio “playbook” to “divide and conquer.” The writers and the studios left the bargaining table on May 1 very far apart on the major issues, and have not resumed negotiations.“They pretended they couldn’t negotiate with the W.G.A. in May because of negotiations with the D.G.A.,” the W.G.A. negotiating committee told writers in an email on Thursday. “That’s a lie. It’s a choice they made in hope of breathing life into the divide and conquer strategy. The essence of the strategy is to make deals with some unions and tell the rest that’s all there is. It’s gaslighting, and it only works if unions are divided.“Our position is clear: To resolve the strike, the companies will have to negotiate with the W.G.A. on our full agenda,” the email continued.Representatives for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers declined to comment.The writers and the directors shared some priorities, including wages, streaming residuals and concerns about artificial intelligence. W.G.A. leaders had said that the studios had offered little more than “annual meetings to discuss” artificial intelligence, and that they refused to bargain over guardrails. The D.G.A. said Sunday that it received a “groundbreaking agreement confirming that A.I. is not a person and that generative A.I. cannot replace the duties performed by members.”Some of the writers’ demands, however, are more complex than those of the directors. W.G.A. leaders have described the dispute in urgent terms, calling this moment “existential,” and saying that the studios “are seemingly intent on continuing their efforts to destroy the profession of writing.”Despite the explosion of television production over the last decade, writers have said that their wages have stagnated, and their working conditions have deteriorated. In addition to improvements on compensation, the writers are seeking greater job security, as well as staffing minimums in writers’ rooms.The W.G.A. has vowed to fight on. The writers, who last went on strike 15 years ago for 100 days, have historically been united.“We are girded by an alliance with our sister guilds and unions,” Chris Keyser, a chair of the W.G.A. bargaining committee, said in a video message to writers last week. “They give us strength. But we are strong enough. We have always been strong enough to get the deal we need using writer power alone.” More

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      How KIRAC Trailed Michel Houellebecq From the Bedroom to the Courtroom

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      The art collective KIRAC was embroiled in court battles over a film about the author’s sex life. Is the dispute a performance? A marketing stunt? Or a genuine cultural feud?On Saturday night, an eclectic art crowd was gathering outside an industrial garage in Amsterdam East, where Michel Houellebecq, the celebrated French author, was set to speak.Houellebecq had on May 24 released “A Few Months of My Life,” a new book describing a tumultuous period from October 2022 to March 2023 when he collaborated with a Dutch art collective called KIRAC. Together, they worked on a film, shooting scenes that show the married 67-year-old author making out with young women.Although Houellebecq had consented to making the film, he later changed his mind and tried to back out. Beginning in February, he brought court cases in France and the Netherlands to stop the movie from being shown. Last month, an Amsterdam judge upheld Houellebecq’s complaint and granted him the right to see a final cut of any re-edited film four weeks before release, giving him a chance to file another action if he doesn’t like what he sees.In “A Few Months of My Life,” a 94-page autobiographical work, Houellebecq digs deep into his hatred for KIRAC. He names the group’s leader, Stefan Ruitenbeek, only once, describing him as a “pseudo-artist” and “a cockroach with a human face.” Female KIRAC members are referred to as “the sow” and “the turkey.”According to the organizer of Saturday’s event, Tarik Sadouma, Houellebecq had not come to Amsterdam to promote his new book, but to talk about his work generally. As a condition of his participation, Houellebecq asked Sadouma to bar Ruitenbeek and his cohorts from the event.Yet just as the audience took its seats inside, Ruitenbeek burst through the door, dressed as a giant brown cockroach, with bobbing antennae and a furry cape. He was trailed by KIRAC members, one wearing a false pig snout, another filming the whole thing.“I’m here!” cried Ruitenbeek, taking the stage, to a mixture of jeering and cheers. “I’m the cockroach!”A woman taking tickets tried to wrangle the camera from the cameraman and Sadouma shouted for the intruders to leave. Eventually, Ruitenbeek — pleading, “No violence!” — left with his entourage.Michel Houellebecq released a 94-page autobiographical book, “A Few Months of My Life,” about his experiences with KIRAC.Philippe Matsas/FlammarionThis was the latest episode in an ongoing, surrealistic conflict between KIRAC, a fringe art group that posts its films on YouTube, and Houellebecq, one of the world’s most famous authors.Was it a performance? A marketing stunt? Or part of a genuine cultural feud? Who could really tell?KIRAC, an acronym for Keeping It Real Art Critics, is often described as an art collective, but its creative center is Ruitenbeek and Kate Sinha, a writer who is also Ruitenbeek’s life partner. They make films that at first appear to be documentaries, or possibly mockumentaries, typically set in the art world. In them, the boundaries between reality and fiction are often blurred, narratives sometimes conflict and onscreen characters can appear to be playing a game with the truth.It is also often difficult to discern KIRAC’s political views. In one of its films, the Dutch architect and curator Rem Koolhaas is criticized as “macho” and “patriarchal.” In another, KIRAC seems to decry diversity efforts, arguing that the artist Zanele Muholi was given a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam, “only because she is from South Africa, Black and lesbian.” (Muholi now uses they/them pronouns and identifies as nonbinary.)Seen as provocateurs or pranksters, and sometimes art world trolls, KIRAC’s members often deliver critical monologues directly to the camera, usually in the form of articulate academic analysis from Sinha, or mocking insults from Ruitenbeek.“In the broadest sense, we’re just trying to make great films, intellectual entertainment,” Sinha said. “I think we are primarily artists, interested in the object we make, which is always the film.”Sinha in “Time’s Up, Old Man,” a KIRAC film in which she criticizes the Dutch curator and architect Rem Koolhaas.KIRACIn a joint interview, Ruitenbeek and Sinha said they developed the concept for the Houellebecq film with the author and shot 600 hours of footage of him, with his contractual consent. Houellebecq only objected when they put together a two-minute trailer for the work in progress, according to Ruitenbeek and Sinha.In that clip, Ruitenbeek explains that a “honey trip,” or sex holiday, that Houellebecq had planned in Morocco had been canceled because the author feared being kidnapped by Muslim extremists. (Houellebecq has a long history of making critical statements about Islam, and some readers have found Islamophobic sentiments in his books.)“His wife had spent an entire month arranging prostitutes from Paris, and now everything was falling apart,” Ruitenbeek says in the trailer, in voice-over. He then suggests that there are plenty of young Dutch women in Amsterdam who would have “sex with a famous writer out of curiosity,” and invites the author to visit.In a French court, Houellebecq argued that the trailer violated his privacy and damaged his image. He asked the court to make KIRAC pull the trailer from all online platforms, remove any mention of his wife arranging prostitutes and pay her damages. The court rejected Houellebecq’s case.Later, in the Dutch court, Houellebecq argued that KIRAC had violated contract law, and misled him so that he ended up “in a different film than the one originally intended,” according to his Dutch lawyer, Jacqueline Schaap. An appeal judge in that case found for Houellebecq.The film is still unfinished and continues to evolve, Ruitenbeek said. After Houellebecq left the project, KIRAC filmed in and around the court proceedings, as well as shooting other moments, such as Saturday night’s cockroach show.Ruitenbeek said he was now rethinking the material, and a final cut may not come for months.“We started off this project in an open-minded attitude toward each other; we took each other as artists,” Sinha said of the collaboration with Houellebecq. “It feels like he backpedaled and put on a different coat.”Houellebecq last week agreed to an interview for this article, but pulled out after learning that he would not be shown his quotes before publication. (At the event in Amsterdam, he again declined to comment, claiming that he did not speak English, although he speaks it in the KIRAC film.)Ruitenbeek’s over-the-top voice-overs and willingness to play a goofball suggest that KIRAC is going for humor. But, often, the subjects of its films don’t find them funny.“They point fingers at others, but carve out a safe space for themselves’,” said the artist Renzo Martens, who was the focus of an unflattering movie. “From this safe space they are brave enough to cut into other people’s flesh.”Three Dutch institutions that KIRAC has lambasted — the Stedelijk Museum, the Van Abbe Museum and the Kunstmuseum, in The Hague — declined to comment for this article.Salima El Musalima in KIRAC’s film “Honeypot.” More than 1,000 people signed a petition calling the film “a glorification of sexual violence.”KIRACThijs Lijster, a senior lecturer on the philosophy of art and culture at the University of Groningen, said that there is “something threatening in their ways of going about their work. They have a style of filming, and approaching and talking to people, which is, in a way, rather hostile.”It is not just KIRAC’s targeting of artists and institutions that has been controversial. Over time, its films have evolved to enter the realm of social commentary, drawing ire from across the political spectrum.Some viewers saw the group’s 19-minute film “Who’s Afraid of Harvey Weinstein?,” in which Sinha speaks about sexual power dynamics between the American film producer and his rape victims, as dismissive of the #MeToo movement.A leading art school in Amsterdam, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, canceled a KIRAC screening after dozens of complaints from students, former students and teachers about statements in the group’s films that they found sexist and racist. The Weinstein movie was championed on a right-wing populist Dutch blog, Geen Stijl. Suddenly, KIRAC became a magnet for conservative followers.Although Ruitenbeek and Sinha said their personal politics are progressive, KIRAC didn’t disavow the attention, and instead produced a film called “Honeypot.” For that, the group convinced a conservative Dutch philosopher and activist, Sid Lukkassen, to have sex on camera with a left-wing student. The idea was to see if the intimate act would somehow bridge a political gap.More backlash ensued. When an Amsterdam arts center called De Balie screened “Honeypot,” a feminist collective submitted a petition with more than 1,000 signatures that called the film “a glorification of sexual violence.” The petition’s signers also included the right-wing Dutch politician Paul Cliteur and some of his followers.Ruitenbeek and Sinha both said their clash with Houellebecq was no stunt. They maintained that they don’t want to be in court with the author, whom they both described as “a genius.”Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times“It was interesting that these two sides teamed up against the film for opposite reasons,” said Yoeri Albrecht, De Balie’s director, who did not cancel the event. “I’ve never seen that happen in the more than a decade that I’ve been organizing events here.”The ambiguity around the group’s motivations only feeds the interest in KIRAC’s work. Many who have been following the Houellebecq affair are unsure whether it’s real or a postmodern KIRAC fiction.“Everyone is wondering, are they playing a game together?” said Simon Delobel, a curator who teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Ghent, Belgium, where he was introduced to the group’s work by his students. KIRAC and Houellebecq were surely “well aware that it can be interpreted as a stunt,” he added.Yet Ruitenbeek and Sinha both said their clash with the author was no stunt. They don’t want to be in court with Houellebecq, whom they both described as “a genius.” They just want to be in conversation with him, Sinha said.Ruitenbeek added that when he showed up at Houellebecq’s talk on Saturday, he thought there was a small chance that everyone would laugh and give each other hugs. He was “very happy the day he went to get the cockroach suit,” Sinha said. “After all these intimidating court cases,” she added, “we were back on our own territory again: making art.”Léontine Gallois More

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      How America’s Playwrights Saved the Tony Awards

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      The screenwriters’ strike threatened next month’s broadcast, a key marketing moment for the fragile theater industry. That’s when leading dramatists sprang into action.Martyna Majok, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, was revising her musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” after a long day in a developmental workshop when she heard the news: The union representing striking screenwriters was not going to grant a waiver for the Tony Awards, imperiling this year’s telecast.So at three in the morning, she set aside her script to join a group of playwrights frantically writing emails and making phone calls to leaders of the Writers Guild of America, urging the union not to make the pandemic-hobbled theater industry collateral damage in a Hollywood dispute. “I had to try,” she said.Surprising even themselves, the army of artists succeeded. The screenwriters’ union agreed to a compromise: it said it would not picket the ceremony as long as the show does not rely on a written script.“Theater is having a very hard time coming back from the devastating effects of the pandemic — shows are struggling and nonprofit theaters are struggling terribly,” said Tony Kushner, who is widely regarded as one of America’s greatest living playwrights, and is, like many of his peers, also a screenwriter. “Ethically and morally, this felt like a recognition of the particular vulnerability of the theater industry. It’s the right thing to do, and costs us nothing.”Kushner, who is best known for the Pulitzer-winning play “Angels in America,” is a fiery supporter of the strike who freely denounces the “unconscionable greed” of studio bosses and who showed up on a picket line as soon as it began. But he spent a weekend calling and writing union leaders in both New York and Los Angeles, urging them to find a way to let the Tony Awards happen, arguing that canceling them would have been far more damaging to theater artists than to CBS, which broadcasts the event.He was among a number of acclaimed dramatists — including David Henry Hwang and Jeremy O. Harris — who spent a weekend phoning and emailing union leaders. At least a half-dozen Pulitzer winners joined the cause, including Lynn Nottage (“Sweat” and “Ruined”), Quiara Alegría Hudes (“Water by the Spoonful”), David Lindsay-Abaire (“Rabbit Hole”), Donald Margulies (“Dinner with Friends”) and Majok (“Cost of Living”).“Cost of Living,” by Martyna Majok, is nominated for best new play. Majok joined other playwrights lobbying the writers’ union to allow the Tonys telecast to proceed. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMajok, who is a first-time Tony nominee herself this year for “Cost of Living,” said, “I approached them with respect and gratitude for all they have done for me,” she said, “but this decision was impacting so many of my colleagues and friends deeply, in an industry that is still financially struggling.”Writers are never the main attraction at the Tony Awards. The annual ceremony centers musical theater, hoping that razzle-dazzle song and dance numbers will inspire viewers to get up off their couches and come visit Broadway. The telecast often struggles with how to represent serious drama.But playwrights say they treasure the Tonys, because the ceremony introduces new audiences to theater. “In one way or another, it’s all connected,” Kushner said.And for once playwrights actually had power, because in recent years, as the number of scripted series on television and streaming services has exploded, many of them have also taken jobs working in film and television, which pays much better than the theater industry. Many of the playwrights concerned about the Tony Awards were also members of the Writers Guild — some quite successful, like Kushner, who wrote the scripts for Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” “Lincoln,” “West Side Story” and “The Fabelmans,” and Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote “The Waverly Gallery” for the stage and “Manchester by the Sea” for the screen.“Most playwrights are W.G.A. members, because they have to make a living and get health insurance,” said Ralph Sevush, the executive director of business affairs for the Dramatists Guild of America, which is a trade association of theater writers. “And yes, there was a great deal of lobbying of the W.G.A. by many of them to find a way to get the broadcast on.”The screenwriters’ union was torn over whether to assist the Tony Awards, with its eastern branch, filled with playwright members more sympathetic than the affiliated western branch, which is more Hollywood-oriented. It did not go unnoticed that many theatrical workers have been vocally supporting the writers’ strike, including Kate Shindle, the president of the Actors’ Equity Association, who has brought members of her union to the picket lines and who spoke with the heads of both branches of the screenwriters’ guild.“There was no master strategy involved — we were just standing up for the writers,” Shindle said. “But I’m happy with the way that it seems like a decision came about: writers talking to and debating with each other, which feels like the right thing.”The Tonys seem likely to be a rare exception. In the days following the greenlighting of the theatrical awards, this year’s Peabody Awards, which honor storytelling in electronic media, were canceled, and the Daytime Emmy Awards, which honor work on television, were postponed.Asked about the decision, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, a vice president of the screenwriters’ guild’s eastern branch, offered an emailed statement that said, in part, “we recognize the devastating impact the absence of a Tonys would have on our New York theater community. Here in W.G.A. East, we have many, many members who are playwrights, and we are deeply intertwined with our sister unions whose members work in the theater.”Playwrights were not actually the first choice of Broadway boosters strategizing about how to save the Tonys — at first, industry leaders thought they might look to prominent politicians and famous actors to make their case. But they quickly realized that playwrights, because of their ties to the W.G.A., were better positioned to influence the discussion. Harris, who wrote “Slave Play,” and Gina Gionfriddo (“Rapture, Blister, Burn”) rallied writers to the cause, along with the agent Joe Machota, who is the head of theater for Creative Artists Agency.This year, they argued, would be an especially unfortunate time to downgrade the Tony Awards.Ariana DeBose, who hosted last year’s Tony Awards, is expected back this year, but it’s unclear what a ceremony without a script will look like.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway attendance and overall grosses remain well below prepandemic levels, and new musicals are struggling — four of the five nominated shows are losing money most weeks.Unlike the Oscars, which generally take place after the theatrical runs of nominated films, the Tonys take place early in the run of most nominated musicals, so they can translate into ticket sales. The Tonys matter for plays in a different way: nominations and wins have an enormous impact on how often those works are staged, read and taught.“People that don’t work in playwriting don’t always have a meaningful understanding of how important Broadway is to Off Broadway and to regional theaters — they’re really a beacon for the community at large, and even if you don’t care about the glitz and the glamour, if they start to lose money, it has impacts all over the country,” said Tanya Barfield, a playwright and television writer who is the co-director of the playwriting program at Juilliard.After she heard her union had denied a waiver for the Tony Awards, a “heartbroken” Barfield joined a picket line with a homemade “I ❤️ the Tony Awards” sticker on her WGA sign. And she wrote union leaders. “We wanted to make sure theaters did not become a casualty,” she said.Another concern: this year’s Tony Awards feature an unusually diverse group of nominees, reflecting the increasingly diverse array of shows staged on Broadway since 2020. Five of this year’s nominated new plays and play revivals are by Black writers; four of the five nominees for best actor in a play are Black; the best score category for the first time includes an Asian American woman; and the acting nominees include two gender nonconforming performers as well as a woman who is a double amputee.“We need to showcase what we’ve been seeing with the diverse talent and rich storytelling of the past few years,” Majok said.The Tonys will be different this year. The event will take place, as planned, at the United Palace in Upper Manhattan, with a live audience, live performances of musical numbers from nominated shows, and the presentation and acceptance of awards. But there will be no scripted material (a draft script had been submitted, but will not be used) and no scripted opening number (Lin-Manuel Miranda had been planning to write one). Ariana DeBose, the Oscar-winning actress who had been named its host for the second year in a row, is still expected to take part, but it is not clear what role she will play.One new element that is expected at this year’s ceremony? Shout-outs to the striking screenwriters. Hwang, a W.G.A. member who called and emailed union leaders asking them to rethink their position on the Tonys, said, “I anticipate that there will be a lot of speeches that express our appreciation and support for the guild on Tony night.” More