The New Yorker - June 06, 2022

80 Pages·2022·26.7 MB·English

PRICE $8.99 JUNE 6, 2022

JUNE 6, 2022
4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
11 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Jelani Cobb on the politics of guns;
the last pay phones standing; cooking for Coachella;
remembering Roger Angell (1920-2022).
DEPT. OF TRANSPORTATION
Kathryn Schulz 16 Shipping News
The phenomenon of container loss.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Ian Frazier 21 Flat
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
Amanda Petrusich 22 Ring of Fire
Angel Olsen’s songs of survival.
ANNALS OF JUSTICE
Ken Auletta 28 Harvey Weinstein’s Last Campaign
How the Hollywood producer lost control of the story.
LETTER FROM LOS ANGELES
Dana Goodyear 40 Above the Law
A sheriff’s department plagued by gangs of deputies.
FICTION
Joshua Ferris 52 “The Boy Upstairs”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Hilton Als 57 What Thom Gunn’s letters reveal about the poet’s life.
Thomas Mallon 63 The tales of the spinster novelist Barbara Pym.
65 Briefly Noted
MUSICAL EVENTS
Alex Ross 68 “X” and “Hamlet.”
THE THEATRE
Vinson Cunningham 70 “Fat Ham” and “Who Killed My Father.”
POEMS
Monica Ferrell 33 “Infancy”
António Osório 46 “A Meaning”
COVER
Eric Drooker “Uvalde, May 24, 2022”
DRAWINGS Edward Steed, Liana Finck, Jeremy Nguyen, William Haefeli, Amy Hwang, Mick Stevens, Roz Chast, Lars Kenseth,
Maddie Dai, Asher Perlman, Victoria Roberts, P. C. Vey, Liza Donnelly SPOTS Cari Vander Yacht
CONTRIBUTORS
Dana Goodyear (“Above the Law,” p. 40) Ken Auletta (“Harvey Weinstein’s Last
is a staff writer at The New Yorker and Campaign,” p. 28) has been contribut-
the host of the podcast “Lost Hills.” ing to the magazine since 1977. His
thirteenth book, “Hollywood Ending:
António Osório (Poem, p. 46), who Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of
died in 2021, was a Portuguese poet. Silence,” will be out in July.
A collection of his poetry in English
translation is forthcoming. Amanda Petrusich (“Ring of Fire,” p. 22)
is a staff writer and the author of “Do
Kathryn Schulz (“Shipping News,” p. 16), Not Sell at Any Price.”
a staff writer, won the 2016 Pulitzer
Prize for feature writing. Her most Joshua Ferris (Fiction, p. 52) has written
recent book is “Lost & Found.” four novels, including “Then We Came
to the End” and “A Calling for Charlie
Eric Drooker (Cover) is a painter and Barnes.”
a graphic novelist whose drawings have
been on display at the Guggenheim Shauna Lyon (Tables for Two, p. 9) is
Museum. He has contributed to the the editor of Goings On About Town.
magazine since 1993.
Thomas Mallon (Books, p. 63) began
Sheila Yasmin Marikar (The Talk of the writing for the magazine in 1997. His
Town, p. 13) will publish her début novel, eleventh novel, “Up with the Sun,” will
“The Goddess Effect,” in October. come out next February.
Jelani Cobb (Comment, p. 11), a staff Monica Ferrell (Poem, p. 33) is the au-
writer, is the co-editor of “The Essen- thor of a novel, “The Answer Is Always
tial Kerner Commission Report.” In Yes,” and two books of poetry, “Beasts
August, he will become the dean of for the Chase” and “You Darling
the Columbia Journalism School. Thing.”
THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM
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Reporting from Texas, Rachel Monroe Emma Green on the debate over T:
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describes the fallout from the school how medical schools should address RI
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shooting in Uvalde. training related to abortion. R
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THE MAIL
PILLARS OF PINE
faith; conversely, many of the horrors per-
petrated by the Nazis were committed
I was pleased to read Rebecca Mead’s ar- within a completely legal framework,
ticle about the potential of timber as a after passing through “all the lawful mech-
construction material, and noticed that anisms,” to use Hulio’s own words. The
the all-timber buildings she mentions— software’s clear link to repressive regimes
including the two-hundred-and-eighty- should cause NSO to reëvaluate its op-
foot Mjøstårnet, in Norway—are situated erations, instead of trying to ignore the
in wealthy countries, many in the Global uses of its product and the consequences
North (“Norwegian Wood,” April 25th & that follow.
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May 2nd). It’s worth adding that all- Sandeep Sandhu
timber construction has tremendous po- London, England
tential in Africa, too. Recent research, led
THE ART OF THE SANDWICH
by the consulting firm Dalberg, shows that
substituting wood for steel and concrete
in half of new buildings across the con- I read with delight Hannah Goldfield’s
tinent would, by 2050, result in a cumu- column on a new branch of the Ital-
lative reduction in net emissions of five ian sandwich shop All’Antico Vinaio,
to ten gigatons of carbon, helping Afri- in Times Square (Tables for Two,
ca’s rapidly expanding cities to become April 25th & May 2nd). For a year, I lived
carbon sinks. Architects are already em- around the corner from the original es-
bracing the innovations of wooden build- tablishment, on Via dei Neri, in Flor-
ings. In the Gabonese capital of Libre- ence. It was a hole-in-the-wall, always
ville, construction of one such building, spilling over with locals. There was a
called the Sovereign Wealth Tower, which serve-yourself wine station, which oper-
is envisioned as having around nine thou- ated by the honor system. The place was
sand square metres of floor space, is in intimidating to an outsider, but, when I
progress. And, in Kenya, BuildX Studio’s finally mustered the courage to go in,
Circular Cooperative Affordable Hous- revelations ensued. I learned, among other
ing Project aims to make modest houses things, that artichokes and pistachios
out of timber. Expanding wooden archi- could become spreadable condiments;
tecture can be a brilliant, large-scale, na- this was mind-blowing to an American
ture-based solution to the climate crisis. accustomed to the industrial trio of may-
Duncan MacQueen onnaise, mustard, and ketchup. Paper-thin
International Institute for mortadella slices were a heady improve-
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Environment and Development ment over the Oscar Mayer bologna of
London, England my suburban youth, and the truffle paste
was transcendent. Like so much about
SPY WARS
Italian culture, All’Antico Vinaio was a
reminder of life’s pleasures, and crossing
I was impressed by Ronan Farrow’s re- the threshold symbolized, to an immi-
porting on the increasing popularity of grant like me, a kind of induction into
commercial spyware, and how it is ex- Italian society. I’m thrilled for the New
ploited by unsavory entities seeking to Yorkers who can now count All’Antico
crush dissent (“The Surveillance States,” Vinaio as their neighbor.
April 25th & May 2nd). It is incredibly Kelly Miller
troubling to see the C.E.O. of the NSO Paris, France
Group, Shalev Hulio, argue that, because
•
Spain’s use of his company’s product, Peg-
asus, occurs under the legitimate rule of Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
law, “it can’t be misused.” Some of what
[email protected]. Letters may be edited
Israel’s Nazi hunters did was illegal, but
for length and clarity, and may be published in
few would doubt the moral case for their any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
actions, or claim that they acted in bad of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
JUNE 1 – 7, 2022
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
The fashion designer and raconteur Isaac Mizrahi has narrated the Guggenheim’s “Works & Process”
production of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” for many years. Now he has imagined a companion piece,
“Third Bird.”
To Prokofiev’s ornithological menagerie, which includes a little bird and a duck, Mizrahi has
added an ostrich on the lam from the local zoo. For “Works & Process,” June 3-5, Mizrahi narrates his tale,
set to music by Nico Muhly and illustrated with John Heginbotham’s quirky and amiable choreography.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BUBI CANAL
As New York City venues reopen, it’s alist’s graphically dazzling exhibition, whose found phrases their strangely intimate, incan-
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advisable to confirm in advance the title, “govern me harder,” she encountered on a tatory quality.—J.F. (52 Walker; through July 1.)
requirements for in-person attendance. sticker in a dog park. The taunting anti-author-
itarian message is at odds with the mod-prod-
uct-design aesthetic of the site-specific murals “Whitney Biennial 2022:
and big enamel-on-steel panels seen here. The
Quiet as It’s Kept”
ART visually commanding compositions seem to
promise the lucid messaging of other sans-serif This startlingly coherent and bold exhibition is
logos and slogans; instead, they deliver barbed a material manifesto of late-pandemic institu-
“Faith Ringgold: poetry. A handsome composition of black, tional culture. Long on installations and videos
white, red, and mustard yellow reads “do the and short on painting, conventional sculpture,
American People”
dogs eat the dog food.” But Turato’s blown-up and straight photography, it is exciting without
Ringgold, now ninety-one years old, is sorely typography so distorts the word“dogs”—elon- being especially pleasurable—geared toward
overdue for canonical status after a protracted gating the letters and dividing them into two thought. The innovative, intimately collabo-
defiance of art-world fashion. First came her lines—that deciphering the piece requires some rative curators David Breslin and Adrienne
stubborn fidelity to figuration in times favoring effort. Even once the phrase becomes legible, Edwards ignore rather than oppose pressures
abstraction, and then her eschewal of Pop and it remains unclear whether it’s a query or a of the ever-romping art market, which can see
postmodernist irony—as opposed to humor, a command.Elsewhere, at the bottom of a mural to itself. Delayed for a year by COVID-19, the
wellspring of her creativity. (Those tendencies of circus-tent-striped circles, a wall-wrapping show consolidates a trend that many of us hadn’t
toward representation and sincerity happen to line of white text—“a lifetime of action and suspected: a sort of fortuitously shared concep-
triumph, retroactively, in the penchants of many adventure with no clock to punch”—runs like an tual sensibility that suggests an in-group but is
younger contemporary artists today.) An inter- oblique closed caption. Although Turato’s works open to all who care about art’s relations to the
mittently active participation in feminist and have a commercially slick appearance, they were wide world. My favorite work in the show is the
identity politics has also caused the Black artist stencilled and painted by hand—perhaps it’s indelibly disturbing and enthralling “Your Eyes
to be embraced in some circles and discounted that arduous process that lends her open-ended Will Be an Empty Word” (2021), by the veteran
in others. Both estimations obscure the truth of
Ringgold’s artistic originality, which registers
powerfully in this six-decade survey, at the New
AT THE GALLERIES
Museum, of more than a hundred works, with
effects that can be deeply moving and feel as
fresh as this morning. A profound personal essay
in the show’s catalogue by Michele Wallace,
an important critic and one of Ringgold’s two
daughters, expertly tracks her mother’s mergers
of racial content and art history, both African
and European. These culminate in such pictorial
epics as “We Came to America: The American
Collection #1” (1997), in which Black survivors
of a distant, burning slave ship swim in seething
waters toward a Black Statue of Liberty who is
cradling a Black child. Victimhood is rarely at
issue in Ringgold’s work, however awful the
circumstances; irrepressible vitality always
is.—Peter Schjeldahl (New Museum; through June 5.)
Emily Sundblad
In a dozen effervescent new canvases (and two
tender drawings), this Swedish-born, New
York-based artist celebrates the decorative
impulse of the Sunday painter—a fitting hook
for the free-spirited Sundblad, who also makes
music and is a co-founder of the influential
bicoastal gallery Reena Spaulings. Flowers are
a favorite theme, and the show’s two largest
works, ”Spring” and “Breezin along with the
breeze,” portray scattered blossoms; they also The most exciting exhibition in the city right now is the New York
share a palette of coral pink, which is playfully solo début of Lauren Halsey, at the David Kordansky gallery (through
reinforced in the latter picture by a conch
June  11). It’s a sculptural love letter to the historically Black neighbor-
shell placed at the bottom of the canvas. The
still-lifes and floating bouquets of Florine hood of South Central Los Angeles, where the artist’s family has lived for
Stettheimer are clearly a touchstone, and the a century. The fourteen pieces on view shift in form from hard-edged to
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R great modernist would surely have approved
LE biomorphic, and in tone from public monument to secret sanctuary, but
L of Sundblad’s use of scalloped white frames in
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G the smaller paintings on view, some of which their primary materials are the language and the life of the street, with its
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SK are mounted on thin poles that stretch from small-business signage (the Braid Shack, Watts Coffee House) and larger-
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D than-life heroes (Kobe Bryant, Nipsey Hussle). In the densely collaged,
R rangement, echoing the appealingly noncha-
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K lant air of the show. There’s a tonal variety billboard-size “LODA,” a cartoon image of a Black astronaut reading
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VI among the floral closeups, landscapes, and Jet magazine underscores that Halsey is building both a time capsule
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D occasional portraits, but they share a savvy
/ and a long-range plan, the latter realized here, to exuberantly funked-up
T joie de vivre.—Johanna Fateman (Bortolami;
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TI through June 18.) effect, in “My Hope,” an eighteen-foot-long model of a teeming block (a
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E detail is pictured above), in which low-rider cars cruise a South Central
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RT A custom typeface is the shape-shifting pro- a preview of a future blockbuster: next summer, the artist will scale up
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O tagonist of this Amsterdam-based Conceptu- her remarkable vision on the roof of the Met.—Andrea K. Scott
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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 6, 2022 5
helped the singer Haley Fohr safely tumble
JAZZ
off a building for the dramatic cover image.
Verging on performance art, the portrait
encapsulates an album flush with such mad
The British saxophonist, clarinettist, and
energy that the entire affair can feel like a
bandleader Shabaka Hutchings has spent free fall. Plotted in the wake of a friend’s
most of his career as part of a collective— death, “-io” processes anguish through oper-
atic laments and even giddiness, with Fohr’s
as the front person of the bands Sons of
voice dancing through enough octaves to give
Kemet and Shabaka and the Ancestors, the impression of a group. Though Fohr sings
as a member of the group The Comet Is against a twenty-four-piece orchestra on the
album, she performs onstage in a duo with
Coming, and as a utility player for others.
Whitney Johnson, of the meditative recording
But when he isn’t performing with a unit, project Matchess. The gothic air, however,
remains: this concert is an entry in the chic
or rehearsing in a nearby community cen-
“Graveyard Shift” series, which presents
“Afrikan
ter, he plays alone in the woods.
brazenly alive art amid the tombstones of
Culture,”
his first solo project as Shabaka, the Green-Wood Cemetery.—Jay Ruttenberg
(Green-Wood Cemetery; June 7.)
seems to embody that outdoor exercise
by embracing the solitary, meditative
Xenia Rubinos
practice of communing with the natural
The Brooklyn-based composer Xenia Ru-
world. The EP’s soothing tracks extend R. & B.
binos reached her personal zenith on last year’s
beyond his clarinet to voice, flute, kalimba, “Una Rosa,” her third full-length record of au-
and an end-blown bamboo flute called a dacious, boundary-breaking songs that connect
political furor with emotional grist. Infused
shakuhachi. Whether solo or carefully
with Caribbean rhythms and jazz phrasings,
layered, the flute playing is serene and her music brings traditional sounds into the
mesmerizing. Even in collaboration, it future, augmenting them with experimental
—Sheldon Pearce electronic beats and askew raps and combining
is music for solitude.
Auto-Tuned disembodiment with erudite,
intimate lyricism. On the mini-odyssey “Who
Shot Ya,” Rubinos threads the movement for
Cuban American artist and singularly plain- Bach’s rigorously calculated counterpoint, but Black lives together with immigrant and In-
spoken social activist Coco Fusco—a gorgeous the Baroque composer had a profound impact digenous struggles. She maxes out her voice
twelve-minute video exploration of Hart Island, on Mendelssohn, who organized an influential on the questing and resolute ballad “Did My
New York’s potter’s field for unidentified or un- revival of the “St. Matthew Passion” a century Best,” sounding breathtakingly unbound as she
claimed corpses. Shots of the artist laboring in after its 1727 première. The 92nd Street Y’s pushes to the song’s peak—at once self-critical
a rowboat along its shores alternate with drone ten-day festival “The Bach-Mendelssohn Con- and tender, casting raw vulnerability as a vital
overviews of a really quite lovely place, where nection” begins with a fugue-inspired concert source of liberation. For the home-town date
rows of small stone markers perfunctorily me- by the Emerson String Quartet and the Ca- of her “Una Rosa” tour, Rubinos is preceded
morialize innumerable lost lives. Beauty stands lidore Quartet that culminates in Mendelssohn’s onstage by the jazz-R. & B. synthesist and
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in for unconsummated mourning. The work exuberant Octet in E-Flat Major, composed fellow New Yorker Linda Diaz.—Jenn Pelly
can seem to invoke both the cascading fatalities when he was just sixteen years old (June 1). (Elsewhere; June 3.)
of the COVID pandemic and, by chance, the Arader Galleries, on the Upper East Side, hosts
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remorseless current carnage in Ukraine.—P.S. a number of eighteenth-century-style salons,
(Whitney Museum; through Sept. 5.) with the individualistic harpsichordist Mahan
Esfahani playing the clavichord (June 6) and DANCE
collaborating with the flutist Elizabeth Mann
(June 3). And, after opening the Orchestra of
MUSIC St. Luke’s parallel Bach festival at Zankel Hall Doug Varone and Dancers
(June 2), Steven Isserlis plunges into Bach’s Celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary,
six enchanting suites for unaccompanied cello Varone’s troupe returns to the Joyce with a
Axel Boman and Kornél Kovács
(June 4).—Oussama Zahr company classic and a New York City pre-
The term “minimal” gets a bad rap mière. “Rise,” from 1993, a dance that estab-
ELECTRONIC
in dance music these days—too tame for young lished a new high in the headlong, near-cha-
Cecil McBee Quartet
partyers hungry for ever-escalating beats per otic group action that became a Varone
minute. But the M-word is inescapable when Although the bassist Cecil McBee has a signature, is a ride on the runaway train of
JAZZ
considering the music of the Stockholm natives secure place in the Cookers, a popular all-star John Adams’s “Fearful Symmetries.” “Some-
Axel Boman and Kornél Kovács, who play back band that unites him with other veteran play- where,” from 2019, takes on Leonard Bern-
to back at Elsewhere on Saturday. On their ers who came up in the sixties and seventies, stein’s orchestral score to “West Side Story,”
own and as part of Studio Barnhus, alongside he may not get the singular recognition he discarding the original narrative in search of
Petter Nordkvist, these house-music producers deserves. A mainstay of recording sessions other drama.—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre;
craft iridescent tracks with an occasionally throughout that vibrant era (and beyond) May 31-June 5.)
wispy soul feel—very Scandinavian, but warm, owing to his comfort with both the avant-garde
rather than chilly. It can come across as fussily and the mainstream, McBee never found his
Kaatsbaan Summer Festival N
subtle at times, but when this music reaches its footing as a principal, despite producing some O
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swelling spots its ghost-of-disco-future vibe fine albums under his own name. This still This year’s festival at the Kaatsbaan Cultural K
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can land with surprising aplomb.—Michaelan- formidable stylist fronts a quartet as part of Park, a performance-and-arts incubator in A
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gelo Matos (Elsewhere; June 5.) Soapbox’s aptly titled “Master Series.”—Steve Tivoli, New York, includes three weekends of N
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Futterman (Soapbox Gallery; June 4.) music, dance, and poetry. The first of these R
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(June 4-5) includes a new dance with choreog- J
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“The Bach-Mendelssohn raphy by Danielle Agami, Jessica Castro, and B
Circuit des Yeux N
Kristin Sudeikis, set to music by the Rolling O
Connection” EXPERIMENTAL Circuit des Yeux’s punch-drunk Stones, Jon Batiste, and others. The second ATI
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Felix Mendelssohn’s graceful early- 2021 album, “-io,” is the rare indie-rock re- (June 11-12) is devoted to performances by T
CLASSICAL S
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Romantic music sounds a world apart from J. S. cord to retain a stunt master: Talin Chat, who standout students from three élite dance L
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6 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 6, 2022
academies in New York—the J.K.O. School, ther King, Jr.,’s “I Have a Dream” speech that brash, weaselly president of China operations,
the School of American Ballet, and Juilliard. quickly devolves into an extended takedown Marshall McLaren (Max Gordon Moore), is an
The final weekend (June 18-19) offers musi- of the room’s cockiest kid, Dayrin (Toney outright villain; the crusading lawyer is Julie
cal performances by the singer-songwriter Goins, who delivers the show’s standout per- Chen (Cindy Cheung), a Chinese American
Taylor Mac, the saxophonist Tyrone Birkett, formance). Miranda Haymon’s direction, woman with a stubborn streak, whose own
and more.—Marina Harss (Kaatsbaan Cultural for Roundabout Underground, highlights morals prove mottled in the pursuit of justice.
Park; June 4-19.) Harris’s fine sense of ebb and flow: between The pace is whip-cracking fast, the plot knotty
confidence and anxiety, between naturalism and political, and the politics themselves saved
and absurdism, between pandemonium and from black-and-white “Pelican Brief” terri-
“Sw!ng Out”
silence.—Rollo Romig (Black Box at the Har- tory by a useful infusion of doubt. King’s best
As it did last summer, Lincoln Center is once old and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre; creation is the Translator (the sparkling Fang
again turning itself into a place to rest, frolic, through June 26.) Du), who stands outside the intercultural story,
listen to music, and watch—or even take part jumping in to gloss a Mandarin phrase for the
in—dance. On June 4, on the stage at Dam- (mostly) English-speaking audience, or to add
Golden Shield
rosch Park (between the Koch Theatre and his own two cents to the subtext percolating
the Met), the “Summer for the City” series This exhilarating new play by Anchuli Felicia beneath a conversation, revealing the ethical
(which runs through Aug. 19) includes Caleb King (directed by May Adrales for Manhattan hurdles and practical compromises that trans-
Teicher’s “Sw!ng Out.” This freewheeling and Theatre Club) richly fictionalizes a real-life lation entails.—Alexandra Schwartz (Reviewed
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upbeat production celebrates the inventive David-and-Goliath tale. In 2011, an American in our issue of 5/30/22.) (City Center Stage 1;
spirit and collaborative vibe of the Lindy lawyer brought a lawsuit against Cisco Sys- through June 12.)
Hop, a social-dance form that originated in tems, on behalf of thirteen Chinese dissidents;
Harlem clubs in the nineteen-twenties. At the suit alleged that Cisco had helped the Chi-
times, the show has the feel of a dance party, nese Communist Party violently suppress dis-
with a host of excellent dancers, including sent—leading to the dissidents’ imprisonment MOVIES
Teicher and LaTasha Barnes, riffing off of each and torture—by designing and implementing
other with wit and warmth. At the end, the the Golden Shield Project, a digital security
1 The Beaches of Agnès
cast invites members of the audience to join system that allowed the C.C.P. to surveil Chi-
in the fun.—M.H. (Lincoln Center; June 4.) nese citizens’ Internet activity. Here, Cisco Starting alone on a beach, the eighty-year-
becomes the imagined ONYS Systems, whose old director Agnès Varda prepares for the
THE THEATRE
OFF BROADWAY
Belfast Girls
“Ireland is no longer a country for young
women,” declares one of the five passengers
crowded into a small cabin on the Inchinnan,
a steamer about to disembark on a three-
month voyage from Belfast to Sydney. It’s
1850, and these desperate travellers are part
of the Earl Grey orphan scheme, designed
both to relieve Ireland’s overcrowded work-
houses and to provide wives and laborers
to England’s colony of Australia. Jaki Mc-
Carrick’s play, directed by Nicola Murphy,
unfolds at the height of the Great Hunger,
and death and devastation are rampant. These
women are pawns of a cruel, paternalistic sys-
tem, but they are also scrappy, independent
agents of their own liberation. In a series of
skillfully structured scenes, relationships are
formed—through jokes, songs, intimidation,
compassion, even love and violence. One by
one, the women reveal the circumstances
that brought them to this point, each story
more harrowing than the last. Five wonder-
ful actors—Caroline Strange, Sarah Street,
Labhaoise Magee, Mary Mallen, and Aida
Leventaki—create moving depths of charac-
terization and communication.—Ken Marks Virtual theatre, that odd, makeshift genre, proliferated during the
(Irish Repertory Theatre; through June 26.) pandemic lockdown as a substitute for live performance. Much of it
was forgettable, but the cheeky avant-garde troupe Fake Friends took
Exception to the Rule the medium to innovative heights. Led by the Yale School of Drama
At a bottom-ranked high school, six Black classmates Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley (with backing from the
students sit in detention and try to extract
playwright and fashionista Jeremy O. Harris), the group live-streamed
confessions of one another’s transgressions.
(Mikayla, for example—played by the nimble campy, elaborate, scathing comedies, drawing on everything from Charles
TIZ Amandla Jahava—broke the rule that “skirts Ludlam’s Theatre of the Ridiculous to “The Real Housewives.” “Circle
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O must be long enough to touch the ground Jerk,”
A its breakout hit, was a sci-fi sendup of white gayness and online
DI while in a kneeling position.”) They’re wait-
LY ing for the monitor, a delay that becomes culture, set on an island retreat where two Internet trolls create a glam-
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B increasingly Beckettian. The playwright Dave orous avatar to instill “gay supremacy”; it was a finalist for the Pulitzer
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ATI age insult, especially when a student named Prize for drama last year. Now that live theatre has returned, the group
TR Dasani (the excellent Claudia Logan) delivers is bringing the show to the Connelly Theatre for a summer fling, with
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LU a half-remembered mangling of Martin Lu- previews starting on June 9.—Michael Schulman
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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 6, 2022 7
serious play and heartfelt whimsy of this art into a work of art in its own right, and into any role that’s thrust upon him—or
filmed autobiography, from 2008. Under one of her best. In French.—Richard Brody that, defying stereotypes, he chooses. As
her exacting direction, her crew sets up an (Streaming on the Criterion Channel, Kanopy, a director, Harris is both sharply original
array of antique mirrors on the beach; this DAFilms, and MUBI.) and slyly allusive, infusing his scathingly
staging, and the many delightful contriv- observant and incisive vision with disruptive
ances that follow, portray her retrospec- narrative techniques borrowed from Frank
Chameleon Street
tive view as a truth that’s inseparable from Tashlin, the French New Wave, and sitcoms.
her imaginative fictions. In Varda’s largely The title of this 1989 independent film, He endows Street’s character with a vast
chronological tour of the sites (in France which was written and directed by Wen- cultural range, stretching from Orson Welles
and elsewhere) and the sights (her movies, dell B. Harris, Jr., who also stars, refers and Jean Cocteau to pop music and TV. The
photographs, and art projects) of her life, to a real-life character, William Douglas result is a disarming, disturbing, elusive, and
her main subject is love. With clever, freely Street, a Black man from Detroit who, in profound meditation on personal identity
associative set pieces, she sparks encoun- the nineteen-seventies, pulled off an ex- and social barriers. Shockingly, Harris hasn’t
ters with family members and long-unseen traordinary series of impersonations (for yet made another film.—R.B. (Streaming on
friends who guide her reminiscences. The instance, while pretending to be a doctor, he the Criterion Channel.)
film’s emotional core is Varda’s life with her performed, according to Harris, thirty-six
husband, the director Jacques Demy, who successful hysterectomies), for which he
Jack Reacher
died in 1990 and posthumously continues to was ultimately imprisoned. Harris plays the
inspire her. Uninhibited about sex, generous part for comedy and for anger, portraying When a number of civilians are killed by a
in her affections, worldly-wise, blending Street as a sardonic victim of racism who, sniper in Pittsburgh, apparently at random,
tender recollections with self-deprecating having grown up conforming to the expec- the principal suspect (Joseph Sikora) asks
antics, Varda turns her tale of a life lived in tations of others, becomes adept at fitting for help from Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise),
a former military investigator who has van-
ished from the grid. (He doesn’t even possess
a driver’s license: American shorthand for
ON THE BIG SCREEN nonexistence.) Needless to say, he questions
the official version of events—good news for
a glamorous defense attorney (Rosamund
Pike), but a source of exasperation for a de-
tective (David Oyelowo) who seems to have
the case nailed down. The movie, adapted
from a novel by Lee Child, is written and
directed by Christopher McQuarrie. There
is a dogged leanness to Reacher’s pursuit that
lifts his adventures from the generic rut, and
although Cruise’s patina of stardom is by now
so fixed and lacquered that elusiveness may
be forever beyond him, the remainder of the
cast—including Werner Herzog, with eyes
of blue ice—is usefully strong. Released in
2013.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of
1/21/13.) (Streaming on Prime Video, Paramount
Plus, and other services.)
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Alfred Hitchcock’s sole screwball comedy,
from 1941, reeks of erotic horror. The hand-
some and prosperous Smiths, David (Robert
Montgomery) and Ann (Carole Lombard),
lock themselves in a bedroom for three
days—to talk out a squabble. The sex has
gone out of the childless couple’s three-year
Throughout a career that began in 1976, the British director Terence marriage; but when David learns that a legal
loophole has rendered their union null and
Davies has created an exquisite and original style that embodies an
void, he becomes aroused by the prospect of
original concept: foregrounding his characters’ cultural passions, and reseducing the newly coy and virginal Ann.
the restrictive social norms that they confront, alongside their intimate Instead, she puts him through the hell of an-
other courtship. Latent erotic frenzy emerges
dramas. Most of Davies’s films will be streaming on the Criterion Chan-
in diabolical details—the phallic neck of a
“Benediction”
nel as of June 1. His new movie, (opening on June 3), champagne bottle that David points at his
is a wide-ranging bio-pic of the British poet Siegfried Sassoon, whose prey, Ann’s new job at a department store’s
layette counter. Meanwhile, David spirals
life was shadowed by the horrors he witnessed as an officer in the First
downward into degradation as Ann sparks
World War and by the death in combat of his great love, the poet Wilfred his jealousy by dating his gallant, athletic
Owen, whom he met in a military hospital. After that war, the grieving law partner (Gene Raymond). All ends up
artificially well, but the comedy foreshad-
and traumatized Sassoon (played, as a young man, by Jack Lowden) S
ows the sexual gamesmanship of “Vertigo” N
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makes his way through the British beau monde as a gay man at a time as well as the metaphysical terror of “The TI
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when homosexuality was illegal; after the Second, the elderly Sassoon Wrong Man” and “North by Northwest,” A
R
in which a person is expelled from his own T
(Peter Capaldi) lives bitterly with his loving wife, Hester (Gemma Jones), AT
1life by a hiccup of fate.—R.B. (Playing June E
whom he married in a doomed flight from solitude. Davies intertwines 5 on TCM and streaming on Prime Video and SID
D
the half-century span of action with simple yet startling special effects; other services.) A
O
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crafting a soundtrack that blends lacerating dialogue and the writers’ Y
S
E
exalted poetry with orchestral music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, he T
For more reviews, visit R
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turns Sassoon’s story into a virtual opera.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town O
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8 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 6, 2022