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Buzz Feed
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
Amber Heard Returns To Acting: Opinion
Last month, social media user @LeaveHeardAlone collected fan messages and money for flowers to send to Amber Heard. Around 350 people wound up sending messages. The flowers were a gift for Heard to celebrate the opening of the new play Spirit of the People by Slave Play writer Jeremy O. Harris at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. It's her first major acting role since the 2022 Depp v. Heard trial, and a rare spot of good news. Lest you need a refresher, Heard was found guilty by a jury of defaming her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, in an op-ed titled 'I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture's wrath. That has to change." In it, she doesn't mention Depp by name, but she refers to herself as a "public figure representing domestic abuse." This was despite a judge in the UK ruling two years earlier that a tabloid calling Depp a "wife beater" was "substantially true," adding, "I have found that the great majority of alleged assaults of Ms Heard by Mr Depp have been proved to the civil standard.' There's been ample speculation about the difference in outcomes in the trials, including that jury members were not sequestered and were allowed to keep their phones, while social media raged against Heard. One juror was even texted by his wife, "Amber is psychotic." It was later found that much of the anti-Heard sentiment online was driven by bots. It was, plainly, a shit time to be a victim of sexual violence with an internet connection, as I am. It still is, given how other men are attempting to use the Depp playbook in court and public opinion. But watching the trial play out as a form of perverse entertainment in real-time felt like a nightmare, seeing friends and family members parrot myths about survivors that they'd unwittingly not realize also applied to me. It seemed like Heard would likely stay in Madrid for some time after the trial, out of the public eye, and who could blame her? But, with Spirit of the People, she's slowly making a return. Photos of her are in Vogue. She's posting on Instagram more frequently. It's hard for me not to see these images and feel a glimmer of hope. To feel inspired by her resilience. Yes, I know that photos aren't a real snapshot of someone's life. But, at the same time, I know I'm not the only one to feel this way. When comments are open, they are remarkably positive. Maybe the bots are gone, or maybe there's been a genuine shift in public opinion, I can't say. Maybe I can exhale, just a little. We've been told endlessly about how accusations ruin men's lives, but the comeback playbook for men accused of wrongdoing feels well-trodden at this point. Depp's out there ranting about #MeToo and conveniently filming his new movie Day Drinker with Penélope Cruz in Madrid. In my opinion, it was Amber whose acting career was ruined simply by being a victim. Against all that darkness, it may not be over yet. I probably won't write another article like this again. I know that mentioning someone's worst moments at every single turn grows into its own kind of cage. Perhaps Depp's most devout fans will be activated like sleeper agents to this piece. It'll be bad another day. But, on July 20, Amber got her flowers. She appeared visibly emotional in her Instagram story as she said, "Thank you so much for these beautiful flowers, I feel like the luckiest woman in the world."
New York Times
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Circus Comes to Williamstown, With Celebrities and Beefcake
You weren't likely to miss Jeremy O. Harris on Sunday in the lobby of the '62 Center for Theater & Dance. At 6-foot-5, plus hair, he stood a head or more above the babble of the crowd. Dressed as always to delight, this time in bright striped pants and a faux-needlepoint floral top, he looked like a maypole, people swirling around him. Or maybe he was more of a lightning rod; as the creative director for this year's Williamstown Theater Festival, his brief was to bring the buzz to an institution that needed it, without burning the place down. But having spent three days racing from one event he had programmed to another, sometimes with barely a half-hour to catch a bite in between, I began to think of Harris, the 'Slave Play' playwright and walking Rolodex, as something else, too: a ringmaster, half visionary, half hokum. Come see the what-are-they-doing-here stars! (Pamela Anderson in 'Camino Real'? Why not?) Dare to experience the melodrama on ice! (Change out of those open-toe shoes, missy!) Wonder at the endless parades of beefcake! (Harris's play 'Spirit of the People,' one of the centerpiece events, might well have been called 'Men in Thongs.') In short, the long-hallowed, lately-harrowed festival is nothing this year if not a circus. Circuses can be fun if you bring few expectations. I tried to lower mine, but it was difficult, given the more traditional theatrical pleasures I'd experienced during visits here over the course of 45 summers. (In 1980, less pleasurably, I was a 'general assistant,' staying up all night slinging waffles and getting yelled at.) More recently, complaints of unfair treatment, racial discrimination and unsafe working conditions had made the festival's operating model untenable, eventually leading to this year's mad experimentation. Harris himself seemed to acknowledge the madness, telling my colleague Michael Paulson that the season, loosely based on European models and focused on the world of Tennessee Williams, might produce 'jewels' from 'raw, weird things' or might be 'a colossal failure.' He was right. On both counts. I don't want to ding an idea still aborning, and it's nice that he's pitched a very big tent. But 'raw' is putting it mildly. Much of what I saw during the first of the festival's three public weekends was under-rehearsed or overthought. Some of it was merely baffling. The Williams connections sometimes seemed stretched to the vanishing point and other times so tightly wound as to suggest parody. Ticketing, including weekend passes for preset 'itineraries,' was bizarrely complicated, with seven core events plus installations, pop-ups and late-night hangs. Few of them started on time, and fewer ended that way. But chaos is not itself failure, and certainly it did not prevent some of the promised jewels from shining. Top among them was Samuel Barber's 'Vanessa,' presented at the festival in a version vastly reduced from the one audiences saw at its Metropolitan Opera premiere in 1958. Some small roles along with the entire chorus were cut, and the original's large orchestra became a seven-player band. It now tells its story — about a woman who has barely moved for 20 years, hoping to remain beautiful for the return of her lover — in just 100 enthralling minutes. transcript [MUSIC] Unlike many abridged operas, this one lost little in being concentrated, partly because Gian Carlo Menotti's intense, almost neurotic libretto profits, like a wailing babe, from tight swaddling. At Williamstown, the tight swaddling came in the form of R.B. Schlather's chic, disciplined, minimalist production, using shadows cast on a long white wall to create a devastating X-ray of the story. A top-notch cast a few feet from my face wailed thrillingly. Did this have anything to do with Williams? You could perhaps connect the gothic aspects of 'Vanessa' to the playwright's hothouse style, and certainly Vanessa herself belongs in the pantheon of floridly suffering straight women like Blanche DuBois and Alexandra Del Lago created and flayed by gay authors. I got to see more of those women back at the Center for Drama & Dance, where three plays were running in repertory. In Harris's 'Spirit of the People,' the woman was Genevieve, a brittle yet entitled American in Mexico. Played by Amber Heard in her professional stage debut, she becomes a mezcal impresario and a kind of death doula to a circle of toxic queer tourists in skimpy beachwear. I can't grade the play itself — critics were asked not to review it — but I can give it five out of five beefcake stars, and five as well for Williams relevance. Indeed, 'Spirit of the People' (a pun, in part, on the mezcal) is in some ways a Williams collage, drawing heavily on all his plays — Heard ends up on a hot tin roof — but especially 'Camino Real,' a surrealistic hodgepodge from 1953. The festival's big, handsome production of that experimental work, directed by Dustin Wills, did not alas justify its revival, except as an object of historical interest for Williams completists. Also, admittedly, for beefcake completists: In the central role of Kilroy, Nicholas Alexander Chavez channeled Marlon Brando in a white T-shirt about 10 sizes too small and distressed to the point of transparency. I'm hardly objecting to sexy men — or women, for that matter. (Anderson, as the tragic if often inaudible Camille figure, was a knockout in strapless black velvet.) But when buried sexuality is unburied, other considerations get shoved aside. That was the case with Williams's 'Not About Nightingales,' a 1938 drama not produced in his lifetime — with good cause in two senses. (It's an impassioned but sloppy cry for prison reform.) In exploring the familiar trope of jailhouse homoeroticism even where Williams took care to suppress it, Robert O'Hara's otherwise sturdy production did the playwright's plea no favors. It's disappointing that the three big plays at the Center for Theater & Dance were the new offerings least reminiscent of the old festival's excellence, despite its intention to honor a connection to Williams going back to 1956. But you can't really honor what you don't quite trust. The names of the sandwiches at Pappa Charlie's Deli on Water Street, where playgoers dashed for quick bites between shows, may still honor beloved Williamstown stars — the Blythe Danner (tuna and sprouts); the Olympia Dukakis (feta and avocado) — but the archival production photos that used to line the halls of the main stage were gone. If the past seemed to require re-education or even redaction, perhaps that's why the three shows at the so-called Annex, four miles east on Route 2, felt freer and more satisfying than the ones in Williamstown proper. The Annex has no theatrical history, having until recently been a Rent-A-Center and before that a Price Chopper. Along with 'Vanessa,' the Annex offered two fine shows. On Friday afternoon, 'The Things Around Us,' an hourlong solo by the droll multi-instrumentalist Ahamefule J. Oluo, was a promising start to the weekend, exploring through melancholy stories interspersed with hypnotic music the interpenetration of opposites: past and future, nothing and everything, order and chaos. And then, on Sunday morning, came the joyful bookend: 'Many Happy Returns,' a dance piece by Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri. Sprightly, humorous, with a motif of finger snaps to go with oldies like 'Take Good Care of My Baby,' it told as lightly as possible the tale of four inseparable high school friends now separated except in memory. transcript [MUSIC] None of the Annex shows, it bears noting, were plays, and all were jobbed in. 'Vanessa' was created for the festival by the New York City-based Heartbeat Opera; 'The Things Around Us' has been on tour for a while; 'Many Happy Returns' ran for a few weeks in January at Playwrights Horizons. Also not a play was the seventh core offering, the one on ice. At the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink, home of the North Berkshire Youth Hockey Black Bears, five talented skaters performed Will Davis's 'The Gig,' a diverting if impenetrable riff on a late Williams novel called 'Moise and the World of Reason.' As the skaters swirled and swooshed in pretty patterns and garish costumes, never enacting the story literally but suggesting a circle of queer friends and lovers, the audience listened on headphones to selections from the novel while trying to stay warm. That one of the characters in the source material is in fact a skater seemed a very thin thread to hang the concept on. But the ideas binding the other offerings were hardly more robust. That Williams celebrated 'the outcast and derelict and the desperate' (as he wrote in a letter quoted in the festival program) is a lovely notion, but not much of an organizing principle. It would exclude almost nothing ever written, sung, danced or skated. Perhaps the more salient connection was Harris; it seemed that his imagination was the main thing being celebrated and the only glue holding the weekend together. (He narrated 'The Gig'; his niece and nephew performed in 'Camino Real.') Fair enough; Nikos Psacharopoulos, a festival founder, ran the place for decades as a cult of personality despite having one of the worst personalities I've ever encountered. Harris at least is charming. And if his primary goal was to use his cultural currency to serve artists while secondarily challenging audiences who don't mind spending money on duds in the hope of the occasional jewel, perhaps he succeeded. The big tent of creativity he designed was mostly sideshows, but it wasn't entirely empty.
Boston Globe
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A journey into hell with Williams's ‘Not About Nightingales'
The mystery of its meaning is not cleared up till late in the play. Let's just say you won't soon forget the moment when the purgatory of prison turns into hell. (Diggle, the scenic designer, does amazing work in that scene.) Advertisement O'Hara helmed the 2019 Broadway production of 'Slave Play,' by Jeremy O. Harris, who is currently Williamstown's creative director. O'Hara is also a playwright of note. His With its intermittent flights into melodrama, its homoerotic subtext, and its lyricism, 'Nightingales' is recognizably a Tennessee Williams play. (With Williams, even the script's stage directions possess a certain lyricism.) It is also recognizably a Tennessee Williams play in the concision and vividness of its character portraits. O'Hara keeps the story grounded, even gritty, with an intensity of focus that largely prevents any drift — an ever-present danger in a drama that features 16 characters. Advertisement Written in 1938 and inspired by a hunger strike by 650 inmates at a penitentiary in Holmesberg, Pa., 'Nightingales' was Williams's fourth full-length play. He considered 'Nightingales' the best play he had written up to that point in his career. He also thought it was one of the most wrenching. In a foreword to the publication of his 1957 'Orpheus Descending,' Williams wrote of 'Nightingales' that 'I have never written anything since then that could compete with it in violence and horror.' The Williamstown cast includes William Jackson Harper — who played the fretful ethicist Chidi Anagonye on NBC's 'The Good Place' — as a prisoner who was brutally treated by the prison's warden and now works for him. Jim is slowly drawn into a romance with Eva (Elizabeth Lail), the warden's new secretary. A haunting figure is Jack (Ben Getz), an inmate whose experiences in prison have led to the disintegration of his mind. Brian Geraghty is the Stanley Kowalski-like convict Butch, all alpha-male aggression and dominance. It is Butch who leads the hunger strike as a form of protest against the nearly inedible food they are served each day. Chris Messina is the creepy Warden Whelan, abusing power in every way he can, the most detestable warden since Bob Gunton's Warden Norton in 'The Shawshank Redemption.' Williams was only 27 when he wrote 'Nightingales,' finishing it in 1938 — two years before his 'Battle of Angels' became his first professionally produced play in a calamitous train-wreck of a production at Boston's Wilbur Theatre. Advertisement His emphasis in 'Nightingales' on social injustice and the politics undergirding that injustice is notable. He dedicated the play to the memory of Clarence Darrow, whom he called 'The Great Defender, whose mental frontiers were the four corners of the sky.' The play languished in obscurity until Vanessa Redgrave became its champion. It was presented in 1998 as a coproduction by the National Theater of London and the Alley Theater of Houston. The next year, 'Nightingales' moved to Broadway, where it had a short run but garnered half a dozen Tony Award nominations. 'Nightingales' was reportedly the first full-length play where Thomas Lanier Williams signed a script as 'Tennessee Williams.' Many impressive accomplishments would eventually be attached to that name, and 'Not About Nightingales' should be counted among them. NOT ABOUT NIGHTINGALES Play by Tennessee Williams. Directed by Robert O'Hara. Presented by Williamstown Theatre Festival. On the NikosStage, Williamstown. Through Aug. 3. Tickets $20-$100. 413-458-3253, Don Aucoin can be reached at
Boston Globe
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Decades after his death, Tennessee Williams still defies categorization
Or should it be measured by his entire oeuvre, which began life in Boston in 1940 with the catastrophic premiere of 'Battle of Angels' at the Wilbur Theatre, and eventually grew to more than 100 plays? The latter proposition has gained momentum in recent years, and the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival has played a crucial role in paving the way. No cultural institution has demonstrated a greater commitment to Williams's complete body of work than the Provincetown festival, which has staged 85 of his plays over the past 20 years, including 13 world premieres of previously unproduced plays, plus 12 adaptations of his short stories. Advertisement 'He's not a lake,' says David Kaplan, who has directed many productions of Williams's plays and is cofounder and curator of the Provincetown festival, in an interview Wednesday with the Globe. 'He's an ocean.' Starting this weekend, the Williamstown Theatre Festival will take In his first year as Williamstown's creative director, dramatist Jeremy O. Harris ('Slave Play') is premiering his own new play, 'Spirit of the People,' billed as a Williams-influenced piece. Also slated for performance are Williams's seldom-produced 'Camino Real,' with a cast that includes 'Baywatch' star Pamela Anderson; and a production of 'Not About Nightingales,' directed by Robert O'Hara, with a cast that includes William Jackson Harper (Chidi on NBC's 'The Good Place.'). Advertisement There will even be an ice-dancing piece, 'The Gig: After Moise and the World of Reason,' based on a Williams novel and presented at a skating rink. On Wednesday, the New York-based Theater for the New City announced it had adapted Williams's 'Memoirs' into a play titled 'Kind Stranger … a memory play,' which will premiere next month. Playwright and screenwriter Tennessee Williams being interviewed by a journalist, April 9, 1957. Kenneth Denyer/Getty That variety suggests the breadth of Williams's work. Part of his strength, and a key reason that theater companies are increasingly willing to venture into the lesser-known plays, is that he offers so many doors to open. The fact that he ranged so widely makes it hard to pigeonhole him. 'He's no more a 'gay writer' than Shakespeare is a 'Stratford writer,'' said Kaplan. When I interviewed Kaplan in 2013, he said that Williams 'had a sojourn into respectability that lasted less than 20 years. In the work he did before that and in the work he did after that, he was pretty consistent in his desire to experiment, and his desire to work in nontraditional forms.' 'His work is contradictory and ambivalent, willfully so,' Kaplan added at that time. Of course, the Big Three are always onstage, somewhere. Williams's best-known plays offer juicy roles that the biggest names want to tackle. Scarlett Johansson starred as Maggie the Cat in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' on Broadway in 2013. And Broadway is always game for another revival of 'The Glass Menagerie'; there have been seven since its 1945 premiere. One transcendent revival in 2013 was presented at Cambridge's American Repertory Theater, starring Cherry Jones, Zachary Quinto, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, before transferring to New York; another, starring Sally Field, had a short run in 2017. Advertisement Few playwrights have endured a more sustained critical drubbing than Williams did. He was devastated by it, and became increasingly dependent on pills and booze. But he had been extraordinarily prolific from the start of his career, and he just kept writing, play after play after play, while experimenting more fully with form than he had when he enjoyed commercial success. The result is a large body of work that demands to be explored. Williams's plays can be staged in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of spaces. Take 'Green Eyes,' for example. In 2012, in a co-production between Company One and the experimental theater troupe the Kindness, 'Green Eyes' was performed in a hotel room in downtown Boston for an audience capped at 25 spectators. In a In 2009, Williams's 'The Remarkable Rooming House of Madame Le Monde' was presented by Beau Jest Moving Theatre at Charlestown Working Theater, a former firehouse. In that same critic's notebook, I described 'Rooming House' as 'a macabre, unsettling excursion into Grand Guignol in which a man named Mint, first seen clinging to hooks from the ceiling, is subjected to physical and verbal brutality before the arrival of the lethal title character, who ups the ante still further.' Advertisement At a time when readers and theatergoers often crave the back story, it adds to his mystique that Williams's 71 years on the planet were exceptionally dramatic, and at times tumultuous, following a tragic arc. The subtitle of John Lahr's excellent 2014 biography of Williams is 'Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh.' How many other playwrights would warrant that description? With many leading American playwrights — Eugene O'Neill, say, or Arthur Miller, or August Wilson, or the gone-too-soon Lorraine Hansberry — the essential character of their work is widely agreed upon. The nature and scope of their achievements are pretty clear-cut. With Williams, though, his legacy seems up for grabs. The organization that has devoted itself to shaping that legacy is preparing for a major programming shift. The theme of this year's Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, scheduled for Sept. 25-28, will be 'Last Call,' with live performances of plays by Williams that 'celebrate endings,' according to Kaplan. The lineup includes productions of 'Sweet Bird of Youth,' 'Clothes for a Summer Hotel,' 'This Property Is Condemned,' 'Lifeboat Drill,' and 'The Frosted Glass Coffin.' After that, the festival will cease operating in the form it has followed for 20 years. Going forward, Kaplan said, the festival will consist of pop-up events in Provincetown, across the country, and around the world. He likened it to Hemingway's memoir of Paris, 'A Moveable Feast.' And, just as with Paris, there is always something new to discover about the work of Tennessee Williams. Don Aucoin can be reached at
Boston Globe
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Jeremy O. Harris leads a Tennessee Williams-focused season at Williamstown
The festival, which once stretched across two months, will now unfold in a three-week furnace-blast of activity Bringing Harris onboard was a no-brainer for Raphael Picciarelli, the festival's managing director of strategy and transformation. 'Jeremy was at the top of my list,' he says. 'He has his finger on a pulse in a way that connects people to the work he's doing.' Advertisement The focus on Tennessee Williams felt natural, Harris says. He, too, is a queer southern writer, and he's long felt a kinship with the playwright. He also liked the synergy of focusing on Tennessee Williams at Williamstown . As Harris began planning, he discovered a letter Williams wrote to a friend in the 1950s in which he talked about building a new theater that would give him the space to 'experiment and clarify,' and the idea resonated powerfully. 'In this moment when commerciality is at the core [of theater making], it's taking us away from the beauty of actually doing the work, of finding out what else we want our voice to be,' Harris says. 'The desire to experiment can often reap a lot of amazing rewards for people who are also trying to ask questions about society at large, and that's what I think Williamstown should be doing.' Out of crisis came reflection and then rebirth. For decades, unpaid interns and apprentices worked brutally long hours in sometimes dangerous conditions at the festival. In 2021, 'I would name that moment as a really pivotal inflection point,' Picciarelli says. 'And the beautiful result is that we had the opportunity to actually reenvision and rethink what the institution could be.' Advertisement The team landed on a guest curation model, drawing from the inspiration of European theater festivals, film festivals, and even museums, 'where you have a cohort of people thinking about the programming,' says Picciarelli. The plan is to rotate in a new creative director every few years, supported by Harris viewed European theater and arts gatherings like They hope to position Williamstown as 'a destination that's immersive, that's curated, that's experiential, that's an event,' Picciarelli says. 'We were inspired by what those [festivals] do to create community and to create this immersive experience.' On the Main Stage, Williams's luridly lyrical epic, think he really wanted to do a big swing in a way that was more [Federico Garcia] Lorca than Arthur Miller,' Harris says. 'He was really punished by the critics, and I think it never got a fair shake.' Advertisement O'Hara, who directed Harris's 'Slave Play,' says he was drawn to 'Nightingales' because 'there's all this sexuality and sensuality bubbling underneath' the brutal conditions inside the prison. 'There's all sorts of ticking time bombs inside this pressure cooker,' he says. The spark for group of queer vacationers intersect with native Mexican women making specialized mezcal. 'It's about gentrification and immigration. I've gotten to interrogate the time I spent there. … What does it mean to visit a land that is not your own, what are your responsibilities, and what does it mean to be a traveler of privilege?,' asks Harris. The show's Mexican director, Katina Medina Mora, says, 'It's a play about grief and belonging and trauma. A lot of people want to go to these places to heal, but what comes with your healing? I can also come with destruction and disrespect.' This year's festival also moves beyond the Williams campus to a new venue in North Adams called the Annex, as well as the Vietnam Veterans Ice Skating Rink in North Adams, for Advertisement At the Annex, audiences will be able to catch Heartbeat Opera's new adaptation of Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti's This year's programming, O'Hara says, 'is so outrageous that it sort of matches Tennessee Williams and his outrageousness. This is a place to be ambitious, and that's what Jeremy is known for. He's known for his ambition and for swinging large. So I'm excited about the possibilities.' WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL July 17-Aug. 3. At Williams College '62 Center for Theatre and Dance, Williamstown; The Annex, North Adams; Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Memorial Skating Rink, North Adams. Weekend passes and single tickets available. 413-458-3253,
