You always learn something new when you watch somebody drink. Not that vino leads to veritas in any literal way—but, over the span of a long, soggy night, small, revealing details, often more gestural than verbal, accumulate. How your fellow-partygoer holds a glass, or how often she takes a drink, or what counts, in her world, as a cocktail: all of this helps you to know her better, to figure out where she’s really coming from. Two recent productions—“Des Moines,” the final play by the late Denis Johnson, from 2007, and a revival of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer-winning Between Riverside and Crazy,” from 2014, in its Broadway premiére—feature alcohol as a spur and a guiding presence, a conduit to otherwise fugitive knowledge.
The central event of Des Moines’— directed by Arin Arbus, for Theatre for a New Audience, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center—is an impromptu gathering that quickly becomes a drinkfuelled bacchanal. Dan Arliss Howard) and Marta Johanna Day) are an aging couple further aged by sorrows that they find hard to articulate, and by a stubborn but unspoken ambivalence about the substance and meaning of their lives. At the beginning of the play, whose main setting is their kitchen, they’re talking past each other in a way that makes their anomie plain. Dan, a cabdriver, has recently come into contact with Mrs. Drinkwater Heather Alicia Simms), whose husband died in a plane crash. Dan's cab was the last car the poor guy ever rode in. As he tries to relate this story to Marta, she’s more worried about whether he plans to eat a full meal. So is this new diet some sort of spiritual thing?” she asks. Because I made spaghetti. Is this a spiritual pilgrimage you're on, Dan, with the cereal?”
Denne historien er fra January 02 - 09, 2023 (Double Issue)-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra January 02 - 09, 2023 (Double Issue)-utgaven av The New Yorker.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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The Football Bro - Pat McAfee brings a casual new style to ESPN.
If, on a cool weekend morning in autumn, you happen to be watching “College GameDay,” on ESPN, don’t worry about figuring out which of the broadcasters behind the improbably long desk is Pat McAfee. He’s the one with the roast-pork tan, his hair cut high and tight, likely tieless among his more businesslike colleagues. The rest of the onair crew—Lee Corso, Rece Davis, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard, and, newly, the former University of Alabama coach Nick Saban—tend to look and dress and talk like participants in an old-school Republican-primary debate. McAfee, though, favors windowpane checks on his jackets and a slip of chest poking out from behind his two or three open buttons. If the others are politicians, he’s the cool-coded megachurch pastor who sometimes acts as their spiritual adviser.
The Dark Time. - On the Arctic border of Russia and Norway, an espionage war is emerging.
On the Arctic border of Russia and Norway, an espionage war is emerging. The point of contact between NATO and Russia's nuclear stronghold is the small town of Kirkenes. For years, Russia has treated the area as a laboratory, testing intelligence and influence operations before replicating them across Europe.
MIRROR IMAGES
‘A Different Man” and The Substance.”
OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY
Proximity to wealth proves perilous in Rumaan Alam’ novel Entitlement.”
EYES WIDE SHUT
How Monet shared a private world.
WITH THE MOSTEST
The very rich hours of Pamela Harriman.
HUGO HAMILTON AUTOBAHN
On the Autobahn outside Frankfurt. November. The fields were covered in a thin sheet of snow.
TRY IT ON
How Law Roach reimagined red-carpet style.
SORRY I'M NOT YOUR CLOWN TODAY
Bowen Yang's trip to Oz, by way of conversion therapy and S..N.L.”
SNIFF TEST
A maverick perfumer tries to make his mark on a storied fashion house.