God, it’s dark out. Going to plays these days is like looking at a painting by Jane Dickson, whose work chronicles an older, more dangerous, less commercially anesthetized Times Square. By the late afternoon, the palette of the street is all black sky and bright lights, neon ref lected in smears on puddled pavement. In this slogging terrain, the lights of the theatre feel like promises of warmth to come. It’s nice to trudge inside, even in a gloomy mood, and warm your hands by drama’s hearth.
Julia May Jonas’s very funny, often moving new play, “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” directed by Annie Tippe at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theatre, starts out at just this time of year. It’s Christmas Eve, at a church whose full name we never learn, in a more or less well-off, implicitly suburban town in New Jersey. "Redacted Church, in Redacted, New Jersey," the church's youth pastor, Rev Kat (Hannah Cabell), calls it in a sermon. Those redactions, and others that pop up throughout the play's text-we never, for instance, learn any of the main characters' last names give it the feeling of an ardent but guarded memory. The show and its author seem to want to both confess and protect, perform and be private, all at once.
Denne historien er fra December 19, 2022-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra December 19, 2022-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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YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.