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A RAISIN IN THE SUN

Ruth (Mandi Masden) and Lena (Tonya Pinkins) look on as Travis (Toussaint Battiste) is filled with hope in Public revival of A Raisin in the Sun (photo by Joan Marcus)

A RAISIN IN THE SUN
Newman Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Through November 20, $80
publictheater.org

Tonya Pinkins rules the roost as Lena Younger in Robert O’Hara’s uneven adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s American classic, A Raisin in the Sun, continuing at the Public’s Newman Theater through November 20. Lena is the matriarch of the Younger family, who live in a cramped, paint-peeling, walls-cracking apartment on Chicago’s South Side. It’s the early 1950s, and she is waiting for a ten-thousand-dollar check to arrive, insurance money from the recent death of her husband (Calvin Dutton). Her thirty-five-year-old ne’er-do-well son, Walter Lee (Francois Battiste), is a chauffeur for a wealthy white man and dreams of using the money to put a down payment on a liquor store with his unreliable friends Bobo (Dutton) and Willy.

Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth (Mandi Masden), is doing her best to try to keep everything together, managing the finances as she and her husband raise their ten-year-old son, Travis (Toussaint Battiste or Camden McKinnon), who sleeps on the couch in the middle of the apartment. Lena’s twenty-year-old daughter, Beneatha (Paige Gilbert), shares a bedroom with her mother and is hoping to go to medical school; Beneatha has two suitors, the rich but dull George Murchison (Mister Fitzgerald) and Joseph Asagai (John Clay III), a university student from Nigeria who Beneatha believes can help connect her to her African roots. Every morning the Younger clan wakes up and hustles off to the bathroom, which is down the hall, used by all of the floor’s tenants.

When Lena buys a house in the white neighborhood of Clybourne Park, Walter Lee feels betrayed. The plot gets more complicated when Karl Lindner (Jesse Pennington), from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, arrives to attempt to convince the Youngers not to move there, barely disguising his racism with pointed threats. (Lindner also appears in Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer Prize winner Clybourne Park, which examines things from the opposing point of view, as the association decides how to discourage a Black family from moving in.)

But Lena is determined to raise her family’s station in life, having earlier told Ruth in one of the play’s most poignant moments: “‘Rat trap’ – Yes, that’s all it is. I remember just as well the day me and Big Walter moved in here though. Hadn’t been married but two weeks and wasn’t planning on living here no more than a year. We was going to set away, little by little, don’t you know, and buy a little place out in Morgan Park. We even picked out the house. Looks right dumpy today. But Lord, child, you should know all the dreams I had ’bout buying that house and fixing it up and making me a little garden in the back. And didn’t none of it happen.” The play’s focus on real estate seems sadly prescient considering the ongoing issue of housing in the US, an issue that’s never been resolved and has exploded into a full-blown crisis in recent years.

Walter Lee (Francois Battiste) has something to say to his wife, Ruth (Mandi Masden), in new version of Lorraine Hansberry classic (photo by Joan Marcus)

Tony winner Pinkins (Caroline, or Change; Red Pill) commands the audience’s attention with a dazzling presence as she and O’Hara make Lena the central character in a role previously portrayed by such actors as Claudia McNeil, Juanita Moore, Esther Rolle, Phylicia Rashad, and LaTanya Richardson Jackson. The focus of A Raisin in the Sun is usually on Walter, who has been played by Sidney Poitier, Earle Hyman, Danny Glover, Sean Combs, and Denzel Washington; Washington, for example, dominated in Kenny Leon’s 2014 Broadway revival, but Battiste’s Walter is not as imposing, though it is touching that his real-life son alternates as Travis. Gilbert (School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play, The Rose Tattoo) gives Beneatha an underlying strength, representing the future of Black America, while Masden (Saint Joan, Our Lady of Kibeho) is affecting as a realistic woman who can’t find the time for her own dreams. “Honey, you never say nothing new,” she tells Walter Lee. “I listen to you every day, every night and every morning, and you never say nothing new. So you would rather be Mr. Arnold than be his chauffeur. So – I would rather be living in Buckingham Palace.”

Clint Ramos’s set, Karen Perry’s costumes, Alex Jainchill’s lighting, and Elisheba Ittoop’s sound are effective, setting the right mood for Hansberry’s powerful commentary on race, class, and housing in America, which is as relevant as ever more than sixty years after its debut. Unfortunately, O’Hara fiddles around too much to put his mark on the production, as he has done recently with revivals of Long Day’s Journey into Night, a streamlined version set in the Covid era, and Richard III at the Delacorte, with Danai Gurira as the conniving title character.

O’Hara has much more success with new plays, including Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, Gurira’s Eclipsed and The Continuum, and his own Bootycandy. His 2010 play The Etiquette of Vigilance imagines where the Younger family is fifty years after Raisin.

Karl Lindner (Jesse Pennington) tries to talk the Younger family out of moving to his white neighborhood (photo by Joan Marcus)

Perri Gaffney injects a burst of energy as the gossipy Mrs. Johnson, but there’s a reason why that scene is usually cut, as it feels out of place and unnecessary. The occasional presence of Lena’s husband’s ghost seeps into melodrama, while a key speech by Walter Lee near the end of the play shatters the fourth wall as it accuses the (mostly white) audience directly of its complicity in his situation.

When Raisin (the title comes from the Langston Hughes poem “A Dream Deferred,” in which the Harlem Renaissance writer and activist asks, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun? / Or fester like a sore — / And then run?”) began its run at the Newman, the Public was also presenting Elevator Repair Service’s Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge at the Anspacher, complete with a coda that also broke the fourth wall and involved Baldwin (Greig Sargeant) and his good friend Hansberry (Daphne Gaines). It’s possible to try too hard with classic material; it’s better to trust the play more even while adding your imprimatur.

OLIVIA HARRISON AND MARTIN SCORSESE IN CONVERSATION: CAME THE LIGHTENING: TWENTY POEMS FOR GEORGE

Who: Olivia Harrison, Martin Scorsese
What: New York City book launch
Where: Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92nd St. Y, 1395 Lexington Ave. between Ninety-First & Ninety-Second Sts., and online
When: Sunday, November 20, in person $31.50 – $55, livestream $25, 8:00
Why: “Only the past is carved in stone / So that it will not be forgotten. / This sand, once granite, / Covers and clings to my wet feet. / Ancient geology as I walk to the sea / Each grain a memory being set free / To solidify and be carved again / Marking the time once more / So the past will not be forgotten.” In her new book, Came the Lightening: Twenty Poems for George (Genesis, June 2022, $35), Olivia Harrison, the widow of beloved musician George Harrison, remembers her husband through twenty poems, photographs, drawings, and more, in honor of the twentieth anniversary of his death from cancer in 2001 at the age of fifty-eight. (The book includes contributions from Henry Grossman, Sue Flood, Mary McCartney, Marcus Tomlinson, Klaus Voormann, and Brian Roylance.) Among the poems are “End of the Line,” “My Arrival,” “Without Hummingbirds,” “Keepsakes,” and the aforementioned “Carved in Stone.” Olivia, who married George in 1978, writes, “Here on the shore, twenty years later / my message in a bottle has reached / dry land. Words about our life, his death / but mostly love and our journey to the end.”

On November 20 at 8:00, Olivia Harrison will be joined by Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese at the 92nd St. Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall for the New York City launch of the book, celebrating the life and career of the Quiet Beatle. (A special-edition signed book-and-print edition will be available December 6 for £125.) If you can’t make it to the event, it will also be livestreamed. As George Harrison sang more than fifty years ago, “Sunrise doesn’t last all morning / A cloudburst doesn’t last all day / Seems my love is up and has left you with no warning / It’s not always gonna be this grey / All things must pass / All things must pass away.”

CAMP SIEGFRIED

A seventeen-year-old boy (Johnny Berchtold) chops wood as a sixteen-year-old girl (Lily McInerny) watches (photo by Emilio Madrid)

CAMP SIEGFRIED
Tony Kiser Theater
305 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 4, $56-$107
2st.com/shows

Tony-nominated playwright Bess Wohl has a penchant for setting her plays in singular, fictional locations where the characters are cocooned from the rest of the world, oddly constructed outdoor microcosms that also comment on society at large. Her 2015 hit Small Mouth Sounds takes place at a silent retreat in the woods, while Continuity unfurls on an isolated movie set in the New Mexico desert re-created to look like a doomed Arctic glacier.

Her latest play, Camp Siegfried, making its US premiere at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, transpires at a 1930s summer camp on Long Island run by the German American Bund. Incredibly, it’s based on reality. During the pandemic lockdown, Wohl and her family escaped their Brooklyn home and stayed near Yaphank. Surfing the web to find things to do with her three children, Wohl learned about Camp Siegfried, which from 1936 to 1941 served as a gathering place in Yaphank for German Americans to support the Third Reich, holding Nazi indoctrination programs and encouraging young men and women to hook up and create the next generation of Aryans.

It’s 1938, and a shy, mousy sixteen-year-old girl (Lily McInerny) is standing by herself, holding a large mug of beer. She is approached by a bold seventeen-year-old boy (Johnny Berchtold) who instantly chats her up. (The two are never given names.) She is from Baltimore, attending the camp for the first time, while he is a regular, his father a bigwig in the Bund. Brett J. Banakis’s marvelous set is a large grassy hill with a deep valley, tree branches overhead, and a narrow dirt path running from bottom to top across the stage.

He (Johnny Berchtold) and she (Lily McInerny) grow close in new Bess Wohl play (photo by Emilio Madrid)

“My aunt / She thinks I need to get more physical exercise / Move around more,” she explains. “Things fester in dark spaces is what she says / And I think by dark spaces she just means Baltimore.” Wohl is referring to a lot more than just a city in Maryland.

She says she doesn’t dance, can’t swim, and doesn’t like crowds, ghost stories, or the ocean; she’s scared of just about everything. He is intent on displaying his strength and superiority, feeling he has something to prove because he’s the runt of his family. He calls her “dummy,” since she has so much to learn. When she doesn’t express pride in her heritage, he gets mad at her, decrying, “Being German / You look all hangdog about it / ‘My mom is . . .’ / What are you ashamed of / We’ve got Oktoberfest / Beer / Hamburgers / Hot dogs.” He claims that Christmas, Santa Claus, and kindergarten are all German inventions, but since WWI, Germans have been mistreated, stigmatized as “Barbarians” and “Huns.”

While he splits logs and shows off his muscles, determined to demonstrate to his father that he has “Kampfgeist” — “Kampf is struggle / Geist is spirit / The spirit of the fight / We’re supposed to have it” — she accumulates cuts and bruises on her legs, gossips about the boys and girls who disappear in pairs into the woods at night, and expresses her admiration for the romantic story of Siegfried and Brunhilde in Valhalla that ends with a funeral pyre. Wohl does not have to remind us that the tale was made famous in the epic opera Der Ring des Nibelungen by renowned German anti-Semite Richard Wagner.

They start growing closer as they work together to build a wooden platform where specially selected youths will give speeches on German Day, in front of tens of thousands of people. He thinks she would be a great choice to represent the girls as they all await what her aunt Linda calls “the Day of Freedom . . . When we storm the government / And fight back.” The two teens share stories with each other that indicate there is more to them than what is on the surface while also revealing vulnerabilities that make them ripe to fall under the lure of Hitler-style extremism. But each of them undergoes a transformation that alters the dynamics of their relationship and just what they are building together.

An unnamed pair of teenagers (Johnny Berchtold and Lily McInerny) work together at Camp Siegfried (photo by Emilio Madrid)

In their professional New York stage debuts, McInerny and Berchtold are thoroughly engaging, superbly capturing the many changes their characters undergo in a short period of time, as weakness becomes strength and vice versa. Christopher Darbassie’s sound design includes offstage chattering of the other camp attendees as well as the chirping of birds and other nature elements, in addition to the blasts of guns during target practice; Tyler Micoleau’s lighting creates long shadows that hover over the teens, who wear summery costumes by Brenda Abbandandolo.

Camp Siegfried is a modest play by Tony nominee Wohl, who is a mix of Jewish, Mormon, and Irish Catholic; her husband is Jewish, and they are raising their children Jewish. The eighty-five-minute narrative unfolds quietly under the almost elegiac direction of Tony winner David Cromer (Our Town, The Band’s Visit), a mostly secular Jew from Skokie, Illinois, where a Nazi group famously marched in 1977; Cromer confronted his own feelings about anti-Semitism when he directed Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic earlier this year, as he told the Forward.

Prayer travels back and forth between 1944–46 and 2016–17, as a family deals with the Nazi occupation of Paris seventy years before as well as the growing anti-Semitism in the twenty-first century. Camp Siegfried tackles similar themes; the play ends a few months before Kristallnacht, which is unleashed in November 1938, leading the way to the Holocaust.

An extraordinarily talented writer, Wohl (Grand Horizons, Make Believe) makes subtle hints that bring the story into modern times, as much of the camp rhetoric evokes QAnon-type conspiracy theories involving racism, anti-Semitism, militia training, and plans to overthrow the government by force. As the girl is told in the play, “Anybody can fall into anything really / Anyone can be seduced. . . . Never underestimate your / Infinite capacity for delusion.” As we’ve seen from the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol to heavily armed Brownshirt-like figures hanging around ballot boxes this month, such seduction and delusion can happen anywhere, at any time.

BAM NEXT WAVE: TROJAN WOMEN

Ong Keng Sen and the National Changgeuk Company of Korea make their BAM debut with Trojan Women (photo courtesy NTOK)

TROJAN WOMEN
Brooklyn Academy of Music, BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, November 18, and Saturday, November 19, $44-$125 (use code COURAGE to save 20%), 7:30
www.bam.org
www.ntok.go.kr/en

In 2011, as part of the thirtieth Next Wave Festival, BAM presented SITI Company’s Trojan Women (After Euripides), Jocelyn Clarke’s adaptation of Euripides’s 415 BCE play, the conclusion of a Trojan War trilogy that began with Alexandros and Palamedes.

In 1991, Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen staged Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1965 adaptation of Trojan Women in a granite quarry. In 2016, Ong revisited the tale, this time with the National Changgeuk Company of Korea, combining classical Greek tragedy with contemporary K-pop and the Korean storytelling form known as pansori, which dates back to the seventeenth century and features each solo singer accompanied by one instrument.

Now Ong brings Hecuba (Kim Kum-mi), Cassandra (Yi So-yeon), Andromache (Kim Mi-jin), Helen (Kim Jun-soo), and the rest of the Trojan men and women (Lee Kwang-bok as Talthybios, Choi Ho-sung as Menelaus, Yu Tae-pyung-yang as Soul of Souls, an eight-woman chorus, and a nine-piece orchestra) to BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House November 18 and 19 as part of the fortieth Next Wave Festival. The production, which has traveled around the world, melds text by playwright Bae Sam-sik, traditional pansori music by South Korean Living National Treasure master singer Ahn Sook-sun, K-pop music by Parasite and Squid Game composer Jung Jae-il, a surreal set by Cho Myung-hee, bold lighting by Scott Zielinski, exciting video design by Austin Switser, and white costumes by Kim Moo-hong.

“My style of distilled yet rich storytelling is often expressed through a strong concept, integrated gesamtkunstwerk, and bold visuality,” Ong explains in a program note. “When I was invited by the National Changgeuk Company of Korea to direct Trojan Women, I yearned to return to the minimalism of pansori, where a solo storyteller sings all the parts with only one drummer. Thus began the task of removing the layers which had been overlaid in time over changgeuk (a musical theater genre formed in the early twentieth century from pansori), like stripping off layers of paints and renovations to get to the base architecture of an old house. . . . From the beginning I felt that Helen, who stands between the Greeks and the Trojans, is a character between binary opposites. In our production, the voice of Helen exists in the space between masculine and feminine — she is an outsider who launched the war between Greece and Troy. With the chorus, I drew inspiration from the music of enslaved peoples transported from Africa to the Americas. Similarly to how African music became the music of spirituals, blues, jazz, rap, it would be wonderful if the chorus of Trojan Women could express the vibrant potential future of pansori. Hence the invitation to Jang Jae-Il to write the music for the chorus in the genre of K-pop, where the emotionalism of pansori infuses contemporary pop elements. ”

This show marks the BAM debut of the National Changgeuk Company of Korea, which is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary. The 110-minute multimedia drama incorporates music, dance, and theater, with a cast of more than dozen singers, actors, and musicians exploring the effects of battle on women, particularly the Korean War. “Trojan Women deals with human dignity and self-respect,” Ong said in an October 2016 interview with the Financial Times. “Most of all, it is focused on women’s strong will to live. I also hope that this work would remind the audience of the pain and sorrow Korean women had suffered after the war.”

FINALE — LATE CONVERSATIONS WITH STEPHEN SONDHEIM: AN EVENING WITH D. T. MAX

Who: D. T. Max, Michael Schulman
What: Book launch
Where: The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South
When: Thursday, November 17, free with RSVP, 8:00
Why: “I always wanted to write about Stephen Sondheim. Actually, long before writing about him was a possibility, I just wanted to meet Stephen Sondheim. In the spring of that long-ago year 1977, my mother went to a benefit for the Phoenix Theatre, a repertory company that pioneered off-Broadway theater. The event included a performance of Side by Side by Sondheim, a revue of the composer-lyricist’s songs. Going to benefits was not the sort of thing my mother usually did, but my uncle was a playwright whom the Phoenix had championed, and he might have persuaded her. Sondheim at the time was exactly the sort of creator the Phoenix wanted to associate itself with. He was remaking the American musical in the same way the Phoenix was trying to remake the theatrical landscape.”

So begins D. T. Max’s new book, Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim (Harper, November 22, $20.99), which collects three years of interviews he conducted with Sondheim, including discussions about technology, boring books, pop music, movies, New York City, the joys of live theater, and more. It was initially going to be for a profile for the New Yorker, focusing on a new musical Sondheim was writing, but the pandemic and the maestro’s death changed things. On November 17 at 8:00, Max (The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace) will be at the National Arts Club to launch Finale with the help of fellow New Yorker scribe Michael Schulman; admission is free with advance RSVP.

MONTAG

Novella (Nadine Malouf) and Faith (Ariana Venturi) face an uncertain future in Montag (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

MONTAG
Soho Rep
46 Walker St. between Broadway & Church St.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 20, $55
sohorep.org

In German, Montag, the name of Kate Tarker’s new play, making its world premiere at Soho Rep through November 20, means “Monday,” a day that is critical to the plot of the eighty-minute show. But it also made me think of Guy Montag, the protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi classic Fahrenheit 451. Named after a paper company, Montag is a firefighter in charge of finding books in people’s homes and burning them, at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the first chapter, Bradbury writes, “The last few nights he had had the most uncertain feelings about the sidewalk just around the corner here, moving in the starlight toward his house. He had felt that a moment before his making the turn, someone had been there. The air seemed charged with a special calm as if someone had waited there, quietly, and only a moment before he came, simply turned to a shadow and let him through. Perhaps his nose detected a faint perfume, perhaps the skin on the backs of his hands, on his face, felt the temperature rise at this one spot where a person’s standing might raise the immediate atmosphere ten degrees for an instant. There was no understanding it. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak. But now tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. His inner mind, reaching out to turn the corner for him, had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing? Or was the atmosphere compressed merely by someone standing very quietly there, waiting? He turned the corner.”

That same feeling pervades Montag, which takes place in set designer Lisa Laratta’s dark box in the middle of the stage. A lone light dangles from the ceiling. (The appropriately dingy lighting is by Masha Tsimring.) Faith (Ariana Venturi) and Novella (Nadine Malouf) sit opposite each other at a small table, the former smoking a cigarette, the latter crunching loudly on chips and crinkling the plastic snack bag. It’s live, in-person ASMR for the audience, experienced in a mysterious claustrophobic space instead of an online video. In the back is a wall filled with random, mostly unidentifiable objects, like remnants from a life shuttered away. Next to that is a doorway through which light can be seen, reminiscent of that corner Montag eventually turns onto.

It’s April 2014, and Faith and Novella live together in a basement apartment on a US army base in Germany; the former is a lead systems analyst from America, while the latter is a comfort woman for the soldiers, a Turkish immigrant who is now a German citizen. They are contemporary versions of the Gastarbeiter, or guest workers, who moved to Germany between 1955 and 1973; each one is married and has a child, none of whom the audience ever sees.

Two friends (Ariana Venturi and Nadine Malouf) search for meaning in Soho Rep world premiere (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

On this evening, Novella is ready to party. “We go all night?” Novella asks. “That’s the deal,” Faith says. “The deal we made with the devil.” They are in day seven of some kind of weeklong deprivation. During that time, a colleague of Faith’s named Clifford Andrews has gone missing. Faith interviews Clifford, channeled by Novella, who, when asked why he stopped coming to work, replies, in a nod to the Boomtown Rats, “Maybe I just don’t like Mondays.” He eventually gets extremely angry, which adds to the sense of danger that surrounds the somewhat existential situation. “Are you planning anything, Cliff?” Faith asks. (The Boomtown Rats’ 1979 hit “I Don’t Like Mondays” was based on a school shooting that year in San Diego.)

But even as they worry about what might happen next, they occasionally break out into song and dance, putting on glittering costumes (by Montana Levi Blanco) and moving and grooving to Beyoncé as well as Rupert Holmes’s “Piña Colada Song,” the real name of which is actually “Escape.” Several characters who enter late, played by Dane Suarez and Jacob Orr, add further confusion to an abstruse plot that is never fully revealed while also providing a sense of finality.

Director Dustin Wills (Wolf Play, Plano) has trouble finding a narrative flow to the proceedings, which too often feel jumpy and random, although he does capture the overall sense of impending doom. Venturi (Mary Page Marlowe, These Paper Bullets!) and Malouf (A Bright Room Called Day, Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya) form an engaging bond as the friends trapped in a dystopian near-future.

Tarker (Thunderbodies, Laura and the Sea), who grew up on the outskirts of an army base in Germany, has cited such wide-ranging influences on the play as Carrie Mae Weems’s “Kitchen Table Series,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, and Ridley Scott and Callie Khouri’s Thelma & Louise, which accounts for the show’s unpredictable course and what it is inherently about, although it’s no coincidence that in August 2014, four months after Montag is set, authoritarian Recep Erdoğan will be elected president of Turkey.

Faith sums it all up when she says, “Most people — they have no idea. How scary the world is.”

Ray Bradbury’s Montag would no doubt agree.

STEVE MARTIN, HARRY BLISS, AND NATHAN LANE: NUMBER ONE IS WALKING

Who: Steve Martin, Harry Bliss, Nathan Lane
What: Book launch
Where: The Town Hall, 123 West Forty-Third St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
When: Tuesday, November 15, $68, 8:00
Why: Multihyphenate Steve Martin has made films and records and written plays, movie scripts, novels, children’s books, and tongue-in-cheek self-help tomes. He has now entered the graphic novel field with Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions (Celadon, November 15, $30), with the help of black-and-white illustrations by cartoonist Harry Bliss. A follow-up to their 2020 cartoon collection A Wealth of Pigeons, the new book features scenes in which Martin looks back at his career for the first time in print. The title comes from a Hollywood trope; in one panel, Martin explains, “On a movie call sheet, the actors are listed numerically. The lead is number one, the second lead is number two, etc. I was slightly embarrassed on my first film, The Jerk, when I would head toward the set and the assistant director would trail me, transmitting into his walkie talkie . . . ‘Number one is walking.’” Martin points out that he was also “number one” on Bowfinger, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Bringing Down the House, but when he did Nancy Meyers’s It’s Complicated with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, each time he came on set he was horrified to hear: “Number three is walking.”

Longtime New Yorker cartoonist Bliss has illustrated such books as Joanna Cotler’s Sorry (Really Sorry), Doreen Cronin’s Diary of a Worm, and Alison McGhee’s Countdown to Kindergarten as well as writing and illustrating Bailey and Luke on the Loose. On November 15 at 8:00, Martin and Bliss will be at the Town Hall to discuss their collaboration; serving as moderator will be the one and only Nathan Lane, who appears with Martin in Only Murders in the Building. All audience members will receive a signed copy of Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions, courtesy of the Strand.