this week in literature

SEARCHING FOR HAPPINESS: ANDREW SCOTT AND SARAH SNOOK GO SOLO

Andrew Scott reaches for dying hope in Vanya at the Lucille Lortel (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

VANYA
Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 11
lortel.org/currently-playing

There are currently two extraordinary solo shows, one on Broadway, one off, based on classic literary works from the 1890s, and they could not be more different.

Both feature extremely talented and sexy award-winning actors from English-speaking countries overseas; in one, the performer creates a warm, intimate space, attempting to make individual eye contact with each of the 299 audience members, while in the other the star spends nearly the entire show looking directly into onstage cameras, although every one of the 1,025 audience members will feel the power and intelligence in that gaze.

At the Lucille Lortel in the West Village, Dublin-born Andrew Scott, a three-time Emmy nominee and two-time Olivier winner who has portrayed Moriarty in Sherlock, the hot priest in Fleabag, the title character in Ripley, and Adam in Andrew Haigh’s well-received 2023 film, All of Us Strangers, is taking on all eight roles in Simon Stephens’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 1899 Uncle Vanya, called simply Vanya.

Meanwhile, Adelaide-born Sarah Snook, an Emmy and Olivier winner who is most well known as Siobhan “Shiv” Roy in Succession, plays all twenty-six parts in Kip Williams’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novella, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Under the whimsical direction of Sam Yates — who created the show with Scott, writer Stephens, and scenic designer Rosanna Vize — Scott, whose only previous New York stage appearance was in David Hare’s The Vertical Hour in 2006–7, employs only subtle shifts in his performance to indicate which character he is at any given moment, with slight vocal changes and the use of such objects as a tennis ball, sunglasses, a necklace, and a scarf. Vize’s attractive set includes a kitchen with a working sink, a door standing by itself in the center, a piano with a small Christmas tree on it, a glowing orb, a table with a lamp and bottle of booze, a large swing, and a curtained back wall that opens to reveal a mirror in which the audience can glimpse themselves, a way to combat the solitude of the solo performer and involve the audience even further.

It definitely helps to know the basics; as one colleague noted to me after the show, “I enjoyed it, but was it Uncle Vanya?” Over the years, the play has proved to be malleable, reshaped and reimagined into various time periods and locations and methods of storytelling. Tony winner Stephens, who has written such diverse presentations as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Heisenberg, and Blindness, sets his version in an undefined time and place, although it seems to be the latter part of the twentieth century, before cell phones and home computers; he has Anglicized the names, added nearly three dozen F-bombs, and references the 1994 Johnny Depp movie Don Juan de Marco.

Ivan (Ivan Petrovich “Vanya” Voynitsky) and his niece, Sonia (Sofya Alexandrovna), run the family estate owned by Alexander (Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov), Sonia’s father; a pompous film director, he was married to Anna, Ivan’s late sister and Sonia’s mother. Alexander has arrived with his much younger second wife, Helena (Yelena Andreevna), who is lusted after by Ivan and the local country doctor and environmentalist, Michael (Mikhail Lvovich Astrov). Ivan’s cranky, well-read, aging mother, Elizabeth (Maria Vasilevna Voynitskaya), lives at the estate, along with the old nurse Maureen (Marina Timofeevna) and Liam (Ilya Ilich “Waffles” Telegin), a poor landowner and family friend who has not gotten over his wife’s desertion with another man years before, opting to remain faithful to her until her utterly unlikely return.

Andrew Scott takes a swing and scores as eight characters in solo Uncle Vanya (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The play opens with a conversation between Michael and Maureen that relates to all the characters:

Michael: How long have we known each other, Maureen?
Maureen: Oh my god, Jesus. Let me think. You came here for the first time, when was it, when Anna, Sonia’s mother, was sick? Then you had to come again the next year. That was two visits in two summers before . . . before she died. So that’s eleven years, is it?
Michael: Have I changed, do you think?
Maureen: Oh god yeah. You have. You used to be so handsome. And you were so young then, Michael, and now you’re old. And of course you drink more than you used to, Michael.
Michael: Yeah . . . Yeah I’ve worked myself to the bone. I’m on my feet all day. I never rest. And then you get home and you pray to God a patient isn’t going to call you out again. But they do, they always do. So in all the time I’ve known you, Maureen. In the last decade. I’ve not had a single day off. What do you expect me to do but get old? And then you look around you and all you can see are lunatics. The people here are lunatics, Maureen. Every single one of them. And when you surround
yourself with lunatics, after a while, you become a lunatic too. I’ve started growing my own carrots. Little tiny carrots. How did that happen? See, I’ve become a lunatic too. It’s not that I’m losing my mind. My brain is still largely in the right place. But my feelings are dull and dead. I don’t want anything. I don’t need anything. I don’t love anybody. Except you. I love you, Maureen.
Maureen: Are you sure you don’t want a drink?

Shortly after that, Ivan, who deeply resents Alexander, explains to Michael and Maureen that he hasn’t been sleeping well, “ever since Alexander and his new wife got here. They’ve knocked our lives completely out of kilter. I sleep really deeply at absolutely the wrong times of day. I’m eating all this weird food. From, like, Kabul. I’m drinking wine in the day. It’s not good for me, Doctor. It’s not good for me at all. Before they got here I didn’t have a moment to spare, did I, Maureen? I was working all the time. Me and Sonia were. Preparing the harvest. Managing the orders. Making deliveries. Now it’s just Sonia that’s doing everything, because all I do is eat, sleep, drink, repeat, eat, sleep, drink, repeat!”

But when Alexander reveals his plans for the estate and Ivan catches Michael with Helena, one of the most famous guns in the history of theater explodes.

Vanya is a unique and thrilling experience. Scott is absolutely magnetic; you won’t be able to take your eyes off him, just as it feels like he can’t take his eyes off you. There are odd moments; turning Alexander into a film director feels unnecessary, and a sex scene is both steamy and awkward, given that Scott is playing both roles.

But overall, the hundred-minute show is as wistful and funny as it is heart-wrenching and touching. The incorporation of the piano to recall Anna is haunting, and the swing evokes a more innocent childhood for Ivan, Scott, and the audience.

Early on, Elizabeth tells Ivan, “You’ve changed, Ivan. Sorry, Sonia, but it’s true. You’ve become cynical. I barely recognize you these days. You had a good soul. You used to be so clear in your convictions. They used to shine from you. . . . What’s odd, Ivan, is that it’s like you blame your misery on your convictions. Your convictions aren’t the problem. You’re the problem. You never put your convictions into practice. You could have gone out and done something. You never did.” Vanya responds, “Done something? Do you have any idea, Mother, how difficult it is to go out and ‘do something’ nowadays?” That’s an exchange everyone can relate to in 2025.

So is it Uncle Vanya?

In Andrew Scott’s capable hands, does it matter?

Sarah Snook portrays all the characters in unique staging of Oscar Wilde classic (photo by Marc Brenner)

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
Music Box Theatre
239 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 29, $74–$521
doriangrayplay.com

Sarah Snook is sensational in her New York stage debut, portraying all the characters in Kip Williams’s exciting solo adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s beloved homoerotic gothic horror morality tale, The Picture of Dorian Gray. For two hours without intermission, Snook, who won an Olivier for her performance in London, ambles across the stage, followed by several mobile cameras operated by Clew, Luka Kain, Natalie Rich, Benjamin Sheen, and Dara Woo, dressed in black, stopping behind and in front of several large screens hanging from the ceiling. A giant Snook is projected onto the screens, dominating the theater as she smiles, winks, and nods knowingly while the dark story unfolds.

The genius in the Sydney Theatre Company production is that the onstage Snook interacts with prerecorded versions of herself as the other characters; thus, the live Snook is seen having conversations with the others on the screens, sometimes several at a time, all aware that they are being looked at and reveling in that connection.

Artist Basil Hallward has painted a portrait of a beautiful young man named Dorian Gray. Showing the work to his aristocratic friend Lord Henry “Harry” Wotton, who wants it to be shown publicly at a prestigious event, Hallward declines, explaining, “I know you will laugh at me, but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it. . . . Harry, every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.”

Dorian arrives at the studio to continue to pose for Basil, who does not want Lord Wotton to corrupt his innocent young model and new friend. He tells Harry to stay away from him, offering, “He has a very bad influence over all his friends, with the single exception of myself.” Dorian asks, “Have you really a very bad influence, Lord Henry? As bad as Basil says?” Lord Wotton replies, “There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral.” Saying he is glad to have met Lord Wotton, Dorian admits, “I wonder shall I always be glad?”

Upon seeing the finished portrait, Dorian is blissful yet taken aback. “How sad it is! How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June,” he declares. “If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that — for that — I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”

And thus, the deal is done.

Sarah Snook briefly takes a seat in The Picture of Dorian Gray (photo by Marc Brenner)

Dorian is taken under the wing of Lord Wotton’s aunt, Lady Agatha, and meets such high-society types as the Duchess of Harley, parliamentarian Sir Thomas Burdon, the charming gentleman Mr. Erskine of Treadley, and the silent Mrs. Vandeleur, an old friend of Lady Agatha’s who decided she had “said everything that she had to say before she was thirty.” Among the others who enter Dorian’s kaleidoscopic world are his housekeeper, Mrs. Leaf; actress and puppeteer Sibyl Vane; Francis Osborne, the doorman; chemist Alan Campbell; Dorian’s friend Adrian Singleton; and Sybil’s younger brother, sailor James Vane.

Murder, suicide, and other forms of mayhem ensue as Dorian’s bloom of youth and beauty never seem to fade despite his depravities while the portrait depicts an ever older and more decrepit figure.

Marg Horwell’s set is mostly spare except for a few props that appear briefly, such as a long table, a puppet show, and an elegant couch with flowers; Horwell’s period costumes and the many wigs Snook wears are fanciful and ornate. The pinpoint precision of Nick Schlieper’s lighting, Clemence Williams’s sound and music, and David Bergman’s video makes it all feel real, especially one scene in which a group is seated at a long table; it is not immediately clear which Snook is the live one. Williams and Bergman also have fun using face filters as Snook cheekily poses for the camera.

The only time Snook is not looking directly into the camera is when she is in the nursery, admiring herself in a handheld mirror; in one corner is a collection of portraits based on paintings by such artists as Sebastiano del Piombo, Jean-Étienne Liotard, and Bronzino, but each now with Snook’s face.

Snook is remarkable as the narrator and all the characters, able to engage with an audience she never actually looks at, acting to be seen on a screen as if the audience is watching a morphing portrait. Despite our being well aware of the artificiality of it all, we fall for the gambit hook, line, and sinker, sucked into this technological marvel; it is a Dorian Gray made for 2025.

It is also an excellent companion piece to Andrew Scott’s Vanya. Just as multiple characters in Stephens’s Chekhov retelling discuss how much others have changed, that concept is key to Dorian Gray as well, and not just in how the man in the portrait deteriorates but Dorian does not. “It’s nigh on eighteen years since I met him. He hasn’t changed much since then. I have, though,” Violet acknowledges. “You are quite perfect, Dorian. Pray, don’t change,” Lord Wotton insists. And Dorian asks of himself, “Was it really true that one could never change?”

In addition, an elusive happiness hovers over Vanya. “I may not have my happiness, Ivan. But I’ve got my pride,” Liam says. Michael debates whether he is happy or not. Sonia asks Helena if she is happy and she answers no. And Alexander brags, “I’m the only happy one in this whole bloody house.” Meanwhile, Lord Wotton says, “Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.” And Dorian admits, “I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.”

In completely different ways, both shows offer pleasures galore, delivering a happiness that will stay with you long after you leave the theater.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FOOTBALL AS AMERICA: MATTHEW BARNEY AT METROGRAPH

Matthew Barney’s multichannel Secondary will be shown on a single screen at Metrograph (image © Matthew Barney, courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, Regen Projects, and Galerie Max Hetzler)

SECONDARY
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday, May 3, 5:00
metrograph.com
secondary.matthewbarney.net
online slideshow

It was the hit heard round the world.

On August 12, 1978, the New England Patriots were playing a preseason game against the Oakland Raiders at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. Late in the second quarter, the Pats have a third and eight at the Raiders twenty-four-yard line. QB Steve Grogan calls the 94 Slant, and wide receiver Darryl Stingley heads downfield. At the ten-yard line, Stingley reaches for the overthrown pass and is crushed in midair by two-time Raiders All-Pro safety Jack Tatum, known as the Assassin for his punishing style of play. Stingley immediately crumples to the ground. Four Oakland defenders look down at Stingley and walk away; Patriots wide receiver Russ Francis stands over his fallen teammate, knowing something is wrong. The twenty-six-year-old Stingley is wheeled off the field on a stretcher, a quadriplegic for the rest of his life; he died in 2007 at the age of fifty-five. Tatum wasn’t penalized on the play and never apologized to Stingley, claiming it was a legal hit and that he had done nothing wrong. Tatum, who died in 2010 at the age of sixty-one, was also involved in the Immaculate Reception on December 23, 1972, in a playoff game against the Steelers; with twenty-two seconds left and Pittsburgh down by one, future Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw was facing a fourth and ten from his own forty. He ran to his right and threw a pass down the middle. Tatum smashed into Steelers running back Frenchy Fuqua, the ball popped up into the air, and future Hall of Famer Franco Harris picked it up by his shoestrings and ran forty yards into the end zone for the winning score.

Filmmaker and installation artist Matthew Barney was eleven years old when Tatum pummeled Stingley. Seeing the collision over and over again on replay did not prevent Barney from becoming a star quarterback in high school in Idaho. But at Yale, he switched from sports to art, beginning his “Drawing Restraint” series in 1987 and making his Jim Otto Suite in 1991–92, about orifices, bodily fluids, energy, Harry Houdini, and Raiders Hall of Fame center Jim Otto, who wore the number double zero, mimicking the letters at the beginning and end of his palindromic last name.

Violence in football takes center stage as a metaphor for America in Matthew Barney’s Secondary (image courtesy Matthew Barney Studio, © Matthew Barney / photo by Julieta Cervantes)

In 2023, Barney said farewell to his longtime Long Island City studio with Secondary, a five-channel video installation that used the Tatum-Stingley play to explore violence in athletic competition. Barney transformed the studio, which was right on the East River, into a football stadium, with a long, artificial turf surface divided into geometric patterns of different colors, centered by his “Field Emblem,” his Cremaster logo, an ellipse with a line going through it, evoking –0-. There were monitors in all four corners of the field, along with a three-sided mini-jumbotron hanging from the ceiling. Visitors could sit on the field or a bench; there was also a painting on the wall, an owners booth filled with football paraphernalia, and a ditch with broken piping and mud dug into the concrete. Outside, on the facade facing the water, there was a digital countdown clock next to graffiti that said, “Saboroso,” which means “delicious.”

Written and directed by Barney, photographed by Soren Nielsen, and edited by Kate Williams, the film — which lasts sixty minutes, the length of a football game — has now been reimagined on a single screen, where it will be shown at Metrograph on May 3 at 5:00, in conjunction with the publication of a two-volume companion book (Rizzoli, April 2025, $115), featuring contributions from Eric Banks, Jonathan Bepler, Raven Chacon, Mark Godfrey, Juliette Lecorne, Helen Marten, Maggie Nelson, and David Thomson; Barney will be at Metrograph for a postscreening discussion with book editor Louise Neri and Banks, followed by a reception with signed books available for purchase.

The multichannel version kicks off with indigenous rights activist Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a Two-Spirit Chiricahua Apache and Isleta Pueblo soprano, composer, poet, and public speaker, performing an alternate national anthem, a none-too-subtle jab at a league that still has teams using offensive Native American names and imagery. The cast, primarily consisting of dancers and choreographers, features movement director David Thomson as Stingley; Raphael Xavier as Tatum; Shamar Watt as Raiders safety Lester “the Molester” Hayes; Wally Cardona as Grogan; Ted Johnson as Francis; Isabel Crespo Pardo, Kyoko Kitamura, and Jeffrey Gavett as the line judges and referees; Barney as Raiders Hall of Fame QB Ken “the Snake” Stabler, who died of colon cancer but was discovered to have had high Stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the disease that affects so many football players, brought on by getting hit so much in the head; and Thomas Kopache as Raiders owner Al Davis, whose motto was “Just win, baby,” no matter the cost. (Football fans will also notice cameos by actors portraying such Raiders favorites as wide receiver Fred Biletnikoff and defensive end John “the Tooz” Matuszak, who became an actor and died in 1989 at the age of thirty-eight from an opioid overdose.) The actors are generally much older than the people they represent, several of whom never made it to the age the performers are today.

The experimental film does not have a traditional chronological narrative; instead, Barney focuses on Tatum, Hayes, and Stingley training in slow motion in equipment rooms as if preparing for a ballet, Grogan making a football out of a gooey substance and then practicing with it, members of Raiders Nation shouting and cheering in fierce black-and-silver Halloween-like costumes, and players venturing into the muddy ditch, the broken pipe echoing Stingley’s shattered body. The music, by sound designer Jonathan Bepler, envelops the audience in a parade of noises, from hums and breathing to clangs and screams. Shots of the Manhattan skyline and the East River beckon to another life outside. The screens sometimes display the same footage, while other times they are different; it is like the viewer is at a football game, with the choice whether to watch the quarterback, the defensive alignment, or other fans in the stands. There is no actual pigskin in the film.

Matthew Barney turned his LIC studio into a multimedia installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The game of football has always been lionized for its violence. Even as the league changes rules to try to protect the quarterback, kick returners, and receivers, the sports networks repeatedly show brutal hits like the one on Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa against the Cincinnati Bengals that resulted in severe head and neck injuries. When we think of Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann, the first thing we remember is the career-ending injury he suffered on Monday Night Football in 1985 at the hands of New York Giants linebackers Lawrence Taylor and Harry Carson, brutally shattering his leg, and not his 1982–83 MVP season when he led his team to a Super Bowl victory over the Dolphins.

But Barney (River of Fundament, “Subliming Vessel”) is not merely commenting on football. Secondary is about America itself, its rituals and celebrations, its embracing of violence on and off the field. It’s about our lack of respect for the human body and one another, about a country torn apart into blue and red states like opposing teams, ready to do whatever is necessary to just win, baby.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ANANSI’S GOLD: YEPOKA YEEBO AT THE AFRICA CENTER

Who: Yepoka Yeebo, Stuart A. Reid
What: Anansi’s Gold: In Conversation with Yepoka Yeebo and Stuart Reid
Where: The Africa Center, 1280 Fifth Ave. between 109th & 110th Sts., and online
When: Wednesday, April 30, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
Why: “In a castle by the sea in Accra, our man was telling his story. Outside, the sky was so bright it was almost white. In the shallows next to the castle, the waves were pale gray with white caps. Farther out to sea, they turned a shimmering blue. Huge fishing canoes rocked gently, close to shore. On the horizon, container ships lined up, waiting to dock. The air smelled of salt and smoke and brine. The castle — Osu Castle — was cut off from the rest of Accra by palm trees and checkpoints. It was a maze of archways and staircases and parapets, patched together over four centuries. Some of its walls were brightly whitewashed. Others were gray concrete, slick with algae. Ancient cannons and soldiers with assault rifles lined the castle’s walls. Even without stepping into its underground dungeons, you could tell that unspeakable things had happened here. In a heavily guarded room at the heart of the castle, a haze hung in the air as our man began. The history of Ghana, he said, had a secret chapter. Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s first president, had revealed it on his deathbed in 1972.”

So begins British-Ghanaian journalist Yepoka Yeebo’s true-crime bestseller, Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Swindled the World (Bloomsbury, April 2025, $19.99), which tells the story of con artist supreme John Ackah Blay-Miezah, who perpetrated a long, complicated financial fraud that involved a CIA-funded military junta, Ghanaian statesman Ako Adjei, former Nixon attorney general John N. Mitchell, and several of Kwame Nkrumah’s cabinet ministers, among others, stretching from Ghana to Philadelphia.

In conjunction with the release of the paperback edition of the book, which won the Jhalak Prize and the Plutarch Award for Biography, Yeebo will be at the Africa Center on April 30 at 6:30, speaking with writer and editor Stuart A. Reid, author of The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassin.

Admission is free with advance RSVP; the event will also be livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BEAUTIFUL UNCERTAINTY: TOM SANTOPIETRO, AUDREY HEPBURN, AND DORIS DAY

TOM SANTOPIETRO AT B&N
Barnes & Noble
2289 Broadway at Eighty-Second St.
Monday, March 31, free, 6:30
212-362-8835
barnesandnoble.com
tomsantopietro.com

“When Audrey Hepburn died at 8 P.M. on January 20, 1993, at the age of sixty-three, she left behind one Academy Award, two Tony Awards, dozens of lifetime achievement awards, her beloved sons Sean and Luca, companion Robert Wolders, millions of fans, universal acclaim as an indefatigable activist on behalf of the world’s children, and one final surprise — a nearly empty closet.

“She had walked away from the church of fame that rules Hollywood and ever-increasing swaths of the general public yet held onto that fame without even trying. Her elusiveness only increased public interest in her films and clothes as well as her life and loves, but Audrey Hepburn had grown uninterested in rehashing old tales of Hollywood glamour and legendary friends. In an industry which based its self-image on endless awards shows, she was, it was safe to say, the only screen idol about whom a son could convincingly state: ‘Being away from home to win an award was really a lost opportunity. Walking the dogs with her sons was a personal victory.’”

So begins Tom Santopietro’s latest book, Audrey Hepburn: A Life of Beautiful Uncertainty (Rowman & Littlefield, March 2025, $45). Born and raised in Waterbury, Connecticut, Santopietro attended Trinity College in Hartford, then went to the University of Connecticut Law School, also in Hartford.

“I always joke that law school was the three misbegotten years of my life,” Santopietro tells me in a phone interview. “I stayed, I graduated, and as soon as I graduated, I said, I’m never doing this ever. And I never have. You know why? Because I was uninterested. And when it comes to work, we’re all good at what we’re interested in.”

A few weeks before, I had met Santopietro at the Coffee House Club for an Oscars straw vote event he hosted with his friend Simon Jones, who has appeared in such series as Brideshead Revisited, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and The Gilded Age (as Bannister) and in New York in such shows as The Real Thing, Privates on Parade, and, most recently, Trouble in Mind.

Santopietro is a lovely storyteller, in person and in print. Among his previous books are The Sound of Music Story: How a Beguiling Young Novice, a Handsome Austrian Captain, and Ten Singing von Trapp Children Inspired the Most Beloved Film of All Time; Considering Doris Day; The Way We Were: The Making of a Romantic Classic; The Importance of Being Barbra: The Brilliant, Tumultuous Career of Barbra Streisand; Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters: What Harper Lee’s Book and the Iconic American Film Mean to Us Today; Sinatra in Hollywood; and The Godfather Effect: Changing Hollywood, America, and Me.

In A Life of Beautiful Uncertainty, Santopietro details Hepburn’s fascinating life and career in five acts comprising sixty-two chapters, including “What Price Hollywood,” “The Last Golden Age Star,” “A Star Is (Not Quite Yet) Born,” “Paris When It Fizzles — 1962–1964,” and “Everything Old Is New Again.” He explores Hepburn’s diverse filmography, from the many hits (Roman Holiday, Love in the Afternoon, The Nun’s Story, Charade, My Fair Lady, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Funny Face) to a trio of what he calls “mistakes” (Green Mansions, The Unforgiven, Bloodline).

On March 13 at 6:30, Santopietro, who lives on the Upper West Side, will be at the Barnes & Noble on Broadway and Eighty-Second St. to discuss and sign copies of A Life of Beautiful Uncertainty. Below he talks about speaking with Doris Day and Alan Arkin, the decline of theater etiquette, celebrities’ charitable work, and his favorite Audrey Hepburn film.

Tom Santopietro will be at Upper West B&N March 31 for NYC launch of his latest book (photo by Joan Marcus)

twi-ny: Where did your love of movies come from?

tom santopietro: When I was a little kid, I always liked movies. But what really accelerated it was when I was at Trinity, I took film courses at Wesleyan, which is in Middletown, and their film department was headed by an incredible woman named Jeanine Basinger. Have you ever met Jeanine?

twi-ny: I haven’t, but I know of her.

ts: She was on the board of the AFI. She was an extraordinary teacher who ignited my love of old films and Hollywood. And that’s where it really took off. Jeanine showed me possibility, and that’s what’s so great. That’s what great teachers do. So anyway, that’s where it really took off. And then I came to New York and worked on several Broadway shows, which I still do, but about twenty years ago, I thought, I want to do something more creative. And that’s how I started to write.

twi-ny: That was your first book, The Importance of Being Barbra, which was published in 2006.

ts: I’ve been fortunate and lucky, and I always joke, I didn’t tell anybody I was writing a book because I thought, What if I don’t finish it? And what if it’s really bad? And then when it was done, I sent it to my oldest friend, and a couple of days later, he called me back. And in a voice of total surprise, he said, It’s good. So I still laugh about that. And that led to Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, and then the Godfather movies.

twi-ny: I’m looking at the books you have written and their subjects. This is something we talked about at the Coffee House, that they’re all beloved icons, beloved films, beloved characters; there’s a lot of love in the room. And one of the things you told me was that that’s one thing you do when choosing a subject.

ts: Yeah, I really do. Because I think, well, you know this, you are a writer. I always say I don’t want to write a book about Stalin because I don’t want that monster in my head for three years. So these are people whose talent I admire so much. And also what I realized, Mark, and this just came to me when the Audrey book was completed, I thought, Oh, I’ve completed a trilogy of books about enormous stars, all of whom are incredibly nice, which is so rare in Hollywood. And that’s Doris Day, Audrey Hepburn, and Julie Andrews, these women who are beloved by their costars. And in the same way, I also realized after it was completed, Oh, I wrote a trilogy of books about family, and those were The Godfather, The Sound of Music, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

So I didn’t even realize it until the trilogy had been completed, but whatever was inside of me clearly needed to be expressed.

twi-ny: In the case of Doris Day, you had a conversation with her.

ts: Yes, after the book came out. The phone rang very late one night. It was after eleven, and I answered the phone grumpily.

I hadn’t eaten dinner yet. I had just come in from work. And I said, Well, who is this? And she said, Well, I’ve been trying to reach you from Carmel, California, for a long time. And then I realized it was Doris. Everybody wants to know what it was like. We spoke for an hour; as nice as she was on the screen, she was even nicer on the phone. It’s extraordinary. She was so unbelievably honest and open; she talked about her failed marriages, her love of animals, and Hollywood. So yeah, she was pretty terrific. I wrote that book because I felt she was a huge star who never received her due.

twi-ny: She retired from movies so early in her career.

ts: Another thing in writing about Audrey Hepburn is Audrey Hepburn and Doris Day had a lot of similarities, which was they worked from when they were teenagers nonstop. And then they both walked away from their fame; Doris said, “It means much more to me to work for animal welfare.” And Audrey said, “I want to work for UNICEF.” So that interests me a lot, that in our fame-obsessed society, world-famous women would walk away from it.

twi-ny: Right. And someone like Doris Day — I bet a lot of people don’t realize that she died only in 2019. So there was a long time, even with social media and the internet and everything, that she still wasn’t around. People didn’t know her, except for her charity work, but she wasn’t flooding Facebook with it. So, she was a very private person.

ts: Yes, a very private person. And so was Audrey. And so what interests me, Mark, is we’re a fame-obsessed society today, right?

twi-ny: Oh, yes.

ts: That’s reality television, everybody demanding to be famous.

twi-ny: Even the president.

ts: That’s a really interesting dichotomy. One thing I discovered while researching the Audrey book is that who knew that Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor were good friends? They were so opposite as people, but separately, toward the end of their lives, they used the exact same phrase: “At last, my fame makes sense to me.” And that’s because Elizabeth Taylor, with her AIDS activism, and Audrey, with UNICEF, that’s how they defined themselves. And I thought that was worth exploring.

twi-ny: That’s something that also happened and is still happening with Brigitte Bardot. She retired early to spend her life with animals and become an antifur activist. And I bet she would say the same thing as Audrey, Doris, and Elizabeth.

ts: I think that’s true. And because at a certain point, fame and money are nice, but how much does the acclaim of strangers really mean when you want to make a difference? And the difference comes through for these women through their social activism. Audrey was a kind of saint. She was such a good person.

twi-ny: All the people you spoke with, you probably never got a bad quote from anyone. Everybody just loved her. Is that right?

ts: That’s fair to say, and it’s not hyperbole. People who worked on the sets, everyone in the village in Switzerland where she lived, said she was unfailingly good to people. And I think after her war-torn, very disrupted childhood, I think she realized the value of family and the value of treating people with kindness. Because she said toward the end of her life, “The most important thing in life is being kind.” She really lived that.

Tom Santopietro signs copies of The Sound of Music Story at B&N in 2015 (photo courtesy Tom Santopietro)

twi-ny: In doing your research and interviews, was there one moment that really struck you or surprised you?

ts: I think the biggest surprise for me is how she really — how do I want to answer this — the reason why I titled the book A Life of Beautiful Uncertainty is that her entire life, she was uncertain of herself. And that was surprising. She genuinely did not think she was pretty. She just saw flaws everywhere. She genuinely did not think she was a good actress. And that shocked me because she was beautiful. And she was a terrific actress. And I think it stems from when, in the span of two months, she won the Tony Award and the Academy Award, and her mother said to her, “It’s amazing how far you’ve gotten considering how little talent you have.” [ed. note: In 1954, Hepburn won the Tony for Ondine and the Oscar for Roman Holiday.]

twi-ny: That haunts people, that kind of stuff.

ts: Yeah. So I think it all comes back to childhood, right?

twi-ny: It so often does.

ts: Barbra Streisand grew those incredibly long fingernails because her mother said, “Well, you should be a typist.” She grew her fingernails so she couldn’t type.

I think the other thing is that because I love films, and this is circling back to what we said earlier, I felt Audrey had never received her due as to how good an actress she was. Everybody says she’s charming and beautiful, but you look at a movie like The Nun’s Story, directed by Fred Zinnemann — that is a spectacularly good performance; the whole performance is with her eyes. And I wanted people to realize how skilled she was, even if she didn’t think she was skilled.

twi-ny: One of my favorite movies, and I don’t know that it would always be at the top of her list, but I adore Charade, which you write about in the book. Even with Cary Grant, Walter Matthau, George Kennedy, James Coburn, all these popular men in the movie, it is all built around her face.

ts: That’s exactly right.

twi-ny: And it’s the best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock didn’t make.

ts: That sums up that movie perfectly.

twi-ny: Do you have a favorite film of hers?

ts: That’s a great question. I know this is a cop-out answer, but I have three favorite films: The Nun’s Story, because her performance is spectacular. And also it’s really interesting the way it grapples with issues of faith and higher powers. My second favorite movie is My Fair Lady, because it’s so beautiful to look at and listen to. And the third one is, believe it or not, Wait Until Dark, because it still scares the living daylights out of me.

twi-ny: Yes. And it’s still scaring us. People who love Alan Arkin don’t realize that he could be pretty threatening.

ts: Toward the end of his life, I was able to interview him over the phone for the book. The funny thing is, when I finally got him, he started the conversation by saying, “Well, I hear you’ve been looking for me.” What he said was that Audrey was so lovely and such a good person that twenty years later, when she received the Chaplin Award from Lincoln Center, he was one of the speakers. And when he saw her, he actually apologized to her and said, I’m so sorry I was so mean to you in that movie, which is sort of amazing.

twi-ny: Can you share publicly who or what your next subject might be?

ts: I actually haven’t really figured out who I’m writing about next because, well, this has taken a long time, but also I wrote a play and it was produced this past summer in Connecticut. So I want to spend time putting the play out in the world for other productions, and it sort of fits in with what I write about because it’s a one-woman play called JBKO, about Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. So that’s really what I’m going to work on next.

twi-ny: Well, this is a good transition, because my last question was going to turn back to theater. You work as a house manager part-time on Broadway.

ts: Yes. I’ve been a general manager, and these days I’m working as a house manager most of the time. I don’t know if you’ve found this too, but because writing is so solitary, it’s really good for me to be around people at night at the theater. So that socialization is great, as long as the audiences are behaving themselves, of course.

twi-ny: That’s where I was going with this. At the Coffee House, we discussed how, since the pandemic, the audience’s relationship with the theater experience, interacting with other people, isn’t the same as when they were going out for a night of theater years ago.

ts: Well, I think it’s a funny thing, but since the pandemic, when people go to the theater, on some level they still think they’re in their living room streaming a show. That’s the only way I can try to make sense of it. When you’re home, you talk, you eat. And it’s different in a Broadway theater. So that’s sort of my best explanation for it.

twi-ny: Right. As someone who goes to a lot of theater, I’ve seen some things that I never had before. It’s like, I paid for my ticket, I can do whatever I want. But no, you can’t. It’s sort of representative to me of how we deal with our fellow human beings in everyday life. Now we’re much more quickly agitated, and people don’t want anyone telling them what to do.

ts: Exactly. Yeah, that has all changed. What hasn’t changed, the positive thing for me, is that theater offers people the sense of being part of a family. Everybody’s there backstage to put on the best possible show. I always say you belong when you walk through the stage door. And that’s a great feeling. That’s the joy of theater for me.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

NOT JUST MAUS-ING AROUND: ART SPIEGELMAN AT THE 2025 COMIC ARTS FEST

Art Spiegelman discusses hie life and career in Disaster Is My Muse

COMIC ARTS FEST 2025: ART SPIEGELMAN: DISASTER IS MY MUSE (Molly Bernstein & Philip Dolin, 2024)
L’Alliance New York, Florence Gould Theater, Tinker Auditorium
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Friday, March 28, $30.55 – $54.20, 7:30
Festival runs March 28–30, pass $86.10
212-355-6100
lallianceny.org

In the documentary Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist and editor Art Spiegelman explains, “I did take comics very, very seriously, and I thought they were time turned into space, a perfect container for memory, and an incredibly maligned art form. And without being pretentious about it, I thought that this was as valid as anything that happened in literature or in painting, or in cinema.”

Winner of the 2024 DOC NYC Grand Jury Prize in the Metropolis Competition, the hundred-minute PBS American Masters film is part of the opening-night celebration of the 2025 Comic Arts Fest, taking place March 28–30 at L’Alliance New York; it will be shown on Friday evening at 7:30, followed by a Q&A with special guests and a party with food and drink, music, and a live Exquisite Corpse session with guest illustrators.

In the documentary, Bernstein and Dolin incorporate archival footage, family photos, detailed investigations of key panels from many of Spiegelman’s comics and graphic novels, and new interviews with such comic artists as Griffith, R. Crumb, Trina Robbins, Gary Panter, Charles Burns, Chris Ware, Peter Kuper, and Jerry Craft in addition to author Hillary Chute, film critic J. Hoberman, filmmaker Ken Jacobs, Spiegelman, Mouly, and their children, Dash and Nadja. “By showing in your comics stuff you’re not supposed to show, stuff you’re not supposed to deal with, the culture outside is telling you don’t go there, by doing it, you’re robbing it of its power,” Griffith says of his Arcade cofounder’s aesthetic.

Mouly offers, “Art has never separated work and life,” especially when it comes to his genre-redefining 1986 graphic novel, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (My Father Bleeds History) and the 1991 sequel, Maus: And Here My Troubles Began. The books explore his complicated relationship with his Polish father, Vladek, who finally told his son about his experiences at Auschwitz, a subject that he and Art’s mother, Anna, had previously avoided delving into with him.

Art Spiegelman holds up the 1973 “Centerfold Manifesto” in poignant documentary

In the books — which the New York Times originally listed as fiction until Spiegelman wrote them a letter explaining that Maus was a carefully and thoroughly researched true story and should be categorized as nonfiction — Spiegelman depicted the Jews as mice and the Nazi soldiers as evil cats. “He tackled a subject that was enormous and he established the medium as a serious literary form,” Sacco says.

As deeply personal as Maus is — the documentary includes scenes of Spiegelman visiting Auschwitz in 1987 — it is primarily a human tale of innocent people trapped amid the scourge of Fascism, something Spiegelman has been warning people about given what is happening around the world this century.

“Art Spiegelman is the guy that reinvented comics as a medium that people took seriously,” artist and author Molly Crabapple says. “He showed that comics could express the darkest, most tragic, most complicated, most true things about history, about our relationships, about family.” Disaster Is My Muse was made prior to Donald Trump reclaiming the presidency in November, but Spiegelman makes his feelings about him very clear in lectures and conversations.

Speaking about his early, radical work with EC and Mad writer and editor Harvey Kurtzman, Spiegelman notes, “It was asking you to deeply question things, and I believe it was an important aspect of what led to the generation that protested the Vietnam War.” Among the other topics that are examined are several of Spiegelman’s autobiographical panels from Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!; 1968’s Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History, about his mother’s suicide, the comic that first attracted Mouly to him; his longtime association with Topps designing Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids cards; making potent New Yorker covers; his 9/11 book, In the Shadow of No Towers; Maus being banned in many school libraries across the country; such influences as Mad magazine #11 and Bernard Krigstein’s Master Race; his adaptation of Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 lost classic, The Wild Party; and his time spent in a state mental facility and the tragic death of his brother. Although his smoking habit is never mentioned, he is nearly always seen with a pipe, cigarette, or vape.

In 1973, Spiegelman and Griffith created the “Centerfold Manifesto” in Short Order Comix #1, which proclaimed, “Comics must be personal! . . . Efficient and Callous Capitalist Exploitation must be condemned and deplored at every turn . . . And replaced by Inefficient and humane Capitalist Exploitation!” More than fifty years later, he is still living by his word.

The Comic Arts Fest overflows with opportunities to appreciate the art form Spiegelman champions: Highlights include screenings of four episodes from season two of Florian Ferrier’s series The Fox-Badger Family and four episodes of Daniel Klein’s Living with Dad, the masterclass “Aleksi Briclot: My Journey with Marvel Studios,” the conversation “The Return of the Iconic Gaston Lagaffe” with Delaf, the lecture “The Rise of Afromanga” with Gigi Murakami, a screening of Anora Oscar winner Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District followed by a discussion with artist Adrian Tomine, a screening of Silenn Thomas’s Frank Miller: American Genius followed by a Q&A with Thomas and artist Emma Kubert, and the closing event, “Françoise Mouly, from Indie Comics to the New Yorker,” in which Spiegelman’s wife and business partner sits down with Anita Kunz, Peter de Sève, Barry Blitt, and others to talk about her career. Spiegelman will also be at the Artist Alley & Bookstore section of the fest on March 30 from 3:30 to 5:30; among the other participants are Paul & Gaëtan Brizzi, Patrick McDonnell, Pauline Lévêque, Griffith, and Tomine.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

DHARMA FRIENDS: NUALA CLARKE AT TIBET HOUSE

Who: Nuala Clarke, Crystal Gandrud, Rob Ward, Megan Mook, Kevin Townley
What: “Alchemy and Art on the Spiritual Path”
Where: Tibet House NYC and online, 22 West Fifteenth St.
When: Monday, March 24, free – $20 – $225, 6:30
Why: “I swim in the sea, and my experience of cold has changed. I can no longer be trusted with the question ‘Is it cold out?’ I experience it without the tightening of torso muscles and raising of shoulders. It has become separate from the whole, less readily identifiable. In my hands it feels like leanness, the appendages pared away to the essential; in my back and around my ribs it tingles; it is fresh on my lips; in my toes it is clear and my chest, above my heart, accepts it as youngness, in need of care. I am an effervescent being.” So writes Irish artist Nuala Clarke in her new book, Irish Moss of a Dead Man’s Skull (the Owl Circus, March 18, $33).

Influenced by the work of Irish alchemist and natural philosopher Robert Boyle (1627–91), author of Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours, with Observations on a Diamond that Shines in the Dark, as well as by installation artist Robert Irwin, serigrapher and ceramicist Robert Brown, and spiritual coach and meditation teacher Robert Chender, Clarke has spent nearly five years “thinking about whether a painting could be prescribed for an ailment.” The result is a work that Clarke calls “an ode to light, color, loss, and the elements.” The 224-page book features 86 full-color images and details the impact each of the four Roberts has had on her art and her meditation practice.

On Monday, March 24, Clarke will launch the book at Tibet House as part of the Dharma Friends series, joined by experimental writer and acquiring editor Crystal Gandrud, Food Will Win the War violist, songwriter, and lead vocalist Rob Ward, and monthly Dharma Friends hosts Megan Mook and Kevin Townley, who will lead guided meditations. Having participated back in 2010 with composer Roarke Menzies, Gandrud, my wife, and others in a performance Clarke curated for her show “You Delight Me” on Shelter Island, I can vouch for how terrific her events are, and this one should offer its own numerous pleasures.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

LITERARY INSIGHT: KYLE THOMAS SMITH AND JOHN MADERA AT NYI MEDITATION CENTER

Who: John Madera, Kyle Thomas Smith, Josh Wexler
What: Writers’ Voices — An Evening of Literary Readings
Where: New York Insight Meditation Center, 115 West Twenty-Ninth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves., twelfth floor, and online
When: Sunday, March 16, free with advance RSVP (suggested donation $15), 2:00
Why: “There’s an album called Classical Music for Creativity that is perfect, or almost perfect, for blocking out noise so you can read, write, or study. I suppose you could paint or draw or sculpt or design clothes to it too. You can buy it on iTunes for $7.99. I could look up the track listings and rattle them off for you, but the truth is, I don’t know which track is which, or who composed what, when it’s sounding away in my earbuds. All I know is that when I hit shuffle, there are no lyrics and no singing to distract me, and the orchestras’ crescendos are often all that it takes to bring what I’m writing to a crescendo. Theories like the Mozart effect say that just listening to classical music will raise your IQ. That kind of thing used to be hugely important to me when I was younger, but what’s more important to me now is that the music drowns out other people’s chatter. I don’t want anyone or anything intruding on my flow. Still, there’s too much cabin fever when you write at home past a certain number of days and libraries are so stuffy. Plus, you can’t bring drinks in. So, I go to cafes. I’ve been going to them ever since I was a teenager. It’s good to be around people, and even to hear a dull roar of their voices, just to know you’re a part of something larger than yourself and your confines. It’s even better if you can tune everybody out when you’re around them and for me, Classical Music for Creativity does the trick.”

So begins award-winning author Kyle Thomas Smith’s latest memoir, François (StreetLegal Press, 2024), the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based author’s follow-up to the hilarious 2018 Cockloft: Scenes from a Gay Marriage and the poignant 2010 novel 85A. Smith will be around people on Sunday, March 16, when he appears at New York Insight Meditation Center to read from François, which features William Etty’s dramatic 1828 oil painting Male Nude, with Arms Up-Stretched on the cover. Smith, a practice leader in New York Insight’s Brooklyn sangha, will be joined by New York City–based writer, editor, and publisher John Madera, who will read from Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024), his debut collection of short experimental fiction that includes such stories as “Some Varieties of Being and Other Non Sequiturs,” “Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan,” and “Notes Toward the Recovery of Desiderata.” Following the readings, Smith and Madera will sit down for a conversation moderated by bookseller, activist, musician, piano teacher, and suicide hotline director Josh Wexler. The event, hosted by the NYI Artist Salon and being livestreamed as well, will begin with presentations by other members of New York Insight’s community.

And just in case Smith is interested, among the works on Classical Music for Creativity are Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Symphony in G Major, Wq. 182 No. 1: I. Allegro di molto, conducted by Hartmut Haenchen; several Vivaldi concertos for violin, cello, mandolin, and/or strings; and Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, HWV 351: IV. La réjouissance, in addition to compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Arcangelo Corelli, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Jean-Philipe Rameau.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]