How individual men and patriarchy broadly continue to shape the lives and freedoms of independent contemporary women are themes that underpin the film. Evocatively set in today’s working-class Mumbai and rich with quietly accreting moments of emotional power, the beguiling drama centers on two roommates, both nurses at a city hospital—kind but rule-abiding head nurse Prabha and the younger, lovestruck Anu—and their elder coworker, Parvaty, a cook.
Sandra Oh on Finding Hope in the Atlantic Theater Company’s The Welkin
At a little after 5 p.m. last Thursday, a jury in New York found former president Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Immediately, my phone was flooded with messages about the court’s ruling—from news apps, my family, friends, and coworkers. Some cheered. Others wondered if a guilty verdict really meant anything for someone like Trump. Others still expressed concern for the safety of the jurors.
I received these alerts en route to see the Atlantic Theater Company’s production of The Welkin by playwright Lucy Kirkwood. (This staging marks the work’s American debut after premiering at London’s National Theatre in 2020.) Inside the Linda Gross Theater, housed within a former church in Chelsea, the cast was warming up before their 7 p.m. curtain when the production manager rushed in to tell them the news.
“There are aware and concerned citizens in our cast,” says Sandra Oh, who appears in the play as Lizzy Luke, a defiant midwife. “There’s no way that we are not influenced by everything that is going on in the world.” And indeed as many theatergoers noted during intermission, The Welkin made for richly apt viewing while a real-world trial unfolded.
Joan Jonas Paved the Way for Video and Performance Art—Just Don’t Call Her a Pioneer
“It’s no exaggeration to say we are living in the spring of Joan Jonas,” said Randy Kennedy on Monday night at the National Arts Club. The veteran arts writer was joined onstage by Jonas, 87 years old and having a major moment, as she currently headlines not one but two shows in New York: at the Museum of Modern Art, where a riveting retrospective of her five-decade career opened in March, and at her enchanting show of works on paper at the Drawing Center in SoHo. Beyond our hallowed art institutions, her work also features on graphic tees, mirrored bags, and fringed dresses from Rachel Comey’s thrilling spring 2024 collection.
For the unfamiliar, Jonas is the visionary American artist who worked on the front lines of performance and video art starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ever inventive, she developed her own language through sound, movement, visual symbols, and a relentless exploration of ideas. She incorporated folklore, ecology, and a feminist point of view, swinging from large-scale performances in the empty lots of downtown Manhattan to tender drawings of beloved pets. She has influenced generations of young artists who, like her, seek to break with artistic norms and tread new ground.
“She works at this lovely intersection that really breeds cultural diplomacy,” said Phillip Edward Spradley, who chairs the National Arts Club’s art and technology committee and who planned Monday night’s talk between Jonas and Kennedy.
The Many Lives of Jennifer Tilly—From Oscar Nominee, to Real Housewife
Fun is certainly the world to describe Tilly’s Real Housewives takeover this season. Not dissimilar to how Kathy Hilton entered the series, Tilly has brought some highly entertaining scene-stealing irreverence to the mix. Four episodes in, and viewers are already obsessed with her glamorous fashions ($33,000 Louis Vuitton bags!), unexpected lore (she owns a stake in The Simpsons!), and eccentric personality. For Tilly, transitioning into this world of reality TV has been a fun, if not unexpected, challenge. “It’s not like anything you would ever imagine,” says Tilly. “First of all, these ladies sit down at dinner, and they start screaming at each other before you’ve even eaten your amuse bouche. But in a weird way, I enjoy it. I feel like I have a front row seat at the Super Bowl.”
Why I’m Not Celebrating Thanksgiving This Year
I have a confession to make—a dirty little secret that I can no longer keep a secret. I’m Indigenous and I’ve always celebrated Thanksgiving. There, I said it! If you’re wondering why this is such a big deal, know that Indigenous people have a very fraught relationship with Thanksgiving. Why? It’s no secret that Native American people long predated European settlers in North America, and the so-called “peaceful” dinner between the pilgrims and the Natives is one that has been greatly exaggerated. For many in the Indigenous community, the annual holiday actually serves as a harmful reminder of how their land was stolen from them during colonization, how many of their people were killed, and how their culture was almost entirely stripped from them. One can understand why Native people today don’t want to break bread and eat turkey: What, in fact, is there to be thankful for?
This year, however, I’m finally choosing not to be thankful, too.
Growing up on Nipissing First Nation—my traditional territory in northern Ontario, Canada—my family always celebrated Thanksgiving. My mom is one of 18 siblings, and our annual tradition would be to gather as a big, crazy, Ojibwe family for a Thanksgiving meal at our grandmother Leda’s house, which served as the meeting spot for the whole motley crew. Given the sheer volume of people, I remember often eating Thanksgiving dinner on the ground, sitting cross-legged among my many cousins (seats at the table are reserved for the elders, obviously—they also got first pass at the food). On the menu would be all the traditional Thanksgiving dishes: turkey, mashed potatoes, turnip, boiled carrots, huge pots of gravy. One year, my dad even cooked a 40-pound turkey for the entire family, a record. But there would always be some Indigenous flavor on tap, too: instead of dinner rolls, we had my auntie Joanie’s epic bannock. Moose meat pies were also omnipresent, though I never partook in that dish. (I’m a Native who doesn’t enjoy wild meat—a sin!).
Because Thanksgiving was something that our family always registered, I never thought twice about how ironic it was: a bunch of Indigenous people basically celebrating the history of their own suffering. Doubly ironic: When I grew older and moved to the U.S., my family, who followed the Canadian calendar and had celebrated the Thanksgiving in October, often had to re-do it for me when I came home in November. When I finally learned about the problematic history of Thanksgiving, the holiday had become so routine in our family that I didn’t bother to question it. Even after my grandmother Leda passed on, and our family stopped having these gigantic feasts—at some point, they just became impossible to organize—my parents, my sister, and I still continued celebrating it. It became a pattern, something we just did. It was mostly always about the food, because who doesn’t want to induce a Tryptophan coma? I still drool at the thought.
This year, however, I am approaching the holiday differently. For one, my family is in Canada while I’m in New York, so celebrating it with them would mean flying across the country. I have also realized that I actively don’t want to celebrate Thanksgiving. I’ve spent far too long being passive about things that I don’t feel right about.
The 5 Best Moments from Saturday Night Live’s 50th Anniversary Episode
I’ve been waking up on Sunday morning to watch a streaming (or, back in the day, TiVoed) episode of last night’s Saturday Night Live since I was in middle school. It’s a ritual I’ve come to depend on, even when the episode in question is a little lighter on laughs than one might hope for. Last night’s 50th-anniversary episode of the late-night show, though, delivered on almost all fronts; sure, there were occasional flat moments–please, God, let “brat summer” jokes fade gracefully away now that it’s officially fall–but with the 2024 presidential election just weeks away, it’s nice to see the SNL cast’s familiar faces and actually be able to laugh a bit about the hellscape that is American politics right now.
Below, find the 5 best moments from the first episode of SNL Season 50:
Maya Rudolph reprising her role as Kamala Harris
Do coconut-tree jokes feel a little stale at this point? Yes. But honestly, Maya Rudolph could roll in reciting a ‘90s-era SNL punchline like “Schweddy Balls” and I’d still be thrilled to see her. Plus, Jim Gaffigan as Harris’s running mate Tim Walz was weirdly perfect, as was Bowen Yang’s take on J.D. Vance; Andy Samberg’s Doug Emhoff wasn’t quite as dead-on, but again, Andy Samberg doing anything is inherently funny to me, so I can forgive it.
Jean Smart’s opening monologue
Stroke of Genius: How 34-Year-Old Flora Yukhnovich’s 21st-Century Spin on Rococo Turned Her Into an Art-World Phenomenon
On an otherwise unremarkable day in the spring of 2017, Flora Yukhnovich, a 27-year-old master of fine art student with no distinct technique, no discernible profile, and no particular prospects, climbed the Wallace Collection’s grand marble staircase and came down again, an hour or so later, fixed on the aesthetic that would make her the pre-eminent British painter of her generation. There, in among the Gouthière clocks and Jean Ducrollay snuffboxes, she’d come face-to-face with Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing, the inescapable French fancy that distills the 18th-century rococo movement’s frivolity and flirtatiousness into a titillating trio of figures: a Marie Antoinette-esque coquette, suspended aloft in billowing blush-silk skirts; her bewigged, cuckolded husband, lurking in the shadows of an Arcadian forest; and her ancien régime paramour, reaching for her as she suggestively sends a ballet-pink slipper flying towards him in the velvet undergrowth.
“It felt like all these strands that I’d been looking at came together,” Yukhnovich tells me today of the 25-by-31-inch canvas, which has, in the centuries since a licentious French baron commissioned it, been reproduced everywhere from Disney’s Frozen to a fridge magnet on Etsy. She’s perching on a rickety folding stool in her southeast London studio, her head tilted in a way that brings out her own resemblance to one of Fragonard’s subjects: copper hair, heart-shaped face, ivory skin, Cupid’s-bow lips. Until that point, she says, she’d spent her MFA indulging her “light-hearted curiosity” about the froufrou via Spode’s Blue Italian porcelain and aughts Cath Kidston wallpapers, and feeling vaguely ashamed about it. (Tricky to imagine her teen idols, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, studying Sèvres’s elephant-head vases with any degree of seriousness.) But with The Swing in her mind’s eye, she suddenly “got the bit between my teeth”—and began to query how and why decorative had come to mean downmarket, the ladylike inherently lowbrow.
Four years later, Tu Vas me Faire Rougir (You’re Going to Make me Blush)—one of three Permanent Rose-daubed reinterpretations of Fragonard she painted for her graduate show—sold at Christie’s for £1,902,000, making her, in the space of a gavel stroke, a bonafide blue-chip artist. Gradually, she expanded her remit beyond Fragonard to encompass other rococo masterpieces—Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s celestial allegories, Nicolas Lancret’s rural idylls—exposing the ways in which they had shaped fashionable conceptions of the “coded feminine,” both then and now. See 2020’s Warm, Wet N’ Wild, which repositions Katy Perry’s maraschino-topped “California Gurls” video in the fruity, fecund context of Watteau’s fête galantes. It sold to a private collector, by way of Sotheby’s, for £2,697,000 in 2022.
All the Easter Eggs to Look Out For at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s New Taylor Swift Exhibition
If you happen to find yourself at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum this summer, don’t be surprised if you see flocks of Swifties, dressed in their Eras tour costumes and wearing stacks upon stacks of friendship bracelets, rushing through the cavernous halls of the South Kensington institution. The reason? “Taylor Swift: Songbook Trail,” a new free exhibition which sees 16 of the 14-time Grammy-winning pop powerhouse’s most memorable looks—from across her music videos, tours, album covers, red-carpet appearances, and all 11 eras—go on display alongside instruments, awards, and storyboards from her personal archive, some of which have never been seen before.
Crucially, though, this isn’t one of the V&A’s standalone exhibitions, but one for which installations are dotted around the entire museum itself, with each showcase opening up a fascinating dialogue with the building’s architecture and permanent objects, and sending visitors on a thrilling treasure hunt as they wind past Renaissance sculptures, medieval tapestries, and 18th-century paintings in search of the next Swiftian curio. Each of the 13 stops—designed to be non-chronological, like the Eras tour before it—features fittingly theatrical displays crafted by Tom Piper, best known for his work for the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as for surrounding the Tower of London with poppies, while Kate Bailey, the museum’s senior curator for theater and performance, has overseen the whole project, seeding in Easter eggs and ensuring each chapter builds on our understanding of this often-mythical-seeming figure.
While Taylor herself wasn’t involved in selecting the items on show, Bailey says her archive was incredibly generous in giving her free reign, so much so that one of the main challenges was editing down her picks to just one or two garments per era. There was also the matter of timing—turning the exhibition around in only a few months, so that it could both incorporate The Tortured Poets Department era and coincide with the second leg of the Eras tour in London—and the need for collaboration. “This is something which has actually involved the whole museum,” she tells me. “I’ve been working with colleagues across different departments and engaging curators in different galleries to open up these historical spaces. And that was challenging because, in many cases, these were things we’d never done before.” Her goal, she says, was to create something that, “like Taylor’s shows, combines spectacle with that feeling of intimacy.”
The first stop on the tour is a case in point. Enter the museum through the grand archway on Cromwell Road, turn left, and make your way up two flights of stairs to the first era: Lover. Here, you’ll find the silk Versace shirt and loafers Taylor sported in her self-directed music video for “The Man” in 2020, alongside the wig and facial hair which transformed her into a millionaire playboy, her director’s chair from the set, the best-director VMA she scooped for her efforts, and a loop of the video itself.