TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020C1

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NEWS CRITICISM

3 MUSIC

Drone works served as

morsels. BY SETH COLTER WALLS

4 THEATER REVIEW

Ugliness from many angles.

BY LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES

5 FILM

Olivia de Havilland

as more than just a

paragon of virtue.

BY SCOTT TOBIAS

THE POETNatasha Trethewey was born in

Mississippi and grew up there and in Atlan-

ta. She became accustomed, she writes in

her new memoir, “Memorial Drive,” to the

“hair rising on the back of my neck when I’d

hear a certain kind of Southern accent, a

tensing in my spine when I’d see the Con-

federate flag or the gun rack on a truck fol-

lowing us too closely down the road.”

Trethewey won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007

for her collection “Native Guard,” and she

served two terms as poet laureate. Some of

her dexterous poetry touches on the autobi-

ographical details of her life, and she is the

author of a previous memoir, “Beyond Kat-

rina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf

Coast.”

Nothing she has written drills down into

her past, and her family’s, as powerfully as

“Memorial Drive.” It is a controlled burn of

chaos and intellection; it is a memoir that

will really lay you out.

“Memorial Drive” is about the murder of

her mother, Gwendolyn, who was 40, by

Gwendolyn’s second husband, a troubled

Vietnam veteran named Joel. The author

was 19. She was led from a dorm room to the

crime scene, where she was filmed entering

DWIGHT GARNER BOOKS OF THE TIMES

A Southern Birth,

A Mother’s Murder

Memorial Drive:

A Daughter’s Memoir

By Natasha Trethewey

CONTINUED ON PAGE C6

When the Compañía Nacional de Danza
took the stage at the Festival Internacional
de Música y Danza de Granada in southern
Spain last Wednesday, it was in many ways
like any other dance performance: a couple
performed a touching Bournonville pas de
deux; an ensemble of 21 dancers wearing
loose, pale gray costumes premiered a new

work, set to music by Juan Crisóstomo Ar-

riaga, a 19th-century Spanish musical prod-

igy.

The dancers moved with silken ease. The

audience applauded.

But the fact that the dancing occurred

amid a pandemic, in a country that has suf-

fered greatly — and continues to suffer —

from the effects of Covid-19, made the situa-

tion extraordinary. It was culmination of

months of careful planning, involving the

development of protocols, testing and a

careful, minutely orchestrated return to the

studio.

All performances at the festival, a yearly

event, were held outdoors, including in a

courtyard inside the complex of the Alham-

bra, with audiences required to wear masks

and seating capped at 50 percent.

Was it too soon, though? In the days lead-

ing up to the company’s performance, new

outbreaks of the disease began to threaten

the country’s reopening and the future of

such events. “We haven’t had any problem

here in Granada,” Antonio Moral, the direc-

tor of the festival, which ended on Sunday,

said last week. “So far, the problems have

been in Catalonia and Aragon” — regions in

the north, hundreds of miles away.

LAURA LEON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Moving Ahead Safely in Granada

A festival’s program was made possible by strict measures to protect the dancers and the audiences.

A technician squeezed past a

dancer who was warming up

backstage last week at a

rehearsal before a festival

in Granada, Spain.

By MARINA HARSS

CONTINUED ON PAGE C2

There’s a lot you could say about Edmund

White: He is the paterfamilias of queer liter-

ature, he witnessed the Stonewall riots, he

literally wrote the book on gay sex. Not for

nothing, his autobiography is called “My

Lives.”

White, who turned 80 this year, is also a

survivor. He has lived with H.I.V. since 1985,

and survived multiple strokes and a heart

attack. In keeping with tradition, he intends

to make it through the coronavirus pan-

demic as well.

“It’s been kind of lonely,” he said during a

Skype interview this month from his apart-

ment in Chelsea, which he hasn’t left more

than a handful of times since New York City

shut down in March. “I’m reluctant to see

people because I’m considered ‘hyper-vul-

nerable,’ you know.”

But White — someone who is sanguine by

nature, quick to weaponize frivolity in the

face of crisis — has remained relatively

carefree, and busy. His sex life might not be

as active as he would like, though he has Edmund White outside of his Chelsea home in Manhattan. His

new novel, “A Saint From Texas,” is out next month.

SEPTEMBER DAWN BOTTOMS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

‘Hyper-Vulnerable,’

With Stories to Tell

The gay novelist Edmund White has a new book,

and it’ll be just like him to survive this pandemic.

By JOSHUA BARONE

CONTINUED ON PAGE C6