The New York Times - USA (2020-12-07)

Monday

THE CALL OF THE WILD(2020) 7 p.m. on HBO
Family. This adaptation of Jack London’s
1903 novel, about a dog being de-domesti-
cated in the Yukon, has two expensive
stars. One is Harrison Ford. The other is
Buck, a cutting-edge computer-generated
canine. “Pondering this interspecies com-
munion — between a craggy star and a
digital dog (based on a man playing a
dog) — may prompt howls into an exist-
ential void,” Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his
review for The New York Times. “But as
the basis for a family crowd-pleaser, the
pairing is often irresistible.”

INDEPENDENT LENS: CHARM CITY (2018) 10
p.m. on PBS (check local listings).The
documentarian Marilyn Ness looks at
violent crime in Baltimore — and some of
the people working to fight it — in this
affecting documentary. Picking up a few
months after the death of Freddie Gray in
2015, Ness follows subjects on multiple
sides of the issue, including community
organizers, a cop and a councilman. The
resulting film “captures up close the way
violence transforms neighborhoods and
families with an immediacy that tran-
scends headlines or sensationalism,” Ben
Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The
Times.

Tuesday

ZZ TOP: THAT LITTLE OL’ BAND FROM TEXAS
(2019) 8 p.m. on Reelz. If you were direct-
ing a documentary about the rock band ZZ
Top, where would you start it? With a
childhood image of the band’s founding
lead guitar player, Billy Gibbons, pre-
beard? With contemporary footage of the
group, now eligible for senior discounts,
tearing through “Sharp Dressed Man”?
Sam Dunn, the director of this recent
documentary about the band, doesn’t do
either: He shows footage of Texas land-
scapes, with a recording of the early-20th-
century Texas blues singer Henry Thomas
playing over it — in a nod to the way both
Texas and early blues shaped ZZ Top’s
sound. The movie covers the band’s dec-
ades-long career, from before the release
of their first album in 1971 (“ZZ Top’s First
Album”) to the present. That’s a lot of
ground to cover. As Gibbons told The
Times in 2005: “We’ve been in this band
longer than school, longer than marriage,
longer than anything else we’ve ever
done.”

Wednesday

DR. SEUSS’ THE GRINCH MUSICAL 8 p.m. on

NBC. Families seeking a contemporary

take on Dr. Seuss’s lean, mean, green

Christmas-gift-stealing machine have

several options, including movie

versions with Benedict Cumber-

batch and Jim Carrey. They’ll get a

fresh one this year in the form of this

televised production of the Grinch

musical, with the Broadway star

Matthew Morrison.

KISMET(1955) 6 p.m. on TCM. For a musi-

cal with vintage CinemaScope flair, con-

sider this film version of the 1953 Broad-

way musical-comedy “Kismet.” This

iteration of the story, about a poet

(Howard Keel) scouring Baghdad for

a rich suitor for his daughter (Ann

Blyth), was brought to the screen by

Vincente Minnelli just a few years

after he directed “An American in

Paris.” Bosley Crowther, in his 1955

review for The Times, was under-

whelmed. Minnelli, he wrote, directs

the script “as though it were the march-

ing orders for the Macy parade.” He

added that the film “moves at a ponder-

ous tempo, as though it is meant to give

all the spectators a chance to see it fully

as it goes by.”

Thursday

ONE NIGHT ONLY: THE BEST OF BROADWAY 8

p.m. on NBC. Tina Fey will host this two-

hour special, a

benefit for the

nonprofit

Broadway

Cares/

Equity

Fights

AIDS. The

broadcast is to include

outdoor performances by cast

members from several

Broadway musicals, includ-

ing “Ain’t Too Proud,”

“Chicago” and “Jagged

Little Pill.” Kelly Clarkson,

Brett Eldredge and Patti

LaBelle will also perform,

along with other celebri-

ties.

Friday

MICHAEL KOSTA: DETROIT. NY. LA 11 p.m. on

Comedy Central. As a correspondent on

“The Daily Show,” the comic Michael

Kosta has found creative ways to make

humor in quarantine, including hosting a

“travel show” from his apartment. This

stand-up special, filmed before the pan-

demic, finds Kosta making city-specific

jokes on more traditional stages in Los

Angeles, Detroit and Manhattan, where he

offers his interpretation of New York’s

fabled unsleeping energy: “It’s not energy,

you idiots, it’s panic.”

Saturday

THE BEE GEES: HOW CAN YOU MEND A BROKEN

HEART (2020) 8 p.m. on HBO. When the

Bee Gees had their first hit song, “Spicks

and Specks,” in the 1960s, the band’s three

sibling members Barry, Robin and Mau-

rice Gibb, were all under 21. “We were still

kids, and we were still very naïve,” Barry

Gibb said in a recent interview with The

Times. “I don’t think the naïveté went

away for a long time.” The peaks and

valleys of the career that followed —

which included an effective breakup, then

a dive into disco — are the subject of this

new documentary, directed by Frank

Marshall.

Sunday

COUPLES THERAPY: THE COVID SPECIAL 8 p.m.

on Showtime. The coronavirus pandemic’s

effects on romantic relationships — some-

times working as a catalyst, some-

times as an extinguisher —

has been discussed and

written about at length.

But this special should

offer some particu-

larly palpable case

studies. The first

season of “Couples

Therapy,” a Showtime

docuseries, followed

Dr. Orna Guralnik, a

therapist, left, as she ran

in-person sessions with cou-

ples. Dr. Guralnik moves to video chat for

this new entry, offering a look at both the

pressures of pandemic romance and the

ups and downs of remote therapy.

“Scripted shows have of course given us

plenty of insightful, probing therapists and

complex, resistant-to-change patients,”

Margaret Lyons wrote in The Times when

the show began last year. “The power here

is the reality of it all, the rawness and

ridiculousness of the human condition.”

From left, Maurice Gibb, Robin Gibb and Barry Gibb, in “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart.”

ED CARAEFF/GETTY IMAGES, VIA HBO

Left, Matthew

Morrison.

This Week on TV

A SELECTION OF SHOWS, SPECIALS AND MOVIES. BY GABE COHN

Dates, details and times are

subject to change.

JOHN BENAM

Clayton Guyton, a Baltimore resident
known as Mr. C, in “Charm City.”

DAVID

COTTER/NBC

C6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2020

high of seeing, in new formats, two plays I
loved the first time around. One is Sarah De-
Lappe’s “The Wolves,” a finalist for the Pul-
itzer Prize in 2017 that the Philadelphia The-
ater Company is offering in an exhilarating
Zoom staging through Dec. 20. The other,
Will Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turn-
ing,” a Pulitzer finalist earlier this year, can
be seen through Dec. 13 in a devastating
film-theater hybrid from the Wilma The-
ater, also in Philadelphia.
These are not just dramas; they were
considerable dramas to produce. To begin
with, “The Wolves” has a big cast; it follows
nine teenage girls on an indoor soccer team
for several months as they stretch, literally
and figuratively. Expectations for it were
big as well. Paige Price, the company’s pro-
ducing artistic director, said “The Wolves”
had already been breaking advance sale
records when local Covid-19 regulations
forced her to shut down production two
days before rehearsals were to begin in
March.
As Price describes it, there immediately
began a hectic process of figuring out what
to do besides “trashing the set.” With all that
ticket income wiped out, she and the direc-
tor, Nell Bang-Jensen, had to start from
scratch. “Nobody wants to do taped Zoom
readings,” Price explained — and “The
Wolves” especially, with its blizzard of
crosscutting conversation, would probably
fall fatally flat in that format.
But as the summer progressed, so did the
flexibility of the technology. By sending
each actor not only her costumes and props
(crutches from Amazon!) but also her own
sound equipment and green screen kit, the
production team was able to vary the fram-
ing in each Zoom box, a huge improvement
on early pandemic experiments that were
basically neck-up and as visually interest-
ing as tic-tac-toe.
On the other hand, because the theater
couldn’t afford to send high-resolution cam-
eras — the budget for the show was $55,000
instead of the $350,000 that might have
been spent onstage — the production had to
make do with smartphone footage that ren-
dered full-screen close-ups unusable.
In the end, the tech restrictions and hand-
made quality of the images do not detract
from the story. With nine players, the 3-by-3
Zoom grid turns out to be a powerfully ex-

pressive element. This is, after all, a play

that consists almost entirely of girls caught

in the act of growing up, using their pack

identity — the team is called the Wolves —

as a kind of privacy screen behind which

they become individuals. What at first ap-

pears to be a single organ, like an insect’s

compound eye, turns out, upon Zoom in-

spection, to be many.

The cast is excellent, landing the jokes no

less than the pathos. But what really stands

out in this virtual production is the way De-

Lappe had already shaped the audience’s

experience to parallel the girls’. We only

slowly discern specific lives within the un-

differentiated mass of faces and jerseys.

(Amusingly, for Zoom purposes, the jerseys

have their numbers facing front instead of

back.) As we are discovering them, they are

discovering themselves.

“Heroes of the Fourth Turning” is a much

more despairing play, less about discovery

than about deepening confusion. In a series

of painful confrontations, it tests the moral

clarity of its main characters: four young

adults associated with a deeply conserva-

tive Catholic college in Montana. What it

finds, over the course of a night, soon after a

protester was killed at a white nationalist

demonstration in Charlottesville, Va., is

that they all struggle with beliefs they can

no longer make sense of.

To pack so much pain and intensity into a

Zoom grid would have been an aesthetic

monstrosity, a Greek drama on the set of

“The Hollywood Squares.” So when the

Wilma’s planned stage production was, like

“The Wolves,” shut down, its director,

Blanka Zizka, who is also one of the compa-

ny’s four co-artistic directors, decided in-

stead to recreate “Heroes” as a digital, site-

specific production. For two and a half

weeks, the actors and crew quarantined to-

gether in five Airbnb rentals in the Pocono

Mountains. The backyard of one of the

Airbnbs was their set; the night was their

soundscape, complete with dying crickets

that ruined takes.

The play is so tightly written and so spe-

cific about its characters that I was not sur-

prised to find the finished production, at

least at first, closely mirroring Danya Tay-

mor’s superb original staging for Play-

wrights Horizons.

But very soon, when the camera panned

up from the scene of the four young people

drinking and jawing and wrangling over

faith to a shot of Orion in a massively starry

sky, Zizka’s version, the first since Tay-

mor’s, took on a completely different as-

pect, more cosmic if perhaps less personal

than the original. The virtual experience of

a real place — as opposed to what live the-

ater gives you: a real experience of a virtual

place — bends the mind toward abstrac-

tions.

The play works beautifully that way too,

and Zizka clearly relished the new opportu-

nities that filming offered. Reverse angles

and close-ups vary the composition and

also provide the chance, unavailable in the-

ater, to tell a story partly by showing how

characters are listening. “Theater audi-

ences will only look at who’s speaking,”

Zizka said.

The downside? “The theater is not a

building, it’s people — actors and audiences

confronting each other,” she continued.

“But now that the play is running, it’s lonely.

I have no idea what anyone is feeling.”

Well, I know what I was feeling: once

again shattered. And the good news for

“Heroes,” as for “The Wolves,” is that pan-

demic productions as fine as these will keep

shattering audiences until they can re-

assemble to confront live theater again.

JESSE GREEN CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

Lifted Up by Two Plays in a Scroogeless Genre

CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1

Top, the Zoom grid of “The

Wolves” turns out to be very

expressive. Above, Campbell

O’Hare and Jered McLenigan in

“Heroes of the Fourth Turning.”

PHILADELPHIA THEATER COMPANY

WILMA THEATER

Follow Jesse Green on Twitter: @JesseKGreen.

The Wolves

Available on demand through Dec. 20;

philadelphiatheatercompany.org.

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

Available on demand through Sunday;

wilmatheater.org.