FRIDAY, AUGUST 23 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
BROADCAST CHANNELS
8/23/19
7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30 10:00 10:30 11:00 11:30
4.1 WRC (NBC) ◆ News Shelters ◆ American Ninja Warrior ◆ Dateline NBC News ◆ Tonight Show
4.2 WRC (IND) Little House on the Prairie Frasier Frasier Frasier Frasier Will & Grace Will & Grace The Office The Office
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7.1 WJLA (ABC) ◆ Wheel ◆ Jeopardy! ◆ Housewife ◆ Fresh-Boat ◆ What Would You Do? ◆ 20/20 News ◆ J. Kimmel
9.1 WUSA (CBS) Off Script ◆ Ent. Tonight◆ NFL Preseason Football: Buffalo Bills at Detroit Lions (Live) 9 News ◆ Late-Colbert
14.1 WFDC (UNI) Amor eterno La reina soy yo Juntos, el corazón Sin miedo a la verdad Noticias ◆ Noticiero
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50.1 WDCW (CW)◆ black-ish ◆ black-ish ◆ Masters of◆ Big Stage ◆ Hypnotize Me ◆ DailyMailTV◆ Seinfeld Mike & Molly Two Men
66.1 WPXW (ION)NCIS: Los Angeles NCIS: Los Angeles NCIS: Los Angeles NCIS: Los Angeles NCIS: Los Angeles
CABLE CHANNELS
A&E (5:00) Live PD (8:06) Live PD: Rewind Live PD (Live)
AMC Movie: Ghostbusters ★★★ (1984) (9:35) Movie: Ghostbusters II ★★ (1989)
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TLC Say Yes to the Dress 90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days 90 Day: Other The Family Chantel
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USA Network Movie: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ★★ (2009) Chrisley Chrisley Chrisley Chrisley
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WNC8 America This Week Govt. Matters ABC 7 News Sports ABC News WJLA 24/7 News at 10 Govt. Matters WJLA News
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LEGEND: Bold indicates new or live programs ◆ High Definition Movie Ratings (from TMS) ★★★★ Excellent ★★★ Good ★★ Fair ★ Poor No stars: not ratedMasters of Illusion (CW at 8)
Featured magicians include Tetro,
Bill Cook, Anna DeGuzman, Andi
Gladwin, Steven Brundage and
Greg Frewin.
Ancient Aliens (History
Channel at 9) Investigators travel
the world in search of evidence of
alien life that may have influenced
the ancient world.
What Would You Do? (ABC at 9)
Featuring LGBTQ rights activist
and reality star Jazz Jennings on
transgender bathroom laws and a
scenario inspired by the story of a
New Jersey teen forced to cut his
dreadlocks by a referee to
compete in his wrestling match.
Killjoys (SyFy at 10) Dutch’s
attempt to overtake the prison
goes awry because of an expected
hostage situation.
SPECIALS
Alice Wetterlund: My Mama Is a
Human and So Am I (Amazon
Prime) Comedian and actress
Alice Wetterlund’s comedy special
reveals her personal struggles
with everything from alcoholism to
cat-rearing.
Alonzo Bodden: Heavy
Lightweight (Amazon Prime)
Bodden strikes a balance between
lighthearted and serious topics in
his comedy special.
#IMomSoHard Live (Amazon
Prime) Comedians Kristin Hensley
and Jen Smedley of the viral Web
series “#IMomSoHard” bring you
their stand-up and improv show.
Mike W. Winfield: StepMan
(Amazon Prime) Mike E. Winfield
explains the challenges of
marrying an older woman and
being a stepfather to a son in his
one-hour comedy routine.MOVIES
El Pepe: Una Vida Suprema
(Netflix) A documentary on the life
of former Uruguayan president
José “Pepe” Mujica. English
subtitles.Jawline (Hulu) A documentary film
examining the fickle world of
Internet stardom, featuring 16-
year-old Austyn Tester, a rising star
in the world of digital celebrities.LATE NIGHT
Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO
at 10) Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.),
Kevin Williamson, Heidi Heitkamp,
Eric Klinenberg and Michael
Smerconish.
— Nina ZafarMore at washingtonpost.com/
entertainment/tvTV HIGHLIGHTS
DAVID MOIR/NETFLIX
13 Reasons Why (Netflix) The third season of the Netflix hit will reveal
Bryce Walker’s killer. Above, Timothy Granaderos, center, as Montgomery
de la Cruz and Alisha Boe, right, as Jessica Davis.
al folk-rock ditty “Unworthy of
Your Love.”
You can imagine a mischievous
grin on Sondheim’s own face as he
dreamed up this ironic love song.
“Assassins,” presented as vi-
gnettes with music, in which nine
people from history croon and
monologize their way through
their successful or botched
crimes, is by turns mordant and
acerbically funny and always a bit
unsettling. “Another National An-
them,” a brilliant ensemble num-
ber, sums up the altered state in
which these disenfranchised
souls dwell. “There are those who
thrive on chaos and despair,”sings the evening’s occasional
narrator, the Balladeer (Sam Lud-
wig). But such bland observations
come across as inadequate —
perhaps intentionally so — to
explaining the motivations of
Americans who commit extreme
violence against their leaders.
Still, “Assassins” finds a gal-
lows humor that’s almost charm-
ing — I told you it’s perverse — in
this creepy cabaret of the dispos-
sessed. Director Eric Schaeffer
and set designer James Kronzer
frame the proceedings with a
decrepit wooden facade; it is not
only the characters who are en-
veloped here in a palpable sense
of decay. To make the metaphor
more concrete, on one side of the
stage are the ruins of the presi-
dential box in Ford’s Theatre,
where Abraham Lincoln was shot
by John Wilkes Booth, played
with operatic malevolence by the
magnetic Vincent Kempski.
Every character gets a spot-
light moment (and that’s the real
point, isn’t it?), whether it is
Ford’s other attempted assassin,
Sarah Jane Moore (a riotously
ditsy Tracy Lynn Olivera), or the
pathetic Giuseppe Zangara (Ian
McEuen), who aimed for Franklin
D. Roosevelt and killed the mayor
of Chicago instead. The fine Sig-
nature regulars who create vivid
portraits of sad sacks desperate
for notoriety include Christopher
Bloch as ranting crackpot Samuel
Byck, who planned to fly a plane
into Richard Nixon’s White
House, and Lawrence Redmond
portraying Leon Czolgosz, who
fatally shot William McKinley.THEATER FROM C1With Jon Kalbfleisch capably
conducting the eight-member or-
chestra, Redmond is apportioned
one of the musical’s most reso-
nant numbers at the moment:
“The Gun Song.” It describes the
involved workaday process of
manufacturing the weapons and
— with Guiteau, Booth and Moore
forming a deranged chorus — the
absurd ease with which they
wreak havoc.
It is Smith’s dementedly serene
Guiteau, assassin of James Gar-
field, though, who most exhilarat-
ingly embodies the show’s ethos,
revealed in equal parts gun
smoke and madness. “I am going
to the Lordy,” he sings on the way
to his execution, as if flights of
angels are accompanying him.
You’ll find the barbarity of “Assas-
sins,” distilled by Sondheim’s re-
fined sense of the absurd, a weird-
ly enjoyable dive into crazy.
[email protected]Assassins, music and lyrics by
Stephen Sondheim, book by JohnWeidman. Directed by Eric Schaeffer.
Music direction, Jon Kalbfleisch; set,
James Kronzer; costumes, Kathleen
Geldard; lighting, Chris Lee; sound,
Ryan Hickey. With Jimmy Mavrikes,
Nova Y. Payton, Christopher Mueller,Christopher Michael Richardson and
Maria Rizzo. About 1 hour 45
minutes. $66-$110. Through Sept. 29
at Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell
Ave., Arlington. 703-820-9771.
sigtheatre.org.‘Assassins’ actors hit their marks
the Philippines and Mexico, as
well as transplants from Louisi-
ana, Mississippi and elsewhere.
This place is where Straight de-
veloped her understanding of
family. Later, in her adult years,
Straight uses the Pakistani term
“biraderi” to define family as
more than kin and blood, to en-
compass a wider community of
neighbors, cousins and friends. A
clan.
Straight, whose novel “High-
wire Moon” was a finalist for the
National Book Award in 2001, is
an effusive writer. Her descrip-
tions of raucous parties in neigh-
borhood driveways, of plentiful
meals of dirty yellow saffron rice
and “collards with softened ham
hock floating amid the tangled
ribbons of green” create a lush
reading experience. The voice
here is intelligent and warm, lov-
ing and honest, respectful and
unafraid to directly confront the
complex reality of being a white
woman writing about marginal-
ized people of color.
The weakness of “In the Coun-
try of Women” is its structure.
Early chapters are devoted to the
women of this vast and varied
family, but then the focus loosens,
jumping from topic to topic. In
one chapter, Straight recounts
how she learned to care for her
daughters’ hair. In another, she
describes the Batmobile, the car
Dwayne drove in high school.
These anecdotes are vivid and
entertaining. Yet without a logi-
cal order, the book at times feels
messy and unwieldy, weighed
down by too many subjects. At
best, we are reminded that the
first and true audience are
Straight’s daughters. We are only
BOOK WORLD FROM C1 being welcomed into the biraderi
for these 359 pages.
What a welcome it is. Straight’s
skillful ability to take us from the
intimacy of family history to the
wider considerations of Ameri-
ca’s legacy is a wonder. This is not
only a story of women, but of
immigration, police brutality and
the history of slavery. By describ-
ing the fear Straight felt for
Dwayne when they were con-
fronted by policemen in Los An-
geles, or her mother’s hardships
as an immigrant from Switzer-
land, Straight captures an Ameri-
can story in all its ugly complexi-
ty. The terrors of the past are
relevant now, including the diffi-
culties of being a woman, how
vigilantly we must protect our
bodies. In one passage, Straight
writes, “My girlfriends and I,
along with every other girl we
knew, had been hunted for years.
I had survived torn clothes, hands
that bruised, violating fingers,
pinching and twisting of body
parts, random bites inflicted by
older teen boys, my hair pulled
and throat exposed.”
What has changed? Have we as
a country and as individuals
learned from our past? “Our
country feels as if it has gathered
itself at a cliff and is studying the
long scree of loose rock,” Straight
writes, “deciding whether to slide
down and descend completely
again into open hatred.” Most
days, I think we are already on the
descent. But some days, I read a
book like this one, and I hope that
we can learn — from these wom-
en, from their stories of survival
and strength.
[email protected]
Crystal Hana Kim is the author of
the novel “If You Leave Me.”A letter to her daughters
and a treatise of our past
FELISHA CARRASCO
Susan Straight’s novel “Highwire Moon” was a finalist for
the National Book Award in 2001.CHRISTOPHER MUELLER
Vincent Kempski plays John Wilkes Booth with operatic malevolence in “Assassins.”“Assassins” finds a
gallows humor that’s
almost charming in
this creepy cabaret of
the dispossessed.
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