THROWBACK THURSDAY — JAY ARMSTRONG JOHNSON, SPRING 2013

As he takes on Pablo Escobar in Netflix’s powerful new drama Narcos, take a look back at our Fall 2012 feature on the rising actor from Gus Van Sant’s Milk and David Fincher’s Gone Girl.

In just one year since we first featured him, Domhnall Gleeson has gone from the sidelights to the limelight. From supporting roles in Anna Karenina and Never Let Me Go, Gleeson is now—however reluctantly—one of Hollywood’s most promising lead actors, starring opposite Michael Fassbender in Frank earlier this year. Gleeson’s latest film, Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, has become a winter smash, and he’s since signed on to a film with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. But buzz is already building over his starring role in Star Wars: Episode VII, directed by J.J. Abrams. We catch up with the young Irish actor just before his life changes forever.

The biopic is, in many ways, a tricky proposition, a form where the carefully-researched realism of history and the emotional impact of drama can blend in a uniquely powerful way. The flip side is the difficulty of doing justice to the memory of a man who lived, especially one who is revered throughout the fashion world. “When you’re playing an icon such as Yves Saint Laurent,” says Pierre Niney, the 25-year-old French actor who does just that in the new film Yves Saint Laurent, “people have their own different expectations, so it’s hard to find the right balance. It’s hard to play someone who existed because of those expectations, but at the same time, he existed, so you have the model.”

The tenth-anniversary edition of the annual Under the Radar Festival, New York’s preeminent showcase for emerging theater and performance art, is currently underway at the Public Theater and various other locations throughout downtown Manhattan. Patrick Barrett offers a recap of some of the shows on offer.

Conor McPherson is a wizard, but you wouldn’t know it. There is little flash in the playwright’s works, only the occasional bang—even pivotal moments are for the most part served up at room temperature in a way that can sometimes leave you feeling unsatisfied but that never, never rings as false. More keenly aware than most of the banality of both our hurts and our joys, McPherson is not one for setting off fireworks, but with surprisingly little material, he can build a fire you will watch for hours.

In 2006, the author Alison Bechdel published the graphic memoir Fun Home, a quietly powerful work about loss and family tragedy that quickly established itself as one of the prime exemplars of the genre. The intimate, contemplative tale, of a young girl discovering her homosexuality against the backdrop of the funeral home where she grows up, has the soft glow of a treasured memory, both personal and universal in its grand dramas. The twin pole—and polar opposite—of Bechdel takes the form of her father Bruce, who dies (perhaps intentionally) after getting hit by a truck soon after she comes out to him. It is only then that Bechdel learns that her father was gay as well, and that he spent his whole life trying to fight the common identity that they share.

Young couples unsure about the prospect of starting a family have not found much comfort this year at LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater’s showcase for young writers. Luce, the company’s latest production, takes on the trying teenage years just months after Daniel Pearle’s sharp A Boy Like Jake tackled the anxieties faced by a couple whose toddler son fantasizes about being a Disney princess. Playwright JC Lee, in his New York début, offers up a liberal-minded husband and wife are forced to reconsider their image of their adopted son, Luce, after he writes a disturbing essay for a class assignment. The bounds of their loyalty are tested, and the inevitable and endless question of how well we can ever know one other—even, or perhaps especially, family—comes to the fore, and is left uncomfortably unanswered.

How do you dance the economy? How can we know the dancer from the dance? These are two questions that pervade French playwright and director Pascal Rambert’s A (micro) history of world economics, danced—co-presented over the weekend by La MaMa, PS 122, and the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) as part of FIAF’s 2013 Crossing the Line Festival—in a theater production that explores our collective economic history throughout centuries of time from the islands of Polynesia to fair France. In one hour.

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