Tag Archives: Reed Birney

RADHA BLANK — THE FORTY-YEAR-OLD VERSION

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When writing and directing this film, I wanted to be as honest as I could, pulling from parts of my life where I had a lot of frustration around being an artist and desiring a different kind of breakthrough… You can’t create this work alone, you need collaborators… Go where the love is… Cultivate the relationships of people who already love you because when shit goes down, that’s who’s going to have your back. — Radha Blank

THE FORTY-YEAR-OLD VERSION—written, directed, and performed by Blank—is an incisive look at relevancy, grief, and New York’s off-Broadway theater world and one of the funniest films of the year. Created before the reckoning of the Summer of 2020, the film captures, with penetrating wit and explosive humor, some of the conditions subsequently outlined in the open letter published by We See You, White American Theater.

Also starring Oswin Benjamin, Peter Kim, Imani Lewis, Haskiri Velazquez, Antonio Ortiz, T. J. Atoms, and Reed Birney, THE FORTY-YEAR-OLD-VERSION is streaming now on Netflix.

THE FORTY-YEAR-OLD VERSION

Netflix

Written and directed by Radha Blank.

Now streaming.

Radha Blank, The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020), from top: Radha Blank; Oswin Benjamin (foreground center) and Blank; Peter Kim; Blank; Reed Birney and Blank; Blank on set in New York City. Photographs by Jeong Park, courtesy and © Netflix.

THE HUMANS

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Stephen Karam has called his play THE HUMANS a “family thriller.” A ghost story where things literally go bump in the night, this last-gasp elegy mourns the death of bohemianism in Manhattan and the middle class everywhere. It is also extremely funny—if a precise explication of the American Dream walking off a cliff can be called comedic.

Unlike most theater families, the Blakes—mother, father, grandmother, two daughters and a son-in-law—aren’t issuing indictments and putting one another on trial. Nor does an inspector call demanding answers. Dealing with differences of class, politics, income, religious fidelity, and expectations for the future, the Blakes are—mostly—civil and respectful. But all the love, understanding, empathy, and forgiveness this family demonstrates for one another somehow renders them powerless. And there are greater forces at work than mere self-sabotage.

THE HUMANS’ widely acclaimed, award-winning ensemble—Jayne Houdyshell, Reed Birney, Lauren Klein, Cassie Beck, Sarah Steele, and Nick Mills—is directed by Joe Mantello, and will be in town through the end of July.

THE HUMANS

Through July 29.

Ahmanson Theatre

135 North Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

Top: Sarah Steele and Cassie Beck in The Humans.

Above: Steele and Reed Birney.

Below: Birney, Steele, Jayne Houdyshell, and Nick Mills.

Photographs by Brigitte Lacombe.