Goings On: David Greenspan Performs in Joey Merlo’s One-Person Show

Truman Capote in 1979. / Photograph from Bettmann / Getty

The situation was bound to combust, and it did: in 1975, nearly a decade late in delivering his manuscript, Capotepublished a chapterfrom his upcoming book inEsquire, and all hell broke loose. His swans felt betrayed—he changed their names, but laid out all their secrets—and vowed to destroy his social life. Between the brutal snubbing from his former friends and his excessive drinking habits, Capote began to spiral out of control, and he died, in 1984, without ever completing his book. This saga, with all its delicious twists and turns, forms the basis of the new FX/Hulu series“Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,”which premièred on Jan. 31. Tom Hollander is brilliant as Capote, and a bank of formidable actresses (Naomi Watts as Paley, Diane Lane as Keith, Chloë Sevigny as Guest, Calista Flockhart as Radziwill, Molly Ringwald as Joanne Carson, Demi Moore as Ann Woodward) play the women he both adored and exposed.

If watching the series makes you yearn to know more, there are many books that will take you deeper into the mess. After Capote’s death, his editor managed to cobble together a partial manuscript for“Answered Prayers”and published the novel posthumously, in 1986. (It doesn’t all hold up, but it does contain such toothsome lines as “It was an atmosphere of luxurious exhaustion, like a ripened, shedding rose, while all that waited outside was the failing New York afternoon.”) The creative team of “Feud,” including Ryan Murphy, Jon Robin Baitz, and Gus Van Sant, took much of the story from Laurence Leamer’s 2021 group biography,“Capote’s Women,”which is a bit frothy as a read but still covers a large swath of material. Melanie Benjamin’s 2016 novel,“The Swans of Fifth Avenue,”is, in some sense, a spiritual precursor to the television show, as is Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott’s“Swan Song.”If you want to go even deeper, you can dive into the scandalous marriage of Ann and Billy Woodward (Capote slyly suggested, in his book, that Ann murdered her husband) in Susan Braudy’s biography“This Crazy Thing Called Love”;pick up the coffee-table book“C.Z. Guest: American Style Icon”; or get your hands on a vintage copy of David Grafton’sout-of-print biographyof the Cushing sisters (Babe Paley was once Babe Cushing). Lastly, you can find all of the swans out in the wild inside Deborah Davis’s 2006 book,“Party of the Century,”which chronicles Capote’s infamous Black and White Ball, of 1966; the party, which Capote threw for Katharine Graham at the Plaza Hotel, was glamorous, exclusive, and ultimately ill-fated. It turned out to be one of the last times that Capote and his swans would all flock together.

Photograph by Raven B. Varona

R. & B.

When the singerTinashebroke through with her club-focussed 2014 single, “2 On,” it seemed as if her aspirations to be a major-label pop star were within her grasp. In 2011, after her girl group the Stunners disbanded, she had carved out space for herself with a series of wondrous, wispy alt-R. & B. mixtapes, which won the attention of RCA Records. When that stardom never materialized, through a three-album run that gradually strayed from her early music’s astral allures, she returned to charting her own path. The records that Tinashe has released since, independently—“Songs For You” (2019), “333” (2021), and “BB/ANG3L” (2023), each more unconventional than the last—showcase an artist who is at her most comfortable, and experimental, working beyond the industry pale.—Sheldon Pearce(Terminal 5; Feb. 9.)

Off Broadway

Max Wolf Friedlich’s play“Job”opens point-blank, with a young woman aiming a gun at her therapist. He talks her into putting it away, but our awareness of it never disappears, even amid the frequently funny dialogue that follows. The woman, Jane (a terrifyingly unpredictable Sydney Lemmon), is on leave from her job at a big-name tech company after a disruptive panic attack; she’s come to the therapist (a comfortingly genial Peter Friedman) for a psychological evaluation, which she needs in order to return to work. Yes, the situation is absurd, but thanks to the playwright, the performers, and the director Michael Herwitz—a master of unsettling effects—it’s also engrossing and disturbing, especially as the nature of Jane’s work emerges. It might even scare you off social media for a day or two.—Dan Stahl(Connelly Theatre; through March 3.)

Movies

Oscars may matter in the movie business for the short term, but the history of cinema advances without regard to the statuettes, as displayed in the teeming six-week series“Snubbed 2: The Performances.”It spotlights movies featuring widely acclaimed performances that went unnominated, such as Pam Grier’s tough-minded and dialectically deft title role in Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown”; Charles Grodin’s brilliant comedic turn as a near-schlub who achieves self-liberation through insincerity and deceit in Elaine May’s “The Heartbreak Kid”; and Gena Rowlands’s star performance in John Cassavetes’s “Opening Night,” one of the great movies about the emotional toll of acting, as an actress preparing for a play, who—fearing that her own aging is being exploited by the elderly playwright—transforms the work by means of furious improvisations.—Richard Brody(Museum of the Moving Image; through March 10.)

Dance

After nearly sixty years of making dances,Twyla Tharpshows no signs of stopping. Recent programs have featured burnished classics along with some revelatory back-of-the-drawer stuff, but she’s been creating new works, too. If these have been less inspired, still, it would be a mistake to assume that her best is all in the past, and she continues to draw extra effort from both the veterans and the up-and-coming dancers in her pickup troupes. Her latest program introduces “The Ballet Master,” an ensemble piece set to Vivaldi, and “Brel,” a solo set to Jacques Brel. How might her take on that mid-century sardonic-romantic Belgian bounce off a revival of “Ocean’s Motion,” her 1975 treatment of Chuck Berry tracks?—Brian Seibert(Joyce Theatre; Feb. 13-25.)