This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. These past couple of weeks, I've encountered

an age-old dilemma when it comes to the arts. Just recently, I went to a stunning, a stunning performance at the Metropolitan Opera

of Richard Wagner's Tristan Undisolda.

For five hours, I was transported by the music and the singing, and yet all the while,

I realized that the composer, Wagner, was a terrible anti-Semite, a favorite of Adolf Hitler's.

And the production, ironically enough, was by Yuval Sharon, an innovator in modern opera and a Jew.

Around the same time, I attended a performance of Giant, Mark Rosenblatt's new play about the life, loves, and

repugnant politics of Roald Dahl.

You leave the theater thinking, yet again, how is it possible for such a complicated and

often hateful man to produce works of literature that are invariably described as beloved?

How is it possible that the same imagination, the same person that conceived James and the Giant Peach and Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, could also give an interview

in which he said, quote, even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason.

The play giant dramatizes the scandal that erupted after Roll Doll had written a profoundly

anti-Semitic article in 1983. The play premiered in London in 2024, and it opens now on

Broadway with the great actor John Lithgow playing role Dahl.

Dahl faces off against his American publisher who would like him to retract those anti-Semitic remarks,

and the events took place some 40 years ago, but they couldn't be more relevant today.

I spoke with John Lithgow this past week.

You know, you've played so many roles over time. The role doll that's on stage that's in this play,

a really beautifully crafted play, is not the portrait of a good man. And I wanted to ask, what's been your

experience of playing people who are not just complicated, but arguably in their sum, are nasty

...