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    For a Pioneering Artist, the Joy of Having Done the Work His Way

    If you keep a musician friend for over 50 years, as the experimental director Ping Chong has done with Meredith Monk, just maybe at your retirement celebration, that friend will sing you a song. And so on Wednesday night at the performance space Chelsea Factory, a luminous Monk sat down at a keyboard, reminisced about Chong when she first knew him — as a pony-tailed student in her dance class, wearing bell-bottom jeans — and played “Gotham Lullaby.”At the front of the crowd, Chong stood listening, transported to his earliest days in theater, when he was a member of Monk’s company. At 76, he has long since become a force in his own right in downtown theater. As a documentary film crew glided through the room, emissaries from La MaMa and the Wooster Group were among the more than 250 guests toasting his nearly half century with Ping Chong and Company.Meredith Monk and Chong have been friends and collaborators for over 50 years. She sang “Gotham Lullaby” at his farewell celebration.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIt was an evening full of warmth and camaraderie, a world away from the loneliness that Chong says he felt when he was an only: toiling alone as an Asian American theater artist in New York. An Obie Award winner and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts — which he received from President Barack Obama in 2014, the same year as Sally Field, Stephen King and Monk, too — Chong formed his company in 1975 and carved out a niche with shows like “Collidescope” (2014), inspired by the killing of Trayvon Martin; the puppet piece “Kwaidan”(1998); and “Nuit Blanche” (1981), about Chong’s touchstone belief that, he said, “we’re all human beings, and we need to stop thinking that what’s on the superficial surface separates us.”Born in Toronto to parents who immigrated from China, he was four months old when his family relocated to New York City. He grew up in Chinatown, where his parents ran two restaurants and a cafe, and went to the High School of Art and Design in Midtown Manhattan. After two years at Pratt Institute (“The easel next to mine was Robert Mapplethorpe”), he studied film at the School of Visual Arts, graduating in 1969.Three years later he made his first independent theater piece, “Lazarus,” which he revisited last fall in a version titled “Lazarus 1972-2022,” his final show as artistic director. His current project is the latest installment in the company’s interview-based, social-justice series Undesirable Elements, about Ukraine, set to have its premiere in May.A Zhongkui puppet by Chinese Theater Works at the Chelsea Factory event.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAfter that, Chong plans to take some time “to see what it feels like to be a civilian again,” while working on getting the rest of his archive to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts — a task he views, like cooperating with the makers of the documentary about him, as part of the responsibility to history that accompanies being an Asian American pioneer. With his retirement — and that of Bruce Allardice, Ping Chong and Company’s longtime executive director, who was also celebrated on Wednesday night — the company will continue under the artistic leadership of a four-person team.Last week, in a rehearsal studio on Great Jones Street in Greenwich Village, Chong sat down to talk about his career. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.What was your first experience of theater?My family’s in the Chinese opera, so it was Chinese opera. I didn’t see Western theater until I was in high school. My mom was a diva. My grandfather was a very famous Chinese opera director-librettist. My father was a director-librettist. My mother was performing in Vietnam in the late ’20s, and my father was directing in Singapore and Malaysia in the ’20s. But I hadn’t planned on being in theater at all. I thought I would be a painter.What drew you to theater making?An accident. I didn’t have that much confidence by the time I graduated from film school. I said, “There aren’t any Asian filmmakers.” I was interested in dance. So this young woman said, “You want to take Meredith Monk’s class?” I took the class, and Meredith invited me to take her personal workshop. If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be here now. At the end of it, Meredith said, “I’m doing a show at Connecticut College in the summer. Are you free to be part of it?” And I said, “I don’t know if I can do it because I’m thinking of going to India.” Sixties, right? I never got to India. I did get to Connecticut College. And my mind was blown because I’d never seen theater like that before. It was like a surrealistic dream. It was completely not realism. Chinese opera is not realism. So the connection was not so crazy for me. Then she invited me to be part of the company.Some of the table décor, highlighting Chong’s playful sense of humor.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesHow do you define theater?I almost don’t like the term theater. I prefer the term performance because it includes dance. My own work integrates dance and theater and visual arts and all these other things, you know? So I prefer a more generous definition.Do you have a philosophy of theater making?The stage cannot compete with cinema or television for realism. Why are we bothering? Theater has its own unique properties. So that means you need to go back to the Greeks. You need to go back to people like the Kabuki or these other theaters that recognize theater is not realism. Theater is a much more imaginative space.I don’t know why I’m asking this, except that it’s a part of having a long career. Were you ever tempted to —Chuck it?To chuck it, yes!The first time I wanted to chuck it was in 1991. That was the one time I wanted to chuck it, actually. I remember being in Portugal between jobs, lying on the floor, thinking, what else can I do? Nobody talks about how scary it is to create. Because you’re always afraid of failure. That’s the big fear. You always think it’s not going to work. I love what I do, but it’s stressful.More than 250 guests turned out to toast Chong’s half-century career and leadership with Ping Chong and Company.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWhat persuaded you not to quit?I couldn’t figure out what else I would do. After I had that little crisis, then I was fine. Once I decided to go on, that was the major flowering for me. Artistically. But I think the other thing that happened was in the late ’80s I went to Asia. I had gone to Asia when I was 17, to Japan and to Hong Kong and to Singapore. I never went back until ’86, when I went to this festival in Japan. It was kind of a shock to be in a place where I didn’t stand out because I was Asian, and that was a real revelation. Two years later I was in Hong Kong. I’m Cantonese. Hong Kong is Cantonese. And when I went to Hong Kong, I reconnected with my cultural roots. Up to that point, I was looking to Europe artistically. After that, I said, “Being approved by Europe is not important to me anymore. I’m just going to go my own way.”Do you remember when you were 17 having that sensation of “I don’t stand out here?” Because when you were 17 you would have been living in Chinatown, right? But also going to a high school that was looking to Europe for validation.Well, that process of leaving Chinatown and going into the high school — at that point, I was trying to learn how to belong to the new world that I was moving into. The alienation wasn’t happening so much yet because I was discovering a new world. The estrangement didn’t really start for me until college, because that’s when I hit the wall with European art, which I did not connect to. I did connect to surrealism.“The whole ’70s was a time where I was grappling with identity,” Chong said. “At this point I’m comfortable with both things. Getting there was complicated.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOf course you did!Because it’s a much more stylized world, right? But I didn’t understand any of those things because I was young. I didn’t understand that leaving Chinatown meant being estranged from that and not really comfortable in this. So my early work all had to do with this sense of limbo. “Lazarus” is an example of where I was emotionally, and of feeling estranged. And “Lazarus” was ’72. The whole ’70s was a time where I was grappling with identity, like, where do I belong? At this point I’m comfortable with both things. Getting there was complicated, accepting these two aspects of myself. I actually went to China, to my father’s hometown. And when I left I said — I said to myself, because he was dead already — I said, “OK, I know where you’re from, but this is not where I’m from.” Because I’m from here. Like it or not.Theater is ephemeral. After 50 years, all those shows, what do you have?You have the joy of having done them. You have the joy of sharing them with people. It’s all ephemeral anyway. It’s not just theater that’s ephemeral. It’s all ephemeral. More

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    ‘You People’ Review: Guess Who’s Going to Roscoe’s

    Jonah Hill and Eddie Murphy are among the stars in this prickly-charming generational Netflix comedy, the feature directing debut of Kenya Barris.When Ezra hops in the back seat of Amira’s Mini Cooper, sparks fly. Played with savvy charm by Lauren London, the budding costume designer furiously calls out Jonah Hill’s unhappy broker and fledgling podcaster for his assumption that she, a Black woman, is his rideshare pickup. But their exchange goes from prickly to something warmer and at times winning — which is an apt description of this interracial, interfaith, bigotry-teasing comedy, directed by Kenya Barris and written by Hill and Barris.More than his Wu-Tang Clan tees and her Gucci slides, hip-hop culture is their lingua franca.And these kids are all right-ish, to borrow a suffix Barris made popular with his TV shows “black-ish” and “grown-ish.” Much like the parents who met in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” more than 50 years ago, it’s the elders who prove to be the problem. Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny play Shelley and Arnold Cohen of Brentwood; Eddie Murphy and Nia Long are Amira’s pessimistic-at-best parents, Akbar and Fatima Mohammed, of Baldwin Hills.While Duchovny and Long aren’t silent partners here, it’s the former “S.N.L.” castmates Murphy and Louis-Dreyfus who whet the comedy as their characters are poised to scuttle Ezra and Amira’s plans to wed. Shelley by being so effusive in her clumsy embrace of Amira that she becomes exhaustingly offensive. The disapproving Akbar by trying to reveal Ezra as a white opportunist.Hill’s Ezra is, in fact, a fool of sorts. Mo, his cocky partner in podcasting (played by the dynamic comic Sam Jay) tries to keep him real. But Ezra lies to please. He tries too hard. He refers to Malcolm X as “the G.O.AT.” during his first meeting with Amira’s parents at a Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles (his idea). He wants to be edgy and lovable. And Hill, wearing blond-streaked hair and a lit smile, carries that yearning throughout the film.Hill and London build on a nice vibe. Their characters are playful and frisky, in sync with their eye rolling and mouthing of apologies from across a room. Like the betrothed, viewers recognize the shoals but remain optimistic they can navigate them. And then the movie begins nimbly nudging doubts. Maybe there is no happily ever after here.Between the two of them, insiders Barris and Hill must have Rolodexes that cover the entire industry. There are cameos aplenty. Rhea Perlman offers a few quips as Ezra’s grandmother. Richard Benjamin, Hal Linden and Elliott Gould say wildly inappropriate things after a Yom Kippur service. Anthony Anderson cuts heads at a Crenshaw barbershop. And Mike Epps arrives as Akbar’s knowing brother, E.J.Additionally, Los Angeles gets more than a passing glance. Mark Doering-Powell’s photography hovers from above and cruises at street level, capturing the city in its best light. This L.A. feels decidedly upscale. With its lavish homage to sneakerhead couture and its killer soundtrack (by Bekon), “You People” can be read as either a critique of the commercialization of hip-hop culture or a celebration of its ongoing durability. Or maybe it’s both, which would likely suit Amira and Ezra just fine.You PeopleRated R for language, sexual friskiness and cannabis use. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘Without You’ Review: Anthony Rapp’s Seasons of Love, and Loss

    The actor, who starred in the original Broadway run of ‘Rent,’ reflects on the show’s early days and dealing with the grief of his mother’s death.Anthony Rapp’s show “Without You” is, in part, about the genesis of “Rent.” It is opening Off Broadway on a symbolic date: exactly 27 years after both that hit musical’s first public performance at New York Theater Workshop, and the death of its creator, Jonathan Larson. That’s 14,201,280 minutes gone by, 14 million moments so dear.As Rentheads will know, this number riffs on a famous lyric from “Seasons of Love,” the runaway anthem from “Rent” and now from “Without You.” That song pops up a few times over the course of the new show, and it still has the power to spur a Pavlovian lacrimal reaction, especially in the context in which Rapp (who originated the role of the aspiring filmmaker Mark) employs it here. Some of the moments he reminisces about are not so dear, because “Without You” is largely about death — brutally unexpected for Larson, and gruelingly protracted in the case of Rapp’s mother, Mary, who had cancer.For decades now, seeing “Rent” has been something of a coming-of-age rite, a gateway for young fans not just into the wondrous world of musical theater, but into adulthood — exposing them to gritty subject matter, helping them come to terms with who they are or might be. It played a similar role for Rapp, as he explained in “Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical ‘Rent,’ ” which came out in 2006. He turned the book into this play with music in 2008, performing it in other cities before finally making its way to New York, where it’s playing New World Stages, directed by Steven Maler.Before getting to the last two elements of the book’s subtitle, it’s worth noting that the theatrical version mostly skips the romantic side of the “love” part. The memoir did not offer much by way of introspection on the subject, but there were glimpses into a personality that appears more complicated, darker even, than the one we get onstage.It is clear that being cast in “Rent” was a turning point in Rapp’s career, even if he was not quite the bumbling beginner he suggests. Yes, he was a 22-year-old actor with a day job at Starbucks, but by the time the director Michael Greif cast him in the “Rent” workshop, he had already been in three Broadway shows and a few movies — one of the first things Larson told Rapp was that he’d liked him in “Dazed and Confused.”“Without You” opens Off Broadway exactly 27 years after the first public performance of “Rent” at New York Theater Workshop.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Without You” is at its most engaging when delivering a quasi-documentary look at the musical’s early days. Rapp performs the song he did for his audition, R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” and we hear a snippet from the demo cassette Larson gave Rapp so he could learn a number for his callback. Hearing the late composer’s own voice is quite affecting, and there is a surreal quality to the scene.Backstage stories have a built-in entertainment factor, and Rapp’s reminiscences have an in-the-room immediacy and enthusiasm. Add the very real artistic and commercial impact of “Rent,” and it’s easy to forgive him for overstating how edgy the show was for its time. After quoting a lyric from “La Vie Bohème” that reclaims slurs for gay men and lesbians, for example, Rapp quips we wouldn’t hear it from Andrew Lloyd Webber. Maybe not, but “Hair” was no slouch when it came to profanity, slurs, drugs and sexuality. And at least that show did not rhyme “curry vindaloo” with “Maya Angelou,” as Larson did.The composer’s abrupt death from an aortic aneurysm after the first dress rehearsal has entered musical-theater legend, and while Rapp was understandably devastated, “Without You” is, just as understandably, more poignant when he’s dealing with his mother’s yearslong decline. The actor recounts frequent trips to Joliet, Ill., where Mary lived, and re-enacts phone calls in which he plays both parts of the conversation (though in general he struggles to differentiate women’s voices, which all end up sounding the same). He also punctuates his mother’s side of the narrative with songs he co-wrote, mostly in an amiable indie-rock vein (the music director Daniel A. Weiss leads a punchy five-piece band from behind the keyboards). But it is hard to step away from the shadow “Rent” casts, then as now, on Rapp’s life: He circles back to that show with a rendition of the number “Without You” at his mother’s memorial. You would have to be made of stone to not be moved.Without YouThrough April 30 at New World Stages, Manhattan; withoutyoumusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    ‘Memorial’ Review: An American Story, Set in Stone

    The national controversy surrounding Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam War Memorial is the subject of Livian Yeh’s nimble, process-driven play.Maya Lin was still a college student when her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was selected through an open-submission process. Built in 1982 on the National Mall in Washington, the memorial features a wide-angle pair of black granite walls engraved with the names of lost soldiers, and it descends below ground like a tomb. Opponents called it a monument to shame and defeat.The controversy surrounding its construction — veterans decrying Lin and her design, the congressional hearings that followed and the addition of a statue nearby depicting three soldiers as a compromise — is the subject of “Memorial,” a nimbly drawn and elegantly executed new play by Livian Yeh that opened on Sunday at the Mezzanine at A.R.T./New York Theaters.The winning design, a scrawl of black pastel that resembles a bat, represents a stark contrast from the Washington and Lincoln Monuments that dominate the National Mall, massive, gleaming-white shrines to America’s founding ideals. When Maya (Angel Lin) shares her proposed memorial with committee members, she describes it as a wound cut into the meadow between the two monuments, one that’s intended to inspire reflection — a fraught idea in those days, given that the subject of contemplation is the Vietnam War.Yeh’s retelling is fictionalized but includes some of the young artist’s real-life supporters as characters: Wolf Von Eckardt (Robert Meksin), an architecture critic who defends her in the press, and Hideo Sasaki (Glenn Kubota), a Japanese American architect, interned during World War II, who becomes a mentor to Maya, particularly after detractors start attacking her race (Ross Perot, a donor on the project, once called Lin an “egg roll”).In “Memorial,” Maya’s opposition takes the form of Colonel Becker (James Patrick Nelson), who spearheads funding for the project but eventually turns against her, and whom Yeh notes is an amalgam of veterans with objections to Lin’s design. Becker asks about Maya’s background upfront, ostensibly to ensure she can withstand national scrutiny. Though she tells him her parents fled Communist China and have no affiliation to the party, her heritage nonetheless becomes a target for racist backlash.Yeh imagines Maya as a headstrong idealist, committed above all to the purity of her design. And Angel Lin’s assured and anchoring performance toes a delicate line, presenting Maya as neither a babe in the woods nor a wunderkind fully prepared for the magnitude of her mission. There’s admirable strength to Maya’s convictions, and philosophical intrigue to her aesthetic arguments. But while the colonel’s side of their conflict is rooted in trauma and memory, Maya’s is purely theoretical. (It’s Maya’s mother, played by a wonderfully flinty Rachel Lu, whose back story illustrates the idea that a memorial ought to feel inclusive, recalling her sister’s — Maya’s aunt’s — design for a shrine to Communist China.)That Maya’s argument for her blueprint is conceptual instead of personal can make her seem as if she’s no more than the sum of her artistic principles, and less sympathetic than the colonel in making her case. Nor is there much talk of the social or political debates over the Vietnam War itself, which might have helped trace a throughline to the present, when U.S. military operations are more often addressed in public discourse with the kind of moral ambiguity Lin’s design confronts. Still, Yeh covers an extraordinary amount of ground in the 95-minute show, and has a draftsman’s keen eye for concision.The director Jeff Liu’s graceful staging, for the Pan Asian Repertory Theater, reflects Yeh’s focus on the rich potential of quietly expressive architecture. The sloped white panels of Sheryl Liu’s set suggest both a venerated graveyard and a row of blank canvases, and serve as a backdrop for evocative projections by Gregory Casparian and lighting by Victor En Yu Tan. The production’s attention to detail, including the impressively subtle 1980s costumes by Karen Boyer and scene-setting sound by Da Xu, lend texture and dimension to the largely process-driven plot.How a country chooses to remember is a clear indication of its values. So what does it say that Lin’s distinctly American success story isn’t more widely known? “Memorial” does for Lin’s legacy what she has striven to do in her work — invite people to consider uncomfortable truths.MemorialThrough Feb. 19 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; panasianrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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    A New Expansion of The 1619 Project on Hulu

    A television docuseries from Lionsgate and Hulu reimagines a signature piece of Times journalism for a new audience.A little over three years ago, after The 1619 Project was first published, The New York Times began the process of turning it into a television documentary. It was clear, from the initial response to the project, that it introduced readers to an eye-opening perspective on American history, one that pushed them to examine how the contradictions of our founding led to persistent inequalities in contemporary society. In its initial form — a special issue of the magazine, a special broadsheet section and a multi-episode podcast series — it reached millions of people. We knew that putting a version of it on television would help it reach millions more.Today the result of that effort finally arrives. “The 1619 Project” docuseries is a six-episode program that will air on Hulu over the next three weeks. The first two episodes premiere tonight, Thursday, Jan. 26; the next two arrive a week from today, on Feb. 2, and the series wraps up the week after that, on Feb. 9, with the final two. The show is hosted, of course, by the project’s creator and main voice, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and it features some of the journalists and historians who contributed to the original 1619 Project. But it is also something new, a collaboration among Nikole, the executive producer Oprah Winfrey and a talented team of producers and writers led by the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Roger Ross Williams. Together with the New York Times film and television producers Caitlin Roper, who was an editor on the original project, and Kathleen Lingo, they reimagined The 1619 Project for a new format, creating new story lines, adding new reporting and bringing in a host of new voices, from the civil rights activist MacArthur Cotton to the pop-music pioneer Nile Rodgers.Since its initial publication, the project has already taken two new forms: an adult trade book and a children’s picture book, both of which were published in 2021. The adult book took the original magazine issue, a series of essays with historical poetry and fiction interspersed, and revised and expanded it significantly, increasing the number of essays from 10 to 18 and the number of pieces of imaginative writing from 16 to 36. The children’s book did something entirely different: It told the story, in an age-appropriate style, of the White Lion, the ship that brought the first enslaved Africans to the English North American colonies and highlighted the contributions of the ancestors of those first arrivals.The docuseries is another new iteration of the original concept behind The 1619 Project. Though each episode is based on an essay from the book, the show represents the most extensive reimagination of the project yet. This is partly because a new group of collaborators brought a fresh set of ideas to the material. But it’s also because television created so many new possibilities.One of my favorite moments in the series is a long interview Nikole conducted with Cotton, a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It comes about midway through the episode based on her opening essay in the book, “Democracy.” This was an expansion of her Pulitzer Prize-winning essay from the original magazine issue, which made a powerful argument that the struggles across many generations by Black Americans for civil and political rights have been an essential part of the evolution of our democracy. In the show, Nikole interviews Cotton, now in his 80s, sitting on a bench outside the county courthouse in Greenwood, Miss., where he tried to register Black people to vote 60 years ago. When she asks him why so few Black people were registered to vote in those days, he responds matter-of-factly: “State-sponsored terror. Straight out. They killed people for trying to register.” In 1963, Cotton and other S.N.C.C. members tried to overwhelm this opposition by leading a large group of registrants to the courthouse. He was arrested and sent to state prison, where he was housed on death row and tortured. In her essay, Nikole wrote about the courage and idealism of people who “believed fervently in the American creed,” as she puts it, “despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all.” Even in this context, it is a revelation to see Cotton describe, with remarkable calmness, how he found the courage to persevere. “Somebody had to do it,” he tells her. “Democracy is a fight.”Nikole’s interview with Cotton is just one of the many new elements of the docuseries that expand the ideas of the original project. Over the course of the six episodes, she interviews various historians, politicians, musicians, activists and average Americans, and she travels to many states and important sites in the nation’s past. She also plunges deep into her own family history. (Greenwood, Miss., where Cotton is from, was the birthplace of Nikole’s father.) For us at the magazine, who helped Nikole launch the original project, it is a thrill to see it reinvented for television, to watch as she brings to life onscreen the urgent contemporary and historical themes that have animated this groundbreaking work of journalism from the beginning. More

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    Late Night Responds to Biden’s Decision to Send Tanks to Ukraine

    Stephen Colbert said that for Volodymyr Zelensky’s birthday on Wednesday, “Joe Biden got him exactly what he asked for.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Giving TanksThe Biden administration announced plans to send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, after weeks of negotiations to persuade Germany to offer its own advanced battle tanks in the war against Russia.Stephen Colbert celebrated the birthday of Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, on Wednesday, saying, “Joe Biden got him exactly what he asked for.”“This wasn’t exactly a huge surprise — Zelensky kind of figured it out while it was still wrapped.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The Abrams is a game changer for this war in Ukraine. It’s a state-of-the-art battle tank that weighs 70 tons. It is capable of speeds up to 42 miles an hour. Plus, it comes with a free month of Sirius XM, so while you’re breaching enemy lines, you can listen to Stern.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Pentagon officials have been reluctant to send the Abrams, but then they changed their minds, after Germany agreed to send its Leopard battle tanks to Ukraine, making this the first time anyone in Europe has said, ‘Good news — the German tanks are rolling in!’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Because, you know, it’s not a great look just when it’s German tanks rolling across Europe. Kind of makes people nervous.” — WANDA SYKES“I think it should have been Sweden. Yeah. And they send tanks to Ukraine and Russia. OK, hear me out, hear me out: And then Sweden, do that thing you do where you send the tanks in parts with a diagram for assembling them. Yeah. See? See, that would bring the countries together because no one could assemble that [expletive] on their own.” — WANDA SYKESThe Punchiest Punchlines (Certifiable Edition)“Former Vice President Mike Pence’s lawyer reportedly found close to a dozen classified documents last week at Pence’s Indiana home. And when Pence heard that, he stayed white as a ghost.” — SETH MEYERS“Man, this is starting to feel like the beginning of the pandemic. You hear about one case, then another and before you know it, we’re all going to be locked in our apartments wiping down our mail, terrified that some classified documents are going to get in.” — SETH MEYERS“The Justice Department has now launched an investigation into the dozen classified documents found at former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana home, and, more specifically, why was Joe Biden keeping them there?” — SETH MEYERS“While a lot of Republicans are mad at Pence, the former V.P. got a boost from the former pres, who truthed: ‘Mike Pence is an innocent man. He never did anything knowingly dishonest in his life.’ Adding, ‘which is why I tried to have him killed.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingThe actress Nia Long sat down with Wanda Sykes on Wednesday’s “Daily Show” to talk about her two new projects, the Netflix comedy “You People” and the techno-thriller “Missing.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightJimmy Kimmel will celebrate the 20th anniversary of his show in prime time on Thursday, with guests from his first episode: George Clooney, Snoop Dogg and a musical performance by Coldplay.Also, Check This OutNatasha Lyonne is a human lie detector in “Poker Face,” a new Peacock series inspired by vintage case-of-the-week shows.Karolina Wojtasik/PeacockNatasha Lyonne turns into a working-class sleuth in Peacock’s new detective show, “Poker Face.” More

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    Justin Roiland Leaves ‘Rick and Morty’ After Domestic Abuse Charges

    The title roles will be recast because Adult Swim has severed ties with Justin Roiland, the animated show’s co-creator.The animated sci-fi comedy “Rick and Morty” will recast its title roles after severing ties with Justin Roiland, a voice actor and the show’s co-creator, who has a pretrial hearing in April for felony domestic abuse charges from 2020.Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s nighttime adult programming block, announced on Tuesday that it had “ended its association” with Roiland. “Rick and Morty will continue,” the statement said. “The talented and dedicated crew are hard at work on Season 7.”Roiland has also been removed from the animated Hulu comedy “Solar Opposites,” according to a statement by 20th Television Animation and Hulu Originals. He co-created the show, which was renewed for a fifth season in October, and voiced one of the main characters, Korvo.“Rick and Morty,” which debuted in 2013, follows the antics of Rick Sanchez, an alcoholic mad scientist, and his anxiety-riddled grandson, Morty Smith, as they travel to other planets and through myriad dimensions. Marie Moore, the senior vice president of communications at Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns Cartoon Network, said in an email on Wednesday that the title characters would be recast but that she had ​​no additional information on the recasting.Roiland developed the show with Dan Harmon, the creator of “Community,” who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Roiland faces one felony count of domestic battery with corporal injury and one felony count of false imprisonment by menace, violence, fraud and/or deceit against an unnamed woman he was dating in 2020, according to Orange County Superior Court records. The charges were earlier reported by NBC News, which said most of the California court records are sealed under a protective order.There is no trial date for Roiland, 42, who has pleaded not guilty. He has had more than a dozen pretrial hearings, including one this month.Roiland’s lawyer, T. Edward Welbourn, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. In a statement to Rolling Stone, he said: “It is hard to overstate how inaccurate the recent media coverage of this situation has been. To be clear, not only is Justin innocent, but we also have every expectation that this matter is on course to be dismissed.”In addition to his television departures, Roiland recently resigned from the video game studio he co-founded, Squanch Games, which released High on Life last month.In 2018, “Rick and Morty” landed a 70-episode renewal deal from Adult Swim that it is halfway through. At that time, Adult Swim said the third season had earned the block’s highest ratings ever. More

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    ‘Modern Swimwear’ Review: The Designer and the Murderer

    Depicting the final hours of a young fashion designer’s life, Caitlin Saylor Stephens’s play lacks the sturdiness to make its connection to real events believable.The murder of the swimsuit designer Sylvie Cachay in 2010 cut short the life of a promising fashion star at the young age of 33. “Modern Swimwear,” a new play by Caitlin Saylor Stephens, imagines the events of her final night. A one-act, (almost) two-hander now in performance at the Tank, it features a strong central performance from Fig Chilcott, but is incurious about its subject to the point of feeling arbitrary, with the choice to turn this particular woman’s tragic end into dramatic fodder unjustified.At a glance, it’s an almost ideal setup: one night, one hotel room, one failing relationship — with Nick Brooks (Frank Zwally), a trust fund baby, then 24, with whom Cachay had a stormy monthslong affair. The two checked into the Meatpacking District’s Soho House late one December night after the candles he’d lit accidentally set her apartment on fire. Hours later, her body was found strangled and drowned in the bathtub.Anyone unfamiliar with this story would most likely be shocked and confused when Nick, who is otherwise written and performed as a lazy, garden-variety 20-something narcissist, attacks the bright and bubbly Sylvie in the play’s final minutes. Though Stephens offers some compelling insights into the crossfire of a doomed coupling, her characters are neither sturdy enough for an ordinary relationship drama to stand on its own, nor specific enough to be tied to real events. Their arguments about wandering eyes and miscommunication are relatable to a fault, yet their end is anything but, and arrives too abruptly.The couple seem at odds on everything from professional ambitions (he has none) to sex; not only is Nick uninterested in the intimacy of “making love” (it’s more of a four-letter word for him), but he is tormented by sensory hallucinations whenever the two come in contact (an invention of Stephens’s). Spookily rendered through Marcelo Añez’s staticky sound design and the way Sarah Johnston’s lights flicker across Christopher and Justin Swader’s true-to-life set, these manifest mainly as intrusive snippets of a song his songwriter father once wrote. But the plot avoids a real-life detail that might have brought Nick’s fraught relationship with women into higher relief: The elder Brooks, Joseph, was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault in 2009.The play does not explore these histories, nor does it spend much time investigating Cachay’s passion for swimwear, aside from one very effective, if simple, sequence. Locked in the bathroom, Sylvie hypes herself up ahead of a meeting with investors scheduled for the next day, speaking poetically and convincingly about the value of style and vision, fashion’s triumph over nakedness. When she then tries to spice things up with Nick by modeling her newest line, he shrugs and mumbles that there should be more nude beaches.It’s a subtly gutting moment, made especially persuasive by the warmth radiating from Chilcott. Right from the opening scene, the actor’s liveliness embodies someone who hasn’t entirely dimmed her light for an unresponsive boyfriend — though Stephens frustratingly leaves unsaid any reason that Sylvie should stick around. As a scene partner, Zwally isn’t so much one-note as he is perhaps misguided by Meghan Finn, whose direction matches the play’s uneasy mix of the momentous and the routine.Chad Pierre Vann appears briefly as a room-service waiter, threatening to steal the show with an entirely out-of-place flash of comic relief. It’s hard to wish away such a deftly farcical performance, but even tougher to argue for its inclusion. As the couple’s only onstage witness, his reappearance to discover Sylvie’s body is inevitable and unfortunately clumsy. Like Stephens’s play, it’s not exploitative — there is palpable care for the fallen woman — but feels unwarranted and unearned.Modern SwimwearThrough Feb. 12 at the Tank, Manhattan; thetanknyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More