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    Review: In ‘Everything’s Fine,’ the Discomfort of Adolescence

    In Douglas McGrath’s one-man show, his account of an experience as a teenager unfurls with the can’t-look-away quality of a slow-motion crash.What’s unnerving about “Everything’s Fine” is how breezy the tone is: The story at the center of Douglas McGrath’s solo autobiographical show, set during his youth in Texas, is one of emotional and psychological distress, after all. McGrath is not exactly making fun of what happened, but he’s not not making fun of it, either. It is hard to tell whether this is a deliberate choice abetted by John Lithgow’s direction or if McGrath is not a crafty enough performer to shake off a naturally avuncular demeanor.But the droll tone is effective, if sometimes startling. And while McGrath may not be a superlative actor, he is a good storyteller — he is best known as the screenwriter and director of “Emma” (1996), and he wrote the Tony-nominated book for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” His account of something that happened to him as a teenager unfurls with the can’t-look-away quality of a slow-motion crash. You might be appalled but laughing, eager to hear what happened next while also dreading it.McGrath, 64, grew up in Midland, a wind-ridden town in West Texas where many people moved to work in the oil and gas industry. Such was the case for his father, a Connecticut-raised Princetonian with “the deluxe name Raynsford Searle McGrath,” whose family included a witty wife and their three children, of which Doug, as he was known, was the eldest.McGrath sets up the scene evocatively, and for a little while, it looks as if the show will be a cozy family tale. His father had worn a glass eye since a terrible accident when he was 10, and his mother, Beatrice, had worked at Harper’s Bazaar magazine alongside Diana Vreeland and an upstart Andy Warhol. McGrath could have easily milked an entire evening out of his urbane parents living in the wilds of Texas.The focus, however, eventually tightens on eighth grade. Doug was 14, and a new history teacher, whom he calls Mrs. Malenkov, entered the picture. This married 47-year-old mother took a liking to him, to put it mildly, and started leaving notes written on blue onionskin paper in his locker. (John Lee Beatty’s set evokes a schoolroom looking half-abandoned and a little desperate.)Those were different times, and a 14-year-old boy from the early 1970s was not like our modern teenagers constantly plugged into the illuminating world of the internet. But even by the standards of his time, McGrath paints a portrait of himself as being a little slow on the uptake. “I was not precocious,” he says. “I was barely coscious.”Yet even the innocent, happy-go-lucky Doug realized that Mrs. Malenkov was not well and that the situation was untenable. When he finally came up with a way to extricate himself from his predicament, the scheme was equally laughable and cringe inducing.As our narrator, McGrath is, of course, aware he is navigating a minefield, and he does so adroitly and without judgment — if anything, he makes fun of himself the most and looks at Mrs. Malenkov in a perplexed, sensitive manner. He acknowledges the impropriety of what he is dealing with, recreating his feelings as he experienced them in the heat of the moment and as an adult looking back. But this also means that McGrath picks whatever point of view suits the story’s suspenseful unfolding, and it’s not always coherent. Sometimes he editorializes with the wisdom he has now, and sometimes he is content to remain locked in his adolescent perspective, which means ignoring glaring blind spots. What was Mrs. Malenkov’s husband up to, for example?Songs like “Teacher’s Pet” and “Come On-a My House” play between some scenes — a little on the nose, too, setting up easy chuckles. Which does not mean they are entirely comfortable.Everything’s FineThrough Jan. 22 at the DR2 Theater, Manhattan; everythingsfineplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    Exploring James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry’s Friendship

    The acclaimed writers are communing once again in productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” and “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.James Baldwin recalled first meeting Lorraine Hansberry in 1958 at the Actors Studio in Manhattan after a workshop production of “Giovanni’s Room,” a play based on his novel of the same name. The “biggest names in American theater” were there, he noted, and gave their critiques of the play. But then he locked eyes with a woman yet-unknown to the theater establishment who articulated a full appreciation of him and his work. Of that encounter, Baldwin wrote: “She talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten.”For the next seven years, Hansberry and Baldwin would continue to find moments of deep understanding, forging a relationship even though they often did not live in the same place. But their storied friendship was cut short by Hansberry’s untimely death at the age of 34 in 1965.This fall the two writers are communing once again at the Public Theater and, perhaps, finishing a few conversations, with productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” created by and co-produced with the Elevator Repair Service, and a revival of Hansberry’s classic play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara.From left: John Clay III, Paige Gilbert and Tonya Pinkins in Robert O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” running through Oct. 23, presents a re-enactment of a 1965 debate between Baldwin, the writer and civil rights activist, and William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative founder of National Review. The two men argued the motion, “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.”The play provides a historical touch point for our fractious political present. The director John Collins said: “I think there are several ways to frame why you should listen to those you disagree with, and sometimes it is because one should allow for the possibilities that the people you don’t agree with might have something intelligent and worthwhile to say. The other reason, though, is to really understand the seriousness, and sometimes the danger, of these other arguments.”Drawing verbatim from the debate transcript, the play ends with an imagined conversation between Baldwin and Hansberry that was inspired by a 1961 discussion about Black Americans in culture. (In addition to Baldwin and Hansberry, the other participants included the essayist and publisher Emile Capouya, the journalist and social commentator Nat Hentoff, the poet Langston Hughes and the writer and critic Alfred Kazin.) While they focused primarily on the question of Black writers in American literature, they also considered the status of Black Americans.On the subject of crafting Black characters, Baldwin explained, “Faulkner has never sat in a Negro kitchen while the Negroes were talking about him, but we have been sitting around for generations, in kitchens and everywhere else, while everybody talks about us, and this creates a very great difference.”Hansberry confirmed, “Which is a different relationship, because the employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house.” She continued as Baldwin and the rest of the room erupted in laughter, “We have been washing everybody’s underwear for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean.” The recording captures Baldwin and Hansberry’s intimacy and the joy they felt in each other’s company.Imani Perry, the Princeton University professor whose books include “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry,” describes theirs as “an intimate intellectual companionship. They are both deeply concerned with Black life and regular Black folks’ lives, and also think about the politics of race and its depiction in the public arena.”“He trusted her artistically, which is a big deal, for someone who is his junior, younger than him, and also when they became friends, he had a larger visible platform,” Perry said of Baldwin, who was 34 when he met a 28-year-old Hansberry. “It was a beautifully intimate friendship. It’s the kind of thing that I think every person who’s either an artist or intellectual, and certainly a person who’s both, yearns for.”Greig Sargeant as James Baldwin and Daphne Gaines as Lorraine Hansberry in the Elevator Repair Service’s production of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” at the Public Theater.Richard Termine for The New York TimesGreig Sargeant, who plays Baldwin and conceived the play, notes that Elevator Repair Service wanted to show the public and private Baldwin. “We did some research,” he said, “and one of the things that we found was that article ‘Sweet Lorraine,’” the essay Baldwin wrote to eulogize his dear friend. In writing the last scene of the play, Sargeant and April Matthis, who originated the Hansberry role, consulted numerous essays, interviews and speeches. Baldwin and Hansberry “sharpen each other by having these debates,” Matthis said, “and it’s always loving, and it’s all meant to hold each other to account with so much love.”The Public Theater’s fall season also includes a revival of Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a Black family’s struggles to achieve their dreams within the constraints of a segregated America. The drama, directed by Robert O’Hara and opening on Oct. 19, centers on the Youngers and their decision to buy a house in a white neighborhood in Chicago. It emphasizes the impact of desegregation.To drive home this point, O’Hara decided to include a scene with a neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, that is usually cut from productions. “We know where they’re moving in many ways is more dangerous than where they were living,” he said. “I love the scene where Mrs. Johnson says she’s for ‘people pushing out.’ And then she says, but you might get bombed. She’s a harbinger of what the Youngers will face in suburban white America.”Ahead of the play’s historic premiere on Broadway (it was the first written by a Black woman to be produced there), Hansberry and Baldwin reunited in Philadelphia for its run at the Walnut Street Theater. Sargeant noted, “I read an article once where Baldwin said that the great thing about going to see ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ was that he had never seen so many Black people in the audience,” because “Black people ignored the theater because the theater ignored them.”“So now the good thing about being in 2022,” he added, “is that we have an institution that is making an effort to make positive changes for the future, having us both there at the same time, highlighting the relationship between Baldwin and Hansberry.”One hears in both O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” a longing for missed conversations. “Baldwin” offers trenchant examinations of the American condition, and “Raisin” questions the American dream. “Lorraine Hansberry had this incredible, fantastic, lightning bolt of a play, and then she died so early,” O’Hara said. She did not live to see the Black power movement, or the queer women of color who led third-wave feminism. O’Hara continued, “Imagine what she would have been able to do if she were able to dream longer with us, and that’s what’s exciting, we can now acknowledge her queerness.”Producing the play in 2022, O’Hara anticipates the impact of the civil rights movement in the late 20th century, a period that Baldwin lived through and wrote about. He continued, “Doing it downtown, we can investigate some of the more difficult crevices.”The production takes on substance abuse, depression, sexism, classism, and the virulent racism that shaped mid-20th-century American society and continues to inform our own. O’Hara said his take on the American classic draws from his general approach to making art. “I live by this tenet as an artist and a human being that I will not be limited by your imagination,” he said. “Because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean that it’s unimaginable.” Similar to Baldwin and Hansberry’s exchanges, O’Hara said, “I bring a cavalcade of interesting and exciting people around me to push me into the future.”He noted the enduring importance of Hansberry’s classic and, similar to “Baldwin and Buckley,” how it anticipates our present. “I think of it as a tragedy in hindsight,” O’Hara said. “There’s uplift in the play of them wanting to move out of where they are. But I don’t want us to get lost in the glorious ending. They are moving into the white suburbs in 1959 Chicago. I just think about King saying that Chicago was more dangerous and more racist than the South.”These two works feature questions not only about the status of America but also the theater by remembering two iconic American artists. Baldwin and Hansberry challenge, as O’Hara noted, the idea that “there’s one type of Black story. There’s one type of reality that fits Blackness.” The story contains many more chapters waiting to be written. More

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    Michael R. Jackson and Jacolby Satterwhite on Making Art in a Shifting Culture

    Two creative people in two different fields in one wide-ranging conversation. This time: the playwright behind “A Strange Loop” and the visual artist.Although the playwright Michael R. Jackson, 41, and the visual artist Jacolby Satterwhite, 36, work in different genres, they have some things in common. Both are queer Black New York-based artists who address trauma, secrets and stigmas. And both have spent most of their careers feeling overlooked and misunderstood. “As the Black gay man in the room,” said Satterwhite, “I was seen as some sort of weird exception and dismissed.”Yet since the summer of 2020 and its global protests against racial discrimination and violence, both men have been enthusiastically embraced by the public. “A Strange Loop,” Jackson’s meta-musical about a queer Black man trying to write a musical, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making its author the first Black writer to win the award for a musical. The production moved to the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway two years later and was nominated for 11 Tony Awards, including that for Best Musical (which it won). Next spring, Jackson’s new musical, “White Girl in Danger,” set in the world of a fictional soap opera town called Allwhite, will open off Broadway. The playwright was born and raised in Detroit and spent nearly 20 years on “A Strange Loop,” taking a variety of jobs to support himself, including as an usher at “The Lion King” on Broadway.Satterwhite, whose work has been shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, hopscotches across mediums — photography, performance, painting, 3-D animation, writing — to create art that raises questions about self-mythology and expression, consumerism, labor, visual utopia and African rituals. His practice defies easy categorization. This year, the South Carolina native has been building multimedia installations around the world, including at the Format music and art festival in the Ozarks, the Front International triennial in Cleveland, the Munch Triennale in Oslo and the Okayama Art Summit in Japan.The two artists met in August for a conversation at Satterwhite’s studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to discuss their experiences in a shifting cultural landscape.Jaquel Spivey in Michael R. Jackson’s musical “A Strange Loop” at the Lyceum Theater in New York City.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJACOLBY SATTERWHITE: On the night “A Strange Loop” premiered, I had a lot of projects going on and wasn’t able to make it but, three times a week, someone would approach me about it. I went in a little skeptical and thought, “I’m probably going to see something that is asymmetrical to my experience.” But what was so great about it was that it encapsulated all the things that make me who I am as an artist and how I feel as a creative producer in an art world that has shifted seismically between 2003 and now.I was in the room before we all got a seat at the table, and I experienced all kinds of resistance among white peers, as well as my own Black colleagues who have a heteronormative stance.MICHAEL R. JACKSON: I think part of the reason a lot of people connect with the show is because this piece contains almost 20 years of thought. I started working on it when I was about 23 and, even though I rewrote it, it still captures whole periods of time of Black gay thinking, feeling and living and reflecting. There’s a lot that one can grab on to.J.S.: I went to see the show with my boyfriend, who is not in the art world or a creative industry. There are times when I struggle to communicate why I am the way I am, and I’ve said things that were a bit niche and esoteric to him with regard to my experience. And there were moments during the show when he looked at me, because the scenes illustrated exactly what I said to him.M.R.J.: In a weird way, the show demonstrates my inherent outsider status that makes me incompatible with being in a relationship. That could be wrong — I could be overdramatizing — but that’s one of the loops in my life.J.S.: Before I started dating this person, I had this “I am meant to be alone” militancy. And honestly, I do feel like I have more agency when I’m alone, because I have an obsessive practice that requires me to be extremely selfish to execute. I don’t have assistants. I’m a computer animator, a painter and an experimental filmmaker, and it requires a certain kind of loneliness.M.R.J.: Yeah. One important lesson I learned about myself during the pandemic was that my instinct is far more “I” than “we.” I’ve always thought of myself as a collectivist, and it’s not that I’m not sympathetic to groups but, if I track my own actions and choices, it was always me: whether it’s me against my family, me against other Black folks, me against white folks. Whatever group it was, I always had to find a way to soldier through the group within my own “I.” J.S.: I actually share a similar sentiment. As a person who grew up with childhood cancer — twice — had chemo and was isolated from a schizophrenic mother who was in a mental hospital, I’ve always felt everything about my identity was broken. So in order to survive, I found solace in my artistic ambitions.Exploring niche illegibility and abstraction as a Black artist is radical and unpopular, and it was one thing that people scoffed at for my whole career. But the boldness to commit to something that’s illegible and unpopular is rewarding, and it actually has more impact on the collective “we.” M.R.J.: My next musical, “White Girl in Danger,” is very much about the “we.” Now there’s a relationship between the “I” and the “we,” but the world is going, “Representation! Representation! Representation!” I’m like, “What is that?” That doesn’t feel true. I mean, you’re putting up what you want to see, and that’s fine. But then you want to try to sell that back to me, and I’m not giving you my money for that. That’s what I find troubling about [the focus on] representation, which is dissonant with what a lot of our culture has been saying for a couple of years.J.S.: Well, capitalism got in the way, and now you have banks saying, “We have money for trans visibility and we create safe spaces at our A.T.M.s,” or whatever.  M.R.J.: You saying that has me thinking about [the 1990 documentary about New York City drag culture] “Paris Is Burning.” What’s actually been most interesting to me, but doesn’t get talked about, is that the group of people in that documentary — and so many more who weren’t in it — were imitating an imitation of an imitation in the Reagan era. All these people in the 1980s were reorienting because of the actual politics of the time, and the things that led to this era of excess and austerity. When I look at these queens, they want to be fictional characters. That has always been a beautiful dissonance.I went to the National Museum of African American History & Culture [in Washington, D.C.,] for the first time recently and found it fascinating. We start in the 1400s with the slave trade and then there’re all these moments in history where people are fighting bitterly to be free. Then in the 1960s and ’70s, it got real hot with the Black Panthers and all these radical groups starting to collaborate, and the government is like, “We have to break that up.” The Panthers are gone and suddenly we’re in the ’80s and it’s Oprah, Bill Cosby, superstars everywhere.An installation view of Jacolby Satterwhite’s “at dawn” (2022) at JSC Berlin. Shown here is Satterwhite’s “Birds in Paradise” (2019), a two-channel HD color video and 3-D animation with sound.Photo: Alwin Lay. © Jacolby Satterwhite, courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New YorkIt seems like the powers that be realized that, to keep the world order, they had to deliver these fantasies to people to confuse them and get them off the scent. And honestly, looking at today, a lot of that stuff’s only continued, and now people have taken those fantasies and pumped them into this idea of radicalism. Within that there’s stuff that’s real, and then there’s stuff that’s not real. But you can’t tell it apart unless you look at it with hard eyes.J.S.: My whole existence is that era. My mom named me after a character from [a spinoff of the 1980s soap opera] “Dynasty.” She was obsessed with Republicans and the Middle East, so my middle name is Tyran [a reference to Tehran]. This was down to her schizophrenia. She made 10,000 schematic diagrams of common objects in the house that she was trying to submit to the Home Shopping Network to get invented. She became so obsessed with imitating and copying the infection of capitalism — it ended up shaping me as a human being, and my artistic pursuit. And it’s interesting to see how my peers don’t even know what they’re imitating now.M.R.J.: For me, that raises the question of who my people are. I started this conversation by saying that I’ve been having complex feelings, and that’s part of it. I thought I knew who my people were, but now I find myself feeling a bit alone.I keep watching the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978) because the idea of pod people resonates with me — this idea of people who’re doing the same thing and trying to get you to be like them. There’s something in me saying, “I can’t trust anyone, because they might pull me into some pod people stuff — I’ve been a pod person before. And it sounds like paranoia, but I also see how people are inconsistent because I see how I can be inconsistent. When I look at other people not recognizing how they can be inconsistent, I worry how we can progress in this self-deluded world that’s constantly having ideas delivered to you from culture, politics, whatever, that’re purposely trying to keep you uninformed and confused.J.S.: I’ve always welcomed erasure and am constantly trying to shift skins. I had a traveling museum survey that started at Carnegie Mellon [in 2021] and, when I went to that survey, I almost cried. I saw a whole room of works from seven years ago that were completely out of context for the person I am today. But they were a part of me. I’m going to spend another seven years making something that represents the stage I’m in now, and those works will have a conversation with each other. What I’ve learned to do is be messy: There’s no such thing as mistakes, because everything can be recontextualized.M.R.J.: The tricky part of it is when other people try to hold you to what you said as evidence in the court of public opinion, [assessing] whether or not you’re a hypocrite.Social media culture has become so horribly linked to what art and entertainment are being made, how they’re viewed and how they’re produced. So much of my voice as a writer was developed on social media and specifically Facebook. That box that said, “What’s on your mind?” I took that as a personal challenge; I have a catalog of every thought I’ve ever had. Sometimes I’ll cringe because I don’t know who that person was, but it was part of my development.J.S.: I mean, the world’s in pain, especially after the pandemic, where lots of jobs were lost and isolation caused a lot of mental illness. We’re in the revenge generation. [But] that doesn’t leave room for artists to grow. We’re eradicating problematic people as if the person who’s throwing the stone isn’t problematic. But everyone is.This interview has been edited and condensed. More

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    For ‘The Great British Baking Show,’ ‘Mexican Week’ Was Not an Accident

    After 12 years, the show’s long, inexorable journey from comfort to cringe is complete.Remember Custardgate? Deborah and Howard each cooked a custard and put it in the fridge to chill. But then! When Deborah was layering her trifle, she grabbed Howard’s custard by mistake. Well! This left Howard no choice but to use Deborah’s custard in his trifle. I couldn’t forget the whole frivolous affair if I wanted to — and I don’t.In its early days, the pleasure of “The Great British Baking Show” was in the reassuring fantasy it built under a high-pitched country tent — an endless source of cheeky innuendo, serious amateur baking and absolutely nothing else. The worst thing imaginable was that someone’s Battenberg cake would come out a bit asymmetrical, or that one baker might accidentally use another baker’s custard.Sue Perkins, then a host, described Custardgate as either a mistake, or “the most incredible case of baking espionage,” not because of actual drama or suspicion, but because problems on the show tended toward the truly wholesome and amusing. Taking them too seriously was a sport.From the start, “The Great British Bake Off” — as it’s known in Britain — seemed completely unlike the chef-driven, adrenaline-fueled, corporate-branded American competition shows that dominated at the time, where contestants casually announced their intention to win — not to make friends! It promised to disrupt the genre.But over its 12 years on the air, the worst thing imaginable on Bake Off has gotten worse, again and again. Last week, the hosts, Noel Fielding and Matt Lucas, strolled up a grassy slope dressed in fringed serapes and straw sombreros to introduce “Mexican Week” with tired puns, saying they shouldn’t make “Mexican jokes” but proceeding to do just that. The show had hit rock bottom, revealing what it had managed to obscure in the past with a bit of charm.To British audiences, Mr. Lucas and Mr. Fielding appearing in a casually racist bit might not have come as a surprise, but American audiences aren’t as familiar with their previous work. In part, that’s because “The Mighty Boosh” and “Little Britain,” their shows which aired in the early 2000s in Britain, were both pulled by Netflix a few years ago over their performances in blackface, brownface and yellowface.The current group of “Great British Baking Show” contestants.Love Productions/NetflixThe “Bake Off” clips were shared incredulously and angrily on Twitter, days before the episode even aired. The phrase “Mexican Week” quickly became shorthand for profound culinary blunder, presented with a sense of naïve triumph. An image of a cursed avocado, lopped away with a knife, became the episode’s unofficial mascot, as if a home cook unfamiliar with peeling an avocado should feel humiliated.To me, it felt more like the episode had betrayed its own contestants, as well as its audience, with a lack of expertise among judges, and a lack of curiosity among hosts. Paul Hollywood explaining steak tacos with pico de gallo and refried beans to Prue Leith would be howlingly funny, if he weren’t positioned as an expert.It was even worse than the clips implied — an hour of incompetent exposition, farcical bumbling and maracas-shaking. A distraction for an increasingly insular, self-referential show that’s run out of energy and expertise, and refuses to find it elsewhere.The show has slowly moved away from regional specialties and technique-centered challenges, from focusing on, say, the beauty of lamination, hot-water crusts and steamed puddings. It has grown to fit the exact, most clichéd limits of its form — countries as themes, cuisines as costumes, identities as performances.Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc, the show’s original hosts, excelled at double entendres, while playing up their lack of baking expertise. But they glowed with curiosity and enthusiasm for baking, and short documentary segments they hosted often featured experts, and cultural context, for many foods on the show. But in more recent seasons, several challenges have presented foods as if encountering them for the first time. A recent, and almost equally chaotic “Japanese Week” introduced a challenge of Chinese steamed buns.As the show found a wider audience in the United States, and moved from the BBC to Channel 4, it lost Ms. Perkins, Ms. Giedroyc and Mary Berry, a judge who was replaced by Ms. Leith. And while it’s tempting to say the show hasn’t been the same since, you might also say its worst tendencies have simply flourished. Viewers have been pointing them out for years. In an old episode, Mr. Hollywood repeatedly and inexplicably referred to challah, a traditional Jewish bread, as “plaited bread,” which prompted the Forward headline, “‘Great British Bake Off’ Has Zero Jewish Friends.’”And in 2019, Sana Noor Haq wrote about the tension between the show’s image as a bastion of modern, multicultural Britain and the judges’ clear sense of discomfort — or smirking amusement — when contestants like Michael Chakraverty infused the flavors of coconut and chile into his Keralan star bread.Contestants were expected to perform their biographies, neatly and concisely, for the judges. To make the flavors and designs of their foods add up to a pleasant and consumable identity. Never mind that some bakers managed to have fun with it, or be really good at it.It was always an impossible task: If they failed, they failed. If they succeeded, they were exotic. And either way, two comedians in serapes and sombreros would come ambling up the hill behind them, insisting they weren’t going to make any jokes.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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    Trevor Noah Is Inspired by Trump’s Camera Work

    Noah joked on Thursday that Trump gets away with so much criminal activity, “it just shows us we could do crime, too.”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.Not So Smooth CriminalAn aide for former President Donald Trump was caught on camera moving boxes out of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago both before and after the Justice Department issued a subpoena demanding the return of all classified documents he’d removed from the White House.Trevor Noah called Trump “a legend.”“Who else gets caught committing crimes with their own security cameras?” Noah said on Thursday. “Who are you? How are you real?”“There’s something inspiring about it, too, when you think about it. It’s actually inspiring. Because Trump is so bad at crime, but he gets away with so much of it, it just shows us we could do crime, too. He’s like the drunk couple at karaoke; hearing them screech through ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ gives you the confidence to try ‘Kiss From a Rose.’” — TREVOR NOAH“Man, he’s a bad criminal. You’re supposed to get rid of the evidence. Trump is the first criminal to plant the evidence on himself.” — SETH MEYERS“I have to say, all this evidence, it’s crazy the only Trump being held in prison right now is Melania.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Remember how he was ranting and raving about the agents searching Barron’s bedroom and going through Melania’s closet? That’s because he put the documents there.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He’s such a bad criminal. If Donald Trump wasn’t born rich, he’d be one of those bank robbers who passes the teller a note with his name signed at the bottom.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Another Day, Another Subpoena Edition)“The House Jan. 6 committee voted unanimously today to subpoena former President Trump. I would say this is big news, but it’s really more like putting one more parking ticket on that van that’s been on your block for a year. That ticket ain’t gettin’ paid.” — SETH MEYERS“And to make sure the former president reads the subpoena, it’s being printed on the wrapper of a Gordita Supreme.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Watching him testify before Congress would be insane. He’d go on all sorts of insane rants and attack people. It would be like casting an actual lion in ‘The Lion King.’” — SETH MEYERS“But I feel like he will be a little conflicted. Because on the one hand, yes, he thinks this is a crooked witch hunt that is out to get him, but on the other hand, the ratings.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingAndrew Garfield, George Clooney, Salma Hayek, Halle Berry and Larry David are just a few celebrities who participated in the latest edition of Mean Tweets on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutTár in charge: Cate Blanchett as the conductor Lydia Tár in Todd Field’s movie.Focus FeaturesCate Blanchett stars as a powerful conductor who behaves as badly as any male maestro in the new film “Tár.” More

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    ‘The Piano Lesson’ Review: August Wilson’s Phantom Notes

    John David Washington, Danielle Brooks and Samuel L. Jackson star in the first Broadway revival of Wilson’s haunting family drama set in 1936.Four Black men gathered around a kitchen table exuberantly sing a work song (“When you marry, don’t marry no farming man, hoh-ah,” they holler, clapping and stomping their feet), a Black woman girds herself with her grief for the husband and father she lost to the anger of white men, and siblings fight over a seemingly haunted family heirloom that tells a story of generational trauma and loss. These circumstances are more than enough to raise the dead.Or at least they are in the Charles household, in the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” which opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.First staged in 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theater, “The Piano Lesson” made its Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr three years later. That year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama — one of two Wilson won for his American Century Cycle, a collection of 10 plays, one for each decade of the 20th century, depicting African American life.In “The Piano Lesson,” it’s Pittsburgh, 1936, in the house of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), an old railroad worker who is now a train cook. His niece, Berniece (Danielle Brooks), and her 11-year-old daughter, Maretha (played by Jurnee Swan at the performance I saw), live with him in what is, in Beowulf Boritt’s too on-the-nose scenic design, a skeletal facsimile of a house — just beams and planks, some of which don’t even connect. Though there’s not much to the house — a love seat, a tiny kitchen with an ice box — there is an ornately carved piano that commands attention, despite its place in the far corner of the living room.It’s an august instrument with a knotty history, linking the Charles family to their enslaved ancestors and the white family that owned them. Each panel is covered with figures representing the Charleses; even the piano’s front legs are elaborately sculpted.From left, Ray Fisher, Washington, Brooks, Trai Byers, Jurnee Swan and Samuel L. Jackson. The elaborately carved piano is covered with figures of the Charles family.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBerniece’s brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), has traveled up north from Mississippi with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) planning to cash it in for a plot of land and in the process hoping to transform an artifact of their family’s past struggles into a path to a better future. But Berniece refuses to give up the piano and all the bloody history it represents. To complicate matters, the piano is haunted by a recently dead member of the white family that once owned generations of the Charleses.Wilson’s usual signatures are here, including the somber subject matter related to Black disenfranchisement, prejudice, history and trauma — paired with witty, casual dialogue and flights into the surreal. Wilson makes poetry out of the mundane minutiae of daily African American life without forgetting how the past is present, alive and immediate like the melody of a song played by a piano that seems to have sprung to life.And yet even among Wilson’s outstanding and occasionally surreal plays, “The Piano Lesson,” both a family drama and a ghost story, stands out as one of the odder works. It’s a mix of themes and tones, both concrete and ethereal, ghoulish and comedic, but the imbalanced direction here, by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, overemphasizes the horror too literally; it works best on a metaphorical level.The performances are, in almost every case, engaging. Michael Potts, the veteran stage and screen actor who has appeared in other Wilson works, including the 2017 Broadway revival of “Jitney” and the 2020 film adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” is perfection as Doaker’s brother Wining Boy, an itinerant musician who can never seem to hold onto a dollar.As the surviving Charles brothers, Potts and Jackson (who played Boy Willie in the original 1987 production) have a breezy rapport: They joke, drink and reminisce like a couple of cads retired from most — but not all — of their wayward ways. Wining Boy remains a smooth scammer, and Doaker is an even-tempered dispenser of wisdom. Trai Byers, as Avery, a new reverend who’s enamored with Berniece, takes on his character’s highfalutin sermonizing with comedic aloofness, and April Matthis makes a brief, though memorable, appearance as a minor character with some big-city attitude. As the simpleton Lymon, Fisher occasionally goes too hokey, especially when it comes to his Southern drawl, but is endearing nonetheless with his dopey physicality and witless expressions.From left: Potts, Fisher, Jackson and Washington singing an old work song from their time as sharecroppers.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFisher is a great contrast to Washington’s downright feverish performance as Boy Willie. He speaks in a hot spitfire of stubborn refusals, denials and lofty aspirations, convinced that he can put a price tag on his family’s past and use the money to build a future where he is equal to the white men who owned his ancestors and still hold power over him and his family.Washington, in a revelatory stage debut, is a blaze of energy lighting every scene he’s in. Brooks, who was a delight in “The Color Purple” and “Much Ado About Nothing,” as well as in her TV roles in “Orange is the New Black” and “Peacemaker,” isn’t as radiant a presence as in her other outings. Though she has a few standout moments, she, like her character, too often fades into the background, overshadowed by the extensive history and myths in the play.Despite Wilson’s eloquent writing, “The Piano Lesson,” at nearly three hours, drags on. The repetitive dialogue, especially in the second act, evokes a nagging sensation of déjà vu. The spooky shifts in lighting (by Japhy Weideman) and Boritt’s broken home, like a metaphor brought to life, leave nothing to the imagination.While in this production the play’s supernatural elements come across like anomalies, on the page they aren’t; the characters aren’t all that shocked by the eerie, odd occurrences and in fact continue on with their lives as usual. What haunts the Charles household is what haunts Black America every day — the living history of racial violence and pervasive inequality. Part of what’s missing in this mostly entertaining but often underwhelming “Piano Lesson” is the sense that this is a reality we’ve lived ourselves. Who hasn’t heard the melody of a ghost’s song in the middle of the night?The Piano LessonThrough Jan. 15 at the Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; pianolessonplay.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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    in Television

    Eugenio Derbez Believes in Job Proposals, Not Job Applications

    The star of the Apple TV+ series “Acapulco” on standing up for dogs, Mexican vs. Marvel cinema and finding respect.In the Apple TV+ series “Acapulco,” the middle-aged Maximo tells his nephew the story of his rise from poverty in Mexico to riches in Malibu, thanks to the job he took in his early 20s at a prestigious resort in Acapulco. The Maximo of the 1980s is played by Enrique Arrizon, while the Maximo with the mansion and the jet is played by Eugenio Derbez, long a major screen star in Mexico.Unlike Maximo, Derbez says the pivotal moment in his career came not in his 20s, but in his 50s. He’d spent almost a decade trying to break into the U.S. film and TV market and had some success, landing roles in the Adam Sandler movie “Jack and Jill” and Rob Schneider’s short-lived CBS series “Rob.” But it didn’t create the momentum he’d hoped for, so he decided to return to Mexico to finally finish the script he’d been tinkering with: “Instructions Not Included,” about a man whose onetime lover hands him a daughter she claims is his.Derbez was the co-writer, director and star of the Spanish-language film, and when it became an enormous hit, it “changed my life in every way.” The doors to Hollywood opened, he changed his mind about having a child with his wife (he already had three grown kids) and he moved to the United States. In the years since, he has made inroads with U.S. audiences, thanks to starring roles in films like “How to Be a Latin Lover,” a supporting role in the Academy Award-winning “CODA,” as well as the Spanish/English-language comedy “Acapulco.”“I took a leap of faith, and nine years later here I am in the true prime of my career, working in another country, in another office, in another language, with a new home and a new production company,” he said in a recent video interview. “I’m happy to have taken a second chance in my life, even though I was 52.”In the second season of “Acapulco,” which premieres on Oct. 21, the elder Maximo brings his nephew to the city where his story started. Here, Derbez revisits the Acapulco of his own youth, the movie that moved him into the business and breaks down the difference between Mexican and Marvel films. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Acapulco, Mexico I spent my childhood summers in Acapulco and some of my best memories as a kid are from my time there. It’s where I learned to do things like the belly roll — where you move your stomach in and out in a wormlike motion. When I was 15, I had my very first trip with my girlfriend — parents included, by the way — to Acapulco. I have always had a strong connection to the beautiful, amazing city.2. 1957 Cadillac My dad was a great car lover. The very first car in the family was a red, convertible 1957 Cadillac. It’s the car my dad drove my mom in on their first date. It’s the first car I ever drove, at 8 years old — I couldn’t even reach the pedals, so I sat on my dad’s lap. I talked my dad out of selling it because I wanted to drive it when I got older. I still have the car today.3. “The Last Snows of Spring” My mom and I used to go to the movie theater every weekend. We would always watch at least two films — sometimes three or four. One day in 1973, she took me to see an Italian film called “The Last Snows of Spring.” You can’t imagine how much I cried. The emotions I felt were so intense. That day I told my mom: This is what I want to do.4. Dogs When I was 10, my sister asked me if I wanted to have a puppy, and I was like, Eh, yeah, maybe, whatever. She asked me to cry with her so that our parents would buy us a puppy. My parents got us a boxer that awoke my love for animals. By the age of 15, I was rescuing dogs from the freeway in Mexico. To this day, I’m an animal activist. I can’t stand any kind of animal cruelty.5. Job Proposals, Not Job Applications When people ask me for advice, I always tell them not to ask for a job, but bring a job proposal. For many years, I thought the right thing to do was to ask for a job. After so many rejections and my career going nowhere, one day I decided to change my approach. I met a writer who was very smart and we wrote a script for a show and we brought it to a network. For the first time, instead of asking for a job, I brought a proposal. After years of feeling ignored, they treated me differently — with respect. And that’s how I got my first opportunity to star on TV, with the show “Al Derecho y al Derbez.”6. Fatherhood, Round 2 I became a dad when I was 23, and one kid quickly turned into three. I was just a kid myself, raising three kids while struggling to make a living and have a career, so the amount of time I spent with them was very limited. In my 50s, 22 years after I had my last child, my wife and I decided to have a child. When my daughter was born, I realized it was the universe giving me another chance to make things right and fix all the mistakes I made when I was younger. I have enjoyed every diaper, every sleepless night and every vomit.7. Prince In 2006, I was in L.A. developing a project with Salma Hayek. After working all day long at her house, she said, “Prince just called and invited me to dinner — do you want to come?” I didn’t know much about Prince. During dinner at his mansion, he only said a few words, but he went through multiple outfit changes. After dinner, we went to a party. Later, back at his house, he played a private concert for the three of us. I started learning more about him after that night and became a huge fan. He was a genius.8. Fisher’s There’s an amazing restaurant in Mexico City, and a few other locations, called Fisher’s. It’s not Mexican food. It’s seafood done in a very unique way. The craziest dishes. They’re so delicious, and you wouldn’t try them anywhere else. I love that.9. Mexican Cinema The difference between cinema in the U.S. and Mexico is money. In the U.S., you can be entertained by Marvel movies, because even when the story and the plot are not strong, the special effects and everything else are amazing. In Mexico, we don’t have the budget for that. So, you have to be really creative. You have to be a really good writer and have original stories. That’s why filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón are so creative. They come from Mexico, a country where there’s no money and we have to make movies with nothing.10. Michel Franco There’s an interesting Mexican director named Michel Franco who has a very raw approach. His movies I would compare to “Parasite,” but in Spanish. Start with “Después de Lucía” (“After Lucia”), and watch it until the end. Until the very last minute. Powerful. More

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    in Theater

    Review: In ‘Peerless,’ Elite College Admissions Are Something Wicked

    The playwright Jiehae Park’s sly and polished adaptation of “Macbeth” transports the characters from the Scottish heath to the halls of a Midwestern high school.Toil and trouble? That’s how you brew a witch’s charm — and gain admission to elite schools. M has perfect SATs, a zillion Advanced Placement credits and extracurricular activities for days, but her application to her dream college has been rejected. So what’s a girl and her scheming sister to do? Commit murder. Maybe more than one.These are the broad outlines of “Peerless,” the playwright Jiehae Park’s sly and polished adaptation of “Macbeth,” which is being presented by Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters. Transported from the Scottish heath to the halls of a Midwestern high school, “Peerless” places the tragedy’s moral quandaries into the mouths and miniskirts of M (Sasha Diamond), a senior, and L (Shannon Tyo), her twin. L is a junior, having stayed back a year to increase their chances of getting into what they refer to only as “The College,” which accepts only one student from their school per year. But those plans go awry when The College accepts their classmate D (Benny Wayne Sully) instead. D has a lower G.P.A., but he is Native American. Though M is a girl and Asian American — “double minority,” as she puts it acidly — she believes that D outranks her in terms of racialized admissions policies.From left, Diamond, Benny Wayne Sully, and Tyo. The play is content to absorb the themes of “Macbeth” without providing corollaries for each of its plot points.James LeynseSmartly — because Park is very smart — the play is content to absorb the themes of “Macbeth” without providing corollaries for each of its plot points. There’s no Birnam Wood here, no spots to out. Macbeth’s bestie, Banquo, is now BF (Anthony Cason), M’s barely there boyfriend. Instead of the three witches and Hecate, there’s only a single classmate known as Dirty Girl (Marié Botha, delightful), costumed by Amanda Gladu in a witchy black trench coat. The set, by Kristen Robinson, shows a school hallway at an angle, with cutouts for a living room and a bed, as needed, while Mextly Couzin’s flashing, deep-hued lights nudge the environment toward the uncanny.In place of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, Park writes in sharp, staccato rhythms, with short lines that drive through the scenes a few syllables at a time. The actors, under Margot Bordelon’s direction, tear through them like so many high-carb snacks. (This is a feature of the adaptation: Who needs a dagger when you have a victim with a tree-nut allergy?) They’re having a very good time. In the case of Sully’s manic, excitable D, arguably too good of a time. Bordelon gives her young cast the trust and space to show what they can do, which, in a homecoming scene, includes some very silly dance moves.Not every part of “Peerless” works. There’s a lot of talk about M and L’s twinness and their ability to switch places, but Tyo, excellent in “The Chinese Lady” and nicely malign here, and Diamond, a fine actor last seen in “Once Upon a (korean) Time,” look very little alike. And as Park spends a lot less time than Shakespeare probing psychology and motive, the characterizations come across as thin.At times, the production suggests a richer and spikier play about the ways in which members of Gen Z rehearse, perform and weaponize identity, and about the sacrifices that we make in the present to secure an increasingly insecure future. There are arguments — fruitful, if undigested — about prejudice, both external and internalized. But “Peerless,” nasty and glossy, lives mostly on its impish surface. It’s something wicked, certainly. It could be much more.PeerlessThrough Nov. 6 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More