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    Review: In ‘Hang Time,’ Lynched Men Tell Finely Tuned Tales

    Zora Howard’s new play at the Flea catches three men during a few moments of their breathless eternity.Walking into the Flea for Zora Howard’s “Hang Time” is like stepping into a horror film. Darkness pervades the black box theater, and cicadas carry on conversations in some unseen woods. A large obstruction — perhaps a statue? or installation? — interrupts the space. Then it becomes clear: Three Black men seemingly hanging from invisible ropes above an elevated round platform. Lights faintly illuminate their slumped heads and shoulders; their shadows are cast on the right wall, evoking Kara Walker’s silhouettes. You have to pass by them to get to your seat.Howard, who wrote and directed this production, certainly knows how to make an impression.In this hourlong premiere, produced by the Flea and WACO (Where Art Can Occur) Theater Center in Los Angeles in partnership with Butler Electronics, the three lynched men, named Bird (Dion Graham), Slim (Akron Watson) and Blood (Cecil Blutcher), have conversations about women, work, fatherhood and loss. The space is bare, and the play stops as suddenly as it starts — as if we’re catching just a few moments in a breathless eternity.Even though there are no visible signs of the men’s restraints, occasionally we hear the sound of ropes tightening, and the men jerk backward and stiffen into their signature pose. The limp lolls of their heads, the surfacing veins of an extended neck, even the synchronized eye movements: This dance of rigor mortis is a master work of small intricacies, even if it grows more gratuitous and less poignant with every reoccurrence.Bird, Blood and Slim are like three chapters in the life of a Black American man: Blood (as in “Young Blood”) is still coming into his own. Slim is the clown, who sings, jokes and brags about his machismo. Bird, the eldest, is the sanctimonious curmudgeon, who preaches a gospel of God, firm morals and hard work, but also has his own losses that have hardened him. Each of the perfectly cast actors manages to straddle the line between realism and the metaphorical space where “Hang Time” exists.Howard draws out every subtlety of her already fine-tuned dialogue, which renders innocuous expressions into brutal double entendres about the men’s hanging bodies (“Look at him getting all red in the face,” Slim jokes at Blood’s expense). But the men don’t just communicate with words; they also grunt, snort and chortle, and at times the wordless exclamations form their own harmony.To accentuate the emotional shifts, Megan Culley’s sound design — which brings the outside world into the space, from rustling leaves to the bellowing of a train — works in tandem with the portentous lighting (by Reza Behjat) and the script’s varied pacing and silences. And the jeans, sneakers and plaid button-down shirts (by Dominique Fawn Hill) worn by the men are discreetly shabby and tattered, so you may not notice the bullet holes and bloody tears until late.There are purposely unanswered questions, including how these men ended up here. Bird, Blood and Slim never mention their deaths; they seem only vaguely aware of their predicament. They repeat exchanges, never seem to grasp the time, and talk about the weather and their plans as if the future were someplace they could actually confront.In both this work and her captivating 2020 play “Stew,” a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, Howard writes her characters into a Möbius strip of trauma and injustice that is Black American history.And while “Hang Time” offers a work of theater that’s undoubtedly moving, it’s also too static to leave a more lasting impression. Even the absurdist purgatories and in-between spaces of Beckett, whose language has the same kind of circuitousness, take us someplace, even if we ultimately end up back where we started.“Hang Time” begins with a visual declaration of horror but, amid its chitter and chatter, never seems to finish the conversation.Hang TimeThrough April 3 at the Flea Theater, Manhattan; theflea.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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    Why There Is Talk of a Writers’ Strike in Hollywood

    TV and movie writers want more money, but Hollywood companies say the demands ignore economic realities. The deadline to sort out those differences is approaching.Television and movie writers want raises, saying that Hollywood companies have taken unfair advantage of the shift to streaming to devalue their work and create worsening working conditions.The companies bristle at the accusation and say that, while they are willing to negotiate a new “mutually beneficial” deal with writers, the demands for an entirely new compensation structure ignore economic realities.Whether the sides can settle their differences will determine if the entertainment industry can avoid its first writers’ strike in 15 years.Unions representing more than 11,000 television and movie writers and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood’s nine largest studios, including Amazon and Apple, began talks on March 20 for a new three-year contract. The current agreement expires on May 1.The Writers Guild of America, West, and the Writers Guild of America, East, have the strength to bring Hollywood to a halt if they do not get a deal to their liking. Chris Keyser, a co-chair of the W.G.A. negotiating committee, said in an interview that this moment for writers was “existential.”“The industry is almost always unfair to labor,” Mr. Keyser said. “This time it’s broken — it’s actually broken.”Here is what you need to know:Will there be a strike?No outcome is certain, but little in the posturing so far suggests an easy resolution. Producers have begun to stockpile scripts by asking writers to complete as many ahead of the May 1 deadline as possible.The negotiations will likely be acrimonious given the seismic changes in the industry. The rapid transition to streaming entertainment has upended nearly every corner of Hollywood, and writers believe they have been left behind.Unlike directors and actors, writers have historically been willing to strike. The most recent strike stretched from 2007 into 2008, lasting 100 days. One in 1988 dragged on for five months. A walkout must first be authorized by union members; the W.G.A. has signaled that it could conduct a vote as early as the first week in April.Authorization gives the union leverage, but it does not mean a strike is inevitable. In 2017, writers overwhelmingly gave the go-ahead for a strike (with 96 percent of the vote). The sides ultimately reached an agreement a few hours before the first pickets hit studio sidewalks.The entrance to NBC Studios in Manhattan.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHow would a strike affect audiences?There will be a gradual halt in the production of many television shows, except for reality and news programs, which would be mostly unaffected.Viewers will notice the fallout first among entertainment talk shows, including “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” If a strike lasts several weeks, “Saturday Night Live” would not be able complete its season. Soap operas, already on viewership life support, would run out of new episodes after about a month.Plenty of high-profile TV series have coming seasons that are already finished. But premieres for fall series like “Abbott Elementary” would be delayed by a monthslong strike, and viewers would begin to notice fewer scripted TV series by the end of the year. Reality and international shows will start to run in heavy rotation.Moviegoers would not experience immediate effects; movie studios work about a year ahead, meaning that almost everything planned for 2023 has already been shot. The risk involves 2024, especially if studios rush to beat a strike by putting films into production with scripts that aren’t quite ready.The offices of the Writers Guild of America West in Los Angeles.Andrew Cullen for The New York TimesWhat are the writers’ complaints?Every three years, the writers’ union negotiates a contract with the major studios that establishes pay minimums and addresses matters such as health care and residuals (a type of royalty), which are paid out based on a maze of formulas.And though there has been a boom in television production in recent years (known within the industry as “Peak TV”), the W.G.A. said that the median weekly pay for a writer-producer had declined 4 percent over the last decade.Because of streaming, the former network norms of 22, 24 or even 26 episodes per season have mostly disappeared. Many series are now eight to 12 episodes long. At the same time, episodes are taking longer to produce, so series writers who are paid per episode often make less while working more. Some showrunners are likewise making less despite working longer hours.“The streaming model has created an environment where there’s been enormous downward pressure on writer income across the board,” David Goodman, a co-chair of the guild negotiating committee, said in an interview.Screenwriters have been hurt by a decline in theatrical releases and the collapse of the DVD market, union leaders said.Between 2012 and 2021, the number of films rated annually by the Motion Picture Association fell by 31 percent. Streaming services picked up some slack, but companies like Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO Max, have been cutting back on film production to reduce costs amid slowing subscriber growth.Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, Calif.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesAre the companies in a position to pay more?They would argue this isn’t the best time for it.Disney said in February that it would cut $5.5 billion in costs and eliminate 7,000 jobs to address streaming losses, an atrophying cable television business and steep corporate debt. Warner Bros. Discovery has already cut thousands of jobs as part of a $4 billion retrenchment. NBCUniversal is also tightening its belt as it contends with cable cord-cutting and a troublesome advertising market.The writers are unmoved by this. Mr. Keyser noted that Netflix is already profitable (to the tune of $4.5 billion last year), and that rival companies have said their streaming services will be profitable in the next year or two. “We don’t get to negotiate again until 2026,” Mr. Keyser said. “We’re not waiting around until they’re profitable.”Who’s doing the negotiating?In a rarity for Hollywood, the chief negotiators are both women. Carol Lombardini, 68, leads the studio effort; she has worked at the producers’ alliance for 41 years. Ellen Stutzman, 40, leads the W.G.A. effort. She was appointed only about a month ago, after David Young, who has served as the ferocious negotiator for writers since 2007, stepped aside, citing an unspecified medical problem.Ms. Stutzman, who has been with the W.G.A. for 17 years, said in an interview that Mr. Young would play no part in these negotiations. She called him “a wonderful mentor.”Are the studios aligned?Absolutely, according to the producers’ alliance. “The A.M.P.T.P. companies approach this negotiation and the ones to follow with the long-term health and stability of the industry as our priority,” the alliance said in a statement, referring to impending contract renewal talks with directors and actors. “We are all partners in charting the future of our business together and fully committed to reaching a mutually beneficial deal.”But differences start to appear when you talk to senior executives on a company-by-company basis. In private conversations, they point out that the group is much less monolithic than in the past. It now includes tech companies like Amazon and Apple, for example, whose primary business is not entertainment.Striking members of the Writers Guild of America passed out leaflets in Rockefeller Center in 2007.Librado Romero/The New York TimesIs the W.G.A. united?For generations, ever since the end of the silent film era, Hollywood writers have complained that studios treat them as second-class citizens — that their artistic contributions are underappreciated (and undercompensated), especially compared with those of actors and directors. This sentiment runs deep among writers and has historically resulted in extraordinary unity.In 2019, when film and TV writers fired their agents in a campaign over what they saw as conflicts of interest, many agency leaders figured that the W.G.A. would eventually fracture. That never happened: After a 22-month standoff, the big agencies effectively gave writers what they wanted.What about collateral damage?Tens of thousands of entertainment workers were idled during the 2007 strike, and the action cost the Los Angeles economy more than $2 billion, according to the Milken Institute. This time around, many of the small businesses that service Hollywood (florists, caterers, chauffeurs, stylists, lumber yard workers) have only started to regain their footing after pandemic shutdowns, increasing the stakes of a strike and potentially leading to community fissures. More

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    Danny and Lucy DeVito Head to Broadway With Roundabout Theater Company’s New Season

    The actors will play a father and daughter in “I Need That,” a comedy written by Theresa Rebeck.Danny DeVito and his daughter, Lucy, will co-star in a new Theresa Rebeck play on Broadway this fall, presented by the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company, which announced its 2023-2024 season on Tuesday.Roundabout said that its Broadway season would include two three-hander plays: “I Need That,” the new Rebeck play, as well as a revival of “Home,” a 1979 play by Samm-Art Williams.“I Need That” is a comedy about a widower, played by DeVito, struggling to let go of clutter after the death of his wife. Lucy DeVito will play the character’s daughter, and Ray Anthony Thomas will play his friend; the production, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, will begin performances in October at the American Airlines Theater. Von Stuelpnagel also directed Rebeck’s last Broadway play, “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” in 2018; that show was also produced by Roundabout.Danny DeVito previously starred on Broadway in “The Price,” another Roundabout production, in 2017.“I had such a great time the last time I was there, and we’re chomping at the bit to do this one,” Danny DeVito said in a joint interview with his daughter.In 2021, when many theaters were still closed, Danny and Lucy DeVito collaborated on an audio play, “I Think It’s Worth Pointing out That I’ve Been Very Serious Throughout This Entire Discussion or, Julia and Dave Are Stuck in a Tree,” by Mallory Jane Weiss, for Playing on Air. That show was directed by Von Stuelpnagel, and led to this new venture: The DeVitos said they’d be open to working with Von Stuelpnagel again, at which point he mentioned their interest to Rebeck, who wrote the new play for them. They workshopped it with a staged reading at the Dorset Theater Festival in Vermont in 2022.“It’s a very humanistic, character-driven, slice-of-life story,” Lucy DeVito said. “The themes speak to loneliness and love, and the hardships you experience with your family while getting older.”“I Need That” will be her Broadway debut.Danny and Lucy DeVito have worked together on a variety of projects: Among them, last year’s “Little Demon,” an FXX animated comedy, as well as “Curmudgeons,” a short comedic film in 2016.“Home,” which Roundabout plans to stage on Broadway next spring, is about a North Carolina farmer who is imprisoned as a draft dodger during Vietnam, and then has a series of adventures in a big city as he tries to put his life back together. The play was first staged Off Broadway by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1979 and then transferred to Broadway in 1980.“The play itself is a freshet of good will, a celebration of the indomitability of man, a call to return to the earth,” the critic Mel Gussow wrote in the Times in 1979. “In all respects — writing, direction and performance — this is one of the happiest theatrical events of the season.”The revival will be directed by Kenny Leon, one of the most prolific directors on the New York stage and a Tony Award winner for directing the 2014 revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.”Roundabout, which only staged one show on Broadway this season (a revival of “1776” that ran for three months), said it hopes to stage three next season; the third has not yet been announced.Roundabout also announced Tuesday plans to stage two plays Off Broadway next season: “The Refuge Plays,” an intergenerational family drama written by Nathan Alan Davis (“Nat Turner in Jerusalem”), and directed by Patricia McGregor (she is the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, and that theater is also associated with the production), next fall, and “Jonah,” a boarding school coming-of-age story written by Rachel Bonds (“The Lonely Few”) and directed by Danya Taymor (“Pass Over”), next spring. And it said it would produce “Covenant,” about a blues musician who may or may not have made a deal with the devil, written by York Walker and directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene and staged in its Off Off Broadway underground black box space in the fall. More

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    The Problem With Celebrity Travel Shows? The Celebrities.

    What used to be meaningfully informative programming, delivered by personable but only tangentially notable hosts, is gradually being swallowed up.In the resplendent green of Costa Rica, a peak reaches toward the clouds. Eugene Levy gazes up at it in awe. “That’s a volcano,” his host explains, adding that it last erupted about 10 years ago. Levy looks unsettled. “I was hoping it would be more dormant,” he says. The understated delivery is classic Levy, but it feels different, less endearing, in this context. The premise of Apple TV+’s “The Reluctant Traveler” is that the celebrity actor hasn’t liked to travel in the past, but is now pushing himself out of his comfort zone with televised trips to places like Finland, Italy and Japan. With that, he joins an increasingly established subgenre: the celebrity travel show. Netflix has “Down to Earth With Zac Efron.” TBS had Conan O’Brien’s “Conan Without Borders.” CNN had “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy,” which was both a celebrity travel show and a celebrity food show — another thriving subgenre, with entries from Selena Gomez, Amy Schumer, Jon Favreau and Paris Hilton.The idea behind these programs is the same as ever: You settle in and watch your host learn about new places. It’s just that, in these shows, it’s the host’s very celebrity that inevitably becomes the star around which everything revolves. Consider Levy and that Costa Rican peak: You’re offered one moment to admire a beautiful scene before the active volcano becomes the setup for celebrity quipping. The shows’ stars can rarely help drawing attention this way, whether it’s with solemn head-nodding or relentless cleverness. O’Brien, traveling in Armenia, is so shameless in his pursuit of laughs that he almost seems to embarrass his Armenian-American assistant. Stanley Tucci, eating cantucci in Florence, has to remark that “anything that ends in ‘tucci,’ I like.” The celebrity travelogue doubles as proof of just how hard it is for performers to subordinate themselves to their surroundings.The point of featuring celebrities seems obvious enough; in a crowded TV market, a familiar host can lure people to watch a new show. The trade-off, of course, is that the format and subject matter — whether travel or food or, say, home renovation — will find itself drifting toward the formal demands of a reality show, sacrificing its capacity to inform to its host’s own shtick or charisma. The things we see must serve the narratives and characters of the stars, providing opportunities to play to or against their images, drawing out their particular moods or charms. A result is a suffocating and often superficial take on how fascinating or delicious everything is. Eventually you come to suspect that each show would feel functionally identical no matter where you sent the celebrity — that Stanley Tucci could tour America’s bowling alleys, or Zac Efron could sample Midwestern diners, or vice versa, without much changing. This is happening across the TV world: What used to be meaningfully informative programming, delivered by personable but only tangentially notable hosts, is gradually being swallowed up by celebrity.I still remember the first time I traveled abroad, and the feeling I had emerging from the Paris-Nord train station to behold one of the world’s most beautiful cities. It made me feel alien and bracingly helpless. I was an outsider. That was the whole point of my being there. That decentered feeling never really went away, neither on that trip nor on later ones. I wouldn’t want it to.Celebrity travel shows tend to evoke something close to the opposite of that feeling. This is not to say that you can’t learn anything from them. It’s just that the celebrity at the center will generally steal the spotlight from the locale itself. Levy, interestingly enough, seems to exhibit some self-awareness about this phenomenon; per his show’s premise, he seems, at times, to progress from fear of travel to an embrace of travel’s helplessness. In southern Utah, he spends time with his guide in the quiet of night, discussing the stars and the spirituality of the desert. It’s a striking contrast to your typical celebrity fare, in that it seems to capture Levy giving himself over to the unfamiliar in a strikingly vulnerable way.But it’s fleeting. The show has Levy spending a lot of time at luxury hotels, where fame affords him deferential treatment. Earlier in the Utah episode, he spends breakfast chatting with a chef (who is making one very elevated pancake) about whether he’s ever cooked for Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Much of the series revolves around this kind of celebrity-centric riffing. The show’s entire premise, after all, revolves around Levy’s own experiences and hang-ups, not the curiosities of a viewer or a would-be traveler. Offered “crocodile schnitzel” at Kruger National Park in South Africa, Levy tells his guide, “I’m going to enjoy watching you eat that,” and quips that he’ll just take a vodka-tonic. In Lisbon, his guide tells him the Portuguese people like to explore the world, and asks if Levy does, too. The actor says that “adventure is my middle name,” and that world exploration is “in my nature,” but he’s then seen confessing his deceit to the camera: “That’s where acting comes in. You know, when you can hide ineptitude on a scale like that, give me an Oscar.” He is traveling as a character in his own travel series, all while ostensibly trying to break free from that character’s limitations and experience new places — which he can never quite do, because the show is ultimately about the character, not the places.Travel stories have often benefited from a guide, from Matsuo Bashō’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” in the 17th century to Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” or Pico Iyer’s “The Lady and the Monk” in the 20th to Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown” in the 21st. (Bourdain became a celebrity, but he had a curiosity and humility, an authenticity in his travels that could make him feel like he wasn’t.) These figures serve as proxies and narrators and cultural synthesizers, both standing in for us and offering us their impressions. When we come to trust them, it’s often precisely because they know how to step out of the way and help us engage with the places they’re exploring. The same goes for any other topic. We know names like “Julia Child” and “Bob Ross” because of how compellingly those people served their subjects, not because of their pre-existing star power. And, I suppose, because nobody at the time thought to develop “Learning to Paint With Mr. T.”I’m inclined to say the ideal travel show would merely be a video montage with someone reading a guidebook over it. The less narrative basis, the better. “Rick Steves’ Europe” and “Big City, Little Budget,” with Oneika Raymond, may be two series that come closest to that ideal, in that they’re basically video guidebooks. The hosts subordinate themselves to the places they visit. They aim to show people why to travel, and what it’s like — not to entertain them along the way.Not so today. In one episode of “The Reluctant Traveler,” Levy visits the Maldives, where he meets a local who seems eager to dispense some wisdom. “You really need to connect — remove your shoes, feel the sand,” he tells Levy, as the camera shows his bare feet and Levy’s footwear. You get the distinct feeling he’s saying this, in part, because it’s what Levy wants to hear. Still: Point taken. To center the place, you must decenter yourself. In travel, as in all things, fame is a distraction.Source photograph (Levy): Maarten De Boer/Contour by Getty Images.Nicholas Cannariato is a writer living in Chicago. He last wrote about common birds for the magazine. More

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    Matthew Macfadyen Has Mixed Feelings About the End of ‘Succession’

    Could there be a more excruciatingly awkward TV character than Tom Wambsgans in “Succession”? Played with understated comic glee by the British actor Matthew Macfadyen, Tom manages to simultaneously exist on all points of the show’s power spectrum: bullied, bullying and wafting helplessly in between.Over most of three seasons, Tom has stayed one and a half steps behind the machinations at Waystar Royco, the company run by his imperious father-in-law, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), while being treated with casual contempt by his wife, Shiv (Sarah Snook).So it came as a shock when Tom pulled himself together at the end of Season 3 to orchestrate a stunning power play, teaming with Logan against Shiv and two of her brothers in an epic battle over Waystar’s future.Not that this guarantees Tom will end up on top in the fourth and final season of “Succession,” which begins Sunday on HBO. (Whatever “on top” really means when the pole is as greasy and compromised as this one.)“Tom may be in Logan’s camp, but it’s not an easy camp to be in,” Macfadyen said on a February afternoon, sipping a bitters and soda in Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel. “He still doesn’t feel particularly secure, and he’s still worrying about his relationship with Shiv. And everyone else is still maneuvering and jockeying and competing.”If Macfadyen is operatically ill at ease in “Succession,” in reality he is the opposite: relaxed, easygoing and affable, his voice deep and self-assured, with none of his character’s nervous tics or frantic efforts to read his fate in others’ eyes. While Tom is beset by inner demons and crippling insecurity, Macfadyen comes across as remarkably well adjusted, someone happy to do his job and not get too wound up about it. He uses the word “lovely” a lot.Long a familiar face to British viewers, Macfadyen had been mostly under the radar on this side of the Atlantic before “Succession.” If Americans knew him at all, it was likely in his guise as a different Tom — Tom Quinn, an arrogant yet vulnerable spy in the first two seasons of the British series “Spooks” (known in the U.S. as “MI-5”), starting in 2002. Or they might have seen him playing a brooding, tortured Mr. Darcy in Joe Wright’s “Pride and Prejudice” (2005), or a Victorian detective in the BBC series “Ripper Street.”Macfadyen and Nicholas Braun, who plays Cousin Greg, in the new season of “Succession.” The actors have teamed in some of the show’s funniest scenes.Macall B. Polay/HBOIn “Stonehouse,” from earlier this year, Macfadyen teamed with his wife, the British actor Keeley Hawes. “It was fun to get a chance to see Keeley at work,” he said. BritBoxIt was a different role that won over Jesse Armstrong, the “Succession” creator: Macfadyen’s turn as the drunkenly bumptious Sir Felix Carbury in “The Way We Live Now” (2001), a British mini-series based on the Trollope novel.“He’s well known in the U.K. as being able to play all sorts of parts, though most people wouldn’t necessarily know him as a comic actor,” Armstrong said.While Tom began “Succession” largely on the fringes, “I knew this role would be significant and important,” Armstrong said. As the series went on, the writers played to Macfadyen’s antic comic skills and ability to show Tom’s poignant vulnerability in quieter moments.“In a show that’s about power and its manifestations, Matthew is very good at playing a character who is the crux of a number of different power relationships,” Armstrong said. “He’s good at showing Tom’s willingness to shape and adjust his personality to fit into the power structure.” (As Macfadyen explained recently on “The Tonight Show,” one way he does this is by raising and lowering the pitch of Tom’s voice depending on who else is in the scene.)Macfadyen, 48, was born in England but raised abroad, including for several years in Jakarta, Indonesia, because of his father’s job in the oil business. He went to boarding school back home, skipped college and enrolled instead at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. After graduation, he toured internationally in the Cheek by Jowl theater ensemble, performing in plays like “The Duchess of Malfi” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”He had a breakthrough when he was cast as Hareton Earnshaw in the 1998 British TV adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” followed quickly by a two-part BBC film, “Warriors,” in which he played a U.N. peacekeeper in Bosnia. He has worked steadily since. “You just get a momentum,” he said.Macfadyen has a tendency, common to English actors, to downplay his own work, as if it all flows effortlessly from him. He also has a predilection for supporting roles.“I feel sometimes you can get in a rut when you play leading men,” he said. “It’s much more fun being the baddie or the clown.”Tom has stood out from the start of “Succession,” but Macfadyen has never felt compelled to demand more airtime. “I don’t feel like it’s my character,” he said. “It’s Jesse’s, and I’m the conduit for it.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“Succession” is full of big names and memorable characters, including the three Roy boys: Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Connor (Alan Ruck), each appalling and damaged in his own special way. But Tom Wambsgans — mercurial yet sensitive, diabolical yet almost constantly hapless — stood out from the beginning.There is the matter of his strange last name, its awkward B bristling aggressively in a string of consonants, defying casual pronunciation. There is his status as a Roy punching bag, a man whose wife announced on their wedding night that she wanted an open marriage and whose father-in-law dangles power before him but uses him as a scapegoat and bagman. There is his loopy relationship with Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), a sadomasochistic romp that Armstrong describes as a “homoerotic power play.”While Tom is no dummy, his awkwardness is so easy to mistake for stupidity that sometimes even Macfadyen does it. “Jesse will remind Nick and me, ‘He’s running a billion-dollar wing of this company; he’s not a total moron,’” he said.Over four seasons of filming in New York City, the “Succession” cast became particularly close, and it was not unusual to see them dining around town in various configurations in what Macfadyen called “the ‘Succession’ supper club.” He often had dinner with Snook, his fictional wife, and other cast members.“I don’t know how he’s managed to make such an obsequious and bullying character likable, but he has,” Snook said. “He’s one of those actors who’s got such love and empathy and compassion and curiosity for the world that he can really fashion a character into anything he wants.”Macfadyen seems to be that rare thing: an actor without a huge ego. (Or perhaps he is such a good actor that he can hide his egotism.) Among other things, he said, he has never felt compelled to demand more airtime or a better story arc for Tom.“I’ve seen actors get very proprietorial about their ‘journey,’” he said. “But I don’t feel like it’s my character — it’s Jesse’s, and I’m the conduit for it.”Also, he added, “You don’t want to get attached to a possible story line, because they may change their minds.”Braun said that Macfadyen has a genuine selflessness, a helpful quality in a series in which numerous actors are often in a single scene. He also praised Macfadyen’s uncanny ability to stay in the moment while performing, and to do so with an un-showy absence of vanity.“He doesn’t expend a lot of extra energy before a scene,” Braun said. “He’s not, like, ruminating or taking a lot of private time or ‘staying in the energy’ of Tom.”(In this way, Macfadyen would seem to be the opposite of his co-star Strong, whose intensity and extreme immersion into his characters have been extensively chronicled in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Macfadyen was loath to discuss this topic. “I think enough has been said about that,” he said.)Though “Succession” is carefully scripted, the actors are encouraged to improvise and play around with alternative dialogue. Braun and Macfadyen, who have shared some of the show’s funniest scenes, were famous on set for cracking each other up. “The guy is abusive in a way that isn’t super on the nose,” Braun said, of Tom.“They evidently just find each other amusing,” Armstrong said dryly.Macfadyen is married to the British actor Keeley Hawes, whom he met when both played spies in “MI-5.” They had a highly public affair — she had a husband and a baby at the time — but married in 2004, after her divorce, and had two more children together. Macfadyen said that everyone has become great friends and co-parents. “It was a bit bumpy at the time, but it’s fine now,” he said.“It was a really lovely bunch of actors,” Macfadyen said about his “Succession” colleagues. “It’s a weird thing, the grief when you finish a job.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesMacfadyen missed his family when he was off shooting “Succession,” and often flew home to England when he had a break in filming. But he sounded wistful about the end of the show.“It was a really lovely bunch of actors,” he said. “It’s a weird thing, the grief when you finish a job. It’s sort of awful and heartbreaking but at the same time, there’s a slight relief — a complicated mélange of feelings.”Macfadyen has worked steadily on other things between seasons. In the British series “Stonehouse,” which debuted in January, he starred as the real-life 1970s Conservative politician John Stonehouse. It was a juicy role: Stonehouse spied (badly) for Czechoslovakia, got involved in dodgy business schemes, cheated on his wife, faked his own death and turned up under a false name in Australia.Mrs. Stonehouse was played by Hawes, whose character soon gleans that her husband is not all that he seems. “It was fun to get a chance to see Keeley at work,” Macfadyen said, “especially her withering looks.”Macfadyen’s next project, with Nicole Kidman, is “Holland, Michigan,” an Amazon thriller about the secrets that lurk in a small town. He seems deeply unfussed about what comes next. Unlike Tom Wambsgans, Macfadyen is very much content with his place in the world.“The whole art of being an actor is to imagine what it’s like to be someone else with sympathy and empathy, to not make it about you,” he said. “The job is great. I like the old-fashioned thing of putting on a costume and sounding different and doing things you would never dream of doing in real life.” More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Celebrates ‘the Calm Before the Stormy’

    Kimmel joked that indictments were “in the air” after former President Donald Trump said he expected to be arrested on Tuesday.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.Save the DateFormer President Donald Trump published a Truth Social post on Saturday saying that he expected to be arrested on Tuesday and requested supporters to “protest, take our nation back.”During his Monday night monologue, Jimmy Kimmel joked that indictments were “in the air.”“It’s really magical,” he said. “It’s the calm before the Stormy.”“You know what, we’ve been saying for years that one of these days, we’re going to wake up, and Trump will have been arrested for one of these many crimes? Well, that day could be tomorrow.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You’ve got to give it to him. It’s not often that everyone sends out a save-the-date for their own arrest.” — JIMMY FALLON“But you never know with him. Either he’s about to actually be arrested or he’s releasing another round of digital trading cards for us to buy. We don’t know for sure.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The truth is, there’s no good reason for Trump to be in any of this trouble. If Casa-no-brain had just paid Stormy Daniels the $130,000 himself out of his Pizza Hut money or whatever, he wouldn’t be in this situation. He wouldn’t have an issue in New York. So many of his legal problems are based on him being an idiot. If President Karen hadn’t picked up the phone and called around Georgia, asking to speak to its manager to find 11,000 votes, he wouldn’t have an issue in Georgia. If he just tweeted the words ‘Calm down, go home’ four hours earlier like everyone, including his daughter, told him to, he wouldn’t have an issue on Jan. 6. And if the great white hope chest hadn’t boxed up his love letters from the Saudis and Kim Jong-un — if he hadn’t squirreled them out of the White House and into the rec room at Golf-a-logo — he wouldn’t have an issue with the F.B.I. In every case, the reason he’s in trouble is because he is the dumbest criminal in the world. He brought this all on himself. He’s Al Ca-BoneHead, is what he is.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Another Failed Business Venture Edition)“Police are going to be like, ‘You have the right to remain silent — now, but also in general. Just think about it. Just something to think about.’” — JIMMY FALLON“You know, if they want Trump’s fingerprints, they could have just looked at the Cheetos dust on his Diet Coke cans.” — JIMMY FALLON“And I’ve got to say, who would have ever thought that Donald Trump would be brought down by a porn star? All of us, right? It was pretty — pretty predictable.” — AL FRANKEN, guest host of “The Daily Show”“But, yeah, Donald Trump paid Stormy Daniels to keep this story quiet, and here we are, still talking about it seven years later, so that would be another failed Trump business venture.” — AL FRANKEN“You know it’s bad when a former president announces that he’s going to be arrested and the general response is, ‘For which crime?’” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingAl Franken invited Senator Lindsey Graham to be his first interview as guest host of “The Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe comedian and television host Nicole Byer will appear on Tuesday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutTaylor Swift kicked off her Eras Tour in Glendale, Ariz.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesTaylor Swift opened her Eras Tour on Friday with a three-hour show traversing her 10-album career. More

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    ‘Perry Mason’ Season 2, Episode 3 Recap: ‘King Kong’ Ding-Dong

    Perry tries to be a better dad. Della tries a Turkish cigarette. Paul runs an interesting and inconvenient ballistics experiment.Season 2, Episode 3: ‘Chapter Eleven’Della Street has Perry Mason’s number. She has just learned of the suicide of their former client Emily Dodson, by way of a stack of desperate postcards and letters Perry that dumps on Della after keeping them secret for months. She realizes that this is the reason they switched to civil cases from criminal law — a major career shift, the rationale for which she ought to have been told.It’s the reason she’s had to “walk on eggshells” around his mercurial moods. It’s part and parcel of his overall pattern of evasive, self-isolating behavior. And worst of all, it’s behavior even he doesn’t fully understand.“Why didn’t you tell me?” Della asks Perry when she learns about Emily at long last. His reply seems to baffle even himself: “I don’t know,” he stammers, before repeating himself for emphasis. “I don’t.” Seeming to extrude the words rather than speak them, Matthew Rhys expertly conveys Perry’s confusion about his own motivations. Why didn’t he lean on his strong, capable colleague for support as Emily’s pleas started piling up? Why didn’t he come clean about the suicide?For that matter, as Della pointedly inquires, why didn’t he do anything to stop it before it happened? “When are you ever not alone in anything?” she asks, exasperated with his need to bear every burden in silence.After another hour spent in Perry’s company, I get the sense that injustice and tragedy are, to him, almost like a physical malady from which he suffers. There are times when he can simply take no more and springs into action, as he did with Emily’s case in the first place, and as he is doing with the Gallardo brothers now. It’s this almost impulsive zeal that leads him to stand up against the oil tycoon Lydell McCutcheon, whose goons strong-arm Perry into a meeting that devolves into threats. (Elsewhere in the episode, McCutcheon maims a man who comes looking to collect on a debt owed him by his dead son, Brooks, so we know he is willing to make good on those threats.)But Perry is also capable of ignoring this kind of pain until it’s too late, then wallowing in it, even exacerbating it. Yes, he is the kind of guy who can deftly, gently shame the new case’s slightly pretentious presiding judge (Tom Amandes) into having the Gallardos placed in protective custody after they report finding broken glass in their jailhouse chow. But he is also the kind of guy who’ll deliberately drive his motorcycle at unsafe speeds rather than admit to Della that he may have contributed to his former client’s sense of suicidal isolation and despair.Perhaps the sad tale of his service in the Great War — he was discharged after mercy-killing his own wounded men in the trenches — says everything you need to know about Perry. He’ll fly in the face of authority and society at large to do what he feels is right, but as that judge points out to him, he almost never does so in a way that will lead to a happy ending for anyone.This dynamic plays out in miniature when he allows his son, Teddy (Jack Eyman), who is staying with him overnight while Perry’s ex works overtime, to skip out on homework in order to catch “King Kong” at the movie theater. It’s a well-intentioned gesture, but all Teddy gets out of it is an extra day of makeup work and nightmares about dinosaurs.That said, Perry’s poor parenting gives him another opportunity to flirt gingerly with Teddy’s teacher, the fetching Miss Ames. It’s a more straightforward bit of banter than what goes down between Perry and Camilla Nygaard, Lydell McCutcheon’s rival in the oil biz. When Perry and Della approach her for information about the McCutcheons, she chats with them in a swimsuit while performing a workout that wouldn’t pass the Hays Code.Is she coming on to Perry, about whose core strength she saucily inquires? To Della, whom she invites to return to the estate? Is it all an intimidation tactic? Is it simply how she rolls? For now, her motives are a mystery — although she bristles when Perry drops the name of a medical facility called San Haven and says, inscrutably, that “the Lawson girl’s family has been through quite enough.” (See below for the apparent answer to this particular riddle.)Some other questions turn out to be a bit easier to answer. Perry and Della’s investigator Paul travels to the Hooverville where the Gallardo brothers lived, where he quickly and cleverly acquires the gun used in the Brooks McCutcheon murder and traces it to the brothers. As he tells the gun dealer, who nearly kills him before Paul backs him off, this was not the answer he wanted to find.Perry, meanwhile, traces the phone number we saw that mysterious figure place in Brooks’s wallet to a sanitarium housing a catatonic young woman named Noreen Lawson (Danielle Gross). Perry’s conversations with both Camilla and Lydell leave the strong impression that Brooks was responsible for the woman’s diminished state of cognition. This means, contrary to initial appearances, that the mystery man must have been out to make Brooks look worse, not better, when he planted that number in the police evidence locker. What’s his game? Another open question.But not all of the goons involved in the McCutcheon murder are quite so inscrutable. The episode begins with a surprisingly sympathetic look at the off-duty life of the crooked Detective Holcomb. When he isn’t busy doing the criminal bidding of Los Angeles’s rich and powerful, he comes home to a loving wife and children whom he’s anxious to remove from a city he can no longer stomach.Holcomb comes across here like one of those ancillary “Sopranos” characters who morph from “third goomba from the left” to late-season main character, however briefly — specifically Eugene Pontecorvo (Robert Funaro), the made guy who inherited a fortune and wanted to ditch New Jersey for the sunny climes of Florida. Sadly for Holcomb, I fear there are few more dangerous things to be on prestige television than a goon with dreams of bettering himself.From the case files:Last week, reporters told Perry that the prosecution had found one of Rafael Gallardo’s fingerprints on Brooks McCutcheon’s car. This week, Rafael swears this is impossible. It’s a discrepancy worth keeping an eye on, especially now that it seems the brothers were in possession of the murder weapon. It’s also worth noting that when we spend time with them alone, neither brother shows the slightest sign of having actually committed the crime.Perry’s conversations with Miss Ames and Camilla Nygaard had some spark to them, but Della’s late-night rendezvous with her new love interest, the screenwriter Anita St. Pierre, over Chinese food and Turkish cigarettes is a four-alarm fire by comparison.At least twice, the director Jessica Lowrey finds poetry in afternoon sunlight: first as beams pass through the window to be filtered through an ornate railing as Perry investigates the sanitarium, then through the trees in the little grove where Paul travels to conduct his amateur ballistics test. I’ve gone on and on about how the lively characters and cast make this show; it’s often just plain lovely to look at, too.For that matter, I adore the show’s ever-inventive end-title sequences. (Since each episode kicks off with just a title card bearing the show’s name, it falls to the closing credits to do the cool-looking stuff most shows these days like to start with.) This week, we’ve got a series of rats standing against a black background getting shot at, just like the critters the kids in the Gallardos’ Hooverville attempt to hunt and eat. It’s very “closing shot of ‘The Departed.’”Paul’s pal Morris (Jon Chaffin) listens to a rabidly xenophobic radio broadcaster in the Father Coughlin vein, who rails about the Gallardos and demands mass deportations in response to the McCutcheon murder. Mo is out of work, thanks largely to the incarceration of the relatively benevolent loan shark whom Paul inadvertently helped put away; broke, miserable people desperate for a scapegoat have always been a key demographic for demagogues of this sort.“At some point, Mr. Mason, you must find all of your righteousness just a bit exhausting.” I think the judge who tells Perry this is right. Find me a single shot in this show where Mason looks well-rested, and I’ll bankroll your baseball team. More

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    ‘Drinking in America’ Review: Men in a Cracked Mirror

    After 15 years away from the stage, Andre Royo of ‘The Wire’ goes all in with an evening of Eric Bogosian monologues at the Minetta Lane Theater.Andre Royo practically glows with pleasure as he walks onstage at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. That’s the first surprise at “Drinking in America,” an evening of Eric Bogosian monologues peopled with misfits, screwups and creeps.We’re not expecting Royo’s shy smile, either, or what seems like genuinely warm feeling when he opens by telling the audience how good it is to be home, meaning both back in New York and back onstage. It has been 15 long years since this actor, a Bronx native best known for portraying the heroin addict Bubbles on the HBO series “The Wire,” has done a play.Yet it takes him just a couple of minutes of patter to forge an easy, sure connection with the crowd. And once he slips into the monologues, you can sense how attuned he is to our presence, even while he stays firmly in character. Royo understands deeply the symbiosis of theater, and it is beautiful to watch him tap into it.“Drinking in America” had its premiere in 1986, when Bogosian’s name was synonymous with provocatively hip, hetero-masculine theater. These dozen monologues are a cracked mirror held up to American men of that wealth-obsessed era, variously pursuing, embracing and rejecting the American dream. If it’s not a flattering look for them — several of Bogosian’s guys are outright Neanderthals with women — it still makes good theater, because of Bogosian’s observational acuity, and because of the fireworks that ensue when an actor is all in.Royo is all in, from the first monologue, “Journal,” a mini-comedy about the jejune reflections of a young guy on an acid trip, to the last, “Fried-Egg Deal,” about an alcoholic panhandler whose flattery of a prosperous passer-by turns to truth-telling.“If I wasn’t where I was, you couldn’t be where you was,” the panhandler says. “’Cause, you know, ’cause you can’t have a top without a bottom.”The pièce de résistance, though, is “Our Gang,” a wild ride of a comic tale about an out-of-control, drug-fueled night that spirals into rampant violence and destruction. Like characters in plays by Stephen Adly Guirgis and Mark O’Rowe, both of whom owe something to Bogosian, Royo’s narrator views it all through the lens of hilarity, and regales us accordingly.Directed by Mark Armstrong, this handsomely designed revival leans into the ’80s-ness of the script, which is peppered with boldface names of that decade. (The set is by Kristen Robinson, costumes by Sarita Fellows, lighting by Jeff Croiter, sound by John Gromada.) But Bogosian has made a few subtle changes for this Audible Theater production.In “Wired,” Royo plays a Hollywood wheeler-dealer, the kind of guy who snorts a line of cocaine and downs a generous shot of bourbon to get going in the morning. On the phone with someone who wants a big star for a project, he explains that an unnamed actor is out of the running because he has a broken hand.“He couldn’t punch out Ricky Schroder today,” the wheeler-dealer says, referring to the child star of the ’80s sitcom “Silver Spoons,” who in more recent years has made headlines as an anti-vaxxer.Schroder wasn’t the original celebrity named in that bit of dialogue, but the tweak is perfect — for practicality and snark.Other monologues are chilling. In “The Law,” a preacher rails against “satanic abortion clinics” and cultural enemies who have been brought down by gunfire and “only understand the discipline of the bullet.” In “Godhead,” a heroin addict insists he doesn’t want any part of the American dream, merely his fix.“Just let me have my taste,” he says. “Have my peace.”Throughout, Royo’s performance crackles with liveness — the kind of lightning in a bottle that Audible intends to capture on audio for wide release. You could wait for the recording. Far better, you could get yourself to the Minetta Lane and experience this show in the moment, in all of its dimensions.Drinking in AmericaThrough April 8 at Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; drinkinginamericaplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More