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    Review: In ‘The Best We Could,’ the Players Follow Directions

    The playwright Emily Feldman structures this work like a personal GPS that plots the course of a family.A bare stage is like a blank canvas; it’s all potential until the artists begin to shape their work. Life can follow a similar logic, in that every move is a foreclosure of possibility, narrowing both the focus and the way forward.Ella (Aya Cash), the drifting Millennial daughter in “The Best We Could (a family tragedy),” which opened at New York City Center on Wednesday, has cycled in and out of enough careers (modern dance, a museum gift shop) that she’s written a children’s book about giving up on your dreams. (She also teaches chair yoga.)We learn all this from a narrator called Maps (Maureen Sebastian), who welcomes the audience to the Manhattan Theater Club production, introduces each character in bitingly specific detail and dictates plot and dialogue before it happens.It’s an apt mode of giving directions, as the play’s nominal throughline is a cross-country road trip that Ella takes with her father, Lou (Frank Wood), to pick up a rescue dog. At the time of their drive, Ella has just broken up with her girlfriend, while Lou, who is nearing retirement age, is angling for a research job. On the way, they visit Lou’s closest friend and former colleague Marc (Brian D. Coats), and Lou appeals to him for help in landing the gig. His wife, Peg (Constance Shulman), chimes in through phone calls to Ella and Lou and appears in revelatory flashbacks.The actors are impeccably cast and deliver unaffected and subtly astonishing performances. Their characters form a kind of Ur-family, their dynamics both convincingly particular and broadly representative of relationships connecting husbands, wives and generations.The playwright Emily Feldman achieves a captivating depth of field beyond her characters’ surface actions, and even their mordant, often bleak powers of observation. (Tragedy seems like a misnomer through most of the show’s 90 minutes, which are shot through with easy but deceptively dark humor.) Cosmic questions that lurk beneath everyday routines seem to creep in from the periphery of the director Daniel Aukin’s minimal but imaginative staging — the loudest being, is this really all there is to life?There is more to Feldman’s layered investigation of consumer capitalism, kinship and gendered power imbalances, which she brings to light throughout “The Best We Could” in the manner of family secrets: There’s no escaping the ones you love, or the truth. Though it also may be no surprise to learn that like the sort of men he represents, Lou is in a crisis of his own making.For Ella, aimlessness itself is a kind of privilege. As her father points out, there’s a reason she was able to take ballet lessons, buy whatever she wanted from the mall and drive her own car. If there’s an element of myopia to Feldman’s otherwise searingly insightful play, it’s the cultural specificity of someone with the luxury of blowing in the breeze, trying out this or that, with a safety net to catch them when they fall.The Best We Could (a family tragedy)Through March 26 at the New York City Center, Stage I; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour and 30 minutes. More

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    The New Black Canon: Books, Plays and Poems That Everyone Should Know

    A guide to some of the undervalued 20th-century works that testify to the richness of the Black American literary archive.Fifty years ago, when college courses in Black American literature were rare; when Zora Neale Hurston’s novels were out of print and Toni Morrison was a book editor with one novel to her name, the job of shaping a Black canon was clear: Rediscover, anthologize, define the terms of a tradition. “The act of recovery means something different now,” says Kenton Rambsy, an associate professor of English and digital humanities at the University of Texas at Arlington, whose research uses data analytics to tell new stories about the Black literary past. Sometimes recovery demands peering into the shadows cast by towering canonical figures. “It might mean finding that writer who is just being overlooked because of the canonicity of, say, Toni Morrison,” Rambsy says. Sometimes it’s even simpler than that. “We don’t have to go deep into archives to find undervalued Black authors,” says the poet and U.C.L.A. English professor Harryette Mullen. In a recent essay, I look to such undervalued authors and works as the impetus for shaping a new Black canon.What follows is a list of 20 books — works of fiction, drama and poetry, presented chronologically by category — that testify to the richness of the Black American literary archive. You’ll encounter many of these works as recent reissues; others remain difficult to find or are out of print entirely. All were published last century. Their writers are genre fiction authors and experimentalists, nature poets and satirists, pulp fiction practitioners and trans-nationalists, writers of the weird, the quirky, the unsettled and unsettling. Together, they help to tell a story of Black American literature that reflects the infinite number of ways of being Black in America — and of being in the world.FictionPauline E. Hopkins, “Of One Blood” (1902-3)In Telassar, a thriving city hidden below the Nubian Desert, Hopkins’s protagonist, the biracial Harvard Medical student Reuel Briggs, encounters an advanced civilization with “specimens of the highest attainments the world knew in ancient days.” This sprawling work of speculative fiction resists paraphrase, but what’s important is that it helped spawn a vast contemporary tradition: “I like to say [this book] was ‘Black Panther’ before ‘Black Panther’, ” says Eve Dunbar, a professor of English at Vassar College. “It’s got something for everyone: Black sci-fi, a passing narrative, a back-to-Africa plot, and a plantation ghost story.” Hopkins published “Of One Blood” in serialized form in the pages of the Boston-based Colored American Magazine, which she edited. Embedded in her novel’s title is Hopkins’s rejection of the pseudoscientific conflation of race with blood, a myth used to buttress white supremacy and racial division.Chester Himes, “Lonely Crusade” (1947)A first edition cover of Chester Himes’s 1947 novel, “Lonely Crusade.”A 1946 portrait of Himes by Carl Van Vechten.Carl Van Vechten © Van Vechten Trust, Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale UniversityHimes’s revival in recent years has come on the strength of his noir crime fiction. Starting with 1957’s “A Rage in Harlem,” he wrote eight books that follow detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones through the New York underworld of the 1950s and ’60s. Himes knew something of crime and punishment himself, having served nearly eight years in prison for armed robbery. His body of work, though, defies tidy categorization. After emigrating to France in the mid-50s (he lived in Europe until his death in 1984), Himes wrote perceptively about the Black expatriate experience. He also wrote about Black-white labor movements, same-sex relationships, interracial marriage and racism. “Few African American writers had his sure-handed ability to depict the nitty-gritty of Black life,” Himes’s biographer Lawrence P. Jackson says. Jackson points to “Lonely Crusade” as “his classic text.” For evidence, he cites a passage in which Himes’s protagonist Lee Gordon listens to his father, not knowing it will be for the last time: “You’re just as good as any white person. Don’t let nobody tell you no different. Now all you got to do is prove it.” Himes takes readers into Lee’s mind as he ponders how his father intended those words — “whether sincerely or satirically Lee Gordon never learned.”Fran Ross, “Oreo” (1974)Ross’s only novel was lightly reviewed and largely overlooked. “Perhaps a book like ‘Oreo’ — though I know few — gets ignored or quite purposefully sidelined because it defies the reader, the reviewer, the cultural critic, the scholar and just about anyone else who dares position it,” the novelist Michelle Latiolais recently wrote. “Oreo” is satire and metafiction, a picaresque and a bildungsroman. (Ross herself described it as “cockeyed and nutty.”) The narrative action, such as it is, concerns a young biracial Black and Jewish protagonist’s search for her father. Most remarkable, though, is the novel’s mode of address. In 2015, the novelist Danzy Senna described the book as “a strange, uncanny dream about a future that was really the past.” As the literary critic Scott Saul points out, though, the novel is also very much of its time. “Oreo,” he writes, “is a queer novel, written by a gay woman who, while she traveled in gay circles and revered queer writers like James Baldwin and Djuna Barnes, opted not to disclose that side of her identity when she made her literary debut.”Alison Mills Newman, “Francisco” (1974)Alison Mills Newman began her creative life as an actor. Her credits include a recurring role on the late-’60s NBC sitcom “Julia,” starring Diahann Carroll, a groundbreaking series that portrayed everyday Black life during a time of national tumult. Soon thereafter, in her early 20s, Mills Newman wrote her first novel, “Francisco,” which chronicles a young Black woman’s love affair with an independent filmmaker. In her foreword to a 2023 reissue (the book, long out of print, was originally published in 1974 by R. C. & J., an independent press founded by the writers Ishmael Reed, Steve Cannon and Joe Johnson), the literary scholar Saidiya Hartman describes it as being in the style of a Künstlerroman: “a portrait of the artist as a young black woman trying to find a way back to herself.” The novel blends vernacular riffs with cameos from Reed and Muhammad Ali, Pharoah Sanders and Angela Davis, Melvin Van Peebles and Amiri Baraka. Writing of “Francisco,” the novelist William Demby observed that it’s “the song one would expect Love to be singing these troubled days of the 1970s — a song you cannot have heard before, off-key and haunting, disturbing even in its unfamiliarity.”James Alan McPherson, “Elbow Room” (1977)“There never was a nationwide coalition that looked unwaveringly at Black storytelling,” the cultural historian Wil Haygood tells me. Haygood — who’s written biographies of Sammy Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson and Thurgood Marshall — understands the responsibility of telling Black American stories on the page and onscreen, not only in the United States, but around the globe. “You have a world market from Japan to Australia to France that has access to streaming services and wants to see Black stories,” Haygood says. That storytelling necessarily involves engaging history-shaping social and political movements: the civil rights struggle, the Black Power era, the recent uprisings for racial justice. But Haygood is also drawn to quieter, though no less radical stories, found in the fiction of the Black quotidian. He particularly likes this collection of restrained, elegant stories that find high drama among ordinary people. You should read McPherson’s stories, Haygood says, “because the Black characters do things that the outside world doesn’t think that they’d ordinarily be doing, like listening to and falling in love with country music.”William Demby, “Love Story Black” (1978)“By some unfortunate miscarriage of advertisement,” writes the scholar Nathan A. Scott Jr. in his foreword to the 1991 reissue of Demby’s second novel, “The Catacombs” (1965), “the fiction of William Demby over more than a generation has remained little known and is not today generally accorded the prominence in the canon of Afro-American literature that it deserves.” More than thirty years after Scott wrote those words and nearly ten years after Demby’s death at 90, the canon may finally be catching up to Demby. An international conference in 2018 at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and a recent issue of the literary journal African American Review, both dedicated to his work, provide evidence. His third novel, “Love Story Black,” is at once a satire of the Black Arts Movement and a departure from the narrow dictates of social realist Black protest fiction in favor of a vision that allows for the uncanny, the humorous and the absurd. Asked to describe Demby, the writer Ishmael Reed, his near contemporary and a professor at California College of the Arts, put it plainly: “One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.”J. California Cooper, “The Wake of the Wind” (1998)Cooper’s dedication to “Wake,” her saga of slavery and freedom, says it plain: “I WILL NEVER BE ASHAMED OF MY ANCESTORS. IF YOU ARE … YOU ARE A FOOL.” In scope (it begins, “Once upon a certain year, 1764 or so, 200 years ago”), and in story (the book opens in Texas with two enslaved people falling in love, ignorant of the fact that the Civil War has brought slavery to an end), “Wake” is the perfect book to celebrate Juneteenth finally becoming a federal holiday. Though some critics have called Cooper preachy, many readers find her inspiring and profound. “Cooper always writes about love. This [book] is steeped in the power of family love, one of the things that no one could ever take away from Black folks,” the novelist and screenwriter Attica Locke says.DramaJean Toomer, “Balo” (1922)A circa 1925 portrait of Jean Toomer by Winold Reiss.National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian InstitutionThis year marks the 100th anniversary of “Cane” (1923), Toomer’s generically mutable masterpiece of fiction, poetry and drama. His one-act play “Balo,” written the previous year and staged by the Howard University Repertory Company during its 1923-24 season, is no masterpiece. However, its imperfections (most notably its tortured dialect) show a young writer endeavoring to capture his experience of unfamiliar places and voices. Both works are set in Georgia, where Toomer, who was raised in Washington, D.C., spent several weeks during the fall of 1921, on a trip to visit the birthplace of his estranged father. The play follows a day in the life of a Black sharecropper and his family, living amid the ruins of an old plantation, alongside a poor white family who reside in a decaying slave mansion. Whereas “Cane” often bends toward tragedy, “Balo” chooses reverie: “AUTUMN DAWN,” the opening stage directions read. “Any week day. Outside, it is damp and dewy, and the fog, resting upon the tops of pine trees, looks like fantastic cotton bolls about to be picked by the early morning fingers of the sun.”Eulalie Spence, “The Starter” (1923)Déja Denise Green and SJ Hannah in a scene from Eulalie Spence’s “The Starter” (1923), one of three plays in “She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind,” at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York City through March 12.Kat duPont VecchioForgoing propagandistic “problem plays,” Spence modeled a style of politically and humanly engaged Black theater that paved the way for Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry and their contemporaries. After emigrating as a child from the Caribbean island of Nevis to New York in 1902, Spence absorbed the speech patterns of her adopted community and gave them expression in plays written in one act, to meet the requirements of the contests to which she often submitted her work. In “The Starter,” Spence stages a comic tale of courtship written in an eye dialect that calls out for gifted actors to make stilted symbols into natural speech: “Y’know, kid, I bin thinkin’ — Say, why don’t we get married? Huh?” asks T. J. of his beloved, Georgia. “Ah dunno, ’cept yuh never mentioned it befo’, ” Georgia replies. To appreciate these lines, one must hear them performed onstage. Fortunately, “She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind,” a production of three of Spence’s plays (including “The Starter”), is running through March 12 at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York. The director, Timothy Johnson, says he enjoys how “in this one-act form she’s able to give you a whole life. … There’s such vibrant specificity about these characters that makes ordinary people extraordinary.”Lorraine Hansberry, “Toussaint” (1961)Above: Lorraine Hansberry in a 1961 clip from the series “Playwright at Work” discussing her play-in-progress, “Toussaint.”“A Raisin in the Sun,” which premiered on Broadway in 1959, is a work of such canonical consensus that it risks subsuming its creator. It marked the commercial and critical high point of a career cut short by illness. In her literary afterlife, Hansberry “becomes boxed into ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ in a way, which is both to her benefit and to her detriment,” explains Soyica Diggs Colbert, author of the 2021 Hansberry biography “Radical Vision.” “Raisin” remains an indispensable work; reading beyond it, however, one discovers the politically radical, formally experimental writer that Hansberry was becoming. In “Toussaint,” a completed 1961 scene from her play in progress about the Haitian general and freedom fighter Toussaint L’Ouverture, Hansberry claims her identity as, in Colbert’s words, a “freedom writer.” In critiquing the legacy of colonialism and understanding that this, too, is part of the Black American story, Hansberry offers an animating insight for her time and for ours.Charles Gordone, “No Place to Be Somebody: A Black-Black Comedy” (1969)The playbill from the 1969 Broadway production of Charles Gordone’s “No Place To Be Somebody.”© PlaybillIn 1969, Amiri Baraka (publishing as LeRoi Jones) released “Four Black Revolutionary Plays,” a series of one-acts obsessively, at times brilliantly, circling Black-white racial conflict. That same year, Gordone’s “No Place” debuted Off Broadway. The two works embody a fundamental tension: Baraka’s favors confrontation while Gordone’s displays a humanistic impulse to see dignity even in seeming degradation. Gordone peoples his play with pimps, prostitutes and hustlers, both Black and white. As Phyl Garland wrote in Ebony, Gordone “came equipped with a loaded pistol and a whole barrel of ‘MF’s’. ” Debuting at the Public Theater, founded by the towering New York theater figure Joseph Papp (a student of Eulalie Spence at Brooklyn’s Eastern District High School in the 1930s), “No Place” earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1970, becoming the first work by a Black playwright to do so. “No Place” blends comedy, tragedy and melodrama. In doing so, it shares with then-emergent Blaxploitation cinema a revolutionary sensibility that seeks not to counter Black stereotypes but rather to annex them, revealing the complexity beneath their distorting masks.Adrienne Kennedy, “An Evening with Dead Essex” (1973)The cast of “Ohio State Murders,” which was first published in 1991 and debuted on Broadway just last year, pays tribute to its playwright, Adrienne Kennedy, in December 2022.Michael Loccisano/Getty ImagesKennedy’s “The Ohio State Murders” (1991), which made its belated Broadway debut last December, closed early, on Jan. 15, after just 44 performances. In a video posted to Instagram, the play’s star, six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, paid tribute to Kennedy. “More of her work deserves to be produced commercially,” the actor said, “and hopefully this will be the beginning of more and more awareness about … how incredible and poetic and profound and raw and revolutionary her work is.” Kennedy’s career spans seven decades, beginning with “Funnyhouse of the Negro” in 1964. Her style is often described as surrealist — a central quality, but only a part of her varied aesthetic. Among the most striking of her early plays is “An Evening with Dead Essex,” first performed in 1973 at the American Place Theatre in New York. The play joins documentary with imagination: It concerns the factual account of a Black Vietnam vet named Mark Essex who returns from war and commits a mass shooting, killing nine and injuring more before being shot by police. The play takes place in a film production studio, with Kennedy insisting that “actors use their real names and the director should get the actors to play themselves.” The action consists of the actors and filmmakers, all but one of whom are Black, reconstruing Essex’s life so as to make some sense of the violence of his death — and of the violence that surrounds us all.Andrea Hairston, “Lonely Stardust” (1998)In the stage directions to “Lonely Stardust,” Hairston describes how she wants her audience to relate to her play. “The Audience,” she writes, “should be embedded in a corner of this galactic wonder. … Occasionally comets whiz by. Periodic showers of Stardust should be arranged. The Traveler has journeyed billions of miles and landed in Springfield, MA, USA. …” Through this asymmetry of scale — the cosmos and a town in western Massachusetts — Hairston opens up points of entry into the everyday and the ineffable. A nameless traveler, searching for life at the end of his own, speaks in a hip vernacular: “When you spiral down that image of lonely, there’s the beginning. Or the end, actually. Buggin’ out.” Sheree Renée Thomas, author of numerous works of speculative fiction, including the short-story collection “Nine Bar Blues” (2020), sees Hairston as the too-often overlooked link between her generation and that of Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany. “Andrea Hairston has had her pulse on the science fiction community since the 1970s,” Thomas says. “She was always in that liminal space with her work: too Black for the science fiction community, and too science fiction for the Black drama community.”POETRYEsther Popel, “Flag Salute” (1934)Esther Popel’s poem “Flag Salute” on the cover of the November 1940 issue of The Crisis.Dickinson College Archives & Special CollectionsIn November 1940, a little more than a year before the United States entered World War II, The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, reprinted Popel’s “Flag Salute” on its cover. Popel’s poem intersperses phrases from the Pledge of Allegiance with an account of a Black man’s lynching. When it first appeared six years earlier, the poem was responding directly to the Oct. 18, 1933, murder of George Armwood, a 27-year-old Black farm laborer from Princess Anne on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, who had been arrested for “grabbing the arm” of a white woman on a public road. “Flag Salute” was newly relevant in 1940, The Crisis editors noted, because of the fact “that the federal anti-lynching bill had been killed in the Senate and that Negro Americans would be segregated and discriminated against in the U. S. armed forces.” Embodying the ambivalence of being both Black and American, Popel’s poem communicated across decades with Harryette Mullen, whose poems “Waving the Flag” and “Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name” bear its influence. “Popel was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,” Mullen says, “where she lived near my great-grandmother, although I can’t be certain they were acquainted.” Reading Mullen’s poems beside Popel’s is a form of acquaintance, too.Bob Kaufman, “The Collected Poems” (1965-78)“When I die, / I won’t stay / Dead.” These three lines conclude Kaufman’s 19-line poem “Dolorous Echo,” first published in his book “Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness” (1965) and now included in the remarkable 2019 edition of Kaufman’s collected poems. The lines have proved prophetic. Kaufman died in 1986 at 60, in his adoptive city of San Francisco (he was born and raised in New Orleans), after struggling for decades with mental illness, addiction, arrests and housing precarity. A careful poetic craftsman, he could nonetheless be a reckless steward of his own work, scrawling poems in the narrow margins of newspapers, reciting words in coffee shops and at house parties. A founding member of Beatitude, the seminal Beat periodical, alongside Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly and others, Kaufman is sometimes shorthanded as the “Black Beat.” While he helped define the Beat aesthetic, Kaufman was also a surrealist, a poet of blues and jazz and a spiritualist (he practiced Buddhism). “Kaufman’s poems use the most far out and surreal tools to render frighteningly honest, terrifying and delicious portraits of people and the world,” the poet Danez Smith tells me.Gwendolyn Brooks, “In the Mecca” (1968)A 1960 portrait of Gwendolyn Brooks on the back steps of her home in Chicago.Slim Aarons/Getty ImagesBy some measures, Brooks is about as canonical as it gets. Her poem “We Real Cool” (1960) is a high school staple, likely because its brevity lends itself to classroom reading and because its sharp enjambments invite close analysis of form. “Most young people know me only by that poem,” Brooks once told an audience. “I would prefer it if the textbook compilers and the anthologists would assume that I had written a few other poems.” Among Brooks’s many other poems, her long sequence “In the Mecca,” featured in a collection of the same name, is among her finest. Released in 1968, after a nearly decade-long publishing hiatus and just months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., “In the Mecca” is both intimately focused on domestic life and urgently engaged in the politics of the moment. The poet Major Jackson, who this year will publish a collection spanning his own two-decade career, says that the poem “reads like a contemporary ballad, where one discerns Brooks’s gift for incisive and stark language as well as a sweeping social vision married to modernist sensibilities.”Ishmael Reed, “A Secretary to the Spirits” (1978)A first edition cover of Ishmael Reed’s 1978 poetry collection “A Secretary to the Spirits,” illustrated by the artist Betye Saar.Betye Saar’s original cover illustration “A Secretary to the Spirits (from the series ‘A Secretary to the Spirits [for Ishmael Reed]’)” (1975).© Betye Saar. The Morgan Library & Museum, courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los AngelesThe richness of the 85-year-old Reed’s ever-expanding catalog (from his 1967 debut novel “The Free-Lance Pallbearers” to his play “The Conductor,” which premieres at New York’s Theater for the New City on March 9) is such that one might overlook the slender 17-poem, 42-page volume he published 45 years ago with NOK, a Nigerian publisher. Julian Lucas, who has written often about Reed, considers “A Secretary to the Spirits” to be “criminally underrated.” The book is long out of print and difficult to find; all of the poems, however, are available in Reed’s “New and Collected Poems” (2007). But if you’re lucky enough to find a copy of the 1978 original, you’ll experience them as Reed intended, in call-and-response with illustrations by the Black Arts Movement assemblage artist Betye Saar. Saar’s full-page panels depict Egyptian motifs juxtaposed with the Cream of Wheat chef, dancing Jazz Age silhouettes beside the Eye of Providence. Reed’s poems are sly and confrontational. In “The Reactionary Poet,” he claims that title in opposition to self-styled revolutionaries whose orthodoxy chokes out creativity and joy. He writes: “In your world of / Tomorrow Humor / Will be locked up and / the key thrown away / The public address system / Will pound out headaches / All day.”Dolores Kendrick, “The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women” (1989)“The Women of Plums” is theater living inside poetry. Kendrick understood as much, adapting her collection for the stage, where it won the New York New Playwrights Award in 1997. She writes in dialect, but not in the caricatured deez and doze of the minstrel stage; instead, much as Toni Morrison did two years earlier in “Beloved,” she employs shifts in syntax, rhythm and diction to render speech that lives beyond the page. Kendrick wrote the poems as a kind of alternative history of the United States, from the Middle Passage to the Civil War, in the voices of 34 enslaved Black women. These voices are so strong that they have even been adapted as an opera, which opened in New York in the spring of 1995. “Soon I’ll go for a stroll / in my blue silk dress, / go into town / and buy myself a plum, / the blackest from the bush,” one of her speakers proclaims.Melvin Dixon, “Love’s Instruments” (1995)Dixon, a novelist, poet and scholar, published only one poetry collection in his lifetime, “Change of Territory” (1983). A posthumous collection, “Love’s Instruments,” released three years after his death at 42, is a playful and poignant tribute to the lives of gay Black men. In “Heartbeats,” Dixon uses line breaks to generate a syncopated rhythm that unfolds a narrative of regularity and revelation. This is how it begins:Work out. Ten laps.Chin ups. Look good.Steam room. Dress warm.Call home. Fresh air.Eat right. Rest well.Sweetheart. Safe sex.Sore throat. Long flu.Hard nodes. Beware.Test blood. Count cells.Reds thin. Whites low.Just months before Dixon died of complications related to AIDS, in 1992, he addressed the Third National Lesbian and Gay Writers Conference in Boston. He warned his fellow writers to “guard against the erasure of our experience and our lives” and to claim responsibility for the future of literature. “I come to you bearing witness of a broken heart,” Dixon said. “I come to you bearing witness to a broken body — but a witness to an unbroken spirit.”Ai, “Vice: New and Selected Poems” (1999)Born Florence Anthony in Albany, Texas in 1947, Ai chose a name that means “love” in Japanese, one of several lineages that the mixed-race poet could claim. Ai was part of a generation of post-Black Arts Movement figures who now occupy canonical places: Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Nathaniel Mackey and Harryette Mullen chief among them. Though Ai, who died in 2010, achieved distinction during her lifetime — she was the first Black recipient of the National Book Award for Poetry, for “Vice” in 1999 — she is less well-known today. None of her poems appear in the major anthologies of African American and American literature. Perhaps that should change: Ai is among the pre-eminent practitioners of the dramatic monologue — a persona-driven mode of poetic address exemplified in the work of Victorian poet Robert Browning. “I want to take the narrative ‘persona’ poem as far as I can,” Ai said. “All the way or nothing.” In “Vice,” she does just that, inhabiting the persona of a Black woman in love and trouble, writing past respectability to the hard truths of lived experience. More

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    Jimmy Fallon Recaps Trump’s ‘Off the Rails’ CPAC Speech

    Fallon said Donald Trump “made some pretty intense promises” in his headlining speech on Saturday.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.Leader of the PACDuring a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, former President Donald Trump made what Jimmy Fallon referred to as “some pretty intense promises.”“In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice,’” Trump said. “Today I add, I am your warrior, I am your justice, and, for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.’”“He’s like, ‘I’m the captain now. I am the one who knocks. I am the walrus. Koo-koo-ka-choo,’” Fallon joked on Monday night.“He’s either running for president or auditioning to be the next John Wick.” — JIMMY FALLON“He was such a terrible president, and now he’s auditioning to be Batman.” — SETH MEYERS“Problem is, he would never respond to the bat signal, because there’s no way he’s ever just looking pensively out the window. You’d have to text it to him or just shine it on Sean Hannity’s forehead. Oh, you know what you could do? You could project it on a solar eclipse — he looks at those.” — SETH MEYERS“It was so empty, the guy started vacuuming because he thought the event was over.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (The Karens and the Darrens Edition)“But let’s be real, the funniest comedy special last weekend was the CPAC, or as I like to call it, crazy white people.” — MARLON WAYANS, guest hosting “The Daily Show”“Turns out, CPAC really stands for ‘Crazy to Put Up all Those Chairs.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“If you don’t know about it, it’s an annual event where all the Karens and their husbands come together, and they complain about the rest of us. The Karens and the Darrens.” — MARLON WAYANS“And some of that [expletive] make no sense at all. Like, Nikki Haley said, ‘wokeness is more dangerous than a pandemic.’ I never had to miss two weeks of work because of wokeness.” — MARLON WAYANS“Yes, wokeness is such a dangerous virus that it apparently killed two-thirds of her audience. It’s got to be stopped.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingJames Corden revealed Tessa Thompson’s first acting role in a music video at the age of 6.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe author Margaret Atwood will appear on Tuesday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”Also, Check This OutIn Chris Rock’s new Netflix stand-up special, “Selective Outrage,” the comedian brings up last year’s “slap heard around the world.”Kirill Bichutsky/NetflixThe comedian Chris Rock responds to being on the receiving end of Will Smith’s Oscars slap in his new comedy special “Selective Outrage.” More

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    ‘Perry Mason’ Season 2 Premiere Recap: Keeping It Civil

    New season, new showrunners, same Perry. Who knew that a show with such a grisly beginning could wind up becoming such great comfort viewing?Season 2, Episode 1: ‘Chapter Nine’It’s been nearly two and a half years since we last saw Perry Mason. In that time we’ve weathered (sort of) a global pandemic, a presidential election and an attempt to overturn that election. We’ve also seen the purchase of HBO’s parent company, WarnerMedia, by Discovery, along with all the changes that the newly minted chief executive David Zaslav has wrought for prestige TV’s most storied brand.Even the “Perry Mason” showrunners have been swapped out. Goodbye, Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald, who have moved on to other creative endeavors; hello, Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, creators of the Steven Soderbergh-directed period piece “The Knick.”The times, in short, have changed.Judging by its Season 2 premiere this week, though, “Perry Mason” hasn’t noticed. The cast, led by Matthew Rhys in the role made famous by Raymond Burr decades earlier, is largely intact. So is the jazzy score by the trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, a million miles removed from the sound of pretty much any other show on television. Ditto the overall vibe of rumpled, boozy Los Angeles noir, pitting the wealthy and sinister against the beaten-down but mostly noble working stiffs who make up Perry and his peers.Funny, isn’t it? A series that began with the mutilated corpse of a murdered infant has become a kind of comfort food.Still, it’s fair to say the time away has not been kind to Mr. Mason. For one thing, he has already retreated from the field of criminal law, despite having successfully navigated his very first, and very complicated, case as a defense attorney during the previous season: the defense of a bereaved mother, Emily Dodson (Gayle Rankin), from the charge of murdering her own baby.The Return of ‘Perry Mason’The second season of the HBO show, which is based on an Erle Stanley Gardner book series that inspired a classic TV courtroom drama, began on March 6.Season 2 Premiere: “Perry Mason” returned with a new season and new showrunners but the same Perry. Who knew that a show with such a grisly beginning could wind up becoming such great comfort viewing?Chris Chalk: The actor has pushed himself hard lately, playing deeply conflicted roles like the ex-cop turned private investigator Paul Drake in “Perry Mason.”Being Perry Mason: The showrunners reimagined a capable, no-nonsense attorney as a schlemiel with unresolved trauma. Casting the actor Matthew Rhys meant that Perry could go even more tragic.Through a harrowing dream sequence, we learn that Dodson has since drowned herself after months of sending unanswered postcards to Perry demanding to know what the point of it all was. Perry has no more of an answer to that than Emily did; perhaps that’s why he races a motorcycle he was given by a client until he crashes. It’s not as if he has his family farm to give him solace: That was sold long ago to Lupe (Veronica Falcón), Perry’s enterprising bootlegger ex-girlfriend.Perry’s current and decidedly lower-stakes focus now is civil law, and his most recent gig is representing the grocery store impresario Sunny Gryce (Sean Astin) against a former employee (Matt Bush) who invented many of Sunny’s successful sales techniques and then used them to start his own store. Perry has no taste for hanging this poor guy out to dry, but he is a very good attorney, as it turns out, and he does what he has to until a favorable verdict is won.The job seems good enough for Della Street (Juliet Rylance), Perry’s assistant and de facto co-counsel, who takes advantage of their steady stream of paying clients to hire an actual secretary (Jee Young Han) to do the work she herself was once tasked with. The civil case work is much less beneficial, however, to the Black ex-cop turned private investigator Paul Drake (Chris Chalk), whose new baby demands a regular source of income that Perry is no longer able to provide. Perry’s former partner, Pete Strickland (Shea Whigham), is able to help by providing Paul with some surveillance work for the ambitious (and, like his friend Della, secretly gay) district attorney Hamilton Burger (Justin Kirk) … but Paul’s family still makes a point of inviting Perry to the cookout when his birthday rolls around. Paul’s wife, Grace (Diarra Kilpatrick), at least, is aware of where his bread can truly be buttered.While Perry quietly rages against his new role as the defender of the petit bourgeois and Della entertains the offer of a date from a woman she encounters at a restaurant — whose gaydar, it seems, is next-gen — the case that will seemingly dominate the season unfolds. A scion of privilege named Brooks McCutcheon (Tommy Dewey), son of a ruthless magnate named Lydell (Paul Raci), spends his days choking his sex partners behind his wife’s back, his nights torching the speakeasy boats of the competition, and is obsessed with trying to convince somebody, anybody, that there is an audience for baseball in Los Angeles. (He is at least two decades ahead of his time in this respect, at least.)Both his sinister father and the crooked Detective Holcomb (Eric Lange) warn him to tread softly, but that doesn’t save Brooks’s life, as we learn when a child in a creepy mask discovers his corpse just before the credits roll.In short, you’ve got everything you would want a Prohibition Era murder mystery to include. Bootleggers, real-estate swindlers, hard-luck investigators, life in the closet, people bearing coins with strange insignia (a star-and-crescent, to be specific), the sense that Los Angeles is an ephemeral fantasyland that nothing so respectable as Major League Baseball would want anything to do with — it’s all there.So are the charming characters — often charming despite themselves — that made the show’s first season a success. Rhys’s resting sour face makes him perfect for Perry, the disgraced veteran of the Great War whose skill at ferreting out other people’s deceptions‌ has made him, in turns, a great detective and a rock-solid lawyer. Della’s competence and ebullience make her equally indispensable to both Perry and Los Angeles County’s most eligible bachelorettes. Drake is a good guy and a good cop in a system with no practical use for either.On the shadier side of the street, the McCutcheons are a solid substitute for the pack of rich evangelical elders who drove the first season’s story along. And it’s fun to trace the parallels between Sunny Gryce and Lupe, both of them thriving in the quasi-legal shadow that capitalism inevitably casts.Working off a script by Amiel and Berger, the director Fernando Coimbra — with Blanchard’s invaluable help — crafts a convincing and familiar 1930s Los Angeles atmosphere for this motley crew of strivers and sad sacks to inhabit; it truly is hard to notice the creative handoff that has occurred between seasons. We’re back in business with Perry, and so far, business is good.From the case files:No graphic violence. No nudity. No explicit sex. Certainly no murdered babies. There’s a distinct ratcheting-down of the taboo from the first season premiere to the second.Isn’t it funny how Della’s dynamism leaves you rooting for her to betray her current partner and cheat with the glamorous woman she meets in the ladies’ room at lunch?“We’re where everyone wants to be!” Brooks hollers when his ballplayer partner communicates the league’s reticence to relocate any teams to Los Angeles. “You think anyone dreams of moving to [expletive] Cincinnati?” Well, that depends, Brooks. Has Skyline Chili opened yet?The closing credits, which on “Perry Mason” take on the role of opening title sequences on other shows, feature sand castles being washed away. If that isn’t the core anxiety at the heart of the California dream, I don’t know what is. More

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    ‘The Outsiders’ Review: Growing Pains Both Brutal and Poetic

    At La Jolla Playhouse, the musical adaptation of the novel and film has considerable appeal, but is weighed down by too many characters and themes.LA JOLLA, Calif. — No one sings during the rumble scene in “The Outsiders,” a new musical at La Jolla Playhouse adapted from S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel of teenage alienation and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film version. The nine-person orchestra — guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, some mournful strings — stays silent, too. Instead, young bodies, about 20 of them, supply their own percussive music, falling to the cork-covered floor, groaning into their mikes, as stage rain soaks them through.This violence is for show, of course. Those kicks and punches don’t actually connect. But the brawl, at least at first, is not aestheticized. It’s a fistfight, not a dance — brutal, futile, wet, raw and sad.“The Outsiders,” despite its considerable appeal, can’t yet bear too much reality. Awkward, yearning, fast on its feet, the show, like the adolescents it describes, is still trying on various identities. Directed by Danya Taymor from a book by Adam Rapp, with gorgeous, mournful music and lyrics from Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, of Jamestown Revival, and Justin Levine, this La Jolla version (and I’m sentimental enough to hope that there will soon be other versions) is a musical with growing pains, currently serving too many characters, too many themes, too many styles. But when it reaches its full height, it might really be something to see.Largely faithful to the book and for better or worse, to the film, which a New York Times critic once witheringly described as “a laughably earnest attempt to impose heroic attitudes on some nice, small characters,” the show is set in 1967 Tulsa, Okla. Amid an environment of vacant lots and broken-down cars (the set, inventive and peculiar, is by Amp featuring Tatiana Kahvegian), it maps the increasingly bloody conflict between the Greasers, the East side have-nots who inspire the title, and the Socs, short for “socialites,” the West side haves.In the book and the movie, both gangs are white and all male. Here the Greasers have been effortlessly yet thoughtfully diversified. (Sarafina Bush’s vivid, considered costumes keep the gang distinctions clear.) There is at least one other significant departure, involving the death of a beloved character, but this, too, is purposeful and apt.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.The overarching concern of “The Outsiders” are the ways in which these teenagers, largely abandoned by their elders, misunderstand the world and one another. At the febrile center of the story is Ponyboy Curtis (played here by Brody Grant), an orphaned 14-year-old who lives with his older brothers, Sodapop (Jason Schmidt) and Darrel (Ryan Vasquez), both of whom have left school to support him.A sweet kid with a poet’s soul, Ponyboy stays up late reading Charles Dickens and glories in sunsets. “Robert Frost is quite talented,” he tells Cherry Valance (Piper Patterson), the Soc goddess he meets at a drive-in. (Frost’s brief ode to youth and decay, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” runs through “The Outsiders” as a leitmotif.) But when a phalanx of drunken Socs attack him and his best friend, Johnny Cade (Sky Lakota-Lynch), Ponyboy finds himself enmeshed in the local violence.From left, Ryan Vasquez, Brody Grant, Jason Schmidt and Daryl Tofa in the musical, directed by Danya Taymor.Rich Soublet IIThe great allure of the book, and now the musical, are the big feelings that it illustrates and invites. Hinton wrote the book while still in high school and maybe because she was a woman (the S.E. stands for Susan Eloise), she articulated for her male characters rich and ardent emotional lives, which fuel the musical’s plaintive score. Though “The Outsiders” — in every form — argues that it is often easier to hate than to love and understand, it does not hesitate to show the passionate relationships (never erotic, but often with a force that borders the romantic) among the Greasers.The show makes a few correctable missteps. An opening number, directly referencing the opening lines of the book and with projections by Tal Yarden, focuses on Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke,” an odd distraction (and a tenuous reference for the under-50 crowd) when we haven’t yet met the principal characters.Only in the third number, “Grease Got a Hold on You,” does the story’s engine finally catch. (Given the preexistence of “Grease” and “Hairspray,” an alternate title for the show could have been “Pomade.”) There’s also an incidence of hand-holding, pushing a platonic friendship toward the romantic, that feels strained, especially given Hinton’s stalwart displacement of sexuality. A climactic scene involving a fire is not yet convincingly staged.There are trickier hitches, too. This is Ponyboy’s story, yet he is hardly its most compelling character. And despite Grant’s earnest, lush-voiced performance, the eye moves inexorably toward other figures, like Vasquez’s Darrel and Patterson’s Cherry and Lakota-Lynch’s Johnny and especially Da’Von T. Moody’s Dallas, a muscled hood with a gangster’s pose and a big, wounded heart beneath it, who can twirl a baseball bat like a majorette’s baton.Though Taymor, aided by the design team and the choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman, manages some striking and playful images, the relationship between the real and the symbolic remains uneasy. (Are we always in the vacant lot? Is this some junkyard passion play? Why is a car now vertical?) And “The Outsiders” sometimes throttles its own exuberance. Taymor (“Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” “Pass Over”) hasn’t yet worked out how to offer a work that feels dangerous and true without flattening the pleasures that a musical can provide.If “The Outsiders” means to steer its muscle cars toward Broadway, which it should, further development will almost certainly smooth these variances in focus and approach. Even now, such discord has a way of receding when the youthful, gifted performers are freed to do what they do best: to move and to sing.Musically, the score is polyglot, borrowing confidently from folk, bluegrass and rockabilly traditions, with occasional gestures toward soul and Broadway balladry. This is a story about conflict, internal and external, but it also allows, in songs such as “Great Expectations” and “Stay Gold,” for luxuriant and surprising concordance. For the hopeless, for the loveless, for the misunderstood, which is all of us, Greaser and Soc, young and old, “The Outsiders” offers the promise of harmony.The OutsidersThrough April 2 at La Jolla Playhouse, La Jolla, Calif.; lajollaplayhouse.org. Running time: 2 hours and 35 minutes. More

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    Tyler James Williams Lifts His Spirits With bell hooks and Tom Ford

    The “Abbott Elementary” star keeps nourished, body and soul, with D’Angelo’s music, Earl Grey lattes and early 2000s rom-coms.Tyler James Williams has had a winning season.A Screen Actors Guild award that he and his “Abbott Elementary” castmates won for their work on the ABC mockumentary about an underfunded public school in Philadelphia.A Golden Globe for best supporting actor for his own performance in the series, as Gregory Eddie, a substitute teacher who finds a sense of purpose and permanence in the job.And, as he took the Globes stage, a standing ovation from Eddie Murphy.“The award is great — I appreciate it. But that did more for me than anything ever could,” Williams admitted in a video call from Los Angeles.The actor, 30, has also morphed into something of a heartthrob in the role, which the “Abbott Elementary” creator Quinta Brunson, whom he’d met on “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” wrote for him after they became lockdown pals.All of the accolades don’t overshadow what he considers his most significant achievement.“We haven’t seen characters like Gregory and Janine” — a teacher played by Brunson with whom Gregory has a slow-burn kind of thing — “exist on television,” Williams said.“There’s not a heavy trauma story line. It’s just Black people living everyday lives and seeing the beauty in that,” he added. “Very rarely do we see that recognized in the awards platforms, so that for me is what I hope that win does.”Still, Williams, who has Crohn’s disease, may have never arrived at this moment had he not had a near-fatal flare-up when he was 23.“When I came out of the other side of it, I realized I had a choice,” he said. “I could be really busy and try to make a bunch of money. Or I could do things that felt like my heart was just bathed.”A few days after wrapping the second season of “Abbott” last month, Williams talked about his deep dive into bell hooks’s work, how D’Angelo captured the feelings of his youth and the Burberry trench he can’t leave behind. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1bell hooksIn 2020, when it became apparent that we were going to be locked down for some time, I was getting book recommendations from people. I had just finished “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” and Miss Lawrence, who was a castmate, had recommended “We Real Cool” by bell hooks. I read it and fell in love with her voice, and felt seen in a way I had never felt seen before, and understood things about myself I didn’t know. Then everything she had ever written, I was just diving through. To me they really question masculinity standards, particularly Black masculinity standards, which, with Gregory, I try to dismantle as many of those as I can.2‘Voodoo’ by D’AngeloI had to be 8 or 9 the first time I heard that album played in my house. And I was like, “Who did this? Who took my insides and made it sonic?” I listen to that album once every day, usually at the top of the day. D’Angelo, he’s kind of everything to me.3CinemaSinsIt’s a YouTube channel that points out all the tropes and archaic things that happen in our industry, where everything is so austere and we make art. It’s usually how I end my night when I’m in bed and winding down. Just to have some guy somewhere break it all down and dismantle it is really funny to me.4Earl Grey LatteDue to Crohn’s, I had to stop drinking coffee when I was younger, and I was a big latte person. So I got this great combination of Earl Grey teas that you mix together. Froth up the milk. It feels like a coffee, but you have the flowery notes that are in the tea. In the wintertime, you could do a dash of nutmeg, even some cinnamon, and a single sugar. And if it’s one of those days where it’s like, “This is going to be a heavy lift,” you do two tea bags.5Skywalker MarijuanaThat’s my favorite strain. Also Crohn’s-related, my doctors wanted me to eat more. My appetite response isn’t the same as everybody else’s — I need something to tell me that I’m hungry. And they were like, “Hey, there’s marijuana.” It seems to do all the things we need it to do.6Tom Ford CandlesI was shooting a show called “Whiskey Cavalier” in Prague, right before “Abbott,” and I stumbled on this candle at one of the stores on Parizska Street. There’s notes that are very masculine, but then there’s this soft powder behind it that’s feminine and light. I was like, “This is what I want my house to smell like at all times.”7‘Brown Sugar’This movie felt like a story that could happen to me: Two New York kids who love hip-hop could essentially just fall in love over that. It was simple. I’m a huge fan of the ’90s/early 2000s rom-com. I feel like we peaked as a society right there.8GoldThere’s something about it aesthetically that has always brightened my day. I’ve tried to get into silver, but it doesn’t really do it for me. There’s something about the way sun hits gold that the world gets brighter. It’s kind of like when you take sunglasses off. Everything becomes more vibrant.9Black Burberry Trench CoatI don’t buy a lot of things, and my closet’s very small. I just have stuff that I’m absolutely in love with. And Burberry has always done the trench better than everybody else. It’s something that I pull out literally all the time. It goes so perfectly with everything, always. I left it in New York when I came back from Christmas to finish shooting, and I was like, “What am I doing? I have to go back and get this.” I need this everywhere I go.10DuragsDuring the pandemic, my hair was really long. I couldn’t see a barber, so I ordered a durag and would put it on. I would compress over and over and over again and just kind of brush it out because I didn’t have any other choice. By the time we had shot the pilot of “Abbott,” I had been wave brushing for almost a year, and that became Gregory’s look. More

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    Review: ‘History of the World’ Repeats, as Farce

    Mel Brooks’s human comedy gets a ‘Part II’ for streaming TV, with a sketch-star cast and a sharp makeover.Before his many lives as America’s tummler-in-chief — movie star, director, Broadway producer — Mel Brooks was a TV guy. He wrote for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” the Big Bang from which much of the TV comedic tradition exploded forth. His 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I” (in which Caesar appeared as a cave dweller), applied an episodic approach, as if it were meant to be a sketch-comedy series.Now, with a little help and a few changes, it is. The eight-part “History of the World, Part II,” which debuts two episodes a day from Monday through Thursday on Hulu, is a screwball tour of civilization that gives the Brooks formula enough contemporary updates that you could think of it as “Evolution of TV Comedy, Part I.”And in an era of dutiful brand extensions and pointless revivals, it turns out to be history that’s surprisingly worth repeating.The 96-year-old Brooks is a writer and producer of the new series and assumes the narrator role performed by Orson Welles in the film. He has limited screen time now — the heaviest lifting is done by the writer-producer-performers Ike Barinholtz, Nick Kroll and Wanda Sykes — but he is responsible for the show’s first sight gag, in which he’s digitally altered into a young, musclebound hunk.Like that image, “Part II” aims not simply to reproduce the Mel Brooks of the last century but also to bring his comedy into 2023. It’s a collaborative production (the cast is so vast it might be easier to list TV-comedy fixtures who don’t appear) that is more diverse in both faces and comedy styles. Beyond the callbacks to the movie and affectionate recreations of Brooks’s slapstick and Jewish humor, the series combines elements of “Kroll Show,” “Drunk History,” “Documentary Now!,” “Sherman’s Showcase” and more.“Part I” was less a parody of actual history than of movie history. Its ancient Rome was lifted from swords-and-sandals epics; its French Revolution was, as the New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote, very much the one imagined in M.G.M.’s “A Tale of Two Cities.”“Part II” is thoroughly made of TV and pop-media references. The story of Jesus Christ begins with a dead-on parody of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” with Kroll as a Larry Davidian Judas riffing with J.B. Smoove as the apostle Luke; later it becomes a drawn-out sendup of the Beatles documentary “Get Back.”“Part II” is hit-and-miss, much like “Part I” and nearly every sketch comedy ever made. When it hits, it’s an almost perfect marriage of style and subject. The strongest extended sketch stars Sykes as Shirley Chisholm — the Black female congresswoman and 1972 presidential candidate — in a note-perfect sendup of a ’70s sitcom. It’s not just impeccably executed and detailed, it’s sharp, smart history, accented with the laughter of a “live Black audience.”When the show misses — well, another advantage streaming has over the movie theater is the fast-forward button. A running bit about Gen. Ulysses S. Grant (Barinholtz) trying to kick his booze habit starts off strong with Timothy Simons as a cranky Abraham Lincoln but becomes a grinding war of attrition. The limp gag of imagining historical figures on social media (Galileo, Typhoid Mary, Princess Anastasia) doesn’t improve with repetition.The many guest stars include, from left, Rob Riggle, Richard Kind and Zazie Beetz.Aaron Epstein/HuluThere’s also the occasional reminder of the changed cultural sensibilities that “Part II” was made for. Brooks was a yukmeister provocateur, who made fun of the horrors of the 20th century (and beyond) while trusting his audience to get the absurdity. His “The Producers” — about the making of a deliberately offensive musical about Hitler — was about that kind of trust backfiring, and it generated backlash in real life.But as Brooks said on “Fresh Air” last year, “If we’re going to get even with Hitler, we can’t get on a soapbox because he’s too damn good at that.” (I guess I should note that Brooks is Jewish, even if that’s news only to Homer Simpson.) In that spirit, the closing credits of “Part I” tease a sequel including the segment “Hitler on Ice.” It’s assumed that the audience, without nudging, sees the ridiculousness of showing a genocidal monster pirouetting on skates.The first episode of “Part II” turns that brief joke into a full sketch with Barinholtz, Kroll and Sykes as sports announcers. Through the routine, their insults of the Nazi skater — “He’s a thug and bad for the sport” — grow sharper and more vulgar, as if to make clear that the depiction does not equal endorsement. It’s a funny bit, too, but funny for a more cautious, earnest time that prefers its problematic comedy more clearly underlined and bracketed.One advantage “Part II” has over its movie predecessor is the freedom of small scale. It can execute a one-joke premise and get out fast, as when it has Johnny Knoxville play the famously hard-to-kill czarist adviser Rasputin as the star of a Russian “Jackass.” (This also distinguishes it from Netflix’s “Cunk on Earth,” which can be screamingly funny but is condemned to repeat its Ali G-esque joke a little too long.)Still, “Part II” doesn’t entirely forget where it came from. A series of musical sketches featuring Kroll as a Jewish peasant selling mud pies during the Russian Revolution is the most Brooksian in style and setting. In a showstopping number, Kroll and Pamela Adlon fend off a murderous Cossack neighbor and duet about the trade-offs of city vs. shtetl life. (“Why seek out death and fear? / We’ve got plenty of it here!”)It’s just the dish to celebrate Mel Brooks’s legacy: Mud pie, à la mode. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Perry Mason’ and The Oscars

    The HBO legal drama, starring Matthew Rhys, returns, and ABC airs the 95th Academy Awards.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Mar. 6-12. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE VOICE 8 p.m. on NBC. The singing-competition show that discovered Cassadee Pope and Morgan Wallen is back, and one of the judges, Blake Shelton, is gearing up for his 23rd and last season. Niall Horan, Kelly Clarkson and Chance the Rapper are joining him in the memorable red-spinning chairs as judges. The series starts with a “blind audition” round, as always.10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU (1999) 8 p.m. on Freeform. This teen romantic comedy is Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” if it took place in the late 1990s. Julia Stiles plays Kat Stratford, a girl who tends to scare off any male suitors with her bad attitude. Because her younger sister cannot date until Kat does, a mission is set forth — get Kat a date. Enter the very handsome Patrick Verona, played by Heath Ledger, who might be the solution to Kat’s dating problem.PERRY MASON 9 p.m. on HBO. Set in 1932 Los Angeles, this legal drama is based on stories by Erle Stanley Gardner, and follows the titular defense lawyer during the Great Depression. This second season will likely be a little different from the first because Jack Amiel and Michael Begler replaced the Season 1 showrunners Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald. The series stars Matthew Rhys as Perry Mason alongside Shea Whigham and Eric Lange.TuesdayFrom left: Julia Michaels, Kelsea Ballerini, Jimmy Fallon, Nicole Scherzinger and Jason Derulo on “That’s My Jam.”Evan Vestal Ward/NBCTHAT’S MY JAM 10 p.m. on NBC. If you were not able to score Kelsea Ballerini tour tickets, you can see the singer team up with Julia Michaels against Nicole Scherzinger and Jason Derulo in musical games like Air Guitar and Launch the Mic in this competition show, hosted by Jimmy Fallon for a second season.WednesdayTHE CHALLENGE 8 p.m. on MTV. In the “World Champions” edition of this long-running reality competition show, winners and MVPs from Argentina, Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. are paired together for the opportunity to win $500,000.ThursdayLES MISERABLES: THE STAGED CONCERT 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Before Anne Hathaway sang “I Dreamed A Dream” or Hugh Jackman stole bread in the film version of “Les Miserables,” the popular musical, set in 19th-century France, had been staged in London’s West End since the mid-1980s. To celebrate, a filmed 2019 performance from the Gielgud Theater is airing on Thursday.TOP CHEF 9 p.m. on Bravo. The chopping, sautéing and seasoning we see on this cooking-competition show might be more impressive than usual this year. For its 20th season, the host Padma Lakshmi is bringing back “Top Chef” all-stars from all over the world. The head judges Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons will be joined each week with guest chefs.FridayTHE 12TH VICTIM 8 p.m. on Showtime. In late January of 1958, the 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, went on a killing spree that left 10 people dead. This four-part documentary series with archival footage looks at the events that transpired and how the justice system has changed since then, through the lens of Fugate’s guilty verdict: She is the youngest female in U.S. history to have been tried and convicted of first degree murder.SaturdayRichard Beymer and Natalie Wood in “West Side Story.”Everett CollectionWEST SIDE STORY (1961) 10 p.m. on TCM. It’s a two-for-one modern adaptation of Shakespeare week: a 1960s version of “Romeo and Juliet” set in New York City. Tony (Richard Beymer), a member of the Jets gang, falls for Maria (Natalie Wood), the younger sister of the leader of the opposing Sharks. Chaos, romance and musical numbers ensue.SundayTHE OSCARS 8 p.m. on ABC. The 95th Academy Awards are back this Sunday at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles and will be broadcast live. The sci-fi movie directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” is up for the most awards with 11 nominations. “The Banshees of Inisherin” and “All Quiet on the Western Front” are tied for second with nine nominations each. See a full list of nominees here and follow along live with our culture reporters on Oscars Sunday.Scott Shepherd and Bella Ramsey in “The Last of Us.”Liane Hentscher/HBOTHE LAST OF US 9 p.m. on HBO. This post-apocalyptic show, based on the video game of the same name, might hit a little close to home as we enter yet another year of the pandemic — but that hasn’t stopped it from being a hit. In the show, a fungal infection turns people into quasi-zombies. This Sunday’s episode will wrap up the first season (HBO just greenlit Season 2), so it is likely that some of the loose ends won’t tie up until next season. More