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    Late Night Casts Doubt on the Russian-Ukrainian Peace Talks

    Trevor Noah warned viewers not to get their hopes up: “Not only did Russia not agree to end the war; it wouldn’t even admit that it started a war.”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.Give Peace a Fighting ChanceRussia and Ukraine held their highest-level peace talks on Thursday since the war began.“But please do not get your hopes up,” Trevor Noah said. “Not only did Russia not agree to end the war; it wouldn’t even admit that it started a war.”“They met in Turkey. Isn’t it just nice to see Russia going somewhere where they’re actually invited?” — JAMES CORDEN“Yeah, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, was asked if they planned to invade any other countries, and his answer was, ‘We are not planning to attack other countries, and we did not attack Ukraine,’ which is obviously a lie, and also not reassuring for the rest of Europe.” — TREVOR NOAH“And, by the way, if Lavrov is denying that Russia is attacking Ukraine, then what’s he attending peace talks for? What, he wants Ukraine to stop blowing up Russian missiles with their maternity wards?” — TREVOR NOAH“I can’t even imagine how strange these meetings must be. It’d be like trying to have a conversation with someone who’s actively setting your house on fire.” — JAMES CORDEN“Do they get there and there’s small talk before they get into it: ‘Ah, yeah, that Russell Wilson trade is crazy. Anyway, we would love it if we could, you know, pump the brakes on the whole invasion thing.’” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Parachuting Spiders Edition)“Apparently, there’s some spider invasion coming to the East Coast in the spring. Oh yeah, and scientists say they’re that the size of a child’s hand, and they can parachute from the sky. I love how scientists were like, ‘How should we describe the size?’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, I settled on a child’s hand.”’ — JIMMY FALLON“You know, sometimes I don’t understand nature. Why did it feel the need to create something like this, huh? Spiders that have parachutes and fly around? You know, with some things, you get why they exist, like how plants put oxygen into the atmosphere, and how birds evolve into chickens so we could make delicious sandwiches. But giant spiders? Was Mother Nature like, ‘People’s nightmares have become too boring; let’s spice things up’?” — TREVOR NOAH“You can’t even kill that thing with a regular shoe. Did you see the size? You probably need like a Shaq-sized shoe.” — TREVOR NOAH“And, by the way, if you think a giant spider is bad, wait until we see the giant pig the giant spider is gonna become best friends with.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingDenzel Washington sat down with the Bodega Boys on “Desus & Mero.”Also, Check This OutFrom left, Georgina Campbell, Graham Dickson, Tom Stourton, Antonia Clarke and Joshua McGuire in “All My Friends Hate Me.”Super Ltd Things turn nasty when a peculiar stranger infiltrates a reunion of college pals in the new horror-comedy “All My Friends Hate Me.” More

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    Emilio Delgado, Luis on ‘Sesame Street’ for Four Decades, Dies at 81

    The actor was a fixture on the groundbreaking educational program. His character’s wedding to Maria on the show in 1988 captivated children and their parents.Emilio Delgado, the actor who for more than four decades played Luis the handyman on the beloved children’s television show “Sesame Street,” died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.The cause was multiple myeloma, which Mr. Delgado had been battling since December 2020, his wife, Carole Delgado, said.Over a span of 44 years on “Sesame Street,” Mr. Delgado’s character was the owner of The Fix-It Shop, where he repaired any objects that needed fixing, like picture frames or giant toasters. Luis was joined in the shop by Maria, played by Sonia Manzano. After an on-screen courtship, the characters married in a widely viewed episode of the program in 1988.The marriage of Maria and Luis was cause for celebration among the children who were learning numbers and letters — and about worldly concepts like death and diversity — from “Sesame Street.” Parents dressed their children in their fancy clothes for viewing parties. Mothers cried as the ceremony unfolded.The union, which followed five months of hugging, serenading and pizza-sharing, was also a way to teach young children about love. The two characters were friends and partners at the shop for 10 years, but their feelings started to change when they cared for a sick kitten.“Since kids see love in terms of physical things like kissing, hugging, giving flowers, we showed Maria and Luis doing a lot of that,” Ms. Manzano, who also wrote for the show, told The New York Times in 1988.“We wanted to show a couple who are nice to each other and have fun together,” she said.Mr. Delgado had a long road to the show that would define his career. After “beating doors in Hollywood” for nine years, he got a call one day to audition for the show because it wanted a more diverse cast, Mr. Delgado said in a 2011 interview for the public television show “Up Close with Patsy Smullin.” He joined the cast in 1971, two years after the program premiered.“I was so excited, but as an actor I knew it was a job,” he said. “Maybe it would last a year, maybe two years. Maybe not even that long. But it was great. I had a job on television, on a major television show.”The program allowed Mr. Delgado to show off his singing in addition to acting. In the 2011 interview, Mr. Delgado said that music was his life. He would later perform with the band Pink Martini at venues like the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall.His love for music developed as a child in Mexico. “I just remember going to sleep to the sound of mariachis,” he said.Emilio Delgado was born on May 8, 1940, in Calexico, a California border town, to Emilio Delgado and Carmen Rodriguez Delgado. He had family he would live with across the border in Mexicali, Carole Delgado said.“He really lived biculturally,” she said, noting that he lived with grandparents and extended family in Mexico. “Because he was an American citizen, he would walk to Calexico every day for school. It wasn’t the border politics of today.”As a teenager, he moved to Glendale, Calif., where he explored his passion for music and theater. Mr. Delgado served six years in the California National Guard in the 1960s before attending California Institute of the Arts, where he was a student in the institution’s first theater class in 1970.When Mr. Delgado wasn’t performing on “Sesame Street,” two “Sesame Street” feature films and many live appearances, he acted in numerous popular shows, including “Hawaii Five-O,” “Falcon Crest,” “House of Cards,” “The Michael J. Fox Show” and “Lou Grant.”In 2018, Mr. Delgado began starring in “Quixote Nuevo,” Octavio Solis’s reimagining of “Don Quixote,” performing at the California Shakespeare Theater, Boston’s Hartford Stage and Alley Theatre in Houston, his family said.In addition to his wife, Mr. Delgado is survived by a daughter, Lauren Delgado; a son, Aram Delgado; and four siblings: Cesar Delgado, Edward Delgado, Martha Ledesma and Norma Vizcaino.Former Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City declared Oct. 15, 2019, “Emilio Delgado Day” at a celebration to honor Hispanic heritage.“At a time when, if you saw diversity on television, it often was with stereotypes, and not the good kind of stereotypes,” Mr. de Blasio said, “Emilio was one of the people who broke the mold, created a positive role model, for everyone, but particularly for children who didn’t get to see or hear people who looked like them and spoke like them.”Christine Chung More

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    An Exiled Theater With a Warning for Europe

    The Belarus Free Theater’s members fled repression at home. The company’s latest show imagines a nightmare future of authoritarian Russian rule.LONDON — When the players of the Belarus Free Theater began working on “Dogs of Europe” three years ago, they thought it was a play about a dystopia.Set in 2049, it imagines the continent cut in half by a wall. On one side sits a Russian superstate, where a dictator has eliminated almost all opposition, and where people cannot speak their native languages or even perform folk dances. On the other side sits a Europe that failed to realize the Russian threat, or stop it from absorbing Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic States and beyond.Yet at a rehearsal in London last month, the day before Russia invaded Ukraine, the play’s nightmare world didn’t feel so far-fetched.Maryna Yakubovich, an actor in the production, which opens Thursday at the Barbican theater in London, said that rehearsing the play had sometimes felt like a premonition. “It’s, like, ‘Oh my God, it’s started to happen,” she said.Nicolai Khalezin, left, and Natalia Kaliada, founders of the Belarus Free Theater.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesNatalia Kaliada, one of the Belarus Free Theater’s founders, said that when she and her husband, Nicolai Khalezin, decided to stage the play, they thought it would be a “warning shot” about the dangers of undemocratic leaders left unchecked. But planned performances in London and New York in 2020 were postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Now that warning shot appears to be too late.As the war in Ukraine enters its third week, the Belarus Free Theater’s performance may seem accidentally timely. But it is only the company’s latest attempt in its 17-year existence to warn about rising authoritarianism in Eastern Europe.The company knows those dangers all too well. Since forming in 2005, it has faced repression in Belarus, which is ruled by President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, who is known as “Europe’s last dictator” in part for his government’s clampdown on opposition and its stifling of free expression. The troupe has long been effectively banned from performing in Belarus, but it continued to do so in secret venues in Minsk, the capital, even after Kaliada and Khalezin were forced into exile more than a decade ago. The couple settled in London — where they developed close ties to theaters including the Young Vic and the Almeida — but continued rehearsing with actors in Belarus via Skype.Those clandestine shows, in venues including a converted car garage that once belonged to the American Embassy, also won the troupe high-profile supporters in the United States. In 2015, The New York Times’s chief theater critic, Ben Brantley, visited the company in Minsk, and praised its “spirit of defiant, exultant fraternity” adding that this was something “you rarely find among the young these days in money-driven, shockproof Manhattan.”A rehearsal of “Dogs of Europe” in London this month.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesNow, even that window to perform in Minsk has closed. The theater’s entire 16-member acting troupe fled Belarus last year to avoid potential jail time for opposing Lukashenko’s regime.The Belarus Free Theater was now homeless, Kaliada said. “We are refugees.”She added that she had hoped its members would be granted asylum in Britain, so they could set up a refugee-led theater there, but the process can take years and asylum applicants are almost always banned from working. After its four-performance run at the Barbican, the company would most likely set up base in Warsaw, a city with numerous refugees from both Belarus and Ukraine, Kaliada said, but added that a final decision had not yet been made.The company’s finances are precarious, Kaliada said, though she had a clear vision for the future. As well as finding a performance space, the company would establish a school where its members could give acting classes to refugee children, she said. All of its future plays would be live-streamed back to Belarus, so the company would keep reaching people there.“It’s a pretty tough time,” Kaliada said. “We’re trying to solve many issues at once.”The company’s experiences over the past two years show how quickly fortunes can change in Eastern Europe. In August 2020, Belarus — a country of some nine million people — looked on the verge of a turning point after Lukashenko declared victory in a vote widely dismissed as fraudulent, leading to mass street protests. It was a “beautiful, powerful,” moment, Kaliada said: It felt like her country was waking from a bad dream, she said.Then a brutal police crackdown against the protesters brought those hopes to an end.Sveta Sugako, left, the Belarus Free Theater’s production manager, and Nadia Brodskaya, its general manager.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesSeveral of the company’s actors were arrested during the period of repression around the election. Sveta Sugako, the company’s production manager, said she spent five days in prison in a tiny cell with 35 other women. None of them were given any food or drinking water for three days, she added. After Sugako refused to sign a confession saying she had taken part in the demonstrations, a police officer grabbed her and choked her, she said.Sugako said she had not wanted to leave Belarus, even after that experience. “I was ready to sit and wait in jail,” she said, but other Belarus Free Theater members persuaded her to go, pointing out that the company had no future if all of its actors were behind bars.Russia-Ukraine War: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4On the ground. More

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    Samuel L. Jackson and Walter Mosley Team Up for a Sci-Fi Fable

    In a joint interview, the actor and writer discuss “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” their “fairy tale” about an old man negotiating dementia and family drama with the help of a wonder drug.Samuel L. Jackson made his name in the movies, Walter Mosley in literature. But when it was time for these two arts legends to collaborate, they knew television was the only medium that would work.“The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” a new limited series starring Jackson and written by Mosley, based on his 2010 novel, tells the story of an elderly Atlanta man with dementia and a family that wants his savings. Just when it looks like all Ptolemy has left is to count his remaining days, two people alter the course of his life. One is Robyn (Dominique Fishback), a teenage family friend who decides Ptolemy is worth taking care of. The other is a neurologist (Walton Goggins) working on a new drug that will bring back Ptolemy’s cognizance — but only for a short time, after which he’ll be worse off than ever (shades of the Daniel Keyes novel “Flowers for Algernon” and its film adaptation, “Charly”).In the series, Jackson’s title character reclaims his life with the help of a young caretaker played by Dominique Fishback.Hopper Stone/Apple TV+In his newfound lucidity, Ptolemy comes to terms with events and people from his past, including the one true love of his life, a beauty named Sensia (Cynthia Kaye McWilliams), and Coydog (Damon Gupton), a childhood mentor who left behind an unusual inheritance. As these figures come and go from his mind, Ptolemy also takes it upon himself to solve the murder of a beloved nephew (Omar Benson Miller), a task appropriate to Mosley’s bread-and-butter turf of crime fiction.Jackson and Mosley were also executive producers on the series, which premieres Friday on Apple TV+. The project was personal for both of them: Each has had loved ones who suffered from dementia. During a freewheeling video interview — Jackson was in London (where he’s filming the Marvel mini-series “Secret Invasion”), Mosley in Los Angeles — they discussed the fairy tale quality of “Ptolemy,” why television was the best option for the project, and how the story jumped across the country from Los Angeles to Atlanta, among other subjects. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“It’s a fairy tale,” Jackson said of his new series. “In reality, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s or dementia, but we get one, however momentarily.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesWho is Ptolemy Grey?WALTER MOSLEY He’s all of us everywhere. This is a destination that either we reach ourselves in our own experience, or with people that we know and love and live with, as far as aging, dementia and death. These things impact everybody’s lives. It’s a great thing to have Sam taking it on and bringing it to a neighborhood that other people don’t seem to think about very much.SAMUEL L. JACKSON As based in reality as we want it to be, he’s actually at the center of a fable. He’s this mythical character that Walter created who has a real-life problem at the beginning, but Walter allows us to circle back and see a life well lived. It’s a fairy tale. In reality, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s or dementia, but we get one, however momentarily, that allows him to be clear about everything that’s happened in his life, in a flash.How does the series address the experience of dementia?MOSLEY A lot of people will see somebody who’s experiencing dementia or Alzheimer’s, and they think, ‘They’re crazy.’ But in reality, there’s something really going on in there, no matter how far gone they are. We allow an audience to identify not only with the character that Sam’s playing, but with our own lives. That was what the book meant to me, to be able to do that.JACKSON Those of us who have had to deal with that know that when those people are sitting there, they may not answer your questions or be present for what you want them to be present for, because they’re busy inhabiting something else that gives them solace in the lost space that they’re in, or that we think they’re in. But they may not be lost at all. They just don’t bother with what you are trying to put on.I talked to my mom when she had dementia and she’d be like, “You’re disturbing me. Stop asking me things that I’m supposed to know the answer to, or you think that I know the answer to, or that I don’t want to be engaged in right now.” When she wanted to engage, she engaged. So this story touched me in a real place.“This is a destination that either we reach ourselves in our own experience, or with people that we know and love and live with, as far as aging, dementia and death,” Mosley said.Erik Carter for The New York TimesAnd through the story, you get to invent a cure, albeit a temporary one.MOSLEY That’s the great thing about imaginative creativity. You look at Jules Verne: He’s the guy who invented the [electric] submarine, who invented the rocket to the moon. He invented all of this stuff in his imagination, and of course, it’s stuff we wanted. I was reading the newspaper yesterday, and they said umbilical cord stem cells have cured a woman of AIDS. This one woman is cured, and they did it from umbilical cord stem cells. If you put the possibility out there, lots of people are going to be thinking about it.Walter, you’ve worked in television quite a bit by now, including as an executive producer on the crime drama “Snowfall.” Sam, you have mostly stuck to movies. What made TV the right medium to tell the story of Ptolemy?MOSLEY Television has the potential to do some amazing things that are good for drama, good for actors, and good for an audience to be able to understand and identify with characters who have real arcs of change. We’re coming up on our final season of “Snowfall,” and we’re going to get to see how things are going to work out or fall apart. That’s what’s been fun.JACKSON There’s a great satisfaction for me to have a character development that allows an audience to go back and say, “OK, that’s where he started. Oh, that’s why he’s this guy. Oh, that’s why he treats women this way.” We watched movies for a very long time before we realized something like “Roots” could come along and be a mini-series. All of a sudden, boom, there’s “Roots,” and you go, “[expletive], that’s the way to tell the story.”The novel takes place in Los Angeles, but the series takes place in Atlanta. Why the move?JACKSON Georgia has better tax breaks.MOSLEY Yes, it wasn’t feasible to do it in L.A. First, we were going to go to Atlanta and try to make Atlanta look like L.A. But Atlanta doesn’t look like L.A.JACKSON There’s not one palm tree in Atlanta.Did setting the series in Atlanta add anything thematically?JACKSON There are certain elements of Atlanta that are historically indigenous to telling a story like this. Anybody who’s lived in any place that’s full of Black people will recognize this. How many white people are in this story? There’s the doctor, and the nurse. A lot of people are going to look at this and go, “Where are the white people?” You didn’t encounter them unless you had to when I was growing up in the South. In Atlanta, they had Black insurance companies, they had Black newspapers. Everything you needed, you could get in the Black community. You didn’t have to go outside of it.MOSLEY I really do think that all of those things are trace elements that impacted the making of the series, with the actors and the crew just being in Atlanta. We would tell the story anywhere we were, but making it in Atlanta was in itself an experience, and that experience had to impart some of its history to the series.Let’s talk a little about the collaboration between you two. Walter, why was it important to have Sam onboard for this?MOSLEY Sam is a great actor, but that’s just a very small part of the answer to your question. I wrote the book 13 years ago. Sam knew the book better than I did. He’d say, “No, no. Don’t you remember? You did this,” and I’d say, “Oh, yeah. OK.” He’s also an executive producer, and his commitment to the book and getting it made is why we got it made. When I was shopping it, people would say, “Sam Jackson doesn’t do television.” Well you’re right, but he’s going to do this. His commitment to it, his talent in doing it, his willingness to play a very different kind of role than he usually does and to make that work so beautifully — it was really great.Sam, what is it about Walter’s work that pulls you in?JACKSON Walter is a very feet-on-the-ground kind of guy that understands and knows his characters and knows the environment that those characters are in. Environment is very important when you’re a reader. I read a lot, two or three books at a time. Descriptions and character development are very important things, no matter what, and Walter has a command of those things that a lot of writers don’t. I read bad novels along with good ones, but I always know that I’m going to get something very satisfying when I’m reading a Walter Mosley book. More

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    LeBron Fandom, and the Making of a Friendship in ‘King James’

    Rajiv Joseph’s new play, which chronicles the bond between two LeBron James fans over 12 years, is having its world premiere at Steppenwolf in Chicago.CHICAGO — When the actor Glenn Davis talks about his new play, “King James,” he gets some variation on this question: “So, are you playing LeBron James?”Not quite.“I’m 5-10,” Davis said, laughing. “He’s 6-9.”And there’s also this: James, the basketball superstar who broke hearts in Cleveland when he left to play for Miami 12 years ago, is not the protagonist of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James.” Rather, the play, which is having its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theater Company here, tracks the friendship between two young men in Cleveland, Shawn (played by Davis) and Matt (Chris Perfetti of “Abbott Elementary”), over a dozen years.Told in four quarters that span James’s rookie season to his championship season with Cleveland in 2016, “King James,” directed by Kenny Leon, explores how fandom can create a lifelong connection between two people who otherwise have little in common.“Rajiv’s first draft had a lot of basketball in it,” said Davis, 40, a longtime friend of Joseph’s and for whom the role of Shawn was written. “But as each new draft came in, the specifics about basketball began to disappear because Rajiv wanted to make sure this play was about friendship.”“Sometimes a love of the game is the only way people who have difficulty expressing their feelings are able to articulate them,” said Rajiv Joseph, the playwright.Lyndon French for The New York TimesKenny Leon is directing his first Steppenwolf production, and said he’s cherishing the opportunity to help develop Joseph’s work.Lyndon French for The New York TimesThe play, which is in previews and will open March 13, was originally slated for Steppenwolf’s 2019-20 season before the pandemic forced its postponement. It now arrives at the same time as several basketball-themed TV projects, including Adam McKay’s HBO mini-series “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,” about the team led by Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the 1980s, and the upcoming Apple TV+ documentary mini-series “They Call Me Magic,” about Johnson’s life on and off the court.In “King James,” Joseph uses James’s career as a window to examine the emotional nature of fandom, and how it can facilitate relationships and increased openness among people, particularly young men.“At least in the sort of heteronormative world in which I grew up, it was a struggle for young American men to communicate emotion,” Joseph, 47, said over coffee at Steppenwolf’s Front Bar before a recent rehearsal. “Sometimes a love of the game is the only way people who have difficulty expressing their feelings are able to articulate them.”Growing up in Cleveland in the 1980s and ’90s, Joseph was surrounded by passionate sports fans.“We were a Cleveland family — we watched the Cavs, we watched the Indians, we watched the Browns,” he said. “And all of our moods fluctuated accordingly.”In the play, LeBron James’s infamous “Decision” announcement looms large for two fans of the Cavaliers.Lyndon French for The New York TimesHe began writing “King James” in the summer of 2017, a year after James had led the Cavaliers to the championship, making them the first Cleveland team to win a major championship in 52 years. He drew from his experience as a Cleveland native inundated with the reactions of friends and family to “The Decision” — a live prime-time special in 2010 in which James, a free agent after seven seasons with the Cavaliers, announced he was leaving his hometown team to “take my talents to South Beach,” as James infamously put it.“I thought this would be an interesting way of exploring my own relationship with LeBron,” said Joseph, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2010 for his play “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.” (He previously collaborated with Davis on that production, which ran on Broadway in 2011.) “This play is a sort of alchemy of stories I’ve heard, conversations I’ve had with people and the general sense of being a young person in Cleveland Heights and those heightened emotions that come out when you start arguing about sports.”The cast and creative team of “King James” had widely varying basketball knowledge — and loyalties. Davis, who was a high school basketball player in the Chicago area but gave up the sport to pursue a theater career, is a lifelong Bulls fan. Leon, who grew up in Florida, has been a Los Angeles Lakers fan for 35 years. Perfetti, 33, who is from upstate New York, grew up in a home “where there was always some sports game on television,” but he didn’t begin following basketball seriously until about six months ago.They watched James’s announcement together — which was Perfetti’s first time seeing it. But, for Joseph and Davis, the special was a reminder of a milestone moment in the basketball world, one in which every fan remembers where they were and what they were doing when they found out.“It was traumatic,” Joseph said. “But when you watch LeBron from then, you realize he was such a different person than he is now — like we all are. If any of us look back at when we were 25, I bet we’d kind of wince at some of the things we did and said.”“Rajiv reminds me of August,” Leon (above left, with Joseph) said, referring to August Wilson. “Even if I’m hating a moment, he can embrace that and go down the hall and rewrite it.”Lyndon French for The New York TimesThis is Leon’s first time directing at the Steppenwolf Theater. When he was contacted last October, Leon, a Tony-winning director whose most recent Broadway production was “A Soldier’s Play” in 2020, already had about a half-dozen projects in the works, including upcoming Broadway productions of Adrienne Kennedy’s “The Ohio State Murders,” starring Audra McDonald, and a revival of “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death,” Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 musical. (Leon, 66, is also the co-founder and artistic director emeritus of True Colors Theater Company, which is based in Atlanta.)But he said he jumped at the chance to oversee the production after its previous director, Anna D. Shapiro, resigned as the Steppenwolf’s artistic director in August. (Davis and Audrey Francis, both Steppenwolf ensemble members, replaced Shapiro as artistic directors.)“You don’t get a lot of opportunities to work with a living playwright on a new play that you think is beautiful and will have a great life,” Leon said as he nursed a cocktail after a rehearsal late last month. “The last time was when I worked with August Wilson on his last play, “Radio Golf,” leading up to the Broadway production [which opened in 2007].”The value of having Joseph in the room for rehearsals, Leon said, was that if he didn’t understand a character’s motivations for doing something, he could ask.“A lot of Rajiv reminds me of August,” Leon said. “I can tell him what I feel. Even if I’m hating a moment, he can embrace that and go down the hall and rewrite it.”And there were plenty of nips, tweaks and tucks to the script in the month leading up to the first performance. It was especially helpful, Joseph said, to have Perfetti’s perspective as an N.B.A. outsider in a play with some deeply insider references. (The Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s use of Comic Sans font in his letter to Cleveland fans after James’s departure, in which he lambasted James for his “disloyalty,” gets a shout.)“There’s lots of lines in the play where he was like, ‘Why am I saying this?’,” Joseph said of Perfetti. “And some of those lines were cut because of that.”“King James” plays out in four quarters, from LeBron James’s rookie year to his championship season with Cleveland in 2016. After Chicago, the play will have a run in Los Angeles.Lyndon French for The New York TimesBut audience members don’t need to be basketball fans to understand the larger points. The play’s first quarter, for instance, ends with Matt and Shawn — who to that point had been strangers — making plans to attend a season of Cavaliers games together. The action then picks up six and a half years later, when the two men are best friends.“With my best friend, the first and second quarter in our relationship feels like it went by that quickly,” Davis said. “That’s how it happens, you know?”Though Matt is white and Shawn is Black, Joseph decided not to make race a focal point of the show — at least, not right away. It eventually factors into their reactions to James’s return to Cleveland in the third quarter, but Joseph said that, having grown up in the diverse suburb of Cleveland Heights — where the play takes place — it “just made sense to me, before I even knew what the play would be about, that it would be a Black guy and a white guy.”“I didn’t anticipate any kind of racial tension in the play,” he said. “But the more I thought about what I was writing about, it just comes out and you allow for the story that wants to be told.”Following its five-week run here, “King James,” commissioned by Steppenwolf and the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles, will transfer to the Mark Taper Forum there in June, with Davis and Perfetti reprising their roles, and Leon again as director. Both Leon and Joseph are hoping for an eventual Broadway transfer, too.It will be special, everyone involved agrees, to present the show in the city where James currently plays. But Leon said it’s important to remember that “80 percent of the audience will be the same,” referring to the audience members who will not be passionate fans of the local team. “We’re going to try to strike those universal chords,” he said. “That’s what makes the play work. Somebody has to be able to say ‘Oh, that’s how I treat my friend’ or ‘That’s how it was when I didn’t see my mother for 10 years.’”Joseph, who has never met James, said he would be “thrilled” if James were to see the show during its Los Angeles run, which will coincide with the N.B.A. finals.“But, on the other hand, I hope he can’t come because he’s still playing,” he said. More

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    Dominique Morisseau Asks: ‘What Does Freedom Look Like Now?’

    Her new play, “Confederates,” straddles two eras, exploring what liberation means to a present-day academic and an enslaved woman in the 1860s.In 2016, Penumbra Theater and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned Dominique Morisseau to write a play as part of the American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle. The remit: to create a work about the Black experience of the Civil War.Morisseau had one question: “What were the Black women doing?”“Confederates,” her new play at the Signature Theater, is one answer. Toggling between the present day and the 1860s, the play — now in previews, with a premiere on March 27 — follows Sandra, a superstar academic played by Michelle Wilson, and Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd), an enslaved woman who spies for the Union Army. While the title evokes the Confederacy, it also teases a bond between the two women.“This is what it means to be at this institution,” Sandra says. “To know deep in your core that there will never be justice for you here.”From left: Andrea Patterson, Kristolyn Lloyd and Elijah Jones in “Confederates,” opening March 27 at the Signature Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara echoes her: “This what it means to be in a peculiar institution. Under its boot, everybody yo’ enemy.”Even as “Confederates” evokes dramatic works as varied as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s postmodern drama “An Octoroon,” Adrienne Kennedy’s devastating tragedy “The Ohio State Murders” and David Mamet’s academic two-hander “Oleanna,” Morisseau renders each scene in her distinctive empathetic, tragicomic style.Rather than focusing on oppression, the play explores Black women’s agency and the different forms that liberation can take from one era to the next.“Getting free in the past, it’s just getting free,” Morisseau said. “Like, you’re literally in bondage. Getting free in the present is a very different thing. What does freedom look like now?”Morisseau was speaking from an apartment in Midtown Manhattan, near both the Signature and Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater, where her play “Skeleton Crew,” part of a trilogy of works set in her native Detroit, recently wrapped. Her 15-month-old son napped in the next room.During a 90-minute video call, she discussed “Confederates,” which will also be presented at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in August, as well as microaggressions, macroaggressions and what empowerment looks like for her. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.In “Confederates,” Sandra and Sara are living about 160 years apart. What joins them?They’re united in the history of Black women fighting for freedom. They’re united in being the most socially expendable.Sandra, the professor, is subject to frequent microaggressions. For Sara, the enslaved woman, the danger is physical and more overt. Do you understand these threats as related?The kind of racism that Sara experiences — you could be hanged, you could be dragged, you could be murdered — that overt racism is not most people’s experience of racism. There is the kind of racism that breaks the body, that attacks the body. Then there’s the other kind that kills the spirit. The one I engage with the most often is the latter. But the micro always leads to the macro. Microaggressions lead into aggressive actions.Eventually, all of these are harmful and deadly.In your research, did you find many examples of Black women spying for the Union?I did not find lots of examples. I would find little pieces. Those kinds of stories are under-told. But they tell me that we were not passive. We were never passive.Brandon J. Dirden and Phylicia Rashad in Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew,” whose run just ended at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou have written plays set in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the ’00s. Did you know that you would eventually write about the 1860s?I never thought about it, to be honest. When I was approached to specifically write about this era, I said to myself, I don’t want to just write about slavery. That’s not what I’m interested in. I am, however, interested in Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, the phrase coined by Dr. Joy DeGruy, which is the impact of being descendants of the enslaved and the traumas that have happened since, without treatment or healing.When you accepted the commission, were there certain stories or stereotypes that you wanted to avoid?I didn’t want to show defeat or agreement with the enslaved culture. There is no agreement.As an undergraduate, did you experience institutional racism?My experience at school taught me that no one’s here to protect me. There’s no agency for me here. I’m going to have to do for me in school, if I want to not be squashed, if I want to see myself as an artist.Theater can also be a racist space. I remember an essay you wrote in 2015 about white privilege, with the headline: “Why I Almost Slapped a Fellow Theater Patron, and What That Says About Our Theaters.” Has theater changed since then?I have actively worked to shift that culture at least around my own work. I have a Playwright’s Rules of Engagement insert that I put inside the program of every show that I do. Because I was policed for my own laughter. [The insert includes instructions such as, “You are allowed to laugh audibly” and “This can be church for some of us, and testifying is allowed.”]I have seen attempts to diversify boards, to have a wider outreach to donors. Then there’s the bottom-up approach: I would like to see more artists taking more agency over themselves and their art. There’s a culture of silence that has been perpetuated. There’s this feeling of expendability that artists get. Like, you cannot speak up, because you will then not have jobs anymore. And that’s crazy.“There are young artists looking at me, watching me. I’m trying to bring up those artists,” Morisseau said, referring to efforts she’s made to counter harmful behavior in the industry.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesLate last year, you spoke up. You pulled your play “Paradise Blue” from the Geffen Playhouse, saying that Black women who worked on the show had been “verbally abused and diminished.” What empowered you to do that?I’ve always been an activist. I just inherently have not ever been OK with things that aren’t right. What made me feel even more empowered in this moment is that I am now visible. And there are young artists looking at me, watching me. I’m trying to bring up those artists. So there is not a chance in hell that I can watch harmful behavior happen and be unaccountable. I will not write about Black women being harmed and learning to take agency for themselves — that’s what “Paradise Blue” is about — I’m not going to have that onstage and the opposite happening for them offstage.I’m not trying to create a culture of people pulling their plays. This is one of the hardest decisions you should have to make as a playwright. It was brutal. It was exhausting for me. I never want to have to do that again.Before the pandemic you made your Broadway debut, writing the book for “Ain’t Too Proud.” Did that change anything for you?“Ain’t Too Proud” happened, a MacArthur happened, quite a few things happened, right at the same time. It’s brought more faith about me as an artist from institutions. I don’t know if I’m a safe bet. I don’t think I’m a safe bet. But I’m worthy of a bet in general. I’m enough of an interesting voice. I’m definitely asked to write more musicals.And what did it mean to have “Skeleton Crew” move to Broadway?With Broadway comes more resources behind your work. I remember when I first saw “Ain’t Too Proud” staged, I was like, everybody deserves all those resources behind their imaginations, just once in their life. To be able to get it twice in my life is amazing.“Skeleton Crew” will always be one of my favorites because I know where it came from. I know where I was when I wrote it and I know who I wrote it for. The biggest thing for me, as a Detroiter, is to make Detroit visible. We had Detroit night on Broadway. It was like a family reunion up in there. It was the most Detroit behavior I’ve ever seen on Broadway. It was epic. More

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    ‘This Space Between Us’ Review: A Do-Gooder Faces a Chorus of Resistance

    Peter Gil-Sheridan’s comedy for Keen Company raises a range of topical issues but fails to cover new ground.Liberals are often criticized for their hand-wringing and failure to walk the walk. But the progressive lawyer at the center of Peter Gil-Sheridan’s “This Space Between Us” intends to lead a life of purpose. “Maybe we could all stand to feel a little more guilty,” he says, without telling us exactly why.His career move from cushy corporate job to international aid work, which rattles his loved ones, could be a compelling, if familiar, indictment of modern-day complacency. But there is neither urgency nor bite in the fallout of his decision, which the playwright uses as a jumping-off point for tired topical debates that rarely get off the ground.“This Space Between Us,” an occasionally amusing but stalled new comedy that opened on Wednesday night at Theater Row, begins, ironically enough, at the races, where Jamie (Ryan Garbayo) delivers the news to his family. His dad (Anthony Ruiz), a conservative Cuban immigrant whose small business recently went bankrupt, doesn’t get how Jamie could give up easy money. Neither does his mom (Joyce Cohen), who says that if they fall on hard times she and her husband may have to work at Home Depot to get by without his help. His boyfriend, Ted (Tommy Heleringer), and his best friend Gillian (Alex Chester) selfishly don’t want to lose him when he is ultimately relocated to Nairobi. His aunt Pat (Glynis Bell), both supportive and wise, tells him to go with God (she’s a nun).Subsequent scenes offer different contexts for clashing opinions, mostly cross-generational, about what people are allowed to say these days and why others might be offended. The play’s title largely seems to refer to the gap in understanding that widens as history barrels forward and people scramble to keep up.“I’m from another time,” Jamie’s father says as he tinkers with his broken watch. “Why doesn’t anyone know how to laugh anymore?”Various points of view collide but these moments fail to generate tension or momentum. Ted is hospitalized with a bad cold, seemingly for the sake of revealing to Jamie’s family that Ted is H.I.V. positive, and explaining what it means that his viral load is undetectable. Jamie and Gillian, who are both mixed race, briefly argue about what it means to pass as white but not identify with white culture. Sister Pat is made to answer for the homophobia of the Roman Catholic Church.All the while, Jamie’s motivation for changing careers doesn’t seem to get much deeper than his vague desire to do good. He even goes as far as to ask, in so many words, how anyone could throw a party when there are people starving in Africa, the continent often serving here as a stand-in for global misfortunes.This Keen Company production, directed by its artistic director, Jonathan Silverstein, is pleasantly modest but almost too straightforward. Though the furniture changes, one hulking constant is a racetrack scoreboard that spans the back of the stage, limiting an already tight playing space with a too obvious metaphor. (The set design is by Steven Kemp.) Between scenes, chyrons on the scoreboard display an assortment of headlines — a natural disaster in Bangladesh, racist remarks from Mitch McConnell — that contribute to the generalized atmosphere of bad news.The theater sporadically goes dark as Jamie is spotlighted mid-action, looking out at the audience to the sound of a heart beating (lighting design is by Daisy Long, sound by Luqman Brown). It’s a play for drama and connection, for the audience to identify with someone who’s voiced a general dissatisfaction with the status quo.But real-world problems, overwhelming as they may be, have stakes, specificity and individual flavor. Bridging the space between us takes not just naming, but inhabiting them.This Space Between UsThrough April 2 at Theater Row, Manhattan; bfany.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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    ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Recap: Q Is the Worst Friend Ever

    Everyone’s favorite omnipotent being is back to reveal yet another alternate universe. But this time, he’s not giving out an education.Season 2, Episode 2: ‘Penance’“Show them a world of their own making and they ask you what you’ve done,” John de Lancie’s Q asks Jean-Luc Picard at the top of the second episode of this season’s “Picard.”This has been the modus operandi of our favorite omnipotent being who has long toyed with Picard as his guinea pig. Q causes a significant disruption, but it’s mostly to teach pitiful humans a stern lesson and get some yuks while doing it. This version of Q seems angrier — even slapping Picard in the face once, which seems a bit out of character, but this is Gritty Trek. (Recall that when Q appears in “Deep Space Nine,” Captain Sisko punches him in the face, which shocks Q, because he can’t conceive of one of his playthings turning to violence.)Q says that this time, he’s not giving out an education.“This is not a lesson,” Q barks. “It’s a penance.”A quick digression: Picard tells Q that he’s too old for his, you know, stuff. There’s a lingering issue from the first season of “Picard” that bothers me. It’s that Picard isn’t actually too old for anything. He’s no longer human. You might remember that Picard died last season! Then he woke up as some sort of aging synthetic being. This is the danger in messing with audience expectations with a fake death. There’s always a technological out for Picard, so he’s never really in any danger. That precedent the show has set for itself will affect the dramatic tension going forward.That doesn’t mean it can’t work. Spock died in “Wrath of Khan” and was brought back to life in the next movie. He remained a compelling character for several more films.In this case, Q places Picard and the rest of his friends in what initially appears to be a Mirror Universe, but turns out to be an altered reality. Several “Trek” franchises have taken on the Mirror Universe, but Picard’s “Next Generation” was never one of them.It’s not, however, the first time Q has revealed an alternate reality to Picard. In the “Next Generation” episode “Tapestry,” Q shows Picard that if a younger version of him hadn’t taken risks, he would have been unsatisfied for the rest of his life. There was also the series finale of “The Next Generation,” where Q goads Picard into creating an anomaly across several different timelines as part of the trial of humanity. Someone please get Q a job or a show to binge watch, for the galaxy’s sake.The stakes in this reality, though, are much higher. Q shows Picard a world in which the Federation were bloodthirsty conquerors. There’s even a Museum of Conquest! We see the remains of some classic “Trek” characters, like Gul Dukat, General Martok and Sarek — all apparently murdered by a Confederation force led by Picard, who wants a “pure” world according a recording of a speech. Subtle!“This is the only life you understand,” Q tells Picard. But maybe Q is crankier than usual because, as Picard points out, he’s not well.It’s not clear what exactly Q is trying to show Picard, because Picard has never been particularly violent. For the most part, he’s always tried to find peaceful solutions. But “Trek” has never shied away from politics. The parallels between white nationalists who have been in the news in the past few years and what Evil Picard describes is apparent. Separately, it hardly seems incidental that the Eradication Day rally near the end of the episode recalls rallies led by former president Donald J. Trump, complete with the crowd chanting Picard’s name.Seven of Nine is married and the leader of the Confederation. (Hey, at least she got a promotion.) Rios is a colonel. Elnor is a rebel. Raffi is somewhere in between. Jurati runs the “eradication” process — and has a digital cat named after Data’s, Spot. She deduces that there’s been a corruption in the timeline. One wonders if Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan will make another appearance this season, since Guinan and Q have their own history.Elnor’s appearance gave me a chuckle because when he appears in the new reality, he is 100 percent on board with the uprising, despite not knowing anything about it or why he is there to begin with. This pretty much fits with his character. He has a keen moral sense, regardless of how much information he has.The Borg Queen made the trip, too. She tells Picard that one single decision made in 2024 had lasting consequences for the entire galaxy. (I wonder if there’s something happening in our 2024 that the show is alluding to!) Incidentally, Q is the entire reason that the Enterprise ever encountered the Borg to begin with, so thanks for that, man.A weird moment comes when Picard is deducing ways to go back in time and mentions that Kirk’s Enterprise did it “on more than one occasion.” Why didn’t he mention that his own Enterprise went back in time in “First Contact,” the best “Next Generation” movie?The occasional head-scratcher aside, the first two chapters of this season have been ambitious and compelling. It’s good to see Picard can still handle a phaser. The episode ends with Seven of Nine’s faux husband discovering that Picard’s merry band is too merry for this timeline. He fell in love with Seven’s cruelty, not her compassion! His idea of date night is genocide, which must’ve made for an interesting Bumble profile.’ More