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    Mitchell Ryan, Who Played the Villain in ‘Lethal Weapon,’ Dies at 88

    Mr. Ryan, who appeared in the TV series “Dark Shadows,” played a brutal businessman in “Santa Barbara” and a wealthy father in the sitcom “Dharma & Greg.”Mitchell Ryan, an actor known for his role in the gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows” and who played a heroin-dealing retired general in the action movie “Lethal Weapon,” died at his home in Los Angeles on Friday. He was 88.The cause was heart failure, Ro Diamond, who represented Mr. Ryan for more than 40 years, said on Saturday.With his square jawline and slicked-back hair, Mr. Ryan entertained moviegoers and television fans in a career that spanned more than 50 years, beginning with an uncredited part in the movie “Thunder Road” (1958).His breakout performance came in 1966 when he landed a role in “Dark Shadows,” a popular soap opera about the adventurous lives of the affluent Collins family. Set in the fictional town of Collinsport, Maine, the family experiences supernatural events and are tormented by strange beings, such as ghosts, witches and zombies.Mr. Ryan played Burke Devlin, an ex-convict who returns to Collinsport and seeks revenge on the family.“It was a wonderfully written Gothic kind of melodrama and Burke was this marvelous, mysterious character,” Mr. Ryan recalled decades later in an interview. “And actually, there wasn’t a whole lot to do with it except bring a lot of my passion to it and just allow it to come out.”He was fired from the show because of his alcoholism.Mr. Ryan, second from left, with Joan Bennett, left, and Louis Edmonds, second from right, in “Dark Shadows” in 1966.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesHe recalled in his memoir, “Fall of a Sparrow,” how grateful he was to have overcome his struggles with sobriety. “I’m blessed that, 30 years a drunk, I’ve managed to live a working actor’s life to be envied,” he wrote.He added that “sober for the next 30 years, I’m told I’ve come out of it all a good and a useful human being.”Another major role came in 1987, when he played an antagonist in “Lethal Weapon,” which starred Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Mr. Ryan recalled in an interview that people involved with the film initially believed it was destined to flop.“It was a total scary mess for everybody,” he said, noting that the script was constantly being rewritten. “Nobody knew what was going on.”Mr. Ryan played a retired general-turned-heroin smuggler who delivers commands in a calm and collected cadence but is inclined to raging outbursts.The film would gross more than $100 million worldwide at the box office.“We were all absolutely totally shocked and dumbfounded when it turned out to be an enormous hit,” Mr. Ryan said.He joked that the series of films that followed made everybody richer, except him because his character, Gen. Peter McAllister, was in a vehicle that was struck by a bus. “Poor Mitch, I got killed,” he said.Mr. Ryan continued to play parts in more than two dozen television series but found that his ego was getting inflated. He wrote on his website that “the more successful I became, the easier it was to take credit for what ‘I’ accomplished.”Mr. Ryan, left, star of Arthur Miller’s play “The Price,” with Lee Marvin, right, and Mr. Marvin’s wife, Pamela, backstage at the Playhouse Theater in New York in 1979.Dan Grossi/Associated PressIt was a behavior that he believed would be “deadly in the long run and not in accordance with reality,” he wrote.Still, in interviews, he would frequently say that he was grateful for his long acting career, which, as a child, seemed unlikely.Mitchell Ryan was born on Jan. 11, 1934, in Cincinnati and raised in Louisville, Ky., by his mother, who was a writer, and his father, who was a salesman. Information about survivors was not immediately available on Saturday.He said that, as a boy, he would often invent people he could be one day and had no idea that he was “acting a role, as it was all real to me.”He served in the U.S. Navy and then pursued work in theater. “I can’t count the number of plays I have done, but it could easily be over one hundred,” he wrote.For 15 years, he acted in a play almost every night in road shows, on Broadway and Off Broadway. Even while working on “Dark Shadows,” he was still performing plays at night after leaving the television set, which, he said, was “not a very good idea.”In 1989, he played Anthony Tonell, a brutal businessman, in “Santa Barbara,” a television series about several wealthy families in California. From 1997 to 2002, he portrayed Edward Montgomery, a wealthy and eccentric father, in the sitcom “Dharma & Greg.”In the preface of his memoir, Mr. Ryan wrote: “A young man became an actor because someone thought he had the right look for a part. A pleasing voice. And he wasn’t doing something else just then.”“And he stayed an actor,” he added, “because, remarkably, he was good at it.” More

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    Actress Morena Baccarin Cooks a Brazilian Stew

    The actress stars in the NBC thriller, “The Endgame.”“If I take these home to my kids and they don’t like them, I’m going to kill them,” the actress Morena Baccarin said.This was on a sopping morning at Rio Supermarket, a Brazilian grocery in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens. Ms. Baccarin, an Emmy-nominated actress, moved from Rio to New York City at 10. She still craves the foods of her childhood, like coxinhas, chicken and potato croquettes, formed into a golden-brown kiss. She placed two orders — one for her, one for her children — in rapid Portuguese and then bit into a croquette, somehow managing not to smear her lipstick.“It’s not part of my diet, but I can’t not eat these,” she said. “It’s deep fried and it’s heaven.”Ms. Baccarin, 42, had come to Rio Market on a recent Friday at the suggestion of two of her cousins, the same cousins who had given her the flamingo pink earrings she wore. She had an afternoon shoot for “The Endgame,” the thriller series that recently premiered on NBC. But she hoped to have just enough time to shop for ingredients and then rush home to make moqueca, a Brazilian fish stew, for her three children: an 8-year-old son, whom she co-parents with her first husband, the producer Austin Chick, and a 5-year-old daughter and 11-month-old son with her current husband, her “Gotham” co-star Ben McKenzie.Ms. Baccarin in a scene from “The Endgame,” a TV thriller in which plays an international arms dealer.Virginia Sherwood/NBCShe grabbed a basket and began to fill it with frozen cheese bread, bay leaves, herbal tea and a carton of brigadeiros, Brazilian sweets made from condensed milk, cocoa powder and butter.“The kids will forgive me for working all day if I bring that home,” she said, striding through the aisles in a camel-hair coat. Her manner was energetic, efficient, self-effacing. Her hair hung like a skein of silk, immune to humidity.Ms. Baccarin started acting early — her mother had been an actress in Rio, her father a journalist at Globo. “I love hiding in character,” she said. “I mean, obviously, it’s me, but I like to pretend that it’s not. I tell myself that I’m creating this whole new person.”So even as she struggled to assimilate to Manhattan life, she kept at it, honing her craft first at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, and then at the Juilliard School. She never felt that she fit in there.“I was not a favorite,” she said. “I had a lot of attitude.” Juilliard taught her technique, stamina, survival, but not how to embrace her strengths or her ethnicity. After graduating, she thought she would do classical theater; Hollywood called instead. “I felt like I was letting everybody down,” she said.She had a breakout role as a courtesan in Joss Whedon’s short-lived space Western “Firefly.” (She did not experience abuse from Mr. Whedon, but she does not dispute that others may have.) On set she discovered that her training helped her to handle elevated, stylized text and make it sound natural, which probably explains why she has found her way to so many superhero projects including “Gotham,” “Deadpool,” and “Justice League Unlimited.” Her work on the Showtime thriller “Homeland” earned her an Emmy nomination.Her character in “The Endgame,” an arms dealer and criminal mastermind named Elena Federova, has no superpowers. She doesn’t need them. “What’s really fun about this character is I just get to mess with people constantly and poke at their weak spots,” Ms. Baccarin said. She also gets to do stunts. In heels.That day she wore sensible ankle boots, which clacked against the ground as she added palm oil to her basket, then hot sauce for her husband. She spotted a 12-pack of soda flavored with guaraná berries. “It’s the best. So sweet,” she said. She upgraded her basket to a cart.Ms. Baccarin wore googles as she chopped an onion at home for a traditional Brazilian stew.Shina Peng for The New York TimesAfter adding coconut milk, herbal tea, hearts of palm, biscuits, juice, cheese and a pair of Havaianas flip flops for her nanny, she paid, toting her haul to a waiting SUV. Half an hour later it delivered her to her South Brooklyn kitchen, in the basement of a brownstone.Growing up, Ms. Baccarin rarely cooked. “My mom always swore that I would never cook for any man,” she said. But as a working actress, she learned to cook for herself and her friends. “It feels like the most like caretaking and loving stuff you can do,” she said.She learned some Brazilian dishes from her cousins, some from cookbooks. Her husband, despite having grown up in Texas, taught her a few more.After removing her coat, she laid out the ingredients and then snapped on a pair of swimming goggles as she briskly chopped an onion, which she slid into bubbling palm oil. Minced garlic followed, then sliced bell peppers, then leeks, a last-minute substitute for lemongrass. “I’m doing it a little bit differently,” she said.From the refrigerator she took a packet of fish and another of shrimp, which her husband had bought that morning. The shells were still on the shrimp. “Guys never get it right, but he’s so sweet I can’t complain,” she said. The shrimp, still unshelled, went in too, along with a bottle of coconut milk, a squeezed lemon, cilantro and salt.“And bay leaves,” she said. “I’m a rebel.”She stirred the soup, blew on it, tasted it. She added more salt and more cilantro and tasted it again. Then she took a sip from a freshly chilled guaraná soda.“I’m such the quintessential Brazilian right now,” she said. More

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    Andrei Belgrader, Director Who Influenced Future Stars, Dies at 75

    His Yale Rep and American Repertory Theater productions included early work by Cherry Jones, Mark Linn-Baker and more, and he directed starry Off Broadway shows.Andrei Belgrader, who directed numerous high-profile stage productions off Broadway and in regional theaters and was an important influence in the careers of John Turturro, Cherry Jones, Tony Shalhoub and other respected actors, died on Feb. 22 in Los Angeles. He was 75.His wife, Caroline Hall, said the cause was lung cancer.Mr. Belgrader, who emigrated from his native Romania in the 1970s after chafing at the artistic censorship there, caught the eye of Robert Brustein, founder of the Yale Repertory Theater, who by the end of the 1970s had him directing there. When Mr. Brustein, who had also been dean of the Yale School of Drama, moved to Harvard University and founded the American Repertory Theater there in 1980, Mr. Belgrader began directing productions there as well.Both A.R.T. and Yale Rep were proving grounds for young actors, and Mr. Belgrader challenged them in ways that had a lasting effect.“He would make odd but incredibly imaginative requests of you as an actor and would be delighted when you could fulfill these requests,” Mark Linn-Baker, who was Touchstone in Mr. Belgrader’s 1979 “As You Like It” at Yale Rep while still a student at the Yale drama school, said by email.Four years later Mr. Linn-Baker, who would soon find television fame on the long-running ABC series “Perfect Strangers,” played Vladimir, one of the leads (John Bottoms was Estragon, the other of Beckett’s famous tramps), in “Waiting for Godot” at A.R.T. directed by Mr. Belgrader. Kevin Kelly of The Boston Globe called the production “a perfect Beckettian vaudeville act on the precipitous edge of the void.” Also in that production, in the supporting role of Pozzo, was Mr. Shalhoub, now an Emmy and Tony Award winner.“One of his great skills was bringing people out of their comfort zones in terms of their performances,” Mr. Shalhoub, who two decades later would recruit Mr. Belgrader to direct episodes of his hit TV series, “Monk,” said in a phone interview. “He had a way of instilling courage and moments of abandon.”Mr. Belgrader, who was partial to Beckett, revisited “Godot” in 1998 at Classic Stage Company in Manhattan, with Mr. Shalhoub elevated to the role of Vladimir and playing opposite Mr. Turturro as Estragon, and Christopher Lloyd as Pozzo. Mr. Turturro, who had studied under Mr. Belgrader decades earlier at Yale, worked frequently with him over the years, including in an acclaimed staging of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at Classic Stage in 2011. Ben Brantley of The New York Times named it one of the 10 best productions of the year. “Andrei Belgrader’s funny, sad and freshly conceived interpretation opened the walls between Chekhov’s then and our now,” he wrote.Mr. Turturro, in a phone interview, said Mr. Belgrader excelled at helping actors mine playwrights like Beckett and Chekhov for the deepest meanings and emotions in their work. The key, he said, was that he gave the actors time to make the discoveries.“I remember many times in rehearsals you would think, ‘This is terrible,’ and he would just be very, very patient,” Mr. Turturro said.It was something Mr. Turturro experienced in 2008 in a Belgrader-directed production of Beckett’s “Endgame” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in which the character he played, Hamm, has a particularly difficult monologue.“He worked me to death in that monologue,” Mr. Turturro said. “He wasn’t unsatisfied, but he knew you could go further, and then one day you did.”John Turturro and Dianne Wiest in Mr. Belgrader’s 2011 staging of “The Cherry Orchard,” which Ben Brantley of The Times called one of the best productions of the year.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAndrei Belgrader was born on March 31, 1946, in Oravita, Romania. His father, Tiberiu, was an economist, and his mother, Magdalena (Gross) Belgrader, was a translator.He began training to be an engineer but didn’t like it and instead gained entry to the Institute of Theater and Film in Bucharest, where he began directing.“In Romania, theater was more important, I think, than in the West,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. “It was really the only form where, in a hidden way, things could be discussed.”Well, up to a point. Romania was under Communist rule, and Mr. Belgrader had his first run-ins with censors while still a student.“They banned almost everything, even Romanian comedies,” he said. “Our trick was to do classical plays, because it was hard to say Shakespeare was anti-Communist.”But battles with censors eventually wore him down, and in the late 1970s he left the country. Ms. Hall said he spent time in a refugee camp in Greece and eventually, with the help of a charity, was able to come to New York, where he stayed with other Romanians and drove a cab to improve his sparse English.“Cabbies in New York don’t speak English and they don’t know where they’re going,” he told The Chronicle. “I was one of them.”Somehow he managed to mount two small theater productions, Buchner’s “Woyzeck” and Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida.” The second is the one that caught Mr. Brustein’s eye.Mr. Belgrader was still not particularly fluent when he began directing at Yale Rep.“It was very peculiar,” Thomas Derrah, who was in the cast of the 1979 “As You Like It” with Mr. Linn-Baker, told The Globe in 1998. “He was trying to communicate what he wanted me to do, and there wasn’t a whole lot of English in there.”A year later, at A.R.T. in Cambridge, he mounted another production of the same play and essentially started the career of Ms. Jones, who had only recently graduated from the drama program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh when she was cast as Rosalind.“In June 1980 I was the last audition of the last day of auditions for Andrei’s ‘As You Like It’ at the A.R.T.,” Ms. Jones, now a multiple Emmy and Tony Award winner, said by email. “Andrei was unlike any director or man I’d ever seen. And with an accent I’d never heard. In an instant he transformed the trajectory of my life.”Stanley Tucci, Elaine Stritch, Oliver Platt, Dianne Wiest and Marisa Tomei are also on the long list of actors directed by Mr. Belgrader over the years. When he wasn’t directing, he was teaching — at Yale, Juilliard, the University of California at San Diego and, at his death, the University of Southern California.He gravitated toward challenging plays that had dark elements, but that also had humor.“He’s a great farceur,” Mr. Brustein once said of him. “He finds that area where farce and dreams meet.”In addition to his wife, whom he married in 2001, Mr. Belgrader is survived by a daughter, Grace, and a sister, Mariana Augustin. He lived in Los Angeles.On a 2005 episode of “Monk,” Mr. Belgrader showed that he could direct even the most inexperienced actors. In the episode, “Mr. Monk and the Kid,” a beloved one to fans of the series, Mr. Shalhoub’s obsessive-compulsive title character gets help solving a crime from a 22-month-old boy (played by 2-year-old twins, Preston and Trevor Shores). The toddler character had a lot of screen time, placing particular demands on Mr. Belgrader.“It was a tricky episode,” Mr. Shalhoub said, “and he knocked it out of the park.”Ms. Jones said that Mr. Belgrader liked to demonstrate that his dog, Hector, could sing along to Janis Joplin.“Before he put the recording on he told me not to laugh during Hector’s truly astonishing howls,” she recalled. “He said, ‘You must respect the artist.’ And he meant it. Whether a dog or an actor.” More

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    The Best of Late Night 🌙

    The Best of Late Night �� Trish Bendix�� Reporting on cultureSarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesPresident Biden’s State of the Union address provided plenty of talking points for the late-night hosts this week — as did Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and an odd statement from Florida’s governor. Here’s what they had to say → More

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    Muriel Miguel and the Native American Bohemia in Brownstone Brooklyn

    Indigenous rodeo riders and Wild West actors all gathered at an unassuming townhouse in Boerum Hill. Listening to the grown-ups under the kitchen table, a future experimental theater director.On a quiet street in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, there’s an unassuming yellow-brick house that once served as an unofficial community center for Native Americans in show business. The theater director Muriel Miguel grew up there, and lives there still. When she was a child, in the 1930s and ’40s, Native dancers and actors from all around the country would stop by the house while working in New York. Some would stick around for months, or even years.Ms. Miguel still remembers sitting under the kitchen table and listening to her parents trading songs and stories with these visitors. Sitting Bull’s grandson Crazy Bull, a national archery champion who advised Rodgers and Hammerstein on their production of “Annie Get Your Gun,” was an occasional presence. Douglas Grant, a trick rider from South Dakota, got stranded in New York while on tour with the rodeo and ended up staying with the Miguels for two decades. And then there were the Big Mountains, a family of Mohawk, Comanche and Apache dancers who lived in the back of a gift shop at a so-called Indian village in Wild West City, a theme park that still lies off Route 206 in New Jersey.As a young woman, Ms. Miguel mostly felt embarrassed by the work her parents and their friends did for money — jobs that required them to dress up in ceremonial costumes and act out white people’s fantasies of how Indians behaved. But now, at 84, she wonders if the fake Indian villages and Wild West shows of that era inadvertently contributed to the survival of real Native culture, if only by bringing such a vibrant community together in New York.At a time when the authorities out West were forbidding Native people from practicing their traditions, Ms. Miguel’s family and friends shared their songs and stories freely with one another, planting what Ms. Miguel described as kernels of inspiration in their children. “Today, I’m collecting the corn,” she said. “And it’s overwhelming.”Ms. Miguel during a break for rehearsals of “Misdemeanor Dream.”Adrienne Grunwald for The New York TimesMs. Miguel and her two older sisters, Gloria (95) and Lisa Mayo (who died in 2013 at 89), have often been described as the matriarchs of Indigenous theater in North America.“They made a space for so many people and companies,” Penny Couchie, an actor and choreographer of Ojibwe and Mohawk ancestry, said. “They made no apologies for the way that we tell stories.”In recent weeks, Ms. Miguel has been scrambling to finish preparing for the debut of her latest production, “Misdemeanor Dream,” a collaboration between her company, Spiderwoman Theater, and Aanmitaagzi, an arts group led by Ms. Couchie and her husband, Sid Bobb, on Nipissing First Nation territory in Ontario. The show, which will open on March 10 at La MaMa, the experimental theater in the East Village, represents the culmination of her life’s work so far, she said.Ms. Miguel has been working in the world of experimental theater since the ’60s, when she was an actor in the Open Theater, a pioneering avant-garde ensemble founded by the visionary director Joseph Chaikin. Like many of her past projects, the new play explores the ways in which old stories shape the lives of Indigenous people in the present, for better and worse. Inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” it takes place in a magical realm where fairies, humans and other beings share stories drawn from the performers’ ancestral traditions and personal memories — a father disappearing in the wilderness of northern Quebec, a mother spurning her daughter because she’s so afraid of losing her.The performers, who trace their roots to a dozen Indigenous nations within the borders of the United States, Canada and the Philippines, created the piece using the “story weaving” method. Spiderwoman Theater developed the technique in the 1970s, when the group was a fixture of the downtown theater scene. Over the years, the company has used it to intertwine narratives about everything from family violence to cultural appropriation with pop songs and bawdy jokes and dreamlike images.“It’s important to tell these stories, but they have to be done in a certain way where people don’t feel like they’re being hit over the head,” Ms. Miguel said. “You can tell a painful story and then tell an awful disgusting joke and give a raspberry. You can take things and turn them around.”On a recent Monday, Ms. Miguel took a break from her rehearsal schedule to ride around her neighborhood, telling stories about her own childhood. She sat in the back of a 2012 Toyota Matrix, a red leather hat trimmed with wolf fur resting on the seat beside her, while her wife, Deborah Ratelle, handled the driving. Ms. Miguel has short, silvery hair and a cascading, shoulder-shaking laugh. She wore turquoise rings on most of her fingers and had on mismatched earrings — one turquoise, the other made of oyster shell. “I don’t like sameness,” she said.Heading down Court Street, she pointed at Cobble Hill Cinema, a longtime movie theater that used to be called the Lido. “That was one of the places that my father used to stand outside in his outfit to ballyhoo all these movies,” she recalled. Her father, a Kuna from Panama, would supplement the money he earned as a dockworker by donning the war-bonnet of a Plains Indian chief and beckoning people into the theater to see the latest John Wayne picture. He had lots of jobs like that: playing a generic Indian at Thanksgiving pageants, performing at ceremonies commemorating the supposed sale of Manhattan to the Dutch.In the summer, he would take Ms. Miguel’s older sisters to Golden City, a long-since-forgotten amusement park in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, where they would dance and sing and sit around in teepees. Gloria, who plays the role of The Elder in “Misdemeanor Dream,” dreaded these outings. “People would come and look and say, “Oh, look at the Indians, they’re eating spaghetti,’” she recalled. It turned her off from doing any theatrical work that involved her heritage until, as a divorced mother of two in her late 40s, she joined her sisters in establishing Spiderwoman Theater. “We got to tell our stories our own way,” she said.“Misdemeanor Dream” features Ms. Miguel’s sister Gloria, in the role of The Elder.Adrienne Grunwald for The New York TimesThe Toyota stopped outside P.S. 146, a massive brick building with an imposing stone archway. Gazing through the car window, Ms. Miguel remembered a social studies teacher telling the class that Indians were a thing of the past. “I got up and I said, ‘No, we’re here,” she recalled. She laughed at the memory, her shoulders bouncing. “I had such a big mouth.”That attitude of spirited defiance ripples through her work. When Spiderwoman Theater was formed, in 1975, she conceived of it as a feminist response to the sexism that she says was plaguing the American Indian Movement at the time. The company’s first play, “Women in Violence,” was a vaudevillian clown show that addressed the abuse of women, something that she and her sisters had all endured. “Somehow I was taught that you have to push back,” she said. “Maybe it was my sisters — they taught me that I could do anything I wanted, that I could be anything I wanted.”Ms. Miguel’s family in her mother’s traditional Rappahannock dress, circa 1930.via Gloria MiguelOn the corner of State and Nevins Streets, Ms. Miguel noted that the surrounding blocks had once been home to a community known as Little Caughnawaga. In the first half of the 20th century, Mohawk ironworkers from Canada settled in the area while helping to build the skyscrapers that now dominate the skyline: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler, Rockefeller Plaza. The Rev. David M. Cory, a white pastor who learned Mohawk and gave sermons in the language, allowed Ms. Miguel and her friends to rehearse authentic Native dances in the basement of a church a few blocks away. They formed a dance group, the Little Eagles, that eventually grew into the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, a widely known company that still performs and teaches at schools, theaters and museums.As the car pulled up to the corner where that church once stood, Ms. Miguel groaned. “Ay, yi, yi,” she said. A wooden construction barrier guarded a white condo complex that would not have looked out of place in Miami. Ms. Miguel got out and approached a young man who stood outside the gate in a hard hat, smoking a Newport. “Excuse me,” she said. “What happened to the church that used to be here?”“It got abandoned a few years back,” he said, in an accent that proved to be Turkish.“How sad,” she said. “When I was growing up, a lot of the people who lived here and on the next blocks were Native people. Indian people.”He nodded politely.“It was really wonderful,” Ms. Miguel said.She spent the next 10 minutes regaling him with interesting facts and anecdotes about that time. She praised the minister (“a socialist”) who let them use the space to dance and laughed about how the ironworkers would pile into their cars for the 12-hour trip back to their reservation every weekend, switching seats while driving so they wouldn’t have to waste time pulling over. “Crazy men!” she said.The contractor gave her a contemplative look. “I didn’t know there were Native people living in this neighborhood,” he remarked.She studied his face. “You didn’t know?” She shared a few more details and thanked him for listening. Walking back to the car, she called out, “Tell people the story.” More

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    Seth Meyers Roasts Ron DeSantis for Berating Teens

    Meyers said Florida’s governor was like “an old man who sees a bunch of innocent teens walking by and screams, ‘Hey, you kids get on my lawn!’”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.Front Row SeatFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis chastised a group of students wearing face masks on Wednesday, saying, “Honestly, it’s not doing anything and we’ve got to stop with this Covid theater.”“How much of a [expletive] do you have to be to yell at a bunch of high school students who are just trying to be safe?” Seth Meyers said. “They’re actually doing the right thing and you’re scolding them for it you’re like an old man who sees a bunch of innocent teens walking by and screams, ‘Hey, you kids get on my lawn!’”“Also, what the hell is Covid theater? Those plays where all the actors have to stand six feet apart? [imitating theatergoer] ‘I just saw the Covid theater production of “Les Mis” — the stage was the size of a football field!’” — SETH MEYERS“Although for people who moved from New York to Florida during the pandemic, that’s the only theater they have left.” — SETH MEYERS“Students like, ‘Somehow you make our principal seem chill.’” — JIMMY FALLON“When the parents asked how their day was, they’re like, ‘I got bullied — by the governor?’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Putin’s Punishment Edition)“Ikea has announced it will temporarily pause manufacturing and retail operations in Russia and Belarus due to the invasion of Ukraine, while Ikea in Ukraine is opening their doors to Russian soldiers and hoping they can’t find their way out.” — SETH MEYERS“Ikea said they’ll do whatever it can to throw a useless tiny wrench into Russia’s economy.” — JIMMY FALLON“This will go into effect as soon as they can find that little Allen wrench to take the stores apart.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“They’re saying that the shutdown of Ikea could dramatically affect Russia’s supply of flardfulls, dagstorps and gronkulas.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And it’s not just business distancing themselves: I read that the International Cat Federation has banned Russian cats from all competition. I’m just going to go ahead and say that’s the biggest news that’s ever come out of the International Cat Federation. Meanwhile, the silence from the International Dog Federation is deafening.” — JIMMY FALLON“I’d be worried about pissing off the cat people. You think Putin is scary? Imagine Carole Baskin!” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Daily Show” correspondent Desi Lydic dug into the “hist-HER-y” of bras on Thursday’s show.Also, Check This OutKia LaBeija’s 2015 work “Eleven” features the artist in her prom dress at her doctor’s office. Kia LaBeija and FotografiskaThe photographer and performer Kia LaBeija, who was born H.I.V. positive in 1990, documents her life in an autobiographical show at Fotografiska New York. More

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    ‘On Sugarland’ Review: A Nameless War, and Too Many Wounds to Count

    Inspired by Sophocles’ “Philoctetes,” Aleshea Harris uses poetic language, songs and symbolism to explore the trauma of being alive, especially for Black people.Let’s begin with the war. Not the war that’s in the headlines. Not Iraq or Vietnam. I’m talking about war as metaphor. And in the realm of metaphor, anything can happen: A veteran’s wound may incessantly — and inexplicably — bleed for years, and a slain soldier’s daughter may have the ability to raise the dead.This allegorical war, along with an impaired officer and a junior necromancer, are of the world of “On Sugarland,” a beautifully produced play that struggles to follow through on its ambitions. “On Sugarland,” which opened Thursday night at New York Theater Workshop, is the latest from the Obie-winning playwright Aleshea Harris (“Is God Is,” “What to Send Up When It Goes Down”), whose work often lifts the everyday trauma of being alive, especially as a Black person, to the plane of poetry through heightened language, songs, rituals and symbols.Speaking of symbols, that’s how the heavy-drinking Odella, played by Adeola Role with delicate vulnerability, describes Sugarland, a makeshift memorial of odds and ends that sits among the cul-de-sac of mobile homes where she lives with her teenage niece, Sadie (KiKi Layne, most exquisite at her most understated). Sugarland is just a symbol, Odella reminds Sadie, though not everyone agrees; a neighbor, tired of mourning, dismisses it as “some kind of horrifying carnival graveyard.”In an early scene, Odella and Sadie are on their way to a funeral for Sadie’s mother, Sergeant Iola Marie, who died in the nameless war. She’ll be commemorated at Sugarland, where a helmet, scarves, dog tags, bottles and other items are arranged into upright posts to remember locals who have died in the war. Every funeral is honored with what the locals call a “hollering,” a ritual of wooting and wailing that’s led by Staff Sergeant Saul Greenwood (Billy Eugene Jones, perfection). He had enlisted with Iola and now suffers trauma that’s both psychological and physical: on his right foot is an unhealing wound.Stephanie Berry is a comic delight as the vain and irreverent Evelyn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd yet Saul extols the virtues of being a soldier and encourages his teenage son, Addis (a profoundly forlorn Caleb Eberhardt), to imagine himself a warrior — while forbidding him to enlist because Addis is intellectually disabled. Tending to Sugarland is Tisha (the underused Lizan Mitchell), a woman in her 60s who speaks to her deceased son through the sacred memorial and lives with her vain, irreverent sister Evelyn (Stephanie Berry, the play’s comic delight). Watching everything unfold mostly from the sidelines is Sadie, who doesn’t speak except for her long soliloquies to the audience. She can raise the dead, she reveals, and summons several generations of ancestors to help her find her mother from beyond the grave.There are a lot of characters and a lot of story lines in this nearly three-hour production. A Greek chorus of neighborhood children called the Rowdy round out the cast of 14. The chorus isn’t the only element Harris borrowed from the Greeks; “On Sugarland” was inspired by the Sophocles play “Philoctetes,” about two soldiers who try to persuade a master archer with a chronically festering foot wound to rejoin the Trojan War. Both works involve an ailing soldier, but whether Harris makes any deeper connections to the Sophocles work, or aspires to some dialogue between her piece and the classic, is unclear.Harris certainly isn’t the only playwright who writes lyrical dialogue with its own internal meter, but she is one of the best navigators of shifts in language and registers, even within a single scene. So we get tasty figurative gumdrops that subtly illuminate the inner thoughts of the characters, like the glamorous Evelyn’s description of the setting sun, which, she says, looks “like a starlet whose solo is over.” But Harris struggles with an overambitious story. “On Sugarland” is unable to adequately unpack its cornucopia of themes: post-traumatic stress disorder, Black masculinity, the history of Black soldiers, Black women fighting racism and misogyny, the ways Black women respond to grief, the choices Black women make about their bodies in a world of prejudice.Layne as Sadie, left, and Adeola Role as Odella, her heavy-drinking aunt.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEven the opposing force within the play’s metaphorical war is a mystery: Perhaps it’s any country or peoples that the U.S. government calls enemy, or perhaps it’s the racist citizens in the characters’ backyards. The issue isn’t a lack of exposition; it’s that “On Sugarland” is inconsistent in the vocabulary it builds for itself.The characters suffer for it, too; they’re saddled with so many symbolic meanings that their roles become muddled and there’s little space for their actual development. In Evelyn, who talks about pregnancy and at one point sheds tears of blood, I found allusions to the phenomenon of bleeding Virgin Mary statues and the higher pregnancy mortality rates for Black women. I wondered if Sadie, with her supernatural ability and muteness, may be an archetypical prophet figure, like Tiresias, the blind soothsayer from the Greek dramas.In other words, I never knew the bounds of the metaphors.With her direction, Whitney White occasionally dips too far into melodrama, but otherwise nimbly adapts to the tonal shifts and key changes of Harris’s script. Raja Feather Kelly’s electric choreography adds a physical syncopation (stomping, marching, pacing, dancing) that complements the rhythms of the dialogue.Caleb Eberhardt, far right, being taunted by members of the Rowdy, a Greek chorus of neighborhood children.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe play’s most intoxicating moments are when all of those bodies are onstage hollering, each moving in such carefully curated directions in such diligently structured postures that they become like a liberated tableau. (The riotous quality of the noise, the combative moves and the sheer volume of the Rowdy are radical; these performers push back against the notion that Black people must act meek and nonthreatening for the comfort of white people.) The cast’s smart costumes are by Qween Jean, whose designs include the casual streetwear of the Rowdy and Evelyn’s taffy-pink ball gown.Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting design is its own eloquent form of storytelling — from the soft sepia-toned light of a lonely street lamp to the vertical Gatorade-green lights that flank the stage — and, at times, works alongside Starr Busby’s bold original music to transform the space into a club.And Adam Rigg’s dynamic set design cleverly uses a multilayered layout to allow action to happen at different heights: On the top are three mobile homes, windows revealing characters arguing or drinking from their domicile; the middle level is a circular grassy platform, the plot of yard called Sugarland; at the bottom, railroad tracks wind around Sugarland and out of sight.“We strong We brave We quick / We aim and … We don’t never miss,” Sadie says, speaking of the women in her family. The story of “On Sugarland,” however, flounders at times; it’s hard to hit a bull’s-eye when a mess of targets cloud your sightline.On SugarlandThrough March 20 at the New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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    ‘Lupin,’ Netflix’s French Heist Drama, Is the Victim of a Theft

    Equipment valued at more than $300,000 was stolen from the set of the hit series during filming in a Paris suburb last week.“Lupin,” the hit French heist drama, was itself at the center of a heist last week when about 20 young men wearing balaclavas stole equipment valued at more than $300,000 from the set during filming in a Paris suburb, a Netflix spokeswoman said.The theft, which was reported by the international news service Agence France-Presse and the French newspaper Le Parisien, came just over a week after more than 200 antique props valued at more than $200,000 were stolen from vehicles during the filming of the fifth season of “The Crown” in England, according to the South Yorkshire Police and Netflix.Netflix said in a statement on Thursday that there was an “incident” during the filming of the third season of “Lupin” on Feb. 25.“Our cast and crew are safe and there were no injuries,” the statement said. “We have now resumed filming.”A Netflix spokeswoman said that equipment and other items worth about 300,000 euros, or $332,000, were stolen by men who showed up on the set and “attacked” with fireworks. Filming was paused for an afternoon, and the local police were investigating, she said.“Lupin” became a global phenomenon upon its release in January 2021 and is among Netflix’s most streamed non-English-language original shows. Omar Sy plays Assane Diop, a debonair Parisian and the son of a Senegalese immigrant who idolizes Arsène Lupin, the “gentleman thief” and main character in a collection of stories by the French writer Maurice Leblanc starting in 1905.A spokesman for the police in Nanterre, the suburb outside Paris where the filming was taking place, said he could not comment on the case.In an earlier statement about the theft from “The Crown,” Netflix said that it hoped the items stolen from the set in Doncaster, in northern England, would be found and returned. The stolen items included a replica of a Fabergé egg, several sets of silver and gold candelabra, the face of a William IV grandfather clock, a 10-piece silver dressing-table set and crystal glassware, according to a report in the Antiques Trade Gazette.“The items stolen are not necessarily in the best condition and therefore of limited value for resale,” Alison Harvey, the set decorator for the fifth season of “The Crown,” told the Antiques Trade Gazette. “However, they are valuable as pieces to the U.K. film industry.”The South Yorkshire police said they had received a report of a theft in the late afternoon on Feb. 16. Three vehicles containing props had been “broken into” and “a number of items” were taken, they said. “Officers investigated the incident but all existing lines of inquiry have now been exhausted,” the police said in a brief statement.Matt Stevens More