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    Amber Gray on Leaving 'Hadestown' for 'Macbeth'

    The actress, who has played Persephone in “Hadestown” in three countries and four productions, is leaving to join a new “Macbeth” on Broadway.Amber Gray spent eight years as a Greek goddess.She joined “Hadestown” in 2014, back when the songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and the director Rachel Chavkin were still trying to figure out how to turn Mitchell’s Orpheus-and-Eurydice concept album into a stage show.Gray had read lots of mythology as a classics-obsessed kid, and felt an immediate connection to Persephone, the split-level queen who spends half of each year in the underworld as Hades’s wife and half on earth as a harbinger of spring.“I kind of knew, ‘Oh, this is my job,’ which is not a feeling I have often,” she said. “I felt possessive of it — that it belongs to me, and it was my baby to help raise.”Her Persephone, clad in green aboveground and black below, is an ageless merrymaker with a taste for drink, toughened by time but still soft of heart. She created the role Off Broadway in 2016, refined it through a Canadian production in 2017 and a London production in 2018, and then was nominated for a Tony Award after originating the role on Broadway, where the show opened in 2019 (winning the Tony for best musical). Along with the rest of the principals, she stuck with the show through an 18-month pandemic shutdown; “Hadestown” returned in September to the Walter Kerr Theater.Her performance won praise from Jesse Green, The New York Times’s theater critic, who wrote, “Ms. Gray, never better, makes something quite brilliant out of Persephone: a free spirit, a loose cannon, a first lady co-opted by wealth yet emotionally subversive.” He declared of her closing number, “you at last wish the show would slow down so you could live in the glowy moment forever.”But on Saturday night, Gray, 40, sang that song for the final time. She is leaving the show to join Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga in a production of “Macbeth” that begins performances in March at the Longacre Theater, directly across 48th Street from the Walter Kerr. She will play Macbeth’s friend Banquo; her “Hadestown” alternate, Lana Gordon, will assume the role of Persephone full time.For the last several months, Gray has been sharing the role of Persephone with another actress, so she could spend more time with her two children.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn her single day off between finishing “Hadestown” and beginning rehearsals for “Macbeth,” she talked about her long run; an ovation-filled final night that included special attention from her co-star André De Shields; and her next chapter. These are edited excerpts from the interview.How are you doing?I don’t know how I’m doing. You have to help me process.At your final performance there were tears on your face at the start, at the end, in the middle. What was going through your head?I’m having great waves of grief, and I’m heartbroken, but I also feel very excited about a new chapter. It feels like commencement.What happened after the audience went home?My partner was there, and we went across the street to Hurley’s, where we go often, the cast and the band, and we just chatted for another hour. I sort of stood around and loved on everyone, and let them love on me. Lots of crying, and there was some sneaky footage of André kissing me, which we watched and laughed and laughed and laughed. It felt very celebratory.What’s it like to spend so long with a single character?It’s kind of like a deep, meditative trance state while I’m doing it. Every 50 shows or so, you go deeper, which is so rad. And in those last few weeks of performing, my peripheral vision opened up. I saw things I’d never seen before that have been happening for years.How has your approach to Persephone changed over time?A huge shift came after two full productions, when the alcohol was introduced. In London, Chavkin came up to me and was like, “I think you’re trashed for a while, and it’s like ‘Ab Fab’ — you’ve got to be like ‘Ab Fab’ trashed.” I was like, “Really, are you sure?” I didn’t get it. And then it became great fun.What does Persephone think of Hades?She loves him. You know, they’ve been married for hundreds of years. They’re like an old couple that knows how to fight well and make up well. That’s important in a long-running relationship.Gray, flanked by Patrick Page, left, and André De Shields, right, toasts the audience in the musical’s final song.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesHow did you stay in shape physically and vocally for this role?Physically, I don’t do anything but the show — that’s plenty of exercise. Vocally, I learned in school to stay away from certain foods, like dairy. I rolled my eyes, but I have really found if you stay away from stuff like that it’s so much easier to sing and scream and growl night after night. I see an ENT [an ear, nose and throat doctor] once a week, and get an IV of a bunch of shots to make sure you never get sick. And I haven’t had alcohol in a couple of years — that’s another way that my physical, spiritual, vocal self is just healthier.Did you have Covid?I got Covid in December with the rest of the cast — I got Omicron after being vaxxed and boosted. It was like a really bad cold for about 36 hours. That was it.How did playing for a masked audience affect your performance?I thought the masks were going to feel weird, but it doesn’t. You can still feel the audience. They did start serving alcohol, though, a couple of weeks ago, and that difference I very much noticed. I was like, “Oh, they love me these last couple of weeks,” and then I was like, “Oh, they’re serving alcohol again.”Why are you an actor?Well, I’m an Army brat that had to move every two or three years, and I was deeply shy. And actors are really nice — they accept the freaks and geeks, no questions asked. I also grew up skiing, but the jocks were not nice. So if I were to make friends in the new town every two or three years, I had to do the play. By the time college rolled around, it was the only thing I loved.During your time in “Hadestown,” you had two children, and when the show reopened you started sharing the role with an alternate. Tell me about that.Before the pandemic hit, I asked for an alternate to do the Sunday matinee and Tuesday night, so that I could have three days off, away from that building, one of those days being Sunday, when my children are not in school. I wasn’t seeing my kids, and that was deeply painful. I didn’t have kids to not raise them. All I wanted was a little family time, and they gave it to me.There were job-sharing experiments both at “Hadestown” and “Jagged Little Pill” that turned out to be short-lived, for different reasons.I’m a big believer in job-sharing. Several productions have done it in London, and that’s what gave me the idea. And in Korea they job share. It’s a wild puzzle to put together, but they’ve figured it out.What’s it like watching other actresses play Persephone?It’s wild. I always offer survival tips. And any Persephone I have watched I always steal one thing from, as a gesture of honor.“It’s time to try new things,” said Gray, sitting on the stage before her final performance at the Walter Kerr Theater. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThis is your first commercial hit. How does that feel?I’m not always aware of what a hit it is, because I don’t use social media and I don’t go through the stage door. But you know, I was totally that kid in high school — I would go to the library and get a CD of “Jesus Christ Superstar” or “The Who’s Tommy” and listen over and over again. So I know what it is to be a teenager who really latches on to a story and an album. Lots of people wrote me over the pandemic about how much “Hadestown” helped them, and it’s beautiful to know that the art is functioning in that way.Why did you decide to leave?I was too comfortable. It’s just time to grow. It’s time to try new things. I come from a short-run world. It’s what I love about theater: it’s ephemeral, it goes away, it evaporates, right? I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I don’t keep any fan mail or fan art or show paraphernalia. I very neurotically photograph it all. I write back to anybody. But then anything that’s paper I burn in the backyard. And then it’s on to the next one.Why “Macbeth?”Because it was the job I got. I was banging out all these auditions, and that one came through. I auditioned for Lady Macduff and Witch One, and then the next day they were like, “Actually, do you want to play Banquo?”Banquo was written as a man. Any thoughts on what you’re going to do?I am a woman and I will play it as a woman. I’m also excited to play a parent onstage, to a sweet 10-year-old that I haven’t met yet. It’s my first time playing a parent in a play after being a parent, and I really look forward to that.A lot of actors have superstitions about “Macbeth.” Do you?It’s been a joke in the cast for a while. Patrick [Page, who plays Hades] has a copy of the folio in his pocket onstage, and every now and then he’ll throw it down on top of our dominoes game to try to scare me.So much of your career has been downtown. I wonder how you viewed Broadway before you worked there, and how your assessment of it has changed.I’ve been on Broadway only twice, but both times were pieces that I helped nurture from little Off Broadway gems. Then you get there, and the realities of producing a show on Broadway are very different, and, to be totally honest, I find the maintenance of the machine quite heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking to see things become moneymaking machines, and the money doesn’t necessarily always go to the artists. But I will say “Hadestown” is doing a ton of work to try to have these conversations about how things could and can change.You have one day off between “Hadestown” and “Macbeth.” Are you planning to rest?No, I’m going to go see Taylor Mac’s “The Hang” for some artistic healing, and then my partner and I are going to go do a shamanic ceremony with a medicine from a frog for spiritual and emotional and energetic cleansing. I’m like, “Bring it on! Let’s clean the slate!” More

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    ‘The Same’ Review: Do You See What I See?

    Enda Walsh’s play, which had its U.S. premiere at the Irish Arts Center, stars two sisters who play different versions of the same character.Imagine that on one otherwise normal day, while going about your normal activities, you encounter someone who looks uncannily familiar — it’s you. Does the discovery cause you discomfort or give you relief? Are you met with assurance or fear?It’s the situation a woman named Lisa — well, two women named Lisa — face in “The Same,” by Enda Walsh, that opened on Sunday for its U.S. premiere, at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan.The Corcadorca Theater Company production stars Catherine Walsh and Eileen Walsh, who are sisters in real life (with no relation to Enda Walsh), as two expressions of Lisa. The younger Lisa recounts her recent arrival to a new city and what is presumably a mental health facility. She occasionally leaves her “small blue room,” as she calls it, for errands or groceries or, on one particular day, to take a job helping prepare for a repast after a funeral. There she meets the woman who shares her face and her memories: her future self.The two Lisas sit, stand and pace, reminiscing about their childhood. They speak in a steady back-and-forth, trading lines and swapping roles in what feels less like a conversation than a team recitation of a story they both know by heart. Their dialogue reflects a constantly changing perspective; sometimes they speak in the first person, sometimes the second, sometimes the third, as though each Lisa is, even individually, too fragmented to maintain a consistent point of view.The production, directed by Pat Kiernan, runs a trim 50 minutes, less than the time it takes to get from some corners of Brooklyn to the Irish Arts Center’s swanky new Midtown location on 11th Avenue.The set design, by Owen Boss, is immersive. It feels like a waiting room; the audience sits in upholstered chairs and love seats arranged in a loose square on a patch of carpet, giving a sense of the contours of a room. There’s a bookcase, a potted plant, and around and alongside the seats are signs of interrupted progress: tables cluttered with half-empty mugs of coffee and half-eaten cookies and an unfinished game of solitaire. The seating faces the center of the space, where the two actors spend most of the play. It’s novel to sit among the action, with one Lisa or another shuffling past your seat, though ultimately the effect doesn’t support its execution.Kiernan’s direction, however, imbues the production with an unsettling feeling: The actresses mirror each other in ways that aren’t always exact replications but rather variations on themes. And so there’s an interplay among their postures, movements and energies — younger Lisa gets worked up and older Lisa is calm, until she, too, gets worked up and younger Lisa becomes subdued. Michael Hurley’s lighting design and Peter Power’s sound design also seem triggered by the volatility of the Lisas’ minds. Kiernan has some of the set’s effects suddenly spring to life — two TV sets suspended in the corners of the room awaken to show clips from a game show or an episode of “Judge Judy,” a bingo machine whirs to life and then chaotically spews its contents on the floor.The success of the play’s Gemini effect is in large part because of the actresses’ talents. Eileen’s performance is jittery, her version of Lisa so full of neuroses that she seems like a shaken can of soda, fizzing just beneath the surface. Catherine gives off a similar, though more muted, anxiety; her Lisa embodies a different type of pressure, one of a dam carefully constructed over the years, pushing back against the waves crashing against its walls.Walsh’s script, however, doesn’t leave as lasting an impression. The play, which was originally commissioned by Corcadorca in celebration of the company’s 25th anniversary, has the usual signatures of the playwright, whose most recent New York production was the arresting “Medicine,” starring Domhnall Gleeson, at St. Ann’s Warehouse. There’s an intentional obliqueness, the traces of a narrative that are blurred and contorted by the characters. It all comes back to the slippery nature of the playwright’s language, which is full of repetition and half-formed ideas; sentences have some unspoken antecedent or trail off, spiraling inward to form an ouroboros of thoughts.But Walsh typically uses those linguistic maneuvers to add more shades to his text; rarely is he interested in a singular theme or mode of storytelling. Here, the short run time prevents him from getting too complicated, but the result is a script that, though still unconventional, is limited.How does a person grow from trauma? What happens when she resolves to leave part of herself behind, only to re-encounter that part unexpectedly? “The Same” circles these questions but never reaches a sharp point. It’s almost as though the play gets trapped simply gazing in the mirror.The SameThrough March 6 at the Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 50 minutes. More

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    Stephen Colbert Riffs on Joe Biden’s Sanctions Against Russia

    Colbert said Putin sought to keep the peace, and imitated Russia’s president: “I keep this piece of Ukraine. I keep that piece of Ukraine. I keep all the pieces of Ukraine.”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.Putin, the Piece-KeeperRussia’s imminent invasion of Ukraine was the talk of late night on Tuesday, when Stephen Colbert sought to answer why Vladimir Putin planned to send troops into another country.“He claims it’s to carry out ‘peacekeeping functions,’ and it’s true,” Colbert said. “I keep this piece of Ukraine. I keep that piece of Ukraine. I keep all the pieces of Ukraine. I am piece-keeping,” he said, imitating Putin.“Putin appears to be inching toward a full-scale attack on Ukraine. Trump, of course, called him a genius and called the idea ‘wonderful’ today. What kind of hotel room hidden camera video does that Putin have? We want to see it already.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Putin sent what he and Trump refer to as a ‘peacekeeping’ force into Ukraine on today — which is 2/22/22 — because he invaded Georgia, Putin did, the country, not the state on Aug. 8, 2008 — 08/08/08. Can that be a coincidence? Oh, yeah, it can? Oh, it can? OK.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Biden gave a speech today at the White House and said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has officially begun. Biden didn’t mean to say that, but Putin invaded his teleprompter, too.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, Biden also used his speech to announce a bunch of new sanctions against Russia. Yeah, nothing stops a dictator in his tracks like raising his A.T.M. fees.” — JIMMY FALLON“So, that means no Russian money in the U.S. There goes Tucker Carlson’s sponsors.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“From now on, Russia doesn’t get the new Wordle until noon.” — SETH MEYERS“It’s not just the president — the Senate is preparing its own list of sanctions and, reportedly, Republican lawmakers are itching to sanction Putin’s romantic partner. Putin’s romantic partner? So, the horse?” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yeah, Biden said, ‘We will not put up with Russian aggression, especially on such an important national holiday, Twosday.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Twosday Edition)“Yeah, ‘Twosday’ because it’s Tuesday 2-22-22. Yeah, this only happens once every 100 years. President Biden was like, ‘I didn’t care then, I didn’t care now.’” — JIMMY FALLON“As you just heard, tonight is 2/22/22, also known as the day the calendar maker fell asleep on his keyboard.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Tonight we honor the most underappreciated number — two. The number it takes to tango. The number of scoops in Kellogg’s Raisin Bran. Without two, there would be no movie sequels. ‘E’ would equal MC nothin’.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The last time an all two date happened was Feb. 22, 1922. American women had just recently won the right to vote, Amelia Earhart bought her first plane. Now President Joe Biden just passed his first gallstone.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingOn “The Tonight Show,” Jimmy Fallon played Good Name, Bad Name, Great Name with the famous monikers of bands, movies, video games and snacks.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightBillie Eilish will chat with Seth Meyers on Wednesday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutThe actresses Sandra Oh, left, and Jodie Comer. Their characters in “Killing Eve” chased each other across multiple continents, sharing a destructive mutual obsession.   Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesSandra Oh and Jodie Comer say goodbye to “Killing Eve” after four seasons together. More

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    Review: Learning ‘English,’ When Your Accent Is a ‘War Crime’

    In a rich new play by Sanaz Toossi, four Iranians and their language teacher find second selves in a second tongue.If you’ve ever tried, as an adult, to learn a new language, you know how painful it can be; it’s bad enough to hear yourself mangling Italian, but worse to hear it mangling you. For those of us accustomed to sounding sharp with our words, it can come as quite a blow to discover the shabby figure we cut in the ill-fitting suit of someone else’s.How our mother tongue gives us voice yet limits our world — and how a new tongue expands that world yet may strangle our voice — is the subject of “English,” a rich new play by Sanaz Toossi that opened on Tuesday at the Linda Gross Theater. Both contemplative and comic, it nails every opportunity for big laughs as its English-learning characters struggle with accents and idioms. But the laughter provides cover for the deeper idea that their struggle is not just linguistic.The play, a coproduction of the Atlantic and Roundabout theater companies, is after all set in Iran in 2008, against a backdrop of travel restrictions and family separations. Each of the four students prepping for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl, at a storefront school in Karaj, a city of two million not far from Tehran, has a different reason for enrolling.For the cheerful 18-year-old Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), the promise and pleasure of new opportunity is reason enough. “English is the rice,” she explains in the inadvertent poetry of the partially fluent. “You take some rice, and you make the rice whatever you want.”But the others are more ambivalent. Dignified Roya (Pooya Mohseni) is there only because her son, who lives in “the Canada” with his wife and daughter, has insisted she speak English if she wants to live with them. He will not have his daughter’s assimilation threatened, he has warned, by a grandmother cooing in Farsi.If Roya is angry about this situation, she mostly suppresses the feeling, leaving her son hilariously passive-aggressive voice mail messages in which she offers evidence of her growing fluency. “I know all the numbers now,” she tells him. “Forty-three. Five hundred and thirty-eight. And seven.”But for Elham (Tala Ashe), anxiety is upfront: Having failed the Toefl five times, she must pass it if she wants her provisional acceptance at an Australian medical school to become official. When the Toefl teacher, Marjan (Marjan Neshat), tells her that “English isn’t your enemy,” she answers, “It is feeling like yes.” Her accent, she adds, is “a war crime.”Marjan learned English during nine years spent living in Manchester, England, gradually experiencing the way the fog of alienation can give way, through language, to the thrill of connection. Now that she is back in Iran, though, her English is eroding at the edges, at least in comparison to that of the fourth student, Omid (Hadi Tabbal), whose accent is minimal and vocabulary exceptional. Playing a game in which everyone must name items of clothing as quickly as possible while tossing a ball, he wins handily, wowing the others with “windbreaker.”Tabbal, left, plays the standout student in the English class taught by Neshat’s character. We understand her fluency (nine years in Britain), but there’s a mystery behind his (where did he learn the word “windbreaker”?).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOver the course of 22 scenes representing lessons, office hours and smoke breaks during the six-week course, we get to know all five characters well, and yet they also remain as stubbornly enigmatic as people do in real life. Their progress, too, is unpredictable, their skills sometimes stalling, then bounding forward, with new words and seemingly new ideas emerging.Not that we are told this; we just see it happen, thanks to Toossi’s clever theatricalization of the process. (When the characters speak English, they do so haltingly and with an accent; when they speak Farsi, which we hear in English, it’s swift and unaccented.) Even Elham, her W’s no longer sounding like V’s, and her tempo improved from largo to allegretto, is eventually able to pose a challenge to Omid’s fluency.The mystery of that fluency (why does he know “windbreaker”?) is one of the more obvious tensioning devices in a play that, despite its pleasures — but also at the root of them — has a somewhat schematic structure. Like a lifeboat movie, it features the immediate and broad differentiation of characters, their shifting alliances in the face of a looming threat and an eventual resolution involving the revelation of lies and someone cast overboard.Nor are its themes entirely novel; the drama of superimposing one language on another is at the heart of works as widely varied as Brian Friel’s “Translations” (in which a 19th-century cartographer is charged with rendering Irish place names in English) and the hyper-asterisked Leo Rosten novel “The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N,” set among immigrants in a night school English class and turned into a musical in 1968.But the delicacy of Toossi’s development handily makes up for both problems, especially the hysteria of lifeboat melodrama; in a recent interview in The New York Times, she told my colleague Alexis Soloski that “writing a trauma play makes me want to dry heave.”So in dealing with characters who could easily be exoticized in their chadors, Toossi has chosen instead to focus on their familiarity; like most of us, they deal less with the disaster of geopolitics than with an atmosphere of mild if daily discomfort. As such, the insights here are deep but never shattering, as when Roya perceives the crucial distinction between the verbs “visit” and “live” in one of her son’s messages. If the world’s happiness does not depend on it, a grandmother’s does.The director Knud Adams gently underlines the calm, almost classical rhythms of Toossi’s writing. Chopinesque piano solos play between scenes. As the play contemplates the question of language from several angles, the cube-like set, by Marsha Ginsberg, slowly rotates, offering in turn a street view of the building, the classroom interior and an entry portico. The cast is uniformly excellent, in a suitably unshowy but fully lived-in way.Too much delicacy has a way of wearing thin, though; with its refusal of trauma and even climax — the romance, if there is one, is buried — “English” begins to feel a bit overlong despite its moderate running time of an hour and 45 minutes.Still, the longueurs are worth it, forcing the audience into a useful position of slight non-fluency. We don’t always know what is going on in the play, as we don’t in the world either. And as each character struggles to decide whether to become another person by mastering another language, we are asked to consider whether we in the English-speaking West are not just cultural imperialists but linguistic ones as well. And whether, perhaps, those are really the same thing.EnglishThrough March 13 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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    ‘Snowfall’ Review: To Live, Love and Die in 1980s L.A.

    FX’s sharply etched, powerfully nostalgic and entirely under-the-radar drama about a family cocaine empire begins its fifth season.“Snowfall,” FX’s South Los Angeles cocaine saga, eased onto the television schedule in July 2017, and since then it’s gone about its business quietly. It doesn’t get talked about a lot, but its fifth season arrives with two episodes on Wednesday. That’s a good run for an astringent morality tale that doesn’t offer predictable thrills, excessive sentimentality or brand-name actors.Which isn’t to say that “Snowfall” doesn’t do some discreet pandering to its audience. It is, in its vicious way, one of the most powerfully nostalgic shows on television — a “Wonder Years” for the drug trade. Its picture of Los Angeles in the mid-1980s may not be realistic in the strict sense, but it’s true to an idea of the city at that time as promulgated by John Singleton, one of the show’s creators, and the show allies itself with that mythos in clever ways. When the family at the story’s center goes ballistic in the new season after a neighborhood rapper rhymes about their business, a light goes on in the eyes of one of the crew: It’s 1986, and he sees gangsta rap coming.Singleton, who died in 2019, was in Los Angeles developing the screenplay for his first and best-known film, “Boyz N The Hood,” at the time that the new season of “Snowfall” takes place. When he was nominated for an Oscar for directing the film, he was 24, the age the hero of the show, the precocious drug dealer Franklin Saint (Damson Idris), reaches in Season 5. “Snowfall” borrows some tragic-young-men archetypes from “Boyz,” and their melodramatic pull is another ingredient in the show’s appeal.But “Snowfall” has taken a cooler and more understated approach — the romanticism and sensationalism are there, but they’re moderated by dry humor, on one hand, and an effective calibration of cold dread, on the other. (Dave Andron, another creator of the series, remains the showrunner and wrote the new season’s first two episodes with Leonard Chang; four of 10 episodes were available for review.) Rather than a rueful tragedy, it is — so far — a Horatio Alger tale of aspirational capitalism, one that adds systemic racism and automatic weapons to the barriers facing the hero.And although it didn’t start out as a wry and moving family drama, it has evolved into one. The plot strands that followed the internal workings of a Mexican drug cartel and the Central American adventures of the rogue C.I.A. agent Reed (Carter Hudson) have dropped away, and the focus is entirely on Franklin and his tight-knit crew: his uncle Jerome (Amin Joseph); Jerome’s girlfriend, Louie (Angela Lewis); his best friend and right-hand man, Leon (Isaiah John); and his mother, Cissy (Michael Hyatt).And it’s those performers, finally, who are the show’s almost-secret weapon. Presumably directed over the seasons to underplay, they’ve consistently worked against any temptation to resort to clichéd gestures and emotions. The central cast, led by Idris as the dangerously conflicted, reluctantly menacing Franklin, has created a quirky and believable gallery of characters, and their emotional credibility keeps you invested through the story’s melodramatic twists and abrupt turns. (The portrayal of the actual drug business, and the fictionalized treatment of the C.I.A.’s involvement with it, is not, it’s safe to say, documentary in nature.)Season 4 ended (spoilers ahead) in a welter of chaos and violence: Franklin and Reed’s partnership was nearly exposed by a reporter; Reed killed the reporter but was then partially outed anyway by Franklin’s father, who in turn was (perhaps) killed by Reed. As Season 5 opens, Franklin has apparently put it all behind him. He’s on top of his game, piloting his own airplane and running his semi-legitimate real estate company with his new girlfriend, Veronique (Devyn A. Tyler of “Clarice”), who’s pregnant.But success is the handmaiden of disaster on “Snowfall” — the perverse reality of Franklin’s American dream is that the wealthier and happier your family becomes, the more ruthless and paranoid you need to be to protect it. The death of the real-life basketball star Len Bias means that the public, and law enforcement, suddenly begin to pay more attention to cocaine. Closer to home, life is complicated by the return of Reed (now going by his real name, Teddy), who’s quickly back in the C.I.A.’s good graces, and of Cissy, who wants to know why her son is back in business with his father’s killer.None of this can end well, it would seem, but it’s a dark, enjoyable, sharply etched ride in the meantime. “Snowfall” is partly about the collateral damage of true belief — the destruction wrought when Reed’s obsessive patriotism hooks up with Franklin’s implacable determination to succeed. But as the battles play out, there’s always love and the pull of friendship down in the trenches. More

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    ‘Writing a Trauma Play Makes Me Want to Dry Heave’

    The playwright Sanaz Toossi on her two comedies about Iranian women, both debuting this season: “English” and “Wish You Were Here.”“Writing a play is a terribly embarrassing thing,” Sanaz Toossi said. “The only way you get to the finish line is if you genuinely love what you’re writing about. I guess I love writing about Iranian women.”Toossi, who completed an M.F.A. in dramatic writing at New York University in 2018, is making a double debut this spring, with “English,” in previews now and set to run through March 13 at the Atlantic Theater Company, and “Wish You Were Here,” which is scheduled to begin previews on April 13 at Playwrights Horizons. Both plays are set in Karaj, Iran — “Wish You Were Here” in the late 1970s and ’80s, “English” in the present — in classrooms and living rooms mostly populated by women.“I feel like your relationships with other women are the most profound and the most devastating of your life,” she said on a recent freezing morning at a diner near the Atlantic. Toossi had dressed against the cold in layered scarves and sweaters. Around her neck hung a gold necklace. The pendant? Her own name in Farsi.“I’m a basic Iranian girl,” she joked.Toossi, 30, grew up in Orange County, Calif., the only child of Iranian immigrants. She fulfilled a pre-law major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was accepted to several law schools. Somehow she couldn’t make herself go. Instead she began writing plays, which she hid from her parents. (Her mother, sensing Toossi had a secret, assumed she was pregnant.) Those first plays were terrible, Toossi said. But then she began writing about the people she knew — Iranians and Iranian Americans — and the plays got better.From left, Tala Ashe, Hadi Tabbal, Marjan Neshat, Ava Lalezarzadeh and Pooya Mohseni in “English,” set in a class for English-language learners.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow she writes comedies, which are also, arguably, tragedies. “English,” copresented with the Roundabout Theater Company, and set in a class for English-language learners, explores the ways in which language and identity intertwine. “Wish You Were Here,” written as a gift to her mother, follows a group of friends through the upheavals of the Iran-Iraq War. Both plays interrogate the losses — real and symbolic — that come when characters can’t fully express themselves.“Sometimes I’m talked about as a writer who writes political content,” she said. “It just means that I write Middle Eastern people. And those people have not been on our stages very often.”Over coffee and eggs, Toossi — anxious, glamorous — discussed language, representation and the comic potential of bleeding onto the furniture. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Were you raised speaking Farsi?We were not the Iranians who were like, “We’re in America now.” I grew up naturally bilingual. I’m a writer now. I make my living in the English language. And my Farsi gets worse every year. It’s painful for me. I wonder if my kids will know Farsi. I did work with a Farsi tutor. I went in thinking, I’ve got this. You’re going to love me. She goes, “Your grammar is very bad.” I was like, OK, that’s great. Tear me a new one, girl.These two plays are about Middle Eastern characters. Is that typical of your work?The family drama I’ve just finished, it’s about Southern Californian Iranians. Everything else has been set in Iran. What happens if I show up with a play about three white girls? Will anyone want to do it? Even if it’s really good? Sometimes I worry that I am the right kind of Middle Eastern. When the Muslim ban [Donald J. Trump’s 2017 executive order that at first barred nationals from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering America] was enacted, I felt a shift. Middle Eastern artists have been knocking at the door for a really long time. People finally started listening.So you worry about being pigeonholed?If all that ever gets produced of my work is just my stories about Middle Eastern people, I don’t think I would ever be upset. But there’s always the worry that I am in the person-of-color slot in a season. It starts to feel a little icky. I don’t know that I’ll ever stop writing about Middle Eastern people until it doesn’t feel special. It feels special right now to have — especially in “Wish You Were Here” — these Iranian girls onstage. It’s a little bit about politics, but it’s mostly about them trying not to period on a couch. Maybe that won’t feel special in 30 years, and that’s fine, too.You have said that “Wish You Were Here” is for your mother. Whom is “English” for?“English” is for me. I had to write it. I wrote it as my thesis. I was really angry that year. After the travel ban, I white-knuckled it for two years, and I wrote “English” because I was furious with the anti-immigrant rhetoric. I just wanted to scream into the void a little bit. It’s a huge thing to learn a different language, a huge thing to give up that ability to fully express yourself, even if you have a full command over language.I was about to graduate. I wanted to be a writer, and it also probably came out of my own insecurities that I would never actually have the words to say what I wanted.What does it mean to present these plays to mostly white, mostly American audiences?The most meaningful responses for me have been the first-generation Middle Eastern kids who come to see “English.” I feel like they’re totally in it with me. Our white audiences, it’s tricky. There is laughter sometimes where I do not think there should be laughter. The accents get laughs. And it’s really uncomfortable some nights. I think the play takes care of it in a way. The pain is so real at the end of the play that I don’t think anybody’s laughing. But it is not easy.Why have you written these plays as comedies?I’m not a political writer. I’m not a public intellectual. I am, at my core, someone who loves a cheap laugh. I would fling myself off this booth to make you laugh.Both “English” and “Wish You Were Here” are sad. “Wish You Were Here” is more obviously sad. But writing a trauma play makes me want to dry heave. I just think it’s so flattening. It doesn’t help people see us as three-dimensional. I just can’t do it. And I don’t think it’s truthful. I don’t think that’s how life works.Politics come into the room, and you’re still trying to make your best friend laugh, or you’re still annoyed that you perioded on the couch — it’s all happening at once. Do people think that Middle Eastern women are huddled under a chador, like, bemoaning our oppressions? Pain looks different than how we think it looks and also joy is always there. Kindness is always there. There’s so much laughter through it. More

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    Seth Meyers on Trump’s ‘Truth Social’ Stumbles

    Meyers said, “By the time you find yourself signing up for Donald Trump’s social media site, something already went wrong.”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.Moment of TruthDonald Trump’s new Twitter alternative went live on Monday. On “Late Night,” Seth Meyers joked that Truth Social is “expected to revolutionize the way Americans have their data stolen.”“But like lots of people, I couldn’t even log in because when it launched, select users who tried to create accounts were repeatedly met with a red error warning, ‘Something went wrong. Please try again.’ Though by the time you find yourself signing up for Donald Trump’s social media site, something already went wrong.” — SETH MEYERS“But I’m guessing they’ll try again. If you were first in line to sign up for Truth Social, you probably got some free time on your hands. [imitating Trump supporter] ‘Well, I’m just sitting here waiting for J.F.K., Jr. to reappear at the Meadowlands with Elvis and the Loch Ness monster to prove the election was stolen. I guess I’ll try logging in again.’” — SETH MEYERS“I really enjoy how vague the error message is: ‘Something went wrong,’ like even they don’t know what the problem is. Usually you get an error code or something, but Trump’s site just gives you a shrug emoji that says, ‘What were you expecting? This thing’s a cluster [expletive].’” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Chilly Willy Edition)“And finally, an athlete from Finland told reporters over the weekend that after competing in the men’s 50-kilometer cross-country ski race at the Beijing Games, his penis was, quote, ‘a little bit frozen’ — though just because he needed an excuse after he was caught ‘warming it up.’” — SETH MEYERS“Or as it’s known by its official medical diagnosis: chilly willy.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Lindholm’s frosty groin was so bad, after the race, he had to use a heat pack to try to thaw out his appendage. OK, you gotta do it. Remember, never let your penis defrost on the counter. Put it in a bowl of water in the fridge — salmonella.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now if this all sounds painful, yes. As Lindholm said, “When the body parts started to warm up after the finish, the pain was unbearable.’ As opposed to ‘bearable’ frozen penis?” — STEPHEN COLBERT“People could tell something was wrong when he was doing a hand stand under the hand dryers in the men’s room. Thank god he’s an Olympian, because I wouldn’t have the hand strength.” — JIMMY FALLON“I feel for the guy, though. He’s training for years and now that’s what comes up when you Google him, you know what I’m saying?” — JIMMY FALLON“He used it to his advantage, though. For two of the turns he didn’t even use a ski pole.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingA bachelorette party crashed Monday night’s “Late Late Show,” and James Corden called on security for help.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightArnold Schwarzenegger will appear on Tuesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutClockwise from right: scenes from “A Banquet,” “You Are Not My Mother,” “Censor” and “She Will.”IFC Midnight; Magnet ReleasingA new wave of woman filmmakers from Britain and Ireland is breaking into the horror genre with scary debuts like “Saint Maud” and “A Banquet.” More

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    ‘The Gilded Age’: What Is Fact and What Is Fiction?

    The HBO period drama sets invented melodrama within actual historical story lines. Here are the back stories of elements that shape the world of the series.A scene in this week’s episode of “The Gilded Age,” Julian Fellowes’s frothy period drama on HBO, takes us to Central Park in the late 19th century. Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), young, rebellious and newly arrived from the obscurity of Pennsylvania, is riding in a carriage with her two blue-blood aunts when talk turns to the subject of Caroline Astor, the fearsome doyenne of New York society.“Do you like Mrs. Astor?” Marian asks.“That’s like saying, ‘Do you like rain?’” her Aunt Agnes (a waspish Christine Baranski) replies. “She is a fact of life that we must live with.”It is one of many nods to New York history that appears in “The Gilded Age.” Set during a time of dramatic change, the series chronicles a moment when the city’s center of gravity moved uptown, when society’s rules were rewritten as swiftly as new European-inspired mansions sprung up along Fifth Avenue, and when old families like the Astors and the Schermerhorns were challenged socially and financially by arrivistes named Vanderbilt, Gould and Rockefeller.The era’s name, from a book co-written by Mark Twain, makes the point that the glitter was on the surface. “Gilded means gold-covered, not golden,” said Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a history professor at Rutgers University who was the main historical consultant for “The Gilded Age,” and a co-executive producer. “It was a time when economic inequality, racial segregation, violence and nativism was living side by side with luxury and opulence.”Carl Raymond, a social historian whose podcast, “The Gilded Gentleman,” focuses on the era, said the cultural shifts were driven largely by “huge changes in commercial infrastructure, when crazy money was pouring in and old New York was being challenged by new.”“It’s when the new society was being created and everybody was jockeying for power,” he said.The HBO series speaks mostly to the Gilded Age of our imagination, full of grand families, sumptuous furnishings, lavish entertainments, stringent social rules, massive fortunes and sky’s-the-limit ambitions.Roughly halfway through its first season, which ends on March 21, “The Gilded Age” has blended fictional melodrama with actual historical story lines, like the importance of the Black press, the influx of stratospherically wealthy railroad magnates into the city and a simmering society dispute over the fashionable opera house’s inhospitality to newcomers.The events have played out among some characters who were wholly invented and others who were clearly inspired by real people — Carrie Coon’s striving Bertha Russell, for instance, channels the similarly eyes-on-the-prize Alva Vanderbilt — as well as a few who are portrayals of actual historical figures. These include the aforementioned Caroline Astor (Donna Murphy), the queen of Gilded Age society; Ward McAllister (Nathan Lane), snobby social arbiter to the elite; Clara Barton (Linda Emond), the founder of the American Red Cross; and T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones), the Black writer, orator, civil rights leader and newspaper editor.Teasing out the real from the fictional is part of the fun of watching “The Gilded Age,” which was recently renewed for a second season. To help you along, here are the back stories of some of the elements that shape the world of the series.Denée Benton plays a reporter who writes for T. Thomas Fortune, a pioneering Black newspaper editor.Alison Cohen Rosa/HBOUptown vs. DowntownIn the first episode, the chef who works for the rapaciously ambitious new-money Russell family notes approvingly that the family has moved to stylish 61st Street, some 30 blocks north of their previous house. “Thirtieth Street is out of fashion,” he declares.Indeed, the early history of upper-class Manhattan is the history of northerly migration, from Bowling Green to Washington Square to Murray Hill to the 50s, and then straight up Fifth Avenue by the 1880s.“All of a sudden people you think are beneath you, people you didn’t want to associate with, are suddenly on your block,” said Esther Crain, author of “The Gilded Age in New York” and founder of the website Ephemeral New York, which explores interesting aspects of the city.She described it as a time when corruption, exploitation and graft were rampant, but also when the culture, lifestyle and institutions of the city began to take shape, cementing New York’s sense of itself as the center of everything.“New York was the microcosm of the era — the financial capital of the country, the industrial base for lots of big business,” she said. “It had the culture, the capital, the theater and shopping and fashion, and everybody who was anybody wanted to be here.”The Opera“The Age of Innocence,” Edith Wharton’s exquisite dissection of Gilded Age New York, opens with the main characters preparing to see “Faust” at the Academy of Music, the opera venue beloved by New York’s old guard. “Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the ‘new people’ whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to,” Wharton writes.Indeed, although Bertha Russell, the richest and most brazen upstart in “The Gilded Age,” attends the opera as a guest, she discovers to her dismay that all her wealth can’t buy her a coveted private box. The Academy had fewer than two dozen, owned by prominent New York families and passed to their heirs.Bertha Russell, a wealthy arriviste played by Carrie Coon, resembles the similarly steely Alva Vanderbilt. Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO“Going to the opera in this period was a social battlefield,” Raymond said. “It was about where you sat, what you were wearing — and most importantly, who saw you do it.” The layout lent itself to social peacocking, he said, with “boxes on one side of the stage looking at boxes on the other side.”In New York, rich people annoyed at being excluded from things tend to set up their own fancier alternatives. In this case, a group of new-money interlopers pooled their money and built a bigger and better building. (A character in “The Gilded Age” describes them as “J.P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts — every opportunist in New York.”) The result, the first Metropolitan Opera House, opened in 1883 at Broadway and 39th Street. (Unable to compete, the Academy tried to reinvent itself as a vaudeville hall but closed several years later.)Dunbar said that the ease with which the rich could buy their way into society during the period reflected and bolstered one of the founding myths of America: that it was a place where anything was possible, as long as you did the work and made the money.“It may seem like this is just a case of ‘old’ rich people and ‘new’ rich people fighting, and who cares,” Dunbar said. “But it speaks to the changing of the guard, and the changing of traditions, and the way this nation has always grappled with change.”European SocietyAmerica was still a young country during the Gilded Age, barely 100 years old and forged by revolution that ostensibly repudiated the old ways. But for all that, Manhattan’s upper crust seemed determined to emulate European customs.In “The Gilded Age,” Mrs. Russell reflects the tastes of the time by boasting that her new chef is French. Her extravagant new home was designed to emulate grand European houses, as were the mansions built by real-life New York arrivistes of the era. (The interiors also were generally full of materials bought from European chateaus and imported at huge expense.) The new opera house was modeled on its European counterparts. Social customs, too — the elaborate codes of dress, manners and decorum, dictating who could be introduced to whom — were also very European, perhaps as a response by a nervous upper class to the exciting but threatening notion of American social mobility.“Caroline Astor’s model was Europe; she wanted to create a European American court,” Raymond said. “One of the funniest ironies about the Gilded Age is that you have a society desperately trying to emulate the courts of Europe and British aristocracy.”Caroline Astor, as depicted by the society portraitist Carolus-Duran. Mrs. Astor ruled New York society in the late 19th century.Sepia Times/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesMrs. Astor vs. Mrs. VanderbiltFor many years, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor was the ruler of New York society and the epitome of old-guard Manhattan. With the help of her friend Ward McAllister, she decreed who and what was worthy, or not. It was said that her parties were limited to 400 guests from just 25 “old” families.But she met her match in the staggeringly rich Alva Vanderbilt, who swept into New York and in 1882 installed herself in the most over-the-top new mansion the city had ever seen, at 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Designed under Vanderbilt’s watchful eye by the renowned architect Richard Morris Hunt and known as the “Petit Chateau,” it was enormous, made of limestone and done in a French Renaissance and Gothic style. It indeed looked like a castle, to the extent you can have a castle in the middle of an American city. Astor herself had two houses, one in the increasingly unfashionable 30s and one in the 50s. But neither was as nice as the Vanderbilt mansion.In 1883, Vanderbilt threw a lavish masked ball for more than 1,000 guests. Everyone clamored to be invited, but Astor and her daughter Carrie (who was said to be desperate to attend) were left off the guest list. The story goes that after Vanderbilt pointed out to McAllister that she had never been introduced to Astor, Astor promptly called on Vanderbilt — and swiftly received an invitation to the party.Alas, like virtually all the Gilded Age mansions, the Vanderbilts’ “Petit Chateau” eventually became too expensive for the family to maintain. In 1926, Vanderbilt heirs sold it to developers for $3.75 million, and it was destroyed. An office building now sits on the site. More