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    On ‘Pictures From Home’ on Broadway, a Family Portrait Full of Secrets

    The actor Nathan Lane had been planning to play the American anti-father Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” (1949) when that production fell apart. Restless during the pandemic and casting about for his next project, he read a draft of Sharr White’s “Pictures From Home,” which recalled “Salesman” to him: The two scripts share an almost incessantly angry, backward-looking gaze at the glory days of midcentury American masculinity, embodied by a discontented businessman. Now, as White’s play opens on Broadway this week, Lane, 67, will star as Irving Sultan, a former Schick razor executive who’s supported both emotionally and financially by his doting if frustrated wife, Jean Sultan (Zoë Wanamaker), while sparring with their childish 30-something son Larry Sultan (Danny Burstein, also doting, also frustrated), both of whom tend to Irv in their artichoke-colored Southern California ranch home even as he struggles to return their affection.The show, says Lane, is “about parents and mortality,” the latter of which has been on the actor’s mind since his 2020 cancer treatment. “They’re all fighting to tell their own story, and certainly Irv is fighting to protect this fantasy of his success.” Indeed, many arguments unfurl over 100 or so minutes, often in the form of direct audience address — it’s “part family dramedy, part documentary, part three-way TED Talk,” as Lane describes it — and the sorts of overlapping conversations native to people, like the Sultans, with Brooklyn roots and Palm Springs aspirations.Jennifer LivingstonWhat moves the play beyond that living room drama tradition is the source material: It’s based on Larry Sultan’s 1992 photo memoir of the same name, which the Bay Area-based artist published after dozens of visits to his parents’ San Fernando Valley home in the 1980s. Sultan then combined a decade’s worth of staged photographs and recorded interviews of his mother and father, both of whom died soon after the book’s release, with stills from home movies taken during his childhood to create a vulnerable family portrait that’s as much about aging as it is about accountability — and loyalty — to those we care about most. Photographers like Alec Soth and Stephen Shore still venerate the project, a longer version of which was republished in 2021; White discovered it in 2015, six years after the photographer’s death, as part of Sultan’s first career retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Afterward, the playwright contacted the artist’s widow, Kelly Sultan, and, over dinner, convinced her to let him option the book. She also agreed to open the archives so that White might achieve a new kind of bioplay, one that its director, Bartlett Sher, signed on to for its “multivariable potential,” he says, using found footage from the Sultans’ garage and photographic projections that, onstage, heighten the divide between truth and fiction.White, who also writes for television and has had two other plays on Broadway, both in different styles, says the half-decade he spent finishing this script was, from the start, an “investigation” into the Sultans’ power dynamics. In memoir and play alike, Jean and Irving are willing subjects … until they become skeptical co-conspirators, wondering why their son seems obsessed with chronicling them so harshly. “There’s lots of conflict, but it’s not the end,” adds White, 52, who had a strained upbringing with his own parents and is now raising two teenage sons in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife, Evelyn Carr White, an artist and interior designer. “I was fascinated by this idea that you can say the worst thing, and ultimately nothing breaks.”And yet it’s Irv — depicted by Lane with jocular, egotistic bravado that barely masks his deep fear of irrelevance — who always seems to get the last word: “I’ll tell you about mess, Larry,” he says near the show’s conclusion. “You know what mess is? It’s intimacy. Intimacy is a big fat [expletive] mess. But I’ll tell you another thing. It’s love, too. OK? This thing you think you’re capturing. This evidence? This mess? It’s love.” More

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    A ‘Bag of Helium’ Helps Chelsea Handler Start Her ‘Daily Show’ Guest Stint

    Handler poked fun at the Chinese surveillance balloon that a U.S. fighter jet shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.I SpyChelsea Handler kicked off her week of hosting “The Daily Show” with jokes about the Chinese balloon that a U.S. fighter jet shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday.Handler said she felt bad for President Biden: “Obama got to order the assassination of bin Laden, and all he gets to do is murder a bag of helium.”“But, hey, why not shoot it when you have a trillion-dollar defense budget and all of these rock-hard missiles lying around? Trump must be so jealous.” — CHELSEA HANDLER“And, as you heard, this balloon was the size of three buses. I love measuring things in buses. And for the rich people out there who don’t know what a bus is, they’re those big yellow vehicles that bring Matt Gaetz’s girlfriends to school.” — CHELSEA HANDLER“What I don’t get is, why does China even need to send this balloon in the first place? They’re already spying on us with TikTok. Is it possible that the Chinese spies became the first people ever to get sick of TikTok? Were they like, ‘I swear to God, if I see one more basic [expletive] make lasagna in a slow cooker.’” — CHELSEA HANDLER“And, by the way: China, if you’re listening, which you obviously are, next time, why you don’t make your balloon the color blue, so we can’t see it in the sky? Or if you’re going to make it white, at least write ‘the moon’ on it. No one here will know the difference. I certainly won’t.” — CHELSEA HANDLER“So the balloon went over Alaska, and then it went through Canada and then into U.S. airspace. And, by the way, Canada, thanks for the heads up on that.” — CHELSEA HANDLER“Canada saw the balloon, and they were like, ‘Oh, look, one of those Chinese lanterns!’” — CHELSEA HANDLERThe Punchiest Punchlines (Big Balloon Edition)“The only way this balloon could have had a higher profile is if it had its own Instagram account.” — SETH MEYERS“This balloon did more traveling than a high school senior taking a gap year before college. True story: It already has diamond medallion status on Delta.” — SETH MEYERS“Just to screw with Fox News, Biden should have announced that he was inviting the balloon to appear in this year’s Thanksgiving Day parade.” — SETH MEYERS“The balloon floated from Montana to South Carolina. Somehow it got across the country faster than someone flying Southwest.” — JIMMY FALLON“But the U.S. really didn’t have a choice. The only other option was to rub the balloon on Bernie Sanders and stick it to Canada.” — JIMMY FALLON“On the bright side, from now on when your kid’s birthday balloon pops and they’re upset, you can just go, ‘No, it was a Chinese spy balloon, Timmy. The Chinese can’t spy on us anymore, you’re a patriot!’” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingJames Corden shared his thoughts on Grammys fashion on Monday’s “Late Late Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe comedian Tig Notaro, who stars in the film “Your Place or Mine,” will appear on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutWith her fourth victory on Sunday, Beyoncé set the record for most Grammy wins by any artist.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesShe may not have walked away with Album of the Year, but Beyoncé broke the record for most Grammy victories ever after adding four more trophies on Sunday. More

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    Jesse Tyler Ferguson Tips His Cap to ‘Take Me Out’

    The actor, who won a Tony Award for playing a baseball star’s business manager in the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, called the role the most personal of his career.At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on Sunday night, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, standing in front of the black outline of a baseball stadium silhouetted against a pink, orange and yellow sky, closed his eyes, inhaling deeply as the lights went dark.“Right before that moment, I was like, ‘If I say these last words, it’s really over,’” Ferguson said later, after returning to his fifth-floor dressing room after his final performance in the Tony Award-winning revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, “Take Me Out.” “And that hit me hard. I was just trying to hold it together.”The sold-out show capped a 15-week return by Ferguson to the role that won him a Tony Award last spring, for best featured actor in a play.The curtain call on Sunday evening at the final performance of “Take Me Out.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesFerguson played Mason Marzac, a business manager for a player portrayed by Jesse Williams.George Etheredge for The New York Times“It’s definitely the most personal role of my career,” said Ferguson, 47, who played Mason Marzac, a fanboy business manager for a player (Jesse Williams) who comes out as gay. “It’s a role that meant something to me before I started learning it myself.”The revival, which was originally slated to debut in spring 2020, finally opened last April at the Helen Hayes Theater and ran through June 11. It received near-universal acclaim from critics and won two of the four Tonys for which it was nominated (it also took home best revival of a play).After the initial run, which was produced by Second Stage Theater, the producers Barry and Fran Weissler announced in August that they would bring it back for a limited encore at the Schoenfeld starting last October, with most of the original cast of the revival — giving Ferguson his first chance to walk onto a Broadway stage as a Tony winner.“We just felt like there was unfinished business with this play,” Ferguson said in a conversation in the Blue Room at the Civilian Hotel before his final performance, surrounded by Broadway memorabilia like a pair of women’s Emerald City boots from “Wicked.” Ferguson saw the play during its original Broadway run in 2002, with Denis O’Hare in his role. “To take the reins 20 years later and get to try my own version of this guy is really meaningful and special,” he said.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThough Ferguson is best known for playing the high-strung lawyer Mitchell Pritchett on the ABC sitcom “Modern Family,” he was a regular on New York’s Off Broadway stages before turning to the small screen.“I just love the intimacy of an audience,” he said. “I love being in a room and whatever happens, happens that day, and it’s just for these people.”In conversations before his final performance and then after the curtain call — life-size cutouts of the show’s cast lined the stairwell up to his dressing room — Ferguson discussed the role’s personal meaning, how the show changed his relationship with baseball and what’s next for him. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.How are you feeling? I’m having a lot of heartbreak right now, being done. And Mason is not — he’s the opposite of heartbreak, his heart’s been cracked open. So I was fighting against this thing happening inside me, with what my character needs. In a few hours, I’m probably going to have a really good cry about this.How did you first become involved with “Take Me Out?”I was approached almost three and a half years ago. I was getting ready to do my last season of “Modern Family,” and it worked out that I was going to go right from that into this show.What appealed to you about it?I saw this play 20 years ago, and Denis O’Hare, who originally played the part, was so wonderful and spectacular in it, and that performance reinforced my desire to be a theater actor. So to take the reins 20 years later and get to try my own version of this guy is really meaningful and special.“I’ve never peeled back the onion this far with a character, and it’s just because of the luxury of all this time we’ve had,” he said of the show’s second engagement.George Etheredge for The New York TimesHow has your performance changed in the encore run?When we all came back, the performances were so much richer and deeper. I’ve never peeled back the onion this far with a character, and it’s just because of the luxury of all this time we’ve had.Did you play or watch baseball growing up?No, though I certainly appreciate it more from working on this. It’s an infectious thing, and I’ve fallen in love with it in a way I never anticipated.Your character’s sudden baseball fandom is largely a means of redirecting an impossible crush. What is a time you’ve similarly become obsessively devoted to something?I’ve felt that way about theater, certainly. I sometimes use that as a replacement when I’m doing a show. I think about being on the stage at the Delacorte Theater, and I can replace that with being on a field by myself and looking at all these empty seats.It’s hard to believe this play was written more than 20 years ago. Are you surprised it’s still so relevant?It’s heartbreaking that it feels so relevant. We all kind of assumed that this play was going to feel like a relic after a while because it was like, “Oh, 20 years from now, that’s not going to be a thing, and people are going to be very open about who they are in professional sports.” And we haven’t gotten there yet. So few professional athletes have come out of the closet. The actor Eduardo Ramos joined Ferguson on the fire escape of the Schoenfeld Theater on Sunday in order to greet the actor Bill Heck who was unable to perform that night.George Etheredge for The New York TimesBecause the play has nude scenes, audience members were required to lock their phones in pouches during the performance. Have you noticed that people are more attentive?I do notice that, in the second act, they’re immediately with us because they haven’t been spending 15 minutes scrolling through Instagram. They’ve spent that time discussing the play with the people they’ve come with and just staying in the moment. I wish more theaters would do this.You are one of the few cast members who remain clothed in “Take Me Out.” But have you ever been naked onstage?When I was 21 or 22, I did a production of “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,” which is a Paul Rudnick play. It was terrifying, and the internet wasn’t what it is now and social media didn’t exist. I really look up to these guys who are doing this. It takes a lot of bravery. There’s three actors in this show who don’t have to get naked and we’re all looking at one another like, “Oh, we can have carbs!”What have you learned about yourself through this role?My last few times on Broadway, I played a kid in a spelling bee, or I did this quirky one-man show about reservations. I just never thought of myself as an actor who had the ability to take on a part as meaty as this.You recently became a father to your second son, Sullivan, in November. And your oldest, Beckett, is 2. How are you sleeping?My kids are in Los Angeles right now. So I’ve been going back and forth to see them in L.A., which has been a series of red-eyes to get back in time for the Tuesday night shows. And that’s been taxing. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do this without the support of my husband.What’s next for you?I’m in “Cocaine Bear,” which is my first studio film. I saw a screening of it a few weeks ago, and it’s absolutely bonkers. I’m so excited to see it with a big audience. And they’re talking about doing “Take Me Out” as a mini-series or an ongoing series, so we’ll see if that gets any traction.OK, before I let you go get some food, let’s do a quick round of confirm or deny.OK!Next up for Ferguson is a role in the film “Cocaine Bear,” which is scheduled to be released later this month.George Etheredge for The New York TimesYou know all the lyrics to “Miss Saigon.”All the lyrics? There was a time when I did. I don’t know if I still have it in my head. So what is that, a confirm and a deny?“Shake It Off” is the best Taylor Swift song.No, though I love “Shake It Off.” My favorite changes daily, but I’m currently obsessed with “Champagne Problems.”If your options to save your life were to either hit a Major League fastball or fight off a cocaine bear, you would —I don’t think I’d survive either. But because I have been mauled by a cocaine bear, I’m going to have to try the baseball.You own a pair of dad shoes, a.k.a. white New Balance sneakers.(Sighs) Yes, I can confirm that.New York is basically Los Angeles now.Deny. There are a lot more juice bars, but beyond that — I don’t think so.If you could guest star on either “The White Lotus,” “Schmigadoon!,” “Yellowjackets” or “The Gilded Age,” you would choose — Oh, shoot! [thinks for a minute] “Schmigadoon!”You can also throw in a wild card if you want —“Severance!” Something dark or different — I need to crawl out under the rock of Mitchell Pritchett and surprise people. More

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    Book Review: ‘Up With the Sun,’ by Thomas Mallon

    In his name-dropping novel “Up With the Sun,” Thomas Mallon fictionalizes the minor career and tabloid murder of the Broadway actor Dick Kallman.UP WITH THE SUN, by Thomas MallonAlfred Hitchcock liked to talk about the MacGuffin, a plot device of great interest to the characters onscreen that keeps the story moving along, yet turns out to be of little consequence. “In crook stories it is almost always the necklace,” he said, “and in spy stories it is most always the papers.” (Famous MacGuffins: Rosebud, from “Citizen Kane”; the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction”; the Maltese Falcon.)In Thomas Mallon’s nostalgic new showbiz novel “Up With the Sun,” the MacGuffin is a fraternity pin: a prop from a real, if forgotten, 1951 Broadway musical called “Seventeen,” worn by an actor who was a success in it (and not much else): Dick Kallman. Kallman presses a fine-jewelry version on his cast crush, the male lead, who refuses the gift. The pin will also pop up as a tie clip worn in friendship; a token of love on a lapel; a tool of sadomasochistic sex; and — most Hitchcockishly — an object of value sought by murderous thieves. Mallon specializes in animating imagined versions of historical figures, and ambitiously so; he recently wrapped up a Washington trilogy about three different Republican presidencies. Unlike Nixon or Reagan or George W. Bush, Kallman clears the bar of “historical” only because the internet, as they used to say of elephants, never forgets. In 1975, his acting career on the rocks, Kallman was quoted in The New York Times’s fashion column advising women to wear terry-cloth dresses designed by a business partner. The next time he was mentioned, five years later on the front page of the paper’s Metropolitan report at age 46, was not because he’d switched to dealing art and antiques. It was because he and a “business assistant” 20 years his junior had been killed in cold blood while in various states of undress in a luxury apartment off Central Park.Mallon swipes the story of Kallman’s short life and shocking end and runs with it like Cary Grant under the crop duster in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (where the MacGuffin was the government microfilm hidden in a Tarascan warrior statue). Grant doesn’t make a physical cameo in “Up With the Sun” — even in death, he’s maybe too major for this, a book that’s about making one’s peace with minorness.But many other celebrities of all gradations do, including Grant’s ex-wife Dyan Cannon, her ring finger smashed into a piece of scenery after Kallman felt she was upstaging him on the tour of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” “You sick bastard,” she hisses at him when he’s seat-filling at the Golden Globes years later.The recreated Cannon is onto something: In Mallon’s well-researched imagining, Kallman is, if not a sociopath, a doomed cipher on whom “ambition stuck out like a cowlick or a horn, fatal to an audience’s complete belief in almost any character he was playing.” He’s good-looking, like “a less perfect Tony Curtis,” but has a belligerent, possibly misogynistic streak that puts off casting directors and colleagues.In a short-lived TV show, “Hank,” he plays an orphan sneaking college classes (the novel’s title is taken from a lyric in Johnny Mercer’s theme song). It’s canceled after he becomes what his agent calls “the first person in history to be the subject of a takedown profile in TV Guide.”“Did he have a soul?” wonders Lucie Arnaz, Lucy and Desi’s daughter, in whose workshop Kallman unfruitfully participated. One pit musician imagines the actor beating the female lead of “Seventeen” to death with her parasol.His foil is that production’s (so far as I can tell wholly fictional) pianist Matt Liannetto, whose story Mallon counterposes to Kallman’s in alternating chapters rendered in sans-serif typeface. A divorced father who’s slowly emerging from the closet, Liannetto is also, in his way, doomed — a cough, diminished appetite and night sweats hint why — but morally secure, a walking indictment of fame. “I’d been glad to be quite good at the little thing I did,” he thinks, comparing himself to Salieri in “Amadeus,” “rather than mediocre at something bigger that I tried to do.”As a drive down the highway of old-style entertainment (theater, movies, books, music, TV) — with gossip columns on the shoulder — “Up With the Sun” is an unqualified success. It’s replete with amusing walk-ons, most notably the underused actress Dolores Gray, Kallman’s partner in a décor concern called Possessions of Prominence; with knowing, affectionate references (Hal Hastings! “They’re Playing Our Song”! Manhattan Plaza!); and with sidelong observations of cultural change.Kallman, for example, hates “A Chorus Line,” disgusted by the “backstage sweat-stink and poor-me agonizing put out in front of the audience. No more hitting your mark with a big grin and singing, full-out, a joyful lyric.” Liannetto, more deeply as is his wont, mourns the “eternal orbits” of an analog watch. We time-travel to Judy Garland’s 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall and Billy Rose’s funeral. Who could ask for anything more?A coherent crime story, maybe. The man convicted IRL of Kallman’s killing, Charles Lonnie Grosso — whatever happened to him, I found myself wondering, tilting inexorably back toward fact. The perpetrators here are given other names, and so many stock characters tromp through in the investigation and courtroom scenes — a Columbo-like detective, a “no-nonsense” judge — it’s hard to understand the particulars or why the main character met his untimely end, other than getting mixed up with a bad drug crowd. The murder was lurid; the motive seems mundane and not fully explained, and Liannetto’s relationship with a police assistant a little too neat.What he and the antihero Kallman have in common is that they’re both “throwbacks,” he soliloquizes. “All my life I’ve loved the past as a place that can keep you safe from the present, an inert world, sleeping and finished, that can’t push you around.”“Up With the Sun” raises the drapes on a weird corner of this past, rousing and rummaging through. We’re left rubbing our eyes.UP WITH THE SUN | By Thomas Mallon | Illustrated | 353 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28 More

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    Mushrooms Aren’t Here to Destroy Us — Or to Save Us

    The fictional fungus in “The Last of Us” touched a collective nerve. When it comes to mushrooms, we just can’t keep our cool.It’s grim, but in every post-apocalyptic story line, I wait for the moment when the characters float their theories about how the world fell apart, hoping to glean something useful.In HBO’s series “The Last of Us,” survivors of a global pandemic live in harsh, government-controlled quarantine zones to evade a parasitic fungus that turns them into zombies. Joel, a smuggler in what remains of Boston, believes that the ophiocordyceps mutation was delivered through the food system — contaminated batches of globally shipped flour or sugar spread the disease too quickly and efficiently for any kind of recall. Over the course of a long weekend, humanity was wrecked.The setup sounds pretty conventional for the zombie-thriller genre, but since the series premiered in January, the response has been a bit sweaty — panicked, even. Mycologists, fungal biologists and other mushroom-world experts have been called on, over and over, to assure us that while cordyceps species that zombify insects are real, a cordyceps mutation that thrives in humans is pure fiction.What got us so rattled?The fictional cordyceps mutation in HBO’s zombie-thriller series “The Last of Us” takes fear of fungus to the extreme.Warner MediaPaul Stamets, one of the country’s best-known mycologists, enjoyed the first two episodes of the show, but posted afterward on Facebook to emphasize the fact that no, cordyceps really aren’t capable of all that. “It is natural for humans to fear that which is powerful, but mysterious and misunderstood,” he wrote, wondering if the show played on our deep-seated fear of mushrooms.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.There are around 1.5 million species of fungi, a kingdom that is neither plant nor animal, and they’re some of the strangest and most marvelous life-forms on the planet, both feared and revered. But our relationship with mushrooms, particularly in the West, can be fraught — and not just because misidentifying one might be dangerous.In nature, mushrooms happily appear under the grossest and most fractious circumstances, when little else will. They can signal death, thriving in damp, dark rot, blooming in decomposition and nimbly decaying organic matter. Nevermind that this process is vital and regenerative (and, witnessed in a time-lapse, weirdly beautiful), it really freaks us out.When the artist Jae Rhim Lee wondered if it was possible for us to make a collective cultural shift, to approach death and its rituals differently, and to make smaller environmental impacts when we die, she designed a burial suit seeded with mushrooms. Nothing could be more natural — or more horrifyingly taboo — than, instead of eating mushrooms, inviting the mushrooms to eat us.Bioluminescent mushrooms, seen here in Gangwon Province, South Korea, glow in the dark.Video by Imazins / Getty ImagesMushrooms have a way of making us consider the things we prefer to avoid. Though this hasn’t stopped us from eating them — mushrooms are an ancient food source.The “stoned ape theory,” which imagines fungus as central to our evolution, was animated in Louie Schwartzberg’s terrifically pro-mushroom documentary, “Fantastic Fungi.” One scene shows how early humans might have eaten mushrooms, including psychedelic ones, off animal dung as they tracked prey across the savanna, then collectively tripped their way toward language, weaponry, music and more.Small, round buttons are the most cozy, familiar and recognizable of our edible mushrooms now, but there are hundreds of varieties we can eat (without tripping). In the pockets of wilderness around my home in Los Angeles, you might find brownish-orange candy caps, wild, yellowish frills of chanterelles and clusters of long-gilled oyster mushrooms. After rain, in the shady nooks of my own backyard, I see shaggy parasols pop up from time to time, as if by magic.In “The Last of Us” a warming climate weaponizes mushrooms against humans — a global disaster of our own making. But in reality, if you scratch just below the surface of our fear, you’ll find quite the opposite: an almost unreasonable expectation that mushrooms will rescue us, clean up our messes, do our dirty work and reverse all of the damage we’re doing to the earth. It’s true that there are species capable of breaking down oils in saltwater, absorbing radiation and cleaning toxins from the soil, though it’s also true that they might have better things to do.A handful of shaggy parasols, a common mushroom with a tousled cap.Deagostini Picture Library / Getty ImagesMushrooms are the fruiting bodies of the mycelium, rootlike threads that connect underground in a vast mycorrhizal matrix so complex, intelligent and essential, Mr. Stamets has called it “the neurological network of nature.”That material, which also stores large amounts of carbon underground and can help plant life survive drought and other stress, is being used to develop alternatives to leathers, plastics, packaging and building materials. (Adidas made a concept shoe using a mycelium-based material last year, which led the company to discuss its “journey to create a more sustainable world.”)Lately, we expect mushrooms to save us, too. The zealous interest in adaptogenic mushrooms — fungi species used medicinally for centuries in China and other parts of Asia — has created an international market for lion’s mane, reishi, chaga and cordyceps. We turn to mushrooms to ease our anxiety, to help us focus, to make us happier and more open-minded, to make us horny, to make our skin glow, to enhance our memory, to get us to sleep.Mushrooms are magnificent. But maybe anxiety over a fictional fungus reflects a flickering awareness that we are, in fact, asking a bit too much of them.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘The 7 Toughest Days on Earth’ and Super Bowl LVII

    A new adventure series is on National Geographic, the Super Bowl airs on Fox, and President Biden delivers his second State of the Union address.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Feb. 6-12. Details and times are subject to change.MondayMartinique Lewis in “Black Travel Across America.”Victoria Donfor/National Geographic for DisneyBLACK TRAVEL ACROSS AMERICA 10 p.m. on National Geographic. Beginning in 1936, Victor Hugo Green, a Harlem-based postal worker, published an annual “Green Book” series for three decades. Serving as a travel guidebook for Black Americans in a time of segregation and racial strife (and in 2018 lending its title to the Oscar-winning movie), the book provided a list of hotels, restaurants and service stations from Connecticut to California where Black American patrons would not only be served, but be safe. In this documentary, the travel consultant Martinique Lewis embarks on a coast-to-coast road trip to visit historic “Green Book” locations and speak to local experts about the businesses that acted as safe havens.TuesdaySTATE OF THE UNION 2023 9 p.m. on ABC, CBS, Fox, HBO and NBC. President Biden’s second State of the Union speech will be his first appearance before a Republican-led House of Representatives. “He looks forward to speaking with Republicans, Democrats and the country about how we can work together to continue building an economy that works from the bottom up and the middle out, keep boosting our competitiveness in the world, keep the American people safe and bring the country together,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.THE 7 TOUGHEST DAYS ON EARTH 10 p.m. on National Geographic. This unscripted adventure series follows Dwayne Fields, an adventurer and explorer known for being the first Black British citizen to reach the North Pole, as he works to keep himself and a small film crew alive for seven days in some of the most extreme environments on earth, during their deadliest times of year. From the glaciers of Kyrgyzstan to the deserts of Oman, Fields must guide his crew through the elements to a specified extraction point. Their journey begins in Tuesday’s premiere in the forests of Gabon.WednesdayGina Rodriguez in “Not Dead Yet.”Eric McCandless/ABCNOT DEAD YET 8:30 p.m. on ABC. Adapted from the book “Confessions of a Forty-Something ____ Up” by Alexandra Potter comes a new series from the creators of “This Is Us” and “The Real O’Neals.” Starring the Golden Globe Award-winning actress Gina Rodriguez (“Jane the Virgin”) as Nell Stevens, a broke obituary writer who can communicate with the dead, the series follows Nell as she works to find herself and restart the life and career she left a decade ago.ThursdayTHE KING AND I (1956) 8 p.m. on TCM. This Oscar-winning musical film tells the timeless story of an English governess named Anna (Deborah Kerr) who travels to modern-day Thailand as a tutor for the 15 children of the King of Siam (Yul Brynner). Adapted from the Tony-winning 1951 musical of the same name, based on the 1944 novel “Anna and the King of Siam” by Margaret Landon (which in turn was inspired by the memoirs written by Anna Leonowens, a teacher to the children of King Mongkut in the 1860s), the film is beloved for its award-winning score and exploration of cultural differences. In a 1996 column for The New York Times, Margo Jefferson described the story as a “seductive and spectacular artifact” that was “based on facts and fictions about the Orient and the British Empire a century earlier; an extravaganza in which East meets West, a monarchy meets a matriarchy and operatic melodrama meets ethnic vaudeville.”FridayBen Affleck and Rosamund Pike in “Gone Girl.”Merrick Morton/20th Century FoxGONE GIRL (2014) 10:15 p.m. on HBOSGe. Based on the 2012 best seller by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay, “Gone Girl” follows the alternating narratives of the husband and wife Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), as an investigation mounts once Amy is discovered missing and Nick becomes a suspect in her disappearance. The Times critic Manohla Dargis described the film as “a ghastly vision” in her review of the movie. “At its strongest,” she added, “‘Gone Girl’ plays like a queasily, at times gleefully, funny horror movie about a modern marriage.”SaturdayA SOLDIER’S STORY (1984) and SERGEANT RUTLEDGE (1960) 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on TCM. This week’s selection for Turner Classic Movies’ Black History Month Saturdays features two films that focus on the Black experience in the Army. First is the Academy Award-nominated “A Soldier’s Story,” which Lawrence van Gelder described in his 1984 review for The Times as mixing “mystery, history, sociology and inquiry into the psychopathology of hatred and the poison of accommodation to injustice.” Based on Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Soldier’s Play,” a loose adaptation of Herman Melville’s novella “Billy Budd,” the film is set in rural Louisiana during World War II and tells the story of Capt. Richard Davenport (Howard Rollins Jr.), a JAG officer who has been called in to investigate the murder of Vernon Waters (Adolph Caesar), a sergeant in an all-Black Army unit. “Sergeant Rutledge” continues this exploration of themes of racial prejudice and justice. Set in the Southwest in the post‐Civil War years, it follows Braxton Rutledge (Woody Strode), a sergeant in one of four all-Black units, as he is tried in the rape and killing of a white girl and the slaying of her father, his commanding officer. Directed by the four-time Oscar-winning director John Ford, “Sergeant Rutledge” represents a shift in the racial consciousness of Ford’s work.SundayPUPPY BOWL XIX 2 p.m. on Animal Planet. Returning for its 19th year, Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl is a call-to-adoption television event that highlights the work of a range of animal rescues and shelters while adoptable puppies “compete” in a series of games. This year’s Puppy Bowl will feature over 120 puppies from 67 shelters, some of whom viewers will learn about in more depth over the course of the three-hour special (in addition to a number of featured kittens during “Kitty Halftime”).SUPER BOWL LVII 6:30 p.m. on Fox. Fox Sports presents its live coverage from State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., as the AFC champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, play the NFC champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, in a battle for the ultimate title. This year’s game is notable for being the first Super Bowl to feature two Black quarterbacks, and the first time a set of brothers will be competing against one another. The 2023 game also pits Andy Reid, the head coach for Kansas City, against Philadelphia, for which Reid was head coach from 1999 to 2012. More

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    ‘The Last of Us’ Season 1, Episode 4 Recap: Truck Stop

    This week, Joel and Ellie’s bond deepened during an unplanned stay in Kansas City. They should have tried Des Moines instead.‘The Last of Us’ Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Please Hold My Hand’For a long stretch of this week’s episode of “The Last of Us,” it looks as if not much is going to happen, and that maybe this week we’ll just have “The Chill Road-Trip Adventures of Joel and Ellie.” They listen to some Hank Williams. Joel teaches Ellie how to siphon gas from parked cars — though when he fumblingly tries to explain the physics behind it, she flashes a wicked smile and says, “You don’t know.”They eat some 20-year-old Chef Boyardee ravioli. (It’s good!) Ellie finds a book of puns at a gas station and torments Joel with jokes like: “What did the mermaid wear to her math class? An algae bra.”The fun can’t last, alas. About a third of the way through the episode, our heroes hit a blocked road in Kansas City, and while trying to find an alternative route through downtown, they are ambushed and then ultimately caught in the crossfire of a power struggle involving a local militia. In the initial melee, they crash Bill’s truck. All things considered, they probably should have driven through Des Moines.By the time the closing credits roll, there is a lot we still don’t know about the predicament in which Joel and Ellie find themselves. We know that the K.C. militia — which has “WE THE PEOPLE” emblazoned on its armored vehicles — is headquartered in a Quarantine Zone that FEDRA abandoned. We know its leader, Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), is so ice-cold that she executes her old family doctor. We know Kathleen is on a rampage against FEDRA “collaborators,” and that as part of that mission she is looking for someone named Henry, who is with someone named Sam: a child, apparently, who draws pictures of himself and Henry as superheroes.We know that Henry and Sam were recently hiding out in a building where the concrete foundation is breaking up and rippling, perhaps because of some cordyceps/infected activity going on underground. And we know that next week, Joel and Ellie are going to have do deal with the two guns pointing at the episode’s cliffhanger ending.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.Assuming our heroes don’t immediately die next week — a pretty safe assumption with five episodes remaining — what mattered most to the story this episode was that the trouble in Kansas City deepened Joel and Ellie’s bond, forcing them to be more honest with each other.After shooting his way out of immediate danger, Joel is surprised by an attacker who nearly chokes him to death. No longer able to keep her gun a secret, Ellie shoots and neutralizes the attacker but doesn’t kill him. That’s one cat out of the bag.When the attacker hands over his knife and pleads for his life — his name is Brian, he tells Ellie in a clear attempt to humanize himself, adding: “We can trade with you! We can be friends!” — Ellie hesitates to finish him off. But Joel has been at this survival game for a while. He snatches Elle’s gun and tells her to hide behind a wall so she won’t see how vicious he has to be with that knife.The moment forces more honesty to the surface. Joel, regretting the burden he assumes Ellie must feel for having shot someone for the first time, learns that she is not wide-eyed innocent he believed. She has, in fact, hurt somebody before. As for himself, he must be honest that he obviously needs her — and her willingness to pull a trigger — more than he wanted to.Unfortunately for both of them, that guy Brian? His dying offer to take them to his mom was probably a pretty good indication that his mother was Kathleen. (Her restrained reaction to the sight of his dead body more or less confirms it.) No way that doesn’t come back to haunt them.By the end of the episode, as they climb 33 flights of stairs in a skyscraper to find someplace safe to sleep, Joel and Ellie are exhibiting an increased level of trust that they can protect each other. So naturally, this is when they get awakened in the middle of the night by two new characters wielding guns, one who appears to be in his 20s, the other just a boy. They’re likely Henry and Sam, given that the younger one wears a painted-on superhero mask.This kind of existential threat was always there, even as Joel and Ellie were just rambling down mostly empty roads, cracking jokes. Even then they couldn’t stop to rest without wondering who or what might be lurking, ready to terminate their adventure.This is what makes Ellie — and Bella Ramsey’s multilayered performance — so pivotal to this story. She isn’t living in fear; she is embracing whatever life she has left. She is surprisingly aware of much of the pre-apocalyptic world — enough so that she can make knowing jokes about the gay porn magazine she finds in the back of Bill’s truck. But she over-romanticizes the past too. When Joel talks about how in the old days the gasoline supplies hadn’t broken down and people could drive for more than an hour on a full tank, Ellie eagerly asks, “Where did you go?” The answer: “Pretty much nowhere.”At one point, Joel says that even though he doesn’t believe this fallen world will ever rise again, he keeps surviving “for family” — while also pointedly telling Ellie that she is just “cargo.” But his attitude is clearly changing; it’s awfully hard not to find Ellie charming. Partnering with her is becoming more than just an obligation.Of course, the Kathleens of the world have family too. Things are likely to get more complicated.Side QuestsA great example of how delightfully puckish Ellie can be: While bedding down for the night in the woods, her tone turns all grave and urgent as she says to Joel, “Can I ask you a serious question?” When he says she can, she asks, “Why did the scarecrow get an award?” (Joel knows that one: “Because he was out standing in his field.”)Once again there is no pre-credits scene in this episode; and for the first time, there is no flashback. The closest we get to returning to the past is when Joel tells Ellie about Tommy, explaining that his brother — a “joiner” by nature — has spent the plague years connecting with anyone who claims to have a plan to fix the world, while sometimes dragging Joel along. Later in the episode, after Joel starts letting his guard down around Ellie, he admits that during his vagabond days with Tommy and Tess, he sometimes set up the kind of ambush traps that they met with in Kansas City.I love the contrast between Bill’s well-preserved old truck and all the rusting junk that Joel and Ellie drive past. Two weeks ago, I praised the work of the show’s digital effects artists for filling the backgrounds of shots with astonishing-looking ruins. (Example this week: a collapsed train trestle on the horizon, with railroad cars dangling.) But I must also tip a cap to the production designer John Paino, whose team built the crumbling physical spaces that Joel and Ellie move through — from the trashed gas stations to the wreckage-strewn Kansas City streets.When Ellie takes a whiff of Joel’s percolated campfire coffee, she recoils, then later asks, “That’s seriously what those Starbucks in the Q.Z. used to sell?” Good to know that even after society collapsed, Starbucks stuck around. More

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    Screen Time: A Film Star Captivates, and a Writer Is Surveilled

    David Greenspan gives a wild ride of a performance in “On Set With Theda Bara,” and marionettes star in Vaclav Havel’s play “Audience.”The performance space at the Brick, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is already veiled in haze when the audience arrives. A long table draped in black runs down the center of the room, lit by sconces and hanging lamps, their soft glow reflected in mirrored walls at either end.There’s a ghostly, expectant feel to it all, as if we’ve entered an alternate plane where specters might be summoned. You wouldn’t be surprised if a séance broke out. Somewhere in the middle of the swirling phantasmagoria that is the play “On Set With Theda Bara,” indeed one will.A certain channeling of spirits, though, begins as soon as the performance does. The actor David Greenspan takes his place at the head of the table, with the audience seated on either side, and becomes the glamorous silent-film star Theda Bara, or a version of her. Identity is slippery in this play, as it was for the actress, who started out as Theodosia Goodman from Ohio but was marketed by Hollywood, under her screen name, as an exoticized Arab.Obsession with her is the gossamer string that binds Theda to the other characters in this campy, comic solo show: Detective Finale, a gay 21st-century gumshoe looking for his missing child; Ulysses, a movie-theater organist enthralled with Theda ever since one of her films aroused him to distraction at the keyboard; and Iras, Finale’s genderqueer 16-year-old, who would become Theda Bara if only that were possible.“The Theda I want to be is like — transgressive but unproblematic, know what I mean?” Iras says. “Like minus the appropriation and stuff.”Greenspan, a virtuoso of multicharacter solo shows, gives a wild ride of a performance, fleet-footed and mercurial but capable of great stillness, too. Stalking, twirling and dancing through the space, even treading on the tabletop, he is quite something to behold, with Stacey Derosier’s lighting finely calibrated to his every move. (The set is by Frank J. Oliva.)Written by Joey Merlo, directed by Jack Serio and presented by the Exponential Festival, this play collides periods and period styles along with storytelling genres. It’s part noir, part vampire tale; a vampire — a predatory woman — was one of Theda’s most famous roles.Like any decent vampire, Theda is undead: 138 years old, by Iras’s calculation, but still looking — Iras tells her when they meet — just as she always did onscreen. Holed up with Ulysses, Theda watches clips from her old movies on YouTube, which she pronounces, adorably, as YouTubah.“Things are strange here,” Ulysses says, and he could easily be speaking of the play. “Reality seems to move about. You’ll be in one place one minute and in another the next. And it’s not only the place that moves but time as well.”In a whipsaw-changeable show that employs just a single costume (by Avery Reed) and almost zero props, it’s not always clear which character is speaking — and the protean Theda has more than one voice. That periodic smudginess is less bothersome than you’d think, though.Only at the very end does the play turn too murky to work. Until then, Greenspan renders it entirely fascinating.Vit Horejs and Theresa Linnihan in “Audience,” a production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater that is set in a brewery, at La MaMa.Jonathan Slaff“Audience,” a puppet version of an autobiographical Vaclav Havel play at La MaMa, in the East Village, has the opposite trouble: a lively finish, but a glacially paced staging whose intriguing aim is never close to realized.Directed by Vit Horejs, who performs it with Theresa Linnihan, this production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater is set in a brewery, where a playwright works, rolling barrels. A brewmaster-informant chats him up, hoping for scraps of intel.Two large projection screens are suspended over the playing space. (Production design is by Alan Barnes Netherton.) One screen displays live, black-and-white video from multiple cameras aimed at parts of the stage, to suggest the oppression of constant surveillance. The other shows color close-ups of the performance.In Horejs’s English translation, it’s a very talky two-hander, but the marionettes (by Linnihan, Milos Kasal and Jakub “Kuba” Krejci) don’t have moving facial features, which makes for unfortunately static close-ups. The acting, alas, does not captivate, so the spying never feels real enough to make the surveillance images meaningful.There is a smart video prelude to the performance, though: a sleek newsreel (by Suzanna Halsey) that gives a quick and clever Czech history lesson to contextualize the play. Bit of a disappointment, what follows.On Set With Theda BaraThrough Wednesday at the Brick, Brooklyn; theexponentialfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes.AudienceThrough Feb. 19 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More