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    Two Black Comedians Sue Police Over Search at Atlanta Airport

    Eric André and Clayton English said they were two of hundreds of Black travelers who have been stopped and questioned by officers just as they were about to board flights.Eric André cleared security at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, gave the gate agent his boarding pass and was moments away from stepping onto a plane when he was stopped by officers with the Clayton County Police Department.The officers questioned Mr. André, who is Black, about whether he was selling drugs and what drugs he had in his possession, he said in an interview and a court complaint.They asked to inspect his bag. When he asked if he had to comply, the officers said no, and Mr. André was eventually cleared to board, he said.During the interaction with the police, other passengers had to squeeze past Mr. André and the officers on the jet bridge, the narrow passageway that connects the gate to the airplane during boarding. He said he was allowed onto the plane but left shaken by the interaction.“I knew it was wrong,” said Mr. André, the creator of “The Eric André Show,” a stand-up comedian, actor, producer and writer. “It was humiliating, dehumanizing, traumatizing. Passengers are gawking at me like I’m a perpetrator as they’re like squeezing past me on this claustrophobic jet bridge.”Mr. André’s encounter in April 2021 echoed another one in October 2020 by Clayton English, another Black comedian, at the same airport.Mr. André and Mr. English filed a lawsuit this month against the Police Department, saying they were unfairly targeted for drug checks, according to the complaint. Their lawyers said the department’s practice discriminated against Black travelers who had already been cleared by Transportation Security Administration agents.The Clayton County Police Department runs a jet bridge interdiction program at the airport and made stops between Aug. 30, 2020, and April 30, 2021, according to the suit.Court papers say the stops resulted in a total of three seizures: “roughly 10 grams (less than the weight of one AAA alkaline battery) of drugs from one passenger, 26 grams (the weight of about 4 grapes) of ‘suspected THC gummies’ from another, and 6 prescription pills (for which no valid prescription allegedly existed) from a third.”Two passengers — those who had the roughly 10 grams of drugs and the pills — were charged, the suit said.In that time, a total of 402 stops were made. In cases where race was recorded, more than half of the 378 passengers who were stopped were Black.The Clayton County Police Department declined to comment, citing pending litigation. In April 2021, when Mr. André shared his experience on Twitter, the department denied wrongdoing.“This type of interaction occurs frequently during our officers’ course of duties, and is supported by Georgia law and the U.S. Constitution,” a 2021 department statement said. The department added, “Our preliminary findings have revealed that Mr. Andre was not racially profiled.”The Atlanta Police Department — not the Clayton County Police Department — is the primary law enforcement agency at the airport, the airport said in a statement. “APD has a robust drug interdiction program but, unless otherwise required, does not engage in jet-bridge stops of passengers,” the statement said.From September 2020 to April 2021, the police seized about $1 million from passengers, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.Richard Deane, a lawyer involved in the suit, said the purpose of the stops appeared to be to seize money and that the stops were made largely, if not solely, based on race.The suit maintains the police violated the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and the equal protection clause, which guarantees racial equality and prohibits racial discrimination, said Barry Friedman, founding director of New York University’s Policing Project, and another lawyer on the case.“We have a great concern about police acting when there’s no policy in place, particularly democratically accountable policy that guides the discretion of police officers,” he said at a news conference this month. “When there’s undue discretion, we get what you have here, which is severe racial discrimination.”Drug interdiction programs at airports started in 1975 with a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration operation in Detroit and expanded to other airports, said Beth A. Colgan, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.“I think it’s a strong suit,” she said. “In terms of the Fourth Amendment claims, it seems clear that they were seized and that searches did occur and it would be difficult to describe these as consent searches.”Civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement to seize cash, property or vehicles based on probable cause that those involved are associated with criminal activity, Professor Colgan said. This is a low standard, she said, and people often do not challenge forfeitures because the process to get the money back is costly and time-consuming.Courts have favored law enforcement in cases of consent versus coercion, said Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, a fellow and visiting professor at Harvard Kennedy School.“People may feel the need to say yes, and it’s a coerced sense of giving consent as opposed to a freedom of saying no and then feeling like everyone is going to suspect they had drugs on them,” she said.Mr. English, who lives in Atlanta, was the winner of NBC’s “Last Comic Standing” competition in 2015 and has headlined in clubs, colleges and festivals.He said he spent his three-and-a-half-hour flight in 2020 wondering what he had done wrong and whether he would be arrested upon landing. When the police took his boarding pass and identification and searched his bag, he felt he had no choice but to comply.“I felt completely powerless,” he said at the news conference. “I felt violated. I felt cornered. I felt like I couldn’t, you know, continue to get on the plane. I felt like I had to comply if I wanted everything to go smoothly.”Mr. André lives in Los Angeles but travels through the Atlanta airport often for work and has recently taken to hiring a service that brings passengers directly to the plane after they’ve cleared security because he’s afraid of repeating his experience from last year.“It’s not just about me or what I went through,” he said. “It’s about the community I identify with. It’s about Black and brown people being discriminated against and being treated like second-class citizens, being treated as if they’re already suspicious and they don’t belong in this country by their own government and the trauma that comes with that.” More

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    ‘Saturday Night Live’ Takes On the Jan. 6 Committee

    Megan Thee Stallion was the host and musical guest of an “S.N.L.” episode that satirized what may have been the committee’s final public meeting.Although its first two episodes avoided opening sketches that recreated news events, “Saturday Night Live” eventually found reality too irresistible: This weekend’s broadcast led with a parody of what was potentially the final meeting of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.As the hearing began, Kenan Thompson, playing the committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, offered some momentous remarks. “Jan. 6 was one of the most dramatic and consequential moments in our nation’s history,” he said. “So to fight back, we assembled a team of monotone nerds to do a PowerPoint.”Summarizing the meeting’s agenda before holding up a tray of miniature cupcakes, he added, “We’re going to summarize our findings, hold a history-making vote, and then and only then, we all get to have a little treat.”He then turned the hearing over to Heidi Gardner, playing Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the committee’s vice chairwoman. Gardner explained that the committee’s evidence was aimed at all Americans: “Whether you’re a Republican who’s not watching or a Democrat who’s nodding so hard your head is falling off, one person is responsible for this insurrection: Donald Trump,” she said. “And one person will suffer the consequences: me.”For those viewers wondering where her toughness came from, Gardner suggested it was hereditary. She asked, “For your 10th birthday, did you eat pizza at Chuck E. Cheese with all your friends, or did you shoot a deer in the face with Dick Cheney?”Thompson almost acknowledged an eerily eager Michael Longfellow, playing Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, but reconsidered. (“Too spooky,” he said.) The committee also showed a video of Chloe Fineman (as Speaker Nancy Pelosi) and Sarah Sherman (as the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer) reacting in real time to the Capitol attack.While Fineman, as Pelosi, conducted a tense call with Mike Pence, Sherman, as Schumer, was also on the phone — to DoorDash, seeking a missing lunch order. (She said it contained “12 dill pickles, still floating in the juice, and a hot pastrami sandwich with very light mustard.”)Another video featured James Austin Johnson as former President Donald J. Trump, making remarks said to have taken place the day before the attack. Speaking on a phone, Johnson said: “The votes don’t matter at all. Because what even is a vote? It’s just a piece of paper, you fold up and put it in a hat, a guy shakes it around.” After some rambling remarks about Apollo Creed, Ivan Drago and Obamacare, Johnson wrapped up the call by casually asking, “Is Mike Pence dead yet?”Thompson concluded the meeting itself: “We tried,” he said. “It was a fun country while it lasted.”Giiiiiiiiirrrrrl of the weekIs it possible for a single joke — a single graphic — to make an entire sketch worthwhile? If so then “Girl Talk” might just have been that sketch. It started off innocuously enough, with an introduction from its host, Mo’nique Money Mo’nique Problems (Ego Nwodim), who described the program as “the talk show where ladies tell me their problems and I keep my advice real simple.”She and her guests (Megan Thee Stallion and Punkie Johnson) went on to discuss their problems and solutions in conversations consisting of different intonations of the word “Girl.” And just to be helpful to “any white people or men tuning in,” Nwodim provided subtitles for a discussion of the war in Ukraine, during which a two-syllable utterance of “girl” by Megan Thee Stallion produced an entire screen’s worth of densely packed (but educational!) text on the history of the conflict.Music video of the weekThis filmed segment for an original song called “We Got Brought” spun laughs (and a genuinely catchy tune) from a recognizably stressful premise: Nwodim, Megan Thee Stallion and Bowen Yang played the tag-along guests of three longtime friends who have met up at a club and ditched their plus-ones to hang out among themselves.Now the three guests, who are strangers to one another, are stuck at a table and unable to find anything to talk about. As one verse goes: “You’re all out of topics and the conversation’s lazy / So you just keep on saying, ‘That’s crazy, that’s crazy.’” The anxiety of Yang’s character — who tries to make small talk by remarking that only 25 people have died at Disneyland since 1955 — is so palpable it pops off the screen.Weekend Update jokes of the weekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Michael Che and Colin Jost continued to riff on the Jan. 6 committee and the outcomes from its latest meeting.Jost began:After the Jan. 6 committee subpoenaed Donald Trump, Trump responded the next day with a 14-page letter. Fourteen pages. OK, Unabomber. I don’t know if this is a coincidence, but Trump wrote the letter on the same day the F.D.A. confirmed the nation is experiencing a shortage of Adderall. I just know from experience in college, any time I wrote a 14-page paper in one night, I’d also taken a disturbing amount of Adderall.He went on:My favorite part of Trump’s letter is the beginning because it’s on really nice letterhead. It starts, “Dear Chairman Thompson.” And then the first line is just screaming. It’s like reading a Victorian love letter that says, “My beloved Winifred, WHO THE HELL ARE YOU HAVING SEX WITH?”Che picked up the thread:The committee showed a never-before-seen video from Jan. 6 of a desperate Nancy Pelosi speaking on the phone with Mike Pence. Which to Pence counts as adultery. In the video, Pelosi said that she wanted to punch out Donald Trump and knew that if she did, she’d go to jail and be happy. I assume because she owns stock in private prisons.Heartfelt musical performance of the weekIt was a moment that passed by almost as quickly as one of Megan Thee Stallion’s verses, but in the midst of a hectic night of comedy and costume changes, the rapper was genuinely moved during a portion of one her songs. In her performance of “Anxiety,” Megan Thee Stallion referenced her mother, Holly Thomas, who died of brain cancer in 2019. As those lyrics run:If I could write a letter to HeavenI would tell my mama that I shoulda been listenin’And I would tell her sorry that I really been wildin’And ask her to forgive me, ‘cause I really been tryin’And I would ask, please, show me who been realAnd get ‘em from around me if they all been fakeIt’s crazy how I say the same prayers to the LordAnd always get surprised about who he takeMegan Thee Stallion did not so much as swallow a syllable but the emotion of the lyrics were audible in her voice and visible on her face — some viewers wondered online if they even saw her shed a tear. On Friday, Megan Thee Stallion tweeted that she was contemplating a break following “S.N.L.,” and if she chooses to take it, she has surely earned it. More

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    ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Season 1, Episode 8: Ramble On

    The season finale included at least one shocking twist and other revelations that set up future seasons. Here are five takeaways from the episode and from the season as a whole.Season 1, Episode 8: ‘Alloyed’Like most prequels, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” is headed toward a fixed endpoint. No matter how many new characters and locations the writers introduce, by the time the series reaches its intended end — after five seasons, if all goes according to plan — we will have witnessed the events that ended the Second Age of Middle-earth and led to Sauron’s all-controlling One Ring disappearing for thousands of years, before eventually landing in a hobbit’s pocket.Unlike most prequels, “The Rings of Power” arrived with much of its story already extensively mapped out, via the tidbits of Middle-earth history J.R.R. Tolkien dropped in both the text of “The Lord of the Rings” novels and in their extensive appendices. This is why fans watching this series have been paying close attention to the names they have never heard before, trying to figure out how they fit into the Tolkien saga. For example: Why did the author never mention Halbrand, the lost king of the Southlands, returned to his home by Galadriel and a contingent of Númenóreans in a failed effort to prevent the orcs from establishing the shadowlands of Mordor?This week’s Season 1 finale answers that question in shocking fashion. Halbrand is Sauron. There is no lost king of the Southlands. Adar, the orc-father, has established a kingdom his former master and most hated foe will someday claim.Part of what makes “Alloyed” a successful season finale is that in resolving the biggest mystery introduced this year — Where has Sauron gone? — it establishes a foundation for fresh conflicts in the next round of episodes. As this mercurial dark angel Sauron returns to the territory Adar has remade into Mordor, a fascinating power-struggle lies ahead, rooted in ancient history and Middle-earth’s longstanding racial conflicts.This episode also fulfills one of the main functions of a prequel, shading in some key details from “The Lord of the Rings” back story. It is part of Tolkien lore that Sauron helped forge the Rings of Power. How did that happen? Now we know: In the form of Halbrand, under the cover of a story of woe and redemption, he charmed his way into a fateful moment that would shape Middle-earth’s destiny for over a thousand years. The ironies are rich; and the ramifications are just beginning.Explore the World of the ‘Lord of the Rings’The literary universe built by J.R.R. Tolkien, now adapted into a new series for Amazon Prime Video, has inspired generations of readers and viewers.Artist and Scholar: Tolkien did more than write books. He invented an alternate reality, complete with its own geography, languages and history.Being Frodo: The actor Elijah Wood explains why he’ll never be upset at being associated with the “Lord of the Rings” movie series.A Soviet Take: A 1991 production based on Tolkien’s novels, recently digitized by a Russian broadcaster, is a time capsule of a bygone era.From the Archives: Read what W.H. Auden wrote about “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first volume of Tolkien’s trilogy, in 1954.Here are five other takeaways and observations from this episode — and from the season as a whole:Stranger dangerBefore the big Halbrand-as-Sauron reveal, this episode teases the possibility that the Stranger is Sauron, as the mysterious white-clad mystics finally track him down and then surprisingly bend their knees, vowing to serve their Dark Lord. All of this happens before the opening credits, in a clever bit of narrative misdirection, intended to keep the audience from catching on too quickly that Halbrand is our Big Bad.There is, as it happens, important new information about the Stranger this week, though it is something much more expected: He is, we learn, one of the Istari, or “wise ones,” or wizards. We still don’t have a name yet for this big fella, but by the end of the episode — after a tense skirmish between the Harfoots and the mystics that sees Sadoc sacrificing his life and the Stranger gaining access to a powerful magic staff — he does finally start speaking in full sentences.The Harfoots story line ends with a promising setup for Season 2: Nori will continue to travel with the Stranger as he sets off toward the land of Rhûn to learn more about who he is. He welcomes her company, because traveling alone is just a journey, but traveling with friends is an adventure. And as Tolkien fans know, adventures are more fun.Daniel Weyman as the Stranger, who was revealed in the finale to be a wizard.Ben Rothstein/Prime Video ‘The ones who see’Earlier this season, while trying to persuade Míriel to join her cause, Galadriel expressed sympathy with the Queen-Regent and her burdensome responsibilities, saying, “I know how it feels to be the only one who sees.” Yet one of this show’s more powerful themes has been the idea that heroes can follow a path of logic and honor with absolute certainty, and still arrive at the wrong conclusion — or worse, can bring into existence the very thing they were trying to prevent.In Galadriel’s case, her need to use Halbrand as a symbol — to inspire her Númenórean army — leads to her bring her sworn enemy Sauron into Eregion, where he then coaxes Celebrimbor into amplifying Elrond’s minuscule supply of mithril by using it to create an alloy, in the form of a crown. Halbrand’s sudden eagerness to create something that will provide “power over flesh” makes Galadriel suspicious, so she has an archivist check the genealogies of the Southlands, which reveals that the region’s last king died centuries ago and left no heir. Not only has she been duped, but she has given Sauron access to a force that could tilt the balance of power in Middle-earth forever.Does the Halbrand reveal make sense, in the context of the season as a whole? I can think of some moments from earlier episodes — like Halbrand hesitating over whether to accept the mantle of king — that may not fit so neatly with what we now know to be Sauron’s grand designs. (On the other hand, Númenor is clearly hugely important to Sauron’s plans as well, so he may have just wanted to stay there rather than heading back to the mainland so soon.)Ultimately, this big twist works because it is a pivotal part of Galadriel’s character arc. In a moving sequence after the reveal, Sauron enters the elf’s mind, and corrupts her happy memories of her brother, intending to convince her that they have all had the same goal all along: a stable and peaceful Middle-earth. Back in Númenor, Halbrand tried to tutor Galadriel in the ways of persuasion by saying she should find out what people fear, and then give them the means to master it. He does that with her here by proposing they rule together — just as he “helps” her fellow elves forge a tool of control.After Galadriel rejects Sauron and flees Eregion, the elves decide to make three rings rather than one crown. But the process that will lead to the next great war has begun. And the one who saw it coming is largely responsible.Island lifeThe other major story line in the finale involves Miriel’s return to Númenor, where she learns that her father has died — though not until he has first shown Elendil’s daughter Eärien how to find his palantir, and has urged her to help lead the kingdom back to its “old ways.” Númenor has been a terrific location in this series, and before Elendil and Miriel left, we were teased with a lot of as-yet-unrevealed history and courtly intrigue that should be fruitful to explore in Season 2.Still, perhaps because of all the big revelations elsewhere in the episode, the action on the island in this finale was fairly forgettable. One of the flaws of this first “Rings of Power” season is that some key characters haven’t been developed enough to grab the audience’s attention. I would say that’s especially been an issue with Elendil and his children. I have barely mentioned Eärien in these reviews, because she has rarely been doing anything noteworthy. Isildur has been a bigger factor in the plot, but given how important he is to the “Rings” saga as a whole, he too has yet to stand out from the sprawling cast.Perhaps Season 2 will handle that better. Speaking of which …Needs improvementWhat could “The Rings of Power” improve on in the seasons to come? One of the show’s biggest weaknesses is one shared by a lot of prestige TV dramas: The episodes are too long, and too repetitive. Partly that springs from the source material. A proper Tolkien experience should be somewhat leisurely, where the conversations and the adventures on the road matter as much as the big battles at the final destinations. But also: This series is handsome-looking and features excellent actors delivering well-crafted dialogue. Sometimes it’s hard for creators with those kinds of resources at their disposal to use less of it.They should, though. Too often this season, episodes spent two or three scenes covering the same narrative and thematic ground — or had single scenes drag on until losing their oomph. (See: Nori’s goodbye to her family in this finale, which is very sweet at first and then just … keeps going.) A brisker pace could tip this show from good to great.Markella Kavenagh, left, and Megan Richards in “The Rings of Power.”Ben Rothstein/Prime VideoThe road goes ever on.All of that said, what stands out most to me from this first season is how much more impressive everything has been than I had expected. The sets, the effects, the language and even the small moments of singing and humor are all clearly crafted with a lot love — and paid for with a lot of money.“The Rings of Power” has offered spectacle and scope beyond what any current television series is attempting. Yet the creators also showed a strong command of that flash and grandeur, using it to frame a good story. This show is hardly perfect, but for the most part it is what it needs to be: the TV equivalent of a page-turner fantasy novel, for fans to get lost in. More

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    Review: In ‘Everything’s Fine,’ the Discomfort of Adolescence

    In Douglas McGrath’s one-man show, his account of an experience as a teenager unfurls with the can’t-look-away quality of a slow-motion crash.What’s unnerving about “Everything’s Fine” is how breezy the tone is: The story at the center of Douglas McGrath’s solo autobiographical show, set during his youth in Texas, is one of emotional and psychological distress, after all. McGrath is not exactly making fun of what happened, but he’s not not making fun of it, either. It is hard to tell whether this is a deliberate choice abetted by John Lithgow’s direction or if McGrath is not a crafty enough performer to shake off a naturally avuncular demeanor.But the droll tone is effective, if sometimes startling. And while McGrath may not be a superlative actor, he is a good storyteller — he is best known as the screenwriter and director of “Emma” (1996), and he wrote the Tony-nominated book for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” His account of something that happened to him as a teenager unfurls with the can’t-look-away quality of a slow-motion crash. You might be appalled but laughing, eager to hear what happened next while also dreading it.McGrath, 64, grew up in Midland, a wind-ridden town in West Texas where many people moved to work in the oil and gas industry. Such was the case for his father, a Connecticut-raised Princetonian with “the deluxe name Raynsford Searle McGrath,” whose family included a witty wife and their three children, of which Doug, as he was known, was the eldest.McGrath sets up the scene evocatively, and for a little while, it looks as if the show will be a cozy family tale. His father had worn a glass eye since a terrible accident when he was 10, and his mother, Beatrice, had worked at Harper’s Bazaar magazine alongside Diana Vreeland and an upstart Andy Warhol. McGrath could have easily milked an entire evening out of his urbane parents living in the wilds of Texas.The focus, however, eventually tightens on eighth grade. Doug was 14, and a new history teacher, whom he calls Mrs. Malenkov, entered the picture. This married 47-year-old mother took a liking to him, to put it mildly, and started leaving notes written on blue onionskin paper in his locker. (John Lee Beatty’s set evokes a schoolroom looking half-abandoned and a little desperate.)Those were different times, and a 14-year-old boy from the early 1970s was not like our modern teenagers constantly plugged into the illuminating world of the internet. But even by the standards of his time, McGrath paints a portrait of himself as being a little slow on the uptake. “I was not precocious,” he says. “I was barely coscious.”Yet even the innocent, happy-go-lucky Doug realized that Mrs. Malenkov was not well and that the situation was untenable. When he finally came up with a way to extricate himself from his predicament, the scheme was equally laughable and cringe inducing.As our narrator, McGrath is, of course, aware he is navigating a minefield, and he does so adroitly and without judgment — if anything, he makes fun of himself the most and looks at Mrs. Malenkov in a perplexed, sensitive manner. He acknowledges the impropriety of what he is dealing with, recreating his feelings as he experienced them in the heat of the moment and as an adult looking back. But this also means that McGrath picks whatever point of view suits the story’s suspenseful unfolding, and it’s not always coherent. Sometimes he editorializes with the wisdom he has now, and sometimes he is content to remain locked in his adolescent perspective, which means ignoring glaring blind spots. What was Mrs. Malenkov’s husband up to, for example?Songs like “Teacher’s Pet” and “Come On-a My House” play between some scenes — a little on the nose, too, setting up easy chuckles. Which does not mean they are entirely comfortable.Everything’s FineThrough Jan. 22 at the DR2 Theater, Manhattan; everythingsfineplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    Exploring James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry’s Friendship

    The acclaimed writers are communing once again in productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” and “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.James Baldwin recalled first meeting Lorraine Hansberry in 1958 at the Actors Studio in Manhattan after a workshop production of “Giovanni’s Room,” a play based on his novel of the same name. The “biggest names in American theater” were there, he noted, and gave their critiques of the play. But then he locked eyes with a woman yet-unknown to the theater establishment who articulated a full appreciation of him and his work. Of that encounter, Baldwin wrote: “She talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten.”For the next seven years, Hansberry and Baldwin would continue to find moments of deep understanding, forging a relationship even though they often did not live in the same place. But their storied friendship was cut short by Hansberry’s untimely death at the age of 34 in 1965.This fall the two writers are communing once again at the Public Theater and, perhaps, finishing a few conversations, with productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” created by and co-produced with the Elevator Repair Service, and a revival of Hansberry’s classic play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara.From left: John Clay III, Paige Gilbert and Tonya Pinkins in Robert O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” running through Oct. 23, presents a re-enactment of a 1965 debate between Baldwin, the writer and civil rights activist, and William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative founder of National Review. The two men argued the motion, “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.”The play provides a historical touch point for our fractious political present. The director John Collins said: “I think there are several ways to frame why you should listen to those you disagree with, and sometimes it is because one should allow for the possibilities that the people you don’t agree with might have something intelligent and worthwhile to say. The other reason, though, is to really understand the seriousness, and sometimes the danger, of these other arguments.”Drawing verbatim from the debate transcript, the play ends with an imagined conversation between Baldwin and Hansberry that was inspired by a 1961 discussion about Black Americans in culture. (In addition to Baldwin and Hansberry, the other participants included the essayist and publisher Emile Capouya, the journalist and social commentator Nat Hentoff, the poet Langston Hughes and the writer and critic Alfred Kazin.) While they focused primarily on the question of Black writers in American literature, they also considered the status of Black Americans.On the subject of crafting Black characters, Baldwin explained, “Faulkner has never sat in a Negro kitchen while the Negroes were talking about him, but we have been sitting around for generations, in kitchens and everywhere else, while everybody talks about us, and this creates a very great difference.”Hansberry confirmed, “Which is a different relationship, because the employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house.” She continued as Baldwin and the rest of the room erupted in laughter, “We have been washing everybody’s underwear for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean.” The recording captures Baldwin and Hansberry’s intimacy and the joy they felt in each other’s company.Imani Perry, the Princeton University professor whose books include “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry,” describes theirs as “an intimate intellectual companionship. They are both deeply concerned with Black life and regular Black folks’ lives, and also think about the politics of race and its depiction in the public arena.”“He trusted her artistically, which is a big deal, for someone who is his junior, younger than him, and also when they became friends, he had a larger visible platform,” Perry said of Baldwin, who was 34 when he met a 28-year-old Hansberry. “It was a beautifully intimate friendship. It’s the kind of thing that I think every person who’s either an artist or intellectual, and certainly a person who’s both, yearns for.”Greig Sargeant as James Baldwin and Daphne Gaines as Lorraine Hansberry in the Elevator Repair Service’s production of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” at the Public Theater.Richard Termine for The New York TimesGreig Sargeant, who plays Baldwin and conceived the play, notes that Elevator Repair Service wanted to show the public and private Baldwin. “We did some research,” he said, “and one of the things that we found was that article ‘Sweet Lorraine,’” the essay Baldwin wrote to eulogize his dear friend. In writing the last scene of the play, Sargeant and April Matthis, who originated the Hansberry role, consulted numerous essays, interviews and speeches. Baldwin and Hansberry “sharpen each other by having these debates,” Matthis said, “and it’s always loving, and it’s all meant to hold each other to account with so much love.”The Public Theater’s fall season also includes a revival of Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a Black family’s struggles to achieve their dreams within the constraints of a segregated America. The drama, directed by Robert O’Hara and opening on Oct. 19, centers on the Youngers and their decision to buy a house in a white neighborhood in Chicago. It emphasizes the impact of desegregation.To drive home this point, O’Hara decided to include a scene with a neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, that is usually cut from productions. “We know where they’re moving in many ways is more dangerous than where they were living,” he said. “I love the scene where Mrs. Johnson says she’s for ‘people pushing out.’ And then she says, but you might get bombed. She’s a harbinger of what the Youngers will face in suburban white America.”Ahead of the play’s historic premiere on Broadway (it was the first written by a Black woman to be produced there), Hansberry and Baldwin reunited in Philadelphia for its run at the Walnut Street Theater. Sargeant noted, “I read an article once where Baldwin said that the great thing about going to see ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ was that he had never seen so many Black people in the audience,” because “Black people ignored the theater because the theater ignored them.”“So now the good thing about being in 2022,” he added, “is that we have an institution that is making an effort to make positive changes for the future, having us both there at the same time, highlighting the relationship between Baldwin and Hansberry.”One hears in both O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” a longing for missed conversations. “Baldwin” offers trenchant examinations of the American condition, and “Raisin” questions the American dream. “Lorraine Hansberry had this incredible, fantastic, lightning bolt of a play, and then she died so early,” O’Hara said. She did not live to see the Black power movement, or the queer women of color who led third-wave feminism. O’Hara continued, “Imagine what she would have been able to do if she were able to dream longer with us, and that’s what’s exciting, we can now acknowledge her queerness.”Producing the play in 2022, O’Hara anticipates the impact of the civil rights movement in the late 20th century, a period that Baldwin lived through and wrote about. He continued, “Doing it downtown, we can investigate some of the more difficult crevices.”The production takes on substance abuse, depression, sexism, classism, and the virulent racism that shaped mid-20th-century American society and continues to inform our own. O’Hara said his take on the American classic draws from his general approach to making art. “I live by this tenet as an artist and a human being that I will not be limited by your imagination,” he said. “Because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean that it’s unimaginable.” Similar to Baldwin and Hansberry’s exchanges, O’Hara said, “I bring a cavalcade of interesting and exciting people around me to push me into the future.”He noted the enduring importance of Hansberry’s classic and, similar to “Baldwin and Buckley,” how it anticipates our present. “I think of it as a tragedy in hindsight,” O’Hara said. “There’s uplift in the play of them wanting to move out of where they are. But I don’t want us to get lost in the glorious ending. They are moving into the white suburbs in 1959 Chicago. I just think about King saying that Chicago was more dangerous and more racist than the South.”These two works feature questions not only about the status of America but also the theater by remembering two iconic American artists. Baldwin and Hansberry challenge, as O’Hara noted, the idea that “there’s one type of Black story. There’s one type of reality that fits Blackness.” The story contains many more chapters waiting to be written. More

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    Michael R. Jackson and Jacolby Satterwhite on Making Art in a Shifting Culture

    Two creative people in two different fields in one wide-ranging conversation. This time: the playwright behind “A Strange Loop” and the visual artist.Although the playwright Michael R. Jackson, 41, and the visual artist Jacolby Satterwhite, 36, work in different genres, they have some things in common. Both are queer Black New York-based artists who address trauma, secrets and stigmas. And both have spent most of their careers feeling overlooked and misunderstood. “As the Black gay man in the room,” said Satterwhite, “I was seen as some sort of weird exception and dismissed.”Yet since the summer of 2020 and its global protests against racial discrimination and violence, both men have been enthusiastically embraced by the public. “A Strange Loop,” Jackson’s meta-musical about a queer Black man trying to write a musical, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making its author the first Black writer to win the award for a musical. The production moved to the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway two years later and was nominated for 11 Tony Awards, including that for Best Musical (which it won). Next spring, Jackson’s new musical, “White Girl in Danger,” set in the world of a fictional soap opera town called Allwhite, will open off Broadway. The playwright was born and raised in Detroit and spent nearly 20 years on “A Strange Loop,” taking a variety of jobs to support himself, including as an usher at “The Lion King” on Broadway.Satterwhite, whose work has been shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, hopscotches across mediums — photography, performance, painting, 3-D animation, writing — to create art that raises questions about self-mythology and expression, consumerism, labor, visual utopia and African rituals. His practice defies easy categorization. This year, the South Carolina native has been building multimedia installations around the world, including at the Format music and art festival in the Ozarks, the Front International triennial in Cleveland, the Munch Triennale in Oslo and the Okayama Art Summit in Japan.The two artists met in August for a conversation at Satterwhite’s studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to discuss their experiences in a shifting cultural landscape.Jaquel Spivey in Michael R. Jackson’s musical “A Strange Loop” at the Lyceum Theater in New York City.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJACOLBY SATTERWHITE: On the night “A Strange Loop” premiered, I had a lot of projects going on and wasn’t able to make it but, three times a week, someone would approach me about it. I went in a little skeptical and thought, “I’m probably going to see something that is asymmetrical to my experience.” But what was so great about it was that it encapsulated all the things that make me who I am as an artist and how I feel as a creative producer in an art world that has shifted seismically between 2003 and now.I was in the room before we all got a seat at the table, and I experienced all kinds of resistance among white peers, as well as my own Black colleagues who have a heteronormative stance.MICHAEL R. JACKSON: I think part of the reason a lot of people connect with the show is because this piece contains almost 20 years of thought. I started working on it when I was about 23 and, even though I rewrote it, it still captures whole periods of time of Black gay thinking, feeling and living and reflecting. There’s a lot that one can grab on to.J.S.: I went to see the show with my boyfriend, who is not in the art world or a creative industry. There are times when I struggle to communicate why I am the way I am, and I’ve said things that were a bit niche and esoteric to him with regard to my experience. And there were moments during the show when he looked at me, because the scenes illustrated exactly what I said to him.M.R.J.: In a weird way, the show demonstrates my inherent outsider status that makes me incompatible with being in a relationship. That could be wrong — I could be overdramatizing — but that’s one of the loops in my life.J.S.: Before I started dating this person, I had this “I am meant to be alone” militancy. And honestly, I do feel like I have more agency when I’m alone, because I have an obsessive practice that requires me to be extremely selfish to execute. I don’t have assistants. I’m a computer animator, a painter and an experimental filmmaker, and it requires a certain kind of loneliness.M.R.J.: Yeah. One important lesson I learned about myself during the pandemic was that my instinct is far more “I” than “we.” I’ve always thought of myself as a collectivist, and it’s not that I’m not sympathetic to groups but, if I track my own actions and choices, it was always me: whether it’s me against my family, me against other Black folks, me against white folks. Whatever group it was, I always had to find a way to soldier through the group within my own “I.” J.S.: I actually share a similar sentiment. As a person who grew up with childhood cancer — twice — had chemo and was isolated from a schizophrenic mother who was in a mental hospital, I’ve always felt everything about my identity was broken. So in order to survive, I found solace in my artistic ambitions.Exploring niche illegibility and abstraction as a Black artist is radical and unpopular, and it was one thing that people scoffed at for my whole career. But the boldness to commit to something that’s illegible and unpopular is rewarding, and it actually has more impact on the collective “we.” M.R.J.: My next musical, “White Girl in Danger,” is very much about the “we.” Now there’s a relationship between the “I” and the “we,” but the world is going, “Representation! Representation! Representation!” I’m like, “What is that?” That doesn’t feel true. I mean, you’re putting up what you want to see, and that’s fine. But then you want to try to sell that back to me, and I’m not giving you my money for that. That’s what I find troubling about [the focus on] representation, which is dissonant with what a lot of our culture has been saying for a couple of years.J.S.: Well, capitalism got in the way, and now you have banks saying, “We have money for trans visibility and we create safe spaces at our A.T.M.s,” or whatever.  M.R.J.: You saying that has me thinking about [the 1990 documentary about New York City drag culture] “Paris Is Burning.” What’s actually been most interesting to me, but doesn’t get talked about, is that the group of people in that documentary — and so many more who weren’t in it — were imitating an imitation of an imitation in the Reagan era. All these people in the 1980s were reorienting because of the actual politics of the time, and the things that led to this era of excess and austerity. When I look at these queens, they want to be fictional characters. That has always been a beautiful dissonance.I went to the National Museum of African American History & Culture [in Washington, D.C.,] for the first time recently and found it fascinating. We start in the 1400s with the slave trade and then there’re all these moments in history where people are fighting bitterly to be free. Then in the 1960s and ’70s, it got real hot with the Black Panthers and all these radical groups starting to collaborate, and the government is like, “We have to break that up.” The Panthers are gone and suddenly we’re in the ’80s and it’s Oprah, Bill Cosby, superstars everywhere.An installation view of Jacolby Satterwhite’s “at dawn” (2022) at JSC Berlin. Shown here is Satterwhite’s “Birds in Paradise” (2019), a two-channel HD color video and 3-D animation with sound.Photo: Alwin Lay. © Jacolby Satterwhite, courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New YorkIt seems like the powers that be realized that, to keep the world order, they had to deliver these fantasies to people to confuse them and get them off the scent. And honestly, looking at today, a lot of that stuff’s only continued, and now people have taken those fantasies and pumped them into this idea of radicalism. Within that there’s stuff that’s real, and then there’s stuff that’s not real. But you can’t tell it apart unless you look at it with hard eyes.J.S.: My whole existence is that era. My mom named me after a character from [a spinoff of the 1980s soap opera] “Dynasty.” She was obsessed with Republicans and the Middle East, so my middle name is Tyran [a reference to Tehran]. This was down to her schizophrenia. She made 10,000 schematic diagrams of common objects in the house that she was trying to submit to the Home Shopping Network to get invented. She became so obsessed with imitating and copying the infection of capitalism — it ended up shaping me as a human being, and my artistic pursuit. And it’s interesting to see how my peers don’t even know what they’re imitating now.M.R.J.: For me, that raises the question of who my people are. I started this conversation by saying that I’ve been having complex feelings, and that’s part of it. I thought I knew who my people were, but now I find myself feeling a bit alone.I keep watching the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978) because the idea of pod people resonates with me — this idea of people who’re doing the same thing and trying to get you to be like them. There’s something in me saying, “I can’t trust anyone, because they might pull me into some pod people stuff — I’ve been a pod person before. And it sounds like paranoia, but I also see how people are inconsistent because I see how I can be inconsistent. When I look at other people not recognizing how they can be inconsistent, I worry how we can progress in this self-deluded world that’s constantly having ideas delivered to you from culture, politics, whatever, that’re purposely trying to keep you uninformed and confused.J.S.: I’ve always welcomed erasure and am constantly trying to shift skins. I had a traveling museum survey that started at Carnegie Mellon [in 2021] and, when I went to that survey, I almost cried. I saw a whole room of works from seven years ago that were completely out of context for the person I am today. But they were a part of me. I’m going to spend another seven years making something that represents the stage I’m in now, and those works will have a conversation with each other. What I’ve learned to do is be messy: There’s no such thing as mistakes, because everything can be recontextualized.M.R.J.: The tricky part of it is when other people try to hold you to what you said as evidence in the court of public opinion, [assessing] whether or not you’re a hypocrite.Social media culture has become so horribly linked to what art and entertainment are being made, how they’re viewed and how they’re produced. So much of my voice as a writer was developed on social media and specifically Facebook. That box that said, “What’s on your mind?” I took that as a personal challenge; I have a catalog of every thought I’ve ever had. Sometimes I’ll cringe because I don’t know who that person was, but it was part of my development.J.S.: I mean, the world’s in pain, especially after the pandemic, where lots of jobs were lost and isolation caused a lot of mental illness. We’re in the revenge generation. [But] that doesn’t leave room for artists to grow. We’re eradicating problematic people as if the person who’s throwing the stone isn’t problematic. But everyone is.This interview has been edited and condensed. More

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    For ‘The Great British Baking Show,’ ‘Mexican Week’ Was Not an Accident

    After 12 years, the show’s long, inexorable journey from comfort to cringe is complete.Remember Custardgate? Deborah and Howard each cooked a custard and put it in the fridge to chill. But then! When Deborah was layering her trifle, she grabbed Howard’s custard by mistake. Well! This left Howard no choice but to use Deborah’s custard in his trifle. I couldn’t forget the whole frivolous affair if I wanted to — and I don’t.In its early days, the pleasure of “The Great British Baking Show” was in the reassuring fantasy it built under a high-pitched country tent — an endless source of cheeky innuendo, serious amateur baking and absolutely nothing else. The worst thing imaginable was that someone’s Battenberg cake would come out a bit asymmetrical, or that one baker might accidentally use another baker’s custard.Sue Perkins, then a host, described Custardgate as either a mistake, or “the most incredible case of baking espionage,” not because of actual drama or suspicion, but because problems on the show tended toward the truly wholesome and amusing. Taking them too seriously was a sport.From the start, “The Great British Bake Off” — as it’s known in Britain — seemed completely unlike the chef-driven, adrenaline-fueled, corporate-branded American competition shows that dominated at the time, where contestants casually announced their intention to win — not to make friends! It promised to disrupt the genre.But over its 12 years on the air, the worst thing imaginable on Bake Off has gotten worse, again and again. Last week, the hosts, Noel Fielding and Matt Lucas, strolled up a grassy slope dressed in fringed serapes and straw sombreros to introduce “Mexican Week” with tired puns, saying they shouldn’t make “Mexican jokes” but proceeding to do just that. The show had hit rock bottom, revealing what it had managed to obscure in the past with a bit of charm.To British audiences, Mr. Lucas and Mr. Fielding appearing in a casually racist bit might not have come as a surprise, but American audiences aren’t as familiar with their previous work. In part, that’s because “The Mighty Boosh” and “Little Britain,” their shows which aired in the early 2000s in Britain, were both pulled by Netflix a few years ago over their performances in blackface, brownface and yellowface.The current group of “Great British Baking Show” contestants.Love Productions/NetflixThe “Bake Off” clips were shared incredulously and angrily on Twitter, days before the episode even aired. The phrase “Mexican Week” quickly became shorthand for profound culinary blunder, presented with a sense of naïve triumph. An image of a cursed avocado, lopped away with a knife, became the episode’s unofficial mascot, as if a home cook unfamiliar with peeling an avocado should feel humiliated.To me, it felt more like the episode had betrayed its own contestants, as well as its audience, with a lack of expertise among judges, and a lack of curiosity among hosts. Paul Hollywood explaining steak tacos with pico de gallo and refried beans to Prue Leith would be howlingly funny, if he weren’t positioned as an expert.It was even worse than the clips implied — an hour of incompetent exposition, farcical bumbling and maracas-shaking. A distraction for an increasingly insular, self-referential show that’s run out of energy and expertise, and refuses to find it elsewhere.The show has slowly moved away from regional specialties and technique-centered challenges, from focusing on, say, the beauty of lamination, hot-water crusts and steamed puddings. It has grown to fit the exact, most clichéd limits of its form — countries as themes, cuisines as costumes, identities as performances.Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc, the show’s original hosts, excelled at double entendres, while playing up their lack of baking expertise. But they glowed with curiosity and enthusiasm for baking, and short documentary segments they hosted often featured experts, and cultural context, for many foods on the show. But in more recent seasons, several challenges have presented foods as if encountering them for the first time. A recent, and almost equally chaotic “Japanese Week” introduced a challenge of Chinese steamed buns.As the show found a wider audience in the United States, and moved from the BBC to Channel 4, it lost Ms. Perkins, Ms. Giedroyc and Mary Berry, a judge who was replaced by Ms. Leith. And while it’s tempting to say the show hasn’t been the same since, you might also say its worst tendencies have simply flourished. Viewers have been pointing them out for years. In an old episode, Mr. Hollywood repeatedly and inexplicably referred to challah, a traditional Jewish bread, as “plaited bread,” which prompted the Forward headline, “‘Great British Bake Off’ Has Zero Jewish Friends.’”And in 2019, Sana Noor Haq wrote about the tension between the show’s image as a bastion of modern, multicultural Britain and the judges’ clear sense of discomfort — or smirking amusement — when contestants like Michael Chakraverty infused the flavors of coconut and chile into his Keralan star bread.Contestants were expected to perform their biographies, neatly and concisely, for the judges. To make the flavors and designs of their foods add up to a pleasant and consumable identity. Never mind that some bakers managed to have fun with it, or be really good at it.It was always an impossible task: If they failed, they failed. If they succeeded, they were exotic. And either way, two comedians in serapes and sombreros would come ambling up the hill behind them, insisting they weren’t going to make any jokes.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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    Trevor Noah Is Inspired by Trump’s Camera Work

    Noah joked on Thursday that Trump gets away with so much criminal activity, “it just shows us we could do crime, too.”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.Not So Smooth CriminalAn aide for former President Donald Trump was caught on camera moving boxes out of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago both before and after the Justice Department issued a subpoena demanding the return of all classified documents he’d removed from the White House.Trevor Noah called Trump “a legend.”“Who else gets caught committing crimes with their own security cameras?” Noah said on Thursday. “Who are you? How are you real?”“There’s something inspiring about it, too, when you think about it. It’s actually inspiring. Because Trump is so bad at crime, but he gets away with so much of it, it just shows us we could do crime, too. He’s like the drunk couple at karaoke; hearing them screech through ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ gives you the confidence to try ‘Kiss From a Rose.’” — TREVOR NOAH“Man, he’s a bad criminal. You’re supposed to get rid of the evidence. Trump is the first criminal to plant the evidence on himself.” — SETH MEYERS“I have to say, all this evidence, it’s crazy the only Trump being held in prison right now is Melania.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Remember how he was ranting and raving about the agents searching Barron’s bedroom and going through Melania’s closet? That’s because he put the documents there.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He’s such a bad criminal. If Donald Trump wasn’t born rich, he’d be one of those bank robbers who passes the teller a note with his name signed at the bottom.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Another Day, Another Subpoena Edition)“The House Jan. 6 committee voted unanimously today to subpoena former President Trump. I would say this is big news, but it’s really more like putting one more parking ticket on that van that’s been on your block for a year. That ticket ain’t gettin’ paid.” — SETH MEYERS“And to make sure the former president reads the subpoena, it’s being printed on the wrapper of a Gordita Supreme.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Watching him testify before Congress would be insane. He’d go on all sorts of insane rants and attack people. It would be like casting an actual lion in ‘The Lion King.’” — SETH MEYERS“But I feel like he will be a little conflicted. Because on the one hand, yes, he thinks this is a crooked witch hunt that is out to get him, but on the other hand, the ratings.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingAndrew Garfield, George Clooney, Salma Hayek, Halle Berry and Larry David are just a few celebrities who participated in the latest edition of Mean Tweets on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutTár in charge: Cate Blanchett as the conductor Lydia Tár in Todd Field’s movie.Focus FeaturesCate Blanchett stars as a powerful conductor who behaves as badly as any male maestro in the new film “Tár.” More