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    A New Class of Campus Satire

    IN THE SMALL hours of the morning, as my viscera turned to water, I binge-watched the entire season of “The Chair,” Netflix’s 2021 campus comedy. It was the night before my first colonoscopy, a middle-age rite of passage, and I was a captive, contemplative audience of one. I must have been a sight: swigging Suprep, laughing in the dark, illuminated only by the glow of my iPhone as Sandra Oh played out scenes from my professorial life. When two of her character’s aged, tweedy white colleagues began discussing colonoscopy results (“Clean as a whistle! You could serve shrimp off my colon”), an existential dread welled up within me: “Perhaps I’m them now — not the hero but an easy satirical mark.”I am a tenured English professor, 47 years old, Black as well as white, more likely to wear a hoodie than houndstooth, Nikes rather than tasseled loafers. I led my first college class when I was 23, which means I’ve been a teacher over half my life. By a conservative estimate, I’ve spent some 3,000 hours lecturing. I’ve taught at small liberal arts colleges, Ivy League and large public universities, on the East and the West Coasts, in the South and in the Mountain West. Of all the places I know, I know the college campus best.That’s why “The Chair” startled me. Unlike most accounts of campus life, it depicts an experience that I recognized as my own. The six-episode series follows Oh’s Ji-Yoon Kim, a newly minted English department chair, as she confronts plummeting enrollments, an aging faculty — and her attempts to reconcile her own progressive values with the realpolitik of administrative leadership, all while attending to life as a single mother of a young adopted child.I’ve grown accustomed to campus fictions that center students, a sensible creative choice. After all, most of us were students once. And students’ lives are intrinsically interesting. College-age 18-to-20-somethings are navigating their identities, tacking to extremes in pursuit of a centered self. College has long figured as a second womb, a space of quasi-independence in which young people, finally free of their childhood homes, can come of age in mind and body with the more measured paternal intervention of the campus: professors to cultivate the mind; staff to provide hot meals; administrators to offer a baseline of safety, a buffer from law and consequence. Onscreen, most college-based films and television series favor students nearly to the exclusion of faculty, staff and administration, like 2021’s “The Sex Lives of College Girls” on HBO Max and “Dear White People” (both the 2014 Justin Simien-directed film and the 2017-21 Netflix series). If you tour fictional colleges — Faber from “Animal House” (1978), Hillman from “A Different World” (1987-93), Port Chester University from “PCU” (1994), Cal U from “Grown-ish” (2018-present) — you’ll discover that faculty are either overlooked or introduced as comic foils trying to catch a contact high off their students’ youth and cool. Pembroke, the Ivy-inspired setting of “The Chair,” is the first place I saw professors both satirized and humanized, presented as fully conceived members of an imagined community. That matters because the real campus is far more complicated — and compelling — than most projections ever show.Clockwise from top left: Marisa Tomei, Dawnn Lewis, Ted Ross, Vernee Watson-Johnson, Phyllis Yvonne Stickney and Lisa Bonet in Season One of “A Different World” (1987-88).© Carsey-Werner Co. Courtesy of Everett Collection“The Chair” is part of a renaissance of college comedy, dramedy and satire — onscreen and on the page — offering new understandings of a swiftly changing campus. In the last three years alone, I’ve read a syllabus’s worth of recent campus novels, which variously employ elements of satire in telling their stories: a voice-driven coming-of-age tale in Elif Batuman’s “The Idiot” (2017); a transgender academic detective novel in Jordy Rosenberg’s “Confessions of the Fox” (2018); a high-literary surrealist dreamscape in Mona Awad’s “Bunny” (2019); a fictionalized multigenerational history of an Israeli prime minister in Joshua Cohen’s “The Netanyahus” (2021). These works are both rooted in conventions of campus satire stretching back nearly a century and responsive to life on campus today.With more people spending more time in college and graduate school, seeking refuge from economic uncertainty; with the proliferation of M.F.A. programs stocked with fiction writers fulfilling the age-old maxim to write what they know; with contentious campus debates over racial justice, gender and reproductive rights, mental health, disability rights, police abolition, academic freedom and so many other issues, it’s no wonder that fictions about college provide such fertile imaginative territory. Satire is uniquely suited to respond to challenging times because it provides a comedic safety valve that admits the existence of tragedy while also holding on to hope that the world can change for the better. One senses all of this in “The Chair.” Pressing in on its expression of the inherited tropes of campus life on film — the strains of Vivaldi opening the first episode, the stately buildings seen from on high, the students cutting paths across the quad — is an insurgent awareness of a modern university in crisis.Another of Winant’s collages, this one made using stills from films and television shows, including “The Sex Lives of College Girls” (2021), “Legally Blonde” (2001), “Old School” (2003) and “The Nutty Professor” (1963), spliced together with vintage images from historically Black colleges and universities.Carmen Winant, courtesy of the artist. Source photos (clockwise from top left): courtesy of HBO Max (2), Bettmann Archive/Getty Images, MPTV, Paul Thompson/FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images, Richard Foreman, Jr./Dreamworks Distribution/Photofest, Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images, courtesy of HBO Max, Buyenlarge/Getty Images, courtesy of HBO Max (2), Paramount/Photofest, courtesy of HBO Max, the Abbott Sengstacke Family Papers/Robert A. Sengstacke/Getty Images, courtesy of HBO Max (2)THE ROOTS OF satire stretch back to antiquity. Narrowly defined, satire is a genre of literature (traditionally a comic poem written in hexameter) that employs techniques such as irony, parody and burlesque to illuminate human folly and vice. However, ask an English professor and they’ll tell you — I’ll tell you — that satire most often functions less as a narrow genre than as a rhetorical mode, a disposition toward life. At a minimum, satire is purpose-driven. One doesn’t accidentally write a satirical takedown of the English occupation of Ireland by suggesting that the impoverished Irish might sell their children to the English as food, as Jonathan Swift did in “A Modest Proposal” (1729).The campus satire emerged in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century with Max Beerbohm’s “Zuleika Dobson” (1911), a whimsical tale that follows a governess who moonlights as a prestidigitator to Oxford University, where she turns class and convention topsy-turvy. (One could even trace the satirical gaze on academic life back to Swift’s portrayal of the grand academy of Lagado in “Gulliver’s Travels” [1726].) It then made its way across the Atlantic during the interwar period: One early example is the Marx Brothers’ film “Horse Feathers” (1932), which introduces Groucho as the college president Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff. In a memorable scene, he barges into a lecture on anatomy and exposes the professor’s teachings as claptrap. The campus, however, is little more than a convenience, as good a place as the circus or the opera for the brothers to clown.Groucho Marx (center) and Zeppo Marx in “Horse Feathers” (1932).Everett CollectionMost modern conventions of campus satire found form in post-World War II literature, with Mary McCarthy’s “The Groves of Academe” (1952), Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim” (1954) and Randall Jarrell’s “Pictures From an Institution” (1954). McCarthy is particularly ruthless when it comes to describing academics, among whom she counts “a certain number of seasoned nonconformists and dissenters, sexual deviants, feather-bedders, alcoholics, impostors.” (Jarrell’s novel, by contrast, filters through a nameless protagonist who offers equal-opportunity comic upbraiding, taking specific aim at a churlish novelist named Gertrude Johnson, allegedly based on McCarthy.)Recent Issues on America’s College CampusesSlavery Ties: Harvard released a 134-page report on the universty’s four centuries of ties to slavery, in an effort to begin redressing the wrongs of the past.Admissions: The Supreme Court will decide whether two race-conscious admissions programs are lawful, raising serious doubts about the future of affirmative action.Hiring: Outrage ensued after U.C.L.A. posted an adjunct position that offered no pay. Turns out, the school is not unique.Tuition: After a plan for free community college failed to gain traction in Congress, New Mexico is taking the lead in the tuition-free movement.The rise of the campus novel coincided with major demographic shifts in higher education. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill, dramatically expanded college attendance. Once the bastion of the privileged few, the campus soon came to be seen as a way station along the road to the middle class. In 1930, only 12 percent of 18-to-21-year-olds attended college; by 1950, that number was nearly 30 percent. (Statistics from 2020 place enrollment at 62.7 percent.) More women also arrived on campus; women now make up nearly 60 percent of students. Racial diversity has similarly expanded; the National Center for Education Statistics reports that almost half of college students now self-identify as a race other than white.Despite this evolution, the campus has remained surprisingly unchanged in the collective imagination. Part of that fixity comes from nostalgia. For many, the college years are the most fun and formative time of life. It’s an age of self-fashioning, when people claim possession of their identities — racialized and gendered, sexual and social. As such, it’s an exciting place at any age, whether you’re in the process of your own becoming or submerged in the ambience of other people’s awakenings.Reese Witherspoon (far right) in “Legally Blonde” (2001).Everett CollectionThe campus is also a workplace, increasingly reliant on underpaid part-time instructors rather than tenured faculty. College presidents warn of an impending enrollment crisis, born of the Great Recession’s baby bust. Higher education’s financial model, reliant on escalating tuitions, appears broken, leaving a generation of students — low-income and Black students most especially — saddled with crushing debt.Yet something about the campus novel, film and television series bends not toward tragic depictions of dire reality but toward satire. Maybe it has to do with ecology. The campus is a nexus of social relations: courtship, custom, identity formation, instruction, service, competition and hierarchy. It’s governed by a seasonal calendar, with certain designated periods of intense activity and others of rest. It’s conceived as a place apart, an ivory tower or, to borrow Don DeLillo’s name for his fictive school from his satirical novel “White Noise” (1985), a College-on-the-Hill. It cultivates its own set of rules and rituals, many of which are inscrutable to outsiders and therefore vulnerable to critique as elitist and out of touch. At a time when values and norms are in flux in almost every sector of society, the campus, by outward appearance, promises stasis. Everyone is enlisted in living — or at least supporting — the life of the mind, or maybe they’re just there to have a good time. Perhaps that is why the campus lends itself so readily to satire; it’s one of the few places contained yet familiar enough in which to stage a comedy of manners.Melissa McCarthy in “Life of the Party” (2018).Hopper Stone © Warner Bros., courtesy of Everett CollectionJohn Belushi in “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (1978).© Universal Pictures, courtesy of Everett CollectionYOU ARE MORE familiar than you might think with the comedy of manners, even if you haven’t spent much time reading British Restoration theater. William Congreve’s “The Way of the World” (1700), one of the best examples of the form, relies on an audience initiated into the rituals of courtly life, the petty squabbles and vanities of the privileged class. Time-travel three centuries to 2001’s “Legally Blonde” and you’ll find many of the same comic mechanisms at work. Reese Witherspoon’s sorority girl and recent college grad, Elle Woods, is out of place and maybe out of her depth in the staid confines of Harvard Law School but, over the course of the film, she bends and snaps the square-toed culture to her fashionable ways, all while proving she can hang with the brightest minds on campus.Satire is generally built on types like these, stock characters that an audience can recognize and learn to anticipate, comprising a shorthand vocabulary that creators may enlist in forging their fictions. Think of the absent-minded professor, so brilliant as to have a hard time with everyday things. That comic idea coalesced in the 1961 film of the same name, starring Fred MacMurray, and in Jerry Lewis’s “The Nutty Professor” two years later. It lives on today in characters as far removed from one another as Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth in the long-running Fox animated series “Futurama” (1999-present) and Professor Mito Fauna, D.V.M., Ph.D., Ed.D., etc., from Adam Gidwitz’s delightful children’s book series “The Unicorn Rescue Society,” which began in 2018. Or consider the rare but relatable species of the binge-drinking, too-old-for-college party animal, as exhibited by John Belushi’s seventh-year frat bro, John “Bluto” Blutarsky, from “Animal House”; Will Ferrell’s Frank “The Tank” Ricard from “Old School” (2003); and Melissa McCarthy’s Deanna “Dee Rock” Miles from “Life of the Party” (2018). Types like these invite a smile, maybe a shake of the head, rather than a finger pointed in judgment.Some satirical types are fashioned to fight. When Ishmael Reed wrote his campus satire “Japanese by Spring” (1993), he was fully enlisted in the 1980s and ’90s culture wars — a time, not unlike our own, when conservatives and progressives waged battle over affirmative action and gay rights, family values and censorship of the arts. Reed’s novel is a satire in the old-school sense of the word. He makes no pretense at realism. Instead, he juxtaposes wild and obvious exaggerations of character (his protagonist is an opportunistic and ideologically mercenary Black professor with the downright silly name of Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt) with even greater absurdities of historical fact (the novel’s fictional Oakland campus, Jack London College, is named for the beloved author of “The Call of the Wild” [1903], who was in fact also an avowed white supremacist who advocated genocide of the “lesser breeds”).Courtesy of Penguin BooksReed, now 84, credits his use of types to his childhood love of comic books and folk tales. “Well, types exist in Black folklore,” he explains. “That’s the basis for a lot of my work in terms of what I call comic aggression, which is used by people who are persecuted.” He points to stand-up performers from Redd Foxx to Richard Pryor, Jack Benny to Lenny Bruce. Comic aggression embodies satire’s seeming paradox: that so much raucous humor can be born out of anger and pain.The mid-20th-century literary theorist Northrop Frye once wrote that satire must have “an object of attack.” It casts an othering gaze, one that essentializes and passes summary judgment. Satire is generally incurious of motive, unconcerned about the conditions that produced whatever distortion of personality, misdeed or excess it targets for opprobrium. Simien’s “Dear White People” makes clear early on that its object of attack is white supremacy. It renders the campus in Black and white rather than as the multicultural community it is today.As such, the film does not invite its viewers to ask why the white kids who run the humor club Pastiche on the fictional Ivy League campus of Winchester University choose to host a party inviting their fellow white students to “unleash their inner Negro,” donning blackface and hurling racist slurs. In a meeting to plan the party, one of the club’s leaders invokes Pastiche’s motto, “Sharpen thy sword.” “It’s a reminder that satire is the weapon of reason,” he explains. Then he ominously asks, “So who on campus is being unreasonable?” Their answer is Black students, particularly a biracial woman named Sam, played by Tessa Thompson, whose radio show, “Dear White People,” insists that white students confront their anti-Black bias. Pastiche’s satire itself becomes the film’s satirical target, upending the insidious claim that those who decry racism are somehow the racists. To underscore the point, the film’s closing credits intersperse real images of blackface parties from campuses across the United States.Courtesy of Penguin BooksCourtesy of Simon & Schuster“ ‘DEAR WHITE PEOPLE’ really shifted how we think about the campus,” the novelist Elaine Hsieh Chou says, reflecting on the racist party scene. Chou’s debut novel, “Disorientation” (2022), centers on a literary hoax: a white male poet assumes a Chinese name and identity, going so far as to masquerade using yellowface and eye tape. It is a grotesque conceit but, as with Reed’s novel and Simien’s film, grounded in fact. Chou, 35, was inspired — and enraged — by the strange case of Yi-Fen Chou, the nom de plume assumed by a middle-aged white poet from Indiana named Michael Derrick Hudson, who hoped that a Chinese name would improve his chances of finding a publisher for his poems. It worked, and one of his poems was published in Prairie Schooner and later reprinted in the 2015 edition of “The Best American Poetry.”“The word ‘satire’ makes us think something is so outrageous and absurd that it could never happen,” Chou says. “But nearly everything in the novel happened.” Chou brings receipts, in the form of endnotes, that include, for instance, a 2014 Seattle Times article detailing a production of the comic opera “The Mikado” starring 40 white actors in yellowface. “I wanted to say [to the reader], ‘Don’t just put down this book and say, “Well, that was a wild ride!,” and never think about any of those implications again.’”The implications of “Disorientation” are inescapable. The novel follows Ingrid Yang, a Taiwanese American graduate student, as she struggles to complete her dissertation. Chou, a former doctoral student herself (she studied literary modernism), knows Ingrid’s world well. She peoples her novel with characters readily available for satire: the arrogant white male professor of East Asian studies, the self-serious campus radical, the model minority conservative. Rather than reveling, as Reed does, in satirical types, however, Chou burrows under them to expose the human complexity that lies beneath. This humanizing approach, common in today’s satirical fictions, blunts the satire as it sharpens the psychological complexity of the characters.“Sometimes with satire, you can make a point with a very broad brush. Ishmael Reed is in that category; Percival Everett — other writers who are outlandish and having fun with being outlandish,” explains Julie Schumacher, 63, the author of two comic novels set on campus, including “The Shakespeare Requirement” (2018). Schumacher’s first campus novel, “Dear Committee Members” (2014), won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, a first for a book by a woman author. Both books center on Jason Fitger, an irascible but idealistic creative writing professor and English department chair at the fictional Payne University. Like Chou, Schumacher considers herself an accidental satirist. “I would never say that I started out thinking, ‘OK, I’m writing a satire,’” Schumacher says. “I don’t feel like that’s my strength as a writer. I want a character to play against type, to not quite fit the category.”For a character to play against type, of course, a writer must first render that type legible to readers. In “The Shakespeare Requirement,” Schumacher does this most pointedly with one of Fitger’s colleagues, a Shakespearean scholar named Dennis Cassovan. Like the colonoscopy-conversing codgers in “The Chair,” Professor Cassovan presents as a familiar comic figure: the elderly curmudgeon upholding antiquated ideals. Cassovan’s particular inflexibility, memorialized in the novel’s title, lies in his conviction that all undergraduate English majors should be required to take a semester of Shakespeare. Schumacher generates some good laughs at “the old mossback” Cassovan’s expense, mostly through Fitger’s acerbic voice. But she also does something that no doctrinaire satirist would ever do: she ventures into Cassovan’s point of view, exposing the emotional complexity that accounts for his beliefs. We learn that he is a widower and that he lost his teenage son to cancer. Schumacher nonetheless resists the consolation of pity, inviting her readers instead to recognize that “Cassovan’s true existence had flowered within the confines of this dingy 8-by-10-foot room.”In this passage Schumacher gifts her character something no stock satirical type could claim: dignity. In doing so, her novel, like Chou’s “Disorientation” and like “The Chair,” joins a new wave of campus satires, many of which are written by women, that aren’t really satires at all. By exposing their characters’ human motives, their frailties and failings, deflated aspirations and unarticulated hopes, they offer something more radical than righteous critique: avenues for empathy and, perhaps, pathways back to community for those who have strayed far away.Winant’s third collage, made with images from “Dear White People,” the 2014 film that inspired the 2017-21 television series of the same name.Carmen Winant, courtesy of the artist. Source photos: courtesy of NetflixTHESE UNSATIRES OF the campus are cropping up onscreen, as well, without sacrificing the outrageous qualities that attract audiences. Consider “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” a series that stands out for truth in advertising, as we witness the aforementioned college girls having sex in an inspired range of locations. (“None of my friends get down like that!” my 21-year-old research assistant, Chazz Hannah, recently said to me.) Shows like “Grown-ish” and “A Different World” also focus on attractive people consciously coupling and uncoupling, and sex remains a fundamental element of the campus novel, too. In “Moo” (1995), for instance, Jane Smiley titles a chapter “Who’s in Bed With Whom,” then calls roll of campus bedfellows: an undergrad with a grad student, two professors in perfunctory congress, two others in passionate embrace, before arriving at an econ professor who’s “in bed” in a figurative sense, colluding with a billionaire.Of course, sex is central to these fictions of the campus because it features so prominently in the real college experience. Mindy Kaling and the series’s co-creator, Justin Noble, spoke about returning to campus — Kaling’s alma mater, Dartmouth, and Noble’s, Yale — to interview current students, but “The Sex Lives of College Girls” does not rely on capturing current trends. Quite the contrary, it is built on types — even stereotypes: Bela, a newly unsheltered South Asian girl looking to make up for lost time with lots of sex; Kimberly, a guileless suburbanite hanging on to a platonic long-distance relationship; Leighton, a blond socialite with a legacy pedigree; Whitney, a Black talented tenth striver whose force-of-nature mother is a prominent politician. The series begins with these stereotypes, then works to reveal the humanity that the stereotypes occlude. By the end of Season 1, for instance, Leighton has begun to embrace her lesbianism.This evolution of character enacts a process of identity formation inherent in college students everywhere. It’s an intimate undertaking often acted out in public, drawing on the influence of others, including professors. “There’s a great craving among students to be told about who they are,” the novelist, playwright and theater professor Julia May Jonas tells me. “And that unasked request, if you answer it, can be very dangerous. It can be at best confusing and at worst dangerous.”Jonas’s 2022 novel, “Vladimir,” surveys the limits of student-professor intimacy — including sexual relationships. One of the animating forces of the plot is a long history of a married male professor’s affairs with his students. This is a familiar story, enough to be a common satirical plotline in its own right; it’s also a topical one, with recent scandals at both Harvard and Yale surfacing the damage done when professors abuse their power. Jonas, 41, plays an intriguing variation on the theme, however, grounding her novel in the seductive first-person perspective of the philandering professor’s wife and, more than that, having her give voice to a nuanced understanding of campus sexual relationships. The book announces these subversive intentions from its opening lines: “When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.” Among other things, the line is a riff on one of Jonas’s inspirations, Vladimir Nabokov and his controversial classic, “Lolita” (1955). (Nabokov was also the author of two satirical academic novels of his own, “Pnin” [1957] and “Pale Fire” [1962].)“Vladimir” is alive to a range of intimacies. Early in the novel, Jonas’s unnamed protagonist revels in its ambience: “I like feeling the thrum of the students’ brains and hearts, uncensored by the classroom setting. In the library their lives swirl around me — I’m aware of their romantic entanglements, their grudges, hatreds, obsessions, all vibrating at a frequency I won’t ever feel again. Never will I love as they love, or hate as they hate or want what they want with such strong and solidified identification.” Jonas’s protagonist looks on her world with an eye alive to both the comic excesses and the enviable vitalities of her students. It invites us to revisit scenes so often played for broad comic effect — the sex lives of college girls, boys and otherwise — as deserving of more nuanced reflection.Fred MacMurray in “The Absent-Minded Professor” (1961)Everett CollectionWE LONG FOR all that satire provides — its moral certitude, its keen eye for hypocrisy, its sanity-saving comedy — even as the writers and creators of today’s satirical art bridle against the narrow dictates of the form. This crisis of satire is nothing new. Seventy years ago, in “Notes on the Comic” (1952), the poet W. H. Auden cautioned that satire was exhausted, a relic of a bygone era when satirists wrote for a privileged audience of thousands rather than diverse communities of tens of millions or more. “Satire flourishes in a homogeneous society where satirist and audience share the same views as to how normal people can be expected to behave,” he writes. But what happens when one segment of society’s idea of “normal people” comes up against a resounding chorus of college students across the country — and, indeed, the world — who are naming and claiming their particular identities beyond the confines of gender binaries, inherited racial and ethnic categories, ability and disability? Satire, a form that thrives on homogeneity, cannot help but change in the face of such diversity. One wonders, though, if it can survive.When “The Chair” landed on Netflix in August of 2021, it provoked a spate of think pieces on academic satire — and an equal but opposite number of essays explaining, if sometimes pedantically, that the series was not, in fact, a satire at all. Annie Julia Wyman, 36, the show’s co-creator (along with the actress, writer and producer Amanda Peet), is definitive on the matter. “ ‘The Chair’ is not satire,” she says. “Satire is a kind of decadent, exhausted, austere and cold form.” Wyman, who holds a doctorate in English from Harvard and has taught courses on comic theory, describes the series instead as “something much closer to pure comedy.” She and Peet conceived the show’s central relationship — between Oh’s Professor Kim and Bill Dobson, played by Jay Duplass — in homage to the long tradition of the romantic comedy. “It’s about renewal and reintegration and what it takes to go on,” she says. “How can we remake our little society while we keep it afloat in a spirit of love and companionship?”That spirit is tested in the very first episode. Duplass’s Dobson, an acclaimed novelist, recent widower and now an empty nester, is struggling to hold himself together. He makes his way across campus to teach his lecture class, Death and Modernism. He begins by writing on the chalkboard.“Absurdism.”“Life isn’t what you think,” he says. “It will never be what you think.”“Fascism.”He points to the word.“All meaning is ascribed to the State.”Then he points to “Absurdism.”“There is no meaning.”His gesture becomes a Nazi salute. Then he utters a muted “Heil Hitler.”It’s a horrific moment to watch, all the more so because of the disconnect between the students’ shocked responses and Bill’s unabashed confidence that he’s simply indulging in a bit of pedagogical theater, ironically weaponizing the hateful gesture against itself.Except he’s wrong.The camera cuts to students’ faces. No one laughs or cracks a smile. The expressions range from befuddlement to concern. Through it all, Bill continues lecturing, oblivious to the growing commotion, unaware that his career may have just come to an end. By Episode 2, he’s a meme, his ironic stunt now source material for the students’ own satire of him.So why does it go so wrong? The series offers plenty of satirical reckoning to go around. Bill is out of touch, quick to exercise his freedoms without consideration of his responsibilities. For their part, the students willfully ignore the context of Bill’s gesture, not because it evades them but because they resent his entitlement. His actions after the incident don’t help; he calls a town hall to not apologize. “I want this to be a forum where everyone can voice their opinion,” he says. “You’re a white tenured professor who writes Op-Eds for The New York Times,” one student snaps back. “You really think this is an equal forum?” At season’s end, the tension is unresolved: Bill is fired but fighting it. On the campus of “The Chair,” on campuses everywhere, satire may well be dying. Who will mourn it?I’m thinking about this in the operating room, positioned on my side, gown open in back. In the final moments before the propofol takes effect, my gastroenterologist attempts to assuage my anxiety — not knowing that its source isn’t my concern over neoplastic polyps but of falling prey to Bill’s mistake. Lecturing is a vulnerable thing; it’s liberating, too. A good lecturer is part teacher, part preacher, part stand-up comic. I’ve danced a two-step, broken into song, laughed and even cried. I’ve marched a 100-student lecture across the quad to teach in an open-air amphitheater. I’ve even taught a semester-long course accompanied by a student D.J. and rapper. I’ve done all of this with the hope that I might inspire my students, or at least entertain them. The experience often leaves me exposed. The only protections are humility and respect for the sensibilities of the young people in your charge. That’s what it means to teach.“What do you teach?”My doctor must have seen my salutation in my chart.“I’m an English professor,” I tell her.This is usually a conversation stopper in Los Angeles, but not today.“Well, you must have watched ‘The Chair,’ right? My partner and I binged it in two nights. What did you think?”I’m out before I can respond. When I come to, I’m in the recovery room, head still cloudy, soul unsettled but clean as a whistle. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel on North Korea’s First Reported Covid Outbreak

    “According to their director of their national institute of infectious disease, Dr. Dennis Rodman, the virus, which until now had been ‘Un’-detected, has appeared,” Kimmel said.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.Infection DetectionKim Jong-un declared a “maximum emergency” in North Korea on Thursday as the country reported its first outbreak of the coronavirus.“According to their director of their national institute of infectious disease, Dr. Dennis Rodman, the virus, which until now had been ‘Un’-detected, has appeared,” Jimmy Kimmel said on Thursday.“North Korea reported its first coronavirus outbreak today and ordered all cities and counties to enter a lockdown. Or as they call it, ‘business as usual.’” — SETH MEYERS“How did Covid even get into North Korea? Did Kid Rock play Pyongyang and not tell us about it?” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (24 Hours in Biden Edition)“While speaking yesterday to thousands of union electrical workers, President Biden referred to former President Trump as, quote, ‘the great MAGA king.’ OK, can we please not give him any more ideas?’” — SETH MEYERS“Congratulations, Joe! You’ve selected the one nickname that Trump will gladly use. I mean, I guarantee Trump already has that monogrammed on towels.” — JAMES CORDEN“Foolish move for Biden trying to play the nickname game with Trump. With Trump? You can’t do that. The guy — the guy is a terrible president, but he’s in the hall of fame when it comes to the nicknames. Right, Sleepy Joe?” — JAMES CORDEN“President Biden criticized Republicans at a fund-raiser last night for their recent attacks on Disney and said, quote, ‘They’re going to storm Cinderella’s castle before this is over.’ Oh, buddy, I hate to tell ya — if they’re storming anything, it’s the Hall of Presidents.” — SETH MEYERS“President Biden told a small gathering at a Democratic fund-raiser last night that it’s going to be ‘hard’ to maintain the majority in both houses of Congress, especially since they don’t have it in the first place.” — SETH MEYERS“But today Biden was back in Washington, where he hosted a — co-hosted a virtual Covid summit. The fact that the summit was held virtually pretty much tells you how we’re doing in the fight against Covid.”— JIMMY FALLON“The U.S. co-hosted a summit with Germany, Indonesia, Senegal and Belize. Good, all the heavy hitters are in on this.” — JIMMY FALLON“But Biden is serious about tackling the pandemic. That’s why today he announced the new head of his Covid task force, Patti LuPone.” — JIMMY FALLON“President Biden today called Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to congratulate him on winning the Philippine presidential election. Said Biden, ‘Remember, winning is the easy part — the hard part is convincing everybody that you actually won.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingJanelle James, star of “Abbott Elementary,” joined Desus and Mero to help children record pep talks on a “Keep It 100” hotline.Also, Check This OutJacoba Ballard in the documentary “Our Father.”Netflix“Our Father” tells the story of siblings who unite to bring to justice the fertility specialist who impregnated their mothers with his sperm without consent. More

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    Susan Nussbaum, 68, Who Pressed for Disability Rights in Her Plays, Dies

    In a wheelchair after being hit by a car in her 20s, she became an advocate for people with disabilities in her writing for the stage and as a novelist.Susan Nussbaum, a playwright and novelist whose work reflected her concern for the rights of people with disabilities, died on April 28 at her home in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. She was 68.Her sister, Karen Nussbaum, said the cause was complications of pneumonia.Ms. Nussbaum began using a wheelchair after being hit by a car at age 24 and soon became an integral part of Chicago’s burgeoning disability-rights scene.Incensed by a lack of accessibility in the city for theater people with disabilities, she wrote her own plays, starring herself and other disabled actors.“If the dominant culture was saturated with backward concepts of who we were, I would answer back with my own collection of disabled characters,” she wrote in a 2012 essay published in The Huffington Post.Ms. Nussbaum began her playwriting career with “Staring Back,” which was performed on the Second City’s E.T.C. stage in 1983. She then collaborated with Mike Ervin, a disability activist who writes a column for Progressive.org, on a series of satirical sketches about disability. Titled “The Plucky and Spunky Show,” it was presented at the Remains Theater.The first reading of her acerbic comic play “Mishuganismo” was in 1992 in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune, in an article about that reading, called it “a mad-sad-glad whirl of politics, activism, love, need, sex and other items.”Directed by her father, Mike Nussbaum, an actor, and based on her own letters, the play took its title from a term that one of Ms. Nussbaum’s friends coined, meaning “a syndrome when a Jewish woman goes crazy for a Latin guy.” The play was later published in the 1997 anthology “Staring Back: The Disability Experience From the Inside Out.”Her last major play, “No One as Nasty,” which documented the relationship between a disabled woman and her paid caretaker, was performed in 2000 at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago.As a member of the Chicago-based disability rights organization Access Living, Ms. Nussbaum campaigned to make theaters more accessible to wheelchair users and participated in other protests, including efforts to make public transit in the city accessible.After decades of work in theater, she turned to fiction. Her novel “Good Kings Bad Kings,” which follows workers and residents in a Chicago care institution for people with disabilities, earned acclaim for its candor and sensitivity and won the 2012 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.The book’s title came from reporting in The New York Times about Jonathan Carey, an autistic boy who was killed by an employee of the Oswald D. Heck Developmental Center, near Albany, where Jonathan was living. “I could be a good king or a bad king,” the man told the boy as he asphyxiated him, according to court documents.That line stuck with Ms. Nussbaum, she said in a 2013 interview with the website Bitch Media. “It became the title because it reminded me how, when it comes to kids, the adults have all the power. And when the adult in question has no emotional connection to the child, and the child’s welfare is turned over to that adult — as is the case in institutions — terrible things can happen.”She continued: “The disabled characters we’re presented with usually fit one or more of the following stereotypes: victim, villain, saint, monster. The fate of the disabled character is usually miraculous cure, death or institutionalization.”In writing the novel, as in her other work, Ms. Nussbaum said, “It was really important to me to give disabled characters — more than one — their own voices, and the agency to represent themselves and their own perspective on what happens.”Susan Ruth Nussbaum was born on Dec. 2, 1953, in Chicago to Mike and Annette (Brenner) Nussbaum. Her mother worked in public relations. She grew up in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, and attended Highland Park High School, graduating in 1972.Interested in theater from a young age after running lines with her father, she began writing plays in high school. After graduating, she took drama classes at the Goodman School of Drama (now The Theatre School at DePaul University) in Chicago.She was on her way to an acting class when she was struck by a car. She spent seven months in the hospital.She then navigated through life as a wheelchair user, becoming angry at the lack of accessibility. At one job, as she recounted in a 2013 Psychology Today article, the workplace did not have accessible bathrooms. Finding no ramps on public transportation, she and other wheelchair users began taking an ambulance to and from work. These experiences galvanized her to join Access Living and begin writing plays.Her activism extended outside Chicago as well. A longtime leftist, Ms. Nussbaum visited Nicaragua and Cuba as a member of coalitions on disability rights. Later in life she founded Empowered Fe Fes, a Chicago organization for disabled young women seeking to explore their sexuality.In addition to her sister, she is survived by her father; a brother, Jacob Nussbaum; and a daughter, Taina Rodriguez. More

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    A 9-Hour Play? Sit, Eat, Drink, Even Fall Asleep to ‘One Night.’

    Target Margin Theater stages an enchanting riff on “One Thousand and One Nights” inside an old Brooklyn garage. Tea and pastries included, blankets welcome.The inspiration for “One Night,” the nine-hour theatrical event at Target Margin Theater in Brooklyn, began about 3,000 nights ago. Or, to tell the story another way, it began more than 1,000 years ago when certain Middle Eastern and Indian folk tales first appeared in Arabic collections. “One Night” distills these nested tales, known as “One Thousand and One Nights” or the “Arabian Nights.” Some editions include dozens of tales; some hundreds. So when you think about it, nine hours isn’t very long at all.“What it really is, for me, is an extended adventure in storytelling,” said David Herskovits, the artistic director of Target Margin, during a recent video call.The actor Anthony Vaughn Merchant telling a story to audience members who are drinking tea. Justin J Wee for The New York TimesTarget Margin, an Off Broadway stalwart, has told stories for more than 30 years, gaining a reputation for deconstructing complicated texts — Plato’s “Symposium”; Gertrude Stein’s plays; both parts of Goethe’s “Faust”— and offering them up again with colorful costumes, playful lights and stages bedecked in 99-cent store pizazz. For a company that bops cheerfully from German opera to Greek tragedy to Yiddish folklore, a lingering sojourn in the Middle East shouldn’t come as a particular surprise. But the company has never worked on a show over quite so many years or served quite so much food to audiences — fruit, pastries, popcorn, chocolate, tofu bowls, grape ceviche.That work began about eight years ago with Moe Yousuf, then an associate artistic director, now an M.B.A. student (“He’s no fool,” Herskovits said). Even though the company was then enmeshed in a yearslong exploration of Eugene O’Neill, Yousuf took turns reading aloud “One Thousand and One Nights” with other members in the company’s office in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.Herskovits didn’t think that anything would necessarily come of it. But he became fascinated by the stories and their complicated textual history.Copious servings of tea.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesPastries as well.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“There is no text,” he said, excitedly. “What you have is a tradition of stories, layered over so many different languages, cultures, religions, geographical locations.”As a longtime storyteller, he also savored the primacy of narrative within the stories — particularly the frame story. In this story, King Shahryar, outraged by the unfaithfulness of his wife, resolves to marry a virgin each night, bed her, then kill her before she has the chance to dishonor him. He kills some number of women until his vizier presents his own daughter, Scheherazade. On that first night — and for a thousand nights after — she tells a tale so enthralling that the king stays her execution so that she can continue.In 2017, with the O’Neill project concluded and the company newly relocated to a converted garage in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, workshops began. These workshops, many of them led by longtime company members, evolved into public presentations: “Pay No Attention to the Girl,” “The Sindbad Lab,” “Marjana and the Forty Thieves” and one more with an unprintable title.To devise the scripts for these presentations, the company told — and retold and retold — the tales to one another.Small stage, big tale: The actor Leonie Bell, standing center on the yellow box, recounts a story to audience members.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“I always describe this process as: How many different ways can you play telephone?” the performer Anthony Vaughn Merchant, who joined in 2017, told me, referring to the children’s game in which players whisper a message to one another, transmuting the message as the game goes on.None of these stories are played straight, not only because Target Margin has rarely confronted a text head on (please, it’s right there in the company’s name) but also because the stories themselves — with their sex and violence and exotic locales — invite Orientalist perspectives. And many of the stories, including the frame story, promote a misogynistic worldview.Audience members are encouraged to get cozy.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesSleeping is optional.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesRawya El Chab, an actress of Lebanese descent, grew up with these stories. When she began working with Target Margin in 2019, she worried how they would be told. “Are we going to say that all these Arab women need saving, which is mostly the narrative that I am afraid of, that Arab men are brutes and Arab women need saving?” she said during a recent video call.But she soon learned that Target Margin emphasizes collaborative creation, which encourages conversation among the company members. “Something amazing about working with David is the possibility for dialogue constantly,” she said.Elsouki, left, with Kate Budney. The company divides the material over two nights; other times they perform from afternoon toward midnight. A few performances run from dusk till dawn.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesDina El-Aziz, a costume designer of Egyptian descent who first worked with Target Margin in “Pay No Attention to the Girl,” also knew these stories from childhood. And she appreciated the liberties that the company took with them, as they told them anew.“We’re not doing an accurate retelling of ‘One Thousand and One Nights,’” she said. “It’s a bunch of people in a garage in Brooklyn.” She let this approach inform the costumes. “I did purposely steer away from harem pants,” she said.Pandemic closures paused these explorations. But during the pandemic’s second year, Herskovits felt the pull to return to these tales, with a totalizing show that would combine what the company had already created with new material, interpolating stories from other traditions and personal stories, too. That became the nine-hour “One Night.” For some performances, the company divides the material over two nights; other times they perform from afternoon toward midnight. A few performances run from dusk till dawn.Budney, left, performing with James Ferguson. Justin J Wee for The New York Times“That’s the dream,” Herskovits said of these overnight performances. “That’s what Scheherazade does.”This is a challenge, of course, for the actors. When he first experienced the overnight performance, during a dress rehearsal, Vaughn Merchant found it exhausting. “It was like, Oh, this is rough,” he said. But it has since become easier. Now, he said, the hours fly by.El Chab agreed. “You feel tired at the end,” she said, “but you feel a sense of liberation, you feel a sense of joy at having accomplished this.”Herskovits wants liberation and joy for the audience, too. Which explains the food, as well as Carolyn Mraz’s cozy set, scattered with comfy sofas, beanbags and poufs. Breaks are encouraged. If someone were to fall asleep, that would be OK, too.“That might even be great,” Herskovits said. “It’s like you’re a little kid, somebody’s telling you a story. That would be beautiful.”“You feel tired at the end,” an actor said, “but you feel a sense of liberation, you feel a sense of joy at having accomplished this.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesOn a rainy Saturday, I stopped into an afternoon-to-evening performance, settling into a buttercup sofa with a mug of herbal tea. An actress (actually a stagehand, Kate Budney, gamely standing in for an absent performer) stopped by and told a small group of us the biblical story of Esther. Then the room reset for the tale of the porter and the three ladies of Baghdad, derived from the “Thousand and One Nights,” which had several other stories — dogs, a dervish, the wife-beating son of a caliph — smuggled inside.The room reset again for the story of the seven voyages of Sindbad, during which tofu bowls (delicious!) were served. Then the cast took the stage at the far end of the room to discuss how Scheherazade, having borne King Shahryar three children and entertaining him for 1,001 nights, finally earned his pardon. (Which means she gets to stay married to a rapist and a serial killer. Happy endings are weird.)“And this is the completion and the end of their story,” a performer said with brisk finality.But, of course, it wasn’t. It was just after 7 p.m. The show had four more hours to go. More

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    Bruce MacVittie, Ubiquitous Character Actor, Dies at 65

    A co-founder of the Naked Angels troupe in New York, he was a familiar face in Off Broadway theater, in movies and on TV, often playing tough guys with tormented souls.Bruce MacVittie, one of New York City’s quintessential character actors, who made his Broadway debut in David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” opposite Al Pacino in 1983 and was a mainstay on Off Broadway stages for over 40 years, as well as a familiar face on television and in film, died on May 7 in Manhattan. He was 65.His wife, Carol Ochs, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but said the cause had not been determined.Mr. MacVittie excelled at playing tough guys with tormented souls, revealing a tenderness at the heart of his characterizations. His casting type was low-life and street-smart, but he himself ran in rarefied acting circles. In the mid-1980s, he helped found Naked Angels, a troupe of young film and theater hipsters (including Matthew Broderick and Marisa Tomei) who immediately dazzled New York with the celebrity wattage and social conscience of their theatrical endeavors.“Naked Angels was the club that was too cool to let me in,” the actress Edie Falco recalled in an interview. “I was just hanging around on the fringes, dying to get my foot in the door, but Bruce was already in. Bruce and I traveled through our actor travails together. We were young together and got less young together.”Mr. MacVittie in the thriller “Killer Among Us” (2021), one of his numerous film roles.Vertical EntertainmentMr. MacVittie’s career began in 1980 at Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan with a lead in Edward Allan Baker’s “What’s So Beautiful About a Sunset Over Prairie Avenue?”In 1988, after bit parts on the series “Barney Miller” and “Miami Vice,” he got his first big television job, partnering with Stanley Tucci in “The Street,” a vérité slice of blue-collar cop life set in the Newark Police Department. Claiming to be “the first television series shot entirely in New Jersey,” the show churned out 40 episodes in 40 days but lasted only a season. Still, it cast a stylistic shadow over future TV crime dramas.“Bruce’s background was working class, like me,” said Frances McDormand, another longtime friend. “There was something about celebrating this in our work that was important to both of us. Bruce had a pride about where he’d come from that he carried with him and was even cocky about. It was very charismatic.”Bruce James MacVittie was born in Providence, R.I., on Oct. 14, 1956. His father, John James MacVittie, was a worker at the Narragansett Electric Company; his mother Olive (Castergine) MacVittie, was a homemaker.Bruce grew up in Cranston, R.I., where he began to act in high school, and went on to graduate from Boston University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He moved to New York in 1979. Four years later, after understudying for the role of Bobby in the Pacino revival of “American Buffalo,” Mr. MacVittie took over the part on Broadway and ultimately performed it on a national tour and in the West End of London.“Bruce carried this currency, especially for young actors then, like me, that he’d worked onstage with Pacino,” recalled the actor Bobby Cannavale. “The fact that he’d elevated to that role as a ‘cover’ made it even more heroic.”In 2011, after over 75 film and television appearances, including 11 different roles on various “Law and Order” franchises, guest spots on “The Sopranos,” “Sex in the City” and “Homicide,” innumerable theatrical roles, like his acclaimed performance as a displaced Cuban immigrant in Eduardo Machado’s “Havana is Waiting,” 10 seasons at the Eugene O’Neill Center Playwrights Conference in Connecticut and an equal number of summers at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, Mr. MacVittie set aside his acting career to train as a nurse. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from Hunter College in Manhattan in 2013.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Sophia Oliva Ochs MacVittie. His first marriage ended in divorce. He lived in Manhattan.Mr. MacVittie returned to acting in his last years, including in a featured role on Ava DuVernay’s lauded Netflix series, “The Way They See Us.” He confined his nursing activities to the palliative care of friends in need.“I loved Bruce MacVittie,” Mr. Pacino said in an interview. “His performances were always glistening and crackling; a heart and a joy to watch. He was the embodiment of the struggling actor in New York City, and he made it work. We will miss him.” More

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    An Arts Festival With Hardly a Stage in Sight

    Performance venues at this year’s Kunstenfestivaldesarts, in Brussels, include a disused museum and the upper house of Belgium’s Parliament.BRUSSELS — As the biggest performing arts festival in Brussels got underway last weekend, there were few traditional stages in sight. Instead, spectators assembled in colonial-era monuments, a disused railway museum and even the debating chamber of Belgium’s Senate.There are practical reasons for the flurry of site-specific shows in the monthlong event, called Kunstenfestivaldesarts, said Daniel Blanca Gubbay, one of its directors, during a break between performances. After two years of pandemic upheaval, a lot of playhouses in Brussels were booked with rescheduled shows this year.The constraints led to a creative lineup, highlighting areas of the city that even frequent visitors don’t necessarily know. In order to see “The Weeping Woods and the Okapi Resistance,” a family-friendly puppet show created by Daniela Ortiz, audience members had to wander into a side alley of the large Cinquantenaire park — and stop in front of the “Monument to the Belgian Pioneers in Congo.”Unveiled in 1921, this sculpted tribute to the colonization of Congo is deeply uncomfortable to look at today. It features racist imagery and inscriptions that portray Belgians as the saviors of the local Black population. Since Belgium has recently begun to publicly reckon with its brutal history and to remove statues associated with it, “The Weeping Woods and the Okapi Resistance” could hardly be more timely.Ortiz is from Peru and remains based there. Here, she attempts to evoke Congo’s colonial-era plight through animal puppets manipulated by two performers from behind a curtain. In the story, the central character, an okapi, is captured by gleeful white puppets representing the colonizers.From a Belgian zoo, the okapi (a close cousin of the giraffe, native to what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo) then yearns for the independence of its native Congo, and conspires with other animals to overthrow the colonial regime. (They succeed, after strangling a human puppet and singing a song.) “The Weeping Woods and the Okapi Resistance” is full of good intentions, and on paper works as a counterpoint to its monumental backdrop in Brussels. Unfortunately, it was far too short and schematic to make for compelling theater: Initially announced as being an hour long, the performance ended up lasting 25 minutes.Aurélien Estager leading a mock tour at the Museums of the Far East as part of Satoko Ichihara’s “Madama Chrysanthemum.”Martine DewilThere was more to take away from Satoko Ichihara’s unclassifiable “Madama Chrysanthemum,” another work that premiered in a prescient setting, the Museums of the Far East. This complex in the north of Brussels, which includes a Chinese Pavilion and a Japanese Tower, is an Orientalist fantasy commissioned by Leopold II, the king who also oversaw Belgium’s violent rule in Congo.All the buildings have been shut for nearly a decade, for safety reasons, so “Madama Chrysanthemum” was a rare opportunity to look around. Ichihara, a Japanese writer and director, offered a playful introduction, too. The deadpan Aurélien Estager, one of two actors in “Madama Chrysanthemum,” welcomed the audience outside the Chinese Pavilion and proceeded with a mock tour of the surrounding landmarks.The tour ended inside the Museum of Japanese Art, one of the closed buildings. There, on a small, empty stage, Estager and Kyoko Takenaka launched into an offbeat performance inspired by the life of Masako, the current empress of Japan (who is also a Harvard-educated former diplomat). In a mix of Japanese and French, the text highlights the pressure Masako faced from the Imperial court, as well as public opinion, to produce a male heir.The critical light in which the show presents Japan’s royal family made it unperformable in Japan, Icihara said. Its surreal twists presumably wouldn’t help. Throughout, Estager assumes the role of a dog named Emperor, and Takenaka plays its owner, who dreams of being impregnated by an emperor (which one is deliberately unclear) even as she tells Masako’s story.An audience member playing the role of the interviewer in Fanny & Alexander’s “Se questo è Levi” at the upper house of Belgium’s Parliament.Werner StrouvenWhile “Madama Chrysanthemum” hijacks its Orientalist décor to tell a very contemporary Japanese story, “Se questo è Levi,” a one-man show, channels the solemnity of the upper house of Belgium’s Parliament. It’s a testament to Kunstenfestivaldesarts’ ingenuity that the organizers secured permission to stage an entire show inside the Senate’s debating chamber, with audience members watching from the lion-decorated seats of Belgian senators.“Se questo è Levi,” created by the Italian company Fanny & Alexander, takes excerpts from interviews given by Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor who wrote about his experience in the camp in “If This Is a Man.” The audience plays the role of the interviewer: A list of questions is provided, and they can be asked in any order. As soon as Andrea Argentieri, who plays Levi, is finished with one answer, anyone can chime in, using the microphone on each senator’s table.It may be artificial, but it is strangely moving, nonetheless, to address Levi, who died in 1987, so personally. When I asked him, “In your opinion, can you erase the humanity of a man?,” Argentieri, who mimics Levi’s demeanor down to the way he rested his glasses on his forehead, looked at me for a few seconds with unspoken pain before replying.Would it work in other contexts? It’s debatable, but in the Belgian Senate, Levi’s eloquent thoughts on the Holocaust and its legacy had the gravitas of an official hearing, for posterity. Perhaps they should be heard there more often.“Se questo è Levi,” like nearly all the other productions at Kunstenfestivaldesarts, was translated into three languages: French and Dutch, the main languages spoken in Belgium, and English. (The Senate is equipped with headsets for simultaneous translation, and in other venues subtitles are used.) That may sound par for the course in Brussels, the multilingual home of the European Union’s main institutions, but the city’s theater scene isn’t quite used to it.Wanjiru Kamuyu in Okwui Okpokwasili’s powerful piece of dance theater “Bronx Gothic.”Anna Van WaegSince the arts are funded separately for Belgium’s linguistic communities (with the exception of a few federal institutions), there is little crossover between French- and Dutch-language playhouses in Brussels, and many don’t provide subtitles. Kunstenfestivaldesarts has attempted to bridge that gap, with partner theaters from both sides.Over the first weekend, François Chaignaud and Geoffroy Jourdain’s “Tumulus,” a polyphonic work blending dance and music, was performed at the Dutch-language playhouse Kaaitheater, while the French-speaking performance space Les Brigittines played host to a new version of Okwui Okpokwasili’s powerful piece of dance theater “Bronx Gothic,” now performed by Wanjiru Kamuyu.The range of languages can be somewhat dizzying, as was the case with “Hacer Noche,” a two-hour Spanish show performed in the former railway museum nestled above the North Station. The piece is a quiet and sensitive conversation between the director, Bárbara Bañuelos, and Carles Albert Gasulla, a well-read man who works as a parking attendant. But there is a lot of translated text to absorb while hearing Spanish, and at times I wished the subtitles had slowed down to let their points about class, mental health and precarious work land.Yet that is a small gripe. In its current form, Kunstenfestivaldesarts shows Brussels at its best: a city of converging cultures, as open to addressing its past as it is to hosting others.KunstenfestivaldesartsVarious venues in Brussels, through May 28. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel: Today Is ‘a Stupefying Day in the History of This Country’

    “Chuck Schumer said he called for the vote so we would know where Republicans stand. Turns out, they’re standing in the year 1865,” Kimmel said.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.Stuck in the PastOn Wednesday, the Senate voted against legislation that would have guaranteed abortion rights nationwide.Jimmy Kimmel referred to the blocking of the bill as “a stupefying day in the history of this country.”“Even though a strong majority of American voters want those rights protected, every Democrat voted in favor of the bill except Joe Manchin, who voted with his fellow Republicans.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“With the Supreme Court likely to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Democrats wanted to get their counterparts on the record opposing it. Chuck Schumer said he called for the vote so we would know where Republicans stand. Turns out, they’re standing in the year 1865.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It almost feels like maybe we shouldn’t have let the host of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ pick three Supreme Court justices, you know?” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Put Out to Pasture Edition)“President Biden spoke today in Illinois about his administration’s plan to support farmers. Although I feel like he should be asking about their plan to support him: [imitating Biden] ‘You guys got one of those Charlotte’s Web spiders who can write something nice about me?’” — SETH MEYERS“Well guys, today President Biden visited a farm in Illinois, where he announced new steps to fight rising food costs and inflation. You know your presidency is in rough shape when your staff is like, ‘It’s time to drive you to a farm upstate.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, when Biden first arrived, a Secret Service agent was like, ‘Older McDonald is on the farm. E-I-E-I-O.’” — JIMMY FALLON“But this is strange: At one point Biden actually walked into a corn field and slowly disappeared: ‘If you build back better, votes will come.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Tonight Show” guest Florence Welch was joined by Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Buffett for a performance of “Margaritaville.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightAmy Sedaris will pop by Thursday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutGeorge Carlin on “Saturday Night Live” in 1975. His fans include Joe Rogan and Jim Gaffigan.Herb Ball/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesNearly 14 years after his death, the comedian George Carlin still has the power to make people across the political spectrum laugh. More

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    Disney+ Added 7.9 Million Subscribers Last Quarter

    Disney+ added 7.9 million subscribers in the most recent quarter for a total of 138 million worldwide, the company announced Wednesday, helping it avoid the streaming slowdown that has lately tanked the stock price of Netflix.Like most media companies, Disney’s stock has been pummeled in the wake of Netflix’s announcement last month that it had lost 200,000 subscribers in the first three months of the year and that it expected to lose two million more this quarter. After years of applauding media companies for losing billions on streaming, investors are now applying pressure to find a path to profitability.The release of films like Pixar’s “Turning Red” helped Disney+ attract subscribers in the first quarter, which ended April 2. Shares of Disney were down about 3 percent in after-hours trading following the earnings announcement.Disney’s results are a bit of good news for Bob Chapek, the chief executive, who has been dealing with a public relations crisis stemming from the company’s response to Florida school legislation that, among other things, restricts classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity. (Disney is the state’s largest private employer.)The company initially refrained from speaking out against the bill publicly but reversed itself after an internal revolt. Mr. Chapek then denounced the legislation, which earned him the ire of conservatives, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Last month, Republican lawmakers in Florida revoked a 1967 law that allowed Walt Disney World to function as its own quasi government. In the wake of the uproar, Geoff Morrell, who joined Disney in January as its most senior government relations and communications executive, resigned last month.Revenue at Disney increased 23 percent compared with last year, to $19.2 billion, but missed analyst expectations. Disney said it took a hit from a decision to pull some of its content back from other distributors in favor of its own channels, which meant a reduction of $1 billion in licensing revenue as part of a trade-off to grow its direct-to-consumer business.Disney reported earnings per share of $1.08, missing analyst expectations of $1.17.Disney’s theme parks unit came roaring back from a year ago, when the Covid-19 pandemic stunted in-person attendance. Revenue in the division doubled compared with the same period last year, with a new line-skipping system driving increases.As streaming services look for more subscribers, India is shaping up to be an important market. Deep-pocketed media companies are preparing to bid for rights to show cricket matches from the popular Indian Premier League. Disney currently has the rights to stream the matches on its Hotstar service, which it acquired in its 2019 megadeal with 21st Century Fox. Losing those rights could be a blow. However, Mr. Chapek has said that Disney can reach its subscriber targets even if it does not retain those rights.On a call following the earnings announcement, Mr. Chapek said that Disney would eventually become more aggressive about moving major live sports onto the ESPN+ streaming service. The cash generated by the lucrative portfolio of ESPN cable channels currently makes that untenable, so the company is taking a measured approach to sports streaming, Mr. Chapek said.“What we’re doing is sort of putting one foot on the dock if you will, and one foot on the boat,” Mr. Chapek said.Mr. Chapek also responded to an analyst question about the lack of new Disney movies that have opened in the Chinese theatrical market, where the company has had an uneven record in recent years. Mr. Chapek said that Disney films were performing well without help from moviegoers in China, pointing to the success of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”“We’re pretty confident that even without China — if it were to be that we continue to have difficulties in getting titles in there — that it doesn’t really preclude our success,” Mr. Chapek said. More