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    Seth Meyers: Trump ‘Can’t Be Bothered’ to Endorse Republicans Correctly

    “You have to grovel and debase yourself to earn the endorsement of a guy who can’t even remember your name,” Meyers 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.Ringing EndorsementFormer President Donald Trump mistakenly endorsed “J.D. Mandel” for Senate in Ohio at a rally on Sunday, conflating his intended Republican choice, J.D. Vance, with Vance’s opponent, Josh Mandel.“This guy can’t even be bothered to remember the names of the people he’s endorsing. He went from ‘J.P.’ to ‘J.D. Mandel.’ If he kept talking, he would have endorsed J.K. Rowling,” Seth Meyers said.“This is how much you have to forfeit your dignity to succeed in today’s Republican Party. You have to grovel and debase yourself to earn the endorsement of a guy who can’t even remember your name.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s bad enough, but then he said, ‘J.D. Mandel will win or my name isn’t Donald Vance.’” — SETH MEYERS“[Imitating Donald Trump] ‘Great guy. J.P. Morgan is great. Can’t say enough about J.C. Penney — I don’t think you can. We love you, J. Lo, we love you.’” — JIMMY FALLON“I’m not sure if it’s a ringing endorsement when you’re like, ‘I fully support what’s his face — he’s the best.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump said even the best leaders make mistakes sometimes, like our great President Abra-george Lincoln-ton.” — JIMMY FALLON“You could see even the crowd was looking like, ‘Ah, man!’ They look like parents watching their kid bombing in a spelling bee.” — TREVOR NOAH“I feel bad for J.D. Vance because now he’s gonna have to change his name to J.P.J.D. Mandel. Yeah, ’cuz if you’re a Republican, Trump is never wrong. At the G.O.P. Starbucks, whatever name Trump calls, that’s you: ‘J.J.J. — J.D.J.P Mandel? Yeah, that’s me. I’ll take it.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Things Are Looking Slightly Up Edition)“According to a new poll, President Biden’s approval rating has increased slightly over the last two months, and now the White House is scrambling like hell to figure out what he did: [Imitating White House staffer] ‘Did he change his hair? Different mask? What tie was he wearing?’” — SETH MEYERS“That’s right, President Biden’s approval rating has increased to 42 percent. He now ranks slightly above leaf blowers.” — SETH MEYERS“Biden was like, ‘Thank God, inflation finally got to me.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Even Biden was surprised by the results. He triple-checked it like an at-home Covid test. He was like: ‘This can’t be right. This can’t be right. Honey, look at this — is this right?’” — JIMMY FALLON“I’m not even sure what caused the spike, really. Apparently a lot of Americans thought, ‘I like how he handled Easter.’” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s great news for Biden, although it’s hard to celebrate when your approval rating skyrockets and it’s still only 42 percent.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe creator and star of Showtime’s “Ziwe,” the mononymic Ziwe, sat down with Trevor Noah on Monday’s “Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe “Euphoria” breakout Sydney Sweeney will appear on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutOscar Isaac has split his career between intimate dramas and mega-franchises. His latest, Marvel’s “Moon Knight,” wraps up on Wednesday.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesOscar Isaac has found satisfaction playing an unconventional Marvel superhero in “Moon Knight.” More

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    Review: Making a Beautiful ‘Case for the Existence of God’

    Samuel D. Hunter’s heartbreaking new play argues for hope even in the face of extreme disappointment.About a third of the way through “A Case for the Existence of God,” Samuel D. Hunter’s must-see heartbreaker of a play, one character, Ryan, tells the other one, Keith, “I think we share a specific kind of sadness.”The insight would seem almost comically unlikely if it came any sooner. Ryan (Will Brill) has been introduced to us as a feckless screw-up: undereducated, hopeless with money, scraping by at a yogurt plant. Though he claims to have written a novella, he does not know what “harrowing” means.He would seem to have nothing in common with Keith (Kyle Beltran), an uptight, button-down professional who uses the word casually. Financially savvy and culturally sophisticated, Keith has a dual degree in Early Music and English. For fun he listens to motets.That Ryan is white and straight, and Keith is Black and gay, also comes into it. You could not make more neatly matched opposites if you were designing a new kind of magnet.But by the time Ryan blurts out to Keith what he sees as their fundamental connection, Hunter’s meticulous plotting has led us to the same conclusion. We are somehow ready to understand that the unlikely statement is both powerfully true and, perhaps, universal. The question is: What is the purpose of a sadness you can share but not escape?“A Case for the Existence of God,” which opened on Monday in a Signature Theater production directed exquisitely by David Cromer, is another of Hunter’s public explorations of his own private Idaho: a post-boom, existential vastness in which emotional and economic collapse are conjoined. Earlier plays set in Lewiston, Boise, Pocatello and others have dealt with people failing to thrive in the barrenness of Costcos, Hobby Lobbys and sub-Olive Garden restaurants.And though “A Case” makes the connection between personal and societal calamity more explicit than ever — can it be just an accident that it’s set in Twin Falls? — it may also be the purest example yet of Hunter’s approach to playwriting as an experiment in empathy.Ryan is the primary beneficiary of that experiment here. Except for his being human, there is nothing huge about him, either heroic or horrendous, that would suggest the makings of a typical main character. Indeed, he has come to Keith, a mortgage broker, with only a very small dream in his pocket: to repurchase 12 acres of property that once belonged to his family. By making a home there, he hopes to show the courts considering his divorce from his wife that he is stable enough to share custody of their 15-month-old daughter.While Brill, left, comes to Beltran to talk about a mortgage, the pair bond as nervous fathers of young daughters.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf Ryan is terrified of losing his child, Keith’s version of the same fear comes from a very different source. As the play begins, he has for more than three years been trying to become a father, first through surrogacy and, when that failed, through foster care leading to adoption. The girl eventually placed with him is about the same age as Ryan’s — the men met at their daughters’ day care — but the threat to Keith is entirely external. A relative of the birth mother has, at the last minute, expressed interest in raising the child herself.The two processes depicted in the play — getting a loan, adopting a child — turn out to be similar, at least for men who, for different reasons, are outsiders to the systems that control their fate. Though Ryan feels that “money is the only real permission I have to be alive,” he is so naïve about how it works, never having had any, that he suggests sending photos to potential lenders to show he’s a “decent guy.” Keith has likewise staked his life’s happiness — his very legitimacy — on institutions that find single men, let alone gay ones, inherently unworthy.As a parent by adoption myself, I have to say that the adoption plot felt absolutely authentic in a way it rarely does in plays. Less so the banking plot; I’ve been through that, too. Only a loan shark would dream of risking a dime on Ryan, as Keith would instantly have known.But Hunter is too complex a playwright to let us bask for long in the procedural aspects of the story anyway — or, for that matter, in the awkwardly growing bond between the men. He is more interested in the misalignment of their needs and abilities; as is nearly inevitable for people damaged in different ways, they can help each other only so much. When you want Keith to be gentle, he lashes out; when you want Ryan to face facts, he can’t. And the world is neither man’s friend.Or is it, eventually? Though the “case” of the title is not proved, it is argued beautifully by the surprising resolution, which suggests that failure may not be the end of the story. That thin thread of optimism depends on the extreme delicacy of Cromer’s production to produce its outsize effect. Most of the play moves in drolly inconclusive eddies of suppressed feeling, scene flowing into scene without pause or signpost, until, having pulled back from emotion for so long, it can’t be contained any longer. Even then, Cromer puts the lid back on as soon as possible; when Keith has a panic attack, why should we get a catharsis?Arnulfo Maldonado’s set confines the actors to a cramped cubicle, surrounded by the vastness of the dark stage, for most of the play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe design follows accordingly. The set, by Arnulfo Maldonado, depicts the cramped cubicle Keith occupies at his brokerage; framed like a cell by the vastness of the Pershing Square Signature Center stage, it could induce a panic attack all by itself. The men never even get out of their chairs until the play suddenly evolves near the end, at which point the set evolves too, producing an almost geological change in atmosphere. The costumes by Brenda Abbandandolo, lighting by Tyler Micoleau and sound by Christopher Darbassie are equally subtle and affecting.The same can be said for Brill and Beltran, always fine on their own but never better and more in sync with an acting partner than here. Perhaps only when people are so comfortable together (the actors were roommates at Carnegie Mellon School of Drama) can discomfort be played and transcended so authentically. Even negotiating Hunter’s slight writerly tics — the way he sometimes spins gears to delay the next development — they backfill each moment with a depth of feeling that gives a quiet play, in many ways a comedy, the density of tragedy.It’s the kind of tragedy, though, that hurts by means of hope, like land broken up to take seeds. If Ryan began the play not knowing that’s what “harrowing” means, he soon learns — as do we.A Case for the Existence of GodThrough May 15 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 4 Recap: The Wicked Flee

    Gus sweats life in red-alert mode while Jimmy goes on a joyride.Season 6, Episode 4: ‘Hit and Run’Gus Fring is getting nervous.We get a de facto tour of his psyche in this week’s episode, by way of the elaborate surveillance system designed to spot Lalo Salamanca, the man Gus tried to kill, before Lalo can kill him. It’s a no-expense-spared operation. Seven cameras are pointed at Gus’s house; someone keeps an eye on nearby cars when he drives; a hired gun is working the fryolator at the Los Pollos Hermanos where Gus has an office; and two guys are trailing Kim, in case Lalo goes looking for her first.Also, he’s wearing a bullet proof vest and has a firearm strapped to his ankle. This guy is expecting the worst.“Two weeks and we haven’t had a tickle,” says Mike, toward the episode’s end.Nonsense, says Gus, in so many words. He’s in a game where your instincts get to fail you only once, and he will not be swayed from his conviction that Lalo is alive. As viewers, we know that he’s right, but we’re in the dark about everything else Lalo-related. He hasn’t been seen for the last two episodes, and spotting Tony Dalton’s name in the opening credits doesn’t count. The effect is to put the audience in the same mind space as Gus. We, too, know that Lao is on his way. Exactly when is a total mystery.If he arrives. When last seen, the suavest member of the Salamanca clan — not a competitive category, true — was on the hunt for proof that Gus was behind the failed, very bloody home invasion of Casa Lalo. He isn’t going to show that proof to Gus, of course. He’s going to show it to the cartel. Which may mean Gus will face a whole organization with many reasonably capable assailants in its employ.Thing is, we know that Gus is going to live, and that frames a conundrum for “Better Call Saul” writers this season. Given that Gus is a lead character in “Breaking Bad” and Lalo is not — OK, he’s mentioned once by Saul in that series, which does leave some narrative wiggle room — Gus’s survival, at least through the end of this series, is assured. Which is to say that the degree of difficulty faced by Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould and every other writer on this show is very high. They are betting that when a tale is told well enough, it is suspenseful even if the ultimate outcome appears to be known.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel returned April 18 for its final season.A Refresher: After the show’s two-year, Covid-induced hiatus, here’s where things left off.Serious Success: Bob Odenkirk was a comedian’s comedian — until “Better Call Saul” revealed him as a peerless portrayer of broken souls.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.Cast Interviews: Rhea Seehorn and Tony Dalton told us how they created the complex Kim Wexler and the murderous Lalo Salamanca.The success of this season thus resides not so much in what is going to happen, but how. And already there is plenty of intrigue. Your Faithful Recapper is riveted by Mr. and Mrs. Ryman, as they are identified in the credits, Gus’s bicycle-happy, hand-signal proficient next-door neighbors, played by real-life couple Kirk and Joni Bovill. There is a hidden tunnel between their homes, and the Ryman’s kitchen and living rooms are occupied by Gus’s underlings, some armed, others manning a video-screen installation. The Rymans appear to live in their basement, where they do jigsaw puzzles when not getting out for a ride.Who are these people? Until now, the number of noncombatants aware of Gus’s double life is, let’s see … uh, zero? At least at this point in the story. So, we have to assume the Rymans are on the payroll. But one of Gus’s video watchers refers to Mrs. Ryman as “ma’am” when he asks for some iced tea, suggesting he doesn’t know her well. And the Rymans seem intimately familiar with the local homeowners association, implying that they are longtime and authentic members of the community.What’s certain is that when Gus moved into 1213 Jefferson St., he purchased the house beside him, presumably a just-in-case measure that is now coming in handy.While Gus frets, Jimmy and Kim continue Operation Cockamamie, which in this episode involves briefly absconding with Howard’s Jaguar while he’s seeing his shrink. (The man has marital problems, we learn.) The plan involves a pantomime with the ever-amenable Wendy S. (Julia Minesci), whom “Breaking Bad” fans will remember as the meth head and prostitute who helped Jesse with a nutty scheme of his own. (She was supposed to deliver poisoned burgers to some especially wicked street-level dealers Jesse wanted dead in Season 3.)This time, Wendy pretends to get bounced out of Howard’s car, making it appear to a slack-jawed Clifford Main, who is the sole audience for this spectacle, that Howard is consorting with, and mistreating, a hooker.Like previous parts of this campaign to frame Howard, this one works without flaw, thus clearly foreshadowing that the entire plan will ultimately fail. There’s a jarring tonal shift in these scenes, as though “Better Call Saul” decided it can’t all be tense violins and deadly tangos and must switch occasionally to tubas and the cancan. This is certainly lighter fare than the anxieties of a man who fears imminent demise. But when Jimmy gets a spray tan, whitened teeth and a wig to pull off his Howard impersonation, the show seems a little goofy.In the courthouse, Jimmy is a pariah because of his success in springing Lalo. As reviled as he has become by security guards, clerks and prosecutors is exactly how sought after has become by criminals. So, welcome back Spooge! (David Ury) Looking far healthier and more lucid than he will be as a meth addict and stickup man in episodes of “Breaking Bad,” Spooge is blissfully unaware that in the not-too-distant future his drug-addled partner is going to crush his head with an A.T.M. For now, he has legal problems with an unidentified buddy, and Jimmy has become so popular that he is soon thrown out of his office at the nail salon.This leads to the episode’s last scene, in which Jimmy shows his new work space to Kim. It has a toilet in the middle of the room and not much else. As viewers know, this modest, odorous corner of an unpopular strip mall is about to get a spectacularly garish, patriotically themed renovation.Odds and EndsFor Your Faithful Recapper, the scene between Mike and Kim was the highlight of this episode, which was directed very deftly by Rhea Seehorn, her first time directing an episode. Mike is surely flattering Kim with his “made of sterner stuff” line. More likely, he is speaking to her instead of Jimmy because Kim noticed that she is being tailed and had the nerve to confront her tailers. It’s entirely possible — actually, it seems pretty likely — that Jimmy is being followed, too, and simply hasn’t noticed. Perhaps Mike decided to have a quiet word with Kim so that he could continue to keep two men hovering close by.Vintage Gus Fring perfectionism: He wants the bodyguard assigned to the kitchen at Los Pollos Hermanos fired because he is “not up to Pollos standards.”The opening song, “Best Things in Life” by the Dreamliners, is the perfect background music for that bike ride.And some questions for the hive mind, to be answered in the comments section:What’s with the tomato-red house? It seems unlikely that we linger on that peculiar building for no reason.Jimmy seems positively eager to admit to new clients that he helped Lalo, who in court went by the name Jorge de Guzman, something Jimmy refused to acknowledge to prosecutors. In this episode, when Deputy District Attorney Bill Oakley (Peter Diseth) accuses Jimmy of moral turpitude — “You scammed the judge. And for what? To get a murdering cartel psychopath back out on the street” — Saul says simply, “Prove it.” Well, isn’t proof unnecessary once you confess to half the criminals in Albuquerque?Oh, and one more: Who. Moves. Cones? More

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    David Birney, Who Starred in TV’s ‘Bridget Loves Bernie,’ Dies at 83

    The sitcom, about an interfaith marriage, drew criticism from Jewish groups and was canceled after one season. He fared better onstage than in television.David Birney, a classically trained theater actor who found success on the stage, including on Broadway, but who was best known for his role in “Bridget Loves Bernie” — a short-lived sitcom about an interfaith marriage in which he starred opposite his future wife, Meredith Baxter — died on Friday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 83.The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said Michele Roberge, who said she was his life partner.Mr. Birney had been in a handful of television series and movies when he was cast in 1972 as Bernie Steinberg, a Jewish taxicab driver and struggling writer. Ms. Baxter played Bridget Fitzgerald, a schoolteacher from a wealthy Roman Catholic family.“This is not a message show,” Mr. Birney, who was Irish American, said during an interview with The Kansas City Star before the series’s debut. “It’s not even an idea show.”CBS gave it a plum time slot between “All in the Family” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” on Saturday night; it consistently finished among the top 10 programs in prime time and was the highest rated new series of the 1972-73 season.But it attracted criticism from a broad spectrum of Jewish groups, which objected chiefly to its treatment of intermarriage between Jews and Christians as a positive outcome and complained that it used Jewish stereotypes. CBS publicly played down the criticism but, without an explanation, canceled “Bridget Loves Bernie” after 24 episodes.“One segment of the protesters is truly concerned about the dilution of their faith,” Mr. Birney told The Daily News several months after the cancellation. “But intermarriage is on the rise, nevertheless. The threat doesn’t come from a harmless show such as ours, but from within.”Mr. Birney and Ms. Baxter married in 1974.In 1976, Mr. Birney received acclaim for playing John Quincy Adams in the public television production of “The Adams Chronicles.” Later that year, he was hired to play Frank Serpico, the corruption-fighting New York City detective, in an NBC series adapted from the Sidney Lumet movie “Serpico” (1973), which had earned Al Pacino an Oscar nomination for best actor.Mr. Birney was cast in the role on the strength of his work playing an officer in two episodes of “Police Story,” another NBC series. But “Serpico” was canceled after less than a full season. Mr. Birney and Meredith Baxter in an episode of “Bridget Loves Bernie,” a short-lived CBS sitcom about an interfaith marriage. Jewish groups were critical of it. CBS via Getty ImagesDavid Edwin Birney was born on April 23, 1939, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Cleveland. His father, Edwin, was an F.B.I. agent, and his mother, Jeanne (McGee) Birney, was a homemaker and later a real estate agent.After earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Dartmouth College in 1961, Mr. Birney turned down a scholarship from Stanford Law School and instead chose to study theater arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received a master’s degree a year later. In the Army, he was part of a program called the Showmobile, which entertained at military bases in the United States.Mr. Birney’s theater career began in earnest in 1965, when he won the Barter Theater Award, enabling him to spend a season acting in shows at the prestigious Barter Theater in Abingdon, Va. He moved on to the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut, and in 1967 he played Antipholus of Syracuse in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of “A Comedy of Errors.”Mr. Birney made his Broadway debut two years later in Molière’s “The Miser.” And in 1971 he starred in a Broadway production of J.M. Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Mr. Birney played Christy Mahon, who enters an Irish pub in the early 1900s telling a story about killing his father.“Mr. Birney had a cock sparrow arrogance,” Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The New York Times, “that mixture of both confidence and certainty that seemed perfectly right.”At the opening of “Playboy,” the Clancy Boys, a popular Irish singing group that Mr. Birney had befriended at a Manhattan bar, sat in the front row.“They had their Irish sweaters on,” Ms. Roberge said in a phone interview, “and their arms crossed as if to say, Come on, show us what you’ve got.”Over the rest of his theatrical career, Mr. Birney played a wide variety of roles, including Antonio Salieri, as a replacement, in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” on Broadway; Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing” at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.; Hamlet at the PCPA Theaterfest in Santa Maria, Calif.; and James Tyrone Jr. in Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” at the Miniature Theater of Chester, Mass.He also adapted some of Mark Twain’s short stories into a play, “The Diaries of Adam and Eve,” which he often performed and directed. In 1989, he starred in one of the productions, with Ms. Baxter, for American Playhouse on PBS.The couple divorced that year. In 2011, she wrote in her book, “Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame and Floundering,” that Mr. Birney had been abusive during their marriage. He denied her accusation, calling it an “appalling abuse of the truth.”One of Mr. Birney’s biggest successes on television was a starring role as a doctor in the first season of the medical dramedy “St. Elsewhere.” But as the second season approached, he left the series because of his commitment on Broadway to “Amadeus.”He continued to work in television through 2007, when he was a guest on the police procedural “Without a Trace.”In addition to Ms. Roberge, Mr. Birney is survived by his children with Ms. Baxter, his daughters Kate and Mollie Birney and a son, Peter Baxter; a stepdaughter, Eva Bush, and a stepson, Ted Bush, Ms. Baxter’s children from a previous marriage; two grandchildren; and his brothers, Glenn and Gregory. Another marriage, to Mary Concannon, also ended in divorce. More

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    In ‘I Love That for You,’ Vanessa Bayer Sells Out

    The “Saturday Night Live” veteran’s new sitcom draws on her experience of childhood cancer and her obsession with home shopping TV.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.According to Vanessa Bayer, being diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia as a 15-year-old wasn’t all bad.It got her out of gym class. The attendance lady at her high school never marked her as tardy. She told a boy she didn’t like that she couldn’t be his date for the homecoming dance because she had chemo that weekend. (She didn’t). Her father talked his way out of a speeding ticket by using her illness as an excuse, a tactic he referred to as “dropping the L-bomb.”Bayer survived the L-bomb. The experience didn’t change her, she said, but it did intensify characteristics that were already inherent — determination, resilience, a borderline delusional sense of optimism. Who receives a diagnosis of cancer and accentuates the positive? Bayer does.“I was always a person who loved attention,” Bayer said chirpily. “This allowed me to get so much attention.”Bayer is getting attention now. On Sunday, Showtime will premiere the first episode of “I Love That for You” (the Showtime app will have it on Friday), a sitcom that draws on Bayer’s pediatric cancer and her longtime obsession with home shopping shows. She stars as Joanna Gold, a sheltered young woman and leukemia survivor who auditions to become the newest host on the Special Value Network. Nearly fired after her disastrous first hour on camera, she saves her job by telling her colleagues that her cancer has returned. (It hasn’t.)Bayer’s character pretends to have cancer in order to keep her job at a home shopping network.Tony Rivetti Jr./ShowtimePlaying Joanna isn’t cathartic for Bayer — she doesn’t seem to need catharsis — but it does offer her a chance to work through her past, this time with even more jokes. “It’s really nice to be able to have some distance from that time and to be able to laugh at it even more,” she said.Bayer grew up in a Reform Jewish family in the suburbs of Cleveland. A star student and a cross-country runner, she decided that she wouldn’t let her illness mess with her G.P.A., even when teachers told her she could coast.“It lit this fire under me,” she said. “It was important to me that everybody saw me as someone who wasn’t weak.”Diagnosed in the spring of her freshman year, she spent time in the hospital, then in outpatient treatment, completing chemotherapy just before her senior year. She graduated on time. As prom queen.She first performed comedy as a member of Bloomers, an all-female troupe at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, she moved to Chicago and studied and performed at various improv theaters, which eventually led to a spot on “Saturday Night Live” in 2010. There she created characters such as Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy and Dawn Lazarus, an anxious meteorologist. But long before she got paid for it, Bayer had relied on jokes as a coping mechanism.“I had to use humor to make everyone, including myself, feel OK,” she said, speaking of her time in treatment. Here comes that optimism again: “I also think it made me funnier.”She was speaking, from a bench on the fringes of Central Park, on a recent Friday afternoon. The temperature had climbed to nearly 70 degrees, but Bayer, who had just flown in on a red-eye from Los Angeles, was bundled against the spring in a belted coat, a knit beanie and Rag & Bone fleece sneakers. She had a green juice in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. A medical-grade mask had left a red mark high on each cheek.Even sleep-deprived and apparently very cold, Bayer radiated positivity. She smiled approvingly at the gamboling dogs, the sweating men, the woman who had arrived for a constitutional in high heels and full makeup. “Nothing like New York birds!” she said, when a flock of pigeons flew over, Hitchcock close. In high school she was voted Most Likely to Succeed. Most Likely to Bake a Mean Casserole would have tracked, too — even sitting in the middle of Manhattan, she emanated Midwestern normalcy and niceness.Over seven years on “Saturday Night Live,” Bayer (with Michael Che) was a dependable utility player with many memorable appearances on Weekend Update.Dana Edelson/NBC“She almost doesn’t seem like an actress,” said Molly Shannon, an “S.N.L.” veteran who now co-stars opposite Bayer as SVN’s superstar host. “She’s very steady and calm and grounded.”The comedian Aidy Bryant, who worked with Bayer in Chicago before they both found their way to “S.N.L.,” noted that Bayer has a way of turning that mildness into a strike force. When it comes to comedy, Bryant said, “She is a quiet, smiling assassin.”“Vanessa has a real reserved, polite, wonderfully Midwestern energy,” she added. “Then she hits with a punchline or a funny reaction or her truly incredible smile, which she can weaponize as a force of pain.”On “S.N.L.,” Bayer became a dependable utility player, often infusing characters (football widow, early career Jennifer Aniston) with a manic intensity — eyes overbright, speech a tick too fast. Taran Killam, another “S.N.L.” co-star, noted how calm the offscreen Bayer seemed, a composure he attributed to her history.“It must have given her incredible perspective,” he said. “‘S.N.L.’ is a very passionate job, a dream job. It feels like it matters more than anything in the world. She would always be the first one to say: ‘Who cares? No big deal. So they didn’t like the sketch? Move on.’”“S.N.L.” has a famously punishing schedule. But Jeremy Beiler, a former “S.N.L.” writer who joined around the same time Bayer did, noted how she met the stresses of the job with buoyancy.“She only looks in one direction,” he said. “It’s only forward.”In 2017, after seven seasons on “S.N.L.,” Bayer moved on. Another comedian might have worried about what would come next. Unsurprisingly, Bayer stayed positive. “My attitude is just that stuff kind of works out,” she said. And it did work out, more or less, with guest spots, voice work, supporting roles in a few movies.“I had to use humor to make everyone, including myself, feel OK,” Bayer said, speaking of her time in cancer treatment as a teen. “I also think it made me funnier.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesAs she was leaving “S.N.L.,” her management team asked her about dream projects, and her mind somehow flashed on home shopping TV. She had watched the channels often as a child: The peek into adult life fascinated her, and she loved the elegance of the hosts and the ways in which they would spin seemingly extemporaneous stories in their attempts to entice buyers.She described the hosts’ particular rhythms and vocabulary as “the first foreign language I ever learned,” and the network most likely provided her first taste of improv, too. (In college, when it came time to write her first sketch, she wrote one set in the world of home shopping, in which the host was selling cardboard with a hole in it. It killed.)A few months later, over brunch, Beiler mentioned that he had, by coincidence, begun a series pilot set in the world of home shopping. They began to collaborate, even arranging a field trip to QVC’s headquarters in West Chester, Pa., where they met with two hosts, Jane Treacy and Mary Beth Roe, whom Bayer had idolized as a child, and also managed to score some free soft pretzels. (Everyone I spoke to mentioned Bayer’s enthusiasm for snacks, and most of them mentioned her gift for scamming her way into free ones.) In the gift shop, they bought matching QVC mugs.Back at work, with Jessi Klein as showrunner, they began to build out a back story for Bayer’s character, Joanna, that would give her stakes and drive. They decided to borrow from Bayer’s own story, particularly her diagnosis and treatment and the way that those years of chemo and radiation stunted her emotional growth for a while.“I didn’t understand dating at all,” she said. “It was just playing catch up. Even out of college and into my 20s, I always was trying to fake being an adult.” In an hour’s conversation, this was the closest she ever came to acknowledging that pediatric cancer hadn’t been entirely a walk in the park.Bayer didn’t mind lending Joanna her medical chart — she has never been shy about her diagnosis. As a teen she used it to win her family a trip to Hawaii courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. (She had thought about asking to meet Jared Leto, but she eventually decided she would prefer to meet him as a peer. Years later, she did.) Colleagues at “S.N.L.” have heard her introduce leukemia into the conversation just to get free ice cream, which jibes with advice she offered during our interview: If you are sick, use it to get whatever you can.Bryant said, “She always takes the things that are hard and makes them something that she can use to empower herself or use to her advantage.”Gradually, Joanna took shape, a woman more guarded than Bayer and more stunted, with her same love of snacks and her same gift for antic improvisation but none of her obvious success. A woman who lies about having cancer shouldn’t be a woman you root for, but Bayer has a way of communicating a kind of desperate brightness that makes terrible things seem less terrible, just because she does them with such enthusiasm.What the camera recognizes is what Shannon, who also survived a major childhood trauma (her mother, youngest sister and a cousin were killed in a car accident), identified as a shared joy and determination to wring the utmost out of life.“We don’t take it for granted,” Shannon said. “We feel so lucky that we’re alive. For real.”There are many stories about illness. (Admittedly, there are fewer of them set in the world of home shopping.) But this is one — with its snacks and its sunniness and its heroine’s determination to exploit her fake diagnosis for all she can — that seemingly only Bayer can tell.“I always wanted to do something about when I was sick,” she said contentedly, as the gentle chaos of Central Park swirled around her. “Specifically, the fun I had.”Audio produced by More

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    Wendell Pierce to Star in ‘Death of a Salesman’ on Broadway

    The production, also starring Sharon D Clarke and featuring André De Shields, will arrive some time next season.Wendell Pierce is ready for another run as Willy Loman.The American actor, best known for his work in “The Wire,” first took on the titanic title role in “Death of a Salesman” in London in 2019, and even then he hungered to bring the performance to New York.Now he’ll get that chance: A group of producers announced Monday that they would transfer the London production to Broadway next season.Pierce will once again star opposite Sharon D Clarke, a British actress who wowed critics and audiences in New York this season with her star turn in a revival of the musical “Caroline, or Change.” Pierce and Clarke played the husband and wife, Willy and Linda Loman, at the Young Vic in London, and then in the West End; Clarke won an Olivier Award as best actress.“I have waited for this moment for a long time — I’m so excited to do this classic American play and join the fraternity of artists who have brought it to life,” Pierce said in a telephone interview. He called the role “the American Hamlet,” and said he had seen many of the best-known performances — Dustin Hoffman, Brian Dennehy and Philip Seymour Hoffman onstage, as well as Fredric March and Lee J. Cobb on film. “It will challenge me, not just as an artist but as a man, to take the time to be self-reflective and consider all the themes in this play: Are my best days behind me? Where have I lost hope? What do I want to leave behind? That’s a worthwhile journey of self-reflection to go on.”“Death of a Salesman,” often regarded as one of the greatest American plays, is about a traveling salesman whose career, and mental state, are falling apart. The play, by Arthur Miller, opened on Broadway in 1949 and won both the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best play; it has been revived on Broadway four times, winning a slew of Tony Awards over the years.This latest production, with the blessing of the Miller estate, offers a new take on the play’s inherent tensions by portraying the Loman family as African American and the other characters (co-workers, neighbors and a love interest) as white.André De Shields, who this month wraps up his Tony-winning run as Hermes in “Hadestown,” will join the cast as Willy’s deceased brother, Ben. And Khris Davis (“Sweat”) will play Biff, one of the Lomans’ two sons.The Broadway production will be directed by Miranda Cromwell, who in London directed it alongside Marianne Elliott. Elliott will remain with the show as a producer.Cromwell, in an interview, said “it’s the same production, but some things will shift as we refine it.” She also said that, as a mixed-race woman, “there are elements of my lived experience that I’ve brought to the production.”She added: “So many of the elements of the play are fundamentally questioning of the American dream, and when you put that through the perspective of the Black experience, that enriches it — the obstacles are harder, and the stakes become higher through this lens.”The revival will be produced by Cindy Tolan, best known as a casting director; Elliott & Harper Productions, which is Elliott’s production company with Chris Harper; and Kwame Kwei-Armah, who is the artistic director of the Young Vic.The producer Scott Rudin had previously been planning to bring a “Salesman” revival to Broadway starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf; he stopped working as a producer after being criticized for the way he treated others, and the team behind the London revival was able to pick up the rights to bring their production to Broadway. More

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    On the Scene: Hillary Clinton at ‘Suffs’

    On the Scene: Hillary Clinton at ‘Suffs’Jennifer Schuessler�� Reporting from the Public TheaterSara Krulwich/The New York Times“Suffs,” written by Shaina Taub, covers the final years of the fight for the 19th Amendment, which passed in 1920. As the lights dimmed, the cast, costumed as jeering men, filed onstage for “Watch Out for the Suffragette!,” a vaudeville-style number inspired by real anti-suffrage songs. More

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    Review: In ‘Jerusalem,’ a Once-in-a-Lifetime Performance, Again

    Mark Rylance is back in a role that won him a Tony more than a decade ago. But this London production isn’t just coasting on past kudos.LONDON — There’s mighty, and then there’s Mark Rylance in “Jerusalem,” a performance so powerfully connected to its part that it feels almost superhuman. That’s as it should be for a play about a larger-than-life character named Johnny Byron, who demands an entirely fearless actor, and has one in Rylance.None of this will surprise those familiar with this play by Jez Butterworth, which premiered with Rylance in the lead role at the Royal Court here in 2009; two years later, it transferred to Broadway and won Rylance the second of three Tony Awards. In a thrilling revival that opened Thursday at the Apollo Theater (running through Aug. 7), everything feels enriched by time.Now 62, Rylance is considerably older than a man described in the text as “about 50.” But such is this actor’s boundless energy and enthusiasm that you can imagine him returning to the role again and again: Johnny defies all conventions, including those of age, and so does a wildly versatile actor who approaches this societal rebel as a kindred spirit.The creative team, headed by Ian Rickson, the most empathic of directors, is the same as it was in 2009. To this run’s credit, it is no museum piece coasting on past kudos, but a vital experience with a revitalizing effect. Standing ovations are commonplace here these days, but the one at Wednesday’s final preview possessed a singular fervor that had Rylance jumping up and down with childlike glee at the curtain call.In the show, Johnny, who goes by the nickname Rooster, walks with a halting gait that goes unexplained. Physical impediments, it seems, barely matter to this tattooed, barrel-chested reprobate, who performs a headstand within minutes of his arrival onstage. He then downs a mixture of vodka, milk and a raw egg, whose shell Rylance tosses into the audience. (On Wednesday, someone tossed the shell back, prompting a delicious double take from the star.)Johnny’s outsize gestures are those of a man whose defiantly reckless existence is under serious threat. While the rural community in which he lives is holding its annual spring fete to mark St. George’s Day, Johnny tenaciously stays at the beat-up trailer he has long called home. A magnet for a cross-section of local hangers-on, including a loquacious professor (a beautiful turn from Alan David) and underage female adolescents hungry for spliffs and sex, Johnny’s illegal encampment is soon to be bulldozed. His young son arrives for a visit, only to be whisked away by the child’s disapproving mother (a persuasive Indra Ové).From left, Charlotte O’Leary, Mark Rylance, Mackenzie Crook, Kemi Awoderu and Ed Kear in “Jerusalem.”Simon AnnandNot only is Johnny faced with a final order from government officials to move on, but he must confront the wrath of Troy Whitworth (a fearsome Barry Sloane), whose 15-year-old stepdaughter, Phaedra, has sought refuge with Johnny. Troy will go to violent lengths to claim her back.It’s Phaedra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) who opens the play, singing the English hymn that gives “Jerusalem” its title and whose lyricist, William Blake, is referenced during a game of Trivial Pursuit later on. Worthington-Cox delivers this most stirring of tunes in front of a drop curtain depicting the cross of St. George, England’s flag. But the play itself transcends nationality to speak to any disaffected outsider who won’t be easily silenced and who gathers acolytes like moths to an inextinguishable flame.I’ve now seen “Jerusalem” five times (including on Broadway), and Rickson’s current company — several of them holdovers, with Rylance — are as good as any predecessors, and sometimes better: Worthington-Cox is the most moving Phaedra I have experienced.Mackenzie Crook remains especially heartbreaking as Ginger, Johnny’s friend and ally whose haunted eyes convey a premonition that his buddy’s days are numbered. Jack Riddiford, a company newcomer, brings a boyish appeal to the role of Lee, who dreams of starting afresh in Australia but is thankful for the raucous good times that Johnny has made possible on home soil.You can imagine one or two of these characters as avid supporters of Brexit, though the idea didn’t exist when Butterworth wrote the play: The sweary abattoir-worker Davey (Ed Kear, another cast newcomer) doesn’t “see the point,” he says, of other countries, including neighboring Wales. British newspapers have been busily assessing “Jerusalem” as a defining state-of-the-nation commentary whose legacy and influence are incalculable. Butterworth has stayed out of the discussion, saying only that he revived the play so his young daughter, Bel, could see it.But such considerations are academic next to the visceral immediacy of a play that soars as high as the designer Ultz’s ravishing tree-filled set, which seems to sweep up beyond the theater’s roof. That vast reach is of a piece with a performance you might describe as once-in-a-lifetime, if it weren’t so evident that Rylance’s passion for this part, thank goodness, seems far from over yet.JerusalemThrough Aug. 7 at the Apollo Theater, London; jerusalemtheplay.co.uk. More