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    The ‘POTUS’ Playwright Is Making a Farce of the Patriarchy

    “POTUS” will be the writer Selina Fillinger’s Broadway debut. “I really didn’t feel like I needed to do any research. I have been all of those women,” she said.Three days before the first preview performance of her first Broadway production, the playwright Selina Fillinger perched in the middle of the empty mezzanine of the Shubert Theater, peering down upon the set. “I’m sorry, I can’t look away,” she said. “It’s like a crew of fairies and angels, just making things happen.”Down below, the crew building the set was buzzing around a re-creation of a women’s restroom in the White House — star-studded carpet, cream and gold wallpaper, coin-operated tampon dispenser. “It’s so specific,” Fillinger said of the tampon machine. “And of course it would be paid.”Fillinger’s new play, “POTUS,” is a comedy about seven women in the inner circle of the president of the United States. It takes place on a day when the president’s various sex and sexism-related scandals are blowing up so spectacularly that the women in his life are prompted to take increasingly desperate measures to keep his administration afloat.The idea began developing in Fillinger’s mind during Donald Trump’s run for office. “I was fascinated by the women in his orbit,” she said. And she noticed that, with every new headline about a man abusing women — Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein — “there was always at least one woman, right there at the elbow.”The stars of the play include, from left, Vanessa Williams, Julianne Hough, Julie White, Suzy Nakamura, Lilli Cooper and Rachel Dratch.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe result is a farce about women’s relationship to male power — how they access it, what they are allowed to do with it, and who else they subjugate along the way. “I love farces, but they typically rely on sexist and racist tropes,” Fillinger said. So she wrote a comedy about women struggling to adhere to the rules of the patriarchy, which “literally causes a farce on a day-to-day basis.”In crafting the play’s characters, Fillinger wanted to create the most combustible combination — among them are the president’s weary first lady, Margaret (Vanessa Williams); his perfectionist personal secretary, Stephanie (Rachel Dratch); and his cocky convicted-felon sister, Bernadette (Lea DeLaria) — and dropped them onto a White House set that rotates dizzily like a turntable as the crisis mounts.As for the president, he is a cipher, appearing in the play only as limbs jutting occasionally into view. “I was interested in purposefully and consciously failing the Bechdel test,” Fillinger said, referring to the challenge popularized by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel that a movie ought to feature two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. “If you take the man out of the room, patriarchy still exists and we still play by its rules.”Also, she found the president character too tedious to actually write. “He’s an amalgamation of so many presidents,” she said, “and also several men that I’ve done group projects with in high school.” The play’s full title is “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive.”When Trump announced his candidacy, Fillinger was an undergraduate at Northwestern University. Now, at 28, she is building a notable body of work, and her farce is being lifted straight to Broadway without an out-of-town tryout. Even as she prepared to open “POTUS” in New York, she was writing for the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show” in Los Angeles; she joined the writer’s room for its third season and has managed both jobs by flying cross-country and back, sometimes every weekend.When I met Fillinger on a Monday morning, she was jet-lagged and unfed in a plum jumpsuit and pale purple face mask, a look she described as “chic mechanic.” We talked until she politely announced that she should probably locate the nearest Starbucks instant oatmeal or “I might pass out.” When I asked about her relationship to her own success, she said, “I really didn’t expect it,” then joked of an alternate life: “I thought I was going to spend my early 20s WWOOFing or whatever.” (WWOOFing: visiting farms through the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms program.) “It has been a dream, and also, it has been a tremendously steep learning curve.”News stories have become a tool for Fillinger, seen her on the “POTUS” set, who then takes them into unexpected directions.Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesFILLINGER WAS RAISED in Eugene, Ore., “by hippies in the woods,” she said. Her father is a sustainability-focused architect, her mother is a social worker who works as a partner in her father’s firm, and Fillinger grew up without television, except for the occasional “Sesame Street” episode and a VHS box set of Charlie Chaplin movies she watched when she was sick. “I read a ton and I wrote a lot of stories and I played a lot of pretend in the woods next to my house,” she said.When she arrived at Northwestern planning to study acting, “it was an intense culture shock,” she said. “There were all these kids from LaGuardia” — the New York performing arts school — “and they knew all the playwrights’ names, and all the directors’ names, and all the actors’ names, and they had all grown up going to Broadway shows, and I had no awareness of any of that.” But she now sees the upside to having waded into the theater world “when you don’t necessarily know what is being done, and what is not being done.”As a sophomore, Fillinger took an introductory playwriting class that she found so difficult she assumed it would be her last. But the professor, Laura Schellhardt, encouraged her to submit her work to a university-wide playwriting festival, and Fillinger was selected.The play was based on a 2013 news story about a Canadian bar that serves a shot garnished with a mummified human toe, and the American man who walked into the bar and swallowed that toe. At the time, “I didn’t know if I belonged at Northwestern. I didn’t feel, necessarily, good enough to be there,” Fillinger said. So she transplanted the story to a fictional Oregon town, and shaped the bizarro news item into a drama about a middle-aged woman fighting to save her bar from being bought by an outsider — a big-city guy whose initial display of dominance over her is to gulp her prized appendage.When Fillinger first entered that class, “she came in and identified as an actress, and she said that several times,” Schellhardt said. “The second she took ownership over the piece, her hold on the identity of being an actress began to loosen. She could tell her own story and not just to be an instrument for someone else’s story.”News stories became a tool for Fillinger — a snapshot of the culture that she could twist into new meanings and steer into unexpected directions. As a senior, she took part in a Northwestern program meant to simulate a play commission, and worked with the Northlight Theater in Illinois to develop “Faceless,” inspired by the story of a white woman in Colorado who is recruited to join ISIS through an online network. The simulation turned real when Northlight staged the play in 2017.Later, her 2019 play, “Something Clean,” a Roundabout Underground production, imagined the parents of a college student convicted of sexual assault in a scenario modeled after the Brock Turner case. After reading Turner’s parents’ statements in that case, “I was just fascinated by the cognitive dissonance that would have to go into their survival,” Fillinger said; the play imagines the mother shielding her identity so she can volunteer at a rape crisis center. The Times critic Ben Brantley called it a “beautifully observed, richly compassionate new drama,” adding that Fillinger “uses traditional forms to frame toxic contemporary subjects” and “keeps readjusting our point of view” along the way.Kathryn Erbe and Daniel Jenkins in “Something Clean,” an earlier work by Fillinger that Roundabout Theater Company staged in 2019.Maria Baranova for The New York TimesFillinger is still affected by current events, but “you don’t necessarily see the stitching as much” in her more recent works, she said. In “The Collapse,” commissioned through the Manhattan Theater Club’s Sloan Initiative for developing new plays about math and science, environmental devastation plays out in miniature in a California apiary, where a bee researcher is dying alongside her hives. When it came time to write “POTUS,” she said she didn’t focus on any particular political figures. “I really didn’t feel like I needed to do any research,” she said. “I have been all of those women at some point.”All of her plays bear certain imprints: they are interested in interrogating women in power, in finding human tenderness and absurd comedy even in great tragedies, and in placing several generations of women in conversation.“It’s a shame that people stop writing love, sex and violence for women after a certain age,” Fillinger said. But exploring women at middle-age and older, as she tends to do, is also a canny defense against those who might reduce a young woman’s work to mere autobiographical stenography. When she does write a 20-something woman, “everyone projects assumptions upon that character,” she said. “All of my plays have so much of me in them, but not necessarily in the ways that you would expect.”AT A TECHNICAL REHEARSAL the week before previews were to begin, the “POTUS” cast practiced on the rotating set for the first time. Under a bust of the suffragist Alice Paul, Dratch, wearing nude shapewear and a lace dickey, writhed on the floor in an inflatable pink inner tube as DeLaria stomped around in camo cargo shorts and a T-shirt that read “SHUT UP, KAREN.” Lilli Cooper, playing a White House reporter, was strapped to a portable breast pump affixed to bottles sloshing with milk; both Cooper and her character recently had a baby. As the set rotated, Suzy Nakamura, who plays the White House press secretary, raced among the rooms to hit her cue at the briefing room podium and stumbled over the president’s disembodied legs, which had accidentally been left splayed on the floor. The cast fell into laughter.“When it gets toward this time of night, they get tired and they get hysterical,” the director, Susan Stroman, said; it was 9 p.m. and nearing the end of the day’s second rehearsal stretch. “Sometimes we laugh so hard that we cry and we have to stop.”Stroman said that when she first read the play, she was startled to find a farce that put women not in secondary or tertiary roles but primary ones. “I couldn’t believe that it had all these things going for it, and that it was really funny,” she said. Then she met the playwright, and “I couldn’t believe she’s 28,” said Stroman, a five-time Tony-winner who directed and choreographed “The Producers.” “She’s an old soul. She carries the spirit of women who have come before her.”If Fillinger were to play a “POTUS” character, it would be Stephanie, the type-A personal secretary who is always subverting her own self-doubt into an exacting performance of perfectionism.She knows that her early success means that she is leaving a very public trail of the emotional and intellectual state of her 20s. Early works are “time capsules of you — sometimes in a good way,” she said. “But they also hold all of your blind spots, and all of your little work-in-progress moments, all of your ignorance and all of your youth. It’s so mortifying to have yourself, frozen at 22, out in the world, just being read.” But that’s been a gift, too: “I’ve been forced to become not so precious.”As “POTUS” nears its opening, she is still tinkering. “I’ve been reworking the ending a lot to try to calibrate the tone,” she said. “POTUS” drives frantically toward a shift among its seven women, who begin to question why they are working so hard in the service of male power. But how that change will shake out — and what it will cost — is somewhat open to interpretation.Fillinger’s relationship to optimism in her work, she said, is complex.“As a young person and a woman, I’m expected to perform hope for people, without having the luxury of expressing my rage,” she said. “But I feel like rage can be hopeful as well.” More

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    Why Max Verstappen Has a Problem With Netflix’s ‘Drive to Survive’

    The champion says it’s exaggerating rivalries, and he now refuses to participate, the only driver to drop out.Last year’s heated title fight between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen drew the focus of Season 4 of “Drive to Survive,” the Netflix series about Formula 1, which was released last month.The streaming series has been a hit for the sport, attracting droves of new fans by highlighting the personalities of the drivers inside the cockpit.But those watching “Drive to Survive” to get the inside story on the championship battle noticed a significant absence. Verstappen has become the only driver to refuse to be interviewed for the series because he thought it faked rivalries and exaggerated incidents.“I’m quite a down-to-earth guy, and I just want it to be facts, don’t hype it up,” Verstappen, of Red Bull, said.“I understand of course it needs to be like that for Netflix. It’s just not my thing.”While Verstappen still appeared in the series through use of Formula 1 footage, the story of his title fight was largely told through interviews with Christian Horner, the Red Bull team principal. Hamilton, of Mercedes, took an active part in the series, engaging in interviews throughout his battle with Verstappen.Driver rivalries are central to the narrative of the show. One example came in Season 3, when an episode featured the McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Carlos Sainz Jr. While they are known to be good friends who worked well together in the team, the episode sought to depict tension in their relationship that Sainz felt was “pushed a bit too far.”Zak Brown, McLaren Racing’s chief executive, at the Grand Prix of Austria in 2021. He said the Netflix series showed the relationship between two of his drivers “a little bit less friendly than it was.”Mark Thompson/Getty Images“I think that rivalry was there, but it was in a friendly way, and they maybe portrayed it a little bit less friendly than it was,” Zak Brown, the chief executive of McLaren Racing, said in an interview. “Deep down, the rivalry was there, but outwardly they never showed it.”Norris thought the editing of the show “can make you look like you said something in a time and place which is definitely not correct,” but was happy as long as the truth was not twisted completely.“As long as they don’t overdo it and literally make someone look like they’ve done something which they definitely haven’t done, it’s good,” he said.Verstappen was more direct about how Norris was portrayed, arguing it made it look like Norris was a bit of a jerk.Formula 1 has spoken with the producers of the show and the teams after Verstappen’s complaints. Ian Holmes, the director of media rights at Formula 1, said that the producers “need to be mindful of his concerns” and that it was important for teams and drivers to feel comfortable participating in the series.But he disagreed that the series had faked rivalries. “This notion that some things are made up, it’s just chatter,” Holmes said in an interview. “At the end of the day, it is authentic. The other thing to remember, as well, is the people that walk up and down the paddock, they’re a bit too close to the sport” to step back and see the bigger picture.The balance between authenticity and dramatizing events to appeal to the audience is a challenge that documentary series often face. But Horner, whose rivalry with his Mercedes counterpart, Toto Wolff, featured heavily in Season 4 with insults and personality clashes, felt the purpose of “Drive to Survive” had to be kept in mind.“At the end of the day, it is a television show,” Horner said. “They’re taking snippets from a season-long battle and turning that into a television program. One has to remember it is designed ultimately to entertain.”Brown felt that the makers of “Drive to Survive” were “at the limit” of ensuring the show was entertaining while pleasing Formula 1’s hard-core fans. But he also said it was “a TV show, intended first and foremost to be entertaining.”Toto Wolff, left, principal of the Mercedes team, and Christian Horner, principal of the Red Bull Racing Team, at a news conference before the Grand Prix of Russia in 2021. Their rivalry was a focus of Season 4 of “Drive to Survive.”Pool photo by XPB“The numbers say people love it,” Brown said. “It’s drawing a tremendous amount of people in the sport, and I don’t think they’re presenting it as a pure documentary. They’re bringing Formula 1 to you in an entertaining way.“A little bit of creative license, I don’t have an issue with it.”The show has been turning new viewers into fans of the sport, with record crowds attending races in the United States and Australia in the past six months.“We’re happy to report, and I think our Netflix friends would be happy to report, that it was the No. 1 show in 33 countries around the world already,” said Greg Maffei, the chief executive of the Liberty Media Corporation, which owns Formula 1.“The Season 4 audience is already larger than the Season 3 audience. So it’s a huge success.”Brown found firsthand just how the show has helped increase the popularity of Formula 1 when he stayed in the same hotel as the Los Angeles Lakers last year.“Some fans were asking for autographs, and two players turned around and say, ‘Sorry, we’re not signing’. The fans went, ‘No, no, not you.’” They were asking Brown. “‘We’re Formula 1 fans.’” he recalled them saying.“You saw the players look at them and go, ‘Who is this guy?’ I can’t go through an airport now without being recognized, and it’s all because of Netflix.”Filming for Season 5 is already underway. With the exception of Verstappen, all drivers are continuing to participate, aware of the good it has done for Formula 1.“People have been very vocal about it being dramatized a little bit, but at the end of the day, you always want to show the best light of your sport,” George Russell, of Mercedes, said.“As long as it’s having a positive impact on Formula 1, I think there’s no real issue.”Sainz, who now drives for Ferrari, said Netflix was good for the sport. “It is a good thing for myself, for the brand of F1, and I will still take part if they want me to be in it.”But Verstappen said his mind would not be changed. “I’ll probably watch it and see how over the top it is, and just continue with my life.” More

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    Jimmy Fallon Mocks Rudy Giuliani’s ‘Masked Singer’ Appearance

    Fallon joked that “the C.D.C. reinstated the mask mandate” after seeing the performance.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.Put the Mask Back On!Rudy Giuliani appeared on Wednesday night’s episode of Fox’s “Masked Singer,” belting out a rendition of “Bad to the Bone.”Jimmy Fallon joked that after seeing Giuliani’s performance, “the C.D.C. reinstated the mask mandate.”“They finally get a Republican to wear a mask and that’s how it goes.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You know, it actually takes talent not to hit any notes.” — JIMMY FALLON“I mean, that is just unbelievable — somebody famous was on ‘The Masked Singer.’” — SETH MEYERS“There is a good chance Rudy genuinely did not know where he was, and was just as surprised as everyone else when they opened that box. He was probably thrilled, by the way: [Imitating Giuliani] ‘A singing competition? I just assumed I was going to jail.’” — SETH MEYERS“Yeah, Rudy Giuliani just got voted off ‘The Masked Singer,’ which means he is about to spend the next five years claiming that he actually won ‘The Masked Singer.’” — TREVOR NOAH“I guess history was made last night because for the first time in ‘The Masked Singer’’s history, a contestant took off their mask and everyone was like, ‘No, no, put it back on, put it back on!’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Explosive Interview Edition)“Meanwhile, our royal pain in the [expletive], his MAGAsty Donald Trump, is at it again. Trump squatted down for what appears to be a contentious chat with Piers Morgan, who used to be his friend. He was on the — as close to a friend as Donald Trump has, I guess.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“After a clip was released yesterday of former President Trump storming out of an interview with journalist Piers Morgan, a spokesman for Trump called the preview a, quote, ‘pathetic attempt to revive the career of a failed television host.’ Buddy, you’re going to have to be more specific.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s right, Piers Morgan released a clip from an interview with former President Trump that he claims will be, quote, ‘the most explosive interview of the year.’ Well, it’s certainly going to be the sweatiest. I mean, look — he looks like Jigsaw just told him he has an hour to name all the state capitals.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Thursday’s “Full Frontal,” Samantha Bee skewered Tucker Carlson’s latest docuseries, “The End of Men.”Also, Check This OutBarbara Gustern, shown here at Joe’s Pub in 2020, found her metier as a vocal coach after her career in musical theater didn’t turn out as she had hoped.James GavinThe singers Debbie Harry, Kathleen Hanna and Justin Vivian Bond remember their late vocal coach Barbara Gustern. More

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    Review: ‘Hangmen,’ Offering the Last Word in Gallows Humor

    Martin McDonagh’s rollicking comedy about capital punishment, now on Broadway, feels like a perfect fit for our unjust times.Welcome to Broadway’s fleurs-du-mal moment, a rare blossoming of funny plays on deeply unfunny subjects. At Circle in the Square, there’s “American Buffalo,” about creeping criminality; at the Friedman, “How I Learned to Drive,” about pedophilia; at Studio 54, “The Minutes,” about white triumphalism. In all of them, comedy is a top note, perfuming the odor of rot underneath.But no fleur is as mal right now as the one that opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater: “Hangmen,” Martin McDonagh’s rip-roaringly hilarious yet profoundly horrific play about the abolition of capital punishment. Or rather its endurance. For in this deeply cynical tale, set in the final days of the death penalty in England, we see how “justified” murder, no longer state sanctioned, survives by other means.Among those other means is Harry Wade (David Threlfall), the country’s second most famous executioner. We meet him, in a chilling prologue set in 1963, as he hangs a man named Hennessy, convicted of raping and killing a young woman. That Hennessy (Josh Goulding) goes to his death maintaining his innocence is neither here nor there to Harry, who sees his job as morally neutral. He merely wants to dispatch the man with dispatch — and does so in an unnerving coup de théâtre.Threlfall’s titanic performance in this Royal Court Theater and Atlantic Theater Company production offers the most terrifying incarnation yet of the author’s acid misanthropy. Which is saying a lot after plays like “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” and “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” that portray the busy small-mindedness behind big ugly doings. His Harry is in some ways the flip side of Smike, the poor mangled wretch he played in “The Life & Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” in the early 1980s. Harry, too, is Dickensian, but more like one of Dickens’s monstrous, red-eyed lawyers: He is cruel, peremptory and, with his dyed hair and prissy bow tie, dandyish in his self-regard.The act of Parliament that suspended the death penalty in 1965 does not erase those traits. Most of the play takes place that year, after Harry has retired from public service to the pub he runs, with an executioner’s charm, near Manchester. There he still cuts an imposing if thin-skinned figure, bullying everyone in sight: Alice, his keeping-up-appearances wife (Tracie Bennett); Shirley, his 15-year-old daughter (Gaby French); and a bevy of barflies who together form a composite idiot.But do not pity the poor hangman with no one to kill; his self-pity is more than sufficient. Despite his protests of “no comment,” it therefore takes very little coaxing for a cub reporter (Owen Campbell) to get him talking for an article timed to the second anniversary of Hennessy’s execution. Out it all pours: the vainglory, the moral equivocation and especially the furious envy of “Albert bloody Pierrepoint,” the “Number One hangman all them years,” with hundreds more executions to his credit.Somehow McDonagh sets these instigating events in motion and assembles the core characters without your even noticing the structural work going on. But now he plays two wild cards. One is a character we met in the opening scene but who returns unexpectedly: Syd (Andy Nyman), Harry’s mousy and possibly pervy former assistant. Syd, too, burns with suppressed fury, Harry having ratted him out for some minor peccadilloes involving other people’s genitals.Threlfall, left, as a former executioner who runs a pub, with Allen, center, as the menacing Mooney, and Jeremy Crutchley, as a detective and pub regular.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe other is the menacing Mooney (Alfie Allen), a “spiffy young devil” (as Ben Brantley called the character in his review of the 2018 Atlantic production) and an obvious outsider with his mod clothes and inscrutable Oxbridge palaver. In Allen’s convincingly reptilian performance, Mooney is an anarchic force, deliberately jangling everyone’s nerves with non sequiturs and contradictions that invite an effort to pin him down. Is he a sociopath or merely an entitled toff?But he is un-pin-down-able, making short work of those who try. When a suspicious detective named Fry (Jeremy Crutchley) does his best to scare him off, it goes nowhere:Fry: You wanna watch yourself, lad. We’re not all friendly up north.Shirley: I am!Mooney: She is.Fry: She’s not everyone, is she?Mooney: She could be if she tried harder.Shirley, whose own mother calls her “moody on the inside and mopey on the outside,” knows this makes no sense but likes Mooney anyway and soon goes missing.Having built its gallows, the play proceeds to hang someone on it. Or perhaps several people, for there is at least mild comeuppance all around. If Harry’s attempts to promote a glorious history instead of his true one are thwarted, so too are almost everyone else’s delusional hopes. Only the cronies come out ahead, having netted for their troubles some free beer and a lot of excitement.Which makes the audience another crony, with beer available at the theater bar. And in Matthew Dunster’s whirlwind production, we certainly get a lot of excitement, even if it’s the sickly kind laced with danger. (The fight direction, by J. David Brimmer, is superb.) Dunster also extracts every possible laugh from each dour situation; even as Hennessy resists the noose in mortal terror, Syd tells him, “If you’d’ve just tried to relax you could’ve been dead by now.”From left, Crutchley, Gaby French, Allen, Horton and Hollis in the play, with sets by Anna Fleischle.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLogic, for these characters, is a backward-flowing sewer, and ethics, likewise, are useful only to the extent they can be inverted into excuses for bad behavior. That Harry is loosely based on Harry Allen, England’s actual last executioner, a man who was indeed less famous than the real Albert Pierrepoint, suggests the play’s diagnosis of the human propensity toward violence and revenge is neither fictional nor narrow; there’s a reason the title is “Hangmen,” plural.This is bracing, yet something nevertheless bothered me about the play, even aside from a few logical holes and untied knots, when I saw it downtown. Though, like most of McDonagh’s earlier work, it trades in the comedy of human pride in awfulness — a bottomless resource — the contrast between its profoundly serious subject and its baroque construction is more unsettling here than usual. Something about a hanging (let alone two) is hard to let go of, and if you laugh as much as I did at “Hangmen,” you may later find yourself asking whatever for.That this feeling of disproportion is fainter in the Broadway production than in 2018 may provide a clue to the answer. The cast, with just four holdovers, is certainly better tuned now, and Threlfall makes a big difference. Also successfully amped up for Broadway are the sinister sets and pinpoint costumes by Anna Fleischle.But it’s more than that. Four years later, the world feels coarser — perhaps it always does — and not just because death has become much more visible in streets and wards and wars. So has people’s indifference to it, and to all kinds of suffering and unfairness. McDonagh’s cynicism feels closer to our own, or rather we to it. “Hangmen” now plays less like a clever exercise and more like news, with an unnerving headline. Garden-variety amorality is not a far throw from violent psychopathology, it reports, or for that matter from what we call justice.HangmenThrough June 18 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; hangmenbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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    ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Season 2, Episode 8 Recap: Mind Melt

    Vulcan mind melds have traditionally been depicted as an intimate telepathic linking of minds — but they can erase memories, too.Season 2, Episode 8: ‘Mercy’Martin Wells, an F.B.I. agent from 2024, is one of the consequential humans in the history of the galaxy, we find out in this episode of “Picard.” It turns out that he is the one who made first contact with an extraterrestrial being, not Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell), as we are led to believe in “Star Trek: First Contact.”And the Vulcans Martin met? They tried to erase his mind. My initial reaction to this revelation was: “Wait a minute. Vulcans can use mind melds to do that?”Actually, it turns out they can! Spock did so with Kirk in the original series episode “Requiem for Methuselah.” Mind melds have traditionally been depicted as an intimate telepathic linking of minds — but they can erase memories, too, like those widgets in “Men In Black.” What if Vulcans were the biggest criminals in the Alpha Quadrant but no one knew about it because they keep erasing everyone’s minds? But we digress.More specifically, how long were Vulcans chilling on Earth?Guinan is the one who correctly deduces that there is more to Martin than being an overzealous F.B.I. agent — that there was something personal to the exchange. Picard notes that the F.B.I. might disrupt the launch of the Europa mission, and this will cause the future timeline to break. (These concerns remain amusing: In the previous episode, Guinan nearly blew up her bar to summon Q. Hardly a subtle gesture to hide an alien presence! Rios beamed 2024 humans to the ship where they’re learning all about the future! And he makes out with one of them! The timeline is shattered, admiral!)Our favorite bartender’s work isn’t done. She finally meets Q, whom, in this timeline, she has never met. And this is where the story becomes even more muddled. Guinan tells Q that when the summoning stopped, she felt “emptiness and fear.” That’s quite perceptive, and in line with Guinan’s character. (Unlike when she first meets Picard and can’t sense anything.) Q is dying and wants to give his life meaning. He seems to fear death.And Q gives Guinan a couple of key pieces of information.“The trap is immaterial,” Q says. “It’s the escape that counts,” Q says.We seem to have gotten away from the story line of the first half of the season, which was that something happens in 2024 that causes a future in which the Federation becomes the bloodthirsty Confederation. It is implied early in the season that Q is the one who caused this in order to teach Picard something about humanity.But how does this link with the Borg Queen’s plan? She wants to assimilate Earth and then the whole galaxy, beginning in 2024, which is essentially the same plot as “First Contact.” It continues to baffle me that Picard doesn’t bring up his previous experience with the same exact thing. The Queen essentially wants to partner with Jurati to accomplish this, which is what she wanted to do previously with Data.This feels like relevant information to bring up to the rest of the crew. It happened! It was a huge deal! It would be like Paul McCartney writing a memoir about his life and not mentioning the Beatles.Either way, lets say Picard stops the Borg Queen from doing her thing, and no one is assimilated — although, as we see at the end of the episode, the assimilations have already begun. How does this connect to a future in which humans become the angry, spiteful versions that Q presents?What remains unclear to me is why the Queen needs Jurati to accomplish her goals, or Adam Soong for that matter. (The Queen is able to mimic voices, overtake computer systems and assimilate at will. She shouldn’t need Soong’s help with anything. Unless her previous fascination with Data comes into play here.) The goal now is to sabotage Renee Picard’s Europa mission, which seems to align with Q’s mission. And now Soong also wants to sabotage the mission so that the world will turn to him for his genius — or at least that’s what the Queen sells him on.(Why does the Queen needs Soong’s assistance to take over La Sirena when she has shown herself perfectly capable of possessing the ship without anyone’s help?)If you’re losing track of what is happening here — who needs what and why — you aren’t alone.There’s a moment when Soong tells his quasi-daughter, “You exist because I willed it,” which lines up neatly with this season’s emphasis on patriarchal views. But more broadly, it speaks to why Soong might be tempted by what the Borg Queen offers: a path to conquest.Even so, Jurati — possessed by the Queen — has become a terrifying figure who nearly chokes Raffi to death, right after Raffi and Seven have a dispute over whether Raffi is too manipulative — incidentally, while they are trying to stop the Borg Queen from accomplishing her mission to manipulate everything.Manipulation is at the core of this season. Jean-Luc wants to manipulate Renee into taking a spaceflight she isn’t ready for. He also manipulates Martin into freeing him and Guinan. (Martin has made finding extraterrestrial beings his life’s work. He finally finds them and almost immediately frees them. It was a bit incongruous.) Q manipulates entire timelines and so forth and so on. Soong manipulates his daughter into believing that she is human.Guinan ends the episode being more optimistic about humans than ever — that they “do the work and want to evolve,” despite not being given any real reason to. No one is to be trusted in this “Picard” universe. And perhaps that’s the key for how the future goes awry. More

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    Mikhail Vasenkov Dies at 79; His Spy Ring Inspired ‘The Americans’

    He and his wife were among 10 Soviet sleeper agents who blended into American society before being exposed and deported in 2010. The TV series sprung from the episode.Mikhail Vasenkov, the most senior of 10 Soviet sleeper agents who posed as ordinary citizens in the United States as they scouted potential recruits, and whose mass arrest and deportation in 2010 inspired the TV series “The Americans,” died on April 6. He was 79.His death was announced by the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. The agency did not specify how or where he died, but he was interviewed as recently as December 2020 in Moscow.When they were arrested, Mr. Vasenkov and his wife, Vicky Pelaez, a journalist, had been living undercover in a Soviet-owned two-story brick and stucco house in suburban Yonkers, N.Y., since immigrating from her native Peru in 1985.The house in Yonkers, N.Y., where Mr. Vasenkov and his wife, Vicky Pelaez, lived undercover.Daniel Barry for The New York TimesThey and eight others, part of a network of so-called illegals, were rounded up in a multiyear F.B.I. investigation, called Operation Ghost Stories, and pleaded guilty to failing to register as agents of a foreign government. They were then deported, flown to Europe on July 9, 2010, and swapped for four Russians who had been imprisoned in Moscow on charges of spying for the United States and Britain.The arrests of the sleeper agents, including several couples with children and a self-styled New York socialite, Anna Chapman, generated the concept for “The Americans,” which was broadcast on FX beginning in 2013.“That was absolutely the inspiration for the series,” Joe Weisberg, who developed the series with Joel Fields, told Time magazine in 2010.Over six seasons, the drama, set in the 1980s, followed two Soviet undercover agents masquerading as a suburban Washington couple, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), in a Cold War cat-and-mouse contest with federal agents.A scene from the sixth season of the FX television show “The Americans,” which was inspired by the arrest of Mr. Vasenkov and nine others as spies. From left, Lev Gorn with Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, who played married Soviet agents at the center of the show. Patrick Harbron/ FXMr. Vasenkov, operating as Juan Lazaro Sr., conducted what sounded more like a cat-and-slouch competition with federal counterintelligence agents. He and Ms. Pelaez didn’t shade their anti-American views, and they apparently neither collected nor delivered any secrets to Moscow.When the spies were rounded up, the F.B.I. said that while “their intent from the start was serious, well-funded by the S.V.R.” — the Soviet intelligence service — “and far-ranging,” they “never got their hands on any classified documents.”Whether for the benefit of eavesdroppers or because he was getting paid regardless, Mr. Vasenkov was recorded by federal agents telling his wife matter-of-factly that his Soviet handlers “say my information is of no value,” adding, “If they don’t like what I tell them, too bad.”He was apparently the first of the Soviet agents to have been compromised, captured on tape as early as 2003 blithely instructing his wife on how to communicate with Moscow.“When you go to Peru, I am going to write in invisible,” he said, according to a transcript, “and you’re going to pass them all of that in a book.” To which Ms. Pelaez replied, “Oh, O.K.”When he was arrested, he told investigators that he “would not violate his loyalty” to the S.V.R. — “even for his son,” a teenager whom he would leave behind when he and his wife were deported.When the 10 agents arrived in Moscow, Vladimir V. Putin, a former K.G.B. agent who was prime minister at the time, greeted them by lustily leading them in patriotic anthems and offering them a “bright life” in Mother Russia with a pension and a monthly stipend.But Mr. Vasenkov, the senior spy among them, said no, thank you. He had not been looking forward to his return. He had not lived in his native Russia for decades (by then he spoke Russian with a Spanish accent), and his wife had never visited the country. And so within weeks of landing in Moscow he decided instead to resume his false identity and return with his wife to Peru.They did, in 2013.In “Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West” (2012), Edward Lucas wrote that while the infiltration by sleeper agents posed a serious threat to U.S. national security, “it is easy to mock the pointlessness of these people, apparently the least serious of the illegals, sent at vast trouble and expense of a foreign country in order to carry out tasks that most people manage with a mouse click.”Nonetheless, in announcing Mr. Vasenkov’s death, the Russian security agency praised him in an obituary.“At work in special conditions since 1975,” the obituary said, “he created and headed an illegal residency, which obtained valuable political information, which was highly appreciated.”The agency openly identified him as a “former Russian spy and sleeper agent” — a covert infiltrator assigned to scout potential spies, assess vulnerable targets and stand ready to be activated in a crisis even decades later.The S.V.R. said that Mr. Vasenkov had reached mandatory military retirement with the rank of colonel in 2004, without elaborating on why he had remained in New York for six more years before he was betrayed, the agency said, by a Soviet defector.The agency’s announcement listed the medals and other commendations that Mr. Vasenkov had been awarded and characterized him as “a hardworking, honest and modest employee” who had been “prone to work associated with risk” and had shown “will, courage and resourcefulness.”The couple’s son, Juan Lazaro Jr., who was 17 at the time of their arrest and already an accomplished pianist, declined to accompany them back to Russia. He was finishing his studies at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan at the time. According to a résumé, he later graduated from the Juilliard School and studied at the Mannes School of Music in Manhattan, part of the New School, and still lives in New York.Ms. Pelaez’s stepson from a previous relationship, Waldo Mariscal, an architect who was 38 at the time, also remained in the United States. He now lives in Peru with his mother, according to her lawyer, Carlos Moreno. She and her sons are among Mr. Vasenkov’s survivors, Mr. Moreno said.Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov was born on Oct. 9, 1942, into what his obituary described as a family of workers in Kuntsevo, a town outside Moscow. (Stalin had a dacha there.) The family moved to Siberia some time after the German invasion during World War II.Mikhail graduated from the Moscow Higher Combined Arms Command School. Trained in English and Spanish, he flew from Madrid to Lima in 1976 on a Uruguayan passport under the name of Juan Jose Lazaro Fuentes, an identity he had stolen from a Uruguayan who had died of respiratory failure in 1947 at the age of 3.Described as a freelance news photographer with a black belt in karate, he was granted Peruvian citizenship in 1979. In 1983, “with the sanction” of the spy service, according to the Russian security service, he married Ms. Pelaez, a television reporter.Two years later, they emigrated to the United States, where she went to work as a journalist for the Spanish-language daily newspaper El Diario/La Prensa.Mr. Vasenkov earned a doctorate in political science at the New School, wrote approvingly of the leftist Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru and, in 2008, taught Latin American and Caribbean politics for a semester as an adjunct professor at Baruch College in Manhattan, part of the City University of New York.Despite the recording of Mr. Vasenkov’s instructions about invisible ink, Ms. Pelaez insisted that she had not known that her husband was a Soviet agent until the arrests. And in interviews, her stepson — who remained loyal to the couple, saying, “We believe in the integrity of our parents”— vouched for her.“My mother barely speaks English,” he said. “She’s going to speak Russian? The only Russian thing my mother likes is vodka.” More

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    Do You Skip Intro?

    Elyssa Dudley and Listen and follow Still ProcessingApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWesley worries the “skip intro” button is killing the TV theme song. When we skip, we’re denying “the possibility of having this connection with a show that becomes bigger and more meaningful than the show itself.”He takes his concern to his friend Hanif Abdurraqib, a poet, music critic and MacArthur “genius grant” winner. Together, they explore their childhood memories of “Good Times,” “The Wonder Years” and “The Jeffersons.” Then, producer Hans Buetow unearths a rendition of a theme song that blows their minds — and they vow never to hit “skip intro” on it.Can you help us identify this choir?On today’s episode, Wesley and Hanif are played this video of a choir singing the “Good Times” theme song. Now, we need your help: Can you identify the choir?We have confirmed that the singers are backstage at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills, Calif., but who are they? We’d love to find out and get in touch with them.If you have any ideas or information about the choir, please email us at stillprocessing@nytimes.com.Theme songs as beautiful wallpaperHanif shares a story about how a photographer visiting his home was struck by the blue wallpaper in his front entryway. Before the pandemic, Hanif would travel more frequently, so coming home and crossing his entryway was “a real beautiful experience,” he says. But now, he’s so consumed by errands — setting down groceries, making sure his dog doesn’t run out — that he’d forgotten about his wallpaper.“The theme song acts as almost the wallpaper,” Hanif says. “When I do notice it, if it’s something that I can pause and notice and I enjoy it, I’m thrilled. But otherwise, it’s kind of like a border between me and something that I have to do, or something that I feel like I am driven to do. But it is nice to notice it when it comes along if it’s wonderful enough.”Hosted by: Jenna Wortham and Wesley MorrisProduced by: Elyssa Dudley and Hans BuetowEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Marion LozanoExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy DorrAssistant Managing Editor: Sam Dolnick More

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    Robert Morse, Impish Tony-Winning Comedy Star, Is Dead at 90

    He dazzled as a charming corporate schemer in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” His later triumphs included a memorable role on “Mad Men.”Robert Morse, whose impish, gaptoothed grin and expert comic timing made him a Tony-winning Broadway star as a charming corporate schemer in the 1961 musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” who later won another Tony for his eerily lifelike portrait of the writer Truman Capote in “Tru,” and who capped his long career with a triumphant return to the corporate world on the acclaimed television series “Mad Men,” has died. He was 90. His death was announced on Twitter by the writer and producer Larry Karaszewski, who worked with Mr. Morse on the television series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.” He did not say where or when Mr. Morse died.Small in stature but larger than life as a performer, Mr. Morse was still a relative newcomer to the stage when he took Broadway by storm in “How to Succeed.” Directed (and partly written) by Abe Burrows, with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, and based on a book by Shepherd Mead, the show, a broad satire of the business world, was set in the headquarters of the World Wide Wicket Company, ruled by its peevish president, J.B. Biggley (Rudy Vallee). The plot revolved around the determined efforts of an ambitious young window washer named J. Pierrepont Finch, played with sly humor by Mr. Morse, to climb to the top of the corporate ladder. Among the show’s many high points was the washroom scene in which Mr. Morse delivered a heartfelt rendition of the song “I Believe in You” while gazing rapturously into a mirror.“How to Succeed” ran for more than 1,400 performances and won seven Tony Awards, including one for Mr. Morse as best actor in a musical, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The 1967 film adaptation, with Mr. Morse and Mr. Vallee repeating their roles, was a hit as well, and the show has been revived on Broadway twice. Mr. Morse always seemed more at home on the stage than on the screen. Five years before “How to Succeed” opened, he made an uncredited and virtually unseen Hollywood debut (his face was swathed in bandages) in the World War II drama “The Proud and Profane.” With no other screen roles in the offing, he returned to New York, where he had earlier studied acting with Lee Strasberg, and where he auditioned for the director Tyrone Guthrie and was given his first Broadway role in “The Matchmaker,” Thornton Wilder’s comedy about a widowed merchant’s search for a new wife. Ruth Gordon played the title role, and Mr. Morse and Arthur Hill played clerks in the merchant’s shop. Mr. Morse would reprise his role in the 1958 film adaptation. From left, John Slattery, Mr. Morse and Nathan Lane in the 2016 Broadway revival of “The Front Page.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Morse’s Broadway career continued with the comedy “Say, Darling” (1958), in which he played an eager young producer, and “Take Me Along” (1959), a musical based on Eugene O’Neill’s play “Ah, Wilderness!,” in which Mr. Morse was a doubt-ridden adolescent, Walter Pidgeon his sympathetic father and Jackie Gleason his hard-drinking uncle. Then came his star-making turn in “How to Succeed.”His success in that show led to movie offers, but not to movie stardom; he rarely had a screen vehicle that fit him comfortably. “The parts I could play,” he observed to The Sunday News of New York in 1965, “they give to Jack Lemmon.” When he co-starred with Robert Goulet in the 1964 sex farce “Honeymoon Hotel,” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote, “It is hard to imagine good actors being given worse material with which to work.” He fared better, but only slightly, in “The Loved One” (1965), a freewheeling adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s scathing novel about America’s moneymaking funeral industry in which he was improbably cast as a British poet who finds work at an animal cemetery, and “A Guide for the Married Man” (1967), in which Mr. Morse gives a fellow husband (Walter Matthau) advice on how to cheat on his wife. Television proved more hospitable. In addition to guest appearances on various shows in the 1960s and ’70s, he co-starred with the actress E.J. Peaker in the 1968 series “That’s Life,” an unusual hybrid of sitcom and variety show that told the story of a young couple’s courtship and marriage through sketches, monologues, singing and dancing. Perhaps too ambitious for its own good — “We’re producing what amounts to a new musical each week,” Mr. Morse told an interviewer — it lasted only one season.Mr. Morse returned to Broadway in 1972 in “Sugar,” a musical based on the Billy Wilder film “Some Like It Hot” about two Chicago musicians — Tony Roberts in the part originally played by Tony Curtis and Mr. Morse, appropriately, in the Jack Lemmon role — who flee from local mobsters by dressing as women and joining an all-girl band en route to Miami. It brought Mr. Morse another Tony nomination and was a modest hit, running for more than a year.But his next show, the 1976 musical “So Long, 174th Street,” based on the play “Enter Laughing” — with Mr. Morse, still boyish-looking at just shy of 45, as an aspiring actor roughly half his age — received harsh reviews and closed in a matter of weeks. It was Mr. Morse’s last appearance on Broadway for more than a decade.He kept busy in the ensuing years, but choice roles were scarce, and he battled depression. He also had problems with drugs and alcohol, although he maintained that those problems did not interfere with his work; looking back in 1989, he told The Times, “It was the other 22 hours I had a problem with.”He starred in a number of out-of-town revivals, including a production of “How to Succeed” in Los Angeles. He was a familiar face on television in series like “Love, American Style” and “Murder, She Wrote” — and a familiar voice as well, on cartoon shows like “Pound Puppies.” But he longed to escape a casting pigeonhole that he knew he had helped create.“I’m the short, funny guy,” he said ruefully in a 1972 Times interview. “It’s very difficult to get out of that.” Eight years earlier he had told another interviewer: “I think of myself as an actor. I happen to have a comic flair, but that doesn’t mean I plan to spend my life as a comedian.”It took him a while to find the perfect dramatic showcase, but he found it in 1989 in “Tru,” Jay Presson Allen’s one-man show about Truman Capote. Almost unrecognizable in heavy makeup and utterly convincing in voice and mannerisms, he was Capote incarnate, alone in his apartment in 1975 and brooding over the friendships he had lost after the publication of excerpts from his gossipy novel in progress, “Answered Prayers.” Mr. Morse’s performance brought him his second Tony Award. A television adaptation of “Tru” for the PBS series “American Playhouse” in 1992 also won him an Emmy.Robert Alan Morse was born on May 18, 1931, in Newton, Mass. His father, Charles, managed a chain of movie theaters. His mother, May (Silver) Morse, was a pianist.In high school, Mr. Morse earned a reputation as the class clown; a sympathetic music teacher helped him transfer his energy from the classroom to the theater. He spent a summer with the Peterborough Players in New Hampshire, came to New York and, after trying and failing to get an acting job, joined the Navy in 1950. After his discharge four years later, he moved back to New York and enrolled at the American Theater Wing.Mr. Morse in an episode of “Mad Men.” “I said I’d be happy to be Bertram Cooper, chairman of the board, and sit behind a desk,” he said of being offered the role, which earned him five Emmy nominations. “It looked like the road company of ‘How to Succeed.’”Jaimie Trueblood/AMCMr. Morse’s first marriage, to Carole Ann D’Andrea, a dancer, ended in divorce. They had three daughters, Robin, Andrea and Hilary. He and his second wife, Elizabeth Roberts, an advertising executive, had a daughter, Allyn, and a son, Charles.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Morse’s success in “Tru” guaranteed that he would no longer be thought of as, in his words, “an aging leprechaun.” A wider variety of roles followed, including, in 2016, a return to Broadway in a star-studded revival of “The Front Page.”“In the small but crucial role of a messenger from the governor’s office,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times, “Mr. Morse, who made his Broadway debut more than 60 years ago, proves he can still steal a scene without breaking a sweat.”But for the last three decades of his life, he was mostly seen on television. He appeared in more than a dozen episodes of the 2000 CBS series “City of Angels” as the unpredictable chairman of an urban hospital. And in 2007 he came full circle when he was cast as the eccentric head of an advertising agency in the acclaimed AMC series “Mad Men,” set in the same era as “How to Succeed.” The role brought him five Emmy nominations. “I was quite elated when Matt called me and said, ‘We’d love you to do this show,’” Mr. Morse told The Times in 2014, referring to the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner. “I said I’d be happy to be Bertram Cooper, chairman of the board, and sit behind a desk. It looked like the road company of ‘How to Succeed.’”Although Bertram Cooper was a straight dramatic role, Mr. Morse got to return to his musical-comedy roots in his last episode, aired in the spring of 2014, when the character died — and then reappeared, in a fantasy song-and-dance sequence, to croon the old standard “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”“What a send-off!” Mr. Morse said. “The opportunity to shine in the spotlight that Matt Weiner gave me — it was an absolute love letter. Christmas and New Year’s, all rolled into one.”Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More