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    Jimmy Kimmel Critiques Donald's Trump's Financial Claims

    “Only Donald Trump would defend himself against charges that he overvalued his assets by re-overvaluing his assets,” Kimmel said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Poor ResponseDonald Trump responded on Tuesday to being dropped by his longtime accounting firm Mazars USA with a four-page statement, writing, among other things, that the Trump brand is worth more than he previously claimed.On Wednesday, Jimmy Kimmel joked that Trump’s response is the longest thing he’s written “since he threatened to sue Gritty for stealing his look.”“Trump wrote at length: ‘We have a great company with fantastic assets that are unique, extremely valuable and, in many cases, far more valuable than what was listed in our financial statements.’ Only Donald Trump would defend himself against charges that he overvalued his assets by re-overvaluing his assets.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He also lashed out at the New York attorney general and D.A., who happen to be Black. He wrote, ‘After five years of constant bombardment, this political and racist attack must stop.’ Now that’s a good one: rich white guy claiming racism. You almost have to hand it to him. That’s like — that’s like Hawaii claiming tourism. That’s ridiculous.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Holy Moly Edition)“Since we were young, many of us have been taught the same story, right? Be good, pray every day and you’ll get into heaven. What your grandmother probably didn’t mention is that a paperwork issue could send you to hell.” — TREVOR NOAH“Here’s what happened: For two decades, Father Andres Arango performed the sacrament with the words, ‘We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ However, the Vatican instructs priests to say ‘I baptize.’ Why can’t it be ‘we’? If anyone would understand, it’s God — he’s three persons in one god. I’m sure he gets it mixed up all the time.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“[imitating God] Hello, hi, hi. Could I get a reservation for three? No, it’s just me.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Wait, wait, I’m sorry, what? All the baptisms are invalid because of one — no, one word? This is like the worst thing a Catholic priest has ever done.” — TREVOR NOAH“Saying the wrong word during a baptism seems like a fun goof-them-up, but according to the local diocese, if you get the words wrong, ‘the baptism is deemed invalid, and if an individual was improperly baptized and later received other sacraments, they may need to repeat some or all of those sacraments.’ That’s right, you’re going to have to redo first communion, so squeeze that fat [expletive] back into that tiny suit, get back up there and stay in the suit, because you’re getting remarried.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Church leaders investigated and found that Father Arango had incorrectly performed thousands of baptisms over more than 20 years. Of course, this was just a priest at a baptism. It could be worse — it could have been a rabbi at a bris.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Like, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to hear that the Catholic Church cares about people’s pronouns, but this seems like a minor mistake to me.” — TREVOR NOAH“You know, like I would understand if the priest accidentally cleansed their souls in White Claw, that I would get. But this doesn’t seem like a huge deal.” — TREVOR NOAH“And what’s going to happen to all the people who weren’t actually baptized — what happens to them now, huh? Are they going to go to hell for someone else’s mistake? That’s so unfair. Everyone else who gets to go to hell goes there because they got to have some fun first, you know?” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingDaniel Craig talked with Stephen Colbert about providing 2,022 New York students with free tickets to see him in “Macbeth” on Broadway.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe “Zola” director Janicza Bravo will appear on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutMelanie Metz for The New York TimesTwenty-five largely unseen works said to be by Jean-Michel Basquiat are on display in Orlando, Fla., but some question their authenticity. More

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    5 Monologues, Each a Showcase for Asian American Actors Over 60

    “Out of Time” at the Public Theater is intended to showcase the talents of older actors. “People want to dismiss your stories,” the show’s director says. Not here.They might be asked to play a person lying in bed, dying of a stroke, or someone’s horrible mother, or a beloved grandparent struggling with dementia.“Commercially speaking, ‘old Asian lady’ is a huge amount of my opportunity,” the actor Natsuko Ohama said recently. “I like being ‘old Asian lady.’ But it has its limitations.”The director Les Waters became even more acutely interested in those kinds of limitations as he was watching a dance performance choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker at the Skirball Center in 2020. The dancers in it, he recalled, were “older than usual.” He was struck by what he saw.Waters, who most recently directed Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.” on Broadway, and Mia Katigbak, the co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company, had met a few years back at a festival and had agreed to work together at some point. Three years later, they were together at dinner, and Waters could not help but share what he called “an insane directorial megalomaniac’s vision.”What if there was a show that started at night, ran until the morning, and featured a succession of talented older actors telling stories — demonstrating just how much they were capable of?“Out of Time,” which began performances Feb. 15 at the Public Theater, is not quite as ambitious as that original vision. But it is intended to showcase the talents of older actors all the same. It will feature five performers delivering five new monologues — centered on themes like memory, parenthood, and identity — in a show that will run roughly 150 minutes. All the playwrights and all the actors are Asian American. And all the performers are over 60.Ohama is performing a 40-minute monologue by the playwright Sam Chanse.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesKubota will perform Naomi Iizuka’s monologue, about a man much like the playwright’s father.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt is a first, officials at the Public maintain, even if the first is a tad specific: The first production in New York theater to be written by five Asian American playwrights for Asian American actors over the age of 60.“This is to say: ‘Older people in the theater exist,’” Waters, 69, said of the production’s purpose. “We’re here, we’re underused and we have experience.”“As an old person myself, I find people want to dismiss your stories — I did it to my parents all the time,” he added.“Hyper-consciousness” in casting these days means you’ll often see one old person featured in an ensemble, making for “its own kind of tokenism,” said Katigbak, who is 67.“This project addresses that,” she added, “because it centers the old character, the old actor.”The message will be purposefully reinforced by the fact that the actors will be giving long, demanding monologues, some of which run more than 40 minutes and approach 5,000 words.In her monologue, Anna Ouyang Moench, who wrote the 2019 Off Broadway play, “Mothers,” captures a grieving documentary filmmaker dealing with both personal loss and professional rejection.Naomi Iizuka’s piece features an elderly Japanese man who loves Scotch and hates jazz, while Sam Chanse introduces audiences to a novelist who is giving a speech at her alma mater despite (or in spite of) having apparently been canceled by the students she is addressing.“We’ve always had limitations — at every age — just being Asian American,” Leong said.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe playwrights also include Jaclyn Backhaus, whose breakout work “Men on Boats” was a 2015 Off Broadway hit; and Mia Chung, whose “Catch as Catch Can” will return next season, after a 2018 New York premiere.Waters and Katigbak said the playwrights were not given specific prompts, except that their monologues should be “of the moment.” Given that they were created during the pandemic, isolation — and an examination of how loneliness metastasizes and manifests when family and friends all but abandon you — pervades almost all of the works.In a round-table discussion earlier this month, the actors said that living through the last few years has made them intimately familiar with the feeling.“My mother, who turned 97 in August, sits at home and watches TV all day because all her friends are gone,” said Glenn Kubota, who will appear in Iizuka’s monologue. “To see what she has to do on a daily basis just to amuse herself is really eye opening. I’m getting a glimpse of what maybe I will be facing 10, 20, years from now.”Many of the works are also at least somewhat autobiographical. And a few of the playwrights, who are all younger than 60, have created characters that resemble one of their parents. In some cases, in the process of acting, editing and rehearsing, the characters have evolved as their creators have reflected more deeply on themselves and those close to them.The monologue by Iizuka, whose well-regarded “36 Views” opened at the Public almost two decades ago, features a Japanese man who, in peeling back the layers of his life, recounts the time a bomb fell on his house leading him to wander around Tokyo and end up inside a candy shop.Iizuka said the character is strongly influenced by her father, who died in December 2020. “It’s about trying to find joy and pleasure, but also running up against your own mortality,” she said.She shared photos of him with the show’s creative team, who in turn provided them to Kubota. Iizuka said the actor has an “uncanny ability” to capture her father’s “feisty, tart-tongued humor.”“I’ve found this process incredibly nourishing,” she said.Kubota noted that the script had changed considerably — from a first draft he felt was filled with anger to the one he is now performing that mostly expresses love.“Hopefully I can do her work justice,” Kubota said, “because I’m going to be talking about her father in front of all of these people.”As co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company, Katigbak helped get the project off the ground.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“Every time I work on something new,” said Wolf, “I do think about generations of minority performers who, for whatever reason, were marginalized.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesSince the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic roughly two years ago, the number of documented episodes of race-based hate toward people of Asian descent have soared, leaving Asian Americans in New York and beyond to endure what has at times been daily dread about their own safety and also the well-being of their older parents.The monologues mostly avoid racial animus and lean toward more universal themes. Even still, Katigbak emphasized that in “Out of Time,” audiences will hear the universal stories through Asian American voices — a rarity in the theater, even in 2022.“We’ve always had limitations — at every age — just being Asian American,” Page Leong, who last performed at the Public in “Too Noble Brothers” in 1997, said of the roles that come to members of her community. “It’s also connected to being relegated to being the surgeon or the lawyer.”Rita Wolf, who has had roles in Richard Nelson’s recent plays, including “The Michaels,” said, “So much of it is about opportunity.” She added: “Every time I work on something new, I do think about generations of minority performers who, for whatever reason, were marginalized. And I think about how they did not have opportunities to do something like this.”Ohama is performing Chanse’s work, “Disturbance Specialist,” which recently clocked in at 40 minutes and 21 seconds and 4,998 words. She joked about doing such a piece at her “advanced age,” since it takes hours and hours of memorization.“When you are our ages, life is there inside of you, so we don’t have to worry about the acting so much,” Ohama said. “But what is concerning to the older actor generally is: Do I know my lines?”“We have dedicated ourselves to this art form,” she added, “and the thing about us older people is we don’t get a chance to show that very often.” More

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    Mamoudou Athie Gets Switched On by TV on the Radio and ‘Cowboy Bebop’

    The actor reveals his feelings about his new Netflix series, “Archive 81,” the inspiration of David Bowie and the real reason he bought a bike.Mamoudou Athie speaks unabashedly about tenderness, humanity and humility, and doing the right thing.In other words, he’s what you might call a romantic, and so are a lot of the characters he falls in love with these days.“But it doesn’t have to be romantic in the traditional sense,” Athie said. “That heart-forward kind of energy, I’m a sucker for it. It just really gets me every time.”And his latest role, as the tortured videotape restorer Dan Turner in the supernatural Netflix hit “Archive 81,” definitely got him. Critics have swooned, too.“He lost his family tragically at a very young age and he’s chosen this profession that gives back people a little bit of their lost past,” he said. “I was like, ‘What a heart this guy has.’”Athie — Mauritania-born, Maryland-raised and a 2014 graduate from the Yale School of Drama — has played a deceased husband in “Sorry for Your Loss,” a punk rocker in “Patti Cake$” and a hardware-store employee in “Unicorn Store.” For the role of Grandmaster Flash in “The Get Down,” he was taught how to D.J. by the legend himself.“I’m not sure fear exists for me in the same way anymore,” he laughed.In a call from Los Angeles, Athie talked about the cultural forces that have shaped his flourishing career.“I could probably start crying when I think about it, but I’ve been fortunate,” he said. “When I’ve been working with like-minded people that feel the same way I feel about them, it’s like, ‘OK, I’m on the right path here.’”Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Jenny Holzer’s “It Is in Your Self-Interest to Find a Way to Be Very Tender” Installation The head of my program at Yale, Ron Van Lieu — this guy is amazing — he was directing Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play “In Arabia We’d All Be Kings,” and it was on the program. I had no idea who Jenny Holzer was, but it really struck me. And honestly, it’s how I approach every project. For me, it’s so important to have that kind of openness and to try to affect another person in that way. It’s something that feels like it’s at the core of a lot of the characters that I’ve been drawn to lately.2. Anime Shinichiro Watanabe, Makoto Shinkai, Hideaki Anno — they’re really interested in the human condition, whether there’s supernatural elements or just truly simple stories about people relating to one another in the face of great adversity. Shinichiro Watanabe is probably best known for “Cowboy Bebop,” which is my favorite show. Period. Makoto Shinkai’s “Your Name” was a big reason I was drawn to “Archive 81,” actually, because it’s kind of a love story separated by space and time. I don’t use this word lightly: I do think they’re geniuses.3. Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” In high school I was always walking past that book, but I was like, “Man, that’s a tome. I don’t want to commit.” Then a teacher put some adaptation with Liam Neeson on, and I was like, “I’ve got to stop watching this right now and just read this book.” Jean Valjean, I mean, who doesn’t love that guy? He’s a true definition of a hero. And Victor Hugo — the thing that struck me about that book was that he would describe the prison walls for 20 pages. I’ve really grown to appreciate that level of detail and painstaking dedication to painting a crystal-clear picture of what you want to share.4. David Bowie I remember reading something [at “David Bowie is,” the 2018 Brooklyn Museum exhibition] that said he was involved in every single bit of what was onstage, what was being worn, down to the curtains. It reminded me, “There are ways to cut corners, and it’s never worth it. You have the time. If you have anything left to give, you should really just give it all.”5. His Bikes I used to ride my sister’s bike when I was a kid, because that was the one bike that we had. I never got another bike until this summer. I was working out with this trainer and I was always admiring his array of bikes. He sold me a bike that he had secondhand. And I was like, “Mamoudou, what the [expletive] is the matter with you? You can afford a bike now. Buy a bike.” I now have this specialized Aethos that I’m obsessed with. And also a Crux and an All-City Cosmic Stallion, which I bought because of the name. It happens to be a great bike, but I would be lying to you if I didn’t tell you that.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    Irma Thomas, a Soul Queen Far Beyond New Orleans

    As she turns 81, the singer whose intimacy matches her grandeur is the subject of a PBS documentary, “Irma: My Life in Music.”The singer Irma Thomas has long been known as the Soul Queen of New Orleans, a title that feels both richly deserved and far too provincial. Her songs never topped the Billboard pop chart, but they did climb it. And even today, they’re covered by bar bands and in blues jams across the country.Still, if the title suggests a mix of regality and relatability, it makes decent sense. Irma Thomas is, first and foremost, a straight shooter. You feel it in conversation, where she’s neither unduly humble nor conceited. And you can hear it in her singing, which achieves the grandeur often expected from R&B singers in the early 1960s, but has always retained a special kind of intimacy; she often sounds a bit like a more plain-spoken Etta James.“Straight From the Heart,” from her breakthrough 1964 album, “Wish Someone Would Care,” is a demand for sincerity that might be a manifesto, and a standout in a catalog studded with gems. As is made clear in “Irma: My Life in Music,” a documentary debuting on PBS stations across the country this month, Thomas has treated baring her soul as serious work for the past six decades. And she has her rules, rooted in faith and practice: Gospel doesn’t belong in an R&B set. One ought to take requests, she said in a recent interview, to be sure an audience “won’t leave disappointed.”It’s the same attitude that made Thomas an indispensable musical partner for the famed producer and songwriter Allen Toussaint: “He knew he could depend on me,” she said.Thomas, who turns 81 on Friday, began singing professionally in her teens, while already raising four children, and by the mid-1960s her career was taking off. A stint in Los Angeles in the late ’60s and ’70s resulted in frustration — as did watching the Rolling Stones score a smash hit off “Time Is on My Side” after they’d heard her version. But she returned home in the mid-70s to a hero’s welcome, and has been a fixture at nearly every New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival since it began more than half a century ago.More recently, she’s found a new generation of fans through Netflix’s “Black Mirror,” where her haunting doo-wop hit, “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand),” frequently cameos. In a phone conversation this month from her home in New Orleans East, Thomas was amicable and down-to-earth as ever — “You ask the questions, and I’ll answer ’em,” she said as we began — as she talked about growing up and thriving in New Orleans, and revealed which of her many songs she treasures the most. These are edited excerpts from the interview.Thomas said she got her start singing in church, and noted, “I’m in the choir at church even now.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWhen did you begin to realize that you really had a passion and a talent?Well, singing was something I did all the time. I mean, I can’t remember when I wasn’t singing. From a wee child, even living in Greensburg, La., I sang “The Tennessee Waltz” for my elementary schoolteacher’s play, “Cinderella.” I thought everybody did it. I didn’t think it was anything unusual.We did a lot of singing, keeping each other company or entertaining each other on the front porch during the week, when we weren’t working in the field. That was in the country. Then when I came to the city, we used to play and sing in the complex where we were. There were several kids who were playing music in school, and on weekends they would be playing music and we were singing whatever the most recent record that was out at the time. To me, I didn’t have such a big deal of a voice. Everybody around me was, you know, musically inclined to sing or play whatever instrument they were playing.You didn’t feel like you got a special response when you sang?Well, they applauded — they didn’t boo me! [Laughs]Your love for singing actually cost you work early in life, correct?I enjoyed singing for pleasure, so I was singing to keep myself company when it got me fired the first time, working the 11-to-7 shift. The second time I got fired for singing on the job, I was supposed to be waiting tables. So rather than waiting tables — or, in between waiting tables — I would get up and sing with the band that was playing at the club.How did your relationship with Allen Toussaint take shape? Was it clear immediately that you two had a special connection?It grew over time. There was just no hardships involved whenever I was working with him. He would have me sing a lot of his demos for people that he was writing songs for. I was a quick learner. When he wanted something done, he knew he could depend on me to sing it the way he wanted it sung. I never knew who he was presenting these songs to, I was just doing the demos for him.But you also made some special records together.Oh yeah, of course. He was one who wrote songs specifically for the artists: He knew my vocal ability and he would write a song that he knew would fit. And there was never a song he wrote that I turned down.One thing we haven’t talked about yet is your relationship to gospel music.I grew up in the church, so naturally I would be singing gospel music. Every Sunday when I’m not working, I still sing in church. I’m in the choir at church even now. Most of us grew up in the church, and a lot of us got our influences in the church. So it would be a natural progression to sing and to be a part of the gospel scene, whenever you could.After Katrina, Quint Davis decided that he would like for me to do a tribute to Mahalia Jackson, which I started doing. And I’m still doing the gospel set at JazzFest every year. I do a gospel set, then I do an R&B set. That’s just the natural thing to do. [Laughs]“He knew my vocal ability and he would write a song that he knew would fit,” Thomas said of working with the famed producer Allen Toussaint. “And there was never a song he wrote that I turned down.”Camille Lenain for The New York TimesHow big was Mahalia Jackson’s influence on you?I grew up listening to Mahalia Jackson’s music as a child. My parents had some of her records, back when it was 78s, and then in New Orleans we had radio stations that had gospel programming during the day. But we heard all kinds of music locally on the radio back then, because the radio stations were owned by local producers and owners. So they played a lot of local music as well as a lot of national music.So people who are my age, who grew up here in New Orleans, we had the best of both worlds because we were hearing it all. And then we didn’t have to fight to have a local record played. Nowadays, you’re lucky to hear your record once a year, because it’s not owned by local people. It’s, you know, ClearChannel or something like that, and they couldn’t care less. When you hear one hour, that’s what you’re going to hear all day long. So you don’t get a chance to call in and request what you would like to hear.Hurricane Ida had a big impact on New Orleans. It was nothing like Katrina, but the city appears to still be struggling in the wake of it.Yeah, because now supplies are hard to come by, because of the problems with shipping replenishing them. And so many people lost the roofs on their houses, so you have to wait in line, I guess. But New Orleans is a city that, you know, we’re resilient. We don’t run away. We stay here, and we snap back and move on.I’m sure almost everyone who interviews you must ask about “Time Is on My Side.” But could you talk about why you gave up playing it for a while in the middle of your career?Well you know, after a while, when you sing something that you know you’ve recorded, and you did the first national version of it, and when you’re singing, somebody tells you: “Oh, you’re doing a Rolling Stones song,” I got tired of explaining that I did it before the Rolling Stones. After a while that gets to be old. And so I stopped doing it, because I got tired of explaining that. They didn’t do their homework, they made assumptions. And so at some point you get tired of repeating yourself. Even now, I don’t do it as much as I do others. I sing it, but a lot of times it’s requested before I think about doing it, because I have so many other songs I can do.I have a large enough repertoire that by choice I can either do all of my own material or I can do a few cover songs that I like. And by taking requests, it makes it simpler, because then you are doing what your audience wants to hear. And I’ll put it this way: Most folks leave satisfied that they’ve heard their favorite song.In fact, “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is” — I recorded that back in 1964. I was at a show on the East Coast somewhere, and somebody in the audience asked me to play “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is.” I said, “Wow, I haven’t heard that request in a long time.” I sang it for them, and then when I got through, I asked them: “What album did you get that from?” They said, “We didn’t get it off an album. We heard it on ‘Black Mirror.’” You never know where you’re going to get a request from, or where they heard the song. And so I prepare — I put as much of my own material in my iPad, lyrically, so in case someone asks for it, I’ll do my best to do it for them.Is there one song that you consider nearest to your heart?The only one that I could say I’m closest to would be the one that got me my first big hit, which was “Wish Someone Would Care.” It became No. 17 in the nation, and if it hadn’t been for the British Invasion, it might have gone a little higher in the charts. There were some personal things going on in my life and I wrote the song because of those things. So that would be the closest to me. More

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    ‘Law & Order’ Is Having an Identity Crisis

    The franchise has always portrayed the police as flawed but ultimately good. The latest spinoff does away with that ambivalence.If you were going to watch a police procedural — which, for the record, I don’t particularly recommend — you could do worse than NBC’s “Law & Order” franchise. Across 32 years and more than 1,200 episodes, the original series and its six American spinoffs have offered a gentle critique of law enforcement, presenting a parade of flawed individuals navigating a byzantine justice system. Detectives are stymied by bureaucrats and squabble with lunkhead patrol officers, who reliably contaminate crime scenes. Idealistic prosecutors grow disillusioned and leave for nonprofit work. And yet the franchise still hinges on a lesser-of-two-evils logic: The institutions may be imperfect, and the cops imperfect, but their vocation is, by definition, good. There are always more victims to avenge, and none better equipped to do it than the New York Police Department.This cautiously optimistic view of policing was once embodied by Elliot Stabler, the detective played by Chris Meloni since the 1999 premiere of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” A hotheaded ex-Marine, Stabler initially clashed with authority and struggled to adapt to married life, receiving reprimands from his captain and consulting a shrink. But paired with his compassionate partner, Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), he proved an exemplary cop and father. He was dogged and intuitive, a man who gave more than he took, rough around the edges but heroic nonetheless.And yet the franchise’s latest spinoff, “Law & Order: Organized Crime,” has done away with all that fortitude. In the pilot, Stabler’s wife is killed by a car bomb, leading him to contemplate violent retribution. He grows a goatee. He goes undercover. He has a rockin’ good time. In a scene from the second season, airing now, we find him training in a boxing gym, where he’s approached by a sultry mob wife — a suspect in a sex-trafficking sting — who presents him with a pair of carnation-pink panties and invites him to her home. Once there, Stabler spikes her drink with an incapacitating agent, and they kiss until she passes out. Stabler hustles into her bedroom and riffles for evidence, escaping through a back door when her husband arrives.Stabler’s wife is killed by a car bomb, leading him to contemplate violent retribution. He grows a goatee.Never mind how implausible this sequence feels, especially given Stabler’s background as a sex-crimes detective. The tone is sleazy, owing more to 1980s action flicks than the trademark “Law & Order” grit. It’s a far cry from the franchise’s origins: middle-aged cops and attorneys plagued with lousy diets and troubled families, a dour but lively metropolis teeming with nosy neighbors and wisecracking witnesses. Instead, “Organized Crime” depicts a backlot version of New York, its desolate cityscapes almost devoid of pedestrians. Stabler’s task force targets deep-pocketed warlords and ethnic outfits, armed traffickers who hijack shipping containers and vaccine supplies. Officers meet informants on abandoned waterfronts, and everybody drives around in a giant black S.U.V. Cruising gang-controlled neighborhoods, Stabler is anxious, adrift and thirsty for vengeance. Whatever happened to America’s dad?While Stabler busies himself with mobsters and madams, the long-running “Special Victims Unit,” whose fictional plots often riff on real-world headlines, has become a lugubrious public-service announcement on modern policing. Now a captain, Benson has been elevated to virtual sainthood, leading an understaffed unit and deflecting misogyny from her superiors. In the aftermath of George Floyd, even her pristine character is tested by institutional bias and dysfunction — and her commanding officer, a Harvard-educated Black man, is replaced by a chauvinistic white man prone to victim-blaming.Benson’s relentless drive for justice remains. An arc in the 22nd season recalls the 2020 Central Park bird-watching incident, in which a white woman filed a false report against a Black man. (The charge against her was later dismissed.) The show’s stand-in for the bird-watcher is arrested; after he’s exonerated, Benson apologizes. “We both want the department to own up to their mistakes and to make changes moving forward,” she tells him. “We can get rid of the worst cops.” Her promise echoes Mayor Eric Adams’s campaign claim that he once worked to “reform the police” from the inside, and it’s a stretch even by “Law & Order” standards. The franchise once focused on good work done by flawed people, but now even “S.V.U.” takes a more evangelistic stance. Police departments may abuse their power, it concedes, but they are redeemed by the likes of Olivia Benson.Stabler is an avenger, Benson a heart-of-gold administrator.What’s jarring about the way “Organized Crime” and “S.V.U.” have diverged is how thoroughly both shows sacrifice realism to preserve optimistic attitudes toward policing. The original “Law & Order,” which aired from 1990 to 2010 (a revival begins this month), took pains to establish its characters as public servants, not superheroes. On the job, the detectives and attorneys wore drab, rumpled suits and worked desk phones from cramped offices. Off the job, they drank and avoided their families, because dealing with predators makes for a harrowing day. For some of them — Sam Waterston’s Jack McCoy, S.Epatha Merkerson’s Anita Van Buren — the lack of glamour suggested selflessness: Clearly they could’ve made more money elsewhere.Judging by the show’s longevity, this vision was a palatable one, a big-tent philosophy that allowed the show to celebrate the justice system while acknowledging its failures. A tone of knowing cynicism lent the writing credibility; a wariness of machismo and bureaucracy gave it tension. It maintained a certitude that New Yorkers needed protection from their neighbors, and that those who provided it merited sympathy.But in a time of skyrocketing funding and increased attention on police brutality, that big tent has collapsed. “Organized Crime” and “S.V.U.” face a new hurdle: They must demonstrate that cops are indeed the good guys. Both have cagily staked their territory. “S.V.U.” pays lip service to reform without seriously considering it; “Organized Crime” looks the other way entirely, supposing a wasteland of a city overrun by militant thugs. Stabler is an avenger, Benson a heart-of-gold administrator who could maybe be talked into some additional sensitivity training.It bears mention that another spinoff, “Law & Order: Hate Crimes,” was announced and then put on hold in 2019. Given the franchise’s expositional method and penchant for moral ambiguity, it’s unsettling to contemplate what that show might have looked like. In interviews, the franchise’s creator, Dick Wolf, has stressed that the shows maintain a nonpolitical lens on current events. But the incoherence of the new installments is a statement in itself. The shows could not ignore that millions of Americans were so shaken by police violence that they took to the streets in 2020. But it’s also true that some share of “Law & Order” fans must have thin-blue-line flags draped from their porches. Two roads diverged in a wood, and “Law & Order” pretends to take them both.Opening page: Screen grab from YouTube. Above: Virginia Sherwood/NBC; Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images; Heidi Gutman/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty Images. More

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    Late Night Dunks on Trump for Getting Dumped During Tax Season

    “It’s like getting divorced on Christmas Eve,” Jimmy Kimmel joked.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.‘H&R Cellblock’Last week, Donald Trump’s longtime accounting firm Mazars USA cut ties with the former president and his family, saying financial statements they prepared for him from 2011 to 2020 should “no longer be relied upon.”“In other words, ‘We are not going to prison with you, Mr. Trump,’” Jimmy Kimmel joked on Tuesday night.“So, for those nine years, no one should trust any of his financial statements, or any of his statements.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Good for them, standing up and doing the right thing 10 years too late.” — JAMES CORDEN“The New York attorney general and Manhattan district attorney have been trying to determine whether the insurers, lenders and others Trump dealt with were misled about the strength of his finances. Let me save you guys some trouble: They were.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“If there’s any karma in this world, they dropped him for a younger, hotter client.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“What new information could have come to light right now? Were they like ‘Wait a minute — Trump organization? As in Donald — does that have something to do with Donald Trump?’” — JAMES CORDEN“Now he’s going to need someone else to do his taxes. I suggest H&R Cellblock.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I tell you, there’s nothing more depressing than getting dumped by your accountant during tax season. It’s like getting divorced on Christmas Eve.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I like the idea of Donald Trump angrily now setting up a TurboTax account to get his taxes done.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“A lot of people believe this could be it for Donald Trump — this could be the one. I don’t know. How many ‘the ones’ have we had now. We’ve had like 400 or something?” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Kamila Valieva Edition)“I also know that nobody believes her excuse, right? That she accidentally took her grandfather’s heart medication, but I do. I believe her, because I know what it was like growing up me and my family — we always had a big bowl of loose pills all mixed together. It’s an easy mistake to make.” — TREVOR NOAH, on the Russian Olympic skater Kamila Valieva testing positive for a banned substance called trimetazidine“She tested positive for three substances that can be used to treat heart problems. Imagine how devastating that must be: You train your whole life to be in the Olympics, follow all the rules, put in all the hours, eat the right things. Last minute, you accidentally take your grandfather’s heart medicine.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“No one is focusing on the fact that her grandpa took her medication, now he’s dominating bingo at the old folks home.” — TREVOR NOAH“But again, I’m not saying Russia did it on purpose; I’m not saying that. I’m just saying don’t be shocked when later this week they use 15-year-olds to invade Ukraine.” — TREVOR NOAH“Her lawyer said maybe her grandfather drank something from a glass, saliva got in and this glass was somehow later used by the athlete. Ah, the old ‘must be from Grandpa’s saliva’ defense, huh?’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“We’ve all shared a big, wet cup of water with Granddad, haven’t we?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I think the real question is, how much of your grandfather’s saliva are you coming in contact with and why?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And why does this keep happening to Russia? These poor people. Will you leave them alone?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I can’t believe they caught someone cheating and they’re still letting her compete while they investigate more. Like guys, it almost feels like the investigation is not about whether she cheated or not, it’s almost like the real investigation here is ‘OK, let’s see what the drugs can do — let it rip! Come on, let’s just see. We want to know, right? Everybody wants to know.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingRoy Wood Jr. dived into the history of Black athletes at the Winter Olympics on his “Daily Show” segment “CP Time.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightRebecca Hall, the director of “Passing,” will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutAudra McDonald, Denée Benton and John Douglas Thompson in “The Gilded Age.”Alison Rosa/HBOHBO’s “The Gilded Age” seeks to depict an elite class of 19th-century Black New Yorkers with historical accuracy. More

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    ‘Wolf Play’ Review: What Keeps a Family From Falling to Pieces?

    Hansol Jung’s new play looks at the broken adoption of a little boy who is plucked from South Korea and moved to one American home, then shunted to another.Sand-colored with beady black eyes and a throaty howl, the character at the center of “Wolf Play” is and is not what he seems. Wolf, who serves as the narrator, is a simple but expressive puppet made of wood, cardboard and papier-mâché in this probing and playful exploration of family by Hansol Jung.Loose-limbed and rising just a few feet off the floor of the tiny stage at Soho Rep, Wolf represents a 6-year-old boy who undergoes one wrenching separation after another. The American couple who adopt him from South Korea decide they can’t handle him and the demands of their newborn too, so they find another family for the boy by advertising on a Yahoo message board.An abandonment so awful and absurd calls for fierce survival instincts. Perhaps that goes to explain why the boy isn’t a boy at all, but a wolf who longs for a pack, as Mitchell Winter, the adult actor maneuvering the puppet, insists.Wolves get a bad rap, Winter tells the audience, which is seated on either side of the stage. The lone ones may snatch red hoods, but they don’t make mischief for its own sake. It’s a natural response for familial creatures left to fend for themselves, crouched defensively much of the time. “But stories need conflict,” he says, “and, boy, do wolves know how to fight.”“Wolf Play,” which opened on Monday, proposes that “the truth is a wobbly thing.” In Jung’s freely associative landscape, that means allowing a puppet to be a boy, a boy to be a wolf and a wolf to be an actor in a knit cap with pointy ears (costumes are by Enver Chakartash).The play directed by Dustin Wills and presented with Ma-Yi Theatre Company, portrays a traumatic situation, but with an antic disposition and a goofy heart. How would a boy respond to these wounds but with growls, howls and swinging paws? It seems too much for one being to process, yet there’s a lightness here that chases away the shadows.Wolf, a volatile and reactive jumble of joints, is handed off by Peter (Aubie Merrylees), the father who adopted him, to Robin (Nicole Villamil) and her wife, Ash (Esco Jouléy). Robin is eager to become a mother, while Ash is a boxer prepping to go pro and reluctant to take on a distraction like a child. Ryan (Brandon Mendez Homer), who is Robin’s brother and Ash’s coach, seems supportive of the adoption — until Wolf’s position in the pack seems to threaten his own.If the play has a love plot, it’s between Wolf and Ash, a prototypical fighter with a tough exterior and soft center. Ash is nonbinary, and is the first person to whom the boy speaks out loud. “Wolf Play” suggests there’s an animality connecting us that transcends gendered social scripts; kinship and love are wild and don’t play by any rules. Peter, however, objects to the absence of a conventional father in the boy’s new home.Performances from the ensemble are uniformly strong and suited to the production’s intimate scale. Winter’s double feat as an energetic narrator and a sensitive puppeteer is so nimble that the boy often appears to be a separate living thing, endearing one moment, a terror the next (Amanda Villalobos is the puppet designer).But casting a wolf as a protagonist becomes a tricky gesture when expressing inner feelings is limited to encyclopedic facts about the species. (“Wolves are cautious, the masters of survival.” “Wolves suck at being alone.”) Though Jung’s narrator seems to promise access to the story’s emotional core, there is only so much that taxonomy can illuminate.Wills’s production has the exuberant restlessness of a crayon drawing tacked to the fridge, chaotic but underlaid with a careful internal logic. A door on wheels, mismatched chairs and blue balloons (from Wolf’s “welcome home” party) are roving fixtures of You-Shin Chen’s set. Barbara Samuels’s lighting makes prodigious use of tone and darkness, while the sound design by Kate Marvin inspires the grating quality of a child’s crying.If stories need conflicts, as Wolf suggests, the climactic ones here — a bout in the ring, the inevitable custody battle — ultimately feel manufactured and somewhat beside the point. There’s an unruly quality to Jung’s idea of what theater can be, jagged and untethered, coy and dreamlike. It’s thrilling to see that potential unleashed on the vagaries of love, even if it’s not so easily tamed.Wolf PlayThrough March 20 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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    Review: A ‘Merchant of Venice’ That Doubles Down on Pain

    John Douglas Thompson stars in Arin Arbus’s caustic and assertive new production of the Shakespeare play.More than 30 years ago, John Douglas Thompson, then a successful salesman at a Fortune 500 company, saw a play in New Haven, Conn. When it was over, he offered up a prayer: “Please, God, make me an actor. Teach me how to do that, and make this possible for me.”Thompson told me this five years ago, on the floor of a Broadway lobby after finishing a performance of August Wilson’s “Jitney.” And I remembered it last week, watching him as Shylock in Arin Arbus’s caustic, provocative production of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” at Theater for a New Audience.That prayer has been answered.Since 2009, when he played Othello — also for Arbus, also at Theater for a New Audience — audiences have recognized Thompson as an outstanding classical actor, perhaps the greatest Shakespeare interpreter in contemporary America theater. There are actors of greater plasticity, better grace, lusher voice. But Thompson, a virtuoso of psychological insight and emotional specificity, makes each centuries-old line sound like it has occurred to him in the moment. In his distinctive sandpaper rasp, he takes what’s timeless and transmutes it to the present. To watch him work is to feel fluttery, lightheaded. Blessed, maybe.“The Merchant of Venice” is a fairy tale with a corrosive center, a chocolate filled with battery acid. Its plot joins two folk tales, three love stories and a nerve-splintering trial scene that puts “Perry Mason” to shame. It concerns a melancholy Christian merchant, Antonio (Alfredo Narciso), who borrows 3,000 ducats from a Jewish usurer, Shylock (Thompson), to fund his friend Bassanio (Sanjit De Silva) — a close friendship that Arbus renders as explicitly romantic. Shylock forgoes interest in favor of an unusual condition: If Antonio forfeits, Shylock will extract a pound of flesh from his body.From left, Thompson, Maurice Jones, Yonatan Gebeyehu, Nate Miller, Alfredo Narciso and Varín Ayala in the production, which emphasizes the awfulness of everyone in Venice, not Shylock alone.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDespite his relationship with Antonio, Bassanio is wooing Portia (a flexible and elegant Isabel Arraiza). To confound her suitors, her father has set them a challenge. They have to choose among three caskets: one gold, one silver, one lead. If a suitor chooses correctly, he will find Portia’s portrait. Otherwise, he has to leave, with the promise that he will never marry. The plots combine in that harrowing courtroom scene, where Portia gives her “quality of mercy” speech.Over the past century, scholars have debated whether “Merchant” should be staged at all, particularly after the play was deployed in Germany in the 1940s as Nazi propaganda. Every responsible production has to contend with its uneasy legacy.Arbus’s solution is to emphasize the awfulness of everyone in Venice, not Shylock alone. Mercy? Look elsewhere. On Riccardo Hernandez’s set, a doge’s palace given a Brutalist remodel, and under Marcus Doshi’s grim lights, the characters demean and betray one another. Even the virtuous Portia displays casual racism and less-casual hypocrisy. No one else behaves any better. Emily Rebholz’s costumes — athleisure, Vans, a hoodie with “Brooklyn” printed on it — confirm this atmosphere of treachery as neither long ago nor far away.Casting Thompson complicates the prejudices at work in the play, superimposing Blackness on Shylock’s Jewishness. Black Jews of course exist, but despite the interpolation of some lines from a Yom Kippur prayer at the play’s end, it is this Shylock’s Blackness and not his Jewishness that Arbus’s production emphasizes. “By casting a Black man as Shylock in America in 2021, one becomes painfully aware of the connections between Shakespeare’s 16th-century Venice and our world now,” she said in a news release.This pays certain dividends, giving some lines particular resonance, as when Shylock, in his speech to the Venetian court, says:You have among you many a purchased slave,Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,You use in abject and in slavish partsBecause you bought them. Shall I say to youLet them be free! Marry them to your heirs!Why sweat they under burdens? Let their bedsBe made as soft as yours?In laying bare Antonio’s prejudices during the first act, Thompson mockingly assumes the cringing tones of a racist caricature, a barbed and devastating choice that shows his anguished self-awareness. He knows how the others see him and how they want him to behave. He refuses. But in exacting revenge on those who perceive him as less than fully human, he loses his own humanity, which is his tragedy.And yet, this doubling feels like displacement — diminishment, perhaps — especially as it sidesteps the thorny questions of the play’s own attitudes toward Jews. Threats against American Jews have risen precipitously in recent years, as has online harassment. The hostage situation at a Texas synagogue last month was a sobering reminder of hatred with a long history. None of this necessarily makes Arbus’s focus on Blackness wrong. (And who would deny Thompson any role he wanted?) But anti-Blackness and antisemitism aren’t identical. And both continue. Which is to say: Wasn’t this painful enough? Weren’t we aware already?The Merchant of VeniceThrough March 6 at Theater for a New Audience, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More