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    Trevor Noah Suggests Sending Marjorie Taylor Greene to Beijing

    “If you want to get back at China, you have Marjorie Taylor Greene in the stands,” Noah said of the U.S. diplomatic boycott of the Olympics.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.Icy Diplomatic RelationsPresident Biden on Monday announced that the U.S. would not be sending diplomats to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, citing China’s human rights abuses.Trevor Noah said that American diplomats would have to watch the Winter Games like the rest of us, “by turning on the TV and then getting bored after three minutes and then turning it off.”“He’s not about to fly across 12 time zones to watch a bunch of Norwegians sweep an ice rink.” — TREVOR NOAH, on Joe Biden“And that’s a real shame that the Americans officials won’t be at the Olympics, because you realize Kamala Harris was about to become the first Black woman to ever watch a hockey game.” — TREVOR NOAH“That’s the one cool reason to be president, right? Most of us, if we don’t want to do something, we have to come up with some lame excuse, and then everyone else shows up and talks about how he didn’t come. But if you are president, you can just be like, ‘Diplomatic boycott: No one is allowed to attend Emily’s birthday brunch.’” — TREVOR NOAH“If you want to get back at China, you have Marjorie Taylor Greene in the stands.” — TREVOR NOAH“Nothing will convince China to change their ways like not sending the secretary of agriculture to the Olympics.” — JIMMY FALLON“When the news broke, everyone’s mom was like, ‘The oiled-up flag bearer from Tonga will still be there, right?’” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s different from our last Olympic diplomatic boycott, which was just Mike Pence refusing to watch men’s doubles luge.” — JIMMY FALLONTalk About Man-SpreadingJimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers weighed in on news that Donald Trump came into contact with at least 500 people after testing positive for the coronavirus.“He’s like the Johnny Appleseed of Covid,” Meyers joked.“So, it turns out that Trump tested positive for Covid before a presidential debate with Joe Biden and kept it a secret. Although, in retrospect, I feel like maybe we should’ve known from that debate that he had something, based on his performance. It was either Covid or rabies.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s right — he could have knowingly infected hundreds of people with a deadly virus himself. You know, when you’re a star, they let you do it — you can do anything.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Trump took no precautions after testing positive. He didn’t cancel events; he was maskless inside the White House and on Air Force One. It’s almost like, you know, if you didn’t know him better, it’s almost like he doesn’t care about others.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Variations on a Theme Edition)“Everybody’s talking about it, but nobody really knows what the story is really about, because it’s all Omicron — Omicron this and Omicron that. But we don’t really understand if it’s going to change anything. We don’t ‘knowmicron’ about Omicron.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So far, Omicron appears to be milder and more infectious than Delta, and that may be happening because, according to a new study, ‘It shares genetic code with the common cold.’ This pandemic has gone on so long, we’re officially in the remix stage. The next variant’s going to be Covid, featuring shingles, the Skrillex mix.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Well, here’s some good news. Dr. Fauci said that the first data on the severity of the Omicron variant is ‘encouraging.’ Yeah, that’s what passes for good news in 2021.” — JIMMY FALLON“Dr. Fauci says that while it’s still too early to know for sure, it looks like Omicron spreads more easily than Delta but may be less severe, yeah — which means Covid might have watered itself down so it could reach more people — like the Ice Cube of corona variants.” — TREVOR NOAH“The new deadly virus variant is only worrisome. People were like, ‘This calls for a tepid uncertain celebration.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, it’s encouraging, which is positive enough to continue with your holiday plans, but vague enough to make you spend the entire time freaking out.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingTig Notaro talked about going back on the road for her “Hello Again” tour while on Monday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightKristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon will talk about their new “Sex and the City” reboot on Tuesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutBradley Cooper, left, with Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in “Licorice Pizza.” Once she mastered driving the truck, she said, “I felt like a badass.” MGM, via Associated PressAlana Haim is as surprised as anyone that she’s getting rave reviews for her acting debut in “Licorice Pizza.” More

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    ‘Selling Kabul’ Review: Trapped in a War, and an Apartment

    In Sylvia Khoury’s suspenseful new play, the characters sometimes feel too much like wheels in a machine, but it’s a tense thrill to watch it work.Sylvia Khoury’s “Selling Kabul,” a 95-minute thriller that opened on Monday at Playwrights Horizons, is a play as tautly made as a military bed. You could bounce a quarter off it — or given its provenance, a five-afghani coin — and then throw yourself down to recover your nerves, which the drama will have absolutely mangled.The time is 2013, 12 years after the beginning of America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan, eight years before its unceremonious close and a moment in which the United States has radically reduced its troop presence. The setting, by Arnulfo Maldonado, is the nice enough Kabul apartment where Afiya (Marjan Neshat) lives with her husband, Jawid (Mattico David), a tailor and storekeeper. For months they have shared the apartment with a third roommate, Taroon (Dario Ladani Sanchez), Afiya’s brother, who spends many of his waking hours in the living room closet.At some point in the past, Taroon worked as a translator for the American forces, which has made him a target of the Taliban. Separated from his pregnant wife, he passes his days surreptitiously watching television and checking the status of his special immigrant visa — when the Wi-Fi works, anyway. As the play begins, Taroon’s wife is in labor and he must weigh the risk of seeing her.As directed by Tyne Rafaeli, “Selling Kabul” has elements of a Greek tragedy and an espionage thriller. As a suspense story that unrolls in real time, it also suggests stage chillers like “Rope.” Khoury has built her play like a puzzle box. Every detail of the wordless opening moments, even the offstage noises — a baby crying, an engine revving — will reverberate later on. (This is the rare play in which the sound design, by Lee Kinney, is absolutely crucial to the story.) Pay particular attention to the opening conversation between Afiya and Taroon, a tangle of truth and lies in which each word matters.A structural marvel, “Selling Kabul” can sometimes sound a little hollow at its core. Khoury sketches personalities for the characters — rounded out by Francis Benhamou as Leyla, a chatterbox neighbor — quickly and deftly. We immediately understand Taroon’s impetuousness, Jawid’s equivocation, Leyla’s bright anguish, Afiya’s fretful good sense. (Afiya is the play’s moral center; Neshat is its standout.) But these people mainly serve as devices to urge the drama toward crisis and their speech can seem stilted, as when Taroon reacts to the birth of his son: “He’ll think me a coward. Too scared to show my face in the light of day.”This would matter less in another play, located in an environment more familiar to American audiences, or if we had more plays, particularly plays by writers of Middle Eastern descent, set in this region. But we don’t have many. In terms of what has played in New York, only “Homebody/Kabul,” “Blood and Gifts” and “The Great Game: Afghanistan” come to mind, works by white British and American writers. At its best, theater can bring the faraway very close, personalize the abstract.Acknowledging that too few of us stateside will ever understand the civilian toll of conflicts like those in Afghanistan, I wish Khoury, a playwright of French and Lebanese descent, and Rafaeli had done more to make these characters feel fully human and not just wheels in a beautiful machine. Or maybe this is simply my own regret talking — my memory of seeing the images of the chaos at Kabul airport during America’s botched August exit and realizing that I should have been paying a lot more attention. But that’s the thing about a forever war waged a world away: I didn’t have to. It’s unfair to want “Selling Kabul” to have made me.So enjoy the play instead as a nimble entertainment and a first-rate workout for your sympathetic nervous system — if I still bit my nails I would have no nails left now. And appreciate, too, that while “Selling Kabul” could have ended tragically, it instead offers some morsel of hope to all of its characters, even if it perverts reason to keep that hope alive. (Honestly, there are a few other logical discrepancies, as when fastidious characters suddenly leave the door open. But when you’re tempted to yell, “For the love of all that’s holy, lock the door!” at the stage, clearly a play has got you.)After the lights come back on, you will find an insert in your program with information about the International Refugee Assistance Project, a charity that offers legal aid to people in Taroon’s situation, a way to make that hope more real. Maybe that’s a test of a play, not how well it works within a theater’s narrow walls, but how much it makes you want to act beyond them.Selling KabulThrough Dec. 23 at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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    Jussie Smollett Tells Jury He Did Not Direct a Fake Attack on Himself

    The actor, who is accused of asking two brothers to mildly attack him, and then reporting it as a hate crime, took the stand at his criminal trial on charges related to the 2019 assault.Jussie Smollett took the stand on Monday in an effort to convince a Chicago jury that he did not orchestrate a racist and homophobic hate crime against himself but, instead, was the victim of both a real attack and the police’s rush to judgment in charging him.Mr. Smollett, 39, submitted himself to questioning in his own trial to rebut the testimony of two key witnesses, Abimbola Osundairo and Olabinjo Osundairo, brothers who told the court last week that Mr. Smollett had instructed them in detail on how to attack him.The Osundairo brothers said Mr. Smollett took them through a “dry run” of the attack on the day before it was supposed to occur in January 2019 and asked one of them to bruise him without inflicting real injuries while the other put a rope around his neck and poured bleach on him.Prosecutors have argued that Mr. Smollett staged the attack because he was upset that the show on which he starred, the Fox hip-hop drama “Empire,” did not take seriously a threatening letter he had received at the studio.But Mr. Smollett sought to undercut the prosecution’s explanation, testifying that he had refused the studio’s offer of additional security, which would have driven him each day from his home to the set.“I’m a grown man,” Mr. Smollett said. “I don’t need to be driven around like Miss Daisy.”He also supported the defense contention that the brothers attacked him so that he might be scared enough to hire them as his private security. Mr. Smollett said that Abimbola Osundairo was persistent in trying to act as his bodyguard, at times behaving when they went out in ways that reminded him of the “Secret Service.”And Mr. Smollett’s version of what happened on Jan. 25, 2019, just days before the attack, when the prosecution says Mr. Smollett asked Abimbola Osundairo for help “on the low,” was completely different. He was seeking a meeting, not to plan his own assault, but to arrange to get an herbal steroid from Nigeria that helps people lose body fat and is illegal in the United States.“At any point in time did you talk to him about some hoax?” Mr. Smollett’s lawyer, Nenye Uche, asked.“No,” Mr. Smollett replied.During their car ride later, they did not plan the attack, as the prosecution argued, but smoked marijuana, Mr. Smollett said.“We drove around and smoked and that was that,” he testified.Olabinjo Osundairo, at the courthouse, where he testified Thursday that Mr. Smollett had orchestrated the attack.Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressAbimbola Osundairo, Olabinjo’s brother, told the court last week that Mr. Smollett was upset that a threatening letter he received had not been taken more seriously.Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressMr. Smollett also sought early in his testimony to indicate just how happy he had been with his role on “Empire,” and, when asked directly, said he had no problem with Fox. Instead Mr. Smollett, who is gay, testified that it had been a blessing to win the role of Jamal Lyon, a gay singer-songwriter, that so closely mirrored his identity and to eventually earn $100,000 per episode.“I had never seen a gay man — let alone a gay Black man — portrayed ever,” Mr. Smollett said. “I really, really wanted to do it.”Over the course of the trial, prosecutors have sought to paint a picture of the attack as a bid for publicity, pointing to how, days before the attack, Mr. Smollett had received the letter at the studio for “Empire.” It included a red stick figure hanging from a noose, a homophobic slur and the acronym “MAGA,” said Daniel K. Webb, the special prosecutor in the case, in the courtroom last week.“He devised this fake hate crime to take place so that the ‘Empire’ studio would take this more seriously,” Mr. Webb said, “because this fake hate crime would get media attention.”But the showrunner for “Empire” at the time, Brett Mahoney, testified earlier on Monday that the show had actually taken the letter “very seriously,” and sought to provide Mr. Smollett with additional security.As he began his testimony, Mr. Smollett depicted himself to the jury with a lengthy biographical summary of his career as someone who grew up in a middle-class family of performers, received some work as a child actor, became deeply involved in charity organizations and returned to acting, landing the major role on “Empire.”In January 2019, when the attack was reported, public sympathy for Mr. Smollett was immediate and widespread. But as the police investigation into the report stalled, suspicion grew about Mr. Smollett’s account, though the actor stood by it.Understand the Jussie Smollett TrialCard 1 of 5A staged hate crime? More

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    Antony Sher, Actor Acclaimed for His Versatility, Dies at 72

    In his long career, most of it with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he played everyone from King Lear to Primo Levi to Ringo Starr.Antony Sher, an actor known for his masterly interpretations of Shakespeare’s great characters and for his versatility, died on Thursday at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. He was 72.The cause was cancer, said the Royal Shakespeare Company, with which Mr. Sher had been closely associated for more than four decades. Gregory Doran, the company’s artistic director and Mr. Sher’s husband, had announced in September that he would take compassionate leave to care for Mr. Sher.Mr. Sher was 32 when he first attracted notice as an actor, playing the leading role of a libidinous, manipulative lecturer in a 1981 BBC adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s novel “The History Man.” He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company the next year.His breakthrough came in 1984, in the title role of Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” He performed on crutches, which he used as an extension of Richard’s contorted physique and psyche to evoke Shakespeare’s description of the character as “a bottled spider.”In The Times of London, Sheridan Morley described his portrayal as “the only one in our lifetime to have challenged the 40-year memory of Olivier in that role.” Other critics agreed that it was a career-making performance. “In this unabashed attempt at incarnating evil, Mr. Sher is monstrously convincing,” Mel Gussow wrote in The New York Times.In 1985 he won an Olivier Award both for his performance as Richard and for his subsequent role as a drag queen in Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy.” In his acceptance speech, he said he was happy “to be the first actor to win an award for playing both a king and a queen.”Mr. Sher went on to play numerous great Shakespearean roles, including Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” (1987), Leontes in “The Winter’s Tale” (1999), Iago in “Othello” (2004), Prospero in “The Tempest” (2008), Falstaff in “Henry IV,” Parts One and Two (2014), and the title roles in “Titus Andronicus” (1994), “Macbeth” (1999) and “King Lear” (2016).“The voice alone is rich, roaring music,” Charles Isherwood wrote in a 2014 New York Times review of “Henry IV,” adding that “Mr. Sher manages to make Shakespeare’s often arcane language sound as familiar as the slang you’d hear on the streets today.”In 1987, when playing Shylock, Mr. Sher noticed “a handsome chap playing Solanio,” he later recalled, “so I asked the director who he was.” It was Mr. Doran, who would become his partner and, in 2015, his husband.After a tense first collaboration, when Mr. Doran directed Mr. Sher in the title role of “Titus Andronicus,” a production they took to Mr. Sher’s native South Africa in 1995, they determined that they wouldn’t discuss work at home. (They went on to work together extensively, but not exclusively.)In addition to Mr. Doran, Mr. Sher’s survivors include two brothers, Joel and Randall.Mr. Sher’s dramatic range was extensive. He won rave reviews for his performances in “Cyrano de Bergerac” and Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” both directed by Mr. Doran. He played Arturo Ui in Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” and Joseph K in an adaptation of Kafka’s “The Trial,” and he won his second Olivier Award in 1997 for his portrayal of the painter Stanley Spencer in Pam Gem’s “Stanley.” He was awarded a knighthood for services to the theater in 2000.Mr. Sher won his second Olivier Award for his portrayal of the painter Stanley Spencer in Pam Gem’s “Stanley.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Sher was also a prolific writer and an accomplished artist. He published an autobiography, “Beside Myself,” in 2001, as well as four novels, two plays and three theater diaries, illustrated with his sketches and paintings.In many of his books he described his connection to, and ambivalence about, South Africa. “Home. Love. Hate,” he wrote in his autobiography. “A triangle, a difficult equation, it’s always there for me.”In 2004 he wrote and starred in “Primo,” an adaptation of “If This Is a Man,” Primo Levi’s unsparing 1947 account of daily life in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Writing about the 2005 Broadway production, Ben Brantley of The Times said that Mr. Sher “creates a portrait in which brutal memory penetrates the very marrow of one man’s existence.”Mr. Sher in the 2005 Broadway production of “Primo,” based on Primo Levi’s 1947 Holocaust memoir, “If This Is a Man.”Ivan KynclHe frequently spoke of being drawn to playing outsiders and misfits. “I was a white Jewish South African and I didn’t feel like I belonged in the classical British theater,” he said in an interview with The Times before the premiere of John Kani’s “Kunene and the King” in 2019. “I always felt a bit like an interloper.”In what was to be his last role, he played a terminally ill South African actor preparing to play King Lear. In the interview, he said that he had tried to leave his South African identity behind when he moved to Britain, but that he could now celebrate the way his life “had come full circle.”Mr. Sher with John Kani in “Kunene and the King,” written by Mr. Kani, in 2019. In what turned out to be his last role, Mr. Sher played a terminally ill South African actor.Ellie KurttzAntony Sher was born in Cape Town on June 14, 1949, the third of four children of Emmanuel Sher, an importer of animal hides, and Margery (Abramowitz) Sher, who ran the house. “Her role in life was of commander in chief, and that often meant battle conditions,” Mr. Sher wrote of their life in Sea Point, the middle-class white suburb where he grew up.Although his grandparents were Lithuanian Jews who had fled pogroms in Europe, Mr. Sher said he had little sense growing up that they were living amid similarly oppressive conditions for Black people in apartheid South Africa. “My family was typical of white families at the time, almost ignorant about apartheid, which sounds impossible but true,” he said in 2019. “I became politicized much later in England.”Short, slight and bespectacled, Mr. Sher never felt he fit in at the sports-mad boys’ school he attended. Sent by his mother to elocution classes, he was introduced to the plays of John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker. By 16, he had decided to go to drama school in London.First however, he had to do nine months of national army service, obligatory for all white men in South Africa. Although it was a traumatic experience, he wrote in his autobiography that he later came to regard it as “a kind of research trip” for playing Macbeth, Richard III, Cyrano and others.In 1968, Mr. Sher flew to London with his parents and auditioned for both the Central School of Speech and Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Both turned him down. The Royal Academy’s letter, he recalled, was particularly wounding. “We strongly urge you to seek a different career,” it said.He found a place at the Webber Douglas Academy, where his teachers included Steven Berkoff, then performed with the theater group Gay Sweatshop before landing the role of Ringo Starr in Willy Russell’s Beatles musical “John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert,” which transferred to the West End. During the run of the show, Mr. Sher met Jim Hooper, a fellow actor, with whom he would live for the next 18 years.It took Mr. Sher a long time to admit openly that he was gay; he had two relationships with women after drama school and a brief marriage before publicly acknowledging his homosexuality in 1989. Rather disappointingly, he wrote, that revelation “made no impact whatsoever.”He also tried hard, early on, to shed any traces of a South African identity, telling people he was British. “It wasn’t just that I was ashamed of apartheid,” he wrote. “I was also ashamed of coming from a cultural wasteland. How could you become a famous actor if you were a white South African?”After “The History Man,” Mr. Sher appeared in a handful of films, including “Mrs. Brown” and “Shakespeare in Love,” but his career remained firmly anchored in the theater. He overcame a cocaine addiction in the mid-1990s and later remarked that he had been able to use that experience in playing Falstaff.“For an actor,” he said, “nothing is wasted.” More

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    No Matter the Role, Antony Sher Made Soaring Seem Possible

    The actor, who died at the age of 72, was known for his commanding performances of Shakespeare’s Richard III and the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi.To watch Antony Sher onstage was an uncommonly visceral experience. Sher, the South African-born British stage star who died on Thursday at 72, made you feel his performances on a level few other actors achieve.I’m not talking about an emotional reaction here, or not only that. I mean a physical response, the kind that registers in your muscles, your stomach, your bones. A small-framed 5-foot-6, Sher was not, by conventional measurements, a naturally imposing presence.Yet the concentration and physiological specificity with which he embodied characters, from power-hungry medieval monarchs to a 20th-century sensualist painter, made you tense up in anatomical empathy. After attending a Sher performance, I would often throb with the ache that follows a rigorous run on rough terrain. I was even tempted to check my body for bruises.After seeing him in the title role of “Primo,” on Broadway in 2005, I found myself walking gingerly as I left the theater, and I imagined I could sense other audience members doing the same. In that one-man work, adapted by Sher from “If This Is a Man,” the memoir of the great writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, the actor gave palpable shape to the unspeakable legacy of life in a concentration camp, in the very way he moved across a stage.Each step he took had a stiffness and wariness that evoked months of existence as a human beast of burden in shoes that never fit. The simplest everyday movements became an assertion of will over the tidal pull of both terrifying memory and an abused body. And you knew, on a gut level, that the six-digit tattoo etched on his arm was only the most superficial emblem of how this man had been scrawled upon by inhuman hands.That sense of wrestling with and overcoming the limitations of the fallible human form was spectacularly evident in the performance that made him a star: Shakespeare’s Richard III. For that 1984 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, he consulted orthopedic surgeons to understand the exact nature of Richard III’s physical disabilities.The resulting portrait was of the “bottled spider,” the “bunch-backed toad” as a man who had taken thorough inventory of the limitations of his body and transformed perceived weaknesses into weapons. On crutches, he moved faster and more forcefully than anyone else onstage, and you were never not aware of the exhausting energy required. (The process of Sher’s transformation into Richard is documented in his 1985 book, “Year of the King,” a first-rate breakdown of an actor’s creation of a role.)I regret having missed his Lear, some three decades later. But I cherish my memories of his Macbeth, directed for the Royal Shakespeare Company by Sher’s partner (and future husband) Gregory Doran, which came to the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Conn., in 2000, with the marvelous Harriet Walter as the thane’s murderous wife. Unlike Richard III, Macbeth was an able-bodied, rather ordinary looking soldier.But the gap between a mortal body and the spirit that would transcend it was still in thrilling evidence. At one point, Macbeth speaks, almost disparagingly, of his “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself and falls on the other …”And Sher’s Macbeth was infused with the sense of ambition stretching arduously to make its possessor smarter, nobler, larger than he really was. His body, in this case, seemed truly to puff up and grow bigger. He looked hot, as in feverish or on fire; the glimmer in his eyes was scary. By the end, the fire had turned to something dead and ashen, and Macbeth had shrunk into an easily vanquished foe.Three years earlier, I had seen him on Broadway as the British painter Stanley Spencer, an artist who focused on the spirit within the palpable flesh and whose often biblical figures were rendered with a fecund earthiness. In Pam Gems’s “Stanley,” Sher seemed almost airborne, a scampering sprite of a man who never walked when he could leap. But even as he did his damnedest to defy gravity, there was no doubt that Stanley’s ecstatic energy had its source in the carnal, the corporeal, the animal, with an attendant, sorrowful awareness of the way of all flesh.Another character in the play describes Spencer’s art in these terms: “He paints people trapped, as it were, in their own flesh, pinned down to this earth, and yet they seek to soar and he makes that seem so very possible.”It’s a worthy epitaph for Mr. Sher as well. Onstage, he truly soared. That you felt, so completely, the effort required for a human body to take flight made you marvel all the more at the accomplishment. More

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    ‘Insecure’ Recap, Season 5, Episode 7: Questions, Questions

    For Issa and the girls, a day of relaxation turns into a night of introspection.Season 5, Episode 7, ‘Chillin’, Okay?!’There is something about spending an entire day with your girls, in the house. Things come out, love is passed around, laughter is shared and there is a warmth that comes from all of that friction.“Chillin’, Okay?!” starts at Issa’s apartment, where Molly, Kelli and Tiffany have met up to start a day of relaxation for Molly, who has been stressed because of her mother’s health crisis. They had planned to meet at the house and then head to a spa, but when a pipe bursts at the spa, they are forced to stay home until dinner.Disappointed, the girls start drinking and forget about the spa. Tiffany starts to play “Last Night,” by Diddy and Keyshia Cole, Molly starts to dance and pretends her wine bottle is a microphone. Issa suggests they play Questions in a Hat, where anonymous questions are thrown in a hat and randomly selected by players, but Kelli is skeptical. “You know the power it has,” she says sinisterly.Questions in a Hat is less a game than an icebreaker exercise, designed to make the mind feel comfortable while exposing vulnerabilities. Even though the girls are friends and have become closer throughout“Insecure,” there are still things that need to be tugged out of them, like when Molly admits to having never seen “Love Jones” (guilty!) even though she bonded with Issa over the movie. Or when Tiffany admits to thinking about her husband when she masturbates.When deeper questions start to come up, Issa explains that she and Nathan are not in a good place. The girls listen and check Issa. That is what sisterhood is for: To let you know that yes, maybe you are inconsistent and maybe your boo is not wrong. The ladies are perfect at it — funny, calm and just harsh enough.Issa says she is willing to start over, to let go of what she has with Nathan, but no one believes her — not her girls and not the viewers. She also admits to feeling bad because Nathan has not returned her “I love you.”Molly then draws the “If you could have one do-over, what would it be?” question.Issa has been thinking about her own do-over since she noticed that Lawrence moved back to Los Angeles. She has been considering reaching out to him for closure, she says, which she hadn’t shared with her friends.“I just wish I figured out what I wanted to do sooner,” she responds to Molly’s question.Later on, while Issa’s friends are ranking her lovers — Daniel for the win — she tells the girls that she saw Lawrence, Condola and Elijah at the hospital. Condola and Lawrence seemed like they were doing well, so Issa assumed they had rekindled their affair. But Kelli lets her know that things were not great with them at Tiffany’s child’s birthday party.“Really?” Issa responds, as if she were trapped in a hot car and a window had just magically opened. She tries to make the case for how she feels to her friends.“You made the smart choice,” Molly reassures her.“Sometimes it’s not about making the smart choice — it just has to make sense to you,” Tiffany says.Issa’s eyes light up. Tiffany’s comment validates her feelings — she’s looking for any reason to run back to who she knows and what feels safe. Things are shaky with Nathan and that instability can be exhausting. Sometimes you just need to be loved and supported.After the girls decide to stay in for the night, they cute up the balcony with rugs and throws and pass libations around. When Dro, the messiest of all “Insecure” men, calls Molly, Issa sees it as an excuse to call Lawrence, though she has no plan for what to say. Molly snatches her phone and hangs up.“Girl, you know I love you right?” she asks, and then reminds Issa about the earlier discussion of her inconsistency. “You’re doing it — like how is this going to help?”While Issa was thinking about backsliding toward Lawrence, the man himself was trying to repair his relationship with Condola. Issa has not realized — or is choosing not to consider — that Lawrence has a world of his own to take care of right now. A baby doesn’t care about Issa’s need for closure or even what Lawrence wants at all. It isn’t like before; starting over for Issa now means leaving safety totems like Lawrence behind.The next morning, Nathan calls and tells her that he loves her and that he knows he can be avoidant and childish. (I cannot confirm that calls like this happen in real life.) He promises to do better and she hangs up with a smile on her face. Then Lawrence returns her call from the night before. She does not pick up because she does not need a security blanket anymore.While there’s still part of me that secretly would like to see Issa and Lawrence end up together in the series finale, what I really want is for Issa to choose herself and the things she wants out of love, not desperation. I want her to chill, OK? More

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    ‘Succession’ Season 3, Episode 8: Italian Ice

    Kendall didn’t come out of the last family wedding so well. His mother’s Tuscan nuptials don’t look any more promising.Season 3, Episode 8: ‘Chiantishire’At the end of this week’s episode of “Succession,” Kendall Roy is floating on an inflatable raft in a swimming pool, face down and clearly intoxicated. From underwater, in a shot aimed toward the pool’s surface, we see Kendall drop his bottle of beer into the water. From the camera’s perspective, it appears his face is also submerged. He looks … dead?Whether this is a literal or figurative death remains unresolved when the closing credits roll. (Surely the show wouldn’t kill off a major character in such an ambiguous way?) We do know, though, who is responsible — in a roundabout way — for putting Kendall into that pool. It’s the same people who brought him into this world: his mother, Caroline (Harriet Walter), and his father, Logan.This week, Kendall joined his family in scenic Italy for the wedding of Caroline and her old flame Peter Munion (Pip Torrens). He appears to be on a mission to straighten out his life after last week’s calamitous birthday party. His hair is buzzed down to stubble — “stripping down,” he says — and he seems determined to make peace with his siblings and to settle his Waystar business.But as soon as Kendall arrives, his mother pulls him aside and tells him about Peter’s awful “itinerary of events,” asking if her son can help divvy them up in such a way that he won’t be in the same space as Logan — per Logan’s request. That is the first blow to Kendall’s confidence.The second comes when Kendall is talking with Comfry about some last-ditch opportunities to keep his crusade against corporate malfeasance alive in the media. A popular podcast is investigating “the Curse of the Roys” and would love to have him participate. The problem? The hosts are going to dig deep into all the family scandals … including the death of the cater-waiter whom the media thinks Logan bullied to death but whom Kendall actually drove into a lake at Shiv’s wedding.The third strike to Kendall’s psyche — the finisher — comes when he has dinner with Logan. Kendall has given this meeting a lot of thought. He consulted with Logan’s doctor to make sure the menu fit with his dad’s restricted diet. (“Afraid I’m going to Jim Jones you with an olive?” Kendall jokes.) And he prepared a reasonable proposal. He will cash out of Waystar for two billion dollars while keeping one of the company’s media assets for himself. He also promises to stay out of Logan’s life forever. “I won’t even speak at your memorial,” he says.But Logan won’t play along. He calls in Kendall’s autistic son, Iverson, to taste his food, to make sure it isn’t poisoned. This is icy not only because it demonstrates a lack of trust but also because Logan seems blithely willing to sacrifice his grandson. (In a further dig, he then asks Kendall of Iverson, “Is he getting better?”) And although he seemed willing to buy his son out before, he hesitates now that he has a counteroffer in hand.This whole scene — intense and emotional — neatly encapsulates the whole Logan Roy mentality. He wants his family and his employees at his beck-and-call, but he doesn’t want to grant them any real boon. Whenever someone he is negotiating with seems satisfied, Logan gets restless.Like nearly every other one of his corrosive personality traits, this combination of greed, envy and paranoia has been passed on to his children — and to Shiv, in particular. While Logan is having a miserable dinner with Kendall, Shiv is stuck at a “girls night” with Caroline and some of her future in-laws. The conversation she has with her mother is just as revealing about “the Curse of the Roys.”Shiv has long kept Caroline on the list of childhood disappointments she had to overcome. But Caroline won’t let her get away with this revisionist history. In Shiv’s memory, her mother took a payout from Logan and then pushed her and her brothers to go live with their dad when she was 10 years old, all because Caroline didn’t want to play mommy any more. The real story? Shiv was 13; and she made an active decision to move in with Logan. (“I’ll have the carbonara and daddy,” is how her mother describes her daughter’s casual cruelty.)This revelation fires up Shiv, who heads back to her room and tells Tom that she is ready to fight for the top Waystar job — and to have a baby with him. But their night of passion goes poorly, as she slips into a curious bit of dominatrix-style role play, which sees her seducing Tom while purring, “You’re not good enough for me,” and, “I don’t love you.”The next day he wants to discuss this, wondering, “Should I maybe listen to things you say directly in my face when we’re at our most intimate?” But Shiv insists none of it should be taken seriously. (“What happens in Sex Vegas …?,” she offers weakly.) She also modifies their pregnancy plan, offering to freeze their embryos instead, and then wraps up the conversation with, “I may not love you, but I do love you.” Such is the way a Roy expresses affection.This deep fickleness is evident also in the way Logan handles the continuing negotiations with Lukas Mattson and GoJo. At the start of this episode Logan brings Stewy and Sandi into the office to inform them about the acquisition, pretending it’s a courtesy but really wanting to rub it in their faces a little. But he also insists that he will kill the deal if they don’t like it; and truth be told, he is a little nervous about the way Mattson seems to be driving up his share price with reckless, emoji-filled tweets. (“I’m not used to negotiating via eggplant,” Logan sighs.)So Roman is dispatched to the Mattson compound to find out whether the GoJo boss is mentally unstable or just making “a move.” The two men have an unsettling discussion about the thrill of failure; and Roman may have come away from this meeting with the impression that Mattson is a flake. But he hedges his bets with Logan regardless, telling his dad that their potential business partner really wants “a merger of equals” — something he figures will torpedo the deal.Instead, surprisingly, Logan is open to the idea of letting GoJo be the acquirer while Waystar runs the business — so long as he knows that Mattson is “a serious person” and not “a Twitter panty flasher.” (“I can win any bout with a boxer,” Logan says. “But I don’t know how to knock out a clown.”)What does give the old man pause, though, is that while Roman is celebrating what he thinks is another big win for himself, he accidentally texts a picture of his penis to his father, thinking that he is harassing Gerri. Now Logan has reason to question Roman, Gerri … really his whole command structure.Amusingly, when Roman tries to explain the whole concept of sending photographs of genitalia, Logan reassures him that he is aware of this phenomenon, saying, “We do publish a number of popular newspapers.” This echoes something he says to Kendall as they wrap up their bitter meal together with nothing settled. Kendall tries to deliver a closing statement on his time at Waystar, telling his dad, “You won because you’re corrupt and so is the world,” and, “You’ve turned black bile into silver dollars.” Logan smirks and says, “Just noticed, did you?”Logan counters Kendall’s self-righteousness first by standing up for his revolutionary vision for the news: “A bit of spice, a bit of fun, a bit of truth.” Then he stabs his son through the heart, referencing the dead waiter again by asking, “How long was that kid alive before he started sucking water?”And so, as day follows night, Kendall ends up sucking water himself, mired in self-loathing in a Tuscan paradise. Dead or not, at this moment, he certainly isn’t alive.Due DiligenceGreg’s budding romance with Comfry seems to be stalling as he watches her getting constantly distracted by “phone stuff.” He says to Tom and Shiv, “I do wonder, is there depth there?” Following their suggestion, he decides to use his time with Comfry as a “date ladder” to something better and flirting with an honest-to-goodness European countess who is also the online brand ambassador for a fermented yogurt drink. But he gets flustered while talking to her, and the best he can think to say is that her beverage of choice is “a gut-cleansing treat.”Everyone is very worried about the true intentions of Caroline’s beau, Peter — even the bride-to-be herself, who admits, “He is awful, I can obviously see that.” (Roman, pretending to be indignant: “That’s my stepfather you’re talking about.”)In the past, through Kendall’s many coups and calamities, Roman and Shiv have maintained a special bond, connected by their shared relief that they are not their brother. That rapport now seems to be in jeopardy, thanks to Roman’s open glee at Shiv’s exile from the inner circle. He tries this week to win her back by recruiting her to help him take down Peter, but instead she asks — sincerely and bitterly — what is wrong with Roman. He mutters: “We’re working on it. An ongoing process.”Leave it to Connor to ignore one of the cardinal rules of social etiquette as he drops to a knee in front of Willa: Never propose at a wedding. More

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    Eddie Mekka, a Star of ‘Laverne & Shirley,’ Is Dead at 69

    As Carmine Ragusa on the hit sitcom, he got to show off his singing, tap-dancing and gymnastic skills — and to croon “Rags to Riches” many times.Eddie Mekka, the actor best known for his role as the aspiring entertainer Carmine Ragusa on the hit television series “Laverne & Shirley,” died on Nov. 27 at his home in the Newhall area of Santa Clarita, Calif., northwest of Los Angeles. He was 69.His death was announced on Mr. Mekka’s Facebook page. No cause was given.Mr. Mekka was a regular cast member on “Laverne & Shirley” (1976-83), a sitcom about two young single women working at a Milwaukee brewery in the 1950s. His character, known as the Big Ragoo, was the high school sweetheart and on-again, off-again boyfriend of Shirley (Cindy Williams).If anyone was upset with Carmine, all he had to do was sing the words “You know I’d go from rags to riches” — in Tony Bennett style — and all was forgiven. Mr. Mekka got to show off his singing, tap-dancing and gymnastic skills in talent-show and other episodes. In the final episode of the series, Carmine found success: He went to New York, auditioned for the Broadway musical “Hair,” and got the job.Mr. Mekka was the second veteran of the “Laverne & Shirley” cast to die in less than a year. David L. Lander, who played Squiggy, died in December 2020.Mr. Mekka began and ended his real-life career on the stage, even earning a Tony Award nomination. He was nominated for best actor in a musical for his performance as Lt. William L. Calley Jr., who perpetrated the My Lai massacre of civilians during the Vietnam War, in “The Lieutenant” (1975). Mr. Mekka at the 2006 TV Land Awards. In his later years, he appeared in regional theater, playing the part of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” and Harold Hill in “The Music Man.”Paul Mounce/Corbis, via Getty ImagesClive Barnes, reviewing the show for The New York Times, said Mr. Mekka displayed “an honesty and openness that proves very attractive” in his portrayal of “a puzzled kid with a gun who has been told to kill.” The musical, with its difficult subject matter, closed after nine performances but received four Tony nominations.He also appeared in more than 50 film and television roles, including small parts in “A League of Their Own” (he jitterbugged with Madonna at a bar) and “Dreamgirls” (as a nightclub manager). His last screen appearance was in the 2018 film “Hail Mary!” (originally titled “Sushi Tushi”), a comedy about a football team that recruits sumo wrestlers.Edward Rudolph Mekjian was born on June 14, 1952, in Worcester, Mass., to Vahe Vaughn Mekjian, an Armenian-born factory worker who served in the U.S. Army in World War II, and Mariam (Apkarian) Mekjian, a dry-cleaning presser.He performed with the Worcester County Light Opera and attended the Boston Conservatory for a year before dropping out to take a job with a regular weekly paycheck in dinner theater.He married the actress DeLee Lively in 1983; they divorced in 1992, and he married Yvonne Marie Grace two years later. His survivors include a daughter, Mia Mekjian, and a brother, Warren Mekjian; complete information on survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Mekka returned to the New York stage in 2008, starring in the one-man Off Broadway comedy “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish and I’m in Therapy.” He also continued to appear in regional theater. He was Harold Hill in “The Music Man,” Pseudolos in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” Seymour in “Little Shop of Horrors” and Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” his favorite role, which he said in 2003 he had already played more than 20 times.He had a unique take on the character, as he told The Boston Globe in 2014: “I play him like an older, grumpier and slower Jackie Mason.” More