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    More Plays, More Stars and More Women in Latest ‘Spotlight’ Series

    In the wake of complaints that “Spotlight on Plays,” a benefit series of Zoom readings, included work only by men, its lead producer announced on Tuesday four more planned shows, all written by women.They are “The Ohio State Murders,” by Adrienne Kennedy; “The Thanksgiving Play” by Larissa FastHorse, a recently named MacArthur fellow; “Dear Elizabeth” by Sarah Ruhl; and “Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous,” by Pearl Cleage.Jeffrey Richards, a veteran Broadway producer, introduced the readings series soon after the pandemic shut down Broadway. Last week, he announced seven shows for this fall, featuring such big-name cast members as Morgan Freeman, Patti LuPone, Laura Linney, Phylicia Rashad and Laurie Metcalf in works by David Mamet, Robert O’Hara, Kenneth Lonergan and others.The series, of one-night events that benefit the Actors Fund, begins on Wednesday night with Gore Vidal’s political drama “The Best Man.”Soon after the announcement, women in the theater world took to social media to point out that all of the writers were men, some also noting that only one of them, O’Hara, was Black.Questions of parity have been front and center in the theater world since the summer, even as very little work is being produced, most of it for short digital runs. Advocacy groups like Black Theater United and We See You, White American Theater have issued demands for change, with promises to hold theaters accountable for what they present and who they hire.Jessica Johnson, a publicist for the “Spotlight on Plays” series, said in a statement that the four spring readings, which don’t yet have casts or run dates, had already been in development.“These plays have been in the works and were decided upon before,” she said. Several additional titles will be announced for the spring within a week, she added. More

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    ‘Fargo’ Season 4, Episode 4 Recap: Something Rotten

    Season 4, Episode 4: ‘The Pretend War’Underneath the expected mélange of funny names, regional dialect, Coen references and knottily orchestrated mayhem, this season of “Fargo” has sought to make a big statement about America. That was clear from the opening sequences in Kansas City, which depict the succession of immigrant groups who turned to criminality as a path to legitimacy. Becoming a true American, the show suggests, involves surviving a cycle of discrimination and conquest — and no single group of people is going to hand power to another willingly.In other words, you have to fake it till you make it.That’s the message sent by Ebal Violante (Francesco Acquaroli), consigliere to the Faddas, when he takes another meeting with Doctor Senator, his counterpart in the Cannon crime syndicate, over the recent violence that has threatened their fragile arrangement.“To be American is to pretend, capisce?” he says to Senator, in the sort of side-winding preamble that begins a lot of conversations in the series. The founding of America — and who gets to tell that story and how — is a topic of fierce political debate right now, but Ebal is enlightened enough to recognize the hypocrisy at the core of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”And so as some Americans find ways to talk around the foundational evils of slavery and stealing land from its Native people — though not this enlightened consigliere — they cling to a rosier fiction about who they really are. For the Faddas and the Cannons, the rosy fiction is that they’re abiding by a power-sharing arrangement — the same kind that has unraveled between clans in the past. And what Ebal wants to know is whether the Cannon’s armed takeover of the slaughterhouse, answered by the attempted hit on Loy Cannon’s son, can be called “war.” Because even in America, not everything can be pretended.Or can it? Tensions are on the rise between the Faddas and the Cannons, but there are still some questions that Loy needs to sort out. Who ordered the hit on his college-age son? And who was behind the Spring Street stickup? Loy seems to have a good read on both situations, but it may not be worth opening up a front against the Faddas when they appear to be heading toward civil war. And it may be worth holding back on retaliating for the Spring Street stickup until the parties involved can be squeezed for all their worth. When poor Thurman Smutney (played by the musician Andrew Bird) inadvertently settles his debts by handing Loy a bag of his own money, Loy seems to sniff out this nervous man’s ridiculous story before a literal whiff confirms it. He could chase him down immediately, but he doesn’t. The time to strike is later.This week’s episode unfolds as an effective series of cliffhangers, ratcheting up tension across the board without resolving it. It becomes perfectly obvious, for example, that Deafy knows that his shifty partner, Odis, has some connections to the Italian mob. Watching Odis coach a witness to talk nonsense about Swanee and Zelmare’s whereabouts is the first tip-off; Deafy’s chat with gangsters outside the building where Odis is having a meeting is the second. The seeds are also planted for a conflict between Oraetta and Ethelrida, who happens to stumble onto the obituaries and trinkets of former hospital patients. Ethelrida takes some souvenirs and leaves her notebook behind, so a she-knows-that-she-knows-that-she-knows situation is inevitable.“It’s sigh-of-relief o’clock around here at the ol’ Smutney household” is the line of the night. One Smutney has paid off a murderous loan shark with his own stolen money, and another Smutney has uncovered evidence of a different murderer. Plus the cops are sniffing around the Smutney household looking for Dibrell’s fugitive sister and her partner-in-crime, who’s still reeling from the poison Oraetta intended the whole family to endure on Thanksgiving. It’s now only a matter of time before one of these parties tries to boost the Smutney’s mortuary business by adding their bodies to it.This is the type of pulp entertainment “Fargo” does well, and the director of the episode, Dearbhla Walsh, keeps the camera active as the stakes are raised. Walsh pushes in on characters as they face consequential decisions — Loy as he sniffs at the cash that Thurman has given him, Dibrell as she realizes it’s definitely not sigh-of-relief o’clock for the Smutneys — but leaves the tension to dangle. It’s the first episode this season to make you want to barrel through to the next one.3 Cent StampsDid we just see an episode without any Coen references? The score quotes Carter Burwell’s original “Fargo” music at the end, but that’s not uncommon. Otherwise, I’m at a loss.OK, if we’re really pushing it, the ring of fire that engulfs the truck hijacking that opens the episode recalls the final act of “Barton Fink,” when John Goodman’s insurance salesman rampages through the halls of a burning hotel. It’s a strong sequence, too, and more evidence that the war between the Faddas and the Cannons is not pretend.“Casablanca” was not shot in Istanbul or Casablanca. It was shot on a soundstage, just like nearly every studio film of that era.There was probably no way for Oraetta to prevent Ethelrida from poking around in the Crime Pantry, but forbidding her to go into this mysterious room absolutely guarantees that she will. More

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    Doc Antle of ‘Tiger King’ Is Charged With Wildlife Trafficking

    The owner of an animal park featured in the Netflix documentary “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness” has been charged with wildlife trafficking in connection with lion cubs moved between Virginia and South Carolina, prosecutors announced on Friday.Bhagavan Antle, who is known as Doc and is the owner of Myrtle Beach Safari in South Carolina, was charged with two felony counts related to wildlife trafficking and 13 additional misdemeanors, according to the Office of the Attorney General of Virginia. Tawny Antle and Tilakam Watterson, daughters of Mr. Antle, are also facing several misdemeanor charges in connection with animal cruelty and alleged violations of the Endangered Species Act.“I categorically deny any act or conduct that could ever be considered as ‘animal cruelty,’” Mr. Antle said in a statement. “I have spent my entire professional life promoting the welfare and conservation of big cats and other species.”In March, as Americans were still getting used to being stuck at home because of the pandemic, Mr. Antle captured nationwide attention with memorable appearances in “Tiger King.” Millions of viewers were drawn to the documentary, which spotlighted the big business of big cats in America.The man at the center of the documentary, Joseph Maldonado-Passage, known as Joe Exotic, is serving a 22-year sentence in federal prison for trying to hire a hit man to kill Carole Baskin, an animal-rights activist who runs Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Fla.Netflix declined to comment on the charges brought against Mr. Antle.“We are thrilled to see law enforcement take action to stop what we believe to be illegal trade and illegal treatment of these innocent tiny cubs,” Howard Baskin, Ms. Baskin’s husband, said in an email.The indictments were announced after a monthslong investigation by the Virginia attorney general’s animal law unit into the relationship between Mr. Antle and Keith A. Wilson, owner of Wilson’s Wild Animal Park in Frederick County, Va. Mr. Wilson was also charged with two felonies related to wildlife trafficking and 17 other misdemeanor charges.Virginia prosecutors said the animal law unit had found that the men trafficked lion cubs between Virginia and South Carolina.“Antle’s tiger mill has been the source of immense cruelty to hundreds of tigers and must be shut down,” Kitty Block, the president and chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, said in a statement. “We know firsthand all about his treatment of animals.”Last November, the Virginia attorney general, Mark R. Herring, announced that Mr. Wilson and his nephew Christian Dall’Acqua had both been indicted on 46 counts of animal cruelty by a grand jury in Frederick County. A trial date has been set for June 2021.In August 2019, the animal law unit seized 119 animals from Mr. Wilson’s “roadside zoo,” prosecutors added in the statement, including lions, tigers, bears, camels, goats and water buffaloes. A 12-hour hearing about the seized animals showed inadequate conditions at Mr. Wilson’s animal park, prosecutors said.“I have deep regard and feelings for the animals in my care and would never hurt or abuse them in any way,” Mr. Antle said in his statement. “I look forward to being able to answer these charges and be able to clear my good name.” More

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    Maurice Edwards, Busy Figure in Theater and Music, Dies at 97

    This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Maurice Edwards, whose long and varied résumé included directing operas and stage plays, acting in numerous Off Broadway productions and a few on Broadway and helping to found experimental theater troupes and manage the Brooklyn Philharmonic, died on Sept. 23 in Englewood, N.J. He was 97.His executor, James Waller, said the cause was the novel coronavirus. Mr. Edwards’s nephew and closest living relative, Allen Markson, said Mr. Edwards had moved to the Actors Fund Home in Englewood from a nursing home in Queens five days before his death.Mr. Edwards was a man of many interests and seemed to find ways to indulge them all. In 1968 he was a founder of the Cubiculo on the West Side of Manhattan, a seat-of-the-pants theater operation that presented plays, poetry readings, films and lots of dance.“To its growing, usually youthful, public — which often spills out of the 60‐ to 75‐chair seating area — the Cubiculo is unique,” The New York Times wrote in 1970 of the group, for which Mr. Edwards served as program coordinator.In 1974 he was a founder of another adventurous Manhattan troupe, the Classic Theater, which he described as “an Off Off Broadway group specializing in seldom-performed classics.”A production Mr. Edwards directed in 1978 underscored just how committed the troupe was to that mission. It was called “The Country Gentleman,” and Thomas Lask’s review in The New York Times began this way:“The Classic Theater, now holding forth at the Loretto Playhouse, 20 Bleecker Street, has come up with a rarity — a world premiere of a play 300 years old.”The play was a comedy written by Sir Robert Howard and George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, and took potshots at one of the duke’s rivals. King Charles II shut down rehearsals before it could be performed, and it lay dormant for centuries until it was discovered in the Folger Library in Washington. Mr. Edwards heard about it and latched on.He was artistic director of the Classic Theater from 1974 to 1989. The next year he became artistic director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, which he had been involved with for decades, first as assistant manager (when the group was known as the Brooklyn Philharmonia), then as manager and executive director. It was a period in which the orchestra, as The Times noted in 1989, “evolved from essentially a community ensemble to a highly visible part of New York’s musical life.”As artistic director, Mr. Edwards was responsible for the planning of recordings and tours. He served until 1997. In 2006 he told the ensemble’s story in the book “How Music Grew in Brooklyn: A Biography of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra.”He told his own story in “Revelatory Letters to Nina Cassian” (2011), an unusual memoir structured as a series of letters to Ms. Cassian, the exiled Romanian poet, whom he had married in 1998. The letters recounted episodes from his life and pondered their meaning. Eve Berliner, in her online magazine, called the book “a symphony of language and art and dance and music and literature.”Maurice Edward Levine was born on Dec. 7, 1922, in Amasa, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. According to a notation in the archives of the New School, where he donated some papers, he changed his name when he joined the Actors’ Equity Association sometime after World War II because there was another actor with his name.His father, Henry, was a trader in furs and scrap metal, and his mother, Sophia (Manhoff) Levine, was a homemaker.Mr. Edwards grew up in Madison, Wis., and in the 1940s earned a bachelor’s degree at New York University and a master’s in comparative literature at Columbia University. In that same decade he served in the Army, earning a Bronze Star when he, as the citation put it, “displayed great ability and self-sacrificing devotion by moving under fire to secure assistance” when his billeting party came under German sniper fire in April 1945.Mr. Edwards was a busy actor and, if never quite a famous one, worked opposite some who were or soon would be.He made his Broadway debut in 1950 in a secondary role in “Happy as Larry,” a vehicle for Burgess Meredith that lasted only three performances. His next Broadway turn, in 1954, fared better; it was the musical “The Golden Apple,” which helped elevate Kaye Ballard to stardom. He also played Nachum, the town beggar, in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof” in 1964, with a cast led by Zero Mostel as Tevye.Off Broadway, his many credits included stepping into the role of Mr. J.J. Peachum as a replacement player in “The Threepenny Opera,” which opened at the Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village in the mid-1950s and ran until 1961. He was also one of many replacement players in the long run of “The Fantasticks,” taking on the role of the father of the female lead.Mr. Edwards’s list of acting credits was rivaled in length by his list of directing credits. He directed dozens of plays for the Classic Theater, the Cubiculo and other groups. He also directed a number of operas, including several at the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented by the Brooklyn Philharmonic.Ms. Cassian died in 2014. Mr. Edwards had previously been married to Ann Alpert, who died in 1973. A son from that marriage, Jacob, died in 2007. Among those who worked with Mr. Edwards was the composer Leonard J. Lehrman. Mr. Lehrman completed Marc Blitzstein’s opera “Sacco and Vanzetti,” about the Italian immigrants executed in 1927 after having been convicted of murder during a highly questionable trial; Mr. Blitzstein had left it unfinished at his death in 1964. When Mr. Lehrman premiered the work at the White Barn Theater in Connecticut in 2001 he called upon Mr. Edwards to play two different Massachusetts governors: Alvan T. Fuller, who refused to grant clemency in the case, leading to the executions, and Michael S. Dukakis, who 50 years later issued a proclamation affirming that the two had been unfairly tried.“Maurice was quite a character,” Mr. Lehrman, who knew him for 30 years, said by email, “full of anecdotes, stories, puns and insights. It was sometimes not easy to end a phone conversation with him, but seldom did one want to!” More

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    How President Trump Ruined Political Comedy

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Earlier this year, before everything happened, I went to New York City to survey the state of American political comedy, which has never felt more important — or more fraught. At a taping of “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” I met a woman from Astoria who had brought a birthday present for the host: a mock campaign poster promoting Ripley-Hicks 2020 — the two main characters from “Aliens” — emblazoned with the slogan “It’s the only way to be sure.” At “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” I watched the warm-up guy wring big laughs out of a malfunctioning T-shirt gun, firing three or at best four rows back into a house packed with cheering fans — people who seemed genuinely to feel part of a movement, a wave of laughter crashing against a president who was, if not washed away, bound to erode at any minute.And then, on a blustery Thursday night, I went to the program that started it all: “The Daily Show.” From a soundstage near the western edge of Manhattan, I watched Trevor Noah put on a clinic in audience management. During one segment, he transitioned smoothly from his impression of the president to a righteous condemnation of sectarian violence in India, followed by a joke about green text bubbles. It was everything the genre now aims to be: breezily informative, morally upright and funny enough that the house knew when to laugh. After the taping, a Comedy Central representative led me backstage, down a hall that transitioned from production industrial to modern corporate décor, and through a warren of offices to a glassed-in conference room, where I met the head writer, Dan Amira, and the showrunner, Jen Flanz. Thinking about the difficulty of making political comedy that jibed with a broad audience, I asked if there was a type of joke they had learned not to do.Default Headline More

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    ‘S.N.L.’ Had a Live Audience. It Went Home With Paychecks.

    Before the coronavirus outbreak, tickets to join the studio audience of “Saturday Night Live” were a precious commodity — offered free by NBC, but so hard to obtain that some comedy fans were willing to pay money for them.But now the tickets to this long-running sketch show — still free, and still scarce — come with an added bonus: Members of its studio audience have been paid to attend.The payments are the result of new guidelines implemented by the state of New York, which has been regulating the reopening of businesses and industries during the pandemic.On Monday night, the state’s health department confirmed that “S.N.L.” had followed its reopening guidelines by “casting” members of the live audience for its season premiere on Saturday — the show’s first live episode since March 7 — and paying them for their time. (It is not clear how many audience members were paid guests.)Sean Ludwig, who attended the “S.N.L.” season premiere over the weekend, said that he and seven friends who had gone with him each received a check for $150 from Universal Television, a division of NBC’s parent company, when the show was over. More

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    ‘Fargo’ Season 4, Episode 3 Recap: Who’s in Charge?

    Season 4, Episode 3: ‘Raddoppiarlo’As Timothy Olyphant strides confidently through the opening scenes of this week’s “Fargo,” it initially feels like an FX crossover event, as if Olyphant were reprising his role as the smooth-drawlin’ U.S. Marshal from the network’s long-running series “Justified.” But then he is offered a coffee.“In my faith we abstain from caffeinated beverages, hot or cold,” he says. He goes on to give a monologue about the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel, which is his long-winded way of introducing himself as a Mormon and servicing this season’s racial themes — one tribe was “cursed by God with skin of Blackness.”His name is Dick Wickware. You can call him “Deafy.”And with that, a sense of too-muchness settled over this season. Because now Deafy, who has come to town to nab our two lesbian fugitives, Swanee and Zelmare, is being partnered up with Odis Weff, whose O.C.D. tics have already threatened to turn “Fargo” into a Midwestern “Motherless Brooklyn.” It has been the creator Noah Hawley’s mission from the beginning to pay homage to the stylized universe of the Coen brothers, but his weakness for cartoony pulp has become a bigger problem this season than usual. The buddy-cop pairing of a Mormon and an O.C.D. detective would be pushing it even if the show weren’t so gummed up by quirky characters across the ensemble.The show stands on firmer ground when it dives back into the tensions between the Faddas and the Cannons, which were inflamed last week after Loy Cannon decided to make a play on the slaughterhouse. The Cannons’ rationale is explained in a typically roundabout speech from Doctor Senator (Glynn Turman) at a meeting with a Fadda family representative. Doctor tells the story of how Black soldiers were made promises about America that weren’t kept after the war, and a story-within-a-story about his discarded report on Hermann Göring at Nuremberg, which underscored that betrayal. The message? Black people have to take what’s theirs. Nothing will be given to them willingly.The response opens up a fascinating rift within the Fadda family that mirrors that of the Gerhardts in the show’s second season: With the big boss out of the picture, there’s a power vacuum to be filled because of the perceived weakness of his successor. The difference here is that Floyd Gerhardt, played by Jean Smart, turned out to be far more shrewd than her duplicitous adversaries in the family assumed. Josto Fadda may actually be weak — he looks like a toddler in the Godfather desk chair — and that’s an invitation for Gaetano to challenge him openly. Gaetano understands only brutality, which makes him an effective and frightening henchman but not necessarily the wisest strategist. It’s the equivalent of letting Joe Pesci’s vicious Tommy DeVito call the shots in “Goodfellas”; there’s a reason the muscle never “get made.”Gaetano’s plan is a multilevel catastrophe waiting to happen. His idea of a shot across the bow is to rub out Loy’s college-going son, Lemuel (Matthew Elam), which would surely trigger a full-on gang war, starting with the deaths of the two other sons issued as collateral between them. He has also decided to use this operation to test the loyalty of the taciturn Irishman in the family, Rabbi Mulligan (Ben Whishaw), who had unquestionably proven his loyalty as a boy by killing his own father.Then there’s the matter of undermining Josto, who will surely have to answer this act of brazen insubordination if he’s to retain his grip on power.And the disarray doesn’t stop there. Josto’s inadequate response to the hospital that refused to treat his father requires a second attempt on its administrator’s life, but he can’t even case the joint properly. Oraetta Mayflower spots him in the parking lot after having talked his target into a new nursing gig, then gifts him a matter-of-fact sexual favor that’s as Minnesota Erotic as the small-town call girls in the Coens’ “Fargo.” The purpose behind Oraetta’s mischief-making continues to be the big question mark hanging over the season, but she and Gaetano have identified Josto as the wounded gazelle on the prairie, and they’re pouncing on him simultaneously.Amid all this chaos, Loy looks utterly assured. He reads the entire situation correctly, like Marge Gunderson surveying a crime scene. The botched shooting gives him all the information he needs — Mulligan’s loyalties, the possible dissent within the Faddas’ ranks, the different implications of retaliation on his end.This is the type of plotting that “Fargo” has always handled well, when violence breaks out and characters scramble to figure out how to harness the fallout to their favor. Hawley just needs to gets out of his own way. Sometimes less is more.3 Cent Stamps:Coen movie references? You betcha. When our fugitives, Swanee and Zelmare, stage an audacious armed robbery of Cannon headquarters, they disguise themselves like Nicolas Cage’s H.I. McDunnough in “Raising Arizona.” That prompts a gender-flipped variation on “Son, you’ve got a panty on your head.” In the car scene with Josto, Oraetta uses the word “paterfamilias,” a nod to a George Clooney line in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?.” Gaetano’s nabbing the small, austere picture of the Italian home country recalls a scene in “The Big Lebowski” when a photo of bleak farmland is supposed to beckon the sexpot Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid) back to Minnesota.Chekhov’s apple pie pays off in the robbery sequence as Swanee farts and vomits her way through the job. It’s not clear yet whether the tainted dessert will pay off as anything more than a ribald joke, but it does give the sequence some added tension and dark comedy.Has popular culture turned on clam chowder? Between the clam chowder fountain in one of the “bad places” on “The Good Place,” which likened it to “hot ocean milk,” to a throwaway line here (“makes more sense to me than clam chowder”), the insults are coming by the ladleful.More evidence that “Fargo” is doing too much this season: The hospital administrator rolling the “r” in “macaroon.” A petty gripe perhaps, but overwritten moments like this have been piling up. More

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    Jim Carrey Plays Joe Biden in ‘S.N.L.’ Season Premiere

    It was perhaps the most anticipated “Saturday Night Live” season premiere in almost 20 years — the show’s first live broadcast in more than six months, hosted by Chris Rock, and its first to be produced under the new guidelines of the coronavirus era.The last live episode of “S.N.L.” had been broadcast on March 7; it was hosted by Daniel Craig and featured a few segments in which the show tried to find what humor it could in the looming pandemic. Then the show announced it was suspending its season altogether, only to come back with three episodes of remotely produced sketches, filmed mostly at the homes of its cast members.“S.N.L.” tends to generate its biggest audiences in presidential election years, and the series’s creator, Lorne Michaels, further stoked expectations by tapping Jim Carrey to play former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee.But the show is also contending with a slew of new health and safety regulations, and as recently as a few days ago, Michaels wasn’t entirely sure that he and his cast and crew could stick the landing: “We’re going to be as surprised as everyone else when it actually goes on,” he told The New York Times in an interview. And questions lingered before Saturday as to whether a live audience would attend. (It did, under visible restrictions.)That would have all been challenging enough. But then “S.N.L.” had to start its season by recapping a week in which President Trump was hospitalized for treatment of Covid-19 and in which the first lady, Melania Trump, along with several Republican senators and high-ranking Republican officials, tested positive for the coronavirus.Perhaps the closest comparable moment in “S.N.L.” history was the season opener of Sept. 29, 2001, the show’s first new broadcast after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That episode began with a call for unity from Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor of New York, who was flanked by police officers and firefighters as he told the audience, “Even as we grieve for our loved ones, it’s up to us to face the future with renewed determination.” Paul Simon played “The Boxer,” and Michaels famously asked Giuliani, “Can we be funny?” Giuliani answered, “Why start now?”This time around, “S.N.L.” simply opened with a sendup of Tuesday’s chaotic debate between President Trump and Vice President Biden.Presidential Debate Parody of the WeekThe segment opened with a voice-over promising a replay of the debate, “even though Tuesday feels like 100 days ago.” Onstage, Beck Bennett played the hapless moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News, while Alec Baldwin returned to his recurring role as President Trump.Bennett began to explain the rules. “Each candidate will have 2 minutes, uninterrupted,” he said, only to be immediately interrupted by Baldwin.“Boring!” Baldwin declared. He said to Bennett, “Tell that to my Adderall, Chris, now let’s get this show on the road and off the rails.”Asked if he had taken the test for coronavirus, Baldwin answered: “Absolutely. Scout’s honor.”Playing Biden for the first time, Carrey strode onto the stage in aviator glasses while making finger guns at the audience. He produced a tape measure, sized up the distance between himself and Baldwin, then picked up his lectern and moved it further away.Asked if he was ready to debate, Carrey answered: “Absolutely not. But I’ve got the beginning of 46 fantastic ideas I may or may not have access to. Now let’s do this. I’m holding my bladder.”Throughout the segment, Carrey (as Biden) tried to exercise some restraint: “Don’t let your inner Whitey Bulger come out,” he told himself. “Flash that smile they taught you in anger management.”Bennett, meanwhile, emphasized Wallace’s passivity. At one point he told Baldwin, “Mr. President, if you keep interrupting this debate, I’ll do absolutely nothing about it.”Maya Rudolph appeared briefly in her recurring role as Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. She told the two presidential candidates, “America needs a W.A.P.: woman as president. But for now, I’ll settle for H.V.P.I.C.: hot vice president in charge.”After Baldwin (as Trump) demurred on the topic of white supremacy, Carrey produced a remote control and paused Baldwin in midsentence. “Sorry, but I think we all needed a break,” Carrey said. “Isn’t that satisfying?”Speaking directly to the camera, Carrey added: “You can trust me. Because I believe in science and karma. Now, just imagine if science and karma could somehow team up to send us all a message about how dangerous this virus can be.”He looked over his shoulder at Baldwin, then continued: “I’m not saying I want it to happen. Just imagine if it did.”Before he, Baldwin and Rudolph ended the sketch, Carrey’s Biden introduced his own campaign slogan: “Make America Actively Not on Fire Again.”Opening Monologue of the WeekRock, the stand-up star and “S.N.L.” alumnus, wasted no time in addressing what he called the elephant in the room: “President Trump’s in the hospital, from Covid,” he said, “and I just want to say, my heart goes out to Covid.” He added that this was a unique show for “S.N.L.” and that, like everyone around him, he had been tested frequently.“I haven’t had so much stuff up my nose since I shared a dressing room with Chris Farley,” he said.Pointing out members of the “S.N.L.” studio audience that he described as first responders, Rock said, “They’re so good, we let people die tonight so they could see a good show.”Assuming that Biden would be elected, Rock said that he should be America’s last president ever and that a new system of government should be instituted after him. “What job do you have for four years, no matter what?” Rock asked. “If you hired a cook and he was making people vomit every day, do you sit there and go, ‘Well, he’s got a four-year deal; we’ve just got to vomit for four more years’?”More sincerely, Rock concluded his monologue with a quotation from James Baldwin: “‘Not everything that is faced can be changed,’” he said, “‘but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’”Musical Number of the WeekMaking her debut appearance on “S.N.L.”, Megan Thee Stallion used her performance of “Savage” to create a powerful and pointed interlude.During the song, Megan Thee Stallion, who was shot in the feet over the summer, paused in the middle of the stage. (She has said that she was shot by the musician Tory Lanez, who has denied responsibility.)The sounds of several gunshots were heard and the digital screens behind her were filled with simulated bullet holes. Malcolm X’s voice was heard saying, “The most disrespected, unprotected, neglected person in America is the Black woman,” as those same words appeared on the screens. “Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair, the color of your skin and the shape of your nose?” the recording, an edited version of a 1962 speech, continued. “Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet?”The next voice heard was that of the activist Tamika Mallory, from a recent speech in which she criticized Daniel Cameron, the attorney general of Kentucky, following the announcement in September that only one former officer would be charged with wanton endangerment after Breonna Taylor was killed in a police shooting in Louisville.The voice of Mallory said, “Daniel Cameron is no different than the sellout negroes that sold our people into slavery.”Megan Thee Stallion spoke next, telling the audience: “We need to protect our Black women and love our Black women because at the end of the day, we need our Black women. We need to protect our Black men and stand up for our Black men because at the end of the day, we’re tired of seeing hashtags of our Black men.”Weekend Update Jokes of the WeekIn their return to the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to speculate aloud about whether it was permissible to make jokes about President Trump’s hospitalization.Jost began by saying:Well, say what you will about 2020, but it’s got moves. This news was a lot for us to process a day before we came back on the air after four months off. And it all happened so fast. I woke up yesterday and heard the president had mild symptoms. And then four hours later he was getting medevaced to a hospital in what looked like the last chopper out of Vietnam. I’ve got to say, it’s a bad sign for America that when Trump said he tested positive for a virus, 60 percent of people were like, “Prove it.” And it’s been very weird to see all these people who clearly hate Trump come out and say, “We wish him well.” I think a lot of them are just guilty that their first wish came true.After joking that Trump was supposed to host “S.N.L.” next week, Che laughed and continued the riff:OK, serious voice. While in the hospital, the president isn’t allowed to see any guests, but he is expected to be visited by three ghosts. Probably one from his past, one from his — OK, look, this is weird. Because a lot of people on both sides are saying there’s nothing funny about Trump being hospitalized with coronavirus. Even though he mocked the safety precautions for the coronavirus. And those people are obviously wrong. There’s a lot funny about this — maybe not from a moral standpoint. But mathematically, if you were constructing a joke, this is all the ingredients you need. The problem is, it’s almost too funny. Like, it’s so on the nose. It’d be like if I were making fun of people who wear belts and then my pants just immediately fell down.As the segment concluded, a camera found Kate McKinnon in the audience, dressed as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom she often impersonated on “S.N.L.” McKinnon put a hand to her heart and wordlessly bowed her head as the screen displayed an image of a robe with a familiar neck collar and a pair of glasses and the words “Rest in Power.” More