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      in Movies

      ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Enters the Pantheon of Conservative Fan Fiction

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      The American right has embraced Tom Cruise’s latest blockbuster, hailing the movie as a patriotic gesture produced in defiance of “woke” liberal elites and the Chinese Communist Party.Today’s newsletter is a guest dispatch from the Culture desk of The New York Times. Marc Tracy, who regularly covers the intersection of culture and politics, writes about Tom Cruise’s latest blockbuster — and the conservatives who are singing its praises.“Top Gun: Maverick,” the inescapable Tom Cruise blockbuster sequel, has been hailed as a cinematic throwback.Many critics have interpreted its story of an increasingly obsolete pilot being called back to teach today’s young people a thing or two for one last mission as a not-so-subtle allegory for the film itself. The movie uses relatively few computer-generated effects, stars the now-60-year-old Cruise and still managed to rake in more than $1 billion globally.But amid praise from filmgoers who enjoyed the realistic dogfights, filmed with real planes that the real actors rode in, another community has embraced the movie for representing its values and vindicating its outlook: conservatives.A sampling:Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida: “Any movie that’s not, like, overwhelmingly woke can actually appeal to normal people.” (DeSantis had not seen the movie at the time; he later saw it with his wife for her birthday, he said.)The Fox News host Jesse Watters: “We’ve been longing to see a movie that’s unapologetically American, and we finally got it.”Tomi Lahren, of the conservative sports outlet OutKick and Fox: “The undeniable success of Top Gun is proof Americans are sick of WOKE and just want to watch good movies without a grandstanding social justice message!!”The right vs. HollywoodWhat’s going on here?There is a long tradition in which conservatives seize upon a cultural artifact produced by the entertainment industry, which is generally seen as left-leaning, and claim it for themselves.“This goes back years,” said Doug Heye, a Republican consultant, “and included when we had a Hollywood actor or a reality TV star for president. They feel besieged by the culture. That feeling has only increased, and it’s increased because there’s even more substance behind it today.”In a recent essay that discussed movies including “Top Gun: Maverick,” A.O. Scott, The Times’s co-chief film critic, argued that one notable aspect of the conservative movement is its antagonism toward the entertainment industry.“The modern right,” Scott wrote, “defines itself against the cultural elites who supposedly cluster on the coasts and conspire to impose their values on an unsuspecting public. In this account, Hollywood acts in functional cahoots with academia and the news media.”And conservative activists’ enmity toward Hollywood and other cultural tastemakers has perhaps never been more conspicuous.DeSantis, whose ability to channel the movement might outstrip any other politician’s (including, arguably, Donald Trump’s), made waves this spring by revoking special tax and self-governing privileges that Disney had enjoyed for its enormous theme park in his state. The governor and the company had clashed over a newly passed state law that bars instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in some grades.‘Top Gun’: The Return of MaverickTom Cruise takes to the air once more in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the long-awaited sequel to a much-loved ’80s action blockbuster.A Triumphant Return: At a time when superheroes dominate the box office, the film industry betis betting on the daredevil actor to bring grown-ups back to theaters. It paid off.The Secret Ingredient: Cruise’s potent mix of athleticism and charisma goes a long way to explain why “Top Gun: Maverick” is a hit.Review: The central question posed by the movie has less to do with the need for combat pilots in the age of drones than with the relevance of movie stars, our critic writes.Your Burning Questions: How similar is it to the original? Who’s back? Who’s absent? We have answers.So when “Top Gun: Maverick” entered this culture war with its uncomplicated, feel-good patriotism — it is, among other things, a movie about how awesome U.S. Navy pilots can be, particularly when fighting America’s enemies — conservatives’ sense of alignment arrived naturally.“When something comes out,” Heye said, “and it’s another version of ‘Rocky IV’” — the 1985 movie in which Sylvester Stallone’s working-class boxer enters the ring with a Soviet fighter named Ivan Drago — “that becomes something that, for the activist part of the base that is looking for something that isn’t critical of their values, they’re going to grab onto.”This is not to say that Maverick, Hangman and the other pilots in the new “Top Gun” film face off against today’s equivalent of the Soviet Union, whatever country that might be. As in the first “Top Gun,” which came out in 1986, the enemy is not explicitly identified.Nor are conservative politicians and media personalities claiming that the movie makes a compelling case for policies like tax cuts or gun rights. Their argument has less to do with what the film is than what it is not; less to do with its specific plot or characters than with its vibe.“It’s political in being apolitical,” said Christian Toto, a conservative film critic and the proprietor of the website Hollywood in Toto.He contrasted “Top Gun: Maverick” with some films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the gender-swapped “Ghostbusters” reboot. Their efforts at inclusivity — diverse casting, same-sex relationships — could come across, he said, as ham-handed, particularly to conservative audiences whose antennae are already on alert for filmmakers they see as trying to sneak some spinach in with the cinematic candy.The conservative allergy to such moviemaking decisions flares up, Toto said, “when the audience gets a sense it’s being put in there awkwardly or there’s a message being sent as opposed to organically woven into the story.”That the pilots training for the daring raid in “Top Gun: Maverick” appear to come from a variety of backgrounds seems not like liberal messaging but realistic detail, Toto said.“The cast is moderately diverse; there are women as pilots,” he said. “But they don’t comment on it; they don’t base the script around it. It’s assumed these are just very talented people willing to risk their lives for the mission.”Cruise at the new movie’s global premiere in San Diego. The film has made more money in the United States and Canada than in the rest of the world.Vivien Killilea/Getty Images Paramount PicturesAn All-American hitBox-office information does not contradict conservatives’ case. About 55 percent of the opening weekend sales, an unusually high proportion, came from ticket-buyers over 35, according to Paramount.And — atypically for big box-office hits in this era — “Top Gun: Maverick” has made more money in the United States and Canada than in the rest of the world, according to Box Office Mojo.Which is itself a point of pride for some of the film’s conservative backers: “‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Reaches $1 Billion Worldwide — Without China,” read a Breitbart headline last month. (The film was not released in China; earlier, a Chinese company withdrew its share of financing for the film because of its pro-American message, according to a Wall Street Journal report.)Ben Shapiro, a popular conservative pundit who co-founded the website The Daily Wire, had predicted in his rave review that the movie would do better domestically than abroad. “The film itself is pretty red, white and blue,” he said. “That’s just assumed as the backdrop. Which is the way movies used to be.”Stanley Rosen, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California who studies China’s film industry, said in an interview that “Top Gun: Maverick” represented an emerging idea that “Hollywood doesn’t need China the way it used to.”The film’s success could signal that the days of Hollywood studios altering story lines to make their releases more palatable to Chinese censors and audiences — a trend documented in a recent book, “Red Carpet” by Erich Schwartzel — might slowly be on their way out.And, Rosen added, whatever the film’s actual political message, the argument that it has one at all might have its own uses.“The controversy over wokeness or whether this is Reagan-era nostalgia,” he said, is “very good for the box office.”What to readDepartment of Never Tweet: The Securities and Exchange Commission is broadening its inquiry into Elon Musk’s disclosures about Twitter, Kate Conger reports. The agency questioned whether a tweet Musk sent in May about the acquisition of Twitter should have been disclosed to the agency and investors.Natalia Winkelman reviews “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down,” a new documentary about the former Democratic congresswoman from Arizona who was shot in the head at a political event in 2011.Follow the latest news from President Biden’s trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia.HOW THEY RUNVice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California are longtime allies and possible future in-state rivals.Lucy Nicholson/ReutersTable for twoGavin Newsom, the governor of California, is sitting down for lunch on Friday in Washington with Vice President Kamala Harris, two of his aides have confirmed.For Newsom, the trip, officially made so he could accept an award and discuss policy issues with lawmakers and Biden administration officials, has doubled as something of a cleanup tour.On Thursday, Newsom said clearly that he supported President Biden to be the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2024, amid a swirl of reporting by my Times colleagues and others suggesting that liberal voters are not especially enthused about another term for the 79-year-old commander in chief.News reports, including in this humble newsletter, have noted that Newsom’s rise as a leader in the Democratic Party could put him in competition with Harris, a longtime ally and possible future in-state opponent, in a hypothetical Biden-free presidential primary.Those stories have gotten the attention of the vice president’s office, while amusing the governor’s staff back home in California. Both camps insist there’s no rivalry between the two leaders.Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Newsom volunteered that Harris had been “wonderful” as vice president and said they were just going to “check in, as we do constantly.” He alluded, however, to unspecified “constraints” Harris had faced in office and said it was “a difficult time for all of us in public life.”Asked what was on the lunch menu, a Newsom aide joked in a text: “Arsenic and arm wrestling. The usual.”Thanks for reading. — BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down’ Review: A New Mission

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      This documentary from the directors of “RBG” offers a window into the life of the former Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords after she survived a bullet wound to the head.In 2011, Gabrielle Giffords, then a Democratic congresswoman, was hosting a public meet-and-greet outside a Safeway supermarket in Arizona when a gunman opened fire into the gathering, killing six people and wounding many more. Giffords suffered a bullet to the head that shattered her skull and wreaked havoc on the left side of her brain. She now struggles with aphasia, a condition that interferes with the expression of language.The documentary “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down” offers a sentimental tour of the former congresswoman’s recovery process and her efforts to prevent gun violence in the years following the shooting. The film also provides a window into Giffords’s marriage to Senator Mark Kelly, a former space shuttle pilot with NASA. Kelly was a pillar of support for Giffords during her rehabilitation, and in 2020 he picked up the thread of her work in politics when he won a special election to represent Arizona in the Senate.Gun control is an urgent issue, and the directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen (“RBG”) scored big time with a frank talking-head interview with former President Barack Obama, who discusses the nation’s need for gun safety laws. At the same time, the film is not shy about positioning Giffords’s advocacy work alongside an assessment of her views on firearms more broadly, including that she and her husband are gun owners.But by and large, this is a human interest story. We begin amid painful home video clips of Giffords in the hospital following the attack. We end with triumphant footage of her and Kelly giving speeches onstage. Even during more analytic or crusading sections, the documentary’s mood never strays from inspirational.Gabby Giffords Won’t Back DownRated PG-13. The horrors of gun violence. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      Mark Shields, TV Pundit Known for His Sharp Wit, Dies at 85

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      A former campaign strategist, he became a fixture in American political journalism and punditry and was seen on “PBS NewsHour” for 33 years.Mark Shields, a piercing analyst of America’s political virtues and failings, first as a Democratic campaign strategist and then as a television commentator who both delighted and rankled audiences for four decades with his bluntly liberal views and sharply honed wit, died on Saturday at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 85. His daughter, Amy Shields Doyle, said the cause was complications of kidney failure.Politics loomed large for Mr. Shields even when he was a boy. In 1948, when he was 11, his parents roused him at 5 a.m. so he could glimpse President Harry S. Truman as he was passing through Weymouth, the Massachusetts town south of Boston where they lived. He recalled that “the first time I ever saw my mother cry was the night that Adlai Stevenson lost in 1952.”A life immersed in politics began in earnest for him in the 1960s, not long after he had finished two years in the Marines. He started as a legislative assistant to Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin.He then struck out on his own as a political consultant to Democratic candidates; his first campaign at the national level was Robert F. Kennedy’s ill-fated presidential race in 1968. Mr. Shields was in San Francisco when Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. “I’ll go to my grave believing Robert Kennedy would have been the best president of my lifetime,” he told The New York Times in 1993.He had successes, like helping John J. Gilligan become governor of Ohio in 1970 and Kevin H. White win re-election as mayor of Boston in 1975. But he was certainly no stranger to defeat; he worked for men who vainly pursued national office in the 1970s, among them Edmund S. Muskie, R. Sargent Shriver and Morris K. Udall.“At one point,” Mr. Shields said, “I held the N.C.A.A. indoor record for concession speeches written and delivered.”As the 1970s ended, he decided on a different path. Thus began a long career that made him a fixture in American political journalism and punditry.He started out as a Washington Post editorial writer, but the inherent anonymity of the job discomfited him. He asked for, and got, a weekly column.Before long, he set out on his own. While he continued writing a column, which came to be distributed each week by Creators Syndicate, it was on television that he left his firmest imprint.From 1988 until it was canceled in 2005, he was a moderator and panelist on “Capital Gang,” a weekly CNN talk show that matched liberals like Mr. Shields with their conservative counterparts. He was also a panelist on another weekly public affairs program, “Inside Washington,” seen on PBS and ABC until it ended in 2013.In 1985, he wrote “On the Campaign Trail,” a somewhat irreverent look at the 1984 presidential race. Over the years he also taught courses on politics and the press at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.Mr. Shields during a taping of “Meet the Press” at the NBC studios in Washington in 2008.Alex Wong/Getty Images for Meet the PressHis longest stretch was as a commentator on “PBS NewsHour” from 1987 through 2020, when he decided at age 83 to end his regular gig. A self-described New Deal liberal, Mr. Shields was the counterpoint to a succession of conservative thinkers, including William Safire, Paul Gigot, David Gergen and, for the last 19 years, David Brooks.In a panegyric to his colleague, Mr. Brooks wrote in his New York Times column in December 2020 that “to this day Mark argues that politics is about looking for converts, not punishing heretics.”Mr. Shields’s manner was rumpled, his visage increasingly jowly, his accent unmistakably New England. He came across, The Times observed in 1993, as “just a guy who likes to argue about current events at the barbershop — the pundit next door.”His calling card was a no-nonsense political sensibility, infused with audience-pleasing humor that punctured the dominant character trait of many an office holder: pomposity. Not surprisingly, his targets, archconservatives conspicuous among them, did not take kindly to his arrows. And he did not always adhere to modern standards of correctness.Of President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Shields said dismissively that “the toughest thing he’s ever done was to ask Republicans to vote for a tax cut.” The House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was “an invertebrate”; Senator Lindsey Graham made Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s loyal sidekick, “look like an independent spirit.” In both major parties, he said, too many are afflicted with “the Rolex gene” — making them money-hungry caterers to the wealthy.Asked in a 2013 C-SPAN interview which presidents he admired, he cited Gerald R. Ford, a Republican who took office in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Ford, he said, was “the most emotionally healthy.”“Not that the others were basket cases,” he said, but “they get that bug, and as the late and very great Mo Udall, who sought that office, once put it, the only known cure for the presidential virus is embalming fluid.”Politics, he maintained, was “a contact sport, a question of accepting an elbow or two,” and losing was “the original American sin.”“People come up with very creative excuses why they can’t be with you when you’re losing,” he said. “Like ‘my nephew is graduating from driving school,’ and ‘I’d love to be with you but we had a family appointment at the taxidermist.’”Still, for all their foibles, he had an abiding admiration for politicians, be they Democrats or Republicans, simply for entering the arena.“When you dare to run for public office, everyone you ever sat next to in high school homeroom or double-dated with or car-pooled with knows whether you won or, more likely, lost,” he said. “The political candidate dares to risk the public rejection that most of us will go to any length to avoid.”Mark Stephen Shields was born in Weymouth on May 25, 1937, one of four children of William Shields, a paper salesman involved in local politics, and Mary (Fallon) Shields, who taught school until she married.“In my Irish American Massachusetts family, you were born a Democrat and baptized a Catholic,” Mr. Shields wrote in 2009. “If your luck held out, you were also brought up to be a Boston Red Sox fan.”Mr. Shields, right, talking with Sandy Levin, Democrat of Michigan, before a meeting of the House Democratic caucus at the Capitol in Washington in 2011.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesHe attended schools in Weymouth and then the University of Notre Dame, where he majored in philosophy and graduated in 1959. With military conscription looming, he chose in 1960 to enlist in the Marines, emerging in 1962 as a lance corporal. He learned a lot in those two years, he said, including concepts of leadership encapsulated in a Marine tradition of officers not being fed until their subordinates were.“Would not our country be a more just and human place,” he wrote in 2010, “if the brass of Wall Street and Washington and executive suites believed that ‘officers eat last’?”As he set out on his career in politics, he met Anne Hudson, a lawyer and federal agency administrator. They were married in 1966. In addition to his daughter, a television producer, he is survived by his wife and two grandchildren. There were bumps along the road, including a period of excessive drinking. “If I wasn’t an alcoholic, I was probably a pretty good imitation of one,” he told C-SPAN, adding: “I have not had a drink since May 15, 1974. It took me that long to find out that God made whiskey so the Irish and the Indians wouldn’t run the world.”Some of his happiest moments, he said, were when he worked on political campaigns: “You think you are going to make a difference that’s going to be better for the country, and especially for widows and orphans and people who don’t even know your name and never will know your name. Boy, that’s probably as good as it gets.” More

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      in Theater

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

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

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      in Television

      Fashioning ‘The First Lady’

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      The new Showtime series on Michelle Obama, Betty Ford and Eleanor Roosevelt makes the connection between substance and style.It is a coincidence, but a telling one, that the day after “The First Lady,” the series that is a revisionist take on presidential wives as seen through the intertwined stories of Michelle Obama, Betty Ford and Eleanor Roosevelt, premiered on Showtime, Dr. Jill Biden hosted the White House Easter egg roll. Or rather, the Easter “Eggucation” roll.There she stood, the current first lady and the only one out of more than 50 (official and acting) to keep her pre-administration day job, like a bouquet of hyacinths in a pink dress festooned with a veritable garden of florals, a coordinating purple coat and fuchsia gloves, flanked by her besuited husband and two life-size bunnies. She exuded warmth and family values, embodying the platonic ideal of a political spouse, while also promoting her signature cause (education).Dr. Jill Biden at the annual White House Easter egg roll at the White House this week.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIf ever there was a real-life illustration of the balancing act between role-playing and real issues that is part of performing one of the strangest non-job jobs that exists, this was it.After all, what is the first lady? Unelected, but part of the package; beholden to the West Wing, but in an office, if not an Office, of her own; emblematic, somehow, of American womanhood writ large. The human face of an administration.Which is to say, said Sean Wilentz, the George Henry Davis 1886 professor of American history at Princeton, she is supposed to be “the ideal wife as helpmeet: swearing (or affirming), to the best of her ability, to preserve (cook, care), protect (as in protecting time) and defend (no matter what) the president.”Exactly how strange that position is, forms the heart of “The First Lady,” a bit of historical didacticism dressed up as pop culture entertainment that makes the case for the presidential wife as the progressive social conscience of an administration, thus aiming to change the narrative from one largely focused on image-making (clothes! holiday events! state dinners!) to one focused on substance.Gillian Anderson as Eleanor Roosevelt.Boris Martin/ShowtimeYet what the series, which flips between moments in each first lady’s life that are connected thematically, rather than chronologically, may do best is illustrate just how intertwined the roles actually are — onscreen as in life. The first reaction of viewers (at least on social media) was not to the premise of the show, which gives its first ladies credit for, among other things, championing women’s rights and desegregation (Eleanor Roosevelt, as played by Gillian Anderson); changing the conversation around breast cancer, mammograms and addiction (Betty Ford, played by Michelle Pfeiffer); and fighting for gay marriage and exposing racism (Michelle Obama, by Viola Davis). Rather, it was to the facial tics, especially the lip pursing, of Ms. Davis as Mrs. Obama.By how they look, we think we know them. “The two things are intrinsically connected,” said Cathy Schulman, the showrunner and executive producer of “The First Lady.” When it comes to first ladies, how they present in the world becomes shorthand for who they are and what they do. It’s the bridge of “relatability” (in the words of the show’s Barack Obama) from the White House to every house. Onscreen as, perhaps, on the political stage.Viola Davis as Michelle Obama.Jackson Lee Davis/ShowtimeIt’s why, even as the characters themselves chafe against the strictures of their new position — as Laura Bush warns Mrs. Obama, people are going to judge everything she does, including what she wears; as Mrs. Obama rolls her eyes at attempts to make her a “Black Martha Stewart”; as Mrs. Ford announces her belief that you can be “ladylike” and yourself at the same time — Ms. Schulman and Signe Sejlund, the costume designer for the series, were focused on getting the clothes as accurate as possible.It was, Ms. Schulman said, “crucial.” Starting in late 2020, teams of researchers began collecting historical documentation and images from the periods represented, many of which had been preserved for posterity, the better to build wardrobes that could consist of about 75 changes for each woman. These included such major public sartorial statements as their wedding dresses, inauguration outfits and the gowns they wore for their official White House portraits.Jason Wu, who designed both of Mrs. Obama’s inaugural gowns, agreed to recreate the first one — the silver-white dress that seemed to proclaim a new dawn — for Ms. Davis. (In part because the original had been donated to the Smithsonian, and he wanted one for his archive.) Ms. Sejlund scoured the RealReal for a copy of the Milly dress Mrs. Obama wore in her portrait, and found it, albeit in the wrong size, so she acquired more fabric from the designer to reinvent it.Michelle Pfeiffer as Betty Ford.Murray Close/ShowtimeSome are clones of the originals, including Mrs. Ford’s shirtdresses, often paired with the silk scarves she favored, her many polka dots and her quilted bathrobes — especially the yellow robe she wore when she left the hospital after her mastectomy, when, Ms. Schulman said, “she knew the place would be crawling with journalists.” It was a canny choice that reflected her desire to be as transparent as possible about connecting her own situation to that of other women. (How many first ladies before her had been publicly photographed in their dressing gowns?)And some are conceptually the same, like the wide belts that, along with the pearls, cardigans and sleeveless sheaths, became a signature of Mrs. Obama, but which were shrunk down to be in proportion with Ms. Davis’s smaller frame. Then there was the giant floral necklace Eleanor Roosevelt wore to her husband’s first inauguration, which, while very au fait in the early 1930s, “looked almost ridiculous when you see it with a modern eye,” Ms. Sejlund said.From left, Gillian Anderson as Eleanor Roosevelt and Lily Rabe as Lorena ‘Hick’ Hickock.Boris Martin/ShowtimeThe necklace was ultimately left in the closet, unlike the collection of jaunty hats that were a Roosevelt trademark and that played a starring role in Mrs. Roosevelt’s 1941 visit to Tuskegee Army Air Field, where she demonstrated her support for Black airmen with a flight that was so smooth, she announced to the world, she “never lost” her hat.All such accessories are on some level recognizable because they serve as wormholes to the events portrayed. We may not remember them exactly, but we’ve probably seen the picture. It exists in our shared memory book, just as the photo of Mrs. Biden in her stylized florals with the rabbits will. Acknowledging that likelihood doesn’t take away from her achievements or the connection she made between holiday décor and learning. It supports it.They are, after all, effectively costumes for real life characters playing a very specific role in a show everyone can watch. More

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      in Television

      Late Night Approves of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s High Ratings

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      A poll found strong support for the judge’s Supreme Court nomination, but “speechmaking and hissy-fitting” continued in the Senate, said Jimmy Kimmel.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.Upon ApprovalWednesday was the final day of questions for the Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, or, as Jimmy Kimmel referred to it, “another day of grandstanding, speechmaking and hissy-fitting in the Senate.”A newly released poll, conducted before the hearings began, found that 58 percent of Americans supported Judge Jackson’s appointment to the court.“It is the most support a Jackson has had since ‘Thriller’ came out.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Right now, Biden’s like, ‘Hey, I nominated you — it’s only fair that we split that approval rating, come on.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, the only way it could have been higher is if she ended today with a water bottle flip.” — JIMMY FALLON“She said the fact that she was even nominated shows how far we’ve come as a country, and so some of the Republican senators on the committee have been hard at work to show how far we haven’t.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“This is how low the United States government has fallen. We’ve gone from ‘Let’s put a man on the moon within the decade’ to ‘Maybe someday we can get at least one Republican to vote for a qualified woman.’” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Uninvited Edition)“In other news, despite the current state of affairs, Vladimir Putin is still planning to attend the G20 summit with other world leaders in Bali this fall — which explains this year’s theme: ‘Awkward.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Seriously, what is he doing? It’s like getting kicked out of high school and then showing up for the reunion.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, it’ll backfire on Putin when he realizes it’s not a G20 summit; it’s an intervention.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth Watching“The Late Late Show” celebrated Reggie Watts’s 50th birthday by giving him a racecar bed.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightGwen Stefani will pop by Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutThe artists Mónica Arreola, left, and Andrew Roberts, selected for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2022 Biennial, titled “Quiet as It’s Kept,” at the graffitied border wall in Tijuana.Alejandro Cossio for The New York TimesThe curators of this year’s Whitney Biennial expanded their reach to include Mexican perspectives on the border. More

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      Late Night Sees Through Republican Questions for Ketanji Brown Jackson

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      “It’s funny listening to the same people who let the president get away with trying to overthrow the government call anyone ‘soft on crime,’ but that’s how it goes,” Jimmy 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.Soft SpotsJudge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings continued on Tuesday, and late-night hosts couldn’t help but notice how Republicans made their biases clear.“I think your dog whistle’s busted, guys. Everyone can hear it now!” Jimmy Kimmel said.“Today was the first of two days where senators can ask the nominee direct questions, so Democrats asked things like ‘Why are you so great?’ and Republicans asked things like ‘Why aren’t you Donald Trump?’” — JAMES CORDEN“But despite the gratuitous attacks, Judge Jackson has been very cool under pressure. They don’t have anything real to criticize, so they’ve been trying to portray her as being soft on crime, which is interesting because she’s been endorsed by both the International Association of Police Chiefs and the Fraternal Order of Police — and the band The Police. Even Sting is in her corner.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“How soft are Republicans talking here, do we think? Like, ‘not handing out maximum sentences’ levels of soft or, you know, ‘deciding to look the other way after Jan. 6’ levels of soft?” — JAMES CORDEN“It’s funny listening to the same people who let the president get away with trying to overthrow the government call anyone ‘soft on crime,’ but that’s how it goes.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (More K.B.J. Edition)“Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson made an opening statement yesterday, got praise from both sides of the aisle. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said he liked it and his wife liked it, too. Judge Jackson got the coveted Barbara Grassley seal of approval.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But not every Republican was impressed. Senators Marsha Blackburn and Josh Hawley were like, ‘You lost us at Ketanji.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yep, these hearings are never really fun, but then again there’s always a paper crinkle to really liven things up.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingSavannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb surprised Jimmy Fallon with a performance of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightSandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, “The Lost City” co-stars, will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutPerformers at the “Bridgerton” ball, which will travel to Washington, Chicago and Montreal after its Los Angeles run.Maggie Shannon for The New York Times“Bridgerton” fans can enjoy a royal ball straight out of their favorite Netflix series. More

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      in Theater

      Julianne Hough and Vanessa Williams to Star in Broadway Farce 'POTUS'

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      “POTUS,” by Selina Fillinger, will star Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams and Rachel Dratch are among the stars of “POTUS” on Broadway.Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images, Caitlin Ochs/Reuters, Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Add one more curveball to this unusual Broadway spring: a political comedy by a 28-year-old writer whose previous New York production took place in a 62-seat basement theater.The new play has a mouthful of a title — “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” — and is a farce about a group of women doing damage control for a problematic president.Selina Fillinger, the playwright, is working with the Broadway veteran Susan Stroman, who will direct. The cast will include Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Previews are scheduled to begin April 14 and the opening date is set for May 9, which will most likely make it part of the next Broadway season, not the current one, if the Tony Awards stick to an expected late April opening deadline for eligibility for this season’s awards. The “POTUS” run, at the Shubert Theater, is limited, and scheduled to end Aug. 14.Fillinger, an Oregon native who has been working in Los Angeles as a writer on “The Morning Show,” said she started “POTUS” six years ago. (POTUS is an acronym for president of the United States.)“For years we’ve had this endless cycle of headlines about powerful men abusing their power, and each time I was fascinated by the women orbiting the men and enabling them,” she said in an interview. “The more I started to think about these women, the farce started to write itself.”And is the show about a particular president, such as, say, the last one?“It is an amalgamation of many men in power,” she said. “I set it in the White House because that’s the highest office in the land, but you could set it in any company and any institution and many homes.”Fillinger’s previous work, “Something Clean,” was staged by Roundabout Underground in 2019 and was praised by the New York Times critic Ben Brantley as “a beautifully observed, richly compassionate new drama.”Fillinger said there is some thematic overlap between “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” which was about a mother grappling with her son’s conviction for sexual assault. Her first play, “Faceless,” was about an American jihadist.“I think I am interested in complicity,” she said. “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” she noted, “are both centered on somebody who is never seen onstage, and that is because I am interested in who we give airtime to, and who we don’t give airtime to, and flipping the switch on that.”Stroman, who over the last 30 years has won five Tony Awards for choreography and direction, including both categories for “The Producers,” is best known for musicals. This will be her first time helming a play on Broadway; Off Broadway she directed a Colman Domingo drama, “Dot,” in 2016.In an interview, Stroman said an agent sent her the “POTUS” script, and she was immediately interested. “It’s very funny, and it has an important message within the comedy. At some point there’s a reckoning about what it’s like to keep these people in power who are not worthy.”The play’s lead producers are four companies: Seaview, led by Greg Nobile; 51 Entertainment, founded by Lynette Howell Taylor; Glass Half Full Productions, managed by Gareth Lake; and Level Forward, co-founded by Abigail Disney. The production is permitted to raise up to $6.75 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but a spokeswoman said the play’s actual capitalization would be $5.9 million. More