In the wake of President Trump unleashing a new series of tariffs that sent markets into a steep decline, a group of stars shoved into the Winter Garden Theater in Midtown Manhattan to see a play that lionizes the press, takes aim at right-wing politicians, and features actors talking about how they wake up in the morning unable to recognize the world around them.

Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC were on the right side of the theater, a few rows behind Gayle King of CBS. Uma Thurman and Kylie Minogue hovered nearby.

Even Jennifer Lopez was in the house, though that was not much of a surprise. The co-writer and star of the play she was about to see was George Clooney, who appeared alongside Ms. Lopez in the 1998 Steven Soderbergh caper “Out of Sight.”

The play, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” is an adaptation of the 2005 film that Mr. Clooney directed and that takes place in the 1950s during the height of the red scare.

It tells the story of Edward R. Murrow, the crusading CBS anchorman who used his platform to help bring about the downfall of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and end a government campaign against suspected American communists.

Mr. Clooney’s own political leanings are well known. A leading fund-raiser for the Democratic Party, he made news during the last election by writing a guest essay for The New York Times declaring it time for President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to stand down and pass the baton.

In the run-up to the premiere of the play, Mr. Clooney gave an interview to CBS News in which he discussed the essential role journalism plays in a functioning democracy and expressed his concern over the way billionaire businessmen who own media outlets like The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have seemed, in his estimation, to be cozying up to Mr. Trump.

When Mr. Trump learned of Mr. Clooney’s comments, he wrote on his social networking site, Truth Social, “Why would the now highly discredited 60 Minutes be doing a total ‘puff piece’ on George Clooney, a second rate movie ‘star,’ and failed political pundit.”

Mr. Clooney’s star power still seemed to shine on Thursday as he received a great deal of support from people like Graydon Carter, the editor of Airmail and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump who famously has referred to him as a “short-fingered vulgarian.”

Also there to show support was Richard Kind, a comedian and actor who appeared with Mr. Clooney in a failed television pilot in the 1980s. After Mr. Clooney struck it big with “E.R.,” Mr. Kind was one of several friends who received $1 million from Mr. Clooney simply because.

“He’s the greatest guy,” Mr. Kind said, adding that he would be open to receiving some more money. “In New York it goes like that. I’ve got three kids in private school.“

The lights went down and a singer delivered a rendition of Nat King Cole’s “When I Fall In Love.” Mr. Clooney took the stage in a dark suit. His salt and pepper hair was dyed a shade of brown that he has said his kids “laugh at” nonstop.

Then, he delivered a monologue imploring people to “recognize that media, in the main, is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us.”

And for the next 90 minutes, parallels piled up between what Mr. Murrow went through in the 1950s and what journalists are going through today.

Here was Mr. Clooney, as Mr. Murrow, getting deflated by an actor portraying Bill Paley, the former head of CBS.

In the audience was the ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos, whose network recently paid Mr. Trump $15 million to bring an end to a defamation suit he filed against the network after Mr. Stephanopoulos said on air that Mr. Trump had been found liable in a civil case for rape, when he’d actually been found liable for sexual abuse.

It was heavy stuff, but most in the crowd seemed to exit the theater happy and ready to let loose at the after-party, at the New York Public Library.

In the lobby, which doubled as the main event space, Anna Wintour, the global chief content officer of Condé Nast, marched up to Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live” and thanked him for his R.S.V.P. to the Met Gala.

“I’m so happy you’re coming,” she said, adding to a nearby reporter that it was going to be “his first time.”

As waiters passed out lobster rolls and mini-burgers, Ms. Lopez wafted over to Mr. Clooney, gave him a peck on the cheek and declared his performance in the play to be “wonderful” and “amazing.” (“You know that was me yelling for you?” she said.)

A few feet away, a reporter asked Rande Gerber, Mr. Clooney’s close friend and business partner on the tequila brand Casamigos, whether staging the show on Broadway might be a curtain raiser for Mr. Clooney to one day run for office.

“I think a lot of people wish he would,” Mr. Gerber said. “But I have no knowledge he is.”

Asked directly if he would consider the option, Mr. Clooney gave a shake of the head, flashed his best People’s Sexiest Man Alive smile and said he was “so much happier” doing things like “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

Further, he said, “it’s fun to pick fights,” especially with a guy like Mr. Trump, who he thinks is doing so much to “tank” the economy.

Then, Mr. Clooney flashed another smile, declared himself to be “more optimistic” about the future of the Democratic Party than many of his friends, and headed off to say hello to several more of them.

Sam Keen, a pop psychologist and philosopher whose best-selling book “Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man” urged men to get in touch with their primal masculinity and became a touchstone of the so-called men’s movement of the 1990s, died on March 19 in Oahu, Hawaii. He was 93.

His death, while on vacation, was confirmed by his wife, Patricia de Jong. The couple lived on a 60-acre ranch in Sonoma, Calif.

Mr. Keen, who described himself as having been “overeducated at Harvard and Princeton,” fled academia in the 1960s for California, where he led self-help workshops and wrote more than a dozen books. He became a well-known figure in the human potential movement of that era.

In the 1970s, he delivered lectures around the country with the mythology scholar Joseph Campbell. He also gave workshops at two of the wellsprings of the New Age: Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., and Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y. Mr. Keen’s specialty was helping middle-class seekers slough off the expectations of family and society, and discover what he called their “personal mythology.”

A long conversation that the ruggedly handsome Mr. Keen had with the journalist Bill Moyers, broadcast on PBS in 1991, brought him national exposure the month that “Fire in the Belly” was published. The book spent 29 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

Mr. Keen told Mr. Moyers that he had spent much of his early life trying to meet expectations about masculinity, especially those placed on him by women.

“They were the audience before whom I dramatized my life,” he said, “and their applause and their approval was crucial for my sense of manhood.”

In “Fire in the Belly,” which was partly inspired by a men’s discussion group he belonged to, Mr. Keen argued that men must discover a new kind of manhood apart from the company of women.

“Only men understand the secret fears that go with the territory of masculinity,” he wrote.

“Fire in the Belly” and an earlier, bigger best seller, “Iron John” (1990) by the poet Robert Bly, became the twin handbooks of the men’s movement, a psychological response to the gains made by feminism.

The movement’s principal authors and workshop leaders claimed that modern men had become “feminized” by demands that they get in touch with their feelings, seek consensus rather than lead, and become domesticated rather than follow their warrior spirit.

At woodsy retreats, men beat on drums, screamed primally and broke down in tears, grieving injuries that had been done to them by society, and especially by absent fathers.

The movement was an easy target for parody, which came from many cultural quarters. But books like Mr. Bly’s and Mr. Keen’s attracted large readerships, both male and female. In 1992, the year after the wrenching Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, which alerted many Americans to the issue of workplace sexual harassment, Mr. Keen was invited to lead a private seminar on gender dynamics for senators in Washington.

The men’s movement of the 1990s might have sowed some early seeds of what became the current “manosphere,” the world of misogynistic influencers who celebrate harassment and violence toward women. But Mr. Keen himself was not a misogynist, and he embraced feminism. He applauded its analysis of a patriarchal society that wounded both women and men, and he wrote that women’s liberation was “a model for the changes men are beginning to experience.”

From the men’s movement, Mr. Keen went on to become a guru of the flying trapeze, encouraging men and women to overcome their psychological fears by learning to swing from a circus bar 25 feet off the ground.

He set up a trapeze on his property in the foothills of Sonoma County and wrote “Learning to Fly: Trapeze — Reflections on Fear, Trust, and the Joy of Letting Go” (1999).

Alex Witchel, a Times reporter who visited him and took him up on the challenge, noted that Mr. Keen, then 67, wore tights and slippers and “looked like a bony old bird, his frame lean and spare from years of flying.”

Samuel McMurray Keen was born on Nov. 23, 1931, in Scranton, Pa., the second-oldest of five children of J. Alvin Keen, the director of a Methodist church choir, and Ruth (McMurray) Keen, a teacher. His early years were spent in Maryville, in East Tennessee.

When Sam was 11, his family moved to Wilmington, Del., where his parents ran a mail-order business selling uniforms to military nurses.

He graduated from Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa., outside Philadelphia, and then earned a Doctor of Theology degree from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. in philosophy of religion from Princeton University.

In 1968, on a sabbatical from the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Kentucky, he visited the West Coast and became, as he once told an interviewer, “engulfed in the California madness.” He never returned to academia.

He became a freelance journalist, writing for Psychology Today and other magazines and interviewing some of the leading lights of New Age spirituality, including Carlos Castaneda, Chogyam Trungpa and Mr. Campbell, whose “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” inspired both the Grateful Dead and “Star Wars.”

His early book “To a Dancing God” (1970) described his rejection of the conservative Christianity in which he was raised and his embrace of direct spiritual experience.

A later book, “Faces of the Enemy” (1986), a study of the use of propaganda to prepare citizens for war, was made into a PBS documentary.

Mr. Keen’s marriage to Heather Barnes ended in divorce after 17 years. A second marriage, to Janine Lovett, also ended in divorce. Besides Ms. de Jong, whom he married in 2004, he is survived by a son, Gifford Keen, and a daughter, Lael Keen, from his first marriage; a daughter, Jessamyn Griffin, from his second marriage; six grandchildren; and three siblings, Lawrence Keen, Ruth Ann Keen and Edith Livesay.

Mr. Keen’s emergence as a spokesman for the men’s movement was somewhat accidental. He had been leading various types of workshops when his publisher, sniffing something in the air, asked him to write about modern manhood.

As “Fire in the Belly” caught fire with readers, Mr. Keen was disdainful of some of the more easily lampooned aspects of the movement.

“I wouldn’t be caught dead with a drum,” he said.