Eliana Willis

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    When the Voice You Hear Is Not the Actor You See

    The playwright Lucas Hnath has been making magic with the sound of speech. Now he’s directing a play by Mona Pirnot, his wife, in which a computer speaks her words.In the darkest moments of a family tragedy, when the playwright Mona Pirnot couldn’t find the strength to verbalize her feelings to her boyfriend or her therapist, she tried something a little unorthodox: She typed her thoughts into her laptop, and prompted a text-to-speech program to voice them aloud.It was a coping mechanism that also sparked a creative pivot: Pirnot’s then-boyfriend, now-husband, Lucas Hnath, is also a playwright, with a longtime interest in sound and a more recent history of building shows around disembodied voices. His last play, “A Simulacrum,” featured a magician re-creating his side of a conversation with Hnath, whose voice was heard via a tape recording; and his play before that, “Dana H.,” featured an actress lip-syncing interviews in which the playwright’s mother recounted the trauma of having been abducted.Now Hnath is directing Pirnot, who wrote and is the lone actor in “I Love You So Much I Could Die,” a diaristic exploration of how she was affected by a life-altering incident that incapacitated her sister at the start of the pandemic. In the 65-minute show, in previews Off Broadway at New York Theater Workshop, Pirnot sits on a ladderback chair, facing away from the audience, while a Microsoft text-to-speech program reads her lines. Between chapters of storytelling, Pirnot plays the guitar and sings songs that she wrote.Disembodied drama: Pirnot sits with her back to the audience for the entire play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe computer’s voice is male, robotic, and, of course, unemotional; its cadence, and the length of pauses, varies based on how Pirnot and Hnath have punctuated the text. The program makes occasional mistakes — a running joke concerns the pronunciation of Shia LaBeouf — that the artists cherish. Hearing a machine recount stories of very human pain can be awkwardly funny, and audiences are laughing, particularly early in the show, as they adjust to the disorienting experience.“I like the relentlessness that I can get with [the computer’s] voice that’s kind of shocking and surprising, and I find it to be at times very moving but at times extremely anxiety provoking,” Pirnot said. “This actually feels like I’m capturing and sharing a little bit of what this felt like.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘True Detective: Night Country’ and ‘Doctor Zhivago’

    The fourth season, with Jodie Foster, Kali Reis and a touch of the supernatural, wraps up. TCM airs a classic romance.With network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Feb. 12-18. Details and times are subject to change.MondayNCIS 9 p.m. on CBS. This nautical-flavored police procedural is back for its 21st season. Since its premier in 2003, it has spawned five spinoff series: “NCIS: Los Angeles,” “NCIS: New Orleans,” “NCIS: Hawai’i,” “NCIS: Sydney” and “NCIS: Origins.” We can expect the newest of the three, “Origins,” to debut sometime this season in a backdoor-pilot episode. You’d wonder how many naval crimes a writing team could possibly come up with, but they show no signs of slowing down.THE HOST (2006) 11:45 p.m. on Flix. The director Bong Joon Ho received international acclaim for his 2019 film “Parasite,” but his monster epic about a man’s quest to rescue his daughter from a mutated creature in the Han River is not to be missed. It’s a pastiche that nails every genre it splices, moving deftly from incisive satire to campy horror/sci-fi to searing family drama.TuesdayEoin Macken in “La Brea.”Mark Taylor/NBCLA BREA 9 p.m. on NBC. This sci-fi drama about a family separated by a sinkhole that opens up a time portal (sure!) will air its series finale, a continuation of last week’s episode “The Road Home.” The show was marginally popular during its first season, earning itself a People’s Choice nomination for sci-fi/fantasy show, and though it was nominated again the next year, this third and final season only ran for six episodes. If you’ll miss watching the show or want a D.I.Y. experience, see: tar pits.WednesdayGHOST ADVENTURES: SCREAMING ROOM 10:01 p.m. on Discovery. If you time your Valentine’s dinner plans well enough, you can arrive home to pour a few nice glasses of red wine, cuddle up to your sweetheart and turn on the most romantic viewing material imaginable: Zak Bagans, a “paranormal investigator” and proprietor of a haunted museum in Las Vegas with a dulcet-toned bro voice who, here, rewatches an episode of his own ghost-hunting reality show, “Ghost Adventures.” I’m really only half-kidding about its V-Day airing date — I do find ghosts romantic.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Ex-W.W.F. Wrestler ‘Billy Jack’ Haynes Arrested in Wife’s Murder

    William Albert Haynes Jr., 70, went by “Billy Jack” in the 1980s during his time in the World Wrestling Federation.William Albert “Billy Jack” Haynes Jr., who in the 1980s competed in the World Wrestling Federation, was arrested in the killing of his wife at a home in Portland, Ore., on Thursday after a standoff with police.The authorities publicly identified Mr. Haynes, 70, on Saturday, days after the police said he shot and killed his wife, Janette Becraft, 85, in the Lents neighborhood of southeast Portland.At the peak of his career, wrestling as Billy Jack Haynes, he faced Randy “Macho Man” Savage and in 1987 went against Hercules Hernandez in WrestleMania III.After his arrest, the Portland Police Bureau said Mr. Haynes was taken to a hospital to get treatment for a medical condition that was “unrelated to the homicide or his contact with law enforcement,” adding that his stay could last “days.”He was expected to be booked into jail and formally charged upon his release from the hospital, the police said Saturday. It was unclear if Mr. Haynes had obtained a lawyer.Just before 10 a.m. on Feb. 8, the police responded to a report of a shooting at the home. Officers made contact with Mr. Haynes, who was inside the home and was uncooperative, they said. After negotiations, officers arrested him and found Ms. Becraft dead inside.Sgt. Kevin Allen, a spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau, said there were no updates Sunday evening and declined to elaborate on the nature of Mr. Haynes’s medical condition.Brelynn Matthieu, a neighbor, told FOX 12 Oregon that she knew the couple well and that she had recently been staying with Ms. Becraft, who had dementia, while Mr. Haynes recovered in the hospital from a rib injury sustained during a fall.Mr. Haynes, of Portland, debuted in the W.W.F., which is today called World Wrestling Entertainment, in 1986, according to the book “WWE Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to World Wrestling Entertainment.”Mr. Haynes was a plaintiff in a federal class-action lawsuit filed against the W.W.E. in 2016. The suit claimed that the organization had mistreated its wrestlers by denying and concealing medical research about the traumatic brain injuries they suffered.The suit further claimed that the W.W.E. had “disavowed, concealed and prevented” medical care for such injuries. More

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    All the Super Bowl Commercials So Far, Ranked

    Here is our ranking of the Super Bowl commercials we have been able to track down ahead of the big game.In the spirit of “Who actually watches the game?,” here is our ranking of all the Super Bowl commercials we have been able to track down so far, from best to worst.Ground rules: Only ads being shown on the national CBS broadcast during the game are eligible. Certain spots, including several advocating a boycott of Tesla and a number of CBS promos for its own primetime series, were omitted from this ranking. Commercials not available beforehand or with a live component — including spots from FanDuel, TurboTax, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism and the controversial Chinese e-commerce company Temu — will be added after the game. (If Travis Kelce proposes to Taylor Swift in a surprise ad for The Knot, we will probably have our winner.)The Best of the BunchThese are the ones we’ll remember for at least a day or two.BMWChristopher Walken makes fun of people making fun of Christopher Walken, with a cameo performance by the Super Bowl halftime star Usher. As always, he walks the walk.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Brian McConnachie, Humor Writer ‘From Another Planet,’ Dies at 81

    A contributor to National Lampoon, “Saturday Night Live” and “SCTV,” he had a patrician presence that belied a whimsical and sometimes anarchic wit.Brian McConnachie, who brought absurdist humor to three comedy touchstones of the 1970s and ’80s — National Lampoon magazine and the NBC television series “Saturday Night Live” and “SCTV Network” — died in hospice care on Jan. 5 in Venice, Fla. He was 81.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Ann (Crilly) McConnachie, said.Mr. McConnachie — who stood 6-foot-5 and often dressed in a bow tie, suit and saddle shoes — had an elegant, patrician presence that set him apart from the wilder, more disheveled writers (most of them men) who often surrounded him.“Look, if you told me that he had been a welcomed member of the Algonquin Round Table, and he was there with James Thurber, I’d get that,” Alan Zweibel, an original “S.N.L.” writer who worked with Mr. McConnachie, said in a phone interview. “The rest of us were hooligans.”Yet even if he appeared to be more of a grown-up than other writers in the Lampoon and “S.N.L.” orbits, Mr. McConnachie’s laid-back, whimsical style — with some anarchic, disturbed twists — fit in well with the other writers’ contributions.“If the story of the National Lampoon were a script by Rod Serling,” Rick Meyerowitz, a leading illustrator there, wrote in “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead” (2010), his history of the magazine, “the main character would have been Brian McConnachie, a man who his colleagues were convinced was from another planet.”In addition to writing for National Lampoon, Mr. McConnachie appeared in its “1964 High School Yearbook Parody,” among other places.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Book Review: “Cocktails With George and Martha” by Philip Gefter

    COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE AND MARTHA: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ by Philip GefterWhat a document dump!The most delicious parts of “Cocktails With George and Martha,” Philip Gefter’s unapologetically obsessive new book about “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — the dark ’n’ stormy, oft-revived 1962 Broadway hit by Edward Albee that became a moneymaking movie and an eternal marriage meme — are diary excerpts from the screenwriter Ernest Lehman. (Gefter calls the diary “unpublished,” but at least some of it surfaced in the turn-of-the-millennium magazine Talk, now hard to find.)That Lehman is no longer a household name, if he ever was, is one of showbiz history’s many injustices. Before the thankless task of condensing Albee’s three-hour play for the big screen (on top of producing), he wrote the scripts for “North by Northwest” (1959), arguably Hitchcock’s greatest, and with some help, “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957). The latter was based on his experience copywriting for a press agent, which inspired a novelette in Cosmopolitan called “Tell Me About It Tomorrow!” (Will someone please bring back the novelette?)From beyond the grave, in a production journal titled “Fun and Games With George and Martha” housed at the Harry Ransom Center, Lehman dishes on working with Mike Nichols, the then-darling of New York intellectuals hired to direct his first Hollywood film, starring his famous, furiously canoodling friends Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.But first “Cocktails With George and Martha” fans out like a deck of cards the back story of the play, which initially featured Uta Hagen as Martha, the delulu grown daughter of a New England college president, and Arthur Hill as George, her husband, an associate history professor whose career has stalled. (Yes, they are named for the first first couple of America.) A younger married pair named Nick and Honey come over for the world’s longest and most hellacious nightcap.Steeped in alcohol and analysis themselves, sophisticated audiences thrilled to the play’s voyeurism and vulgar language, even as the Pulitzer Prize committee got prudish, suspending the drama prize the year “Woolf” was eligible.Gefter describes how another playwright, probably jealous of the box-office returns, accused Albee rather homophobically of “neuroticism” and “nihilism” in The New York Times. “If the theater must bring us only what we can immediately apprehend or comfortably relate to,” Albee responded in one of cultural journalism’s best mic drops, “let us stop going to the theater entirely. Let us play patty-cake with one another or sit in our rooms and contemplate our paunchy middles.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Puppy Bowl XX: Behind the Scenes at the Super Bowl’s Adorable Cousin

    The other big game on Super Bowl Sunday? The 20th outing of Animal Planet’s football game for puppies (complete with a kitten halftime show).It’s frowned upon when N.F.L. players complain to the referees. But at least they don’t urinate on them.The same cannot be said for the competitors in the Puppy Bowl, Animal Planet’s canine football game that takes place in October but does not air until the afternoon of Super Bowl Sunday.The event’s referee, Dan Schachner, stays ready for all eventualities by keeping five identical uniforms in his dressing room so he can change when accidents occur. Mr. Schachner, 49, admitted he had gotten lax about handing out penalties for “premature watering of the lawn” since he began calling the game in 2011.“I don’t automatically reach for the flag,” he said. “We have a game to play.”This year’s Puppy Bowl, which will be televised at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, is the 20th edition of the event, a milestone for a program that began as a tongue-in-cheek feed of puppy playtime before evolving into a counterprogramming juggernaut.The three-hour skirmish over a football-shaped chew toy has been on the air for longer than “Grey’s Anatomy.” Animal Planet said last year’s Puppy Bowl “reached” more than 13 million viewers.Dan Schachner, who is the Puppy Bowl’s official referee, keeps five identical uniforms around so he is prepared for any accidents.Animal PlanetWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘True Detective’ Season 4, Episode 5 Recap: Dots Finally Connect

    This week’s episode finally answers some questions that have been teased out for a long time.This week’s recap is posting earlier than usual because the episode premiered Friday on Max.Season 4, Episode 5: Part 5She’s awake. The show, that is.After last week’s episode spend too much time fussing over underdeveloped subplots and supernatural occurrences, this week’s hour snaps to attention like a procrastinating student who had been putting off a term paper. There have been stretches where “Night Country” has left the case untended, letting it thaw away in the background like the corpsicle at center ice. Too often, the show’s rich ambience has slipped into abstraction, leaving the detectives to wrestle with ghosts and lingering personal traumas while the more compelling tensions within Ennis are addressed in fits and starts. The forensics report on the scientists’ bodies only just came back this week!There are few ruminative moments in this penultimate episode and the excitement of the premiere comes rushing back, because there are finally some answers to the questions that have been teased out for so long. Danvers and Navarro are getting closer to the truth of what happened to the scientists and Annie K., which triggers the conspiratorial forces within the town and presents them with a race-against-the-clock scenario that not only reignites the show, but deepens its themes. In the classic noir tradition, the procedural elements are telling a larger story about the powers-that-be, like Jack Nicholson following a routine infidelity case into a web of municipal corruption in “Chinatown.”The mine has been the black heart of “Night Country,” pumping poison through the city’s water taps and government institutions. It remains to be seen what kind of threat Annie K. might have represented for the business, but Danvers and Navarro are more convinced than ever that the network of ice caves outside town hold the answer. Getting access to the caves, however, is no small matter. Their only feasible guide is Otis, a cagey German heroin addict with scorched eyeballs who once mapped the caves. They manage to get to base of the cave, but it is on mine company property and the entrance has been blown to pieces. Should they find another way in, they have to worry about the glass-like instability of the ice, to say nothing of Raymond Clark and other potential dangers.Meanwhile, Danvers’s young protégé, Peter, has something else to show for all the hard work that has finally gotten him kicked out of his house. After delivering information on Otis last week, Peter offers another file definitively connecting the mine to the Tsalal Research Station, which had been receiving funding in exchange for dubiously rosy pollution data. When Danvers gets called to a meeting at the mine offices with its owner, Kate McKittrick (Dervia Kirwan), and Ted, Danvers’s overseer and third-rate occasional sex partner, she assumes it is going to be a dressing-down about a protest that had turned violent, even though policing the scene was not her responsibility. She tucks the file away like a gun in an ankle holster.Danvers was right to expect an ambush. First, Kate presents surveillance footage of Danvers and Navarro scoping out the mine entrance and pumps her for information on why they were there. Then she cheerily offers the good news that the forensics team in Anchorage determined that the scientists had died en masse because of a freak weather event that kicked up when they were perhaps catching the last sunset before the long night. Danvers knows enough about the case by now to roll her eyes at this explanation, and she confronts Kate with the incriminating file, but Kate and Ted have another card to play. Ted knows the Wheeler case wasn’t a murder-suicide and suggests that Danvers and Navarro would be wise to stop snooping.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More