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    Solo Shows in Theater This Fall: Patrick Page, Isabelle Adjani and More

    For theatergoers who love uncrowded stages, the coming months bring a range of works, from musical comedies to Shakespearean dramas.Solo shows have been around as long as there has been theater — longer, actually, if we count storytelling by a campfire. There is an elemental intimacy about the format and, let’s face it, an economic appeal at a time of belt-tightening.Despite their seemingly restrictive approach, one-person productions come in many shapes and forms: tales told by a single narrator and ones in which the performer embodies many characters, for example; dramatic yarns; and comic efforts that can flirt with stand-up. The last hybrid seems to be enjoying a kind of golden age, illustrated by the successes of Mike Birbiglia (“The Old Man and the Pool”) and Alex Edelman, whose recent Broadway hit, “Just for Us,” will be at the Curran Theater in San Francisco, Oct. 26-28.The coming months are a boon for theatergoers who love uncrowded stages, starting with the fall iteration of the cornucopia known as the United Solo Theater Festival (through Nov. 19 at Theater Row). Here is a selection of notable shows.Interrogating biographySometimes, it takes one icon to take measure of to another. The French actress Isabelle Adjani (“The Story of Adèle H.,” “Camille Claudel”) engages with Marilyn Monroe, myth and woman, in “Marilyn’s Vertigo.” The show, presented in French with supertitles as part of the Crossing the Line Festival, is framed as a dialogue with the Hollywood star, and was written by Adjani and Olivier Steiner. Oct. 12-13; FIAF Florence Gould Hall, Manhattan.John Rubinstein in Richard Hellesen’s “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground,” adapted from Eisenhower’s memoirs, speeches and letters.Maria BaranovaIn a different register, John Rubinstein returns for an encore of Richard Hellesen’s “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground,” a dive into the life of the military leader-turned-president that has proved quite popular. Through Oct. 27; Theater at St. Clement’s, Manhattan.One’s a crowdThe formidable Patrick Page is a versatile actor, but let’s face it: He is best known for portraying antagonists, including the Green Goblin in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” and Hades in “Hadestown.” Maybe it’s his basso profundo voice? In “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain,” directed by Simon Godwin, Page — whose command of his craft our critic described as “stupefying, effortless” — scrutinizes those classic characters. This might be the only time we ever see his take on Lady Macbeth. Through Jan. 7; DR2 Theater, Manhattan.Following his acclaimed solos “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes” (2015) and “I Hear You and Rejoice” (2018), the Irish writer and actor Mikel Murfi is bringing to New York the trilogy’s conclusion, “The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey.” Murfi portrays a range of characters from County Sligo, and performs all three pieces in repertory. Audiences can see any of the shows, or all of them. Oct. 24-Nov. 18; Irish Arts Center, Manhattan.Lameece Issaq has written for ensembles in works like “Food and Fadwa,” but her new piece, “A Good Day to Me, Not to You,” is a solo. In the show, presented by the Waterwell company and directed by Lee Sunday Evans (“Oratorio for Living Things”), Issaq plays a 40-something former dental lab technician reconsidering her life as she moves into a rooming house run by nuns on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Nov. 8-Dec. 9; Connelly Theater, Manhattan.Stand-up or theater?The comedian Caitlin Cook returns to SoHo Playhouse with her show “The Writing on the Stall.”Mindy TuckerGabe Mollica and Caitlin Cook are usually called comedians, but their work blurs the line with theater. Both performers are returning to the stage with encore runs of pieces that have been building a buzz. In “Solo: A Show About Friendship,” Mollica explores his realization that he has buddies but no close friends, and tries to dig into the reasons for that. Our ideas and hangups about masculinity may well play a part. Oct. 10-28, Connelly Theater Upstairs, Manhattan.Cook’s “The Writing on the Stall” is inspired by the gold mine of comic material found on the walls of bar bathrooms. She has turned graffiti spotted over the years into a show integrating songs (a nice micro-trend among comedians; see also Catherine Cohen), bits of anthropology and autobiographical sharing. Oct. 16-17, SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan.Birth of a performerEdgar Oliver, a longtime fixture of the downtown New York theater scene, revisits his days at the Pyramid Club in his new work, “Rip Tide.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFour years ago, Ben Brantley described Edgar Oliver’s body of work as a “singular series of elegiac performance pieces,” which essentially amount to an oral history narrated by one person. Oliver’s new piece, “Rip Tide,” revisits his days performing at the Pyramid Club, the East Village boîte where renegade drag, rock, spoken word and performance art thrived in the 1980s and ’90s. Through Oct. 28; Axis Theater, Manhattan.In her review for The New York Times, Laura Collins-Hughes pointed out how Melissa Etheridge turns Circle in the Square into an intimate music club for her concert-cum-memoir show, “My Window,” now on Broadway. Some of the rocker’s most fun anecdotes cover her early years playing lesbian spaces from her native Kansas to California. Through Nov. 19, Circle in the Square, Manhattan.Table for how many?Geoff Sobelle most recently performed his dinner party as theater spectacle at the Edinburgh Festival.Iain MastertonTechnically speaking, Geoff Sobelle’s “Food,” which is part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, involves a lot of people. Sobelle (“The Object Lesson”) is the host of a dinner party at which audience members sit at a very large table for what is described as “a meditation on how and why we eat.” Since “Food” was created with the magician Steve Cuiffo (“A Simulacrum”), it is no spoiler to mention it involves entertaining trickery. Nov. 2-18, Brooklyn Academy of Music.Repertory of onesPlaywrights Horizons is making smart use of its space by presenting three solos in repertory. Drawing from years as a tutor, Milo Cramer wrote and performs in “School Pictures,” a play with music that looks at our education system via a range of New York students. The comedian Ikechukwu Ufomadu, who opened for Catherine Cohen at Joe’s Pub this summer, brings more of his surreal musings in “Amusements.” And Alexandra Tatarsky’s “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” which involves clowning and nudity, looks to be the wild card of this bunch — emphasis on wild. Nov. 2-Dec. 3, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan. More

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    ‘Dicks: The Musical’ Review: Hitting High Notes, Going Lowbrow

    Larry Charles’s musical comedy is so hellbent on being outrageous that it just ends up being tiresome.The funniest part of “Dicks: The Musical” sneaks in at the very end, when outtakes are interspersed with the credits. Nathan Lane, in particular, comes across as a living illustration of the words “game” and “trooper.” He and his co-star Megan Mullally, pros that they are, elegantly suggest hints of disbelief at just how they ended up in a movie in which his character spits pre-chewed cold cuts into the gaping maws of hideous puppet monsters and hers complains that her vagina has flown away (at one point it attaches itself to someone like the facehugger in “Alien”).On paper this sounds intriguing, in a Troma Entertainment kind of way, and maybe one day this musical comedy will turn into a cult film like that company’s “Surf Nazis Must Die” or some of the jetsam perpetually washing up at pop culture’s edges.For now this movie from the hip indie studio A24 simply exerts itself as it tries way too hard to join the hallowed ranks of exploitation favorites extolling schlock values.Directed by Larry Charles (“Borat”), the film was adapted by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp from a show they performed at Upright Citizens Brigade in the mid-2010s. The two writers also play the supposedly identical twins Trevor and Craig, who were raised separately after their parents (Lane and Mullally) split up. The siblings, whose straightness is too aggressive to not be conspicuous, coincidentally work at the same company, where they compete for the title of best salesman and the attention of their boss, Gloria (Megan Thee Stallion, who gets the movie’s single best number, “Out-Alpha the Alpha”).The new colleagues’ relationship is frosty at first: “You have long hair like a girl,” Craig tells Trevor; “you have short hair like a lesbian girl,” Trevor replies, expertly wielding the rapier wit of a peeved eight-year-old. But eventually, the pair team up to reunite their folks. One potential obstacle is that their father, Harris, is decidedly not heterosexual. Cue the song “Gay Old Life,” in which Harris details his fabulous queer existence and introduces the aforementioned creatures, his beloved Sewer Boys. (Jackson and Sharp wrote the passable songs with Karl Saint Lucy and Marius de Vries, and their staging is mostly anemic.)Once Lane and Mullally, who plays the lisping mom Evelyn like a 1930s movie’s idea of a Park Avenue eccentric, enter the story, they hijack it from Jackson and Sharp, which is not necessarily a bad thing but also destabilizes the movie.Despite brief instances when it spills into surreal madness, most notably in a scene set in a sewer, the film is rudderless — which is a polite way to say limp. Its only point is highly self-aware pseudo-gonzo provocation, peaking in a denouement that feels both surprising and inevitable, and looks as if it had been engineered to deliberately unsettle some viewers. Some keyboard warriors and craven politicians might take the bait, while the rest of us will be left wondering why Lane and Mullally didn’t get a song with Megan Thee Stallion.Dicks: The MusicalRated R for language, sexual single entendres, cartoonish taboo-breaking and offenses against musical theater. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Seth Meyers Spurns Suggestions for Trump to Replace McCarthy

    “Only the Republicans would consider giving the job of speaker to someone who is under a gag order,” Meyers 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.Floating TrumpThe ouster of Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House continued to dominate late night on Wednesday, with hosts discussing potential replacements.Seth Meyers said that because “you have to be insane to actually want this job, some Republicans are floating the name of a person who is, in fact, insane” — with President Donald Trump as one possibility.“Incredible. Only the Republicans would consider giving the job of speaker to someone who is under a gag order. It’s like hiring a French mime as your new N.F.L. play-by-play guy.” — SETH MEYERS“Don’t worry. There’s no way he can be drafted — he’s got the bone spurs.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (National Kevin Day Edition)“We got a new episode of ‘The House Floor Is Lava’ last night.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“That’s right, the House voted yesterday to remove a speaker from power for the first time in 234 years. Well, they removed him from office. It’s hard to have power when you have all the fire and charisma of the Facebook silhouette guy.’ — SETH MEYERS“After just nine months of sucking at his job, McCarthy was stripped of the gavel by eight members of his own party. To make it even worse, this all happened — and this is true — on National Kevin Day.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Today, of course — and, again, this is true — is National Taco Day and National Vodka Day. Tacos and vodka, or as Kevin McCarthy called them this morning: breakfast.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Well, Kevin, don’t cry because it’s over; cry because it happened.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingChelsea Handler cleared up rumors brought on by tabloid headlines while on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightDavid Byrne, the frontman for the Talking Heads, will talk about the rerelease of the band’s 1984 concert film, “Stop Making Sense,” on Thursday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutA self-portrait of Tove Jansson with the Moomins.Moomin CharactersA new exhibit in Paris explores the life and work of the Scandinavian writer and artist Tove Jansson, the talent behind the beloved Moomin characters. More

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    ‘Saturday Night Live’ Returns with Pete Davidson, Ice Spice

    Pete Davidson — who left the cast of the show in 2022 — will host the season premiere on Oct. 14.With the five-month writers’ strike ending last week, a certain corner of television is coming back to life: first with the return of the late night shows on Monday, and now with “Saturday Night Live,” which will kick off its 49th season on Oct. 14, the show announced Wednesday on X, formerly known as Twitter.Pete Davidson, who left the long-running NBC sketch comedy program in May 2022 along with other big-name cast members including Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant, will host the season premiere; the Bronx rapper Ice Spice will be the musical guest. On Oct. 21, the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny will serve as both the host and musical guest. On Wednesday, “S.N.L.” also posted a welcome to its newest cast member, Chloe Troast.Season 48 was supposed to run through May 20 but concluded early because of the strike. The Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 11,000 writers, reached a tentative deal with the major entertainment studios on Sept. 24, and the guild’s board members approved of the deal on Sept. 26, announcing then that the strike would end the following morning. SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents tens of thousands of actors, on strike since July, returned to the negotiating table this week.While Davidson is also an actor, starring in the recently released film “Dumb Money” and the Peacock dramedy “Bupkis,” the actors’ union does not consider hosting to be a violation of their strike. In a letter to members that was posted online on Wednesday, SAG-AFTRA made clear that union members who appear on “S.N.L.” as either hosts, guests or cast members are not in violation of their strike rules because they are working under the Network Code Agreement, not the contract the union is striking.“The majority of our members who are regular cast on ‘Saturday Night Live’ had contractual obligations to the show prior to the strike,” the letter also states. “Many are under option agreements that require them to return to the show if the producers exercise their option, which the producers have done.” More

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    Introducing Nathan Lane, the Hip New Face of A24

    When you’re pondering actors associated with the indie-film company A24, your thoughts may run to the young, hot and impossibly tousled.In years past, this stable of dewy ingénues has included the likes of Robert Pattinson (“Good Time,” “The Lighthouse”), Riley Keough (“American Honey,” “Zola”) and Lucas Hedges (“Lady Bird,” “Waves”). But it’s time to make way for the studio’s newest muse, a three-time Tony winner whose key roles this year in a pair of A24 films — Ari Aster’s trippy “Beau Is Afraid” and the gleefully silly “Dicks: The Musical” (opening Friday) — offer the delightful opportunity to turn to your cool nephew and exclaim, “Oh, he’s in this?”Rest assured, the he in question is just as surprised. “I’m now the poster boy for A24,” said Nathan Lane, 67, over a recent morning coffee date in Los Angeles. “Who would have guessed?”One of Broadway’s most beloved actors, Lane had his breakout moment on the big screen in 1990s studio fare like “The Lion King” and “The Birdcage,” which mined his musical-theater talents and expansive comic sensibility for all they were worth. But though Lane has worked continually in the theater and on TV ever since, the film industry hasn’t always known what to do with him, which makes his current renaissance all the sweeter: He was the first choice for his roles in both of those A24 envelope-pushers, even though they’re utterly unlike anything he’s done before.Take “Beau Is Afraid,” released in April, a three-hour mind-bender about filial anxiety that had Lane come in for a midmovie face-off with an intense Joaquin Phoenix. (SAG-AFTRA strike rules prohibit Lane from talking about it, but the guild gave him a waiver for the new film.) Or sample “Dicks,” a proudly filthy queer musical that asks Lane to spit deli meat at puppets and ensures that for the rest of his life, he will share an IMDb page with the rapper Megan Thee Stallion.“Don’t you love show business, when these things can happen to a little boy from Jersey City?” Lane quipped.Lane’s co-star Aaron Jackson said, “Now that people like us are coming of age and getting to write stuff, it’s like, what about casting one of the most brilliant actors we’ve ever had?”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesThe Lane-aissance could either be a feat of timing or the beginning of a trend. But it’s also a reminder, not long after Michelle Yeoh found Oscar-winning acclaim in A24’s “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” that the studio’s coolness can come from more than the minting of new stars: It can be just as rewarding to pluck well-known veterans and toss them into a world that’s unexpected and wild.“To me, he’s the foundation,” said Aaron Jackson, who co-wrote and co-stars in Lane’s new film musical with his comedy partner, Josh Sharp. As a child, Jackson would do an impression of Lane as the “Lion King” meerkat Timon to make his grandfather laugh; when he was older, he got a DVD of Lane in a filmed version of the 2000 play “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and watched it on a near loop. “Now that people like us are coming of age and getting to write stuff, it’s like, what about casting one of the most brilliant actors we’ve ever had?”Though Jackson, Sharp and the director Larry Charles were eager to get Lane into their movie, the actor wasn’t initially sure what to make of the project. A hard-R spin on “The Parent Trap” that Jackson and Sharp based on a play they used to perform in the basement of a Gristedes, their film casts the New York comedians as long-lost twins who conspire to reunite their daffy parents. Hayley Mills never had it so hard, though: Here, dear old Mom (Megan Mullally) is an eccentric shut-in with a detached vagina, while Dad (Lane) is a newly out bon vivant who’s uncomfortably devoted to the two disgusting sewer creatures he keeps caged in his living room.“When I read it, I said to my agent and manager, ‘Are you serious with this?’” Lane recalled. The script had made him laugh, but he worried the comic situations were too outrageous, even for him. To assuage his fears, Lane met Sharp and Jackson at an Indian restaurant near his house, where their comic sensibilities clicked and cosmopolitans were served until the house lights came on.“It went on for four hours, and I fell in love with them and wanted to adopt them,” said Lane, who was ultimately won over by the eagerness of Jackson and Sharp to fly in the face of decorum at a time when “Don’t Say Gay” bills were being written into law. “We’re going to say whatever we want,” Lane said, channeling the duo’s brio. “And you’ll have to live with it.”Still, it’s one thing to read those out-there scenes and quite another to actually perform them, as Lane found when he showed up on set. Many of his big moments revolve around those unnerving sewer creatures, a pair of diapered reptilians that his character dotes on like an attentive mama bird. (Hence the regurgitated deli meats.) Though the filmmakers considered hiring Cirque du Soleil gymnasts to play the sewer boys, they ultimately settled on two puppets, which may be an even creepier touch.Lane, left, with Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Ryan in “Beau Is Afraid.”Takashi Seida/A24Lane with, clockwise from top right, Josh Sharp, Aaron Jackson and Megan Mullally in the new film. “When I read it, I said to my agent and manager, ‘Are you serious with this?’” Lane said.Justin Lubin/A24“I’m not crazy about puppets — I’ve worked with them in the past, it’s nothing but trouble,” Lane said, adding under his breath, “I’ll be getting hostile letters from Basil Twist.” In order to play the scenes with true affection despite the twisted context, Lane endeavored to think about the sewer creatures as though they were his character’s pet corgis.“It has to be very grounded and it has to be subtle,” Lane explained, “even when you’re spitting cold cuts at two ugly puppets in a cage.”The closing-credits blooper reel suggests that was a tough task: In more than a few blown takes, Lane wonders aloud how the hell he ended up in such a surreal situation. (Asked by the director to spit more deli meats into the puppets’ mouths, Lane playfully pronounces it the worst of “all the humiliations I’ve experienced in my years of show business, and they are legion.”) Even during our coffee, Lane was unable to describe an emotional clinch with the sewer creatures without bursting into laughter.“You can’t even explain it!” he said. “I was crying and holding these puppets and kissing them goodbye, thinking, I can’t believe this is happening.”Sharp praised Lane’s ability to still dial into those scenes and commit to something real. “There’s two or three sneaky little heart moments in the movie and Nathan drives all of them,” he said. “He’s a fabulous actor.”Lane just hopes people will notice. “I mean, this may have killed it,” he joked, “but if it led to other things in film, interesting stuff, that would be great.” A more robust movie career is something Lane wants but has always been wary of: Wouldn’t you feel skittish if you gave one of the most finely calibrated comic performances of the ’90s in “The Birdcage” and the only two film scripts you received afterward were for “Mouse Hunt” and “Mr. Magoo”?Though Lane felt the stage could offer him a more expansive suite of roles, including his most famous part, as Max Bialystock in “The Producers,” even there, the appearance of typecasting could make him bristle. In 2010, while playing Gomez Addams in a Broadway musical version of “The Addams Family,” Lane read an article in this paper by Charles Isherwood that deemed him the greatest entertainer to appear on Broadway over the past decade. While it was meant as high praise, the description rankled him.“Amy Sedaris likes to call herself an entertainer, but for some reason it really bothered me,” Lane said. “It’s not like I spent 48 years in Ringling Bros. — I had done plenty of plays, the work of Terrence McNally or Jon Robin Baitz or Simon Gray. I felt like I had shown a lot of different colors along the way, but you become known for a handful of things.”Determined to shake things up, Lane emailed his friend, the actor Brian Dennehy, who was mulling a new adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” Though that shattering drama wasn’t the sort of production he would immediately come to mind for, Lane pitched himself for the tricky role of Hickey, the salesman who forces his fellow bar mates to confront dreams long deferred.Despite acclaimed performances in the ’90s in “The Birdcage” and “The Lion King,” Lane had trouble getting traction in Hollywood films.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesDennehy was intrigued, and the two men signed on for a production that played at BAM in 2015. “It changed the way I approach everything now,” Lane said. “I wanted to be scared again. I wanted to think, I don’t know if I can do this.” From Isherwood, Lane earned a “lusty bravo,” though the review that mattered most was the kind one he received from Dennehy, who died in 2020. “He was a very loving and supportive mentor, and I miss him very much,” Lane said, tearing up.He hopes more roles akin to Hickey are in his theatrical future, though he noted, “I don’t think they would be handing me that part in a film.” So why is it that Lane can be widely recognized as an unparalleled multitalent and yet good movie offers can be so hard to come by? I asked his new co-star Jackson, who replied with a mordant chuckle.“Well, Hollywood does hate gay people, even still,” he said. “I mean, they pretend that they don’t, but they do.”Still, he hoped that Lane’s A24 hot streak indicates that a younger generation of people, raised on Lane’s performances, have more exciting ideas of what do with him than the old guard Lane initially encountered: “He’s so good at acting that now they’re like, ‘Maybe we should let a gay person be a star.’”In the meantime, there’s “Dicks.” “Our little baby is going out to the real world where people can’t wait to be offended,” Lane said. “When I saw it, I just said, ‘Well, either it’s going to be this cult hit, or we’ll all be deported.’”Though he isn’t sure how the film will be received — “I’d like to show this to Mitch McConnell, then he’d really freeze” — Lane still offered some marketing suggestions. He told Sharp and Jackson they should record a video to warn that watching the film in a theater could make the audience gay, then ask a few willing football players to serve as the guinea pigs: “You send in Aaron Rodgers and a couple of others, and then they come out of there in caftans.”The idea was vetoed when they heard that the recent comedy “Bottoms” might also be planning a turn-you-gay marketing angle, but Lane was just happy to have the company. “If you can get away with ‘Bottoms’ — if you can have a high-school comedy about teenage lesbians starting a fight club — you certainly can have ‘Dicks: The Musical,’” he said.With that remark, our coffee date was over. And though we had met in the early morning, at an hour when some party-hearty A24 stars might finally be crawling into bed, Lane assured me it was no trouble at all.“This was like therapy,” he said. “I cried, I laughed, I talked about ‘Dicks.’” More

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    ‘The Confessions’ Review: A Mother’s Tale, Told With Empathy and Care

    A new play by Alexander Zeldin recreates his mother’s winding, painful path to a life of her own.Minutes into “The Confessions,” a new production by the British playwright and director Alexander Zeldin, the main character, Alice, says demurely, “See, I’m not interesting. I have nothing of interest to tell.”How many women have said as much before sharing piercing experiences? Thankfully, Zeldin didn’t take the woman on whom Alice is based — his mother — at her word. Instead, in “The Confessions,” which runs through Oct. 14 at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, in Paris, he recreates her winding, painful path to a life of her own. (The show transfers to the National Theater, in London, and to the Comédie de Gèneve, in Geneva, later this fall.)While Zeldin is best known for his “Inequalities” trilogy, which explored the damage that government austerity policies have inflicted on ordinary British people, he has increasingly turned to his own origins for inspiration. “A Death in the Family,” a French-language production he created in 2022, was partly inspired by the deaths of his father and grandmother. “The Confessions,” which is performed in English, is even more personal: In the final few scenes, Lilit Lesser plays a younger version of Zeldin, named Leander here.Not that Zeldin’s modus operandi has changed. Just as he interviewed social workers and homeless families for the “Inequalities” plays, according to an interview in the playbill, he recorded lengthy conversations with his mother as the source material for this production.“The Confessions” fits into an intriguing trend. Over the past few years, prominent male writers in France have been telling their mothers’ stories. In 2021, Édouard Louis published a short volume about his working-class mother, “A Woman’s Battles and Transformations.” The same year, the playwright Wajdi Mouawad, who is at the helm of the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris, delved into his family’s exile from Lebanon from a similar point of view in “Mother.”Alexander Zeldin, known for his “Inequalities” trilogy, chose to draw on stories from his own family for “The Confessions.”Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesZeldin states in the playbill that he, like Louis, was inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux, and “The Confessions” openly reckons with the harm that patriarchal norms have inflicted upon women. The expectations of others keep thwarting Alice, an initially shy girl from Australia who inherited her father’s love of painting. Her art studies are deemed a failure, and her mother encourages a quick marriage to a stilted sailor. Alice eventually finds the courage to divorce and pursue her dreams, but then a prominent art historian corners her in an artist’s studio and rapes her.The scope of “The Confessions” has led Zeldin to take a step back from his usual naturalistic style. The sets are less true to life, and two actors play Alice at different ages. The older Alice, Amelda Brown, acts as a discreet witness, often sitting in the orchestra seats along with the audience and wistfully closing and reopening the stage curtains between some scenes.The younger Alice, Eryn Jean Norvill, first appears on a stage within the stage, where the character and her friends hide behind curtains as naval cadets chase them. An early scene with her father, who clearly wishes to support his daughter yet fails to help her, skillfully exemplifies how young working-class women are encouraged not to “get above themselves,” as Alice’s mother reminds her.The storytelling then settles into an efficient pattern, going from episode to episode in Alice’s life, with Norvill subtly manifesting the character’s changes — skittish, then increasingly self-reliant. Yet it takes the traumatic encounter with the art historian for “The Confessions” to move into a higher gear.Eryn Jean Norvill plays the role of the younger Alice, a character based on Zeldin’s mother.Christophe Raynaud de LageArrestingly, Zeldin doesn’t show us what happens. We see the man following Alice into the bathroom with the tacit approval of the artist hosting them, and a long silence ensues before she staggers out of the room, looking dazed.It’s more chilling than any literal depiction of violence could be, and the unusual form of reparation Alice then seeks elevates “The Confessions” further. While Alice’s well-meaning friends in the art world advise her to simply move on, she asks to stay alone with her aggressor at a party. Then she orders him to undress and get into a bath with her.Movingly, the scene is played by Brown, the older Alice, as her younger counterpart looks on. Suddenly vulnerable, forced to recognize the humanity of the woman in front of him, the man grows flustered, then cries softly.“Mom, I had no idea,” someone says from the audience after that encounter. It’s the younger Zeldin, also acknowledging what his mother went through — an event that led her to leave Australia for Europe, where she met Zeldin’s father, a Jewish refugee. Brian Lipson beautifully embodies his kind awkwardness, up until his death when Zeldin was 15, but the focus remains on Alice — a woman whose “ordinary” life was anything but.And there is hope in seeing Zeldin, like Louis and Mouawad before him, look back on his mother’s experiences with such care and empathy. “I feel like forgiveness is near,” the older Alice says at the end. The first step may be for men to listen, as Zeldin did. More

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    Garry Hynes Brings Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy to Life

    At NYU Skirball, Druid’s marathon production depicts the beginning of a free Irish state through the voices of the working class.In the back room of a hotel cafe in Lower Manhattan, the Irish director Garry Hynes was talking about Sean O’Casey, the laborer turned playwright whose frequently funny, sometimes blood-chilling, canonical 1920s tragicomedies are set amid the tenements of Dublin.Mostly, Hynes called him O’Casey, but a few times she called him Sean, and the warmth of that familiarity melted away any sepia encrustation that has accumulated around his name. Hynes, 70, the artistic director and a co-founder of the Druid theater company in Galway, Ireland, imagines O’Casey was “a bit of a joker,” “grumpy” and given to provoking people “just for the sake of provoking.” Not easy, in other words, but playful.She has long believed O’Casey, who died at 84 in 1964, in his adopted England, to be miscategorized as a playwright — lumped in with the naturalists when really he is up to something richer than that.Steeped in him of late, she has brought his famous Dublin trilogy to New York in the acclaimed production DruidO’Casey. A five-star review in the London Observer called the marathon experience of it “revelatory,” and said it “probes the ambiguities and indeterminacies of O’Casey’s texts,” bringing “his impoverished characters to rumbustious life.”Together the three plays tell a story of the beginning of a free Irish state: “The Shadow of a Gunman” (1923), set in 1920 during the Irish War of Independence; “Juno and the Paycock” (1924), set in 1922 during the Irish Civil War; and “The Plough and the Stars” (1926), set in 1915 and ’16, leading up to and during the Easter Rising against the British.Home is the locus of each play, all first staged at the Abbey Theater in Dublin when the historical events in them were recent memories.The Irish playwright Sean O’Casey bore witness to Ireland’s rebirth a century ago.Bettmann/Getty Images But combat seeps into every crevice of the lives of O’Casey’s Dubliners — characters who, as the Druid Ensemble member Rory Nolan said by phone, “aren’t even aware that they’re going through gigantic societal changes and through moments in history that will echo down the ages to where we are now.”Hynes has interpreted O’Casey for New York audiences before: in “Juno,” a musical adaptation of “Juno and the Paycock,” starring Victoria Clark, for Encores! in 2008. A decade earlier, she became the first woman to win a Tony Award for directing — in 1998 for “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” on the same night that Julie Taymor won for “The Lion King,” but a few minutes sooner.For years she had wanted to direct a single company of actors in the entire Dublin trilogy, much as she did with her lauded play cycles DruidSynge, DruidShakespeare and DruidMurphy. A cast of 18 will perform DruidO’Casey from Wednesday through Oct. 14 at NYU Skirball in New York, then Oct. 18-21 in Ann Arbor, Mich. Audiences can see single shows or, for the cumulative effect, the full marathon in one day.Hynes chatted about DruidO’Casey one morning last week over coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Why are you doing the marathon chronologically in order of the action of the plays rather than of the dates when they were written?We discussed it a lot. You can see O’Casey develop as a writer over the three plays if you do them in the order in which they were written. Then somebody said to me, “But do we want six and a half hours of theater — of some of the greatest theater that this country’s produced — to end [as ‘Plough’ does] with two British soldiers singing in a Dublin house, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning,’ or do you want the trilogy to end [as ‘Juno’ does] with two women walking into a future that they have no idea what it is?”Aaron Monaghan and Anna Healy in “The Plough and the Stars,” one of three works being performed as part of DruidO’Casey.Ros KavanaghThat’s the argument.That’s the argument, yeah. Like when the last scenes of “Juno” were played for the first or second or third time in the Abbey Theater in the 1920s, nobody knew what the future would be. But when we do them, we know.What do you hear in O’Casey’s voice that he’s saying to the present?It is pretty shocking for us to realize that the struggles that are going on in Ireland through those three plays are homes, houses, health, which are the things that are happening in Ireland now. You know, O’Casey did not agree with the Rising in 1916. He was politically against it. He thought that the whole movement was beginning to be less about what the people’s needs are, and more about historic deeds: fighting for the freedom of Ireland rather than fighting for the freedom of Irish people to live in proper homes.Why did you want to stage the trilogy?I did “Plough and the Stars” [with Brendan Gleeson] as the first production I directed in the Abbey when I became artistic director there. And then I did a “Juno” with Michael Gambon. But one of the things I felt is that, as well as being great plays, they were talked of as naturalism, and increasingly, my experience of the plays was that they’re not naturalism — that O’Casey’s whole experience of the theater was coming from the music hall, and coming from [the 19th-century Irish melodramatist Dion] Boucicault.O’Casey gave to very poor people great passions. Because he did that, he was regarded as a naturalist, but I believe the plays are far more interesting than that. They’re an extraordinary sort of mix whereby you can be laughing one moment and crying the next. We want to provide an ability for the plays to be performed as pieces of theatrical writing that were asked to be performed, not asked to be endured.O’Casey’s plays endure because they get “inside your head, inside your heart,” Hynes said. “He fiercely believed in people being treated properly. And he never abandoned that even when others abandoned it.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesO’Casey roots them in the inescapably domestic.What is so wonderful is that the domestic is constantly reflecting on what’s outside. So you’re hearing about all the things going on out in the streets. They’re marching. They’re striking. They’re killing people. They’re doing all these kind of things out there on the street. And it’s like it’s [solely] out there. But actually it’s not, because inside they’re fighting. So the two things are playing off each other in counterpoint all the time.And these are war plays that have women in them. He doesn’t erase the fact of who else is living through that history.Yeah, absolutely.Tell me about him and women.About Sean and women? Well, he dedicates “Plough” “To the gay laugh of my mother at the gate of the grave.” He created wonderful characters all through. But his women were the mainstay of life, you know?He sees them as whole humans.He absolutely does. But I don’t think he hero-worships them either.He doesn’t do that with anyone. A striking thing is his absolute refusal to valorize violence. He presents all sorts of characters who do that, but he is not doing it himself.It’s marvelous because the argument about what is valorous or not, what is worthy or not, is being had there on that stage, constantly.Why does O’Casey matter?O’Casey matters because he wrote plays that can get inside. Inside you. Inside your head, inside your heart. He fiercely believed in people being treated properly. And he never abandoned that even when others abandoned it. He was never not completely true to what he believed, although he had many opportunities to not be. I know if I knew him, we’d probably row. But he is a hero of mine. More

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    Sex, Thugs and Kidneys: ‘Bargain’ Bids to Be the Next ‘Squid Game’

    A new Paramount+ thriller depicts a fight for survival amid sex scams, organ auctions and earthquakes. Like other Korean dramas, it is really about class.In “Bargain,” a new dystopian South Korean series on Paramount+, a man shows up at a hotel far from the city to consummate a deal. He is to pay a young woman for sex; the price is steep because she claims to be a virgin. But wait: It turns out she actually works for a criminal organ-auctioning operation, and the guy is about to unwillingly give up a kidney.Then an earthquake levels the hotel, initiating a desperate scramble for survival. And that’s just the first 30 minutes or so.There’s an almost comical amount of calamity in “Bargain,” the latest offering in the push from Paramount+ into a robust South Korean streaming market that exploded with the popularity of Netflix’s “Squid Game” in 2021. Like that show, which depicted debt-ridden citizens competing in a series of deadly, Darwinian children’s games for the amusement of wealthy overlords, “Bargain” deals in dystopian extremes. (All six episodes begin streaming on Thursday.)But these shows aren’t serving up shock for its own sake. They use dark fantasy to confront issues that plague contemporary South Korean society, particularly the economic inequality fostered by capitalism run amok; social isolation in a frenzied tech boom; and a widespread distrust of government authority.In a paradox of the South Korean streaming boom, shows that often dramatize desperate efforts to get a piece of the economic pie are proving to be big business. (Netflix, the world’s biggest streaming service, reported that 60 percent of its subscribers worldwide had watched a Korean-language show or movie in 2022; the company plans to invest $2.5 billion in South Korean content over the next four years.)Jin Sun Kyu plays a man lured into a trap set by a woman posing as a prostitute. Next thing he knows, a roomful of people are bidding on his organs. Then comes the earthquake.TVING Co/Paramount+“We’ve seen a lot of demand for international content across the globe, and Korean content particularly is a phenomenon in itself,” Marco Nobili, the executive vice president and international general manager of Paramount+, said in a video interview. “Globalization has really brought that to light. So certainly Korea was a top market for us.”Paramount+ entered the arena through a film and television partnership between its parent company, Paramount Global, and the South Korean media conglomerate CJ ENM. As part of that deal, Paramount+ and the Korean streaming giant TVing, which CJ ENM controls, committed to co-producing seven original Korean series, of which “Bargain” is the second. The first, “Yonder,” about a man who reconnects with his dead wife, debuted on Paramount+ in April. (Both premiered in South Korea, on TVing, in October 2022.)At the same time, Paramount+ has begun building its K-drama library with hit shows from the CJ ENM vaults, including the 2016 procedural “Signal” and a 2017 thriller about a religious cult, “Save Me,” both of which also arrived in April.A dark, competitive thread runs through much of it; and just as the characters in Korea’s many dystopian offerings must fight for survival, there seems to be a kind of “can you top this?” contest happening among the shows themselves. The premise of “Bargain” is a little more extreme than that of “Squid Game.” Paramount+’s coming series “Pyramid Game,” in which a bullied high school girl must become a sniper in order to survive a brutal game, looks to be yet another nightmare blood sport.For Byun Seungmin, the creator of “Bargain,” the idea of toxic competition is crucial.“In South Korea, the issue of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is severe,” Byun said in a video interview last month through an interpreter. “There’s a prevailing sense of defeat that if one isn’t born into a good background, it’s difficult to have a fair opportunity to achieve something.”In “Bargain,” you can either afford to buy a kidney for your dying father (freshly carved from a captive), or you can’t. You either run a criminal empire, or what’s left of your body is fed to the fish. Near the end of the series, as the female and male lead characters (played by Jun Jong Seo and Jin Sun Kyu) try to escape the collapsing structure, one says to the other: “If we die here, we die for nothing.” The response: “People like us always die for nothing.”The hit Netflix series “Squid Game,” whose premise put contestants in a series of deadly children’s games, initiated the boom in the South Korean streaming market. Noh Juhan/Netflix“Bargain,” like “Squid Game,” offers the spectacle of millions in cash literally dangling above those who can grab it. Such images are laden with meaning, said the journalist Elise Hu, whose book “Flawless” is a deep examination of South Korea’s booming beauty industry.“You have this story in which body parts are actually getting fragmented, and organs sold and then harvested, so that you can put a price on a body,” she said last month in a phone interview. “It all flows from this moment that South Korea is in with consumption, where you can buy all the things that you want and it’s all money, money, money.”As Byun put it, “The younger generation in Korea now believes unless the system collapses, or a disaster occurs where everyone becomes truly equal, there is no opportunity for the future.”“Bargain” unfolds in a series of carefully choreographed long takes, the camera darting and gliding among the wreckage and creating a sense that, even in this dog-eat-dog world, everyone’s fate is connected. The dearth of editing made it essential that everyone hit their marks and stay on the same page.“It felt like a theater piece, or like I was playing a game of chess or Go,” Jun, the female lead, said through an interpreter. “The series is quite experimental in terms of the scenario and also the structure.”From left, Chang Ryul, Park Hyung-Soo and Jun in “Bargain.” Their characters must battle in an postapocalyptic-like environment after an earthquake collapses much of the building they are in.TVING Co/Paramount+The past few years have seen seismic change and even scandal in South Korean television and film. In 2017 the conservative president Park Geun-hye was removed from office and later convicted on charges of bribery, extortion and abusing her power, including the maintenance of a government blacklist that denied state funding to thousands of artists deemed unfriendly to her administration or insufficiently patriotic. During the Park administration, more filmmakers subsequently sought funding and distribution from streamers — especially Netflix, Hu said.Now the streaming frontier is wide open, and Paramount+ is staking its claim. Nobili, the Paramount+ executive, is particularly excited about the coming series “A Bloody Lucky Day,” about a taxi driver and a serial killer — shades of Michael Mann’s hit man/cabby movie “Collateral.”Business, in other words, is promising. But if “Bargain” stands to provide some wild entertainment for American audiences — and the promise of big revenue for its American streamer — Byun, its creator, seemed more focused on the culturally specific ways he hopes the series will speak about South Korea today. He described a country in which birthrates are plummeting and “people tend to avoid communication with others.”“They express anger about many things, claiming the value of fairness,” he continued. The characters in “Bargain,” he added, “reflect the masses in modern South Korea who seem to have lost hope, and even among them there is a rift.”And yet where there is collapse — of a building, an entertainment industry, a society — there is also the hope for renewal.“Collapse is not the end but a new beginning,” Byun said. “After going through the collapse, the characters inadvertently gain an opportunity to start over in a more primitive era where equality prevails.“I believe this also reflects the psyche of the public, desiring the end of the period they’re living in so that a new one can arise.” More