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    Jimmy Kimmel Jeers at Trump for Claiming to Declassify Documents With His Mind

    “Like Harry Whodummy,” Jimmy Kimmel quipped on Thursday night.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.Magical ThinkingIn an interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump said he could declassify documents with his mind.“Like Harry Whodummy,” Jimmy Kimmel joked in his Thursday night monologue.“He couldn’t even read documents with his brain — how does this happen?” — TREVOR NOAH“If Trump actually had the power to change things just by thinking about them, Don Jr. would have turned into a Big Mac 30 years ago.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I felt like he was this close to using the word ‘abracadabra.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump’s argument is that you can just declassify things in your mind, it’s officially declassified as long as you believe it’s declassified. That’s according to Trump’s newest legal adviser, Tinkerbell.” — SETH MEYERS“So Trump is saying that he declassified these documents just by thinking about it, which I don’t even believe, because that would be the first time in his life that Trump has thought something and not said it out loud. Think about it. This is a man who thought to himself, ‘Ooh, if I wasn’t related to my daughter, I would date her,’ and then he told everyone on TV. He said it out of his mouth!” — TREVOR NOAH“Hannity was like, ‘Oh, I get it, you’re going to plead insanity.’” — JIMMY FALLON“I really hope that ‘I can make things happen with my mind’ is going to be the actual argument at the trial. That would be great: ‘Your Honor, the defendant pleads Jedi.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (But Her Emails Edition)“The F.B.I. came to his house looking for Hillary Clinton’s emails that were deleted, which, how could there even be emails if they were deleted, and how would they get into his house? Did Hillary sneak in after midnight and stuff them under his pillow like the email fairy or something?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“So is Trump saying the F.B.I. raided his house to find Hillary’s emails? So they didn’t want the documents he declassified with his mind? No, they wanted the emails he couldn’t find but that he actually had the whole time at his house? Because Donald Trump is Hillary Clinton?” — TREVOR NOAH“That’s so crazy, he confused Sean Hannity — and Sean comes pre-confused.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“At that point, even QAnon people were like, ‘OK, that conspiracy seems a little nuts.’” — JIMMY FALLON“You’ve got to give Trump credit, though. He knows how to say something so crazy that it actually makes the last crazy thing he said seem normal.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingDulcé Sloan challenges New Yorkers on their beliefs about education on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutSinead O’Connor in the documentary “Nothing Compares,” directed by Kathryn Ferguson.Andrew Catlin/SHOWTIMEA new documentary about Sinead O’Connor highlights her career highs and lows as well as her genuinely incomparable voice. More

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    Making a Meal of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival

    A handful of works deal with the many questions of nourishment and nurture. How we feed. How we are fed.Last Friday night, a group of about a dozen of us walked into a woman’s vagina. It was red, French-accented and soft. This was near the climax of “The Path of Pins or the Path of Needles,” a cynosure of this year’s FringeArts Festival in Philadelphia, which began on Sept. 8 and runs until Oct. 2.Philadelphia’s Fringe began in 1997, the same year that the New York International Fringe Festival got started, both of them modeled, loosely, after Edinburgh’s Fringe. (The New York festival hasn’t been presented since 2019.) Most years, the Philadelphia Fringe has included several big names on the performance circuit — big enough to attract out-of-town ticket buyers — while also demonstrating a strong commitment to local artists like Pig Iron Theater Company, Lightning Rod Special, Thaddeus Phillips and others.Since the pandemic, the presence of artists from beyond Philadelphia appears to have diminished, but the festival still includes more than 180 theater, performance art, dance, circus and comedy shows. Last weekend I could have seen a musical about sleep apnea or an improvised Dungeons & Dragons adventure — aren’t all D&D adventures essentially improvised? — or, if I were less uptight, “Bath House,” which was advertised as “a deeply sensory immersive theatrical experience dripping with erotic energy.”Instead, I went with “The Path of Pins or the Path of Needles,” a collaboration between Pig Iron and the filmmaker Josephine Decker, and “Food,” a solo show from the Pig Iron member Geoff Sobelle (who also makes work with the theatrical group rainpan 43). And as a kind of palate cleanser in between, “Yes, We’re Ready, We’ll Split an Order of Fries for the Table — Does That Work for You? — Sure, One Check Is Fine,” an elegy for the American diner. At a late-night cabaret, I also caught a drag peep show with a butcher shop theme. Nothing I saw felt finished (in fact, I received a post-show email from “Path” clarifying it as a work in progress), but all seemed to take on questions of nourishment and nurturing. How we feed. How we are fed.Diners sharing French fries in “Yes, We’re Ready,” a tribute to the diner. Mike Durkin“Path,” a site-responsive piece staged in a shabby mansion to the north of the city, imagines its audience members as people in the late, sway-bellied stage of pregnancy. The cast, mostly women garbed in flamboyant thrift-store finery, is spread out across the lawn — jumbled with beds, lamps and clotheslines — and the first floor of the house. It is nearly sunset when the show begins and just after dark when it ends. This golden-hour gloaming lends the show a dreamy, fairy-tale quality. If some of its subject matter inclines toward the grisly, that’s true of fairy tales, too.As a filmmaker, Decker (“Madeline’s Madeline,” “Shirley”) favors intense psychology and surrealistic flights. For “Madeline’s Madeline,” a movie set in and around the world of experimental theater, she studied with Pig Iron. This new collaboration marries that company’s physical and metaphysical theatrics with Decker’s feminine, fevered aesthetic. There’s a sense of play here. And also a sense of danger.Some scenes are quiet and abstract, as when a pile of clothes is flung into the air, then carefully folded. Others are noisy and more pointed, as when audience members are given scraps of paper, each of which details a mother’s failures, and asked to recite them, loudly. Much of the show suggests an ambivalence — angry, funny, raucous, witchy — toward pregnancy and motherhood and the lived reality of the female body. A pumping bra is used to droll effect (though, honestly, I had hoped to never see a pumping bra again), and many of the lines have a comic anguish.“I used to be a woman who washed my hair!” one performer wails.It wasn’t always clear if we spectators had the freedom to explore the various locations or if we were constrained to follow where led. (The freedom that a pregnant body does or doesn’t have is a resonant theme, especially now, but this tension felt accidental rather than intended.) I’m relatively obedient, so I went where I was bid and read from Daphne Spain’s “Gendered Spaces” when asked. But late in the play, when a performer asked, “Does anyone feel like decomposing?” I veered elsewhere. Because feeding a baby is one thing. Being food for worms? That’s another.Geoff Sobelle in “Food,” a meditation on what and how and why we eat.Maria BaranovaThe next day I found myself seated at a long table at one end of the Broad Street Diner, sharing a bowl of crispy, salty, twice-fried French fries. This was a highlight of “Yes, We’re Ready,” Mike Durkin and Nick Schwasman’s daylight tribute to the diner. Gentle if haphazard, this show celebrates the phenomenon of the all-night eatery with jokes, stories, snacks and friendly audience participation. Its relationship to theater feels remote and its structure limp in the way of an abandoned onion ring, but it is unfailingly cheerful and kind. And maybe theater would be a happier place if more shows allowed ticket holders, like the ones seated near me, to happily demolish shared plates of chicken fingers and Belgian waffles while the action unrolls.This was an appropriate appetizer for Sobelle’s “Food.” As he proved in “The Object Lesson” and his work with rainpan 43 (“all wear bowlers,” “Elephant Room”), Sobelle is both a philosopher and a clown, and “Food” is his meditation on what and how and why we eat. It begins with the first multicelled creature to evolve a mouth and ends with the promise and devastation of the global food system, with a multicourse dinner served in between. Not served to you, of course. Though if you are seated at the table at which the action takes place (I was shunted to a balcony), Sobelle may pour you a glass of wine.For much of the show, Sobelle plays a harried waiter — attentive, dandified, arrogant. Using prompts and magic tricks and graceful physical comedy, he makes an enormous amount of food appear and then disappear, seemingly down his own gullet, as in the Monty Python skit. A point of concern: Should one man really drink that much ranch dressing? Each course has been prepared with care, though how those courses interrelate and whether they constitute a full meal is less certain. The show seemed to end about five different times before actually concluding, which suggests a disjointedness, a difficulty in translating so many ideas — good ideas! — into theater.And yet, I would watch Sobelle do just about anything — like, say eat half a dozen apples in just a minute, even from far away. (And for those at the table, there are opportunities to do more than merely watch and listen.) The ending, when it does come, doles out one final conundrum. Do you applaud? Or tip your waiter? More

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    At the End of Her Reign, the Queen Takes a Bow Onstage

    “Handbagged,” a play that opened in London a day after Queen Elizabeth II died, depicts a clever, compassionate monarch. But theatrical depictions haven’t always been so reverential.LONDON — When the Kiln Theater planned its current revival of “Handbagged,” nobody knew how extraordinary the timing would turn out to be.The 2013 play, by Moira Buffini, is one of a long line of dramas to put Queen Elizabeth II center stage. But its reopening during this period of mourning for the monarch turns out to serve the piece well, communicating a respect and affection for her memory that chime with the public mood. (The play’s first preview was Sept. 9, the day after the queen’s death.)Plays can catch a moment, which is what “Handbagged” has done. Seeing Indhu Rubasingham’s production several days before the queen’s state funeral, I felt an audience connecting with the play with an intensity I didn’t sense during its West End transfer in 2014. Theater, a live art, can seem especially vital at times like this. Would it have felt as moving to be watching “The Crown” on TV that recent afternoon? I doubt it.Several other playwrights have given voice to this essentially mysterious figure. Plays like Peter Morgan’s “The Audience” and Alan Bennett’s “A Question of Attribution” revealed the queen to be a great theatrical subject: wry and witty, her onstage intelligence feeding a sense among the public that so private a person always knew more than she let on.Some Key Moments in Queen Elizabeth’s ReignCard 1 of 9Becoming queen. More

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    ‘Beetlejuice’ to Close on Broadway

    The show had a bumpy, boisterous run, and will now begin a tour.“Beetlejuice,” an exuberantly ghoulish musical that was so on brand it came back from the dead, will end its Broadway run on Jan. 8, the show’s producers announced Tuesday.This is the latest in a string of closings as Broadway grapples with diminished tourism, fewer Manhattan office workers and an inflation-driven rise in production costs following the lengthy pandemic shutdown of theaters. Last week, “The Phantom of the Opera,” which is Broadway’s longest-running show, announced that it would close in February; over the weekend “Dear Evan Hansen” closed and “Come From Away” is closing early next month.“Beetlejuice,” adapted from the 1988 film, has had a bumpy ride on Broadway. It opened in 2019, but sales were weak enough that the Shubert Organization asked it to vacate the Winter Garden Theater; before it did so, sales rebounded thanks to a viral embrace of the show on social media, and then, while it was still trying to figure out its next steps, the pandemic shuttered all theaters.The show, produced by Warner Bros. Theater Ventures and Langley Park Productions, returned to Broadway last April, now at the Marquis Theater, and its grosses have been decent — $930,798 during the week that ended Sept. 18 — but apparently not good enough to sustain a long run for a large-scale musical. At the time of its closing it will have played 679 performances, including the runs at both theaters.The musical features songs by Eddie Perfect and a book by Scott Brown and Anthony King; it is directed by Alex Timbers. The show is planning a tour starting in December in San Francisco.“Beetlejuice” was originally capitalized for $21 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It has not recouped those costs. More

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    Carol Burnett Leading Campaign to Rename Theater for Hal Prince

    The Majestic Theater has housed “The Phantom of the Opera,” which Prince directed, for the entire 35 years of its run.Carol Burnett doesn’t own a Broadway theater. But she does have a long résumé, a lot of friends and fans, and an Instagram account. And now she is hoping to use what influence she has to persuade Broadway’s bigwigs to rename a theater after the legendary director and producer Hal Prince.Burnett, speaking in a telephone interview, said that last week’s announcement of the impending closing of “The Phantom of the Opera,” which Prince directed and is the longest-running show in Broadway history, prompted her unexpected activism. She said she has come to believe that the Majestic Theater, which has housed “Phantom” for the entire 35 years of its run, should bear Prince’s name.“Hal not only had the longest-running show, but he had 21 Tony Awards, and now that ‘Phantom’ is closing, what a great way to honor him,” she said. “It should have been done a long time ago.”On Wednesday, she posted a short Instagram video urging the renaming, and called on others to do the same. Among those supporting her efforts: Chita Rivera and Kristin Chenoweth. “He changed the face of musical theater,” Chenoweth said in an email. “Changes are happening, and this is one he’d be so proud of.” Rivera agreed, saying in an email: “Hal was such a visionary director and producer as well as an extraordinary human being. It is so vitally important to keep his flame burning.”Prince, who died in 2019 at the age of 91, was among the most significant figures in Broadway history, directing not only “Phantom” but also “Cabaret” and a string of Sondheim musicals, from “Company” to “Sweeney Todd.” He also directed a 2002 play called “Hollywood Arms,” which was based on Burnett’s memoir.Burnett, 89, said she considered Prince “a dear friend” and felt the time was right for Broadway (where she won a special Tony Award for contributions to the theater in 1969) to name a theater for him. “The Majestic is fit for a Prince,” she said, test-driving a slogan she hopes will catch on. The project is being coordinated by Eila Mell, a writer who just co-wrote a book about Broadway set design.Hal Prince, left, with Andrew Lloyd Webber at a 2006 performance of “The Phantom of the Opera” at the Majestic Theater. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPlenty of people have had ideas and suggestions about whose names should be added, or subtracted, from Broadway’s 41 theaters, and the decisions are up to the theater owners and operators. This year, two renamings are already underway — last week the Cort was renamed the James Earl Jones, and this fall the Brooks Atkinson is to be renamed after Lena Horne — both moves prompted by an agreement between theater owners and Black Theater United to name some buildings for Black artists.The Shubert Organization, which operates the Majestic Theater, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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    A Welcome Gust of Weird, and Adventures in Shadow Puppetry

    “My Onliness” is voluptuous and frenetic, while “This and That” is a slip of a show. Both are pleasingly peculiar.Some theaters dim the lights momentarily to signal that the performance is about to begin. Others sound a delicate three-note chime.At the New Ohio Theater, in Greenwich Village, audience members crowded into the lobby waiting to see the madcap new play “My Onliness” are alerted to curtain time by the sudden blast of a conch shell and the arrival of a human with a unicorn head, who leads a procession into the house.Don’t mind the man in swim goggles showering onstage under a thin stream of water, wearing a sign that says “WRITER” and a tall foil hat that looks like the progeny of a Hershey’s Kiss and a bishop’s miter. Just take in the voluptuous strangeness of it all. For theater lovers ravenous for the downtown-peculiar, “My Onliness” is savory sustenance.The cast of characters includes a ginormous lobster, who is warm of heart and terribly charming. But first in this dark, frenetic fable by Robert Lyons, with music by Kamala Sankaram, there is the Mad King.Dressed in sequined red, his face sparkly with glitter, the Mad King (Daniel Irizarry, who directed the show) occupies a throne that is quite literally a high chair — the perfect perch for a childish narcissist extraordinaire, who considers himself “a great genius of living.”“Listen up!” he barks at the audience arrayed around him on three sides. “I told you that in my presence you are all equal. It’s true! You are equally nothing.”A danger to the Writer (Rhys Tivey), whom he considers a threat, and an enemy to Morbidita (Cynthia LaCruz), a subject who dares to approach him with a petition, the Mad King nonetheless has a sneaky charisma, and he’s well-mannered when it suits him.If he wants to lie across spectators’ laps, or recruit someone to drag him around the stage, he asks nicely and does take no for an answer. Ditto when he goes seat to seat, offering generous slugs of rum to each of us. Who says consent protocols can’t be fun?Presented with One-Eighth Theater and IRT Theater, “My Onliness” is sprinkled with songs and performed in English and American Sign Language, with two graceful, glamorous Court Mediums (Malik Paris, who also plays the lobster, and Dickie Hearts) signing the show. (Artistic sign language direction is by Alexandria Wailes and Kailyn Aaron-Lozano.) The musicians, Joanie Brittingham and Drew Fleming, are comparatively subtle presences onstage — until the show turns operatic and Brittingham unleashes her lovely soprano.Lyons calls his play “an homage to Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz,” the early 20th-century, anti-totalitarian avant-gardist who was a visual artist as well as a playwright. With a crimson, alley-style set by Jungah Han, vivid lighting by Christina Tang and phantasmagorical costumes by James Terrell and Brittani Beresford, this show is saturated with color and tinged with the absurd. Occasionally delicate, it’s more often chaotic, and gleefully so.And while it’s a political play — “You have to wonder why someone doesn’t just kill him,” the Writer says of the Mad King — it’s less about plot than about a near onslaught of sensation, some of which is lost to poor sight lines.“My Onliness” is the kind of show that in its muchness may leave you slightly mystified. But there’s an unhinged jollity to it, too. It is a welcome gust of weird.“This and That” at the Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens uses shadow puppets and projections to create a plotless landscape of music and morphing shapes.Maya SharpeAt the Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City, Queens, the Institute of Useless Activity’s “This and That” is also experimental, but it occupies the other end of the overload spectrum. Its medium is light and shadow.Created by Steven Wendt and Phil Soltanoff, and performed by Wendt, one of the Blue Men of Blue Man Group, it is a slip of a show — no plot or dialogue, just projections, shadow puppetry, music.Presented with the Bushwick Starr and directed by Soltanoff, it’s soothing stuff. The first section gets gently psychedelic, with kaleidoscopic colors and morphing shapes, and lots of following an emerald-green light. If you have a favorite edible, I imagine that preshow would be a fine time to indulge.Later Wendt makes shadow puppets, which are variously impressive — such as the form of an adult and a child, sweetly rocking — and perplexing. There was one that I never did figure out.A grain of salt: At the performance I saw, someone in the front row was shooting cellphone video for the Chocolate Factory’s archives. In a show about light and darkness, a brightly glowing phone screen is as loud as a shout, and as disruptive. I might have been able to lose myself more to the experience without that.It is a playful production, though, with a spirit of inquiry. In just under an hour, it doesn’t add up to much, but, then again, the clue is in the name. “This and That” is a sampling — curated odds and ends.My OnlinessThrough Sept. 24 at the New Ohio Theater, Manhattan; newohiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.This and ThatThrough Sept. 24 at the Chocolate Factory Theater, Queens; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

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    The Theater at War

    In shows like “The Burnt City,” the chaos of war meets the curated artifice of performance, our critic writes. But “Oresteia” took a different view, and the audience was better for it.LONDON — On a recent trip to this city I went to war. Not literally; I’m no soldier. But in Punchdrunk’s latest immersive show, “The Burnt City,” audience members are transported to the Trojan War battlefields.In dramatizing a story rife with murders, enslavement and rape, the production essentially becomes a monstrous playground in which visitors wander among the war atrocities.The staging of violence has always given me pause, because it can quickly become gratuitous, even triggering to audience members. It’s a tough subject to navigate, as some recent theatrical productions have proved. Take, for example, the empty gore of Sam Gold’s “Macbeth” on Broadway last season, with its severed limbs and gushing blood, which did nothing to elevate or elucidate the production. Yet brutal war imagery seemed to serve a grander purpose in Yaël Farber’s appealingly brooding London production of “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” which I saw via a livestream last fall.Though the lengthy, gut-wrenching staging of the murder of Lady Macduff and her children (all played by Black actors) felt a bit too ruthless in “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” the implication was how women, children and people of color can too often become casualties of conflicts that don’t even involve them. Here, the Macbeths’ machinations were placed in context: No longer is their ascension just about the inevitability of fate, but how the greed of a privileged few can destroy the lives of a marginalized many.This summer, Robert Icke’s robust and captivating “Oresteia” at the Park Avenue Armory also told a story involving the Trojan War. The nearly-four-hour play, an expansive adaptation of Aeschylus’ trilogy, was comparatively light on violence despite it being a tale of sacrifice and revenge.There’s blood, but most of the violence is expressed through implication and foreshadowing: the way Agamemnon snaps at his daughter Iphigenia and towers over her menacingly as he debates whether to sacrifice her life for the war; the focus on Agamemnon’s constant bathing, presaging his murder in the bath. The show was more interested in the psychology of its characters and how a change in perspective can alter the way a story is received, especially a tragedy, rather than in reveling in senseless bloodshed.These fictional stories exemplify how much of our historical accounts and reporting of wars are subject to biases, skewed perspectives and selective memories. The optics of war, like theater, are carefully crafted, from the “war to end all wars” slogan during World War I to the War on Terror drumbeat after Sept. 11, and now the David-and-Goliath narrative of the Russia-Ukraine war.Tia Bannon, foreground left, and Luke Treadaway, with, background from left: Elyana Faith Randolph, Angus Wright and Anastasia Hille in “Oresteia” at the Park Avenue Armory this summer.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn “The Burnt City,” the chaos of war meets the curated artifice of performance. But even in its attempts to emphasize the inhumanity of war, the production ultimately offers war as solely entertainment. Despite or perhaps because of its failures, this production mirrors an unfortunate truth about war: that the stories we tell of ravaged cities and bloody battlefields reflect a limited, often problematic, view of conflicts and those affected by them.In “The Burnt City,” directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle (who worked with a scholar of classical theater), audience members are encouraged to explore the dark rooms and hallways of a former arsenal that is fittingly transformed into the desolate Mycenae, the carnivalesque Troy and the soldiers’ barracks where such legendary warriors like Achilles stop to rest.Like Punchdrunk’s “Sleep No More,” “The Burnt City” is a nearly wordless performance, interspersed with interpretive dance and props in meticulously designed rooms. Also like “Sleep No More,” audiences, who wear plastic masks inspired by the masks worn in classic Greek theater, may choose to follow individual characters or wander throughout the warehouses.Sarah Dowling in “The Burnt City” at One Cartridge Place in London. This latest show from Punchdrunk is scheduled to run until Dec. 4.Julian AbramsThere’s something perverse about this, I thought when I found Achilles and Patroclus preparing for battle a few minutes in. The two, dressed in military uniforms, were dance-fighting — a mix of brute force and a sensual interplay of limbs — in a grand courtyard.I began to feel uneasy as I followed them to their soldiers’ quarters, peeking through a window in the tiny wooden structure while they laughed and washed up. At best, I felt like a war tourist, searching for where the juiciest action would happen, and at worst I felt complicit, tagging along with the actors portraying the Greeks, who drive the conflict — and the story forward — rather than the ones playing the Trojans, like Hecuba and her daughters, who are the unfortunate victims.As the muddled and disquieting production went on, I started to skip out early during several gruesome death scenes, moving to find the next part of the story. I watched Agamemnon’s murder, a lengthy threesome between him, his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, that led to his stabbing in the shower; but while his naked body fell to the floor, I made my way through the crowd, trying to remember what came next. Dispassionately, I wondered if I should find Achilles or someone else for the conclusion.Even the bloodiest scenes paired grace with horror. In one room I gathered with a group of people in a circle — Agamemnon and his soldiers encounter the Trojan women, Hecuba in front, moving in an elegant choreography of sweeping arm motions and rhythmic swaying. Periodically Hecuba violently drums on her chest — a classical gesture of mourning. Her daughter Polyxena is stripped and killed in front of Agamemnon, and soldiers string her up by her feet. She swings, mostly naked, with blood smeared on her chest, in the center of the room. The sight is horrifying, but much of the onlookers, myself included, quickly dispersed after Agamemnon left the room.Vinicius Salles, Omagbitse Omagbemi and Andrea Carrucciu in “The Burnt City,” directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle.Julian Abrams“The Burnt City” doesn’t seem to be taking much of a stand on the subject of violence against women, especially to an audience of gawkers. Part of the issue is the lack of dialogue. There isn’t a moment when the female characters can speak up, and be heard.With disgust, I made my way through the warehouses, and caught myself following the male characters more than the women, who often seemed more ornamental than anything — tragic objects to look at not engage with. I wondered, did “Burnt City” simply reinforce an old narrative rather than present a new one?Roughly 90 minutes into the show, which can stretch as long as three hours, I was exasperated enough to head for the exit. I thought about the abhorrent kind of privilege that allows a person to see only parts of someone else’s war, to be able to look at just the sights that most pique one’s interest.It occurred to me at some point that, at the very least, even when “The Burnt City” is impenetrable, it does mirror war in its untidiness. There’s no one narrative to follow. In Icke’s “Oresteia,” mirroring the violence is never the intention; we encounter the war only through the perspective of the family, more precisely through Orestes, the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. The production renders the Trojan War more as a metaphor for the emotional and physical conflicts this family undergoes: the Trojan horse, the soldiers and the sacrifices are all shadows we see on their living room walls.“The Burnt City” makes the war itself the main object of our attention and so is stuck negotiating the savagery of combat with the promise of immersive entertainment. In reality, if a city is burning, it doesn’t become an attraction. More

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    In ‘Joyce’s Women,’ 2 Great Irish Writers Square Up

    Edna O’Brien’s latest stage work, at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, imagines the inner lives of important female figures around James Joyce.DUBLIN — Toward the end of “Joyce’s Women,” the Irish writer Edna O’Brien’s ninth work for the stage, handwritten letters rain down from the ceiling and the scene is interrupted by anonymous voices. One calls James Joyce’s writing “beyond human comprehension.” Another labels it “ejaculatory smut.” Finally a man’s voice, unseen, disembodied, asks a question: “Who owns James Joyce?”Running through Oct. 15 at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, the play addresses the personal life of an author banned in his time but celebrated today, whose works are synonymous with Dublin, but who fled the city as a young man. It’s the product of O’Brien’s lifelong fascination with Joyce, her “ultimate hero” and the subject of her 1999 biography, “James Joyce.”In “Joyce’s Women,” we see the author through the eyes of the women who were his inspiration and his support network, including his lifelong partner, Nora Barnacle; his daughter, Lucia; and his patron, Harriet Weaver. They wait for news of Joyce from a hospital in Zurich; with the writer on his deathbed, the play weaves together scenes from a life marked by ambition and poverty, creativity and madness, attempting to capture what O’Brien called “the enormity of James Joyce’s personal and imaginative life.”Hulme-Beaman on top of Brid Ni Neachtain, who plays Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle, in rehearsal.Ellius Grace for The New York TimesRegarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Joyce’s works continue to be widely read (“Dubliners,” his 1914 short story collection), widely attempted (“Ulysses,” his 700-plus-page epic of Dublin life) and widely speculated-upon (“Finnegans Wake,” the cryptic behemoth that was his final novel). The play brings Joycean language to life with music as well as the spoken word.“What I felt with Joyce, as I had never felt with another writer,” O’Brien said in an interview, was that “for all the boundaries he has broken, through language, he also speaks very truly, at least to me. There is always, without it being too demonstrative, an emotional pulse, an emotional engine behind what he says.”This year is the centennial of “Ulysses,” and many events, in Ireland and abroad, were clustered around Bloomsday, June 16, the date on which the novel unfolds. Nearing the end of this Joyce year, O’Brien’s dreamlike, reflective play is like a theatrical wake after the festivities. “This is one great writer squaring up to another,” said Conall Morrison, the director of “Joyce’s Women,” after a day of rehearsals at the Abbey Theater. “It is also, to a lesser extent, self-referential. It’s Edna’s meditation on the creative process, and the cost involved — the cost to the writer, and everyone around the writer.”Like Joyce, O’Brien has lived in literary exile. Her debut novel, “The Country Girls,” was the subject of a national scandal when it was published in 1960. It was banned in Ireland for its depictions of sex and female sexuality, as were its sequels, “The Lonely Girl” and “Girls in Their Married Bliss.” In 2015, President Michael D. Higgins issued a formal apology to O’Brien on behalf of the nation, and O’Brien was made a Saoi of Aosdana, the highest honor for an Irish artist.Left to right: Caitríona McLaughlin, the Abbey Theater’s artistic director; Edna O’Brien, who wrote “Joyce’s Women”; and Mark O’Brien, the theater’s executive director.Ste Murray“I think the fact that Edna O’Brien has chosen to write this, and that she’s someone whose genius has cost her throughout her life, makes for a fascinating prism to view this play through,” said Ali White, who plays Harriet Weaver. “What has been her own experience with success, failure, fame, notoriety and being banned?”In recent decades, plays, films, fiction and graphic novels have explored the lives of Joyce’s female family members, occasionally positioning them as each other’s rivals. Annabel Abbs’s novel “The Joyce Girl” (2016) is a fictionalized account of the life of Lucia, in which she is cast as Joyce’s muse and Nora’s adversary; Nuala O’Connor’s novel “Nora” (2021) is more sympathetic to its heroine.“There is this cottage industry of plays and novels and so on about Joyce’s family members,” said Sam Slote, a professor of Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin who has edited five books on Joyce. “What’s interesting is that the works are sacrosanct, but the contemporary imagination of artists is on the life of Joyce and his family members.”Little has survived of Lucia’s own voice; her nephew, Stephen Joyce, announced in 1988 that he had destroyed the letters she wrote to her family. Joyce’s famously pornographic “dirty letters” to Nora were published in 1975, but her side of the correspondence has never surfaced. Faced with these blank patches, “Joyce’s Women” imagines each character’s point of view, and allows them to narrate different sides of the same story. Nora is embattled, but resolute. Lucia drifts between fact and fiction. Later they are joined by Miss Weaver, the tireless activist and financial backer who funded Joyce’s lifestyle and helped secure his legacy.“While their allegiances, claims and counter claims differed,” O’Brien said, “I did not want to write a wrangling, bitter play, a relentless toll of enmity, accusation and intrigue. These women were crucial both in his life and in his work.”Sabine Dargent’s set design of “Joyce’s Women,” under construction in September.Ellius Grace for The New York TimesOne scene, incorporating dance, captures the rapport between Joyce (Stephen Hogan) and Lucia (Genevieve Hulme-Beaman). Then a screen unfurls across the stage, and a film is projected onto it that shows Lucia’s descent into psychosis. “She crept into her father’s work and her father’s psyche,” O’Brien said. “She adopted some of his more idiosyncratic words and, though doctors warned of alarming schisms in her behavior, Joyce believed that she was a genius, both of them being only a transparent leaf away from madness.”Another scene features May Joyce, the writer’s mother. An early supporter of his writing, May is believed to have had 15 pregnancies — 10 children survived — before her early death at the age of 44. Summoned home from Paris by telegram as she was dying, Joyce refused to pray at her bedside alongside other family members and wrote, in a letter to Nora, that when he saw her in her coffin, “I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim.”Joyce abandoned the Catholic church as a teenager; he wrote to Nora that his aim was to “make open war on it in what I write and say and do,” and they eloped in defiance of Ireland’s religious culture. Yet his work is haunted by a distinctly Catholic sense of guilt. “Catholic religion was embedded in Joyce’s thinking, not only by the church but by the long-suffering May,” O’Brien said. “His mother’s effect on him was deep but remained unfinished.” This early bond inspired a lifelong relationship to women split between reverence and torment: Joyce visited brothels from age 14, but found, in Nora, a partner who was as much a mother figure as a free spirit. “It was carnal love,” O’Brien said, “but also he saw within her a melancholy and an ancient knowledge that answered his deeper needs.”Stephen Hogan as James Joyce. The production features projected visuals and incorporates dance.Ros KavanaghIn a rehearsal in September, White (as Weaver) and Hogan (as Joyce) ran through a scene depicting the writer’s final hours. Joyce, wearing his familiar waistcoat and circular glasses, lay on a hospital bed and drifted in and out of lucidity. He sang an Irish rebel song, “The Sean-Bhean Bhocht,” then raged at Weaver, his patron, who had told him that he was wasting his genius on “Finnegans Wake,” the enigmatic dream-novel that took Joyce 17 years to complete. Weaver knelt at his bedside and asked for forgiveness.Weaver, who was raised a Quaker, and who later joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, bankrolled Joyce with an estimated equivalent of over $1.7 million today. “It became almost like her religion to support these people,” White said later of Weaver, who also quietly funded writers including T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. Joyce’s charisma was “such that he entranced people, even if they weren’t getting much in return,” she added.“Joyce’s Women” dismisses present-day debate about separating art from the artist, arguing that to draw a line between Joyce’s life and his works would be impossible. Slote, the professor, quoted a line from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in which Joyce says a writer is “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.” Slote said this was “a good capsule description; the artist takes their experience and refracts it, and turns it into something else.”The play explores that process in all its complexity. “He loved these women, not as muses but as beings who answered to the longings and anguish of his inner life,” O’Brien said. Yet Joyce’s greatest loyalty was to his work. “That’s where the writer really lives, and belongs,” O’Brien said. “With their words.” More