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    ‘Bodies They Ritual’ Review: Plush Robes and Cults

    Angela Hanks’s new comedy is set in Santa Fe, N.M., where five women of color have traveled for some fancy R&R laced with New Age spirituality.The tapas party had not gone over well: “The food was so tiny,” the guest of honor, Faye, recalled. “And I was so hungry.”So for Faye’s 65th birthday, her daughter, Marie, has invited her mother and three friends for a relaxing stay at a fancy sweat lodge. The cantankerous Faye is not crazy about that, either. And that’s even before the cult members turn up.Angela Hanks’s bittersweet new comedy, “Bodies They Ritual,” is set in Santa Fe, N.M., where the five women (four are African American and one is Bengali American) have traveled from Dallas for some fancy R&R laced with New Age spirituality. There are hot stones and plush white robes, chats by the fire pit and periods of zoning out. There are also the uncomfortable revelations and colorful encounters that pop up whenever Americans’ fictional characters go on retreats (see: Bess Wohl’s play “Small Mouth Sounds,” which takes place at a silent retreat, or the book and series “Nine Perfect Strangers”).“Bodies They Ritual” — the third and final play in this year’s edition of the Clubbed Thumb company’s Summerworks series — revolves around a series of meetings between the visitors and assorted locals. Naturally, the locals help excavate a few truths, but somehow there don’t seem to be any earth-shattering changes for anybody. Whatever metaphorical splinter was lodged under a character’s skin at the start is pretty much still there at the end, a constant reminder of past choices and roads taken, or not.Marie (Ebony Marshall-Oliver), for example, prefers to keep her relationships free from romantic entanglements. Faye (Lizan Mitchell), a retired hairdresser, picks at what she sees as her daughter’s idiosyncrasies, like her taste in music as a kid, or Marie’s decision to focus on her career as the manager for a professional sports team and forgo children. While the relationship between the two women feels commonplace, Hanks adorns it with offbeat details that often materialize almost out of the blue, like Faye’s spur-of-the-moment rendition of the Sublime song “Santeria.”Similarly, when Faye’s friend Toni (Denise Burse) fantasizes about seeing her late husband again just so she can tell him how much she still loathes him, Hanks seeds her angry monologue with surreal specificity — “I want to hit him in the head with a candelabra.”Turquoise Sunshine (Keilly McQuail) and Dawn (Kai Heath) are acolytes in “Bodies They Ritual.”Marcus MiddletonThis technique applies to the locals, like a teenage barista (Bianca Norwood) who tells Toni that she was named for her mother’s “third favorite thrash metal band,” Sepultura. “I consider myself lucky my name isn’t Anthrax,” she tells Toni.Best, or at least strangest of all are Queen Harvest (Emily Cass McDonnell), the Galadriel of New Mexico, and her acolytes Dawn (Kai Heath) and Turquoise Sunshine (Keilly McQuail, coming up with some strikingly kooky line readings).Hanks, whose “Wilder Gone” was in the 2018 edition of Summerworks, has a dry, tart tone that is well served by the director Knud Adams. He wrings finely tuned performances from the excellent cast and never oversells the comedy, letting a raised eyebrow, a side glance or a throwaway line do a lot of work. This is especially effective since Hanks, to her credit, refrains from open conflicts and cathartic resolutions — Santa Fe may peddle enlightenment, but this playwright does not take the bait. Admittedly, “Bodies They Ritual” does not quite cohere into a whole, but its parts are wonderful. They may be tiny, but they add up to a full meal.Bodies They RitualThrough July 2 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; clubbedthumb.org. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. More

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    On Broadway, One Show Decides to Keep Masks. No, It’s Not ‘Phantom.’

    Three days after the Broadway League announced that all 41 theaters would make masks optional starting July 1, one of those theaters has decided to stick with mandatory face coverings.The producers of a starry revival of “American Buffalo,” which is a 1975 drama by David Mamet about three schemers in a junk shop, announced Friday that they would continue to require masks through the scheduled end of the show’s run at Circle in the Square Theater on July 10.That’s only 10 days beyond when Broadway plans to drop its industrywide masking requirement, and it’s just one show, but it suggests that the unanimity among producers and theater owners may not be rock solid.There are several factors that make the “American Buffalo” situation unusual.The play, starring Sam Rockwell, Laurence Fishburne and Darren Criss, is being staged at Broadway’s only theater-in-the-round (it’s actually almost-in-the-round, because the seating doesn’t entirely encircle the stage), which means there are more patrons seated within spitting distance of actors than at other theaters.Also, Circle in the Square, with 751 seats as it is currently configured, is the only remaining Broadway theater that is not operated by a large company or a nonprofit organization, so its decisions are not tied to those of a bigger entity.Rockwell expressed concerns about the end of the masking policy in an interview this week with the New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante.The show announced the change in policy in a news release, saying that it was “due to the close proximity of the audience to the actors as a result of the intimate size of the theater and the staging in the round.” The production and theater owner did not immediately respond to requests for further comment.Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, said of the “American Buffalo” decision, “As the optional mask policy takes effect in July, there may be unique situations which would require the audience, or some of the audience, to be masked.”It is not clear whether the decision will affect other Broadway shows. The vast majority take place in theaters operated by a handful of big landlords who endorsed the mask-optional decision. Broadway’s four nonprofit theater operators, who have been more Covid-cautious, do not have any shows this summer. And summer fare on Broadway is dominated by big musicals, where the audience tends to skew toward tourists, many of whom come from places where masks are long gone; older New York playgoers are scarcer at this time of year (and the volume of shows is lower, too: there are only 27 shows now running on Broadway).After “American Buffalo” closes next month, Circle in the Square is scheduled to be vacant until October, when a new musical called “KPOP” begins previews.Actors’ Equity, the union representing performers and stage managers, has declined to comment on the audience safety protocols, but this week sent an email to its members, previously reported by Deadline, saying, “This decision was made unilaterally, without input from your union or any other, and the unions were only given advance notice a couple of hours before the announcement.”Although the decision was announced by the Broadway League, it was made by theater owners and operators, and they plan to reconsider the protocols monthly. More

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    Immersed in ‘Stranger Things,’ Then Strolling to Beckett

    Our writer checked out two very different experiences in New York. In Netflix’s TV re-creation, you fight Demogorgons. In “Cascando,” you walk off your existential angst.Before the pizza parlor, before the arcade games, before the ice cream shop and the merch kiosks (so many merch kiosks!) and the photo op with a fiberglass-and-silicone Demogorgon, “Stranger Things: The Experience,” at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, puts on a show.Netflix, which has created other immersive entertainments based on its “Bridgerton” and “Money Heist” properties, co-produced this 45-minute experience with Fever. Based on the teen-horror pastiche “Stranger Things,” it plunks participants, many of them dressed in 1980s finery, into tens of thousands of square feet of Hawkins, Ind. Some rooms have an unfinished feel (did the budget not include ceilings?); others suggest a theme-park-quality buildout. The most fully realized ones are nestled inside Hawkins’s cheery state-of-the-art lab. Ostensibly, ticket holders have signed up for a sleep study. An interdimensional rift soon complicates study protocols. Will these test subjects survive? Of course. They have tote bags to buy afterward.“Stranger Things: The Experience” is a piece of fan service that adopts the vocabulary of immersive theater. While legible, barely, for those unfamiliar with the series, this story has been built for devotees, allowing them to enter into the fictional world. Enterprises like this used to be lower-budget affairs of the do-it-yourself variety, the province of live-action role-players and tabletop gamers. Now for about $58 — less for gutsy under-17s, more if you book on a weekend — Netflix and its partners will do the doing for you.“We look at live experiences as providing fans another way to see themselves more in the stories they love,” Greg Lombardo, the head of live experiences at Netflix, told me in an interview a couple of days after my visit.This show, which runs for about 45 minutes, chugs along like a reasonably well-oiled machine. What eldritch fluids comprise that oil? Best not ask. The cast members who circulate are trained improvisers, skilled at eliciting responses, practiced at batting those responses back. At one point I was harangued by a journalist character — sweaty, anxious, overconfident. Ow.The Upside-Down World of ‘Stranger Things’After a three-year wait, Netflix’s sci-fi series returns with a fourth season.Season 4 Guide: As in seasons past, this go-round is full of nods and Easter eggs to 1970s and ’80s pop culture. Here are the major highlights.Review: “Stranger Things” has gone from lovingly echoing 1980s touchstones to industriously copying itself, our critic writes of the show’s fourth installment.The Duffer Brothers: The “Stranger Things” creators seem to share a brain. But they could never lock themselves in a writing cabin together.David Harbour: While “Stranger Things” was on hiatus, the actor tackled a string of strangely compelling deadbeat characters.While immersive, “The Experience” doesn’t really depend on you. The Demogorgons will eventually explode, whether or not you deploy your extrasensory powers. Which is a letdown. Because there is a fantasy that many of us entertain about the art we love — that we might matter to the art as much as it matters to us. Still, the teenagers and young adults in the room gasped and screamed and unleashed their psychic abilities with apparent delight.“We’re trying to give fans a chance to be the hero of their stories,” Lombardo said. This is pushing it. Eleven, the psychokinetic phenom played by Millie Bobby Brown, who appears via hologram, is the real hero here. The motivating factors of “The Experience” owe less to art than to marketing, and its ultimate goal suggests a branding ouroboros: devotion to the show encourages consumption of the experience, consumption of the experience urges re-engagement with the show.After “The Experience,” with the rift safely sealed, you can consume without the distractions of a plot — which is when “Stranger Things: The Experience” achieves its final and ideal form. There is pizza to be eaten and ice cream to be licked and cocktails to be drunk. Bertolt Brecht used to rail against the culinary theater, a theater that delivered only emotion and sensation, rather than intellectual engagement. Brecht probably never had a drink with a stroopwafel as garnish. I didn’t buy a tote bag, but I did play through the “Stranger Things”-branded pinball game. I think I did pretty well.“Cascando,” an adaptation of a Beckett radio play, comes courtesy of Pan Pan Theater. Upon arrival each ticket holder is outfitted in a black-hooded robe and handed a pair of headphones.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTo wander the streets of Manhattan dressed as a high-fashion druid, a goth garden gnome, is fun of a kind.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNo amusement genius has yet made a Samuel Beckett pinball machine — I imagine a gloomy palette, defective flippers and a high-score list that reads GODOT GODOT GODOT. But those eager for a Beckett brand extension can instead arrive at New York University’s Skirball Center for “Cascando,” an adaptation of a Beckett radio play from the early 1960s. It comes courtesy of Pan Pan Theater, an Irish company with an insouciant approach to the classics.Originally created in conjunction with the composer Marcel Mihalovici, “Cascando” is intended as a passive audio experience. But this “Cascando,” directed by Gavin Quinn and designed by Aedin Cosgrove, adds a participatory element.Upon arrival each ticket holder is outfitted in a black-hooded robe and handed a pair of headphones. Loosed onto La Guardia Place, a quiet street adjacent to Washington Square Park in Manhattan, participants begin a single-file walk around and through the neighboring blocks. As they stroll, they listen to the text, prerecorded here by Andrew Bennett and Daniel Reardon.To wander the Village dressed as a high-fashion druid, a goth garden gnome, is fun of a kind. But there are no stops along the way, no interactions, no activations. The choreography — a sharp turn here and there — is minimal. At one point, I wondered, with almost breathless excitement, if we would sit. We did not sit.While it makes sense to encounter Beckett’s text via headphones — there are references throughout to a story existing only in someone’s head — the alone-together walk doesn’t illuminate or galvanize the text, which is, like so much of Beckett’s work, heavy on repetition and ellipses. On the rainy sidewalk, meaning slid away.In another city, at another moment, a show like “Cascando” might at least have ornamented the street life. But New York’s typical street life is already a variety of theater, druids or no. As we re-entered the park, I saw a clump of skateboarders look us up and down. We had become part of their story, I thought for a moment, part of their experience. Then they shrugged and returned to their conversation. Just another Wednesday in the Village, bro.Stranger Things: The ExperienceThrough Aug. 21 at Duggal Greenhouse, Brooklyn; strangerthings-experience.com. Running time: 45 minutes for the show, then mingling.CascandoThrough July 3 at N.Y.U. Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 30 minutes. More

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    3 Theaters, 3 Plays, One Cast, All at Once

    The Crucible Theater in Sheffield, England, is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a mind-boggling logistical challenge that also honors a declining industry in the city.SHEFFIELD, England — Visitors to Tudor Square in the center of this northern English city might spot some unusual figures there this week: a woman sprinting through in a neon boilersuit, or a tutu, or a man running with a box of scissors. And if they look like they’re in a hurry to get somewhere, that’s because they are. These are actors, and they have an entrance to make — on a different stage from the one they just left.“Rock/Paper/Scissors,” running through July 2, is a triptych of plays designed to be performed by one cast, at the same time, in three different theaters. Programmed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Sheffield’s Crucible Theater, the trilogy unfolds on that playhouse’s 980-seater main stage, a smaller studio below and across the square at the Victorian-era Lyceum.The project’s logistics are mind-boggling. The 14 cast members appear as the same characters across all three shows, and most of them are on one of the stages, most of time — hence those hurried journeys between theaters. Each play has its own director and technical team, while nine stage managers ensure smooth running backstage.The three plays, which offer varying perspectives on a family saga, are designed to work as stand-alone stories, but watching all three in succession reveals densely interwoven plotlines and character arcs. “Rock,” “Paper” and “Scissors” are all set at the same time, on the same day, in almost the same place: across three different spaces in a run-down Sheffield scissor factory. The crumbling location has resonance in a city that once had a rich industrial tradition of producing steel and manufacturing world-class cutlery, including scissors.From left, Guy Rhys, Lucie Shorthouse and Samatha Power rehearsing “Rock/Paper/Scissors” at the Lyceum theater in Sheffield, England.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe plays open after the death of the factory owner, whose will is missing. Each narrative centers on characters with competing claims on the building, and conflicting visions for its future.Chris Bush, who wrote the three plays to celebrate the Crucible Theater’s anniversary, said they were about offering a “perspective shift” across the three generations. “The same world is shared by three different stories, where heroes become villains and villains become heroes,” she said.To make sure the scripts worked for simultaneous performance, Bush planned them out with a series of spreadsheets, timing the entrances and exits by the word count of each scene, she said.Robert Hastie, Sheffield Theaters’ artistic leader and the director for “Paper,” said, “The precision tuning is more complicated than anything I’ve ever done.” Even scheduling rehearsals proved a headache, he added, requiring careful planning with his fellow directors Anthony Lau and Elin Schofield to divide the 14 actors’ time.Backstage during a recent preview performance, an atmosphere of quiet concentration prevailed. If any play were to start running fast, or slow, or to stop for any reason, it would throw all three out of sync. The team of stage managers were all focused on marked-up scripts and color-coded spreadsheets detailing the more than 80 entrances and exits.A large screen in each of the theater’s backstage areas shows all three stages as well as a giant synchronized clock, so any deviations from the plan can be quickly spotted. The stage managers communicate via radios and WhatsApp, and are ready, in the worst-case scenario, to stop all three shows if they have to. (So far, this only happened once in previews, because of a technical fault rather than a timing issue.)The stage manager Andrew Wilcox, center, conferring with colleagues backstage.Mary Turner for The New York TimesNonetheless, the swift entrances and exits — and the knowledge that the cast are having to run across a busy public square to get between the theaters — adds a frisson for both audiences and the actors.One of the cast members, Samantha Power, said she had some entrances “where I am absolutely sprinting across Tudor Square.” She added that this was more of a challenge on a Saturday night, “negotiating all the inebriated people.”Andrew Macbean, another actor in the show, said that during the same journey, “Somebody asked me if I had any spare change.” But mostly, he added, the cast was unfazed. “For us, it’s just one play,” he said. “Three different venues is no different, really, to doing it on three different sets.”Responses to “Rock/Paper/Scissors” have been positive so far, with the shows earning standing ovations and strong reviews. Watching all three plays back-to-back on press day on Wednesday, the performances became a cumulative experience: each new part deepened the audience’s understanding of the characters.The triptych also offers three different answers to a question that is freshly topical after two years of the coronavirus pandemic: What do we do with our empty city center spaces?In “Rock,” presented on the Crucible’s thrust stage, the character of Susie — an aging rocker and the sister of the scissor factory’s deceased owner — puts forward idealistic plans to turn the gritty space into a vibrant new music venue. In “Paper,” at the Lyceum, the owner’s daughter Faye and her wife argue for the most financially lucrative option: selling the building to a developer to turn it into apartments. “Scissors,” in the Studio, is set in a workshop where four young apprentices put the case for maintaining the building as a workshop for hand-making scissors, preserving a local tradition.These arguments will sound familiar to Sheffield residents. Like many British town centers, Sheffield contains many shuttered buildings, including a prominent former department store that city authorities are currently debating how to repurpose. (Options include a soccer museum, bars and restaurants, and housing). The decline of Sheffield’s steel industry since the 1970s has meant that many buildings once used in manufacturing also fell into disuse, although several have been repurposed as street food markets, nightclubs, vintage stores and housing developments.Fifty years ago there were dozens of scissor factories in Sheffield; now, there are just two. One of those that remains, Ernest Wright, lent working machinery to the production, so actors could sharpen real blades during “Scissors.”Hastie said it was “impossible to overestimate how central cutlery is to Sheffield’s sense of self and its sense of pride.” Examining this legacy, as well as considering the future of former industrial spaces, seemed an appropriate subject for a 50th anniversary show at a theater at the city’s heart, he said.“We were very much looking for an idea for our 50th anniversary that had a spirit of adventure and daring,” he said, adding that using the three theater spaces simultaneously fit that bill. “We wanted to see if we’d bitten off more than we could chew.”And have they? “We’re still chewing very hard,” Hastie said.Rock/Paper/ScissorsThrough July 2 at the Crucible, Studio and Lyceum theaters in Sheffield, England; sheffieldtheatres.co.uk.Jabez Sykes and Maia Tamrakar, actors in the production, embracing backstage after an exhausting performance.Mary Turner for The New York Times More

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    The ‘Most Real Richard III There’s Ever Been’

    The Royal Shakespeare Company has cast a disabled actor to play the “deformed, unfinish’d” king for the first time. The choice has been hailed as a landmark moment.STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England — A raucous party was underway in one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s rehearsal rooms this month as the cast of “Richard III” ran through the play’s opening, dancing in a conga line while music blared and balloons bounced off the floor.Off to one side, the future Richard III sneered at the scene. Shakespeare depicted the king as a scheming hunchback who murdered his way to the British throne, and in this imagining of the play, he is personified by the 30-year-old actor Arthur Hughes. In role, Hughes stepped into the middle of the party, veering through the revelers to deliver the play’s famed opening speech: “Now is the winter of our discontent,” he began.As the speech continues, Richard lists the insults he has faced. He is “curtail’d of this fair proportion”; he is “cheated of feature”; he is “deformed, unfinish’d.” As Hughes declaimed each barb, he angrily squeezed a white balloon. Eventually the pressure became too much. The balloon popped.The moment of tension was made even more powerful by Hughes’s own appearance. He has radial dysplasia, meaning he was born with a shorter right arm, his wrist bending into the body and his hand missing a thumb.The first casting by the Royal Shakespeare Company of a disabled actor to play Richard III has been hailed as an advance in British theater. The play opened in Stratford-upon-Avon on Thursday and runs through Oct. 8.“You can see a despot and tyrant,” Hughes said of Richard III, “but also a little boy who hasn’t been loved and someone who’s shunned.”Ellie Kurttz, via Royal Shakespeare CompanyShakespeare used and amplified Richard III’s real-life condition — the king is thought to have had scoliosis or curvature of the spine — to highlight the character’s unsavory nature. (He is described at one point as a “pois’nous bunch-back’d toad.”) According to Gregory Doran, the director of the current adaptation, the casting of Hughes in the role “sends out a big message, just as not casting a disabled actor would have sent out a different message.”Hughes’s casting comes as the frequency of disabled actors earning major roles appears to be growing in British theater. In July, the National Theater will present “All of Us” by Francesca Martinez, an actor and playwright who has cerebral palsy (Martinez said in a telephone interview that the play would feature three disabled actors, including herself). And Liz Carr, who uses a wheelchair, this year won an Olivier Award, Britain’s equivalent of a Tony, for her performance in Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” at the National.In her Olivier acceptance speech, Carr highlighted some persistent problems. “There’s so many fears of risk of employing disabled actors,” she said, but added the award “proves we can do it, we can project, we can fill a stage.”Jack Thorne, the playwright behind “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and an activist for disabled people, said in a telephone interview that there was “definitely a willingness” to expand disabled casting in Britain. The National Theater was a leader, he said, as were six regional theaters behind an initiative called Ramps on the Moon that stages productions led by deaf and disabled actors.Yet there was still a dearth of lead roles in London’s commercial heartland, he said. “There aren’t West End shows with disabled leads,” he added. In discussions about diversity, the issue was routinely forgotten, he said. Theaters should bring in targets to increase participation, he said.The National Theater, for instance, has experimented with aspirational quotas for women and people of color, but not for disabled people. Alastair Coomer, the theater’s head of casting, said in a telephone interview that new targets were being discussed and that he “would not be surprised” if that discrepancy was addressed.Hughes in a Royal Shakespeare Company costume storeroom. “Richard III” plays in the company’s repertoire through Oct. 8.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesHughes, eating potato chips in a break from rehearsal, said he hoped his casting as Richard III “sets the mold for how the industry can change.”Growing up in Aylesbury, a town about 40 miles northwest of London, Hughes said that he had experienced few barriers to pursuing acting. As a child, he said, he was so enthusiastic in drama classes that he was given prime roles, such as Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”Hughes said that he had read “Richard III” for the first time while looking for speeches to use when auditioning for drama schools. He instantly identified with the role, he added, since the play’s characters view the future king as “not cut out for big parts” because of his looks. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me,’” Hughes said.After drama school, Hughes did not immediately secure an agent — unlike many of his colleagues. “Voices in my head were going, ‘Are you a risk?’” he said, but those doubts lifted after he secured a role in a production by Graeae, a British theater company that casts deaf and disabled actors. Before then, Hughes said, he felt his appearance “was going to hold me back,” but after being surrounded by other disabled actors, he felt empowered. He even started wearing short sleeves to highlight his limb difference, he added.The Royal Shakespeare Company show is Hughes’s most high-profile casting to date. In May, Doran gave an interview to The Times of London that was headlined: “Able-Bodied Actors Cannot Be Richard III.” In a letter of complaint to that newspaper, Doran said that the headline was misleading. His point, he wrote, was that, although anybody could play the role, a disabled actor could “enhance the performance and impact of the production.”Richard III is often portrayed as an almost comedic bad guy, Hughes said, often with a fake “hump and limp.” While not trying to hide the character’s villainy, he hoped to draw attention to his motivations: “You can see a despot and tyrant,” he said, “but also a little boy who hasn’t been loved and someone who’s shunned and outcast and is underestimated.”Mat Fraser, another disabled actor, who played Richard III in a production in Hull in northern England in 2017, said that the king was often played by older performers who could make the king seem a “withered little twig.” But Hughes is young and muscular — better suited to portraying a monarch who died at age 32 on a battlefield, Fraser said. “We’re going to see the most real Richard III there’s ever been,” he added.Hughes said he was already looking beyond his turn as Richard to other Shakespeare roles, and would love to play Hamlet, and Iago from “Othello.”“I’d like to play a role that’s not specified as disabled,” he said. “Obviously, whichever role I play will be disabled by the very nature of me playing it,” he added. “But that’s not the point.”Richard IIIThrough Oct. 8 at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England; rsc.org.uk. More

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    Trevor Noah Has Gun Law Ideas for New York

    Noah says the state should propose new restrictions where “anyone can buy a gun if they want, but the gun stores are only open on the nights that the Knicks win.”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.And You Get a Gun! And You Get a Gun!The U.S. Supreme Court issued a major ruling on Thursday, striking down a New York State gun law that allowed residents a conceal and carry permit only if they demonstrated a special need.Trevor Noah said the ruling “makes complete sense — because that would be making the militia well regulated, and I mean, you can’t do that, you know? It’s not like it’s written anywhere.”“You can see where this is going. This Supreme Court is feeling themselves, huh? Because you realize they finally have all the justices they need to do anything they want. It’s like Amy Coney Barrett was the last infinity stone that they needed. Yeah, they put it in, and now they’re just snapping away at all the laws. It’s like voting rights, gun control, Miranda rights, abortion. I love this song, yeah!” — TREVOR NOAH“Yeah, I don’t know about you guys, whenever I’ve been sitting in rush-hour traffic in New York with drivers screaming at each other and bikers cussing out the drivers and pedestrians wailing at the bikers and the drivers, the one thing I always think is, ‘Man, one thing that would calm this down is if everyone had a gun right now. Just a Glock or two would really chill the situation out.’” — TREVOR NOAH“So this is obviously a big setback for gun safety. But if you ask me, New York just needs to get creative. Yeah, they need to think outside of the box, the same way that Texas did, right? Look at what Texas did with banning abortion — they weren’t allowed to ban it, so they just made a crazy new law that basically banned it anyway. That’s what New York needs to do with guns. Like, yeah, they should say, ‘OK, anyone can buy a gun if they want, but the gun stores are only open on the nights that the Knicks win.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Gun Show Edition)“The Supreme Court today issued several rulings, including one that overturns a New York State gun law restricting concealed weapons. So move over, tourists! Seriously, move over, ’cuz you’re gonna get shot.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s right, the Supreme Court overturned a New York law — a New York State gun law restricting concealed weapons. ’Cuz you know how sometimes you’ll be on the F train in August and there’s no A.C. and then it stops in the middle of the tunnel and the conductor doesn’t announce anything and you think to yourself, ‘Man, I wish we all had guns.’” — SETH MEYERS“Basically, New York had a law for the past 100 years that said if you want to just carry a gun around with you wherever you go, you need to prove that you have a specific reason you need that gun, you know, for your protection. You have to go to the police, you have to tell them, explain the whole thing. Maybe someone is making threats against you, or maybe you’re Liam Neeson’s daughter and people keep trying to kidnap you, even though it seems like it would be way easier to kidnap someone else’s daughter at this point.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingSamantha Bee shot this week’s “Full Frontal” while she had Covid, saying the news of a potential abortion ban was important enough to power through.Also, Check This OutAustin Butler as Elvis Presley in “Elvis,” directed by Baz Luhrmann. The soundtrack shakes up the expected playlist, and offers the strongest argument for Presley’s relevance.Warner Bros.Austin Butler plays Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s operatic, chaotic anti-biopic, “Elvis.” More

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    ‘Epiphany’ Review: A Holiday Party, but What Are We Celebrating?

    In this heady Lincoln Center Theater production, Brian Watkins finds laughs and shivers in a pensive gathering of old friends.I could describe Brian Watkins’s “Epiphany,” which opened Thursday night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, as an existential dinner-party play. Or a satire of academics, armchair psychologists and the general intelligentsia, always trying to find a common language for our ways of living in the world. It could be called a critique of our modern society of self-interest. A statement on grief. Or a ghost story.I could even call it a kind of poem, making music out of abstractions while traversing the past and the present, the real and the surreal. That this heady work, in a Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Tyne Rafaeli, evades any one definition is a testament to its grand ambitions. In one hour and 50 minutes, “Epiphany” astutely captures a wide swath of ideas without losing its grasp on the hilarious and heartbreaking experience of being a person in the world.On a January evening in a secluded old house in the middle of nowhere, Morkan (Marylouise Burke, perfect as a jittery sexagenarian) hastily prepares for the holiday known as Epiphany, her itinerary packed with drinks, speeches, poems, songs, dancing and a goose feast. Which would be fine if anyone had read the full dossier Morkan sent along beforehand — or if anyone, Morkan included, actually understood what this archaic, forgotten ritual is.Thankfully Gabriel — Morkan’s beloved nephew, a revered writer and public intellectual, and the guest of honor — will be arriving to lead the festivities, and also to explain them. When Gabriel fails to show, instead sending Aran (an ethereal Carmen Zilles) in his place, a night of awkward exchanges, misunderstandings and spirited debates evolves into a dreamlike meditation on mortality.Also attending this vaguely defined soiree are Loren (Colby Minifie, currently in the Amazon series “The Boys”), a sober, vegan 20-something, helping with the preparations; Freddy (C.J. Wilson), a middle-aged alcoholic teacher; Kelly (Heather Burns), a pretentious pianist; Charlie (Francois Battiste), a smartly dressed, self-important lawyer; Sam (Omar Metwally), a pedantic psychiatrist with many opinions; Taylor (David Ryan Smith), his comically snide and heavy-drinking husband; and Ames (the reliably dry-witted Jonathan Hadary), an old friend of Morkan’s and her conspicuously absent sister Julia’s.In a rapid series of processions and introductions, we hear the characters before we see them; they ascend from an unseen lower level and appear in the parlor room of an old house.John Lee Beatty’s antique set design, with the main flight of stairs leading up into an ominous darkness, establishes an unsettling mood, strangely removed from the present day. And Isabella Byrd’s ghostly lighting summons an eerie “Fall of the House of Usher” vibe before illuminating a stunning surprise backdrop: We are watching an evening gathering during a January flurry, snow fitfully descending past the gnarled fingers of tree branches outside the towering windows.Members of the company on the “Epiphany” set, designed by John Lee Beatty with lighting by Isabella Byrd.Jeremy DanielThere’s not much action in “Epiphany,” so the play’s dynamism is all in the controlled chaos of the dialogue: interruptions, overlapping voices, heavy pauses. Watkins (whose plays include “Wyoming” and who created the recent time-loop western series “Outer Range”) effortlessly extracts the humor from the partygoers’ pretensions and posturing, which are just a cover for the insecurities they feel in the modern world — and in their own lives.Absurd developments offer punctuation: One character makes inappropriate bathroom jokes, another performs a “purposefully untitled” piano composition, and after one of the guests suffers a dinnertime injury, the others debate which alcohol to use to sterilize the wound.While Watkins leans into scorn for the insufferable urbanites one-upping one another, he seems to treasure the more introspective figures of Morkan and Ames. And there is plenty of beauty in the play’s abstractions; at its heart “Epiphany” is a love letter to the indefinable and unnameable.“As soon as you try and define love as an empirical thing you’ve suddenly lost the essence of love itself,” Aran says at one point in the night. “It’s bigger than our connotations.” And in a rare moment of drunken insight, Freddy recalls how he heard a poet once explain how the creative process is an act of “creating time … that the space between seconds and minutes actually like widens and deepens … as if eternity was inhabiting you.”Empiricism, existentialism, solipsism — “Epiphany” sends a lot of -isms into space, just to laugh at the volley. (“Well now we’re just saying words,” Ames points out.) Occasionally the play seems to fall down the rabbit hole of its own philosophical musings, but “Epiphany” never remains there too long; the humor, which works at several different registers, from barbed irony to tragicomic lampoonery to wacky physical comedy, reins in the play’s haughtier inclinations.Speaking of haughty — audiences may or may not catch the specter of another work within “Epiphany,” James Joyce’s “The Dead,” from his collection “Dubliners.” “Epiphany,” which first premiered in Ireland in 2019, in a production from the renowned Druid Theater Company, replicates some of the characters’ relationships and exchanges in “The Dead,” uses many of the same character names and echoes the general existential theme.References and snippets of the original text may fly right past anyone unfamiliar with “The Dead,” or anyone who hasn’t picked up “Dubliners” since college. No matter. There’s more than enough in “Epiphany” for it to stand on its own. See it and ruminate; this is a play “bigger than our connotations.”EpiphanyThrough July 24 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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    ‘Transparent’ Musical Highlights Center Theater Group Season

    “A Transparent Musical,” with music and lyrics by Faith Soloway, will have its world premiere in May 2023 at Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.The world premiere of a stage musical adaptation of the groundbreaking Amazon series “Transparent” will highlight the 2022-23 season of Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, the company announced Thursday.The production, “A Transparent Musical,” features characters from the original series about a sexagenarian parent in a Jewish Los Angeles family who comes out as a transgender woman. The new musical comedy is billed as “a story of self-discovery, acceptance and celebration.” It will have its world premiere in May at the Mark Taper Forum.The creator of the original series, Joey Soloway, and MJ Kaufman wrote the book, with music and lyrics by Faith Soloway (who wrote for all four seasons of the television series and composed the songs for its finale). The choreography is by James Aslop (“Girls5eva”), and it will be directed by Tina Landau (“SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical”).“My sibling and I have dreamed of creating a stage musical that brings the experiences of being trans and Jewish into a mainstream, pop culture fantasia,” Joey Soloway said in a release.The original series, which was inspired by the siblings Joey and Faith Soloway’s parent’s own transition later in life, was one of the first mainstream shows to focus on transgender issues when it premiered in 2014. It won eight Emmy Awards, and The New York Times’s Alessandra Stanley praised it as “an insightful, downbeat comedy told without piety or burlesque.” It was also the first scripted series to showcase a transitioning transgender character.“A Transparent Musical” will begin performances on May 20, 2023, and open on May 31, with a limited run through June 25, 2023.Center Theater Group, a 55-year-old nonprofit theater, will present the world premiere of Larissa FastHorse’s comedy “Fake It Until You Make It” (Aug. 2-Sept. 3, 2023), about “shifters” — people who exist in a world of self-determined identity. It will also present Jane Wagner’s one-woman play “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” which stars Cecily Strong of “Saturday Night Live” (Sept. 21-Oct. 23); Lynn Nottage’s Tony-nominated truck-stop-set comedy “Clyde’s” (Nov. 15- Dec. 18); and a revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” (March 8- April 9, 2023) at the Taper.The productions are part of a Center Group season that includes work exclusively by writers who identify as female, transgender or nonbinary, a majority of whom are artists of color, which took shape after the company was called out last fall for its 10-play 2021-22 season, which included only one work by a woman. More