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Years Later, ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ Wields Different Magic
As his own life unfolds, an artist reconsiders his reaction to Joan Didion’s memoir about loss. More
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‘Shawshank’ in China, as You’ve Never Seen It Before
A stage adaptation of the film featured an all-Western cast, was performed in Chinese and raised questions about translation, both linguistic and cultural.When a stage production of “The Shawshank Redemption” opened recently in China, it was cast entirely with Western actors speaking fluent Mandarin Chinese. But that may have been the least surprising part of the show.That the show — an adaptation of the Stephen King novella that became one of the most beloved movies of all time — was staged at all seemingly flew in the face of several trends in China’s cultural sphere.Chinese audiences’ interest in Hollywood films is fading, with moviegoers turning to homegrown productions. China’s authoritarian government has stoked nationalism and cast Western influence as a political pollutant. Censorship of the arts has tightened.Yet the production reflects how some artists are trying to navigate the changing landscape of both what is permissible and what is marketable in China. And its success shows the appetite that many Chinese still have for cultural exchange.A scene from the play.Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times“The Shawshank Redemption” — the story of a man wrongfully convicted of murder who defies prison officials’ tyranny and eventually pulls off a daring escape — has been a target for Chinese censors before. Mentions of it were briefly censored online in 2012, after a prominent Chinese dissident escaped house arrest and fled to the American Embassy. In general, the Chinese authorities have shown little tolerance for calls, artistic or otherwise, for freedom and resistance to injustice.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Review: Sarah Snook Is a Darkly Funny Dorian Gray
In a stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Snook plays all the characters — with the help of screens.A large, rectangular screen hangs from the top of the stage at the Theater Royal Haymarket in London. It is, rather appropriately, in portrait mode.Beneath it, the Australian actress Sarah Snook (“Succession,” “Run Rabbit Run”), sporting a Johnny Bravo-style blonde quiff, is circulated by a small team of black-clad camera operators who broadcast her every move onto the screen in real time as she simultaneously narrates and performs the title role of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”Later, several more screens descend, playing prerecorded footage of Snook in no fewer than twenty-five other roles. Over the course of the next two hours, the onstage Snook interacts seamlessly with these digitalized selves. There are no other actors involved.Wilde’s 1890 novel, in which a handsome rake makes a Faustian bargain with the cosmos by trading his soul for eternal youth (and comes to regret it), lends itself to stage adaptation: It is dialogue-heavy, punctuated by witty, morally intelligent exposition; its allegory of human hubris is timeless.This adaptation, by the Sydney Theater Company, directed by Kip Williams and running through May 11, is a formally ambitious but playful multimedia production. The single-actor format and clever use of camerawork give visual expression to the novel’s themes of overweening egotism and existential dread.The play’s aesthetic palate is a blend of period and contemporary. There’s something tongue-in-cheek about much of the dated garb.Marc BrennerWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Tobias Menzies on ‘The Crown’ and His Role in ‘The Hunt’
The British actor excels at playing reserve, and what roils beneath, on “The Crown.” And now he brings that stoicism to “The Hunt,” onstage in Brooklyn.On a morning in early February, the actor Tobias Menzies walked the Brooklyn Heights Promenade in the relative anonymity he prefers. Menzies wasn’t hiding. He wore no sunglasses, no cap, just Blundstones, jeans, a shearling coat. He didn’t duck when people came his way. But the past few years, including multi-season stints on “The Crown” and “Outlander,” have brought him a new visibility, which still makes him uneasy.“I’m not that confident about my life or what it is to be able to put it out in the public,” he said, shoulders hunched against the breeze. “I’m just bumbling along as best I can.”Menzies, 49, had come to Brooklyn, to rehearse “The Hunt,” a theatrical adaptation of the Thomas Vinterberg movie that begin performances at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Friday. Back in 2019, Menzies had originated the stage role of Lucas, a preschool teacher falsely accused of exposing himself to a child, in a London production. A member of a local hunting club, Lucas now finds himself targeted by the community that once embraced him.In the years since “The Hunt” premiered, Menzies has won an Emmy, for playing Prince Philip on the Netflix hit “The Crown,” and a fan base for his dual roles of Frank Randall and his sadistic ancestor Black Jack Randall on the Starz series “Outlander.” He also played somewhat against type as an anxious therapist in Nicole Holofcener’s acerbic comedy “You Hurt My Feelings.”Menzies has won an Emmy, for playing Prince Philip on the Netflix hit “The Crown,” opposite Olivia Colman.Sophie Mutevelian/NetflixFive years ago, the role made perfect sense for Menzies, who specializes in wounded masculinity. The play, adapted by David Farr, is caustic and cerebral, and it reunited him with a frequent collaborator, the director Rupert Goold. And Lucas is a type that Menzies has often gravitated toward, a man unable, whether by upbringing, temperament or circumstance, to show his feelings. Lucas benefits from both Menzies’ natural reserve and his ability to show what roils beneath that stoicism, a game of emotive hide-and-seek.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Review: ‘I Love You So Much I Could Die,’ an Experiment in Distance
Mona Pirnot’s crisis-centered play uses all its resources to keep the audience at a physical and emotional remove from her sorrow.Whether it’s thought through or instinctual, turning your back to the audience certainly makes a statement. The person onstage might need to hide from an intrusive gaze, or might be deliberately trying to recalibrate the nature of spectacle and the expectations we place on it. Or maybe it’s all part of a grand conceptual design involving the subconscious connections we make when absorbing art.It’s tempting to reach for that last explanation when considering Mona Pirnot’s “I Love You So Much I Could Die,” partly because this New York Theater Workshop production is directed by Lucas Hnath (her husband), who explored the link between storytelling and sound in his plays “Dana H.” and “A Simulacrum.” But this show is too slight, too wan, to bear the weight of analytical dissection.Pirnot, who wrote and stars in “I Love You,” spends the entire 65-minute running time sitting at a table, facing away from the audience. When she picks up a guitar and sings the songs that dot the narrative, we cannot see her expression.We can’t see it during the spoken sections, either, because her words, generated by a speech-to-text application, are piped out of a laptop in a male-sounding voice. A cursor is visible moving across the screen, highlighting the text as the gnomic A.I. interpreter works its way through; at times it feels as if we are sitting in on a willfully dull karaoke session.Interweaving songs and stories, Pirnot pieces together a traumatic event from her life, in a manner that feels solipsistically granular. “I’m the kind of person who will think and think and think, and then think about what I’m thinking, and then think about what I think about what I’m thinking,” she says. “My mom calls it having a pity party.”If that’s her own mother’s take — especially in light of the show’s subject, which gradually comes into relief — imagine the challenge it is to elicit interest, not to mention compassion, from a theater full of people not related to Pirnot. It is a challenge “I Love You” struggles to meet.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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‘Between Two Knees’ Review: A Virtuosic Romp Through a Century of Terrors
Two deadly standoffs at Wounded Knee are the bookends for a show that manages to narrate a violent history with moments of light and humor.Rapid-fire punchlines and crafty sight gags may not seem the most obvious means to convey a brutal history of displacement and extermination. But “Between Two Knees,” which opened at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Manhattan on Tuesday, uses both in an audaciously sidesplitting comedy that’s an indictment of Native American persecution.The show’s antic account of Indigenous struggle was written by the 1491s, an intertribal sketch comedy troupe that includes Sterlin Harjo, a creator of “Reservation Dogs.” The action is bookended by two deadly standoffs: the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, where U.S. soldiers killed as many as 300 members of the Lakota Sioux tribe, and the occupation of that site in 1973 by the American Indian Movement and its supporters, who were protesting government injustice.A narrator named Larry (Justin Gauthier) welcomes the audience with the casual air of a stand-up breaking in the crowd, saying that Indians have experienced some “pretty dark” stuff. White audience members are warned that guilt pangs lie ahead — and encouraged to assuage them by depositing donations into a basket being passed around. “Don’t be cheap now,” Larry prods. “I promise, when you leave, you will still own everything.”Playful daggers like these are cloaked throughout the production, directed with ingenuity and finesse by Eric Ting, with a vaudeville-style emphasis on amusement and artifice.When we meet Ina (a wryly deadpan Sheila Tousey) clutching her baby during the Wounded Knee massacre, for example, an ensemble member demonstrates the severity of Ina’s wounds by detaching her false arm and absconding offstage with it. (Victims of the siege, many of them women and children, were unarmed.) A red streamer unfurls from Ina’s shoulder like a clown’s handkerchief, the show’s recurring signifier of bloodshed.Ina’s murder starts a multigenerational story that follows her descendants’ turmoil through the 20th century: Ina’s orphaned son Isaiah (Derek Garza) and his love interest, Irma (Shyla Lefner), defeat the wicked nuns at their Native American boarding school (a video-game-style showdown with witty projections by Shawn Duan) to become vigilantes. Their son William, a.k.a. Wolf (Shaun Taylor-Corbett), departs to fight in World War II. A cascade of soapy twists, including a baby left on a doorstep, eventually leads the family back to Wounded Knee.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Dating Woes? Nina Conti Has the Answer, or at Least Some Jokes
In “The Dating Show,” the British comedian and ventriloquist initiates close encounters of the potentially romantic kind. Laughs will definitely ensue.Meaningful, long-lasting connections can take a while to form, but when Nina Conti met her future partner-in-crime, she knew they were simpatico right away.“It was one of those moments where I felt very grounded as soon as I saw his face,” Conti, a British performer and writer, said in a video conversation. “It was the chemistry between my personality and something so cozy about him. You can put him in a handbag, no problem.”It might be worth mentioning that the face in question belongs to Monkey, the puppet that has been Conti’s main scene partner for most of her nearly 25 years as a ventriloquist.“You can actually project anything onto that face,” she said. “Wisdom is what I choose to project onto it. When I look at him, I expect him to say something wise that might get me out of a tight pinch. But it’s weird because onstage it’s kind of the opposite: He’s throwing me in the [expletive] all the time, and I’m clambering to apologize and keep up.”Creating and sustaining personal relationships seems to matter to Conti, who inherited the dummy collection of her lover and mentor, the theater maker Ken Campbell, after he died in 2008. (She explored that grief-stricken time in the 2012 documentary “Her Master’s Voice,” which also follows her to a ventriloquist convention in Kentucky.) Now, close encounters of the potentially romantic kind are at the center of “The Dating Show,” which Conti is performing at SoHo Playhouse through March 2.Monkey, however, is not her main collaborator in that piece — the audience is.“I expect him to say something wise that might get me out of a tight pinch,” Conti said of Monkey. “Onstage, it’s kind of the opposite: He’s throwing me in the [expletive] all the time, and I’m clambering to apologize and keep up.”Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Is Earlier Better for Theater Start Times?
In an effort to entice audiences back after the pandemic, Britain’s National Theater is testing a 6:30 p.m. curtain.At 6:30 p.m. on a recent Thursday, most London theatergoers were still busy at work, or eating a preshow dinner, or maybe waiting at home for a babysitter.Except at the National Theater. There, about 450 theater fans were already in their seats, where the curtain had just gone up on “Till the Stars Come Down,” a dark comedy about a wedding that goes disastrously wrong. That night was the first performance in a six-month trial to see if starting some shows at 6:30 p.m. instead of 7:30 can lure back theatergoers who, since the coronavirus pandemic began, don’t want to stay out late in London anymore.The early performances were “marginally outselling” other midweek shows, said Alex Bayley, the National Theater’s head of marketing. The theater will wait to see the trial results before making the early starts a permanent fixture. In interviews in the bustling foyer before the show, 20 attendees said that they thought the early start was a good idea. Ruth Hendle, 65, an accountant, said that it meant she wouldn’t have to run out at the end to catch the last train home. “I’m too old to be doing that anymore,” she said. Mary Castleden, 68, said that an early finish would mean an easier drive home.The only complaints concerned the lack of time to have dinner first. “I hope they’re not eating food in this play,” said Karim Khan, 29, “otherwise I might get hungry.” (Khan did not get his wish: Soon after the play began, the ensemble cast performed a scene in which they snacked from an overflowing buffet.)In New York, there has been some movement on curtain times, too. Jason Laks, the Broadway League’s general counsel, said that about 10 years ago, an 8 p.m. theater start was sacrosanct. Now, there was “a trend to a 7 p.m. curtain,” he said, although he noted that that shift began before the pandemic.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
