Brunstetter, Bekah

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    Video Games Are a Playwright’s Muse, Not Her Hobby

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    In Bekah Brunstetter’s new play “The Game,” women withhold sex from their partners who are obsessed with a Fortnite-like game. Her previous work includes “The Oregon Trail.”The writer Bekah Brunstetter is decidedly not a video game aficionado. Her personality type — “psychotically obsessed with productivity,” as she put it — has sealed off all gaming rabbit holes for the past 25 years.And yet Brunstetter, perhaps best known for her television work on “This Is Us” and the book for the current Broadway adaptation of “The Notebook,” has now written not one but two plays about the ways that video games can hinder or facilitate human connection.“The Game,” which is currently having its world premiere, is about a fictionalized version of Fortnite Battle Royale, a third-person shooter where each round ends with only one survivor. It comes seven years after Brunstetter’s “The Oregon Trail,” inspired by the game that condemned countless 1990s middle schoolers to an array of awful deaths (cholera, dysentery, snake bites, etc.) as they tried to replicate the grueling 19th-century passage west from Independence, Mo.In “The Oregon Trail,” Brunstetter paralleled the modern-day struggles of a young woman with the higher-stakes perils of her video game counterpart. With “The Game,” she is taking the outsider perspective, focusing on a support group of wives who decide to withhold sex to get their partners off Fortnite — or The Game, as it is called here. (The play is a very loose adaptation of “Lysistrata,” the ancient Greek comedy in which the sex strike is designed to end the Peloponnesian War.)Brunstetter, 41, spoke over a video call about “The Game” the day after its final dress rehearsal at Playmakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, N.C. She discussed the two plays, her learning curve and the TV show that might lure her back into the world of gaming.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Megan Ketch and Lucas Dixon in “The Game,” in which a group of women try to get their partners to stop playing a video game that resembles Fortnite.HuthPhoto, via PlayMakers Repertory CompanyWe 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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      in Theater

      ‘The Notebook’ Review: A Musical Tear-Jerker or Just All Wet?

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      The 2004 weepie comes to Broadway with songs by Ingrid Michaelson and a $5 box of tissues.Romantic musicals are as personal as romance itself. What makes you sigh and weep may leave the person next to you bored and stony.At “The Notebook,” I was the person next to you.You were sniffling even before anything much happened onstage. As the lights came up, an old man dozed while a teenage boy and girl frisked nearby in an unconvincing body of water. A wispy song called “Time” wafted over the footlights: “Time time time time/It was never mine mine mine.”But having seen (I’m guessing more than once) the 2004 movie on which “The Notebook” is based, and possibly having read the 1996 novel by Nicholas Sparks, you perfectly well knew what was coming. That was the point of mounting the show, which opened on Thursday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, in the first place.It therefore cannot be a spoiler — and anyway this block of cheese is impervious — to reveal that over the course of the 54 years covered by the musical, the frisky boy, Noah, turns into the dozing man. And that Allie, the frisky girl, having overcome various impediments to their love, winds up his wife. Nor does it give anything away to add that Allie, now 70 and in a nursing home with dementia, will not remember Noah until he recites their story from a notebook she prepared long ago for that purpose.So there’s a reason the producers are selling teeny $5 “Notebook”-themed boxes of tissues in the lobby. Love is powerful. Dementia is sad. The result can be heartbreaking.Or maybe, seen with a cold eye, meretricious.The movie, a super-slick Hollywood affair, did everything it could to keep the eye warm. Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, as the young couple, could not have been glowier. The soundtrack relied on precision-crafted standards like “I’ll Be Seeing You” to yank at your tear ducts. The production design, like a montage of greeting cards come to life, celebrated valentine passion, anniversary tenderness and golden sympathy, releasing flocks of trained geese into a technicolor sunset to symbolize lifelong pair bonding.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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      in Movies

      ‘The Notebook’ Musical to Land on Broadway in the Spring

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      The adaptation of the popular Nicholas Sparks romance novel, with music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson, had a well-reviewed run last year in Chicago.“The Notebook,” Nicholas Sparks’s best-selling 1996 novel about a star-crossed couple’s lifelong romance, which was adapted into a 2004 film starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling, will soon arrive in New York in another form: a Broadway musical.The production had a well-reviewed world premiere at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater last fall. Steven Oxman of The Chicago Sun-Times wrote that it represented “a significant leap in artistic quality over its sources, which it respects, while also providing a clear, resonant and unique voice of its own.” He had particular praise for the “poetic” songs, by the indie singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, and the “impressive” onstage rainstorm.Previews are scheduled to begin Feb. 6, and the opening is set for March 14 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, most recently home to “Life of Pi.”The story of the couple, Noah and Allie, is relayed in flashbacks that come to life as the older Noah reads from a notebook detailing their love story to the older Allie, who has dementia. (In a change from the book and the film, the story now begins in the 1960s instead of the 1940s.)In the Chicago production, Allie and Noah were each played by three different actors, who embodied them at various ages. The younger and older versions of the characters often share the stage, with the older couple watching as scenes from their past unfold. (Jordan Tyson and John Cardoza played the teenage Allie and Noah; Joy Woods and Ryan Vasquez depicted them in their late 20s; and Maryann Plunkett and John Beasley played the older versions.)Casting for Broadway has not yet been announced, but one casting change is certain: Beasley, who played the older incarnation of Noah, died in May at 79.The Chicago creative team will return for the Broadway run: Michael Greif (“Dear Evan Hansen,” “Rent”) and Schele Williams (“Aida,” “The Wiz”) will direct, with choreography by Katie Spelman (associate choreographer of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”). Bekah Brunstetter (“This Is Us”) wrote the book, with music and lyrics by Michaelson, a first-time theater composer. It will be produced by Kevin McCollum (“Six,” “The Devil Wears Prada”) and Kurt Deutsch, an executive at Warner Music Group.“The Notebook,” which was Sparks’s first published novel, consistently ranks among the most popular of his more than 20 books. Though the film adaptation — directed by Nick Cassavetes from a screenplay by Jeremy Leven and adapted by Jan Sardi from the novel — received mixed reviews, it became one of the highest-grossing romantic dramas of all time. More