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    With a Killer Onstage and a Body Part in the Back, the Show Went On

    Fourteen years ago in Orange County, Calif., Daniel Wozniak killed two people: Sam Herr, a 26-year-old Army veteran and neighbor, and Julie Kibuishi, a 23-year-old student and Herr’s close friend. Wozniak was convicted of the murders, received a death sentence and is serving time on death row, though California has a moratorium on executions.Those circumstances alone would be enough to adapt the case into a play in our true-crime-loving era. But additional details about the heinous murders shoot a cold dose of evil through that old theater maxim “The show must go on.”Wozniak performed twice in a community theater production of the musical “Nine” as Guido, the ladies-man lead, in the hours after the separate shootings of Kibuishi and Herr, whom he also dismembered and whose savings he wanted. Investigators found Herr’s torso inside the theater where Wozniak and his fiancée, Rachel Buffett, had performed in the show. Buffett was later convicted of lying to the police about the murders.What kind of person would gamely act between gruesome acts? That’s the question Ryan Spahn set out to explore in his darkly comic new play, “Inspired by True Events,” running through Aug. 4 at Theater 154 in the West Village, in an Out of the Box Theatrics production.Directed by Knud Adams, the show takes place inside a community theater’s intimate green room, where Mary (Dana Scurlock), a mama bear stage manager, helps the actors Colin (Jack DiFalco), Eileen (Mallory Portnoy) and Robert (Lou Liberatore) prepare for the play-within-the-play. The audience of 35 (seated on chairs inside the theater’s green room) watches the humdrum thrum of a dressing room: Mary makes coffee, Colin showers, Eileen puts on her wig, Robert steams his costume. That is until Robert finds a duffel bag that reeks of Colin’s gym clothes — and it’s no spoiler to say that what’s in the bag are not Colin’s gym clothes.Dana Scurlock, left, and Jack DiFalco in the Out of the Box Theatrics production.Thomas BrunotWe 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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    ‘Silo’ Review: When Life on a Farm Is Far From Wholesome

    A mainstay of American agriculture, corn can become a suffocating trap when a human comes up against tons of it in a vertical storage bin.The terror of certain life-threatening situations is tough to translate to the screen. One of these is what a dispatcher in “Silo” calls a grain engulfment. Here, it happens when a teenage farmworker, Cody (Jack DiFalco), is sent into a multistory silo to break up clumps of corn. Someone negligently activates the machinery, and Cody becomes marooned in a quicksand-like rush of corn. Any movement might cause him to sink below the surface. And any effort to extract him must account for the forces exerted by 1.5 million pounds of corn.The scenario is a real one; statistics at the end cite how frequent and deadly these entrapments are. Building a movie around Cody’s peril requires an approach that makes every creak of metal or shift in grain suspenseful to viewers. For Cody, being unable to budge, reach his inhaler or see the rescue efforts is petrifying. But the director, Marshall Burnette, doesn’t stick to Cody’s perspective. Every time he cuts beyond the silo, the tension is lost.Burnette’s feature debut, “Silo” is based on a story he devised from news coverage. Jason Williamson wrote the screenplay.If Burnette’s formal instincts are suboptimal — the pervasive backlighting and underlighting keep much of the action in shadow — his dramatic instincts are worse. Cody’s mother (Jill Paice) curses fate for entrusting her son’s life to Frank (Jeremy Holm), the volunteer fire chief, the person she holds responsible for Cody’s father’s death in a car accident. The cast also struggles to capture the urgency. Few actors could convincingly engage in an angry dispute about the best way to rescue a kid “surrounded by unstable corn.”SiloNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More