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    ‘Inspired by True Events’ Review: True Crime Thriller Riddled With Clichés

    The actor Ryan Spahn makes his Off Broadway playwriting debut with an immersive, psychologically shallow dark comedy.In May 2010, Daniel Wozniak, an actor performing in a production of the musical “Nine” at the Liberty Theater in Los Alamitos, Calif., killed two people. He dismembered the body of one of his victims, and kept a portion of it at another local theater. News of the heinous acts sent shock waves through the performing arts community, and more recently led the actor Ryan Spahn to write “Inspired by True Events,” an Out of the Box Theatrics production now running at Theater 154 in the West Village.This immersive show wisely plays off our modern-day fascination with true crime, but, frustratingly, it’s missing the elements that keep the genre compelling: a clear mapping of intimate relationships, a psychological analysis of motive and a captivating villain.“Inspired by True Events” begins with the stage manager, Mary (Dana Scurlock), of Uptown Theater — the kind of scrappy local company that programs “A Christmas Carol” every winter to offset the cost of more adventurous work during other seasons — entering a green room littered with grease-stained pizza boxes and empty bottles of vodka (the scenic design is by Lindsay G. Fuori), evidence of the previous night’s opening festivities.We’re all backstage with Mary, inside the real green room of Theater 154. (The building’s traditional theater is cleverly used too.) The backstage environment, made even more intimate by the production’s 35-seat audience cap, adds multisensory layers to the show. When Mary puts on a fresh pot of coffee in anticipation of her haggard cast — Colin (Jack DiFalco), Eileen (Mallory Portnoy) and Robert (Lou Liberatore) — we not only smell the pungent brew but also the gurgling of the coffee maker cuts into the dialogue. The sound of the water roiling effectively hints at something more sinister to come.Spahn and the director, Knud Adams, have a couple of these adrenaline-inducing tricks up their sleeves, including offstage thuds and the rustling of mice gnawing on something in the vents (sound design by Peter Mills Weiss). But the show is at its best when it lets the green room serve as a microcosm for these characters’ anxieties: Colin’s breakup with his girlfriend, Claire; Eileen’s stress over her mother being in the audience; and Robert’s laments about his horrible day. These interesting bits of character development have a meta impact, influencing how the Uptown players are preparing for their performance, and how we, the audience, come to view the Uptown players. These moments prove Spahn’s ability to weave personality into the high-concept narrative fabric, so it’s mind-boggling that he doesn’t do it more frequently.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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    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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    Review: Close Quarters and Distant Love in ‘The Last Five Years’

    Casting Black actors and filming in a claustrophobic New York apartment revitalizes Jason Robert Brown’s popular two-character musical.Breakups, hookups, divorces, engagements: Even if you haven’t been afflicted yourself, you’ve surely heard stories of the dramatic changes Covid-19 has wrought on relationships, as though Cupid himself got feverish and went rogue.It’s unsurprising, given how the pandemic has redefined space, shrinking the square footage of our lives to a house or a studio apartment. Proximity became a test, and if you don’t believe me, the proof is in Out of the Box Theatrics and Holmdel Theater Company’s gorgeously performed and neatly contained virtual production of “The Last Five Years.”Plot-wise, you may already know the lowdown: Created by Jason Robert Brown, the 2001 musical is about the beginning and ending of a five-year relationship between two young New Yorkers. Each side of the story is enacted separately, and in opposite chronological order; Cathy (Nasia Thomas), a struggling actress, begins the tale in the future, after the fights and farewells, while Jamie (Nicholas Edwards), a talented novelist on the path to celebrity, starts in the past, in the exciting early days of courtship. Their paths only cross once, in the middle of the musical, during their wedding.Though the show is barely old enough to be of legal drinking age, it’s had many lives. Consider the myriad productions we’ve recounted in this newspaper: in 2002, at the Minetta Lane Theater; in 2012, at Crossroads Theater Company; in 2013, at Second Stage Theater; and in 2016, a benefit concert with Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Henry at Town Hall. I’ll even take a moment to recall the tragically limp 2015 film version, starring the otherwise button-cute Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan.And yet for all of this, “The Last Five Years” was and remains just … fine. The diverging timelines are often confusing, the songs workable but nothing extraordinary and the character portraits rely too heavily on the clockwork conceit.Which is what makes this virtual production, directed by Jason Michael Webb (the musical director of several Broadway shows), that much more delightful. For one, a Black Cathy and Jamie feel like a novelty, given how many productions cast white leads by default. And Webb’s arrangements, which anchor Brown’s score with more soul and strut, allow Thomas and Edwards to revitalize the songs.Thomas and Edwards in the filmed production, which, under Jason Michael Webb’s direction, stresses the claustrophobia of a troubled relationship.Gerald Malaval“Still Hurting” is a showcase for Thomas’s regal timbre, her vibrato recalling the crystal-clear tone of a knife clinked on a champagne glass.Edwards, who recently starred as the Son of God in the Berkshire Theater Group’s pandemic-era production of “Godspell,” wears the kind of toothy grin that could bring out the sun on a cloudy day, and his vocals are just as sunny, especially in his character’s effervescent early numbers.Later, Edwards, as an older, restless Jamie, slows down into the melancholic swells of “Nobody Needs to Know.” (Carin M. Ford’s sound editing and Nicole Maupin’s sound mixing expertly coax liveliness from the performers, by no means a given in a recorded musical.)The production’s most clever aspect, however, is what defines it as a Covid-19 theater experience: the penned-in feel of where and how it’s shot. Filmed inside a New York apartment, “The Last Five Years” recalls the claustrophobic bubble of a couple who remain stuck — because of love or codependency or, maybe, a pandemic — in each other’s orbits until something gives.Wall scrolls, tapestries, pictures, books and random Star Wars collectibles (like a familiar green baby alien) create the look of a fully lived-in space and also provide visual clues into the couple’s style and personality, details absent in the script (design is by Adam Honoré).Webb’s inspired direction keeps the characters, and the paths of their relationship, in a tight embrace. Cathy and Jamie move around each other, often inhabiting the same space, but their interactions often feel distanced. Because the couple meets only once in the timeline, there’s a sense of pantomime to their other scenes together, reactions and physical proximity but no dialogue. It’s fitting because we know, watching, that what we’re seeing is only one character’s memory of an event.At least Cathy and Jamie have beautiful accompanists to score their confrontations and declarations of love. Six musicians haunt the space like ghosts: Sitting on a couch, perched on a bed, they function as silent stand-ins for friends and roommates, before fading back into the background, or discreetly poke the fourth wall with a subtle smirk or nod at the singing characters.Meanwhile, Brian Bon’s videography waltzes with the contours of the apartment, angling high and low and peeking around corners to create the illusion of a labyrinthine setting for relationship purgatory.In purgatory, time doesn’t pass. The same may feel true during a pandemic. Two lovers stuck together but living in two different moments — one racing toward the future, one clinging to the past — that’s a story I’ve heard before.But in this robust production, it’s a story impressively freed, not trapped, by its physical and creative limitations.The Last Five YearsThrough April 25; ootbtheatrics.com More