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      Review: Royalty as Horror Show in ‘Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!’

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      An uncanny new play imagines Meghan (and Kate, too) trapped in a nightmare palace where racism reigns.“Were you silent,” Oprah Winfrey asked Meghan Markle, “or were you silenced?”That transfixing moment from Sunday’s televised interview between the Queen of Empathy and the Duchess of Sussex rang in my ears as I watched, on Monday, a new play, by Vivian J.O. Barnes, that explores the same question in 32 minutes instead of two hours. With uncanny timing and daring theatricality, “Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!” — now streaming from the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago — dissects the phenomenon of Black women who, in exchange for privilege, forfeit their ability to speak, or have it taken from them.I don’t mean Winfrey, of course. In Barnes’s play, which she started writing in 2018, the interview is rather between a woman called the Soon-to-Be Duchess, who is like Markle shortly before her wedding to Prince Harry, and a woman called the Duchess, a Kate Middleton figure reimagined as Black. The occasion is a meeting, evidently arranged by palace apparatchiks, in which the experienced royal wife is supposed to school the totally inexperienced royal fiancée in the finer points of duchessing: how to hold one’s legs (“the Duchess slant”) and especially how to hold one’s tongue.Cooper, right, conferring with Sydney Charles as an experienced royal in the Steppenwolf Theater Company production.Lowell ThomasBy making the Middleton figure Black, Barnes both generalizes the problems of royalty to encompass any woman who joins “the firm” and stakes a claim on particular themes without having to spell them out. The Duchess (Sydney Charles) is sleek and sophisticated, with straight hair, silky diction and a profound mastery of self-abnegation. Soon-to-Be (Celeste M. Cooper) is less processed in every way: She shows too much skin, says what she thinks and has condoms in her purse.Still, she’s jittery. At night she dreams of her mouth turning into a hand that waves as if to perpetual crowds. She has already been pilloried in racist terms in the press and, even within the palace, has been advised to tone herself down. One internal memo asks that she try to be “a little less cocoa, a lot more beige” — a line that, though written earlier, recalls Markle’s description of royal family members expressing concern about the skin tone of the children she and Harry might have.Unlike them, Soon-to-Be laughs off the matter, tearing the memo to pieces along with many others. But if she expected to find the Duchess a comforting sister, “one person who gets it, who’s gonna look out for me,” she is as mistaken as Markle apparently was in the parallel situation.There is no solidarity to be found in a hollowed-out personality; the Duchess, who has recently had a baby she can’t quite recall giving birth to, imagines her public self as a “person who’s taking up the me-shaped hole I left behind.” She has bought so deeply into the royal mythology that she seems to believe she now exists in a rarefied world beyond personality and thus beyond race.As the Markle interview made clear, no such world exists. Institutions can be racist even when their leaders (as Markle said of Queen Elizabeth) have “always been wonderful.” Because this can only be seen from outside, it is not the assimilated royal in Barnes’s play who ends up teaching the outsider how to speak, but the reverse. In ways that are both fascinating and intensely disturbing, Soon-to-Be takes both women to places they could not reach in real life.This puts “Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!” in the line of recent movies, including “Get Out,” “Us” and “Antebellum,” that figure racism as a species of horror, complete with surrealistic touches, eerie mash-ups of sounds and music (by Pornchanok Kanchanabanca) and a culminating dose of (implied) gore. Yet it is still recognizably a play: The director, Weyni Mengesha, stages it elegantly on a minimal set, against a black backdrop, with just enough editing to stitch the two characters, who were filmed separately, together.Even aside from creating mini-studios in their own apartments, the cast has a difficult job here. Working hard to split the genre difference, they aim for a performance style that is neither too stagy for film nor too subtle for theater. Charles has an easier time of it; Barnes has given the Duchess a clear dramatic profile with a rising arc of crisis. Cooper’s role is rangier and harder to corral: Soon-to-Be toggles so fast between nerves and nerve that she starts to seem like a firefly.That’s a trap built into the setup: Someone has to keep goading the action when the primary antagonists are deliberately kept offstage. Another trap is that horror can lend those absent antagonists a kind of otherworldly glamour; why were the Duchess and Soon-to-Be — or Markle and Middleton, for that matter — attracted to royals in the first place?Yet as Markle reminded us, racism isn’t glamorous, even when it wears a tiara. It’s ordinary and sour.If “Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!” can’t strike that note clearly, it strikes plenty of others. The obtuseness of privilege — and the mania that aims to preserve it with absurd rituals and at unimaginable emotional cost — get a thorough workout, even in such a short play. The writing itself is wonderfully operatic; you could almost imagine the script as a libretto. No surprise that among Barnes’s inspirations are such musical stage stylists as Ntozake Shange, Caryl Churchill and George C. Wolfe.Beyond that, it’s no small thing to find a young playwright — Barnes is still in graduate school, at the University of California, San Diego — using the theater’s big tools so presciently and fearlessly. She’s got a voice, and she knows it.Duchess! Duchess! Duchess!Through Aug. 31; steppenwolf.org More

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      You’re New Here, Aren’t You? Digital Theater’s Unexpected Upside

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeWatch: ‘WandaVision’Travel: More SustainablyFreeze: Homemade TreatsCheck Out: Podcasters’ Favorite PodcastsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyYou’re New Here, Aren’t You? Digital Theater’s Unexpected UpsideCompanies and venues that put work online are finding big, new and younger audiences — but little revenue.Pittsburgh Public Theater has found an audience for streamed shows like “The Gift of the Mad Guys,” an adaptation of O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.”Credit…via Pittsburgh Public TheaterFeb. 24, 2021Five days after the coronavirus quieted performing arts venues, the Irish Repertory Theater found its voice.It was St. Patrick’s Day, after all — not an occasion to go unacknowledged, even during a pandemic. So the humble nonprofit started posting homespun videos of company members performing Irish-themed songs, poems and monologues on social media.The response was encouraging, and in the 11 months since, the theater has added nine full-length digital productions. A house manager with no video editing experience stitched together the first such effort, a three-person play about a blind woman called “Molly Sweeney,” using video actors shot of themselves on their phones.By the time the theater was ready to attempt a holiday musical, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” it was considerably more ambitious, shipping green screens, tripods, lighting and sound equipment to actors’ homes.Was there an audience for these virtual ventures? Decidedly, yes.Over the course of this pandemic year, 25,000 households have reserved tickets — they are free, but there is a suggested donation — for at least one of Irish Rep’s digital productions (and many of them watch more than one show). That’s double the 12,500 people who buy tickets to at least one of the company’s productions in an ordinary year, when it’s comparatively safe to see live performances while sitting next to strangers.Even more striking: 80 percent of those who have watched an Irish Rep production over the last year are newbies who have never been to the company’s 148-seat theater, nestled in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.“We’re batting down barriers we’ve been wrestling with for decades,” said Frances Howorth, the theater’s director of marketing and digital strategy. “We’ve reached audiences we couldn’t have imagined reaching.”From left, Paul O’Brien, Geraldine Hughes and Ciaran O’Reilly in the Irish Repertory Theater’s virtual production of “Molly Sweeney.”Credit…via Irish RepThe pandemic has, of course, been devastating for theaters, costing lives, jobs and dollars. And many longtime theatergoers find streaming unsatisfying — no substitute for the you-are-there sensory experience.But across the country, and beyond its borders, many theaters say new audiences for their streaming offerings has been an unexpected silver lining — one that could have ramifications for the industry even after it is safe to perform live again and presenters try to return patrons to their seats.“We’ve been excited and somewhat surprised at the eagerness and size of the audience that we’ve uncovered,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, a large New York nonprofit best known for its free Shakespeare in the Park program. The theater, which has streamed both video and audio shows during the pandemic at no charge, has drawn an audience of 700,000 for its digital productions. And while measuring the size of online audiences can be imprecise, the theater has attracted people from every state and 68 countries.“I got a fan letter from Kazakhstan, which is a first for me,” Eustis said.The pattern, although not universal, is widespread. In California, La Jolla Playhouse has seen its audience grow sixfold, from about 100,000 during a typical in-person season, to 640,000 thus far for its digital programming, which included a three-part radio horror show.Christopher Ashley, the theater’s artistic director, said he imagined digital programming would be a less dominant part of his programming post-pandemic, but that because so many people had been interested in watching it, “we’re not going to just shut off that stream.”There are reasons to be cautious about the metrics. The basic tools used by theaters to measure audience can’t determine how many people are watching within a household, and generally don’t reflect how many people watch or listen for just a moment and move on.But many theater executives assert that online theater has brought them a significantly larger audience than they saw in-person, a growth they attribute to price (much of the digital content is free or low-cost); geography (you can check in from anywhere with internet access); and, in many cases, ease (watch at your convenience, with no advance planning).Some of the content is full-length, but much is also bite-size, reflecting online viewing habits. And it comes in many flavors: archival and new, recorded and live, in some cases seeking to capture the feeling of being in Row J, and in others embracing digital theater as a new art form. Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, a nonprofit in New York, has streamed not only plays, concerts and conversations, but also a court transcript reading, a “communal ritual” and, now underway, a 17-part audio series set on the No. 2 train.David Kwong (framed in yellow) with members of the digital audience gathered for his Geffen Playhouse production “Inside the Box.”Credit…via Geffen PlayhouseThere is even money to be made. The Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles has earned $2.5 million selling tickets to a series of live and interactive shows featuring magic, puzzles, cooking and a murder mystery. That theater has been quite aggressive — it has held more than 600 live performances since last May, including several scheduled for the convenience of international audiences — and reports that 88 percent of its audience during the pandemic had never been to a show at the playhouse.But digital content, in most instances, generates far less revenue: At the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, which decided to make most digital programs free to donors and subscribers, streaming has brought in $154,000 during the pandemic, whereas by this time in a normal season, that theater would expect about $23.5 million in box office revenue. Most nonprofit theaters are staying afloat thanks to a combination of philanthropy and layoffs; they say the digital work is not for revenue, but to maintain audience and provide work for artists. Often, theaters must navigate thorny health and labor issues as part of the process.“We started this for our members as a way to keep them close when we had to shut down our stages, and, quite frankly, so they wouldn’t ask us for ticket refunds,” said Kara Henry, the marketing director for the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago.Many of the theater’s longtime patrons greeted the initiative with a shrug, but newcomers were more enthusiastic. Now Steppenwolf has 2,500 digital-only members, who pay $75 for a subscription. “Our virtual-only members are a full decade younger than our traditional members, so obviously that thrilled us,” Henry said.Marya Sea Kaminski, the artistic director of Pittsburgh Public Theater, has been pleased to reach senior citizens by streaming shows to their residential communities.Credit…Ross Mantle for The New York TimesPittsburgh Public Theater not only has seen audience growth, but also has found ways to reach the hard-to-reach: It arranged to stream its productions on the television sets at residential senior communities in western Pennsylvania. “This has been a truly fascinating time to really think about who we are, what is our mission, and to have a lot of important conversations about access and accessibility,” said Marya Sea Kaminski, the theater’s artistic director.Streaming helped TheatreSquared in Fayetteville, Ark., avoid layoffs and persuade three-quarters of its subscribers to renew during the pandemic. The theater has created 10 streaming productions, five of them filmed onstage using safety protocols, including Jocelyn Bioh’s acclaimed “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play,” which has been extended through March 14. (Another play, about Marie Curie, is watchable through that date as well.)“Obviously, it’s better to sit down in the theater,” said Martin Miller, the organization’s executive director. “But tell that to a kid in a rural school 100 miles away who might not otherwise have a theater to go to, or to the patron who came for years but can’t leave home anymore home due to mobility issues.”The virtual pivot is not for everyone. In interviews, several theater-lovers around the country expressed screen fatigue, quality concerns and technology woes. “I tried,” said Jonathan Adler, a 42-year-old psychology professor in Massachusetts. “Much of it is quite entertaining, some of it is quite moving, and a bit of it is dreck, but, quite frankly, none of it is theater.”But to others, streaming is a gift — even preferable to live performance. Before the pandemic, Rena Tobey, a 62-year-old freelance educator in New York, subscribed to multiple local theaters; now, citing comfort, sightlines and sound quality, “I will be thrilled to give them all up to watch from home.”Even when theaters resume live productions for live audiences, many are planning to put money behind streaming as part of their offerings. Ma-Yi Theater Company and Dixon Place, both in New York, have invested in studio-quality equipment, hoping for rental income as well as to innovate in their own work.From left, Carly Sakolove, Amy Hillner Larson and Michael West in “NEWSical the Musical,” the first show produced and streamed by the Lied Center for Performing Arts.Credit…via Lied Center for Performing ArtsThat future has already arrived at the Lied Center for Performing Arts in Lincoln, Neb., where socially distanced performances returned in July. The center bought a five-camera system to broadcast work from its theater and has been using it since September. Its spring 2021 season — yes, it has a spring season — will feature Kelli O’Hara, the Silkroad Ensemble and mandolinist Chris Thile, all viewable either in person or online.And the Oregon Shakespeare Festival recently announced a 2021 season that promises both live and virtual productions, including a “Cymbeline” released in episodes over two years. Nataki Garrett, the festival’s artistic director, said the pandemic had expedited her efforts to reach new audiences.“We are providing a door,” she said, “for anybody to enter.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      In Four Audio Plays, No Stages but Lots of New Voices

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn Four Audio Plays, No Stages but Lots of New VoicesA big-box store, a hotel for transgender women and a dinner party gone awry are some of the places your ears will take you to.Clockwise from top left: Stacy Osei-Kuffour, Isaac Gómez, Ike Holter and Shakina Nayfack.Credit…Clockwise from top left: via Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible Theatre, Juli Del Prete, via Studio Theatre and via Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreMaya Phillips, Jesse Green and Dec. 30, 2020When actors can’t gather onstage, they can still make drama with their voices. Our critics review four recent audio plays.I Hate It Here: Stories From the End of the Old World(Through March 7; studiotheatre.org)Top row, from left: Luisa Sánchez Colón (stage manager), Jennifer Mendenhall, Sivan Battat (assistant director) and Jaysen Wright. Middle row: Adrien-Alice Hansel (dramaturg), Sydney Charles, Tony Santiago and Behzad Dabu. Bottom row: Gabriel Ruiz, Mikhail Fiksel (sound designer) and Ike Holter (playwright and director).Credit…Studio TheatreI wonder if there’s been a play that channels the discontent and despondency of 2020 as perfectly as Studio Theater’s sharp and satisfyingly foul-mouthed “I Hate It Here: Stories From the End of the Old World.” I’d wager not. Written and directed by Ike Holter, “I Hate It Here” is a collection of vignettes from people who, after a year of disease and death, are done with pleasantries.A woman who has carried on her mother’s legacy of protesting confronts her friend and his partner for not doing enough; a teacher reflects on the racist parents of a white student in her class; a middle-aged couple who started the pandemic “glamping” realize they’re now homeless in the woods; and a man struggles to accept the fact that his mentor is a sexual harasser. Issues of race, class, accountability and political engagement come up at a catering job, a fast-food restaurant and a pandemic wedding — with 18 characters (performed by a cast of seven) having conversations or speaking monologues to an unknown listener.Holter has a well-tuned ear for language; his dialogue is sparky and cynical, confrontational and personal, so monologues feel like the casual dinner conversation you’d have with a friend. But just because Holter’s text is fluent in the disillusionment that’s overtaken this year doesn’t mean that it lacks humor or wit. His characters speak in phrases that contort idioms and rhyme and pun and string expletives together like jewels on a necklace — yes, his unprintables are as elegant as that (disciples of the profane would be proud).“I Hate It Here” gathers great momentum, especially early in the nearly 90-minute production, as shorter vignettes are delivered in quick succession. Later, some longer sequences start to drag and could use snips in the dialogue, but ultimately these deliver the stories with some of the most heft. The intro and outro music, composed and directed by Gabriel Ruiz, who also stars, could be nixed. And occasionally the actors play the text too loud, so to speak, but it’s forgivable, especially given the language’s perverse gambols — who wouldn’t be carried away by these lines?At the end, a woman, recounting the losses she’s faced, says she’s done pretending things are fine. “I hate it here!” she screeches, culling it from the tips of her toenails. Then she pauses briefly, and is suddenly renewed. That’s the sound of catharsis, and I felt it, too. MAYA PHILLIPSChonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club(Ongoing, audible.com)Even when the performers have utterly distinct voices, audio plays can be difficult to follow. Absent are the clues of countenance and costuming that usually help viewers track who’s who and what their story is. The best way to approach the genre is often just to succumb to the confusion and listen, turning off the part of your brain that wants instant clarity.That’s probably also the best way to approach new subjects when they finally hit the stage, or in this case hit your headphones. “Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club,” by Shakina Nayfack, is that kind of play, telling the story of seven transgender women awaiting, recovering from or seeking to improve the results of gender confirmation surgery. As drama, it may be confusing, even if beautifully cast for vocal contrast. But as a bulletin from the front lines of identity, it’s ear-opening.The “butterflies” emerging from their cocoons at the (fictional) title hotel, in Thailand, are drawn with heavy outlines to emphasize the diversity of transgender life. Sivan (Kate Bornstein) is an astronomer from Hawaii, joined in Chonburi by her cisgender wife. Jerri (Bianca Leigh), from Australia, also brings her wife, as well as their surprisingly chill 15-year-old son. Dinah (Dana Aliya Levinson) is a retired racecar driver; Van (Angelica Ross), a video game designer; Yael (Ita Segev), a former soldier in the Israeli army. You could imagine them in a lifeboat story, and in a way they are.Needing rescuing most is the newcomer Kina, played by Nayfack (“Difficult People”) and based to some degree on her own experiences as a transgender woman who crowdfunded her surgery in Thailand with what she calls a “kickstart her” campaign. At first standoffish, and later in pain and anguish, she finds solace in the sisterly ministrations of the butterflies and in the care of a nurse and a bellhop whose back stories conveniently dovetail the main plot. Kina even gets an ambiguous romantic arc, with a Thai sex worker she hires for one last pre-op fling.“Chonburi,” a coproduction of Audible and the Williamstown Theater Festival, is not one of those plays that’s about too little. Though its director, Laura Savia, gives it a fast-talking sitcom spin, with jaunty interstitial music, its origins in autobiography make it difficult to shape. Discussions of spirituality, parental rights and the occupation of Palestine, let alone the Thai coup d’état of 2014, quickly come to feel like tangents.Other scenes, like the one in which Jerri gives Kina (and us) an explicit post-surgery anatomy lesson, are riveting. It’s here, in the central story of transformation — how each woman puts her “body on the altar” to free herself — that “Chonburi” achieves the kind of focus it needs to do the same. JESSE GREENAnimals(Ongoing, audible.com)Clockwise, from top left: Jason Butler Harner, Madeline Brewer, Aja Naomi King, Whitney White (director) and William Jackson Harper.Credit…Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible TheatreTwo couples — one a bit more seasoned, the other still fresh — get together for a night, and amid too many drinks and dredged-up histories, they turn to a feast of insults to sate their appetites. Everyone’s bitter. Everyone’s unhappy. And it’s pretty clear none of these people should be within 50 miles of one another. They are, as the young girlfriend in the new couple observes, animals.No, this isn’t an Edward Albee play, though that’s an understandable assumption to make. “Animals,” written by Stacy Osei-Kuffour and directed by Whitney White, has much of the same DNA — lust, longing and resentment among lovers and friends, as well as alcohol — but instead of improving the formula, it ends up feeling like a rote reconstruction.There is one notable divergence: “Animals,” also on Audible as part of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, brings in the matter of race. Henry (Jason Butler Harner), who’s white, proposes to his longtime girlfriend, Lydia (Aja Naomi King), who’s Black, before a dinner they’re hosting — but the timing is suspicious: The occasion for the event is Lydia’s “anniversary” with her old friend and amour Jason (William Jackson Harper), who’s also Black. With Jason is his latest young white girlfriend, Coleen (Madeline Brewer).Henry notes Lydia’s code-switching and resents her inappropriate familiarity with Jason, who has renamed himself Yaw in an Alex Haley-esque a-wokening after a trip to Africa. Jason, a pedantic New York University professor, judges Henry, especially when the topic of race comes up, as Lydia attacks Coleen and moons over Jason. This is a therapist’s nightmare: There are more deflections and projections than in a carnival house of mirrors.But “Animals” feels burdened with effort; it’s too quick to get to the worst of its characters, giving the roughly 90-minute production nowhere deeper to go. No foreplay of nuanced chitchat here, just a relentless barrage of aspersions, which led me to the thought: Do I really believe these people sneering their way through this evening? Not for a second. The interlocking links of insecurity and codependence that supposedly chain these characters to this truly horrendous gathering are less apparent than the play seems to believe.Even during the characters’ most bitter invectives, the cast’s performances similarly skate over the surface, more ornamental than immersed. It feels like a symptom of the play’s inability to extricate itself from the clichés of its genre and successfully surface its more novel elements. Lydia and Jason are connected not just through their history but by their racial experience, and simultaneously want to keep that but also shelter within the privilege and status of their white partners.Interracial sexual politics is a vast McDonald’s-style playground for a writer to explore (just ask Jeremy O. Harris, whose characters certainly play in his “Slave Play”). But “Animals” struggles to parse out how its characters’ racial identities connect to their desires and shames in and out of the bedroom. For large swaths of the play, the white partners feel like afterthoughts, but it also doesn’t fully commit to investigating the Blackness of Lydia and Jason and how much of their intimacy is tied to that. When the play reaches its conclusion, it’s unclear of its upshot.Proposals and retractions, propositions and rejections, someone breaking something and someone storming off: “Animals” plays the standards but this cover of the theme “misery loves dinner company” doesn’t chart. MAYA PHILLIPSWally World(Through Aug. 31; steppenwolf.org)Inside Wally World, it’s one of the most frantic times of the year — and that’s saying something for a big-box store so vast that thousands of customers prowl its aisles each day. Chaos comes with the territory, especially on Christmas Eve.So it’s a bit of a mystery that Isaac Gómez’s audio play, “Wally World,” is such a pleasantly relaxing experience, even as it thrives on workplace tensions. From the first notes of holiday music at the top of the show (the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s jazzy “O Tannenbaum,” from “A Charlie Brown Christmas”) and the first static off the walkie-talkies that keep the store’s management team connected, we sense that we’re in good hands.Like many a Christmas tale, this sprawling ensemble dramedy — directed by Gómez and Lili-Anne Brown for Steppenwolf Theater Company — has at its center someone who has lost her way. Andy (Sandra Marquez) has spent 23 Christmas Eves at this Wally World in El Paso, Tex., working her way up to store manager, fearsomely bossing a whole team of deputies. Trouble is, the rigor that helped her rise now clouds her vision and stunts her sympathy.A cousin of sorts to the sitcom “Superstore,” “Wally World” hits its mark much better than the Off Broadway musical “Walmartopia” did. This play is a fiction, yet for Gómez (“the way she spoke”), a very personal one: His mother, too, worked her way up from cashier to manager at a Walmart in El Paso. “Wally World” is a portrait of a place he knows — so well that he neglects to explain some of its jargon.On this Christmas Eve, Andy’s store is short-handed. You might think the added pressure would send everyone scrambling, but that’s consistently true only of the no-nonsense Estelle. In a standout performance by Jacqueline Williams, she is the character we root for hardest — especially when she reports “actual velociraptors destroying our store.”A close second is Jax (the terrific Kevin Curtis), an assistant manager who begins his workday with aplomb by insulting the higher-ranking Mark (Cliff Chamberlain), who is a sexual-harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.Spiked with sociopolitical point-making and rather a lot of day drinking, “Wally World” (which runs two hours and 20 minutes) has a cast of 10, which might have threatened to overwhelm the medium: so many voices to learn. But the performances are almost uniformly strong, and Aaron Stephenson’s sound design is remarkably thoughtful.So it’s easy to follow along, though Janie (Karen Rodriguez) isn’t credibly written as the barely functioning alcoholic of the bunch, while Karla (Leslie Sophia Perez), the sole sales associate we meet, seems more plot device than person. There is, however, a charming romantic subplot, and the ending is satisfying without being too sweet.Warning: You can’t buy single tickets to “Wally World.” It’s only available as part of a virtual membership. Essential workers, however, are among those who can get a hefty discount. Well done on that, Steppenwolf. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More