We only did this for school plays and funerals
New fiction by Will Hall, plus new Mentions
In “Love Language,” Will Hall’s Issue Sixteen short story, an aspiring actor with an intense, rivalrous love for her best friend goes on a dating show where contestants aren’t able to speak directly to their prospective mates. Spinning a tightly plotted tale that leads from London to Marseille, Hall examines the performances that constitute even our most intimate relationships. Read his story online today.
WILL HALL
I’d wondered how they planned to make watchable TV with two people who couldn’t hear each other. Their first solution was to bring in two whiteboards. Paul and I each had to describe our impressions of one another in one word without using physical description. A good start, seeing as I planned to make fun of the experience later to Mia. Paul went first and, after visibly struggling to think, he wrote: creative.
Issue Sixteen’s extremely abbreviated reviews also contend with performance and communication in our televisual age. Read on for a diapered man-baby, a wisp of a gothic tale, an attempted magnum opus, a gargantuan Bey, and the demon Pazuzu.
The Rehearsal
TV
Nathan Fielder’s HBO show made at least one thing clear: between the rotating cast of babies raised as a single baby in season one, and Fielder’s turn as a diapered man-baby being raised as a baby-baby in season two, the man is fascinated with babies.
Abigail Gray
Viola’s Room
THEATER
The target audience for The Shed’s latest immersive offering appears to be bats: visitors are instructed to surrender their phones, remove their footwear, and “follow the light,” only to be repeatedly plunged into pitch blackness, groping along corridors like penitents in a haunted house stripped of actors and fun. Based on a wisp of a gothic tale about a princess obsessed with a moonlit maze, the nearly hour-long guided crawl across grassy carpets, sand, and gravely symbolic set pieces feels at once too long and too short. (Daisy Johnson wrote the somnolent script, which is conveyed to us, in Helena Bonham Carter’s feathery ASMR voice, through bulky headsets.) Any feeling of suspense is mostly of the will-I-get-a-fungal-foot-infection variety.
Rhoda Feng
“An Evening with Francis Ford Coppola”
DISQUISITION
After a showing of his attempted magnum opus Megalopolis this past summer at the Chicago Theater, the director wheeled out a whiteboard that listed ten concepts he believes we must abolish in order to promote human flourishing. The first three were time, money, and work. Perhaps Coppola’s rebellion against the latter explains the many factual errors in his lecture, including his misdating of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which he claimed are ten thousand years old and predate the Epic of Gilgamesh. But the crowd didn’t challenge him. The first audience question was whether Marlon Brando really ate cheeseburgers in a canoe.
Ben Sloan
Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit Tour
MUSIC
“America Has a Problem” is on the set list of Beyoncé’s tenth concert series, but after the visual onslaught of stars and stripes one would be forgiven for assuming the production designer forgot. The nearly-three-hour spectacular was rife with Americana, from classic Cadillacs to cardboard cutouts of bald eagles, and featured a video interlude that included a dizzying Attack of the 50 Foot Woman homage in which a gargantuan Bey traipses across past world landmarks, stopping to light her cigar on Lady Liberty’s torch, and get winked at by the Lincoln Memorial. Do the troops feel respected by the product managers in assless chaps removing their bejeweled cowboy hats for Queen B’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner?” I didn’t ask, and they certainly wouldn’t tell.
Gabe Abdellatif
Dourifs imprisoned in hospitals
FAMILY MATTERS
Take a moment to consider the beguiling, poignant symmetry in the series of events that have befallen members of the Dourif family. In The Exorcist III (1990), the brilliant, reliably batshit Brad Dourif plays the Gemini Killer, a possibly possessed and highly charismatic lunatic, straitjacketed and stashed away in an empty wing of a Washington, D.C. hospital. (He had to put up with the same business in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but the Gemini could eat Billy Bibbit for lunch.) Now, on HBO’s The Pitt, Brad’s daughter Fiona plays Cassie McKay, one of the attractive, harried E.R. doctors, who cannot leave her workplace without being arrested thanks to a court-mandated ankle monitor. Both are charming and clever; both flail bitterly against the sinister forces confining them (for Brad, it’s the demon Pazuzu; for Fiona, it’s the Pittsburgh probation court). None of the nurses at Pittsburgh Trauma have been decapitated, as they were in The Exorcist III’s Georgetown University Hospital. But there’s always next season.
Pete Segall
