Helen Shaw at The New Yorker:
Two actors are wriggling across the stage on their bellies. They’re earthworms, or maybe simply brothers, Cricket and Coyote, who want to become earthworms. They’re planning to write a screenplay together, and one suggests making their movie about worms. But “I thought we were writing something about what it means to come from the same root,” the other brother complains. “A movie, a Western, brothers killing men and running amuck in the desert.”
In the oozy, ontologically slapstick “Bad Stars,” written and directed by Amanda Horowitz, and produced in the experimental space the Collapsable Hole in 2025, certain correspondences emerge, particularly if the watcher is familiar with Sam Shepard’s “True West.” In that play, from 1980, two brothers, the wild Lee and the uptight Austin, also bicker about how to write a movie; they also think about “running amuck in the desert.” At the comic coup-de-théâtre climax of “True West,” a drunken Lee smashes a typewriter with a golf club, as Austin gloats over an entire fleet of toasters that he has stolen to prove his macho bonafides.
more here.
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