Movie night was Asteroid City (2023), which I thought would be about atomic testing in Nevada in the 1950s. Instead, I was watching the Theater of the Absurd. Maybe Ionesco, where your mother turns into a giraffe and offers you brownies, or a Monte Python episode where one sketch bleeds into another, so Vikings are suddenly talking to the Minister of Finance about the hippodrome tariff.
As far as I can tell, there are two plays with plays.
1. In an old-fashioned black and white tv studio, a narrator tells us that what we are witnessing is a story, not real. The curtain opens to reveal:
2. The Playwright (Edward Norton) auditioning an actor for the lead in his play (Jason Schwartzman), who brings him ice cream, changes into a different costume, and delivers a nonsequiter monologue.
A lot of people arrive for the Junior Stargazers' Convention in Asteroid City, Nevada , where an asteroid crashed to Earth (they mean a meteor). During the opening speeches, an alien descends from a spaceship and grabs the asteroid. Everyone is put under quarantine, while the government tries to convince them that nothing happened. After a week, the government is about to lift the quarantine, but the alien returns and gives the asteroid back. The quarantine is on, but everyone riots, and the next day they are gone. Maybe it was all a dream.
While all this is going on, there are several soap opera stories. Steinbeck (Jason Schwartzman again, I think) arrives with his son and three young daughters. He was going to leave the son and go on to his wealthy father-in-law's house to bury his wife's ashes, but his car broke down. During the quarantine his three daughters, who are witches, bury the ashes in the desert and perform a spell to resurrect her. She isn't actually resurrected, but she apparently appears in a flashback or flash-sideways scene.
Left: This is Jason Schwartzman's penis. It is not Jason Schwartzman's penis, it is a salami. It is not a salami, it is the diary of a 17th century French poet who wrote about salamis.
I figured that Steinbeck must be the famous novelist and nude model, who was active in Hollywood at the time, so I went scurrying to wikipedia for his biography. It doesn't match.