During his decade on the BBC period drama Peaky Blinders, Cillian Murphy matured visibly as a man, and also as an actor. Steven Knight wrote such a challenging and nuanced role for him, as gangster Tommy Shelby, that it wasn’t surprising at all that, when the series concluded, Murphy was tapped to star as J. Robert Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan.

It also wasn’t surprising, if you’d devoured all six seasons of Peaky Blinders, that Murphy would be not only willing, but eager, to revisit the character of Tommy in a movie-length sequel. Especially when the script is written by series creator Steven Knight, and brings the story to a dramatic conclusion.

The drama in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is provided by both personal and historical challenges. We last saw Tommy, in the final episode of Peaky Blinders, in the 1930s. Prohibition had been repealed in the U.S., the Nazi Party was rising in Germany, and Tommy’s volatile brother, Arthur, was about to die.

The movie jumps ahead to November 1940, when England already is at war with Germany. A munitions factory staffed by women in Birmingham, Tommy’s hometown, is bombed by aerial strikes from the Nazis, and claims more than 100 victims.

Tommy has long since secluded himself far away, isolated in a remote farmhouse, haunted by wartime memories and what he fears are family ghosts. But the bombing brings a visit from his sister Ada (Sophie Rundle). She informs him not only of the devastation to Birmingham, but the fact that his estranged son has taken control of his old gang, the Peaky Blinders, and is making new and dangerous moves and alliances.

Tommy would prefer to stay distant, and uninvolved. But the recklessness of his son Duke (Barry Keoghan) leaves him little choice. Duke meets with Beckett (Tim Roth), a British Nazi sympathizer who finds in Duke an important and agreeable collaborator.

Soon Tommy finds himself having to take sides and do battle — either defending or betraying his own country, and either saving or opposing his own son. The stakes couldn’t be much higher — or, in writer Knight’s hands, more unpredictable or gripping.

Knight always populates his dramas with terrific actors and vibrant characters, and in The Immortal Man we get delightful return visits from, among others, Peaky Blinders series players Rebecca Ferguson, Stephen Graham and Packy Lee.

And most of all, we get Knight’s brilliant approach to his period dramas, the way he folds the fictional and the factual. He’s done it so well, so many times, for so many outstanding TV series, and I’ve given rave reviews to most of them, including A Thousand Blows, The Veil, House of Guinness and All the Light We Cannot See.

Some of Knight’s shows eluded me at the time, but I’ve since caught up with and been delighted by them. Like Taboo, from 2017, which featured great early performances by both Tom Hardy and Jessie Buckley, who just won a best actress Oscar for Hamnet.

You can watch The Immortal Man all by itself, but if you’re uninitiated in what’s come before, you shouldn’t. All six seasons of Peaky Blinders are available on Netflix, and there are only six episodes per season — so even if you start from the beginning, you’ll get to this new movie sequel before you know it. Like any good Knight drama — and they’re all good — Peaky Blinders is addictive, easy to consume, and impossible to forget.

Anxieties due to war. A culture inhospitable to LGBTQ+ communities. And an underpinning of loneliness and suppressed yearning.

The play “5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche” is set in 1956, but its themes resonate in 2026. The United States is at war. Attacks on gay marriage and other LGBTQ+ rights remain a cornerstone of today’s conservative movement. A reimagining of the 2011 production, one popular with universities and fringe festivals, seeks to further modernize the show in which a morning gathering quickly turns into a stay in a Cold War-era bomb shelter after near nuclear annihilation.

When I arrived at the back room of a Glendale church, I was given a new name. It was clear that “Todd” was not welcome here. “Joan” turned out to be a suitable replacement, and I was immediately asked how my life had been since my husband had died. For on this night I would no longer be occupying the role of a straight white male. Every audience member is asked to take on the persona of a widow, for losing a husband appeared to be a perquisite to enter this meeting of the Susan B. Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertude Stein.

How did he die, I was asked. “Ski accident,” I blurted out. “Yours?” A camping travesty that led to a bear mauling, I was told. Ad-libbing, in addition to quiche, was on the menu tonight. Metaphors, absurdities and seriousness intermingle in this production from New Forms LA and directed by Marissa Pattullo.

Pattullo’s vision for “5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche” ramps up the interactivity, seeking to transform a largely traditional proscenium show, albeit one with a few moments of fourth-wall breaking, into one that is centered around audience participation. Staged in a flex space without a tinge of irony at the Glendale Church of the Brethren, “5 Lesbians,” written by Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood, has been reconstructed as a largely immersive production, that is one that asks audiences to lean in and interact.

While there is a small stage, it is used sparingly. The five-person cast roams the room, sitting at various circular tables to blur the lines between script and improvisation. Typically a svelte 75-minute show, on the night I saw the production it swelled to about two hours, allowing time for drinks, mingling and, of course, the eating of a quiche. Pattullo has added an intermission, with quiches courtesy of Kitchen Mouse and Just What I Kneaded included in the ticket.

For quiche, I was told often, was the primary topic of conversation at the Easter-timed meeting, so much so that it was clear within moments that this was a gathering not of breakfast enthusiasts but of the repressed. The hidden meaning is no secret; it’s in the title of the play.

“It’s a giant metaphor,” Pattullo, 30, says. The show, she adds, “keeps finding ways to make sense with the times, whether it’s Trump being elected, or we’re at war. Or gay marriage. All of those things. A bomb going off and being trapped inside. It speaks to whoever is watching it.”

Pattullo, who splits time building New Forms LA and serving tables at Los Feliz’s Little Dom’s, first discovered the show while in college in the Midwest. It immediately resonated, and Pattullo has been tinkering with ways to perform it live ever since. During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, she staged an online version of the show, and debuted it as an immersive production last winter. It’s back for two weekends this month.

“5 Lesbians” makes a relatively smooth transition to the immersive format. Perhaps that’s because the audience, in the script, is cast as attendees of the Susan B. Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertude Stein’s brunch meeting, whose motto is “no men, no meat, all manners.” For about the first 30 minutes of the show we largely interact with the actors. Dale Prist (Nicole Ohara) has hidden ambitions. Vern Schultz (Chandler Cummings) seems ready for the group to cut its charade. Lulie Stanwyck (Noelle Urbano) is fighting so hard to stay prim and proper that she feels on the verge of bursting.

“I really like to play,” Pattullo says, referencing how “5 Lesbians” lends itself to improvisation. “Some of the girls I think are very ‘stick to the script.’ I’m like, ‘Stray from the script.’ If people come in late, call them out. If people are talking, call them out. You can adjust and improvise in immersive theater. Having a script but being able to break from it, is really fun for me. It tickles me.”

Wren Robin (Emily Yetter), Vern Schultz (Chandler Cummings) and Lulie Stanwyck (Noelle Urbano) protect breakfast in “5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche.”

(New Forms LA)

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There’s an underlying tension in the show because it walks a line between silliness and graveness. Ultimately, “5 Lesbians” is about finding joy in dark times, and moments inspire uncomfortable laughter, such as jokes about gay marriage being legal in four years’ time (1960) or Ginny Cadbury (Jessica Damouni) devouring a quiche in a way that leaves nothing to the imagination. But it’s also a show about how stressful moments can bring about vulnerability and community, as the whole church practically exhaled when Wren Robbin (Emily Yetter) finally let her hair down and expressed who she truly was.

“Even when we did it back when I was in college, Trump had just won, so it just feels like it’s keeping relevant,” Pattullo says. The timeliness, she says, makes it such an amusing play to perform.

Pattullo will sometimes, depending on cast availability, take on a role in the show. It’s a chance, she says, to amplify the play’s wackiness, which she believes helps puts audiences at ease and makes its difficult subject matter easier to digest. She tries to create the most outlandish tale possible for when relaying to guests one on one how her husband perished.

“My story was a raccoon attack,” she says. “Because my husband thought the raccoon was behaving with foreign intent, like the raccoon was a spy or something. It was just stupid.”

Or it was evidence of how immersive theater can delight when it deviates from the script.

Cesar Chavez, the famed union leader and champion of farmworker rights, has been accused of sexually abusing two girls in the 1970s as well as Dolores Huerta, with whom he co-founded the United Farm Workers, in the 1960s, according to an investigation published by the New York Times.

The newspaper spoke with two women who said they were children when Chavez began to groom and sexually abuse them during his time as UFW president. One of the women said Chavez raped her in a motel room in 1975 when she was 15 years old and he was 47. The other woman said Chavez began groping her in his office at the union’s headquarters when she was 13. Both women, now in their 60s, were the daughters of organizers within the farmworker movement.

NPR has not independently investigated the allegations against Chavez, who died in 1993. The New York Times spoke with more than 60 people and reviewed documents and other materials bolstering his accuser’s stories.

Huerta, a labor leader long revered for her work on behalf of farmworkers alongside Chavez, told the newspaper that he raped her in a car in 1966.

She told the Times that “Mr. Chavez drove her out to a secluded grape field in Delano, Calif., parked and forced her to have sex inside the vehicle.” Huerta told the newspaper that she chose not to tell anyone about the rape because “she feared that no one within the union would believe her.”

In a statement posted to Medium on Wednesday, Huerta wrote: “I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.”

She wrote that she had two separate encounters with Chavez in the 1960s.

“The first time, I was manipulated and pressured into having sex with him, and I didn’t feel I could say no because he was someone that I admired, my boss and the leader of the movement I had already devoted years of my life to,” she wrote. “The second time I was forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped.”

Both encounters led to pregnancies that she kept secret, she wrote. After the children were born, she said, she arranged for them to be raised by other families. Over the years, she has become close to those children, she said, “but even then, no one knew the full truth about how they were conceived until just a few weeks ago.”

Some people close to Chavez during his lifetime, including longtime bodyguards, rejected the allegations against him, according to the Times.

The newspaper’s report came a day after the United Farm Workers issued a statement saying it had become aware of the allegations against Chavez.

“Allegations that very young women or girls may have been victimized are crushing,” the union said. It said it was seeking to learn more and to help women who may have been victims. It also announced that it would not be participating in events for Cesar Chavez Day, a state holiday celebrated in California each March 31, Chavez’s birthday.

The Cesar Chavez Foundation, which in part works to promote Chavez’s legacy and with which members of his family are still involved, wrote in its own statement on Tuesday that it would also seek to support victims of the alleged abuse.

“We are deeply shocked and saddened by what we are hearing,” the foundation wrote. “The Foundation is working with leaders in the Farmworker Movement to be responsive to these allegations, support the people who may have been harmed by his actions, and ensure we are united and guided by our commitment to justice and community empowerment.”

Chavez became a national figure during the 1960s for his work organizing farmworkers struggling for better wages and working conditions, employing hunger strikes and a famed national boycott of California grapes.

In the decades since his death, he has become one of the most iconic heroes of the labor movement and of the Mexican American community. Schools, community centers and streets across the western United States have been renamed after him.

Fallout from the abuse allegations has been swift. In California, Texas and Arizona, celebrations planned in his honor later this month have been canceled or renamed. On social media, some Latinos have been calling for the many murals of Chavez to be painted over, and for schools and boulevards bearing his name to be renamed after Huerta.