Cynthia Nixon will discuss WIT at the Greene Space on February 16 (photo by Joan Marcus)
The Greene Space
44 Charlton St. at Varick St.
Thursday, February 16, $20 ($15 with code GREENE), 5:00
www.thegreenespace.org
www.witonbroadway.com
After we recently saw Wit, Margaret Edson’s marvelous Pulitzer Prize–winning play that is making its Broadway debut at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, we wrote that “Cynthia Nixon is magnificent as Vivian Bearing; for all her eccentricities, Bearing should not be a sympathetic character, but Nixon turns the lonely, snarky woman, who has no real friends or family, into a delightful character who is not afraid to look death in the face.” The play deals with Bearing’s battle with stage IV metastatic ovarian cancer with both humor and seriousness. Following that matinee, cast members Greg Keller, Carra Patterson, and Jessica Dickey participated in a talk back with the audience, shedding illuminating light on the production’s creative process. On Thursday at 5:00, Keller (Dr. Jason Posner) and Patterson (nurse Susie Monahan) will join Tony and Emmy winner Nixon, herself a breast cancer survivor, for a special presentation at the Greene Space, going behind the scenes in a conversation moderated by WNYC’s Amy Eddings as part of the Manhattan Theatre Club’s “After Words” series. Tickets are $20, but if you use the code “GREENE,” they’re only $15.
In the late 1970s, Andrea Callard helped found a collective of artists that would come to be known as Colab, or Collaborative Projects, Inc. Among her fellow officers in the group were Coleen Fitzgibbons, Tom Otterness, and Ulli Rimkus. “Through a juicy and conflicted multi-year period of identity and structural definition,” she explains on her website, “there was experimentation in and rich discussion of accessible content, political forces, technology, equity, corporate versus union models, and material resources.” From February 13 to 19, the Maysles Institute will look back at Callard’s career by presenting the world premiere of her first feature-length film, Talking Landscape: Early Media Work, 1974-1984, which examines all those things and more in its eighty minutes. More a greatest-hits package than a narrative nonfiction film, Talking Landscape consists of several of Callard’s low-budget, low-tech Super 8 shorts, narrated in her steady deadpan, beginning with 11 thru 12, in which Callard humorously discusses “inspiration, information, transportation, the National Geographic, the Yellow Pages, and taxi cabs” while standing at an ironing board, trying to hail a cab out on the street, and walking on her hands in the ocean. In Notes on Ailanthus, she details the history of the tree that “grows abundantly in all the empty spaces around New York.” In Sound Windows, she has fun with her apartment windows. In Walking Outside, she sings a blues song while walking through green fields. Talking Landscape also includes a trio of slide shows of site-specific installations Callard was involved in. Commuting from Point to Point combines images shot in Paris, Italy, and New York with phrases lifted from books; for example a shot of cigarettes put out in a bowl of dirt on a newspaper is accompanied by the words “only time gets lost,” while a photo of the Spanish Steps features the phrase “worn by millions of feet.” The Customs House is a document of the 1979 Creative Time group show “Custom and Culture 2,” held inside the dilapidated Customs House by Bowling Green, now home to the National Museum of the American Indian. And finally, The Times Square Show takes viewers on a tour of the seminal art show held in June 1980, which sought to investigate “the need to communicate in a larger world”; the Colab exhibition comprised works by Keith Haring, Lee Quinones, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, John Ahearn, Kiki Smith, Otterness, Callard, and others held in the then-still-seedy neighborhood. Throughout the film, Callard displays a wry sense of humor in these brief experimental works that were part of a major shift in the New York City art scene. Talking Landscape is being screened as part of the Maysles Institute’s continuing “Documentary in Bloom” series, curated by Livia Bloom, who will moderate Q&As with Callard following the February 16 and 19 showings.
The IFC Center’s Stranger Than Fiction series generally consists of classic and new documentaries, often with the filmmakers and/or subjects participating in postscreening Q&As. But on Valentine’s Day, it takes a slightly different approach, showing Woody Allen’s Zelig, a story of love and acceptance disguised as a historical newsreel. Allen stars as the fictional Leonard Zelig, a lonely little man who becomes known as the Human Chameleon for his ability to change not only the way he talks and acts but how he looks, based on whatever situation he is currently involved in. Zelig becomes a cultural phenomenon, hobnobbing with Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, William Randolph Hearst, Charlie Chaplin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many other famous figures of the 1920s and 1930s while also being studied by eminent psychiatrist Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow). Master cinematographer Gordon WIllis (The Godfather) earned an Oscar nomination for the way he was able to insert Allen and Farrow into existing footage, including literally stepping on the film to make it look older. As wildly funny as Zelig is, it is also an extremely insightful examination of identity, individuality, and the basic human need to be part of something. The STF series continues February 21 with Lisa Katzman’s Tootie’s Last Suit, February 28 with The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, and March 6 with Leon Gast’s Smash His Camera.
