this week in comedy

PENNY ARCADE: LONGING LASTS LONGER

Who: Penny Arcade
What: One-night only engagement
Where: The Players NYC, 16 Gramercy Park South
When: Thursday, April 27, $35, 8:00
Why: “There is a gentrification that happens to neighborhoods and cities, but there is also a gentrification that happens to ideas,” Penny Arcade says in her solo show Longing Lasts Longer. On April 27, the legendary performance artist and activist will deliver what she calls a “refutation of nostalgia” at the Players NYC for one night only, mixing stand-up comedy, rock and roll, and memoir as she tackles zombie tourists, bookstores, advertising, cupcakes, hipsters, and how the world has changed during her lifetime, and not necessarily for the better.

Born in Connecticut in 1950, she has performed the show more than two hundred times in more than forty cities, including at Joe’s Pub and St. Ann’s Warehouse here in New York. At the Players, where it is being presented by the White Horse Theater Company, she will be joined as always by her longtime collaborator, director, designer, and filmmaker Steve Zehentner, who will create a live soundscape. “Look, people, thinking is hard work,” she says in the eighty-minute piece. “That’s why so few people do it.” Priority table seating is already sold out, but general admission tickets are still available to see this force of nature take on our contemporary society like no one else can.

THE DOWNTOWN SEDER

Who: David Broza, BETTY, Bettye LaVette, Paul Shapiro’s Ribs & Brisket, Basya and Saadya Schechter, Mark Vincent, Gary Lucas and the Golem, Modi, Resistance Revival Chorus, Dr. Ruth, Mayor Eric Adams, Congressman Max Rose, Terrance Floyd, Vince Warren, Jason Flom, Lorenzo Johnson, more
What: Downtown Seder 2023
Where: City Winery, 25 Eleventh Ave. at Fifteenth St.
When: Sunday, April 2, $85-$125 (livestream free), 1:00
Why: For more than three decades, Michael Dorf has been hosting all-star seders to celebrate Passover, concentrating on freedom and justice. The latest iteration takes place on Sunday afternoon, April 2, at City Winery, which Dorf opened on Varick St. in 2008 and moved to Hudson River Park’s Pier 57 in 2020. Attendees will be seated at long, communal tables and have a vegetarian meal with four glasses of wine as they go through the Haggadah, the illustrated text that tells the story of the Jewish people’s exodus from Egypt. This year’s participants include musicians David Broza, BETTY, Paul Shapiro’s Ribs & Brisket, Basya and Saadya Schechter, Mark Vincent, Resistance Revival Chorus, and Gary Lucas and the Golem, comedian Modi, Dr. Ruth, Mayor Eric Adams, Congressman Max Rose, Vince Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Jason Flom and Lorenzo Johnson of the Innocence Project. Terrance Floyd, George Floyd’s brother, will be asking “The Four Questions”; the setlist is also likely to include “Dayenu,” “Chad Gadya,” “Go Down Moses,” and “The Ten Plagues.”

“It says in the beginning of the Haggadah that one should recount and retell the story of the exodus from Egypt in the language that you understand. The ancient Israelites didn’t know Hebrew, so they told the story in Armenian. Americans read it in English,” Dorf said in a statement. “Our interpretation is to tell the story in the language of the arts, in ways we can relate and truly empathize with what it would be like to be in bondage, to be emancipated, and the universal civil rights we need to continually remind ourselves.” During the pandemic, City Winery livestreamed its Downtown Seders; you can check out the 2021 virtual event above. And it was just announced that the 2023 seder will be streamed live for free here.

ÁGUA

Performers enjoy a drink of water in Pina Bausch’s Água at BAM (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

ÁGUA
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave. between St. Felix St. & Ashland Pl.
March 3-19
www.bam.org
www.pina-bausch.de/en

Dance-theater pioneer Pina Bausch would probably agree with Nobel Prize–winning Hungarian biochemist Dr. Albert Szent-Györgyi, who said “Water is life’s matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.”

In such dazzling pieces as Vollmond (Full Moon), Nefés, and “…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si…” (Like moss on a stone), Bausch repeatedly explored the role of this element, the elixir of life.

Water again takes center stage in the US premiere of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch’s Brazil-inspired Água, which debuted in 2001 in Rio de Janeiro and has at last come to BAM, the company’s exclusive New York home since 1984. Água, which means “water,” is a nearly three-hour masterpiece (with a far too long intermission), combining music, comedy, storytelling, video, props, and, of course, sensational dance. Peter Pabst’s stark white stage features three large curved screens on which he projects footage of palm trees blowing in the wind, a team of drummers playing in the street, and adventures through the rainforest.

Men in everyday clothing and suits and women in gorgeous, colorful gowns — Marion Cito’s costumes are stunning — perform a series of vignettes to songs by a wide range of artists, including Mickey Hart, Tom Waits, the Tiger Lillies, PJ Harvey, Amon Tobin, Susana Baca, Caetano Veloso, David Byrne, Gilberto Gil, Bebel Gilberto, Nana Vasconcelos, and Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Tsai-Wei Tien is lifted off the ground and passed hand to hand by Dean Biosca, Oleg Stepanov, and Denis Klimuk, clad only in bathing suits and platform shoes, Christopher Tandy rows across the stage in a palm leaf, Tsai-Chin Yu asks several people in the first row where they are from and then uses a boot to predict the weather there, and a dancer in a lush red dress falls to the ground and reveals her long legs as men pass by, ignoring her. Performers break out into sudden solos that meld with the projected images that envelop them. The screens rise to reveal a surprise behind them. The women all have long hair that they use inventively as an object of sex and power.

Fire plays a continuing function, as dancers light cigarettes and candles and original Água cast member Julie Shanahan tries to set the place ablaze, explaining, “I wanted to do something really beautiful for you, but I don’t know how. . . . I wanted to go crazy. But it’s not possible.” The cast, which also features Emma Barrowman, Naomi Brito, Maria Giovanna Delle Donne, Taylor Drury, Letizia Galloni, Nayoung Kim, Reginald Lefebvre, Alexander López Guerra, Nicholas Losada, Jan Möllmer, Milan Nowoitnick Kampfer, Franko Schmidt, Ekaterina Shushakova, Julian Stierle, and Sara Valenti, attends a cocktail party, pulls out white couches to take a break, and uses hilariously patterned towels at a beach resort. They bounce off walls. They spray water at each other. They use microphones as if they’re comedians.

A handful of scenes feel extraneous, and Bausch’s highly gendered choreography can be perceived as out of date in 2023, though the company has its first trans dancer (Brito). But Água is still hugely entertaining.

Bausch, who died in June 2009 at the age of sixty-eight, displayed a passion for life and all that it offers in her work, from light to dark, creating a mélange that ranged from Café Müller and The Rite of Spring to Kontakthof and Bamboo Blues. Artistic director Boris Charmatz continues her legacy with this international tour of Água, which is, contrary to what Shanahan said, “something really beautiful.”

ESTROGENIUS FESTIVAL: BAN(NED) TOGETHER

ESTROGENIUS FESTIVAL: BAN(NED) TOGETHER
The Kraine Theater, 85 East Fourth St.
UNDER St. Marks, 94 St. Marks Pl.
Arts on Site, 12 St. Marks Pl.
721 Decatur Street Community Garden, Bushwick
March 15 – April 2, sliding scale $20
www.estrogenius.nyc

Since 2000, the EstroGenius Festival has been celebrating “the artistry of femme, nonbinary, nonconforming, and trans womxn artists.” The 2023 edition, presented by FRIGID New York and Manhattan Theatre Source, launches March 15 with “Funny Women of a Certain Age,” an evening of comedy with Amanda Cohen, Jessie Baade, Laura Patton, and Carole Montgomery. The festival, curated by maura nguyễn donohue, Melissa Riker, and John C. Robinson, kicks into high gear March 18 through April 2 with nearly two dozen productions taking place at the Kraine Theater, UNDER St. Marks, Arts on Site, and the 721 Decatur Street Community Garden in Bushwick, from concerts and plays to discussions and burlesque.

On March 19 at 3:30, Joya Powell and Pele Bauch team up for the open dialogue “Who We Are | Ban(ned) Together,” getting to the heart of this year’s theme: “Ban(ned) Together,” a response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the violence being committed against trans and femme bodies.

Claire Ayoub heads down memory lane in her solo show The GynoKid. Marina Celander shares the family-friendly story The Tale of An-Noor, incorporating dance and puppets. In the duet Develop(ing) Together: BEAR, c/s movement projects investigates balance, exhaustion, and tolerance. Molly Kirschner’s BiPolar Brunch brings together four characters seeking connection. Alt-folkers Brokeneck Girls perform songs from The Murder Ballad Musical.

“An Evening with Peterson, Savarino & Wells” features Muriel “Murri-Lynette” Peterson’s Black Enough, Kim Savarino’s Blue Bardo, and Portia Wells’s Inside Flesh Mountain, Part II. Anabella Lenzu examines herself as a woman, a mother, and an immigrant in Solo Voce: The Night You Stopped Acting. Hip-hop takes center stage with Yvonne Chow’s #Unapologetically Asian and an excerpt from Janice Tomlinson’s PRN. There are also works by sj swilley, Emily Fury Daly, Vanessa Goodman, Donna Costello, Kayla Engeman, Leslie Goshko, Soul Dance Co., and Petra Zanki, among many others.

XOXO, ALAMO: BRIDESMAIDS MOVIE PARTY

A bride and her bridesmaids are looking for trouble in fab comesy

A bride and her bridesmaids are looking for trouble in fab Paul Feig comedy

BRIDESMAIDS (Paul Feig, 2011)
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn
445 Albee Square West
Monday, February 13, $22.36, 10:05
www.bridesmaidsmovie.com
drafthouse.com

The bachelorette partying will jump right off the screen and into the audience at Alamo Drafthouse on February 13 when the Downtown Brooklyn venue hosts its next movie party with a screening of Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids. The interactive event, specially timed for Valentine’s Eve, features lemons, poo spray, bridal veils, special cocktails and shakes, and other goodies.

The film itself is not one of those lousy SNL one-note movies, nor is it a silly chick flick. As it turns out, Bridesmaids is one of the most consistently funny laugh-out-loud romps of this century. Directed by Freaks and Geeks creator Feig, Bridesmaids is an endlessly clever and insightful examination of love, loneliness, and friendship starring SNL’s Kristen Wiig, who cowrote the smart script with Groundlings member Annie Mumolo (who makes a cameo as a nervous flyer). Wiig shows impressive depth and range as Annie, a perennial screw-up whose closest childhood friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), is marrying into a very snooty upper-crust family. After agreeing to be Lillian’s maid of honor, Annie gets involved in a battle of wits with Lillian’s future sister-in-law, the elegant Helen (a radiant Rose Byrne), who is determined to outshine Annie in every way possible and steal Lillian away from her.

Already a mess — she had to close her bakery, she shares an apartment with a bizarre pair of British siblings, she works in a jewelry store where she drives away potential customers with her sorry tales of woe, and she allows herself to be treated miserably as a late-night booty call for a self-centered businessman (Jon Hamm) — Annie experiences a series of hilarious, pathetic setbacks as she attempts to organize the bridal shower and bachelorette party, including a riotous potty-humor scene in a high-end boutique that is likely to go down in comedy history for its sheer relentlessness.

The rest of the bridesmaids are quite a hoot — Becca (Ellie Kemper), the Disney-loving kewpie doll; Rita (Wendi McLendon-Covey), a foul-mouthed married mom who can’t wait to go crazy away from her family; and the groom’s burly sister, Megan (the hugely entertaining Melissa McCarthy, on the cusp of superstardom), who lives life without a filter. Annie is so caught up in her own failures that she doesn’t recognize when something potentially good enters her life, in the form of state trooper Nathan Rhodes (Chris O’Dowd). Wiig gives the finest performance of her career to that point as Annie. Despite the slapstick nature of many of the jokes, Bridesmaids is filled with heart and soul, making it one of the best comedies in years. Alamo’s Movie Party series continues February 25 with Elizabeth Banks’s Cocaine Bear, with an agility course, bear claws, gummy bears, and more (but none of that white stuff).

GABE MOLLICA — SOLO: A SHOW ABOUT FRIENDSHIP / COLIN QUINN: SMALL TALK

Gabe Mollica shares his difficulty in making friends in one-man show (photo by Mindy Tucker)

GABE MOLLICA: SOLO: A SHOW ABOUT FRIENDSHIP
Soho Playhouse
15 Vandam St. between Varick St. & Sixth Ave.
Wednesday – Saturday through February 25, $36, 9:00
Extension: Connelly Theater Upstairs
220 East Fourth St. between Aves. A & B
Tuesday – Saturday through November 18, $40
www.sohoplayhouse.com
www.gabemollica.com

Having earned multiple extensions since opening at Soho Playhouse on November 2, comedian Gabe Mollica and his one-man Solo: A Show About Friendship are hard not to love. Yet the night I went, there were fewer than twenty people in the audience, several of whom Mollica knew, referring to them by name as they nodded in agreement with something he said onstage. In his easygoing, not-quite-self-deprecating demeanor, Mollica started the sixty-minute confessional pointing out that he has performed Solo for three people at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival — “the same three people that an hour earlier I had had dinner with” — and for a packed Soho Playhouse on a Saturday night, so he was not bothered by such a sparse turnout on a cold Thursday. In fact, it fit the theme of the evening, which he explains early on: “This is a show about how I don’t have friends.”

Mollica, who recently turned thirty, hails from Garden City, and lives in Astoria, spends an hour detailing his lifetime of seeking male companionship that goes beyond mere camaraderie. He provides a spot-on description of his “six bros,” complete with their going-out and staying-home rituals. One of the bros, Nick, makes ranked lists, from types of music and wood to Adam Sandler flicks. (Yo, Nick, how is Uncut Gems not in the top ten?). Mollica also reveals that his mother, who is named Joy, is sick. (“She’s feeling a lot better now. Thank you for asking.”)

Obsessed in high school with Stephen Sondheim and terrible at sports, Mollica found himself trapped in the middle, “too straight for the gay kids but too gay for the straight kids.” At college he meets Tom, and they hit it off right away, becoming inseparable. Mollica is thrilled beyond belief that he finally has someone he can say anything to, can receive unconditional support from, and is able to be completely honest with.

Gabe Mollica admits to being “too straight for the gay kids but too gay for the straight kids” in Solo (photo by Mindy Tucker)

Mollica relates his and Tom’s adventures and misadventures, but because he’s already told us that today he has no friends, there’s some well-executed narrative tension as we await the inevitable funny/not-funny punchline. Before he gets to that, Mollica discusses his origins as a stand-up comic, his relationships with a few women, and his job working at a summer camp, occasionally supplemented with photos projected on a screen at the back of the stage, which otherwise features only a small stool and a carpet.

Smoothly directed by comedian and monologist Greg Walloch (Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King, F**k the Disabled), Solo is an engaging and heartfelt look at male bonding and the need to have friends, regardless of gender. The show is smartly written, with a finale that circles back to the beginning and results in a poignant conclusion that makes you want to immediately get in touch with your best friend(s). Mollica has a natural charm that, well, will compel you to want to be his friend. After the show, he greeted audience members outside the theater, shaking hands, hugging, and posing for photos. We invited him to an upcoming tribute to Stephen Sondheim; we don’t know whether he’ll be coming solo.

Colin Quinn offers more than just small talk in Small Talk (photo by Monique Carboni)

COLIN QUINN: SMALL TALK
Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St.
Monday – Saturday through February 11, $49-$59
Greenwich House
27 Barrow St. at Seventh Ave. South
Tuesday, Saturday, Sunday, March 30 – May 6, $49-$79
www.colinquinnshow.com

There’s a fine line between thematic stand-up comedy and a one-person theatrical show. Recent presentations such as Mike Birbiglia’s The Old Man & the Pool, Alex Edelman’s Just for Us, and Ryan J. Haddad’s Hi, Are You Single? qualify as the latter, as does Gabe Mollica’s aptly titled Solo.

Brooklyn-born actor and comedian Colin Quinn is a master of the one-man show, having explored the history of New York, America, and the world in such highly praised works as Long Story Short, Unconstitutional, The New York Story, and Red State Blue State.

His latest solo foray is Colin Quinn: Small Talk, continuing at the Lucille Lortel Theatre through February 11 (and now extended March 30 to May 6 at Greenwich House). The seventy-five-minute show explores how strangers connect, or don’t, by taking part in brief, generally inconsequential face-to-face conversations in elevators, at stores, at work, or on the street, chatting about the weather, sports, what day of the week it is, and other minor tidbits. “Small talk is intimate. It’s an acknowledgment,” he explains. “It’s like two ships that signal each other in the ocean. . . . It’s how we unite by common experience in under a paragraph.”

He worries that the way kids today are being raised, the end of small talk, which began with cavemen and reached new levels with Socrates, is fast approaching, since it depends on one of humankind’s most important inventions, “citizen personality,” which we no longer teach or value. “Personality is who the people that know you think you are. Your reputation is who the people who don’t know you think you are. Your social media profile is who you think you are, and your browser history is who you are,” he says.

Colin Quinn discusses banter, personality, and the history of small talk in latest solo performance (photo by Monique Carboni)

Walking around the stage in a black tee, unbuttoned black shirt, black pants, and white sneakers, Quinn, in his familiar gravelly voice, fills the show with pop-culture references, controversial political issues, and the top five “last words.” Individual jokes can be incisive, immediately relatable, and very funny, but the show, directed by James Fauvell, feels at times like it’s still a work-in-progress. Several tangents and digressions don’t seem to arise naturally from the narrative.

Quinn, who had a heart attack on Valentine’s Day in 2018 when he was fifty-eight, scans the audience for reactions as if he’s testing out new material. After seeing him look up numerous times at a spot in the back of the theater, I turned around and noticed a monitor where the text was scrolling by. He also uses a handheld microphone, which is more associated with stand-up than theatrical productions. Zoë Hurvitz’s set consists of ten blackboards with chalk drawings on them, linking images of hands and faces with Ancient Greek words and modern emojis, but they are never incorporated into the show or identified, which left me scratching my head.

From his days on MTV’s Remote Control and Comedy Central’s Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn through his solo presentations and film and television appearances (Girls, Trainwreck), Quinn has demonstrated his unique personality along with his hilarious and all-too-real take on society at large. “Some people don’t like small talk,” Quinn says in the show. I liked Small Talk, but I wanted to love it. Quinn’s response might be, as he says about one friend’s thoughts on sausage and peppers, “Nobody gives a shit and nobody asked you.” To which I might respond, “Hey, how ’bout this weather?”

UNDER THE RADAR 2023

A Thousand Ways (Part Three): Assembly brings strangers together at the New York Public Library (photo courtesy 600 Highwaymen)

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL
Public Theater and other venues
January 4-22, free – $60
publictheater.org

The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival is back and in person for its eighteenth iteration, running January 4-22 at the Public as well as Chelsea Factory, NYU Skirball, La MaMa, BAM, and the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch. As always, the works come from around the world, a mélange of disciplines that offers unique theatrical experiences. Among this year’s selections are Jasmine Lee-Jones’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner, Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff’s Our Country, Roger Guenveur Smith’s Otto Frank, Rachel Mars’s Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters, Kaneza Schaal’s KLII, and Timothy White Eagle and the Violet Triangle’s The Indigo Room.

In addition, “Incoming! — Works-in-Process” features early looks at pieces by Mia Rovegno, Miranda Haymon, Nile Harris, Mariana Valencia, Eric Lockley, Savon Bartley, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, and Justin Elizabeth Sayre, while Joe’s Pub will host performances by Eszter Balint, Negin Farsad, Julian Fleisher and his Rather Big Band, Salty Brine, and Migguel Anggelo.

Below is a look at four of the highlights.

600 HIGHWAYMEN: A THOUSAND WAYS (PART THREE): AN ASSEMBLY
The New York Public Library, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library
455 Fifth Ave. at Fortieth St., seventh floor
January 4-22, free with advance RSVP
publictheater.org

At the January 2021 Under the Radar Festival, the Obie-winning 600 Highwaymen presented A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call, a free hourlong telephone conversation between you and another person, randomly put together and facilitated by an electronic voice that asks both general and intimate questions, from where you are sitting to what smells you are missing, structured around a dangerous and lonely fictional situation that is a metaphor for sheltering in place. The company followed that up with the second part, An Encounter, in which you and a stranger — not the same one — meet in person, sitting across a table, separated from one another by a clear glass panel, with no touching and no sharing of objects. In both sections, I bonded quickly with the other person, making for intimate and poignant moments when we were all keeping our distance from each other.

Now comes the grand finale, Assembly, where sixteen strangers at a time will come together to finish the story at the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch in Midtown. Written and created by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, A Thousand Ways innovatively tracks how the pandemic lockdown influenced the ways we interact with others as well as how critical connection and entertainment are.

Palindromic show makes US premiere at Under the Radar Festival (photo courtesy Ontroerend Goed)

ONTROEREND GOED: Are we not drawn onward to new erA
BAM Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 4-8, $45
publictheater.org
www.bam.org

What do the following three statements have in common? “Dammit, I’m mad.” “Madam in Eden, I’m Adam.” “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” They are all palindromes, reading the same way backward and forward. They also, in their own way, relate to Ontroerend Goed’s Are we not drawn onward to new erA, running January 4-8 at BAM’s Fishman Space. Directed by Alexander Devriendt, the Belgian theater collective’s seventy-minute show features a title and a narrative that work both backward and forward as they explore climate change and the destruction wrought by humanity, which has set the Garden of Eden on the path toward armageddon. But maybe, just maybe, there is still time to save the planet if we come up with just the right plan.

PLEXUS POLAIRE: MOBY DICK
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 12-14, $40
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

The world is obsessed with Moby-Dick much the way Captain Ahab is obsessed with the great white itself. Now it’s Norwegian theater company Plexus Polaire and artistic director Yngvild Aspeli’s turn to harpoon the story of one of the most grand quests in all of literature. Aspeli (Signaux, Opéra Opaque, Dracula) incorporates seven actors, fifty puppets, video projections, a drowned orchestra, and a giant whale to transform Herman Melville’s 1851 novel into a haunting ninety-minute multimedia production at NYU Skirball for four performances only, so get on board as soon as you can.

Brian Mendes and Jim Fletcher get ready for NYCP’s Field of Mars (photo courtesy New York City Players)

NEW YORK CITY PLAYERS: FIELD OF MARS
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 19-22, 24-29, $60
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

I’ll follow Richard Maxwell and New York City Players anywhere, whether it’s on a boat past the Statue of Liberty (The Vessel), an existential journey inside relationships and theater itself (The Evening, Isolde) and outside time and space (Paradiso, Good Samaritans), or even to the Red Planet and beyond. Actually, his newest piece, Field of Mars, playing at NYU Skirball January 19-29, refers not to the fourth planet from the sun but to the ancient term for a large public space and military parade ground. Maxwell doesn’t like to share too much about upcoming shows, but we do know that this one features Lakpa Bhutia, Nicholas Elliott, Jim Fletcher, Eleanor Hutchins, Paige Martin, Brian Mendes, James Moore, Phil Moore, Steven Thompson, Tory Vazquez, and Gillian Walsh and that the limited audience will be seated on the stage.

Oh, and Maxwell noted in an email blast: “Field of Mars: A chain restaurant in Chapel Hill is used as a way to measure the progress of primates, from hunter/gatherer to fast casual dining experience. Topics covered: Music, Food, Nature, and Spirituality. . . . I also wanted to take this opportunity to tell parents regarding the content of Field of Mars: my kids (aged 11 and 15) will not be seeing this show.”