Barbara Kruger’s immersive atrium installation continues at MoMA through January 2 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
BARBARA KRUGER: THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU.
The Museum of Modern Art
Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 2, $14-$25 www.moma.org online slideshow
There’s one word that sticks out in Barbara Kruger’s text-based architectural installation Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. in MoMA’s atrium, and it’s in the title twice: No, not Mean but You. Standing in the middle of the imposing space, you are surrounded by words, phrases, and sentences in black-and-white, arranged in horizontal grids and ovals on the floor, walls, and stanchions, that deal with personal and group identity, racial and class injustice, greed, war, consumer culture, and capitalism. These are themes the seventy-seven-year-old Newark native has been exploring throughout her five-decade career, in such pervious works as I Shop Therefore I Am,You Are Not Yourself, The Globe Shrinks,Untitled (Questions), and Whose Hopes? Whose Fears?
A block on the floor pronounces: “IF YOU WANT A / PICTURE OF THE / FUTURE, IMAGINE / A BOOT STAMPING / ON A HUMAN FACE, / FOREVER. / GEORGE ORWELL.”
On the upper south wall, Kruger explains: “THIS IS ABOUT THE YOU NOT I. / THIS IS ABOUT A WORLD OF HURT. / THIS IS ABOUT LOOKING FOR / THE MOMENT WHEN PRIDE / BECOMES CONTEMPT. ABOUT / WANTING ONE ANOTHER. / ABOUT FEARING ONE ANOTHER. / ABOUT TOUCHING ONE ANOTHER. / ABOUT THE WAR FOR ME TO BECOME YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU.”
Among the other statements that emerge in this dizzying display are “MONEY TALKS,” “THIS IS ABOUT LOVING AND LONGING. ABOUT SHAMING AND HATING. . . . ABOUT WHO GETS WHAT AND WHO OWNS WHAT,” “YOU ARE HERE, LOOKING THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, DARKLY. / SEEING THE UNSEEN, THE INVISIBLE, THE BARELY THERE,” and “IN THE END, YOU DISAPPEAR / IN THE END, LIES PREVAIL / IN THE END, ANGER FADES / IN THE END, HOPE IS LOST.” In addition, a few playful emojis contribute their thoughts on it all.
“Barbara Kruger said architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space,” curatorial assistant Margarita Lizcano Hernandez says in a MoMA ArtSpeaks video, continuing, “There’s this level of activation of the space that, just by entering it, you’ve become part of it.”
But even as the words, in Kruger’s trademark bold, sans serif font, predict loneliness and doom, hope is not lost; there is an innate joy in just seeing these words, in sharing them with the strangers around you undergoing the same experience. There’s a reason why “YOU” and “ME” are crossed out in the title, followed by a “YOU” that is not crossed out: It’s really about us; Kruger is pointing a finger at everyone.
Giancarlo Esposito plays a philosophical cabbie in Julian Rosefeldt’s Euphoria (photo by Nicholas Knight / courtesy of Park Avenue Armory)
EUPHORIA
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
Daily through January 8, $18 www.armoryonpark.org
“The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good,” Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) famously pronounced in Oliver Stone’s Oscar-nominated 1987 film, Wall Street. “Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”
Well, as it turns out, greed has not exactly saved America or the world, but is there still hope? German filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt explores that possibility in his beautifully rendered twenty-four-channel immersive installation, Euphoria, continuing at Park Avenue Armory through January 8. It arrives at an opportune moment, not only in the midst of a post-global-pandemic economic crisis but during the holiday season, when rampant consumerism dominates our everyday life.
In 2016, Rosefeldt presented Manifesto at the armory, a thirteen-channel film projected on screens placed throughout Wade Thompson Drill Hall, featuring Cate Blanchett as twelve different characters spouting cultural missives by artists and philosophers going back more than 150 years. One of the themes came from Jim Jarmusch: “Nothing is original.” While nearly all the dialogue in Euphoria is taken from another source, how it is incorporated into a 115-minute visual and aural feast is anything but derivative or uninventive. And it’s about a lot more than just the Benjamins.
Euphoria comprises six distinct scenes, each of which exists on its own in a loop; you can enter at any time, as the order doesn’t matter. The linking factor is the discussion of socioeconomics in the modern world. There are black fold floor chairs scattered around the space, but you can also walk around the installation. The main screen hangs at the center, where the six stories are told. Five smaller screens are at the same level in a circle, where drummers Terri Lyne Carrington, Peter Erskine, Yissy García, Eric Harland, and Antonio Sanchez occasionally pick up their sticks and play. Eighteen more screens surround the space, except for the entrance, on which 140 members of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus are projected, life-size; in the dark hall, it often looks like they are actually there, in person, singing or, when silent, standing more or less still, their slight swaying adding a dash of reality to the primary narrative, which delves into the fantastical. (The score is by Samy Moussa, with an additional composition by Cassie Kinoshi.)
Julian Rosefeldt’s twenty-four-channel installation surrounds viewers (photo by Nicholas Knight / courtesy of Park Avenue Armory)
On a cold winter night in New York City, a taxi driver played by Giancarlo Esposito, partially channeling his character from Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, including his “fresh” winter hat with earflaps, picks up a well-dressed man with shopping bags who is going to the Brooklyn Navy Yard; it’s not long before we realize Esposito is playing both roles. The cabbie does most of the talking, his dialogue made up of quotes from John Steinbeck, Noam Chomsky, Fareed Zakaria, G. K. Chesterton, JR, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and others, seamlessly woven together. “My momma always said: Too many people buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have to impress people who don’t care,” the cabbie says (Will Rogers). Passing by strange things happening on the street, the cabbie delivers lines that essentially sum up much of what Euphoria is about: “And then they see their idealism turn into realism, their realism into cynicism, their cynicism turn into apathy, their apathy into selfishness, their selfishness into greed and then they have babies, and they have hopes but they also have fears, so they create nests that become bunkers, they make their houses baby-safe and they buy baby car seats and organic apple juice and hire multilingual nannies and pay tuition to private schools out of love but also out of fear. What happened? You start by trying to create a new world and then you find yourself just wanting to add a bottle to your cellar, you see yourself aging and wonder if you’ve put enough away for that and suddenly you realize that you’re frightened of the years ahead of you. You never think you’ll become corrupt but time corrupts you, wears you down, wears you out. You get tired, you get old, you give up on your dreams. . . . You mind who you think you wanted to be” (Don Winslow).
The action moves next to a postapocalyptic ship graveyard where five white homeless men, Poet, Smartass, Randy, Keynes, and Sidekick, gather around a trash fire, discussing the “three great forces [that] rule the world: stupidity, fear, and greed” (Albert Einstein). Randy declares, “It seems to me that not doing what we love in the name of greed is just very poor management of our lives. I will tell you the secret to getting rich: Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful!” (Warren Buffett). Quotes from Machiavelli, Snoop Dog, Erich Fromm, Socrates, Adam Smith, Stephen King, Elizabeth Warren, and more are interwoven as the men pass around a bottle of rum, eat marshmallows, and burn a smartphone and, unbeknownst to them, a parade of animals in the background boards a large wooden ship, as if a new world is starting that the men will not be part of.
In a parcel delivery factory, three women (Virginia Newcomb, Ayesha Jordan, Kate Strong) work an assembly line, scanning and organizing packages while discussing how “things can only get worse” (Invisible Committee). They detail their struggles with overwhelming debt, long hours and low pay, racial injustice, motherhood, and misogyny and sexualization, sharing the words of Audre Lorde, Sojourner Truth, Ursula K. Le Guin, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Cardi B, and Frantz Fanon. “You sound like an archaeologist!” one of the women says to her conveyor-belt mate, who responds, “That’s right! I am an archaeologist. You wanna know why? ’Cause my life lies in fucking ruins.”
An elegant Kyiv bank turns into a surreal carnival in a scene that kicks off with a doorman (Yuriy Shepak) looking into the camera and saying, “It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money” (Albert Camus). A moment later he adds, “Money is like blood. It gives life if it flows. Money enlightens those who use it to open the flower of the world” (Alejandro Jodorowsky). Excerpts from Yuval Noah Harari, Michael Lewis, Matt Taibbi, Bertolt Brecht, George Carlin, Don DeLillo, and Karl Marx merge as a security guard (Nina Songa), a mother (Evgenia Muts), a homeless woman (Elena Aleksandrovich), and a cleaner (Corey Scott-Gilbert) go about their business, the bankers transforming into magicians, acrobats, and dancers. It’s a Busby Berkeley celebration in which money isn’t real, just another trick or performance. As the cleaner notes, “Money isn’t a material reality — it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. So why does it succeed? Because people trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. Religion asks us to believe in something. Money only asks us to believe that other people believe in something” (Yuval Noah Harari).
In another vignette, six skate teens (Rocio Rodriguez-Inniss, Esther Odumade, Tia Murrell, Dora Zygouri, Asa Ali, and Luis Rosefeldt) come together in an abandoned bus terminal talk to about the future, debating quantitative vs. qualitative value, spouting lines from Arthur C. Clarke, Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, Aldous Huxley, and John Maynard Keynes. “It’s considered sexy to accumulate property, money, stocks, cars. What a waste of dopamine and adrenaline if it’s all just about quantity, right?” (JR) one of the girls asks. “Right,” replies a second girl. “I mean, if a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes” (Nathalie Robin Justice). One of the boys points out, “A brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian, is presented to us as ideal” (Alain Badiou), adding, “We humans want to compete with each other, to grow, to invent, to expand. Fair enough. But why not within an ethically defined framework, based on common shared values” (JR). As almost always, the younger generation believes they can change the world for the better, through education and the reestablishment of goals based on equality and what’s best for all, not competition that serves the few. “We need to think big. Our natural habitat has always been the future, and this terrain must be reclaimed” (Nick Srnicek/Alex Williams) a third girl says. But as a fourth girl points out, “No wonder the galaxies recede from us in every direction, at the speed of light. They are frightened. We humans are the terror of the universe” (Edward Abbey). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this section contains the most original dialogue, as the teenagers seek to discover what comes next for themselves and not just relying on existing theories.
My cycle concluded in a large supermarket, where a bold, beautiful, ever-threatening tiger (voiced by Blanchett) makes its way up and down the aisles of canned, boxed, and bottled food and drink. It warns us, “Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid (Theodor W. Adorno). History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce (Karl Marx). Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. But even knowing can’t save them. ’Cause what is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood (Cormac McCarthy).” With quotes from Thomas Hobbes, Terry Pratchett, A. S. Byatt, Marquis de Sade, and Theodor W. Adorno, the hungry, swaggering animal accuses humans of being short-sighted power-mongers, filled with hatred and violence, whose extinction would bring no harm to the planet; in fact it would be welcomed. But the tiger adds, “And the best at war, finally, are those who preach peace. Beware the preachers. Beware the knowers. Beware their love” (Charles Bukowski).
In his 2000 breakthrough hit, “Ride wit Me,” Nelly proclaimed, “Hey, must be the money!” In Euphoria, Rosefeldt zeroes in specifically on greed and its devastating cost on humanity. At the beginning of the bank scene, the doorman says, “For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers, and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil,” quoting Hurari. But the full biblical quote from the apostle Paul in Timothy 6:10 actually puts it in a different perspective: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Today, more than ever, with more of the planet’s wealth in very few hands, financial institutions are like houses of worship, evoked further by the celestial sounds of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus in the armory. Perhaps the security guard says it best when, quoting one of the wisest sages of the last fifty years, George Carlin, he says, “Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.”
Eric Bogosian (between Chain artistic director Kirk Gostkowski and playwright G.D. Kimble) returns to the Chain for a solo benefit (photo courtesy Chain Theatre)
Who:Eric Bogosian What: One-night-only benefit for Chain Theatre Where:The Chain Theatre, 312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves., third floor When: Saturday, January 21, $30-$50+, 8:00 Why: Founded in 2010 and based on West Thirty-Sixth St. since 2018, the Chain Theatre is a nonprofit whose mission is “to create artistic work that is accessible, relatable, and invokes a visceral response in the audience through the mediums of theater and film. . . . A deep respect for the narrative is the driving force behind the cultivation of original texts, the further investigation of recently produced work, and the reclaiming of existing classics for a modern audience. The material chosen focuses on the cyclical nature of history and complexity of the human spirit.” The Chain has presented works by such writers as Arthur Miller, David Rabe, Dale Wasserman, Neil LaBute, Sam Shepard, Martin McDonagh, and Edgar Allan Poe in addition to hosting the annual One Act Festival and Chain Film Festival. In 2014, the Chain staged Obie, Drama Desk, and Silver Bear—winning actor and writer Eric Bogosian’s 1988 Pulitzer finalist, Talk Radio, and this past summer featured the New York City premiere of Black Box PAC’s new production of Bogosian’s 2008 show 1+1 as part of its Play Festival.
On January 21, the Boston-born, New York City–based Bogosian will be at the Chain for the one-night-only benefit “An Evening with Eric Bogosian: Monologues, Digressions, and Air Guitar,” mixing recent work with older favorites. Tickets are $30 for general admission and $50 for priority seating to support the Chain. Bogosian has also written such other solo plays as Drinking in America,Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, and Notes from Underground as well as subUrbia and Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, which he adapted into films, and the novels Mall,Wasted Beauty, and Perforated Heart and the nonfiction Operation Nemesis: The Secret Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide. His acting career is highlighted by Interview with the Vampire,Billions,Law & Order: Criminal Intent,Uncut Gems, and Succession, so basically, you can expect just about anything from him at this ninety-minute charity event. Perhaps he’ll even include “Benefit” from 100 Monologues, in which a rock star discusses why his band is participating in a benefit for — well, you’ll have to discover that for yourself.
Ghrai DeVore-Stokes and Chalvar Monteiro explore love in Jamar Roberts’s In a Sentimental Mood (photo by Paul Kolnik)
ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER: ALL NEW
New York City Center
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through December 24, $39-$169 www.alvinailey.org www.nycitycenter.org
It was all about coupling, uncoupling, and never-coupling at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s all-new program on December 15, part of the annual City Center season that continues through Christmas Eve. The evening began with the world premiere of Jamar Roberts’s poignant and emotional In a Sentimental Mood, in which Courtney Celeste Spears and Christopher R. Wilson follow the trajectory of a relationship in a dark and mysterious red-lit room. Spears appears first, dressed in a long white coat and white hat with red gloves, filled with hope as a scratchy recording of Duke Ellington’s “There’s Something About an Old Love” plays. She rips off her coat and hat to reveal a sexy black outfit underneath as she is joined by Christopher R. Wilson and the two get romantic to Rafiq Bhatia’s version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” featuring vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, who sings, “The first time ever I kissed your mouth / I felt the earth move in my hand / Like the trembling heart of a captive bird,” holding the last word for a jarring, extended period. As Roberts’s sharp, angular choreography continues, the dancers experience an angry, then melancholic setback and try to reunite to Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” and Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose.” It’s a lovely piece from former longtime Ailey dancer Roberts, who also designed the costumes and set, enhanced with stark lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker.
Belén Indhira Pereyra and Patrick Coker merge as one in Paul Taylor’s DUET (photo by Paul Kolnik)
Following a pause, Jacquelin Harris and Renaldo Maurice become one in the company premiere of Paul Taylor’s 1964 DUET, a classic pas de deux set to Franz Josef Haydn’s “The Seven Last Words of Christ” Sonata VII in E-flat major – Largo. Dressed in George Tacet’s tight-fitting, colorful bodysuits, Harris and Maurice move elegantly with sinewy expertise, their beings merging amid their confident love.
Vernard Gilmore and Ghrai DeVore-Stokes reach for freedom in Alvin Ailey’s Survivors (photo by Paul Kolnik)
After intermission, a new production of Ailey and Mary Barnett’s 1986 Survivors, restaged by Masazumi Chaya, focuses on the love story between Nelson and Winnie Mandela after his arrest. As jazz drummer Max Roach’s “Survivors” and “Triptych” practically explode (balanced by Peter Phillips’s stings), Harris, in a flowing red skirt and African top, and Yannick Lebrun, in brown pants, a white shirt, and suspenders, are separated by incomplete bars, evoking both the injustice of Apartheid and the possibility of freedom. (The costumes are by Toni-Leslie James, with original décor by Douglas Grekin and lighting by Tim Hunter.) They are accompanied by Wilson, Solomon Dumas, Hannah Alissa Richardson, Caroline T. Dartey, and Yazzmeen Laidler, wearing traditional South African hats and serving as a kind of Greek chorus. It’s a powerful work about a determined couple, all the more affecting since we know that Mandela was freed in 1990 and he and Winnie divorced in 1996.
Chalvar Monteiro and Ashley Green come together and break apart in Kyle Abraham’s Are You in Your Feelings? (photo by Paul Kolnik)
The world premiere of Kyle Abraham’s Are You in Your Feelings? brought the house down, an exhilarating celebration of Black culture. Through spoken dialogue and such songs as the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You,” Lauryn Hill’s “Forgive Them Father,” Drake’s “That’s How You Feel,” Erykah Badu’s “I’ll Call U Back,” and Kendrick Lamar’s “LOVE. ft. Zacari,” seven women (Dartey, Ghrai DeVoire-Stokes, Samantha Figgins, Ashley Kaylynn Green, Ashey Mayeux, Miranda Quinn, and Deidre Rogan) and five men (Dumas, Maurice, James Gilmer, Chalvar Monteiro, and Jermaine Terry), flirt, diss, come together, and grow apart in front of a backdrop of a fluorescent semicircle and larger, flatter circle, suggesting the sun and the moon. At the center of it all are Monteiro and Green, who swirl, embrace, push away, and keep an eye on each other as various other couples, including two men, form and dissolve. There’s a little bit of West Side Story here, some Night Creature there, leading to a thrilling finale.
Are You in Your Feelings? bursts with a masterful, infectious energy that is a fitting conclusion to a night of love and separation, joy and sadness, humor and romance, starting and ending with the choreographers who are leading AAADT into the future, Roberts and Abraham.
Andy (Tim Hopper) and Em (Sally Murphy) have something to say to Fred (Francis Guinan, at left) in Downstate (photo by Joan Marcus)
DOWNSTATE
Playwrights Horizons, Mainstage Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 7, $61-$101 www.playwrightshorizons.org
“If you knew in advance exactly what was going to happen in your life, and how everything was going to turn out, and if you knew you couldn’t do anything to change it, would you still want to go on with your life?” Bee asks Jay in Bruce Norris’s A Parallelogram. “What if it turned out to be for the best if we’d never even existed?”
That question is central to Norris’s latest work, Downstate, extended through January 7 at Playwrights Horizons. One of the best plays of the millennium, Downstate takes an unusual angle on child molesters, making us see them as human rather than evil demons, eliciting compassion but not sympathy while delving into the concept of victimhood from all sides.
“I used to fantasize about how I would kill you,” Andy (Tim Hopper, now replaced by Brian Hutchison) tells his abuser, Fred (Francis Guinan), as Andy calmly reads from a reconciliation contract. “I would park outside your apartment and wait until you pulled in the driveway. And I would bring along my mother’s thirty-eight, the one she kept in her bedside table, and when you stepped out of your car I would hold it against your head and duct tape your mouth so I wouldn’t have to listen to any of your toxic bullshit . . . and I’d drive you to the edge of the forest preserve, and you’d kneel down in the dirt . . . and I’d rip the tape off your mouth and jam the barrel of the gun down your throat so that you —” Andy is cut off by several interruptions before accusing Fred of “exploiting my trust. By enlisting my sympathy. But you will never be deserving of sympathy.”
Em (Sally Murphy), Andy’s wife, says to Fred, “How can I ever explain to my child why Daddy is sometimes sad? Why he’d rather sit alone in the dark instead of using the PlayStation? Children need answers. And they need to know that some monsters are real.”
It’s a tough topic to navigate onstage; in recent years, David Harrower’s Blackbird, Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, and Jennifer Haley’s The Nether successfully tackled the issue from different angles, but Norris offers several new twists that test the standard dynamic that good and evil are black-and-white.
Four residents of a group home for convicted child molesters meet with parole officer Ivy Delgado (Susanna Guzmán) (photo by Joan Marcus)
Fred is an easygoing old man in a motorized wheelchair who speaks gently; in the script, Norris compares him to Mr. Rogers (whose first name is Fred). Fred was a piano teacher and still has a fondness for Frédéric Chopin, who he is quick to point out led a tragic life after the family of the woman he loved rejected their relationship. All four molesters in the home still believe what they did to their victims was done out of love and understanding, despite what the law and society dictate. Fred has a small keyboard in the living room, where he fake-plays to a CD of Chopin’s “Raindrop” Prelude, the drip-drip-drip of the music evoking the repetitive nature of the crimes by child abusers who think they are in love.
The home is run by Dee (K. Todd Freeman), an impassioned gay man who does the shopping and tries to keep everyone sane; he’s especially supportive of Fred, although he still angrily defends what he himself did to a teenage boy. Fast-talking, Bible-quoting Gio (Glenn Davis) is the youngest of the four and is facing the shortest sentence; convicted of statutory rape of a girl he thought was “old enough,” he considers himself to be better than the others, not an abuser, and has grand plans for starting his own business. Felix (Eddie Torres) is the quiet one who keeps to himself, although he has a problem with lying, especially to the group’s parole officer, Ivy Delgado (Susanna Guzmán), who lets them all know when they have broken the rules of their closely supervised release. The four men are tracked by ankle monitors and are not allowed to use the internet or a cellphone.
When Ivy announces that the local community has passed rulings further limiting their movement, they are furious, but she points out, “Well, ya know what? Nobody really wants y’all livin’ anywhere, much less in their neighborhood.” Dee says, “Why not put us on a desert island?” Gio suggests, “Y’all oughta be banished from human society.”
Gio works with the pert and cheeky Effie (Gabi Samels), who is not a fan of the police. When she shows up to drive Gio to their job, Ivy asks to see her ID. Effie repeatedly states, “Am I being detained?” Ivy then asks her name, to which Effie replies again and again, “I do not consent to the question.” It’s a comic scene, but it brings to the surface the critical ideas of detention and consent.
Things get even more heated in the second act when Andy returns, with more to say to Fred.
Downstate is brilliantly directed by Tony and Obie winner Pam MacKinnon, who previously helmed Norris’s Tony-, Olivier-, and Pulitzer Prize–winning Clybourne Park and The Qualms (as well as superb Broadway adaptations of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). MacKinnon accounts for every gesture, every interaction, every line of dialogue, making sure each aspect of the story is fully believable, from fighting over the bathroom to bickering over unripe bananas, the latter a reference to children too young for sex; it’s no coincidence that Dee sees no problem with them, telling Gio, who refuses to pay for his share of the bananas because they are too green, “Didn’t want bananas for next week, I wanted bananas for immediate consumption.” Norris and MacKinnon succeed in making the four abusers into a kind of family, with Ivy the de facto parent.
Fred (Francis Guinan) and Dee (K. Todd Freeman) share a rare tender moment in Downstate (photo by Joan Marcus)
Todd Rosenthal’s set is deceptively cozy, a cutaway living room above which is a roof with a satellite dish, emphasizing the limitations of the men’s lives. A flatscreen TV fills the fireplace, blocking the possibility of real warmth. Gio’s exercise equipment is in one corner, in front of Felix’s room, where Felix spends most of the show, behind an accordion door. The window next to the front door is broken, the result of a shotgun blast from an unhappy person in the neighborhood. (The lighting is by Adam Silverman, with sound by Carolyn Downing and costumes by Clint Ramos.)
The cast is exceptional; an ever-present tension hovers over the space as the characters interact as if on the edge of a knife. Guinan (Tribes,The Night Alive) is soft and gentle as Fred, who appears to be tender and harmless, especially in the wheelchair, but he has a dark past. Davis (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,The Christians) is a bundle of nonstop energy as Gio, while Torres, who is primarily a director (Familiar,Water by the Spoonful), makes the most of his few scenes. Two-time Tony nominee and Obie winner Freeman (Airline Highway,Song of Jacob Zulu) is a powder keg as Dee, ready to explode at any moment with the slightest provocation. Samels, in her off-Broadway debut, is electric as Effie, who speaks her mind, not afraid to hang out in a house of sexual predators. At one point she tells Gio, “A workplace is a safe space,” which also reveals a certain naivete.
Hopper (Go Back to Where You Are,More Stately Mansions) is a bundle of nerves as Andy, whose abuse at the hands of Fred has tortured him as he searches desperately for closure, while Murphy (The Minutes,August: Osage County) is forceful and tenacious as Em, who wants her husband to finally be free from pain.
Guzmán (La Luz de un cigarillo,Comida de Puta) is firm and unyielding as Ivy, especially when the concept of victimhood is raised. She tells Felix, “I got forty-seven clients, aright? Forty-seven of y’all I gotta deal with on a weekly basis all shapes and sizes but ya all got one thing in common, okay? Every one of you’s a victim. Everybody’s misunderstood, been done wrong, system’s broke, system ain’t fair blah blah, and that may or may not be the case — but I’ll tell ya something. If y’all feel so victimized? Maybe that gives ya a little idea how ya made other people feel, okay?”
Norris (The Low Road,Domesticated) was inspired to write Downstate by the sociopolitical disconnect between the right and the left in the United States, how the liberals and the conservatives are unable to talk to each other and resolve their differences in any constructive way, instead demonizing the supposed enemy.
The horror of child abuse is one thing that everyone agrees on; in 2019, New York State passed the Child Victims Act, which gave survivors a one-year window to file claims that had been barred by the statute of limitations, leading to approximately ten thousand lawsuits. The vote was 63-0 in the Senate and 130-3 in the Assembly. This past May, New York governor Kathy Hochul signed into law the Adult Survivors Act, which gives survivors who were abused when they were over eighteen a one-year lookback to pursue legal recourse.
In the must-see Downstate, Norris offers a compelling, thought-provoking, and exquisitely rendered exploration of our humanity as a people; it’s about child sexual abuse, justice, and victimhood, but it’s also about so much more.
John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered debuted at the Cloisters in 2018 (photo by Joshua Bright for the New York Times)
Who:American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) What:John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered Where:The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Ave. at 112th St. When: Wednesday, December 21, $5-$45 (choose-what-you-pay), 7:30 Why: Originally presented by American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) in 2018 at the San Martín at Fuentidueña chapel in the Cloisters, John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered will be performed one-time only at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, in a slightly revised iteration. A retelling of the traditional Christmas story, El Niño premiered in Paris in 2000, with a libretto by Peter Sellars. At St. John the Divine, the nativity oratorio, conceived and curated by Julia Bullock, includes soprano Bullock, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, violinists Miranda Cuckson and Keir GoGwilt, cellist Coleman Itzkoff, bassist Doug Balliett, flutist Emi Ferguson, percussionist Jonny Allen, pianist Conor Hanick, mezzo-soprano Rachael Wilson, and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street; the conductor is Christian Reif, who is responsible for the new chamber opera arrangement.
In a program note for the Met Museum digital premiere, Bullock wrote, “El Niño is one of my favorite pieces of music and I feel one of John and Peter’s greatest collaborations. . . . It is rarely programmed, either because of the resources needed or possibly because our North American holiday tradition insists upon multiple performances of Handel’s Messiah. The Messiah is, of course, a beloved work, but it doesn’t meditate solely on the nativity story; it also encompasses the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. El Niño, on the other hand, explores the central themes of the nativity — the immaculate conception, the unique relationship between mother and child, and gift giving — and also ruminates on the notion that with the promise of new life, there is the equal threat of inexplicable violence and sacrifice. In creating El Niño, John and Peter consciously decided that alongside European interpretations from the male-centric biblical canon, they would feature the contributions of women and Latin American poets.” Tickets for this special event are $5 to $45 based on what you are able to pay.
Dan (Arliss Howard) and Marta (Johanna Day) are in for quite a night in Des Moines (photo by Hollis King)
DES MOINES
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 8, $97
866-811-4111 www.tfana.org
Denis Johnson’s Des Moines is a sly, beguiling black comedy about — well, I’m not quite sure what it’s about, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it, and not in a car-wreck sort of way. The 2007 play opened Friday night at TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, but director Arin Arbus started working on the play with Johnson, the German-born novelist who died in 2017 at the age of sixty-seven, way back in 2013. In a program note, TFANA founding artistic director Jeffrey Horowitz explains that in 2015, after a week of workshopping with Arbus, the author, and dramaturg Jonathan Kalb, he told Johnson he “felt the play needed more clarifying. Denis said ‘no.’ Des Moines was finished.”
Now that I’ve seen its off-Broadway premiere, which continues through January 1 in Brooklyn, I am thrilled that Johnson refused to make any changes; clarification would have denuded the hundred-minute work of its endless charms and purposefully chaotic confusion. The characters speak in non-sequiturs, as if they are not listening to one another while engaging in what are generally called conversations. They go off on tangents or suddenly fall into silence. “It’s just kind of a little bit weird,” Marta (Johanna Day) understatedly says.
The play takes place in an upstairs apartment of a two-flat building in the capital of Iowa, whose caucuses have traditionally kicked off the presidential primary cycle, a city steeped in the insurance industry and whose name translates from the French as “of the monks.” The Online Etymology Dictionary posits that the name Des Moines grew out of the Native American word “Moinguena,” explaining, “Historians believe this represents Miami-Illinois mooyiinkweena, literally ‘shitface,’ from mooy ‘excrement’ + iinkwee ‘face,’ a name given by the Peoria tribe (whose name has itself become a sort of insult) to their western neighbors. It is not unusual for Native American peoples to have had hostile or derogatory names for others, but this seems an extreme case.” Now, I’m not claiming that Johnson knew any of this, but it feels like it fits in with the show’s exhilarating bathos.
The apartment hovers in midair, with space above and below it, as if it is a kind of floating bardo, way station, or purgatory. Riccardo Hernández’s comfy set includes a standard kitchen with a working sink, microwave, and coffeemaker, tchotchkes on the walls and counters, a small table in the center, two empty metal dog bowls, a garbage can, and a back room behind sliding French doors. Things are a little wilder and less ordinary in the back room, which is drenched in erotic red lighting.
The apartment belongs to the soft-spoken Dan (Arliss Howard), a twenty-year Army veteran who now drives a cab, and his wife, Marta, a relatively simple couple with simple needs, happy with leftover spaghetti and mediocre beer. They are taking care of their late daughter’s daughter, Jimmy (Hari Nef), who lives in the back room, confined to a wheelchair after a botched trans surgery.
Jimmy (Hari Nef) and Father Michael (Michael Shannon) get ready for a party in Denis Johnson’s final play (photo by Hollis King)
On this particular night, Marta has asked their parish priest, Father Michael Dubitsky (Michael Shannon), to come over and be there when she gives Dan some important news; Dan has some important news of his own about Michael, who he saw wearing lipstick outside a gay bar. Meanwhile, Dan is expecting the recently widowed Helen Drinkwater (Heather Alicia Simms) to stop by to pick up her late spouse’s wedding ring, which she left at the garage where Dan works. Her husband, a lawyer, died in a commuter plane crash; Dan had driven him to the airport, so Helen is hoping that the taxi driver will remember something that her husband said, what might have been his last words.
Once everyone is there, depth chargers — the drink in which a shotglass of alcohol is dropped into a mug of beer — are flowing, music is playing, and anarchy ensues as everyone and everything spirals out of control in a party to end all parties, the kind of crazy fete that is best experienced from a distance, like safely ensconced in seats in a theater, with additional physical space between the audience and the set.
Des Moines evokes the classic Twilight Zone episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” in which a clown, a soldier, a ballerina, a hobo, and a bagpiper are trapped in an unknown, inescapable pit. The five characters in Johnson’s play seem trapped as well, if not in the apartment itself then in the city of Des Moines. Dan, who was stationed a few blocks from where he was born, has never been west of town, while it’s his job to take people to other places, including airports, where they travel away from Des Moines. Jimmy is confined to a wheelchair and appears to have no desire to go anywhere, especially after what happened to her when she went to the fictional Barrowville, West Virginia, where she got her problematic sex change operation.
And Ellen, who has lived in Des Moines “always and forever,” is widowed because her husband died on a commuter plane that only made it eight miles upriver before crashing, four miles from the fictional Sheller-Phelps factory, perhaps named after Phelps Sheller, a real-life Illinois farmer and military veteran who worked at the Sangamon Ordnance Plant, which manufactured ammunition during WWII.
It’s time for depth chargers and karaoke in off-Broadway premiere at TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center (photo by Hollis King)
Time is irrelevant in Des Moines. Father Michael forgot to turn his clock back to standard time. Ellen doesn’t know whether it’s Halloween or Christmas, confused by the holiday decorations in Jimmy’s room, which has both an antique phonograph with a large horn and a karaoke machine, mixing past and present. Dan and Marta can’t remember whether their dog ran away one winter ago or two, but they still leave two empty dog dishes on the floor as if the pooch just went out for a walk. Father Michael says several times that he hardly recognizes the old neighborhood even though he’s there all the time.
While no one in the apartment is living the American dream, dreams play a major role in the narrative, which is so helter-skelter, so disorganized that it sometimes seems like various scenes are actually dreams we are experiencing through the dreamer’s memories. Dreams are referenced throughout the show. Dan asks Father Michael to yell at him when he least expects it, “Wake up! You’re dreaming!” The first time we see Jimmy, she says, “I woke up. I was somewhere beautiful in a dream.” Ellen tells Dan and Marta, “I’ve been having some very strongly vivid dreams just lately.”
Not everyone likes listening to other people’s dreams. In the 2017 Scientific American article “Why You Shouldn’t Tell People about Your Dreams,” cognitive science professor Jim Davies delves into “why most of your dreams are going to seem pretty boring to most people.” But made-up dreams coming from the mind of Denis Johnson, well, there’s nothing boring about that.
Two-time Tony nominee Day (Sweat,How I Learned to Drive), Howard (Mank,Joe Turner’s Come and Gone), Nef (“Daddy,”Assassination Nation), Shannon (The Killer,Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune) and Simms (Fairview,By the Way, Meet Vera Stark have a field day in Des Moines, National Book Award winner Johnson’s (Jesus’ Son,Tree of Smoke,Hellhound on My Trail) last play. The actors appear to be having so much fun as the the story descends more and more into madness, and that energizes the audience. Obie winner and Shakespeare veteran Arbus (The Skin of Our Teeth,Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune) maintains an ecstatic anarchy throughout the proceedings, with gleeful choreography by Byron Easley.
“I dreamed I was in this weird place,” Dan says the morning after the party. “It was a strange place. I’m trying to remember the kind of place it was, but I can’t remember.” That’s kinda the way I feel about the show, which I will long remember.
