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TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES, 1992

Karl Kenzler, Elena Hurst, Wesley T. Jones, Tiffany Rachelle Stewart, and Francis Jue star in reimagining of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight (photo by Joan Marcus)

TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES, 1992
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through November 21, $35-$70
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Anna Deavere Smith has brilliantly reimagined her 1993 one-woman show, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, for this moment in time, for a cast of five portraying more than two dozen characters, all involved in some way in the LA riots that followed the Rodney King verdict nearly thirty years ago. Originally scheduled to premiere in the spring of 2020 as part of Smith’s residency at the Signature Theatre, which began in October 2019 with a superb remount of her 1992 solo show, Fires in the Mirror, about the Crown Heights riots, Twilight has been updated and expanded to include references to the murders of Eric Garner and George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.

In the nearly three decades since Deveare Smith created the work, a number of different productions have tackled it. In 2001, the play was turned into a film with Deavere Smith as part of PBS’s Great Performances series. During the pandemic, a virtual edition of the play was performed by twenty-one students at the Roxbury Latin School in Massachusetts, and a one-woman version starring Jazzma Pryor ran at Evanston’s Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre in September. The Signature released a short Zoom preview in July with a slightly different cast that failed to capture the scope and majesty of the final product, which opened at last on the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center on November 1.

The play is exceptionally performed by Elena Hurst, Francis Jue, Wesley T. Jones, Karl Kenzler, and Tiffany Rachelle Stewart, using verbatim dialogue accumulated by Smith from 320 interviews with subjects ranging from King’s aunt Angela, former LA police commissioner Stanley K. Sheinbaum, store owner and gunshot victim Walter Park, gang truce organizer Twilight Bey, and author and professor Elaine Kim to attorney Charles Lloyd, community activist Gina Rae aka Queen Malkah, semitruck driver and beating victim Reginald Denny, liquor store owner Jay Woong Yahng, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Taibi Magar directs with a captivating ferocity.

Elvira Evers (Tiffany Rachelle Stewart) is one of dozens of characters who share their thoughts about the Rodney King riots in Smith play (photo by Joan Marcus)

LAPD officer Ted Briseno, one of four cops accused of beating Rodney King, laments that his children might not look up to him as a hero anymore. An anonymous juror in the King trial says that members of the jury have received letters from the KKK asking them to join after they acquitted the officers. Real estate agent Elaine Young talks about how she was safe and sound in Beverly Hills and explains how she “was such a victim” because of all her cosmetic facial surgeries.

Sgt. Charles Duke of the LAPD’s special weapons and tactics unit, testifying for the defense, supports the use of control holds, or chokeholds, despite evidence that it kills suspects, primarily Black men. Discussing his own run-in with bigoted policemen, sculptor and painter Rudy Salas Sr. says, “I grew up with the idea that whites, are . . . Physically . . . I still got that, see that’s a prejudice that whites are physically . . . inferior, physically afraid of minorities. People of color, Blacks, and Mexicans. It’s a physical thing,
It’s a mental, mental thing that they’re physically afraid. But you see I still have that prejudice against whites. (But.) I’m not a racist!”

Reginald Denny co-assailant Keith Watson declares, “You got to realize the not guilty verdicts was heavy on everybody’s mind. I followed the trial cause I wanted to see if justice works and on that particular day justice didn’t work.” Free the LA Four Plus defense committee chairperson Paul Parker exclaims, “Basically, it’s that you as Black people ain’t takin’ this shit no more. Even back in slavery. ’Cause I saw Roots when I was young. My dad made sure. He sat us down in front of that TV when Roots came on, so it’s embedded in me since then. And just to see that, eh, eh! This is for Kunta! This is for Kizzy! This is for Chicken George! Now we got some weapons, we got our pride, we holdin’ our heads up and our chest out. We like, yeah, brother, we did this!” Former LA Times journalist Hector Tobar returns for a 2021 interview that places the events of 1992 in a contemporary context.

The actors perform on a central platform, occasionally using a chair or table. They change clothing quickly, either in the wings or right onstage. At one point, dozens of costumes are dumped on the floor, evoking the disarray during the riots. Often, as one monologue is finishing, the actor for the next segment walks up to the platform in silhouette. (The effective set is by Riccardo Hernández, with costumes by Linda Cho, lighting by Alan C. Edwards, sound by Darron L West, and projections by David Bengali.)

Each character is identified by accompanying text, along with the title of that segment; for example, “The words of Elaine Brown, former chairwoman of the Black Panther Party, ‘Bad’” and “The words of Daryl Gates, former chief of Los Angeles Police Department, ‘It’s awful hard to break away.’” Archival video footage of the riots, including the beatings of King and Denny, are shown on a pair of video monitors at the right and left as well as the back screen, immersing the audience in the horrific events of 1992–93, which look all too familiar in 2021.

Francis Jue is one of five actors portraying multiple characters in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 at the Signature (photo by Joan Marcus)

I was deeply moved by Deavere Smith’s solo Broadway version, which ran at the Cort Theatre in 1994, but this new Signature iteration blew me away. Running more than two hours with an intermission, Twilight flies by at a relentless, furious pace, a nonstop parade of individuals directly and indirectly discussing systemic racism, police brutality, anti-Asian hate, classism, journalistic biases, government indifference, and looting. “Oh yes, I am angry! It is all right to be angry!” Congresswoman Maxine Waters proclaims. “The fact of the matter is, whether we like it or not, riot is the voice of the unheard,” echoing what Waters and others have said about the rash of Black men killed by white police officers this century.

In a program note, Deavere Smith explains that the play is very much about gathering, about diverse people coming to the table despite their differences, ready to talk — and to listen. In the play’s most theatrical and involving scene, “A Dinner Party That Never Happened,” Brown, Parker, Rev. Tom Choi of the Westwood Presbyterian Church, Asian American man Jin Ho Lee, Chez Panisse chef Alice Waters, and former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley sit down at a table, eating and drinking while appearing to speak to one another. (At the performance I attended, one of the actors accidentally knocked over a glass of wine, and as several other cast members wiped it up, staying in character, it made me think of a ritual spilling of wine, an apt metaphor for what was happening onstage.)

Two-time Tony nominee and Pulitzer finalist Deavere Smith (House Arrest, Let Me Down Easy) and Obie winner Magar (Blue Ridge, Is God Is) have woven together a pseudo-conversation from the individual transcripts, in which the participants discuss responsibility, roots, justice, Saddam Hussein, commitment, and community. “I’m saying that these are the long haul,” Brown explains. “We just be thrown back and we will be twenty more years trying to figure out what happened to Martin, Malcolm, and the Black Panther Party.” It’s now nearly thirty years later and, sadly, as Twilight reveals, we are still trying to figure that out.

LACKAWANNA BLUES

LACKAWANNA BLUES
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 12, $59
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

In 2006, the HBO film of Lackawanna Blues earned John Papsidera an Emmy for Outstanding Casting for a Miniseries, Movie, or Special and S. Epatha Merkerson won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Rachel “Nanny” Crosby. But in the Broadway debut of Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s one-man show, which premiered at the Public in 2001 and continues at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through November 12, Santiago-Hudson proves once again that he can do it all by himself.

In the ninety-minute play, Santiago-Hudson, serving as actor, writer, and director, portrays more than two dozen characters that were part of his childhood growing up in the steel town of Lackawanna in upstate New York, focusing on his five-year-old self and the woman left in charge of his care, the beloved Miss Rachel, also known to the tight-knit community as Nanny. Ruben’s mother had financial problems stemming from drug abuse, and his father did not live with them. Through the age of eleven, he often lived with Miss Rachel, who ran a pair of boardinghouses, one at 32 Wasson Ave., where young Ruben met such fanciful figures as Numb Finger Pete, Sweet Tooth Sam, Ol’ Po’ Carl, Small Paul, Mr. Lucious, Freddie Cobbs, and Mr. Lemuel Taylor; Santiago-Hudson embodies each of them with shifts in his voice and physical movement as he relates funny and poignant anecdotes about fishing, baseball, and domestic violence.

He wanders across Michael Carnahan’s intimate set, consisting of a few chairs, a small table, the front door of 32 Wasson Ave., a hanging window, and a back wall that evokes the boardinghouse, beautifully lit by Jen Schriever (with several cool surprises). Sitting in one corner is New York Blues Hall of Fame guitarist and Grammy nominee Junior Mack, playing music composed and originally performed onstage by Bill Sims Jr.; Mack previously performed in Sims’s band, so it is a natural hand-off. He interacts well with Santiago-Hudson, sometimes coming to the forefront, other times whispering under Santiago-Hudson’s dialogue. Occasionally, Santiago-Hudson whips out a harmonica and blasts away with verve. (The warm sound design is by Darron L West.)

Lackawanna Blues is a celebration of a town that was enjoying the fruits of prosperity, not a dirge about marginalized people suffering hard times. The play begins with Santiago-Hudson declaring, “Nineteen fifty-six. Lackawanna, New York, like all Great Lakes cities, was thriving! Jobs everywhere, money everywhere. Steel plants, grain mills, railroads, the docks. Everybody had a new car and a conk. Restaurants, bars, stores, everybody made money. The smell of fried fish, chicken, and pork chops floating in the air every weekend. In every bar the aroma of a newly tapped keg of Black Label, Iroquois, or Genesee beer, to complement that hot roast beef-on-weck with just a touch of horseradish. . . . You could get to town on a Monday and by Wednesday have more jobs than one man can take. These were fertile times.” There were problems, but the people knew how to take care of one another, with Miss Rachel at the center. “Nanny was like the government if it really worked,” Santiago-Hudson says.

Santiago-Hudson is no stranger to one-man shows; in 2013 at the Signature, he portrayed his mentor and friend, the late August Wilson, in How I Learned What I Learned. He has directed and/or starred in numerous Wilson works, winning a Tony for his role as Cantwell in Seven Guitars and earning a Drama Desk Award for directing Jitney and an Obie for helming The Piano Lesson. He won an Obie Special Citation for the original production of Lackawanna Blues, while Sims earned an Obie for his music.

On Broadway, Santiago-Hudson makes you think you see every character, smell every smell, witness minute details of every scene even though he never changes his costume or introduces props. It’s a compelling, deeply personal performance that feels right at home in the 622-capacity theater as he marvelously succeeds in inviting the audience into his past. When asked at a talkback about what happened to his mother, he said that would be a show unto itself while sharing some of the specifics of her tragic yet hope-filled life. Sounds like a heckuva sequel.

KEYBOARD FANTASIES

Beverly Glenn-Copeland discusses his life and career in Keyboard Fantasies

KEYBOARD FANTASIES (Posy Dixon, 2021)
Roxy Cinema Tribeca
2 Sixth Ave.
Opens Friday, October 29
www.roxycinematribeca.com
www.keyboardfantasies.movie

“I just lived my life,” Philadelphia-born Canadian composer and Black trans activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland says in the documentary Keyboard Fantasies, opening October 29 at the Roxy in Tribeca. The seventy-minute film follows the now-seventy-seven-year-old musician as he plays several shows after having been rediscovered in 2015, which led to the rerelease of his 1986 album, Keyboard Fantasies, a work that melds ambient, jazz, classical, folk, world, and New Age sounds in a way that was ahead of its time. Obsessed with Glenn-Copeland’s music, director Posy Dixon became Skype friends with him and ended up making her debut feature film.

Dixon cuts back and forth between live performances and Glenn-Copeland sitting on a chair in his house, discussing his life, accompanied by family photographs and home movies. Both of his parents were pianists; when his mother became a Quaker, she decided that Glenn-Copeland, then known as Beverly, needed to be fixed. “Her protective instinct was that I should be as normal as possible. Well, I wasn’t like that,” he says.

Beverly Glenn-Copeland basks in his rediscovery in Keyboard Fantasies

Born in 1944, Glenn-Copeland went to McGill University in Canada, where he felt targeted and isolated, unhappy in his body. “I was having to fight quite a lot to be able to be just who I was,” he recalls. He left school, bought a guitar, and started writing music. It took decades before he realized he was trans, including a disastrous stint as a lesbian and the parental threat of electroshock therapy. In 2016, he got an email from a Japanese collector, requesting copies of Keyboard Fantasies. It wasn’t long before Glenn-Copeland was out on the road, playing gigs with the young band Indigo Rising, consisting of Jeremy Costello, Carlie Howell, Kurt Inder, Nick Dourado, and Bianca Palmer, who are seen in the film hanging out with him and performing onstage together. “He’s completely out of time and place always,” Dourado says affectionately.

Dixon travels with Glenn-Copeland and Indigo Rising to the Scribe Center in Philly, the Barbican Centre and Café Oto in London, TivoliVredenburg and Le Guess Who? in the Netherlands, the Jam Factory in Toronto, and other venues, where he plays such meditative songs as “Sunset Village,” “Complainin’ Blues,” “Color of Anyhow,” “Ever Anew,” “Let Us Dance,” “La Vita,” and “Wade in the Water.” (The last tune is the one Glenn-Copeland sings on an eighty-four-foot diaphanous curtain hanging from the top of the Guggenheim Museum in the recent exhibition “Wu Tsang: Anthem.”)

The documentary focuses on Glenn-Copeland’s search for personal identity and his music career; there are no experts or critics chiming in, we don’t get to meet his wife, Elizabeth Paddon, and he doesn’t talk about adding “Copeland” to his name in honor of American composer Aaron Copland. In addition, the film was made before Glenn-Copeland had to cancel a tour because of the pandemic lockdown just as his career was being fully revived and he and Paddon had to resort to a GoFundMe page to avoid homelessness.

But it’s all part of his journey. “I don’t believe there’s any mistakes in our lives,” he says. The positivity of Glenn-Copeland’s outlook is infectious, even when it comes to a bad joke that appears after the closing credits.

BULLETPROOF

Bulletproof reveals the capitalization and marketing of school shootings (photo © Emily Topper)

BULLETPROOF (Todd Chandler, 2020)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, October 29
212-660-0312
nyc.metrograph.com

There’s a powerful moment near the end of Todd Chandler’s Bulletproof that I won’t soon forget. It takes place at a shooting range, where an employee is sweeping up hundreds of spent shells from guns fired by teachers and parents learning how to defend themselves in the event of a school shooting. The casings evoke the many horrific deaths of children around the country who’ve been killed just because they went to class that day, their stories swept away as the next massacre awaits.

Bulletproof sounds like a thriller, and in many ways it is. When I was a kid, we were taught to duck and cover, hiding under our desks or in the halls to survive a nuclear threat that, fortunately, never came to fruition. But today’s children face a far greater danger from school shootings, although one person in the film does note that they are more likely to die in an airplane crash than by a bullet in school. Chandler (Flood Tide, A Debtors’ Prison) and cinematographer Emily Topper (After Tiller, The Departure) travel to schools in Missouri, Texas, Chicago, Pittsburgh, California, Colorado, and New York, filming shooter drills, local hearings, and presentations from safety officers that use scare tactics and fear to convince districts they need to hire armed security guards and give the teachers guns. “The threat always comes from inside,” a Texas principal says. Another man explains, “Some people will say, ‘That’s just some kid playing,’ but the problem is, we can’t take that risk anymore.” Chandler intercuts scenes of kids just being kids, learning math, going to homecoming, and kicking a ball around.

The Texas principal boasts of having spent forty thousand dollars on twenty-two AR-15s for nineteen security officers. A Pittsburgh policeman is met with resistance when he blames school shootings on prescription SSRIs. Teachers play a life-size video game placing them in the middle of a mass shooting in a gym. A man shows off an all-pervasive surveillance system. A young Bay Area tech worker postpones getting her Master’s and instead starts making bulletproof Kevlar Wonder Hoodies. A school safety convention in Las Vegas reveals capitalism at its best as companies push bulletproof whiteboards and desks, safety lockers displayed in a colorful toylike diorama, and an electronic flashbang that can be used as a distraction device. They are all marketing to panic and monetizing trauma, but you can still take a selfie with a pair of scantily clad women in blue sequins.

Chandler doesn’t speak with any talking-head experts or pundits; instead, Bulletproof is more of a fly-on-the-wall Maysles-like documentary in which the audience gets more than a peek at how the plague of school shootings is being dealt with in these local communities. There are no statistics, no news reports, no debates over guns and the NRA; none of the participants in the film are identified, primarily because they are us, and we are them. America is in crisis, and, as Chandler shows, much of America has gone into crisis mode, to the extreme, when it comes to addressing school shootings, of which, according to CNN, there have been 180 since 2009, with 365 victims.

Are any of these security measures going to work? Chandler might not answer that question directly, but the image of a broom sweeping shell casings like so many dead bodies makes a strong point.

Bulletproof opens October 29 at Metrograph, with Chandler on hand for Q&As at the 8:30 screening on Friday night and the 7:00 show on November 1, when he will be joined by fellow documentarian Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson, Dick Johnson Is Dead).

SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

Nazi leader Albert Speer tries to whitewash history in Speer Goes to Hollywood

SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD (Vanessa Lapa, 2021)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, October 29
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
speergoestohollywood.com

In 2014, Belgium-born, Israel-based documentarian Vanessa Lapa made her feature-length debut with The Decent One, in which she painted a frightening portrait of Heinrich Himmler, using the private diary of the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (Himmler’s official title). She has now followed that film with Speer Goes to Hollywood, which incorporates archival footage from the Nuremberg trials and clips from propaganda films accompanying forty hours of recordings made in 1971 by up-and-coming British screenwriter Andrew Birkin as he worked with convicted Nazi leader Albert Speer, known as Hitler’s Architect, collaborating on a screenplay for Paramount Pictures based on the former Reichsminister of Munitions’ bestselling memoir, Inside the Third Reich.

Birkin, the brother of model and actress Jane Birkin and whose mentors include Stanley Kubrick and Carol Reed, met with Speer in the latter’s country home in Heidelberg in the winter of 1971. Birkin kept the tape rolling as he and Speer carefully reviewed every scene in the screenplay, as Speer tries to whitewash many of the more outrageous and gruesome details regarding his culpability in the Nazis’ reign of terror while Birkin tries to not let him off the hook.

“I would be careful,” Reed (The Third Man, Oliver!) warns Birkin over the phone after reviewing the first draft of the script. “You can’t build without him knowing. The man holds his mind blank to that. This is not a sweet man.”

Tall and elegant, Speer seizes control of the narrative again and again, claiming to be a dreamer and making sure he is seen with his dog, as if he’s just a normal guy. “I want a private life too,” he opines. He considers war “an adventure” and the Nazi regime “just good fun” to downplay the piles of murdered bodies the Third Reich left in its wake. He refers to the tortured prisoners of war in factories and the concentration camps as workmen and laborers, making excuses that argue that the negative aspects of what the Nazis did have been exaggerated. “I did not know what crimes I’m committing,” he claims. He explains that the “camps were necessary” and blames his Labor Department head, Fritz Sauckel, for the mistreatment of the Jews and other captives under his watch. “I was not responsible for those things. It was him,” he points out.

All the while, Birkin attempts to convince himself that he is doing the right thing by sharing Speer’s story on film. “I’ve been saying all along that I find it easy to identify myself with you,” he tells Speer. “The only point where I think I would have opted out would have been if I had been present or if I witnessed a scene that involved children being carted off. Can you ever remember a situation where you either read about, or more probably heard about, children being separated up or families being torn apart? Anything. Can you ever remember anything that happened? Even if, at the time, you were able to rationalize it?” Speer says no, “But . . . Yes, well, but you know, small things are now seen as the center of a thing. But I’m sorry. It would be wrong to say now I had a sentimental reaction or so. Your idea of the film and of my person that I had any reaction is wrong.”

Speer talks about Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels and admits to being one of Hitler’s best friends — and still claims he did not know what was going on despite his heavy involvement with the Mathausen camp and his visit to Auschwitz. “Indirectly, I knew from Hitler that he was planning to annihilate the Jewish people. He said it quite often. But I had no direct knowledge until ’44.” Seeking to garner some sympathy, he says, “If ever I can get rid of the guilt, and quite often I was thinking that I never shall get rid of it, that this burden will ever last with me.”

Albert Speer is profiled in new documentary built around revelatory footage

Birkin might want to give Speer the benefit of the doubt to some degree, but it’s hard for viewers to see anything but a twisted man who lacks empathy and compassion for his fellow human being, lording his sense of superiority over all others, trying to skirt his responsibilities during the war and rewrite history — a project that cannot help but make one reflect on the way America is these days when it comes to slavery, remembering the Holocaust, removing public statues of the founding fathers, tearing apart immigrant families at the border, and changing textbooks to present partisan views of the nation’s past.

Explaining one of Kubrick’s arguments, Birkin (The Name of the Rose, The Cement Garden) says the director told him, “I would find it very difficult to do the film if your character, the Speer in the film, you still made out that he didn’t know what was going on.” Speer just wanted a normal life, reveling in his being called “the good Nazi,” but as Lapa’s film shows, there is not a whole lot of good in him.

Winner of the Israeli Oscar for Best Documentary, Speer Goes to Hollywood is a chilling work that gets into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s most terrifying figures. Lapa and producer Tomer Eliav will be at Film Forum for the 7:00 shows on October 29 and 30 for Q&As that will dig even deeper into this extraordinary story.

DANCING FUTURES: MAY I DANCE ON YOUR SCREEN? LIVE Q&A

Who: Rourou Ye, Wendy Perron
What: Virtual Q&A about online exhibition
Where: digitaldance.space
When: Thursday, October 28, free with RSVP, 7:30
Why: “When I returned to the dance studio again in April 2021, I felt weird,” multidisciplinary artist Rourou Ye said about working during the pandemic. “The studio was empty. Not only because there was no one else there but because it also lacked the characteristics and stories inherent to one’s surroundings. What can I do with this space? There was nothing I could play with, and it made me the center of attention. I was motionless. So I went back home to create dances through video.” On October 28 at 7:30, the Chinese-born, US-based artist, who incorporates dance, shadow puppetry, everyday objects, and multimedia technology into works that defy reality, will discuss her process with teacher, writer, dancer, choreographer, and Dance magazine editor at large Wendy Perron over Zoom.

They will be delving into Ye’s online exhibition, “May I Dance on Your Screen?,” which continues through December 31 with such dance films as Daydreaming (“How can I duplicate myself so I can have a dance companion?”), Dis/Placed, (“How can I appear in my collaborator’s space even though I’m physically in another location?”), and I Followed the Moon to the River, My Far-Flung Home (“It’s been so long since I’ve been home . . .”). The program is part of the seventh annual Dancing Futures: Artist and Mentor Collaborative Residency, which “offers emerging Bronx-based and/or dance artists of color with resources, performance opportunities, mentorship, and documentation to strengthen and shine a spotlight on the Bronx as a creative incubator of new dance and performance work.”

THIS IS ME EATING___

Et Alia Theater’s This Is Me Eating___ has been turned into an immersive, in-person experience (photo courtesy Et Alia Theater)

THIS IS ME EATING___
The Alchemical Studios
104 West 14th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Saturday, October 30, free with advance RSVP, 4:00 – 9:00
www.etaliatheater.com

“I like my body,” Maria Müller says at the beginning of her video This Is Me Eating Those Stupid Comments. “Or at least I’ve grown to like it.” The short is one of five made by members of the two-year-old New York City–based Et Alia Theater as part of This Is Me Eating___, in which women share their personal thoughts about food and body image.

In This Is Me Eating My Taste Buddies, Ana Moioli explains, “Life can get pretty shitty. You can’t trust anyone. People betray you. But you can trust food. Even in the darkest times, food will always be there for you. Now, what if, suddenly, you weren’t there for food anymore?” The online project, which was an official selection of the NYC Indie Theatre Film Festival, also features Giorgia Valenti’s This Is Me Eating My Eating Disorder, Luísa Galatti’s This Is Me Eating My Weight, and Deniz Bulat’s This Is Me Eating Alone Thinking About Eating Together in addition to public submissions from around the world, which you can watch here.

Et Alia, which “strives to foster an accepting community that provides a safe space where people can take risks, push themselves outside of their comfort zones, and collide with an array of international voices which may be culturally unfamiliar,” is now presenting a live version of This Is Me Eating___, taking place October 30 at the Alchemical Studios on West Fourteenth St. There will be four forty-five-minute cycles, starting at 4:00, followed by an open discussion at 8:00. The immersive sessions, directed by Debora Balardini, designed by Dave Morrissey, and conceived by Valenti after Moioli received a City Artist Corps Grant, combine projection, sound, and movement that expand off the videos but are wholly new. Admission is limited to twenty to twenty-five audience members per cycle as people are encouraged to consider how they would fill in the blank in the title; among the virtual submissions were Thais Fernandes’s This Is Me Eating My Anxiety, Ana Carolina’s This Is Me Eating the Time We (Don’t) Have, Bianca Waechter’s This Is Me Eating My Anger, Kendall DuPre’s This Is Me Eating My Words, and Bruna da Matta’s This Is Me Eating and Being Eaten.

“Come ready to be part of these women’s inner and outer explorations of their eating habits, traditions, and mental reflections,” co-artistic director Valenti said in a statement. “Come ready to feel part of a creative process and absorb this global process. You might just discover you are not so alone.”

Et Alia has previously staged Hasnain Shaikh’s Running in Place at Dixon Place, Müller’s On How to Be a Monster at Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò and the Tank, and None of the Above at Rattlestick’s Global Forms Theater Festival. “Do you eat for pleasure or survival?” Galatti asks in This Is Me Eating My Weight. The same can be asked about live theater, especially as we come out of a pandemic lockdown.