5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Quarantine Body will conclude performance series on October 24 (photo by Bones)
5 INDICES ON A TORTURED BODY
Bronx Museum
1040 Grand Concourse
September 8 – October 24, free with advance RSVP
718-681-6000 www.bronxmuseum.org
Since July, the Bronx Museum of the Arts has been hosting “5 Indices on a Tortured Body,” a series of five live performances held in conjunction with the excellent exhibition “Wardell Milan: Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good to You.” The small but powerful show by Harlem-based artist Wardell Milan, continuing through October 24, is part of the institution’s special fiftieth anniversary programming, focusing on social justice. “Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good to You” consists of collages, photographs, and works on paper that address white supremacy and ask the question “What do terrorists do when they’re not terrorizing?” One end of the exhibit contains a ritual room inspired by the Rothko Chapel in Houston; for “5 Indices on a Tortured Body,” Milan is collaborating with Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Zachary Tye Richardson and sculptor and designer Billy Ray Morgan to present the live events, which explore the disenfranchised and marginalized in search of a place of refuge. “The Chapel of Five Indices serves as a ‘Safe Space’ for these tortured bodies — interlinked through histories of violence, to be affirmed and celebrated,” Milan explains in a museum brochure. “Within this chapel, these irrepressible bodies cannot be flattened but must be reckoned with.” Below is the remaining schedule (“The Black Male Body” had its last performance September 4, with Richardson and Milan, written by Casey Gerald); admission is free with advance RSVP.
Wednesday, September 8 5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Female Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, Catherine Fisher, and Trinity Dawn Bobo, written by Fisher, 6:00
Saturday, September 25 5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Trans Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, B. Hawk Snipes, and Mae Eskenazi, written by Snipes and Richardson, 2:00
Wednesday, October 13 5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Migrant Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, DJ Chappel, and Brittany Bringuez, written by Jabu Ndlovu, 6:00
Sunday, October 24 5 Indices on a Tortured Body: The Quarantine Body, with Zachary Tye Richardson, written by Noah Wertheimer, 2:00
“Born in Flames: Feminist Futures,” features dazzling work by Chitra Ganesh, Saya Woolfalk, Huma Bhabha, and others (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Also on view at the Bronx Museum, through September 26, is the phenomenal “Born in Flames: Feminist Futures,” inspired by Lizzie Borden’s seminal 1983 underground classic film, Born in Flames, which is shown on a loop along with recent works by Caitlin Cherry, Chitra Ganesh, Clarissa Tossin, Firelei Baez, Huma Bhabha, Maria Berrio, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Rose B. Simpson, Saya Woolfalk, Sin Wai Kin (fka Victoria Sin), Shoshanna Weinberger, Tourmaline, and Wangechi Mutu.
Unauthorized “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?” exhibit is selling out fast (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
BANKSY: GENIUS OR VANDAL?
526 Sixth Ave. at West Fourteenth St.
Wednesday – Monday through November 28, children $19.90, adults $29.50 ($5 additional for VIP) banksyexpo.com online slideshow
“There’s no such thing as good publicity,” Banksy wrote on a wall in a lot on West Broadway and McDougal in October 2008, accompanied by an image of a giant rat whitewashing over an ad for a Fox television show. The mysterious British artist and activist was in New York City for the opening of his free, immersive exhibition “The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill,” consisting of animatronic animals that were not available as either pets or meat.
There has not been a lot of good publicity for “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?,” an unauthorized exhibition of screenprints, photographs, and only a handful of original works by Banksy, one of three such traveling shows. (The others are “The Art of Banksy: ‘Without Limits’” and “The Art of Banksy: Unauthorized Private Collection.”) When told about the Moscow edition of one of the exhibits, he posted online, “What the hell is that? I wish I could find it funny. What’s the opposite of LOL? You know it’s got nothing to do with me, right? I don’t charge people to see my art unless there’s a fairground wheel.” When asked what he was going to do about it, he slyly replied, “Hmm — not sure I’m the best person to complain about people putting up pictures without permission.” Meanwhile, the Seoul edition of “Without Limits” offered visitors refunds once it became known that most of the works in the show were reproductions.
Among the replicas at the New York show is a reproduction of Banksy’s studio, based on the 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop. Since we still don’t know who Banksy is, the exhibition has to go to extreme lengths to come up with some form of biography.
The fairground wheel the Bristol-born Banksy was referring to was one of the attractions in his massive 2015 “Dismaland Bemusement Park,” a dark reimagination of Disneyland on the Somerset seaside for which he charged a mere three pounds for entry. “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?” includes a trailer for the park and a series of photographs. (Many of the items on view have been lent by Steve Lazarides, who worked with Banksy for more than a decade.) Of course, it’s not the same as being there, which is the essential problem when staging a show of site-specific street art in a gallery, in this case a large two-floor space on the corner of West Fourteenth St. and Sixth Ave. — and charging $19.90 for children and $29.50 for adults. “Genius or Vandal?” falls somewhere in between “Beyond the Streets,” which comprised works by graffiti artists hung on walls and standing on plinths, and the two immersive van Gogh experiences, which turned Vincent’s life and paintings into an Instagram-friendly fiasco.
Divided into thematic sections, “Genius or Vandal?” explores some of Banksy’s most famous pieces, which take on consumerism, police brutality, government surveillance, the health-care system, immigration, the royals, art history, and the art market. Among the images on display are Banksquiat, a rebuke of a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibit about which Banksy wrote, “Major new Basquiat show opens at the Barbican — a place that is normally very keen to clean any graffiti from its walls”; Golf Sale, an image of a man holding up a “Golf Sale” sign in front of three tanks, referencing the individual famously refusing to move as tanks made their way through Tiananmen Square; Napalm, which brings together Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald holding hands with “Napalm Girl” Phan Thi Kim Phuc in the center; several of Banksy’s rats, declaring, “Get Out While You Can,” “If Graffiti Changed Anything It Would Be Illegal,” and “Welcome to Hell!”; and Pulp Fiction, in which the John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson characters from the Quentin Tarantino film hold bananas instead of guns.
I have to admit that even with all my misgivings with the exhibit, I enjoyed seeing such originals as Welcome, a welcome mat made out of material from life jackets; Smiley Copper, a panel showing a heavily armed police officer with a yellow smiley face; and Grappling Hook, Banksy’s unique version of the crucifixion.
Exhibit features the words and images of mysterious British street artist and activist Banksy (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
There is also video of Girl with a Balloon shredding itself after being auctioned off for more than one million dollars in 2018 (which is widely available online); the resulting work, retitled Love Is in the Bin, is expected to be sold for more than five million at an October auction. For an additional five bucks, you can take a ten-minute virtual reality tour through suburban British streets, where numerous Banksy works suddenly appear as you fight off nausea. In an enclosed room, dozens of images are projected onto four walls, immersing you in Banksy’s oeuvre. And you can record yourself on live CCTV; Banksy might have been pointing out the fascist nature of video surveillance, asking, “What are you looking at?,” but now you can add footage of yourself directly to social media.
The mostly inane wall text and audioguide do the exhibition no favors. In discussing the 2011 Los Angeles wall piece Fire Starter, in which Charlie Brown is an arsonist, cigarette dangling from his mouth, the text defines the round-faced boy as “the protagonist of the animated film A Boy Named Charlie Brown.” Delving into Banksy’s fascination with primates, as in Monkey Parliament,Monkey Queen, and Laugh Now (in which a monkey wears overalls that proclaim, “Laugh now but one day we’ll be in charge”), the text notes that “the imagery is also well documented in cinematography. . . . [An] iconic film is Planet of the Apes by Tim Burton. This film tells us about a world in which monkeys have evolved so much so that they have enslaved humans.” And in discussing No Ball Games, in which two children are playing with a red sign that says “No Ball Games,” the text criticizes a previous unauthorized exhibition by pointing out, “Banksy had nothing to do with this company, nor with the exhibition that was held. Those are the ones who should be considered real vandals!”
Police brutality is one of several Banksy themes explored in exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
In many ways, all you need to know about the exhibition — which is unlikely to attract anyone who believes Banksy is in fact a vandal, making the title somewhat moot — is at the beginning and end. The show opens with a replica of Pasquino, a fifteenth-century Roman “talking statue” that was a precursor to political street art; it bears no relationship to Banksy or his work. And, in an ironic twist, you cannot exit through the gift shop, because there is none. Since “Banksy: Genius or Vandal?” is unauthorized, the creators don’t have any legal rights to the images they could otherwise plaster on hats, T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc., although you do get a poster with VIP admission.
Nonetheless, the narration does seem to be obsessed with Banksy’s “GrossDomesticProduct” temporary installation and online store, where you can purchase reproductions of some of the items in the New York show but includes the following warning: “The artist would like to make it clear that he continues to encourage the copying, borrowing, and uncredited use of his imagery for amusement, activism, and education purposes. Feel free to make merch for your own personal entertainment and nonprofit activism for good causes. However, selling reproductions, creating your own line of merchandise, and fraudulently misrepresenting knock-off Banksy products as ‘official’ is illegal, obviously a bit wrong, and may result in legal action. In the event of prosecution all funds will be donated to charity.”
STREB’s August performance at Jacob’s Pillow is streaming for free through September 16 (photos by Christopher Duggan and Jamie Kraus, courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow)
In July 2020, STREB Extreme Action shared Best Zoom Dance (with Martha Graham Dance Company) in twi-ny’s Pandemic Awards for Body Grammar, an inventive way to utilize dancers’ body parts to play with ideas of community and movement online, especially for a troupe used to working with unique action machines that often place the performers in physical danger. The Brooklyn-based company, founded in 1985 by Elizabeth Streb, maintained a continuous virtual presence during the lockdown, but you can now catch the troupe in person when they perform five outdoor shows September 17-19 at Manhattan West. (Admission is free with advance RSVP.)
The bill includes Molinette, in which three STREB action heroes have their feet affixed to a twenty-foot-high horizontal swivel pipe designed by Noe España, commissioned for the 2019 reopening of Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris; Add, a 1983 solo piece in which the dancer must stay within a cross taped to the floor; Plateshift, featuring six action heroes on a sprung floor that incorporates centrifugal force; and the world premiere of Kaleidoscope, in which eight action heroes are fastened to LERU (London Eye Rehearsal Unit), a solid steel circle that has them defying gravity, a STREB tradition.
To get in the mood, you must check out STREB’s return to Jacob’s Pillow last month after twenty years, streaming for free through September 16. The show consists of twelve repertory works from 1978 to 2006, performed on the outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage in front of a matinee audience by Jackie Carlson, Daniel Rysak, Tyler DuBoys, Justin Ross, Kairis Daniels, Luciany Germán, Leonardo Girón Torres, and associate artistic director Cassandre Joseph, wearing tight-fitting blue superhero costumes. The technical direction is by company emcee and DJ Zaire Baptiste, who knows how to rile up a crowd.
It shows the range of Streb’s choreography and her spirited use of existing and invented objects that often put the action heroes in danger, an astonishing melding of acrobatics, gymnastics, modern dance, and circuslike peril set to original music by technoaxe and compilations produced by Voodo Fé and Freshbeatz. Streb introduces each work with a quote from a review of the piece (from the Village Voice, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Examiner, and the New York Times) and a snippet about where the idea originated.
It begins with 2006’s Tip, in which seven dancers move precariously on a tipping machine, a twelve-feet-in-diameter wheel cut in half, able to achieve complete verticality. Carlson twirls a wooden dowel like a baton in 1978’s Pole Vaults, Rysak brandishes a rope in 1983’s Whiplash, Carlson, Rysak, Daniels, and Germán toss around a heavy twelve-foot-long, three-inch-wide dowel in 1990’s Log, Daniels is trapped in a box modeled for Streb’s size in 1985’s Little Ease, Germán plays with a hula hoop in 1983’s Target, Joseph and Ross turn a long dowel into a third dancer in 1992’s Link, the troupe pays homage to the Three Stooges and Buster Keaton with a long dowel and a ramp with a cut-out window in 2002’s Buster, and the company does miraculous things with a pair of rectangular doorlike plywood slabs in 1984’s Surface.
There are also two brief pieces with no props, Ross honoring Merce Cunningham in 1978’s 7′ 43″ and DuBoys re-creating Streb’s 1983 solo, Add, which she remembers as being “the most painful two minutes of my life.” The show concludes in a big way with 2003’s breathtaking Air, in which all eight action heroes jump off a trampoline, landing on a large mat over and over again. As with so many of Streb’s works, you can’t help but wait for disaster to occur, but it never does, at least not in the numerous times I’ve been fortunate to see the endlessly brave and talented troupe perform, at such diverse locations as Park Ave. Armory, Gansevoort Plaza, and the World Financial Center as well as in the documentaries Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity and One Extraordinary Day. Be sure to stick around for the postshow talk with Streb, Joseph, and Baptiste, moderated by Pillow scholar-in-residence Maura Keefe.
LOUISE BOURGEOIS, FREUD’S DAUGHTER
The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday – Monday through September 12, $12-$18 (free on Saturdays)
212-423-3200 thejewishmuseum.org
To paraphrase something Dr. Sigmund Freud most likely never said, sometimes a white marble penis is just a white marble penis. In the exhibition “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter,” continuing at the Jewish Museum through September 12, curator Philip Larratt-Smith attempts to explore the French-American artist’s work through a psychoanalytic lens based on her thirty-three years of analysis with Freud disciple Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, beginning in 1952, shortly after the death of her father. The exhibit reverses the standard setup; most of the fifty pieces by Bourgeois are in vitrines, while excerpts from her extensive notes — from personal thoughts to dream diaries — are framed and hanging on the walls. Above the facsimiles and original sheets are dual quotes from Bourgeois and Freud.
“Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings profoundly recalibrate our understanding of her artistic trajectory and motivational impulses,” Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois’s literary archivist, said in a statement. “They do not explain or demystify her art but rather represent a freestanding corpus of writing that display her unusual literary gifts and underline her enduring engagement with analysis. They highlight the centrality of her Oedipal deadlock as the traumatic kernel of her psychic organization. And they complicate the narrative of early childhood trauma which the artist herself fostered, encouraging instead a more nuanced appreciation of this relationship which she often spoke about.”
Bourgeois’s writings are extraordinary. “The fear of success is a misconception of the fear of responsibility. Perhaps fear of men. Refusal to accept to grow up / Refusal to accept reality / Refusal to accept what I am / Refusal to accept my lot / Refusal to look at oneself to measure, judge / Refusal to grow up. Refusal to accept being a woman. I accept on my own terms,” one begins. “Guilt is the Product of envy,” she writes in another. “There is essentially no difference between the Penis envy and the Oedipus complex . . . it is not him that I love it is what he has — it is not him that I love it is his money — The only thing that gives me hope is that millions of people women have suffered from this mystery.” And in a screed against her father and the family’s British au pair, Sadie Gordon Richmond, who became her father’s mistress (and was only six years older than Louise), Bourgeois declares, “I can prove that he loves me / that he loves me more than anybody else / that his wife is unbearable / that he doesn’t love her / that I deserve to be loved / that I deserve him more than Sadie does / that Sadie loves me / that Sadie loves him / that Sadie doesn’t want him any longer / so he is free / so there is hope.” You can listen to actress Rachel Weisz reading eighteen of Bourgeois’s selected writings here.
The works on view are equally extraordinary. Couple III entwines two people in fabric and leather, one with a steel prosthetic arm. (“The prosthesis recalls a theme that was important to Louise. Louise saw herself as a survivor but also as radically incomplete,” Larratt-Smith says on the audioguide.) Hysterical is a small sculpture of a nude woman with three heads looking off in different directions. The tomblike Venthouse (Cupping Jar) features two slabs of dark marble, with glass cupping jars on the top one, lit with lights from within, a manifestation of the procedure Louise would perform on her mother to help ease her back pain. (Bourgeois’s mother, Joséphine, died in 1932 when Louise was twenty.) The Destruction of the Father is a large tableaux in a wall, bathed in hellish bloodred lighting, that is essentially the aftermath of a cannibalistic feast, made in 1974, a year after the death of Bourgeois’s husband, Robert Goldwater, at the age of sixty-five. The hanging sculpture Janus Fleuri is a bronze melding of male and female genitalia.
The centerpiece of the show is Passage Dangereux, the largest of Bourgeois’s Cells, a room-size installation that explores memory and desire, with dozens of elements representing sex and death incorporating all five senses, a journey into deep-seated trauma locked behind the bars of a physical and psychological prison. And finally, there’s Sleep II, a 1967 white marble sculpture that strongly resembles the top of an enormous penis, above which hangs Fillette (Sweeter Version), a biomorphic latex-over-plaster depiction of genitalia about which Bourgeois said, “From a sexual point of view I consider the masculine attributes to be extremely delicate. They’re objects that the woman, myself, must protect.” She was famously photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe carrying the sculpture in her right arm, like a treasured pet.
“Life is so funny. Life is so ridiculous,” Bourgeois once said. Throughout her life and career, she revealed a dry sense of humor and had fun with how she was categorized as an artist and a person. “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter” delves into the impact decades of psychoanalysis had on her and her art, particularly exposing her writings that emerged from deep inside her soul. But don’t get too caught up in trying to find answers for all her words and images. “Her writings reveal the extent to which Freudian concepts and practices — whether directly or indirectly, whether through his own writings, those of his followers, or Bourgeois’s longstanding analysis — informed and enriched her art making,” Larratt-Smith argues. “To call Bourgeois ‘Freud’s daughter’ is thus to invoke filiation and resistance, likeness and dissent, and to highlight the central importance of psychoanalysis in the making of her mysterious and idiosyncratic oeuvre.” And sometimes a white marble penis is just a white marble penis.
Riz Ahmed plays a rapper searching for his identity in Mogul Mowgli
MOGUL MOWGLI (Bassam Tariq, 2020)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, September 3
212-727-8110 filmforum.org
There may be no more riveting, multidimensional actor, rapper, and activist working today than Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Riz Ahmed. Born and raised in London in a British Pakistani family, Ahmed rose to prominence as a suspected murderer in the HBO series The Night Of and made a major breakthrough playing a drummer who suddenly loses his hearing in the Academy Award–nominated Sound of Metal. For more than fifteen years, Ahmed has been releasing music, with his band, Swet Shop Boys (as Riz MC, with Heems), and as a solo act. It all comes together in his latest film, Mogul Mowgli, which opens September 3 at Film Forum.
Ahmed stars in and cowrote the tense drama with Karachi-born American director Bassam Tariq. Ahmed plays Zaheer, a rapper who goes by the name Zed and has just scored a huge gig opening for a popular rapper. But shortly before the tour kicks off, he gets hit with a baffling debilitating illness. With his career in jeopardy, he battles his hardworking religious father, Bashir (Alyy Khan); receives unconditional tenderness from his caring mother, Nasra (Sudha Bhuchar); is criticized by his brother, Bilal (musician, poet, and activist Hussain Manawer); reaches out to an ex-girlfriend, Bina (Aiysha Hart); argues with his friend and manager, Vaseem (Anjana Vasan); and is stupefied by the rising success of fellow rapper RPG (Nabhaan Rizwan), whose silly video “Pussy Fried Chicken” has gone viral.
All the while, Zed is haunted by memories from his childhood and hallucinations of a mysterious figure known as Toba Tek Singh (Jeff Mirza), whose face is covered by a ritual crown of rows of colorful fabric flowers. “People pay attention,” Toba Tek Singh tells him. “They drew a line in the sand. India and Pakistan. East and West. Us and them. I was born from this rupture. And I am the sickness from this separation. I am Toba Tek Singh!” The name refers to a city in Punjab and the title of a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, about the troubles between India and Pakistan and a “Sikh lunatic” with a “frightening appearance” who “was a harmless fellow.” Ahmed also has a song called “Toba Tek Singh” on his March 2020 album, The Long Goodbye, in which he declares, “She wanna kick me out / but I’m still locked in / What’s my fucking name? / Toba Tek Singh.”
Riz Ahmed is a force to be reckoned with in Bassam Tariq’s debut narrative feature
Named after the Swet Shop Boys’ 2016 song “Half Moghul Half Mowgli,”Mogul Mowgli is a gripping film that deals with various dichotomies as laid out by Toba Tek Singh as Zed tries to find his place in a world that keeps letting him down. “The song’s about being torn between different sides of your identity, being descended from moguls and rich heritage, but living as Mowgli, lost in the urban jungle far away from the village that was once home,” Ahmed says in the film’s production notes. “That’s our experience in diaspora.”
In a concert scene, Zed raps, “Legacies outlive love,” which is at the center of his search for personal meaning, a concept he also explored in his arresting one-man show The Long Goodbye: Online Edition, livestreamed by BAM and the Manchester International Festival last December. (“I don’t belong here,” he says in the piece.) In addition, Ahmed gave a 2017 speech to the House of Commons on the importance of diversity and representation and has written about being typecast as a terrorist and profiled at airports.
Ahmed (Nightcrawler,) and Tariq (These Birds Walk,Ghosts of Sugar Land), in his debut narrative feature, don’t make room for a lot of laughs in Mogul Mowgli, which passes the five-part Riz Test evaluating Muslim stereotypes in film and on television. It’s a powerful, personal work, made all the more poignant by Ahmed’s semiautobiographical elements and Tariq’s background as a documentary filmmaker. Ahmed is a force to be reckoned with; Anika Summerson’s camera can’t get enough of him, from his dark, penetrating eyes to his shuffling bare feet. Ahmed delivers a monumental performance that avoids clichés as it blazes across the screen. The 6:45 show at Film Forum on September 3 will be followed by a Q&A with Tariq in person and Ahmed on Zoom, moderated by filmmaker, critic, and curator Farihah Zaman; Tariq will also be at the 6:45 show on September 4 (moderated by Oscar nominee Shaka King) and the 4:40 screening on September 5.
The Chocolate Genius will lead an interactive demonstration at MAD in conjunction with new chocolate bar inspired by Fisher Dollhouse (photo courtesy Museum of Arts & Design)
Who: Paul Joachim, the Chocolate Genius What: Chocolate-making demonstration and hands-on activity Where:Museum of Arts & Design, 2 Columbus Circle When: Saturday, September 4, free with museum admission of $12-$18, noon–2:00 Why: Paul Joachim, the Florida-based artist known as the Chocolate Genius, has a simple but critical mission: “to transform one billion people or more through chocolate.” Joachim believes that “chocolate creates a visceral, personal response in everyone. It’s a bridge between classes, gender, religion, races — all labels of culture. In other words, chocolate creates a deep human connection — often missing in our divisive world.” Joachim will increase that deep human connection on September 4 when he he will lead an in-person, interactive chocolate-making demonstration at the Museum of Arts & Design, launching a new chocolate bar in conjunction with the exhibition “The Fisher Dollhouse: A Venetian Palazzo in Miniature.”
Chocolate demo takes place in Fisher Dollhouse exhibit at MAD (photo by Jenna Bascom)
On view through September 26, the dollhouse was created by New York–based arts patron and collector Joanna Fisher during the pandemic as a place of refuge; it was designed and built by dozens of craftspersons, with miniature works of art by Dustin Yellin, Ryan McGinness, Hunt Slonem, and others. On September 4 at noon, Joachim will show visitors how to make silicone molds, cast edible works, and temper chocolate at home, along with discussing the history of chocolate and cacao. The milk chocolate bars feature the facade of the dollhouse on their front. “When most people think of chocolate, it’s simply a chocolate bar,” Joachim’s mission statement continues. “I have the gift of transforming chocolate into a mystifying, inspirational experience, live and in front of audience’s eyes. Inspiring them with joy, awe, and love, disrupting the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible within each viewer’s point of view and own life.” Entry to this “Art Alive” presentation is free with museum admission. Also on view at MAD are “Craft Front & Center,” “Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times,” “Beth Lipman: Collective Elegy,” and “45 Stories in Jewelry: 1947 to Now.”
Stephanie Osin-Cohen’s set design is a highlight of new play at Rattlestick (photo by Andrew Soria)
NI MI MADRE
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
224 Waverly Pl. between Eleventh & Perry Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 19, $40
866-811-4111 www.rattlestick.org
“Gender’s confusing in our family,” Bete (pronounced “BET-chi”) says in Arturo Luís Soria’s one-person show, Ni Mi Madre, performed live at Rattlestick and streaming online through September 19. In the sixty-minute play, writer-star Soria portrays his domineering Brazilian mother, zeroing in on their complicated relationship.
Ni Mi Madre, which means “not (or “nor”) my mother,” begins with Soria, in a long white gown (by Haydee Zelideth) that bares his hirsute chest, walking onstage carrying a row of ritual candles and flowers. He puts the objects down carefully and pulls the top of the dress over his chest and voilà, he is now his mother. He spends the remainder of the show acting and speaking like her as she discusses life and love, family and children, with a particular focus on her queer Latino son, Arturo.
“You know, he had the right idea going gay,” she says. “I just don’t think he executed it properly, because when he came out . . . He. Came. Out! I mean, it was like the Fourth of July on New Year’s, okay. Then he tells me he’s not just gay, he’s bisexual. So I say, ‘Listen, bisexuals are greedy, okay. The world is gay and it’s straight; it’s black and it’s white; it’s in and it’s out, so figure it out.’”
Arturo Luís Soria portrays his mother in one-person show (photo by Andrew Soria)
Elegant and proud, Bete talks about her three marriages, to Inebriated Jew, Ecuadorian Commie, and Gay Dominican; how it’s okay for her to beat her children; her dedication to Meryl Streep; and her own difficult mother. “My mother never wanted to be a mother. Never,” she explains. “You only get one mom. And my mother didn’t want me.” However, she’s not seeking sympathy but instead defends her treatment of her children.
“My kids don’t know how lucky they are to have a mother like me. I am their inspiration and they don’t even know it and I went through a lot of trouble to raise them,” she says. “I was a good mother to them. And I never abandoned them nor shipped them off to boarding school. I thought about it. Arturo was such a maniac as a kid I used to pray to God that he would go to sleep and not wake up until college, but those were only empty prayers. Kind of. Arturo thinks I was a bad mother to him. I wasn’t bad. He was a fuckin’ lunatic.” She might be harshly critical of him, but she also loves and supports him. “He’s following his dreams,” she adds. “He’s doing what I always wanted but never could because I didn’t have a mother like me.’
The night I saw the show, it was followed by a talkback with Soria and director Danilo Gambini (The Swallow and the Tomcat,An Iliad), a native Brazilian who has been working with Soria on the play since their Yale days going back to 2017 (in addition to other collaborations); Soria began writing Ni Mi Madre in 2008, and it has gone through numerous iterations before opening in New York City on August 25, when Soria’s mother was present in the audience. The postshow discussion lent further insight into mother and son, especially how the latter came to better understand and humanize the former through forgiveness and love as the play developed and he grew in the role. (There will be a free Zoom community conversation with Soria, Gambini, and Sam Morreale on September 2 at 5:00, and if you bring your own mother to the play, you can use code HIMOM to get her in for free September 2-6.)
The show, which features songs by Cher, Cyndi Lauper, Gloria Estefan, and Maria Bethania, lip-synced in drag finery by Soria, takes place on Stephanie Osin-Cohen’s gorgeous stage, a kind of shrine room with ritual objects, including candles galore, a bedecked vanity, and a large depiction of Iemanjá, the Umbanda (Candomblé) goddess of the sea, protector of fishermen and pregnant women — and who looks suspiciously like Cher. The floor is patterned like an Ipanema sidewalk of twisting black-and-white designs in the style of Roberto Burle Marx, which was highlighted in 2019 at the New York Botanical Garden. The walls are “persuasive papaya,” as Bete believes that “you have to paint the colors of your walls something that has to do with suggestive foods.” Krista Smith’s lighting shines brightly on Soria and casts long shadows on either side of the stage in one scene when Bete confronts her own parents.
Bold and barefoot, Soria (The Inheritance,Hit the Wall) fully inhabits the character of his mother. Too many of the lines fall flat and it can feel a bit repetitive even at only an hour, but Ni Mi Madre is a potent and poignant observation of first-generation immigrants, queer Latinidad, and the importance of family, despite the headaches.
“No matter how hard I try / You keep pushing me aside / And I can’t break through / There’s no talking to you,” Cher sings in “Believe,” which Bete mistakenly thinks is by Madonna. With Ni Mi Madre, Soria has taken a very public platform and touching way to break through to his mother.
