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THE MACALUSO SISTERS

Five siblings face a tragedy they cannot recover from in The Macaluso Sisters

THE MACALUSO SISTERS (Emma Dante, 2020)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, August 6
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Emma Dante’s The Macaluso Sisters is a heart-wrenching tale that follows seventy years in the lives of five sisters in Palermo, Sicily, after they endure a horrific tragedy. The film begins in 1985, as the orphaned siblings prepare for a day at the beach, which they have to sneak onto because they can’t afford the admission fee. It is a chance for them to enjoy themselves and be free of their problems for an afternoon, much like the pastel-painted pigeons they raise and rent out for special occasions, from weddings to funerals. The oldest, eighteen-year-old Maria (played first by Eleonora De Luca, then Simona Malato), uses the escape to secretly share kisses with a young woman she is in love with as they set up an outdoor screening of Back to the Future.

Pinuccia (Anita Pomario, Donatella Finocchiaro, Ileana Rigano) spends much of her time in front of mirrors, putting on makeup and getting ready to attract men. Lia (Susanna Piraino, Serena Barone, Maria Rosaria Alati) is the most passionate and impulsive member of the family. Katia (Alissa Maria Orlando, Laura Giordani, Rosalba Bologna) is the chubby, imaginative one who embraces fantasy. And Antonella (Viola Pusateri) is the beloved baby of the close-knit group, cute and adorable, whom the rest dote over. Following a terrible accident, the four remaining sisters try to go on with their lives, but they are haunted by loss, literally and figuratively, some damaged beyond repair as the decades pass.

Written by Dante, Elena Stancanelli, and Giorgio Vasta based on Dante’s play Le sorelle Macaluso, the award-winning film is centered around the sisters’ home, which grows more ramshackle over time, representing their deteriorating psychological state. Dante (Via Castellana Bandiera, mPalermu) often trains the camera on the building’s yellowing facade, four floors with many windows, tiny terraces, and a rooftop extension where the pigeons live. Just like the birds always return, so do the surviving sisters, the sadness enveloping them, pain evident in their vacant eyes and aging bodies.

Dante has described the five siblings as parts of the same being, with Maria the brain, Pinuccia the skin, Lia the heart, Katia the stomach, and Antonella the lungs, each one necessary to maintain the whole; take away any single aspect and the body is in danger of failing. It is no coincidence that the middle-aged Maria works in a veterinary lab where she has to cut open animals and dispose of their internal organs, saving the heart in a plastic bag. Meanwhile, whenever the older Katia, the only one who develops some sort of life of her own and is in favor of selling the place, tries to go inside, her key won’t open the door, as if she is no longer welcome, the house aware of her intentions.

Antonella (Viola Pusateri) is the beloved youngest of the Macaluso sisters in elegiac film

The elegiac film is gorgeously photographed by Gherardo Gossi, capturing the beauty of the bright outdoors, filled with life and excitement, offset against the darkness of the family home, shadows everywhere. Occasionally one of the sisters looks through a hole in the wall they made as children, allowing them to see a sunny world that has eluded them. Throughout the film, Dante focuses on water, from the ocean to the bathtub where the young Antonella likes to play and the older Maria seeks respite.

Dante lingers on Maria more than the others; as a teenager, she dreams of becoming a dancer, her lithe, naked body alive with promise. But decades later, her once-wide eyes are tired, deep, dark circles dominating her face; as she soaks in a tub, we again see her naked body, but it lacks the vitality she previously reveled in, doomed to a different fate, not simply because of age but because she, like her sisters, have never been able to get over their loss. It’s like the fancy plate Antonella uses to feed the pigeons; when it breaks years later, Maria tries to glue it back together, but she cannot fill in all the cracks.

THE VIEWING BOOTH

Maia Levy is the unexpected subject of Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Viewing Booth

THE VIEWING BOOTH (Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, 2020)
Museum of the Moving Image, Bartos Screening Room
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
August 6-15
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

“There’s a lot for me to learn from your viewing,” Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz tells Jewish American college student Maia Levy before turning the camera on us in the ingenious documentary The Viewing Booth, running August 6-15 at the Museum of the Moving Image. The seventy-one-minute work developed out of an experiment Alexandrowicz was doing at Temple University in Philadelphia, individually filming a small group of young men and women watching internet video clips of interactions between Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip; in previous films such as The Law in These Parts and The Inner Tour — both of which will also be shown at MoMI — the Jerusalem-born Alexandrowicz has made clear his support of the Palestinians in this conflict. But along the way, his focus switched specifically to Levy, whose thoughtful, careful evaluations of the scenes and acknowledgment of her pro-Israel bias are mesmerizing. We end up seeing far more of Levy’s captivating face and exploring eyes than the videos themselves as the film challenges the viewer to rethink how they experience politically charged videos.

The film takes place in a small studio at Temple, where Levy sits in a closed-off room with a large window; Alexandrowicz mans a table with two monitors and editing equipment that he adjusts as Levy observes the videos. The director cuts between shots of Levy’s face, the videos themselves, and him watching Levy on his monitors, occasionally speaking with her. Six months later, he invites Levy back so she can watch herself watching the videos and comment on that as well. It’s absolutely gripping studying Levy as she interprets and reinterprets the videos, some of which were posted by B’Tselem, the Jerusalem-based Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, whose mission is to end the occupation; others are from unidentified sources. Alexandrowicz does not give Levy any additional details about the clips, even though he knows more about some of them, instead letting her navigate the images as if she were home by herself, surfing the internet.

In one scene, a Palestinian boy hugs an Israeli soldier who gives him food. In another, a group of young men throw rocks at someone recording them from an apartment, unclear at first who is who. In a third, an Israeli soldier snatches a young Palestinian boy and a second soldier kicks the child. The majority of the film concentrates on a longer video of a masked Israeli military unit searching the home of a Palestinian family in the middle of the night, forcing the parents to wake up the children as rifles are pointed at them. Levy scrutinizes every detail of the video, wondering if it was staged, considering what was happening just off camera, thinking the boy might be lying when he gives a wrong name that his father quickly corrects.

Levy innately understands that she brings her own personal bias and mistrust of B’Tselem to her interpretation. “I view it from an objective point,” she says. “I don’t really get my information from it. The point is, these things do happen; whether they skew the filming and everything, it still does happen, it’s still there. Yeah, they probably play a lot with it, and there is a lot of bias and things and they don’t show you the whole picture, but, I guess it’s true to some extent. That’s what it seems like.” This questioning of what is real and what isn’t is intriguing to Alexandrowicz, a documentarian whose career has been spent making nonfiction films; Levy even notes that Alexandrowicz makes choices — subjects, edits, camera angles — that impact what people see and don’t see in his work.

In his 2018 essay “50 Years of Documentation: A Brief History of the Documentation of the Israeli Occupation,” Alexandrowicz writes, “After viewing hundreds of news reports, films, and online videos about this subject, I found myself asking: What has all this documentation achieved? What has been the documentation’s role in this tragic piece of history? Visual culture scholars have long argued that images do not merely depict reality; they also perform and create reality. Then what is the relationship between the audiovisual documentation of the Israeli Occupation and the reality it claims to portray? These questions have led me to a wider inquiry about the role that documentation practices play in shaping historical, political, and social issues.” The Viewing Booth might ostensibly be about Israelis and Palestinians, but it also illuminates the great divide in America as political affiliation appears to affect how we evaluate actual footage; it seems impossible to escape from the diametrically opposed analyses of the murder of George Floyd, the BLM protests, the January 6 insurrection, and a Catholic high school student’s interaction with a Native American man at a MAGA rally.

Recognizing that many people won’t even watch videos that they presuppose will contradict their belief system, Levy offers, “I think people are scared, that they don’t watch them because they’re scared that they’re going to change their minds about it. They’re going to be, like, Wow, this is bad, and maybe I’m not so pro-Israel as I thought I would be. I think if you accept reality, then these things don’t really make or break your viewpoints. I don’t think that this can really, like . . . they can be informative to some extent, but you have to be careful.”

Alexandrowicz was inspired to make the film by Virginia Woolf’s book Three Guineas One, which grew out of a letter she was responding to about how to prevent war; she begins by discussing the visual depiction of war in newspapers and magazines. “But besides these pictures of other people’s lives and minds — these biographies and histories — there are also other pictures — pictures of actual facts; photographs. Photographs, of course, are not arguments addressed to the reason; they are simply statements of fact addressed to the eye. But in that very simplicity there may be some help. Let us see then whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things.” As we’ve learned over these last few years, we most often see and feel what we want to see and feel despite watching the same exact nonfiction footage.

The Israeli title of The Viewing Booth is The Mirror, a much more apt name, as we put ourselves in Levy’s position, with all our inherent biases and fears, and hopefully look at ourselves to reflect on how we watch such videos, which generally come to us through social media algorithms that keep us in our preferred bubbles or from friends who think as we do, reinforcing our beliefs. “You are the viewer that I’ve been making these films for,” Alexandrowicz tells Levy. In the case of The Viewing Booth, that is not quite true; we are all the viewers he has made this film for.

Alexandrowicz will be at MoMI for a live conversation with film critic Alissa Wilkinson following the 7:00 screening on August 6, and he will be back for the 5:00 screening on August 8 with Levy. The Viewing Booth might not change your belief system, but it will change the way you experience online nonfiction video.

THE PARIS THEATER GRAND REOPENING

Radha Blank’s Netflix hit The 40-Year-Old Version opens the renovated Paris Theater

THE PARIS THEATER
4 West Fifty-Eighth St. at Fifth Ave.
Reopens August 6
www.paristheaternyc.com

To slightly misquote Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca, “We’ll always have the Paris.” Following the pandemic lockdown and a major renovation, the Paris Theater, New York City’s historic single-screen cinema, is officially reopening on August 6 with special programming. The longest-running arthouse in the Big Apple has been presenting films since 1948, when it showed Jean Delannoy’s La Symphonie pastorale; over the years it has screened classic works by such international auteurs as Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Marcel Pagnol, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Demy, Agnieszka Holland, and Bernardo Bertolucci.

The Arte Moderne theater was purchased by Netflix in November 2019 to keep it from closing; to celebrate its reopening, the Paris will be hosting the New York City theatrical premiere of Radha Blank’s Netflix hit, The Forty-Year-Old Version, the Williamsburg native’s breakthrough autobiographical film about a struggling playwright that she wrote, directed, produced, and stars in, accompanied by a selection of hip-hop videos.

“I made Forty-Year-Old Version in 35mm black and white in the spirit of the many great films that informed my love of cinema” Blank said in a statement. “I’m excited to show the film in 35mm as intended and alongside potent films by fearless filmmakers who inspired my development as a storyteller and expanded my vision of what’s possible in the landscape of cinema. That Forty-Year-Old Version gets to screen alongside them at the Paris Theater, a New York beacon for cinema, makes it all the more special.”

Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon will help open the doors of the renovated Paris Theater

In conjunction with the August 6-12 run of her film, Blank, who will be on hand to talk about the movie at the 8:00 screening on opening night, has selected nine repertory works that have had an impact on her, a stellar collection that ranges from John Cassavetes’s Shadows, Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, and Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman to Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, Nick Castle’s Tap, and Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail. A screening of the late Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground will be followed by a discussion with Collins’s daughter, Nina Collins, while there will be a video conversation with Robert Townsend after a showing of his 1987 smash, Hollywood Shuffle.

But that is only the beginning. Also on the 545-seat theater’s agenda is “The Paris Is for Lovers,” a two-week retrospective of thirty-one films chosen by master programmer David Schwartz that premiered at the Paris, reaching deep into the venue’s history. It’s a veritable crash course in cinema studies, consisting of such seminal films as Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, Bertrand Blier’s Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (with Stillman in person), the Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, Ira Deutchman’s Searching for Mr. Rugoff (with Deutchman in person), Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, Todd Haynes’s Carol (with cinematographer Ed Lachman in person), and Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle.

To slightly misquote a key conversation from Wilder’s Sabrina, the title character, portrayed by Audrey Hepburn, says to Linus (Bogart), “Maybe you should go to the Paris, Linus.” He replies, “To the Paris?” She explains, “It helped me a lot. . . . It’s for changing your outlook, for . . . for throwing open the windows and letting in . . . letting in la vie en rose.”

Vs.

VS.
Mabou Mines
August 6-8, suggested donation $10
www.maboumines.org

Founded in 1970 by JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow, Mabou Mines has presented multidisciplinary experimental works at such New York City venues as the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Kitchen, Paula Cooper Gallery, Theater for the New City, the Performing Garage, La MaMa, the Public Theater, the Skirball Center, Classic Stage, HERE Arts Center, St. Ann’s, New York Theatre Workshop, and Abrons Arts Center during its legendary, influential half-century history. Amid a pandemic lockdown, it has now turned its attention to Zoom for its latest production, Carl Hancock Rux’s virtual Vs., continuing August 6-8. The fifty-minute piece was written by Rux and directed by Mallory Catlett, the two new co-artistic directors of the East Village–based company.

Vs. channels Franz Kafka, Hélène Cixous, Audre Lorde, and James Baldwin through an absurdist lens as four figures are brought before an interrogator, answering the same repetitive bureaucratic questions with a sly didacticism and a tongue-in-cheek pedantry amid the language of rhetoric —or the rhetoric of language. The four witnesses are played by Becca Blackwell, David Thomson, Mildred Ruiz-Sapp, and Perry Jung; the audience serves as the visual component of the monotone interrogator, who is heard off camera. Beware of your Zoom background, because you will occasionally be front and center, your face and body covered by a black silhouette (unless you move), as if you are the anonymous interviewer.

Innocuous questions are answered with mini-essays that will make you feel like you’re back in grad school, except now with a sense of humor. When asked if they were born in November, the first witness testifies, “Not if we are to consider an opposition to phallogocentricism and the hegemonic ideals contained in patriarchal culture uniting theory and fantasy, challenging such discourse within the frameworks of a constitution blown up by law. Certainly not if we are to consider language as a central trope and your appropriation and adaptation of language, or challenge to, genre (as language); or the anarchic strategy of regulating forces of hegemonic and phallogocentric culture encoded in language and hierarchical oppositions or distinctions between what I am and what you are; between what is black or white, man or woman. Not if we are to ignore the elementary rubrics of binary principles which lie at the heart of most human structures.”

If you didn’t already know you were in for something different, you’ll start realizing it when the second witness gives the same exact answers as the previous one, word for word.

The third witness responds only in Spanish, giving the most emotional answers (which are translated in the chat). Asked about being born in November, they declare, “Why do you keep asking me if I was born in November? Who cares? I said I don’t know. Ay, what are you, crazy? . . . Stop asking me where I am from and when I was born; did I ask you personal questions?”

Four witnesses make their case in Mabou Mines’ virtual Vs.

Finally, the last witness, asked if they want a glass of water, responds, “God forbid, if there be a God, I prefer something other than water. Something untainted by conservatives, that would be cool. Let’s both have one. You can tell so much about a person by what zie, zim, zir, zieself, sie, sie, hir, hirs, hirself, ey, em, eir, eirs, eirself, ve, ver, vis, vers, verself, tey, ter, tem, ters, tersel, e, em, eir, eirs, emself are drinking. Whether the drinker is loved, or has loved at all. Whether the drinker is now or long ago. Whether the drinker is drinking first harvest, or near the end. Bird of prey? Predator?”

During each interrogation, digital designer Onome Ekeh fiddles with the technology, playing around with color and resolution, making the witnesses go out of focus or disappear into backgrounds, surrounding them with random objects, or creating multiple versions of them. Just as the four subjects refuse to take the questions seriously, they also won’t let their identities be clearly delineated. We learn nothing about who they are, why they are there, or what the interrogator is trying to find out, although the truth seems to be at the center of it all, whatever that is. (Am I referring to the truth or the center there? I honestly don’t know.) “The danger is you, and this council, and this hearing, and this senate, and its polity, paying too much attention to a conciliatory approach to existence,” one witness says. “The first shall go. The last shall come. Age comes. The body withers. Truth comes as itself, a dissembling.”

Throughout the show, you can watch the reactions of your fellow audience members. While I found much of the play very funny in a sarcastic, screw-authority kind of way, it appeared that I was the only one laughing. It’s certainly not a comedy, nor is it a purely academic look at an insecure future. Well, actually, it might be that. In a statement about the production, Rux, a poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, actor, director, singer, and songwriter, explains, “The last four years of American — and for that matter, global — politics has revealed repetitive yet unprecedented abject horror as it relates to historical oppression and colonialism. Vs. attempts to engage the audience in a tribunal of sociopolitical rifts; a discourse that may or may not attempt to lay blame on a nation state and that ultimately reveals the nation state to be ‘us,’ or, rather, ‘we the people.’ The questions it attempts to address are complicated and yet quite simple: What is the history of oppression? Who are the oppressed? What is the final and definitive language of freedom, justice, and liberty for all? What are our tools for human survival?”

Rux (Talk, The Baptism) is not joking around there, making important points about where we are as a culture in the twenty-first century. The same points are dealt with in the play, just not so directly. If you take it completely seriously, you might be bored with the repetition and the apparent lack of advancement of the narrative. But seek out the satirical bent to better appreciate its unique style. Otherwise, God help us all, if there is a God.

TICKET ALERT: RETURN THE MOON

Tickets for Third Rail Projects’ virtual, interactive Return the Moon go on sale August 6

Who: Third Rail Projects
What: Livestreamed interactive online production
Where: Third Rail Projects Zoom
When: August 11 – September 30, $15, $42, $67
Why: What is a company that specializes in site-specific immersive theater supposed to do during a pandemic lockdown? Brooklyn-based Third Rail Projects has come up with an answer: Return the Moon, a live, participatory Zoom presentation that begins previews August 11 for a September 8 opening. Conceived and directed by Zach Morris, the seventy-five-minute multimedia production explores remembrance and recurrence, featuring Alberto Denis, Joshua Gonzales, Justin Lynch, and Tara O’Con, with choreography by Marissa Nielsen-Pincus and the cast, sound and original music by Sean Hagerty, and visual design by Morris. “I was curious how we might create a ‘remote’ project that felt inviting and intuitive, communal and personal,” Bessie winner Morris said in a statement. “I wondered what inspiration might be found in this now ubiquitous platform that has become kind of an artifact and metaphor for the dissonance of distanced connection. I was interested in what it meant to craft a work specifically for this medium that would acknowledge and engage with its strengths, its all-too-familiar challenges, and also capitalize on the opportunities that it could afford that would be otherwise impossible in a traditional theater setting.”

Third Rail has previously taken adventurous audiences down the rabbit hole in a former parochial school in Then She Fell, behind the scenes at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater in Ghost Light, and to a beach resort in a Bushwick warehouse in The Grand Paradise. You experience Return the Moon from the confines of your own home and are encouraged, but not required, to participate in the shaping of the narrative, which deals with an old fable about the moon; in addition, afterward, you will receive a package in the mail continuing the exchange between audience and performer. Tickets go on sale August 6 but are limited to sixty per show, so act quick, because they are sure to go fast for this popular, innovative company. The standard price is $42, but you can pay it forward by contributing $67, with the difference helping subsidize $15 tickets for those who cannot afford more.

RESTART STAGES: LOOK WHO’S COMING TO DINNER / BECOMING OTHELLO / DARK DISABLED STORIES

RESTART STAGES
Lincoln Center, the Isabel and Peter Malkin Stage at Hearst Plaza
Company SBB//Stefanie Batten Bland, Look Who’s Coming to Dinner
Tuesday, August 3, free with RSVP, 7:00
Debra Ann Byrd, Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey
Wednesday, August 4, free with RSVP, 7:00
Ryan J. Haddad, Dark Disabled Stories
Thursday, August 5, free with RSVP, 7:00
www.lincolncenter.org

Lincoln Center’s ambitious Restart Stages program, welcoming back audiences with free outdoor multidisciplinary performances, continues this week with one-time-only shows by three distinct creators, available through the TodayTix lottery. On Tuesday, August 3, at 7:00, Company SBB//Stefanie Batten Bland serves up Look Who’s Coming to Dinner, a new take on Stanley Kramer’s 1967 film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The movie, which was nominated for ten Oscars and won for Best Actress and Best Original Story and Screenplay, is about an interracial couple portrayed by Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton who are celebrating their engagement by visiting her parents, a liberal couple played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn who are not exactly thrilled at first to see who their daughter will be marrying. SBB has been busy during the pandemic, presenting such works as Kolonial for BAC, This Moment for Works and Process at the Guggenheim, Unnatural Contradictions for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Mondays at Two, exploring safe spaces, isolation, racial injustice, and the coronavirus crisis, in addition to a three-week residency at the Yard on Martha’s Vineyard that culminated in the dance-theater installation Embarqued: Stories of Soil.

Debra Ann Byrd brings her one-woman show, Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey, to Restart Stages this week (photo by Christina Lane / Shakespeare and Company)

If you missed Debra Ann Byrd’s Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey at Shakespeare & Company’s Roman Garden Theatre earlier this month, you can catch it on Wednesday, August 4, at 7:00 on the Isabel and Peter Malkin Stage at Hearst Plaza at Lincoln Center. Directed by Tina Packard, the one-woman show of song and text details Byrd’s experiences as a Black woman attempting to be a classical actress, detailing a life that has included foster care, teen pregnancy, trauma, abuse, and single parenting on a path to play Othello (while also becoming the founding artistic director of the Harlem Shakespeare Festival).

In February 2021, Ryan J. Haddad’s one-man show, Hi, Are You Single?, streamed from Woolly Mammoth, where it was filmed live onstage in front of a limited, socially distanced, masked audience made up of members of the staff and crew, one of the first to do that; the bittersweet autobiographical piece follows Haddad, who has cerebral palsy and requires a walker, as he searches for love in all the wrong places. Haddad can currently be seen in “Wings and Rings,” a short film he made with set designers Emmie Finckel and Riccardo Hernández for Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon’s installation The Watering Hole at the Signature. In the ten-minute work, Haddad relives a terrifying moment from his childhood involving swimming in a pool. On Thursday, August 5, at 7:00, at Restart Stages, Haddad will premiere his latest solo show, Dark Disabled Stories, in which he discusses a crosstown bus, a bathroom stall, and Gramercy Park as he encounters strangers and confronts ableism wherever he goes.

THE CORDELIA DREAM: A PERFORMANCE ON SCREEN

Danielle Ryan and Stephen Brennan are exceptional as a bitter daughter and father in streaming revival of Marina Carr’s The Cordelia Dream

THE CORDELIA DREAM
Irish Rep Online
Daily through August 8, suggested donation $25
irishrep.org

Summer theater in New York City is dominated by outdoor Shakespeare presentations, including Shakespeare in the Parking Lot’s Two Noble Kinsmen, the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s Seize the King, the Public Theater’s Merry Wives of Windsor at the Delacorte and the Mobile Unit’s Shakespeare: Call and Response, and NY Classical’s King Lear with a happy ending.

One of the best productions is taking place indoors, but not in a theater with an audience. I wouldn’t be giving anything away if I told you that there is no happy ending in the Irish Rep’s virtual revival of Marina Carr’s The Cordelia Dream, streaming online through August 8. The brutal, relentless two-act, ninety-minute play was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and debuted in 2008 at Wilton’s Music Hall in London. Charlotte Moore and Ciarán O’Reilly of the Irish Rep, in association with casting director and producer Bonnie Timmermann, enlisted director Joe O’Byrne to helm a new version filmed at the New Theatre in Dublin, as part of the innovative company’s continuing onscreen works made during the pandemic.

The play takes place in a dark, eerie room where an elderly man (Stephen Brennan) lives alone, drinking by himself and playing his piano. He is visited one day by his long-estranged daughter (Danielle Ryan); they have not seen each other in many years, and their discomfort and hostility are immediately apparent in their initial exchange.

Man: You.
Woman: Yes. Me.
Man: Well.
Woman: It wasn’t easy . . . seeking you out.
Man: Wasn’t it?
Woman: I stayed away as long as I could.
Man: You think I’m going to die soon?
Woman: Maybe.
Man: You want to kiss and make up before the event?
Woman: Some people visit each other all the time.
Man: I’m not some people. You of all people should know that.
Woman: Can I come in or not?

There is no love lost between father and daughter; it’s as if an older Cordelia has come to see her aging father, both filled with resentment, no reconciliation in sight. “Love needs a streak of darkness. The day is for solitude. Morning especially. Morning is for death,” he says. “And afternoons?” she asks. “At your age they’re for transgressions, at mine they’re for remorse,” he replies. “You know about remorse?” she wonders. “I’m an expert on it,” he answers.

Both characters are revealed as cold and cruel as details of their lives emerge in the corrosive conversation. He is an extremely talented but failed composer attempting to create his magnum opus before he dies, while she is a famous composer who has not been able to enjoy her success. He accuses her of wasting her gifts, claiming his superiority, unashamed of his hatred of her. He is glad that none of her children are named after him; he even criticizes the wine she brought. “You are very mediocre,” he declares. “Does mediocre need ‘very’ in front of it?” she asks. “When talking about you. Yes, it does,” he replies with bitterness.

She is there to say her piece, not about to cower from him. “You haven’t left me alone,” she says. “You’ve retreated to this sulphurous corner to gather venom for the next assault. You? Leave me alone? You haunt me.”

She has also come to tell him about a dream she has had, about their life and death, about the four howls and the five “never”s in Shakespeare’s grand tragedy. “You think you’re Cordelia to my Lear. No, my dear. You’re more Regan and Goneril spun,” he spits at her. “And you’re no Lear,” she shoots back, soon leaving.

She returns five years later, but it is not quite the same. His mental faculties are decreasing, not unlike the mad Lear’s, thinking her to be the goat-faced, dog-hearted dark lady of his nightmares, a reference to the character Shakespeare addresses in Sonnet 130 and others, whom he loves but cannot outright compliment, disparaging her instead. He recalls moments from his past but is foggy. “Your self-delusion is complete,” she says. “Men should not have daughters,” he opines. The acerbic cat-and-mouse dialogue continues as they eviscerate each other till nothing’s left.

Fiercely directed by Joe O’Byrne (McKeague and O’Brien present “The Rising,” Frank Pig Says Hello), The Cordelia Dream is a merciless, unyielding depiction of an unredeemable relationship between a father and daughter. With biting language, Carr (Woman and Scarecrow, Marble) brilliantly compares the creation of a work of art to the birth of a child and all the responsibilities that are supposed to accompany it. The play is intimately photographed and edited by Emmy winner Nick Ryan, with ghostly set design by Robert Ballagh and sound and original music by Emmy nominee David Downes, the actors naturally lit by a few lamps and a window that offers brief reprieves from the enveloping darkness that makes it feel like it is all a dream.

Brennan (A Life, The Pinter Landscape) commands the screen with an immense presence, his white-haired, white-bearded character skewering his daughter with relish, unafraid of any consequences. Ryan (Harry Wild, Wild Mountain Thyme), who made her professional debut in 2007 playing Cordelia and Brigitte in the Edinburgh Fringe award winner Food, portrays the lost woman with a graceful finesse as she tries to unburden herself of the many ways she claims he destroyed her life. The harrowing work hits even deeper at a time when loved ones are reuniting after the long pandemic lockdown, with hugs and kisses, smiles of relief and unabashed joy, none of which is evident in these two characters who harbor a disturbing, apparently unsalvageable history.