Cofounded in 2012 by artistic director Tess Howsam, Brooklyn-based Exquisite Corpse Company produces site-specific works in unusual places; Odd.A.See was set in the basement of an abandoned hospital ward, The Chechens and Killjoy were staged in a Fifth Ave. loft, and A Ribbon About a Bomb,Secession 2015,The Enchanted Realm of Rene Magritte, and Water, Water, Everywhere . . . made their way through houses on Governors Island. With the coronavirus crisis preventing the troupe from finding another unique space, ECC presented Insulted. Belarus(sia) on Zoom last fall.
Now the company has brought together the outside and the inside with Zoetrope. The interactive, immersive thirty-five-minute show, written by ECC writers-in-residence Elinor T Vanderburg, Leah Barker, and Emily Krause and directed by Porcia Lewis and Howsam, unfolds in a cramped New York City apartment on a cargo trailer bed on Vanderbilt Ave. in Brooklyn. Five audience members at a time watch the action through socially distanced windows and listen on headphones as Angel and Bae (and their fish) deal with the pandemic, politics, racism, and their relationship; the cast features Jules Forsberg-Lary, Leana Gardella, Vanessa Lynah, and Starr Kirkland. A button next to each window allows viewers to impact the action in the room, which is decorated in black-and-white by designers Emily Addision and Dominica Montoya and is so tiny that the most important member of the team might be intimacy director Daniella Caggiano. Zoetrope runs Thursdays to Sundays, May 1-23; tickets are $35, but the code PREVIEW will save you ten bucks May 1-2.
Joel Grey, Samantha Hahn, Stephanie Lynne Mason, Zalmen Mlotek, Rosie Jo Neddy, Bebe Neuwirth, Raquel Nobile, Jana Robbins, and Rachel Zatcoff will take part in Yiddish Fiddler book celebration
Who: Joel Grey, Samantha Hahn, Stephanie Lynne Mason, Zalmen Mlotek, Rosie Jo Neddy, Bebe Neuwirth, Raquel Nobile, Jana Robbins, Rachel Zatcoff What: Virtual book launch party Where:National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene When: Sunday, May 2, free, 2:15 Why: In the summer of 2018, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene unleashed a phenomenon on the New York City theater world, a mind-blowing production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish. At the time, I wrote, “I’ve seen numerous Fiddlers over the years, but this Yiddish version, which could have felt dated and old-fashioned, instead is very much of the moment in the wake of the immigrant and refugee crisis currently going on in America and around the world. It’s chilling watching the final scenes in light of what is shown on the news night after night.” Samantha Hahn, who played Beylke, the youngest of Tevye and Golde’s five daughters, documented the making of the show, regularly talking to cast and crew, and now takes us behind the scenes — through auditions, rehearsals, mishaps, and more — in On The Roof: A Look Inside Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish. She writes in the book, “I went home that night and took a shower, put on my pajamas, turned out the lights, and crawled into bed. A minute later I got out of bed, turned on the lights, took the pillow case off of my pillow to wrap around my head like a shmata, and practiced the ‘Tradition’ choreography. Even in my little bedroom, wearing my ‘Yertle the Turtle’ hand-me-down pajama shirt and my blue pillow case around my head — it felt like I was doing something special.”
On May 2 at 2:15, Hahn, an actress, singer, voiceover artist, and author, will do something special at a virtual book party, reuniting with her four stage sisters, Stephanie Lynn Mason (Hodl), Rosie Jo Neddy (Khave), Raquel Nobile (Shprintze), and Rachel Zatcoff (Tsaytl), as well as director Joel Grey, producer Jana Robbins, NYTF artistic director Zalmen Mlotek, and Fiddler fan Bebe Neuwirth, who was at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust for opening night. (The musical later moved uptown to Stage 42.) The party will include backstage video footage, a panel discussion, a live chat, and a Q&A. To get in the mood, you can check out Fiddler’s Stars in the House reunion here.
Who:Trisha Brown Dance Company What: Digital program Where:Joyce Theater online When: April 29 – May 12, $25 Why: The pandemic lockdown might have shuttered theaters, but it has also stirred the creative instinct, particularly among dance companies, which quickly turned to streaming not only older productions but exciting new works developed over Zoom and other online platforms. This week it’s Trisha Brown’s turn, with an online spring season at the Joyce. Now in its sixth decade, the company looks back with 2002’s Geometry of Quiet, recorded at the Joyce in 2017; the intimate twenty-minute piece features music by Salvatore Sciarrino, white costumes by Christophe de Menil, and four dancers. The troupe then looks back and forward at the same time with new iterations of 1980’s semiautobiographical Locus Trio, set on a cubelike grid to an improvised score, and the 1978 short solo Watermotor, inspired by childhood memory and originally performed by Brown at the Public Theater, now danced by Marc Crousillat. The program concludes with “The Decoy Project,” a reimagining for video of 1979’s Glacial Decoy, an eleven-minute work for four dancers that Brown adapted for WNET and the company now approaches as a way to bring dancers back together again in the same physical space while reaching out to the local community. Tickets are $25 for the stream, which runs April 29 to May 12. The Joyce’s spring season continues with Limón Dance Company May 6-19, Stephen Petronio Company May 13-26, and Batsheva Dance Company May 27 – June 2.
André Holland’s dramatic reading of Saidiya Hartman’s “The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance” will take place at 92Y and online
Who: André Holland, Saidiya Hartman What: Virtual and in-person dramatic monologue and conversation Where:92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, Kaufmann Concert Hall, 1395 Lexington Ave., and online When: Thursday, April 29, $20, 7:00 Why: The 92nd St. Y is transitioning from virtual events to in-person presentations with its “Almost Home” series, in which up to 150 people can buy tickets to see the event in the Kaufmann Concert Hall while an unlimited amount can pay the same $20 price and watch on their screens at home. The spring miniseason kicks off April 29 at 7:00 with André Holland (Moonlight,The Knick) reading Saidiya Hartman’s “The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance,” a June 2020 article the American writer and academic penned for Bomb magazine. The piece is a retelling of W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 postapocalyptic short story, “The Comet,” along with a new interpretation of it. The tale begins:
“He watches the human swirl as it moves determinedly along Broadway. Perched at the top of the stairs, the customers and employees of the bank brush by as he hesitates near the entrance. A nod, a look of recognition, a meager hello, a begrudging acknowledgment that he exists are not forthcoming. The street is teeming with people. No one glancing casually at him would use a phrase like ‘towering figure”’ or waste a moment wondering about his position at the bank; words like idle or lingering or un-mastered or servile brush at the murky edges of consciousness, latent and without the full awareness or deliberateness of thought, because most of the men rushing through the streets of the financial center rarely perceive him. Few noticed him. Few ever noticed him except in a way that stung. He was outside the world — ‘nothing!’”
Following the reading, Holland and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Hartman (Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America; Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route; Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments) will discuss the work, in which Hartman writes, “Du Bois believed that telling such stories mattered. In hindsight, he would explain this earnestness (the belief that intelligent argument and reasoned judgment might defeat racism) as a consequence of not having read psychoanalysis. He ‘was not sufficiently Freudian to understand how little human action is based on reason’ or to apprehend the deep psychic investment in racism, what others have since described as the libidinal economy of an antiblack world. He had assumed that ‘the majority of Americans would rush to the defense of democracy,’ if they realized that racism threatened it, not only for blacks, but for whites, ‘not only in America, but in the world.’”
“Almost Home” continues May 3 with “Alyson Cambridge and Friends in Concert” and May 5, 11, and 26 with a trio of shows that are part of the Marshall Weinberg Spring 2021 Classical Music Season. For all in-person events, a negative COVID-19 test or proof of vaccination is required.
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate William Shakespeare’s 457th birthday — and honor the 405th anniversary of his death — by watching Patrick Page’s extraordinary one-man show, All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain, in which the award-winning actor makes the case that no one has ever created bad guys quite like the Bard.
Shakespeare Theatre Company’s streaming presentation begins with an introduction by Page from his home, explaining why he wrote a play about scoundrels and malefactors. “My aim in doing so is to show how Shakespeare’s two-decade exploration of evil actually made him a more humane and sophisticated writer. In creating an entirely new kind of villain, Shakespeare rejected the prejudices of his age and became a writer for all of us.”
In the eighty-minute show, filmed at STC’s Sidney Harman Hall without an audience, Page traces the history of villains in the Bard’s plays chronologically, from 1590 to 1611, adding in a nod to a theatrical experience from young Will’s childhood. “Do you believe in evil spirits? Do you believe in evil? Did Shakespeare?” Page asks. “It’s an important question because Shakespeare, for all intents and purposes, invented the characters we now call the villain. You’ve likely seen Shakespeare’s influence everywhere and not even recognized it.”
Page, who is one of theater’s greatest Shakespearean actors and teachers, portrays Richard III, Sir John Falstaff from Henry IV, Part 2 (referring to him as “a walking compendium of the Seven Deadly Sins”), Malvolio from Twelfth Night, Claudius from Hamlet, Prospero from The Tempest, Lady Macbeth from Macbeth, and Iago from Othello, who he identifies as a sociopath. Talking about playing Iago in an STC production (opposite Avery Brooks), Page explains, “And so began a year of research and study that changed my view of my fellow human beings and opened my eyes to the reality of the evil hidden in plain sight all around us.” (Page has also played Macbeth, Claudius, Prospero, and Coriolanus at STC.)
Page compares the title character of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta to Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus and does a deep dive into Shylock from The Merchant of Venice. “Shylock is the villain of the play,” he states. “But for the first time in history, he’s a villain whose motivation is so clear, whose psychology is so complex, and whose language is so rich and idiosyncratic that he changes the way we experience villainy itself.”
Directed by Alan Paul and shot by Ryan Risley, the play opens with Page walking onstage, looking out at an empty audience, an immediate reminder of the world’s current villain, the coronavirus, which has kept theaters closed for more than a year. Elizabeth A. Coco’s lighting is sharp and intense as Risley’s camera films Page from numerous angles, with appropriately ominous close-ups. Various props add further tension as well as comic relief; just wait until you see how Page portrays Falstaff. Gordon Nimmo-Smith’s sound design captures Page’s distinctive baritone as it resonates throughout the empty theater.
Patrick Page looks at the concept of evil in Shakespeare’s characters, including Richard III, in streaming presentation
Page knows what of he speaks; in addition to having portrayed his fair share of Shakespeare baddies, he has played Scar in The Lion King, Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, the Green Goblin in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Hades in Hadestown, and the Grinch in Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, villains all in one form or another. His command of Shakespeare and the concept of evil is bold and impressive, but he is down-to-earth enough to throw in plenty of surprising modern-day pop-culture references to keep it fresh and relevant to those who might not know much about the Bard or Elizabethan theater. It’s a bravura performance that provides a much-needed level of comfort as theaters remain closed, albeit with legitimate hopes that they will be reopening in the very near future. In the meantime, we have Page and All the Devils Are Here to keep us company and scare the wits out of us, as he does with the following frightening excerpt from Macbeth:
“Make thick my blood. / Stop up the access and passage to remorse, / Let no compunctious visitings of nature / Shake my fell purpose, nor keep a peace between / The effect and it! Come, thick night, / and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, / That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark / To cry ‘Hold, hold!’”
Who: Claire Danes What:Shakespeare Hour Live! discussion about Romeo + Juliet Where:Facebook Live and YouTube Live When: Friday, April 23, free, 8:00 Why: Twenty-five years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes starred as the title lovers in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, a modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, pitting two business empires against each other, the Montagues and the Capulets, while using the the Bard’s original dialogue. On the night that PBS’s Great Performances presentation of the National Theatre’s Romeo & Juliet, which was filmed following Covid-19 protocols, is making its US premiere, Danes will talk about the movies and the play in the latest Shakespeare Hour Live!, the ongoing series hosted by DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, whose artistic director, Simon Godwin, directed the National Theatre production. Luhrmann’s 1999 movie features Brian Dennehy and Christina Pickles as Romeo’s parents, Paul Sorvino and Diane Venora as Juliet’s folks, John Leguizamo as Tybalt, Dash Mihok as Benvolio, and Miriam Margolyes as the nurse, while Godwin’s version, which makes full use of the National Theatre space, stars Jessie Buckley as Juliet and Josh O’Connor as Romeo, with Tamsin Greig as Lady Capulet, Lloyd Hutchinson as Lord Capulet, Colin Tierney as Lord Montague, David Judge as Tybalt, Alex Mugnaioni as Paris, Shubham Saraf as Benvolio, Adrian Lester as the prince, Fisayo Akinade as Mercutio, and Deborah Findlay as the nurse.
The life and art of Bill Traylor are the subject of illuminating documentary (photo courtesy Jean and George Lewis / Caroline Cargo Folk Art Collection)
“I think Traylor is probably the greatest artist you’ve never heard of, but he’s getting heard of more and more,” art critic Roberta Smith says at the beginning of Jeffrey Taylor’s Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts, an insightful documentary that runs April 16–22 at Film Forum — both virtually and in person at the West Houston St. theater.
I well remember the first time I truly encountered the scope of Bill Traylor’s art, at a pair of 2013 exhibits at the American Folk Art Museum. I had seen his work before, but these two shows opened my eyes to his immense self-taught skill and his poignant and personal view of the world he had experienced, becoming, in his later years, a unique chronicler of the American South, from slavery and the Civil War through the Great Migration and the Great Depression to Jim Crow and WWII. He passed away in 1949 at the age of ninety-six, leaving behind some 1,500 drawings, all made between 1939 and 1942; it would still be decades until he would be duly recognized him as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.
Director, producer, and editor Taylor and writer-producer Fred Barron tell Traylor’s uniquely American tale through archival photos, commentary from art connoisseurs and historians, members of Traylor’s family, and, most important, images of hundreds of his works. Born into slavery in Benton, Alabama, in 1853, Traylor was a slave on a cotton plantation, a field hand, a tenant farmer, a shoe repairman, and an ill homeless man while fathering nine children with multiple women before spending three years sitting behind a small refrigerated soda case on Monroe St. in Montgomery, Alabama, drawing both from memory and observation of the bustling Black community in front of him. Using anything he could find — torn paper, stained cardboard with logos on one side — Traylor would draw flat, silhouetted objects, primarily in black but with flourishes of blue, red, and occasional yellows, imbued with a musicality that breathes life into them while also exploring race and class; today, his art evokes elements of both Jacob Lawrence and Kara Walker. Taylor often juxtaposes Traylor’s drawings with photographs of places that might have served as inspiration, which offer further understanding of the art and the man.
“There are certain elements in the work — the use of animal spirits and plant spirits, and there’s hybrid people, there’s were-people — that all of these speak to someone operating intentionally with the desire to render the fantastic. So he’s giving us a whole enchanted, magical realm,” writer, musician, and producer Greg Tate says, adding, “The mystery prevails throughout.” Artist Radcliffe Bailey notes, “When I look at Traylor’s work, I see this freedom of expressing, or seeing what’s going on around him but also being very lyrical about it.” Among the others celebrating Traylor with a deep reverence are archivist Dr. Howard O. Robinson II, professor Richard Powell, and curator Leslie Umberger. Taylor includes readings by actors Russell G. Jones and Sharon Washington, songs by Willie King, Lead Belly, Buddy Guy, and Chick Webb, and tap dances by Jason Samuels Smith, along with the words of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes as well as the white painter and teacher Charles Shannon, who championed and represented Traylor.
The film’s latter section focuses on Traylor’s descendants, including his great-grandson Frank L. Harrison, who tears up when talking about his ancestor. Some knew of Traylor, and some didn’t, which is all part of his legacy. Umberger, who curated the major 2018-19 Smithsonian retrospective “Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor,” sums it up when she states, “He put down this entire oral history in the language that was available to him, which was the language of pictures.” What pictures they are, and we now know more about where they came from, thanks to Chasing Ghosts.
