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DEMOCRACY IN ACTION: EMERGENT CITY, INNOVATION, AND THE BROOKLYN WATERFONT

Documentary traces community battle against rezoning of Industry City in Brooklyn

EMERGENT CITY (Jay Arthur Sterrenberg & Kelly Anderson, 2024)
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette St.
Opens Friday, April 25
www.dctvny.org
www.emergentcitydoc.com

“Everybody wants to live, work, shop, spend money in Brooklyn,” real estate journalist Michael Stoler said in a July 2012 episode of The Stoler Report. “Why’s everybody want Brooklyn?”

Carlos Scissura of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce responded, “Look, there’s no other place in America that anyone should be, period.”

That exchange kicks off Emergent City, Jay Arthur Sterrenberg and Kelly Anderson’s documentary tracking the rezoning battle of Industry City, comprising sixteen buildings on the Brooklyn waterfront, from the time that developers started buying up property there after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in the fall of 2012 through the end of 2022, when a decision was ultimately reached.

Sterrenberg and Anderson are flies on the wall during a seemingly endless series of meetings, town halls, protests, hearings, and other gatherings over the course of ten years, during which Industry City CEO Andrew Kimball and attorney Jesse Masyr, backed by such billion-dollar companies as Jamestown and Belvedere Capital and real estate investor Angela Gordon, defend their plan to rezone the Sunset Park industrial waterfront for commercial and retail use and luxury hotels.

The fight against the project, as it goes through the six-stage approval process — Scoping, Certification, Community Board, Borough President, Planning Commission, and City Council — is led by tenant organizer Marcela Mitaynes, later the Community Board 7 house chair; Antoinette Martinez of the Protect Our Working Waterfront Alliance; Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation executive director Ben Margolis; UPROSE Climate Justice Center executive director Elizabeth Yeampierre; Community Board 7 land use chair John Fontillas and chair César Zuñiga; city council director of land use and planning Renae Widdison; and others.

Caught in the middle is city councilmember Carlos Menchaca, who is trying to negotiate a community benefits agreement that will make both sides happy, which appears to be an impossible task.

“How do you retain the working-class character of the community, how do you keep it a walk-to-work community and keep it industrial, but not at the expense of our lives?” Yeampierre asks, noting that “catastrophic events are heading our way.”

Trying to find perspective, Margolis says, “It’s not that this is the ideal scenario. The ideal scenario is that the waterfront is owned by the city, and everybody can choose how to make it work. That’s just not the reality.”

Kimball refers to the area as an “innovation district,” talking to several local small business owners who have decided to lease space in Industry City, seeing it as a boon for the community, while others argue that it will invariably lead to higher rents, gentrification, and displacement.

Finally, after a decade of contentious and volatile discussion, a surprising resolution settles the matter.

A vivid portrait of democracy in action, with all its flaws and inherent prominence of power, money, and politics, Emergent City opens April 25 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, with eight postscreening Q&As through May 1 featuring Sterrenberg and Anderson and such guests as Menchaca, Widdison, Mitaynes, Martinez, cinematographer Alex Mallis, executive producer Stephen Maing, field producer Betty Yu, city councilmember Alexa Avilés, and moderators Max Rivlin-Nadler, Oscar Perry Abello, Siddhant Adlakha, Alyssa Katz, and Firehouse Cinema director of programming Dara Messinger

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

HERE I AM: A TRANS RABBI SHARES HER STORY IN BECOMING EVE

Tommy Dorfman stars as a trans rabbi trying to come out to her father in Becoming Eve (photo by Matthew Murphy)

BECOMING EVE
Abrons Arts Center Playhouse Theater
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
Through April 27, $29.88-$130
212-598-0400
www.nytw.org
www.abronsartscenter.org

On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, synagogues around the world read and discuss Genesis 22:1–24, the story of Abraham’s binding of his son Isaac on Mount Sinai, preparing him as a human sacrifice until an angel of G-d intervenes, replacing Isaac with a ram at the last moment. Known as the Akedah, the passage has been hotly debated for millennia by religious leaders, scholars, and laypeople, exploring issues of faith, obedience, familial responsibility, and the value of human life.

One line of thought considers whether Abraham, and perhaps Isaac as well, is aware that it is a test and that Abraham believed that G-d never planned on having him go ahead with the slaughter of the son who was born to him and his wife Sarah in their old age.

In Emil Weinstein’s debut play, the searing Becoming Eve, another interpretation comes to the fore: whether what happened on Mount Sinai was actually a transformation of Isaac’s soul from female to male, as argued by Rabbi Yechiel Michel of Zloczow in the seventeenth century.

Based on Abby Chava Stein’s 2019 memoir, Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman, the lightly fictionalized play, continuing at Abrons Arts Center through April 27, focuses on Chava (Tommy Dorfman), a trans rabbi who has not come out yet to her deeply religious family, whose ancestors include the Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidism.

Chava has been spotted wearing a dress in midtown Manhattan by a member of her parents’ tight-knit Williamsburg community, and, fearing that the observer will reveal her secret, she decides to tell her father, Tati (Richard Schiff), and mother, Mami (Judy Kuhn), enlisting the support of Jonah (Brandon Uranowitz), a rabbi who has recently started a progressive shul on the Upper West Side.

Chava is afraid her parents won’t understand, explaining to Jonah, “They live in a hermetically sealed nineteenth-century village that happens to be in Brooklyn. They don’t know the Internet. They don’t know Superman.”

Jonah is excited to learn of Reb. Michela’s interpretation, proclaiming, “That story has always confounded me. This essential paradox, at the very start of our religion, G-d telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his beloved son, when G-d has just promised Abraham that Isaac will father generations! How can both be true? But the whole story is about both-ness, right? This essential both-ness that Abraham has to contend with. But it makes so much sense with the Michela commentary. It cracks the whole thing open. The sacrifice is actually a transformation, which is so essentially Jewish. We’re the people of transition. Of exodus, of leaving and starting over, of walking through doorways. And doorways are fundamentally about liminality, right? The in-between space between two extremes! Between borders and genders and sexualities and — This may have cracked open my Rosh Hashanah speech.”

Tati (Richard Schiff) reads Scripture next to a puppet of his son in powerful new play (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Chava is disappointed when only Tati shows up, and she hesitates in sharing her truth. As she delays, the narrative shifts back and forth between the present and the past, depicted in poignant memory scenes from Chava’s childhood in which she is portrayed by a series of Bunraku-style puppets that get bigger and older as Chava does; they’re operated by Justin Perkins and Emma Wiseman, dressed in all black, with Dorfman standing with them, speaking the dialogue in darkness.

The vignettes begin with Chava at the age of two and a half, when Tati, thrilled to finally have a son after five daughters, wants to bring his boy to shul for the first time and Mami disagrees. At six, Chava is asking Tati whether doctors will someday be able to perform full-body transplants. At thirteen, Chava is taught by Tati how to put on tefillin; he explains, “The tefillin binds us, father and son, together to the end of time,” recalling the Akedah. At sixteen, Chava grows close with a curious schoolmate, Chesky (Rad Pereira). And at nineteen, Chava is introduced to Fraidy (Tedra Millan), who has been chosen to be his bride.

Meanwhile, in the present day, Chava, Jonah, and Tati have intriguing conversations about family and the Torah. Tati is confused when Jonah offers, “I left Judaism completely for a few years, actually, and then I found my way back, through transdenominational Renewal Judaism, which takes a lot of inspiration from the Hasidic masters.” Tati doesn’t understand why Chava is refusing to attend her brother’s upcoming wedding. When Jonah mentions that Steven Spielberg helped fund the local Yiddish Book Center, Tati claims to have never heard of him. Chava reminds her father that, as a teenager, he had snuck out of his house to see Jaws, an event that he is ashamed of. “You looked America in the teeth and it scared you back to Williamsburg,” Chava says. Tati replies, “I wasn’t scared. It was clearly a machine.” Jonah adds, “Machines can be scary,” to which Tati concludes, “Only if you let them run your life,” a clever reference to biblical fundamentalists like Tati.

Presented by New York Theatre Workshop, Becoming Eve was initially scheduled for the Connelly Theater but had to be moved after the New York Archdiocese, which runs the venue, canceled the show because of its content. Archdiocese director of communications Joseph Zwilling wrote in a statement, “It is the standard practice of the archdiocese that nothing should take place on Church-owned property that is contrary to the teaching of the Church. That applies to plays, television shows, or movies being shot, music videos being recorded, or other performances.” The Connelly is part of the Cornelia Connelly Center, a nonprofit whose mission is “to champion girls, empowering them to realize their full potential from middle school through college and beyond.”

Tony winner Brandon Uranowitz plays an Upper West Side rabbi in Becoming Eve (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The play, which is in English but the characters are actually speaking in Yiddish and Hebrew, feels much more at home at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side, where immigrant Jewish communities have thrived for more than a century. Abrons is part of the Henry Street Settlement, which was established in the late-nineteenth century and whose mission is “to open doors of opportunity for Lower East Side residents and other New Yorkers through social service, arts, and health care programs.”

To signal time shifts, Ben Stanton’s lighting goes dark and UptownWorks’ (Daniela Hart, Noel Nichols, Bailey Trieweiler) sound explodes before Daniel Kluger’s music calms things down. The convincing puppets are by Amanda Villalobos, who has previously worked on such shows as Is This a Room, Wolf Play, and The Old Country.

Becoming Eve unfolds on Arnulfo Maldonado’s exquisitely detailed set, an upstairs office with overstuffed bookcases, a small kitchen, a flyer for a production of The Hamantaschen Monologues, exposed air ducts, Jonah’s cluttered desk, a cabinet with two Torah scrolls, a bemah, and three arched windows. Enver Chakartash’s costumes range from Chava’s sexy dress to Jonah’s casual clothing to Tati’s traditional Hasidic garb.

Weinstein, a trans man who, as a teenager, attended the synagogue that Stein had left, writes incisive dialogue that avoids becoming, well, preachy and didactic, with unexpected twists and turns that are guided with expert precision by director Tyne Rafaeli (Epiphany, The Coast Starlight). Dorfman (Romeo + Juliet, “Daddy”) is heartbreaking as Chava, who is desperate to be accepted by her family; it is wrenching when she changes from her revealing dress to a zipped-up hoodie, terrified at how her father might react. Unrecognizable Emmy winner Schiff (Glengarry Glen Ross, The West Wing) is sensational as the long-bearded Tati, a respectable man stuck in the past, unwilling to face the realities of the modern era.

Tony winner Uranowitz (Falsettos, An American in Paris) is eminently likable as Jonah, a rabbi who understands just how to bridge the gap between Chava and Tati. Three-time Tony nominee Kuhn (Fun Home, Les Misérables) and Millan (On the Shore of the Wide World, The Wolves) excel as the key women in Chava’s life, while Pereira (Take Care, Madonna col Bambino) is touching as Chesky.

One of the best plays of the year, Becoming Eve begins with Chava singing Ariana Grande’s “Break Free,” which includes the lyrics “If you want it, take it / I should have said it before / Tried to hide it, fake it / I can’t pretend anymore,” and ends with SOPHIE’s “Immaterial” (“Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial / Immaterial boys, immaterial girls / Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial / We’re just, im-ma-ma-material [I could be anything I want] / Immaterial, immaterial boys [anyhow, anywhere] / Immaterial girls [any place, anyone that I want] / Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial”).

In Genesis 22:1, G-d calls out to Abraham, who answers, “Hineni” — “Here I am” — which is also the name of one of the most beautiful Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur prayers, sung in the shul by the cantor, who is representing the congregation despite their own personal faults and transgressions. The final word of Weinstein’s play is also “hineni,” a defiant conclusion to a complex, thought-provoking work about who we are, how we are seen by others, and everything in between.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FIRST LOVE AND TMI: RYAN J. HADDAD’S HOLD ME IN THE WATER

Ryan J. Haddad thinks it might be love in Hold Me in the Water at Playwrights Horizons (photo by Valerie Terranova)

HOLD ME IN THE WATER
Playwrights Horizons, the Judy Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through May 4, $62.50 – $102.50
www.playwrightshorizons.org

Even with a heavy dose of TMI, Ryan J. Haddad’s Hold Me in the Water is a poignant, touching, and very funny solo show about first love.

In such previous plays as Hi, Are You Single? and Dark Disabled Stories and the immersive installation Wings and Rings in the pandemic presentation The Watering Hole at the Signature, Haddad has shared important moments from his life as a queer actor and writer with cerebral palsy.

Rising from below the stage on a lift like a rock star, he opens his new show, running at Playwrights Horizons through May 4, by saying, “I’m Ryan J. Haddad. For those of you who don’t know me, I don’t know how you ended up here! But for those of you who don’t know me . . .” He then describes himself and the set to the audience, detailing what he looks like and what he is wearing, providing access to those who are blind or have low vision; in addition, everything he says is projected as surtitles for the hard of hearing.

For seventy minutes, Haddad, baring his soul while using his metallic posterior or reverse posture-control walker, moves around dots’ blue set, which features a nine-inch-high platform, a long, narrow bench, and a pair of modular cubes. The story begins in June 2018, when Haddad immediately fell for a beautiful boy at a summer artist residency in upstate New York. During a pair of inaccessible activities, one at a bookstore, the other at the beach — “Ryan doesn’t do the beach,” he notes — he receives help from “the boy,” as he calls him.

In the first case, Haddad explains, “His grip was firm. He went ahead of me and I leaned on his strong frame as I pulled my legs up one at a time. We walked through the door together. He waited for someone else to bring my walker up behind me before he let go. No questions had to be asked. No mishaps. The trust between our bodies — my hand, his hand — was magnetic and instinctual. And I told him that. And then we started texting.”

They get even closer at the beach, where the boy never lets go, making Haddad feel safe in the water and part of the group. “It was . . . um . . . it was the most intimate I had ever been with another man,” Haddad confesses.

Haddad wants it to be more, and when they start seeing each other, albeit with stops and starts, he thinks he might have found his first true love, shocked “that someone that attractive, that kind, that talented and dreamy and sexy would want to show me any sort of romantic affection.” But Haddad also learn some hard truths about relationships.

Several times, Haddad dives headfirst into graphic depictions of sex that go too far, regardless of race, gender, or whether it involves people with a physical, sensory, or intellectual disability or not. That much intimate, very specific information is a lot to take.

Otherwise, Haddad is an engaging storyteller, discussing emotions that everyone can relate to, from fear, loneliness, and lack of self-esteem to love, trust, and self-confidence. He connects with the audience from that initial ascent; director Danny Sharron gives Haddad plenty of room to reveal his deepest desires.

It’s a relaxed performance: The house lights are on dim, audience members can make sounds and move about to make sure they’re comfortable, and they can leave and come back if they need to use the facilities or require a break in a safe space on the second floor. There will also be select shows requiring masks, with ASL interpreters or audio description, and other enhancements.

As with Dark Disabled Stories, it’s a new way to experience theater, and its inclusivity and accessibility both echo and frame the themes of Haddad’s compelling narrative.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FINDING LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS: FOR THE LIVING AT THE JCC

Holocaust survivor Marcel Zielinski revisits Auschwitz with his granddaughter, Chen, in For the Living

FOR THE LIVING (Marc Bennett & Tim Roper, 2024)
Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Ave. at West Seventy-Sixth St.
Thursday, April 24, $19.95, 7:00
www.jccmanhattan.org
www.forthelivingmovie.com

“When considering the question, What makes us human?, we must also ask, What might render us less than human? And more importantly, What makes us inhumane?” narrator Tim Roper says at the beginning of For the Living, a powerful and important documentary he codirected with Marc Bennett.

Near the end of the film, Yale professor and On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder points out, “Recognizing that someone else is a human being is a really demandingly high threshold. If you can get to that, then a lot of other problems will solve themselves.”

In the documentary, which is having a special screening April 24 at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan on the Upper West Side, Roper and Bennett use the 2019 Ride for the Living as the centerpiece of their exploration of dehumanization and genocide and the need for empathy and compassion.

In 2014, software developer and long-range cyclist Robert Desmond traced the liberation path, a twenty-five-day, 1,350-mile bike ride from London to Auschwitz, stopping off at historic locations related to WWII and, more specifically, the Holocaust. The next year, Desmond, a British Jew, established the Ride for the Living, in which groups of bikers travel from Auschwitz to Krakow, following the rode that ten-year-old Marcel Zielinski and many others walked after being freed from the concentration camp in 1945. Zielinski became a regular rider at the annual event, establishing a close relationship with Desmond; despite their age gap of more than fifty years, they consider themselves brothers.

The film cuts between the preparation for the 2019 Ride for the Living, archival Holocaust footage, and brief explorations of twentieth-century genocides in Turkey, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda as well as the treatment of Indigenous peoples in what would become America and African slavery.

Zielinski returns to his childhood home and visits Auschwitz with his granddaughter, Chen, sharing terrifying details of what he experienced. Bernard Offen, who survived five camps as a child and lost fifty-nine members of his family in the Holocaust, emphasizes how important it is to tell the story, a critical theme through the film.

Rabbi Michael Paley notes, “We shouldn’t come as tourists just to see [Auschwitz]; we should come as witnesses, we should bear witness.” Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz demands, “Crimes against humanity should not be tolerated.”

Krakow Jewish Community Center CEO and ride participant Jonathan Ornstein explains, “The most important message is not being a bystander, they say. There will always be good people, and there will always be bad people, and I think the way the world goes is largely dependent on the ones in the middle.”

Roper and Bennett also speak with Zimbabwe genocide survivor and international human rights lawyer Gugulethu Moyo, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum founding project director Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, USC Shoah Foundation executive director emeritus Stephen Smith, Emory psychology professor emeritus Frans de Waal, University of Illinois at Chicago social emotional learning chair Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, and Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.

In the latter part of the 117-minute film, the focus turns to dehumanization and antisemitism, as practiced by the Nazis and even world leaders today, referencing how Hitler was influenced by America’s belief in manifest destiny, a concept that is now being practiced by Vladimir Putin in Russia and the current US administration.

“I grew up thinking that we learned the lessons of the Holocaust, and I’ll say living here, in the heart of Europe for eighteen years, that I don’t think those lessons were learned,” Ornstein says. “With antisemitism on the rise, with Holocaust denial on the rise, I’m shocked by things that happen all around Europe; I’m shocked by things that happen in the United States.”

University of New England philosophy professor David Livingstone Smith explains, “There are great advantages to be reaped by doing bad things to others, by exterminating them,” adding that in certain “circumstances, with the psychology we have, very many of us would yield to that way of thinking.”

And astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson posits, “It’s pretty clear when you look at the history of atrocities, it’s not just simply hatred; it’s like a psychological delusion that has to be put into place so that you can carry this out on a large scale.”

The film — which opens with Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” and concludes with Joan Osborne’s version of Bruce Springsteen’s more hopeful “Further On Up the Road” — was made prior to the current administration, but it’s hard not to think about what is happening right now in the United States involving illegal immigrants, deportation, and antisemitism. Words such as dehumanization and empathy are again being discussed every day.

“It’s bigger than a Jewish thing; this is a human tragedy,” Desmond says.

And it’s far from over.

Roper, Bennett, and producer Lisa Effress will participate in a Q&A following the 7:00 screening at the JCC. The film is also being shown April 23 at 6:30 at Iona University in New Rochelle before traveling to festivals in Dubuque, Boulder, Flint, Detroit, and the Berkshires. The next Ride for the Living is scheduled for June 25–29; registration is now open.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

SISTERS ARE DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES: LESBIAN EROTICA AT HERE

Bailey Williams and Emma Horwitz open up a lot of boxes at HERE Arts Center (photo by HanJie Chow)

TWO SISTERS FIND A BOX OF LESBIAN EROTICA IN THE WOODS
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave.
Through May 3, $45
here.org

If you’re going to call your show Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, you had better live up to that amazing title. On- and offstage partners Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams do just that and more in a rollicking extravaganza about art aesthetics and sisterhood in all their varying forms.

Extended at HERE Arts Center through May 3, the coproduction from Rattlestick Theater and New Georges starts with Horwitz bopping behind a desk, deejaying on her laptop; the playlist includes MUNA’s “Number One Fan,” Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra,” and Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” which boasts, “Wanna disco? Wanna see me disco? / Let me hear you depoliticize my rhyme . . . Because I’m so bored that I’d be entertained / Even by a stupid floor, a linoleum floor, linoleum floor.”

Horwitz is surrounded by a semicircle of hundreds of carefully stacked bankers boxes with such labels as “Co-dependent Defendents” [sic], “Broken Vibrators,” “Top Chef Bottom Chef,” “Help! My Ex Has a Popular Podcast,” and “Gay Girls Who Like Gay Boys Who Also Like Gay Girls.” Over the course of the play — which runs exactly sixty-nine minutes, Williams explains with a smile — many of the boxes will be opened and explored, exposing clever, hilarious, and at times revealing plot devices.

In addition to portraying various versions of themselves, Horwitz is also an interviewer, a trucker, a doctor, a researcher, a businessman, and an executed spy/opera lover while Williams is an artist, a barback, a patient, an escort, a secretary, and a babysitter/pizza deliverer, among other characters. Across sixteen scenarios, they visit a pet shop, a diner, a black box theater, a lesbian spaceship, and the First Annual NIPPLI Conference, in which the National Institute for Paranormal Psychic Lesbian Investigations “posits that there are a number of energetic hotspots that produce hyper-dimensional gateways of electromagnetic significance. . . . They cannot — yet — transport humans. But they can — and do — transport lesbian erotica.”

The piece is inherently self-referential, fully aware that it is an experimental work taking place in a downtown venue, performed by a real-life queer couple to an ecstatic audience. Horwitz and Williams were inspired by such avant-garde theater companies as Split Britches and Five Lesbian Brothers, the woman-run erotica magazine On Our Backs, and the actual Reddit forum “We gotta talk about porn in the woods,” where people post stories of, well, finding lesbian erotica in the woods.

Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods consists of a series of wildly funny and fiendishly clever vignettes (photo by HanJie Chow)

One of the show’s leitmotifs involves a mysterious performance artist known as Valentina, who interviewer Emma and artist Bailey may or may not know, have collaborated with, or had a relationship with. When Emma says she recently received a postcard from Valentina, Bailey says, “That is so very, very Valentina . . . a woman with extremely clear boundaries between work and play. Anyway, this is all – we’re here to talk about my new piece, I think?” In describing a previous performance installation, Body Double and the Doubled Body, Bailey explains, “I am here, I am my work.”

Slyly toying with notions of clear professional and personal boundaries, Horwitz and Williams also explore the multiple meanings of “sister,” from blood siblings to chosen family members to women who are good friends supporting each other — and, as another Reddit asks, “to lesbian couples, are you often mistaken as sisters?”

When artist Bailey tells interviewer Emma that she lives with her wife in Rhinebeck, interviewer Emma responds, “Oh! I thought you were sisters!” In a postcard to Valentina, Bailey writes about their pretending to be sisters and drinking Champagne in first class aboard a steamer ship. In another vignette, Emma and Bailey play sisters both named Christina, who are in business together giving psychic readings. “A sister is your first and greatest love,” Christina Bailey says.

Serious issues concerning queer culture, sexual orientation, societal rules and regulations, and private relationships pop up, but always through a comic lens that never gets overbearing or preachy. Tara Elliott (Illiterates, Burq Off!) directs the proceedings with a gleeful immediacy that sucks the audience in from the very start. Normandy Sherwood’s set, costumes, and props (red heels, gloves, soda cans, vibrators) all add to the fun, along with Josiah Davis’s humorous lighting and Johnny Gasper’s witty sound design.

Dancing, singing, telling jokes, and sharing wildly entertaining stories, Horwitz and Williams are so charming and engaging, so welcoming and self-possessed, that you’ll just want to give them both big hugs and hang out with them more — but don’t; that will have to wait for their next show, which can’t come soon enough.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

REIMAGINING SHAKESPEARE IN STRIDE: WHITNEY WHITE’S MACBETH AT BAM

Whitney White reimagines Shakespeare tragedy in rousing Macbeth in Stride at BAM (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

MACBETH IN STRIDE
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Harvey Theater at the BAM Strong
651 Fulton St.
April 15-27, $29-$85
www.bam.org/macbeth

Whitney White’s Macbeth in Stride is an exhilarating hijacking of Shakespeare’s Scottish play, transforming it into an empowering and unrelenting Black feminist rock opera that serves as a takedown of the traditional roles assigned to women not only in the Bard’s canon but in theater and the world itself.

“Irreverence is everything,” White notes at the beginning of her multilayered, irreverent script. Best known as the award-winning director of such plays as Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, On Sugarland, soft, and Liberation, White is both the author and star of this dazzling production at BAM’s Harvey Theater. The ninety-minute show is fervently directed with plenty of winks and nods by Taibi Magar (Help, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992) and Tyler Dobrowsky, who previously collaborated with White (and Peter Mark Kendall) on the virtual pandemic concert play Capsule.

In Macbeth in Stride, White portrays an unnamed woman who is the dazzling lead singer of a hot band and an actress playing Lady Macbeth. Holli’ Conway, Phoenix Best, and Ciara Alyse Harris are a trio of backup vocalists, the three witches, and a kind of Greek chorus; everyone interacts with the audience, starting with the sensational opening number, “If Knowledge Is Power.”

“So what’s the story?” the woman, dressed in a tight-fitting black sparkling pantsuit, asks in her speech following the song. “For me . . . tonight there is one story — one play in particular that kicked it all off / The funky little chain reaction that led someone like me / To be standing before you now / That led someone like me from where I’m from / To school and stage and work and rehearsals / And kept me up many nights / But for now let’s get back to all of you / Let’s stick with you. / What’s the story you told yourselves to get here?”

Macbeth is introduced in the next song, “Reach for It,” in which several characters sing, “So if foul is fair then fair is foul / Ambition’s not a sin at all!,” after which the woman proclaims she wants ambition and love, no matter that the witches tell her women cannot have both. She also is intent on flipping the switch on Shakespeare, since all of his “great women never seem to make it out of these plays alive!”

The man playing Macbeth (Charlie Thurston) arrives, a white accordionist clad in black leather. Learning that he is destined to be king, she realizes that she in turn would become queen and wants the power that comes with that, to be more than the secondary character Lady M is through much of the original play. She asks the audience, “Women, queer folk, and othered people out there? / What are you willing to do to get what you need? / To get what you want?” She admits that violence might be the answer.

When Macbeth tells Lady M that King Duncan will be staying the night at their castle, she advises her husband, “I’m pretty sure we’re gonna have to kill him.” He does the deed, she frames the guards, and they become king and queen. As he deals with a heavy dose of fear, suspicion, and guilt, she is determined to be more than an appendage who just gets to host dinner parties; instead, she is going to “reclaim everything.”

Whitney White and Charlie Thurston star as the doomed couple in meta-heavy Macbeth in Stride (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

Macbeth in Stride is a rousing reimagining of Shakespeare’s 1606 tragedy, a clever, passionate, and downright fun show that celebrates the freeing of women from the shackles of literature as well as the chains of real life. White’s Lady M is a symbol of changing the narrative and taking control of the story, in this case in the guise of a spectacular concert. Songs such as “Dark World,” “Doll House,” and “I for You” help place the tale in contemporary times. “You gon’ rework a four hundred year old play just for your ego?” the first witch asks White, who replies, “Yup. / Sure did! Sure did!”

Dan Soule’s set features several platforms and a diagonal walkway cutting through the middle. Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew lights the show like a concert, including vertical strips of colored lights, while Nick Kourtides’s sound balances the loud music with the less raucous dialogue. Qween Jean’s costumes are fashionably glitzy, as is Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography.

The crack band consists of music director Nygel D. Robinson on keyboards, Kenny Rosario-Pugh on guitar, Bobby Etienne on bass, and Barbara “Muzikaldunk” Duncan on drums. Conway (Six, Tina), Best (Dear Evan Hansen, Teeth), and Harris (Dear Evan Hansen, White Girl in Danger) excel as the chorus, who are worthy of their own show. Thurston (Liberation, Here There Are Blueberries) succeeds in a nearly impossible task, surrounded by strong, tenacious women.

White, who also sits at the piano for a few tunes, is right at home center stage. She might not always have the range the songs require — “Reach for It” is a bit of a reach for her — but she embodies her character with an intense grandeur that is as intoxicating as it is fierce.

Shakespeare purists will notice occasional iambic pentameter in the streamlined text, and most of the famous quotes are in there, in one form or another. However, since this is Lady M’s story, aside from Duncan, whose murder is described in some detail, there is no mention of Macduff and his family, no King Edward, no Donalbain and Malcolm, no visible ghosts, no Earl of Northumberland, no noblemen and doctors, no Birnam Wood, and only one mention of Banquo and his son.

As the end approaches, the woman wonders, “Why do they write us this way? / Why do they imagine us this way?”

White has picked up a sharp quill and stands boldly under the spotlight to write it her way. The script notes that Macbeth in Stride is the first of a four-part series; I can’t wait to see what she has in store for us next.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

HOLEY CINEMA: TRIPLE CANOPY PRESENTS DECASIA AND MORE AT BAM

Bill Morrison’s Decasia concludes BAM/Triple Canopy series on holes

DECASIA (Bill Morrison, 2002)
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Thursday, April 24, 9:15
Series runs April 18-24
www.bam.org
canopycanopycanopy.com

Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison’s production company is called Hypnotic Pictures, and for good reason: The Chicago-born, New York–based auteur makes mesmerizing, visually arresting works using archival found footage and eclectic soundtracks that are a treat for the eyes and ears. Made in 2002, Decasia is about nothing less than the beginning and end of cinema. The sixty-seven-minute work features clips from early silent movies that are often barely visible in the background as the film nitrate disintegrates in the foreground, black-and-white psychedelic blips, blotches, and burns dominating the screen. The eyes at first do a dance between the two distinct parts, trying to follow the action of the original works as well as the abstract shapes caused by the filmstrip’s impending death, but eventually the two meld into a single unique narrative, enhanced by a haunting, compelling score by Bang on a Can’s Michael Gordon, which begins as a minimalist soundtrack and builds slowly until it reaches a frantic conclusion. The onscreen destruction might seem random, but it is actually carefully choreographed by Morrison (The Miners’ Hymns, The Great Flood), who wrote, directed, produced, and edited the film.

The first twenty-first-century film to be added to the National Film Registry, Decasia is screening April 24 at BAM Rose Cinemas, concluding “Triple Canopy Presents: In the Hole,” the fifth collaboration between BAM and the magazine; running April 18–24, the series, guest-curated by Yasmina Price, focuses on “films about openings and absences.” Among the other works being screened are Andrew Davis’s Holes, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face, and Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]