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DOC NYC 2021

Matthew Heineman’s The First Wave closes the 2021 DOC NYC festival

DOC NYC 2021
In-person: November 10-19, $19 per screening
Online: November 11-28, $12 per screening
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Cinépolis Chelsea, 260 West Twenty-Third St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
SVA Theatre, 333 West Twenty-Third St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
www.docnyc.net

The twelfth annual DOC NYC festival emerges from the pandemic with a hybrid collection of more than two hundred films and events that offer an alternative to the continuing rash of fake news and truthiness found on cable and social media. Of course, documentarians have their own agendas as well, but they lean strongly in favor of highlighting important issues through facts and celebrating legitimate feats accomplished through individual determination, both public and private.

This year’s sections include “Coming of Age,” “Fight the Power,” “Luminaries,” “Personal Journeys,” “Sonic Cinema,” and “Focus: Journalists,” covering more than seventy themes, from Food & Wine, History, and Music to Activism, Outsiders, and War & Conflict. The 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award winners are cameraperson, cinematographer, and director Joan Churchill (Gimme Shelter, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, Shut Up & Sing) and Raoul Peck (Fatal Assistance, Moloch Tropical, I Am Not Your Negro).

Sam Pollard and Rex Miller’s Citizen Ashe is the centerpiece selection of this year’s DOC NYC fest

Among the many portraits are explorations of such figures as entertainer and Rat Packer Dean Martin, singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette, chef Julia Child, actress and filmmaker Adrienne Shelly, singer Dionne Warwick, cartoonist Spain Rodriguez, undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau, restaurateur and TV host Anthony Bourdain, rapper DMX, actress Selma Blair, basketball star Kevin Garnett, and author Kurt Vonnegut, with works by such luminaries as Stanley Nelson, Liz Garbus, Eva Orner, Alison Klayman, Jon Alpert, Andrea Arnold, and Todd Haynes.

The festival opens with Penny Lane’s Listening to Kenny G, with director and subject participating in a postscreening discussion; the centerpiece is the New York City premiere of Sam Pollard and Rex Miller’s Citizen Ashe, a look at tennis great and activist Arthur Ashe, with Matthew Heineman’s The First Wave, about the beginning of the pandemic in New York City’s hospitals, the closing-night selection. Keep watching this space for more recommendations and capsule reviews as the festival continues, both in person at the IFC Center, Cinépolis Chelsea, and the SVA Theatre and online.

Todd Haynes will discuss his latest film at DOC NYC

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND (Todd Haynes, 2021)
IFC Center
Wednesday, November 10, 9:30
www.docnyc.net

The Velvet Underground was more than just a music group; they electrified a generation, and continue to do so today, half a century later. Todd Haynes, whose 1998 Velvet Goldmine was set in the world of glam rock and whose 2007 I’m Not There explored the career of Bob Dylan through six characters and a nonlinear narrative, now turns his attention to the true story behind the Velvets. Haynes details the history of the band by delving into leaders John Cale and Lou Reed’s initial meeting, the formation of the Primitives with conceptual artists Tony Conrad and Walter DeMaria, and the transformation into the seminal VU lineup at the Factory under Pop icon Andy Warhol’s guidance: singer-songwriter-guitarist Reed, Welsh experimental composer and multi-instrumentalist Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, drummer Maureen Tucker, and German vocalist Nico. Much of Haynes’s documentary focuses on Warhol’s position in helping develop and promote the Velvets. “Andy was extraordinary, and I honestly don’t think these things could have occurred without Andy,” Reed, who died in 2013, says. Haynes will be at the IFC Center to introduce the November 10 screening.

The life and career of Anthony Bourdain is explored in Roadrunner

ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN (Morgan Neville, 2021)
IFC Center
Thursday, November 11, 9:45
www.docnyc.net

Director Morgan Neville goes behind the scenes to share the story of beloved restaurateur and TV show host Anthony Bourdain in Roadrunner. Neville, whose previous films include The Cool School, 20 Feet from Stardom, and Won’t You Be Neighbor?, will be at IFC to introduce the November 11 screening.

Two Minnesota high school teams battle it out in Tommy Haines’s Hockeyland

HOCKEYLAND (Tommy Haines, 2021)
Cinépolis Chelsea
Saturday, November 13, 2021 1:35 PM
www.docnyc.net/film/hockeyland
www.hockeylandmovie.com

There’s the Stanley Cup playoffs for the NHL pros and the Frozen Four for the NCAA Men’s Ice Hockey Championship, but Tommy Haines focuses on a pair of rival Minnesota high school teams, the underdog Eveleth-Gilbert Golden Bears and the far more successful Hermantown Hawks, as they prepare to perhaps meet in the playoffs. Haines follows the very different approach of the two coaches, delves into the lives of the teams’ best players, talks to the parents, and goes inside the locker rooms as the teenagers balance education with the game and their future. The film contains lots of good hockey action, along with intimate moments as injuries occur and pro scouts come to watch. The November 13 screening will be followed by a Q&A with Haines, producers JT Haines and Andrew Sherburne, cinematographer Benjamin Handler, and film subjects Elliot Van Orsdel, Indio Dowd, and members of their families.

Fatima Shaik searches for a critical piece of family history in The Bengali

THE BENGALI (Kavery Kaul, 2021)
IFC Center
Saturday, November 13, 4:45
www.docnyc.net/film/the-bengali
www.thebengalifilm.com

“Why would anybody come from the other side of the world to find somebody who doesn’t even exist anymore?” author Fatima Shaik says at the beginning of The Bengali. “Why not?” asks director Kavery Kaul. Armed with a partial ship’s registry and a photograph of her grandfather, Shaik Mohamed Musa, who left his small village in India in 1893 to make a new life in the United States, in New Orleans, where he married a Black woman, Fatima travels to her ancestral country, wanting to know more about where she came from and to see a patch of land that he owned. Joined by Kaul, who is Bengali, and cinematographer John Russell Foster, who is white, they have very little information and face roadblock after roadblock until success is in reach, but everywhere she goes, Fatima is met with resistance, as Indians view her with suspicion, thinking that she, a Christian in a Muslim community, might be there to reclaim her grandfather’s land. The Bengali is an emotional, deeply personal search for identity, almost to the point of obsession, of seeking out one’s family history in a land where you don’t speak the language and are not immediately welcome. The November 13 New York City premiere at IFC will be followed by a Q&A with Kaul and producer Lucas Groth.

UNITED STATES vs. REALITY WINNER (Sonia Kennebeck, 2021)
Saturday, November 13, IFC Center, 9:50
Monday, November 15, Cinépolis Chelsea, 4:15
www.docnyc.net
www.codebreakerfilms.com

The Broadway play Is This a Room is a verbatim re-creation of the FBI’s interrogation of Reality Winner, an Air Force veteran who was suspected of leaking classified documents. Award-winning documentarian Sonia Kennebeck, whose previous films include Enemies of the State, about a family under siege when their hacker son gets into serious trouble with the government, and National Bird, which revealed the devastating story of the military personnel pushing the buttons in America’s drone war, now goes behind the scenes to tell what really happened with Winner, the Intercept, and other parties involved in the complex situation. The November 13 and 15 screenings will be followed by a Q&A with Kennebeck, the latter moderated by Jo Livingstone of the New Republic.

An amateur British theater group consisting of bus drivers, engineers, and dispatchers adapt a Ridley Scott classic in Alien on Stage

ALIEN ON STAGE (Danielle Kummer & Lucy Harvey)
IFC Center
Sunday, November 14, 7:00
Monday, November 15, 2:15
www.docnyc.net/film/alien-on-stage
www.alienonstagedoc.com

In 2015, a group of bus drivers, engineers, and dispatchers in Dorset, England, banded together to put on an amateur theatrical adaptation of Ridley Scott’s Alien a benefit for the Allendale Community Centre and the Guillain-Barré Syndrome Charity. Calling themselves Paranoid Dramatics, the men and women took a DIY approach, creating the costumes and special effects from scratch and learning their lines to the best of their abilities. After seeing the show, Danielle Kummer and Lucy Harvey became obsessed with it and decided to document the play’s surprising move to London’s West End. The result is an extremely fun film about human ingenuity against all odds; just as Ripley had to face the monster, will this group survive as opening night approaches? And will Scott be there to cheer them on? The November 14 and 15 screenings will be followed by a Q&A with Kummer.

An eleven-year-old blind boy seeks to become a board game champ in Go through the Dark

GO THROUGH THE DARK (Yunhong Pu, 2021)
Cinépolis Chelsea
Saturday, November 13, 7:10
Tuesday, November 16, 9:30
www.docnyc.net
www.instagram.com

First-time filmmaker Yunhong Pu serves as director, producer (with Jean Tsien), cinematographer, editor, and publicist for the subtly captivating Go through the Dark. Yunhong travels with eleven-year-old Guanglin Xu, a blind Chinese boy who has a remarkable affinity for Go, which might be the world’s oldest board game, as he participates in competitions and seeks special coaching far away. He is being raised by a single father who adores him but might not always understand what is best for his son. As father and child meet more people, new options arise for Guanglin, who does not know how to ask for what he truly wants and needs. The game Go involves turning over small, circular black and white stones, but there’s nothing black-and-white about this unique and moving story. Yunhong will participate in Q&As at the November 13 and 16 screenings.

Gary Oldman has a lot to say about Eadweard Muybridge’s photos and personal life in stirring documentary

EXPOSING MUYBRIDGE (Marc Shaffer, 2021)
Saturday, November 13, IFC Center, 7:05
Monday, November 15, Cinépolis Chelsea, 2:00
www.docnyc.net
www.muybridgethemovie.com

English photographer Eadweard Muybridge is most well known for taking some of the earliest, most influential pictures in the history of the art form (and sometimes animating them), including The Horse in Motion, his shots of redwoods in Yosemite, and his plates of nude men and women walking, running, and stepping over plates. But writer, director, and producer Marc Shaffer focuses on Muybridge’s bizarre life as well as his photography in the documentary Exposing Muybridge, highlighting an existence filled with murder, betrayal, naked ambition, legal and political wheeling and dealing, alchemy, and immense talent and ingenuity. Among those sharing their thoughts about Muybridge are actor and collector Gary Oldman, who must play the photographer in the eventual film, and author Rebecca Gowers, who is related to the man Muybridge killed. The sordid doings grow more and more intriguing as Shaffer cuts between the speakers, archival photographs and letters, and dozens of Muybridge’s pictures. My only quibble with the film is that I was hoping to learn the proper way to pronounce the photographer’s chosen surname (he was born Edward James Muggeridge), but not everyone in the film says “Muybridge” the same way. The November 13 and 15 screenings will be followed by a Q&A with Shaffer.

ASCENSION (Jessica Kingdon, 2021)
Cinépolis Chelsea
260 West Twenty-Third St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday, November 16, 4:15
Thursday, November 18, 4:45
www.docnyc.net/film/ascension
ascensiondocumentary.com

Jessica Kingdon’s Ascension is one of the most beautifully photographed documentaries you’re ever likely to see. Evoking the mesmerizing visual style of such photographers as Andreas Gursky, Edward Burtynsky, and Jeff Wall, director, editor, and producer Kingdon and producer and cinematographer Nathan Truesdell, who rarely moves his camera, explore Xi Jinping’s promise of the Chinese Dream, what the leader calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people,” in a three-part film about capitalism and consumption, poverty and wealth in China. The biracial Chinese American Kingdon first explores the job market, as men and women in outdoor booths shout out hourly wages, responsibilities, and housing opportunities to those in need of work, who are then shown toiling in factories, sewing, plucking fowl, and building sex dolls.

In the second section, workers are indoctrinated into the company lifestyle, learning how to climb the ladder through very specific and often demeaning business etiquette; the film concludes by showing the luxuries success and wealth can bring. One of the most memorable shots in a film filled with them is of a glamorous young woman being photographed at a seaside resort as a worker, unnoticed by the model and photographer, tends to a lush green lawn; the differences between her posh bag and chapeau and his garbage bag and straw hat, his face hidden as hers pouts for the camera, speak volumes. Featuring a pulsating score by Dan Deacon, Ascension might be specifically about China, but it also relates to what is happening in America today, particularly with the current supply chain issues as so many workers decided not to return to work as the pandemic lockdown lifted while income inequality continues to grow at obscene levels. The November 16 screening will be followed by a Q&A with Kingdon.

DRIFT: FRAGILE FUTURE / DRIFT MATERIALISM: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

DRIFT: FRAGILE FUTURE
The Shed, the McCourt
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Wednesday – Sunday through December 19, exhibition $25, Drifters and exhibition $35
Includes admission to Ian Cheng: Life After BOB
646-455-3494
theshed.org
online slideshow

Since 2007, the Amsterdam-based duo DRIFT, a partnership between Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, have been exploring the intersection and interdependence of humans, nature, and technology. Their environmentally conscious, multidimensional works are like individual ecosystems that present hope for a future potentially doomed by climate change. Continuing through December 19 at the Shed at Hudson Yards, Fragile Future is a wonderland of experiential installations, presented by Superblue, which specializes in immersive art.

The exhibition begins with Fragile Future, a light sculpture with a modular system based on the growth of dandelions, constructed from LED lights, phosphor bronze, printed circuit board, and the hairs and seeds of dandelions themselves. Coded Coincidence consists of dozens and dozens of beaded lights that move about a long, rectangular, netted space, sudden gusts of air making them mimic the flight of elm seeds in the spring. There’s an emotional aspect to the movement as they travel in groups and gather in a corner, or, with a kind of sadness, one gets trapped in the netting, alone until it can be freed and join the rest of the herd.

Ego might be composed of nylon fiber, ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene fiber monofilaments, polyester, and polyvinyl fluoride and run by motors set to specific algorithms, but it seems to have an organic life of its own. Created for Nederlandse Reisopera’s production of Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo, about the love between Orpheus and Eurydice and his descent into the underworld, Ego is a monumental handmade woven block that rises, falls, spreads out, collapses, and twists and turns as if magically floating through space, evoking human emotions amid a gentle soundscape. Describing its construction, Gordijn explains in a Drift video, “It depends on how that ego is shaped, how flexible it is, or how rigid it is. Because if it is rigid, there is only one truth, and if it’s flexible, you can move along with what is needed in order for it to accept certain truths or accept how life is or how the world is being built. And I think it’s a big difficulty in everybody’s life to be flexible in your vision and to be flexible in your perspective. But we have to be flexible, and I like that about Ego, that it can be a very rigid block but it can also completely change. It can be a solution.”

The next room is filled with “Materialism,” a collection of reverse-engineered sculptures that reduce such consumer products as a Big Mac menu, a coffee cup, an iPhone, a pencil, and a bicycle into colored blocks based on the size of their raw materials, resulting in miniature architectural models meant to reveal how we exploit the earth and its labor force.

In the two-channel, twelve-minute film Drifters, Drift’s iconic concrete blocks float through New York City at one end of a long room and across mountains, rivers, and forests at the other end, searching for where they came from and what awaits them.

The pièce de resistance takes place in the McCourt, the Shed’s 17,000-square-foot McCourt performance venue, only at certain times and with an extra charge, so plan your visit carefully. Four levitating Drifters, real versions of the blocks from the film in the previous room, move slowly throughout the space for more than an hour, set to a droning soundtrack by Anohni, the English singer-songwriter who used to lead the band Antony and the Johnsons. The blocks are floating without wires, engaged in a butoh-like dance as they very (very) slowly flip, lower, and rise, sometimes dangling just overhead. Occasionally they gently bump into each other in a kind of soft kiss. The audience can walk around the area, sit in folding chairs, or lie down on their backs on the floor as these monoliths put on a mesmerizing show that could be an outtake from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. During the performance, I asked Gordijn how they did it. After offering two guesses that she quickly said no to, I suggested a third, which she simply smiled at. It’s extraordinarily peaceful and relaxing while also instilling hope for a future where humans, nature, and technology can exist together in harmony.

[On December 10 and 11, Ego will be activated by special dance performances, featuring Company Wo. (Daniel Kersh, Marcella Ann Lewis, Erika Choe, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, and Myssi Robinson) from 11:30 to 5:00 and Project-TAG (Mizuho Kappa) from 5:30 to 8:00 on Friday and Limón Dance Company (Jessica Sgambelluri) from 11:30 to 2:00 and Battery Dance (Durgesh Gangani, Jillian Linkowski, Razvan Stoian, Randall Riley, Sarah Housepian, and Vivake Khamsingsavath) from 2:30 to 8:00 on Saturday.]

Drift exhibit at Pace features self-portraits of founders Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

DRIFT MATERIALISM: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE
Pace Gallery
540 West Twenty-Fifth St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
November 5 – December 18, free
www.pacegallery.com

In an April 2020 online Pace discussion with musician Lee Ranaldo — he was supposed to play live with Ego when it was previously at Pace but it was canceled because of the pandemic — Gordijn said about the lockdown, “One of the beautiful things I found in the last days or weeks, actually, was that I realized that every night at a certain time, a group of crows is flying the same circles as if they’re all waiting for each other. Every day it is around 8:00, before sunset. This sort of connection with a place, where you start to get to know the animals, the plants, and the particularities, that is what I would love to explore more and the relationship that you can have with that.”

It is that kind of worldview that makes Drift’s work so compelling. In conjunction with Drift: Fragile Future, Pace is presenting “Drift Materialism: Past, Present, Future,” which expands on the “Materialism” room at the Shed. Continuing through December 18, the small show features sculptures that resemble Russian Constructivism filtered through children’s blocks. For the large-scale wall hanging 1980 Beetle, Gordijn and Nauta took apart a Volkswagen and put it back together. The resulting blocks represent forty-two materials, reduced to their accumulated mass.

DRIFT, 1980 Beetle, 2021 (photo by twi-ny/mdr / © DRIFT)

Drift usually deconstructs inanimate objects, but two new works explore the molecular elements of the human body, side-by-side self-portraits of Gordijn and Nauta that are exactly equal. In the back room, the augmented reality Block Universe consists of a plexiglass sun surrounded by planets; the gallery supplies iPads that depict orbiting Drifters and other elements. The title comes from the theory that everything is happening at once, that past, present, and future exist in unison.

“We’re not having relationships with the materials and objects around us anymore,” Nauta explains in a Drift video. “And if you start losing the connection with this, you’re going to be very unhappy, because you lose the wonder in life.”

Next up is Drift’s kinetic sculpture Amplitude, a permanent commission slated to go on view at 45 Rockefeller Plaza, providing yet more wonder.

GNIT

Peter Gnit (Joe Curnutte) takes a break on a mountainside in New York premiere of Gnit (photo © Henry Grossman)

GNIT
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 21, $20-$125
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

In Will Eno’s 2014 Broadway play, The Realistic Joneses, Jennifer tells John, “I think you have a nice way with words.” Eno has demonstrated his own “nice way with words” throughout his career; probing language and communication is ingrained in his MO. Such is the case with the New York premiere of his 2013 play, Gnit (pronounced “Guh-nit”), which opened today at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, in a sparkling version directed by longtime Eno collaborator Oliver Butler.

Gnit is an imaginative, clever adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 five-act verse play, Peer Gynt, which was inspired by a Norwegian fairy tale. The title character, Peter Gnit (Joe Curnutte), is on a search for his “true self,” encountering a series of unusual people who speak with him in offbeat patterns; they converse in non sequiturs, repetition, and abstraction with a deadpan glibness. “Do you know who I am?” he asks a stranger, who answers, “Yes, I do. Actually, let me be more honest, here — no, I don’t. I’m sure you’re someone.” When an outdoorswoman (Christy Escobar) tells him, “You’re just like everyone else,” Peter responds, “Me? No. That’s probably the problem. I’m not enough like everyone else.” A woman in green (Escobar) says to him, “You look like a person.” Peter replies, “Well, I try to be myself. Because, really, that’s just a large part of who I am.”

But he has no idea who he is and no understanding of how to relate to others. Even his name is a question. “‘Gnit?’ I’ve heard about you. I’ve always wondered about that name — where’s it from?” Solvay (Jasmine Batchelor) asks. “It’s a typo,” Peter admits. And his beloved, sickly mother (Deborah Hedwall) explains, “When you begin sentences with the word ‘I,’ I’m not even sure you know who you’re talking about. Because maybe I didn’t hold you enough when you were little.”

The play opens with Peter returning home to discover his childhood sweetheart, Sarah (Escobar), is getting married to a man named Moynihan (Jordan Bellow) that very day. He sneaks into the wedding to try to stop it, where he encounters Town, ingeniously portrayed by David Shih in hysterical monologues in which he plays numerous people gossiping about this and that, drinking, and complaining, switching between characters like a machine gun. Peter also meets Solvay, who he instantly falls in love with even though he is there to run away with the bride. He is soon off on an adventure that will take him around the world, chancing upon a sexy woman on a mountainside (Escobar), a witchy lady (Escobar) and her father (Shih), an international businessman (Shih), an unsympathetic bartender (Batchelor), a cigarette girl selling maps (Escobar), a beggar (Hedwall), a shackled man (Bellow) in a psychiatric clinic, and a disembodied voice that calls itself the Middle.

Peter (Joe Curnutte) is late to see his mother (Deborah Hedwall) in Will Eno play (photo © Gerry Goodstein)

No matter where he is or what happens to him, he proceeds at an even keel, as if he’s walking through his life without actually fully engaging in it, unconcerned about how he treats anyone and shunning all responsibilities. “Can you tell me what you were born for? Honestly? Because I can’t,” his mother says to him. He responds, “I’m on a journey to discover, to uncover, the authentic self,” but it’s a narcissistic, egotistical solo trip, one on which he chooses to ignore anyone and anything beyond his own immediate needs and desires, never thinking about tomorrow or how his actions might impact others. “It does take a certain temerity to see yourself at the center of it all,” a stranger (Bellow) acknowledges.

Gnit made its world premiere at the Humana Festival in Louisville in March 2013 and has been slightly revised for its New York debut, which was supposed to happen in March 2020 but was put on hold because of the pandemic. Curnutte is superb as Peter, melding the wackiness of Zach Braff with the hotness of David Boreanaz; the audience wants to hate Peter but we just can’t help but root for him no matter how awful he gets. The rest of the cast dazzles, playing more than thirty characters among them, swirling around Curnutte, pulling off seemingly impossible quick changes as they appear, disappear, and reappear in the blink of an eye. (Ásta Bennie Hostetter and Avery Reed designed the costumes, with lighting by Amith Chandrashaker, sound by Lee Kinney, and original music by Tony and Grammy nominee Daniel Kluger.)

Kimie Nishikawa’s lush set recalls Beckett’s Happy Days and Waiting for Godot, a clearly fake landscape with a projection of a lake and mountains in the back, signifying the great world beyond Peter’s home. For the former, Beckett called for an “expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound. Gentle slopes down to front and either side of stage . . . Very pompier trompe-l’oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance.” Also, just as Winnie, in Happy Days, is buried at the top of the mound, Gnit opens with Peter’s mother in bed vertically, the lower half of her body hidden. And in a specific nod to Godot, a solitary tree in Nishikawa’s set changes after intermission. Eno has counted Beckett as one of his inspirations; his dialogue is nothing if not Beckett-esque. In addition, the facades of small houses occasionally lower from the ceiling (don’t miss how a framed image in Peter’s house matches the projection).

Town (David Shih) shares a toast with Peter (Joe Curnutte) in retelling of Ibsen classic (photo © Gerry Goodstein)

The search for identity, how we communicate, and the concept of home, explored with a wry sense of humor and, at times, outright slapstick, have been fundamental in many of Eno’s works, from Wakey, Wakey and The Realistic Joneses to Pulitzer finalist Thom Pain (based on nothing) and Title and Deed. They are even more central in Gnit, in which the telling is just as important as the story.

Obie winner Butler (What The Constitution Means to Me, The Amateurs) knows just where Eno is coming from, guiding the 110-minute show with an unending, endearing charm. At one point, Peter says, “There is a limit to the magic powers of language.” In the skillful hands of Eno and Butler, I would have to disagree.

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF A WOMAN IN NEED

Naima Mora portrays different versions of herself in The Amazing Adventures of a Woman in Need (photos by Harris Davey)

Who: Naima Mora
What: On-demand livestreamed solo show The Amazing Adventures of a Woman in Need
Where: Vimeo
When: Through November 11, $10
Why: In the prologue to her debut solo show, The Amazing Adventures of a Woman in Need, Naima Mora, wearing jeans and a tight white tank top, holding a pink rose, describes the day in Harlem in 2002 when she realized she needed to turn her unhappy, unsatisfying life around. “I sit alone in my room, on my bed, wondering how I got here, wondering why I’m in this hell of a city, wondering why I’m killing myself to be here, wondering why my hair is falling out, wondering why I partied all night shoveling drugs up my nose, wondering why I’m sabotaging myself,” she says. “And then, I have to cradle myself, be gentle with myself, fall in love with myself, breathe and try to forget the last eight hours, and then forgive myself: forgive myself for being a drunk, for wanting insatiable fun to fill a void and forget the disappointment that I have with myself. And to myself, in my room, on my bed, guilt having settled in, and a little bit of a panic attack, just a little bit, I think to myself, I forgive you. I forgive you for being a fucking mess.”

Mora then admits, “Now, I’ve lived many lives: a supermodel, a crazy woman, and a gold digger, but I still haven’t really lived. So why not tell my story. I need to tell my story. I need to get this shit out of my body and out of my head. I need to rid myself of this self-inflicted destruction.” For the next seventy-five minutes, Mora portrays each of those characters, Penelope the supermodel, who can’t get a runway job anymore; the quirky Joanne, who suffers miscarriages and spends time in a psychiatric hospital; and Marisol Yanette Arnelis Rodriguez Lopes, a ritualistic woman facing too much solitude, offering such life lessons as “Get Your Hands Off My Peach Fuzz” and “Checkmate the Seduction: Train the Eggplant.” The set features a chair, a table, and a couch, a few props, and a screen on which photographs are projected.

An America’s Next Top Model winner, actress, author, and inspirational speaker, Mora who was born in Detroit in 1984, is barely recognizable in the roles, immersing herself fully into them, each with very different costumes, accents, hair, and movement. Directed and cowritten by Brooklyn native Marishka S. Phillips, The Amazing Adventures of a Woman in Need is a deeply intimate tale that also provides a roadmap for personal introspection; watching Mora deal with her issues so openly is likely to encourage audiences to do the same.

The show was recorded live with an audience at the Triad Theater on October 16 and continues on demand through November 11. Mora bravely puts herself out there as she battles her demons in public; she also traced the development of the play on social media. In a Twitter post, she wrote, “My director is pushing me to my limits this week. Asking me to expand and literally stretch my artistic muscle for our show coming up in just 2 days!!! This has truly been a transformative experience.”

MIA HANSEN-LØVE SELECTS

Mia Hansen-Løve is curating an inspirational series at Metrograph (photo by Judicaël Perrin)

MIA HANSEN-LØVE SELECTS
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
November 5-13
212-660-0312
nyc.metrograph.com

“Filmmaking is a perpetual questioning of existence. What is beauty? Why am I living? And I need that, I think, perhaps because of being the daughter of two philosophy teachers,” French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve told the Guardian in 2016. A critics darling and regular award winner for her intimate tales of family drama and romantic love (Goodbye First Love, The Father of My Children, Things to Come), often with semiautobiographical elements involving her DJ brother, her philosophy professor parents, and her long relationship with former husband Olivier Assayas, she is ready to make a big jump with her latest film and first in English, Bergman Island, in which a pair of filmmakers (Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth) seek inspiration on Fårö Island, where Ingmar Bergman lived and made some of his finest films.

In conjunction with the film’s release, she is curating a program at Metrograph, “Mia Hansen-Løve Selects,” running November 5-13, consisting of six films that had an impact on her, in addition to her debut. Earlier this year, for a similar series at BAMPFA in California, she chose Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumière, Gérard Blain’s The Pelican, Bo Widerberg’s Adalen 31, and Éric Rohmer’s Summer. Her Metrograph lineup is similarly diverse: Bergman actor Victor Sjöström’s 1928 silent classic, The Wind; indie favorite Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, in which Michelle Williams portrays a homeless woman on the move with her dog; Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter, about a single mother searching for companionship; Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur, a unique take on happiness; Edward Yang’s epic four-hour A Brighter Summer Day, about teen angst in Taiwan; and Hou’s dizzying, swirling Millennium Mambo, starring a resplendent performance by Shu Qi. The series is anchored by Hansen-Løve’s 2007 debut feature, All Is Forgiven, being shown November 5-18 (and available on demand), about a family in crisis because of drug addiction. Below are select reviews.

Lillian Gish in The Wind

Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) is being driven crazy by internal and external sources in The Wind

THE WIND (Victor Sjöström, 1928)
Metrograph
Friday, November 5, and Sunday, November 7, noon
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Victor Sjöström’s 1928 now-classic silent film The Wind stars Lillian Gish as Letty Mason, a young woman moving from Virginia to Texas to live with her cousin Beverly (Edward Earle). Traveling from the cultured, civilized East to what was still the wild West, the uncertain Letty must confront the fierceness of nature head-on — both human nature and the harsh natural environment. On the train, she is wooed by cattleman Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love), but her fears grow as she first sees the vicious wind howling outside the train window the closer she gets to her destination. Once in Sweetwater, she is picked up by her cousin’s neighbors, the handsome Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson) and his goofy sidekick, Sourdough (William Orlamond). Both men take a quick liking to Letty, who seems most attracted to Wirt. Soon Beverly’s wife, Cora (Dorothy Cumming, in her next-to-last film before retiring), becomes jealous of Letty’s closeness with her husband and kids and kicks her out, leaving a desperate Letty to make choices she might not be ready for as the wind outside becomes fiercer and ever-more dangerous.

The Wind

Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) and Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson) have some tough decisions to make in Victor Sjöström’s silent classic

The Wind is a tour de force for Gish in her last silent movie, not only because of her emotionally gripping portrayal of Letty, but because she put the entire production together, obtaining the rights to the novel by Dorothy Scarborough, hiring the Swedish director and star Hanson, and arguing over the ending with the producers and Irving Thalberg. (Unfortunately, she lost on that account, just about the only thing that did not go the way she wanted.)

Sjöström (The Phantom Carriage, The Divine Woman), who played Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and cinematographer John Arnold create some dazzling effects as a twister threatens and Letty battles both inside and outside; she is regularly shot from the side, at the door of the shack where she lives, not knowing if she’d be safer inside or outside as the wind and sand blast over her. The film, an early look at climate change, was shot in the Mojave Desert in difficult circumstances; to get the wind to swirl, the crew used propellers from eight airplanes. Dialogue is sparse, and the story is told primarily in taut visuals.

LE BONHEUR

François (Jean-Claude Drouot) tries to convince Thérèse (Claire Drouot, his real-life wife), that he has plenty of happiness to spread around in Le Bonheur

LE BONHEUR (HAPPINESS) (Agnès Varda, 1965)
Metrograph
Friday, November 5, and Monday, November 8, 6:45
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In 1965, French Nouvelle Vague auteur Agnès Varda said about her third film, Le Bonheur, which translates as Happiness: “Happiness is mistaken sadness, and the film will be subversive in its great sweetness. It will be a beautiful summer fruit with a worm inside. Happiness adds up; torment does too.” That is all true more than fifty years later, as the film still invites divided reaction from critics. “Miss Varda’s dissection of amour, as French as any of Collette’s works, is strikingly adult and unembarrassed in its depiction of the variety of love, but it is as illogical as a child’s dream,” A. H. Weiler wrote in the New York Times in May 1966. “Her ‘Happiness,’ a seeming idyll sheathed in irony, is obvious and tender, irresponsible and shocking and continuously provocative.” All these decades later, the brief eighty-minute film is all that and more, save for the claim that it is illogical. In a patriarchal society, it actually makes perfect, though infuriating, sense.

François and Émilie (Marie-France Boyer) seek out their own happiness in Nouvelle Vague classic

François and Émilie (Marie-France Boyer) seek out their own happiness in Nouvelle Vague classic

French television star Jean-Claude Drouot (Thierry La Fronde) stars as the handsome François, who is leading an idyllic life with his beautiful wife, Thérèse (Claire Drouot), and their delightful kids, Pierrot (Olivier Drouot) and Gisou (Sandrine Drouot), in the small, tight-knit Parisian suburb of Fontenay. While away on a job, François meets the beautiful Émilie (Marie-France Boyer), a postal clerk who connects him to his wife via long-distance telephone, flirting with him although she knows he is happily married. And despite being happily married, François returns the flirtation, offering to help with her shelves when she moves into an apartment in Fontenay. Both François and Émilie believe that there is more than enough happiness to go around for everyone, without any complications. “Be happy too, don’t worry,” Émilie tells him. “I’m free, happy, and you’re not the first,” to which he soon adds, “Such happiness!” And it turns out that even tragedy won’t put a stop to the happiness, in a plot point that angered, disappointed, confused, and upset many critics as well as the audience but is key to Varda’s modern-day fairy tale.

The beauty of nature plays a key role in LE BONHEUR

The beauty of nature plays a key role in Le Bonheur

Le Bonheur is Varda’s first film in color, and she seems to have been heavily influenced by her husband, Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), bathing the film in stunning hues that mimic Impressionist paintings, particularly the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in a series of picnics and flower-filled vases. In a sly nod, at one point a black-and-white television is playing the 1959 film Le Déjeuner Sur L’herbe (“Picnic on the Grass”), which was directed by Jean Renoir, one of Auguste’s sons, and also deals with sex, passion, procreation, and nature. Le Bonheur also features numerous scenes that dissolve out in singular blocks of color that take over the entire screen. Cinematographers Claude Beausoleil and Jean Rabier shoot the film as if it takes place in a candy-colored Garden of Eden, all set to the music of Mozart, performed by Jean-Michel Defaye. Varda doesn’t allow any detail to get away from her; even the protagonists’ jobs are critical to the story: François is a carpenter who helps builds new lives for people; Thérèse is a seamstress who is in the midst of making a wedding gown; and Émilie works in the post office, an intermediary for keeping people together. As a final touch, François, who represents aspects of France as a nation under Charles de Gaulle, and his family are played by the actual Drouot clan: Jean-Claude and Claire are married in real life (and still are husband and wife after more than fifty years), and Olivier and Sandrine are their actual children, so Le Bonheur ends up being a family affair in more ways than one.

MORNING SUN

Edie Falco, Marin Ireland, and Blair Brown are extraordinary as three generations of one family in Morning Sun (photo © Matthew Murphy 2021)

MORNING SUN
Manhattan Theatre Club
MTC at New York City Center – Stage I
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 19, $99-$109
212-581-1212
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

Tony winner Simon Stephens’s Morning Sun opened tonight at New York City Center’s Stage I, starring three sensational actresses: Tony winner and Emmy nominee Blair Brown, Emmy winner and Tony nominee Edie Falco, and Tony nominee Marin Ireland. They play three generations of women in the McBride clan: Falco is Charley McBride, Brown is her mother, Claudette, and Ireland is Charley’s daughter, Tessa. The script identifies them as 1, 2, and 3, respectively; while Falco is Charley throughout the hundred-minute Manhattan Theatre Club production, Brown and Ireland also portray numerous other characters, including friends, relatives, and lovers, reenacting moments from the past without changing costumes and altering their demeanor only slightly if at all. It sometimes takes a few lines for the audience to figure out one of these transitions, to discern who is speaking, but that’s part of the play’s attraction.

The structure can’t help but call to mind Edward Albee’s 1991 Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Three Tall Women, in which a trio of sensational actresses — most recently Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf, and Alison Pill in the show’s 2018 Broadway debut — portrayed three generations of unnamed women who the script identifies as A, B, and C. From the very start of Morning Sun, however, Stephens references not only Edward Albee but also artist Edward Hopper, and it’s clear that these women live in a different social class than the triad of Three Tall Women and that Stephens’s project is very different from Albee’s.

The show begins with an obtuse conversation that sets the mood and signals what is to come next:

Charley: Am I safe?
Tessa: You ask yourself.
Claudette: And I can’t really understand your question.
Charley: I want to know if I’m safe.
Claudette: Please be quiet.
Charley: I’m very scared. I’m very confused it’s very bright here please just tell me whether or not I am safe.
Claudette: I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.
Tessa: Here. Hold her carefully.
Claudette: The way your face scrunches up and the noise that you make and how I know I’m supposed to feel and the difference between that and how I actually do feel —
Charley: Just tell me.
Claudette: Here. Come here. Come here.
Charley: Am I safe? That’s all I’m asking. It’s not a very difficult question to understand, is it? Is it? It’s not. No. It isn’t.

Charley McBride (Edie Falco) and Brian (Marin Ireland) discuss Edward Hopper in Manhattan Theatre Club world premiere Morning Sun (photo © Matthew Murphy 2021)

In chronological order, Claudette, Charley, and Tessa discuss seminal moments in their lives, reflecting on their successes and failures, as one character often narrates what is happening to the other in the second person. Tessa tells her grandmother, “One morning at the end of summer you take a train to Penn Station walk two blocks up Seventh and get a job in the Macy’s haberdashery department. That night you find a rent controlled fifth floor walk-up on Eleventh Street in the West Village. Two bedrooms. A railroad apartment with a tub in the kitchen and a view of the courtyard to the south side of the building. And if you crane your neck you can see the Hudson.” Claudette says, “I love it completely. . . . And I never live anywhere else. . . . For the rest of my life.”

The women introduce us to Claudette’s brother-in-law, Stanley; her husband, Harold; Charley’s best friend, Casey; an airplane pilot in a bar; a museum guard named Brian; and others, looking back as if they are all ghosts. Indeed, the play takes place in a nonspecific time, a kind of way station, where some of the characters have already passed away. At one point, Uncle Stanley tells Charley that the Cherry Lane Theatre is haunted. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Charley says. “Don’t you think?” he responds. “No I don’t. And there’s no way of making me think otherwise. So don’t try,” she says. “If there’s no such thing as ghosts, then why do they need a ghost light?” he asks. Charley: “What’s a ghost light?” Stanley: “It’s a light they keep on in the theater all night to keep the ghosts away.” A moment later, Stanley adds, “A ghost is an interruption,” which evokes the eighteen months of the pandemic lockdown, when theaters were empty, ghost lights on.

Place is essential to the play, which is set in Claudette’s West Village apartment. To the left is a clothes closet, to the right a piano and a working kitchen with running water and electricity, and in the center is a large, open area with a couch, a chair, and a bench, backed by half a dozen high-set windows. (The set is by dots, with lighting by Lap Chi Chu, sound by Lee Kinney and Daniel Kluger, and costumes by Kaye Voyce.) The characters move about the space almost like ghosts, occasionally appearing like they’re in a Hopper painting. The show is named after Hopper’s 1952 canvas Morning Sun, in which a lonely woman (the model is Hopper’s wife, painter Jo Nivison, the only female who ever posed for him) sits on a bed facing an open window, her hands gripping her legs, feet in front of her, the light forming an ominous rectangle on the wall. She peers outside as if there’s something she’s lost, something she can’t get back. It’s reminiscent of such other Hopper works as Cape Cod Morning, Western Motel, Eleven A.M., Morning in a City, and A Woman in the Sun, which all feature women seemingly trapped in an isolation they can’t escape.

Claudette was born and raised in Nyack, Hopper’s hometown in Rockland County. The titular painting plays a key role in the narrative, such as when Charley meets Brian, the museum guard, while looking at it. Charley tells him, “I like finding Edward Hopper paintings and thinking this is where I came from. Morning Sun. I like the strange expression on the woman’s face and wondering what she’s staring at and if she’s thinking about what she’s staring at or if her face is just kind of frozen because she’s gone to somewhere in her head that she can’t ever talk about.” Referring to the edifice that can be seen through the window, Brian points out, “I like trying to figure out what that building is.” Charley offers, “It could be a prison.”

Impeccably directed by Lila Neugebauer (The Wolves, Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo, The Waverly Gallery), the show also made me think of Hopper’s New York Movie, in which a woman, bathed in light, hand on chin, stands just outside the seating area of a theater, perhaps contemplating whether she wants to sit down and join the crowd, be part of something. In the age of Covid, it now evokes the pandemic lockdown and the tentative return of audiences to theaters, but it also relates to the loneliness that Claudette, Charley, and Tessa experience in their daily lives; they might have one another in this surreal conversation happening onstage, but they each harbor fears of being alone.

Marin Ireland is extraordinary playing Tessa McBride and several other characters in latest Simon Stephens play (photo © Matthew Murphy 2021)

They rejoice in New York City — among the locations mentioned are the White Horse Tavern, Peter McManus, Shea Stadium, the old Penn Station, Wollman Rink, Washington Square Park the New School, and the High Line — but they bond to Joni Mitchell’s “Song to a Seagull,” in which Mitchell sings, “I came to the city / And lived like old Crusoe / On an island of noise / In a cobblestone sea / And the beaches were concrete / And the stars paid a light bill / And the blossoms hung false / On their store window trees.” The three women are together, but they are alone.

Brown (Copenhagen, Arcadia, Mary Page Marlowe), Falco (The True, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune), and Ireland (Reasons to Be Pretty, Blue Ridge, On the Exhale) are exquisite, portraying their complex characters with a gentle ease that is intoxicating, as if we’re spending quality time in front of a great painting. The drama leisurely but compellingly proceeds at a calm pace as the characters move about the stage, sometimes gathering at the small table in the kitchen, other times sitting so far apart it is as if they are in separate canvases, hung nearby on a wall.

Stephens is a writer with breathtaking skill, whether penning a charming two-character drama about a pair of loners who meet at a London Tube station (Heisenberg), a major spectacle about the murder of a pooch (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), an intimate one-man show dealing with horrific tragedy (Sea Wall), a postapocalyptic nightmare told with blindfolds and through headphones (Blindness), or a profound exploration into the lives of three generations of New York women. Morning Sun is a masterful artistic rendering of three ordinary, intertwined lives continually trying to find their unique path while battling solitude, like an Edward Hopper painting come to life, the subjects ever peering out the window, considering what is, what was, and what could have been.

Talking with Casey about Tessa, Charley says, “I want her to look back on me when she’s an adult and know that I did my best for her and that I always tried even if sometimes I let her down.” Casey replies, “We all let each other down,” to which Charley responds, “But that I did my very, very best.” What more can we ask of each other, in life and in art?

BERTOLT BRECHT’S THE MOTHER (a learning play)

Pelagea Vlasov (Kate Valk) has some qualms with the butcher (Ari Fliakos) and his wife (Erin Mullin) in The Mother (photo by Nurith Wagner-Strauss / Wiener Festwochen)

THE MOTHER
The Wooster Group
The Performing Garage
33 Wooster St. between Grand & Broome Sts.
Tuesday – Saturday through November 20, $40
Return engagement: February 18 – March 19, $30-$40
thewoostergroup.org

It’s hard to believe that in its nearly half-century existence, the Wooster Group has never before presented a work by Bertolt Brecht, the German modernist whose revolutionary ideas about theater appear to be right in line with the experimental Soho company’s vision. So it’s exciting not only that the Wooster Group is now tackling Brecht’s seldom-performed 1932 play, The Mother, but has done such a fine job with it.

Not to be confused with Brecht’s more well known anti-Fascist Mother Courage, The Mother is one of Brecht’s Lehrstücke, a learning play meant to bring the actors and the audience together while also taking a social stand. “The aim was to teach certain forms of political struggle to the audience,” Brecht wrote in 1933 about the show when it was at the Schriften zum Theater. “It was addressed mainly to women. About fifteen thousand Berlin working-class women saw the play, which was a demonstration of methods of illegal revolutionary struggle.”

Based on Maxim Gorky’s 1906 novel, the play is built around the simple and illiterate Pelagea Vlasov (Kate Valk), who just wants to make tea and soup and protect her son, Pavel (Gareth Hobbs), who recently had his pay cut by a nickel an hour. “Me, I’m no help to him anymore,” she says. “I’m a burden.”

Pavel is involved with a pair of radicals, Semjon (Ari Fliakos) and Masha (Erin Mullin), who are illegally handing out leaflets calling for a strike against the powerful Suklinov factory. They are assisted by a teacher named Fyodor (Jim Fletcher) who doesn’t believe that their actions will lead to any viable change.

“Like the crow in the snowstorm, feeding her baby, she can’t feed her, what does she do? No way out, no way out. And crows are the smartest animal in the world, after humans,” the teacher talk-sings. “Whatever you do / It won’t be sufficient. / The situation’s bad / It gets worse. / It can’t go on like this / But what is the way out?”

The Wooster Group rehearses its unique interpretation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother (photo by Erin Mullin)

When she discovers what Pavel is up to, Pelagea turns courageous, demanding to hand out the leaflets herself so her son can be safe. A policeman (Fletcher) starts sniffing around, so Pelagea moves in with the teacher, who is not thrilled that his calm life has suddenly been upended. After the workers’ representative, Karpov (Fliakos), returns with an unsatisfactory deal, the revolutionaries sing, “Good, this is the breadcrumb / Ah, but where is / The whole loaf?” Events get ever-more dangerous as Pelagea takes up the cause, praising Communism, while the police, factory sympathizers, and strikebreakers loom in every corner.

In true Wooster Group style, The Mother is wildly unpredictable, hysterically funny, and emotionally poignant, winding itself in and out of Brecht’s words. Addressing the audience following the song “Praise of Communism,” the teacher explains about Brecht, “You know, for somebody who says he doesn’t want emotions in the theater, there’s a lot of emotion in that song, you know — it’s the end of madness, it’s the end of crime, is that not sentimental?” Props are smashed and then replaced. Projections by Irfan Brkovic on the back wall and a monitor focus on the factory town and a rallying flag, with original music by Amir ElSaffar.

The set, built by Joseph Silovsky, consists of a long table where the characters often sit, interacting with a laptop and the script itself; a small room where Pelagea worries about her son; a clothesline used for multiple purposes; a chalkboard where Fyodor writes important words; two doors that are labeled “Way” and “Out,” a sly reference to the song “The Question of the Way Out”; and a keyboard played by Pavel. There’s also a monitor above the audience that shows old crime movies, dictating the pace and enhancing the themes for the performers. Cofounding artistic director Elizabeth LeCompte ably brings those disparate elements together through eighty tense minutes and eleven scenes, including “What can a mother do?,” “The Mother gets a lesson in economics,” and “The war is here.”

WG founding member Valk and Fletcher (the teacher, the policeman, the prison guard, a strikebreaker) are always a joy to watch, and they lead the way in this stellar production. Fliakos (Semjon, Karpov, the gatekeeper, jobless Gorski, Vasil the butcher) and Mullin (Masha, the butcher’s wife, the Bible lady) stand right with them through minor costume changes and musical breaks. No one portrays the worker Smilgin because, as the narrator explains, they didn’t have enough money in the bank.

Speaking of money, LeCompte points out in a program note that a “spirit of repurposing” guided the show. “Nearly everything in the production has been repurposed from previous Wooster Group works. This includes performers, ideas, set elements, and all but two props: the aqua typewriter and yellow telephone. In addition to Brecht and Gorky, the company used such sources as educational media (PeeWee’s Playhouse, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie), Slavoj Žižek’s YouTube videos, the 1958 German version for the Berliner Ensemble, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, books by and about Brecht, and 1930s gangster movies on TCM.

Continuing at the Performing Garage through November 20 (the show is back for a return engagement February 18 – March 19), The Mother was initially supposed to premiere in 2020, but the group took advantage of the additional pandemic downtime by continuing to work on it. (It debuted in June 2021 at Vienna’s Wiener Festwochen.) During the lockdown, I watched several videos Wooster posted about their progress, and their process, not all of which made the final cut — if a production like this can ever be called final. The script has a warning that “it may contain text that no longer appears or has been changed, and it may lack text that has been added for a given performance.”

Just as Brecht, in writing The Mother, was teaching about political struggle and theatrical form (he called the play “a piece of anti-metaphysical, materialistic, non-Aristotelian drama — that is, dramatically seen, of a very highly developed type”), the Wooster Group is teaching political struggle and Brecht himself to the audience, which is seated on mats on risers, with no backs. It’s been done previously as a melodrama, a call to action, and a politically driven full-on musical, but the Wooster Group has made it into something else entirely.