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BUSHWICK FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Lynn Cohen uncovers a secret about her late husband in Emma without Edmund

BUSHWICK FILM FESTIVAL
Online, Lot45, Regal Cinema, Circa Brewing Co.
October 20-24, $5-$7 per virtual film, $60-$250 per bundle, $15 in-person screenings
www.bushwickfilmfestival.com

One of my favorite shorts in the fourteenth annual Bushwick Film Festival, running online and in person October 20-24, is Nicolas Minas’s thirteen-minute heart-tugger, Emma without Edmund. Part of the “Defining Stages” program, the film stars Lynn Cohen as a widow who discovers that her recently deceased husband had an affair when they were much younger and insists on finding out more about it. Her husband is played by her real-life spouse, Ronald Cohen. I used to see the two of them regularly at the theater, always making sure to say hello. I saw her many times onstage and onscreen as well; she appeared in such television shows as Law & Order, Damages, and Sex and the City, such films as Vanya on 42nd St., Munich, and The Hunger Games, and such plays as Hamlet with Kevin Kline, Macbeth with Liev Schreiber, and I Remember Mama with an all-star cast of older actresses.

With theaters opening up again, I miss Cohen, who passed away in February 2020 at the age of eighty-six; she and Ronald had been married for fifty-five years, so seeing them together in Emma without Edmund is a special moment. The touching film is being shown October 23 at the Regal Cinema on Court St. with Erica Eng’s Americanized, Naaji Sky Adzimah’s 27 Candles, Ashley Paige Brim’s The Goldfish, and Sarah Kamaras and Harry Spitzer’s The Two Bees, an adorable documentary about longtime roommates Bette and Bonnie, who are ninety-five and recount details from their seventy-year friendship.

The film festival gets under way with an opening-night reception on October 20 at Lot45 and is highlighted by several in-person shorts programs on October 23 at Regal, including “Defining Stages,” “Art as Resistance,” “Family Lies,” and “Campy Comedies” in addition to Kate Beacom and Louis Legge’s full-length Rehab Cabin and a BFF Happy Hour from 2:00 to midnight at Circa Brewing Co. All films are also available online, either individually or in packaged bundles, including all 133 shorts and features from more than two dozen countries for $250. On October 24 from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm, the free, online Movie Industry Conference consists of such panel discussions as “Dive into Development/Production/Distribution,” “Heard City Presents Uplifting Underrepresented Voices,” “Meet the Producers,” and “NFTs and the Creative Future.”

THEATER OF WAR: TAPE

Who: Tracie Thoms, David Denman, Nyasha Hatendi, Bryan Doerries, more
What: Livestreamed play reading followed by community discussion
Where: Theater of War Productions Zoom
When: Thursday, October 21, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
Why: Theater of War’s live presentations of play readings followed by community discussions continue October 21 with an investigation into consent, power dynamics, and sexual assault. The evening begins with a dramatic reading of scenes from Stephen Belber’s 1999 play, Tape, about two friends who meet with a woman one of them might have date raped back in high school; it was made into a 2001 film by Richard Linklater starring Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, and Uma Thurman. The reading will be performed by Tracie Thoms, David Denman, and Nyasha Hatendi, helmed by Theater of War artistic director Bryan Doerries. Immediately following the reading, Doerris will facilitate a discussion held in conjunction with Go Purple Day.

“Awareness is the first defense against domestic violence, and every year, with NYC Go Purple, we keep this important issue in front of New Yorkers,” Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence commissioner Cecile Noel said in a statement. “Domestic violence awareness and prevention is not confined to one day of the year. NYC Go Purple reminds us that, every day, every New Yorker can play an important role in ending domestic violence.”

On October 28, Doerries will speak with author Margaret Atwood about social activism and his new translation of the Oedipus Trilogy; on October 27, David Patrick Kelly, Glenn Davis, Amy Ryan, David Strathairn, Marjolaine Goldsmith, and Jumaane Williams will perform Oedipus the King, followed by a discussion on the pandemic and the climate crisis hosted by the University of Notre Dame as part of its “Care for Our Common Home: Just Transition to a Sustainable Future” forum.

THE CITIES SUMMIT: A LOOK AT THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN CITIES IN A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD

Who: Frank Gehry, Eric Garcetti, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Kunlé Adeyemi, Angela Hsu, more
What: Livestreamed discussion
Where: 92nd St. Y online
When: Wednesday, October 20, free, noon – 3:00
Why: On October 20, the 92nd St. Y is convening a three-hour summit on the future of American cities in light of health crises, climate change, growing income inequality, transportation complications, and other critical matters. The seven panels and two keynotes will feature prominent architects, designers, urban planners, arts leaders, and others offering ways to face numerous problems, including architect Frank Gehry, LA mayor Eric Garcetti, Citizen University cofounder and CEO Eric Liu, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism founder and creative director Vishaan Chakrabarti, BAM president emerita Karen Brooks Hopkins, architect and professor Kunlé Adeyemi, UNC public policy assistant professor Angela Hsu, and New York City Employment and Training Coalition CEO Jose Ortiz Jr.

“The role of cities in American life has remained essential throughout the pandemic, notwithstanding early predictions to the contrary,” 92Y CEO Seth Pinsky announced in a statement. “That said, it is clear that as a result of the pandemic, the fundamental changes that our cities were undergoing even pre-COVID have only accelerated. Adapting to climate change, investing in infrastructure, including open spaces and parks, distributing prosperity more evenly, while ensuring that business, including the arts and entertainment, thrive — those are just some of the big issues of the day.” Virtual admission is free; below is the full lineup.

Opening Keynote: “Frank Gehry on the Future of Cities,” moderated by Alex Ross

“The Renewal of the American City,” with Anne-Marie Slaughter, Eric Liu, and Ai-Jen Poo

“Arts and the City,” with Karen Brooks Hopkins and Seth Pinsky

“The Future of New York City,” with Vishaan Chakrabarti, Bruce Katz, and Julie Samuels

“Jane Jacobs’s Big Ideas,” with Rana Foroohar

“Cities on the Frontlines of Climate Change,” with Angel Hsu, Rohit Aggarwala, Kunlé Adeyemi, and Emily Tisch Sussman

“The Equitable City: A Design for Fairer Living,” with Ifeoma Ebo, Jose Ortiz Jr., and Jennifer Rittner

Closing Keynote: “How Do Megacities Confront Their Biggest Challenge, Climate Change?” with Eric Garcetti

CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL 2021

CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL
FIAF and other locations
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
October 20 – November 6, free – $25
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

Igbo-Nigerian American multidisciplinary artist Okwui Okpokwasili has not let the pandemic lockdown slow her down. After appearing in the Public’s outstanding revival of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf in the late fall of 2019, Okpokwasili has taken part in Danspace Project’s Platform series, the New Museum exhibition “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” and numerous online discussions and special presentations. Her 2017 film, Bronx Gothic, was screened virtually by BAM. In June, she led a procession through Battery Park City for the River to River Festival. And in May, I caught her captivating project On the way, undone, in which she and a group of performers walked across the High Line wearing futuristic head gear made of light and mirrors, vocalizing as they headed toward Simone Leigh’s Brick House sculpture.

Okpokwasili is now the centerpiece of FIAF’s 2021 Crossing the Line Festival, taking place at multiple locations from October 20 to November 6. Throughout the festival, her video installation Before the whisper becomes the word, made with her regular collaborator, director, and husband, Peter Born, will be on view in the FIAF Gallery, exploring remembrance, community mourning, and history. On October 20 at 7:00, she will speak with festival curator Claude Grunitzky in the FIAF Skyroom about the show. “This installation is a crossroads, a midpoint, a caesura. A place caught between worlds,” she said in a statement. “Can we remember what came before while imagining the shape of a future landscape? We enter mid-song, a song that marks a singular moment in time while also expressing an entire lineage. The song is a container for an unreliable memory. From whose mouth is history born? Whose words are trusted when it comes to the telling of what happened? If the history we learn is that which is spoken aloud, what is learned by listening to the whispers that have not been written?”

Christopher Myers’s Fire in the Head will make its world premiere at FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival

Okpokwasili will also be presenting On the way, undone at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn October 21-23 ($25). In a High Line video, she says about the work, “I hope it’s a kind of medicine . . . an architecture of sound, light, that is in some way trying to imagine a portal, an opening through space and time, and it’s imagining a woman’s future self, a young girl’s future self singing back to her.”

In addition, the festival includes nora chipaumire’s Nehanda, an opera that was excerpted for River to River at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center and for FIAF will be broadcast in two cycles both online ($15) and in person ($25) at FIAF’s Tinker Auditorium, divided into eight “days”: natives, whites, pungwe, thinkers, komuredhi judhas nemajekenisheni, white verdict, killings, and manifesting, with an artist talk on October 30 at 5:00; a concert by Grammy nominee Somi in Florence Gould Hall on October 28 ($25); Christopher Myers’s Fire in the Head, a tribute to Vaslav Nijinsky with shadow puppets taking place October 29 and 30 ($25, 7:30) at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association; and Kaneza Schaal’s work-in-progress KLII, November 4-6 in Florence Gould Hall ($25), an exorcism of colonialism and the ghost of King Leopold II, incorporating archival footage and texts by Mark Twain and Patrice Lumumba.

THE FEVER

Wallace Shawn’s The Fever continues at the Minetta Lane through October 24 (photo © Daniel Rader 2021)

THE FEVER
Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 24, $56
www.audible.com

About two-thirds of the way through The Fever, Wallace Shawn’s one-person play being revived at the Minetta Lane, two audience members siting at the front right got up to walk out. Star Lili Taylor paused her monologue but stayed in character as she told the audience she would wait for the two women to leave. They exited slowly, apparently unaware the show had stopped, hoping to sneak out unnoticed. Wryly smiling, Taylor announced that this would be a good time for anyone else thinking of leaving to head for the exits. Wisely, no one took her up on her offer.

The Fever premiered at the Public in 1991, winning an Obie for Best New American Play. The New Group brought it back in 2007 at Theatre Row; Shawn played the unnamed lead both times. Vanessa Redgrave starred in Carlo Gabriel Nero’s 2004 film version. Now the New Group, in conjunction with Audible, is presenting a limited run, with the innately appealing and engaging Taylor as the traveler, a woman sharing tales of vacationing in banana republics. Although you can imagine how Shawn would have delivered the lines, in a much more wild and snarky way, Taylor is exquisite, like a dear friend sitting down with you and talking over tea and finger sandwiches. The writing and performance are so vivid, you’ll feel like you’re on these trips with her, seeing and experiencing exactly what she is seeing and experiencing.

The show is again directed by New Group founding artistic director Scott Elliott, with a light, amiable hand. A masked Taylor arrives in the theater huffing and puffing, running down the aisle and wriggling onto Arnulfo Maldonado’s set. She puts down flowers and coffee, just as so many of us do regularly when we come home, and begins to wheel out furniture on the otherwise barren stage — a lamp, a comfy chair, an end table with two doors. (The cozy lighting is by Cha See.)

“Okay, so it’s great to see all of you. I mostly see your eyes, obviously, but that’s a very beautiful part of any human being — or animal,” she says, welcoming us into her world. “I don’t know how many of you have dogs, but I love the eyes of dogs in particular. Anyway, as you can see, I’m sort of setting up a very small room here. It’s really just suggestive of a room; I’m not trying to convince you that it’s a real room, but it’s useful to represent a room just to help tell the story I’m going to tell you, and also, I don’t know, I think a completely bare stage can sometimes create a sort of almost threatening atmosphere, as if someone were saying, you know, ‘Don’t get too comfortable, there won’t be anything charming or attractive in the course of our evening at all,’ whereas I find these little bits of furniture quite pleasant and nice.’”

She immediately takes us into her confidence, and we’re on her side, identifying with her thoughts about travel, politics, and art. She seems to care about people in need, and we at first forgive her for certain views that sneak into her story. She notes that she goes to “poor countries” where they don’t speak her language, words that begin to make us uncomfortable as they’re repeated, almost like a mantra. Soon she is emphasizing dichotomies of income inequality: She looks at the helpless people across the street in a shelter as she eats in a fancy restaurant. Recalling how an office worker detailed cases of political murder, torture, and rape sponsored by the government, she remembers her parents teaching her how to properly go to the bathroom, wash her hands, and brush her teeth. She describes a wealthy old man spending a ton of money to keep himself alive as he’s dying, paying for all kinds of special treatments, a direct comparison to an execution by injection she recounted earlier. She prances about on a nude beach while so many in the world can’t afford proper clothing and shelter.

She admits that she has lived in towns “whose streets ran with the blood of good-hearted victims,” but she still loves the violin and Beethoven. “I like to go out at night in a cosmopolitan city and sit in a dark auditorium watching dancers fly into each other’s arms,” she says, turning a mirror on just about everyone in the theater. She sees The Cherry Orchard with friends but doesn’t understand why she was supposed to be weeping by the end.

Where we were previously nodding in agreement with the traveler, we become taken aback as she starts criticizing poor people for depriving her of the fun she used to have. “I’d always said, ‘I’m a happy person. I love life,’ but now there was a sort of awful indifference or blankness that was coming from somewhere inside me and filling me up, bit by bit,” she complains. “Things that would once have pleased me or even delighted me seemed to go dead on me, to spoil. But my problem was that somehow, suddenly, I was not myself. I was disconcerted.” She turns so sad that she can’t even give her family presents anymore, and it isn’t long before she is blaming the poor.

Our comfort level continues to decrease when she proclaims, “Yes, I’m an aesthete. I like beauty. Yes — poor countries are beautiful. Poor people are beautiful. It’s a wonderful feeling to have money in a country where most people are poor, to ride in a taxi through horrible slums.” She rationalizes why she is not going to give all the money in her purse to a beggar, arguing that she worked hard for that money. “I’m entitled to be served, I’m entitled to expect that certain things will be done. Which means that the holders of money determine what happens in the world,” she says.

Ah, there it is; the truth comes out, and it’s not easy for a liberal New York City audience to hear. Years before the subprime mortgage crisis, before President George W. Bush called his base “the haves and the have-mores,” before the immigration crisis reached epic proportions, before corporations as people were awarded First Amendment rights, Shawn spotlighted the privileged, the growing income gap, and the personal justifications necessary to maintain some agreeable level of inequality by people on both sides of the aisle.

Taylor (Six Feet Under, Household Saints), who played Lemon in the New Group’s 2004 revival of Shawn’s 1985 examination of civilization, Aunt Dan and Lemon — and was mesmerizing reprising the role with the rest of the original cast in a streaming Zoom version during the pandemic — is a warm, affectionate actor, and she excels as the traveler, setting us up for a reevaluation of our personal belief systems, of what we deem important and unavoidable on a beautiful planet where ugliness awaits just around the corner. We can’t help but like her, and in liking her — at least in part because we identify so closely with her — we give her character the benefit of the doubt.

As Pogo said in a 1971 Earth Day comic, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Perhaps that’s why those two women got up and left before the play was over.

PERICLES 2021

Who: Red Bull Theater
What: Online reading and discussions about Shakespeare’s Pericles
Where: Red Bull Theater YouTube and Facebook
When: Livestreamed events October 4, 11, 18, 25, 28, free with advance RSVP
Why: Last year Red Bull Theater presented “Othello 2020,” a deep dive into the Shakespeare tragedy through performances and discussions. This year Red Bull is digging into one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known works, Pericles, about the Prince of Tyre, who sets out on a series of adventures when the answer to a riddle goes awry. In a statement, Red Bull founding artistic director Jesse Berger explains, “Shakespeare’s Pericles is at the heart and soul of Red Bull in many ways: our founding play, Jacobean in period, hopeful in spirit, and about the power of imagination at its core. ‘It hath been used as restoratives,’ the poet Gower says right at the beginning of the play. To me, this play is about restoring hope and peace after a period of turmoil and tragedy. I’ve always loved the idea of this play as a hero journey, and a play about the healing power of storytelling itself. As the play that began the life of our theater company, it seems most appropriate that we explore this play anew, continuing our journey — toward our twentieth year of existence as a company, reemerging out of the pandemic shutdown, and inviting new voices to be in creative conversation with the play and the Western classical canon.”

Red Bull’s inaugural production, in 2003, featured Daniel Breaker in the title role, with Raphael Nash Thompson as Gower and Cerimon; on October 4, Thompson, who also portrayed Gower in Sir Trevor Nunn’s version at TFANA in 2016, performed the prologue “To sing a song that old was sung” and discussed the play in a RemarkaBULL Podversation with Red Bull associate artistic director Nathan Winkelstein that you can watch here. “Exploring Pericles in 2021” began on October 11 and continues October 18, with BIPOC artists Grantham Coleman, Kimberly Chatterjee, Callie Holly, Mahira Kakkar, Jordan Mahome, Anthony Michael Martinez, Clint Ramos, Kenny Ramos, Madeline Sayet, and Craig Wallace delving into what Pericles means today. On October 25, Kent Gash will direct a livestreamed benefit reading of the play, with Coleman as Pericles. The programming concludes October 28 with an interactive Bull Session featuring Gash, scholar Noémie Ndiaye, and members of the company.

“Over the last two decades, Pericles has been produced around the world more often than in the entire twentieth century,” writes Ndiaye, an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. “The play was wildly popular in its own time, and it is now poised to become one of the twenty-first century favorite rediscovered Shakespearean plays. It may have caught the attention of contemporary theatermakers invested in diversifying Shakespeare in part because its geographical location, which moves between ancient Lebanon, Turkey, Libya, and Greece, makes it suitable for cross-cultural multiracial casting. And, certainly Pericles is a fertile terrain for racial investigation. Yet at the same time, the play’s consistent characterization of ‘fairness’ (a word used twenty-three times) as the feminized object of Pericles’s desire and the curative means of his salvation frames his journey as a romantic quest for whiteness and white world-making at the dawn of modernity. It is that fraught and complex racial terrain with which contemporary theatermakers must reckon when they stage Pericles today, finding new creative ways of doing Shakespeare better, Shakespeare with us and for us.”

RECLAMATION

Breton Tyner-Bryan will premiere Reclamation in Jefferson Market Library Garden on October 16 (photo by James Jude Johnson)

Who: Breton Tyner-Bryan, Hugh Ryan, Dajuan Harris, James Jude Johnson, Tatiana Stewart
What: World premiere of site-specific work honoring the Women’s House of Detention
Where: Jefferson Market Library Garden, 10 Greenwich Ave. at Tenth St.
When: Saturday, October 16, free with advance RSVP, 5:00
Why: From March 1932 to June 1972, the Women’s House of Detention held female prisoners, including Ethel Rosenberg, Afeni Shakur, Grace Paley, Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Andrea Dworkin; it was an art deco building in which inmates facing the street could speak with passersby. The structure was demolished in 1973 and replaced with a lovely garden behind the Jefferson Market Library, designed by Pamela Berdan with a wide range of colorful plants and flowers.

On October 16 at 5:00, dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and teacher Breton Tyner-Bryan will activate the space with the world premiere of Reclamation, a piece directed, choreographed, and performed by Tyner-Bryan, joined by three members of the Breton Follies, Dajuan Harris, James Jude Johnson, and Tatiana Stewart, and featuring an original score by Brooklyn-based composer and pianist Ai Isshiki. The work explores the metaphysical energy and spiritual freedom of the garden and the location’s history, particularly as they relate to the local LGBTQIA+ community. In addition, writer, historian, and curator Hugh Ryan (When Brooklyn Was Queer) will read from his upcoming book, The Women’s House of Detention. The library itself is currently closed; when it reopens, Tyner-Bryan will present her latest films, Invicta and West of Frank, as part of the celebration.