Elevator Repair Service adaptation of Ulysses is fun frolic through 1920 masterpiece (photo by Joan Marcus)
ULYSSES
The Public Theater, Martinson Hall
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 1, $109 www.publictheater.org www.elevator.org
Who knew that Ulysses was such raunchy fun? Certainly not me, who, like many others, have cracked open but never fully read James Joyce’s 1920 masterpiece.
Since 1991, the downtown avant-garde theater troupe Elevator Repair Service has been staging unique adaptations, from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Chekhov’s The Seagull to Euripides’s The Bacchae and Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The daring company now continues its reinterpretations of classic literature, which include William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,The Select (Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises), and Gatz, an eight-hour extravaganza featuring every single word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, with a frisky frolic through what is considered to be one of the greatest books ever written.
“Hello and welcome to Ulysses,” longtime ERS cast member and codirector Scott Shepherd announces at the beginning. “Get ready. As one critic said, not much happens in Ulysses, apart from everything you can possibly imagine.” Shepherd prepares the audience by explaining that Joyce purposely filled the novel with enigmas and puzzles and experimental turns, writing many chapters in different styles, in order to “keep the professors busy for centuries arguing about what he meant, and that’s how he would insure his immortality. And like many things Joyce said, it’s a joke, but also not a joke, because here we are, more than a hundred years later, and the professors are still arguing.”
The set, by the collective known as dots, is centered by a long table in the front, where seven actors playing forty characters often sit before getting up and participating in absurdist scenes. A clock on a far wall keeps track of the time, which goes back and forth on Thursday, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. Shepherd and codirector John Collins have trimmed the story down to a lean 165 minutes with intermission; whenever they skip a few sentences, paragraphs, or pages, the words are speedily projected on the table and/or wall, initially accompanied by screeching sounds that eventually calm down a bit as the actors grab on to the table, as if the time jumps have them holding on for dear life.
Dr Malachi Mulligan (Scott Shepherd) examines “bisexually abnormal” asylum escapee Dr Bloom (Vin Knight) in Ulysses (photo by Joan Marcus)
The narrative consists of eighteen episodes, from “Telemachus” and “Nestor” to “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” reimagining Homer’s eighth-century BC saga The Odyssey, adding references to King Lear and Hamlet. The action travels from Eccles St., Essex Bridge, and the post office to Davy Byrne’s pub, the library, and the Ormond Hotel, following the (mis)adventures of protagonist Leopold Bloom (Vin Knight), a simple man married to Marion, also known as Molly (Maggie Hoffman), a singer who is having an affair with her goofy manager, Blazes Boylan (Shepherd), who struts around with his silly locks of hair spewing out from under his straw hat, and Stephen Dedalus (Christopher-Rashee Stevenson), who previously appeared in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and returns here as a deeply pensive history professor mourning the loss of his mother (Stephanie Weeks) while avoiding his father, Simon (Kate Benson).
Among the other figures who pop in and out of the less-than-neatly-laid-out plot are university students Armstrong (Dee Beasnael) and Haines (Benson), Dr Punch Costello (Weeks), the expert spitter known as the citizen (Benson), newspaper editor Myles Crawford (Benson), antisemitic headmaster Mr Deasy (Knight), pub gossipers Joe Hynes (Stevenson) and John Wyse Nolan (Weeks), Nosey Flynn (Weeks) from Dubliners, and medical student Buck Mulligan (Shepherd), who is the subject of Joyce’s beloved opening: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: ‘Introibo ad altare Dei.’”
Don’t try to get caught up in the plot, as it’s not the point, although Odyssey fans are likely to spot numerous similarities between Homer’s and Joyce’s characters; instead, Ulysses, in the book and in this vastly entertaining ERS staging, is about human consciousness and the love of language, with tongues firmly in cheeks. Exquisite verbiage pours forth at any moment — “Ah! Godblazeqrukbrukarchkrasht!” Boylan declares to Marion, who responds, “O! Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck?” — as well as spectacular, unforgettable lines, such as when Stephen says, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Also showing up are such fab phrases as “the scrotumtightening sea,” “ineluctable modality of the visible [and the audible],” “Shut your eyes and see,” “the incipient intimations of proximate dawn,” and “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” Oh, and let’s not forget “He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.”
Here is an exemplary passage, the narration divided between two of the performers:
SW: Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. KB: He liked thick giblet soup, SW: nutty gizzards, KB: a stuffed roast heart, SW: liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, KB: fried hencods’ roes. SW: Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Leopold Bloom (Vin Knight) takes a gander at the dirty Sweets of Sin in ERS adaptation (photo by Joan Marcus)
“The pity is, the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it,” Joyce told Djuna Barnes in a 1922 interview for Vanity Fair. “In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious — but as for psychoanalysis, it’s neither more nor less than blackmail.”
ERS takes that spirit and runs with it, from Enver Chakartash’s playful costumes, Marika Kent’s mischievous lighting, and Ben Williams’s brash sound to Matthew Deinhart’s text projections and Patricia Marjorie’s hilarious props, which range from paper airplanes to doll babies. The six actors hit just the right note throughout as they switch in an instant from one character to narrator to another character, never missing a beat.
You don’t have to have read the book or seen Joseph Strick’s 1967 film adaptation to understand what is going on, since nothing happens, and everything. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the wild, unpredictable shenanigans as ERS celebrates another literary treasure as only it can.
As Stephen says early on, “When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once . . .”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
“The words of the prophets are written on subway walls and tenement halls,” Paul Simon sang in 1964.
Film Forum, which just named Tabitha Jackson its new director, has teamed up with the Tenement Museum to present the wide-ranging sixty-plus-movie series “Tenement Stories: From Immigrants to Bohemians,” in which there are plenty of prophets. Running February 6–26, the program includes classic favorites, lesser-known gems, and plenty of surprises that take place in old New York, from D.W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley with Lillian Gish and The New York Hat with Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore, both released in 1912, to Film Forum repertory artistic director Bruce Goldstein’s 2010 Les Rues de Mean Streets (screening with Martin Scorsese’s 1973 Mean Streets) and 2020 Uncovering the Naked City (shown with Jules Dassin’s 1948 The Naked City) in addition to Aicha Cherif’s 2025 Heat (accompanying Diego Echeverria’s 1984 Los Sures).
“In the silent and early talkie eras, Hollywood churned out cinematic fantasies about the super-rich, but there were also many movies set in New York’s so-called tenement districts, particularly the Lower East Side of Manhattan, once the most densely populated place on earth,” Goldstein said in a statement. “That and other neighborhoods, like Harlem, East Harlem, and parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx, also had an avid moviegoing population — in the 1930s and ’40s, the Lower East Side alone had over thirty movie theaters, from fleapits to palaces — so people were seeing versions of their own lives reflected onscreen. The same neighborhoods would show up in later movies, but with New York’s changing population represented.”
The festival boasts films by Francis Ford Coppola, King Vidor, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Hal Ashby, Ken Jacobs, Sergio Leone, John Huston, D. W. Griffith, Leon Ichaso, Raoul Walsh, Preston Sturges, Sean Baker, and many more; among the stars are James Cagney, Loretta Young, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Edward G. Robinson, Ginger Rogers, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Joe Pesci, Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno, Dick Gregory, Marilyn Monroe, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg.
Tenement Museum president Annie Polland added, “Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, famously wrote to his readers, ‘Under your tenement roofs is real life — the very stuff of which the greatest books are written.’ In 1900, 75% of Manhattanites lived in a tenement — a shared experience for decades of New Yorkers and their descendants. Every day the Tenement Museum shares the stories of those tenement dwellers — immigrant, migrant, and refugee families — by taking people into their re-created homes. The Film Forum series shows these real life dramas through film, letting you time travel through the tenements, from the Yiddish-speaking sweatshop in Uncle Moses, to a young Irish American girl’s awakening in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, to Martin Scorsese’s portrait of his parents in ItalianAmerican,, to more recent tenement life, as seen through the eyes of Latino, Chinese, Iranian, and other New Yorkers.”
On February 8 and 13, the museum is hosting “Love at the Tenement,” a Valentine’s Day holiday tour of 97 Orchard St., followed by “Crime in the Tenements: Fact and Fiction,” which will have their own real-life tenement stories.
There will be numerous special presentations during the series, including live piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner; introductions by Cathy Sorsese, Uncle Floyd Show alum Michael Townsend Wright, and Kaity Tong; postscreening conversations with Peter McCrea, Cherif, and Mari Rodríguez Ichaso; and a Yiddish vaudeville performance by Allen Lewis Rickman, Yelena Shmulenson, Steve Sterner, and Shane Baker, who have been involved in such Yiddish treats as The Essence: A Yiddish Theatre Dim Sum and Tevye Served Raw. On February 16, “16mm Treasures from the New York Public Library” comprises four shorts introduced by NYPL collection manager Elena Rossi-Snook.
Below is a look at several of the films, which shine a light on the history of New York City since the turn of the twentieth century, particularly as a new home for immigrant families.
A Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) and an abandoned child (Jackie Coogan) form a family in The Kid
THE KID (Charles Chaplin, 1921)
Sunday, February 8, 11:00 am filmforum.org
Charlie Chaplin’s first feature, The Kid, was a breakthrough for the British-born silent-film star, a touching and tender sixty-eight-minute triumph about a poor soul getting a second chance at life. When a baby arrives at his doorstep, a Tramp (Chaplin) first tries to ditch the boy, but he ends up taking him to his ramshackle apartment and raising him as if he were his own flesh and blood. Although he has so little, the Tramp makes sure the child, eventually played by Jackie Coogan, has food to eat, clothes to wear, and books to read. Meanwhile, the mother (Edna Purviance, Chaplin’s former lover), who has become a big star, regrets her earlier decision and wonders where her son is, setting up a heartbreaking finale.
In addition to playing the starring role, Chaplin wrote, produced, directed, and edited the film and composed the score for his company, First National, wonderfully blending slapstick comedy, including a hysterical street fight with an angry neighbor, with touching melodrama as he examines poverty in post-WWI America, especially as seen through the eyes of the orphan boy, played beautifully by Coogan, who went on to marry Betty Grable, among others, and star as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family. Chaplin’s innate ability to tell a moving story primarily through images reveals his understanding of cinema’s possibilities, and The Kid holds up as one of his finest, alongside such other silent classics as 1925’s The Gold Rush and 1931’s City Lights. The film is screening with Chaplin’s 1917 short Easy Street, with live piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner.
The Naked City features more than one hundred NYC locations
THE NAKED CITY (Jules Dassin, 1948)
Thursday, February 12 , 12:50
Wednesday, February 18, 8:10 www.filmforum.org
Jules Dassin’s police procedural was one of the first films shot on location in New York City, bringing to life the grit of the streets. Barry Fitzgerald stars as Lt. Muldoon, an Irish cop who knows the game, never allowing anything to get in the way of his sworn duty to uphold the law while never getting too emotionally involved. A model has turned up dead, and young detective Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor) is heading up the investigation, which includes such suspects as swarthy Frank Niles (Howard Duff). Producer Mark Hellinger’s narration is playful and knowing, accompanying William Daniels’s great camerawork through Park Avenue and the Lower East Side, stopping at little city vignettes that have nothing to do with the story except to add to the level of reality. The thrilling conclusion takes place on the Williamsburg Bridge. The film will be followed by Bruce Goldstein’s 2020 documentary Uncovering the Naked City, which visits many of The Naked City’s locations.
Harold Lloyd has a crazy time in Coney Island in Speedy
Much like the end of the silent film era itself, the last horse-drawn trolley is doomed in Harold Lloyd’s final silent film. Big business is playing dirty trying to get rid of the trolley and classic old-timer Pop Dillon. Meanwhile, Harold “Speedy” Swift, a dreamer who wanders from menial job to menial job (he makes a great soda-jerk with a unique way of announcing the Yankees score), cares only about the joy and wonder life brings. But he’s in love with Pop’s granddaughter, Jane, so he vows to save the day. Along the way, he gets to meet Babe Ruth. Ted Wilde was nominated for an Oscar for Best Director, Comedy, for this thrilling nonstop ride through beautiful Coney Island and the pre-depression streets of New York City. The 4K restoration will feature live piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner.
The Connection is a gritty, jazzy New York City story
THE CONNECTION (Shirley Clarke, 1962)
Thursday, February 19, 4:20
Friday, February 20, 8:00
Tuesday, February 24, 1:00 filmforum.org
“Now look, you cats may know more about junk, see,” square film director Jim Dunn (William Redfield) says midway through The Connection, “but let me swing with this movie, huh?” Adapted by Jack Gelber from his play and directed and edited by Shirley Clarke, The Connection is a gritty tale of drug addicts awaiting their fix that was banned for obscenity after only two matinee screenings back in October 1962. In 2012, a sharp new fiftieth-anniversary print was released, beautifully restored by Ross Lipman of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. In a New York City loft, eight men are waiting for their man: Leach (Warren Finnerty), the ringleader who has an oozing scab on his neck; Solly (Jerome Raphael), an intelligent philosopher who speaks poetically about the state of the world; Ernie (Garry Goodrow), a sad-sack complainer who has pawned his horn but still clutches tight to the mouthpiece as if it were a pacifier; Sam (Jim Anderson), a happy dude who tells rambling stories while spinning a hula hoop; and a jazz quartet consisting of real-life musicians Freddie Redd on piano, Jackie McLean on sax, Larry Richie on drums, and Michael Mattos on bass. Dunn and his cameraman, J. J. Burden (Roscoe Lee Browne), are in the apartment filming the men as Dunn tries to up the drama to make it more cinematic as well as more genuine. “Don’t be afraid, man,” Leach tells him. “It’s just your movie. It’s not real.” When Cowboy (Carl Lee) ultimately shows with the stuff, Bible-thumping Sister Salvation (Barbara Winchester) at his side, things take a decidedly more drastic turn.
Mixing elements of the French New Wave with a John Cassavetes sensibility and cinema verité style, Clarke has made an underground indie classic that moves to the beat of an addict’s craving and eventual fix. Shot in a luridly arresting black-and-white by Arthur Ornitz, The Connection is like one long be-bop jazz song, giving plenty of time for each player to take his solo, with standout performances by McLean musically and Raphael verbally. The film-within-a-film narrative allows Clarke to experiment with the mechanics of cinema and challenge the audience; when Dunn talks directly into the camera, he is speaking to Burden, yet he is also breaking the fourth wall, addressing the viewer. Cutting between Burden’s steady camera and Dunn’s handheld one, Clarke adds dizzying swirls that rush past like a speeding subway train. A New York City native, Clarke made such other films as The Cool World and Portrait of Jason and won an Academy Award for her 1963 documentary Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World. The restoration is part of Milestone Films’ Shirley Clarke Project, which has preserved and restored a quartet of her best work, inclduing the 1985 documentary Ornette: Made in America.
Young Elgar Winthrop Julius Enders’s (Beau Bridges) spoiled life of privilege is about to dramatically change in The Landlord
THE LANDLORD (Hal Ashby, 1970)
Friday, February 20, 3:40
Saturday, February 21, 6:10
Thursday, February 26, 4:50 filmforum.org
When rich kid Elgar Winthrop Julius Enders (Beau Bridges) finally decides to do something with his spoiled life of privilege, he takes a rather curious turn, buying a dilapidated tenement in a pregentrified Park Slope that resembles the South Bronx in Hal Ashby’s poignant directorial debut, The Landlord. At first, the less-than-worldly Elgar doesn’t quite know what he’s gotten himself into, believing it will be easy to kick out the current residents and then replace the decrepit building with luxury apartments. He pulls up to the place in his VW bug convertible, thinking he can just waltz in and do whatever he wants, but just as his car is vandalized, so is his previously charmed existence, as he gets to know wise house mother Marge (Pearl Bailey), the sexy Francine (Diana Sands), her activist husband, Copee (Louis Gossett Jr.), and Black Power professor Duboise (Melvin Stewart), none of whom is up-to-date with the rent. Meanwhile, Elgar starts dating Lanie (Marki Bey), a light-skinned half-black club dancer he assumed was white, infuriating his father, William (Walter Brooke), and mother, Joyce (a delightful, Oscar-nominated Lee Grant), who are in the process of setting up their daughter, Susan (Susan Anspach), with the white-bread Peter Coots (Robert Klein).
Elgar has a whole lot of learning to do in Hal Ashby’s New York City–set black comedy
Based on the novel by Kristin Hunter, The Landlord is a telling microcosm of race relations and class conflict in a tumultuous period in the nation’s history, as well as that of New York City, coming shortly after the civil rights movement and the free-love late ’60s. The film is masterfully shot by Astoria-born cinematographer Gordon Willis (Klute, Annie Hall, Manhattan, all three Godfather movies), who sets the bright, open spaces of the Enderses’ massive estate against the dark, claustrophobic rooms of the dank tenement. Screenwriter Bill Gunn (Ganja and Hess) and Ashby avoid getting overly preachy in this at-times outrageous black comedy, incorporating slapstick along with some more tender moments; the scene in which Joyce meets Marge is a marvel of both. And just wait till you see Coots’s costume at a fancy fundraiser. The Landlord began quite a string for Ashby, who followed it up with Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There in a remarkable decade for the former film editor (In the Heat of the Night), who died in 1988 at the age of fifty-nine.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer whose maternal grandparents grew up in Lower East Side tenements; you can follow him on Substack here.]
CHAIN WINTER ONE-ACT FESTIVAL
Chain Theatre
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
February 5 – March 1, live and virtual, $24–$35 www.chaintheatre.org
The Chain Winter One-Act Festival is back with an impressive lineup of plays through March 1, featuring twenty-eight programs consisting of between two and four works totaling sixty to eighty minutes. Soap opera fans will be especially excited, as many of the participants come from that genre (As the World Turns,All My Children,One Life to Live,Falcon Crest).
This year is highlighted by Jeryl Brunner’s Sweet Tart, directed by two-time Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg and starring Emmy nominee Ralph Macchio and his daughter, Julia Macchio, who played Vanessa on Cobra Kai.Sweet Tart is on a can’t-miss bill with Lyle Kessler’s Shit Kickers, starring two-time Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Carol Kane and Margaret Ladd, and John Arthur Long’s The Fusion Experiment, with David Rey and Christina Elise Perry, helmed by Chain artistic director Kirk Gostkowski. [Ed. note: It was announced on February 23 that Carol Kane will no longer be appearing in Shit Kickers; she will be replaced by Sachi Parker.]
“We don’t do safe — we do real,” Gostkowski said in a statement. “This is where audiences and artists meet on equal ground to explore the world as it is, and imagine what it could be.”
Two-time Obie-winning playwright José Rivera presents the world premiere of the fabulously titled Look What Crashed through the Portal and Ended up in Brooklyn, Emmy winner Jennifer Pepperman writes and directs Ray, David Zayas Jr. directs Diego Aguirre, Joseph Russo, and Jacob Lumet Cannavale in Aguirre’s Stalled, and three-time Emmy winner Cady McClain takes the lead in three-time Emmy-winning director Christopher Goutman’s The Oblique. Other shows to watch out for are Annabel McConnachie’s Waiting for Gadot, Sarah Swift’s True Crime, John Corins’s Brad Pitt and the Exploding Head, and Melanie Acampora’s Too Much Fondant.
General admission tickets begin at $24; if it’s too cold for you to venture outside, four of the programs will be livestreamed.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
RUTH ASAWA: A RETROSPECTIVE
Museum of Modern Art
The Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through February 7, $17-$30 www.moma.org ruthasawa.com
“To watch you at work on a wire sculpture is to see how a single line is transformed into a network of interconnectedness. It’s an expression of the Heart Sutra: form is emptiness, and emptiness is form,” author, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki writes in a letter to the late Ruth Asawa in the catalog of the outstanding MoMA exhibition “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective.” She continues, “It’s a performance of eternal and infinite nonduality, in which inside is out, and outside is in, and there is no start, no finish, and no separation between these continuous and continually related moments of being.”
“Let the medium express itself.”
On view through February 7, the show features approximately three hundred wire sculptures, bronze casts, drawings, paintings, prints, class notes, a Guggenheim fellowship application, a letter of patent, and public projects. Asawa was born in California in 1926, was sent to an internment camp in Arkansas in 1942 (her parents were Japanese immigrants), studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina with Josef Albers, Jacob Lawrence, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, and Buckminster Fuller, and helped create the San Francisco School of the Arts, which was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010. That background led to a career making wide-ranging works that combine movement, architecture, color, and music into something wholly new. She died in 2013 at the age of eighty-seven.
“I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.”
Among the pieces to watch out for are the oil on masonite We Five and Fourteen, the ink and crayon on paper Untitled (MI.121, Chair with Straw Bottom), the ink on paper Untitled (PT.128, Plane Tree), clay life masks, a glazed ceramic plate and persimmon, gentle watercolors, carved doors, lithographs of children, the ceramic Untitled (S.806d, Everyone’s Favorite City: The Golden Gate Bridge, the Cable Car, and the San Francisco Victorian House), bronze body parts, a series of flower lithographs from 1965, index cards, sketchbooks, archival photographs, and a wedding ring made for Asawa by Fuller. There are also works by Albers, Hazel Larsen Archer, Elizabeth Jennerjahn, Imogen Cunningham, Ray Johnson, Merry Renk, and Marguerite Wildenhain.
“I am able to take a wire line and go into the air and define the air without stealing it from anyone. A line can enclose and define space while letting the air remain air.”
But mostly there are Asawa’s dazzling wire sculptures, mounted on bases and walls and hanging from above, intricate constructions of interlocking spheres and continuous organic forms within forms based on nature. They cast shadows as you walk around them, and some spin ever so slowly, but they all nimbly dance between positive and negative space.
“An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
On January 29 and 30, Weems will be at Alice Tully Hall for her latest gathering, “Contested Sites of Memory.” Produced in collaboration with Shore Art Advisory and Lincoln Center, it will feature live music, video art screenings, spoken word, and more, with trombonist, composer, sonic shaman, and musical director Craig Harris, British-born Brooklyn-based playwright, radio host, author, and Armah Institute of Emotional Justice CEO Esther Armah, singer, songwriter, producer, and activist Nona Hendryx, Grammy-winning violinist Jennifer Koh, poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, composer, pianist, professor, and writer Vijay Iyer, and recording artist Carl Hancock Rux, and emcee, trumpeter, composer, producer, educator, and social activist Jawwaad Taylor. The focus is on the purpose and meaning of American monuments and how they relate to the past, present, and future of the country.
Born in Portland, Oregon, and based in Syracuse, Weems is best known for such highly influential photographic projects as “The Kitchen Table Series,”“Family Pictures and Stories,”“The Louisiana Project,”“Constructing History,” and “Museums.” A National Academician and MacArthur Genius, she was busy during the pandemic, making the hypnotic short film The Baptism with Rux and hosting a podcast for the Whitney, “Artists Among Us,” in which she spoke with a wide range of artists, curators, and writers, including Glenn Ligon, Bill T. Jones, Lucy Sante, Jessamyn Fiore, An-My Lê, and Adam Weinberg.
“Contested Sites of Memory” should be another unique and fascinating high point in the career of one of America’s genuine treasures, who has been documenting the shape of things for more than four decades.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Abbey Lee and Owen Teague star as a couple seeking escape from the world in Blackout Songs (photo by Emilio Madrid)
BLACKOUT SONGS
Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater
511 West Fifty-Second St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through February 28, $59-$129 www.blackoutsongs.com
“I spoke about wings / You just flew / I wondered, I guessed, and I tried / You just knew / I sighed / But you swooned / I saw the crescent / You saw the whole of the moon,” Mike Scott sings in the 1985 Waterboys tune “The Whole of the Moon.” The propulsive song appears several times in Joe White’s scintillating, Olivier-nominated Blackout Songs.
Running at the Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater through February 28, the show stars Owen Teague and Abbey Lee as an initially unnamed American college student studying painting and a free-spirited British wannabe poet who meet at their first AA meeting. While she looks stylish in jeans, a faux fur coat, a belly-revealing shirt, and sunglasses, he is ragged and unsteady, with torn pants and a denim jacket. (The costumes are by Avery Reed.) He speaks in a stammer, wearing a neck brace that he can’t explain.
Finding a tooth in her pocket, she says, “Some people might (panic), you know, but my brain, my brain’s just gone ‘pfff, don’t worry about it.’ Gone. And that’s — Well, that’s what, exactly? That’s mercy, isn’t it? This is what mercy looks like, you go out, get pissed, get hurt, fall in love, whatever, doesn’t matter, in the morning it’s gone anyway, new day — do you know you’re shaking?” He doesn’t.
That opening sets the stage for the rest of the play, in which the two alcoholics fall in and out of love, disappear for extended periods, and remember and forget significant parts of their toxic relationship. They are both completely right and completely wrong for each other; you can’t help but root for them even when it’s clear they are caught on a dangerous downward spiral, unable to avoid the “medicine” they still think can help them. They role-play, attend a funeral, and dance in a bar, as beautiful moments intersect with bad decisions. One night, when he shows up bleeding from the mouth, she says, “I think it’s sexy, actually. Desperately romantic. You’re so doomed, aren’t you.” He later professes, “There’s no life without you.”
They exist in an amorphous time and space, where no one else is ever around, just the two of them reveling in and falling prey to their inner demons. When she talks about her father, who essentially abandoned her when she was six, he asks, “Don’t you think you’re memorable? Is that what you think — Cos he — Cos he sent you away, that means he tried to forget you?” She responds, “OK, alright, thanks, Dr. Freud, but I’m done here — Let’s go get a drink.”
The past and the present intertwine as the man and the woman contemplate their future, minute by minute, depending on what they can remember.
Stacey Derosier’s extraordinary lighting nearly steals the show in Blackout Songs (photo by Emilio Madrid)
Blackout Songs unfolds in a mostly empty space designed by three-time Tony winner Scott Pask, with a small pub table on one side against the wall, a folding table with coffee and snacks on the other, and a church pulpit near a far corner, next to large windows that later reveal a glowing cross. In the first scene, the woman is convincing the man to leave the meeting and get some medicine; looking directly at the audience, she says to him, “Don’t look at them,” as if we’re not only watching the play but are also fellow recovering addicts at the meeting — and we have no right to judge them because we all have our failings.
The concept of the moon is a theme throughout the story; in addition to the Waterboys song, the man recalls the beauty of the moon when showing the woman one of his paintings, and he later says, “Won’t forget this, will you. Full moon, holy wine, it’s like a song or something. You know the world is different under a full moon? People are. People fall in love. Cos it pulls liquid around, doesn’t it. Tides. And there’s liquid in us too. Blood and. Other liquids. Chemicals. The brain is the moistest organ in the body. Moon drunk is different.”
Brian Hickey’s striking sound and original music and Stacey Derosier’s extraordinary lighting — almost a character unto itself — help define the shifts in time to startling effect. The production, under Rory McGregor’s (The Wasp,Buggy Baby) expert direction, evokes such other complex works as Nick Payne’s Constellations, in which a couple’s relationship constantly changes in the quantum multiverse, Philip Ridley’s Tender Napalm, about an unnamed man and woman whose intense passion leads them on mysterious mini-adventures, and David Ives’s Venus in Fur, in which a theater director and an actor turn an audition into a reality-bending treatise on gender, sexuality, and degradation, as well as Blake Edwards’s 1962 film Days of Wine and Roses, about a married couple who trap themselves in a haze of alcohol. (McGregor directed Tender Napalm at Theaterlab in late 2024, with a crew that included Reed, Hickey, and Derosier.)
Blackout Songs boasts a trio of firsts: Two-time Olivier nominee White’s (The Little Big Things,Mayfly) and Lee’s (Florida Man,Black Rabbit) American stage debuts and Teague’s (Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,You Hurt My Feelings) US debut. Lee is a force of nature in the play, her character never slowing down, always on the move, while Teague lends a sensitive air to the man, who thinks he knows what he wants but keeps making choices that hold him back. It’s a beguiling, heart-wrenching ninety-minute pas de deux as two lost souls try to find love and escape together.
The play does have a hard time figuring out how to end, but by then you’ll be so entranced by the two characters, and the two actors, that you won’t mind, especially if you’re addicted to good theater.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
There are no actors on hand but the Mabou Mines production of All That Fall boasts a magnificent set (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“Space is the place,” Sun Ra sang on the title track of his 1973 album, Space Is the Place. “There’s no limit to the things that you can do. . . . And your life is worthwhile.”
The jazz legend might have been referring to the cosmos, but one of the (many) things that makes my life worthwhile is entering a theater with no idea what to expect visually. I’m not talking about standard setups where the proscenium stage is in front of rows of affixed seats but rooms that can be reshaped and reconfigured in multiple ways. For example, I am filled with anticipation every time I walk into Park Ave. Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, the Shed’s McCourt, BAM Fisher, and the Signature’s Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, all of which can be transformed into fascinating rearrangements.
Below are four recent shows I’ve seen that offered unique spatial experiences.
The cast of All That Fall does not appear in person at the 122 Community Center (photos by Jeri Coppola)
UNDER THE RADAR: ALL THAT FALL
Mabou Mines@122CC
150 1st Ave. at Ninth St.
January 8–25, $20-$50 www.maboumines.org utrfest.org
Since 1970, the experimental avant-garde Mabou Mines troupe has been challenging the boundaries of theater, and they do it again with their adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s 1957 radio play, All That Fall. When audience members get off the elevator at the 122 Community Center, they encounter a series of objects in the hallway and a side room that prepare them for the show: a photo of the Orangedale train station next to a radio playing a Big Band–era instrumental; a poster of a railway man’s “hand, flag and lamp signals” with an actual rusty lamp; a photo of the train station interior, with empty benches, which hints at what we’ll soon see; horse-racing information; and a piece of paper with the opening quote from Beckett’s 1938 novel, Murphy, “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new,” along with a drawing of a tree by Harry Bliss with the caption “A tree greeting the morning sun, because it has no choice.”
Inside the theater, the seats are arranged in a traditional manner, but the set is like an art installation, a large model of a miniature town with tiny houses, bumpy hills, rocky streets, a river, two bridges, hens near the tracks, and an elevated train station, all surrounded by a map on the walls; in the back are regular-size remnants, an abandoned bicycle and parts of some kind of moving vehicle. In front of the model, a man is projecting slides on an old carousel of costumed men and women — the characters the actors will be portraying. Shortly after the projections stop and the man leaves, we realize that there will be no actors for us to watch; in true radio-play fashion, they will only be heard, prerecorded, but we now know what they look like.
The narrative is fairly straightforward: Mrs Maddy Rooney (Randy Danson) is worried when her blind husband, Dan (Tony Torn), is late getting home. She finds out that the ever-dependable train has not arrived yet, and she is concerned why. Along her journey, she meets up with Christy the carter (Jesse Lenat), Mr Barrell the station master (Lenat), Mr Tyler the retired bill collector (Steven Rattazzi), Mr Slocum the racecourse manager (Torn), Tommy the railway porter (Tẹmídayọ Amay), the pious Miss Fitt (Wendy vanden Heuvel), the little girl Dolly (Lila Blue), and the little boy Jerry (Sylvan Schneiderman). They have absurdist conversations about dung, the Matterhorn, damnation, sex, bicycles and vans, the Titanic and the Lusitania, and “the horrors of home life.”
Mrs Rooney’s dialogue is filled with lovely snippets about human existence: “What kind of a country is this where a woman can’t weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!” she complains to Mr Tyler. “Christ what a planet,” she declares to Miss Fitt. “I do not exist,” she says to Tommy. “I am not half alive nor anything approaching it,” she explains to Mr Tyler. “Have you no respect for misery?”
The breathtaking set is by Thomas Dunn, lit by Jennifer Tipton, with a bevy of sound effects by Bruce Odland, from animal noises to a storm that shakes your seat almost like Sensurround. Mabout Mines cofounder JoAnne Akalaitis directs with a wry sense of humor.
Wally Cardona and Molly Lieber revive David Gordon’s Times Four for its fiftieth anniversary (photo by Maria Baranova)
LIVE ARTERY: TIMES FOUR / DAVID GORDON: 1975/2025
New York Live Arts / Pick Up Performance Co. Studio
541 Broadway between Spring & Prince Sts.
January 11–13, $33.85 newyorklivearts.org
In May 1977, husband-and-wife dancers David Gordon and Valda Setterfield performed their 1975 piece, Times Four in the SoHo loft where they lived and worked. Their son-in-law, Wally Cardona, has brought their little-seen pas d’deux back for a fiftieth-anniversary tribute, teaming up with Molly Lieber to re-create it from a video rehearsal, Setterfield’s handwritten notes, photographs, and other ephemera, taking place in the same loft. It is like a 1960s happening: The limited seating is a single row of folding chairs around the periphery of the otherwise empty room; in addition, the night I attended, there were numerous familiar choreographers and dancers in the audience, all greeting one another. There is no score; the only sounds are Cardona’s (Interventions,The Set Up) and Lieber’s (Rude World,Gloria) breathing and their feet and other body parts touching the floor, sometimes landing softly, sometimes hard. They stare at the walls and windows, rarely making eye contact with the audience, as they glide primarily in unison to four beats, then deleting one move and replacing it with another.
Concentrating mostly on their legs and feet, they move forward, backward, sideways, lifting here, pounding there, almost always in unison. They fall to the ground, extend their bodies, come within inches of the audience. When slight differences occur, you can feel it in your bones. You never know which direction they are going to turn in, resulting in a thrilling suspense to it all.
They both exert remarkable strength as they perform difficult maneuvers, their muscles rippling, sweat forming. It’s a compelling feat of human endurance that last about sixty tense, exhilarating minutes. A poem associated with the dance explains, “well worn wood floor / smooth burnished brown / the kind of floor that begs to be danced on / that wants to seduce me out of my shoes and socks. . . . I face my back to the windows / I imagine 1975.”
Consider me seduced.
Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson stage first revival of Richard Foreman’s What to wear at BAM (photo by Stephanie Berger)
PROTOTYPE: WHAT TO WEAR
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Strong Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
January 15-18 www.bam.org www.prototypefestival.org
In September 2006, experimental avant-garde legend Richard Foreman and composer Michael Gordon debuted their surreal post-rock opera, What to wear, at the Redcat in LA. It took twenty years, but the show has finally made it to New York at the BAM Strong Harvey Theater as part of the Prototype festival, in its first-ever revival. To prepare everyone for what awaited inside the theater, in the lobby was Foreman’s detailed original concept design model for the complex, fabulously overstuffed stage, a kind of mind-blowing melding of Monty Python, Pablo Picasso, and Alice in Wonderland. It is thrilling to walk into the Harvey and see how that set has been painstakingly re-created at full size by Michael Darling, like magic; Darling also did the props, and the wild costumes are again by E. B. Brooks. Big Dance Theater’s Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson direct, honoring the 2006 production, which you can watch online here.
The show begins with fancy lighting coming down from the ceiling as a giant cartoonish duck emerges from a doorway and the deep voice of Richard Foreman booms from the heavens: “As of this moment, this ugly duckling is now effectively banished from the realm of the oh so beautiful people.” The duck exits, and sopranos Sarah Frei and Sophie Delphis, mezzo Hai-Ting Chinn, and tenor Morgan Mastrangelo sing, “This is Mad’line X” eight times, then adding, “In a terrible world / One unpleasant world / Such a bad, bad world.” Over the next sixty-plus minutes, those four are joined by St. Vincent, an ensemble of more than a dozen vocalists and dancers, and the seven-piece Bang on a Can orchestra caged in one corner as the story goes through such chapters as “Mad’line X, who understands now,” “So sad but I reject you,” and “When a duck enters a fine restaurant.”
Marchers in kilts hold signs with a big X on them, a pointing finger drops down from above like the hand of G-d, skulls abound, headpieces feature little colored balls on top, a character walks around in a barrel, golf clubs become weapons, a head is locked in a box, and cool wizardry occurs just about everywhere. The unsatisfying ending does not diminish the triumph of this engaging revival. We are told that “Madeline X lives in this terrible world,” but any world that includes works by Foreman can’t be all bad.
AN ARK
The Griffin Theater at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building at Hudson Yards
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 1, $45 theshed.org
“Don’t panic. Don’t be scared. This must feel strange to you. It felt strange to me,” an unnamed character played by Sir Ian McKellen says at the beginning of British playwright Simon Stephens’s An Ark, continuing at the Shed through March 1.
Too late.
In the summer of 2021, Stephens’s Blindness was reimagined for the pandemic, presented at the Daryl Roth Theatre in Union Square, where a maximum of eighty-six masked and blindfolded people were seated in chairs in pods of two, either facing the same or opposite directions, each couple at least six feet away from other pairs. Everyone listened to the play, about a spreading virus that leads to chaos, through individual binaural headphones; the prerecorded narrative was performed by Juliet Stevenson.
In the summer of 2023, Tin Drum brought Kagami to the Shed’s Griffin Theater, which began with a historical multimedia installation that led to a mixed-reality concert in which everyone put on specially designed optically transparent devices that made it appear that the late pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto was playing live, enveloped in augmented reality art. In actuality, the room was completely empty except for a row of chairs along the perimeter where audience members could sit and watch, although it was much better to walk around and get up close and personal with Sakamoto — you could even go right through him.
The prep for the show is mind-bogglingly annoying. The audience is encouraged to arrive at least fifteen or twenty minutes before showtime in order to check their coats and bags, which is mandatory; however, the line was so long when we go there that we were advised to just bring our stuff in with us. At the Griffin, a sign announced, “wipe your feet / check your glasses / store your shoes / enter through the curtain / find a seat / put on your headset / sit back / enjoy the ride.” There was no curtain; the open doorway revealed a large room with plush red carpeting, a giant glowing orb hanging in the center from the ceiling, and three circular rows of chairs with a pathway through the middle. While my guest waited for corrective lenses — glasses won’t work with the headset — I took off my shoes and jacket, placed them on the floor, and tried to grab a specific seat, then come back and store my garb in one of the small cubby-hole benches, but I was told by a guide that I couldn’t do that; first I had to put the shoes and coat away, then someone would guide me to a chair. The shoes fit in the little cubby, but I had to really force the coat into another slot, only to be told that I had placed them in the wrong bench and had to move them. By then, my guest was already seated — with her jacket, which she was allowed to keep on her lap, and bag, which she could put under her chair.
Mixed reality An Ark at the shed is a confusing jumble (photo by Marc J. Franklin)
Next, you put on the headsets, and four white holographic chairs appear in front of you; mine had to be adjusted by a guide because the chairs were enormous and floating in the ether. I was disappointed that I could also see everyone else in the room, which detracted from the personal nature of the show, even though theater is usually meant to be a communal experience. Then, guides wheeled the cubby benches straight through the middle of the theater and out the curtain on the other side of the room, further disturbing the alternate reality that was being created. As the play proper began, with the four characters, all barefoot and wearing white, entering the space and sitting down, it was hard not to wonder why the floor had to be carpeted and why we had had to take off our shoes; perhaps it was some kind of ASMR thing.
For forty-seven minutes, the actors perform just for you, making intense direct eye contact, reaching out with their hands, and using the second person as they recount multiple versions of a life, from birth, childhood, and adolescence to adulthood, the senior years, and death. For example: “At school you work hard but you never really feel like you belong,” “You’ll want to tell people about the things that have happened to you in here,” and “You get on first name terms with your pharmacist.” The dialogue is filled with detailed descriptions of objects and scenarios that involve all five senses; while poetic, they don’t propel the plot, which remains mysterious through the end.
Recorded in one take and directed by Sarah Frankcom (Our Town,Punk Rock) with sound by Ben and Max Ringham, set and costumes by Rosanna Vize, and lighting by Seth Reiser, An Ark has numerous beautiful moments, and the interaction between the characters and you can be utterly chilling (Sir Ian McKellen is only a few feet away!); when Sheehy reached a hand out to me, I reached back, attempting to grasp it.
But too much of it was confusing and unnecessary; I’m eager to see where the technology goes. Hopefully the kinks will be smoothed out and creators will have more faith in the story itself, without all the bells, whistles, and rules.
As McKellen says early on, “When this is over . . . things will have changed forever.” Well, hopefully not too much.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
