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ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER: 65th ANNIVERSARY SEASON

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Y. Lebrun, P. Coker, X. Mack, and R. Maurice in Alvin Ailey’s For “Bird” — with Love (photo by Dario Calmese)

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
New York City Center
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
November 29 – December 31, $42-$172
www.alvinailey.org
www.nycitycenter.org

No matter what’s going on in the world — and in case you haven’t noticed, right now there’s a whole lot — when the end of November rolls around, you can count on Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater to provide a much-needed respite with its always exciting and entertaining end-of-year season at New York City Center. This time around the company is celebrating its sixty-fifth anniversary by presenting more than two dozen works, including world premieres by first-time AAADT choreographers Amy Hall Garner (CENTURY) and former Ailey dancer Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish (Me, Myself and You) and new productions of Hans van Manen’s Solo, Alonzo King’s Following the Subtle Current Upstream, Ronald K. Brown’s Dancing Spirit, and Jamar Roberts’s Ode.

Kyle Abraham’s Are You in Your Feelings? is part of Ailey season at City Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)

The programs are divided into “Premiere Night,” “Ailey Classics,” “All Ailey,” “Live Music,” “All New,” and “Pioneering Women of Ailey”; the opening-night gala, honoring former Ailey dancer, choreographer, and artistic director Judith Jamison, pairs a performance of Revelations with a live choir and a world premiere with Tony, Grammy, and Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Cynthia Erivo.

The personal CENTURY was inspired by Garner’s grandfather and is set to music by Ray Charles, Count Basie, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and others; Me, Myself and You explores reminiscence, love, and loss. “Pioneering Women of Ailey” pays tribute to Jamison, Carmen de Lavallade, Denise Jefferson, and Sylvia Waters, while rising jazz stars will perform live December 15-17. Among the other highlights the company of thirty-three dancers will perform are Paul Taylor’s DUET, Alvin Ailey and Mary Barnett’s Survivors, Roberts’s In a Sentimental Mood, and Kyle Abraham’s Are You in Your Feelings? After twelve years as artistic director, Robert Battle announced that he is stepping down immediately because of health concerns; longtime Ailey dancer and associate artistic director Matthew Rushing will take over temporarily until the board chooses a full-time successor; among Battle’s works for the company are Ella, For Four, In/Side, Love Stories, Mass, and Unfold.

SABBATH’S THEATER

Drenka Balich (Elizabeth Marvel) and Mickey Sabbath (John Turturro) are sexually linked in Sabbath’s Theater (photo by Monique Carboni)

SABBATH’S THEATER
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 17, $32-$112
212-244-7529
thenewgroup.org
www.signaturetheatre.org

John Turturro must have been Jewish in a previous life.

Born in Brooklyn to a mother whose parents were from Italy and a father who emigrated from Italy to America when he was six, Turturro has spent a significant part of his five-decade career portraying Jewish characters, from Bernie “the Shamata Kid” Bernbaum in Miller’s Crossing and Herb Stempel in Quiz Show to Primo Levi in The Truce, Moe Flatbush in Mo’ Better Blues, and writer Barton Fink. He’s also portrayed Egyptian pharaoh Seti I in Exodus: Gods and Kings and Palestinian militant Fatoush “The Phantom” Hakbarah in You Don’t Mess with the Zohan in addition to too many Italians to mention.

So it’s no surprise that Turturro is absolutely exhilarating as Mickey Sabbath in the New Group world premiere of Sabbath’s Theater, which has been extended at the Pershing Square Signature Center through December 17, making it an excellent Hanukkah present.

Turturro and New Yorker writer Ariel Levy adapted the script from Philip Roth’s 1994 novel, which won the National Book Award. Turturro was a good friend of Roth’s; they collaborated on a never-completed one-man show of Roth’s controversial 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint — which lends itself to solo performance — and Turturro portrayed Lionel Bengelsdorf, the misguided, overly trusting rabbi, in the 2020 HBO miniseries The Plot Against America, an alternate history of the rise of antisemitism in America in the early 1940s, based on the 2004 book by Roth.

Mickey is a failed puppeteer — he ran the Indecent Theater — who has had two unsuccessful marriages and has a missing daughter. He’s haunted by the death of his beloved brother, Morty, during WWII and by the ghost of his mother, who seems to hover around him, occasionally whistling, “Don’t Fence Me In.” Mickey is also a sex fiend; the show opens with him making love to the married Drenka Balich (Elizabeth Marvel), the two speaking openly and vividly about copulation. “Coming is an industry with you — you’re a factory,” Mickey says when they’re done. She wants him to be loyal to her, demanding, “I don’t want anyone else. Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over.” He replies sarcastically, “You like monogamy so much with your husband you want it with me, too?”

A moment later they are discussing a potential threesome when, still basking in the glow of sex, Mickey admits to the audience, “I was pierced by the sharpest of longings for my late little mother! I wondered if she had somehow popped out of Drenka’s pussy the moment before I entered it…”

Women are always on Mickey’s mind; his last name, Sabbath, is the Jewish day of rest, which is embodied by a Shabbos Queen, fitting Mickey’s approach to life.

Norman (Jason Kravits) and Michelle (Elizabeth Marvel) try to help their friend Mickey (John Turturro) in world premiere production (photo by Monique Carboni)

Mickey often turns directly to the audience, sharing personal tidbits, deep, dark desires, and explanations for why he is the way he is. He is a man of few morals; he has no respect for Drenka’s husband, Matija (Jason Kravits); his best friends, Norman (Kravits) and Michelle Cowan (Marvel), and their teenage daughter; or his second wife, Roseanna (Marvel), who can’t stand him. “I hated his increasing girth, his drooping scrotum,” Roseanna says about Mickey, adding, “his apish hairy shoulders, his white, stupid, biblical beard.” She then relates how she considered going all Lorena Bobbitt on him. Mickey responds by citing scripture: “She couldn’t have stuck something unpleasant up his ass? A frying pan! A rectum for a rectum. Exodus 21:24.”

When an old acquaintance, Lincoln Gelman, dies by suicide, Mickey starts having thoughts of killing himself too, but he might just love — or at least think he needs — sex too much. Then a visit with his father’s hundred-year-old cousin, Fish (Kravits), sends him careening again back into the past. “Was it good, life? Was it good to live, Fish?” Mickey asks. Fish replies, “Sure, better than being dead.”

Arnulfo Maldonado’s spare set features small pieces of furniture and a handful of props at the far left and right sides that are occasionally brought center stage by the actors or stage crew; Maldonado also designed the costumes, primarily modern-day dress save for a fab white sweater worn by Drenka and an American flag that Mickey wraps himself in. Alex Basco Koch’s projections, Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound, Jeff Croiter’s lighting, and Erik Sanko’s shadow puppet design help define the past from the present.

The story grows bumpier and bumpier in the second half as Mickey, an unreliable narrator, becomes more and more unlikable. But director Jo Bonney (Cost of Living, Fucking A) steers it back just in time before the character completely loses his way.

Turturro (Endgame, The Master Builder) is a powder keg as Mickey, a frenetic, mesmerizing whirlwind you cannot keep your eyes off of; onstage for nearly the full one hundred minutes, Turturro is relentless, relishing his acting job much how Mickey relishes sex. When, during an argument with Roseanna, she yells at him, “You cannot think straight if you’re shouting!” and he fires back, “Wrong! It’s only when I’m shouting that I begin to think straight! Shouting is how a Jew thinks things through!” it’s nearly impossible to believe that Turturro is not Jewish.

Marvel (Julius Caesar, Long Day’s Journey into Night) inhabits her characters so thoroughly that she is nearly unrecognizable as Drenka, Roseanna, Michelle, and cemetery superintendent A. B. Crawford, willing to go toe to toe with Turturro through thick and thin. And Kravits (The Drowsy Chaperone, A Play Is a Poem) sparkles as a series of schleppy men, culminating in his loving portrayal of Fish.

Developed earlier this year by New Jersey Performing Arts Center for “Philip Roth Unbound: Illuminating a Literary Legacy” in honor of what would have been Roth’s ninetieth birthday weekend — the Newark-born writer died in 2018 in Manhattan at the age of eighty-five — Sabbath’s Theater is an uneven but intriguing exploration of sex, love, and death with a heavy dose of filthy Jewish schmaltz.

Mickey might be a wholly indecent man, but underneath it all is a scared little boy. Reflecting on the many losses he’s experienced, he explains, “What’s the point of trying to find reason or meaning? By the time I was twenty-five I already knew there wasn’t any.” But just as Mickey is dishonest with others, he’s also dishonest with himself.

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

POOR YELLA REDNECKS

The cast of Poor Yella Rednecks occasionally breaks out into hip-hop songs (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

POOR YELLA REDNECKS
MTC at New York City Center – Stage I
131 West Fifty-Fifth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 3, $89-$109
212-581-1212
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.nycitycenter.org

Arizona-born Vietnamese American playwright and screenwriter Qui Nguyen follows up his semiautobiographical Vietgone with Poor Yella Rednecks, making its New York premiere at MTC at New York City Center — Stage I through December 3.

In praising Vietgone, I wrote, “Passionately directed by [May] Adrales with a frenetic warmth, the hip-hop immigrant tale — with a sweet nod to Hamilton — is colorful and energetic.” I am happy to say the same thing about Poor Yella Rednecks, except it’s even better than its predecessor.

Once again, the play begins with Nguyen (Jon Norman Schneider), called the playwright, explaining that not everything we are about to see actually happened. “This story is based on true events. All heavily researched. All one hundred percent historically accurate. Well, at least according to my mom.”

It’s August 7, 2015, and Nguyen is sitting at a table, interviewing his mother, Tong (Maureen Sebastian), for a play about how she left Vietnam and began a new life in America. But she thinks it’s a terrible idea and the reason why he is poor. “No one want to hear story about old woman who speak bad English with bald son,” she says. She ultimately agrees to talk with him but with a few important rules: “I don’t want you to only tell happy thing. I see your other play. You like to write romantic and funny. But no life is all romance. And it is not all fun. Sometimes it is hard. We Vietnamese. We good at being hard. I want it to be true and hard.” Another rule relates to speech: “If this going to be my play, I want all the white people to sound like the way I hear them. Let them hear all the stupid stuff they say. . . . And finally, I want to talk good.”

Thus, when Vietnamese characters speak with each other, it is in perfect English, substituting for Vietnamese so the audience can understand what they’re saying. But when a Vietnamese character is actually speaking English, it is in broken English. For example, when the older Tong talks to her son in broken English, that is how she is pronouncing the language; however, when she speaks in perfect English, she is actually talking to him in Vietnamese. It’s handled beautifully by Adrales and the cast, a constant reminder of the immigrant experience.

Tong takes him back to Arkansas in 1975, when she met her future husband, Nguyen’s father, Quang, at a relocation camp named Fort Chaffee, then moved to El Dorado. When the playwright says that it must have been love at first sight, Tong replies, “Mm-hmm. And Santa Claus is real, as is the Easter Bunny, and capitalism works for everybody.”

The playwright (Jon Norman Schneider) interviews his mother (Samantha Quan) in Poor Yella Rednecks (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

The action then shifts to the past as Tong and Quang (Ben Levin) fall in love even though she is still dating Bobby (Paco Tolson) and he is still married to Thu (Samantha Quan), who is raising their two children in Vietnam. Five years later, Quang and Tong are living in a trailer with her mother, Huong (Quan), a foul-mouthed, cynical smoker who takes care of Quang and Tong’s son, Little Man, while Tong works at a local diner and Quang hangs out with his hapless friends, including his bestie, Nhan (Jon Hoche). In an ingenious move, Little Man is a puppet, designed by David Valentine, that is voiced and operated by Schneider as the playwright, essentially the adult son playing himself as a child. It works wonderfully, especially when Huong teaches Little Man how to defend himself.

When Nhan announces that he’s moving to Houston to find better opportunities and it turns out that Quang hasn’t quite settled things with Thu yet, Tong starts to reevaluate who she is and what she wants out of life.

Tim Mackabee’s set is structured around five large neon letters — Y, E, L, L, A — that occasionally light up in different colors and are moved around to expose smaller sets attached to them, from a living room and a bar to the diner and a fast-food joint. They were designed to evoke the letters in the fabled Hollywood sign; just as that sign beckons wannabe stars to California from all over the world, the Y-E-L-L-A letters represent the American dream that Asians have when they emigrate from their countries to the United States — and encounter hatred, bigotry, language barriers, and other elements that do not make their transition easy. Several scenes also occur in and around a pickup truck, revealing that the vehicle is a favorite not only for a certain stereotyped group of white men who like country music and beer.

The big letters, along with comic-book-like projections by Jared Mezzocchi, are also a nod to Nguyen’s success as a writer for Marvel Studios and founder of the New York–based Vampire Cowboys troupe; Nguyen even has Marvel legend Stan Lee (Tolson, who portrayed the playwright in Vietgone) show up once in a while and deliver statements about heroes. Valérie Thérèse Bart’s costumes hit their target, and Lap Chi Chu’s lighting ranges from bold to intimate.

As in Vietgone, the cast, nearly all of whom appeared in that show at South Coast Rep and/or MTC, displays their vast talents by often breaking out into exciting raps; the original music is by sound designer Shane Rettig, arranged by Kenny Seymour, choreographed by William Carlos Angulo, and with music direction by Cynthia Meng. “I know you think I’m joking — what the hell am I smoking? / But being next to you is what got my heart thumping / Our kiddies will be cuties, bring over that fine bootie / Nothing’s gonna stop us with our combined beauty,” Quang declares. “Let me reintroduce myself / I’m better known as that shorty that you up and left / I must be crazy, baby — thought you were dead / We threw a funeral to commemorate your death,” Thu announces. “Cuz I’m more than just pretty, my brain is damn witty / Gimme one hot second — Imma run this city / Yo, say that I shouldn’t — I’m my own woman / Stronger than any man and twice as good looking,” Tong proclaims. “Even if they mad at you, you gotta be true to you / Every scar you wear, you show the shit that you went through / Ya gotta stand strong, be strong, head strong, ya ain’t wrong / So come on listen close, this here’s our fight song,” Huong tells Little Man.

Jon Norman Schneider (left) portrays the playwright and his younger puppet self in New York premiere from MTC (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Nguyen (She Kills Monsters, Living Dead in Denmark) and Adrales (The Strangest, Golden Shield) are in total sync; nearly every minute rings true, and the pace never lags. Schneider (The Coast Starlight, Once Upon a (korean) Time) is warm and charming as the playwright, Hoche (King Kong, Life of Pi) is a hoot as Nhan and various rednecks, Levin is hunky as Quang, Quan is cute and lovable as Huong, Tolson (The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Children of Vonderly) gives Bobby an unexpected edge, but Sebastian (The Best We Could: A Family Tragedy, Soul Samurai) steals the show as Tong, who stares adversity right in the face but refuses to give up, in many ways representing the Asian diaspora in America.

Early on, right before the official interview begins, Tong tells her son, “Let me tell you what kind of story white people want to hear.” He asks, “Wait, why only ‘white people?’” She replies, “Because only white people like to watch a play.” He argues, “All sorts of people watch plays, Mom.” To which she counters, “Yes, all sorts of white people. It look like a Fleetwood Mac concert. It so white. . . . Maybe I don’t want to dig up old history just so you can make a few dollar on play white people won’t like.”

At the matinee I saw, the audience appeared to be at least half Vietnamese or Vietnamese American, both young and old, and they and the white people reacted in unison to the unconventional, important story taking place onstage. Eliciting a wide range of emotions, the show accomplishes what theater does best, bringing people of different backgrounds together to focus on the human condition, reaching into the past while giving us hope for the future.

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

DOC NYC: NEIRUD

Filmmaker Fernanda Faya explores a lost part of her family’s past in Neirud

NEIRUD (Fernanda Faya, 2023)
Available online through November 26
Festival runs November 8-26 at IFC Center, SVA Theatre, Village East by Angelika, and Bar Veloce, $13-$30
www.docnyc.net
www.neirudfilm.com

“Who was Neirud?” Brazilian filmmaker Fernanda Faya asks in her poignant documentary, Neirud, making its international premiere at DOC NYC.

When Fernanda was an infant, her father, Edgard, bought a camcorder, taking lots of home movies of her. When she got older, Faya because curious about the woman she knew as her aunt, Élida Neirud dos Santos, who was best friends with Edgard’s mother, Grandma Nely. Faya’s mother was Jewish, and her father came from a nomadic Roma circus clan; Neirud was Black.

One afternoon, long after Nely’s death, Faya starts asking Neirud about her life. Neirud, was born in 1935 in São Francisco de Assis in Rio Grande do Sul, what Faya describes as Brazil’s whitest region, then raised in Livramento. Her parents sent her to live with a white family, where she was responsible for all the chores.

Neirud ran away when she was eight and became a nanny in Porto Alegre. When she was twelve, she joined the Great Circus Real Palassius. Fascinated by what she has learned in just a few minutes, Faya tells Neirud that she wants to conduct a more in-depth interview. Unfortunately, Neirud passed away a few months later, in 2014.

Neirud had left nothing behind; her apartment was empty: no clothes, no photos, no notebooks or journals. So Faya began a nearly ten-year-journey to find out everything she could about Nely, Neirud, and the circus, where the two women had met and where Neirud developed into an intimidating circus wrestler known as Mulher Gorila.

“I never really understood what they did, so in my mind, Aunt Neirud became a superhero, and Gorilla Woman, her circus persona, was her secret identity,” Faya says in voice-over narration. “Aunt Neirud became the only living memory of this circus history.”

The more Faya digs, the more she uncovers, unraveling the mystery of her aunt and grandmother. The story involves homosexuality, a military coup, racism, the church, and colorful balls on the beach.

Featuring a score by Brazilian guitarist and composer Chico Pinheiro, Neirud is a bittersweet documentary. Because of the whitewashing of history and selective memory, Faya (One for the Road) only knew so much about her family, and it’s a shame that she didn’t know more about her grandmother and aunt while they were still alive. At the same time, it is exciting to follow her as the truths slowly emerge and their beautiful, complicated, and important stories are told at last.

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

DOC NYC: ANGEL APPLICANT

Ken August Meyer explores his connection to Swiss-German artist Paul Klee in Angel Applicant

ANGEL APPLICANT (Ken August Meyer, 2023)
Available online through November 26
Festival runs November 8-26 at IFC Center, SVA Theatre, Village East by Angelika, and Bar Veloce, $13-$30
www.docnyc.net
angel-applicant.com

During the pandemic, I watched a Zoom play called UnRavelled about Canadian scientist Anne Adams, who, in 1994, at the age of fifty-three, became obsessed with Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” and made a remarkable painting based on the musical work, which Ravel composed for dancer Ida Rubenstein in 1928, when he was fifty-three. As it turns out, both Adams and Ravel had the same serious brain disease, one that affects memory while lighting a creative fuse.

I was thinking about that play while watching Ken August Meyer’s Angel Applicant, in which Meyer becomes obsessed with Swiss-German painter Paul Klee, who suffered from systemic scleroderma, a diseases that attacks connective tissue and for which there is still no cure. Meyer was diagnosed with the same life-threatening disease, which ultimately spurred him to make this film, although he had little previous cinematic experience. Meyer is particularly taken by Klee’s later period, when the scleroderma affected Klee’s work significantly. Meyer believes that he can understand what Klee is saying in these canvases and how it relates to their shared, rare autoimmune disease.

In the film, Meyer, who wrote, directed, and edited it and produced it with director of photography Jason Roark, explains, “It’s really an odd sort of comfort for me. It’s not particularly cheerful, nor is it as colorfully inventive as his earlier work, but I’m obsessed with it. It really speaks to me like a strange language of cryptic codes and symbols that I can’t help but interpret for myself. And I know this is gonna sound completely crazy and pretty pretentious, but some of these paintings feel like they’re messages sent in a bottle just for me.”

Meyer, a former drugstore stock boy, Zamboni driver, graphic designer, and advertising art director, reviews his old family photos and home videos and intercuts them with images of Klee’s drawings and paintings, including Portrait White-Brown Mask, Atrophy, Insula Dulcamara, As Time Passes By, and High Spirits. He examines several of them in depth, decoding their meaning from a health standpoint while visually comparing them to shots of him undergoing testing and getting results in which the colors, shapes, and lines evoke elements of Klee’s work. “They are testaments that destruction can feed creation and make something so ugly so beautiful,” says Meyer, who studied art and design at the School of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University.

The film also features several reenactments of key moments from Meyer’s life. One takes place in a store where two women thought that Meyer, his body stiff from the disease, was actually a mannequin. “Did he also feel like a stiff, broken doll?” he asks, wondering whether Klee, known as the Bauhaus Buddha, had felt similarly. In addition, he flies to Bern to meet with one of Klee’s grandchildren, Alexander Klee, who cofounded the Zentrum Paul Klee and passed away in 2021 at the age of eighty.

Even as his condition worsens, Meyer refuses to give in, documenting his life as he gets married and has a child, who he wants to see grow up. He continues to get bad news about his health, but he keeps the camera going and doesn’t lose his sense of humor. “Fear was becoming the new order [in the world]. And somehow, it even found my home address,” he says, zooming in on a “Consider Cremation!” mailing he received.

Meyer named the film after a ghostly 1939 painting by Klee as well as his newfound belief that maybe angels do exist. When he asks, “How long do I have? And what comes after that?,” we fully believe that he’s not done yet. It’s also a question that we all ask ourselves, whether we’re ill or not.

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

THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL 4K RESTORATION

Mark Bittner feeds several cherry-headed conures in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL (Judy Irving, 2003)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Opens Friday, November 17
newplazacinema.org
pelicanmedia.org

Judy Irving begins her 2003 documentary, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, with a shot of a skeptical passerby who has stopped to watch Mark Bittner as he cares for a flock of forty-five cherry-headed conures, also known as red-masked parakeets, living in the trees outside his apartment.

“They’re not really wild if you have names for them, if you don’t mind my saying,” the man claims. “You feed them out of your hands, you have names for them, and they come up to you like they’re your pets. . . . Well, whatever.” He then shrugs and walks away.

The exchange doesn’t bother Bittner at all; he gleefully answers the suspicious man’s doubts and just continues doing what he’s doing, a big smile on his face.

It’s an extremely clever way to start the film, which opens November 17 in a brand-new 4K twentieth anniversary digital restoration at New Plaza Cinema. With the question of Bittner’s relationship with the birds resolved right up front, Irving, who served as director, producer, editor, and cinematographer, is free to now follow Bittner’s odd life choice.

Born in Vancouver, Washington, in 1951, Bittner moved from Seattle to Berkeley when he was twenty and then to San Francisco with the goal of making it as a rock-and-roll musician, in search of a “real transformation.” In 1993, he became infatuated with the conures, some of whom had previously been pets and others that had been born in the wild. Over the course of several years, he devoted his life to them, giving them names, caring for them when they were ill, watching out for predatory hawks, and keeping a somewhat scientific journal of their comings and goings and their individual personalities.

As if he’s sharing the plot of a soap opera, he talks about Scrapper and Scraperella’s breakup; discusses the pairing of Picasso and Sophie; introduces us to Fanny, Gibson, Flap, Pushkin, and Olive; sings to Mingus to get him dancing; vacuums up the mess the birds make in his apartment; nurses Tupelo; and bonds deeply with Connor, the only blue-crowned conure in the flock, an older bird who cannot find a mate or best friend. Connor is not unlike Bittner, a single man with thick glasses, a bushy beard and mustache, and a long ponytail who apparently has no close friends either.

“I don’t think of myself as an eccentric,” he says in his calm, relaxing voice.

Inspired by such Beat writers as Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, Bittner is a kind of throwback, an easygoing Bohemian going with the flow, living for free without a paying job. “It wasn’t a plan; it just happened,” he says about his caring for the birds. “It was what I was doing while I was trying to figure out what that thing would be, my idea of where I was going to go in my life. But it became the thing that I’m doing. It’s magic that way.”

But that magic threatens to disappear when he is forced to leave his apartment and has to figure out what will happen to the birds.

Irving, who appears in the film, originally intended the project to be a short but ended up compiling thirty hours of 16mm footage over a few years on a shoestring budget. “When I first met him, I thought Mark was an inarticulate hippy recluse and he thought I was an ecofeminist lesbian,” she writes in a new article for Talkhouse. That changed as filming continued.

A companion piece to Bittner’s 2004 memoir of the same name (the book has the added subtitle A Love Story . . . with Wings), The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is a tender and touching — and colorful — look at not just one man’s dedication to conures but the connection between humanity and nature, as well as the need for people to be a part of something, like a bird in a flock. We are not built for solitude. And that comes to fruition in a sweet shocker of a finale involving Irving (Pelican Dreams, Dark Circle), who will be at New Plaza Cinema for Q&As following the 6:10 screening on November 17 and the 2:40 shows on November 18 and 19.

Meanwhile, Bittner is working on his next book, Street Song, which will be accompanied by an album featuring such originals as “Poppa John,” “The Arrow You Want,” and “You’re So Peaceful” and covers of tunes by Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles.

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

REVERSE SHOT AT 20: SELECTIONS FROM A CENTURY: MANAKAMANA

A mother and daughter eat ice cream in experimental documentary Manakamana

MANAKAMANA (Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez, 2013)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, November 18, 12:30, & Sunday, November 19, 3:30
Festival continues through November 26
www.manakamanafilm.com
movingimage.us

If you’re an adventurous filmgoer who likes to be challenged and surprised, the less you know about Pacho Velez and Stephanie Spray’s Manakamana, the better. But if you want to know more, here goes: Evoking such experimental films as Michael Snow’s Wavelength, Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, and Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests as well as the more narrative works of such unique auteurs as Jim Jarmusch and Abbas Kiarostami, Manakamana is a beautiful, meditative journey that is sure to try your patience at first. The two-hour film, which requires a substantial investment on the part of the audience, takes place in a five-foot-by-five-foot cable car in Nepal that shuttles men, women, and children to and from the historic Manakamana temple, on a pilgrimage to worship a wish-fulfilling Hindu goddess. With Velez operating the stationary Aaton 7 LTR camera — the same one used by Robert Gardner for his 1986 documentary Forest of Bliss — and Spray recording the sound, the film follows a series of individuals and small groups as they either go to or return from the temple, traveling high over the lush green landscape that used to have to be traversed on foot before the cable car was built. A man and his son barely acknowledge each other; a woman carries a basket of flowers on her lap; an elderly mother and her middle-age daughter try to eat melting ice-cream bars; a pair of musicians play their instruments to pass the time.

A heavy metal band takes a picture of themselves in meditative documentary

Each trip has its own narrative, which must be partly filled in by the viewer as he or she studies the people in the cable car and the surroundings, getting continually jolted as the car glides over the joins. The film is a fascinating look into human nature and technological advances in this era of surveillance as the subjects attempt to act as normal as possible even though a camera and a microphone are practically in their faces. Produced at the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory at Harvard, Manakamana consists of eleven uncut shots of ten-to-eleven minutes filmed in 16mm, using rolls whose length roughly equals that of each one-way trip, creating a kind of organic symbiosis between the making and projecting of the work while adding a time-sensitive expectation on the part of the viewer.

A film well worth sticking around for till the very end — and one that grows less and less claustrophobic with each scene — Manakamana is screening November 18 and 19 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “Reverse Shot at 20: Selections from a Century,” honoring the twentieth anniversary of the film publication Reverse Shot, which has been its in-house journal since 2014; the two-month retrospective highlights twenty-first-century works touted by what was originally a stapled zine. Velez will be present at the November 19 show to discuss the film; both screenings will be preceded by the 2014 video Reverse Shot Talkie: Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez. “Spray and Velez’s film calls attention to attention, the ways our thoughts and perceptions slowly drift and return during long durations spent looking at certain subjects or familiar scenarios,” Leo Goldsmith wrote in Reverse Shot.