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A DEBT TO THE CINEMA: MABOU MINES CELEBRATED AT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

MABOU MINES CINEMA
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
March 13 – March 19
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

“Do I owe a debt to the cinema?” a character asks in Lee Breuer’s 1974 forty-minute video The Red Horse Animation, part of the weeklong Anthology Film Archives series “Mabou Mines Cinema.”

Actually, lovers and creators of experimental avant-garde film and theater owe a huge debt to Mabou Mines.

Founded in 1970 by Breuer, JoAnne Akalaitis, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow, Mabou Mines has been presenting unique, wholly original live works onstage for more than half a century, but the collective, currently under the artistic leadership of Mallory Catlett, Karen Kandel, and Carl Hancock Rux, also has a long history of low-budget DIY films that pushed the boundaries of what cinema can be.

From March 13 to 19, Anthology will be screening nine films across seven programs, with numerous shows followed by Q&As with special guests. Perhaps the most unusual work in the series is the theatrical premiere of Jill Godmilow’s 2001 Mabou Mines’ Lear ’87 Archive (Condensed), a nearly six-hour documentary of the making of the troupe’s 1990 adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, which won multiple Obies and starred Maleczech as Lear, Greg Mehrten as the Fool, Ellen McElduff as Elva, Bill Raymond as Goneril, Ron Vawter as Regan, and Lute Ramblin’ as Cordelion. It will be shown in two parts; the March 14 show will be followed by a Q&A with Mehrten and journalist Alisa Solomon.

In Godmilow’s 1984 hybrid Far from Poland, the director, who passed away last September at the age of eighty-two, is determined to make a documentary about the Polish Solidarity movement despite being denied a visa, so she takes viewers behind the scenes into her process as she discusses the possibilities with Mark Magill, incorporates archival news footage, and re-creates interviews with Anna Walentynowicz (played by Ruth Maleczech), Elzbieta Komorowska (Hanna Krall), reporter Barbara Lopienska (Honora Fergusson), government censor K-62 (Bill Raymond), Polish dictator Wojciech Jaruzelski (David Warrilow), journalist Richard Fraser (John Fitzgerald), and shipyard worker Adam Jarewski (Mark Margolis). The March 17 screening will be followed by a Q&A with film historian Susan Delson and film scholar Ricky Herbst.

In 2009, I saw Mabou Mines Dollhouse at St. Ann’s Warehouse; in my review, I wrote, “Winner of two Obies — for director (and company cofounder) Lee Breuer and star Maude Mitchell — this unique reimagination of Henrik Ibsen’s controversial 1879 feminist classic features three leading men who are all under four and a half feet tall, with the three main women approaching six feet, immediately calling into question issues of strength, power, and social status.” The previous year, Breuer directed a film of the stage work, which Anthology will be screening on March 15 at 7:45, followed by a Q&A with professor Olga Taxidou and co-adaptor Mitchell.

The series was programmed by Breuer’s son Mojo Lorwin; below is a look at other highlights.

Mojo Lorwin finishes his father’s film, Moi-même, after more than half a century

MOI-MÊME (Mojo Lorwin & Lee Breuer, 1968/2024)
Friday, March 13, 6:30
Wednesday, March 18, 6:30
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

In 1968, experimental theater director, playwright, and poet Lee Breuer began making a black-and-white improvised film during the May 1968 Paris riots, where he was living at the time. He and cinematographer John Rounds shot the footage but never added sound, edited it, or wrote a script. In 1970, Breuer cofounded the seminal New York City company Mabou Mines with Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, David Warrilow, and Frederick Neumann, winning numerous Obies among other accolades over the next half century, but he never finished the movie, which itself is about making a movie.

Breuer died in January 2021 at the age of eighty-three; one of his children, Mojo Lorwin, decided to complete the project, hiring voice actors and musicians and serving as writer, director, editor, and producer. The result is the hilarious Nouvelle Vague satire Moi-même (“Myself”), a sixty-five-minute foray into the world of François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Pierre Melville, Agnès Varda, William Klein, and Jean-Luc Godard, who makes a cameo, walking backward as Kevin shares a series of statements ending with “Everything is a movie.”

Kevin Mathewson stars as Kevin (voiced in 2024 by Declan Kenneally), an adolescent who is making a film with his alter ego (Patrick Martin). As he proceeds around town, he meets up with a strange driver (executive producer Russ Moro / 2024 composer Olivier Conan), a movie producer (Frederick Neumann / David Neumann, Frederick’s son), a starlet (Ginger Hall / Clove Galilee, Breuer and Maleczech’s daughter), the son of a baron (Warrilow / David Neumann), an Italian heiress (Renata / Tessie Herrasti), a revolutionary actress (Anna Backer / Tiera Lopper), her replacement (Judy Mathewson, Kevin’s younger sister / Ruma Breuer, Lee’s granddaughter), a sleazy agent (Mark Smith / Alon Andrews), a couple of goons (Pippo and Mike Trane / Frier McCollister), and the owner of a film shop (Lee Pampf / Thomas Cabus). He is often accompanied by his conscience (Maleczech / Alexandra Zelman-Doring) as he faces financial and creative crises.

Lorwin has fun with cinematic and societal tropes while maintaining the underground, DIY feel; for example, he doesn’t match the dialogue exactly to the movement of the characters’ mouths as they make such proclamations as “The movies aren’t fair,” “The movies are a game and everyone who plays is a cheater,” and “All I want is to be seen and heard.” The soundtrack consists of unexpected sound effects and songs and music by Frank LoCastro, Alex Klimovitsky, Eliot Krimsky, Conan, and others.

There’s lots of drinking and smoking, violent shootings, political ranting, discussions of art and love, vapid gatherings, a heist, a touch of psychedelia, and superfluous nudity, nearly everything you could possibly want in a French film.

“Film costs money, more than you’ve got,” the driver barks at Kevin. “Producers are perverts,” Kevin tells the actress while preparing a baby bottle of milk. Unable to afford film reels, Kevin says, “Film is more expensive than love and revolution.”

Describing the film to the agent, Kevin explains, “Here it is: It’s me, but it’s not me. You dig? I mean, it’s the film adaptation of me. I just need a little bread to turn boring old me into moi-même. Feels like doors are finally opening for me.” He delivers the last line as a door opens in front of him.

Perhaps the most important line of dialogue is given to Kevin from a man on the street, who tells him, “There are no rules.” I would add, “Viva la revolución!”

Moi-même is being shown March 13 and 18 at 6:30 at Anthology Film Archives and will be followed by Q&As with professor emeritus Arthur Sabatini, Kevin Mathewson, and Lorwin.

The Red Horse Animation captures a live Mabou Mines performance with cinematic additions

THE RED HORSE ANIMATION (Lee Breuer, 1974) / B. BEAVER ANIMATION (Lee Breuer, Chris Coughlan, and Craig Jones, 1979) / SISTER SUZIE CINEMA (Lee Breuer, 1982)
Friday, March 13, 8:45
Wednesday, March 18, 8:30
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

The second program in the “Mabou Mines Cinema” series brings together a trio of cutting-edge shorts that embody the Mabou Mines approach to art while challenging the audience to adjust their expectations. The thirty-eight-minute Horse Animation captures Mabou Mines’ inaugural production, a piece that melds together movement, music, and text by Breuer that is a kind of manifesto as JoAnne Akalaitis, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow crawl over one another across the floor, recite words in robotlike fashion (“I’m not myself. How in my illness I see something, my life, somewhere. And now it comes to me that I am a representation”), laugh, and turn into ghostlike digital projections by DeeDee Halleck, whose camera shoots the rest of the film in grainy black-and-white from a multitude of angles; the live music is by Philip Glass. In a 1970 Guggenheim program note, Breuer wrote about the piece, “The red horse, in its representational form, materializes and falls apart in the course of the performance. It lives in real time. ‘Lives’ in this sense means conveys meaning to its creators and observers. It tries to create its life outside the real performance time. It tries to live in dramatic time.”

In B. Beaver Animation, Breuer, Chris Coughlan, and Craig Jones zoom close in on Fred Neumann as he delivers a thirty-minute monologue about floods, snow, beavers, and dams; when he says early on, “To be specific, a force of nature,” he could be speaking about himself as he tears through the words like he’s in a race against time, with stutters and occasional breaks so he — and the audience — can catch a breath until he slows down for the dramatic finale.

And in Sister Suzie Cinema, the a capella quintet 14 Karat Soul performs gospel-tinged doo-wop songs while in a movie theater, the flickering light illuminating them in the darkness until they take flight in a nineteen-minute cinematic fantasia directed by Breuer in muted colors and written by Breuer and composer Bob Telson. The March 18 screening will be followed by a Q&A with Carl Hancock Rux, Telson, and singer Glenny T of 14 Karat Soul.

Dead End Kids is an unusual, haunting look at nuclear war from JoAnne Akalaitis

OTHER CHILDREN (JoAnne Akalaitis, 1979) / DEAD END KIDS: A HISTORY OF NUCLEAR POWER (JoAnne Akalaitis, 1986)
Monday, March 16, 7:00
Thursday, March 19, 7:00
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

Other Children, JoAnne Akalaitis’s first film and not a Mabou Mines production, is a visually rich, poetic adaptation of Jane Bowles’s last work of fiction, the coming-of-age short story “A Stick of Green Candy.” The nineteen-minute film was shot in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in a small house, on the streets, and at a rocky clay pit. Juliet Glass stars as Mary, Erik Moskowitz as Franklin, George Rosenblatt as her father, and Joan Jonas as his mother; the verbatim dialogue is overdubbed by Glass, Moskowitz, Bill Raymond as the man, and Ellen McElduff as the woman and features such gems as this from Franklin’s mother: “I’d rather have a girl than a boy. There’s nothing much I can discuss with a boy. A grown woman isn’t interested in the same things a boy is interested in. My preference is discussing furnishings. Always has been. I like that better than I like discussing styles. I’ll discuss styles if the company wants to, but I don’t enjoy it nearly so well. The only thing about furnishings that leaves me cold is curtains. I never was interested in curtains, even when I was young. I like lamps about the best. Do you?” Jacki Ochs’s camera lovingly follows Mary, bringing her imaginary adventures to life as she leads an army of mountain-goat fighters, with gentle editing by David Hardy. In a rare title card with narration from the original story, we are told, “All at once she had had the fear that by looking into her eyes the soldiers might divine her father’s existence. To each one of them she was like himself — a man without a family.” The 16mm film, which was restored in 2022, concludes with the Hackberry Ramblers’ jaunty Cajun country instrumental “Just Once More.”

Other Children is screening on March 16 and 19 with Akalaitis’s 1986 feature Dead End Kids: A History of Nuclear Power, which captures Akalaitis’s Obie-winning 1980 play that incorporates numerous elements as it assesses the future of the world, with a cast that includes McElduff, Ruth Maleczech, Terry O’Reilly, Greg Mehrten, Fred Neumann, Glass, and Lee Breuer and Maleczech’s children Clove Galilee and Lute Ramblin’ in addition to David Byrne, who composed the synth soundtrack. The March 19 screening will be followed by a Q&A with journalist Don Shewey and McElduff.

Meanwhile, Mabou Mines is still going strong, having recently staged Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall, directed by Akalaitis, with such promising upcoming shows as the opera Barcelona, Map of Shadows and Rux’s Etudes.

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

PMA: JESSE MALIN’S SILVER MANHATTAN AT BOWERY PALACE

Jesse Malin makes a triumphant return to the Bowery in Silver Manhattan (photo by Ehud Lazin)

SILVER MANHATTAN
The Bowery Palace
327 Bowery
Wednesday – Sunday through March 29, $52-$187
www.silvermanhattan.com
www.jessemalin.com

Upon entering the downstairs theater at the new Bowery Palace, audience members are greeted by an unusual sight: At the front and center of the small, crowded stage, surrounded by various chairs, tables with lamps, a drum kit, and vertical white fluorescent lights on a shimmering curtain, is an empty wheelchair.

It’s a haunting image, made all the more palpable when singer-songwriter Jesse Malin makes his grand entrance, carried down the aisle on a stretcher, his hands folded across his chest as if dead. But the Queens native, along with the crowd, is about to be resurrected by the power and glory of rock and roll in the heart-wrenching yet exhilarating Silver Manhattan.

“I love walking in New York,” Malin says after being placed in the wheelchair. “You hit the street, no plan, no agenda — then you bump into someone, talk to a stranger, make a new friend. You see a poster, you run into a show, a movie — you hear music from a bar, it draws you in. Next thing you know, you’ve danced all night, fallen in love, learned a good joke from a homeless person, fed a stray cat, and jumped back into bed as the sun comes up and the last garbage truck rolls by. Anything’s possible here.”

Some of those things might never be possible for Malin again, but that’s not preventing him from living his life to the fullest he can.

“The last time I walked down a New York street was May 4, 2023,” he says shortly before launching into his 2015 song “Turn Up the Mains” while sharing the story of the day he suffered a spinal stroke on his way to a one-year memorial party he was hosting and DJing for his late friend and former bandmate Howie Pyro, who he calls an “occasional Satanist.” Malin describes the event in graphic detail as the pain shot through his legs, he got down on the ground, and then was taken by ambulance to the hospital, where he received the awful diagnosis and was told that he’s “effectively paraplegic,” that he might never walk again without assistance.

The band — keyboardist Rob Clores, bassist James Cruz, drummer Paul Garisto, and musician and vocalist Bree Sharp — then kicks into the Rolling Stones’ 1971 track “Sway” and Malin picks up a guitar.

Doctor: Did you ever wake up to find / A day that broke up your mind? / Destroyed your notion of circular time.
Band: It’s just that demon life / Got you in its sway / It’s just that demon life / Got you in its sway.
Malin: Ain’t flinging tears out on the dusty ground / For all my friends out in the burial ground / Can’t stand this feeling, getting so brought down.

Malin, who was born in 1967, then returns to his childhood in Whitestone, where his single mother raises him and his sister. He recounts jumping on his bed to songs by Elton John and Paul Simon, being bullied because he has to wear an eye patch, and discovering such bands as KISS, the Sex Pistols, the Dead Boys, and the Ramones.

He sings, “Waiting on a midnight bus / To get me to the 7 train / Running from the chicken hawks / And I never went back . . . never went back . . .” in “Whitestone City Limits.”

As a teenager, he first forms the band Heart Attack (“Trendies”), then downtown punk legend D Generation (“No Way Out”). He goes solo in 2000, releasing such albums as Glitter in the Gutter, Love It to Life, and New York Before the War. He collaborates with Bruce Springsteen, Billie Joe Armstrong, Ryan Adams, and Lucinda Williams. He opens a club in the city.

And then, at the age of fifty-six, he learns that he might lose everything.

Jesse Malin is joined by his bandmates while telling his poignant story (photo by Ehud Lazin)

The preshow setlist blasting through the speakers sets the stage for the music that follows, from the Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer” and the Ramones’ “She’s the One” to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “My Little Town,” letting the audience know that this is not going to be just a punk concert. Over the course of ninety pulsating minutes, Malin reaches deep into his back catalog, performing songs not in chronological order but how they relate to the narrative, which switches between his history and his efforts to not give in to his diagnosis, including seeking out special treatment in Argentina. He is joined several times by Satish Indofunk and Danny Rey on horns, adding another dimension to the songs. The often warm lighting is by Brian Scott, with propulsive sound by Angela Baughman.

Just as Marsha Ginsberg’s scenic design is cramped, so is the audience, seated in folding chairs on the floor or balcony and on narrow benches or standing in the back; it’s not the most comfortable way to enjoy music, but it works here, especially as Malin makes eye contact with as many audience members as he can as he chronicles his wild adventures, baring his heart and soul. And he never becomes treacly, even when adopting a mantra from his friend HR of Bad Brains: PMA, or Positive Mental Attitude. “Before him, I never thought how my outlook might effect where I end up,” Malin acknowledges.

He doesn’t wallow in self-pity or ask for sympathy but instead forges ahead, determined to beat the odds and, primarily, keep making music. His band doubles as characters from his life: DJ Jonathan Toubin, his doctor, his mother, Jack Flanagan, his physical therapist. As the evening progresses, he gets more and more pumped, waving his arms in the air and shaking his body in the chair. He has an infectious enthusiasm that dances over the room like a swirling disco ball. You don’t have to know anything about Malin or his music to fall for him and the presentation, which is reminiscent of Springsteen on Broadway and Bono’s Stories of Surrender, both of which were tied to memoirs; Malin’s Almost Grown (Akashic Books, $28.95) will be published on April 7.

Passionately directed by Ellie Heyman (Space Dogs, The Tattooed Lady), Silver Manhattan — named for Malin’s 2004 song that does not appear in the show; nor does his 2002 track “Almost Grown” — is an intimate journey into one man’s refusal to take no for an answer, through his entire life. It’s a thrilling, no-holds-barred celebration, tinged with loss and sadness, but ultimately it’s a triumphant homecoming for a man who has been part of the New York City music scene for five decades and is not about to stop now.

He saves some special surprises for the very end, then, as an encore, brings out a different friend each night; I saw Tony-winning actor and musician John Gallagher Jr. (American Idiot, Spring Awakening) playing the Replacements’ hit “Alex Chilton,” which features the line “I’m in love / with that song.”

Well, I’m in love / with this show.

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

EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THORN: THE MINT RESURRECTS ZACK

Zack (Jordan Matthew Brown) finds himself caught between two women (Cassia Thompson and Grace Guichard) in Mint revival at Theatre Row (photo by Todd Cerveris)

ZACK
Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 28, $39-$95
www.theatrerow.org
minttheater.org

Jordan Matthew Brown and Cassia Thompson are terrific in the Mint’s adaptation of Harold Brighouse’s 1916 Edwardian parlor comedy of manners, Zack; unfortunately, it’s not enough to lift the play out of the doldrums.

Last year, the Mint, which has been staging lost or forgotten plays for more than thirty years, presented Brighouse’s savvy 1914 political satire Garside’s Career, which earned a well-deserved Drama Desk nomination for Best Revival. Brighouse is most well known for Hobson’s Choice, the 1915 play that was adapted into an Oscar-winning 1954 film, the 1966 Broadway musical Walking Happy, and a 1989 ballet. While Zack has seen several British productions over the last fifty years, it is virtually unknown in America. Perhaps it should have stayed that way.

The 105-minute play is set in the Munning home in the quaint, close-knit village of Little Hulton, a suburb of Lancashire. Mrs. Munning (Melissa Maxwell) and her older son, Paul (David T. Patterson), run the late Mr. Munning’s joinery company but have had to add a catering business to try to make ends meet. They try to keep Paul’s younger brother, Zack (Jordan Matthew Brown), hidden, considering him a hapless fool who only hurts their reputation, which is so critical in their small community. When their young cousin Virginia Cavender (Cassia Thompson) needs a place to convalesce, Mrs. Munning agrees to take care of her for about a month, devising a plan to cash in on her wealth.

“There’s money in that family, and when my cousin writes to me and says Virginia’s not been well and needs the country air, I say it’s folly not to have her here, cost what it may,” Mrs. Munning tells the penny-pinching Paul, who is aghast. “She’s not an invalid. She’s just run down,” Mrs. Munning says. Paul responds, “And Lord knows what it’ll cost in fancy goods to wind her up.”

Mrs. Munning hires Sally Teale (Caroline Festa) to serve as a maid during Virginia’s stay in an attempt to convince Virginia that all is well with them, that they are not facing dire straits and still have a fine reputation, even as they are losing business to rival caterers the Wilsons. Not used to being a maid, Sally may not have been the best choice, full of cheeky responses and disinclined to work.

When the resplendently dressed Virginia arrives, she explains that she prefers being called Jenny, immediately giving her a more casual, less finicky presence. Much to Mrs. Munning and Paul’s chagrin, Zack joins them for tea; he’s a nebbishy sort, with unkempt hair and a full beard and mustache, wearing old, ill-fitting clothes and not displaying the best manners. When Jenny puts out her hand to greet him, Mrs. Munning chastises him, declaring, “You’ll wash your hand before you touch Jenny’s.” Zack says, “Maybe I ought, I’m not so frequent at the soap as I might be.” To which Jenny replies, “I think we’ll shake hands as you are.”

Soon Mrs. Munning and Paul are scheming to convince Jenny that Paul loves her and that they should wed, a plan they kick into high gear as Zack grows closer to Jenny.

Soon Martha Wrigley (Grace Guichard) arrives and finds Zack, to whom she delivers the news that her father, Joe (Sean Runnette), who works for Paul, has broken his arm and will not be available for the next day’s wedding — but asks if her father can be paid nonetheless. Zack, a big Teddy bear of a man, is sympathetic; he gives her a shilling that he had just earned as well as some food from his pocket, where he absentmindedly stuffs leftovers and half-eaten snacks. He consoles her as she cries, and, just as Mrs. Munning enters the room, Martha kisses Zack. “Oh? When’s the wedding, Zack?” Mrs. Munning says, to which Zack playfully answers, “Oh, I dunno. In about a month, eh, Martha?” It isn’t long before Joe, who was fired by Paul because of the injury, is demanding that they go through with the nuptials unless the Munnings want to be embroiled in scandal, their catering business ruined.

Paul is furious, but Zack, kind and likable schlemiel that he is, offers to fill Joe’s duties, an offer that his brother at first rejects but eventually agrees to, even though he expects it to be a disaster, already envisioning Zack breaking cups and dishes and disrupting the party. Unable to stand up for himself and fearful of any type of conflict or confrontation, Zack agrees to marry Martha although he loves Jenny but is afraid to tell anyone, believing that he is a worthless person who is an embarrassment to his mother and brother, who even forget his birthday.

Paul and Mrs. Munning get a taste of their own medicine when they grab some roses for Jenny and are pricked by the thorns, but it looks like nothing will get in the way of their nefarious doings.

Harold Brighouse’s 1916 Zack is an Edwardian parlor comedy of manners (photo by Todd Cerveris)

Brown (Book of Mormon, All Shook Up) is delightful in the title role, channeling a little Zach Galifianakis here, a bit of Richard Dreyfuss there, as he inhabits the gentle angst that makes Zack uncomfortable in his own skin; you want to just wrap him up in a big hug and tell him everything will be all right. Thompson (Murder on the Orient Express, The Wolves) is charming in her off-Broadway debut as Jenny, a perceptive young woman who does not put on airs, tries to find the good in people, and has a mind and will of her own.

However, Festa (1999, Peter Pan), Guichard (Straight Icons, The Woman in Black), Patterson (Picnic, Les Liaisons Dangereuse), Runnette (Animal Magnetism, The Changeling), and Maxwell (The Trial of Donna Caine, The House of Bernarda Alba), along with Đavid Lee Huỳnh (Bus Stop, The Merchant of Venice) and Mint regular Douglas Rees (The New Morality, Mary Broome) in minor parts, all come off as cardboard cutouts, clichéd characters who range from mustache-twirling villains and not-so-innocent maidens to sarcastic, inefficient servants and greedy, conniving relatives; each lacks the necessary nuance, instead trending too far into cartoon territory. In addition, no one even attempts a British accent.

Brittany Vasta’s parlor room set is lovely, but the stacks of chairs piled in the corner in the second half, which come into and out of use as scenes change, belie the pseudo perfection Mrs. Munning is striving for; the stage business that felt organic in the Mint’s Garside’s Career feels forced here, running counter to an important plot point. Kindall Almond’s costumes are fashionable, Mary Louise Geiger’s lighting is efficient, but Jane Shaw’s sound, which includes outdoor bird chirps, found itself in at least one scene competing with music from one of the other theaters in the complex.

Directed by Britt Berke (Antigonick, I Don’t Trust Adults), who did such a wonderful job with the world premiere of Betty Smith’s Becomes a Woman in 2023, Zack is a missed opportunity, a tedious romcom that feels like it’s a hundred years old, a farce that is not nearly as funny as it needs to be while exploring social mores and norms of the past, hard to relate to in the modern day.

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

EVERY LITTLE THING THEY DO IS MAGIC: THE ILLUSION OF CINEMA AT BAM

TRIPLE CANOPY PRESENTS: MAGIC
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave.
March 6–12
www.bam.org
canopycanopycanopy.com

“I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians,” Francis Ford Coppola said. In its sixth annual collaboration with BAM, Triple Canopy celebrates that connection with “Magic,” a weeklong selection of programs, curated by Yasmina Price, that explores the illusion inherent in the medium.

Among the highlights are “Rituals for the Dead and Living,” consisting of short works by Noor Abed, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Ulysses Jenkins; such all-time favorites as Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, and Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger; such sleepers as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon, Sergei Parajanov and Dodo Abashidze’s The Legend of Suram Fortress, Raúl Ruiz’s Three Crowns of the Sailor, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh; and “Tricks, Spirits, and Flickering Lights,” featuring shorts by Walter R. Booth, Alice Guy-Blaché France, Gaston Vell, Christopher Harris, Ken Jacobs, Rea Tajiri, John Baldessari, and Cynthia Maughan.

On March 7 at 7:00, “A Night with Alex Tatarsky” will feature the American performance artist will explore “movement writing” in a special lecture-séance.

Below is a look at some of the films.

Orson Welles explores cinematic reality and artistic forgery in F for Fake

F FOR FAKE (Orson Welles, 1976)
Sunday, March 8, 4:30
www.bam.org

Orson Welles plays a masterful cinematic magician in the riotous F for Fake, a pseudo-documentary (or is it all true?) about art fakes and reality. Exploring slyly edited narratives involving art forger Elmyr de Hory, writer Clifford Irving, Spanish painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso, and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, the iconoclastic auteur is joined by longtime companion Oja Kodar and a cast of familiar faces in a fun ride that will leave viewers baffled — and thoroughly entertained. Welles manipulates the audience — and the process of filmmaking — with tongue firmly planted in cheek as he also references his own controversial legacy with nods to such classics as Citizen Kane and The Third Man. It’s both a love letter to the art of filmmaking as well as a warning to not always believe what you see, whether in books, on canvas, or, of course, at the movies.

A traveling troupe of illusionists is forced to defend itself in Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician

THE MAGICIAN (ANSIKTET) (Ingmar Bergman, 1958)
Monday, March 9, 8:30
Tuesday, March 10, 4:30
www.bam.org

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 1959 Venice Film Festival, Ingmar Bergman’s darkly comic 1958 film The Magician is one of the Swedish auteur’s lesser-known, underrated masterpieces, an intense yet funny, and fun, work about art, science, faith, death, and the power of the movies themselves. When Vogler’s Magnetic Health Theater comes to town, the local triumvirate of Dr. Vergérus (Gunnar Björnstrand), police commissioner Starbeck (Toivo Pawlo), and Consul Egerman (Erland Josephson) brings the traveling troupe in for questioning, forcing them to spend the night as guests in Egerman’s home. The three men seek to prove that mesmerist Albert Emanuel Vogler (Max von Sydow), his assistant, Mr. Aman (Ingrid Thulin), a witchy grandmother (Naima Wifstrand), and their promoter, Tubal (Åke Fridell), are a bunch of frauds. The interrogations delve into such Bergmanesque topics as science vs. reason, good vs. evil, life and death, and the existence of God. As various potions are dispensed to and tricks played on a staff that includes maid Sara (Bibi Andersson), cook Sofia Garp (Sif Ruud), and stableman Antonsson (Oscar Ljung) in addition to Starbeck’s wife (Ulla Sjöblom) and Egerman’s spouse (Gertrud Fridh), a series of romantic rendezvous take place, along with some genuine horror, leading to a thrillingly ambiguous ending.

Max von Sydow is mesmerizing as mesmerist and Ingmar Bergman alter ego Albert Emanuel Vogler in The Magician

Von Sydow is mesmerizing as the mesmerist, a silent, brooding man in a sharp beard and mustache, his penetrating eyes a character all their own. (The original title of the film is Ansiktet, which means “Face.”) His showdowns with Dr. Vergerus serve as Bergman’s defense of the art of film itself, an illusion of light and shadow and suspension of belief. Meanwhile, Tubal and wandering drunk Johan Spegel (Bengt Ekerot) add comic relief and a needed level of absurdity to the serious proceedings. The film is superbly shot in black-and-white by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, maintaining an appropriately creepy and mysterious look throughout. It also introduces character names into Bergman’s canon, appellations such as Vogler, Vergérus, and Egerman, that will show up again in such future works as Persona (with Liv Ullmann as actress Elisabet Vogler, who has stopped speaking, and Björnstrand as Mr. Vogler), Hour of the Wolf (with Thulin as Veronica Vogler, a former lover haunting von Sydow’s painter Johan Borg), Fanny and Alexander (with Jan Malmsjö as Bishop Edvard Vergérus), and After the Rehearsal (with Josephson as theater director Henrik Vogler and Lena Olin as actress Anna Egerman).

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

LIKE MOTHS TO A FLAME: WALLACE SHAWN AND ANDRÉ GREGORY REUNITE FOR THREE-HOUR PLAY

Hope Davis, Josh Hamilton, Maria Dizzia, and John Early star in Wallace Shawn’s What We Did Before Our Moth Days (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

WHAT WE DID BEFORE OUR MOTH DAYS
Greenwich House Theater
27 Barrow St. at Seventh Ave. South
Wednesday – Monday through May 24, $144-$174
mothdays.com

“OK. Yes, we are bored. We’re all bored now,” André Gregory says to Wallace Shawn in Louis Malle’s classic 1981 film, My Dinner with André, in which the two protagonists sit in a restaurant, eating, drinking, and talking for what was initially supposed to be three hours. Some professional and amateur critics agreed with Gregory.

Director Gregory, now ninety-one, and playwright Shawn, who is eighty-two, have been collaborating for more than fifty years, beginning in 1975 with Our Late Night and continuing with such other plays as Grasses of a Thousand Colors in 2009 and The Designated Mourner in 2013. They have reunited again for What We Did Before Our Moth Days, a three-hour absurdist comedy in which four characters sit in chairs and deliver monologues. Yes, for three hours (including two intermissions).

It’s worth every minute.

Riccardo Hernández’s set essentially announces what the audience is in for; there are four plain chairs onstage, three with a small wooden table to their right, one to the left. Behind them are three large windows onto which, before and after the show and during intermission, Oscar-nominated documentarian Bill Morrison projects moths flitting about to original music by sound designer Bruce Odland. There’s a religious atmosphere to the space, like an open confessional, and that soon becomes the case as the characters bare their souls — each in their own way — to the audience, which serves as a kind of priest or rabbi.

The characters enter one at a time, in naturalistic costumes by Hernández that look like they could have come from the actors’ closets. Tim (John Early) sits stage left, followed by Elle (Maria Dizzia), Dick (Josh Hamilton), and Elaine (Hope Davis), the only one without a cup of tea. Since there is little physical movement in the play, details such as who is drinking what can assume outsize importance, although one cannot track every minor change as a major metaphorical statement.

Since nearly the entire play unfolds with the actors seated — making their silent entrances and exits for each act downright thrilling — the dialogue has to sparkle and shine, and the performances must bring it vividly to life, defining the characters and laying out the plot. All the participants do so with expert precision. The initial interaction between actor and audience is key, and Shawn and Gregory pull it off with grace and elegance — and plenty of sardonic humor.

Hope Davis, Maria Dizzia, and Josh Hamilton chat in the dressing room of the Greenwich House Theater (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The first to speak is Tim, who delivers a long, satirical monologue about his relationship with a teenage girl. He shares his story with a benign innocence that is both funny and awkward, shifting somewhat uncomfortably in his seat while attempting to gain the audience’s trust, searching the crowd for sympathetic eyes. Describing his situation, he says, “I got back in my car, but just before setting off for the familial apartment where my mother was now waiting alone with my father’s body, I made a quick phone call to my best friend, a girl called Rapunzel whose house was just down the street from mine in the little town where I lived. I just had to tell her that my father had died. Rapunzel was a tall girl with a deep voice and a big face that looked partly like the face of a wolf and partly like the face of a calf, and as I was twenty-five and she was thirteen, there was an age difference there. Her parents were divorced, and she lived with her father, a disturbed and horrible man who would often pull me into his bedroom when I’d come to visit his daughter and keep me more or less imprisoned there as he passed on to me the latest facts about his love affair with a wealthy married woman whose frightening gluttony in regard to sex, he would explain to me rather frantically, his eyes darting wildly around the room, was so extreme as to be, he thought, possibly dangerous, medically, to him.”

Next up is Elaine (Hope Davis), who is far more precise in her deportment, looking straight ahead, more matter-of-fact as she recalls visiting the body of her dead lover, Dick, in his bedroom, explaining, “I’d called Dick on the phone that [his wife] never answered, and, when she picked up, I knew what she would say, though her voice was different from the voice I’d always imagined she’d have. Now I felt sick, but all the same I went up to her, and I touched her arm, and I said, ‘Please, I’m sorry, I need to see him.’ She caught her breath and took a step back. I went into the room, and then she closed the door, or maybe she slammed it in a stifled sort of way. And there on an unmade bed in his wife’s apartment my lover lay before me, face up in his pajamas, partly under the covers, but the expression on his face was one I’d never seen, a sort of half-grimace, that weird ‘snapshot’ look people have when a photograph catches them at the wrong moment, and yes, he was dead, all right. There was no ambiguity about it, as perhaps I’d expected there to be. He was simply a corpse.”

Moments later, Elle (Maria Dizzia), Dick’s wife, speaks for the first time, sharing a strange memory: “There was a story I read to Tim at bedtime more than once when he was a very young boy about the monkey god Hanuman, and I remembered how I’d felt when I read him the section in which Hanuman tore open his own chest with his bare hands to show the image that stood in his heart. And I remembered saying to Tim, ‘You know, your father’s image stands in my heart.’” Elle is constantly making prolonged eye contact with individual members of the audience, even when she’s not speaking, as if making sure they understand what has happened, particularly to her, but not in a self-centered way.

Finally, we hear from Dick (Josh Hamilton), who stares into the distance, avoiding eye contact, sitting rigidly upright, like a deer in the headlights — or a moth drawn to a flame. He states, “I’d probably figured out by the age of eight that everybody had many birthdays in the course of their life but only one day on which they died, and, as I sometimes made up my own private names for things, for some reason that I don’t remember I decided to call the day on which a person died not their death day but their ‘moth day’ — partly I’m sure because I always found moths to be quite unpleasant — they were vague and powdery and fluttery — and they weren’t horrible or terrifying, but they seemed to be blind, and I didn’t like the way that they would suddenly appear and bump into me — and I guess I sort of pictured that when people died, they were sort of gently and vaguely and flutteringly escorted into death by a flock of blind moths. Well, this is all by way of saying that my own moth day, to everyone’s surprise, turned out to take place only a few days before what would have been my forty-fifth birthday.”

Three hours of watching four actors deliver monologues in chairs fly by in Moth Days (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Those first “confessions” beautifully set the stage for everything that follows as we learn more about the characters, their strengths and insecurities, and, perhaps most critically, how they view themselves, their self-worth after an unexpected tragedy. There has been a surfeit of plays about grief since the pandemic, but Moth Days attacks the theme in a unique and affecting way, avoiding sentimentality or melodrama. While the play is certainly not interactive or immersive, the connection between each character and the audience is so palpable, so intense, that you’ll feel like you’re experiencing the events being described as they unfurl in Shawn’s unique language. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting may focus on the speaker, a spot illuminating them from above, but be sure to gauge the other characters’ reactions, or lack thereof, to what is being said. It’s utterly fascinating to watch, making it all the more breathtaking when that structure is broken for a few exhilarating minutes.

Tony nominee Davis (God of Carnage, Pterodactyls), actor, comedian, writer, singer, director, and producer Early (Showgasm, Search Party), Tony nominee Dizzia (Pre-Existing Condition, If I Forget), and Independent Spirit Award nominee Hamilton (The Antipodes, The Coast of Utopia) maintain just the right balance among their characters, calmly waiting their turn to convey their point of view, revealing their psychological makeup as they carefully avert judging the others.

According to the January 2024 Nature magazine article “Why flying insects gather at artificial light,” “Under natural sky light, tilting the dorsum towards the brightest visual hemisphere helps maintain proper flight attitude and control. Near artificial sources, however, this highly conserved dorsal-light-response can produce continuous steering around the light and trap an insect.” Each of the characters in What We Did Before Our Moth Days is trapped in their own way, drawn to a flame whether they want to or not, attempting to steer around the light. It can also be interpreted as a metaphor for theater itself, whether it takes place in complicated changing sets or four people just sitting around drinking and talking, testing the audience’s comfort level for three hours.

In My Dinner with André, the original script of which was cut by Malle to a more amenable 110 minutes onscreen, Gregory says, “Wally, don’t you see that comfort can be dangerous? I mean, you like to be comfortable and I like to be comfortable too, but comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquility.”

Prepare to be comforted by this extraordinary, and safely tranquil, production.

[For those who, like me, cannot get enough Wallace Shawn, he will be performing his Obie-winning 1991 solo play The Fever on Sunday and Monday nights at Greenwich House. Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

TRAGEDY CAN FALL OUT OF THE SKY: ROB PRUITT AT 303

Latest Rob Pruitt show at 303 Gallery is a deeply personal one (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

SKYSCAPES . . .
303 Gallery
555 West 21st. St. between 10th & 11th Aves.
Through March 7
www.303gallery.com
www.robpruitt.com

In the fall of 2023, Rob Pruitt presented “The Golden Hour” at 303 Gallery in Chelsea, a show in which the DC-born artist faced his approaching sixtieth birthday with one of his “Flea Markets,” in this case a collection of personal objects that visitors could pore over and take one home; as I write this, one of Pruitt’s cigar boxes is right next to me.

His latest exhibition at 303, today titled “Watching the Sun Set and Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art” — the name changes every day; it began on January 15 as “Skyscapes” — is another deeply personal show, focusing on the loss of his sister, Gina, who died on December 7, 2025, following a stroke. The works on view include his monthly 2025 “Sunrises” watercolor and silkscreen ink calendar series, ceramic fruit bowls, selections from his “Bright Light” acrylic on linen series, two of his “Suicide Paintings,” and the concrete sculpture Karen, a cat on the floor looking up at Bright Light — Purple.

In the back room are two works by his partner, Jonathan Horowitz: the video Father land: Wilhelm Reich, Jacques Morali, et al., about gay culture and authoritarian political ideology, and the gold-plated bronze Crucifix for Two.

There is a warm radiance to the gallery as Pruitt explores time. The show is accompanied by a heart-wrenching artist statement that places everything in context and is worth adding here in full:

Tragedy, like joy, can fall out of the sky.

When I was working on this show, my sister Gina suffered multiple strokes and was rendered paralyzed from the neck down, unable to speak. She made the decision to stop treatment and end her life on her own terms. This changed the show for me and I changed the show.

As I sat with Gina and recounted memories from our childhood, I thought about what she might be experiencing. She liked the room filled with light and liked to face the sun, even with her eyes closed. I imagined that she might be seeing bright, vivid colors.

The suicide paintings started for me as an expression of my own social anxiety. They were about punching a hole through a wall to make an escape, leaving one space and entering another space. With the paintings I made for Gina, the metaphor became literal. But not suicide from a place of darkness and depression. Just a choice.

Also, while the show was coming together, I could hear my partner Jonathan Horowitz from the room next door, working day after day on a video project. He never told me what the video was about, but I would occasionally hear familiar fragments – a Village People song, clips from the movies Cruising with Al Pacino and Saturday Night Fever, chanting political rioters. When Jonathan was finished and showed me the work, I was blown away. It’s called Father land: Wilhelm Reich, Jacques Morali, et al. and it’s about hyper masculinity and gay history and the political nightmare that we’re all living through today. Somehow, the particularity of his work seemed like a perfect counterpoint to the generality of mine. I asked him if I could put his video in the project room of the gallery, coming through the wall like at our house.

These were my days when I made the show. They are embedded within the work.

Rob Pruitt

FROM PONG TO AI: CHILLING DATA AT THE LUCILLE LORTEL

Maneesh (Karan Brar) and Jonah (Brandon Flynn) take a break from work by playing ping-pong in Data (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

DATA
Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 29, $61-$126
www.datatheplay.com
lortel.org

The New York debut of Matthew Libby’s chilling Data feels like it’s been ripped from today’s headlines, but the playwright first started thinking about it in 2017, after interviewing for and not getting an internship at Palantir — one of the tech companies at the center of the current massive expansion of artificial intelligence — then reading an Intercept article about the firm’s plans, the title of which would be a major spoiler.

Data premiered in the fall of 2024 at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, directed by Margot Brodelon; director Tyne Rafaeli’s skillful adaptation opened at the Lucille Lortel on January 25 and has been extended through March 29. Karan Brar reprises his role as Maneesh Singh, a twenty-two-year-old Indian American working in the User Experience (UX) department of the fictional, highly prestigious Silicon Valley company Athena Technologies.

The play begins with Maneesh playing ping-pong in the almost blindingly white break room with fellow UX employee Jonah (Brandon Flynn), who has been assigned to be his mentor. They are not competing at championship-level table tennis but instead are hitting the ball back and forth slowly and casually, reminiscent of Pong, the 1972 Atari video game that brought digital technology into the mainstream and people’s homes. While the somewhat goofy Jonah gossips about secrecy, cutting-edge software, potential layoffs, Taco Tuesday, and an engineer in Data Analytics who left the company under mysterious circumstances, the very serious Maneesh has no interest in networking, listens to what his parents tell him to do (or not do), and, despite his obvious abilities, seems happy to stay in UX and not be promoted to Data Analytics, where the real work is being done.

When he bumps into Riley (Sophia Lillis), a college classmate now in Analytics, she is shocked that he is in UX. Next he is meeting with Alex Chen (Justin H. Min), the charming, fast-talking analytics head who used to work with Maneesh’s brother and now wants Maneesh to team up with Riley on a special project that involves signing an NDA. Maneesh is hesitant and uncomfortable, especially when Alex insists on knowing more about his breakthrough predictive algorithm, which Maneesh developed as a way to anticipate the success of baseball players and has since made it closed source, preventing access to it.

“Talk to me, bro. Cone of silence,” Alex says. Maneesh responds, “Look. As I got further and further into my thesis, and I realized what exactly it was I was creating . . . I, like, saw this conversation. Like, this exact conversation we’re having right now. Right down to the joking about baseball, because of course, the algorithm has nothing to do with baseball. The rare event model can be applied, hypothetically, to predict . . . anything, really. And so, after I presented the initial results, I started getting emails. But not from sports teams. They were from headhunters, trying to poach me, poach the project — investment firms, lobbying groups, even an oil company. And that . . . I guess I realized that scared me. I just mean — I felt it. That it’s not what I wanted.”

But it’s exactly what Alex and Athena want.

Riley (Sophia Lillis), Maneesh (Karan Brar), and Alex Chen (Justin H. Min) have different grand plans in New York City premiere (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

According to the script, the story takes place in the mid-2020s, but “it might already have happened.” The plot will make you think not only of Palantir but also about Mantic, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cambridge Analytica, and other such tech firms in the news. One of the script’s epigraphs is a quote from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” Last month, Anthropic safety researcher Mrinank Sharma quit, writing in an open letter, “The world is in peril. . . . We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.”

Data marks Libby’s off-Broadway debut, and it’s an exciting one. The dialogue is keenly pointed, the characters believable, and plot twists and surprises abound in a taut hundred minutes. Only Jonah’s sexual pursuit of Riley rings false and feels forced, but otherwise Rafaeli (Weather Girl, Becoming Eve) maintains a deft touch.

Marsha Ginsberg’s set morphs from the break room to Alex’s spare, pristine office to a fascinating late shift; the whiteness recalls the streaming hit Severance, where employees are not sure what their jobs are for or what the company does while they keep their working and personal lives completely separate, one knowing nothing about the other. Scene changes are made in darkness as fluorescent lights speed around a rectangular frame accompanied by 8-bit digital music. (The lighting is by Amith Chandrashaker, with sound and music by Daniel Kluger and contemporary casual costumes by Enver Chakartash.)

Brar makes a terrific theatrical debut as Maneesh, capturing his deep unease at where his life appears to be going against his better judgment. Despite his vast tech knowledge and abilities, he represents all of us who are more concerned about the future of humanity than the success of a business, or a government. Lillis (Heroes of the Fourth Turning, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) brings a beguiling nuance to the complicated Riley, Min nails the bold, forward-thinking, eminently likable but ethically questionable tech boss, and Flynn (Kowalski, Kid Victory) lends Jonah the right balance, aside from the pervy subplot.

Libby studied cognitive science and symbolic systems at Stanford, so he knows what he’s talking about when Alex says, “It’s a geopolitical reality. Data is the language of our time. And like all languages, its narratives will be written by the victors.” But he’s also on target when Maneesh considers that AI can make “the world a worse place.”

It may have taken more than a half century to proceed from Pong to today’s video games, but so many elements of AI are moving so fast, Data could potentially be an ancient relic — like Pong — by the time it completes its run at the Lortel.

Thus, it’s better to see it now, while it’s still a legitimate cautionary tale and not a portent that the end is near, brought on by humanity itself.

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