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PLAN 75

Michi Kakutani (Chieko Baisho) faces the end of her life sooner than she wants to in Plan 75

PLAN 75 (Chie Hayakawa, 2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, April 21
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.kimstim.com

In March 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, sixty-nine-year-old Texas lt. gov. Dan Patrick told Tucker Carlson on Fox News, “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.” Many people agreed that in order to protect the US economy, it was acceptable to let senior citizens die from the coronavirus.

Japanese writer-director Chie Hayakawa takes that concept to the next level in her debut feature, the melancholic, gorgeously photographed Plan 75, opening April 21 at IFC Center.

Expanded from a short film she made for the 2018 omnibus Ten Years Japan, in which five directors made works set ten years in the future, Plan 75 unfolds in a near dystopia where the Japanese government, in order to combat the inconvenient truth that the population is aging at a potentially unsustainable rate, offers all citizens seventy-five and older the opportunity to be euthanized, no questions asked, in exchange for one thousand dollars and free cremation, among other lures.

“The surplus of seniors is draining Japan’s economy and taking a heavy toll on the young generation,” a young man with a rifle narrates at the beginning of the film. “Surely the elderly don’t wish to be a blight on our lives. The Japanese have a long, proud history of sacrificing themselves to benefit the country. I pray that my courageous act will trigger discussion and a future that’s brighter for this nation.”

Yôko Narimiya (Yumi Kawai) takes a job at a government euthanasia company in Plan 75

Plan 75 evokes elements of Richard Fleischer’s 1973 thriller Soylent Green, in which the government provides extravagantly organized assisted suicide, and Michael Anderson’s 1976 sci-fi flick Logan’s Run, in which citizens are not permitted to live past the age of thirty.

Legendary actress and singer Chieko Baisho is mesmerizing as Michi Kakutani, an elegant seventy-eight-year-old woman with no family. After losing her job as a hotel maid, she tries to find other employment, but it’s difficult at her age. Running out of money, she worries that she might soon be homeless.

She then finds out about the government program called Plan 75; cheerful banners and television commercials are pervasive. Several of her friends, including Ineko (Hisako Ôkata), are interested in the proposition, especially the part that comes with a free stay in a resort. But Michi is not ready to die.

Hiromu Okabe (Hayato Isomura) is a bright and enthusiastic young man who is one of Plan 75’s leading salesmen. He eagerly signs up senior citizens for Plan 75 with a smile on his face, believing it is a good thing for everyone. But when his uncle, Yukio Okabe (Taka Takao), shows up to enroll in the program, he starts having second thoughts.

Meanwhile, fellow employee Yôko Narimiya (Yumi Kawai) is assigned to Michi’s case, quickly growing close with the older woman, which is against the rules. And Maria (Stefanie Arianne) is a Filipino caregiver who has come to Japan to make enough money to pay for her ailing daughter’s heart operation; instead of helping sick and elderly people survive, she is now processing their belongings after they are killed by the state, reminiscent of how the Nazis collected the possessions of victims of the gas chambers.

“Humans have no choice about whether to be born, but it would be a good thing if we were able to choose when it’s time to die,” an elderly woman says happily in a commercial in a Plan 75 waiting room that reverses our usual expectations; instead of waiting to see doctors to keep them healthy, these seniors are waiting to die. “Being able to decide how my life will end provided me peace of mind,” the spokeswoman adds.

Plan 75 is a chilling look at where we might be headed; at times it feels like a documentary, its narrative all too believable. Cinematographer Hideho Urata’s camera ranges from close-ups of Baishô’s face, both celebrating and mourning every deep wrinkle, to dark interiors where the elderly slowly go through their meager daily existence and bright exteriors where children play and trains speed by as Michi can only watch.

At one point, after reading a section of the Plan 75 manual, which purports to give older people the chance to die with dignity, Yôko stares accusingly at the audience, implicating us in this frightening example of elder abuse. Hayakawa and Urata then cut to a sunset peeking through a tree next to a bland housing complex, followed by a shot of Michi’s hand, held up to a fading light through the window, examining each bent and crooked finger as she lies on a futon, wondering if she’s made the right choice — or even was given much of one in the first place.

Winner of a Caméra d’Or Special Distinction at Cannes, Plan 75 is a haunting cautionary tale that speaks volumes as to how senior citizens are treated, or mistreated, whether during a global pandemic or just every day, in Japan or elsewhere, including right here in America, where too many politicians consider them excess baggage. And the stunning finale emphasizes that we need to do something about it, and fast.

Hayakawa (Bird, Niagara) will be at IFC Center opening weekend, participating in Q&As on April 21 at 7:00 with Reiko Tahara, April 22 at 7:10 with Risa Morimoto, and April 23 at 4:25 with Kris Montello.

LUNCH BUNCH

A team of public defenders forms a unique culinary group in Lunch Bunch (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

LUNCH BUNCH
122CC
150 1st Ave. at Ninth St.
Tuesday – Saturday through April 22, $10-$100
playco.org

In their 2006 study “The Cultural Structuring of Mealtime Socialization” published in Wiley InterScience, Elinor Ochs and Merav Shohet write, “Anthropologists have long considered ways in which food preparation, distribution, and consumption authenticate both social order and moral and aesthetic beliefs and values. Less frequently examined are the socialization processes that promote continuity and change across generations in the sociocultural life of food. . . . With this notion of cultural site in mind, mealtimes can be regarded as pregnant arenas for the production of sociality, morality, and local understandings of the world. Mealtimes are both vehicles for and end points of culture.”

Starting in childhood, all of us have experienced mealtime socialization, the good and the bad. At school, we might sit at the cool kids’ table or be left to sit alone, wondering why we’ve been ostracized. I remember when I started my first full-time job after college, I desperately wanted to be asked to join the group that went out for dollar grilled cheeses and shot pool once a week at lunch. Writer Sarah Einspanier and director Tara Ahmadinejad take the concept of the office lunch to a new level in Lunch Bunch, a delectable new collaboration between PlayCo and Clubbed Thumb extended through April 22 at 122CC.

The fifty-five-minute show — the running time just about matches the standard one-hour lunch break — was inspired by a real lunch group at the Bronx Defenders’ office, “a nonprofit that is radically transforming how low-income people in the Bronx are represented in the justice system and, in doing so, is transforming the system itself.” Lunch Bunch follows eight public defenders, five of whom use their daily shared lunch hour as a much-needed break from their heavy caseloads, trying to help their clients survive an unnecessarily complex system that too often separates children from parents.

Jacob (Ugo Chukwu) is the ersatz leader of the bunch, a serious gourmet who treats lunch as a way to approach culinary perfection. Only five employees at a time can participate in lunch bunch; each one is assigned a day to prepare lunch for the entire group. Initially, Tuttle (Louisa Jacobson) is Monday, Jacob is Tuesday, Hannah (Jo Mei) is Wednesday, Greg (Francis Mateo) is Thursday, and Tal (Janice Amaya) is Friday.

They prepare such superb fare as lemon tahini goddess noodles with tempeh “bacon” and garlic broccolini; spicy peanut soba noodles topped with shaved carrot and cucumber salad; lentil loaf with sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts; and BBQ jackfruit sandwich with side arugula pear salad. This is no casserole club.

Jacob (Ugo Chukwu) and Greg (Francis Mateo) talk about more than just lunch in PlayCo / Clubbed Thumb collaboration (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

However, Tal’s vacation to Paris and Tuttle’s conversion to the restrictive Whole30 diet means Jacob has two days to fill. He turns to a pair of new lawyers, Nicole (Julia Sirna-Frest) for Monday and Mitra (Tala Ashe) for Friday, bookending the week. While Mitra looks like she’ll fit in fine, it is clear that Nicole is going to be a problem for Jacob, who is aghast when he learns that Nicole does not know what a cast-iron is.

Over the course of several weeks, the lunch bunch enjoys four mouthwatering meals a week while agonizing over specific cases, complaining about certain judges, going for cries in the coat closet, and sharing tidbits about their personal lives. When Jacob says, “I’m not asking for a Michelin star. I’m asking for a four and a half star Yelp review,” he is essentially talking about more than just what’s for lunch, whether he realizes it or not.

“How do I say this?” the perennially uptight Jacob begins. “I have low ‘expectations,’ little ‘faith,’ when it comes to the law, government, organized religion, things that fall under the umbrella of ‘humanity’ and its ‘systems.’ And soooo, I seek my jollies, my ‘joy,’ my ‘bliss,’ what have you — some semblance of control — in this one area, this one ‘arena,’ of my existence.”

The more Zen-like Greg explains, “It’s about happiness, anxiety, boredom, chronic dissatisfaction, escalating expectations, fixation on achievement, our ultimate aloneness — basically, existential dread — really it’s about the fact that there’s no way our ‘affluent,’ ‘scientific,’ supposedly ‘sophisticated’ world is going to provide us with happiness, and that no matter how much energy we devote to its care the body will give out — eventually.”

At one point, a former lunch buncher named David (David Greenspan) walks past; he now works on the fourth floor but was thrown out of the group for considering pretzels a side dish. He delivers a wickedly delicious monologue that hearkens back to the Stone Age, well before there was anything like Top Chef.

Pain and pleasure intersect as things threaten to reach the boiling point, with Hannah’s eyelid growth getting bigger and Jacob ready to explode at any second.

Jean Kim’s shallow set features seven rolling desk chairs up against a long red wall; the characters sit facing it when they’re working and turn around when they talk to one another and eat. Alice Tavener’s costumes are workplace efficient and pitch-perfect, ranging from Jacob’s blue suit to Greg’s sweater and slacks, the women in well-tailored pants and sharp shoes. The lighting is by Oona Curley, with sound by Ben Vigus.

Mitra (Tala Ashe), Nicole (Julia Sirna-Frest), and Tuttle (Louisa Jacobson) take a break in Lunch Bunch (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The cast forms a tight-knit unit, with sweet and savory performances by Chukwu as the insensitive Jacob, Ashe as the smart, sassy Mitra, Mateo as the keenly perceptive Greg, Jacobson as the goofy Tuttle, Amaya as the wacky Tal, Mei as the serious Hannah, Greenspan as the mysterious David, and Sirna-Frest as Nicole, who so wants to fit in at her new job, a feeling nearly all of us have had. Einspanier’s funny, barbed dialogue captures the drudgery of what it’s like to work in an office environment, while Ahmadinejad calmly stirs the pot as the tension mounts.

Lunch Bunch is reminiscent of Lynn Nottage’s 2021–22 Broadway play, Clyde’s, about a small group of ex-cons working at a roadside diner who each attempt to create the perfect sandwich, as if doing so would make their life meaningful and solve all their problems.

In the case of Lunch Bunch, it’s public defenders coming up with gourmet meals that could go a long way toward helping them believe they’re more than just cogs in a machine, caught up in an unwinnable game where people’s lives are at stake. Lunch success could also prevent these public servants from experiencing what happened to David, who remembers being “completely alone and . . . utterly defenseless.” The monologues are funny and often poignant, the dialogue deadpan hilarious, instantly relatable to anyone who’s ever worked in an office. Despite the generic, soul-deadening cubicle situation, the actors make the characters sparkle with uniqueness and verve — and somehow, humanity triumphs.

In the 1987 film Wall Street, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) declares, “Lunch is for wimps.” Studies have shown that more than sixty percent of office workers have their lunch alone at their desk, eating what the Atlantic calls “sadwiches.” The famous tumblr Sad Desk Lunch was an instant hit and is still going strong. Some claim that partaking of lunch with fellow employees can boost productivity, while others argue that eating with colleagues can lead to additional stress.

Lunch Bunch is not concerned about any of that data. Instead, it offers up a tasty mélange of lawyers seeking some solace from the everyday grind, using food as a way to lighten their heavy load as well as assert their individuality, rephrasing “You are what you eat” as “You are what you make.” But it turns out it’s not quite as simple as all that.

RIALTO AT 25

World premiere of 4K restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville kicks off “Rialto at 25” at MoMA (photo courtesy the Kobal Collection)

RIALTO AT 25
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
April 19 – May 22, $8-$12
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.rialtopictures.com

In 1997, Bruce Goldstein started Rialto Pictures, joined the following year by Adrienne Halpern. For more than a quarter-century, Rialto has been dedicated to reissuing and restoring classic foreign and independent films, both famous and forgotten, often debuting them at Film Forum, where Goldstein has long served as master programmer. MoMA pays tribute to copresidents Goldstein and Halpern with “Rialto at 25,” a five-week series consisting of thirty-one films released by the beloved distribution company, beginning with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1947 murder mystery, Quai Des Orfèvres, and the world premiere of a brand-new 4K restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 futuristic thriller, Alphaville.

Organized by MoMA Film curator Dave Kehr, the festival also includes Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Lève, Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, Joe Dante’s The Howling, and Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well?

“I began Rialto Pictures out of sheer frustration. Many classic movies, particularly European films, had no distribution in the United States, with prints either impossible to get or unavailable to repertory cinemas,” Goldstein said in a statement. “And, just as bad, a lot of important classics — like Renoir’s Grand Illusion and Godard’s Breathless — were seen for decades only in miserable 16mm copies, with bad image and sound. By getting the rights to movies like these myself, I could make brand new 35mm prints and show them — not just in New York — but in movie theaters across the country.”

Rialto has amassed a profoundly remarkable collection that is well represented in the MoMA series; among the other highlights and surprises are Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (with a seven-minute restored scene), Jules Dassin’s Rififi, Orson Welles’s The Trial, Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein, John Boulting’s Brighton Rock, and Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. In addition, MoMA has created a special forty-five-minute compilation of Rialto trailers.

On April 29, Goldstein will present the illustrated talk “The Art of Subtitles”; several screenings will feature introductions or discussions; and originally commissioned Rialto posters will be on view. Goldstein will introduce Jacques Deray’s La Piscine on April 26 and Dino Risi’s Una Vita Difficile on May 14, translator and subtitler Michael F. Moore will introduce Francesco Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli on April 22, Whit Stillman and actors Dylan Hundley and Carolyn Farina will participate in a discussion following a screening of Metropolitan on April 27, actor Madjid Niroumand will talk about Amir Naderi’s Davandeh with Goldstein after a screening on April 28, and Julien Duvivier’s Panique will be introduced on April 26 by Pierre Simon, the son of Georges Simenon, on whose novel the film is based. You might as well just move in to MoMA from April 19 to May 22, but keep looking over your shoulder.

TWO NEW TEXTS ON HILMA AF KLINT

Hilma af Klint: Tree of Knowledge is one of two books about the Swedish abstractionist launching at New Museum on April 20 (courtesy David Zwirner)

Who: Massimiliano Gioni, Julia Voss, Tracey Bashkoff
What: Book launches and panel discussion
Where: New Museum Theater, 235 Bowery at Prince St.
When: Thursday, April 20, $10, 6:30
Why: From October 2018 to April 2019, the Guggenheim hosted the smash exhibition “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” the first major US solo show dedicated to the Stockholm-born abstract artist. That was followed by Halina Dyrschka’s documentary Beyond the Visible, which delved further into af Klint’s life and career. On April 20, the New Museum is hosting “Two New Texts on Hilma af Klint,” serving as a book launch for Hilma af Klint: Tree of Knowledge (David Zwirner, 2023, $55), featuring contributions from Julia Voss, Susan Aberth, Suzan Frecon, Max Rosenberg, Helen Molesworth, Joy Harjo, and William Glassley, and Voss’s Hilma af Klint: A Biography (University of Chicago, 2022, $35). New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni will be joined by Voss and Guggenheim curator Tracey Bashkoff celebrating both books and the art of af Klint (1862–1944), who is finally having her long-deserved moment.

DIRECTED BY ESTELLE PARSONS

Who: Estelle Parsons, Actors Studio members
What: Seventy-fifth anniversary celebration
Where: The Actors Studio, 432 West Forty-Fourth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
When: April 20-22, free with RSVP
Why: In March 2017, legendary Oscar and Obie winner and five-time Tony nominee Estelle Parsons directed Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Last Days of Judas Iscariot at LaMama, featuring members of the Actors Studio. As part of its ongoing seventy-fifth anniversary celebration, the influential studio is now presenting “Directed by Estelle Parsons,” in which the ninety-five-year-old Parsons will direct productions of Maria Irene Fornés’s The Danube on April 20 and 21 at 7:00, the first two acts of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya on April 22 at 2:00, and the new Re-Entry on April 22 at 7:00. Co-associate artistic director of the Actors Studio and the mastermind behind the Theater and Climate Change Series, Parsons won her Oscar for Bonnie and Clyde, made her Broadway debut in 1955 in Happy Hunting, has appeared in such other shows as The Seven Descents of Myrtle, And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, Miss Margarida’s Way, and Morning’s at Seven, and has directed such other plays as Guirgis’s Our Lady of 121st St., Oedipus, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, As You Like It, Salome, and Orgasmo Adulto Escapes from the Zoo. Seating is free and extremely limited, so reserve your spot now.

THE COAST STARLIGHT

TJ (Will Harrison) and Jane (Camila Canó-Flaviá) consider what might be in The Coast Starlight (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

THE COAST STARLIGHT
Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Through April 16, $103
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Sliding Doors meets Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and the Twilight Zone episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” in Keith Bunin’s The Coast Starlight, making its New York City debut through April 16 at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.

The ninety-five-minute play takes place on board the Coast Starlight, a real Amtrak train that travels from Los Angeles to Seattle in thirty-six hours. The premise is wholly relatable: Various individuals get on the train and sit in the same car, where they wonder about the identity of their fellow travelers and consider what might happen if they engaged one another in conversation. Who hasn’t been on a train, bus, or plane and thought about who was sitting nearby, thinking about who they might be and maybe even saying hello.

“One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off,” Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane) says in Citizen Kane. “A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.” There’s an inherent sadness in every fleeting glimpse we humans have of each other, that maybe life would have turned out differently if we had made a different choice in that instant.

For years, Missed Connections listings have appeared, first in newspapers and magazines, now online, from people who saw a stranger somewhere, regret not having introduced themselves, and are now trying to find that person. It was captured beautifully in Adrian Tomine’s November 8, 2004, New Yorker cover depicting a young man and a young woman in aligning subway trains, both reading the same book, looking at each other as if they understand they were meant to be together but might never get the chance.

Characters engage in imaginary conversations in moving play at Lincoln Center (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

In The Coast Starlight, the half dozen characters are all heading somewhere, but it’s not necessarily where they want to be going, and their inner and outer journeys could potentially be changed if only they had said something. “It’s an awful thing to feel like you don’t have a home,” Jane (Camila Canó-Flaviá) says about halfway through.

TJ (Will Harrison) is a navy medic about to go AWOL to avoid being sent back to Afghanistan. Jane is an aspiring animator visiting her boyfriend who she may not love anymore. Noah (Rhys Coiro) is a veteran and a drifter caring for his ailing mother. Liz (Mia Barron) is a loud, lively woman who has just ditched her lover at an Extraordinary Couples Workshop. Ed (Jon Norman Schneider) is a harried, drunk traveling salesman working for a questionable invention company. And Anna (Michelle Wilson) is a married mother who has just had to identify the body of her dead brother.

The play is primarily a series of imaginary conversations, as if the characters decided to speak to one another, sharing intimate details of who they are and what they want out of their daily existence.

“I wanted to lean across the aisle and say to her: I have no idea where I’m headed today — I just decided I’d get on a train and head north,” TJ says about Jane, who responds to the audience, “If he’d told me that, I’m not sure what I would’ve said. TJ: “Then I wanted to tell her: I’ve lived in California for a year and till this morning I’ve never been north of San Diego.” Jane: “And then I probably would’ve said: Well, I’ve never been to San Diego.” TJ: “You should definitely go sometime. It’s totally weird.”

“I wanted to tell all of you: Obviously I’m nowhere near the person I intended to be,” Ed says. “But I’m the only person I can be under the circumstances. I know how shitty today was and I hold no illusions about tomorrow.”

These six diverse people are not having their best day, and they have no idea what the future has in store for them. They are lost souls contemplating what happens next, not necessarily looking forward to it. Worried that he’s going to be caught and brought back to face justice for military desertion, TJ says, “Then I remembered nobody could be looking for me because I wasn’t missing yet.”

A whirlwind conclusion brings it all into perspective, focusing on the concept of “What if?”

Arnulfo Maldonado’s set is a rotating platform with six movable train seats. Daniel Kluger’s sound, Lap Chi Chu’s lighting, and Ben Pearcy’s projections (for 59 Productions) makes the audience feel that they’re also on the train, motoring north through gorgeous scenery, although only flashes of light and color stream by. Ásta Bennie Hostetter’s everyday-dress costumes help give identity to the characters.

Directed by Tyne Rafaeli (Epiphany, I Was Most Alive with You), the play occasionally gets lost itself, the dialogue running off the rails; it’s not clear why the stage spins or why the actors continually rearrange their seats, and Kluger’s interstitial music is too standard.

Harrison (Daisy Jones and the Six) is affecting in his off Broadway debut, speaking in a manner that emphasizes how unanchored TJ is. Canó-Flaviá (Dance Nation, Mac Beth) is warm and gentle as Jane, Coiro (Dinner at Eight, Boy’s Life) is compelling as the unpredictable Noah, and Barron (Dying for It, Domesticated) nearly rips the roof off the Newhouse in her entrance scene, screaming into her cellphone as if no one else is around. Wilson (Confederates, Sweat) is touching as Anna, while Schneider (Once Upon a [korean] Time, Awake and Sing!) does his best with a character who is more tangential, not as deeply nuanced.

At one point Jane imagines telling TJ about James Turrell’s Dividing the Light Skyspace at Pomona College. She explains, “The artist who made it, he believes that the sky is way too enormous for us to really comprehend it. So he builds these little rooms all over the world with holes cut in their ceilings so you can look up at the sky like it’s a picture in a frame. It’s so much cooler than I’m making it sound. I promise you’ll never look at the sky the same way again.”

It’s an apt metaphor for the Coast Starlight, both the train and the play. (Notably, Pearcy was an assistant to Turrell for ten years.) I’ve been on long train rides, and I’ve sat several times in Turrell’s first US Skyspace, Meeting, which is on permanent view at MoMA PS1. I’m not sure that, having seen Bunin’s show, I will be more amenable to engage strangers in conversation, but I’m likely to wonder a whole lot more about who they might be.

WEATHERING

Humanity gets caught up in the maelstrom in Faye Driscoll’s Weathering (photo by Maria Baranova / courtesy New York Live Arts)

WEATHERING
New York Live Arts
219 West Nineteenth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
April 5-8, 12-15, $32-$50, 7:30
212-924-0077
newyorklivearts.org
www.fayedriscoll.com

Faye Driscoll’s latest work, Weathering, is, well, everything.

The seventy-minute piece, continuing at New York Live Arts through April 15, takes place on a squishy white movable platform raft designed by Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughan. The audience sits on all four sides of the object. One by one, ten performers — James Barrett, Kara Brody, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Amy Gernux, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Jennifer Nugent, Cory Seals, Eliza Tappan, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, and Jo Warren, in Karen Boyer’s costumes of everyday dress, some with backpacks, bags, and other accoutrements — step on and off the platform, eventually all standing in place and freezing, becoming what Driscoll calls a flesh sculpture.

Stage managers Emily Vizina and Ryan Gamblin, in all black, go to opposite corners and gently push the platform so it spins around, extremely slowly at first. The dancers barely move a muscle, but as the platform rotates, you can start to tell that the performers have shifted ever so slightly, lowering a knee, reaching out a hand, turning a foot, almost imperceptibly; the effect is like you are watching a living, creeping flipbook. Soon they begin touching, the connections electrifying, as if the contact is life affirming, which is especially potent as we emerge from Covid restrictions that kept us physically apart from one another. As the bodies interweave, they close gaps, filling spaces of loss and absence.

Performers encounter all five senses while spinning around the New York Live Arts stage (photo by Maria Baranova / courtesy New York Live Arts)

Driscoll incorporates all five senses as she and the stage managers occasionally spray the performers (and the audience) with citrus-smelling water and some of the dancers let out small groans and grunts as they put their mouths on an arm, leg, or neck that approaches them, somewhere in between the hunger for sex and the hunger of zombies seeking sustenance.

As the score builds — the sound and music direction is by Sophia Brous, with live sound and sound design by Ryan Gamblin and composition, field recordings, and sound design by Guillaume Malaret — the raft is spun around faster and faster. Personal items fall haphazardly to the ground: keys, a wallet, cellphones. Clothes start coming off, revealing more of who these people are and challenging what we might have previously thought about them while harkening back to our primeval existence, equating the beginning and the end. Chaos ensues, as the audience tries to capture as much of the action as it possibly can, not wanting to miss a single thing, as if every little movement, every sound, every change could upset the balance of this mini-universe.

Driscoll is telling us to pay attention, letting us know that humanity is failing and we are destroying the planet. The raft, evoking Earth and its orbit, sometimes slides slightly out of control, nearly hitting the people in the first row.

Faye Driscoll’s Weathering continues at NYLA through April 15 (photo by Maria Baranova / courtesy New York Live Arts)

The faster the raft goes, the more the audience is overcome by an intoxicating joy mixed with impending doom; it is absolutely exhilarating to follow each of the performers’ journeys, ten individuals striving to survive on their own and as a group, just as we in the audience are.

The show is accompanied by the companion reader Durations of Short Detail, with short pieces by dramaturg Dages Juvelier Keates (“We Are So Close”), dancer and choreographer Jesse Zaritt (“To Hold and Be Held”), and Driscoll, whose poem “Chariots of Flesh” relates, “We’ve been trembling in the trench for / Days? / Weeks? / Years? / Lifetimes? / Despite thick fog / I am overcome / By the smell of your clean shaven skin / Face, eyes, gaze, nose, mouth, fear / I try to pound you out but you latch onto my arm, / wrap your leg around me and reverse position / You try to pound me out but I latch onto your arm, / wrap my leg around you and reverse position / We are desperate to know the outcome / Desperate to know the outcome / Desperate to know the outcome. . . .”

As she has in such previous pieces as the Thank You for Coming trilogy, You’re Me, and There is so much mad in me, Driscoll investigates the intrinsic relationship between performer and audience, the imperative bond, but there is a lot more at stake in Weathering, nothing less than the future of the human race.

I don’t know that we can save the world through art, but with creators such as Driscoll, we can have a hell of a lot of terrifying fun trying.