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ATHENA FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Tracy Droz Tragos’s Plan C is the closing night selection of the thirteenth Athena Film Festival

ATHENA FILM FESTIVAL 2023
Barnard Campus
Broadway between 116th & 120th Sts.
March 2-5, $16 (Festival Pass $50)
www.athenafilmfestival.com

Begun in 2011, the Athena Film Festival is “dedicated to celebrating and elevating women’s leadership. . . . showcasing women’s leadership from underexplored perspectives; women leading in all places and spaces who are resisting and refuting preconceived notions of all they can be and do. . . . bolstering the pipeline of women creatives who are telling these stories and fostering a network of women in film.” The thirteenth annual event, a collaboration between Barnard’s Women and Hollywood and the Athena Center for Leadership, runs March 2-5, consisting of forty features, documentaries, and shorts and six panel discussions. The opening night film is Chinonye Chukwu’s Till, the story of Mamie Till Mobley’s fight for justice following the lynching of her son, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. The centerpiece is Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok’s Judy Blume Forever, honoring the legendary author, and the closing night selection is the New York premiere of Tracy Droz Tragos’s Plan C, about the abortion pill in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Highlights in between include Madison Thomas’s Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On, Sarah Polley’s Oscar-nominated Women Talking, Stephen Frears’s The Lost King starring Sally Hawkins and Steve Coogan, Valerie Kontakos’s Queen of the Deuce, Brydie O’Connor’s Love, Barbara about experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, and Destiny Macon’s Talk Black. The free panel discussion “Leadership from Below the Line” looks at women and nonbinary film production technicians; among the postscreening panels are “Andrea Dworkin: Ongoing Evolutions of Feminist Herstory,” “Policing Women’s Bodies,” and “Youth Activism, Climate Change, and Environmental Action.”

As I wrote in my preview of the inaugural festival in 2011, “More than a century after women started making movies, it seems a shame that we still need a festival that separates the girls from the boys to celebrate and foster women in film. But alas, we do.” And alas, despite some inroads, that is still true today.

EDWARD HOPPER’S NEW YORK

EDWARD HOPPER’S NEW YORK
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Through March 5, $18-$25
212-570-3600
whitney.org

Blockbuster solo exhibitions often elevate already famous artists to the next stratosphere, in the minds of the general public if not always the critics. Major shows spotlighting Rembrandt, Picasso, van Gogh, Matisse, Warhol, Basquiat, Magritte, Kusama, and others are events that draw enormous lines. People are traveling from around the world to see “Vermeer” at the Rijksmuseum, a collection of twenty-eight of the thirty-seven extant works attributed to the Dutch painter, the most ever on view in one show; however, be careful about planning your trip to Amsterdam, as it’s already sold out through its June 4 closing date.

What’s much harder to do is to humanize that superstar artist, but that’s exactly what the Whitney has done with “Edward Hopper’s New York,” an intimate and appealing exhibit that continues through March 5. Hopper has long been the centerpiece of the Whitney’s holdings, which comprise more than three thousand of his drawings, paintings, watercolors, letters, personal objects, photographs, film, and other paraphernalia. “Edward Hopper’s New York” has a razor-sharp focus on Hopper’s relationship with the city, where he began studying in 1899; he moved to New York in 1908, eventually settling in Washington Square in 1913, and married fellow artist Josephine Nivison in 1924. They had no children, instead concentrating on their work and going to the theater with a near-obsession.

The Whitney is packing them in in the fifth-floor galleries, in dramatic opposition to the works themselves, which mostly feature a single human figure, if any, and almost always modeled by his wife. The paintings are filled with a pervasive loneliness in a giant municipality re-created in Hopper’s imagination; this is no bustling Big Apple but rather a contemplative metropolis without skyscrapers or mass transit. (Even his canvases of bridges and railroad tracks are devoid of cars, buses, and trains.) Instead, the Nyack-born Hopper has transformed his longtime home into a vision of small-town America that could exist nowhere else. The paintings explore the often accidental formal beauty of the city’s built environment in their careful composition and sometimes surprising color juxtapositions.

“Hopper’s New York was a product of his personal experiences in the city throughout his lifetime, of the particular ways that he engaged with the sites and sensations around him,” Whitney curator Kim Conaty writes in her catalog essay. “The painstaking deliberateness with which he absorbed, reflected upon, then refined his impressions — ‘I’m thinking out my picture,’ he once responded to a neighbor who approached him as he sat idly in the park — can be gleaned from his pace of output, which increasingly averaged but two or three canvases a year.” New York can be a push-push place, but the Hoppers were in no rush.

Divided into such sections as “Reality and Fantasy,” “The Window,” “The Horizontal City,” and “Theater,” the show comprises dozens of works that contain haunting, mysterious narratives. In Morning Sun, a woman sits on a bed, the light pouring in as she stares emptily out a window. In Morning in a City, a naked woman stands next to an unmade bed that is too small for her; she holds a piece of clothing and looks out a window for something or someone missing.

In New York Movie, a woman in a blue outfit with a red stripe running down the side, most likely an usher, stands against the wall at the right, a hand on her chin, deep in thought; at the left, we can see only a few rows in the movie theater and a sliver of the black-and-white film, with only two people in the audience, the lush red velvet seats and a touch of blue echoing the usher and the entrance curtain, casting the picture in an elegant loneliness.

In Early Sunday Morning, one of the grandest American works of the twentieth century, a glowing light casts long shadows across an empty sidewalk in front of a two-story building, including, impossibly, a blue one emanating from a gray fire hydrant; the first-floor storefronts are closed, the second filled with windows, some partially covered with yellow shades. It was based on a scene from Elmer Rice’s 1929 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Street Scene, expanded from Rice’s earlier Sidewalks of New York. “There was neither plot nor situation,” Rice told the New York Times that February. “One merely saw the house shaking off its sleep and beginning to go about the business of the day.” That is precisely what Hopper captures, in that and so many other paintings.

The Hoppers were avid theatergoers, which is creatively displayed in an installation that includes dozens of ticket stubs they saved, along with a small notebook detailing the shows they saw, accompanied by projections of photographs of the theaters they went to and scenes from the productions they took in. They generally paid $1.10 for balcony seats for such plays as An American Tragedy, Pygmalion, The Front Page, and Dead End; they splurged for $3.30 orchestra seats for Hamlet with John Gielgud, as Hopper noted on the back of the stub from November 24, 1936. The vitrine also shines a light on Hopper’s numerous works that are set inside theaters.

Another section traces the Hoppers’ attempt to combat the potential intrusion of New York University into the serenity of Washington Square Park, the neighborhood where Hopper moved to in 1913 and lived the rest of his life. Amid such works as Skyline Near Washington Square, the charcoal drawing Town Square (Washington Square and Tower), and Roofs, Washington Square is a glass case that highlights an exchange of letters between Hopper and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. The room also focuses on Edward’s relationship with Jo, pointing out that when she posed for him, they would often create fictional characters and situations, role-playing. Several watercolors by Jo are on view as well as a charming short video of them both working in their home studio.

Lovingly curated by Conaty, the show welcomes viewers into the Hoppers’ world like no other solo exhibition I can recall; there’s a constant chatter in the galleries by New Yorkers and tourists alike discussing the paintings and the city with enthusiasm, regardless of their prior knowledge of art or Manhattan. The works have a way of uniting everyone at the Whitney, perhaps in part as a response to the loneliness depicted in so many of the canvases (and in real life during the pandemic lockdown). “Edward Hopper’s New York” might not be an exact replica of the city, but it gracefully represents the town we savor every day.

PICTURES FROM HOME

Danny Burstein plays real-life photographer Larry Sultan in Pictures from Home on Broadway (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

PICTURES FROM HOME
Studio 54
254 West 54th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 30, $65-$312
212-719-1300
picturesfromhomebroadway.com

Even an all-star cast and an award-winning director can’t prevent Sharr White’s Pictures from Home from feeling like you’re watching people you don’t know show you their home movies and vacation photos; you can only care so much. The play, continuing at Studio 54 through April 30, has its share of touching and funny moments, but it’s primarily a bumpy, inconsistent trip through strangers’ family albums.

The show is adapted from photographer Larry Sultan’s 1992 book of the same name, the result of an eight-year project in which Larry (Danny Burstein) took pictures of his parents, Jean (Zoё Wanamaker) and Irving (Nathan Lane), primarily at their home in the San Fernando Valley. Larry lives in the Bay Area with his pregnant wife and child but spends many weekends visiting his mother and father to take photos, most of which are posed.

The three characters are aware of the audience’s existence, occasionally addressing them directly. The play begins with Larry explaining that he is a distinguished professor of photography at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and that “this project will become one of my hallmark achievements — I know that’s not a modest thing to say. Regardless, this isn’t about me, it’s about them.” Irv interjects, “Larry may say it’s about us, but trust me. It’s about him.”

Larry admits, “My wife, Kelly, and I joke that no matter how much respect I get in the outside world, stepping inside these walls is my Kryptonite. I turn to mush when I try to get the shots I’m looking for.”

After finding a dusty box in his parents’ garage filled with hundreds of reels of Super-8 film, “thirty years of folktales,” Larry decides to start photographing Irv, who is not in favor of the project and hates nearly all the pictures his son takes of him, and Jean, who is not so upset but doesn’t quite understand why Larry is making such a fuss.

Larry (Danny Burstein) documents his parents’ (Zoё Wanamaker and Nathan Lane) life in Pictures from Home (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Asking the unseen projectionist to play a clip from one of the reels, Larry tells us, “You can’t watch this movie without getting the impression of, of . . . a family living in a small apartment in Brooklyn projecting its dreams onto film emulsion.” He adds, “Knowing the disparity between the actual circumstances of the movie versus the hopes you nurtured when you made the movie . . . can’t you then imagine the possibility that a home movie could be more than, as you call it . . . ‘a record of actual events?’” (The projections are by Ben Pearcy at 59 Productions.)

Irv doesn’t want the memories to be treated like some kind of psych evaluation, so he answers, “What I’m saying is, why am I not allowed to just have my home movies?” Larry responds, “I’m not saying you’re not! But did you ever think that my examining them is perhaps my way of getting to know . . . a different version of you?” Irv declares, “Larry, I think you know me perfectly well. And if you’d like, I’ll introduce you to a version of your mother.”

It’s a very funny exchange, but it’s an argument that runs throughout the play repeatedly, offering little that is new. Irv is a realist who did whatever he had to in order to support his family, from working in clothing stores to becoming an executive for Schick razors. Jean raised the kids and, later in life, began a successful career as a Realtor, which the retired Irv considers a hobby.

We don’t learn much about Larry’s siblings, or his wife and kids; it’s like they are an afterthought, not that important as Larry instead digs into his parents’ lives, whether they want him to or not. He tells his bewildered father, “What I’m doing, Dad? Is looking for the, the . . . life beyond the frame.” He wants to preserve them, particularly as they get older, but he appears to be sacrificing his own present to accomplish that.

Michael Yeargan’s set is a comfy, relatively spare California living room, with a flowery couch, a desk, and glass doors leading to a backyard where Irv gardens and barbecues. The space is cantilevered, with the back wall painted an ugly green. I initially thought that it was done that way for effect, a metaphor for their off-tilt, colorless life. (I can already hear Irv saying, “I don’t think that’s a metaphor,” which he barks at Larry early on.)

Irving (Nathan Lane) gives his son (Danny Burstein) another talking-to as his wife (Zoё Wanamaker) watches (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

But it turns out that it very much matches Irv and Jean’s actual home, which is not a candidate for House Beautiful; it’s more like my great-aunt Sylvia’s old Florida place from that same era. All the photos and videos are taken from Larry’s collection; they are of the real Irv and Jean, not Lane and Wanamaker, which is both good and bad. While it’s exciting to see the actual pictures, several of which are warmly Rockwellian, it also forces us to compare how much the actors do or don’t look like the people they are portraying, Lane in his white wig, Wanamaker in a poufy hairdo. Burstein, in an obviously fake ill-fitting wig, looks more like Jerry O’Connell than Larry.

Thus, it is hard to lose yourself in the production, as the artifice stands out. Complaining about one of the photos of him, Irv tells his son, “The picture shows how strained and artificial the situation was that you set up.” The play cannot escape that same feeling.

Three-time Tony winner Lane (It’s Only a Play, Angels in America) plays, well, Nathan Lane, using his trademark boisterous bravado. When he shouts at Jean, “I can’t interject? I’m just doing a little interjecting!,” we see Lane, not Irv. Four-time Tony nominee and two-time Olivier winner Wanamaker (Loot, Awake and Sing!) is underused, usually kept in the background except when they are discussing a photo of Jean in the garage. And Tony winner Burstein (Talley’s Folly, Fiddler on the Roof) is ever likable, but his character is severely underdeveloped, leaving too many holes about his life away from his parents. It’s also hard to believe he’s playing their son, as Lane and Wanamaker are only eight and fifteen years older than Burstein, respectively.

White (The Other Place, The True, The Affair) and Sher (My Fair Lady, Oslo) can’t get past the general stagnation of an audience watching actors look at photos on a wall. You keep wanting the show to go somewhere, to offer more than one man’s attempt to ensure his parents live forever, at least on film. Instead, it’s too slight, 105 minutes of studying a family album I had only mild interest in.

WOLF PLAY

Mitchell Winter is the wolf operating a young boy in Wolf Play (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

WOLF PLAY
Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater, the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
511 West 52nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 2, $68-$88
mcctheater.org

Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play is the most exhilarating hundred minutes you will spend in a theater right now, or at least through April 2, when its extended run at MCC’s Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater concludes.

Originally presented a year ago at Soho Rep in conjunction with Ma-Yi Theater Company, the production has transferred uptown to Hell’s Kitchen with all its joys, and all its horrors, fully intact, with the same cast and crew. Be sure to arrive early to check out You-Shin Chen’s set, which features a prop wall with hundreds of items, from baseballs, dolls, lights, and cabinets to an old stove, luggage, hat boxes, and a cast iron tub. Numerous items are used in the play, while others tantalizingly remain in place; they were carefully selected by director Dustin Wills and propmaster Patricia Marjorie from Wills’s personal collection or from previous shows of his, including a teddy bear, a pirate flag, two cacti, a wooden table with googly eyes, and an image of dancing Russian ladies, as detailed in a lobby display. It gives the show a homey feel; these things could be in anyone’s garage or attic, family mementos as well as junk.

While the house lights are still on, Mitchell Winter emerges from a surprise entrance and offers a prologue, speaking directly to the audience, which is seated on two opposite sides of the space, partially separated by a curtain. “What if I said I am not what you think you see,” he announces. He invites us to imagine that we are in a forest near a river, then tells specific audience members that they are a spider, or an eagle, or a drop of dew, riding on a giant turtle, before pulling the proverbial rug out from under us.

“The truth is a wobbly thing,” he says. “We shall wobble through our own set of truths like jello on a freight train, and tonight I add a bump to that journey and put to you my truth: I am not what you think you see. I am the wolf.” He then lets out a pair of howls and points out, “Wolves get a bad rep for being evil. . . . But you gotta understand these evil wolves are abandoned wolves. Solo wolves, not necessarily out on the prowl to steal your red riding hoods.” Just prior to becoming involved in the narrative, he tells us, “See, wolves suck at being alone. Wolves need family.” And it’s family the wolf will have, but not of its choosing.

The story begins as Peter (Christopher Bannow) arrives at the home of Robin (Nicole Villamil) and Ash (Esco Jouléy) to sell his adopted child. Ash isn’t there, but Robin’s brother, Ryan (Brian Quijada), is. Ash is Robin’s wife, a nonbinary person of color who is not in favor of the whole arrangement. Robin found out about Peter’s son, and how to acquire him, through a Yahoo! online group devoted to the exchange of adopted children; for a relatively small cash payment, Peter will sign over power of attorney to Robin and the deal will be done.

Ash (Esco Jouléy) sits down to breakfast with Jeenu and the wolf (Michael Winter) in Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Peter is giving up Peter Jr., a Korean orphan whom he and his wife adopted several years earlier, because they have just had a baby of their own and believe they can no longer properly take care of both of them. Peter makes clear to Robin that the child is nonreturnable; she must sign an “affidavit of waiver of interest in child.” Peter insists, “We’re really not terrible people. We really want what’s best for him. We love him. So much. We do.”

The powerful scene also introduces us to the show’s unique conceit: The child, who is six, is a three-foot-tall wooden puppet operated by Winter, who interjects asides to the audience, as if in a PBS nature special. When Peter says, “Katie and I, we had such a great time together, as a family,” the wolf tells us, “Sometimes wolves will ally with another species for coexistence. Wolves are not above making friends if it means survival.” When Peter Jr. won’t let go of Peter’s leg, the wolf explains, “Wolves are an extremely adaptable species / wolf is one of the few that survived the last ice age.”

When the child announces that his name is actually Jeenu and becomes more attached to Ash than to Robin, things get even more complicated. Ash is a boxer preparing for their first professional bout, being trained by Ryan at the gym he runs. They want to concentrate on the match, not raising a kid. As the fight approaches, Peter starts contacting Ryan to find out how things are going with Jeenu, perhaps reconsidering what he has done.

There is nothing conventional about Wolf Play. Jung (Wild Goose Dreams, Cardboard Piano, Human Resources) and Wills (Montag, Plano) inject every action with something unusual and special, and not just for effect, as each detail enhances the development of the story and the characters. The movement, accompanied by Barbara Samuels’s lighting and Kate Marvin’s sound, is spectacularly choreographed with split-second precision and more than a bit of stage magic, as Winter reveals. On several occasions, Ryan is engaged in a phone conversation but his words also seem to be responses to another character doing something else; for example, when Peter, at the sink in his kitchen, asks his unseen wife, “Honey, do you have the email, of those people that you found?,” Ryan, on the phone with his mother, says, “There was no time to ask, the kid was crying like a siren,” as if answering Peter.

One constant on the set is a ramshackle door that is moved around depending on whether it is for Robin and Ash’s home, Ryan’s gym, or another location, but it also represents the different types of entry and exit that are elusive to children such as Jeenu. He’s not a puppet just because it’s cool to watch; he’s treated like an object, similar to the items in the prop wall except more foreign. Early on, after being chastised by Peter for cursing, Ash argues, “We can import him from Asia, we can put him up for auction the minute something doesn’t feel right, but hey now be careful of the f word coz that will really fuck him up.” Shockingly, Wolf Play is not complete fiction; Jung began writing it after reading Megan Twohey’s 2013 Reuters investigative report “The Child Exchange: Inside America’s Underground Market for Adopted Children,” parts of which the audience can read on boards on their way out.

Peter (Christopher Bannow) tries to explain himself in Wolf Play (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Winter (Frontières Sans Frontieres, Jung’s Romeo and Juliet) is remarkable as the wolf, bringing to life a wooden, thin-limbed puppet, imbuing it with emotion even though it has two black dots for eyes and no mouth, a performance reminiscent of how beautifully Kennedy Kanagawa operated Milky White in the recent Broadway revival of Into the Woods. Especially touching are breakfast scenes in which Ash and Jeenu bond at a long table.

Jouléy (The Demise, Interstate) and Villamil (How to Load a Musket, Network, Lessons in Survival) capture the fears and worries of a young couple suddenly faced with parenthood, while Quijada (Jung’s No More Sad Things, Oedipus El Rey) is the concerned uncle trying to find his place in this new situation. Bannow (Alamat, Oklahoma!) brings humanity to Peter, who could have been a straightforward villain, his name evoking Sergei Prokofiev’s 1936 symphonic fairy tale Peter and the Wolf.

Hovering over all the laughs and all the sighs is the very real issue of child trafficking, particularly of foreign-born children, recalling slavery as well as the current immigration crisis. Wolf Play is an endlessly imaginative and entertaining show, but it is also a cleverly layered examination of systemic problems that continue to haunt America.

UNBREAKABLE SPIRIT: COMMEMORATING ONE YEAR OF UKRAINE’S RESILIENCE AND RESISTANCE

Ukrainian Institute commemoration event on February 24 features art, film, dance, lectures, panel discussions, and more

Who: Sofika Zielyk, Olia Rondiak, Kathy Nalywajko, Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, Evelyn Farkas, Marcy Kaptur, Adrian Karatnycky, Urmas Reinsalu, Taisa Markus, Denys Drozdyuk, Antonina Skobina, more
What: Ukrainian Institute commemoration event
Where: The Ukrainian Institute, 2 East Seventy-Ninth St. at Fifth Ave.
When: Friday, February 24, free, 12:00 – 6:00 pm
Why: On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, starting a war that has resulted in the deaths of more than forty thousand people in addition to more than fifty-five thousand wounded, at least fifteen thousand missing, and some fourteen million displaced. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s plan was to “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine, but he never expected to be in a real battle twelve months later. The Ukrainian Institute will commemorate a year that has proved the strength, valor, and courage of Ukraine, under the leadership of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with “Unbreakable Spirit: Commemorating One Year of Ukraine’s Resilience & Resistance,” an afternoon of free programming on February 24 that includes art exhibitions, film screenings, panel discussions, dance, and special remarks. On the first floor will be “Window on Ukraine,” “The Pysanka: A Symbol of Hope” with curator and ethnographer Sofika Zielyk and more than five hundred eggs, and a Ukrainian bookstore.

The second floor features a concert hall and Chandelier Room where contemporary Ukrainian paintings will be on display as part of the Kozytskiy Charity Foundation’s “We and the World” initiative, short films and documentaries will be shown from noon to 4:00, and conversations with experts will be held. On the third floor will be a healing space with handmade motanky sculptures with artist Olia Rondiak and a “Lives Cut Short” print and video tribute to fallen artists, curated by Ukrainian dancers Denys Drozdyuk and Antonina Skobina, with live presentations from 4:00 to 6:00. There will also be remarks and conversations with Ukrainian Institute president Kathy Nalywajko, Ukrainian MP Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, American national security advisor Evelyn Farkas, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, Eurasia Center senior fellow Adrian Karatnycky, Estonian minster of foreign affairs Urmas Reinsalu, White & Case partner Taisa Markus, Ukrainian female former POWs, and others. Slava Ukraini!

A BRIGHT NEW BOISE

Will (Peter Mark Kendall) tries to make a connection with Alex (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio) in Signature revival of Samuel D. Hunter’s A Bright New Boise (photo by Joan Marcus)

A BRIGHT NEW BOISE
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through March 19, $49-$139
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Samuel D. Hunter’s most recent play, one of the best of 2022, is called A Case for the Existence of God. The Signature revival of one of his first works, 2010’s A Bright New Boise, could be retitled A Case for the Nonexistence of God.

The Obie-winning show was originally presented at the Wild Project in September 2010, two years before Hobby Lobby sued the government to allow the privately owned arts and crafts chain to prevent its employee health care plan from covering contraception, on religious grounds. “The Green family’s religious beliefs forbid them from participating in, providing access to, paying for, training others to engage in, or otherwise supporting abortion-causing drugs and devices,” the company said in a statement at the time.

A Bright New Boise takes place in a clean, windowless, nondescript Hobby Lobby break room in Boise, Idaho. Wilson Chin’s coolly efficient set features several tables and chairs, a refrigerator, vending machines, a microwave, a sink, a bulletin board with rules and regulations, and lockers. A television is mounted on the wall next to the door, playing either invasive, up-close medical procedures (a result of a problem with a satellite dish) or a never-ending Hobby Lobby TV program in which two men in white lab coats mutter on unintelligibly about corporate policy, their constant low drone suggesting a form of brainwashing.

Will (Peter Mark Kendall) is interviewing with store manager Pauline (Eva Kaminsky) for an open position, but she’s concerned about a specific period that’s missing from his resume; he tells her that he had an inconsequential second job as a bookkeeper for a church but is clearly uneasy talking about it. It won’t be long before she finds out why.

The main reason Will wants to work at Hobby Lobby, which he does not tell Pauline, is to reconnect with his seventeen-year-old son, Alex (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio), who works summers there; Alex was given up for adoption shortly after birth, and he is not excited when Will blurts out that he’s his father. The next morning, Alex grills Will to make sure he’s not just some creepy stalker. Mentioning his adoptive parents, Alex says, “Yeah, well, they’re assholes. If you are my father, then fuck you, because you gave me to assholes.” Whenever Alex doesn’t like what Will says, he chimes in, “I’m gonna kill myself” but assures Will that it’s “nothing, it’s just something I say.”

A Bright New Boise takes place in the break room of a Hobby Lobby store in Idaho (photo by Joan Marcus)

Will tries to begin a relationship with Alex, but Alex’s older brother, Leroy (Angus O’Brien), is suspicious of Will. Leroy is a tough-talking artist who wears homemade T-shirts with threatening slogans intended to upset the soccer moms, grade school kids, and little old ladies who shop at Hobby Lobby. Because he is the only employee who actually knows anything about art supplies, he gets away with it.

Will soon develops a friendship with fellow employee Anna (Anna Baryshnikov); they surprise each other in the break room after hours on his first day, both having hid in the store after closing time. Will does it for the wi-fi so he can continue writing his blog about the rapture; Anna does it so she can read books at night, which she’s not allowed to do at home, where she lives with her parents.

Pauline, an F-bomb dropper who runs a tight ship, is proud of how she “brought order to chaos,” turning a failing store into a profit center, so she’s not about to let any kind of family dysfunction affect her success. But when the truth emerges about that gap in Will’s resume, Pauline battens down the hatches.

“So you still believe in God?” Pauline asks Will. “Yes,” he answers. “After all that?” she says. “Yes,” he repeats. “Why?” she prods. “You’ll see,” he promises.

Hunter (Greater Clements, The Whale) was inspired in part to write A Bright New Boise from his personal experience attending a nondenominational Christian school that taught fundamental evangelical dogma and working as a cashier at Walmart as well as a documentary he saw about Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps. The play takes on such issues as adoption (Hunter and his husband adopted a girl six years ago), unionization, rampant consumerism, and the separation between church and state without getting overtly political, but there’s an underlying theme of religion’s ever-growing role in modern society, from the government to the church to the individual as extremism seeks to become the norm. In 2010, when the show debuted, words such as Hobby Lobby and Westboro Baptist Church weren’t so immediately fraught with meaning, dividing people into opposing camps, so Hunter doesn’t need to add anything to the inherent controversies. Nor does he focus on the dichotomies of capitalism itself, which is its own religion, although lacking a supreme being.

Pauline (Eva Kaminsky) has a chat with her new employee, Will (Peter Mark Kendall), in A Bright New Boise (photo by Joan Marcus)

But no matter their religious affiliation or lack thereof, all the characters are suffering from a kind of isolation, seeking connection to release them from their stagnation and boredom. The break room can be seen as a sort of purgatory where everyone is trying to figure out what comes next, whether they realize it or not.

Adroitly directed by Oliver Butler (What the Constitution Means to Me, GNIT), who effectively builds the expanding tension in the break room, the hundred-minute play features a strong cast led by Kendall (Blue Ridge, Mercury Fur), who splendidly portrays how awkward and squeamish Will is in his own skin; Kendall, who starred in Hunter’s solo microplay Brick in Theatre for One’s “Déjà Vu” at the Signature last year, makes it hard to like Will even as we root for him to find his place in life.

Kaminsky (Harry Potter & the Cursed Child, Hunter’s The Few) provides much-needed comic relief as the dedicated foul-mouthed manager, Baryshnikov (Time and the Conways, chekhovOS /an experimental game/) brings a warm innocence to Anna, and Diaz-Silverio (John Proctor Is the Villain) and O’Brien make superb off-Broadway debuts as two very different brothers. Jen Schriever’s lighting and Christopher Darbassie’s sound design spark each new scene with a jolt.

However, A Bright New Boise doesn’t know how to finish. I anticipated the lights going out for the last time twice before they actually did. Hunter raises important questions throughout this deeply compelling drama, but like the existence of God himself, he could have left a few more answers open-ended.

SCIENCE ON SCREEN: THE CONGRESS + WORLD OF TOMORROW

Robin Wright gets scanned for Hollywood posterity in The Congress

THE CONGRESS (Ari Folman,, 2013) + WORLD OF TOMORROW (Don Hertzfeldt, 2015)
Museum of the Moving Image, Redstone Theater
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, February 24, $9-$15, 7:00
movingimage.us

The Museum of the Moving Image’s ongoing “Science on Screen” series continues February 24 with an intriguing pair of films that offer unique insight into what might be next. The evening begins with the first episode of Don Hertzfeldt’s seventeen-minute Oscar-nominated animated short World of Tomorrow, a series that began in 2015 and deals with cloning, time travel, digital consciousness, and immortality, featuring stick figures amid bold colors; young Emily is voiced by Hertzfeld’s four-year-old niece, Winona Mae, whose dialogue was recorded while she was playing. “We mustn’t linger,” future Emily (Julia Pott) tells younger Emily. “It is easy to get lost in memories.”

World of Tomorrow is followed by writer-director Ari Folman’s underrated 2013 live action/animated hybrid, The Congress, in which Folman imagines a sad but visually dazzling future. Inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s 1971 short novel The Futurological Congress, the film focuses on Robin Wright as a fictionalized version of herself, an idealistic actress about to turn forty-five who has let her career come second to raising her two children, daughter Sarah (Sami Gayle) and, primarily, son Aaron (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who is slowly losing the ability to see and hear. Wright’s longtime agent, Al (Harvey Keitel), has a last-chance opportunity for her: Jeff Green (Danny Huston), the head of Miramount, wants to scan her body and emotions so the studio can manipulate her digital likeness into any role while keeping her ageless. They don’t want the modern-day Robin Wright but the young, beautiful star of The Princess Bride, State of Grace, and Forrest Gump. The only catch is that in exchange for a substantial lump-sum payment, the real Wright will never be allowed to act again, in any capacity. With no other options, she reluctantly takes the deal. Twenty years later, invited to speak at the Futurological Congress, she enters a whole new realm, a fully animated world where men, women, and children live out their entertainment fantasies. Shocked by what she is experiencing, Wright meets up with Dylan Truliner (Jon Hamm), who has been animating her digital version for years, as a revolution threatens; meanwhile, Green has another offer for her, even more frightening than the first.

Robin Wright enters the animated, hallucinogenic fantasy world of the future in The Congress

The Congress is a stunning examination of America’s obsession with celebrity culture and pharmaceutical release amid continuing technological advancements in which avatars can replace real people and computers can do all the work. The animated scenes, consisting of sixty thousand drawings made in eight countries, are mind-blowing, referencing the history of cartoons, from early Max Fleischer gems through Warner Bros. classics as well as nods to Disney, Pixar, Who’s Afraid of Roger Rabbit, and even Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped Waking Life; Folman also pays homage, directly and indirectly, to James Cameron and Stanley Kubrick. (The central part of the cartoon scenes were actually filmed live first, then animated based on the footage; be on the lookout for cameos by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Frida Kahlo, and dozens of other familiar faces.)

Wright gives one of her best performances playing a modified version of herself, maintaining a calm, cool demeanor even as things threaten to completely break down around her. Paul Giamatti does a fine turn as her son’s concerned doctor, and Huston has a ball chewing the colorful scenery as the greedy, nasty studio head (as well as numerous other authority figures). The film also plays off itself in wonderful ways; the fictionalized Wright is at first against being scanned and used in science-fiction films, but the real Wright, of course, has agreed to be turned into a cartoon character in a science-fiction film. The story does get confusing in the second half, threatening to lose its thread as it goes all over the place, but Folman, whose previous film was the Oscar-nominated Waltz with Bashir, manages to bring it all together by the end, led by the stalwart Wright. Named Best European Animated Feature at the European Film Awards, The Congress is an eye-popping, soul-searching, hallucinogenic warning of what just might be awaiting all of us.