Who: John Musgrave, Oscar Isaac, Greg Gadson, Ashleigh Byrnes, David Strathairn, Bryan Doerries What: Book launch of war memoir Where:Theater of War Productions online When: Wednesday, April 13, free with RSVP, 7:00 Why: Theater of War Productions regularly produces live readings of classic and classical plays, tying them to what is happening in the world today. On April 13 at 7:00, they will be presenting something a little different, a free event built around John Musgrave’s 2021 memoir, The Education of Corporal John Musgrave: Vietnam and Its Aftermath (Knopf, $27, November 2021). Musgrave (Notes to the Man Who Shot Me: Vietnam War Poems) is a permanently disabled war veteran who has been awarded two Purple Hearts and two Vietnamese Crosses of Gallantry.
He writes in the first chapter: “Service was in my DNA from the very beginning. I was born because of my parents’ service, and I was born to serve. World War II brought my mother and father together, compelling them both to join the effort right after the United States declared war against Japan. My father served as a pilot and my mother as a secretary at a nearby aviation plant, where they first met. So, in a very real way, my older brother, Butch, and I both owe our lives to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. My first conscious memory of our nation being at war was forged when I was just three or four years old, around 1951.”
Actors Oscar Isaac, Greg Gadson (a retired colonel), and David Strathairn will read excerpts from the book, along with Musgrave and Ashleigh Byrnes, the deputy national communications director of Disabled American Veterans (DAV). The readings will be followed by a panel discussion and audience Q&A about war and healing; the evening is directed and facilitated by Theater of War artistic director Bryan Doerries.
Who: David Mamet, Bari Weiss What: Livestreamed book discussion Where:The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center online When: Monday, April 11, free with advance RSVP, 7:00 (with option to purchase book) Why: “President Trump has been calling out the fake news since he declared he’d run. I’m with him there. In fact, an excellent preparation for dealing with blacklisting (my own) is a career as a playwright. The science of history burgeoned with the invention of movable type; it is now dying through the application of ink eradicator known as ‘the media.’ Soon it will be no more.”
So writes David Mamet in his latest book, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch (HarperCollins, $28.99, April 2022), in which he pulls no punches about the sorry state of our world. In such chapters as “The Fountain Pen,” “Cause and Effect,” “Reds, Pinks, and Goo-Goos,” and “What’s in a Name,” Mamet delves into religion, politics, the social contract, and his personal life, unpredictably skewering all sides as only he can. For more than fifty years, the Chicago-born Pulitzer Prize winner has been challenging us in such plays as American Buffalo,Glengarry Glen Ross,Speed-the-Plow, and Oleanna, such films as House of Games,The Spanish Prisoner,Things Change, and State and Main, and such books as Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business; The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture; and The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Jewish Self-hatred, and the Jews.
He will be launching Recessional with a free livestreamed event on April 11 hosted by the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center, moderated by Bari Weiss, the journalist and author of How to Fight Anti-Semitism and The New Seven Dirty Words who famously resigned from the New York Times, explaining, “The lessons that ought to have followed the election — lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society — have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.” Get ready for a lively conversation that is likely to both enlighten and infuriate but never bore you.
Who: Baba Israel, AMYRA, Drew Drake, Dizzy SenZe, Freakquencee, DJ Reborn, Jade Charon What: Live music, dance, and spoken word performances centered around Aṣẹ Where:BAM Fisher, Fishman Space, 321 Ashland Pl. When: April 7—9, $25, 7:30 Why: BAM’s annual celebration of spoken word and hip-hop features a stellar lineup of performers honoring the power of Aṣẹ, the Yoruba philosophical concept of affirmation, life force, and verbal creation. Artist, producer, educator, and consultant Baba Israel will host “Word. Sound. Power. 2022,” which takes place April 7-9 at BAM Fisher’s intimate Fishman Space. The impressive gathering brings together Bronx-born lyrical assassin Dizzy SenZe, Newark vibe curator Freakquencee, NYC-based poet and actor Drew Drake, and Harlem musician, author, and director AMYRA, with music by Brooklyn-based DJ Reborn and choreography by Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Jade Charon. The seventy-minute showcase, exploring agency, creativity, resilience, and more, also includes student poets from Brooklyn public schools, part of a BAM in-school residency program, and will conclude with a twenty-minute Q&A with the artists.
Who: Lisa Gorlitsky, Margaret Ivey, Postell Pringle, Adam Gopnik, Erica Schmidt, Comédie-Française What: Celebration of Molière’s quadricentennial Where:FIAF, Florence Gould Hall and Skyroom, 55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves. When: March 10-12, 24, 30, $20-$45 (three-event package $75) Why: Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was born into a bourgeois family in early 1622 in Paris. Nicknamed “le Nez” because of his relatively large proboscis, he eventually became better known as poet, playwright, and actor Molière. In celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of his birth, the French Institute Alliance Française is hosting a trio of special events. Taking place March 10-12 at 7:30 ($45) at FIAF’s Florence Gould Hall, “Molière Turns 400: 17th Century Paris Meets 21st Century New York” consists of staged excerpts, complete with sets, costumes, and live music, from The Misanthrope,The School for Wives, and Tartuffe, with Lisa Gorlitsky, Margaret Ivey, and Postell Pringle and directed by Lucie Tiberghien, the founding artistic director of Molière in the Park, which performed livestreamed adaptations of all three works during the pandemic lockdown. The March 10 presentation will be followed by a reception.
Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of Molière’s uncensored Tartuffe screens at FIAF March 24
On March 24 at 7:00 ($25), New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik and director Erica Schmidt will be at the FIAF Skyroom for the talk “Modernizing Molière,” available in person and via livestream. Gopnik contributed the foreword to Molière: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations, while Schmidt directed Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid at Bard SummerScape in 2012, starring her husband, Peter Dinklage. The fête concludes March 30 at 7:00 ($35) in Florence Gould Hall with a screening of Molière’s uncensored Tartuffe or the Hypocrite by Comédie-Française, directed by Ivo van Hove from the original script, which was censored by Louis XIV in 1664; the filmed version stars Christophe Montenez and features a score by Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat.
Rashaad Newsome’s Assembly is an immersive multimedia exploration of the intersection of humanity and technology (photo by Stephanie Berger Photography / Park Avenue Armory)
ASSEMBLY
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 6, $18 exhibition, $40 performances www.armoryonpark.org rashaadnewsome.com
The Muthaship has landed — and taken root inside Park Ave. Armory’s 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. New Orleans–born interdisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome’s immersive multimedia installation Assembly is an open call to end colonialism, white supremacy, systemic racism, homophobia, and other societal ills based in bigotry and inequality, through music, movement, art, and storytelling grounded in Black queer culture. A kind of group healing focusing on opportunity, Assembly is hosted by Being the Digital Griot, an artificial intelligence project Newsome developed at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI).
When you enter the hall, you are met by Wrapped, Tied & Tangled, a thirty-foot-tall scrim on which a series of performers in bright red, yellow, and blue costumes appear to be dancing and drawing in space while a robotic voice makes affirmations. “Dig into your mind. Welcome to your insides,” Being offers in a gentle, caring tone. “I am here to listen and provide you with a new beginning for your journey. . . . There is only breath, heartbeat, rhythm, and peace. . . . No matter what, you are enough. . . . You are the most beautiful you. You are the master of your own self. You are radiant. You are divine. Always. Ever. Only. Enough. This is your solution. An infinite everything.” The dancers morph into one another — and then into Being, as if we all are one and the same, a spiritual melding of humanity and technology.
Large screens surround the scrim on three sides; to your right, the dancer in yellow moves proudly, with an army of tiny dancers arranged on their head like cornrows, while to the left, the dancer in blue moves in the universe, where miniature dancers align like stars. The screens in front feature computer-generated diasporic imagery of flowers, fractals, twerking, and abstract shapes seemingly coming to life. And behind you, above the entrance, site-specific projections interact with the wall and windows, from more dancers and flashing lights to a facade evoking a plantation house collapsing and figures emerging in silhouette. The textile-like flower imagery is repeated as wallpaper and across the floors.
Tuesday through Sunday at 1:00, 3:00, and 5:00 (free with general admission), workshops are held on the other side of the far screens, in a 350-seat classroom that also serves as a live performance venue Tuesday through Saturday evenings at 9:00 ($40). In the workshop, the onscreen Being leads the class through a series of movements the AI relates to oppression, suppression, the power of consumption, the culture of domination, the ownership of narrative, and freedom by exploring voguing and its highly stylized modes of catwalking, duckwalking, spin dipping, and ballroom.
Being hosts an interactive workshop as part of Assembly (photo by Stephanie Berger Photography / Park Avenue Armory)
Speaking about how spin dips conclude with falling to the floor, Being explains, “I see that collapse as the transgressive moment when we let go of the binary of imperfect and perfect and engage in the incredible pedagogy of resistance by thinking critically about our process, acknowledging that we don’t have the visionary skills at that moment to make the most liberatory decision and then stop, reflect, and try again.” Workshop participants are invited to come down from their seats and join in the movement. “Floor performance leads into the embodied pedagogy aspects of vogue femme, centering the erotic and rejecting the patriarchal legacy of the mind-body split,” Being says. After Being’s presentation, audience members can share their thoughts and ask questions of the AI, who supplies analytical answers generated by key words and algorithms through which Being continues to learn.
The AI also celebrates their father, Newsome, and declares that author, activist, and feminist bell hooks, who passed away on December 15 at the age of sixty-nine, is their spiritual mother, while strongly suggesting that we read Paulo Freire’s 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed to better understand what we are all facing as a society. The text of the presentation was inspired by the writings of hooks, Audre Lord, Alok Vaid-Menon, and Assembly performer Dazié Rustin Grego-Sykes. Among the other performers are rappers Ms. Boogie, TRANNILISH, and Bella Bags, a ten-piece band, opera singer Brittany Logan, and a six-member gospel choir. The choreography is by Wrapped dancers Kameron N. Saunders, Ousmane Omari Wiles, and Maleek Washington, with music by Kryon El and booboo, lighting by John Torres, scenography by New Affiliates (Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb), and sound by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe and Mark Grey.
Ansista has a leg up in front of Twirl,Isolation, and Formation of Attention (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Around the back of the classroom is a semicircle of other works by Newsome, who is based in Brooklyn and Oakland. At either end are Ansista and Thee Variant, lifesize iterations of Being, one wearing red heels and a West African print dress, the other styled like a dominatrix with spiky black leather pants, stilettos, and a helmet mask, with warped facial parts that are also evident in nine framed collages featuring such titles as Isolation,Formation of Attention,It Do Take Nerve,O.G. (Oppositional Force), and JOY! In addition, there are monitors at either end of the armory hallway and in the gift shop, showing the twerking video Whose Booty Is This, the 2015 King of Arms parade and coronation, and the 2021 postapocalyptic Build or Destroy. Be sure to check out the cases in the shop, as Newsome has snuck in some hand-carved mahogany and resin African objects alongside the armory’s historic pieces, including Adinkra,Gemini,Brolic, and Unity. On February 20, the armory hosted the salon “Captcha: Dancing, Data, Liberation,” an all-day seminar examining art, technology, and Black queer culture and quantum visual language that you can watch here.
Given the history of hate and oppression that Assembly takes on, it is a surprisingly hopeful, forward-thinking installation, as Newsome envisions a “utopian future [of] beloved togetherness” at the intersection of humanity and technology, where “racial hierarchies and biases” can be overcome through what he calls a “real reboot.” Being and Assembly are only the beginning.
Birthe Neumann is radiant as socialite and author Karen Blixen in The Pact
THE PACT (PAGTEN) (Bille August, 2021)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
February 11-17 quadcinema.com pactmovie.com
Birthe Neumann is mesmerizing as Karen Blixen in Bille August’s The Pact, now playing at the Quad. Blixen is better known by her pen name, Isak Dinesen, author of such books as Out of Africa and such stories as Babette’s Feast and The Immortal Story, all of which became films. The Pact opens in 1948, and Blixen, referred to as Tanne or the baroness, holds court over the fanciful and the glitterati at her family estate, Rungstedlund. Now sixty-three, she is seriously ill but still able to revel in manipulating those around her. She forms an instant liking for young poet Thorkild Bjørnvig (Simon Bennebjerg), taking him under her wing and making a pact of spiritual faithfulness with him, built on mutual trust and protection; she compares it to a deal she claims to have made with the devil, trading her soul for the ability to tell stories.
The thirty-year-old Thorkild is reserved and inexperienced, but the baroness is determined to instill in him the courage to be fearless to make him a better writer. “All white people have a fear in them that I can’t stand. And that is the fear of displeasing. Instead of doing what they want, they try to flatter, hoping to be liked,” she advises him. “Do you know why so many people are unhappy nowadays? It’s because they are no longer raised to be brave. But in order to be happy, you need to risk being unhappy.”
As he spends more time at Rungstedlund, the baroness attempts to drive a wedge between him and his wife, Grete (Nanna Skaarup Voss), a shy librarian, and their young son, Bo (Mikkel Kjærsgaard Stubkjær); she also tries to make him grow closer to Benedicte Jensen (Asta Kamma August), the wife of socialite and arts philanthropist Knud W. Jensen (who would go on to found the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, in 1958). Thorkild finds himself trapped in the middle: He wants to be a successful writer, husband, and father, but the baroness, who is divorced and asexual, living in a mansion with only her housekeeper and assistant, Mrs. Carlsen (Marie Mondrup), pining away for her lost love, Denys Finch Hatton, insists that he cannot be all three and must choose between them.
The baroness (Birthe Neumann) has very specific plans for poet Thorkild Bjørnvig (Simon Bennebjerg) in Bille August’s The Pact
The Pact is a compelling, beautifully photographed tale of unrequited love, heartbreaking loss, and the creative process. Adapted by Christian Torpe from Thorkild Bjørnvig’s 1974 memoir, the film, gorgeously directed by Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror,The Best Intentions) with a subtle simplicity, opens with a pair of fascinating shots: Cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro first shoots Blixen from the side, her face hidden in shadow as she applies makeup in front of a mirror, followed by Thorkild shaving in bright light, his wife holding their baby beside him. One is facing the end, while the other is just starting, a visualization of the film’s epigraph, a quote from Blixen: “Not by your face but by your mask shall I know you.”
But as good as Neumann is, the film’s heart and soul is Bennebjerg (Borgen,A Report on the Party and the Guests), who has primarily appeared in shorts and television series before assuming this lead role. He walks a fine line as Thorkild navigates his different, deep attractions for the characters played by Neumann (The Celebration,The Kingdom), Voss (Klaphat), and Kamma August (Burn All My Letters,Sex), the daughter of Bille August and Danish superstar Pernilla August. Bennebjerg portrays Thorkild’s coming-of-age as he moves from innocence to experience under the strict tutelage of the baroness with a trepidatious unease that holds everything together; his performance grows more nuanced as the character learns more about what he has signed up for and is often not sure quite how to proceed. It’s a stage of growth we’ve all found ourselves in, even if it didn’t involve a world-famous Danish writer, but Bennebjerg makes it feel like it could happen to any of us, at any moment.
Edmund de Waal will talk about his book and accompanying exhibition in free, virtual Jewish Museum program (photo by Iwan Baan)
Who:Edmund de Waal, E. Randol Schoenberg What: Live virtual discussion about book and exhibit Where:JewishGen Talks online When: Wednesday, February 9, free with advance RSVP (donations accepted), 2:00 Why: “It is not just things that carry stories with them. Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina,” Edmund de Waal writes in his 2010 memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance. When ceramicist de Waal inherited his family’s netsuke collection, consisting of hundreds of miniature objects, he did a deep dive into the history of the Ephrussi clan, turning it into a bestselling book. Now the story behind his family and the netsuke is on view at the Jewish Museum through May 15. The fabulous show features paintings, letters, photographs, personal documents, keepsakes, and several vitrines containing hundreds of tiny items made of wood, ivory, or bronze, ranging from mice, monkeys, fish, rats, and nuts to spirits, demon catchers, gods, masks, and bottles. A woman takes a bath. A boy exposes himself. A snake wraps around a lotus leaf. A sea woman suckles an octopus. An eji stretches.
“The Hare with Amber Eyes” is on view at the Jewish Museum through May 15 (photo by Iwan Baan)
On the audio guide, de Waal quotes from the prologue, “I want to know what the relationship has been between this wooden object that I am rolling between my fingers — hard and tricky and Japanese — and where it has been. I want to be able to reach to the handle of the door and turn it and feel it open. I want to walk into each room where this object has lived, to feel the volume of the space, to know what pictures were on the walls, how the light fell from the windows. And I want to know whose hands it has been in, and what they felt about it and thought about it — if they thought about it at all. I want to know what it has witnessed.”
On February 9 at 2:00, de Waal will discuss the book, his family history, and the exhibit with attorney, philanthropist, and genealogist E. Randol Schoenberg; the free, virtual event is sponsored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, the Jewish Museum, and the Leo Baeck Institute. You can check out an earlier Jewish Museum conversation between de Waal and Adam Gopnik, about de Waal’s 2021 book, Letters to Camondo,here.
