live performance

THE ALCHEMIST

Manoel Felciano, Reg Rogers, and Jennifer Sánchez play a trio of swindlers in Red Bull revival of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (photo by Carol Rosegg)

THE ALCHEMIST
New World Stages
340 West Fiftieth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through December 19, $70
Available for streaming January 12-26
www.redbulltheater.com
newworldstages.com

Red Bull Theater was one of the most active companies during the pandemic, presenting livestreamed reunion readings of previous productions, the online interview series RemarkaBULL Podversations, and deep explorations into Othello and Pericles. So it’s disappointing that its return to live, in-person theater is an overbaked version of Ben Jonson’s 1610 Jacobean farce, The Alchemist.

Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher and directed by Jesse Berger — the same team that gave us the superb 2017 revival of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector — The Alchemist is a hot mess, a frantic, unrelenting satire laden with anachronistic references and modern speech that bury what Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously referred to as one of the “three most perfect plots ever planned.” (The other two, in his opinion, were Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.)

The tale is set in 1606 in the Lovewit mansion in London as plague rips through the land; the wealthy master has left for the countryside, reminding us that the rich haven’t changed much, considering their response to the current coronavirus pandemic. A voiceover announces at the start, “Some wear masks, just like you do, that cover the nose and mouth and comply with CDC guidelines at all times, including during the show, except while actively drinking at your seat, so if you’re going to drink, drink actively.”

Lovewit’s manservant, the rogue Face (Manoel Felciano), has teamed up with the charlatan alchemist Subtle (Reg Rogers) and their bawdy colleague, Dol Common (Jennifer Sánchez), to con members of the local community out of their money. When the trio learns that Lovewit is unexpectedly returning in two hours, they ramp up their schemes as they attempt to defraud the tobacconist Abel Drugger (Nathan Christopher), the law clerk Dapper (Carson Elrod), the deacon Ananias (Stephen DeRosa), and the knight Sir Epicure Mammon (Jacob Ming-Trent) and his butler from Brooklyn, the surly skeptic known as Surly (Louis Mustillo).

Red Bull returns to in-person theater with The Alchemist at New World Stages (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Subtle might think he is in charge, but Face is quick to remind him, “Recollect, sir: you were not long past known to all the neighborhood as that scurvy beetle who nothing did but loiter at the corner in moldy rags so thin scarce covered they your buttocks. I took pity on you, gave you roof and a bed, replaced your tatters with well-cut cloth, and introduced you to that household item called the bathing tub.” Subtle responds, “Recollect, sir: you were not long past that lowly servant who nothing did but sit your master’s house with no one to converse with save your brooms and dustpans. Twas I took pity on you, raised you up to your potential, taught you to present yourself so convincingly as a captain with a beard so nautical it could fool a blind man who’s never been to sea. Twas I conceived the scheme, tis I should take the largest share!” Meanwhile, Dol points out about their Venture Tripartite, “Well, if we three do not this treasure equal share, you two shall not share mine.”

Despite already having a heavy chest brimming with ill-gotten gains and Lovewit’s arrival fast approaching, Face and Subtle can’t control their greed when they learn of a wealthy widow, Dame Pliant (Teresa Avia Lim), who has come to town with her protective brother, Kastril (Allen Tedder). So they set out to scam her as well, agreeing not to tell Dol. Their nefarious plans play out in real time, a grandfather clock ticking away throughout the nearly two-hour show as things grow more and more frenetic and overwrought.

Red Bull and founding artistic director Berger know their way around classic works, as evidenced by their stellar adaptations of John Ford’s 1630s drama, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1777 comedy of manners, The School for Scandal, and Jonson’s 1606 English Renaissance satire, Volpone. But they try too hard to make The Alchemist relevant to this moment in time, sacrificing story for slapstick. Alexis Distler’s two-floor set is filled with doorways, a staircase, and surprise entryways, but the timing of the various door slams is too often slightly off. At one point Rogers ad-libbed about having to run up and down the stairs again, and we feel his pain. As always with Red Bull, the costumes (by Tilly Grimes) are wonderfully extravagant, as is Tommy Kurzman’s wig and makeup design.

The show suffers from being in the 199-seat Stage 5 at New World Stages, which is too small and intimate for such a broadly played farce; you’re liable to get whiplash from swiveling your head back and forth and up and down so much, particularly as Subtle changes from “a mystic newly come from Rotterdam” to “a fortune teller late of Portugal” to “a Swedish hypnotist learned in financial planning.” Perhaps it will be easier to take when it is available for streaming January 12-26.

In a program note, Hatcher wryly admits, “Of course, I did screw around with the plot. Ours is a slimmed down version of the play, with fewer characters and one setting instead of four. So, apart from dumbing down the highbrow jokes, ruining the perfect plot, tossing in anachronisms, and adding a song very much like one sung by Shirley Bassey in 1964, the play is pretty much your grandmother’s The Alchemist.” The talented cast, led by Obie winner Rogers, does its best with this dumbing down, seeming to enjoy themselves immensely, as did much of the audience the night I went. I wish I felt the same.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS: LAND OF BROKEN DREAMS CONVENING & CONCERT SERIES

LAND OF BROKEN DREAMS
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
Concerts and convenings: December 9-11, $25
Installation: Tuesday – Sunday through December 31, $18
www.armoryonpark.org

As part of Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Shape of Things” monumental multimedia installation at Park Ave. Armory, there will be three days of live music, conversations, and performances that activate the space. Tickets are going fast for the “Land of Broken Dreams” series, which features nighttime concerts by singer-songwriter Somi on December 9, the jazz trio of Vijay Iyer, Arooj Aftab, and Linda May Han Oh on December 10, and Terri Lyne Carrington and Lisa Fischer, whose latest project is “Music for Abolition,” on December 11. Tickets also include admission to a “Daytime Convening” from 1:00 to 7:00, with pop-up performances by more than 150 artists in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the Board of Officers Room, the Veterans Room, and the Colonels Room.

Among those participating are photographer Dawoud Bey, tap dancer Maurice Chestnut, painter Torkwase Dyson, theater director Scott Elliott, Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray and the D.R.E.A.M. Ring, philanthropist Agnes Gund, poet, playwright, and novelist Carl Hancock Rux, dancer and choreographer Francesca Harper, musician and author Nona Hendryx, civil rights leader Ben Jealous, interdisciplinary artist Rashid Johnson, visual artist Joan Jonas, set designer Christine Jones, artist Deborah Kass, painter Julie Mehretu, cultural theorist, poet, and scholar Fred Moten, visual artist Shirin Neshat, curator, critic, and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist, multimedia installation artist Tony Oursler, poet, essayist, playwright, and editor Claudia Rankine, sculptor Alyson Shotz, conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, performance artist Carmelita Tropicana, rapper, actor, and Roots MC Tariq Trotter, author Quincy Troupe, director Whitney White, and the Peace Poets. You might just have to move in to the armory for seventy-two hours so you don’t miss a minute of what promises to be a memorable event.

THE ANTELOPE PARTY

Five Bronies and Pegasisters meet weekly to celebrate their love of My Little Pony in The Antelope Party (photo by Bjorn Bolinder)

THE ANTELOPE PARTY
The Wild Project
195 East Third St. between Aves. A & B
Through December 4, $25-$45
www.theantelope.party
thewildproject.com

Cosplay battles fascism in Dutch Kills Theater’s creepy good production of Eric John Meyer’s The Antelope Party. The show, extended through December 4 at the Wild Project, takes place primarily in the Western Pennsylvania apartment of Ben (Edward Mawere), a Brony — an adult fan of the children’s television cartoon program My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic — who hosts weekly meetings where he and several other Bronies and Pegasisters gather to dress up in character and participate in role-playing games. Shawn (Will Dagger) is Pinkie Pie, Doug (Quinn Franzen) is Rainbow Dash, Maggie (Lindsley Howard) is Rarity, Rachel (Caitlin Morris) is Twilight Sparkle, and Ben is Fluttershy.

Like Dungeons & Dragons, they follow specific rules as they create fantasy scenarios that offer a respite from the ever-more-threatening world outside, one that would never accept them.

“When I saw my first episode it was like opening a door into this other room in my brain that I never knew existed — where I could have feelings and not be ashamed of them or have to make sarcastic remarks or have to put people down before they put me down,” Shawn says. “It was like getting this warm welcome to the home I never knew I had. Where everypony gets me and I get them.”

Acknowledging everyone’s right to be themselves, Rachel explains, “Our Friendship Magic is for us and if anypony wants to live without it, we need to let them do that.”

They are thrown off balance when a stranger, Jean (Anna Ishida), shows up, and it turns out she thought the online posting was code for a different kind of meeting. Soon they are discussing the new Neighborhood Watch, a vigilante group that appears to be kidnapping people as the police look the other way. “They’ve been popping up around the country in towns like this one: high unemployment, high poverty,” the conspiracy-prone Jean says.

Shawn (Will Dagger) and Maggie (Lindsley Howard) go for a walk in Eric John Meyer’s The Antelope Party (photo by Bjorn Bolinder)

When Maggie returns after having been snatched by the watch, she denies it, although Doug, who was there when it happened, claims otherwise. Soon Maggie and Shawn are falling in step with the watch, which is part of a growing group called the Antelope Party that employs fascist tactics to rule over communities, pitting Brony against Brony, neighbor against neighbor.

You don’t have to know anything about Equestria and My Little Pony to appreciate the play, which unfolds on Yu-Hsuan Chen’s highly effective set, which morphs from Ben’s living room to a booth at a diner, a park bench, and other locations. Kate Fry’s costumes are bright and colorful, with adorable little touches that match Brian Bernhard’s props, which include dozens and dozens of My Little Pony toys and memorabilia. Director Jess Chayes (HOME/SICK, Half Moon Bay) treats the subject matter with the care it deserves, mixing humor with the impending doom, although the ending feels overly ambiguous and a few plot holes remain open.

The Antelope Party, which evokes Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, might feel like it was written yesterday, but Meyer (The Broken Umbrella, The Wheel of Fortune [a theory of change]) wrote it in 2016, inspired by Trump rallies. In fact, in the 2017 world premiere at the Wit in Chicago (which also featured Mawere as Ben), the watch wore red hats that proclaimed, “Make Antelopes Great Again.” But the show is no mere anti-Trump diatribe; instead, it’s a cautionary parable about the dangers of authoritarianism, where obedience to the state is forced upon all citizens, who are punished for their individuality. Bronies and Pegasisters are stand-ins for Black and brown people, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, Jews and Muslims, the homeless, and other minorities that are suppressed in dictatorships. As Shawn says early on, “You don’t get to choose your cutie mark. It chooses you.” And as Rachel declares, “This is so fucked. All I ever wanted was to not have to act normal.” Welcome to the new normal.

CULLUD WATTAH

A tight-knit family of five women battle the Flint water crisis in world premiere at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

CULLUD WATTAH
Martinson Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday through Sunday through December 12, $40-$150
212-539-8500
publictheater.org

“You are free to bear collective witness & be collectively witnessed,” Erika Dickerson-Despenza writes in a program note to her extraordinary Cullud Wattah, continuing through December 12 at the Public’s Martinson Theater. The play is a powerful call to action inside a harrowing drama about one of humanity’s most basic needs: clean water. As you enter the space, you are met by hundreds of plastic bottles filled with dirty brown water, lining the stage and hanging from the ceiling, a forest of sickness that resembles a mass lynching.

Nine-year-old Plum (Alicia Pilgrim) is adding tally marks in chalk to the wall, tracking how many days it’s been since the city of Flint, Michigan, has been without clean drinking water. For years, their water has been tainted by lead, which Michigan governor Rick Snyder and GM were well aware of — but both government and corporation chose profit over public health. Plum makes her way into a bathtub at the front of the stage as she is joined by her mother, Marion (Crystal Dickinson), her seventeen-year-old sister, Reesee (Lauren F. Walker), her aunt, Ainee (Andrea Patterson), and her grandmother, Big Ma (Lizan Mitchell). The five women, four dressed in white, looking like ghosts, sing a spiritual while gathering in a type of ritual procession: “lead/ in thuh wattah/ lead/ in thuh wattah cheeldrun/ lead/ in thuh wattah/ snyder playin god/ with wattah.”

The play is set in Michigan’s fifth ward, Genessee County, in the fall of 2016, five years ago to the day. It takes place in the home of the Coopers, their house suggested by a set with no walls and only a partial ceiling. (The stunning design is by Adam Rigg, the costumes by Kara Harmon.) In the script, Dickerson-Despenza explains that the form and structure “are fundamental components of an artistic aesthetic & political instrument the playwright calls ‘jook joint writing’: a radical, subversive practice that dis/orders linguistic (neo)colonialism & imperialism, building vernacular without walls.” The characters move throughout the space with a rhythm that the outside world forbids.

Playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza, director Candis C. Jones, and actress Crystal Dickinson rehearse Cullud Wattah (photo by Joan Marcus)

Marion is a widowed third-generation assembly-line worker at GM, trying to keep her job amid layoffs. Her older sister, Ainee, an addict survivor who is prepared to fight for change, is thirty-four weeks pregnant and worried that she will lose this baby as she has several before. Reesee wants to be a doula and a dancer and is immersed in Yoruba culture. Plum is battling illness, concerned for her immediate future. And Big Ma is trying to hold it all together. “White folks’ll take this house n flip it for a million once this whole lead thing is ovah,” she says. As word of a potential strike at the plant spreads, Marion and Ainee are at odds that could cause a rift in this tight-knit family of strong women.

Although Cullud Wattah is not part of Susan Smith Blackburn Prize winner Dickerson-Despenza’s planned ten-play Katrina Cycle, which includes the superb [hieroglyph] and the compelling radio play shadow/land, it features similar themes, exploring the intersection between water, race, and politics. References to liquids as a life-giving (and life-taking) force abound throughout the play. Ainee says that the baby in her womb is “doin wattah aerobics.” Reesee prays to Yemoja, the Yoruba water deity. Blood and piss figure prominently. The title itself can be read in several ways, from referring to the color of the water in the bottles to foul water that has been served to Black families.

Elegantly directed by Candis C. Jones (Pipeline, shadow/land), Cullud Wattah might specifically be about the Flint lead crisis but also recalls the history of whites-only water fountains and segregated pools in America; racism and colonialism are embedded in the play’s bones without Dickerson-Despenza having to stress them. Inspired by the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, and Suzan-Lori Parks, the playwright keeps the audience on edge for all 110 minutes, with a stellar cast led by Dickinson (Why Would I Dare: The Trial of Crystal Mason, You Can’t Take It with You, The Low Road) as a widowed mother willing to go to extreme lengths to support her family and Mitchell (Here Is Future: The Transformed Returns, Passage, shadow/land) as the matriarch who says exactly what she thinks.

Discussing the loss of Marion’s husband in the Afghanistan war, Big Mama says, “He provided for his family by any means necessary/ there’s money in war,” to which Marion responds, “There are wars in money mama/ too many to count.” As the play reminds us at the very end, there’s still a war going on in Flint over money and water, swiftly approaching its twenty-eight-hundredth day.

[Note: For more on the play, you can watch a conversation between Dickerson-Despenza and Jones here.]

APPROVAL JUNKIE

Faith Salie shares her quest for approval in one-woman show (photo by Daniel Rader)

APPROVAL JUNKIE
Audible Theatre’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 12, $46-$56
www.audible.com

In her one-woman show, Approval Junkie, actress, author, and television and radio correspondent Faith Salie explains that when she would share a personal or professional success with her father, he would say, “I’m impressed, but not surprised.” I was impressed and surprised by how much I enjoyed the monologue, in which Salie details her lifelong quest for approval, from being an anorexic Georgia high school beauty and talent show contestant to auditioning for acting parts to getting married and wanting to have children. She also admits to being an applause junkie. “I’m half a century old, and I give a ton of fucks that you’re sitting at my feet,” she tells the audience. “Y’all came to the theater. And I’m pretty sure you’re wearing pants. And I hope you’re smiling behind those masks.”

Salie, an Emmy winner who appears regularly on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! and CBS Sunday Morning, is charming and likable — and brutally honest. She talks about some intensely private moments, but as much as she’s after our approval, she takes a humble, self-deprecating approach, telling a story that, in many ways, could be about any woman, although she acknowledges her significant privilege. She doesn’t brag about her accomplishments or look for sympathy for her failures; she just wants us to enjoy ourselves and, hopefully, learn about how we don’t need to search for approval ourselves around every corner.

Faith Salie accepts approval on opening night of Approval Junkie (photo by Daniel Rader)

The show is adapted from her book of the same name, which has two different subtitles: Adventures in Caring Too Much for the hardcover, My Heartfelt (and Occasionally Inappropriate) Quest to Please Just About Everyone, and Ultimately Myself for the paperback and ebook. For ninety minutes, Salie, in a lovely dark blue jumpsuit and beige heels (the costume is by Ivan Ingermann), walks across Jack Magaw’s spare set, which features a central platform, two small speakers where she sometimes sits, and a stained-glass-like backdrop of abstract geometric shapes on which video and animation are occasionally projected. Salie shares funny and moving stories about going to an Ayurvedic Healing Center in a Sarasota, Florida, strip mall to exorcise the darkness out of her in order to please her wasband (what she calls her ex-husband); being retweeted by Hillary Clinton and Mandy Patinkin; her desperation to look good at her divorce hearing; and attempting to be a hit on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox program. She remembers that early in her career, she took vocal lessons from acting coach Lesly Kahn, who asked her, “Why aren’t you as pretty as I want you to be?” She answers now, “I don’t know — I’m not as pretty as I want me to be.”

Directed by actor and producer Amanda Watkins, the play — which continues at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre through December 12, after which an Audible audio recording will be available — has a warm, welcoming atmosphere. Even when lines fall flat, and a bunch do, Salie proceeds, okay with that momentary lack of approval. Except for the animation at the beginning and end, the projections are random and inconsistent; you’ll find yourself time and again thinking something will be shown when nothing is. And that’s okay too.

It’s all bookended by tales about Shel Silverstein’s classic children’s book The Giving Tree (Salie calls the titular tree “the ultimate woodland approval junkie”) and Salie’s friendship with 104-year-old Ruth Rosner, a journey from childhood to old age. Describing Rosner’s sudden fame from Salie’s television profile of her, Salie says, “We all want to sit at the feet of someone with a century of wisdom and hear that once you get old enough, you stop striving, you figure it all out. You have, as the kids say, ‘zero fucks to give.’ But it doesn’t work that way. It feels too good to take a bow.” In this case, Salie has our approval, and she can take a well-deserved bow. (Salie will be taking part in an Audible Theater online 92Y conversation about Approval Junkie with writer and comic Josh Gondelman on November 30 at 7:00.)

MORNING’S AT SEVEN

Alley Mills, Lindsay Crouse, Patty McCormack, and Alma Cuervo play four sisters in Morning’s at Seven (photo by Maria Baranova)

Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 West Forty-Sixth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Through December 5, $44
www.morningsat7.com

It’s a shame that Dan Wackerman’s warm and cozy adaptation of Paul Osborn’s 1939 family comedy, Morning’s at Seven, is ending its run a month earlier than planned at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, closing on December 5 instead of January 9. It certainly can’t be because of the overall quality of the show, which is first-rate, with an outstanding cast and a terrific set. Perhaps it’s the space itself; over the last nine years, I’ve seen only one other play at the theater that I’ve heartily recommended (although I was in the minority); this is the second.

The three-act, 135-minute show (including one intermission) is set in an unnamed middle America small town in 1922, in a quaint backyard shared by an extended family. In one house, Cora (Lindsay Crouse) and her husband, Thor (Dan Lauria), live with one of Cora’s sisters, the single Arry (Alley Mills). Next door, another sister, Ida (Alma Cuervo), lives with her husband, Carl (John Rubinstein), and their forty-year-old nerdy son, Homer (Jonathan Spivey). The fourth and oldest sister, Esty (Patty McCormack), lives a few blocks away with her condescending professor husband, David (Tony Roberts), who thinks her relatives are a bunch of morons. Everyone (except David) is all atwitter that Homer is finally bringing home his girlfriend, Myrtle (Keri Safran), after dating her for twelve years. The general expectation is that Homer will finally marry Myrtle and move into the nearby house on Sycamore Drive that his father Carl built for them, off in the distance as if a beacon of hope. (The homey, comfortable set is by Harry Feiner, with modest, unembellished period costumes by Barbara A. Bell.)

But all is not a Thomas Kinkade / Norman Rockwell scene. Carl has what at the time would be called “a nervous condition,” suffering from vaguely existential spells in which he thinks he is a failure and asks himself, “Where am I?” When the supercilious David finds Esty visiting her family against his wishes, he declares her to be a “free agent” and banishes her to the second floor of their house while he plans to live on the first, barely interacting with her. It soon becomes evident that Arry is no mere old maid but has been in love with Thor for decades. And Cora dreams of at last being alone with her husband, a considerate, likable man who smokes a pipe and prefers to avoid controversy.

Dan Lauria and Alley Mills of The Wonder Years reunite in John Osborne revival (photo by Maria Baranova)

“Cora’s made a couple of awful funny remarks lately about me living by myself. She’s got some bee in her bonnet. She’s up to something,” Arry tells Thor. “Oh, she isn’t either,” Thor says. “Well, she hadn’t better be, that’s all I say,” Arry adds. “Now, your home’s right here with us, Arry. Just as long as you want it,” Thor promises. Arry replies, “Well, don’t you forget it either.” Of course, Cora is up to something, and this long-suffering sister is plotting to take home all the pie, as it were.

Over the course of less than twenty-four hours, long-held secrets, and new ones, emerge as a nine people take stock of their lives, asking themselves, “Where am I?” And they’re not always satisfied with the answer to a question that the audience itself can relate to. It’s probably one of the reasons why the play has been so successful on the rare occasions it has been mounted, earning a slew of Tony awards and nominations for its 1980 and 2002 Broadway revivals, for example.

David (Tony Roberts) has some pointed advice for Carl (John Rubinstein) in Morning’s at Seven (photo by Maria Baranova)

It’s also a treat to watch a play starring seven wonderful actors in their seventies and eighties, at the top of their game. Lauria (Lombardi, A Christmas Story The Musical) and Mills (The Bold and the Beautiful, Bad Habits with her late husband Orson Bean) rekindle the chemistry they had as the father and mother on The Wonder Years from the 1980s; Mills ably stepped in when Judith Ivey tore a tendon during previews. Obie winner and Emmy and Grammy nominee Crouse (The Homecoming, Places in the Heart) is touching as the woman caught between them.

Oscar nominee McCormack’s (The Bad Seed, Frost/Nixon) Esty is just the right foil for two-time Tony nominee Roberts’s (The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, Play It Again, Sam) ornery and persnickety David, while Obie winner Cuervo (Uncommon Women and Others, On Your Feet!) is appropriately motherly to everyone, especially Tony winner Rubinstein’s (Pippin, Children of a Lesser God) Carl, who is a lost little boy except when he has his manly tools. Safran (Typhoid Mary) and Spivey (The Front Page) hold their own in such talented company as the naive, somewhat simpleminded young couple trying to figure out how to start their life together while the others are closer to reaching the end of theirs.

Obie winner Wackerman (Rocket to the Moon, Ten Chimneys), of the Peccadillo Theater Company, makes the audience feel like it’s a part of this small community, investing in the gossip and intimate drama of a family that unknowingly hides behind false modesty and a self-imposed politeness. They live in their own bubble; they don’t talk about politics, or the economy, or war, which is refreshing. Oscar and Tony winner Osborne, who wrote such hard-hitting plays as Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, and Luther, took a lighter approach with Morning’s at Seven, and it works wonderfully in this version. Catch it while you can at this theater of doom.

JOHN SIMS RESIDENCY — 2020: (DI)VISIONS OF AMERICA

John Sims speaks out in multimedia presentations at La MaMa

Who: John Sims
What: Five-day multidisciplinary residency
Where: The Ellen Stewart Theatre, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
When: December 1-5, pay what you can $10-$60
Why: Conceptual artist and activist John Sims has been working on the multimedia project Recoloration Proclamation for two decades; it is now ready to be unveiled at La Mama, where the Detroit native is the 2021 artist-in-residence. From December 1 to 5, Sims will present six programs hitting on topical issues involving race, slavery, the Confederacy, police brutality, and inequalities that came to light during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The residency kicks off December 1 at 7:00 with an installation viewing and artist talk featuring the AfroDixieRemixes Listening Session — fourteen different Black versions of “Dixie” — and the world’s largest AfroConfederate flag, followed December 2 at 7:00 (and December 5 at 2:00) with a film screening of Recoloration Proclamation. On December 3, 4, and 5 at 7:00, Sims will take part in live performances of 2020: (Di)Visions of America. It all forms a unique self-portrait of the artist as well as a multidisciplinary look at the mind-set of contemporary America as Sims seeks redemption and rebirth through peace, liberty, and justice.