live performance

TIME AND “TIME AGAIN”: TRISHA BROWN AT THE JOYCE

Opal Loop / Cloud Installation #722503 is part of Trisha Brown season at the Joyce (photo by Maria Baranova)

TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at Nineteenth St.
April 29 – May 4, $52-$72
www.joyce.org

For its 2025 season at the Joyce, Trisha Brown Dance Company looks back at its seminal Unstable Molecular Structure Cycle while also forging ahead into the future.

Running April 29 through May 4, the program features three dances, beginning with the world premiere of Time again, which explores the concept of change, repetition, chance, and familiarity. Choreographed by Lee Serle, who was mentored by Brown in 2010 through the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Initiative, the work features set and visual design by Mateo López, who was mentored by William Kentridge in 2012–13 in the Rolex program, lighting by Jennifer Tipton, and music by Australian sound artist Alisdair Macindoe. It will be performed by TBDC members Savannah Gaillard, Rochelle Jamila, Burr Johnson, Ashley Merker, Patrick Needham, Jennifer Payán, and Spencer James Weidie.

Following intermission, the company returns with two pieces from the Unstable Molecular Structure Cycle, which executive director Kirstin Kapustik calls “a series of works that embrace fluidity, unpredictability, and the beauty of constant change.” First up is 1980’s Opal Loop / Cloud Installation #722503, a collaboration with Japanese fog artist Fujiko Nakaya that invites the audience “to bring together images within themselves.” Merker, Needham, Payán, and Weidie perform to the sounds of water passing through high-pressure nozzles, with costumes by Judith Shea and lighting by Beverly Emmons.

The evening concludes with 1981’s Son of Gone Fishin’, which Brown called “a doozey. In it I reached the apogee of complexity in my work.” The full ensemble randomly selects sections of Robert Ashley’s score from his three-opera opus Atalanta, with costumes by Shea and lighting by Emmons evoking the original set design by Donald Judd.

To dive deeper, there will be a Curtain Chat following the April 30 performance.

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

NOT JUST PASSING THE TIME: GRAHAM PARKER AND JAMES MASTRO SOLO AT CITY WINERY

Graham Parker and James Mastro will be playing solo gigs at City Winery on April 28 (photo courtesy James Mastro)

GRAHAM PARKER ‘SOLO’ WITH JAMES MASTRO
City Winery New York
25 Eleventh Ave. at Fifteenth St.
Monday, April 28, $38-$58 (plus $25 per person minimum), 8:00
citywinery.com
www.grahamparker.net
www.jamesmastro.net

On December 2, 2012, the Paramount in Huntington hosted a memorable show by a pair of British ex-pats. First up was the reunited Graham Parker and the Rumour, followed by Ian Hunter and the Rant Band, the latter featuring James Mastro on guitar, sax, and mandolin.

On April 28, Parker and Mastro will be at City Winery, with Parker playing songs from throughout his illustrious fifty-year-career, during which he has been backed by the Rumour, the Shot, the Figgs, the Small Clubs, and the Goldtops. His most recent album, 2023’s Last Chance to Learn the Twist, is classic GP, a phenomenal package of incisive tunes, from the bluesy rocker “The Music of the Devil” to the throwbacks “Grand Scheme of Things” and “Wicked Wit” to a love song to weed, “Cannabis.”

An expert raconteur, Parker came out of the gate with a remarkable string of records between 1976 and 1979 — Howlin’ Wind, Heat Treatment, Stick to Me, and Squeezing Out Sparks — and he has never stopped releasing terrific new music while also writing the short story collection Carp Fishing on Valium and the backstage novel The Thylacine’s Lair and acting in Judd Apatow’s This Is 40. I’ve seen him numerous times over the decades and he has never failed to work wonders; one of my favorite evenings was a house concert in New Jersey in which Parker performed one deep cut from each of his albums, in chronological order, introducing each song by talking about what was going on in the world when he wrote it.

In an interview on his website, he explains, “I can’t say I ever think I’m doing anything more with each song or each album other than throwing another pebble into the stream where it swirls around for a bit until it eventually gets picked up by the current and flows off downstream. Bye bye, thanks for helping pass the time.”

Graham Parker joins James Mastro, Ian Hunter, and the Rant Band at the Paramount in 2012 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

I’ve also had the good fortune to see Mastro play in numerous configurations over the years, with the legendary Hoboken band the Bongos, the underappreciated Health & Happiness Show, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Syd Straw, Megan Reilly, Amy Speace, and others. But last year the consummate sideman released his highly praised debut solo album, Dawn of a New Error, with Mastro taking on faith and religion in “My God,” death and loss in “Never Die,” true love in “Gangster Baby” and “Three Words,” and fake news in “Right Words, Wrong Song.”

In a February 2024 twi-ny talk, Mastro, who also runs the the Hoboken art gallery and live event space 503 Social Club, explained, “I’ve really enjoyed being a side guy all these years, and especially when you’re working with someone like Ian Hunter, or Patti or John [Cale], anyone I’ve worked with, Megan. So it’s been nice to go in and try to contribute and watch how other people work. It takes a lot of pressure off. Running a band is a pain in the ass; you gotta make sure the drummer doesn’t get arrested.”

Parker and Mastro will be more than passing the time at City Winery, and there will be no drummers needing protection from the law.

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

THE VOICE OF A TEARDROP: ACTIVATING OTOBONG NKANGA’S CADENCE AT MoMA

Artist Otobong Nkanga will be joined by six performers to activate Cadence installation on April 27 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Who: Otobong Nkanga and others
What: Installation activation
Where: Marron Family Atrium, MoMA, 11 West Fifty-Third St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
When: Sunday, April 27, free with museum admission, 10:30 am – 5:30 pm
Why: Describing her MoMA atrium commission Cadence, Nigeria-born, Belgium-based artist Otobong Nkanga notes, “Once I’d visited MoMA, I was interested in creating a tapestry work for the highest wall in the atrium, which would allow for a way of looking into the world from a different perspective. I wanted to create the notion of falling: a fall of things, a certain shift, a certain rhythm. The tapestry opens up to a more three-dimensional space, with sculptural pieces made of clay, smoked raku, and glass hanging from ropes and sitting on anthracite rocks, and a sound piece integrated in the sculpture that relates to the notion of teardrops, which is another kind of fall. . . . I wanted to make something that explores different rhythms of life. You might also feel that it’s a world that is beyond this one, like the universe somehow. It’s a mix of different worlds — from the underworld and the mining of minerals, to the surface and the soil, to the atmosphere and the heat of the sun, into outer space — all collapsing together in one place. That’s what creates the cadence of life. That’s what creates, actually, a world, because you cannot separate what is happening in the universe from what is happening underneath the soil in the core of the earth.”

On April 27 from 10:30 to 5:30, Nkanga and six other performers — Holland Andrews, Keishera, Muyassar Kurdi, Anaïs Maviel, Miss Olithea, and Samita Sinha, in costumes by Christian Joy — will activate the installation, incorporating sound and movement to interact with the piece. “What if a teardrop actually had a voice? What would it say? How would it say it? The work is really looking at that teardrop, and the emotions that go with it,” Nkanga says of the live performance, which is free with museum admission. Cadence is on view through July 27.

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

HERE I AM: A TRANS RABBI SHARES HER STORY IN BECOMING EVE

Tommy Dorfman stars as a trans rabbi trying to come out to her father in Becoming Eve (photo by Matthew Murphy)

BECOMING EVE
Abrons Arts Center Playhouse Theater
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
Through April 27, $29.88-$130
212-598-0400
www.nytw.org
www.abronsartscenter.org

On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, synagogues around the world read and discuss Genesis 22:1–24, the story of Abraham’s binding of his son Isaac on Mount Sinai, preparing him as a human sacrifice until an angel of G-d intervenes, replacing Isaac with a ram at the last moment. Known as the Akedah, the passage has been hotly debated for millennia by religious leaders, scholars, and laypeople, exploring issues of faith, obedience, familial responsibility, and the value of human life.

One line of thought considers whether Abraham, and perhaps Isaac as well, is aware that it is a test and that Abraham believed that G-d never planned on having him go ahead with the slaughter of the son who was born to him and his wife Sarah in their old age.

In Emil Weinstein’s debut play, the searing Becoming Eve, another interpretation comes to the fore: whether what happened on Mount Sinai was actually a transformation of Isaac’s soul from female to male, as argued by Rabbi Yechiel Michel of Zloczow in the seventeenth century.

Based on Abby Chava Stein’s 2019 memoir, Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman, the lightly fictionalized play, continuing at Abrons Arts Center through April 27, focuses on Chava (Tommy Dorfman), a trans rabbi who has not come out yet to her deeply religious family, whose ancestors include the Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidism.

Chava has been spotted wearing a dress in midtown Manhattan by a member of her parents’ tight-knit Williamsburg community, and, fearing that the observer will reveal her secret, she decides to tell her father, Tati (Richard Schiff), and mother, Mami (Judy Kuhn), enlisting the support of Jonah (Brandon Uranowitz), a rabbi who has recently started a progressive shul on the Upper West Side.

Chava is afraid her parents won’t understand, explaining to Jonah, “They live in a hermetically sealed nineteenth-century village that happens to be in Brooklyn. They don’t know the Internet. They don’t know Superman.”

Jonah is excited to learn of Reb. Michela’s interpretation, proclaiming, “That story has always confounded me. This essential paradox, at the very start of our religion, G-d telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his beloved son, when G-d has just promised Abraham that Isaac will father generations! How can both be true? But the whole story is about both-ness, right? This essential both-ness that Abraham has to contend with. But it makes so much sense with the Michela commentary. It cracks the whole thing open. The sacrifice is actually a transformation, which is so essentially Jewish. We’re the people of transition. Of exodus, of leaving and starting over, of walking through doorways. And doorways are fundamentally about liminality, right? The in-between space between two extremes! Between borders and genders and sexualities and — This may have cracked open my Rosh Hashanah speech.”

Tati (Richard Schiff) reads Scripture next to a puppet of his son in powerful new play (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Chava is disappointed when only Tati shows up, and she hesitates in sharing her truth. As she delays, the narrative shifts back and forth between the present and the past, depicted in poignant memory scenes from Chava’s childhood in which she is portrayed by a series of Bunraku-style puppets that get bigger and older as Chava does; they’re operated by Justin Perkins and Emma Wiseman, dressed in all black, with Dorfman standing with them, speaking the dialogue in darkness.

The vignettes begin with Chava at the age of two and a half, when Tati, thrilled to finally have a son after five daughters, wants to bring his boy to shul for the first time and Mami disagrees. At six, Chava is asking Tati whether doctors will someday be able to perform full-body transplants. At thirteen, Chava is taught by Tati how to put on tefillin; he explains, “The tefillin binds us, father and son, together to the end of time,” recalling the Akedah. At sixteen, Chava grows close with a curious schoolmate, Chesky (Rad Pereira). And at nineteen, Chava is introduced to Fraidy (Tedra Millan), who has been chosen to be his bride.

Meanwhile, in the present day, Chava, Jonah, and Tati have intriguing conversations about family and the Torah. Tati is confused when Jonah offers, “I left Judaism completely for a few years, actually, and then I found my way back, through transdenominational Renewal Judaism, which takes a lot of inspiration from the Hasidic masters.” Tati doesn’t understand why Chava is refusing to attend her brother’s upcoming wedding. When Jonah mentions that Steven Spielberg helped fund the local Yiddish Book Center, Tati claims to have never heard of him. Chava reminds her father that, as a teenager, he had snuck out of his house to see Jaws, an event that he is ashamed of. “You looked America in the teeth and it scared you back to Williamsburg,” Chava says. Tati replies, “I wasn’t scared. It was clearly a machine.” Jonah adds, “Machines can be scary,” to which Tati concludes, “Only if you let them run your life,” a clever reference to biblical fundamentalists like Tati.

Presented by New York Theatre Workshop, Becoming Eve was initially scheduled for the Connelly Theater but had to be moved after the New York Archdiocese, which runs the venue, canceled the show because of its content. Archdiocese director of communications Joseph Zwilling wrote in a statement, “It is the standard practice of the archdiocese that nothing should take place on Church-owned property that is contrary to the teaching of the Church. That applies to plays, television shows, or movies being shot, music videos being recorded, or other performances.” The Connelly is part of the Cornelia Connelly Center, a nonprofit whose mission is “to champion girls, empowering them to realize their full potential from middle school through college and beyond.”

Tony winner Brandon Uranowitz plays an Upper West Side rabbi in Becoming Eve (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The play, which is in English but the characters are actually speaking in Yiddish and Hebrew, feels much more at home at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side, where immigrant Jewish communities have thrived for more than a century. Abrons is part of the Henry Street Settlement, which was established in the late-nineteenth century and whose mission is “to open doors of opportunity for Lower East Side residents and other New Yorkers through social service, arts, and health care programs.”

To signal time shifts, Ben Stanton’s lighting goes dark and UptownWorks’ (Daniela Hart, Noel Nichols, Bailey Trieweiler) sound explodes before Daniel Kluger’s music calms things down. The convincing puppets are by Amanda Villalobos, who has previously worked on such shows as Is This a Room, Wolf Play, and The Old Country.

Becoming Eve unfolds on Arnulfo Maldonado’s exquisitely detailed set, an upstairs office with overstuffed bookcases, a small kitchen, a flyer for a production of The Hamantaschen Monologues, exposed air ducts, Jonah’s cluttered desk, a cabinet with two Torah scrolls, a bemah, and three arched windows. Enver Chakartash’s costumes range from Chava’s sexy dress to Jonah’s casual clothing to Tati’s traditional Hasidic garb.

Weinstein, a trans man who, as a teenager, attended the synagogue that Stein had left, writes incisive dialogue that avoids becoming, well, preachy and didactic, with unexpected twists and turns that are guided with expert precision by director Tyne Rafaeli (Epiphany, The Coast Starlight). Dorfman (Romeo + Juliet, “Daddy”) is heartbreaking as Chava, who is desperate to be accepted by her family; it is wrenching when she changes from her revealing dress to a zipped-up hoodie, terrified at how her father might react. Unrecognizable Emmy winner Schiff (Glengarry Glen Ross, The West Wing) is sensational as the long-bearded Tati, a respectable man stuck in the past, unwilling to face the realities of the modern era.

Tony winner Uranowitz (Falsettos, An American in Paris) is eminently likable as Jonah, a rabbi who understands just how to bridge the gap between Chava and Tati. Three-time Tony nominee Kuhn (Fun Home, Les Misérables) and Millan (On the Shore of the Wide World, The Wolves) excel as the key women in Chava’s life, while Pereira (Take Care, Madonna col Bambino) is touching as Chesky.

One of the best plays of the year, Becoming Eve begins with Chava singing Ariana Grande’s “Break Free,” which includes the lyrics “If you want it, take it / I should have said it before / Tried to hide it, fake it / I can’t pretend anymore,” and ends with SOPHIE’s “Immaterial” (“Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial / Immaterial boys, immaterial girls / Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial / We’re just, im-ma-ma-material [I could be anything I want] / Immaterial, immaterial boys [anyhow, anywhere] / Immaterial girls [any place, anyone that I want] / Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial”).

In Genesis 22:1, G-d calls out to Abraham, who answers, “Hineni” — “Here I am” — which is also the name of one of the most beautiful Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur prayers, sung in the shul by the cantor, who is representing the congregation despite their own personal faults and transgressions. The final word of Weinstein’s play is also “hineni,” a defiant conclusion to a complex, thought-provoking work about who we are, how we are seen by others, and everything in between.

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

FIRST LOVE AND TMI: RYAN J. HADDAD’S HOLD ME IN THE WATER

Ryan J. Haddad thinks it might be love in Hold Me in the Water at Playwrights Horizons (photo by Valerie Terranova)

HOLD ME IN THE WATER
Playwrights Horizons, the Judy Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday-Sunday through May 4, $62.50 – $102.50
www.playwrightshorizons.org

Even with a heavy dose of TMI, Ryan J. Haddad’s Hold Me in the Water is a poignant, touching, and very funny solo show about first love.

In such previous plays as Hi, Are You Single? and Dark Disabled Stories and the immersive installation Wings and Rings in the pandemic presentation The Watering Hole at the Signature, Haddad has shared important moments from his life as a queer actor and writer with cerebral palsy.

Rising from below the stage on a lift like a rock star, he opens his new show, running at Playwrights Horizons through May 4, by saying, “I’m Ryan J. Haddad. For those of you who don’t know me, I don’t know how you ended up here! But for those of you who don’t know me . . .” He then describes himself and the set to the audience, detailing what he looks like and what he is wearing, providing access to those who are blind or have low vision; in addition, everything he says is projected as surtitles for the hard of hearing.

For seventy minutes, Haddad, baring his soul while using his metallic posterior or reverse posture-control walker, moves around dots’ blue set, which features a nine-inch-high platform, a long, narrow bench, and a pair of modular cubes. The story begins in June 2018, when Haddad immediately fell for a beautiful boy at a summer artist residency in upstate New York. During a pair of inaccessible activities, one at a bookstore, the other at the beach — “Ryan doesn’t do the beach,” he notes — he receives help from “the boy,” as he calls him.

In the first case, Haddad explains, “His grip was firm. He went ahead of me and I leaned on his strong frame as I pulled my legs up one at a time. We walked through the door together. He waited for someone else to bring my walker up behind me before he let go. No questions had to be asked. No mishaps. The trust between our bodies — my hand, his hand — was magnetic and instinctual. And I told him that. And then we started texting.”

They get even closer at the beach, where the boy never lets go, making Haddad feel safe in the water and part of the group. “It was . . . um . . . it was the most intimate I had ever been with another man,” Haddad confesses.

Haddad wants it to be more, and when they start seeing each other, albeit with stops and starts, he thinks he might have found his first true love, shocked “that someone that attractive, that kind, that talented and dreamy and sexy would want to show me any sort of romantic affection.” But Haddad also learn some hard truths about relationships.

Several times, Haddad dives headfirst into graphic depictions of sex that go too far, regardless of race, gender, or whether it involves people with a physical, sensory, or intellectual disability or not. That much intimate, very specific information is a lot to take.

Otherwise, Haddad is an engaging storyteller, discussing emotions that everyone can relate to, from fear, loneliness, and lack of self-esteem to love, trust, and self-confidence. He connects with the audience from that initial ascent; director Danny Sharron gives Haddad plenty of room to reveal his deepest desires.

It’s a relaxed performance: The house lights are on dim, audience members can make sounds and move about to make sure they’re comfortable, and they can leave and come back if they need to use the facilities or require a break in a safe space on the second floor. There will also be select shows requiring masks, with ASL interpreters or audio description, and other enhancements.

As with Dark Disabled Stories, it’s a new way to experience theater, and its inclusivity and accessibility both echo and frame the themes of Haddad’s compelling narrative.

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

SISTERS ARE DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES: LESBIAN EROTICA AT HERE

Bailey Williams and Emma Horwitz open up a lot of boxes at HERE Arts Center (photo by HanJie Chow)

TWO SISTERS FIND A BOX OF LESBIAN EROTICA IN THE WOODS
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave.
Through May 3, $45
here.org

If you’re going to call your show Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, you had better live up to that amazing title. On- and offstage partners Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams do just that and more in a rollicking extravaganza about art aesthetics and sisterhood in all their varying forms.

Extended at HERE Arts Center through May 3, the coproduction from Rattlestick Theater and New Georges starts with Horwitz bopping behind a desk, deejaying on her laptop; the playlist includes MUNA’s “Number One Fan,” Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra,” and Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” which boasts, “Wanna disco? Wanna see me disco? / Let me hear you depoliticize my rhyme . . . Because I’m so bored that I’d be entertained / Even by a stupid floor, a linoleum floor, linoleum floor.”

Horwitz is surrounded by a semicircle of hundreds of carefully stacked bankers boxes with such labels as “Co-dependent Defendents” [sic], “Broken Vibrators,” “Top Chef Bottom Chef,” “Help! My Ex Has a Popular Podcast,” and “Gay Girls Who Like Gay Boys Who Also Like Gay Girls.” Over the course of the play — which runs exactly sixty-nine minutes, Williams explains with a smile — many of the boxes will be opened and explored, exposing clever, hilarious, and at times revealing plot devices.

In addition to portraying various versions of themselves, Horwitz is also an interviewer, a trucker, a doctor, a researcher, a businessman, and an executed spy/opera lover while Williams is an artist, a barback, a patient, an escort, a secretary, and a babysitter/pizza deliverer, among other characters. Across sixteen scenarios, they visit a pet shop, a diner, a black box theater, a lesbian spaceship, and the First Annual NIPPLI Conference, in which the National Institute for Paranormal Psychic Lesbian Investigations “posits that there are a number of energetic hotspots that produce hyper-dimensional gateways of electromagnetic significance. . . . They cannot — yet — transport humans. But they can — and do — transport lesbian erotica.”

The piece is inherently self-referential, fully aware that it is an experimental work taking place in a downtown venue, performed by a real-life queer couple to an ecstatic audience. Horwitz and Williams were inspired by such avant-garde theater companies as Split Britches and Five Lesbian Brothers, the woman-run erotica magazine On Our Backs, and the actual Reddit forum “We gotta talk about porn in the woods,” where people post stories of, well, finding lesbian erotica in the woods.

Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods consists of a series of wildly funny and fiendishly clever vignettes (photo by HanJie Chow)

One of the show’s leitmotifs involves a mysterious performance artist known as Valentina, who interviewer Emma and artist Bailey may or may not know, have collaborated with, or had a relationship with. When Emma says she recently received a postcard from Valentina, Bailey says, “That is so very, very Valentina . . . a woman with extremely clear boundaries between work and play. Anyway, this is all – we’re here to talk about my new piece, I think?” In describing a previous performance installation, Body Double and the Doubled Body, Bailey explains, “I am here, I am my work.”

Slyly toying with notions of clear professional and personal boundaries, Horwitz and Williams also explore the multiple meanings of “sister,” from blood siblings to chosen family members to women who are good friends supporting each other — and, as another Reddit asks, “to lesbian couples, are you often mistaken as sisters?”

When artist Bailey tells interviewer Emma that she lives with her wife in Rhinebeck, interviewer Emma responds, “Oh! I thought you were sisters!” In a postcard to Valentina, Bailey writes about their pretending to be sisters and drinking Champagne in first class aboard a steamer ship. In another vignette, Emma and Bailey play sisters both named Christina, who are in business together giving psychic readings. “A sister is your first and greatest love,” Christina Bailey says.

Serious issues concerning queer culture, sexual orientation, societal rules and regulations, and private relationships pop up, but always through a comic lens that never gets overbearing or preachy. Tara Elliott (Illiterates, Burq Off!) directs the proceedings with a gleeful immediacy that sucks the audience in from the very start. Normandy Sherwood’s set, costumes, and props (red heels, gloves, soda cans, vibrators) all add to the fun, along with Josiah Davis’s humorous lighting and Johnny Gasper’s witty sound design.

Dancing, singing, telling jokes, and sharing wildly entertaining stories, Horwitz and Williams are so charming and engaging, so welcoming and self-possessed, that you’ll just want to give them both big hugs and hang out with them more — but don’t; that will have to wait for their next show, which can’t come soon enough.

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

REIMAGINING SHAKESPEARE IN STRIDE: WHITNEY WHITE’S MACBETH AT BAM

Whitney White reimagines Shakespeare tragedy in rousing Macbeth in Stride at BAM (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

MACBETH IN STRIDE
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Harvey Theater at the BAM Strong
651 Fulton St.
April 15-27, $29-$85
www.bam.org/macbeth

Whitney White’s Macbeth in Stride is an exhilarating hijacking of Shakespeare’s Scottish play, transforming it into an empowering and unrelenting Black feminist rock opera that serves as a takedown of the traditional roles assigned to women not only in the Bard’s canon but in theater and the world itself.

“Irreverence is everything,” White notes at the beginning of her multilayered, irreverent script. Best known as the award-winning director of such plays as Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, On Sugarland, soft, and Liberation, White is both the author and star of this dazzling production at BAM’s Harvey Theater. The ninety-minute show is fervently directed with plenty of winks and nods by Taibi Magar (Help, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992) and Tyler Dobrowsky, who previously collaborated with White (and Peter Mark Kendall) on the virtual pandemic concert play Capsule.

In Macbeth in Stride, White portrays an unnamed woman who is the dazzling lead singer of a hot band and an actress playing Lady Macbeth. Holli’ Conway, Phoenix Best, and Ciara Alyse Harris are a trio of backup vocalists, the three witches, and a kind of Greek chorus; everyone interacts with the audience, starting with the sensational opening number, “If Knowledge Is Power.”

“So what’s the story?” the woman, dressed in a tight-fitting black sparkling pantsuit, asks in her speech following the song. “For me . . . tonight there is one story — one play in particular that kicked it all off / The funky little chain reaction that led someone like me / To be standing before you now / That led someone like me from where I’m from / To school and stage and work and rehearsals / And kept me up many nights / But for now let’s get back to all of you / Let’s stick with you. / What’s the story you told yourselves to get here?”

Macbeth is introduced in the next song, “Reach for It,” in which several characters sing, “So if foul is fair then fair is foul / Ambition’s not a sin at all!,” after which the woman proclaims she wants ambition and love, no matter that the witches tell her women cannot have both. She also is intent on flipping the switch on Shakespeare, since all of his “great women never seem to make it out of these plays alive!”

The man playing Macbeth (Charlie Thurston) arrives, a white accordionist clad in black leather. Learning that he is destined to be king, she realizes that she in turn would become queen and wants the power that comes with that, to be more than the secondary character Lady M is through much of the original play. She asks the audience, “Women, queer folk, and othered people out there? / What are you willing to do to get what you need? / To get what you want?” She admits that violence might be the answer.

When Macbeth tells Lady M that King Duncan will be staying the night at their castle, she advises her husband, “I’m pretty sure we’re gonna have to kill him.” He does the deed, she frames the guards, and they become king and queen. As he deals with a heavy dose of fear, suspicion, and guilt, she is determined to be more than an appendage who just gets to host dinner parties; instead, she is going to “reclaim everything.”

Whitney White and Charlie Thurston star as the doomed couple in meta-heavy Macbeth in Stride (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

Macbeth in Stride is a rousing reimagining of Shakespeare’s 1606 tragedy, a clever, passionate, and downright fun show that celebrates the freeing of women from the shackles of literature as well as the chains of real life. White’s Lady M is a symbol of changing the narrative and taking control of the story, in this case in the guise of a spectacular concert. Songs such as “Dark World,” “Doll House,” and “I for You” help place the tale in contemporary times. “You gon’ rework a four hundred year old play just for your ego?” the first witch asks White, who replies, “Yup. / Sure did! Sure did!”

Dan Soule’s set features several platforms and a diagonal walkway cutting through the middle. Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew lights the show like a concert, including vertical strips of colored lights, while Nick Kourtides’s sound balances the loud music with the less raucous dialogue. Qween Jean’s costumes are fashionably glitzy, as is Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography.

The crack band consists of music director Nygel D. Robinson on keyboards, Kenny Rosario-Pugh on guitar, Bobby Etienne on bass, and Barbara “Muzikaldunk” Duncan on drums. Conway (Six, Tina), Best (Dear Evan Hansen, Teeth), and Harris (Dear Evan Hansen, White Girl in Danger) excel as the chorus, who are worthy of their own show. Thurston (Liberation, Here There Are Blueberries) succeeds in a nearly impossible task, surrounded by strong, tenacious women.

White, who also sits at the piano for a few tunes, is right at home center stage. She might not always have the range the songs require — “Reach for It” is a bit of a reach for her — but she embodies her character with an intense grandeur that is as intoxicating as it is fierce.

Shakespeare purists will notice occasional iambic pentameter in the streamlined text, and most of the famous quotes are in there, in one form or another. However, since this is Lady M’s story, aside from Duncan, whose murder is described in some detail, there is no mention of Macduff and his family, no King Edward, no Donalbain and Malcolm, no visible ghosts, no Earl of Northumberland, no noblemen and doctors, no Birnam Wood, and only one mention of Banquo and his son.

As the end approaches, the woman wonders, “Why do they write us this way? / Why do they imagine us this way?”

White has picked up a sharp quill and stands boldly under the spotlight to write it her way. The script notes that Macbeth in Stride is the first of a four-part series; I can’t wait to see what she has in store for us next.

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