The thirty-eighth annual Performance Mix Festival, hosted by New Dance Alliance at Abrons Arts Center, features live and recorded works from thirty-five experimental dance and film artists, including pieces from NDA’s Black Artists Space to Create residency and LiftOff residency. Running June 6-9, the festival features such creators as Mickey Davidson, Carole Arcega, Arantxa Araujo, j. bouey, Beatriz Castro Mauri, Jordan Deal, Tal Halevi, Yolette Yellow-Duke, and Aya Shabu, exploring such issues and subjects as ghost porn, climate change, queer platonic intimacy, Michael Jackson, masculinity, gun violence, gender markers, effeminacy and androgyny, and landscapes of memory. The 2024 event is curated by NDA founder and executive director Karen Bernard and an artist panel comprising Rafael Cañals, Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Jil Guyon, Rebecca Patek, and Stacy Lynn Smith, with films selected in collaboration with Ciné-Corps.
Tickets are $18.50; below is the complete schedule.
Thursday, June 6
j. bouey: A Message from Mx. Black Copper, Shua Group: Over, Frédéric Nauczyciel: A Baroque Ball (Shade), Bob Eisen, 7:00
Nina Laisné and François Chaignaud: Mourn, O Nature!, Flamenco Rosado, ankita sharma: jagaana/Awaken/, Isa Spector: A Larger Body, 8:30
Friday, June 7
Breakfast Mix: virtual dance experience organized by Agora de la danse/Koros, New Dance Alliance Studio, 182 Duane St., free with advance RSVP, 10:00
Panel discussion with Karen Bernard, L’Annexe-A, Virginie Combet, and Vanessa Bousquet of Koros, including two VR dance pieces by Hélène Blackburn and Andrea Peña, 10:30
Thomas Choinacky: Home Is the Body, Smaïl Kanouté: Never Twenty One, Company [REDACTED]: My Apocalypse, Shua Group: Over, 7:00
Saturday, June 8
Audrée Juteau, Zoey Gauld, Catherine Lavoie-Marcus, and Ellen Furey | Mystic-Informatic, followed by a reception, 7:00
Sunday, June 9
Carole Arcega: Hymen, Beatriz Castro Mauri: girl crush, Chloë Engel: Rubber, Johanna Meyer: Suit Hang, noon
Mickey D. & Friends: Visiting the Past to See the Future, Jordan Deal: capeforce, Lo Fi Dance Theory: Move Freely, Aya Shabu: LandED (excerpt), 1:30
Tal Halevi: Hidden in a Closet My Mother Imagined Being Wrapped in Her Father’s Shawl, Mohamad Moe Sabbah and Khansa: Khayef, Yolette Yellow-Duke, 3:00
Arantxa Araujo in collaboration with Mariana Uribe: Breathsculpt: Transformations Unveiled, Lena Engelstein: Stage Direction, Viktor Horváth, 4:30
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Jamar Roberts’s Ode is a meditation on gun violence (photo by Paul Kolnik)
ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
June 4-9, $37-$105
718-636-4100 www.bam.org
If you missed Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s annual monthlong visit to City Center this past November/December, you can still catch two programs from their sixty-fifth anniversary season, taking place at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House June 4-9. Alvin Ailey had close ties to BAM, dancing there in 1956 and starting a company residency in 1969.
“Contemporary Visions” consists of new productions of Jamar Roberts’s 2019 Ode, Hans van Manen’s 1997 Solo, and Alonzo King’s 2000 Following the Subtle Current Upstream. Set to Don Pullen’s “Suite (Sweet) Malcolm (Part 1 Memories and Gunshots),” Ode is a seventeen-minute meditation on gun violence, restaged by Ghrai Devore-Stokes. Solo, originally performed by the company in 2005 and restaged by Clifton Brown and Rachel Beaujean, is seven minutes of playful one-upmanship as three male dancers strut their stuff in a kind of dance-off, their costumes (by Keso Dekker) differentiated by yellow, orange, and red; as each finishes a solo, they make gestures and eye movements inviting the next dancer to top what they have just done. But this is no mere rap battle; instead, it’s set to Sigiswald Kuijken’s versions of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Partita for Solo Violin No. 1 in B minor, BWV 1002 — Double: Presto” and “Partita for Solo Violin No. 1 in B minor, BWV 1002 — Double: Corrente.”
Alonzo King’s Following the Subtle Current Upstream is part of “Contemporary Visions” Ailey program at BAM (photo by Paul Kolnik)
And Following the Subtle Current Upstream, which King calls “a piece about how to return to joy,” is a twenty-two-minute work that unfolds in a series of vignettes with nine dancers performing to silence, a storm, chiming bells, and other sounds by Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain, American electronics composer Miguel Frasconi, and the late South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba. At one point a dancer is alone onstage, like a music box ballerina, two horizontal beams of smoky light overhead; the lighting is by Al Crawford based on Axel Morgenthaler’s original design, with tight-fitting, short costumes by Robert Rosenwasser, the men in all black, the women in black and/or yellow.
“All Ailey” is a treat for company aficionados, with presentations of the Ailey classics Memoria (1979), A Song for You (1972), Cry (1971), and Revelations (1960). Memoria, which will be performed with members of Ailey II and students from the Ailey School, was inspired by the death of Ailey’s friend and colleague Joyce Trisler; it is set to music by Keith Jarrett. A Song for You, an excerpt from Love Songs, features Donny Hathaway’s version of Leon Russell’s title track. Ailey choreographed the seventeen-minute Cry as a birthday gift for his mother. And Revelations is, well Revelations, one of the most famous and important dance works of all time.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES
New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 30, $105-$125 www.nytw.org
When you enter New York Theatre Workshop to see Here There Are Blueberries, there’s a projection of the Leica logo on a translucent curtain behind an actual camera on a stand on the stage. “In the 1930s, the development of compact, portable cameras like this one changed everything,” an actor says in a prologue, explaining that as Germany emerged from a national depression, citizens started taking photos as an affordable hobby in the pursuit of happiness. “Each pose, each press of a button, each frozen moment tells the world: This is our shared history, and this is what it means to us. Viewed in this way, the apparent ordinariness of these images does not detract from their political relevance. On the contrary: Asserting ordinariness in the face of the extraordinary is, in itself, an immensely political act.”
According to the September 2020 U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey, the first national poll ever taken of millennials and Gen Z about the Holocaust, sixty-three percent of respondents did not know that six million Jews were killed by the Nazis, forty-eight percent could not name a single concentration camp or European ghetto, and twenty percent believed that the Jews caused the Holocaust. As more survivors and witnesses pass away and antisemitism grows around the world, those numbers are only likely to increase, which is why a play such as the exquisitely rendered Here There Are Blueberries is so timely and necessary.
Running at New York Theatre Workshop through June 30, the gripping hundred-minute drama from the Tectonic Theater Project pores over the contents of a book of photos delivered to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007 by an eighty-seven-year-old retired U.S. lieutenant colonel (Grant James Varjas); he had been holding on to them since he discovered them in an abandoned Frankfurt apartment in 1946. There was something unique and unexpected — and terrifying — about the pictures: They did not contain a single image of a victim or prisoner.
With limited information, the archival team, led by Dr. Rebecca Erbelding (Elizabeth Stahlmann) and Judy Cohen (Kathleen Chalfant), begin a detailed forensic investigation that yields a surprising result: The photos are of Nazi officers and Helferinnen, a communication corps of young women, enjoying themselves at Auschwitz, exploring the facilities, laughing and singing, and relaxing at the previously unknown chalet known as Solahütte, where weekends were awarded to hard workers, a bonus for a job well done — asserting ordinariness in the face of the extraordinary, examples of what Jewish historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany with her family in 1933, referred to as “the banality of evil.”
As the museum archive team starts identifying the men in the photos — among those seen in large projections on the back wall are Dr. Josef Mengele, Commandant SS Major Richard Baer, chief SS doctor Eduard Wirths, Auschwitz builder Rudolph Höss, and his right-hand man, former bank clerk SS Obersturmführer Karl Höcker (Scott Barrow), who owned the album — it reaches out to descendants of the subjects, some of whom are shocked to find out what their fathers and grandfathers were up to. One, Tilman Taube (Jonathan Raviv), decides to help the museum track down more relatives in order to gather further information. “Those who say nothing . . . they transfer this trauma to the next generation,” he bravely argues.
Meanwhile, Dr. Erbelding, Cohen, and museum director Sara Bloomfield (Erika Rose) debate whether the photographs should be put on display. “Here we find our first obstacle. There’s a sense at our museum that we should focus on the victims, not on the perpetrators,” Cohen says. Bloomfield replies, “In the creation of the permanent exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, special effort has been made to avoid undue attention to the perpetrators and to humanize and honor the victims.” Shortly after a survivor declares that the museum should let the public see the pictures for themselves, Bloomfield says, “We don’t want to elevate Nazis, to give them any kind of platform.”
The photographs that give the play its name are a series of shots of Höcker with a group of Helferinnen in skirts sitting on a fence on the Solahütte deck, eating blueberries, all smiles as they pose for the camera; one of the young women pretends to cry because her bowl is empty. “People called us and said — these people look normal, the girls look like teenage girls. Because they were. And that was surprising, that they look like us!” Dr. Erbelding explains. The caller continued, “‘I know I never could’ve been a Mengele. I know I never could’ve been a Höcker. But could I have been a Helferin?’”
And therein lies the dilemma at the heart of the play: What would any of us have done in that situation — and what would we do today?
Using their Moment Work method of collaboration, Tectonic Theater Project and founding artistic director Moisés Kaufman have created such fact-based narrative plays as The Laramie Project,33 Variations,I Am My Own Wife, and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. Conceived and directed by Tony and Emmy nominee Kaufman — inspired by the 2007 New York Times article “In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Frolic” — and cowritten by Kaufman and Emmy nominee Amanda Gronich, Here There Are Blueberries takes the audience inside the tense research and analysis as the museum realizes how important the evidence is.
The album served as visual reference for the Oscar-nominated film The Zone of Interest, a fictionalized version of the everyday life of Höss and his family, who lived next door to Auschwitz. It also has much in common with Bianca Stigter’s astounding 2021 documentary, Three Minutes — A Lengthening, which follows the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as it tries to uncover the details about a mysterious 180-second home-movie clip from Poland in 1938, searching for the exact location, who is in the footage, and what happened to the citizens of this community.
Derek McLane’s set is a research room containing several standing desks where characters in Dede Ayite’s everyday costumes conduct their analyses; David Lander’s clear-cut lighting includes overhead industrial fluorescents and illuminates individual speakers, while Bobby McElver’s sound ranges from the accordion and a storm to chirping birds, a flowing river, and marching feet. David Bengali’s bold projections of the photos, news reports, related documents, and maps makes the audience feel like they are part of the research team, especially with close-ups and when a particular figure in a photo is lit up or silhouetted. A few instances of live video are distracting and unnecessary, but they are kept to a minimum.
Stahlmann (Slave Play,Pushkin “Eugene Onegin” in our own words) and Tony nominee Chalfant (Angels in America,Novenas for a Lost Hospital) lead a strong ensemble cast (which also includes Noah Keyishian, Anna Shafer, and Charlie Thurston) that smoothly handles multiple roles. The material is treated with a gentle sensitivity that makes the various revelations all the more powerful.
Early on, Dr. Erbelding concludes, “This album is something [Höcker] treasured. There are no ink blots, he doesn’t misspell anything, he made sure the lettering was right. Everything is glued perfectly. This was meant to last.” After the show, as the audience exits, facsimiles of many of the photos are on display in the lobby, a potent reminder that the story that has just been told is true and that the snapshots are real.
I know that for me, one thing that is going to last from this play: I will never be able to look at blueberries the same way again.
[The June 4 and 12 performances will be followed by discussions with the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Harriet Stubbs will perform at Joe’s Pub on June 2 (Drew Bordeaux Photography)
HARRIET STUBBS
Joe’s Pub
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Sunday, June 2, $32.50 (plus two drink or one food item minimum), 6:00
212-539-8778 www.joespub.com www.harrietstubbs.com
“If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area,” David Bowie said in a 1990s video interview. “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
British classical pianist, William Blake scholar, and Bowie aficionado Harriet Stubbs has built her career on such advice, as evidenced by her latest album, the exciting Living on Mars; the record is the follow-up to 2018’s Heaven and Hell: The Doors of Perception, a title inspired by Aldous Huxley’s autobiographical 1954 book The Doors of Perception and 1956 essay Heaven and Hell and Blake’s 1793 tome The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Now based in London, Los Angeles, and the East Village, the British-born Stubbs took to the keys when she was three and has performed at such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, St Martin-in-the-Fields, the Cutting Room, Tibet House, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. On June 2, she will play Living on Mars in its entirety at her Joe’s Pub debut; be sure to get a good look at her shoes, which are always spectacular.
The eclectic record features Stubbs’s unique solo adaptations of the Thin White Duke’s “Space Oddity” and “Life on Mars” as well as Nick Cave’s “Push the Sky Away,” Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird,” and Beethoven’s “Pathétique” in addition to homages to the duos of J. S. Bach/Glenn Gould and Frédéric Chopin/Leopold Godowsky.
My wife and I first became interested in Stubbs when Cave gave her a shout-out at an October 2023 show at the Beacon; earlier this month my wife saw Stubbs perform a private Coffee House Club concert at the Salmagundi Club on Fifth Ave., and then we bumped into her on the street by Sheridan Square. Clearly, our paths were destined to cross.
In this exclusive interview, Stubbs talks about Blake and Bowie, the pandemic, swimming with Cave, and playing in New York City.
twi-ny: You started your career early, first performing publicly as a pianist at the age of four and performing piano concertos as soloist at the age of nine. Growing up immersed in classical music performance, when did you become interested in contemporary pop music?
harriet stubbs: My love of music outside of classical really developed as a teenager and as I was transitioning from a career as a child prodigy to that of an adult artist: what I wanted to do with classical music, how I wanted to remain in it, why, and how these were going to come together to inform my professional adult life. A moment that I remember in particular was hearing the Verve live at Glastonbury in 2008 and realizing that it would always be music that I wanted to dedicate my life to. The thrill of a shared moment in music where everyone has been moved by the same thing is simply extraordinary.
twi-ny: That thrill was changed when the pandemic hit. During the Covid-19 crisis, you played live daily, from your London flat — 250 twenty-minute concerts. Do you have any favorite memories from that rather dark time? How did it feel to get back in front of larger audiences in person again after the lockdown ended?
hs: I think that period was so bleak that every concert in its own way was a deeply moving experience, whether it was two people in the pouring rain or two hundred. Pre-vaccine it was outside of a small window, attached to an amp attached to an upright at a busy intersection of traffic, with people very distanced and masked — who I waved at through the window.
At the time there was no end in sight, so just to have a shared experience in that way — however tentative — was needed more than ever. The two hundredth concert was in December of 2020 and the last at that address and under those circumstances in the dark and the rain. When the spring came, people were starting to be vaccinated, and as they were, I was able to offer them drinks outside; the weather was beautiful (mostly), there was a grand piano, a bay window, and a quiet, residential street where people could hear properly. Being awarded a British Empire Medal [in 2022] by the late Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was very special, as was Nick Cave showing up to hear “Push the Sky Away”! Those concerts were made by the regulars who came right up until the border opened back up for me to return to New York.
twi-ny: Speaking of Nick Cave, we recently saw him play the Beacon, and he raved about you. Your cover of “Push the Sky Away” is on your new album, Living on Mars. How did the Nick Cave connection come about?
hs: Nick and I met in a park in London a few years ago and became fast friends and swimming partners, and eventually Nick became an integral part of how the album came to be. We swam in a lake together every day and would talk about everything from philosophy to music, politics, literature, and what we were working on as the seasons changed around us.
These are some of my happiest memories. If Nick hadn’t insisted under the moon on a dark New Year’s Day swim that I “get on with” the new album — just as he was starting his [Wild God will be released August 30] — I would never have been on a plane to LA three weeks later to record it. Mike Garson wrote the arrangement of Nick’s “Push the Sky Away” as a thank-you to Nick, and it became the centerpiece.
twi-ny: I’m glad you brought that up. How does a classical pianist end up recording one album with Russ Titelman, who has worked with Randy Newman, Rickie Lee Jones, James Taylor, the Monkees, and Eric Clapton, and then Garson, who’s produced and played with the Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, and, primarily, David Bowie?
hs: I have been in New York for fifteen years now and over that time have had so many adventures, many of which were not directly related to classical music. Russ and I met at Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side through our mutual friend, author Julian Tepper. Russ wrote his number on a Barney receipt and we would meet for milkshakes. Two years later we were on a train to Pleasantville to “try out” recording together, which then turned into Heaven and Hell: The Doors of Perception, recorded at Samurai NYC.
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Russ invited Marianne Faithfull because of my love of William Blake — I recently wrote the lead editorial article for The Journal of the Blake Society,“Invisible Women in Blakean Mythology” — and really the point of the record was just that, to bring together the worlds of rock and roll, literature, classical, and popular music, to see all of them in each other and to have as Blake would have referred to it an “illuminated” experience. Living on Mars continues this threading of the worlds together, just a little more literally.
[ed. note: Stubbs also participated in a January 2022 panel discussion at the Global Blake conference that you can watch here. Faithfull narrates Blake text over John Adams’s “Phrygian Gates” to open Heaven and Hell: The Doors of Perception.]
twi-ny: There are Blakean influences throughout Bowie’s work, particularly in the 1970s. What makes his music so translatable to classical?
hs: I have always been a Bowie fan, and over the years there have been many ways in which our worlds seemed to collide serendipitously. I loved Bowie as a teenager and through my friendship with May Pang became friends with [producer] Tony Visconti and later Mike Garson, who produced and arranged Living on Mars. Before the Bell Canyon wildfires I went to Mike’s home there and played for him, and we started to conceive of the album. We finally got to record it in 2023 in LA, entirely live, which was a thrilling experience.
twi-ny: Who are your favorite classical composers?
hs: It depends who I am at any given time of the day but usually somewhere between late Beethoven’s final piano sonatas living on the border between life and death or dancing through some gothic Prokofiev.
twi-ny: Besides Bowie and Cave, what other contemporary performers or songwriters do you listen to? Who’s doing things that you find musically intriguing?
hs: I have recently started listening to the Last Dinner Party. My rotation at the moment seems to be some [Krystian] Zimerman Brahms B flat piano concerto, the Magnetic Fields, [Marc-André] Hamelin’s late Busoni, Rob Zombie, Judas Priest, Alter Bridge, and the National, but that’s just this week. Always a mix!
twi-ny: Yes, that is quite a mix. Having performed on both sides of the Atlantic for years, do you notice any difference between American and British or European concertgoers, especially over time, pre- and postpandemic?
hs: I think that location is becoming less relevant to those that consume their music entirely through platforms such as TikTok. I think that the US has been more open to contemporary reimagining of classical music than other locations around the world, but social media has changed that concentration, as has the growing need for audience development. Anywhere that there is a live, enthusiastic audience is the same thrill, but there’s nothing like playing to my adopted hometown of New York; it’s electrifying.
twi-ny: You’ll be in New York on June 2 at Joe’s Pub. Have you ever been there before?
hs: I am so excited to perform at Joe’s. This will be my first show there and I can’t wait!
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
“Our goal is dialogue, not divisiveness,” Art at a Time Like This (ATLT) cofounders Anne Verhallen and Barbara Pollack say about their latest event, a two-day summit featuring panel discussions, live performances, illustrated lectures, and more.
“Dangerous Art/Endangered Artists” takes place June 7–8 at BRIC in Brooklyn, hosted by ATLT and Artists at Risk Connection (ARC). ATLT started on March 17, 2020, as an online community focusing on art as a direct response to what was happening in the world, from the pandemic lockdown to racial injustice. ARC began in 2017, helping international artists and cultural professionals of all disciplines connect to such resources as emergency funds, legal assistance, temporary relocation programs, and fellowships.
Among the summit participants are Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, American journalist and author Nikole Hannah-Jones, Cuban American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator Coco Fusco, Kenyan rapper Henry Ohanga aka Octopizzo, Native American artist and activist Demian DinéYazhi’, Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander, and Vietnamese singer and sound artist Mai Khôi. “I was born in Vietnam, where freedom of expression and artistic freedom have always been suppressed,” Mai Khôi, who recently performed her autobiographical show Bad Activist at Joe’s Pub, said in a statement. “I have had to become an activist to protect my right to be an artist because the artist inside me doesn’t want to be killed by the censorship system.”
TICKET GIVEAWAY: “Dangerous Art / Endangered Artists” takes place June 7-8 at BRIC in Brooklyn; tickets are $30 for one day and $50 for both, but twi-ny has two pairs to give away for free. Just send your name and favorite sociopolitical artist to contest@twi-ny.com by Monday, June 3, at 3:00 pm to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older, and all information will be kept confidential; two winners will be selected at random.
Here is the full schedule (times and participants subject to change):
Summit Day 1: Challenges Facing Artists in Authoritarian Regimes
Opening Remarks, with Anne Verhallen, cofounder and codirector, ATLT, 5:00
Keynote Speaker: Shirin Neshat in conversation with ARC artistic director Julie Trebault, 5:05
Performance: Henry Ohanga aka Octopizzo, 6:00
Artists at the Forefront of Social Movements, with Dread Scott and Samia Halaby, moderated by ATLT cofounder and codirector Barbara Pollack, 6:15
Resiliency in Exile: Rania Mamoun and Mai Khôi, moderated by Ethiopian American writer Dinaw Mengestu, 7:15
Closing Remarks: ARC artistic director Julie Trebault, 7:50
Reception, 8:15
Summit Day 2
Registration + Coffee, 10:30
Here and Now: Censorship as a Political Tool in the United States, with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Aruna D’Souza, 11:00
Global Censorship: What It Looks Like, Who Does It, How to Combat It, with Coco Fusco, Omaid Sharifi, Khaled Jarrar, and Henry Ohanga AKA Octopizzio, moderated by Mari Spirito, 12:15
Is Censorship Discriminatory?, with Lorena Wolffer, Demian Diné Yazhi, and Shahzia Sikander, moderated by Jasmine Wahi, 3:30
PUBLIC THEATER MOBILE UNIT: THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
Multiple locations in all five boroughs
May 28 – June 30, free (no RSVP necessary) publictheater.org
Last year the Public Theater’s Mobile Unit presented Rebecca Martínez and Julián Mesri’s terrific bilingual adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. The production is back for the 2024 summer season, on the road May 28 through June 30, making stops in all five boroughs: the New York Public Library/Bryant Park, Wolfe’s Pond, J. Hood Wright Park, Hudson Yards, Roy Wilkins Park, A.R.R.O.W. Field House, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Sunset Park, Travers Park, Maria Hernandez Park, Astor Place, St. Mary’s Park, and the Peninsula at Prospect Park.
No advance reservations are necessary, but you should get there early if you want to get up close and personal with the show; last year I caught it in the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park, where some audience members sat on the stage, surrounding the action. If you’re not familiar with the Mobile Unit, you need to be; the program is now in its thirteenth year of bringing free Shakespeare to all five boroughs, presenting works in prisons, shelters, and underserved community centers as well as city parks.
With the Delacorte undergoing renovation, the Mobile Unit is part of “Go Public!,” a festival of free Shakespeare events that includes The Comedy of Errors, outdoor screenings of Kenny Leon’s 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado about Nothing starring Danielle Brooks, Chuck Cooper, Margaret Odette, and Billy Eugene Jones, online streaming of that show as well as 2021’s Merry Wives, 2022’s Richard III, and 2023’s Hamlet, and a block party on July 28.
Below is my review of The Comedy of Errors from last year; I cannot recommend it highly enough.
A fab cast sings and dances its way through exuberant production of The Comedy of Errors (photo by Peter Cooper)
PUBLIC THEATER MOBILE UNIT: THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
Multiple locations in all five boroughs
Through May 21, free (no RSVP necessary)
Shiva Theater, May 25 – June 11, free with RSVP publictheater.org
The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit touring production of The Comedy of Errors is the most fun I’ve ever had at a Shakespeare play.
The Mobile Unit is now in its twelfth year of bringing free Shakespeare to all five boroughs, presenting works in prisons, shelters, and underserved community centers as well as city parks. On May 13, it pulled into the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park, where part of the audience sat on the stage, on all four sides of a small, intimate square area where the action takes place; attendees could also sit in the regular seats, long concrete benches under the open sky.
Emmie Finckel’s spare set features a wooden platform and a bright yellow stepladder that serves several purposes. Lux Haac’s attractive, colorful costumes hang on racks at the back, where the actors perform quick changes. Music director and musician Jacinta Clusellas and guitarist Sara Ornelas sit on folding chairs, performing Julián Mesri’s Latin American–inspired score; Ornelas is fabulous as a troubadour and musical narrator, often wandering around the space and leading the cast in song. The lyrics, by Mesri and director and choreographer Rebecca Martínez, who collaborated on the adaptation, are in English and Spanish and are not necessarily translated word for word, but you will understand what is going on regardless of your primary tongue. As the troubadour explains, “I should mention that most of / this show will be performed in English / though it’s supposed to / take place in two states in Ancient Greece. / But don’t be surprised / if these actors switch their language.”
Trimmed down to a smooth-flowing ninety minutes, the show tells the story of a pair of twins, Dromio (Gían Pérez) and Antipholus (Joel Perez), who were separated at birth. In Ephesus, Dromio serves Antipholus, a wealthy man married to the devoted Adriana (Danaya Esperanza) but cheating on her with a lusty, demanding courtesan (Desireé Rodriguez). The other Dromio and Antipholus arrive in Ephesus and soon have everyone running around in circles as the mistaken identity slapstick ramps up.
Adriana (Danaya Esperanza) and Dromio (Gían Pérez) are all mixed up in The Comedy of Errors (photo by Peter Cooper)
Meanwhile, the merchant Egeon (Varín Ayala) is facing execution because he is from Syracuse, whose citizens are barred from Ephesus, per a decree from the Duchess Solina (Rodriguez); the goldsmith Angelo (Ayala, to be played in 2024 by Glendaliris Torres-Greaux) has made a fancy gold rope necklace for Antipholus but gives it to the wrong one; the Syracuse Dromio is confounded when Adriana’s kitchen maid claims to be his wife; the Syracuse Antipholus falls madly in love with Luciana (Keren Lugo), Adriana’s sister; and an abbess (Rodriguez) is determined to protect anyone who seeks sanctuary.
In case any or all of that is confusing, the troubadour clears things up in a series of songs that explain some, but not all, of the details, and the Public also provides everyone with a cheat sheet. Again, the troubadour: “In case you missed it / or took a little nap / Here’s what’s been happening / since we last had a chat / We’ll do our best / but we confess / this plot is really putting our skills to the test.”
It all comes together sensationally at the conclusion, as true identities are revealed, conflicts are resolved, and love wins out.
Martínez (Sancocho,Living and Breathing) fills the amphitheater with an infectious and supremely delightful exuberance. The terrific cast interacts with the audience, as if we are the townspeople of Ephesus. Gían Pérez (Sing Street) and Joel Perez (Sweet Charity,Fun Home) are hilarious as the two sets of twins, who switch hat colors to identify which brother they are at any given time. Esperanza (Mary Jane,for colored girls . . .) shines as the ever-confused, ultradramatic Adriana, Lugo (Privacy,At the Wedding) is lovely as Luciana and the duchess, Rodriguez is engaging as Emilia and the courtesan, and Ayala (The Merchant of Venice,The Taming of the Shrew) excels as Angelo, Egeon, and Dr. Pinch.
But Ornelas (A Ribbon About a Bomb,American Mariachi) all but steals the show, switching between leather and denim jackets as she portrays minor characters and plays her guitar with a huge smile on her face, words and music lifting into the air. Charles Coes’s sound design melds with the wind blowing through the trees and other people enjoying themselves in the park on a Saturday afternoon. There are no errors in this comedy.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Rufus Collins, Sarah Street, and John Keating star in Irish Rep revival (photo by Carol Rosegg)
MOLLY SWEENEY
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West Twenty-Second St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through June 30, $60-$95
212-727-2737 irishrep.org
Early on in Irish Rep’s riveting revival of Brian Friel’s 1994 three-character play Molly Sweeney, Mr. Rice (Rufus Collins), an ophthalmologist, recounts his first meeting with Molly Sweeney (Sarah Street), who has been blind since she was ten months old, and her husband of two years, Frank Sweeney (John Keating). “I liked her. I liked her calm and her independence; the confident way she shook my hand and found a seat for herself with her white cane. And when she spoke of her disability, there was no self-pity, no hint of resignation. Yes, I liked her,” he tells the audience. “She had a full life and never felt at all deprived.”
He then describes the irrepressible Frank’s constant interruptions, insisting that there was some hope to restore her eyesight because she could detect shadows when Frank passed his hand in front of her face. Mr. Rice recalls agreeing with Frank, saying, “If there is a chance, any chance, that she might be able to see, we must take it, mustn’t we? How can we not take it? She has nothing to lose, has she? What has she to lose? — nothing! — nothing!” But they come to this conclusion without Molly’s input, two males deciding what is best for a woman.
At a party the night before her surgery, Molly realizes that she is not doing it for herself. “With sudden anger I thought: Why am I going for this operation? None of this is my choosing. Then why is this happening to me? I am being used,” she says. “Of course, I trust Frank. Of course, I trust Mr. Rice. But how can they know what they are taking away from me? How do they know what they are offering me? They don’t. They can’t. And have I anything to gain? — anything? — anything?”
In her 2019 Missouri Medicine article “Hear Me Out,” Amelia Cooper explores the controversy over cochlear implant devices; while some members of the deaf community and their families celebrate, in online videos, people being able to hear for the first time, others find them “oppressive and offensive. For these critics, deafness is not defined by the lack of ability to hear, but, rather, by a distinct cultural identity of which they are proud.” Much like deaf people who get implants and regain at least some of their ability to hear, Molly realizes that if she were to regain at least some of her sight, she may have plenty to lose, something that Mr. Rice and Frank could never understand.
John Keating again proves himself to be one of New York’s finest actors in conclusion of the Friel Project at Irish Rep (photo by Carol Rosegg)
In fact, the play was inspired by a real-life case that British neurologist Oliver Sacks documented in his May 2, 1993, New Yorker article “To See and Not See,” later included in his 1995 book An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. He writes, “The rest of us, born sighted, can scarcely imagine such confusion. For we, born with a full complement of senses, and correlating these, one with the other, create a sight world from the start, a world of visual objects and concepts and meanings. When we open our eyes each morning, it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning to see. We are not given the world: we make our world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection.”
Molly’s father had taught her how to experience a world they thought she would never see. He encouraged her to touch and smell objects, especially the plant species Nemophila, better known as Baby Blue Eyes. “I know you can’t see them but they have beautiful blue eyes, just like you. You’re my nemophila,” he told her. She remembers the smell of whiskey on his breath, which made her giddy; she does not feel the same when she smells whiskey on Mr. Rice’s breath.
In the second act, the bandages are taken off Molly, and she, her husband, and her doctor each has a different reaction to what happens next.
Molly Sweeney concludes Irish Rep’s four-part Friel Project, preceded by lovely productions of Translations,Aristocrats, and Philadelphia, Here I Come! The company previously staged Molly Sweeney in person in 2011 with Jonathan Hogan, Geraldine Hughes, and Ciaran O’Reilly and virtually in May 2020. Like those versions, this revival is intricately directed by founding artistic director Charlotte Moore (Aristocrats,The Streets of New York). (A 1996 Roundabout production starred Catherine Byrne, Alfred Molina, and Jason Robards.)
Molly (Sarah Street) dreams of a better life in Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Charlie Corcoran’s set consists of three chairs on a fake stone-paved floor, each with a slightly different rectangular wall and window behind it; Mr. Rice’s has a chest with folders and a bottle of whiskey, Molly’s has a vase of flowers on the windowsill, and Frank’s has a shelf with books and random objects. Linda Fisher’s costumes are in a muted Irish palette. Michael Gottlieb’s lighting is razor sharp; while focusing on one character, the others are bathed in shadow. In addition, abstract projections in blue, red, and purple morph on the rear horizontal wall, evoking what might be going on inside Molly’s head. Hidenori Nakajo’s sound envelops the audience in Molly’s auditory realm.
The actors are exceptional. Collins (Translations,The Quare Land) brings a cool serenity to Mr. Rice, who has not had an easy life; his wife left him for another ophthalmologist, and he eventually found himself working at a small hospital in Ballybeg in County Donegal, the fictional town where many of Friel’s plays take place. When Mr. Rice speaks, he stands up, sometimes holding a book or folder, and talks succinctly.
New York City treasure Keating (Translations,Autumn Royal) gives the unemployed Frank a harried demeanor, his tall, wiry frame flitting about as he relates his fondness for getting involved in charity cases — he’s been asked to supervise a food convoy in Ethiopia — but he has no conception of how he can help his wife.
Sitting in between them is Street (Aristocrats,Belfast Girls), who gazes into the audience, making eye contact when she or the others speak, as opposed to Collins and Keating, whose characters appear to rest their eyes or doze off, not listening to what Molly is saying; they choose, essentially, not to see or hear her and concentrate on their own future. Molly shares her story matter-of-factly, not getting wrapped up in emotion but not cold and distant either.
She could be any woman, fighting for personal freedom of any kind in a country that was still struggling with women’s rights in the late twentieth century. It’s a complex performance in a complex play that will make you think twice before offering certain types of medical advice to friends and loved ones.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
