live performance

LIVE ARTERY 2024: WEATHERING

Humanity gets caught up in the maelstrom in Faye Driscoll’s Weathering (photo by Maria Baranova / courtesy New York Live Arts)

WEATHERING
New York Live Arts
219 West Nineteenth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
January 9-13, $10-$45
212-924-0077
newyorklivearts.org
www.fayedriscoll.com

As I noted in April 2023, Faye Driscoll’s latest work, Weathering, is, well, everything.

It is now back for an encore run January 9-13 as part of New York Live Arts’ Live Artery 2024 series. Below is my original review; do whatever you can to get a ticket to this extraordinary experience.

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The seventy-minute Weathering takes place on a squishy white movable platform raft designed by Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughan. The audience sits on all four sides of the object. One by one, ten performers — James Barrett, Kara Brody, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, Amy Gernux, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Jennifer Nugent, Cory Seals, Eliza Tappan, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, and Jo Warren, in Karen Boyer’s costumes of everyday dress, some with backpacks, bags, and other accoutrements — step on and off the platform, eventually all standing in place and freezing, becoming what Driscoll calls a flesh sculpture.

Stage managers Emily Vizina and Ryan Gamblin, in all black, go to opposite corners and gently push the platform so it spins around, extremely slowly at first. The dancers barely move a muscle, but as the platform rotates, you can start to tell that the performers have shifted ever so slightly, lowering a knee, reaching out a hand, turning a foot, almost imperceptibly; the effect is like you are watching a living, creeping flipbook. Soon they begin touching, the connections electrifying, as if the contact is life affirming, which is especially potent as we emerge from Covid restrictions that kept us physically apart from one another. As the bodies interweave, they close gaps, filling spaces of loss and absence.

Performers encounter all five senses while spinning around the New York Live Arts stage (photo by Maria Baranova / courtesy New York Live Arts)

Driscoll incorporates all five senses as she and the stage managers occasionally spray the performers (and the audience) with citrus-smelling water and some of the dancers let out small groans and grunts as they put their mouths on an arm, leg, or neck that approaches them, somewhere in between the hunger for sex and the hunger of zombies seeking sustenance.

As the score builds — the sound and music direction is by Sophia Brous, with live sound and sound design by Ryan Gamblin and composition, field recordings, and sound design by Guillaume Malaret — the raft is spun around faster and faster. Personal items fall haphazardly to the ground: keys, a wallet, cellphones. Clothes start coming off, revealing more of who these people are and challenging what we might have previously thought about them while harkening back to our primeval existence, equating the beginning and the end. Chaos ensues, as the audience tries to capture as much of the action as it possibly can, not wanting to miss a single thing, as if every little movement, every sound, every change could upset the balance of this mini-universe.

Driscoll is telling us to pay attention, letting us know that humanity is failing and we are destroying the planet. The raft, evoking Earth and its orbit, sometimes slides slightly out of control, nearly hitting the people in the first row.

Faye Driscoll’s Weathering continues at NYLA through April 15 (photo by Maria Baranova / courtesy New York Live Arts)

The faster the raft goes, the more the audience is overcome by an intoxicating joy mixed with impending doom; it is absolutely exhilarating to follow each of the performers’ journeys, ten individuals striving to survive on their own and as a group, just as we in the audience are.

The show is accompanied by the companion reader Durations of Short Detail, with short pieces by dramaturg Dages Juvelier Keates (“We Are So Close”), dancer and choreographer Jesse Zaritt (“To Hold and Be Held”), and Driscoll, whose poem “Chariots of Flesh” relates, “We’ve been trembling in the trench for / Days? / Weeks? / Years? / Lifetimes? / Despite thick fog / I am overcome / By the smell of your clean shaven skin / Face, eyes, gaze, nose, mouth, fear / I try to pound you out but you latch onto my arm, / wrap your leg around me and reverse position / You try to pound me out but I latch onto your arm, / wrap my leg around you and reverse position / We are desperate to know the outcome / Desperate to know the outcome / Desperate to know the outcome. . . .”

As she has in such previous pieces as the Thank You for Coming trilogy, You’re Me, and There is so much mad in me, Driscoll investigates the intrinsic relationship between performer and audience, the imperative bond, but there is a lot more at stake in Weathering, nothing less than the future of the human race.

I don’t know that we can save the world through art, but with creators such as Driscoll, we can have a hell of a lot of terrifying fun trying.

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

UNDER THE RADAR 2024: TOP FIVE

Get tickets to such shows as Volcano at the Under the Radar festival before time runs out (photo by Emijlia Jefrehmova)

UNDER THE RADAR 2024
Multiple venues
January 5-21
utrfest.org

There was quite an uproar in June when Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis announced the cancellation of the widely popular Under the Radar festival, which the Public had hosted since 2006. Held every January, the series featured a diverse collection of unique and unusual international theatrical productions, discussions, and live music and dance, from the strange to the familiar, the offbeat to the downright impossible to describe. Eustis followed that outcry with another message:

“Last week, difficult news was shared that the Under the Radar festival would not return for the Public’s 23–24 season. We made the painful decision to place the festival on hiatus. I understand and share the hurt that those who participated in and loved the festival have expressed over the past few days. . . . Unfortunately, these are exceptionally challenging times in our field. The Public, like almost every other nonprofit theater in the country, is facing serious financial pressure. . . . In the certainty that better times will come, we continue to work to preserve the health and mission of the Public. We look forward to a time when we can fully expand back into the robust and expansive theater we need to be.”

Festival founder and director Mark Russell was determined that the show must go on, and he brought it back to life. “Festivals are celebrations. They mark harvests and other moments of abundance or recognition,” he said in a statement. “Under the Radar is a festival that each year celebrates the vibrancy of new theater, in New York and internationally. At this moment, even in very challenging times, there is still innovative work rising from communities around New York and in far-reaching parts of the globe. Under the Radar aims to spotlight this work for audiences — not only those ‘in the know’ but from a wider stretch of communities, diverse in all respects, that could benefit by engaging with these creative leaders.”

The 2024 program includes two dozen presentations at seventeen venues, taking place from January 5 to 21. Below are my top five choices, which do not include two highly praised and strongly recommended works that are making encore appearances in New York, Dmitry Krimov/Krymov Lab NYC’s Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: In Our Own Words at BRIC and Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s bilingual Public Obscenities at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. In addition, the UFO sidebar of works in progress consist of Matt Romein’s Bag of Worms at Onassis ONX Studio, Zora Howard’s The Master’s Tools at Chelsea Factory (with Okwui Okpokwasili as Tituba from The Crucible), Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon’s How does it feel to look at nothing at National Sawdust, Theater in Quarantine and Sinking Ship Productions’ live debut of the previously streamed The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy at the Connelly Theater, Jenn Kidwell and *the Blackening’s We Come to Collect [A Flirtation, with Capitalism] at the Flea, and Penny Arcade’s The Art of Becoming — Episode 3: Superstar Interrupted [1967-1973] at Joe’s Pub. In addition, a free symposium at NYU Skirball Center on January 12 at 9:30 am features Inge Ceustermans, Hana Sharif, Sunny Jain, Taylor Mac, Jeremy O. Harris, Ravi Jain, and Kaneza Schaal, hosted by Edgar Miramontes, looking at the future of independent theater.

A book club offers unique insight into Miranda July’s The First Bad Man (photo by Ros Kavanagh)

THE FIRST BAD MAN
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Samuel Rehearsal Studio, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza
January 5-13, choose-what-you-pay (suggested admission $35)
www.lincolncenter.org
www.panpantheatre.com

Ireland’s Pan Pan Theatre has staged unique versions of Beckett’s Embers and Cascando as well as Gina Moxley’s The Patient Gloria. The company now turns its attention on a unique aspect of literature; for The First Bad Man at Lincoln Center’s Samuel Rehearsal Studio, audience members watch a book club dissect Miranda July’s wildly original 2015 novel, as characters and story lines intersect with reality.

A bouncy castle becomes more than just a fun children’s place in Nile Harris’s this house is not a home (photo by Alex Munro)

this house is not a home
Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 6-14, $30.05
www.abronsartscenter.org

A bouncy castle helps Nile Harris explore how the world has changed over the last two years, with the assistance of Crackhead Barney, Malcolm-x Betts, slowdanger, and GENG PTP along with a gingerbread minstrel, vape addicts, a movie cowboy, and others, in this house is not a home. Afropessimism is on the menu in this collaboration between Abrons Art Center and Ping Chong Company.

Hamlet | Toilet makes its NYC debut at Japan Society (photo courtesy Kaimaku Pennant Race)

HAMLET | TOILET
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 10-13, $35
japansociety.org

In 2019, Yu Murai and Kaimaku Pennant Race blew our minds with the outrageous Ashita no Ma-Joe: Rocky Macbeth, a bizarrely entertaining mashup of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa. They’re now back with another mad mix at Japan Society; I’m not sure there’s much more to say that what’s in the press release: “Notoriously iconoclastic and scatological director Yu Murai’s Hamlet | Toilet runs the Bard’s highbrow tale of existential woe through the poop chute.” Each ticket comes with free same-day admission to the exhibition “Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus.”

VOLCANO
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
January 10-21, $54
stannswarehouse.org

Melding theater, dance, and sci-fi, Irish writer, director, and choreographer Luke Murphy (Slow Tide, Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte) introduces audiences to the mysterious Amber Project in this four-part miniseries of forty-five-minute multimedia segments starring Murphy and Will Thompson, exploring their past as they face an uncertain future.

OUR CLASS
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 12 – February 4, $68-$139
www.bam.org
ourclassplay.com

During the pandemic, Igor Golyak and Massachusetts-based Arlekin Players Theatre broke through with innovative, interactive livestreamed productions, attracting such stalwarts as Jessica Hecht and Mikhail Baryshnikov to join the troupe. Following shows at BAC and Lincoln Center, the company brings a timely new adaptation of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class to BAM, about a 1941 pogrom in Poland that severely impacts the relationships of a group of students. Broadway veterans Richard Topol, Alexandra Silber, and Gus Birney star, alongside Jewish and non-Jewish cast and crew members from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Israel, Germany, and the US.

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

DRACULA, A COMEDY OF TERRORS

The count makes a grand entrance in Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors (photo by Matthew Murphy)

DRACULA, A COMEDY OF TERRORS
New World Stages
340 West Fiftieth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through January 7, $134-$154
draculacomedy.com
newworldstages.com

Rocky Horror meets What We Do in the Shadows and Dracula: Dead and Loving It in Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s deliciously frightful farce, Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors. Channeling Mel Brooks, Charles Ludlam, and Monty Python, they reimagine the terrifying tale of Count Dracula, written by closeted Irish homosexual Bram Stoker in 1897, as a hilarious low-budget send-up of horror tropes, gender identity, and theater itself.

The nuts and bolts of the story stick to the classic narrative, with clever twists and turns: English solicitor Jonathan Harker (Andrew Keenan-Bolger) ventures to Transylvania to finalize a deal with Dracula (James Daly) in which the count is purchasing five properties in London and the abandoned Withering Manor. Following a shipwreck, Dracula shows up unexpectedly at an engagement party for Harker and his fiancée, Lucy Westfeldt (Jordan Boatman). The count is instantly enraptured with Lucy’s beautiful skin and lovely neck, but it’s her sister, Mina (Arnie Burton), who is desperate for the count’s attention.

The party is being held at the Westfeldt home in Whitby, where the siblings’ father, Dr. Westfeldt (Ellen Harvey), treats mental patients, including kleptomaniac maid Kitty Rutherford (Boatman) and insect-eating butler Renfield (Ellen Harvey). Soon Renfield is doing Dracula’s bidding, the ailing Mina is being drained of blood, and Dr. Jean Van Helsing (Burton) from the University of Schmutz is hot on the vampire’s trail, which leads right to Lucy.

Dracula (James Daly) shows a special interest in Jonathan Harker (Andrew Keenan-Bolger) in hilarious farce at New World Stages (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Cowriter and director Greenberg and cowriter Rosen, who previously collaborated on The Secret of My Success, Ebenezer Scrooge’s BIG San Diego Christmas Show, and Crime and Punishment, A Comedy, go for the jugular every chance they can, sinking their teeth into every likely — or unlikely — pop culture trope around. When the carriage driver (Boatman) is taking Harker to the count’s castle, the horses neigh at precise moments, à la Young Frankenstein, in which they whinny at each mention of Frau Blücher’s name. When the count arrives at the party with babka, Dr. Westfeldt lets him know that his son-in-law-to-be has dietary restrictions, but Dracula is prepared, noting, “It’s gluten free, cruelty free, vegan, non-GMO, and certified organic. I also brought one for the rest of us that tastes good.” When Dracula declares his desire to Lucy and grabs her, Lucy says, “But . . . but . . .” as her hands clutch the count’s taut bottom.

This smashingly handsome Dracula is all-access: The homoerotic subtext isn’t very sub. The scene where the count leans in for a possible kiss with the nerdy, weaselly Harker goes wonderfully over the top. “You’re joking, right?” Harker asks. Dracula answers, “Not even a little. Are you not curious?” Harker responds, “Somewhat. But I could never see myself actually doing anything about it. . . . Do I have a choice?” Dracula asserts, “You always have a choice.”

The biggest laughs in the ninety-minute show are saved for Mina, who looks like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz if the lion were a drag barrister. Mina is the ugly duckling to Lucy’s beautiful swan, desperate for any man. When she is introduced to Lords Cavendish, Windsor, and Havemercy (Keenan-Bolger and two puppets), they tell Dr. Westfeldt, “We prefer your other daughter. / Lucy. / The hot one.” When Lucy is concerned that Mina is looking “haggard and sickly,” Harker says, “Looks the same to me.”

Sisters Lucy (Jordan Boatman) and Mina (Arnie Burton) share a playful moment in horror comedy (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Daly (Damn Yankees, Grand Hotel) has a feast as the count, reveling in his bisexual gorgeousness while the other actors all play multiple roles, often with seemingly impossibly fast costume changes, sometimes accompanied by a knowing wink or nod at the audience. Tristan Raines’s costumes are a riot, from the count’s Village People black leather outfit to Harker’s professorial vest and bow tie and the Victorian splendor of Lucy’s and Mina’s dresses. Mina’s hair, courtesy of wig and hair designer Ashley Rae Callahan, is practically a character unto itself. Tijana Bjelajac’s gothic set features neon-framed windows, elegant bookshelves, and large double doors at the center back through which characters and objects, including a bed and a coffin, enter and leave. Rob Denton’s lighting and Victoria Deiorio’s original music and sound keep the atmosphere playfully eerie (along with numerous spray cans of fog).

Boatman (Medea, The Niceties) is cheerfully lovely as Lucy, Keenan-Bolger (Newsies, Tuck Everlasting) is adorably persnickety as Harker (Taylor Trensch will take over the role December 27 to January 2), Harvey (Little Women, Present Laughter) brings a firm dignity to Dr. Westfeldt and a touching indignity to Renfield, but Burton (The 39 Steps, The Government Inspector) steals the show, leaving no part of the scenery unchewed and digested. It’s a dazzlingly hysterical performance yet one that questions beauty, sexuality, and gender with an implicit understanding.

Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors was originally produced by Maltz Jupiter Theatre in 2019 and adapted into an all-star radio play for the Broadway Podcast Network with Annaleigh Ashford, Laura Benanti, Alex Brightman, James Monroe Iglehart, Richard Kind, Rob McClure, Ashley Park, Christopher Sieber, and John Stamos. This iteration, extended at New World Stages through January 7, is a must-see for lovers of camp, vamps, double and triple entendres, and pure, unadulterated fun.

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

ALVIN AILEY: ALL NEW 2023

Caroline T. Dartey and James Gilmer team up in world premiere of Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish’s Me, Myself and You (photo by Paul Kolnik)

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
New York City Center
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through December 31, $42-$172
www.alvinailey.org
www.nycitycenter.org

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s annual all-new programs at City Center are among my favorite events of the year, and the 2023 edition, the troupe’s sixty-fifth anniversary, is no exception. The evening began with a new production of Alonzo King’s Following the Subtle Current Upstream, which the choreographer calls “a piece about how to return to joy”; the original debuted at City Center in 2000. The twenty-two-minute work unfolds in a series of vignettes featuring, on December 23, Patrick Coker, Isaiah Day, Caroline T. Dartey, Coral Dolphin, Samantha Figgins, Jacquelin Harris, Yannick Lebrun, Corrin Rachelle Mitchell, and Christopher Taylor, who perform 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 (a gorgeous duet to “Unhome”). 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.

Former Ailey dancer Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish’s world premiere, Me, Myself and You, is a seven-minute duet that recalls Jamar Roberts’s 2022 In a Sentimental Mood, about a young couple exploring love and desire. Here Roxas-Dobrish uses Damien Sneed and Brandie Sutton’s version of the Duke Ellington classic, “In a Sentimental Mood,” as Dartey, in a sexy, partially shear black gown, sets up a three-paneled mirror in the corner and shares tender moments with James Gilmer, bare-chested with black pants, combine for some awe-inspiring moves. The costumes are by Dante Baylor, with lighting by Yi-Chung Chen that makes the most of the couple’s reflections in the mirror while calling into question whether it is actually happening or a memory or fantasy.

A new production of Hans van Manen’s Solo, originally performed by the company in 2005 and staged here by Clifton Brown and Rachel Beaujean, is seven minutes of playful one-upmanship as Renaldo Maurice, Christopher Taylor, and Kanji Segawa 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.”

A new production of Ronald K. Brown’s Dancing Spirit honors Judith Jamison’s eightieth birthday (photo by Paul Kolnik)

In 2009, AAADT presented the world premiere of by Ronald K. Brown’s Dancing Spirit, which Brown choreographed as a tribute to former Ailey dancer Judith Jamison’s twentieth anniversary as artistic director of the company. Now, in honor of Jamison’s eightieth birthday, Brown revisits the work in a lovely new production. The half-hour piece, danced by Hannah Alissa Richardson, Deidre Rogan, Yazzmeen Laidler, Harris, Solomon Dumas, Taylor, Christopher R. Wilson, Jau’mair Garland, and Coker, builds at a simmering pace as the cast, in blue and white costumes designed by Omatayo Wunmi Olaiya that evoke Jamison’s performance of the “Wade in the Water” section of Revelations, move in unison and break out into solos, duets, and other groups to Stefon Harris’s and Joe Temperley’s versions of Ellington’s “The Single Petal of a Rose,” Wynton Marsalis’s “What Have You Done?” and “Tsotsobi — The Morning Star (Children),” the Vitamin String Quartet’s cover of Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” and War’s “Flying Machine (The Chase).” Brown incorporates Afro-Cuban and Brazilian movement into his rhythmic language; the work is highlighted by Dumas and Richardson celebrating Ailey and Jamison, respectively, with stunning solos as the moon arrives for a glowing conclusion.

Also debuting at City Center in 2023 is a new production of Roberts’s Ode and the world premiere of Amy Hall Garner’s CENTURY.

In her 1993 autobiography, Dancing Spirit, Jamison writes, “Dance is bigger than your physical body. When you extend your arm, it does not stop at the end of your fingers, because you’re dancing bigger than that; you’re dancing spirit.” AAADT has been maintaining that spirit for sixty-five years, with more to come.

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

LIFE & TIMES OF MICHAEL K

Life & Times of Michael K tells a heart-wrenching story set in war-torn South Africa (photo by Richard Termine)

LIFE & TIMES OF MICHAEL K
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
Through December 23
718-254-8779
stannswarehouse.org

Lara Foot’s extraordinary adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 Booker Prize–winning novel, Life & Times of Michael K, begins with a group of people huddling around a figure wrapped in a blanket on the ground of a dark, bombed-out area, like an infant left on its own to face a harsh struggle. The figure is lifted up to reveal a wooden puppet of a young man with a harelip, seemingly born from the earth. For the next two hours, he goes on an adventure that takes him across poor and desolate sections of South Africa during a fictional civil war in the time of apartheid.

He is part Josef K from Kafka’s The Trial, part Chauncey Gardiner from Jerzy Kosiński’s 1970 novel, Being There, and subsequent Hal Ashby film, with a bit of Jack Crabb from Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel, Little Big Man, made into a 1970 film by Arthur Penn. On his journey, he faces bureaucratic red tape, tragic loss, severe hunger, and violence as he survives scene after scene in which it is hard to tell the good people from the bad, all the while just wanting to tend to a garden, bringing new life to a dangerous world. “It is because I am a gardener, he thought, because that is my nature,” one of several narrators says. “The impulse to plant had been reawakened / now, in a matter of weeks, he found his waking life bound tightly to the patch of earth / he had begun to cultivate / and the seeds he had planted there.”

It’s a haunting tale told through puppetry — Michael K is a life-size wooden puppet operated by Markus Schabbing, Craig Leo, and Carlo Daniels, who voices the character, while Michael K’s mother, Anna K, is animated by Faniswa Yisa, Roshina Ratnam, and Nolufefe Ntshuntshe. Designed by Adrian Kohler, who cofounded Handspring Puppet Company with puppetry director Basil Jones, the puppets are magically imbued with emotion by the handlers, who are out in the open, not hidden from the audience; when Michael K is given a pie, the handlers actually eat it. However, the handlers also represent how Michael K and his mother are controlled, never free; when left to himself, Michael K crumples on the floor, unable to move. As he says, “I do not know what is going to happen. The story of my life has not been an interesting one; there has usually been someone to tell me what to do next; but now there is no one, and the best thing seems to be to wait.”

The journey starts with Michael K determined to bring his ailing mother back to their home in Prince Albert, a trip for which he constructs a special rickshaw cart for her. Along the way he encounters bullies, armed soldiers, a goat, work camps, thieves, children playing, and extreme poverty and hunger, which is made palpable when Michael K removes his shirt, revealing bones with nothing inside. Although race is never mentioned specifically, Michael K is treated differently, and often negatively, because of his harelip, a physical manifestation that makes him feel less than, a metaphor for his color.

The other, nonpuppet characters are portrayed by Sandra Prinsloo, Andrew Buckland, Wessel Pretorius, Billy Langa, Ntshuntshe, Yisa, and Ratnam, including cyclists, soldiers, bus passengers, guards, police officers, bullies, nurses, clerks, and others; Ntshuntshe excels making baby noises. They also serve as narrators, relating important plot developments with Coetzee’s poetic language: “Michael did not miss his mother. No, he did not miss her, he found, except insofar as he had missed her all his life.” “Because of his face Michael did not have women friends. He was easiest when he was by himself.” “The problem that had exercised him all those years ago behind the bicycle shed at Huis Norenius, namely, why had he been brought into the world, had finally received its answer: He had been brought into the world to look after his mother.”

The effective, naturalistic costumes are by Phyllis Midlane, with sound by Simon Kohler and lighting by Joshua Cutts that puts you right in the middle of the action on Patrick Curtis’s war-torn set, enhanced by Kyle Shepherd’s original music. Video projections feature extreme close-ups of Michael K in which his face and body dominate the back wall; the photography and film are by Fiona McPherson and Barrett de Kock, with videography and editing by Yoav Dagan and projection design by Kirsti Cumming.

In such recent shows as The Jungle, Into the Woods, Life of Pi, and Wolf Play, puppets have been used ingeniously; Michael K continues that welcome trend.

Michael K encounters a goat in unique adaptation of novel by J. M. Coetzee (photo by Richard Termine)

One characters sums it up when he tells Michael K, “Why should we run away if we have nowhere to run?”

A collaboration between Foot’s Baxter Theatre Centre (Mies Julie, The Inconvenience of Wings), Handspring Puppet Company (Little Amal, War Horse), and the Dusseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Life & Times of Michael K is about trying to find one’s place in a world that is overwhelmed by sociopolitical ills, where one individual can get trapped in a system that refuses to acknowledge who he is and what his needs are. It might be set in South Africa, but it is a timeless, universal story, told here in a moving and poignant way.

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

MADWOMEN OF THE WEST

Melanie Mayron, Marilu Henner, Brooke Adams, and Caroline Aaron enjoy a hilarious brunch from hell in Madwomen of the West (photo by Carol Rosegg)

MADWOMEN OF THE WEST
Actors Temple Theatre
339 West 47th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Through December 31, $48.50 – $110
sandratloh.ag-sites.net
actorstempletheatre.com

The tag line for Sandra Tsing Loh’s Madwomen of the West might be “Brunch Is Hell,” but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a whole lotta fun, especially with four heavenly actresses having a blast together. The play itself, if you can even call it that, is a mess, with plot holes galore, inexplicable tangents, confusing breaks of the fourth wall, and unimaginative direction. But spending one hundred minutes with this quartet of lovely seventysomethings is wonderful.

Madwomen of the West features four delightful talents; for the uninitiated, who should know better, they are: Caroline Aaron, a regular on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel who has appeared onstage in The Iceman Cometh, The Sisters Rosensweig, and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and in a bevy of films by Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Nora Ephron, Paul Mazursky, and Mike Nichols; Brooke Adams, the star of such films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Days of Heaven and such plays as Happy Days, Key Exchange, and Lend Me a Tenor; Marilu Henner, most famous for her role as Elaine Nardo on Taxi but who has also appeared on Broadway in Gettin’ the Band Back Together, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, and Chicago and in such films as Bloodbrothers, Perfect, and L.A. Story; and Melanie Mayron, who won an Emmy for thirtysomething, appeared in such plays as Godspell, Crossing Delancey, and The Goodbye People and such indies as Girlfriends and Sticky Fingers, and has directed nearly one hundred episodes of television series and movies. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I’ve had long crushes on three of them.

It’s Claudia’s (Mayron) birthday, and Jules (Adams) has invited her to her ritzy Brentwood mansion for a special brunch, along with Marilyn (Aaron). “Birthdays can be fraught — especially our dear friend Claudia’s,” Marilyn tells the audience. “She’s been feeling a little down — she needed a lift!” The three college friends are soon unexpectedly joined by another member of their old gang, the fabulously famous Zoe (Henner).

“Oh, for Pete’s sakes, Zoey! I’m happy for your mega-success but I haven’t read any of your books!” Marilyn declares. “I’m on this fucking sugar cleanse and I don’t know why you’ve suddenly turned up in our lives to make them look shitty when we’re just trying to mark Claudia’s sad ‘run out of condiments’ birthday and I’m just so hungry!”

College friends Jules (Brooke Adams) and Claudia (Melanie Mayron) share a happy moment at the Actors Temple Theatre (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Many of the characters’ attributes are based on the actors’ real lives. Marilyn is a growly voiced kvetcher who founded a private girls school for underrepresented minorities and has been married to Barry for thirty-five years (in actuality, Aaron teaches at HB Studio; the show begins with her telling a story about her and Shelley Winters at the Actors Temple Theatre); Zoey is a world-renowned actress and self-help guru with a perfect memory (Henner is renowned for her own memory skills and has written numerous wellness books); Claudia is a single mother and photographer who is “vaguely Jewish, vaguely lesbian” (Mayron played a Jewish photographer on thirtysomething and in Girlfriends and has twins with her ex, screenwriter Cynthia Mort); and Jules was a law partner who gave it up to start a family (the role was originally going to be played by JoBeth Williams, who was replaced by Adams in October).

Christian Fleming’s set looks like a special edition of an afternoon women’s TV chat show on location, featuring two comfy chairs, a matching couch, a large backdrop of a photo of palm trees, a piñata just waiting to be broken open, and a round, gold-plated circular table that is oddly misused. Sharon Feldstein and Erin Hirsh’s costumes do a good job helping define the four friends, with Zoe in a sexy, tight-fitting black bodysuit with a gold chain belt, Marilyn in black shirt and pants and a blue blazer, Jules in a long, elegant black Issey Miyake gown and boots, and Claudia in pajamas and sneakers. When Jules says, “No costume budget. I brought this from home,” it’s easy to believe her.

Loh, whose previous books and plays include The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones, Mother on Fire, Aliens in America, and Bad Sex with Bud Kemp, doesn’t give much of a chance for Caruso (Emojiland, Southern Comfort) to make sense of things, so the story is all over the place as the actors go in and out of character and the plot meanders. Meanwhile, the quartet’s first-wave feminism doesn’t do the show any favors as they discuss the women’s movement, Hillary Clinton, Mary Tyler Moore, motherhood, smoking, female bodies, sexual liberation, getting canceled, and what Marilyn calls the “trans wave.”

Spoiler alert: They never bust open that piñata, which is a shame.

“You really can’t have it all,” Jules says.

Maybe not, but these actors do deliver a lot of it.

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

JOHN ADAMS’ EL NIÑO: NATIVITY RECONSIDERED

John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered returns to St. John the Divine on December 21 (photo by Nina Westervelt)

Who: American Modern Opera Company (AMOC)
What: John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered
Where: The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Ave. at 112th St.
When: Thursday, December 21, choose-what-you-pay; suggested admission $35, 7:30
Why: Originally presented by American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) in 2018 at the San Martín at Fuentidueña chapel in the Cloisters, John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered was performed last December at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, in a slightly revised iteration, and it is now back for an encore presentation. A retelling of the traditional Christmas story, El Niño premiered in Paris in 2000, with a libretto by Peter Sellars. At St. John the Divine, the nativity oratorio, conceived and curated by Julia Bullock, includes soprano Bullock, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, violinists Miranda Cuckson and Keir GoGwilt, cellist Coleman Itzkoff, bassist Doug Balliett, flutist Emi Ferguson, percussionist Jonny Allen, pianist Conor Hanick, guest soloist contralto Jasmin White, and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street; the conductor is Christian Reif, who is responsible for the new chamber opera arrangement.

In a program note for the Met Museum digital premiere, Bullock wrote, “El Niño is one of my favorite pieces of music and I feel one of John and Peter’s greatest collaborations. . . . It is rarely programmed, either because of the resources needed or possibly because our North American holiday tradition insists upon multiple performances of Handel’s Messiah. The Messiah is, of course, a beloved work, but it doesn’t meditate solely on the nativity story; it also encompasses the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. El Niño, on the other hand, explores the central themes of the nativity — the immaculate conception, the unique relationship between mother and child, and gift giving — and also ruminates on the notion that with the promise of new life, there is the equal threat of inexplicable violence and sacrifice. In creating El Niño, John and Peter consciously decided that alongside European interpretations from the male-centric biblical canon, they would feature the contributions of women and Latin American poets.” Tickets for this special event are choose-what-you-pay with a suggested donation of $35.

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