live performance

THE CATSKILLS MYSTIQUE: A WALK ON THE MOON AT THE LAURA PELS

The married Pearl Kantrowitz (Talia Suskauer) considers a summer dalliance or more with blouse man Walker Jerome (Sam Gravitte) in A Walk on the Moon (photo by Joan Marcus)

A WALK ON THE MOON
Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 22, $56-$121
awalkonthemoonmusical.com

The summer of 1969 was one of the most provocative, contentious, and exhilarating times in American history. US troops were fighting Communism in Vietnam. The Stonewall Riots took place in Greenwich Village. The Cuyahoga River caught fire. Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The Miracle Mets unexpectedly surged into first place on their way to a world championship. The Manson family murdered actress Sharon Tate and seven others in Los Angeles. Some 400,000 people attended an era-redefining counterculture music festival on a farm in Bethel, New York. The original cast album of Hair topped the charts, while Sly and the Family Stone, Johnny Cash, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Doors, Miles Davis, CCR, the Rolling Stones, the Who, and the Isley Brothers released new records. And the ATM made its debut, at a Chemical Bank on Long Island.

That sense of constant excitement is precisely what’s missing from A Walk on the Moon, a pleasant if not thrilling New York premiere continuing at the Laura Pels through August 22.

The 2018 musical is adapted from Tony Goldwyn’s 1999 film, written by Pamela Gray, that starred Diane Lane as Pearl Kantrowitz, a mother of two who is feeling underappreciated by her TV-repairman husband, Marty (Liev Schreiber), and falls for the hot young blouse man, Walker Jerome (Viggo Mortensen), during her family’s annual summer weekend retreats to their bungalow in the Catskills. “Take a deep breath / Fresh air in the mountains / You can’t get this on Flatbush Avenue,” Pearl (Talia Suskauer) sings in the opening number, “Summer of All Summers,” joined by Marty (Max Chernin), their nine-year-old son, Danny (Leo Caravano or Reid Gardner Clarke), Marty’s mother, Lillian (Andréa Burns), and their couples friends, Neil and Rhoda Tanklow (David R. Gordon and Becca Suskauer), Irv and Bunny Gelfand (Andrew Faria and Megan Kane), and Stan and Eleanor Applebaum (Michael Tacconi and Caroline Pernick).

The number is fairly standard, and it doesn’t feel in any way like it’s the summer of 1969, lacking the promise of what’s to come. Perhaps that was on purpose, to display the mundanity of their lives, but it’s not the smartest way to begin a musical. In the second song, “When Did You Know the Moon Was Possible?,” Pearl worries that life is passing her by, addressing astronaut Neil Armstrong, one of the crew members of Apollo 11. “Mr. Armstrong / How did I not know a decade has gone by / And was I even in it / Mr. Armstrong / How did the years run right past / As fast as my teenager is growing / When did you learn / When was that moment of knowing / That there was no limit to how high you could fly?” she wonders. “Mr. Armstrong / In this beginning of a new age / Where am I? / When I never began.”

That all changes when the new blouse man, Walker (Sam Gravitte), arrives, giving Pearl a tie-dye shirt she was eyeing. “My husband would hate it,” she says. Walker replies, “But what’s your opinion, Pearl Kantrowitz?”

A Catskills bungalow colony is the setting for musical based on 1999 film (photo by Joan Marcus)

Meanwhile, Pearl and Marty’s sixteen-year-old contrarian daughter, Alison (Sophie Pollono), a radical activist, is furious that her father forgot to pack her record player. “I can’t survive without music,” she argues. But she’s soon smitten with seventeen-year-old Ross (Oscar Williams), who goes everywhere with his acoustic guitar and is working on a song in which he declares himself “the Big Jewish Hendrix.” When Ross tells Alison that he is thinking about going to a concert called Woodstock — “It’s supposed be be gigantic, like five hundred people!” — they decide they have to go, especially since her favorite, Joni Mitchell, is scheduled to perform.

With two historic events in the offing, the moon landing and the music festival, Pearl has some difficult decisions to make involving her family and, primarily, herself, whom she has never put first before.

Featuring music and lyrics by Tony and Grammy nominee AnnMarie Milazzo and a book and additional lyrics by Gray, A Walk on the Moon never quite blasts off but is a pleasurable slow glide through the summer of 1969. The orchestrations at the beginning and end are overly traditional; several of the songs in between get closer to capturing the Flower Power feel of the era. The music director is Jillian Zack, with arrangements by Andy Einhorn. Ricky Lurie’s costumes fit the period and Josh Prince’s choreography never gets out of hand, maintaining a playful edge. Tal Yarden’s scenic design tends to be too cardboardy, but his projections, particularly of a giant moon and television, help set the mood.

Talia Suskauer (Be More Chill, Wicked) portrays Pearl with an enticing depth, keeping her from becoming a deceitful villain; instead, she garners understanding from the audience, even those who aren’t rooting for her to schtup the blouse man. Gray and Tony-nominated director Sheryl Kaller (Next Fall, The White Chip) cast no judgments on Pearl or any of the other characters. Among the ensemble, Becca Suskauer, Talia’s sister, stands out, but I may be partial because she is playing a character named after two of my relatives; my last name makes it into the show as well in a brief mention. (My second cousin is a close friend of Gray’s, so it’s not a coincidence.)

I sat next to a pair of alta kockers from the Bronx who had been to the Borsch Belt bungalows, and we agreed that the show was not Jewish enough; I was hoping for something closer to the “We’re Going to the Catskills!” second-season episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which takes place at the fictional Steiner Mountain Resort. But maybe that’s just me.

However, I do think that the show missed an opportunity that it is well aware of. In “We’re Girls with Somethin’ to Do,” Rhoda sings, “‘Enjoy the unconventional’ / Well, Betty dear, my hands are full,” quoting from Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique.

If only A Walk on the Moon were more unconventional, like the time period it covers.

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

BOB DYLAN STEPS INTO THE UNKNOWN

“Stepping into the Unknown” features rare and previously unreleased footage and special live performances

STEPPING INTO THE UNKNOWN: FILMS FROM THE BOB DYLAN CENTER
Paris Theater
4 West Fifty-Eighth St. at Fifth Ave.
Wednesday, September 2, $15-$17, 7:00
paristheaternyc.com
bobdylancenter.com

My first Bob Dylan show was in September 1978 at the Nassau Coliseum. At one point relatively early on, I could see that my best friend was looking uncomfortable. “I don’t know any of these songs,” he said. “When is he going to play ‘Tangled Up in Blue’?” I hesitated before telling him, “Um, he just played that.”

I’ve since seen Dylan — with whom I share a birthday — about twenty times, with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty, at Forest Hills, the Beacon, and the Jones Beach Theater, with such opening acts as Mavis Staples, Patti Smith, and Lucinda Williams. I camped outside overnight to get tickets to the 1992 Bobfest at the Garden. I was at the 2012 Prospect Park concert where he shared a brief memory about having once lived nearby in Brooklyn. “He knows where he is!” I called out.

During the pandemic, I watched Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan, his mysterious concert film that had a wild live chat, questioning just about everything we were seeing and hearing. I devoured his 2005 memoir, Chronicles: Volume 1, glorying in the vastly entertaining fictionalization of stories from his life (while understanding that just because he called it Volume 1 didn’t mean there would be a Volume 2). I was impressed by Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown and tried not to let all the factual inaccuracies get in the way of a good movie. I can’t hear “A Hard Rain’s a‐Gonna Fall” without remembering the excitement I felt watching the 1976 Hard Rain film on NBC documenting the Rolling Thunder Revue. Heck, I once let the nails of my thumbs grow ridiculously long because Bob’s were like that on the cover of the 1978 tour book.

And then there are the shows on Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, in which he constantly reinvents songs, sometimes making them all but unrecognizable. He stands back from the stage, wearing a hat or a hoodie, in low lighting so his face is hard to see. He doesn’t allow any video or photography and he rarely speaks to the audience except for announcing his band, which lately has been changing without explanation. At every concert, a handful of the uninitiated leave when they realize he’s not going to play many of his most famous songs, and when he does they sound very different. But we faithful love every twist and turn, following the master’s superb vocal phrasings and precise enunciations emanating from his raspier and raspier voice.

Which brings us to the Bob Dylan Center (BDC), his archive that opened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May 2022. Why Tulsa? One answer is because it’s Dylan, so why ask. But Dylan himself said, “There’s more vibrations on the coasts, for sure. But I’m from Minnesota and I like the casual hum of the heartland.”

On September 2, the Bob Dylan Archive comes to the Paris Theater for the special program “Stepping into the Unknown: Films from the Bob Dylan Center.” The event, presented by BDC director Steven Jenkins, will feature rare and previously unreleased material and will be followed by a Q&A and a live solo-electric performance by jazz guitarist extraordinaire Bill Frisell, who has recorded several Dylan songs and recently celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday by playing a show at BDC that included tunes by Dylan and Woody Guthrie.

“Stepping into the Unknown” is part of the Paris Theater’s annual “Big & Loud” series, consisting of 70mm screenings and 4K restorations of more than forty classics, from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Elevator to the Gallows to Fight Club and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, with such special guests as Sofia Coppola and Isabella Rossellini.

You can also catch “Stepping into the Unknown” on September 1 at the Nitehawk in Williamsburg, followed by a Q&A with Jenkins and a performance by Steve Wynn from the Dream Syndicate and the Baseball Project, and on September 3 at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville with a Jenkins Q&A and a performance by Traveling Medicine Man with Luke Havranek.

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

FEMINIST FOIBLES: AN AMERICAN DAUGHTER AT THE SIGNATURE

An all-star cast cannot save thirtieth-anniversary revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter (photo by Joan Marcus)

AN AMERICAN DAUGHTER
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Irene Diamond Stage
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 20, $59-$149
lafemmetheatreproductions.org

With about ten minutes to go before intermission of La Femme Theatre Productions’ thirtieth-anniversary revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter, a group of about a half dozen people sitting behind me got up and left. I can’t say I didn’t want to join them, but it is my responsibility to stay through entire shows, which can certainly proceed to better — or worse — second acts.

At intermission, more people left and didn’t come back.

I can’t say I blamed them, as the two-and-half-hour play did not improve but instead devolved even further.

A timely topic, an excellent roster of actors, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, and a gorgeous set could not save the dull and lifeless narrative. The most excitement came during the second act, when a woman over my right shoulder let out a series of loud, poignant gasps that echoed throughout the Pershing Square Signature Center’s Irene Diamond Stage; much of the audience twittered, wondering what show she was watching.

An American Daughter followed Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles in 1988 and The Sisters Rosensweig in 1992; the original June 1996 Seattle production starred Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Penny Fuller, Adam Arkin, and Liev Schreiber and moved the next year to Lincoln Center with Kate Nelligan, Elizabeth Marvel, a Tony-winning Lynne Thigpen, Hal Holbrook, and Fuller. The play was inspired by something Hillary Clinton said while campaigning for her husband, Bill, who was on the presidential trail. Defending her career — and angering housewives across the country — she stated, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

In An American Daughter, Dr. Lyssa Dent Hughes (Jean Lichty), an avowed liberal, has been nominated for the position of surgeon general. The former president of Georgetown Hospital and a national advocate for women’s health issues, Dr. Hughes has a plan centered on education, information, and prevention to provide affordable health care to every American man, woman, and child. She is married to Georgetown sociology professor Walter Abrahmson (Robert Sean Leonard), author of the popular book Towards a Lesser Elite, who fully supports her. Her best friend since high school, Dr. Judith B. Kaufman (Montego Glover), is a Black and Jewish oncology professor at Georgetown Medical School who specializes in treating breast cancer.

Lyssa is perhaps most well known as the daughter of longtime powerful conservative Indiana senator Alan Hughes (Dakin Matthews), who is on his fourth wife, the elegant Charlotte, also known as Chubby (Mary Beth Peil). Lyssa and Alan might not agree politically but they have a strong, close relationship.

Always hovering around Walter and Lyssa’s lovely home is their good friend Morrow McCarthy (Ryan Spahn), a controversial, acerbic Washington Post columnist who is both gay and antichoice.

The media plays a key role in the attacks on a woman surgeon general nominee in An American Daughter (photo by Joan Marcus)

One of Walter’s prized former students, Quincy Quince (Carmen Zilles), drops by unannounced one afternoon; Quincy has become a celebrity since the publication of her book The Prisoner of Gender and is drawn to the limelight, especially when popular broadcaster Timber Tucker (Chris Ghaffari) and his cameraman kick off a series of interviews with Lyssa.

Lyssa’s nomination is immediately in jeopardy when Morrow lets it slip that Lyssa apparently ignored a jury duty notice and she remarks to Timber about her mother, “She was the kind of ordinary Indiana housewife who took pride in her icebox cakes and cheese pimento canapés.”

All hell breaks loose as people jockey for position, seek to protect or attack Lyssa, flirt with one another, and argue over a woman’s place in society. It all feels like much ado about nothing, whether it’s 1997 or 2026. Even if that’s part of the point — that it doesn’t take a lot to bring down brilliant women about to acquire some kind of power — the controversies inherent in the play ring false and are overly manufactured and manipulated.

The problems extend to the forced musical choices; the play begins with the hit song “You’re Sixteen,” a creepy tune about a man in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, while Walter is a big Beach Boys fan, which disappoints Quincy, who explains, “All that California crap is so limited in positive body imagery for women.” This play does not rely on subtlety in any way.

The revival was cobbled together from an unpublished second act and eight versions of the script, including from the 2000 Lifetime television movie featuring Christine Lahti, Tom Skerritt, Jay Thomas, Mark Feuerstein, and Thigpen. The result is an uneven pace and choppy transitions that director Sarna Lapine (Call Me Izzy, Little Women) is unable to smooth out. The impressive collection of award-winning pros seems lost, starting with Lichty, La Femme’s founding executive director, who is seriously miscast; nearly every performer is noticeably either too young or too old for their role. They wander aimlessly around Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’s pristine Georgetown living room, the former home of general and president Ulysses S. Grant, as if it’s representative of the United States itself; in fact, Lyssa is named after her great-great-grandfather, and the family owns a treasured letter Grant sent to his wife, Julia, from Vicksburg, which is teased throughout the play.

At one point, discussing Grant’s failures and achievements, the senator says to Tucker, “We’re human, Timber, that’s what’s so timeless about Grant: His foibles are our foibles. He was a great American hero, imperfect like all of us.”

In 2015, I called Pam McKinnon’s Broadway revival of The Heidi Chronicles “a kind of tepid time-capsule experience that lacks energy and fervor.” Unfortunately, An American Daughter is much of the same, not timeless but certainly imperfect, overstuffed with foibles that feel dated and irrelevant today.

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

THEATER AS A HOLY SPACE: THE SAVIORS AT THE ATLANTIC

Paul (Julius Rinzel) and Michael (Ivan Howe) experience challenges as confirmation approaches in The Saviors (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

THE SAVIORS
Atlantic Theater Company, Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 15, $56.50-$111.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

“I didn’t know you could do that — that you could argue the content of a play in the form of it,” theater director Jack Serio told American Theatre magazine in June 2023 about his reaction to seeing Ivo van Hove’s 2014 Scenes from a Marriage at New York Theatre Workshop, an immersive rendering of the 1973 Ingmar Bergman miniseries.

Over the last five years, Serio has argued the content of a play in the form of it across more than half a dozen unique productions, leading up to his latest success, The Saviors, extended through August 15 at the Atlantic.

Unlike theater, film is a director’s discipline. A movie is almost never identified as belonging to the writer, or even the star, but to the director: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. In those cases, the directors are also the writers.

Quick: Who wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, or Ridley Scott’s Alien? Not the directors. Spike Lee hasn’t penned a solo screenplay in more than twenty-five years, Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa had cowriters on most of their projects, and David Fincher has never been credited as a screenwriter. That does not take away from their filmmaking prowess but merely points out that it is the director who is the guiding force.

The same cannot be said for the stage, where the author is king. A play or musical is almost never never identified as belonging to the director, or even the star, but to the writer: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

Quick: Who directed such Tony winners as Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop, David Ajmi’s Stereophonic, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, or Bess Wohl’s Liberation?

Of course, one of the unique allures of theater is how a director can take an existing play or musical and reshape it, make it their own, whether it’s by William Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, Tom Stoppard, Noël Coward, or Rodgers & Hammerstein; screenplays are written with very specific action cues, while most plays, aside from those by Samuel Beckett and maybe a handful of others, include few if any stage directions. Awards are given out for best revivals of a play or musical but not for best movie remake.

And then comes Serio.

The NYU Tisch graduate is a master of intimacy and space. For Ken Urban’s Danger and Opportunity at East Village Basement, a limited audience was seated against the walls of a living room. Uncle Vanya took place in a private Flatiron loft for forty people at a time. For Joey Merlo’s On Set with Theda Bara at the Brick, thirty audience members sat around a long, rectangular wooden table surrounded by lamps and mirrors. For Ruby Thomas’s The Animal Kingdom at the Connelly Theater Upstairs, the small audience was packed in so tight it was hard to breathe.

Even with more traditional setups, Serio — and, of course, the scenic designers — creates visceral experiences that feel private and personal, from Rita Kalnejais’s This Beautiful Future at the Cherry Lane, with its curved walls and additional area at the back of the stage, to Samuel D. Hunter’s Grangeville at the Signature, where the two actors felt like they were miles apart when on opposite sides of the spare, dark set.

Last year, Serio teamed with actor Bubba Weiler for Weiler’s stunning debut as a playwright, Well, I’ll Let You Go, a tale of grief and community for ninety-nine people at a time, originally produced at the vast six-thousand-square-foot Space at Irondale, a former church Sunday school.

Julian (Stanley Simons), a troubled soul, seeks sanctuary in The Saviors (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Weiler and Serio are now back together for the world premiere of The Saviors at the Linda Gross Theater, housed in a nineteenth-century Gothic Revival building that was formerly the parish house of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. Three-time Tony winner David Zinn has transformed the theater into a church, with a spare but pristine altar, stained-glass windows, iconographic statuary, an organ, and a hymn board.

Two altar boys in white cassocks run onto the stage, racing to extinguish the candles. Paul (Julius Rinzel), fourteen, and Michael (Ivan Howe), thirteen, are best friends. The names are meant to be biblical: The archangel Michael was a guardian and fierce defender of God, while the apostle Paul was a missionary who wrote between seven and fourteen books of the Bible.

They are preparing for their confirmation project in which they select a saint to honor; Michael is considering Saint George while also suggesting that Paul be Saint Michael and Michael be Saint Paul, but, as we are soon to find out, the two boys are not interchangeable. Michael fantasizes about being a martyr, telling Paul, “Martyrs go straight to heaven and like . . . that’s the whole point. And then maybe I’d even become a saint, which would be like, whoa. And then like fifty years from now some kid would pick me for their confirmation and that would just be. . . . I think about that all the time.” Paul does not.

Their conversation is suddenly interrupted by a loud noise; a ragged man with a backpack has entered the church, coming down the right side of the theater aisle, shocking the audience as well as the boys. About ten years older than Michael and Paul, Julian (Stanley Simons) is clearly distraught and in need of support, especially with a snowstorm about to strike at any minute. (He could be named for the apostate Julian, the fourth-century Roman emperor who rejected Christianity and fought a civil war against his cousin Emperor Constantius II.)

“I just want to pray,” he says. Michael wants him to leave immediately, mentioning that there are nearby Protestant and Presbyterian churches he can try, but Paul offers him shelter, and Julian gratefully accepts, upsetting Michael.

Meanwhile, Michael has chosen “church MVP” Judy (Crystal Finn) as his confirmation sponsor, telling her, “I want someone that could like actually really help me because like — Like I want to take it serious and I was just thinking that your son is like Jesus — and if he’s Jesus then that makes you Mary and Mary is like my favorite person of all time besides Jesus, and so like — who better to sponsor me than Mary?” In the Deuterocanon, Judith is the Jewish widow who saves Jerusalem.

As confirmation approaches, the characters reassess their connections to God, Christianity, and one another.

Judy (Crystal Finn) leads Michael (Ivan Howe) through a Christian meditation in world premiere at the Atlantic (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Theater has long been compared to church. “The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart,” Pulitzer Prize–wining playwright Marsha Norman said. “The theatre is your pulpit, it is your church, and you want to be a priest in your church and that’s what I believe in,” actor, playwright, and director Steven Berkoff explained to the Telegraph in 2015. Actor Brian Cox told Variety in 2023 that he believes “theater is the one true church, because it’s the church of the human experience. Everything else is about belief systems that we bring in. . . . But the theater is about our relationship directly with something which is so personal, and so immediate, and it’s the effect that it has on the people watching.”

Weiler is a former altar boy who attended Catholic school and now considers himself an agnostic; he and Serio, who also went to Catholic school, met at NYU’s Playwrights Horizons Theater School, where Weiler was Serio’s TA in his freshman playwriting class. Together they have turned the Linda Gross Theater into a holy space that immerses the audience into its aura. Nearly every scene begins with either Michael or Paul changing the numbers on the board, as if what is to come has been crafted from hymns. The seats feel like pews when the characters move through the aisles. Serio makes expert use of every corner of the stage, while Weiler’s angelic dialogue echoes like the Word made flesh. There is a breathtaking twist that helps elevate the ninety-minute play to the next level, although there are a few conventional, dare I say preachy, plot developments that fail to resonate.

The script calls for the roles of Michael and Paul to be portrayed by “age-authentic actors,” and Howe (Eric, Oliver!) and Rinzel (The Antiquities, A Beautiful Voice), respectively, are indeed young teens who capture the nascent spiritual awakening of adolescent boys learning how to make decisions for themselves and whether they can trust adults and religion, from the sheer joy of horsing around to the more serious aspects of responsibility. Finn (Cold War Choir Practice, Birthday Candles) is effective as the church lady hiding a secret, and Simons (The Iron Claw, Mile End Kicks), whose Playbill bio says he has “crippling stage fright,” makes an impressive theater debut as Julian, that fear perhaps assisting him in displaying his character’s deeply felt unease.

Half a millennia ago, French theologian and pastor John Calvin wrote, “The whole world is a theatre for the display of the divine goodness, wisdom, justice, and power, but the Church is the orchestra, as it were — the most conspicuous part of it.”

Wherever Serio sets up his pulpit next, the faithful, including me, are sure to follow him and his orchestra.

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

“IT BEGAN AS A MISTAKE”: ANNUAL CHARLES BUKOWSKI MEMORIAL READING AT THE BITTER END

Who: Penny Arcade, Kat Georges, Peter Carlaftes, Jennifer Blowdryer, Puma Perl, Frank Messina, Michael Puzzo, Danny Shot, Richard Vetere, George Wallace, more
What: Annual tribute to Charles Bukowski
Where: The Bitter End, 147 Bleecker St. between Thompson & La Guardia
When: Friday, August 14, $10, 6:00
Why: “What sort of cultural hangover keeps Charles Bukowski in print and popular more than twenty years after his death?” S. A. Griffin asks in his Three Rooms Press essay “Charles Bukowski: Dean of Another Academy.” “In light of the fact that a good portion of what has been published since his passing in 1994 may not be the man’s best work, along with some heavy editing at times, why does Charles Bukowski remain relevant well into the 21st century?”

The nineteenth annual Charles Bukowski Memorial Reading takes place August 14 at 6:00 at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village in honor of what would have been the 106th birthday of the author of such books as Pulp, Factotum, Post Office, On Cats, and Love Is a Dog from Hell, with tribute readings by performance artist Penny Arcade, musician and storyteller Jennifer Blowdryer, poets Frank Messina, Puma Perl, Danny Shot, and George Wallace, and playwrights Richard Vetere and Michael Puzzo, hosted by Kat Georges and Peter Carlaftes of Three Rooms Press. Bukowski, who died in 1994 at the age of seventy-three, will be celebrated through poetry, oral history, rare videos, and live performances, with a special look at what he might have thought about the world’s first trillionaire, the decline of alcohol consumption, AI, the demise of the US Post Office, and other contemporary issues.

“It began as a mistake,” Bukowski writes at the beginning of his 1971 novel, Post Office. Where it goes from there will have you thinking twice about your mailman.

As a bonus, various prizes, including books and recordings, will be given away at this always welcome literary event.

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

SHINING LIKE A FIREBIRD: MISTY COPELAND AT THE JOYCE

BALLET FESTIVAL
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
August 4-16, $87-$102
212-645-2904
www.joyce.org

On October 22, 2025, Misty Copeland retired from American Ballet Theatre after a twenty-five year career that included her becoming the first Black female principal dancer in the company’s history. But that hasn’t appeared to slow down the forty-three-year-old Kansas City native.

In December, she had hip replacement surgery. In March, she performed in a musical tribute to the film Sinners at the Oscars. In April she was honored at the Misty Copeland Foundation Spring Benefit as part of the Celebrating Misty Campaign. In May she received the Medal for Distinguished Service from Teachers College at Columbia and walked the red carpet at the Met Gala as a member of the host committee. In June she was named the inaugural recipient of the Lincoln Center Luminary Award, received the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement for “exceptional accomplishment in the sciences, the professions, business, industry, arts, literature, sports, entertainment, and public service,” and delivered the keynote commencement address at the Success Academy Charter Schools graduation. In July she attended the FIFA World Cup Final in her role as a skin-care spokesperson. And on August 25, her latest children’s book, Firebird Waltz, will be published.

If that were not enough, she is also curating this year’s Ballet Festival, which runs August 4–16 and features dancers from American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Houston Ballet, and Complexions Contemporary Ballet, performing works by Ingrid Silva, Kyle Abraham, Bob Fosse, Houston Thomas, José Limón, Rudolf Nureyev, Dwight Rhoden, and Aleisha Walker the first week and Stanton Welch AM, Andrea Miller, Alonzo King, John Taras, Roland Petit, James Whiteside, and Ilo the second. Among the dancers are Madison Brown, Guillaume Diop, Joe Gonzales, Babatunji Johnson, Sae Eun Park, Taylor Stanley, April Watson, and Harper Watters.

“At the heart of my curation for The Joyce Ballet Festival is a celebration of Black, Brown, and Queer voices,” Copeland wrote on Instagram. “Ballet has a remarkable history, and I believe it grows stronger when we create space for a wider range of artists and perspectives. This festival honors that history while celebrating the artists expanding what ballet can be. I’m so excited to share these extraordinary performances with you.”

There will be a Summer Soirée on August 4, a Curtain Chat with Copeland and Complexions cofounder Desmond Richardson on August 5, and a teen ballet workshop on August 8 at New York Center for Creativity & Dance.

So what are you up to in your retirement?

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

THE SINGULARITY APPROACHES: DISRUPTION AT THE SIGNATURE

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nick (John David Washington) offers “the opportunity of a lifetime” to a group of old friends in Disruption (photo by Emilio Madrid)

DISRUPTION
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 27, $99-$176
www.disruptionplay.com

“To this day, I remain convinced of this basic philosophy: no matter what quandaries we face — business problems, health issues, relationship difficulties, as well as the great scientific, social, and cultural challenges of our time — there is an idea that can enable us to prevail,” American computer scientist Ray Kurzweil wrote in his 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. “Furthermore, we can find that idea. And when we find it, we need to implement it.”

One of the great fears of this era is the implementation of artificial intelligence and our growing dependence on AI — in addition to grave concerns over the singularity, the potential for AI to develop beyond human control, take over our lives, and, perhaps, ultimately destroy us.

Numerous recent plays have considered where that can lead us, including Matthew Libby’s Data, Olivia Haller’s Loneliness Was a Pandemic, and Tjaša Ferme’s Bioadapted, none of which are comedies with particularly happy endings.

The latest to offer its take on the future of AI technology is Andrew Stein’s engrossing Disruption, making its American premiere at the Pershing Square Signature Center following its 2023 debut in London. But Stein and director Hersh Ellis don’t focus so much on the tech behind AI as on the entrepreneurs and computer scientists who keep expanding it — and the humans who use it. In many ways, it’s a contemporary domestic drama disguised as a high-tech thriller.

Successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nick (John David Washington) has gathered his three best friends and their wives for a dinner in a private room in an upscale Tribeca restaurant. Ben (Conrad Ricamora) is a Columbia professor married to Suzie (Shaunette Renée Wilson), a therapist on the Upper West Side; they have no children by choice and are deciding whether their next vacation should be to the Galápagos or Machu Picchu. Barry (Jason Ralph) is a surgeon married to Mia (Irene Sofia Lucio), a photographer; they also have no children and are contemplating buying a brownstone in Park Slope but he is not sure they can afford it. And Paul (Joe Tippett) is an art director at a print magazine married to Jill (Elizabeth Stanley), who believes she sold out by becoming a corporate lawyer; they have two young children they are hoping to get into Fieldston but are also short on funds.

The three women are worried that Nick has come for their husbands, seeking investments in whatever his latest venture is; the three men promise that they just want to see their old friend and hear him out, nothing more.

“Let’s not get seduced by Nick,” Mia says to Barry.

But seduction is the key part of Nick’s charm. And to up the ante, he has brought with him his gorgeous and brilliant new business partner, the younger Raven (Emma Kikue); she is twenty-seven while the others are in their late thirties and early forties.

Nick explains to his friends that he’s not after their money but is instead offering them “the opportunity of a lifetime.” He believes that their involvement will lead to easier, happier lives with fewer challenges. “The world is changing at a rate most people can’t comprehend. Computing capacity doubles every two years, you know what that means?” Nick asks. Raven responds, “People are fucked.” To which Nick adds, “Unless . . . they embrace technology.”

Suzie is having none of it, leading to an exchange with Ben that gets to the heart of the narrative.

Suzie: I hate how technology has made us so connected to everything except ourselves. This obsession with making everything faster and easier. As if that’s inherently better.
Ben: It’s called progress.
Suzie: No. It’s not. It’s not progress. It’s something else. Something insidious.
Ben: It’s life’s speeding up. That’s all.
Suzie: The new shiny object that replaces something tried and true isn’t necessarily better. Disruption for the sake of disruption can’t be the goal.
Ben: When you improve one thing, you eliminate another. That’s life. The herd gets trimmed. . . .
Suzie: Our souls are being gutted. Which isn’t progress. It’s programming. And I know I keep saying this, but no one seems to notice. Or give a shit.
Ben: Except you.
Suzie: I don’t think we have any idea how much we’re being manipulated.

Disruption takes place in a dark, high-tech oblong space with the audience on two sides (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Faust meets The Big Chill in Disruption, a kind of newfangled couples drama in which men and women contemplate their future — personal and professional, individual and as pairs — only this time through the lens of an AI algorithm that may be able to help guide them, or control them. But it deals with more than what Suzie refers to as Nick’s “God Machine” and free will; it’s about how each of us faces the daily trials and tribulations of life and how we go about trying to solve our problems, ignore them, blame them on others, or look for the easy way out. The algorithm is not just a technological advance but a metaphor for how everyone attempts to get a leg up at one time or another, sometimes compromising our ethics and ideals.

Zoë Hurwitz’s set is a dark oblong open on its two long sides, where the audience sits, making us feel complicit in what is happening onstage, as if we’re part of the algorithm. In between scenes, the actors wheel in chairs, tables, and other furniture items while electronic music softly drones and the floor of the oblong lights up with numbers, letters, circles that glow red, and synapses connecting like constellations. The lighting, by Reza Behjat, occasionally reveals a glass-fronted room where Raven operates the algorithm; the sound, which at one point includes creepy echoes, is by Caroline Eng, with contemporary costumes by Hurwitz, with one big surprise at the end.

The ensemble is terrific; each upper-middle-class couple is believable if not wholly unique, with Washington (The Piano Lesson) and Kikue (God Said This, Fruiting Bodies) as their advisers who may or may not have their best interest in mind.

About halfway through the show, Barry tells Nick how his shoelace broke in between patients and, as he was fixing it, he received an ad on his phone for a shoe repair store a block away. “I didn’t say anything. Didn’t search anything . . . it was like someone knew exactly what had happened.” Nick responds, “They probably did.”

Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

Don’t be surprised if, after reading this review, you get an ad on your phone or on social media for the play, guiding you to get tickets.

Kurzweil also wrote in The Singularity Is Near, “The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.”

Be careful what you wish for, especially when it comes to AI.

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