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BECKETT, BRIEFLY: A TRIO OF GEMS AT THE IRISH REP

Sarah Street’s mouth is the star of the first of three short Beckett plays at Irish Rep (photo by Carol Rosegg)

BECKETT BRIEFS: FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West Twenty-Second St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through March 9, $60-$125
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

Why is the Irish Rep presenting Beckett Briefs: From the Cradle to the Grave, three short works by Samuel Beckett, now? “Because he’s Irish, and he knows things,” Irish Rep artistic director Charlotte Moore and producing director Ciarán O’Reilly explain in a program note.

The Dublin-born playwright died in Paris in 1989 at the age of eighty-three, during the Irish Rep’s second season, in which they staged Chris O’Neill and Vincent O’Neill’s one-man Endworks, based on more than a dozen Beckett plays. The company has since performed Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in 1998, Endgame in 2005 and 2023, A Mind-Bending Evening of Beckett in 2013 featuring Act without Words, Play, and Breath, and Bill Irwin’s solo show On Beckett in 2018, 2020, and 2024.

In his unique, existential writings, Beckett displayed a flair for knowing things, although it is usually not easy to parse out exactly what he means, a significant part of the joy of experiencing his plays, which also include the full-length All That Fall, Happy Days, and Waiting for Godot. Theater itself is a regular subject; his scripts have extremely detailed instructions of nearly every movement, costume, and prop, and the narratives are often about the art of storytelling.

Such is the case with Beckett Briefs, a trio of tales about life, death, and the afterlife in which the narrative style drives the work.

First up is Not I, Beckett’s 1972 monologue that has been performed by Beckett muse Billie Whitelaw, Jessica Tandy, Julianne Moore, Lisa Dwan, and British comedian Jess Thom, who incorporated her copralalia (cursing) form of Tourette’s syndrome into her delivery of the nonstop barrage of text. The play generally runs between nine and fifteen minutes; it is not a race, but the actor is expected to go through the 2,268 words as fast as possible. “I am not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I hope the piece may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect,” Beckett wrote in a 1972 letter to Tandy prior to the play’s world premiere at Lincoln Center.

A hole has been cut in a black curtain more than eight feet above the stage, so the only thing we can see is a mouth peeking through, in this case belonging to Irish Rep regular Sarah Street. Her teeth are sparkling white and her red lipstick thick and emotive — resembling the famous movie poster for The Rocky Horror Picture Show — as she speeds through Beckett’s wildly unpredictable verbiage, barely stopping to breathe. Known as Mouth, the character has been mostly speechless since her parents died when she was an infant, but now, at the age of seventy, words start pouring out of her.

The audience is not meant to understand every plot detail as she relates stories involving shopping in a supermarket, going to court, sitting on a mound in Croker’s Acres, and searching for cowslips in a field, bringing up such concepts as shame, torment, sin, pleasure, and guilt. The protagonist has suffered an unnamed trauma that has led to her becoming an outcast from society and virtually unable to communicate with others. In many ways, she is as surprised at what she’s saying as we are at what we are hearing. For example:

“imagine! . . . whole body like gone . . . just the mouth . . . lips . . . cheeks . . . jaws . . . never . . . what? . . . tongue? . . . yes . . . lips . . . cheeks . . . jaws . . . tongue . . . never still a second . . . mouth on fire . . . stream of words . . . in her ear . . . practically in her ear . . . not catching the half . . . not the quarter . . . no idea what she’s saying . . . imagine! . . no idea what she’s saying! . . and can’t stop . . . no stopping it . . . she who but a moment before . . . but a moment! . . could not make a sound . . . no sound of any kind . . . now can’t stop . . . imagine! . . can’t stop the stream . . . and the whole brain begging . . . something begging in the brain . . . begging the mouth to stop . . . pause a moment . . . if only for a moment . . . and no response . . . as if it hadn’t heard . . . or couldn’t . . . couldn’t pause a second . . . like maddened . . . all that together . . . straining to hear . . . piece it together . . . and the brain . . . raving away on its own . . . trying to make sense of it . . . or make it stop . . .”

O’Reilly, the director of all three parts of Beckett Briefs, has excised the second character, known as the Auditor, who in some renderings stands off to the side of the stage, hidden in the shadows. (In Thom’s case, the Auditor served as ASL translator.) So the focus is completely on the mouth in a dazzling performance by Street, a celebration of language and a potent reminder that life is to be lived, not merely watched or listened to, that there is more to our existence, even beyond theater.

Sarah Street, Roger Dominic Casey, and Kate Forbes examine their love triangle in Beckett’s Play (photo by Carol Rosegg)

In Endgame, a married couple named Nell and Nagg live in garbage cans. In Play, the middle section of Beckett Briefs, three people find themselves in urns in the afterlife, only their heads and the outlines of the vessels visible. A man (Roger Dominic Casey) appears to be doomed for eternity to be trapped between his wife (Kate Forbes) and his mistress (Street). They look straight ahead “undeviatingly,” the script says, and speak only when a spotlight shines on them.

Their initial exchange sets the stage of this forever love triangle.

W1: I said to him, Give her up. I swore by all I held most sacred —
W2: One morning as I was sitting stitching by the open window she burst in and flew at me. Give him up, she screamed, he’s mine. Her photographs were kind to her. Seeing her now for the first time full length in the flesh I understood why he preferred me.
M: We were not long together when she smelled the rat. Give up that whore, she said, or I’ll cut my throat — [Hiccup.] pardon — so help me God. I knew she could have no proof. So I told her I did not know what she was talking about.
W2: What are you talking about? I said, stitching away. Someone yours? Give up whom? I smell you off him, she screamed, he stinks of bitch.
W1: Though I had him dogged for months by a first-rate man, no shadow of proof was forthcoming. And there was no denying that he continued as . . . assiduous as ever. This, and his horror of the merely Platonic thing, made me sometimes wonder if I were not accusing him unjustly. Yes.
M: What have you to complain of? I said. Have I been neglecting you? How could we be together in the way we are if there were someone else? Loving her as I did, with all my heart, I could not but feel sorry for her.

It’s a tour de force for Casey (Aristocrats, CasablancaBox), Forbes (A Touch of the Poet, Rubicon), and Street (Molly Sweeney, Belfast Girls) as well as lighting designer Michael Gottlieb and sound designers M. Florian Staab and Ryan Rumery, who must be in perfect sync and not miss a beat as the spotlight switches from face to face in the snap of a finger, sometimes illuminating all three characters at the same time. Occasionally the light grows dim, signaling the actors to slow down. As with Not I, it is not a race, but it leaves the audience breathless, as if we had just finished running laps.

Everything slows down in the finale, Krapp’s Last Tape, but that doesn’t mean it is any easier to decipher. The set, by Irish Rep genius Charlie Corcoran, is a dark, messy room with overstuffed shelves, a desk with an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape player and several canisters on it, and a light fixture with a single bulb dangling overhead. The unkempt, disheveled Krapp (F. Murray Abraham) shuffles around the floor, struggles to open one of the drawers in the front, and takes out a banana, which he fondles before eating it, tossing the peel to his right. Beckett, a vaudeville fan, does indeed have Krapp slip on it. Krapp, occasionally letting out tired grunts of woe, then opens the second drawer, takes out another banana, peels it, and puts it in his mouth, being more careful this time with the peel. However, he decides not to eat the banana, instead putting it in his pocket.

An aging man (F. Murray Abraham) looks back at his younger self in Krapp’s Last Tape (photo by Carol Rosegg)

He goes in the back and returns with a large ledger that he looks through, reading out loud, “Box . . . thrree . . spool five. Spool! Spooool!” He finds the box he needs, starts playing the recording, then sweeps everything else off the desk and onto the floor. He has chosen to listen to a memory of his thirty-ninth birthday, his young self explaining, “Thirty-nine today, sound as a bell, apart from my old weakness, and intellectually I have now every reason to suspect at the . . . crest of the wave — or thereabouts. Celebrated the awful occasion, as in recent years, quietly at the Winehouse. Not a soul. Sat before the fire with closed eyes, separating the grain from the husks. Jotted down a few notes, on the back of an envelope. Good to be back in my den, in my old rags. Have just eaten I regret to say three bananas and only with difficulty refrained from a fourth. Fatal things for a man with my condition. Cut’em out! The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness round me I feel less alone. In a way. I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to . . . me. Krapp.”

It doesn’t appear that much has changed over the last three decades, Krapp still alone, still eating bananas, still surrounded by darkness. As the tape continues, Krapp scampers off to take a few gulps from a bottle of liquor, looks up the meaning of “viduity,” sings, and recalls a romantic evening on a lake. But the tape does not provide him with happiness; he barks out, “Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that’s all done with anyway.”

The autobiographical, poetic Krapp’s Last Tape was written in 1958 for Patrick Magee and has also been performed by Harold Pinter, Brian Dennehy, Michael Gambon, and, primarily, John Hurt, who brought it to the 2011 BAM Next Wave Festival. Oscar and Obie winner and Emmy and Grammy nominee Abraham (Good for Otto, It’s Only a Play), who is eighty-five, fully inhabits the role of a man long past the crest of the wave. The desk is near the front of the stage, so close to the audience that you can practically reach out and touch him, although you’re probably inclined to stay away from such a dour, sad, disheveled person.

All three plays, which total about seventy-five minutes, deal with time, memory, and the futility of language, as each character faces issues with communication yet delivers masterful articulation. Expertly directed by O’Reilly (Endgame, The Emperor Jones), Beckett Briefs is a vastly entertaining evening that immerses you in the unique, engaging, complex, and minimalistic worlds the playwright is renowned for, enigmatic works that are worth revisiting over and over again, offering new and fascinating insights as viewers age and understand them in ever-changing, profound ways.

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

PUNCH TO THE GUT: A CYMBELINE FOR OUR TIME

The pure and passionate love between Princess Imogen (Jennifer Lim) and Posthumus Leonatus (KK Moggie) is challenged in NAATCO’s Cymbeline (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

CYMBELINE
Lynn F. Angelson Theater
136 East Thirteenth St. between Third & Fourth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 15, $25-$55
https://www.naatco.org

“Context is everything,” according to a phrase attributed to twentieth-century sociologist Alvin Ward Gouldner, author of such books as The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology and Against Fragmentation: The Origins of Marxism and the Sociology of Intellectuals.

That expression was on my mind as I watched the National Asian American Theatre Co.’s (NAATCO) splendid production of William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, running at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater through February 15.

When I saw Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me at New York Theatre Workshop in 2018, it was the day that the Judiciary Committee had voted to advance the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for Supreme Court Justice to the Senate floor. The air was thick with that event, which Schreck shrewdly noted without getting specific, but the entertaining show soon had the audience laughing.

I saw Cymbeline the day I learned that President Donald J. Trump had signed an executive order declaring, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. . . . Agencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other messages.”

Andrea Thome’s modern-verse adaptation, which identifies itself as “all-femme, all–Asian American,” feels like a punch to the gut of that executive order, which essentially seeks to ban the word “gender” from the English language. It is particularly relevant in a work by Shakespeare, since original productions of his plays featured all-male casts because women were not permitted to perform onstage in Elizabethan times. , as it was considered unladylike and demeaning to their established role in Victorian society.

In Ancient Britain, King Cymbeline (Amy Hill) has banished Posthumus Leonatus (KK Moggie), a soldier who has wed his daughter, the princess Imogen (Jennifer Lim), without royal permission, ignoring their deep love for each other. The queen (Maria-Christina Oliveras) is determined that her son from a previous marriage, Cloten (Jeena Yi), will be Imogen’s husband, ensuring he will be the next ruler.

In exile in Rome, Posthumus boasts to a group of men from Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and France about his true love’s undying fidelity. The Frenchman tells the doubting Iachimo (Anna Ishida) of a conversation he had with Posthumus the night before in which they both were “lavishly praising our beloved mademoiselles back home; this gentleman at the time vouching (and vowing to defend it with his blood) that his lady was more lovely, virtuous, wise, chaste, faithful, praiseworthy and less temptable to seduction than any of the most extraordinary ladies in France.”

Iachimo takes that as a challenge and offers half his estate against Posthumus’s diamond ring, which belonged to Imogen’s mother, that he can seduce the princess and bring back absolute proof of his success. “The goodness of my mistress exceeds the depth of your vulgarity. I dare you to this match,” Posthumus says, agreeing to the bet and adding that they will duel when Iachimo fails.

Cymbeline features an “all-femme, all–Asian American” cast (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Even though Imogen boldly rejects Iachimo’s advances, he tricks Posthumus into believing that the princess did indeed surrender her honor, prompting Posthumus to write to Imogen advising her to meet him in the Welsh town of Milford Haven and commanding his loyal servant, Pisanio (Julyana Soelistyo), to kill her because of her adultery. “Do I seem to the world to lack humanity so much as this crime asks?” Pisanio says, questioning the order.

In addition, the foolish Cloten has decided that he too will head to Milford Haven, to kill Posthumus and “defile” Imogen on his path to becoming next in line for the throne.

Meanwhile, the Roman ambassador Caius Lucius (Purva Bedi) has threatened King Cymbeline with war if he does not pay tribute tax to Augustus Caesar; the queen has acquired poison from the doctor, Cornelius (Narea Kang), that she intends to use on Imogen; and on her way to Wales disguised as a boy named Fidele, Imogen encounters a father and his two boys, who live in a cave, surviving on sheer will. Little does she know that it is actually Belarius (Oliveras), who was wrongly banished by Cymbeline many years before and who absconded with Arviragus (Annie Fang) and Guiderius (Sarah Suzuki), the king’s two young sons and her half brothers, who the ruler believes are dead.

The numerous subplots all come together in a rousingly satisfying finale.

Cymbeline is a problematic play that is far from the Bard’s finest. It feels cobbled together with leftovers from such other works as Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, Richard III, Hamlet, and Othello. A dream sequence involving the god Jupiter (Soelistyo) is one of Shakespeare’s strangest, most awkward scenes. The dialogue lacks memorable, familiar lines. At nearly three hours (with intermission), it is too long. In New York City, the play has never made it to Broadway; the Public has presented it three times in its Shakespeare in the Park festival, in 1971, 1998, and, most recently, 2015, with Patrick Page as the king, Kate Burton as the queen and Belarius, Hamish Linklater as Posthumus and Cloten, Lily Rabe as Imogen, and Raúl Esparza as Iachomo.

But NAATCO, in partnership with Play On Shakespeare, has breathed new life into the show. Yi-Hsuan (Ant) Ma’s spare, often bare set is highlighted by a multipurpose large stretch of cloth that cleverly morphs from a bedsheet to royal drapery to a cave entrance, evoking what would be considered then women’s work, made by seamstresses. Mariko Ohigashi’s costumes feature lots of black leather and British and Roman finery that stand in contrast to the princess’s white gown. Yiyuan Li’s lighting keeps the audience, sitting on three sides of the action, visible through much of the show, as if we are all part of the kingdom, especially on the several occasions where the fourth wall is broken. Caroline Eng’s sound includes musical chimes that signal various changes.

The banished Belarius (Maria-Christina Oliveras) has raised Arviragus (Annie Fang) and Guiderius (Sarah Suzuki) in a cave in the woods (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The majority of the cast is exemplary, ably emitting Shakespeare’s poetic iambic pentameter even when Thome’s contemporary translation uses modern language, although Bard purists should not be too worried.

Here is one example of Thome’s (Pinkolandia, A Dozen Dreams) style, with the Folger Library version first, followed by the new adaptation:

Cloten: Was there ever man had such luck? When I
kissed the jack, upon an upcast to be hit away? I
had a hundred pound on ’t. And then a whoreson
jackanapes must take me up for swearing, as if I
borrowed mine oaths of him and might not spend
them at my pleasure.

Cloten: Has there ever been a man with luck like mine? I’d bowled my
ball, just kissed the jack . . . and then was hit away! I had bet a
hundred pounds on that game: and then that damned monkey
son of a whore had to scold me for swearing.

It is important to point out that the ensemble is identified as “all-femme,” not “all-woman”; in real life, not all of the actors use the pronouns “she/her.” In addition, being “all–Asian American” is a strong rejoinder to the Asian and immigrant hate so pervasive in America today and apparently supported by the current administration, which is also seeking to subvert the fourteenth amendment by ending birthright citizenship and to deport Dreamers. Director Stephen Brown-Fried (Misalliance, Awake and Sing!), who does a terrific job guiding the proceedings, does not emphasize any of that, instead letting it all unfurl in an organic and natural way, gender be damned.

“I see a man’s life is a tedious one,” Imogen says in a soliloquy in Act 3, Scene 6, in front of the cave in the Wales forest.

In this wonderful adaptation in these troubled times, that statement speaks volumes.

[There are several special postshow events scheduled: January 29 is AAPINH Night, with a talkback with the director, members of the cast, and the casting company; February 2 is Shakespeare Trivia Night after the matinee; and the February 6 performance will be followed by the panel discussion “Shakespeare in Translation: Body and Verse,” with Lue Douthit, Karen Shimakawa, and Thome.]

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

A SINKING SHIP: SHOW BOAT / A RIVER AT NYU SKIRBALL

Target Margin Theater’s adaptation of Show Boat continues at NYU Skirball through January 26 (photo by Greg Kessler)

SHOW/BOAT: A RIVER
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl.
Through January 26, $60
nyuskirball.org

In 1927, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat revolutionized musical theater, taking on such tough topics as racism and addiction while making the narrative central to the production. Hammerstein called it a “musical play,” and Richard Rodgers announced that it was “trailblazing.”

You wouldn’t know any of that from Target Margin Theater’s head-scratching adaptation, renamed Show/Boat: A River, that is confusing audiences at NYU Skirball through January 26 as part of the Under the Radar festival.

There’s something off from the very first moments. The lights are on throughout the theater as several actors take the spare stage, the only design a large white cloth in the back with two doorways cut out, one marked “White,” the other “Black,” seen backward, meaning we are inside, not outside, but of what there is no telling. They begin singing “Cotton Blossom,” explaining, “Listen / N-word — work on de Mississippi / Black people work while de white folks play — / Loadin’ up boats wid the bales of cotton, / Gittin’ no rest till the Judgment day.”

The use of “N-word” is like nails on a chalkboard, and the first act doesn’t get any better. Each cast member wears a beauty-pageant-like sash that identifies their character as either white or black, and since some actors play multiple roles without costume changes, it’s impossible to know who’s who; one character is even portrayed by two people at the same time. I tried to make sense of it all by reading Target Margin Theater founding artistic director David Herskovits’s script after seeing the show, but it refers to the speakers and singers by their real first names, not the characters’. I initially was trying to figure out who Ruby is, as she’s not listed in the program as a performer and is not the name of any character, major or minor, but realized that it refers to the woman playing Magnolia; my first guess was they changed actors but didn’t update the script, although it now looks like Ruby is the nickname for the actor.

The plot, or what I could make of it, does follow the original story line, based on Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel. It’s the late 1880s, and Capt. Andy Hawks (Steven Rattazzi) owns and operates the Cotton Blossom, a riverboat docked in Natchez, Mississippi, whose star entertainer is Julie LaVerne (Stephanie Weeks), who is married to leading man Steve Baker (Edwin Joseph). Julie is half Black but passing as white. Capt. Andy and his unpleasant wife, Parthy (J Molière), have a daughter, Magnolia (Rebbekah “Ruby Reb” Vega-Romero), who is a burgeoning star. Known as Nola, she hooks up with smarmy gambler Gaylord Ravenal (Philip Themio Stoddard). Villain Frank Schultz (Tẹmídayọ Amay) and his wife, Ellie May Chipley (Caitlin Nasema Cassidy), the toast of Cairo, Illinois, are supporting actors in the troupe. Joe (Alvin Crawford) is a dockworker whose wife, Queenie (Suzanne Darrell), is the ship’s cook.

Pete (Stoddard), an engineer, has the hots for Julie and had given her a brooch that she then gifted to Queenie. The jewelry becomes a key symbol, bringing up issues of race, infidelity, and ownership — of things and people.

“That’s hell of a thing to do — givin’ my presents to a n—,” Pete tells her. She responds, “Pete — if Steve ever knew about you sending me that brooch, I declare he’d just about beat you to death.” Pete then threatens, “Well, he better not try, and you better be pretty nice to me — or you’ll be mighty sorry.”

A few moments later, Frank asks Queenie, “Where you get that brooch you got on?” She answers simply, “It was given to me.” Gaylord demands, “Who give it to you?” and she says, “Ax me no questions ‘n’ ah’ll tell y’no lies!”

It’s often difficult to tell who’s who and what’s what in Show/Boat: A River (photo by Greg Kessler)

Show Boat debuted on Broadway in 1927, with revivals in 1932, 1948, 1983, and, most recently, 1994, with Rebecca Luker, Lonette McKee, Robert Morse, Elaine Stritch, John McMartin, and Cloris Leachman. The musical was made into a film in 1936 by James Whale, with Irene Dunne as Magnolia, Hattie McDaniel as Queenie, Helen Morgan as Julie, and Robeson, who was not in the original Broadway cast, as Joe; George Sidney’s 1951 movie, starring Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, Howard Keel, Joe E. Brown, Marge and Gower Champion, and Agnes Moorehead, earned Oscar nods for Best Color Cinematography and Best Scoring of a Musical Picture.

The first act of Herskovits’s two-and-a-half-hour Show/Boat: A River feels like an open rehearsal that still needs a lot of work. Early on, the “Show Boat parade” celebrates the upcoming performances on board the Cotton Blossom; during intermission, a very different kind of parade occurred, as dozens of audience members abandoned ship and left the theater. They did not return.

The second act is significantly better, although not necessarily anything to sing about. The sashes have been replaced by circular buttons, Kaye Voyce’s set adds numerous elements, Dina El-Aziz’s costumes get to shine, and Cha See’s lighting is not always annoyingly on, all combining to finally achieve important character and plot development. Perhaps more important, the score by musical directors Dionne McClain-Freeney (also vocal arranger) and Dan Schlosberg (also orchestrator) settles into a groove, performed by Nan-Cheng Chen on cello, Nicole DeMaio and Kristina Teuschler on reeds, Thomas Flippin on guitar, and Sam Zagnit on bass, the band visible in the pit where the actors occasionally take rests.

Among the highlights of Kern’s music and Hammerstein’s lyrics (he also wrote the book) are such songs as “Make Believe,” a duet between Stoddard and Vega-Romero; “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” which becomes Nola’s dazzling audition number; “In Dahomey,” a racist tune at the World’s Fair; the moving “Bill,” achingly delivered by Weeks; and the show’s standard-bearer and underlying theme, “Ol’ Man River,” made famous by Paul Robeson as Joe and here boldly performed by Crawford: “Dere’s an ol’ man called de Mississippi; / Dat’s de ol’ man dat I’d like to be! / What does he care if de world’s got troubles? / What does he care if de land ain’t free?” he asks, bellowing, “Ol’ Man River / Dat Ol’ Man River, / He mus’ know sumpin’ / But don’t say nuthin’, / He jes’ keeps rollin’, /
He keeps on rollin’ along. . . . Ah gits weary / An’ sick of tryin’, / Ah’m tired of livin’ / An’ scared of dyin’, / But ol’ Man River, / He jes’ keeps rollin’ along.”

Oh, and don’t wait for “After the Ball,” because it’s been left on the cutting-room floor.

It all adds up to too little, too late by a beloved Brooklyn-based company that has been staging unique versions of classic and new works for four decades. Sometimes, as in this case, the ship just sinks.

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

HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS: DEAD AS A DODO AT BARUCH PAC

A dodo and a young boy are best friends fighting to survive in Dead as a Dodo (photo by Richard Termine)

DEAD AS A DODO
Baruch PAC
55 Lexington Ave. between Twenty-Fourth & Twenty-Fifth Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 9, $55
utrfest.org
bpac.baruch.cuny.edu

“The race is over!” the Dodo suddenly calls out in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 masterpiece, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Its animal friends crowd around, pant, and ask, “But who has won?”

You might be surprised by who wins in Wakka Wakka’s Dead as a Dodo, an awe-inspiring, visually stunning parable about the potential end of the human race and the tenuous future of the planet, sensationally staged with puppets. Running through February 9 at Baruch PAC as part of the Under the Radar festival, the eighty-minute extravaganza plays off the old adage “as dead as a dodo,” which refers to a person, place, or thing that is either no longer alive or decidedly out of date. The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) itself was a flightless bird of Mauritius that was last spotted in 1662.

In the Bone Realm, a pair of skeletons, a female dodo and a young boy, are besties. The boy is searching for bones to replace his arm and leg, digging into the basalt for anything that will fit. “So I’m missing an arm / And my ribs are all broken / I’ve lost half my teeth / And my skull is cracked open,” he sings. “Yes, I’m falling apart / And I’m close to the end / Still I’ve gotta take heart / Because I’ve got a friend / And my friend is a dodo.”

The two are always on the lookout for the Bone King and his daughter, the conniving princess, who are determined to own every bone in the land and are prepared to rip them right off the boy if necessary. “After life is stripped away / All the flesh has decayed / What remains? / Nothing but the bones / Nothing but the bones,” the king chants with dastardly glee. “All the bones in the fields are mine / You can try to take ’em if you got the spine.”

The greedy Bone King wants to own it all in sensationally eerie Dead as a Dodo (photo by Erato Tzavara)

As the boy fears he is disappearing, he notices that the dodo has grown a new feather or two — indications of life. When the Bone King discovers the feathers as well, the Bone Doctor, a kind of Grim Reaper, commands, “It is a plague upon our kingdom. There is only one thing to do. . . . You, sire! — Must chop it up and throw it into the fiery waters of the River Styx!”

The boy and the dodo then set off on a dangerous journey into other realms, where they meet a scavenging demon, a chatty gondolieri, a giant glowing fish, devil goats, a woolly mammoth, and a scientist named Phinneas who believes that the resurgent dodo is a sign that “the Age of Shimmering Darkness and Fog is coming to an end.”

But no one knows what will happen if the dodo actually returns to the Living Realm, rising like a phoenix. “Ha! That is not the order of things,” the gondolieri argues. “The river only flows in one direction.”

The staging of Dead as a Dodo is a marvel of technology and DIY ingenuity. There are three layers of opaque black string curtains onto which Erato Tzavara’s projections and Daphne Agosin’s lighting lend the proceedings a breathtaking 3D atmosphere. Lei-Lei Bavoil, Alexandra Bråss, Andy Manjuck, Hanna Margrete Muir, Sigurd Rosenberg, Marie Skogvang Stork, Anna Soland, and Kirjan Waage, dressed in black sequined costumes that meld into the background except for their glitter, operate the puppets with great skill and more than a touch of jaw-dropping magic.

The set and costumes are by Wakka Wakka cofounding artistic directors Gwendolyn Warnock and Waage, who also wrote and directed the production; in addition, Waage designed the puppets, based on actual skeletons. Thor Gunnar Thorvaldsson’s music and soundscape, harvested from geodes and crystals and featuring bells and gongs, keep the audience immersed in the riveting narrative, which evokes the climate change, war, and greed that threaten the earth today.

The look and feel of the show were inspired by Tales from the Crypt, Dante’s Inferno, old Silly Symphonies cartoons, and the art of Hieronymus Bosch, a mix that relates to the company’s Bioeccentrism Manifesto, which states, “Life like art is hyperbolically weird, stupendous, openly ridiculous, momentary, rapid, flashy fleshy and loud,” words that can also describe Dead as a Dodo and such previous Wakka Wakka works as The Immortal Jellyfish Girl, Animal R.I.O.T., and Saga.

The show is also about our own fear of death. “When you vanish, will you forget everyone you love?” the basalt asks at the beginning. Shortly after that, the dodo pulls an alarm clock out of the rubble and it rings. “That’s just junk,” the boy says, ignoring the literal and figurative wake-up call, a warning cry to all of us that humanity is on the brink of extinction.

“What do you think happens when you disappear completely? Are you going to forget about me? Will I forget you?” the boy says to the dodo, continuing, “I don’t want to disappear. I’m not ready.”

Then again, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all.”

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

TO THE MOON AND BEYOND: LUNA LUNA AT THE SHED

“Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” features large-scale amusement-park installations by Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hockney, Arik Brauer, and many others (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

LUNA LUNA: FORGOTTEN FANTASY
The McCourt at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Through March 16, $25-$49
theshed.org
lunaluna.com
luna luna online slideshow

In the summer of 1987, a one-of-a-kind art-musement park delighted audiences in Hamburg, Germany. Curated by Viennese artist André Heller, it boasted contributions from more than thirty international artists, who Heller enticed with the following pitch: “‘Listen, you are constantly getting the greatest commissions, everyone wants your paintings or sculptures, but I am inviting you to take a trip back to your own childhood. You can design your very own amusement park, just as you think would be right today,’ and really without exception everyone answered by saying, sure, that’s a nice, pleasant challenge.”

The park opened for several months during a rainy European summer and was scheduled to travel to the Netherlands and San Diego, but the stock market crash of October 1987 and legal entanglements shelved that plan, and the works were eventually packed away in containers and stored in a Texas warehouse. In 2022, rapper Drake and his DreamCrew team bought the forty-four containers, sight unseen, put the surviving pieces back together, and opened “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” in Los Angeles, consisting of about half of the original attractions.

Visitors can enter Roy Lichtenstein’s Luna Luna Pavilion glass labyrinth (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Luna Luna” is now open at the Shed’s McCourt space in Hudson Yards through February 23, and it is a barrel of fun, for art lovers, amusement park fans, and just about anyone else willing to take a joyful and thoroughly entertaining trip back to their childhood — and the 1980s.

Although you can’t go on any of the rides because of their fragility and for safety reasons, you can marvel at the dazzling installations: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s white Ferris wheel, which rotates to Miles Davis’s “Tutu,” is decorated with familiar Basquiat visual tropes and such words and phrases as “Pornography,” “Jim Crow,” and “Skeezix.” Kenny Scharf’s chair swing ride has panels of his trademark cosmic characters, some of whom also hang out around the piece. Keith Haring’s carousel is populated by his unique stencil caricatures and silhouettes. Birds, fish, animals, and hands (the grune welt, pferdehand, nixe, wolfin) spin on Arik Brauer’s carousel.

You can wander into David Hockney’s Enchanted Tree, a shadowy silo with music by the Berlin Philharmonic; carefully navigate Roy Lichtenstein’s dark glass labyrinth to the sounds of Philip Glass; walk through Sonia Delaunay’s painted entrance archway and under Monika Gil’Sing’s twenty-eight flags; saunter along several large-scale horizontal tarp murals by Keith Haring; stop by Manfred Deix’s Palace of the Winds, an orchestra of butt blasts; and linger in Salvador Dalí’s geodesic Dalídom, a mirrored infinity room with ever-changing hues.

Unfortunately, you cannot test your romantic future (damage, madness, tenderness, magic, embrace, touch) with Rebecca Horn’s Love Thermometer, but you can renew your vows — or marry anyone, or anything, you’d like — in Heller’s Wedding Chapel, where you’ll receive a certificate and Polaroid of the ceremony. You can also dance and interact with Poncili Creación’s costumed performers and giant puppet people who pop up from time to time, ranging from an elephant trainer and her pachyderm to strange, tall creatures, as music by André 3000, Floating Points, Jamie xx, Daniel Wohl, and others waft over the space. (You can listen to a “Luna Luna” playlist here, with songs by Eric B. & Rakim, Kraftwerk, Madonna, Art of Noise, Talking Heads, Neneh Cherry, and others.)

Among the original installations that are not part of this revival are Erté’s Mystère Cagliostro, Gertie Fröhlich’s gingerbread booth, Jörg Immendorff’s and Wolfgang Herzig’s shooting galleries, Susanne Schmögner’s spiral-shaped labyrinth, Patrick Raynaud’s Playground, August Walla’s circus wagon, Günter Brus’s Universe of Crayons, Christian Ludwig Attersee’s boat swing ride, Jim Whiting’s Mechanical Theater, Heller’s Dream Station, and pavilions by Roland Topor, Hubert Aratym, and Georg Baselitz. You can find elements of Daniel Spoerri’s Crap Chancellery in a side room that documents some of the history of “Luna Luna,” with a wall of twenty of the moon paintings Heller asked the artists to make. A timeline details the complicated history of “Luna Luna,” with video of the restoration.

Be sure to visit the upstairs Butterfly Bar, where an overlook offers a sensational view of Scharf’s, Basquiat’s, and Brauer’s rides, which turn on one by one while the Philip Glass Ensemble’s “In the Upper Room: Dance II” booms through the hall and lights flash, unveiling an audiovisual sensation.

Moon paintings can be found in history room (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Art should come in unconventional guises and be brought to those who might not ordinarily seek it out in more predictable settings,” Heller, who is not affiliated with this reboot, said of the project.

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“Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” is a must-see adventure, filled with exciting art in unconventional guises for all ages, although it’s an especially poignant bit of time travel for Gen Xers who remember the glee and whimsy of a time before AIDS and addiction had ravaged the creators of New York’s downtown scene, before digital photography, cell phones, and email became always available in your pocket, when discovering new art wasn’t quite so easy and perhaps a lot more thrilling. Yet “Luna Luna” is much more than a journey into the past; it’s a vibrant presentation of art that can inspire today — and in the future.

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

SILENCE IS GOLDEN: PICO IYER AT ASIA SOCIETY

Who: Pico Iyer, William Green
What: Book launch and conversation
Where: Asia Society, 725 Park Ave. at Seventieth St.
When: Wednesday, January 22, $15, 6:30
Why: Pico Iyer dedicates his new book, Aflame: Learning from Silence (Riverhead, January 14, 2025, $30), to “the monks and nuns, in every tradition, who have sustained so many of us, visibly and invisibly, through so many lifetimes.” The Oxford-born Iyer, who has written such books as The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, and The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, will be at Asia Society on January 22 to launch Aflame, in conversation with William Green, author of Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World’s Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life. In the book, Iyer traces three decades of silent retreats at a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur as he faces the ups and downs of life, from glorious successes to personal tragedy. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has praised the work, offering, “Reading Aflame may help many to lead lives of greater compassion and deeper peace of mind.” Tickets for the event, which is copresented with the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA), are only $15. Below is an excerpt from chapter two.

—————————————————————————

The silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop; it’s active and thrumming, almost palpable. And part of its beauty—what deepens and extends it—is that it belongs to all of us. Every now and then I hear a car door slam, or movement in the communal kitchen, and I’m reminded, thrillingly, that this place isn’t outside the world, but hidden at its very heart.

In the solitude of my cell, I often feel closer to the people I care for than when they’re in the same room, reminded in the sharpest way of why I love them; in silence, all the unmet strangers across the property come to feel like friends, joined at the root. When we pass one another on the road, we say very little, but it’s all we don’t say that we share.

***

Coming out one afternoon into the singing stillness, I pass a woman, tall and blond, looking like she might be from the twenty‑fifth‑floor office in Midtown where my bosses await my essays. She smiles. “You’re Pico?”

“I am.”

“I’m Paula. I wrote you a letter last year to see if you could come speak to my class.”

She’s a novelist, I gather—complete with agent, good New York publisher, grant from the National Endowment for the Arts—and she teaches down the road, two hours to the south. She fled Christianity as a girl, growing up in Lutheran Minnesota, but now—well, now she’s been brought back into silence and a sense of warm community.

“Do you write while you’re here?” she asks.

“All I seem to do is write! But only for myself. This is the one place in life where I’m happy not to write in any public way.”

She smiles in recognition. The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing.

***

The others I pass along the way, or see in the shared kitchen, are not at all the solemn, stiff ones I might have expected. One greets me with a Buddhist bow, another with a Hindu namaste. On the cars outside the retreat‑house I read i brake for mushrooms, notice a fish that announces, darwin. We’re not joined by any doctrine, I realize, or mortal being or holy book; only by a silence that speaks for some universal intimation.

“What do you think of this?” an older man asks as we pass one another near a bench.

“Nothing,” I say, and he looks puzzled until he sees what I’m about.

“That’s the liberation, don’t you find?” I go on. “There’s nothing to think about other than oak tree and ocean. Nothing to smudge the wonder of . . .” and then I say no more.

We look out together at the tremble of light across the water.

THE HARRIET ZONE: LIFE ON AND OFF MARS

Who: Harriet Stubbs
What: City Vineyard Sessions
Where: City Vineyard at City Winery, 223 West St. at Pier 26
When: Tuesday, January 21, $22 in advance, $28 day of show, 7:30
Why: “There’s nothing like playing to my adopted hometown of New York; it’s electrifying,” Harriet Stubbs told twi-ny in a May 2024 interview. The British classical pianist, William Blake scholar, and Bowie aficionado was preparing for a show at Joe’s Pub, where she played her latest album, Living on Mars; the record includes Stubbs’s unique adaptations of such songs as David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and “Life on Mars,” 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. It all makes for an eclectic and unpredictable setlist.

Stubbs is an intoxicating pianist, performing in spectacular glittery outfits and exuding warmth and charm; Paul Cavalconte, the renowned DJ at New York’s classical radio station, WQXR (as well as WFUV and WNYC), calls it the Harriet Zone. On January 21, she’ll be at City Vineyard at City Winery, promising to play “a mix of Living on Mars and some core classical, with maybe a few surprises!” General admission tickets are $22 in advance and $28 at the door. Be prepared for a special, unusual evening of fabulous music, with a touch of magic.

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