twi-ny recommended events

MACBETH (AN UNDOING)

Liz Kettle portrays a mysterious narrator guiding audiences through a unique version of the Scottish play at TFNA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center (photo by Ellie Kurtz)

MACBETH (AN UNDOING)
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 4, $97-$132
www.tfana.org

Zinnie Harris pulls a thread from the Scottish play to unravel and reconstruct it in her unique and appealing revamp, Macbeth (an undoing).

The tinkering begins with the curtain; I can’t remember the last time I saw a curtain used at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. Here it’s like a tease, promising something different, and that’s just what writer-director Harris and the talented ensemble deliver.

The play, arguably William Shakespeare’s most malleable, usually begins with the three witches prognosticating Macbeth’s future, but Harris kicks things off with a theater hand named Carlin (Liz Kettle) telling a knock-knock joke. She knows precisely what the audience is there for. “Misery seekers — here they come. Eyes all nasty and randy for gore. You recognise yourself? Mouths open, tongues out. You’re all the same,” she says. “Death is what you want — blood, despair, the fall of man? It’ll be as you last saw it — but no matter, things fare better when they are played and played again. Never an end to your asking for more. And — what more do we have for your ghouls? Bare boards. Nothing much. If you’re looking for pyrotechnics, you’ll be disappointed — no thunder to speak of, no heath — no lightning, no rain — what will you do? No matter, you say — blood cold and unmoving — just give us the play! The play the play, of course we’re here to do the play.”

Macbeth (an undoing) is a stripped-down version of the tale of power and ambition. The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh production features a cast of ten actors turning the familiar story upside down and inside out; characters are excised, motivations flipped, and roles reversed on a makeshift set that is constantly being taken down and rebuilt. The central figure is a revamped Lady Macbeth (Nicole Cooper), who takes the reins early and never gives them up.

The basics of the narrative are there: A trio of witches (Emmanuella Cole, Star Penders, Kettle) tells war hero Macbeth (Adam Best) and his right-hand man, Banquo (James Robinson), that the former will become thane of Cawdor and then king and that the latter will be the father of kings. After King Duncan (Marc Mackinnon) indeed names him the new thane of Cawdor, Macbeth and his wife conspire to murder the ruler, who has come to their home to celebrate and spend the night. Macbeth’s rise leaves a trail of blood behind, along with a guilty conscience that overwhelms him.

If that sounds like the traditional Macbeth you’ve seen perhaps numerous times, well, Harris throws a lot of that tradition out the window and reimagines the narrative from a feminist angle, mostly with gritty success.

Lady Macbeth (Nicole Cooper) and her husband search for their sanity in Macbeth (an undoing) (photo by Hollis King)

The bloody soldier (Taqi Nazeer) who announces at the beginning, “Doubtful it stood,” has trouble getting the words out, so Carlin spurs him on. When he says they won the war, she asks the badly wounded man, “Aye, did you win?”

Macbeth is not the heroic figure we are used to seeing at the start of the play; instead, he’s indecisive and tentative, like a grounded bird. Upon learning of his possible future from the witches, he proclaims to Banquo, “I’m the thane of fucking Cawdor.” When Lady Macbeth removes a ladybird (the British term for a ladybug) from his sleeve, declaring it’s good luck, he sees it as “another strange soliciting”; a raven — a bird of prey — shrieks, and Macbeth wonders what he is going to wear for dinner. At the end of the scene, Carlin picks up the ladybird and puts it in a box, saving it to perhaps perform evil deeds later.

Carlin then becomes a bent-over servant who says a line that is usually spoken by the nobleman Lennox: “And the obscure bird clamoured outside the window the livelong night.” She adds, “And yet downstairs a party. Duncan couldn’t hear the screams of the birds over the sound of his own delight.” Duncan might not be able to hear the birds, but we can, courtesy of sound designer Pippa Murphy.

Lady Macduff (Cole) is given more prominence in Harris’s adaptation; she is pregnant and carrying on a torrid affair with Banquo. Her husband (Thierry Mabonga) is a cuckolded buffoon who is always in a hurry. When he tells Malcolm to pick up branches and Malcolm asks where they are, Macduff replies, “On the trees, you idiot. Where branches grow. Though god knows how you grew on the royal one.”

Lennox (Nazeer) and Ross (Laurie Scott), a messenger, seem to have emerged from a contemporary cocktail reception. At the celebration for King Duncan, a bird flies inside. “I don’t like birds,” Malcolm complains. “No matter – I’ll deal with it,” the determined Lady Macbeth says. “It makes a racket,” Lennox adds. “Perhaps Cawdor’s spirit coming to piss on the party — !” Ross concludes. While Shakespeare has Ross and Lady Macduff cousins, Harris changes it to Lady Macduff and Lady Macbeth. “Cousins, as you always remind me, the root and tree of our family are not as close as sisters,” Lady Macbeth opines.

The biggest change occurs in the second act, when Lady Macbeth essentially swaps roles with Macbeth, becoming the central figure, even taking over one of Macbeth’s most famous soliloquies. In this version, Lady Macbeth stares madness in the face as she recounts her numerous failed pregnancies and admits feeling confused about one of the play’s new fragments about her character. She asks the witches, “But even if I was given to remorse and grief, what would she fall down upon? For taking the options that a man would? For living in a life and place that was so brutal that power by any other means was impossible.”

Moments later, Macbeth wonders, “How comes it that all our children die?” Lady Macbeth laughs, looks at him, and responds, “So I am reduced to my infertility after all. Even by you. I thought I loved you.” She’s also reduced to her infertility by Harris, who teeters on the edge of undoing one of her major themes by blaming Lady Macbeth’s impending insanity on her inability to become a mother.

The party is just about over in feminist reimagining of Macbeth (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

Kettle (Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning, Attempts on Her Life) is a splendid host for the 155-minute evening (with intermission), smoothly transitioning among her three roles; I would have loved to see more of her as Carlin, our guide through a sometimes confusing reinterpretation by Harris (The Scent of Roses, The Duchess [of Malfi]) that is often exhilarating and occasionally awkward as she toys with classical tropes. Cooper’s (Coriolanus, Medea) Lady Macbeth is bold and strong, not about to play second fiddle to Best’s (Cyrano De Bergerac, The Beauty Queen of Leenane) duly tentative and jittery Macbeth. Mabonga (Everything Under the Sun, Last Dream on Earth) redefines Lady Macduff, while Penders (Aganeza Scrooge, SCOTS) provides comic relief while engenders sympathy as the not-ready-for-prime-time Malcolm.

Tom Piper’s fog-drenched minimalist set, with metal structures, wooden panels, and various pieces of furniture wheeled on and off, alternates between the present day and the distant past — yes, that’s a telephone and an electric lamp on Lady Macduff’s desk — and shabby-chic fun-house mirrors shift characters’ physical dimensions at certain angles. Alex Berry’s costumes maintain the dichotomy, highlighted by Lady Macduff’s dazzling red dress and a series of magically bloodstained white frocks. Oğuz Kaplangi provides atmospheric interstitial music.

Late in the show, Carlin says to Lady Macbeth, “Knock knock knock, open locks. And perhaps we do meet one more time. In a place where we talk about women helping each other. Of seeing each other as we are.” Lady Macbeth asks, “Why do you do this?” Carlin answers, “Because you always got us wrong.” Harris goes a long way to setting things right, although there are slip-ups.

The play concludes with another new fragment, this one incorporating a snippet of a famous quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as Harris wonders whether her new version has offended anyone, then thinks better of it as birdsong floats in the air. It’s a lovely ending to a tragic story.

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

TEETH

A group of Promise Keeper Girls vow to remain chaste until marriage in uproarious Teeth (photo by Chelcie Parry)

TEETH
Playwrights Horizons, Mainstage Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 28, $125-$145
www.playwrightshorizons.org

As if the world isn’t screwed up enough, now we have to be on the lookout for toothy genitalia.

In the 2013 book The Moral Panics of Sexuality, Michelle Ashley Gohr, in the chapter “Do I Have Something in My Teeth? Vagina Dentata and Its Manifestations within Popular Culture,” writes, “Although it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the seemingly endless tirade of moral and political outrage, corporate greed, sex scandals, gun violence, and more, these societal crises have not simply spontaneously arisen in response to a mere few contemporary problems. Rather, today’s moral panics represent an aggregate of borrowed histories layered on for centuries upon centuries. . . . One well known anxiety, the fear of female sexuality, signifies one such displaced anxiety that has taken a displaced form through the little known yet subtly prevalent myth of vagina dentata. While this myth or its basic retellings may not have an obvious place in everyday language or discourse (and few are aware of the myth’s manifestations in current U.S. culture), it nevertheless functions as a powerful force in contemporary conversations about women’s sexuality and the villainization of female desire.”

Gohr, an Arizona State University librarian and faculty associate, then goes on to discuss Michael Lichtenstein’s 2007 award-winning horror comedy Teeth, in which a teenage virgin finds out the hard way that she has teeth in her vagina.

Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs have now adapted the film into the ravenously funny and bloody musical Teeth, continuing at Playwrights Horizons through April 28.

The story takes place in the present day in New Testament Village, where Pastor Bill O’Keefe (Steven Pasquale) runs a congregation of high school students called Promise Keeper Girls, who have vowed to remain chaste until marriage, along with several celibate boys. In his opening livestreamed homily about Adam and Eve and the serpent and the apple, he declares, “Woman? Where is your fig leaf? Woman? Where is your shame? I’m gonna ask that again! WOMAN? WHERE IS YOUR FIG LEAF? WOMAN? WHERE IS YOUR SHAME?!?”

He is decrying Amy Sue Pearson, a pregnant teenager he says “let the Enemy corrupt her mind!” He has charged his cultlike team of followers with the responsibility of “carrying the banner for an especially awesome message of female empowerment through sexual purity!,” but he feels they have failed their mission by not protecting Amy Sue. He rails against the boys and the girls, warning them that the same thing better not happen to them. Promise Keeper Girls leader Dawn, the pastor’s stepdaughter, falls right in line, declaring, “I say Promise Keeper Girls can’t be about feeling good! I say Promise Keeper Girls have to be about being good!!!”

A trio of Truthseekers vow to fight for masculinity in horror comedy musical at Playwrights Horizons (photo by Chelcie Parry)

Dawn and the other PKGs, Becky (Courtney Bassett), Fiona (Phoenix Best), Trisha (Jenna Rose Husli), Rachael (Lexi Rhoades), Stephanie (Wren Rivera), and Keke (Helen J Shen) assure Pastor Bill that they will not allow any boy to pound their precious gift, and Tobey (Jason Gotay) and Ryan (Jared Loftin) swear they will do no pounding. But Brad (Will Connolly), the pastor’s son, is having none of it. A shy, withdrawn gamer, Brad thinks the church is a sham. He turns instead to a secret group known as the Truthseekers, led by a mysterious disembodied voice called Godfather, as if the exact opposite of the pastor.

“There’s a pain all men carry, Truthseekers,” Godfather says to Brad and a pair of fellow Truthseekers (Gotay and Loftin) wearing black VR headsets. “Some of us carry it in our shoulders. Some in our stomachs. Some of us even carry it in our balls — in our nutsacks. It’s a pain we’ve become numb to in this era of ‘dismantling the patriarchy.’ An era where our every word is ‘mansplaining.’ An era where any male who expresses sexual desire gets labeled a predator or an ‘incel.’ We can’t even sit on a bloody train without being ‘manspreaders’ for Christ’s sakes! Because we take up too much space!” Godfather proclaims that their enemy is the feminocracy — but to learn how to fight back, the trio must access Truthseeker Premium.

As Brad delves further into the Truthseekers and Dawn and Tobey consider going all the way, the battle lines are drawn and blood is spilled from the hungry choppers that inhabit Dawn’s yearning vulva.

Pastor Bill O’Keefe (Steven Pasquale) has his hands full as he tries to save teenage girls from being pounded between their thighs (photo by Chelcie Parry)

Jacobs (POP!, Harmony, Kansas) and Jackson (A Strange Loop, White Girl in Danger) collaborated on the terrific book, which pays homage to Little Shop of Horrors — one scene involving a gynecologist (Pasquale) harkens back to Little Shop’s dentist dilemma — while tackling religious obsession, female empowerment, and sexual desire. Jacobs composed the rousing score, which crosses genres, while Jackson wrote the lyrics to such hilarious songs as “Precious Gift,” “Between Her Thighs,” “Modest Is Hottest,” “According to the Wiki,” and “Take Me Down.” Kris Kukul’s expert orchestrations are horror-movie worthy, performed by music director and conductor Patrick Sulken and Randy Cohen on keyboards, John Putnam and Liz Faure on guitar, Steve Count on bass, Melissa Tong on violin, and Marques Walles on drums and percussion.

It’s hard to beat such quatrains as “Press our flesh together / Bless me as her groom / Watch me be reborn as I / Fertilize her womb” and “As promise keeper girls, we’re soldiers in battle / With this ring we sally forth to win the war / His word is very clear, he gave us two choices / Take your pick — are you a virgin or a whore?”

Obie-winning director Sarah Benson (Fairview, In the Blood, Samara) fills nearly every moment with wild and woolly fun, culminating in an orgiastic finale that reverberates throughout the theater. Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography rocks out to Jacobs’s music on Adam Rigg’s two-level set, which always has a cross hanging in the back, often set aglow as if delivering messages from above (and below). Enver Chakartash’s costumes range from hoodies and high school jackets to leather and lace, with prominent heavenly whites and demonic reds. Jane Cox and Stacey Derosier’s lighting and Palmer Hefferan’s sound envelop the audience, while Jeremy Chernick’s tongue-in-cheek special effects up the ante.

The ensemble cast has a field day incorporating tropes from horror films and coming-of-age dramas. The set can barely contain Pasquale (The Light in the Piazza, American Son), who infuses the pastor with otherworldly aspirations. Louis (White Girl in Danger, Soft Power) beautifully plays Dawn, who undergoes quite a metamorphosis, while Connolly (Once, Clueless: The Musical) is wonderfully mopey as the disgruntled Brad.

Jackson, who won the Pulitzer and two Tonys for his first show, the semiautobiographical A Strange Loop, might have slipped a bit with his follow-up, the disjointed and overwrought White Girl in Danger, but he gets right back on track with Teeth, a precious gift with plenty of bite.

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

GRIEF HOTEL

Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert) shares her concept for a new kind of place to seek healing in Grief Hotel (photo © Maria Baranova)

GRIEF HOTEL
The Shiva Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St.
Monday – Saturday through April 27, $57.50
212-539-8500
publictheater.org
www.clubbedthumb.org

Don’t let the title of Clubbed Thumb’s Grief Hotel scare you off; the play, which has returned to the Public Theater after a 2023 Summerworks presentation, is much more than yet another show about death and healing. Instead, it’s a uniquely entertaining, thought-provoking, and darkly funny exploration of how humans deal with loneliness, lack of connection, and loss, of many kinds, from friends and lovers to jobs and homes. The night I went, the audience was packed with a college drama class of mostly female-identifying and nonbinary students who were loving every minute of it, a few calling out, snapping, and sharing their enjoyment, which was infectious.

A collaboration with New Georges, Grief Hotel is structured around a proposal by Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert), who, for an assignment from a hotel chain, has made a picture book that encourages young people to come to what she calls the grief hotel, inspired by the case of Penelope, whose baby suffered a horrific injury. A fussy woman who looks like an old-fashioned librarian, Aunt Bobbi explains, “You can go there if your sibling gets deathly sick, or if you find out that the person you love doesn’t love you back, or if you commit manslaughter, et cet-ra. And so everything there — okay, so these are just my guesses — everything there is meant to heal you and this all has to be based on science. So the colors of the walls. Here’s a picture of green. The chairs. Some crystals. The beds. You can go on a walk. Or not. You have activities to heal you. Little. Animals.”

The one-room set, by Kimie Nishikawa of the dots collective, is influenced by the interior pictures of American photographer Todd Hido and echoes Aunt Bobbi’s description: It’s an obtuse trapezoid with three plainly papered walls, one open doorway, a window covered by a long shade, ordinary carpeting, a comfy chair, a floor lamp, and a small table. The room is slanted, larger stage left than right, where it is like a corner for time-outs. (At several points, characters stand still, facing the wall, punishing themselves by briefly hiding from the world.)

The white fabric ceiling helps produce compelling shadows of the characters that seem to live and breathe on their own, like doppelgängers or looming souls, furthering the mysteries of the narrative. The stunning lighting is by Masha Tsimring, with suburban-style costumes by Mel Ng and adept sound and music by Jordan McCree.

Aunt Bobbi continues, “There’s no alcohol at the grief hotel and there’s no Instagram. It really is getting better the Hard Way but it’s also an exclusive luxury bespoke experience. Beaucoup beaucoup expensive. Anyway, so this is a picture of Penelope feeling better because after her good bespoke activities and foods and all that she is ah. Healed. And other people paid for it. So that’s my creative expression.” The word “bespoke” is used numerous times throughout the play, referring to the “custom-made” experience of each person’s life.

Em (Nadine Malouf) and Winn (Ana Nogueira) explore their unique relationship in Clubbed Thumb’s Grief Hotel (photo © Maria Baranova)

The liminal space is populated by a half-dozen individuals who are often not at the same location but communicating over the phone or online; dialogue overlaps and intersects so it’s not always immediately clear when two or more people are actually physically together, as if we’re eavesdropping on more than one conversation at a time. For example, Aunt Bobbi, reading from her proposal, says that the name grief hotel “sounds a little sad.” Asher (Bruce McKenzie), texting Winn (Ana Nogueira), states as if in response to Aunt Bobbi, “Not cool.”

Winn, who describes herself as “a fundamentally unemotional person,” lives with the nonbinary Teresa (Susannah Perkins) but becomes interested in Asher, an older married man she has met on dating apps. Em (Nadine Malouf), Winn’s constantly perturbed college lover, is now with Rohit (Naren Weiss), a man who prefers life to be uncomplicated although he is afraid of death.

“I just want to bleed from my face until I die,” Em tells Winn. “I’m panicked about mortality actually. Incredibly panicked,” Rohit says to Aunt Bobbi.

The characters discuss love and sex, work and death, empty malls and AI, and queerness and sleeping through earthquakes over the course of eighty thoroughly charming and stimulating minutes. You’ll find yourself rooting for Winn and Asher to hook up, Em to be kind to Rohit (and herself), Teresa to be treated fairly by Winn, and Aunt Bobbi to keep sharing her unique impressions of the human condition.

Meanwhile, a horrific accidental death from twenty years before hovers over the sudden disappearance of an old high school friend, Stanley Chi — whose last name means “vital energy,” something all the characters could use.

Winn (Ana Nogueira) and Asher (Bruce McKenzie) contemplate what kind of relationship they might have, if any (photo © Maria Baranova)

Liza Birkenmeier’s (Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, F*ck7thGrade) dialogue crackles with ingenuity and wit as the plot continually surprises; the story is based on a real plan she offered in an ideation session for an innovation agency. Director Tara Ahmadinejad (Lunch Bunch, Karen, I Said) masterfully handles the distinct characters in the tight quarters, as if they’re in a sort of bardo, weighing their future against their nostalgic past.

The wonderful cast is led by Nogueira (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Which Way to the Stage), whose Winn is afraid to face what she feels deep inside. McKenzie (STET, White Noise) has an offbeat charm as a famous person in search of privacy, his dry delivery yearning for things to be simpler than they are. Obie winner Malouf (The School for Scandal, A Bright Room Called Day) is a powder keg as Em, who is filled with rage that hides her insecurities. Weiss (Over Here, Letters of Suresh) is sweetly innocent as Rohit, a well-meaning man who walks around with his head in the clouds.

Obie winner Perkins (The Wolves, The Good John Proctor) excels as Teresa, who is the most sensible one of the group. “It’s damp in here and I’m worried it’s cognitively damaging,” they opine. And Blommaert (Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, 4000 Miles) has a ball with the pleasantly persnickety Aunt Bobbi, who shares all the right buzzwords — sustainability, wellness, intimacy, holistic well-being, community, empowerment, body-positivity, ethically sourced food origin stories — as she seeks to heal those in need of support.

Early on, Rohit lets Em know that he’s considering doing a cleanse. Later, after Rohit asks if she believes in any sort of god, Em replies, “My parents got an exorcism on my house,” a rather extreme cleanse. Grief Hotel requires no such cleansing.

In her proposal to the hotel chain, Aunt Bobbi offers, “You might wanna change that name because it doesn’t exactly sound delightful.” But as everyone declares in the stirring participatory finale, “Lord only knows where the road’s gonna go (go!).” In this case, the road goes to the delightful Grief Hotel at the Public’s Shiva Theater.

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

TRAVELS

James Harrison Monaco’s Travels keeps sharing stories at Ars Nova through April 20 (photo by Ben Arons)

TRAVELS
Ars Nova
511 West 54th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 20, name your price (suggested $25-$35)
212-352-3101
arsnovanyc.com

James Harrison Monaco takes audiences on a poignant and entertaining audiovisual journey in Travels, continuing at Ars Nova through April 20. The ninety-minute show, which Monaco calls “a sonic narrative collection,” is an intimate multimedia trip comprising eight tales that venture from Southern California, Cairo, Zurich, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic to Switzerland, Turkey, Iran, Mexico, and Bay Ridge.

“All of the stories we are about to tell you tonight, to a certain extent the people who first told me these stories have given me permission to tell versions of them now to you,” Monaco explains early on. “I’m not sure I’m the best person to be telling these stories, but I also know I love these stories deeply. And I’ve invited some of my favorite storytellers and musicians to help me understand and tell these stories.”

Each anecdote is related in the first person by Monaco, Ashley De La Rosa, El Beh, or Mehry Eslaminia — or a combination of them — spoken in dialogue or sung. Multi-instrumentalist John Murchison accompanies them on the bass, oud, or qanun. When Monaco, De La Rosa, El Beh, and Eslaminia are not sharing a yarn, they contribute heavy beats and dance loops on electronics (there are several laptops on a central table) or manipulate live images shown on a small wall to the left.

Meanwhile, abstract shapes and recognizable forms are projected on a rear screen and spill out above the stage, and chasing lights in LED tubes shoot across the sides of the theater in emotionally tinged colors. (The music and lights are already pulsating as the crowd enters, as if preparing for a rave.) The music supervision is by Or Matias, with set design by Diggle, appealing costumes by Sarita Fellows, lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, sound by Nick Kourtides, and projections by Stefania Bulbarella.

Ashley De La Rosa is one of four storytellers and a musician in James Harrison Monaco’s Travels (photo by Ben Arons)

The first story, “Sa’eed,” is about a chemist from a porcelain factory in Cairo who is now a Lyft driver in Southern California. They bond over tiles. Monaco gushes, “Now, you need to understand that I fucking love porcelain more than any other material on this earth – I made a whole other full length show about this [Paulownia], so I won’t talk too much about it here, but we started talking passionately about this magical form of ceramic.” Thus, the floor and walls of Diggle’s set are made of black tile squares.

Monaco, who is also a professional translator, occasionally speaks in different languages as he intersperses elements from his personal life, often involving romantic breakups. We learn about the complicated relationship between landscaper/school bus driver Thomas, Gerhard, and Leopoldo. He investigates the strange cabaret visa in Switzerland primarily affecting strippers and men coming from outside the EU seeking pleasure. He visits Guanajuato, Mexico, where he encounters Aurora and Sofia, bar-hopping teachers who introduce him to narcocorrido music as they discuss food poisoning, the phases of love, and the mystery of life.

Half of the show is about Monaco’s friend known simply as R. They meet at a dinner party on the Upper West Side, where they bond over literature. A journalist, R’s adventures include prison, seeking asylum, and Persian translations of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Travels is about the stories we tell, who gets to tell them, and how we tell them. It doesn’t matter how true they in fact might be, since in many cases it’s Monaco, or one of his three surrogates, relating a story that was told to him by strangers who, through storytelling, seemingly become friends. The show is affectionately directed by Andrew Scoville in a way that makes us all feel like friends by the end — after which we will go out and tell stories about Travels, perhaps recommending it to other friends.

El Beh (Bark of Millions), De La Rosa (Mean Girls, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical), Eslaminia (1776), and Monaco (The Conversationalists) are warm and engaging, making connections with the crowd, especially when they venture into the audience, who are seated either in swivel chairs or, up front, on large, comfortable couches. Murchison (Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812; Oratorio for Living Things) is a wizard with his numerous instruments.

At one point Monaco notes upon a surprising revelation from R, “I recall holding eye contact with him in this moment. It would be rude of me to ask directly more of this story; it wasn’t my business — his story clearly involved a lot of pain. You could see that in his eyes. And yet, there was something in our eye contact, where he was aware that there was a great story he could tell. I couldn’t ask about it directly; that would be rude.” But soon R is off and running, beginning, “This is an interesting story. . . .”

During the Mexican teachers tale, Aurora asks Monaco, “All right, who are you? What’s your story?” and then states, “Everybody travels.”

Using travel as the thread, Monaco tells us his story while making us consider our own.

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

TICKET ALERT: IRONWEED — AN EVENING OF ART & HUMANITY

Mark Ruffalo will be joined by Jessica Hecht for reading and discussion about upcoming stage production of Ironweed and the unhoused crisis (photo by Victoria Will)

Who: Mark Ruffalo, Jessica Hecht, Vinson Cunningham
What: Play reading and discussion
Where: BAM Strong, Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St.
When: Tickets on sale Thursday, April 18, $35+, 1:00; show is Friday, May 17, 7:30
Why: “Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods.” So begins Ironweed, the third of eight books in William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle. The 1983 novel earned the Albany native the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie four years later by Hector Babenco starring Oscar nominees Jack Nicholson as Francis and Meryl Streep as Helen Archer, a homeless couple just trying to make it to the next day.

The story is now being told in a new play, along with an all-star audio recording of the drama, directed by Jodie Markell. On April 18 at 1:00, tickets go on sale for “Ironweed: An Evening of Art & Humanity,” which consists of a staged reading of several scenes from the play, with Mark Ruffalo and Jessica Hecht as the couple, followed by a discussion with the actors and experts on the unhoused crisis, moderated by Vinson Cunningham. The audio recording features Ruffalo, Hecht, Norbert Leo Butz, Kristine Nielsen, John Magaro, Michael Potts, David Rysdahl, Frank Wood, Katie Erbe, and others, the ninety-six-year-old Kennedy as narrator, songs by Tom Waits, and an original score by Tamar-kali.

Ruffalo is on the board of the Solutions Project, which “funds and amplifies climate justice solutions created by Black, Indigenous, immigrant, women, and communities of color building an equitable world.” Hecht is the cofounder of the Campfire Project, which “promotes arts-based wellness in refugee spaces and empowers refugees to step into the spotlight, explore their creativity, and refocus on their humanity,” and she is on the board of Projects with Care, an organization that “works closely with housing and social service agencies in New York City to coordinate need-based initiatives for families who need a helping hand.”

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

SICKS BY JOHN WATERS: POLYESTER

Francine Fishpaw (Divine) faces a series of suburban dilemmas in John Waters’s odoriferous Polyester

POLYESTER (John Waters, 1981)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, April 19, and Saturday, April 20, midnight
Series continues through April 27
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Camp champ John Waters’s crudely rambunctious cult classic suburban satire Polyester, which underwent a 4K restoration in 2019, follows the misadventures of the Job-like Francine Fishpaw, ravishingly portrayed by drag queen extraordinaire Divine. Her God-fearing life takes a bitter turn when she catches her nasty, demanding husband, porn purveyor Elmer (David Samson), with his sexpot secretary, Sandra Sullivan (Mink Stole). Her status in the community, so precious to her, is ruined as she becomes an alcoholic, unable to rein in her wildly promiscuous daughter, Lu-Lu (Mary Garlington) — who has the hots for bad boy Bo-Bo Belsinger, played by Dead Boys frontman Stiv Bators!! — or her inhalant-abusing son, Baltimore Foot Stomper Dexter Fishpaw (Ken King).

She also receives no emotional or financial support from her skunk of a mother, La Rue (Joni Ruth White). The only one who stands by her is her ultra-strange, simple-minded bestie, the Baby Jane-like although kindhearted Cuddles Kovinsky (Edith Massey), but she finds a glimmer of hope in a handsome hunk of a he-man (Hollywood heartthrob Tab Hunter!!) who tantalizingly keeps showing up on her radar in a flashy white sports car, like Suzanne Somers does to Richard Dreyfuss in American Graffiti.

Francine (Divine) falls for the hunky Todd (Tab Hunter) in Polyester

When the Douglas Sirk-inspired Polyester premiered in May 1981 at the old Waverly, which became the IFC in 2005, it was shown in Odorama — each moviegoer was given a scratch-and-sniff card of ten smells that were signaled by the corresponding number blinking on the screen. (I unfortunately still remember number nine all too well.) It’s not just a gimmick; in the movie, Francine is constantly sniffing around like an animal, though she is not so much hunting prey as being prey. The acting is about as over the top as it gets and the editing and camerawork DIY sloppy as writer, producer, and director Waters, who had previously made such films as Pink Flamingos and Female Troubles and would go on to make Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, and Hairspray, addresses such issues as pornography, abortion, religion, addiction, marriage, class, fat shaming, parenting, and the movies themselves with a brash sense of humor that can never go too low.

Baltimore native Waters fills the film, his first major hit, with his usual Dreamlanders cast of oddball actors; in addition to Divine, Massey, and Stole, you’ll find Susan Lowe, Cookie Mueller, George Hulse, Mary Vivian Pearce, Sharon Niesp, Jean Hill, George Figgs, and Marina Melin in small roles. The score features a trio of songs — Hunter sings the title track, written by Chris Stein and Debbie Harry of Blondie, while Bill Murray warbles Harry and Michael Kamen’s “The Best Thing.” More than forty years later, Polyester is still like nothing you’ve ever seen before, a wacky work that established Waters in popular culture as a unique auteur with his own unique cinematic language. The film is screening April 19 and 20 — in Odorama — at midnight in the IFC Center series “Sicks by John Waters,” which concludes April 26-27 with Multiple Maniacs.

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

WORD. SOUND. POWER. 2024 — RHYTHM IS RHYTHM

Who: MC Baba Israel, Hetep BarBoy, Squala Orphan, JSWISS, KUMBAYA, DJ Reborn
What: Word. Sound. Power. 2024: SOUND — Rhythm Is Rhythm
Where: BAM Fisher, Fishman Space, 321 Ashland Pl.
When: Friday, April 19, and Saturday, April 20, $25, 7:30
Why: In past years, BAM’s annual “Word. Sound. Power.” showcase of hip-hop and spoken-word artists has featured such performers as Helixx C. Armageddon, Pri the Honey Dark, Silent Knight, Peggy Robles-Alvarado, Jade Charon, Nejma Nefertiti, Okai, Dizzy SenZe, and others. The 2024 iteration, “SOUND — Rhythm Is Rhythm,” is taking place at the Fishman Space April 19 and 20, with an impressive lineup that includes host, cocurator, and director MC Baba Israel, Hetep BarBoy with Squala Orphan, Kumbaya, JSWISS, and DJ Reborn, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary.

“Hip-hop embodies an ongoing dialogue between the beat and the community. Sometimes, it’s the rhyme that answers back, while other times, it’s the body that continues the discussion,” event cocurator and BAM education manager Mikal Amin Lee said in a statement. “This year, we aim to spotlight the dynamic conversation between beats and rhymes, in the spirit of the Last Poets, the block, and the Cipher. Whether expressed through the ones or the mic, the essence remains the same: rhythm is rhythm.” The seventy-minute live performance will be followed by a twenty-minute Q&A with the artists.

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