Željko Ivanek and Sarah Steele make a powerful team in Greg Pierce’s beautifully done SLOWGIRL (photo by Erin Baiano)
Claire Tow Theater
LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater
150 West 65th St.
Extended through August 5, $20
www.lct.org
Lincoln Center has inaugurated its new low-price, 112-seat Claire Tow Theater, which sits above the Vivian Beaumont and Mitzi E. Newhouse, with the world premiere of Greg Pierce’s wonderful two-character Slowgirl. After being blamed for a high school tragedy back home, seventeen-year-old Becky (Sarah Steele) is sent off to spend a few days with her reclusive uncle Sterling (Željko Ivanek), a divorced lawyer who has been living by himself in a shack in the jungles of Costa Rica for nine years. Whereas Becky is outgoing and seems to never be able to shut up and relax, Sterling chooses his words far more carefully, as if each one pains him to say out loud, while wincing at Becky’s openness and questionable language. The two very different people eventually bond over smoothies and iguanas as Becky talks about what happened to her somewhat off classmate known as Slowgirl, who was seriously injured at a graduation party, and Sterling discusses the events that ultimately led him into the jungle.
The reclusive Sterling (Željko Ivanek) is forced to face some dark secrets in SLOWGIRL (photo by Erin Baiano)
Emmy winner and multiple Tony nominee Ivanek, most well known for recurring roles on such television series as Homicide, Damages, and Oz in addition to stage appearances in such shows as The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial and Brighton Beach Memoirs, is mesmerizing as Sterling, a pent-up bundle of nerves who can barely get the words out of his mouth, while Steele (All-American, Russian Transport) is delightful as Becky, a fast-talking teen with no filter, spitting out whatever’s on her mind. Rachel Hauck’s main set, Sterling’s open-air shack, rises at one point to reveal a labyrinth Sterling built to help him silently concentrate and focus, something Becky seems incapable of doing. Leah Gelpe’s sound design includes animal and bird noises that make the audience feel like they’re in the middle of the jungle, while Anne Kauffman’s (This Wide Night, Thugs) direction seamlessly weaves the characters and story together. Pierce (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) has written a compelling, intelligent, splendidly nuanced hundred-minute drama that is filled with small surprises and little touches that serve as a terrific introduction to Lincoln Center’s intimate new theater, which is dedicated to works by emerging playwrights, directors, and designers, with tickets for all productions only $20.
Director Fritz Lang and screenwriter Dudley Nichols’s adaptation of Jean Renoir’s 1931 La Chienne, based on the novel by Georges de La Fouchardière, is a transplanted German street film moved to New York City. Edward G. Robinson stars as Christopher Cross, one of the all-time-great saps in the history of cinema. A henpecked cashier at a large clothing store where he has just been given his twenty-five-year gold watch, Cross instantly falls in love with a floozy he meets on a rainy night, Kitty March (Joan Bennett), who is soon conspiring with her sleazy boyfriend, Johnny (Dan Duryea), to bilk Cross, thinking that he is a wealthy painter whose canvases go for upwards of fifty grand apiece. Meanwhile, Cross continues to think that Kitty is a good girl who will marry him if he were free. But as Chris’s suspicions about Johnny grow, so does the tension, leading to a classic noir finale. Filmed on Hollywood sets designed to resemble Greenwich Village and Brooklyn, Scarlet Street is a dark, somber psychological thriller built around a mark and a femme fatale, reminiscent of Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 tale The Blue Angel, in which Emil Jannings is willing to sacrifice everything for Marlene Dietrich. Robinson, so good at playing tough gangsters, shows a surprisingly vulnerable, tender side as Cross, who refuses to see the truth staring him in the face, just as his paintings lack proper perspective. Duryea has a field day as Johnny, while Bennett is appropriately shady as the deceitful moll. Scarlet Street is screening July 22-23 with John Farrow’s 1948 thriller, The Big Clock, starring Charles Laughton and Ray Milland, as part of Film Forum’s Universal 100, a wide-ranging celebration of the studio’s centennial that continues with such other double features as Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows, James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein and Edgar G. Ullmer’s The Black Cat, and Stanley Donen’s Charade and Michael Gordon’s Pillow Talk.
Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to his 2005 hit Batman Begins is one of the most brilliant superhero films ever made. Christian Bale is back as billionaire bachelor Bruce Wayne, who spends his evenings fighting crime in Gotham City, which is under siege, victim to a brutal crime spree led by the vicious Joker (Heath Ledger in a massive, Oscar-winning performance). As the madman with the wild hair and evil clown face starts knocking off public officials, mob bosses, ordinary citizens, and even his own minions, Wayne is also beset by the blossoming relationship between Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhall), the woman he loves and who knows his secret, and the new DA, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who has come into his high-profile job with both arms swinging, determined to make Gotham City safe. The Bat Man is joined once again by his faithful butler, Alfred (Michael Caine), Wayne Industries exec Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), and police lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman); the film also features Anthony Michael Hall as a television talk-show host who finds himself in danger, Eric Roberts as a smooth-talking gangster, and Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow in a brief cameo. The Dark Knight is a carefully constructed tale of good and evil, love and death, and everything in between, working as both a thrilling action movie as well as a psychoanalytic examination of what lurks deep in the soul. Although there are special effects aplenty, it is primarily a very intimate, personal film about one man’s tortured existence. In a summer of the high-octane superhero flick (Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Hellboy II, Hancock), The Dark Knight towers above them all.
