Bruna Braidotti’s Luisa is part of Italian Theater Festival across five boroughs, May 1-16
IN SCENA!
Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo at NYU (and other locations)
24 West Twelfth St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
May 1-16, free – $23.41 www.inscenany.com
The tenth edition of the “In Scena!” Italian Theater Festival takes place May 1-16, at NYU’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò and other locations in all five boroughs. This year’s iteration features eight timely plays; admission is free with advance RSVP, but donations of $23.41 will be accepted. The opening-night celebration on May 1 at 7:00 includes an awards ceremony with artists present, along with a special video and more.
The works include four solo shows: Italian star Paola Minaccioni’s I am so much better live, with music by DJ Coco; Valentina Diana’s Mubarak’s Niece, performed by Marco Vergani, about a friendship that develops amid the Tahrir Square Revolution; Bruna Braidotti’s Luisa, which follows a woman haunted by the men in her past; Antonio Grosso’s Only Mozart Is Missing, performed by Marco Simeoli and based on the true story of Simeoli’s grandfather; and Marco De Simone’s We Puppets: Story of a life shattered by racism, set during the racial laws of 1938.
Marco Vergani stars in Valentina Diana’s Mubarak’s Niece at “In Scena!” festival
Also on the bill are The Gummy Bears’ Great War, about a fictional battle that echoes current events, written and directed by Angelo Trofa and performed by Valentina Fadda and Leonardo Tomasi; Maurizio Rippa’s Little Funerals, in which vocalist Rippa and guitarist Amedeo Monda play songs about a series of funerals; and Tiziana Troja’s DDD! Donne, Donnette, Donnacce, about a female comic duo, performed by Troja, Fadda, Trofa, Michela Sale Musio, and Michele Sarti, with original music and arrangements by Davide Sardo.
Presented by Kairos Italy Theater in association with KIT Italia and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, the festival, which moves to BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island, the Vino Theater in Brooklyn, and Theaterlab in Queens (as well as Los Angeles, Detroit, and San Diego), concludes May 16 at the Italian Cultural Institute on Park Ave. with Andrea Scramali’s L’Attesa, about an estranged father and son who meet in an emergency room, and the presentation of the 2023 Mario Fratti Award to Scramali.
Red Bull and Fiasco join forces for delightful revival of The Knight of the Burning Pestle (photo by Carol Rosegg)
THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE
Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Monday – Saturday through May 13, $77-$112
212-352-3101 www.redbulltheater.com www.fiascotheater.com
After seeing the wonderful revival of Francis Beaumont’s 1607 comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a collaboration between Red Bull and Fiasco that opened last week at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, I rushed home to read up on the Elizabethan pastiche. Surely these two inventive and consistently reliable New York–based companies had made significant changes to the plot, which centers on what I imagined was a twenty-first-century twist when it came to breaking the fourth wall. But to my delightful surprise, directors Noah Brody and Emily Young have remained faithful to the original story, though adding plenty of playful touches along the way.
The festivities kick off as an ensemble announces that it is about to present a show called The London Merchant when a grocer named George (Darius Pierce) jumps out of the audience and onto the stage, demanding that the troupe perform a different play. “Down with your title!” he proclaims. Believing they are elitists who “sneer at citizens,” George would prefer a play about the common man — say, a grocer — with a title like The Legend of Lord Wittington and His Exemplary Cat or The Story of Queen Elenor with the Rearing of London Bridge from a Tax on Woolsacks.
He is soon joined by his wife, Nell (Jessie Austrian), and they convince the actors to add George’s apprentice, Rafe (Paco Tolson), to the cast, as a stately, heroic grocer they christen the Knight of the Burning Pestle. After initial hesitation, the ensemble decides to proceed with the show, with Rafe’s presence providing the opportunity for everyone to improvise. George and Nell, meanwhile, sit in chairs at stage left, critiquing everything and interrupting whenever they don’t like what’s happening — usually involving Rafe’s not getting enough to do.
In the central narrative, apprentice Jasper Merrythought (Devin E. Haqq), who serves the wealthy Venturewell (Tina Chilip), is in love with his master’s daughter, Luce (Teresa Avia Lim). But Venturewell has decided to marry her off to fashionable gentleman and dullard Humphrey (Paul L. Coffey). “You know my rival?” Jasper asks Luce, who replies, “Yes, and love him dearly, even as I love an ague or foul weather; I prithee, Jasper, fear him not.”
Venturewell (Tina Chilip) tries to force Luce (Teresa Avia Lim) to marry Humphrey (Paul L. Coffey) in 1607 comedy by Francis Beaumont (photo by Carol Rosegg)
When Venturewell tells Humphrey, “Come, I know you have language good enough to win a wench,” Nell cries out, “A whoreson mother! She’s been a panderer in ’er days, I warrant her.” George holds his wife back, saying, “Chicken, I pray thee heartily, contain thyself.” He then turns to the actors and says, “You may proceed.” Such interruptions continue throughout the play, becoming more and more disruptive.
Meanwhile, Jasper’s parents, Charles (Ben Steinfeld) and Mistress Merrythought (Tatiana Wechsler), have apparently fallen out of love. She is a determined woman who will not give her blessing to her eldest son, whom she considers a “waste-thrift,” instead promising her inheritance to her other child, Michael (Royer Bockus). The unemployed Charles has spent nearly all his money on fine food and drink but still finds joy in life, particularly when it comes to singing, much to his wife’s chagrin. She commands that he is responsible for Jasper’s future, expecting them both to fail miserably.
Among the other characters are Rafe’s apprentice, Tim (Steinfeld), who accompanies the knight on his journey of protecting fair ladies and distressed damsels; the squire Tapster (Paul L. Coffey), who runs the Bell End Inn with a threatening host (Chilip); the evil giant Barbaroso (Haqq); the lusty princess of Cracovia (Austrian); and Little George (Bockus), Rafe’s faithful horse.
Royer Bockus, Ben Steinfeld, Paco Tolson, and Tatiana Wechsler are part of terrific ensemble in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Their sensibilities mesh in organic ways in this splendid interpretation of Beaumont’s rarely performed play. Christopher Swader and Justin Swader’s set features a wooden floor and back wall, the latter with surprise openings. Two painted backdrops move the action to an inn and the forest, and a rolling door serves as the entrance to the Merrythought home. There are chairs scattered on each side, where the actors sit when they’re not part of the scene, some occasionally playing instruments, a hallmark of Fiasco productions. Some musical interludes work better than others; a group singalong on the old-time ballad “De Derry Down” is engaging, and a jolly version of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave” is delightfully frisky, but a rewritten take on Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy” and a too-long solo by Steinfeld in which he makes sounds with his mouth and by striking parts of his body feel out of place.
Yvonne Miranda’s costumes range from the relatively contemporary to seventeenth-century traditional to theatrical makeshift, as when Rafe dons a metal colander for a helmet and uses a metal trashcan top as a shield. (The funny props are by Samantha Shoffner.) Reza Bahjat’s lighting includes nearly two dozen chandeliers and fixtures that extend over the audience, as if we’re part of the production — and we are, represented by George and Nell onstage.
The couple’s interventions are a mixture of purposely awkward and fresh, given the recent spate of shows having to stop or be delayed because of audience members yelling at actors, singing along too loud (contrary to theater instructions), or crawling onto the set to plug their phone into a fake outlet. When George gives the troupe two shillings in order to have specific music, it evokes a producer making an unreasonable demand, then watching closely to ensure it is done.
Brody and Young (you can watch an online RemarkaBULL Podversation with them here) have also performed in many of Fiasco’s productions; as directors, they get the best out of their talented cast, giving them a freedom that they gleefully embrace. Pierce chews up the scenery as the annoying George, Tolson excels as the stalwart Rafe, and Bockus brings the house down as Rafe’s horse.
Beaumont, who died in 1616 around the age of thirty-two, wrote only one other play by himself, The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, while collaborating with John Fletcher on thirteen works, including The Woman Hater,A King and No King, and Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding. I imagine he would be quite satisfied with Red Bull and Fiasco’s collaboration on The Knight of the Burning Pestle.
Sam Green explores how we listen and connect with humanity and nature in 32 Sounds
32 SOUNDS (Sam Green, 2022)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, April 28
212-727-8110 filmforum.org 32sounds.com
Sam Green’s 32 Sounds might be about how we hear the world, but it’s also filled with a barrage of stunning visuals that, combined with the binaural audio, creates a unique and exciting cinematic journey.
Green was inspired by his relatively new friendship with experimental composer and musician Annea Lockwood, which blossomed over Skype during the pandemic, and by François Girard’s 1993 biographical anthology Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, in which Colm Feore portrays the Canadian classical pianist most famous for his interpretations of such Bach works as the Goldberg Variations. In 32 Sounds, Green teams with composer, DJ, and musician JD Samson, from such bands as Le Tigre and MEN, to present ninety-five minutes of remarkable delicacy and insight.
The film is best experienced on headphones; at Film Forum, where it opens April 28, it will be shown several different ways, including with specially customized headphones with the audio mixed live inside the theater. The sound was recorded binaurally, so the audience can hear speech and movement as if it’s to your left or right, behind you, far away, or close up.
In the film, Princeton professor and scientist Edgar Choueiri introduces us to Johann Christoff, a recording device shaped like a human head that “captures sound exactly how you hear it.” Similar technology has been used for such theatrical presentations as The Encounter and Blindness. Hollywood veteran and two-time Oscar winner Mark Mangini (Dune,Mad Max: Fury Road) designed the sound for the film, immersing the viewer into what feels like a three-dimensional universe.
The film kicks off with Green and Samson in a playful scene that sets the stage for what is to follow. “This is a little bit of an odd movie in that we’re going to ask you to do some things,” Green explains. “Simple things, like close your eyes. If you don’t want to do them, don’t worry about it. But the truth is, the more you give yourself to the experience” — Samson then cuts in, finishing, “the more you get out of it.”
The first sound Green explores, appropriately enough, is of the womb, recorded by former midwife Aggie Murch, whose husband is Oscar-winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now,The English Patient,The Conversation). Over a purplish white screen with no figuration, Green discusses Walter Murch’s 2005 essay “Womb Tone,” in which Murch writes, “Hearing is the first of our senses to be switched on. . . . Although our mature consciousness may be betrothed to sight, it was suckled by sound, and if we are looking for the source of sound’s ability — in all its forms — to move us more deeply than the other senses and occasionally give us a mysterious feeling of connectedness to the universe, this primal intimacy is a good place to begin.”
Green then jumps from birth to death, taking out old cassette tapes of voice messages he has saved from decades past, telling us how “they hold the voices of so many people I’ve loved who are gone. I was wondering, How does that work? How does a little piece of eighth-of-an-inch magnetic tape hold a person? Make it seem like they are alive and in front of you more than any photo or piece of film ever could. I was wondering if sound is somehow a way to understand time, and time passing, and loss, and the ephemeral beauty of the present moment, all the things that I keep coming back to in my movies.”
He meets with Cheryl Tipp, curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds at the British Library Sound Archive, who shares the poignant and heartbreaking story of the mating call of the Hawaiian bird the moho braccatus. Lockwood, the subject of a short companion film Green directed, demonstrates how she has recorded the sound of rivers for fifty years, after gaining notoriety for her burning-piano installations.
Foley artist Joanna Fang reveals how she creates sound effects for films using unusual items in her studio, from a bowling ball to a wet cloth. “Art can elevate a truth beyond what is feasibly there,” she says. “And if we pull it off right, hopefully the emotional experience of hearing it and being part of it is enough to make you fully accept the poetry of what you’re hearing. Because isn’t that what we’re all trying to do, trying to take what we’re feeling on the inside and show it to somebody else, or let them listen to it, and have them feel the same way we do?”
Black revolutionary and fugitive Nehanda Abiodun listens to a tape of McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now,” transporting her to another place and time. Poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten marvels about “ghost sounds” of his relatives. Bay Area military veteran and environmental journalist Harold Gilliam postulates about sleep and foghorns in the context of “being part of this total community of life and nonlife on Earth.” Lebanese artist and musician Mazen Kerbaj recalls being able to make sound art during bombings when others were trapped in their homes or dying.
Green gives examples of recording “room tones,” a documentary process in which the subject is silent for thirty seconds as the sound recordist grabs the natural sound in order to help with later editing. It’s fascinating watching Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Rebecca Solnit, and others sit or stand uncomfortably as they wait, and we wait; we are not used to seeing such stagnation in a motion picture.
Annea Lockwood has been recording rivers for more than fifty years
Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim uses ASL to describe vibration and how she was taught when she was a child that sound was not part of her life, a concept that infuses her art. “I realized that sound is like money, power, control; it’s social currency,” she explains.
Along the way Green also looks at inventor Thomas Edison, polymath Charles Babbage, electronics engineer Alan Blumlein, and a classic Memorex commercial starring Ella Fitzgerald. We see and hear Glass playing piano, church bells ringing in Venice, Don Garcia driving through the city in his red Mazda blasting Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” and John Cage performing 4’33” outdoors. A Zamboni cleans the ice at a hockey rink. A cat purrs. Evel Knievel jumps over obstacles on his motorcycle. Samson blasts away on a whoopee cushion. Danny drives his Big Wheel through the empty halls of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Different groups dance to Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”
Oscar nominee Green (The Weather Underground,A Thousand Thoughts) edited the documentary with Nels Bangerter; the new, sharp cinematography is by Yoni Brook. The visuals range from a deluge of quick cuts of archival footage to nearly blank screens when Green asks the audience to close their eyes and just listen.
While the film is a technical marvel, it also becomes deeply emotional, as Green and several subjects listen to recordings of friends and family no longer with us, something you can’t get out of a photo album. It made me think of the messages I had saved on my answering machine of my mother, who passed away in 2017; while I try to avoid hearing them — they used to pop up after I went through new messages, sending me screaming into another room — it is comforting to know that they exist, that I can hear her whenever I need to. Such is the power of sound.
Green will be at Film Forum for postscreening Q&As with Lockwood, moderated by Nadia Sirota, on April 28 at 7:40, with Choueiri and Anderson on April 29 at 7:40, and with Samson, moderated by Matt Wolf, on April 30 at 5:15.
Karen Finley performs latest show at the Laurie Beechman Theatre (photo by Max Ruby)
COVID VORTEX ANXIETY OPERA KITTY KALEIDOSCOPE DISCO
The Laurie Beechman Theatre
West Bank Cafe, 407 West Forty-Second St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Select Saturdays through June 24, $27 general admission, $39 reserved VIP seating (plus $25 food and drink minimum), 7:00 www.westbankcafe.com spincyclenyc.com
In such works as Shut Up and Love Me,Deathcakes and Autism,Written in Sand,Make Love,Unicorn Gratitude Mystery, and Sext Me If You Can, Chicago-born, New York–based performance artist, musician, poet, author, and activist Karen Finley has explored such topics as AIDS, rape culture, suicide, rampant consumerism, politics, censorship, 9/11, sexual and societal taboos, and the power of art in deeply personal ways that have included chocolate, honey, yams, and nudity. In her latest show, Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco, continuing on Saturday nights through May 6 at the Laurie Beechman Theatre, Finley turns her attention to the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on trauma, loss, loneliness, Zoom, masks, and human connection.
Finley takes the stage to rapturous applause, wearing a hazmat suit and dancing to the 1976 disco hit “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” with Thelma Houston singing, “I can’t survive / I can’t stay alive, / without your love, oh baby.” She proceeds to deliver thirteen poem-monologues from behind a microphone and music stand. To her right is a rack of sequined costumes, where she changes between each number, putting on different masks, shawls, boas, and dresses. To her left is a screen divider with mask-scarves draped over it; sparkling glitter and sequins are everywhere. At the back of the stage is a screen on which are projected news reports, advertisements, video of New Yorkers cheering and banging pots and pans for health-care workers, and, primarily, still photos of pages from old books (encyclopedias, science texts, religious doctrine), music scores, calendars, and magazines she has written over in black marker, including such phrases as “It will get worse before it gets worse,” “It’s called war porn,” and “There is no happy ending.”
For sixty-five minutes, Finley rails against racial injustice, Zoom gatherings, the Catholic church, school shootings, anti-abortion laws, the fatigue and exhaustion the lockdown brought, and the closing of St. Vincent’s. She finds much-needed respite in baking and watching videos of interspecies love and friendship (complete with sing-along).
“Can I just pretend this isn’t happening?” she asks. “Oh grief / Here we go again / Oh loss / I am your constant companion,” she says. Addressing the goddess Venus, she demands, “Provide and support our empowerment / to transform this hate with all our creative imaginative strength / and change this oppressive senseless system forever.” When she opines, “I will try my best today / even in the smallest ways,” it is tentative as she battles despair and sorrow. A segment showing gay men dancing in a club asks us to look at how we viewed AIDS and how we view the coronavirus in what she calls her “Zoom Disco.”
Karen Finley prepares to bake while TV experts discuss hand washing (photo by Max Ruby)
But Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco is often as funny as its title. “I do not want to have a Zoom family reunion,” she proclaims. Asking a stranger on an elevator to put on a mask, Finley says, “The mask is your friend / Really, it is a very friendly mask. Trust me.” Making a cake, she declares, “Give me amaranth flour liberty or give me breath!” Watching a pair of experts discuss hand washing, she acknowledges, “Turns out none of us really knew how to wash our hands / We were doing it all wrong.” Referencing how we dressed during the lockdown, she states, “You do not know where you are / What day it is / What day you are on / What planet you are on / When you changed your clothes / Before or after Tiger King? / How long you have been wearing . . . anything . . . or nothing!”
Finley herself gained notoriety for occasionally wearing nothing onstage; we attended the show with two longtime fans, one of whom had poured honey over Finley’s naked body during one interactive performance. But this time around, the edible items remained on the table, as there is a $25 food and drink minimum in addition to the ticket price.
The production has a DIY feel to it; when Finley is done with an item of clothing, she just tosses it to the floor, the projections are not exactly HD, and a large prop at center stage blocks the bottom of the screen so all the words are not always legible, depending on where you’re sitting. (The technical director is JP Perraux, with sound by Jasmine Wyman; Becky Hubbert is the costume and prop consultant, and the production design is by Violet Overn, Finley’s daughter.)
Don’t expect a polished sheen, but that is a significant part of the show’s charm. Finley plays off the audience, which is in her corner every step of the way. The night I went, she was upset that she forgot a veil for her penultimate piece, “Eulogy,” and asked the crowd to give her a moment to prepare herself psychologically; she was warmed by shouts of encouragement and proceeded with a replacement for the veil as she related, “So many have left us — / the loss and the sorrow of never having a place to mourn. / Here is our eulogy for the lost and left. . . . Let us heal / Let us restore / Let us love / Let us forgive.”
With Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco, Finley once again explores difficult, controversial topics while helping us all heal, restore, love, and forgive.
Jacolby Satterwhite’s An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time is on view at Lincoln Center (photo by Nicholas Knight)
Who:Jacolby Satterwhite What:Public Art Fund Talk Where:The Cooper Union’s Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Sq., Third Ave. at Seventh St. When: Wednesday, April 26, free with advance RSVP for in-person or livestream, 6:30 Why: In a 2021 “Meet the Artist” interview with the Haus der Kunst museum in Munich, multimedia artist Jacolby Satterwhite explains, “The influences I draw on are from pop culture, politics, my family, my personal histories, queer theory, art history, postructuralism and design, gaming. It’s sort of like, you know, the simulacra of the universe.” Born in 1986 in Columbia, South Carolina, the New York–based Satterwhite’s latest installation is An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time, on view on the fifty-foot-long Hauser Digital Wall in the Karen and Richard LeFrak Lobby in David Geffen Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic.
Commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem and Public Art Fund, the nearly half-hour work explores the past, present, and future of Lincoln Center, featuring more than seventy-five dancers and more than fifty musicians from local performing art schools amid HD color video and 3D animation incorporating real-life figures, archival footage, trees, buildings, text, paintings, and photographs. On April 26 at 6:30, Satterwhite will be at the Cooper Union’s Frederick P. Rose Auditorium to discuss An Eclectic Dance to the Music of Time and place it within the context of his career as well as the arts community it celebrates. “I wanted to describe time and history through a vehicle of abstraction, using color, shape, landscape, horizontality, and movement as a way to kind of reorient the history in a way that it hasn’t been normally told,” he says in the above Lincoln Center video. You can hear more on April 26 either at the Cooper Union or via livestream, both free with advance RSVP.
The beginning and ending of Jamie Lloyd and Amy Herzog’s Broadway revival of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Hudson Theatre are unforgettable, for significantly different reasons. What happens in between is fairly memorable as well.
About fifteen minutes prior to showtime, the curtain rises, revealing Oscar-winning actress Jessica Chastain, alone on a barren stage, the lower part of the back brick wall behind her painted white, the wings visible. Arms folded, legs crossed, wearing a long black dress and black heels, Chastain is elegantly seated in a chair on a set that slowly revolves, staring out directly at the audience, making as much eye contact as possible as people file into the theater, chatter away, and check their phones. Most of the crowd pays little attention to what’s happening onstage, except for those eagerly snapping photos and taking video, then turning away to do other things.
I have to admit that I took a few photos and a video, but then I put my smartphone in my pocket and couldn’t look away from Chastain, playing Nora Helmer in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, as she continued her seemingly endless circling. She occasionally crosses and uncrosses her legs, but otherwise she resembles a life-size doll, the rotation out of her control, being manipulated by unseen forces.
It’s an intense performance, every slight body move and eye shift a work of art while preparing the audience for what they are about to experience. One by one, the rest of the cast takes a chair and begins rotating on one of several other circles. They’re all dressed in Soutra Gilmour and Enver Chakartash’s mournful black costumes; Gilmour also designed the empty set, which, as Chastain rotates, includes the year “1879” projected on the back wall, the only signifier of when the play takes place, although it soon becomes clear that it could be any time in the past, present, or future.
Nora, a wife and mother of three unseen but heard children, is slowly joined onstage, one at a time, by her husband, Torvald (Arian Moayed), a lawyer who has just been named manager at his bank; Dr. Otto Rank (Michael Patrick Thornton), a close family friend; Kristine Linde (Jesmille Darbouze), a schoolmate of Nora’s; Nils Krogstad (Okieriete Onaodowan), a lawyer with secretive ties to several other characters; and Anne-Marie (Tasha Lawrence), the Helmers’ devoted nanny.
A Doll’s House cast is dressed in black and cast in shadows and silhouettes throughout (photo by Emilio Madrid)
About seven years prior, when Nora was pregnant with her first child, Torvald became seriously ill, and Nora financed a trip to Italy that doctors said would cure him. Everyone assumed she got the money from her dying father, but she’s been hiding an ugly truth while scrambling to pay back her debt. She’s been treated like a kid her entire life, so no one believes she can fend for herself or is responsible for any of her family’s success.
“Nora, you’re basically still a child,” Kristine tells her. Torvald calls Nora his “baby” and his “headstrong little bird,” but it’s not spoken like a loving, amorous husband. Dr. Rank suggests she dress for next year’s Halloween as Fortune’s Child. And Nora recalls how her father referred to her as “his little doll and he played with me just like I played with my dolls,” comparing that to how Torvald treats her, particularly when he makes her put on a fisher girl costume and dance like a young fairy at a party. But she wants more, even if she doesn’t know how to express her adult desires.
“You can see how being with Torvald is a lot like being with Papa,” she tells Dr. Rank.
Explaining to Kristine how she has been paying off her debt, she says, “I’ve had some jobs here and there, like I said. Last Christmas I got a big copying job; I stayed up late writing every night for weeks. It was exhausting, but it was also fun, to work hard and make money! I felt kind of like a man.”
As Kristine and Nils jockey for a position at the bank and Torvald worries about how his wife’s actions could jeopardize his reputation, Nora comes to an understanding about who she is and what she wants out of life in a dramatic turnabout that is a statement for women and marginalized people everywhere.
Pulitzer finalist Herzog’s (Mary Jane,4000 Miles) adaptation focuses directly on Nora, who sits front and center nearly the entire play. Tony nominee Lloyd knows what to do with movie stars on spare sets; his recent productions of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac at BAM, starring James McAvoy, and Harold Pinter’s Betrayal at the Jacobs on Broadway, with Tom Hiddleston, were both compelling, unique character-driven interpretations that mostly eschewed bombast. In A Doll’s House, all of the actors speak in an even-keeled manner free from sentimentality, save for one outburst by Moayed that feels out of place.
Jon Clark’s superb lighting casts long shadows across the stage and against the back wall, where he illuminates only part of it in a long white horizontal bar, keeping the rest in darkness. Ben and Max Ringham’s sound is highlighted by the offstage voices of Nora’s three children, Ivar, Bob, and Emmy, which emphasizes the kind of pretend world Nora has been thrust into and might not be able to escape from. When Dr. Rank asks Torvald for one of his good cigars and Nora offers to light it for him, there is no cigar and no lighter; a later exchange of objects is also made without actual props. It’s like Nora is play-acting in a doll house. The eerie score, by Alva Noto and the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, keeps an intriguing mystery hanging over everything.
Oscar winner Chastain (The Eyes of Tammy Faye,Zero Dark Thirty), whose only previous appearance on Broadway was in 2012’s The Heiress, is mesmerizing as Nora, commanding the stage with her bold presence for each of the 105 minutes; her character’s ultimate transformation is a bit sudden but powerful nonetheless. The rest of the cast is strong, but this is Chastain’s show, from its unusual start to its radical climax, which will leave some audience members cheering, some laughing, and others gasping.
“After all these years I still haven’t been able to teach Nora how to make a dramatic exit,” Torvald says to Kristine.
All dancer and choreographer Douglas Dunn needed to do was give Mimi Gross the title of his new production and the painter, set and costume designer, installation artist, and teacher was off to the races.
Born in California in 1942, Dunn has been collaborating with Gross, a native New Yorker born in 1940, since Dunn presented Foot Rules in 1979; they’ve worked together some two dozen times since, including on 1980’s Echo, 1981’s Skid, 1988’s Matches, 1995’s Caracole, 2007’s Zorn’s Lemma, and 2017’s Antipodes. They met quite serendipitously.
“I’d been working with Charles Atlas on film, video, and costumes for several years. Being then in a moment unavailable, he suggested Mimi,” Dunn explained via email. “She made wonderful apparel for an hour-long duet for Deborah Riley and me called Foot Rules. What I noticed right away was her love of color.”
“Charlie Atlas was presenting live performances which he made up and directed. That is how I first met Charlie, and then I met Douglas,” Gross added. “They had been making dances and videos together. When Douglas asked Charlie if he could make some costumes for a new dance he was choreographing with Deborah Riley, Charlie was super busy — he was working with Merce Cunningham full-time — and recommended me to do it. I had made many costumes for movies with cardboard and hot glue . . . nothing to be washed! Or worn many times! Quite a challenge. Of course, I said sure. And then through the decades on and off we have shared many projects, sets and costumes, sometimes sets, sometimes costumes, sometimes both — very open, warm, clear mutual caring to work within our shared possibilities, never knowing how it will come out.”
Douglas Dunn emerges from his pulpit in Mimi Gross’s fantastical Garden Party installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Dunn and Gross are currently at work on their latest project, Garden Party, which runs April 24-30 at Douglas Dunn + Dancers’ SoHo loft studio. Last week I attended a rehearsal of the sixty-minute piece, which features Dunn, Grazia Della-Terza, Alexandra Berger, Janet Charleston, Vanessa Knouse, Emily Pope, Paul Singh, Jin Ju Song-Begin, Timothy Ward, and Christopher Williams moving through the spectacular space created by Gross, consisting of lushly painted trompe l’oeil walls and ceiling and a long horizontal mirror, covered with pink, yellow, and green flowers, plants and trees, clouds, raindrops, and more. While the plants at the right are fake — Dunn told me at the rehearsal that he had “planted” some of them himself — the greenery at the left is real, repurposing the plants that were already in the studio.
There’s also a colorful pulpit where Dunn spends much of the show; he had specifically requested it, asking for it to be based on the design at Grace Church on Broadway. The dancers glide across the floor like blossoming flowers, in solos, pas de deux, and trios, celebrating birth, life, and growth; however, the soundtrack of pop and classical songs (Robert de Visée, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Bach, Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris, more), birdsong, and poetry (by John Keats, Anne Waldman, Molière, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Milton, Stephanie Jacco, and others, read by Dunn, Waldman, Jacco, and Della-Terza) touch on loss and loneliness. A few of the dancers occasionally sit on an inviting white park bench, and Dunn clutches a plush bird named April.
“Mimi always helps me see color; I always see line first,” Dunn explained. “We got along just fine and knew right away how much to interact and how much to let the other alone. She often saw historical references in the dancing and she’d take off from there. We’re both dead serious but also insistent on having a good warm time relating when preparing for a new dance show. The feel of this evening was clear to me the day the title hit me (about three years ago, the pandemic postponing the project). The lavish beauty of Mimi’s set completely fulfills my initial intuition . . . as if she’d read my dancing mind.”
Douglas Dunn’s Garden Party runs April 24-30 in SoHo loft studio (photo by Jacob Burckhardt, 2023)
“The new dance had been talked about a long while ago,” Gross noted. “All of 2021-22, I made many landscape drawings, and then, when the pandemic seemed to subside, I painted these flowers last summer and called them ‘Feel Good Flowers.’ When Douglas asked me if I would make a garden and sets about ‘Early Spring,’ he said, ‘Fill up the studio.’ That was just what I was doing anyway. I asked him if I could paint it with this stylization, and that I didn’t know exactly how I would do it. He was fine with that. I made a big drawing of a bird and discussed the texture and color with Sue Julien, who fabricated it. Both Sue and David Quinn made an amazing contribution fabricating the costumes from my drawings. Douglas wanted each dancer to be different, with different leg lengths. That is all he had said. I pored over my Ballet Russe books, and Charles James and I made drawings. The only common link is the fluorescent yellow in each costume.”
The collaboration extends to Lauren Parrish, who designed the lighting and projections, and sound designer Jacob Burckhardt. The show will be preceded by live music from guitarist and composer Tosh Sheridan, who has released such albums as Tosh,Tosh Sheridan Trio, and solo/duo.
“All of these plain facts are fine and good and relate our collaborating history, but it is the depth of poetic reality where we really collaborate,” Gross concluded, “by dance and by making an atmosphere for the dance.”
And what an atmosphere Dunn and Gross have created for Garden Party.
