twi-ny recommended events

DRINKING IN AMERICA

Andre Royo plays multiple addicts in revival of Eric Bogosian’s Drinking in America (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

DRINKING IN AMERICA
Audible Theater’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Monday – Saturday through April 13, $53-$98
drinkinginamericaplay.com
www.audible.com

In “Fried-Egg Deal,” the last of twelve monologues that comprise Eric Bogosian’s Drinking in America, a loaded man says to the audience, “I’m a good-for-nothin’ drunken bum, you shouldn’t even look at me.”

Written and first performed by Bogosian in 1986 when he was eighteen months sober, having kicked alcohol and hard drugs, Drinking in America examines different forms of addiction as a variety of characters attempt to be seen, on city streets, in hotel rooms, at work, and in theater itself.

The play is now being revived by Audible at the Minetta Lane, starring Bronx-born Andre Royo and directed by Mark Armstrong. Royo, who played Reginald “Bubbles” Cousins on The Wire, Mayor Robert “Bobo” Boston on Hand of God, and Thirsty Rawlings on Empire, originally wanted to do Bogosian’s Talk Radio, but rights issues led him instead to Drinking in America, which has a personal connection, as he is currently about eighteen months sober himself.

I did not see the original 1986 production at the American Place Theater, which earned Bogosian an Obie for Best Play and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance. But this past January, I attended a benefit for the Chain Theatre at which Bogosian presented several pieces from the play as part of “An Evening with Eric Bogosian: Monologues, Digressions, and Air Guitar.” In addition, on Bogosian’s “100 Monologues” website, I’ve watched such actors as Bill Irwin, Sam Rockwell, Brian d’Arcy James, Dylan Baker, Anson Mount, Michael Shannon, and Marin Ireland perform scenes from the show.

Royo makes the play his own from the opening moment, when he introduces himself to the audience and ad-libs about who he is and where he is from. After a few minutes of personal banter, he segues into the narrative, which begins with “Journal,” reading the April 11, 1987, entry. “Today I began to understand one of the immutable truths with regard to my own existence,” he shares. “Today I discovered that I am not a being surrounded by walls and barriers but part of a continuum with all other things, those living and even those inanimate. I feel a new surge of desire for life, for living now, for getting out and becoming part of everything around me. I want to change the world and I know I can do it. I’m like a newborn baby taking his first steps. I was blind before to my inner self, my true desires, my own special powers and the universe itself. So many people live lives of pointless desperation, unable to appreciate that life is life to be lived for today, in every flower, in a cloud . . . in a smile.”

Andre Royo stars in Audible revival of Eric Bogosian’s 1986 solo show (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

While it sounds like it could be the memories of a man who has cleaned himself up and has a new lease on life, it quickly descends into a drug-fueled tale in which the man reconsiders his own importance. “I was literally on top of the world. I felt like GOD,” he declares. What follows are the stories of eleven more men addicted to drugs, alcohol, power, prestige, money, and sex, each with a tenuous grasp on reality. Royo fluently shifts from character to character, with changes in speech, body movement, and, minimally, costumes, as each man makes his case. They stumble across the stage, swing bottles around, and get into confrontations, lost in the haze of addiction. Kristen Robinson’s set features a few chairs, a table, a lamp, and a dark back wall with a doorway that beckons to another state of mind, a proverbial light at the end of the tunnel (or an entrance to hell?). The costumes are by Sarita Fellows, with sound by John Gromada and lighting by Jeff Croiter.

In “American Dreamer,” a street drunk yells out that he has a bevy of fancy cars and lovely ladies. In “Wired,” a Hollywood player snorts coke and swizzles booze in the morning as he talks on the phone about the availability of Lee Marvin or Richard Chamberlain for an upcoming film. (Although Bogosian has made small tweaks for Audible, which will be releasing an audio version of the show, he has left in the original references.)

In “Commercial,” a voice-over actor is pitching an upscale beer, narrating, “You’ve worked hard to get where you are today and you’ve still got a long way to go before you get to the top . . . You want your life to be good . . . so you surround yourself with the best . . . the very best . . . in clothes, in food, in people . . . You know you’re going to get there someday . . . and when you do, you’ll say ‘good-bye’ to your companions of a less prosperous time. But there is one thing you will never leave behind . . . And that’s your beer: Krönenbräu . . . The beer of kings.” Beer commercials make all kinds of promises, but as the characters in Drinking in America reveal to us, what booze often delivers is something else.

In “No Problems,” the character tries to assure us, and himself, “I have no problems. I’m happy with life. Things are fine as far as I’m concerned. I know some people have problems, some people have quite a few. I, fortunately, have none.” The monologue implicates the audience, speaking to all those in the theater who believe they are not like anyone they have seen onstage, that none of that could happen to them, since they’re satisfied with their existence.

Not only has Royo struggled with addiction but his Wire costar Michael K. Williams, despite all his professional success, died of an overdose in September 2021 at the age of fifty-four. No one is invulnerable. In “Godhead,” a tough-talking man claims, “I just wanna live my life. I don’t hurt nobody.” But addiction affects more than just the addict.

Andre Royo pauses to examine addiction and demons in Drinking in America at the Minetta Lane (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Nearly forty years after its debut, Drinking in America still feels fresh and relevant. The toll of alcoholism and drug addiction grew even greater during the recent pandemic and its concurrent isolation, and there’s no end in sight. It hurts families, destroys relationships, impacts careers, and keeps men and women from reaching their potentials. Each vignette is straightforward and direct, with Royo skillfully depicting the characters, giving them unique idiosyncrasies and attributes, but in many ways they are similar as well. And, as Bogosian (subUrbia, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead) and Royo make clear, they are us, and we are them.

In “The Law,” a preacher asks, “What has happened to our country? Will somebody answer that question for me, please? We are in trouble. We are in serious trouble. Look around you, what do you see?” We might not be seeing the same world the preacher does — he rails against “crime, perversion, decay, apathy,” and abortion, proclaiming that “we are living in a nightmare” — but we are asking the same questions.

The eighty-minute play is adroitly directed by Armstrong (The Angel in the Trees, The Most Damaging Wound) and wonderfully performed by Royo, who fully inhabits each of the characters he portrays, some of whom he, as a recovering alcoholic, can specifically relate to. In addition, because he’s Black, the show has an additional edge as it tackles toxic masculinity and male fragility, terms that were not household words in 1986, although race has taken on an expanded meaning in recent years.

Unfortunately, many of the same sociopolitical issues are still affecting America, from racial inequality and injustice to immigration reform and religious hatred. It’s always too easy to just look away, saying to ourselves, “I have no problems. None. I’m happy. I’m healthy. I love my wife, I love my kid . . . good job . . . no problems. That’s what it’s all about . . . I guess.”

THE HARDER THEY COME

Ivan (Natey Jones, far left) arrives in the city seeking fame and fortune in The Harder They Come (photo by Joan Marcus)

THE HARDER THEY COME
Newman Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 9, $105
publictheater.org

There’s a big difference between a show or movie with music and a fully fledged musical, in which original songs help propel the narrative. That divergence is one of the central flaws in the world premiere of The Harder They Come, at the Public’s Newman Theater through April 9.

The 1972 movie is a Jamaican cult favorite that recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary; it follows a country boy named Ivanhoe Martin, portrayed by reggae legend Jimmy Cliff in his first and only starring role as an actor, who arrives in Kingston with little more than a guitar and the dream of making a hit record. The soundtrack is one of the all-time greats, consisting of genre-defining tunes by the Maytals (“Sweet and Dandy,” “Pressure Drop”), the Slickers (“Johnny Too Bad”), Desmond Dekker (“007 [Shanty Town]”), the Melodians (“Rivers of Babylon”), Scotty (“Draw Your Brakes”), and Cliff himself, who contributed six songs, including the title track, the only one written specifically for the film.

In her book, Public writer-in-residence and Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks, who has written such hard-hitting plays as Topdog/Underdog, Fucking A, and Father Comes Home from the Wars . . . , squeezes too many songs that were background and incidental in the film into the show’s narrative, forcing them into the plot.

An accomplished singer-songwriter, as evidenced by her terrific Plays for the Plague Year, a three-hour intimate performance piece about the pandemic that reopens at Joe’s Pub on April 5, Parks adds several new songs to The Harder They Come, including “Hero Don’t Never Die,” “Please Tell Me Why,” and “Better Days,” expanding, and sometimes changing, the motivations of various characters as Parks attempts to smooth out the bumps and choppiness of the film.

Alas, that is part of its charm. And I’m still trying to understand why the second act opens with Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now,” which Cliff recorded in 1993 for the film Cool Runnings about the 1988 Jamaican Olympic bobsled team. The song was part of Reggae Hit the Town: Crucial Reggae 1968-1972, a bonus disc added to the soundtrack album years later; Dekker’s “Israelites” also is in the show from the same collection.

Preacher (J. Bernard Calloway) has a tight hold on his congregation in world premiere at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

The story is a rough and violent drama that begins with Ivan traveling to the big city to give his mother, Daisy (Jeannette Bayardelle), her pittance of an inheritance. She wants him to return to the country, but Ivan (Natey Jones) is determined to stay and become a star. With no place to go, he hooks up with the Holy Redeemer Church after meeting and instantly falling for the young and innocent Elsa (Meecah), the orphan ward of the church’s well-connected Preacher (J. Bernard Calloway).

Desperate to make a record, Ivan ultimately signs a terrible contract with local music mogul Hilton (Ken Robinson), a wealthy man who controls what gets played when and where. With no money, Ivan starts working for ganja dealer Jose (Dominique Johnson), who is in cahoots with a plainclothes cop named Ray (Dudney Joseph Jr). Everywhere he goes, Ivan creates conflict with the avaricious men of Kingston, battling religion, drug lords, law enforcement, and corporate greed in his determination to get what he believes he deserves. “You can get it if you really want it / But you must try, try and try, try and try,” he sings.

Instead of laying low like his best friend, Pedro (Jacob Ming-Trent), who also sells for Jose, Ivan can’t stop speaking his mind. After an altercation with a policeman, Ivan is on the run, attempting to hold things together while also reveling in his newfound fame.

Directed by Tony Taccone (Bridge & Tunnel, Wishful Drinking) with codirector Sergio Trujillo, who is best known for his choreography for jukebox bio-musicals (Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, A Bronx Tale), The Harder They Come contains numerous wonderful scenes with fabulous music, performed by a strong cast (Ming-Trent stands out, his character providing comic relief and an honest perspective) and an excellent six-piece band; Kenny Seymour’s orchestrations and arrangements do justice to the originals, although some snippets are too much of a tease and a few of Parks’s new songs are overly melodramatic. In addition, you never get to hear the title track in full; as a kind of encore, it is performed at the very end, but one stanza is curiously left out.

Local music mogul Hilton (Ken Robinson) offers Ivan (Natey Jones) a bad deal in The Harder They Come (photo by Joan Marcus)

Choreographer Edgar Godineaux makes sure the movement never gets out of hand on Clint Ramos and Diggle’s two-level shanty town set, strewn with garbage drums, used tires, multiple old TV sets and speakers on the walls, bamboo, palm leaves, and muted greens and yellows inspired by the Jamaican flag (found also on the railings near the stage), along with earth-toned colors that are also prominent in Emilio Sosa’s costumes. The sound is by Walter Trarbach, with lighting by Japhy Weideman.

In the film, directed by Perry Henzell and cowritten with Trevor Rhone, Cliff’s Ivan already had a hard edge, a willingness to become an outlaw to fight for what he thinks is fair. But in Parks’s version, Jones (Get Up Stand Up, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical) portrays a far more naive and good-natured Ivan, more sensitive to Elsa’s needs and not as inherently dangerous. Cliff’s Ivan is proud of what he did to the policeman and glories in becoming a hero-villain who cheats on his wife and smokes big spleefs, while Jones’s Ivan claims the incident was accidental and never fully inhabits the character’s bad side.

The show has been stripped of its nuance, too easily pitting good vs. evil amid hierarchical, colonialist power structures. While a lot has changed since the film came out half a century ago, a lot hasn’t. This theatrical iteration — Henzell oversaw the script for a 2005 British adaptation — ends up caught somewhere in between.

[Note: The Public is hosting the “Wheel & Come Again” art auction on the mezzanine level, with more than a dozen works available, from $300 to $1000, inspired by the film and musical, raising funds to benefit scholarships at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston.]

PATTIE BOYD PRESENTS MY LIFE IN PICTURES

Pattie Boyd will be discussing and signing copies of her new book at Rizzoli (photo courtesy Reel Art Press)

Who: Pattie Boyd, Dave Brolan
What: Book talk and signing
Where: Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway at 26th St., 212-759-2424
When: Monday, April 3, $59.87 (includes admission, signing line access, and book), 6:00
Why: “I decided very early on that there never needed to be a dull moment in life. If you find yourself feeling dull, just change your mind,” model, photographer, and muse Pattie Boyd proffers in her new book, My Life in Pictures (Reel Art Press, December 2022, $49.95).

Born in England in March 1944, Boyd has not had a very boring life. She went to boarding school in Nairobi, began modeling as a teenager, and married and divorced George Harrison and Eric Clapton. She was the muse behind Harrison’s “Something” and Clapton’s “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight” and appeared on an endless stream of magazine covers. But all the while she was dazzling people in front of the camera, she was also taking her own photographs.

On April 3 at 6:00, Boyd will be at Rizzoli to discuss her life and career, joined by photo editor, curator, and archivist Dave Brolan from Reel Art Press. My Life in Pictures features photographs of Boyd by such lensmen as David Bailey, Eric Swayne, Norman Parkinson, Terence Donovan, Robert Freeman, and Robert Whitaker; photos by Boyd of Twiggy, Mick Jagger, Billy Preston, and the Beatles; and diary entries, artifacts, artworks, and other memorabilia, including letters from John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Tickets are still available with a copy of the book and come with access to the signing line. (Boyd will only be signing books purchased at Rizzoli.)

“I liked the idea of being independent and working but not all the time,” Boyd, who married real estate developer Rod Weston in 2015, writes in the book. “I wasn’t pinned down to anything nine to five. I thought that would be an incredibly boring thing to do.”

ROBYN HITCHCOCK AT BOWERY BALLROOM

Who: Robyn Hitchcock
What: Live concert with full band
Where: Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. between Bowery & Chrystie St., 212-260-4700
When: Saturday, April 1, $25, 8:00
Why: Throughout a long career that has included leading the Soft Boys, the Egyptians, and the Venus 3 in addition to extensive solo work, Paddington-born singer-songwriter and raconteur Robyn Hitchcock has regaled concertgoers with hilarious stories about the music business and wry views on the human condition while putting out a bevy of terrific albums and memorable songs. During the pandemic, Hitchcock took to Facebook in a big way, posting memories, promoting new material, and suddenly going live, playing short, impromptu online gigs from his hotel room or at home. On the Mandolin streaming platform, which lets performers get paid by fans, Hitchcock has also been performing longer living room concerts, known as “Live from Tubby’s House,” named after one of his beloved Scottish Fold cats, Tubby Vincent, who often makes an appearance, along with Ringo M. Stardust the cat, Perry the lobster, and Hitchcock’s partner, fellow singer-songwriter Emma Swift.

Emma Swift and Robyn Hitchcock are psyched to be back out on the road and not just dreaming of trains (photo by Kelley Stolz)

But live audiences are irreplaceable, and Hitchcock is beyond thrilled to be touring again, traveling the world in support of his latest record, the fabulous Shufflemania! (Tiny Ghost Records, October 2022), and sharing his journey every day on Facebook. The album is a jangly mélange of pure pop psychedelia, highlighted by such songs as “The Shuffle Man,” “Socrates in Thin Air,” “The Sir Tommy Shovell,” and “The Raging Muse.” Hitchcock explains on Bandcamp, “What is Shufflemania!? It’s surfing fate, trusting your intuition, and bullfighting with destiny. It’s embracing the random and dancing with it, even when it needs to clean its teeth. It’s probably the most consistent album I’ve made. It’s a party record, with a few solemn moments, as parties are wont to supply. Groove on, groovers!” (On April 23, Hitchcock will release the all-instrumental Life After Infinity, boasting such titles as “Plesiosaurs in the Desert,” “Tubby Among the Nightingales,” and “Mr Ringerson’s Picnic.”)

On the tour, he has played solo acoustic and electric and with different band configurations depending on where he is and which friends of his are available; on April 1, he was supposed to be joined by Kelley Stolz and Bart Davenport at Bowery Ballroom, but they both have just contracted Covid. Instead, he’ll be accompanied by Kurt Bloch (Fastbacks, the Young Fresh Fellows) on guitar, Julia Rydholm (Ladybug Transistor, Essex Green) on bass, and Patrick Berkery (the War on Drugs, the Pernice Brothers) on drums, promising that “the show will start quietly and finish loud. . . . We’ll condense forty-five years of music into ninety minutes as best we can.” In addition to Hitchcock gems, be on the lookout for witty repartee and classic covers, from Dylan, the Beatles, the Psychedelic Furs, and unexpected surprises, especially because it will be April Fools’ Day.

THE DOWNTOWN SEDER

Who: David Broza, BETTY, Bettye LaVette, Paul Shapiro’s Ribs & Brisket, Basya and Saadya Schechter, Mark Vincent, Gary Lucas and the Golem, Modi, Resistance Revival Chorus, Dr. Ruth, Mayor Eric Adams, Congressman Max Rose, Terrance Floyd, Vince Warren, Jason Flom, Lorenzo Johnson, more
What: Downtown Seder 2023
Where: City Winery, 25 Eleventh Ave. at Fifteenth St.
When: Sunday, April 2, $85-$125 (livestream free), 1:00
Why: For more than three decades, Michael Dorf has been hosting all-star seders to celebrate Passover, concentrating on freedom and justice. The latest iteration takes place on Sunday afternoon, April 2, at City Winery, which Dorf opened on Varick St. in 2008 and moved to Hudson River Park’s Pier 57 in 2020. Attendees will be seated at long, communal tables and have a vegetarian meal with four glasses of wine as they go through the Haggadah, the illustrated text that tells the story of the Jewish people’s exodus from Egypt. This year’s participants include musicians David Broza, BETTY, Paul Shapiro’s Ribs & Brisket, Basya and Saadya Schechter, Mark Vincent, Resistance Revival Chorus, and Gary Lucas and the Golem, comedian Modi, Dr. Ruth, Mayor Eric Adams, Congressman Max Rose, Vince Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Jason Flom and Lorenzo Johnson of the Innocence Project. Terrance Floyd, George Floyd’s brother, will be asking “The Four Questions”; the setlist is also likely to include “Dayenu,” “Chad Gadya,” “Go Down Moses,” and “The Ten Plagues.”

“It says in the beginning of the Haggadah that one should recount and retell the story of the exodus from Egypt in the language that you understand. The ancient Israelites didn’t know Hebrew, so they told the story in Armenian. Americans read it in English,” Dorf said in a statement. “Our interpretation is to tell the story in the language of the arts, in ways we can relate and truly empathize with what it would be like to be in bondage, to be emancipated, and the universal civil rights we need to continually remind ourselves.” During the pandemic, City Winery livestreamed its Downtown Seders; you can check out the 2021 virtual event above. And it was just announced that the 2023 seder will be streamed live for free here.

black odyssey

Ulysses Lincoln (Sean Boyce Johnson) searches for a way back to Harlem in black odyssey (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

black odyssey
Classic Stage Company, Lynn F. Angelson Theater
136 East 13th St. between Third & Fourth Aves.
Through March 26, $77
classicstage.org

Marcus Gardley’s black odyssey is one of those genius ideas you hope will pay off. It turns out to be a mixed bag, as poet, playwright, assistant professor, actor, and screenwriter Gardley and director Stevie Walker-Webb have so many takes on the story that it sometimes feels like they’ve thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the audience, and the message feels clogged in the end.

A reimagining of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey through the lens of African American history, the play premiered in Denver in 2014 and was revised three years later for the California Shakespeare Theater. Revised again for its New York premiere, it is now completing a run at Classic Stage, taking place on David Goldstein’s minimalist set, a glossy black rectangular platform, the only props two halves of a wooden boat.

The 150-minute show (with intermission) opens with a chorus, representing chess pieces, delivering a fourth-wall-breaking prologue.

“Let us begin at the beginning so we may end at the end / Shake off the cares of this day, my friend. Close your eyes / Breathe in the perfume of mother nature: her still waters run deep / As do her blue skies. There is no griot greater. / And like her, we have come to sow and season and play/ But don’t get too excited, this part here is just . . . foreplay,” they announce with a Shakespearean touch.

“You are the true star in our galaxy. / Only you can guide our ship through this tale we call ‘black odyssey.’ / It is by the light of your smile, the sparkle in your eyes / That we compass our way to the end. So, hold on tight, my friend. / Yet get loose: let the music move you some. Sing if you feel like singing / And if you can’t hold a tune then baby hold a hum. Sway. / Dance if your feet can’t stand you. Clap or stomp even if it scares you. / Shout out when the spirit gets in your bones. But please, for the love of the gods turn off your beeping cellphones.”

Harriett D. Foy brings the house down as Aunt Tee in black odyssey at Classic Stage (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Deus (James T. Alfred), the god of the sky, and Paw Sidin (Jimonn Cole), the god of the sea, are playing chess with mortals’ bodies. Paw Sidin is determined to exact revenge on Ulysses Lincoln (Sean Boyce Johnson), who killed Paw Sidin’s son, Poly’famous (Marcus Gladney Jr.), in battle. Aunt Tee (Harriett D. Foy), the goddess of war who is Deus’s daughter and Ulysses’s aunt, is ready to do whatever is necessary to protect her nephew.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus endures many trials as he attempts to return to his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus, in Ithaca after the Trojan War; here, Ulysses is struggling to get home to his wife, Nella P. (D. Woods), and son, Malachai (Gladney Jr.), in Harlem after fighting overseas. “I went to war to make a better life for myself,” he explains. “I wasn’t supposed to serve. I signed up during peacetime but then 9/11 happened, the World Trade Center came down, and before I knew it . . . I was in Afghanistan.”

When Ulysses joined the navy, Nella P. was eight months pregnant. Sixteen years later, Nella refuses to believe that her still-missing husband is dead while she raises Malachai and is beguiled by a suitor (Cole). Over the years, Paw Sidin has put on disguises to trick Nella, punishing her and Malachai. “Revenge is a meal best served raw,” the sea god declares with relish.

The story goes back and forth between the present and flashbacks of Ulysses’s adventures, in which he encounters characters revamped from Homer’s original, including sea creatures Scylla (Foy) and Carib’diss (Adrienne C. Moore), Ulysses’s grandmother Calypso (Foy), the Soul Siren (Lance Coadie Williams), Circe (Moore), Benevolence Nausicca Sabine (Tẹmídayọ Amay), and shagadelic prophet Super Fly Tireseas (Alfred).

A Black family fights for survival in New York premiere at Classic Stage (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Ulysses’s adventures range from a powerful section in which he joins a Black family floating on their roof in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to being serenaded by Carib’diss, Scylla, and the Soul Siren channeling some of the greatest Black stars of the 1960s and ’70s.

Although the show has several fine performances and terrific individual scenes, Gardley overstuffs the narrative with too many historical and contemporary references, from comical to serious, dating between 1619 and 2017, as Ulysses battles four hundred years of racial injustice. Among the kaleidoscopic references are Sylvia’s Restaurant, Rosa Parks, the Studio Museum in Harlem, James Baldwin, the Schomburg Center, Jay Z, the Hamptons, the subway, Langston Hughes, Famous Fish Market, Malcolm X, JFK, MLK Jr., and The Color Purple.

The play works best when it focuses on the undying love between Ulysses and Nella and Ulysses’s desperate attempts to rejoin his family. Otherwise, it’s all over the place, as are the performances. The standouts are Woods, who gives heart to Nella; Cole as the ever-evil Paw Sidin; Foy as the scene-stealing Aunt Tee; and Johnson, who is marvelous as Ulysses, who represents four centuries of continuing suffering and oppression as well as the unconquerable spirit of Blacks in America.

Gardley (The House That Will Not Stand) and Walker-Webb (one in two, Ain’t No Mo’) try too hard to make black odyssey epic; the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts, as captivating and powerful as some of those parts are.

EVERY OCEAN HUGHES: RIVER

Every Ocean Hughes’s River will be performed March 24–26 in conjunction with photography exhibit (photo courtesy Every Ocean Hughes)

Who: Every Ocean Hughes
What: Live performance
Where: Whitney Museum of American Art, the Susan and John Hess Family Theater, 99 Gansevoort St.
When: March 24, 7:00; March 25, 4:00 & 7:00; March 26, 4:00, $25; exhibition continues through April 2
Why: Multidisciplinary artist Every Ocean Hughes activates her Whitney photography exhibition “Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Side” with four live performances this weekend in the Susan and John Hess Family Theater. Formerly known as Emily Roysdon, Hughes investigates legacy, loss, and inheritance in “Alive Side,” consisting of photographs of the west side piers right outside the Whitney; Hughes calls them “unmarked memorials, found monuments to the lives that needed that unregulated space. To those who died living queerly. Those who died of neglect, poverty, AIDS, violence, and politics. And to those seeking life by crossing West Street.” The black-and-white photos of the dilapidated wooden piers sticking out of the water, some works sliced diagonally in half, are framed in bright pastel colors that evoke the rainbow pride flag. The exhibit also features the forty-minute video One Big Bag, in which a death doula portrayed by Lindsay Rico describes and enacts rituals surrounding the end of life; “the whole process is a creative process,” she says.

Every Ocean Hughes, The Piers Untitled (#12 collaged, #9, #14 collaged, #4), 2009-23 (photo by Ron Amstutz)

On March 24–26, the Maryland-born Hughes, who lives and works in her home state and Stockholm, will present River, a thirty-minute live performance incorporating song, text, choreographed movement, and set design exploring the crossing that takes place at death, the descent into the underworld. The cast includes Rico, Geo WyeX, Æirrinn, and Nora Brown, with movement direction by Monica Mirabile, costumes by Montana Levi Blanco, and lighting by Timothy Johnson. Tickets are $25; it is recommended they be purchased in advance.