Inner Course helps you look deep inside yourself at Honey Space
Open Casting at Honey Space
148 11th Ave. between 21st & 22nd Sts.
Tuesday – Saturday through July 28, free with advance RSVP, 1:00 – 6:00
www.honey-space.com
www.innercourse.me
Inner Course, the performance duo of Tora Lopez and Rya Kleinpeter, has staged projects in Tasmania, New Orleans, and Sonoma and is currently presenting “Panties for Diamonds — A Psychodramatic Audition for Love in the Age of Abandonment” at Thomas Beale’s nonprofit Honey Space gallery in Chelsea. Funded with donations over Kickstarter, the three-part piece requires visitors to actively participate in a mental and physical examination of the self. The less you know about “Panties for Diamonds” the better, but you need to be prepared to be touched, and the more willing you are to dig into your past and future with complete honesty, the more rewarding an experience it will be. SPOILER ALERT: If you want to be surprised — and boy, will you be surprised — then stop reading here and reserve your time now. But if you want to know just a little more — don’t worry, we’re not about to give the whole thing away — then read on.
The approximately forty-five-minute “Panties for Diamonds” begins with “The Secretary,” in which you fill out a questionnaire that features some rather odd questions. That is followed by “The Softing,” about which we will say nothing more. Those two sections lead to “The Audition,” in which you sit down and discuss various aspects of your life with Rya, an L.A.-born photographer and installation artist, and New Orleans native Tora, a fashion designer and artist who regularly collaborates with Kirsha Kaechele’s KKProjects. Among the other rotating performers are Lisa Lozano, Anne Koch, Daphane Park. Amanda Kanter, Pamala Bishop, Benjamine Heller, Carlton de Woody, John Wells, Fauzeeya Hunter, Hellen Mathers, Matt Savitsky, Tyra Bombetto, and Class Actress. It’s all free, and you are not asked to give such personal information as your age, address, or phone number. Advance reservations are suggested, although walk-ins are welcome, but they might already be booked for that afternoon. We strongly recommend you be adventurous and sign up for this strange but ultimately exhilarating experience; we’re seriously considering going back for a second time.
It’s hard to believe that the Hays Code, a set of standards initiated by two religious figures and named after chief censor Will H. Hays, was enacted and enforced, to varying degrees, in Hollywood from 1934 all the way up to 1968. Film Forum is looking back at some of the racier movies made right before the code took effect in the series “Essential Pre-Code,” consisting of fifty films made between 1931 and 1934, all being shown in 35mm prints. One of the best examples of pre-code films is William A. Wellman’s rarely screened 1931 doozy, Night Nurse. The first of five collaborations between Wellman and Barbara Stanwyck, Night Nurse, based on Dora Macy’s 1930 novel, stars Stanwyck as Lora Hart, a young woman determined to become a nurse. She gets a probationary job at a city hospital, where she is taken under the wing of Maloney (Joan Blondell), who likes to break the rules and torture the head nurse, the stodgy Miss Dillon (Vera Lewis). Shortly after treating a bootlegger (Ben Lyon) for a gunshot wound and agreeing not to report it to the police, Lora starts working for a shady doctor (Ralf Harolde) taking care of two sick children (Marcia Mae Jones and Betty Jane Graham) whose proudly dipsomaniac mother (Charlotte Merriam) is being manipulated by her suspicious chauffeur (Clark Gable). Wellman pulls out all the stops, hinting at or simply depicting murder, child endangerment, rape, alcoholism, lesbianism, physical brutality, and Blondell and Stanwyck regularly frolicking around in their undergarments. It’s as if Wellman is thumbing his nose directly at the Hays Code in scene after scene. Although far from his best film — Wellman directed such classics as Wings (1927), The Public Enemy (1931), A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Beau Geste (1939), and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) — Night Nurse is an overly melodramatic, dated, but entertaining little tale with quite a surprise ending. Night Nurse is screening at Film Forum on July 19 as part of a triple feature with Howard Bretherton and William Keighley’s Ladies They Talk About, starring Stanwyck in one of the earliest women-in-prison movies, and William Dieterle’s Lawyer Man, which pairs Blondell with the always charming William Powell. The series continues through August 11 with such films as Rouben Moumalian’s Love Me Tonight, Frank Tuttle’s Roman Scandals, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross, Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus, Howard Hawks’s Scarface, Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, and Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong (bestiality!), nearly all of which are part of double or triple features.
Sidney Lumet spins an intriguing web of mystery and severe family dysfunction in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke) are very different brothers who are both in desperate financial straits. Andy, a real estate exec, has a serious drug problem and a fading marriage to his sexy but bored young wife (Marisa Tomei), while ne’er-do-well Hank can’t afford the monthly child-support payments to his ex-wife (Aleksa Palladino) and daughter (Amy Ryan). Andy convinces Hank to knock off their parents’ (Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris) jewelry store, but when things go horribly wrong, everyone involved is forced to face some very difficult situations, leading to a harrowing climax. Seymour and Hawke are both excellent, the former cool, calm, and collected, the latter scattershot and impulsive. Tomei gives one of her finest performances as the woman sleeping with both brothers. Lumet tells the story through a series of flashbacks from various characters’ point of view, with fascinating overlaps — although a bit overused — that offer different perspectives on critical scenes. Adapted from a script by playwright Kelly Masterson — whom Lumet had never met or even spoken with — Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (the title comes from an Irish toast that begins, “May you be in heaven half and hour…”) is a thrilling modern noir from one of the masters of melodrama.
