twi-ny recommended events

THE PATIENT GLORIA

Gina Moxley makes a phallic point in The Patient Gloria (photo by Teddy Wolff)

THE PATIENT GLORIA
St. Ann’s Warehouse
45 Water St.
Through December 4, $49-$59
718-254-8779
stannswarehouse.org
www.panpantheatre.com

I never want to end up on Gina Moxley’s shitlist.

In 1964, a thirty-one-year-old chain-smoking divorced mother of a young girl sat down with three distinguished psychotherapists to discuss various aspects of her personal life. The sessions were filmed; the woman, Gloria Szymanski, was told that the recordings were to be used for educational purposes — astonishly, they ended up being shown in theaters. Three Approaches to Psychotherapy, which became more familiarly known as The Gloria Films, documented Gloria speaking with Dr. Carl Rogers, whose specialty was client-centered therapy; Dr. Frederick Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy; and Dr. Albert Ellis, whose discipline was rational-emotive therapy.

Dublin-based actor and playwright Moxley shares Gloria’s story in The Patient Gloria, a stirring seventy-five-minute work making its US premiere at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Focusing on the misogyny inherent in the field of psychology and society at large, it may have taken place more than half a century ago, but the attitudes remain all too contemporary.

As the audience enters the theater, Moxley is sitting at a small table at the front of the stage to the right. Behind her, Gloria (Liv O’Donoghue), in a pouffy hairdo and an elegant white dress that shows off her long legs, tries to relax on a couch. She might look like the wife straight out of an early 1960s sitcom, except she is about to talk about sexual desire in a way that Donna Reed (The Donna Reed Show) and June Cleaver (Leave It to Beaver) never dreamed of.

As the play begins, Moxley, in tight-fitting men’s pants, a white button-down shirt, and awesome gold shoes (the costumes are by Sarah Bacon), asks the audience if they can hear her. She then gets up and says, “Can you see me? That any better? Can you see me now? You can? Wow. Yes. Miraculous. You should not be able to see me at all. Seriously, I’ve been fading for years and am technically invisible by now.” She reveals the item that she was sewing to be a fabric phallus, which she gleefully swings around. “I’m about to play three men — yeah, because I want to — so I felt I needed to get a true feeling for the apparent sense of authority and entitlement that comes with this lump of meat, of manhood,” she says, offering an alternate interpretation of Sigmund Freud’s theory of penis envy. “Since I’ve always been good with my hands I thought I’d make myself a nice, muscular dick to help me get into character.” The male member is a humorous motif that continues throughout the play.

Gloria (Liv O’Donoghue) and one of her psychotherapists (Gina Moxley) are exasperated in US premiere at St. Ann’s (photo by Teddy Wolff)

Moxley proceeds to portray each of the three doctors, with slight adjustments to her costume, accent, and demeanor, as Gloria explains that her major concern is how to tell her nine-year-old daughter, Pammy, that since the divorce she has been having sex with men other than Pammy’s father. She tells Dr. Rogers, “The other day she asked, ‘Mommy, did you ever go to bed with anyone besides Daddy?’ And I lied to her. I looked straight into her eyes and lied, ‘No, honey.’ I mean, what was I meant to say? ‘Sure, honey, everyone does.’ Oh shit. It keeps coming into my mind. I feel so guilty having lied to her. I never lie, I hate liars. I want — I can’t help wanting . . . I remember when I was a little girl and found out my parents made love, oh, it was dirty, terrible. I was particularly disgusted by my mom.”

The idea of a woman, no less a mother, admitting to having and enjoying sex for pleasure has always been frowned upon by much of America, yesterday and today, and the psychotherapists aren’t hesitant to demean Gloria by displaying their own sexual desires for her, thinking with their dicks. Just as Moxley announced at the beginning that she assumed she couldn’t be heard or seen, Gloria is not truly being listened to by the doctors.

To assert themselves and celebrate their quest for individuality and freedom, Gloria and Moxley occasionally break out into joyous dancing (O’Donoghue is also the choreographer), sometimes joined by experimental Irish bassist Jane Deasy, who participates in several dialogues. Feeling like a devil, Gloria says, “I want to get rid of my guilt. But I don’t want to put it on Pammy. Guilt kills.” “Guilt kills,” Moxley agrees. “Guilt kills. Ain’t that the truth,” Deasy adds. A few minutes earlier, Deasy had come to the front of the stage, stood at a microphone, and performed a version of the all-female rock band L7’s “Shitlist,” declaring, “For all the ones / Who bum me out / Shitlist / For all the ones / Who fill my head with doubt / Shitlist / For all the squares who get me pissed / Shitlist / You’ve made my shitlist.”

Presented by Beckett experts Pan Pan (Cascando, Embers), The Patient Gloria is directed by John McIlduff (The Scorched Earth Trilogy, Fatal System Error) with a mix of chaos, absurdity, and exhilaration. Andrew Clancy’s open set counters the claustrophobic design of The Gloria Films, where the subject was mostly seen in the shadow of the supposedly brilliant, much more powerful men. Adam Welsh’s sound and Sinéad Wallace’s lighting maintain the overarching welcoming atmosphere, which often has more of a feel of a party than conversations with a shrink. Projections of photos from the original sessions, words, drawings of phalluses, and other imagery appear on the folded red curtain in the back, not always clear, contributing to the at-times disorienting atmosphere.

O’Donoghue (Good Sex, Lippy) portrays Gloria with a subtle fierceness; the character might be nervous and off balance speaking with the psychotherapists, but she also is not ashamed of the choices she has made. Moxley (Danti-Dan, Endgame), here a dynamic sprite who, dressed as a man, resembles a cross between Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, and Lindsey Graham, is bursting with an infectious, confident energy that fills St. Ann’s. And the tall, thin Deasy adds just the right flourishes, including a rousing finale. Together they don’t just take the power back but revel in it. It’s the kind of play that needs to be performed for the US Congress and at psychiatric conferences around the world.

The real Gloria Szymanski got married and divorced again before dying from leukemia in 1979 at the age of forty-six. In 2008, her daughter, Pamela J. Burry, wrote the book Living with ‘The Gloria Films,’ sharing the effects Three Approaches to Psychotherapy had on her and her mother, who essentially starred in one of the first reality shows. Nearly sixty years after the events of The Patient Gloria, the rights of women to control their bodies are under siege, an undercurrent of the play, which, in its extremely entertaining way, demands that things must change, yet again, as more people make Moxley’s shitlist.

TANTURA

Teddy Katz listens to damning audiotapes about a 1948 massacre in Tantura

TANTURA (Alon Schwarz, 2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, December 2
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

There’s a deeply disturbing theme that runs through Alon Schwarz’s shocking, must-see documentary, Tantura, about one specific incident during what Palestinians refer to as Al Nakba, “the Catastrophe” that took place during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

In the late 1990s, a graduate student named Teddy Katz researched a possible Israeli army massacre that occurred in the Palestinian village of Tantura. When filmmaker Schwarz interviews members of Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade about it, they smile and laugh as they either flat-out deny that such war crimes happened or basically tell Schwarz, so what if it did?

“In the War of Independence, we knew one simple thing: It’s either me or them,” Amitzur Cohen says. “What would I tell [my wife]? That I was a murderer?” he easily admits with a laugh. “If you killed, you did a good thing,” Hanoch Amit says with a smile. Henio-Tzvi Ben Moshe, head of the Alexandroni Veteran’s Association, lets out a disturbing laugh when he declares, “We’re done with Teddy Katz.”

In the late 1990s, for his master’s thesis at the University of Haifa, Katz interviewed 135 people about the massacre, compiling 140 hours of recordings about the Tantura atrocities, centered around the alleged cold-blooded murder of some two hundred Palestinians whose bodies were then dumped into a mass grave. He received a high grade on the paper, but it was soon submerged in controversy, resulting in a defamation lawsuit and claims that it was all a lie.

“You can take the tapes and listen to them, but if you want to make a movie out of it, be careful, because you’ll be hunted down like I was,” Katz tells Schwarz.

But that warning doesn’t deter Schwarz, who speaks with Alexandroni Brigade vets — who are now in their nineties — university professors, engineers, and Arabs who survived the massacre as he puts together what actually happened at Tantura and how Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion began the cover-up, which is still going on.

“My whole life I thought, and I still think, that the root of the disaster, including the part . . . that can be called the contamination, is 1948,” explains Katz, who was named after Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. “To this day the vast majority of what happened in 1948 is not only hushed up but also destroyed.”

Schwarz intercuts archival footage from the war — in which hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were demolished and some three quarters of a million refugees fled their homes — with scenes from a staged propaganda reenactment and clips of Ben-Gurion and the establishment of the State of Israel. As the evidence mounts, so does the refusal to acknowledge the Catastrophe.

“It’s forbidden to tell. I’m not going to talk about it . . . because . . . it could cause a huge scandal. I don’t want to talk about it,” brigade vet Yossef Diamant says. “That’s it. But it happened; what can you do? It happened. . . . [Katz] told the truth,” he adds with a dismissive laugh.

Casually sitting in a chair outside with a woman on either side of him, Mulik Sternberg proudly says, “The Arabs are an evil, cruel, vindictive enemy, but we were better, in battle. Always. . . . Of course we killed them. We killed them without remorse.” He is clearly unafraid of any possible repercussions.

Mustafa Masri, who lives in Fureidis, where many of the Tantura survivors were relocated, describes seeing the bodies of his murdered father and brother piled on a cart of victims. Professor Yoav Gelber comes right out and says, “I don’t believe witnesses.”

Professor Ilan Pappe puts it all in perspective when he says, “I think the self-image of Israel as a moral society is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. How important it is to be exceptional. We are the Chosen People. This is part of the Israeli self-identification as a very superior moral people. . . . I think it’s very hard for Israelis to admit that they commit war crimes.”

Schwarz is an Israeli-born Jew who worked as a high-tech software entrepreneur before turning to documentaries, making Narco Cultura and Aida’s Secrets with his brother Shaul. Alon, who considers himself “a member of the moderate left side of Israel’s political system,” initially set out to make a film about young human rights activists who are trying to end the 1967 occupation and are labeled by many as traitors — much as Katz is. Schwarz stumbled on Katz’s dilemma by accident.

Documentary seeks to uncover the truth of what happened in Tantura in May 1948

Schwarz is no mere fly on the wall in the film but is actively investigating numerous aspects of the case, putting himself in the story. Tantura is reminiscent of Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 The Act of Killing and 2014 follow-up, The Look of Silence, as the director confronts the perpetrators of the 1965–66 genocide in Indonesia, who are proud of what they did. It also recalls the 1968 Mỹ Lai massacre led by US Lt. William Calley Jr. in Vietnam.

Katz, who has had three strokes and uses a motorized scooter to get around, is determined to not give up until justice wins out, despite all that’s happened to his career and his family. “You feel like the country is against you,” his wife, Ruth, tells Schwarz. But none of it might matter in the long run.

“What we remember are the good memories,” says Drora Varblovsky, one of four remaining original residents of Kibbutz Nachsholim, which was started in June 1948 on the former site of Tantura.

“Yes, exactly. I have only good memories,” Tereza Carmi adds. “Because I’m fed up with remembering bad things.”

Tantura opens at IFC on December 2, with Schwarz on hand for Q&As after the 7:50 shows on December 2 and 3.

TRANSFORMER TURNS 50!

Who: Joe Hurley & the Gents, Eugene Hutz, Edward Rogers, Mary Lee Kortes, Ellen Foley, Don Fleming, Tish & Snooky, Richard Barone, Eamon Rush, Roger Clark, Screaming Orphans, Michael Tee, Jesse Bates, more
What: Tribute to Lou Reed’s 1972 Transformer album
Where: City Winery New York, 25 Eleventh Ave. at Fifteenth St., 646-751-6033
When: Saturday, December 3, $30-$55, 8:00
Why: In November 1972, Lou Reed released his second solo album following the dissolution of the seminal experimental Velvet Underground. His eponymous debut earlier that year was met with barely a whimper, but Transformer was a transformative record, for Reed and for rock music itself. Produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, the LP boldly mixed glam with S&M from its opening words. “Vicious / You hit me with a flower / You do it every hour / Oh, baby, you’re so vicious / Vicious / You want me to hit you with a stick / But all I’ve got’s a guitar pick / Huh, baby, you’re so vicious,” Reed declared over a squealing guitar and happily thudding bass. Reed changed the face of top-forty radio with his biggest hit, “Walk on the Wild Side,” which detailed the adventures of Andy Warhol Factory denizens Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Joe Dallesandro, Jackie Curtis, and Joe Campbell and included controversial lyrics that are still shocking today. “Andy’s Chest” is about Warhol, inspired by his 1968 shooting. The album was way ahead of its time, exploring gay and trans subculture and androgyny years before the AIDS crisis.

In celebration of the album’s golden anniversary, City Winery is hosting “Transformer Turns 50!,” in which Joe Hurley & the Gents and special guests will perform the record and other Reed/VU tracks; joining in will be Eugene Hutz, Mary Lee Kortes, Ellen Foley, Don Fleming, Richard Barone, Roger Clark, Screaming Orphans, and members of Ian Hunter’s Rant Band, Roxy Music, Twisted Sister, the Bob Dylan Band, Sonic Youth, and Mink DeVille. Transformer also features the gorgeous “Perfect Day” and “Satellite of Love,” the playful “New York Telephone Conversation,” and the Tin Pan Alley–like closer, “Goodnight Ladies,” which is now a kind of epitaph for Reed, who died in 2013 at the age of seventy-one; “Goodnight ladies, ladies goodnight / It’s time to say goodbye,” he sings. “Oh, nobody calls me on the telephone / I put another record on my stereo / But I’m still singing a song of you / It’s a lonely Saturday night.”

Reed fans must also check out “Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars,” the outstanding, wide-ranging exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, consisting of hundreds of Reed items, from early, never-before-heard recordings to interviews, photographs, memorabilia, and live footage, highlighted by songs from the Transformer tour, when Reed dyed his hair blonde and did a bit of disco dancing, in a black T-shirt and dark sunglasses.

KEEN ON NEW WORK: 2022 KEEN PLAYWRIGHTS LAB READINGS

Who: Keen Company
What: Free readings of three new plays
Where: ART/NY Conference Room, 520 Eighth Ave. at Thirty-Sixth St., third floor
When: Friday, December 2, free with RSVP, 3:00; Monday, December 12, free with RSVP, 3:00; Monday, January 9, free with RSVP, 3:00
Why: Started in October 2013, Keen Company’s “Keen on New York” features readings of works-in-progress by three midcareer playwrights, with impressive casts. The 2022 edition begins on December 2 with Anna Ziegler’s (Photograph 51, Boy) Antigones, a contemporary reimagining of Sophocles’s family and political drama, directed by Tyne Rafaeli and read by Santino Fontana, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Marianne Rendón, and Armando Riesco. On December 12, Things with Friends, written and directed by Kristoffer Diaz (Hercules, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity), invites guests into a fateful dinner party. And on January 9, Sarah Schulman’s (Manic Flight Reaction, The Lady Hamlet) Free Ali! Free Bob! takes on political hierarchies surrounding a gay art clique.

“I am thrilled to announce the details for this year’s Playwrights Lab readings, the first in-person sharing from our lab since the pandemic,” Keen artistic director Jonathan Silverstein said in a statement. “It has been an honor to be in the room with these three exceptional and seasoned artists throughout the year, under the leadership of Keen’s director of new work, Jeremy Stoller. Anna, Kris, and Sarah are all unique voices, yet they share a common sense of compassion and a deep understanding of the world we live in while also reveling in the joy of the human condition.” The readings take place in the ART/NY Conference Room in the Garment District and are free with advance registration.

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER AT NEW YORK CITY CENTER

Jamar Roberts’s In a Sentimental Mood will make its work premiere at AAADT season at City Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
New York City Center
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
November 30 – December 24, $39-$169
www.alvinailey.org
www.nycitycenter.org

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a rough coupla weeks. Thankfully, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns to New York City Center this week just in time to give me just the break I need, something I look forward to every year.

AAADT’s 2022 fall/winter season at City Center runs November 30 to December 24, featuring fifteen works presented in various groupings, beginning with an opening night gala consisting of an excerpt from Mauro Bigonzetti’s Festa Barocca (with Constance Stamatiou and students from the Ailey School), a romantic duet from Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs, and excerpts from Alvin Ailey’s classic Night Creature along with artistic director Robert Battle’s Unfold, with live vocals by soprano Brandie Sutton, before concluding with Ailey’s standard-bearer, Revelations.

If you haven’t been paying attention to former Ailey dancer Jamar Roberts’s growth as a choreographer, you’ve been missing a special progression. The world premiere of his In a Sentimental Mood, the exploration of a young couple’s love and desire, set to music by Duke Ellington and Rafiq Bhatia’s spin on a quartet of jazz standards, is sure to be a highlight at City Center. The other world premiere is Kyle Abraham’s Are You in Your Feelings?, a celebration of Black culture with songs by the Flamingos, Jazmine Sullivan, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, and others. The troupe will present the company premieres of Paul Taylor’s 1964 short, motionless DUET and Tharp’s 1997 Roy’s Joys, a nine-part piece honoring trumpet legend Roy “Little Jazz” Eldridge. There will also be a new production of Ailey and Mary Barnett’s 1986 Survivors, a tribute to Nelson and Winnie Mandela with music by drummer Max Roach and singer Abbey Lincoln, restaged by former AAADT associate artistic director Masazumi Chaya.

Fan favorite BUSK by Aszure Barton is part of AAADT presentation at City Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)

The repertory pieces offer a wide range of consistent delights from throughout the company’s sixty-four-year existence. “All Ailey A” encompasses Night Creature, Reflections in D, Pas de Duke, and The River, “All Ailey B” brings together Memoria, Survivors, and Revelations, “All Ailey C” comprises Blues Suite, Reflections in D, Cry, and Revelations, and “All Ailey D” boasts The River, Blues Suite, and Revelations.

Future of Jazz Orchestra will perform live December 16-18 to Night Creature, Reflections in D, For Four, and Pas de Duke. Two “All New” programs team up In a Sentimental Mood, DUET, Survivors, and Roy’s Joys or Roy’s Joys, Survivors, and Are You in Your Feelings?

I always make sure to see one of the “All New” evenings, a glorious way to say goodbye to one year and welcome the next one, filled with hope and promise and great dancing.

QUONDAM

QUONDAM
The Muse Brooklyn
350 Moffat St.
Sunday, November 27, $20 in advance, $25 day of show, 7:00
themusebrooklyn.com

The mission of the Muse in Brooklyn is to “celebrate circus in all its forms: circus as therapy, as fitness, as play and exploration, as building self-confidence and trust, and especially as high-quality art and spectacular entertainment.” The venue is offering a post-Thanksgiving respite with Quondam, an evening of interdisciplinary improvisation in a quest for healing of any kind of breakup while looking ahead to the future of these difficult, challenging times. (The word quondam means “former,” “in the past,” or “erstwhile.”) The show features acrobats Eleanor Getz and Teddy Menton on duotrapeze, Catherine Jett on trapeze, Megan Gendell on handstand, Sophia Herscu on rope, and juggler Copper Santiago, with musicians Aliya Ultan on cello and voice, Adam Turay and Simon Hanes on guitar, Kevin Eichenberger on bass, Tété Leguia on prepared bass, and Kevin Murray on drums. Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 day of show.

PARIS, TEXAS

Harry Dean Stanton gives a staggering performance as a lost soul in Paris, Texas

PARIS, TEXAS (Wim Wenders, 1984)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
November 25 – December 1
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Winner of both the Palme d’Or and the Critics Prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas is a stirring and provocative road movie about the dissolution of the American family and the death of the American dream. Written by Sam Shepard and adapted by L. M. Kit Carson, the two-and-a-half-hour film opens with a haggard man (Harry Dean Stanton) wandering through a vast, deserted landscape. A close-up of him in his red hat, seen against blue skies and white clouds, evokes the American flag. (Later shots show him looking up at a flag flapping in the breeze, as well as a graffiti depiction of the Statue of Liberty.) After he collapses in a bar in the middle of nowhere, he is soon discovered to be Travis Henderson, a husband and father who has been missing for four years. His brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), a successful L.A. billboard designer, comes to take him home, but Travis, remaining silent, keeps walking away. He eventually reveals that he is trying to get to Paris, Texas, where he has purchased a plot of land in the desert, but he avoids discussing his past and why he walked out on his wife, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and son, Hunter (Hunter Carson, the son of L. M. Kit Carson and Karen Black), who is being raised by Walt and his wife, Anne (Aurore Clément). An odd man who is afraid of flying, has a penchant for arranging shoes, and falls asleep at key moments, Travis sets out with Hunter to find Jane and make something out of his lost life.

Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) and Hunter (Hunter Carson) bond while searching for Jane in Wim Wenders road movie

Longtime character actor Stanton (Repo Man, Wise Blood) is brilliant as Travis, his long, craggy face and sad, puppy-dog eyes conveying his troubled soul and buried emotions, his slow, careful gait awash in loneliness and desperation. The scenes between Travis and Jane are a master class in acting and storytelling; Stanton and Kinski (Tess, Cat People) will break your heart over and over again as they face the hardest of truths. Wenders and regular cinematographer Robby Müller use a one-way mirror to absolutely stunning effect in these scenes about what is hidden and what is revealed in a relationship. Wenders had previously made the Road Movie Trilogy of Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road, which also dealt with difficult family issues, but Paris, Texas takes things to another level. Ry Cooder’s gorgeous slide-guitar soundtrack is like a requiem for the American dream, now a wasteland of emptiness. (Cooder would later make Buena Vista Social Club with Wenders. Another interesting connection is that Wenders’s assistant director was Allison Anders, who would go on to write and direct the indie hit Gas Food Lodging.) A uniquely told family drama, Paris, Texas is rich with deft touches and subtle details, all encapsulated in the final shot. (Don’t miss what it says on that highway billboard.)