twi-ny recommended events

MONOCHROMATIC LIGHT (AFTERLIFE)

Who: Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Sellars, Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray, Julie Mehretu, Kim Kashkashian, Sarah Rothenberg, Steven Schick, Davóne Tines, the Choir of Trinity Wall Street
What: Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)
Where: Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall, 643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
When: September 27 – October 8, $40-$95
Why: During the pandemic lockdown, the Rothko Chapel in Houston celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a livestreamed meditation and discussion from the ecumenical space in May 2021. “The Rothko Chapel is oriented towards the sacred, and yet it imposes no traditional environment. It offers a place where a common orientation could be found – an orientation towards God, named or unnamed, an orientation towards the highest aspirations of Man and the most intimate calls of the conscience,” said Dominique de Menil, who commissioned the chapel with her husband, John, in 1964. Rothko had previously written to his benefactors, “The magnitude, on every level of experience and meaning, of the task in which you have involved me, exceeds all of my preconceptions. And it is teaching me to extend myself beyond what I thought was possible for me.”

Continuing the golden celebration, Newark-born American composer Tyshawn Sorey will be presenting a new multidisciplinary piece, Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), at the Park Avenue Armory September 27 through October 8. The work is inspired by the Rothko Chapel and Morton Feldman’s 1971 masterpiece, “Rothko Chapel,” created for the opening dedication. Sorey’s score for percussion, viola, celesta, piano, bass-baritone, and choir premiered at the chapel in February and has now been reimagined for the armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, featuring new and existing immersive art by Ethiopian-born painter Julie Mehretu, choreography by Brooklyn-born Flex dance pioneer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray, and direction by Pittsburgh-born theater legend Peter Sellars. Mehretu and Gray were both involved in Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Shape of Things: Land of Broken Dreams” at the armory last December, multi-instrumentalist Sorey performed with pianist and composer Conrad Tao in the armory’s Veterans Room in May 2016, and Sellars staged St. Matthew Passion in the Drill Hall in October 2014 and collaborated with Gray on FLEXN and FLEXN Evolution at the armory in 2015 and 2017, respectively. The music will be performed by Kim Kashkashian on viola, Sarah Rothenberg on piano and celesta, and Steven Schick on percussion, with vocalist Davóne Tines and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street.

Art, music, and dance come together in Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) (photo by Stephanie Berger Photography / Park Avenue Armory)

“When asked to write this piece, I made the conscious decision to not compose a single note of music until I experienced the visual and spiritual transformation of [Rothko’s fourteen] paintings for myself inside the Chapel, where I’ve spent several hours during different times of each day I went,” Sorey said in a statement. “This piece reflects these experiences as well as the influence of both Rothko’s artistic output and that of Morton Feldman, one of my biggest musical inspirations. As with all my works, my hope for this composition is for audiences to have an active, dynamic experience with it, not simply just to listen, which the nontraditional space of the armory’s Drill Hall helps to realize.”

Sellars added, “Tyshawn Sorey has created a spare, intimate, enveloping world of sound calling forth the piercing memories, unfinished and unburied histories, yearning, and resolve that live inside every step forward and each moment of stillness; Julie Mehretu’s paintings frame, focus, color, and intensify a thirst for justice and spiritual renewal that moves across layers of generations and geographies; Regg Roc Gray and the courageous movers of FLEXN wear the grief, the loss, the endurance, the grace, and the unbroken life-force itself in every bone and sinew as they break, glide, pause, and get low. It is a privilege for me to enter and share the charged, contemplative, cleansing space opened, activated, and sustained by these artists. For these evenings, the Park Avenue Armory will become a communal site of remembrance and deep introspection.”

On September 29 at 6:00 ($15), Sorey, Mehretu, Gray, Tines, and Sellars will come together for a preshow panel discussion about Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), which was originally co-commissioned by Park Avenue Armory, DaCamera, and Rothko Chapel. In the above promotional video of the four creators at the armory, Sellars, explaining how the work is really a ceremony, a way for people to gather peacefully, says, “For me, one of the deepest things about this not being a show is I also think that we’re at a period in history where we don’t need more shows.” Sorey adds, “Yeah, there’s not a show at all.”

Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) offers a multimedia meditation at armory (photo by Stephanie Berger Photography / Park Avenue Armory)

Update: At the end of the performance, I approached Sellars to tell him how moved I was by the stunning show. His eyes tearing up, he gave me a warm embrace and said, “We’re all so moved. It really was beautiful, wasn’t it?”

I had never met Sellars before and he didn’t know who I was, but Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) provides that kind of atmosphere, bringing everyone together across ninety minutes of art, music, and dance.

The piece is presented in the round, with violist Kim Kashkashian, pianist Sarah Rothenberg, percussionist Steven Schick, and composer-conductor Sorey in the center, surrounded on all sides by the audience. Eight abstract works by Mehretu circle the space, hanging above a platform on which eight dancers are positioned, each in front of one painting. The Choir of Trinity Wall Street is seated in a back row; vocalist Tines walks throughout the space, entering through the audience and later slowly moving across the platform.

Banks Artiste, Deidra “Dayntee” Braz, Rafael “Droid” Burgos, Quamaine “Virtuoso” Daniels, Calvin “Cal” Hunt, Infinite “Ivvy” Johnson, Derick “Spectacular Slicc” Murreld, and Jeremy “Opt” Perez, most of whom are veterans of FLEXN and/or the D.R.E.A.M. Ring, perform unique dances in front of their assigned painting, their Black and brown bodies, particularly their arms and legs, interacting with the swirls and shapes of Mehretu’s canvases, which have such titles as torch, sphinx, about the space of half an hour, and A Mercy (four of which were created for this collaboration). James F. Ingalls’s superb lighting creates shadows of all sizes as well as haunting silhouettes when the dancers roll under the paintings and dance on the other side; shifts in the color of the lights, from blue, red, and pink to green, yellow, and white, breathe life into the paintings as their palettes change.

The music is slow and deliberate, at times almost too much so, but it is also meditative and, perhaps surprisingly, comforting, as it harkens to memory and grieving in addition to healing and rebirth . Tines mostly sings guttural sounds, but he repeats occasional words, such as “Sometime I feel” and “Child,” evoking the Negro spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” The dramatic sound design is by Marc Urselli.

For ninety minutes, there is always something going on, something to be seen or heard, wrapping the audience, including the creators, in a warm and loving embrace.

GOING SOLO: BURN / REMEMBER THIS / FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS

Alan Cumming channels Scots poet Robert Burns at the Joyce (photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

BURN
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at Nineteenth St.
September 21-25, $76-$106
www.joyce.org

Quite by coincidence, the last three shows I’ve seen were all solo plays featuring award-winning performers, three very different productions that run the gamut of what one-person shows can be. Two were based on real people while the third is a work of imaginative fiction, and all three take unique approaches to narrative storytelling and staging.

Continuing at the Joyce through September 25, Alan Cumming and Steven Hoggett’s Burn is an inventive and exciting piece of dance theater that takes the audience inside the head of Scottish poet Robert Burns (née Burnes). Tony and Olivier winner Cumming portrays Burns, the author of such poems as “Auld Lang Syne,” “Scots Wha Hae,” “Tam o’ Shanter,” and “A Red, Red Rose,” as a delightfully impish ghoul in goth-clown makeup and attire. (The cool costumes are by Katrina Lindsay). Hoggett and Cumming follow Burns from his birth in January 1759 to his death in July 1796 at the age of thirty-seven; the text comes primarily from Burns’s poems and letters.

“Here am I,” Burns says at the start. “You have doubtless heard my story, heard it with all its exaggerations. But I shall just beg a leisure moment of you until I tell my own story my own way. My name has made a small noise in this country, but I am a poor, insignificant devil, unnoticed and unknown. I have been all my life one of the rueful looking, long visaged sons of Disappointment. I rarely hit where I aim, and if I want anything I am almost sure never to find it where I seek it.”

Alan Cumming and Steven Hoggett’s Burn is a multimedia wonder (photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

The son of a gardener and failed farmer, Burns suffered from hypochondria and anxiety, turning to poetry in his teen years. Sitting at a desk, he explains, “My way of poesy is: I consider the poetic sentiment, then choose my theme, begin one stanza, when that is composed — which is generally the most difficult part of the business — I walk away.” As he walks away, the quill pen keeps on writing, the first of several illusions that bring a magical quality to the tale. Ana Inés Jabares Pitz’s spare set consists of a desk and a few chairs, all of which hold surprises.

Burns shares his romantic philandering, talking to ladies’ shoes that dangle from the ceiling. A seeming pile of garbage transforms into a glowing white dress that floats in the air. Andrzej Goulding’s projections on the back wall begin with a dark and ominous thunderstorm, accompanied by Matt Padden’s eerie sounds and Tim Lutkin’s stark lighting, and also include Burns’s handwriting, shots of the Scottish mountains partially hidden by clouds (and fog that seeps onto the stage), and dark images evocative of early experimental cinema that explored the celluloid filmstrip itself.

The fifty-seven-year-old Cumming (Cabaret, Macbeth) is his charmingly sly self in the role, occasionally breaking out into short stretches of choreographed movement (by Hoggett and Vicki Manderson), during which his dialogue is prerecorded. The score consists of several of British composer Anna Meredith’s pulsating electronic landscapes (“Solstice,” “HandsFree,” “Calion,” Descent,” “Return”). There is always something to see and hear; the work is in constant motion, never slowing down for a second. It’s a marvel of timing as all the elements come together in a well-paced sixty-five minutes.

At one point, Burns tells us that his motto is “I dare!” That holds true for Cumming and Hoggett with Burn, which deserves a longer run.

David Strathairn portrays Jan Karski and others in Holocaust tale (photo by Rich Hein)

REMEMBER THIS: THE LESSON OF JAN KARSKI
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Wednesday – Sunday through October 16, $97
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

Like Cumming in Burn, Oscar nominee and Emmy winner David Strathairn plays a real person in Clark Young and Derek Goldman’s sharply drawn Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center through October 16. But in this case, we know what Karski, born Jan Romuald Kozielewski in Łódź, Poland, in 1914, looked and sounded like.

The play begins with a prologue in which Strathairn explains, “We see what goes on in the world, don’t we? Our world is in peril. Every day, it becomes more and more fractured, toxic, seemingly out of control. . . . We see this, don’t we? How can we not see this? So, what can we do?” He concludes, “Human beings have infinite capacity to ignore things that are not convenient.”

We then see a projection of a scene from Claude Lanzmann’s epic Shoah documentary. He is interviewing Karski, who gets choked up and leaves the room, walking down a narrow hallway. As he returns in the documentary, Strathairn takes his place onstage, emerging as Karski, ready to proceed with his harrowing, all-too-true tale. He refers to himself as “the man who told of the annihilation of the Jewish people while there was still time to stop it.” He was a witness, hence Lanzmann’s interest in filming him.

Karski goes back to his childhood, explaining how his mother, a devout Catholic, taught him to treat everyone the same, especially the Jews, who were harassed by other kids. He was groomed to become a statesman from an early age; he in fact became a Polish diplomat before teaching law at Georgetown for forty years.

A soft-spoken, humble gentleman, Karski had not planned on becoming a hero, and he did not want to be celebrated as one. “I was forgotten, and I wanted to be forgotten,” he says. But he at last shared his story, and it is a thrilling yet tragic one. He is recruited by the Polish resistance and goes to Auschwitz, sending secret messages about the horrors that are happening in Eastern Europe. He ultimately brings his case to several of the most prominent and powerful men in the United States, but we all know how they reacted.

Jan Karski (David Strathairn) is a witness the powers that be won’t listen to in Remember This (photo by Rich Hein)

Calm and composed, Strathairn portrays dozens of characters in the show, from his grandmother, his mother, Lanzmann, Hermann Goering, Polish officers, Russian guards, and Polish prisoners to his sister-in-law, Nazis, a teacher, a priest, a nurse, and such Jewish leaders as Szmul Zygielbojm. (“Remember his name. This man loved his people more than he loved himself. Zygielbojm shows us this total helplessness, the indifference of the world,” Karski says.)

Strathairn (Nomadland; Good Night, and Good Luck) adopts slightly different accents for each character but doesn’t change his costume (by Ivania Stack), an earth-toned suit with suspenders and a button-down sweater vest; throughout the play, he takes his jacket, shoes, and vest off, adjusts his suspenders, puts his jacket, shoes, and vest back on, or just buttons and unbuttons the jacket and vest seemingly at random, but these small movements, seemingly insignificant as they relate to the story, are mesmerizing.

Misha Kachman’s simple set is just a table and a few chairs, not unlike that of Burn, with Zach Blane’s lighting and Roc Lee’s sound adding layers of depth at certain moments. They all come together to depict Karski diving out of a moving train, a stunt pulled off by the seventy-three-year-old Strathairn, who jumps off the table and rolls across the floor.

Written by Young and Goldman and directed by Goldman, the ninety-minute Remember This was originally created by the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown; fortunately, it does not get bogged down in merely educating the audience but maintains a gripping pace, although the frame intro and conclusion are essentially unnecessary. (There will be TFANA Talks featuring such guests as Bianca Vivion Brooks, Joshua Harmon, Benjamin Carter Hett, and Jerry Raik following the Sunday matinees on September 25 and October 2.) All these years later, it’s still infuriating that America, a land of immigrants, turned its back on the Jews and what became the Holocaust, only entering the war after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

“I report what I see,” Karski, who was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2012, repeats. If only the powers that be listened to him. He might call himself “an insignificant little man,” but Strathairn and Remember This prove him to be so much more.

But in the end, it might be the words of Zygielbojm that pertain closest to what is happening today across the globe: “Madness, madness, madness. They are mad, they are mad. The whole world is mad. . . . This is a mad world. I have to do . . . I don’t know what to do . . . So what do I do?”

David Greenspan plays sixty-six roles in one-man Gertrude Stein adaptation

FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS
The Doxsee @ Target Margin Theater
232 52nd St., Brooklyn
Thursday – Sunday through October 9, $15-$35
212-924-2817
lortel.org

In 1927, soon-to-be literary giant and art collector Gertrude Stein wrote the libretto for composer Virgil Thomson’s 1928 opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. It was a dizzying barrage of words for sixty-six characters, filled with nonsense sentence fragments, inexplicable repetition, and mini-explosions of numbers.

Six-time Obie winner David Greenspan completes his solo trilogy, which began with Barry Conners’s The Patsy and Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, with a frenetic adaptation of Stein’s libretto, with Greenspan performing every role while not cutting a word from Stein’s original. Just as Cumming embodied Burns and Strathairn manifested Karski, Greenspan fully inhabits Stein’s complex dialogue.

A Lucille Lortel Theatre production running through October 9 at the Doxsee @ Target Margin Theater in Sunset Park, Four Saints is no traditional narrative. In fact, it is almost impossible to know what is going on at any moment; there is no real plot. Instead, it is all about the beauty and rhythm of language and poetry amid the mystery of religious saints.

In 1989, shortly before his death, Thomson wrote in the New York Review, “Curiously enough, British and American ways in both speech and movement differ far less on the stage, especially when set to music, than they do in civil life. Nevertheless, there is every difference imaginable between the cadences and contradictions of Gertrude Stein, her subtle syntaxes and maybe stammerings, and those of practically any other author, American or English. More than that, the wit, her seemingly endless runnings-on, can add up to a quite impressive obscurity. And this, moreover, is made out of real English words, each of them having a weight, a history, a meaning, and a place in the dictionary.”

In a ninety-five-minute tour-de-force performance, the sixty-six-year-old Greenspan gives equal weight to every word he speaks, using various accents and hand movements for different characters. (Saint Chavez, for example, is always identified by bringing his hands together as if holding a baseball bat, reminding me of Hollis Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma, which creates its own verbal and visual alphabet.) Greenspan moves across a large rug on a platform stage, surrounded on three sides by gentle off-white curtains, portraying such characters as commère, Saint Therese, Saint Martyr, Saint Settlement, Saint Thomasine, Saint Electra, Saint Wilhelmina, Saint Evelyn, Saint Pilar, Saint Hillaire, Saint Bernadine, and compère. (The set and lighting are by Yuki Nakase Link.)

David Greenspan goes it alone in Four Saints in Three Acts at the Doxsee

He says, “Saint Therese seated and not standing half and half of it and not half and half of it seated and not standing surrounded and not seated and not seated and not standing and not surrounded not not surrounded and not not not seated not seated not seated not surrounded not seated and Saint Ignatius standing standing not seated Saint Therese not standing not standing and Saint Ignatius not standing standing surrounded as if in once yesterday. In place of situations.”

He explains, “A scene and withers. Scene Three and Scene Two. This is a scene where this is seen. Scene once seen once seen once seen.”

He expresses, “Once in a while and where and where around around is as sound and around is a sound and around is a sound and around. Around is a sound around is a sound around is a sound and around. Around differing from anointed now. Now differing from anointed now. Now differing differing. Now differing from anointed now. Now when there is left and with it integrally with it integrally withstood within without with drawn and in as much as if it could be withstanding what in might might be so.”

He opines, “Across across across coupled across crept a cross crept crept crept crept across. They crept across.”

Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll (The Invisible Hand, The Internationalist), Four Saints in Three Acts is more than just a flight of fancy; it’s a celebration of language, and of Stein’s radicalism. It doesn’t have the straightforward narrative of Remember This or the special effects of Burn, but it does sing with its own cadence and rhythm, anchored, as in all three plays, by a stellar solo performance.

NOTHING COMPARES

Sinéad O’Connor explores her past and her legacy in Nothing Compares documentary

NOTHING COMPARES (Kathryn Ferguson, 2022)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, September 23
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com
www.sho.com/nothing-compares

On October 16, 1992, I was at Madison Square Garden for the Bobfest, an all-star concert celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Bob Dylan’s first album for Columbia Records. The lineup included Johnny and June Carter Cash, Lou Reed, Willie Nelson, Tracy Chapman, Kris Kristofferson, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Chrissie Hynde, Neil Young, George Harrison, and many others. But the thing that most people remember about the one-of-a-kind concert — especially those of us who were there — was the reaction when the one-of-a-kind Sinéad O’Connor took the stage.

Two weeks earlier, the twenty-five-year-old Irish activist singer-songwriter had torn up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live after performing a haunting solo version of Bob Marley’s “War,” a political song whose lyrics come from a 1963 speech by Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. At MSG, O’Connor was met with an eerie mix of joyous applause and a building, ominous booing. She stood frozen for a moment, then Kristofferson came out and famously told her, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Instead of playing Dylan’s “I Believe in You,” O’Connor reprised “War,” then exited.

I remember being so upset at how she was treated that I wrote my first and only letter to the editor, which was printed in the Daily News, defending her actions. I quickly received several anti-Semitic phone calls from anonymous “bastards.”

O’Connor’s appearance at the Bobfest serves as the frame for the new Showtime documentary Nothing Compares, opening September 23 at Cinema Village before streaming on the cable channel beginning September 30. The film is appropriately unusual and bends genre traditions, in homage to its iconoclastic subject. Director Kathryn Ferguson focuses on O’Connor’s life and career up to 1993, eschewing all that came after, from more albums and tours to an autobiography and her conversion to Islam. We hear a lot from her first husband, record producer John Reynolds, and about their son, Jake, but no mention is made of her subsequent three marriages and three more children.

O’Connor honestly and unabashedly shares critical insight on pivotal events that influenced who she was and what she became, but her contemporary self is mostly not seen, only heard. It’s not until the very end that we get to see her in the present day, with her band, perform an old song specially chosen for the film. In addition, all the other interviewees, from her music teacher and longtime friend to directors, journalists, and fellow musicians, are also heard but not seen on camera. This is a film about Sinead 1.0.

Sinéad O’Connor belts out an early song in the archival-heavy Nothing Compares

Ferguson (Taking the Waters, Space to Be), who will be at Cinema Village for a Q&A following the 5:00 screening on September 23, keeps the Dublin born and raised O’Connor front and center, in a barrage of archival news clips, family photographs, behind-the-scenes recording footage, staged re-creations, and more (courtesy editor Mick Mahon), as O’Connor delves into the horrible abuse she experienced at the hands of her mother (which was ignored by her father), the poor education she received from nuns, her refusal to get an abortion despite demands from her record company, her condemnation of the church because it was turning its back on pedophilia, her support for mental health programs, her insistence the national anthem not be played before a New Jersey gig, and her boycotting of awards shows because of misogyny and racism in the music industry and society at large.

“There was no therapy when I was growing up. So the reason I got into music was therapy,” she tells Ferguson, who previously directed music videos for O’Connor. “Which is why it was such a shock to become a pop star; it’s not what I wanted. I just wanted to scream.”

The film explores her swift rise from her debut album, 1987’s The Lion and the Cobra, to 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got and 1992’s Am I Not Your Girl?, with detailed looks at such songs as “Troy” (a testament that was her first song truly about herself), “Mandinka,” and “Black Boys on Mopeds.” (The Prince estate did not give Ferguson permission to use “Nothing Compares 2 U” in the film, so we only see the video without hearing the music.) Stardom was not easy for her, but she became an international icon fighting the power, particularly for young girls and women, well ahead of her time. “The powers that be weren’t ready for her,” Chuck D says. Kathleen Hanna was influenced by watching O’Connor’s “feminist performance art” on television — the controversial SNL appearance.

O’Connor resisted being stereotyped or talked down to because she was an attractive woman with a shaved head who liked to dress provocatively, and both her attitude and her looks rattled well-known talk-show hosts thirty years ago.

“I just knew that I didn’t want any man telling me who I could be or what I could be or what to sound like,” she declares. “I came from a patriarchal country where I’m being told everything I can and can’t do because I’m a girl. I figured, well, if I didn’t take it from the system, and I didn’t take it from my daddy, I ain’t taking it from anybody else.”

O’Connor’s voice today is deep and mature, not immediately recognizable. She makes no apologies for the choices she made, and she remains firm in her beliefs in fighting social injustice. Her legacy shines through, even given the difficult times, which continue. She offers a compelling, profoundly personal explanation about why she ripped up the photograph of the pope and shares her thoughts on how she came to be regarded as a powerful, influential public figure.

“I didn’t mean to be strong. I wasn’t thinking to myself, I must be strong. I didn’t know I was strong,” she says. “I did suffer through a lot because everybody felt it was okay to kick the shit out of me. I regret that I was so sad because of it. I regret that, that I spent so many years very isolated and lonely, really.”

The song she was scheduled to sing at the Bobfest, “I Believe in You” from 1978’s Slow Train Coming, contains the following stanza: “They show me to the door / They say don’t come back no more / ’Cause I don’t be like they’d like me to / And I walk out on my own / A thousand miles from home / But I don’t feel alone / ’Cause I believe in you.” After all these years, O’Connor is still doing things her own way, not about to be shown to the door by anyone.

BOOK LAUNCH FOR EL ANATSUI: THE REINVENTION OF SCULPTURE

Who: El Anatsui, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Jason Farago, Massimiliano Gioni, Julian Lucas
What: Book launch
Where: New Museum Theater, 235 Bowery
When: Thursday, September 22, $10, 6:30
Why: “The fact that El Anatsui normally expects curators and collectors of his metal sculpture to decide how to install them, but also because they are hand-wrought, flexible things, with numerous parts that can behave in infinite ways when moved, how they are installed determines their composition, affect, and phenomenological presence. Having conceived the work, and invested so much labor along with his many studio assistants to realize it in initial sculptural form, ceding its inaugural and future manifestations to whoever has custody of the work, is an extraordinary power to invest in others, without any instruction or even suggestion of his own authorial intentionality.” So write Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu in their new book, El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture (Damiani, $70), about Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui, who uses discarded items (primarily bottlecaps) in creating large-scale pieces that comment on the relationship between humans and the environment. The works are malleable, able to be displayed in various configurations that El Anatsui leaves up to whoever is showing the piece.

On September 22 at 6:30, the seventy-eight-year-old El Anatsui (“Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui”), who works in Ghana and Nigeria, will be at the New Museum for the official US launch of the book, highlighted by a panel discussion with Princeton-based artist, critic, and art historian Okeke-Agulu, art critic Jason Farago, and Brooklyn-based critic and essayist Julian Lucas, moderated by New Museum director Massimiliano Gioni. Okeke-Agulu wrote the book, which features such chapters as “El Anatsui and Modern African Art,” “The Aesthetic and Rhetoric of Fragmentation,” and “The Epic and Triumphant Scale,” with beloved Nigerian curator and critic Enwezor, who passed away in 2019 at the age of fifty-five and whose spirit will be felt throughout the evening.

OUR MAN IN SANTIAGO

Maria Troncoso (Presciliana Esparolini) comes between CIA agents Jack Wilson (George Tovar) and Daniel Baker (Nick McDow Musleh) in Our Man in Santiago (photo by Charlie Mount)

OUR MAN IN SANTIAGO
ATM Theater
354 West Forty-Fifth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through October 28, $49-$79
ourmaninsantiago.com

Making its New York City debut through October 28 at ATM Theater, two-time Emmy nominee Mark Wilding’s Our Man in Santiago is a good-natured spy thriller spoof of the US government’s possible involvement in the death of Chilean president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, but it ends up missing its target.

The play is framed by testimony by CIA agent Daniel Baker (Nick McDow Musleh) to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, one year after Allende’s short tenue came to an end. He takes Sen. Harry Rubin back to that fateful day, as the inexperienced Baker and his boss, Jack Wilson (George Tovar), plot to assassinate the democratically elected Allende, who had been president since November 3, 1970. The eager Baker and the self-satisfied Wilson are staying in a room with a balcony at the Carrera Hotel in the Chilean capital of Santiago, across the street from the president’s Moneda Palace. (The effective set is by Jeff G. Rack.) There’s marching in the street as a violent coup is expected at any moment. Baker, a functionary who was previously stationed in New Zealand, has not exactly trained to be an assassin; he fumbles when trying to load his gun, the bullets falling to the floor, a scene witnessed by the maid, Maria Troncoso (Presciliana Esparolini), who had walked into the room but, seeing the gun, backed out.

“How many times . . . You don’t drop bullets, Baker,” he says to himself. “Bullets can’t help you when they’re outside the gun. They need to be inside the gun. Doesn’t matter how fast you pick them up. You’re already dead. The enemy has shot you.”

Maria knocks and then enters despite Baker telling her not to. She shares details of the widespread poverty in Santiago as they try to find a better time for her to come clean the room. “Five is good. I will miss my only meal of the day but it is worth it for you to have a new bar of soap,” she says snidely in broken English. When Wilson shows up, he treats Maria with disdain, ordering her to get out; he then warns Baker that anyone could be a foreign operative and that he should trust no one. The young agent has no idea how true that will soon be.

President Richard Nixon (Steve Nevil) and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Michael Van Duzer) supply comic relief in spy thriller spoof (photo by Charlie Mount)

Wilson sees himself on a path to become the next deputy director of the CIA, a carrot dangled by President Richard Nixon (Steve Nevil) and his loyal secretary of state, Henry Kissinger (Michael Van Duzer), who appear as a back wall slides open to reveal them on the phone at the White House. “Number two man at the agency. That’s a pretty good promotion, wouldn’t you say?” Nixon tells Wilson, who is not about to let Baker ruin this opportunity for him.

Soon Baker, armed with a gun, a press pass, and a camera — for proof that he carried out his mission — heads across the street to kill Allende as the coup gets underway.

Baker has a handgun, but in order for the play to work, director Charlie Mount needs the action and dialogue to be like a rapid-fire machine gun; unfortunately, the pacing is too slow, especially when things get hectic. Mount and Wilding, who has produced and/or written for such television shows as Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, Good Girls, Charmed, and Promised Land, should have injected far more fast slapstick. There were numerous moments when I wanted to be rolling around the floor laughing but instead let out a mere chuckle. The setup is fine, slowly revealing several fun plot twists, but ultimately there are just too many holes in the story, more sitcom than play.

Individually, Musleh is sweetly nervous as the beleaguered Baker, Esparolini is bewitching as the complicated Maria, and Tovar is cool and collected as the calm but not so honorable Wilson, but they don’t light sparks together enough. Nevil and Van Duzer are there to supply comic relief as Kissinger and Nixon, respectively, but they go too far over the top. Wilding, who was inspired to write Our Man in Santiago by the 1974 Harper’s article “The Death of Salvador Allende” by Gabriela García Márquez, about a botched 1970 CIA attempt to oust Allende — the title of the play itself recalls the late-1950s Graham Greene novel and Carol Reed film Our Man in Havana — does cleverly lampoon crass commercialism, US imperialism, and dirty politics. It all makes for a pleasant but underwhelming experience that falls short of what it could have been.

NEW YORK PUBLIC RADIO LIVE: CELEBRATING 40 YEARS OF NEW SOUNDS WITH JOHN SCHAEFER

Who: John Schaefer, Red Baraat, Combo Chimbita, Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley
What: Celebrating forty years of New Sounds
Where: Brooklyn Bowl, 61 Wythe Ave.
When: Wednesday, September 21, $51.90 – $1046.71, 7:30
Why: Queens-born Fordham grad John Schaefer began his New Sounds program on NPR in September 1982, introducing listeners to a wide range of musicians from around the world. The fortieth anniversary of the show will be celebrated on September 21 at Brooklyn Bowl as New York Public Radio’s annual fundraiser. The evening will include live performances by Red Baraat and Combo Chimbita, two groups that were recently featured on the program, which proclaims, “Hand-picked music, genre free. 24/7 radio from New York City.” There will also be a DJ set by Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley from Yo La Tengo. In a January 2011 twi-ny talk, Schaefer, when discussing how the internet has impacted his relationship with his audience, explained, “Now, if you don’t want to stay up till midnight, you can still hear New Sounds — and hear it anytime you like. And even after all these years, I feel like the digital communication with our listeners is still growing up, unsure of what it’s eventually going to be.” Now you can be part of the fortieth anniversary of New Sounds, in person at Brooklyn Bowl, where various NYPR on-air talent will be hanging out to mingle with.

BURN

Alan Cumming brings his debut solo dance-theater piece, Burn, to the Joyce this week (photo by Jane Blarlow/PA Wire)

Who: Alan Cumming
What: North American premiere of solo dance-theater piece
Where: The Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. at Nineteenth St.
When: September 21-25, $76-$106
Why: “You must not deny me!” Alan Cumming declares in his portrayal of eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns in Burn, making its North American premiere at the Joyce this week. The solo dance-theater work was created by Olivier- and Tony-winning actor Cumming with Olivier- and Obie-winning choreographer Steven Hoggett, who choreographed the piece with Vicki Manderson, and is set to the music of British composer Anna Meredith, including such songs as “Solstice In,” “HandsFree,” “Blackfriars,” “Descent,” and “Return.” The set design is by Ana Inés Jabares Pitz, with costumes by Katrina Lindsay, lighting by Tim Lutkin, projections by Andrzej Goulding, and sound by Matt Padden.

In a program note, Cumming — who has appeared on Broadway in Cabaret and a one-man reinterpretation of Macbeth and off Broadway in “Daddy” and has lent his voice to such films as They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead and numerous animated children’s films (while spectacularly lending his body to the hybrid documentary My Old School) — explains, “In 2015, I has just turned fifty and realised I would never be as fit or asked to dance in a show in the same way again. But I still felt I had one more in me! I meant a play or a musical that was dance heavy. Little did I think I would end up making my solo dance theater debut at fifty-seven!” Together, Cumming and Hoggett (Black Watch, Once, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) point out, “An early intention was to explore the idea of Burns as national icon and a figure who, under modern scrutiny, was becoming something more complex than the beloved face on tourists’ souvenir biscuit tins.” There will be a curtain chat with members of the creative team following the September 21 performance. Some shows are already sold out, so get your tickets now if you want to experience what should be an exhilarating evening of dance, theater, music, and poetry.