twi-ny recommended events

HAMLET / ORESTEIA

Alex Lawther is impressive as Hamlet in Robert Icke’s dazzling production at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

HAMLET/ORESTEIA
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
In repertory through August 13, $45-$199
www.armoryonpark.org/hamlet
www.armoryonpark.org/oresteia

An overwhelming sense of grief and severe family dysfunction link Robert Icke’s ingenious pairing of Hamlet and Oresteia, running in repertory at Park Ave. Armory through August 13. You might not immediately think of the two tragedies, one written in English by William Shakespeare around 1600 about an introspective Danish prince, the other a Greek trilogy penned by Aeschylus in the fifth century BCE focusing on the conflicted son of a powerful king, as theatrical brethren, but Icke masterfully weaves them together over the course of seven thrilling hours.

Following up his superb one-person reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People starring Ann Dowd in a pandemic-reconfigured Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the armory, Icke returns with this extremely satisfying duo, which tackle similar themes in these contemporary versions. Whereas Icke makes subtle tweaks to Hamlet, he institutes much heavier changes to Oresteia.

They both take place on Hildegard Bechtler’s expansive, relatively shallow horizontal set, with entrances at either side and a glassed-in back room with sliding doors that are alternately transparent, translucent, or opaque. For Hamlet, business chairs and a comfy L-shaped couch are brought on- and offstage in between rectangular marble stanchions, while for Oresteia, the furniture includes a long dinner table with benches, marble Greek pillars with exposed stone walls, and a large bathtub in the rear. Bechtler also designed the modern-day costumes, with intricate lighting by Natasha Chivers and sound by Tom Gibbons.

Hamlet, superbly played with a tender vulnerability by twenty-seven-year-old British actor Alex Lawther, is dismayed to find that his recently widowed mother, Gertrude (Jennifer Ehle), has married her late husband’s brother, Hamlet’s father, Claudius (Angus Wright), who is now the king of Denmark. The two seem very much in love, making out on the couch. But when Hamlet’s father’s ghost (David Rintoul), who appears on closed circuit security cameras wandering the empty, dungeonlike halls of Elsinore castle, tells his son that Claudius murdered him, Hamlet, who has been considering going back to school in Wittenberg, becomes obsessed with revenge, yet he lacks the resolve to take any kind of significant action in his life.

Klytemnestra (Anastasia Hille) and Agamemnon (Angus Wright) face each other across the family dinner table in Oresteia (photo by Joan Marcus)

Meanwhile, he seems destined to marry Ophelia (Kirsty Ryder), the daughter of Claudius’s chief adviser, Polonius (Peter Wight), and sister of the strong-willed Laertes (Luke Treadaway). Soon bodies are piling up, as Hamlet says, “with blood of fathers mothers daughters sons.”

In Oresteia, Agamemnon (Angus Wright), the king of Mycenae, is told by a seer, “By his hands alone. The child is the price. Fair winds.” Agamemnon and his brother, Menelaus (Peter Wight), need to sail their ships to Troy but are becalmed in Aulis, and Agamemnon interprets the prophecy to mean that he must kill his six-year-old daughter, Iphigenia (Elyana Faith Randolph or Alexis Rae Forlenza), in order to appease the gods and get the winds moving. The king is desperate to find another way, but both his brother and his herald, Talthybius (Josh Higgott), insist the deed must be done. When the queen, Klytemnestra (Anastasia Hille), deciphers the prophecy, she is of course furious, declaring, “You’re ill. You’re mad. To kill our child?” But she might not be able to stop him.

Ten years later, when Agamemnon returns from the war, bringing with him teenage captive Cassandra (Hara Yannas), he finds his family vastly changed. Bright young Orestes (Hudson Paul or Wesley Holloway) has grown into a conflicted teenager (Treadaway), daughter Electra (Tia Bannon) is jealous of Cassandra, and cousin Aegisthus (Angus Wright) has usurped Agamemnon’s place in the family. Soon bodies are piling up, and Klytemnestra warns Orestes, with more than a touch of wishful thinking, “You do not want blood on your hands.” Fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons are all in jeopardy.

Fear is central to both narratives. While Hamlet delivers his despair and anxiety directly to the audience in famous soliloquys, Oresteia unfolds in flashbacks as Orestes shares his memories with an unidentified woman (Ryder) who appears to be his therapist. Orestes tells her, “I watch it again, happening for the first time but — too late, too late to stop it. It pours out of me. But what if what’s next is — ? What if it’s better left sealed up, undisturbed?” The doctor responds, “We have to understand the truth.” Orestes: “What if it’s a dream? What if it’s a lie?” Doctor: “Then those lies reveal something about you. ‘Our self’ isn’t an absolute thing. It’s handfuls of memories and moments and people — and we form them into who we think we are. For most of us, it’s only partly true: one version of truth. A story.” Orestes: “A story. A story I’ve been through before. As a child. But I don’t know where it ends —”

Claudius (Angus Wright) and Gertrude (Jennifer Ehle) hold hands, much to Hamlet’s (Alex Lawther) consternation (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Looking backward and forward while fearing the end is also a leitmotif for each play. “I try and look forward rather than backward,” Agamemnon says. Hamlet explains, “I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down / for yourself sir should be old as I am / if like a crab you could go backward.” At dinner, Electra confesses, “I know. I was late. I have apologized. Let’s all just move forward.” When Orestes insists to the doctor that he can’t remember the past, she implores, “You will remember something. We just have to begin. Travel back along the road, all the way back to where it began.” Hamlet says to his mother, “Repent what’s past / Avoid what is to come.”

The words “end” or “ending” are repeated throughout all seven hours. “It’s ending. It is ending,” Agamemnon says. Hamlet explains to Claudius, “We fat all creatures else to fat us and we fat ourselves for maggots / that’s the end.” Talthybius tells Agamemnon and Menelaus, “No one thinks this thing is close to the end. It’s cut in deep, it’s gone too far for that. And our enemy is prepared, planning years beyond — so there’s no road to the end of this that’s swift.” Ophelia, losing control of her wits, babbles to Laertes, “I would give you some violets but they withered all when my father died / they say he made a good end / and will he not come again? / and will he not come again? / no no he is dead.”

Both works also explore the power of dreams. Hamlet famously says, “To die to sleep / to sleep perchance to dream / ay, there’s the rub / for in that sleep of death what dreams may come / when we have shuffled off this mortal coil / must give us pause.” Orestes asks the doctor, “What happens when I dream? What is knotting together with what — what is being made? Fear and wishes and — and if it’s me, if it’s just inside me with no meaning elsewhere, can’t I create something better than this, can’t I choose imagined hope rather than imagined fear?” Shortly after Klytemnestra awakes from a bad dream, Cilissa (Marty Cruikshank), Orestes’s nurse, recalls of him as a baby, “He screamed and screamed at night. Never a good sleeper.”

Icke, who is only thirty-five and was an associate director with the Almeida in London from 2013 to 2019, is now the Ibsen artist in residence at Ivo van Hove’s Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, and he has picked up van Hove’s obsession with using cameras to present live feeds on screens. (The projections are by Tal Yarden for Hamlet and Tim Reid for Oresteia.) In addition to the video surveillance that reveals Hamlet’s father’s ghost, there are news reports about young Fortinbras leading Norway’s military marching toward Denmark; press interviews with Agamemnon; and Claudius closely watching The Mousetrap, the play-within-a-play in which Hamlet discloses to Claudius that he knows he murdered his father. In addition, the screens are used for countdowns, ticking away the seconds during fifteen-, ten-, and five-minute intermissions in Oresteia like a doomsday clock. Meanwhile, articles of evidence and the exact times of characters’ deaths are detailed above the set like breaking news.

Klytemnestra (Anastasia Hille) can’t hold the pain inside any longer in Oresteia (photo by Joan Marcus)

Icke digs into 1960s music icons by featuring several Bob Dylan songs in Hamlet — one does not generally associate Dylan, and such tunes as Things Have Changed (“Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose / Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose / People are crazy and times are strange / I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range”) and All Along the Watchtower (“There must be some kind of way outta here / Said the joker to the thief / There’s too much confusion / I can’t get no relief), as the soundtrack for a party with lots of dancing and balloons (of course, “Masters of War” would not exactly be the best choice either) — while Iphigenia sings verses from the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” in Oresteia (“God only knows what I’d be without you”).

The casting between the two plays is shrewdly resourceful. Wright is terrific as Claudius, Agamemnon, and Aegisthus, standing tall, speaking firmly, but not afraid to show the cracks in their armor. Peter Wright is stalwart as the loyal but ill-fated Polonius and Menelaus. Rintoul portrays the Player King and the ghost, haunting Claudius and Hamlet, respectively. Other key dualities that bring the works together include Bannon as Guildenstern and Electra, Treadaway as Laertes and Orestes, Abubakar as Marcellus and Calchas, Higgott as Horatio and Talthybius, Ryder as Ophelia and the doctor, Hara Yannas as Bernardo and Cassandra, and Athene Ross Waiton (in Hamlet only) as Francisco and the gravedigger, who makes a memorable appearance from under the stage, warbling Dylan’s “Sugar Baby.” Lia Williams was scheduled to play Gertrude and Klytemnestra but had to pull out after injuring her Achilles heel; Ehle and Hille are excellent as her respective replacements.

Both Hamlet and Orestes are onstage virtually the entire show, watching the proceedings when they’re not directly involved. They experience devastating loss that rips at their souls, and each has the opportunity to commit murder to avenge wrongdoing. Instead of wielding “a bare bodkin,” Hamlet puts a gun to Claudius’s head, while Orestes pulls a knife on one of his parents. But revenge will not necessarily relieve them of their deep trauma. “You must know your father lost a father / that father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound / in filial obligation for some term / to do obsequious sorrow / but to persever / in obstinate condolement is a course / of impious stubbornness / ’tis unmanly grief,” Claudius tells Hamlet. Referring to a murder in his family, the doctor tells Orestes, “You survived that trauma. We’re barely there in the moment it happens — we hardly feel it as it hollows us out — what hurts is the next second; awakening into what’s left — And I don’t think you’ve woken up. I’m not sure you want to wake up.” Orestes asks, “Why would I?” The doctor responds, “Fear. Of where you might be. Where you might really be.”

In a world turned upside down by a global pandemic that has killed nearly six and a half million people, Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, climate change that is threatening the future of the planet, mass shootings in the United States committed with automatic assault weapons, and an insurrection that continues to jeopardize American democracy, many of us are afraid of where we might really be.

As Electra asks, “How do you mourn?” It’s a question we are all facing these days, in one way or another, a question brilliantly explored in Icke’s dueling plays.

HEDDA LETTUCE PRESENTS THE CLASSICS: STRAIT-JACKET

Lucy Harbin (Joan Crawford) doesn’t take kindly to marital infidelity in Strait-Jacket

STRAIT-JACKET (William Castle, 1964)
Village East Cinema by Angelika
181-189 Second Ave. at 12th St.
Friday, August 12, $20, 8:00
www.angelikafilmcenter.com

One of the posters for William Castle’s 1964 camp classic, Strait-Jacket, screams out, “Warning! Strait-Jacket vividly depicts ax murders!” accompanied by a lurid illustration of an ax swinging down and spraying blood. Indeed, when Lucy Harbin (Joan Crawford) comes home early one night and catches her younger husband (Lee Majors) in bed with another woman (Patricia Crest), she grabs an ax and gives them each a nasty whack. After twenty years in an asylum, she returns to her farm to find her daughter, Carol (Diane Baker), engaged to Michael Fields (John Anthony Hayes), whose parents (Howard St. John and Edith Atwater) don’t particularly approve of the union. Soon heads are rolling, and no one is safe.

The first of a handful of low-budget exploitation films made by Crawford at the end of her career — which also included Castle’s I Saw What You Did, Jim O’Connolly’s Berserk! and Freddie Francis’s Trog — Strait-Jacket has quite a pedigree, written by Robert Bloch, the screenwriter of Psycho; produced and directed by Castle, who had previously made House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler; photographed in black-and-white by two-time Oscar nominee Arthur E. Arling (The Yearling, I’ll Cry Tomorrow); a Theremin-heavy soundtrack by bandleader and composer Van Alexander; and costarring future Oscar winner George Kennedy, Six Million Dollar Man Majors, WWII navy hero Leif Erickson, and Pepsi vice president and nonactor Mitchell Cox. (Crawford was the widow of former Pepsi president Al Steele and was still on the board of directors of the company, resulting not only in Cox’s appearance but also in overt product placement in the movie.)

But most of all, Strait-Jacket has Crawford, who chews up the scenery with relish, living up to Faye Dunaway’s portrayal of her in Frank Perry’s 1981 cult favorite, Mommie Dearest. Just wait till you see her light a match using a record on a turntable and her reaction to a bust of her that her daughter has made — an actual bust of Crawford from her time at MGM in the 1930s. And be sure not to miss the Columbia Pictures logo at the end. Strait-Jacket is being shown August 12 at 8:00 in the long-running Village East series “Hedda Lettuce Presents the Classics,” hosted by the one and only drag icon Hedda Lettuce (Steven Polito); Hedda Lettuce will be back August 26 with the one and only Mommie Dearest.

HEART: A POETIC PLAY

Jade Anouka shares her personal story in Heart (photo by Trévon James 2022)

HEART
Audible Theater’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Wednesday – Sunday through August 14, $30-$67
www.audible.com/ep/minettalane
hearttheplay.com

British poet and performer Jade Anouka establishes the parameters of her world premiere one-person show, Heart, from the very beginning, in an explanatory prologue. Standing front and center onstage, she tells the audience at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, “This story was written by a black woman. / But this story has no mention of blackness. / This story is being performed by a black woman. / The fact that she is black / And a woman / Is political enough / And she already takes up much of her life talking about it. / About being black / And how it feels to be a woman. / So this is a just a story / Told by a black woman. / This is not a black story / Or a woman story / This is perhaps a story / For all the misfits, all those who have ever felt ‘other.’”

For the next seventy minutes, through six scenes plus an interlude and an epilogue, Anouka, a self-declared hopeless romantic who was born in London in 1990, shares her deeply intimate tale of her search for who she is, seeking personal and professional success. “I invite you to feel / Feel the rhythms / Of your own heartbeat / As I tell you a story / My story,” she says.

In spoken-word verse that ranges from furious rap to Shakespearean metre, Anouka — who, at the age of only thirty-one, has already appeared in nine works by the Bard, in addition to starring in such British series as Cleaning Up and Turn Up Charlie and portraying witch Ruta Skadi in His Dark Materials — leads us through a failed marriage; being misunderstood by her Bible-thumping Trinidadian mother and Jamaican father; a booze-and-drugs-fueled sexual rampage; using running to escape her issues; and jumping into a surprising new relationship.

Along the way, she offers no apologies for the choices she makes, concentrating on small instances that help define her emotional and psychological journey, like the tender interlocking of fingers. But ever-present is what she calls “the beast,” which she first saw in her husband but now believes is inside her. “I know he’s got a dark side / But sure haven’t we all,” she notes, later admitting, worried about her own mental health, “Precious moments of stillness / Of breath, of noticing / My beast / Realising / My beast.”

Anouka is haunted by thoughts of inadequacy, as a daughter, an actor, and a partner. “Unfortunately / I’m stuck with me / Trying to be / The best version / Of me I can be / But inadequacy / Pulls me inside of me / Can’t see the strengths / Only focus on the bad of me . . . It’s my beast you see / It’s taunting me,” she confesses in a way we can all relate to.

When she falls hard for someone, she attempts to break free of the beast and find joy in a new relationship, opining, “I so wish I was bolder / So wish I was braver / I so wish you could be proud of me / So wish you could love me / So wish you could trust me / So wish you knew just what I do / That I’d shout from the rooftops / And sing from the rafters / I love you I love you I love you! / But I can’t do that / I’m scared to do that.” But this time she’s determined to make things work.

Anouka is no stranger to solo performances. She turned her 2015 poem “Winning,” from her poetry collection Eggs on Toast, into a spirited video and won a Stage Award for Acting Excellence at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe Festival for Sabrina Mahfouz’s one-person show, Chef. Although the narrative sometimes lapses into the mundane, the staging picks it up, occasionally literally. Heart is gorgeously directed by Ola Ince (The Convert, Poet in da Corner), with a wonderfully transcendent set by Obie winner Arnulfo Maldonado.

Jade Anouka rises high in world premiere one-person show (photo by Trévon James 2022)

Anouka, in a colorful costume by Emily Rebholz, interacts with several rows of fabric hanging from the ceiling alongside narrow, vertical neon bulbs, their hues changing with Anouka’s emotions courtesy of Obie winner Jen Schriever’s majestic lighting. Early on, a swing drops down from above like a gift from heaven, offering Anouka a brief respite of childhood innocence. Later, she climbs atop a tall chair that nearly reaches the rafters, evoking both a lifeguard station and a high chair for infants. The engaging movement choreography is by Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster. Tony winner Fitz Patton’s sound design (with original music by Renell Shaw and Patton) serves a key role from the outset, starting with a low drone that murmurs through the theater as the audience enters.

Audible specializes in presenting short runs of one-person shows (with some exceptions, as with the recent truncated, controversial adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night) that are available as audiobooks. Previous productions include Faith Salie’s Approval Junkie, Lili Taylor in Wallace Shawn’s The Fever, Carey Mulligan in Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys, and Billy Crudup in David Cale’s Harry Clarke.

Heart is so dependent on the compelling staging and Anouka’s connection with the theatergoers — she tries to make eye contact with every audience member, never just looking into space — that I can’t imagine simply listening to it through earphones or in the car without those visuals. So get yourselves over to the Minetta Lane to see it in person as soon as you can; your heart will thank you.

[Note: The August 10 performance will be followed by a talkback with Anouka and playwright Dave Harris (Exception to the Rule, Tambo & Bones).]

POOL PARTY: SWIMMING POOL / A BIGGER SPLASH

POOL PARTY
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
August 5-14
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
www.focusfeatures.com

With New York City sweltering in a muggy, sweat-drenching summer with temps that have stayed in the nineties, Metrograph offers two things to cool you off that usually don’t go together: air-conditioning and swimming. But that’s just what their new series, “Pool Party,” does, consisting of seven films in which characters go for a dip, for good and for bad.

The series kicks off with François Ozon’s beguiling mystery Swimming Pool, in which Charlotte Rampling shows Ludivine Sagnier that she still has it, followed by Jacques Deray’s 1969 erotic thriller La Piscine, in which Jane Birkin shakes things up between Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. Burt Lancaster swims home through suburban backyard pools in Frank Perry’s 1968 adaptation of John Cheever’s 1964 short story “The Swimmer.” Selena Gomez and friends take a wild road trip in Harmony Korine’s 2012 Spring Breakers, meeting up with a metallic-smiling James Franco. Elsie Fisher finds more trouble than she bargained for as a middle school vlogger in Bo Burnham’s bittersweet debut, Eighth Grade. British artist David Hockney makes a big splash in Jack Hazan’s 1974 hybrid docudrama, A Bigger Splash. And Lucretia Martel traces the fall of a bourgeois family in her 2001 debut, La Ciénaga. Below is a deeper dive into two of the films; get those bathing suits on and jump in to beat the heat!

Jealousy and envy are at the heart of François Ozon’s sexy thriller

SWIMMING POOL (François Ozon, 2003)
Friday, August 5, 2:45
Sunday, August 7, 12:20
metrograph.com
www.focusfeatures.com

Charlotte Rampling is divine in Swimming Pool, François Ozon’s playfully creepy mystery about a popular British crime novelist taking a break from the big city (London) to recapture her muse at her publisher’s French villa, only to be interrupted by the publisher’s hot-to-trot teenage daughter. Rampling stars as Sarah Morton, a fiftysomething novelist who is jealous of the attention being poured on young writer Terry Long (Sebastian Harcombe) by her longtime publisher, John Bosload (Game of Thrones’s Charles Dance). John sends Sarah off to his elegant country house, where she sets out to complete her next Inspector Dorwell novel in peace and quiet. But the prim and proper — and rather bitter and cynical — Sarah quickly has her working vacation intruded upon by Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), John’s teenage daughter, who likes walking around topless and living life to the fullest, clearly enjoying how Sarah looks at her and judges her. “You’re just a frustrated English writer who writes about dirty things but never does them,” Julie says, and soon Sarah is reevaluating the choices she’s made in her own life. Rampling, who mixes sexuality with a heart-wrenching vulnerability like no other actress (see The Night Porter, The Verdict, and Heading South), more than holds her own as the primpy old maid in the shadow of a young beauty, even tossing in some of nudity to show that she still has it. (Rampling also posed nude in her sixties in a series of photographs by Juergen Teller alongside twentysomething model Raquel Zimmerman, so such “competition” is nothing to her.)

Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and Sarah (Charlotte Rampling) come to a kind of understanding in François Ozon’s Swimming Pool

Rampling has really found her groove working with Ozon, having appeared in five of his films, highlighted by a devastating performance in Under the Sand as a wife dealing with the sudden disappearance of her husband. Sagnier, who has also starred in Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women, is a delight to watch, especially as things turn dark. Swimming Pool is very much about duality; the film opens with a shot of the shimmering Thames river while the title comes onscreen and Philippe Rombi’s score of mystery and danger plays, and later Sarah says, “I absolutely loathe swimming pools,” to which Julie responds, “Pools are boring; there’s no excitement, no feeling of infinity. It’s just a big bathtub.” (“It’s more like a cesspool of living bacteria,” Sarah adds.) Ozon (Time to Leave, Criminal Lovers) explores most of the seven deadly sins as Sarah and Julie get to know each other all too well.

David Hockney works on his masterpiece in Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash

A BIGGER SPLASH (Jack Hazan, 1974)
Saturday, August 6, 2:30
Sunday, August 7, 5:00
Saturday, August 13, 7:15
metrograph.com

Coinciding with Pride celebrations throughout New York City in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in June 2019, Metrograph premiered a 4K restoration of Jack Hazan’s pivotal 1974 A Bigger Splash, a fiction-nonfiction hybrid that was a breakthrough work for its depiction of gay culture as well as its inside look at the fashionable and chic Los Angeles art scene of the early 1970s. In November 2018, David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at auction for $90.3 million, the most ever paid for a work by a living artist. A Bigger Splash, named after another of Hockney’s paintings — both are part of a series of canvases set around pools in ritzy Los Angeles — takes place over three years, as the British artist, based in California at the time, hangs out with friends, checks out a fashion show, prepares for a gallery exhibition, and works on Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) in the wake of a painful breakup with his boyfriend, model, and muse, Peter Schlesinger, who is a key figure in the painting.

It’s often hard to know which scenes are pure documentary and which are staged for the camera as Hazan and his then-parter, David Mingay, who served as director of photography, tag along with Hockney, who rides around in his small, dirty BMW, meeting up with textile designer Celia Birtwell, fashion designer Ossie Clark, curator Henry Geldzahler, gallerist John Kasmin, artist Patrick Procktor, and others, who are identified only at the beginning, in black-and-white sketches during the opening credits. The film features copious amounts of male nudity, including a long sex scene between two men, a group of beautiful boys diving into a pool in a fantasy sequence, and Hockney disrobing and taking a shower. Hockney’s assistant, Mo McDermott, contributes occasional voice-overs; he also poses as the man standing on the deck in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), only to be replaced by Schlesinger later. There are several surreal moments involving Hockney’s work: He cuts up one painting; Geldzahler gazes long and hard at himself in the double portrait of him and Christopher Scott; and Hockney tries to light the cigarette Procktor is holding in a painting as Procktor watches, cigarette in hand, mimicking his pose on canvas. At one point Hockney is photographing Schlesinger in Kensington Gardens, reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which questions the very nature of capturing reality on film.

Hockney was so upset when he first saw A Bigger Splash, which Hazan made for about twenty thousand dollars, that he offered to buy it back from Hazan in order to destroy it; Hazan refused, and Hockney went into a deep depression. His friends ultimately convinced him that it was a worthwhile movie and he eventually accepted it. It’s a one-of-a-kind film, a wild journey that goes far beyond the creative process as an artist makes his masterpiece. Hockney, who turned eighty-five last month, has been on quite a roll of late. He was the subject of a 2016 documentary by Randall Wright, was widely hailed for his 2018 Met retrospective, and had a major drawing show at the Morgan Library in 2020-21. In addition, Catherine Cusset’s novel, Life of David Hockney, was published in English in 2019, a fictionalized tale that conceptually recalls A Bigger Splash.

ART TALK: CYNTHIA DAIGNAULT ON CRISTINA IGLESIAS

Cristina Iglesias’s Landscape and Memory consists of five bronze pools flowing along the Oval Lawn in Madison Square Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Who: Cynthia Daignault
What: Free art talk in conjunction with Cristina Iglesias’s Landscape and Memory
Where: Oval Lawn, Madison Square Park
When: Wednesday, August 3, free, 6:00
Why: Mad. Sq. Art concludes its free summer talk series with American painter Cynthia Daignault discussing monuments, memory, and the natural world as it relates to her work and Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias’s Landscape and Memory, which is on view in the park through December 4. Daignault’s canvases feature lush mountain valleys, black-and-white trees, words barely visible on black backgrounds, objects such as skulls and food, and figures such as JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Barack Obama, Malcolm X, and Divine. Iglesias’s public interventions include water-based works in England, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Belgium, and Norway in addition to gates and passages, entwined murals, rooms and mazes, screens, suspended pavilions, and other conceptual and architectural projects. On August 3 at 6:00, Daignault will be on the oval lawn in Madison Square Park to share her thoughts on Iglesias’s captivating piece, a stream that winds through the grass in five bronze sculptural pools, referencing Cedar Creek and Minetta Brook, which once upon a time flowed across the park, heading for the East or Hudson River.

Each pool offers its own calming respite, with water gently babbling against rocks. “I started being interested in the use of water as an element of movement and change in this culture and also in the city, a way to show how nothing if we look carefully is always the same,” Iglesias explained in a 2021 virtual discussion for Whitechapel Gallery. “And I think water somehow makes that more visible.” It’s as if Iglesias, the daughter of a scientist, has uncovered a slice of the geographic history of Madison Square Park, now bubbling to the surface. (The park has also been home to a potter’s field, a parade ground / arsenal, and a reform school.) The title pays tribute to Simon Schama’s 1995 treatise Landscape and Memory, which explores the Western world’s interaction with nature. “Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock,” Schama writes. “Once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents; of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery.” Following the informal talk, the public is invited to continue the dialogue directly with Daignault.

MEDUSA

A masked gang of religious zealots seek out sinners in Anita Rocha da Silveira’s Medusa

MEDUSA (Anita Rocha da Silveira, 2021)
Angelika Film Center
18 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, July 29
www.angelikafilmcenter.com
www.musicboxfilms.com/film/medusa

Brazilian writer-director Anita Rocha da Silveira follows up her 2015 success, Kill Me Please, about murder, sin, and misogyny among adolescents, with Medusa, which takes similar themes and more to another level.

According to ancient myth, Medusa was a beautiful mortal Gorgon virgin who was cursed after being seduced by Poseidon; she turned into an ugly snake-haired demon, and men who looked directly at her were turned into stone. In Medusa, a group of God-fearing young women prowl the streets at night, wearing white masks, hunting down sinful women and beating them until they agree to renounce their sins and worship Jesus; their confessions are recorded and posted on social media, where they go viral. The vicious group is inspired by an unknown woman who, years before, put on a mask and set on fire the face of an actress and dancer named Melissa (Bruna Linzmeyer) because of her lascivious promiscuity. Neither woman has been seen since.

By day, the mask-wearing gang is a bright and cheery religious singing troupe known as the Treasures of the Lord, dressed all in white, proudly chirping, “The Lord shall make my dream come true,” declaring themselves to be “witnesses of faith.” They are members of a cultlike church run by the charismatic Pastor Guilherme (Thiago Fragoso), who tells his flock, “My brothers, for a long time, the church has been estranged from the nation’s decisions. How much time have we wasted believing that the church shouldn’t decide the country’s future?”

The young men in the church are part of the Watchmen of Sion, self-appointed “guardians of the family, the morals, and the Lord,” a well-trained vigilante mob whose goal is to “crush the sinners.” The objective is that the Watchmen and the Treasures chastely fall in love and marry, creating a next generation of religious zealots to continue their mission to transform the world into faithful legions.

One night, the masked Treasures’ target fights back, scarring Mari’s (Mari Oliveria) face. The disfigurement is embarrassing to Mari, Treasures leader Michele (Lara Tremouroux), and the plastic surgery clinic where Mari works; she is soon fired because of her appearance.

While indoctrinating newbie Clarissa (Bruna G), Mari sets out to get a photo of the original victim, Melissa, and expose her sins on social media. She gets a job at a mysterious hospital that cares for people in long-term comas who are not expected to regain consciousness. There Mari is befriended by coworker Lucas (Felipe Frazão), who is attracted to her. It isn’t long before Mari begins questioning where her carefully regimented life is leading her.

Medusa is a creepy thriller, the eerie spawn of John Carpenter, David Lynch, Claire Denis, Dario Argento, and Brian De Palma as well as Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face and Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s Jesus Camp. Not afraid to let her influences show, Rocha da Silveira imbues the film with a 1970s giallo / 1980s horror aesthetic even though it is set in the present day. It’s a cleverly disguised condemnation of the far-right evangelical movement that seeks to control women’s bodies, legislate their restrictive morality, and convert their country — be it Brazil, the United States, or elsewhere — into a Christian nation.

Mari (Mari Oliveria) and Michele (Lara Tremouroux) attempt to hide their own scars while inflicting pain on others in Brazilian thriller

Cinematographer João Atala often zooms in for close-ups of characters’ faces, exploring ideas of beauty as well as physical and emotional scars; Mari isn’t the only one attempting to cover something up. The women occasionally stare directly into the camera, implicating the viewer for making judgments and hiding their own sins, symbolically threatening to turn them to stone.

Despite numerous plot holes, digressions left hanging, and bumpy transitions between scenes, Medusa is a dark, compelling chiller with a killer soundtrack by Bernardo Uzeda, including classic tunes (for example, “House of the Rising Sun”) with rewritten religious lyrics that provide a false sense of security to their performers. The film, now playing at the Angelika, is a dark cautionary tale about forcing one’s morals onto others in a world where we all debate who the real monsters are.

HIT THE WALL

Adam Files and Alexandra Guerrero star in Jake Shore’s Hit the Wall (photo by Neil Ryan)

HIT THE WALL
The Kraine Theater
85 East Fourth Street between Second Ave. & Bowery
Thursday – Saturday through August 11, $25
www.frigid.nyc

During the pandemic lockdown, Rhode Island native Jake Shore wrote and directed (Adjust the Procedure, one of the best Zoom plays built around Zoom itself, consisting of a series of online meetings at a university attempting to deal with — or not deal with — a terrible tragedy. Presented by Spin Cycle and Shore’s JCS Theater Company, the prerecorded play enjoyed several extensions and was picked up by various festivals.

Shore’s first in-person play since theaters have reopened is Hit the Wall, a didactic seventy-minute, two-character drama about art and the audience continuing at the Kraine through August 11.

The show begins with famous forty-four-year-old graffiti artist Amir (Adam Files) and his protégé, twenty-five-year-old Rae (Alexandra “Allie” Guerrero), in his high-rise New York City apartment in 2010. For several minutes, they stand behind an empty picture frame hanging from the ceiling; it serves as a window to the outside world, an invisible canvas, and a reference to the Zoom boxes that were so prevalent during the height of the coronavirus crisis.

Rae tells Amir about a current project she’s failed to complete, a Madonna and Child on a wall in Crown Heights. She wants to go back and finish it, but Amir, who she compares to such graffiti legends as Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Lee Quiñones, and Claw Money, asserts that it would be a mistake, that she could be caught and sent to prison. “You’re succumbing to the rush and thrill of the chase, not the connection to your art,” he insists.

After some back and forth, Rae convinces Amir that she must finalize the work. He offers to help, but she refuses his support. The next morning she is excited, having executed the full piece in Brooklyn, and is now entertaining thoughts of hitting a wall in Times Square, despite the obvious danger. She tells him, “When I mention a wall, one of the first things you ask about is the visibility. The intention behind this being how many people can see it. How many sets of eyes. High visibility means a large audience, and then, in turn, more of a shot at influencing culture.” It’s as if Shore is comparing an off-off-Broadway play in Brooklyn — or a Zoom show — to a big-time production on the Great White Way.

While Rae desires the attention and wants to be a social media phenomenon, Amir is all about the art itself and its natural visibility to the right kind of people. He rails against capitalism and corporate greed, repeatedly claiming that sell-outs are rapists, thieves, and prostitutes. “Do you think that I would waste myself on the fuckers who visit and frequent Times Square?” he says. “That’s the point. Visibility is not just about the number of people you can reach, it’s about the quality of your audience.” A few moments later, Rae explains, “An empty theater has no audience,” another reference to the lockdown, when all theaters were empty and actors performing virtually had no idea who was out there watching them.

When Rae’s Madonna and Child suddenly and unexpectedly goes viral — perhaps not unlike what happened, to a lesser degree, with Adjust the Procedure — her relationship with Amir, and with her art, undergoes a rapid change.

Rae (Alexandra Guerrero) and Amir (Adam Files) discuss art and audiences in world premiere play at the Kraine (photo by Neil Ryan)

Directed by Timothy Haskell (Road House the Stage Play, Fatal Attraction: A Greek Tragedy, The Rise and Fall, Then Brief and Modest Rise Followed by a Relative Fall of . . . Jean Claude Van Damme . . .), Hit the Wall feels like an unfinished work in need of significant touch-ups. Even at only seventy minutes, it is repetitive as the two characters argue incessantly about the value of art and the need for it to be seen. Guerrero (At Least He Didn’t Die with Antlers on His Head) has the better, more well-rounded part, and she does a good job with it, capturing our attention and gaining our sympathies, while Files (Adjust the Procedure, Fragments) is held back by dialogue that sometimes sounds like he’s defending a dissertation — but only when you can hear the two actors, who have to compete with an aggressively loud air-conditioning unit.

Shore (The Devil Is on the Loose with an Axe in Marshalltown, Down the Mountain and Across the Stream) makes some interesting comparisons about mentors and protégés, parents and children — Rae has a strained relationship with her mother and ill father, so it’s not surprising that her signature piece is the idealized Madonna and Child, but the subplot grows overbearing.

The most compelling theme in the play is the exploration of the exchange between artist and audience as it relates specifically to live theater. At certain points Amir and Rae wonder if they themselves are performing for people sitting in seats, watching them.

“There is an eternal audience, Rae,” Amir says. “Imaginary?” Rae asks. Amir: “An eternal audience more real and present than any single person or group. . . . An audience on another plane. Like we’re in a play.” Rae: “Some otherworldly judgment? You speak clearly of God.” Amir: “Not God or gods.” Rae: “Then what?” Amir: “A group of viewers beyond our comprehension. . . .” Rae: “They are down there in the city, or up here so many stories high, but not seated in a dark theater in the caverns of your subconscious.”

No, we are seated in a dark theater, physical presences who have returned from two years of experiencing plays online, if at all, ready to be entertained, and challenged, no longer beyond comprehension. In a program note, Shore explains, “One reason I wanted to write a play like this is because graffiti artists want walls so badly. That’s sort of where it started.” Unfortunately, in his attempt to hit this wall, he misses.