twi-ny recommended events

THE GOLDBERG VARIATIONS: REMAKING WHOOPI AT LINCOLN CENTER

Five unique characters share their stories in The Whoopi Monologues at Lincoln Center (photo by Angela Marie Orellana)

THE WHOOPI MONOLOGUES
Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 30, $102.50 – $202.50
212-362-7600
www.lct.org/shows

In 1983, a little-known actress and comedian with the unlikely name Whoopi Goldberg, born Caryn Elaine Johnson in a Chelsea housing project, caused a sensation with The Spook Show, a solo performance at Dance Theatre Workshop in which she portrayed a collection of Black characters commenting on everyday life in America. Mike Nichols saw it, retitled it Whoopi Goldberg, and brought it to the Lyceum on Broadway in 1984; in 1985, it was adapted into an HBO special. I still remember how the HBO show blew me away; like so many other people, I had never seen anything like it.

It has now been reimagined by director Whitney White as The Whoopi Monologues, continuing at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater through August 30. Instead of having one actor portray all five characters — four from the original Broadway production and one introduced in the twentieth-anniversary revival — the outstanding cast features five actors taking on one role apiece.

The play begins as the ensemble gets ready in individual dressing rooms at the back of the stage, referencing the HBO show, which started with Goldberg walking into the Lyceum and knocking on dressing-room doors, saying hello to Fontaine, Blonde Girl, Surfer Girl, Jamaican Lady, and the Cripple through cinematic magic. It was a clever way of immediately giving the characters their individuality; Goldberg portrayed them in the same black-and-white costume, with only minor changes to help define each person.

But at the Newhouse, the actors appear in different costumes, designed by Tony winner Qween Jean, and distinctive hairstyles, by Nikiya Mathis, that further emphasize their uniqueness. In between scenes, they intermingle and go in and out of the dressing rooms as if deciding whose turn is next, adding a fun element to the proceedings.

Theater superstar and two-time Tony winner Kara Young (Purlie Victorious, Gruesome Playground Injuries) kicks things off as Fontaine, a gender-neutral street philosopher and junkie with a PhD who quickly sets the tone by wanting to kiss the hand of an audience member. “No, the one with the diamonds on it,” Fontaine says, adding after the smooch, “I’m glad you was cool enough to play. I noticed you didn’t clutch your pocketbook.” Fontaine explains, “I’m a thief. It’s the old American traditional gig. People always got stuff, people always want stuff. I provide a service.” Fontaine travels on a plane for the first time — the trip is hilarious — and heads to Amsterdam to visit the Anne Frank House, finding a kindred spirit in the young girl who had to hide from the Nazis, understanding the Jewish plight and comparing it to the civil rights movement.

Dominique Fishback nearly steals the show as Blonde Girl in The Whoopi Monologues (photo by Angela Marie Orellana)

Emmy nominee Dominique Fishback (Swarm, The Deuce) is sensational as Blonde Girl, a seven-year-old who dreams of being white. She wears a white shirt over her head, dangling like blonde locks, and tells us she’s going to get blue eyes. “And then I’m gonna have a dream house and a dream car and dream candy and a dream horse and me and Barbie gonna live together with Ken and Skipper and Malibu Barbie. We are!” she declares. Like Fontaine, she interacts with the audience, asking a man or woman if she can touch their hair. It’s a particularly tense moment for the white people in the audience, who have been told again and again to respect and celebrate Black people’s hair without touching it.

The night I went, I saw Denise Manning (What to Send Up When It Goes Down, Amani), the understudy for Danielle Pinnock (Ghosts), as Jamaican Lady, who is hired by a wealthy elderly white man to leave her home in Kingston and come take care of him in America. A jaunty storyteller, she says, “I don’t know if you can tell that I’m Jamaican because I lost my accent,” which elicits laughter because she could not sound much more Jamaican. She refers to her new employer as the Old Raisin, a shriveled man. She asks the audience to join her in singing the well-known song from a Jamaica travel commercial, she talks about dentistry, but things take a turn when he wants her to do more than just cook and do the laundry.

Emmy winner Kerry Washington (Race, American Son) is next as Surfer Girl, a young teen who, despite her accent and subject matter, claims not to be a Valley girl, pointing out, “No, I’m a surfer because before there was the mall, there was the ocean, okay.” After a dalliance with a “total hunk” on the beach, she is pregnant, trying to figure out what to do. At confession, she tells the priest, “I’m totally with child, like Mary was with Jesus, except like I do know who the father was.” The adults around her are unhelpful, and she doesn’t understand the severity of her situation; she soon contemplates getting rid of the baby herself. [Note: Emmy nominee Jurnee Smollett (Lovecraft Country) has since taken over the role.]

The hundred-minute play concludes with Tony winner Kecia Lewis (Hell’s Kitchen, Dreamgirls) as Lurleen, who was added to the repertoire in 2004, replacing the Cripple. Lurleen is a delightfully open and honest woman freely sharing the details of going through menopause and what her life used to be like, delving into the future of her pudenda, the horror of hot flashes, sanitary napkins, girdles, the pill, erectile dysfunction, Sex and the City, waxing, and plastic surgery. Amid all the comedy are some serious explorations of race, misogyny, discrimination, and fear, especially when her son asks her, “Am I going to die on the way to school?” She also gets the audience to join in on the Hustle (humorously crediting it to jazz legend McCoy Tyner instead of Van McCoy).

Fontaine (Kara Young) takes a life-changing trip to Amsterdam in Whoopi Goldberg revival (photo by Angela Marie Orellana)

In the fall of 2021, director Taibi Magar reimagined Anna Deavere Smith’s solo show, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, for five actors taking on some forty roles, which breathed new life into the play, ensuring it felt as vital as ever despite covering a tragic event that happened nearly thirty years before.

White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, On Sugarland) directs The Whoopi Monologues with a swift, infectious enthusiasm, giving plenty of room for the five extraordinary actors to embody their characters in their own way, rather than attempting to mimic Goldberg, although it’s difficult not to think of the originator of the material as the show progresses. Having them all together onstage, at the beginning, in between scenes, and at the end, makes it feel like they’re representing all women, everywhere.

However, some of the material is dated, as various references and other parts are old, the Jamaican Lady’s story is funny but obvious, Lurleen’s tale is too long, and the characters no longer shock like they did in the 1980s. But more than enough hits home in 2026, especially the elements relating to control of (Black) women’s bodies, inherent racism, and class conflict, to make this a necessary and vibrant reboot. Who would have thought in 1984 that the Civil Rights Act and Roe v. Wade would be gutted two generations later?

Speaking of her younger years, Lureen says, “We were being told that we could talk to anybody, anywhere, something new. We were told that we had peace in our hands. That we had the ability to change the world.”

Although a lot of progress has been made, it’s frightening to think that these struggles continue. Who knows how The Whoopi Monologues will be experienced in ten, twenty, or forty years.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

SERVING AND PERFORMING ARCHETYPES: DEREK FORDJOUR ON THE HIGH LINE

Derek Fordjour will discuss his High Line commissions in an artist talk on August 22 (photos by twi-ny/mdr)

Who: Derek Fordjour, Cecilia Alemani
What: Artist talk
Where: The High Line at Twenty-Second St.
When: Saturday, August 22, free with advance RSVP (walkups as available), 3:00
Why: When I was on the High Line looking at Derek Fordjour’s Archetypes I, II, and III, a trio of painted bronze Black figures on plinths shaped like plantation columns, one of a woman in a burlesque costume performing (Seduction), one of a male waiter in a black vest and white apron (Servility), and a third of a boxer with white gloves, shorts, and lace-up boots (Resilience), I couldn’t help but notice that a series of people were taking pictures of their friends smiling and posing with the works; they clearly did not carefully look at the sculptures or read the accompanying labels. The three sculptures deal with how Black bodies are used in entertainment and service economies, dealing with such issues as power, labor, and control. “Who do these performers serve?” Fordjour asks in an Instagram video.

It made me immediately think of Kara Walker’s 2014 A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, sculptures of melting slave children carrying baskets amid an enormous white sphinx, made of foam and refined white sugar, sitting proudly, a highly sexualized mammy figure. At the time, I wrote, “Central to the work are viewers’ reactions. Some are in awe of its beauty and scope, while others pose in front of it for touristy photographs. Some consider the history and mystery that literally surround it, while others smile and pretend to put their arms around one of the slave babies as if they are friends or perform silly acts with the sphinx’s backside and genitalia. Many are so obsessed with taking pictures and video that they never pause, process, and contemplate what they are looking at. Yes, it’s spectacle, but it’s spectacle on a grand order, an unforgettable experience that places a powerful mirror on America’s four-hundred-year history, revealing telling elements that many still refuse to accept.” Walker responded to the public reaction with the Chelsea exhibition Afterword, writing, “Conversation around A Subtlety wound its way across different social media platforms to become an object of contention as well as reverence, and a talking point about historic injustice, artistic hubris, the public gaze, responsible viewership, black audiences vs. white ones, black female representation, aggressive male behavior, self recognition, and ‘selfies.’ . . . It was certainly a curiosity.”

I don’t mean to imply that Fordjour feels the same way about how his installation is being received — it also includes the nearby mural Backbreaker Double, depicting a pair of Black marching band drum majors in the middle of an acrobatic stunt — but most likely he is thrilled that people are engaging with it. You can find out more on August 22 at 3:00 when he sits down with High Line Art director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani for a High Line Wordmark artist talk on the High Line at Twenty-Second St. The advance RSVP line is full but walkups are encouraged.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

SIN, SOILED SHIFTS, SODOM BY THE SEA, AND SISYPHUS: benevolent AT THE IATI

Margaret (Chani Reese), Sarah (Rachel Ravel), Abby (Livvy Marcus), and Emma (Mia Fowler) toil away day after day in 1917 reformatory (photo by Nina Goodheart)

benevolent
IATI Theater
64 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through September 5, $27.81 – $63.85
goodapplescollective.com

Sophie McIntosh’s benevolent is one of the most exhilarating, thoroughly satisfying productions I have ever seen. It’s not only one of the best shows of the year but of the decade.

Written by McIntosh and directed by Nina Goodheart, cofounders of Good Apples Collective, benevolent is the fourth collaboration between them, following the highly regarded Road Kills, cunnicularii, and cityscrape. Here’s hoping there are many more to come.

The show was inspired by the real-life Inwood Benevolent Home, which was incorporated as the New York Magdalen Benevolent Society in 1851. In March 1930, the Times called it “a modern refuge for girls from sixteen to twenty-one years of age, striving to remedy defects in character that would handicap them in their future adjustments to society.”

The play envelops you in its beguiling charm as you first enter the IATI Theater in the East Village. Charlotte Shi’s set is a small basement space surrounded by dirty white sheets; in the center-back is a laundry chute. The feeling of being trapped is palpable.

It’s September 1917, and four young women have been assigned to “soiled shift” at the Benevolent Home, a charitable institution in Upper Manhattan. Emma (Mia Fowler), twenty-six, is a fifty-cent prostitute who has been in and out of the home, keeping to herself, not seeking to make friends. Sarah (Rachel Ravel), nineteen and the most outgoing of the group, is there for singing for money on the boardwalk at Coney Island, which her father calls Sodom by the Sea. Margaret (Chani Reese), already cynical at twenty-four, works at a ten-dollar brothel. And Abby (Livvy Marcus), seventeen, was born into privilege and has been sent to the home by her father for having allowed her suitor, William of the Astor family, to come calling without a chaperone. Her mother was a former chairwoman of the Benevolent Society, and her godmother, Miss Antonia, is the matron currently in charge.

“What do you think? Blood or shit?” Sarah asks Abby at the beginning of the play, showing her a pair of dirty drawers. It’s a superb opening line, setting the tone, as there will be a lot more blood and shit to come.

Wearing white aprons over their pink uniforms, the women grab linen after linen, scrubbing hard at their washboards in tubs of water. The drudgery and monotony are evident; any time they make the slightest bit of progress, another pile of soiled sheets and clothes, always white with one notable exception, fall down the chute. The Sisyphean tasks extend both to their daily workload as well as their attempts to serve their six-month term and be released into a better life, though only Abby displays any kind of legitimate hope.

“My mother always said it was important to teach the poor fallen girls to work! And support themselves! So they don’t slip back into sin,” Abby tells Sarah, who replies, “I’m not sure your mother’s the best authority considering where her own girl ended up.” Abby answers, “One mistake is hardly a life of vice,” to which Sarah responds, “We’ve all got to start somewhere.”

When Margaret thinks she is pregnant following a dalliance with Stephen the carriage boy, the women are initially not sure what to do — Margaret does not want to have the baby — but they are soon bonding together, pooling their individual strengths to help her even if it breaks the rules. Their decision seems especially fraught after what happened to Ruthie, another pregnant woman whose terrifying, monstrous screams during childbirth rattle through the basement.

Amid betrayal, lies, various aspects of female friendship, and an aching camaraderie, the four women press on in this prisonlike atmosphere, each one trying to believe that there is something more waiting for them on the outside.

Four young women question their futures in Sophie McIntosh’s brilliant benevolent (photo by Nina Goodheart)

The play is beautifully written by McIntosh and intimately directed by Goodheart; there’s nary a word or movement out of place, resulting in an embracing, intoxicating poetry. It’s a tour de force of theatermaking; McIntosh’s script is exquisite, as scenes in the hands of other writers that might seem superfluous here always come back around to make subtle points and tie up loose ends brilliantly. Max Van’s sound design, from the screams to a pageant to the clunking of the laundry dropping down the chute, immerses the audience in the story, while Paige Seber’s lighting includes dangling bare bulbs that offer a sense of impending danger.

The cast is so exceptional that I was sorry the show was only ninety-five minutes; I wanted to spend more time with them. Fowler (cityscrape, Search Engine), Marcus (Suffs, Ride), Ravel (The Panic of ’29, Fiddler on the Roof), and Reese (Measure for Measure, The Cherry Orchard) bring depth and soul to their characters; they are not portraying stereotypes delivering messages but playing believable women faced with situations that are still relevant today as the government and the courts take away reproductive freedom, enforcing control over women’s bodies and manipulating voting rights. More than a century later, there are far too many women in the same circumstances as Abby, Sarah, Emma, and Margaret; they might not be in a benevolent home, but they are trapped nonetheless.

Despite all that seriousness, benevolent is also very funny, and a lot of fun; there is just the right amount of humor to make it feel fresh and alive and of the moment. I left the theater with a bounce in my step, filled with joy on many levels by what I’d just experienced.

benevolent is not just one of the best plays of the year; it’s one of my favorite shows of the decade. Stop what you’re doing and get tickets now. Please. Please. Please.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE CATSKILLS MYSTIQUE: A WALK ON THE MOON AT THE LAURA PELS

The married Pearl Kantrowitz (Talia Suskauer) considers a summer dalliance or more with blouse man Walker Jerome (Sam Gravitte) in A Walk on the Moon (photo by Joan Marcus)

A WALK ON THE MOON
Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 22, $56-$121
awalkonthemoonmusical.com

The summer of 1969 was one of the most provocative, contentious, and exhilarating times in American history. US troops were fighting Communism in Vietnam. The Stonewall Riots took place in Greenwich Village. The Cuyahoga River caught fire. Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The Miracle Mets unexpectedly surged into first place on their way to a world championship. The Manson family murdered actress Sharon Tate and seven others in Los Angeles. Some 400,000 people attended an era-redefining counterculture music festival on a farm in Bethel, New York. The original cast album of Hair topped the charts, while Sly and the Family Stone, Johnny Cash, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Doors, Miles Davis, CCR, the Rolling Stones, the Who, and the Isley Brothers released new records. And the ATM made its debut, at a Chemical Bank on Long Island.

That sense of constant excitement is precisely what’s missing from A Walk on the Moon, a pleasant if not thrilling New York premiere continuing at the Laura Pels through August 22.

The 2018 musical is adapted from Tony Goldwyn’s 1999 film, written by Pamela Gray, that starred Diane Lane as Pearl Kantrowitz, a mother of two who is feeling underappreciated by her TV-repairman husband, Marty (Liev Schreiber), and falls for the hot young blouse man, Walker Jerome (Viggo Mortensen), during her family’s annual summer weekend retreats to their bungalow in the Catskills. “Take a deep breath / Fresh air in the mountains / You can’t get this on Flatbush Avenue,” Pearl (Talia Suskauer) sings in the opening number, “Summer of All Summers,” joined by Marty (Max Chernin), their nine-year-old son, Danny (Leo Caravano or Reid Gardner Clarke), Marty’s mother, Lillian (Andréa Burns), and their couples friends, Neil and Rhoda Tanklow (David R. Gordon and Becca Suskauer), Irv and Bunny Gelfand (Andrew Faria and Megan Kane), and Stan and Eleanor Applebaum (Michael Tacconi and Caroline Pernick).

The number is fairly standard, and it doesn’t feel in any way like it’s the summer of 1969, lacking the promise of what’s to come. Perhaps that was on purpose, to display the mundanity of their lives, but it’s not the smartest way to begin a musical. In the second song, “When Did You Know the Moon Was Possible?,” Pearl worries that life is passing her by, addressing astronaut Neil Armstrong, one of the crew members of Apollo 11. “Mr. Armstrong / How did I not know a decade has gone by / And was I even in it / Mr. Armstrong / How did the years run right past / As fast as my teenager is growing / When did you learn / When was that moment of knowing / That there was no limit to how high you could fly?” she wonders. “Mr. Armstrong / In this beginning of a new age / Where am I? / When I never began.”

That all changes when the new blouse man, Walker (Sam Gravitte), arrives, giving Pearl a tie-dye shirt she was eyeing. “My husband would hate it,” she says. Walker replies, “But what’s your opinion, Pearl Kantrowitz?”

A Catskills bungalow colony is the setting for musical based on 1999 film (photo by Joan Marcus)

Meanwhile, Pearl and Marty’s sixteen-year-old contrarian daughter, Alison (Sophie Pollono), a radical activist, is furious that her father forgot to pack her record player. “I can’t survive without music,” she argues. But she’s soon smitten with seventeen-year-old Ross (Oscar Williams), who goes everywhere with his acoustic guitar and is working on a song in which he declares himself “the Big Jewish Hendrix.” When Ross tells Alison that he is thinking about going to a concert called Woodstock — “It’s supposed be be gigantic, like five hundred people!” — they decide they have to go, especially since her favorite, Joni Mitchell, is scheduled to perform.

With two historic events in the offing, the moon landing and the music festival, Pearl has some difficult decisions to make involving her family and, primarily, herself, whom she has never put first before.

Featuring music and lyrics by Tony and Grammy nominee AnnMarie Milazzo and a book and additional lyrics by Gray, A Walk on the Moon never quite blasts off but is a pleasurable slow glide through the summer of 1969. The orchestrations at the beginning and end are overly traditional; several of the songs in between get closer to capturing the Flower Power feel of the era. The music director is Jillian Zack, with arrangements by Andy Einhorn. Ricky Lurie’s costumes fit the period and Josh Prince’s choreography never gets out of hand, maintaining a playful edge. Tal Yarden’s scenic design tends to be too cardboardy, but his projections, particularly of a giant moon and television, help set the mood.

Talia Suskauer (Be More Chill, Wicked) portrays Pearl with an enticing depth, keeping her from becoming a deceitful villain; instead, she garners understanding from the audience, even those who aren’t rooting for her to schtup the blouse man. Gray and Tony-nominated director Sheryl Kaller (Next Fall, The White Chip) cast no judgments on Pearl or any of the other characters. Among the ensemble, Becca Suskauer, Talia’s sister, stands out, but I may be partial because she is playing a character named after two of my relatives; my last name makes it into the show as well in a brief mention. (My second cousin is a close friend of Gray’s, so it’s not a coincidence.)

I sat next to a pair of alta kockers from the Bronx who had been to the Borsch Belt bungalows, and we agreed that the show was not Jewish enough; I was hoping for something closer to the “We’re Going to the Catskills!” second-season episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which takes place at the fictional Steiner Mountain Resort. But maybe that’s just me.

However, I do think that the show missed an opportunity that it is well aware of. In “We’re Girls with Somethin’ to Do,” Rhoda sings, “‘Enjoy the unconventional’ / Well, Betty dear, my hands are full,” quoting from Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique.

If only A Walk on the Moon were more unconventional, like the time period it covers.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BOB DYLAN STEPS INTO THE UNKNOWN

“Stepping into the Unknown” features rare and previously unreleased footage and special live performances

STEPPING INTO THE UNKNOWN: FILMS FROM THE BOB DYLAN CENTER
Paris Theater
4 West Fifty-Eighth St. at Fifth Ave.
Wednesday, September 2, $15-$17, 7:00
paristheaternyc.com
bobdylancenter.com

My first Bob Dylan show was in September 1978 at the Nassau Coliseum. At one point relatively early on, I could see that my best friend was looking uncomfortable. “I don’t know any of these songs,” he said. “When is he going to play ‘Tangled Up in Blue’?” I hesitated before telling him, “Um, he just played that.”

I’ve since seen Dylan — with whom I share a birthday — about twenty times, with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty, at Forest Hills, the Beacon, and the Jones Beach Theater, with such opening acts as Mavis Staples, Patti Smith, and Lucinda Williams. I camped outside overnight to get tickets to the 1992 Bobfest at the Garden. I was at the 2012 Prospect Park concert where he shared a brief memory about having once lived nearby in Brooklyn. “He knows where he is!” I called out.

During the pandemic, I watched Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan, his mysterious concert film that had a wild live chat, questioning just about everything we were seeing and hearing. I devoured his 2005 memoir, Chronicles: Volume 1, glorying in the vastly entertaining fictionalization of stories from his life (while understanding that just because he called it Volume 1 didn’t mean there would be a Volume 2). I was impressed by Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown and tried not to let all the factual inaccuracies get in the way of a good movie. I can’t hear “A Hard Rain’s a‐Gonna Fall” without remembering the excitement I felt watching the 1976 Hard Rain film on NBC documenting the Rolling Thunder Revue. Heck, I once let the nails of my thumbs grow ridiculously long because Bob’s were like that on the cover of the 1978 tour book.

And then there are the shows on Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, in which he constantly reinvents songs, sometimes making them all but unrecognizable. He stands back from the stage, wearing a hat or a hoodie, in low lighting so his face is hard to see. He doesn’t allow any video or photography and he rarely speaks to the audience except for announcing his band, which lately has been changing without explanation. At every concert, a handful of the uninitiated leave when they realize he’s not going to play many of his most famous songs, and when he does they sound very different. But we faithful love every twist and turn, following the master’s superb vocal phrasings and precise enunciations emanating from his raspier and raspier voice.

Which brings us to the Bob Dylan Center (BDC), his archive that opened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May 2022. Why Tulsa? One answer is because it’s Dylan, so why ask. But Dylan himself said, “There’s more vibrations on the coasts, for sure. But I’m from Minnesota and I like the casual hum of the heartland.”

On September 2, the Bob Dylan Archive comes to the Paris Theater for the special program “Stepping into the Unknown: Films from the Bob Dylan Center.” The event, presented by BDC director Steven Jenkins, will feature rare and previously unreleased material and will be followed by a Q&A and a live solo-electric performance by jazz guitarist extraordinaire Bill Frisell, who has recorded several Dylan songs and recently celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday by playing a show at BDC that included tunes by Dylan and Woody Guthrie.

“Stepping into the Unknown” is part of the Paris Theater’s annual “Big & Loud” series, consisting of 70mm screenings and 4K restorations of more than forty classics, from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Elevator to the Gallows to Fight Club and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, with such special guests as Sofia Coppola and Isabella Rossellini.

You can also catch “Stepping into the Unknown” on September 1 at the Nitehawk in Williamsburg, followed by a Q&A with Jenkins and a performance by Steve Wynn from the Dream Syndicate and the Baseball Project, and on September 3 at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville with a Jenkins Q&A and a performance by Traveling Medicine Man with Luke Havranek.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THEATER AS A HOLY SPACE: THE SAVIORS AT THE ATLANTIC

Paul (Julius Rinzel) and Michael (Ivan Howe) experience challenges as confirmation approaches in The Saviors (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

THE SAVIORS
Atlantic Theater Company, Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 15, $56.50-$111.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

“I didn’t know you could do that — that you could argue the content of a play in the form of it,” theater director Jack Serio told American Theatre magazine in June 2023 about his reaction to seeing Ivo van Hove’s 2014 Scenes from a Marriage at New York Theatre Workshop, an immersive rendering of the 1973 Ingmar Bergman miniseries.

Over the last five years, Serio has argued the content of a play in the form of it across more than half a dozen unique productions, leading up to his latest success, The Saviors, extended through August 15 at the Atlantic.

Unlike theater, film is a director’s discipline. A movie is almost never identified as belonging to the writer, or even the star, but to the director: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. In those cases, the directors are also the writers.

Quick: Who wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, or Ridley Scott’s Alien? Not the directors. Spike Lee hasn’t penned a solo screenplay in more than twenty-five years, Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa had cowriters on most of their projects, and David Fincher has never been credited as a screenwriter. That does not take away from their filmmaking prowess but merely points out that it is the director who is the guiding force.

The same cannot be said for the stage, where the author is king. A play or musical is almost never never identified as belonging to the director, or even the star, but to the writer: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

Quick: Who directed such Tony winners as Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop, David Ajmi’s Stereophonic, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, or Bess Wohl’s Liberation?

Of course, one of the unique allures of theater is how a director can take an existing play or musical and reshape it, make it their own, whether it’s by William Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, Tom Stoppard, Noël Coward, or Rodgers & Hammerstein; screenplays are written with very specific action cues, while most plays, aside from those by Samuel Beckett and maybe a handful of others, include few if any stage directions. Awards are given out for best revivals of a play or musical but not for best movie remake.

And then comes Serio.

The NYU Tisch graduate is a master of intimacy and space. For Ken Urban’s Danger and Opportunity at East Village Basement, a limited audience was seated against the walls of a living room. Uncle Vanya took place in a private Flatiron loft for forty people at a time. For Joey Merlo’s On Set with Theda Bara at the Brick, thirty audience members sat around a long, rectangular wooden table surrounded by lamps and mirrors. For Ruby Thomas’s The Animal Kingdom at the Connelly Theater Upstairs, the small audience was packed in so tight it was hard to breathe.

Even with more traditional setups, Serio — and, of course, the scenic designers — creates visceral experiences that feel private and personal, from Rita Kalnejais’s This Beautiful Future at the Cherry Lane, with its curved walls and additional area at the back of the stage, to Samuel D. Hunter’s Grangeville at the Signature, where the two actors felt like they were miles apart when on opposite sides of the spare, dark set.

Last year, Serio teamed with actor Bubba Weiler for Weiler’s stunning debut as a playwright, Well, I’ll Let You Go, a tale of grief and community for ninety-nine people at a time, originally produced at the vast six-thousand-square-foot Space at Irondale, a former church Sunday school.

Julian (Stanley Simons), a troubled soul, seeks sanctuary in The Saviors (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Weiler and Serio are now back together for the world premiere of The Saviors at the Linda Gross Theater, housed in a nineteenth-century Gothic Revival building that was formerly the parish house of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. Three-time Tony winner David Zinn has transformed the theater into a church, with a spare but pristine altar, stained-glass windows, iconographic statuary, an organ, and a hymn board.

Two altar boys in white cassocks run onto the stage, racing to extinguish the candles. Paul (Julius Rinzel), fourteen, and Michael (Ivan Howe), thirteen, are best friends. The names are meant to be biblical: The archangel Michael was a guardian and fierce defender of God, while the apostle Paul was a missionary who wrote between seven and fourteen books of the Bible.

They are preparing for their confirmation project in which they select a saint to honor; Michael is considering Saint George while also suggesting that Paul be Saint Michael and Michael be Saint Paul, but, as we are soon to find out, the two boys are not interchangeable. Michael fantasizes about being a martyr, telling Paul, “Martyrs go straight to heaven and like . . . that’s the whole point. And then maybe I’d even become a saint, which would be like, whoa. And then like fifty years from now some kid would pick me for their confirmation and that would just be. . . . I think about that all the time.” Paul does not.

Their conversation is suddenly interrupted by a loud noise; a ragged man with a backpack has entered the church, coming down the right side of the theater aisle, shocking the audience as well as the boys. About ten years older than Michael and Paul, Julian (Stanley Simons) is clearly distraught and in need of support, especially with a snowstorm about to strike at any minute. (He could be named for the apostate Julian, the fourth-century Roman emperor who rejected Christianity and fought a civil war against his cousin Emperor Constantius II.)

“I just want to pray,” he says. Michael wants him to leave immediately, mentioning that there are nearby Protestant and Presbyterian churches he can try, but Paul offers him shelter, and Julian gratefully accepts, upsetting Michael.

Meanwhile, Michael has chosen “church MVP” Judy (Crystal Finn) as his confirmation sponsor, telling her, “I want someone that could like actually really help me because like — Like I want to take it serious and I was just thinking that your son is like Jesus — and if he’s Jesus then that makes you Mary and Mary is like my favorite person of all time besides Jesus, and so like — who better to sponsor me than Mary?” In the Deuterocanon, Judith is the Jewish widow who saves Jerusalem.

As confirmation approaches, the characters reassess their connections to God, Christianity, and one another.

Judy (Crystal Finn) leads Michael (Ivan Howe) through a Christian meditation in world premiere at the Atlantic (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Theater has long been compared to church. “The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart,” Pulitzer Prize–wining playwright Marsha Norman said. “The theatre is your pulpit, it is your church, and you want to be a priest in your church and that’s what I believe in,” actor, playwright, and director Steven Berkoff explained to the Telegraph in 2015. Actor Brian Cox told Variety in 2023 that he believes “theater is the one true church, because it’s the church of the human experience. Everything else is about belief systems that we bring in. . . . But the theater is about our relationship directly with something which is so personal, and so immediate, and it’s the effect that it has on the people watching.”

Weiler is a former altar boy who attended Catholic school and now considers himself an agnostic; he and Serio, who also went to Catholic school, met at NYU’s Playwrights Horizons Theater School, where Weiler was Serio’s TA in his freshman playwriting class. Together they have turned the Linda Gross Theater into a holy space that immerses the audience into its aura. Nearly every scene begins with either Michael or Paul changing the numbers on the board, as if what is to come has been crafted from hymns. The seats feel like pews when the characters move through the aisles. Serio makes expert use of every corner of the stage, while Weiler’s angelic dialogue echoes like the Word made flesh. There is a breathtaking twist that helps elevate the ninety-minute play to the next level, although there are a few conventional, dare I say preachy, plot developments that fail to resonate.

The script calls for the roles of Michael and Paul to be portrayed by “age-authentic actors,” and Howe (Eric, Oliver!) and Rinzel (The Antiquities, A Beautiful Voice), respectively, are indeed young teens who capture the nascent spiritual awakening of adolescent boys learning how to make decisions for themselves and whether they can trust adults and religion, from the sheer joy of horsing around to the more serious aspects of responsibility. Finn (Cold War Choir Practice, Birthday Candles) is effective as the church lady hiding a secret, and Simons (The Iron Claw, Mile End Kicks), whose Playbill bio says he has “crippling stage fright,” makes an impressive theater debut as Julian, that fear perhaps assisting him in displaying his character’s deeply felt unease.

Half a millennia ago, French theologian and pastor John Calvin wrote, “The whole world is a theatre for the display of the divine goodness, wisdom, justice, and power, but the Church is the orchestra, as it were — the most conspicuous part of it.”

Wherever Serio sets up his pulpit next, the faithful, including me, are sure to follow him and his orchestra.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]

“IT BEGAN AS A MISTAKE”: ANNUAL CHARLES BUKOWSKI MEMORIAL READING AT THE BITTER END

Who: Penny Arcade, Kat Georges, Peter Carlaftes, Jennifer Blowdryer, Puma Perl, Frank Messina, Michael Puzzo, Danny Shot, Richard Vetere, George Wallace, more
What: Annual tribute to Charles Bukowski
Where: The Bitter End, 147 Bleecker St. between Thompson & La Guardia
When: Friday, August 14, $10, 6:00
Why: “What sort of cultural hangover keeps Charles Bukowski in print and popular more than twenty years after his death?” S. A. Griffin asks in his Three Rooms Press essay “Charles Bukowski: Dean of Another Academy.” “In light of the fact that a good portion of what has been published since his passing in 1994 may not be the man’s best work, along with some heavy editing at times, why does Charles Bukowski remain relevant well into the 21st century?”

The nineteenth annual Charles Bukowski Memorial Reading takes place August 14 at 6:00 at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village in honor of what would have been the 106th birthday of the author of such books as Pulp, Factotum, Post Office, On Cats, and Love Is a Dog from Hell, with tribute readings by performance artist Penny Arcade, musician and storyteller Jennifer Blowdryer, poets Frank Messina, Puma Perl, Danny Shot, and George Wallace, and playwrights Richard Vetere and Michael Puzzo, hosted by Kat Georges and Peter Carlaftes of Three Rooms Press. Bukowski, who died in 1994 at the age of seventy-three, will be celebrated through poetry, oral history, rare videos, and live performances, with a special look at what he might have thought about the world’s first trillionaire, the decline of alcohol consumption, AI, the demise of the US Post Office, and other contemporary issues.

“It began as a mistake,” Bukowski writes at the beginning of his 1971 novel, Post Office. Where it goes from there will have you thinking twice about your mailman.

As a bonus, various prizes, including books and recordings, will be given away at this always welcome literary event.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]