twi-ny recommended events

A LOVE LETTER TO THE THEATER: GOOD TIME CHARLIE AT THE PUBLIC

Ryan J. Haddad pays tribute to his beloved uncle in Good Time Charlie at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

GOOD TIME CHARLIE
The Public Theater, Martinson Hall
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 25, $99
www.publictheater.org

Ryan J. Haddad has made his mark as the solo performer of such evocative, graphic, and compelling autobiographical shows as Dark Disabled Stories, Hold Me in the Water, and Hi, Are You Single? He reaches the next level with the evocative, graphic, and compelling Good Time Charlie, his first multicharacter, multigenerational play, one that offers audiences a damn good time.

Haddad is still at the center of it all, even though it’s about his real-life relation, Uncle Charlie (Jonathan Raviv), who actually is his father’s first cousin. At the beginning, Haddad says to us, “Hello, all you beautiful people out there in the dark. My name is Ryan J. Haddad. Thank you for coming out to the Public Theater and our production of Good Time Charlie. If you know my work, you probably know me as an autobiographical performer, usually a solo performer. But I’ve been putting my family in plays for decades. From the ages of five to thirteen, I was the artistic director of the Haddad Theater, and together with my family, we put on plays of my favorite movies and musicals. We started in the living room, then moved to the backyard.”

It’s a smart way to start the show; not only does it introduce Haddad to audience members who might not know much about him, but it also lets everyone see that he uses a metallic reverse posture-control walker; he later explains that he has cerebral palsy. The premise of Good Time Charlie is that Ryan is now putting on a play about and starring his family in an expensive re-creation of the Japanese-inspired garden at the home of Charlie and his longtime partner, Lou (Timothy Bagley). In addition, it sets up an ongoing subplot in which writer-actor Haddad battles for control with Charlie, who is not always fond of where Haddad takes the narrative.

Charlie: Remember, doll, it’s my play.
Ryan: Our play.
Charlie: They’re here to see me. My name is in the title.
Ryan: They don’t know who you are.
Charlie: They’re about to find out!

Throughout the 135-minute production (including intermission), there are constant interruptions in which the characters ask Ryan questions about their parts and suggest changes to the script, none of which makes Ryan happy. It’s a wonderfully multilayered meta as the actors portray characters portraying their younger selves, who remember certain things differently or don’t want to relive painful memories.

The deeply personal tale travels between 1976 and the present, with stops in 1976 Ohio, where Charlie is attending Heidelberg College, to 1983, when he meets Lou in a gay bar in Cleveland, to 1998, when Ryan is six and is staging his third show, an adaptation of the TV movie Cinderella starring Brandy. Ryan is the prince, of course; his cool lesbian aunt, Janice (Beth Malone), is Cinderella; his great-aunt Joan (Artemis Pebdani), Charlie’s mother, is the evil stepmother; and Charlie Sr. (Nael Nacer) is the king. Their repartee helps establish the characters’ relationship with one another as well as the pacing of Good Time Charlie itself.

Haddad introduces his own parents, Bob (Nacer) and Judy (Pebdani), when they all start arguing over who got Ryan interested in theater in the first place. Bob and Judy let their son know that they’re not thrilled that the play is not about them.

Bob: We’re the ones who clothed you, fed you, wiped your ass.
Janice: Hey, I did that, too.
Judy: It really is better to write about your parents before we die.
Bob: He can’t. He’s always writing about gay people.

Ryan furthers his love of theater and especially old movies under the tutelage of Sheldon (Michael Cristofer), the artistic director of a local repertory movie house and a close friend of Lou’s; they talk about Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand, Tennessee Williams, and other gay icons.

There are also critical and insightful discussions about coming out, loneliness, and aging as several of the older characters fall ill.

A terrific cast becomes a second family for Ryan J. Haddad in autobiographical play (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Lebanese American Haddad is a fierce storyteller, driven by a brutal honesty that is central to his shows. In Hold Me in the Water, his descriptions of his first sexual encounters with men are the most graphically specific I’ve heard in theater, whether gay or straight. In Hi, Are You Single?, he is so in need of companionship and closeness that he brings up a volunteer from the audience to dance with, despite a disability that requires him to keep his walker within arm’s reach at all times. And in Dark Disabled Stories, which focuses on his fraught relationship with public transportation, he tells the audience early on, “I try to make disability funny so that nondisabled people can understand it and open themselves to it and realize that it’s not so scary, so dark. And make it more accessible for them. Not tonight. I don’t feel like it. I’m not saying I won’t make you laugh at all. I’ll probably make you laugh a lot. I’m a naturally comedic person, but . . . not everything is accessible to us, so why should we try to make our experiences accessible to you?”

In Good Time Charlie, Haddad is not afraid to share his intense theatrical ambition. In one of the play’s most powerful scenes, Haddad gets angry when Charlie, who became a dentist instead of pursuing his artistic dreams, starts tearing pages out of the script. “Like it or not, this is the material we have. Either you want to play it or you don’t,” Ryan tells his beloved uncle, who replies, “Honey, I know what a good script looks like. I’ve been seeing theater my entire life.” Ryan shoots back, “And I’m the one who’s actually doing it.”

When one of the characters suffers a major health problem and needs a walker, the effect on Haddad is palpable. Yes, the person is more than twice Haddad’s age, but while the character moves painfully slowly, Haddad often puts his walker aside as he sits in chairs, dances with his aunt, and — well, I don’t want to give away the surprise, even though Haddad lets us know what’s coming. When he is without his walker, Haddad needs help standing, and the other actors/characters assist him, but Haddad is not seeking sympathy. He is just revealing what his everyday life is like.

Affectionately directed by Danny Sharron (Hold Me in the Water, Okay) on Afsoon Pajoufar’s lovely garden set (beautifully lit by Barbara Samuels, with expert sound and music by Ryan Gamblin), the play does veer toward sentiment and melodrama in the second act, but otherwise it is a triumph. The cast, in Enver Chakartash’s warm, occasionally flashy contemporary costumes, is so involved that they feel like members of your own extended family: Malone (Fun Home) is delightful as a gay woman who is completely comfortable with the choices she’s made, Cristofer (The Shadow Box) is endearing as the fair but firm friend, Nacer (Meet the Cartozians) and Pebdami (Wish You Were Here) find the right balance in portraying two very different sets of parents, Bagley (No Actors Allowed) is gentle as the man who often serves as mediator, and Raviv (The Bands Visit) is so believable as the title character that it’s hard to believe he’s not really Ryan’s uncle.

Nearly ten years in the making, Good Time Charlie is a love letter to the arts, to the people who are important to us, and to the Public Theater itself (through several funny inside jokes), where Haddad has found a second home.

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

BEARING WITNESS: ZIV KOREN & OCTOBER 7

ZIV KOREN’S OCTOBER 7 WAR
Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center
1 East Sixty-Fifth St. at Fifth Ave.
Wednesday, October 7, free with advance RSVP, 4:00-8:00
Exhibition continues through November 4
streicker.nyc
zivkoren.com

On October 7, 2023, Israeli photojournalist Ziv Koren headed to the south of the country immediately after hearing about Hamas’s attack during the festive Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. The photos he took captured the horrific brutality of the day and the war that followed.

On the third anniversary of that terrible day, the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center is opening the exhibition “Ziv Koren’s October 7 War,” displaying photos from Koren’s 2024 book, The October 7 War (Gefen, $70), which he published “to pay respect to some of those thousands of fateful moments that went undocumented and to the heroes of those moments.”

At 6:30, a yahrzeit candle will be lit and kaddish will be said for the victims. The exhibition, another example of the Jewish legacy of bearing witness, continues through November 4. In addition, an auction is being held for one of Koren’s original framed photographs, with the proceeds benefiting the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

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

AN ECOSEXUAL EMERGENCY: BETH STEPHENS AND ANNIE SPRINKLE PLAY WITH FIRE AT ANTHOLOGY

Partners Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens explore the many aspects of fire in latest documentary

PLAYING WITH FIRE: AN ECOSEXUAL EMERGENCY (Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, 2025)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, October 10, 7:30
Sunday, October 11, 4:00
anthologyfilmarchives.org
sprinklestephens.ucsc.edu

There’s an important warning at the start of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’s Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency: “This film contains environmental destruction, explicit ecosexuality, and performance art.”

It sure does.

In the film, longtime life and professional partners Sprinkle, a former sex worker turned feminist performance artist and sex educator, and Stephens, an artist, filmmaker, and art professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explore both the beneficial and detrimental aspects of fire. The topic became forefront in their minds after they survived the devastating CZU Lightning Complex Fire of 2020; not everyone in their tight-knit community of Boulder Creek, California, was so fortunate.

In such chapters as “The Inferno,” “The Return,” and “Some Like It Hot,” they meet with a wide range of people who work with fire, from ceramicists Laurie and Dan Hennig, musicians Kate Freeman and Hillary Kay, and permaculturalist Aaron Allen to Forestry & Fire Recruitment Program cofounder Brandon Smith, artistic directors and curators Melonie and Melorra Green, and burlesque queen Lady Monster. Fire is seen as a necessary part of the Earth as it is used in rituals, art, weddings, and healing.

Therapist and witch Deborah Oak shares her “10 Top Tips for Staying Sane in Insane Times.” Indigenous sustainability professor Melissa Nelson explains, “Fire is a destroyer, it’s a great destroyer, but it’s a great regenerator.” Artists and game designers Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou and Huntrezz Janos display one of their projects as the latter says, “We want to showcase pleasure in a world of pain, and we want to help people dealing with catastrophe and survival.”

After her house is completely destroyed, Agz Rags owner Agnes De Lucchi says, “More than my own home, I worried about the trees.”

Sprinkle and Stephens, whose previous films include Water Makes Us Wet, Goodbye Gauley Mountain, and Playing in the Garden, also introduce us to their dog, Butch, and their remarkable white peacock, Albert, who became a symbol of Boulder Creek’s resilience. Their positive outlook on life is infectious, and more than a little woo-woo, as they delve into the connection between environmental fires and social fires through a trans rights march, playful animation (including animals talking and texting), discussions of consumption, and, ultimately, cremation.

“Not only do we believe that art can help our society evolve, we also believe in the power of love and pleasure,” Beth says, getting to the heart of ecosexuality.

Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency is screening October 10 at 7:30 and October 11 at 4:30 at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “The Cinema of Gender Transgression”; Sprinkle and Stephens will perform the ten-minute “Ecosex 101” before each show. In addition, they will participate in a Q&A with Urban Tantra and The Book of Ecstasy author Barbara Carrellas on October 10 and A Body to Live In director Angelo Madsen on October 11; there will also be a reception and book signing on Sunday, celebrating the milestone birthdays of adult entertainment legends Veronica Vera and Veronica Hart, cofounders of the pornstar support group Club 90. Attendees are strongly encouraged to dress up in fire or ecosex costumes for both screenings.

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

ROVING BIRD NERDS & KINDRED SPIRITS: THE ART OF ADVENTURE AT NEW PLAZA CINEMA

The remarkable journey of Bristol Foster, Robert Bateman, and the Grizzly Torque is fondly detailed in The Art of Adventure

THE ART OF ADVENTURE (Alison Reid, 2025)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Sunday, October 11, 4:45
theartofadventuremovie.com
newplazacinema.org

“Life is an adventure. It’s mystical. It’s magical. I’d like to be twenty-five years old again, but I’m glad I had all those life experiences,” biologist and naturalist Bristol Foster says at the beginning of Alison Reid’s utterly fabulous documentary, The Art of Adventure. “In those days, it was just raw nature, raw and beautiful. I think of how much things have changed and how damn lucky we were to do it then.”

Artist and naturalist Robert Bateman adds, “I think I’m basically the same kid that I always was. I always wanted to do adventures and speak up, spread the word about nature. . . . It was like a dream trip in a way.”

In 1957, Foster and Bateman, both Canadians in their twenties, began an eighteen-month journey covering more than fifty thousand miles, visiting nineteen countries across four continents in a brownish-yellow 1957 Series I Land Rover that they dubbed the Grizzly Torque. They drove it through mud and desert, had it transported (not so safely) by sea and air, and lived in it, sometimes surrounded by curious indigenous people and animals. They were originally in search of birds, but their discoveries quickly became far more anthropological and wide-ranging.

Fortunately for the world, they extensively detailed the trip, with copious photographs, movies, and a detailed journal, and Bateman added a small painting of each nation they visited to a mural around the Grizzly Torque. What they found on their route is remarkable; what is even more remarkable is that they survived, and now, in their nineties, best friends for eight decades, they’re sharing their story.

Reid’s previous feature documentary, The Woman Who Loves Giraffes, is about Canadian zoologist Anne Innis Dagg, who worked with Foster and is credited as a producer on The Art of Adventure; she died in 2024 at the age of ninety-one. In this follow-up, Reid and editor Dave Kazala interweave stunning footage of Bateman and Foster’s travels with new interviews of Bateman and Foster, members of their families, and such others as geographer and naturalist Briony Penn, writer and art curator Paul Gilbert, artist and naturalist Erik Thorn, anthropologist and writer Wade Davis, Haida leader and political activist Gidansda Guujaaw, environmental activists David Suzuki and Tara Cullis, and Land Rover collector Alan Simpson. Gilbert, the author of The Rover Boys, gets significant screen time; he was also one of Bateman’s high school art students and helped form the Bateman Foundation. Together they paint a loving picture of these two extraordinary men who have dedicated their lives to protecting and saving the environment, well before it was a cause célèbre or hot-button political issue.

“This is not a trip that you could do today. They saw the world at a time when it was transitioning from almost the Middle Ages to the modern world, and they saw it as it was,” Gilbert says. Bateman surmises, “In a tiny way, I guess people might view Bristol and I as adventurers in another era.”

Robert Bateman and Bristol Foster recount their old and new adventures in award-winning documentary

It’s also a poignant look at aging, as the film shifts between shots of the two rugged, handsome, well-built young men and their current selves, walking slowly, facing medical problems, but never giving up on their goals, both still doing whatever they can to help get us out of the mess we’ve created. Cinematographer Dale Hildebrand captures the two elderly men in gorgeous vistas of beautiful landscapes whose very existence is in jeopardy, but even then, hope conquers fear.

The last part of the film focuses on what became of the Grizzly Torque, which comes to represent everything to the men. “This Land Rover symbolizes nature, like a magic carpet to get into magical places,” Bateman says.

And, in its way, The Art of Adventure is like a cinematic carpet, taking us into magical places.

The Art of Adventure is screening October 11 at 4:45 at New Plaza Cinema, followed by a Q&A with Reid and Wild Tomorrow cofounder and COO and Columbia adjunct professor Wendy Hapgood.

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

FRIGHTENED SHEEP: HUMAN THINGS AT THE WEST END THEATRE

Two couples hunker down for a coming storm in Human Things at the West End Theatre (photo by Emilio Madrid)

HUMAN THINGS
West End Theatre at St. Paul & St. Andrew United Methodist Church
263 West Eighty-Sixth St. between Broadway & West End Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 30, $49-$119
humanthingsplay.com
wetnyc.org

Joshua Owen’s debut play, Human Things, offers the opportunity to see a bravura performance from a two-time Tony winner in a tiny space. Victoria Clark is phenomenal in the bumpy play at Bedlam’s upstairs space at the West End Theatre, which holds a mere seventy-six seats in four rafters on two sides of the staging area, which is essentially the floor. It’s so intimate that you have to walk through the set in order to get to your seat, which is particularly engaging following a major change for the second act.

Margaret (Rebeca Robles) and Greg (Ben Rosenfield) are a married couple living on a remote atoll in the South Pacific; she is an ornithologist studying a bird sanctuary that is experiencing a serious, unaccounted-for decline, while he is an engineer who tinkers with electronics and reads Søren Kierkegaard. Margaret is mad that she slept on the beach the night before and he did not come looking for her, apparently unconcerned that she did not make it home. They bicker for far too long, about that, as well as the future of humankind and the planet.

“I hate feeling like this,” she says. He replies, “Like what?” She responds, “Like I’m a person who is alive and paying attention at the end of the world.”

With nothing better to do, they decide to have sex, but in the midst of their lovemaking, an older man enters their cabin, brusquely calling for help. Bo (Michael Mulheren) explains that he and his wife, Darce (Clark), were sailing when their boat hit a coral reef and she was injured. He demands their help, but Greg is suspicious; he feels the couple may be up to something.

“You think he wants to hurt me? Come on,” Margaret says. “If he were some psycho axe murderer, there are, you know, easier ways than sailing out to the middle of the ocean and crossing your fingers that you find your next victim on some fucking island. Besides, look at him. He’s harmless.”

Bo and Greg bring back Darce, who, with her leg bleeding, is worried that there might be Japanese soldiers around still fighting WWII. When Greg assures her that even if there were, they would be too old, Darce says, “So, what — old people can’t be dangerous?”

Bo and Darce quickly grow extremely comfortable in the cabin while feeling free to treat their saviors with a cynicism and skepticism that annoys Greg. When a severe storm warning is broadcast over the radio, Bo and Greg head to the shed for supplies, leaving Margaret and Darce to contemplate what’s next.

When Darce points out that Margaret only watches the birds but doesn’t do anything to save them from extinction, the ornithologist says, “This is my life and I am an adult woman with agency and with skills and I want to use that agency and those skills to, you know, do something.” The older and wiser Darce answers, “Ahh. The affliction of protagonism. . . . The pathological needs to do things. To change outcomes. To matter. But we don’t really matter all that much. Life is mostly just sitting and watching.”

The storm hits hard, setting the stage for the gripping second act, in which Clark really gets to strut her stuff.

Greg (Ben Rosenfield) is suspicious of Bo (Michael Mulheren) in Joshua Owen’s debut play (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Owen wrote the play while he and his wife, Robles, were sheltering in place during the pandemic, so isolation was on their mind, although Margaret and Greg are not based on their real relationship. The setup is like a reversal of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which a young couple in love visits an older, bickering couple named Martha and George — like Margaret and Greg? It also has elements of Gilligan’s Island, though not nearly as silly — or funny.

The title of the play comes from C. S. Lewis’s 1948 essay “On Living in an Atomic Age,” in which the author of the Narnia series writes, “If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

Previously called Gods of Mercy, Human Things considers those options, the atomic bomb being represented by the typhoon, which itself evokes how climate change might kill us all. Neither Darce nor Margaret has kids, so, in a way, they are already looking at the end of the road for them. Darce is in an especially fraught predicament, which causes further disagreement between Margaret and Greg, leading to a crazy finale that furthers the play’s exploration of marriage and motherhood in a way that will confound and confuse many but I found both hilarious and prescient.

Five-time Tony nominee Clark (The Light in the Piazza, Kimberly Akimbo) is a force to be reckoned with, delivering a master class in acting in the second half of the show, one you’ll not soon forget. Tony nominee Mulheren (Bright Star, Kiss Me, Kate) is a fine companion as the bold, bearlike Bo, looking like someone who has just come from a Jimmy Buffett concert. (The costumes are by Amanda Roberge.) Robles, making her off-Broadway debut as a producer and an actor, and Rosenfield (The Nether, Love, Love, Love) are hampered by repetitive dialogue that too often lacks nuance.

Director Rory McGregor makes the most of Jacob Bers’s terrific set, which features two tables, one a mini-kitchenette, the other cluttered with electronics, and some chairs and a couch, while a large white tentlike cloth hovers above the characters and the audience, implicating all of us in the fate of the Earth. Reza Behjat’s lighting, Ian Scot’s sound, and Thomas Jenkeleit’s props create a fantastic low-budget storm that rattles the theater.

Margaret sums it all up when she states, “Everything might be shit but at least I’m here to bear witness.”

What’s more human than that?

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

GOOD NIGHT, MR. CALABASH: ROGER GUENVEUR SMITH HONORS JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT AT NEW YORK THEATRE WORKSHOP

Roger Guenveur Smith remembers his friend and collaborator in solo show In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat (photo by Marc J. Franklin)

IN HONOR OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
New York Theatre Workshop
83 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Through October 10, $54-$99
www.nytw.org

I’m not sure I can fairly assess Roger Guenveur Smith’s latest solo show, In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a poetic tribute to his good friend and collaborator, the Brooklyn-born artist and musician who soared to fame in the 1980s before dying from a heroin overdose at the age of twenty-seven.

The night I went, a jazz performer and friend of Smith’s was in the audience, to my left in the row ahead of me, interacting with Smith throughout the sixty-minute show. He called out loudly twice, once when Smith was re-creating part of the 2017 auction of Basquiat’s untitled skull painting that went for $110.5 million, a record at the time for an American artist, and again when Smith was talking about Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, in which Smith portrayed Smiley, a character he based on Basquiat. During several moments, the man enthusiastically shook his calabash, a percussive gourd, drowning out Smith’s words. Smith seemed happy nonetheless; initially surprised by his friend’s appearance, he later shouted out for him to join in. The man also regularly boisterously voiced his acknowledgment and recognition (mm-hhmm, uh-huh), adding exclamation points to Smith’s calmly delivered dialogue. In general, such utterances are fine, but when offered again and again and again, with no joiners in the audience, well, it got to feel like a bit much, especially since it was happening so close to me.

In the show, which has been extended at New York Theatre Workshop through October 10, Smith stands stage right, at a slight angle, barefoot in a dark suit, an homage to how Basquiat often dressed. On the opposite side, Marc Anthony Thompson operates live sound design, from music to immersive sound effects that work better when not competing with noise from an audience member. In between them, a door in the back wall offers shadowy glimpses of another time and place. (The set is by Raphael Mishler, with soft lighting by Arlo Sanders.)

Smith relates biographical information with personal vignettes about both his and Basquiat’s lives, connecting them to other artists and public figures and historical occurrences. For example, after mentioning that Basquiat’s Haitian father came to Brooklyn in 1955, he points out that was also the year that Emmett Till was murdered, Disneyland opened, the Dodgers won the World Series, and Charlie Parker died. He notes that Basquiat was born six days after planes collided over Staten Island, one crashing into Prospect Park. He tells us that Basquiat got hit by a car and lost his spleen in 1968, the same year his mentor, Andy Warhol, was shot by Valerie Solanas. He says that Basquiat’s parents met at a Brooklyn dance hall, while he and Basquiat met at a Brooklyn dance hall.

Some of these comparisons are intriguing, but others seem like too much of a stretch. Also referenced are Charles Mingus, Bud Powell, Robert Rauschenberg, David Byrne, Michael Stewart, Eric Dolphy, Bob Marley, Frantz Fanon, Mark Twain, James Van Der Zee, and Marcus Garvey. In addition to the skull painting, Smith also brings up 1981’s Bird on Money, a tribute to Charlie Parker that includes a depiction of Green-Wood Cemetery, where Basquiat would be buried six years later, 1982’s The Pilgrimage, on which Basquiat wrote “twenty seven,” his age when he died, and 1983’s Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart).

Roger Guenveur Smith and Marc Anthony Thompson honor Jean-Michel Basquiat at New York Theatre Workshop (photo by Marcus Middleton)

The show works best when Smith, known as the rapper Hollywatts when he met Basquiat, shares stories about his close relationship with the artist, as in scenes when they go clubbing, Smith takes Basquiat to a Jamaican barber, and they talk about his drug use. Smith’s previous nonfiction solo shows include A Huey P. Newton Story, about the cofounder of the Black Panther Party; Juan and John, which delves into the 1965 confrontation between San Francisco Giants pitcher Juan Marichal and Los Angeles Dodgers catcher John Roseboro; Rodney King, about the 1992 LA riots; and Frederick Douglass Now, in which Smith portrayed the abolitionist and orator — which premiered in 2011 at La MaMa, across the street from NYTW. Although he does change voices for some of the people in In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat, he mostly relies on his own tender and moving cadence:

“Resurrected as the ascendant dread / Jean-Michel Basquiat / Unbeknowest to me / Thought JMB / Was just a cool club kid / With an electronic hairdo / Little did I know / He was incognegro numero uno / Writing acrylic poems and philosophy / On concrete walls and canvas / And refrigerator doors / A feathered Icarus / Touched by the tarbrush / The big brother / Who had thrown snowballs / And flown kites / With his two little sisters.”

The play begins with Smith explaining that his father, a former elevator operator in DC (in fact, his father was a lawyer and judge), advised him to go to a trade school, saying that “power has its ups and downs,” and opining that, regarding Basquiat, “Hell, that boy didn’t live long enough / to see his shit really sell.” His dad also told him, “So you go ahead / You be an actor / But you’ll never act yourself out of this coffin / called the US of A. . . . And before it’s all over, son / Why don’t you / Act something out / For your friend Jean-Michel / And for me.”

Initially presented in 2004 in conjunction with a revelatory Basquiat exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat, fulfills that request. I only wish I hadn’t been so distracted through most of it.

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

HUGGING IT OUT: AMERICA, WHO HURT YOU?

Sarah Jones explores the Declaration of Independence and more in latest solo show (photo by HanJie Chow)

AMERICA, WHO HURT YOU?
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 4, $70-$125
www.tfana.org
americawhohurtyou.com

At the end of Sarah Jones’s potent one-woman show, America, Who Hurt You?, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Fort Greene, the Queens-born actress, podcaster, solo specialist, and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador asks audience members to stand “and if you’re open to it, silently hug the person you’re with if you already have their consent, or you can silently give ocular hugs — I made that up.” I was there by myself on the aisle, and the seat next to me was empty; I looked around and no one near me seemed to want to hug anyone but who they were with. I was both disappointed and relieved.

However, that night there was a talkback, followed by a gathering with food and drink at a pub down the street. After filling a plate and getting a stout, I found a small round table and sat down. A woman next to me did the same at a second table. In a move that was extremely unlikely for me, I asked to join her, and she heartily accepted.

We started discussing the play, in which Jones celebrates the semiquincentennial of the nation by exploring how the past has led to the present, focusing on the ever-growing gap between right and left, Republican and Democrat, on various critical issues. I mentioned that I had wanted to ask a question at the talkback but it turned out that someone else had already submitted the same query, about how the show would play in red states; it turned out that the interlocutor was the woman I was sitting with.

Jones had answered, “I want to take this show to Hank,” referring to one of the characters she portrays, a Trump-supporting right winger. “And there’s a version of it that can actually, hopefully hold a dialogue. I have to get my ego out of the way, because I don’t think I’m going to get a standing ovation necessarily from those folks. But that’s not the point; the point is to connect and remind them that we’re related, and that maybe we can do some family counseling together.”

Jones was certainly creating connection at the party, but in this case she was preaching to the choir, an audience of New York City liberals. Would it work in MAGA territory? I wondered.

Family photographs are occasionally projected as Sarah Jones delves into America’s past and present (photo by HanJie Chow)

America, Who Hurt You? is the follow-up to Jones’s 2000 Surface Transit, set on a New York City bus; the Tony-winning 2006 Bridge & Tunnel, about New York City’s immigrant communities; and her 2016 Sell/Buy/Date, which deals with the commercial sex trade. Some of her earlier characters reappear in the latest work, which began life as a podcast about the upcoming 2024 presidential election. “We thought perhaps sanity might prevail, and it was sort of facetious. Like, ‘America, girl,’ who hurt you? Why are you like this? Are you alright? Blink twice. You in danger! Too many?” she says in the play’s introduction. “Well, we all know how it’s turned out. It’s going really well. I mean, have you bought eggs or berries or lettuce recently? No, you probably haven’t because then you might have fucking salmonella-cyclospora and have to miss the theater tonight.”

Among the characters of different genders, ethnicity, age, and class who share their opinions about the state of the nation are Lorraine (“I come from the white part of Sarah’s family that has both Christians and Jews. It’s a long story filled with intrigue and interfaith guilt.”), Nereida (“It’s feels very . . . gentrified to be with you at your Shakespeare Theater”), Rashid (“Whenever we got a room with some good white people in it, we appreciate y’all, that’s mad important, and I know this shit ain’t all your fault, however, for real for real, we gon’ need y’all to fix this.”), Gary (“It does take more than centuries of extermination campaigns, broken treaties, and making us blue creatures for the Avatar movie franchise to destroy an entire people.”), Ms. Lady (“Hank, you know good and well, y’all been lying through your teeth for centuries about the real history of America.”), Mrs. Ling (“Now this country, it’s different. It’s not safe anymore – so many people, more afraid, more separated, there’s more hate, and Sarah Jones started to be afraid for us to speak in public.”), Suneeta (“In recent years even I have begun to warn her that perhaps she should tread lightly or face possible accusations of the cultural appropriation.”), and Habiba (“The past few years especially, the voice I used to share with her, it has been silent.”).

An engaging figure and compelling storyteller, Jones also reaches into the country’s not-always-illustrious history as we meet Louise, who was sold as a slave when she was twelve; Civil War veteran Juan-Carlos, a Mexican who argues that the North broke promises they made to foreign soldiers; and Moira, Jeannie, Shizuko, Edmund, and Marcus, who help round out the diaspora. Jones employs only minor adjustments in shifting among characters, changing her accent and her body movement.

There are also several phone conversations between Britain (“America, I love you, but you are at a frightful bottom – we believe you’re in complete denial, and this is a therapeutic intervention.”) and America (“I’m just getting better and better – like, I’m the hottest country in the world, no one can get in!”)

Projections behind Jones feature family photographs, a live video feed, and a timeline that would probably be controversial in many schools, as the truth hurts. It’s likely no accident that the official logo of the play has a whole lot more red than it does blue in its patriotic design. The play is warmly directed by Eric Ting (The Comeuppance, Between Two Knees), with set and lighting by Jiyoun Chang, sound by Palmer Hefferan, costume by Toni-Leslie James, and video by Stefania Bulbarella.

A production of the National Black Theatre and Theatre for a New Audience, America, Who Hurt You? was commissioned by Oxford University for its Unfinished Revolutions series, comprising works by Suzan-Lori Parks, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Anna Clyne and Jody Elff, Taylor Mac and Matt Ray, and Lil Buck and Dannielle “Rhimes” Lecointe. It’s part history lesson, part tribute to America’s melting-pot legacy, and part screed about how we ended up where we are. Some of her comparisons do lean into obvious left-wing judgments and verbiage over the one-hundred-minute performance, but it is an ever-evolving narrative, notably with the midterms approaching. “With the current news cycle, I basically have to rewrite it twice a day,” Jones says. “Like brushing my fucking teeth.”

In 2026 America, even the brand of toothpaste she uses is probably controversial. She’ll find out when she takes her show on the road.

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