twi-ny recommended events

SHADOW’S WHISPERS

SHADOW’S WHISPERS
Opgenomen in Zuiderstrandtheater, Den Haag
February 15-17, €15,00, 2:00 (streaming begins 1:15)
www.ndt.nl

Following its terrific livestreamed production of Yoann Bourgeois’s I wonder where the dreams I don’t remember go, performed in an empty Opgenomen in Zuiderstrandtheater in its home in Den Haag, Nederlands Dans Theater is back with the two-part program “Shadow’s Whispers,” taking place February 15-17 at 2:00 EST.

London-based Israeli choreographer and composer Hofesh Shechter, who previously created Clowns and Vladimir for NDT, returns with the world premiere of From England with Love, for a team of ten dancers, along with Imre van Opstal and Marne van Opstal’s brand-new Baby don’t hurt me; the pair previously made The Grey for NDT 2 and Take Root for NDT 1.

Tickets are about $18 at the current exchange rate. The seventy-five-minute program will be performed live three times, then be gone, so catch it while you can. And be sure to check in early, as NDT will be streaming special behind-the-scenes goodies, including a live Q&A, starting forty-five minutes before showtime each day.

XIValentine: A VIRTUAL VARIETY SHOW

Company XIV
Premieres Sunday, February 14, $125-$325, 8:00
companyxiv.com

For fifteen years, Brooklyn-based baroque burlesque troupe Company XIV has been dazzling audiences with sexy dance, music, and acrobatics in dramatic, fabulous costumes, re-creating fairy tales and other stories (Cinderella, Snow White, Queen of Hearts, Seven Sins) with an unabashed joy. During the presentation, the cast members make their way through the crowd, interacting with blissful guests who are sitting on lush couches, classy chairs, and intimate booths, eating and drinking as the performers spin from the ceiling, swirl on poles, reinterpret familiar standards, and dance in glittery, revealing outfits. It’s more of a happening than a mere show. So what to do during a pandemic lockdown, when Company XIV is unable to welcome audiences to its fashionable home on Troutman Ave. in Bushwick?

Founder and artistic director Austin McCormick has moved things online with XIValentine, a virtual holiday extravaganza premiering February 14 at 8:00 and available on demand for thirty days. Joining in on the raunchy reverie are aerialist, pole dancer, and soprano Marcy Richardson, aerialist, musician, and dancer Nolan McKew, powerhouse singer Storm Marrero, magician Matthew Holtzclaw, dancer and acrobat Nicholas Katen, actor and singer Brandon Looney, juggler Sam Urdang, dancer and choreographer Nicole von Arx, singer and specialty performer Syrena, and dancers Lilin, Scott Schneider, and Melissa Anderson, along with an appearance by canine cutie Macaron McCormick. The scenic design and costumes are by the amazing Zane Pihlström, who has never met a swath of red velvet and sequins he couldn’t turn into something fabulous.

Nolan McKew and Company XIV are preparing a special experience for Valentine’s Day

At its in-person productions, Company XIV offers different levels of ticketing; the more you pay, the more you get, including greater interaction with the cast and better food and drink. The troupe is attempting to recapture that feeling by offering four ways to experience the fifty-minute XIValentine. The thirty-day streaming pass is $125; the Be Mine package comes with chocolate truffles, The Male Nude or 1000 Pin-Up Girls book, and a canvas tote for $160; the Champagne Package features glasses, candles, bar soap, a bath bomb, and a quilted tote for $195; and the Lust Package consists of a rabbit mask, a gold riding crop, black nipple covers, a black beeswax corset candle, passionfruit CBD gummies, a chocolate fondue set, and both a quilted and canvas tote, for $325. Did we point out that things can get pretty kinky with Company XIV, both on- and offstage? In addition, if you live in New York City, you can get Champagne and cocktails delivered to your building. It’s always an expensive night out with Company XIV, and now it’s an expensive night in, but there’s nothing else like it.

If it’s all a bit much, you can go for the virtual edition of the seasonal favorite Nutcracker Rouge, where a $50 ticket provides you with a twenty-four-hour streaming pass to access eight acts (performed by Richardson, Lilin & LEXXE, Troy Lingelbach, Katen & McKew, Demi Remick, Christine Flores, Làszlò Major & Looney, and Jourdan Epstein, Pretty Lamé & Jacoby Pruitt), while $75 extends the pass to fourteen days and adds two weeks of bespoke cocktail lessons.

SMITHTOWN

Michael Urie, Ann Harada, Constance Shulman, and Colby Lewis deliver interconnected monologues in Drew Larimore’s Smithtown

SMITHTOWN
The Studios of Key West
February 13 – March 13, $20
tskw.org

Drew Larimore’s Smithtown is set not in the nearby North Shore municipality on Long Island but in a fictional midwestern college town in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy. The sixty-five-minute virtual play, presented by the Studios of Key West through March 13, explores the incident from four different perspectives, in a quartet of interlinked Zoom monologues that slowly reveal how it unfolded, through jealousy, thoughtlessness, ambition, and accident.

The show, directed by opera librettist Stephen Kitsakos, begins with the indefatigable, always charming Michael Urie (Torch Song, Buyer & Cellar) as Ian A. Bernstein, a grad student on the first day of teaching the new Smithtown College class Introduction to Ethics in Technology. Frazzled and uneasy, Bernstein explains that they will be examining how technology, and the cell phone in particular, can be used “as a tool, as a device, as a weapon.” He then begins to detail a specific event involving himself and his ex-girlfriend that went horribly wrong, revealing an alarming blindness to his own role in the event.

The action then shifts to Ann Harada (Avenue Q, Emojiland) as perky Bonnie, aka Text Angel, a former guidance counselor at Smithtown High School who now makes a living by sitting in front of a computer in her basement, sending uplifting messages to people in need of “digitized self-esteem.” She says of a new client, “I’ve got a seven-hundred-pound woman in Akron, Ohio, who’s got the bottomless kung pao chicken at Ling’s Chinatown Buffet eyeing her like a hooker. This time next year we’ll have you posing in the swimsuit edition, hotcakes.”

In the third scene, Colby Lewis (Hamilton, Five Guys Named Moe) plays Eugene Pinkerton, a jack-of-all-trades at the Smithtown Heritage Center who is making a YouTube video praising the cultural glories of the town. But a chip on his shoulder gets in the way: “Our nation’s finest artists live in small-town America; we should be looking there for our next great minds and hearts and not write folks like me off as folksy hacks,” he says. He then talks about his own art exhibit, which he calls “groundbreaking,” work “that will put those avant-garde folks in New York to shame,” defending the indefensible subject matter.

Smithtown concludes with Constance Shulman (Orange Is the New Black, Steel Magnolias) as Cindy, a woman welcoming an unseen couple to the neighborhood. She’s in her kitchen, offering them lemon cookies and explaining that it’s been a rough year, separating from her husband and having trouble sleeping. “I’d like nothing more than to take an eraser to wipe away any trace. That way you never have to . . . ,” she says, her voice trailing off with sadness. She changes the discussion to her obsession with Facebook and also shows a picture on her phone of her estranged husband — an old photo of Shulman’s real-life spouse, actor Reed Birney. As the overall story comes full circle, it’s likely to hit you like a brick.

Larimore (The New Peggy, The Cannibals of McGower Country) wrote Smithtown before the pandemic, but it has been revamped for online viewing in a way that makes it feel like it’s very much about these current troubled times as it deals with loneliness and connection. The play is bookended by terrific performances by Urie and Shulman, two of New York’s finest actors. Urie, who has been very busy during the coronavirus crisis, participating in numerous benefit readings, conversations, and short plays, lends a complexity to the deeply disturbed Bernstein; just watch how he corrects himself each time he says “girlfriend,” following it up with “ex-girlfriend.” And Shulman is extraordinary as a woman trapped with her memories, desperate to reach out and not be alone, something we can all appreciate as we’re sheltering in place, so many of us unable to see our loved ones. Technology can bring us together, but as Smithtown demonstrates, by crowd-sourcing away our personal responsibility, it can also tear us apart.

HAPPY CLEANERS

The Choi family finds itself at a critical crossroads in Flushing in Happy Cleaners

HAPPY CLEANERS (Julian Kim & Peter S. Lee, 2018)
Opens virtually Friday, February 12
koreanamericanstory.org
K-Town Stories

Following appearances at seventeen festivals around the globe, including the Asian American International Film Festival, KAFFNY Infinite Cinema, and Queens World Film Festival based here in New York City, Happy Cleaners is getting its virtual streaming release starting February 12. Set in Flushing, Queens, the insightful, small-scale film is produced by KoreanAmericanStory.org, founded in 2010 to document the Korean-American experience. Written and directed by Julian Kim and Peter S. Lee and cowritten by producer Kat Kim, Happy Cleaners is about a multigenerational immigrant family trying to make it in Flushing despite familiar hardships. “As Korean-Americans, we have called this country our home for over one hundred years. However, we have never really felt like true members of the family but mere guests in someone else’s house,” the filmmakers explain in their note about the film.

Gentle Mr. Choi (Charles Ryu) and stern Mrs. Choi (Hyanghwa Lim) operate a large dry cleaners on a busy corner. Their son, Kevin (Yun Jeong), works at Big D’s Grub Truck, a mobile food purveyor of Asian fusion cuisine — grinders, tacos, bulgogi, dumplings, and yuca fries. (Note: Big D’s is a real operation in NYC, and I highly recommend their grub.) Kevin wants to move to LA and start his own food truck business, but he doesn’t exactly have a plan. His mother is furious with him, insisting he stay in school and become a doctor, which he has no interest in. Kevin’s sister, Hyunny (Yeena Sung), works as a nurse in a hospital, contributing money to her parents and refereeing the battles between mother and son. But Mrs. Choi is also angry at Hyunny for refusing to break up with her boyfriend, Danny (Donald Chang), who she thinks will hold her back; Danny has recently quit school to work in a liquor store. When the new landlord of the dry cleaners (John Del Vecchio) starts poking around shortly before the lease is up for renewal — the store has been a part of the community for seventeen years — the Chois face an uncertain future in a country the parents still do not feel at home in.

Happy Cleaners might not be a wholly original tale, but it has an intimate, authentic feel as it deals with cultural identity, assimilation, and tradition. “It’s not my fault you live like this,” Kevin shouts at his father, who responds, “What do you know about our lives?” When Kevin and his mother argue about how to prepare a favorite family dish, she tells him, “It’s better bland than salty,” a metaphor for their different approaches to life. Overseeing it all is Kevin’s wise, feisty grandmother (Jaehee K. Wilder), who always knows just what to say. It’s all summed up by Hyunny, who explains, “This is the fate of being children of immigrants. It’s even embedded in our ethnicity in the form of a hyphen.” That multifaceted identity is expressed further in the song that plays over the closing credits, rap duo Year of the Ox’s “Word to the Hyphen.” Winner of the Narrative Audience Award at San Francisco’s CAAMFest Happy Cleaners might not break new ground, but it’s a realistic, heartfelt drama about the American dream and its impact on a Queens family that finds itself at a crossroads, in more ways than one.

MILES AND MILES AND MILES OF HEART: LOVE SONGS FOR THE MOST ROMANTIC NIGHT OF THE YEAR

Who: KT Sullivan, Natalie Douglas, Jeff Harner, Marissa Mulder
What: Love songs for Valentine’s Day
Where: Mabel Mercer Foundation
When: Sunday, February 14, free, 7:00 (available for one week)
Why: English cabaret superstar Mabel Mercer, winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, passed away in 1984 at the age of eighty-four; the next year, the Mabel Mercer Foundation was founded “to preserve and advance an endangered part of American musical heritage: the intimate art of cabaret performance and the Great Songbook of its repertoire.” That mission takes center stage on February 14 at 7:00 when KT Sullivan, the foundation’s artistic director, will host the Valentine’s Day concert “Miles and Miles and Miles of Heart: Love Songs for the Most Romantic Night of the Year,” featuring Natalie Douglas, Jeff Harner, and Marissa Mulder performing such standards as “The Nearness of You,” “All the Way,” “Because of You,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man,” “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” “Love Is Here to Stay,” and “My Funny Valentine.” Admission is free, although donations are welcome if you can afford it, helping the foundation in this time of Covid to continue as a “central source of information for artists, presenters, promoters, and the general public about Ms. Mercer and the art form she exemplified.”

LiveLabs — ONE ACTS: ON LOVE

Who: Tẹmídayọ Amay, Keith David, Antwayn Hopper, Chiké Johnson, Patrice Johnson, Zonya Love, Anastacia McCleskey
What: Seven short vignettes focusing on the eight different types of love
Where: MCC Theater
When: Thursday, February 11, $7, 6:30 (available on demand through February 13 at midnight); open mic night February 12, free with RSVP, 5:30
Why: MCC’s LiveLabs series of one-act virtual plays has included Talene Monohan’s Monty Python-esque farce Frankie & Will, directed by Jaki Bradley and starring real-life partners Ryan Spahn and Michael Urie, the latter a playwright attempting to write his own plague version of “King Leir”; Aziza Barnes’s Pues Nada, directed by Whitney White and starring Ito Aghayere, Alfie Fuller, Karen Pittman, and Kara Young, a very funny satire dealing with some strange goings-on at a bar in East LA (complete with puking and a brutal murder), inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies; Matthew Lopez’s poignant and honest The Sentinels, directed by Rebecca Taichman and starring Jane Alexander, Denee Benton, and Katrina Lenk as three 9/11 widows whose significant others all worked in the Twin Towers and who meet in a diner on the anniversary of the tragedy every year, the action moving backward in time, with Priscilla Lopez as the waitress and reading stage directions; and C. A. Johnson’s When, directed by Taylor Reynolds and starring Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and Kecia Lewis as a daughter going through a breakup and her Downton Abbey-obsessed mother on a long Zoom call that gets pretty personal. The plays run between twenty-five and forty-five minutes each, followed by a discussion facilitated by Ianne Fields Stewart.

The series continues February 11-13 with Mfoniso Udofia’s On Love, exploring eight types of love through seven short vignettes, poems, and songs, consisting of Philautia: Self Love, Ludus: Playful Love, Storge: Family Love, Eros: Erotic Love, Agape: Love within Community, Pragma: Enduring Love, Philia: Friendship Love, and Mania: Obsessive Love. The terrific cast features Tẹmídayọ Amay, Keith David, Antwayn Hopper, Chiké Johnson, Patrice Johnson, Zonya Love, and Anastacia McCleskey; Awoye Timpo (The Homecoming Queen, The Revolving Cycles Truly and Steadily Roll’d) directs the play, Udofia’s online follow-up to such previous works as Sojourners, runboyrun, and Her Portmanteau. Tickets are only seven dollars. In addition, MCC is hosting a free On Love open mic Zoom night on February 12 at 5:30, where you can sit back and watch or share your own spoken word, poem, or song.

LET FREEDOM RING VOL. 2

Jasmine Wahi’s On Visibility was part of first iteration of BAM’s “Let Freedom Ring” project (photo © Terrence Jennings 2020)

LET FREEDOM RING VOL. 2
BAM sign screen
Flatbush Ave. at Lafayette Ave.
February 12-15, free
www.bam.org/let-freedom-ring

Last month, as part of its thirty-fifth annual Brooklyn Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., BAM hosted “Let Freedom Ring,” a weeklong public art display on its sign screen at the corner of Flatbush and Lafayette Aves., featuring visual meditations on what freedom means by Derrick Adams, Alvin Armstrong, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Lizania Cruz, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Hank Willis Thomas, and Jasmine Wahi. Armstrong’s We Don’t Die We Multiply depicted two silhouetted bare-chested men bumping bodies. Adams offered MLK’s Tropic Interlude. Thomas asked, “Who Taught You to Love_?” Wahi’s On Visibility posits, “Do you see me for who I am or what you think I am” over an image of two large eyes. And Barrayn expllored beauty in Self-Portrait (Extension of a Woman) and Water Spirit (March on Washington 2020). The second iteration of “Let Freedom Ring” takes place February 12-15, with electronic billboard contributions from Jordan Casteel, Kevin Claiborne, Amy Sherald, Deborah Roberts, Cruz, Barrayn, and Wahi.

In a statement, BAM curator-at-large Larry Ossei-Mensah said, “After the first project’s success, I felt it necessary to continue the conversation and reflect on freedom as the nation observes Presidents Day and celebrates Black History Month. Working on ‘Let Freedom Ring’ has been a cathartic experience growing from a desire to ponder and imagine what freedom could look like in 2021 and beyond. It’s imperative that we share this thought-provoking work with the public and not relegate it to just a gallery exhibition. These are fundamental questions and concerns we all share as Americans, as human beings.” Commenting on the participants, he noted, “Naturally, as a curator, I look to artists who create work that inspires hope, proposes deep philosophical questions, and reminds us of our humanity for guidance on what is possible. I’m honored that these seven artists accepted my invitation and responded in a variety of ways. I was thrilled to see each artists’ perspective on freedom — from self-reflection, joy, and a reintroduction to Dr. King’s fight for economic justice with the Freedom Budget document.” BAM is one of the institutions I am missing the most during this pandemic lockdown, but this is a little taste of the kind of work it has been doing for decades.