twi-ny recommended events

THROUGH THE NIGHT

The extraordinary Deloris “Nunu” Hogan and her daycare center are profiled in intimate documentary Through the Night

THROUGH THE NIGHT (Loira Limbal, 2020)
maysles documentary center virtual cinema
December 11-24, $10
www.maysles.org
www.throughthenightfilm.com

The pandemic has revealed one of the most complicated issues at the heart of American family and economic life: the problem of safe, affordable child care, especially for single and working-class mothers. Loira Limbal’s intimate and heartfelt documentary, Through the Night, shares the moving story of Deloris “Nunu” Hogan and Patrick “Pop Pop” Hogan, who have run Dee’s Tots daycare out of their New Rochelle home since 1985. The film, which was shot prior to the coronavirus crisis, focuses on Nunu and PopPop in addition to two women whose children they care for, Marisol Valencia, who is struggling to make ends meet even with three jobs, and pediatric ER nurse Shanona Tate, both of whom often work overnight shifts. The Hogans operate their “day” care twenty-four/seven and never seem to take a break; they have two young children of their own as well.

“It’s not just a job. This is really our life,” NuNu says. “My children, ever since they were the age of two years old, they had to share me with other children. I remember my children saying, ‘Mommy, why do they have to come first?’ Sometimes my children didn’t get what I had to give to the other kids.”

What NuNu gives to these other kids is love and affection; to their parents, she gives them a much-needed lifeline: the ability to hold a job. Dee’s Tots is like one big extended family; there’s a lot of laughing and a lot of crying, and the Hogans make personal sacrifices: Not only are they worried about their own children, but they limit the time they see each other, sleeping at different times so there’s always someone watching the kids.

The film also reveals a problem at the heart of working-class poverty and the American economy without hammering at it: The mothers of the children the Hogans take care of are primarily women of color who work what would be deemed essential jobs even before Covid-19 and who don’t have the option of corporate or expensive independent daycare. They are barely making enough money to keep their children at Dee’s, which has also felt the impact of the lockdown. In July 2020, Awesome without Borders, which awards grants to initiatives and projects “that increase representation and inclusion in age, class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and/or ability,” gave a grant to Dee’s, explaining that “the Hogans are frontline heroes in their own right. They make it possible for essential workers to leave their children in good hands and do essential work.” Meanwhile, NuNu notes on the film’s official website, “We are staying open until they shut us down because our parents need us. It is a little bit scary because every person who walks in could bring in Covid-19.”

Afro-Dominican director and DJ Limbal (Estilo Hip Hop, #APartyCalledRosiePerez), a single mother of two living in the Bronx who holds a full-time job, says in her director’s statement: “I was raised by an amazing cast of Black and Latinx women who performed miraculous acts of resilience, creativity, and subversion on a daily basis. Unfortunately, when I look around at our popular culture these women are rarely seen and when they do appear, they are represented in reductive ways that often amount to caricatures. My vision as a filmmaker is to flood our popular culture with beautifully complex portrayals of the lives of working-class women of color so that we have new gazes and new ways of seeing ourselves.”

Limbal filmed at Dee’s from 2016 to 2018, showing Nunu and/or PopPop making arts and crafts with the kids, flipping through a family album, marching in a parade, preparing children for overnight stays, dancing at a party, teaching gardening, and playfully auctioning off goodies. It is a love story not only between the Hogans and the children but between the Hogans themselves. “We kinda feed off of each other. We need our spirits lifted up too in order to be the people that we are,” NuNu says. Through the Night, which is screening virtually December 11-24 at the maysles documentary center, will lift viewers’ spirits as well while also opening their eyes.

THE DYBBUK

Theater for the New City is presenting a livestreamed adaptation of The Dybbuk through Sunday (screenshot by twi-ny/mdr)

Theater for the New City
December 9-13, $5-$36 (pay-what-you-can)
www.stellartickets.com
theaterforthenewcity.net

Good things come to those who wait. If there’s one thing we’ve learned during this pandemic, it’s that we need to have patience. Help is on the way, but if we as a nation follow protocols and have strong leadership, we can each make a difference, even with an administration that has turned its back on its people. We also have to be patient with the return of live theater as companies around the world experiment with Zoom, livestreaming, recording onstage without an audience, and other attempts to bring storytelling to a starving public.

So there I was on December 9, watching the hundredth-anniversary premiere of Theater for the New City’s livestreamed revival of the popular Yiddish play The Dybbuk, performed live onstage and broadcast over the Stellar platform. The chat function was on, so virtual attendees started getting ornery quickly when the show didn’t start exactly on time. And once it did, there were significant technical problems involving superimposed text, the green screening, and, most important, the sound, with a screeching electronic score drowning out the dialogue. Several people in the chat began complaining, even demanding a refund. But a solitary voice of reason explained that this is an opening night different from in-person opening nights and everyone should calm down. And she was right, because the tech crew was on the case, and after a near-disastrous beginning, the rest of the play was wonderful.

Written in 1914 by Jewish playwright S. An-ski, aka Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport, who hailed from what is now Belarus, The Dybbuk premiered at the Elyseum Theatre in Warsaw on December 9, 1920, one month after An-ski’s death at the age of fifty-seven. Presented in association with New Yiddish Rep, this new English-language adaptation (with a fair sprinkling of Yiddish) is by NYR artistic director David Mandelbaum. The Dybbuk takes place in an old Jewish shtetl, where a long-arranged match between Menashe and Leah, the daughter of the wealthy Sender, dooms the love young student Khanan has for her. But on her wedding day, she is possessed by a spirit who will not let her marry Menashe, and the case soon comes before the judgment of the learned rabbi.

Cool backgrounds propel Theater for a New City virtual revival of classic Yiddish play (screenshot by twi-ny/mdr)

Director Jesse Freedman eventually works out the kinks in real time and gets everything in sync — with lighting by Alexander Bartieneff, sound by Eamon Goodman, and video by Tatiana Stolpovskaya — resulting in a moving and delightful production that features fun backgrounds and solid performances by Darrel Blackburn, Amy Coleman, Hannah Gee, Lev Harvey, Lucie Lalouche, Thomas Morris, and Mandelbaum as the rabbi. “A play about possession seems particularly suited to the times. The country has been possessed by the evil spirits of strife and division and could use a good exorcism to bring it back to its senses,” Mandelbaum said in a statement. “An intrepid group of artists is soldiering on through this pandemic minefield to honor the one-hundredth anniversary of this iconic play with the battle cry of their calling: ‘The show must go on.’ This will be a spiritual fusion of live performance and digital artistry. The ‘possession’ of live theater by the spirits of techno-wizardry.”

So be patient; the show will go on. It might not get off to a big start, but it packs quite a wallop by the finish.

For more on The Dybbuk, which was also made into a classic 1937 Yiddish film directed by Michał Waszyński, you can check out the Congress for Jewish Culture’s recent panel discussion “The Dybbuk at 100” on Facebook with playwright, translator, and theater historian Nahma Sandrow, Baruch College assistant professor and author Debra Caplan, and author and UT Austin senior lecturer in Yiddish Itzik Gottesman, moderated by writer, translator, actress, and theater historian Caraid O’Brien. The organization will also be presenting its own production of The Dybbuk on December 14 at 7:00 in Yiddish with Mike Burstyn, Shane Baker, Mendy Cahan, Refoyel Goldwasser, Amitai Kedar, Yelena Shmulenson, Suzanne Toren, and Michael Wex, directed by Allen Lewis Rickman; it can be seen here.

MOLIÈRE IN THE PARK: PEN/MAN/SHIP

Who: Molière in the Park theater company
What: Livestreamed performances and Q&As
Where: FIAF Facebook and Molière in the Park YouTube
When: Saturday, December 12, free with RSVP, 2:00 & 7:00 (show will be available for viewing through January 3)
Why: After staging Zoom adaptations of three classic seventeenth-century plays by Jean-Baptiste Poquelin — better known as Molière — Brooklyn-based Molière in the Park is getting significantly more contemporary with its latest live, online production, playwright, TV writer, and educator Christina Anderson’s new work, Pen/Man/Ship. Following The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and The School for Wives, Molière in the Park moves into the late nineteenth century with Pen/Man/Ship, which takes place in 1896 aboard a ship heading for Liberia shortly after the US Supreme Court decided in Plessy v. Ferguson to uphold the constitutionality of racial segregation under the concept of “separate but equal.” The cast features Crystal Lucas-Perry, Kevin Mambo, Jared McNeill, and Postell Pringle; the parable is directed by Molière in the Park founding artistic director Lucie Tiberghien using Liminal Entertainment Technologies’ StreamWeaver software, which takes actors out of Zoom boxes and puts them in front of backgrounds that more resemble indoor and outdoor sets while also allowing the tech crew to work together regardless of where they are. Copresented with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in partnership with the Prospect Park Alliance and the LeFrak Center at Lakeside, the play will be performed live twice on December 12, at 2:00 and 7:00, followed by Q&As with the creatives; a recording will be available for on-demand viewing through January 3.

TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

Atsuko Maeda is mesmerizing as a young woman trying to find her place in the world in To the Ends of the Earth

TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2019)
Metrograph Digital
December 11-17, $12
metrograph.com
www.kimstim.com

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth is a gorgeously photographed, hauntingly meditative treatise on finding one’s place in the world. In her third film with Kurosawa following Seventh Code and Before We Vanish, former J-pop idol Atsuko Maeda of AKB48 fame is transcendent as Yoko, the host of a global travel show. She is making her way through Uzbekistan with her small crew — director Yoshioka (Shota Sometani), cameraman Iwao (Ryo Kase), production assistant Sasaki (Tokio Emoto), and translator Temur (Adiz Rajabov) — but the peppiness and determination she displays when being filmed is not repeated in real life, where she is quiet, lonely, and somber.

They head from Samarkand to Tashkent to Zaamin, from old cities to modern urban centers to the mountains and the sea, seeking out unusual and compelling stories, but not much is going well. At Lake Aydar on the hunt for the elusive bramul fish, a local fisherman refuses going out on the water with a woman. At an amusement park, a ride operator does not think she is strong enough to handle a fierce topsy-turvy spin. And a woman at a chaykhana won’t make her a proper plate of plov. But she soldiers on, doing whatever is necessary for the sake of the show, but it’s clear that her heart is no longer in it, if it ever was.

When she comes upon a goat tethered in a small pen in a back alley, she stops and says, “If I set that goat free in some grassy place, it’d be so happy.” Then, speaking directly to the goat, she asks, “What do you want?” It’s really a question she’s asking herself. Later she tells Iwao, “I feel like I’m moving away from what I really want to do.”

She rarely hangs out with the crew when they’re not filming. She eats by herself, is constantly late, does her own makeup and chooses her own clothing, and spends evenings alone in her hotel room, texting her firefighter boyfriend, who is in Tokyo, the only time she appears to experience any sort of genuine pleasure, but even that becomes problematic later on. When she is given a handheld video camera to take on her private adventures, she soon finds herself on the run from the law. Yoko is a kind of cross between Iris (Kati Outinen) in Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl, though not nearly as dark and pathetic, and Giulietta Masina in any of a number of Fellini films, sweet and innocent but hiding pain. The camera adores her face, as if it’s a character unto itself.

The film is filled with memorable images: Yoko standing waist-deep in the lake, lying flat on the floor of her hotel room, hiding from the police, trekking through sandy mountains, skittering through a sketchy underpass, and wandering into the empty Navoi Theater. It was made in conjunction with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and Uzbekistan and takes place along the Silk Road. Akiko Ashizawa’s cinematography of these little-seen landscapes is captivating, each shot composed like a unique work of art. Editor Koichi Takahashi’s pacing is mesmerizing, with immersive sound by Shinji Watanabe and understated music by Yusuke Hayashi.

Kurosawa is known for such gripping thrillers as Cure and Pulse as well as the elegiac Tokyo Sonata and the romantic drama Journey to the Shore; To the Ends of the Earth, which opens December 11 at Metrograph Digital, takes him to another level, highlighted by an unforgettable performance by Maeda in a film that is about filmmaking, about telling stories and acting them out in a fictitious world where, as in reality, life doesn’t always follow the script.

TAYLOR MAC’S HOLIDAY SAUCE . . . PANDEMIC!

Taylor Mac’s annual “Holiday Sauce” celebration goes virtual this year (photo courtesy of Pomegranate Arts)

Who: Taylor Mac, Colin Brooks, Viva DeConcini, Antoine Drye, Greg Glassman, J. Walter Hawkes, Marika Hughes, Dana Lyn, Gary Wang, Thornetta Davis, Stephanie Christi’an, Tigger! Ferguson, Dusty Childers, Sister Rosemary Chicken, sidhe degreene, Romeo-Jay Jacinto, Glenn Marla, Travis Santell Rowland (Qween), Timothy White Eagle
What: Virtual edition of annual seasonal celebration
Where: Multiple venues through Holiday Sauce website
When: Saturday, December 12, pay-what-you-can, 2:00, 7:00, 10:00 (also available on demand through January 3)
Why: Taylor Mac isn’t about to let something like a lockdown keep him from celebrating the Christmas season as only judy, Mac’s preferred gender pronoun, can. On December 12, Mac will be hosting three “Holiday Sauce . . . Pandemic!” livestreamed parties, at 2:00, 7:00, and 10:00, featuring a fabulous cast of performers where just about anything can happen. This virtual vaudeville, an online edition of the event Mac has been holding around the country since 2017, features special guests Thornetta Davis, Stephanie Christi’an, and Tigger! Ferguson and cameos by Dusty Childers, Sister Rosemary Chicken, sidhe degreene, Romeo-Jay Jacinto, Glenn Marla, Travis Santell Rowland (Qween), and Timothy White Eagle. The festivities are directed by Jeremy Lydic, designed by Machine Dazzle and Anastasia Durasova, and photographed by Rob Kolodny.

Mac, who has written and/or performed in such works as Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, Hir, The Lily’s Revenge, and A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, will be highlighting songs from judy’s new album, Holiday Sauce, which includes covers of Graham Nash’s “Cathedral,” the Velvet Underground’s “The Black Angel’s Death Song” (paired with “Carol of the Bells”) and “All Tomorrow’s Parties” (with “Little Drummer Boy”), and Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids,” such seasonal favorites as “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “Silent Night,” and the new tune “Christmas with Grandma,” which doesn’t go well for the old lady. Ticket prices vary from pay-what-you-can to $25 for the livestreams and $10 to watch it on demand through January 3. Each institution presenting the fifty-minute show is dedicating it to a local elder of the queer community; Mac has dedicated Holiday Sauce to judy’s drag mother, Mother Flawless Sabrina. As Mac explains in the album’s liner notes, “I declare this holiday season, and all future ones, a celebration of drag mothers. That’s the world I want to live in. And if you don’t have a drag mama . . . the spirit of Mother Flawless Sabrina is out there for the loving.” In addition, Mac will be receiving the International Ibsen Award, the first American to have that honor.

INSIDE THE WILD HEART

Immersive production of Inside the Wild Heart has been reimagined for online livestreaming (photo by Erika Morilla)

INSIDE THE WILD HEART
Thursday – Sunday through December 20, $20-$50 (based on what you can afford)
Encore run: Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, February 12 – March 28, $15-$50
www.group.br.com

I’m an immersive theater junkie. Put on a show in an abandoned hotel or warehouse, in an empty church or a cemetery, or behind the scenes at an arts venue and I will be first in line. There’s just something about wandering among storylines and characters on your own path and schedule, even when knowing you’re likely not to see everything or understand completely what’s happening and I’m there, from Sleep No More, Then She Fell, and Ghost Light to The Grand Paradise, Empire Travel Agency, and Counting Sheep.

I don’t know how I missed Group.BR’s Inside the Wild Heart, which was first presented in a Williamsburg gallery in 2016, then two years later at Aich Studios, an 1848 brownstone and former foundry in the Gramercy Park area. The New York-based Brazilian company filmed one of the 2018 shows, enlisting nine friends with cameras to place themselves throughout the three floors and a mezzanine and take continuous video without getting in the way of the audience, which is allowed to walk, stand, and sit wherever they want as they chase the action over two hours. Artistic director Andressa Furletti didn’t know what she would do with the footage until the pandemic hit and she discovered the Gather.town digital platform, which she immediately realized would supply her with just what was needed in order to virtually reimagine the show, which is based on the writings of prominent Jewish author Clarice Lispector. Thus, it turns out that I didn’t miss the show after all; via the innovative platform, I was able to amble, observe, follow, and interact not only with the recorded footage but with other live audience members as well.

Group.BR uses the Gather.town digital platform to bring the interactive Inside the Wild Heart to the internet

Inside the Wild Heart features characters, dialogue, and plots from nine novels and eight short stories by the Ukraine-born Brazilian Lispector (1920-77), who wrote such books as Near to the Wild Heart, The Passion According to G.H., The Stream of Life, and The Woman Who Killed the Fish. Each audience member is assigned a video-game-like avatar that they guide with their keyboard across an animated architectural rendering with couches, chairs, a fireplace, a bathroom, screening areas, and a bar where they can take a break and speak with others. Everyone is encouraged to keep their cameras on but their microphones muted except when they’re in the bar; whenever you’re in a room, you can not only see the other avatars who are there as well but you can see their names and photos at the top of the screen. There’s also a live chat where you can connect with one another, but the night I went, nearly all the other comments were in Portuguese.

Don’t be in a hurry to try to see everything quickly; you have time to take it slow and linger in a room for fifteen minutes or more as the semblance of a story takes shape, a nonlinear narrative told through video, still photographs, dance, music, prerecorded film, and various surprises. You might encounter a woman in a claw-foot tub, people preparing for a wedding, a lady with a whip, and a ghostlike figure climbing stairs, with talk of love, murder, motherhood, the Society of Shadows, the Tree of Secret Desires, and the existence of God. Make sure to find the rare television interview with Lispector, who shares such thoughts as “Adults are sad and solitary” and “I think that when I’m not writing I’m dead.” Other Lispector quotes pop up here and there, including “Getting lost is also a way,” “What I desire doesn’t have a name yet,” and “If you were you, how would you be and what would you do?”

The show is directed by Linda Wise and performed by Balardini, Furletti, Mirko Faienza, Patricia Faolli, Fabiana Mattedi, Gio Mielle, Gonçalo Ruivo, Yasmin Santana, Ibsen Santos, and Montserrat Vargas, with scenic design and art installations by Vargas and Furletti, costumes by Jussara Lee, lighting by Charlie Jarboe, score by Sergio Krakowski (with Mario Forte on violin), and video design by Paul Leopold. Together they have managed to ably re-create the immersive theater experience online, resulting in a fab interactive presentation that is a lot of fun while introducing you to quite an eclectic writer.

Inside the Wild Heart runs Thursday to Sunday through December 20; on December 10, Group.BR will celebrate the centennial of Lispector’s birth with “Clarice’s Day,” a free sixteen-hour party on Zoom, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube that includes “The Morning Is a Premature Flower” with Balardini (5:00 am), videos of scenes from the books Besieged City and A Breath of Life as performed in Inside the Wild Heart (10:00), such readings and/or discussions as “Clarice in English” (10:20), “Clarice and Visual Arts” (11:00), “Clarice in Life and Works” (12:30), and “Clarice and Theater” (5:00), a musical performance of Sara Carvalhos’s “Perto do Coração Selvagem” by Késia Decoté on the toy piano (2:30), short films (3:00), and a special 7:00 screening of the full play, followed by a talkback. [Ed. note: Inside the Wild Heart is back for a much-deserved encore run, February 12 – March 28.]