Henry Hintermeister, Retreat to Victory, oil on canvas (gift of Charles Lauriston Livingston, Jr. / courtesy of Fraunces Tavern Museum)
Who: Scott Dwyer, Lisa Goulet, Peter Hein, Seth Kaller, Charles (Chuck) Schwam, Lloyd S. Kramer, Louise M. Joy, George Bruton Delaney, Moses L. Delaney, Richard Sylla, more What: Independence Day open house and “The 1700s: The Path to Liberty” symposium Where:Fraunces Tavern Museum, 54 Pearl St. When: Friday, July 4, $1 in person, free virtually, 1:00 – 5:30 Why: The Lower Manhattan Historical Association’s It Happened Here turns to the founding of America on July 4 with an Independence Day open house and afternoon symposium at Fraunces Tavern Museum, home to a banquet on June 18, 1776, honoring General George Washington’s military victories. “The 1700s: The Path to Liberty,” which can be attended in person or online, features members of the Sons of the Revolution, the American Friends of Lafayette, history professors, collections managers, military veterans, descendants of James Armistead Lafayette, and others. Visitors can explore such exhibitions as “Path to Liberty: The Emergence of a Nation,” “Fraunces Tavern: Over 300 Years of Building History,” and “Lafayette: A Hero’s Return” before attending the symposium prelude “Liss and the Culper Spy Ring in Historic Lower Manhattan” at 1:00, followed at 1:30 by the symposium itself.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Emmanuelle Mattana wrote and stars in Trophy Boys at MCC (photo by Valerie Terranova)
TROPHY BOYS
Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater
Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
511 West Fifty-Second St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through August 3, $64-$114 mcctheater.org
The Breakfast Club meets John Proctor Is the Villain in the US premiere of Emmanuelle Mattana’s Trophy Boys at MCC.
The seventy-minute play takes place in approximate real time as four men from the private boys school Imperium are prepping for a debate against their sister private school, St. Gratia. Owen (Mattana) is a wonk who sees a clear path for himself to become president of the United States. Jared (Louisa Jacobson) is an artist who loves women, and repeatedly reminds everyone of that. Scott (Esco Jouléy) is an athlete who randomly shows off his physical prowess. And David (Terry Hu), the quietest of the team, is determined to become a powerful businessman.
All four roles are portrayed by actors who identify as either female, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary, adding a complicated layer to the argument the high school seniors are given for the debate: “Feminism has failed women — affirmative.”
The humanities classroom is filled with posters depicting famous women, some with one-word descriptions, among them Oprah Winfrey, Amelia Earhart, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frida Kahlo, Yoko Ono, Gloria Steinem, Michelle Obama (Empathy), Mother Teresa (Compassion), Katherine Johnson (Hard Work), and Harriet Tubman (Fearlessness). “I am at my most inspired when surrounded by inspiring women,” David says, then calls out excitedly, “Malala!!!” upon seeing a framed picture of Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai.
The cocky boys, who have had an undefeated season thus far, have one hour to assemble their argument, with Owen putting himself in charge, telling the others, “Trust me. When have I let you down? International politics round you relied on me to know all about the complexities of Pyongyang’s internal power struggle. Technology round I knew all about the ethics of AI in sex dolls. Sports round I knew all the football players with charges of assault. And I don’t even like sports. It’s the same here. I’m on an academic scholarship. I’m smart. Trust me.”
As they proceed, Scott worries about their being accused of mansplaining. Jared doesn’t want to get canceled for accidentally saying something that might be offensive and upset his girlfriend. David complains that he is screwed up because his mother spent more time on the board of eight multinational corporations rather than breast-feeding him. And Owen is not about to let anything get in the way of his political career.
They discuss intersectionalism, pole dancing, the male gaze, the correct word for a woman’s nether region, periods, boobs, women CEOs, the divine feminism, and tradwives, taking potshots at each other’s manhood as if they were in a locker room, complete with a dose of homophobia. Taking notes on the whiteboard, Owen doesn’t realize when he has drawn both a penis and a vagina/vulva.
But when the boys discover that one of them has been accused of sexual assault by a St. Gratia debater, their attitudes about power, gender, and feminism itself begin to morph as they turn on one another, unwilling to jeopardize their futures even as they insist that all women should be believed.
Jared (Louisa Jacobson), Owen (Emmanuelle Mattana), Scott (Esco Jouléy), and David (Terry Hu) have their work cut out for them as final debate nears (photo by Valerie Terranova)
Mattana, who wrote the play when she was twenty-one, quit competitive high school debating “to become an artist and hang out with other queer weirdos who helped me imagine a braver, more radical future.” In the program, she points out, “The very nature of the endeavour — turning argument into sport while believing yourself the smartest in any room — required you fervently argue things you didn’t know enough about or even necessarily believe. Logic was a game, something to be won or lost, and words and arguments were things you could twist at your own whim. If you were articulate and commanding enough you could speak over anyone, or for anyone. It was no wonder this ethos seeped so dangerously into other parts of these boys’ lives. . . . Gender is learnt, which means it is also taught. No more so than to those young men I knew from debate. With this brand of masculinity inhabited onstage by non-cis male bodies, my hope is that it can be revealed for what it truly is — a comical, absurd, and ultimately disturbing performance.”
Trophy Boys is all those things and more. The play is skillfully directed by Danya Taymor, who won a Tony for The Outsiders and was nominated for John Proctor Is the Villain, both of which also deal with toxic masculinity and gender; she and movement director Tilly Evans-Krueger employ full use of Matt Saunders’s realistic set, adroitly lit by Cha See. But Mattana, in their playwriting debut — they have previously appeared in such television series as Mustangs FC and Videoland and cowrote and starred in the feature film Fwends — isn’t about to make anything easy for the audience, providing no simple answers while avoiding genre clichés. In one of the most potent scenes, the four actors strip out of Márion Talán de la Rosa’s school uniform costumes down to their skivvies, a revealing moment that posits that body type does not define gender.
There is plenty of mansplaining, which gets complicated since it’s being delivered by non-cis-male performers, building in an inherent humor and ridiculousness. “Our case has to be more feminist than the pro-feminist side. We believe feminism has failed women from the perspective that we are actually more feminist than the feminists,” Owen declares. David offers, “It’s because they hate us. They hate men. That’s why feminism has really failed. It’s not interested in helping women, it’s interested in denigrating men.” Scott says, “Everyone’s confused about whether Emily Ratajkowski showing her ass on Instagram is feminist or not,” to which Jared, who, as a reminder, really loves women, replies, “Fuck, she’s hot.”
Hu (Never Have I Ever), Jacobson (Lunch Bunch), Jouléy (Merry Me,Wolf Play), and Mattana form a tight-knit, believable quartet of students in a classroom, a setting used for such other recent hard-hitting plays as Donja R. Love’s soft, Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize—winning English, and Dave Harris’s Exception to the Rule. They are like a sports team getting ready for the big game, each with their own responsibility, to themselves as well as their team.
Occasionally, the characters, particularly Owen, recognize that the audience is present, making direct gestures at us, but I found those instances perplexing, not sure whether we were supposed to be the crowd watching the eventual debate or the MCC audience, and they seemed to be unnecessary breaks in the fourth wall.
Otherwise, Trophy Boys is a rousing and inventive twenty-first-century battle of the sexes — which is, I imagine, an out-of-date phrase, but please don’t cancel me — that will have you gasping, laughing, and whooping it up, but possibly not always in unison with the rest of the audience.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Rock stars are celebrated onstage and behind the scenes in “Amplified” at ARTECHOUSE (photo by ATH Studio)
ROLLING STONE PRESENTS AMPLIFIED
ARTECHOUSE NYC
Chelsea Market
439 West Fifteenth St.
Daily through August 31, $32-$42 (BOGO June 30 – July 7 with code NYCJULY4) www.artechouse.com
For many years, Rolling Stone magazine was my go-to for music, movies, and politics; I had a subscription for decades, and I pored over every page, every article, every review, every interview, every photo. Somewhere along the line it fell off my radar. So I was excited when I heard about “Rolling Stone Presents: Amplified,” an immersive experience at ARTECHOUSE in Chelsea Market. But I left feeling “meh.”
Audiovisual immersive experiences have been hot in New York City since the pandemic, from dueling van Gogh experiences in 2021 to Limitless AI at AD/BK in 2022, Monet’s Garden in 2023, Dark Matter at Mercer Labs in 2024, and TECHNE: The Vivid Unknown at BAM earlier this year. Featuring no performers, the Insta-friendly productions range from cool to silly to just plain why?
The latest is “Amplified,” which attempts to get to the heart of rock and roll in sixty minutes of photos, videos, colorful designs, and text narrated by Kevin Bacon, leading us through categories dedicated to specific instruments, famous singers, studio work, cars, fashion, concerts, and fandom, among others. More than a thousand photos and two hundred video clips are projected onto three walls and the floor, covering 270º in 18K resolution, bringing us the Who, the Beatles, Miley Cyrus, the Rolling Stones, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Beyoncé, the Ramones, Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, Aretha Franklin, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Sam Cooke, Karol G, Rico Nasty, Kendrick Lamar, Kiss, Cyndi Lauper, Dr. Dre, Radiohead, Lauryn Hill, AC/DC, Amy Winehouse, Metallica, Siouxsie Sioux, Rage Against the Machine, Ice Spice, Van Halen, Chappell Roan, Jimi Hendrix, et al.
The photographs are by such legends as Mark Seliger, Janette Beckman, Danny Clinch, Lynn Goldsmith, Anton Corbijn, Bob Gruen, Pooneh Ghana, Jim Marshall, and Neal Preston, although they don’t all come from the pages of Rolling Stone. It often feels like a random collection of sights and sounds within each category, flashing by quickly save for longer focuses on a few artists. The same with the projections that bleed off the screens and onto the floor, some exciting, others ho-hum. Make sure to get up and walk around — staring down at the floor will make you gleefully dizzy — and take a cushion and sit in the middle of the projections to get a fuller effect. It probably helps if there’s a big crowd when you go; when I was there, only four other people were in the room, and they remained seated on a couch in the back the entire time.
“Amplified” finally hits its stride in the grand finale, as more than thirteen hundred Rolling Stone covers are unveiled across the space in the span of several minutes, a thrilling barrage that reminded me why the magazine, which was cofounded by Jann Wenner in 1967, has been so essential for so many decades and how iconic and memorable so many of those covers are.
There’s a bar upstairs where you can order beer, soft drinks, and cocktails (Rebel Spirit, Bohemian Fever, Whole Lotta Magic), take a shot of house-made blackberry vodka, and check out a few additional small installations — don’t miss the narrow, vertical screen of hundreds of miniature videos — and you’ll find a wax figure of Jimi Hendrix in the gift shop, on loan from Madame Tussauds. In addition, tickets are two-for-one June 30 to July 7 with the code NYCJULY4.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
In 2022, the Onomatopoeia Theatre Company presented the New York premiere of Jethro Compton’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It is now back for a return engagement, through July 27 at the Gene Frankel Theatre. Below is my original review; cast changes include Mari Blake as Hallie Jackson, Dillon Collins as Jake Dowitt, and Ben-David Carlson and Emily Cummings in multiple roles. In addition, no blank guns will be used, only nonfiring replica prop guns and sound effects.
“The hairs on your arm will stand up / At the terror in each sip and in each sup / Will you partake of that last offered cup / Or disappear into the potter’s ground? / When the man comes around,” Johnny Cash warned on the title track of his 2002 American IV album. The song is one of many by the Man in Black that echo in the Gene Frankel Theatre before the start and during intermission of Onomatopoeia Theatre Company’s stirring New York premiere of Jethro Compton’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In this case, the man coming around is Liberty Valance.
British playwright Compton’s 2014 play is based on the 1953 short story by Dorothy M. Johnson; the twenty-two-page tale was turned into a popular 1962 John Ford film packed with an all-star cast — John Wayne, James Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin, Edmond O’Brien, Andy Devine, John Carradine, Jeanette Nolan, Woody Strode, Denver Pyle, Strother Martin, Lee Van Cleef — but Compton’s adaptation brings the play into the twenty-first century, twisting many of the movie’s genre clichés inside out as he takes on social and racial injustice while toning down the movie’s political rhetoric, general Hollywood misogyny, and freedom of the press blather.
The two-and-a-half-hour show begins in 1910, as Sen. Ransome Foster (Leighton Samuels) and his wife, Hallie (Stephanie Craven), arrive in Twotrees for the funeral of Bert Barricune (Samuel Shurtleff), who seems to have been an insignificant forgotten man in an insignificant one-horse town. Young reporter Jake Dowitt (Jeff Brackett) wants an exclusive with the senator, leading to a flashback to 1890, when a severely injured Foster is brought into the Prairie Belle Saloon by Barricune. After he is tended to by Jackson and Jim “the Reverend” Mosten (Daniel Kornegay), who works for her, he explains that he was beaten by three men who turn out to be the villainous murderer Liberty Valance (Derek Jack Chariton) and his henchmen.
Foster is a peaceful man from New York, a law scholar traveling not with a gun but with legal texts, Shakespeare sonnets, Greek tragedies, and a Bible. When Marshal Johnson (Scott Zimmerman) refuses to arrest Valance, Foster considers going up against the feared gunslinger himself. “I am no law man, sir,” Foster admits. The marshal responds, “Seems from what I’ve heard you ain’t much good at defending yourself, let alone a town.”
Soon Foster is teaching some residents of Twotrees to read, which angers others, especially since Jackson is a woman and Mosten is the only Black man around; book learning is not for the likes of them. Much of the strength of the play comes from the power Compton invests in the two characters; in the short story and movie, Jackson is a restaurant employee, while Mosten is Barricune’s loyal helper and doesn’t even appear in Johnson’s tale. In the play, Jackson speaks her mind with a razor sharpness, while Mosten is a well-respected man who has the ability to memorize whatever anyone says or reads to him.
Barricune is not happy when he sees Foster and Jackson spending a lot of time together; Bert believes he is destined to marry her. “She’s always been my girl,” Barricune says. “Does she know that?” Foster replies.
After Valance and his two sycophants commit a horrific act, Foster is more intent than ever to face him down and let the chips fall where they may.
Ransome Foster (Leighton Samuels) and Liberty Valance (Derek Jack Chariton) are headed to a final showdown in Onomatopoeia production (photo by Joshua Eichenbaum)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance takes place primarily on Nino Amari’s intimate set, a small Western saloon with a bar in the far corner, one table, two windows on either side of a piano, and swinging wooden doors in the back (which audience members must walk through to use the restrooms, but not during the performance). Most of the action occurs at the angled bar, including two sizzling scenes with Valance, the first between him and Mosten, the second him and Foster. Neither scene is in the short story or film, so the suspense is ratcheted up.
In his New York stage debut, Charlton is a magnetic force, his every word and move electrifying. He knows exactly who Valance is and what he wants, a villain who has no veneration for the law or for Blacks. When Foster raises the possibility of his defeating him in a showdown, the cocky Valance says, “Unless the hand of God comes down and strikes me dead there ain’t much chance of that.” Foster, knowing he doesn’t really have a shot, responds, “Or the earth opens up and the Devil takes you under.” Valance retorts, “No. We have an agreement, me and him.” When those words are spoken by Charlton, you don’t doubt it.
The rest of the cast holds up its end of the bargain; Samuels and Craven have a sweet chemistry, Shurtleff portrays Barricune with an inner loneliness, and Zimmerman’s marshal is neither coward nor buffoon. (Assistant director Chandler Robyn ably portrays numerous small roles.)
The play is expertly helmed by Onomatopoeia artistic director Thomas R. Gordon, maintaining a thrilling tension throughout. Susan Yanofsky’s period costumes are effective, while Reid Sullivan’s lighting hints at a danger always lurking, although the changing colors in the two windows are sometimes confusing. The narration occasionally gets in the way of the plot, explaining what we already know or making a point that is better left for the audience to decide for themselves.
Compton has also adapted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button into a Celtic musical and Jack London’s White Fang into Wolf’s Blood; his Frontier Trilogy is set in the American West in the mid-nineteenth century, while The Bunker Trilogy delves into Arthurian legend, classical Greek tragedy, and Shakespearean drama. In Liberty Valance he has created a stage Western for our times, cleverly referencing the conflicts of contemporary America, as red states battle blue states over jobs, immigration, and education; rights for women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ are in serious jeopardy; gun control is being hotly debated; and liberal urban elites and the conservative south and Midwest seem immersed in an endless duel. The arguments the citizens of Twotrees are having are not unlike what we see every day on social media and partisan news outlets.
In the play, Foster teaches his class Shakespeare’s seventy-first sonnet, which reads in part: “No longer mourn for me when I am dead / Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell / Give warning to the world that I am fled / From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell.” Johnny Cash couldn’t have said it any better.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
June 3-22: Central Park, Central Park West & 103rd St.
June 24-29: Carl Schurz Park, East 87th St. & East End Ave.
July 1-6: Castle Clinton, Battery Park nyclassical.org
Every summer, numerous companies deliver free Shakespeare in parks (and even a parking lot) throughout the five boroughs. One of the best, most consistent troupes is New York Classical Theatre (NYCT), which has “staged” more than nine hundred free performances since 2000, including nearly two dozen Bard plays in addition to classics by Oscar Wilde, Anton Chekhov, Molière, Bernard Shaw, Friedrich Schiller, and others. Burdman refers to it as Panoramic Theatre, in which scenes take place in different parts of the parks, the audience moving along with the cast. NYCT has done it again with a splendid revival of All’s Well That Ends Well.
Most everyone knows the phrase “All’s well that ends well,” but few have actually seen what is one of the Bard’s problem plays, and it feels as problematic as ever in the twenty-first century. However, Burdman and NYCT are breathing new life into it this season as it travels from Central Park to Carl Schurz Park to Castle Clinton in Battery Park, continuing the mission they began in 2000: “NY Classical firmly believes that everyone — regardless of economic, social, or educational background — should have the opportunity to enjoy live professional theatre together as a community. Our free, engaging performances interpreted for approachable spaces inspire experienced theatergoers to reconnect with the classics and build new and future audiences.”
All’s Well That Ends Well is a kind of rom-com with an edge, a twist that feels forced, and not just in the current environment. Helena (Anique Clements) has been recently orphaned by the death of her father, Gérard de Narbonne, physician to the ailing king of France (Nick Salamone). She is now a ward of the countess of Roussillon (Carine Montbertrand) and is deeply in love with the countess’s son, Bertram (Paul Deo Jr.), who wants nothing to do with her. Helena travels to the king to offer him one of her father’s remedies; the king is suspect, since so many other doctors have failed him, so Helena offers him a deal: The king will take the prescription and, if it cures him, Helena can choose any man in the kingdom to be her husband, but if he is still sick, he can have Helena executed. The king agrees.
The king’s fistula goes away, and Helena tells him she wishes to marry Bertram, who is strongly against the union but must ultimately fulfill the king’s command. But instead of consummating the marriage, Bertram takes off to fight in Florence, leaving behind a letter in which he sets for his new bride what appear to be impossible tasks: “When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband. But in such a ‘then,’ I write a ‘never.’”
Bertram is accompanied by his untrustworthy friend, Parolles (Karel Heřmánek), a fool and a coward who thinks he’s a fashionista and doesn’t realize when he’s being ridiculed, including by the French courtier Lafeu (Clay Sorseth), who wouldn’t mind if his daughter were to wed Bertram.
A determined Helena disguises herself as a pilgrim and goes to Italy, where she meets old widow Capilet (Montbertrand) and her virgin daughter, Diana (Angelique Archer). The three devise a plan to coerce Bertram into marrying Helena, and it’s a devious one that is at the heart of why the play is so rarely performed.
Partly inspired by a story from Boccaccio’s Decameron that was adapted by Geoffrey Chaucer in “The Clerk’s Tale,” All’s Well That Ends Well has been performed at the Delacorte in the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park series four times, in 1966, 1978, 1993, and 2011, and has appeared on Broadway only once: Trevor Nunn’s Royal Shakespeare production, which ran for a month at the Martin Beck in 1983. Otherwise, there are small iterations here and there, including TV movies in 1968, 1978, and 1981. So it is exciting that Burdman has brought it back; the company last presented it in 2006.
I saw the show when it was in Central Park by the 103rd St. entrance, winding its way under trees, down paths, and by a pond. (The shows in Carl Schurz Park will be seated in one location, while the scenes will move in Castle Clinton.) Burdman has streamlined it to fit into the company promise of keeping it under two hours, so several characters and some major quotes have been excised (“No legacy is so rich as honesty”; “A young man married is a man that’s marred”), but others are still there (“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none”; “many a man’s tongue shakes out his master’s undoing”).
The costumes are lovely, the props minimal (blindfolds, a pair of swords, a crown), and the lighting necessary only as the sun sets. (Members of the crew sit in the front with flashlights focused on the speaking actor.) Burdman directs the proceedings with a swift hand, the actors occasionally meandering through the audience. The strong cast is led by superb performances by Clements, who is so appealing as Helena that it’s hard to believe Bertram’s reluctance to wed her, and Montbertrand, who ably shifts between the countess and the widow. Reeves gets well-deserved breakout applause for her singing.
The finale is still troubling, requiring a key suspension of disbelief, but even so, NYCT’s production lives up to the title of the play.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
David (Babak Tafti) and Tally (Jodi Balfour) experience a unique first date in Lowcountry (photo by Ahron R. Foster)
LOWCOUNTRY
Atlantic Theater Company, Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 13, $56.50-$111.50
866-811-4111 atlantictheater.org
Abby Rosebrock’s Lowcountry begins with a lengthy, laborious phone call but ends with a sudden, unexpected explosion. In between, the narrative builds with a pair of unpredictable characters playing a unique game of cat and mouse as Rosebrock and director Jo Bonney slowly lay out breadcrumbs, teasing the audience with key details that emerge at a confounding pace.
It’s 2024, and David (Babak Tafti), a thirtysomething adoptee born in a foreign country, is preparing for what appears to be his first date in many moons. He lives in Moncks Corner, a small town near Charleston, South Carolina, and works at a Waffle House as he tries to put his life back together. “I need to be there for my child,” he declares while talking over the phone to his sponsor, Paul (Keith Kupferer). David is boiling pasta and readying his plain, style-less studio apartment — consisting of a cramped kitchen, a bathroom, a coffee table on an oval rug, an armchair, a bookcase, and unmatched lamps. A brown curtain hangs precariously to hide his bed but it keeps falling down. Paul owns the place and has agreed to let David stay there as long as he follows the rules of his program, which is centered around David not having women in his apartment, not meeting them in parks, and being honest about why he cannot have sex with them.
David, who does not have to wear a GPS cuff anymore, has been divorced for about a year and is fighting for joint custody of his son, Jacob, who is almost eight; Paul, a grandfather, is helping David with his court case. It’s been months since David has seen or spoken with Jacob, instead finding comfort in listening over and over again to voice messages Jacob left him. The protracted, drawn-out phone conversation — which supplies lots of info but keeps the audience at an unfortunate distance — concludes with Paul telling David, “Now when I say text me, you text me the truth” and David responding, “I don’t lie anymore.” Yet nearly everything he’s said to Paul is a lie, a trait that will continue during his date.
He is making dinner for Tally (Jodi Balfour), a woman he met on Tinder who lives in Los Angeles but is visiting her father in the home where she grew up. Shortly after she enters, part of the curtain falls down again, causing David embarrassment. He has trouble fixing it, so she insists she give it a go. “I have a curtain like that!” she proclaims proudly. David is hesitant to let her try, but she ultimately does it without a problem.
Jodi Balfour makes an exciting off-Broadway debut in Lowcountry at the Atlantic (photo by Ahron R. Foster)
It’s an extremely effective scene, depicting David’s intense nervousness and overwhelming worries, matching his ordinary brown and tan unappealing wardrobe, while showing Tally to be a spontaneous, enthusiastic free spirit, enhanced by her low-cut, sexy blue skirt and platform heels. (The costumes are by Sarah Laux and set by Arnulfo Maldonado.) Over spaghetti and wine, they discuss Shakespeare, warlords, porn, confessing, and their deepest fears. “I’m very self-righteous but I have no follow-through,” Tally admits. David asks, “You think it makes me a sociopath that I never cry?”
Every time the subject turns to David’s addiction, he goes out of his way to change the topic, despite her intent curiosity. Meanwhile, she has various secrets of her own that she is not about to share, at least not initially. As the evening continues, the bed seems to be creeping closer and closer.
Rosebrock (Blue Ridge, Different Animals) and Tony nominee Bonney (Cost of Living,Father Comes Home from the Wars) walk that dangerous fine line between manipulation and employing sharp techniques as they release critical plot details little by little, which quickly goes from tantalizing to frustrating. At several points I found myself thinking, “Oh, just tell us already!”
Tafti (Small Mouth Sounds,Othello) manages to make the audience feel some compassion for David, even after the major revelations that explain why he is where he is. It’s a challenging role, and Tafti is up to it. But the show belongs to Balfour; in her off-Broadway debut, the South African actress, best known for Bomb Girls,For All Mankind, and Ted Lasso, she is mesmerizing as Tally, fully embodying this self-demeaning, complex woman who is more than she seems. Balfour commands the audience’s attention, from how she sits in a chair to how she takes off her shoes and drinks wine. It’s a bravura performance that saves the play from getting too caught up in itself, breathing exciting life into the story.
Despite some narrative issues, the ninety-minute Lowcountry ends up being a compelling work with a memorable conclusion that will leave audiences surprised by their reaction to it.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Rachel Elizabeth Seed turns the camera on her mother and herself in A Photographic Memory (courtesy of Capariva Films and Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber)
A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY (Rachel Elizabeth Seed, 2025)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Friday, June 27, through Sunday, June 29 newplazacinema.org
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Monday, June 30, 7:00 www.ifccenter.com
“I have no memories of my mother. And when I set out to find her a few years back, she was basically a stranger to me,” Rachel Elizabeth Seed explains in her award-winning debut documentary, A Photographic Memory. “My dad never talked much about her except to tell me that she was an accomplished writer and photographer way ahead of her time. But it wasn’t until I became a photographer myself that I started to become curious about the work she created and whether in the pages of her transcripts and contact sheets, her journals and her audio tapes, I might also find her.”
Rachel’s mother, Sheila Turner Seed, was a pioneering photojournalist and filmmaker who died suddenly and unexpectedly in June 1979 at the age of forty-two, when Rachel was eighteen months old. While working on “The Motherless Project” (2004–11), in which she interviewed and photographed forty women who had grown up without a mother, Rachel found, in her father’s attic, a box of reels her mother had made, and decided to go on a journey to learn more about her by investigating her legacy while also dealing with her own sense of loss. “I thought that telling their stories would make me feel less alone. But what do you do when your greatest loss is something you can’t even remember?” she says.
A Photographic Memory is not about having total recall but is a moving and cathartic love letter constructed from family pictures and home movies, journals and letters, and personal remembrances centered around Sheila’s “Images of Man,” an audiovisual project for Scholastic in which she spoke with and photographed some of the most important and influential photographers in the world, compiling fifty hours of audio interviews with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, Cecil Beaton, William Albert Allard, Brian Lanker, Cornell Capa, Bruce Davidson, and Eliot Porter in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rachel also goes through Sheila’s phone book and calls up her old friends and contacts. “Your mother was a remarkable storyteller,” one instantly says.
Rachel visits with ICP founder Capa, Davidson, and Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson’s widow, who remember Sheila well and talk about the interview sessions fondly. She meets with Scholastic president and CEO Dick Robinson, who was extremely close with Sheila; he happily recalls when Rachel worked there as an intern and how Sheila decided that she did not need a cameraman accompanying her on her Scholastic assignments. Among the others sharing memories are Sheila’s brother, Barry; Sheila’s ex-boyfriend Gabriel Edmont, who gets teary; her father, Joe Turner, a successful photographer himself; and Sheila’s old friend, author Lael Morgan, who refers to her and Sheila as “lifeaholics . . . Sheila had to see the world.”
Sheila’s relatives, including her father and grandfather, had experienced severe oppression in their native Russia and did not want to leave America once they arrived. “Many members of my family will not travel outside of US borders. It is only there that they feel safe. Maybe that’s one reason why I have an insatiable desire to travel everywhere and to see everything,” Rachel reads from her mother’s autobiography. Rachel also re-creates scenes from the interviews, bathed in mysterious black-and-white and filled with memorable quotes.
“I’m tired of being lonely,” Allard tells Sheila in Virginia in 1972. “Photography, it’s what I do, but it is not totally me.”
In his Paris living room in 1971, Cartier-Bresson offers, “Life is very fluid. Sometimes the pictures disappear and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t tell the person, ‘Oh, please smile again. Do that gesture again.’ There’s no repetition. Life is once forever.”
“You have a lot of your mother in you,” Davidson says in the same New York City apartment where he spoke with Sheila in 1971. He also advises, “I think probably one of the most dangerous things that one can do is to look at themselves.”
Rachel admits, “Revealing myself scares me. What am I hiding?” But she is soon turning the lens on herself, not only discussing her relationship with her boyfriend, Joseph Michael Lopez, and whether she wants to have children but also observing herself in the archival footage she finds. Watching home movies, she says as if addressing her mother, “I saw you moving for the first time, family footage of your childhood, and then of your wedding. And then, at the end, I saw the two of us together. I only remember not having a mother, but here is a little girl who has a mother. And in this perfect arc of time, we’re together.”
It’s an intimate moment that gets to the heart of the film, which Rachel directed, wrote, and produced; it was edited and cowritten by Christopher Stoudt, shot by Rachel, Lopez, and Drew Gardner, and scored with a tender gentleness by Mary Lattimore and Troy Herion. A Photographic Memory is a vivid and poignant celebration of craft, of family lost and found, of film and photography and mothers and daughters. It will have you searching through your own albums, slides, and reels, finding long-forgotten gems. It is sad that, with the advent of the internet, smartphones, and social media, future generations will not have these opportunities to establish and reestablish personal connections with the past, as everyone is now a photographer and a filmmaker, posting away online, each picture fading away as soon as the next one is uploaded.
Rachel says, “The camera was always present,” which was a rare thing back then, when each click had to be made carefully, with limited availability on every roll. With A Photographic Memory, Rachel has given us a special treasure grounded in the art forms used by her mother, her father, and her with such joy.
A Photographic Memory is screening June 27–29 at New Plaza Cinema and June 30 at IFC Center; each show will be followed by a Q&A with Rachel Elizabeth Seed, along with Danielle Varga on June 27, Stoudt and Judith Helfand on June 28, Dami Akinnusi, Jill Campbell, and Liz Nord on June 29, and executive producer Kirsten Johnson on June 30 in a special encore from DOC NYC 2024.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
