VIRTUAL IMPOSSIBILITIES
the wild project
December 16-20, $20, 8:00 (extended Saturdays at 3:00 & 8:00, January 2 – February 27) www.virtualimpossibilities.com
Over the summer, New York City-based mentalist and magician Eric Walton created a Zoom show for private clients and holiday parties, displaying his feats of wonder for individuals, couples, and groups. He is now taking the sixty-minute presentation, Virtual Impossibilities, public through the Lower East Side arts and culture hub the wild project. From December 16 to 20 [ed. note: extended Saturdays at 3:00 & 8:00, January 2 – February 27], Walton will be dazzling an unlimited amount of audience members with card tricks, word games, and more in this fully interactive online performance. Walton’s previous shows include Esoterica and Eric Walton: Mentalist, which incorporate philosophy and metaphysics into his many mysteries; he has also created the fun short “Welcome to the Show!” A Rube Goldberg Machine, delivered the lecture “The Psychology of Magic,” and writes and recites such poetry as “An Injunction to the Poet to Embellish, Elaborate, and Barnumize.” In addition, he is a proud vegan and activist. Tickets are $20 per household; come ready to participate and to have your mind blown.
Jack Baxter plays the harmonica for a child at the Presevo Refugee Camp in Serbia in The Last Sermon
THE LAST SERMON (Jack Baxter & Joshua Faudem, 2019)
Opens in theaters, VOD, and virtually December 15 www.thelastsermonmovie.com
“There is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, or of a non-Arab over an Arab, or of a white over a Black, or a Black over a white except by righteousness and piety,” Jack Baxter says from his hospital bed at the beginning of the deeply personal documentary The Last Sermon, quoting from the Prophet Muhammad’s Farewell Sermon delivered in March 632. “That’s the essence of Islam . . . Not murder.”
It was a long road to The Last Sermon for Baxter and his codirector, Joshua Faudem. In September 1993, Baxter was trying to interview Louis Farrakhan for what would become his controversial documentary Brother Minister: The Assassination of Malcolm X when he was introduced to the prophet’s Last Sermon by an Arab man. A decade later, in April 2003, Baxter went to Israel to make a documentary about accused Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, only to find out that someone else was already doing that. While taking a walk along the beach the night before he was going to go back to the States, he heard blues music coming from a bar and discovered Mike’s Place, a Tel Aviv nightclub, next to the US Embassy, where people of all races, religions, and ethnicities gathered to drink, speak in English, and listen to live blues.
Baxter teamed up with Faudem and began shooting a documentary about the club when the narrative drastically changed: On April 30, 2003, two radicalized British nationals who had entered Israel through the Gaza Strip went to Mike’s Place on a suicide bombing mission, killing Ran Baron, Dominique Caroline Hass (who they had interviewed for the film), and Yanai Weiss in the bar and seriously wounding Baxter, leaving him partially paralyzed and with “organic shrapnel” in him — tiny bits of one of the bombers. Their 2004 documentary, Blues by the Beach, ended up being very different from its original intention.
In 2015, Baxter and Faudem published the graphic novel Mike’s Place: A True Story of Love, Blues, and Terror in Tel Aviv. And then, in 2016, they set out to make a film about the refugee crisis in Europe but decided to also try to meet the families, now living in England, of the two suicide bombers. The Last Sermon follows Baxter, who grew up Irish Catholic in the Bronx and likes to play the harmonica, and Faudem, a former Israeli checkpoint guard, as they travel to Macedonia, Serbia, Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Paris, and London, visiting refugee camps, mosques, and other locations, speaking with politicians, religious leaders, journalists, musicians, scholars, fashion designers on a photo shoot, a graffiti artist, and an anti-refugee singer-songwriter, as they try to track down the suicide bombers’ families with the help of an investigator.
Baxter notes that documentarians are not supposed to be part of the story, but he explains early on that he is breaking that rule. He admits he’s not clear about what he is seeking and hasn’t planned what he will say to the families if they agree to meet with him. Cinematographer Avi Levi, who served in the Israeli army with Faudem, often focuses on Baxter deep in thought, reflecting on what he’s seeing and what he’s remembering, as his purpose grows stronger the closer he gets to his goal. Baxter, who sports impressive curly white locks, might be a peacenik — he is most often seen wearing a black T-shirt with the English word “Peace” on it, with the Hebrew above and the Arabic below — but he turns ever-more-ornery after all that he has witnessed on the way to London.
One of the most moving interactions is at the Grand Mosque of Paris with radicalization consultant Mohammed Chirani, who works with arrested terrorists. “Religion is the pretext,” he says. “There’s the ideology and there’s the religion. If ideology wants to gain power, it clothes itself with religion, with the sacred, and says, ‘Everything you’re doing, if you murder, or if you commit terrorist attacks, it’s a jihad, an honorable action. You do it in the name of G-d so you can go to paradise.’ So it’s a perversion. They need to deconstruct to separate ideology from religion and act on their spirituality.”
Jack Baxter and Joshua Faudem stand near the Hungary border fence in The Last Sermon
Baxter doesn’t believe that the terrorists can, or should, be saved, that they are blatant murderers who cannot be reformed. Chriani responds, “For me, radicalization is a combination of ideology, which is the manipulation of religion, due to a breach inside the individual, a failure of meaning and identity. Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? . . . They have a right to redemption.” Baxter is not so sure. It’s the turning point of the documentary, as Baxter starts getting visibly angrier the rest of the way. “Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? . . . They have a right to redemption” are, of course, also the questions Baxter must answer for himself.
Winner of the Best Documentary Feature and the Truth Seeker Award at the 2020 Queens World Film Festival, The Last Sermon is an intimately powerful, beautifully photographed exploration of radicalization, bigotry, hate, PTSD, and humankind’s basic desire for peace but intrinsic propensity to fight. It takes us inside one man’s very personal journey, baring his raw, exposed emotions as he tries to find resolutions that might never be able to satisfy the gaping void in his life, something we can all understand. It’s often painful to watch, but it’s also necessary, especially in these dark times. Shalom. Peace. سلام.
RECONNECTED: A VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE WITH MENTALIST JASON SURAN
Friday & Saturday nights through January 15 (extended through July 23), $50, 8:30 www.jasonsuran.com/reconnected
It’s one thing for mentalists to blow your mind in person. But over Zoom?
Performer and corporate consultant Jason Suran has figured out a way to do just that with his virtual show Reconnected, which takes place weekends through July 23. At each sixty-minute presentation, Suran appears before about three dozen people who have paid fifty dollars each to experience Suran’s unique abilities at what he calls “brainfuckery.” Beaming in from his home in New York City, Skokie-born Suran, whose previous works include The Other Side: A Psychological Seance and All in Your Head: An Evening of Mindreading, performs psychological illusions involving words, numbers, sharp objects, and a homemade pendulum that seem impossible but unfurl before your very eyes.
Even if you’re skeptical about mentalists and mindreading, Suran is likely to win you over with his innate charm and good humor. It also helps if you participate, either volunteering or being chosen; I have to admit to being a wee bit disappointed until Suran called on me to be part of the big finale, which was unforgettable.
When not performing feats of wonder, Suran, who conceived of the show with coproducer Adam Rei Siegel, trains corporate executives to improve observation and communication skills through his seminar “Hacking Minds,” focusing on cold reading, memory systems, and strategic questioning. Those talents are in full evidence in Reconnected; you should come prepared to use your own powers of observation and communication as well, at a moment’s notice, to enhance your experience.
“The best part of my job has always been connecting with the audience. I mean, that’s the whole point of reading minds,” Suran says in a sneak preview you can watch above. “The strange thing is, after all the shows I’ve done, all the rooms I’ve worked, all the people I’ve gotten to know, the truth is, I’ve never felt closer to the crowd than I do right now.” At a time when we are all hungering to be part of a crowd, to sit beside other people in a dark theater as we are entertained, Reconnected gives us the opportunity to connect with others, even if it’s onscreen. As the pandemic lockdown continues, there’s a lot to be said for that — and it certainly doesn’t hurt when that connection is loads of fun.
Who: Blake Shelton, Dave Matthews, Jimmie Allen, Jason Mraz, Michael Ray, Shy Carter, the War and Treaty, John Rzeznik, Dispatch, Keala Settle, Mt. Joy, Augustana, Indigo Girls, Lucie Silvas, Annie Bosko, Bre Kennedy, CJ Hammond & Sloane, Veridia, Public, Michael Cerveris, the McCrary Sisters, Sam Wade, Roger Daltrey, Steve Connell, Michael McDonald, Kenny G, Jeff Tweedy, Nick Wheeler, Greta Van Fleet, Adam Gardner, Ray Parker Jr., Jerry Dipizzo, Taye Diggs, Ben Wysoki, the Harleys, Dublin Gospel Choir, Jim Sheridan, Storme Warren, Nicole Ryan What:“A Festival of Music & Stories of Life On & Off the Road” Where:Ryman Auditorium When: Wednesday, December 16, free (donations encouraged), 8:30 Why: “It is so important that music fans and governments realize the impact this virus is having on millions of self-employed people who make the music industry function to bring much needed joy to our lives,” Roger Daltrey says about the effect the pandemic lockdown is having on the people who make a living supporting the work of superstar musicians. Daltrey will be appearing along with dozen of other rock, country, pop, R&B, and gospel musicians at “Lift Up,” a festival streaming live on Twitch from the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville that benefits the entertainment and events industry. The concert will feature the brand-new song “12 Million,” written by Sam Wade and LEVL UP music supervisor Keith Levenson in tribute to the crews that make music happen from behind the scenes. “Almost my whole adult life I have been touring in one shape or form and the road crews on my team and the venue crews that welcomed us and helped us put on a great show are all part of my extended touring family,” Cisco Adler said in a statement. “They really make it possible for artists like me to do what we do, and they are truly unsung heroes. They are also the first to be hit hard by a situation like this, so part of our mission at NoCap is to get shows happening again and get these good people back to work.”
Standing in front of a Marc Chagall painting can transport you to another world, a fantastical realm of lavish colors where humans and animals float through the air and fiddlers perform on rooftops. The Bristol Old Vic, Kneehigh, and Wise Children have captured the essence of the lush canvases as well as the artist himself in the gorgeously rendered revival of Daniel Jamieson’s The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, streaming via NYU Skirball through December 18.
Filmed with three cameras and no audience at the UK’s Bristol Old Vic Theatre, the ninety-minute show is one of the best productions of the pandemic lockdown, an enchanting, bittersweet love story that will make your heart soar. Essentially a memory play, The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk recounts the tender romance between Chagall (Marc Antolin), born Moishe Zakharovich Shagal in 1887 in what is now Belarus, and Bella Samoylovna Rosenfeld (Audrey Brisson), born eight years later in the shtetl of Vitebsk to a well-off family that owned three jewelry stores. They fall madly, passionately in love when they meet in 1909; “I want to waste the rest of my life with you,” she tells him. Over the course of their life together, they experience more highs than lows as they deal with his success as a painter in Western Europe but struggles at home amid WWI, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism.
Director Emma Rice’s staging is magnificent, as are the performances. Antolin (The Trial, Taken at Midnight) and Brisson (Secret Cinema, The Wild Bride) are engaging as the sweethearts, both wearing white greasepaint as if primed canvases ready for action; when he paints her, he gently touches her face with a brush. They occasionally break into song, in English, French, and Yiddish, accompanied by composer and pianist Ian Ross and cellist James Gow, who also appear as minor characters throughout. There are also several scenes of lovely contemporary dance, choreographed by Rice and Etta Murfitt, that reference such Chagall works as 1914’s Blue Lovers, 1915’s Green Lovers and Birthday (when it premiered in 1992, the play was titled Birthday), 1916’s Lovers in Pink, 1917’s Study for Double Portrait with Wine Glass, and the much later Bouquet with Flying Lovers (ca 1934-47).
The small, intimate set by Sophia Clist, who also designed the costumes, places the actors in between empty wooden picture planes in the front and a wall of twisted canvas in the back, with drawings of flowers on the floor; it as if the Chagalls are a painting come to life. The playful nature of Marc’s painting is echoed in Rice’s use of props, including a red balloon as Bella’s mother, a portrait of their rabbi that Brisson sits behind and puts her arms through, and animal objects from the paintings that become Salvador Dalí-like chapeaux. Cinematographer Steve Tanner occasionally cuts to a long shot of the mostly empty theater, reminding us where we are and what we’re experiencing together, but he quickly puts us right back onstage with Marc and Bella and their impassioned love. Malcolm Rippeth’s lighting and Simon Baker’s sound are excellently coordinated for online viewing.
Early on, Marc tells his biographer and son-in-law, Franz Meyer, “When some things are gone, you thirst for their details in such a heartbreaking way. You feel an agony of need to remember.” The Bristol Old Vic’s The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is an exhilarating reminder of the power of live theater, the power of art, and the power of true love. Don’t miss it.
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.
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.
