twi-ny recommended events

FORWARD. TOGETHER.

Who: Jelani Alladin, Jacqueline Antaramian, Antonio Banderas, Laura Benanti, Kim Blanck, Ally Bonino, Danielle Brooks, Jenn Colella, Elvis Costello, Daniel Craig, Alysha Deslorieux, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Holly Gould, Danai Gurira, Stephanie Hsu, David Henry Hwang, Oscar Isaac, Nikki M. James, Alicia Keys, John Leguizamo, John Lithgow, Audra McDonald, Grace McLean, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Kelli O’Hara, Mia Pak, Suzan-Lori Parks, David Hyde Pierce, Phylicia Rashad, Liev Schreiber, Martin Sheen, Phillipa Soo, Meryl Streep, Trudie Styler, Sting, Will Swenson, Shaina Taub, Kuhoo Verma, Ada Westfall, Kate Wetherhead
What: Virtual celebration and fundraiser
Where: Public Theater, Facebook, YouTube
When: Tuesday, October 20, free (donations accepted), 8:00
Why: Originally planned for June 1 but delayed because of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Public Theater is now holding its gala fundraiser online on October 20. “Forward. Together.” features appearances and performances by a wide range of actors, musicians, playwrights, and other creators, sharing songs and stories, from Lin-Manuel Miranda, Antonio Banderas, Elvis Costello, Daniel Craig, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and John Leguizamo to Danielle Brooks, Jenn Colella, Audra McDonald, Phillipa Soo, Meryl Streep, and Suzan-Lori Parks, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. One of the highlights will be Jelani Alladin performing a brand-new song from the Public Works production of Hercules. The cochairs are Kwame Anthony Appiah, Candia Fisher, Joanna Fisher, Laure Sudreau, and Lynne Wheat, honoring Audrey and Zygi Wilf and Sam Waterston; the evening is directed by Kenny Leon, with music direction by Ted Sperling.

Admission is free but donations will be accepted; twenty-five percent of the proceeds will go to eight Public Works partner organizations and Hunts Point Alliance for Children. You can also participate in the online auction, where you can bid on such items as a virtual conversation with Queen Latifah and Lee Daniels, a coffee chat with Liev Schreiber, ten years of premium reserved tickets to the Delacorte for Shakespeare in the Park, a private Zoom cooking class with Andrew Carmellini, and lunch (on Zoom or in person) with Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis. The Public has presented several outstanding productions during the pandemic, including The Line, What Do We Need to Talk About?, and the current audio play Shipwreck, so give if you can to help support this ongoing dream from Joe Papp.

FRICK ON THE MOVE: A VIRTUAL GALA

The Frick will take art lovers inside its history and future in October 19 virtual gala

Who: Firelei Báez, Rosanne Cash, Moeko Fujii, Maira Kalman, Nico Muhly, Simon Schama, Aimee Ng, Xavier F. Salomon, Ian Wardropper
What: Virtual gala
Where: Frick Zoom
When: Monday, October 19, free – $50,000, 6:30
Why: For decades, one of my crucial respites has been the Frick Collection, the spectacular museum on East Seventieth St. and Fifth Ave. that houses endless masterpieces assembled by Pittsburgh industrialist Henry Clay Frick and his daughter, Helen Clay Frick. The Gilded Age mansion features one of New York City’s most beautiful indoor fountains and art treasures around every corner. But it will be a while before I am able to visit this austere institution, as it has been closed not because of the pandemic but for a major renovation; however, it is expecting to reopen in early 2021 in a temporary new location, taking over the former home of the Whitney and the Met Breuer on Madison Ave. The Frick has been active online during the coronavirus crisis, presenting “Frick Five” interviews and the hugely popular weekly series “Travels with a Curator” on Wednesdays and “Cocktails with a Curator” on Fridays, hosted by curator Aimee Ng and deputy director and chief curator Xavier F. Salomon. (You can read my May interview with viral superstar Salomon here; have a cocktail ready.)

And now you will be able to get a sneak peek at the Frick Madison while also looking back at the museum’s history at “Frick on the Move: A Virtual Gala,” an online fundraiser being held on October 19 at 6:30. The evening includes appearances by Firelei Báez, Rosanne Cash, Moeko Fujii, Maira Kalman, Nico Muhly, and Simon Schama; in addition, Ng will give a tour of the museum’s second floor, and Salomon will debut a special edition of “Cocktails with a Curator.” (The preferred cocktail is a White Russian or an Iced Ginger Coffee.) Admission is free, but donations will be accepted; gifts of $1,000 or more come with access to an exclusive behind-the-scenes virtual tour led by director Ian Wardropper. You can keep in touch with the Frick during the renovation through several ongoing online programs, including “Collecting Impressions: Six Centuries of Print Connoisseurship Part III” on October 21, “Symposium on the History of Art” on October 23, “Continue the Conversation: El Greco, Purification of the Temple” on October 28, and “Provenance Stories” on October 30.

THAT KINDNESS: NURSES IN THEIR OWN WORDS

V introduces her new streaming play, That Kindness: Nurses in their Own Words

Who: V (formerly Eve Ensler), Ed Blunt, Connie Britton, Rosario Dawson, Stephanie Hsu, LaChanze, Liz Mikel, Rosie O’Donnell, Billy Porter, Dale Soules, Marisa Tomei, Monique Wilson
What: New streaming play
Where: BAM YouTube
When: October 15 – November 3, free (donations encouraged)
Why: Ten years ago, playwright and activist V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, went public with her diagnosis of uterine cancer. “I am lucky. I have been blessed with a positive prognosis that has made me hyper-aware of what keeps a person alive,” she wrote in the Guardian while relating it to the work she was doing with City of Joy in Democratic Republic of Congo to help young survivors of gender violence. “How does one survive cancer? Of course — good doctors, good insurance, good luck. But the real healing comes from not being forgotten. From attention, from care, from love, from being surrounded by a community of those who demand information on your behalf, who advocate and stand up for you when you are in a weakened state, who sleep by your side, who refuse to let you give up, who bring you meals, who see you not as a patient or victim but as a precious human being, who create metaphors where you can imagine your survival. This is my medicine, and nothing less will suffice for the people, for the women, for the children of Congo.”

V, in collaboration with James Lecense, is now paying tribute to the purveyors of such care, nurses, whom she calls “radical angels of the heart,” in the new virtual play That Kindness: Nurses in their Own Words. The seventy-five-minute piece, streaming on BAM’s YouTube channel, features Ed Blunt, Connie Britton, Rosario Dawson, Stephanie Hsu, LaChanze, Liz Mikel, Rosie O’Donnell, Billy Porter, Dale Soules, Marisa Tomei, and Monique Wilson portraying real-life nurses sharing stories about who they are, what they do, and why they are in their profession; the dialogue is based on conversations and interviews V, whose previous work includes The Vagina Monologues, The Treatment, and her 2018 one-woman show, In the Body of the World, did with these front-line health care workers. Divided into such sections as “What Is a Nurse?,” “Things I Am Most Proud Of,” “Morally Wounded,” and “‘We Are Not Expendable,’” the narrative shifts from nursing in general to the more specific situation of the Covid-19 crisis as the nurses dig deeper into themselves and the importance of genuine care, especially at a time when so many hospitals are going private, being run like corporations, even during a pandemic. The show, reminiscent of the Public Theater’s The Line, which consisted of the words of doctors, nurses, EMTs, and other brave heroes during the coronavirus crisis, was produced in partnership with National Nurses United and California Nurses Association; BAM’s presentation is free to watch through November 3, but donations are requested for the Brooklyn Hospital Foundation’s Covid-19 Fund. Be sure to stick around for Morley’s closing song.

LOVE STORY, THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

Yoshiko Chuma’s Love Story, The School of Hard Knocks is a twenty-four-hour durational online experience

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
Saturday, October 17, 11:00 am – Sunday, October 18, 11:00 am, $5 – $400 (pay what you can)
lamama.org/love-story

Osaka-born multidisciplinary artist Yoshiko Chuma celebrates the fortieth anniversary of her collective, “The School of Hard Knocks” (SOHK), with the live, twenty-four-hour virtual work Love Story, streaming through La MaMa beginning at eleven o’clock in the morning on October 17. SOHK debuted at the 1980 Venice Biennale and became an official company four years later; the troupe has traveled the world with such shows as AGITPROPS: The Recycling Project, 7 x 7 x 7, and Pi=3.14 . . . Ramallah-Fukushima-Bogota Endless Peripheral Border, many of which were developed and premiered at La MaMa as well as PS122 and Dixon Place here in New York. A durational performance installation that incorporates dance, music, film, visual art, and narrative storytelling, Love Story deals with such timely topics as immigration, national security, and war; Chuma, who has been based in the United States since 1977, will also be looking at her personal and professional past, present, and future, focusing on the idea of borders, which have taken on a whole new level of importance under the Trump administration while also impacting how art is now created online as well as how Chuma has shunned the limitations of genre in her career.

Love Story — which consists of live and prerecorded segments, with part of the show taking place in La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre — was conceived, choreographed, and directed by Chuma, working with artist liaison Ai Csuka, creative producer and musician Ginger Dolden, actor Ryan Leach, Middle East specialist Ruyji Yamaguchi, and dramaturgs and designers Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughan. Among the cast of more than fifty international performers are Deniz Atli from Turkey, Agnè Auželytė from Amsterdam, Los Babuinos from Venezuela, Sahar Damoni from Palestine, Tanin Torabi from Iran, and Martita Abril, Mizuho Kappa, Heather Litteer, Devin Brahja Waldman, and zaybra from New York, with live, original music by Robert Black on double bass, Jason Kao Hwang on violin, Christopher McIntyre on trombone, and Dane Terry on piano.

“This week I was supposed to be in New York for performances celebrating Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks’ forty-year anniversary,” Auželytė recently wrote on Facebook. “While my physical body will stay put in Amsterdam for a long while to come, I will still be there, online and energetically, sharing the screen with a group of artists, some whom I had the opportunity to get to know for a long time already and some whom I only ever met on Zoom! (How weird is that? Is it still weird?) I am also touched to see some of them physically at the theater at La MaMa, which has been closed to the public for seven months now! We’ve had a lot of late-night conversations during this process and it continues to make me think about how to reimagine theater in the era of self-isolation and Zoom life. What does local-global mean anymore? Where are our bodies? What are our bodies?”

The multidisciplinary Love Story streams live from Saturday to Sunday morning (photo courtesy La MaMa)

The list of collaborators on Love Story is long and impressive. In addition to those listed above, there will be choreography by Yanira Castro, Ursula Eagly, Allyson Green, Jodi Melnick, Sarah Michelson, Anthony Phillips, Peter Pleyer, Kathryn Ray, Steve Recker, and Vicky Shick; poetry by Kyle Dacuyan, Bob Holman, and Anne Waldman; music by Mark Bennett, Tan Dun, Nona Hendryx, Christian Marclay, Lenny Pickett, and Marc Ribot; film and video by Chani Bockwinkel, Jacob Burckhardt, Rudy Burckhardt, Andrew Kim, Jonas Mekas, and Charlie Steiner; photography by Robert Flynt and Dona Ann McAdams; set designs by Tim Clifford, Alex Katz, Elizabeth Kresch, and Elizabeth Murray; and appearances by Barbara Bryan, Rachel Cooper, Mark Russell, Yoko Shioya, Bonnie Sue Stein, Laurie Uprichard, David White, Donald Fleming, Dan Froot, Kaja Gam, Brian Moran, Nicky Paraiso, Harry Whittaker Sheppard, Gayle Tufts, Sasha Waltz, David Zambrano, Nelson Zayao, Emily Bartsch, Peter Lanctot, Kouiki Mojadidi, Emily Marie Pope, Isaac Rosenthal, and Aldina Michelle Topcagic. Of course, it takes a lot of work to fill up 1,440 continuous minutes of performance, and Chuma has assembled quite a team.

You can get a sneak peek and behind-the-scenes look at the collaborative project on October 15 at 8:00 when La MaMa will present a livestream preview that includes archival footage, sketches, and rehearsal clips. In preparation for Love Story, La MaMa has also been hosting such live Saturday morning Zoom events as “Secret Journey: Stop Calling Them Dangerous” and “SML: Zooma — Dead End” in addition to evening shows that give a taste of what we’re all in for from Bessie Award winner Chuma and her unpredictable troupe, a virtual hybrid that should offer, at the very least, a twenty-four-hour respite from this school of hard knocks we are living through in 2020.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER: BEETHOVEN / EGMONT

Liev Schreiber narrates new English translation of Egmont with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (photo by Chris Lee)

Who: Orpheus Chamber Orchestra with Liev Schreiber and Karen Slack
What: Livestreamed world premiere
Where: IDAGIO Global Concert Hall
When: Saturday, October 17, $15, 8:00
Why: Orpheus Chamber Orchestra goes virtual and global with “Speaking Truth to Power,” an online performance of Beethoven’s Egmont, Op. 84, with a new English translation by Philip Boehm commissioned for the New York City ensemble, narrated by actor Liev Schreiber. A series of incidental music pieces written by Beethoven for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1787 play, Egmont, the work has reunited the full orchestra, which has not been together since the pandemic began; they performed it recently as a socially distanced unit at the Beechwood Park bandshell in Hillsdale, New Jersey. “One of Beethoven’s masterworks, this work has yet to find its way into the major concert halls in the US and I believe that this new version will be worthy to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday this year,” Orpheus executive director Alexander Scheirle said in a statement. “Especially in a time where concert halls are closed, it will be a magical moment for our musicians and all the other family members of Orpheus. A spectacle not to be missed.”

Soprano Karen Slack performs with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in New Jersey (photo by Chris Lee)

The hourlong piece, which also features soprano and activist Karen Slack, will be available from the online hub IDAGIO Global Concert Hall beginning October 17 at 8:00 and continue through October 22 at midnight. In preparation for the concert, you can watch a “Thursdays with Thomas” chat between Slack and baritone Thomas Hampson here, and on October 15 at 7:00 a Zoom Concert Preview will take place with Orpheus artistic directors Christof Huebner, Dana Kelley, and Miho Saegusa along with Scheirle and Boehm at 6:00 and an opening night gala at 7:00 honoring Consul General of Germany David Gill. The new translation is rather timely, as evidenced by this quatrain: “Many wish their rulers nothing but good will / While others hope the current state won’t last, / Many just abide the present, keeping still, / While in their hearts they’re yearning for the past.”

LA TIMES COOK-A-THON

Who: Daniele Uditi, Dave Beran, Greg Dulan, John Cleveland, Roni Cleveland, Jon Shook, Vinny Dotolo, Jonathan Whitener, Ludo Lefebvre, Mary Sue Milliken, Susan Feniger, Nick Montgomery, Steve Samson, Wes Avila, Alice Waters, Ana Roš, Dominique Crenn, Éric Ripert, Ferran Adrià, Fuchsia Dunlop, José Andrés, Josh Niland, Lamar Moore, Musa Daĝdeviren, Zaiyu Hasegawa, Jenn Harris, Laurie Ochoa, Evan Kleiman, Lisa McRee, Phil Rosenthal, Danny Trejo, Jack Black, Jamie Lee Curtis, Eric Wareheim, more
What: Virtual food event benefiting World Central Kitchen and the Food Bowl Takeout & Give Back campaign
Where: Los Angeles Times YouTube and Facebook
When: Saturday, October 17, free with advance RSVP, 8:30
Why: Craving travel and good food? You can get a bit of both at the LA Times Cook-a-thon, taking place virtually on October 17 at 8:30. Several dozen chefs, gourmands, gourmets, food writers, and celebrity guests from LA and around the globe will share culinary tales, lead kitchen tours, give recipes, and discuss the dire situation the restaurant business finds itself in during the coronavirus crisis. A fundraiser for José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen and the LA Times Food Bowl Takeout & Give Back initiative, the cook-a-thon will feature appearances by Daniele Uditi, Dave Beran, Greg Dulan, John Cleveland and Roni Cleveland, Mary Sue Milliken, Alice Waters, Ana Roš, Éric Ripert, Musa Daĝdeviren, Zaiyu Hasegawa, Phil Rosenthal, Danny Trejo, Jack Black, Jamie Lee Curtis, and many more. Admission is free; be sure to come hungry.

ANTIGONE IN FERGUSON: BALTIMORE

Who: Bryan Doerries, Tracie Thoms, Jason Isaacs, Jumaane Williams, Marjolaine Goldsmith, Nyasha Hatendi, Willie Woodmore
What: Live Zoom theatrical production and discussion from Theater of War
Where: Zoom link sent with advance registration
When: Saturday, October 17, free with RSVP, 6:00
Why: On August 9, Theater of War presented a live Zoom reading of its 2016 project, Antigone in Ferguson, which was created in collaboration with community members of Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the death of Michael Brown in 2014. The August presentation was part of the sixth annual “Michael Brown Memorial Weekend” and was followed by a discussion with Gwen Carr (Eric Garner’s mother), Valerie Bell (Sean Bell’s mother), Marion Gray-Hopkins (Gary Hopkins Jr.’s mother), and Uncle Bobby X (Oscar Grant’s uncle). Theater of War, which specializes in relating classic and classical plays to contemporary issues — from Sophocles’s Antigone and Ajax and Euripides’s Medea and The Bacchae to works by Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Conor McPherson, and William Shakespeare — is revisiting Antigone in Ferguson on October 17, partnering with Johns Hopkins to focus on how police brutality, community violence, and the Covid-19 crisis have impacted the city of Baltimore, where Freddie Gray died in police custody in 2015. The cast features Tracie Thoms as Antigone, Jason Isaacs as Creon, Jumaane Williams as the messenger, Marjolaine Goldsmith as Ismene, Nyasha Hatendi as Haemon, and Willie Woodmore as Tiresias in an adaptation translated and directed by Theater of War artistic director Bryan Doerries, who will facilitate the postshow talk with De-Andrea Blaylock Johnson. The play also includes live choral music composed and conducted by Dr. Philip Woodmore.

Theater of War has been busy during the pandemic, forging ahead with Zoom versions of The King Lear Project, The Oedipus Project, and other virtual events. On October 15 at 1:00, Theater of War teams up with the Brooklyn Rail for a live “Common Ground” Q&A with Carr and Bell of Mothers of the Movement, cohosted by Doerries and community liaison Dominic Dupont; you can register for free here.