twi-ny recommended events

ENCORE ENGAGEMENT: THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE

Onomatopoeia’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is back for an encore engagement at the Gene Frankel Theatre (photo by Joshua Eichenbaum)

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
Gene Frankel Theatre
24 Bond St. at Lafayette St.
Wednesday – Sunday through July 27, $25-$35
www.genefrankeltheatre.com
www.theonomatopoeiatheatrecompany.com

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.]

DOES THE END JUSTIFY THE MEANS? NYCT’S ALL’S WELL EN PLEIN AIR

New York Classical Theatre’s All’s Well That Ends Well travels from Central Park to Carl Schurz Park to Battery Park (photo © Da Ping Luo)

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.

Anique Clements and Carine Montbertrand stand out in NYCT Shakespeare production in the parks (photo © Da Ping Luo)

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.]

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT: LOWCOUNTRY AT THE ATLANTIC

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.]

“THE CAMERA WAS ALWAYS PRESENT”: RACHEL ELIZABETH SEED’S A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY

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.]

REMAPPING THE UNIVERSE: ENCOUNTERS IN THE MILKY WAY

Encounters in the Milky Way expands humanity’s knowledge and understanding of the universe (photo by Alvaro Keding/© AMNH)

ENCOUNTERS IN THE MILKY WAY
American Museum of Natural History
Hayden Planetarium, Rose Center for Earth and Space
Central Park West at 81st St.
Open daily, $18-$30
212-769-5200
www.amnh.org

Everything I know about space I learned from Star Trek, Stanley Kubrick, Carl Sagan, and the American Museum of Natural History. At the Hayden Planetarium, the institution continues to explore the final frontier and push the boundaries of our knowledge of the universe in its space shows, which have included 2000’s Passport to the Universe, narrated by Tom Hanks; 2002’s The Search for Life: Are We Alone? (Harrison Ford); 2006’s Cosmic Collisions (Robert Redford); 2009’s Journey to the Stars (Whoopi Goldberg); 2013’s Dark Universe (Neil deGrasse Tyson); and 2020’s Worlds Beyond Earth (Lupita Nyong’o).

In the brand-new Encounters in the Milky Way, the ubiquitous Pedro Pascal, of The Mandalorian, The Last of Us, and Narcos, takes audiences deep into our galactic neighborhood as scientists uncover surprising aspects of time and cosmic movement so unexpected that it shocked even the filmmakers. To the everyday museum visitor who just hasn’t been thinking about our universe lately, Encounters is a thrilling, jaw-dropping reminder of exactly how small we humans are in space and time, and how much remains to be explored.

“There was this day that happened, I can tell you it’s an actual day, April 25, 2018. That was the day that the European Space Agency’s Gaia Observatory . . . revealed this massive, amazing map, a map that is foundational in astrophysics. On April 24, I gave a talk in here to a sold-out crowd and I told this audience — I don’t know, they thought that I was on the Kool-Aid or something — I was, like, it all changes tomorrow,” AMNH curator Jackie Faherty said at the press preview of the twenty-four-minute film. “It’s all changing because up until that moment we had about 116,000 stars that we measured the distances to and that we knew their motion really well. But the next day we were getting nearly 2 billion. So to me, the most important thing and why this is happening now is because on April 25, 2018, Gaia dropped a map that all humans should be proud of. We mapped the cosmos in a way, and the Milky Way really was the star of it, we had never been able to do before. And because of that, that was the sheer inspiration for starting the conversations about this show. And we could test out some of the material with audiences in here with open space. But because of Gaia — sometimes I call this show a little love letter to Gaia because that map is so phenomenal.”

Encounters in the Milky Way was a huge undertaking, made with the participation of a wide range of astronomers, educators, science visualization experts, and artists from the University of Surrey, NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute, the Southwest Research Institute, the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian, Technische Universität Berlin, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, the European Space Agency, and more than a dozen other organizations. Using the Gaia space telescope, the James Webb Space telescope, and complex digital models, the film features the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud, Gliese 710, icy comets, a local bubble, and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy like they’ve never been seen before. As with all space shows, the visuals are spectacular, highlighted by a spiral, found in collaboration with the Czech astronomer David Nesvorný, that jolted all involved.

“There’s this huge universe out there, and this show is concentrating on the Milky Way. . . . Because we’re being parochial, local to the Milky Way, there’s that emphasis of time, but it’s brought home to us in a kind of personal way that just as the solar system is our home, so too is the Milky Way,” director Carter Emmart, helming his seventh and final show, said. “And because we can see it organically behaving in great detail like this, there’s an aspect to it that, yes, it’s so far out there, and the time scales are so large, but then when Pedro tells you that we are twenty galactic years old and that it takes us 230 million years to make one orbit — when we were at this last orbit, it was the Triassic, and dinosaurs were just getting their legs — that’s one of the twenty orbits. It makes you understand that our story is a larger story of life and that while we are single instances, that the DNA of your children and the grandparents and so forth that you come from is a continuum, and that goes back into deep time. . . . I really feel that message comes across in this story; I hope it does. I hope that’s the takeaway, that this is a vast story. . . . For me its been a tremendous exhilaration from being ten years old, my mom bringing me to classes in the basement of this planetarium, to having a career working here. It’s been a great, great pleasure to be here across these various shows but end on something that I think is a pretty special production. It certainly is to me.”

In the film, Pascal explains, “By moving through space to observe from multiple angles, Gaia has built a three-dimensional atlas containing nearly two billion stars. That’s fifteen thousand times more than were ever mapped before, and about a million times more stars than we see with the naked eye. Could the ingredients of life be carried from one star system to another, aboard a comet or asteroid? Scientists are studying the possibilities. For us — for our sun and solar system — one orbit takes 230 million years to complete. So far, we’ve made about twenty orbits. We’re twenty galactic years old!”

It’s also special to Faherty, whose excitement and sense of wonder are infectious, particularly when it comes to the map.

“I want kids coming here and being like, What’s up with this map? I’d like to see more on that map. What else does that map have? Open up the map; look for stuff,” she continued. “I’m showing you the globe, guys — this is the map, the map of your cosmos. It’s your cosmos as well; it’s humanity’s map. Go play with the map. All Gaia data is available for everybody. Look at where these stars are; look at where they’re going. You can make discoveries — so much science to be had. I hope that people walk away wanting to be scientists when they leave this room.”

On Wednesday, June 25, Faherty and Emmart will be back in the room for “Astronomy Live: The Making of a Space Show,” sharing insights into the creation of Encounters in the Milky Way. Be prepared to reconsider your current career and think about becoming a scientist yourself after you experience their unbounding enthusiasm and childlike joy at expanding our knowledge of the endless universe.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

WORSHIPPING LBJ: XHLOE RICE AND NATASHA ROLAND RETURN TO SOHO PLAYHOUSE WITH REMARKABLE LETTER

Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice return to SoHo Playhouse with remarkable award-winning production (photo by Morgan McDowell)

A LETTER TO LYNDON B. JOHNSON OR GOD: WHOEVER READS THIS FIRST
SoHo Playhouse
15 Vandam St. between Varick St. & Sixth Ave.
Wednesday – Sunday through June 29, $45.50
www.sohoplayhouse.com
www.xhloeandnatasha.com

Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland’s A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First is back for an encore run at SoHo Playhouse, with good reason: It’s one of the best, most innovative and thoroughly satisfying shows of the year.

Rice and Roland met in high school eleven years ago and have been creating unique and inventive two-character plays and short films ever since, offering funny and poignant views of American history and culture and the elusive American dream.

Developing their own form of absurdist physical clown theater, they’ve portrayed Lewis and Clark in a pair of short films, satirized violence in the thirteen-minute Caramel Apples, and, onstage, played a rodeo clown and his shadow who want to become cowboys in And Then the Rodeo Burned Down and scrutinized the desires of 1950s housewives in What If They Ate the Baby?

They shocked the Edinburgh Fringe by winning the Fringe First award in 2022 for Rodeo, 2023 for Baby, and 2024 for Lyndon B. Johnson, their first three works, a feat never before accomplished.

A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First packs a lot into its fast-moving sixty-five minutes; in addition to starring in the show, Rice and Roland are responsible for the writing, directing, choreography, costumes, set, and sound design, a legitimate DIY effort. Their regular collaborator Angelo Sagnelli is credited with lighting and technical management.

Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland explore America in A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First (photo by Morgan McDowell)

Twenty-four audience members sit on the stage in single rows of eight on the two sides and the back; the rest of the audience is in standard seating. The only prop is a large Mudstar radial M/T all-terrain tire with optimized traction; although it was chosen somewhat randomly by Roland’s father, it fits the concept of the show, in which Ace (Roland) and BFF Grasshopper (Rice) share stories of their past in small-town America and their service in Vietnam as they equate President Lyndon B. Johnson with G-d.

Ace is the tough one, from a military family, while Grasshopper is more gentle and vulnerable, raised by his grandmother. They both are barefoot and wearing Boy Scout uniforms, Ace’s covered in many more patches — evoking battle medals — than Grasshopper’s. Their faces, arms, and legs are thick with dirt and grime; Ace also has a bandanna around his head and a bandage on one calf that look like war wounds but, as we learn, aren’t.

“Stay with me,” Grasshopper says at the beginning; we’re not about to go anywhere. Running across the stage, jumping on each other, lying down on the floor, rolling and balancing on the tire, and spit-shaking, Ace and Grasshopper talk about the time Hillbilly had a problem with a high rope swing, relate an evening when their proposed prank of putting snakes in camp counselor Davis’s pillowcase went awry, and prepare for Ace to play the trombone for the president as his train passes through town. Although the trombone scene eerily recalls the 1954 thriller Suddenly, in which Frank Sinatra plays a hit man hired to assassinate the president when his train is scheduled to stop in a small California town, Ace and Grasshopper worship LBJ. They alter the Pledge of Allegiance to include him and offer their own version of the Our Father, as if praying to Johnson and G-d is the same thing; they often swear to Johnson, as if he’s in charge of it all, amid numerous references to religion. Ace has a dream in which his father becomes LBJ.

Throughout the play, Grasshopper tells a multipart fable about “a young boy who lived in a mountain village and . . . wanted nothing more than to be a man.” A witch advises that he must undertake a long, dangerous journey to find a lake filled with leeches that will suck his blood and make him a man; it loosely parallels Ace and Grasshopper’s story as they go from kids to soldiers fighting an ill-defined war in Southeast Asia, one that their hero, LBJ, escalated.

Rice and Roland are utterly charming as Grasshopper and Ace; through direct eye contact with the audience and physically reaching out with various gestures and incorporating the tire, they not only humanize the characters but instantly make them our friends. We all feel a part of the group, enhancing our emotional investment in what happens to them. Their goofing around as kids helps us reminisce about our goofing around as kids:

Ace: I’m what they call “highly decorated.”
Grasshopper: You’re what they call “highly annoying.”
Ace: [puts Grasshopper in a headlock] And what do they call your mom’s brother?
Grasshopper: Uncle! Uncle!

But their faith is tested, as shown in this brief exchange:

Grasshopper: Do you think they’ll let him be president forever?
Ace: They have to.
Grasshopper: He’ll love us.
Ace: He has to.

The immersive sound features nature and music — three Beatles songs play a prominent role, with Rice and Roland performing on that war-movie staple, the harmonica, replacing the words with notes, beginning with “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” which contains the refrain “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on, brah / La-la, how their life goes on.” The sound and lighting ultimately explode in a gripping, unforgettable finale.

Winner of SoHo Playhouse’s International Fringe Encore Series Overall Excellence award, A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First captures the America of the late 1960s as well as today, as politics, religion, and the military become intertwined and the everyday struggles of the common people are completely misunderstood or purposely ignored. Rice and Roland remind us who we were, who we are, and who we still can be. I can’t wait to see where they’ll take us next.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE WHOLE MEGILLAH: YIDDISH TOUR OF “THE BOOK OF ESTHER IN THE AGE OF REMBRANDT”

Rembrandt van Rijn, A Jewish Heroine from the Hebrew Bible, oil on canvas, 1632–33 (National Gallery of Canada, purchased 1953)

Who: Rukhl Schaechter, Adina Cimet
What: Yiddish tour of “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt”
Where: The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
When: Friday, June 20, $40.25, 11:30 am
Why: The Jewish Museum exhibition “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt” is a surprising look at the Dutch fascination with the story of Esther, King Ahasuerus, Queen Vashti, Mordecai, and Haman (boo!!). Artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Lievens, Aert de Gelder, and Jan Steen painted depictions of the biblical story that is related in the Megillah, which is read on the holiday of Purim; the show is supplemented with beautifully designed scrolls and contemporary works, including Fred Wilson’s 1992 Queen Esther/Harriet Tubman. Curators Abigail Rapoport and Michele Frederick make a strong case connecting the events surrounding Esther with Jewish immigration to the Netherlands during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648); as Rapoport writes in the catalog, “The Dutch, who saw themselves as religiously and politically oppressed by the Spanish monarchy, found in the Book of Esther a viscerally apt analogy for their own liberation and associated their war of independence with the Jewish people’s struggle with, and ultimate triumph over, the ancient Persian Empire.”

The exhibit continues through August 10; on June 20 at 11:30 am, Forverts editor Rukhl Schaechter will lead a one-hour tour of the show in Yiddish, along with sociologist Adina Cimet. Tickets are limited and include general admission to the museum, which is also hosting the terrific “Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity” exhibition.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]