In June 2021, Jody Oberfelder Projects presented Amphitheater activating the endangered East River Park bandshell through live music and dance. At the time, Oberfelder noted that the piece “challenges the pending demolition of this fifty-acre park that transformed Lower Manhattan more than eighty years ago through inscribing the space with our movement inspired from human connections. We believe it is time to be happy again and reconnect with our community through our common joie de vivre, our passion for dance.” Despite a valiant battle that went to the courts, the amphitheater was torn down that December.
A New York–based director, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, Oberfelder is fighting for another worthy cause with her latest work, Story Time, which takes place throughout the Center at West Park in the landmarked West Park Presbyterian Church, which is also under threat of demolition. On March 8, hundreds of people gathered at a Love Our Landmarks: Save Park West rally to keep the wrecking ball away from the 135-year-old institution, with such special guests as actors Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick, Laurence Fishburne, Julianna Margulies, and Fisher Stevens and local politicians Mark Levine, Brad Hoylman-Sigal, and Gale Brewer.
“It would be a tragedy if this landmarked building and thriving community arts hub were demolished — especially given that there is a viable plan to save it,” Manhattan borough president Mark Levine said at the protest. “We cannot allow this vital piece of our city’s history and culture to be lost. We must do everything in our power to protect it. I fully support the community-driven effort to preserve this unique and special place for New Yorkers. I call on the Landmarks Preservation Commission to take immediate action to save this gem. We will not give up the fight.”
Oberfelder, who has also staged works in an officers house on Governors Island, in the 6½ Ave. corridor in midtown Manhattan, in a garden pool at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in Green-Wood Cemetery, in a partially enclosed lot in Brisbane, and in a seventeenth-century baroque palace in Portugal, will be activating Park West on May 16 and 17 at 7:30, leading audience members from the sanctuary on foot to various nooks and crannies holding surprises before bringing myths and fairy tales to life as the audience sits in the historic pews.
The sets are designed by Juergen Riehm, Tine Kindermann, Johanna Maier, and Nick Cassway, with costumes by Katrin Schnabl, lighting by Connor Sale, music by Ellen Reid, Maurice Ravel, Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, Frank London, and, playing live, Tine Kindermann and Grace Bergere, and dramaturgy by Rebekah Morin. The piece was conceived, directed, and choreographed by Oberfelder in collaboration with the performers: Mariah Anton, Andi Farley-Shimota, Michael Greenberg, Nyah Malone, and Caleb Patterson.
“Across cultures and time, people have always gathered around stories — to make sense of the world, to find direction, to feel less alone,” Oberfelder said in a statement. “Dance is its own kind of storytelling: fleeting, wordless, yet full of meaning. There’s a Grimm tale that ends, ‘And the mouth of the person who last told this story is still warm.’ That warmth — that sense of something just passed on — is what I hope lingers. I want audiences to arrive with wonder, to follow the threads of their own journey, and perhaps leave seeing themselves as the hero in their own unfolding tale.”
She added via email, “How do we stand up when our country is pushing us down? How do we courageously live and give, redirect and inspire? Art is transformative. I’ve created a piece that I hope, with each turn of the page, addresses dark and light. How do we keep our humanity in this heroic journey? Especially right now, with everything coming at you faster than you can imagine. How do you summon your inner hero to survive?”
Tickets for the immersive, site-specific Story Time are $24–$30 to follow Oberfelder on her never-ending quest to bring unique, often interactive dances that ask all the right questions to unusual and thrilling locations across the globe, including right here in New York City.
And in this case, here’s hoping this fairy tale has a happy ending.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Tamara (Snezhana Chernova) and Ilyin (Roman Freud) reunite after being apart for seventeen years in Five Evenings (photo by Alexandra Vainshtein)
FIVE EVENINGS
The West End Theatre
263 West Eighty-Sixth St. at Broadway
May 28 – June 15, $54.65 www.fiveevenings.com
“No, this is madness,” Zoya says to Ilyin at the start of Jewish-Soviet playwright Aleksandr Volodin’s Five Evenings, a multigenerational melodrama that is as relevant today as it was when it was first presented in 1959 at the Leningrad State Academic Bolshoi Drama Theater and later adapted into an award-winning 1978 film by Nikita Mikhalkov.
The work was revived by director Eduard Tolokonnikov and producer Polina Belkina for a sold-out run at the Chain Theatre in March and is having an encore engagement May 28 to June 15 at the West End Theatre, with Yelena Shmulenson or Snezhana Chernova as Tamara, Roman Freud as Ilyin, Ekaterina Cherepanova as Katya, Aleksei Furmanov as Slava, Inna Yesilevskaya or Iryna Malygina as Zoya, and Dima Koan as Timofeev. The ninety-minute play (with intermission) will be performed in Russian with English surtitles; the set design is by Jenya Shekhter, with lighting by Hannah Wolland, sound by Denis Zabiyaka, and costumes by Natasha Danilova.
The story looks at two relationships, between the older Tamara and Ilyin and the younger Katya and Slava. In the second evening, they’re together at Tamara’s, and the two men have a chat while Slava sets the table, a scene that is representative of Volodin’s character development and dialogue:
Ilyin: See how nice it is? When there’s a white tablecloth and flowers on the table; it’s awkward to be petty, rude, or mean. The tablecloth should have creases from the iron — they bring back childhood memories. Slava: How poetic. Ilyin: One must live wisely, without haste. Remember, life’s book is full of unnecessary details. But here’s the trick: You can skip those pages. Slava: Well, this is one page I don’t feel like reading. Aunt Toma can clean up when she gets here. After all, isn’t there a division of labor? Ilyin: Don’t make me angry — get to work.
Katya walks in as Ilyin is teaching Slava how to box, declaring, “What are you doing, you slimy snake? What are you doing?!” A moment later, Ilyin says to Katya, “A demonic woman. Is that a manicure you’ve got there?”
Five Evenings revival is back for an encore run at the West End Theatre (photo by Alexandra Vainshtein)
Born in Minsk and raised in Moscow after his mother’s death when he was five, Aleksandr Lifshitz — he changed his last name to Volodin because Lifshitz was too Jewish and was impacting his ability to get published — was drafted into the Red Army during WWII and was injured twice before earning a medal for courage. His first play, The Factory Girl, debuted in 1955 and traveled throughout the USSR. Five Evenings, which deals with time, suffering, resilience, and rebuilding, was followed by such plays as My Elder Sister and Do Not Part with Your Beloved in addition to several screenplays.
A champion of the individual who subtly rejected Stalinism in his works, Volodin died in 2001 in St. Petersburg at the age of eighty-two; his son Vladimir Lifschitz, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, revoked the copyright of his father’s plays in Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine.
As note above, the Chain run sold out, so act fast if you want to catch this production.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The Worms (Patrick Nathan Falk, Milly Shapiro, and Luke Islam) dig deep into an internet rabbit hole in The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse (photo by Monique Carboni)
THE LAST BIMBO OF THE APOCALYPSE
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 1, $38-$94 thenewgroup.org
Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley take an iconic 2006 photo and build an exciting mystery around it in The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse, zeroing in on the allure of online celebrity through pop-culture obsession.
On November 29, 2006, the New York Post published a cover photograph of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton in the front seat of a car with the headline “Bimbo Summit”; the accompanying story was called “3 Bimbos of the Apocalypse — No Clue, No Cares, No Underwear: Meet the Party Posse of the Year,” labeling Britney as Bashful, Paris as Dopey, and Lindsay as Sleepy.
Nearly twenty years later, a young woman known as She/Her Sherlock (Milly Shapiro) has a popular online true crime channel devoted to finding missing girls. “Wars and hurricanes / Botched elections, mass infections / Apocalypse is in my veins,” she sings. “So I stay inside and fixate on / Girls who disappeared / I find what no one sees or hears / I crack crimes in the end times / And I haven’t been outside in four years / No one looked for me / No one looked for me / Which means / I don’t exist unless I’m online / On their screens.” She’s excited by her latest case, announcing, “I’ve never been more stumped! This new girl is from an archaic, regressive, primitive civilization that I know nothing about. I need evidence! I need experts!”
At the same time, a pair of young men, Earworm (Luke Islam) and Bookworm (Patrick Nathan Falk), with their own channel, devoted to ’00s (the “aughts”) pop culture, that rarely gets any viewers at all, are analyzing the Post picture, seen behind them as a painting on a large canvas. “Have you ever wondered how this one photo from twenty years ago created the digital dystopia we live in today?” Earworm asks. When their only viewer logs out, they wonder if their show is over. “No!” Bookworm declares. “The first time I heard you talk about Juicy Couture tracksuits, I felt like I finally understood the cultural context of 9/11.” Earworm responds, “And I never understood why Britney Spears shaved her head until you taught me about Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
Earworm and Bookworm are surprised when Sherlock herself makes a comment, pointing out that there is a fourth girl in the photo: Barely visible extending from the backseat is a hand with a bracelet around the wrist that says Coco. They next show a 2006 video from Coco (Keri René Fuller), a wannabe star who posted a YouTube song called “Something out of Nothing” in which she declares, “I don’t wanna do / Anything / And I wanna be rewarded for it. . . . Uh huh / Gonna shoot a massive blank / Bang bang! / Gonna rob an empty bank / Am I a manifesto or a prank? / I don’t think therefore I am! / The future of this world of cameras! / I’ll take a picture on my phone / And post it so I’m not alone.”
The video tanked and, according to gossipmonger Perez Hilton, Coco was dead a few days later. Rebranding herself Brainworm, Sherlock teams up with Earworm and Bookworm to find out exactly what happened to Coco, but the only other clue they have is a selfie of Coco and two other women in a clothing store with palm trees outside. They zoom in on the photo (re-created by the cast) and decide to refer to the older woman as Coco’s mother (Sara Gettelfinger) and the other as Hoodie Girl (Natalie Walker); the Worms come up with an outrageous murder scenario that they have to abandon, but it sends them down a, well, wormhole as they dig deeper and deeper, especially when the bracelet suddenly appears on Brainworm’s doorstep.
An old selfie provides important clues in world premiere musical from the New Group (photo by Monique Carboni)
Developed and directed by Obie winner Rory Pelsue, who worked with Breslin and Foley on This American Wife and Pulitzer Prize finalist Circle Jerk, and featuring fun choreography by Jack Ferver,The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse is a lively, appealing ninety-minute pop opera about a group of unique characters trying to figure out who they are and what they want, seeking answers by using social media from the distant (to them) past instead of going out into the current real world. They are terrified of actual contact with other humans; Brainworm hasn’t been outside in four years and hides her face when she is online, having been traumatized by a single cruel comment from an anonymous user when she was twelve. Earworm, who is gay, and Bookworm, who claims he is straight, do not broadcast from the same space but are a thousand miles apart, the former in Staten Island, the latter in Nebraska — and afraid of sharing their true feelings with each other. The three actors might be onstage together, but their fears and physical distance are palpable; they are near but so far.
The book does meander a few times, particularly with references to the old MTV show Total Request Live, but it always manages to come back around, complete with a cool double twist.
Stephanie Osin Cohen’s set consists of a series of concentric semicircles from which various elements occasionally drop down, providing information about the Worms’ search. Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting casts ever-shifting colors across the stage, along with illumination from the phones when things get dark. Cole McCarty’s costumes get funky, from hoodies and T-shirts with emojis to internet chic, while Matthew Armentrout’s hair and wig designs are fab. The sound design, by Megumi Katayama and Ben Truppin-Brown, is loud and clear, effectively shifting between live music and online discussions. The rocking orchestrations are by music director Dan Schlosberg, who plays the keyboards, joined by Jakob Reinhardt on guitar and ukulele, Brittany Harris on bass and cello, and Emma Ford on drums and percussion; the back wall rises whenever the group is performing so we can see them in action.
The cast is an exuberant delight, highlighted by Tony winner Shapiro (Matilda the Musical,You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown) and Fuller (Six,Jagged Little Pill), who embody the loneliness that comes with online addiction. About halfway through the show, during the song “Stop Scrolling,” a character yells at Brainworm, “You think you know about the world, little girl? You know nothin’! Why don’t you get your own life and live it yourself?” then screams out the chorus: “Stop scrolling! / Stop scrolling! / Log off and live / It’s controlling you! / You will never reach the end of your feed! / This will never fill the pit of your need!” The message is delivered by a villainous figure, but it still packs a punch and strikes a nerve, for the Worms and the audience.
In 2006, many young girls considered Lindsay, Britney, and Paris role models. In her program note, one of the dramaturgs, Ariel Sibert, writes, “On TikTok, I see a lot of comments from Millennials under videos of enlightened high schoolers explaining economic inequality, or teaching their homeroom teacher what ‘twink death’ means — comments like, ‘the kids are alright’ [emojis]!!! Are the kids alright, really? Have you checked? Were they ever alright? I mean, were you?”
As the internet age continues and we all spend more and more time on our devices, are any of us alright?
[There will be a series of talkbacks taking audiences behind the scenes of the making of The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse, including “Designing The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse and the Y2K Era” on May 17 at 2:00 with Armentrout, assistant costume designer Jason A. Goodwin, fashion designer Cynthia Rowley, and dramaturg Cat Rodríguez; LGBTQ+ Night on May 22, moderated by Preston Crowder; and on May 27 a conversation with the cast and creative team, moderated by Bryan Campione.]
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Author and professor Jon (Hugh Jackman) tends to student and fan Annie (Ella Beatty) in Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes (photo by Emilio Madrid)
SEXUAL MISCONDUCT OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES
Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Through June 18, $35-$298.50 www.audible.com
Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes might not quite be the story of the Big Bad Wolverine and Little Red Riding Hood, but it is an intriguing and thought-provoking adult fairy tale with a marvelous final twist and purposely ambiguous moral.
Hugh Jackman makes a curious choice for his off-Broadway debut and the inaugural show from his new company, Together, a collaboration with Audible, but it is an alluring and tantalizing success.
Cofounded by the Emmy–, Grammy–, and Tony–winning and Oscar-nominated Jackman with megaproducer Sonia Friedman, Together is “dedicated to live theater that is intimate and accessible . . . driven by a commitment to offering audiences a chance to experience theater in a fresh and engaging way” — including making half of the tickets available for free or $35. That’s precisely what happens with the New York premiere of Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s 2020 Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, a pre-#metoo story about a relationship between a hunky college professor and a nineteen-year-old student that offers new insights on a familiar subject.
As audience members are still taking their seats, a young woman (Ella Beatty) moves around furniture on Brett J Banakis and Christine Jones’s long, narrow, and relatively sparse set, consisting of a few chairs and tables, a desk, and a floor lamp that morph from an office to a porch to a hotel room. She’s not part of the crew, and why she is arranging the set will become clear later. Jon Macklem (Jackman), a professor and famous novelist, enters and starts speaking in the third person, addressing the audience directly while Annie sits off to the side, watching closely but dispassionately. We soon find out that she is Annie, a shy, somewhat awkward teenager who did not enjoy high school and is hoping college will bring her more confidence and freedom.
As he narrates, Jon surveys the audience, making eye contact with as many people as he can, in the orchestra and the balcony. A real charmer, he reacts in a friendly manner when he hears a particularly loud laugh, gasp, or titter. At one point he sits over the lip of the stage, his feet dangling mere inches from people in the first row. Isabella Byrd keeps the lights only slightly dimmed during his monologues, then lowers them to a more accustomed level when Jon interacts with Annie.
Jon (Hugh Jackman) and Annie (Ella Beatty) begin a complex relationship in Hannah Moscovitch play (photo by Emilio Madrid)
“Well, he was agitated: he didn’t know why, nothing came to him” are his first words. He wonders, “Could it be a fragment of . . . ? His publishers were waiting on a novel about turn-of-the-century lumberjacks, so hopefully this girl was a part of that, or . . . could be shoehorned into it? Because also: come on, a girl, a young girl? Wasn’t there something deadly about the ‘young girl’ as an object of fiction? Wasn’t it where writers went to expose their mediocrity? Because wasn’t it so often the ‘young girl’ who was grossly underwritten, a cipher, a sex object, reduced to a cliché by lust-addled men?”
He knows precisely why he’s agitated, and it has everything to do with the young girl as opposed to the third divorce he’s going through. He adds, sounding like the literature professor he is, “He was on the side of the Greeks: learning is a seduction. . . . The erotics of pedagogy . . . That was the sort of thing you couldn’t say out loud without getting fired.”
Annie sits in the front row of his class and lives right across the street from Jon. He is surprised when he sees her standing at his house while he mows the lawn, but another day he writes outside on his porch, hoping she stops by. With a hesitating naivete, she tells him she loves his work, that it means a lot to her that someone else in the world thinks like she does.
When she suffers an injury, he asks her inside so he can patch her up, making “an ashamed, apologetic face” at the audience. He knows where this might lead, understanding that it is wrong and feeling panic. “Well, this, he recognized, was very bad,” he admits to us, trying to find a way to “get her the fuck out of his house.” But instead, he is soon locked in her embrace.
Jackman (A Steady Rain,The Music Man) is terrific as Jon; the actor is so handsome, so charming — so physically close — and Jon is so aware of what he is doing that we don’t want to see him as a villain, instead giving him the benefit of the doubt whenever we possibly can, despite, as he is well aware, “the horrible predictability of it all.” (In addition, Jackman is performing his Live from New York with Love concert twice a month through October.)
In her third play, following the recent Appropriate and Ghosts, Beatty, whose parents are Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, brings to Annie a nearly impenetrable quality, never giving away just how innocent she may or may not be, whether she is predator or prey, victim or ingénue, or whether a nineteen-year-old student can ever take responsibility for an affair with her college professor. When Jon is addressing the audience in third person, Annie sits in one of the chairs at stage left, with her ever-present red coat — the only burst of color in Ásta Bennie Hostetter’s otherwise subdued, naturalistic costumes — watching Jon, her eyes riveted but not in the same way ours are.
Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, and others rehearse for two Together plays running in repertory at Audible theater (photo by Guy Aroch)
Three-time Olivier winner Ian Rickson (Jerusalem,The Weir), who previously directed Jackman in Jez Butterworth’s The River, guides the proceedings with a sure hand, maintaining an air of mystery as the relationship grows more complicated, perhaps more like that between J. D. Salinger and Joyce Maynard than the one in David Mamet’s two-character Oleanna. Moscovitch, whose 2016 Bunny also involves a sexual liaison between a male professor and one of his female students, avoids falling into any traps; her dialogue is concise and believable, and Jon and Annie are no mere cardboard cutouts but complex characters who are not sure what they want — or what they don’t.
Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, which is running in repertory through June 18 with Jen Silverman’s new adaptation of August Strindberg’s Creditors, with Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff, and Justice Smith, is not a he said/she said cliché-ridden narrative but a tense, realistic parable with plenty of bite and a finale that will have the drama spinning back through your mind for a long time to come.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
CONEY ISLAND BOOK FAIR
Coney Island USA
1208 Surf Ave.
Saturday, May 10, fair free, panels $20, variety show $25, $40 for both www.coneyislandbookfair.org
Coney Island has been a poignant location in such books as Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, Sol Yurick’s The Warriors, Joseph Heller’s Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here: A Memoir, Billy O’Callaghan’s My Coney Island Baby, and Alice Hoffman’s The Museum of Extraordinary Things.
The Brooklyn home of the Cyclone, the Wonder Wheel, Luna Park, and the New York Aquarium is now taking the next step in its literary history with the inaugural Coney Island Book Fair, done in its usual style, with more than a touch of freaky entertainment. On May 10, there will be four panel discussions, books for sale, art vendors, jewelry, food and drink, and a concluding variety show with special guests. Below is the full schedule.
Sip, Search, and Swap Stories!, Freak Bar, noon – last call
Writing the City: New York as Muse, with Eddie McNamara, John Strausbaugh, and Laurie Gwen Shapiro, moderated by Heather Buckley, 1:00
Writing the Creepy: Books That Go Bump in the Night, with Leila Taylor, S. E. Porter, Colin Dickey, Alix Strauss, and Sadie Dingfelder, moderated by Laetitia Barbieri, 2:00
Writing the Shimmy: The Politics of Pasties and Performance, with Jo Weldon, Linda Simpson, and Elyssa Goodman, moderated by Ilise S. Carter, 3:00
Writing the Bally: Sideshow as a Main Character, with James Taylor, Jim Moore, and Dawn Raffel, hosted by Trav S.D., 4:00
Body of Work: A Literal Literary Variety Show, with Jo Weldon, Johnny Porkpie, Fancy Feast, Victoria Vixen, Garth Schilling, and more, hosted by journalist, author, writer, sword swallower, fire-eater and straitjacket escape artist the Lady Aye, $25, 7:00
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Caryl Churchill’s Glass. takes place on a glowing, floating platform (photo by Joan Marcus)
GLASS. KILL. WHAT IF IF ONLY. IMP.
Martinson Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday through Sunday through May 25, $89
212-539-8500 publictheater.org
British playwright Caryl Churchill burrows into the fragility of human life and the concept of impermanence in Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp., four short works being performed together at the Public’s Martinson through May 25.
For more than fifty years, Churchill, now eighty-six, has been writing inventive, experimental plays that challenge audiences through abstract narratives and unique, unexpected stagings, from Cloud Nine and Top Girls to Vinegar Tom and Love and Information, creating her own genre, with flourishes of Beckett, Pinter, and Brecht mixed in. The four-time Obie winner has penned more than fifty works for the stage, radio, and television; three of the pieces at the Public were written in 2019, the fourth in 2021. (Glass.,Kill., and Imp. were originally performed with Bluebeard’s Friends at the Royal Court Theatre in September 2019 but has been replaced here by What If If Only, her latest play.)
The 135-minute show (with intermissions) is a triumph for both Churchill and Miriam Buether, whose breathtaking sets lift Churchill’s themes to the next level, along with stunning lighting by Isabella Byrd and compelling sound by Bray Poor, making it a visual and sonic treat. First up is Glass., which unfolds on a glowing rectangular platform hanging in the middle of the space, surrounded by darkness. It’s a kind of mantel where a Girl Made of Glass (Ayana Workman), a Clock (Sathya Sridharan), a Vase (Japhet Balaban), and a Red Plastic Dog (Adelind Horan) interact, attempting to define their existence and importance.
“She doesn’t want to be touched. She’s afraid of being broken,” the Girl’s protective mother says, explaining how there are many cracks in her daughter, who needs bubble wrap to go out.
The defensive Clock tells the Girl, “You’re beautiful but I’m also useful.” The Girl responds, “A clock isn’t useful anymore. Who looks at you? Time’s on the phones.” The Clock answers back, “They look at me because I’m worth looking at. Time from me is richer because I’m old and time’s run through me since before their parents were born. And you see it flow because my second hand goes round and my minute hand goes round and my hour hand goes slowly round and there’s none of this digital jumping. You gaze at me and think how long a minute lasts. Pain for a whole minute would be torture. Joy for a whole minute would be exceptional. And even if I stopped I’d be kept as an object because my history is intriguing and my shape is graceful and my value is unquestioned.”
The Dog says she is a reminder of happy times, even if she’s dusty and hasn’t been played with in years. The Vase is thrilled when the Girl says he is beautiful even without flowers. A group of schoolgirls stop by and taunt the Girl. A friend tells her a secret.
The play ends with a moving monologue in which the Girl expresses her fears in a way we can all relate to, how easy it is to become physically and emotionally damaged.
During the first break, hand balancer Junru Wang performs remarkable feats on canes in the pit in front of the stage as the set is changed behind the red velvet curtain. Wang pushes herself high into the air, stretching, switching hands, and contorting her limbs, a dazzling display of what the human body is capable of, a thrilling counterpoint to the delicate Girl Made of Glass.
Deirdre O’Connell relaxes on a cloud while talking about death in Kill. (photo by Joan Marcus)
In the solo Kill., Tony winner Deirdre O’Connell, wearing all white, sitting comfortably on a floating cloud in a black sky, delivers a treatise on the gods’ power over humans, treating them as playthings as they watch them murder one another as if orchestrating a Greek tragedy for fun. Fathers, mothers, husbands, brothers, cousins, lovers, and kings are brutally murdered, sent to hell, eaten, brought back for more punishment — it’s a vicious cycle of death and destruction put on for pleasure, a sly comment on the theater itself as well as the violence inherent in everyday life.
She begins, “We take this small box and shut the furies up in it, they’re furious and can’t get out, they say let us out and we’ll be kind. We gods can do that sometimes, quieten the furies, we can’t do everything, we don’t exist, people make us up, they make up the furies and how they bite. They’re after the boy, they won’t let him sleep or wake or sleep and he suffers. He suffers and suffers because he kills his mother, which we’re against and so is everyone but he has his reason so he’s right and wrong. He kills his mother, hoping she’ll die quickly, it can’t be over quickly enough, he doesn’t want her unrecognisable but still here, both slipping in the blood, his duty to do it, everyone thinks that and so do we, and he kills her lover happy to kill him but taking out the knife he remembers loving his mother and the nonsense words they’d say to each other though he still has the same hate in his heart coming home as when he’s little and runs away when she’s killing his father.”
It’s a tour de force for O’Connell, the words spilling out in a nonstop poetic assault that underlines humanity’s penchant for real and fictional violence; Churchill also questions the notion of faith, people’s belief that someone else is pulling the strings, be it a supreme being or, perhaps, a playwright, from Ancient Greece or twenty-first-century England. As the god says multiple times, “We don’t exist.”
During the second break, Maddox Morfit-Tighe juggles clubs, involving a few audience members; it’s not as awe-inspiring as what Wang did, and the metaphor is more obvious, but it is still entertaining as the stage is prepared for the third tale.
A man (Sathya Sridharan) faces loss in What If If Only. at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)
What If If Only. is set in a mysterious large white cube reminiscent of Churchill’s Love and Information. A man identified in the script as Someone on Their Own (Sridharan) is sitting at a small table with a bottle of wine and two chairs; it is apparent that he is waiting for a person who is unlikely to come.
“If I was the one who was dead would you still be talking to me? We once said if one of us died if there was any way of getting in touch we should do it, I thought we’d be old. Are you not trying?” he says. “If you’d wanted to talk to me you could have stayed alive. I’ve nothing to say really, I just miss you. I once thought I saw a ghost, not spooky like Halloween, just a wisp of something standing in the door. I’ve told you this already, do you remember? Is remembering something you can do or has it all gone now? I miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you. I miss you. Please, can you? Just a wisp would be fine. If you can, please. Please, I miss you. A small thing, just any small thing, let me know you’re there somewhere. If you can.”
A woman (Workman) does arrive, but the man is not sure what or who she is. They agree she is at least a little like his lost love, then talk about regrets and possibilities, living and dying. She tells him, “I’m the ghost of a dead future. I’m the ghost of a future that never happened. And if you can make me happen then there would be your beloved real person not a ghost your real real living because what happened will never have happened what happened will be different will be what you want will be a happy happy.”
Soon the walls of the white cube rise and others enter, including a young girl (Cecilia Ann Popp), Asteroid, Empire, Silver, Nature, Small, and a calm, supportive older man (John Ellison Conlee) who tries to help the younger man face the reality of his situation, that there are so many futures but only one that will happen. It’s a gorgeous existential conversation with a surprise conclusion.
Imp. concludes quartet of existential works by Caryl Churchill (photo by Joan Marcus)
Imp. follows a full intermission (without acrobatics), featuring another brilliant set, this time a raggedy living room with a couch, a comfy chair, a floor lamp, and a red oriental rug on a slanted platform. It is the home of nonkissing cousins Jimmy (Conlee) and Dot (O’Connell), who bicker like an old married couple with nothing better to do. While the widowed Jimmy occasionally gets up to go running, training for a half marathon, the divorced Dot never leaves her chair.
Their several-times-removed Irish niece, Niamh (Adelind Horan), was recently orphaned, so she is visiting Jimmy and Dot while making a new life for herself in England. When Niamh says she needs to lose a stone by summer, Dot disagrees and says, “You’re lovely how you are. Don’t do it.” Jimmy argues, “Leave her alone, goals are good, you want everyone not to be fit so they’re no better than you. Just like you want everyone to be miserable.” Dot barks back, “You’re fattist is what he is, not he’s the fattest, Niamh, I mean like racist.” It’s rarely easy to parse Dot’s logic.
Another day they are speaking with the homeless Rob (Sridharan), a world traveler who’s been sleeping in a cemetery, wanting to go back to his son and estranged wife. The ever-suspicious Dot worries that if they let him stay in their house, he might kill them and take the residence for himself. “Why would he want to do that? He’s not stupid,” Jimmy says. Dot replies, “But if he could get away with it and have the flat. Don’t tell me you’ve never thought it.” Rob deadpans, “I’ve never thought it.” Soon Dot and Jimmy are hoping that Niamh and Rob get together.
They delve into faith and religion, with Niamh wondering what being Catholic ever did for her except make her terrified of sin and hell. Dot, a former nurse, is afraid of her temper, which might have cost her her marriage and career. Rob is deeply worried about his immediate future. Meanwhile, Jimmy is an eternal optimist.
But when Jimmy tells Rob about the bottle Dot keeps that she claims has a wish-giving imp in it, new questions arise about what’s next.
There might be a period after the name of each part of Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp., but they form a cohesive whole in this stellar production, gorgeously directed by longtime Churchill collaborator James Macdonald (Infinite Life,Escaped Alone). In three of the four plays, the characters wear Enver Chakartash’s casual, naturalistic costumes (O’Connell is in heavenly garb in Kill.), equating them with the audience, making the otherworldliness more believable. The pain of loss, the brittleness of life, the lack of power humans have over their destiny hover over all four plays. In each one, there is also trepidation about the future of each character, the sets tilted and suspended in ways that make it seem like the actors could at any moment fall off into the darkness or be trapped in blazing white light.
Churchill and Macdonald practically implore us to take a look at ourselves and examine how we deal with faith, grief, and, perhaps most important, time. “I sit on the mantelpiece and time goes by,” the Girl says in Glass. The characters in the other three works also are often sitting down, not taking action but watching and waiting.
It’s enough to force you to face your own future once you get out of your theater seat and venture back into the real world.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Alethea Pace will present between wave and water twice on May 10 (photo by Whitney Browne)
Who:Alethea Pace and dancers What:Boogie Down Dance Series site-specific performances Where:Joseph Rodman Drake Park and Enslaved People’s Burial Ground, Hunts Point When: Saturday, May 10, $12.51-$44.52, 12:30 & 4:00 Why: The BAAD! (Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance) Boogie Down Dance Series continues May 10 with two site-specific performances by Bronx-based multidisciplinary artist Alethea Pace. Incorporating movement, music, and storytelling, between wave and water takes audiences on an immersive, interactive, participatory journey into the history of Joseph Rodman Drake Park and Enslaved People’s Burial Ground in Hunts Point, which was designated an individual landmark in December 2023; it contains two colonial-era cemeteries in an area where the Munsee-speaking Siwanoy people lived until being forced out in 1663 by English settlers.
Written and directed by Pace, the piece, which honors more than three dozen ancestors buried in the park, explores legacy and reclamation in the context of the modern world, with Ghost representing the present, Trickster the past, and Prophet the future; the music is by S T A R R busby with lyrics by Pace, who choreographed the work with the other performers, Maria Bauman, Imani Gaudin, Darvejon Jones, Alex LaSalle, Maleek Rae, Katrina Reid, and Indigo Sparks. The show, which runs between seventy-five and ninety minutes, includes walking a few blocks and getting on a short bus ride. Pace will also host her guided “Listening With: Hunts Point Walking Tours,” with specific dates and times to be announced.
“The articulation of memory, evoked through the act of moving, unearths an ever-evolving archive,” Pace explains on her website. “In collaboration, the participants and I investigate how our histories reside in our bodies, how our bodies shape and are shaped by the places they inhabit, and how bodies moving in nontraditional spaces inspire new ways of seeing.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
