Sarah Jones explores the Declaration of Independence and more in latest solo show (photo by HanJie Chow)
AMERICA, WHO HURT YOU?
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 4, $70-$125 www.tfana.org americawhohurtyou.com
At the end of Sarah Jones’s potent one-woman show, America, Who Hurt You?, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Fort Greene, the Queens-born actress, podcaster, solo specialist, and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador asks audience members to stand “and if you’re open to it, silently hug the person you’re with if you already have their consent, or you can silently give ocular hugs — I made that up.” I was there by myself on the aisle, and the seat next to me was empty; I looked around and no one near me seemed to want to hug anyone but who they were with. I was both disappointed and relieved.
However, that night there was a talkback, followed by a gathering with food and drink at a pub down the street. After filling a plate and getting a stout, I found a small round table and sat down. A woman next to me did the same at a second table. In a move that was extremely unlikely for me, I asked to join her, and she heartily accepted.
We started discussing the play, in which Jones celebrates the semiquincentennial of the nation by exploring how the past has led to the present, focusing on the ever-growing gap between right and left, Republican and Democrat, on various critical issues. I mentioned that I had wanted to ask a question at the talkback but it turned out that someone else had already submitted the same query, about how the show would play in red states; it turned out that the interlocutor was the woman I was sitting with.
Jones had answered, “I want to take this show to Hank,” referring to one of the characters she portrays, a Trump-supporting right winger. “And there’s a version of it that can actually, hopefully hold a dialogue. I have to get my ego out of the way, because I don’t think I’m going to get a standing ovation necessarily from those folks. But that’s not the point; the point is to connect and remind them that we’re related, and that maybe we can do some family counseling together.”
Jones was certainly creating connection at the party, but in this case she was preaching to the choir, an audience of New York City liberals. Would it work in MAGA territory? I wondered.
Family photographs are occasionally projected as Sarah Jones delves into America’s past and present (photo by HanJie Chow)
America, Who Hurt You? is the follow-up to Jones’s 2000 Surface Transit, set on a New York City bus; the Tony-winning 2006 Bridge & Tunnel, about New York City’s immigrant communities; and her 2016 Sell/Buy/Date, which deals with the commercial sex trade. Some of her earlier characters reappear in the latest work, which began life as a podcast about the upcoming 2024 presidential election. “We thought perhaps sanity might prevail, and it was sort of facetious. Like, ‘America, girl,’ who hurt you? Why are you like this? Are you alright? Blink twice. You in danger! Too many?” she says in the play’s introduction. “Well, we all know how it’s turned out. It’s going really well. I mean, have you bought eggs or berries or lettuce recently? No, you probably haven’t because then you might have fucking salmonella-cyclospora and have to miss the theater tonight.”
Among the characters of different genders, ethnicity, age, and class who share their opinions about the state of the nation are Lorraine (“I come from the white part of Sarah’s family that has both Christians and Jews. It’s a long story filled with intrigue and interfaith guilt.”), Nereida (“It’s feels very . . . gentrified to be with you at your Shakespeare Theater”), Rashid (“Whenever we got a room with some good white people in it, we appreciate y’all, that’s mad important, and I know this shit ain’t all your fault, however, for real for real, we gon’ need y’all to fix this.”), Gary (“It does take more than centuries of extermination campaigns, broken treaties, and making us blue creatures for the Avatar movie franchise to destroy an entire people.”), Ms. Lady (“Hank, you know good and well, y’all been lying through your teeth for centuries about the real history of America.”), Mrs. Ling (“Now this country, it’s different. It’s not safe anymore – so many people, more afraid, more separated, there’s more hate, and Sarah Jones started to be afraid for us to speak in public.”), Suneeta (“In recent years even I have begun to warn her that perhaps she should tread lightly or face possible accusations of the cultural appropriation.”), and Habiba (“The past few years especially, the voice I used to share with her, it has been silent.”).
An engaging figure and compelling storyteller, Jones also reaches into the country’s not-always-illustrious history as we meet Louise, who was sold as a slave when she was twelve; Civil War veteran Juan-Carlos, a Mexican who argues that the North broke promises they made to foreign soldiers; and Moira, Jeannie, Shizuko, Edmund, and Marcus, who help round out the diaspora. Jones employs only minor adjustments in shifting among characters, changing her accent and her body movement.
There are also several phone conversations between Britain (“America, I love you, but you are at a frightful bottom – we believe you’re in complete denial, and this is a therapeutic intervention.”) and America (“I’m just getting better and better – like, I’m the hottest country in the world, no one can get in!”)
Projections behind Jones feature family photographs, a live video feed, and a timeline that would probably be controversial in many schools, as the truth hurts. It’s likely no accident that the official logo of the play has a whole lot more red than it does blue in its patriotic design. The play is warmly directed by Eric Ting (The Comeuppance,Between Two Knees), with set and lighting by Jiyoun Chang, sound by Palmer Hefferan, costume by Toni-Leslie James, and video by Stefania Bulbarella.
A production of the National Black Theatre and Theatre for a New Audience, America, Who Hurt You? was commissioned by Oxford University for its Unfinished Revolutions series, comprising works by Suzan-Lori Parks, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Anna Clyne and Jody Elff, Taylor Mac and Matt Ray, and Lil Buck and Dannielle “Rhimes” Lecointe. It’s part history lesson, part tribute to America’s melting-pot legacy, and part screed about how we ended up where we are. Some of her comparisons do lean into obvious left-wing judgments and verbiage over the one-hundred-minute performance, but it is an ever-evolving narrative, notably with the midterms approaching. “With the current news cycle, I basically have to rewrite it twice a day,” Jones says. “Like brushing my fucking teeth.”
In 2026 America, even the brand of toothpaste she uses is probably controversial. She’ll find out when she takes her show on the road.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Michael Gardner’s adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles is a rowdy, intense extravaganza (photo by Kent Meister)
LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES
East Village Basement
321 East Ninth St. between First & Second Aves.
Thursday – Sunday through October 4, $16.88-$25.00 enfantsplay.com
As fortunate ticket holders enter the East Village Basement, a small, intimate downstairs space on Ninth St., the four actors in Michael Gardner’s adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles are already present, three moving around carefully, turning on a record player, or simply flitting about, while one hides in a corner on a windowsill.
One of the performers crawled over to me, looked up at me, and barked. I barked back. She seemed to enjoy the interaction. Other audience members were not sure what to do while the actors traversed the room, simply ignoring them as they continued their conversations or checking their phones.
Eventually, the play proper begins, and it is a rowdy extravaganza that makes clear why Cocteau’s 1929 novella caused quite a stir at the time. Agatha (Caroline Lina DeFazio), Gerard (Victor Gao), Elisabeth (Maysie Jane Kilgore), and Paul (Rutger Scott) are four teens immersed in decadent, degrading, somewhat deranged games of sex and war, love and death, education, health, Hollywood, high fashion, and religion. There are seats for only fifteen audience members for each show, on three sides of the basement. The walls are covered with photographs and newspaper and magazine clippings. Life-size fabric human dolls hang in one corner. A Victrola plays the kinds of songs that were heard in the ghost scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. A steamer trunk holds numerous surprises.
Elisabeth recites lines from the Catholic responsory “Deliver Me.” She asks, “Where’s my bier?” Her brother, Paul, responds, “You can’t lie on a bier until you’re dead.” Paul grabs Elisabeth by the neck and she pulls out a gun. The siblings try to force one of the dolls to eat a communion wafer. “You have to eat the body, body!” Paul demands. Elisabeth says, “You’re going to hell if you don’t eat the body!” Paul declares, “I’m going to hell!” Elisabeth counters, “No, I’m going to hell!”
Gerard and Agatha enter the fray and a snowball fight breaks out. Elisabeth complains about having to take care of her sick mother, who is in another part of the house. Elisabeth offers to carve her name on Gerard’s tongue. Agatha is covered by a white sheet. Paul idolizes his friend Dargelos. They visit the seaside. The turn the trunk into a bathtub. Elisabeth makes Gerard do strange things with the doll she names Polly Pigtails. They perform creepy rituals.
They play a game called Terrorize the Children, in search of candy. They treat a crayfish like it’s a baby. When Agatha explains that she’s an orphan, Paul says that everyone is an orphan. There are no parents in this world; the kids have been left to fend for themselves, feral beings living like animals, the only rules the ones they make up.
Maysie Jane Kilgore and Rutger Scott play siblings caught up in decadent games in Les Enfants Terribles(photo by Kent Meister)
Les Enfants Terribles is an exciting and exhilarating theatrical experience, harkening back to the days when companies, many based in the East Village, took risks and chances in thrilling experimental happenings that challenged norms. Gardner (The Ninja Cherry Orchard,In a Strange Room) directs with a kind of controlled chaos, allowing his talented cast to dig deep into the material, bringing it to life with an infectious energy.
Kilgore and Scott are particularly effective as the siblings who more than hint at incest as Elisabeth and Paul orchestrate the maelstrom swirling around them and tempt death again and again; the actors are no longer teenagers but they know well from where they came. The object-strewn set is haunting, a blast from the past that holds secrets all its own. Despite its tragic nature, the show is very, very funny, although it does lose some steam in the latter sections when jealousies take over.
In his novella, Cocteau, the French novelist, playwright, designer, and filmmaker, wrote, “The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.” Cocteau showed elements of understanding and empathy for his characters in Les Enfants Terribles, four youngsters who had been done wrong by their elders; we cannot blame them for the outlandish dramas they concoct.
Cocteau revealed the folly of mothers and fathers in his 1938 play, Les Parents Terribles, which he adapted into a 1948 film starring Jean Marais and Yvonne de Bray; although it is not a direct sequel to Les Enfants Terribles, the later work does not show grown-ups in the best light.
At its heart, Gardner’s adaptation is a wild and frenetic condemnation of the damage adults and society inflict on children. It is unusual, it is unpredictable, it is deeply involving, and there’s nothing else quite like it in New York theater right now.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
TRAINS: LOCAL ROUTES
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
October 3 – November 1 metrograph.com
In her new book, Trains (Fordham University Press, October 6, $18.99-$70), New School associate professor Genevieve Yue writes about the connection between trains and cinema around the world in four chapters: “How It Feels to Be a Woman on a Train (Itinerary: London to Venice),” “Ends of the Line (Itinerary: Los Angeles to Rhinecliff),” “Phantom Rides (Itinerary: Shanghai to Hong Kong),” and “Strangers on Trains.” In conjunction with the publication of the book, Yue is guest-curating the two-part Metrograph series “Trains: Local Routes,” running October 3 through November 1. The seventeen films range from Louis Lumière’s 1896 L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat to Payal Kapadia’s 2024 All We Imagine as Light, including works by Chantal Akerman, Martin Scorsese, Sergei Dvortsevoy, Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, and Bruce Conner.
“The humble journeys of the short-range rail rarely get their due. The subway ride, the suburban commute, and the municipal railways that encircle daily life: these are spaces we typically associate with boredom and routine, unlike the adventure of their long-distance cousins,” said in a statement. “The history of film, however, tells a different story. From the Lumière brothers’ train of early cinema, rolling into the station at La Ciotat — and, by some accounts, headed straight into the audience — to the wind that sweeps through the Mumbai local in Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024), the short line has been a place where working people have crowded together and discovered, sometimes, romantic possibility, unnerving encounters, and opportunities for existential self-interrogation. For women especially, like the housewives in David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) and Yasujirō Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952), the train offers a space of reflection and relative freedom, even as its berth is narrow, its passages fleeting.”
Below is a closer look at several of the films, not all of which have been scheduled yet. Each review is followed by a quote from Yue, who will attend several screenings for introductions and book signings.
Walter Matthau tries to get to the bottom of a bizarre subway heist in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (Joseph Sargent, 1974)
Metrograph
Saturday, October 3, 2:30
Friay, October 9, 2:00 metrograph.com
Loosely adapted from the book by John Godey, Joseph Sargent’s underground thriller, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, wonderfully captures the cynicism of New York City in the 1970s. Four heavily armed and mustached men — Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw), Mr. Green (Martin Balsam), Mr. Gray (Hector Elizondo), and Mr. Brown (Earl Hindman), colorful pseudonyms that influenced Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs — hijack an uptown 4 train, demanding one million dollars in one hour from a nearly bankrupt city or else they will kill all eighteen passengers, one at a time, minute by minute. The hapless mayor (Lee Wallace) is in bed with the flu, so Deputy Mayor Warren LaSalle (Tony Roberts) takes charge on the political end while transit detective Lt. Zachary Garber (a great Walter Matthau) and Inspector Daniels (Julius Harris) of the NYPD team up to try to figure out just how in the world the criminals expect to get away with the seemingly impossible heist.
Sargent (Sybil) offers a nostalgic look back at a bygone era, before technology radically changed the way trains are run and police work is handled. The film also features a very funny, laconic Jerry Stiller as Lt. Rico Patrone and the beloved Kenneth McMillan as the borough commander. It was remade as a television movie in 1998, starring Edward James Olmos, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Lorraine Bracco, and as an embarrassingly bad big-budget bomb in 2009 by Tony Scott.
Genevieve Yue, who will introduce the October 3 screening with film scholar Erika Balsom and will sign copies of her book after the film: “Featuring one of the grittiest New Yorkers ever seen on film: the ruddy-cheeked wino who, despite the commotion on her hijacked 6 train, sleeps through the entire ordeal.”
A group of men try to find kidnappers in Akira Kurosawa’s tense noir / police procedural
HIGH AND LOW (TENGOKU TO JIGOKU) (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)
Metrograph
Sunday, October 4, 1:15
Saturday, October 10, 10:20 metrograph.com
On the verge of being forced out of the company he has dedicated his life to, National Shoes executive Kingo Gondo’s (Toshirō Mifune) life is thrown into further disarray when kidnappers claim to have taken his son, Jun (Toshio Egi), and are demanding a huge ransom for his safe return. But when Gondo discovers that they have mistakenly grabbed Shinichi (Masahiko Shimazu), the son of his chauffeur, Aoki (Yutaka Sada), he at first refuses to pay. But at the insistence of his wife (Kyogo Kagawa), the begging of Aoki, and the advice of police inspector Taguchi (Kenjiro Ishiyama), he reconsiders his decision, setting in motion a riveting police procedural that is filled with tense emotion. Loosely based on Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novel King’s Ransom, Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, photographed by longtime Kurosawa cinematographer Asakazu Nakai, is divided into two primary sections: The first half takes place in Gondo’s luxury home, orchestrated like a stage play as the characters are developed and the plan takes hold. The second part of the film follows the police, under the leadership of Chief Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai), as they hit the streets of the seedier side of Yokohama in search of the kidnappers.
Known in Japan as Tengoku to Jigoku, which translates as Heaven and Hell, High and Low is an expert noir, a subtle masterpiece that tackles numerous socioeconomic and cultural issues as Gondo weighs the fate of his business against the fate of a small child; it all manages to feel as fresh and relevant today as it probably did back in the ’60s. Spike Lee remade the film as Highest 2 Lowest in 2025 but failed to capture the intricacies of the story and characters.
Genevieve Yue: “High and Low has one of the most iconic train scenes of all time. And though it’s only one of many segments, the entire, wildly careening film has the feeling of a train in the slow-motion throes of derailment.”
Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) explore an extramarital affair in Brief Encounter
BRIEF ENCOUNTER (David Lean, 1945)
Metrograph
Saturday, October 10, noon
Friday, October 23, 1:50 metrograph.com
“Don’t hurry. I’m perfectly happy,” Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) tells her rather boring husband, Fred (Cyril Raymond), as he returns to his crossword puzzle one night. “How can I possibly say that?” she then thinks to herself. “‘Don’t hurry. I’m perfectly happy.’ If only it were true. Not, I suppose, that anybody’s ever perfectly happy, really. But just to be ordinarily contented, to be at peace. It’s such a little while ago really but it seems an eternity since that train went out of the station, taking him away into the darkness. I was happy then.” In David Lean’s Brief Encounter, one of the greatest romantic films ever made, Laura, a housewife and mother, can’t stop herself from falling for dapper doctor Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), who is also married. As they explore a potential physical relationship, Laura is wracked with guilt, especially as she keeps bumping into nosy gossip Myrtle Bagot (Joyce Carey). But the two potential lovers are so drawn to each other, filling the holes in each other’s lives, that they consider risking all they have for just one more moment together.
Winner of the 1946 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Brief Encounter is told in flashback in Laura’s voice as she goes over every wonderful and terrifying detail in her mind while contemplating whether to spill the beans to the generally oblivious Fred. Written by Noël Coward based on his 1936 one-act play, Still Life, the film features terrifically subtle performances by Johnson and Howard as the daring couple; you can’t help but root for them, despite the possible consequences. Lean, who earned the first of his seven Best Director Oscar nominations for the heartbreaking film, keeps things relatively, well, lean, getting right to the point in less than ninety minutes; he would go on to helm such sprawling epics as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India before his death in 1991 at the age of eighty-three.
Genevieve Yue: “The trains are mercilessly exact in Brief Encounter — there’s only three minutes between the departures of the trains that take Laura and Alec away from each other, and they’re never late.”
Opposites attract in strange ways in Alfred Hitchcock’s STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)
Metrograph
Friday, October 16, 2:15
Friday, October 23, 3:50 metrograph.com
Metrograph’s “Trains: Local Routes” continues with one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most multilayered, complex tales, the 1951 psychological double-murder thriller Strangers on a Train. Shortly after introducing himself to amateur tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) on a train, mama’s boy Bruno Anthony (an appropriately creepy Robert Walker) concocts a supposedly foolproof plan in which Bruno will kill Guy’s unfaithful wife, Miriam (Laura Elliott), so Guy can marry his socialite girlfriend, Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), one of the daughters of a U.S. senator (Leo G. Carroll). In return, Guy will kill Bruno’s father (Jonathan Hale). Bruno believes he has devised the perfect crisscross murder, with neither man having a clear motive and nothing for the cops to find to link them together. While Bruno is serious, Guy thinks he’s just a loon (Walker had in fact been recently released from a psychiatric clinic after suffering a nervous breakdown and died at the age of thirty-two before the film even opened), but after the psychopathic Bruno actually does kill Miriam — photographed in an unforgettable way by cinematographer Robert Burks, shown in a pair of broken eyeglasses — he starts shadowing Guy, insisting he keep his part of the bargain and kill Mr. Anthony, something Guy never intended on doing. Soon the cops are involved, along with a broken alibi, a key, and a critical cigarette lighter, leading to a spectacular conclusion on a merry-go-round.
Reflections in a pair of glasses continue the theme of doubling in eerie Hitchcock classic
Loosely based on Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel and featuring an early screenplay written by Raymond Chandler (whose name was kept in the credits for marquee value despite Hitchcock’s famous — and literal — trashing of his contribution), Strangers on a Train is a powerful, tense mystery built around the idea of the double; from the opening scene of two pairs of shoes — immediately equating, and differentiating between, the two protagonists, as if they were two parts of the same person — to Hitchcock’s appearance carrying a double bass, to Anne’s younger sister, Babs (Patricia Hitchcock, Alfred’s daughter), wearing the same glasses as Miriam, to Bruno’s declaration, upon ordering two double scotches and relating them to tennis, “The only kind of doubles I play,” the film is filled with mirroring or directly opposing elements. As with Hitchcock’s Rope, which also starred Granger, Strangers on a Train also has a clear homosexual subtext; in real life Walker was straight while Granger was bisexual. Shot in a dark black-and-white that adds to the chilling effects, Strangers on a Train is one of Hitchcock’s best, a fully realized, frightening film that ends in a big way.
Genevieve Yue: “In Hitchcock, the people you meet on trains can spell romance, adventure, or, in the case of Strangers on a Train’s Guy Haines, a colossal headache! Tip: beware anyone wearing spectator shoes.”
Prabha (Kani Kusruti) takes a new look at her life in All We Imagine as Light
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
Metrograph
Sunday, October 25, 12:15 metrograph.com
Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia won the Golden Eye at Cannes in 2021 for best documentary for A Night of Knowing Nothing, a film that mixes fact and fiction while telling the story of two lovers trying to stay connected via letters amid student protests in India. Kapadia mixes fact and fiction again in her follow-up, the tender and deeply poignant All We Imagine as Light, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes.
The follow-up opens with gritty shots of the streets of Mumbai, as unseen people share their difficulties trying to make a new life for themselves after migrating from the country. “There’s always the feeling I’ll have to leave,” one person says. Another opines, “The city takes time away from you.” A third argues, “Why would anyone want to move back?”
Kapadia, who was born in Mumbai, then shifts to the fictional tale of two nurses and a third hospital employee fighting loneliness as they care for sick people. Prabha (a heart-wrenching Kani Kusruti) and the younger Anu (Divya Prabha) live together in an apartment in the city. Prabha, who is in an arranged marriage, has not seen her husband, who is working in Germany, for more than a year. Anu, whose family is Hindi, is in love with a Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), keeping their relationship secret for fear of being discovered and shunned. And Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) is a recent widow who is being evicted from her home of twenty-two years because her name is nowhere on the paperwork left behind by her husband.
When Prabha receives a brand-new German rice cooker in the mail, she assumes it is from her spouse, perhaps a message that he is not coming back and that she should proceed with her life. But she is tentative to start dating, even as she is pursued by the goofy but sweet Dr. Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), who writes poetry for her.
The three women decide to hit the road, taking a trip to Parvaty’s seaside Maharashtrian hometown, where they take stock of their lives, particularly after a man washes up onshore.
All We Imagine as Light is sensitively shot by cinematographer Ranabir Das, with a soft, jazzy score by Topshe as soft rain falls, trains pass by in the background, and Prabha and Parvaty throw stones at a billboard for a pending skyscraper that proclaims, “CLASS is a privilege reserved for the PRIVILEGED.”
All We Imagine as Light is an engaging and touchingly lyrical look at womanhood in contemporary Mumbai, as the city threatens three women with potential isolation and alienation until they bind together. The youngest, Anu, instills new energy into the others to reevaluate their situations and take action. “Do you ever think of the future?” Anu asks.
The film appropriately provides no firm answers in the end, but it is clear that Kapadia’s future is a bright one.
Genevieve Yue: “The humble journeys of the short-range rail rarely get their due. The subway ride, the suburban commute, and the municipal railways that encircle daily life: these are spaces we typically associate with boredom and routine, unlike the adventure of their long-distance cousins. The history of film, however, tells a different story. From the Lumière brothers’ train of early cinema, rolling into the station at La Ciotat—and, by some accounts, headed straight into the audience—to the wind that sweeps through the Mumbai local in Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024), the short line has been a place where working people have crowded together and discovered, sometimes, romantic possibility, unnerving encounters, and opportunities for existential self-interrogation. For women especially, like the housewives in David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) and Yasujirō Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952), the train offers a space of reflection and relative freedom, even as its berth is narrow, its passages fleeting.”
Chantal Akerman combines footage of 1970s New York with letters from her mother in News from Home
NEWS FROM HOME (Chantal Akerman, 1977)
Metrograph
Sunday, November 1 metrograph.com
In 1971, twenty-year-old Chantal Akerman moved to New York City from her native Belgium, determined to become a filmmaker. Teaming up with cinematographer Babette Mangolte, she made several experimental films, including Hotel Monterey and La Chambre, before moving back to Belgium in 1973. But in 1976 she returned to New York City to make News from Home, a mesmerizing work about family and dislocation, themes that would be prevalent throughout her career. The film consists of long, mostly static shots, using natural sound and light, depicting a gray, dismal New York City as cars move slowly down narrow, seemingly abandoned streets, people ride the graffiti-laden subway, workers and tourists pack Fifth Ave., and the Staten Island Ferry leaves Lower Manhattan. The only spoken words occur when Akerman, in voice-over, reads letters from her mother, Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, sent during Chantal’s previous time in New York, concerned about her daughter’s welfare and safety. “I’m glad you don’t have that job anymore and that you’re liking New York,” Akerman reads in one letter. “People here are surprised. They say New York is terrible, inhuman. Perhaps they don’t really know it and are too quick to judge.” Her mother’s missives often chastise her for not writing back more often while also filling her in on the details of her family’s life, including her mother, father, and sister, Sylviane, as well as local gossip.
Although it was not meant to be a straightforward documentary, News from Home now stands as a mesmerizing time capsule of downtrodden 1970s New York, sometimes nearly unrecognizable when compared to the city of today. The film also casts another light on the relationship between mother and daughter, which was highlighted in Akerman’s final film, No Home Movie, in which Chantal attempts to get her mother, a Holocaust survivor, to open up about her experiences in Auschwitz. Nelly died shortly after filming, and Akerman committed suicide the following year, only a few months after No Home Movie played at several film festivals (and was booed at Locarno). News from Home takes on new meaning in light of Akerman’s end, a unique love letter to city and family and to how we maintained connections in a pre-internet world. News from Home will be preceded by G. W. “Billy” Bitzer’s 1905 short, Interior NY Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street.
Genevieve Yue, who will introduce the November 1 screening: “Though Chantal Akerman’s voice can be heard throughout News from Home, her image is only briefly glimpsed, in a reflection on the train. We can’t quite see her, but others undoubtedly can — men, especially, gawk unashamedly, a reminder that the graffiti-covered subway of 1976 New York was often a place of danger and hostility. Not so for the turn-of-the-century train of Interior NY Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street, whose newly built tunnels are illuminated by lanterns that glow like Christmas lights.”
Asa Butterfield stars as a homeless orphan on a mission in Martin Scorsese’s 3-D adventure
HUGO (Martin Scorsese, 2011)
Metrograph
Dates to come metrograph.com
Martin Scorsese wears his cinematic heart on his sleeve in his first family-friendly film, Hugo. Based on Brian Selznick’s Caldecott-winning 2007 illustrated historical-fiction novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the 3-D movie follows the adventures of the title character, a homeless orphan boy (Asa Butterfield) who survives by his wits in a Paris train station in the early 1900s. He spends his days stealing small bits of food, winding the big clock, avoiding Inspector Gustav (Sacha Baron Cohen), and trying to find parts for an automaton he is rebuilding, hoping it will have a message for him from his father (Jude Law). He soon makes his only friend, a girl named Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) who is being raised by her godparents, the bitter Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley) and his wife, Mama Jeanne (Helen McCrory). When it turns out that Papa Georges is the one and only Georges Méliès, who made the world’s first science-fiction film, A Trip to the Moon, among hundreds of others, then was thought to have died in obscurity, all of his work destroyed, Hugo and Isabelle, along with the help of film historian René Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg), are determined to resurrect Papa Georges and his reputation.
Gorgeously shot by Robert Richardson and featuring marvelous period sets by Dante Ferretti, Hugo is beautiful to look at, the camera roaming through the immense train station and up the tall clock tower like in a Jules Verne story. Such side plots as the budding romances between a café owner (Frances de la Tour) and the newspaper seller (Richard Griffiths) and between Gustav and a shy flower girl (Emily Mortimer) feel forced, and the main narrative meanders its way into treacly territory as all the parts slowly come together. At its heart, Hugo is a movie about the love of movies, paying tribute to the early cinema of Méliès, Harold Lloyd, and others but it gets too stuck on the underlying theme of the preservation of old films, one of Scorsese’s driving forces. Still, Hugo is a visual treat in which Scorsese makes the most of 3-D technology, particularly in the first half, before things get a little too sticky (and slickly) sweet, even for a children’s film.
Genevieve Yue: “Of all the mechanical marvels in Hugo — a mysterious automaton, a wind-up mouse, the camera of early film pioneer Méliès — the steam locomotive is what brings them all together, and Hugo to his newfound family, like a set of converging tracks.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
BEN KATCHOR: HOTEL & FARM LAUNCH EVENTS
Brooklyn Public Library for Arts & Culture
10 Lafayette Ave., L10 Building, second floor
Tuesday, October 6, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
Strand Books, 828 Broadway
Friday, October 16, $13.61 ($39.15 includes signed copy of book), 7:30 katchor.com bklynlibrary.org strandbooks.com
“At dawn, a battered pickup truck carrying 300 pounds of fresh manure emerges from the garage of a suburban home.” So begins master cartoonist and storyteller Ben Katchor’s latest graphic novel, Hotel and Farm (Pantheon, October 6, $32). The New York City native and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow has been detailing the trials and tribulations of average, everyday people with odd proclivities, often involving a disappearing past, for nearly forty years, having published such marvelous books as Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay,The Jew of New York,The Cardboard Valise, and Hand-Drying in America and written such musical theater pieces as The Rosenbach Company,Up from the Stacks, and The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, or, The Friends of Dr. Rushower. His most beloved creation is grumpy real estate photographer Julius Knipl.
In Hotel and Farm, Katchor introduces us to Yalos Finger, Lillian Kurort, the Playfellows, Jug Oar, Randolph Prinzkoff, the Blossims, Echoic City, the Ottoman Crib, the Ruffyan Hotel, Parmysian Fields factory farm, Ecstatic Foods, and other people and places just getting through each day. Katchor is a superb raconteur and observer of life, with a love of old architecture and characters who exist under the radar.
He will be celebrating the publication of the new book on October 6 at 6:30 (free with RSVP) at the Brooklyn Public Library for Arts & Culture, in conversation with Afghan-born, NYC-based filmmaker and multimedia artist Jem Cohen, who has made such works as Museum Hours,Chain, and, with Katchor, the 1989 short Love Teller. Ten days later, Katchor will be at the Strand, speaking with Emmy-, Tony-, and Grammy-winning composer David Yazbek (The Band’s Visit,Buena Vista Social Club). Tickets are $13.61 for the event itself and $39.15 with a signed copy of the book.
If you don’t know anything about Katchor, this is a great opportunity to see one of the consummate chroniclers of another side of New York City and the world.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Volunteers are needed for special public art project on Saturday (artwork: Join Together, 2026, by Debra Pearlman)
TAKE ONE ACTION
Cristin Tierney Gallery, 49 Walker St., and other locations
Saturday, October 3, free, noon – 6:00
Volunteers needed: info@artatatimelikethis.com artatatimelikethis.com cristintierney.com
Two weeks ago, Art at a Time Like This (ATLT) kicked off its “Take One Action” public art project programming with a panel discussion in Brooklyn, focusing on how to resist current US immigration policies. The next phase launches on October 3, when six mobile LED trucks hit the streets, featuring original work by Shaun Leonardo, Marilyn Minter, Robert Longo, Sasha Stiles, Jonathan Allen, Marka27, Janet Biggs and Terry Berkowitz, Debra Pearlman, Autumn Savage, Kiyo Gutiérrez, and Julian Alexander, as part of Fall of Freedom, “an open instigation to artists, venues, and institutions across all disciplines to put your work in the world on October 2, 3, and 4, countering fascist repression and censorship with joyful communities of defiant creativity.” The ATLT works examine patriotism, immigration, the climate crisis, and a call to participate.
The day begins at noon at Cristin Tierney Gallery on Walker St., where many of the artists will be available for a meet-and-greet. The other trucks will depart from the Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and MoMA PS1 at 11:00, and Columbia University and the Bronx at noon. Each truck will follow a unique route; maps will be available.
“I often hear people say, but what can we do? We believe that taking one small action can make a difference, create a snowball effect, and restore a sense of empowerment and hope,” ATLT cofounder and director Barbara Pollack said in a statement.
ATLT considers the project “an antidote” for what is happening around the globe today, where freedom finds itself facing more frightening barriers every day. The organization, which was formed at the beginning of the pandemic, is looking for volunteers to be onsite and share information about the project with pedestrians and viewers and take photographs at two of the stops. If interested, please send an email to info@artatatimelikethis.com.
The event concludes at Cristin Tierney at 6:00, where people will gather for a celebration amid Biggs’s terrific “Path of Totality” exhibition, which includes two stunning short films, the 2022–24 Eclipse (Antarctica, December 4, 2021) and the 2025 three-channel Eclipse (Amazon, September 7, 1858), in addition to fascinating related ephemera.
What can you do? You can volunteer for this exciting project and/or check out several of the trucks as they campaign for change one month before the extremely consequential midterm elections.
As Pollack told twi-ny a few months ago, “At the very beginning of a worldwide pandemic, we asked a simple question: How can you think of art at a time like this? The question is now more relevant than ever, which presents both a tragedy and an opportunity for creative solutions.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Damon Horowitz’s Becoming Hamlet gives him and the audience the opportunity to portray the tragic Danish prince (photo by Valerie Terranova Photography)
BECOMING HAMLET
Five Angels Theater
789 Tenth Ave. at Fifty-Second St.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 3, $29-$79 becominghamlet.com
To be Hamlet, or not to be Hamlet: That is the question posed in Becoming Hamlet, which continues at Five Angels Theater through October 3.
If you are a purist who wants to see Hamlet, perhaps William Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, this play is not the thing. However, if you’ve ever wanted to portray the Dane, for a few seconds or a minute or two, then this show just might be the thing, a fun participatory event for those who have dreamed of at least temporary stardom.
Adapted by Damon Horowitz and directed by Sybille Bruun, Becoming Hamlet has streamlined the often-three-hour-play to about a hundred bumpy minutes. The audience has the choice of watching in standard riser seating or participating, in which case they sit on a chair on the floor. Everyone is considered to be Hamlet, as if the conflicted prince has been divided into dozens of beings and personalities. The night I attended, there were about twenty-five Hamlets on the floor and approximately fifteen people in the risers, with plenty of empty seats.
As you enter the theater, characters engage you in conversation — a man in a regal blue suit walked up to me and was surprised when I correctly addressed him as Polonius, so we spoke about whether I was being faithful to Ophelia while studying in Wittenberg. Facilitators in dark cloaks (Tristan Andre, Emily Jackoway, Addy Jenkins, Sevans Martinez) approach you and ask what kind of a role you want, from reading a line on a card to going onstage for something more. I was given the line “I am constant to my purposes” from act five, scene two, and told that I would be led around the right side of the space, then walk slowly to the center, where I would face the audience and make my Shakespearean debut.
While waiting for my moment in the sun — or, in this case, darkness — I couldn’t help but recall two recent dreams in which I was an actor in a play and completely blanked out on my lines, intense fear and embarrassment overwhelming me. So I studied the card relentlessly, even as I occasionally was tapped to deliver other bits of dialogue. Some audience members were led onstage and read lines that were projected on the walls at the right and left.
Alas, a gravedigger (Equiano Mosieri) introduces poor Yorick in classic Shakespeare scene (photo by Valerie Terranova Photography)
The production features fine costumes by Amit Gajwani, with Gertrude (Desiree Baxter) and Ophelia (Jude Feingold) standing out in fabulous shoes. The story has been whittled down to the basics: Hamlet (Horowitz) has returned home to see his recently widowed mother, Gertrude, marry his dead father’s brother, Claudius (David Littleton), who has assumed the crown. Accompanied by his best friend, Horatio (Tyler Moss), Hamlet is told by his father’s ghost (Equiano Mosieri) that Claudius in fact murdered King Hamlet, and he considers revenge. He is in love with Ophelia, whose father, Polonius (Jim Pratzon), is chief counsel to Claudius and whose brother, Laertes (Steven Lamon), is suspicious of Hamlet. As Hamlet appears to be going mad, Claudius summons his nephew’s childhood friend, Guildenkrantz (Truman Gaudoin) — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been turned into one person — to be spies for him. There’s a play-within-the-play and a visit to a graveyard, but otherwise various other subplots and minor characters have been excised.
The pacing is inconsistent, since it is dependent on the skills of several dozen nonprofessional actors. Various words are repeated in ways that seem random. The show doesn’t provide new insight into the work; instead, if feels more like a vanity project for Horowitz and the audience, arranged just so they can all play the tormented Danish prince. If you go with that as your goal, not caring about the intricate emotional and psychological aspects of Shakespeare’s story, then you will most likely be fine with what you get.
As my time approached, I devised a plan: Since I was going to deliver my line center stage, only a few feet from my chair, I placed the card facing out. I was tapped on the shoulder, and a facilitator led me on my journey. Finally standing at my spot, I began my very brief soliloquy: “I am constant,” I said defiantly, and then forgot the next word. I looked out at the audience, then, attempting a natural maneuver, at my chair, where I could read the large type. I firmly, proudly stated, “to my purposes,” as if the pause was, well, on purpose.
I sat back down and breathed a huge, silent sigh of relief.
Later, as I was heading for the bus, three women who had been at the show called out to me, “Congratulations!”
I felt like a star.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
A new production of Václav Havel’s Unveiling comes to Chelsea this month (photo courtesy Untitled Theater Company No. 61)
UNVEILING
Torn Page
435 West Twenty-Second St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Thursday – Saturday, October 1–17, general admission $2, suggested donation $25 untitledtheater.com tornpage.org
In honor of what would have been Václav Havel’s ninetieth birthday — the first president of the Czech Republic and acclaimed dissident playwright died in 2011 at the age of seventy-five — Edward Einhorn and Untitled Theater Company No. 61 are bringing a revival of Havel’s 1975 absurdist one-act play Unveiling (Vernisáž) to Torn Page in Chelsea, in association with the Czech Center New York. Part of the Vaněk Trilogy that also includes Audience and Protest, the work continues the story of Ferdinand Vaněk, a kind of Havel alter ego who battles authoritarianism.
In Unveiling, running October 1–17 in a production directed by Einhorn using a translation by Jan Novák, Vaněk is invited to see how two of his friends, Vera and Michael, have upgraded their apartment, where they get caught up in a debate about moral integrity and Communism in a way that relates to what is happening today, when Americans are faced with ever-more-ethical choices nearly every day. When the couple shows him their new confessional, he asks, “What do you do with it?” The cast features Craig Anderson, Bob Brader, and Yvonne Roen, with costumes by Ramona Ponce.
On October 5 ($27.50), the play will move to the Bohemian National Hall on the Upper East Side for one night only, with live ASL translation, followed by a panel discussion and a reception with goulash.
And on October 12 at Torn Page, Untitled Theater Company No. 61 will present a staged reading of Einhorn’s Frida Vaněk, a modern sequel to Unveiling starring Vas Eli, Nalina Mann, Alyssa Simon, and Richard Toth, about Ferdinand’s niece, whose mother dies, leaving behind a file that contains some surprising information. General admission is $2, with a suggested donation of $10. Seats are limited for all performances.
As Havel himself said, “Truth and love must overcome lies and hatred.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
