twi-ny recommended events

JERUSALEM QUARTET AT 92NY

The Jerusalem Quartet will perform works by Haydn, Brahms, and Shostakovich on April 16 at 92NY

Who: Jerusalem Quartet
What: Marshall Weinberg Classical Music Season concert
Where: The 92nd Street Y, Kaufmann Concert Hall, 1395 Lexington Ave. between Ninety-First & Ninety-Second Sts.
When: Tuesday, April 16, $25-$55 in person, $25 online (available for 72 hours after performance), 7:30
Why: The 92nd St. Y’s Marshall Weinberg Classical Music Season continues on April 16 with a live performance by the Jerusalem Quartet. Now in its twenty-ninth season, the quartet consists of first violinist Alexander Pavlovsky, second violinist Sergei Bresler, violist Ori Kam, and cellist Kyril Zlotnikov; founding members Pavlovsky and Bresler are from Ukraine, third cofounder Zlotnikov is from Belarus, and Kam was born in California and raised in Israel. The program at Kaufmann Concert Hall features Haydn’s Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 76, No. 6; Brahms’s Quartet No. 3 in B-flat Major, Op. 67; and Shostakovich’s, Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 68. Tickets are $25-$55; the concert will also be available online ($25) for seventy-two hours after the performance.

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

CORRUPTION

Toby Stephens stars as “Hatchet Man Watson” in J. T. Rogers’s Corruption (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

CORRUPTION
Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 14, $108
www.lct.org

In the last ten years, a handful of plays have successfully taken on the financial industry, the media, and politics in intriguing and involving productions often based on real-life events. In such works as Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand and Junk, Sarah Burgess’s Dry Powder, and James Graham’s Ink, capitalism trumps basic humanity in pursuit of money and power.

Brooklyn-based playwright J. T. Rogers follows the money and power in the provocative thriller Corruption, making its world premiere at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.

Rogers delved into the Rwandan genocide in The Overwhelming, the Soviet war in Afghanistan in Blood and Gifts, and the Middle East peace process in the Tony-winning Oslo. Inspired by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman’s 2012 book, Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain, he now turns his attention to the ripped-from-the-headlines true story behind the News International phone hacking scandal, in which the British tabloid News of the World was accused of breaking into thousands of people’s phones, from average citizens to politicians, celebrities, law enforcement, competitors, and the royal family, in order to get dirt and, essentially, blackmail them in order to sell more papers and gain further influence.

At the center of it all is Rebekah Brooks (usually portrayed by Saffron Burrows but I saw her understudy, Eleanor Handley), the ruthless editor of the paper and the company’s CEO. The show begins at her gala wedding, where she marries socialite and former horse trainer Charlie Brooks (John Behlmann); among the guests at the Sarsden Estate in Oxfordshire are Prime Minister Gordon Brown (Anthony Cochrane), Tory leader David Cameron, and freshly promoted News Corp head James Murdoch (Seth Numrich), the younger son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who remains unseen in the play but is a key figure throughout.

“Newspapers are a relic, Rebekah,” James says. Rebekah argues, “Now, James, the News of the World and the Sun are the backbone of this company. They are the engine that powers everything else.” James responds, “Save that speech for my father. You two can continue your newsprint romance when I’m not around. I’m here to grow this company. Going forward, change is the order of the day. From now on, our focus is television and new media. Everything else is expendable.”

Rebekah Brooks (Saffron Burrows) in under the microscope in ripped-from-the-headlines play (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Meanwhile, after being excoriated in the Sun as a “hatchet man” for Prime Minister Brown, Watson (Toby Stephens), a member of Parliament, tells the PM that he needs a less visible role because the newspaper’s vitriol is affecting his wife, Siobhan (Robyn Kerr), and their young son. He instead accepts what is supposed to be a lackluster position on the Culture, Media, and Sport Select Committee. But when it is revealed that Gordon Taylor, president of the Professional Footballers’ Association, accepted a seven-figure payoff from News International to keep quiet about phone hacking, the committee starts investigating the case, which leads them to Brooks, former News of the World editor Andy Coulson (Numrich), and assistant police commissioner John Yates (T. Ryder Smith).

Despite pleas from his wife to let it go, Watson is driven to expose the corruption at nearly any cost, working with Guardian journalist Nick Davies (Smith), political foe Chris Bryant (K. Todd Freeman), New York Times reporter Jo Becker (usually Eleanor Handley but I saw a fine Doireann Mac Mahon), tainted multimillionaire Max Mosley (Michael Siberry), Independent journalist Martin Hickman (Sanjit De Silva), lawyer Charlotte Harris (Sepideh Moafi), and Paul (Behlmann) and Karie (Mac Mahon) from Watson’s staff. Leading the charge against them is News International chief counsel Tom Crone (Dylan Baker), who has Uncle Rupert’s ear, which enrages James, who thinks he is now running his father’s business.

Many of the key players risk their careers — and the lives of themselves and their families — as Watson can’t stop digging for the truth.

Paul (John Behlmann), Jo Becker (Eleanor Handley), and Tom Watson (Toby Stephens) uncover damning evidence in Corruption (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Corruption is a taut cloak-and-dagger-style drama that makes a bold statement about where we are as a society as technology offers opportunities for abuse in the name of leverage, control, and domination. Cover-ups abound as strong-willed and determined men and women maneuver themselves, unable, or unwilling, to see the damage they are causing, personally and/or professionally. It’s the kind of story you wish couldn’t be true, but it’s all too real.

Michael Yeargan’s set consists of distressed walls evoking long-faded newsprint; movable, rearrangeable curved tables; and, above the stage, a circle of television monitors delivering a barrage of actual reports from multiple channels. Projections on the walls by 59 Productions reveal breaking news, social media posts, and important evidence. Jennifer Moeller’s costumes capture the essence of the characters, while Justin Ellington’s sound immerses the audience in the gripping narrative. Donald Holder’s lighting features three pairs of dazzling crisscrossing horizontal lines on the floor that change color, particularly as scenes shift, accentuating the fast pace as startling details emerge.

Tony-winning director Bartlett Sher (South Pacific, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone) builds the tension with skill and precision; even if you’re familiar with the story, there are many surprises in Rogers’s razor-sharp script, which feels economical even with a running time of more than two and a half hours (with intermission). The ensemble is excellent, led by Stephens (The Forest, Oslo), who refuses to quit regardless of the consequences; Handley (The Hard Problem, Jericho), who is superb as Brooks, a woman obsessed with expanding her influence; Kerr (The Great Society, Dark Vanilla Jungle) as Siobhan, who doesn’t understand why Tom cannot choose his family over his job; and Baker (La Běte, Not About Horses) as both the smarmy, egotistical lawyer Crone and the mysterious investigator Glen Mulcaire. Siberry seems right at home as Mosley, following his appearances in such other hard-hitting financial works as Ink and Junk.

The one-word title is not as simple as it may at first seem; the play is specifically about the News International phone hacking scandal, but it also alludes to rampant business and political crime that is growing throughout so many sectors of society, with no end in sight, particularly because the media itself is among the guilty.

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

(UN)SILENT FILM NIGHT: METROPOLIS IN CONCERT

Workers change shifts in the lower depths in Fritz Lang’s futuristic masterpiece, Metropolis

METROPOLIS (Fritz Lang, 1927)
New School Tishman Auditorium
63 Fifth Ave. at Fourteenth St.
Wednesday, April 10, free with advance RSVP, 7:30
www.newschool.edu

Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent epic, Metropolis, has been shown over the years in various versions and with different music, most famously Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 score. On April 10, the New School’s College of Performing Arts will present the world premiere of a new score by Mannes School of Music student Amir Sanjari, performed live to the film by the Mannes Orchestra, conducted by Robert Kahn. “Among the many things that are magical about masterpieces of the silent film era is the possibility of creating new musical sound worlds for extraordinary moving images. This is just what our student composer Amir Sanjari has done with Fritz Lang’s legendary Metropolis, where the brilliant young composer of 2024 joins forces with the 1927 thunderbolt of silent film history,” executive dean Richard Kessler said in a statement. The event is part of the (Un)Silent Film series, which has featured new scores for such works as Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and The Immigrant and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., with such hosts as Matthew Broderick, Bill Irwin, and Rob Bartlett.

Set one hundred years in the future, Metropolis pits man vs. machine, the corporation against the worker, and sin vs. salvation in a technologically advanced society run by business mogul Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel). While Fredersen rakes in the big bucks on the surface, the workers are treated like slaves way down below, in a dark, dank hell where they perform their automaton-like jobs. When Fredersen’s son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), starts feeling sympathy for the workers and falls for Maria (Brigitte Helm), an activist who is trying to convince the men, women, and children of the lower depths that they deserve more out of life, Fredersen has mad inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) create a man-machine version of Maria to steer his employees to a revolution that will lead them to self-destruct, although things don’t quite turn out as planned. Written by Lang and his wife, Thea Von Harbou, Metropolis is a visual marvel, featuring jaw-dropping special effects by Eugen Schüfftan (who was developing his Schüfftan process of using miniatures) and a stunning man-machine designed by sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff.

Walter Schulze-Mittendorff’s man-machine stirs up plenty of trouble among the workers in 2026

The complex story incorporates biblical elements, from direct references to the Tower of Babel to other allusions, including fire and flood, while focusing on the relationship between father and prodigal son that evokes both God and Jesus and Abraham and Isaac. A parable that also relates to the battle between employers and unions, the film features a series of doppelgängers: There are two Marias, the real one, who is loving and genuine, and the cold and calculating man-machine; Freder and worker 11811, Georgy (Erwin Binswanger), who temporarily switch places; and Fredersen’s wife, Hel, who died while giving birth to Freder but has been revived into the initial man-machine by Rotwang, who was also in love with her. The massive achievement was shot by Karl Freund (Dracula, Key Largo) with Günther Rittau and Walter Ruttmann, who give it a dazzlingly dramatic look in every scene, accompanied by a soaring score by Gottfried Huppertz that incorporates snippets of Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle’s “La Marseillaise.” The film declares, “The mediator between head and hands must be the heart!” Lang explores all three in this remarkable film.

“Fritz Lang got the idea for Metropolis when he was in Manhattan in the 1920s promoting another movie of his. Knowing this, I took inspiration from the city itself,” Sanjari said in a statement. “The buildings, the art, and many other things in New York City inspired me to write the score. In addition, I was very inspired by minimalism and the repetition of musical ideas, so I tried to incorporate that.” Admission is free with advance RSVP.

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

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

Jeremy Strong stars in new translation of Henrik Ibsen’s cautionary An Enemy of the People (photo by Emilio Madrid)

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
Circle in the Square Theatre
1633 Broadway at 50th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 23, $99 – $499
anenemyofthepeopleplay.com

What price truth?

That is the question that drives Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 drama An Enemy of the People, which can currently be seen in an intense new translation by Obie winner and Tony nominee Amy Herzog, directed by her husband, Tony and two-time Obie winner Sam Gold, at Circle in the Square; this is the first time the couple has worked together, and hopefully not the last.

The story takes place in the late nineteenth century in a small Norwegian town in late winter, but it could also be set anytime, anywhere, including America in 2024. The fortysomething Dr. Thomas Stockmann (Jeremy Strong), a widower, lives a quiet life with his daughter, Petra (Victoria Pedretti), a schoolteacher in her early twenties. They have an open house, welcoming friends and colleagues to stop by for a drink, a smoke, a meal, or stimulating conversation.

The play opens with Petra and the family maid serving dinner to an eager Billing (Matthew August Jeffers). When Petra points out how hard it can be teaching her class of sixteen boys “anything of value,” Billing replies, “So take a load off, sit with me. Teach me something, I’m very ignorant, it’s a real shame.” Value, ignorance, and shame will become key themes to the show.

Billing’s boss, Hovstad (Caleb Eberhardt), arrives, followed by Peter Stockmann (Michael Imperioli); the former is the editor of the local paper, the People’s Messenger, while the latter is the mayor and Thomas’s older brother.

Town mayor Peter Stockmann (Michael Imperioli) doesn’t like what he hears in Broadway revival (photo by Emilio Madrid)

The town’s future has been built on the success of the Baths, the main attraction at the new spa resort. The local economy is about to boom as spring and summer approach, but Thomas has some bad news. “The water at the Baths is rife with bacteria, tiny micro-organisms that cause disease. It’s completely unsafe,” he tells Petra, Billing, Hovstad, and Captain Horster (Alan Trong). Petra says, “Thank goodness you discovered it in time.” They toast Thomas as a local hero, but Petra’s response is not necessarily shared by the rest of the town, including her maternal grandfather, Morten Kiil (David Patrick Kelly), who owns a tannery that might be contributing to the water pollution.

Hovstad is excited “to expose these clowns” by publishing Thomas’s article about the poisonous water and what it will take to save the spa. The printer, Aslaksen (Thomas Jay Ryan), who is also the chair of the Property Owners’ Association and a temperance leader, offers Thomas his full support but suggests he proceed carefully, in moderation.
But when Peter finds out what it will take to make the Baths safe, Thomas goes from hero to villain as he’s publicly declared an Enemy of the People.

Herzog, whose 4000 Miles was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and whose Mary Jane begins Broadway previews April 2, last year adapted Ibsen’s 1879 masterpiece, A Doll’s House, earning six Tony nominations, including Best Revival of a Play. Gold, who won an Obie and a Tony for directing Fun Home at the Public and Circle in the Square, respectively, and another Obie for Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation, was also nominated for a Tony for helming Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2. You can expect a boatload of Tony nods for their inaugural collaboration.

The audience sits on three sides of the narrow rectangular stage, which runs down the middle. Thomas’s home is plainly furnished, with simple tables and chairs; small changes are made when the scene moves to the printing press and a large meeting room. A white building facade surrounds the space at the top, seemingly unnecessary except to hide a surprise that arrives at intermission. The set is by dots, with tender lighting, featuring several gas lamps, by Isabella Byrd, sound by Mikaal Sulaiman that incorporates dialogue and musical performances, and fine period costumes by David Zinn.

Dr. Thomas Stockmann (Jeremy Strong) is afraid everything will all fall apart unless local town listens to him (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Taking a page out of Daniel Fish’s 2019 Tony-winning revival of Oklahoma! at Circle in the Square, which invited the audience onto the stage during intermission for cornbread and a cup of chili, An Enemy of the People offers shots of a prominently featured Nordic liqueur while several ensemble members (Katie Broad, Bill Buell, David Mattar Merten, Max Roll, Kelly) sing Norwegian folk songs. After intermission, more than a dozen audience members remain onstage, becoming citizens at the town meeting where the mayor maneuvers to silence his brother, along with the rest of the audience, as the speakers address all of us directly with the lights on, each person in the theater involved in the controversy.

Emmy winner Strong (A Man for All Seasons, The Great God Pan), best known for his role as Kendall Roy on Succession, gives a profoundly measured performance as Thomas, a gentle, considerate, if somewhat elusive man, at the edge of exploding, whose life turns upside down when he becomes a whistleblower, standing nearly alone as he staunchly refuses to surrender his principles; it’s a cautionary tale that’s ripe for the modern age, given the spread of fake news over social media and the rejection of truth in favor of money and power by politicians and corporations.

In his Broadway debut, Emmy winner Imperioli (The Sopranos, The White Lotus) is a fine foil as Peter, an arch-conservative to his liberal brother. The ever-dependable Ryan (Dance Nation, The Nap) is phenomenal as Aslaksen, whose belief in freedom of the press goes only so far.

All that said, Herzog is not able to solve some of the play’s inherent problems, a significant reason why it is performed relatively rarely. Arthur Miller’s adaptation debuted on Broadway in 1950 with Fredric March as Thomas and Morris Carnovsky as Peter and was turned into a 1978 film with Steve McQueen and Charles Durning; a 2012 revival with Boyd Gaines and Richard Thomas as the brothers was disappointingly trite. Unfortunately, Robert Ickes’s inventive, interactive 2021 solo version starring Ann Dowd at the Park Ave. Armory was cut short when Dowd had to leave for unstated personal reasons.

Herzog excises the doctor’s wife, and we never see their two sons, making Thomas more of a lone wolf. The town hall scene gets a bit ludicrous at the end with the addition of awkward props. And there is far too much editorializing as the narrative reaches its overly simplistic resolution.

But the play’s relevancy still hits home in 2024, amid domestic and international crises that continue to shake the stability of the world as we realize it will take a lot more than just one brave man to save us from our destiny.

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

FILMS OF PATRICIA ROZEMA: A RETROSPECTIVE

The career of Canadian auteur Patricia Rozema will be celebrated at Roxy retrospective

FILMS OF PATRICIA ROZEMA
Roxy Cinema
2 Sixth Ave. at Church St.
April 5-11
www.roxycinemanewyork.com

“You know, the smile that people have when they think they’re alone — that look people have when they think they’re alone or they’re not being watched — is entirely different from the way we are with others in the room,” award-winning Toronto New Wave director Patricia Rozema told David Schwartz in a November 1999 Museum of the Moving Image Pinewood Dialogue about Mansfield Park, her adaptation of the novel by Jane Austen. “I’m probably attracted to making movies because I’m a voyeur, because I wish for those moments. And since it’s illegal, for the most part, to capture them, you have to re-create them.”

Rozema will be at the Roxy Cinema for several Q&As during a weeklong retrospective consisting of five of her films, beginning April 5 at 7:15 with a 4K restoration of her second feature, White Room, which stars Maurice Godin, Margot Kidder, and Kate Nelligan in a dark fairy tale about murder and celebrity obsession; the screening will be followed by a Q&A with the Future of Film Is Female’s Caryn Coleman. On April 6 at 7:30 and April 11 at 7:30, Rozema will speak with Queer Forty editor-in-chief Merryn Johns after a screening of a 4K restoration of 1995’s When Night Is Falling, in which two university professors at a faith-based institution, Camille (Pascale Bussières) and Martin (Henry Czerny), are considering getting married until Camille is suddenly drawn to the mysterious acrobat Petra (Rachael Crawford).

On April 7 at 5:15, Rozema will discuss 2018’s Mouthpiece with writer director Charlie Kaufman; the film is based on a play by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, who star as two sides of the same woman, Cassandra, dealing with the death of their mother. And on April 8 at 7:00, Rozema will be on hand to talk with A. M. Homes about her debut, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. In addition, a 35mm print of Mansfield Park will be shown April 6 at 5:15, and White Room will have an encore screening on April 10 at 9:00.

“I believe in tension and release, in that if you stay in the the same tone and mode and intensity for too long, it actually becomes monotonous. When you change up your pace or your humor level, then the release is welcome,” Rozema says in the DVD audio commentary of Mansfield Park. “I believe that’s my biggest job: tone control, and maintaining enough unity so that it all feels like one movie and all the scenes belong together, and yet diversity so that emotional and narrative interest is maintained.”

Polly Vandersma (Sheila McCarthy) shares her unique view of the world in I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing

I’VE HEARD THE MERMAIDS SINGING (Patricia Rozema, 1987)
Monday, April 8, 7:00
www.roxycinemanewyork.com
www.kinolorber.com

“Gosh. You know, sometimes I think my head is like a gas tank. You have to be really careful what you put into it because it might just affect the whole system,” Polly Vandersma (Sheila McCarthy) says in I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. “I mean, isn’t life the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?”

Considered one of the best films to ever come out of Canada, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is plenty strange itself. The 1987 comedy is a unique exploration of queer culture and belongs with such 1980s underground fare as Smithereens, Liquid Sky, and Repo Man as well as James McBride’s 1967 David Holzman’s Diary. In her second film, McCarthy stars as the birdlike Polly, a quirky, self-described “unsuccessful career woman” and “gal on the go,” a not-very-good girl Friday who is content being a temporary secretary, the antithesis of the ’80s archetype embodied by Tess McGill, the ambitious thirty-year-old portrayed by Melanie Griffith in Mike Nichols’s 1988 Working Girl.

The story is told in flashback as Polly makes a video about her simple existence, kind of like a precursor to the confessions in MTV’s The Real World but without the self-aggrandizement. Polly lives alone in Toronto, with no friends; now thirty-one, she lost both her parents ten years before. She’s not exactly smart or well rounded and not much of a conversationalist. When gallery curator Gabrielle (Paule Baillargeon) offers her a full-time position, Polly jumps at the chance, ready to immerse herself in the contemporary art world, which she knows nothing about, and Gabrielle’s personal life, which includes the sudden, unexpected return of her old girlfriend, Mary (Ann-Marie MacDonald).

Polly is an aspiring photographer who snaps pictures of people on the street hanging out, playing sports, and falling in love, all activities that seem to evade her. She develops the film in her bathroom, which she has converted into a makeshift darkroom. Meanwhile, she has endearing fantasies of climbing buildings, flying, and walking on water. Her photos and fantasies are in black-and-white, countering the pastel colors of her daily life. When she finds out that Gabrielle is a painter — her canvases literally glow, as if descended from heaven (while evoking the mysterious object in the trunk of the Chevy Malibu in Repo Man) — she becomes obsessed with her mentor’s works as both of them decide to pursue their artistic talents further.

Filmed in Toronto in one month for $275,000, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, winner of the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, underwent a 4K restoration in 2017 as part of Canada 150, a celebration of the country’s 150th anniversary of its confederation. The title was taken from a line in T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.”

McCarthy, who also appeared in Rozema’s White Room, won the first of two Genie Awards for Best Actress, the Canadian equivalent of the Oscars, for Mermaids; she would nab the honor again six years later for Diane Kingswood’s The Lotus Eaters. She is mesmerizing as the endlessly eccentric, spikey-red-haired Polly, who is as peculiar and unpredictable as she is charming and endearing; it’s like she’s arrived from another planet, intent on learning what life can be about. Pay close attention to the scene in which Gabrielle and art critic Clive (Richard Monette) discuss a new painting by a gallery artist while Polly eavesdrops; they are actually talking about her potential transformation, even if she doesn’t realize it.

Rozema wrote, directed, edited, and coproduced the film, which features playful cinematography by Douglas Koch and a fab ’80s score by Mark Korven, alongside Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.

Rozema will participate in a Q&A with author A. M. Homes following the screening. “I wanted to make a warm-spirited anti-authority film,” Rozema says in her director’s statement. “But most of all I wanted to make a film with Polly in it, one where she and I get to hear the mermaids singing.” We should consider ourselves fortunate to be able to do the same.

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

NOVEL ENCOUNTERS: THE FILMS OF LEE CHANG-DONG

NOVEL ENCOUNTERS
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
April 5-28
212-660-0312
metrograph.com/film

Since his debut as a writer and director with 1997’s Green Fish, South Korean auteur has Lee Chang-dong has made only five subsequent feature films, which might actually add to his growing international reputation. Born on July 4, 1954, Lee is also a novelist, playwright, and short story writer and former Minister of Culture and Tourism. Metrograph will be screening all six full-length works in the series “Novel Encounters: The Films of Lee Chang-dong,” running April 5-28, featuring the US theatrical premieres of new 4K restorations of Green Fish, Peppermint Candy, Poetry, and Oasis. The series also includes A Brand New Life and A Girl at My Door, which Lee produced, and the below three works. “It brings me great delight and thrill to hold my retrospective at the esteemed Metrograph, renowned as a cherished haven for cinephiles in New York,” Lee said in a statement. “The films curated for this retrospective each serve as vessels for my earnest contemplations on life, society, and humanity, each in their own way.”

Lee Chang-dong’s Burning was the first South Korean movie to make the Oscar shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film

BURNING (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
Friday, April 5, 9:30
Sunday, April 7, 4:30
Wednesday, April 10, 8:45
metrograph.com/film

Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 Burning, his first film since 2010, met with breakout success, becoming the first South Korean film to be shortlisted for a Best Foreign Language Oscar. Based on the short story “Barn Burning” by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, Burning is a psychological thriller, cowritten by Oh Jung-mi, about a wannabe young writer and slacker, Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), who bumps into an old classmate, Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), and starts up a new friendship with her, including taking care of her cat when she’s away. Lee is none too happy when she later shows up with Ben (Steven Yeun), who Jong-su thinks is wrong for her. Ben shares with Jong-su his penchant for burning down greenhouses, which only furthers Jong-su’s distrust of Ben, which does not please Hae-mi. At two and a half hours, Burning is long and slow moving, but it is also lushly photographed by Hong Kyung-pyo and deeply meditative, with a powerful ending that is worth waiting around for.

Lee Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon) reexamines her life in Secret Sunshine

SECRET SUNSHINE (MILYANG) (Lee Chang-dong, 2007)
Saturday, April 13, 12:00
Sunday, April 14, 2:20
metrograph.com/film

Lee Chang-dong’s fourth film — and his first since 2002’s Oh Ah Shisoo (Oasis) — is a harrowing examination of immeasurable grief. After losing her husband, Lee Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon) decides to move with her young son, Jun (Seon Jeong-yeob), to Milyang, her late husband’s hometown. Milyang, which means “secret sunshine,” is a typical South Korean small town, where everyone knows everybody. Restarting her life, Shin-ae gets help from Kim Jong-chan (Song Kang-ho), a local mechanic who takes an immediate liking to her. But Shin-ae is more concerned with settling down with her son and giving piano lessons. When a horrific tragedy strikes, she begins to unravel, refusing help from anyone until she turns to religion, but even that does not save her from her ever-darkening sadness. Cannes Best Actress winner Jeon gives a remarkable, devastating performance, holding nothing back as she fights for her sanity. Song, best known for his starring role in Bong Joon-ho’s The Host, is charming as Jong-chan, a friendly man who is a little too simple to understand the depth of what is happening to Shin-ae. Don’t let the nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time scare you away; Secret Sunshine is an extraordinary film that does not feel nearly that long.

Yun Jung-hee returns to the screen for the first time in sixteen years in moving Poetry

POETRY (SHI) (Lee Chang-dong, 2010)
Friday, April 26, 5:00 & 7:40
Saturday, April 27, 12:00 & 7:50
Sunday, April 28, 12:00 & 7:15
metrograph.com/film

Returning to the screen for the first time in sixteen years, legendary Korean actress Yun Jung-hee is mesmerizing in Lee Chang-dong’s beautiful, bittersweet, and poetic Poetry. Yun stars as Mija, a lovely but simple woman raising her teenage grandson, Wook (Lee David), and working as a maid for Mr. Kang (Kim Hi-ra), a Viagra-taking old man debilitated from a stroke. When she is told that Wook is involved in the tragic suicide of a classmate (Han Su-young), Mija essentially goes about her business as usual, not outwardly reacting while clearly deeply troubled inside. As the complications in her life grow, she turns to a community poetry class for solace, determined to finish a poem before the memory loss that is causing her to forget certain basic words overwhelms her. Winner of the Best Screenplay award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Poetry is a gorgeously understated work, a visual, emotional poem that never drifts from its slow, steady pace. Writer-director Lee (Peppermint Candy, Secret Sunshine) occasionally treads a little too close to clichéd melodrama, but he always gets back on track, sharing the moving story of an unforgettable character. Throughout the film he offers no easy answers, leaving lots of room for interpretation, like poems themselves.

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

FISH

Latricia (Torée Alexandre), LaRonda (Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew), Lakkayyah (Morgan Siobhan Green), and LaNeeyah (Margaret Odette) take the same elevator to different schools in Fish (Valerie Terranova Photography)

FISH
Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 20, $70
www.keencompany.org
theworkingtheater.org

In the prologue to her debut novel, 1970’s The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison recalls Dick and Jane and their children, a fictional, white middle-class family created in 1930 to help kids learn to read; for nearly four decades, they represented the American dream. Morrison writes, “Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy.” She shares further details of their idyllic existence, then repeats the paragraph twice, the words getting closer and closer until they are essentially unreadable. The dream is not for everyone.

The Bluest Eye plays a key role in Kia Corthron’s Fish, a coproduction of Keen Company and Working Theater that opened last night at Theatre Row. The hundred-minute show takes place primarily at a public school in an unidentified city in the present. It begins with four teenage girls, Latricia (Torée Alexandre), LaRonda (Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew), Lakkayyah (Morgan Siobhan Green), and LaNeeyah (Margaret Odette), meeting in an elevator. Latricia, who now prefers to be called Tree, is heading to the terrible public school on the fifth floor, where teachers come and go, there are little or no supplies, students don’t care about their classes, the nurse is only part-time, and every day is a struggle. The other three girls have managed to avoid that hell by being chosen in a lottery to attend the prim and pristine Peak and Pinnacle charter school on the heavenly sixth floor, known as the Penthouse, where they have all the bells and whistles, including clean bathrooms, new textbooks, musical instruments, devoted teachers, and a computer lab.

Tree’s latest homeroom teacher, Jasmine Harris (Rachel Leslie), has given her detention. Tree already has an assignment to write a short paper on a historical or contemporary Black woman, but Ms. Harris adds to her load by telling her she has to write another essay, on The Bluest Eye.

Tree argues, “I ain’t got time to write no hundred-word report! I gotta pick up my brother sixteen minutes, I gotta make the mac n cheese dinner and half the cheese clumps together! I ain’t some suburb desktop PC swimming pool, I’m real!” With her mother in jail and no father in the picture, Tree is taking care of her eleven-year-old asthmatic brother, Zay (Josiah Gaffney); she angrily explains that she doesn’t have a computer at home, has no time to go to the library, and can’t afford to buy any book. Ms. Harris unlocks her desk — she doesn’t trust the students, expecting them to steal from her — and hands Tree her personal copy, but she insists that Tree come in early and stay late each day to read it; she won’t just lend it out.

When tragedy strikes, Tree can only rely on herself to get through it.

Jasmine Harris (Rachel Leslie) tries to get through to Tree (Torée Alexandre) in play about failing education system (Valerie Terranova Photography)

Later, Tree tells Ms. Harris, “Oh wait, don’t tell me. First you was all idealism, all ‘I wanna make a change.’ But the years make you hard. Bitter. Now just bidin till retirement. That your cliché?” For much of the play, Corthron (Tempestuous Elements, A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick) and Williams (The Gospel Woman, A Limbo Large and Broad) successfully exploit clichés to make their points about an unfair, racially biased education system and social structure. Each scene is named after subjects, but they have multiple meanings — Homeroom deals with life at home, Speech and Debate involves an argument between Ms. Harris and Tree that gets personal, Social Studies explores friendship in and out of the classroom, Women’s Studies reveals surprising facts about Ms. Harris, and Geography is about searching for one’s place in the world.

But the last third of the play becomes mired in clichéd scenarios that are stale and obvious, hampered by concluding scenes that offer overly simplistic solutions while casting aside the conflicts that had driven the narrative up to that point. Corthron touches on such contemporary issues as standardized testing, budget cuts, teacher strikes, grading scandals, and school shootings in a kitchen-sink barrage, trying to squeeze in too much instead of concentrating on her well-developed characters.

The strong all-BIPOC ensemble does its best, but there’s not much they can do as the dialogue devolves into platitudes. The production lacks subtlety even in its smallest details, as when teacher Nabila Muhammad (Green) is quietly reading Other People’s Shoes, a memoir by award-winning white British actress Harriet Walter. The name “Tree” itself raises ideals of establishing roots and blooming, And I’m still trying to forget when Nadeem (Christopher B. Portley) asks Jasmine, “What’s a ‘scar city’?” upon seeing the word “scarcity” on a test.

Teachers Jasmine Harris (Rachel Leslie) and Nabila Muhammad (Morgan Siobhan Green) take a break in Fish (Valerie Terranova Photography)

Fish comes on the heels of two recent plays that explore similar issues in more nuanced and effective ways, Donja R. Love’s soft and Dave Harris’s Exception to the Rule, powerful works that challenge the audience while taking on the education system.

The evening I saw Fish, the fluorescent lights on the left side of Jason Simms’s set — divided into a classroom, a center section that changes from an elevator to a living room, and a table in the teachers lounge — flickered on and off. I thought it was representative of the shoddy state of the public school, but it turned out that it was a technical problem and the play had to be paused for several minutes. (The lighting is by Nic Vincent, with sound by Michael Keck and realistic costumes by Mika Eubanks.)

One of the show’s leitmotifs is the adage “Give a man a fish, you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime,” which is where the title of the play comes from, but here it feels trite and unnecessary. Meanwhile, the P&P students are assigned Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novella, The Old Man and the Sea, in which the protagonist catches a marlin but has a battle on his hands to bring it to shore. Fish casts a wide net, but it ultimately comes away empty-handed.

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