twi-ny recommended events

COMPOSING FOR THE SUN: A CONVERSATION WITH PHILIP GLASS

Philip Glass will be at Japan Society on November 6 to talk about Akhnaten (photo © Richard Hubert Smith / English National Opera)

Who: Philip Glass, Tom Hare, Anthony Roth Costanzo
What: Conversation, performance, reception
Where: Japan Society, 333 East 47th St. at First Ave., 212-715-1258
When: Wednesday, November 6, $28, 6:30
Why: On November 8, the Met is premiering a new production of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, directed by Phelim McDermott, conducted by Karen Kamensek, and featuring countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo as the monotheistic title pharaoh and mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges as Nefertiti. On November 6, Japan Society is hosting “Composing for the Sun: A Conversation with Philip Glass,” in which the eighty-two-year-old Glass, whose other operas include Einstein on the Beach, In the Penal Colony, Satyagraha, and The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, will sit down with Princeton professor Tom Hare to talk about the opera; as a bonus, Costanzo will perform an excerpt from the work, and there will be a post-event reception with the artists. Tickets are sold out, but a waitlist will start one hour before the start time. The presentation is part of Japan Society’s Emperor Series, celebrating Emperor Naruhito’s ascension to the Chrysanthemum Throne in May.

BAM NEXT WAVE: HAMNET / HE DID WHAT?

Dead Centre makes its BAM debut with Hamnet (photo by Ed Lefkowicz)

HAMNET
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
Through November 3, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/hamnet
www.deadcentre.org

What is a son without a father? What is a father without a son? Those questions are at the heart of Dead Centre’s Hamnet, making its New York premiere this week at BAM. The sixty-minute multimedia show is part of new BAM artistic director David Binder’s inaugural Next Wave Festival consisting exclusively of BAM debuts, and this one is highlighted by a dynamite performance by Aran Murphy as the title character, in his professional acting debut. Murphy is a contemporary Hamnet, William Shakespeare’s only son, who died tragically in 1596 at the age of eleven. The boy is dressed in modern clothes, carries around a backpack, and regularly asks Google for information; it’s as if he’s been searching for his father, who abandoned him and his twin sister, Judith, and their mother, Anne Hathaway, in order to write his plays, for more than four hundred years. “To be, or not to be,” he declares several times, hoping that maybe his dad’s writings will help him find him.

Written and directed by Dead Centre founders Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, Hamnet features a large screen at the back of the stage, where the audience is live-streamed through most of the show. Jose Miguel Jimenez’s innovative video design and Liv O’Donoghue’s choreography form a kind of magic as Hamnet roams Andrew Clancy’s set, sometimes disappearing onscreen even though he is right in front of us, or vice versa, and growing even more complex and eerie when the ghost of his father (Moukarzel) appears. The narrative at times becomes murky and confusing, but the technical wizardry and Murphy’s astounding portrayal overshadow its shortcomings. “Who would fardels bear, / To grunt and sweat under a weary life, / But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns, puzzles the will, / And makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of?” Hamlet asks. Hamnet is a hypnotic puzzle about death, grief, and personal identity, albeit one that is not easily unravele’d.

BAM presents free animated street opera on building facade (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

HE DID WHAT?
Peter Jay Sharp Building
30 Lafayette Ave. at St. Felix St.
Through November 2, free, 7:00 – 10:00
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.dumbworld.co.uk

After seeing Hamnet, make your way around the corner to BAM’s main home, the Peter Jay Sharp Building, which houses the Howard Gilman Opera House, to catch the world premiere of Dumbworld and Irish National Opera’s He Did What? The ten-minute animated film, conceived and created by Brian Irvine and John McIlduff with video by Killan Waters and Conan McIvor, is projected onto the facade of the building at the corner of Lafayette Ave. and St. Felix St. The audience is given headsets through which they hear the hysterical story of three alter kockers with walkers parading slowly down the street, a man followed by two women. The two women are gossiping about him, as his wife recently caught him in bed with another woman and is deciding what to do about it. The characters are sung by Doreen Curran, Sylvia O’Brien, and Dan Reardon, with music composed by Irvine and played by the RTE Concert Orchestra, conducted by Fergus Shiel. The piece was written and directed by McIlduff; the riotous words also appear on the wall in goofy, graffiti-like type, complementing KAWS’s BAM mural and David Byrne’s bike rack across the street. While Hamnet will have you wondering, “How did they do that?,” the free presentation of He Did What?, running 7:00 to 10:00 nightly through November 2, will have you saying again and again, “He did what?” as well as “Oh no she didn’t. Oh yes she did.”

BELLA BELLA / A WOMAN OF THE WORLD

Kathleen Chalfant is radiant as Mabel Loomis Todd in A Woman of the World (photo by Carol Rosegg)

A WOMAN OF THE WORLD
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 17, $25-$35
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org

Currently two one-person shows about real women are running off Broadway, both with a feminist bent, both starring New York theater legends. Yet they could not be more different, one far superior to the other. At 59E59, five-time Obie winner Kathleen Chalfant is beautifully portraying Mabel Loomis Todd (1856–1932) in the Acting Company’s world premiere of Pulitzer Prize finalist Rebecca Gilman’s utterly delightful A Woman of the World. It’s 1931, and Todd is giving a lecture, “The Real Emily Dickinson,” at the Point Breeze Inn on Maine’s Hog Island. In the 1890s, Todd edited several collections of Dickinson’s poetry, published after the reclusive New England poet’s death in 1886 at the age of fifty-five, and Todd built a lucrative and unusual career around her association with Dickinson. Todd’s talk is supposed to be about Dickinson, but it ends up instead delving into Todd herself as she shares intimate stories about her own life, including her relationship with her husband, astronomer David Todd; her close friendship with Emily and her brother Austin; and her affection for Hog Island, much of which she owns.

Mabel Loomis Todd (Kathleen Chalfant) details her relationship with Emily Dickinson and her family in A Woman of the World (photo by Carol Rosegg)

“If you haven’t already, do step outside tonight and look at the sky. It’s one of those clear nights on Hog Island when the stars are so close you feel like you could reach out and touch Polaris,” she says wistfully. “And while you’re out there, listen closely and you’ll hear — well, besides the wind in the trees — and the waves on the rocks — which together comprise the most peaceful sound I know. . .” Margaret Montagna’s sound design includes chirping birds that add to the allure. Todd continually turns to her unseen daughter, Mrs. Millicent Bingham, who is signaling her from the back, particularly as her mother gets distracted and goes off topic, letting her personal biases and vengeful character show through, as well as her extreme self-aggrandizement. “I confess to you, it’s been something of a burden to me over the years that men have always found me impossible to resist. And it’s not because of anything I actively do to attract them,” she boasts. “It’s because the average man is rarely exposed to someone of my natural talents, and singular charm. When I was young, I was renowned for my beauty. But more than that, I was an accomplished artist.” There’s seemingly nothing Todd couldn’t do, and she wants the audience to know about it all.

But soon after she notes that “like all families, the Dickinsons had their secrets,” it’s the Todd family secrets that come pouring out, one after another, offering myriad surprises and more than a few shocks. Chalfant (Wit, Talking Heads) fully embodies the elegant and graceful Todd, wearing an ankle-length off-white dress with a long necklace and short hair like a second skin. (The costume is by Candice Donnelly.) She is captivating and beguiling as she slowly glides around Cate McCrea’s tiny yet cozy set, featuring a wooden bench, a pair of carpets, and two stacks of books on the floor, with framed pictures of plants on the wall and a window revealing clouds and sky. Gilman (Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976; The Glory of Living) and director Valentina Fratti (Williston, R.U.R.) turn the 2019 audience at 59E59 into the 1931 crowd in the parlor at the Point Breeze Inn as we hang on Todd’s every word and movement, enraptured by the house of cards she has so carefully constructed. Todd was clearly ahead of her time, in more ways than one.

Harvey Fierstein plays firebrand Bella Abzug in Bella Bella (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

BELLA BELLA
Manhattan Theatre Club
MTC at New York City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 1, $99-$139
212-581-1212
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
bellabellaplay.com

Four-time Tony winner Harvey Fierstein pays tribute to another woman ahead of her time, Bella Savitsky Abzug (1920-98), in Bella Bella, an MTC production making its world premiere at New York City Center. Fierstein wrote the play, based on Battling Bella’s own words, and stars as the Bronx-born firebrand, an antiwar social activist, feminist, and lawyer who spent three terms as a US Congresswoman. It’s September 15, 1976, and Abzug is cooped up in the cluttered bathroom of a room at the Summit Hotel on West Fifty-Seventh St. while awaiting the returns in her Senate primary race against Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Her husband, Martin; daughters, Eve and Liz; sister, Helene; press secretary, Harry Holzer; and famous friends Shirley, Lily, and Gloria are all gathered outside the bathroom, cheering on the outspoken Abzug, who spends the time regaling the audience with anecdotes from her personal and professional life, focusing on how she has never backed away from a challenge.

“When I started this whole senatorial campaign,” she explains, “a pollster handed me a survey and was surprised when I threw it back in his face. ‘Would you vote for a woman if she was qualified?’ Now why the hell does a woman have to be qualified when a man only has to be a man?” Further regarding woman politicians, she declares, “We are not all good any more than all men are bad. But to my grave I will defend the right of a woman to be an unqualified asshole and still become president just like a man.”

Harvey Fierstein wrote and stars in Bella Bella (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

The play is stuffed with such quotes, in addition to Yiddish phrases, and Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy, Casa Valentina often mugs to the audience for extra laughs. It’s more like a series of gags than a compelling narrative. Fierstein first appears onstage silhouetted in the shower entrance, holding one of Abzug’s trademark large hats. The hat “kinda became my thing,” she later notes. “And the press, the only thing they wrote about was, ‘The hat. The hat. The hat.’ I finally said, ‘Anyone want to know what’s under the hat?’” But Fierstein puts away the hat after the beginning and chooses not to impersonate Abzug or her style; instead, he speaks like himself, and he wears a black shirt and pants, standing barefoot on the stage. (The costume is by Rita Ryack.) Thus, we’re all too well aware that we are watching Harvey Fierstein as Bella Abzug, a stark contrast to Kathleen Chalfant’s expert personification of Mabel Loomis Todd. Director Kimberly Senior (Disgraced, The Niceties) seems limited by John Lee Beatty’s busy set, which includes a stellar rendering of the facade of the Summit Hotel but nothing is done with it aside from a very brief, very tiny shadow of a person walking down the hall. Abzug was a central figure of life in New York City in the 1970s, a passionate leader and fighter, but Fierstein never grabs hold of the era or the woman, and neither do Caite Hevener’s period projections. We never get to know any more about what’s under the hat than we did when we came in, which is a shame, because there was no one else quite like Bella.

FIRST SATURDAYS: CROSSING ASIAN AMERICA

Xu Bing, Square Word Calligraphy: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Walt Whitman, ink on paper, 2018 (photo courtesy of the artist)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, November 2, free (some events require advance tickets), 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum parties with Asian pride in the November edition of its free First Saturday program. There will be live performances by the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra (playing works by Mastora Goya and Chen Yihan, featuring such instruments as the koto, erhu, guzheng, and pipa), Hong Kong-born, Brooklyn raised singer-songwriter Reonda, the Metropolitan Opera (previewing Philip Glass’s Akhnaten with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Gandini Juggling, and the Philip Glass Institute at the New School’s College of Performing Arts), Collective BUBBLE_T (with DJ sets by Tito Vida and Stevie Huynh, Clara Lu performing “The Butterfly Lovers” on guzheng, and Walang Hiya NYC), Miho Hatori’s New Optimism, and comics Fumi Abe, Karen Chee, Saurin Choksi, Aidan Park, and Irene Tu; a screening of Mountains That Take Wing (C. A. Griffith & H. L. T. Quan, 2009), followed by a talk with community organizer Akemi Kochiyama, granddaughter of one of the film’s subjects; poetry readings by Diannely Antigua, Mark Doty, and Jessica Greenbaum, hosted by Jason Koo, celebrating Walt Whitman, the inspiration behind the exhibition “One: Xu Bing”; teen pop-up talks in the Arts of Japan galleries; a curator tour of the Arts of China galleries and “One: Xu Bing” with Susan L. Beningson; a hands-on art workshop in which participants can make works on paper with brushpens inspired by the calligraphy in Arts of Asia galleries; and a community talk with the W.O.W. Project about the future of Chinatown. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Garry Winogrand: Color,” “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall,” “JR: Chronicles,” “Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion,” “Infinite Blue,” and more.

NYC HORROR: GOD TOLD ME TO

Tony Lo Bianco stars as a New York City cop searching for a cultlike leader in God Told Me To

GOD TOLD ME TO (Larry Cohen, 1976)
BAMfilm, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Saturday, November 2, 4:15
Series runs October 31 – November 5
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Watching the first half hour of Larry Cohen’s 1976 thriller, God Told Me To, is extremely difficult, given the continuing spate of mass shootings in the United States and the battle over gun control. The film opens with a man (Sammy Williams) on top of a water tower in New York City, picking off random people down below with a .22 caliber rifle. Detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) risks his life to go face-to-face with the soft-spoken killer, who says he did it because “God told me to.” A religious Catholic suffering a crisis of faith, Nicholas gets the same response from a series of other mass murderers, including a cop played by Andy Kaufman, in his big screen debut, who lets loose during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. (The next scene takes place at the Feast of San Gennaro, which is held every September in Little Italy, but it’s clear that six months have not elapsed, so we’ll give Cohen, a native of Washington Heights, poetic license in this case.) As Lo Bianco gets deeper and deeper into the mystery that involves an odd, cultlike figure named Bernard Phillips (Richard Lynch), he also has to deal with his estranged wife, Martha (Sandy Dennis), and his younger girlfriend, Casey Forster (Deborah Raffin). As he gets closer to the truth, he is forced to look deep into his soul amid all the madness. God Told Me To is shot by cinematographer Paul Glickman guerrilla style primarily without city permits and using a handheld camera, keeping the viewer off balance; the choppy editing by Michael D. Corey, Arthur Mandelberg, and William J. Waters doesn’t help smooth things out. The production values are quintessential low-budget mid-’70s, eliciting screams not of horror but of campy enjoyment among the middle-aged, who grew up watching these offbeat films at offbeat times in wood-paneled basements. Inspired by the Bible and one of the very first “aliens visited Earth!” books, Erich von Däniken’s bestselling Chariots of the Gods, Cohen, a producer, director, and writer who made such other low-budget faves as Black Caesar, It’s Alive, Q, The Stuff, and The Masters of Horror episode Pick Me Up, creates some intense scenes, including a hellish visit to a burning underground lair, as the twisting plot enters sci-fi territory involving a very special vagina.

god told me to

One of the undersung actors of the 1970s, Lo Bianco, who starred in such films as The Honeymoon Killers, The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, and Bloodbrothers and played Mayor Fiorella La Guardia in his traveling one-man show The Little Flower, gives one of his most nuanced performances in God Told Me To, whether desperately trying to stop killers or learning some hard facts from an elderly woman in a nursing home, portrayed by Oscar winner Sylvia Sidney. (The film also features old-time Broadway and Hollywood actor Sam Levene as publisher Everett Lukas.) Oscar-winning composer Bernard Herrmann was supposed to write the score but sadly passed away before he could begin, so Frank Cordell took over; the film is dedicated to Herrmann, who had written the score for It’s Alive. Fans of 1960s and 1970s television series will have a field day recognizing familiar faces in small roles, character actors who appeared in multitudes of comedies and dramas; among the names you’ll be Googling to see what else they’ve been in are Mason Adams, Richard Lynch, Harry Bellaver, and John Heffernan. God Told Me To, which was also released as Demon, is a gritty, dark film that resonates in a new way today, especially since all of the killers are white American males with apparent links to a supreme being. The film is screening November 2 as part of the BAM series “NYC Horror,” which runs October 31 to November 5 and includes such other scary New York City-set faves as Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, Michael Winner’s The Sentinel, Mark Robson’s The Seventh Victim, and Larry Fessenden’s Habit.

SHIRLEY CLARKE 100: THE CONNECTION

The Connection is part of Shirley Clarke centennial celebration at Film Forum

THE CONNECTION (Shirley Clarke, 1962)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Tuesday, October 29, 12:30; Monday, November 4, 8:30; Tuesday, November 5, 2:30
Series continues through November 5
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.milestonefilms.com

“Now look, you cats may know more about junk, see,” square film director Jim Dunn (William Redfield) says midway through The Connection, “but let me swing with this movie, huh?” Adapted by Jack Gelber from his play and directed and edited by Shirley Clarke, The Connection — screening October 29 and November 4-5 in the Film Forum series “Shirley Clarke 100,” celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the New York City native’s birth — is a gritty tale of drug addicts awaiting their fix that was banned for obscenity after only two matinee screenings back in October 1962. In 2012 it was rereleased in a sharp new fiftieth-anniversary print, beautifully restored by Ross Lipman of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. In a New York City loft, eight men are waiting for their man: Leach (Warren Finnerty), the ringleader who has an oozing scab on his neck; Solly (Jerome Raphael), an intelligent philosopher who speaks poetically about the state of the world; Ernie (Garry Goodrow), a sad-sack complainer who has pawned his horn but still clutches tight to the mouthpiece as if it were a pacifier; Sam (Jim Anderson), a happy dude who tells rambling stories while spinning a hula hoop; and a jazz quartet consisting of real-life musicians Freddie Redd on piano, Jackie McLean on sax, Larry Richie on drums, and Michael Mattos on bass. Dunn and his cameraman, J. J. Burden (Roscoe Lee Browne), are in the apartment filming the men as Dunn tries to up the drama to make it more cinematic as well as more genuine. “Don’t be afraid, man,” Leach tells him. “It’s just your movie. It’s not real.”

When Cowboy (Carl Lee) ultimately shows with the stuff, Bible-thumping Sister Salvation (Barbara Winchester) at his side, things take a decidedly more drastic turn. Mixing elements of the French New Wave with a John Cassavetes sensibility and cinema verité style, Clarke made an underground indie classic that moves to the beat of an addict’s craving and eventual fix. Shot in a luridly arresting black-and-white by Arthur Ornitz, The Connection is like one long bebop jazz song, giving plenty of time for each player to take his solo, with standout performances by McLean musically and Raphael verbally. The film-within-a-film narrative allows Clarke to experiment with the mechanics of cinema and challenge the audience; when Dunn talks directly into the camera, he is speaking to Burden, yet he is also breaking the fourth wall, addressing the viewer. Cutting between Burden’s steady camera and Dunn’s handheld one, Clarke adds dizzying swirls that rush past like a speeding subway train. A New York City native, Clarke made such other films as The Cool World and Portrait of Jason and won an Academy Award for her 1963 documentary Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World. This new print of The Connection is part of Milestone Films’ Shirley Clarke Project, which has preserved and restored a quartet of her best work. “Shirley Clarke 100” continues through November 5 with screenings of The Cool World and Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World, shown with the shorts In Paris Parks and Christopher and Me.

WHITE LIGHT FESTIVAL — ZAUBERLAND: AN ENCOUNTER WITH SCHUMANN’S DICHTERLIEBE

Soprano Julia Bullock plays a pregnant Syrian refugee in reimagined Schumann song cycle (photo copyright Patrick Berger)

Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College
524 West Fifty-Ninth St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
October 29-30, $35-$95
Festival continues through November 24
www.lincolncenter.org

English theater director Katie Mitchell transforms German composer and pianist Robert Schumann’s 1840 song cycle, Dichterliebe (“A Poet’s Love”), into a haunting tale about the European migrant crisis in Zauberland (“Magic Land”), making its New York premiere October 29-30 at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival. A production of C.I.C.T. — Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, the eighty-minute piece, staged in the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, features St. Louis-born rising star soprano Julia Bullock, the 2018-19 artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the 2019-20 artist-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony, as a pregnant Syrian refugee fleeing Aleppo for the safer confines of Cologne, leaving her family behind. The original Lieder, with words by German writer Heinrich Heine from his Lyrisches Intermezzo, has been expanded with new text by British playwright Martin Crimp and music by Belgian composer and conductor Bernard Foccroulle, specifically created for Bullock.

The cast also includes Ben Clifford, Natasha Kafka, David Rawlins, and Raphael Zari, with Cédric Tiberghien on piano, sets and costumes by Chloe Lamford, and lighting by James Farncombe. Bullock is best known for Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, a work about Josephine Baker she conceived with Peter Sellars; she has also appeared in Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, John Adams’s Girls of the Golden West, and Leoš Janaček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, among other productions around the world, in addition to being a community activist. Schumann wrote Dichterliebe in the span of a week during a particularly productive time, the year he married Clara Wieck. It takes on a whole new meaning in this contemporary reimagination.