twi-ny recommended events

A LOS LOBOS CHRISTMAS

Los Lobos has released it first Christmas record and will be playing new seasonal tunes at the Society for Ethical Culture this week

The Concert Hall at New York Society for Ethical Culture
2 West 64th St. at Central Park West
Saturday, December 14, $55-$95
www.metropolitanpresents.com
www.loslobos.org

Mexican East LA band Los Lobos, which means “the wolves,” named its second album How Will the Wolf Survive? after an article in National Geographic. “It was like our group, our story: What is this beast, this animal that the record companies can’t figure out? Will we be given the opportunity to make it or not?” founding member Louie Pérez told Rolling Stone in 1989 when the 1984 record was named the thirtieth best of the past decade by the magazine. Los Lobos has made it, and on their own terms, having released more than twenty records and toured relentlessly around the world for more than forty years (they started as a high school group in 1973), led by founding members David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas on guitar and vocals, Pérez on drums and vocals, Conrad Lozano on bass and vocals (since 1974), and newbie Steve Berlin on keyboards and woodwinds; he came on board in 1984. As is their trademark, Los Lobos, who come to the New York Society for Ethical Culture for a show December 14, is once again venturing into new territory with its first Christmas album, Llegó Navidad (Rhino, October 2019), a collection of eleven traditional Latin holiday tunes and one original.

“We’re not doing the typical ‘Silent Night’ and all that, which is fine,” Pérez says in a promotional video, continuing, “I mean, I wouldn’t mind doing that in our own kind of way. But there is such a wealth of traditional songs, songs that have been around for a while from all over Latin America.” The band explored more than 150 tunes before deciding what to record. “It took us a while to find the stuff we felt comfortable with,” Hidalgo said. The album includes such gems as “La Rama,” “Reluciente Sol,” “It’s Christmas Time in Texas,” “Las Mañanitas,” “Regalo De Reyes,” and “Christmas and You,” bringing Los Lobos’ unique flair and flavor to foster a feliz navidad for everyone. “Is this true to our ethos? I’d say absolutely,” Berlin explains. At Ethical Culture, you can expect a generous mix of old favorites (“One Time One Night,” “Will the Wolf Survive?”), cool covers (“Bertha,” “Volver, Volver”), and soon-to-be-classic Latin Christmas songs.

HALFWAY BITCHES GO STRAIGHT TO HEAVEN

Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven features another large cast of well-drawn characters (photo © Monique Carboni)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 29, $81.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

New York City native Stephen Adly Guirgis has spent much of his career creating wickedly funny, socially relevant plays set in minority communities where the underrepresented, the underserved, and the marginalized confront religion, law enforcement, poverty, racism, systemic institutions, and family dynamics as they battle against a system set up to keep them down. Most of his plays, including Our Lady of 121st Street, In Arabia, We’d All Be Kings, and The Little Flower of East Orange, feature large ensembles that form tight-knit communities onstage. Such is the case with Guirgis’s return to the Atlantic, where his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Between Riverside and Crazy, debuted in 2014, with the world premiere of the fiendishly hilarious and hard-hitting Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven, which opened last night at the Linda Gross Theater.

A woman’s residence is the setting for new play by Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Adly Guirgis (photo © Monique Carboni)

The three-hour LAByrinth Theater coproduction, which flies by with one intermission, takes place in Hope House, a government-funded women’s residence for addicts, the abused, the mentally ill, and survivors of domestic violence. It is run by the strict, serious Miss Rivera (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and Nigerian social worker Mr. Mobo (Neil Tyrone Pritchard). Among those who find shelter at the home are the tough-talking Sarge (Liza Colón-Zayas); her single-mother girlfriend, Bella (Andrea Syglowski); teenage poet Little Melba Diaz (Kara Young); the foul-smelling Betty Woods (Kristina Poe); ex-con Queen Sugar (Benja Kay Thomas) and her bestie, Munchies (Pernell Walker); the lonely, alcoholic Rockaway Rosie (Elizabeth Canavan); the wheelchair-bound rule-breaker Wanda Wheels (Patrice Johnson Chevannes); the trans Venus Ramirez (Esteban Andres Cruz); and the twentysomething Taina (Viviana Valeria), who takes care of her mentally ill mother, Happy Meal Sonia (Wilemina Olivia-Garcia). Also on the staff are eager white millennial social worker Jennifer (Molly Collier); ex-con janitor Joey Fresco (Victor Almanzar); and Father Miguel (David Anzuelo), who has a dark secret in his past. Seventeen-year-old Mateo (Sean Carvajal), whose mother is staying at the home, often helps out, allowed to hang around as the women share their often very private concerns about their troubled lives.

Narelle Sissons’s bilevel set consists of the main gathering room, a stoop, an outdoor bench, a dark alley, a balcony, and a concrete front space where the residents gossip and drink and smoke in defiance of the regulations. LAByrinth artistic director John Ortiz (Guinea Pig Solo, Jack Goes Boating) infuses the proceedings with tremendous vitality as Guirgis’s well-developed characters fight for survival. Taina has a chance to go back to school but is terrified of leaving her mother. Venus insists on staying even though several residents cruelly reject her claim to female identity, accusing her of unfairly invading their safe space. Father Miguel jostles with a man (Greg Keller) who demands to see his wife, who has a restraining order against him. Miss Rivera isn’t sure that Jennifer has what it takes to deal with the residents, who can be harsh and unforgiving. Wanda Wheels seems determined to drink herself to death. And at the center of it all is Sarge, superbly played by Guirgis regular and Tony nominee Rodriguez (Orange Is the New Black, The Motherf**ker with the Hat). A veteran with PTSD, Sarge is fierce and unrelenting, quick to brutally insult people, especially Venus and Betty, but she sometimes lets her more tender and loving side show through. She tells Bella, “I commanded a platoon. I survived combat. Kept my people safe. Took care of the villagers as much as I could. I looked death in the eye — twice — and I didn’t flinch. I can do this, Bella. I can do this with you. If you let me.” Sarge approaches her life like she’s embroiled in a never-ending war, which is true of many of the women living there.

Ex-cons Queen Sugar (Benja Kay Thomas) and Joey Fresco (Victor Almanzar) face off in Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven (photo © Monique Carboni)

The title comes from a poem Little Melba Diaz reads that sums up much of what the play is about, the difficulties and challenges these women can’t break free from: “Halfway Bitches go straight to Heaven / I ex-caped foster care and met a boy named Kevin / He was the apple of my eye but nigga turned into a lemon . . . No money in my pocket, I was feeling kinda low. . . . Words are turds and rhymes are crimes / Memories mere summaries, / Though I might some day share some of these,” she declares. Despite getting a little syrupy as it winds down, Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven is another deeply affecting, honest, and gutsy work that lays bare the lives of too many women who rightfully doubt there’s any light at the end of the tunnel for them.

YAYOI KUSAMA: EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE

Yayoi Kusama (photo courtesy David Zwirner)

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room — Dancing Lights That Flew Up to the Universe, mirrored glass, wood, LED lighting system, metal, and acrylic panel, 2019 (photo courtesy David Zwirner)

David Zwirner
537 West 20th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through December 14, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.davidzwirner.com
online slideshow & video

What? You’re not on line yet? This is the last week to see Yayoi Kusama’s latest show at David Zwirner, “Every Day I Pray for Love,” another fabulous immersive presentation by the Japanese artist who turned ninety this year. All the furor is specifically for the new Infinity Mirrored Room — Dancing Lights That Flew Up to the Universe, a spectacular closed-in space of mirrors, hanging balls, and changing colored lights that create a beautiful, endless world. But you’ll have to wait upwards of two and a half hours and more to spend thirty seconds in the room, most of which you will spend snapping photos and video instead of experiencing its bountiful wonder. However, there’s much more to “Every Day I Pray for Love,” and you don’t have to line up outside in the freezing cold to see it.

Yayoi Kusama’s Clouds slither toward “My Eternal Soul” paintings at David Zwirner (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In the main, large gallery, forty-two of Kusama’s “My Eternal Soul” paintings are arranged in three rows, exciting, colorful canvases that feature her trademark faces, circles, dots, eyes, embryos, and abstract geometric shapes and patterns, boasting such positive names as The Beauty of Millions of Love Seekers Flying Infinitely to the Universe, Shapes Full of Love That Have Always Shone in My Heart, Road to Eternal Love and Hope, The Limit of the Endless Beauty That Colours Spoke of Is Infinite, Such a Beautiful Love and Life Found by Us, and Challenge to New Art by I Who Thought the Splendor of the Universe Cannot Be More. On the floor of the room are several conglomerations of Kusama’s stainless-steel with patina and wax Clouds, which resemble dripped mercury taken solid form. Like the spheres in her Narcissus Garden, which people lined up to see in the Rockaways in the summer of 2018, you can walk among them and follow the changing reflections caused by the light from above.

Yayoi Kusama’s cast aluminum “Souls of Women That Continue Forever” hang over garden of soft sculptures as part of “Every Day I Pray for Love” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

At the base of the stairwell is the black-and-white fiberglass-reinforced plastic and stainless-steel Pumpkin, which you can look into, as its insides have already been scooped out. The upstairs gallery contains a childlike garden of sewn and stuffed soft sculptures with spiky elements and playful faces (for example, I Will Love with All My Heart and The Greatness of This Figure Talking Through Humankind and the Universe); “Souls of Women That Continue Forever,” a wall of cast aluminum shapes with women’s profiles repeated over and over in different colors; and two more acrylic paintings, including one whose title captures Kusama’s ethos: There Is No One Who Is Unmoved by How Amazing It Is to Be Able to See the Beauty of Creation Everyday in This World and Universe We Live In. And finally, be sure to go behind the black curtain to check out the awe-inspiring Ladder to Heaven, twelve LED-lit rungs with round mirrors above and below that make it seem like the ladder is going both deep underground as well as into the heavens as the color shifts like a James Turrell installation.

So don’t get too caught up waiting in line for the infinity room and risk not seeing the rest of this wonderful show, by perhaps the most popular, happy-making, and critically acclaimed living artist in the world. (And, yes, Instagram-friendly as well.) Meanwhile, Kusama — who still works every day, going from the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo, where she has lived voluntarily since 1977, to her nearby studio — is most likely busy preparing her next batch of paintings, sculptures, and, just maybe, another infinity room that people are already dreaming of lining up for. As she writes on one of the walls of the gallery: “My entire life has been painted in these paintings. / Every day, any day. / I will never cease dedicating my whole life to my love / for the universe. / Oh my dearest art. / With the challenge of creating / new art, I work as if dying / these works are my everything.”

MUSEUM OF THE STREET

“2628 Maple Ave., LA, April 1997” (photo courtesy Camilo José Vergara / Museum of the Street)

Who: Naa Oyo A. Kwate, Lawrence Hubbard, Camilo José Vergara, Ben Katchor
What: Slideshow presentation and panel discussion about “religious visions, public memorials, political effigies, historical tableaux, and commercial signage found in the Black and Latinx neighborhoods of America”
Where: The New School, 66 West Twelfth St., Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall
When: Wednesday, December 11, free, 7:00
Why: “For more than four decades I have devoted myself to photographing and documenting the poorest and most segregated communities in urban America,” Chilean-born, New York-based writer and photographer Camilo José Vergara notes about his ongoing project “Tracking Time,” part of his Museum of the Street. He continues, “I feel that a people’s past, including their accomplishments, aspirations, and failures, are reflected less in the faces of those who live in these neighborhoods than in the material, built environment in which they move and modify over time. Photography for me is a tool for continuously asking questions, for understanding the spirit of a place, and, as I have discovered over time, for loving and appreciating cities.”

“Mrs. Ada Marshall, Martin Luther King Drive at Bostwick, Jersey City, 2004” (photo courtesy Camilo José Vergara / Museum of the Street)

In conjunction with “The Other Street Art,” architecture editor and writer Cynthia Davidson’s recent interview with Vergara, the New School is hosting an illustrated discussion on December 11 at 7:00 with Vergara, Rutgers associate professor Naa Oyo A. Kwate, PhD, South LA comics artist Lawrence “Raw Dog” Hubbard, and Parsons associate professor and Julius Knipl creator Ben Katchor. “When my friend, the cartoonist Ben Katchor, saw my photos, he said, these institutions only want diversity that fits their narrow definitions of art,” Vergara says in the interview, which can be read in full here. “If the nature of the work challenges the economic basis of their institutions, they won’t recognize it, including street muralists, who work for little money in poor neighborhoods. Their work is meant to be ephemeral and would undermine the economic existence of major art institutions. Unlike the artists selected by the Getty, the largely unrecognized street artists have not enjoyed a privileged upbringing, nor have they had any training beyond high school art classes.” Be prepared for a lively and eye-opening evening.

THE COURTROOM: A RE-ENACTMENT OF DEPORTATION PROCEEDINGS

The Courtroom details a hot-button immigration case (photo by Maria Baranova)

The Great Hall at the Cooper Union
7 East Seventh St.
Monday, December 9, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
waterwell.org
cooper.edu

In 2006, Filipino immigrant Elizabeth Keathley, whose husband is an American citizen, voted in Indiana elections. The next year, after a government official learned at a citizenship interview that she had done so despite not being a citizen herself, the Department of Homeland Security demanded her deportation. Her breakthrough legal case is dramatized in Waterwell founder Arian Moayed’s The Courtroom: A Re-enactment of Deportation Proceedings, a traveling free show that comes to the Great Hall at the Cooper Union on December 9. The stellar cast features five-time Obie winner and Tony nominee Kathleen Chalfant (Wit, Angels in America), two-time Obie winner J. Smith-Cameron (As Bees in Honey Drown, Succession), Happy Anderson, Hanna Cheek, Michael Bryan French, Mick Hilgers, Linda Powell, Jason Ralph, and Kristin Villanueva. All of the dialogue is taken verbatim from court transcripts; the ninety-minute play is directed by Waterwell artistic director Lee Sunday Evans (Dance Nation, Intractable Woman). Admission is free with advance RSVP, but it is strongly encouraged that you arrive early to grab a seat, as the civic-minded, socially conscious Waterwell (The Flores Exhibits, Fleet Week Follies) generally overbooks to make sure the house is full.

MIDNIGHT FAMILY

EMT Juan Ochoa deals with corrupt police in Luke Lorentzen’s Midnight Family

MIDNIGHT FAMILY (Luke Lorentzen, 2019)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, December 6
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
midnightfamilyfilm.com

Following nearly 120 screenings at film festivals around the world and winning more than two dozen awards, Luke Lorentzen’s spellbinding documentary Midnight Family opens December 6 for a weeklong run at Metrograph. The San Francisco–based Stanford grad initially went south of the border to make a different movie, but after meeting the Ochoa family, he quickly changed direction, embedding himself for six months over three years with Fernando (Fer) Ochoa and his two sons, Juan, who is now seventeen, and Josué, now ten, riding along with them in their private ambulance as they roam around Mexico City searching for hurt people in desperate need of assistance. The film announces at the beginning that there are only about forty-five government ambulances for nine million people in the city, so a slew of independently operated vehicles use radio scanners and police tips to race toward scenes of accidents so they can take victims to nearby hospitals and get paid for their efforts. However, they are not necessarily properly trained EMTs, and their ambulances are often not registered — the Mexican health-care system is in such disarray that there is little if any oversight anywhere — and if the people they pick up are poor, they don’t collect on the bill.

But the Ochoas, who named their business Med Care, soldier on, going out night after night. They are truly concerned about helping men, women, and children who require medical care, even if they don’t always know the best methods to treat them while speeding toward either a public or private hospital — sometimes making the decision based on whether they have a deal with that hospital to get some cash in exchange for delivering patients. There’s a good reason why it says on their ambulance: “Urgencias Basicas,” which means “basic emergencies.”

Lorentzen expertly unfolds the narrative, as the emergencies start with a broken nose and build up to much more serious health situations. It plays out like a thriller, first with the Ochoas racing through crowded streets and on sidewalks, trying to get to the accident scene before another ambulance does, then roaring to the hospital while their new passenger is still alive. Serving as producer, director, cinematographer, and editor, Lorentzen uses two Sony FS-7s, one mounted on the windshield facing in, the other either handheld or on a tripod in the back, making viewers feel like they’re in the ambulance, experiencing the breathtaking, claustrophobic nature of the Ochoas’ everyday experiences, enhanced by Matías Barberis’s immersive sound design and natural light, which is often quite beautiful, as street lamps and glowing gas stations add a magical quality to the darkness.

There are no talking heads, no experts discussing the health-care crisis, no pontificating about how bad things are. It’s just the Ochoas and their ambulance. Even when they take a break, Fer relaxes right in front of the vehicle, ready to jump into action if a call comes in. “I’d love to take just one night off to show people how screwed they’d be without us. This city would be a mess without private ambulances,” Juan says. Even with them, it’s quite a mess, as Lorentzen does not shy away from the ethical questions raised by the Ochoas’ modus operandi. But in the end, Midnight Family is a gripping and powerful look at the struggles to get quality health care and make a living in Mexico while also evoking the countless medical issues that are prevalent around the world — and in America too.

LITTLE JOE

Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham) surveys her creation in Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe

LITTLE JOE (Jessica Hausner, 2019)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, December 6
212-255-2243
www.littlejoefilm.com
quadcinema.com

Emily Beecham was named Best Actress at Cannes for her role as a scientist and single mother who creates a different kind of monster in Jessica Hausner’s tense and gripping Little Joe, which opens Friday at the Quad. The Austrian director’s first English-language film was inspired directly by Frankenstein and Invasion of the Body Snatchers while evoking elements of Rosemary’s Baby and Little Shop of Horrors as it plays with horror, sci-fi, teen drama, and other genre conventions. Beecham is Alice Woodard, a plant breeder who is developing a flower she believes can make people happy through its “mood-lifting, antidepressant” scent. She names the new species Little Joe, after her son, Joe (Kit Connor), and even sneaks one plant home for him from the highly secured lab, which is blatantly against the rules.

She works at a science institute — a pristine environment with sterile-looking halls and researchers walking around in white lab coats — with Chris (Ben Whishaw), who has a crush on her, Bella (Kerry Fox), who goes everywhere with her dog, assistants Ric (Phénix Brossard) and Jasper (Andrew Rajan), and their boss, Karl (David Wilmot), who is hesitant to release the plant to the public until rigorous testing proves its safety, even though there’s an important plant show coming up where it would be perfect to introduce it. But after the lovely red blooms start emitting clouds of white spores, first Bella’s dog, then Alice’s coworkers and son, along with his friend Selma (Jessie-Mae Alonzo), begin changing.

Joe (Kit Connor) and his mother, Alice (Emily Beecham), sit down for takeout in stylized, atmospheric Little Joe

Written by Hausner (Lourdes, Amour Fou) with Géraldine Bajard, Little Joe is thick with foreboding, as scenes play out slowly to creepy electronic music by late Japanese composer Teiji Ito, who scored films by Maya Deren. The film is set in a timeless world of brightly lit, vividly contrasting pastel yellows, reds, greens, pinks, purples, and blues that conjure the 1970s but there are cell phones; cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, editor Karina Ressler, costume designer Tanja Hausner (the director’s sister), and production designer Katharina Wöppermann invoke the atmosphere of such cult faves as auteurs John Carpenter and David Cronenberg and novelist Ira Levin — who wrote The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, and Rosemary’s Baby — as Alice soon finds herself fighting against what appears to be a spreading conspiracy, all the while exploring her fears with her understanding psychotherapist (Lindsay Duncan). Alice’s bowl-cut red hair is reminiscent of Mia Farrow’s in Rosemary’s Baby (and her last name, Woodard, is similar to Rosemary’s, Woodhouse). Like that classic horror film, Little Joe focuses on the concept of birth and parenthood from a female point of view; even as Alice tries to protect her scientific creation, she is attempting to hold on to her pubescent son as he and his father, Ivan (Sebastian Hulk), become closer. “The ability to reproduce is what gives every living being meaning,” Bella says.

Perhaps the scariest part of the film is how realistic it feels despite its heavily stylized artifice. Hausner, for her first English-language movie, consulted with neuroscientist James Fallon, biologist Hanns Hatt, and other experts to research the validity of her plot, particularly in an age where there is global controversy over the efficacy of genetically modified food and animal and human cloning. Beecham (Sulphur and White, Into the Badlands) is superb as Alice, a stand-in for all of us, someone who just wants to bring happiness to the world but, in this case, may not fully understand the price it comes with.