twi-ny recommended events

NEXT WAVE 2019

The Second Woman repeats the same scene from John Cassavetes’s Opening Night one hundred times (photo by Heidrun Lohr)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 230 Lafayette Ave.
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space, 321 Ashland Pl.
October 15 – December 15
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Like myriad loyal BAMgoers, I look forward every year to the announcement of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which has been presenting cutting-edge, experimental, and innovative dance, music, film, theater, opera, and hard-to-categorize multidisciplinary performances from around the world for nearly forty years. We eagerly scour the schedule to see when our longtime BAM favorites will be returning, scanning for such beloved names and companies as Robert Wilson, Sasha Waltz, Grupo Corpo, Batsheva, Philip Glass, Sankai Juku, Ivo van Hove, Mark Morris, Théâtre de la Ville, William Kentridge, Laurie Anderson, and the incomparable Pina Bausch, programmed by masterful executive producer Joe Melillo since 1999.

But this year’s lineup features nary a single familiar name, including that of Melillo, who retired after the Winter/Spring season. For his debut Next Wave Festival, new artistic director David Binder has opted to include a roster of performers all making their BAM debuts as well. But don’t be scared off by the lack of recognition. There was a time when no one in New York had ever seen Pina Bausch, Sankai Juku, Batsheva, Sasha Waltz, et al. And by its very nature, the Next Wave is all about the future of performance, delivered to an eager and intrepid audience open to anything and everything.

Dead Centre’s Hamnet tells the story of Shakespeare’s son (photo by Ernesto Galan)

“In programming my first season at BAM, I was inspired by the genesis of Next Wave and the groundbreaking work of my predecessors, Harvey Lichtenstein and Joe Melillo,” Binder said in a statement. “Next Wave is a place to see, share, and celebrate the most exciting new ideas in theater, music, dance, and, especially, the unclassifiable adventures. We’ve invited a slate of artists who have never performed at BAM. Each and every one of them is making a BAM debut, with artistic work that’s surprising and resonant. I’m excited to launch this season and to build BAM’s next chapter
with you.”

The 2019 Next Wave roster is an impressive one, kicking off October 15-20 with Michael Keegan-Dolan and Teaċ Daṁsa’s Swan Lake / Loch na hEala, about a young girl sexually assaulted by a priest. In The Second Woman, Alia Shawkat performs the same scene from John Cassavetes’s Opening Night one hundred times with one hundred different men over the course of twenty-four consecutive hours. Christiane Jatahy’s What if they went to Moscow? explores film and theater in a retelling of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters that takes place concurrently onstage at the BAM Fisher and onscreen at BAM Rose Cinemas, the audiences switching places as the performance repeats. In Dante or Die’s User Not Found, audience members sit in a café at the Greene Grape Annex on Fulton St., following the exploits of a man a few tables away. Dimitris Papaioannou breaks boundaries as he explores human existence in The Great Tamer. And Glenn Kaino’s When a Pot Finds Its Purpose will be the inaugural free exhibition at the new Rudin Family Gallery at BAM Strong.

Dante or Die’s User Not Found takes place in the Greene Grape Annex on Fulton St. (photo by Justin Jones)

The 2019 Next Wave Festival also includes Bruno Beltrão/Grupo de Rua’s Inoah, Dumbworld’s free outdoor art piece He Did What?, Selina Thompson’s free interactive installation Race Cards, Dead Centre’s Hamnet, Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s Bacchae: Prelude to a Purge, Untitled Projects/Unicorn Theatre, UK’s The End of Eddy, Peeping Tom’s 32 rue Vandenbranden, Fuel/National Theatre/Leeds Playhouse’s Barber Shop Chronicles, Kyle Marshall Choreography’s A.D. & Colored, Kate McIntosh’s In Many Hands, and Meow Meow’s A Very Meow Meow Holiday Show. Still worried about unfamiliarity? If you’ve been to BAM before, you should be ready, willing, and able to be surprised, and if you’ve never been to BAM, you should be preparing to make your debut.

HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING

It’s Catholic conservative against Catholic conservative in world premiere of Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning at Playwrights Horizons (photo by Joan Marcus)

Playwrights Horizons, Mainstage Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 10, $49-$89
www.playwrightshorizons.org

Almost every day we see news about the cannibalistic infighting among the Democrats as the moderate, liberal, and progressive wings argue over policy and identity politics while the original field of more than two dozen candidates to challenge President Donald Trump is whittled down. What appeared to be a slam dunk has been hampered by uncertainty and venomous attacks on their own. Tired of watching them yelling at one another? Then perhaps it’s time to hear some Republicans ripping each other apart, as playwright and filmmaker Will Arbery twists audience expectations in his unnerving and wickedly poignant Heroes of the Fourth Turning, making its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons through November 10. New York City theatergoers who are used to seeing liberal-minded works that attack, and often deride, religious conservatives and Trump supporters are in for a surprise as Arbery, who was raised in a Christian conservative home in Dallas, Texas, brings together five Republicans who are also hampered by uncertainty and let loose some venomous attacks. “We are living in barbaric times,” Justin says.

It’s August 19, 2017, one week after the Charlottesville riot and two days before the solar eclipse, and a group of friends are mingling in Justin’s backyard in the small town of Lander, Wyoming, pop. 7,000. (The cozy evening set is by Laura Jellinek.) He’s hosting a party for Dr. Gina Presson (Michele Pawk), who has just been inaugurated president of Transfiguration College of Wyoming, the alma mater of Justin (Jeb Kreager), Emily (Julia McDermott), Kevin (John Zdrojeski), and Teresa (Zoë Winters). They all graduated Transfiguration over the past fifteen years, and all are in the path of totality, a scientific term relating to the eclipse as well as a metaphor for their attempts to find their individual paths in the world. Although the Republicans control the White House and Congress, the friends are concerned about the Democrats. “There are more of them. We lost the popular vote, by a lot. And they’re mobilizing. In many ways, they are in power. And they’re trying to wipe us out,” Justin says. “There’s a war coming,” Teresa warns.

Kevin (John Zdrojeski), Justin (Jeb Kreager), and Teresa (Zoë Winters) pray for better times in new political play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Kevin, who drinks, smokes, and snorts too much, is an off-balance clod who spurts out whatever’s on his mind, which pisses off the cold, calculating Teresa, who has moved to Brooklyn. “Don’t say gross things in a holy space,” Teresa declares after he makes a rude remark. “This isn’t a holy space; it’s just Justin’s house,” Kevin replies. “The panopticon, Kevin, Catholicism is the panopticon. This is a holy space,” Teresa explains. “It’s also a profane space,” Kevin responds.

They bicker over the Virgin Mary, morality, identity, the LGBT community, Trump, Hillary Clinton, Barry Goldwater, abortion, Patrick Buchanan, and more, making many of the same arguments that liberals do; in fact, if you were to switch a few names or words here and there, it could be a battle between lefties. There’s also a sexual energy that looms, from a past secret to possible future hook-ups.

The verbal sparring heats up when the distinguished Gina joins them and is not happy about Teresa’s unyielding support of far-right ideologues. Gina — a right-wing mirror of Hillary Clinton, down to her personal style — tells her, “These new people on the right, they’re not true conservatives. They’re charlatans, they’re hucksters. And honestly, darling, they’re a bit racist.” Meanwhile, Emily, who is very ill with what appears to be Lyme disease, is somewhere in the middle, searching for the human element. “Wow, she is . . . I’m sorry but she is such a hypocrite,” she says of Teresa. “At the ceremony, she had a little audience and she was trying to get me to admit that my liberal friend was a bad person. And I’m sorry, but I think it’s unfair to argue that I should cut ties with someone just because they’re on the other side. I can’t see things in black-and-white like that. I have a full faith, it’s my rock, it’s my pain, it’s my everything — and I also am friends with whoever I want to be friends with.”

Kevin (John Zdrojeski) and Emily (Julia McDermott) discuss love and politics in Heroes of the Fourth Turning (photo by Joan Marcus)

Arbery (Plano, Evanston Salt Costs Climbing) was inspired by William Strauss and Neil Howe’s 1997 book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy — What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny and his own family: He was raised in Texas by Catholic conservatives who were not a bunch of numbskull deplorables but fellow citizens with a different point of view. Teresa explains that there are four turnings, each one lasting about a generation: High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis. In the play, as in America today, we are at Crisis mode. Not only won’t Republicans listen to Democrats, and liberals won’t listen to conservatives, but all the caterwauling within the same party is creating chaos; empathy and compassion have all but disappeared when it comes to politics. “Trump was made possible by the uneducated. . . . Liberty is being attacked, by both sides, and it’s tragic to see. Polarities make way for a tyrant,” Gina says, but Teresa proclaims, “Trump is a Golem molded from the clay of mass media and he’s come to save us all.”

Danya Taymor’s (Daddy, Pass Over) sharp, eagle-eyed direction smooths over some rough patches and carefully avoids turning the play into the kind of political posturing and manufactured conflicts we see on television news and social media, and monologues delivered by the three actresses are downright exhilarating, even if your personal opinions are completely contrary to theirs. In fact, the three female characters are stronger than the two males, and that shows in the acting; McDermott (Epiphany, Queens), Tony winner Pawk (A Small Fire, Hollywood Arms), and Winters (White Noise, An Octoroon) kick the men’s butts. But the real star of the show just might be sound designer Justin Ellington; the play begins with a blaring gunshot, and Ellington later lets loose a shrill, mysterious explosion of loud noise several times, a clarion call that perhaps is meant to wake us up to what is happening to every one of us, no matter who you plan to vote for in 2020.

NYFF57 SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: THE BOOKSELLERS

Rare-book dealers such as Adam Weinberger scour through private homes to find buried treasure in The Booksellers

THE BOOKSELLERS (D. W. Young, 2019)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Monday, October 7, Francesca Beale Theater, 6:00
Wednesday, October 9, Howard Gilman Theater, 8:30
Festival runs September 27 – October 13
www.filmlinc.org

“There’s so much more to a book than just the reading,” Maurice Sendak is quoted as saying in D. W. Young’s wonderfully literate documentary The Booksellers, screening at the New York Film Festival on October 7 and 9. I have to admit to being a little biased, as I work in the children’s book industry in another part of my life, and I serve as the managing editor on Sendak’s old and newly discovered works. The film follows the exploits of a group of dedicated bibliophiles who treasure books as unique works of art, buying, selling, and collecting them not merely for the money but for the thrill of it. “The relationship of the individual to the book is very much like a love affair,” Americana collector Michael Zinman explains.

Sisters Adina Cohen, Judith Lowry and Naomi Hample, owners of the Argosy Book Store, at the store on East 59th Street in Manhattan

Sisters Adina Cohen, Judith Lowry, and Naomi Hample of Argosy Book Store keep the family legacy alive

In the film, which features narration by executive producer Parker Posey, Young visits the Antiquarian Book Fair at the Park Avenue Armory and speaks with a wide range of intellectual characters, including author and cultural commentator Fran Lebowitz, who relates her experiences in rare-book stores; bestselling writer Susan Orlean, who discusses her archives; leather-bound connoisseur Bibi Mohamed of Imperial Fine Books, who talks about going to her first estate sale; late-twentieth-century specialist Arthur Fournier; Nicholas D. Lowry and Stephen Massey of Antiques Roadshow, the latter of whom was the auctioneer for the most expensive book ever sold, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Hammer codex; sci-fi expert and author Henry Wessells; Justin Schiller, who worked with Sendak and other children’s book authors; Rebecca Romney of Pawn Stars; Jim Cummins, who owns some four hundred thousand books; Erik DuRon and Jess Kuronen of Left Bank Books; Nancy Bass Wyden of the Strand; and Adina Cohen, Naomi Hample, and Judith Lowry, the three sisters who own the Argosy Book Store, continuing the family legacy.

But times have changed, for both good and bad. Dealer Dave Bergman complains, “The internet has killed the hunt,” comparing the excitement of live auctions and the detective-like chase for a title to the boredom of automated online searches and bidding. However, diversity is on the rise, as explored with Kevin Young of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Caroline Schimmel, a leading collector of books by women; and hip-hop archivist and curator Syreeta Gates. “I think the death of the book is highly overrated,” Heather O’Donnell of Honey and Wax Booksellers declares. From her mouth. . . . The Booksellers, which is worth seeing solely for Antiques Roadshow appraiser and Swann Auction Galleries president Nicholas D. Lowry’s fab mustache, is screening October 7 at 6:00 and October 9 at 8:30, followed by Q&As with D. W. Young and producers Judith Mizrachy and Dan Wechsler.

NYFF57 MAIN SLATE: THE MONEYCHANGER

Daniel Hendler plays the harried Humberto Brause in Federico Veiroj’s The Moneychanger

THE MONEYCHANGER (Federico Veiroj, 2019)
New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center
144/165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Wednesday, October 9, Walter Reade Theater, 9:00
Thursday, October 10, Francesca Beale Theater, 6:00
www.filmlinc.org

“Jesus knew what he was doing; at the very cradle of civilization, we money brokers are the root of all evil. We’re to blame for everything that’s rotten in this world,” Humberto Brause (Daniel Hendler) says at the beginning of The Moneychanger, Uruguayan-Spanish writer-director Federico Veiroj’s fifth narrative feature, making its US premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 9 and 10. Hendler is terrific as Brause, playing the selfish, greedy businessman with a jittery unease, a man clearly uncomfortable in his own skin, especially as his world falls apart all around him.

The film begins in the city of Montevideo in 1975 and flashes back to 1956, when Brause is working for successful financier Schwensteiger (Luis Machín) and takes an instant liking to his boss’s daughter, Gudrun (Dolores Fonzi). Schwensteiger might be highly ethical, but his protégé and son-in-law is soon in bed with corrupt politicians, a questionable couple who needs a whole lot of laundry done, and an unclean prostitute. Brause knows he is doing bad things, breaking laws, and jeopardizing his relationship with his family — he moves about awkwardly, hesitant with his words, a kind of schmendrick who keeps being offered piles of cash — but he just can’t say no. “Our goal in life wasn’t to earn our peers’ respect and admiration,” he narrates. “Life was about making money and enjoying it. Enjoy every penny earned and spent. Getting into the garden of Eden was just a small fortune away.” But when his actions start blowing up in his face, he has to decide how far he will go to protect his interests.

Based on Juan Enrique Gruber’s 1979 novella Así habló el cambista, this cinematic satire was written by Veiroj with Martín Mauregui and cinematographer Arauco Hernández, who shoots the film in a droll 1970s palette of browns, blacks, and grays; the splendid period art direction is by Pablo Maestre Galli. Fonzi is static as Gudrun; her passive expression barely changes no matter what is happening. The cast also includes Benjamín Vicuña as extortionist Javier Bonpland, Paulo Betti as political conspirer Don Marins, and Germán de Silva as hit man Moacyr. Veiroj (A Useful Life, The Apostate) maintains an offbeat pace with subtle humor aimed at the absurdity of it all as one man navigates through a business sector gone off the deep end because of rampant deregulation. The Moneychanger is screening at the Walter Reade Theater on October 9 at 9:00 and at the Francesca Beale Theater on October 10 at 6:00, both followed by Q&As with Veiroj.

NOVENAS FOR A LOST HOSPITAL

Saint Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton (Kathleen Chalfant) rules over Novenas for a Lost Hospital (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and other locations
224 Waverly Pl.
Wednesday – Monday through October 13, $20-$60
212-627-2556
www.rattlestick.org

Cusi Cram’s Novenas for a Lost Hospital is part historical walking tour, part theatrical drama, honoring the legacy of St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village, guiding sixty guests a night from a church courtyard to a theater to the park across the street from where the nonprofit Catholic hospital stood from its beginnings as a one-room medical facility founded by the Daughters of Charity in 1849 until April 2010, when it closed due to ballooning debt and questionable redevelopment plans. In the two-plus-hour show, longtime West Village residents Cram, Rattlestick artistic director Daniella Topol, and dramaturg Guy Lancaster relate the history of St. Vincent’s, a Level 1 trauma institution and teaching hospital that treated victims of the cholera epidemic in 1849, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, the Titanic sinking in 1912, the FALN bombing in 1975, and the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Cusi Cram’s Novenas for a Lost Hospital explores the history of St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

But the hospital is perhaps most well known for being front and center battling the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, which is what Cram focuses on from the start, in the courtyard of St. John’s in the Village, where a singer (Goussy Celestin) welcomes everyone, hands are ritually washed, a quartet does the Hustle, and an ailing man bathes himself with agonizing difficulty. The action then heads indoors to the Rattlestick black box, where a collection of newspaper articles and photographs about St. Vincent’s are on display on upturned gurneys. After they are wheeled out, a long, repetitive, melodramatic middle section switches back and forth between 1849 and more contemporary times, led by Sisters of Charity founder and first American-born saint Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton (Kathleen Chalfant), who is accompanied by Sister Mary Ulrica (Natalie Woolams-Torres) and Sister Mary Angela Hughes (Kelly McAndrew) in the past and a pair of nurses (Woolams-Torres and McAndrew) more recently.

They are visited by flamboyant Afro-Caribbean slave, hairdresser, and philanthropist Pierre Toussaint (Alvin Keith) as they treat a series of patients, primarily Lazarus (Ken Barnett), so named because he won’t die, his boyfriend (Justin Genna), and choreographer JB (Justin Genna). “A crisis can be very grounding. Purposeful,” Lazarus tells the audience. “Not dying was my job for three years. And before that, trying to save everyone I loved or admired from dying a miserable, humiliating death was my job.”

The audience is led from a courtyard to a theater to a park in Novenas for a Lost Hospital (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Ultimately, the show, which is divided into nine novenas, including “A Prayer for the Reluctantly Resurrected,” “A Prayer for the Forgotten,” and “A Prayer for the Beauty of Chaos,” makes its way through the streets to NYC AIDS Memorial Park for a grand finale that brings everything full circle. Despite plenty of bumps and slow moments, Novenas for a Lost Hospital is a touching communal experience, a unique eulogy for an institution that helped define a neighborhood — and a city — through more than a century and a half and is now a memory of a bygone era when money wasn’t everything and individual lives mattered.

NYFF57 SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: THE BOOKSELLERS CAPSULE REVIEW

Rare-book dealers such as Adam Weinberger scour through private homes to find buried treasure in The Booksellers

D. W. Young’s wonderfully literate documentary The Booksellers is making its world premiere at the New York Film Festival, screening on October 7 at 6:00 and October 9 at 8:30, followed by Q&As with D. W. Young and producers Judith Mizrachy and Dan Wechsler. The film follows the exploits of a wide-ranging group of dedicated bibliophiles who treasure books as unique works of art, buying, selling, and collecting them not merely for the money but for the thrill of it. “The relationship of the individual to the book is very much like a love affair,” Americana collector Michael Zinman explains. Among those who share their thoughts on books are Fran Lebowitz, Susan Orlean, and the owners of such New York City bookstores as Imperial Fine Books, Left Bank Books, the Argosy Book Store, and the Strand. Look for my full review to be posted when the film debuts Monday night.

CROSSING THE LINE: WHY?

Kathryn Hunter in Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne's play 'Why?' at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris, June 2019 Pascal Gely

Kathryn Hunter wonders why in Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne production about theater itself (photo by Pascal Gely)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Through October 6, $85-$120
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org
crossingthelinefestival.org

The basic three-letter question “Why?” can be a repeated response, over and over again, from a curious child learning about the world, a deeply philosophical inquiry into human nature, or a painful cry when tragedy occurs. In Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s Why?, continuing at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center through October 6, it relates to two queries, general and specific: Why do we make and attend theater, and why did Josef Stalin have theater innovator Vsevolod Meyerhold and his actress wife, Zinaida Reich, brutally killed?

Part of FIAF’s multidisciplinary Crossing the Line Festival, Why? is also the centerpiece of “Peter Brook\NY,” a two-week, two-borough tribute to the ninety-four-year-old theater and film director — he actually prefers being called a “distiller” — an Emmy and two-time Tony winner who has written such books as The Open Door: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre, Tip of the Tongue: Reflections on Language and Meaning, and The Shifting Point: Theatre, Film, Opera 1946-1987 and has directed such plays as Hamlet with Paul Scofield, The Visit with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Marat/Sade, and more recently The Suit, The Prisoner, and The Valley of Astonishment. He is a fixture at TFANA, which is around the corner from the BAM Harvey Theater, which he helped renovate in 1987 for his epic version of The Mahabharata. He and Estienne have been collaborating for more than forty decades, and they know theater.

Marcello Magni gets serious after clowning around in Why? (photo by Pascal Gely)

The first half cheerfully explores why there is theater at all, how it came to be, and what can make it so special. The show begins with Hayley Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, and Marcello Magni, all dressed in black, giving a kind of master class in acting. Highlights include a clownish Magni running around in circles and Hunter wondering how to make the line “My Lord, the carriage awaits” not boring. They interact with the audience, even bringing a few people onstage for some clever improv, and clearly are in love with their chosen profession, just as we are in love with watching them. There’s lots of laughter, accompanied by Laurie Blundell on piano. Theater appears to be a friendly, safe space for everyone.

But in the second act, the trio, still wearing the same costumes, moving about on the same, mostly empty stage (Brook is known for his spare sets, as evidenced by his seminal book The Empty Space — A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate), the trio becomes far more serious, reading letters, news reports, and other documents relating what happened to Stanislavski protégé Meyerhold and Reich when they supported the communist revolution instead of Stalin, who dealt with them in violent, theatrical ways. The harsh tale also involves actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. “Theater is a dangerous weapon,” Meyerhold famously wrote in the 1920s. Nearly a century later, it still is; it may be able to entertain, educate, and enlighten us, but it is also seen by far too many as a threat, which Brook and Estienne point out in their inimitable, inestimable way.