twi-ny recommended events

LITTLE GEM

Kay (Marsha Mason) brings up some very private details in Little Gem at the Irish Rep (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through September 8, $50-$70
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

Three generations of women in a North Dublin family share their foibles and exert their fortitude in successive monologues in Marc Atkinson Borrull’s engaging if not quite sparkling revival of Elaine Murphy’s Little Gem, running at the Irish Rep through September 8. First seen in the US at the Flea in 2010, the hundred-minute play begins with eighteen-year-old Amber (Lauren O’Leary), who enters a doctor’s office waiting room (the antiseptic set is by Meredith Ries) and talks about a night of partying at a high school ball with her best friend, Jo, involving drugs and alcohol, dancing, and her maybe-boyfriend, Paul. “Jo and me just did a line in the toilets. Feeling nice. The music is thumping in my chest. Unce, unce, unce. Like this fuzzy feeling, know exactly where I am but when I close my eyes I could be anywhere,” she says dreamily.

When she is done, her mother, Lorraine (Brenda Meaney), comes in and, while Amber watches her, discusses a strange occurrence at the store where she works that ends up with her having to speak with human resources. The “HR bird” asks her about her ill father. “She reaches across the desk and touches my hand. Don’t remember the last time someone touched me, hugged me, or even bleedin’ nudged me,” Lorraine admits to the audience.

And then Kay (Marsha Mason), Amber’s grandmother and Lorraine’s mother, walks in and, while the other two look at her, describes her vaginal itch and her ill husband, Gem, who she loves but calls a “cantankerous oul’ fuck.” She says, “I’m the wrong side of sixty, not dead. I haven’t had sex in well over a year and it’s killing me.” So off she goes to Ann Summers to purchase her very first vibrator.

Grandmother Kay (Marsha Mason), granddaughter Amber (Lauren O’Leary), and mother Lorraine (Brenda Meaney) share their fears and desires in Irish Rep revival (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Sex, significant others, loneliness, and the pains of life and death are the key themes as the trio of women continue alternating monologues. Amber becomes pregnant. Lorraine, who is divorced from Ray, goes on her first date ever with a man she met at a salsa dance class. And Kay tries to use her vibrator while worrying about Gem’s health. They meander across the stage, occasionally sitting down, as they open up about intimate details of their innermost fears and desires; while the youngest, Amber, has no filter, Lorraine is ready to burst out of her sheltered existence and Kay is a bit surprised by how brutally honest she is.

Everything about Murphy’s (Ribbons, Shush) first play is solid, from Borrull’s (Beginning, Outlying Islands) effective direction to the performances by four-time Oscar nominee Mason (The Goodbye Girl, Fire and Air), Meaney (Indian Ink, Incognito), and, in her off-Broadway debut, O’Leary (The Awkward Years), but Little Gem never quite grabs you as it should, falling just short of reaching the next level it aims for. Like life itself, it can be disappointing, but there are enough genuine moments to recommend it, even if it doesn’t glitter.

NYC BROADWAY WEEK SUMMER 2019

Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of the Temptations is one of twenty-four shows participating in Broadway Week (photo by Matthew Murphy)

BROADWAY WEEK: 2-for-1 Tickets
September 3-16, buy one ticket, get one free
www.nycgo.com/broadwayweek

Tickets are on sale for the end-of-summer edition of Broadway Week, which runs September 3-16 and offers theater lovers a chance to get two-for-one tickets in advance to see new and long-running productions on the Great White Way. Two dozen shows are participating, but one is already sold out — The Lion King — so you need to act fast. You can still grab seats, either half-price or a $30 upgrade, for Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of the Temptations, Aladdin, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Beetlejuice, Betrayal, The Book of Mormon, Chicago, Come from Away, Dear Evan Hansen, Derren Brown: Secret, Frozen, The Great Society, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, The Height of the Storm, Mean Girls, Oklahoma!, The Phantom of the Opera, Sea Wall / A Life, Slave Play, The Sound Inside, Tootsie, Waitress, and Wicked.

EUREKA DAY

A woke executive committee at a California private school tries to reach a consensus in Eureka Day (photo by Robert Altman)

Walkerspace
46 Walker St. between Broadway & Church St.
Wednesday – Sunday, through September 21, $25-$40
www.coltcoeur.org

Political correctness, inclusivity, neurodiversity, sensitivity, and conflict avoidance run amok in Colt Coeur’s East Coast premiere of Jonathan Spector’s uproarious satire, Eureka Day, which opened last night at Walkerspace. When an unvaccinated student at a supposedly woke California private school, Eureka Day, contracts mumps and the county health department issues a quarantine order, the executive committee, which strives to treat all children, students, and parents with equal respect and considers every opinion valid, suddenly faces a crisis that makes it question its most basic value systems. The white Don (Thomas Jay Ryan), Eli (Brian Wiles), and Suzanne (Tina Benko), the black Carina (Elizabeth Carter), and the Asian Meiko (K.K. Moggie) meet in the elementary school library; the cluttered room (designed by John McDermott) features three tall bookshelves, divided into Fiction, Nonfiction, and Social Justice, as if the third one is neither fiction nor nonfiction, fake nor real. The alphabet circling the room consists of such words as “co-op” for C, “democracy” for D, “trans” for T, and “union” for U.

The committee, which makes decisions only by consensus — heated arguments are not their thing, because offensive language or behavior of any kind will not be tolerated — agrees to hold a live community activated conversation over social media, an online town hall about the health situation. Despite Don’s peaceful intentions, it erupts into a frenzy of personal attacks between those parents in favor of vaccinations and those against — a larger number than anyone anticipated — but even the phrasing causes problems. “‘Anti-vaxxer’ is not really a term I’m comfortable with. It’s actually something said out of IGNORANCE,” one mother posts, while a father writes, “TRUE FACTS: Moonlanding wasn’t faked / 9/11 wasn’t an inside job / Global Warming is real / Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism.” The committee shuts it down when it devolves into curses and vicious name-calling, but the controversy soon blossoms among the five of them when it is learned that Suzanne and Meiko refuse to vaccinate their children, while Eli and Carina have immunized theirs. Don, the head of the school, doesn’t have the same skin in the game, as he is childless.

A live community activated conversation over social media looks at a community health crisis in Jonathan Spector’s black comedy (photo by Robert Altman)

Don, Suzanne, Eli, and Meiko are determined not to offend anyone, in any way, ever — even the scones they eat are carefully sourced and served — but Carina, the newest member of the committee, is not afraid to state her case for fact-based science over undereducated opinion, which does not make Suzanne happy. And it only gets worse when race, religion, and class enter the fray, rearing their ugly heads in the hallowed halls of Eureka Day.

Adroitly directed with subtle, dry humor by Adrienne Campbell-Holt (Downstairs, Joan), Eureka Day is a shrewd, cunning laceration of would-be social justice warriors, conspiracy theories, identity politics, and the education system. The characters are well drawn and fully believable, portrayed by a terrific cast led by Benko (Top Girls, Nantucket Sleigh Ride), who matter-of-factly contorts her body in funny ways throughout, and Ryan (The Nap, Dance Nation) as the soft and tender though oblivious Don, looking ever-so-gentle and caring in his shorts and mandals (without socks) as he attempts to steer clear of confrontation. The story has a little extra oomph here in New York City, where a measles outbreak in Brooklyn has spread fear and misinformation, especially on the internet. It’s Pollyanna-ish to think, in this day and age, that everyone gets a say, that every opinion bears equal weight despite the evidence. As it becomes clear in Eureka Day, in an environment in which everyone wins, there eventually has to be losers. But it’s not always who you might think.

THE LOAD

Leon Lučev stars as a man just trying to get by during the Kosovo war in The Load

THE LOAD (TERET) (Ognjen Glavonić, 2018)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Opens Friday, August 30
212-875-5600
grasshopperfilm.com
www.filmlinc.org

Eight years in the making, Ognjen Glavonić’s narrative feature debut, The Load, is a tense, gripping drama set amid the NATO bombings during the Kosovo war in Yugoslavia in 1999. After the factory where he worked closes down, Vlada Stefanovic (Leon Lučev) takes a job driving a truck from the countryside to Belgrade. The mission is reminiscent of the ones in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear and William Friedkin’s underrated remake, Sorcerer, except in those films, the drivers, played by Yves Montand and Roy Scheider, respectively, knew they were transporting dangerous cargoes of nitroglycerin and dynamite. Not only won’t his facilitators tell Vlada what’s in the back of the truck, but it’s padlocked so he can’t look inside. He just has to follow two very basic rules: “Once you start driving, there’s no stopping” and “Avoid traffic and don’t attract attention.”

The film, inspired by real events that Glavonić documented in 2016’s Depth Two, opens with a dark, beautiful shot of a vast mountain landscape, bombs going off in the distance while a van slowly moves down a winding path. Vlada is first shown from outside the vehicle, his head leaning against the window, a forest and a burning house reflected in the glass; he appears to be trapped inside, resigned to his fate. This is not the life he has chosen, risking everything so he can bring home money to his wife and son. For much of the movie, he is in the claustrophobic cab of his truck or in corners of small rooms, as if there is no way out. He reluctantly picks up a young hitchhiker, Paja (Pavle Čemerikić), who says he knows the way to Belgrade, avoiding roads and bridges that have been bombed.

Paja (Pavle Čemerikić) hitches a ride in Ognjen Glavonić’s suspenseful road movie

Glavonić occasionally strays from the central narrative, temporarily following the stories of minor, peripheral characters — the director has said that he structured the film like a tree, with many branches representing various aspects of everyday life at that harsh time — but he always returns to Vlada, the tree’s trunk, who smokes cigarette after cigarette, using his father’s lighter, an engraved memento from the 1943 Battle of Sutjeska. He doesn’t say much, rarely smiles, just forges ahead. When he walks into the middle of a party, the first words sung by the band are “like a wounded bird”; he is a victim of war, collateral damage. “Take me away from here,” the song continues, but there is nowhere to go but to his mysterious destination.

A coproduction of Serbia, Croatia, France, Qatar, and Iran, The Load is a masterpiece of suspense, a caustic thriller gorgeously photographed by Tatjana Krstevski, often with a roaming, off-balance handheld camera, with subtly immersive sound design by Jakov Munižaba, making it feel like you’re on the road with Vlada, seeing and hearing what he’s experiencing. Croatian actor Lučev (Silent Sonata, I Can Barely Remember the Day) is magnetic as Vlada, a kind of everyman caught up in a terrible situation that he can do nothing about. The Load opens August 30 at Lincoln Center, with Krstevski and producer Stefan Ivančić introducing the 7:15 screening that night; Ivančić will also introduce the 5:00 show on August 31.

LEONARD COHEN: A CRACK IN EVERYTHING

George Fok, "Passing Through," 2017. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Frederick Charles

George Fok’s Passing Through is centerpiece of Leonard Cohen show at Jewish Museum (courtesy of the artist / photo by Frederick Charles)

The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Through September 8, $8-$18, pay-what-you-wish Thursday from 5:00 – 8:00, free Saturday
212-423-3200
thejewishmuseum.org

In an October 2016 Q&A at the Canadian Consulate in LA, Leonard Cohen explained, “Uh, I said I was ready to die recently. And I think I was exaggerating. I’ve always been into self-dramatization. I intend to live forever.” Leonard Norman Cohen died the next month at the age of eighty-two, leaving behind a legacy that might just live forever, as evidenced by the sensational exhibition “Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything” that continues at the Jewish Museum through September 8. Curated by John Zeppetelli and Victor Shiffman for the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in Cohen’s beloved hometown, the show is an ingenious exploration of the life and career of the singer-songwriter, poet, novelist, visual artist, Buddhist monk, father, grandfather, Sabbath-observant Jew, and elegant raconteur.

Named after a quote from his song “Anthem” from the 1992 album The Future — “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in” — the three-floor multimedia exhibit consists of thirteen installations by artists repurposing and recontextualizing Cohen’s words and images. The centerpiece is George Fok’s nearly hourlong Passing Through, a nine-channel video across three walls of a large room in which visitors can sit on benches or beanbag chairs; the piece features concert and backstage footage ranging from Cohen’s early days to his final tour in 2013, merging together performances of the same songs through the years, including “Hallelujah,” “Tower of Song,” “Suzanne,” “I’m Your Man,” “Chelsea Hotel #2,” and “First We Take Manhattan,” revealing how he adapted his unique trademark vocal phrasings as he got older. Kara Blake’s The Offerings is a five-channel video that compiles thirty-five minutes of interviews in which Cohen discusses his writing process and some of his life choices, from moving to Greece to becoming a monk. In Ari Folman’s Depression Chamber, the director of such films as Waltz with Bashir and The Congress invites people one at a time to spend five minutes in a dark room, lying on a bed as Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” plays, the lyrics coming alive in mesmerizing, meaningful ways. At the other end of the hall, more than two hundred of Cohen’s self-portrait drawings from 2003 to 2016 are projected on a loop, edited together by Alexandre Perreault.

Candice Breitz, "I'm Your Man (A Portrait of Leonard Cohen)," 2017. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Frederick Charles

Candice Breitz’s I’m Your Man (A Portrait of Leonard Cohen) consists of eighteen fans singing all of 1988 Cohen comeback album (courtesy of the artist / photo by Frederick Charles)

Candice Breitz’s two-part I’m Your Man (A Portrait of Leonard Cohen) begins with a video of the all-male Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Choir, from Cohen’s longtime shul, singing only the background vocals to every tune on Cohen’s extraordinary 1988 comeback album, I’m Your Man (“First We Take Manhattan,” “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” “Everybody Knows,” “Take This Waltz,” “Tower of Song,” the title track, et al.); down a narrow path blanketed by red curtains, eighteen Cohen fans sing the main lyrics to the songs, each on their own screen and speaker. For the best effect, walk around the room and then into the hall to find the exact spot where the lead vocals and harmonies merge. Audiences can participate in Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Poetry Machine, a vintage Wurlitzer organ with an array of speakers and gramophone horns; guests can take a seat and press down the keys, each of which connects to Cohen’s voice reading poems from his 2006 Book of Longing. You can also sit or lie down on a bench and hum “Hallelujah” into any of several dangling microphones in Daily tous les jours’ Heard There Was a Secret Chord, joining a chorus of live hummers online.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, "The Poetry Machine," 2017. Courtesy of the artists; Luhring Augustine, New York; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo. Photo: Frederick Charles

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Poetry Machine invites visitors to take a seat (courtesy of the artists; Luhring Augustine, New York; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo / photo by Frederick Charles)

On the third floor is a listening room where you can relax and hear specially commissioned Cohen cover songs while immersed in a James Turrell–like display of changing colors and shapes; the setlist includes Feist’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” Dear Criminals’ “Anthem,” Ariane Moffatt and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal’s “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Moby’s “Suzanne,” Chilly Gonzales, Jarvis Cocker, and Kaiser Quartett’s “Paper Thin Hotel,” and the National, Sufjan Stevens, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Richard Reed Parry’s “Memories.” There are also contributions from Christophe Chassol, Kota Ezawa, Jon Rafman, Taryn Simon (linking Cohen’s death with the election of Donald Trump), and Tacita Dean (a sweet tribute to “Bird on the Wire”) along with extensive biographical text in one area. It all comes together to paint a magnificent portrait of an exceptional artist who continually challenged himself and his audience, a highly intelligent storyteller and performer who seemed to exist on his own plane. “I never had the sense that there was an end. That there was a retirement or that there was a jackpot, Cohen told Paul Zollo in an 1990s interview. With “Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything,” fans hit the jackpot with a potpourri of phenomenal proportion. (On August 29, the Jewish Museum and Russ & Daughters are hosting the final “Cocktails with Cohen,” in which, from 5:30 to 7:30, visitors can partake of the Red Needle, a drink invented by Cohen in 1975 consisting of tequila, cranberry juice, lemon, and ice. Beer, wine, and other drinks will also be available for purchase.)

PROGRAMMER’S NOTEBOOK — ON MEMORY: UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or winner is a subtly beautiful meditation on death and rebirth, memory and transformation

UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (LUNG BOONMEE RALUEK CHAT) (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
BAMfilm, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Saturday, August 31, 6:00
Series runs through September 5
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The BAM series “Programmers’ Notebook: On Memory,” consisting of works involving creative, cinematic ways of the mind’s relationship with the past, continues August 31 with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s exquisite 2010 Palme d’Or winner, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, an elegiac, personal meditation on memory, transformation, death, and rebirth, a fascinating integration of the human, animal, and spirit worlds. Uncle Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) is dying of kidney failure, being tended to by his Laotian helper, Jaai (Samud Kugasang). Boonmee is joined by his dead wife’s sister, Jen (Jenjira Pongpas), in his house in the middle of the jungle. Boonmee and Jen have nearly impossibly slow conversations that seem to go nowhere, just a couple of very simple people not expecting much excitement out of what’s left of their lives. Even when Boonmee’s long-dead wife, Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwonk), and his long-missing son, Boonsong (Geerasak Kulhong), now a hairy ghost monkey covered in black fur and with two laserlike red eyes, suddenly show up, Boonmee and Jen pretty much just go with the flow. Weerasethakul maintains the beautifully evocative pace whether Jaai is draining Boonmee’s kidney, the characters discuss Communism, Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee) questions his monkhood, a princess (Wallapa Mongkolprasert) has sex with a catfish, or they all journey to a cave in search of another of Boonmee’s past lives, framing each section in the context of a different cinematic genre, a lament for the ways movies used to be made and viewed.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is screening at BAM as part of series on memory

The film, which was shot in 16mm (but is being shown in a digital projection at BAM) and was inspired by a 1983 book called A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives (as well as some of Weerasethakul’s own family experiences), is part of the Primitive Project, Weerasethakul’s multimedia installation that also includes the short films A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Phantoms of Nabua and which was displayed at the New Museum in 2011. Weerasethakul, who gained a growing international reputation with such previous works as Blissfully Yours (2002), Tropical Malady (2004), and Syndromes and a Century (2006) and has a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Khon Kaen University and an MFA in filmmaking from the Art Institute of Chicago, is a master storyteller who continues to challenge viewers with his unique visual language and subtly effective narrative techniques. “Programmers’ Notebook: On Memory” runs through September 5 and includes such other films as Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie, and Gregory Nava’s Mi Familia.

PROGRAMMER’S NOTEBOOK — ON MEMORY: THE TREE OF LIFE

Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, and Brad Pitt star in Terrence Malick’s epic masterpiece, The Tree of Life

THE TREE OF LIFE (Terrence Malick, 2011)
BAMfilm, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
August 28-30
Series runs through September 5
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The BAM series “Programmers’ Notebook: On Memory,” consisting of works involving creative, cinematic ways of the mind’s relationship with the past, continues August 28-30 with an unforgettable gem. As of 2005, iconoclastic writer-director Terrence Malick had made only five feature films in his forty-plus-year career, but his 2011 effort, The Tree of Life, is his very best. Following Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005), The Tree of Life is an epic masterpiece of massive proportions, a stirring visual journey into the beginning of the universe, the end of the world, and beyond. The unconventional nonlinear narrative essentially tells the story of a middle-class Texas family having a difficult time coming to grips with the death of one of their sons in the military. Malick cuts between long flashbacks of Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) in the 1950s and 1960s, as they meet, marry, and raise their three boys, to the present, when Jack (Sean Penn), their eldest, now a successful architect, is still searching for answers. The sets by production designer Jack Fisk transport viewers from midcentury suburbia to the modern-day big city and a heavenly beach, all gorgeously shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Every frame is so beautiful, it’s as if they filmed the movie only at sunrise and sunset, the Golden Hour, when the light is at its most pure. The Tree of Life is about God and not God, about faith and belief, about evolution and creationism, about religion and the scientific world. The film opens with a quote from the Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation . . . while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Early on Mrs. O’Brien says in voice-over, “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: The way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one to follow.” Malick doesn’t get caught up in those questions, instead focusing on the miracles of life and death and everything in between.

Sean Penn plays an architect searching for answers in The Tree of Life

With the help of Douglas Trumbull, the special effects legend behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind — and who hasn’t been involved in a Hollywood film in some thirty years — Malick travels through time and space, using almost no CGI. Instead, he employs images from the Hubble telescope along with Thomas Wilfred’s flickering “Opus 161” art installation, which evokes a kind of eternal flame that appears in between the film’s various sections. Malick brings out the Big Bang, dinosaurs, and the planets during this inner and outer head trip of a movie that will leave you breathless with anticipation at where he is going to take you next, and where he goes is never where expected, accompanied by Alexandre Desplat’s ethereal orchestral score. But perhaps more than anything else, The Tree of Life, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, is about the act of creation, from the creation of the universe and the world to the miracle of procreation (and the creation of cinema itself). Mr. O’Brien is an inventor who continually seeks out patents but always wanted to be a musician; he plays the organ in church, but his dream of creating his own symphony has long been dashed. And Jack is an architect, a man who creates and builds large structures but is unable to get his own life in order. In creating The Tree of Life, Malick has torn down convention, coming up with something fresh and new, something that combines powerful human emotions with visual wizardry, a multimedia poem about life and death, the alpha and the omega. “Programmers’ Notebook: On Memory” runs through September 5 and includes such other films as Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment.