twi-ny recommended events

DYING CITY

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Colin Woodell star in two-actor, three-character play at Second Stage (photo by Joan Marcus)

2econd Stage Theater
Tony Kiser Theater
305 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Through June 30, $30-$125
2st.com/shows

With President Trump threatening to attack Iran and Congress fighting over whether to fully fund ailing 9/11 first responders, Christopher Shinn’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Dying City, takes on added relevance in its intense Second Stage revival at the Tony Kiser Theater, where it runs through June 30. The two-actor, three-character play shuttles between July 2005 and January 2004 as Gold Star wife Kelly (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) examines her relationship with her husband, Craig (Colin Woodell), upon the sudden arrival of Craig’s twin brother, Peter (Woodell), late one night at her Manhattan apartment. It’s been nearly a year since Craig was killed in the Iraq war, and Peter, an actor on the rise, needs to connect with Craig’s widow, Kelly, a therapist who has not been returning his calls or emails.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead makes a strong theater debut as a Gold Wife widow in Christopher Shinn’s Dying City (photo by Joan Marcus)

“It’s — yeah, it’s. — I’ve been meaning to call you and — it’s — I just haven’t. I’ve been so busy,” Kelly stumbles, offering excuses. “I wanted to make sure I had the, that I had enough — energy, mental space, before I called.” Kelly seems to want to put everything behind her and get on with her life, but Peter, who is starring in a New York City production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night — a prime example of family dysfunction — insists on dredging up the past, insinuating that something may be wrong with the story of Craig’s death. Peter is also facing problems with his boyfriend, Tim.

Meanwhile, in 2004, it’s Craig’s last night at home before heading to Fort Benning in the morning, and Kelly is not having the touching goodbye she expected as he criticizes Peter’s choice of movies and lovers and how she is handling one of her patients, a man who claims to be a fierce animal in bed. “You’re so passive,” Craig tells Kelly. “This always happens when we talk seriously about my work,” she responds. “We don’t talk seriously about your work,” he replies. “Exactly,” she shoots back. As that final night gets rehashed, Kelly, Peter, and Craig enter some harsh territory.

Colin Woodell plays very different identical twin brothers in Dying City revival (photo by Joan Marcus)

Obie winner Shinn (Where Do We Live, Now or Later), who also directed this version, has said that he structured Dying City like a trauma; in many ways, it feels like Kelly and Peter are suffering through their own forms of PTSD over what happened to Craig and how that has impacted their lives. Dane Lafrey’s comfortable, uncluttered apartment-house set — a sharp contrast to the characters’ inner turmoil — consists of an L-shaped couch at the center, with an unseen kitchen off stage left, a hallway in the back that leads to the bedroom, and a television in the front corner, often tuned to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The barefoot Winstead wears the same clothing throughout the ninety-minute play, while Woodell makes slight changes as he morphs from Craig to Peter and back again, usually walking out of view as one character and then returning as another, darkness and a flash of light accompanying the shifting scenes. (The costumes are by Kaye Voyce, with lighting by Tyler Micoleau.)

Winstead (Fargo, All About Nina) is terrific in her stage debut, embodying Kelly’s extreme unease at having to speak with Peter and look at the past, while Woodell (Unsane, Masters of Sex), who did in fact recently appear in a revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night (in LA), excels at keeping his portrayals of the twin brothers separate, the needy Peter insecure and sensitive, the brash Craig more concerned with his manhood. Dying City is a breadcrumb play; the plot and its many intricacies — among the topics that get covered are sexual assault, the military, political leanings, guns, homosexuality, the theater, lies, violence, love, and war — unfold slowly in bits of dialogue that require close concentration. However, following the crumbs does not lead to a fairy-tale ending but to a devastating finale.

GRIT AND GLITTER — BEFORE AND AFTER STONEWALL: MULTIPLE MANIACS / TROPICAL MALADY

Divine is the star of “Cavalcade of Perversions” in John Waters’s splendidly lurid Multiple Maniacs

MULTIPLE MANIACS (John Waters, 1970),
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, June 28, 7:00
Series continues through July 6
718-777-6888
www.movingimage.us

In conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riot, the Museum of the Moving Image is presenting “Grit and Glitter: Before and After Stonewall,” a thirteen-film series guest curated by Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri (October Country, Peace in the Valley) consisting of queer-cinema works that have inspired them. The seventeen-day festival began with such films as Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema and continues June 28 with one of John Waters’s craziest early works, when the King of Bad Taste, serving as writer, director, producer, cinematographer, and editor, was only twenty-three. The extremely low budget romp Multiple Maniacs begins with barker Mr. David (David Lochary) inviting people into Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions, proclaiming, “This is the show you want. . . . the sleaziest show on earth. Not actors, not paid imposters, but real, actual filth who have been carefully screened in order to present to you the most flagrant violation of natural law known to man.” Of course, that is an ideal introduction to the cinematic world of Waters, one dominated by the celebration of sexual proclivities, fetish, salaciousness, indecency, violence, and marginalized weirdos living on the fringes of society. Lady Divine, played by Divine, turns out to be a cheat, the freak show just a set-up for a robbery. Soon Divine is jealous of David’s relationship with Bonnie (Mary Vivian Pearce), hanging out with her topless daughter, Cookie (Cookie Mueller), and being led into a church by the Infant of Prague (Michael Renner Jr.), where she’s brought to sexual ecstasy by Mink (Mink Stole). There’s also rape, murder, Jesus (George Figgs), the Virgin Mary (Edith Massey), and the famed Lobstura. Shot in lurid black-and-white, Multiple Maniacs is a divine freak show all its own, an underground classic that redefined just what a movie could be, a crude, disturbing tale that you can’t turn away from.

“The outrageously subversive Multiple Maniacs could easily be mistaken as mere freak show sentiment and gross-out comedy, but at heart it’s a defiantly angry rejection of all things mainstream,” Palmieri explains in a program note. “Shot in the summer of Stonewall in Baltimore in 1969 and released in 1970, the film begins with Mr. David installed on a quiet wooded suburban street luring unsuspecting passersby to dare to attend Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversion, in which all hell breaks loose. The audience is made complicit in this transgression, and appropriately assaulted for it for the rest of the production. As punk and queer as film gets.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady was both booed and celebrated at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival

TROPICAL MALADY (SUD PRALAD) (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, June 29, 7:00, and Sunday, June 30, 2:00
Series continues through July 6
718-777-6888
www.movingimage.us

“Grit and Glitter: Before and After Stonewall” takes quite a turn from Multiple Maniacs with Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, a beautiful, mystical work that won the Jury Prize at Cannes and will thoroughly engage you — if you allow it to. Part tender love story between a country boy (Banlop Lomnoi) and a soldier (Dakda Kaewbuadee), part folktale set in the deep forests of Thailand, Tropical Malady is like a visual poem in which details are not as important as the overall effect, which is intoxicating. The unorthodox film features ghosts, a shape-shifter, unusual characters, and a playful sense of humor that come together to form a subtle meditation on life and love. Weerasethakul once again displays the gentle, captivating narrative technique that lies at the heart of his oeuvre, which also includes such works as Blissfully Yours, Syndromes and a Century, and 2010 Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Own Lives. Some people at Cannes walked out on Tropical Malady and others stuck around to boo it; Quentin Tarantino headed the group that awarded it the Jury Prize regardless. You can decide to cheer or boo, or merely just experience it, when it screens on June 29 and 30 at the Museum of the Moving Image.

“Blissfully beyond categorization, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s breathtaking Tropical Malady is a sui generis romance told in two parts: a gentle courtship between two men that transforms into a mind-altering tale of a soldier stalked by a shaman in the form of a tiger,” Palmieri writes. “Mysterious on just about every level possible, Apichatpong explores the complicated nuances of desire through this magical and haunting parable, where playful evasiveness eventually gives way to total surrender. Come for the love story, stay for the talking monkey.”

The series runs through July 6 with such other films as Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette, and Pietro Marcello’s The Mouth of the Wolf. “Being a rural gay kid, my source of queer presence and history mostly came from viewing media stereotypes and news reports about AIDS — save for the rare films that were illuminated windows into a queer world happening, waiting, and calling from the other side,” Mosher notes. “Since then I’ve spent my life seeking and, hopefully, on occasion, creating such illuminated moments. We now live in a time when LGBTQ+ representation is so mainstream that the Stonewall riot can be rewritten as a triumph of whiteness and the life of Freddie Mercury can be retooled to support normative family values. To me, though, the films in this program shine with a disruptive, beacon-like power. Some are celebratory, some problematic. Some are highly crafted, some crudely made. Some are all of these things, which is why the light they radiate is not a single reductive beam but a necessary iridescence — multifaceted, shifting, reflecting the visions of both vast communities and the single, lonely viewer in the dark.”

Palmieri adds, “With this series, we’re interested in the films and filmmakers whose ideas reflected the cultural shifts bubbling under the surface that led to Stonewall, as well as the effect it had on the cinema and culture that followed. In these films you’ll find a multitude of approaches, even contradictions, but they all share a subversiveness, a strain of rage, a rejection of social and cinematic norms, and a deep well of empathy. These films are clarion calls to me as a filmmaker, and they serve as a constant reminder that rage and empathy can coexist, and that they are powerful tools to work with.”

LITTLE WOMEN

Kate Hamill adapts Little Women for the twenty-first century and plays Meg (far left) (photo by James Leynse)

Cherry Lane Mainstage Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 29, $82-$152
212-989-2020
primarystages.org
www.cherrylanetheatre.org

Kate Hamill strips down Louisa May Alcott’s classic semiautobiographical children’s book, Little Women, to its bare essentials in her self-described “radical adaptation,” a Primary Stages production continuing at the Cherry Lane through June 29. Hamill, who previously wrote and starred in dynamic versions of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, explores gender identity and traditional male and female roles as it relates to both the mid-to-late nineteenth century and today. The story zooms in on Jo March (Kristolyn Lloyd), a tomboy who wants to break out of her family’s small world by going to college, becoming a writer, and traveling through Europe. She lives with her mother, known as Marmie (usually Maria Elena Ramirez, although I saw Mary Bacon, who also plays Aunt March), who understands the significant differences among her children; the oldest sister, Meg (Kate Hamill), already a spinster at sixteen; the sweet but sickly thirteen-year-old Beth (Paola Sanchez Abreu); the youngest, twelve-year-old Amy (Carmen Zilles), who is determined to find her Prince Charming; and their maid, Hannah (Ellen Harvey, who also portrays Mrs. Mingott), who is pitching in more than ever while the family patriarch, Robert March (John Lenartz), is off fighting for the Union in the Civil War.

Fifteen-year-old Jo develops an intimate friendship with their new neighbor, Laurie (Nate Mann), an effeminate piano-playing orphan who lives on a large estate with his wealthy grandfather, Mr. Laurence (Lenartz), and is being tutored by John Brooks (Michael Crane, who also plays the nasty parrot). The tutor is preparing Laurie for upper-middle-class manhood: college followed by heading up the family business, which he is loathe to do. “I’m not very good at being a, you know, a ‘lady,’” Jo, who shortened her name from the more feminine Josephine, says to Laurie, who prefers being called that instead of his more masculine given name of Theodore. “I’m not very good at being a ‘gentleman.’ So perhaps we should — be ourselves,” he says. They are mirror images of each other, both wanting to further their education and travel overseas while just being their not-so-cisgender selves, an option open to them in 2019 but not in the 1860s.

The March family needs a group hug in Primary Stages production at the Cherry Lane (photo by James Leynse)

Hamill has excised many supporting characters and changed several key plot points in order to focus more on the family dynamic and the individual sisters’ relationships. “You’re all growing up so fast,” Marmie says. In fact, the word “grow” is used extensively throughout the play. “In this story, they never grow up. They just stay the same, and it lasts forever,” Jo tells Beth when she’s about to read her one of her tales. “Nothing lasts forever,” Jo responds. “We all grow up, eventually,” Laurie says later with a tinge of sadness. “One isn’t better than the other. They just need different things to grow,” Marmie says about flowers but referring to her children as well. Meanwhile, Hannah explains, “Took care of all of you since you were babies. Each one of you growing different than the other.” In Hamill’s view, as kids head toward adulthood, they don’t have to follow societal norms and do what’s expected of them; they can make their own choices, follow their dreams.

Purists shouldn’t be worried; this is still Alcott’s Little Women, even as it’s reclaimed by Hamill, whose mother first gave her the book when Kate was reaching puberty. She is not reinventing or reimagining it so much as bringing a contemporary perspective that is refreshing while still remaining true to the heart of the novel. The play, which, even with its changes, sticks more to the original story than Hamill’s previous works, is briskly directed by Sarna Lapine on Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’s two-level set, the upstairs containing Jo’s writing desk and Beth’s bed, the main floor serving as multiple locations with very minor adjustments. Lloyd (Dear Evan Hansen, Paradise Blue) is superb as Jo, prancing about with a fake mustache, wearing men’s clothes (the fine period costumes are by Valérie Thérèse Bart), and determined to make something of herself, but as a person, not specifically as a woman. In his New York debut, Mann, a recent Juilliard grad, is wonderful; he and Jo practically melt into each other. And Hamill is a cool Meg, giving her more weight in this adaptation. The play also features a lovely piano score by Deborah Abramson, which works its way into the narrative. We can’t get enough of Hamill’s ingenuity and can’t wait to see which classic she tackles next.

CÔTES DU RHÔNE FESTIVAL

cotes du rhone festival

SECOND
849 Sixth Ave. between 29th & 30th Sts.
Sunday, June 23, $55 (6:00 entry), $80 (5:15 entry), 25% with discount code MINT
www.cdrfest.com

You don’t have to go to southern France to enjoy a Côtes du Rhône culinary experience, as southern France is coming to New York City. On June 23, the Côtes du Rhône Festival takes place at Second, an event space on Sixth Ave., featuring more than sixty regional wines paired with a variety of food dishes. Such sommeliers as Betsy Ross of L’avenue, Fred Dex aka the Juiceman, Nicolas Prieto from the Grand Hyatt New York City, Anna Cabrales of Morrell Wine Bar & Cafe, and Meaghan Levy of the Pierre New York will select whites, reds, and rosés to be served with such plates as assorted country pate, mustards, pickles, and crostini; purple tomato skewers with Reblochon cheese, turnip seed oil, and Shibazi spice; sirloin tartare, fleur de sel, rosé vin, fried capers, cured yolk, and crostini; beef Wellington sausage with grain mustard; Boudin blanc sausage; mussels Suzette, crispy leeks, and sherry and pepper conserva; gnocchi Parisienne, aged comte, yomato jus, and wildflower honey; and praline profiteroles of cocoa choux, hazelnut ice cream, vanilla-tonka chantilly, and chocolate sauce. The menu is prepared by such chefs as Tyler Atwell of Lafayette Grand Café, Kimberly Plafke of Grand Army, Raymond Smith of Blacksmith’s Breads, Drew Buzzio of Salumeria Biellese, Phillip Kirschen-Clark of the Milling Room, Jocelyn Guest and Erika Nakamura of J & E Smallgoods, David Robinson of Formaggio Kitchen, Eric Simpson of the East Pole, Joshua Smith, Mary Dumont, and Mitch Willis and Garth Jobb of Hudson & Charles Dinette and Butcher Shop. Tickets are $55 for general entry at 6:00 and $80 for early-bird VIP admission at 5:15; use discount code MINT to save 25%.

BEFORE STONEWALL: THE MAKING OF A GAY AND LESBIAN COMMUNITY

Documentary follows the beginnings of the gay liberation movement leading up to Stonewall

BEFORE STONEWALL: THE MAKING OF A GAY AND LESBIAN COMMUNITY (Greta Schiller, 1984)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, June 21
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

“Unless otherwise stated, the people who appear in this film should not be presumed to be homosexual . . . or heterosexual,” it says at the beginning of Before Stonewall, the 1984 documentary that has been restored for the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Executive producer John Scagliotti, director Greta Schiller, and codirector Robert Rosenberg go back in time to show the evolution of gay liberation that led up to the events of June 28 to July 1, 1969. Narrated by Rubyfruit Jungle author Rita Mae Brown, the film combines new interviews with archival footage of silent movies, personal photographs, songs, intimate recollections, and poignant anecdotes, both painful and funny. “Homosexuality has always been a dirty word,” says artist and writer Richard Bruce Nugent. “I cannot remember, in my seventy-some years, a time when it wasn’t a dirty word. But on the other hand, homosexuality, the practice of it, was not a dirty thing.”

Writer and former dancer Harry Otis, retired bookkeeper Donna Smith, activist and Mattachine Society cofounder Harry Hay, domestic worker and dancer Mabel Hampton, newspaper reporter and WWII army chaplain George Buse, priest Grant Gallup, entertainer Carroll Davis, journalist and archivist Jim Kepner, US government scientist Frank Kameny, poet Allen Ginsberg, and historian and playwright Martin Duberman are among those who share stories about discrimination they experienced and how they fought to maintain their identity. WAC soldier Nell “Johnnie” Phelps’s anecdote about General Dwight D. Eisenhower is one of the best Ike tales you’ll ever hear.

The film looks at censorship, secret parties, all-gay theater, the Hays Code, homosexuality in the military, drag queens, Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC hearings, same-sex marriage, gay publications, and Black Power as the desire for freedom for gays and lesbians builds, leading to the Stonewall rebellion. “In the sixties, there was a distinct change in the temper and the tempo of the gay movement, partly as a result of the black civil rights militancy,” activist Barbara Gittings says. “We began to get more militant in the gay movement. We began to see that the problem of homosexuality is not really gay people’s problem. It’s a problem of the social attitudes of the people around us, and we had to change their attitudes, and that in turn would help us with our self-image.” Despite how far they’ve come, however, gays and lesbians still have a long way to go in an America that has still not fully accepted them. Before Stonewall opens June 21 at the Quad, with Q&As with Schiller, Rosenberg, and research director Andrea Weiss on June 21 at 6:30, with Rosenberg on June 222 at 7:05, and with Schiller, Weiss, production manager Amy Chen, historical consultant Blanche Wiesen Cook, and Lesli Klainberg on June 23 at 2:50, moderated by Tracy Daniels.

ENDZEIT (EVER AFTER)

Vivi (Gro Swantje Kohlhof) and Eva (Maja Lehrer) hide from hungry zombies in Endzeit

ENDZEIT (EVER AFTER) (Carolina Hellsgård, 2018)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, June 21
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
endzeiteverafter.com

Swedish-born, Berlin-based Carolina Hellsgård follows her 2015 debut, Wanja, with Endzeit — Ever After, a gripping feminist gothic zombie movie. In a postapocalyptic world, flesh-eating zombies wander hungrily through the land, looking for living souls to consume. Twenty-two-year-old Vivi (Gro Swantje Kohlhof), haunted by the memory of leaving behind her beloved younger sister, Renata (Amy Schuk), and determined to find her, arrives at a fenced-in outpost that is one of only two places where humans have survived. It is run by the warden (Barbara Philipp), who keeps a tight grip on the rules to keep everyone alive. After a zombie attacks, the meek Vivi is soon on the run with tough-as-nails twenty-six-year-old Eva (Maja Lehrer) as they attempt to make it through the Black Forest to the town of Jena. But without much food and water and with zombies liable to jump out at them at any moment, safety is a long way away.

Eva (Maja Lehrer) faces a gardener (Trine Dyrholm) as Vivi (Gro Swantje Kohlhof) looks on in Endzeit

Endzeit is a dystopian tale by and about women: The screenplay was written by Olivia Vieweg, based on her graphic novel; Leah Striker’s cinematography is lush and beautiful; Julia Oehring and Ruth Schönegge serve as editors; Jenny Roesler did the sets; Teresa Grosser designed the costumes, highlighted by a white wedding dress; Franziska Henke composed the eerie score; and the film was produced by Claudia Schröter and executive produced by Ingelore König. Men are inconsequential in this hellish future, where Mother Nature is in charge. There might be a lot of blood and gore and fear, but the land is in full bloom, with gorgeous green fields, healthy, flourishing plants and trees, and warm sunshine. At one point Vivi encounters a gardener (Trine Dyrholm) who appears to be part of the earth itself. Hellsgård and Vieweg have created a different kind of zombie flick, where the protagonists face their individual guilt as they search for freedom in a dangerous landscape bursting with life. It also demonstrates the failure of fences to do only one job — keeping others out. Endzeit opens June 21 at IFC, with Hellsgård participating in Q&As following the 7:45 shows on June 21 and 22.

A BIGGER SPLASH

David Hockney works on his masterpiece in Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash

A BIGGER SPLASH (Jack Hazan, 1974)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, June 21
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

Just in time to coincide with Pride celebrations throughout New York City in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Metrograph is premiering a 4K restoration of Jack Hazan’s pivotal 1974 A Bigger Splash, a fiction-nonfiction hybrid that was a breakthrough work for its depiction of gay culture as well as its inside look at the fashionable and chic Los Angeles art scene of the early 1970s. This past November, David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at auction for $90.3 million, the most ever paid for a work by a living artist. A Bigger Splash, named after another of Hockney’s paintings — both are part of a series of canvases set around pools in ritzy Los Angeles — takes place over three years, as the British artist, based in California at the time, hangs out with friends, checks out a fashion show, prepares for a gallery exhibition, and works on Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) in the wake of a painful breakup with his boyfriend, model, and muse, Peter Schlesinger, who is a key figure in the painting.

It’s often hard to know which scenes are pure documentary and which are staged for the camera as Hazan and his then-parter, David Mingay, who served as director of photography, tag along with Hockney, who rides around in his small, dirty BMW, meeting up with textile designer Celia Birtwell, fashion designer Ossie Clark, curator Henry Geldzahler, gallerist John Kasmin, artist Patrick Procktor, and others, who are identified only at the beginning, in black-and-white sketches during the opening credits. The film features copious amounts of male nudity, including a long sex scene between two men, a group of beautiful boys diving into a pool in a fantasy sequence, and Hockney disrobing and taking a shower. Hockney’s assistant, Mo McDermott, contributes occasional voice-overs; he also poses as the man standing on the deck in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), only to be replaced by Schlesinger later. There are several surreal moments involving Hockney’s work: He cuts up one painting; Geldzahler gazes long and hard at himself in the double portrait of him and Christopher Scott; and Hockney tries to light the cigarette Procktor is holding in a painting as Procktor watches, cigarette in hand, mimicking his pose on canvas. At one point Hockney is photographing Schlesinger in Kensington Gardens, reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which questions the very nature of capturing reality on film.

Hockney was so upset when he first saw A Bigger Splash, which Hazan made for about twenty thousand dollars, that he offered to buy it back from Hazan in order to destroy it; Hazan refused, and Hockney went into a deep depression. His friends ultimately convinced him that it was a worthwhile movie and he eventually accepted it. It’s a one-of-a-kind film, a wild journey that goes far beyond the creative process as an artist makes his masterpiece. Hockney, who will turn eighty-two next month, has been on quite a roll of late. He was the subject of a 2016 documentary by Randall Wright, was widely hailed for his 2018 Met retrospective, saw one of his paintings set an auction record, and is scheduled to have a major drawing show at the National Portrait Gallery next year. In addition, Catherine Cusset’s novel, Life of David Hockney, was just published in English, a fictionalized tale that conceptionally recalls A Bigger Splash, which opens June 21 at Metrograph, with various Q&As and introductions by Hazan, Richard Haines and Alexander Olch, Nick McCarthy, Ryan McNamara, Matt Wolf, and Cusset from June 21 to 30. And if you can’t get enough of Hockney, Anita Rogers is showing “Films by James Scott, Etchings by David Hockney” through July 27, consisting of Hockney’s 1966 series “Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C. P. Cavafy” and Scott’s 1966 documentary short about the series, Love’s Presentation.