twi-ny recommended events

COMPASSIONATE ACTION: THE HEALING POWER OF TELLING YOUR STORY

Jamia Wilson, Lisa Weinert, and Kate Johnson will come together for Compassionate Action at the Rubin on May 15 (photos by Aubrie Pick, Renee Choi, Filip Wolak)

Who: Kate Johnson, Jamia Wilson, Lisa Weinert
What: Thought Party (“mindfulness of thinking”) and Group Journaling
Where: Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave., 212-620-5000
When: Wednesday, May 15, $25 (use discount code CA20 to save $5), 7:00
Why: On May 15, Feminist Press executive director Jamia Wilson, Narrative Healing founder Lisa Weinert, and meditation teacher Kate Johnson will gather at the Rubin Museum for the latest installment of Compassionate Action, a series of interactive events with artists, healers, and others that will help guide participants in strengthening their skills and making a difference in the ever-more-challenging contemporary world. The evening’s theme is “Thought Party (‘mindfulness of thinking’) and Group Journaling” and will include a mindful contemplation meditation, a conversation about how stories can lead to healing, and an activity to find your voice and express it, as we all have stories to tell and to hear. Co-created and hosted by Johnson, Compassionate Action continues Wednesdays in May and June with such other programs as “Pleasure, Power, and Sexual Liberation” with Lama Rod Owens and Johnson, “The Power of Hope in a Changing Climate” with Ibrahim Abdul-Matin and Jungwon Kim, and “Joy, Rigor, and the Power of Wise Masculinity” with Bobbito Garcia and Johnson.

ARUNDHATI ROY: THE ARTHUR MILLER FREEDOM TO WRITE LECTURE

Arundhati Roy will deliver the Arthur Miller lecture at PEN America World Voices Festival (photo by Mayank Austen Soofi)

Who: Arundhati Roy, Siddhartha Deb
What: The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, PEN America World Voices Festival
Where: Apollo Theater, 253 West 125th St.
When: Sunday, May 12, $30-$65, 6:00
Why: The fifteenth annual PEN World Voices Festival comes to a close in New York City on May 12 with Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy delivering the prestigious Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, the keynote event of the weeklong celebration of the written word, which seeks to “broaden channels of dialogue between the United States and the world.” The Indian screenwriter, essayist, novelist, and activist is the author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness; her collection of essays, My Seditious Heart, is coming out in June. She will be speaking about “the defense of the collective, of the individual, and of the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military, and governmental elites”; the talk will be followed by a Q&A with Indian writer and professor Siddhartha Deb. Among the other events this weekend are “Secrets and Lives” with Boris Kachka, Dani Shapiro, and Bridgett M. Davis, “The Art of Violence” with Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Tommy Orange, and Mohammed Hanif, “Women Uninterrupted” with Jennifer Egan, Inês Pedrosa, and Elif Shafak, and the free debate “A Question of Justice” at the Center for Social Innovation.

SOCRATES

Michael Stuhlbarg is riveting as the title character in Tim Blake Nelson’s Socrates at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

Martinson Hall, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday through Sunday through June 2, $85-$150
212-539-8500
www.publictheater.org

Michael Stuhlbarg is rousingly gallant and stout as the title character in Tim Blake Nelson’s cogent but irritatingly long Socrates, which has been extended at the Public Theater’s Martinson Hall through June 2. The tale of the fate of one of the world’s most famous philosophers — who never wrote anything down, so all we know about him has come from the writings of others — is told in flashback via a pedantic, unnecessary frame story in which Plato (Teagle F. Bougere), a student of Socrates’s, is deciding whether he should become a boy’s (Niall Cunningham) teacher. The tall, blond boy is angry at Plato and what has been done to Socrates. “You’re an Athenian. The Athenians killed him. My question therefore implicates you, especially in the context of a democracy where leaders and their actions are promulgated as representing the people’s will,” the boy says. Plato acknowledges his responsibility, explaining, “In a sense I betrayed him more profoundly and lastingly than Athens did.”

Crito (Robert Joy, center) is one of the writers whose dialogues form the basis of Socrates (photo by Joan Marcus)

Forget the bookended nonsense and instead revel in the bulk of the play, which really begins with a gathering in which Socrates, war hero Alcibiades (Austin Smith), playwright Aristophanes (Tom Nelis), doctor Eryximachus (David Aaron Baker), poet Agathon (Joe Tapper), writer Crito (Robert Joy), and others, dressed in period togas and robes designed by Catherine Zuber, are drinking heavily and regaling one another with tales of Socrates’s supposed love of good-looking boys and his general brilliance, both of which he adamantly denies. “You’ve taught an entire generation how to think!” Alcibiades exclaims, to which Socrates responds, “That’s simply not true!” Nelson soon jumps ahead to Socrates’s final days, as he’s arrested, facing a trial that could result in his execution. Like Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, Socrates refuses to bend his principles, spouting philosophy even as he denies his intelligence and ignores the pleas of his friends, colleagues, wife, Xanthippe (Miriam A. Hyman), and son to avoid the death penalty. “It would hardly become a man my age to resent his own end, don’t you think?” he says, arguing that there is only one outcome.

The Athenians make their case against Socrates in Tim Blake Nelson world premiere at the Public Theater (photo by Joan Marcus)

His fellow philosophers attempt to convince him otherwise, resulting in fascinating debates about happiness, equality, knowledge, memory, and truth in which the Tony- and Obie-winning, bushy-bearded Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man, The Pillowman), looking like a cross between Mandy Patinkin and the hirsute David Letterman, expounds on democracy with an intense fury that relates to the current situation in America and around the globe. After one particularly astute declaration, an audience member, a well-regarded thespian himself, shouted out, “Right on!”

Nelson, an actor (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs; O Brother, Where Art Thou?), filmmaker (The Grey Zone, O), and playwright (Eye of God, Anadarko), and Tony-winning director Doug Hughes (Doubt, The Father) let things go on way too long; the play runs a mind-boggling 160 minutes (with intermission), and you might find yourself groaning during the coda as Plato and the boy can’t stop evaluating what we’ve just seen. But when Stuhlbarg is onstage, it is electrifying. Scott Pask’s immersive set features walls that extend throughout the theater covered in the hand-carved text of Pericles’s Funeral Oration in Ancient Greek: “We are unique in the way we regard anyone who takes no part in public affairs: We do not call that a quiet life, we call it a useless life.” (Pericles was the uncle of Alcibiades.) Socrates did not live a quiet, useless life, his legacy as relevant today as ever.

JEAN-CLAUDE CARRIÈRE: YOYO / HEREUX ANNIVERSAIRE

All the wealth in the world can’t make a lonely millionaire (Pierre Étaix) happy in Yoyo

YOYO (Pierre Étaix, 1965) / HEREUX ANNIVERSAIRE (Pierre Étaix & Jean-Claude Carrière, 1962)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Thursday, May 9, 4:30, and Wednesday, May 15, 7:00
Series runs May 9 – June 16
www.moma.org

French auteur Pierre Étaix’s strange and beautiful films were long inaccessible, the subject of nearly two decades of legal wrangling, but on May 9 and 15, MoMA will be presenting his 1965 bittersweet black-and-white slapstick charmer, Yoyo, as part of its “Jean-Claude Carrière” series, celebrating the screenwriter and master collaborator who worked with such legends as Luis Buñuel, Louis Malle, Miloš Forman, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrzej Wajda, Nagisa Oshima, and Peter Brook; the eighty-seven-year-old Carrière will introduce the May 9 screening. (In April 2010, Étaix was finally able to once again bring his films to the public, his entire output restored and making their New York debut at a festival at Film Forum in October 2012.) Étaix, who wrote Yoyo with Carrière, stars as a ridiculously wealthy but extremely bored man who lives alone in an ornately decorated, absurdly large chateau. It’s 1925, and he has servants for absolutely everything, as well as his own private band and flappers, but he pines for his lost love, Isolina (Claudine Auger). One day she arrives with a traveling circus, along with a young boy (Philippe Dionnet) who turns out to be his son. She at first rejects the multimillionaire, but when he loses it all on Black Tuesday, the three of them form their own traveling circus, with the boy ultimately turning into a popular clown named Yoyo (played as an adult by Étaix) and seeking to restore the chateau and his family.

French auteur Pierre Étaix takes clowning around very seriously in rediscovered classic

The first section of the film is a glorious homage to the silent film era and other cinematic comedians, with Étaix evoking his mentor, Jacques Tati; Charlie Chaplin; Buster Keaton; and, later, Jerry Lewis, with whom he’d appear as Gustav the Great in Lewis’s never-to-be-seen Holocaust film The Day the Clown Died. Nouvelle Vague cinematographer Jean Boffety (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge; Je t’aime, je t’aime) shoots Yoyo in a sharp, gorgeous black-and-white, composing breathtaking shots that boast a dazzling symmetry that must make Wes Anderson giddy with delight, while Étaix fills the film with ingenious sight gags that would make Ernie Kovacs proud (just wait till you see the supposed still-life painting), all anchored by Jean Paillaud’s memorable musical theme. But once the stock market crashes and talkies take over, dialogue enters the picture, and the camera is often off balance, the perfect symmetry a thing of the past. With Yoyo, Étaix, who had previously made Le Soupirant and would go on to make The Great Love and En pleine forme, was influenced by the sudden, tragic death of his father, his love of the circus — he had already worked under the big tent, and he would leave films to become a clown in a traveling circus in the early 1970s — and his viewing of Fellini’s 8½ (look for the La Strada poster) resulting in a film that sometimes gets a little lost and too surreal, but he ultimately brings things back around as Yoyo grows into a star and the story travels through the arc of twentieth-century entertainment, from the silent era to talkies to television. Truffaut called it “a beautiful film in which I loved every shot and every idea, and which taught me many things about movies.”

Pierre Étaix and Jean-Claude Carrière’s Heureux Anniversaire kicks off Carrière festival at MoMA with Yoyo

It’s a real treat that Étaix’s work is undergoing this rediscovery; lovers of Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist will particularly enjoy Yoyo, which is being shown with Heureux Anniversaire, Étaix and Carrière’s deliriously funny black-and-white short that won the 1963 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject. As a woman (Laurence Lignières) prepares a special anniversary dinner at home, her husband (Étaix) gets trapped in all kinds of craziness as he desperately tries to make it home in time, but the traffic and parking gods are against him. Hysterical slapstick ensues virtually without dialogue, like a classic silent film with a wacky score. And you’ll never be able to look at Mr. Bean the same way again. “Jean-Claude Carrière” runs May 9 to June 16 and includes such other works Carrière wrote and/or directed as Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Godard’s Every Man for Himself, Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, and Wajda’s Danton, with Carrière introducing several screenings.

RICOCHET: ENTANGLED

The lives of Bradley (James Kautz) Greta (Naomi Lorrain) intersect after a tragedy in Entangled (photo by Travis Emery Hackett)

RICOCHET: AN AMORALISTS ANTHOLOGY ABOUT SURVIVING AN AMERICAN EPIDEMIC
Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre
A.R.T./New York Theatres
502 West 53rd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday – Saturday through May 11, $20-$30, 7:30
amoralists.com

The Amoralists, one of the city’s most adventurous and exciting theatrical troupes, concludes its 2018-19 ’Wright Club season with the gripping Entangled. The ’Wright Club program consists of four new plays built around “one unifying event. Three distinct perspectives. No right answers.” The fictional event is a mass shooting in the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History; Entangled is the final installment of “Ricochet: An Amoralists Anthology about Surviving an American Epidemic,” which has previously been explored from different angles in Gabriel Jason Dean’s Triggered at the Cherry Lane Studio in August, directed by Kimille Howard; Charly Evon Simpson’s Stained at New Ohio Theatre in October, directed by Kate Moore Heaney; and James Anthony Tyler’s Armed at Teatro Latea at the Clemente in December, directed by Bianca LaVerne Jones. You do not have to have seen any of those plays, which all ran for three performances, to get caught up in the thrall of Entangled, a stellar collaboration between Simpson and Dean, directed by Moore Heaney, that plays for three weeks, through May 11 at A.R.T./New York Theatres.

Naomi Lorrain and James Kautz star in Amoralists’ conclusion to Ricochet (photo by Travis Emery Hackett)

In the two-character Entangled, Bradley (Amoralists founding artistic director James Kautz), a white man, is the older brother of the shooter, Little. Greta (Naomi Lorrain), a black woman, is the mother of one of the youngest victims, Astrid. The play unfolds in alternating monologues in which Bradley and Greta speak directly to the audience and dictate emails to each other, sent and unsent, as they search for answers, deal with the traumatic death of a loved one, and try to maintain relationships, although their situations are never made equal. “Dear Greta,” Bradley writes, “Although we’ve never met, we are forever linked by the senseless tragedy my little brother brought into our lives.” Greta, however, feels further violated by this additional unwanted intrusion. Wondering if Little is still connected to Astrid, she writes, “If he is haunting her in the afterlife / If your brother is haunting her in the afterlife / Are you haunting me in this life, Bradley? / Are you?” She later muses, “I wonder a lot about who thinks they must survive the trauma / And who thinks they must cause it in order to survive.” Greta’s dialogue is written by Simpson (Behind the Sheet, Jump), a black woman, and Bradley’s by Dean (Terminus, Qualities of Starlight), a white man. And yes, race does play a part in the proceedings, particularly when it comes to the media. (Dean has probed the aftermath of mass shootings before, including in Our New Town, a musical inspired by both the Newtown massacre and the classic American drama Our Town.)

The Amoralists’ Entangled immerses the audience in the cosmos (photo by Travis Emery Hackett)

Moore Heaney directs with a calm hand as the actors take turns center stage on a circular platform or pull up a chair on Andrew Diaz’s spare set, which also features a curved horizontal backdrop onto which Kate Freer projects images of the sky and clouds and the cosmos. The universe plays a central role in the play, from the planetarium where the shooting occurred to the name Astrid, as Simpson and Dean compare the Big Bang that created everything to the scourge of gun violence (perpetrated this time by a man known as Little), which wreaks destruction on individuals and society as a whole. It’s always a pleasure watching Kautz (Nibbler, Utility) onstage; he embodies a kind of everyman persona, and here he represents someone who could be any of us, desperate to find out what went so horribly wrong. Lorrain (Song for a Future Generation, Stained) is much more active and lively as she is suddenly thrust into the role of public figure. “After the first few days, people didn’t stop me in the street / I am not sure if that’s because they didn’t want to say anything to me / Didn’t want to intrude / Or maybe they just weren’t sure,” she says. “Just weren’t sure I was the one they saw on the news / I think it is more likely that they just forgot / Forgot how they knew me.” In today’s day and age, with so many mass shootings in America being detailed in the 24/7 news cycle and then disappearing into the maelstrom, it is much too easy to forget the names of the shooters, the victims, the heroes. But those with families involved are doomed to remember, reliving the horror over and over again.

AI: ARE YOU BRAVE ENOUGH FOR THE BRAVE NEW WORLD?

live ideas

LIVE IDEAS 2019
New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St.
May 8-12, $10-$20
newyorklivearts.org

New York Live Arts’ seventh annual Live Ideas humanities festival explores artificial intelligence with five days of art, dance, discussion, music, lectures, and more, asking the question “AI: Are You Brave Enough for the Brave New World?” Inaugurated in 2013, the festival previously focused on Dr. Oliver Sacks and James Baldwin; social, political, artistic, and environmental issues; a nonbinary future; and strengthening democracy. Among those participating in the 2019 edition are Bill T. Jones, Nick Hallett, Yuka C Honda, Scorpion Mouse, Kyle McDonald, Patricia Marx, and Eunsu Kang, delving into technological dreaming, coding, mental illness, drones, and the truth. Tickets for most events are between ten and twenty dollars; below are some of the highlights.

Wednesday, May 8
What Is AI?, keynote/performance with Nick Hallett, Meredith Broussard, Patricia Marx, Baba Israel, and Ragamuffin, $15, 6:00

Wednesday, May 8
through
Saturday, May 11
Rhizomatiks Research X ELEVENPLAY X Kyle McDonald: discrete figures, performed on stage designed for interactivity between performers, drones, and AI, $36-$45, 8:00

Thursday, May 9
Future of Work, panel discussion with Arun Sunderarajan, Matthew Putman, Carrie Gleason, Madeleine Clare Elish, and moderator Ritse Erumi, $20, 6:00

Rational Numbers: Music and AI, performance by Yuka C Honda and Angélica Negrón, $10, 9:00

Friday, May 10
Does Truth Need Defending?, panel discussion with Ambika Samarthya-Howard, Hilke Schellmann, Jeff Smith, and moderator Malika Saada Saar, $10, 6:00

Algorave: LiveCode.NYC, rave featuring AI experiments and live performances by Scorpion Mouse, CIBO + Ulysses Popple, Colonel Panix + nom de nom, ioxi + Zach Krall, and Codie, $10, 9:00

Rhizomatiks Research, ELEVENPLAY, and Kyle McDonald collaborate on interactive performance piece discrete figures (photo by Tomoya Takeshita )

Saturday, May 11
Symposium: AI x ART, including “Body, Movement, Language: AI Sketches” with Bill T. Jones, “Between Science & Speculation: Technological Dreaming” with Ani Liu, “AI in Performance: Making discrete figures” with Kyle McDonald, “Yes, AI CAN help you develop a new relationship with your audience” with Dr. Brett Ashley Crawford, “Livecoding Traversals through Sonic Spaces” with Jason Levine, “GANymedes: Art with AI” with Eunsu Kang, “Emergent Storytelling with Artificial Intelligence” with Rachel Ginsberg, and “Creating in the Age of AI” with Ani Liu, Dr. Brett Ashley Crawford, Eunsu Kang, Kyle McDonald, and Bill T. Jones, $15, 4:30

Sunday, May 12
Class: How to Question Technology, Or, What Would Neil Postman Say?, with Lance Strate, $15, 1:30

HACK-ART-THON: ACT LABS, “Breaking the Stigma Around Mental Illness,” prototype presentation, jury deliberation, and award ceremony, with Katy Gero & Anastasia Veron, Artyom Astafurov & Beth Graczyk, Jennifer Ding & Dominika Jezewska, Ishaan Jhaveri & Esther Manon Siddiquie, Keely Garfield & Cynthia Hua, Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang & Nia Laureano, Jared Katzman & Rachel Kunstadt, and Marco Berlot & Zeelie Brown, free with advance RSVP, 6:30

INK

Who: Bertie Carvel, Jonny Lee Miller, David Wilson Barnes, Bill Buell, Andrew Durand, Eden Marryshow, Colin McPhillamy, Erin Neufer, Kevin Pariseau, Rana Roy, Michael Siberry, Robert Stanton, and Tara Summers
What: Ink on Broadway
Where: Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
When: Tuesday – Sunday through July 7, $79-$189
Why: At the beginning of James Graham’s Tony-nominated Ink, which takes place on Fleet Street in 1969–70, soon-to-be international media mogul Rupert Murdoch (Bertie Carvel) asks newspaper editor Larry Lamb (Jonny Lee Miller) what makes a good story. “Well, it’s the five ‘W’s, isn’t it,” he says, listing the first four — Who, What, Where, When — then hesitating before getting to the last one. “So what’s the fifth? The fifth ‘W’?” Murdoch implores. “Fifth ‘W’ I used to think was the most important, now I think it’s the least. Fifth ‘W’ is Why,” Lamb responds. Murdoch: “You think the least important question is ‘why’; I would have said that was the most important question.” Lamb: “Once you know ‘why’ something happened, the story’s over, it’s dead. Don’t answer why, a story can run and run, can run forever. And the other reason, actually, honestly, I think, is that there is no ‘Why?’ Most times. ‘Why’ suggests there’s a plan, that there is a point to things, when they happen and there’s not, there’s just not. Sometimes shit — just —happens. Only thing worth asking isn’t ‘why,’ it’s . . . ‘What next?’”

Larry Lamb (Jonny Lee Miller) and Rupert Murdoch (Bertie Carvel) check their progress in MTC newspaper tale (photo © Joan Marcus 2019)

Graham (Labour of Love, Privacy) and director Rupert Goold (King Charles III, American Psycho) follow that advice in the sparkling Manhattan Theatre Club presentation of the award-winning Almeida Theatre production, running at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through July 7. The play dives right into the Who, What, Where, and When as Murdoch decides to buy the failing Sun newspaper from the company that publishes the Mirror and hires exiled editor Lamb to run it. It’s thrilling to watch Lamb put together a ragtag staff, including news editor Brian McConnell (David Wilson Barnes), chief sub Ray Mills (Eden Marryshow), sports editor Frank Nicklin (Bill Buell), woman’s editor Joyce Hopkirk (Tara Summers), persnickety deputy editor Bernard Shrimsley (Robert Stanton), and novice photographer Beverley Goodway (Andrew Durand), as they attempt to not only put out a newspaper immediately but, within one year, surpass the Mirror in circulation, a ridiculously absurd proposition — but one that drives Lamb, Murdoch, and his devoted deputy chairman, Sir Alick McKay (Colin McPhillamy), who are willing to do just about whatever it takes to make it happen, much to the consternation of Mirror chairman Hugh Cudlipp (Michael Siberry) and editor Lee Howard (Marryshow), who worry about the integrity of their industry.

Two-time Olivier winner Goold adds glitter and flash to the proceedings, with the sexy Stephanie Rahn (Rana Roy) occasionally breaking out into song and dance with various characters, turning Bunny Christie’s multilevel, dark-gray, crowded stage into a hopping nightclub, with fun choreography by Lynne Page. Tony nominee Carvel (Matilda the Musical, The Hairy Ape), employing a slight hunch and an overly affected interpretation of Murdoch’s voice, and Miller (Elementary, Frankenstein), bold and forthright as Lamb, make a dynamic duo; even though we know how it’s all going to turn out — particularly how tabloids would present so-called news to the public — we root for them to succeed against the stodgy old guys who actually care about truth and quality. Jon Driscoll’s projections add color to the proceedings, primarily the familiar red of the Sun logo. The serious proceedings, the repercussions of which are still being felt today, with Murdoch’s ownership of such papers as the New York Post and such television stations as Fox News, President Trump’s favorite channel, are infused with a wickedly dry sense of humor; even the insert telling audience members to turn off their cellphones is like the front page of the Sun, blaring the headline: “Cellphone Humiliates Playgoer.”