Eva von Schweinitz’s The Space between the Letters is part of Incoming! section of Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival (photo by Alejandro Fajardo)
UNDER THE RADAR
Public Theater and other venues
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
January 3-13 publictheater.org
The Public Theater’s annual Under the Radar Festival invites adventurous theatergoers to experience cutting-edge, experimental theater and music from around the world. The 2019 iteration features works from twenty-one artists from nine countries, with most tickets costing a mere thirty bucks. Below are some of the highlights.
Hear Word! Naija Woman Talk True, by Ifeoma Fafunwa, January 3, 5, 6, 7, Public Theater, Martinson Theater, $30
Frankenstein, by Manual Cinema, concept by Drew Dir, January 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, Public Theater, LuEsther Theater, $30
Minor Character, New Saloon adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, January 4-13, Public Theater, Martinson Theater, $30
BITCH! DYKE! FAGHAG! WHORE! The Penny Arcade Sex and Censorship Show, by Penny Arcade, January 3, 6, 10, 12, 13, Joe’s Pub, $35
Incoming! Macbeth in Stride, by Whitney White, Public Theater, Shiva Theater, $25
Winter Jazzfest is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary with special tributes, talks, listening sessions, and events supporting social justice. As always, it’s highlighted by amazing marathons, taking place January 5, 11, and 12 at such venues as LPR, the Bitter End, Subculture, Zinc, the Sheen Center, the Bowery Ballroom, and the Mercury Lounge. This year’s artist-in-residence is Meshell Ndegeocello. Below are only some of the highlights.
We Resist!, with Fandango at the Wall with Arturo O’Farrill & the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, with special guests Marc Ribot’s Songs of Resistance, Samora Pinderhughes Transformations Suite, Word*Rock*Sword: A Musical Celebration of Women’s Lives featuring Toshi Reagon, Allison Miller, Ganessa James, and others, Le Poisson Rouge, January 6, $25, 7:00
The Bad Plus, Terence Blanchard featuring the E-Collective, Terri Lyne Carrington & Social Science, Le Poisson Rouge, January 7, $30-$35, 7:00
Medeski Martin & Wood, Alarm Will Sound, Brooklyn Steel, January 9, $55, 8:00
Meshell Ndegeocello Catalog — An Intimate Set, with Chris Bruce, Jebin Bruni, and Abraham Rounds, Nublu, January 10, $35-$45, 7:00
Winter Jazzfest Marathon, multiple artists at numerous venues, January 11-12, $50-$60 one day, $90-$105 both days, 6:00
Kaneisha (Teyonah Parris) and Jim (Paul Alexander Nolan) have an unusual relationship in Slave Play (photo by Joan Marcus)
New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 13, $79 www.nytw.org
Jeremy O. Harris’s intense Slave Play delves deep into a trio of dangerous sexual interactions defined by race, gender, and power in the Antebellum South as well as today. The story takes place in Virginia on the MacGregor Plantation, which is represented by a large image of the main house behind the audience that is reflected on the mirrored wall across the back of the stage on Clint Ramos’s narrow set, onto which various pieces of furniture are brought on through a doorway at the center and around the sides. The play opens with black slave Kaneisha (Teyonah Parris) sweeping the floor, twerking to Rihanna’s “Work,” when she is caught by her white overseer, Jim (Paul Alexander Nolan). “I ain’t never seen no / ‘negress’ / move like that there before!” Jim says. “Where’d you learn dat? / Thought they beat all the Africa outcha’ll fore we broughtcha up here to MacGregor’s.” Kaneisha responds, “Ya’ll did / try to tear it way from us. / The truth of our bodies? / The way they moved / Our bodies. / Told us it / was / devilish / Our bodies / told us that it won’t / fit / for civ’lized eyes.” Kaneisha expects to be whipped for her actions, but Jim, who tells Kaneisha to address him as “Mista Jim,” not “Massa,” becomes turned on by her instead.
Alana MacGregor (Annie McNamara) wants more than just music from Phillip (Sullivan Jones) in Jeremy O. Harris play (photo by Joan Marcus)
After they depart the stage, a four-poster bed is wheeled on with Alana MacGregor (Annie McNamara), the plantation owner’s wife, who calls for her “mulatto” house servant, Phillip (Sullivan Jones), to play his violin for her. While he wants to play Beethoven, she condescendingly insists on hearing “some of your music. A negro spiritual!” Soon she is appealing for more than just music. The third couple arrives next, Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer), a white indentured servant, and Gary (Ato Blankson-Wood), his black boss. “I’s in charge. / But / that’s what makes you a funny white man. / Ha!” Gary tells him. “Ain’t used to seein’ them allow / no n—a to run they show. / You’s a funny white man.” They end up fighting to Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s “Multi-Love,” until clothes start coming off. With the later addition of facilitators Patricia (Irene Sofia Lucio) and Teá (Chalia La Tour), the second act offers a surprising twist that puts the actions of the first act into a compelling contemporary context, but to say anything further would be doing the play a disservice.
Gary (Ato Blankson-Wood) and Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer) turn the power dynamic inside out in Slave Play at NYTW (photo by Joan Marcus)
Inspired by such films as Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo, such writings as Hortense J. Spillers’s Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book and José Esteban Muñoz’s Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position, and songs by Rihanna, Slave Play is a hard-hitting look at America’s shameful past, an investigation into slavery, racism, white privilege, and political correctness that will have you laughing nervously as you shift uncomfortably in your seat, the plantation mind-set still all-too-real. Divided into three sections, “Work,” “Process,” and “Exorcise,” the two-hour intermissionless production explores the things we say and don’t say, the demands we make on our partners as well as ourselves. Harris — who also examines what he refers to as “decolonizing desire” in 2016’s water sports; or insignificant white boys and the upcoming Daddy and is actually still a graduate student at Yale — and Obie-winning director Robert O’Hara (Eclipsed, The Continuum) keep the audience rapt but uneasy throughout; when the lights are up, audience members can see themselves reflected in the stage mirror, making them complicit in the shenanigans they are watching, evoking the sexist and racist problems still so prevalent in contemporary society and our psyches, born of America’s original sin, slavery.
New York City native Peter Halley casts Lever House in a soft, soothing yellow glow in his site-specific installation, “New York, New York,” on view through the end of the year. “I grew up in Midtown, just a few blocks from Lever House,” he said in a statement. “It was constructed the year before I was born, so it was always part of the landscape of my childhood. The lobby is a classic Mies van der Rohe glass box. It provided an irresistible opportunity to create a postmodern intervention within this paradigmatic modernist space.”
A central architectural structure holds colorful surprises at Lever House (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
A Neo‐Conceptualist who was a key part of the downtown arts scene in the 1980s and later founded INDEX magazine, Halley surrounds a central architectural structure with Day-Glo paintings that incorporate his love of geometric patterns he calls “prisons,” “cells,” and “conduits,” relating to technological and social connections.
“Prisons,” “cells,” and “conduits” are a common theme of Peter Halley’s art (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Inside the structure is a series of rooms that change color with shifting lighting effects, revealing walls of cartoon explosions and dreamlike, diagrammed latticework, as if the spectator has entered deep into Halley’s paintings — and his mind. One experiences both confinement and escape in the work, shielded from the outside world until you have to again face the madness that is Midtown Manhattan.
Undine (Cherise Boothe) faces some new challenges when an FBI agent (Marcus Callender) shows up at her office in Signature revival (photo by Monique Carboni)
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 30, $35; through January 13, $35-$60
212-244-7529 www.signaturetheatre.org
To kick off her residency at the Signature Theatre, Lynn Nottage has pulled out her 2004 comedy, Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine, which has been extended at the Linney through January 13. Best known for the two plays that earned her Pulitzer Prizes — 2009’s Ruined, about sexually abused women in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and 2016’s Sweat, which explores economic strife in a dying Pennsylvania factory town — Nottage takes a different route in Fabulation, a consistently very, very funny play, but, like her later works, it also faces such issues as race, gender, and class head-on. Cherise Boothe stars as Undine, a highly motivated, high-powered businesswoman who thinks she has made it, with her own posh boutique public relations firm in Manhattan that, she tells the audience directly, “caters to the vanity and confusion of the African American nouveau riche,” and a hot husband, Hervé (Ian Lassiter), to escort her to just the right parties. But when Hervé cleans out her bank account and disappears, Undine is forced to go back to the family she abandoned fourteen years earlier, when she was Sharona Watkins living in the Walt Whitman Houses in Brooklyn. Her mother (Nikiya Mathis), father (J. Bernard Calloway), brother (Marcus Callender), and grandmother (Heather Alicia Simms) are not exactly thrilled to see her, but blood is blood, so they take her in, and she is soon overwhelmed by all she had fought to leave behind as she battles various addictions and anxieties.
Undine (Cherise Boothe) can’t believe what is happening to her in Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation (photo by Monique Carboni)
Fabulation is reminiscent of John Landis’s Trading Places, the 1983 comedy in which an upper-class white snob (Dan Aykroyd) gets an unexpected comeuppance when two old white brokers (Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy) take everything away from him and give it all to a black man who has nothing (Eddie Murphy). Sharona tried extremely hard to get away from her past in the projects, creating a supposedly tony life as Undine — her chosen name evokes ambitious social climber Undine Spragg from Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country — but she learns some valuable lessons once back home; it’s no coincidence that both her parents work in security, something she desperately needs on several levels. But Nottage (Mlima’s Tale,Intimate Apparel) and director Lileana Blain-Cruz (The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,Actually) keep the belly laughs coming as Undine reevaluates who she is and where she came from.
In a role originated by Charlayne Woodard at Playwrights Horizons, Boothe (Ruined, When We Were Young and Unafraid) is, well, fabulous as Undine, beautifully handling her character’s fast fall from grace and her frantic desire to get back up again, if she possibly can ever face reality. The rest of the cast — MaYaa Boateng, Dashiell Eaves, Lassiter, Mathis, and Simms — excels in multiple small roles that represent and challenge the notion of black stereotypes with humor that is not meant to make the audience uncomfortable; Mathis and Boateng are a hoot, quickly changing characters and some pretty choice outfits, while Eaves switches among several white dudes with jocularity. (The costumes are by Montana Levi Blanco, with set design by Adam Rigg.) Nottage will follow up her Signature residency with a revival of her 2011 comedy, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, and a brand-new comedy as well; Fabulation is a fab start.
Sean Willingham rides Millennium’s Buck during second round of 2018 Duluth PBR contest (photo by Andy Watson/Bull Stock Media)
PROFESSIONAL BULL RIDERS MONSTER ENERGY BUCK OFF AT THE GARDEN
Madison Square Garden
31st – 33rd Sts. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
January 4-6, $28-$226 ($506 for PBR Elite Seats) www.pbr.com www.msg.com
When twi-ny was first offered the opportunity to interview PBR veteran Sean Willingham, the focus was going to be on his farewell tournament, the Professional Bull Riders Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden January 4-6. After a storied nineteen-year-career, the eight-time winner and twelve-time world finalist was hanging up his boots. But a funny thing happened on the way to the World’s Most Famous Arena: Willingham has had such a productive season that he changed his mind. “I am just old,” he told PBR.com in November 2017 when he announced his retirement. “I have been riding bulls for a long time. Man, it ain’t easy. That is for sure. Bull riding is all I have ever known since I was fifteen years old. I live, breathe, and sleep it. It is hard to realize I am going to give it up.”
The thirty-seven-year-old Willingham, who was born in Norman, Oklahoma, and raised in Georgia, where he still lives, has suffered such riding injuries as a cracked skull, a dislocated hip, a torn groin, and a broken neck. So no one was shocked when he called it quits so he could spend more quality time with his wife, Kayla Leigh, and their two young children, daughter Lani and son Conlee. But then came the 2018 season. “I definitely want to go out on top; who knows what the year brings. This may be the best year I ever have. I don’t know. Nobody knows. Only time will tell,” he told PBR.com last November. Time has told, so Willingham is sticking it out for at least one more campaign and discussing with twi-ny what his suddenly different immediate future holds in store for him.
twi-ny: Last November, you announced that this would be your last PBR season. How has the year gone?
Sean Willingham: The season went very well, with no surprises. I accomplished everything I wanted to, including making the PBR World Finals, the richest and most prestigious event in our sport. I had such a good year, I decided that this will actually not be my last PBR season. If the Rolling Stones and the Who can retire and unretire, so can I, right? I’m going to ride for another season to see if I can have an even better one than my comeback year in 2018. My goals are, first of all, to win New York City, and then qualify again for the World Finals in Las Vegas in November and win the Finals event. Ultimately, I want to win the world title. If you don’t think you can win it, you shouldn’t be in it.
twi-ny: The Duluth competition in March didn’t go quite as planned. What was that experience like, in what you thought was your last event in your home state?
SW: The experience was good; a lot of fans were there. It didn’t go as good, but I love Georgia and the fans. But now that we’re going another year, I’m pretty excited to be competing in front of my home-state crowd again with another chance to win the event for myself and the people in Georgia. The hardest place to win is in your hometown.
Sean Willingham is introduced at third round in Billings during PBR twenty-fifth anniversary season (photo by Andy Watson/Bull Stock Media)
twi-ny: You initially chose Madison Square Garden as your farewell appearance. Why New York City?
SW: I originally chose New York City because of the history of Madison Square Garden and what it’s known for — championships, legendary concert performances, even event rodeos back in the ’50s. The atmosphere is totally different here, and the fans are great to us. They love a good show, and PBR is a great show to watch. New York fans are very involved and feed off us riding. The Garden would be a great place for athletes in any sport to finish their career. You know, I’ve never won this event; 2008 was my best year, finishing fourth, and ten years later I’m still here competing. And twelve years ago, I was here to introduce our sport to New Yorkers. Nobody expected to see bull riding in New York City. We even set up an arena on Broadway in the middle of rush hour, which made all the commuters stop and check us out. Every year since, it’s been a little more successful and keeps growing and growing.
twi-ny: Will you be able to perhaps spend some extra time in New York as a tourist, and if so, what will be on the agenda?
SW: I plan to see the sights. We’ll probably do a little touring after the fact. I am going to go see the Statue of Liberty and hopefully some late-night shows. I don’t know if they’ll be coming or not, but the kids want to go see the World Trade Center Memorial. We’ll probably do some shopping and also go to Central Park and feed the ducks. I’d love to go to Rockefeller Center and put on some ice skates.
twi-ny: You’ve spent more than half your life as a professional. When you started as a teenager, did you think you’d still be riding more than twenty years later?
SW: Yes, I sure did. I knew I was too lazy to work and too scared to steal! Joking aside, I definitely figured I would still be riding, but not at this level of competition. I’ve been fortunate enough to stay at the top for this long, which is very unheard of in the sport of bull riding. They say I’m the longest-tenured rider at the top of the PBR. That means a lot to me. With all the injuries that can happen in this sport, most people don’t last more than ten years at this level; luckily for me I’ve been able to keep my body in a good working manner to stay competing.
twi-ny: When you thought this would be your last season, what did you envision doing next? I’m going to assume it wasn’t going to be something in which you could suffer such injuries as a broken neck, which you did in 2015 in Montana.
SW: Well, you can break your neck getting hit by a car crossing the street. But to be fair, I guess the big difference is the car then won’t chase you down like in bull riding.
twi-ny: Will you be continuing the Sean Willingham Invitational?
SW: I’ll still be promoting my event, running my pressure-washing business, and hopefully doing some work on the television side of things for PBR, commentating at the events.
twi-ny: What about golf?
SW: I plan on playing a lot of golf, that’s for sure! I’m looking forward to going to ball games with my kids and watching them grow up, helping them and supporting them in whatever they decide to do.
Sean Willingham and his wife, Kayla Leigh, enjoy a relaxing moment away from the bull ring (selfie by Sean Willingham)
twi-ny: When you do eventually retire, are there any specific bulls you’re going to miss?
SW: I’m going to miss SweetPro’s Bruiser. His ability to buck at the top of his game for three years is incredible. It’s the same for him as it is for me as a rider; to be able to perform as long as he has and be the Bull of the Year the last three years like he has is pretty impressive.
twi-ny: What is your favorite memory from your PBR career so far?
SW: My favorite memory is winning Duluth in 2014. I had been competing at that event for twelve years before finally winning it in my home state. The hardest one to win is in front of everyone who has such high hopes for you.
twi-ny: What will you try hardest to forget?
SW: The hardest to forget is a tough question. Sleepless nights and breaking my neck are two of them, along with a long list of other injuries I have had to deal with throughout my career, including having six anchors put in my groin to reattach it to my pelvis. Other than that, there’s not really much in this sport I don’t want to remember. I enjoy all of the memories and opportunities this sport has given me.
twi-ny: You enjoy water sports, and you recently went on a cruise with your wife and kids. How was that?
SW: The cruise was good. We got to experience our first hurricane on the boat, going right through Michael. But the cruise was very enjoyable, very relaxing, and I love the Grand Caymans.
twi-ny: What other family-friendly things do you expect to do once your career is over that you couldn’t do while on tour?
SW: I want to show up at more games my kids are involved in, more cheerleading competitions that my daughter does, and play more golf with my friends. And most importantly take my wife out on a date.
Robert Battle’s Mass is part of “3 Visionaries” program (photo by Paul Kolnik)
New York City Center
130 West 56th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
November 28 – December 30, $29-$159
212-581-1212 www.alvinailey.org www.nycitycenter.org
I usually check out one of the all-new programs every year at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s City Center season, guaranteeing that I see productions I’ve never seen before. But for the company’s sixtieth anniversary, I decided instead to choose “3 Visionaries,” an evening of works by AAADT’s trio of artistic directors, Ailey (1958-89), Judith Jamison (1989-2010), and Robert Battle (2011-). The night began with Battle’s 2004 Mass, which the troupe debuted last year, restaged by Elisa Clark. Inspired by seeing Verdi’s Requiem at Carnegie Hall, Battle created a fourteen-minute dance in which a sixteen-piece choir in long robes move under a heavenly glow to John Mackey’s percussive score. (The lighting is by Burke Wilmore, with costumes by Fritz Masten.) The group comes together in a tight circle, forms a straight line, and glides across the floor on their tiptoes in spiritual reverence. Next was Battle’s Ella, reconceived from a solo to a duet in 2016, in which Michael Francis McBride and Chalvar Monteiro spend five exhilarating minutes prancing and preening, having a ball in Jon Taylor’s black sequined outfits as they try to outdo each other to a live recording of Ella Fitzgerald’s scat classic “Airmail Special.”
AAADT’s Jacqueline Green in Alvin Ailey’s gorgeous Cry (photo by Paul Kolnik)
Following intermission, there were two very short excerpts from Jamison’s ouevre, a four-minute solo from Divining, beautifully performed by Jacquelin Harris to music by Monti Ellison and Kimati Dinizulu, and a duet from 1989’s Forgotten Time, with Clifton Brown and Chalvar Monteiro stretching the bounds of what the male body can do, with music by Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares and costumes by Jamison and Ellen Mahlke. Then came a stunning version of Ailey’s 1971 classic, Cry, a seventeen-minute ballet he created as a birthday present for his mother. Wearing A. Christina Giannini’s nineteenth-century-style ruffled white dresses, Akua Noni Parker, Ghrai DeVore, and Constance Stamatiou each perform a solo (to Alice Coltrane’s “Something about John Coltrane,” Laura Nyro’s “Been on a Train,” and the Voices of East Harlem’s “Right On. Be Free,” respectively), with Parker starting out incorporating a long white sash that she uses to clean the floor and as a headdress, celebrating women’s historical and evolving roles in African culture and the diaspora.
AAADT’s Jacquelin Harris and Megan Jakel let loose in Robert Battle’s Ella (photo by Christopher Duggan)
The program concludes with the usual finale (except in the all-new program), Ailey’s signature work, 1960’s Revelations. Don’t look past this thirty-six-minute gem, which still contains plenty of thrills and chills. Ailey was inspired by such writers as James Baldwin and Langston Hughes as well as childhood church services he attended in Texas, leading to a multipart ballet that Ailey explained thusly at its debut: “This suite explores motivations and emotions of African American religious music which, like its heir to the Blues, takes many forms — ‘true spirituals’ with their sustained melodies, ring shouts, song-sermons, gospel songs, and holy blues — songs of trouble, love, and deliverance.” The piece is divided into three sections, “Pilgrim of Sorrow” (“I Been ’Buked,” “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” “Fix Me, Jesus”), “Take Me to the Water (“Processional/Honor, Honor,” “Wade in the Water,” “I Wanna Be Ready”), and “Move, Members, Move” (“Sinner Man,” “The Day Is Past and Gone,” “You May Run On,” “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham”). Highlights included Parker and Jeroboam Bozeman’s duet to “Fix Me, Jesus,” McBride’s solo to “I Wanna Be Ready,” and the trio of DeVore, Brown, and Stamatiou’s “Wade in the Water.” Ailey also said, “I wanted to explore black culture, and I wanted that culture to be a revelation.” After nearly sixty years, it still is. Ailey’s winter season continues at City Center through December 30, with “3 Visionaries” being presented again on December 26 at 2:00. Among the other upcoming programs are “Timeless Ailey,” “All Battle,” and “All New.” Each performance begins with Bob Bonniol’s new seven-minute documentary short, Becoming Ailey, with audio quotes from Ailey.
