twi-ny recommended events

DISTANT CONSTELLATION

Selma tells the heartbreaking story of her family during the Armenian genocide in Distant Constellation

DISTANT CONSTELLATION (Shevaun Mizrahi, 2018)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, November 2
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
grasshopperfilm.com

Shevaun Mizrahi’s debut feature, Distant Constellation, is a lovely, intimate portrait of a group of residents at an old age home in Istanbul who just go about their business or share deeply personal stories while major construction outside tears down the past to build a future the senior citizens will not be a part of. Two men spend much of their day going up and down in the elevator, making fun of each other, talking about aliens, and not wanting to be bothered by anyone else. A man is delighted to bring in halvah. A photographer who now can barely see repeats words and phrases as he tries to fix his flash. A man sleeps in a coffinlike bed, coughing, gasping, and singing as the wind whistles through the window. A woman tells the heart-wrenching tale of what she and her family went through during the Armenian genocide of 1915. And another man talks about his unending passion for sex and eroticism, reading passages from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. There’s a lot of napping and sitting, staring into nothingness and watching television. Snow falls lightly from the sky. A flock of birds fly near giant cranes.

Life goes on at Turkish retirement home, inside and outside, in Distant Constellation

A still photographer who studied filmmaking at NYU and apprenticed with Oscar-nominated cinematographer Ed Lachman (Far from Heaven, Carol), Mizrahi regularly travels to Turkey to visit her father. (Her mother is an American.) Back in 2009, she started spending time at a retirement home for the elderly in her father’s hometown and, using a basic DSLR camera, began filming the very old men and women. Encouraged by film-school friends Shelly Grizim and Deniz Buga and inspired by Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth, and Wallace Stevens’s “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” Mizrahi decided to make a full-length film. She focuses her camera, which almost never moves, directly on her subjects, many of whom speak in their bedrooms, the construction often visible outside. Mizrahi shoots Selma, the genocide survivor, in extreme close-up, every moment of her life seemingly right there on her face. The people are not identified in the film by their full names, there is no voiceover narration, no doctors or nurses are interviewed, and no ages or background information is supplied other than what they choose to tell Mizrahi.

At one point Mizrahi, who served as director, cinematographer, editor, and sound designer — Grizim and Buga ultimately became her producers and worked with her on the sound, with Grizim also contributing to the editing and visual effects — shows two old alarm clocks side-by-side, with slightly different times, a wry comment on time itself, something that the residents do not experience the same as the construction workers, who expect to be part of the future they are building. Mizrahi even humanizes them, not casting them as villains eliminating the past. It’s quite a group of elderly characters she’s assembled, members of minorities who speak in Turkish, English, Armenian, French, Greek, and Kurdish. “Light the first light of evening, as in a room / In which we rest and, for small reason, think / The world imagined is the ultimate good,” Stevens wrote in “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” But as someone says in Distant Constellation, “So is life.” The genuinely poetic film opens November 2 at Metrograph, with Mizrahi appearing at Q&As at the 7:00 show Friday, moderated by Eric Hynes, and at the 7:45 show on Saturday.

SOUL OF A NATION: ART IN THE AGE OF BLACK POWER

Faith Ringgold, “United States of Attica,” offset lithograph on paper, © 2018 courtesy ACA Galleries, © 2018 Faith Ringgold

FIRST SATURDAYS
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, November 3, free (some events require advance tickets), 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum explores art and Black Power in the November edition of its free First Saturday program. There will be live performances by Antoine Drye, Shelley Nicole’s blaKbüshe, and the Brooklyn Dance Festival; an Art & Dialogue discussion with curators Valerie Cassel Oliver and Catherine Morris; a hands-on workshop in which participants can create miniature paintings inspired by jazz and the work of Alma Thomas, William T. Williams, and others; a curator tour of “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” with Ashley James; original poetry and music by Jaime Lee Lewis, Jennifer Falu, Joekenneth Museau, Asante Amin, Frank Malloy, and Terry Lovette in addition to excerpts from the 1968 collection Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing; pop-up poetry with Sean DesVignes, Joel Dias-Porter, and Omotara James of Cave Canem; an “Archives as Raw History” tour with archivist Molly Seegers; and the community talk “Black Art Futures Fund.” In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” “Syria, Then and Now: Stories from Refugees a Century Apart,” “One: Do Ho Suh,” “Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection,” “Something to Say: Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, Deborah Kass, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Hank Willis Thomas,” “Cecilia Vicuña: Disappeared Quipu,” “Rob Wynne: FLOAT,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” and more.

WHITE LIGHT FESTIVAL: WAITING FOR GODOT

Druid’s Waiting for Godot shows up at Lincoln Center November 2-13 (photo by Matthew Thompson)

WAITING FOR GODOT
Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College
November 2-13, $55-$95
www.lincolncenter.org
www.druid.ie

In his delightful one-man show On Beckett at the Irish Rep, Bill Irwin spends a significant portion of time discussing Samuel Beckett’s most famous play, Waiting for Godot, including delving into the correct pronunciation of “Godot.” In addition to GOD-oh and guh-DOH, Irwin brings up a third version, suggested to him by Irish Rep producing director Ciaran O’Reilly: godjo. From November 2 to 13, you can see how Ireland’s Druid theater company says the name when its widely hailed slapstick version of Waiting for Godot is presented at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College as part of Lincoln Center’s annual White Light Festival. (The Druid was last at Lincoln Center with DruidShakespeare in 2015, an epic work that brings together Richard II, both parts of Henry IV, and Henry V.) The comic reimagining features Garrett Lombard as Lucky, Aaron Monaghan as Estragon, Rory Nolan as Pozzo, and Marty Rea as Vladimir, with Nathan Reid and Jaden Pace alternating as the boy.

The play is helmed by Druid artistic director Garry Hynes, who won a Tony in 1998 for The Beauty Queen of Leenane, with sets and costumes by Francis O’Connor, lighting by James F. Ingalls, sound by Greg Clarke, and movement by Nick Winston. The 7:30 show on November 3 will be preceded by a 6:15 talk with Hynes and opera and theater producer, essayist, and consultant Robert Marx. The multidisciplinary White Light Festival continues through November 18 with such other productions as The Distant Light with the Latvian Radio Choir, conducted by Sigvards Kļava at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, The Creation with Les Arts Florissants, conducted by William Christie at Alice Tully Hall, and Only the Sound Remains, composed by Kaija Saariaho and directed by Peter Sellars at the Rose Theater.

INDIA PALE ALE

Basminder “Boz” Batra (Shazi Raja) dreams of owning a bar in Madison, Wisconsin, in Jaclyn Backhaus’s India Pale Ale (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club
MTC at New York City Center – Stage I
Tuesday – Sunday through November 18, $69-$89
212-581-1212
indiapalealeplay.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

Jaclyn Backhaus’s India Pale Ale takes on even greater meaning in the wake of the synagogue shooting that left eleven Jewish worshipers dead in Pittsburgh on October 27. Her follow-up to Men on Boats, which was about an 1869 expedition to the Grand Canyon, India Pale Ale, a Manhattan Theatre Club production that opened last week at City Center, shuttles between the current day in Raymond, Wisconsin, and a pirate ship traveling from Calcutta to England in 1823. Desperate to try something new, twenty-nine-year-old Basminder “Boz” Batra (Shazi Raja) is secretly planning on leaving her extremely close Punjabi community to open a bar in Madison, Wisconsin, near the college. She dreams of being like one of her ancestors, Brownbeard (Alok Tewari), a wild pirate and explorer who led a mutiny of an East India Company ship two centuries before. “His cargo was beer / as mine’ll be! / In my bar / in Madison, Wisconsin,” she declares in a pirate accent. “Aye, the lineage is full circle now. / Oim leaving home to see the world. / The world in this yar instance: / a bar that sells alcoholic drinks / in a place that is not here.” Boz, who recently broke off an engagement with Vishal Singh (Nik Sadhnani), has not yet told her rather traditional parents, Deepa (Purva Bedi) and Sunny (Tewari), or her younger brother, Iggy (Sathya Sridharan), who is engaged to Lovi (Lipica Shah), about the bar. Deepa actually finds out about Boz’s plans from her gossipy cousin, Simran Rayat (Angel Desai). Overseeing it all is the family matriarch, Sunny’s mother, Dadi Parminder (Sophia Mahmud), who imparts wisdom as necessary.

The Batra family prepares for langar following horrific tragedy in India Pale Ale (photo by Joan Marcus)

A year later, Boz is tending bar with only one patron, who she finds out is the lonely Tim (Nate Miller), described in the script as “just so white it’s honestly painful.” Tim is a stand-in for much of white society (and much of the City Center audience) when he assumes that Boz is an immigrant, not a second-generation American born and raised in Wisconsin, and she doesn’t make it easy for him to get out of the hole he keeps digging. “So like your family / what are they . . . like what are you / what are they / where are they from,” he says, stumbling over the words. She eventually decides to be friendly, as Tim seems to be harmless, not a dangerous bigot. It’s a powerful, critical scene that beautifully lays out what so much of the play is about. Their conversation is ultimately cut short when Vishal unexpectedly shows up to bring Boz back to Madison, as there’s been a terrible tragedy in their Sikh community. They return home, where the family is preparing langar, a traditional feast that will try to bring the community together following the awful event.

A scene between Tim (Nate Miller) and Basminder “Boz” Batra (Shazi Raja) plays a central role in Jaclyn Backhaus drama (photo by Joan Marcus)

Backhaus was inspired to write the play by the Muslim travel ban executive order Donald Trump signed as well as a real tragedy that took place in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in 2012. The contemporary scenes are poignant, funny, and heartfelt, but Backhaus and director Will Davis spend too much time on Brownbeard and his dancing pirates. Neil Patel’s set switches from the spare langar hall, with chairs and tables brought in and out, to the dark bar Boz runs, to a disco-like stage for the pirates; Arnulfo Maldonado has fun with the costumes, ranging from traditional Punjabi clothing to wild pirate apparel. Raja (Milk Like Sugar) excels as Boz, avoiding the stereotypical transitional figure that is found in so many plays involving a clash between the old and the new. She and Bedi (Dance Nation, An Ordinary Muslim) develop a wonderful rapport as the daughter-mother characters. The play is dragged down by late pedantic speeches by Deepa and Sunny that are wholly unnecessary, merely explaining what we’ve already seen. Otherwise, India Pale Ale is a compelling drama that offers new ways to look at shocking, all-too-real events that continue the hatred overwhelming America.

LIFE AND NOTHING MORE

Robert (Robert Williams) attempts to charm Regina (Regina Williams) in Life and Nothing More

LIFE AND NOTHING MORE (Antonio Méndez Esparza, 2017)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Through Tuesday, November 6
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.cafilm.org/lanm

Antonio Méndez Esparza’s follow-up to his debut, Aquí y Allá, is a sensitive, beautifully paced film that lives up to its title: Life and Nothing More. Inspired by Italian neorealism, Esparza employs a cinema vérité style to tell the story of Regina (Regina Williams), an African American single mother struggling to get by in Florida. Regina has a delightful three-year-old daughter (Ry’Nesia Chambers) and a quiet, distant fourteen-year-old son, Andrew (Andrew Bleechington), who is starting to get in trouble with the law, hanging around with bad kids and carrying around a knife. Regina works menial minimum-wage jobs to try to keep the family afloat while the father of her children is in prison. Robert (Robert Williams), a newcomer to the town, starts trying to charm her, wanting to take her out, but Regina is suspicious of his intentions, as is Andrew. But when Robert shows the least bit of threatening anger as he and Andrew clash, Regina has some difficult decisions to make, which grow more complicated when other facts come to light.

Fourteen-year-old Andrew (Andrew Bleechington) has trouble connecting in Antonio Méndez Esparza’s Life and Nothing More

Cinematographer Barbu Balasoiu keeps his camera slow and steady as it lingers on scenes with very little or no dialogue, maintaining a tense mood that hovers over the film. As with Aquí y Allá, which was shot in Mexico, most of the actors are nonprofessionals in their first film, which heightens the reality. Regina Williams gives a strong, tenderhearted performance as the mother, a woman dedicated to making a better life for her children but continually runs into roadblocks beyond her control. Writer-director Esparza often focuses on her eyes as she watches events unfold, saying nothing but wanting to fight back more and more without risking the safety of her family. The film also smartly explores the incarceration gap between blacks and white without getting overtly political. Robert Williams (no relation) is engaging, with just the right hint of mystery and possible danger, while Bleechington reveals much with very few words, a boy who just can’t seem to say or do the right thing (when he speaks at all). Winner of awards at film festival around the world in addition to the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award, Life and Nothing More is an honest, nuanced look at race and class in twenty-first-century America, an intelligent and heartbreaking depiction of what life is like for so many people today.

FIREFLIES

Reverend Charles Emmanuel Grace (Khris Davis) and his wife, Olivia (DeWanda Wise), take a hard look at their life in Fireflies (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 11, $45-$65
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

Donja R. Love’s Fireflies is a heartbreaking, eerily relevant drama about bigotry and hate, desire and passion. The second in the Afro-Queer playwright’s trilogy of the black experience in America — Sugar in Our Wounds dealt with slavery, while the forthcoming In the Middle takes place during the Black Lives Matter movement — Fireflies is set in the fall of 1963, at the rise of the civil rights movement. Reverend Charles Emmanuel Grace (Khris Davis) has just given a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, about the four black girls who were killed in the 16th St. Baptist Church bombing. (The preacher’s name, but not the character itself, was inspired by Harlem evangelist Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace, who died in 1960.) A big, bold man, Charles comes home to his wife, Olivia Grace (DeWanda Wise), who was just sneaking a smoke. Olivia is deeply troubled by what’s happening in the world, her body suddenly shuddering at certain moments. “You still seeing fire and hearing bombs in your head?” Charles asks, and she answers yes. It’s as if she can feel every tragedy as it happens. Meanwhile, the sky, which hovers in the background throughout the play, behind Arnulfo Maldonaldo’s note-perfect 1960s kitchen set, does indeed often become overcast in a bloodred color. And slowly, what appears to be a beautiful, natural love between husband and wife becomes something else as they talk about having a child and each reveals a dark secret, threatening their supposedly idyllic life.

A bloodred sky hovers over Donja R. Love’s Fireflies at the Atlantic (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Fireflies features terrific performances from Davis (The Royale, Sweat) and Wise (She’s Gotta Have It, Sunset Baby) as a couple struggling to preserve their family in times of crisis, troubles that Olivia can’t shake. “Last night I had a dream the sky wasn’t on fire anymore,” she says. “The sky was filled with . . . fireflies. . . . So I start to pray. I ask, what does it all mean? And I hear him. I hear God. His voice is real faint. I was struggling to hear Him. But I do. He says, ‘Each firefly is one of my colored kids flying home.’ That scare me even more because it was so many. I would much rather have fire. I’m used to that. I’m used to the bombings, and crosses burning, and all of that. I’m not used to seeing God’s children fly home.” That brief monologue captures the immense fear still felt by so many people of color and minorities, especially in light of the neverending shootings in churches, schools, and synagogues across America in the twenty-first century. Directed by Saheem Ali (Sugar in Our Wounds, Kill Move Paradise), the play, which continues at the Atlantic through November 11, features a final monologue that is far too preachy and melodramatic, laying things out too simply, and the scenes in the porch can be physically awkward and jarring. But throughout it all the blue sky keeps turning red, which it still seems to do more than fifty years later.

TONY OURSLER: TEAR OF THE CLOUD

Speaking figures are projected onto a tree along the Hudson River in Tony Oursler’s “Tear of the Cloud” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Riverside Park South / Hudson River
Enter at West 68th Street and Riverside Blvd.
October 30-31, free, 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm
www.publicartfund.org
flickr slideshow

For many years I’ve marveled at Tony Oursler’s unique and fantastical installations, living narratives in which people’s faces and bodies are projected onto sculptural works, either life-size versions of their bodies, miniature tableaux, or more abstract objects. The New York City native, who grew up on the banks of the Hudson River in Nyack, has now expanded his repertoire with “Tear of the Cloud,” a large-scale multimedia work on and around the landmarked 69th Street Transfer Bridge (Gantry), formerly a dock for car floats for the New York Central Railroad. (Previously, Oursler’s “The Influence Machine” took over Madison Square Park in 2000, in which he created a kind of giant séance; both that and “Tear of the Cloud” are Public Art Fund projects.) From seven to ten o’clock every night but Monday through Halloween, Oursler beams images onto the front and sides of the dock, on the base of the elevated West Side Highway, on a weeping willow tree, and onto the surface of the water itself. The visuals are supplemented by audio tracks of music, stories, and dialogue about the history of the area, dating from Lenape times and the Oneida community to the tech-heavy present and future.

Tony Oursler’s “Tear of the Cloud” consists of a wide range of iconic and abstract sound and images (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Oursler incorporates a vast range of people, places, and things into the work, focusing on modes of communication, historical figures, and seminal eureka moments, including Samuel F. B. Morse painting his daughter for “Susan Walker Morse (The Muse),” hollow-face illusions, artificial intelligence bots, Haverstraw bricks used in city construction, IBM’s Deep Blue, the color guard, the Great West Point Chain, Thomas Edison’s Black Maria movie studio, the Headless Horseman, the Jacquard loom, molecular recorders, the telegraph, PCBs, Morse code, Indian Point, the Manhattan Project, Jimi Hendrix, Timothy Leary, LSD, Woodstock, Franz Mesmer, a viking-like Millerite, punch cards, actress and feminist Pearl White from The Perils of Pauline, the talking drum, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” the official seal of the City of New York, and Mary Rogers being fished out of the water after being murdered in Sibyl’s Cave in New Jersey, which inspired Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” Among the more than two dozen performers making appearances are costume and prop designer Enver Chakartash, assistant editor Jack Colton, Grandmaster Flash, Spencer Davis, Constance Dejong, Jim Fletcher, Holly Stanton, Jason Scott Henderson, animator Sakshi Jain, Kate Valk, and soundtrack composers MV Carbon, Corey Riddell, Idrissa Kone, and Oursler himself in addition to the Manhattan Project Chorus and the New Red Order collective.

One of the finest and most influential experimental artists of the last four decades, Oursler is not about to make it simple for viewers to figure out exactly what is happening. As you walk all around the area — make sure to go down the pier and to look and listen in all directions — you’ll take in abstract audio and visuals that might not form a complete narrative but are instead like the many tributaries that ultimately feed into the enormous Hudson River. Fortunately, the official website features a well-annotated glossary as well as a map identifying all of the figures and scenes. Oursler refers to the installation as a “visual palimpsest, depicting the layering of information associated with unforeseen legacies of the waterway [inspired by] the mnemonic effect of the river and the many intertwined tropes associated with the Hudson Valley region.” Oursler named the work after Lake Tear of the Clouds in Essex County, which is the highest source of the Hudson; the title of the work (the first word of which can be read as either teer or tayr) also evokes digital storage, acid rain, climate change, and even the “Keep America Beautiful” commercial in which an actor portraying a Native American sheds a lone tear after seeing how we shamelessly pollute the Earth. However, as Oursler makes clear in a long, projected, hard-to-read text, he is acknowledging what has been done to the environment but going far beyond merely apologizing. There are only two more nights to catch this fab installation; be sure to allow at least an hour in order to properly absorb its many facets.