Upper West Siders Jay (Matt Servitto) and Brooke (Ilana Becker) laugh as they fire their nanny, Britanny (Zonya Love), in Emma and Max (photo by Joan Marcus)
Flea Theater, the Sam
20 Thomas St. between Broadway & Church St.
Wednesday – Monday through November 11, $47-$102
866-811-4111
theflea.org
Eclectic auteur Todd Solondz, the creator of such offbeat, unusual indie films as Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, and Storytelling, doesn’t disappoint with his first play, the dark, acerbic Emma and Max, which has been extended at the Flea through November 11. Solondz reveals the dark underbelly of suburbia in the ninety-minute show, which is wickedly funny and all too real. Wealthy white Upper West Siders Brooke (Ilana Becker) and Jay (Matt Servitto) are attempting to fire their black nanny, Britanny (Zonya Love), who has been taking care of their kids, three-year-old Emma and two-year-old Max (played by Sawyer Manning and Mason Goldstein, respectively, seen only briefly in video and photographs). “The children adore you,” Brooke tells Brittany, who looks at her blond boss stone-faced. “You’re more than we could ever have hoped for. So much more,” Jay adds. Brooke and Jay are acting like it is harder for them to get rid of her than it is for Brittany to get kicked out; they’re terrified of saying anything that can be construed as even the slightest bit politically incorrect. “What I do wrong?” Brittany asks. “Nothing,” Brooke replies, to which Brittany says, “Can’t be nothing. A person don’t get fired for nothing.” When Brooke explains that she is being replaced by an au pair from Holland, Brittany says, “What’s that? A white girl?” A disturbed Brooke answers, “Actually we don’t know her ethnicity. We didn’t ask,” as if a Dutch woman named Famke (Lacy Allen, also seen in video only) could be anything else.
Brooke (Ilana Becker) and Jay (Matt Servitto) discuss privilege and more in world premiere of Todd Solondz’s first play (photo by Joan Marcus)
Brooke takes an instant liking to Famke but feels guilty that she doesn’t feel guilty over firing Brittany, who spends most of her time in bed listening to Meryl Streep singing “The Winner Takes It All” from Mamma Mia! and not responding to Brooke’s constant phone calls and texts asking her to return her keys to their house. When she’s not at home, Brittany is making the set changes, as if she is a slave still working for Brooke and Jay, who watch her opening and closing doors and pushing and pulling furniture, occasionally making faces at her if they think she is taking too long. It’s an ingenious conceit that extends beyond the narrative world of the play, as if Solondz the director is also abusing Love the actress, who portrays Brittany with a steely, decidedly unglamorous demeanor. (The storage-like set with aluminum-siding-like covering and clever props are designed by Julia Noulin-Mérat.) Brooke and Jay go on vacation in Barbados, where Brittany is from, rubbing yet more salt in the wound without even realizing it. Complaining about certain aspects of her own childhood, Brooke says, “The point is, I know something about what it means to feel marginalized . . . My experience, my pain . . . I wish I’d been born black — then at least I could’ve shared the pain, the injustice of it all.”
Britanny (Zonya Love) finally gets to share her tragic story in Emma and Max at the Flea (photo by Joan Marcus)
Everything comes full circle as Brittany finally gets to share her own story, telling it to a woman named Padma (Rita Wolf, who also plays flight attendant Mira) who is recording the mostly one-sided conversation. “I believe in things I know and understand and see. I’m not good at make-believe. I’m not invisible,” Brittany explains. “White people see me. Black people see me. White people see my blackness. Black people see my blackness. That’s what they see. But I see water.” The concept of water is essential to Solondz, a New Jersey native who is married and has two young children; images of water are projected by Adam Thompson onto the set as well as forming the entrance to a resort swimming pool. Emma and Max is about how people see and judge one another, but primarily how whites see and judge blacks. Brooke and Jay get flustered by white people’s problems, reveling in their ingrained, unearned white privilege while believing the world owes them everything, from wealth and success to exceptional children and servants. The play is a sharply observant skewering of the status quo in a Trump America that continues to encounter racism, bigotry, and hatred every day and where the term “privilege” has become a dirty word to about half the country. It’s also a place where payback can be a bitch, where there are consequences for physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. It’s not a happy situation, but it’s damn funny and frighteningly realistic, a mirror brilliantly held up to a society in crisis.
Screening at NewFest on October 29, 
More than two dozen sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots have not diluted in the slightest the grandeur of the original 1954 version of Godzilla, one of the greatest monster movies ever made. If you’ve only seen the feeble, reedited, Americanized Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, made two years later with Canadian-born actor Raymond Burr inserted as an American reporter, well, wipe that out of your head. On October 26, BAMcinématek is screening the real thing, the restored treasure as part of “Ghosts and Monsters: Postwar Japanese Horror.” The film was inspired by Eugène Lourié’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and a real incident involving the Daigo Fukuryū Maru, a tuna-fishing boat that got hit by radioactive fallout in January 1954 from a U.S. test of a dry-fuel thermonuclear device in the Pacific Ocean. Writer-director Ishirō Honda and cowriter Takeo Murata expanded on Shigeru Kayama’s story, focusing on a giant dinosaur under the sea who comes back to life after H-bomb testing by the U.S. Standing 165 feet tall and able to breathe atomic gas, Godzilla — known as Gojira in Japanese, a combination of gorira, the Japanese word for gorilla, and kujira, which means whale — wreaks havoc on Japanese towns as he makes his way toward Tokyo. While the military and the government want to destroy the creature — who is played by Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka in a monster suit, tramping over miniature houses, streets, cars, trains, and buildings using the suitmation technique (both men also make cameos outside the costume) — Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura) wants to study Godzilla to find out how the radiation only makes it stronger instead of destroying it. (Throughout, Godzilla is referred to as “it” and not “he,” perhaps because the creature is in part a representation of America and what it wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) “Godzilla was baptized in the fire of the H-bomb and survived. What could kill it now?” Dr. Yamane asks. Meanwhile, one of Dr. Yamane’s assistants, Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), is working on a secret oxygen destroyer that he will show only to his fiancée, Yamane’s daughter, Emiko (Momoko Kōchi), who is having trouble telling Dr. Serizawa that she is actually in love with salvage ship captain Hideto Ogata (Akira Takarada). “Godzilla’s no different from the H-bomb still hanging over Japan’s head,” Ogata tells Dr. Yamane, who is none too pleased with his take on the situation. Through it all, the media risks everything to get the story.
Birds start slamming into the windows of an airplane. The sky has turned a deep red. “It’s just like flying through a sea of blood,” first officer Ei Sugisaka (Teruo Yoshida) says. It’s reported that a bomb might be on board the aircraft. A suitcase with a rifle is discovered. A spectacular yellow UFO buzzes over the plane, which catches fire and crashes in a vast postapocalyptic wasteland in the middle of nowhere, as if on a deserted planet. And then the real trouble begins in Hajime Satô’s Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, a color-saturated nightmare released by Shochiko in 1968. The survivors include the stalwart and dedicated Captain Sugisaka; sweet and innocent flight attendant Kazumi Asakura (Tomomi Saito); corrupt politician Gôzô Mano (Eizo Kitamura); weapons dealer Tokuyasu (Nobu Kaneko), who is so desperate to make a sale that he offers his wife, Noriko Tokuyasu (Yûko Kusunoki), to Mano; a blonde American, Mrs. Neal (Kathy Horan), who is picking up the body of her dead husband, who was killed in the Vietnam War; Momotake (Kazuo Kato), a psychiatrist who sees this as a great opportunity to study human nature in a time of severe crisis; Professor Sagai (Hideo Masaya Takahashi), a space biologist with some wacky theories; Hirofumi Teraoka (Hideo Ko), a suspicious passenger in a white suit and sunglasses; and Matsumiya (Norihiko Yamamoto), the young bomber.
BAMcinématek is presenting a 4K restoration of one of the most important and influential — and greatest — works to ever come from Japan. Winner of the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, Kenji Mizoguchi’s seventy-eighth film, Ugetsu, is a dazzling masterpiece steeped in Japanese storytelling tradition, especially ghost lore. Based on two tales by Ueda Akinari and Guy de Maupassant’s “How He Got the Legion of Honor,” Ugetsu unfolds like a scroll painting beginning with the credits, which run over artworks of nature scenes while Fumio Hayasaka’s urgent score starts setting the mood, and continues into the first three shots, pans of the vast countryside leading to Genjurō (Masayuki Mori) loading his cart to sell his pottery in nearby Nagahama, helped by his wife, Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka), clutching their small child, Genichi (Ikio Sawamura). Miyagi’s assistant, Tōbei (Sakae Ozawa), insists on coming along, despite the protestations of his nagging wife, Ohama (Mitsuko Mito), as he is determined to become a samurai even though he is more of a hapless fool. “I need to sell all this before the fighting starts,” Genjurō tells Miyagi, referring to a civil war that is making its way through the land. Tōbei adds, “I swear by the god of war: I’m tired of being poor.” After unexpected success with his wares, Genjurō furiously makes more pottery to sell at another market even as the soldiers are approaching and the rest of the villagers run for their lives. At the second market, an elegant woman, Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyō), and her nurse, Ukon (Kikue Mōri), ask him to bring a large amount of his merchandise to their mansion. Once he gets there, Lady Wakasa seduces him, and soon Genjurō, Miyagi, Genichi, Tōbei, and Ohama are facing very different fates. 
