twi-ny recommended events

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.

EMMA AND MAX

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.

A BREAD FACTORY — PART ONE: FOR THE SAKE OF GOLD

Dorothea (Tyne Daly) and Greta (Elisabeth Henry) fight to save their community arts center in A Bread Factory: For the Sake of Gold

A BREAD FACTORY — PART ONE: FOR THE SAKE OF GOLD (Patrick Wang, 2018)
Village East Cinema
181-189 Second Ave. at 12th St.
Opens Friday, October 26
212-529-6799
abreadfactory.com/the-films
www.villageeastcinema.com

All politics are local, and so it is with Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory: For the Sake of Gold, the first of a two-part epic about a small town’s battle over arts funding. Forty years ago, Dorothea (Tyne Daly, often in pigtails) and Greta (Elisabeth Henry) moved to Checkford in Upstate New York and turned a shuttered bread factory into an arts venue for the local community. They are now being challenged by businessman Karl (Trevor St. John) and the avant-garde performance art duo of May (Janet Hsieh) and Ray (George Young), who have constructed their own modern arts building, the FEEL Institute, and want the financial allocation that otherwise would have gone to the Bread Factory. Joined by Elsa (Nana Visitor), journalist Jan (Glynnis O’Connor), Sir Walter (Brian Murray, in his final film), and others, they have to convince the sketchy board — including Joel (Joe Felece), the ornery Alec (Joe Paparone), Darren (Eugene Brell), Pat (Kit Flanagan), Mavis (Nan-Lynn Nelson), and Laura (Julia Rock) — that it is more important to the town that the Bread Factory remains open, providing art, theater, film, music, and more to children and adults. Meanwhile, the shy Max has started dating Julie (Erica Durham), Mavis’s daughter, who wants to be an actress; Dorothea and Pat have a deeply personal feud; the rather unusual projectionist, Simon (Keaton Nigel Cooke), gets to meet one of his cinematic heroes, Jordan (Janeane Garofalo), who teaches an odd class to a group of youngsters; teacher Jason (James Marsters) demands administrative accountability; Dorothea is staging a version of Euripides’s Hecuba; Hollywood star Trooper Jaymes (Chris Conroy) unexpectedly arrives in town; and Sandra (opera soprano Martina Arroyo), who seems to live in a seat in the Bread Factory theater, shows a surprising aptitude for singing (and serves as a kind of Greek chorus).

Cinematographer Frank Barrera and writer-director Patrick Wang discuss a scene in first of two-part epic, A Bread Factory

The film takes on numerous contemporary issues, such as art against commerce, tradition versus the future, corruption, governmental conflict of interest, illegal immigration, Chinese influence, and even child labor laws. Wang (In the Family, The Grief of Others), who was partially inspired to make the film after visiting an old theater in Hudson, New York, adds plenty of absurdist humor to the proceedings, preventing things from getting too didactic; Daly is particularly adept at walking that fine line. Cinematographer Frank Barrera tends to keep his camera steady, preferring long shots with slow movement, giving the audience time to digest the wide-ranging, twisting plot. Be sure to pay attention to Chip Taylor’s self-referential, tongue-in-cheek song over the closing credits, which explains, “But is it over yet? Is it really over yet? Looking back, we all could use a little more story.” And more there is; A Bread Factory, Part Two: Walk with Me a While continues the tale, combining for more than four hours of Checkford intrigue at Village East, in addition to several postscreening Q&As, concluding at the 9:30 show on October 28, with critic Godfrey Cheshire, producer Daryl Freimark, and actors Zachard Sayle and Jonathan Iglesias. A Bread Factory will then be joined November 2 by Wang’s 2015 drama, The Grief of Others, with Q&As on Friday and Saturday after the 6:45 screenings.

NewFest 2018: EVERY ACT OF LIFE / MAKING MONTGOMERY CLIFT

Terrence McNally looks back at his life and career, as well as considering his future, in Every Act of Life

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: EVERY ACT OF LIFE (Jeff Kaufman, 2018)
SVA Theatre
333 West 23rd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Monday, October 29, 6:00
Festival runs October 24-30
212-592-2980
everyactoflifedocumentary.com
newfest.org

Screening at NewFest on October 29, Jeff Kaufman’s Every Act of Life is a lovely and loving look at playwright and activist Terrence McNally, a compelling film about chasing one’s hopes and dreams, refusing to back down, and fighting for what’s right personally and professionally, onstage and off. Director, producer, and writer Kaufman speaks extensively with McNally, who is forthcoming about his career and his sexuality, which included relationships with Edward Albee and Wendy Wasserstein and several men who died during the height of the AIDS crisis. “Terrence is able to get to the core of the human condition in so many different ways. I defy you to name another playwright who can do this,” six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald says. Kaufman traces the life of four-time Tony winner McNally, from his dysfunctional childhood in Florida and Texas and his world travels as tutor to John Steinbeck’s children (“Don’t write for the theater; it will break your heart,” Steinbeck told him) to his first Broadway flop, his alcoholism, his championing of same-sex marriage, his battle against lung cancer, and the success of such (often controversial) shows as The Ritz; Corpus Christi; Master Class; A Perfect Ganesh; Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune; Kiss of the Spiderwoman; Lips Together, Teeth Apart; and Love! Valour! Compassion!

The film includes wonderful clips from many productions in addition to scenes of pairs of actors talking about McNally, most entertainingly Edie Falco with F. Murray Abraham and McNally himself with Larry Kramer. McNally also goes through some old scrapbooks with his husband, Tom Kirdahy; they were previously featured in Kaufman’s The State of Marriage. “Terrence was way ahead of his time,” Abraham posits. Among the many other theater stalwarts offering their carefully considered thoughts on McNally are Angela Lansbury, Bryan Cranston, Rita Moreno, Nathan Lane, Meryl Streep, Patrick Wilson, Marin Mazzie, Jon Robin Baitz, Zoe Caldwell, Billy Porter, Chita Rivera, John Kander, Lynn Ahrens, and Stephen Flaherty, along with behind-the-scenes footage, theater memorabilia, archival photographs, and a lot of fascinating memories. “I’d have no career if it wasn’t for Terrence McNally,” Lane says. On the film’s KickStarter page, Kaufman (The Savoy King: Chick Webb and the Music That Changed America, Brush with Life: The Art of Being Edward Biberman) and producer Marcia Ross explain about McNally, “We thought, ‘Why hasn’t anyone done a documentary about this man?’ Then we said, ‘Well, we should.’” It’s simply grand that they did, and such a fine documentary to boot. Every Act of Life is screening at 6:00 on October 29 at the SVA Theatre and will be followed by a Q&A with McNally, who is still at work on several new plays as his eightieth birthday approaches.

Making Montgomery Clift makes a compelling case for a new interpretation of the actor’s life and career

CLOSING NIGHT GALA: MAKING MONTGOMERY CLIFT (Robert Clift & Hillary Demmon, 2018)
SVA Theatre
333 West 23rd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday, October 30, 7:30
newfest.org
www.facebook.com/montyfilm

At the beginning of Making Montgomery Clift, Robert Clift, Montgomery Clift’s youngest nephew, explains, “This isn’t really a story about a man. It’s about what his life was allowed to mean. Remember that.” What is revealed will be hard to forget, even with Robert later admitting, “The idea of Monty’s brokenness has persisted all these years, and I don’t know if it could ever change.” But with the documentary, making its New York premiere on October 30 as the closing-night selection of the thirtieth annual NewFest, Robert strives to set the record straight about the uncle he never met, a four-time Oscar nominee who is perhaps best known as a drug-addicted, self-destructive drunk unable to deal with his homosexuality and whose career went downhill following a car accident that marred his beautiful face. Directed, produced, and written by Robert Clift and Hillary Demmon and photographed by Clift, Making Montgomery Clift instead shows the actor to be a man dedicated to his craft, from his teenage years in the theater to his ascent to Hollywood stardom, as well as a caring human being who did not suffer deeply because of his sexuality. “He was really not that closeted!” Clift’s companion, Lorenzo James, declares. “He didn’t hate himself!”

Robert is continuing his father’s legacy; Brooks Clift, Montgomery’s brother, spent many years trying to correct the public misunderstandings and damaging lies about his sibling, pointing out the critical errors in major biographies by Patricia Bosworth and Robert LaGuardia — Bosworth herself is featured prominently in the film — as well as newspaper and magazine articles and news reports that focused on supposed scandals. It turns out that Brooks, an information gatherer during WWII, was a persistent audio taper, recording every conversation he possibly could, giving his son a treasure trove of material to sift through and now share alongside film clips, archival media footage, home movies, and yet more tapes, secretly recorded by Montgomery himself. Together they give Robert, who also interviews his brothers Eddie and Woody, Jimmy Olsen portrayer and producer Jack Larson, and other friends, colleagues, and relatives, compelling evidence that many of the gossip-heavy stories about Montgomery are sensationalistic if not outright fabricated. “I guess I always felt he was a little bit like Sisyphus battling the myth-making apparatus” of the media, Eddie says.

The film follows Montgomery’s career trajectory, including his decision-making process when it came to choosing roles, turning down East of Eden and On the Watefront while accepting Red River, I Confess, From Here to Eternity, and Judgment at Nuremberg. It also explores his penchant for rewriting scripts, his refusal to become part of the studio system, and his problems working with John Huston on Freud: The Secret Passion. Montgomery Clift died in 1966 at the age of forty-five; his nephew Robert has done a terrific job of resurrecting his uncle’s influential legacy, taking it back from the tabloids and redefining it for generations to come. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and an after-party at Plunge Rooftop Lounge. NewFest continues through October 30 with such other films as Ondi Timoner’s Mapplethorpe, Jonah Greenstein’s Daddy, Michael Fisher’s Cherry Grove Stories, and a twentieth anniversary screening of Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art.