twi-ny recommended events

LIGHT AFTER DARKNESS: MEMORY, RESILIENCE, AND RENEWAL IN CAMBODIA

Loung Ung and Angelina Jolie in Cambodia.

Loung Ung and Angelina Jolie, seen above in Cambodia collaborating on film project, will be at Asia Society on December 14 for panel discussion (photo courtesy of Netflix)

Who: Angelina Jolie, Rithy Panh, Phloeun Prim, Loung Ung, Darren Walker
What: Panel discussion on the journey of resilience experienced by the Cambodian people and documented by artists in the post-Khmer Rouge era
Where: Asia Society, 725 Park Ave. at 70th St., 212-288-6400
When: Thursday, December 14, $25, 5:00
Why: In conjunction with the outstanding Asia Society exhibition “After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History” and the U.S. premiere of Him Sophy and Rithy Panh’s Bangsokol: a Requiem for Cambodia at BAM, Asia Society is hosting “Light after Darkness: Memory, Resilience, and Renewal in Cambodia,” a panel discussion on December 14 with American actress, filmmaker, and Special Envoy to UN High Commissioner for Refugees Angelina Jolie, Cambodian director Panh (The Missing Picture), Cambodian Living Arts executive director Phloeun Pri, and memoirist and screenwriter Loung Ung (First They Killed My Father, which was directed by Jolie), moderated by Ford Foundation president Darren Walker. “Some have said that poetry after atrocity is not possible anymore, yet we need to have it. We must continue to create. We can’t start mourning without knowing how, and part of knowing how is to accept something very painful, something unexplainable. This art may bring us answers, help us accept our pain and loss. Yet, it is more than an act of remembrance; it’s an act of transmission and brings humanization,” Panh says about Bangsokol.

PRIME LOIS SMITH

Lois Smith will be at the Quad this week for a celebration of her long career, including her acclaimed performance in Marjorie Prime

Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
December 12-14
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

Topeka-born stage and screen actress Lois Smith will be at the Quad this week to celebrate her seven-decade career, which has featured such plays as The Grapes of Wrath, The Trip to Bountiful, Buried Child, and John, earning two Tony nominations and an Obie, and such films as East of Eden; Foxes; Five Easy Pieces; Next Stop, Greenwich Village; and this year’s Marjorie Prime and Lady Bird. Five of those films, with the exception of Lady Bird, make up the Quad series “Prime Lois Smith,” running December 12–14, with Smith either introducing or taking part in Q&As for every screening but one. Among the television programs she’s had recurring roles on are Desperate Housewives, True Blood, ER, and Grace and Frankie. Smith, who was on the November 21, 1955, cover of Life magazine with Judy Tyler, Jayne Mansfield, Susan Strasberg, and Diane Cilento, is still going strong at the age of eighty-seven, with more work on the horizon.

Cal Trask (James Dean) and Anne (Lois Smith) share a tender moment in Elia Kazan’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden

EAST OF EDEN (Elia Kazan, 1955)
Tuesday, December 12, 6:30
quadcinema.com

“I guess there’s just a certain amount of good and bad you get from your parents and I just got the bad,” Cal (James Dean) says in Elia Kazan’s cinematic adaptation of part of John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel, East of Eden, a modern retelling of the biblical Cain and Abel story. In his first starring role, Dean received a posthumous Oscar nomination for his moody, angst-ridden performance as Cal Trask, a troubled young man who discovers that the mother (Best Supporting Actress winner Jo Van Fleet) he thought was dead is actually alive and well and running a successful house of prostitution nearby. Cal tries to win his father’s (Raymond Massey as Adam Trask) love and acceptance any way he can, including helping him develop his grand plan to transport lettuce from their farm via refrigerated railway cars, but his father seems to always favor his other son, Aron (Richard Davalos). Aron, meanwhile, is in love with Abra (Julie Harris), a sweet young woman who takes a serious interest in Cal and desperately wants him to succeed. But the well-meaning though misunderstood Cal does things his own way, which gets him in trouble with his father and brother, the mother who wants nothing to do with him, the sheriff (Burl Ives), and just about everyone else he comes in contact with.

Set in Monterey and Salinas, East of Eden begins with a grand overture by Leonard Rosenman, announcing the film is going to be a major undertaking, and it lives up to its billing. Dean is masterful as Cal, peppering Paul Osborn’s script with powerful improvisational moments as he expresses his frustration with his family and life in general. His inner turmoil threatens to explode in both word and gesture as he just seeks to be loved. Dean would follow up East of Eden with seminal roles in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant before his death in a car crash in 1955 at the age of twenty-four, leaving behind a remarkable legacy that has influenced generations of actors ever since. Lois Smith makes her film debut as Anne, the young woman who works at the brothel and is charmed by Cal in a steamy scene. Smith will be on hand for a Q&A following the December 12 screening of the film at the Quad as part of the series “Prime Lois Smith.”

Lois Smith plays the sister of prodigal son (Jack Nicholson) in Five Easy Pieces

Lois Smith plays the sister of prodigal son Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces

FIVE EASY PIECES (Bob Rafelson, 1970)
Wednesday, December 13, 6:30
Thursday, December 14, 9:10
quadcinema.com

A key film that helped lead 1960s cinema into the grittier 1970s, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces is one of the most American of dramas, a tale of ennui and unrest among the rich and the poor, a road movie that travels from trailer parks to fashionable country estates. Caught in between is Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson), a former piano prodigy now working on an oil rig and living with a well-meaning but not very bright waitress, Rayette (Karen Black). When Bobby finds out that his father is ill, he reluctantly returns to the family home, the prodigal son who had left all that behind, escaping to a less-complicated though unsatisfying life putting his fingers in a bowling ball rather than tickling the keys of a grand piano. Back in his old house, he has to deal with his brother, Carl (Ralph Waite), a onetime violinist who can no longer play because of an injured neck and who serves as the film’s comic relief; Carl’s wife, Catherine (Susan Anspach), a snooty woman Bobby has always been attracted to; and Bobby’s sister, Partita (Lois Smith), a lonely, troubled soul who has the hots for Spicer (John Ryan), the live-in nurse who takes care of their wheelchair-bound father (William Challee).

Jack Nicholson, sitting next to Karen Black, is about to place the most famous sandwich order in film history

Rafelson had previously directed the psychedelic movie Head (he cocreated the Monkees band and TV show) and would go on to make such films as The King of Marvin Gardens, Stay Hungry, and Black Widow; written by Carole Eastman, Five Easy Pieces fits flawlessly in between them, a deeply philosophical work that captures the myriad changes the country was experiencing as the Woodstock Generation was forced to start growing up. The film suffers from some unsteady editing primarily in the earlier scenes, but it is still a gem, featuring at least two unforgettable scenes, one that takes place in a California highway traffic jam and the other in a diner, where Bobby places an order for the ages. And as good as both Nicholson, who earned the first of seven Best Actor Oscar nominations, and Black, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, are, Helena Kallianiotes nearly steals the picture as a crazy woman railing against the ills of the world from the backseat of Bobby’s car. Five Easy Pieces is screening December 13 and 14 in the Quad series “Prime Lois Smith,” with Smith taking part in a Q&A following the 6:30 screening on the 13th.

ACTOR’S CHOICE — LAMBERT WILSON & YVES MONTAND: Z

The Deputy (Yves Montand, rear left) is on his way to a fateful encounter in Costa-Gavras’s Z

CINÉSALON: Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, December 12, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 19
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

In her new book Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes (Columbia University Press, $20, November 2017), Columbia professor and film historian Annette Insdorf writes that the beginning moments of Costa-Gavras’s masterful 1969 political thriller, Z, “places us metaphorically in the perspective of the investigator even before we meet him: we must be attentive to detail, skeptical, and then capable of seeing the larger picture. Given the film’s incorporation of flashbacks as well, Z builds a cumulative sense of inevitability that the truth will emerge.” Insdorf will be at FIAF on December 12 to sign copies of her book and introduce the 7:30 screening of Z, which is part of the CinéSalon series “Actor’s Choice: Lambert Wilson & Yves Montand,” curated by French actor and singer Wilson. (The film will also be shown at 4:00; both screenings will be followed by a wine reception.) The Algerian-French coproduction was adapted by Costa-Gavras and Jorge Semprún from Vassilis Vassilikos’s novel, a fictionalized account of the 1963 assassination of Greek left-wing antiwar activist Grigoris Lambrakis and the government cover-up that tried to make it look like an unavoidable accident. “Any similarity to real persons and events is not coincidental. It is intentional,” the credits explain. The film opens with rapid cuts of military and religious medals before zeroing in on a meeting in which the General (Pierre Dux) tells fellow law enforcement and governmental figures that they must eradicate the “ideological mildew,” referring to left-wing activists and, specifically, a deputy (Montand), based on Lambrakis, who is scheduled to speak at a large rally. After a violent incident, the Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) starts interviewing participants and witnesses and refuses to give up even when the General, the Colonel (Julien Guiomar), and other important figures threaten him as he seeks the truth, which doesn’t matter at all to those in power, who feel they understand the larger scheme of things. The Magistrate is helped by a photojournalist (producer Jacques Perrin) who is not afraid of asking penetrating questions and secretly snapping pictures. As the lies build, the truth slowly emerges, but that doesn’t mean the violence is over.

The Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is intent on getting to the bottom of a government cover-up in classic political thriller

Costa-Gavras, a Greek expat who lives and works in France, has made many political films in his long career (State of Siege, L’Aveu, Missing, Amen.), influenced by his father, who was part of the anti-Nazi Greek resistance and was later imprisoned by Greece for being a Communist. Z might ostensibly be based on specific events, but unfortunately it’s a universal story that could take place just about anywhere in a world that has lost such leaders as Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedy brothers, Yitzhak Rabin, Anwar Sadat, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, and others to assassination. The film, which is in French, never reveals where it is set, and most of the characters are not named, instead identified by their jobs: the deputy, the colonel, the general, the magistrate, etc. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard, best known for his work with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Philippe Garrel, shoots the film in a cinéma-vérité style, favoring handheld cameras (he also plays the English surgeon); Françoise Bonnot’s editing keeps building the tension while flirting with documentary-like elements; and Mikis Theodorakis’s lively score complements the action with energy and fervor. There’s also a huge dose of sly humor bordering on farce throughout. The film is particularly relevant in America, where terms such as “fake news” and “truthiness” have taken hold and the forty-fifth president has repeatedly called for and/or condoned violence against his opponents, his rivals’ supporters, and the free press. The title refers to the French word “Zei,” which means “He lives!” a phrase used by protestors; when the military took over Greece in 1967, it banned the use of the letter “Z” on placards and graffiti, along with many other things, which are listed over the closing credits. “Z” was nominated for five Oscars — Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Foreign Language Film, winning the latter two; it was the first film to be nominated for both Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film. In addition, Trintignant (Amour, The Conformist, A Man and a Woman) was named Best Actor at Cannes. “Actor’s Choice” concludes December 19 with Jérôme Salle’s The Odyssey, with Lambert Wilson, Pierre Niney, and Audrey Tatou.

THÉÂTRE DU SOLEIL: A ROOM IN INDIA

Le Theatre du Soleil performs A Room in India directed by Ariane Mnouchkine at the Park Avenue Armory on December 4, 2017. A collective creation by the Théâtre du Soleil Directed by Ariane Mnouchkine Music by Jean-Jacques Lemêtre Together with Hélène Cixous With the exceptional participation of Kalaimamani Purisai Kannappa Sambandan Thambiran (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Hélène Cixous gives a tour-de-force performance in Théâtre du Soleil’s epic A Room in India at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

UNE CHAMBRE EN INDE
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
December 5-20, $45-$150
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
www.theatre-du-soleil.fr

One of the true joys of experiencing anything at the Park Ave. Armory, from film and dance to music, theater, and art installations, is to see how the spectacle-driven institution has reinvented itself for its latest production. Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford’s Macbeth took place in a narrow stone-bounded pathway that turned to mud. Audience members were encouraged to walk around the space to fully immerse themselves in Shen Wei’s Undivided Divided. And visitors could have fun on large swings in Ann Hamilton’s The Event of a Thread. Ariane Mnouchkine and Théâtre du Soleil’s epic four-hour A Room in India, running through December 20, does not disappoint. Upon entering the armory, guests are wanded by the Great Police Security Brigade, guards wearing fanciful uniforms. In one of the period rooms, attendees who preordered dinner sit down for a buffet-style meal by chef Gaurav Anand of Moti Mahal Delux. (During intermission, free chaat, masala peanuts, wine, and water are served as well.) Inside the massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall, you’ll first come upon an open dressing room tucked under the seat risers, where you can talk to the performers as they are getting ready, applying makeup and getting into costume. To the left is a bookstore, while to the right is a carpeted and pillowed area where some of the actors prepare with vocal exercises about fifty minutes before showtime and which ticket holders are invited to watch. The long, deep set is on the east side of the hall; the audience seating rises on the west. Even the program is unique, a booklet packed with information, including inspirational quotes and excerpts from the main character’s journal. “It was as if we were refugees from history,” Cornélia writes. “All about our bedroom, the times had been unleased. We wondered what would become of us, we wondered what to call this, this chaos.”

A Room in India the Théâtre du Soleil (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Ariane Mnouchkine returns to the Park Ave. Armory with latest spectacle, A Room in India (photo by Stephanie Berger)

A Room in India is chaotic indeed, but wonderfully so, with a decidedly feminist take on the state of the planet, especially one lacking in legitimate, compassionate leadership. A theater company is in India for a performance when its leader suddenly has a manic episode and quits the troupe, leaving his assistant, Cornélia (Hélène Cixous), in charge, to her surprise and dismay. The entire play takes place in the same enormous room, in which the furniture is constantly being moved around and changed save for an ever-present bed, where Cornélia sleeps; it is often difficult to know which scenes are really happening and which are Cornélia’s (Freudian?) dreams and nightmares come alive, often spurred by telephone calls from the company’s administrator, Astrid (Thérèse Spirli). Mnouchkine, who was previously at the armory with Les Éphémères in 2009 as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, throws just about everything she can into the mix as she explores the responsibility that theater has both to inform and entertain, shining a light on society’s ills and thrills; among those making an appearance are Shakespeare (Maurice Durozier), King Lear (Seietsu Onochi) and Cordelia (Man-Waï Fok), Mahatma Gandhi (Samir Abdul Jabbar Saed), Anton Chekhov (Arman Saribekyan), the God Krishna (Palani Murugan), and Charlie Chaplin, along with bumbling police led by Lt. Ganesh-Ganesh (Omid Rawendah), local mobster S. S. Loganathan (Duccio Bellugi-Vannuccini), monkeys (Seear Kohi, Saribekyan) who can’t believe what evolution has wrought, a holy white cow (Ghulam Reza Rajabi or Saribekyan), a pimp (Rawendah), the Taliban, and rickshawallahs. Torture alternates with farce, including a riotous Terukkuttu scene of a film being made in the desert. Two sections from The Mahābhārata are presented. Meanwhile, Jean-Jacques Lemêtre’s entrancing music is played in a separate room stage left by Ya-Hui Liang and Marie-Jasmine Cocito. Mnouchkine — whose father, Alexandre, produced such films as Jean Cocteau’s L’Aigle à deux têtes, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Name of the Rose, Philippe de Broca’s L’Homme de Rio, and Claude Lelouch’s Un homme qui me plait — doesn’t seem to have an “off” switch; the show does not need to be four hours long, as there is repetition and various needless moments, but Cixous is so delightful as Cornélia, and the cast of thirty-five is having so much fun, that you might not really care that much about the shortcomings and instead just revel in the daring, exhilarating spirit of the superb production as a whole.

YAYOI KUSAMA: FESTIVAL OF LIFE / INFINITY NETS

Be prepared to wait hours to get ninety seconds inside Yayoi Kusama’s 2017 “Infinity Mirrored Room — Let’s Survive Forever” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

David Zwirner
Festival of Life: 525 & 533 West 19th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., through December 16
Infinity Nets: 34 East 69th St. between Park & Madison Aves., through December 22
Tuesday – Saturday, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.davidzwirner.com

You probably should already be on line if you want to see Yayoi Kusama’s 2017 “Infinity Mirrored Room — Let’s Survive Forever,” part of her wide-ranging “Festival of Life” exhibition, which closes December 16 at David Zwirner’s Chelsea galleries. The wait times have been reaching upwards of six hours, and that will likely only increase as the end of the run approaches; you can stay updated about the line on Zwirner’s twitter feed. The approximately 12x20x20-foot carpeted room features stainless-steel balls hanging on monofilaments from the ceiling and arranged on the floor, with mirrored surfaces on all sides that seem to reflect into infinity. There is also a vertical box with three round viewing panes where visitors can look into a kaleidoscopic wonderland. Kusama, now eighty-eight, has been making the mirrored infinity rooms since 1963, when the Japanese artist was living and working in New York City. Five or six people at a time are allowed to enter the small space and spend ninety seconds there; be sure to actually experience the dazzling, brightly lit room and not just concentrate on taking selfies. In fact, each picture is a selfie because everyone inside is reflected again and again all over the room.

Yayoi Kusama’s “Longing for Eternity” brings people together at David Zwirner (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

There are three other sections of the exhibit that don’t require standing on line. In a dark room, the new “Longing for Eternity” rises near the center, a vertical box with four viewing holes where visitors can stick their heads inside to see more endless, ever-changing kaleidoscopes of multiple colors made of LED lights; you can also see the other people sticking their heads in the box, at different heights. You cannot put your camera or iPhone through the holes to snap a picture; if you were to drop it inside, it would break and ruin the piece. So again, just let yourself get lost in the awe-inspiring visuals and don’t worry so much about perfect documentation.

Yayoi Kusama, “With All My Love for the Tulips, I Pray Forever,” installation view, “Yayoi Kusama Eternity of Eternal Eternity,” the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan, 2012 (image © Yayoi Kusama; courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.)

You’ll next enter a captivating paradise known as “With All My Love for the Tulips, I Pray Forever,” a 2011 installation making its U.S. debut. The room is covered from floor to ceiling (including the hallway and the door) in big red polka dots on a white background; it also contains a trio of large-scale fiberglass tulips in planters that evoke the images you see when looking into Magic Eye stereograms. In fact, it can feel like you’re experiencing it through virtual reality glasses, but it’s actually right there, playing with your equilibrium in fun ways. But there’s more to it than just that; as Kusama, who combines Pop Art, Minimalism, and Abstract Expressionism and refers to herself as an Avant-Garde artist, writes in a “Message to the people of the world from Yayoi Kusama”: “Today’s world is marked by heightened anxiety connected to ever growing strife between nations and individuals, and to elusive prospects for peace. In the midst of such turmoil, we must, as human beings, be ever more vigilant and determined to build a better world through strengthened cooperation. . . . My greatest desire is that my vision of a future of eternal harmony among people be carried on.”

Yayoi Kusama’s “Festival of Life” combines “My Eternal Soul” paintings with “Flowers That Bloom Now” sculpture (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Finally, in the vast west gallery, Kusama, who works six days a week, nearly nonstop, has arranged sixty-six new paintings from her “My Eternal Soul” series, which she began in the late 2000s. Each canvas is 76.375 x 76.375 inches square, in two rows across all four walls. The works, which boast such titles as “When I Saw the Largest Dream in Life,” “Women in the Memories,” “Everyone Is Seeking Peace,” “The Far End of My Sorrow,” “A Soul Is Leaving the Body,” “Dear Death of Mine, Thou Shalt Welcome an Eternal Death,” and “Festival of Life,” contain repeated elements such as eyes, profiles, amoebalike organisms, aliens, faces, geometric patterns, and others in an endless array of colors. In the center of the room is a platform with a trio of forty-one-inch-high stainless-steel “Flowers That Bloom Now,” with long, snakelike green stems and polka-dotted petals and pistils, looking like a delightful ride in a children’s playground or amusement park (except it doesn’t rotate and you can’t go on it).

“Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Nets” has been extended at David Zwirner’s uptown space through December 22 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

There are no lines to see “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Nets” at Zwirner’s new space on East 69th St., which will afford you plenty of time to breathe in Kusama’s stunning, iconic net paintings, inspired by hallucinations she has experienced since childhood; Kusama suffers from obsessive neurosis and has been voluntarily living at Tokyo’s Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill since 1977. She first prepares the canvas in a solid color, then washes over it in a second color, her impasto brushwork evident, sometimes swirling, sometimes thick with clumps, as she makes hundreds of tiny arcs, like crescent moons or waves, in the background color. (She was influenced by a 1957 plane trip from Tokyo to Seattle, watching the ocean crests below her.) The works look different from every angle, at times offering optical illusions or what appear to be hidden figures, but that’s just your imagination getting in the flow. “My net paintings were very large canvases without compositions – without beginning, end, or center,” Kusama has said. “The entire canvas would be occupied by monochromatic nets. This endless repetition caused a kind of dizzy, empty, hypnotic feeling.” The ten works, which can be seen as traps or safety nets, include random letters in their titles that don’t actually mean anything (for example, WFCOT, BNDBS, and FWIPK), adding to the intrigue. “My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it, with dots — an accumulation of particles forming the negative spaces in the net. How deep was the mystery? Did infinities exist beyond our universe? In exploring these questions I wanted to examine the single dot that was my own life,” Kusama has explained. And in her unique universe, each single dot reveals the hand — and heart and mind — of the artist, a rare treat in a digital world.

SPECIAL SCREENING: THE MISSING PICTURE

Director Rithy Panh uses dioramas to fill in the gaps in Oscar-nominated The Missing Picture

THE MISSING PICTURE (L’IMAGE MANQUANTE) (Rithy Panh, 2013)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Tuesday, December 12, $15, 7:00
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.themissingpicture.bophana.org

In conjunction with the December 15-16 U.S. premiere of Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia as part of the 2017 Next Wave Festival, BAM is presenting Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture on December 12 at 7:00, with Panh participating in a postscreening Q&A with Ford Foundation program officer Chi-hui Yang. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, The Missing Picture is a brilliantly rendered look back at the director’s childhood in Cambodia just as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge began their reign of terror in the mid-1970s. “I seek my childhood like a lost picture, or rather it seeks me,” narrator Randal Douc says in French, reciting darkly poetic and intimately personal text written by author Christophe Bataille (Annam) based on Panh’s life. Born in Phnom Penh in 1964, Panh, who has made such previous documentaries about his native country as S21, The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell and wrote the 2012 book L’élimination with Bataille, was faced with a major challenge in telling his story; although he found remarkable archival footage of the communist Angkar regime, there are precious few photographs or home movies of his family and the community where he grew up. So he had sculptor Sarith Mang hand-carve and paint wooden figurines that Panh placed in dioramas to detail what happened to his friends, relatives, and neighbors. Panh’s camera hovers over and zooms into the dioramas, bringing these people, who exist primarily only in memory, to vivid life. When a person disappears, Panh depicts their carved representatives flying through the sky, as if finally achieving freedom amid all the horrors.

He delves into the Angkar’s propaganda movement and sloganeering — the “great leap forward,” spread through film and other methods — as the rulers sent young men and women into forced labor camps. “With film too, the harvests are glorious,” Douc states as women are shown, in black-and-white, working in the fields. “There is grain. There are the calm, determined faces. Like a painting. A poem. At last I see the Revolution they so promised us. It exists only on film.” It’s a stark comparison to cinematographer Prum Mésa’s modern-day shots of the wind blowing through lush green fields, devoid of people. The Missing Picture is an extraordinarily poignant memoir that uses the director’s personal tale as a microcosm for what happened in Cambodia during the 1970s, employing the figures and dioramas to compensate for “the missing pictures.” Like such other documentaries as Jessica Wu’s Protagonist and In the Realms of the Unreal, Michel Gondry’s Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol, and Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer, which incorporate animation, puppetry, and/or miniatures to enhance the narrative or fill in gaps, Panh makes creative use of an unexpected artistic technique, this time concentrating on painful history as well as personal and collective memory.

TIME AND THE CONWAYS

Carol (Anna Baryshnikov) entertains her family in revival of J. B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Run ended November 26
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

“A novel or a play cannot really be about Time. (And I ask the reader to remember that I am a man who is widely credited with having written ‘Time plays,” although I never made any such claim myself),” British playwright J. B. Priestley wrote. “Time is a concept, a certain condition of experience, a mode of perception, and so forth; and a novel or a play, to be worth calling one, cannot really be about Time but only about people and things that appear to be in Time.” Among Priestley’s Time plays are An Inspector Calls, I Have Been Here Before, and Time and the Conways, which was just revived by the Roundabout at the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway. As the title implies, Time is like a character unto itself in the show, which begins in 1919, shortly after the end of WWI. The Conways, led by their widowed matriarch (Elizabeth McGovern), are celebrating the twenty-first birthday of Kay Conway (Charlotte Parry), an aspiring novelist. The family is immersed in a game of Charades, which is going on in another, unseen room. Among those participating are Kay’s sisters, Hazel (Anna Camp), Madge (Brooke Bloom), and Carol (Anna Baryshnikov); their brothers, dullard Alan (Gabriel Ebert) and the swashbuckling Robin (Matthew James Thomas); and family friend Joan Helford (Cara Ricketts). They are soon joined by their solicitor, Gerald Thornton (Alfredo Narciso), and his odd pal, a businessman named Ernest Beevers (Steven Boyer), who has a creepy liking for Hazel. (“Ugh. I’d just as soon marry a — a ferret,” Hazel tells Joan.) The word they are trying to convey to their guests is “pussyfoot,” which, appropriately enough, means to evade commitment, emblematic of how the Conways avoid facing reality. “Just when everything is very jolly and exciting, I suddenly think of something awfully serious, sometimes horrible — like Dad drowning — or that little mad boy I once saw with the huge head — or that old man who walks in the Park with that great lump growing out of his face,” Carol says, to which Hazel responds, covering her ears, “I’m not listening. I’m not listening.” Mrs. Conway essentially covers her ears when Beevers advises that she accept a generous offer for her house, but the family will have none of it.

A family refuses to face harsh realities in Roundabout Broadway revival (photo by Jeremy Daniel)

When Mrs. Conway says, “I’m not used to happiness,” she’s not kidding, but she’s also not about to do much to change things and face reality. The play then shifts to 1937, as the Conways all have to deal with the decisions they’ve made, most of which have not been for the better. The stern Madge, explaining that she has come to the house just because she was in the neighborhood, tells Kay, “I’ve no further interest in these family muddles, financial or otherwise.” When Gerald is about to deliver some bad news, Kay complains, “When you turn on that legal manner, I can’t take you seriously — I feel you’re still acting in one of our old charades.” But it’s the Conways who can’t come to terms with what his happening. The third act returns to 1919, picking up just where act one left off, cleverly filling in some holes to explain how things got to where they were eighteen years later. Time and the Conways, which is rarely revived and has been made into a film twice, a 1984 Russian drama and a BBC version starring Claire Bloom, is reminiscent of the Roundabout’s 2013 expert production of Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy, which also ran at the American Airlines Theatre and dealt with a family facing a dilemma. Priestley’s play also evokes elements of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as the Conways face an uncertain future they’d rather not think about. The ten-person cast is superb, with precise, confident direction by rising star Rebecca Taichman (Indecent, Familiar) on Neil Patel’s engaging drawing-room set. Frank Ventura is credited with etiquette and period movement, which is appropriately proper. “Some novelists and dramatists may be unusually aware of Time, but they have to write about something else,” Priestley explained. In Time and the Conways, he has done just that in telling the fateful story of a dysfunctional family that refuses to look in the mirror.