twi-ny recommended events

YERMA

An unnamed woman (Billie Piper) and her partner (Brendan Cowell) consider starting a family in Simon Stone’s sizzling Yerma (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Monday – Saturday through April 21, $40-$135
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Australian director Simon Stone puts domesticity and obsession under a microscope in the blistering, no-holds-barred Yerma, which opened last night at the Park Avenue Armory. His adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s radical 1934 drama, part of the Spanish poet and playwright’s seminal Rural Trilogy that also includes Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba, digs deep into the heart and soul of a woman who wants to have a baby but is having trouble conceiving. In a coproduction between the armory and the Young Vic, Stone moves the play to modern-day London, where a thirty-three-year-old blogger identified only as “her” (Olivier Award winner Billie Piper) and her forty-three-year-old partner, international businessman John (Brendan Cowell), have just bought a three-floor apartment. At first the couple is deliriously happy with their life, thrilled to be free of bourgeois expectations, when the woman suddenly and surprisingly decides she wants to have a baby, but John’s enthusiasm is questionable. They have difficulty conceiving, and soon all kinds of connections to sex and reproduction appear, from her pregnant sister, Mary (Charlotte Randle), married to a philanderer, to a former boyfriend, Victor (John MacMillan), now father of a two-year-old, who gets a job at her office. Her twenty-one-year-old assistant, Des (Thalissa Teixeira), talks about her extremely active sex life while the woman’s mother, Helen (Maureen Beattie), can’t stop complaining about raising kids. In none of the situations is having children and being a parent ideal; instead, each person faces their own demons. Over several years, as the woman battles infertility, she descends into an ever-more-difficult struggle to maintain balance in her life as madness threatens.

Two sisters (Billie Piper and Charlotte Randle) evaluate their situations while their mother (Maureen Beattie) looks on in Park Ave. Armory production (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Yerma unfolds on Lizzie Clachan’s spectacular stage, reconfigured specifically for the massive fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, which has previously been transformed in dazzling ways for productions of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, Matt Charman and Josie Rourke’s The Machine, and Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh’s Macbeth, among other plays, art installations, and music events. The audience is seated on risers on two sides of the stage, a horizontal space encased by glass, making everyone a voyeur peering into someone else’s personal life, as if turning the woman’s blog into a physical reality. The woman is trapped within the glass structure, which evokes her mind; she is the only one who ever makes contact with the walls, except for when her mother washes it early on, not wanting to get involved too much in her daughter’s problems. Each side of the audience can see the other through the glass; at first it looks like it could be a reflection, but it’s not, equating everyone, as if the story we’re all experiencing could be happening to any one of us.

At certain angles, the actors are reflected multiple times; thus, it is often possible to see four or five ghostly, unformed versions of Piper, visible far off to the right and left and across to the other side of the audience. It is a powerful dramatic effect that makes her deepening issues that much more universal. The lightning-fast set changes by lighting designer James Farncombe occur in sudden blackness as magisterial arias echo loudly throughout the space and a monitor announces the next chapter, which have such names as “Conception,” “Disillusion,” and “Deception,” followed by phrases both descriptive and ominous. In addition, the characters are mic’d in such a way that their voices seem transcendent as they echo above them. (The gorgeous music and sound design is by Stefan Gregory.) It’s a testament to Stone and the exceptional cast that they do not let the complex staging overwhelm the intimacy of the story. Nothing is done simply for show or to merely revel in the magic of theater; every aspect of the production has been ingeniously crafted to organically intersect into a wholly involving and shattering experience that will leave you physically and emotionally exhausted as well as thoroughly exhilarated.

A couple’s relationship evolves and devolves in Yerma at the Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

In her North American stage debut, Piper (The Effect, Treats) is electrifying as her character devolves from a fun-loving, sexy, multifaceted woman into a mental wreck falling into the lower depths of the human condition; it is a brave, bold, unforgettable performance that leaves it all out on the stage and on the glass, literally and figuratively. Cowell (Life of Galileo, The Dark Room) marvelously complements her as John, maintaining the mystery behind the man’s fears and desires as he reacts to his partner’s gut-wrenching unpredictability. As a collective unit, the cast displays the wide range of emotions associated with pregnancy, from conception, the morning after pill, and abortion to motherhood, postpartum depression, and separation. It never lets up for a second throughout its one hundred minutes, with no detail extraneous; an early discussion of a certain sexual position only later lends insight into John’s unspoken feelings about potentially becoming a father, and even the characters’ names have been carefully chosen, with biblical and historical references or descriptions of who they are and what they want. And yet Toneelgroep Amsterdam veteran Stone (The Wild Duck, Miss Julie) has opted to not call the woman “Yerma” even though that is the title of the play — the name is shouted out only once in Lorca’s original — emphasizing her lack of identity without a child while reminding us again that she is us. It’s a terrifying prospect, brought to life in this stunning, brutal production.

THE WINTER’S TALE

Leontes (Anatol Yusef) grows suspicious of Hermione (Kelley Curran) and Polixenes (Dion Mucciacito) in The Winter’s Tale at TFANA (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 15, $90-$125
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

Theatre for a New Audience resident director Arin Arbus approaches William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale — a tragicomedy and late romance that is considered one of the Bard’s problem plays — with sharp teeth and claws bared, like a grizzly bear just awakened from hibernation. In fact, a bear — well, a man in a bear suit (Arnie Burton) — is a key character in the nearly three-hour production, which opened Sunday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Fort Greene. The bear, who lives under the stage, impacts the narrative in each of the very different two acts, which are famously separated by a sixteen-year gap in the story, another kind of hibernation. With snow falling in Sicilia, King Leontes (Anatol Yusef) is hosting Polixenes (Dion Mucciacito), the king of Bohemia, When Polixenes considers leaving for home, Leontes suddenly, and without reason, becomes convinced that his pregnant wife, Hermione (Kelley Curran), and the Bohemian leader are in love and have made a cuckold of him. Leontes’s trusted friend, Camillo (Michael Rogers), assures the king that no such treachery has occurred, but the king refuses to listen to him, declaring, “Is whispering nothing? / Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? / Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career / Of laughter with a sigh? — a note infallible / Of breaking honesty. Horsing foot on foot? / Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift? / Hours minutes? Noon midnight? And all eyes / Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only, / That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing? Why, then the world and all that’s in ’t is nothing, / The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, / My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, / If this be nothing.” In accusing his wife, the king has also deeply troubled their young son, Maximillius (Eli Rayman). Leontes orders Camillo to kill Polixenes, but instead Camillo flees to Bohemia with him. In prison, Hermione gives birth to a girl, and Leontes tells Lord Antigonus (Oberon K. A. Adjepong), the husband of Hermione’s dedicated lady-in-waiting, Paulina (Mahira Kakkar), to take the baby away and abandon it. After heartbreaking tragedy, the baby is found on the shores of Bohemia by a shepherd (John Keating) and his clownish son (Ed Malone), who bring the infant, whom they name Perdita, home.

Autolycus (Arnie Burton) offers a phallic flower in Arin Arbus’s latest Shakespeare adaptation (photo by Carol Rosegg)

After intermission, the dire, dour mood changes dramatically. Father Time (Robert Langdon Lloyd) walks with a cane onto the stage as green leaves fall in Bohemia, announcing spring. Time, representing the chorus, explains that sixteen years have passed, filling in the details of what has become of the main characters. Most important, Perdita (Nicole Rodenburg) is now a teenager who is close with Florizel (Eddie Ray Jackson), the son of Polixenes, although no one knows her true lineage. As the region prepares for a sheep-shearing feast, Autolycus (Burton), a former servant of Florizel’s who has gone rogue, picks a few pockets, including that of an audience member in the first row. “Ha, ha, what a fool Honesty is! And Trust, / his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman! I have sold all my trumpery,” Autolycus, who serves as the play’s turning point, admits. Through a series of events, everyone winds up back in Sicilia, where a little bit of magic eases much, but not all, of the pain that spread through the first act and the bitterness of winter turns into the hopeful blossoming of spring as time marches ever forward.

Bohemians celebrate at the sheep-shearing fest (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Arbus (King Lear, The Skin of Our Teeth) juggles the play’s so-called problems deftly, balancing the darkly serious with the lightly comic, moving things relatively briskly on Riccardo Hernandez’s spare but austere, at times almost blindingly white set, which features a large arch in the back, behind which projections change from ominous clouds to blue skies. Emily Rebholz’s contemporary costumes take some getting used to, although they do shift from dignified black, white, and brown in the first act to a more casual look with splashes of color in the second. Much of the cast, which also includes Maechi Aharanwa as Mopsa, Liz Wisan as Dorcas, cellist Zsaz Rutkowski, and multi-instrumentalist Titus Tompkins, is allowed a wide berth, especially during the wacky sheep-shearing festival, but Curran (Present Laughter, Sense & Sensibility), Rogers (The Call, Sucker Punch), and RSC vet Yusef (Hamlet, Boardwalk Empire) keep it grounded just enough. The Winter’s Tale might be a lesser-performed Bard work, but it still has its gems. “If powers divine / Behold our human actions, as they do, / I doubt not then but innocence shall make / False accusation blush and tyranny / Tremble at patience,” Hermione says, speaking for all truths. And of course, the play also boasts perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction: “He exits, pursued by a bear.”

WHAT THE FEST!?

Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge opens What the Fest!? at IFC Center on March 29

IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
March 29 – April 1
212-924-7771
www.whatthefestnyc.com
www.ifccenter.com

If you’re the kind of moviegoer who likes to be challenged by outrageous genre films and undiscovered gems that provide unique experiences, What the Fest!? might be just the festival you’ve been looking for. Creative director Maria Reinup and executive director Raphaela Neihausen have put together four days of programming at IFC Center meant to make you go, “What the —” The festival consists of ten films never before screened in New York City in addition to a sneak preview of the upcoming series The Terror starring Jared Harris, who will be on hand to talk about the project with executive producers Soo Hugh and David Kajganich. Opening night features the science lecture “Death by Thousand Bites” by biology professor Simon Garnier, followed by Coralie Fargeat’s debut thriller, Revenge, and a reception. Among the other presentations are the world premiere of Boiled Angels: The Trial of Mike Dana, followed by a Q&A with director Frank Henenlotter, comics legend Mike Dana, and producers Anthony Sneed and Mike Hunchback; the Scandinavian Gothic tale Valley of Shadows, followed by a Q&A with cowriter and director Jonas Matzow Gulbrandsen; The Endless, a twist on cults, followed by a Q&A with stars and codirectors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead; the Indonesian smash hit Satan’s Slaves, Joko Anwar’s horror remake; and the restoration of Marek Piestrak’s Estonian adventure flick Curse of Snakes Valley. What the Fest!? concludes Sunday night with Jenn Wexler’s teen-punk The Ranger, followed by a Q&A with Wexler and producer and costar — and low-budget master — Larry Fessenden.

TICKET ALERT: AN EVENING WITH MEL BROOKS

Mel Brooks is back for a return engagement of his one-man show at the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center

Who: Mel Brooks
What: Film clips and reminiscences by a comedy legend
Where: Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center, One East 65th St. at Fifth Ave., 212-507-9580
When: Wednesday, May 9, $99, 7:00
Why: “Look, I really don’t want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you’re alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you’re quiet, you’re not living. . . . You’ve got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy and colorful and lively.” So says the noisy and colorful and lively Brooklyn-born Melvin Kaminsky, better known as comedy legend Mel Brooks. The ninety-one-year-old Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony winner, the genius behind such films as Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, The Producers, and Silent Movie, is returning to the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center with his one-man show, an evening of anecdotes, film clips, stand-up, and personal stories from his life and career. The $150 reserved seats are sold out, but there are still $99 general admission tickets for this rare chance to see and hear Brooks in person, in a unique venue that directly relates to one of his most-memed quotes: “I may be angry at God or at the world, and I’m sure that a lot of my comedy is based on anger and hostility. It comes from a feeling that as a Jew and as a person, I don’t fit into the mainstream of American society. Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way you can deal with the world is to laugh — because if you don’t laugh, you’re going to cry and never stop crying — that’s probably what’s responsible for the Jews’ having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep learned more than anyone else how to laugh.”

JOANNA KOTZE: WHAT WILL WE BE LIKE WHEN WE GET THERE

Joanna Kotze’s What will we be like when we get there will make its world premiere March 28-31 at New York Live Arts (photo by Carolyn Silverman)

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
March 28-31, $15-$25, 7:30
212-924-0077
newyorklivearts.org
www.joannakotze.com

Joanna Kotze has been dancing in New York since 1998 and creating her own works since 2009, collaborating with a wide range of artists and performing virtually nonstop. The South Africa-born, Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and teacher will be at New York Live Arts this week with her latest commission, the interdisciplinary What will we be like when we get there, running March 28-31. The piece, part of the New York Live Arts Live Feed residency program, has been developed at the Sedona Arts Center, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Governors Island, Bennington College, Jacob’s Pillow, the 92nd Street Y, the Milvus Artistic Research Center, and other locations around the world and now will make its world premiere in Manhattan. The interdisciplinary work, inspired by the 2016 presidential election and exploring personal connections impacted in the wake of that, was conceived and directed by Kotze (FIND YOURSELF HERE; It Happened It Had Happened It Is Happening It Will Happen) and choreographed and performed by Bessie Award winner Kotze, visual artist Jonathan Allen, sound designer, composer, and musician Ryan Seaton, and dancer and choreographer Netta Yerushalmy; the lighting is by Kathy Kaufmann. The March 28 performance will be followed by a discussion with Allen about his lobby exhibition of related paintings, “Knowing That Your House Is on Fire,” on view March 26 through April 13; the March 29 performance will feature a Stay Late Conversation moderated by Okwui Okpokwasili; and the March 31 show will be followed by live music curated by Seaton.

THE LOW ROAD

Jim (Chris Perfetti) tries to unbalance the books while being celebrated by Old Tizzy (Crystal A. Dickinson) and Mrs. Trewitt (Harriet Harris) in The Low Road (photo by Joan Marcus)

Anspacher Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday through Sunday through April 8, $85
212-539-8500
publictheater.org

Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Norris uses Adam Smith’s 1776 economic epic, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, as the basis for his potent and rollicking The Low Road, running at the Public’s Anspacher Theater through April 8. The Texas-born Norris follows the development of American capitalism through the trials and tribulations of one Jim Trewitt, from his birth in 1758 to the year of independence, 1776. The bitter yet playful satire is narrated by Smith (Daniel Davis), who hovers around the stage and in the aisles as he watches the shenanigans unfold along with the audience when he’s not front and center, using business-speak to introduce scenes. “As the ladies within had no marketable skills to speak of, they set about to purvey the only commodity available to them,” he says about a brothel, where the madam, Mrs. Trewitt (Harriet Harris), and her one-eyed slave, Old Tizzy (Crystal A. Dickinson), have taken in a baby left to them by one “G. Washington of Virginia,” according to a note that also promises they will be “generously compensated” upon the lad’s seventeenth birthday. One day, young Jim (Jack Hatcher) fortuitously comes upon a work-in-progress by Smith, reading a paragraph that will change his life: “Every individual endeavours as much as he can to employ his capital in support of domestic industry. He neither intends to promote the public interest nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, led by an invisible hand to promote an end that was never part of his intention. Nor is it the worse for society that it was no part of it.” Jim becomes a master with money, embezzling from Mrs. Trewitt without the slightest bit of guilt, and upon his seventeenth birthday, he (now played by Chris Perfetti) heads out on his own with a hidden stash under his hat. He buys himself a slave, John Blanke (Chukwudi Iwuji), loses a lot more than just his shirt to a mysterious masked thief, gets taken in by Brother Pugh (Max Baker), the presiding elder of the Bible-thumping New Light of Zion Colony of Waterfleet, and courts the daughter (Tessa Albertson) of the fabulously wealthy Isaac Low (Kevin Chamberlin). All the while, he is accompanied by Blanke, who turns out to be a lot more than the “deef . . . substandard product” he thought he purchased.

Jim Trewitt (Chris Perfetti) belittles his new slave, John Blanke (Chukwudi Iwuji), in Bruce Norris play at the Public Theater (photo by Joan Marcus)

Tony winner Norris (Clybourne Park, A Parallelogram) fills The Low Road with economic language and potent platitudes that never get tedious or pedantic — and much of which is as true today as it was in Smith’s time, taking on income inequality, class, gender, legacy, luxury, labor, power, property, organized religion, the military, and race. “All profit is theft,” Constance Pugh (Susannah Perkins) declares. “As he considered the disparity betwixt himself and the man whose chamber-pot he presently emptied, he wondered what it should be that caused such divergence of fortune,” Smith says of Trewitt cleaning up after the Duke of Buccleuch (Gopal Divan) at the brothel. “Might I suggest you learn to value that which cannot be obtained at gunpoint?” Blanke tells Jim shortly after they had been shackled together, evoking Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones. “You provide commendable service to my men and in return we provide you with protection. Now, surely that’s a fair exchange, yes?” Captain Shirley (Richard Poe) reminds Mrs. Trewitt when explaining why he and his soldiers don’t have to pay for their jaunts with her ladies of the night. “Yet somehow it seemed that, as his authority increased, the affection of those within had diminished proportionally,” Smith says of Jim as he cheats Mrs. Trewitt and her coterie, continuing, “For, their needs were modest, and, as a future gentleman, his were understandably greater.” And just in case the audience doesn’t tune into how modern these ideas still sound, the second act begins with a brilliantly conceived scene that establishes Jim as the founding father of corporate greed.

Isaac Low (Kevin Chamberlin) shares his good fortune with his wife (Harriet Harris) as their daughter (Tessa Albertson) and Adam Smith (Daniel Davis) look on in The Low Road (photo by Joan Marcus)

Four-time Tony nominee and three-time Obie winner Michael Greif (Dear Evan Hansen, A Parallelogram) superbly directs a cast of eighteen on the small Anspacher stage, which undergoes numerous changes by scenic designer David Korins, as chairs, tables, beds, barriers, a podium, and other elements are wheeled on and off; a short technical delay the night I went actually gave insight to the complexity behind the staging. Emily Rebholz’s period costumes and J. Jared Janas and Dave Bova’s wig and hair design are right on target, as is live music by violinist Josh Henderson, composed by Mark Bennett. Perfetti (Picnic, Cloud Nine) brings an engaging quirkiness to the role of Jim; you can’t help but root for him even though he does terrible things that will essentially lead to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. RSC veteran Iwuji (Hamlet, Hedda Gabler) is ferocious as John Blanke, representing America’s greatest shame and delivering the timeless line “But how much profit does one need? P’raps there ought be some penalty for the accumulation of unseemly wealth.” And Tony nominee Daniel Davis (Wrong Mountain, Talking Heads) lends it all a grand Shakespearean air. Thirty years ago, Gordon Gekko proclaimed, “Greed is good.” Norris ingeniously takes roads both low and high to reveal just how American that concept is, from the birth of the nation to this very minute.

PERSON PLACE THING: NOAH EMMERICH

Native New Yorker and proud American Noah Emmerich will be at JCC on March 28 for live podcast

Native New Yorker and proud American Noah Emmerich will be at JCC on March 28 for live Person Place Thing podcast

Who: Noah Emmerich, Randy Cohen, Gregorio Uribe Trio
What: Person Place Thing live podcast
Where: Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, 334 Amsterdam Ave. at 76th St., 646-505-4444
When: Wednesday, March 28, $15-$20, 7:30
Why: Five-time Emmy-winning television writer, columnist, and author Randy Cohen will record his next Person Place Thing podcast live March 28 at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, sitting down with actor Noah Emmerich. The native New Yorker has appeared in such films as Beautiful Girls, Super 8, and Miracle and such TV series as The Walking Dead, White Collar, and The Americans, where he currently portrays FBI agent Stan Beeman. He has also been onstage at the Kennedy Center, the Cherry Lane, Playwrights Horizons, and other theaters. Preparing for the live show, Cohen blogged, “It is easy to confuse the actor with the role, so to clarify: He is not a troubled, complicated FBI agent. (He may be troubled and complicated; that’s not for me to say.)” Don’t be surprised if the discussion turns to politics, judging from Emmerich’s Twitter feed. The evening will also include live music by the Gregorio Uribe Trio.