twi-ny recommended events

GRAND CENTRAL HOLIDAY TRAIN SHOW 2017

Transit Museum Holiday Train Show lights up Grand Central for the sixteenth year (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

GRAND CENTRAL HOLIDAY TRAIN SHOW
New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex
Shuttle Passage next to the Station Masters’ Office
Open daily through February 4, free, 8:00/10:00 am – 6:00/8:00 pm
www.mta.info
www.grandcentralterminal.com
holiday train show online album

The New YorkTransit Museum’s always delightful Holiday Train Show is back for the sixteenth year, continuing in Grand Central through February 4. A collaboration between Lionel and TW Design, the thirty-four-foot-long, two-level layout features plenty of old favorites with some new touches. As you walk inside the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex, you are met by a model of Grand Central itself, in front of the MetLife building. Follow along as the Lionel “O” gauge trains motor past such city monuments as the Empire State Building (complete with King Kong) and Philip Johnson’s AT&T/Sony building, along with cozy smaller stops reminding everyone of a relatively simpler time. Complementing the display this year is a bright and cheery cityscape by Brooklyn-based artist Josh Cochran depicting multiple forms of travel.

DAVID SMITH: ORIGINS & INNOVATIONS

Installation view, “David Smith: Origins & Innovations,” 2017 (© The Estate of David Smith / Courtesy The Estate of David Smith and Hauser & Wirth / photo by Genevieve Hanson)

Hauser & Wirth
548 West 22nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through December 23, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.hauserwirth.com

Hauser & Wirth firmly entrenches itself in its new space in the old Dia building in Chelsea with the revelatory, museum-worthy show “David Smith: Origins & Innovations,” continuing through December 23. Smith, who was born in Indiana in 1906 and died in a car crash in Vermont in 1965, is most well known for his large-scale metal sculptures, but the exhibition features paintings, ink drawings, photographs, painted reliefs, miniatures, and other works that reveal Smith’s mastery of multiple media and styles, from the 1930s through to his death. The show is also beautifully curated, with pieces arranged in ways that they interact with one another to display similarities in line, shape, space, and form. The exhibit is accompanied by an extensive free brochure that digs further into Smith’s unique approach.

SCHOOL GIRLS; OR, THE AFRICAN MEAN GIRLS PLAY

Ericka Boafo (Nabiyah Be, center) instantly changes the power dynamic when she arrives at Aburi Girls Boarding School in debut play by Jocelyn Bioh (photo by Joan Marcus)

MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 31, $49-$125
212-352-3101
www.mcctheater.org

Actress Jocelyn Bioh’s professional playwriting debut is a sharp, uproarious tale of a clique of young boarding school students in central Ghana who can be as nasty as they wanna be, able to go toe-to-toe with Cady, Regina, Gretchen, Janis, and Karen from Mark Waters’s 2004 hit movie, Mean Girls. Bioh, who has appeared in such plays as Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everybody and An Octoroon, and Jaclyn Backhaus’s Men on Boats, even references the film, which was written by Tina Fey (and is coming to Broadway as a musical in the spring), in the title of her show, School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play, making its MCC world premiere at the Lucille Lortel through December 31. It’s 1986, and the students at Aburi Girls Boarding School are getting ready to audition for the Miss Ghana beauty pageant. Paulina Sarpong (MaameYaa Boafo) is the egotistical, narcissistic leader of a group of girls, willing to say or do just about anything to remain in charge. She brags about her soccer-playing boyfriend and how she is a shoo-in to be named Miss Ghana while brazenly putting down the rest of her crew, which consists of the tall, bright Ama (Níkẹ Kadri), the innocent, overweight Nana (Abena Mensah-Bonsu), and the twinlike duo of Gifty (Paige Gilbert) and Mercy (Mirirai Sithole). The power dynamic immediately shifts when headmistress Francis (Myra Lucretia Taylor) introduces a new student, Ericka Boafo (Nabiyah Be), a beautiful, talented, and bold young woman who quickly challenges Paulina’s authority. Of course, putting Paulina on the defensive is not something you want to do, unless you’re ready for the barrage that will follow. So when Miss Ghana 1966, Eloise Amponsah (Zainab Jah), whom Francis knows all too well, arrives to select one of the girls to compete in the pageant, the gloves are off and sides are chosen in a no-holds-barred battle for supremacy. “Headmistress likes to make everyone feel like they have a fair chance,” Paulina declares, “but we all know I’m the best.”

The ruthless Paulina Sarpong (MaameYaa Boafo) is determined to follow in the footsteps of Miss Ghana 1966, Eloise Amponsah (Zainab Jah), in MCC world premiere at the Lucille Lortel (photo by Joan Marcus)

School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play was inspired by the true story of Yayra Erica Nego, the 2009 Miss Minnesota who went on to be named Miss Ghana 2011, a controversial decision for several reasons, including her fair skin, as well as by Rosalind Wiseman’s nonfiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes. In the seventy-five-minute play, Bioh, a first-generation Ghanaian American who went to boarding school in Hershey, Pennsylvania, explores such issues as body image and colorism, beauty and friendship, and race and class in this microcosmic Lord of the Flies scenario. Arnulfo Maldonado’s scenic design is simple but effective, a few tables in the school cafeteria, while Dede M. Ayite’s costumes change from the standard green-and-white school uniform to fancy dresses for the competition, giving each character a moment to shine. Tony-winning director Rebecca Taichman (Indecent, Familiar) keeps it all in check, never letting things get out of hand or become too clichéd. Be (Hadestown, Queen of the Night) is charming and delightful as Ericka, who has some secrets of her own; Jah (Eclipsed, In Darfur) brings heft to the complicated Eloise; and Taylor (Nine, Familiar) is warm and amiable as the caring, concerned Francis. The rest of the cast is terrific as well, although the character of queen bee Paulina can come off as too harsh at times, going too far and getting away with too much. School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play is no mere African American version of Mean Girls; instead, it is as smart and entertaining, as sweet and honest, its characters as obnoxious and horrible and lovable and vulnerable, as teen girls themselves.

GILBERT & GEORGE: THE BEARD PICTURES

Gilbert & George, “Vote Beard,” from “The Beard Pictures,” mixed media, 2016 (© Gilbert & George. Courtesy the artists and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong)

Lehmann Maupin
536 West 22nd St. & 201 Chrystie St.
Through December 22, free
www.lehmannmaupin.com
www.gilbertandgeorge.co.uk

Things have gotten a bit hairy at Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side and Chelsea galleries. Turner Prize winners Gilbert & George are celebrating their fiftieth anniversary — Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore met at Saint Martin’s School of Art in September 1967 — with their latest series, monumental pictures of the longtime partners in red with unique items hanging from their chins, from leaves and historical figures to an anchor and a gate, furthering their dedication to “living sculpture” and “Art for All.” In most of the large-scale works, Gilbert & George, now in their mid-seventies, are physically joined, either holding hands, standing shoulder to shoulder, or connected via their beards, often surrounded by chain-link fences and barbed wire. The pictures bear such titles as “Bless This Beard,” “Beardblood,” “Beard Wars,” “Beard Honor,” “Fuck Off Hipsters,” “Vote Beard,” and “Tits & Dicks,” combining humor with fear as they take on sociopolitical mores. In his exhibition essay, Michael Bracewell writes, “Like scenes from some bizarre animated cartoon, the ‘Beard Pictures’ dominate and confound the viewer’s experience, as though alive upon the gallery wall — in the way that sacred, ritual, and ceremonial art of ancient civilizations can feel alive. A sleepless energy within the image, semi-occult, which derives from the beliefs and convictions of the artist-workers who created them. These crazy pictures tell visionary stories, housing spirits, seemingly: portent, suffering, acceptance, journeying, anger, mockery, humiliation, mischief; disappearance into a world of absurdist pageantry.” It is quite an absurdist pageantry, one only Gilbert & George could stage.

EMOTION PICTURES — INTERNATIONAL MELODRAMAS: THE GODDESS

Iconic Chinese star Ruan Lingyu gives one of her best performances in silent classic The Goddess

THE GODDESS (SHEN NU) (Wu Yonggang, 1934)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Thursday, December 21, 8:30
Series runs December 13 – January 7
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org

Wu Yonggang’s directorial debut, The Goddess, made for Lianhua Film Company after he worked as a designer for the Shaw brothers, is a socially conscious, emotive tale about one woman’s struggle to give her young son a better life than her own. The seventy-three-minute silent film opens with a series of shots by cinematographer Hong Weilie that follows the evening light, from the setting sun to a man on a ladder lighting a street corner oil lamp to an apartment window seen from the outside. Wu then cuts to inside the room, revealing a dressing table with lots of makeup, then a pair of dresses hanging on the wall, and a doll. The camera next rises from an empty basket on the floor to a nervous woman (Ruan Lingyu) cradling a baby. She looks at a clock; it is time for her to leave her child and walk the streets of the city to make money. It’s a melancholy scene in a melancholy film, but the unnamed prostitute is no mere hooker with a heart of gold; she is a determined yet fragile woman who will do anything for her son, Shuiping (Keng Li). Running from the police, she is helped by Zhang (Zhang Zhizhi), a low-level gangster who decides to become her pimp, regularly taking her money and threatening her future, and that of her son’s. Whenever she attempts to raise her station, particularly when she saves enough money to send Shuiping to private school, there is always something that brings her back down.

A prostitute (Ruan Lingyu) dreams of a better life for her son (Keng Li) in Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess

Writer-director Wu also designed the sets, which include German Expressionist-type buildings and alleyways along with blinking neon towers and stores. Large columns increase in number, as if creating bars around the woman. Holding on to Shuiping, the woman is seen through Zhang’s spread legs, trapped. Using soft focus, superimposition, and slow fades — the camera cannot get enough of Ruan’s expressive face — Wu depicts her nightly travails as she smokes cigarettes and looks for her next customer. In one memorable scene, Wu shows only feet on the sidewalk as she is propositioned and accepts. But he never sentimentalizes the fallen woman, instead making her a tragic example of societal ills in 1930s China, especially gender and class hierarchies, as explained by the school’s principal. “She is a human being and has her human rights — so does her son,” he says. Unfortunately, most everyone else does not agree. The Goddess is a silent film classic, a major success in China; Wu (The Desert Island, Loyal Family) remade it with sound in 1938 as Rouge Tears. Sadly, Ruan, a huge star, had serious personal problems and committed suicide in 1935, at the age of twenty-four, a victim of gossip and physical abuse; Stanley Kwan’s award-winning 1992 biopic, Centre Stage, detailed her life, with Maggie Cheung playing Ruan. (Visual artist Isaac Julien re-created scenes from The Goddess with Zhao Tao and also cast Cheung as Goddess of the Sea in his nine-screen 2013 MoMA installation, Ten Thousand Waves.) The Chinese title, shennü, refers to both a goddess and a prostitute; Wu, and Ruan, reveals that one does not preclude the other. The Goddess is screening December 21 at the Walter Reade Theater in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” with live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin. The series, which divides its more than fifty films into four categories — Silent Screen, Hollywood’s Golden Age, International Classics, and Modern/Postmodern Drama — continues through January 7 with works by Yasujirô Ozu, Arturo Ripstein, Charlie Chaplin, Pedro Almodóvar, Clint Eastwood, Guy Maddin, Douglas Sirk, Leo McCarey, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Vincente Minnelli, Terence Davies, and many more.

NEW YIDDISH REP: AWAKE AND SING!

The Bergers sit down for some food and tsouris in New Yiddish Rep adaptation of Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! at the 14th Street Y (photo by Pedro Hernandez)

VAKH OYF UN ZING
Theater at the 14th Street Y
344 East 14th St. at First Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through December 24, $45
646-395-4310
www.newyiddishrep.org
www.14streety.org

In her 1983 book From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama, Ellen Schiff calls Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! “the earliest quintessentially Jewish play outside the Yiddish theatre. It bears the unmistakable stamp of authenticity, exactly what one would wish from a Jewish dramatist writing a slice of Jewish life problem play.” That stamp of authenticity is at the center of a new version by New Yiddish Rep, continuing at the Theater at the 14th Street Y through Christmas Eve. The show is adapted and directed by New Yiddish Rep artistic director David Mandelbaum, using Chaver Paver’s Yiddish translation for Jacob Mestel’s 1938 Federal Theatre production. During the Depression, the Berger family is trying to get by in their crowded Bronx apartment, where they are not exactly living the immigrant American dream. Matriarch Bessie Berger (Ronit Asheri-Sandler) is desperate for her children to marry well, but son Ralph (Moshe Lobel), a wannabe entertainer, is secretly dating a young woman from a poor family and daughter Hennie (Mira Kessler) doesn’t seem to like any of her suitors, who include Moe Axelrod (Gera Sandler), a shady operator who lost his leg in the war, and Sam Feinschreiber (Luzer Twersky), for whom Hennie has no desire. Bessie’s husband, Myron (Eli Rosen), is a gentle man who can’t keep a good job and instead puts money on the horses, while Bessie’s elderly father, Jacob (Mandelbaum), wanders around the apartment listening to opera and spouting Marxist doctrine. Bessie’s sister, Mimi (Amy Coleman), occasionally stops by to gossip and gloat. When Hennie gets pregnant and the man who did it is instantly out of the picture, the close-knit but argumentative family has some important decisions to make, facing difficult choices in very hard times.

Hennie Berger (Mira Kessler) and Moe Axelrod (Gera Sandler) have one of many disagreements in New Yiddish Rep production of Awake and Sing! (photo by Pedro Hernandez)

Awake and Sing! premiered on Broadway in 1935 with the sensational cast of Luther Adler, Stella Adler, Morris Carnovsky, John Garfield, and Sanford Meisner. In 2013, the National Asian American Theatre Co. staged a strong version with an all-Asian cast. But the show really feels at home in this Yiddish production, featuring a charming apartment set by Nathan Rosen, with an old radio and Victrola, a kitchen table, a couch, an armchair, and a daybed in the corner of the living room, where Ralph sleeps. The Bergers complain about life and love in Yiddish, with English supertitles. The whole thing is warm and comfy, with an emphasis on the status and power of women in Jewish families; the men in the show are at the mercy of the women. In addition, the part of Mimi was originally written for a man, Morty, but it has been skillfully changed to a successful businesswoman, something that was relatively unusual in 1930s America. Asheri-Sandler, who is married to Sandler in real life, is wonderfully domineering as Bessie, while Lobel ably personifies a man refusing to give up on his dreams. The play sounds absolutely lovely in Yiddish, flowing with the beauty and angst ingrained in the language like no other. It’s almost disappointing when English words or lines suddenly show up, probably because there’s no legitimate translation for them. The theater is also filled with Yiddish songs as the audience enters and during intermission, adding to the nostalgic atmosphere. Established in 2013 to keep Yiddish theater alive, New Yiddish Rep has previously staged Waiting for Godot, Death of a Salesman, Rhinoceros, and a double bill of one-acts by Wolf Mankowitz. Awake and Sing! is a natural for them, and they do Odets, and Yiddish theater, proud.

DESCRIBE THE NIGHT

Nikolai Yezhov (Zach Grenier) and Isaac Babel (Danny Burstein) begin a dangerous friendship in Describe the Night (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 24, $51-$86.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

At the beginning of Rajiv Joseph’s extraordinary Describe the Night, Isaac Babel (an almost unrecognizable Danny Burstein), a military journalist covering the Polish-Soviet War in 1920, has stopped in the Polish countryside and says to himself, “Describe the night . . . Describe the air . . . Describe the field . . .” as he unsuccessfully tries to capture their essence in his diary. He is soon joined by Russian captain Nikolai Yezhov (Zach Grenier). “The night. Describe it,” Isaac says. “Why?” Nikolai asks, dumbfounded. Isaac explains, “I just described it in my journal. I’m wondering how you would describe it. And if we both describe the same thing at the same time, will one of our descriptions be more true than the other?” Joseph’s follow-up to Guards at the Taj and Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is a glorious, difficult-to-describe work that searches for the truth amid many lies, melding fact and fiction in creating a wildly unpredictable, endlessly adventurous tale that is as historical as it is contemporary. (At one point, a character says, “Go ahead, write your fake news story.”) The swiftly moving 165-minute play is told in three acts of four scenes each, featuring such titles as “Lies,” “Fate,” “Blood,” “Asylum,” and “Freedom,” shifting back and forth between 1920, 1937, 1940, 1989, and 2010, from Smolensk to Moscow to Dresden. As Isaac becomes a successful and well-respected writer, he maintains an odd friendship with Nikolai, who rises in the ranks of Stalin’s secret police; Isaac also has an extra-close relationship with Nikolai’s wife, Yevgenia (Tina Benko). Meanwhile, in 1989 Dresden, Russian KGB agent Vova (Max Gordon Moore) is determined to not let young Polish immigrant Urzula (Rebecca Naomi Jones) defect to the West, for both personal and political reasons. And in 2010, a plane flying from Poland to Russia to honor the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn Massacre in WWII crashes in Smolensk, setting journalist Mariya (Nadia Bowers) on the run, where she encounters young Feliks (Stephen Stocking), who just wants to avoid trouble. Through the years, various characters and their stories intersect in unexpected ways as Isaac’s diary makes its way around the world.

Rajiv Joseph’s Describe the Night climbs high at the Atlantic (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Continuing at the Atlantic through December 24, Describe the Night is a gorgeously ambitious play, continually challenging the audience with its unconventional twists and turns. Director Giovanna Sardelli, who has previously collaborated with Joseph on Archduke and Guards at the Taj, brilliantly navigates through the multiple time periods and Tim Mackabee’s mostly simple but effective changing sets. Six-time Tony nominee Burstein (Fiddler on the Roof, The Drowsy Chaperone) is gentle and touching as Isaac, a man who believes that his principles will triumph over tyranny; Tony nominee Grenier (33 Variations, The Good Wife) is an excellent counterpoint, loud and blustery as Nikolai, a proud but uncomplicated man who is able to overlook friendship when necessary for the sake of the party. Benko (Scenes from a Marriage, Desdemona) excels as the strangely mysterious Yevgenia, while Stocking (Archduke, Dance Dance Revolution) embodies all of our everyday fears with an intense quirkiness. The Playbill comes with an extra sheet that details the true stories of Isaac, Nikolai, Yevgenia, and the Smolensk crash; be sure not to read it until after the show to fully appreciate the artistic license Joseph takes in transforming this tale into so much more. “You’re a media person, and so you you you love to make up stories that are more interesting than what the truth is and what the truth is that sometimes planes try to land in a heavy fog over a forest and then hit trees and crash,” Feliks tells Mariya. So how to succinctly describe Describe the Night? Truthfully, it’s indescribable.