twi-ny recommended events

OSCAR — OUR FAVORITE BEST PICTURE WINNERS: THE HURT LOCKER

Kathryn Bigelow’s explosive Iraq War drama puts viewers in the middle of the action

THE HURT LOCKER (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Sunday, February 19, 4:00 & 8:45
Series runs February 18 – March 1
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
thehurtlocker-movie.com

Metrograph is getting ready for the Academy Awards by screening some of its favorite Best Picture champs, beginning February 18 with Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, followed February 19 by Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Based on embedded journalist Mark Boal’s experiences in Iraq, The Hurt Locker follows a three-member Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit as they are called in to defuse a series of dangerous situations involving various kinds of bombs, including IEDs and other life-threatening explosive devices. Team leader Will James (Jeremy Renner) is an expert bomb defuser and maverick who doesn’t follow protocol and likes to live on the edge. Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is a greenhorn who just wants to survive the last forty days of their rotation. And Sgt. J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) likes to go by the book and take no unnecessary chances, which puts him in constant conflict with the unpredictable James. Recalling the second half of Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam drama Full Metal Jacket, The Hurt Locker unfolds in a series of harrowing set pieces in which the EOD unit is called in to either safely detonate or defuse explosive devices while under the eyes of local Iraqis, any of whom could potentially be the bomber or a sniper.

Sgt. J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) is distressed by the realities of the Iraq War in THE HURT LOCKER

Director Kathryn Bigelow (Blue Steel, Point Break) masterfully builds suspense scene after scene, beginning with the edge-of-your-seat opener through to the gripping conclusion. The experiences of the EOD unit serve as a microcosm for modern warfare in general and the U.S. involvement in the Middle East specifically, placing viewers in the midst of a tense, bitter, psychologically and emotionally draining battle that can never be won. The outstanding cast also features Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, and Evangeline Lilly in small roles; many of the Iraqis were played by actual war refugees. Shot in Jordan not far from the Iraq border, The Hurt Locker is a remarkable story, one of the best war films of the young century. Nominated for nine Academy Awards and winner of six (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Sound Editing), The Hurt Locker is screening February 19 at 4:00 and 8:45 in the Metrograph series “Oscar: Our Favorite Best Picture Winners,” which continues with such other great flicks as Federico Fellini’s La Strada, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, and John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy.

KEEP QUIET

Former Hungarian right-wing leader Csanád Szegedi meets with Rabbi Boruch Oberlander in KEEP QUIET

KEEP QUIET (Joseph Martin & Sam Blair, 2016)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema
1886 Broadway at 63rd St.
Opens Friday, February 14
212-757-2280
keepquietmovie.com
www.lincolnplazacinema.com

“When you create a story about yourself that’s based on a lie about who you are and who your family is, sooner or later it’s bound to be revealed,” political journalist Anne Applebaum says at the beginning of Joseph Martin and Sam Blair’s engrossing documentary, Keep Quiet. “Who are we really?” In 2012, Csanád Szegedi was a terrifying young star in Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party, one of the founders of the paramilitary, pro-Nazi, nationalist Hungarian Guard, rising to election to the European Parliament on the strength of a resurgent, virulent anti-Semitism. “I wanted everyone to believe in the world as I saw it,” he says in the film. “Anti-Semitism and discrimination of Jews was a powerful motivation.” But it all came crumbling down when the public heard an audio recording of the young leader’s phone conversation with disgruntled Jobbik party member Zoltán Ambrus, who tells Szegedi that his family is actually Jewish. At first Szegedi refuses to believe it, but soon his maternal grandmother is admitting to him that she is indeed a Holocaust survivor, with a number tattooed on her arm and memories of the camps.

Martin (Win a Baby, Scientologists at War) and Blair (Personal Best, Maradona ’86) detail how Szegedi dealt with this dramatic revelation as the conflicted man shares his innermost thoughts, meets with Orthodox Rabbi Boruch Oberlander, and travels to Auschwitz with Holocaust survivor Eva “Bobby” Neumann. He undergoes a radical transformation that not everyone trusts as the film explores who we are, the impact of where we come from, and whether blood trumps all. Keep Quiet is particularly relevant in a world that is experiencing yet another frightening rise in anti-Semitism, especially in Europe. Martin and Blair also delve into Hungary’s history with the Jews, and it’s not a very pleasant one. The film gets to the very heart of the matter, examining the nature of religious hatred in one man who reevaluates everything he believes in when the tables are suddenly turned. Keep Quiet, which features a beautiful score by cellist and composer Philip Sheppard, was shown in the World Documentary Competition at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival and is opening theatrically February 17 at Lincoln Plaza.

GOOD SAMARITANS

Rosemary (Rosemary Allen) and Kevin (Kevin Hurley) have some healing to do in GOOD SAMARITANS (photo courtesy New York City Players

Abrons Arts Center Playhouse Theater
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
Wednesday – Saturday through February 25, $25
212-598-0400
www.abronsartscenter.org
www.nycplayers.org

“I will try my best not to be sinful,” the frumpy Rosemary (Rosemary Allen) sings at the beginning of experimental theater director Richard Maxwell’s revival of his absurdist black comedy Good Samaritans, which opened last night at Abrons Arts Center. Originally produced by Maxwell’s New York City Players in 2004 and earning an Obie for Allen, the ninety-minute play features five songs written by Maxwell; his trademark odd dialogue delivered in a dry, stylized manner that highlights its theatricality; and an existential plot that is delightfully mysterious. Rosemary, who is in her seventies, runs an urban rehabilitation center where the bedraggled Kevin (Kevin Hurley), a man in his fifties, suddenly shows up one evening, in desperate need of a bathroom. “I will make it my business to make your business my business,” the straightforward Rosemary tells him. “I don’t want you here. You don’t want to be here. That’s what we have in common. In a couple six months, we’ll see what you’re made of. . . . The twelve-step program, faith-teaching, and work therapy are to help the client reenter mainstream society.” Rosemary, who’s been working at the center for thirty-five years, is sure she can help him, because that is what she does. “You came to me. And I’m telling you. I’m the answer, the only answer you need,” she assures him. Soon they’re helping each other, in a rather unexpected way.

Kevin Hurley and Rosemary Allen reprise their original roles in Richard Maxwell’s revival of GOOD SAMARITANS (photo courtesy New York City Players

Maxwell (Isolde, The Evening) was looking through his previous work (he’s written twenty plays since 1997) when he decided to bring back Good Samaritans, the first time he has revived one of his plays. He believed that it “feels even more resonant in 2017,” and he has a point, with Americans more obsessed than ever with self-identity. “Where is your house? Where is your ID? You know? Why are you here?” Rosemary asks, but Kevin never reveals why he has been placed in the facility, allowing the audience not only to wonder but also to consider what sins of their own might be in need of rehabilitation. The superb acting relies on the intentionally emotionless delivery of lines, but the relationship between the two protagonists is actually filled with a passion that sucks you into their curious tale, which becomes even stranger whenever the characters break out into song, accompanied by guitarist James Moore and pianist David Louis Zuckerman. At the center of it all is a deep need for human connection of almost any kind, and when Rosemary and Kevin do connect, it’s both wildly unanticipated and gently touching. Original designer Stephanie Nelson’s set is brightly cold and antiseptic, a cinder-block cafeteria with long tables and one small window that is hard for the characters to look out of, as if they’re trapped in a kind of way station. (Nelson also designed the lighting and the costumes.) A longtime nurse, Allen seems born to play Rosemary, embodying the intake counselor with an offbeat glee that seems to hover right beneath the surface; meanwhile, Hurley (Sea Plays, Bad Boy Nietzsche!) is affecting as a man in search of meaning. Together they face love and fear, loneliness and desire in ninety captivating minutes. Maxwell (People without History, Neutral Hero), a Guggenheim Fellow who with the New York City Players has won five Obies, has a unique way of interpreting the world we live in, and he is thankfully being a Good Samaritan himself by giving us all another opportunity to see this splendid work.

SURVIVING AND RESISTING: A PRESIDENTS DAY EVENT

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE provides a fascinating inside look at AIDS activists fighting the power

HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (David France, 2012)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Monday, February 20, $15, 7:30
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.surviveaplague.com

With protests continuing around the country, and the world, against Donald Trump and his administration, IFC Center is honoring Presidents Day with the special evening “Surviving and Resisting: A Presidents Day Event.” The centerpiece is a screening of the gripping 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague. For his directorial debut, longtime journalist David France, one of the first reporters to cover the AIDS crisis that began in the early 1980s, scoured through more than seven hundred hours of mostly never-before-seen archival footage and home movies of protests, meetings, public actions, and other elements of the concerted effort to get politicians and the pharmaceutical industry to recognize the growing health epidemic and do something as the death toll quickly rose into the millions. Focusing on radical groups ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), France follows such activist leaders as Peter Staley, Mark Harrington, Larry Kramer, Bob Rafsky, and Dr. Iris Long as they attack the policies of President George H. W. Bush, famously heckle presidential candidate Bill Clinton, and battle to get drug companies to create affordable, effective AIDS medicine, all while continuing to bury loved ones in both public and private ceremonies. France includes new interviews with many key activists who reveal surprising details about the movement, providing a sort of fight-the-power primer about how to get things done. The film also shines a light on lesser-known heroes, several filled with anger and rage, others much calmer, who fought through tremendous adversity to make a difference and ultimately save millions of lives. How to Survive a Plague is screening at 7:30 on February 20, along with three new short documentaries, Jem Cohen’s Birth of a Nation and two works from Laura Poitras’s Field of Vision online platform, Alex Winter’s Trump’s Lobby and Josh Begley’s Best of Luck with the Wall, followed by a Q&A and book signing with France, Cohen (Museum Hours, Instrument), and journalist, documentarian, and visual artist Poitras (Citizenfour, “Astro Noise”). It should be quite a night as people gather to discuss how to survive the plague that has infected the White House.

THE DRESSMAKER’S SECRET

Estranged friends Mária (Tracy Sallows) and Irma (Caralyn Kozlowski) face some difficult choices in THE DRESSMAKER’S SECRET (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The Simon Studio
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 5, $25
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org
www.dressmakerssecret.com

A superb cast is the highlight of the world premiere of The Dressmaker’s Secret, a play with a compelling story and intriguing characters that nearly get lost in a somewhat muddled production running at 59E59 through March 5. It’s late 1963, and Hungarian refugee Mária (Tracy Sallows) and her nineteen-year-old son, Robi (Bryan Burton), are living a meager existence in Kolozsvár in Romania. Mária is a very serious, dour woman who wants only the best for her son, an electrician who dreams about moving to America. He’s at odds with his mother, who refuses to tell him who his father is. “I love you,” Mária says. “I hate you. I want my own life, away from you and away from this country,” Robi responds before apologizing. The dowdy Mária is making a stylish dress for her long-estranged friend Irma (Caralyn Kozlowski), a tall, beautiful woman whose brother, Robert (Robert S. Gregory), might be Robi’s father, but Mária’s not talking. Slowly — and slowly is the operative word here — the four characters reveal secret after secret, leading to a tear-jerking finale that would make the Lifetime network proud.

Irma (Caralyn Kozlowski) and Robi (Bryan Burton) wonder what’s to come in world premiere at 59E59 (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The Dressmaker’s Secret was cowritten by opera singer and playwright Sarah Levine Simon (The Portrait) and Vassar professor Mihai Grünfeld, adapted from his unpublished novel and inspired by his memoir, Leaving: Memories of Romania. Directed by Roger Hendricks Simon (Bard at the Bar), who is married to Sarah, the production suffers from seemingly endless set changes between more than a dozen scenes that unnecessarily bring the action to a halt, especially in the tiny, intimate theater where the audience is practically sitting on the stage. The show would have benefited greatly from a more imaginative set design that kept things simple. At nearly two and a half hours, the play is also in need of severe trimming and much less repetition. The play’s best line, and it’s an emotional powerhouse, ends up feeling clichéd after it pops up twice more. But still, the central story, a kind of Sophie’s Choice with political intrigue and ramifications that are relevant given the current refugee crisis, is riveting, and the acting is excellent. Gregory (Othello, The Glass Menagerie) brings a Shakespearean bravura to the bold Robert, Burton (The Night Of; Neon Joe, Werewolf Hunter) has just the right amount of naïveté as the confused Robi, Kozlowski (Prodigal Son, Dirty Dancing) is sexy and charming as the fashionable Irma, and Sallows (The Audience, Angels in America) plays the deeply conflicted Mária with grace and dignity. It may take a little work on the part of the audience, but there’s plenty to like about The Dressmaker’s Secret, despite the rough edges.

TICKET ALERT: THE MUSIC OF ARETHA FRANKLIN (AND LIVE REHEARSAL SHOW)

the music of aretha franklin

Who: Kenny Loggins, Melissa Etheridge, Rhiannon Giddens, Bettye LaVette, Allen Stone, Glen Hansard, Taj Mahal & Deva Mahal, Living Colour, G. Love, Sarah Dash, Sam Moore, Ledisi, Todd Rundgren, Ceelo Green, Naomi Shelton, Richard Thompson, and Antibalas
What: Fundraising tribute to Aretha Franklin
Where: Carnegie Hall, Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage, 57th St. & Seventh Ave., 212-247-7800
When: Monday, March 6, $48-$160, 8:00 (Live Rehearsal Show March 5 at City Winery, $40-$65, 8:00)
Why: Legendary R&B singer Aretha Franklin just announced her retirement from touring (she will still record at least one more album, with Stevie Wonder), so “The Music of Aretha Franklin” tribute being held March 6 at Carnegie Hall couldn’t be much more timely. City Winery owner Michael Dorf’s “Music of” celebrations, benefits for numerous music education programs for underprivileged youth, in the past have honored such musicians as Prince, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, the Who, R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan; this year an all-star lineup pays R.E.S.P.E.C.T. to the Memphis-born soul superstar who will turn seventy-five on March 25; her #1 hits include “Chain of Fools,” “Think,” “Jump to It,” “Freeway of Love,” and, of course, “Respect.” In addition, on March 5, City Winery will be hosting the annual Live Rehearsal Show, in which many of the artists performing at the Carnegie Hall show will rehearse in front of an audience, led by house band Antibalas.

THE OBJECT LESSON

New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 19, $69
www.nytw.org
www.geoffsobelle.com

“That’s all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That’s all your house is — a place to keep your stuff,” George Carlin said in his famous “A Place for My Stuff” routine. The popular comedy bit served as inspiration for Geoff Sobelle’s tour-de-force one-man show, The Object Lesson, which was first seen in New York City in a brief four-day run at BAM in November 2014 and is currently in the midst of an extended seven-week engagement at New York Theatre Workshop. The ever-malleable NYTW space has been transformed by designer and multidisciplinary artist Steven Dufala into a large storage room cluttered with hundreds of boxes; although there are some chairs and couches along the perimeter, the majority of the audience sits on small boxes that they take from piles in the central area. Arrive at least fifteen minutes before the official start time so you can look inside any of the myriad boxes that are not taped shut, finding strange and unusual items that might trigger memories of your own. You can also peruse a card catalog filled with yet more stuff and listen in on a conversation coming through a tin can in an old phone booth in the corner. Ultimately, Sobelle emerges from the audience, as if he could be any one of us, and for the next hundred minutes he explores his life through the things he’s saved in the boxes. Channeling Buster Keaton, he sets up small, decidedly analog vignettes that involve ingenious illusions and audience participation as he comes upon objects that bring up remembrances that are touching and funny as well as sad and heartbreaking. They also make us, the audience, consider our own relationship to our collected stuff; don’t be surprised if you go home after the show and start gathering items to be thrown away — only to put some of them back.

Director David Neumann keeps the action moving all around the space, on the floor and high into the mountains of boxes, so it really doesn’t matter where you sit, although if you’re on a box, you can move around somewhat to follow Sobelle, the co-artistic director of rainpan 43 and longtime member of Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theatre Company. Christopher Kuhl’s lighting is extraordinary, a character unto itself (which is especially true in one of the later scenes). The boxes and the “stuff” they contain evoke the way humans compartmentalize memories in the brain, storing some away forever while others keep popping up, making the psyche not just a house but a home, to paraphrase and invert David Byrne’s “Glass, Concrete & Stone,” which Sobelle plays on a turntable early on. The pace of the show can change depending on who Sobelle asks to participate; note that none of them are plants. When I saw the production at BAM, the participants were not only seamless but added to the overall performance; however, when I saw it at NYTW, a few of those moments came to a screeching halt because of some of the participants (although the primary one was great). The play concludes with a scintillating journey through time that is utterly brilliant and beautifully cathartic. Winner of three major awards at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe, The Object Lesson is about the roots that hold us together and tear us apart, the lifetime of cords that connect and disconnect us, the archaeology of memory, and the very things that make us who we are.