twi-ny recommended events

REQUEST CONCERT

Danuta Stenka gives a bold, bravura performance in hypnotic revival of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s REQUEST CONCERT (photo by Richard Termine)

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: WUNSCHKONZERT
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
October 26-29, $25, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Danuta Stenka is absolutely mesmerizing in Request Concert, Laznia Nowa Theater and TR Warszawa’s intense, ingenious revival of German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1971 hyperrealistic play, a treatise on the state of loneliness and isolation in contemporary society. As the audience enters BAM’s intimate Fishman Space at the Fisher, Polish star Stenka (Krum, Angels in America), as Fräulein Rasch, is already onstage, standing still, midstep, returning home from her job as a stenographer. The stage, designed by Simona Biekšaitė and Zane Pihlstrom, is a studio apartment complete with kitchen, washing machine, shower, sofa bed, and bathroom in the center of the theater, on a wooden platform just off the ground. The audience is encouraged to walk around the set as Fräulein Rasch meticulously goes about her nightly routines, changing into comfy clothes, making dinner, checking the mail, and watching television, all done with an exquisite care consumed by emptiness and melancholy. She never speaks as she butters pieces of crispbread, takes drags off a cigarette, uses the (working) toilet, glances at the haute couture fashion show on TV, and pages through IKEA and Costco catalogs. Aside from a red chair, her apartment is all white and gray, small and drab yet coldly functional, with no identity of its own. It all combines for a heartbreaking portrait of solitude, made all the more sad by Stenka’s slow, studied movement and deep stares filled with longing and, perhaps, fear. The only dialogue comes from a radio program she listens to, with host Ari Shapiro (of NPR) reading letters about new lovers and happy families and playing related songs by the Beach Boys, Leonard Cohen, Bob Marley, and a band that Shapiro sings with, Pink Martini. When Fräulein Rasch sits down at her laptop, she turns on a Sims-like video game in which she has created her own alternate universe, a man, a woman, and children living in a computer-animated room based on her own surroundings. Her isolation is devastating.

Gracefully directed with sensitivity and subtlety by Yana Ross (Bambiland), Request Concert is like a modern-day version of Chantal Akerman’s 1973 minimalist classic, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, only live and in person, with the audience getting close enough to touch the performer, as there are no barriers separating Stenka from the people walking around the set, hypnotized by her every gesture; not a single action is wasted in a brave and bold tour de force. It’s so realistic that at times you’ll feel like you’re infringing on Fräulein Rasch’s privacy, wanting to look away, but you won’t be able to. We learn almost nothing about her, yet we learn everything; she is no one, yet she is everyone, the set both a zoolike cage and a mirror on ourselves. The only reason we know that she is a stenographer — a job that requires a certain anonymity and lack of personal identity, taking down the words of others with precise exactitude — is because it says so in the program. For nearly seventy-five minutes, Fräulein Rasch, and Stenka, avoids making eye contact with anyone until. . . . Well, to say more would deprive those lucky enough to score a ticket the surprise of a hypnotic finale you won’t soon forget. The show is best experienced by moving around what essentially is a living installation, following Fräulein Rasch’s captivating boredom and ritualistic behavior from every angle; standing in one place the whole time is actually unfair to those attempting to take full advantage of this unique and critical element. For those who do need to sit, there are chairs in the balcony, offering a different perspective.

13 CATS: KURONEKO

A black cat is not happy with the turn of events in Kaneto Shindô’s KURONEKO

KURONEKO (藪の中の黒猫) (Kaneto Shindô, 1968)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 28 – November 2
Series continues through November 3
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

“A cat’s nothing to be afraid of,” a samurai (Rokkô Toura) says in Kaneto Shindô’s 1968 Japanese horror-revenge classic, Kuroneko. Oh, that poor, misguided warrior. He has much to learn about the feline species but not enough time to do it before he suffers a horrible death. In Sengoku-era Japan, a large group of hungry, bedraggled samurai come upon a house at the edge of a bamboo forest. Inside they find Yone (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law, Shige (Kiwao Taichi), whose husband, Hachi (Kichiemon Nakamura), is off fighting the war. The men viciously rob, rape, and murder the women, but they leave behind a mewing black cat (“kuroneko”) that is not exactly happy with what just happened. Three years later, the aforementioned samurai is riding his horse on a dark night when he encounters, by the Rajōmon Gate, a young woman positively glowing in the darkness. She says she is frightened and asks if he can accompany her home; he claims he has met her before but can’t quite place her. He agrees to help her, and when they reach her abode he is treated to some tea served by an older woman and some fooling around with the younger one — until the latter creeps on top of him and turns into a menacing animal, biting into his throat and drinking his blood. One by one, the samurai are lured into this trap, until a surprise warrior arrives.

A bamboo forest leads to a kind of hell for samurai in KURONEKO

Written and directed by Shindô and based on an old folktale, Kuroneko is a tense, spooky film, with a foreboding score by Hikaru Hayashi (Shindô’s The Naked Island and Onibaba) and shot in eerie black-and-white by Kiyomi Kuroda (Shindô’s Mother, Human, and Onibaba). One of the great feminist ghost stories, it’s like the missing sequel to Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan, with elements of Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress and Rashomon thrown in, along with echoes of flying ninja movies. Memorable images abound: The two women, in ghostly white, float in the air; the camera weaves through the bamboo forest; a gruesome killer is beheaded. The film also features Kei Satō as Raiko, Hideo Kanze as Mikado, and Taiji Tonoyama as a farmer, but Kuroneko belongs to Shindô regular — and his lover and, later, his wife — Otowa, who appeared in nearly two dozen of his films, and Taichi, who also worked with such other directors as Keisuke Kinoshita, Mitsuo Yanagimachi, Yôji Yamada, and Shintarô Katsu before dying in a car accident in 1992 at the age of forty-eight. The two women go about their business with a calm and somewhat placid demeanor until they pounce, like cats luring mice to certain doom. Kuroneko is screening from October 28 to November 2 in the BAMcinématek series “13 Cats,” a baker’s dozen of feline flicks that continues through November 3 with Roger Corman’s The Tomb of Ligeia, John Gilling’s The Shadow of the Cat, Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat, and both Jacques Tourneur’s and Paul Schrader’s Cat People.

PLENTY

Codename Lazar (Ken Barnett) and Susan Traherne (Rachel Weisz) unexpectedly meet at a WWII drop site in Public Theater revival of PLENTY (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Newman Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 1, $90-$95
212-967-7555
www.publictheater.org

“I don’t know why anybody lives in this country,” Alice Park (Emily Bergl) tells her best friend, Susan Traherne (Rachel Weisz), at the beginning of David Hare’s Plenty, which explores the failed promise of plenty in post-WWII England. The show is being revived at the Public, where it made its U.S. debut in 1982, directed by Hare, and later moved to Broadway, where it earned four Tony nominations, including Best Play. This first major New York City revival is a compelling if not wholly successful production that travels back and forth in time, shuffling between 1943 and 1962 in nonlinear fashion. The story centers on Susan, a strong woman who speaks her mind, even as she starts losing control of it. She goes from being a secret courier in France during the war to a diplomat’s wife to a feminist who refuses to rely on a man to make her happy. “I’d like to change everything but I don’t know how,” she tells Alice. Susan meets a series of men she carefully manipulates, from her caring dullard of a husband, Raymond Brock (a finely mustachioed Corey Stoll), who works for old-fashioned ambassador Leonard Darwin (the always excellent Byron Cummings), and Mick (LeRoy McClain), a potential baby daddy, to Sir Andrew Charleson (Paul Niebanck), head of the Foreign Office, and Codename Lazar (Ken Barnett), an English paratrooper. Susan declares exactly what she’s thinking, not worried about who she might offend or how it will affect her marriage or reputation. But true happiness is just out of reach, a parable of England’s efforts to resurrect itself after the war. “This is hell,” Susan says. “No doubt,” Alice agrees, a far cry from the “peace and plenty” they, and all of England, were expecting.

The English argue over their future in return of David Hare’s PLENTY to Public Theater (photo by Joan Marcus)

Hare is undergoing quite a resurgence recently, with major revivals of Skylight on Broadway and The Judas Kiss at BAM (and around the world) and his latest film, Denial, which he wrote for director Mick Jackson, now in theaters, also starring Weisz. In Plenty, Weisz, in the role originated by Kate Nelligan and later played on film by Meryl Streep in 1985 and onstage in London by Cate Blanchett in 1999, is superb as Susan, bringing a wide range of emotions to a character whose fears are getting the best of her even as she fights for her personal freedom. (The film also starred Tracey Ullman as Alice, Charles Dance as Brock, John Gielgud as Darwin, Sting as Mick, Ian McKellen as Charleson, and Sam Neill as Lazar; the original Public Theater production featured Nelligan, Edward Herrmann, Kelsey Grammer, and Dominic Chianese.) Some of the scenes fall flat, feeling out-of-date, particularly when Susan, Brock, and the aptly named Darwin meet with the Burmese ambassador (Pun Bandhu) and his wife (Ann Sanders) and briefly discuss the Suez Canal crisis, which has little impact on contemporary American audiences. Mike Britton’s set features a large horizontal wall that rotates to change scenes, with interstitial jazz by David Van Tieghem as the story goes from Susan and Brock’s house to Darwin’s office to a WWII drop site. Five-time Tony-nominated director David Leveaux (Nine, Anna Christie) never quite reaches a steady narrative flow, as the jumps in time can be confusing. In addition, many of the British references get lost as the disillusioned Susan represents the highs and the lows, the promise and the failure experienced by the country over the course of thirty years. “Oh yes. New Europe. Yes yes,” Darwin says to Brock and Susan early on. “Reconstruction. Massive. Massive work of reconstruction. Jobs. Ideals. Marvellous. Marvellous time to be alive in Europe. No end of it. Roads to be built. People to be educated. Land to be tilled. Lots to get on with. . . . Have another gin.” Or as Brock puts it, “Of course our people are dull, they’re stuffy, they’re death. But what other world do I have?” It’s a world that Susan won’t accept, and it destroys her as well as nearly all those around her.

TICKET ALERT — A ONE-NIGHT-ONLY PRESENTATION: LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE

love-loss-and-what-i-wore

Who: Lucy DeVito, Carol Kane, Natasha Lyonne, Rosie O’Donnell, Tracee Ellis Ross
What: One-night-only reading of Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron’s Love, Loss, and What I Wore
Where: Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92nd St. Y, 1395 Lexington Ave. at 92nd St., 212-415-5500
When: Sunday, February 5, $15-$48, 8:00
Why: In August 2008, Linda Lavin, Karyn Quackenbush, Leslie Kritzer, Kathy Najimy, and Sara Chase starred in a benefit performance of Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron’s new play, Love, Loss, and What I Wore, a series of monologues based on the 1995 book by Ilene Beckerman that explores the female condition in contemporary America through discussions about clothing and accessories. Over the years, in other benefits, off-Broadway runs, and national tours, the show has become a rite of passage for actresses and comedians; cast members have included Marlo Thomas, Tyne Daly, Blythe Danner, Samantha Bee, Veanne Cox, Sally Struthers, Rhea Perlman, America Ferrera, Brooke Shields, Debi Mazar, Jane Lynch, Christine Lahti, Kristin Chenoweth, Joy Behar, Parker Posey, Marian Seldes, Melissa Joan Hart, Fran Drescher, Florence Henderson, and Kristen Wiig, among many others. Now the 92nd St. Y, in conjunction with original producer Daryl Roth, is presenting a one-night-only reading of the play, featuring Lucy DeVito, Carol Kane, Natasha Lyonne, Rosie O’Donnell, and Tracee Ellis Ross and directed by Karen Carpenter, who helmed the original New York and Los Angeles productions; O’Donnell and Lyonne were in the original cast at the Westside Theatre in 2009, followed shortly by DeVito, Ross, and Kane. The special event isn’t until February, but tickets are already going fast, especially at such reasonable prices.

CROSSING THE LINE — ARTIST’S CHOICE: JÉRÔME BEL / MoMA DANCE COMPANY

(© 2012 Museum of Modern Art, New York. photo by Julieta Cervantes)

MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, Marron Atrium
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Thursday, October 27, through Monday, October 31, free with museum admission, 12:30 & 3:00
crossingthelinefestival.org
www.moma.org

In the fall of 2012, French conceptual choreographer Jérôme Bel presented The Show Must Go On as part of the three-week MoMA series “Some sweet day.” The piece was performed by professional dancers, teachers, and choreographers. Bel is now returning to MoMA for “Artist’s Choice: Jérôme Bel / MoMA Dance Company,” a new, site-specific work that will feature an unusual troupe composed of MoMA staff members, who had to audition in order to be chosen. Bel is a main focus of this year’s Crossing the Line festival, FIAF’s annual multidisciplinary lineup of dance, art, theater, film, and discussion. Bel restaged The Show Must Go On last week at the Joyce, and he is bringing back 1995’s eponymously titled Jérôme Bel for its New York premiere October 27-29 at the Kitchen. At MoMA every afternoon at 12:30 and 3:00 from October 27 to 31, staffers will dance in the Marron Atrium, moving around and among the crowd, many of which are, of course, rather dance savvy. (Maria Hassabi just won a Bessie Award for PLASTIC, her 2016 dance that also took place in the atrium and other locations around the museum.) Others won’t know quite what’s going on, which is all part of the fun.

LETTER TO A MAN

Mikhail Baryshnikov goes inside the mind of Vaslav Nijinsky in Robert Wilson’s LETTER TO A MAN (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

BAM Harvey
651 Fulton St.
October 15-30, $35-$130
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Robert Wilson and Mikhail Baryshnikov, who teamed with Willem Dafoe in 2014 at BAM for The Old Woman, have returned to Brooklyn for another avant-Expressionist multimedia marvel, Letter to a Man. Continuing at the Harvey through October 30, the mostly one-man show is based on the diaries of Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, who electrified the dance world before his schizophrenia had him in and out of mental institutions from 1919, when he was twenty-nine, until his death in 1950 at the age of sixty-one. Conceived, directed, and designed by Wilson, who has previously dazzled BAM audiences with such consciousness-expanding works as The Blue Rider, Einstein on the Beach, and Woyczeck, Letter to a Man is built around snippets from the diary Nijinsky kept in early 1919, shortly before being hospitalized for the first time. Performed by Baryshnikov, dressed in a sharp tuxedo and white-painted face, and various disembodied voices as if they’re echoing in Nijinsky’s head, the text, adapted by Christian Dumais-Lvowski and filled with references to God, sex, war, and death, features such devastating lines as “I am standing in front of a precipice into which I may fall. I am afraid to fall,” “I will eat everyone I can get hold of. I will stop at nothing,” and “I went in the direction of the abyss.” Baryshnikov moves exquisitely across the stage, with small dance flourishes that are breathtaking, particularly because no footage of Nijinsky performing exists. A. J. Weissbard boldly lights Wilson’s surreal set, with vaudeville-style flashing stage lights in the front, mesmerizing shades of white and blue, and dark shadows as Baryshnikov stands in front of a large window that could be in an asylum or a church. Wilson includes such elements as a burning cross, a fiery red circle that references Nijinsky’s paranoid drawings of eyes in the diaries, and branches that evoke Nijinsky’s only extant choreographic work, Afternoon of a Faun.

Mikhail Baryshnikov acts out Vaslav Nijinsky’s inner demons in multimedia work at BAM (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The show gets its title from Nijinsky’s fourth notebook, which consists of letters he wrote but never sent; in this case, the “man” in question is Ballets Russes founder and artistic director Sergei Diaghilev, who is never specifically named in the diaries but had a severe falling out with his star dancer and lover after Nijinsky married Romola de Pulszky in September 1913. Although Wilson is treading on familiar territory from a technical standpoint, Letter to a Man is still a mind-blowing tribute to both Nijinsky and Baryshnikov, who along with Rudolf Nureyev redefined ballet in the twentieth century. The music, selected by Hal Willner, ranges from classical to pop, from Arvo Pärt and Henry Mancini to Tom Waits’s “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” and Napoleon XIV’s novelty hit, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!,” bringing levity to the proceedings as Nijinsky’s battle with mental illness intensifies. The mysterious projections are by Tomek Jeziorski; Jacques Reynaud designed Baryshnikov’s costumes, which include a straitjacket, while choreographer Lucinda Childs collaborated on the movement. As with most of Wilson’s works, there are many striking, memorable images that are likely to stay with you for a long time, from Baryshnikov sitting in a chair up on a wall in an almost blindingly white space to him slowly inching backward on a dark beam, moving away from the aforementioned large window, from him approaching a projection of a battlefield to performing a little soft shoe. It’s a glowing tribute that is fraught with sadness, memorializing a special dancer who was overcome by a debilitating disease.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: REQUEST CONCERT

Danuta Stenka (KRUM) returns to BAM in one-woman show, REQUEST CONCERT, at BAM Fisher (photo by Klaudyna Schubert)

WUNSCHKONZERT
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
October 26-29, $25, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Polish companies Laznia Nowa Theater and TR Warszawa (Nosferatu, Festen) have teamed up for Request Concert, a one-character show running at the BAM Fisher October 26-29. Translated by Danuta Żmij-Zielińska from German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1971 hyperrealistic play, Request Concert features Danuta Stenka as Fräulein Rasch, an average woman going about her average life, a fifty-year-old stenographer returning home after a day at work. Taking aim at loneliness in modern society, the seventy-five-minute production is directed by Yana Ross, with music by Aśka Grochulska and Tomasz Wyszomirski, lighting by Mats Öhlin, and multimedia set design by Simona Biekšaitė. “Karl Marx defines a time ripe for revolution when the masses are fed up with oppression and the elite is no longer able to control them,” Ross explained shortly before the play’s premiere in Poland. “But what if the financial elite has adapted with the times and worked out a way to keep the masses more or less occupied with consumerism, keeping them busy with enough daily small rewards and pleasures to forget the pain of a senseless cycle of life?” All tickets for the dialogue-free show, being staged in the round at the intimate Fishman Space, are $25, and attendees are encouraged to walk around to experience Fräulein Rasch’s futility from all angles.