twi-ny recommended events

OF GHOSTS, SAMURAI, AND WAR — A SERIES OF CLASSIC JAPANESE FILM: UGETSU

Genjurō (Masayuki Mori) makes his pottery as son Genichi (Ikio Sawamura) and wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) look on in UGETSU

UGETSU (UGETSU MONOGATARI) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
Asia Society
725 Park Ave. at 70th St.
Friday, March 11, $10-$12, 6:30
Series continues through March 19
212-288-6400
asiasociety.org

Asia Society’s “Of Ghosts, Samurai, and War: A Series of Classic Japanese Film” series heads into its second weekend with one of the most important and influential — and greatest — works to ever come from Japan. Winner of the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, Kenji Mizoguchi’s seventy-eighth film, Ugetsu, is a dazzling masterpiece steeped in Japanese storytelling tradition, especially ghost lore. Based on two tales by Ueda Akinari and Guy de Maupassant’s “How He Got the Legion of Honor,” Ugetsu unfolds like a scroll painting beginning with the credits, which run over artworks of nature scenes while Fumio Hayasaka’s urgent score starts setting the mood, and continues into the first three shots, pans of the vast countryside leading to Genjurō (Masayuki Mori) loading his cart to sell his pottery in nearby Nagahama, helped by his wife, Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka), clutching their small child, Genichi (Ikio Sawamura). Miyagi’s assistant, Tōbei (Sakae Ozawa), insists on coming along, despite the protestations of his nagging wife, Ohama (Mitsuko Mito), as he is determined to become a samurai even though he is more of a hapless fool. “I need to sell all this before the fighting starts,” Genjurō tells Miyagi, referring to a civil war that is making its way through the land. Tōbei adds, “I swear by the god of war: I’m tired of being poor.” After unexpected success with his wares, Genjurō furiously makes more pottery to sell at another market even as the soldiers are approaching and the rest of the villagers run for their lives. At the second market, an elegant woman, Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyō), and her nurse, Ukon (Kikue Mōri), ask him to bring a large amount of his merchandise to their mansion. Once he gets there, Lady Wakasa seduces him, and soon Genjurō, Miyagi, Genichi, Tōbei, and Ohama are facing very different fates.

Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyō) admires Genjurō (Masayuki Mori) in Kenji Mizoguchi postwar masterpiece

Written by longtime Mizoguchi collaborator Yoshitaka Yoda and Matsutaro Kawaguchi, Ugetsu might be set in the sixteenth century, but it is also very much about the aftereffects of World War II. “The war drove us mad with ambition,” Tōbei says at one point. Photographed in lush, shadowy black-and-white by Kazuo Miyagawa (Rashomon, Floating Weeds, Yojimbo), the film features several gorgeous set pieces, including one that takes place on a foggy lake and another in a hot spring, heightening the ominous atmosphere that pervades throughout. Ugetsu ends very much as it began, emphasizing that it is but one postwar allegory among many. Kyō (Gate of Hell, The Face of Another) is magical as the temptress Lady Wakasa, while Mori (The Bad Sleep Well, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs) excels as the everyman who follows his dreams no matter the cost; the two previously played husband and wife in Rashomon, which kicked off the Asia Society series. Mizoguchi, who made such other unforgettable classics as The 47 Ronin, The Life of Oharu, Sansho the Bailiff, and Street of Shame, passed away in 1956 at the age of fifty-eight, having left behind a stunning legacy, of which Ugetsu might be the best. “Of Ghosts, Samurai, and War: A Series of Classic Japanese Film,” being held in conjunction with the exhibition “Kamakura: Realism and Spirituality in the Sculpture of Japan,” continues March 18 with Keisuke Kinoshita’s Fuefuki River and concludes March 19 with Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba.

GOLDEN DAYS — THE FILMS OF ARNAUD DESPLECHIN: A CHRISTMAS TALE

Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve star as siblings in a dysfunctional family in Arnaud Desplechin’s A CHRISTMAS TALE

A CHRISTMAS TALE (UN CONTE DE NOËL) (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Francesca Beale Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Saturday, March 12, 8:00, and Wednesday, March 16, 7:00
Series runs March 11-17
www.filmlinc.org

One of the best films of 2008, A Christmas Tale is yet another extraordinary work from French post-New Wave filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin (La Sentinelle, Esther Kahn). Desplechin, who examined family dysfunction in the masterful Kings and Queen (one of the best films of 2006), brings back much of the same cast for A Christmas Tale. Catherine Deneuve stars as Junon, the family matriarch who has just discovered she has leukemia and is in need of a bone-marrow transplant. Although it is rare for children to donate bone marrow to their mother (or grandmother), Junon insists that they all take the test to see if they are compatible. Soon they gather at Junon and Abel’s (Jean-Paul Roussilon) house for the holidays: oldest daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a dark and depressed woman whose teenage son, Paul (Emile Berling), has been institutionalized with mental problems and whose husband, Claude (Hippolyte Girardot), is rarely home; Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), the youngest son, a carefree sort married to Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve’s real-life daughter), whom Junon strongly distrusts; and black sheep Henri (Mathieu Amalric), the middle child who was initially conceived primarily to save Abel and Junon’s first son, Joseph, who ended up dying of the same leukemia that Junon has contracted. Henri, who shows up with a new girlfriend, the very direct Faunia (Emmanuelle Devos), is a philandering ne’er-do-well who is deeply estranged from Elizabeth and not close with his mother, leading to much strife as Christmas — and a possible transplant — nears. Desplechin, who wrote the script with playwright and director Emmanuel Bourdieu, once again has created powerful, realistic characters portrayed marvelously by his extremely talented cast; despite the family’s massive dysfunction, you’ll feel that even spending more than two and a half hours with them is not enough. A Christmas Tale is screening March 12 & 16 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Golden Days: The Films of Arnaud Desplechin,” a weeklong retrospective celebrating the March 18 release of his latest film, My Golden Days. Running March 11-17, the festival features such other films as My Sex Life . . . or How I Got into an Argument, La vie des morts (which Desplechin will introduce on March 15), Kings and Queen (which will be followed by a Q&A with the director on March 17), and My Golden Days (with Desplechin on hand for Q&As after screenings on March 15 & 18).

GREGORY CREWDSON: CATHEDRAL OF THE PINES

Gregory Crewdson, “The Barn,” digital pigment print, 2014 (© Gregory Crewdson)

Gagosian Gallery
522 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Extended through Saturday, March 12, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-741-1717
www.gagosian.com

In Ben Shapiro’s 2012 documentary, Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, Brooklyn-born photographer Gregory Crewdson says, “My pictures are about a search for a moment — a perfect moment.” In such series as “Twilight,” “Dream House,” and “Beneath the Roses,” Crewdson captures that critical in-between moment, creating fictional cinematic images in which something seems to have just happened, or is about to happen, but he leaves it up to viewers to create their own narratives. Those were followed by “Sanctuary,” in which he photographed abandoned sets at the Cinecittà studios in Rome, black-and-white shots of postapocalyptic architecture devoid of people. It was almost as if he was saying goodbye to his movie-like oeuvre, his trademark style that was part Alfred Hitchcock, part David Lynch. For two years, while going through a painful divorce, Crewdson did not pick up his camera, but he’s back with an intimate, personal series, “Cathedral of the Pines,” taken in and around his new home in Becket, Massachusetts. The large-scale photographs, each one 37.5 x 50 inches framed, focus on seemingly downtrodden friends and relatives, including his daughter, Lily, his new partner, Juliane Hiam, and Hiam’s children, in contemplative poses under an arched bridge, on the back of a pickup truck, in a living room, in a kitchen, in a barn. The crystal-clear, deep-focus photos combine the indoors and the outdoors, human figures and nature, as the subjects look forlornly into an imaginary abyss. The men and women are surrounded by snowy mounds, lush green trees, a rolling river. As opposed to Crewdson’s previous series, in which the photos were like movie stills, these Hopper-esque scenarios capture heart-rending moments that are palpable, that feel like they come closer to approaching reality than his more fantastical creations, like we’re intruding on these people’s difficult, domestic lives, like we have compromised their privacy.

Gregory Crewdson, “The Pickup Truck,” digital pigment print, 2014 (© Gregory Crewdson)

In “Reclining Woman on Sofa,” a naked woman lies on a couch, her body mimicking the icy pond out her window. In “The Motel,” a distraught couple sits on a porch, almost disappearing into the snowy scene. In “Seated Woman on Bed,” a woman in a nightgown waits on the corner of her bed, part of her visible in a mirror, the blanket arranged to show that she slept alone. And in “The Shed,” a woman stands outside the door of a nearly empty wooden shed, her hands coated in mud, her head down, as if giving up. The photos might be wrapped in sadness, as if the subjects are all dealing with some kind of loss, but there is a serene beauty to them. “It was deep in the forests of Becket, Massachusetts, that I finally felt darkness lift, experienced a reconnection with my artistic process, and moved into a period of renewal and intense creative productivity,” Crewdson says about the series, which in many ways is a natural progression, a culmination, of everything he has done before. What comes next for the photographer? In October 2006, Crewdson told the Guardian, “I think I’d be a terrible movie maker because all I know is the one image. I’m not really that interested in the before or after. I want the story to remain unresolved.” But Crewdson appears to not be done with cinema quite yet; it was recently announced that he and Hiam will adapt Carla Buckley’s The Deepest Secret into a film.

A ROOM OF MY OWN

Little Carl (Nico Bustamente) and Adult Carl (Ralph Macchio) go over old times in A ROOM OF MY OWN (photo by Ben Strothmann)

June Havoc Theatre, Abingdon Theatre Company
Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex
312 West 36th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 13, $65
212-868-2055
abingdontheatre.org

Playwright and director Charles Messina wishes everyone a merry frickin’ Christmas in the raucous and riotous, and poignant and bittersweet, A Room of My Own. Eight years in the making, the show, making its world premiere at the Abingdon Theatre Company through March 13, is based on Messina’s childhood, when he was a boy living with his family in a one-room tenement apartment on Thompson St. in Greenwich Village. Ralph Macchio stars as Carl Morelli, Messina’s alter ego, who serves as the play’s narrator and ostensible scribe, carrying around a MacBook Air along with the marble composition notebook he wrote in when he was a kid, referring to both as the play unfolds through his memory. It’s Christmas season in 1979, a time that Morelli describes as “after Stonewall but before AIDS. Post-Watergate and pre-Reagan. Our little corner of the world was still a staunch Italian American enclave, with the first wave of immigrants who had settled there around the turn of the century, now aging, and dying in the shadow of the church.” Morelli’s father, Peter (Johnny Tammaro), stays at home, collecting disability, while Morelli’s mother, Dotty (Joli Tribuzio), works at a local bakery and has a penchant for stealing things. At night, Peter shares the pull-out couch with ten-year-old Carl (Nico Bustamante), while Dotty sleeps on the sofa with teenage daughter Jeannie (Kendra Jain). Dotty’s gay brother, Jackie (Mario Cantone), lives upstairs with his beloved dog, Lil’ Pish. All six of the characters — including Little Carl — are about as foul-mouthed as they come. After Adult Carl’s introduction, the first words of the play he’s written flow like poetry from Dotty: “So I says, Go an’ f&*k yourself, ya guinea c*cksucka!” And that’s only the beginning, as everyone gets in on the action, even the kids. “Nobody knows how to f&*in’ talk in this family,” Jeannie says. The Morellis are experiencing tough times, as the church is after them for Little Carl’s past-due tuition, which they don’t have — for reasons that become clear later — but Dotty doesn’t hold back her wrath for the principal, who is a nun. “Not for nothin’ but she’s got some balls callin’ this house,” Dotty declares. “They’re supposed to take a vow of poverty or did she forget? Houndin’ workin’ people for a lousy $150.” Jackie soon enters the fray with a series of curse-laced rants, performed with breathless, showstopping glee by Cantone. With Christmas on the horizon, Little Carl asks Santa for a room of his own, but the Morellis are used to not getting what they want.

Joli Tribuzio, Mario Cantone, and Johnny Tammaro have a f&*kin’ field day in New York-set un-family-friendly comedy (photo by Ben Strothmann)

Set designer Brian Dudkiewicz places the Morellis’ drab, appropriately sloppy apartment within a picture frame, as if it’s a living snapshot of what once was. Macchio, the Karate Kid and My Cousin Vinny star — who still has those teen-idol good looks — is tender and charming as Adult Carl, who desperately tries to be cool, calm, and collected but usually ends up exasperated as the characters stray from the script or miss their cues. He sits on the edge of the stage, walks into the audience, and occasionally heads onto the set to talk to his family, but the only one who can see or hear him is his younger self. “Don’t do it,” Little Carl says. “Don’t do what?” Adult Carl asks. “Don’t write this,” Little Carl replies. “I have to write it,” Adult Carl answers. Messina then adds some real relish to the interaction between the two Carls, which gets to the heart of the story.

Little Carl: You’re gonna end up with a big problem on your hands. This is dangerous. Trust me.
Adult Carl: Trust you? Trust me.
Little Carl: Trust you? I am you.
Adult Carl: So then trust me.
Little Carl: Why should I trust you when you don’t trust me?
Adult Carl: I don’t trust you because I know me.
Little Carl: So what you’re saying is, you don’t trust yourself?
Adult Carl: That’s enough out of you. I’ll write you out of it.
Little Carl: Oh yeah, how ya gonna do that? I’m the main character, stupid!
Adult Carl: Oh, you think so, huh?
Little Carl: I know so!
Adult Carl: Just do this with me. Please. We need to go back, it’s the only way to go forward.
Little Carl: Lemme ask ya something. . . . Are you gonna tell the truth?
Adult Carl: I’m gonna tell my truth, yes.
Little Carl: Are you gonna tell the truth?!
Adult Carl: I’m gonna . . . fix . . . the truth. . . .
Little Carl: Fix my ass! You’re a liar!
Adult Carl: How am I a liar? Don’t ever call me a liar!
Little Carl: Only liars and writers say they’re gonna tell the truth, when deep down they know they’re gonnna change shit!
Adult Carl: Get back in there!
Little Carl: Are you ready?
Adult Carl: Am I ready for what?
Little Carl: Are you ready for the pain?
Adult Carl: I don’t know. . . .
Little Carl: You better be. You better be made outta steel, just like they were.
Adult Carl: Steel?
Little Carl: Steel. F&*kin’. Beams.
Adult Carl: That. F&*kin’. Mouth. Now would you just please go!
Little Carl: Oh, up yours!
Adult Carl: Up mine? Up yours!
Little Carl: Your mother!
Adult Carl: We have the same mother!
Little Carl: I gotta grow up to be this guy?

Adult Carl (Ralph Macchio) and Little Carl (Nico Bustamente) clutch their writing notebooks in Charles Messina’s raucous and touching memory play (photo by Ben Strothmann)

Messina’s (An Honest Woman, The Wanderer) sharp writing is evident throughout A Room of My Own, which he also directs with an electric, nonstop pace. The mostly Italian-American cast is exceptional, dressed in Catherine Siracusa’s fab period clothes (just wait till you see Jackie’s green shirt and Dotty’s brown velour pants). Bronx native Tribuzio and Brooklyn kid Tammaro, both veterans of Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding, clearly are having a great time as they lash out at each other with words you’re not likely to find in any dictionary, English or Italian, while getting every gesture and facial expression just right. Bustamente is a wonder in his stage debut, having acted before only in commercials; his interactions with Macchio could have been gimmicky but instead are gentle and heartfelt, even with the cursing, as they combine the past and the present with an eye to the future. And Cantone (Steve, Sex and the City), who, as it turns out, spent a lot of time when he was younger right across the street on Thompson St., visiting his sister (the building can be seen in the backdrop through a window), is a force of nature as Jackie, celebrating gay culture while fighting the loneliness of his closeted life. Much of the cast has been with the project since its inception, so the actors have developed a real feeling of family that translates beautifully to the stage. It’s a treat to be invited into the Morellis’ frantic world, which is sure at times to remind you of your own relatives, even if you’re not Italian and from New York City.

KINETIC PAINTING: AN ART BOOK SERIES EVENT

carolee schneeman kinetic painting

Who: Carolee Schneemann with Kathy Battista, Jenny Jaskey, and David Levi Strauss
What: Celebration of the release of Carolee Schneeman monograph Kinetic Painting (Prestel, February 2016, $60), edited by Sabine Breitwieser
Where: New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Celeste Auditorium, Fifth Ave. at 42nd St., 917-275-6975
When: Wednesday, March 9, free, 6:00
Why: In Kinetic Painting, editor Sabine Breitwieser writes, “Schneeman’s vital contributions to the establishment of a feminist art practice, her ‘painting constructions,’ her choreography and performances, and her experimental films, whose full significance has not yet been recognized: these are only some facets of her oeuvre, and a thorough review of her prodigious output, which now spans six decades and reflects the period’s social and technological changes in its extraordinary diversity, has been long overdue.” The fully illustrated monograph seeks to rectify that, and on March 9, Schneeman will be at the New York Public Library to talk about her career, joined by Kathy Battista, director of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art; Jenny Jaskey, director and curator of the Artist’s Institute; and writer, cultural critic, and professor David Levi Strauss. The monograph was published on conjunction with a major retrospective of Schneeman’s work at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, which was organized by Breitwieser and Branden Joseph. A book signing will follow the discussion.

BRODSKY/BARYSHNIKOV

Mikhail Baryshnikov will interpret the poetry of his longtime friend, Joseph Brodsky, in multimedia one-man show (photo by Janis Deinats)

Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jerome Robbins Theater
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
March 9-19, $35-$40
646-731-3200
bacnyc.org

Legendary ballet dancer, actor, photographer, and artistic director Mikhail Baryshnikov is a fixture at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, which he opened on West Thirty-Seventh St. in 2005. He can often be seen in the audience, watching the institution’s wide range of productions. But Misha, as he is affectionately known, will be assuming a different role March 9-19, taking the stage for the hotly anticipated U.S. premiere of Brodsky / Baryshnikov. Originally presented at the New Riga Theatre in Baryshnikov’s hometown of Riga, Latvia, in October, the show is part of the Boris and Ināra Teterev Foundation arts program TÊTE-À-TÊTE, which seeks to expand the art and culture available in the capital city. In Brodsky / Baryshnikov, the famed dancer will interpret the poems of Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky through text and movement. Baryshnikov and Brodsky, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, were friends for more than twenty years; the latter died in Brooklyn in 1996 at the age of fifty-five.

The ninety-minute one-man show is directed by Alvis Hermanis, with a fascinating set by Kristīne Jurjāne, lighting by Gleb Filshtinsky, and video by Ineta Sipunova, all of which delves into Brodsky’s mind; Baryshnikov will perform the works in their original Russian, with English surtitles by Jamey Gambrell. “This will be a departure from normal theatrical plays. Instead, it will be something more akin to a spiritual séance,” Hermanis said prior to the show’s debut. “We spend our everyday lives on a horizontal level or dimension. This form of theater offers you the chance to spend [ninety minutes] in an exclusively vertical dimension in which people are confronted with nothing other than the big issues.” Baryshnikov added, “This project is important to us. Alvis is venturing into unknown territory, which he invariably does; otherwise, why bother? We are both greatly looking forward to our encounter with the audience.” Although the run is sold out, there will be a wait list at the box office beginning one hour before each performance.

STEPHEN PETRONIO COMPANY: BLOODLINES II

Longtime Stephen Petronio Company dancer Gino Grenek will dance the male solo in MIDDLESEXGORGE at the Joyce this week (photo by Sarah Silver)

Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
March 8-13, $10-$60
212-645-2904
www.joyce.org
petron.io

Last April, Newark-born dancer and choreographer Stephen Petronio premiered his new initiative, “Bloodlines,” at the Joyce, presenting Merce Cunningham’s RainForest. The five-year project will consist of iconic works from master American choreographers, paired with a new work by Petronio. This week the New York-based company returns to the Joyce with the second edition of “Bloodlines,” performing Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy, her 1979 silent piece featuring costumes and visual design by Robert Rauschenberg, who also designed the lighting with Beverly Emmons. Glacial Decoy was Brown’s first piece for a proscenium stage and debuted the same year that Petronio joined her company as its first male dancer. To complement the all-female Glacial Decoy, Petronio has chosen to reconstruct his 1990 piece about gender and power, MiddleSexGorge, set to commissioned music by the British band Wire and inspired by Petronio’s participation with the AIDS activist organization ACT UP in the late 1980s. Company dancer and assistant artistic director Gino Grenek, in his seventeenth and last season with the troupe, will take the male solo and one half of the male duet. “The piece is ferocious and the dancers must be fearless in their execution of the dance. Hands grab, legs fly, heads whip, and torsos twist at warp speed. It is a rite of passage for every Petronio dancer to perform MiddleSexGorge,” Grenek writes on the company’s blog. “I adore it, I crave it, and I am humbled by it.” Also on the bill is the world premiere of Petronio’s Big Daddy Deluxe, an updated version of his 2014 solo “talking dance” Big Daddy, a tribute to his late father, built around text from Petronio’s 2014 memoir, Confessions of a Motion Addict; the work has now been expanded for the full company, which includes Grenek, Davalois Fearon, Kyle Filley, Cori Kresge, Jaqlin Medlock, Tess Montoya, Nicholas Sciscione, Emily Stone, and Joshua Tuason. The March 10 performance will be followed by a Curtain Chat with members of the company