twi-ny recommended events

RIOULT DANCE NY: WOMEN ON THE EDGE . . . UNSUNG HEROINES OF THE TROJAN WAR

Queen Clytemnestra and King Agamemnon battle over Iphigenia’s fate as part of RIOULT DANCE NY’s (photo by Sofia Negron)

Queen Clytemnestra and King Agamemnon battle over Iphigenia’s fate as part of RIOULT Dance NY’s “Unsung Heroines of the Trojan War” (photo by Sofia Negron)

Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
June 21-26, $10-$56
212-645-2904
www.joyce.org
www.rioult.org

RIOULT Dance NY kicked off its Joyce season on June 21 with a trio of works focusing on mythological women, as New York City–based French choreographer Pascal Rioult channels his mentor, Martha Graham. The evening began with 2013’s Iphigenia, based on Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis. Iphigenia (Catherine Cooch) is in love with Achilles (Jere Hunt), but her father, King Agamemnon (Brian Flynn), is considering sacrificing her to appease a goddess who has prevented the winds from carrying the Greek ships to do battle against Troy. Meanwhile, Iphigenia’s mother, Queen Clytemnestra (Charis Haines), wants to protect her daughter. Michael Torke’s score ranges from noirish jazz to elegant Baroque-style music as the characters, dressed in white (all the men are bare-chested except for Flynn, and their pants are loosely wrapped spirals of fabric; the costumes are by Karen Young), remain within a large white circle in front of a haphazard log structure. (The set is by Harry Feiner, with lighting by Jim French that turns the circle from white to blue to purple to red.) Cooch gives a highly expressive performance as the title character, from a balletic solo to pas de deux with each of her parents to an emotional quartet with Hunt, Haines, and Flynn. The story is narrated by Oscar-nominated actress Kathleen Turner, barefoot and wearing black, her legendary husky voice adding context to the lovely dances.

Charis Haines is Helen of Troy in Pascal Rioult’s emotional ON DISTANT SHORES (photo by Sofia Negron)

Following intermission, Haines is back, this time as Helen of Troy in On Distant Shores . . . a redemption fantasy, dancing among four Trojan War heroes (Flynn, Hunt, Michael Spencer Phillips, and Sabatino A. Verlezza) who at first appear to be dead until she raises them one at a time, she in a flowing white dress, the men in tight black shorts. (The costumes are by Pilar Limosner.) As projections on the back wall shift from heavenly clouds to ominous darkness, Haines moves swiftly in between and around the men to Aaron Jay Kernis’s cinematic score. At one point she kneels on the floor in desperation, as if resigned to her fate, but her warriors stand by her, determined to fight for her.

RIOULT Dance NY presents world premiere of CASSANDRA’S CURSE at the Joyce (photo by Eric Bandiero)

The splendid night of antiwar statements concludes with the world premiere of Cassandra’s Curse, inspired by Euripides’ The Trojan Women. Sara Elizabeth Seger is Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess who has been cursed so that no one will believe her prophecies. She is trying to warn everyone that the Greek army is hiding within a large Trojan horse, but they are not listening. “If she had used a thousand words, no one would have believed her,” Turner narrates. Feiner’s set features a series of movable screens that entrap Seger in a cage as Brian Clifford Beasley’s projections of the horse and Turks unspool behind her. Richard Danielpour’s dramatic score is performed live by the Uptown Philharmonic, conducted by Kyle Ritenauer and consisting of four violinists, two violists, and a cellist. The three pieces work together extremely well, a kind of clarion call, through movement, music, and text, for peace in these difficult times. Rioult is also presenting a second program that includes the New York City premiere of 2015’s Polymorphous, 2014’s Dream Suite, 2002’s Bolero, and a selection of duets from various other repertory works. (The June 23 show will be followed by a Curtain Chat with members of the company.)

SONG OF MYSELF: THE WORDS OF WALT WHITMAN

One-man show honors the legacy of Walt Whitman

Who: Matthew Aughenbaugh, Michael Ruby, Graham Fawcett
What: Immersive theater piece
Where: The Old Stone House, Washington Park & JJ Byrne Playground, between Fourth & Fifth Aves. and Third & Fourth Sts., Park Slope, 718-768-3195
When: Friday, June 24, $15-$20, 8:00
Why: On June 24, Matthew Aughenbaugh will perform his one-man show, Song of Myself: The Words of Walt Whitman, at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, in the borough where the mighty poet was raised. “Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me! / On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose, / And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose,” Whitman wrote in 1856’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Aughenbaugh, a Shakespearean actor who has also done musical theater, noted in a statement, “I was inspired to create a theater piece using only original text as a way to share my passion for our greatest American poet.” The immersive show, presented by London’s Upper Wimpole Street Literary Salon, will be followed by a Q&A with Aughenbaugh and Brooklyn poet Michael Ruby, moderated by British broadcaster, teacher, and translator Graham Fawcett. Tickets are $15 in advance and $20 at the door and come with wine and refreshments.

THE GREAT AMERICAN CASKET COMPANY

Unique production in Green-Wood Cemetery includes jugglers, a skeleton band, and lots of fire (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Green-Wood Cemetery
Fifth Ave. and 25th St., Brooklyn
Thursday – Sunday through June 26, $75, 7:00
www.green-wood.com/gacc

In The Great American Casket Company, BREAD Arts Collective (Rise & Fall) takes full advantage of the opportunity to stage the first-ever site-specific multiperformance theatrical production in historic Green-Wood Cemetery. Every Thursday through Sunday in June, up to seventy-five “clients” come to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn to hear the extensive, immersive sales pitch from “employees” of the Great American Casket Co. The evening kicks off with heavenly standards by Coriander Suede and the Tombstones (Owen Weaver, Lizzie Hagstedt, Eric Powell Holm, and composer and musical director Andrew Lynch), including “My Blue Heaven” and “Pennies from Heaven.” (Feel free to dance if you’d like.) The audience is introduced to seven characters identified only by number (in ascending order from one to seven: Mélissa Smith, Kelly Klein, Gregory G. Schott, Kate Gunther, Andy Talen, Ashley Winkfield, and Ben Lewis) who are awaiting the arrival of the President (Toni Ann Denoble), a heavily made-up steampunk leader pushing the company’s exclusive afterlife technology.

Employees of the Great American Casket Co. push their exclusive afterlife technology in immersive show (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

As the sun sets over the spectacular grounds, the clients are guided through various parts of the cemetery, encountering puppets (courtesy of puppeteers Matthew A. Leabo, Winkfield, and Rachael Shane, who is also an aerialist), jugglers, ghostly guitarists, and other entertainments. The show drags significantly in the middle when a subplot regarding one Agnes Butterfield (Lyndsey Anderson) begins, but it takes off again toward a sparkling and otherworldly conclusion. Written by Anderson and Lewis, charmingly directed by Katie Melby, and featuring costumes by Elizabeth May that range from skeletal to clownish to devilish to angelic, The Great American Casket Company is, above all else, a great way to experience Green-Wood Cemetery, which is the resting place of such “famous residents” as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Boss Tweed, Leonard Bernstein, Horace Greeley, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Charles Ebbets, and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. Not all of the knots are tied at the end, and several elements will leave you scratching your head, but if you “buy the plot,” as the opening number says with clever double meaning, you’ll have a grand old time. The show concludes with a reception with members of the cast and crew, hosted by Brooklyn-based alternative event planners Modern Rebel, with free popcorn, s’mores, and Pixy Stix, wine and beer (with suggested donation), and a photo booth.

“NUTS!”

The bizarre story of John Romulus Brinkley is recounted in unique ways in “NUTS!”

“NUTS!” (Penny Lane, 2016)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, June 22
212-727-8110
www.nutsthefilm.com
filmforum.org

Penny Lane’s wonderfully titled, inventively told “Nuts!” tells the wacky true tale of Dr. John R. Brinkley, a pivotal twentieth-century figure who was part P. T. Barnum, part Donald Trump, a controversial doctor or a quack, a radio pioneer or a snake-oil charlatan, depending on one’s opinion. He became rich and famous by surgically implanting goat glands into men’s testicles, claiming it increased virility, but his story is about much more than that. “This is a film about John Romulus Brinkley, a doctor, amongst other things, a man who succeeded against terrible odds and powerful opposition, a man who changed the world,” narrator Gene Tognacci explains early on. Lane, who previously profiled another intriguing individual in her debut feature-length documentary, 2013’s Our Nixon, this time follows the often outrageous exploits of Brinkley, using text from Clement Wood’s 1934 book, The Life of a Man: A Biography of John R. Brinkley, home movies and photographs, newspaper and magazine articles, and actual radio broadcasts. She also has seven different animators re-create scenes from Brinkley’s life and career, and each artist or team (Drew Christie & Dane Herforth, Julia Veldman C, Michael Pisano, Krystal Downs, Ace & Son Moving Picture Co., Rose Stark, and Hazel Lee Santino & Downs) employs a unique style while maintaining the film’s overall potent sense of humor. Producer-director Lane, who cleverly edited the film with writer Thom Stylinski, initially casts Brinkley as a sympathetic character just trying to get his own piece of the American dream for him and his family in the tiny town of Milford, Kansas, but as Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, gets ever closer in his obsessive quest to discredit Brinkley, everything the goat-gland doctor has built threatens to unravel. But Lane’s genius is yet to come, as she begins to unravel our assumptions and the very process of biography and history itself as the film proceeds to its inevitable conclusion.

It’s hard to believe that “Nuts!” is true, but that’s all part of the fun. Lane just lays it out there for us to see, and you’ll be rooting for Brinkley as he grows his empire, just as you’ll be booing Fishbein for desperately trying to bring him down. Brinkley was a kind of mad genius, understanding how to get ahead in business by giving the people what they want via early infomercials, realizing the vast power of radio, and flouting the rules whenever he could — and then attempting to change them. Lane limits the talking heads to very occasional comments from historian and former Kansas councilman James Reardon, social and cultural historian Dr. Megan Seaholm, Border Radio: Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, Psychics, and Other Amazing Broadcasters of the American Airwaves coauthor Gene Fowler, and Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam author Pope Brock. “Nuts!” is all the more comic for its reality, and Lane has succeeded wildly in transferring that notion to the way she has made the film, literally revealing the hands of the artist as the pages of Wood’s sycophantic book are turned; by the end, viewers will be questioning the documentary form itself just as they’re questioning Brinkley’s validity. In fact, Lane is readying a public online database “for audiences to consider the epistemological and ethical issues at the heart of the nonfiction storytelling process.” “Nuts!” opens at Film Forum on June 22, with Lane participating in Q&As following the 8:00 shows on opening night and June 24 and after the 6:10 show on June 25.

FREE TALKS: NICOLAS WINDING REFN

Nicolas Winding Refn will discuss his latest film, THE NEON DEMON, and more at free talk at Lincoln Center on June 23

Who: Nicolas Winding Refn
What: Film Society Free Talks
Where: Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave., 212-875-5232
When: Thursday, June 23, free, 7:00
Why: Danish writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn, who has made such films as Bronson, Valhalla Rising, the Pusher trilogy, and the upcoming psychological thriller The Neon Demon, starring Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Christina Hendricks, Keanu Reeves, and Alessandro Nivola, will be at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on June 23 to give a free talk about his career, the day before The Neon Demon opens in theaters. Refn, who was partly raised in New York City, was named Best Director at Cannes in 2011 for Drive, and his Pusher trilogy can be seen in its entirety on June 20 as part of the IFC Center series “Cold Cases: The Department Q Trilogy and the New Nordic Noir.”

RADIANT VERMIN

Ollie (Sean Michael Verey) is suspicious of a deal the mysterious Miss Dee (Debra Baker) offers him and his wife, Jill (Scarlett Alice Johnson), in Philip Ridley’s RADIANT VERMIN (photo by Carol Rosegg)

BRITS OFF BROADWAY: RADIANT VERMIN
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 3, $35
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org

How far would you go to achieve your suburban dreams? British playwright Philip Ridley reveals just how much one young couple is ready to risk in the unapologetically delicious wicked black comedy Radiant Vermin. At first, Jillian and Oliver Swift (Scarlett Alice Johnson and Sean Michael Verey) are suspicious of the official government letter they receive from Miss Dee (Debra Baker) offering them a free house in a questionable neighborhood. Ollie thinks it’s some kind of reality television show gag. “Let’s make fun of the underclass desperate to get on the property ladder,” he says. But Jill quickly changes her mind after verifying that the offer is indeed real. “Ollie! If you do not agree to see this house then I will get very upset,” she declares to her husband. “And if I get very upset, our unborn baby will get very upset. And you remember what that psychiatrist on the telly said about pregnancy shaping the rest of a child’s life. Do you want our child to grow into someone who machine guns his classmates?” When they meet Miss Dee at the house, they overlook her strange, intimate knowledge of their life and sign a contract, taking ownership of the home; the only catch is that the house needs a lot of work, which they’ll need to take care of themselves. Everything else, including all taxes and utilities, have been paid. “You’re a marriage made in heaven,” Miss Dee proclaims, one of many references to heaven, hell, angels, reincarnation, and God. But when Jill and Ollie find out just what they have to do in order to renovate their new house, they are initially shocked but quickly go to the extreme lengths required to provide a happy home for them and their child. “What would you prefer, Jill? Eh?” Ollie asks. “A new kitchen? Or a dead body in the old one?”

Jill (Scarlett Alice Johnson) and Ollie (Sean Michael Verey) envision a much rosier future in wickedly funny Philip Ridley play (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Staging is always unusual in Ridley’s plays, and Radiant Vermin is no different. In the New Group’s 2015 revival of Mercury Fur at the Signature, the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre was turned into a postapocalyptic urban battleground. In the fierce 2012 love story Tender Napalm at 59E59, the action took place in a narrow space between the two rows of audience members on either side. And the back-to-back one-person shows Tonight with Donny Stixx and Dark Vanilla Jungle at HERE this past winter featured a cagelike area that entrapped the main characters. William Reynolds’s set for Radiant Vermin is a spare, almost blindingly white makeshift floor and backdrop, a little slice of heaven, with no props; three fluorescent lights hang from above, illuminating the sharp colors of the costumes, Jill in yellow, Ollie in blue, and Miss Dee, of course, in red. David Mercatali, who has directed six Ridley world premieres, keeps it as basic as possible as Jill and Ollie tell their crazy story directly to the audience. Johnson (EastEnders, Nightshift) and Verey (Tonight with Donny Stixx, Moonfleece), who starred together in Chris Reddy’s BBC series Pramface, playing teenagers who are going to have a baby, share a delightful familiarity with each other that is infectious, bringing the fabulous absurdities of Jill and Ollie’s situation down to earth, making it all natural and believable. And Baker (Mercury Fur, Vincent River) is a steadying force as the cool and calm Miss Dee, who is fully prepared for any and all eventualities. Ridley, who is also a children’s book writer, filmmaker, poet, and visual artist, was inspired to write the play after moving from his longtime home in Bethnal Green, which led to his questioning rampant consumerism and the housing crisis. As Jill and Ollie sing in the play, “Make it bigger / make it brighter / make it faster / make it louder / make it stand out in the crowdier / for the world to adore / and when you’ve done all that — / oh, hell, I’ll still want more. / Hell, I still want more.” Part of the annual Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59, which also includes Alan Ayckbourn’s Confusions and Hero’s Welcome, Radiant Vermin is another thrilling triumph from one of England’s most talented voices.

GERHARD RICHTER: PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, “941-1 Abstraktes Bild,” oil on canvas, 2015 (photo courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery)

Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through June 25, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-977-7160
www.mariangoodman.com
www.gerhard-richter.com

In 1985, Gerhard Richter wrote, “When I paint an abstract picture (the problem is very much the same in other cases), I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings — like that of a person who possesses a given set of tools, materials and abilities and has the urgent desire to build something useful which is not allowed to be a house or a chair or anything else that has a name; who therefore hacks away in the vague hope that by working in a proper, professional way he will ultimately turn out something proper and meaningful.” Well, the German artist has turned out something proper and meaningful yet again, reinventing painting for the umpteenth time in his latest stirring cycle, 2014-15’s “Abstraktes Bild,” twenty spectacular examples of which are on view at Marian Goodman Gallery through June 25. Comprising ten large-scale oil-on-canvas works and ten smaller pieces (on canvas, wood, or aluminum mounted on wood), the series is utterly breathtaking, a deluge of color and abstract form that nearly jumps out of each work and envelops you with its physicality. Richter, who turned eighty-four earlier this year, built up layers of paint on each canvas, letting them dry and scratching and scraping at them until arriving at the finished work. Since 2010, Richter, who was profiled in the excellent 2011 documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, has been focusing on “initiatives directed towards recasting painting,” Dieter Schwarz explains in the catalog, “in various ways, in order to return to it in the end.” Don’t rush through these paintings; instead, take your time and inhale their supreme beauty. The exhibition also includes five of Richter’s lacquer-behind-glass Aladin pieces; fourteen photographs that Richter partially painted over, melding the real and the surreal, fact and fiction in primarily outdoor scenes; and forty pencil drawings lined up at eye level across the rear space, works that Schwarz writes are “not preparatory studies for paintings but rather a kind of finale, which can be understood in relation with the introduction, crescendo, development, and conclusion of the painting sequence.” And what a sequence it is.