Brittane Rowe, Ashton Muñiz, Rachel Lin, and the rest of the Bats perform with the audience in TAKE CARE at the Flea Theater (photo by Bjorn Bolinder)
The Flea Theater
41 White St. between Broadway & Church St.
Thursday – Sunday through January 25, $15-$35
866-811-4111
www.theflea.org
If edgy participatory theater is your thing, especially with a distinctly controversial political bent, then Take Care is the show for you. The world premiere by the Bats, the Flea Theater’s resident company of young actors, is an immersive production that essentially begins the moment you enter the building on White St. in TriBeCa. You will be led downstairs to the basement one at a time by a Bat to a folding chair, where you decide how much you want to participate – featured participants will be given solo responsibilities, group participants will always be accompanied by at least one other participant, and voyeurs will mostly stay in the background. For nearly fifty minutes, the Bats use the central motif of hurricane destruction to explore climate change and racism in contemporary America, interacting with audience members who might shout a racist slur, get doused by a hose, or share a personal story. Each participant receives a unique series of precisely timed instructions, and everyone has enough time to prepare for their involvement. (Several monitors around the room display a running clock, in addition to various related videos.) “Everything you do tonight is perfect and absolutely right,” Rebeca Rad assures the crowd near the start. “If you mess up, it’s right. If you’re late, it’s right. If you laugh or cry or sit down early, it’s the absolutely right thing to do.”
Written by Elastic City’s Todd Shalom and Niegel Smith and directed by Smith, the Flea’s new artistic director, Take Care is a vibrant, thought-provoking, and fun show, even if the links between hurricanes, global warming, segregation, civil rights, and individual identity are often quite a stretch. The eager, energetic cast, which consists of Tommy “Tsunami” Bernardi, Maki Borden, Rachel Lin, Ashton Muñiz, Derek Christopher Murphy, Rad Pereira, Brittane Rowe, Isabella Sazak, Ryan Stinnett, and Catherine Woodard, does an excellent job of keeping things moving (along with choreographer and understudy Ethan Hardy) and making sure the participants are kept busy, even though audience members might at times find themselves outside their comfort zones, which of course is part of the point. I asked to be a featured participant, and I ended up with a scary responsibility that had me agonizing for forty minutes and fifty seconds (it was scheduled for 40:50), as it sets in motion events that result in a rather potent open discussion. No matter which participant level you choose, Take Care will have you looking deep inside, facing some harsh realities about yourself as well as where America is as a country today. Smith calls the show “a perfect storm to expose the ways we take care of and neglect one another,” and it is indeed very much about both the individual and the collective and how we consider our fellow human beings. Each performance is significantly different, as it changes depending on the audience. It also has a major effect on the Bats themselves; the night we went, one of the actors broke down in tears at the conclusion, moved by the power of what had just happened. It’s not for everyone, but adventurous theatergoers should not hesitate to become part of what is going on in the Flea’s basement Thursday through Sunday nights through January 25.
Following its prestigious midnight film screening at Cannes this past May, Hong Won-chan’s debut feature, Office, was the opening-night selection of the 2015 New York Korean Film Festival in November at the Museum of the Moving Image. If you missed it then, you have another chance to see it in Queens on January 3, as it is one of eight films that comprise the museum’s “Curators’ Choice” series, its annual survey of some of the best films of the year. In the contemporary thriller, written by Choi Yun-jin (Steel Cold Winter), Seoul salaryman Kim Byung-Guk (Bae Seong-woo) calmly comes home from work one night and butchers his family with a hammer. The next morning, Detective Jong-hoon (Park Sung-woong) arrives at the office with plenty of questions, but no one has much to say about the killer, who was part of sales team #2 — although they are clearly hiding something. Only frazzled, insecure, wide-eyed intern Lee Mirae (Ko Ah-sung), who had a friendly relationship with Kim, wants to tell the truth, but she keeps her mouth shut, harassed by her boss (Ryu Hyun-kyung) and director Kim (Kim Eui-sung). When it is discovered that the murderer returned to the office after committing his vicious crime and may still be in the building, the tension ramps up, as does the body count. 
Throughout the year, MoMA shows “Modern Matinees” at 1:30 on many weekday afternoons, treating visitors with an afternoon to spare to some amazing “deep cuts” from its vast cinema library. “Modern Matinees: The Film Library Grows” is its current series, celebrating the eightieth anniversary of the Department of Film and honoring the legacy of founding curator Iris Barry. It concludes December 31 with William A. Wellman’s classic gangster picture, The Public Enemy. But as a treat for those who can’t get away for a weekday afternoon screening, MoMA is now bringing back some of its favorites in “Modern ‘Matinees’: Fashionably Late,” presenting the films at more convenient times, including on holiday and weekend afternoons and weekday evenings. “Fashionably Late” begins January 1 at 4:00 with Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 silent black-and-white Underworld, which is generally considered the first modern gangster picture and was a major influence on such films as The Public Enemy and Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar, the latter scheduled for January 1 at 7:00. Sternberg’s fourth film, Underworld is set in “a great city in the dead of night. . . . streets lonely, moon-flooded. . . . buildings empty as the cliff-dwellings of a forgotten age.” The opening shot is of a superimposed clock, emphasizing that it is two o’clock in the morning, a time when most are tucked safely in their bed at home. But not Bull Weed (George Bancroft), who has just pulled off a bank heist, only to be spotted by Rolls Royce (Clive Brook), a down-on-his-luck drunken bum. At Bull’s hangout, the Dreamland Café, his girl, Feathers (Evelyn Brent), enters, and a single strand from her extravagant getup floats down, the camera following it until it is grabbed by Rolls Royce, who is sweeping the floor. Bull’s main rival, Buck Mulligan (Fred Kohler), tries to get the attention of Feathers, upsetting his own moll, Meg (Helen Lynch). Walking out of the nightclub, Bull is greeted by an electronic billboard proclaiming, “The City Is Yours.” (Howard Hawks goes one better in his seminal 1932 film, Scarface, in which the title character, Antonio “Tony” Camonte, played by Paul Muni, is encouraged by an electronic sign that tells him, “The World Is Yours.”) Laughing, Bull playfully asks Feathers, “What’ll you have?” She scoffs at him, then Rolls Royce, a former lawyer, says, “Attila, the Hun, at the gates of Rome.” To which Bull replies, “Who’s Attila? The leader of some wop gang?” The stage has been set for the rest of the film, built around jealousy and envy as both Buck and Rolls Royce, who Bull decides to rehabilitate, fall hard for Feathers, but Bull is not about to just sit back and take it. 
