twi-ny recommended events

FOOL FOR LOVE

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 13, $75-$150
foolforlovebroadway.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

In the published script for Fool for Love, Sam Shepard explains, “This play is to be performed relentlessly, without a break.” And as with many of Shepard’s plays, it is indeed relentless. In a seedy motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert, Eddie (Sam Rockwell), a former rodeo cowboy, reclines in a shaky chair against the back wall, while May (Nina Arianda), a tall blonde, is hunched statue-like on the end of the bed, her face covered by her long hair, looking toward the ground. At the front of the stage near the corner, an older man (Gordon Joseph Weiss) sits back in a sturdy chair, hands grasping the armrests like the slick hipster from the Maxell commercials. The Old Man and May remain stock-still as Eddie begins talking and makes his way over to May, showing a slight limp. “I’m not goin’ anywhere. See? I’m right here. I’m not gone,” he tells her, and she eventually reaches out and grabs his leg, holding on for dear life. That sequence sets the stage for this seventy-five-minute one-act play about two people who both attract and repel each other, for reasons that become more clear with a surprise revelation about halfway through. May and Eddie have known each other since high school, and they have been on-and-off lovers ever since. “You’re just guilty. Gutless and guilty,” she says shortly before promising to kill both Eddie and the Countess, a woman he might be seeing. “I’m gonna torture her first, though. Not you. I’m just gonna let you have it. Probably in the midst of a kiss. Right when you think everything’s been healed up. Right in the moment when you’re sure you’ve got me buffaloed. That’s when you’ll die.” The ever-confident Eddie is sure that May will ultimately choose to come away with him, despite May’s claims that she has started a new life, dating a normal man, Martin (Tom Pelphrey). Every once in a while, the Old Man chimes in briefly, like a Greek chorus all by himself. “I wanna show you somethin’. Somethin’ real, okay? Somethin’ actual,” he says to Eddie, referring to a nonexistent picture on the wall. A moment later, after the Old Man has settled back in his chair, once again soundless and immobile, May tells Eddie how much she can’t stand him. “No matter how much I’d like not to hate you, I hate you even more. It grows. I can’t even see you now. All I can see is a picture of you. You and her.” We only see what we want to see, remember what we want to remember, mixing fiction and reality in our memories, much like theater itself. For Eddie and May, there’s one thing they can never forget. “You know we’re connected, May,” Eddie says. “We’ll always be connected. That was decided a long time ago.” To Shepard, destiny is a bitch.

Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Fool for Love is part of the series of plays, including the Family Trilogy, that Shepard wrote between 1978 and 1985, consisting of Curse of the Starving Class, Pulitzer winner Buried Child, Pulitzer nominee True West, and A Lie of the Mind. Partly inspired by his relationship with Jessica Lange, Fool for Love is a treat for actors; previous versions have featured such Eddie-May pairings as Ed Harris and Kathy Baker, Ian Charleson and Julie Walters, Martin Henderson and Juliette Lewis, Bruce Willis and Denise Simone, and, in the 1985 Robert Altman film, Shepard and Kim Basinger (with Harry Dean Stanton as the Old Man and Randy Quaid as Martin). The original 1983 production was directed by Shepard, who includes extremely specific stage cues in his script. For the play’s Broadway debut, Daniel Aukin (Bad Jews, 4,000 Miles) takes the reins. Tony winner Arianda (Venus in Fur, Born Yesterday) and Rockwell (A Behanding in Spokane, Moon) have a fiery energy together, but their back-and-forth rapport gets repetitive, and you can feel the hands of Shepard (and Aukin) manipulating your emotions too much, especially when Rockwell puts his lasso to interesting use, bringing a little S&M into the proceedings. The story bounces between the physical and the metaphysical, occasionally getting caught within both at the same time. Pelphrey (Guiding Light, As the World Turns) plays Martin with just the right amount of cluelessness, and Weiss is terrifically perverse as the Old Man; while the rest of the action is going on, you can’t help but cast glances over at him sitting in the darkness. Shepard is a man’s man, and Fool for Love is very much a masculine tale; May might get in her digs, but Eddie is really calling the shots as he cleans his rifle and swigs tequila straight from the bottle. Love ain’t easy, and destiny is a bitch, Shepard is telling us. Damn straight.

TICKET ALERT: AN EVENING WITH JOEL SHAPIRO

Sculptor Joel Shapiro will be at the National Academy on November 4 to discuss the evolution of his work

Who: Joel Shapiro
What: An Evening with Joel Shapiro
Where: Assembly Hall, National Academy Museum & School, 1083 Fifth Ave. at 5 East 89th St., 212-369-4880
When: Wednesday, November 4, free with advance RSVP, 6:00
Why: National Academician and sculptor supreme Joel Shapiro will be at the National Academy on November 4, discussing the evolution of his extensive and impressive career, “focusing on the development of form, its possible meaning, and the relationship between sculpture and drawing to the plane.” The New York native is represented in the current “On the Square Part II” group show at Pace on East Fifty-Seventh St., and his work can also be found in museums, galleries, lobbies, and public spaces around the world, including the Sony Building at 550 Madison Ave. “I was always interested in art, but I didn’t pursue it. I mean, I had this sort of idea that I was supposed to become a physician,” Shapiro told Lewis Kachur in a 1988 interview for the Archives of American Art Oral History Program. “It was tough to come to the realization that in fact what I really was good at, and what interested me, and what satisfied me, was doing art work. That came much later.” (Oral history interview with Joel Shapiro, 1988 July 15 – December 14, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.) The talk will be followed by a reception in the Sonia Gechtoff Gallery.

THE GIN GAME

James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson reunite onstage in lovely Broadway revival of THE GIN GAME (photo by Joan Marcus)

Golden Theatre
252 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 10, $57 – $141
thegingamebroadway.com

Life is like a game of cards in D. L. Coburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Gin Game, back at its original Broadway home, the Golden Theatre, in a lovely revival starring James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson. But it’s also a whole lot more complicated than that. Weller Martin (Jones) and Fonsia Dorsey (Tyson) have both recently moved into a nursing home to live out their final years. “Is there something wrong with you — if you don’t mind my asking,” Fonsia says. “Oh my, I should say so,” Weller replies. “I have one of the most advanced cases of old age in the history of medical science. The mortality rate’s incredible.” Over numerous games of gin on the ramshackle back porch, Weller, who fancies himself a card sharp, and Fonsia, who claims to not have played in a long time, slowly and carefully reveal details about their lives and their families, none of whom come to visit them. They are two old, lonely people brought together by circumstance; as they play gin, the other residents are inside, taking advantage of more of what the nursing home has to offer. “I don’t understand all this ‘entertainment,’” Weller says. “I’m talking about this constant need to entertain us. Sometimes I get the idea that they feel like if they don’t have a choir up there, or if they don’t have a goddamn magician up there doing tricks or something, then we’re all going to drop dead right in front of their eyes. En masse.” Weller is a big, blustery man whose cynicism and deep-seated anger seep into his card playing, especially when he continues losing games to the God-fearing, slim, and demure Fonsia, who doesn’t take kindly to his language. “You know, I never heard my father say a curse word in his life,” she explains, to which Weller responds, “Obviously you never played gin with him.”

Weller Martin (James Earl Jones) and Fonsia Dorsey (Cicely Tyson) play cards as a metaphor for life in THE GIN GAME (photo by Joan Marcus)

Coburn’s first play, The Gin Game sums up the whole of two people’s lives in clever, if at times sentimental and overly metaphorical, ways, while avoiding any easy, pat answers. At one point, Weller is not willing to accept that Fonsia’s success is just beginner’s luck. “I didn’t realize there was that much strategy to it,” she says. “There most certainly is. Anyone who tells you that gin is nothing but luck doesn’t know what the game is all about,” he says, referring to life as well. Riccardo Hernandez’s set is littered with broken-down sinks and refrigerators, old walkers and wheelchairs, but Weller and Fonsia are not ready for the garbage heap quite yet. Director Leonard Foglia (On Golden Pond, Master Class) sure-handedly makes a play that is mostly made up of games of cards mesmerizing and exciting, letting his stars do their stuff. (To see the cheat sheet Coburn created so the performers can keep track of the games, go here.) The two actors, who first worked together on Broadway nearly fifty years ago, in Roscoe Lee Browne’s 1966 show A Hand Is on the Gate, are sensational. The eighty-four-year-old Jones (You Can’t Take It with You, Gore Vidal’s The Best Man), who has won two Tonys, three Emmys, a Grammy, and a lifetime achievement Oscar, adds a complex sadness to Weller’s pomposity, his deep, mellifluous voice raising and lowering like a choreographed dance, while the ninety-year-old Tyson (The Trip to Bountiful, Sounder), who has won a Tony and three Emmys along with an Oscar nomination, is utterly charming and delightful as Fonsia, who turns out to be much stronger than she first appears. Both characters, despite their age, do some growing up during the course of the two-hour play, which has been previously performed by such pairs as Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, E. G. Marshall and Maureen Stapleton, and Charles Durning and Julie Harris and won Tonys in 1977 for Best Play and in 1997 for Best Revival. (There is also a 2003 television adaptation starring Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore.) The night I saw the show, both Jones and Tyson each had a moment when they accidentally dropped something. As they bent down to pick the items up, you could feel a tension build in the audience, wondering whether the actors would be able to do so without a problem. We should have had no such fears; it appears that there’s almost nothing this dynamic duo can’t accomplish.

HANNA LIDEN: EVERYTHING

Hanna Liden’s bagel sculptures pay tribute to a New York City icon (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Hudson River Park at Christopher St.
Through October 20
www.artproductionfund.org
everything slideshow

In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten wrote, “If you have never tasted a bagel, I feel sorry for you.” I understand that completely. I spent countless Sunday mornings as a child going out with my father to pick up lox, whitefish, sable, cream cheese, and a bag of hot, steaming bagels, their aroma lofting through the car as we drove back home, where the rest of the family awaited our arrival with great anticipation. Swedish-born, New York City-based artist Hanna Liden pays tribute to the bagel and her adopted home with the sculptural installation “Everything,” which continues in Hudson River Park through October 20. (The bagels in Ruth Wittenberg Plaza were taken down September 30.) Liden’s bagels are much bigger and harder than the standard hand-rolled, water-boiled doughy delights, which date back to early-seventeenth-century Poland, but that doesn’t make them any less visually appetizing. Carved out of styrofoam and then covered with polyurethane, the bagels are stacked three, four, and five high, except for one that sits alone under a tree, making a unique kind of bench. Some have black and brown areas where they have been toasted — “a romantic tribute to the darkness and grime, which are essential and beautiful characteristics of our city,” Liden notes — and some have poppy or sesame seeds. One of the stacks forms a giant vase, with a tulip sticking out of the top, as Liden, who has previously made vases out of such objects as a takeaway coffee cup, a boot, and a Yankees helmet, has fun with the homophone “flour-flower” while also evoking the work of Claes Oldenburg. To Liden, the bagel also represents the “eternal cycle of city life” and is something that is uniquely New York; bagels don’t taste the same anywhere else in the world.

CONSEQUENCES: ALPHAVILLE

Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) seeks help from Natasha Vonbraun (Anna Karina) in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterful ALPHAVILLE

ALPHAVILLE: A STRANGE ADVENTURE OF LEMMY CAUTION (ALPHAVILLE: UNE ÉTRANGE AVENTURE DE LEMMY CAUTION) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, October 16, $10, 9:30
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

“Sometimes, reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world,” a growly, disembodied, mechanical-like voice says at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s futuristic sci-fi noir thriller, Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution. Godard’s 1965 black-and-white masterpiece takes place in an unidentified time period in a dark, unadorned, special-effects-free Paris. A tough-as-nails man in hat and trench coat named Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) has arrived in Alphaville from the Outlands, claiming to be journalist Ivan Johnson, on assignment from the Figaro-Pravda newspaper. But his real mission is to first find fellow agent Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), then capture or kill Alphaville leader and death-ray inventor Professor Vonbraun (Howard Vernon), the former Leonard Nosferatu. A Guadalcanal veteran who drives a Ford Galaxie, Caution — a character Constantine played in a series of films based on the novels of Peter Cheyney, including This Man Is Dangerous, Dames Get Along, and Your Turn, Darling — is a no-nonsense guy who takes nothing for granted. “All things weird are normal in this whore of cities,” he tells a blond seductress third class, who apparently comes with his hotel room. Documenting everything he sees with an Instamatic flash camera, Caution (perhaps a stand-in for Godard himself?) is soon visited by Natasha Vonbraun (Anna Karina), the professor’s daughter, setting off on an Orwellian journey through a grim city where poetry and emotion, and such words as “love,” “why,” and “conscience,” are banned in favor of “because” and “Silence. Logic. Security. Prudence,” where the hotel Bible is actually an ever-changing dictionary and enemies of the state are killed in swimming pools and pulled out by clones of Esther Williams, all overseen by a computer known as Alpha 60 (whose text, based on writings by Jorge Luis Borges, is eerily spoken by a man without a larynx, using a mechanized voice box).

Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff) attempts to shed light on a grim situation in intellectual sci-fi film noir

Meanwhile, Caution travels everywhere with his paperback copy of Paul Éluard’s Capital of Pain, which includes such short poems as “To Be Caught in the Trap,” “In the Cylinder of Tribulations,” and “The Big Uninhabitable House.” Paul Misraki’s relentless noir score fits right in with Raoul Coutard’s bleakly beautiful cinematography, which often shows Caution through glass doors and windows and in enclosed spaces. Godard infuses Alphaville with cinematic flourishes, inside jokes, political statements, and intellectual references, directly and indirectly evoking Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin, Chris Marker’s La Jetée, American cartoons (a pair of white-coated professors who announce a memory problem with 183 Omega Minus are named Eckel and Jeckel, played by Cahiers du cinema’s Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean-André Fieschi), and even his own films, with Jean-Pierre Léaud making a very brief cameo as a waiter. But one of the myriad pleasures of Alphaville — which won the Golden Bear at Berlin and at one time had the working title Tarzan vs. IBM — is that it can be enjoyed on many different levels, as dystopian warning, fascist parable, cinema about cinema, individual vs. the state thriller, or, quite simply, classic French noir. Recently digitally restored with a new translation and subtitles by Lenny Borger and Cynthia Schoch, Alphaville is screening October 16 in the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Consequences” and will be introduced by Buddhist studies professor Christopher Kelley. “All is linked, all is consequence,” a scientist tells Caution in the film. The series is being held in conjunction with “Karma: Cause, Effect and the Illusion of Fate,” which continues through December 30 with conversations (David Eagleman + Whoopi Goldberg, Noah Hutton + Jonathan Demme, Gary Indiana + Tracey Emin, Ian Somerhalder + Carol Anne Clayson) and such other karma-related films as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Ken Russell’s Altered States, Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, and Sherwood Hu’s Prince of the Himalayas.

SPRING AWAKENING

Brooks Atkinson Theatre
256 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 24, $49-$149
877-250-2929
www.springawakeningthemusical.com
www.deafwest.org

America would be in much better shape if every member of Congress went to see Deaf West Theatre’s thrilling revival of Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s Spring Awakening. The musical, which won eight Tony Awards in its initial 2006 Broadway run, deals with homosexuality, guns, teen pregnancy, child abuse, suicide, premarital sex, disabilities, masturbation, education, religion, the arts, and more. At its heart, it’s a story about the eternal generation gap, focusing on the miscommunication between adults and children, which is as critical today as it was in 1891, when German author Frank Wedekind wrote the original play on which it’s based. But this time around, director Michael Arden and choreographer Spencer Liff have made the mediocre songs and Shakespeare-does-YA story secondary to a spectacular staging that will take your breath away over and over again. Arden has paired each deaf member of the cast with a hearing actor to speak or sing their lines; both performers use sign language as well, their bodies moving in a very different, very beautiful kind of dance. Sometimes the dual performers are on opposite sides of the stage, and sometimes they follow each other around, as if linked together by an invisible chain. Lines that are not vocalized or signed are projected onto a blackboard or the back wall; cues for the deaf actors consist of physical touches from their hearing doppelganger, musical vibrations, multicolored lighting, offstage closed-captioned monitors, and the use of props, such as the opening of a letter. It all works as seamlessly as in the most heavily choreographed musical, so much so you’re likely to not even realize there’s not much actual dancing in the show, which is somewhat different from Deaf West’s previous Broadway production, 2003’s Big River.

The show takes place in 1891 Germany, a time when deaf people were discriminated against and sign language was banned in classrooms. Sandra Mae Frank stars as Wendla Bergmann, an adolescent girl who asks her mother, Frau Bergmann (Camryn Manheim), how babies are made. Frau Bergmann’s fear of telling her daughter the truth sets everything in motion, as parents and teachers battle their children and students, the lack of communication between the young and old serving as the major theme of the play. The bright and charming Melchior Gabor (Austin P. McKenzie) challenges his teacher, Herr Sonnenstich (Patrick Page), over the concept of “critical commentary on textual conjecture,” Moritz Stiefel (Daniel D. Durant) has sexual dreams he doesn’t understand, the geeky Georg (Alex Wyse) has the hots for his piano teacher, and the girls don’t want what happened to the bruised and battered Ilse (Krysta Rodriguez) to happen to Martha (Treshelle Edmond) and cause her to run away too. “When I have children, I’ll let them be free. And they’ll grow strong and tall,” Anna — portrayed by Ali Stroker, the first wheelchair-bound actor to ever play a part on Broadway, even more impressive because it’s a role that doesn’t call for it — says, to which Thea (Amelia Hensley) responds, “Free? But how will we know what to do if our parents don’t tell us?” Only Frau Gabor (Marlee Matlin), Melchior’s mother, is willing to give the kids the freedom to grow. “Surely, you boys are now of an age to decide for yourselves what is good for you and what is not,” she tells her son and Moritz. But Melchior makes their dire situation clear when leading everyone in the showstopper, “Totally Fucked,” declaring, “There’s a moment you know you’re fucked / Not an inch more room to self-destruct.”

The set is like an industrial warehouse, with several metal staircases leading to a second level where the adults often look down on the children, watching them in shame and embarrassment. The impeccable casting features Emmy winner Manheim, who studied sign language in college and used the skill on The Practice; Oscar winner Matlin (Children of a Lesser God), the grand dame of deaf actors, in her Broadway debut; and Page (Casa Valentina, Cyrano de Bergerac), whose deep, booming voice echoes throughout the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, reminding everyone of the power, and bombastic nature, of vocalized speech. As the show opens, Frank, a short brunette, looks into a glassless mirror; on the other side is Katie Boeck, a tall blonde with a guitar, who will follow Frank around for the rest of the show as they portray Wendla as a team, Boeck supplying the voice of the character while also playing music. Their relationship is a beauty to behold, as if every one of us, whether we’re deaf or hearing, has two parts that form our own whole. In a later scene, a deaf actor’s voice partner becomes more than just a talking, singing shadow, making for an unforgettable, magical moment that is what live theater is all about. Wedekind’s stories work amazingly well with music; in addition to Spring Awakening, German composer Alban Berg turned his Lulu plays, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, into the opera Lulu, which is being performed at the Met in November and December in a new production directed by South African multimedia artist William Kentridge. So now, how do we get Congress to see Spring Awakening?

HANK WILLIS THOMAS: THE TRUTH IS I SEE YOU

Hank Willis Thomas installation in MetroTech Commons explores different aspects of truth around the world (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MetroTech Commons, Brooklyn
The Truth Booth: Thursday, October 15, free, 12 noon – 8:00 pm
Fall Talks: The New School, Wednesday, October 21, $10, 6:30
Installation continues through June 3, 2016
publicartfund.org
the truth is i see you slideshow

Throughout his career, Brooklyn-based visual artist Hank Willis Thomas has attempted to uncover the truth while investigating race, popular culture, gender, branding, and commodification. In works such as “B®ANDED,” “Unbranded,” “What Goes without Saying,” and “All Things Being Equal . . . ,” Thomas strips away the surface of media and advertising to get to the heart of black identity in America. For his latest work, the Public Art Fund project “The Truth Is I See You,” Thomas has filled the main walkway in MetroTech Commons with twenty-two speech bubbles of varying sizes, mounted near the tops of lampposts, each a quote about truth, in English on one side and in a foreign language spoken in Brooklyn on the other. Each bubble is accompanied by a placard that gives the translation and pronunciation of the phrase in the second language, all of which are from a poem written together by Thomas and ©ause Collective cofounder Ryan Alexiev: “The truth is I love you / The truth is I know you /The truth is I see you / The truth is I hear you / The truth is I feel you / The truth is I respect you / The truth is I follow you / The truth is I choose you / The truth is I remember you / The truth is I remind you / The truth is I liberate you / The truth is I believe you / The truth is I am you / The truth is I understand you / The truth is I need you / The truth is I miss you / The truth is I reflect you / The truth is I accept you / The truth is I trust you / The truth is I support you / The truth is I balance you / The truth is I welcome you.”

Visitors will be able to share their own thoughts on truth on October 15 in MetroTech Commons (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Among the languages are Swahili, Italian, French, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Yiddish, Vietnamese, and Hebrew. In the center of the path is a video monitor playing “In Search of the Truth,” consisting of clips of various people finishing the statement “The truth is . . .” that they recorded in the large, inflatable “Truth Booth,” a collaboration between Thomas, Alexiev, and Jim Ricks of the ©ause Collective that has been traveling around the world, stopping in Afghanistan, Ireland, and South Africa as well as the U.S. so far. Meanwhile, across the commons, a metal tree with bare branches holds aloft a half dozen cushiony speech bubbles that spell out “The truth is I love you,” along with question marks. “The Truth Is I See You” makes a powerful statement about inclusion, referencing America’s supposed melting pot, particularly in a borough containing so many different ethnicities. On October 15 from 12 noon to 8:00, “The Truth Booth” will be in MetroTech Commons, where visitors are invited to add their own thoughts about truth. Thomas also has contributed to the Public Art Fund group show “Image Objects” in City Hall Park (through November 20); his sculpture, “Liberty,” features a purple arm spinning a basketball atop a plinth. And on October 21, Thomas will be at the New School for a Public Art Fund Talk as part of the “Public Context, Private Meaning” series. (Thomas can also be seen in Thomas Allen Harris’s 2014 documentary, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, based on the book Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present by his mother, Deborah Willis.)