Brothers Darren (Jack DiFalco) and Elliot (Zane Pais) are caught up in some shady dealings in Philip Ridley’s MERCURY FUR (photo by Monique Carboni)
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 27, $25-$75
www.thenewgroup.org
www.signaturetheatre.org
British playwright Philip Ridley — who also writes children’s books, pens screenplays, song lyrics, and poetry, directs films, is an experienced photographer, and has staged multimedia installations and performance art projects — has a special relationship with his audience. In Tender Napalm, which enjoyed a limited run at 59E59 in 2012, the audience sat in two rows across a narrow, horizontal space between which two actors shared their dreams and fantasies in abstract soliloquies. If a patron had to use the rest room (there was no intermission), he or she would have to walk right through the action, and would not be allowed back in. There’s a similar conceit in Mercury Fur, Ridley’s confrontational 2005 work being revived by the New Group at the Signature’s Linney theater, which has been transformed by Derek McLane into a dilapidated room in an abandoned New York City housing project, strewn with debris, the windows boarded up. On two facing sides, the audience sits in folding chairs, ratty couches, or decaying love seats; on the other two sides, people sit high atop walls that offer occasionally limited views of what is happening below. Once again, there is no intermission, so getting up to use the facilities would be rather noticeable, and reentry is only at the discretion of management. Then again, Mercury Fur has been known to cause audience members to leave and not want to come back; in fact, Ridley’s publisher rejected it, refusing to release a printed edition. (Ridley defiantly took the play, and his backlist, to a different company.) Which is all rather beside the point, as the two-hour Mercury Fur is a bold, engrossing work that is not afraid to challenge audiences as it digs deeply into the dark part of the soul, revealing the lengths to which humans will go when faced with imminent disaster. As the David Leavitt epigraph in the published play states, “Sometimes brutality is the only antidote to sorrow.”
Things don’t go so well at a bizarre party in the New Group revival of MERCURY FUR (photo by Monique Carboni)
As the play opens, nineteen-year-old Elliot (Zane Pais) and his younger brother, sixteen-year-old Darren (Jack DiFalco), are cleaning up a ramshackle apartment, preparing it for a special party. Elliot is by far the stronger of the two, telling his not-too-swift sibling, “You know what you’re like? A fucking anvil round my neck. The lifeboat’s sinking and I’m bailing it out like a good egg but I’ve got this fucking anvil getting heavier and heavier dragging the whole thing down.” The brothers, who soon touch each other’s hearts in a sweetly innocent moment, are working for Spinx (Sea McHale), a dangerous tough guy who throws parties for wealthy people in which they can do any degraded thing they want, for a price. Afterward, the entire building will be burned down, leaving no evidence of the depravity that occurred there. In this case, with WWIII on the horizon, a Wall Streeter called Party Guest (Peter Mark Kendall) has very specific, and deviant, plans for the ten-year-old Party Piece (Bradley Fong), involving gold lamé, Elvis Presley style. Also on hand for the festivities are Lola (Paul Iacono), a scantily clad transgender makeup artist; Spinx’s date, the Duchess (Emily Cass McDonnell), who is brought along unexpectedly, complicating things for Elliot, who sells hallucinogenic butterflies, and Darren, who likes to eat those colorful treats; and Naz (Tony Revolori), a fifteen-year-old who is squatting in the building and wants to join in the fun, thinking it’s going to be a regular party. Oh, how wrong he is.
New Group artistic director Scott Elliott (Sticks and Bones, Hurlyburly) directs this Off-Broadway premiere with pre/post-apocalyptic punk flair, keeping the aggression level high while maintaining an intoxicating yet uncomfortable intimacy. You can’t look away, even when you know what’s going to happen, even though most of the ultraviolence takes place offstage. The play includes elements of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, J. G. Ballard and Tennessee Williams, so you never know which direction it will turn. The brave, talented cast — which features several actors with little or no professional stage experience, including Revolori, who recently won accolades for his portrayal of Zero the lobby boy in Wes Anderson’s Oscar-nominated The Grand Budapest Hotel — holds nothing back as events spin out of control and an overwhelming sense of doom dominates the proceedings. The characters live in a frightening world, one that is even more terrifying because it doesn’t feel that much removed from our current situation, as if all of this is waiting for us, just around the corner. With Mercury Fur, the New Group, which staged Ridley’s The Fastest Clock in the Universe in 1998, takes a good look at the future, and it is not a happy prospect.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice, completed shortly before his death in 1986 of cancer at the age of fifty-four, serves as a glorious microcosm of his career, exploring art, faith, ritual, devotion, and humanity in uniquely cinematic ways. Made in Sweden, the film has many Bergmanesque qualities: Bergman’s longtime cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, shot the film; the production designer is Anna Asp, who won an Oscar for her work on Fanny and Alexander; Bergman’s son Daniel served as a camera assistant; and the star is Erland Josephson, who appeared in ten Bergman films as well as Tarkovsky’s previous feature, the Italy-set Nostalghia. Josephson plays Alexander, a retired professor and former actor living in the country with his wife, the cold Adelaide (Susan Fleetwood), his stepdaughter, Marta (Filippa Franzén), and young son, Little Man (Tommy Kjellqvist), who cannot speak after a recent throat operation. It is Alexander’s birthday, and the family doctor, Victor (Sven Wollter), has come to visit, along with the odd local postman, Otto (Allan Edwall), who explains, “I collect incidents. Things that are unexplainable but true.” Also on hand are the two maids, Maria (Guðrún Gísladóttir), who Otto believes is a witch, and Julia (Valérie Mairesse). Alexander states early on that he has no relationship with God, but when a nuclear holocaust threatens, he suddenly gets down on the floor and prays, offering to sacrifice whatever it takes in order for him to survive, leading to a chaotic conclusion that is part slapstick, part utter desperation. 
F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton comes barreling out of the gates with all the rage and fury of the 1988 title track, which kicks off with Dr. Dre declaring, “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge.” The energetic film follows the rise and fall, or creation and dissolution, of N.W.A, the seminal south L.A. hip-hop group that changed music forever. In the late 1980s, Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), MC Ren (Aldis Hodge), and DJ Yella (Neil Brown Jr.) formed a rap group that sought to capture the sound and feel of what was happening on the streets of Compton, from drugs and gangs to racist cops and poverty. They were a smash hit, particularly their controversial song “Fuck Tha Police,” which set up confrontations with authorities as the band hit the road on a nationwide tour. But when Cube and Dre start questioning where all the money is going — Eazy-E and manager Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) seem to be doing a lot better than the rest of them — everything they have built up threatens to unravel. And once Suge Knight (R. Marcus Taylor) enters the picture, the violence level increases, and things start getting even more out of control.
Czech master Jan Švankmajer’s debut feature-length film is a unique and unusual trip inside Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But this being Švankmajer, who began making creepy and fun stop-motion animated shorts in 1964, this is not a traditional telling. “Alice thought to herself, Now you will see a film made for children — perhaps,” Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) says at the beginning. “But — I nearly forgot — you must close your eyes. Otherwise, you won’t see anything.” Sitting on the bank of a river, Alice tries to look at the book being read by her older sister (the figure is possibly a doll; the audience never sees the head), but Alice gets slapped, so she soon creates her own story in her head, as a taxidermied white rabbit comes alive and she follows it into a desk drawer and enters a weird, fantastical land where she alternates between being a regular-sized girl, a giantess, and a small doll. She encounters Carroll’s Mad Hatter, the beheading-crazed queen, a live piglet, and his other oddball creatures as she keeps finding keys that lead her into stranger and stranger places. She never smiles as her curiosity grows, very much a child with natural fears about what awaits her in the future. Alice gives different voices to all the characters as she narrates the tale, with all the lines identifying the speaker (“said the white rabbit,” “cried out the Mad Hatter and the March Hare”) accompanied by an extreme and disconcerting close-up of Alice’s mouth saying the words. Alice has constructed a dark world in her imagination, one that is not nearly as playful as the one created by Carroll. Švankmajer’s (Faust, Little Otik) use of dolls, puppets, and bizarre sets is impressively peculiar as the story takes grotesque twists and turns that are certainly not for younger children. Alice is screening August 19 as part of the Socrates Sculpture Park Outdoor Cinema series and will be preceded by a live performance by Brooklyn electronics duo Xeno and Oaklander, and Eastern European food will be available from Bear; the summer festival concludes August 26 with Joann Sfar’s Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. And be sure to get there early to check out the 
