Bailey Williams and Emma Horwitz open up a lot of boxes at HERE Arts Center (photo by HanJie Chow)
TWO SISTERS FIND A BOX OF LESBIAN EROTICA IN THE WOODS
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave.
Through May 3, $45 here.org
If you’re going to call your show Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, you had better live up to that amazing title. On- and offstage partners Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams do just that and more in a rollicking extravaganza about art aesthetics and sisterhood in all their varying forms.
Extended at HERE Arts Center through May 3, the coproduction from Rattlestick Theater and New Georges starts with Horwitz bopping behind a desk, deejaying on her laptop; the playlist includes MUNA’s “Number One Fan,” Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra,” and Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” which boasts, “Wanna disco? Wanna see me disco? / Let me hear you depoliticize my rhyme . . . Because I’m so bored that I’d be entertained / Even by a stupid floor, a linoleum floor, linoleum floor.”
Horwitz is surrounded by a semicircle of hundreds of carefully stacked bankers boxes with such labels as “Co-dependent Defendents” [sic], “Broken Vibrators,” “Top Chef Bottom Chef,” “Help! My Ex Has a Popular Podcast,” and “Gay Girls Who Like Gay Boys Who Also Like Gay Girls.” Over the course of the play — which runs exactly sixty-nine minutes, Williams explains with a smile — many of the boxes will be opened and explored, exposing clever, hilarious, and at times revealing plot devices.
In addition to portraying various versions of themselves, Horwitz is also an interviewer, a trucker, a doctor, a researcher, a businessman, and an executed spy/opera lover while Williams is an artist, a barback, a patient, an escort, a secretary, and a babysitter/pizza deliverer, among other characters. Across sixteen scenarios, they visit a pet shop, a diner, a black box theater, a lesbian spaceship, and the First Annual NIPPLI Conference, in which the National Institute for Paranormal Psychic Lesbian Investigations “posits that there are a number of energetic hotspots that produce hyper-dimensional gateways of electromagnetic significance. . . . They cannot — yet — transport humans. But they can — and do — transport lesbian erotica.”
The piece is inherently self-referential, fully aware that it is an experimental work taking place in a downtown venue, performed by a real-life queer couple to an ecstatic audience. Horwitz and Williams were inspired by such avant-garde theater companies as Split Britches and Five Lesbian Brothers, the woman-run erotica magazine On Our Backs, and the actual Reddit forum “We gotta talk about porn in the woods,” where people post stories of, well, finding lesbian erotica in the woods.
Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods consists of a series of wildly funny and fiendishly clever vignettes (photo by HanJie Chow)
One of the show’s leitmotifs involves a mysterious performance artist known as Valentina, who interviewer Emma and artist Bailey may or may not know, have collaborated with, or had a relationship with. When Emma says she recently received a postcard from Valentina, Bailey says, “That is so very, very Valentina . . . a woman with extremely clear boundaries between work and play. Anyway, this is all – we’re here to talk about my new piece, I think?” In describing a previous performance installation, Body Double and the Doubled Body, Bailey explains, “I am here, I am my work.”
Slyly toying with notions of clear professional and personal boundaries, Horwitz and Williams also explore the multiple meanings of “sister,” from blood siblings to chosen family members to women who are good friends supporting each other — and, as another Reddit asks, “to lesbian couples, are you often mistaken as sisters?”
When artist Bailey tells interviewer Emma that she lives with her wife in Rhinebeck, interviewer Emma responds, “Oh! I thought you were sisters!” In a postcard to Valentina, Bailey writes about their pretending to be sisters and drinking Champagne in first class aboard a steamer ship. In another vignette, Emma and Bailey play sisters both named Christina, who are in business together giving psychic readings. “A sister is your first and greatest love,” Christina Bailey says.
Serious issues concerning queer culture, sexual orientation, societal rules and regulations, and private relationships pop up, but always through a comic lens that never gets overbearing or preachy. Tara Elliott (Illiterates,Burq Off!) directs the proceedings with a gleeful immediacy that sucks the audience in from the very start. Normandy Sherwood’s set, costumes, and props (red heels, gloves, soda cans, vibrators) all add to the fun, along with Josiah Davis’s humorous lighting and Johnny Gasper’s witty sound design.
Dancing, singing, telling jokes, and sharing wildly entertaining stories, Horwitz and Williams are so charming and engaging, so welcoming and self-possessed, that you’ll just want to give them both big hugs and hang out with them more — but don’t; that will have to wait for their next show, which can’t come soon enough.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Whitney White reimagines Shakespeare tragedy in rousing Macbeth in Stride at BAM (photo by Marc J. Franklin)
MACBETH IN STRIDE
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Harvey Theater at the BAM Strong
651 Fulton St.
April 15-27, $29-$85 www.bam.org/macbeth
Whitney White’s Macbeth in Stride is an exhilarating hijacking of Shakespeare’s Scottish play, transforming it into an empowering and unrelenting Black feminist rock opera that serves as a takedown of the traditional roles assigned to women not only in the Bard’s canon but in theater and the world itself.
“Irreverence is everything,” White notes at the beginning of her multilayered, irreverent script. Best known as the award-winning director of such plays as Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,On Sugarland,soft, and Liberation, White is both the author and star of this dazzling production at BAM’s Harvey Theater. The ninety-minute show is fervently directed with plenty of winks and nods by Taibi Magar (Help,Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992) and Tyler Dobrowsky, who previously collaborated with White (and Peter Mark Kendall) on the virtual pandemic concert play Capsule.
In Macbeth in Stride, White portrays an unnamed woman who is the dazzling lead singer of a hot band and an actress playing Lady Macbeth. Holli’ Conway, Phoenix Best, and Ciara Alyse Harris are a trio of backup vocalists, the three witches, and a kind of Greek chorus; everyone interacts with the audience, starting with the sensational opening number, “If Knowledge Is Power.”
“So what’s the story?” the woman, dressed in a tight-fitting black sparkling pantsuit, asks in her speech following the song. “For me . . . tonight there is one story — one play in particular that kicked it all off / The funky little chain reaction that led someone like me / To be standing before you now / That led someone like me from where I’m from / To school and stage and work and rehearsals / And kept me up many nights / But for now let’s get back to all of you / Let’s stick with you. / What’s the story you told yourselves to get here?”
Macbeth is introduced in the next song, “Reach for It,” in which several characters sing, “So if foul is fair then fair is foul / Ambition’s not a sin at all!,” after which the woman proclaims she wants ambition and love, no matter that the witches tell her women cannot have both. She also is intent on flipping the switch on Shakespeare, since all of his “great women never seem to make it out of these plays alive!”
The man playing Macbeth (Charlie Thurston) arrives, a white accordionist clad in black leather. Learning that he is destined to be king, she realizes that she in turn would become queen and wants the power that comes with that, to be more than the secondary character Lady M is through much of the original play. She asks the audience, “Women, queer folk, and othered people out there? / What are you willing to do to get what you need? / To get what you want?” She admits that violence might be the answer.
When Macbeth tells Lady M that King Duncan will be staying the night at their castle, she advises her husband, “I’m pretty sure we’re gonna have to kill him.” He does the deed, she frames the guards, and they become king and queen. As he deals with a heavy dose of fear, suspicion, and guilt, she is determined to be more than an appendage who just gets to host dinner parties; instead, she is going to “reclaim everything.”
Whitney White and Charlie Thurston star as the doomed couple in meta-heavy Macbeth in Stride (photo by Marc J. Franklin)
Macbeth in Stride is a rousing reimagining of Shakespeare’s 1606 tragedy, a clever, passionate, and downright fun show that celebrates the freeing of women from the shackles of literature as well as the chains of real life. White’s Lady M is a symbol of changing the narrative and taking control of the story, in this case in the guise of a spectacular concert. Songs such as “Dark World,” “Doll House,” and “I for You” help place the tale in contemporary times. “You gon’ rework a four hundred year old play just for your ego?” the first witch asks White, who replies, “Yup. / Sure did! Sure did!”
Dan Soule’s set features several platforms and a diagonal walkway cutting through the middle. Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew lights the show like a concert, including vertical strips of colored lights, while Nick Kourtides’s sound balances the loud music with the less raucous dialogue. Qween Jean’s costumes are fashionably glitzy, as is Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography.
The crack band consists of music director Nygel D. Robinson on keyboards, Kenny Rosario-Pugh on guitar, Bobby Etienne on bass, and Barbara “Muzikaldunk” Duncan on drums. Conway (Six,Tina), Best (Dear Evan Hansen,Teeth), and Harris (Dear Evan Hansen,White Girl in Danger) excel as the chorus, who are worthy of their own show. Thurston (Liberation,Here There Are Blueberries) succeeds in a nearly impossible task, surrounded by strong, tenacious women.
White, who also sits at the piano for a few tunes, is right at home center stage. She might not always have the range the songs require — “Reach for It” is a bit of a reach for her — but she embodies her character with an intense grandeur that is as intoxicating as it is fierce.
Shakespeare purists will notice occasional iambic pentameter in the streamlined text, and most of the famous quotes are in there, in one form or another. However, since this is Lady M’s story, aside from Duncan, whose murder is described in some detail, there is no mention of Macduff and his family, no King Edward, no Donalbain and Malcolm, no visible ghosts, no Earl of Northumberland, no noblemen and doctors, no Birnam Wood, and only one mention of Banquo and his son.
As the end approaches, the woman wonders, “Why do they write us this way? / Why do they imagine us this way?”
White has picked up a sharp quill and stands boldly under the spotlight to write it her way. The script notes that Macbeth in Stride is the first of a four-part series; I can’t wait to see what she has in store for us next.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Bill Morrison’s Decasia concludes BAM/Triple Canopy series on holes
DECASIA (Bill Morrison, 2002)
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Thursday, April 24, 9:15
Series runs April 18-24 www.bam.org canopycanopycanopy.com
Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison’s production company is called Hypnotic Pictures, and for good reason: The Chicago-born, New York–based auteur makes mesmerizing, visually arresting works using archival found footage and eclectic soundtracks that are a treat for the eyes and ears. Made in 2002, Decasia is about nothing less than the beginning and end of cinema. The sixty-seven-minute work features clips from early silent movies that are often barely visible in the background as the film nitrate disintegrates in the foreground, black-and-white psychedelic blips, blotches, and burns dominating the screen. The eyes at first do a dance between the two distinct parts, trying to follow the action of the original works as well as the abstract shapes caused by the filmstrip’s impending death, but eventually the two meld into a single unique narrative, enhanced by a haunting, compelling score by Bang on a Can’s Michael Gordon, which begins as a minimalist soundtrack and builds slowly until it reaches a frantic conclusion. The onscreen destruction might seem random, but it is actually carefully choreographed by Morrison (The Miners’ Hymns,The Great Flood), who wrote, directed, produced, and edited the film.
The first twenty-first-century film to be added to the National Film Registry,Decasia is screening April 24 at BAM Rose Cinemas, concluding “Triple Canopy Presents: In the Hole,” the fifth collaboration between BAM and the magazine; running April 18–24, the series, guest-curated by Yasmina Price, focuses on “films about openings and absences.” Among the other works being screened are Andrew Davis’s Holes, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face, and Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng) has a thing about time in Tsai Ming-liang film
WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? (NI NA BIAN JI DIAN) (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Monday, April 21, 4:40
Series runs April 19 – May 4
212-660-0312 metrograph.com
Malaysian-born Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? is one heck of an existential hoot. When his father (Miao Tien) dies, Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), who sells watches on the street in Taipei, becomes obsessed with a series of things: a strange woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) who insists on buying Hsiao-kang’s own watch and then leaves for Paris; François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Tsai’s “all-time favorite film”); urinating in whatever is near his bed instead of going to the bathroom; and changing clocks to Paris time. Meanwhile, his mother (Lu Yi-ching) is determined to follow ridiculous rituals to bring her husband back, and the woman in Paris (Cecilia Yip) goes through a number of bizarre events as well. There is not a single camera movement in the film (except for in the 400 Blows film clips); the scenes are shot by Benoît Delhomme in long takes, often lingering before and after any action — when there is any action. The dialogue is spare, ironic, and hysterical. If you like your movies straightforward and linear, then this is not for you, but it’s easy to love this absolute riot of a film. And yes, that person sitting on the bench in the cemetery is exactly who you think it is.
One of several Tsai films in which Lee portrays a version of Hsiao-kang, What Time Is It There? is screening April 21 at 4:40 as part of “Drifting Through Time: Focus on Lee Kang-sheng,” Metrograph’s tribute to Lee’s thirty-five-year career as an actor, screenwriter, and director, in conjunction with the US release of Constance Tsang’s Blue Sun Palace, in which Lee portrays an immigrant working in Flushing; the series also features such films as Tsai’s The Wayward Cloud,Vive l’amour,The Hole, and I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone and Lee’s Help Me Eros. Lee will be at Metrograph April 25–27 to introduce The Hole and for Q&As following screenings of Blue Sun Palace with Tsang and costar Ke-Xi Wu, Help Me Eros, and the triple pack of Tsai’s Boys (Xiaohai),My Stinking Kid, and Single Belief.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
El Greco’s St. Jerome is once again flanked by Hans Holbein the Younger’s Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
THE FRICK COLLECTION
1 East 70th St. at Fifth Ave.
Wednesday – Sunday, $17-$30 (pay-what-you-wish Wednesdays 2:00–6:00) www.frick.org
The Frick is my happy place.
Judging by the smiles on the faces of the hundreds of other Fricksters I encountered at a recent members preview of the reopened Fifth Ave. institution, I am far from the only one.
In 1913, American industrialist and art collector Henry Clay Frick commissioned the architecture firm of Carrère and Hastings to design the building as both a private home and a public resource. Frick died in 1919 at the age of sixty-nine; his daughter, Helen Clay Frick, served as a founding trustee of the collection and, in 1920, established the Frick Art Reference Library. In 1931, the building was adapted into a museum by architect John Russell Pope. The Frick Collection opened on December 11, 1935, for distinguished guests; three days later, ARTnews editor Alfred M. Frankfurter wrote that it is “one of the most important events in the history of American collecting and appreciation of art.”
The Frick closed in March 2020 for a major renovation, temporarily moving its remarkable holdings to the nearby Breuer Building on Seventy-Fifth and Madison, the former home of the Whitney. On April 17, the Frick will reopen to the public, with ten percent more square footage, going from 178,000 square feet to 196,000, including 60,000 square feet of repurposed space and 27,000 square feet of new construction, increasing the gallery space by thirty percent, highlighted by the unveiling of the second floor, which has been converted from administrative offices to fifteen rooms of masterpieces. The renovation and revitalization also features a new Reception Hall, Education Room, and 218-seat auditorium.
The 1732 Great Bustard resides on a pedestal near the Garden Court fountain (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The main floor will be familiar to anyone who has ever visited the Frick; amid some minor changes, the twenty rooms have remained mostly intact. The Gainsboroughs are in the Dining Room, Boucher’s The Four Seasons are in the West Vestibule, four Whistler portraits stand tall in the Oval Room, Fragonard’s The Progress of Love series populates the Fragonard Room, and Goya’s Portrait of a Lady (María Martínez de Puga?) brings mystery to the East Gallery.
El Greco’s Purification of the Temple can be found in the Anteroom, Tiepolo’s Perseus and Andromeda in the East Vestibule, and Vecchietta’s The Resurrection in the Octagon Room. John C. Johansen’s portrait of Henry Clay Frick enjoys primo placement in the Library, where he is joined by Gilbert Stuart’s 1795 portrait of George Washington and numerous canvases by such British artists as Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Turner, and Constable, whose Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds has delighted me over and over again.
The Garden Court, with its peaceful fountain surrounded by columns, plantings, and Barbet’s Angel, is one of the loveliest indoor respites in the city.
Velázquez’s King Philip IV of Spain and Goya’s The Forge hang catty corner in the West Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The glorious West Gallery houses many of the greatest hits, from Rembrandt’s stunning 1658 Self-Portrait and Velázquez’s regal King Philip IV of Spain to Goya’s gritty The Forge and Veronese’s enigmatic parable The Choice Between Virtue and Vice, along with a pair of gorgeous Turner port scenes, Corot’s captivating landscape The Lake, Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid, portraits by El Greco, Hals, Goya, and Van Dyke, and more than a dozen small mythological sculptures.
Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert no longer has its own room but is coping (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The centerpiece of the Frick has always been the Living Hall, with magisterial furniture, chandeliers, large vases, and a five-hundred-year-old Persian carpet. On one wall, Titian’s Pietro Aretino and Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat flank Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, which in the Frick Madison had its own room. Opposite that trio is the pièce de résistance: El Greco’s elongated St. Jerome stares out above the fireplace; to his left and right, respectively, are Hans Holbein the Younger’s stunning portraits of archenemies Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More, the latter, in my opinion, the most spectacular portrait in the history of Western art. Its name, the Living Hall, could not be more appropriate, as it feels lived in.
Drouais’s The Comte and Chevalier de Choiseul as Savoyards is near the base of the stairs (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The South Hall offers two Vermeers, Girl Interrupted at Her Music and Officer and Laughing Girl, facing a Frick fan favorite, Bronzino’s Lodovico Capponi, with its cleverly placed sword. After years of appearing behind the ropes that bar visitors from going upstairs, Drouais’s The Comte and Chevalier de Choiseul as Savoyards, depicting two young boys smiling like the cat who ate the canary, can now be approached before you make your pilgrimage to newly sanctified land.
And then, there it is: the Grand Stairway leading to the previously off-limits second floor. The looks as people make their way to the steps are fascinating, a mix of bated breath, yearning, excited anticipation, and even stealth, as if some museumgoers still can’t believe it is allowed. At the landing is a decorative screen and an Aeolian-Skinner organ that was once played by Archer Gibson for Henry and at dinner parties. At the top is Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Promenade, a lush oil of a woman and two young twin sisters that used to reside near the base of the stairs and now serves as a fine introduction to the myriad treasures upstairs.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Promenade greets visitors at the top of the Grand Stairway (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The second floor is a mazelike procession of tighter spaces where the Fricks lived, again adorned with dazzling classics and lesser-known works that were not regularly on view in the past. Corot’s Ville-d’Avray and The Pond are in the Breakfast Room, with sets of jars and wine coolers and Théodore Rousseau’s The Village of Becquigny. Manet’s The Bullfight can now be found in the Impressionist Room, joined by Degas’s The Rehearsal and Monet’s Vétheuil in Winter, which had numerous people gasping. “I don’t remember ever seeing this before,” one woman said, and others nodded. Don’t miss Watteau’s The Portal of Valenciennes in the Small Hallway.
Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Man is now upstairs in the Sitting Room at the Frick (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The Gold-Grounds Room gathers such religious works as Fra Filippo Lippi’s The Annunciation, Piero della Francesca’s The Crucifixion, and Paolo Veneziano’s The Coronation of the Virgin. Although there is a user-friendly app that tells you where everything is, I preferred searching on my own and was thrilled when I finally located Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Man in the Sitting Room, a depiction of an invitingly calm, laid-back man. Ingres’s Louise, Princesse de Broglie, Later the Comtesse d’Haussonville, another Frick fave, now holds court in the Walnut Room, near Houdon’s marble Madame His.
Among the other second-floor galleries are the Clocks and Watches Room, the Du Paquier Passage, the Boucher Room and Anteroom, the Ceramics Room, the Medals Room, and the Lajoue Passage, each with their own charm. And be sure to check out the hallway ceilings, covered in a beautiful mural with fabulous detail in the corners and ends.
The corners of the second-floor ceiling murals hold tiny gems (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
As recently retired former Frick director Ian Waldropper notes in the Frick’s Essential Guide, “The reopening of the renovated Frick Collection is cause for celebration.” It’s an inspiring place to visit old friends and make new ones, to see masterpieces in literal and figurative new light. One way the Frick has not changed is that the institution still does not allow any photos or videos, except at the early members and press previews. At first, I wasn’t going to take any pictures, but then I heard a few guards say, “Get out your cameras now, because you won’t be allowed to starting April 17.”
My happy place is back, and just in time.
There are two current special exhibitions; “Highlights of Drawings from the Frick Collection,” continuing in the Cabinet through August 11, consists of a dozen rarely displayed works, from Pisanello’s haunting pen and brown ink Studies of Men Hanging and Whistler’s surprising black chalk and pastel Venetian Canal to Goya’s brush and brown wash The Anglers and the coup de grâce, Ingres’s graphite and black chalk study for Louise, Princesse de Broglie . . .
Vladimir Kanevsky’s porcelain hydrangeas can be found in the Breakfast Room (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Meanwhile, for “Porcelain Garden,” US-based Ukrainian artist Vladimir Kanevsky has installed porcelain flowers in nineteen locations throughout the Frick, on the floor and on tables, in vases and pots, creating a dialogue between the fragile plants and the museum’s many treasures; you’ll find lilacs in the Dining Room, foxgloves in the West Vestibule, cascading roses and white hyacinths in the Fragonard Room, dahlia branches and anemones in the Portico Gallery, and a lemon tree in the Garden Court, among others.
And from June 18 to August 31, “Vermeer’s Love Letters” unites the Frick’s Mistress and Maid with the Rijksmuseum’s Love Letter and the National Gallery of Ireland’s Woman Writing a Letter, with Her Maid.
Below are only some of the scheduled programs, with more to come.
Friday, April 18
Gallery Talk: A Home for Art, Library Gallery, free with museum admission, 6:00 & 7:00
Gallery Talk: Closer Look at Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid, West Gallery, free with museum admission, 6:00 & 7:00
Friday, April 25
Gallery Talk: A Home for Art, Library Gallery, free with museum admission, 6:00 & 7:00
Saturday, April 26
Spring Music Festival: Jupiter Ensemble, Lea Desandre, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00
Thursday, May 1
Spring Music Festival: Takács Quartet and Jeremy Denk, Piano, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00
Saturday, May 3
Spring Music Festival: Sarah Rothenberg, Solo Piano, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00
Sunday, May 4
Spring Music Festival: Alexi Kenney, Violin and Amy Yang, Fortepiano, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00
Thursday, May 8
Sketch Night, free with advance RSVP, 5:00
Spring Music Festival: Emi Ferguson, Flute and Ruckus, Baroque Ensemble, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00
Friday, May 9
Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher Fellow Lecture: The Milicz Medals of Johann Friedrich of Saxony and the Subtleties of Political Art in the Age of Reformation, with Maximilian Kummer, Ian Wardropper Education Room, free with advance RSVP, 6:00
Sunday, May 11
Spring Music Festival: Mishka Rushdie Momen, Solo Piano, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 5:00
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Makuri (Leon Addison Brown) and Alu (Jenny Jules) wait for their son to return in The Swamp Dwellers (photo by Hollis King)
THE SWAMP DWELLERS
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 27, $902-$132 www.tfana.org
Wole Soyinka, the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, packs a lot of potent story into the seventy-minute one-act play The Swamp Dwellers, receiving its off-Broadway premiere at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, but it can’t quite stand on its own; instead, the quality production feels like the middle section of a larger work, with too much left unsaid.
The action takes place on Jason Ardizzone-West’s gorgeous set, in a hut constructed with marsh stakes and hemp rope, built on stilts in a small village along the Niger Delta; water shimmers under and around the abode. It’s the late 1950s, shortly before Nigeria will gain its independence from Britain on October 1, 1960, a time of major change that Soyinka relates through one family.
Sixtysomething couple Alu (Jenny Jules) and Makuri (Leon Addison Brown) are struggling to get by; she dyes Yoruba textile cloths while he is a barber and basket weaver. Their twin sons, Igwezu (Ato Blankson-Wood) and Awuchike, have left for the city, seeking wealth; While Igwezu has just returned and is checking to see if anything is left of his farmland, Awuchike is probably dead, according to Alu.
Alu and Makuri love each other, but each enjoys needling the other, as in this marvelous exchange:
Alu: If you had any good at all in you, you’d go and look for him. Makuri: And catch my death of cramp? Not likely . . . And anyway, what’s preventing you from going? Alu: I want to be here when he gives me the news. I don’t want to fall down dead out in the open. Makuri: The older you get, the more of a fraud you become. Every day for the past ten years, you’ve done nothing but swear that your son was dead in the marshes. And now you sit there like a crow and tell me that you’re waiting for news about him. Alu: I know he’s dead. Makuri: Then what do you want Igwezu to tell you? Alu: I only want to know if . . . I only want to ask him . . I . . . I . . . He shouldn’t have rushed off like that . . . dashing off like a madman before anyone could ask him a thing. Makuri: Before anyone could ask him WHAT? Alu: You’re always trying to make me a liar. Makuri: I don’t have to make you one. Alu: Bah! Frog-face! . . . Dropped his bundle and rushed off before I could ask him a thing . . . And to think he could have found him after all. To think he could have found him in the city. Makuri: Dead men don’t go to the city. They go to hell. Alu: I know one dead man who is sitting right here instead of going quietly to hell. Makuri: Now see who is calling who . . . Alu: You’re so useless now that it takes you nearly a whole week to make one basket . . . and to think you don’t even cut your own rushes! Makuri: If you had to get up so often to shave the heads of the whole village . . . and most of them crusted with kraw-kraw so that a man has to scrape and scrape until . . . [Alu yells suddenly and slaps herself on the arm.] Makuri: Ha! Don’t tell me now that a fly has been trying to suck blood from your dried-up veins. Alu: If you had enough blood to hold you up, you’d prove it by going to look for your own son, and bring him home to supper.
A blind Muslim beggar (Joshua Echebiri) arrives, having traveled far to seek employment, wanting to work the soil with his hands. He lost his sight to the fly sickness when he was a child; the mention of the word “fly” instantly recalls the flies that taunt Alu, as if potential illness hovers around her.
While the beggar learns about how floods ruined the family’s farm, the local holy man, known as the Kadiye (Chiké Okonkwo), the Servant and Priest of the Serpent of the Swamp, visits with his attendant (Jason Maina) and drummer (Olawale Oyenola). The Kadiye announces that the rains have stopped and planting can begin again. Makuri caters to him, insisting that the Kadiye sit in the fancy swivel barber chair and demanding that Alu bring them drink.
After the Kadiye leaves, Igwezu enters, bitter and distant. The beggar tells him he wants to be his loyal bondsman while also planting a seed that the Kadiye may be corrupt. “How does the Serpent fare in times of dearth? Does he thrive on the poisonous crabs? Does he drink the ooze of the mire?” the beggar asks. Makuri resonds, “Beware. That borders upon sacrilege. That trespasses on the hospitality of this house.” Igwezu wonders, “Perhaps he can give meaning to what seems dark and sour.”
When Kadiye and his attendants return, Igwezu details what happened between him and his brother and questions the holy man as he prepares to shave him, razor at the ready.
Igwezu (Ato Blankson-Wood) prepares to shave the Kadiye (Chiké Okonkwo) in Wole Soyinka off-Broadway premiere (photo by Hollis King)
Born in British Nigeria in 1934, Soyinka wrote The Swamp Dwellers, his second play, in 1958. He would go on to write such other works as The Lion and the Jewel,The Invention,The Interpreters, and Season of Anomy. In The Swamp Dwellers, he explores such issues as colonialism, systems of faith, infidelity, the ecosystem, and revenge. It’s a lot to take on in seventy minutes, and as compelling as it is under the direction of Awoye Timpo (Wedding Band,Elyria), some elements feel like they need more.
Qween Jean’s costumes, Seth Reiser’s lighting, Rena Anakwe’s sound, and Chief Ayanda Clarke’s music help transport the audience to the Niger Delta, where danger and darkness lurk amid the haze; you can practically smell the swamp and fear the serpent. The ensemble cast is led by strong performances by Brown (soft,The Painted Rocks of Revolver Creek) and Jules (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,Sweat) as the bickering couple, trying their best in a nearly impossible situation, although independence is just around the corner, along with corporate drilling that followed the discovery of oil in the region.
In a December 2010 New York Times piece included in the revival’s online program, Soyinka, who collaborated with TFANA on the revival, remembered being in Nigeria as the extraction phase began, writing, “[Oil] flares signaled at the time nothing more than the mission of the company — to open the land to industrialization. Oil was only the facilitator. . . . The earth of the swamp dwellers was under siege. Eviction; land takeovers; home demolitions; environmental degradation; lost livelihoods: The oil flares were no longer harmless sky-writings but the fires of improvidence and indifference.”
The Swamp Dwellers gives us a glimpse of a world on the brink of dissolution, already starting to slide toward destruction.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The Dublin-based Irishtown theater company prepares to stage a play in New York in Irish Rep world premiere (photo by Carol Rosegg)
IRISHTOWN
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West Twenty-Second St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through May 25, $60-$125
212-727-2737 irishrep.org
Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s Irishtown, making its world premiere at the Irish Rep through May 25, tackles an issue that the theater company probably faces regularly: How Irish must a play be to be staged at the Irish Rep? How far does its cultural responsibility extend, and, perhaps most important, can it be a comedy?
As one of the characters asks the writer during rehearsals of the play within the play, a contemporary legal drama about sexual assault in Hertfordshire, England, “Where’s the lyricism? Where’s the backward syntax? And I’m sorry, I know I’ve said it before, but a happy ending? Do you know one happy Irish person?”
The ninety-minute show is set at the offices of the Dublin theater company Irishtown. Actors Constance (Kate Burton), Síofra (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), and Quin (Kevin Oliver Lynch) are completing a table read with director Poppy (Angela Reed) and playwright Aisling (Brenda Meaney) of Aisling’s latest work, Who Are We if We Are Not Ourselves at All, which is scheduled to open in New York City in four weeks.
The actors’ initial fawning displays of support soon give way to underhanded comments, sideways digs, and outright suggestions for changes, which infuriates Aisling, who insists the script will be locked and that the story is based on her own real-life experiences. Constance, an Irish legend who is struggling to pay for care for her ailing mother, is worried that “the script isn’t displaying as ‘authentically’ Irish” and that Poppy is English. Quin, who is bad at accents and has just been dumped by his girlfriend, complains about the script, “I think everything is wrong with it.”
Even Síofra, who is Aisling’s girlfriend and has been named Newcomer of the Year twice — ten years apart — and Poppy, who was kicked out of the Royal Shakespeare Company for having sex with numerous cast members, get in on the attacks.
Quin: We have one card in America, the Irish card, and you didn’t even play it? Even the English are playing the Irish card. Poppy: Are they? Constance and Síofra: Yes. Aisling: Hang on now, not everything I write needs to be about being Irish. Quin: But we are Irish. Aisling: But if Irish drama needs to define Irish identity and its claims of independence from Britain, what further declaration of independence can there be than an Irish play not desperately seeking to be Irish? Síofra: It’s a balance though, isn’t it? You want to represent Ireland as a home of ancient idealism with a rich cultural heritage but not tip it over into depicting us as buffoons of easy sentiment or drunken fucking monkies.
As the trip to New York inches closer and Aisling battles the producer, McCabe (voiced by Roger Clark), she decides to walk off with her script, leaving Constance, Quin, Síofra, and Poppy to come up with their own Irish play in a week.
Constance (Kate Burton) watches carefully as playwright Aisling (Brenda Meaney) and her girlfriend, Síofra (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), share a moment (photo by Carol Rosegg)
As always with the Irish Rep, the production is stellar. Colm McNally’s dingy, basement-like office set, featuring posters of such Irish classics as Waiting for Godot,Dancing at Lughnasa, and The Beauty Queen of Leenane — in addition to Aisling’s The Happy Leper of Larne — has a claustrophobic feel as time is running out; McNally also designed the lighting, with sound by Caroline Eng and casual costumes by Caroline Eng, highlighted by Aisling’s sweaters.
The cast is led by Burton (Hedda Gabler,The Elephant Man) as the careful Constance, Reed (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,The Power of Darkness) as the tough but vulnerable Poppy, and the ever-dependable Meaney (Little Gem,The New Morality) as the defensive Aisling.
Even at only ninety minutes, the play, directed by Nicola Murphy Dubey (Belfast Girls,Pumpgirl), gets bogged down in slapstick while a few subplots get short shrift and the ending is rushed. But Smyth (Lie Low,We Can’t Have Monkeys in the House) has a lot to say about celebrating, and being honest about, personal and cultural identity, as exemplified by the title of the play within the play, Who Are We if We Are Not Ourselves at All. When Poppy talks about having “inherited” the cast, an English director in charge of an Irish crew, it brings up centuries of conflict.
But Quin sums it up best when he asks, “We could just devise an Irish play . . . How hard could it be?”
The Irish Rep knows the answer.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
