David (Joshua Zirger) and Simone (Karen Eilbacher) deal with a surprise medical diagnosis in Christy Smith-Sloman’s NEGATIVE IS POSITIVE (photo by Magali Charron)
Theater for the New City
155 First Ave. between Ninth & Tenth Sts.
Thursday – Sunday through November 30, $15
212-254-1109
www.negativeispositivetheplay.com
www.theaterforthenewcity.net
It’s rarely a good sign when you go to the theater and there are as many people in the audience as there are actors in the cast. It doesn’t help when the stage is surrounded by sheets of plastic that make it look like it is still under construction, not ready for the public yet. And then you have to sit through an opening scene that is so dreadful you’re looking for the emergency exits, wondering how you can sneak out without being noticed. (You can’t.) But then something happens, and you remember why you love going to the theater in the first place. In this case, it’s the entrance of Joshua Zirger, who commands his role with such a genuineness that you’re willing to forgive many of the shortcomings of Negative Is Positive, a new work by Christy Smith-Sloman, directed by Andreas Robertz, running at the Theater for the New City through November 30. The play is set in 2010, with Simone (Karen Eilbacher) getting diagnosed with HIV by a dentist (Fulton C. Hodges) using a rather questionable experimental procedure. Instead of seeking a second opinion — a serious flaw in the story — Simone rails against her husband, David (Zirger), accusing him of cheating and attacking him unmercifully, reevaluating their life together no matter how much he swears he’s innocent and that he loves her. When their best friends, Brianna (Vivienne Jurado) and George (David M. Farrington), arrive for dinner, Simone gets in an even fouler mood, with fireworks flying that get only more intense in the second act.
Negative Is Positive made headlines recently when former New York Rangers forward, Vogue intern, and model Sean Avery, who was originally supposed to play George, abruptly quit the show amid an argument over pizza. Smith-Sloman, who is also a journalist, and Robertz, the artistic director of OneHeart Productions, have, dare we say, turned a negative into a positive with Avery’s last-minute replacement, Farrington, who displays a natural ease in the role and clearly works well with others. Eilbacher is at her best when she unleashes several massive screams, but it’s Zirger who’s the one to watch here, even during the last moments of intermission, as his character examines his board of notes — David’s taken a year off from his sports job to write a screenplay — trying to decide what comes next. For Zirger, hopefully it’s bigger and better things onstage.
In 1924, two British men, among the most famous mountaineers of their time, George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, set out with a large team to climb to the summit of Everest. Their amazing journey was documented by Captain John Noel, who used a hand-cranked camera with an impressive telephoto lens and sent the footage via yak to a lab in Darjeeling to be developed. The resulting black-and-white film, The Epic of Everest, is a poetic document of the third attempt to scale Everest, a mountain the Tibetans called “Chomo-Lung-Ma,” or Goddess Mother of the World. The eighty-seven-minute silent film has been digitally restored by the British Film Institute in a beautiful version that is making its New York premiere November 14 at the Rubin Museum, where it will be shown more than a dozen times through December 21, with most screenings introduced by a special guest and some followed by Q&As. The Epic of Everest, which is also ethnographically important for its (at times ethnocentric) depiction of local Tibetan culture, includes several scenes of Mount Everest tinted in blue, red, and violet; the ice-blue Fairyland section is especially breathtaking. Meanwhile, the restored intertitles display such dramatic text as “There is nowhere here any trace of life or man. It is a glimpse into a world that knows him not. Grand, solemn, unutterably lonely, the Rongbuk Glacier of Everest reveals itself.” and “Nor can one wonder at the invention that has clothed this extraordinary peak with a sacred character. What a terrifying thing it is! What an immensity of size, height and power it possesses!”
By their very nature, street photographers take pictures of anonymous individuals, capturing a moment in time in which viewers can fill in their own details. In the wonderful documentary Finding Vivian Maier, codirectors John Maloof and Charlie Siskel turn the lens around on a street photographer herself, attempting to fill in the details of the curious life and times of Vivian Maier, about whom very little was known. “I find the mystery of it more interesting than her work itself,” says one woman for whom Vivian Maier served as a nanny decades earlier. “I’d love to know more about this person, and I don’t think you can do that through her work.” In 2007, while looking for historical photos for a book on the Portage Park section of Chicago, Maloof purchased a box of negatives at an auction. Upon discovering that they were high-quality, museum-worthy photographs, he set off on a mission to learn more about the photographer. Playing detective — while also developing hundreds of rolls of film, with thousands more to go — Maloof meets with men and women who knew Maier as an oddball, hoarding nanny who went everywhere with her camera and shared little, if anything, about her personal life. “I’m the mystery woman,” Maier says in a color home movie. Her former employers and charges, including talk-show host Phil Donahue, debate her background, the spelling and pronunciation of her name, her accent, and how she might have felt about a documentary delving into her secretive life.
