twi-ny recommended events

THE MYSTERY OF LOVE AND SEX

Two generations deal with love, sex, and food in Lincoln Center production (photo by T Charles Erickson)

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 26, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Bathsheba Doran’s The Mystery of Love and Sex explores the many facets of the title concepts in light but smart ways, touching on the complicated nature of friendship and family, romance and lust. Friends since they were nine years old, Charlotte (Gayle Rankin) and Jonny (Mamoudou Athie) are now going to the same Virginia college not far from where they were raised, and they have invited her parents, Lucinda (Diane Lane) and Howard (Tony Shalhoub), to come over for what Lucinda quickly decides is a “bohemian” dinner, on a makeshift table with salad, bread, no chairs, and cheap wine. While Lucinda gets right into the spirit of things, Howard has much more trouble, beginning with attempting to sit on the floor, then trying to serve himself some food. Soon the talk turns to the relationship between Jonny, a young black man with a sick mother, and Charlotte, a young Jewish woman preparing her own way in the world. Howard, a successful writer of detective fiction, might have been treating Jonny like a member of the family for the past decade, but now that he thinks that Jonny might become an official part of the family, he is not so happy. But the kids are still teenagers with their whole lives in front of them, and their undefined relationship grows more puzzling when Jonny starts dating another woman — and Charlotte says she has the hots for a fellow coed. Things heat up even further when the four main characters start debating such issues as racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, religion — and food. (The show features a lot of eating, so you might want to be sure to dine beforehand.) The second act takes place five years later, as some matters have been settled, but most have not, as marriage and divorce enter the conversation.

Jonny (Mamoudou Athie) and Charlotte (Gayle Rankin) contemplate their future in THE MYSTERY OF LOVE AND SEX (photo by T Charles Erickson)

Returning to New York theater for the first time since 1977, when she was twelve, the now fifty-year-old Lane (A Little Romance, Unfaithful) is resplendent as Lucinda, her smile lighting up the entire theater, along with her rich southern accent, her character’s flair for life infectious. Shalhoub (Act One, Golden Boy) is terrific as Howard, a bundle of nerves and deeply hidden prejudices who fumbles fantastically in the opening dinner scene, showing a riotous mastery of physical comedy, while standing firm later when he gets into it with Jonny. Athie and Rankin are fine as Jonny and Charlotte, the former timid and withdrawn, the latter energetic and fancy-free, but the play slows down considerably when Lane and Shalhoub are not onstage. One of the busiest directors in New York, Sam Gold, who has helmed such delights as Fun Home, The Realistic Joneses, and Seminar, makes good use of the small Newhouse stage, keeping things moving proficiently on Andrew Lieberman’s minimalist sets, which generally consist of a few pieces of furniture and long drapes in the back. Doran, who has written such other plays as Kin and Nest and for such cable series as Boardwalk Empire and Masters of Sex, has a gift for creating unpredictable situations and taking them further than expected with a smooth calm, although she is occasionally too clever for her own good. The Mystery of Love and Sex is a perfectly pleasant piece of theater, a tasty morsel if not quite the gourmet meal it attempts to be.

MADAME CÉZANNE

Paul Cézanne, “Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress,” oil on canvas, 1888-90 (The Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ittleson Jr. Purchase Fund, 1962)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Galleries 955 & 961–962
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Daily through March 15, recommended admission $12-$25
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

Not much is known about the relationship between French artist Paul Cézanne and his wife, former artist’s model Marie-Hortense Fiquet, other than that they met in 1869, had a son in 1872, were married in 1886, and, when Paul died in 1906, had long lived apart, and he left her nothing in his will. However, he did leave behind twenty-nine known portraits of her, twenty-five of which are on display at the Met in the intriguing exhibition “Madame Cézanne,” continuing through March 15. The show features paintings, drawings, and watercolors, ranging from a page of 1871-74 graphite studies to the ca. 1895-1900 oil sketch “Portrait of a Woman (Madame Cézanne).” The centerpiece of the exhibit is the quartet of portraits of Madame Cézanne in a red dress, each one very different, highlighted by the 1888-90 canvas with the most detailed surroundings. The four paintings have not been seen together for many years, and the group, now side by side, is both breathtaking and provoking in the insights it offers and questions it generates about Cezanne’s choices on the canvas. The paintings do not add insight into the couple’s love, or lack thereof, for each other, however, as Cézanne nearly always depicts his wife as dour and matronly, rarely smiling. In the unfinished 1891 oil painting “Madame Cézanne” in the Conservatory,” Hortense Fiquet sits on a chair, her hands on her lap, tree branches and fruit in the background; she gazes directly at the viewer, her eyes open, her mouth closed, appearing neither sad nor happy, just resigned to her fate. “If these quietly powerful paintings of Hortense Fiquet came to be acknowledged as a testing ground for Cézanne’s innovation and experimentation with paint on canvas, their subject and her vital partnership as model, mistress, wife, and mother have been willfully overlooked,” curator Dita Amory writes in the preface to the exhibition catalog. “Their story is a deeply compelling one, perhaps even more so for the very absence of its particulars.” What isn’t absent in this show are some very beautiful works, which add yet more mystery to this curious artistic relationship. (As a bonus, the Met is showing “Paul Cézanne: Drawings and Watercolors” in Gallery 960 in the Robert Lehman Wing, also through March 15.)

CARRIE MAE WEEMS: FIELD OF VIEW AND OTHER MINOR CONSIDERATIONS

Carrie Mae Weems, “The Considered,” 2012 (photo courtesy the Performa Institute

Who: Carrie Mae Weems
What: “Field of View and Other Minor Considerations”
Where: NYU Steinhardt, Einstein Auditorium, Barney Building, 34 Stuyvesant St., 212-366-5700
When: Thursday, March 26, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
Why: As part of the Performa Institute Portrait of the Artist series, Portland, Oregon–born photographer and video artist Carrie Mae Weems will deliver a lecture on her life and career, “Field of View and Other Minor Considerations,” with a focus on her artistic process and production. Weems, who had a terrific retrospective at the Guggenheim last year, “Three Decades of Photography and Video,” is a fascinating person, so this should be a very special evening. “My work has led me to investigate family relationships, gender roles, the histories of racism, sexism, class, and various political systems,” she writes in her online biography. “Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.”

CANADIAN OPERA COMPANY: SEMELE

Zhang Huan has transported a 17-ton, 450-year-old Ming Dynasty temple as setting for SEMELE (photo by Jack Vartoogian / Frontrowphotos)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
March 4, 6, 8, 10, $35-$170
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.coc.ca

When Belgium’s Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie and China’s KT Wong Foundation approached Shanghai-based visual and performance artist Zhang Huan to make his directorial debut in a production of composer George Frideric Handel and librettist William Congreve’s Semele, they were clearly seeking something different, a unique interpretation of the Baroque opera by John Eccles, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And Zhang certainly delivers, bringing his complex sensibility to this mythical tale of love gone wrong. Semele takes place in and around a 17-ton, 450-year-old Ming Dynasty ancestral family temple that Zhang had previously purchased in a small village near Shanghai, then disassembled, transported, and reconstructed for the three-hour work, which is being performed by the Canadian Opera Company at BAM March 4-10. The fascinating details behind the history of the temple, including recent poverty, infidelity, and murder that relate to the Greek myth from which the opera is adapted, are communicated through a short black-and-white film that opens the program. Then Zhang dives into the tragic narrative of Semele (soprano Jane Archibald), the daughter of Cadmus, the king of Thebes (bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen), who has been promised to Prince Athamas (countertenor Lawrence Zazzo) but is actually beloved by the god Jupiter (tenor Colin Ainsworth). That infuriates Juno, Jupiter’s wife (contralto Hilary Summers), who solicits the help of Somnus, the god of sleep (Ketelsen), and her messenger, Iris (soprano Katherine Whyte), to trick Semele and send her to her mortal doom. But not surprisingly, Zhang — who once covered his body with raw meat and walked to the Whitney Museum — brings it all together in surprising ways, using creative staging, gorgeous costumes (by fashion designer Han Feng), unusual props, and fire, breathing compelling life into this exciting production while combining Eastern and Western elements.

Somnus looks down from above in Zhang Huan’s visually dazzling production of SEMELE (photo by Jack Vartoogian / Frontrowphotos)

In the program notes, Zhang explains, “The fact that the roots of pain introduced in a Western opera can reappear in the East in the fate of a single peasant family in the countryside makes us continually ponder the redemptive qualities of humanity. . . . The human race has to continuously and eternally develop as it regresses.” Zhang explores that concept by incorporating into the opera a pair of sumo wrestlers (Americus Abesamis and Byamba Ulambayar), a huge blow-up god, two actors portraying a donkey showing off an enormous phallus, a twisting dragon, a chorus of men and women dressed as Buddhist monks, a Tibetan singer (Amchok Gompo Dhondup), characters that ascend and descend on wires, an orgy, nudity, and a shimmering magic mirror. (And it doesn’t take too much imagination to see the temple pillars as phallic objects either.) Handel’s score is beautifully conducted by Christopher Moulds, leading the COC Orchestra; the cast, singing in English (with English surtitles), features standout performances by Ainsorth, Whyte, and particularly Archibald in the title role, who dazzles in a late aria. In merging Eastern and Western philosophies, Zhang has infused this Greek myth with the four noble truths — aging, arising, cessation, and the path — while also relating it to modern-day China, resulting in a wholly satisfying, nontraditional, extremely entertaining multimedia experience.

FOLLIES OF GOD BOOK LAUNCH WITH JAMES GRISSOM

Rescheduled book launch for James Grissoms FOLLIES OF GOD will take place March 10 at the Corner Bookstore (photo by Mike Chiodo)

Who: James Grissom
What: Book launch for Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog (Knopf, March 3, 2015, $30)
Where: The Corner Bookstore, 1313 Madison Ave. at 93rd St., 212-831-3554
When: Tuesday, March 10, free, 6:00
Why: The epigraph to James Grissom’s Follies of God is a quote from Tennessee Williams: “I have been very lucky. I am a multi-souled man, because I have offered my soul to so many women, and they have filled it, repaired it, sent it back to me for use.” Later, in the first chapter, Grissom writes, “No play written by Tennessee Williams, however, got its bearings until a fog rolled across the boards, from which a female form emerged. ‘I do not know why this is,’ Tenn confessed to me, ‘but there is a premonitory moment before a woman, an important, powerful woman, enters my subconscious, and this moment is announced by the arrival of fog. Perhaps it is some detritus of my brain belching forth both waste and a woman. . . . I have not seen the fog in years.’” In the book, Grissom delves into Williams’s inspirations, his creative process, and the actresses who played the dramatic roles in his works, including Lillian Gish, Maureen Stapleton, Jessica Tandy, Geraldine Page, Julie Harris, and Katharine Hepburn, in addition to female relatives and others. The book launch was supposed to take place February 27 at the Corner Bookstore but was moved to March 5 because of the weather, so you have another chance to learn more about this fascinating tome about one of America’s greatest playwrights.

TICKET ALERT: FULL BUNNY CONTACT

Full Bunny Contact is back for another year of fiendish battles with humans

FULL BUNNY CONTACT
The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center
107 Suffolk St. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
April 1-5, $10-$60
www.fullbunnycontact.com

Easter has always been a rather violent holiday. Every spring, we bite the heads off of chocolate rabbits and devour their colored eggs like candy, at least in part to attempt to get even for the punishment inflicted on the human race by giant killer bunnies in the cult classic Night of the Lepus. For the second year, Full Bunny Contact, billed as an “extreme Egg Hunt and Insane Easter Carnival,” offers a unique way to celebrate Easter while taking on the Easter Bunny himself. From April 1 to 5, the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center will be home to a bizarre group of activities that you can just marvel at or get in on the hot action. General admission is $10, with individual game tickets an additional charge; for $60, you get to go hog wild, with a free drink as a bonus. But how can you pass up such games as Ride the Rabid Rabbit, Shoot the Peep, Bunny Warrior Joust, Psychotic Bunny Fortune Teller, Take a Picture with the Insult Bunny, Egg Put, ESP-ster Island, and Bunny Ball? Winners receive prizes ranging from candy to cold, hard cash. There will also be food, live music, the April Fools Day Ball, the FBC Bunny Beauty Pageant, the FBC Temper Tantrum Contest (“I wanna Easter egg! I wanna Easter egg!”) and other forms of maniacal entertainment. In our 2014 interview with FBC founder Timothy Haskell, the impresario explained, “Holidays are fantastic. I think people love celebrating them, and I think Easter in this city has lost its youthfulness. I hope this event brings some of that back.” The 2015 edition is directed by John Harlacher, who previously collaborated with Haskell on his annual Nightmare haunted house, and produced by Daniel Demello and Nathaniel Nowak. Oh, did we forget to mention the main event? In the game that gives the entire evening its name, FBC, participants are locked in a steel cage with giant Easter bunnies (again, think Night of the Lepus) from whom they must take as many eggs as they can in one minute to win yet more valuable, invaluable, or pretty much worthless prizes.

WIM WENDERS: THE SALT OF THE EARTH

Sebastião Salgado is shown photographing the planet — and trying to save the world — in THE SALT OF THE EARTH

THE SALT OF THE EARTH (Wim Wenders & Juliano Ribero Salgado, 2014)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, March 7, 7:45
Series runs March 2-17
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.sonyclassics.com
www.moma.org

Over the course of his storied five-decade career, German-born auteur and photographer Wim Wenders has alternated between making documentaries, primarily about other artists (Pina Bausch, Yasujirō Ozu, the Buena Vista Social Club) and fiction films, often unique takes on the road movie in which photographs play a key role (Paris, Texas; Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road). In his latest work, Wenders has found one subject that combines his many interests, as he follows the remarkable adventures of Brazilian photographer and environmentalist Sebastião Salgado, who has traveled the world taking stunning pictures of the land and native peoples. In The Salt of the Earth, which was nominated for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar and won the Un Certain Regard special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the César at France’s national film awards, Wenders teams up with Salgado’s son, filmmaker Juliano Ribero Salgado (Suzana; Nauru, an Island Adrift), as they accompany Salgado on his journeys and talk about his work, which consists predominantly of black-and-white photographs in such social justice series as “Workers” and “Migrations” and his most recent, the nature-themed“Genesis,” which was just shown at ICP. In the documentary, Salgado is shown rolling around on a shore to get a picture of a polar bear in the Arctic Circle, heading down into the mines of Brazil, meeting the Yali in Papua New Guinea, and sitting on a mountain, contemplating the future of the planet.

Sebastião Salgado talks about his life and work in Oscar-nominated documentary directed by his son and Wim Wenders

Salgado is not only photographing parts of the world devoid of technological modernity but is also involved, with his wife and curator, Lélia Wanick Salgado, in returning to nature, having planted more than two million trees to rebuild part of the Atlantic Forest on his family’s land in Brazil and starting Instituto Terra, a nonprofit community organization dedicated to restoring the ecosystem. “A photographer is literally somebody drawing with light, a man writing and rewriting the world with light and shadows,” Wenders narrates in the film. “Little did I know that I was going to discover much more than just a photographer.” Using a semitransparent mirror, Wenders also conducts interviews with Salgado, who is seen in front of a screen, looking at his photographs while discussing them. Other times the only thing on camera is Salgado’s bald head against a black background, as he peers into the camera to share his tale, including his relationship with his wife and children. “If you put many photographers in one place, they’ll all take very different pictures,” Salgado says. “Each one forms their way of seeing according to their history.” As The Salt of the Earth ably displays, Salgado has a fascinating history. The Salt of the Earth is being shown at MoMA on March 7 at 7:45 as part of a two-plus-week Wenders retrospective in advance of the film’s March 27 theatrical release; Wenders, who just received the Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at the Berlin Film Festival, and Juliano Ribero Salgado, whose next film will be a psychological thriller, will introduce the work and participate in a postscreening discussion. The series continues through March 17 with such other Wenders films as The American Friend, Wings of Desire, Until the End of the World, Tokyo-Ga, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and other well-known gems and rare early shorts, with Wenders at the museum for Q&As and introductions at all screenings through March 7.