twi-ny recommended events

LOST LAKE

Veronica (Tracie Thoms) and Hogan (John Hawkes) are a pair of lost souls set adrift in new play by David Auburn (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club
NY City Center Stage 1
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through December 21, $90
212-581-1212
www.lostlakemtc.com
www.nycitycenter.org

One of the best new plays of the fall season, David Auburn’s Lost Lake is a relatively simple yet compelling drama about two flawed souls trapped in worlds they can’t break out of. Veronica (Tracie Thoms) is a single mother looking to rent a cabin upstate for a week for her, her children, and one of their friends. Veronica goes up early to check out the cabin, which turns out to be as shoddy and ramshackle as its owner, Hogan (John Hawkes), a gaunt, grizzled, but well-meaning man who can’t seem to do anything right in his life. Both are repairers of a sort; Veronica is a nurse practitioner with aspirations to perhaps become a doctor, while Hogan purports to be a handyman who can fix just about anything, including the rotting swimming dock out on the lake behind the cabin. But neither can patch the gaping holes in their lives. As her supposed vacation progresses, Veronica gets caught up in Hogan’s family drama, as he lurks around the property, telling her about his problems with his ex-wife, his daughter, his brother, and, mostly, his despised sister-in-law, no matter how much Veronica just wants him to leave. But various events, both major and minor, keep bringing these two very different people together during a complicated period in which each is forced to take a long, hard look at the choices they’ve made while dealing with the hands they’ve been given.

Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner Auburn reteams with his Proof director, Daniel Sullivan, for this moving slice-of-life tale, which is highlighted by two superb performances. Thoms (Cold Case, Stick Fly) is careful and deliberate as Veronica, a troubled woman who does not like to let her wounds show. The Oscar-nominated Hawkes (Winter’s Bone, The Sessions) is riveting as Hogan, all herky-jerky and unpredictable as a man seemingly uncomfortable in his own skin. The back-and-forth banter between them is enhanced by the piercing yet vulnerable looks in their eyes, neither character happy with their lot in life but not sure how to turn things around. The script cleverly touches on such issues as race, the economic crisis, class, elitism, and gender roles while efficiently dismissing the one place you really don’t want it to go. J. Michael Griggs’s set is appropriately broken-down and dilapidated, echoing the protagonists’ inner demons. The ninety-minute Manhattan Theatre Club production follows the play’s debut earlier this year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with Jake Weber and Opal Alladin as part of the Sullivan Project, a residency led by artistic director Daniel Sullivan, who has also helmed such shows as Rabbit Hole, Orphans, The Heidi Chronicles, and many Shakespeare in the Park presentations. Lost in the Lake is a fine fit for the intimate Stage I at City Center, where it is scheduled to run through December 21.

DOC NYC METROPOLIS: SOME KIND OF SPARK

Pete Destil studies the flute with MAP mentor Gretchen Pusch in SOME KIND OF SPARK (photo by Ben Niles)

SOME KIND OF SPARK (Ben Niles, 2014)
SVA Theatre
333 West 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Sunday, November 16, 2:00
Series runs November 13-20
www.docnyc.net
www.somekindofspark.com

Ben Niles’s Some Kind of Spark is a heartwarming and heartbreaking documentary about the importance of music education in children’s lives. Niles, whose award-winning 2007 film, Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, detailed the care and craftsmanship that goes into the creation of a grand piano, this time goes inside Juilliard’s Music Advancement Program, “a Saturday instrument instruction program for highly talented children from backgrounds underrepresented in American performing arts.” Niles follows six kids, between the ages of eight and fourteen, as each one is mentored by a member of MAP’s staff of professional musicians during a three-year course. Violist Kara Charles, trombonist Rahman Amer, trumpeter Abdullah Amer (Rahman’s twin brother), flutist Pete Destil, singer and bassist Ami Kone, and percussionist Alejandro Cediel are shown studying with their teachers (including Bill Ruyle and Mike Truesdell on percussion, San San Lee on violin, Gretchen Pusch on flute, Lubima Kalinkova-Shentov on bass, and Paula Bing and Huang Ruo on music theory) and talking to their families about what they’re learning.

Niles concentrates almost exclusively on the music; he doesn’t delve deep into the kids’ personal lives, the families’ financial situations, or what else the children might be into. The focus is on the playing, on the studying, and, more important, on the practicing. “Make sure you refuse to be the guy who just gets the notes. Do something greater,” mentor Weston Sprott tells Rahman. The most fascinating part of the film centers on Pete and Gretchen; prior to the program, Pete had never even picked up a flute, and Gretchen isn’t afraid to get tough with him if he’s not properly prepared, especially after a summer in which the young boy couldn’t practice at all because he can’t afford his own instrument. The tension builds as the kids decide whether to audition for a third year at MAP, try to make the Juilliard Pre-College Orchestra, or apply to LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. Some Kind of Spark is a truly inspiring film that never gets overly sentimental, instead revealing, with brutal honesty, the challenges these kids face, because the path they have chosen is not an easy one. But seeing their eyes shine as they experience music in so many different ways makes it all worth it. Some Kind of Spark is having its world premiere November 16 at the SVA Theatre in the Metropolis competition of the fifth annual DOC NYC festival, with Niles, editor Sara Pellegrini, and select cast members present to talk about the film. The festival runs November 13-20 and consists of more than 150 documentaries, panel discussions, and workshops at Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas, the IFC Center, and the SVA Theatre.

MY FORMATIVE YEARS: THE HIRED HAND

Harry Collings (Peter Fonda) has some reckoning to do in revisionist Western THE HIRED HAND

CABARET CINEMA: THE HIRED HAND (Peter Fonda, 1971)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, November 14, free with $10 bar minimum, 9:30
Series continues Fridays through December 5
212-620-5000
www.rubinmuseum.org

After many years away from the homestead, Harry Collings (first-time-director Peter Fonda) returns to his farm, only to find that his wife (Verna Bloom) has kept herself rather busy once she assumed he was not coming back, in The Hired Hand, a so-called hippie Western written by Scottish novelist Alan Sharp, who also wrote Ulzana’s Raid and Night Moves. Warren Oates is his usual fine self as Harry’s dedicated sidekick, Arch Harris, as they do battle with the likes of the evil McVey (Severn Darden). The quiet, beautiful Fonda is like a Zen cowboy, trusting in karma to right the world’s wrongs, but that doesn’t always work out. Fonda considers the film, photographed by a young Vilmos Szigmond (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Deer Hunter), to be a Greek tragedy within a Western; indeed, it’s a little gem that that goes way beyond the trappings of the genre, laying the groundwork for such later anti-Westerns as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. The film is being shown November 14 as part of the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “My Formative Years,” curated by artist Francesco Clemente in conjunction with his current solo show, “Inspired by India,” and will be introduced by playwright Neil LaBute. Clemente says about the film, “I’m in favor of psychedelia in all manifestations and to find psychedelia in a Western is always nice when it happens, but it never happens.” The film series continues with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain on November 21 and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom on November 28 (introduced by choreographer Karole Armitage), before concluding with Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA on December 5.

THE OLDEST BOY

A lama (James Saito), a mother (Celia Keenan-Bolger), and a monk (Jon Norman Schneider) sip Tibetan butter tea in THE OLDEST BOY

Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 28, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

Inspired by a true story told to her by her children’s Tibetan babysitter, playwright Sarah Ruhl explores motherhood, Buddhism, and monastic tradition in The Oldest Boy. Three-time Tony nominee Celia Keenan-Bolger (The Glass Menagerie, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) stars as a Cincinnati-born mother who is surprised when a monk (Jon Norman Schneider) and a lama (James Saito) arrive at her home (in an unnamed American city), claiming that her three-year-old son is the living reincarnation of the monk’s beloved teacher. Both she and her husband (James Yaegashi) — a Buddhist owner of a Tibetan restaurant who was born and raised in India, where the Dalai Lama and many Tibetans have lived in exile since the Chinese army crushed the 1959 Tibetan uprising — are honored that their child might be a tulku, or reincarnated Rinpoche. However, they face a dilemma, for the monk and the lama have come to take the boy to be enthroned in Dharamsala, where he will study in a monastery and become a Rinpoche himself, the teacher now being taught by his student in the endless circle of life. While the thought of giving up her son is shocking to the mother, the father is much more accepting of the situation, as it is part of his family’s culture.

A mother has an impossible decision to make in Sarah Ruhl’s THE OLDEST BOY

The Oldest Boy is set on a round wooden floor that evokes a mandala. Two-time Pulitzer finalist Ruhl (The Clean House, In the Next Room, or the vibrator play) and director Rebecca Taichman (Ruhl’s Stage Kiss and Orlando) open up the back wall of the Mitzi Newhouse, where performers enact symbolic rituals that highlight Tibetan culture but detract from the central narrative, more David Henry Hwang than Sarah Ruhl. Keenan-Bolger and Schneider are both excellent, their difficult relationship wholly believable. The boy is portrayed by a wooden puppet operated by Takemi Kitamura, Nami Yamamoto, and Ernest Abuba, with Abuba providing the speaking voice. It’s a conceit that is odd and uncomfortable at first but ends up working rather well. Also influenced by such documentaries as Unmistaken Child and My Reincarnation, The Oldest Boy is a moving, if uneven, portrait of faith and family, of the value of belief and tradition in the modern world.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: THE LIVING KILLS

While readying their full-length follow-up to 2011’s Faceless Angels, due early next year, Brooklyn’s the Living Kills have tided us over with Odd Fellows Hall, a five-track treat that furthers the psychedelic garage rockers’ mission to scare the bejesus out of all of us. “Anywhere,” “And You Scream,” “Don’t Wait for Me,” “It Ain’t Easy,” and “The Tragic World of the Living Kills” contain plenty of screams and shouts, creepy organ riffs and thrashing drums, frightening guitars and eerie background noises. But, as the self-described “psychotronic” band sings on “Don’t Wait for Me”: “Don’t look for any meaning / There never was any meaning.” Lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter Merrill Sherman, organist Jennifer Bassett — who also plays the moog! — guitarist Heron Furtwangler, bassist Erica Keller, and drummer Brian Del Guercio will be celebrating the November 14 release of the Odd Fellows Hall that night at the Knitting Factory with Bradley Dean & the Terminals. As with the best scary movies, we keep coming back to Odd Fellows Hall again and again and again. Be afraid; be very afraid.

DOC NYC: FLORENCE, ARIZONA

Gunny Jackson is just one of the many characters who populate the prison town of FLORENCE, ARIZONA

FLORENCE ARIZONA (Andrea B. Scott, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, November 14, 12:30, and Wednesday, November 19, 7:30
Festival runs November 13-20
212-924-7771
www.florencearizonafilm.com
www.docnyc.net

Brooklyn-based documentarian Andrea B. Scott reveals the soft underbelly of contemporary America in Florence, Arizona, which is having its world premiere this week at the annual DOC NYC festival. Scott heads to the small desert town of Florence in the Grand Canyon State, an area that was a farm community until a nearby 1875 silver boom led to its becoming a more wild West kind of place. Today the town revolves around the prison system; there are twice as many prisoners in Florence as there are residents, and a call to privatize more of the jails is part of the battle for mayor between the New Age-y Lina Austin and former police chief Tom Rankin, both of whom speak openly and honestly with Scott. Scott, who directed, produced, coedited, and photographed the film — which includes gorgeous shots of sunrises and vast landscapes — also meets with prison barber and former inmate Andy Celaya, who remembers the respect ex-cons used to get after serving their time; another former prisoner, young Marcus Seitz, who can’t wait to turn twenty-one so he can work inside the prison, explaining, “That would be pretty cool”; and grizzled prison detention officer Gunny Jackson, who runs the Semper Fi Ranch with his wife, Lois, and considers himself a “dove” who can be “a very vicious man when I want to be; I know how to inflict pain.” Scott also visits the Pinal County Historical Society, which features a section on all of the people who have been executed in Florence’s prisons.

Originally called Good Men, Bad Men, and a Few Rowdy Ladies during its successful Kickstarter campaign, Florence, Arizona is a pure slice of Americana, casting no judgments on a small cowboy town now beholden to the prison industrial complex. “What I found there was so much richer and nuanced than I ever could have expected — a prison town, yes, but also a deeply American town, full of colorful characters with universal stories,” Scott has said about her first visit to Florence, in December 2010. “On that trip, we began to spin an intricate web of people and places and stories — and before long, like any well-made web, we got stuck there, drawn into the town, its history, and its characters.” Florence, Arizona is screening November 14 and 19 at the IFC Center, with Scott, producer Devorah Brand, and executive producers David Menschel and Julie Goldman on hand to talk about the making of the film. DOC NYC runs November 13-20 at the IFC Center, Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas, and the SVA Theatre, consisting of more than 150 screenings of new and old films, panel discussions, Q&As, and workshops.

THE ART OF SEX AND SEDUCTION: LADY CHATTERLEY

Connie Chatterley (Marina Hands) and gamekeeper Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h) explore sexual freedom in LADY CHATTERLEY

CINÉSALON: LADY CHATTERLEY (Pascale Ferran, 2006)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, November 11, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 16
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

D. H. Lawrence’s oft-banned and censored Lady Chatterley’s Lover has been turned into several films, including highly erotic versions starring Sylvia Kristel, Patricia Javier, and Harlee McBride. But for his 2006 film, Lady Chatterley, French director Pascale Ferran turned to the second version of Lawrence’s tale of love, sex, and infidelity, adapting 1927’s John Thomas and Lady Jane into the César-winning Lady Chatterley. Marina Hands won a César as Best Actress for her sensitive portrayal of Constance Chatterley, wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley (Hippolyte Girardot), a bitter, wealthy aristocratic mine owner who was paralyzed from the waist down in World War I. Sent to give a message to the Chatterleys’ gamekeeper, Parkin (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h), Connie sees him with his shirt off, washing himself outside, and something instantly stirs inside her. She begins making frequent visits to his cabin in the forest, and soon they are having an affair. When Connie prepares to go on a trip with her sister, Hilda (Hélène Fillières), she hires Mrs. Bolton (Hélène Alexandridis) as Sir Clifford’s nurse, but Clifford and Mrs. Bolton grow suspicious of Connie’s long disappearances, forcing Connie to decide what path to take.

Marina Hands won a César as Best Actress for her moving portrayal of the title character in Pascale Ferran’s LADY CHATTERLEY

Lady Chatterley is no mere sex romp or erotic tale; Ferran (L’Âge des possibles, Bird People), who cowrote the César-winning script with Roger Bohbot and Pierre Trividic, treats the subject with an austere honesty. The sex scenes are not lurid but instead wholly believable as Connie and Parkin explore each other’s bodies and souls, their class differences creating a wall between them. The award-laden film also won Césars for Julien Hirsch’s lush yet old-fashioned cinematography and Marie-Claude Altot’s beautiful costume design, the precise details of which are particularly on display when Connie carefully undresses. The film is at times agonizingly slow-paced and too long at nearly three hours, but its overt Frenchness offers a fascinating take on a familiar story. Lady Chatterley is being shown November 11 at 4:00 and 7:30 as part of the French Institute Alliance Française CinéSalon series “The Art of Sex and Seduction,” with the later screening introduced by film critic Nicholas Elliott and followed by a wine reception; the series continues Tuesdays through December 16 with François Ozon’s Swimming Pool introduced by Ry Russo-Young, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake introduced by Alan Brown, Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress introduced by Melissa Anderson, and François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women introduced by Laura Kipnis. There will also be talks, panel discussions, Jean-Daniel Lorieux’s “Seducing the Lens” photography exhibition, and other programs as part of “The Art of Sex & Seduction.”