twi-ny recommended events

TICKET GIVEAWAY: “IT’S A DISASTER” Q&As WITH DAVID CROSS & AMERICA FERRERA

Brunch might very well turn into a group of friends’ last meal in Todd Berger’s black comedy, IT’S A DISASTER

IT’S A DISASTER (Todd Berger, 2012)
Village East Cinemas
181-189 Second Ave. at 12th St.
Opens Friday, April 12
212-529-6799
www.itsadisastermovie.com
www.villageeastcinema.com

When a group of friends show up for one of their regular couples brunches, the disaster was supposed to be news that one of the pairs was splitting up, but that revelation is somewhat overwhelmed by the possibility that dirty bombs have been detonated nearby and they all might be facing a grim, extremely short future in the very funny black comedy It’s a Disaster. Emma (Erinn Hayes) and Pete (Blaise Miller) have invited over four other couples to partake in wine and quiche before announcing their impending divorce, but that all changes when next-door-neighbor Hal (writer-director Todd Berger) knocks on the door wearing a hazmat suit and tells them that lethal toxins might very well be on their way to their perfect little suburban community. Potentially facing the end, the friends all react in different ways, revealing secrets, panicking, or simply welcoming the end. Wacky Lexi (Rachel Boston) and her husband, the none-too-bright Buck (producer Kevin M. Brennan), want to go out having plenty of sex; chemistry teacher Hedy (America Ferrera) sees no hope while her fiancée, Shane (producer Jeff Grace), wants to battle the unknown enemy like it’s a video game; the steady Tracy (Julia Stiles) can’t believe that she might finally have found the right guy, calm history teacher Glen (David Cross); and Jenny (Laura Adkin) and Gordon (Rob McKillivray), well, they’re late as usual. Berger (The Scenesters, Don’t Eat the Baby: Adventures at Post-Katrina Mardi Gras) does a fine job establishing the characters early and letting them develop at their own pace as they all take turns considering the impact Armageddon will have on them. Cross is a riot as Glen, murmuring hysterical deadpan asides under his breath, while Ferrera holds nothing back as she concocts a grand finale. It all makes for an intimate gathering (Berger, Brennan, Miller, and Grace make up the Vacationeers comedy team, ramping up the actors’ familiarity level) that warmly welcomes the audience into the eventual madness.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: It’s a Disaster is currently available on VOD and opens April 12 at Village East Cinemas and Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn. On Friday night, Cross (Mr. Show, Arrested Development) will be on hand for a Q&A following the primetime screening, and Cross and Ferrera (Ugly Betty, Real Women Have Curves) will both be at Village East after the Saturday night show for a Q&A, and twi-ny has a free pair of tickets to give away for each special event. Just send your name, daytime phone number, show preference (Friday or Saturday night), and all-time-favorite end-of-the-world movie to contest@twi-ny.com by Thursday, April 11, at 3:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; two winners will be selected at random.

LUCKY GUY

John Cotter (Peter Gerety) mentors Mike McAlary (Tom Hanks) on New York City journalism in LUCKY GUY (photo by Joan Marcus)

Broadhurst Theatre
235 West 44th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 16, $87-$152
www.luckyguyplay.com

Tom Hanks makes a terrific Broadway debut as New York City journalist Mike McAlary in Nora Ephron’s consistently entertaining Lucky Guy. Hanks, who won back-to-back Oscars in 1993-94 for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump and starred in Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, uses his general likability to endear the audience to McAlary, a fiercely ambitious reporter who shifted between New York Newsday, the Daily News, and the Post from 1985 to 1998, breaking some of the most important stories of that time, including the 77th Precinct corruption scandal, which made his career. The show is set up as a kind of Irish wake, with a group of McAlary’s colleagues drinking and telling stories about the Pulitzer Prize winner’s life and dedication to his chosen field. Among them are Courtney B. Vance as his longtime editor, Hap Hairston; Hanks’s former Bosom Buddies costar Peter Scolari as Daily News scribe Michael Daly; Peter Gerety as mentor John Cotter; Michael Gaston as subway columnist Jim Dwyer; Richard Masur as bombastic newspaper editors Jerry Nachman and Stanley Joyce; and Danny Mastrogiorgio as journalist Bob Drury. Maura Tierney, in her Great White Way debut as well, plays McAlary’s wife, Alice, who spent many a night worrying about his safety as he investigated dangerous stories, while Christopher McDonald is his fast-talking lawyer, Eddie Hayes. David Rockwell’s scenic design evokes the look and feel of a city newsroom, with lots of smoking, cursing (much of it courtesy of Deirdre Lovejoy as reporter Louise Imerman), drinking, and fighting for “the wood” — the story that is teased at the top of the front page, while a big logo at the rear of the stage announces which paper McAlary is writing for at that time.

Journalist Mike McAlary (Tom Hanks) becomes part of the story in LUCKY GUY (photo by Joan Marcus)

Ephron, who spent part of her early career as a journalist, did plenty of research in writing Lucky Guy, and she pulls no punches in portraying McAlary — whose battle with cancer while still trying to do his job was an inspiration to Ephron, who was fighting myelodysplastic syndrome while finishing this play — warts and all, exploring his jealousy of Jimmy Breslin, his lack of loyalty to his employers, his near-fatal drunk-driving accident, and his famous failure when he refuses to back off of a story that implodes in his face. Ephron also avoids overplaying the sympathy card as the cancer begins to eat away at him. Director George C. Wolfe keeps things moving smoothly even as the characters go from reenacting the various tales to addressing the audience directly, sharing personal insights into McAlary and New York City journalism. Despite being about a man who tragically died too young, at the age of forty-one, written by a woman who also died tragically, at the age of seventy-one, both of whom still had a lot to give to this world, Lucky Guy manages to be a funny, irreverent, and, ultimately, uplifting two hours, led by an immensely talented actor who has seamlessly made the transition from Hollywood to Broadway.

RAYYA ELIAS IN CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH GILBERT

HARLEY LOCO: A MEMOIR OF HARD LIVING, HAIR, AND POST-PUNK FROM THE MIDDLE EAST TO THE LOWER EAST SIDE by Rayya Elias (Viking, April 4, 2013, $27.95)
Barnes & Noble
97 Warren St.
Tuesday, April 9, free, 6:00
212-587-5389
www.barnesandnoble.com
www.rayyaelias.com

“Another eviction — this time, unavoidable. Kim and I had known it was coming, but we still weren’t ready to be thrown out of our home, no matter how much we deserved it. We were pathetic. Tired, sick, numb, strung out. It was 1987 and we were living on Second Street between avenues A and B.” So begins Rayya Elias’s poignant and brutally honest Harley Loco: A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk from the Middle East to the Lower East Side. Born in Syria in 1960, Elias and her family escaped to Detroit when she was seven. She later moved to New York City and became a punk musician and hair stylist, indulging in sex, drugs, and rock and roll and spending time homeless and in jail before cleaning herself up and getting her life back on track. Elias, who has also created a soundtrack of original songs (“Star,” “Myself Without You,” “Miss You,” “Loaded Gun,” and “Fever”) to accompany the book, will be celebrating the release of Harley Loco at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble on April 10 at 6:00 with a reading, signing, audience Q&A, and conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and the National Book Award finalist The Last American Man. In the introduction to Harley Loco, Gilbert, who met Elias in 2000 in the East Village, writes, “Rayya, meanwhile, was a rough diamond — a black-clothed, raspy-voiced, tattooed dropout of a soul, and she owned a motorcycle, and she kept pit bulls, and she was gay, and she was of Middle Eastern descent, and she’d grown up in Detroit, and she fucking loved the NFL, and she’d been to prison, and she called everyone ‘dude’ or ‘baby,’ and she was trying to clean up her life after years of heroin addiction and decades of an absolutely Byronic free fall into rock-and-roll abandon. . . . It is my honor to introduce these pages — so gravelly, so straggly, so hopeful, bright, and true. Just like the dude herself.” We can vouch for all of that as well — and we’ve even gone to an NFL game with her, even if it was the Jets.

THE MOUND BUILDERS

August Howe (David Conrad), his wife, Cynthia (Janie Brookshire), and his sister, D.K. (Danielle Skraastad), can’t separate the past from the present and the future in Signature revival of Lanford Wilson’s THE MOUND BUILDERS (photo by Richard Termine)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 14, $75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

In 1970, Joni Mitchell sang, “Don’t it always seem to go / that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone / They paved paradise / and put up a parking lot.” That essentially sums up Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders, currently being revived at the Signature Theatre. One of Wilson’s personal favorites and winner of the 1975 Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting, The Mound Builders is not an easy play, as evidenced by a Q&A following the April 4 performance, when the dramaturg and members of the cast were barraged with questions from the audience about what they all just saw, what it meant, and why the first act “meandered, meandered, and meandered.” But the players handled it all in stride, as they do the show itself. The Mound Builders takes place in February 1975 in Blue Shoals, Illinois, where Professor August Howe (David Conrad) and his right-hand man, Dr. Dan Loggins (Zachary Booth), are leading an archaeological dig after the discovery of a pre-Columbian civilization that surfaced as construction crews came in to build a new hotel and resort center. The story is actually told in a series of flashbacks, as Howe dictates a slideshow onto a tape recorder for his assistant, the scenes unfolding after he introduces them for the unseen “Diane.” Howe and his wife, Cynthia (Janie Brookshire), who has taken all the photos, are staying with their young daughter, Kirsten (Rachel Resheff), in a home owned by Chad Jasker (Will Rogers) and his family, who are in line to make quite a windfall from the new development. Also in the house are Dan’s pregnant gynecologist wife, Dr. Jean Loggins (Lisa Joyce), and novelist D. K. “Delia” Eriksen (Danielle Skraastad), August’s deeply troubled sister who has recently been released from an institution. As August and Dan continue to uncover remarkable artifacts of the past, they fail to connect with the present, as the jittery Chad makes moves on Cynthia, Jean, and a clueless Dan, and a thunderous rainstorm threatens to flood the area.

Dan (Zachary Booth) and Chad (Will Rogers) toast to very different futures in THE MOUND BUILDERS (photo by Richard Termine)

Part of the Signature’s Legacy Program honoring the tenth anniversary of Wilson’s 2002-3 tenure as playwright in residence, The Mound Builders takes a while to get going, but once it does, it becomes a compelling character study that explores people’s needs and desires, from love, money, and sex to fame, family, and just plain acknowledgment. The ricketiness of set designer Neil Patel’s somewhat ramshackle wooden-slatted house corresponds well with the fragility of the characters’ relationships with one another, as secrets rise to the surface like the ancient objects August and Dan are obsessed with finding. Director Jo Bonney jumps up the action in the second act, in which the house is curiously askew from its previous position, foreshadowing what is to come between the characters. Although Wilson’s legacy — the Missouri-born playwright passed away in 2011 at the age of seventy-three — is being better served right now by the Roundabout’s wonderful revival of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley’s Folly at the Laura Pels, The Mound Builders is still a more-than-able production of a complicated play. By the end, the characters indeed don’t know what they’ve got till it’s gone, each of their individual paradises paved over, lost forever.

CARTE BLANCHE — SCOTT MACAULAY AND TWENTY YEARS OF FILMMAKER MAGAZINE: LAWS OF GRAVITY

Jon (Adam Trese) and Denise (Edie Falco) talk over tough times in Nick Gomez’s LAWS OF GRAVITY

LAWS OF GRAVITY (Nick Gomez, 1992)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Sunday, April 7, 2:00
Series runs through April 15
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
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Nick Gomez wrote and directed this gritty urban drama about Jimmy (Peter Greene) and Jon (Adam Trese), a couple of guys on the mean streets of Brooklyn who get more than they bargained for when a friend stores some guns in Jimmy’s apartment and Jon thinks he’s ready for the big time. The film features Edie Falco in one of her earliest major performances, as Jimmy’s tough-talking girlfriend, Denise. Powerful acting, dead-on dialogue, and expert location shooting drive this film, which was made for a mere thirty-eight grand. Gomez (Drowning Mona) has gone on to direct multiple episodes of some of the best television shows of the last twenty years, including Homicide, Oz, The Shield, and Dexter, among others. Laws of Gravity is screening at MoMA on April 7 at 2:00 as part of “Carte Blanche: Scott Macaulay and 20 Years of Filmmaker Magazine,” which celebrates the continuing success of the IFP publication that focuses on independent film from the filmmakers’ point of view. Curated by the magazine’s editor in chief, Scott Macaulay, the series continues through April 15 with such other films as Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, Hal Hartley’s Amateur, Miguel Arteta’s Chuck and Buck, Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for Melancholy, and Todd Haynes’s Safe. In the Winter 1992/93 issue of Filmmaker, Peter Broderick went behind-the-scenes of Laws of Gravity, detailing the financing, casting process, rehearsals, and equipment and publishing the budget itself, which included $33 for prop blood, $48 for Polaroids, and $60 for phone calls. “The breathless, handheld 16mm camerawork by Jean de Segonzac, which always seems to be racing to catch up with the characters, made its mark on generations of subsequent filmmakers,” Macaulay writes on the MoMA website about the film.

HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY: DEFIANCE

Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber star as brothers at odds in gripping Holocaust drama

DEFIANCE (Edward Zwick, 2008)
Symphony Space, Leonard Nimoy Thalia
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
Monday April 8, $25, 7:30
212-864-5400
www.symphonyspace.org
www.defiancemovie.com

In December 2008, there was a spate of Holocaust-related dramas released in theaters, examining the Nazis and the persecution of the Jews from many different angles — with various degrees of success. Among the best of the films — and one that tells a seldom-told tale — is Edward Zwick’s Defiance. Zwick, whose Glory looked at the contribution of African Americans fighting for the North in the Civil War, now turns to WWII, following the Bielski clan as it fights back against the Germans and the local constabulary in Russia. Based on a true story detailed in the book of the same name by Nechama Tec, Defiance stars Daniel Craig as Tuvia, Liev Schreiber as Zus, and Jamie Bell as Asael, three brothers who have left their farm and take refuge in the vast forest they have been playing in since they were kids. As more and more Jews hear about the small community they are establishing hidden among the trees, they flock there. But while Tuvia feels he cannot send anyone away, Zus believes such foolish generosity will result in a lack of food and a greater chance that they will be found and killed. With Tuvia as the group’s reluctant leader, adamant that they should remain in the forest, Zus takes off to join the Russian resistance. “Each day of freedom is a victory,” Tuvia proclaims. “And if we die trying to live, at least we die like human beings.” But as the Germans get closer and the winter grows harsher, the chances of survival seem bleaker and bleaker. Although Defiance does lapse into soap-opera territory and pulls at the emotional heartstrings too often — Zwick and executive producer Marshall Herskovitz were, after all, the creators of Thirtysomething — it is a powerful drama that reveals a rarely shown side of the Holocaust as a group of working-class Jewish men and women refuse to give in or give up, taking up arms and fighting back against impossible odds. The underrated film is being screened April 8 at Symphony Space as part of a special Holocaust Remembrance Day program that benefits School News Nationwide, a Brooklyn-based organization that teaches children journalism skills and tolerance; SNN founder Bill Tingling will introduce the film, there will be a memorial candle lighting and poem, and the screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Holocaust survivor Sally Frishberg and Zvi Bielski, the son of Zus, moderated by Izzy Fridman, the son of a Bielski partisan.

FIRST SATURDAY — “WORKT BY HAND”: HIDDEN LABOR AND HISTORICAL QUILTS

Elizabeth Welsh, “Medallion Quilt,” cotton, circa 1830 (Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Roebling Society)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, April 6, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum celebrates the recent opening of “‘Workt by Hand’: Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts,” which examines the craft and culture behind approximately three dozen masterpieces from the collection, at the April free First Saturday program. There will be live performances by Jessy Carolina & the Hot Mess, Adia Whitaker and Ase Dance Theater Collective, Jesse Elliott (These United States) and friends, and Brooklyn Ballet, which will present Quilt with violinist Gil Morgenstern. Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art curator Catherine Morris will give a talk on “‘Workt by Hand,’” Robyn Love will share her knitting project “SpinCycle,” there will be a screening of Barbara Hammer and Gina Carducci’s Generations, followed by a Q&A with Carducci, a felt collage workshop, a book club discussion with Bernice McFadden about her latest novel, Gathering of Waters, and a zine-making cookbook workshop with Brooklyn Zine Fest and Malaka Gharib and Claire O’Neil of The Runcible Spoon. In addition, the galleries will remain open late so visitors can check out “LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital,” “Käthe Kollwitz: Prints from the ‘War’ and ‘Death’ Portfolios,” “Fine Lines: American Drawings from the Brooklyn Museum,” “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui,” “Raw/Cooked: Marela Zacarias,” “Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company,” and more.