LEONARD NIMOY’S VINCENT
Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 West 46th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through June 5, $59-$89
starrynighttheater.com/vincent
Leonard Nimoy lived long and prospered before passing away last February at the age of eighty-three, leaving behind a legacy that includes two children, two marriages of more than twenty years, major roles on and off Broadway (Equus, Fiddler on the Roof, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and this little television and movie franchise known as Star Trek. But one of his most important personal projects was a one-man show called Vincent, which he adapted from Phillip Stephens’s Van Gogh and toured in beginning in 1981. In the play, Vincent’s younger brother, Theo, talks about life with his older sibling, an artist whose talent and innovation was only recognized after his death. The thoroughly researched text is based on hundreds of letters between the brothers; Nimoy also traveled to Arles, Saint-Rémy, and Auvers while preparing the show. The play is now being revived by the Starry Night Theatre Co. starting April 1 at the Theatre at St. Clement’s. Company artistic director James Briggs plays Theo, with Dr. Brant Pope directing. “Last week when we buried my brother, there was so much I wanted to say, I couldn’t do it,” Theo says at the start. “You see, I simply couldn’t speak. I didn’t express myself. It’s been a burden on my soul . . . what I wanted to say and I couldn’t . . . what I needed to say, what you need to hear. So I thank you for this second opportunity.”
James Briggs stars as Theo van Gogh in revival of Leonard Nimoy’s VINCENT, coming to the Theatre at St. Clement’s
TICKET GIVEAWAY: Vincent begins previews April 1 and opens April 7 at Theatre at St. Clement’s, and twi-ny has three pairs of tickets to give away for free. Just send your name, daytime phone number, and favorite van Gogh painting to contest@twi-ny.com by Wednesday, March 30, at 3:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; three winners will be selected at random.
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The opening line of Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood picture, instantly sends chills down the spine of anyone who has seen the film or read the book on which it is based, Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel of the same name. The line is spoken in voice-over by the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine), so haunted by the first Mrs. de Winter, the recently deceased Rebecca, that she never even gets a first name, depriving her of her own identity. While serving as a paid companion to snooty wealthy matron Edythe Van Hopper (Florence Bates) on a trip to Monte Carlo, the orphaned young woman meets the dapper but dark Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), an elegant widower who takes a liking to her. Following a whirlwind courtship, they are married, and Maxim takes his mousey bride to his castlelike Cornwall estate, Manderley, where she is constantly compared to and overshadowed by the ghost of Rebecca, idolized as the perfect woman by the large staff, in particular the grim housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), who relentlessly tortures the second Mrs. de Winter. “You wouldn’t think she’d been gone so long, would you?” Mrs. Danvers tells her. “Sometimes, when I walk along the corridor, I fancy I hear her just behind me. That quick light step, I couldn’t mistake it anywhere. It’s not only in this room, it’s in all the rooms in the house. I can almost hear it now.” But just as the second Mrs. de Winter finally tries to establish herself — “I am Mrs. de Winter now” she declares to Mrs. Danvers — Maxim shares a shocking truth about the first Mrs. de Winter that turns her world inside out. 
Experimental director Marie Losier tells a very different kind of love story in the intimate documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, her debut feature-length film. In 1993, British industrial music legend Genesis P-Orridge, the founder of such highly influential groups as Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle, and COUM Transmissions (and who changed his name from Neil Andrew Megson in 1971), married Jacqueline Mary Breyer, a nurse and singer who then changed her name to Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. The two artists were so madly in love that they decided to become a single “pandrogynous” unit known as Breyer P-Orridge, undergoing various forms of plastic surgery to look more alike. Both their life and their music were influenced by the literary cut-up style developed by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, but the film itself has the feel that it too was cut up and randomly put back together, resulting in a seriously flawed and fractured narrative that has fascinating individual moments that don’t form a cohesive whole. Mixing in home movies, staged reenactments, archival concert footage, voice-over narration by Genesis, and new interviews (with such friends and colleagues as Tony Conrad, Marti Domination, Lili Chopra, and Peaches), Losier never quite gets to the heart of the matter. Much of the film feels as if something’s missing, as if the director got too close to her subjects and assumed the audience can fill in certain gaps. As she says in the project’s production notes, “The film will attempt to present the incredible complexity of Genesis’ personality from many different angles, most especially my subjective point of view. From my earliest films, my feeling has been that when shooting real life subjects, my very presence changes the reality of what I am filming. Therefore, I am not a neutral participant, but one equally engaged and inspired by what is happening in front of my camera.” As personal and revealing as the film gets at times, much of it also seems forced and overly arty. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is screening at various days and times through April 3 at the Rubin Museum in conjunction with the new site-specific interactive-exchange exhibition