this week in film and television

XOXO, ALAMO: BRIDESMAIDS MOVIE PARTY

A bride and her bridesmaids are looking for trouble in fab comesy

A bride and her bridesmaids are looking for trouble in fab Paul Feig comedy

BRIDESMAIDS (Paul Feig, 2011)
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn
445 Albee Square West
Monday, February 13, $22.36, 10:05
www.bridesmaidsmovie.com
drafthouse.com

The bachelorette partying will jump right off the screen and into the audience at Alamo Drafthouse on February 13 when the Downtown Brooklyn venue hosts its next movie party with a screening of Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids. The interactive event, specially timed for Valentine’s Eve, features lemons, poo spray, bridal veils, special cocktails and shakes, and other goodies.

The film itself is not one of those lousy SNL one-note movies, nor is it a silly chick flick. As it turns out, Bridesmaids is one of the most consistently funny laugh-out-loud romps of this century. Directed by Freaks and Geeks creator Feig, Bridesmaids is an endlessly clever and insightful examination of love, loneliness, and friendship starring SNL’s Kristen Wiig, who cowrote the smart script with Groundlings member Annie Mumolo (who makes a cameo as a nervous flyer). Wiig shows impressive depth and range as Annie, a perennial screw-up whose closest childhood friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), is marrying into a very snooty upper-crust family. After agreeing to be Lillian’s maid of honor, Annie gets involved in a battle of wits with Lillian’s future sister-in-law, the elegant Helen (a radiant Rose Byrne), who is determined to outshine Annie in every way possible and steal Lillian away from her.

Already a mess — she had to close her bakery, she shares an apartment with a bizarre pair of British siblings, she works in a jewelry store where she drives away potential customers with her sorry tales of woe, and she allows herself to be treated miserably as a late-night booty call for a self-centered businessman (Jon Hamm) — Annie experiences a series of hilarious, pathetic setbacks as she attempts to organize the bridal shower and bachelorette party, including a riotous potty-humor scene in a high-end boutique that is likely to go down in comedy history for its sheer relentlessness.

The rest of the bridesmaids are quite a hoot — Becca (Ellie Kemper), the Disney-loving kewpie doll; Rita (Wendi McLendon-Covey), a foul-mouthed married mom who can’t wait to go crazy away from her family; and the groom’s burly sister, Megan (the hugely entertaining Melissa McCarthy, on the cusp of superstardom), who lives life without a filter. Annie is so caught up in her own failures that she doesn’t recognize when something potentially good enters her life, in the form of state trooper Nathan Rhodes (Chris O’Dowd). Wiig gives the finest performance of her career to that point as Annie. Despite the slapstick nature of many of the jokes, Bridesmaids is filled with heart and soul, making it one of the best comedies in years. Alamo’s Movie Party series continues February 25 with Elizabeth Banks’s Cocaine Bear, with an agility course, bear claws, gummy bears, and more (but none of that white stuff).

NEW FILMS FROM JAPAN: YAMABUKI

Chang-su (Kang Yoon-soo) fights off loneliness and desperation in Juichiro Yamasaki’s Yamabuki

YAMABUKI (Juichiro Yamasaki, 2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, February 10, 7:00, and Saturday, February 11, 4:00
Series runs February 10-16, $17
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
yamabuki-film.com/en

“You have two options. Be prepared to die for what you believe or give up on it and run from it,” widowed detective Hayakawa (Yohta Kawase) tells his teenage daughter, Yamabuki (Kilala Inori), in Juichiro Yamasaki’s Yamabuki, making its US premiere February 10-11 at IFC as part of the sixth ACA Cinema Project series, “New Films from Japan.”

The first Japanese film selected for the ACID section at Cannes, Yamasaki’s third feature follows multiple characters as they struggle through the loneliness of everyday existence, their lives intertwining primarily at a crossroad intersection in a small town. It all takes place in Maniwa, where Yamasaki’s father was born and where Yamasaki is a tomato farmer in addition to being a writer and director.

Chang-su (Kang Yoon-soo) is a former Olympic equestrian who had to quit the sport when his father’s business collapsed. The South Korean native is now working in Japan for a construction company that shatters large rock formations in a mountain quarry; the resulting gravel will be used to build infrastructure for the Tokyo Olympics. The soft-spoken Chang-su lives with his girlfriend, Minami (Misa Wada), and her six-year-old daughter, Uzuki, whose father is out of the picture.

Yamabuki is a high school student who spends much of her time “silent standing” at the crossroad with a small group, holding signs protesting the 2015 military legislation change that permitted Japan to get involved in foreign conflicts even when not for self-defense. She is joined by Yusuke (Hisao Kurozumi), a classmate who is obsessed with her; while her sign reads, “Flowers in the rifle barrel! Peace in Okinawa!,” his declares, “I’m in love with this woman!” with an arrow pointing at her.

On one of his mountain hikes, Hayakawa spots a small yamabuki plant, also known as the Japanese rose, and decides to take it home and replant it in his garden. However, while doing so, he dislodges numerous large stones of the type Chang-su smashes, and, without Hayakawa’s knowledge, they tumble down onto the mountain road where Chang-su is driving, causing him to get into an accident and break his leg. Shortly thereafter, something else falls down the mountain that leads the many subplots to intersect even further (while also offering another meaning of the word “yamabuki”).

Yamabuki (Kilala Inori) is not sure of her place in the world in Juichiro Yamasaki’s third feature

Yamabuki is shot on 16mm film stock by cinematographer Kenta Tawara, giving the movie a grainy, nostalgic feel; if it weren’t for the cars and the occasional use of cell phones, you might think it was made in the 1970s, especially when Chang-su stops twice to use public pay phones. Composer Olivier Deparis’s toy piano score adds to the film’s wistfulness while Sébastien Laudenbach’s animation of blossoming yamabukis in the opening and closing credits are charming, bookending the pervading melancholia.

The Osaka-born Yamasaki (The Sound of Light, Sanchu Uprising: Voice at Dawn) — who was inspired to make the film not only by the Olympics but because of Kang Yoon-soo’s real life as a Korean actor who moved to Maniwa with a woman and her two children — takes his time with the narrative; scenes unfold slowly, often with not much happening and explanation kept at a minimum, left to visual and aural poetry. “Di tang grows in the shade, where people don’t look,” a prostitute says to Hayakawa about a tree she spots through a window, surrounded by garbage. “Sunflowers face the sun but you don’t have to,” Yamabuki recalls her mother telling her.

The final moments of the film turn surreal and can be interpreted in several different ways. Oddly, much of the scene is used in the official trailer, so anyone wanting to see the film should avoid that at all costs.

Yamabuki is screening February 10 at 7:00 and February 11 at 4:00, with Yamasaki on hand for Q&As at each show. The series continues through February 16 with Kei Ishikawa’s A Man, Shô Miyake’s Small, Slow, and Steady, Nao Kubota’s Thousand and One Nights, and Yuji Nakae’s The Zen Diary.

SEIJUN SUZUKI CENTENNIAL

Tokyo Drifter is part of six-film Japan Society tribute to master filmmaker Seijun Suzuki

SEIJUN SUZUKI CENTENNIAL
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
February 3-11, $15
japansociety.org

“I am often told that a script with a dark subject always turns into a more cheerful movie in my hands,” master Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki says in a brief Criterion “Suzuki on Suzuki” video interview. “Maybe it is due to my personality that I dislike dark stories. I always start by thinking about the style and design of the film. I choose the costumes and sets based on that initial image. Rather than using the same color, isn’t if more fun if each scene is a different color?”

Suzuki’s 1966 yakuza yarn, Tokyo Drifter, is a prime example of his philosophy of cinema, a berserk noir screening February 4 in the Japan Society tribute “Seijun Suzuki Centennial,” honoring the Tokyo-born director of more than fifty films between 1956 and 2005; Suzuki died in February 2017 at the age of ninety-three.

Tokyo Drifter must be seen on the big screen to be fully appreciated. Nearly every set is an eye-popping work of art, courtesy of production designer Takeo Kimura, and lushly photographed by cinematographer Shigeyoshi Mine. Black-and-white morphs into bold and brash reds, yellows, and blues for no reason. Backgrounds disappear so it looks like a shootout is taking place in a black void. A statue of a woman holding some kind of prehistoric giant donut switches hues as the action continues around it. Our hero, whose blazer goes from powder blue to yellow to cream to white, turns a corner and is suddenly running down a heavenly white German expressionist passageway. A villain uses his black gun to dial on a red phone. Hajime Kaburagi’s jazzy noir score mixes with romantic ballads, complete with a man in black playing a white piano. Red blood squirts into the air. Shinya Inoue’s editing is inconsistent and choppy, adding to the derangement, whether done on purpose or not.

Suave Tetsu “Phoenix” Hondo (Tetsuya Watari) and his boss, Kurata (Ryūji Kita), are getting out of the yakuza game, but Otsuka (Hideaki Esumi) and his gang, including Tatsu “the Viper” (Tamio Kawaji), are not going to let it be easy for them. Kurata owes an important building payment to Keiichi (Tsuyoshi Yoshida), who is willing to make a fair deal, as Kurata does not have all the money. But Otsuka sneaks in and threatens Keiichi to sell to him so Otsuka can take over the immensely valuable property. Kurata’s assistant, Mutsuko (Kaoru Hama), reads comic books and is secretly in cahoots with Otsuka, while Tetsu’s girlfriend, Chiharu (Chieko Matsubara), is a sweet-natured lounge singer who performs in a far-out nightclub. (Watari sings the song over the opening credits.) Double crosses lead to characters questioning loyalty and trust as the body count rises amid a groovy avant-garde Pop art setting unlike any other yakuza flick. (Suzuki followed it up with Tokyo Drifter 2: The Sea Is Bright Red as the Color of Love, a very different kind of film.)

Copresented by the Japan Foundation and guest curated by University of Alberta assistant professor William Carroll, “Seijun Suzuki Centennial” runs February 3-11 and comprises imported 35mm films from throughout Suzuki’s career: the ghost story Kagero-za (1981), the second part of his Taisho Trilogy, which began with 1980’s Zigeunerweisen and concluded with 1991’s Yumeji; a double feature of the director’s first Nikkatsu yakuza thriller, Satan’s Town (1956), and the forty-minute melodrama Love Letter (1958); 1966’s Carmen from Kawachi, one of three Suzuki adaptations of novels by Tôkô Kon; and A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (1977), about a model turned golf star who faces stress and a stalker, Suzuki’s first film in ten years following a battle with Nikkatsu, which decided it no longer liked his unpredictable work after Branded to Kill.

“As Suzuki worked in a transforming film industry, he experimented with new possibilities given by changes in technology and took up new stylistic trends as they were developed by his colleagues, but he pushed them toward more abstract ends. As a result, Suzuki’s style was a constantly shifting target,” Carroll writes in Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema. “Ultimately, the Seijunesque is defined less by a singular trait or tendency than by a push-or-pull, direct juxtaposition, or synthesis between multiple tendencies that would seem to be irreconcilable.” All that and more is on view in this tribute to a film icon.

SLAMDANCE: ONLOOKERS

Kimi Takesue’s Onlookers looks at tourists and locals in Laos

ONLOOKERS (Kimi Takesue, 2023)
Streaming January 23-29
slamdance.com
www.onlookersfilm.com

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak,” John Berger writes in the seminal text Ways of Seeing. “But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”

In documentary filmmaker Kimi Takesue’s Onlookers, having its world premiere at Slamdance in Park City, Utah, this weekend and available for streaming January 23-29, there are no words, no dialogue — just seventy-two minutes of stunning visuals exploring what we see and what we know, what we are present for and what we are absent for.

The film takes place in various parts of Laos as director, producer, cinematographer, sound recordist, and editor Takesue sets up her camera and leaves it there as scenes unfold in real time and with natural sound, from a breathtaking fourteen-second sunset to five and a half minutes of six women sitting by the side of the road, preparing to fill begging bowls for a long line of Buddhist monks. Animals graze in a temple courtyard as bells chime. Women sell goods at an open-air market. Rivers flow, wind rustles trees, roosters crow, birds chirp, a cat rests on a step, a man relaxes in a hammock, all taking their time, no one in a hurry.

Then the tourists arrive; a few run up to take pictures of a monk beating a drum, then walk away, not actually stopping to watch and listen. A woman snaps a photo of three fellow sightseers standing atop a small, raging waterfall as a man fishes below. A local worker waits as a woman checks her cell phone, as if he isn’t there, standing next to her. A group of backpackers gets a prime view at a boat racing festival while locals observe from the shore. On a mountain, six tourists search for the best angle to take selfies. Visitors at a guest house sit in an outdoor lounge and watch Friends.

Born in Colorado and raised in Hawai’i and Massachusetts, Takesue has previously made Where Are You Taking Me? in Uganda, Heaven’s Crossroad in Vietnam, and 95 and 6 to Go in Hawai’i, about reconnecting with her grandfather. In Onlookers, she is not necessarily criticizing the tourists or celebrating the Laotian locals; she’s merely showing how people witness and experience the world, particularly when it comes to travelers and residents.

She beautifully captures this relationship in a short but captivating scene that begins with a static shot of an old religious shrine that looks like it hasn’t been in operation for years. A young woman enters the frame, sits down, poses for a selfie, stands up, snaps a photo of the shrine, then saunters off, never once stopping to just look at the shrine itself. The camera lingers on the building for several seconds, with nobody around, just the decaying structure set against a blue sky and between lush greenery.

We see what we want to see, when we want to see it, not always recognizing what is right in front of us, whether we’re at home or on vacation. It reminded me of people who go to a museum and take pictures of classic artworks but only see them through the lens of their phone rather than experiencing them with their own eyes. In fact, each frame of Onlookers is composed like a painting that slowly comes to life.

“The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe,” Berger writes in his book. “Yet this seeing which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli. (It can only be thought of in this way if one isolates the small part of the process which concerns the eye’s retina.) We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach — though not necessarily within arm’s reach. To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it. . . . We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are. Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen.”

In all films, the audience might not have a choice of what they’re looking at, but they can decide for themselves what they’re seeing. And in the case of Onlookers, what they’re seeing is a gorgeous portrait of ourselves that no selfie can catch.

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Cecilia Suárez stars in NYJFF closing night selection, Violeta Salama’s Alegría

THIRTY-SECOND ANNUAL NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
January 12-23, $15 in person, $10 virtual (bundle $15)
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
thejewishmuseum.org

The thirty-second annual New York Jewish Film Festival comes along at a time with rising anti-Semitism in America and around the world, disarray in the Israeli government amid the controversial return of a former leader, and continuing battles in the Middle East over human rights and land possession. Why should this year be different from any other year?

Running January 12-23 at Film at Lincoln Center, the series comprises twenty-one feature-length narrative films and documentaries and a program of six shorts by women that explore the past, present, and future of Judaism and the diaspora. The festival kicks off with the New York premiere of Fred Cavayé’s Farewell, Mr. Haffmann, in which Daniel Auteuil plays the title character, a jeweler in Nazi-occupied Paris trying to preserve his family. The opening-night selection is Ofir Raul Graizer’s America, about an Israeli swimming coach (Michael Moshonov) who returns to Tel Aviv after living in Chicago, a reunion that doesn’t go quite as planned; the screening will be followed by a Q&A with writer, director, and editor Graizer.

Hannah Saidiner’s My Parent, Neal is part of special shorts program at NYJFF

The centerpiece film is Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin’s Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden, a documentary about the German-Jewish artist who was murdered at Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six but left behind a remarkable legacy; the film includes the voices of Vicky Krieps, Mathieu Amalric, and Hanna Schygulla, and both screenings on January 18 will be followed by a Q&A with the directors. The festival closes with Violeta Salama’s Alegría, about a single mother (Cecilia Suárez) wrestling with her own faith and the patriarchy as she ventures from Mexico to her hometown in the autonomous North African city of Melilla for her niece’s Orthodox wedding. Salama will discuss her debut feature after both screenings on January 22.

A Life Apart: Hasidism in America returns to the New York Jewish Film Festival in a twenty-fifth anniversary 4K restoration

Among the other highlights are Sylvie Ohayon’s Haute Couture, starring Nathalie Baye as a Dior seamstress in Paris; the New York premiere of Tomer Heymann’s I Am Not, a documentary about boarding school student Oren Levy, who shuns human contact, which will be followed by a hybrid Q&A with Heymann and several of the film’s subjects; the New York premiere of octogenarian Ralph Arlyck’s I Like It Here, a personal film about aging; Jake Paltrow’s June Zero, a fictionalized retelling of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann from three different perspectives; and a pair of revivals, Joseph Green and Leon Trystand’s 1939 Yiddish film A Letter to Mother, and the world premiere of the twenty-fifth anniversary 4K restoration of Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum’s A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, a seminal documentary narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker and Leonard Nimoy and with a score by Yale Strom, followed by a panel discussion with Daum, Rudavsky, Ayala Fader, Marcus Allison, Pearl Gluck, and Rabbi Mayer Schiller.

(Keep watching this space for full and capsule reviews throughout the festival.)

Farewell, Mr. Haffmann offers a unique perspective on the Nazi occupation of Paris

FAREWELL, MR. HAFFMANN (Fred Cavayé, 2021)
Walter Reade Theater
Monday, January 16, 8:30
www.filmlinc.org

Fred Cavayé’s stunning Farewell, Mr. Haffmann offers several unique twists on the Holocaust drama, resulting in a breathtaking microcosm of so much of what happened, particularly during the Nazi occupation of France. The film is adapted from a play by Jean-Philippe Daguerre, with nearly all the action taking place in Joseph Haffmann’s jewelry shop, where Haffmann lives with his wife and three children. After getting his family out in May 1941, Haffmann finds himself trapped in Paris, cutting a deal with his assistant (Gilles Lellouche) and his wife (Sara Giraudeau) that grows ever-more dangerous as Nazi leaders start coming to the shop to buy jewelry for their wives and mistresses. Daniel Auteuil (Jean de Florette, Girl on the Bridge) is riveting as Haffmann, who experiences anti-Semitism and war from a fascinating perspective, both psychologically and physically.

Two men are at odds over religion and love in Ady Walter’s Shttl

SHTTL (Ady Walter, 2022)
Walter Reade Theater
Monday, January 16, 5:30, and Tuesday, January 17, 1:00
www.filmlinc.org

On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a small Yiddish-speaking village on the Polish border teeters on the edge as the citizens debate war, collaboration, religion, women’s roles in society, and true love. In the tense, gripping Shttl, Ady Walter pulls off quite an impressive directorial debut, shooting the 110-minute film in one continuous take, shifting between black-and-white and color as the narrative unfolds: Mendele (Moshe Lobel) joins the military, promising to come back for Yuna (Anisia Stasevich), but while he is gone she is wooed/harassed by the mean-spirited Folie (Antoine Millet), whose father (Saul Rubinek) is the community’s spiritual leader. The strange spelling of the title is an homage to Georges Perec’s 1969 novel, La Disparition (A Void), which never uses the fifth letter of the alphabet, its loss a symbol of profound absence. (Both of French novelist Perec’s parents were killed during the Holocaust, his father on the field of battle, his mother in Auschwitz.) The village, or shtetl, was built for the film and is being turned into a Jewish-Ukrainian museum. The screening on January 16 will be followed by a Q&A with Walter, New Yiddish Rep veteran Lobel, award-winning German-born Canadian actor Rubinek, and producer Jean-Charles Lévy.

Barren is a chilling look at faith and ritual

BARREN (Mordechai Vardi, 2022)
January 23-28, virtual only
www.filmlinc.org/films/barren

An intense melding of Unorthodox and Shtisel, Mordechai Vardi’s Barren is a heart-wrenching drama about an Orthodox couple, Naftali (Yoav Rotman) and Feigi (Mili Eshet), desperate to have a child. They live with his mother, a matchmaker (Ilanit Ben-Yaakov), and his father, a Torah scribe (Nevo Kimchi), both of whom were secular before becoming Orthodox. When Naftali goes on a pilgrimage to Uman for Rosh Hashanah to pray for fertility, his father invites over a mysterious man who has nowhere to spend the holiday. Rabbi Eliyahu (Gil Frank) claims to be able to heal by blowing the shofar; he offers to do so for Feigi, but their encounter turns terribly wrong, leading every member of the family to reconsider their faith and their personal responsibilities.

Eshet (Take the “A” Train, Beyond the Mountains and Hills) is haunting as Feigi, her eyes filled with yearning for what she imagined her life would be like. Based on actual events, the film focuses on the unjust treatment of women in Orthodox society, their rights determined by men, including local tribunals made up of supposedly wise scholars following religious doctrine, who decide what women should and should not do and whether they should remain married or get divorced. It’s a harrowing tale anchored by a powerful lead performance. The film will be available virtually January 23-28.

THE CONFORMIST

Jean-Paul Trintignant tries to find his place in the world in Bernardo Bertolucci’s lush masterpiece, The Conformist

THE CONFORMIST (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
January 6-19
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Based on the novel by Alberto Moravia, Bernardo Bertolucci’s gorgeous masterpiece, The Conformist, is a political thriller about paranoia, pedophilia, and trying to find one’s place in a changing world, and you can experience it in all its glory in a 4K digital restoration at Film Forum. Jean-Louis Trintignant (And God Created Woman, Z, My Night at Maud’s) stars as Marcello Clerici, a troubled man who suffered childhood traumas and is now attempting to join the fascist secret police. To prove his dedication to the movement, he is ordered to assassinate one of his former professors, the radical Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), who is living in France. He falls for Quadri’s much younger wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda), who takes an intriguing liking to Clerici’s wife, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), while Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) keeps a close watch on him, making sure he will carry out his assignment.

The Conformist, made just after The Spider’s Stragagem and followed by Last Tango in Paris, captures one man’s desperate need to belong, to become a part of Mussolini’s fascist society and feel normal at the expense of his real inner feelings and beliefs, not unlike the indoctrination too many people get sucked into today via online hate groups. An atheist, he goes to church to confess because Giulia demands it. A bureaucrat, he is not a cold-blooded killer, but he will murder a part of his past in order to be accepted by the fascists (as well as Bertolucci’s own past, as he makes a sly reference to his former mentor, Jean-Luc Godard, by using the French auteur’s phone number and address for Quadri’s). Production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro bathe the film in lush Art Deco colors as Bertolucci moves the story, told in flashbacks, through a series of set pieces that include an erotic dance by Anna and Giulia, a Kafkaesque visit to a government ministry, and a stunning use of black and white and light and shadow as Marcello and Giulia discuss their impending marriage. The Conformist is a multilayered psychological examination of a complex figure living in complex times, as much about the 1930s as the 1970s, as the youth of the Western world sought personal, political, and sexual freedom.

UNDER THE RADAR 2023

A Thousand Ways (Part Three): Assembly brings strangers together at the New York Public Library (photo courtesy 600 Highwaymen)

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL
Public Theater and other venues
January 4-22, free – $60
publictheater.org

The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival is back and in person for its eighteenth iteration, running January 4-22 at the Public as well as Chelsea Factory, NYU Skirball, La MaMa, BAM, and the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch. As always, the works come from around the world, a mélange of disciplines that offers unique theatrical experiences. Among this year’s selections are Jasmine Lee-Jones’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner, Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff’s Our Country, Roger Guenveur Smith’s Otto Frank, Rachel Mars’s Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters, Kaneza Schaal’s KLII, and Timothy White Eagle and the Violet Triangle’s The Indigo Room.

In addition, “Incoming! — Works-in-Process” features early looks at pieces by Mia Rovegno, Miranda Haymon, Nile Harris, Mariana Valencia, Eric Lockley, Savon Bartley, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, and Justin Elizabeth Sayre, while Joe’s Pub will host performances by Eszter Balint, Negin Farsad, Julian Fleisher and his Rather Big Band, Salty Brine, and Migguel Anggelo.

Below is a look at four of the highlights.

600 HIGHWAYMEN: A THOUSAND WAYS (PART THREE): AN ASSEMBLY
The New York Public Library, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library
455 Fifth Ave. at Fortieth St., seventh floor
January 4-22, free with advance RSVP
publictheater.org

At the January 2021 Under the Radar Festival, the Obie-winning 600 Highwaymen presented A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call, a free hourlong telephone conversation between you and another person, randomly put together and facilitated by an electronic voice that asks both general and intimate questions, from where you are sitting to what smells you are missing, structured around a dangerous and lonely fictional situation that is a metaphor for sheltering in place. The company followed that up with the second part, An Encounter, in which you and a stranger — not the same one — meet in person, sitting across a table, separated from one another by a clear glass panel, with no touching and no sharing of objects. In both sections, I bonded quickly with the other person, making for intimate and poignant moments when we were all keeping our distance from each other.

Now comes the grand finale, Assembly, where sixteen strangers at a time will come together to finish the story at the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch in Midtown. Written and created by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, A Thousand Ways innovatively tracks how the pandemic lockdown influenced the ways we interact with others as well as how critical connection and entertainment are.

Palindromic show makes US premiere at Under the Radar Festival (photo courtesy Ontroerend Goed)

ONTROEREND GOED: Are we not drawn onward to new erA
BAM Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 4-8, $45
publictheater.org
www.bam.org

What do the following three statements have in common? “Dammit, I’m mad.” “Madam in Eden, I’m Adam.” “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” They are all palindromes, reading the same way backward and forward. They also, in their own way, relate to Ontroerend Goed’s Are we not drawn onward to new erA, running January 4-8 at BAM’s Fishman Space. Directed by Alexander Devriendt, the Belgian theater collective’s seventy-minute show features a title and a narrative that work both backward and forward as they explore climate change and the destruction wrought by humanity, which has set the Garden of Eden on the path toward armageddon. But maybe, just maybe, there is still time to save the planet if we come up with just the right plan.

PLEXUS POLAIRE: MOBY DICK
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 12-14, $40
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

The world is obsessed with Moby-Dick much the way Captain Ahab is obsessed with the great white itself. Now it’s Norwegian theater company Plexus Polaire and artistic director Yngvild Aspeli’s turn to harpoon the story of one of the most grand quests in all of literature. Aspeli (Signaux, Opéra Opaque, Dracula) incorporates seven actors, fifty puppets, video projections, a drowned orchestra, and a giant whale to transform Herman Melville’s 1851 novel into a haunting ninety-minute multimedia production at NYU Skirball for four performances only, so get on board as soon as you can.

Brian Mendes and Jim Fletcher get ready for NYCP’s Field of Mars (photo courtesy New York City Players)

NEW YORK CITY PLAYERS: FIELD OF MARS
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 19-22, 24-29, $60
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

I’ll follow Richard Maxwell and New York City Players anywhere, whether it’s on a boat past the Statue of Liberty (The Vessel), an existential journey inside relationships and theater itself (The Evening, Isolde) and outside time and space (Paradiso, Good Samaritans), or even to the Red Planet and beyond. Actually, his newest piece, Field of Mars, playing at NYU Skirball January 19-29, refers not to the fourth planet from the sun but to the ancient term for a large public space and military parade ground. Maxwell doesn’t like to share too much about upcoming shows, but we do know that this one features Lakpa Bhutia, Nicholas Elliott, Jim Fletcher, Eleanor Hutchins, Paige Martin, Brian Mendes, James Moore, Phil Moore, Steven Thompson, Tory Vazquez, and Gillian Walsh and that the limited audience will be seated on the stage.

Oh, and Maxwell noted in an email blast: “Field of Mars: A chain restaurant in Chapel Hill is used as a way to measure the progress of primates, from hunter/gatherer to fast casual dining experience. Topics covered: Music, Food, Nature, and Spirituality. . . . I also wanted to take this opportunity to tell parents regarding the content of Field of Mars: my kids (aged 11 and 15) will not be seeing this show.”