Emily and Sarah Kunstler’s Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America opens third annual Cinematters: NY Social Justice Film Festival (photo courtesy Off Center Media)
CINEMATTERS: NY SOCIAL JUSTICE FILM FESTIVAL
Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan online
Carole Zabar Center for Film
January 13-17, $15 per film, $5 for shorts block, $40 all-access pass mmjccm.org
From the Covid-19 pandemic to the murder of George Floyd to the January 6 insurrection, the last two years have revealed the ever-growing gap and animosity between the two Americas. The third annual Cinematters: NY Social Justice Film Festival, being held virtually January 13-17 by the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, consists of five features, four shorts, a weekend of service, and a racial justice workshop that explores what has become of the modern-day United States.
The festival opens with Emily and Sarah Kunstler’s Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, in which civil rights attorney Jeffery Robinson traces the history of racism from slavery to today. The spotlight selection is Iman K. Zawahry’s Americanish, about an immigrant trying to make her way in Jackson Heights. The festival closes with John Maggio’s A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks, in which such figures as LaToya Ruby Frazier, Spike Lee, Anderson Cooper, Ava DuVernay, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar discuss the life and legacy of photographer Gordon Parks. Also being shown are Christi Cooper’s Youth v Gov, about young activists taking on the US government, and Jeff Adachi and Chihiro Wimbush’s Ricochet, which tells the story of an undocumented immigrant accused of murder in San Francisco. All screenings will be followed by a live Zoom Q&A with the filmmakers and other participants.
“These films are not just entertainment. Cinematters celebrates the power of film as a vehicle for social change, with some of the most important films of the year,” Carole Zabar Center for Film director Isaac Zablocki said in a statement. “These films shine a light on dark areas and bring action where our society needs movement.”
In addition to the screenings, Repair the World Harlem is sponsoring an MLK Weekend of Service with the East Harlem Tutorial Program on January 16-17, and there will be an allyship workshop on Monday at 3:30.
MELTDOWN IN DIXIE (Emily Harrold, 2021)
January 13-17, $5
Live Zoom Q&A January 17, 2:00 www.meltdownindixie.com
When Tommy and Debbie Daras first bought avowed racist Maurice Bessinger’s popular barbecue restaurant in Orangeburg, South Carolina, transforming it into Edisto River Creamery & Kitchen — home of the Double Dog Dare — the couple was not alarmed by the Confederate flag that flew on the tiny far corner of the parking lot, accompanied by a stone monument honoring soldiers who fought for the South in the Civil War. Tommy saw it as part of the area’s history, even as he did not believe in what it stands for.
After the June 2015 mass shooting that killed nine Blacks attending a Bible study class at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, the Sons of Confederate Veterans put up a much bigger flag, as if in support of the murders, leading Tommy to change his mind; he wanted the memorial gone. But as director and producer Emily Harrold shows in the forty-minute documentary Meltdown in Dixie, racism and fear are alive and well in Orangeburg, a city where more than sixty percent of the residents are people of color and that suffered its own race massacre in 1968 over the integration of a bowling alley. As the Darases and their lawyer, Justin Bamberg, go to the zoning board and the courts to have the flag and memorial removed, they are challenged every step of the way by Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp 842 Lt. Commander Buzz Braxton and their attorney, Lauren Martel.
“White supremacy has its roots everywhere; Orangeburg is no different,” Bamberg points out. Meanwhile, Braxton proclaims that Robert E. Lee was “probably the greatest man to ever walk the face of this Earth,” defends his use of the N-word, says the slave trade was good for African Americans, and participates in Civil War reenactments that portray the southern army as heroes and patriots. Harrold gives equal time to both sides of the argument, letting everyone share their views without judgment.
Documentary follows heated battle over Confederate monument in Orangeburg, South Carolina
Meltdown in Dixie gets to the heart of the controversy over Civil War monuments without making it about Democrats vs. Republicans or even whites against Blacks; in many ways, Tommy represents a significant section of America that is caught in between the current reevaluation of history that is going on in schools and small towns across the country. He admits to having had the image of a Confederate flag on his car when he was a professional racer but also says he is following in the footsteps of his father, who he proudly explains didn’t have a racist bone in his body.
“When I bought the creamery, I saw it was in a beautiful park — I said, what’s not to like. But if I could rewind this whole situation, I would have never came to South Carolina in the first place,” he acknowledges. It’s hard to blame him for thinking that.
Meltdown in Dixie is available in a shorts block with Patrice D. Bowman’s Under the Sun After the Wind, Mark Decena’s Heal Thy Neighbor: Denver, and Melissa Gira Grant and Ingrid Raphael’s They Won’t Call It Murder. In conjunction with MLK Day, there will be a live Zoom Q&A on January 17 with Bowman, Harrold, and others, moderated by arts and culture critic Jo Livingstone.
Alicia Jo Rabins offers a public kaddish for Bernie Madoff in new film
THIRTY-FIRST ANNUAL NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
January 12-25, $12 virtual (all-access $85), $15 in person (all-access $95)
212-875-5050 www.filmlinc.org thejewishmuseum.org
The 2022 New York Jewish Film festival goes hybrid this year, with more than two dozen shorts and features exploring Jewish art, history, culture, and politics around the world. Running January 12-25 both at the Walter Reade Theater and online, the thirty-first annual event, a collaboration between Film at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum, includes in-person introductions and Q&As for many screenings. The opening-night selection is Mano Khalil’s autobiographical Neighbours, about a six-year old Kurdish boy enamored with the last Jewish family in his village as nationalism and anti-Semitism rise up. The centerpiece is Kaveh Nabatian’s Sin La Habana, dealing with cross-cultural relationships in Cuba. And Aurélie Saada’s Rose closes things out, a tale about a suddenly widowed woman, played by French legend Françoise Fabian, who has to reevaluate her future as she approaches her eightieth birthday.
In addition, there will be a special tribute to film scholar, author, archivist, educator, activist, filmmaker, and independent distributor Pearl Bowser, with virtual screenings of Lloyd Reckord’s 1963 short Ten Bob in Winter and Oscar Micheaux’s 1925 classic, Body and Soul, along with a ten-minute November 2021 interview with Bowser at the Jewish Museum reflecting on the 1970 exhibition she curated there, “The Black Film.”
I kicked myself when I missed Alicia Jo Rabins’s one-woman show, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, when it debuted at Joe’s Pub in 2012. I had seen her play with the klezmer band Golem and had wanted to see the song cycle live. She released the album in 2014, but now she has collaborated with director and photographer Alicia J. Rose on a delightful, kooky film version, playing at the New York Jewish Film Festival on January 17 at 1:00 and 7:00, with Rose, Rabins, and producer Lara Cuddy at the Walter Reade Theater for postscreening Q&As.
Rose follows Rabins as she becomes endlessly fascinated with the story of Bernie Madoff, the financier who built an elaborate Ponzi scheme over forty years, bilking nearly five thousand clients out of billions of dollars. Rabins, in the midst of an arts residency in a Financial District office tower while earning money by teaching bat mitzvah girls how to chant from the Torah, spoke with numerous people impacted by Madoff’s fraud, from a credit risk officer (her mother’s college roommate), a whistleblower, and an FBI agent to a therapist, a lawyer, and a Buddhist monk.
“I wasn’t just obsessed with Bernie Madoff; I was obsessed with anyone who had a connection to him, and they kept coming, one after the other,” Rabins says in the film. “I interviewed them, went back to my studio, and turned their stories into songs. I was being sucked deeper and deeper into my obsession.”
Each song is its own set piece in a different space, with Rabins dressing up like the person (her wigs are particularly fun while evoking the work of Cindy Sherman) and detailing how they were affected by Madoff’s scheme in such pop tunes as “Due Diligence,” “No Such Thing as a Straight Line,” “Down on the Seventeenth Floor,” “My Grandfather Deserted the Czar’s Army,” and “What Was the Pathology There?” She is occasionally joined by members of her band (drummer David Freeman, cellist Jennifer Kersgaard), meets a couple of yentas by a Palm Beach pool (Robin McAlpine and Judy Silk), participates in synchronized swimming, and considers holding a ritual excommunication. “I hated thinking about Madoff as a Jew. I mean, he’s pretty much the definition of bad for the Jews,” she opines. She’s not the only one to feel that way.
A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff is a great fit for the festival because it is not only about Judaism but also about New York City, shot on location in and around Wall Street, the Lipstick Building in Midtown, the Williamsburg Bridge, and other familiar spots. There is cool animation by Zak Margolis and several Golem songs in the background as Rabins relates her life and art to Madoff’s legacy, incorporating what she refers to as a kabbalistic interconnectedness and a “messianic idea of perfection.” She questions the entire financial system as she explains, “Very few people knew he was just making shit up.” And she admits that “confronting Bernie was confronting myself.” You’re bound to connect with this film in more ways than you might think.
SHORT FILMS ON CREATIVITY: UNTITLED (TANIA PROJECT) (Rima Yamazaki, 2020)
Available virtually January 20-25 www.filmlinc.org rimayamazaki.com
In the fall of 2017, filmmaker Rima Yamazaki was invited by Ranger Mills, the widower of the late artist Tania Milicevic, to explore her legacy. Yamazaki, who has made previous films about still-life painter Ellen Altfest, on-site painter Rackstraw Downes, photographer James Casebere, and multimedia icon Joan Jonas, had never heard of Tania, but she took on the project, doing a deep dive into her work, which included painting, sculpture, collage, and public installations.
Yamazaki went through Tania’s letters, official documents, press clippings, family photographs, exhibition brochures, and personal writings to form a compelling portrait of the little-known artist, whose large-scale murals can still be seen at the corner of Mercer and Third St. in Manhattan (from 1970) and at 10 Evergreen Ave. in Brooklyn (1967), in addition to a Torah ark she designed for Tribeca Synagogue (1967). Tania was also an early feminist with intriguing statements about life and art — she favored geometric abstract patterns in multiple colors — that Yamazaki types out on the screen.
“I had four husbands . . . but I don’t think I’ve ever been married,” Tania, who was born Tatiana Lewin in Łódź, Poland, in 1920, wrote. “I want to escape gravity and the surfaces that prevent us from feeling our weight — Can we understand what we cannot feel?” she jotted down. And: “I never know what the art world is talking about. . . . I hope they do.”
Yamazaki visits the sites of Tania’s work while also going through her old studio. She uses split-screens to show photos of Tania’s oeuvre, including slides taken by Joel-Peter Witkin, known for his depictions of corpses and grotesque figures. We learn about the Construction Process Environment that Tania and Nasson Daphnis were commissioned to design in 1971 at 1500 Broadway in Times Square as well as her plans for city rooftops, which was left unfinished after her death from cancer in 1982. Yet we never see or hear Tania speak, or see others talk about her. It’s an intensely personal journey for Yamazaki, who shares only select tidbits.
The twenty-five-minute documentary will be available virtually January 20-25 as part of the New York Jewish Film Festival program “Short Films on Creativity,” which also includes Cynthia Madansky’s AA (about poet and photographer Anna Alchuk), Yoav Potash’s Beregovsky #136 (about folklorist Moshe Beregovsky), Asali Echols’s The Violin Upstairs (about the filmmaker’s violin), Eli Zuzovsky’s Mazel Tov (about Adam Weizmann’s wartime bar mitzvah), and Adrienne Gruben’s Lily (about comic-book artist Lily Reneé).
Who:Ric Burns,James Sanders What: An Evening with Ric Burns and James Sanders Where:National Arts Club Zoom When: Friday, January 14, free with advance RSVP, 8:00 Why: This past November, documentarian Ric Burns and architect, author, and filmmaker James Sanders released a revised and expanded version of their 1999 book, New York: An Illustrated History (Knopf, $75), a companion volume to PBS’s eight-part, seventeen-hour TV series that ran from 1999 to 2003. On January 14 at 8:00, Burns and Sanders will discuss the third edition of the book in a free, livestreamed National Arts Club discussion over Zoom.
“Especially in the past year — a defining crossroads in the life of the city and the planet — the eyes of much of the world have turned to New York City, which has found itself, yet again, at the epicenter and leading edge of increasingly momentous global experiences,” they write in the new preface. “In the coming years, as the world emerges from the worst of the pandemic, and New Yorkers themselves try to comprehend what has happened to their city and their lives, the example of New York — its history, its perspective, its setbacks, and perhaps above all its capacity for innovation, resilience, and adaptation — will be looked to as a kind of vanguard in which, in many ways, the lineaments of the future of all cities may be discerned.” The third edition goes up to the present day, with two new chapters, 128 new illustrations, and contributions from Adam Gopnik, Suketu Mehta, and Ester Fuchs, in conjunction with new episodes of the series.
Who: Works by and/or featuring Moko Fukuyama, Joshua William Gelb, Gabrielle Hamilton, Jace, Elmore James, Jamal Josef, Katie Rose McLaughlin, Sara Mearns, Zaire Michel, Zalman Mlotek, Alicia Hall Moran, Patrick Page, Barbara Pollack, Seth David Radwell, Jamar Roberts, Tracy Sallows, Xavier F. Salomon, Janae Snyder-Stewart, Mfoniso Udofia, Anne Verhallen What:This Week in New York twentieth anniversary celebration Where:This Week in New York YouTube When: Original air date: Saturday, May 22, free with RSVP, 7:00 (now available on demand) Why: In April 2001, I found myself suddenly jobless when a relatively new Silicon Alley company that had made big promises took an unexpected hit. I took my meager two weeks’ severance pay and spent fourteen days wandering through New York City, going to museums, film festivals, parks, and tourist attractions. I compiled my experiences into an email I sent to about fifty friends, rating each of the things I had done. My sister’s husband enthusiastically demanded that I keep doing this, and This Week in New York was born.
Affectionately known as twi-ny (twhy-nee), it became a website in 2005 and soon was being read by tens of thousands of people around the globe. I covered a vast array of events – some fifteen thousand over the years – that required people to leave their homes and apartments and take advantage of everything the greatest city in the world had to offer. From the very start, I ventured into nooks and crannies to find the real New York, not just frequenting well-known venues but seeking out the weird and wild, the unusual and the strange.
For my tenth anniversary, we packed Fontana’s, a now-defunct club on the Lower East Side, and had live music, book readings, and a comics presentation. I had been considering something bigger for twenty when the pandemic lockdown hit and lasted longer than we all thought possible.
At first, I didn’t know what twi-ny’s future would be, with nowhere for anyone to go. But the arts community reacted quickly, as incredible dance, music, art, theater, opera, film, and hybrid offerings began appearing on numerous platforms; the innovation and ingenuity blew me away. The winners of twi-ny’s Pandemic Awards give you a good idea of the wide range of things I covered; you can check out part one here and part two here. (Part III is now up as well.)
I devoured everything I could, from experimental dance-theater in a closet and interactive shows over the phone and through the mail to all-star Zoom reunion readings and an immersive, multisensory play that arrived at my door in a box. Many of them dealt with the fear, isolation, and loneliness that have been so pervasive during the Covid-19 crisis while also celebrating hope, beauty, and resilience. I’ve watched, reviewed, and previewed more than a thousand events created since March 2020, viewing them from the same computer where I work at my full-time job in children’s publishing.
Just as companies are deciding the future hybrid nature of employment, the arts community is wrestling with in-person and online presentations. As the lockdown ends and performance venues open their doors, some online productions will go away, but others are likely to continue, benefiting from a reach that now goes beyond their local area and stretches across the continents.
On May 22 at 7:00, “twi-ny at twenty,” produced and edited by Michael D. Drucker of Delusions International and coproduced by Ellen Scordato, twi-ny’s business manager and muse, honors some of the best events of the past fourteen months, including dance, theater, opera, art, music, and literature, all of which can be enjoyed for free from the friendly confines of your couch. There is no registration fee, and the party will be available online for several weeks. You can find more information here.
Please let me know what you think in the live chat, which I will be hosting throughout the premiere, and be sure to say hello to other twi-ny fans and share your own favorite virtual shows.
Thanks for coming along on this unpredictable twenty-year adventure; I can’t wait to see you all online and, soon, in real life. Here’s to the next twenty!
Who: Def Leppard, Noel Gallagher, Simon Le Bon and John Taylor, Living Colour, Evan Rachel Wood, Rob Thomas, Gary Oldman, Walk the Moon, Jake Wesley Rogers, Ricky Gervais, Gail Ann Dorsey, Bernard Fowler, Judith Hill, Earl Slick, Charlie Sexton, Joe Sumner, more What: Annual birthday party for David Bowie Where:RollingLiveStudios.com When: Saturday, January 8, $25, 9:00 (available through January 16) Why: January 8, 2022, would have been David Bowie’s seventy-fifth birthday. Rolling Live Studios will again host an online celebration featuring performances and special appearances from a wide range of artists to honor the Thin White Duke, who passed away on January 10, 2016, at the age of sixty-nine. Among the participants are Def Leppard, Noel Gallagher, Simon Le Bon and John Taylor from Duran Duran, Living Colour, Evan Rachel Wood, Brian Henson, Rob Thomas, Gary Oldman, Ricky Gervais, Gail Ann Dorsey, and Bernard Fowler — who tore up the joint at last year’s party — covering tunes from throughout Bowie’s extraordinary career. There will also be a tribute to the thirty-fifth anniversary of Labyrinth, Jim Henson’s sci-fi puppet flick in which Bowie played Jareth, the king of the goblins; Bowie wrote five songs for the film: “Underground,” “Magic Dance,” “Chilly Down,” “As the World Falls Down,” and “Within You.”
The house band will include Earl Slick, Charlie Sexton, Alan Childs, Steve Elson, Mark Guiliana, Omar Hakim, Stan Harrison, Tim Lefebvre, Gerry Leonard, and Carmine Rojas. “It’s an honor to be able to continue to share David Bowie’s music with the world,” event organizer and longtime Bowie pianist Mike Garson said in a statement. “I’m excited for everyone to be able to experience this very special show we’ve got in store in celebration of what would have been David’s seventy-fifth birthday, with the bandmates he recorded and performed with, plus a great group of guest artists who he was such an influence to.” The show is dedicated to photographer Mick Rock, “the Man Who Shot the ’70s,” who died this past November in Staten Island at the age of seventy-two. Tickets are $25, with various bundles including merch and a virtual Q&A ranging from $30 to $5,000; $$2 from each purchase will benefit Save the Children, which Bowie raised money for at this fiftieth-birthday concert at Madison Square Garden on January 9, 1997.
White Snake Projects’ Death by Life: A Digital Opera in One Act redefined what live online opera could be
On July 4, 2020, I published Part I of the twi-ny Pandemic Awards, hoping that it would be the first of hopefully only two such postings celebrating the amazing innovation and creativity in dance, film, theater, food, opera, art, literature, music, and other forms of entertainment made online since March 2020.
As the pandemic lockdown proceeded, I followed that up with Part II on January 1, 2021. And now, a year later, comes the third — and final — edition of twi-ny’s Pandemic Awards, honoring the best, and most unusual, online presentations of 2021. To see some of the video highlights from March 2020 through last May, check out the “twi-ny at twenty” anniversary gala here.
Even as the omicron variant tears through New York City and the world, entertainment venues are back open, and more people are visiting museums, theaters, sports venues, and other forms of indoor and outdoor entertainment. Meanwhile, there is still much happening exclusively online. This Week in New York will continue to track virtual and hybrid productions of all kinds from across the globe, in addition to live performances happening in the five boroughs, so keep following this space for the best, and the worst, in live and recorded in-person and virtual events.
Happy 2022 to all — may you and your friends, family, and loved ones stay safe and healthy!
BEST FUTURISTIC PLAY
Edward Einhorn’s Alma Baya, Untitled Theater Company No. 61, A.R.T./New York. Edward Einhorn delves into isolation and living in pods in this in-person/online show about what might happen next.
BEST IMMERSIVE HISTORICAL DRAMA
Arlekin Players Theatre, Witness. Igor Golyak uses Arlekin’s Zero Gravity Lab to place viewers aboard the MS St. Louis in this interactive exploration of antisemitism.
BEST SHORT PLAY SERIES BY ONE PLAYWRIGHT
Steppenwolf Now, “Three Short Plays by Tracy Letts”:Night Safari, The Old Country, The Stretch. Steppenwolf did exemplary online work during the pandemic lockdown, including this triple crown of short one-acts by Tracy Letts, featuring Rainn Wilson, Letts, and William Petersen and Mike Nussbaum voicing puppets in a diner.
BEST GIFT ACCOMPANYING AN ONLINE PLAY
Third Rail Projects, Return the Moon. Immersive site-specific theater experts Third Rail Projects sent viewers a package including an exquisite little cut-paper diorama in conjunction with its interactive virtual show.
BEST FILMED OUTDOOR PLAY
Amy Berryman’s Walden, TheaterWorks Hartford. Twin sisters and an Earth Advocate argue over the future of the planet in Amy Berryman’s superb play about loss, loneliness, and reconnection, filmed in front of a socially distanced live audience in the woods by the Connecticut River.
BEST ZOOM PLAY TAKING PLACE ON ZOOM
Jake Shore’s Adjust the Procedure, Spin Cycle and JCS Theater Company. Zoom fatigue had not quite settled in yet when Jake Shore’s play about a university facing a crisis over the course of several Zoom meetings was released.
BEST USE OF LIVE CHAT IN A PLAY
Arlekin Players Theatre, chekhovOS /an experimental game/. The audience gets to vote on which Chekhov play Arlekin will perform, then argue in the chat about anything they want, including the quality of the production itself, with administrators encouraging all responses.
BEST ACTOR
Jason Alexander, Rob Ulin’s Judgment Day, Barrington Stage Company; Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig, Spotlight on Plays. Jason Alexander was a riot in two virtual readings, as a greedy lawyer whose life is changed by a near-death experience in Judgment Day, which had an encore streaming in July, and as Mervyn Kant in Sisters, playing to his home camera with effusive glee.
Kathleen Chalfant elegantly performs Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking for Keen Company benefit
BEST ACTRESS
Kathleen Chalfant, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Keen Company; Karen Malpede’s Blue Valiant, Theatre Three Collaborative. Theater treasure Kathleen Chalfant read directly from the published book of Joan Didion’s poignant memoir with an exquisite elegance, performed from her home, lending it a mesmerizing intimacy. She went outside for Blue Valiant, a play about a horse and a mother’s relationship with her daughter that was written by Karen Malpede specifically for Chalfant, who was lovely acting alongside George Bartenieff as pianist Arthur Rosen gave life to the horse in an unusual way.
BEST ACTRESS IN A FILMED PLAY ON A STAGE
Charlayne Woodard, The Garden, Baltimore Center Stage. Charlayne Woodard, who presented a stellar online version of her one-woman show Neat for MTC, returned to the stage for her two-character play The Garden, in which she and Caroline Stefanie Clay starred as a daughter and a mother trying to reconnect after a series of tragic events.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A VIRTUAL PLAY
Elizabeth Heflin, Michael Gotch’s Tiny House, Westport Country Playhouse. Elizabeth Heflin was wonderful as a cynical mother visiting her daughter and her environmental-nut husband in the mountains on the Fourth of July, as fireworks fly.
BEST PLAYWRIGHT FINALLY GETTING HER DUE
Adrienne Kennedy, “The Work of Adrienne Kennedy: Inspiration & Influence,” Round House Theatre / McCarter Theatre Center. If you didn’t know much about hugely influential playwright Adrienne Kennedy, Round House Theatre and McCarter Theatre Center changed that with excellent virtual productions of He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, Sleep Deprivation Chamber, Ohio State Murders, and Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side, along with a series of online discussions celebrating the now-ninety-year-old experimental legend.
BEST NONTHEATRICAL INDOOR LOCATION FOR A PLAY
Sharon Karmazin’s home, George Street Playhouse. George Street board member Sharon Karmazin generously turned over her house to the New Jersey company for excellent virtual filmed productions of Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates and Becky Mode’s Fully Committed, allowing each one-person show to shine.
BEST OLD-FASHIONED RADIO PLAY
Lucille Fletcher’s 1943 Sorry, Wrong Number, Keen Company. Keen Company made it feel like you were listening to the radio in 1943 with its audio production of while Lucille Fletcher’s Sorry, Wrong Number, in which Marsha Mason thinks she has overheard a murder plot and desperately wants to stop the potential killing.
BEST ILLUSTRATED SHORT PLAY
Rajiv Joseph’s Red Folder, Steppenwolf Now. Carrie Coon narrates Rajiv Joseph’s devilishly clever and insightful short Red Folder, a kind of graphic novel come to life about being different.
BEST PLAY FILMED WITH AN AUDIENCE
Ryan J. Haddad’s Hi, Are You Single?, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. Ryan J. Haddad’s autobiographical one-man show was recorded in front of a small, socially distanced audience of crew members at Woolly Mammoth; the moment when he is joined onstage by a man wearing a mask was as alarming as it was invigorating.
BEST PLAY ABOUT PARANOIA X the Experience. Aaron Salazar and Jason Veasey’s interactive online show casts the viewer as a trainee for the mysterious conglomerate known as WE, which appears to disdain individuality in favor of a faceless collective, touching a nerve as vaccines started promising an eventual return to normalcy.
BEST SCIENTIFIC PLAY
Jake Broder’s UnRavelled. This virtual collaboration between the Global Brain Health Institute and Trinity College Dublin told the true story of a doctor who started channeling composer Maurice Ravel through extraordinary paintings that had her husband worried about her mental stability; the play was accompanied by a discussion featuring the doctor who treated her.
BEST USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN A PLAY
The Javaad Alipoor Company’s Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran. Javaad Alipoor and Peyvand Sadeghian used Instagram Live to relate the true story of a 2015 fatal car accident in Tehran, going backward in time to explore government corruption, unchecked capitalism, climate change, and the impact social media has on the younger generation.
BEST SOCIAL DISTANCING IN A PLAY
Mike Bartlett’s Cock, Studio Theatre; Kelli Goff’s The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls, Baltimore Center Stage. As companies started filming theatrical productions back on their stages, without an audience, they still kept the actors apart from one another, which was done intuitively in Mike Bartlett’s Cock and Kelli Goff’s The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls, both of which are structured to involve touch and physical closeness.
STRANGEST ONLINE PLAY Sloppy Bonnie: A Roadkill Musical (for the Modern Chick!), No Puppet Co., OZ Arts. Leah Lowe, Krista Knight, and Barry Brinegar add goofy cartoonish animation to the online version of this full-tilt campy musical about a road trip that leaves dead bodies in its wake, filmed live in front of a Nashville audience that can’t know what fun we are having watching it at home.
Odd Man Out offers a theatrical journey in a box to be experienced at home (photo by twi-ny/ees)
BEST AT-HOME INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE
Martín Bondone’s Odd Man Out, Teatro Ciego and theatreC. Writer Martín Bondone and codirectors Carlos Armesto and Facundo Bogarín’s immersive memory play arrives at your home in a box containing elements for four of the senses as you listen on headphones while blindfolded, following the story of a blind musician returning to Argentina.
BEST COMEDY FILMED ON A STAGE
Terrence McNally’s It’s Only a Play, George Street Playhouse. After presenting two excellent online solo shows, Bad Dates and Fully Committed, filmed in a board member’s home, George Street Playhouse returned to its New Jersey stage for a stellar rendition of Terrence McNally’s hysterical comedy about theater that had me laughing out lout time and time again.
BEST SURPRISE ENDING OF A VIRTUAL PLAY
Christopher Chen’s Communion, American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.). It would be unfair to reveal what Stacy Ross tells us at the conclusion of Christopher Chen’s online, interactive Zoom show, which comes complete with breakout rooms and is skillfully directed by Tony winner Pam MacKinnon.
BEST REVIVAL SERIES
MTC’s Curtain Call, The Niceties,Three Days of Rain,The Past Is the Past,Neat. Manhattan Theatre Club looked back in presenting virtual versions of past productions, in most cases reuniting the original casts, including the late Lisa Banes and Jordan Boatman in Eleanor Burgess’s The Niceties, about an allegation of racism at a prestigious university, as well as Patricia Clarkson, John Slattery, and Bradley Whitford in Richard Greenberg’s family mystery Three Days of Rain and Charlayne Woodard re-creating her one-woman autobiographical show Neat.
BEST MUSICAL FILMED ON A STAGE
Heather Christian’s Animal Wisdom, Woolly Mammoth and San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. Heather Christian reimagined her 2017 show, Animal Wisdom, for online viewing, recording it with her band onstage at DC’s Woolly Mammoth, incorporating aspects of the pandemic while Christian faces ghosts from her past.
BEST SITE-SPECIFIC INDOOR FILMED MUSICAL
Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, Out of the Box Theatrics, Holmdel Theatre Company, and Blair Russell. Jason Michael Webb’s adaptation of Jason Robert Brown’s 2001 two-character sung-through musical about the end and beginning and end of a relationship follows Nasia Thomas and Nicholas Edwards through a cramped New York City apartment as concepts of time and space are obliterated.
BEST REIMAGINING OF A ONE-WOMAN PLAY
Studio Theatre, Dael Orlandersmith’s Until the Flood. Studio Theatre associate artistic director Reginald L. Douglas reimagines Dael Orlandersmith’s gripping one-woman show about the police killing of Michael Brown as a piece for three Black women actors of different ages, who portray multiple characters as they move about the empty DC theater.
Dan Lauria and Wendie Malick are warm and welcoming in Sitting and Talking
BEST TWO-CHARACTER ZOOM PLAY ABOUT CONNECTING
Lia Romeo’s Sitting and Talking, Miles Square Theatre. Dan Lauria and Wendie Malick are delightful as two older single people attempting to connect through online dating, trying to dig themselves out of the loneliness they are both experiencing, and not just because of the pandemic.
BEST SOLO SHAKESPEARE PLAY
Patrick Page, All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain, Shakespeare Theatre Company. Patrick Page gives a master class in Shakespeare, focusing on his many villains in this triumphant one-person show filmed onstage at STC.
BEST PODCAST PLAYS
Wallace Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors and The Designated Mourner, Gideon Media. The original casts of these two prescient plays by Wallace Shawn reunited for outstanding audio versions, with Julie Hagerty, Jennifer Tilly, Emily Cass McDonnell, Deborah Eisenberg, and Larry Pine joining Shawn.
BEST ONLINE FILM FESTIVAL DOC NYC 2021. The twelfth annual DOC NYC festival went hybrid, presenting more than two hundred films online and in theaters that look at where we are as a society today, in the midst of a pandemic that has killed more than five million people around the world, including several important films about Covid-19 and how we have responded to it.
BEST INTERACTIVE FILM Republique, the Interactive Movie. Created by director Simon Bouisson and writer Olivier Demangel, Republique puts the viewer in control of the action, choosing which of several unfolding scenes to watch during a terrorist attack in the Paris Metro.
Bob Dylan’s bizarre Shadow Kingdom delighted and confounded fans
BEST INCOMPREHENSIBLE MUSIC PRESENTATION Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan. Leave it to the enigma that is Bob Dylan to present a virtual production that had fans wondering whether any of it was recorded live, as microphones hid Dylan’s mouth throughout and the unidentified masked musicians might or might not have been actually playing their instruments; the lively chat ranged from angry fans wanting their money back to devotees proclaiming it was the best twenty-five bucks they had spent during the pandemic.
BEST DUET
Dorit Chrysler and Alexander Calder, “Calder Plays Theremin,” Museum of Modern Art. Berlin-based composer and sound artist Dorit Chrysler activated two works in MoMA’s “Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start” exhibition by using four theremins and a Moog Model 15 analog synthesizer to create a gorgeous eight-minute suite in four movements.
BEST BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE TO A LATE ROCK STAR “A Bowie Celebration: Just for One Day!,” Rolling Live Studios. Pianist Mike Garson transformed the annual David Bowie birthday tribute into a superstar online event, with Bowie songs performed by such Bowie acolytes as Yungblud, Michael C. Hall, Ian Hunter, Anna Calvi, Boy George, Trent Reznor, Perry Farrell, Macy Gray, Adam Lambert, Andra Day, Duran Duran, Peter Frampton, David Sanborn, Rick Wakeman, Ian Astbury, William Corgan, Gary Oldman, Gavin Rossdale, Joe Elliott, Bernard Fowler, Corey Glover, and Catherine Russell, among others.
Robyn Hitchcock played a series of home gigs in Nashville and London, joined by his partner and pets (including Perry the lobster)
BEST INFORMAL AT-HOME MUSIC SERIES
Robyn Hitchcock, Live from Tubby’s House. Taking a page out of British raconteur Richard Thompson’s book, who performed living-room concerts from his Jersey home with his partner, singer-songwriter Zara Phillips, fellow British raconteur Robyn Hitchcock performed a series of home concerts from Nashville and London over Mandolin and StageIt, accompanied by his wife, singer-songwriter Emma Swift, her pup Daphne, and their beloved cats, Ringo Baez and Tubby Grossman, a follow-up to their 2020 Live from Sweet Home Quarantine shows.
BEST INDOOR DANCE FILMED ON A STAGE
Yin Yue Dance Company, Ripple, 92nd St. Y. Harkness Promise Award recipient Yin Yue’s Ripple, filmed live in front of an audience at 92Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall, was a gorgeously flowing multipart work that was followed by a fascinating talk with the company.
BEST OUTDOOR DANCE FILMED ON A STAGE STREB Extreme Action, Jacob’s Pillow. Elizabeth Streb and her Extreme Action team returned to Jacob’s Pillow for the first time in twenty years, presenting twelve repertory works filmed live on the outdoor stage in front of an audience, with Streb offering commentary between pieces, an excellent aperitif to the company’s stirring live show at Manhattan West.
Stephen Petronio Co. remimagines Trisha Brown’s Group Primary Accumulation for its digital Joyce season
BEST OUTDOOR DANCE NOT ON A STAGE
Stephen Petronio Company, Accumulation, Joyce Digital Season. As part of its digital season at the Joyce, Stephen Petronio continued his Bloodlines program, in which he interprets seminal works by important choreographers, with a mesmerizing outdoor mixed-gender performance of Trisha Brown’s Group Primary Accumulation, filmed from high above, as if the four dancers are just another part of the natural world.
BEST DANCE ABOUT EMERGING FROM LOCKDOWN
Stefanie Batten Bland, Kolonial, Baryshnikov Arts Center. For her BAC digital commission, Stefanie Batten Bland contributed the filmed piece Kolonial, in which she and six other dancers try to burst out of a trapped isolation.
BEST ONLINE DANCE FESTIVAL “WOMEN / CREATE! A Virtual Festival of Dance,” New York Live Arts. The ninth annual “WOMEN / CREATE!” festival went digital with impressive works by Karole Armitage, Meagan King, Sidra Bell, Jennifer Muller, Tatiana Desardouin, and Jacqulyn Buglisi, followed by a rousing discussion.
BEST BALLET FILMED ONSTAGE
George Balanchine’s Emeralds, San Francisco Ballet. I let out a gasp as the curtain rose on San Francisco Ballet’s glorious version of George Balanchine’s Emeralds, the most dancers I had seen onstage together since the pandemic lockdown had started, and then gasped over and over again at the beautiful production, with stunning costumes and spectacular movement.
BEST ONLINE ART PROGRAM
David Zwirner, Program; Hauser & Wirth, .Philip Guston: On Edge. David Zwirner’s all-day online symposium featured discussions with artists, critics, curators, filmmakers, designers, and others, including Barry Jenkins, Hilton Als, Emily Bode, and Peter Schjeldahl, along with visits to Zwirner galleries around the world. Meanwhile, in conjunction with its superb exhibition “Philip Guston 1969-1979,” Hauser & Wirth hosted “Philip Guston: On Edge,” a symposium at the SVA Theatre that included William Kentridge responding to Guston’s The Studio as well as other strong presentations by Trenton Doyle Hancock and Rachel Rossin and conversations with Charles Gaines, Art Spiegelman, Max Hollein, Massimiliano Gioni, George Condo, Katy Siegel, Randy Kennedy, and Jasmine Wahi.
BEST ART MEDITATION
Pace Gallery, Monday Meditation at the Rothko Chapel. Pace offered a lovely opportunity to reflect on life from wherever you were while watching a peaceful shot inside Houston’s nondenominational Rothko Chapel as part of its fiftieth anniversary.
BEST ONLINE ARTS DISCUSSION SERIES
The New Museum, “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America.” Even if you weren’t ready yet to venture into arts institutions, the New Museum supplemented its outstanding “Grief and Grievance” exhibition with a series of talks with more than a dozen of the participating artists, all of which are still available online for free.
BEST LIVESTREAMED OPERA
White Snake Projects, Death by Life: A Digital Opera in One Act and A Survivor’s Odyssey: The Journey of Penelope and Circe. Cerise Lim Jacobs’s activist opera company, White Snake Projects, continued its inspiring, barrier-breaking livestreamed digital presentations with Death by Life, which dealt with systemic racism and mass incarceration, and A Survivor’s Odyssey: The Journey of Penelope and Circe, an inventive take on Odysseus which places the power in the hands of the women characters.
BEST DIGITAL OPERA FILMS Opera Philadelphia,Soldier Songs, The Island We Made, We Need to Talk, Blessed, Save the Boys. Opera Philadelphia redefined what opera could be in an online world during the pandemic lockdown, presenting a series of spectacular filmed operas about loneliness, legacy, and personal identity in these hard times; The Island We Made contained some of the most stunning visuals of the year.
Audience members take photos of themselves using props sent to their home in The Wandering
BEST PARTICIPATORY OPERA The Wandering, Actor and curator Calista Small, baritone and actor Jeremy Weiss, designer Charlotte McCurdy, theater artist Christine Shaw, filmmaker Lara Panah-Izadi, and animator Zach Bell took a unique look at the life of Austrian composer Franz Schubert in a multipart, multidisciplinary immersive production that included props sent to the at-home audience.
BEST OPERA MINISERIES
Boston Lyric Opera, Desert In. Boston Lyric Opera’s Desert In is a tantalizing and titillating eight-part soap opera that combines loss and loneliness with the supernatural, with Justin Vivian Bond as the lounge singer, Jon Orsini as the son, Jesus Garcia as Rufus, Edward Nelson as his new husband, Ion, Alan Pingarrón as Federico, Isabel Leonard as Cass, and Talise Trevigne as Sunny, all delighting in the delicious dastardly doings.
MOST ADVENTUROUS OPERA ADAPTATION
Boston Lyric Opera / Operabox.tv, The Fall of the House of Usher. Director James Darrah’s inventive virtual adaptation of Philip Glass and Arthur Yorinks’s 1988 opera, The Fall of the House of Usher, combined puppets, stop-motion animation, the refugee crisis, and a mysterious host in retelling Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tale of the demise of a once-prominent family.
Uncle Floyd is back with Tuesday night watch parties of clips from old episodes
BEST VIRTUAL TV WATCH PARTY This Was the Uncle Floyd Show. David Bowie, John Lennon, Iggy Pop, Paul Simon, and the Ramones were among the fans of The Uncle Floyd Show, a faux-kiddie program that ran on various outlets, from local cable access channels to NBC, from 1974 to 1998, a supremely low-budget panoply of improvised sketches, music parodies, beloved puppets, and appearances by internationally renowned rock stars; the shows were never rerun and will never be available on DVD, so Floyd and his right-hand man, Scott Gordon, are hosting fifty-minute livestreamed clip compilations over StageIt hosted by tech Luddite Uncle Floyd Vivino himself, with a rousing, worshipful chat featuring longtime fans and some of the original cast and crew members. Snap it, pal!!
Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a poignant, poetic farewell to the cinema
GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003)
Metrograph (in-person and digital)
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, December 31
212-660-0312 metrograph.com
Taiwanese master Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a heart-stirring elegy to going to the movies, opening at Metrograph on December 31 after streaming in a gorgeous 4K restoration at Metrograph Digital last year. (The stream is available again as well, through January 31.) The accidentally prescient 2003 film takes place in central Taipei in and around the Fu-Ho Grand Theater, which is about to be torn down. For its finale, the Fu-Ho is screening King Hu’s 1967 wuxia classic Dragon Inn, Hu’s first work after moving from Hong Kong to Taiwan; the film is set in the Ming dynasty and involves assassins and eunuchs.
In 2021, Tsai’s film seems set in a long-ago time as well. It opens during a crowded showing of Dragon Inn in which Tsai’s longtime cinematographer, Liao Pen-jung, places the viewer in a seat in the theater, watching the film over and around two heads in front of their seat, one partially blocking the screen, which doesn’t happen when viewing a film on a smaller screen at home — especially during a pandemic, when no one was seeing any films in movie theaters. So Goodbye, Dragon Inn takes on a much bigger meaning, since the lockdown has changed how we experience movies forever.
Most of the film focuses on the last screening at the Fu-Ho, with only a handful of people in the audience: a jittery Japanese tourist (Mitamura Kiyonobu), a woman eating peanuts or seeds (Yang Kuei-mei), a young man in a leather jacket (Tsai regular Chen Chao-jung), a child, and two older men, played by Jun Shih and Miao Tien, who are actually the stars of the film being shown. (They portray Xiao Shao-zi and Pi Shao-tang, respectively, in Dragon Inn.) In one of the only scenes with dialogue, Miao says, “I haven’t seen a movie in a long time,” to which Chun responds, “No one goes to the movies anymore, and no one remembers us anymore.”
The tourist, a reminder of Japan’s occupation of Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, spends much of the movie trying to find a light for his cigarette — a homoerotic gesture — as well as a better seat, as he is constantly beset by people sitting right next to him or right behind him and putting their bare feet practically in his face or noisily crunching food, even though the large theater is nearly empty. In one of the film’s most darkly comic moments, two men line up on either side of him at a row of urinals, and then a third man comes in to reach over and grab the cigarettes he left on the shelf above where the tourist is urinating. Nobody says a word as Tsai lingers on the scene, the camera not moving. In fact, there is very little camera movement throughout the film; instead, long scenes play out in real time as in an Ozu film, in stark contrast to the action happening onscreen.
Meanwhile, the ticket woman (Chen Shiang-chyi), who has a disabled foot and a severe limp, cleans the bathroom, slowly steams and eats part of a bun, walks down a long hallway, and brings food to the projectionist (Tsai mainstay Lee Kang-sheng). She is steeped in an almost unbearable loneliness; she peeks in from behind a curtain to peer at the few patrons in the theater, and at one point she emerges from a door next to the screen, looking up as if she wishes to be part of the movie instead of the laborious life she’s living.
A woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) works during the final screening at the Fu-Ho Grand Theater in Goodbye, Dragon Inn
In his Metrograph Journal essay “Chasing the Film Spirit,” Tsai, whose other works include Rebels of the Neon God,The River,The Hole,Days, and What Time Is It There? — which has a scene set in the Fu-Ho, where he also held the premiere — writes, “My grandmother and grandfather were the biggest cinephiles I knew, and we started going to movies together when I was three years old. We would go to the cinema twice a day, every day. Sometimes we would watch the same film over and over again, and sometimes we would find different cinemas to watch something new. That was a golden age for cinema, and I’m proud my childhood coincided with that time.”
He continues, “Nowadays everyone watches movies on planes. On any given flight, no matter the airline, you can choose from hundreds of films: Hollywood, Bollywood, all different types of movies. However, you can count on one thing: You’ll never find a Tsai Ming-liang picture on a plane, as I make films that have to be seen on the big screen.” Unfortunately, in 2020-21, we had no choice but to watch Goodbye, Dragon Inn on small monitors, but now you can catch this must-see film on the big screen; it’s a stunningly paced elegiac love letter, and even more essential as we emerge from the pandemic, when we were all forced to watch movies from the safety of our homes, our only seatmates those we were sheltering in place with.
Already we were watching more films than ever on our private screens and monitors — as well as on airplanes — and it will still be quite a while before most of us again participate in the communal pleasure of sitting in a dark theater with dozens or hundreds of strangers, staring up at light being projected onto a screen at twenty-four frames per second, telling us a story as only a movie can, with a head partially blocking our view, bare feet in our face, and someone crunching too loudly right behind us.
