Dead Centre makes its BAM debut with Hamnet (photo by Ed Lefkowicz)
HAMNET
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
Through November 3, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/hamnet
www.deadcentre.org
What is a son without a father? What is a father without a son? Those questions are at the heart of Dead Centre’s Hamnet, making its New York premiere this week at BAM. The sixty-minute multimedia show is part of new BAM artistic director David Binder’s inaugural Next Wave Festival consisting exclusively of BAM debuts, and this one is highlighted by a dynamite performance by Aran Murphy as the title character, in his professional acting debut. Murphy is a contemporary Hamnet, William Shakespeare’s only son, who died tragically in 1596 at the age of eleven. The boy is dressed in modern clothes, carries around a backpack, and regularly asks Google for information; it’s as if he’s been searching for his father, who abandoned him and his twin sister, Judith, and their mother, Anne Hathaway, in order to write his plays, for more than four hundred years. “To be, or not to be,” he declares several times, hoping that maybe his dad’s writings will help him find him.
Written and directed by Dead Centre founders Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, Hamnet features a large screen at the back of the stage, where the audience is live-streamed through most of the show. Jose Miguel Jimenez’s innovative video design and Liv O’Donoghue’s choreography form a kind of magic as Hamnet roams Andrew Clancy’s set, sometimes disappearing onscreen even though he is right in front of us, or vice versa, and growing even more complex and eerie when the ghost of his father (Moukarzel) appears. The narrative at times becomes murky and confusing, but the technical wizardry and Murphy’s astounding portrayal overshadow its shortcomings. “Who would fardels bear, / To grunt and sweat under a weary life, / But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns, puzzles the will, / And makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of?” Hamlet asks. Hamnet is a hypnotic puzzle about death, grief, and personal identity, albeit one that is not easily unravele’d.
BAM presents free animated street opera on building facade (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
HE DID WHAT?
Peter Jay Sharp Building
30 Lafayette Ave. at St. Felix St.
Through November 2, free, 7:00 – 10:00
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.dumbworld.co.uk
After seeing Hamnet, make your way around the corner to BAM’s main home, the Peter Jay Sharp Building, which houses the Howard Gilman Opera House, to catch the world premiere of Dumbworld and Irish National Opera’s He Did What? The ten-minute animated film, conceived and created by Brian Irvine and John McIlduff with video by Killan Waters and Conan McIvor, is projected onto the facade of the building at the corner of Lafayette Ave. and St. Felix St. The audience is given headsets through which they hear the hysterical story of three alter kockers with walkers parading slowly down the street, a man followed by two women. The two women are gossiping about him, as his wife recently caught him in bed with another woman and is deciding what to do about it. The characters are sung by Doreen Curran, Sylvia O’Brien, and Dan Reardon, with music composed by Irvine and played by the RTE Concert Orchestra, conducted by Fergus Shiel. The piece was written and directed by McIlduff; the riotous words also appear on the wall in goofy, graffiti-like type, complementing KAWS’s BAM mural and David Byrne’s bike rack across the street. While Hamnet will have you wondering, “How did they do that?,” the free presentation of He Did What?, running 7:00 to 10:00 nightly through November 2, will have you saying again and again, “He did what?” as well as “Oh no she didn’t. Oh yes she did.”
Watching the first half hour of Larry Cohen’s 1976 thriller, God Told Me To, is extremely difficult, given the continuing spate of mass shootings in the United States and the battle over gun control. The film opens with a man (Sammy Williams) on top of a water tower in New York City, picking off random people down below with a .22 caliber rifle. Detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) risks his life to go face-to-face with the soft-spoken killer, who says he did it because “God told me to.” A religious Catholic suffering a crisis of faith, Nicholas gets the same response from a series of other mass murderers, including a cop played by Andy Kaufman, in his big screen debut, who lets loose during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. (The next scene takes place at the Feast of San Gennaro, which is held every September in Little Italy, but it’s clear that six months have not elapsed, so we’ll give Cohen, a native of Washington Heights, poetic license in this case.) As Lo Bianco gets deeper and deeper into the mystery that involves an odd, cultlike figure named Bernard Phillips (Richard Lynch), he also has to deal with his estranged wife, Martha (Sandy Dennis), and his younger girlfriend, Casey Forster (Deborah Raffin). As he gets closer to the truth, he is forced to look deep into his soul amid all the madness. God Told Me To is shot by cinematographer Paul Glickman guerrilla style primarily without city permits and using a handheld camera, keeping the viewer off balance; the choppy editing by Michael D. Corey, Arthur Mandelberg, and William J. Waters doesn’t help smooth things out. The production values are quintessential low-budget mid-’70s, eliciting screams not of horror but of campy enjoyment among the middle-aged, who grew up watching these offbeat films at offbeat times in wood-paneled basements. Inspired by the Bible and one of the very first “aliens visited Earth!” books, Erich von Däniken’s bestselling Chariots of the Gods, Cohen, a producer, director, and writer who made such other low-budget faves as Black Caesar, It’s Alive, Q, The Stuff, and The Masters of Horror episode Pick Me Up, creates some intense scenes, including a hellish visit to a burning underground lair, as the twisting plot enters sci-fi territory involving a very special vagina.
“Now look, you cats may know more about junk, see,” square film director Jim Dunn (William Redfield) says midway through The Connection, “but let me swing with this movie, huh?” Adapted by Jack Gelber from his play and directed and edited by Shirley Clarke, The Connection — screening October 29 and November 4-5 in the Film Forum series “Shirley Clarke 100,” celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the New York City native’s birth — is a gritty tale of drug addicts awaiting their fix that was banned for obscenity after only two matinee screenings back in October 1962. In 2012 it was rereleased in a sharp new fiftieth-anniversary print, beautifully restored by Ross Lipman of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. In a New York City loft, eight men are waiting for their man: Leach (Warren Finnerty), the ringleader who has an oozing scab on his neck; Solly (Jerome Raphael), an intelligent philosopher who speaks poetically about the state of the world; Ernie (Garry Goodrow), a sad-sack complainer who has pawned his horn but still clutches tight to the mouthpiece as if it were a pacifier; Sam (Jim Anderson), a happy dude who tells rambling stories while spinning a hula hoop; and a jazz quartet consisting of real-life musicians Freddie Redd on piano, Jackie McLean on sax, Larry Richie on drums, and Michael Mattos on bass. Dunn and his cameraman, J. J. Burden (Roscoe Lee Browne), are in the apartment filming the men as Dunn tries to up the drama to make it more cinematic as well as more genuine. “Don’t be afraid, man,” Leach tells him. “It’s just your movie. It’s not real.”
