this week in (live)streaming

I AGREE TO THE TERMS

The audience participates on Zoom and their smartphone in I Agree to the Terms (photo by Giada Sun)

I AGREE TO THE TERMS
The Builders Association
NYU Skirball Zoom
Friday – Sunday, March 25 – April 3, $15, 2:00 & 5:00
nyuskirball.org
new.thebuildersassociation.org

The Builders Association goes back to the beginning of World Wide Web bulletin boards (BBS) in I Agree to the Terms, an uneven but ultimately fun virtual journey into the strange world of MTurks, short for Mechanical Turks. These Amazon microworkers are defined as “a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually.” The program, which began in 2005, well before the pandemic had so many people around the world working from home, offers anyone the opportunity to perform HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks, that computers are unable to do, such as evaluating consumer behavior, reviewing product similarities, and other skills that require more than just 0s and 1s. The employees make a minuscule amount of money as they complete each HIT, mere pennies, but the MTurks say that it has the potential to add up to a decent living.

Moe Angelos and David Pence host the show from MITU580 in Brooklyn; participants, using both a desktop computer and a mobile device, are sent a QR code a few hours before it starts, which offers advance reading material so they will be a bit more familiar with what is about to be experienced. From a room filled with old computer equipment, the earliest forms of online communication are depicted on out-of-date monitors as Angelos and Pence read BBS chats aloud, mostly from early adopters trying to help one another navigate this new environment.

Moe Angelos and David Pence host interactive show from Brooklyn

They also present excerpts from a series of manifestos about the future of the internet by such key figures as Stewart Brand, who predicted in 1985 that “personal ‘computer networking’” was going to “become as widespread eventually as the telephone and television”; Art Kleiner, who also in 1985 claimed that “addiction, for most, is short-lived”; and John Perry Barlow, the internet pioneer and Grateful Dead lyricist, who declared in 1996 that he came “from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.” These sections are clunky, as the text from the chats and manifestos also appears in its original font on your smartphone, so you’re not sure where to look and listen and how much of the material you’re supposed to digest. In addition, the images are lo-fi, which might be the point, but it still feels less than fully formed.

Things pick up significantly when director Marianne Weems, who founded the troupe in 1994, switches over to interviews with four actual Turkers: Adah Deveaux, Noel Castle, Sybil Lanham, and Michelle Brown, who describe what they do and how much they can earn. They’re not actors, so don’t expect a smooth, flowing narrative, but we do get such lines as “Jeff Bezos is my pimp daddy.” The audience is then divided into four breakout rooms led by each MTurk, where you participate in HITs, answering questions on your mobile device.

Before you begin, however, you have to agree to a ridiculously long list of terms and conditions that would probably take hours to read through (longer than a CVS coupon printout), but if you want to play the game, you need to sign off on it regardless, just as we do all the time online these days. There’s a running score that measures your percentage, and you accumulate a tiny amount of money for each completed HIT that isn’t rejected, with a chance to use that cash in a “Builders Marketplace.” Essentially, Amazon has created a virtual company town and store where MTurks are unlikely to get rich as they make Bezos wealthier and wealthier in this unregulated territory.

The Obie-winning Builders Association has previously staged such works as the innovative, interactive Elements of Oz, a unique reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, and House/Divided, a multimedia investigation of the 2008 mortgage crisis as seen through John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Their latest piece, in which just about everything is real — for example, the video with Sharon Chiarella is legitimate, as she was the Amazon VP who launched the MTurks program — is being livestreamed six more times April 1-3; tickets are only $15, but whatever you make on the survey platform will not be applied to that cost. As Barlow wrote for the Dead, “You imagine sipping champagne from your boot / For a taste of your elegant pride / I may be going to hell in a bucket / But at least I’m enjoying the ride.”

On March 30 at 7:00, there will be a free Zoom webinar, Meet the Artists: Office Hours, featuring Builders Weems and James Gibbs, Clay Shirky of NYU, and Turkers Deveaux, Castle, Lanham, and Brown.

THE WETSUITMAN

Five actors portray more than two dozen characters in the Cherry’s hybrid production of The Wetsuitman

THE WETSUITMAN
The Cherry Artists’ Collective
The Cherry Artspace, Ithaca
March 31 – April 3, livestream $20, in-person $25-$35
www.thecherry.org

“It’s only a case,” a detective says in the Cherry’s English-language world premiere of Freek Mariën’s The Wetsuitman. Of course, in police procedurals, especially Scandiavian ones, it’s never only a case.

The Cherry continues its exemplary live and livestreamed productions with The Wetsuitman, running March 31 through April 3 from the Cherry Artspace in Ithaca, directed by Samuel Buggeln. Inspired by a magazine article by Norwegian journalist Anders Fjellberg and translated by David McKay, the hundred-minute crime thriller begins when a decaying body in a wetsuit is found by an old architect in a cove.

It’s 2015, and Inspector Westerman and criminology intern Magnussen are on the case, which has similarities to a previous unsolved murder. Again, evidence is scarce; the dour medical examiner states something many of us have learned by streaming Scandinavian crime dramas during the pandemic: “Norway is a country made for / accidents / we have cliffs / we have storms / we have big ships / we have big rocks / we have all those people / on drilling platforms / and god-knows-where in the Arctic / we freeze to death / we have train crashes / we have plane crashes / we have shipwrecks / terrorists / and remember half the time / this is in total darkness / so whatever can break down / will break down / and if no one else does it to us / we do it to ourselves / Norway / land of alcoholism and suicide / it’s not what the brochures say / but it’s true / we beat the world in drinking and depression / we beat each other to a pulp in the darkness / drunk and depressed / we fall off cliffs / that’s if we don’t get blown up / flattened / sucked into a propeller / which is all to say / we’re the best at identifying bodies / got it down to a science / give me a body / I’ll give you a name / I’m the medical examiner / I smell like formaldehyde / and have a hard time getting into relationships / because women seem to think / ‘those hands of his / were just inside a corpse.’”

The medical examiner (Marc Gomes) discusses death in Norway in The Wetsuitman

When Westerman asks him what the cause of death was, he essentially throws his hands up, admitting, “I couldn’t even tell you / if he’s been dead three days or three weeks.”

Westerman and Magnussen are joined by another detective, Hustvedt, as they interview anyone who might have information on the missing person, but red herrings keep being dangled in front of them. The investigation goes from Norway and France to Syria and the Netherlands as the cops and a journalist speak with Customs and tourism officials, salespeople, a scientist, a lifeguard, a corporate spokesperson, a beachcomber, refugees, and others, trying to figure out who the Wetsuitman is and how he died.

Eric Brooks, Marc Gomes, Karl Gregory, Amoreena Wade, and Sylvie Yntema do a terrific job portraying more than two dozen characters, with only minimal costume changes; sometimes they even argue over who is going to play whom at any moment, taking over a role in the middle of a scene. They often introduce themselves or each other so the audience knows who is who; for example, Hustvedt explains, “I’m on the case now / Hustvedt / head of missing persons / I’m taking over the investigation / bald spot / big mustache / clenching a cigarette / in my gold teeth.”

Sylvie Yntema makes a point in English-language premiere of Freek Mariën’s The Wetsuitman

The actors move folding tables and chairs on and off the set to indicate changes of time and space; still photos are projected onto a back screen to add detail to the story, including the geographic location. The livestream is designed by Karen Rodriguez, with multiple cameras offering closeups as well as views from the audience; several attempts at using split screens are not quite successful, but otherwise it definitely feels like a play and not a movie. And for the record, the comment about Renée Zellweger feels out of place, unnecessarily mean-spirited in an otherwise spirited production.

The narrative starts out as a murder mystery but turns into so much more as such issues as race, corruption, and immigration come into focus. During the lockdown, the Cherry presented such fine works as A Day, And What Happens if I Don’t, Hotel Good Luck, and Felt Sad, Posted a Frog (and other streams of global quarantine); I’m glad to see the company is continuing to stream its productions from its upstate home to give us city folk a chance to see it as well.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: AN AFTERNOON OF COMEDIC DELIGHTS

Blythe Danner and Bob Dishy team up again in one-act plays for Food for Thought

Who: Food for Thought Productions
What: In-person and livestreamed performance of three one-act plays
Where: Theatre 80 St. Marks, 80 St. Marks Pl. at First Ave., and online
When: Monday, March 28, free with RSVP for in-person (646-366-9340, info@foodforthoughtproductions.com), 2:00; available online March 28 and April 3
Why: Food for Thought Productions has presented more than a thousand one-act plays since 2000, featuring all-star casts in lesser-known works by major playwrights. Its twenty-second season kicks off March 28 at 2:00 with “An Afternoon of Comedic Delights,” three short plays featuring the incomparable Tony and two-time Emmy winner Blythe Danner and the inestimable Bob Dishy, directed by Antony Marselli, live in person at Theatre 80 St. Marks and online; you can also catch the stream on April 3. The Brooklyn-born eighty-eight-year-old Dishy (Lovers and Other Strangers, Sly Fox, Damn Yankees) and the Philadelphia-born seventy-nine-year-old Danner (Butterflies Are Free, Betrayal, Huff) will first team up for George S. Kaufman and Leueen MacGrath’s Amicable Parting, about a young couple, Bill and Alicia Reynolds, going through their possessions as they plan to separate; in the foreword, the authors explain, “This is meant to be high comedy. It should be played lightly, gayly. Never heavily. Never emotionally. Thank you.”

Early on, Alicia points out a specific painting. “I would like to have this one, if you don’t mind, Bill,” she says. “Suits me,” he replies. “Now, Bill, you’re sure? — I mean, that you don’t want it? Of course, I love it, but then you love it too,” she explains. Bill: “No, Sweetie — you saw it first — I remember very clearly. Paris, ’53. What was the name of the restaurant? Chez Something.” Alicia: “Nico.” Bill: “Chez Nico. Too much to eat, too much to drink, too much for this painting.” Ah, memories.

Bob Dishy and Blythe Danner deal with family issues in Brighton Beach Memoirs

Next up is Peter Stone’s Commercial Break, which has been previously performed by Lauren Bacall and Robert Preston and was initially written for Audrey Hepburn in Charade, then revised for Cary Grant in Father Goose, ending up on the cutting-room floor both times. In the play, Tony, Oscar, Emmy, and Edgar winner Stone (Kean, 1776, Woman of the Year) introduces us to Catherine and Harry Crocker; the couple finds itself in quite a predicament when she accuses him of being unfaithful. Dishy presented Stone’s My Doctor the Box with Judy Graubart at a 2007 FFT tribute to Stone, who passed away in 2003 at the age of seventy-three. The third relationship play is Tallulah Finds Her Kitchen, which Neil Simon, Danny Simon, and Joseph Stein wrote for the one and only Tallulah Bankhead, a monologue that takes place, well, in her kitchen. The festivities conclude with a Q&A with Danner and Dishy, who appeared together in Brighton Beach Memoirs in 1986 and in FFT’s December 2021 production of Arthur Miller’s I Can’t Remember.

ProEnglish THEATRE OF UKRAINE: THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Who: ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine
What: Livestreamed fundraiser
Where: ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine Facebook Live
When: Sunday, March 27, free with RSVP (donations encouraged), 11:00 am
Why: Shortly after the Russians began their invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine converted its black box space into a shelter for members of the theatrical profession and neighbors, creating a safe area where actors, directors, technicians, and others could gather together. The company, which is based in Kyiv, has been collecting food and medicine for the elderly while continuing to make art. It is also supporting an effort to train actors as medical personnel to make videos to show people how to care for injured citizens. As part of Boston-based Arlekin Players Theatre’s #Artists4Ukraine project, “a campaign of hope,” ProEnglish Theatre is presenting a livestreamed version of British playwright Harold Pinter’s 1991 drama The New World Order, which deals with imperialism, totalitarianism, and hegemony. The three-character, ten-minute play involves a blindfolded man about to be tortured for unknown reasons.

ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine has converted its space into a shelter for the cast, crew, and community in Kyiv

Des: Do you want to know something about this man?
Lionel: What?
Des: He hasn’t got any idea at all of what we’re going to do to him.
Lionel: He hasn’t, no.
Des: He hasn’t, no. He hasn’t got any idea at all about any one of the number of things that we might do to him.
Lionel: That we will do to him.
Des: That we will.

After finding out about what ProEnglish Theatre was doing, Arlekin founding artistic director Igor Golyak, who was born in Kyiv, made a video in which he declared, “This could be us. This is us.” The play will be performed live over Facebook on March 27 at 11:00 in the morning; if you can give anything, donations will be accepted to help the cause of ProEnglish Theatre in these dire times, as the people of Ukraine demonstrate a profound resilience to protect their freedom.

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ IN CONVERSATION: PERFORMATIVE (POSTPONED)

Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present, MoMA performance, 2010 (photo by Marco Anelli / courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives)

Who: Marina Abramović, Glenn Lowry, Marco Anelli
What: Livestreamed discussions in conjunction with new gallery show, “Performative”
Where: Sean Kelly Gallery YouTube, MoMA online
When: Tuesday, March 15, free with RSVP, 6:15 [now postponed]; Thursday, March 24, free with RSVP, 7:30
Why: In 2010, MoMA staged the widely hailed immersive exhibition “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present,” a chronological career survey highlighted by the re-creation of many of the Belgrade-born artist’s performance pieces, centered by the title work, in which she and a visitor sat across from one another, staring into each other’ eyes for as long as possible as the audience watched. In conjunction with the new Sean Kelly exhibit “Marina Abramović: Performative,” which explores four key turning points in Abramović’s oeuvre, the gallery is presenting a pair of live discussions between and Abramović and special guests, sitting down together but most likely not having a staring contest.

On March 15 at 6:15, Abramović will be at Sean Kelly with Glenn Lowry, the longtime MoMA director who oversaw the 2010 show; the livestream will be available on YouTube. [ed note: This event has been postponed because of the knife attack at MoMA over the weekend.] On March 24 at 7:30, Abramović will be at MoMA for a virtual conversation with Italian photographer Marco Anelli. “Performative,” consisting of photographs, video, objects, and ephemera, is on view at Sean Kelly Gallery at 475 Tenth Ave. through April 16, featuring looks at Abramović’s Rhythm 10, The Artist Is Present, the participatory Transitory Objects, and Seven Deaths.

JOHN EARLY SELECTS: MAPS TO THE STARS

Jerome Fontana (Robert Pattinson) and Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska) look to the Hollywood hills in Maps to the Stars

MAPS TO THE STARS (David Cronenberg, 2014)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Wednesday, March 9, 4:45 and 7:15
Metrograph at Home, March 12-14
www.focusfeatures.com
nyc.metrograph.com

Actor and comedian John Early’s latest selection for Metrograph is an underrated gem. Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg and American novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner, a match made in Hollywood Babylon, paint a savage portrait of celebrity culture in the absolutely incendiary and off-the-charts satire Maps to the Stars. The darkly funny comic drama centers on Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska), a young woman who returns to Hollywood after having been put away for a long time for a dangerous deed, her face and body marked by burns. Befriending limo driver Jerome Fontana (Robert Pattinson), who is an aspiring actor and writer, Agatha gets a job working for disgruntled actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), who is desperate to star in the remake of Stolen Moments, playing the role that made her mother, Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon), famous, but Havana fears that according to Hollywood she is much too old. Havana undergoes regular intense physical and psychological therapy to deal with her mommy issues with television healer Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), Agatha’s father, who has banished his daughter from ever contacting the family again. Meanwhile, Agatha’s younger brother, thirteen-year-old child star Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird), is a Bieberesque character fresh out of rehab who is negotiating the sequel to his massive hit, Bad Babysitter, with his very serious stage mom, Cristina (Olivia Williams). Slowly but surely, everyone’s lives intersect in a riot of fame and misfortune, drugs and guns, ghosts and incest.

Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) screams for success in dazzling collaboration between David Cronenberg and Bruce Wagner

Cronenberg, who has made such cult favorites as Scanners, The Fly, Naked Lunch, and A History of Violence, and the L.A.-based Wagner, author of such stinging novels as I’ll Let You Go, Still Holding, The Empty Chair, and I’m Losing You, which he also turned into a film, leave nothing and no one unscathed in this thoroughly brutal depiction of Hollywood as a haunted La La Land of dreams and nightmares, both literally and figuratively. Rising star Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, In Treatment, Jane Eyre) is superb as Agatha, her inner and outer scars revealing more and more of themselves as she reinserts herself into the life of her crazy family, with Cusack channeling a bit of Nicolas Cage as the overprotective patriarch, a self-help guru who could use a little help himself. Moore was named Best Actress at Cannes for her harrowing portrayal of an actress teetering on the edge of reality.

Shooting for the first time ever in the United States, Cronenberg captures the sights and smells of Los Angeles and its environs; most of the film was shot in Canada, however, but Cronenberg kept Wagner, a former Hollywood limo driver himself, close by, trying to attain as much authenticity as possible. Twilight hunk Pattinson, who spent all of Cronenberg’s previous movie, Cosmopolis, in the back of a limo, gets in the driver’s seat here, playing an alternate, reimagined version of Wagner. The severely screwed-up Weiss family serves as a microcosm for Hollywood’s own severely screwed-up dysfunction, as Cronenberg melds the ridiculous with the sublime, the tragic with the comic, the bizarre with the, well, more bizarre, creating a modern-day fairy-tale mashup of Shakespeare and Williams, Sunset Boulevard and Less than Zero, a caustic, cautionary tale of the price you pay for getting what you wish for. Maps to the Stars, with an introduction by Early (Search Party, The Afterparty), is screening March 9 at 4:45 and 7:15 at Metrograph, then will be streaming March 12-14 as part of Metrograph at Home.

A BENEFIT FOR UKRAINE

Who: Eugene Hütz, Gogol Bordello, Craig Finn & Franz Nicolay, Jesse Malin, Lady Lamb, Marc Roberge, Matisyahu, Patti Smith, Stephin Merritt, Suzanne Vega, more
What: Benefit concert for Ukraine and the Come Back Alive Foundation
Where: City Winery on Mandolin
When: Thursday, March 10, $20, 8:00
Why: City Winery’s all-star benefit for Ukraine sold out almost instantly, but you can still catch it from the comfort of your own home while donating to help a sovereign nation deeply in need of support, with nearly two million refugees seeking new places to live. City Winery will be livestreaming the show, raising funds for Ukraine and the Come Back Alive Foundation, an organization, founded in 2014, that declares: “Ukraine is the Shield of Europe. We believe that a threat to freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere. We are here defending the values we share across Europe and the world. We are doing our best to make sure Putin’s values do not spread further, even beyond our borders. Our Army is strong and determined, but they are underequipped.”

For a mere twenty bucks, you can watch a parade of musicians take the stage at the Far West Side venue, hosted by Eugene Hütz and his band, Gogol Bordello; Hütz was born in Ukraine to a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother. “Ukraine belongs to Ukrainians! We are an ancient independent nation distinctly and forever different from this criminally insane neighbor,” Hütz said in a statement. “The proof you all see now in the fierce mind-blowing battle that the world is witnessing, a battle of Ukrainian people’s choice of freedom and democracy against a psychotic totalitarian regime next door. Please help us to win this battle, help us to end this catastrophe immediately and bring the intruder to justice. Please stand with Ukraine in the battle for its democracy and freedom. Please donate and fundraise with us. Ukraine needs all of you. All your support counts.”

The lineup, so far, includes Craig Finn and Franz Nicolay of the Hold Steady, Jesse Malin, Lady Lamb, Marc Roberge of O.A.R., Matisyahu, Patti Smith, Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, and Suzanne Vega. You can also join the waitlist to see the concert live and in person. Хай живе, вільна Україна!