this week in (live)streaming

THE MURDER ON THE LINKS

Who: L.A. Theatre Works
What: All-star audio play based on Agatha Christie novel
Where: LATW online
When: Available starting July 1, $20 (nine-play season $150)
Why: In the 1990s, L.A. Theatre Works focused its attention on audio plays, “producing world classics, modern masterpieces, contemporary, and original works that speak to the issues of our times.” Audio plays have flourished during the pandemic lockdown, with excellent productions from the Public Theater, Keen Company, and Gideon Media, among many others. So the time is right for LATW’s digital 2020-21 nine-play season, which has included audio versions of The Thanksgiving Play by Larissa FastHorse, Life on Paper by Kenneth Lin, Extinction by Hannie Rayson, Bump by Chiara Atik, A Weekend with Pablo Picasso by Herbert Sigüenza, For Us All by Jeanne Sakata, No-No Boy by Ken Narasaki, and A Good Day at Auschwitz by Stephen Tobolowsky.

Alfred Molina and Simon Helberg star in LATW audio adaptation of The Murder on the Links (photos by Matt Petit and Derek Hutchison)

The final work is Kate McAll’s audio theater adaptation of The Murder on the Links, based on Agatha Christie’s 1923 novel, which featured John Moffat as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in a 1990 BBC Radio 4 version and David Suchet as the intrepid detective in a 1996 episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot for British television. Here Alfred Molina stars as Poirot, with Simon Helberg as Poirot’s bestie, Capt. Arthur Hastings. The two men travel to France to meet with Paul Renauld, only to find out he has been murdered — and their quest soon leads to another body. The cast also features Adhir Kalyan as Jack Renaud, Joanne Whalley as Madame Daubreuil, Kevin Daniels as Detective Giraud, Edita Brychta as Madame Renauld and Françoise, Anna Lyse Erikson as Leonie, Darren Richardson as a sergeant, a doctor, and others, Jocelyn Towne as Cinderella and Marthe Daubreuil, and Matthew Wolf as Monsieur Hautet; the download includes access to a digital video of a table read. Recorded in West Hollywood in April 2021, The Murder on the Links is directed and produced by Erikson, with original music by John Biddle, editing by Charles Carroll, and foley sound by Jeff Gardner. Each LATW play can be downloaded for $20; all nine are available for $150 and come with such bonuses as a video conversation with LATW founding members Ed Asner, Richard Dreyfuss, Hector Elizondo, Stacy Keach, Marsha Mason, and JoBeth Williams.

TWO BY WALLACE SHAWN: GRASSES OF A THOUSAND COLORS / THE DESIGNATED MOURNER

Who: Wallace Shawn, Julie Hagerty, Jennifer Tilly, Emily Cass McDonnell, Deborah Eisenberg, Larry Pine
What: Audio versions of Wallace Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors and The Designated Mourner
Where: Gideon Media
When: Available July 9
Why: Beloved New York City icon Wallace Shawn has kept himself very busy during the pandemic lockdown. He wonderfully reprised his role as the villainous Vizzini (“Inconceivable!”) in a Zoom benefit reunion reading of Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride to help support the Wisconsin Democratic party in the 2020 elections. The New GroupOffstage: Two by Wallace Shawn consisted of all-star Zoom reunion readings of his plays Aunt Dan and Lemon and Evening at the Talk House, the latter featuring his stellar turn as a bedraggled actor. And through July 25, you can catch him as Lucky in the New Group’s online adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, with Ethan Hawke as Didi, John Leguizamo as Gogo, and Tarik Trotter as Pozzo.

The curmudgeonly Shawn continues visiting his past with audio versions of his two of his most intense shows, presented for free by Gideon Media and reuniting the casts from previous productions. In Grasses of a Thousand Colors, an erotic futuristic nightmare that had its world premiere in 2009 at the Royal Court Theatre in London and debuted in New York four years later at the Public, Shawn expands on Madame d’Aulnoy’s 1698 fairy tale The White Cat in a wild and unpredictable story about sex, humans, animals, sex, the food chain, and sex. “Oh, hello there!” Shawn begins as a doctor named Ben. “You know, I’m just so thrilled that you’ve made the rather wild decision to listen to the meaning of all people right at this very moment. I mean, I know you’re probably just as mixed up about everything as I am because since yesterday, well, things have obviously changed since yesterday, that’s totally clear. Things are definitely different in one way or another. I mean, it’s been quite a journey, my God. And the last part of it was so crazy.” The play brings back Julie Hagerty as Cerise, Ben’s wife; Jennifer Tilly as Robin, his mistress; and Emily Cass McDonnell as Rose, his girlfriend, along with director André Gregory, who starred with Shawn in Louis Malle’s brilliant 1981 film, My Dinner with André.

The play is divided into six sections, “Invitation,” “The Quest to Be Known,” “Affair,” “Revenge,” “Illness,” and “Party,” that are definitely not safe for work, for those who are back in the office. “So anyway,” Dr. Ben says, “You see, I’d always loved nudity, including nude performances, because what other pleasures can we get in life except from what is naked, or in other words from getting closer and closer to what we call nature.”

Also available is an audio version of Shawn’s The Designated Mourner, which premiered at the Royal National Theatre in 1996; this reading reunites Shawn, Deborah Eisenberg (Shawn’s real-life wife), and Larry Pine from the 2000 New York City production directed by Gregory in several small rooms in a building on William St. in the Financial District. Divided into “Resentment,” “Accommodation,” “Danger,” “Flight,” “Arrest,” and “Death,” the play delves into violence, authoritarianism, and injustice amid Shawn’s unrelenting trademark dark humor.

“It’s just remarkable that your father is allowed to exist!” Judy (Eisenberg) recalls being told about her father, Howard (Pine), a famous and well-respected poet. “And meanwhile your attention is entirely turned away from the human suffering that is going on all around you,” Howard tells Jack (Shawn), her husband. “You can sum me up in about ten words: a former student of English literature who — who went downhill from there!” Jack explains.

In Woody Allen’s 1987 comedy Radio Days, Shawn played the Masked Avenger, the hero of a popular radio serial, who says, “I wonder if future generations will ever even hear about us. It’s not likely. After enough time, everything passes. I don’t care how big we are or how important are our lives.” Through podcasts such as these of Shawn’s plays, future generations around the world will indeed get to hear about these seminal works.

CAN YOU BRING IT: BILL T. JONES AND D-MAN IN THE WATERS

Documentary explores the creation and legacy of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s D-Man in the Waters (photo courtesy Rosalynde LeBlanc)

CAN YOU BRING IT: BILL T. JONES AND D-MAN IN THE WATERS (Rosalynde LeBlanc & Tom Hurwitz, 2020)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, July 16
212-727-8110
www.d-mandocumentary.com
filmforum.org

In 1989, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company presented the world premiere of D-Man in the Waters at the prestigious Joyce Theater in New York City, a physically demanding, emotional work born out of the AIDS crisis, dealing with tragedy and loss in the wake of the death of Zane, Jones’s personal and professional partner, at the age of thirty-nine in 1988. Directors Rosalynde LeBlanc and Tom Hurwitz take a deep dive into the history of the dance and its lasting impact more than thirty years later in the captivating documentary Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters, opening July 16 at Film Forum.

“What is D-Man? Is it alive now? Is it a cautionary tale? Is it one of inspiration?” Jones tells fifteen Loyola Marymount dancers who are staging the piece under the direction of LeBlanc, a former company member who runs the Jones/Zane Educational Partnership at the school, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Dance. Jones continues, “Makes you want to get all your shit together, your community together, take responsibility, be beautiful, be fierce — is that what it is? I don’t know what it is. . . . What do they share that is so big, so tragic that you need a piece like this to move it and give it body?”

LeBlanc, who also produced the film, and two-time Emmy-winning cinematographer Hurwitz, the son of longtime Martha Graham dancer, choreographer, and teacher Jane Dudley, talk to most of the original cast of D-Man, many of whom have gone on to form their own companies: Arthur Avilés, Seán Curran, Lawrence Goldhuber, Gregg Hubbard, Heidi Latsky, Janet Lilly, and Betsy McCracken, who, along with Jones and his sister Johari Briggs, share intimate stories of working with Jones and Zane and the importance of the piece as the arts community was being ravaged by AIDS. Sometimes holding back tears, they speak lovingly of Zane and Demian Acquavella, nicknamed “D-Man,” who died at the age of thirty-two in 1990. “He was always a boy, but always a bit of a devilish boy, and the dancing was also that way,” Jones remembers.

Through new and old interviews, home video and archival photographs, and exciting footage from the dance’s original rehearsals and Joyce premiere, LeBlanc, Hurwitz, and editor Ann Collins choreograph a gracefully flowing, compelling narrative as the documentary participants discuss specific movements — Latsky’s attempts at a jump and Curran’s memories of a duet with Acquavella in which their foreheads have to keep touching are wonderful — and LeBlanc tries to reach inside the Loyola Marymount performers to motivate them. They might have the movement down, but D-Man requires more than that to be successful. “Do you dare to let the stakes really be high?” she asks as they search for contemporary issues that impact them similarly to how AIDS affected the creation of the work, which is set to Felix Mendelssohn’s 1825 Octet for Strings, which the German composer wrote at the age of sixteen. “There was some healing, cathartic ritual in the making and the doing of this dance that sustained us,” Curran says, a feeling LeBlanc wants to instill in the college students.

“This work is not about anybody’s epidemic,” Jones, a Kennedy Center Honoree, MacArthur Grant awardee, and Tony winner who is the artistic director of New York Live Arts, said in a statement about the film. “It is about the dark spirit of what is happening in the world and how you push back against it.” Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters gets to the heart of that spirit by revealing the legacy, and the future, of a seminal dance piece that continues to find its place on an ever-evolving planet.

LeBlanc and Hurwitz will be at Film Forum to discuss the film at the 7:00 shows on July 16 and 17 and will participate in a live, virtual Q&A with Jones at 8:00 on July 21. Jones, whose riveting Afterwardsness at Park Avenue Armory in May explored the Covid-19 pandemic, isolation, and racial injustice, will return to the space this fall with Deep Blue Sea, a monumental work for more than one hundred community members and dancers that begins with a solo by Jones and incorporates texts by Martin Luther King Jr. and Herman Melville, with water again playing a critical role.

ACROSS THE MacDOWELL DINNER TABLE: EXCELLENCE, AESTHETICS, AND VALUE

Who: Nell Painter, Linda Harrison, Joyce Kozloff, Garth Greenan
What: Livestreamed discussion
Where: 92Y online
When: Thursday, July 15, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
Why: For more than a century, artists of all disciplines have come to MacDowell to create works in residency in a welcoming New Hampshire community. (It was previously known as the MacDowell Colony, but the name was changed in 2020 because of the its oppressive overtones.) MacDowell Fellows have included James Baldwin, Meredith Monk, Thornton Wilder, Leonard Bernstein, Suzan-Lori Parks, Studs Terkel, Ruth Reichl, and Jonathan Franzen. On July 15 at 7:00, the 92nd St. Y is hosting the free virtual discussion “Across the MacDowell Dinner Table: Excellence, Aesthetics, and Value,” with Newark Museum director and CEO Linda Harrison, visual artist Joyce Kozloff, and gallerist Garth Greenan, moderated by artist, author, and board chair Nell Painter. They will consider the past, present, and future of MacDowell and its place in a quickly changing art world. The Garth Greenan Gallery is currently showing “Alexis Smith: Not in Utopia” through July 30; the Newark Museum has on view “Anual de Artes de Nueva Jersey 2021: ReVisión y Respuesta,” “Four Quiltmakers, Four American Stories,” and “Wolfgang Gil: Sonic Geometries”; and Kozloff’s “Uncivil Wars,” in which she repurposes Civil War battle maps by incorporating images of viruses, runs through August 13 at DC Moore. Kozloff will be at the gallery to talk about the exhibition on July 21 at 6:00 as part of the free ADAA Chelsea Gallery Walk.

STOP AAPI HATE: A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE AND MURDER

Abridged online version of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder benefits Stop AAPI Hate

Who: Lea Salonga, Ali Ewoldt, Diana Phelan, Thom Sesma, Cindy Cheung, Karl Josef Co
What: All-Asian-American abridged online version of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder
Where: Broadway on Demand
When: July 15-22, pay-what-you-wish (suggested donation $20.14 – $1,000)
Why: On May 19, the National Asian American Theatre Company held a one-time-only virtual benefit reading of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, featuring an all-Asian-American cast. Now CollaborAzian and Broadway on Demand are teaming up for an online version of Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder that will benefit Stop AAPI Hate, which “tracks and responds to incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States.” An abridged adaptation of the Broadway musical that was nominated for ten Tonys, winning three (Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Direction of a Musical), the show will be available July 15-22. The story, based on the 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal by Roy Horniman and the 1949 British film Kind Hearts and Coronets, follows the exploits of a man ninth in the line of succession to his family’s dukedom who decides to get rid of the eight people above him and grab the crown for himself as revenge for how his mother was treated by them. Thom Sesma plays the endangered members of the D’Ysquith clan, with Cindy Cheung as Ms. Shingle and others, Ali Ewoldt as Phoebe D’Ysquith, producer Karl Josef Co as Monty Navarro, and producer Diane Phelan as Sibella Hallward; hosted by Tony winner Lea Salonga, the presentation is directed by Alan Muraoka, who has played Alan, the owner of Hooper’s Store on Sesame Street, for more than two decades, with music direction by Steven Cuevas, costumes by Carla Posada, props by Alesha Borbo Kilayko, and audio engineering by Jonathan Cuevas.

“Historically, Asian American artists have been marginalized in media and on stage, and productions like this help to spotlight the tremendous talent that has been overlooked. We’re here to show the world that we are here, and we are fantastic,” Salonga said in a statement. The event is being held in conjunction with the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, the Broadway Diversity Project, Unapologetically Asian, Leviathan Labs, Chinosity, and Tremendous Communications.

THE GARDEN

Caroline Stefanie Clay and Charlayne Woodard play a mother and daughter reconnecting in The Garden (photo by J Fannon)

THE GARDEN
Baltimore Center Stage
Through July 18, $15-$40
www.centerstage.org

This past April, Manhattan Theatre Club presented a virtual version of Charlayne Woodard’s solo play Neat as part of its Curtain Call series; the autobiographical work, written and performed by Woodard, had debuted on MTC’s stage in 1997. Recorded from her home for the online version, Neat tells the story of Woodard’s coming-of-age in Albany in the 1970s, when she was a teenager and her disabled aunt, Neat, came to live with her family. Woodard has also delved into her past and present in Flight, In Real Life, and Pretty Fire, while The Night Watcher was based on actual slave narratives.

Woodard returns to the stage in The Garden, a La Jolla Playhouse commission filmed live at Baltimore Center Stage and streaming through July 18. Woodard stars as Cassandra, a middle-aged woman who is visiting her mother, Claire Rose (Caroline Stefanie Clay), for the first time in three years. They are so estranged that Cassandra uses her mother’s given name, refusing to call her “mother” or any other similar appellation. Sneaking up on her as the play starts, Cassandra says, “Claire Rose, Claire Rose, Claire Rose, Claire Rose! I’m sorry! Oh my God! I didn’t mean to frighten you! I’m sorry! Please? It’s just me. Claire Rose, Claire Rose, please!!!” Her mother replies, “I was beginning to think I might never see you again.”

Over the course of seventy-five minutes, mother and daughter bring up past wrongs, explore what tore them apart, and reveal deeply emotional secrets that might bring them back together. The show takes place in a large garden created by Tony-winning set designer Rachel Hauck, featuring pinkeye purple hull peas, crookneck squash, Swiss chard, mustard greens, and turnip greens in numerous floor boxes and a small greenhouse. Claire Rose might live by herself, but she does not consider herself lonely. Answering her phone, Claire Rose says to the person on the other end of the line, “I am not at all alone. I’m in my garden.” Later, she tells Cassandra, “All I can say is this particular morning, I need the peace my garden brings me.”

The garden is an apt metaphor for the lives Claire Rose and Cassandra are living and the concepts of “home” and being “uprooted,” representing elements they personally chose to grow as well as those that were forced upon them, out of their control, especially when it comes to race. “This day . . . I believe this day is different from all the rest,” Cassandra says. Claire Rose responds, “Different from all the rest. . . . I don’t know. But I turned on CNN, the BBC. I turned on Fox News, only to find out things are far worse today than they were yesterday! My big question is why are we going backwards in this country. Pretty soon Black folk will be back at the voting booth, guessing how many jelly beans are in the jar —” Cassandra cuts her off, declaring, “— Very true. These are frightening times. But I didn’t come three thousand miles to discuss . . . voter suppression. I suggest you stay away from the twenty-four-hour news cycle, anyway—” This time Claire Rose cuts her daughter off, proclaiming, “—Oh, no. We can’t afford to live in a bubble. They are coming for us, Cassandra! It’s time to be vigilant. You don’t want to find yourself living like Negroes had to live back in the ’40s and ’50s. This country was a misery back then. . . . Oh, yes. Good ole’ racism. It is and always has been alive and kicking.”

Charlayne Woodard wrote and stars in Baltimore Center Stage streaming production of The Garden (photo by J Fannon)

Claire Rose and Cassandra each share horrifying, tragic stories from their past, which get to the heart of their fractured relationship, in need of serious tending. Cassandra is defiant in explaining that she felt her mother cared more for the garden than for her children, imploring, “Claire Rose . . . you are so generous, so nurturing every step of the way with this garden. April to October. Whether there’s too much rain or freezing temperatures. This garden never gets on your nerves. Me, Rachel, Isaiah, even Pop-Pop — we’ve all been competing with this garden. I have always done the best I could to be a good daughter. But you left me out of it. My shrink says —” An adamant Claire Rose defends herself: “This garden is between me and my God. Competing with my garden? That’s as silly as me competing with your career. Who does that? If you choose to be jealous of some beets and some eggplant and my heirloom tomatoes, maybe that’s a topic to bring up with your shrink.” It all leads to a haunting, unforgettable finale.

Filmed by David Lee Roberts Jr. with camera operators Darius Moore and Taja Copeland, The Garden is directed with a compelling green thumb by Patricia McGregor (Hamlet, Hurt Village), who allows the actors, who occasionally break the fourth wall, time and room to grow as the narrative unfolds. Two-time Obie winner and Tony nominee Woodard (Jeremy O. Harris’s “Daddy,” Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine) and Clay (Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, Adrienne Kennedy’s Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side) cultivate a potent and powerful chemistry as a daughter and mother who have never quite understood each other but are more alike than they realize.

It’s a gripping story that blossoms at just the right moment in time, tackling issues of loss and isolation as we emerge from the pandemic lockdown and family and friends meet up in person for the first time in more than a year in a country dangerously polarized by social injustice, police brutality, and health and economic crises that disproportionately affect people of color. In her 1983 book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker wrote, “Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength — in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.” Those words ring as true as ever in 2021, embodied in Woodard’s moving, heartrending play.

PTP/NYC: LUNCH / STANDING ON THE EDGE OF TIME / A SMALL HANDFUL

PTP/NYC’s tasty virtual free Lunch continues through July 13

Who: PTP/NYC (Potomac Theatre Project)
What: Virtual summer season
Where: PTP/NYC YouTube
When: July 9-13 (Lunch), July 23-27 (Standing on the Edge of Time), August 13-17 (A Small Handful), free with advance RSVP (donations accepted)
Why: Every summer, I look forward to seeing what unique plays Potomac Theatre Project, aka PTP/NYC, brings to the city. Founded in 1987 by co-artistic directors Cheryl Faraone, Richard Romagnoli, and Jim Petosa at Middlebury College, the organization presents old and new works by such playwrights as Vaclav Havel, Harold Pinter, Snoo Wilson, Tom Stoppard, C. P. Taylor, and, primarily, Caryl Churchill and Howard Barker. The company’s 2020 season ran online in the fall, with Churchill’s Far Away, Dan O’Brien’s The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage, and Barker’s A Political Statement in the Form of Hysteria. The 2021 season is virtual as well, opening July 9-13 with a splendid production of Steven Berkoff’s Lunch.

“What do you want?” pushy salesman Tom (Bill Army) asks Mary (Jackie Sanders). “Nothing,” she replies. The two are sitting on the edge of a moving sea, their backs to the ocean as dark clouds emerge behind them. Refusing to give up, he later asks, “Don’t you ever want something else?” She responds again, “Nothing.” She tries to leave several times, but he insists she stay.

During the forty-minute absurdist play, the two strangers wonder about a romantic rendezvous as they defend their lives and the choices they’ve made while attacking the other’s, at times hitting hard and deep, although not much seems to stick. She calls him a “salesman of nothing, a canine groper . . . a dirty little man,” while he tells her, “Crawling words creep out like spiders from your ancient gob.” Occasionally they speak directly to the viewer, considering their situation, not sure what they should do next. It might not be love at first sight for both of them, but neither can they simply get up and walk away, allowing us to eavesdrop on their unusual conversation, with unique language that the closed captioning often has no idea how to transcribe.

“You sound like high-pressure hissing from cracked pipes,” Mary says as he waxes poetic about his job. “I’m no pressure,” he replies. “I dissolve into fat and slide under the door, staining the concrete stairs on the way down — those thousands of white — dirty — grey concrete stairs that have gnawed my feet away — choked on the dust — white dust that concrete secretes — salesman’s disease — bang-bang, up the stairs and then slither down in a visceral pool of grease dragging nerve endings, plasma, and intestines . . . re-form on the pavement — plunge the eyes back in — the shirt has dissolved into my flesh — become an outer skin . . . recoup in the ABC — salesman’s filling station — pump in the hot brown bird vomit — and the others are just sludging in, their faces slapped puce with rejection, the waitress, sliding around the dead pool of grease, slithers her knotted varicosity towards me and for a treat smashes some aerated bread down my throat which dissolves into dust, white dust that concrete secretes, atrophying delicate nasal membranes . . .” She asks, “Don’t you like your work?” He answers, “Love it! Every moment, every earth-shattering cosmological moment of it.”

Directed by Romagnoli, the prerecorded play was filmed with the actors in different locations, but Courtney Smith’s production design, lighting, and cinematography attempt to make it appear like they are in the same space. Army (The Band’s Visit, Scenes from an Execution) and Sanders (The Taming of the Shrew, Cowgirls) are lovely together — er, well, apart — in a work that premiered at the King’s Head in London in 1983, with Linda Marlowe and Ian Hastings starring. Berkoff, who has played villains in such films as Beverly Hills Cop, Octopussy, and Rambo: First Blood Part II, has also written and directed such plays as East, West, Decadence, Kvetch, Actor, and Massage, many of which he appeared in as well. Lunch, which runs about as long as it takes to eat lunch, is a tasty treat, a delicious morsel about two very different people who come together by chance and reevaluate their lives as they reaffirm their identities.

PTP/NYC’s free 34.5 season continues July 23-27 with the ninety-minute Standing on the Edge of Time, consisting of short works by David Auburn, Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, Mac Wellman, Steven Dykes and others, directed by Faraone and featuring such company vets as Alex Draper, Tara Giordano, Stephanie Janssen, Christopher Marshall, and Aubrey Dube, followed August 13-17 with A Small Handful, a filmed thirty-minute piece directed and conceived by Petosa that uses text by Anne Sexton and songs by composer Gilda Lyons, spoken by Paula Langton and sung by Kayleigh Riess.