Who:Heather Wolf What: Webinar on the birds of Brooklyn Where:Brooklyn Bridge Park YouTube When: Friday, February 26, free with RSVP, 7:00 Why: If you missed the initial broadcast of Heather Wolf’s virtual discussion “Birds of Brooklyn,” you’ll get another chance on February 26 at 7:00, when the event is repeated by Brooklyn Bridge Park on its new YouTube channel. The California-born, Brooklyn-based Wolf, a former circus guitarist and current juggling teacher, maintains “The Birds of Brooklyn Bridge Park” blog, where she posts photos and avian observations. She is also the author of the 2016 book Birding at the Bridge: In Search of Every Bird on the Brooklyn Waterfront (Workman, $14.95) and, in the before times, led birding walks in the park. Among her most recent photos are of a ring-billed gull, a red-throated loon, a double-crested cormorant, a northern cardinal, and three brant in midair.
Who:Alfredo Jaar, Koyo Kouoh What: Livestreamed conversation Where:Galerie Lelong & Co. online When: Thursday, February 25, free with RSVP, 1:00 Why: Chilean-born, New York-based artist, architect, photographer, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar specializes in sociopolitical interventions and installations, such as The Skoghall Konsthall,Culture = Capital,Shadows, and Lament of the Images. On February 25 at 1:00, he will discuss his sixteen-year work The Rwanda Project 1994-2010 with Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa executive director and chief curator Koyo Kouoh, kicking off the new series “Galerie Lelong: Dialogues.” The talk, “Making Visible the Invisible,” will focus on his investigations and photojournalistic field research done in Rwanda over six years, resulting in twenty-five works he calls “exercises in representation.” The Zeitz Museum, located in Cape Town, South Africa, is currently home to “Alfredo Jaar: The Rwanda Project,” on view through May 23, consisting of photographs, mounds of slides, black file cabinets, and a neon sculpture that declares, “So much to do today / kill memory / kill pain / turn heart into a stone / and yet / prepare to live again,” documenting the Rwandan genocide that occurred while the world watched and did nothing. “Galerie Lelong: Dialogues” will continue with conversations with Mildred Thompson, whose “Throughlines, Assemblages, and Works on Paper from the 1960s to the 1990s” runs at the gallery through March 27, and Tariku Shiferaw, who will have his first show with the gallery in the spring.
Who: Bill Camp, JoAnne Akalaitis, Alisa Solomon What: One-man show and live discussions Where:TFANA Vimeo When: Thursday, February 25, free with RSVP, 7:00 (available through March 1 at 7:00) Why: “I associate, rightly or wrongly, my marriage with the death of my father, in time. That other links exist, on other levels, between these two affairs, is not impossible. I have enough trouble as it is in trying to say what I think I know.” So begins Samuel Beckett’s short story First Love, which was written in French in 1946 but was not translated into English by the author until 1973. Theatre for a New Audience will be presenting a theatrical adaptation of the work performed by Tony and Emmy nominee and Obie winner Bill Camp (The Crucible,Homebody/Kabul,The Queen’s Gambit), streaming February 25 at 7:00 through March 1 at 7:00; admission is free with advance RSVP. The show, a confessional that deals with death, desire, and solitude, is directed by six-time Obie winner JoAnne Akalaitis, with lighting by Jennifer Tipton, costumes and scenery by Kaye Voce, and video design by Eamonn Farrell. Camp has previously appeared in Measure for Measure,Macbeth,Sore Throats, and Notes from Underground at TFANA; in 2007-8, he collaborated with Akalaitis, Tipton, and Voce on Beckett Shorts at New York Theatre Workshop.
“If theaters opened up tomorrow, I wouldn’t do this on the stage: it’s made specifically for Zoom and our times, and very do-it-yourself,” Akalaitis said in a statement. “Part of my wanting to do it is to acknowledge that the world has changed. One of the big game players in cultural change was Samuel Beckett, to whom I owe so much. It just felt right to put this work by a young, war-damaged Beckett — this mean-spirited, mordant, misanthropic piece from the point of view of this fucked up, misogynist character — in the hermetic setting of Zoom.” Part of TFANA’s “Artists & Community” series, the performance, filmed over Zoom from Camp’s family home in Vermont, will be supplemented by two live talks with Akalaitis, Camp, and other members of the team, moderated by Alisa Solomon, on February 25 and 26 at 8:45.
Who: Gabriel Byrne, Sarah McNally What: Livestreamed discussion Where:McNally Jackson Books Zoom When: Thursday, February 25, $5, 7:00 Why: “How many times have I returned in my dreams to this hill. It is always summer as I look out over the gold and green fields, ditches foaming with hawthorn and lilac, river glinting under the sun like a blade. When I was young, I found sanctuary here and the memory of it deep in my soul ever after has brought me comfort. Once I believed it would never change, but that was before I came to know that all things must. It’s a car park now, a sightseers panorama.” So begins award-winning actor Gabriel Byrne’s widely hailed, poetic, soul-searching memoir, Walking with Ghosts (Grove Press, January 2021, $26).
The seventy-year-old Dublin native has appeared in such films as The Usual Suspects and Miller’s Crossing, such television series as In Treatment and Vikings, and such Broadway productions as A Moon for the Misbegotten and Long Day’s Journey into Night. On the book, he recounts his childhood in a working-class family, his discovery of the theater, and his battle with addiction with grace, humor, and bracing honesty. On February 25 at 7:00, he will speak with McNally Jackson Books founder Sarah McNally about the memoir and his career, live over Zoom. Admission is $5, but you can get those five bucks back if you buy a copy of the book when registering for the event and using discount code BYRNE5OFF.
An all-star lineup will pay tribute to Octavia E. Butler on February 24 via Symphony Space
Who: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, N. K. Jemisin, Walter Mosley, Imani Perry, Yetide Badaki, Adepero Oduye What: Readings and conversations Where:Symphony Space Virtual Space When: Wednesday, February 24, $15, 7:00 Why: In honor of the fifteenth anniversary of the passing of award-winning American science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, who died on February 24, 2006, at the age of fifty-eight, a stellar group of writers and actors are gathering virtually at Symphony Space for an evening of readings and live discussion. A feminist and, arguably, an Afro-futurist, Butler wrote such works as Kindred, Bloodchild and Other Stories, and the Patternist, Xenogenesis, and Earthseed series. In her 1998 MIT speech “Devil Girl from Mars: Why I Write Science Fiction,” she said, “It’s impossible to begin to talk about myself and the media without going back to how I wound up writing science fiction and that is by watching a terrible movie.The movie was called Devil Girl from Mars, and I saw it when I was about twelve years old, and it changed my life.” There’s no telling how many people’s lives were changed by reading Butler; the evening will feature playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, authors N. K. Jemisin, Walter Mosley, and Imani Perry, and actors Yetide Badaki and Adepero Oduye.
Who:Justin Hicks, Meshell Ndegeocello What: Live conversation about Hicks’s Use Your Head for More Where:Baryshnikov Arts Center Zoom When: Wednesday, February 24, free with RSVP, 8:00 (Use Your Head for More available on demand through March 1 at 5:00) Why: On February 24 at 8:00, multidisciplinary artist and performer Justin Hicks, who was born in Cincinnati and is based in the Bronx, will be joined by DC-born singer-songwriter, musician, and ten-time Grammy nominee Meshell Ndegeocello to talk about Hicks’s world premiere commission from the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Use Your Head for More, which is streaming for free through March 1 at 5:00. The half-hour piece is an experimental audiovisual poem with spoken text based on a 2004 conversation Hicks had with his mother, found sound and background vocal samples from members of his family, and rich, dreamlike imagery, from empty corners and doors to a wrinkled hand repeatedly rubbing a wall, all bathed in a golden glow and filmed in his home. “The saying ‘Use your head for more than a hatrack’ became a song my mom wrote as a reminder to her children that mining your imagination offers a way to create lushness with little at hand,” Hicks said in a statement. “She would also use it in moments to let us know that your brain is much more valuable than anything you could acquire. She used songs to remind us of things that kept us safe.”
Use Your Head for More, which features editing by Breck Omar Brunson, lighting by Tuce Yasak, cinematography and styling by Kenita Miller-Hicks, and vocals by Jade Hicks and Jasmine Hicks, is part of the BAC Artist Commissions initiative, which was started in September 2020 to support new online works made during the COVID-19 pandemic; Mariana Valencia’s brownout premieres March 1, followed by Holland Andrews’s Museum of Calm March 15-29, Stefanie Batten Band’s Kolonial May 3-17, Tei Blow’s The Sprezzaturameron May 17-31, and Kyle Marshall’s STELLAR June 7-21.
Round House Theatre in Maryland and McCarter Theatre Center at Princeton have teamed up to deliver an extraordinary gift during the pandemic lockdown. Continuing through April 30, “The Work of Adrienne Kennedy: Inspiration & Influence” is a fabulous crash course in all things Adrienne Kennedy, consisting of staged readings of four of the eighty-nine-year-old Pittsburgh native’s avant-garde plays, filmed onstage at the Round House without an audience, along with four panel discussions. I am embarrassed to admit that I knew relatively little about Kennedy and had seen only two of her works, the Signature’s 2016 revival of her 1964 debut, Funnyhouse of a Negro, and TFANA’s 2018 world premiere of He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box. That last work is the shining star of the virtual program, which celebrates Kennedy’s uncompromising fierceness, her unique use of narrative, and her brilliant understanding of such issues as race, slavery, whiteness, and power in America.
Directed by Nicole A. Watson, He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box is one of the best plays of the coronavirus crisis. Inspired by events in her own life and featuring snippets from Noël Coward’s Bitter Sweet and Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris, the half-hour show, introduced by Jeremy O. Harris and with stage directions read by Agyeiwaa Asante, takes place during WWII, in the fictional town of Montefiore, Georgia. The white Christopher (Michael Sweeney Hammond), heir to a successful local business, is declaring his love for Kay (Juliana Canfield), the daughter of a white writer and a Black woman who died mysteriously shortly after Kay was born. Christopher doesn’t seem to fully comprehend the dilemma of their potential relationship, especially as Kay learns more about what happened to her mother.
At TFANA, you could check out a miniature model of the town; here Watson incorporates models presented to us in a person’s hands, a miniature house, graveyard, and train car and station onto and through which she projects images of racism in the Jim Crow south, ingenious stagecraft that could only be this effective onscreen, shot in close-up by cinematographer Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, with visual effects by Kelly Coburn and editing by Joshua Land of Mind in Motion. Canfield and Hammond, who also portrays the father, deliver most of their lines while at music stands, socially distanced but intrinsically tied together. Simply dazzling.
Kim James Bey and Deimoni Brewington play mother and son in Adrienne Kennedy’s Sleep Deprivation Chamber (photo courtesy Round House Theatre)
Original director Michael Kahn introduces Kennedy’s very personal 1996 play, the Obie-winning Sleep Deprivation Chamber, which she wrote with her son, Adam P. Kennedy, about something that actually happened to him. Driving home one day, just down the street from his father’s house, a Black man is pulled over by a white police officer and is brutally beaten. It’s winter, and the Antioch College Theatre Department is rehearsing Hamlet. “Ophelia, betrayal, disillusionment,” five students announce twice, establishing the tone of the play. Kim James Bey stars as Adrienne Kennedy alter ego Suzanne Alexander, mother of Teddy (Deimoni Brewington), who was visiting his dad, David Alexander (Craig Wallace), in Arlington, Virginia, where the incident occurred.
Director Raymond O. Caldwell cuts between Suzanne reading letters she has sent in defense of her son; Teddy on the stand, describing what happened in detail; his older brother, March (Marty Lamar), speaking on a terrace; Teddy’s lawyer, Mr. Edelstein (David Schlumpf), trying to convince the prosecutor, Ms. Wagner (Jjana Valentiner), that they can come to an agreement without going to trial; David Alexander testifying about what he saw; flashbacks from Suzanne’s life, with other actors playing a younger version of her and other characters (Imani Branch, Sophia Early, Janelle Odom, Moses Princien, and Kayla Alexis Warren); and Officer Holzer (Rex Daugherty) giving his side of the story of the encounter. The constant shifting in time and space, along with dream scenes and surreal touches, furthers the confusion surrounding the event, one that is all too representative of what the Black Lives Matter movement is battling against. It’s a powerful if familiar story, handled with grace and anger.
“I was asked to talk about the violent imagery in my work, bloodied heads, severed limbs, dead father, dead Nazis, dying Jesus,” Suzanne (Lynda Gravatt) says at the beginning of Ohio State Murders, repeating words she stated in Sleep Deprivation Chamber. Introduced by Awoye Timpo and Arminda Thomas of Classics, Ohio State Murders, published in 1992, offers a different perspective on Suzanne, who is played in flashbacks by Billie Krishawn set between 1949 and 1952. The modern-day Suzanne is in the library at Ohio State, delivering a speech about what occurred when she was a student there, involving her English teacher, Robert Hampshire (Daugherty).
It’s a sordid tale of racism, sex, and murder that brings to life earlier episodes from her time at college, filmed in black-and-white, as the younger Suzanne faces her complicated situation with her aunt Louise (Andrea Harris Smith), her ex-boyfriend Val (Yao Dogbe), her new friend David Alexander (Dogbe), and her roommate, violinist Iris Ann (Heather Gibson). Along the way she learns about Sergei Eisenstein, Thomas Hardy, and the importance of symbols. Directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton, the hourlong work is poignant and sharp, the flashback scenes like a kind of noir mystery. Unfortunately, Gravatt, who tells the story from start to finish, never quite finds the right rhythm in her narration, emphasizing the wrong words and reading too obviously, which is a shame, because the language is powerful and poetic. But Krishawn is mesmerizing as Kennedy’s young alter ego.
Caroline Clay gives a dazzling solo performance in Adrienne Kennedy’s Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side (photo courtesy Round House Theatre)
Caroline Clay is exquisite as the narrator in the world premiere of Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side, hitting all the right notes. The play, directed by Timothy Douglas, is like an interwoven short story, set in Manhattan, as two sisters, Ella and Etta Harrison, fight over men, writing, and hairdos. Sitting at a table in front of the brick wall at the back of the stage, Clay discusses musician and writer Troupe, the Vanishing Literary Club, and murder — yes, another reference to Ohio State Murders and Sleep Deprivation Chamber — in a captivating matter-of-fact way while her eyes search the space and notes appear on the screen. (For example, “sometimes he walks to the roof of the brownstone and looks to the Harlem” and “suddenly Etta stood up.”)
About ten minutes in, the narrator gets to the heart of the dilemma. “‘Ella, I’ve asked my editor, can I stop you from writing articles about me?’ He told me to leave you alone. I told him you’re making me sick. ‘I think if you leave her alone, she’ll stop. I don’t want to upset you, Etta, but I saw parts of manuscript she submitted to Grove on you. Do you want to see it? I took a look to see if she’s violating your legal rights. I feel this is leading to something terrible between you.’” Who has the right to tell whose story has become a major issue over the last few years.
Kennedy’s words sing as the narrator describes characters’ clothing, their quirks, and their desires as they meander through New York City, from the Upper West Side and the Hudson River to the Strand and the East Village, and lament what happened to old, treasured movie theaters like the Thalia and the New Yorker. Kennedy draws a pretty picture of the metropolis as she focuses in on the relationship between two sisters who are practically clones of each other.
Kennedy — the first syllable of her first name is pronounced “ah,” not “ay” — deserves to be more famous than she is, her acclaim currently relegated to the inner circle of theater people, but this program should go a long way to spreading the word about just how important she is to the canon. “The Work of Adrienne Kennedy: Inspiration & Influence” is a fitting tribute to one of America’s most talented playwrights, a fearless woman who has taken on the status quo for five decades, tackling difficult subjects with elegance and beauty, revealing the dark underbelly of a nation unable, and unwilling, to reckon with its past. After experiencing these four tales, you’ll never miss another Adrienne Kennedy play when it comes to your town.
You can take a deeper dive by watching the four talks, which are available for free: “Influence & Imagination,” with Eisa Davis, Zakiyyah Alexander, and Haruna Lee; “Acting Adrienne Kennedy,” with Watson, Clay, Crystal Dickinson, and Mikéah Ernest Jennings; “Critical Reflections,” with Jill Dolan, Rohan Preston, and Regina Victor; and “The Black Avant Garde,” with Caldwell, Daniel Alexander Jones, and Holly Bass.
