this week in lectures, signings, panel discussions, workshops, and Q&As

2026 NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL: NOTHINGNESS, EVERYTHING, AND MATZOH BALLS TOO

Anat Maltz’s Real Estate screens January 21 at the New York Jewish Film Festival

THIRTY-FIFTH ANNUAL NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
January 14-28
www.filmlinc.org
thejewishmuseum.org

The New York Jewish Film Festival is now celebrating its thirty-fifth year of bringing narrative features, documentaries, and shorts dealing with Judaism, Israel, and the Jewish diaspora, from romantic comedies and poignant dramas to hard-hitting looks at the state of the world amid ever-growing antisemitism. As I’ve noted before, it sometimes feels like a political statement just to attend the festival.

A joint production of the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center, the 2026 edition runs January 14-28, consisting of twenty-nine works from the United States, France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Argentina, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, Canada, Denmark, Uganda, and Israel, including many New York premieres. The festival opens with Ken Scott’s Once Upon My Mother, about a Moroccan family in Paris with a matriarch determined to ensure her son lives a happy life, based on an autobiographical novel by Roland Perez, who will participate in Q&As following both screenings. The centerpiece selection is Guillaume Ribot’s All I Had Was Nothingness, which follows director Claude Lanzmann during his twelve years making Shoah. NYJFF26 concludes with actor Matthew Shear’s writing and directing debut, Fantasy Life, in which a schlubby but endearing schlemiel/schlimazel/shmegege/shmendrik becomes a manny for an actress, her rock musician husband, and their three young daughters, starring Amanda Peet, Judd Hirsch, Andrea Martin, Bob Balaban, Alessandro Nivola, Jessica Harper, and Zosia Mamet.

Among the other highlights are Abby Ginzberg’s Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold, about the founder of Hadassah; Marisa Fox’s My Underground Mother, who finds out that her mother was a spy and freedom fighter against the Nazis; Anat Maltz’s Real Estate, which takes place over the course of one day as a young couple about to have a baby are forced out of their Tel Aviv apartment; and a restoration of Aleksander Marten’s 1936 I Have Sinned, the first Yiddish sound film made in Poland. And this year’s winner for best title is Emily Lobsenz’s A Bit of Everything and Matzoh Balls Too.

Below are several films to watch out for; most screenings throughout the festival will be followed by a discussion with directors, producers, subjects, cast members, or experts.

All I Had Was Nothingness follows Claude Lanzmann as he makes Shoah

ALL I HAD WAS NOTHINGNESS (Guillaume Ribot, 2025)
Walter Reade Theater
Thursday, January 22, 2:30 & 7:45
www.filmlinc.org
mk2films.com

In 1985, Claude Lanzmann’s extraordinary nine-and-a-half-hour epic, Shoah, changed the discussion surrounding the Holocaust, as Lanzmann, a French Jew, traveled around the world interviewing survivors, witnesses, collaborators, and perpetrators. In honor of the fortieth anniversary of Lanzmann’s award-winning magnum opus, French director and photographer Guillaume Ribot, who is not Jewish, has made All I Had Was Nothingness, a remarkable documentary, produced by Claude’s widow, Dominique Lanzmann, that follows Lanzmann on his journey, filled with self-doubt, doors slammed in his face, and a lack of funds that constantly threaten the project. Ribot and editor Svetlana Vaynblat went through two hundred hours of unused footage to put the film together, with Ribot adding narration taken directly from Lanzmann’s writings, primarily from his 2009 memoir, The Patagonian Hare. Even though we know that Shoah gets released to widespread acclaim — and is followed by such other Holocaust films as Sobibor, 14 October 1943, 4 p.m., The Last of the Unjust, and Shoah: Four Sisters before Lanzmann died in 2018 at the age of ninety-two — the story plays out like a gripping, intimate thriller.

“Making Shoah was a long and difficult battle,” Lanzmann (voiced by Ribot) says early on. “I wanted to film, but all I had was nothingness. The subject of Shoah is death itself. Death and its radicality. On some evenings it felt like senseless suffering, and I was ready to give up. But during those twelve years of work, I always forced myself to stare relentlessly into the black sun of the Shoah.”

Among the people Lanzmann meets are Abraham Bomba, who survived Treblinka, where he was forced to cut the hair of women who were gassed to death; Simon Srebnik, a Chelmno survivor whose father was killed in the Łódź Ghetto and whose mother was murdered in a gas van in the concentration camp; SS commander Gustav Laabs; convicted Treblinka exterminator Franz Suchomel; locals who lived next to concentration camps and claim to have not known what was going on inside; Treblinka train engineer Henryk Gawkowski; Heinz Schubert from the Einsatzgruppen; Treblinka survivor Richard Glazar; Einsatzgruppe Obersturmführer Karl Kretschmer; and Yitzhak “Antek” Zuckerman, deputy commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. “Daily, we tackled a new prey,” Lanzmann notes as he attempts to “deceive the deceivers.”

Along the way, Lanzmann obtains a fake passport under the name Claude-Marie Sorel, quarrels with his cameraman William Lubtchansky (whose father was gassed in Auschwitz), wonders what the overall message of the film will be, uses a special hidden camera, and is unable to raise a single dollar from potential American investors. He also smokes a lot of cigarettes.

Ribot, whose previous films include Le Cahier de Susi, inspired by the discovery of a notebook by an eleven-year-old girl who was murdered in Auschwitz, and Treblinka, je suis le dernier Juif, about camp survivor Chil Rajchman, turns the focus on Lanzmann and the lengths documentarians will go to tell their stories. All I Had Was Nothingness is a valuable addition to films about the Holocaust, but it is much more than that in its search for the truth, which can be so easily hidden, while providing a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a masterpiece.

“I could have been one of the victims. I knew nothing of it, truly,” Lanzmann says about his knowledge of the Holocaust prior to doing his research for the film. “My knowledge was nil. Nothing but a statistic, an abstract figure.” Through such necessary films as Shoah and, now, All I Had Was Nothingness, the world knows.

Lanzmann often lingers on his own eyes and the eyes of his subjects, penetrating shots that are emotionally and psychologically powerful. “My journey has led me to capture eyes that have seen horror. The eyes that saw, I saw them too,” he says. And now we can seem them as well, bearing witness.

(All I Had Was Nothingness is screening January 22 at 2:30 and 7:45, with Vaynblat on hand for Q&As.)

Actor, writer, director, activist, and family man Charles Grodin is subject of fascinating documentary

CHARLES GRODIN: REBEL WITH A CAUSE (James L. Freedman, 2025)
Walter Reade Theater
Sunday, January 25, 6:15, and Monday, January 26, 1:00
www.filmlinc.org
charlesgrodinfilm.com

James L. Freedman’s Charles Grodin: Rebel with a Cause reveals that the man best known to the general public for the Beethoven movies and his oddball, awkward, but hilarious talk-show appearances was in fact a deeply beloved, respected, and humble husband, father, and grandfather, a hugely successful actor, director, and writer on the big screen, the small screen, and the stage, and a fierce fighter of injustice.

“Robert Kennedy once said, ‘Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope,’” writer, director, producer, and narrator Freedman says at the beginning of the documentary. “Charles Sidney Grodin, inspiring, cajoling, and annoying people every step of the way, unleashed a tidal wave of hope.”

Grodin was born in Pittsburgh in 1935 to Orthodox Jewish parents; his maternal grandfather was a talmudic scholar from Belarus, and he was estranged from his difficult father. He was impeached as fifth-grade class president and thrown out of Hebrew school. Deciding to become an actor after seeing George Stevens’s 1951 classic A Place in the Sun, Grodin left college and moved to New York City, where he worked as a cabdriver and a nightwatchman while studying acting with Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg. By the late 1950s, he was appearing on episodic television, including numerous Westerns, made his Broadway debut in 1962, and starred in the long-forgotten Sex and the College Girl in 1964; his big breaks came in 1968, when he played Dr. Hill in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and directed Lovers and Other Strangers on the Great White Way. In archival interviews, he talks about turning down the role of Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, battling Polanski on set, being fired three times from Candid Camera, directing the controversial television special Simon & Garfunkel: Songs of America, and the failure of his first marriage.

Then, in the 1970s, he made it big with such films as Catch-22, The Heartbreak Kid, and Heaven Can Wait and the Broadway hit Same Time, Next Year. Among those singing his praises as a performer and friend are Robert De Niro (Midnight Run), Marlo Thomas (Thieves), Martin Short (Clifford), Ellen Burstyn (Same Time, Next Year), Lewis Black (Madoff), Jon Lovitz (Last Resort), Carol Burnett (Fresno), Alan Arkin (Catch-22), Art Garfunkel, and director Martin Brest (Midnight Run).

“He was a phenomenal actor. There is no actor better than him,” says Elaine May, who directed Grodin in The Heartbreak Kid. Marc Maron calls him a “cranky comedic genius.” Steve Martin (The Lonely Guy) points out, “None of us could do what he did.” Richard Kind (Clifford) explains, “Chuck was the most caring, loving narcissist.” Television executive Henry Schlieff and producer Julian Schlossberg discuss their positions on Grodin’s ever-changing top-ten-friends list. Grodin’s second wife, Elissa, a journalist he met when she was doing a story on him, notes, “He was unbelievably annoying, and I adored him.” Freedman also speaks with Grodin’s son, Nick, and daughter, Marion.

The documentary takes a fascinating shift when it turns its attention to Grodin’s extensive work for unjustly imprisoned people serving long sentences because of the Felony Murder Rule and the Rockefeller Drug Laws. He helped free Elaine Bartlett, June Benson Lambert, Randy Credico, and Jan Warren, all of whom participate in the film. “He rescued me,” Warren states. Elissa Grodin says, “He was always defending underdogs.” He brought his activism to The Charles Grodin Show, which ran on CNBC from 1995 to 1998; he was hired by Roger Ailes, who later founded Fox News.

Freedman and editor Frank Laughlin interweave new interviews with home movies, news reports, and lots of film clips of Grodin — who died in 2021 at the age of eighty-six — in films and on talk shows (Jon Stewart declares him “the best talk show guest ever . . . ever!”). It’s a joyful celebration of an extraordinary human being, a supremely talented and endlessly inventive individual whose impact on everyone he met was profound.

De Niro sums it all up when he says, “Chuck was a very special person.”

(Charles Grodin: Rebel with a Cause is screening January 25 at 6:15 and January 26 at 1:00, both followed by Q&As with Freedman.)

Amanda Peet and Matthew Shear star in Shear’s Fantasy Life, the closing night selection of NYJFF26

FANTASY LIFE (Matthew Shear, 2025)
Walter Reade Theater
Wednesday, January 28, 1:15 & 7:15
www.filmlinc.org

After losing his job, Sam (Matthew Shear) becomes a manny for actor Dianne (Amanda Peet), rock bassist David (Alessandro Nivola), and their three young girls (Riley Vinson, Romy Fay, Callie Santoro), and a touching hilarity ensues as Sam contemplates his future, not always making the best choices. Judd Hirsch and Andrea Martin play David’s parents, Bob Balaban and Jessica Harper are Dianne’s father and mother, and Holland Taylor makes a cameo as a therapist. Peet is in top form, building a gentle and tender chemistry with Shear, in his debut as a writer-director. Fantasy Life closes the festival on January 28 at 1:15 and 7:15, preceded by Jack Feldstein’s six-minute Animated New Yorkers: Joel and followed by a Q&A with Shear and Peet.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION 2026: “GET OUT OF YOUR HOUSE AND BE WITH PEOPLE”

Elevator Repair Service’s Ulysses is a highlight of the January performance festival season (photo by Maria Baranova)

Every January, many of us begin the new year with resolutions to make positive changes in our lives; I find the best way to start that is by checking out the latest in cutting-edge and experimental theater, music, dance, opera, film, and other forms of entertainment. Performance festivals abound this month, at tiny venues you’ve never heard of, places you’ve always wanted to go to but haven’t yet, and well-known spaces you haven’t been to in years.

You now have the chance to fill those voids at such festivals as Under the Radar, Prototype, Exponential, Out-Front!, Live Artery, Winter Jazzfest, New Ear, the Fire This Time, and PhysFestNYC, none of them costing nearly as much as a Broadway show. As sound designer Mark Anthony Thompson says in the below video, “Get out of your house and be with people.”

Here are only some of the highlights of this exhilarating time to try something that might be outside your comfort zone — or right up your alley.

UNDER THE RADAR: IN HONOR OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday, January 7–18, $35
www.nytw.org
utrfest.org

Obie-winning actor, playwright, rapper, and director Roger Guenveur Smith has staged such solo shows as A Huey P. Newton Story, about the founder of the Black Panthers, Frederick Douglass Now, in which he embodies the nineteenth-century abolitionist and orator, and Juan and John, which explored the real-life 1965 fight between Major League pitcher Juan Marichal and catcher John Roseboro. For the 2026 Under the Radar festival, he will perform In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat, about his friendship and collaboration with the highly influential Brooklyn-born artist and musician who died of a heroin overdose in 1988 at the age of twenty-seven. Smith and Basquiat met during their LA club years in the 1980s; Smith created the character of Smiley, inspired by Basquiat, for the 1989 Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing. The sixty-minute piece features live sound design by Mark Anthony Thompson; the January 8 and 15 performances will be followed by a Q&A.

UNDER THE RADAR: KANJINCHO
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 8–11, $63
japansociety.org
utrfest.org

Yuichi Kinoshita reimagines the 1840 Kabuki classic Kanjincho (“The Subscription List”) as a contemporary hip-hop and pop-culture-infused theatrical experience, making its North American premiere at Japan Society January 8–11 as part of Under the Radar. The eighty-minute show is set in the twelfth century, around the Genpei War, a civil clash between the Taira and Minamoto clans. The work is performed by the Kyoto-based Kinoshita Kabuki, all dressed in black, and directed by Sugio Kunihara on a runway-like hanamachi (“flower path”) platform that juts into the audience, with the first two rows on the stage itself. The story concerns war, betrayal, race, and class as refugees attempt to cross borders, giving it a modern-day relevance. The company’s previous works include Musume Dojoji, Shinju Ten no Amijima, and Sannin Kichisa. The 7:30 show on January 8 will be followed by a reception; the 7:30 performance on January 9 will conclude with an artist Q&A. Ticket holders are invited to visit the immersive exhibition “Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries” with complementary same-day admission.

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UNDER THE RADAR: ALL THAT FALL
Mabou Mines@122CC
150 1st Ave. at Ninth St.
January 8–26
www.maboumines.org
utrfest.org

“It is our desire to create, as Beckett says, ‘a text written to come out of the dark,’” director JoAnne Akalaitis says about Mabou Mines’s tenth production of a work by Samuel Beckett, the absurdist black comedy All That Fall, following such presentations as Cascando, Happy Days, Play, and Worstward Ho over the course of the company’s fifty-six-year history. The seventy-five-minute one-act radio play will be performed by Randy Danson, Jesse Lenat, Steven Rattazzi, Tony Torn, Tẹmídayọ Amay, Wendy vanden Heuvel, Lila Blue, and Sylvan Schneiderman as part of Under the Radar. “What have I done to deserve all this, what, what?” the frail Mrs Maddy Rooney moans to bill broker Mr Tyler, later adding, “Have you no respect for misery?” I saw Trevor Nunn’s splendid version in 2013 starring Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins and can’t wait to see what Akalaitis (Beckett’s First Love, BAD NEWS! I was there . . .) has in store for us this time around, with a set by Thomas Dunn, lighting by Jennifer Tipton, sound by Bruce Odland, costumes by Andreea Mincic, and projections by Jeri Coppola. Expect the unexpected.

WINTER JAZZFEST: MANHATTAN MARATHON
Multiple venues
Friday, January 9, $85-$550
www.winterjazzfest.com

Founded in 2005, “Winter Jazzfest celebrates the music as a living entity, wherein history collides with the future in every note. Creative improvisation in the digital age continues to stimulate thought and emotion of its listeners, embracing innovation, defying instrumental boundaries and the old cliches of ‘What is Jazz?’” The festival runs January 8–13 and is highlighted by the Manhattan Marathon on January 9, boasting forty-five shows at Le Poisson Rouge, Nublu, DROM, City Winery, Close Up, Zinc, and the Bitter End, featuring Nels Cline’s “Songs from Lovers,” the Getdown, James Carter, David Murray, Lady Blackbird, and many more.

Drita Kabashi stars in Sara Farrington’s Euripides adaptation at the Tank (photo by Carol Ostrow)

APAP: A TROJAN WOMAN
Theater 98 at the Tank
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
January 10-11, $23-$42
apap365.org/conference
thetanknyc.org

“A Trojan Woman exists inside an act of modern warfare, inspired by an early moment in the Russian war against Ukraine that affected me deeply,” playwright Sara Farrington explains in a note about her adaptation of Euripides’s 415 BCE Greek tragedy The Trojan Women. Originally performed at the outdoor Theatro Attikou Aldous/Katina Paxinou Attica Grove Theater in Athens, Greece, in July 2023, A Trojan Woman will be at the Tank January 10-11 as part of the APAP (Association of Performing Arts Professionals) festival, directed by Meghan Finn and starring Drita Kabashi as Irina; the costumes are by Suzanne Bocanegra, with video by Ana Veselic. Farrington has previously collaborated with her husband, Reid Farrington, on such productions as BrandoCapote, CasablancaBox, and Dora Maar, always providing a unique take on the world and theater itself; Sara is currently working on Dr. Uncanny Presents: Moreau ’96, a musical based on the 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau. She is also the author of the popular Theater Is Hard. on Substack.

Ian Andrew Askew and Johnnie Cruise Mercer will present world premieres at Out-FRONT! Fest (photos by Maria Baranova and Johnnie Cruise Mercer)

OUT-FRONT! FESTIVAL: IAN ANDREW AND JOHNNIE CRUISE MERCER
Judson Memorial Church
243 Thompson St. at 55 Washington Square South
Saturday, January 10, and Sunday, January 11, free with advance RSVP (suggested donation $28.52)
pioneersgoeast.org
www.judson.org

Pioneers Go East Collective’s multidisciplinary Out-FRONT! Fest “champions the voices of LGBTQ and Feminist artists for a lively exchange of art and culture.” Curated by Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, Remi Harris, Philip Treviño, and Joyce Isabelle, the 2026 edition runs January 5–11, with works by such performers as Dominica Greene, Suzzanne Ponomarenko, Alexa Grae, Sugar Vendil, Jo Warren, Owen Prum, and Corentin JPM Leven at Judson Memorial Church. On January 10 and 11, Ian Andrew Askew will present the world premiere of SLAMDANCE punk lessons, which explores sociopolitical aspects of moshing and violence, followed by the world premiere of Johnnie Cruise Mercer’s Mercies of a Butterfly, “a movement allegory about resilience.” All tickets are free with suggested donation and are going fast.

Wally Cardona and Molly Lieber restage David Gordon’s 1975 duet in original SoHo loft (b&w photo by Babette Mangolte; color photo by Daqi Fang)

LIVE ARTERY: TIMES FOUR / DAVID GORDON: 1975/2025
New York Live Arts / Pick Up Performance Co. Studio
541 Broadway between Spring & Prince Sts.
January 11–13, $33.85
newyorklivearts.org

Two of my favorite dancer-choreographers, Wally Cardona and Molly Lieber, have teamed up for Times Four / David Gordon: 1975/2025, an adaptation of David Gordon’s 1975 duet with his wife and muse, Valda Setterfield, that will run January 11–13 as part of New York Live Arts’ Live Artery festival. The work will be presented in the same SoHo loft where Obie and Bessie winners Gordon and Setterfield debuted it fifty years ago; Times Four has not been seen in its entirety since then. In 2021, Gordon asked Cardona, who is married to playwright Ain Gordon, David and Valda’s son, if he wanted to perform something from his archives. Cardona was instantly interested in Times Four, an unusual, relatively unknown piece, but Gordon rejected that. However, after both Gordon and Setterfield died, the former in 2022 at the age of eighty-five, the latter in 2023 at eighty-eight, Cardona decided to resurrect Times Four in their honor. “I think that they, especially Valda, would be very happy that we are doing this piece and that we are performing something,” Cardona told choreographer, dancer, director, and NYLA head Bill T. Jones in an online interview. Cardona (Interventions, The Set Up) and Lieber (Rude World, Gloria) reconstructed the piece from a video rehearsal, Setterfield’s handwritten notes, photographs, and other ephemera, as no footage of the full original duet, which is done in silence, exists. The audience will sit in folding chairs on all four sides of the loft.

Eric Berryman shares African American toasts in Wooster Group’s Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (photo by Marika Kent)

UNDER THE RADAR: GET YOUR ASS IN THE WATER AND SWIM LIKE ME
Joe’s Pub, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Monday, January 12, and Tuesday, January 13, $36
utrfest.org
publictheater.org

In 2019, the Wooster Group production of The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” a Record Album Interpretation earned a Drama Desk nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience for Eric Berryman’s multimedia adaptation of a 1965 LP compiled by Bruce Jackson, consisting of performances by inmates of color on segregated agricultural prison farms. Writer and actor Berryman and director Kate Valk followed that up with Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me, which is having an encore presentation at Joe’s Pub as part of Under the Radar. This time Berryman dives deep into Jackson’s 1974 book and 1976 disc, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition, a collection of folktales known as toasts, made for heroes and antiheroes in the Black storytelling canon. The tales are filled with tawdry sex and extreme violence — bullets are flying everywhere — but as funny as they are, there’s also an underlying sense of discomfort, particularly with a primarily white audience, as the stories contain stereotypes reminiscent of minstrelsy. Berryman compares over-the-top characters to Greek myths, where such figures as Hercules and Jason “would do stupid shit because they knew it would help them uh, uh, more quickly achieve kleos, and get kleos . . . A community creates the heroes that they need.” Berryman (Primary Trust, Toni Stone) is not just sharing old fables but exploring Black identity then and now. At one point he digresses into a discussion of his own name, how disappointed he is to be anchored with the plain “Eric” when he has relatives called Qasim, Idris, Indira, Akeem, Alenka, and Adia. (He does note that there is a Gary but does not share that it’s his uncle, Grammy-winning jazz saxophonist Gary Bartz.) The show concludes with the all-time favorite “Stackolee,” a tale of murder and mayhem that has been recorded in different versions by Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, Wilbert Harrison, Long Cleve Reed, Lloyd Price, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, among others, its familiarity spotlighting the centrality rather than the marginalization of the Black experience in American popular culture.

PhysFestNYC: BILL BOWERS: IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING
Stella Adler Center for the Arts
65 Broadway
Tuesday, January 13, $20, 7:30 & 9:00
www.physfestnyc.org

PhysFestNYC was started in 2024 as “a community-focused festival that celebrates, enriches, and envisions our field of physical theater . . . [which] tends to be experimental, innovative, and genre-breaking.” The third annual event, taking place January 8–18 at the Stella Adler Center for the Arts, consists of workshops, panel discussions, masterclasses, and live performances. On January 13, Bill Bowers will present the one-man show It Goes without Saying, which delves into his life and career from his childhood in Montana to studying with Marcel Marceau and appearing in several Broadway productions.

Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, Vin Knight, and Scott Shepherd rehearse for NYC premiere of ERS’s Ulysses (photo by Joan Marcus)

UNDER THE RADAR: ULYSSES
Martinson Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
January 13 – February 15, $109
publictheater.org
utrfest.org

Elevator Repair Service follows up its farewell performance of the eight-hour Gatz at the Public with its adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, clocking in at a mere two hours and forty minutes. Directed by John Collins, who has previously tackled such literary biggies for ERS as The Sound and the Fury and The Sun Also Rises in addition to Gatz, the show stars Dee Beasnael, Kate Benson, Maggie Hoffman, Vin Knight, Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, Stephanie Weeks, and codirector and dramaturg Scott Shepherd, with sets by dots, costumes by Enver Chakartash, and projections by Matthew Deinhart. Joyce is having a bit of a renaissance onstage recently, with a rare revival of Joyce’s only play, Exiles, last winter and Colin Murphy’s The United States vs. Ulysses at the Irish Arts Center last spring; ERS’s Ulysses, part of Under the Radar, promises to be the best of the bunch.

THE EXPONENTIAL FESTIVAL: MY UTOPIAS
Loading Dock Theatre
170 Tillary St.
January 15–18
www.theexponentialfestival.org

Writer Jay Stull (The Capables, Rantoul and Die) and director Jillian Jetton have put together a fantastic cast for my utopias, running at the Loading Dock Theatre as part of the Exponential Festival: Brittany Bradford, Ugo Chukwu, Fernando Gonzalez, Melissa Hurst, Jon Norman Schneider, Colleen Werthmann, and Julyana Soelistyo. The show is about a kind of postapocalyptic nightmare in New York City as a group of survivors wonder what the future holds.

Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson stage first revival of Richard Foreman’s What to wear at BAM (photo by Scott Groller)

PROTOTYPE: WHAT TO WEAR
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Strong Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
January 15-18
www.bam.org
www.prototypefestival.org

“Don’t finish what you start,” reads one of ninety-four notecards collected in experimental theater maestro Richard Foreman’s posthumously published book No Title. Fortunately, Foreman, the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater who died last January at the age of eighty-seven, finished much of what he started, including more than eighty plays, operas, films, and books. The seven-time Obie winner and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow turned the theater and opera community inside out and upside down with such influential avant-garde works as Sophia = (Wisdom) Part 3: The Cliffs, Pandering to the Masses, and Elephant Steps. In the past year and a half, Object Collection presented the world premiere of Foreman’s Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, the Wooster Collective staged 1987’s Symphony of Rats, and the Segal Center Film Festival on Theater and Performance held a retrospective of Foreman’s movies and videos. Big Dance Theater’s Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson are now reviving, for the first time since its premiere, Foreman and Michael Gordon’s 2006 surreal post-rock opera What to wear, running January 15–18 at the Harvey as part of the Prototype and BAM’s Next Wave festivals. Foreman wrote the libretto and directed the original; Gordon composed the music, which will be performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars. The cast is highlighted by St. Vincent, sopranos Sarah Frei and Sophie Delphis, mezzo Hai-Ting Chinn, and tenor Morgan Mastrangelo, along with an ensemble of more than a dozen vocalists and dancers.

NEW EAR FESTIVAL: NIGHT 02
Fridman Gallery
169 Bowery between Delancey & Broome Sts.
Saturday, January 17, $22.46–$43.57, 8:00
withfriends.events

The Fridman Gallery’s annual New Ear multimedia festival showcasing “time-based art in all its forms” is highlighted by an impressive roster of performers on January 17, consisting of dancer and choreographer Jade Manns, artist and biohacker Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg, and the live debut of the trio of sound artist Stephen Vitellio, Fugazy drummer Brendan Canty, and multi-instrumentalist and producer-engineer Hahn Rowe, supporting their sophomore LP, Second. Talullah Calderwood, Sue Huang, and Konjur Collective open the three-day fest on January 16, while La Frae Sci, Ben Shirken x Dorothy Carlos, and Lucky Dragons close things out on January 18.

Fire This Time fest features ten-minute works by six playwrights

THE FIRE THIS TIME FESTIVAL: TEN-MINUTE PLAY PROGRAM
The Apollo Stages at the Victoria
233 West 125th St. between Frederick Douglass & Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvds.
January 23–31, $51.25
www.firethistimefestival.com

Founded in 2009 by Kelley Nicole Girod, the Fire This Time Festival, now in its seventeenth year, “provides a platform for early career playwrights of African and African American descent.” The 2026 iteration comprises six ten-minute shows at the Apollo Stages at the Victoria: Teniia Micazia Brown’s Everything But–, Preston Crowder’s Black to Save the Day, Mo Holmes’s Clumsy, Naomi Lorrain’s DNR, DeLane McDuffie’s Goose, and Donathan Walters’s White Diamond.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FACETS OF THE PAST: JIMIN SEO AND DIANA SEOHYUNG CELEBRATE PARK HYUNKI AT GALLERY HYUNDAI

Who: Jimin Seo, Diana SeoHyung
What: An evening of special readings
Where: Gallery Hyundai New York Project Space, 529 West Twentieth St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
When: Wednesday, December 17, free with advance RSVP, 6:00
Why: “I am a child of nothing / that is to say / I am a child of books and the voice they sang / into my body, and like a ghost stole my voice / to sing whatever they have to say to you / in my first language, in every language, not for sale, not for sale, 사라지는 팔짜,” Jimin Seo writes in his debut poetry collection, September 2024’s OSSIA. On December 17 at 6:00, the Seoul-born, New York City–based poet will be at Gallery Hyundai New York Project Space in Chelsea to participate in a special evening of readings in conjunction with the exhibition “Park Hyunki: Pass Through the City,” which features video and photographic installations, alongside archival material, by the late Korean minimalist video pioneer who passed away in 2000 at the age of fifty-seven. It was originally presented in 1981 on a fifty-foot-long trailer truck moving through the streets of Daegu in southeast Korea. Jimin will read from Park’s writings in Korean as well as from OSSIA. He will be joined by writer and translator Diana SeoHyung, who will share her translation of Park’s text in English. Admission is free with advance RSVP.

“It may have been vague then, but at that time, I wholeheartedly put my energy into moving towards anything but technology. I became fully absorbed in and moved towards various facets of our past – our images, the videos of our past, and their paradigms,” Park wrote in 1978. “Once I decided to see it this way – our ways, my ways – I felt at ease, as there was no need to consider or worry about our neighbors. Therefore, that is when I began to experiment by using past footage with ponds, rivers, and springs as the stage of my work, near the Nakdong river.” The gallery exhibition continues through February 14.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

IT’S COME TO THIS: WTO/99 AT DCTV

Documentary explores Seattle protests against the WTO in 1999 (photo by Rustin Thompson)

WTO/99 (Ian Bell, 2025)
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
December 5-11
www.wto99doc.com
www.dctvny.org

Young and old march through the streets, forming blockades and human chains. Signs denounce globalization and corporatization. Angry farmers and union workers demand they be heard. Cries of fascism ring out. Local police, state troopers, and the National Guard douse protesters with pepper spray and tear gas, toss flash-bang grenades, and shoot the crowd with rubber bullets. Mysterious agitators in all black smash store windows. Donald Trump and Roger Stone weigh in on free trade and tariffs.

A documentary about government intervention into blue cities in 2025? A “No Kings” rally gone bad? Clips from the Rodney King and George Floyd protests?

No, Ian Bell’s riveting WTO/99 is composed exclusively of archival footage of the Battle of Seattle, when, beginning on November 30, 1999, tens of thousands of local, national, and international men and women took to the streets to protest the WTO Ministerial Conference being held in the largest municipality in the State of Washington. Bell includes no talking heads, no experts, no eyewitnesses, only film and video taken by news organizations and individuals. No one is identified by name, and occasional interstitial text notes the time and day, with just little bits of information.

Two early exchanges set the tone. After buying a gas mask, a pair of twentysomethings are preparing to head into Seattle. “I know we are all hoping this is gonna be peaceful, but do you think that the police will use tear gas?” the man asks. The woman answers, “I’m gonna say that, no, they’re not going to use tear gas.” The man says, “What do you think would make them go to that extreme?” The woman responds, “They would go to those extremes if there was a need for it. That’s the positive attention that I want to set out there for them, that they would do it if there’s a need, and I don’t think that there will be.”

On the TV show Seattle Police: Beyond the Badge, a law enforcement official explains, “We’re not looking to provoke anything; in fact, Seattle has a long and well-deserved history of working well with demonstrators, regardless of their views.”

Both sides might have been hoping for peace, but violence escalates as the WTO has to rearrange its schedule. Mayor Paul Schell proclaims, “The city is safe,” despite evidence to the contrary.

Among the familiar faces getting in sound bites are Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Roger Stone, Michael Moore, Amy Goodman, Tom Hayden, Ralph Nader, Howard Schultz, and Alan Keyes. At a club, a supergroup consisting of Dead Kennedys leader Jello Biafra, Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, and Sweet 75 drummer Gina Mainwal rock out for the cause.

In his feature documentary directorial debut, Seattle native Bell and co-editor Alex Megaro weave in events coming from both sides in a fury that matches what is happening on the ground; much of the footage is jerky and low-tech, adding to the chaos. “I think we all need to thank the inventor of video cameras,” one man says.

The film evokes such other poignant works about protests and rallies as Stefano Savona’s Tahrir: Liberation Square, David France’s How to Survive a Plague, and Daniel Lindsay and T. J. Martin’s LA 92, but WTO/99 feels particularly relevant now, given what is happening with ICE and the National Guard in cities all across the country.

“I’ve never seen the United States come to this,” another man says, but now it seems to be happening every week, available for everyone to watch on their smartphones as the discord unfolds in real time.

WTO/99 runs December 5-11 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, where eight screenings will be followed by Q&As with various combinations of Bell, Megaro, producer Laura Tatham, and archival producer Debra McClutchy, moderated by Goodman, Steve Macfarlane, Krishna Andavolu, Isabel Sandoval, Deborah Schaffer, and David Osit.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

IN CONTENTION: MoMA’S BEST FILMS OF 2025

MoMA has deemed Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s revenge thriller Cloud one of the best films of 2025

THE CONTENDERS 2025
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Series runs through January 7
www.moma.org

Every year, MoMA screens what it considers the best films of the past twelve months from all over the world, in a series called “The Contenders.” Occasionally, directors are on hand for discussions after. Last month, MoMA showed such 2025 favorites as Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia. Among December’s best are Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, and Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day.

Below is a look at some of the other upcoming class of 2025 contenders; keep watching this space for more reviews.

The United States is under a mysterious attack in Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE (Kathryn Bigelow, 2025)
Tuesday, December 2, 7:00
www.ahouseofdynamitefilm.com
www.moma.org

In A House of Dynamite, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim meld John Badham’s 1983 War Games with Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove and Sidney Lumet’s 1964 Fail Safe in a gripping thriller told from three perspectives as an unidentified ICBM makes its way to America. On the case are Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), and the president (Idris Elba), who are desperately trying to figure out who launched it — and, even more important, how to stop it. The cast also features Anthony Ramos as Major Daniel Gonzalez, Jason Clarke as Admiral Mark Miller, Gabriel Basso as Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington, Renée Elise Goldsberry as the First Lady, Greta Lee as National Intelligence Officer for North Korea Ana Park, Jonah Hauer-King as Lieutenant Commander Robert Reeves, and, practically stealing the show, Jared Harris as Secretary of Defense Reid Baker. Bigelow pulls no punches as the film builds to a sensational finale. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Bigelow, whose previous movies include Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker, and the original Point Break.

SENTIMENTAL VALUE (Joachim Trier, 2025)
Wednesday, December 3, 7:00
www.neonrated.com
www.moma.org

Danish-born Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier follows up one of the best films of 2022, two-time Oscar nominee The Worst Person in the World, which concluded his impressive Oslo Trilogy, with Sentimental Value, one of the best films of 2025 — and the decade, if not the century. Written by Trier and longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt, the intimate drama begins with a poetic house stating its raison d’être, establishing itself as a character all its own, then cutting to one of the most tense, uncomfortable, and stirring examples of stage fright ever put on celluloid. Renate Reinsve is spectacular as Nora Borg, an actress who, along with her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), must confront their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), who wants to come back into their lives upon the death of their mother, his ex-wife. Gustav is a famous filmmaker who has written a deeply personal script for Nora, who refuses to work with him. He instead courts popular American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) for the role as Nora weighs her options. Sentimental Value is a heart-wrenching story of family dysfunction, patriarchal manipulation, trauma, and filmmaking that you won’t soon forget.

CLOUD (『クラウド』) (KURAUDO) (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)
Tuesday, December 9, 7:00
www.janusfilms.com
www.moma.org

Kobe-born suspense master Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who has made such horror faves as Cure, Pulse, and Creepy as well as such psychological dramas as Bright Future and Tokyo Sonata, is back with an intense revenge thriller that is not for the faint of heart, featuring torture and violence — and a ton of fun. In Cloud, Masaki Suda stars as Yoshii, a quiet, disengaged young man who works at a cleaning factory, supplementing his income as an online reseller, purchasing goods at cut rates — unethically taking advantage of people — and selling them online at exorbitant prices, with no care whether the items are actually legitimate or fakes. He is upset when the owner, Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), offers him a promotion; Takimoto sees promise in Yoshii, but Yoshii has no interest in taking on more responsibility. When one of his deals makes him a lot of money, he quits his job and dedicates all his time to reselling whatever products he can get his hands on, from designer handbags to anime figures. Yoshii alienates his business partner, Muraoka (Masataka Kubota), and moves with his girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), to a house in a small, faraway town, where a young local man, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), insists on being his assistant. As his deals get more and more lucrative and dangerous, Yoshii builds a well-deserved bad reputation as a ruthless operator, and soon a group of men, armed to the hilt, come after him, determined to get even.

Cloud is a fierce, propulsive trip down the internet rabbit hole, where anonymity might feel safe but reality threatens to blow it all up. Yoshii ruins every relationship he has, with clients, customers, Sano, Akiko, Takimoto, et al., seemingly without any care or regard; he spends hours staring at his computer screen, waiting for his items to start selling, with more concern and passion than he has for any human being. And when the posse finds him, he has no understanding why they want him dead. Suda (Kamen Rider, Cube) is terrific as Yoshii; we are initially offput by his herky-jerky movement and disengagement from society, but as everything closes in on him, we also feel compassion for his potential fate. The film is beautifully shot by Yasuyuki Sasaki and expertly directed by Kurosawa, who knows just how to make the audience squirm, especially at unexpected moments. “Grudges, revenge, they’ll only drag you down,” one member of the posse tells another. “Think of this as a game.” It’s a wry comment on how too many people look at the real world these days.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

’TIS THE SEASON: ALICIA GRAF MACK’S AAADT AD DEBUT AT CITY CENTER

The Holy Blues is part of all-new evenings of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater season at City Center (photo by Steven Pisano)

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
New York City Center
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
December 3 – January 4, $45-$195
www.alvinailey.org
www.nycitycenter.org

It’s been a time of change for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. This has been the first year without the shining light of Judith Jamison, the beloved Ailey dancer and artistic director who passed away last November at the age of eighty-one. That month, her successor, Robert Battle, became a resident choreographer with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. And this past spring, longtime Ailey dancer and Juilliard Dance Division dean Alicia Graf Mack was named the fourth artistic director in the history of AAADT.

“This monumental season draws deeply on Alvin Ailey’s legacy rooted in celebrating the resilience of the human spirit while extending its truth and bold virtuosity to reflect this moment in time and our hopes for the future,” Graf Mack said in a statement about the company’s upcoming annual City Center residency. “Each new creation shares the utterly distinctive voice of its choreographer, testifying to the vitality of the tradition Mr. Ailey gave us and the gifts of spirit that Judith Jamison so lovingly nurtured. I am grateful and honored to be a caretaker of this ever-changing continuum of inspiration, along with Matthew Rushing and the company of brilliant dancers whose artistry will move us all as we take our next steps forward.”

Running December 3 through January 4, the 2025 City Center season features the company premiere of Medhi Walerski’s Blink of an Eye, set to J. S. Bach’s violin sonatas and partita, and a new production of Jamison’s duet A Case of You, originally a birthday tribute to Chairman Emerita Joan Weill, danced to Diana Krall’s version of the Joni Mitchell song.

There are five world premieres from a wide range of choreographers. Inspired by Geoffrey Holder’s book Black Gods, Green Islands, about Trinidad and Tobago, Cuban American theater director and arts educator and activist Maija García’s Jazz Island celebrates the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, with original music by jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles. Matthew Neenan’s Ailey debut, Difference Between, is set to music by MacArthur fellow and two-time Obie winner Heather Christian, who sings in “Tomorrow”: “Difference between. Deference, reverence, sever its shoots on the bean / Sanity, brevity, bravery, levity — these are the virtues / are any restored or recorded or / pored over once the romance of it leaves?”

Superstar Jamar Roberts, the company’s first resident choreographer, follows up such gems as Ode, A Jam Session for Troubling Times, and Holding Space with Song of the Anchorite, a reimagining of Alvin Ailey’s 1961 solo Hermit Songs, set to jazz trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s interpretation of a Ravel adagio. In Embrace, Fredrick Earl Mosley incorporates tunes by Stevie Wonder, Kate Bush, Etta James, Maxwell, Ed Sheeran, Des’ree, and P!nk in exploring the intimacy of human connection.

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And Urban Bush Women founder and Ailey Artist in Residence Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, collaborating with current Ailey dancer Samantha Figgins and former company member Chalvar Monteiro, looks to the concepts of the Ring Shout and the Door of No Return in The Holy Blues, named after the title of Alvin Ailey’s journal. The twenty-five-minute piece debuted at BAM in June; in a company interview, Figgins explained, “Through life, we have these hills and valleys, our human suffering and our pleasure, our delight, our bliss, our joy, and The Holy Blues is a chance to watch that journey of a group of people — a community, of course, but all individuals — how they tackle the challenges of bringing themselves up out of whatever pain they may be in, out of whatever life throws at them, and how they are able to create something beautiful out of it.”

The thirty-two dancers will also perform the Ailey classics Memoria, Night Creature, Pas de Duke, Masekela Langage, A Song for You, Opus McShann, For Bird — with Love, Love Songs, Reflections in D, Hidden Rites, and Cry; Ronald K. Brown’s Grace; Lar Lubovitch’s Many Angels; Rushing’s Sacred Songs; Elisa Monte’s Treading; and Alonzo King’s Following the Subtle Current Upstream. Many of the programs will conclude with the one and only Revelations, six with live music. In addition, the Saturday family matinees will be followed by a Q&A.

“I join with the entire company in welcoming Alicia Graf Mack in her new role as our artistic director,” Rushing said in a statement. “Her great respect for and commitment to the Ailey mission, along with the perspective and integrity that informs her vision, will help elevate everything we do. We are excited to welcome audiences to New York City Center this holiday season to be uplifted by cherished classics and remarkable new works as the curtain goes up on the next chapter in Ailey’s extraordinary story.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

SEEING HELENE SCHJERFBECK: PANEL DISCUSSION AT SCANDINAVIA HOUSE

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 1912 (Finnish National Gallery Collection / Ateneum Art Museum; photo courtesy Finnish National Gallery / Yehia Eweis)

Who: Dr. Anna Maria von Bonsdorff, Dita Amory, Patricia Berman
What: Panel discussion on the life and career of Helene Schjerfbeck
Where: Scandinavia House, 58 Park Ave. between Thirty-Seventh & Thirty-Eighth Sts.
When: Wednesday, December 3, free with advance RSVP, 5:00
Why: On December 5, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is opening “Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck,” an exhibition featuring nearly sixty works by Finnish modernist painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946), from landscapes and portraits to still-lifes and self-portraits. You can get a behind-the-scenes preview of the show on December 3 at 5:00 when Scandinavia House hosts a panel discussion with Ateneum Art Museum Finnish National Gallery director Dr. Anna Maria von Bonsdorff, Met Museum Robert Lehman Collection curator in charge Dita Amory, and Wellesley College art professor Patricia Berman. The event, which is part of Scandinavia House’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, is free with advance RSVP.

Be sure to arrive early to check out the institution’s current exhibit, “A Time for Everything: 25 Years of Contemporary Art at Scandinavia House,” comprising works by such artists as Jesper Just, Louisa Matthíasdóttir, Shoplifter / Hrafnhildur Arnasdóttir, Pekka & Teija Isorättyä, Jeppe Hein, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Outi Pieski, and Olof Marsja.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]