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

MY BROKEN LANGUAGE

A cast of five extraordinary women share roles in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s My Broken Language (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

MY BROKEN LANGUAGE
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 27, $49-$159
212-244-7529
www.mybrokenlanguage.net

Quiara Alegría Hudes’s My Broken Language is an exhilarating ninety minutes of love and loss among a close Puerto Rican family in North Philly over the course of sixteen years.

During the pandemic, Hudes, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for her play Water by the Spoonful, about an Iraq War veteran returning to his home in Philadelphia, published a memoir, My Broken Language, detailing her childhood from 1988, when she was ten, to 2004, when she went to the Brown University Grad School for Playwriting. The book is divided into four parts: “I Am the Gulf between English and Spanish,” “All the Languages of My Perez Women, and Yet All This Silence . . . . ,” “How Qui Qui Be?,” and “Break Break Break My Mother Tongue.” At a public reading, Hudes, also known as Qui Qui, invited a group of actors to read different chapters, which sparked the development of the book into a play with multiple women sharing the lead role. The stirring result is at the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at the Signature, where it opened tonight for a limited run through November 27. Get your tickets now.

The audience sits on three sides of Arnulfo Maldonado’s beautifully bright, intimate set, a tiled courtyard with three porcelain bathtubs filled with plants, a shower, and steps leading to the door of a house with a facade of two long rows of windows, behind which is greenery, as if life is growing inside. Tucked next to the steps is a piano where Ariacne Trujillo Duran occasionally plays Chopin and original music by Alex Lacamoire.

The play, which Hudes calls “a theater jawn,” begins with Zabryna Guevara, Yani Marin, Samora la Perdida, Daphne Rubin-Vega, and Marilyn Torres declaring in unison, “My Broken Language. North Philly. 1988. I’m ten years old.” Each “movement” of the jawn kicks off with similar declarations as time passes, with a different actor taking over the lead role of Qui Qui, complete with singing, dancing, and poignant and prescient monologues; the rest of the cast play other roles as well.

Daphne Rubin-Vega plays the ten-year-old author in Signature world premiere (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

“Cousinhood in my big-ass family was a swim-with-the-sharks wonderland,” ten-year-old Qui Qui says on the way to an amusement park in New Jersey. “When Cuca invited me to Six Flags with the big cousins, I was Cinderella being invited to the ball. These weren’t the rug rats of the family, my usual crew. Five to ten years my elder, my big cousins were gods on Mount Olympus, meriting study, mythology, even fear.” A moment later, she adds, “Cuca, Tico, Flor, and Nuchi. Saying their names filled me with awe. They had babies and tats. I had blackheads and wedgies. They had curves and moves. I had puberty boobs called nipple-itis. They had acrylic tips in neon colors. I had piano lessons and nubby nails. They spoke Spanish like Greg Louganis dove — twisting, flipping, explosive — and laughed with the magnitude of a mushroom cloud.”

As 1988 becomes 1991 in West Philly, 1993 in North Philly, 1994 in Center City, 1995 back in West Philly, and 2004 in Providence, Qui Qui, identified as “Author” in the script, has her period, is fascinated by her mother’s mysterious Yoruba religious rituals, discovers great literature (Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sandra Cisneros, Esmeralda Santiago) and art (Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, Fountain), and learns too much too quickly about death.

“One day I would dream of a museum, a library I might fit into. One with space to hold my cousins, my tías, my sister, mi madre. An archive made of us, that held our concepts and reality so that future Perez girls would have no question of our existence or validity,” sixteen-year-old Qui Qui fantasizes. “Our innovations and conundrums, our Rashomon narratives could fill volumes, take up half a city block. Future Perez girls would do book reports amid its labyrinthine stacks, tracing our lineages through time and across hemispheres. A place where we’d be more than one ethnic studies shelf, but every shelf, the record itself. And future Perez girls would step into the library of us and take its magnificence for granted. It would seem inevitable, a given, to be surrounded by one’s history.”

That soliloquy gets to the heart of My Broken Language, which is an inclusive celebration of who the Perez family is and what they can be. Despite the constant adversity, Hudes focuses on the individuality of the characters and the author herself, portrayed by five distinct women who represent the vast range of Puerto Rican women, in mind and body, washing away ethnic and gender stereotypes. Even as “asterisks” point out future tragedy, the play is life-affirming as the actors stand firm and bold, singing Lacamoire’s “La Fiesta Perez” and “Every Book, a Horizon,” Ernesto Grenet’s “Drume Negrita,” and Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira” and moving to Ebony Williams’s engaging choreography in Dede Ayite’s colorful, dramatic costumes that trace the development of young women. (Yes, that’s Daphne Rubin-Vega in pigtails!)

Tiled bathtubs figure prominently in My Broken Language (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

In her directorial debut, Hudes allows each actor the freedom to incorporate their own realities into their characters, including a wonderful moment in which all five line up on the steps and, one by one, grab the person next to them in their own way. Although a scene about Qui Qui’s favorite books feels didactic — the listing in the digital program, which also includes a glossary of terms and pop-culture references, would have sufficed — everything else flows together organically, immersing the audience in the story of the Perez family. Jen Schriever’s lighting never goes completely dark, allowing the audience to see the actors, the actors to see the audience, and audience members to see themselves, all part of an intimate, caring community.

The cast, led by the fabulous Rubin-Vega, who has also appeared in Hudes’s Daphne’s Dive at the Signature and Miss You Like Hell at the Public, and Guevara, who starred in the playwright’s Water by the Spoonful at Second Stage and Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue at 45 Below, revels in the flexibility Hudes gives them; in the script, she notes, “No need for them to act, speak, or move like one cohesive character. The point is a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and vibez.” That advice works for the audience as well, during the play and as they exit back into real life.

[On November 13 at 5:00, the Bushwick Book Club will hold a special free event at the Signature, hosted by Guevara and featuring readings from Hudes’s memoir along with original music and movement by spiritchild, Patricia Santos, Anni Rossi, Susan Hwang and Troy Ogilvie.]

BITTERSWEET: THE DARK SIDE OF THE CHOCOLATE INDUSTRY

Terry Collingsworth will discuss the evils of the chocolate industry in special MOFAD event

Who: Terrence Collingsworth, Clay Gordon
What: MOFAD discussion of the history of the chocolate industry and tasting
Where: Chelsea Market Maker’s Studio, 75 Ninth Ave. between Fifteenth & Sixteenth Sts.
When: Tuesday, November 8, $45 (including chocolate three bars and beverage), 6:00
Why: Every night before we go to bed, my wife and I have several pieces of dark chocolate. We’re hoping an upcoming discussion sponsored by the Museum of Food and Drink doesn’t change our ritual. On November 8 at 6:00, International Rights Advocates founder and executive director Terry Collingsworth and Discover Chocolate author and TheChocolateLife.com and chocophile.com founder Clay Gordon will be at the Chelsea Market Maker’s Studio for “Bittersweet: The Dark Side of the Chocolate Industry,” which examines labor issues and child trafficking in the production and distribution of chocolate. The event was originally scheduled to include journalist Simran Sethi, who wrote in a June 2021 article for The Counter, “Chocolate brought Americans sweet respite in 2020 — more than usual, according to recent research into pandemic purchasing. But the great irony in our chocolate indulgence is that it’s also a product borne out of great suffering.”

Collingsworth and Gordon will examine specific human rights cases and screen a clip from Miki Mistrati’s 2022 documentary The Chocolate War, which follows Collingsworth over a five-year court battle. The evening will conclude with a tasting of three bars from Missouri-based small-batch purveyors Askinosie Chocolate.

GrahamDeconstructed — MARTHA GRAHAM: WHEN DANCE BECAME MODERN

Who: Martha Graham Dance Company, Neil Baldwin, Janet Eilber
What: GrahamDeconstructed
Where: Martha Graham Studio Theater, 55 Bethune St., eleventh floor
When: November 8-9, in person $20-$30 (livestream $25), 7:00
Why: “For me, growing up in the Manhattan neighborhood where Lincoln Center would someday be built, the name ‘Martha Graham’ conjured a distant image: A goddess-like, athletic personage in a tight, shirred bodice extended at the hips into a flowing gown, her bare right foot weighted and planted as if holding to the floor, left leg poised aloft at an impossible angle revealing a long, muscular thigh emerging from the play of fabric in the eloquent garment. Her right arm is bent, her hand half-crooked at the wrist, fingers contracted and crowning a smooth brow while she gazes, angular-featured, luminous half-closed eyes fixed downward and focused inward, seeking an undefined, urgent answer.” That’s how Neil Baldwin describes his subject at the beginning of his new biography, Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern (Knopf, October 2022, $40).

On November 8 and 9 at 7:00, the Martha Graham Dance Company will present a special program as part of its continuing “GrahamDeconstructed” series. Baldwin, who has also written such books as The American Revelation, Man Ray: American Artist, Edison: Inventing the Century, and Henry Ford and the Jews, will be at the Martha Graham Studio Theater on Bethune St. to launch the book, reading sections — joined by MGDC company members who will perform excerpts from dances he mentions — signing copies, and participating in a discussion with MGDC artistic director Janet Eilber, followed by a wine reception. The event will be livestreamed as well.

MODERN MONDAYS: AN EVENING WITH ALFREDO JAAR

Alfredo Jaar explores healing, meditation, and death in Between the Heavens and Me

Who: Alfredo Jaar, Luis Pérez-Oramas
What: Film premiere and discussion
Where: MoMA, the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2, 11 West Fifty-Third St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
When: Monday, November 7, $8-$12, 7:00
Why: During the pandemic, Chilean artist, architect, activist, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar made the thirteen-minute video Between the Heavens and Me, which he calls “an exercise in healing, a meditation on the immense curing power of music, a philosophical essay on death, and a futile response to a moment of infinite sadness.” In the film, Jaar, whose Black Lives Matter installation 06.01.2020 18.39 had its own gallery at the Whitney Biennial, explores news footage of a mass grave on Hart Island for victims of Covid-19. “My brain cannot comprehend what my eyes are seeing,” he says in voice-over while watching the scene on his laptop. The haunting score features music by Iranian composer Kayhan Kalhor and Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou. The New York theatrical premiere takes place on November 7 at 7:00 as part of MoMA’s “Modern Mondays” series and will be followed by a discussion with Jaar and curator and art historian Luis Pérez-Oramas, who will examine the 2020 film as well as other projects by Jaar, including the recent Red Pavilion and The Power of an Idea.

BOOK SIGNING WITH KIMBERLY BROWN: NAVIGATING GRIEF AND LOSS

Kimberly Brown will celebrate new book at Rubin Museum on November 4 (photo courtesy Kimberly Brown)

Who: Kimberly Brown
What: Book launch
Where: Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
When: Friday, November 4, free, 6:30 – 8:30
Why: “Unsuccessful attempts to deny, bypass, or discharge pain create disappointment or frustration and increase our suffering. Why do I still feel so angry? When am I going to stop being so tired? These can also make our feelings even more powerful, insistent, and overwhelming, because they need to be heard and cared for by you before they can resolve,” meditation and mindfulness teacher Kimberly Brown writes in her new book, Navigating Grief and Loss: 25 Buddhist Practices to Keep Your Heart Open to Yourself and Others. Brown’s follow-up to July 2020’s Steady, Calm, and Brave: 25 Practices of Resilience and Wisdom in a Crisis, Navigating Grief and Loss pairs chapters with guided practice; for example, “There Is Nothing Wrong with You” is linked with “Stay,” “When People Behave Badly” with “Forgive and Remember,” and “Mourning and Social Media” with “Skillful Speech.”

“I wrote the book to share the practices that supported me after my dear friend Denise died, and when my elderly dad had a health crisis during the pandemic, and included chapters on divorce and job loss too because not all painful losses are deaths,” Brown explained in a Substack post. “I hope it will remind everyone that profound loss doesn’t have to overwhelm or destroy us because we can learn useful and simple tools to meet our pain and sadness with kindness and wisdom, and open our beautiful hearts to ourselves and everyone else — to connect in our sorrows as well as our joys.” Brown will be at the Rubin Museum on November 4 to sign copies of the book as part of the institution’s free K2 Friday Nights program. Brown is one of the teachers in the museum’s Mindfulness Meditation series on Mondays; you can listen to past sessions here. In addition, on November 15 at 7:00, Brown will celebrate the book’s release with an online party hosted by Mindful Astoria.

BROOKLYN TALKS: ARTISTS AND ACTIVISTS ON CLIMATE GRIEF, WITH DUKE RILEY

Duke Riley exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum features hundreds of maritime-related existing artwork and painted salvaged plastic (photo courtesy of the artist)

Who: Duke Riley, Kizzy Charles-Guzman, Larissa Belcic, Michelle Shofet, Ajay Singh Chaudhary
What: Panel discussion
Where: Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Pkwy. at Washington St.
When: Wednesday, November 3, $16, 7:00 (exhibition continues through April 23, 2023)
Why: For more than twenty years, Boston-born, Brooklyn-based multimedia installation artist Duke Riley has been trying to save the planet, one pigeon, one fish, and one piece of garbage at a time, creating immersive works that explore the state of the environment, with a focus on water. In 2007’s “After the Battle of Brooklyn,” he reenacted the Revolutionary War mission of the one-manned primitive submarine known as the Turtle in New York harbor. In 2012’s “The Rematch,” he restaged the mythological Chinese race that established the zodiac and the measurement of time in a yearly cycle, using a dozen gondolas with live animals, a person wearing an animal mask, and an opera singer performing a song told from the animal’s perspective. In 2013-14, “See You at the Finish Line” at Magnan Metz Gallery documented fifty homing pigeons that Riley bred and trained to travel back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean from Key West to Cuba. And in 2016’s “Fly by Night,” he trained two thousand pigeons, each fitted with a remote-controlled LED light, to soar through the sky and over the sea at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in a dazzling, glowing dance.

Continuing through April 23 at the Brooklyn Museum, Riley’s “DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash” furthers his investigation of our relationship with the natural world. The show consists of several hundred objects, from seventeenth- to twentieth-century porcelain and earthenware with portraits and maritime themes on them to dozens of works by Riley, part of his “Poly S. Tyrene Memorial Maritime Museum” series, in which he draws intricate designs on salvaged plastic garbage — bottles, combs, frames, brushes, flip-flops, coffee cups, a Whiffle ball — echoing the craft of scrimshaw, carvings on whale bone and teeth. They are arranged in glass cases, a few horizontal ones that recall the still-lifes of Giorgio Morandi; some of the portraits are of oil, food, chemical, and plastics industries lobbyists and CEOs.

The exhibition also features the short video Wasteland Fishing, in which Riley goes fishing with lures he made out of recycled trash, many of which are on view in wall cases with such titles as Mother Ocean and Monument to Five Thousand Years of Temptation and Deception III; colorful, kaleidoscopic mosaic panels made of broken shells, cigarette butts, and other effluvia, including one with the message “Tomorrow Is a Mystery”; the videos Beach Clean Up and Newtown Creek; and interventions in the museum’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jan Martense Schenck and Nicholas Schenck Houses, including a plastic chandelier and Riley’s work table. The ink-on-canary-paper The View from the Mouth of the Newtown Creek During Final Days of Battle is a heavily detailed map of boats, skeletal police, merfolk, plastic garbage, tombstones, and more, with an AR component that leads visitors to stories of the history of the polluted Newtown Creek in Brooklyn.

Duke Riley, The View from the Mouth of the Newtown Creek During Final Days of Battle, ink on canary paper, 2021 (photo courtesy of the artist)

“In 2003 I sailed a 26′ dilapidated sloop into the creek and illegally tied it up to an abandoned bulkhead, expecting to get chased off in a matter of days. As days turned into years, other boats began to appear around me and continued to do so long past my departure from the creek in 2013,” Riley explained in a label for the 2022 Biennale of Sydney, which commissioned the piece. “There are currently more than thirty derelict boats moored in the creek, mostly clustered together, with people living aboard full time. At first glance, the people that remain there are living out a romantic maritime dream. A rent-free life enviable to the rest of us caught up in the demands of living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. In reality, for most this alternate existence is coupled with harsh winters without heat and a lack of plumbing, running water, and basic amenities that many of us take for granted. The most notable downside is the continuous and potentially lethal exposure to a highly carcinogenic environment caused by living on top of a federal Superfund site. Most have no financial means to leave and live elsewhere but are constantly in fear of being told to leave in the middle of the night.”

On November 3 at 7:00, Riley will be at the museum for the special program “Brooklyn Talks: Artists and Activists on Climate Grief,” a panel discussion with NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice executive director Kizzy Charles-Guzman, Larissa Belcic and Michelle Shofet of Nocturnal Medicine, and Brooklyn Institute for Social Research executive director Ajay Singh Chaudhary, who will serve as moderator. Riley will focus on his works made of found plastic and how everyone can fight local pollution and global marine devastation. And on March 12, 2023, Riley will give a tour of the exhibition as part of the museum’s “Artist’s Eye” program.

MONTHLY ANIME: MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO / CONTEMPORARY THEATER TALK: BEHIND-THE-SCENES

Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro wonderfully captures the joys and fears of being a child

MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (TONARI NO TOTORO) (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Film: Friday, November 4, $15, 7:00
Talk: Thursday, November 10, $20, 6:30
japansociety.org
www.nausicaa.net

The Royal Shakespeare Company is currently presenting a live-action stage adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s beloved My Neighbor Totoro at the Barbican, where it is receiving glowing reviews. The show was written by Tom Morton-Smith and is directed by Phelim McDermott, with a score by longtime Miyazaki collaborator Joe Hisaishi and puppetry by Basil Twist. As part of its monthly anime series, Japan Society will be screening a 35mm print of the 1988 film on November 4 at 7:00, followed November 10 at 6:30 by a discussion with Twist (Symphonie Fantastique, Dogugaeshi) about the making of the show.

In many ways a precursor to Miyazaki’s masterpiece, Spirited Away, the magical multi-award-winning My Neighbor Totoro is a fantastical trip down the rabbit hole, a wondrous journey through the sheer glee and universal fears of childhood. With their mother, Yasuko, suffering from an extended illness in the hospital, Satsuki and her younger sister, Mei, move to a new house in a rural farming community with their father, anthropology professor Tatsuo Kusakabe. Kanta, a shy boy who lives nearby, tells them the house is haunted, and indeed the two girls come upon a flurry of black soot sprites scurrying about. Mei also soon discovers a family of totoros, supposedly fictional characters from her storybooks, living in the forest, protected by a giant camphor tree. When the girls fear their mother has taken a turn for the worse, Mei runs off on her own, and it is up to Satsuki to find her.

Basil Twist will be at Japan Society to share behind-the-scenes stories of the Totoro stage show

Working with art director Kazuo Oga, Miyazaki paints the film with rich, glorious skies and lush greenery, honoring the beauty and power of nature both visually as well as in the narrative. The scene in which Satsuki and Mei huddle with Totoro at a bus stop in a rainstorm is a treasure. (And just wait till you see Catbus’s glowing eyes.) The movie also celebrates the sense of freedom and adventure that comes with being a child, without helicopter parents and myriad rules suffocating them at home and school. Twist’s talk will go behind-the-scenes of the RSC production, discussing the creation of puppets based on animated characters and sharing backstage images.