Who:Keen Company What: Free readings of three new plays Where:ART/NY Conference Room, 520 Eighth Ave. at Thirty-Sixth St., third floor When: Friday, December 2, free with RSVP, 3:00; Monday, December 12, free with RSVP, 3:00; Monday, January 9, free with RSVP, 3:00 Why: Started in October 2013, Keen Company’s “Keen on New York” features readings of works-in-progress by three midcareer playwrights, with impressive casts. The 2022 edition begins on December 2 with Anna Ziegler’s (Photograph 51,Boy) Antigones, a contemporary reimagining of Sophocles’s family and political drama, directed by Tyne Rafaeli and read by Santino Fontana, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Marianne Rendón, and Armando Riesco. On December 12, Things with Friends, written and directed by Kristoffer Diaz (Hercules,The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity), invites guests into a fateful dinner party. And on January 9, Sarah Schulman’s (Manic Flight Reaction,The Lady Hamlet) Free Ali! Free Bob! takes on political hierarchies surrounding a gay art clique.
“I am thrilled to announce the details for this year’s Playwrights Lab readings, the first in-person sharing from our lab since the pandemic,” Keen artistic director Jonathan Silverstein said in a statement. “It has been an honor to be in the room with these three exceptional and seasoned artists throughout the year, under the leadership of Keen’s director of new work, Jeremy Stoller. Anna, Kris, and Sarah are all unique voices, yet they share a common sense of compassion and a deep understanding of the world we live in while also reveling in the joy of the human condition.” The readings take place in the ART/NY Conference Room in the Garment District and are free with advance registration.
Jamar Roberts’s In a Sentimental Mood will make its work premiere at AAADT season at City Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)
ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
New York City Center
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
November 30 – December 24, $39-$169 www.alvinailey.org www.nycitycenter.org
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a rough coupla weeks. Thankfully, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns to New York City Center this week just in time to give me just the break I need, something I look forward to every year.
AAADT’s 2022 fall/winter season at City Center runs November 30 to December 24, featuring fifteen works presented in various groupings, beginning with an opening night gala consisting of an excerpt from Mauro Bigonzetti’s Festa Barocca (with Constance Stamatiou and students from the Ailey School), a romantic duet from Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs, and excerpts from Alvin Ailey’s classic Night Creature along with artistic director Robert Battle’s Unfold, with live vocals by soprano Brandie Sutton, before concluding with Ailey’s standard-bearer, Revelations.
If you haven’t been paying attention to former Ailey dancer Jamar Roberts’s growth as a choreographer, you’ve been missing a special progression. The world premiere of his In a Sentimental Mood, the exploration of a young couple’s love and desire, set to music by Duke Ellington and Rafiq Bhatia’s spin on a quartet of jazz standards, is sure to be a highlight at City Center. The other world premiere is Kyle Abraham’s Are You in Your Feelings?, a celebration of Black culture with songs by the Flamingos, Jazmine Sullivan, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, and others. The troupe will present the company premieres of Paul Taylor’s 1964 short, motionless DUET and Tharp’s 1997 Roy’s Joys, a nine-part piece honoring trumpet legend Roy “Little Jazz” Eldridge. There will also be a new production of Ailey and Mary Barnett’s 1986 Survivors, a tribute to Nelson and Winnie Mandela with music by drummer Max Roach and singer Abbey Lincoln, restaged by former AAADT associate artistic director Masazumi Chaya.
Fan favorite BUSK by Aszure Barton is part of AAADT presentation at City Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)
The repertory pieces offer a wide range of consistent delights from throughout the company’s sixty-four-year existence. “All Ailey A” encompasses Night Creature,Reflections in D,Pas de Duke, and The River, “All Ailey B” brings together Memoria,Survivors, and Revelations, “All Ailey C” comprises Blues Suite,Reflections in D,Cry, and Revelations, and “All Ailey D” boasts The River,Blues Suite, and Revelations.
Future of Jazz Orchestra will perform live December 16-18 to Night Creature,Reflections in D,For Four, and Pas de Duke. Two “All New” programs team up In a Sentimental Mood,DUET,Survivors, and Roy’s Joys or Roy’s Joys,Survivors, and Are You in Your Feelings?
I always make sure to see one of the “All New” evenings, a glorious way to say goodbye to one year and welcome the next one, filled with hope and promise and great dancing.
Who:COMPLEXIONS Contemporary Ballet What: Twenty-eighth anniversary season Where:The Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. at Nineteenth St. When: November 22 – December 4, $61-$81 Why: Founded in 1994 by artistic directors Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson, COMPLEXIONS Contemporary Ballet (CCB) espouses its own “nique,” which “uses a classical ballet structure as its foundation yet allows momentum and the integration of a fully mobile torso, weight shift, and dynamics to enhance the outcome. Contemporary in its perspective, nique places a special emphasis on coordination, physical integration, precision, efficiency, and clarity of form.” CCB will exhibit that discipline in its upcoming season at the Joyce, running November 22 to December 4.
The New Rochelle–based troupe will be presenting two programs plus a gala. The first program (November 23-27) consists of Rhoden’s twenty-eight-minute Hissy Fits, a work for ten dancers set to music by J. S. Bach, and his 2021 Snatched Back from the Edges, which began life as a series of Black Is Beautiful films made during the pandemic lockdown, taking on racial injustice, with spoken word and music by Terrell Lewis, Tye Tribbett, Shirley Caesar, and Jon Batiste. The second program (November 29 – December 4) includes an excerpt from Snatched Back from the Edges, Jae Man Joo’s Serenity, William Forsythe’s Slingerland Pas de Deux, and the world premieres of Francesca Harper’s System and Rhoden’s Endgame/Love One. (The works will be performed by Christian Burse, Jacopo Calvo, Kobe Atwood Courtney, Jasmine Cruz, Jillian Davis, Thomas Dilley, Vincenzo Di Primo, Joe Gonzalez, Harrison Knostman, MaryAnn Massa, Marissa Mattingly, Tatiana Melendez, Miguel Solano, Lucy Stewart, Candy Tong, April Watson, Elijah Mack, and Angelo De Serra.)
The gala, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, will be held on November 22, with highlights from the company’s twenty-eighth season and its collaboration with the American Ballet Theatre Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School. There will be a Curtain Chat following the November 30 performance and a family matinee on December 3 at 2:00.
Who:Olivia Harrison, Martin Scorsese What: New York City book launch Where:Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92nd St. Y, 1395 Lexington Ave. between Ninety-First & Ninety-Second Sts., and online When: Sunday, November 20, in person $31.50 – $55, livestream $25, 8:00 Why: “Only the past is carved in stone / So that it will not be forgotten. / This sand, once granite, / Covers and clings to my wet feet. / Ancient geology as I walk to the sea / Each grain a memory being set free / To solidify and be carved again / Marking the time once more / So the past will not be forgotten.” In her new book, Came the Lightening: Twenty Poems for George (Genesis, June 2022, $35), Olivia Harrison, the widow of beloved musician George Harrison, remembers her husband through twenty poems, photographs, drawings, and more, in honor of the twentieth anniversary of his death from cancer in 2001 at the age of fifty-eight. (The book includes contributions from Henry Grossman, Sue Flood, Mary McCartney, Marcus Tomlinson, Klaus Voormann, and Brian Roylance.) Among the poems are “End of the Line,” “My Arrival,” “Without Hummingbirds,” “Keepsakes,” and the aforementioned “Carved in Stone.” Olivia, who married George in 1978, writes, “Here on the shore, twenty years later / my message in a bottle has reached / dry land. Words about our life, his death / but mostly love and our journey to the end.”
On November 20 at 8:00, Olivia Harrison will be joined by Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese at the 92nd St. Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall for the New York City launch of the book, celebrating the life and career of the Quiet Beatle. (A special-edition signed book-and-print edition will be available December 6 for £125.) If you can’t make it to the event, it will also be livestreamed. As George Harrison sang more than fifty years ago, “Sunrise doesn’t last all morning / A cloudburst doesn’t last all day / Seems my love is up and has left you with no warning / It’s not always gonna be this grey / All things must pass / All things must pass away.”
Who:D. T. Max,Michael Schulman What: Book launch Where:The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South When: Thursday, November 17, free with RSVP, 8:00 Why: “I always wanted to write about Stephen Sondheim. Actually, long before writing about him was a possibility, I just wanted to meet Stephen Sondheim. In the spring of that long-ago year 1977, my mother went to a benefit for the Phoenix Theatre, a repertory company that pioneered off-Broadway theater. The event included a performance of Side by Side by Sondheim, a revue of the composer-lyricist’s songs. Going to benefits was not the sort of thing my mother usually did, but my uncle was a playwright whom the Phoenix had championed, and he might have persuaded her. Sondheim at the time was exactly the sort of creator the Phoenix wanted to associate itself with. He was remaking the American musical in the same way the Phoenix was trying to remake the theatrical landscape.”
So begins D. T. Max’s new book, Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim (Harper, November 22, $20.99), which collects three years of interviews he conducted with Sondheim, including discussions about technology, boring books, pop music, movies, New York City, the joys of live theater, and more. It was initially going to be for a profile for the New Yorker, focusing on a new musical Sondheim was writing, but the pandemic and the maestro’s death changed things. On November 17 at 8:00, Max (The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery,Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace) will be at the National Arts Club to launch Finale with the help of fellow New Yorker scribe Michael Schulman; admission is free with advance RSVP.
Who: Steve Martin, Harry Bliss, Nathan Lane What: Book launch Where:The Town Hall, 123 West Forty-Third St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves. When: Tuesday, November 15, $68, 8:00 Why: Multihyphenate Steve Martin has made films and records and written plays, movie scripts, novels, children’s books, and tongue-in-cheek self-help tomes. He has now entered the graphic novel field with Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions (Celadon, November 15, $30), with the help of black-and-white illustrations by cartoonist Harry Bliss. A follow-up to their 2020 cartoon collection A Wealth of Pigeons, the new book features scenes in which Martin looks back at his career for the first time in print. The title comes from a Hollywood trope; in one panel, Martin explains, “On a movie call sheet, the actors are listed numerically. The lead is number one, the second lead is number two, etc. I was slightly embarrassed on my first film, The Jerk, when I would head toward the set and the assistant director would trail me, transmitting into his walkie talkie . . . ‘Number one is walking.’” Martin points out that he was also “number one” on Bowfinger,Cheaper by the Dozen, and Bringing Down the House, but when he did Nancy Meyers’s It’s Complicated with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, each time he came on set he was horrified to hear: “Number three is walking.”
Longtime New Yorker cartoonist Bliss has illustrated such books as Joanna Cotler’s Sorry (Really Sorry), Doreen Cronin’s Diary of a Worm, and Alison McGhee’s Countdown to Kindergarten as well as writing and illustrating Bailey and Luke on the Loose. On November 15 at 8:00, Martin and Bliss will be at the Town Hall to discuss their collaboration; serving as moderator will be the one and only Nathan Lane, who appears with Martin in Only Murders in the Building. All audience members will receive a signed copy of Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions, courtesy of the Strand.
Shlomi Elkabetz documents the making of Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem with his sister, Ronit
BLACK NOTEBOOKS: RONIT (CAHIERS NOIRS: RONIT) (Shlomi Elkabetz, 2021)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Opens Friday, November 11 panoramafilmsus.com newplazacinema.org
About halfway through his award-winning documentary Black Notebooks: Ronit, director Shlomi Elkabetz says in a gentle voice-over, “And so it happened. And I just observe. The parting and final conversations, and last words, if there were any, passed us by, like in a film, above and beneath life, and silence in life is the same as the silence of death.”
Shlomi is talking about his relationship with his sister, Israeli film star Ronit Elkabetz, who can be heard saying, “It’s over.” Shlomi, pensively looking out a window, turns to face the camera and continues, “And the same silences are still there. You and I still speak.” Shlomi then switches to a close-up of Ronit as he concludes, “And we never parted.” He next cuts back and forth between his and his sister’s faces before he gets up and walks away, then shows Ronit sitting by herself at a table with an empty chair.
The companion piece to Black Notebooks: Viviane,Black Notebooks: Ronit is a powerful and often uncomfortably intimate behind-the-scenes story about the making and marketing of the 2014 film Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, the final work of a trilogy that began with To Take a Wife and Shiva. The three films were cowritten and codirected by the siblings and star Ronit (Late Marriage,The Band’s Visit) as the unhappily married Viviane Amsalem. In Gett, Viviane has filed for divorce in a religious court, the three-man beit din, seeking to obtain a gett, which will grant her freedom from her husband (Simon Abkarian), who refuses to let her go.
Fighting the lung cancer that will eventually kill her in 2016 at the age of fifty-one, Ronit is having difficulty with the movie. She forgets her lines and prefers to spend time with her two young children rather than do yet another take of a scene. “I can’t stand being so exposed anymore,” she tells her brother, explaining that she has lost her desire to act. But Shlomi is determined to finish the film, helping Ronit do the work any way he can, bringing family to visit the set, feeding her dialogue, and giving her extra time between shots. Her costar Menashe Noy, who plays her advocate, Carmel Ben-Tovim, watches her closely, not always sure what to do.
At one point, on the media tour supporting Gett, Ronit is standing in front of a mirror as Shlomi, visible in the reflection, films her with a small handheld camera. “Why not give an interview? Am I afraid? Yes, I’m afraid,” she says. “And I don’t want my fear to run my life. I don’t want that to happen; right away I say to myself: Okay, I don’t want to cooperate with fear.” Through it all, Shlomi holds the camera at chest level as he gazes at his sister, neither looking through the lens nor worrying about the angle. Duality, mirroring, and life versus the depiction of life are the inescapable themes.
“We’ll do the most amazing things, despite and because of the limitations!” Ronit tells her brother, although it’s clear that it won’t be easy. As Ronit becomes sicker, Shlomi grows more poetic, but neither will give up the fight.
Directed by Shlomi and cowritten with frequent collaborator Joelle Alexis, Black Notebooks: Ronit does a beautiful job of paralleling Viviane’s battle to obtain a gett with Ronit’s real-life struggle against cancer. When one of the beit din judges says to her, “Accept your fate. There’s nothing more I can do,” Ronit, as Viviane, shakes her head and covers her face with her hands, a reaction that could be Ronit being given a fatal diagnosis. The audience roots for both women, fictional and real; one melds into the other, lending a hybrid nature to the storytelling.
When Shlomi speaks of casting Noy, he points out, “Here, Menashe plays Carmel Ben-Tovim, who tries to save Viviane. And what I see is myself fighting alongside you. And now, when I look at the two of you” — Shlomi cuts to a shot of Noy looking over at a solemn yet steadfast Viviane — “I see me and you. But when I try to plead for you . . . It’s too much for me.” It’s almost too much for us as well, especially with the sweeping melodramatic score, featuring original music by Dikla and Yiftach Shahaf in addition to the Israel Symphony Orchestra performing Bernard Herrmann’s “Vertigo: Suite,” from the Alfred Hitchcock film in which Kim Novak plays two different women whom Jimmy Stewart’s character tries to make the same.
Winner of the Israeli Ophir Award for Best Documentary, Black Notebooks: Ronit opens November 11 at New Plaza Cinema, with Shlomi Elkabetz participating in Q&As on November 11 at the 7:45 show with American actor John Turturro (Miller’s Crossing,Barton Fink), on November 12 at the 7:30 screening with American novelist Nicole Krauss (Forest Dark,The History of Love), and on November 13 at the 4:30 show with Israeli actress Mili Avital (Dead Man,Prisoners of War).
