Who:L.A. Theatre Works What: All-star audio play based on Agatha Christie novel Where:LATW online When: Available starting July 1, $20 (nine-play season $150) Why: In the 1990s, L.A. Theatre Works focused its attention on audio plays, “producing world classics, modern masterpieces, contemporary, and original works that speak to the issues of our times.” Audio plays have flourished during the pandemic lockdown, with excellent productions from the Public Theater, Keen Company, and Gideon Media, among many others. So the time is right for LATW’s digital 2020-21 nine-play season, which has included audio versions of The Thanksgiving Play by Larissa FastHorse, Life on Paper by Kenneth Lin, Extinction by Hannie Rayson, Bump by Chiara Atik, A Weekend with Pablo Picasso by Herbert Sigüenza, For Us All by Jeanne Sakata, No-No Boy by Ken Narasaki, and A Good Day at Auschwitz by Stephen Tobolowsky.
Alfred Molina and Simon Helberg star in LATW audio adaptation of The Murder on the Links (photos by Matt Petit and Derek Hutchison)
The final work is Kate McAll’s audio theater adaptation of The Murder on the Links, based on Agatha Christie’s 1923 novel, which featured John Moffat as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in a 1990 BBC Radio 4 version and David Suchet as the intrepid detective in a 1996 episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot for British television. Here Alfred Molina stars as Poirot, with Simon Helberg as Poirot’s bestie, Capt. Arthur Hastings. The two men travel to France to meet with Paul Renauld, only to find out he has been murdered — and their quest soon leads to another body. The cast also features Adhir Kalyan as Jack Renaud, Joanne Whalley as Madame Daubreuil, Kevin Daniels as Detective Giraud, Edita Brychta as Madame Renauld and Françoise, Anna Lyse Erikson as Leonie, Darren Richardson as a sergeant, a doctor, and others, Jocelyn Towne as Cinderella and Marthe Daubreuil, and Matthew Wolf as Monsieur Hautet; the download includes access to a digital video of a table read. Recorded in West Hollywood in April 2021, The Murder on the Links is directed and produced by Erikson, with original music by John Biddle, editing by Charles Carroll, and foley sound by Jeff Gardner. Each LATW play can be downloaded for $20; all nine are available for $150 and come with such bonuses as a video conversation with LATW founding members Ed Asner, Richard Dreyfuss, Hector Elizondo, Stacy Keach, Marsha Mason, and JoBeth Williams.
Who: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Jeremy McCarter What: Book signing Where:The Drama Book Shop, 266 West Thirty-Ninth St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves. When: Wednesday, July 21, 2:00 (tickets on sale Friday, July 16, 10:00 am) Why: In 2002, a theater group started rehearsing a new musical in the tiny Arthur Seelen Theatre in the basement of the Drama Book Shop, which was founded in 1917 by the Drama League and was bought by Arthur and Rozanne Seelen in 1958. With the future of the beloved store in jeopardy, it was purchased in January 2019 by two of the primaries involved with that rehearsal, director Thomas Kail and writer Lin-Manuel Miranda, along with producer Jeffrey Seller and theater impresario James L. Nederlander. The production was In the Heights, cowritten by Quiara Alegría Hudes, the Broadway smash that was nominated for thirteen Tonys and won four, including Best Musical. Delayed by the pandemic lockdown, the new store, designed by David Korins, opened June 10 on West Thirty-Ninth St., and it is celebrating with its first in-store book signing, a rather big one.
On July 21 at 2:00, composer-lyricist-star Miranda, librettist Hudes, and theater writer Jeremy McCarter will be signing copies of their new tome, In the Heights: Finding Home (Penguin Random House, June 2021, $40), following up on the virtual launch that took place last month. The book opens with an introduction by McCarter that begins, “The actors took their bows, the crowd finished cheering, and everybody headed for the doors. Spotting a friend, I cut across the lobby. I asked, Did you just see what I just saw? Or words to that effect. It’s been fourteen years, so I can’t remember exactly what I said that night. But I do remember exactly how In the Heights made me feel.” The show was turned into a major motion picture that was released on June 10, in theaters and on HBO Max, to wide acclaim and a casting controversy. Limited tickets for the bookstore event, in which the authors will not sign anything other than the books and no photos with them are allowed, go on sale July 16 at 10:00 am, and they’re likely to go fast, so don’t hesitate if you want to keep sharing that feeling.
Documentary explores the creation and legacy of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s D-Man in the Waters (photo courtesy Rosalynde LeBlanc)
CAN YOU BRING IT: BILL T. JONES AND D-MAN IN THE WATERS (Rosalynde LeBlanc & Tom Hurwitz, 2020)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, July 16
212-727-8110 www.d-mandocumentary.com filmforum.org
In 1989, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company presented the world premiere of D-Man in the Waters at the prestigious Joyce Theater in New York City, a physically demanding, emotional work born out of the AIDS crisis, dealing with tragedy and loss in the wake of the death of Zane, Jones’s personal and professional partner, at the age of thirty-nine in 1988. Directors Rosalynde LeBlanc and Tom Hurwitz take a deep dive into the history of the dance and its lasting impact more than thirty years later in the captivating documentary Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters, opening July 16 at Film Forum.
“What is D-Man? Is it alive now? Is it a cautionary tale? Is it one of inspiration?” Jones tells fifteen Loyola Marymount dancers who are staging the piece under the direction of LeBlanc, a former company member who runs the Jones/Zane Educational Partnership at the school, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Dance. Jones continues, “Makes you want to get all your shit together, your community together, take responsibility, be beautiful, be fierce — is that what it is? I don’t know what it is. . . . What do they share that is so big, so tragic that you need a piece like this to move it and give it body?”
LeBlanc, who also produced the film, and two-time Emmy-winning cinematographer Hurwitz, the son of longtime Martha Graham dancer, choreographer, and teacher Jane Dudley, talk to most of the original cast of D-Man, many of whom have gone on to form their own companies: Arthur Avilés, Seán Curran, Lawrence Goldhuber, Gregg Hubbard, Heidi Latsky, Janet Lilly, and Betsy McCracken, who, along with Jones and his sister Johari Briggs, share intimate stories of working with Jones and Zane and the importance of the piece as the arts community was being ravaged by AIDS. Sometimes holding back tears, they speak lovingly of Zane and Demian Acquavella, nicknamed “D-Man,” who died at the age of thirty-two in 1990. “He was always a boy, but always a bit of a devilish boy, and the dancing was also that way,” Jones remembers.
Through new and old interviews, home video and archival photographs, and exciting footage from the dance’s original rehearsals and Joyce premiere, LeBlanc, Hurwitz, and editor Ann Collins choreograph a gracefully flowing, compelling narrative as the documentary participants discuss specific movements — Latsky’s attempts at a jump and Curran’s memories of a duet with Acquavella in which their foreheads have to keep touching are wonderful — and LeBlanc tries to reach inside the Loyola Marymount performers to motivate them. They might have the movement down, but D-Man requires more than that to be successful. “Do you dare to let the stakes really be high?” she asks as they search for contemporary issues that impact them similarly to how AIDS affected the creation of the work, which is set to Felix Mendelssohn’s 1825 Octet for Strings, which the German composer wrote at the age of sixteen. “There was some healing, cathartic ritual in the making and the doing of this dance that sustained us,” Curran says, a feeling LeBlanc wants to instill in the college students.
“This work is not about anybody’s epidemic,” Jones, a Kennedy Center Honoree, MacArthur Grant awardee, and Tony winner who is the artistic director of New York Live Arts, said in a statement about the film. “It is about the dark spirit of what is happening in the world and how you push back against it.” Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters gets to the heart of that spirit by revealing the legacy, and the future, of a seminal dance piece that continues to find its place on an ever-evolving planet.
LeBlanc and Hurwitz will be at Film Forum to discuss the film at the 7:00 shows on July 16 and 17 and will participate in a live, virtual Q&A with Jones at 8:00 on July 21. Jones, whose riveting Afterwardsness at Park Avenue Armory in May explored the Covid-19 pandemic, isolation, and racial injustice, will return to the space this fall with Deep Blue Sea, a monumental work for more than one hundred community members and dancers that begins with a solo by Jones and incorporates texts by Martin Luther King Jr. and Herman Melville, with water again playing a critical role.
Who: Nell Painter, Linda Harrison, Joyce Kozloff, Garth Greenan What: Livestreamed discussion Where:92Y online When: Thursday, July 15, free with advance RSVP, 7:00 Why: For more than a century, artists of all disciplines have come to MacDowell to create works in residency in a welcoming New Hampshire community. (It was previously known as the MacDowell Colony, but the name was changed in 2020 because of the its oppressive overtones.) MacDowell Fellows have included James Baldwin, Meredith Monk, Thornton Wilder, Leonard Bernstein, Suzan-Lori Parks, Studs Terkel, Ruth Reichl, and Jonathan Franzen. On July 15 at 7:00, the 92nd St. Y is hosting the free virtual discussion “Across the MacDowell Dinner Table: Excellence, Aesthetics, and Value,” with Newark Museum director and CEO Linda Harrison, visual artist Joyce Kozloff, and gallerist Garth Greenan, moderated by artist, author, and board chair Nell Painter. They will consider the past, present, and future of MacDowell and its place in a quickly changing art world. The Garth Greenan Gallery is currently showing “Alexis Smith: Not in Utopia” through July 30; the Newark Museum has on view “Anual de Artes de Nueva Jersey 2021: ReVisión y Respuesta,” “Four Quiltmakers, Four American Stories,” and “Wolfgang Gil: Sonic Geometries”; and Kozloff’s “Uncivil Wars,” in which she repurposes Civil War battle maps by incorporating images of viruses, runs through August 13 at DC Moore. Kozloff will be at the gallery to talk about the exhibition on July 21 at 6:00 as part of the free ADAA Chelsea Gallery Walk.
You Are Here takes place across the Lincoln Center campus July 14-30 (photo by Justin Chao)
YOU ARE HERE
The Isabel and Peter Malkin Stage, Josie Robertson Plaza, Hearst Plaza, Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace, Lincoln Center campus
Installation: July 14-23, free
Live performances: July 24-30, free two weeks in advance through TodayTix lottery, 7:00 www.lincolncenter.org
Lincoln Center continues its free Restart Stages program with You Are Here, a multidisciplinary audio and performance installation on Josie Robertson Plaza and Hearst Plaza. From July 13 to 23, the work, conceived by Andrea Miller, the founder and artistic director of the Brooklyn-based Gallim dance company, will be open to the public, who can make their way through a series of sculptures featuring audio portraits of twenty-five New Yorkers affiliated with Lincoln Center and its arts and education community partners. Sharing their experiences over the last sixteen months is a diverse group of individuals, including Bruce Adolphe of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Kiri Avelar of Ballet Hispánico, Anthony Roth Costanzo of the Metropolitan Opera, Alphonso Horne of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Egyptt LaBeija of BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Cassie Mey of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Muriel Miguel of Spiderwoman Theater, Hahn Dae Soo of Korean Cultural Center New York, Taylor Stanley of the New York City Ballet, Gabriela Torres of Juilliard, and Valarie Wong of NewYork-Presbyterian. Other participants are Dietrice Bolden, Jessica Chen, Ryan Dobrin, Jermaine Greaves, Milosz Grzywacz, Lila Lomax, Ryan Opalanietet, Elijah Schreiner, Alexandra Siladi, Paul Smithyman, Jen Suragiat, KJ Takahashi, Fatou Thiam, and Susan Thomasson of Lincoln Center Security, Film at Lincoln Center, the Asian American Arts Alliance, the School of American Ballet, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, and other institutions and organizations. The sound sculptures are by Tony-winning scenic designer Mimi Lien, spread across an aural garden created by composer Justin Hicks; costumes are by Oana Botezan, with choreography by Miller and direction by Miller and Lynsey Peisinger.
From July 24 to 30 at 7:00, the audio portraits will be replaced by live performances in and around the Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace that are free through a TodayTix lottery available two weeks in advance; activating the space will be Gallim dancers Lauryn Hayes, Christopher Kinsey, Nouhoum Koita, Misa Lucyshyn, Gary Reagan, Connor Speetjens, Taylor Stanley, Haley Sung, Georgia Usborne, and Amadi Washington. (The audio sculptures will be open to ticket holders at 6:00.) In addition, on July 22 at 6:00, Miller will host the latest edition of the virtual Gallim Happy Hour, a livestreamed discussion with Stanley and Mey about You Are Here, taking place over Zoom and Facebook Live.
Who: Dawoud Bey, Torkwase Dyson, Elisabeth Sherman What: Live online discussion Where:Whitney Museum Zoom When: Thursday, July 8, free with advance RSVP, 6:00 (exhibit continues through October 3) Why: One of the many pleasures of “Dawoud Bey: An American Project,” the exemplary survey of the work of Queens-born photographer Dawoud Bey, is listening to him describe his process on the audio guide. The sixty-eight-year-old artist and Columbia College Chicago professor shares detailed aspects of his career while discussing numerous photos and series. You can hear more from Bey on July 8 at 6:00 when he participates in the Zoom talk “Narrative Materiality” with interdisciplinary artist Torkwase Dyson, moderated by exhibition cocurator Elisabeth Sherman.
On the audio guide, Bey talks about about his series “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” a 2017 commission for the Front Triennial in Cleveland consisting of photos taken along what was the Underground Railroad in Ohio, dark shots of houses, trees, and the sea without people, “Of necessity, those locations, most of them were never known. They couldn’t be. They weren’t supposed to be. So there is that layer of invisibility built into the history. And so what I did was through research finding a few sites that are in fact known to be related to the Underground Railroad and then began to look at the landscape around those sites imagining a fugitive African American moving through that landscape, what that landscape might have looked like and felt like.”
In her catalog essay “Black Compositional Thought: Black Hauntology, Plantationscene, and Paradoxical Form,” Dyson writes, “Blackness will swallow the whole of terror to be free. It will move across distances, molecules, units — through atmospheres and concrete, in magic and bloodstreams to self-liberate. To image and imagine movements and geographies of freedom, known and unknown, is to regard this space as irreducible, or to regard black spatial geography as irreducible. ‘Night Coming Tenderly, Black’ is attuned to the irreducible place of black liberation inside terror. Each photograph makes manifest in the viewer a full-body, ongoing refusal to belong to a nation, land, person, or state under a system of terror, as conditioned by architecture, agriculture, modernity, or industrialized white supremacy. The process of freeing a full black body from spatial terror while black flesh holds and is seen as material and terror is liberation.”
Bey continues, “They’re all about the imagination. Looking closely at a piece of the land and noticing all of these thorns that certainly make the landscape so much more threatening if one had to move through it. So when I thought about it through that particular narrative, the landscape became for me a very transformed space. And that’s the space and place that I want the viewer to think about when they look at that work. I want them to completely forget about the present. This work is not about the present, which is why those photographs are all so large. I wanted to create a physical space for the viewer to enter into that, allow them just to be in that landscape.”
Named after a quote from Langston Hughes’s poem “Dream Variation” — “Rest at pale evening. . . . / A tall, slim tree. . . . / Night coming tenderly / Black like me.” — the series is notable in that there are no people in these dark, mysterious photographs, which more than hint at the ghosts of those who escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad as well as their descendants. These large-scale works demand and reward intense viewing, beautiful in and of themselves while imbued with the narrative of this country’s original sin.
“Night Coming Tenderly, Black” is one of only several powerful series in the show, which continues on the first and eighth floors of the Whitney through October 3. Bey’s 2012 “Birmingham Project,” which was included in the New Museum’s recently closed “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” features black-and-white diptychs that pair a photo of a child the same age as one of the four Black girls (Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley) killed in the 1963 KKK bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama and the two boys (Johnny Robinson, Virgil Ware) murdered in the aftermath with an image of a grown woman or man the age the victims would have been in 2012 had they lived. It’s a brutal reminder of what racism continues to take away, evoking the missing men, women, and children in “Night Coming Tenderly, Black.”
Bey’s first series, “Harlem, USA,” invites viewers into the Harlem of the mid- to late-1970s, with 35mm black-and-white photographs of Deas McNeil in his barbershop, two girls having fun posing in front of a local restaurant, three well-dressed women leaning on a “Police Line” barrier during a parade, and a dapper old man wearing a white bowtie and a black bowler.
In the 1980s, Bey headed upstate to Syracuse, where he again focused on the Black community in its natural surroundings. “It was a deliberate choice to foreground the Black subject in those photographs, giving them a place not only in my pictures . . . but on the wall[s] of galleries and museums when that work was exhibited,” Bey notes. He moved from the 35mm wide-angle-lens camera to a tripod-mounted 4 × 5-inch-format camera for his Polaroid street portraits of strangers he met, including a boy eating a Foxy Pop, a young man and woman hugging in Prospect Park, and a young man on an exercise bicycle in Amityville, all looking directly at the camera. Bey would give the instant Polaroid picture to his subjects, then print them later from the negative; for this exhibit, they can now be seen nearly life-size.
In 1991, Bey turned to a two-hundred-pound, six-foot-tall, five-foot wide Polaroid camera to photograph friends and such fellow artists as Lorna Simpson, putting together two, three, and as many as six exposures for each, the edges of the Polaroids visible, letting us inside his process as he emphasizes the complexities of the people in these color images.
Another room is dedicated to Bey’s “Class Pictures,” color photos of marginalized teenagers whose words are seen alongside the pictures. “Sometimes I wonder what color my soul is. I hope that it’s the color of heaven,” Omar says. Kevin admits, “Thanks to the death of my father I grew up much too fast and never learned how to ask anyone for help. I carry my own burdens . . . alone. This is my curse.”
Bey returned to Harlem in 2014–17 for “Harlem Redux,” pigmented inkjet prints that focus on place rather than people in a changing neighborhood that is very different from the Harlem he photographed four decades earlier, best exemplified by Girls, Ornaments, and Vacant Lot, NY, which depicts two hair advertisements of smiling Black girls next to an abandoned, litter-strewn, fenced-in area. “One of the things that was beginning to happen in Harlem was that there were these, as I called them, spaces where something used to be,” Bey says on the audio guide. “And when those places are completely obliterated, when they’re torn down and you end up with a vacant lot, there’s a kind of disruption of place memory. Because at some point, even if you know the community well, you can’t quite remember what used to be there. And that to me was a profound experience.” A visit to the Whitney to see “Dawoud Bey: An American Project” is a profound experience itself, reminding us of what was, and projecting what might be.
Regina Aquino stars in Round House Theatre’s virtual version of Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die
WE’RE GONNA DIE
Round House Theatre online
Available on demand through July 25, $32.50 www.roundhousetheatre.org
One of the last in-person plays I saw before the pandemic lockdown was Second Stage’s dynamic, ebullient version of Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die. Near the end, silver balloons bearing the name of the show were released from the ceiling of the Tony Kiser Theater, gently drifting down on the audience. I brought two home, and, remarkably, one of them is still partially filled, resting on top of a shelf where I see it every day. It is a symbol of the resilience of the human spirit, and of theater itself, which is on its way back after a difficult time.
Sixteen months later, Maryland’s Round House Theatre has mounted a more subdued but still powerful virtual version of the sixty-five-minute show, filmed live with a masked, limited, socially distanced audience and streaming through July 11. We’re Gonna Die consists of a series of first-person true stories and accompanying songs that look at how we approach and deal with impermanence. It was originally staged by Lee and her band, Future Wife, at Joe’s Pub in 2011 and then at Lincoln Center’s Clare Tow Theater in 2013. Raja Feather Kelly tore the roof off with his production at Second Stage, which took place in a hospital waiting room and featured a breakout performance by Janelle McDermoth.
At Round House, Regina Aquino stars as the narrator and singer, who relates the tales as if they all happened to her. (They were actually compiled from friends and relatives of Lee’s.) She runs up the steps, writhes across the floor, and jumps up and down on Paige Hathaway’s two-level set, which features bold colors and graphic symbols, with the musicians of the Chance Club each in their own large, homey cubicle: bassist Jason Wilson, keyboardist Laura Van Duzer, guitarist Matthew Schleigh, and drummer Manny Arciniega. The evening begins with an original composition by the Chance Club, “Wagons and Stars,” to set the mood, and then the show kicks off with the first of six vignettes that cover a wide spectrum of age and health, from the innocence of children to the isolation of growing old, exploring insomnia, the health-care system, family responsibilities, friendship, and generational angst, including “Lullaby for the Miserable,” “Comfort for the Lonely,” “When You Get Old,” and “Horrible Things.”
“I would have horrible nightmares and wake up with this feeling of dread that I was gonna die the exact way my father did,” Aquino says, talking about having trouble sleeping. “And if anyone tried to help me, I would just get angrier and angrier, and no one could do anything.” In the propulsive “I Still Have You,” she declares, “You still have me / I’m in your bed / I’ll hold your hand / until you’re dead / If I die first / you’ll be alone / but until then / you’ll have a home.”
Regina Aquino shares stories of loneliness and loss amid rocking songs in We’re Gonna Die
The show is fluidly directed and choreographed by Paige Hernandez, with cinematography by Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, costumes by Ivania Stack, sound by Mathew M. Nielson, and lighting by Harold F. Burgess II, making it a successful hybrid that is anchored by Aquino’s (The Events,Eureka Day) warm, intimate performance that will have you hanging on her every word.
In the grand finale, “I’m Gonna Die,” everyone joins in for a celebratory chorus that is filled with hope after a year in which more than six hundred thousand American died of Covid-19. The show has always had a positive outlook, but it hits a little deeper now. We all have developed a very different relationship with mortality, so don’t be surprised when you join in, with a smile on your face, as Aquino sings, “I’m gonna die / I’m gonna die someday / Then I’ll be gone / And it’ll be OK.”
In my March 2020 review of Kelly’s production at Second Stage, I wrote, “‘There’s a very good chance you’re not going to die,’ President Trump said when news about the coronavirus crisis was first spreading. While that might be true when it comes to Covid-19, it’s not true in general.” Indeed, what a year and a half it has been, as that balloon can attest.
The stream is available on demand through July 25; you can watch a panel discussion with Aquino, dramaturg Naysan Mojgani, and others here.
