As a teenager, I first became aware of the government’s use of Agent Orange in Vietnam on a 1980 episode of Barney Miller, in which Sgt. Wojciehowicz (Max Gail) calls in representatives from the air force, the government, and a chemical company to explain the possibly dangerous side effects of the compound. (Their ultimate answer: They just don’t know.) In 1982, I was at Pier 84 for a benefit concert for victims of Agent Orange, featuring Ian Hunter, Todd Rundgren, Paul Butterfield, and John Cale. Nearly forty years later, it took another form of popular entertainment to make me aware that many of the problems associated with the herbicide have not gone away — and are still being denied by those using the vilified chemical compound.
“I was born in war, I grew up in war, and we are at war now,” French-Vietnamese activist, journalist, and author Tran To Nga says early on in Kate Taverna and Alan Adelson’s award-winning documentary, The People vs. Agent Orange, opening virtually March 5 at New Plaza Cinema here in New York City. The film details the long-lasting effects of the deployment of Agent Orange on four generations in Vietnam as well as the devastating impact it is having in the Pacific Northwest, specifically in Five Rivers in Oregon, where it is used for brush eradication. Yes, “is,” present tense.
Written and produced by Taverna, Adelson, and Véronique Bernard, directed by Taverna and Adelson (In Bed with Ulysses,Lodz Ghetto), and edited by Taverna, the revelatory film follows two converging story lines: Nga’s fight for justice in Paris and South Vietnam and environmentalist and author Carol Van Strum’s battle over the deployment of Agent Orange, made with the controversial chemical Dioxin (in 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D), in Oregon’s Five Rivers area between 1975 through today. Taverna and Adelson meet with human rights lawyers, including Bruce Anderson and Jonathan Moore working with Van Strum and Susan Swift, who formed the group Citizens Against Toxic Sprays (C.A.T.S.), and Bertrand Repolt, William Bourdon, and Amélie Lefebvre representing Nga, who know it won’t be easy, as the chemical companies (Dow, Monsanto) are not about to give in. “This case will be merciless,” Bourdon says.
The filmmakers incorporate archival footage of news reports and interviews from the 1960 and 1970s, whistleblower video taken by Oregon spray helicopter crew member Darryl Ivy in 2015, and home movies and photos of Van Strum, Nga, and their families, detailing the terrible personal tragedies they have suffered. Nga visits a children’s hospital where kids have severe birth defects, walks through the tiger cages in Poulo Condor Prison on Con Dao Island in Vietnam where her mother was tortured, and returns to the forest where she and her husband, Kieu Xuan Long, were married. Van Strum and Swift discuss how they have been followed, intimidated, and harassed by mysterious men in black cars. Retired Oregon physician Dr. Renee Stringham talks about how, after recording a serious increase in the number of birth defects among her patients, her family was threatened. And Heather Bower, founder of Children of Vietnam Veterans Health Alliance, shares her information about birth defects wile displaying her own.
Among the other experts adding their voices are David Zierler, author of The Invention of Ecocide, Peter Sills, lawyer and author of Toxic War, André Bouny, author of Agent Orange: Apocalypse Vietnam, former Senate majority leader Thomas Daschle, and retired air force scientist Dr. James Clary, who chokes up when he says, “I was getting so angry that my own government didn’t want to provide help to veterans who were suffering.” Nobody goes on the record to defend the chemical companies, although retired senior US district judge Jack Weinstein tiptoes around some pointed questions.
“Agent Orange spared no one,” Nga says. And the horrors are far from over. To find out more, you can watch two recent panel discussions featuring the filmmakers, Van Strum, and other activists, researchers, and journalists here.
You can have Sounder, Old Yeller, and Lassie, cheer on Balto, Benji, and Beethoven. But the best movie dog ever is Keytin, the extraordinary golden mutt who is the star of Elizabeth Lo’s masterful feature-length debut, Stray. Lo follows the remarkable canine as she wanders through the streets of Istanbul and other parts of Turkey, living a dog’s life, in a place that until fairly recently would regularly round up strays and euthanize them mercilessly. Everywhere she goes, she meets up with people she knows and who love her, from a dock to a dangerous construction site; she also plays with such puppy pals as Nazar and Kartal. Keytin scavenges for food, cuddles up with homeless refugee children from Aleppo, relaxes amid traffic, and chases a cat, all with a look in her eyes that reveals great depth and understanding that humans can only dream of. The film was born out of loss; Lo notes in her director statement, “The impetus for Stray is personal. When my childhood dog died, I felt a quiet need to suppress my grief at his passing. I was shocked that something as personal as how my heart responds to the death of a loved one could be shaped by an external politics that defined him or ‘it’ as ‘valueless.’ As my grief evolved, I also saw how our moral conceptions of who or how much one matters can be in constant flux. This transformative moment is what propels Stray’s exploration into value, hierarchy, and sentience.”
The pandemic has only increased the meaning of pets in our lives, as if we needed more reasons to worship them. For many people, their dogs and cats have been their sole companions while sheltering in place, and it is devastating every time someone posts on social media that their dog or cat has passed — to say nothing of friends and relatives who have been stricken with the coronavirus and did not survive. Crouching down to get the dog’s perspective, Lo filmed the independent, purposeful Keytin for six months, with no choice but to let the confident canine guide the action as they encounter class, ethnic, and gender differences while making deep connections with everyone Keytin comes into contact with — a connection the audience will make as well, especially if they are watching the film at home, all alone. The soundtrack mixes a splendid score by Ali Helnwein with snippets of poignant conversation overheard on Keytin’s journeys, accompanied by occasional intertitles with wise, relevant quotes by Diogenes and Themistius, including “Human beings live artificially and hypocritically and would do well to study the dog.” As I said, Best. Movie. Dog. Ever. Stray begins streaming March 5 via Film Forum Virtual Cinema, complete with a conversation between Lo and filmmaker Rachel Grady and a Q&A with Lo and Joanne Yohannan from the North Shore Animal League, moderated by film critic Tomris Laffly.
Japan Society: Online Contemporary Theater
Saturday, March 6, 9:30; Sunday, March 7, 4:30; Thursday, March 11, 8:00 (followed by a live Q&A), $15
Available on demand March 12—26, $15 www.japansociety.org ayaogawa.com
In 2015 at Walker Space, Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based playwright, director, performer, and translator Aya Ogawa debuted Ludic Proxy, a three-part immersive, apocalyptic play that takes place in the past (Pripyat, post-Chernobyl), the present (Fukushima, post-disaster), and the future (New York, underground). Ogawa has now adapted the middle section for the virtual multimedia production Ludic Proxy: Fukushima, streaming live through Japan Society on March 6, 7, and 11 (and available on demand March 12-26). The title, a phrase coined by a game designer, “refers to the phantom knowledge of something or somewhere real gained through game play,” Ogawa explains in a video about the reimagining. Originally commissioned by PlayCo in 2010, Ogawa was inspired to write Ludic Proxy following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Fukushima Prefecture, the death of her mother, and the birth of her second child. “The collision of [these personal life-changing events and the global disasters] created the foundation for this play. And it made me really think about, How does the intrinsic human tendency to play, to want to play, help us process the catastrophes that we experience in life?” she adds. The three-act play gave the audience the opportunity to help direct the narrative, like a choose-your-own-adventure story; that component will be adapted for the virtual presentation, about two sisters (Saori Tsukada as Maho and Yuki Kawahisa as Maki) in Fukushima. Online viewers will be asked to vote on what one of the sisters, an avatar for the audience, says and does, meaning that every live performance is unique.
“During this almost year that we’ve been living through this pandemic, I’ve really been thinking about the Fukushima section,” Ogawa continues. “It has audience interaction built into it that translates naturally to a digital platform but also there is something newly resonant about its premise today in 2021.” The sisters are attempting to connect in a way that relates to the problems so many American families are having today amid different belief systems involving politics and Covid-19, while honoring the tenth anniversary of the Fukushima disaster. If you buy a ticket for March 6 or 7, you will also have access to the subsequent live performances; the March 11 show will be followed by a live Q&A with Ogawa (The Nosebleed, Journey to the Ocean, oph3lia). From March 12 to 26, on-demand viewers will be able to control the path of the prerecorded narrative themselves instead of via online polling by everyone watching. Ludic Proxy: Fukushima is part of Japan Society’s ongoing program “Ten Years Later: Japan Society Remembers 3.11,” which also includes the March 9 symposium “Resiliency & Recovery: A U.S.-Japan Dialogue Ten Years after 3.11” and “Tea Time Season Three: Remembering 3.11.” In addition, Ogawa is the special guest at the next PlayClub on March 9 at 5:00, a live conversation about Toshiki Okada’s 2018 Time’s Journey Through a Room; sign up now to read a copy of the script, which also deals with the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and participate in the discussion, facilitated by Kate Loewald.
GRIEF AND GRIEVANCE: ART AND MOURNING
New Museum
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Special online events free with RSVP
Exhibition runs through June 6, $12-$18 www.newmuseum.org
The New Museum exhibition “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” is an extraordinary collection of nearly one hundred works by thirty-seven artists taking on racism and violence in Black communities. The show was conceived by Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor prior to the coronavirus crisis and the BLM protests and scheduled to open around the time of the presidential election, but it was delayed because of the pandemic lockdown and Enwezor’s death in March 2019 at the age of fifty-five. Completed by Naomi Beckwith, Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, and Mark Nash, the exhibit includes new and older painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installation by such artists as Terry Adkins, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Garrett Bradley, Theaster Gates, Arthur Jafa, Rashid Johnson, Simone Leigh, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Lorna Simpson, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, Nari Ward, and Carrie Mae Weems exploring how we deal with loss.
In conjunction with the exhibit, the New Museum is hosting weekly live online conversations and virtual tours, featuring an all-star lineup of participating artists. All programs are free with advance RSVP; click on each title for more information.
For arts institutions now facing a pandemic lockdown that has lasted nearly a year with no immediate end in sight, it helps to have a sense of humor. And that’s precisely what Monica Bill Barnes & Company have plenty of in Keep Moving. Presented by WP Theater, Keep Moving is a ten-chapter series conceived and created by Monica Bill Barnes and company creative producing director and performer Robbie Saenz de Viteri that looks at how a group of women have dealt with the health crisis.
The digital presentation is hosted by Saenz de Viteri with a wry smile as he speaks with Barnes and several of the dancers, mostly via Zoom but a few over the phone, with no visuals. Chapters such as “Get. Ready. To. Go.,” “The Only Tedious Part,” “It Is Super Essential,” “Oh Hey I Do Exist,” and “Then I’m Gonna Fix the World” introduce such participants as Julieta Rodriguez-Cruz, Manuela Agudelo, Nadjie Forte, Kai Chen, Anakeiry Cruz, mentor Wendy Rogers, and others as Saenz de Viteri focuses on how everyone has been surviving the lockdown, with a specific focus on the company’s collaboration with Hunter College on a project called The Running Show. It’s both funny and poignant as the young women talk about what it means to be a dancer and the older ones discuss how that changes over a career. In “Even Though I Was Alone,” Barnes thinks she’s out of shape and Naja Newell, Esther Nozea, and Amanda Konstantine Perlmutter dance in their kitchen or bedroom or out on the street as they keep moving despite all the current limitations. Extended through March 14, Keep Moving offers a tantalizing inside look at the creative process during a time of crisis, stagnation not an option.
Online solo shows during the pandemic have found new ways to challenge and entertain the audience, as with online adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Letter to My Father (photo by Eileen Meny Photography)
With theaters shuttered across the country — and the world — since last March, companies big and small have been coming up with creative and inventive ways to put on shows, from benefit Zoom readings to, more recently, live and recorded presentations onstage, following all Covid-19 protocols and performed by a minimal cast without an audience. Among the highlights have been Arlekin Players Theatre’s State vs. Natasha Banina, starring Darya Denisova, directed by her partner, Igor Golyak, streamed live from their living room; Jefferson Mays in Michael Arden’s tech-heavy A Christmas Carol, filmed at the empty United Palace theater on Broadway at 175th St.; Ryan J. Haddad’s Hi, Are You Single?, recorded live at the Woolly Mammoth in DC in front of a limited masked audience of staff members; Lauren Gunderson’s The Catastrophist, in which William DeMeritt portrays her husband, virologist Nathan Wolfe, filmed at the Marin Theatre in San Francisco; Bill Irwin’s updated version of On Beckett / In Screen, which begins with him walking down Twenty-Second St. and entering the Irish Rep, trudging through an empty theater to the stage; and Patrick Page’s All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain, a crash course in the Bard’s bad guys, taped at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s vacant home at the Harman Centre for the Arts in DC.
A trio of new one-person shows have pushed the envelope with casting, technology, and location, resulting in virtual productions that challenge and entertain the viewer, offering sustained thrills and, occasionally, a bit of frustration. Even the most jaded of theatergoers who have refused to recognize what has been occurring online should reconsider by streaming at least one of these ambitious, worthwhile works.
Andréa Burns recounts her sad dating history and love of fancy shoes in virtual reimagining of Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates
BAD DATES
George Street Playhouse
Twenty-four-hour stream available on demand through March 14, $33 georgestreetplayhouse.org
George Street Playhouse’s online adaptation of Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates is a family affair. Originally performed by Tony winner Julie White at Playwrights Horizons in 2003, the play now features Andréa Burns as Haley Walker, a divorced single mother who, after years of struggling with finances while raising her daughter, Vera, has been promoted to managing the restaurant where she worked as a waitress and is ready to start dating again now that Vera is thirteen. The lively seventy-five-minute monologue is set in the home of George Street Playhouse board member Sharon Karmazin, a producer of such Tony-winning shows as Clybourne Park,Dear Evan Hansen, and The Band’s Visit. It’s directed in person (not over Zoom) by Burns’s husband, Peter Flynn (Curvy Widow,Smart Blonde), the streaming director of Stars in the House, Seth Rudetsky and James Wesley’s daily benefits for the Actors Fund, and filmed and edited by Burns and Flynn’s seventeen-year-old son, Hudson Flynn, the technical director of Stars in the House. (You can watch Burns guest hosting a “Date Night” edition of the series with Peter here.)
Burns (In the Heights,On Your Feet! The Story of Gloria Estefan) is effervescent as Haley, who can’t wait to get back into the dating scene. She agonizes over which shoes to wear — there are several dozen boxes of fancy footwear in her bedroom, along with a box of cold, hard cash — and tries on a parade of dresses. “Okay, this looks good, right? This is very good,” she says, checking herself out in a full-length mirror. “I look like a hooker. Well, maybe I can wear this with a scarf. You know, look like a hooker wearing a scarf.” She wanders from the bedroom to the bathroom to the closet to down the hall to get the unseen Vera’s approval, charmingly blathering on directly into the camera, aware we are watching her every move. She shares details of a series of bad dates, compares her life to that of the fictional Mildred Pierce in Michael Curtiz’s 1945 film, and recognizes her strengths and weaknesses, her successes and failures.
“It seems like I’m the only one who knows anything about how the place works,” she says about the restaurant. “So, you know, finally, the noncriminal Romanians go, ‘To hell with it,’ and they put me in charge because apparently, I’m some sort of weird restaurant idiot savant. Who knew? Born to run a restaurant. Which is exciting, when you find something, that strange combination of who you are and what you can do — to find your gift like that. How many people get that to fall on their head like that? ’Cause I started out being, like, just a waitress trying to support herself and her kid. I was just another person who married a moron and then had a load of shit to deal with.”
She unloads the shit with an infectious demeanor leading up to a surprise ending. A full crew helps make the production a joy, with fab costumes by Lisa Zinni, sharp lighting by Alan C. Edwards, incidental music and sound by Ryan Rummery, grand hair and makeup by Dorothy Petersen, and fun props and sets by Helen Tewksbury. Bad Dates makes for a great date night, streaming through March 14.
Bill Camp explores his family home in online adaptation of Samuel Beckett short story (photo courtesy Theatre for a New Audience)
Tony and Emmy nominee and Obie winner Bill Camp is all on his own in JoAnne Akalaitis’s adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s 1946 short story “First Love” for Theatre for a New Audience, streaming through March 1. The seventy-five-minute show takes place in Camp’s family home in Vermont, where he travels through several rooms while telling us his woeful tale of love, loss, and isolation. Camp (The Crucible,The Queen’s Gambit), with his scruffy, scraggly beard and wearing a Petzl headlamp as if he were going spelunking, looks like a hermetic recluse as he lies on the floor, rolls across the wall, and puts his face uncomfortably right up against the screen, speaking with an absurdist tongue.
“I associate, rightly or wrongly, my marriage with the death of my father, in time, That other links exist, on other levels, between these two affairs, is not impossible. I have enough trouble as it is in trying to say what I think I know,” he begins. In the memory play, the wholly unreliable narrator doesn’t understand why he can’t stay in his father’s house after the home is sold, shares why he has “no bone to pick with graveyards,” meets a woman named Lulu on a bench and starts an odd relationship with her, and doesn’t hesitate to talk about his bowel movements and erections. “What mattered to me in my dispeopled kingdom, that in regard to which the disposition of my carcass was the merest and most futile of accidents, was supineness in the mind, the dulling of the self and of that residue of execrable frippery known as the non-self and even the world, for short,” he opines.
Camp is not completely alone in the making of the show, which was rehearsed and filmed over Zoom. The collaboration with Akalaitis also features lighting by Jennifer Tipton, costume and scenery by Kaye Voce, and video design by Eamonn Farrell. (In 2007-8, Camp, Akalaitis, Tipton, and Voce worked together on Beckett Shorts at New York Theatre Workshop.) Camp’s strange adventure through the house is captured by three carefully positioned laptop cameras, one of which is sometimes picked up and carried by him, giving the piece a Blair Witch Project feel. Throughout, the narrator is on edge, literally and figuratively, Camp daring us to look away, but we can’t. And this is the only chance we get to see this version of First Love.
“If theaters opened up tomorrow, I wouldn’t do this on the stage: It’s made specifically for Zoom and our times, and very do-it-yourself,” Akalaitis notes in the program. “Part of my wanting to do it is to acknowledge that the world has changed. One of the big game players in cultural change was Samuel Beckett, to whom I owe so much. It just felt right to put this work by a young, war-damaged Beckett — this mean-spirited, mordant, misanthropic piece from the point of view of this fucked up, misogynist character — in the hermetic setting of Zoom.” You can learn more about the production in two Q&As with the cast and crew here.
Michael Guagno reprises his stage role in Letter to My Father for livestreamed production (photo by Eileen Meny Photography)
In May 2012, M-34 premiered Letter to My Father, a one-man show adapted and directed by James Rutherford and performed by Michael Guagno, the latter sitting at a desk with a microphone and computer at the Magic Futurebox theater in Brooklyn. He reads Hannah Stokes and Richard Stokes’s translation of a 1919 letter Franz Kafka wrote to his father, Hermann, a ritual slaughterer; it’s a dark, deeply personal, and disturbing confession that his father never saw. Rutherford and Guagno have now adapted the work for the internet, presenting the show Friday nights and Sunday afternoons through March 28.
The seventy-five-minute play streams live from a cramped, crowded room in M-34’s rehearsal space in Industry City in Brooklyn; the set, designed and lit by Oona Curley and Stacey DeRosier, is filled with rows and rows of boxes organized in a Kafkian manner on shelves. Some of the boxes come with a Kafka-like warning on them: “Contents: From: Destruct:” In a far corner, a mattress is on the floor, and closer to the center is a desk with two computers and a large microphone.
The interactive streaming platform allows each audience member to choose from three feeds: one straight-on view of Guagno at the desk, a second shot from the side (and sometimes upside down), and a third that consists of four different views that are harder to make out, not as crystal clear as the others. You can decide how to arrange the three feeds on your screen, and you also have the choice to watch only one feed at a time by switching over to Twitch. (Don’t worry; it’s easy to get back, and an instructional video is sent with the link.) There’s also a live chat associated with each view, although the night I attended, no one used it. As much as I love live chats during some shows, this one truly requires your attention; headphones are highly recommended, as is closing all other browser windows and turning off your cell phone, just like you were in an actual venue.
Guagno casually flips the pages of the long diatribe, which has been annotated just like the actual letter, but he knows the text so well he is not merely reading the words. When the stream begins, it takes a few minutes to figure out what is going on; don’t worry that you’re doing anything wrong with the controls, as things will soon become more explicit. Guagno eventually crawls out of bed, goes over to the desk, and delivers the opening lines of the letter:
“You asked me recently why I claim to be afraid of you. I did not know, as usual, how to answer, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, partly because an explanation of my fear would require more details than I could even begin to make coherent in speech. And if I now try to answer in writing it will still be nowhere near complete, because even in writing my fear and its consequences raise a barrier between us and because the magnitude of material far exceeds my memory and my understanding.”
Ominous sounds and foreboding music by Dave Harrington hover over the scene as Guagno brings up memories of humiliation, guilt, contempt, powerlessness, defenselessness, and “an orgy of malice,” suffering psychological and physical parental abuse no child should encounter. When he quotes the father specifically, Guagno clicks on a keyboard that triggers a prerecorded, deeper voice, as if Hermann were suddenly in the room, overwhelming Kafka again. “Not a word in contradiction!” the father demands. “I’ll gut you like a fish,” he threatens.
Kafka’s recounting of life under his father’s thumb is done not so much to assign blame but to explain how the writer became who he is. It’s not a stretch to rethink such Kafka works as The Trial,The Metamorphosis,A Hunger Artist, and the unfinished The Castle in light of this filial relationship. One example gets to the heart of the matter:
“There is only one episode from those early years that I remember directly, perhaps you remember it too. I was whining persistently for water one night, certainly not because I was thirsty, but in all probability partly to be annoying, partly to amuse myself. After a number of fierce threats had failed, you lifted me out of my bed, carried me out onto the pavlatche and left me awhile all alone, standing outside the locked door in my nightshirt. I do not mean to say that this was wrong of you, perhaps at that time there really was no other way of having a peaceful night, but I mention it as a characteristic example of the way you brought me up and the effect it had on me. This incident almost certainly made me obedient for a time, but it damaged me on the inside. I was by nature unable to reconcile the simple act (as it seemed to me) of casually asking for water with the utter horror of being carried outside. Years later it still tormented me that this giant man, my father, the ultimate authority, could enter my room at any time and, almost unprovoked, carry me from my bed out onto the pavlatche, and that I meant so little to him.”
Guagno is appropriately efficient in his performance; the haunting specter of Kafka’s father lingers in the air, exacerbating the already claustrophobic nature of the production, which features media design by
Lacey Erb, technology design by Casey Robinson, and technical direction by David Rudi Utter. When the feeds grow ever-so-slightly out of sync as the end approaches, that is not a glitch but a look further inside Kafka’s troubled mind.
Like Bad Dates and First Love, this adaptation of Letter to My Father could only exist in a virtual setting. The productions are not film or theater but a new hybrid format that should outlive the pandemic. All three shows deal with issues of belonging, isolation, and family crises that are crucial to this unique moment in history; though written by different writers at different times for distinct purposes, together they feel of a piece, a kind of trilogy that reveals a little of all of us as we face personal loss as well as that of in-person theater.
Childhood friends David Shapiro and Leeds Atkinson search for the perfect slice — of pizza and life — in Untitled Pizza Movie (photo courtesy of Sundance Institute)
Who: David Shapiro, Jonathan Lethem, Matt Wolf, Scott Macaulay What: Q&As at live screenings in conjunction with online members-only release of seven-part Untitled Pizza Movie Where:Metrograph Digital When:Untitled Pizza Movie Part 1: Ice Cube Trays, Friday, February 26, 8:00; Untitled Pizza Movie Part 4: Zig Zag, Thursday, March 4, 8:00; Untitled Pizza Movie Part 5: The Natufian Culture of 9,000 BC, Saturday, March 6, 8:00 Why: “We had New York dreams, like the next Bohemian, but there was no hometown discount,” David Shapiro says in the first episode of the seven-part series Untitled Pizza Movie. This was the mid-1990s, and he and his childhood friend from Stuyvesant, Leeds Atkinson, went on a search for the best pizza in New York City, pretending to be with the Food Channel and showing up at restaurants with a caliper and cameraman Jonathan Kovel, stuffing themselves as they measured slices as if they knew what they were doing, speaking with the owners to get them to reveal some of their secrets. But what started as a quest for free food turned into a socially conscious adventure about their own lives as well as that of a New York City seeing so much of its past go by the wayside in the modern era, as Shapiro cuts back and forth in time. “I’m clouding this narrative with nostalgia, clinging to the rock by documenting fiction,” Shapiro explains. “We remember the stories we want to tell and misremember the ones that we don’t. Leeds and I were in denial; friends and cities are forever. We were making a movie, a movie to stop time. But then we met Bellucci.” New York City pizza aficionados will recognize that as being Andrew Bellucci, formerly of Lombardi’s before he was sent to prison; he is now out and just opened a slice joint in Astoria. Bellucci and Leeds become the centerpieces of the film.
Shapiro (Keep the River on Your Right,Missing People), who wrote, directed, edited, and produced the film, also meets with food and wine critic Eric Asimov, Drew Nieporent of Nobu, Anthony “Mummy” Barile of the much-lamented Three of Cups, lawyers, and members of Bellucci’s and Atkinson’s families, visiting some of the most famous pizza parlors in the city, driving through the streets and over bridges, playing in a band, and interspersing shots of various and sundry items spinning on a turntable. Along the way, it’s made clear that pizza is life. The series is being streamed February 27 through March 14 via Metrograph Digital, for members only. (Membership is only five bucks a month.) Each film — Part 1: Ice Cube Trays,Part 2: Eat to Win in the Elevator,Part 3: Pizza Purgatory,Part 4: Zig Zag,Part 5: The Natufian Culture of 9,000 BC,Part 6: Clams, and Part 7: Mars Bar — will have a live premiere, and three of them will include a Q&A with Shapiro, moderated by Jonathan Lethem (Part 1), Matt Wolf (Part 4), and Scott Macaulay (Part 5).
