RECONNECTED: A VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE WITH MENTALIST JASON SURAN
Friday & Saturday nights through January 15 (extended through July 23), $50, 8:30 www.jasonsuran.com/reconnected
It’s one thing for mentalists to blow your mind in person. But over Zoom?
Performer and corporate consultant Jason Suran has figured out a way to do just that with his virtual show Reconnected, which takes place weekends through July 23. At each sixty-minute presentation, Suran appears before about three dozen people who have paid fifty dollars each to experience Suran’s unique abilities at what he calls “brainfuckery.” Beaming in from his home in New York City, Skokie-born Suran, whose previous works include The Other Side: A Psychological Seance and All in Your Head: An Evening of Mindreading, performs psychological illusions involving words, numbers, sharp objects, and a homemade pendulum that seem impossible but unfurl before your very eyes.
Even if you’re skeptical about mentalists and mindreading, Suran is likely to win you over with his innate charm and good humor. It also helps if you participate, either volunteering or being chosen; I have to admit to being a wee bit disappointed until Suran called on me to be part of the big finale, which was unforgettable.
When not performing feats of wonder, Suran, who conceived of the show with coproducer Adam Rei Siegel, trains corporate executives to improve observation and communication skills through his seminar “Hacking Minds,” focusing on cold reading, memory systems, and strategic questioning. Those talents are in full evidence in Reconnected; you should come prepared to use your own powers of observation and communication as well, at a moment’s notice, to enhance your experience.
“The best part of my job has always been connecting with the audience. I mean, that’s the whole point of reading minds,” Suran says in a sneak preview you can watch above. “The strange thing is, after all the shows I’ve done, all the rooms I’ve worked, all the people I’ve gotten to know, the truth is, I’ve never felt closer to the crowd than I do right now.” At a time when we are all hungering to be part of a crowd, to sit beside other people in a dark theater as we are entertained, Reconnected gives us the opportunity to connect with others, even if it’s onscreen. As the pandemic lockdown continues, there’s a lot to be said for that — and it certainly doesn’t hurt when that connection is loads of fun.
Standing in front of a Marc Chagall painting can transport you to another world, a fantastical realm of lavish colors where humans and animals float through the air and fiddlers perform on rooftops. The Bristol Old Vic, Kneehigh, and Wise Children have captured the essence of the lush canvases as well as the artist himself in the gorgeously rendered revival of Daniel Jamieson’s The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, streaming via NYU Skirball through December 18.
Filmed with three cameras and no audience at the UK’s Bristol Old Vic Theatre, the ninety-minute show is one of the best productions of the pandemic lockdown, an enchanting, bittersweet love story that will make your heart soar. Essentially a memory play, The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk recounts the tender romance between Chagall (Marc Antolin), born Moishe Zakharovich Shagal in 1887 in what is now Belarus, and Bella Samoylovna Rosenfeld (Audrey Brisson), born eight years later in the shtetl of Vitebsk to a well-off family that owned three jewelry stores. They fall madly, passionately in love when they meet in 1909; “I want to waste the rest of my life with you,” she tells him. Over the course of their life together, they experience more highs than lows as they deal with his success as a painter in Western Europe but struggles at home amid WWI, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism.
Director Emma Rice’s staging is magnificent, as are the performances. Antolin (The Trial, Taken at Midnight) and Brisson (Secret Cinema, The Wild Bride) are engaging as the sweethearts, both wearing white greasepaint as if primed canvases ready for action; when he paints her, he gently touches her face with a brush. They occasionally break into song, in English, French, and Yiddish, accompanied by composer and pianist Ian Ross and cellist James Gow, who also appear as minor characters throughout. There are also several scenes of lovely contemporary dance, choreographed by Rice and Etta Murfitt, that reference such Chagall works as 1914’s Blue Lovers, 1915’s Green Lovers and Birthday (when it premiered in 1992, the play was titled Birthday), 1916’s Lovers in Pink, 1917’s Study for Double Portrait with Wine Glass, and the much later Bouquet with Flying Lovers (ca 1934-47).
The small, intimate set by Sophia Clist, who also designed the costumes, places the actors in between empty wooden picture planes in the front and a wall of twisted canvas in the back, with drawings of flowers on the floor; it as if the Chagalls are a painting come to life. The playful nature of Marc’s painting is echoed in Rice’s use of props, including a red balloon as Bella’s mother, a portrait of their rabbi that Brisson sits behind and puts her arms through, and animal objects from the paintings that become Salvador Dalí-like chapeaux. Cinematographer Steve Tanner occasionally cuts to a long shot of the mostly empty theater, reminding us where we are and what we’re experiencing together, but he quickly puts us right back onstage with Marc and Bella and their impassioned love. Malcolm Rippeth’s lighting and Simon Baker’s sound are excellently coordinated for online viewing.
Early on, Marc tells his biographer and son-in-law, Franz Meyer, “When some things are gone, you thirst for their details in such a heartbreaking way. You feel an agony of need to remember.” The Bristol Old Vic’s The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is an exhilarating reminder of the power of live theater, the power of art, and the power of true love. Don’t miss it.
Good things come to those who wait. If there’s one thing we’ve learned during this pandemic, it’s that we need to have patience. Help is on the way, but if we as a nation follow protocols and have strong leadership, we can each make a difference, even with an administration that has turned its back on its people. We also have to be patient with the return of live theater as companies around the world experiment with Zoom, livestreaming, recording onstage without an audience, and other attempts to bring storytelling to a starving public.
So there I was on December 9, watching the hundredth-anniversary premiere of Theater for the New City’s livestreamed revival of the popular Yiddish play The Dybbuk, performed live onstage and broadcast over the Stellar platform. The chat function was on, so virtual attendees started getting ornery quickly when the show didn’t start exactly on time. And once it did, there were significant technical problems involving superimposed text, the green screening, and, most important, the sound, with a screeching electronic score drowning out the dialogue. Several people in the chat began complaining, even demanding a refund. But a solitary voice of reason explained that this is an opening night different from in-person opening nights and everyone should calm down. And she was right, because the tech crew was on the case, and after a near-disastrous beginning, the rest of the play was wonderful.
Written in 1914 by Jewish playwright S. An-ski, aka Shloyme Zaynvl Rapoport, who hailed from what is now Belarus, The Dybbuk premiered at the Elyseum Theatre in Warsaw on December 9, 1920, one month after An-ski’s death at the age of fifty-seven. Presented in association with New Yiddish Rep, this new English-language adaptation (with a fair sprinkling of Yiddish) is by NYR artistic director David Mandelbaum. The Dybbuk takes place in an old Jewish shtetl, where a long-arranged match between Menashe and Leah, the daughter of the wealthy Sender, dooms the love young student Khanan has for her. But on her wedding day, she is possessed by a spirit who will not let her marry Menashe, and the case soon comes before the judgment of the learned rabbi.
Cool backgrounds propel Theater for a New City virtual revival of classic Yiddish play (screenshot by twi-ny/mdr)
Director Jesse Freedman eventually works out the kinks in real time and gets everything in sync — with lighting by Alexander Bartieneff, sound by Eamon Goodman, and video by Tatiana Stolpovskaya — resulting in a moving and delightful production that features fun backgrounds and solid performances by Darrel Blackburn, Amy Coleman, Hannah Gee, Lev Harvey, Lucie Lalouche, Thomas Morris, and Mandelbaum as the rabbi. “A play about possession seems particularly suited to the times. The country has been possessed by the evil spirits of strife and division and could use a good exorcism to bring it back to its senses,” Mandelbaum said in a statement. “An intrepid group of artists is soldiering on through this pandemic minefield to honor the one-hundredth anniversary of this iconic play with the battle cry of their calling: ‘The show must go on.’ This will be a spiritual fusion of live performance and digital artistry. The ‘possession’ of live theater by the spirits of techno-wizardry.”
So be patient; the show will go on. It might not get off to a big start, but it packs quite a wallop by the finish.
For more on The Dybbuk, which was also made into a classic 1937 Yiddish film directed by Michał Waszyński, you can check out the Congress for Jewish Culture’s recent panel discussion “The Dybbuk at 100” on Facebook with playwright, translator, and theater historian Nahma Sandrow, Baruch College assistant professor and author Debra Caplan, and author and UT Austin senior lecturer in Yiddish Itzik Gottesman, moderated by writer, translator, actress, and theater historian Caraid O’Brien. The organization will also be presenting its own production of The Dybbuk on December 14 at 7:00 in Yiddish with Mike Burstyn, Shane Baker, Mendy Cahan, Refoyel Goldwasser, Amitai Kedar, Yelena Shmulenson, Suzanne Toren, and Michael Wex, directed by Allen Lewis Rickman; it can be seen here.
Who:Molière in the Park theater company What: Livestreamed performances and Q&As Where: FIAF Facebook and Molière in the Park YouTube When: Saturday, December 12, free with RSVP, 2:00 & 7:00 (show will be available for viewing through January 3) Why: After staging Zoom adaptations of three classic seventeenth-century plays by Jean-Baptiste Poquelin — better known as Molière — Brooklyn-based Molière in the Park is getting significantly more contemporary with its latest live, online production, playwright, TV writer, and educator Christina Anderson’s new work, Pen/Man/Ship. Following The Misanthrope,Tartuffe, and The School for Wives, Molière in the Park moves into the late nineteenth century with Pen/Man/Ship, which takes place in 1896 aboard a ship heading for Liberia shortly after the US Supreme Court decided in Plessy v. Ferguson to uphold the constitutionality of racial segregation under the concept of “separate but equal.” The cast features Crystal Lucas-Perry, Kevin Mambo, Jared McNeill, and Postell Pringle; the parable is directed by Molière in the Park founding artistic director Lucie Tiberghien using Liminal Entertainment Technologies’ StreamWeaver software, which takes actors out of Zoom boxes and puts them in front of backgrounds that more resemble indoor and outdoor sets while also allowing the tech crew to work together regardless of where they are. Copresented with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in partnership with the Prospect Park Alliance and the LeFrak Center at Lakeside, the play will be performed live twice on December 12, at 2:00 and 7:00, followed by Q&As with the creatives; a recording will be available for on-demand viewing through January 3.
Immersive production of Inside the Wild Heart has been reimagined for online livestreaming (photo by Erika Morilla)
INSIDE THE WILD HEART
Thursday – Sunday through December 20, $20-$50 (based on what you can afford)
Encore run: Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, February 12 – March 28, $15-$50 www.group.br.com
I’m an immersive theater junkie. Put on a show in an abandoned hotel or warehouse, in an empty church or a cemetery, or behind the scenes at an arts venue and I will be first in line. There’s just something about wandering among storylines and characters on your own path and schedule, even when knowing you’re likely not to see everything or understand completely what’s happening and I’m there, from Sleep No More,Then She Fell, and Ghost Light to The Grand Paradise,Empire Travel Agency, and Counting Sheep.
I don’t know how I missed Group.BR’s Inside the Wild Heart, which was first presented in a Williamsburg gallery in 2016, then two years later at Aich Studios, an 1848 brownstone and former foundry in the Gramercy Park area. The New York-based Brazilian company filmed one of the 2018 shows, enlisting nine friends with cameras to place themselves throughout the three floors and a mezzanine and take continuous video without getting in the way of the audience, which is allowed to walk, stand, and sit wherever they want as they chase the action over two hours. Artistic director Andressa Furletti didn’t know what she would do with the footage until the pandemic hit and she discovered the Gather.town digital platform, which she immediately realized would supply her with just what was needed in order to virtually reimagine the show, which is based on the writings of prominent Jewish author Clarice Lispector. Thus, it turns out that I didn’t miss the show after all; via the innovative platform, I was able to amble, observe, follow, and interact not only with the recorded footage but with other live audience members as well.
Group.BR uses the Gather.town digital platform to bring the interactive Inside the Wild Heart to the internet
Inside the Wild Heart features characters, dialogue, and plots from nine novels and eight short stories by the Ukraine-born Brazilian Lispector (1920-77), who wrote such books as Near to the Wild Heart, The Passion According to G.H., The Stream of Life, and The Woman Who Killed the Fish. Each audience member is assigned a video-game-like avatar that they guide with their keyboard across an animated architectural rendering with couches, chairs, a fireplace, a bathroom, screening areas, and a bar where they can take a break and speak with others. Everyone is encouraged to keep their cameras on but their microphones muted except when they’re in the bar; whenever you’re in a room, you can not only see the other avatars who are there as well but you can see their names and photos at the top of the screen. There’s also a live chat where you can connect with one another, but the night I went, nearly all the other comments were in Portuguese.
Don’t be in a hurry to try to see everything quickly; you have time to take it slow and linger in a room for fifteen minutes or more as the semblance of a story takes shape, a nonlinear narrative told through video, still photographs, dance, music, prerecorded film, and various surprises. You might encounter a woman in a claw-foot tub, people preparing for a wedding, a lady with a whip, and a ghostlike figure climbing stairs, with talk of love, murder, motherhood, the Society of Shadows, the Tree of Secret Desires, and the existence of God. Make sure to find the rare television interview with Lispector, who shares such thoughts as “Adults are sad and solitary” and “I think that when I’m not writing I’m dead.” Other Lispector quotes pop up here and there, including “Getting lost is also a way,” “What I desire doesn’t have a name yet,” and “If you were you, how would you be and what would you do?”
The show is directed by Linda Wise and performed by Balardini, Furletti, Mirko Faienza, Patricia Faolli, Fabiana Mattedi, Gio Mielle, Gonçalo Ruivo, Yasmin Santana, Ibsen Santos, and Montserrat Vargas, with scenic design and art installations by Vargas and Furletti, costumes by Jussara Lee, lighting by Charlie Jarboe, score by Sergio Krakowski (with Mario Forte on violin), and video design by Paul Leopold. Together they have managed to ably re-create the immersive theater experience online, resulting in a fab interactive presentation that is a lot of fun while introducing you to quite an eclectic writer.
Inside the Wild Heart runs Thursday to Sunday through December 20; on December 10, Group.BR will celebrate the centennial of Lispector’s birth with “Clarice’s Day,” a free sixteen-hour party on Zoom, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube that includes “The Morning Is a Premature Flower” with Balardini (5:00 am), videos of scenes from the books Besieged City and A Breath of Life as performed in Inside the Wild Heart (10:00), such readings and/or discussions as “Clarice in English” (10:20), “Clarice and Visual Arts” (11:00), “Clarice in Life and Works” (12:30), and “Clarice and Theater” (5:00), a musical performance of Sara Carvalhos’s “Perto do Coração Selvagem” by Késia Decoté on the toy piano (2:30), short films (3:00), and a special 7:00 screening of the full play, followed by a talkback. [Ed. note: Inside the Wild Heart is back for a much-deserved encore run, February 12 – March 28.]
Jefferson Mays portrays more than fifty characters in A Christmas Carol (photo by Chris Whitaker)
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Twenty-four-hour stream through January 3, $50 ($30 with code SCROOGE through 12/12) Daily lottery: $15 (10 random winners) www.achristmascarollive.com
Jefferson Mays’s mostly one-man version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is the best filmed theatrical production made during the pandemic that I have seen. It is also the best one I’ve heard. Tony winner Mays may be the star of the holiday tale, spectacularly portraying more than fifty characters in ninety minutes, but Joshua D. Reid nearly steals the show with his stunning sound design, which works hand in hand with Ben Stanton’s pinpoint-precision lighting; headphones and as large a screen as possible are a must to fully appreciate this outstanding presentation. A big monitor and great speakers will also increase the scare level, because first and foremost, this telling is a ghost story, with genuine frights, one of which made my heart drop into my stomach.
Originally produced at the Geffen Playhouse in LA in 2018, the play, adapted by Mays and his wife, Susan Lyon, with director Michael Arden, has been reimagined by Arden and set and costume designer Dane Laffrey for online viewing. It was recorded in October at the historic United Palace theater on Broadway at 175th St., built in 1930 as a lush vaudeville and movie house that served as a church for the Rev. Ike and his ministry from 1969 to 2017. United Palace calls itself the Home of Spiritual Artistry, and that’s exactly what you’ll find in A Christmas Carol.
“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, was Scrooge!” Mays announces early as the narrator. “A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.” The word “solitary” hits us differently during the pandemic lockdown, as we watch a single actor onstage, performing in an empty theater for an audience of one, or maybe a few more, sheltering at home.
He continues, “Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, `My dear Scrooge, how are you?’ No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even blind men’s dogs, when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways. . . . But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.” At that instant, Arden cuts to a far shot of Mays, looking lonely and far away, socially distanced from the rest of humanity.
A Christmas Carol has been reimagined for online viewing during the pandemic (photo by Chris Whitaker)
Cinematographer Maceo Bishop’s camera follows Mays across the space, zooms in for extreme close-ups, and occasionally pulls back to remind us that Mays is on a stage; this Christmas Carol is a hybrid piece of film/theater, a new kind of work that is both and neither, something that is likely to last beyond Covid-19, when venues are open again for audiences to sit together in community while people around the world are craving access to the same show. At one point, when Mays is shifting between Ebenezer Scrooge and one of the ghosts, Mays not only changes his voice for each character, enhanced by Reid’s bold sound manipulation, but he merely needs to shift his shoulders from left to right to move between the roles, his face bathed in green as the ghost and in white light as the grinchy banker. It’s a terrifying scene that could not be captured in the theater for all to see, while on a movie screen it would lose its intimacy. There are also video projections, smoke and fog, and lighting effects so palpable they have an intense physicality to them.
Mays knows his way around multiple parts; his breakthrough came in 2003 in Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning I Am My Own Wife, in which he portrayed the real-life Charlotte von Mahlsdorf and thirty-nine others, earning a Tony, and he played nine members of the D’Ysquith family in the Tony-winning musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. In A Christmas Carol, he plays more than fifty characters, from Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Fezziwig, and Tiny Tim to Fred, Scrooge, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. He does so in the same Victorian outfit, a white shirt under a dark suit and long coat, with a top hat. His hair, styled by Cookie Jordan, fluffs up over each ear, evoking an unbalanced Princess Leia.
Mays inhabits the roles from the very start with an easygoing grace and familiarity; when he was a child, his parents would read the story to the family every year. Two-time Tony nominee Arden (Spring Awakening,Once on This Island) began his career playing Tiny Tim in a Texas community theater production of A Christmas Carol when he was ten. The care and understanding they have for the material shines through; the only weakness is Sufjan Stevens’s treacly caroling, which feels like it was meant for a different holiday show.
A Christmas Carol streams through January 3 and is a benefit for more than fifty local theater companies and venues around the country that have been impacted by the Covid-19 crisis. When two gentlemen knock at the door seeking a charity donation, Scrooge is none too happy, leading to the following exchange:
“Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
He politely gets to the point.
“What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.”
This Christmas Carol should make many people merry during what will be a very challenging holiday season, with the coronavirus raging inside and outside prisons, millions out of work, so many charities and businesses in need of funds, and the desperate need to not be alone overwhelming our daily existence. Mays, Arden, et al. don’t just transport us to another plane for ninety thrilling minutes — they have given us a present that will stay with us for a long time.
MANSAI NOMURA’S KYOGEN: KAGAMI-KAJA (A MIRROR SERVANT) + SHIMIZU (SPRING WATER)
Japan Society
Launch with Watch Party: Wednesday, December 9, free with RSVP (suggested price $5-$20), 8:30 (available on demand through December 31)
Live Talk + Q&A with Mansai Nomura on YouTube: Saturday, December 12, 9:00 www.japansociety.org
A Holder of Important Intangible Cultural Property, kyogen actor Mansai Nomura returns to Japan Society — virtually — in an online double feature launching with a livestreamed watch party complete with real-time commentary on December 9 at 8:30. Nomura, the star of the cult movie duology Onmyoji, was last at Japan Society in 2015 with the Mansaku-no-Kai Kyogen Company, founded by his grandfather in 1957 and then run by his father, Mansaku Nomura, staging the solo piece Nasu no Yoichi, based on a chapter from The Tale of the Heike, as well as Akutaro (Akutaro Reforms) and Bonsan (The Dwarf Tree Thief). (Nomura was previously seen in New York City in March 2013 in Sanbaso, Divine Dance, a collaboration with Hiroshi Sugimoto that was copresented by Japan Society at the Guggenheim.)
This time Nomura, the artistic director of Setagaya Public Theatre, will be performing in two works. The new Kagami-kaja (“A Mirror Servant”) was written for Nomura by comedian, novelist, rapper, and avid gardener Seiko Ito; Nomura conceived of and directs and stars in the story about a servant who gets trapped in his reflection. The evening also includes the traditional piece Shimizu (“Spring Water”), a complex tale involving a trickster servant and a tea ceremony. Nomura will introduce each show, and he will also take part in a live talk and Q&A on December 12 at 9:00 that will delve into the history of the seven-hundred-year-old art form known as kyogen. Admission to both events is free, although there is a suggested donation of $5 to $20 based on what you can afford during these challenging times, during which Japan Society has continued to deliver innovative, cutting-edge programs online. If you miss the livestream of the double feature, it will be available for on-demand viewing through December 31; the discussion will take place on YouTube.
