this week in theater

WE PERSIST! I CAN’T REMEMBER ANYTHING

Who: Penny Fuller, Bob Dishy, James Naughton, Susan Charlotte
What: In-person and livestreamed play reading
Where: Theatre 80 St. Marks and Zoom
When: Monday, April 19, live and on Zoom, 2:00 (available on demand April 24-25, 646-366-9340 / info@foodforthoughtproductions.com)
Why: Food for Thought Productions is now in its twenty-first season of presenting all-star readings of little-known and classic one-act plays by major writers. Its current series, “We Persist!,” kicked off with Christopher Durang’s For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls and Tennessee Williams’s Life Boat Drill, presented live at Theatre 80 St. Marks to a limited, masked audience. The award-winning company is now back for Arthur Miller’s I Can’t Remember Anything, directed by Antony Marsellis and starring Penny Fuller and Bob Dishy as an elderly widow and her late husband’s best friend, respectively; FFTP previously presented the play two decades ago with Elaine Stritch and Dishy, with Miller in attendance. (Miller would later go on to direct shows for the troupe.) The play will be followed by a Q&A with the cast, moderated by FFTP founder Susan Charlotte, with a special appearance by James Naughton, who directed Dishy in Miller’s The Price at the 1999 Williamstown Theatre Festival. In addition, FFTP regular Tony Roberts will read from his 2015 memoir, Do You Know Me? Free tickets to see the show in person are first come, first served, for those who agree to be part of a documentary being made about the company; the recording will be available for a small fee April 24-25. Next up for FFTP is Charlotte’s The Hairdresser on May 24.

TICKET ALERT: A DOZEN DREAMS

A DOZEN DREAMS
Winter Garden at Brookfield Place
230 Vesey St.
Wednesday – Saturday, May 13-30, 2:00 – 8:00, free with RSVP beginning April 19
www.engardearts.org

Site-specific specialists En Garde Arts return to the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place, where they previously staged Harbored, with the immersive performance installation A Dozen Dreams. Free tickets become available on April 19 to experience the fifty-five-minute work at the Winter Garden Wednesdays through Sundays from May 13 to 30. En Garde asked twelve New York City–based women playwrights, “What are you dreaming about right now?” Each one — Sam Chanse, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, Emily Mann, Martyna Majok, Mona Mansour, Rehana Mirza, Ellen McLaughlin, Liza Jessie Peterson, Ren Dara Santiago, Caridad Svich, Lucy Thurber, and Andrea Thome — will give their answer in separate rooms, with visual and environment design by Irina Kruzhilina, projection and video by Brittany Bland, lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, and sound by Rena Anakwe. Attendees, who go through the labyrinthine multimedia installation one at a time or in pod pairs, are invited to share their own pandemic dreams in a thirteenth room. The project, which follows all Covid-19 precautions, was conceived by dramaturg John Clinton Eisner, Kruzhilina, and En Garde Arts artistic director Anne Hamburger, who founded the organization in 1985 and relaunched it in 2014. So far, in-person theatrical works, whether free or not, have sold out fast, so get ready to book your visit on April 19 when reservation lines open up.

THE WANDERING

THE WANDERING
April 15 – May 15, $24.99 – $29.99
experiencethewandering.com

Every spring for more than forty years, the Schubertiade has celebrated the work of Austrian composer Franz Schubert through concerts, exhibitions, lectures, and discussion. Overlapping with the 2021 Schubertiade, which runs April 28 to May 2, is an unusual, immersive hybrid production called The Wandering, available online April 15 through May 15. The multimedia presentation uses film, music, props, postcards, and photography to explore Schubert’s creativity and sexual orientation.

In his 1992 New York Times article “Critic’s Notebook: Was Schubert Gay? If He Was, So What? Debate Turns Testy” about a 92nd St. Y symposium on the composer, Edward Rothstein wrote, “As for the issue of homosexuality, Mr. [Maynard] Solomon’s case is compellingly argued, but I defer to scholars for a final verdict. The most vexing problems arise in judging the musical importance of the composer’s sexuality. Mr. Solomon asserts, for example, that Schubert’s homosexuality demonstrated a ‘resistance to compulsion’ and that it revealed a ‘heroic region in Schubert’s personality.’ But while Schubert obviously possessed a profound knowledge of suffering and isolation, heroism seems alien to his compositions, imported from some contemporary views of sexual ‘unorthodoxy.’”

Conceived by actor and curator Calista Small, baritone and actor Jeremy Weiss, designer Charlotte McCurdy, theater artist Christine Shaw, filmmaker Lara Panah-Izadi, and animator Zach Bell, The Wandering, which delves into Schubert’s suffering, isolation, heroism, and sexuality in abstract ways, is meant to take place over four days, although you can proceed at your own pace. Each day features a short film starring Weiss as the Wanderer, a curious man traversing a strange landscape, with music by Schubert played by pianist Marika Yasuda and German lyrics sung by Weiss. (English translations by Julian Manresa are available.)

Jeremy Weiss portrays the Wanderer in hybrid immersive production about Franz Schubert

In the Matthew Barney–like films, which can be viewed only once — there’s no going back after you start each one — cinematographer Frank Sun follows the Wanderer as he encounters a series of mysterious characters out on the road, in a forest, in the historic Tivoli Theatre in Downers Grove, Illinois, and at the landmark Wright in Kankakee home in the Illinois woods: Bambi Banks Couleé as the Performer, Ethan Kirschbaum as the Doppelgänger, Daria Harper as the Crow, Small as the Crystallography Denizen, and Josh Romero as the Gardener Denizen. Directed by Panah-Izadi, the films, ranging between six and ten minutes apiece, are beautifully shot tone poems incorporating music, theater, and dance, with choreography by Craig Black, sound by Jared O’Brien, costumes by Casey Wood (the Doppelgänger outfit is particularly impressive), sets by Rachel Cole, and hair and makeup by Erica Martens.

After watching each individual film, you open a packet you received in the mail (well worth the additional $5 cost) containing an object for you to interact with, poetry, letters, pre-addressed stamped postcards you can fill with drawings and/or words and send, QR codes for augmented reality (by Sahil Gupta), and various prompts surrounding your personal “wunderlich,” which can mean “wondrous,” “queer,” “odd,” “fantastical,” or “whimsical.” Several tasks involve going outside, taking a photo, and posting it to the gallery on the main site, known as the Prism (the web design is by TanTan Wang), which features a perennial meditative soundscape. There’s also a page where you can listen separately to the songs, which include “Wandrers Nachtlied,” “Die Krähe,” “Die Gebüsche,” “Nacht Und Träume,” and “Ganymed.”

Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797 and died there at the age of thirty-one, having produced more than 1,500 works, from orchestral overtures, operas, and symphonies to lieder, cantatas, and song cycles. In an 1822 letter the composer sent to his friend and maybe lover, Austrian actor, poet, and librettist Franz von Schober (and which is excerpted in the show’s packet), he describes a dream he had, explaining, “I wandered into a distant land. . . . For long, long years, I sang songs. When I wanted to sing about love, it turned to pain. When I wanted to sing of pain, it turned to love. Thus, love and pain divided me.”

Weiss responds with his own letter to Schubert, writing, “Your music was the first thing I turned to in a moment of crisis during a pandemic. Thank you for writing of your pain, and of your love. Did you ever learn not to let them divide you? Might we?” It’s a question a lot of us have been asking, especially during this last, tumultuous year.

THE CIVILIANS PRESENTS SHOWING UP

Accra Shepp’s portraits of BLM activists are inspiration for virtual evening of music and theater (photo © Accra Shepp)

Who: The Civilians
What: Livestreamed music, art, and performance
Where: Civilians online
When: Friday, April 16, free with RSVP (suggested donation $15), 7:30
Why: In the spring of 2020, award-winning photographer Accra Shepp began taking pictures of Black Lives Matter activists on the front lines, posting them to Instagram; his Covid Journals started with “Contagion,” with “Hunger” and “Justice” to follow. Those portraits are now the basis for Showing Up, a livestreamed event led by Brooklyn-based “investigative theater” specialists the Civilians in which four actors (Becca Blackwell, Cecil Blutcher, Sheldon Best, and Marsha Stephanie Blake) and a group of musicians and singers (bassist Rashaan Carter with vocalist Anaïs Maviel; composer Jacinth Greywoode and singer-songwriter Rebecca Hart; Jamie Lozano, with Javier Ignacio; and Katie Madison and composer-musician Jarret Murray, with Deborah Cowell) will perform new material inspired by the New York City native’s photos and by interviews with some of his subjects conducted by Blake, Jesse Baxter, Bailey Jordan Garcia, Dee Harper, Matt Maher, and Riley Tollen.

“I was introduced to Shepp’s Covid Journals this past fall and was moved by his striking ability to connect with each subject,” Civilians artistic director Steve Cosson said in a statement. “In Shepp’s photos, I saw an individual assert their presence on his or her own terms, giving a human-scale dimension to these larger, collective events. I’m delighted that Shepp agreed to work with us on this project, offering an opportunity for the voice of the individuals in these photos to ‘show up’ through their conversations with our company of interviewers and the interpretation of their words by actors and musicians.” Copresented with the International Center for Photography and Alice Austen House and with the collaboration of the Alfred Stieglitz Society at the Met, Showing Up is directed by Colette Robert, with video direction by Sadah Espii Proctor; Nidra Sous la Terre serves as host. Admission is free with advance RSVP; a talk with Shepp bookends the evening. Up next for the Civilians is Black Feminist Video Game April 27 to May 9.

JOHN CULLUM: AN ACCIDENTAL STAR

John Cullum shares a life in the theater in one-man show (photo by Carol Rosegg)

JOHN CULLUM: AN ACCIDENTAL STAR
Available on demand through May 6, $28.75 – $81 (pay-what-you-can)
Live watch party: Saturday, April 17, 2:00
irishrep.org
www.vineyardtheatre.org

“Most of the shows I’ve done – and the parts I’ve played – have come to me through the back door, by accidents, you might say, or coincidence, or just plain luck. And tonight, I’d like to share with you some of my lucky accidents,” two-time Tony winner John Cullum says at the start of his wonderful one-man show, An Accidental Star, streaming on demand through April 21. Copresented by three theaters that have played an important role in Cullum’s long, distinguished career, the Vineyard, the Irish Rep, and Goodspeed Musicals, the eighty-minute production takes viewers behind the curtain as Cullum relates funny and poignant anecdotes and sings songs from throughout his more than sixty years in the business.

Cullum, who turned ninety-one last month, was born in Tennessee and had dreams of making it as an actor. When he arrived in New York City in 1956, he was ready to do whatever it took to land an audition and get an acting job. Through a series of lucky accidents, he soon found himself cast in three summer plays for Joe Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park, even though he had zero experience with the Bard. That led directly to auditioning for Moss Hart for Camelot on Broadway, where Cullum would meet Richard Burton, who became a lifelong friend.

Julie McBride plays piano as John Cullum reflects on his long career in An Accidental Star (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Cullum, who won Tonys for Shenandoah and On the Twentieth Century, was nominated for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Urinetown, and 110 in the Shade, and scored an Emmy nomination for his role as Holling Vincoeur in Northern Exposure, also chronicles experiences involving Maximilian Schell, Louis Jourdan, Lerner & Lowe, Hal Prince, Robert Preston, Robert Goulet, Madeline Kahn, The Scottsboro Boys, and his wife of more than sixty-one years, choreographer and writer Emily Frankel. Filmed by Carlos Cardona in January onstage at the Irish Rep, An Accidental Star was conceived by Cullum and Jeff Berger, written by David Thompson (The Scottsboro Boys; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), and directed by Lonny Price and Matt Cowart (110 in the Shade, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill), with music supervision by Georgia Stitt and music direction by Julie McBride, who accompanies Cullum on piano. The cameras shoot Cullum, dressed in an unbuttoned vest, purple shirt, and brown pants, from all sides as he sits on a stool, gets up and spreads his arms for a big finale, and walks over to the piano to join McBride. He’s an engaging raconteur who is deservedly proud of what he’s accomplished yet humble enough to understand how fortunate he’s been on this amazing journey, which includes a live watch party on April 17 at 2:00.

UNRAVELLED

Dr. Bruce Miller (Leo Marks) meets with Anne Adams (Lucy Davenport) and her husband, Robert (Rob Nagle), in Jake Broder’s UnRavelled (photo by Corwin Evans)

UNRAVELLED
The Global Brain Health Institute / Trinity College Dublin
Available on demand through April 30, free
www.gbhi.org/unravelled

One of the most fascinating plays of the Zoom era comes to us from an unlikely source: the Global Brain Health Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. Jake Broder’s UnRavelled is a deeply affecting ninety-minute play that shares the true story of Canadian scientist Anne Adams, who, in 1994, at the age of fifty-three, became obsessed with Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” and made a remarkable painting based on the 1928 musical work, which Ravel composed for dancer Ida Rubenstein in 1928, when he was fifty-three. As it turns out, both Adams and Ravel had the same serious brain disease that affects memory while lighting a creative fuse.

Directed by Nike Doukas and edited by Corwin Evans in Zoom boxes, UnRavelled stars Lucy Davenport as Anne, a mathematician, chemist, and biologist, and Rob Nagle as her husband, Robert, a traffic architectural engineer. They are trying to hold together following a serious accident involving their son, but when they continue to have trouble communicating and Anne starts spending more time by herself in her studio, listening to “Bolero” and painting, Robert begins to suspect something else is going on, and Dr. Bruce Miller (Leo Marks) ultimately confirms that.

Doukas cuts between the current reality, in color, and Anne’s imaginary conversations with Ravel (Conor Duffy) about art, love, and science, usually in black-and-white. The play not only traces the intricate details of Anne’s illness but the effects it has on Robert, a gentle, caring man whose world has also been turned upside down. Prior to her submersion into “Bolero,” Anne is painting strawberries over and over, which upsets Robert. “You aren’t a painter,” he tells her. Anne responds, “You’re going to tell me what I can and can’t do?” Robert: “You’d be wasting your gifts, your experience in your field. And you will leave the world a poorer place, let alone our family.” Anne: “You don’t get to take a spiritual high ground. . . . I don’t need my choices mansplained to me, thank you. . . . I’m stopping to paint strawberries for a while, but that should be all I have to say.” Robert: “Yes, that’s true if you were some normal person and it didn’t matter, but you’re not and it does.” Later, after Anne considers leaving her chair at the university, Robert says to himself, “Seriously, who are you and what have you done with my wife?”

Anne Adams (Lucy Davenport) and Maurice Ravel (Conor Duffy) have something in common in fascinating new play (photo by Corwin Evans)

Broder includes interstitial scenes in which Dr. Miller, a neurologist who becomes Anne’s physician, is giving an intriguing lecture about modern art, while Ravel also speaks with Rubenstein (Melissa Greenspan), who has commissioned “Bolero,” which Ravel detests and can’t believe he actually wrote. “It just dumped itself into my lap all at once,” Ravel tells Anne. “At the premiere, the crowd roared. And I knew that this would be the first line of my obituary, and there is not a note of music in it.” The merging of the different aspects of science and the artistic process in the two distinct time periods works well as more information comes out about Anne’s condition. Nagle stands out among the cast, representing a kind of everyperson suddenly having to face a difficult, unexpected situation that he can’t control; he’s the character the audience can most identify with. The power of the play, which features the London Symphony Orchestra’s version of “Bolero” as well as French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard performing Ravel’s “Jeux d’eau, M.30,” lies in how it develops organically, like a work of art or, sadly, an untreatable disease.

Copresented by GBHI and Trinity College Dublin, UnRavelled is streaming for free through April 30. In conjunction with the play, there are several talkbacks and panel discussions available on demand, with Broder (Our American Hamlet, His Royal Hipness Lord Buckley), Doukas UnRavelled (Red Ink, The Hothouse), GBHI codirector and UCSF Memory and Aging Center director Miller, neurologists Bill Seeley and Adit Friedberg, neuroscientist Francesca Farina, theater and dementia specialist Nicky Taylor, GBHI alumni relations manager Camellia Latta, as well as a related dance choreographed by Magda Kaczmarska.

RICH KIDS: A HISTORY OF SHOPPING MALLS IN TEHRAN

Javaad Alipoor and Peyvand Sadeghian guide viewers through multimedia, immersive Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran

RICH KIDS: A HISTORY OF SHOPPING MALLS IN TEHRAN
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
April 1-18, $15.99
www.woollymammoth.net
javaadalipoor.co.uk

The Javaad Alipoor Company’s Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran is a virtual production of, by, and for its time like no other. Previously presented at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival in January, the immersive online experience, now livestreaming from DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company through April 18, takes on capitalism, consumerism, climate change, government corruption, income inequality, colonialism, the collapse of civilization, geopolitics, and just about everything else under the sun as it relates to the past and future of the Anthropocene Epoch, all stemming from a fatal car accident in Iran in 2015.

On May 1 of that year, the New York Times reported that twenty-year-old Parivash Akbarzadeh and twenty-one-year-old Mohammad Hossein Rabbani-Shirazi were killed when his brand-new yellow Porsche, which she was driving, crashed after reaching speeds of more than 120 miles per hour. The focus of the story, however, went beyond the tragedy and instead zeroed in on the public reaction in the aftermath, particularly how people took to social media to lambast Parivash and Hossein, the latter described by the Times as “the nouveau riche grandson of an ayatollah,” for their carefree, luxurious lifestyle, which they and those like them show off on Instagram, flaunting the country’s rigid Islamic laws.

The follow-up to 2017’s multimedia The Believers Are But Brothers, about the birth of Islamic radicalization over the internet and WhatsApp, Rich Kids was previously staged at the Edinburgh Festival and various venues in England but has been reimagined for online viewing. Written by Alipoor, created by Alipoor and Kirsty Housley, and performed by Alipoor and Peyvand Sadeghian, the seventy-minute show goes backward in time from the crash itself to the specific events leading up to it as well as to the decades and centuries before that impacted the development of current Iranian culture, including the role of American politics and capitalism. The narrative toggles between Instagram Live, where text and photos tell the story of Parivash and Hossein with hashtags to such other pages as #richkidsoftehran and #mallwave and the internet, where Alipoor and Sadeghian go on a deep dive into the anthropological annals of the world using animation, archival footage, European and traditional Safavid painting, and video of a burning planet bathed in dripping red. “History isn’t linear,” they point out. “No past. No future. There’s no reason why time as we feel it should be a physical thing.”

In its nine-part manifesto, the Javaad Alipoor Company declares, “Every work we make should say something directly about politics,” “Every project needs to speak to history, and find something new about how we got here,” and “Things have to be fun,” among other statements of purpose. Rich Kids accomplishes that and more, although it can at times be bumpy as you switch screens and technological elements overlap. Along the way it makes hard-hitting observations about who and where we are in the twenty-first century, not just Iranians or the wealthy children of the elite filled with contempt but every one of us. “We’re not the first people to feel like our world is ending,” they explain. “We spend a lot of time thinking about how the world will end, but we almost never think to ask those whose worlds have already ended.” They also make note of how “we now upload more pictures to Instagram every day than existed in total a hundred years ago.”

The play is perhaps best summed up by an image of a huge fireball exploding as Alipoor and Sadeghian wonder “why we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of humanity.” To keep the investigation going, performances on Friday will be followed by community conversations with such facilitators as Héctor Flores Komatsu, Adam A. Elsayigh, and Trà Nguyễn, while Sunday shows will conclude with talkbacks featuring Alipoor and journalists and cartoonists, moderated by Cynthia Schneider.