this week in theater

SUNDAY

A group of close friends gather for their Sunday book club in world premiere at the Atlantic (photo by Monique Carboni)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 13, $66.50-$86.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

The first rule of book club should be: You do not talk about book club. Tony winner Jack Thorne has followed up his massive hit, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, with the significantly smaller scale Sunday, an intimate drama, directed by Obie winner Lee Sunday Evans, set on a Sunday when a group of close friends meet for their book club. Self-obsessed millennials Alice (Ruby Frankel), Marie (Sadie Scott), Jill (Juliana Canfield), Keith (Christian Strange), and Milo (Zane Pais) have gathered in Jill and Marie’s cluttered New York City apartment supposedly to discuss Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant but, much to Alice’s consternation, begin by talking about just about anything except the Pulitzer Prize winner’s classic work of fiction. Tyler’s book details a family’s survival after a father’s desertion; theatergoers may wish there were more than children in this narrative as well. It’s a memory play narrated by Alice, who at times sits in a high balcony in the back brick wall, watching the action as we are, sharing details about the characters and telling us about the “most defining moments” of their lives. “Marie is now twenty-four but everyone thinks she’s twenty-two,” Alice says. “She had to take two years off from college and rather than remember those years she’s decided they didn’t exist. She likes books, chicken, alcohol, her roommate, and the possibilities if not the reality of New York.”

Downstairs neighbor Bill (Maurice Jones) shares his concerns with Marie (Sadie Scott) in Jack Thorne’s Sunday (photo by Monique Carboni)

This kids are definitely home alone, and not really adults: Shortly before the book club meeting begins, Marie’s downstairs neighbor, an odd, awkward older man named Bill (Maurice Jones), comes by to tell her to keep the music down because he needs to get a good night’s sleep before work, something Marie wouldn’t know about, since her recent internship ended without the offer of a full-time job. Once the gang is together they discuss morality, trust, toxic masculinity, sincerity, sex, and whether they would relive their childhoods, which leads to some brutal battling. But it’s all nonsense spouted by self-absorbed twentysomethings wrestling with personal identity and self-pity, and it’s rarely dramatically compelling. The narrative occasionally stops, Masha Tsimring’s lighting shifts, and the characters break out into stylized dance movements choreographed by Evans to music by Daniel Kluger. It’s actually more exciting to see them facing their inner angst and demons this way than listening to them drone on about life and literature, which they do eventually get to. Brett J. Banakis’s set is centered by a mountainous wall of books, from Danielle Steel to David Foster Wallace; it also includes a working sink and toilet. The two scenes with Scott (Downtown Race Riot, CRSHD) and Jones (The Lifespan of a Fact, Linda) are the best in the play, especially the latter one, which has gorgeous moments, but Thorne (King Kong, The End of History) and Evans (Dance Nation, In the Green) can’t quite figure out how to conclude the play, which opened tonight at the Atlantic and runs through October 13. Of course, the second rule of book club is also: You do not talk about book club. And I’ve already said enough.

WIVES

Diane de Poitiers (Aadya Bedi) and archrival Queen Catherine de’ Medici (Purva Bedi) fight over the affections of King Henri II (Sathya Sridharan) in Wives (photo by Joan Marcus)

Playwrights Horizons
Peter Jay Sharp Theater
416 West 42nd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 6, $49-$89
www.playwrightshorizons.org

Jaclyn Backhaus follows up her widely acclaimed Men on Boats and India Pale Ale, which earned her the Horton Foote Prize for Most Promising New American Play, with the world premiere of Wives, a disjointed, disappointing look at the women behind powerful men. The eighty-minute production, which opened Monday night at Playwrights Horizons, consists of four disparate scenes; the first three focus on the wives, ex-wives, and lovers of historical figures either near death or dead. In mid-sixteenth-century France, Queen Catherine de’ Medici (Purva Bedi), the wife of King Henri II (Sathya Sridharan), fights with his lover, Diane de Poitiers (Aadya Bedi), as he prepares for a jousting tournament, and the cook (Adina Verson) shares her secret for chopping onions. “Go to the larder and reach into a sack for a pair of yellow onions,” she says as if on a cooking show. “Find the ones that are not soggy because a soggy onion is a rotten onion and in sixteenth-century France a rotten onion will kill you.”

Four hundred years later, the recently deceased Ernest Hemingway (Sridharan) reads his own eulogy in Idaho, then his current and former spouses, Hadley Richardson (Purva Bedi), Martha Gellhorn (Aadya Bedi), and Mary Welsh (Verson), discuss various aspects of Big Ern’s life. “Don’t you just wonder like sometimes like how chewy and hot it would be to like be married to like such a thick slab of masculinity?” Martha says. “Just to like be tethered to a monolith that happens to be like the pinnacle of all manhood? But also, like, to own him? Like to be married is to be like property of someone but also like to own them is like the technical term. Sometimes I just totally fucking wondered what it would be for him to be mine. Well, he was mine for a time. It sucked.”

The action then shifts back to early-nineteenth-century Rajasthan, India, where hyper-moralistic British colonialist Aloysious Patterson (Verson) is spying on Maharajadhiraja Sawai Madho Singh II (Sridharan) to document his immorality with “his fave concubine, the noted witch Roop Rai” (Purva Bedi), despite being married to the Maharani (Aadya Bedi), who understands her husband’s needs and has no problem with his culturally acceptable visits to the zenana to seek additional sex partners. The Maharaja is ill and knows he is no longer in control. “Who are you dedicated to?” Roop Rai asks. “You,” the Maharaja answers. “Who do you serve?” she asks. “You,” he responds. “AGAIN!!” “YOU. YOU!!! You!!!”

Maharajadhiraja Sawai Madho Singh II (Sridharan) seeks healing from Roop Rai (Purva Bedi) and his wife, the Maharani (Aadya Bedi), in world premiere at Playwrights Horizons (photo by Joan Marcus)

The first three acts don’t flow together smoothly but have smart, funny moments in this often slapstick battle of the sexes, but it all falls apart in a frustrating and tame finale. In my otherwise favorable review of India Pale Ale, I wrote, “The play is dragged down by late pedantic speeches by Deepa and Sunny that are wholly unnecessary, merely explaining what we’ve already seen.” I can say the same thing about Wives, which moves to the present, where Oxbridge junior Swarn (Aadya Bedi) arrives at a meeting of a commune of witches led by sophomore Clarisse (Verson) and overseen by a portrait of Virginia Woolf. When asked what she hopes to accomplish, Swarn says, “I want to untether myself from the visions made by men.” It’s an admirable desire that quickly devolves into dogmatic pretension. “We’re here to help you learn who you’ve been in order to help you see who you’ll be,” a character tells Swarn, seeking to empower her in clichéd and didactic ways.

Reid Thompson’s previous playful sets and Valérie Thérèse Bart’s adorable costumes now get serious and Margot Bordelon’s (Something Clean, Eddie and Dave) appropriately loosey-goosey direction becomes heavy-handed and unctuous as Backhaus is determined to make her point by driving it home over and over again. Wives began life as three separate plays, and the ending makes you feel that, anchored by a forced conclusion that preaches at an audience that the cast and crew have already won over.

FERN HILL

Close friends gather to talk about their future together in (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Close friends gather to talk about their future together in Michael Tucker’s Fern Hill (photo by Carol Rosegg)

59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 27, $75.50
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org

The Big Chill meets Cocoon and the Friends episode “The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break” in Michael Tucker’s wonderfully spry Fern Hill, which opened tonight at 59E59 in its New York City premiere. The play takes place at a farmhouse called Fern Hill, owned by Sunny (Jill Eikenberry) and Jer (Mark Blum). They have invited two other couples, longtime friends Billy (Mark Linn-Baker) and Michiko (Jodi Long) and Vincent (John Glover) and Darla (Ellen Parker), to celebrate the men’s milestone birthdays and also discuss the possibility of all six of them living together at the farmhouse, enjoying life and caring for one another as they face the inevitable: old age, sickness, and death. Jer, a philosopher and writer, is seventy that day; Billy, who is in a semi-successful classic rock band, will turn sixty the following week; and painter Vincent will hit the big eight-oh in a few months. The usually stoned Billy, always quick with a joke, refers to the three of them as “the father, the son, and the holy shit.” The six musketeers talk about wine, clam sauce, drugs, music, new hips, bourbon, art, and sex — they have a lot to say about sex, as the three couples are still getting busy in bed, apparently on a near-nightly basis. “What do you say, darling? Shall I bend you over the plow for a few minutes before we start dinner?” Jer asks Sunny.

One of the central questions is whether they will refer to their new living arrangements as an orphanage or a commune, almost as if they were children or young adults again. As Dylan Thomas wrote in his 1945 memory poem “Fern Hill,” which was published in his book Deaths and Entrances: “And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns / About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home, / In the sun that is young once only, / Time let me play and be / Golden in the mercy of his means.” It’s all fun and games until an affair comes to light; the sexual betrayal has an immediate impact not only on that couple but on the future of all six of them. “How is it that we could be married for all these years and had sex — what? — fifty thousand times? — and still be so fucking dumb about it?” Sunny declares at the end of the first act.

A promising weekend turns sour for Jer (Mark Blum) and Sunny (Jill Eikenberry) in New York premiere at 59E59 (photo by Carol Rosegg)

It’s genuinely refreshing to watch six older, mature men and women discuss sex, sharing how often they get it and how good — or not so good — it can be. Not everyone is comfortable delving into the gory details, but these friends have long ago decided not to keep any secrets from one another, even about what’s going on under the covers, especially if they’re going to be spending their golden years together, living side-by-side-by-side. Jessica Parks’s kitchen set is charming and welcoming, and director Nadia Tass (Malcolm, e-baby) provides just the right gentle touches to Tucker’s (The M Spot, Living in a Foreign Language: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Love in Italy) sharp dialogue. What could have been pompous and doctrinaire — listening to seemingly well-off drunk and high people theorize on how great their lives are — could have been torture, but instead it’s illuminating and insightful.

The chemistry among the stellar cast is superb, starting with Obie and Emmy winner Eikenberry (Lemon Sky, The Kid), Tucker’s wife and LA Law costar, whose vulnerability is the key to the drama, and she displays it beautifully, her youthful spirit intoxicating; a terrific Linn-Baker (Perfect Strangers, On the Twentieth Century) offers the comic relief, Obie winner Blum (Mozart in the Jungle, Gus and Al) is the dour naysayer, Long (Flower Drum Song, Long Story Short) is smart and alluring, Tony winner Glover (Smallville, Love! Valour! Compassion!) is as ineffable as ever, and Parker (The Heidi Chronicles, 20th Century Blues) is as steady as they come. It often feels like they’re six real friends hanging out, not six actors performing a fictional work to an audience. The ending is liable to lead to arguments about which characters are right, which are wrong, who gets off easy, and what will happen next; a few days after having seen the show, I’m still debating with the person I went with. And when theater can have that kind of an effect on you while also being vastly entertaining, it has more than done its job.

DANIEL FISH: WHITE NOISE

Bruce McKenzie stars in Daniel Fish’s multimedia adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl.
September 20-22, $55-$65
212-992-8484
nyuskirball.org

I first encountered the endlessly inventive, unpredictable work of Daniel Fish four years ago with A (radically condensed and expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a brilliantly devised piece that combined a tennis-ball machine with actors performing lines spoken by author David Foster Wallace from audiobooks, interviews, and speeches. The New Jersey–born, New York City–based creator also involves film and classic theater in his avant-garde oeuvre, which includes adaptations of Molière’s The Misanthrope, Clifford Odets’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life, a piece titled Tom Ryan Thinks He’s James Mason Starring in a Movie by Nicholas Ray in Which a Man’s Illness Provides an Escape from the Pain, Pressure, and Loneliness of Trying to Be the Ultimate American Father, Only to Drive Him Further into the More Thrilling Though Possibly Lonelier Roles of Addict and Misunderstood Visionary. More recently, his Tony-winning revival of Oklahoma! is dividing audiences and critics at Circle in the Square.

Daniel Fish’s White Noise runs at NYU Skirball September 20-22

Fish now has turned his attention to consumerism run rampant as depicted in one of the best American novels of the second half of the twentieth century, Don DeLillo’s National Book Award–winning White Noise. Initially staged last year by Theater Freiburg and Ruhrfestspiele Recklingshausen in Germany, the seventy-minute multimedia work, running September 20-22 at NYU’S Skirball Center, focuses on DeLillo’s extensive use of lists within his narrative. For example: “The ashram is located on the outskirts of the former copper-smelting town of Tubb, Montana, now called Dharamsalapur. The usual rumors abound of sexual freedom, sexual slavery, drugs, nudity, mind control, poor hygiene, tax evasion, monkey-worship, torture, prolonged and hideous death.” And: “You know how I am. I think everything is correctible. Given the right attitude and the proper effort, a person can change a harmful condition by reducing it to its simplest parts. You can make lists, invent categories, devise charts and graphs. This is how I am able to teach my students how to stand, sit and walk, even though I know you think these subjects are too obvious and nebulous and generalized to be reduced to component parts. I’m not a very ingenious person but I know how to break things down, how to separate and classify. We can analyze posture, we can analyze eating, drinking and even breathing. How else do you understand the world, is my way of looking at it.”

White Noise: Freely Inspired by the Novel by Don DeLillo is performed by Bruce McKenzie as Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney, with live music by composer and percussionist Bobby Previte. The bold projections are by Jim Findlay (including an appearance on video by nineteen German teenagers), with sets by Andrew Leiberman and costumes by Doey Lüthi. I could make a long list of reasons why you should see this, but it’s not really necessary. Just go if you want to experience another unusual theatrical adventure by the amazing Mr. Fish.

THE COOPING THEORY 1969: WHO KILLED EDGAR ALLAN POE?

The Poe Society brings in a medium to try to find out who killed Edgar Allan in The Cooping Theory

RPM Underground
244 West 54th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through November 2, $75 (plus $25 beverage/food minimum per guest)
www.knock3xs.com

On October 7, 1849, short story master and poet extraordinaire Edgar Allan Poe died a mysterious death at the age of forty. In conjunction with the 170th anniversary of his demise, Poseidon Theatre Company has brought back a revamped version of The Cooping Theory 1969: Who Killed Edgar Allan Poe?, which the Manhattan-based troupe calls “An Immersive Paranormal.” The show, previously presented two years ago in a Brooklyn speakeasy in a somewhat different form, takes place in a series of rooms in RPM Underground, a funky karaoke bar on West Fifty-Fourth St. filled with old-time memorabilia, from typewriters and gas signs to radios and a dentist chair. It’s 1969, and the Poe Society is holding a séance to try to contact Poe so he can tell them how he died, whether from drink, natural causes, murder, or, as many believe, the nineteenth-century practice called cooping, in which men were kidnapped and tortured in order to force them to vote for a political candidate multiple times.

Every night, an audience of no more than sixty adults is sworn in as new members of the society by wealthy, budding psychologist Tom Turner (Aaron Latta-Morissette), upbeat actress Anna Carver (Makaela Shealy), the heart-on-his-sleeve Jimmy Harder (Johnny Pozzi), and the ever-dependable Gina Standen (Samantha Lacey Johnson), along with WASPy pledge twins Crispin (Brian Alford) and Cordelia Carlyle (Estelle Olivia), who have hired Madam Harlow (Dara Kramer) to lead the proceedings. (The names of the characters were inspired by Poe’s real life and writings: for example, he was born on Carver St. in Boston; MGM once claimed that Jean Harlow was a direct descendant of Poe, who had no children; he would have been named Cordelia if he were born a girl — his mother had recently portrayed the king’s youngest daughter in Lear; he publicly decried the work of Thomas Carlyle; and he used to find respite on a rocky knoll he named Mount Tom along the Hudson River.)

You never know what’s going to happen in The Cooping Theory

The evening begins with a cocktail hour during which the audience can mingle with the characters, having one-on-one conversations that can be both entertaining and informative; I learned a lot while talking to Anna and Cordelia and catching Jimmy playing a haunting ballad on his guitar. Then Madam Harlow enters and the show really takes off; audience members are free to stay in one space, follow specific characters for extended periods of time, or just go with the flow. You will not be touched or asked to do anything you don’t want to; the rules and recommendations are supplied early on by director Aaron Salazar, who conceived the fab project. You can navigate at your own pace, although the narrative grows more and more frantic and exciting as it nears the grand finale, so be sure to wear comfortable shoes and not settle in anywhere for too long a stretch. The dialogue — the aptly named Nate Raven, formerly known as Nate Suggs before he married Rick Raven, is credited with writing the book — is chock full of direct and indirect references to Poe’s work, from such popular stories as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tomb of Ligeia, The Masque of the Red Death, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, Berenice, and Eleonora to such poems as The Raven, Annabel Lee, Spirits of the Dead, and The Conqueror Worm. Knowledge of Poe’s work is not a prerequisite, but it is a bonus.

The cast is delightfully energetic and extremely careful not to bowl anyone over as they race down hallways and close doors for more private moments. You don’t have to be a Poe fan or believe in the spiritual world in order to have a great time at The Cooping Theory 1969, but the more you invest of yourself, the more thrilling it all is. “It’s gotten a bit freaky, hasn’t it?” Anna says at one point. It sure has, but only in the best way. (Poe addicts will also want to check out John Kevin Jones’s one-man performance piece Killing an Evening with Edgar Allan Poe at the Merchant’s House Museum from September 24 to November 3.)

THE TALMUD

Meta-Phys. Ed. multimedia production brings together the Talmud and Kung Fu movies (photo by Jenny Sharp)

The Doxsee @ Target Margin Theater
232 52nd St. between Second & Third Aves., Sunset Park
Through September 28, $20-$25
866-811-4111
www.targetmargin.org/talmud

In his 2012 book A Kosher Christmas: ’Tis the Season to Be Jewish, Rabbi Joshua Eli Plaut discusses, among other things, American Jewish families’ penchant for eating Chinese food every December 25 and San Francisco’s annual Kung Pao Kosher Comedy show, taking place December 24-26 this year, providing “Jewish comedy on Christmas in a Chinese restaurant.” Experimental theater director Jesse Freedman, who cofounded Meta-Phys. Ed. in 2011 with Rabbi Bronwen Mullin, has found another connection between Jewish and Chinese culture, turning it into a new multimedia show, The Talmud, which opened last night at the Doxsee @ Target Margin Theater in Sunset Park.

“The Talmud is a very exciting and important Jewish text and is incredibly difficult to understand,” he explains in a statement. “I was watching a Kung Fu movie and thought, ‘This Kung Fu movie reminds me of the Talmud.’ I started to learn more Talmud and thought, ‘This reminds me of Kung Fu movies.’ I started to watch and learn more about Chinese martial arts cinema, my appreciation for them deepened, and the world of the Talmud, which had previously been opaque to me, started to make sense.” As a Jew and a Kung Fu movie fan, I fully understand where Freedman is coming from. The Talmud, consisting of the Mishnah and the Gemara, is a dense text that examines Jewish law and customs, requiring years of study to grasp its labyrinthine breadth. However, not even years of study will help you figure out what is happening in most Kung Fu movies, whether they are in Chinese or English. Trying to figure out the plot in films that have been dubbed into English rather than subtitled is especially confusing and entertaining, worthy of its own Mishnah investigation. Freedman’s complex production fits right in with those themes.

The Talmud continues at the Doxsee @ Target Margin Theater in Sunset Park through September 28 (photo by Jenny Sharp)

Continuing through September 28, The Talmud is set on a chessboard floor with several long, narrow, translucent curtains, reminiscent of Chinese scroll paintings, onto which Hebrew words from the Talmud are projected, as well as live streams of the action occurring onstage, courtesy of an iPhone basically strapped to the stomach of actress Lucie Allouche. (The senic design is by Kyu Shin, with projections by Lacey Erb and costumes by Karen Boyer.) Allouche, Abrielle Kuo, Eli M. Schoenfeld, and Jae Woo detail stories from one chapter of the Talmud, including the complex law of Sicarii, the case of mistaken identity involving enemies Kamtza and bar Kamtza and Nero, and the battle between zealots and sages over peace with the Romans. These pieces are dense with meaning that is difficult to follow within the play’s narrative; as you are still evaluating what you have just seen, the next tale proceeds, jumbling together in your mind. The show is punctuated by choreographed Kung Fu movement among the four actors, occasionally enhanced with swooshing sound effects; the score is by Avi Amon, with lovely music performed onstage by Lu Liu on pipa. The Talmud is a well-crafted production, with good performances and intriguing staging, but, like reading the Talmud and watching Kung Fu movies, you’ll be left scratching your head, not quite fully sated.

CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL: OPENING NIGHT

Crossing the Line Festival opens with Isabelle Adjani in Opening Night

French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
September 12-14
Festival continues through October 12
212-355-6160
crossingthelinefestival.org/2019

After the audience has settled in at FIAF’s Florence Gould Hall for Cyril Teste’s multimedia adaptation of John Cassavetes’s 1977 film Opening Night, there appears to be confusion on the stage, as a man in headphones converses in French with an unseen tech crew, their words not translated on the supertitles screen. It’s a disorienting moment, especially if you don’t understand French, and a terrific introduction to one of the themes of the play, the pull between fact and fiction, fantasy and reality inherent in theater and cinema. The man in the headphones is the play-within-a-play’s director, Manny (Morgan Lloyd Sicard), who is helming a melodrama featuring famous actress Myrtle Gordon (five-time César winner Isabelle Adjani) and her stoic costar, Maurice (Frédéric Pierrot); in the original film, itself based on a play by John Cromwell, Gena Rowlands was Myrtle, her real-life husband, Cassavetes, was Maurice, and one of their closest friends, Ben Gazzara, was Manny, their personal relationships further blurring the lines of reality.

With opening night a day away, Myrtle is having trouble with her lines and her physical presence, particularly in a scene that involves Maurice slapping her. She’s becoming emotionally unhinged, having a nervous breakdown, spurred by the earlier accidental death of a seventeen-year-old fan seeking an autograph and Myrtle’s inability — or overt unwillingness — to relate to her character, who is all too much like her, as if she is unable to face her own fate. Throughout the play’s eighty-five minutes, there is an additional figure onstage, cameraman Nicolas Doremus, who follows the characters as they move about Ramy Fischler’s elegant living-room set, which features a couch, a table, knickknacks on shelves, a visible backstage area with Agnès b.’s costumes, and, at the very center, a large screen where Doremus’s footage streams live, offering viewers a different angle on what’s happening. At one point, Doremus zooms in close on Manny and Myrtle, who might be about to kiss, the cameraman completing a kind of love triangle between life and artifice; at another, Doremus films other characters behind stage sharing their concerns as Myrtle is alone on the couch, drinking away her pain. Everyone is dressed in dark colors, mostly black, signaling potential doom.

Morgan Lloyd Sicard, Isabelle Adjani, and Frédéric Pierrot star in Cyril Teste’s multimedia adaptation of John Cassavetes’s Opening Night at FIAF

Teste (Patio, Nobody) based his script on Cassavetes’s screenplay more than the final film itself, although he did use the director’s longtime friend and cinematographer, Al Ruban, who shot Opening Night, as a consultant. Teste encourages improvisation and changes stage directions every night, ensuring that each performance is unique in a way a film can never be yet still capturing the essence of the movie. “While Cassavetes’s other great films are models of immediacy — gut-level attempts to devise a cinematic syntax that accounts for and responds to the quantum flux of moment-to-moment experience — the doubly framed and multiply mirrored Opening Night operates at a remove,” Dennis Lim notes in his Criterion essay, which is appropriately titled “The Play’s the Thing.” He continues, “The filmmaker’s habitual insistence on the inseparability of actor and character (and of art and life) reverberates here within the haunted corridors of a backstage melodrama.” Adjani (The Story of Adele H, Queen Margot) is ravishing in her New York theatrical debut, her regal stage demeanor working hand-in-hand with her total command of the screen; we get to see both facets of her immense talent at the same time, which is both a treat and disconcerting; non-French speakers will lose a little as they avert their eyes to the supertitles while also deciding whether to look at the activity onstage, backstage, or onscreen. Sicard is superb as the director, and Pierrot is hardy as the skeptical Maurice, but Doremus stands out by not standing out even as he is right in the middle of the action. Opening Night opens FIAF’s monthlong Crossing the Line Festival and is supplemented by “Magnetic Gaze: Isabelle Adjani on Screen,” consisting of ten of her films shown on Tuesdays through October 29.