this week in theater

THE BIRDS

Nat (Tony Naumovski) and Diane (Antoinette LaVecchia) fight to survive an attack of killer seagulls in THE BIRDS (photo by Carol Rosegg)

59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 1, $20
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org

BirdLand Theatre’s mounting of Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s 2009 adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s short story “The Birds” fails to soar at the small Theater C at 59E59, where it runs through October 1. It’s the same space where Joe Tantalo’s inventive Godlight Theatre Company has staged innovative versions of In the Heat of the Night, Deliverance, and Cool Hand Luke, all based on the original novels rather than the subsequent hit movies. McPherson, the author of such successful plays as The Weir and Shining City, similarly returns to Du Maurier’s original 1952 story, which was completely revamped by screenwriter Evan Hunter for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film, but takes only its bare bones in creating a postapocalyptic nightmare where a kind of makeshift family is essentially trapped in an abandoned lake house that becomes threatened by killer birds every day during high tide. The story is set in New England in the near future, where two middle-age strangers, the calm, competent Diane (Antoinette LaVecchia) and the unpredictable, perhaps mentally unstable Nat (Tony Naumovski), who barrels into the theater in a literally naked fury, have taken refuge from sudden, unexpected vicious attacks by seagulls that have decimated the area — and perhaps the world. They are soon joined by a younger woman, Julia (Mia Hutchinson-Shaw), sporting a head injury. Running out of just about everything, they have to make very specific plans on when and where to go to scavenge for supplies in order to avoid encountering the killer fowl — or other humans desperate to survive. They also need to beware of each other as their cozy little surrogate family gets a whole lot more complicated.

Julia (Mia Hutchinson-Shaw) blows bubbles while doomsday nears in THE BIRDS (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The Birds, which had its world premiere at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 2009 with Ciarán Hinds as Nat, Sinéad Cusack as Diane, and Denise Gough as Julia, bears little resemblance to the insightful original story and lacks the gripping suspense of the film. Director Stefan Dzeparoski (Wide Awake Hearts, Gruesome Playground Injuries) gets solid performances from the three actors, and Konstantin Roth’s set is intriguing, with the audience sitting at an angle in folding chairs in the four corners of the room, which features some scattered pieces of furniture. Ien Denio’s sound keeps the swarming birds ever-present, but David J. Palmer’s video projections are overly abstract and too difficult to comprehend. The projections inexplicably begin and end with the American flag, while the British Union Jack is represented by a pillowcase lying at the foot of the video wall. The narrative lacks any real bite; situations feel forced (and ultimately melodramatic), the threat of danger is existential at best (even if that is what McPherson was going for, it gets lost here), and most of the ninety minutes are far too uninvolving. At one point, Diane, a writer who is keeping a diary, thinks out loud, “I can’t help feeling that [Nat and Julia] communicate something to each other in the silence. But all I get is the silence. And the strange . . . hatred that consumes me isn’t just for them and their proximity and the claustrophobic pain of never having any privacy — it’s a hatred of myself too.” Those might be good lines, but Dzeparoski needs to show rather than tell those feelings within the drama of the play, which ends up being rather bland and strangely dull despite some promising elements. This time around, The Birds never takes flight.

BLISS

Black Moon Theatre tackles the Tibetan Book of the Dead at the Flea (photo by Steven Pisano)

The Flea Theater
41 White St. between Broadway & Church St.
Thursday – Sunday through September 25, $20-$30
866-811-4111
www.theflea.org
www.blackmoontheatrecompany.org

Italian-born American actor Alessio Bordoni, who has previously adapted François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and has appeared in works by Diderot, Levi, and Dante, turns to The Tibetan Book of the Dead for his latest piece, Bliss, an eccentric, idiosyncratic, underwhelming, and woefully self-indulgent multimedia production continuing at the Flea through September 25. The audience enters the theater at the precise start time as “part of the experience,” scurrying around for seats (it’s general admission), perhaps noting that two performers are already onstage, lying on each other behind a scrim. Soon Charlotte Colmant rises slowly from atop Alessio like a spirit leaving a dead body; both are topless, with Alessio wearing Butoh-like white-chalk makeup. For the next sixty minutes or so, Alessio, in an overly bold and dramatic voice, recites lines about attachment, impermanence, aspiration, suffering, delusion, and enlightenment while veins pop out all over his taut body and Colmant dances beautifully yet ultimately repetitively. Meanwhile, Estella Dupree’s amateurish designs of fire, mysterious figures, and Spirograph lotuses are projected onto the scrim — at one point interrupted by a computer cursor trying to move to the next image — and Amaury Groc’s score drones on, from John Carpenter-like synth horror music to bland New Age melodies. Alessio’s character is in the bardo, the transitional state between death and rebirth, contemplating his past and future lives, but it’s hard to really care about his fate. Black Moon Theatre Company artistic director René Migliaccio (Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Bordoni’s Ponzi, a Dollar and a Scheme) is a proponent of what he calls “expressionistic realism,” but he is unable to find “the intensity of emotion and the lyricism of the movement” that is the third tenet of that discipline. Finally, the show’s website features four pretty cool photos, including the one above, that actually look very little like the actual impression produced by the performance, so beware.

PHAEDRA(S)

(photo courtesy of Odéon Théâtre De L’Europe) Avec: Isabelle Huppert, Agata Buzek, Andrzej Chyra, Alex Descas, Gael Kamilindi, Norah Krief, Rosalba Torres Guerrero. (photo by Pascal Victor/ArtComArt)

Krzysztof Warlikowski’s ambitious but bewildering PHAEDRA(S) had them running for the exits at BAM (photo by Pascal Victor/ArtComArt; courtesy of Odéon Théâtre De L’Europe)

PHAÈDRE(S)
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
September 13-18, $30-$95
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

About halfway through the second act of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s three-and-a-half-hour Phaedra(s), continuing at BAM’s Harvey Theater through September 18, two people jumped over from the crowded row behind us and ran out through our far-more-empty row, barreling past us in a desperate attempt to get out of the theater as fast as they could. They probably regretted not leaving at intermission, as so many others had, allowing the rest of the audience to jockey for better seats. But even better seats didn’t significantly help Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe’s dark and lurid multiple retelling of the Greek myth of Phaedra, the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë and wife of Theseus who is made to fall in love with her stepson, Hippolyte, by the spurned Aphrodite. Isabelle Huppert, previously at BAM’s Next Wave Festival in 2005 in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychose and in 2009 in Robert Wilson’s Quartett, plays Aphrodite, three versions of Phaedra, and Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee’s 2003 novel. The first act, based on writings by Wajdi Mouawad and inspired by Euripides and Seneca, inexplicably begins with the musical recitation of the Arabic poem “At-Atlal,” with no English-language translation as singer Norah Krief, dancer and choreographer Rosalba Torres Guerrero, and guitarist Grégoire Léauté turn in a head-scratching glam-rock performance. Soon Phaedra is trying to clean the blood pouring from between her legs while considering whether to bed down with Hippolyte (Gaël Kamilindi).

Isabelle Huppert appears as multiple Phaedras in Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe production at BAM (photo courtesy of Odéon Théâtre De L’Europe)

In the second section, adapted from Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, a sloppy and messed-up Hippolyte (Andrzej Chyra), who has already slept with Phaedra’s daughter, Strophe (Agata Buzek), wants nothing to do with stepmom Phaedra no matter how much she insists on having some form of sex with him. In the third version, a talk-show host (Chyra) is interviewing writer and international lecturer Costello, the author of The House on Eccles Street, a retelling of James Joyce’s Ulysses from the point of view of his wife, Molly Bloom. Then, suddenly, about halfway through, Costello/Huppert literally lets down her hair and goes into a gorgeous, albeit brief, monologue taken from Racine’s famous 1677 version of Phaedra that momentarily makes us forget everything that has come before — Kamilindi as a barking dog, Phaedra dragging herself across the floor while grunting, Torres Guerrero strutting around the stage seemingly looking for a pole, Phaedra dry heaving into a sink, Chyra exposing his buttocks again and again, the shower scene from Psycho repeating on a small monitor, Phaedra looking on as Theseus (Alex Descas) humps her masked corpse, and annoying Warholian projections by Denis Guéguin that are reflected in mirrors on Malgorzata Szczesniak’s strange prison/locker room set, a mostly empty space save for a sink at the upper left, a shower head on the back wall, a vertical mirror in which part of the audience is visible (watching them sit openmouthed at the proceedings was somewhat interesting for a time), and a side room that occasionally slides out to the center. Those few minutes near the end reveal the heart of the story and let Huppert finally act as we know she can, and it’s probably the primary reason why the show received a wildly enthusiastic standing ovation from a crowd that was significantly smaller than it had been 210 minutes earlier.

TARYN SIMON: AN OCCUPATION OF LOSS

Taryn Simon’s Park Ave. Armory installation resembles both a memorial pipe organ and a semicircle of crematorium chimneys (photo © Naho Kubota)

Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. between 66th & 67th Sts.
September 13-25, daytime installation: Tuesday – Sunday, $10, 12 noon – 4:00
September 13-25, evening performances: Tuesday – Sunday, $45, 6:20, 7:10, 8:00, 8:50, 9:40, 10:30, 11:20
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
tarynsimon.com

New York–based conceptual artist Taryn Simon has primarily used text and image and exhaustive research to document, collect, catalog, categorize, and classify multiple aspects of the human condition, examining such issues as politics, justice, governance, immigration, economics, and religion in such previous works as “A Living Man Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII,” “Contraband,” “Paperwork and the Will of Capital,” and “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.” In her latest piece, “An Occupation of Loss,” Simon takes on all that and more in a compelling and deeply involving interactive performance installation continuing its world premiere at the Park Ave. Armory through September 25. Co-commissioned by the armory and London’s Artangel, “An Occupation of Loss” is an intimate exploration of the ritual of grief and the marginalization of professional mourners. Each evening, there are seven thirty-five-minute performances that begin with a group of fifty ticket holders waiting outside the armory on Sixty-Seventh St. At the designated start time, they are led up the stairs and into the massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where they line up on the balcony, overlooking eleven forty-eight-foot concrete wells (composed of eight six-foot rings apiece), arranged in a semicircle, each with a walkway leading to a small entrance. Slowly and quietly, up to three professional mourners enter each structure (designed by OMA / Shohei Shigematsu for maximum acoustical effect), which evoke Zoroastrian Towers of Silence as well as crematorium chimneys and a pipe organ. The audience is then led downstairs onto the floor of the 55,000-square-foot drill hall, through two long, narrow vertical white lights that echo the “Tribute in Light” homage to the Twin Towers (the lighting is by Urs Schönebaum), and are then permitted to enter the small, tight-fitting spaces where the mourners perform their laments. Wearing traditional clothing (except for a trio of Greeks who are in contemporary dress), the men and women sing, chant, cry, wail, and play instruments as they would at a funeral in their native country; however, in this case, since they are not mourning for any specific person, it is as if they are mourning for us all. “I was looking at the space that grief and loss generate and how it is performed and that line between something that is scripted and authentic,” Simon explains in an armory video, “and how we process that when the object of loss is not present — when there’s no body at the center. Is there a space where one actually has individual emotion, and where are our emotions governed and part of a program, and when are they liberated and something of our own? And questioning if that space even exists.” In addition to the evening performances ($45), the installation will be open Tuesday through Sunday from noon to four o’clock ($10), when visitors can walk around the wells and lament in their own way without the professional mourners, who only appear at night. The piece challenges viewers to consider such dualities as life and death, absence and presence, sound and silence, day and night, bona fide and staged, the private and the public, and light and dark.

Visitors can enter small spaces where professional mourners perform their laments (photo © Naho Kubota)

Taryn Simon’s “An Occupation of Loss” offers a fascinating look at how several cultures deal with grief in a public setting (photo © Naho Kubota)

As detailed in a booklet that visitors receive on their way out, the mourners come from Burkina Faso, India, Azerbaijan, Greece, France, Cambodia, Ghana, Ecuador, China, Romania, Russia, Malaysia, and Venezuela. The extensive information Simon had to provide in order to get the performers nonimmigrant visas forms a fascinating overview of their historic and cultural context. For example, Dr. Boureima T. Diamitani writes, in support of Burkina Faso mourners known as masks, “For many years, performers of mourning rituals are taught sacred practices to protect them from malefic powers of external enemies.” Dr. Sarah Laursen notes, “It is also customary throughout China to hire professional mourners to inspire attendance at funeral ceremonies, as it is believed that the number of attendees at a funeral is reflective of the importance of the deceased in the community.” And Juan Mullo Sandoval points out, “Along with its poetic structure and morphological system, the telluric, sentimental, and lamentation aspects of yaravíes represent the affliction that has characterized marginal sectors of the Ecuadorian population since the colonial times: problems of exclusion, economic deprivation, and exploitation.” “An Occupation of Loss” is particularly poignant in the wake of last weekend’s fifteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but there’s a timeless quality to it as well, given the many military actions going on around the globe right now, the frightening number of mass shootings in America, the fierce battle over immigration, and the national controversy over the killings of unarmed black men, women, and children by white police officers. Also, Simon was very careful to omit the graceful ambience of the armory, with its decorated period rooms, portraits, and plaques honoring veterans and military dead, from visitors’ experience. Thus, no one exits or enters through the main lobby; instead, a side and back door are used, allowing the installation to stand on its own. “An Occupation of Loss” might be about death and grief, but it is also a celebration of unique and different cultures at a moment when fear of the other is so prevalent in America’s psyche, and Simon doesn’t want anything else to get in the way of that.

Taryn Simon’s “An Occupation of Loss” offers a fascinating look at how many cultures deal with grief in a public setting (photo © Naho Kubota)

Visitors can enter small spaces where professional mourners perform their laments (photo © Naho Kubota)

The thirty-five minutes pass by very fast, so be sure to save some time to relax near the center of the semicircle, where all of the sounds of mourning come together to form an entrancing cacophony of lament. You will then be led out through a surprise exit that will delight those who attended the armory’s previous exhibition, Martin Creed’s “The Back Door.” And the booklet itself is also extremely worthwhile, identifying each of the professional mourners and sharing engrossing information on their specific forms of lamentation and how they relate to social, political, and economic issues in their country; over the years, many of the mourners have risked their own lives in order to help honor those that have already lost theirs, adding yet more power to this wholly original experience. [Note: Simon will be at the armory on September 24 for an artist talk moderated by scholar Homi K. Bhabha ($15, 6:00).]

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: PHAEDRA(S)

Isabelle Huppert appears as multiple Phaedras in Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe production at BAM (photo courtesy of Odéon Théâtre De L’Europe)

PHÈDRE(S)
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
September 13-18, $30-$95
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In 2005, French superstar Isabelle Huppert was devastating in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychose, part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival. Four years later she returned to the festival in Robert Wilson’s Quartett, a wild adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses for Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe. Huppert and Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe are now back at BAM with Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Phaedra(s), a two-hundred-minute production in which the award-winning Huppert (La Cérémonie, The Piano Teacher) plays three versions of the title character from Greek mythology, taken from Kane’s Phaedra’s Love and writings by Wajdi Mouawad and J. M. Coetzee. Huppert and Warlikowski previously worked together in 2004 on The Dybbuk and 2010 in A Streetcar Named Desire. The dramaturgy is by Piotr Gruszczynski, with sets and costumes by Malgorzata Szczesniak, lighting by Felice Ross, music by Pawel Mykietyn, video by Denis Guéguin, and choreography by Claude Bardouil and Rosalba Torres Guerrero. The show runs September 13-18; in addition, Huppert will participate in a discussion about Phaedra(s) with Simon Critchley on September 17 at the Hillman Attic Studio ($25, 5:00), and Charles Mee, Caridad Svich, and moderator Kaneza Schaal will gather for “Phaedra Interpreted” on September 18 (free, 11:00 am) at Borough Hall Courtroom as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival, in conjunction with BAM and the Onassis Cultural Center New York.

THE ENCHANTED REALM OF RENE MAGRITTE

Georgette Magritte (Anya Krawcheck) receives a balloon from Fantomas (Danny Wilfred) in THE ENCHANTED REALM OF RENE MAGRITTE (Al Rodriguez Photography)

A JOURNEY THROUGH THE MIND OF THE SURREALIST PAINTER
Governors Island
Nolan Park House 17
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through September 25 (except 9/9), $15
www.exquisitecorpsecompany.com

Brooklyn-based Exquisite Corpse follows up last summer’s Secession 2015, which took place in House 17 in Nolan Park on Governors Island and told the story of several artists and their muses in early twentieth-century Vienna, with The Enchanted Realm of Rene Magritte, set in the same building but now following the tempestuous relationship between Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte (Max Henry Schloner) and his wife and muse, Georgette (Anya Krawcheck). The play features ten vignettes, each written by one of eight writers (T. Adamson, Blake Bishton, Simon de Carvalho, Eric Marlin, Matthew Minnicino, Ran Xia, Emily Zemba, and Laura Zlatos), and is set in various rooms featuring Magritte-inspired designs. Forget about the silly, unnecessary frame story in which an annoying Realtor is trying to sell Magritte’s house and instead let yourself get swept up in the surreal love story between Rene and Georgette, from their first meeting, when he was fifteen and she was thirteen, through their later courtship and blatant infidelities. Following his father’s death, Rene is deciding whether to sell the house; the oddball Mr. Fish (Lee Collins) is desperate to buy it, but Rene’s deceased mother, Regina (company producing director Blaine O’Leary), a former milliner, has emerged from the river where she drowned herself years before to return to her son, begging him not to part with the home. After a disappointed Mr. Fish exits, Rene leads approximately fifteen guests on a tour of the house, each room relating to a piece of his personal past.

Rene Magritte (Max Henry Schloner) gets down with new friend Sheila Legge (Blaine O’Leary) in THE ENCHANTED REALM OF RENE MAGRITTE (Al Rodriguez Photography)

In the parlor, Fantomas features no dialogue, instead relying on shadow puppets, masked dancers, WWII sound effects, Paul Simon’s “Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War,” and a red balloon to poetically show the couple’s relationship blossoming. In The Surrealist Phantom, Rene introduces Georgette and Paul (choreographer Danny Wilfred), his best friend, to Sheila Legge (O’Leary,), his new girlfriend. For Out of the River, Regina scampers up and down steps, sharing her deepest thoughts with the audience. Day Trip is set in the sun room, where Georgette and Paul are at the beach, talking about their affair. The costumes, dialogue, and design of each room boast little Magritte-like flourishes referencing his paintings, from intersecting empty frames to fish, from an apple to a pipe, from a bowler hat to masks and a tree. Not all of it makes sense; you’ll be scratching your head a lot, trying to figure out just what is happening, but director and creator Tess Howsam maintains a relatively smooth flow from scene to scene. Schloner plays Magritte with a soft-spoken sense of wonder, the artist’s mind always wandering, his words flowing like one of his surreal paintings. “I worry that one day I will look out the window and, instead of the hill and the river below, I will see just a big wall of grey, translucent and covered in scales, like the belly of a giant trout, blocking out everything else,” he says. “So I’ve been keeping the blinds closed, because I never know when I might see the fish instead of the river.” The excellent O’Leary is intense as Regina and playful as the limber Sheila. Krawcheck is a revelation as the dedicated but confused Georgette, giving a tour-de-force performance that should soon have her busting out of the Nolan Park house and into bigger digs. She commands each scene she’s in with a sweetly infectious confidence and a natural artistic grace that is a delight to watch. The ninety-minute show continues September 10-11, 16-18, and 23-25; art lovers might also want to check out the ninth annual Governors Island Art Fair, which takes place in several houses along Colonels Row as well as at Fort Jay and Castle Williams.

BRIDGE OVER MUD

Norway’s Verdensteatret pulls into the BAM Fisher this week with the U.S. premiere of experimental, immersive multimedia production (photo courtesy of the artist)

Oslo’s Verdensteatret combines experimental sound and kinetic imagery in BRIDGE OVER MUD (photo courtesy of the artist)

BROEN OVER GJØRME
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
September 7-10, $25, 7:30 & 9:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
verdensteatret.com

BAM’s 2016 Next Wave Festival got under way September 7 with the U.S. premiere of Bridge over Mud, a dazzling hour-long audiovisual experience that transforms the Fishman Space into a unique electroacoustic adventure. Oslo-based arts collective Verdensteatret has created an open-ended work that made me imagine what it would be like if Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy were to take over the controls of the Joshua Light Show, combining avant-garde music and live experimental imagery with cutting-edge and DIY technology. Video of abstract gray industrial faces and slow-moving taxicabs are joined with screeching, droning sounds. Model-train-like cars mounted with lights and cameras and Russian Constructivist-inspired geometric cutouts motor across 195 feet of winding tracks, passing by plastic dishes and wiry kinetic sculptures that resemble dogs and dinosaurs, casting bizarre shadows evoking futuristic landscapes onto cardboard screens as a man blasts away on a tuba and a woman mutters hard-to-decipher dialogue.

Perplexing abstruse eyes look back at the audience. Blacks and grays are enlivened with greens, reds, and yellows. Plastic cups rise from the tracks like alien communicators. Thin metal rods descend from the ceiling, forming angular shapes. There’s a frisson of representation in the shadowy movement and the intense sound emerging from sixty speakers, but it’s more atmospheric and suggestive than plaintively narrative, enveloping the audience in a mysterious emotional resonance as it reaches an exciting, thrilling crescendo that explodes in the intimate space. A collaboration between Asle Nilsen, Lisbeth J. Bodd, Piotr Pajchel, Eirik Blekesaune, Ali Djabbary, Martin Taxt, Espen Sommer Eide, Torgrim Torve, Elisabeth Gmeiner, Niklas Adam, Kristine Sandøy, Thorolf Thuestad, Janne Kruse, Laurent Ravot, and Benjamin Nelson, Bridge over Mud is a captivating multimedia symphony, more performance installation than traditional theatrical presentation, “a work where one sees the music and listens to the images,” as Verdensteatreter (Louder, And All the Question Marks Started to Sing) explains in the program. What’s it all about? It doesn’t really matter. Just sit back and enjoy.