this week in theater

UNDER THE RADAR — TOSHIKI OKADA: GOD BLESS BASEBALL

Toshiki Okada steps up to the plate with his political allegory, GOD BLESS BASEBALL (photo © Julie Lemberger)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 14-17, $35
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
www.publictheater.org

Toshiki Okada uses America’s national pastime to explore the relationship between Japan, Korea, and the United States in God Bless Baseball, making its North American premiere this weekend at Japan Society as part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival. The Yokohama-born playwright and director doesn’t begin God Bless Baseball with the traditional “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” but instead with “Mickey Mouse March,” the theme from The Mickey Mouse Club, as two young women, one Korean (Sung Hee Wi), one Japanese (Aoi Nozu), take the stage. Sung and Aoi are marvelous, their odd gestures, a hallmark of Okada’s style, epitomizing “awkward” as they discuss how they don’t understand the rules of baseball. They are standing at the front of controversial visual artist Tadasu Takamine’s primarily black set: a small baseball diamond with four white bases; a pair of scoreboard-like monitors, one for Korean, the other for Japanese surtitles; a bucket of balls; and a twelve-sided polygon high on the wall behind home plate; the quirky costumes are by Kyoko Fujitani. The two women are soon joined by a man (Yoon Jae Lee) who attempts to explain the rules of the game, even though he admits that he is not a fan of the sport. They delve into offense and defense, strikes and innings, free time and boredom, and how their fathers love the game. “OK, so that’s all clear and great but I still don’t really understand like what kind of sport baseball is, ultimately,” the Japanese girl says. “For those of us who don’t understand anything about baseball, it was honestly pretty opaque,” the Korean girl adds. Soon an Ichiro impersonator (Pijin Neji) arrives, carrying a bat and wearing the Seattle great’s number, 51, on the back of his spectacularly hip hoodie. He references the March 2006 controversy when Ichiro, playing for Japan against Korea in the World Baseball Classic, may or may not have dissed his opponents, which set off a new hostility between two nations that already had a bad history. “It was just a misunderstanding,” Ichiro says while taking practice cuts. Things get even more surreal when the polygon starts talking to the characters in a disembodied voice that is part umpire, part godlike figure. “It’s no use lying to me,” the very American voice intones. “Place your hand upon your heart and tell me the truth.”

Okada, who has previously presented such works as Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech and Five Days in March at Japan Society with his chelfitsch theater company, creates just the right mood in this clever allegory, capturing the complications of not only the game of baseball itself but the relationships between parents and children as well as political tensions in Asia. Casting America as the spiritual father of Korea and Japan when it comes to baseball, two cousins who do not get along very well, Okada also throws in a few fastballs at corporate culture, gently mocking sponsorship and the more capitalist aspects of the sport. The four actors are excellent, especially in a late dance segment in which they give up control of their bodies. And as a sweet bonus, when you enter Japan Society, you’ll be met by two women hawking small, adorable bags of Tohato caramel corn. You definitely don’t need to know anything about baseball to enjoy this delightful, metaphorical romp, so don’t be afraid to step up to the plate and take a swing.

MISERY

Bruce Willis and Laurie Metcalfe star in stage adaptation of Stephen King’s MISERY

Broadhurst Theatre
235 West 44th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 14, $59 – $169
www.miserybroadway.com

It’s extremely difficult to pull off a successful suspense thriller on Broadway. After Deathtrap and Wait Until Dark, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with another solid example. So it was with high expectations that Misery opened on Broadway in November. The story of an unbalanced obsessive keeping her favorite novelist hostage in her home began with Stephen King’s superb 1987 novel, one of his first and best non-supernatural books. Three years later, director Rob Reiner and screenwriter William Goldman turned it into a nail-biting film, a gripping psychological thriller starring an Oscar-nominated Kathy Bates and James Caan. Unfortunately, the material can’t pull off a hat trick, as the much-anticipated stage version, with wryly comic action hero Bruce Willis making his Broadway debut as writer Paul Sheldon and Tony-nominated theater and television veteran Laurie Metcalf taking on the role of deranged nurse Annie Wilkes, is dull and lifeless, delivering only occasional moments of shock and tension. After a serious car accident in a small snow-laden town in 1987 Colorado, Sheldon is rescued by Wilkes, who brings him to her isolated home and repeatedly tells him, “I’m your number one fan.” She lives for his Misery Chastain series, popular bodice rippers set in the nineteenth century. Wilkes claims that the roads are closed and the phone lines are down, so she will take care of his busted shoulder and two broken legs, dispensing painkillers on a regular schedule. Barely able to move, Sheldon cautiously learns to deal with Wilkes’s clearly disturbed personality, which can instantly swing from ridiculously sweet to frighteningly violent. When Wilkes finds, reads — and hates — the manuscript of his latest book in the car, things get bad, but the plot takes an even nastier turn when Sheldon’s latest Misery book is published and Wilkes is not exactly happy with the ending. “A writer is God to the people in a story; he made them up just like God made us up,” she screams at him. “As far as Misery goes, God just happened to have a couple of broken legs and be in my house, eating my food.”

Both Paul Sheldon and Bruce Willis look for a way out of MISERY (photo by Joan Marcus)

Misery never finds its groove. Willis (Die Hard, Pulp Fiction), a likable actor who last appeared on a New York stage in an off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love in 1985, brings no depth or range to Sheldon, playing him with the same smirking, even keel throughout; at times it feels as if he is merely reading his lines instead of performing them. Metcalf (Roseanne, November), who has become one of New York’s most dependable and enjoyable actors to watch in such shows as Domesticated and The Other Place, is unable to infuse Wilkes with the intense flashes of evil so expertly captured by Bates in the film, and Annie’s trademark phrases (“cockadoodie,” “dirty bird”) come off as silly. The sledgehammer scene will have you jumping out of your seat, but more because of how it’s technically achieved. In his Broadway directorial debut, Will Frears maintains a flat level that is in desperate need of energy, missing from the start with the lack of chemistry between the two leads. Goldman, who has written such books and screenplays as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, and The Princess Bride, has trimmed the story down to ninety minutes, cutting out critical parts of Wilkes’s back story and making the sheriff (Leon Addison Brown) more of a stock character instead of the investigative cop he is in the book and film. Of course, Frears, the son of accomplished film director Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Launderette, The Queen), doesn’t have access to the equipment of the movies or outdoor locations here; he cannot zoom in on Sheldon’s and Wilkes’s faces or use quick edits and swift camera movement to build tension. David Korins’s rotating set helps contribute some much-needed action to the claustrophobic proceedings, but it’s not enough to revive this Misery.

UNDER THE RADAR: GERMINAL

GERMINAL brilliantly melds low-tech and high-tech as four characters create a brand-new world from the bottom up (photo by Bea Borgers)

The Newman Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
January 6-9, $25
Festival continues through January 17
212-967-7555
www.undertheradarfestival.com
amicaledeproduction.com

The stars were out in force on January 6 for the opening night of the Public Theater’s twelfth annual Under the Radar Festival. Among those squeezing into the sold-out Newman Theater for the New York premiere of the highly touted international hit Germinal were David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, John Leguizamo, and Denis O’Hare. The eighty-minute piece, inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s posthumously published 1899 novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, uses the magic and mechanics of stage craft to help construct a mysterious new plane of existence, as the characters create a unique theatrical experience while modeling the birth of a civilization. Conceived by Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort of l’Amicale de Production, the vastly entertaining, highly literate, and charmingly goofy show begins with some playful lighting effects, as if the God of Theater has slowly declared, “Let there be light.” Soon Arnaud Boulogne, Sébastien Vial, Ondine Cloez, and Defoort are each using small, handheld machines to manipulate first the lights, then their thoughts, conjuring them onto the back wall. Reminiscent of babies finding their way outside their mother’s womb, the four erstwhile explorers delve into the nature of language, sound, speech, communication, identity, recognition, classification, music, architecture, archaeology, self-expression, and various philosophical conundrums that would make Roland Barthes proud, Samuel Beckett happy, and Bertolt Brecht concerned. Social interaction takes center stage as they seek out connections of all sorts in addition to reason, meaning, and, well, just plain old fun. Boulogne, Vial, Cloez, and Defoort may give the appearance that everything is low-tech and improvised, but Germinal is actually a brilliantly seamless use of modern technology choreographed to the second. As the delighted audience filed out, we couldn’t help but think that if you could put younger versions of Byrne, Anderson, Leguizamo, and O’Hare onstage together in a black-box theater with today’s technology, you just might end up with something very much like Germinal.

AMERICAN REALNESS

Keyon Gaskin’s IT’S NOT A THING is part of American Realness festival at Abrons Arts Center (photo by Duncan Gray)

Abrons Arts Center and other venues
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 7-17, $20 unless otherwise noted
212-598-0400
www.americanrealness.com
www.abronsartscenter.org

The seventh American Realness festival consists of twenty cutting-edge theatrical presentations ($20 each), a movement workshop ($90), and four free lectures and discussions over the course of eleven days, January 7-17, almost exclusively at Abrons Arts Center. There’s so much going on that every day features between six and ten events spread throughout the venue, which includes the Experimental Theater, the Playhouse, the Underground Theater, and room 201. Two performances take place at other venues: The great Jack Ferver, who has a well-deserved rabid fan base for his deeply personal and intimate, often confessional multidisciplinary works, returns to American Realness with Mon, Ma, Mes (Revisité) at Gibney Dance (January 13-16), an updated version of a piece that debuted in 2012 at FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival and in which the audience becomes part of the action. And Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen also employs interactivity in her multimedia 69 Positions (January 15-17, $15), which connects sexuality and public space in MoMA PS1’s VW Dome. Back at Abrons, the New York premiere of Heather Kravas’s dead, disappears (January 7-11) integrates Richard Serra’s Verb List into a solo work about words and movement, woman and object. In choreographer Larissa Velez-Jackson’s Star Crap Method (January 9-17), performers Tyler Ashley, Talya Epstein, and Velez-Jackson and lighting designer Kathy Kaufman improvise as they examine the role of sound, light, music, and movement. In the world premiere of Erin Markey’s A Ride on the Irish Cream (January 13-17), Markey and Becca Blackwell bring to life the love between a girl and a pontoon boat/horse. M. Lamar’s Destruction (January 13-16) investigates the white supremacist world order using Negro spirituals. Sadness is at the heart of the New York premiere of Ligia Lewis’s Sorrow Swag (January 7-10), performed by Brian Getnick with live musical accompaniment by George Lewis Jr. Antonija Livingstone, Jennifer Lacey, Dominique Pétrin, Stephen Thompson, Dana Michel, and Brendan Dougherty collaborate on Culture Administration & Trembling (January 7-8), which explores the nature of spectatorship.

The festival also includes Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s #negrophobia (January 8-17), Keyon Gaskin’s it’s not a thing (January 8-11), Fernando Belfiore’s AL13FB<3 (January 9-12), Keith Hennessy and Jassem Hindi’s future friend/ships (January 9-12), Sara Shelton Mann, Hennessy, and Norman Rutherford’s Sara (The Smuggler) (January 11-13), Yvonne Meier’s Durch Nacht und Nebel (January 11-16), Antonio Ramos and the Gang Bangers’ Mira El! (January 12-15), choreographer Milka Djordjevich and composer Chris Peck’s Mass (January 13-15), the world premiere of the Bureau for the Future of Choreography’s Score for a Lecture, and James & Jen | McGinn & Again’s Over the River | Through the Woods diptych (January 16-17). In addition, Kravas, Lewis, Jenn Joy, and Kelly Kivland will discuss “Melancholia and Precarious Virtuosity” on January 8 at 3:30, Claudia La Rocco, Lane Czaplinski, Annie Dorsen, Yelena Gluzman, Katherine Profeta, and others will explore the question “How Should the Present Think About the Future?” on January 9 at noon, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Thomas J. Lax, Soyoung Yoon, and Cassie Mey will delve into “A Charming Uproar: On Documenting Dance” on January 10 at 3:30, Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz will lecture on “I Am Black (You Have to Be Willing to Not Know)” on January 17 at 11:00 am, and Movement Research will host the workshop “Creative Differences” with La Rocco on January 7, 10, and 12 ($90).

PROTOTYPE

Enda Walsh’s first opera, THE LAST HOTEL, is part of fourth annual Prototype festival (photo by Hugh O’Conor)

Multiple venues
January 6-17, $25 unless otherwise noted
www.prototypefestival.org

The fourth annual Prototype, consisting of pioneering, cutting-edge opera-theater and music-theater works by classical and postclassical composers, takes place January 6-17, consisting of seven presentations at multiple venues. The world premiere of composer Du Yun and librettist Royce Vavrek’s Angel’s Bone, about two angels returning to earth, features Abigail Fischer, Kyle Pfortmiller, Jennifer Charles, Kyle Bielfield, the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and NOVUS NY and runs January 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, and 15-17 at 3-Legged Dog Art & Technology Center on Greenwich St. Vavrek also wrote the libretto for composer David T. Little’s Dog Days, making its New York City premiere January 9-11 ($25-$81) at NYU’s Skirball Center; the work is based on the short story by Judy Budnitz. Greek tragedy meets the Vietnam War in composer Heidi Rodewald and librettist Donna Di Novelli’s The Good Swimmer, a first-look presentation running at HERE January 7-17. Irish playwright and screenwriter Enda Walsh (Lazarus, Once, Hunger) wrote the libretto and directs composer Donnacha Dennehy’s The Last Hotel at St. Ann’s Warehouse January 8, 9, 10, 12, and 15-17 ($51-$61). Brooklyn-based five-piece Bombay Rickey brings its cinematic sound to HERE January 8-9 and 15-16 with a sixty-minute opera-cabaret work directed by Kristin Marting. Gregory Frateur and Nicolas Rombouts’s multimedia song cycle Sága makes its American premiere January 9-10 at National Sawdust. And on January 17, FIAF will host a one-time only concert reading of Jorge Sosa and Laura Sosa Pedroza’s La Reina, featuring mezzo-soprano Audrey Babcock, Laura Claycomb, and Christopher Burchett and conducted by David Allan Miller; it will be followed by a discussion moderated by Lawrence Edelson.

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL

Dorothée Munyaneza and Compagnie Kadidi’s SAMEDI DÉTENTE is part of Public Theater’s annual Under the Radar Festival (photo by Laura Fouqueré)

The Public Theater unless otherwise noted
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
January 6-17, $25 unless otherwise noted
212-967-7555
www.undertheradarfestival.com

The Public Theater’s 2016 Under the Radar Festival features eighteen innovative music, dance, and theater hybrids from around the globe, taking place primarily at the Public’s many stages. The fun begins with the French duo of Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort and Germinal (January 6-9, the Public’s Newman Theater), who use the magic of theater to build the world from scratch. Lars Jan and Early Morning Opera combine a 1950s typewriter with kinetic light sculptures in The Institute of Memory (TIMe) (January 8-17, the Public’s Martinson Hall), as Jan delves into his father’s past as a Cold War operative. Director Andrew Scoville, composer Joe Drymala, technologist Dave Tennent, and writer Jaclyn Backhaus team up for the live podcast People Doing Math Live! (January 8 & 17, the Public’s Shiva Theater), complete with audience participation. Canadian duo Liz Paul and Bahia Watson’s two-woman show pomme is french for apple returns to Joe’s Pub on January 10 & 17, exploring womanhood in unique ways. DarkMatter, the trans South Asian spoken-word duo of Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian, will perform the concert #ItGetsBitter at Joe’s Pub on January 12 & 14. Individual tickets for Martha Redbone’s new Bone Hill (January 13-16, Joe’s Pub), a collaboration with Aaron Whitby and Roberta Uno, are sold out, but you can still catch the show as part of a UTR Pack (five shows for $100). Nikki Appino and Saori Tsukuda’s Club Diamond (January 13 & 17, Shiva) combines silent film, live music, and Japanese techniques to explore the concept of truth in thirty-five minutes. Dorothée Munyaneza, who was born in Rwanda and currently lives in France, brings her Compagnie Kadidi to the Public’s LuEsther Hall for Samedi détente (January 14-17), looking back at the 1994 genocide, joined by Ivorian dancer Nadia Beugré and French musician Alain Mahé. Japan’s Toshiki Okada, who was previously at UTR in 2011 with Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech and in 2013 with the Pig Iron Theatre Company for Zero Cost House, will be back at Japan Society with God Bless Baseball (January 14-17, $35), which examines America’s pastime in Korea and Japan.

Canadian Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq takes a unique look at NANOOK OF THE NORTH at Under the Radar Festival (photo by Nadya Kwandibens)

Canadian Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq will perform live to Robert J. Flaherty’s 19922 silent film, Nanook of the North, January 15-17 at the Newman, reclaiming her heritage, joined by percussionist Jean Martin and violinist Jesse Zubot. The 2016 Under the Radar Festival also includes 600 Highwaymen’s Employee of the Year (January 7-17, Martinson Hall), Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble’s The Art of Luv (Part I): Elliot (January 8-17, the Public’s Anspacher Theater), Sister Sylvester’s They Are Gone But Here Must I Remain (January 9 & 16, Shiva), I Am a Boys Choir’s demonstrating the imaginary body or how i became an ice princess (January 10 & 16, Shiva), Ahamefule J. Oluo’s Now I’m Fine (January 12-17, Newman), Guillermo Calderón’s Escuela (January 13-17, LuEsther Hall), Wildcat!’s I Do Mind Dying — Danse Précarité (January 14 & 17, Shiva), and Dane Terry’s Bird in the House (January 15-16, Shiva). In addition, numerous performances will be followed by Q&As with members of the creative teams, and there will be two free round-table discussions at the Public, “Assembly Required: New Media, New Dramaturgies” with Jan, André M. Zachery, and others on January 16 at noon and “Destroyer of Worlds” with Janani Balasubramanian, Abigail Browde, Calderón, Michael Silverstone, and Vaid-Menon on January 17 at noon.

COIL 2016

Ranters Theatre’s SONG kicks off COIL 2016 festival (photo by Jorge Lizalde)

Multiple venues
January 5-17, $20 unless otherwise noted
www.ps122.org

Every January, New York City is home to a handful of performance festivals that feature cutting-edge and experimental theater, dance, music, and installation art. PS122’s home at 150 First Ave. is scheduled to reopen this summer following a major renovation, but in the meantime you can experience its innovative programming at COIL 2016, taking place at various venues in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. “COIL 2016 attacks the very concept of boundaries and of limits. The boundaries between ideologies, life and death, the contemporary and historic, human and machine, light and darkness, audience and performer,” PS122 artistic director Vallejo Gantner explains on the event website. “Limitations of time, identity, age, and geography disappear. The work we will see this year deals with evolutionary transformation — personal, social, and artistic.” COIL begins on January 5 with Ranters Theatre’s Song (January 5-8), a sixty-minute immersive sound and visual installation at the New Ohio Theatre in which the audience can sit or lie down on the floor. Composer and vocalist Samita Sinha collaborates with Red Baarat percussionist Sunny Jain, guitarist and sound designer Greg Mcmurray, lighting designer Devin Cameron, visual artist Dani Leventhal, and director Ain Gordon on bewilderment and other queer lions (January 6-10, Invisible Dog Art Center), an intimate investigation of ritual and mythology through music, text, and image. Choreographer Jillian Peña’s Panopticon (January 9-17, Abrons Arts Center), a copresentation with American Realness, uses reflections to give a kaleidoscopic effect to a duet by Alexandra Albrecht and Andrew Champlin.

At the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Australians Helen Herbertson and Ben Cobham team up for Morphia Series (January 12-16), an eighteen-minute phantasmal environment for twelve audience members at a time. Annie Dorsen, whose Magical with Anne Juren was a highlight of COIL 2013, is back with Yesterday Tomorrow (January 13-16, La MaMa), in which Hai-Ting Chinn, Jeffrey Gavett, and Natalie Raybould go on a multimedia musical journey from the Beatles’ “Yesterday” to Annie’s “Tomorrow.” Asia Society will be hosting Xi Ban and Po Huang Club’s one-night only Shanghai / New York: Future Histories 2 (January 13, free with RSVP, 7:00 & 9:30), which melds Peking Opera with southern blues. The festival also includes niv Acosta’s Discotropic (January 6-10, Westbeth Artists Community), Frank Boyd’s The Holler Sessions (January 6-17, Paradise Factory), Kaneza Schaal’s Go Forth (January 7-12, Westbeth), David Neumann’s I Understand Everything Better (January 10-16, the Chocolate Factory), Ranters Theatre’s Intimacy (January 11-16, New Ohio Theatre), Chris Thorpe and Rachel Chavkin’s Confirmation (January 13-17, Invisible Dog), Jonathan Capdevielle’s Adishatz / Adieu (January 15-17, Abrons Arts Center), and Michael Kliën’s Excavation Site: Martha Graham U.S.A. (January 15, Martha Graham Studios, 3:00 – 7:00).