this week in theater

TICKET GIVEAWAY: 20AT20

The Irish Rep revival of DA is among more than three dozen shows participating in 20at20 promotion

Multiple venues
January 20 – February 8, $20
www.20at20.com

It’s once again time for off-Broadway’s annual 20at20 promotion, in which theater lovers can score $20 tickets to more than three dozen productions twenty minutes before curtain by going up the box office and saying, “20at20.” Among this year’s participants are the revival of Da at the DR2 Theatre, A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes at City Center, Men and Women Talking Love and Sex at the Davenport, Churchill and Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe at New World Stages, The Lion at the Lynn Redgrave Theater, The Road to Damascus and The Woodsman at 59E59, Wiesenthal at the Acorn, Rasheeda Speaking with Tonya Pinkins and Dianne Wiest at the Signature, Fashions for Men at the Mint, Application Pending at the Westside, and Film Chinois at the Samuel Beckett.

TICKET GIVEAWAY: In case that deal isn’t good enough, we’ve got an even better one for you. We have vouchers for three of the shows participating in 20at20 that will score you a pair of free tickets in advance. To be eligible to win, just send your name, daytime phone number, and which show you’d like to see to contest@twi-ny.com by Monday, January 19, at 12 noon. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; winners will be selected at random.

OTRO TEATRO: THE PLEASURE PROJECT

Luciana Achugar’s OTRO TEATRO moves indoors for AMERICAN REALNESS festival at Abrons Arts Center (photo by Alex Kangangi)

AMERICAN REALNESS
Abrons Arts Center Playhouse
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
Thursday, January 15, 6:30, and Saturday, January 17, 4:30, $20
212-598-0400
www.lachugar.org
www.americanrealness.com

There’s a lot of pleasure to be had in Otro Teatro: The Pleasure Project, the culmination of luciana achugar’s three-month exploration of public intervention, individual and collective ritualized movement, and the relationship between performer and spectator. As its title suggests, it is “other theater,” an unusual, experimental approach to dance and performance, part of the American Realness festival at Abrons Arts Center. But first things first: It’s best to know as little as possible about this eighty-minute evening-length work. If you like nontraditional, challenging, immersive dance theater, then just buy your tickets and go. They don’t even hand out the programs until you’re on your way out; instead, you’re given a small piece of paper with a quote about the body, including: “a body in pleasure with eyes that see without naming, they see without knowing….” But if you truly need to know more and don’t want to experience the numerous surprises that achugar (The Sublime Is Us, A Supernatural Return to Love) has in store for you — and there are surprises galore every step of the way in this unconventional, invigorating theatrical premiere — then read on.

Luciana Achugar explores the relatioship between performer and spectator, as well as the venue itself, in OTRO TEATRO: THE PLEASURE PROJECT (photo by Ian Douglas)

Luciana Achugar explores the relationship between performer and spectator, as well as the performance space itself, in OTRO TEATRO: THE PLEASURE PROJECT (photo by Ian Douglas)

Spoilers Galore: Otro Teatro takes place in the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse, but instead of sitting in the cushiony red seats in the audience, you’re led through a hallway onto the stage itself, where you can sit or stand anywhere on the four sides of what has now become a small black box space. The lights are on and the curtain is closed as several bottles of Old Taylor are passed around, with everyone invited to take repeated swigs of the “Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey of Topmost Class.” Slowly, a few people break away from the mingling and start moving determinedly. One pounds her feet on the floor. Another kicks an aluminum gate. A third slithers like a snake. A fourth bangs against a post. At times it evokes a group of zombies waking up, getting their brain-hungry day started. As the performers, one of whom might be right next to you, continue to reveal themselves, it becomes confusing; someone stretching might just be someone stretching and not part of the show. Then again, you start wondering if anyone can participate, as it appears to be so random, and the performers come in all different shapes and sizes. Eventually, the lights go out, and in the darkness the sound and movement continue until the curtains are being pushed back and forth, opening up onto a whole new world. A few of the performers squiggle toward the rim of the stage and tumble over, reversing the usual stage-star dynamic as the audience, onstage, watches a handful of dancers making their way over chairs and up and down the aisles, pounding doors and creeping through the rows. The crowd follows the dancers toward the front of the stage, a few audience members even walking down the steps and finding a seat as action keeps going on all around them. Soon clothes start coming off as well. It’s part zombie apocalypse (evoking Bruce High Quality Foundation’s short film Isle of the Dead, about zombies heading toward a theater on Governors Island), part 1960s happening, with Old Taylor still making the rounds. The show never really ends; it just peters out, as ushers start asking the audience to grab their things and head for the exits, even as naked dancers are not quite done yet, scratching the walls and hiding beneath some seats. So, what was it all about? You won’t find the answer in the program, which is three pages of bios of the cast and crew and acknowledgments; they even left the fourth page blank, leaving it up to you to figure out what you’ve just experienced. Which, of course, is always the way it should be.

UNDER THE RADAR: A (radically condensed and expanded) SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN — AFTER DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

David Foster Wallace’s love of tennis informs unique production based on his readings and interviews (photo by Brian Rogers)

Anspacher Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St.
Through January 16, $25
212-967-7555
www.publictheater.org
www.danielfish.net

Daniel Fish returns to the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival with an ingenious take on the work of Infinite Jest author David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008 at the age of forty-six. But A (radically condensed and expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again isn’t about the life or death of the Ithaca-born writer, nor is it a theatrical adaptation of the title short story. It’s not even a celebration of the written word; instead, the ninety-minute show, continuing at the Public’s Anspacher Theater through January 16, focuses on the spoken word, inspired by the way Wallace vocalized, whether narrating an audiobook, giving an interview, or making a speech. Moved by the rhythm, tone, and pattern of Wallace’s voice, Fish, who presented Eternal at last year’s Under the Radar Festival, scoured the archives of the David Foster Wallace Audio Project for essays, short stories, excerpts, and interviews with Wallace and created various setlists of the pieces over the last few years; one stretched to a four-hour marathon. But the audience doesn’t actually hear Wallace; instead, Fish sends Wallace’s audio recordings into headphones worn by performers Mary Rasmussem (Trade Practices), Jenny Seastone Stern (Our Planet), Therese Plaehn (Family Play), and John Amir (All Your Questions Answered), who repeat the words out loud. Fish often changes speeds in the recordings he feeds them, resulting in the actors’ sometimes having to speak very fast, using their bodies to help them keep up.

The current iteration of the show includes such Wallace writings as his outrageously funny 1996 Harper’s piece “Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise”; “Forever Overhead,” which takes place at a swimming pool as a boy turns thirteen; and “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” an essay/book review that delves into Wallace’s longtime love of tennis. In fact, the sport plays a central role in the production. As the audience enters the theater — seating is general admission — a tennis machine is shooting yellow balls at a picture of Tracy Austin taped to the wall. The tennis balls remain on the stage throughout the show. The actors, who at one point move all the balls to the back of the stage, are in a kind of tennis match themselves, waiting for the words to come to them (they don’t know which parts Fish will send them or how fast he’ll make them) as if preparing for the next tennis shot, ready to volley Wallace’s words at the audience, but it goes beyond mere repetition and into a sheer love of language. Even at ninety minutes, A (radically condensed and expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again feels a little too long — when you’re reading a short story or listening to an audiobook, you have the ability to stop for a while and ponder what you’ve read or heard, but in this case there’s no off switch — but it’s most definitely a fun thing, even if we haven’t decided whether we’ll ever do it again. But one thing we’ll definitely do is read or listen to a whole lot more by Mr. Wallace.

BURQ OFF!

Nadia P. Manzoor plays twenty-one characters in deeply personal one-woman show (photo courtesy of Dan Demello Public Relations)

Teatro Circulo
64 East Fourth St. between Bowery & Second Ave.
January 14-18, 425-$30
www.nadiapmanzoor.com
www.teatrocirculo.org

Writer and performer Nadia P. Manzoor, who was born in Chicago, moved to Singapore and Dubai as a toddler, then was raised primarily in a Pakistani immigrant community in North London, lifts the veil off her struggle to break free of the cultural norms that envelop her in her one-woman show, Burq Off!, running through January 18 at Teatro Circulo. Mitchell Ost’s set features a table and three chairs surrounded by a crescent-shaped wall draped with heavy, brightly colored, elaborately designed fabrics, the only opening a small, sparkling window in the center back, offering Nadia the hint of a bigger world outside. Over the course of eighty minutes, Manzoor symbolically removes the layers of cloth that metaphorically obstruct Islamic women from living lives of freedom, using stories from her childhood as a microcosm for women around the world. Manzoor plays twenty-one people in the production, changing accents and twisting and folding a red scarf to create costumes to depict such characters as her mother, Ammi, and her father, Abbu, who both adhere to the old Pakistani ways; her annoying twin brother, Khurram; family friend Aunty Ji; Katy, her sexually liberated English schoolmate; her teacher Molvisaab; her first cousin and first crush, Mustafa; and her bartender boyfriend, Brendan. The modern-day Nadia, who serves as narrator, introduces the play with a memory of herself at five years old, when she wanted to be an astronaut. “Lying in bed, time would disappear as I gazed into the night sky. Mesmerized by the infinite, I would just begin to float, like smoke, far away from my bedroom, from my family, from my house in Hertfordshire, England, and towards I didn’t know what.” But her parents immediately shoot down her dreams. “How can you be an astronaut,” her father says. “Women can’t be astronauts. Who will cook? Who will clean? Who will feed your husband if you are floating about in space?” Her mother adds, “One day you will make a man very very happy.”

Nadia P. Manzoor uses various accents and a red scarf to differentiate among friends and family in BURQ OFF! (photo courtesy of Dan Demello Public Relations)

The setting shifts from her family’s dining room to her school dorm to her mother’s hospital bed as Nadia attempts to overcome the ties that bind her, experiencing love and loss as she considers options that go against the dictates of the society in which she was born and raised, including a set of strict, old-fashioned rules her father gives her as a college present. She talks about the influence of Bollywood movies, how her mother referred to her vagina as “shame shame,” and the hypocrisy of her culture. Manzoor has an easy way about her, immediately drawing the audience onto her side. Although some of the vignettes are fairly familiar for the coming-of-age genre, the bits about Mustafa and Brendan are particularly effective and unique. Directed and developed by Tara Elliott, Burq Off! recalls Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, about a young girl growing up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and Anna Khaja’s one-woman show, Shadeed: The Dream and Death of Benazir Bhutto, in which Khaja portrays eight characters with differing views of the prime minister on the day she was killed. Manzoor, who is also preparing the online series Shugs & Fats, never gets quite so overtly political, but her personal liberation is political in and of itself, as it is for so many women in so many cultures around the world.

ANOTHER MEDEA

The darkly mesmerizing ANOTHER MEDEA, starring Tom Hewitt, is back in New York City for a run at the Wild Project (photo by Aaron Mark)

Who: All for One Solo Theater
What: Another Medea
Where: The Wild Project, 195 East Third St. between Aves. A & B, 212-228-1195
When: January 14-31, $40-$60
Why: When this one-man show, written and directed by Aaron Mark and inspired by Euripides’ Medea myth, played the All for One Theater Festival in fall 2013, we were absolutely blown away by it, hoping it would soon return for a longer run; the play we called “as intense and gripping a show as you’re ever likely to see” is now scheduled for sixteen performances this month at the Wild Project, once again starring Broadway veteran Tom Hewitt (The Rocky Horror Show, Chicago, The Lion King, Jesus Christ Superstar), who we said in October 2013 “is nothing short of breathtaking, immersing himself in the role of an extremely complex and conflicted character whose crime is unfortunately all too familiar in these difficult times. His mastery of the material is stunning, poetically delivered without calling attention to itself.” You can read our full review of Another Medea, which deals with a man imprisoned for committing a horrific act, here.

COIL — ALEXANDRA BACHZETSIS: FROM A TO B VIA C

Swiss choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis examines beauty and the act of viewing in free COIL presentation, FROM A TO B VIA C

Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art
18 Wooster St.
Performance: Wednesday, January 14, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
Installation: January 12-13, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
212-352-3101
www.ps122.org/from-a-to-b
www.swissinstitute.net

Swiss choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis once again explores gender identity, body language, concepts of beauty, and the very nature of art and performance in today’s communication-obsessed world in her latest work, From A to B via C, inspired by the fascinating history of Diego Velázquez’s “The Toilet of Venus.” In that painting, which is also known as “Venus at Her Mirror” and “The Rokeby Venus,” Cupid holds up a reflecting glass so his nude, reclining mother, Venus, the goddess of love, can admire her visage. The controversial work, completed by the Spanish painter in 1651, stirred one viewer, Canadian suffragette Mary Richardson, to repeatedly slash it in March 1914; her attack was a very public response to the brutal treatment being given fellow feminist activist Emmeline Parkhurst. “I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history, as a protest against the government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history,” Richardson wrote at the time. “Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas.” One hundred years after that attack, Bachzetsis’s multimedia performance installation From A to B via C, taking place this week at the Swiss Institute as part of PS122’s tenth annual COIL festival, investigates this strange conjunction of art, protest, and feminism. In the hour-long U.S. premiere, Bachzetsis and Gabriel Schenker, wearing Cosima Gadient’s costumes depicting the inner musculature of the human body, are joined by a naked Anne Pajunen, who holds up a monitor showing a live feed as Bachzetsis reclines on a couch and looks at herself. The Zurich-born Bachzetsis’s previous work includes The Stages of Staging, Bluff, and Mainstream; the installation From A to B via C can be seen January 12 & 13 from 12 noon to 6:00, while the final live performance is scheduled for January 14 at 7:00. Admission is free with advance RSVP.

DYING FOR IT

Semyon Semyonovich Podeskalnikov (Joey Slotnick) tells his wife (Jeanine Serralles) and mother-in-law (Mary Beth Peil) that he’s had enough in DYING FOR IT (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 18, $20-$86.50
866-811-4111
www.atlantictheater.org

Living in 1920s Russia was no walk in the park, as so cleverly depicted in Moira Buffini’s Dying for It, a rollicking good “free adaptation” of Nikolai Erdman’s long-banned 1928 play, The Suicide. Twenty-seven-year-old Semyon Semyonovich Podeskalnikov (Joey Slotnick) is at the end of his rope. “I’m a parasite,” he tells his wife, Masha (Jeanine Serralles). “I’m a bloodsucking leech. I have no work in this worker’s paradise.” They have such little money, they live in the hallway of a miserable apartment building, their bed under the stairs. One of their upstairs neighbors, the hulking, recently widowed Alexander Petrovich Kalabushkin (C. J. Wilson), tries to convince him that “life is a miracle, full of wonder,” but Semyon is adamant that it’s too late to change his mind. “I have no dignity, no labor, no value at all,” he says. But shortly after he decides to off himself, he is bombarded by various members of Soviet society, each of whom wants to make him their martyr — one imploring him to write a suicide note crying out about what they believe is wrong with the social order, another protesting the revolution, the next a victim of Communism, et al. Too afraid to speak out themselves, they want the soon-to-be-dead Semyon to be their personal mouthpiece. Among those who want to turn Semyon’s last act into a heroic gesture are comrade Aristarkh Dominikovich Grand-Skubik (Robert Stanton), an intellectual who tells him, “You are in a position of great power. . . . Nowadays, only the dead may say what the living think”; Kleopatra “Kiki” Maximovna (Clea Lewis), a kittenish romantic who believes she has found a kindred soul in Semyon; Father Yelpidy (Peter Maloney), a priest who wants Semyon to consider the damnation he faces; and Viktor Viktorovich (Patch Darragh), “the people’s poet,” who sees this as an important career opportunity for himself. Also involved in the festivities are Masha’s mother, Serafima Ilyinichna (Mary Beth Peil), who can’t wait for Semyon to be out of her daughter’s life; Yegor Timoveivich (Ben Beckley), a postman who prefers to play by the very strict rules; and Margarita Ivanovna Peryesvetova (Mia Barron), a married, carefree vamp having an affair with Alexander. Semyon might have had no purpose in life, but he has suddenly found his true calling in death.

Kleopatra “Kiki” Maximovna (Clea Lewis) and Alexander Petrovich Kalabushkin (C. J. Wilson) have an idea for Semyon Semyonovich Podeskalnikov (Joey Slotnick) as his suicide approaches (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Dying for It gets off to a rocky start, with silly, lackluster slapstick that quickly grows tiresome. But once Semyon gets rid of the blood sausage and the tuba, the play, keenly helmed by Atlantic Theater artistic director Neil Pepe (3 Kinds of Exile, A Life in the Theatre), finds its groove on Walt Spangler’s appropriately dilapidated boarding-house set, evolving into an engaging farce about trying to find meaning in one’s life. The cast is a mixed bag: Slotnick (Boston Public, The Altruists ) is charming as the suicidal Semyon, Lewis (Ellen, Writer’s Block) is delightful as the spirited Kiki, Stanton (A Free Man of Color, All in the Timing) is stalwart as the determined Aristarkh, Barron (Domesticated, Knickerbocker) is fiery as the wild Margarita, and Wilson (The Lady from Dubuque, Gore Vidal’s The Best Man) proves once again that he is one of New York theater’s finest character actors as the bold and beefy Alexander, but Serralles (The Jammer, Stunning) is too brusque as Masha, the usually dependable Maloney (Outside Mullingar, Glengarry Glen Ross) falters with comedic timing as the priest, and Darragh (The Jammer, Appropriate) overdoes it as the poet. The Suicide was never staged in Erdman’s lifetime (he died in Moscow in 1970); it made a brief run on Broadway in 1980, with Derek Jacobi in the lead role. With Dying for It, Buffini (Gabriel, Handbagged) has thankfully brought it back from the dead, reinvigorating it for another time, when rampant surveillance, cyber-bullying, and terrorism have people around the world questioning what they say and do in public.