this week in theater

ALEX EDELMAN: JUST FOR US

Alex Edelman’s one-person Just for Us is a riotously funny exploration of Judaism and whiteness (photo by Monique Carboni)

JUST FOR US
SoHo Playhouse
15 Vandam St. between Varick St. & Sixth Ave.
Monday – Saturday through April 23, sold out
www.sohoplayhouse.com
Greenwich House Theater
27 Barrow St.
Monday – Saturday, June 14 – September 2, $40-$65
www.justforusshow.com

Near the end of Alex Edelman’s hysterical one-person Just for Us, the comedian tells the audience how much he loves doing it and asks them to tell their friends and everyone we know to come check it out so he can keep performing it.

So that’s exactly what I’m doing: Go see this show! It opened in December at the Cherry Lane, then moved to SoHo Playhouse, where I saw it, and will have an encore run at Greenwich House beginning June 14. (It will sell out, so act fast.)

In Just for Us, the New York City–based, Boston-raised Edelman describes an unusual recent adventure; shortly after getting into a Twitter war with hundreds of anti-Semites over an episode of his BBC radio program, Peer Group, he was intrigued by this tweet:

“Hey — if you’re curious about your #whiteness — and you live in New York City — come to [STREET ADDRESS] tomorrow night at 9:15.”

He immediately thought to himself, “I live in New York City. And I’m free tomorrow night at 9:15. And as a Jew I’m curious about my whiteness.” So off he went to what ended up being a meeting of seventeen neo-Nazis in Astoria, one of whom he was instantly attracted to. “You never know,” he says about his chances with her, dreaming that it could make for a great rom-com.

As he tells the riotous story of what happened that night in Queens, involving the alluring Chelsea, the suspicious Cortez, and an elderly racist jigsaw puzzle aficionado, among other white supremacists trying to hold on to their status in the world, he interweaves flashbacks from his past, primarily focusing on the role Judaism has played in his life. “I always feel a little bit weird. I always feel too Jewish,” he admits. “It is a mailing list you can never unsubscribe from.”

Alex Edelman’s Just for Us will be moving from SoHo Playhouse to Greenwich House in June (photo by Monique Carboni)

His full name could not be much more Jewish: David Yosef Shimon ben Elazar Reuven Alex Halevi Edelman. “I’ve got cousins Menachem and Yitzhak,” he says. “You can’t even spell their names right in English ’cause there’s no English letter for phlegm.”

His shirt nerdily buttoned up all the way, he shares the four words that will always help you through a conversation when you don’t know what else to say, points out that he usually doesn’t discuss politics in his act, details his brother’s attempt to make the Olympics as a skeleton racer for Israel, shares his love of Robin Williams (and his friendship with Koko the gorilla), and talks about going to Yeshiva. “I am white, but, like, I grew up in a place where there were different kinds of white people,” he explains when considering his whiteness. “I grew up in Boston. I grew up in this really racist part of Boston called Boston.”

The centerpiece of his memories is an unforgettable story about the time his deeply Jewish family celebrated Christmas. It’s not only funny and poignant but it shines a light on how religion should, in theory, bring people of different faiths together instead of tearing them apart. There’s no need to fear; Edelman never gets preachy. But he does advise, “If you came to the show tonight not wanting to hear a bunch of Jewish material, I am so sorry about this.”

(To paraphrase an old ad campaign for Levy’s rye bread, you don’t have to be Jewish to love Just for Us. But it helps if you’re not a white supremacist.)

In his third solo presentation, Edelman (Everything Handed to You, Millennial) is utterly charming, wonderfully self-deprecating, and downright funny. Directed by Adam Brace, the seventy-five-minute show features no accoutrements, just Edelman walking back and forth across the stage, empty of all but a few stools, holding the microphone as he continues his banter, including interacting with the audience, which the night I went included a group from his school that clearly adores him.

Just for Us might be about divisiveness, but Edelman has created a welcoming space where we all can laugh despite such serious topics. I could relate to so much of his story that all of my nodding in agreement nearly started to hurt my neck.

Early on, when an older gentleman got up from his seat and headed for the aisle, Edelman stopped the show and inquired, “Bathroom or political issue?” When the man returned a few moments later, Edelman asked him if everything went well.

By the end of the show, everyone answered with a resounding yes.

I AGREE TO THE TERMS

The audience participates on Zoom and their smartphone in I Agree to the Terms (photo by Giada Sun)

I AGREE TO THE TERMS
The Builders Association
NYU Skirball Zoom
Friday – Sunday, March 25 – April 3, $15, 2:00 & 5:00
nyuskirball.org
new.thebuildersassociation.org

The Builders Association goes back to the beginning of World Wide Web bulletin boards (BBS) in I Agree to the Terms, an uneven but ultimately fun virtual journey into the strange world of MTurks, short for Mechanical Turks. These Amazon microworkers are defined as “a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually.” The program, which began in 2005, well before the pandemic had so many people around the world working from home, offers anyone the opportunity to perform HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks, that computers are unable to do, such as evaluating consumer behavior, reviewing product similarities, and other skills that require more than just 0s and 1s. The employees make a minuscule amount of money as they complete each HIT, mere pennies, but the MTurks say that it has the potential to add up to a decent living.

Moe Angelos and David Pence host the show from MITU580 in Brooklyn; participants, using both a desktop computer and a mobile device, are sent a QR code a few hours before it starts, which offers advance reading material so they will be a bit more familiar with what is about to be experienced. From a room filled with old computer equipment, the earliest forms of online communication are depicted on out-of-date monitors as Angelos and Pence read BBS chats aloud, mostly from early adopters trying to help one another navigate this new environment.

Moe Angelos and David Pence host interactive show from Brooklyn

They also present excerpts from a series of manifestos about the future of the internet by such key figures as Stewart Brand, who predicted in 1985 that “personal ‘computer networking’” was going to “become as widespread eventually as the telephone and television”; Art Kleiner, who also in 1985 claimed that “addiction, for most, is short-lived”; and John Perry Barlow, the internet pioneer and Grateful Dead lyricist, who declared in 1996 that he came “from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.” These sections are clunky, as the text from the chats and manifestos also appears in its original font on your smartphone, so you’re not sure where to look and listen and how much of the material you’re supposed to digest. In addition, the images are lo-fi, which might be the point, but it still feels less than fully formed.

Things pick up significantly when director Marianne Weems, who founded the troupe in 1994, switches over to interviews with four actual Turkers: Adah Deveaux, Noel Castle, Sybil Lanham, and Michelle Brown, who describe what they do and how much they can earn. They’re not actors, so don’t expect a smooth, flowing narrative, but we do get such lines as “Jeff Bezos is my pimp daddy.” The audience is then divided into four breakout rooms led by each MTurk, where you participate in HITs, answering questions on your mobile device.

Before you begin, however, you have to agree to a ridiculously long list of terms and conditions that would probably take hours to read through (longer than a CVS coupon printout), but if you want to play the game, you need to sign off on it regardless, just as we do all the time online these days. There’s a running score that measures your percentage, and you accumulate a tiny amount of money for each completed HIT that isn’t rejected, with a chance to use that cash in a “Builders Marketplace.” Essentially, Amazon has created a virtual company town and store where MTurks are unlikely to get rich as they make Bezos wealthier and wealthier in this unregulated territory.

The Obie-winning Builders Association has previously staged such works as the innovative, interactive Elements of Oz, a unique reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, and House/Divided, a multimedia investigation of the 2008 mortgage crisis as seen through John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Their latest piece, in which just about everything is real — for example, the video with Sharon Chiarella is legitimate, as she was the Amazon VP who launched the MTurks program — is being livestreamed six more times April 1-3; tickets are only $15, but whatever you make on the survey platform will not be applied to that cost. As Barlow wrote for the Dead, “You imagine sipping champagne from your boot / For a taste of your elegant pride / I may be going to hell in a bucket / But at least I’m enjoying the ride.”

On March 30 at 7:00, there will be a free Zoom webinar, Meet the Artists: Office Hours, featuring Builders Weems and James Gibbs, Clay Shirky of NYU, and Turkers Deveaux, Castle, Lanham, and Brown.

THE WETSUITMAN

Five actors portray more than two dozen characters in the Cherry’s hybrid production of The Wetsuitman

THE WETSUITMAN
The Cherry Artists’ Collective
The Cherry Artspace, Ithaca
March 31 – April 3, livestream $20, in-person $25-$35
www.thecherry.org

“It’s only a case,” a detective says in the Cherry’s English-language world premiere of Freek Mariën’s The Wetsuitman. Of course, in police procedurals, especially Scandiavian ones, it’s never only a case.

The Cherry continues its exemplary live and livestreamed productions with The Wetsuitman, running March 31 through April 3 from the Cherry Artspace in Ithaca, directed by Samuel Buggeln. Inspired by a magazine article by Norwegian journalist Anders Fjellberg and translated by David McKay, the hundred-minute crime thriller begins when a decaying body in a wetsuit is found by an old architect in a cove.

It’s 2015, and Inspector Westerman and criminology intern Magnussen are on the case, which has similarities to a previous unsolved murder. Again, evidence is scarce; the dour medical examiner states something many of us have learned by streaming Scandinavian crime dramas during the pandemic: “Norway is a country made for / accidents / we have cliffs / we have storms / we have big ships / we have big rocks / we have all those people / on drilling platforms / and god-knows-where in the Arctic / we freeze to death / we have train crashes / we have plane crashes / we have shipwrecks / terrorists / and remember half the time / this is in total darkness / so whatever can break down / will break down / and if no one else does it to us / we do it to ourselves / Norway / land of alcoholism and suicide / it’s not what the brochures say / but it’s true / we beat the world in drinking and depression / we beat each other to a pulp in the darkness / drunk and depressed / we fall off cliffs / that’s if we don’t get blown up / flattened / sucked into a propeller / which is all to say / we’re the best at identifying bodies / got it down to a science / give me a body / I’ll give you a name / I’m the medical examiner / I smell like formaldehyde / and have a hard time getting into relationships / because women seem to think / ‘those hands of his / were just inside a corpse.’”

The medical examiner (Marc Gomes) discusses death in Norway in The Wetsuitman

When Westerman asks him what the cause of death was, he essentially throws his hands up, admitting, “I couldn’t even tell you / if he’s been dead three days or three weeks.”

Westerman and Magnussen are joined by another detective, Hustvedt, as they interview anyone who might have information on the missing person, but red herrings keep being dangled in front of them. The investigation goes from Norway and France to Syria and the Netherlands as the cops and a journalist speak with Customs and tourism officials, salespeople, a scientist, a lifeguard, a corporate spokesperson, a beachcomber, refugees, and others, trying to figure out who the Wetsuitman is and how he died.

Eric Brooks, Marc Gomes, Karl Gregory, Amoreena Wade, and Sylvie Yntema do a terrific job portraying more than two dozen characters, with only minimal costume changes; sometimes they even argue over who is going to play whom at any moment, taking over a role in the middle of a scene. They often introduce themselves or each other so the audience knows who is who; for example, Hustvedt explains, “I’m on the case now / Hustvedt / head of missing persons / I’m taking over the investigation / bald spot / big mustache / clenching a cigarette / in my gold teeth.”

Sylvie Yntema makes a point in English-language premiere of Freek Mariën’s The Wetsuitman

The actors move folding tables and chairs on and off the set to indicate changes of time and space; still photos are projected onto a back screen to add detail to the story, including the geographic location. The livestream is designed by Karen Rodriguez, with multiple cameras offering closeups as well as views from the audience; several attempts at using split screens are not quite successful, but otherwise it definitely feels like a play and not a movie. And for the record, the comment about Renée Zellweger feels out of place, unnecessarily mean-spirited in an otherwise spirited production.

The narrative starts out as a murder mystery but turns into so much more as such issues as race, corruption, and immigration come into focus. During the lockdown, the Cherry presented such fine works as A Day, And What Happens if I Don’t, Hotel Good Luck, and Felt Sad, Posted a Frog (and other streams of global quarantine); I’m glad to see the company is continuing to stream its productions from its upstate home to give us city folk a chance to see it as well.

CONFEDERATES

Siblings Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd) and Abner (Elijah Jones) fight for freedom in Confederates (photo by Monique Carboni)

CONFEDERATES
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 24, $35-$80
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

Playwright Dominique Morisseau and director Stori Ayers magnificently interweave two parallel threads, one that takes place on a plantation during the Civil War, the other at a modern-day university, in the world premiere of Confederates, which opened tonight at the Signature’s Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre for an extended run through April 24.

The play begins with tenured Black poly sci professor Sandra (Michelle Wilson) speaking to school leaders — and the audience — projecting a picture of the real-life postcard Type de Negresse d’ADANA, which famously depicts a Black woman breastfeeding a white baby, from more than a hundred years ago. “Before this becomes a complete misinterpretation of intent, I’d like to say that I am not averse to images of slavery,” she announces. “There is nothing slavery that is off limits for me. No shame in my own enslaved heritage. No shame. And yet. . . .” She then switches to a doctored version of the photo, with her head photoshopped onto the Black body, a printout of which had been taped to her office door, and asks for an immediate investigation.

As she departs, the action switches to a slave cabin in the 1860s, where Sara (Kristolynn Lloyd) is stitching a wound suffered by her brother, Abner (Elijah Jones), a runaway slave who is fighting for the Union army. On a raised platform sits a bench chest on one side and a writing desk on the other, surrounded by columns evoking the front of a southern estate. (Rachel Hauck’s set remains the same throughout the play, equating the two time periods.)

Sara wants to join the army too and be useful to the cause, but Abner is having none of it. He tells her, “You good n’ safe with what you do right now. Fast picker. Keep out of the eye of the storm. You like the nighttime nobody seem to notice. That’s good n’ safe. I ain’t got to worry as much.”

Sara insists that Abner train her on how to hold a musket. “So I know what it feels like to have the power of freedom in my hands. ’Case I never see you again,” she says. He shows her and replies, “Now you’re a real man.”

Candice (Kenzie Ross) and Sandra (Michelle Wilson) discuss bias in Dominique Morisseau world premiere (photo by Monique Carboni)

Jones does a quick change and becomes Malik, a Black student arguing a grade with Sandra, his teacher. He is defending his paper, which got a B-, claiming that his unconventional interpretation of Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and affirmative action is valid. Sandra responds, “I’m saying there are loopholes in your overall analysis of the so-called modern-day plantation in the workforce and its parallel to slavery during the time of the Civil War,” a capsule summary of what the play is about.

“Neither of these policies originally targeted the people it was designed to protect,” he declares. “They both came with multiple side clauses and loopholes. The result, slaves still weren’t freed even after the proclamation, and so-called minorities weren’t employed equally after affirmative action. Paperwork and lies and bullshit and plantation by another name.” She ultimately gives him a chance to rewrite the paper and hand it in the next morning.

Back at the plantation, the master’s daughter, Missy Sue (Kenzie Ross), has returned from her brief, failed marriage with new insight into the condition of slavery; having grown up with Sara, she considers them close friends — Sara most certainly does not feel the same way — and now she wants to work with Sara to spy on her father, the master, and ultimately live together safely in the North. Abner is not happy about this prospect, and Luann (Andrea Patterson), a slave who is sleeping in the master’s bed, starts getting suspicious that something is going on under her nose.

Meanwhile, at the university, Sandra is being accused by numerous people of having bias — Malik thinks she is biased against him; her ditzy, talkative white assistant, Candice (Ross), believes she favors Malik; and her fellow Black professor, Jade (Patterson), has heard that Sandra will not support her tenure vote and feels she treats her more like a threat than a colleague. In addition, everyone has a different opinion, not all of them good, about Sandra having worn a Black Lives Matter T-shirt the other day. Issues of gender, class, and race explode in shocking ways as the poignantly beautiful finale approaches.

Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd) and Missy Ann (Kenzie Ross) confront each other in play that bounces between past and present (photo by Monique Carboni)

Morisseau is one of the most successful and busiest writers of the last decade. In the last ten years, she has given us the Detroit Projects trilogy (Detroit ’67, Paradise Blue, Skeleton Crew), Pipeline, and Ain’t Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations, addressing inequities in housing, business, employment, education, and entertainment.

Inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2011 Atlantic article “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War,?” Confederates is another sparkling triumph from Morisseau, ninety minutes that will dig into your soul while also making you laugh. In a program note, the playwright offers, “Just like in the present, the enslaved are multifaceted. We all carry snark and sarcasm. We are all expert navigators of the systemic fuckeries. And sometimes, navigating that shit is painful. And sometimes, navigating that shit is funny.” Amid all of the controversy over critical race theory and the 1619 Project, Morisseau sharply portrays how America’s racial history has brought us directly to this moment in time, where we must learn from our past and face hard truths.

To further the comparison of then and now, Patterson, Jones, and Ross play characters existing in each era, with direct similarities, while Lloyd’s and Wilson’s characters are mirrors of each other. For example, Candice is aware of her white privilege just as Missy Sue wants to do something to help Sara after all the awful things her family has done to her, even though they each still don’t quite get it; both women are played with humor by Ross. The connections between the dual roles are further established in the costume changes, in which the actors tear off their clothes to reveal their other character as light and sound bombard us; the costumes are by Ari Fulton, with lighting by Amith Chandrashaker and Emma Deane, sound by Curtis Craig and Jimmy Keys, and projections by Katherine Freer.

The cast is superb, led by Wilson (The House That Will Not Stand, Sweat), who mixes vulnerability with determination as Sandra, and Lloyd (Dear Evan Hansen, Paradise Blue), who unearths a dark fierceness as Sara. The line conjoining them is evident from the start and passionately fuses them together by the end, making a grand statement of how much America has to learn about race.

Morisseau wrote Confederates after being challenged by Penumbra Theatre founder Lou Bellamy to craft a theatrical response to one of the main points Coates made in that 2011 Atlantic piece: “For my community, the message has long been clear: The Civil War is a story for white people — acted out by white people, on white people’s terms — in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props.” She was also inspired by Toni Morrison’s discussion of the white gaze; she once told Charlie Rose, “I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.”

In another program note, Morisseau explains, “I, too, have felt the lash of writing in a continuum that honors this gaze, even when I personally do not hold space for it in my own aesthetic. But there are other gazes as well. As a woman writer, I have also felt the male gaze. As a radical writer, I have felt the gaze of respectability politics. And as a Black writer, I have felt the gaze of Blackness that sometimes is only qualified as one myopic thing, rather than expansive and global as Blacknesss truly is. No matter the gaze, they all feel like one collective thing to me as an artist: oppression.” Confederates takes on all of those gazes in elegant and intensely clever ways. Morisseau’s Signature Residency 5 began with Paradise Blue and continues with Confederates; but no matter how much you enjoy it, don’t wait for the curtain call, because the play is about a whole lot more than just applauding a job well done.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: AN AFTERNOON OF COMEDIC DELIGHTS

Blythe Danner and Bob Dishy team up again in one-act plays for Food for Thought

Who: Food for Thought Productions
What: In-person and livestreamed performance of three one-act plays
Where: Theatre 80 St. Marks, 80 St. Marks Pl. at First Ave., and online
When: Monday, March 28, free with RSVP for in-person (646-366-9340, info@foodforthoughtproductions.com), 2:00; available online March 28 and April 3
Why: Food for Thought Productions has presented more than a thousand one-act plays since 2000, featuring all-star casts in lesser-known works by major playwrights. Its twenty-second season kicks off March 28 at 2:00 with “An Afternoon of Comedic Delights,” three short plays featuring the incomparable Tony and two-time Emmy winner Blythe Danner and the inestimable Bob Dishy, directed by Antony Marselli, live in person at Theatre 80 St. Marks and online; you can also catch the stream on April 3. The Brooklyn-born eighty-eight-year-old Dishy (Lovers and Other Strangers, Sly Fox, Damn Yankees) and the Philadelphia-born seventy-nine-year-old Danner (Butterflies Are Free, Betrayal, Huff) will first team up for George S. Kaufman and Leueen MacGrath’s Amicable Parting, about a young couple, Bill and Alicia Reynolds, going through their possessions as they plan to separate; in the foreword, the authors explain, “This is meant to be high comedy. It should be played lightly, gayly. Never heavily. Never emotionally. Thank you.”

Early on, Alicia points out a specific painting. “I would like to have this one, if you don’t mind, Bill,” she says. “Suits me,” he replies. “Now, Bill, you’re sure? — I mean, that you don’t want it? Of course, I love it, but then you love it too,” she explains. Bill: “No, Sweetie — you saw it first — I remember very clearly. Paris, ’53. What was the name of the restaurant? Chez Something.” Alicia: “Nico.” Bill: “Chez Nico. Too much to eat, too much to drink, too much for this painting.” Ah, memories.

Bob Dishy and Blythe Danner deal with family issues in Brighton Beach Memoirs

Next up is Peter Stone’s Commercial Break, which has been previously performed by Lauren Bacall and Robert Preston and was initially written for Audrey Hepburn in Charade, then revised for Cary Grant in Father Goose, ending up on the cutting-room floor both times. In the play, Tony, Oscar, Emmy, and Edgar winner Stone (Kean, 1776, Woman of the Year) introduces us to Catherine and Harry Crocker; the couple finds itself in quite a predicament when she accuses him of being unfaithful. Dishy presented Stone’s My Doctor the Box with Judy Graubart at a 2007 FFT tribute to Stone, who passed away in 2003 at the age of seventy-three. The third relationship play is Tallulah Finds Her Kitchen, which Neil Simon, Danny Simon, and Joseph Stein wrote for the one and only Tallulah Bankhead, a monologue that takes place, well, in her kitchen. The festivities conclude with a Q&A with Danner and Dishy, who appeared together in Brighton Beach Memoirs in 1986 and in FFT’s December 2021 production of Arthur Miller’s I Can’t Remember.

UPLOAD

Soprano Julia Bullock and baritone Roderick Williams portray a daughter and father dealing with a digital afterlife in Upload (photo by Stephanie Berger)

UPLOAD
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
March 22-30, $45-$150, 7:30 / 8:00
www.armoryonpark.org
www.vanderaa.net

Created specifically for Park Ave. Armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall, Dutch composer Michel van der Aa’s multimedia opera Upload is a haunting adventure into a near-future where people can choose to surrender their corporeal bodies and exist for eternity as digital beings. The process involves scanning the brain to make a map of the mind, implanting in the upload their family, social, and personal identities, pushing pain and trauma into the background.

The ninety-minute production begins in total darkness as a father (baritone Roderick Williams) and his daughter (soprano Julia Bullock) share many of the elements that make life unique; phrases such as “light – smile,” “struggle – grip,” “tingle – cheek,” “seek – calm,” and “carry – loss” emerge from speakers placed all around the drill hall. The darkness lifts to reveal lighting and set designer Theun Mosk’s stunning stage, which features three movable, translucent triptych screens in front of a larger movie screen. In the far right corner sits Ensemble Musikfabrik, an eleven-piece orchestra conducted by Otto Tausk; the powerful, immersive sound design, by Tom Gelissen and Paul Jeukendrup, lets van der Aa’s wonderful score, which often turns into scratchy electronic noise, echo gloriously in the cavernous space.

The daughter, in a red jumpsuit, converses with her father, who appears on the movable screens, wearing jeans and an unbuttoned shirt; his image is often blurry or pixelated, indicating the transmission is murky. Williams is actually performing from stage right, a camera projecting him onto the screens. The effective motion capture and graphics are by Darien Brito, with special effects by Julius Horsthuis.

A man is getting scanned to become a digital upload in Michel van der Aa’s multimedia opera at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The daughter is furious that her father has chosen to become an upload without consulting her; he assures her that he hasn’t left her. “Sweet smile of my child, / I still hear, / I see without knowing that I see. / It’s easier to feel than to explain. / My sense of touch is gone, / but no matter. / I can still think my own thoughts. I went on a journey to be what I must be. / I made this decision for us; / you can no longer lose me. . . . If you can’t live the way you want, there’s no point in living.” She angrily asserts, “Why didn’t you ask how I would feel about all this?”

The moments between father and daughter, which include footage of their home and garden projected onto the back screen, alternate with prerecorded scenes from the clinic that invented the procedure, from a sterile waiting room and laboratory to a fantastical Lego-like structure in shocking blue. The dialogue at the clinic is spoken, not sung. A psychiatrist (Katja Herbers) explains, “I think that what we do here can be regarded as a form of rebirth, analogous to the afterlife. I mean, haven’t we always tried to cheat death?” The smarmy CEO (Ashley Zuckerman) posits, “In the past, when a generation died, we would lose their collective wisdom. And that’s a great loss. . . . By digitizing the mind, removing it from the body, we’re removing it from these risks. Take one last trip in your biological body, and then you’ll live forever. . . . You just have to die first.”

The key to the transfer is a “memory anchor,” something the person being uploaded can think about to make the procedure go smoothly. The CEO notes that “memories are faulty,” but he believes that, technologically, the anchor “will always be reliable.” But as the daughter later tells her father, “No world they created for you can compete with the real one.”

Previously presented at the Dutch National Opera and the Bregenz Festival in Austria, Upload is like a live production of the popular anthology series Black Mirror directed by Ivo van Hove, along with a dash of the Amazon Prime show similarly titled Upload, which also involves a digital afterlife. Van der Aa previously explored what happens following death in his 2006 piece After Life, adapted from the film of the same name by Hirokazu Kore-eda; the opera featured Williams in a way station between heaven and hell.

Upload features dramatic staging at the armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

The interplay between the live and prerecorded flashbacks, shot by cinematographer Joost Rietdijk, builds off the tension being experienced by father and daughter onstage; as the characters, sometimes assisted by others, push the vertical triptychs back and forth, the films depict nonstatic scenes outdoor, indoors, and underwater, the movement in multiple directions resulting in an uneasy 3D-like effect that matches the emotional mood of the narrative.

Bullock (Girls of the Golden West, Doctor Atomic, Zauberland) and Williams (Eugene Onegin, Billy Budd, Madam Butterfly) sound glorious together; I would have loved to have heard more from them. While there are English subtitles, you won’t need them for his vocals, which are sharp and pristine.

Written, composed, and directed by van der Aa — who was last at the armory with 2017’s Blank Out, in which Williams appeared onscreen in a story loosely based on the life and career of bilingual South African poet Ingrid Jonker — Upload can be confusing at times, but the overall production, complete with a breathtaking surprise near the end, is a genuine treat, a thrilling peek at the potential future of humanity while testing the boundaries of what opera can be.

ProEnglish THEATRE OF UKRAINE: THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Who: ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine
What: Livestreamed fundraiser
Where: ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine Facebook Live
When: Sunday, March 27, free with RSVP (donations encouraged), 11:00 am
Why: Shortly after the Russians began their invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine converted its black box space into a shelter for members of the theatrical profession and neighbors, creating a safe area where actors, directors, technicians, and others could gather together. The company, which is based in Kyiv, has been collecting food and medicine for the elderly while continuing to make art. It is also supporting an effort to train actors as medical personnel to make videos to show people how to care for injured citizens. As part of Boston-based Arlekin Players Theatre’s #Artists4Ukraine project, “a campaign of hope,” ProEnglish Theatre is presenting a livestreamed version of British playwright Harold Pinter’s 1991 drama The New World Order, which deals with imperialism, totalitarianism, and hegemony. The three-character, ten-minute play involves a blindfolded man about to be tortured for unknown reasons.

ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine has converted its space into a shelter for the cast, crew, and community in Kyiv

Des: Do you want to know something about this man?
Lionel: What?
Des: He hasn’t got any idea at all of what we’re going to do to him.
Lionel: He hasn’t, no.
Des: He hasn’t, no. He hasn’t got any idea at all about any one of the number of things that we might do to him.
Lionel: That we will do to him.
Des: That we will.

After finding out about what ProEnglish Theatre was doing, Arlekin founding artistic director Igor Golyak, who was born in Kyiv, made a video in which he declared, “This could be us. This is us.” The play will be performed live over Facebook on March 27 at 11:00 in the morning; if you can give anything, donations will be accepted to help the cause of ProEnglish Theatre in these dire times, as the people of Ukraine demonstrate a profound resilience to protect their freedom.