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SUN & SEA (MARINA)

Sun & Sea brings the beach to BAM in thrilling production (photo by Barbara Pollack)

SUN & SEA (MARINA)
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
September 15-26, $25
www.bam.org

The summer beach season might unofficially come to a close on Labor Day weekend, but BAM has extended it through September 26 with the US premiere of Sun & Sea, a wonderfully engaging indoor presentation that brings fun in the sun to Fort Greene. Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the hour-long opera takes place on the 57×46-square-foot floor of BAM Fisher, where twenty-one tons of sand have been trucked in from South Jersey and spread out two inches deep. One hundred audience members at a time watch the show from the balcony that surrounds the stage on all four sides; you can walk around to see it from numerous angles as thirteen vocalists and about two dozen locals sing about the environment, bananas, colonialism, the threat of drowning, exhaustion, running out of water, tourism, littering, work, and vacation.

The unnamed characters do what people on the beach generally do: eat, drink, read books and magazines, apply suntan lotion, talk with one another, snooze, and catch rays. Kids play badminton, two men battle it out in a friendly game of ring toss, people check their cell phones, and a dog (Beans or Grimaldi) wanders about while certain characters break into song as the action continues around them. Wealthy Mommy (Kalliopi Petrou) confesses, “What a relief that the Great Barrier Reef has a restaurant and hotel!” Her husband, Workaholic (Vytautas Pastarnokas), surmises, “Suppressed negativity finds a way out unexpectedly.”

The Philosopher (Claudia Graziadei) asks, “Is this not a parody of the Silk Road?” Complaining Lady (Eglė Paškevičienė) declares, “What’s wrong with people?” And one of the young men from the Volcano Couple (Marco Cisco and Lucas Lopes Pereira) opines, “Not a single climatologist predicted a scenario like this / Maybe someone had a feeling.” Hope is embodied by Chanson of Admiration (Nabila Dandara Vieira Santos), who gently conveys, “O la vida.”

Among the others chiming in on income inequality, lava, shrimp, 3D printers, the extinction of the mammoth, and the end of the world are Bossanova Woman (Svetlana Bagdonaitė) and Bossanova Man (Jonas Statkevičius), Dreamer (Artūras Miknaitis), Siren (Ieva Skorubskaitė), 3D Sisters (Auksė Dovydėnaitė and Saulė Dovydėnaitė), and two Choir Singers (Aliona Alymova and Evaldas Alekna). The singing is all matter-of-fact, as if the characters’ thoughts are calmly emerging, one no more urgent than another, set to a shimmering score, mixed live by Salomėja Petronytė, that glistens like sunlight on the ocean. Each audience member is given a printout of the libretto; I got a kick out of peeking at who was next and guessing who the performer would be. (I batted about fifty percent.) Photos are allowed (but not video), and you can stay as long as you want, as the performance repeats for five hours.

Commissioned for the Lithuanian Pavilion at the fifty-eighth Venice Biennale and featuring an all-female creative team, the ingenious Sun & Sea is the second collaboration between director and set designer Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, librettist Vaiva Grainytė, and composer and musical director Lina Lapelytė, the Lithuanian trio’s follow-up to its 2013 show, Have a Good Day!, in which ten cashiers took on capitalism and consumption. It’s a seamless production, like a day at the beach; you can imagine yourself on the sand with the cast, hearing snippets of conversations here, admiring bathing suits there, wishing the kids wouldn’t run across your blanket, and turning over to get an even tan.

But as relaxed as you might feel, there is a rising tide of fear at the future of the planet if we remain on our current path. As the Vacationers’ Chorus intones, “Today they have raised the red and yellow flag up high / The whirlpools of the sea, / drop-offs / riptides / undertows. / You’re not allowed / to wade in / deeper than your knees!” If we don’t start doing something about our environment fast, there’ll be no more beaches or oceans for safe wading at all.

THAT KINDNESS: NURSES IN THEIR OWN WORDS

V introduces her new streaming play, That Kindness: Nurses in their Own Words

Who: V (formerly Eve Ensler), Ed Blunt, Connie Britton, Rosario Dawson, Stephanie Hsu, LaChanze, Liz Mikel, Rosie O’Donnell, Billy Porter, Dale Soules, Marisa Tomei, Monique Wilson
What: New streaming play
Where: BAM YouTube
When: October 15 – November 3, free (donations encouraged)
Why: Ten years ago, playwright and activist V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, went public with her diagnosis of uterine cancer. “I am lucky. I have been blessed with a positive prognosis that has made me hyper-aware of what keeps a person alive,” she wrote in the Guardian while relating it to the work she was doing with City of Joy in Democratic Republic of Congo to help young survivors of gender violence. “How does one survive cancer? Of course — good doctors, good insurance, good luck. But the real healing comes from not being forgotten. From attention, from care, from love, from being surrounded by a community of those who demand information on your behalf, who advocate and stand up for you when you are in a weakened state, who sleep by your side, who refuse to let you give up, who bring you meals, who see you not as a patient or victim but as a precious human being, who create metaphors where you can imagine your survival. This is my medicine, and nothing less will suffice for the people, for the women, for the children of Congo.”

V, in collaboration with James Lecense, is now paying tribute to the purveyors of such care, nurses, whom she calls “radical angels of the heart,” in the new virtual play That Kindness: Nurses in their Own Words. The seventy-five-minute piece, streaming on BAM’s YouTube channel, features Ed Blunt, Connie Britton, Rosario Dawson, Stephanie Hsu, LaChanze, Liz Mikel, Rosie O’Donnell, Billy Porter, Dale Soules, Marisa Tomei, and Monique Wilson portraying real-life nurses sharing stories about who they are, what they do, and why they are in their profession; the dialogue is based on conversations and interviews V, whose previous work includes The Vagina Monologues, The Treatment, and her 2018 one-woman show, In the Body of the World, did with these front-line health care workers. Divided into such sections as “What Is a Nurse?,” “Things I Am Most Proud Of,” “Morally Wounded,” and “‘We Are Not Expendable,’” the narrative shifts from nursing in general to the more specific situation of the Covid-19 crisis as the nurses dig deeper into themselves and the importance of genuine care, especially at a time when so many hospitals are going private, being run like corporations, even during a pandemic. The show, reminiscent of the Public Theater’s The Line, which consisted of the words of doctors, nurses, EMTs, and other brave heroes during the coronavirus crisis, was produced in partnership with National Nurses United and California Nurses Association; BAM’s presentation is free to watch through November 3, but donations are requested for the Brooklyn Hospital Foundation’s Covid-19 Fund. Be sure to stick around for Morley’s closing song.

MEDEA

Real-life partners Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale star in Simon Stone’s sizzling Medea at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 8, $45-$195
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/medea

As you enter BAM’s elegantly shabby chic Harvey Theater to see Simon Stone’s Medea, there are two young boys already onstage, one stretched out on the floor, on his laptop, the other leaning against a wall, on his smartphone. Bob Cousins’s dramatic cyclorama set is blindingly white, evoking a heavenly way station, making it look as if the unconcerned brothers are floating in a mysterious void. In this riveting adaptation, inspired by Euripides’s 431 BC original and the true story of Dr. Debora Green, who committed horrific crimes against her family in Kansas in 1995, Stone instantly puts us in the kids’ shoes. It’s a thrillingly uncomfortable moment since, of course, this is Medea, and we know it will not end well for the siblings. And getting there is indeed heart-wrenching.

Contemporary stand-ins for Jason and Medea, Lucas (Bobby Cannavale) and Anna (Rose Byrne) are married pharmaceutical scientists facing a crisis. Anna has just been released from a psychiatric facility after having done something bad to Lucas, who is in a relationship with a woman half his age, Clara (Madeline Weinstein), the daughter of their boss, Christopher (Dylan Baker). Anna plans to simply walk back into their old life with their two sons, Edgar (Gabriel Amoroso or Jolly Swag) and (Gus Emeka or Orson Hong Guindo), but Lucas has other ideas. “I know your trust will be hard to regain. What I did to you,” Anna says. “We don’t need to talk about it now,” Lucas replies. Anna: “No, I want to. It was a breach of trust. Most importantly it was trust that we lost.” Lucas: “I’m not —” Anna: “In all those messy months we lost sight of everything we’d promised to be to each other and both of us did that but I overstepped the line —” Lucas: “We should never have stayed together this long.” A determined Anna later adds, “I’m going to win you back.” That does not go so well either.

Social worker Elsbeth (Jordan Boatman) does not have the easiest of jobs monitoring Anna (Rose Byrne) and her two young sons (photo by Richard Termine)

Medea is ripe for reinterpretation, particularly in a world rife with misogyny and violence. In the past ten years I have seen Aaron Mark’s Another Medea, Limb Hyoung-taek’s Medea and Its Double, and Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, all of which took the central story and reimagined it in unique and compelling ways. Born in Basel and raised in England and Australia, Stone, who moves all around the globe, rarely settling down for an extended period of time, has previously adapted such classics as The Wild Duck, Miss Julie, John Gabriel Borkman, Peer Gynt, Three Sisters, and Hamlet and dazzled New York audiences with his sizzling Yerma at Park Avenue Armory in 2018, infusing his work with personal experience, as he does again with Medea.

The set features one large rectangular white wall that occasionally rises to serve as a projection screen, showing either extreme close-ups of the action, primarily a spellbinding Byrne, her evocative eyes searching for meaning, or live-stream shots by Edgar, who is making an autobiographical film for school. (The video design is by Julia Frey, with bright lighting by Sarah Johnston.) The play was originally performed at live-streaming master and BAM fixture Ivo van Hove’s Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (formerly Toneelgroep Amsterdam); the video footage can get to be a bit too much, so it’s a relief when the device goes away in the latter parts of the eighty-minute production, when things really heat up.

The cast is all new for this US premiere, with solid support led by Tony and Emmy nominee Baker (La Bête, Happiness, The Americans) and Weinstein (The Real Thing, Mary Page Marlowe) in addition to Victor Almanzar as bookstore owner Herbert, who offers Anna a job, and Jordan Boatman as Elsbeth, the social worker in charge of her case, keeping a close watch on her treatment of Gus and Edgar. At one point Stone makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to the finale of The Sopranos that is a wry riff on what ultimately happens in his take on Medea, as two famous families meet their fate.

Anna (Rose Byrne) is none too happy that her husband, Lucas (Bobby Cannavale), is now with Clara (Madeline Weinstein) in contemporary update of Medea (photo by Richard Termine)

Byrne (Bridesmaids, You Can’t Take It with You) plays Anna with a strong-willed vulnerability; she is no mere woman scorned, seeking revenge, but an intelligent wife, mother, and scientist who had the deck stacked against her and refuses to sit back and let everyone walk over her. She has a fiery, passionate chemistry with Cannavale (The Hairy Ape, The Lifespan of a Fact), who also displays a strong-willed vulnerability, allowing the cracks in Lucas’s armor to show through. “She created this instability,” Clara argues to Lucas. “I did too,” he readily admits. This is a Medea that could only be created in today’s #MeToo sociopolitical climate.

The Australian Byrne and New Jersey native Cannavale are real-life partners with two young boys of their own; after going through hell onstage, they head back to their nearby Gowanus apartment to be with their kids. Byrne and Cannavale work together often on television and in film, but this is the first time they are acting opposite each other onstage; later this year they will portray another married couple in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge for the Sydney Theatre Company. At the start of Medea, Anna shows Lucas a painting she made while at the asylum, depicting Noah’s ship in a storm, in which all the animals are drowning. “They thought they were safe and then another storm whipped up and capsized the ark,” Anna tells a confused Lucas. She continues, “You see the dead dove floating on the swell over there? With the olive branch still in its mouth?” It’s a metaphor for Anna’s state of mind, but one can also think of it as a kind of peace offering between Byrne and Cannavale as they return to a normal life following the searing heartbreak their characters experience night after night.

TICKET ALERT — ST. PETERSBURG BALLET THEATRE: SWAN LAKE

St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre makes its US debut in February with Swan Lake at BAM (photo by KT)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
February 15-16, $35-$135, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
spbt.ru

Internationally acclaimed Russian prima ballerina Irina Kolesnikova and the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre will make their US debut February 15-16 at BAM with their lush and lavish production of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Rejected by the Kirov and the Bolshoi because of her size, Kolesnikova ultimately made a home — and a family — with the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre, eventually marrying founder Konstantin Tachkin, with whom she has two children. They’ve come a long way since he called her a “little red lump in a T-shirt” when she auditioned at the age of ten.

Not to be confused with the St Petersburg Festival Ballet or the St Petersburg State Ballet — the name issue is currently in court — the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre has toured with such classics as The Nutcracker, Giselle, Cinderella, and The Sleeping Beauty, but their gem is Swan Lake, with two dozen swans and Kolesnikova as Odette/Odile. At BAM, they will be accompanied by the Chamber Orchestra of New York, conducted by Timur Gorkovenko. The Vaganova-trained Kolesnikova also has performed the title role in the company’s Her Name Was Carmen, its unique take on the Georges Bizet ballet based on Prosper Mérimée’s novella, with the setting moved to a refugee site, inspired by her 2016 visit to Balkan camps.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: HAMNET

Dead Centre makes its BAM debut with Hamnet (photo by Ernesto Galan)

BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
October 30 – November 3, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/hamnet
www.deadcentre.org

New BAM artistic director David Binder continues his season of BAM debuts with Hamnet, presented by Ireland’s Dead Centre. In 1585, William Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, gave birth to twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith. Hamnet died tragically in 1596 at the age of eleven; three years later, the Bard wrote perhaps his greatest play, Hamlet, at least partly about a young man haunted by the death of his father. Founded in 2012 by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd and based between Dublin and London, Dead Centre has previously staged Beckett’s Room, Lippy, (S)quark!, Souvenir, Chekhov’s First Play, and Shakespeare’s Last Play; all but Lippy deal with writers, including James Joyce and Marcel Proust in addition to Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov, and Shakespeare. It has long been debated whether Shakespeare wrote Hamlet specifically in reaction to the death of his son, or whether Hamnet also inspired part of other works. For example, in King John, published in 1623, Constance says, “Grief fills the room up of my absent child.”

“Over centuries of feverish speculation, the most compelling reflections on the presence of Shakespeare’s emotional life in his plays — preeminently, James Joyce’s brilliant pages in Ulysses, but there are many others — have focused on Hamlet,” Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt wrote in 2014 in the New York Review of Books. “This biographical attention to a work deriving from recycled materials and written for the public stage would seem inherently implausible, were it not for the overwhelming impression on readers and spectators alike that the play must have emerged in an unusually direct way from the playwright’s inner life, indeed that at moments the playwright was barely in control of his materials. I will attempt in what follows to trace Hamlet back to a personal experience of grief and to sketch a long-term aesthetic strategy that seems to have emerged from this experience.” The sixty-minute multimedia piece, running October 30 to November 3 at BAM Fisher, features text and direction by Moukarzel and Kidd, with dramaturgy by Michael West, set design by Andrew Clancy, costumes by Grace O’Hara, lighting by Stephen Dodd, sound by Kevin Gleeson, video by Jose Miguel Jimenez, and choreography by Liv O’Donoghue. Aran Murphy plays Hamnet, addressing the audience directly as he shares his tragic tale.

NEXT WAVE 2019

The Second Woman repeats the same scene from John Cassavetes’s Opening Night one hundred times (photo by Heidrun Lohr)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 230 Lafayette Ave.
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space, 321 Ashland Pl.
October 15 – December 15
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Like myriad loyal BAMgoers, I look forward every year to the announcement of the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which has been presenting cutting-edge, experimental, and innovative dance, music, film, theater, opera, and hard-to-categorize multidisciplinary performances from around the world for nearly forty years. We eagerly scour the schedule to see when our longtime BAM favorites will be returning, scanning for such beloved names and companies as Robert Wilson, Sasha Waltz, Grupo Corpo, Batsheva, Philip Glass, Sankai Juku, Ivo van Hove, Mark Morris, Théâtre de la Ville, William Kentridge, Laurie Anderson, and the incomparable Pina Bausch, programmed by masterful executive producer Joe Melillo since 1999.

But this year’s lineup features nary a single familiar name, including that of Melillo, who retired after the Winter/Spring season. For his debut Next Wave Festival, new artistic director David Binder has opted to include a roster of performers all making their BAM debuts as well. But don’t be scared off by the lack of recognition. There was a time when no one in New York had ever seen Pina Bausch, Sankai Juku, Batsheva, Sasha Waltz, et al. And by its very nature, the Next Wave is all about the future of performance, delivered to an eager and intrepid audience open to anything and everything.

Dead Centre’s Hamnet tells the story of Shakespeare’s son (photo by Ernesto Galan)

“In programming my first season at BAM, I was inspired by the genesis of Next Wave and the groundbreaking work of my predecessors, Harvey Lichtenstein and Joe Melillo,” Binder said in a statement. “Next Wave is a place to see, share, and celebrate the most exciting new ideas in theater, music, dance, and, especially, the unclassifiable adventures. We’ve invited a slate of artists who have never performed at BAM. Each and every one of them is making a BAM debut, with artistic work that’s surprising and resonant. I’m excited to launch this season and to build BAM’s next chapter
with you.”

The 2019 Next Wave roster is an impressive one, kicking off October 15-20 with Michael Keegan-Dolan and Teaċ Daṁsa’s Swan Lake / Loch na hEala, about a young girl sexually assaulted by a priest. In The Second Woman, Alia Shawkat performs the same scene from John Cassavetes’s Opening Night one hundred times with one hundred different men over the course of twenty-four consecutive hours. Christiane Jatahy’s What if they went to Moscow? explores film and theater in a retelling of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters that takes place concurrently onstage at the BAM Fisher and onscreen at BAM Rose Cinemas, the audiences switching places as the performance repeats. In Dante or Die’s User Not Found, audience members sit in a café at the Greene Grape Annex on Fulton St., following the exploits of a man a few tables away. Dimitris Papaioannou breaks boundaries as he explores human existence in The Great Tamer. And Glenn Kaino’s When a Pot Finds Its Purpose will be the inaugural free exhibition at the new Rudin Family Gallery at BAM Strong.

Dante or Die’s User Not Found takes place in the Greene Grape Annex on Fulton St. (photo by Justin Jones)

The 2019 Next Wave Festival also includes Bruno Beltrão/Grupo de Rua’s Inoah, Dumbworld’s free outdoor art piece He Did What?, Selina Thompson’s free interactive installation Race Cards, Dead Centre’s Hamnet, Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s Bacchae: Prelude to a Purge, Untitled Projects/Unicorn Theatre, UK’s The End of Eddy, Peeping Tom’s 32 rue Vandenbranden, Fuel/National Theatre/Leeds Playhouse’s Barber Shop Chronicles, Kyle Marshall Choreography’s A.D. & Colored, Kate McIntosh’s In Many Hands, and Meow Meow’s A Very Meow Meow Holiday Show. Still worried about unfamiliarity? If you’ve been to BAM before, you should be ready, willing, and able to be surprised, and if you’ve never been to BAM, you should be preparing to make your debut.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: THE BACCHAE

Anne Bogart and SITI Company relate Euripides’ The Bacchae to today’s sociopolitical ills in new interpretation (photo by Craig Schwartz)

THE BACCHAE
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
October 3-7, $40-$75
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Anne Bogart and SITI Company return to BAM’s Next Wave Festival with their new interpretation of Euripides’ classic tale of gods and mortals, religion and the state, the earthly and the divine, The Bacchae. “More than any other play in Western civilization, Euripides’ is probably the one that most directly addresses the art of theater,” Bogart explains in a program note. “We are aware, for example, that we are looking at an actor or at a precisely lit staging and scenery, but at the same time we allow ourselves to enter into another world that is merely suggested by what is actually present.” The work, which premiered at the Getty Villa in California last month, is translated by Aaron Poochigian, with set and lighting by Brian H Scott, sound by Darron L West, and music composed by Erik Sanko. The cast features Ellen Lauren as Dionysus, Barney O’Hanlon as Tiresias, Stephen Duff Webber as Cadmus, Eric Berryman as Pentheus, and Akiko Aizawa as Agave. In conjunction with the show, the talk “Speaking Truth to Power: On Fear and Governance” will take place October 5 at the BAM Fisher’s Hillman Studio ($15, 6:00), with Anne Bogart and Monica Youn in conversation with Corey Robin, and BAM and the Mark Morris Dance Group are teaming up for “Introduction to Suzuki & Viewpoints,” a master class with SITI, on October 10 ($25, 12 noon) for theater artists, actors, dancers, performers, and directors.