Five actors re-create 1970s WNYC programs in documentary play (photo by Hunter Canning)
RADIO DOWNTOWN: RADICAL ’70s ARTISTS LIVE ON AIR
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 9, $44
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The Civilians’ Radio Downtown: Radical ’70s Artists Live on Air is an odd documentary play that is difficult to decipher. Conceived and directed by Steve Cosson and written by Cosson and Jocelyn Clarke, it consists of five actors re-creating segments from three 1970s programs on WNYC: Arts Forum, Artists in the City, and Poetry of the Avant-Garde.
The conceit is that, as the audience is told at the start, “The actors do not know their lines. This is made from archival recordings. The actual words, pauses, and sounds from back then will be fed into the actor’s ears.” I’m not quite sure why Cosson decided to present the dialogue that way; it makes for an uneasy experience, as I found myself on edge every time an actor paused, wondering whether the hesitation was in the original interview, there was a technical glitch, or the performer lost their place. In addition, these are professional actors, and one would think that, especially after several weeks of performance, they would know their lines, complete with pauses and hesitations.
Robert M. Johanson, Jennifer Morris, Joshua David Robinson, Maya Sharpe, and Colleen Werthmann portray a who’s who of the avant-garde scene: film theorist and historian P. Adams Sitney, experimental choreographer, dancer, and visual artist Yvonne Rainer, filmmakers George Kuchar and Kenneth Anger, poets Leroi Jones and Lorenzo Thomas, critic and academic Annette Michelson, polymath Harry Smith, and actress, dancer, and singer Kimako Baraka, among others. The seventy-minute production takes place in a room with numerous chairs, lamps on the floor (did they run out of tables, or was this how it was at WNYC?), and a back wall featuring a large image of part of a naked human body with a fly on its mouth.
The actors switch between characters by making small clothing adjustments, selecting jackets, vests, and other apparel hanging from hooks on each side of Andrew Boyce’s set. (The costumes are by Emily Rebholz.) Attilio Rigotti’s projections identify the speakers and include newspaper headlines, snippets from a Rainer dance rehearsal, and clips from Anger’s 1967 Lucifer Rising, which starred Bobby Beausoleil, who committed murder the next year as an associate of the Manson family and is still serving life in prison.
The highlight of the show is Anger discussing fellow filmmaker Maya Deren’s apparent disgust of his work. Deren had sent a letter to Anger explaining why she chose not to award a film of his a prize at a festival; in response, Anger describes, “I wrote her back and I said, ‘The whole thing was a joke.’ And she wrote me back and said, uh, she said, ‘You are guilty of confounding the public, and you are also guilty of pulling my leg, [laughter] and I will never forgive you.’ And I said, well, if she has — if she has such a lack of a sense of humor. . . .”
As far as a sense of humor goes, I was questioning mine throughout Radio Downtown, particularly when Werthmann, as Rainer, mimicked some of the choreographer’s slow, angular movement. While my theater companion found it hilarious in a good way, I was perplexed, uncertain whether it was a pretentious tribute or a playful parody of Rainer and the whole underground scene.
That was essentially my takeaway from the show, a constant level of confusion. Later, I checked out The NYPR Archive Collections, where you can listen to the original recordings and read the transcripts.
When I heard Rainer talk to Michelson about “kinesthetic empathy,” I knew just what she meant.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Former Japanese national surfing champion Takuji Masuda documents the wild life and times of sugar scion Bunker Spreckels in the bumpy, oddly titled Bunker77, which is having its New York City premiere November 16 and 17 at the DOC NYC festival. Born in Los Angeles in 1949, Spreckels is described in the film by friends and relatives as “radical,” “original,” “unique,” “dangerous,” and “fun,” a blond beach bum and party lover who rode waves around the world with his specially made short boards. “That was his international persona: the hunter, the surfer, the playboy, the jet-setter, the martial artist, all in one,” skateboard legend Tony Alva says of his friend and mentor. Spreckels’s grandfather, Adolph B. Spreckels, ran the Spreckels Sugar Company and, with his wife, Alma, helped develop the cities of San Francisco and San Diego. After Spreckels’s parents, Adolph B. Spreckels II and former actress Kay Williams, divorced, his mother married Clark Gable, who helped raise Bunker and his sister, Joan, for five years. Bunker always did things his own way, but his life spiraled out of control once he turned twenty-one and gained access to his multimillion-dollar trust fund, caught up in a storm of drugs, alcohol and women. He tried to become a rock star and a screen idol while skateboarding and surfing in California, Hawai’i, Australia, and South Africa. His story is told by such surfing legends as Laird Hamilton, Vinny Bryan, Bill Hamilton, Rory Russell, Nat Young, Herbie Fletcher, Spyder Wills, and Wayne Bartholomew; childhood friends Curtis Allen (son of cowboy movie star Rex Allen) and Ira Opper; Surfer magazine photographer Art Brewer, associate editor Kurt Ledterman, chief editor Drew Kampion, and publisher Steve Pezman; longtime girlfriend Ellie Silva; and journalist C. R. Steyck III, whose extensive interview with Spreckels near the end of his life is sprinkled throughout the documentary. Masuda also includes home movies, photographs, relevant clips from Gable films, and scenes from 2005’s Lords of Dogtown, in which Johnny Knoxville plays Topper Burks, who is based on Spreckels, and 1961’s Blue Hawaii, in which Elvis Presley plays a character eerily similar to Bunker. “You can definitely have too much fun with too much money,” Bartholomew says, while Steyck adds, “He was a dangerous man, mainly dangerous to himself.”
A British gangster on the run hides out with a psychedelic rock star in this strangely enticing film from Donald (The Demon Seed) Cammell and Nicolas Roeg (making his big-screen directorial debut). James Fox didn’t know what he was getting into when he signed on to play Chas, a mobster who finds sanctuary with mushroom-popping rock-diva has-been Turner, played with panache by Mick Jagger. Throw in Anita Pallenberg, a fab drug trip, and the great “Memo to Turner” scene and you have a film that some consider the real precursor to MTV, some think a work of pure demented genius, and others find to be one of the most pretentious and awful pieces of claptrap ever committed to celluloid. We fall somewhere in the middle of all of that. Performance is screening November 23-24 as part of the MoMA tribute “The Rolling Stones: 50 Years on Film,” celebrating the group’s golden anniversary, which includes appearances in New Jersey and Brooklyn next month. Throughout their career, the Stones have gotten some of the world’s greatest directors to make live concert films of their shows, most of which are part of this series, which continues through December 2 with such other films as Hal Ashby’s Let’s Spend the Night Together, Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light, Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s Gimme Shelter, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil in addition to Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother and more.