Tag Archives: la mama

SHIMMER AND HERRINGBONE

Fashion takes center stage at Talking Band’s Shimmer and Herringbone (photo by Maria Baranova)

SHIMMER AND HERRINGBONE
Mabou Mines@122CC
150 1st Ave. at Ninth St.
Wednesday – Sunday through May 19, $35
talkingband.org

Amid the flurry of Broadway openings — no fewer than nineteen between March 7 and April 25, the cutoff to be eligible for the Tonys — you may have missed the celebratory event of the season, the fiftieth anniversary of Talking Band, the independent downtown company founded by Ellen Maddow, Paul Zimet, and Tina Shepard in 1974. The avant-garde troupe has staged more than sixty productions since 1975’s The Kalevala, and this year it has treated us to three exquisite new shows in a span of three months.

In February, TB presented the moving and intimate The Following Evening at PAC NYC, a collaboration with 600 Highwaymen that explored personal and professional legacy, starring real-life couples Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone of 600 Highwaymen and Maddow and Zimet of TB. In March, Maddow, in her mid-seventies, and Zimet, in his early eighties, teamed up for the brilliant Existentialism at La MaMa, a dazzling meditation on aging.

TB concludes its unofficial trilogy with the hilariously inventive and profound Shimmer and Herringbone, which opened last night at Mabou Mines@122CC for a limited run through May 19.

In his 1905 short story “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” Mark Twain wrote, “As Teufelsdröckh suggested, what would man be — what would any man be — without his clothes? As soon as one stops and thinks over that proposition, one realizes that without his clothes a man would be nothing at all; that the clothes do not merely make the man, the clothes are the man; that without them he is a cipher, a vacancy, a nobody, a nothing.”

The ninety-minute Shimmer and Herringbone takes place in the titular clothing store, where a handful of oddball characters across three generations — old friends, former lovers, not-so-strangers — shop with the help of eclectic dressing room attendant Rhonda (Maddow), who shares tidbits of carefully phrased philosophy as they seek to change their clothes, their style, and, in several cases, their lives, to not be a nobody or a nothing.

When Rhonda asks one customer, “Did you find what you were looking for?,” she’s referring to more than just a new scarf or jacket.

She says to another shopper, “Where are you going, if you don’t mind my asking?,” a question that requires a bigger answer than the shoe department.

Melanie (Tina Shepard), Colin (Jack Wetherall), and Lilly (Lizzie Olesker) wonder about pigeons and life in world premiere play (photo by Maria Baranova)

At the beginning of the play, Lilly (Lizzie Olesker) and her daughter, the twentysomething Bree (Ebony Davis), find the elderly Melanie (Tina Shepard), who speaks in non sequiturs, facedown on the floor. Grace (Louise Smith) is a realtor who isn’t sure how she knows Colin (Jack Wetherall) and runs away when she sees Lilly, an ornithologist who is embarrassed that she doesn’t recognize Gus (James Tigger! Ferguson), who appears to know her very well.

As they slowly discover more about one another, the characters not only dig deep within themselves but try to understand how they are seen by others — and how they have changed over the years.

“I see this face and I wonder — could that be me?” Grace says, later adding, as only a real estate agent can, “My face is falling apart like an old house.”

Reaching out, Colin talks to Grace about the apartment where he’s lived for more than thirty years. “Suddenly, about a month ago, I woke up and everything looked drab, everything was in the wrong place. The rug that I inherited from my mother was tatty and raveled around the edges, the kitchen table was greasy, and my favorite chair looked like a toadstool with its undersides oozing toxins. It’s like I have changed, but my apartment is stubbornly, defiantly sitting in the past, and I can’t stand it,” he says. Grace responds, “That’s been happening to people a lot lately,” implicating the audience itself.

As the characters share stories from their past that often include details about what they were wearing at the time, Bree is having none of it. When Rhonda asks her, “Can I help you?,” the youngest member of the group quickly replies, “I don’t need help.” When her mother is considering whether she should return a shirt, Bree declares, “It’s just a blouse,” a phrase that sticks out like blasphemy.

Through it all, a string trio consisting of Rachel Feldhaus, Marija Kovacevic, and Agustin Uriburu performs in a far corner, sometimes adding soothing background music and sometimes playing to the characters, who sit down and watch them while having conversations.

Gus (James Tigger! Ferguson) and Rhonda (Ellen Maddow) find common ground through dress in Shimmer and Herringbone (photo by Maria Baranova)

Shimmer and Herringbone is another delightful triumph from Talking Band, reminiscent of its 2022 production Lemon Girls or Art for the Artless, which also featured Olesker, Shepard, Smith, Wetherall, and writer and composer Maddow and was directed by Zimet. The new piece is cowritten by Maddow and Zimet and directed by Zimet, in collaboration with costume designer Olivera Gajic, whose outfits nearly steal the show, from black leather and leopard print to fluffy slippers and feathery hats.

The narrative unfolds on Anna Kiraly’s cozy set, which is centered by four lighted dressing-room doors that the shoppers enter and exit and is also used for Kiraly’s projections of social media posts, images of clothing and the moon, abstract shapes, birds on a wire, and a short film. The soft lighting is by Mary Ellen Stebbins, with sweet and touching choreography by Sean Donovan. A kind of angel at a way station, Rhonda is often pushing along a mannequin or a rack of clothes that were rejected. The characters occasionally sit on concrete slabs like park benches at the front, almost touching the audience.

In addition to the classical music played by the string trio, there are pop songs and poetry, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Blue “Gene” Tyranny to the combo of Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith. Gus, who fashions himself a literary junkie, references Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Borges, Hemingway, and Kerouac as he morphs into James Joyce, who once wrote, “Mother is packing my new secondhand clothes. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life!”

The centerpiece of the show is ornithologist Lilly’s spark bird, the New York City pigeon. Also known as the Columba livia and the rock dove, the bird is not only ubiquitous — it’s believed there are about four million in the city, compared with nine million people — but it is hard for the average person to tell them apart. Human beings have the ability to choose clothing that can assist in defining who they are, both outside and inside, but pigeons don’t have that option. It’s even difficult to identify their gender, as Lilly notes, which becomes relevant late in the play.

At one point, Grace explains that part of her job is “staging” a house, evoking the staging of a play: cleaning it out from top to bottom, then painting the walls white and adding cream carpets and innocuous artworks, allowing the buyer to make it their own home. Each character entering Shimmer and Herringbone is like that plain house, ready to redecorate themselves in their own personal style.

When Bree sees Melanie dragging a large garbage bag, she asks her what’s in there. “Nothing,” Melanie answers. “Stuff that’s been clogging up my closets, burdening my soul for half a century.” How many of us would love to go through our closets and get rid of old clothes that feel like a burden?

“So you want to find something that reflects who you are,” Rhonda says to Grace, who is worried about suffering buyer’s remorse, as if a new outfit is as important as a new home.

Isn’t it?

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

TALKING BAND: EXISTENTIALISM

Husband-and-wife Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet portray a married couple in Existentialism (photo by Maria Baranova)

EXISTENTIALISM
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
The Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East Fourth St. between Second Ave. & Bowery
Wednesday – Sunday through March 10, $35-$40
212-475-7710
www.lamama.org
talkingband.org

Early on in Talking Band’s gorgeously poetic two-character play Existentialism, the man says, “Choice is possible. / What is impossible is not to choose. / If I decide not to choose, / That still constitutes a choice.”

It would be a mistake not to choose to see one of the best shows of the year.

Existentialism is created and directed by former SITI Company head Anne Bogart specifically for Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Talking Band, the troupe Maddow and Zimet cofounded with Tina Shepard in 1974. The duo, who have been married since 1986, portray an unnamed woman and man living in a home on the beach. Anna Kiraly’s set features a pair of house-shaped structures, open in the front, each with the same overhead lamp and a small table with a backless chair and typewriter. Short walkways lead out of and around the rooms, with a small planting bed on the woman’s side. Brian Scott’s lighting casts warm red, yellow, orange, blue, and green glows on the structures, while Darron L West’s sound ranges from loud music to soft nature elements to the actors’ crystal-clear enunciations. Kiraly’s projections of waves on the shore and birds flying freely come and go on a large screen in the back.

The woman waters her plants with panache, raising the watering can high above her as the liquid drips out. She does the shopping and is agonized by a speck of dirt she cannot get clean on the path. The two sit at their respective desks on opposite sides of a wall and type in unison.

He saunters to the front of the stage and speaks directly to the audience: “There is a wall between us, but it is a wall we build together. Each of us puts a stone in the gap left by the other. / I’m going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become,” he says, sharing an intimate, funny smile. “I am no longer sure of anything. / Something has to snap. / Words are loaded pistols. / There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.” Throughout the show’s seventy minutes, we all fill the gaps with figurative stones (and smiles) of our own.

The dialogue is based on the writings of life partners Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in addition to Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sarah Bakewell, Maggie Nelson, Octavia Butler, bell hooks, and Betty Friedan. The words form an enticing and gentle meditation on gender and aging, delivered in a soft, plain-spoken, but not dispassionate style. The text is all the more compelling because Maddow is seventy-five and Zimet eighty-one; however, they are imbued with an infectious youthfulness.

“My life is set within a given space of time: / It has a beginning and an end, / It evolves in given places, / Always retaining the same roots, / It spins an unchangeable past, / Its future is limited,” the woman says. “No one else is as old as I am. / How young everyone is!”

The man says, “I was young once.”

The man turns on the radio and listens to Dave Brubeck’s “Broadway Bossa Nova” and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” The duo dances to the Jim Carroll Band’s punk anthem “People Who Died” blasting out of the speakers, a furious song about how more than a dozen men and women meet untimely ends. “They were all my friends and they died,” Carroll belts out. A New York City native, Carroll himself died of a heart attack in 2009 at the age of sixty; his most well known works include the novel The Basketball Diaries and the LP Catholic Boy.

Time moves on, but the man and the woman continue their daily existence, discussing life in abstract terms.

“No one will ever make sense of this mystery,” she says.

Paul Zimet and Ellen Maddow take a spin in Existentialism (photo by Maria Baranova)

Last month Maddow and Zimet appeared in The Following Evening at PAC NYC, a show written and directed specifically for them by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone of 600 Highwaymen, two married creators in their early forties paying tribute to the older couple and what they have accomplished both personally and professionally.

With Existentialism, Bogart is also celebrating Maddow and Zimet. Bogart last worked with Talking Band in 1988, winning the first of her three Obies for directing No Plays No Poetry but Philosophical Reflections Practical Instructions Provocative Prescriptions Opinions and Pointers from a Noted Critic and Playwright, incorporating the writings of Bertolt Brecht; Maddow and Zimet were part of an ensemble cast that also included Louise Smith and Shepard. Bogart has said that when Maddow and Zimet suggested they work together again, she instantly knew it would be called Existentialism; it’s a fitting title for the show, which has its own built-in meta.

Maddow and Zimet are utterly charming in this new piece, which continues at La MaMa through March 10. Although not much is revealed about their characters, you can’t help but fall in love with their relationship. They know they are in the sunset of their lives, but that isn’t stopping them from enjoying every moment. “Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over. It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk,” he says.

Bogart captures the essence of long-term love, with all its bumps and bruises. When the woman hides behind the wall, listening intently to the man typing away, you can feel how much they adore and need each other. It’s a tender moment that I won’t soon forget.

But right in front of the houses is a rectangular gap in the walkway, a small but constant threat, reminding us how easy it is to fall off one’s path, something Bogart, Maddow, and Zimet don’t have to worry about with this wonderful collaboration.

“Why do we even exist? Hahaha . . . ,” the woman asks. One reasonable answer could be so we could experience such shows as Existentialism.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

UNDER THE RADAR: PUSHKIN “EUGENE ONEGIN” IN OUR OWN WORDS

Four actors portray multiple characters in Pushkin “Eugene Onegin” in our own words (photo by Bronwen Sharp)

PUSHKIN “EUGENE ONEGIN” IN OUR OWN WORDS
BRIC Arts Media House
647 Fulton St., Brooklyn
Tuesday – Sunday through January 28, $52.11-$67.93
bricartsmedia.org
krymovlabnyc.com

This past October, Moscow-born director, designer, and visual artist Dmitry Krymov made a smashing debut with his new company, Krymov Lab NYC, in Big Trip, two shows that ran in repertory at La MaMa. I saw Three Love Stories Near the Railroad, wild and woolly, wholly unpredictable retellings of Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Canary for One,” followed by a pair of scenes from Eugene O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms. The other presentation was the oddly titled Pushkin “Eugene Onegin” in our own words, another strange but clever and gratifying journey that is enjoying an encore run through January 28 at BRIC Arts Media House as part of the Under the Radar festival.

In the hallway, you are told that this is a children’s show and that, in order to gain entry to the BRIC Ballroom, you need to select a puppet from among the dozens and dozens scattered around what would have been the coat check room. The handmade puppets, created by Leah Ogawa and Luna Gomberg, are adorably grotesque, made of papier-mâché and assorted random items that serve as eyes, ears, or limbs. You are expected to hold on to your child-puppet throughout the wild and woolly, wholly unpredictable proceedings, a hilarious ninety minutes of meta-theatrics.

Four actors — Inna Natanovna (Anya Zicer), Pyotr Naomovich (Jeremy Radin), Oleg Lvovich (Jackson Scott), and Alla Borisovna (Elizabeth Stahlmann) — walk on Emona Stoykova’s sparse stage dragging bags of goofy props that they lay out on a table on one side and a row of chairs on the other. Addressing the audience directly, Pyotr says, “Hello. We come tonight to explain you about Evgeny Onegin, a very famous narrative poem. A novel, made of many little poems, written by Alexander Pushkin — the most great, most wonderful, amazing, fantastic poet in all history of Russia. Greatest poet of all time. Your parents ask us, four old Russian immigrants, to tell you story about Onegin and Pushkin.”

And so they do, but definitely not as you might expect.

Pyotr Naomovich (Jeremy Radin) and Inna Natanovna (Anya Zicer) move along the plot in unique ways at BRIC (photo by Bronwen Sharp)

Inna, Pyotr, Oleg, and Alla portray themselves and multiple characters from “Evgeny Onegin” and Pushkin’s personal life. Some require more significant costume changes than others, and many of the outfits look like they might have come from the performers’ own closets. (The costumes are by Gomberg, with lighting by Krista Smith, sound by Kate Marvin, and projections by Yana Biryukova, all of which are purposely low-tech.)

In the 1830s novel in verse, Pushkin introduces readers to the title character, a dandy who inherits a country estate. The landowner’s daughter, Tatyana Larina, falls in love with Onegin, who has become friendly with poet Vladimir Lensky, who is about to marry Olga Larina, Tatyana’s younger sister. When Onegin and Olga dance together at a celebration, Tatyana and Vladimir are none too happy, and things devolve from there as Pushkin explores class, gender, naïveté, and unrequited love.

The story is regularly interrupted by a heckler (Kwesiu Jones), logistical issues, literary arguments, and tangents about the art of theater itself, some of which involve “stage manager” Natalie Battistone. As Pyotr explains at one point, “From the traproom, you can rise and fall! This trick is often used in opera and ballet performances by devils! But we don’t talk about devils. Very superstitious people, theater people, ptew! No devils — we don’t want to give you nightmares, okay? We tell you, instead, about angels. . . .”

Several audience members in the first row are asked to participate. The actors keep a feather afloat by blowing on it for no apparent reason. Onegin’s spleen (depression) is examined. One of the men becomes the lower half of a ballerina’s body. A pair of oddball contraptions are employed to elucidate characters’ motivations. Onegin is compared to Pushkin. Clothes come off, revealing an unexpected surprise. A buxom nanny opens a window, then closes it, then opens it, then . . .

Writer-director Krymov was preparing a production of The Cherry Orchard in Philadelphia in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Condemning Vladimir Putin’s actions, he became an exile, moving to New York City with his wife and starting Krymov Lab NYC. If these first two vastly inventive and entertaining shows are any indication of what is to come, Putin has cost Russia something very valuable indeed.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

IVO DIMCHEV: IN HELL WITH JESUS / TOP 40

Get ready for the wildly unexpected in Ivo Dimchev’s In Hell with Jesus / Top 40 at La MaMa (photo by Krasimir Stoichkov)

Who: Ivo Dimchev and company
What: Interactive performance
Where: The Downstairs, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, 66 East Fourth St. between Second Ave. & Bowery
When: November 16-26, $10-$30
Why: Bulgarian theater director, performance artist, activist, choreographer, singer-songwriter, and visual artist brings his unique talents to La MaMa with 2022’s In Hell with Jesus and the US premiere of 2023’s Top 40. The former is a musical, centered around an audition, that challenges political correctness in theater and beyond, conceived and directed by Dimchev and performed by him and Andrew Fremont-Smith, Cassondra James, Louis Schwadron, Xavier Smith, and Chris Tanner in madcap costumes; it asks the question, “Big dick, big house, or great sense of humor?” Dimchev, the founder and director of Bulgaria’s Humarts Foundation, wrote and choreographed the latter, which features songs from previous shows of his and a hefty amount of audience participation.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

UNDER THE RADAR 2023

A Thousand Ways (Part Three): Assembly brings strangers together at the New York Public Library (photo courtesy 600 Highwaymen)

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL
Public Theater and other venues
January 4-22, free – $60
publictheater.org

The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival is back and in person for its eighteenth iteration, running January 4-22 at the Public as well as Chelsea Factory, NYU Skirball, La MaMa, BAM, and the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch. As always, the works come from around the world, a mélange of disciplines that offers unique theatrical experiences. Among this year’s selections are Jasmine Lee-Jones’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner, Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff’s Our Country, Roger Guenveur Smith’s Otto Frank, Rachel Mars’s Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters, Kaneza Schaal’s KLII, and Timothy White Eagle and the Violet Triangle’s The Indigo Room.

In addition, “Incoming! — Works-in-Process” features early looks at pieces by Mia Rovegno, Miranda Haymon, Nile Harris, Mariana Valencia, Eric Lockley, Savon Bartley, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, and Justin Elizabeth Sayre, while Joe’s Pub will host performances by Eszter Balint, Negin Farsad, Julian Fleisher and his Rather Big Band, Salty Brine, and Migguel Anggelo.

Below is a look at four of the highlights.

600 HIGHWAYMEN: A THOUSAND WAYS (PART THREE): AN ASSEMBLY
The New York Public Library, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library
455 Fifth Ave. at Fortieth St., seventh floor
January 4-22, free with advance RSVP
publictheater.org

At the January 2021 Under the Radar Festival, the Obie-winning 600 Highwaymen presented A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call, a free hourlong telephone conversation between you and another person, randomly put together and facilitated by an electronic voice that asks both general and intimate questions, from where you are sitting to what smells you are missing, structured around a dangerous and lonely fictional situation that is a metaphor for sheltering in place. The company followed that up with the second part, An Encounter, in which you and a stranger — not the same one — meet in person, sitting across a table, separated from one another by a clear glass panel, with no touching and no sharing of objects. In both sections, I bonded quickly with the other person, making for intimate and poignant moments when we were all keeping our distance from each other.

Now comes the grand finale, Assembly, where sixteen strangers at a time will come together to finish the story at the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch in Midtown. Written and created by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, A Thousand Ways innovatively tracks how the pandemic lockdown influenced the ways we interact with others as well as how critical connection and entertainment are.

Palindromic show makes US premiere at Under the Radar Festival (photo courtesy Ontroerend Goed)

ONTROEREND GOED: Are we not drawn onward to new erA
BAM Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 4-8, $45
publictheater.org
www.bam.org

What do the following three statements have in common? “Dammit, I’m mad.” “Madam in Eden, I’m Adam.” “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” They are all palindromes, reading the same way backward and forward. They also, in their own way, relate to Ontroerend Goed’s Are we not drawn onward to new erA, running January 4-8 at BAM’s Fishman Space. Directed by Alexander Devriendt, the Belgian theater collective’s seventy-minute show features a title and a narrative that work both backward and forward as they explore climate change and the destruction wrought by humanity, which has set the Garden of Eden on the path toward armageddon. But maybe, just maybe, there is still time to save the planet if we come up with just the right plan.

PLEXUS POLAIRE: MOBY DICK
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 12-14, $40
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

The world is obsessed with Moby-Dick much the way Captain Ahab is obsessed with the great white itself. Now it’s Norwegian theater company Plexus Polaire and artistic director Yngvild Aspeli’s turn to harpoon the story of one of the most grand quests in all of literature. Aspeli (Signaux, Opéra Opaque, Dracula) incorporates seven actors, fifty puppets, video projections, a drowned orchestra, and a giant whale to transform Herman Melville’s 1851 novel into a haunting ninety-minute multimedia production at NYU Skirball for four performances only, so get on board as soon as you can.

Brian Mendes and Jim Fletcher get ready for NYCP’s Field of Mars (photo courtesy New York City Players)

NEW YORK CITY PLAYERS: FIELD OF MARS
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 19-22, 24-29, $60
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

I’ll follow Richard Maxwell and New York City Players anywhere, whether it’s on a boat past the Statue of Liberty (The Vessel), an existential journey inside relationships and theater itself (The Evening, Isolde) and outside time and space (Paradiso, Good Samaritans), or even to the Red Planet and beyond. Actually, his newest piece, Field of Mars, playing at NYU Skirball January 19-29, refers not to the fourth planet from the sun but to the ancient term for a large public space and military parade ground. Maxwell doesn’t like to share too much about upcoming shows, but we do know that this one features Lakpa Bhutia, Nicholas Elliott, Jim Fletcher, Eleanor Hutchins, Paige Martin, Brian Mendes, James Moore, Phil Moore, Steven Thompson, Tory Vazquez, and Gillian Walsh and that the limited audience will be seated on the stage.

Oh, and Maxwell noted in an email blast: “Field of Mars: A chain restaurant in Chapel Hill is used as a way to measure the progress of primates, from hunter/gatherer to fast casual dining experience. Topics covered: Music, Food, Nature, and Spirituality. . . . I also wanted to take this opportunity to tell parents regarding the content of Field of Mars: my kids (aged 11 and 15) will not be seeing this show.”

NEIL GREENBERG: BETSY

Neil Greenberg will present the world premiere of Betsy this week at La MaMa (photo by Frank Mullaney)

Who: Neil Greenberg, Paul Hamilton, Opal Ingle, Owen Prum
What: World premiere dance
Where: La MaMa’s Downstairs Theater, 66 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
When: November 12-14, 17-20, $10-$30
Why: “Betsy makes use of projected written text that situates the dance within a two-pandemic landscape of COVID and AIDS, and within the also-ongoing crisis of racism and white supremacy,” dancer and choreographer Neil Greenberg explains on the Kickstarter page for his latest piece, premiering November 12-14 and 17-20 at LaMaMa. “I’m working to expose the cultural rootedness of any performance material in the conditions of its production. The use of text simultaneously gestures toward the kind of meaning-making encouraged by language while also intervening to allow for other perceptual possibilities.” The work features Greenberg, Paul Hamilton, Opal Ingle, and Owen Prum, with an original score by James Lo and Zeena Parkins and lighting by Michael Stiller. A former member of Merce Cunningham Dance Company and dance curator at the Kitchen and currently on the dance faculty at the New School, Greenberg made his La MaMa debut in 1987 with MacGuffin, or How Meanings Get Lost.

“Betsy will engage with the phenomenon of performance itself, in a play with the multiple relational possibilities between performers and spectators, and between a work and its spectators,” Greenberg (Partial View, This) continues. “Betsy will be presented with audience surrounding the performance arena, each viewer necessarily experiencing the performance materials differently due to their distinct vantage point, enabling spectators to watch the dance, themselves, and each other as they watch the dance together.”

LAZARUS 1972–2022

Ping Chong will revisit his 1972 work, Lazarus, at La MaMa (photo by Cathy Zimmerman)

Who: Ping Chong and Company
What: Reimagining of Ping Chong’s 1972 Lazarus
Where: La MaMa Downstairs Theater, 66 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
When: September 30 – October 16, $30 (panel discussion moderated by Sara Farrington on October 9 after 4:00 show)
Why: “I’ve never thought of myself as a theater artist, I’ve thought of myself as an artist in the theater,” Ping Chong tells Sara Farrington in her new book, The Lost Conversation: Interviews with an Enduring Avant-Garde (53rd State Press, April 2022, $16). Asked how he first became involved in avant-garde theater around 1971, the Toronto-born Ping explains, “I graduated from the School of Visual Arts in film and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I mean, there were no filmmakers of color around. There was no role model and I wasn’t one of these go-getter aggressive kids. So I was just killing time, trying to figure out what to do next. And then a friend of a friend, an associate of mine from school, said, I’m taking some dance classes with Meredith Monk, do you want to go? So I took her classes — she was doing continuing education classes at NYU. And Meredith said to me, You’re talented, come to my workshop. But I didn’t.” He eventually did attend a workshop — Monk’s studio was only three blocks from his apartment — and even joined Monk’s company. His apartment was also only two blocks from La MaMa; he put on his first show there in 1979.

Ping is now back at La MaMa with what will be his final production as artistic director, Lazarus 1972–2022, a reimagining of his first independent work, which was staged at Meredith Monk’s loft studio half a century ago. It’s a nonlinear piece about cultural alienation in which the title biblical character is resurrected in 1972 New York City; it featured projections, puppets, voice-overs (by Ping and Andrea Goodman), sound effects, music, but no dialogue spoken by the two main characters, portrayed by Tony Jannetti and Catherine Zimmerman. The sixty-minute Lazarus 1972–2022 runs Thursdays through Sundays from September 30 to October 16 at La MaMa Downstairs Theater; Christopher Caines will be Lazarus and Jeannie Hutchins portrays Woman, with sets by Watoko Ueno, lighting by Hao Bai, costumes by Stefani Mar, sound by Ernesto Valenzuela, and projections by Kate Freer.

“Lazarus was a metaphor for my own experience, because I had just left my insular world of Chinatown, moving out of that limbo into figuring out how to exist in larger society,” Ping said in a statement. “The original show was 1972; New York City was nearly bankrupt at that time and the urban purgatory aspect of it was very surreal and real. Originally the work reflected that — but the work has changed: I’m a lifetime New Yorker, and Lazarus is now different than the show was at the time in the sense that New York is also different, and centrally, part of the character of the show. Lazarus 1972–2022 is my love for New York but it’s also my sadness for what it’s become. Lazarus may have left purgatory and come back into the world — but what kind of a world did he come back into in 2022?”

On October 9 following the 4:00 performance, playwright, theater artist, screenwriter, director, and Foxy Films cofounder Farrington will join Ping at La MaMa for the panel discussion “Time Passes: Ping Chong and Fiji Theater Company Then and Now,” accompanied by members of his company from the late-1970s and 1980s, including John Fleming, Brian Hallas, Louise Smith, and Jeannie Hutchins. In her book, Farrington, who has collaborated with her husband, Reid, on such experimental multimedia shows as The Passion Project, CasablancaBox, Tyson vs. Ali, and BrandoCapote in addition to writing and/or directing other works, also speaks with such legendary figures as JoAnne Akalaitis, Anne Bogart, Richard Foreman, André Gregory David Henry Hwang, Bill T. Jones, Adrienne Kennedy, David Van Tieghem, Kate Valk, Mac Wellman, and Robert Wilson, creating a fascinating oral history of avant-garde theater.