THE FEVER
Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane between Sixth Ave. and MacDougal St.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 24, $56 www.audible.com
About two-thirds of the way through The Fever, Wallace Shawn’s one-person play being revived at the Minetta Lane, two audience members siting at the front right got up to walk out. Star Lili Taylor paused her monologue but stayed in character as she told the audience she would wait for the two women to leave. They exited slowly, apparently unaware the show had stopped, hoping to sneak out unnoticed. Wryly smiling, Taylor announced that this would be a good time for anyone else thinking of leaving to head for the exits. Wisely, no one took her up on her offer.
The Fever premiered at the Public in 1991, winning an Obie for Best New American Play. The New Group brought it back in 2007 at Theatre Row; Shawn played the unnamed lead both times. Vanessa Redgrave starred in Carlo Gabriel Nero’s 2004 film version. Now the New Group, in conjunction with Audible, is presenting a limited run, with the innately appealing and engaging Taylor as the traveler, a woman sharing tales of vacationing in banana republics. Although you can imagine how Shawn would have delivered the lines, in a much more wild and snarky way, Taylor is exquisite, like a dear friend sitting down with you and talking over tea and finger sandwiches. The writing and performance are so vivid, you’ll feel like you’re on these trips with her, seeing and experiencing exactly what she is seeing and experiencing.
The show is again directed by New Group founding artistic director Scott Elliott, with a light, amiable hand. A masked Taylor arrives in the theater huffing and puffing, running down the aisle and wriggling onto Arnulfo Maldonado’s set. She puts down flowers and coffee, just as so many of us do regularly when we come home, and begins to wheel out furniture on the otherwise barren stage — a lamp, a comfy chair, an end table with two doors. (The cozy lighting is by Cha See.)
“Okay, so it’s great to see all of you. I mostly see your eyes, obviously, but that’s a very beautiful part of any human being — or animal,” she says, welcoming us into her world. “I don’t know how many of you have dogs, but I love the eyes of dogs in particular. Anyway, as you can see, I’m sort of setting up a very small room here. It’s really just suggestive of a room; I’m not trying to convince you that it’s a real room, but it’s useful to represent a room just to help tell the story I’m going to tell you, and also, I don’t know, I think a completely bare stage can sometimes create a sort of almost threatening atmosphere, as if someone were saying, you know, ‘Don’t get too comfortable, there won’t be anything charming or attractive in the course of our evening at all,’ whereas I find these little bits of furniture quite pleasant and nice.’”
She immediately takes us into her confidence, and we’re on her side, identifying with her thoughts about travel, politics, and art. She seems to care about people in need, and we at first forgive her for certain views that sneak into her story. She notes that she goes to “poor countries” where they don’t speak her language, words that begin to make us uncomfortable as they’re repeated, almost like a mantra. Soon she is emphasizing dichotomies of income inequality: She looks at the helpless people across the street in a shelter as she eats in a fancy restaurant. Recalling how an office worker detailed cases of political murder, torture, and rape sponsored by the government, she remembers her parents teaching her how to properly go to the bathroom, wash her hands, and brush her teeth. She describes a wealthy old man spending a ton of money to keep himself alive as he’s dying, paying for all kinds of special treatments, a direct comparison to an execution by injection she recounted earlier. She prances about on a nude beach while so many in the world can’t afford proper clothing and shelter.
She admits that she has lived in towns “whose streets ran with the blood of good-hearted victims,” but she still loves the violin and Beethoven. “I like to go out at night in a cosmopolitan city and sit in a dark auditorium watching dancers fly into each other’s arms,” she says, turning a mirror on just about everyone in the theater. She sees The Cherry Orchard with friends but doesn’t understand why she was supposed to be weeping by the end.
Where we were previously nodding in agreement with the traveler, we become taken aback as she starts criticizing poor people for depriving her of the fun she used to have. “I’d always said, ‘I’m a happy person. I love life,’ but now there was a sort of awful indifference or blankness that was coming from somewhere inside me and filling me up, bit by bit,” she complains. “Things that would once have pleased me or even delighted me seemed to go dead on me, to spoil. But my problem was that somehow, suddenly, I was not myself. I was disconcerted.” She turns so sad that she can’t even give her family presents anymore, and it isn’t long before she is blaming the poor.
Our comfort level continues to decrease when she proclaims, “Yes, I’m an aesthete. I like beauty. Yes — poor countries are beautiful. Poor people are beautiful. It’s a wonderful feeling to have money in a country where most people are poor, to ride in a taxi through horrible slums.” She rationalizes why she is not going to give all the money in her purse to a beggar, arguing that she worked hard for that money. “I’m entitled to be served, I’m entitled to expect that certain things will be done. Which means that the holders of money determine what happens in the world,” she says.
Ah, there it is; the truth comes out, and it’s not easy for a liberal New York City audience to hear. Years before the subprime mortgage crisis, before President George W. Bush called his base “the haves and the have-mores,” before the immigration crisis reached epic proportions, before corporations as people were awarded First Amendment rights, Shawn spotlighted the privileged, the growing income gap, and the personal justifications necessary to maintain some agreeable level of inequality by people on both sides of the aisle.
Taylor (Six Feet Under,Household Saints), who played Lemon in the New Group’s 2004 revival of Shawn’s 1985 examination of civilization, Aunt Dan and Lemon — and was mesmerizing reprising the role with the rest of the original cast in a streaming Zoom version during the pandemic — is a warm, affectionate actor, and she excels as the traveler, setting us up for a reevaluation of our personal belief systems, of what we deem important and unavoidable on a beautiful planet where ugliness awaits just around the corner. We can’t help but like her, and in liking her — at least in part because we identify so closely with her — we give her character the benefit of the doubt.
As Pogo said in a 1971 Earth Day comic, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Perhaps that’s why those two women got up and left before the play was over.
Who: Wallace Shawn, Julie Hagerty, Jennifer Tilly, Emily Cass McDonnell, Deborah Eisenberg, Larry Pine What: Audio versions of Wallace Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors and The Designated Mourner Where:Gideon Media When: Available July 9 Why: Beloved New York City icon Wallace Shawn has kept himself very busy during the pandemic lockdown. He wonderfully reprised his role as the villainous Vizzini (“Inconceivable!”) in a Zoom benefit reunion reading of Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride to help support the Wisconsin Democratic party in the 2020 elections. The New GroupOffstage: Two by Wallace Shawn consisted of all-star Zoom reunion readings of his plays Aunt Dan and Lemon and Evening at the Talk House, the latter featuring his stellar turn as a bedraggled actor. And through July 25, you can catch him as Lucky in the New Group’s online adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, with Ethan Hawke as Didi, John Leguizamo as Gogo, and Tarik Trotter as Pozzo.
The curmudgeonly Shawn continues visiting his past with audio versions of his two of his most intense shows, presented for free by Gideon Media and reuniting the casts from previous productions. In Grasses of a Thousand Colors, an erotic futuristic nightmare that had its world premiere in 2009 at the Royal Court Theatre in London and debuted in New York four years later at the Public, Shawn expands on Madame d’Aulnoy’s 1698 fairy tale The White Cat in a wild and unpredictable story about sex, humans, animals, sex, the food chain, and sex. “Oh, hello there!” Shawn begins as a doctor named Ben. “You know, I’m just so thrilled that you’ve made the rather wild decision to listen to the meaning of all people right at this very moment. I mean, I know you’re probably just as mixed up about everything as I am because since yesterday, well, things have obviously changed since yesterday, that’s totally clear. Things are definitely different in one way or another. I mean, it’s been quite a journey, my God. And the last part of it was so crazy.” The play brings back Julie Hagerty as Cerise, Ben’s wife; Jennifer Tilly as Robin, his mistress; and Emily Cass McDonnell as Rose, his girlfriend, along with director André Gregory, who starred with Shawn in Louis Malle’s brilliant 1981 film, My Dinner with André.
The play is divided into six sections, “Invitation,” “The Quest to Be Known,” “Affair,” “Revenge,” “Illness,” and “Party,” that are definitely not safe for work, for those who are back in the office. “So anyway,” Dr. Ben says, “You see, I’d always loved nudity, including nude performances, because what other pleasures can we get in life except from what is naked, or in other words from getting closer and closer to what we call nature.”
Also available is an audio version of Shawn’s The Designated Mourner, which premiered at the Royal National Theatre in 1996; this reading reunites Shawn, Deborah Eisenberg (Shawn’s real-life wife), and Larry Pine from the 2000 New York City production directed by Gregory in several small rooms in a building on William St. in the Financial District. Divided into “Resentment,” “Accommodation,” “Danger,” “Flight,” “Arrest,” and “Death,” the play delves into violence, authoritarianism, and injustice amid Shawn’s unrelenting trademark dark humor.
“It’s just remarkable that your father is allowed to exist!” Judy (Eisenberg) recalls being told about her father, Howard (Pine), a famous and well-respected poet. “And meanwhile your attention is entirely turned away from the human suffering that is going on all around you,” Howard tells Jack (Shawn), her husband. “You can sum me up in about ten words: a former student of English literature who — who went downhill from there!” Jack explains.
In Woody Allen’s 1987 comedy Radio Days, Shawn played the Masked Avenger, the hero of a popular radio serial, who says, “I wonder if future generations will ever even hear about us. It’s not likely. After enough time, everything passes. I don’t care how big we are or how important are our lives.” Through podcasts such as these of Shawn’s plays, future generations around the world will indeed get to hear about these seminal works.
EdgeCut and New York Live Arts offer new way to experience live events with other people
When I posted the first edition of the Pandemic Awards on July 4, I never expected that on January 1, 2021, we would still be at least six months away from opening venues for live, in-person entertainment. As I wrote then, it would be “the first of hopefully only two This Week in New York Pandemic Awards.” Well, here is the second round, with a third likely to come in the summer. Once again, there’s only one rule for eligibility: There must be a live facet to a performance — either the performance is happening at the minute one is watching onscreen or has an interactive element such as a live Q&A or live chatting.
We’ve come a long way since March, as creators have displayed remarkable ingenuity and forward thinking in coming up with innovative and exciting ways of developing virtual works, from dance, music, and art to theater, literature, and discussion, from all around the globe. Below is the best of the best, productions both big and small, that took the ball and ran with it. I can’t wait to see what will evolve over the next six months to keep us entertained online while we continue to shelter in place.
Happy 2021 to all!
BEST NEW PLAY ABOUT THE PANDEMIC The Line, written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, directed by Blank, the Public Theater. Blank and Jensen’s Coal Country had to be postponed because of the lockdown, so they turned their attention to the health crisis, teaming again with the Public Theater to present a harrowing look at what New York healthcare workers were experiencing as Covid-19 raged through the city, with Santino Fontana, Alison Pill, John Ortiz, Arjun Gupta, Nicholas Pinnock, Lorraine Toussaint, and Jamey Sheridan speaking the real words of doctors, nurses, EMTs, and others on the front lines of this dread virus.
BEST NEW PLAY NOT ABOUT THE PANDEMIC
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, This Is Who I Am, written by Amir Nizar Zuabi, directed by Evren Odcikin. Amir Nizar Zuabi’s poignant livestreamed tale of an estranged father (Ramsey Faragallah) and son (Yousof Sultani) preparing a family dish together over Zoom is a warm and heartfelt look at loss, loneliness, and reconnection.
BEST NEW PLAY READING NOT ABOUT THE PANDEMIC pen/man/ship, written by Christina Anderson, directed by Lucie Tiberghien, Molière in the Park. Brooklyn-based Molière in the Park went contemporary with Christina Anderson’s pen/man/ship, a smart, moving play that takes place in 1896 aboard a ship heading for Liberia shortly after the US Supreme Court decided in Plessy v. Ferguson to uphold the constitutionality of racial segregation under the concept of “separate but equal”; the solid cast features Crystal Lucas-Perry as Ruby, the only woman on board, Kevin Mambo as an unyielding minister named Charles, Jared McNeill as his son, Jacob, and Postell Pringle as Cecil, who is working on the ship, with interstitial animation by Emily Rawson, sea-shanty music by Victoria Deiorio, and green-screen set design by Lina Younes that mimic being on a real ship.
BEST LIVESTREAMED PLAY WITH AN AUDIENCE Crave, Chichester Festival Theatre. Chichester presented a stirring, socially distanced revival of Sarah Kane’s brutal Crave, happening in real time as a masked audience watched Tinuke Craig’s fierce adaptation that was the closest thing yet to capturing the feeling of live theater online.
BEST FILMED PLAY The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, written by Daniel Jamieson, directed by Emma Rice, recorded at the UK’s Bristol Old Vic Theatre. The virtual tour of the Bristol Old Vic, Kneehigh, and Wise Children’s beautifully staged adaptation of The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, about the romance between painter Marc Chagall (Marc Antolin) and Bella Samoylovna Rosenfeld (Audrey Brisson) amid some very difficult situations in the world, made its way to Skirball, where viewers were treated to its lush look, outstanding acting, and compelling, intimately told story.
BEST SHOCKING MOMENT IN A PLAY
Ali Ahn and William Jackson Harper, Outside Time without Extension, written by Ben Beckley, directed by Vivienne Benesch, Red Bull Theater. A few minutes into Ben Beckley’s Outside Time without Extension, part of Red Bull’s Tenth Annual Short New Play Festival, Ali Ahn and William Jackson Harper joined together in the same Zoom box, the first time I saw two actors in the same space. It turns out that they are partners living together; they would later appear in Matt Schatz’s two-character play The Burdens as a Jewish brother and sister.
BEST SOUND DESIGN OF A FILMEDJoshua D. Reid PLAY
Joshua D. Reid, A Christmas Carol,directed by Michael Arden. As good as Jefferson Mays’s mostly one-man version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol looked, it sounded even better, immersing the audience in the more ghostly aspects of the story, including one moment that made my heart drop into my stomach.
BEST REIMAGINING OF AN IMMERSIVE PLAY Inside the Wild Heart, Group.BR. In Inside the Wild Heart, New York–Brazilian company Group.BR ingeniously used the Gather.town digital platform to allow the audience to guide their avatar across various rooms and floors and interact with other viewers as they navigated through a recorded version of the multidisciplinary show about author Clarice Lispector and her writings.
Lilli Taylor tantalizes the audience during countdown to New Group reunion reading of Aunt Dan and Lemon
BEST OPENING OF A REUNION READING
Lilli Taylor, Aunt Dan and Lemon, the New Group. The New Group’s reunion reading of Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon begins with three minutes of narrator Lilli Taylor getting ready by calmly looking around and making all kinds of facial gestures during the countdown to the start of the play.
BEST ACTOR IN A REUNION READING OF A PLAY
Edie Falco, The True, the New Group. Edie Falco gave a master class in Zoom acting as she re-created her role as the real-life Albany political mover and shaker Polly Noonan in Sharr White’s powerful play, alongside Michael McKean, Peter Scolari, John Pankow, and the rest of the original cast of this New Group production.
BEST ACTOR IN A REUNION READING OF A MOVIE
Mandy Patinkin, The Princess Bride. Mandy Patinkin was a hoot as the revenge-seeking swashbuckler Inigo Montoya in the reunion-reading benefit for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, having trouble remaining in his Zoom box while joined by original costars Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Carol Kane, Chris Sarandon, Wallace Shawn, and Billy Crystal, along with director Rob Reiner and Josh Gad as Fezziwig.
BEST INTERACTIVE READING Read Subtitles Aloud, written by Onur Karaoglu and Kathryn Hamilton. Media Art Xploration and PlayCo teamed up for this thirteen-part series in which the viewer supplies half the dialogue, reading off the screen in response to the words spoken by the prerecorded actors onscreen.
BEST ACTOR IN A SHORT PLAY
LeeAnne Hutchison, Pigeons, written by Amy Berryman, directed by Amber Calderon, Eden Theater Company. LeeAnne Hutchison was mesmerizing as a conspiracy theorist dealing with the death of her husband from Covid-19 in Pigeons, one of Eden Theater Company’s “Bathroom Plays.”
BEST DUO IN A TWO-CHARACTER ZOOM READING
Marsha Mason and Brian Cox, Dear Liar, Bucks County Playhouse. Marsha Mason and Brian Cox are deliciously wicked in Bucks County Playhouse’s Zoom reading of Jerome Kitty’s Dear Liar, about the longtime correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell; Cox is so good as Shaw that even Mason has a ball watching him.
Brian Cox and family get involved in some playful high jinks in Melis Akers’s Fractio Panis for the Homebound Project
BEST FAMILY IN A SHORT PLAY
The Coxes, Fractio Panis, written by Melis Aker, directed by Tatiana Pandiani, Homebound Project 5: Homemade. Melis Aker’s Fractio Panis, part of the Homebound Project benefiting No Kid Hungry, took us inside the country home of Brian Cox, his wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, and their children, Orson and Torin, as they have a ball baking bread and discussing rectal thermometers.
BEST ZOOM REVIVAL The Wolves, Philadelphia Theatre Company. Sarah DeLappe’s 2017 Pulitzer finalist The Wolves felt more empowering than ever in Philadelphia Theatre Company’s Zoom version, with a terrific cast of young women in uniform in front of a green-screened practice field as soccer became a metaphor for what ails us and what brings us together.
BEST REVIVAL EXCERPTS “The Great Work Begins,” amfAR. An amazing lineup performed moving scenes from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America AIDS epic, benefiting amfAR’s Fund to Fight Covid-19, with Andrew Rannells, Paul Dano, and Brian Tyree Smith as Prior Walter, Glenn Close as Roy Cohn, Jeremy O. Harris, Larry Ownes, and S. Epatha Merkerson as Belize, Laura Linney, Vella Lovell, and Lois Smith as Harper Pitt, and Daphne Rubin-Vega, Linda Emond, Nikki M. James, Patti LuPone, and Brandon Uranowitz in other parts, not in Zoom boxes but in well-designed backdrops.
MOST PASSIONATE SHAKESPEARE SPEECH
Ralph Fiennes, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 4, Scene 14, Shakespeare Everywhere. Shakespeare has been just about everywhere during the pandemic, but no one got into the heart of the Bard as much as Ralph Fiennes did at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Shakespeare Everywhere gala, where he chewed up all of the desert scenery in his prerecorded soliloquy from Antony and Cleopatra, the camera getting up close and personal with his grizzled face; Fiennes portrayed Antony opposite Sophie Okonedo’s Cleopatra at the National Theatre in 2018.
MOST PASSIONATE SHAKESPEARE DISCUSSION
Patrick Page, RemarkaBULL Podversations, Red Bull Theater. Patrick Page delivers the “I hate the Moor” speech from Othello, then delves into the nature of the character, the play, and Shakespeare himself in an unforgettable discussion that will leave you exhausted and exhilarated.
BEST WALLPAPER IN A PLAY Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, Tomorrow Tix. Discount ticket service Today Tix rebranded itself as Tomorrow Tix in streaming prerecorded Zoom versions of Broadway plays with all-star casts, including Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Zachary Quinto, Vanessa Williams, Stacy Keach, Rashad, Reed Birney, Robert Sella, and Katie Finneran for Gore Vidal’s play about a vicious election, but the wallpaper around the tall, vertical Zoom boxes garnered plenty of attention itself.
BEST SCENIC DESIGN OF A ZOOM PLAY
The Irish Rep, A Touch of the Poet, written by Eugene O’Neill, directed by Ciarán O’Reilly. The Irish Rep has been among the most innovative of theater companies during the lockdown, each successive filmed production getting closer and closer to the real thing, and in its revival of A Touch of the Poet, director Ciarán O’Reilly incorporates props, costumes, and photographs and video of Charlie Corcoran’s set to make it appear that the actors are in the same room, sometimes even seated at the same table, even though they are Zooming in from different locations.
BEST PERFORMANCE WITH A CHILD IN THE BACKGROUND Why Would I Dare: The Trial of Crystal Mason, directed by Tyler Thomas, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. In Rattlestick’s Zoom staging of the transcript of the trial of Crystal Mason, an ex-con who was facing jail time for trying to vote in the 2016 election, Crystal Dickinson is electrifying as she and her lawyer (Shane McRae) battle with the judge (Peter Gerety) and the prosecutor (Peter Mark Kendall), but as gripping as the production is, it’s hard not to notice Dickinson’s six-year-old son playing in the background of the large living room where she is broadcasting from, a sign of better times to come.
Celine Song transports The Seagull to the Sims 4 for New York Theatre Workshop
BEST CASTING FOR A DIGITAL PLAY The Seagull on the Sims 4, written and performed by Celine Song, New York Theatre Workshop. Playwright Celine Song busted down barriers with her spectacularly inventive adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, re-creating the classic work live on the simulation game “Play with Life: The Sims 4,” chatting with the audience and several other theater creators as she molded Irina, Konstantin, Nina, Trigorin, Medvendenko, and others from scratch using the digital platform and then placed them in a virtual world where they had free will.
BEST THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE “Here We Are,” Theatre for One. Theatre for One reinvented the solo show with “Here We Are,” a collection of eight microplays written by, starring, and directed by BIPOC women (except for one male actor), performed live for one person at a time, with their camera and audio on so each could see the other and, in some of the works, interact; a virtual lobby allowed attendees to communicate anonymously, as if in a real theater, waiting for the lights to go down and the show to begin.
BEST MUSICAL PERFORMANCE AT A GALA FUNDRAISER
The cast of The Amen Corner, “I’m Not Tired Yet,” and “Sonnet 69,” Biko’s Manna and Family, Shakespeare Everywhere. DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company hosted one of the best gala fundraisers, including a pair of exciting musical performances, with the cast of The Amen Corner delivering a rousing Zoom version of “I’m Not Tired Yet” and Biko’s Manna and Family performing a lovely rendition of the Bard’s “Sonnet 69.”
BEST BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE TO A LATE ROCK STAR
The Flaming Lips, “Listen to Her Heart,” Tom Petty’s 70th Birthday Bash. Dozens of musicians sent in musical contributions to celebrate what would have been Tom Petty’s seventieth birthday, but it was the Flaming Lips’s herky-jerky take on “Listen to Her Heart” that warranted repeat viewing, in addition to Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell’s touching finale.
BEST LIVESTREAMED CONCERT SERIES “Live Streaming at the Vanguard,” Village Vanguard. The legendary Village Vanguard began streaming live jazz concerts from its intimate stage, without an audience, with concerts by Ron Carter’s Golden Striker Trio, the Eric Reed Quartet, Joe Lovano’s Trio Fascination, and others.
BEST INTERACTIVE OPERA The Threepenny Opera, City Lyric Opera. Audience members were sent advance instructions so they could take part in City Lyric Opera’s extremely fun virtual production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera for the people, with Justin Austin as Macheath, Philip Kalmanovitch as Mr. Peachum, Rachelle Pike as Mrs. Peachum, Sara LaFlamme as Polly Peachum, Michael Parham as Tiger Brown, Sara LeMesh as Lucy Brown, Shanelle Valerie Woods as Jenny, and Kameron Ghanavati as Filch, with live and prerecorded scenes ingeniously staged at HERE Arts Center in individual rooms and boxes terrifically lit by Karina Hyland and designed by Anna Driftmier.
BEST POP OPERA Is This the End? Part One: Dead Little Girl, libretto by Éric Brucher, music and lyrics by Jean-Luc Fafchamps, directed by Ingrid Von Wantoch Rekowski, La Monnaie. FIAF streamed Jean-Luc Fafchamps’s frantic “New Pop Requiem,” Is This the End? from the Brussels company La Monnaie, in which Sarah Defrise plays a teenager on the run through La Monnaie’s labyrinthine buildings, with Amaury Massion as the man and Albane Carrère as the woman in a futuristic nightmare scenario.
The virtual opera Alice in the Pandemic takes place down an alternate New York City rabbit hole
BEST USE OF TECHNOLOGY IN A VIRTUAL OPERA Alice in the Pandemic, libretto by Cerise Lim Jacobs, music by Jorge Sosa, art by Anna Campbell, White Snake Projects. Boston’s White Snake Projects incorporated cutting-edge digital animation in its livestreamed production of the one-act opera Alice in the Pandemic, as the title character (Carami Hilaire) traverses a lonely city in search of her ill mother (Eve Gigliotti) with the help of the White Rabbit (Daniel Moody).
BEST SERIOCOMIC TRIPPY SCI-FI OPERA SERIES Only You Will Recognize the Signal, libretto by Rob Handel, music by Kamala Sankaram, directed by Kristin Marting, video design by David Bengali, virtual stage design by Liminal, HERE Arts Center. HERE’s seven-part, seventy-minute space opera, Only You Will Recognize the Signal, will shake you out of your therapeutic hypothermia and blast you off into another dimension, where a cast of pseudo-astronauts and a humanlike AI system (Paul An, Christopher Burchett, Hai-Ting Chinn, Adrienne Danrich, Joy Jan Jones, Joan La Barbara, Jorell Williams) share their fears amid kaleidoscopic imagery, melting wallpaper, video of Cambodia and NYC, high- and low-tech computer graphics, and a fab score.
BEST OUTDOOR CHAMBER OPERA CONCERT Speaking Truth to Power / Egmont, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Orpheus Chamber Orchestra went to the Beechwood Park bandshell in New Jersey to perform a socially distanced version of Beethoven’s Egmont, Op. 84, with a new English translation by Philip Boehm, featuring soprano and activist Karen Slack and narration by Liev Schreiber.
BEST MULTIMEDIA OPERA
Marina Abramović, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, Bayerische Staatsoper. Performance artist Marina Abramović died seven times as she reenacted death scenes from seven operas in which Maria Callas had played the lead, accompanied by dancers onstage in masks and Willem Dafoe onscreen.
BEST DANCE SCORE
Michael Wall, Brown Eyes, BalletX, Works & Process at the Guggenheim. Penny Saunders’s haunting black-and-white Brown Eyes, danced by Andrea Yorita and Zachary Kapeluck, among the first pandemic pieces to feature dancers touching each other, is set to Michael Wall’s propulsive percussive score that features ventilator-like breathing and a constant knocking that evokes a clock running out of time.
BEST LONG-FORM ZOOM DANCE Rooms, Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble. The New York–based Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble was preparing to present Anna Sokolow’s 1955 Rooms when the pandemic hit, so it adapted the forty-five-minute work, with such aptly titled sections as “Alone,” “Escape,” “Going,” “Desire,” and “Panic,” for online viewing, with dancers filming themselves from wherever they were sheltering in place, both indoors and outdoors, set to Kenyon Hopkins’s groovy jazz score.
BEST REIMAGINED DANCE MASTERPIECE
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Revelations Reimagined. For its winter virtual season, Alvin Ailey presented an exuberant sixtieth anniversary outdoor version of its signature masterpiece, retitled Revelations Reimagined, weaving together old footage with new scenes shot at Wave Hill, directed by Preston Miller.
Sara Mearns appears in triplicate in L.A. Dance Project work
BEST SOLO DANCE AS A TRIO
Sara Mearns, Sonata for Saras, choreographed by Janie Taylor. New York City Ballet principal dancer Sara Mearns has been a star during the pandemic, appearing in Joshua Bergasse’s Storm for Works & Process at the Guggenheim, Molissa Fenley’s State of Darkness for the Joyce, and Justin Peck’s Thank You, New York for NYCB’s Festival of New Choreography, but in Janie Taylor’s Sonata for Saras, we get three versions of Mearns, in a cute, short red dress, dancing together against a white background, flipping her long hair for six delightful minutes.
BEST SOLO DANCE SEEN SEVEN TIMES
Molissa Fenley, State of Darkness,JoyceStream. Molissa Fenley revisited her 1994 epic solo, State of Darkness, for the Joyce, where it was performed by Jared Brown, Lloyd Knight, Sara Mearns, Shamel Pitts, Annique Roberts, Cassandra Trenary, Michael Trusnovec, and Peter Boal, displaying how the same choreographic movements are interpreted by difference dancers.
BEST USE OF TECHNOLOGY IN A ZOOM DANCE Continuous Replay / Come Together, Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company, New York Live Arts. Bill T. Jones reimagines his partner Arnie Zane’s Continuous Replay in a glorious reinvention featuring a large, wide-ranging cast spanning four decades and four continents performing in Zoom boxes that video editor Janet Wong turns into a futuristic digital architectural landscape in constant motion.
BEST EXPERIMENTAL DIGITAL DANCE FILM Untitled (perfect human), Danspace Project. Dean Moss’s Untitled (perfect human) offered a kaleidoscopic, nearly scientific exploration of the human body, inspired by Jørgen Leth’s 1967 The Perfect Human, while commenting on our epic loneliness.
BEST SHORT ZOOM DANCE “…it’s okay too. Feel,” Hope Boykin, BalletX, Works & Process at the Guggenheim. Savannah Green and Ashley Simpson dance separately in Hope Boykin’s “…it’s okay too. Feel,” which includes poetic narration wondering what comes next for all of us.
BEST LIVESTREAMED DANCE
Yoann Bourgeois, I wonder where the dreams I don’t remember go, Nederlands Dans Theater. Streamed live from NDT’s Zuiderstrandtheater in front of a limited audience, Yoann Bourgeois’s I wonder where the dreams I don’t remember go is a mesmerizing, meditative, awe-inspiring, gravity-defying piece about identity and personal relationships that uniquely captures the emotional and physical ups and downs of life during this age of Covid-19 and quarantine.
BEST BEACH DANCE iyouuswe II, White Wave Dance. Young Soon Kim took her company’s name literally for iyouuswe II, a short dance film with Mark Willis, Katie Garcia, and Joan Rodriguez in the water and on the sand at Jones Beach, with music by Greg Haines and cinematography by Alexander Sargent.
The Love Space, the New Harmony Project. Gabrielle Hamilton, Janae Snyder-Stewart, Zaire Michel, and Jamal Josef join hands in Jace’s The Love Space, with text by Mfoniso Udofia and choreography by Josef, part of the New Harmony Project’s digital Sunrise Gallery series.
BEST ZOOM BIRTHDAY DANCE “Event2 for Jasper Johns,” Whitney Museum of American Art. Seventy former members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company celebrated the ninetieth birthday of artist and Cunningham friend and collaborator Jasper Johns with excerpts from more than three dozen Cunningham works, filmed by the dancers at lovely outdoor locations, hitting the bull’s-eye.
BEST DURATIONAL DANCE
Lee Mingwei and Bill T. Jones, Our Labyrinth, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Taiwanese-American contemporary artist Lee Mingwei and American choreographer, director, dancer, and activist Bill T. Jones collaborated on Our Labyrinth, a trio of four-plus-hour meditative, hypnotic performances recorded at the Met’s Great Hall consisting of a dancer sweeping a sand labyrinth and a vocalist, including one iteration with the indefatigable Sara Mearns and Alicia Hall Moran.
MOST EXUBERANT DANCE A Jam Session for Troubling Times, choreographed by Jamar Roberts, music by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, narration by Max Roach, directed by Emily Kikta and Peter Walker, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Jamar Roberts’s Cooped was the most explosive, fierce five minutes of dance of the first part of the pandemic; his twelve-minute Jam Session for Troubling Times, which premiered at AAADT’s virtual winter season and features seven dancers reveling in newfound freedom — even though they never touch one another — is a celebration of the nightclub scene of the 1940s and ’50s and the glorious sounds of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, at a time when New Yorkers are still wondering when they’ll be allowed back in jazz and other music venues.
BEST WEB SERIES The Gaze: No_Homo. Larry Powell’s twelve-part series follows the fictional Evergreen Theatre Festival as young actor Jerome Price (Galen J. Williams) fights for his personal beliefs and battles institutional racism with director Miranda Cryer (Sharon Lawrence); TC Carson stands out as the wise and experienced Buddy DuBois.
FUNNIEST FICTIONAL FAMILY ZOOM CALL
Jordan E. Cooper, Mama Got a Cough. Jordan E. Cooper’s laugh-out-loud hysterical Zoom call was actually posted in the first half of the year, but I only saw it recently and so am including it here, the funniest sketch I saw in 2020, with Amber Chardae Robinson, Brittany Inge, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Dewayne Perkins, Juanita Jennings, Marcel Spears, and Danielle Brooks meeting up online to discuss the health of the family matriarch.
BEST TELEPHONE PRODUCTION
Woolly Mammoth, Telephonic Literary Union’s Human Resources. Woolly Mammoth takes listeners down an audio rabbit hole in Human Resources, a choose-your-own-adventure play on the telephone, offering the chance to acquire the super-secret happiness access code.
BEST MEMORY AT A ZOOM CAST REUNION
Marilu Henner, Taxi,Stars in the House. While it was great to watch Juddy Hirsch, Danny DeVito, Carol Kane, and Christopher Lloyd reminisce about their Taxi days, it was Marilu Henner, who played Elaine Nardo in the 1977-83 hit sitcom, who stole the show, not only for looking a generation younger than the other actors but for displaying an unbelievable level of recall for names, dates, places, and dialogue because of her highly superior autobiographical memory, a rare condition that only about a hundred people in the world have.
BEST CAST REUNION OF A FILM SERIES / STREAMING SHOW Reunited Apart,The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai. Josh Gad keeps serving up fun cast reunions for his Reunited Apart series, including a dual reunion of the stars of the 1984-94 Karate Kid movie franchise and the actors of the current YouTube/Netflix sequel, Cobra Kai, which brings back Ralph Macchio, William Zabka, and others.
MOST EMOTIONAL MOMENT AT AN AWARDS SHOW Eugene Levy, Newport Beach Film Festival. When Eugene Levy was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the virtual 2020 Newport Beach Film Festival, he was surprised with Zoom tributes from Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Steve Martin, Jason Biggs, and his entire Schitt’s Creek family, resulting in lots of tears and laughter.
MOST FUN HAD BY THE CAST DURING A NON-REUNION BENEFIT READING
The cast of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, CORE. The all-star cast assembled for a live table read of Amy Heckerling’s 1982 fave Fast Times at Ridgemont High — including Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Jennifer Aniston, Ray Liotta, Jimmy Kimmel, Julia Roberts, John Legend, Dance Cook, Matthew McConaughey, and Sean Penn not as Spicoli — was having an absolute blast watching their fellow actors as they made their way through the script, especially Shia Lebeouf as Spicoli in this fundraiser for CORE’s COVID-19 relief efforts.
BEST LIVE CHATTING WITH THE ARTIST DURING A WORK-IN-PROGRESS SCREENING
Raja Feather Kelly, Any Given Wednesday, New York Live Arts. Half the fun of watching director and choreographer Raja Feather Kelly’s sneak peak at his upcoming documentary, Any Given Wednesday, about the making of his show Wednesday, a unique take on Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, was following the live chat, in which Kelly excitedly interacted with friends, collaborators, and just plain audience members, sharing insight into his thought process while having a grand old time.
BEST DEBATE RE-CREATION Baldwin vs. Buckley, BRIC. BRIC restaged the famous February 1965 debate between James Baldwin (Teagle F. Bougere) and William F. Buckley (Eric T. Miller) at Cambridge, which asked the question “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?,” an inquiry that feels just as relevant today as it did then.
BEST OPEN REHEARSALS
The Commissary, “Lessons in Survival,” Vineyard Theatre. A group named the Commissary, with such actors and directors as Marin Ireland, Peter Mark Kendall, Tyler Thomas, and Reggie D. White, re-created important speeches and interviews involving such Black creators and leaders as James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Bobby Seale, Muhammad Ali, and others, but as striking as those reenactments were, it was their open live rehearsals that were revelatory, regarding not only the works to be performed but the genuine, infectious pleasure they were experiencing in being able to collaborate with others during the pandemic.
BEST SOLO LITERARY READING
Paul Giamatti, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” by Herman Melville. Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated actor Paul Giamatti gives a wonderfully spry reading of Herman Melville’s classic story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” along with an in-depth analysis of the tale and the author with scholar Andrew Delbanco.
BEST VIRTUAL REIMAGINING OF A SHORT STORY
Theater in Quarantine, Footnote for the End of Time. Joshua William Gelb’s endlessly creative use of his closet continued with this retelling of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Secret Miracle,” in which Gelb narrated the tale of Jewish writer Jaromir Hladik as the Nazis take over Prague, with live black on white and red drawing by Jesse Gelaznik, music by Alex Weston (performed by Rob Walker on clarinet, Alex Weill on violin, Susan Mandel on cello, and Weston on piano) inspired by Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and movement by Katie Rose McLaughlin, directed by Jonathan Levin
BEST POETRY READING
Theater of War, “Poetry for the Pandemic.” Theater of War moved away from its virtual readings of classic works to bring together established poets and National Student Poets for an evening of readings in which each young poet read a piece by an older poet and vice versa, with both onscreen to watch and listen, along with contributions from Bill Murray and Tracie Thoms, followed by a discussion.
BEST VIDEO POEM The Baptism, written and performed by Carl Hancock Rux, directed by Carrie Mae Weems. Commissioned by Lincoln Center, Carl Hancock Rux’s tribute to John Lewis and C. T. Vivian, a sharecropper’s son and the boy from Boonville, features lush videography of scenes from nature by Herman Jean-Noel, James Wang, and Ermanno de Biagi, music by Brian Eno, and such text as “The lifeblood of transition, one city to the next city, story upon story, house upon house, our wanting always cleaning the air, nourishing the soil of insistence. Every being is a building with music — grace upon grace upon grace.”
BEST TWO-STAGE BOOK LAUNCH
Chuck Palahniuk, The Invention of Sound,Garden District Book Shop. New Orleans’s Garden District Book Shop had difficulty getting Chuck Palahniuk to join the Zoom launch for his latest novel, The Invention of Sound, so the first try turned into a gossipfest with fans talking amongst themselves, displaying singed copies, treats won at the author’s famed in-person events, and Chuck tattoos; the rescheduled evening was a fascinating journey inside the mind of Palahniuk, who has also written such books as Fight Club and Invisible Monsters.
BEST MUSEUM GALA “Frick on the Move,” the Frick. In addition to appearances by Rosanne Cash, Maira Kalman, Nico Muhly, Aimee Ng, Simon Schama, and others, the Frick’s virtual gala was highlighted by a new edition of “Cocktails with a Curator” with Xavier F. Salomon and a sneak peek behind the scenes of the Frick Madison with director Ian Wardropper.
BEST ARTS MARATHON
Yoshiko Chuma, Love Story, the School of Hard Knocks, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Yoshiko Chuma celebrated the fortieth anniversary of her collective with an extraordinary live, twenty-four-hour virtual presentation incorporating dance, film, discussion, music, art, and just about anything else you could think of.
BEST SOCIOCULTURAL MULTIDISCIPLINARY PROGRAM Unfinished Live. Host Baratunde Thurston led audiences through unique explorations of “Economy & Justice,” “Democracy & Voice,” “Technology & Humanity,” and “Questions, Culture & Change,” with contributions from Abigail Disney, Julián Castro, Yo-Yo Ma, Carrie Mae Weems, Hank Willis Thomas, Alfredo Jaar, Andrew Yang, Nadya Tolokonnikova, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Alicia Garza, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Anna Deavere Smith, Bruce Springsteen, and others, along with a live, interactive chat.
BEST FUTURISTIC INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE “EdgeCut,” New York Live Arts. In “Captivity” and “Sanity,” EdgeCut used the Nowhere platform, placing each attendee in an oval pod they steer through fantastical landscapes to watch short presentations (dance, art installations, experimental technology demos, music videos) and talk to other viewers and the creators themselves; I’ve tried just about every form of online entertainment while we’re all sheltering in place and arts venues are closed, and nothing else comes close to this one, even given various hiccups that require patience.
The full original cast returns for virtual reunion reading of Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House for the New Group
TWO BY WALLACE SHAWN
The New Group Evening at the Talk House,Aunt Dan and Lemon
Through November 29, $25 ($45 for both plays) thenewgroup.org
When I sat down at my desktop computer to watch the New Group’s online reunion reading of Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House, I was most interested in seeing how original director Scott Elliott, the company’s founding artistic director, would deal with the immersive nature of the preshow setup: As the audience entered the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center for its 2017 US premiere, the actors were already onstage, milling about Derek McLane’s comfy, inviting communal room, and we were encouraged to join them, grabbing a drink, sharing snacks, and chatting with them. “The last time I saw you, you were wearing a dress,” I casually said to Larry Pine, referring to his character in Harvey Feinstein’s 2014 Broadway drama, Casa Valentina, about cross-dressing in the Catskills in the 1960s. “Yes you did,” he answered with a smile. I then had gummy worms and marshmallows with Claudia Shear before sitting down and settling in for the play, which begins with a long monologue by Matthew Broderick in which he makes eye contact with just about everyone in the audience. I wasn’t sure how they would replicate that feeling of instant connection in a Zoom reading, and it turns out they chose to not even try, which disappointed me greatly. But I decided to keep watching anyway, and I’m supremely glad I did.
Part of “The New Group Off Stage: Two by Wallace Shawn,” which also includes a reunion reading of Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon, which is worth checking out (through November 29) just for Lili Taylor’s facial gestures during the three-minute countdown to the start of the play, Evening at the Talk House turns out to be an eerily prescient commentary on the state of the country postelection, as if Shawn had written it yesterday, or tomorrow. The play is about a reunion itself, as some of the cast and crew of the Broadway flop Midnight in a Clearing with Moon and Stars have gathered at their old haunt upon the tenth anniversary of the show’s opening night: playwright Robert (Broderick), star Tom (Pine), composer Ted (John Epperson), costume designer Annette (Shear), and producer Bill (Michael Tucker), along with longtime Talk House host Nellie (Jill Eikenberry) and server Jane (Annapurna Sriram), unexpectedly joined by the bedraggled Dick (Shawn).
US premiere of Evening at the Talk House took place at the Signature Center (photo by Monique Carboni)
As I wrote in my original review, early on, Robert, now a hugely successful television writer, says, “At that time, you see . . . theater played a somewhat larger part in the life of our city than it does now. . . . Because what exactly was ‘theater,’ really, when you actually thought about it?” In 2017, I noted how the play prefigured the Trump administration and the many proposed cuts to arts funding, but four years later it could be seen as being about the pandemic lockdown as theaters across the country and around the world find themselves unable to take the stage in front of audiences, relegated to livestreaming and recorded events over Zoom and YouTube at least in part because of the federal government’s profound failure at handling the Covid-19 health crisis.
In addition, there is a twist in the play that deals with targeting human life: In 2017, it had a sci-fi futuristic bent but today evokes the decisions made by the government and its citizens as to who will live and who will die, who is expendable and who is not in order to save the economy, echoing the cries of essential workers as they have to choose who to intubate and who will not be treated, left to die alone in the ICU or a nursing home.
But amid all that bleakness, Evening at the Talk House is a very funny play, a delight to watch both in person and digitally. The acting is some of the best I have seen in Zoom boxes, led by the soft-spoken Broderick, the engaging Sriram, the firmly brash Tucker, and Shawn himself, who can’t help but steal every scene he’s in, even when his character is just nodding off. The immediate future of theater is very much in doubt right now, but nostalgically looking back at the past is not the answer, even as these reunion readings grow in popularity. “I want the old days back! Where are they? Where have they gone?” Dick declares. Onstage, he wore pajamas, like most of us probably are as we watch him online; since we can see only the top half of Shawn in his cluttered home office, we don’t know what kind of bottoms he is wearing. Later, Robert asks Jane, “You don’t get pleasure from reliving the past?” The future might be uncertain, but with well-written, cleverly crafted works such as Evening at the Talk House, which hold up so well during this time of intense, unpredictable change and never-before-conceived-of stagings, theaterlovers still have much to look forward to.
Who: Matthew Broderick, Jill Eikenberry, John Epperson, Larry Pine, Wallace Shawn, Claudia Shear, Annapurna Sriram, Michael Tucker; Kristen Johnston, Lili Taylor, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Thomas Bradshaw, Liam Craig, Melissa Errico, Carlos Leon, Emily Cass McDonnell, Maulik Pancholy, Stephen Park, Bill Sage What: The New Group reunion readings of two plays by Wallace Shawn Where:“The New Group Off Stage” When: Wednesday, October 28, $25, 7:00, and Thursday, October 29, $25, 7:00 (available for viewing through November 29) Why: In his 2011 essay “Why I Call Myself a Socialist: Is the World Really a Stage?,” beloved playwright, actor, and voice artist Wallace Shawn explains, “We are not what we seem. We are more than what we seem. The actor knows that. And because the actor knows that hidden inside himself there’s a wizard and a king, he also knows that when he’s playing himself in his daily life, he’s playing a part, he’s performing, just as he’s performing when he plays a part on stage. He knows that when he’s on stage performing, he’s in a sense deceiving his friends in the audience less than he does in daily life, not more, because on stage he’s disclosing the parts of himself that in daily life he struggles to hide. He knows, in fact, that the role of himself is actually a rather small part, and that when he plays that part he must make an enormous effort to conceal the whole universe of possibilities that exists inside him.”
It’s inconceivable that you’re unfamiliar with the cuddly, adorable, shaggy-haired Shawn, who has appeared in more than one hundred films, including numerous Woody Allen movies, as well as voicing Rex in the Toy Story franchise and portraying a fictionalized version of himself in Louis Malle’s reality-busting My Dinner with Andre, in which he shares a meal with theater director Andre Gregory. Shawn’s most famous performance is, no doubt, as Sicilian mastermind Vizzini in Rob Reiner’s 1987 fairy-tale classic, The Princess Bride. The scenes between Shawn as Vizzini and wrestling legend Andre the Giant as his cohort Fezzik are among the film’s most treasured. (My Movie with Andre?) Shawn, the son of famed New Yorker editor William Shawn and journalist Cecille Shawn, is also an esteemed playwright, winning an Obie in 1974 for Our Late Night and earning kudos galore for 1996’s The Designated Mourner, which, in several productions, was directed by Gregory, with Shawn playing Jack in stage and radio iterations.
In the age of coronavirus, with theaters shuttered, Shawn reunited last month with the cast of The Princess Bride for a virtual reading and discussion benefiting the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Now the New Group is celebrating him with “The New Group Off Stage: Two by Wallace Shawn,” a pair of live, virtual readings of productions the company has previously staged. First up, on October 28, is 2017’s Evening at the Talk House, which in my review I said was an “utterly delightful, deliciously wicked black comedy, one of the most gregarious shows you’re ever likely to see, despite its dark undertones.” As you walked into the Signature’s Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, the actors were circulating on the set at the center, and the audience was invited to speak with them, joining a small, intimate cocktail party before the main event. The original all-star cast is back for the reading — Matthew Broderick, Jill Eikenberry, John Epperson, Larry Pine, Claudia Shear, Annapurna Sriram, Michael Tucker, and Shawn — but that preliminary interaction will be gone, changing the dynamic between audience and performer even more than in most Zoom renditions.
The next night, October 29, the New Group will present Shawn’s 1985 play, Aunt Dan and Lemon, which the company revived in 2004 at the Acorn Theatre; back for the virtual show are Kristen Johnston as Aunt Dan and Lili Taylor as Lemon along with Maulik Pancholy, Marcia Stephanie Blake, Liam Craig, Melissa Errico, Carlos Leon, Bill Sage, Emily Cass McDonnell, Stephen Park, and Thomas Bradshaw replacing Isaach De Bankole and Layla Khoshnoudi stepping in for Brooke Sunny Moriber. Ten percent of the proceeds of the Talk House reading will go to City Harvest, while the same amount of the Aunt Dan proceeds will go to the Center for Constitutional Rights. (Both readings will be available for viewing through November 29.) The New Group’s virtual pandemic programming has featured excellent reunion readings of The True and The Jacksonian in addition to the ongoing “Why We Do It” interview series with such alums as Cynthia Nixon, Bobby Cannavale, Edie Falco, Suzanne Vega, and Natasha Lyonne; here’s hoping that Shawn soon tells us why he does it. (My Dinner with Wallace, anyone?)
Who: Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Mandy Patinkin, Wallace Shawn, Christoper Guest, Billy Crystal, Carol Kane, Chris Sarandon, Rob Reiner, Josh Gad, Eric Idle, King Bach, Finn Wolfhard, Shaun Ross, Whoopi Goldberg, Jason Reitman, Patton Oswalt, Norman Lear What: Benefit reunion reading of The Princess Bride script Where:Act Blue When: Sunday, September 13, suggested donation $27, 7:00 Why: After voting Democratic from 1988 to 2012 in the presidential election, Wisconsin went red in 2016, helping Donald J. Trump become the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. Amid protests and riots in the wake of the shooting of Jacob Blake seven times in the back by a police officer, Wisconsin is once more a key swing state, this time in the battle between Trump and former vice president Joe Biden. One way to contribute to turn the Badger State blue again is by signing up for an amazing livestreamed reunion reading of Rob Reiner’s 1987 cult classic, The Princess Bride. On September 13 at 7:00, most of the original cast will participate in a one-time-only table reading of the script, with Cary Elwes as Westley, Robin Wright as Buttercup, Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, Wallace Shawn as Vizzini, Christoper Guest as Count Rugen, Billy Crystal as Miracle Max, Carol Kane as Valerie, and Chris Sarandon as Prince Humperdinck; joining them are director Rob Reiner as the Grandfather, Josh Gad as Fezzik, Eric Idle as the Impressive Clergyman, Finn Wolfhard as the Grandson, Shaun Ross as the Albino, Whoopi Goldberg as the Ancient Booer and the Mother, Jason Reitman as the Narrator, and King Bach as Yellin, the Assistant Brute, and the King, with Patton Oswalt as the Q&A Moderator and executive producer Norman Lear as the Man That Made It All Happen. Gad has been the king of reunions during the pandemic, having hosted online cast and crew reunions for Back to the Future, Splash, Lord of the Rings, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ghostbusters, and The Goonies on his YouTube channel.
Based on William Goldman’s 1973 novel — he wrote the screenplay as well — The Princess Bride is a riotously told fairy tale about power, family, vengeance, and true love, with memorable lines appearing throughout. (My favorite is “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” You might prefer “As you wish,” “Anybody want a peanut?,” “You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles,” or “Inconceivable!”) In order to get the Act Blue link, you have to make a donation of any amount to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which explains, “Anything you donate will be used to ensure that Trump loses Wisconsin, and thereby the White House,” as per the famous saying “As goes Wisconsin, so goes the nation.” In a statement, Elwes added, “I think most people are aware by now that Donald Trump has completely abdicated his duties as president to represent and stand up for all Americans. He has failed to keep the country safe from Covid-19 and as a result he is responsible for the devastating chaos, violence, and economic collapse that we are now experiencing. If America is going to have a real chance at healing we must get rid of Trump. And that is only possible if we win Wisconsin. I am thrilled to be part of this very rare reunion of my colleagues from The Princess Bride as a way to increase awareness and garner resources for the state that will determine the fate of America.” Be sure to take a moment of silence to pay your respects to the crew and cast members who are no longer with us, including Goldman, Peter Falk (the Grandfather), André the Giant (Fezzik), Peter Cook (the Impressive Clergyman), Mel Smith (the Albino), Margery Mason (the Ancient Booer), Anne Dyson (the Queen), and Willoughby Gray (the King). When Westley says, “We’ll never survive!,” he’s of course referring to another four years of the current administration, but we also can’t forget what the Grandfather explains: “Life isn’t always fair.” (For more Princess Bride fun, check out the star-studded Quibi home movie version here, benefiting World Central Kitchen.)
Geneviève Bujold stars as a radio love doctor in Alan Rudolph’s Choose Me
CHOOSE ME (Alan Rudolph, 1984)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Thursday, August 10, 9:00, and Sunday, August 13, 1:00
Series runs August 10-16 quadcinema.com
The Quad is celebrating French-Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold’s seventy-fifth birthday with the wide-ranging fourteen-film retrospective “The Beguiling Bujold,” running August 10-16. The Montreal native was on the cusp of becoming a major star after a 1968 Emmy nomination for playing Joan of Arc in Saint Joan and an Oscar nod the next year for her portrayal of Anne Boleyn in Anne of the Thousand Days, but she opted for a more quirky career of small, independent films, dotted with a handful of bigger pics. One of her best roles is Dr. Nancy Love in 1984’s Choose Me, the first of three consecutive films she made with Alan Rudolph. Nancy hosts a popular radio talk show about love and sex, two things she doesn’t enjoy much of herself until she meets Eve (Lesley Ann Warren), a lounge owner who goes home with a different person every night and is a regular caller into her program under a fake name. Among the men enamored of Eve are her bartender, Billy Ace (John Larroquette); the mean-spirited, married, well-connected Zack (Patrick Bachau); and the new guy in town, Mickey (Keith Carradine), who has lived a rather complicated life. Meanwhile, barfly Pearl (Rae Dawn Chong) has the hots for Mickey too. As part of her “research,” Nancy moves in with Eve, but neither knows that they actually talk to each other almost daily on the radio. Bujold is an intoxicating adult ingénue in Rudolph’s darkly comic tongue-in-cheek noir that features a riotous soundtrack by Teddy Pendergrass and Luther Vandross and lurid photography by Jan Kiesser. Choose Me is screening August 10 and 13 as part of both “The Beguiling Bujold” and “Quadrophilia,” the latter consisting of films relating to the LGBTQ community.
Geneviève Bujold plays cool and calm art dealer Libby Valentin in Alan Rudolph’s The Moderns
Bujold comfortably settles into the background in her second film with Rudolph, 1988’s The Moderns, a wickedly sly riff on the Lost Generation in post-WWI Paris. Bujold is gallery owner Libby Valentin, the guiding conscience among the self-important literati, including Ernest Hemingway (Kevin J. O’Connor), who speaks in hysterical quotations that would wind up in The Sun Also Rises and other books; Gertrude Stein (Elsa Raven), and Alice B. Toklas (Ali Giron), who host high-falutin’ salon gatherings; gossip columnist Oiseau (Wallace Shawn), who never a met a story he couldn’t make up; wealthy art collector Nathalie de Ville (Geraldine Chaplin), who has more up her sleeves than she initially lets on; powerful, jealous businessman Bertram Stone (John Lone) and his wife, the sexy, troublesome Rachel (Linda Fiorentino); and expatriate painter Nick Hart (Keith Carradine), who has little time for nonsense as he homes in on Rachel. The beginning of the film is annoying, pretentious, and self-indulgent, but once it kicks into high gear, it wonderfully pokes fun at itself, especially via Oiseau, played to a comic T by Shawn — who likes to hang out at Bar Sélavy, owned by Rose (Marthe Turgeon), in a sweet homage to Marcel Duchamp. Cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita slowly switches from black-and-white to color as scenes change and the backstabbing heats up. The plot centers around forgeries, referencing the phoniness that resides within every character. The only one who remains steady throughout is Libby, who is played with just the right touch of mystery by Bujold. The Moderns is screening at the Quad on August 10 at 6:45.
Devout choir girl Martha Hayes (Geneviève Bujold) has a sexual awakening in The Act of the Heart
THE ACT OF THE HEART (Paul Almond, 1970)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, August 12, 5:45
Series runs August 10-16 quadcinema.com
Bujold made three films with her husband, Paul Almond, during their six-year marriage. In between 1968’s Isabel and 1972’s Journey is the very strange, ultimately unsatisfying The Act of the Heart, which earned Bujold a Canadian Film Award for Best Actress. The low-budget 1970 film hints at being a horror movie, which would have been much better than the rather drab drama it turns out to be, save for a bizarre finale. Bujold is Martha, a shy, devout young woman who has arrived in a small town on the North Shore of Quebec to be a nanny to Russell (Bill Mitchell), a boy being raised by his widowed mother, Johane (Monique Leyrac). Martha auditions for the church choir, which is conducted by Augustinian monk Father Ferrier (Donald Sutherland). As she becomes deeply involved in Billy’s life, which includes his getting seriously injured in a hockey game, she and Father Ferrier take a liking to each other, severely testing their faith. Bujold excels as Martha, as she grows from a church mouse to a woman filled with desire, but Sutherland sleepwalks through the first half of the film, and the subplot with Russell and Johane turns soapy. Still, watching Bujold work her magic is always worth it. Winner of six Canadian Film Awards (Best Director, Best Actress, Best Art Direction, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound, and Best Musical Score), The Act of the Heart is screening August 12 at 5:45 at the Quad. “The Beguiling Bujold” also boasts such other diverse Bujold films as the Michael Crichton medical thriller Coma with Michael Douglas, the Brian De Palma Hitchcock homage Obsession with Cliff Robertson, David Cronenberg’s creepy Dead Ringers with Jeremy Irons, Michael Cacoyannis’s Euripides adaptation The Trojan Women with Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave, and Alain Resnais’s The War Is Over with Yves Montand. And as a bonus, the Quad is showing Mark Robson’s Earthquake, starring Bujold with Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Lorne Greene, Richard Roundtree, Walter Matthau, Victoria Principal, et al., on August 20 and 21 in the upcoming “Disasterpieces” series.
The Quad is celebrating French-Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold’s seventy-fifth birthday with the wide-ranging fourteen-film retrospective “The Beguiling Bujold,” running August 10-16. The Montreal native was on the cusp of becoming a major star after a 1968 Emmy nomination for playing Joan of Arc in Saint Joan and an Oscar nod the next year for her portrayal of Anne Boleyn in Anne of the Thousand Days, but she opted for a more quirky career of small, independent films, dotted with a handful of bigger pics. One of her best roles is Dr. Nancy Love in 1984’s Choose Me, the first of three consecutive films she made with Alan Rudolph. Nancy hosts a popular radio talk show about love and sex, two things she doesn’t enjoy much of herself until she meets Eve (Lesley Ann Warren), a lounge owner who goes home with a different person every night and is a regular caller into her program under a fake name. Among the men enamored of Eve are her bartender, Billy Ace (John Larroquette); the mean-spirited, married, well-connected Zack (Patrick Bachau); and the new guy in town, Mickey (Keith Carradine), who has lived a rather complicated life. Meanwhile, barfly Pearl (Rae Dawn Chong) has the hots for Mickey too. As part of her “research,” Nancy moves in with Eve, but neither knows that they actually talk to each other almost daily on the radio. Bujold is an intoxicating adult ingénue in Rudolph’s darkly comic tongue-in-cheek noir that features a riotous soundtrack by Teddy Pendergrass and Luther Vandross and lurid photography by Jan Kiesser. Choose Me is screening August 10 and 13 as part of both “The Beguiling Bujold” and “Quadrophilia,” the latter consisting of films relating to the LGBTQ community.
Bujold comfortably settles into the background in her second film with Rudolph, 1988’s The Moderns, a wickedly sly riff on the Lost Generation in post-WWI Paris. Bujold is gallery owner Libby Valentin, the guiding conscience among the self-important literati, including Ernest Hemingway (Kevin J. O’Connor), who speaks in hysterical quotations that would wind up in The Sun Also Rises and other books; Gertrude Stein (Elsa Raven), and Alice B. Toklas (Ali Giron), who host high-falutin’ salon gatherings; gossip columnist Oiseau (Wallace Shawn), who never a met a story he couldn’t make up; wealthy art collector Nathalie de Ville (Geraldine Chaplin), who has more up her sleeves than she initially lets on; powerful, jealous businessman Bertram Stone (John Lone) and his wife, the sexy, troublesome Rachel (Linda Fiorentino); and expatriate painter Nick Hart (Keith Carradine), who has little time for nonsense as he homes in on Rachel. The beginning of the film is annoying, pretentious, and self-indulgent, but once it kicks into high gear, it wonderfully pokes fun at itself, especially via Oiseau, played to a comic T by Shawn — who likes to hang out at Bar Sélavy, owned by Rose (Marthe Turgeon), in a sweet homage to Marcel Duchamp. Cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita slowly switches from black-and-white to color as scenes change and the backstabbing heats up. The plot centers around forgeries, referencing the phoniness that resides within every character. The only one who remains steady throughout is Libby, who is played with just the right touch of mystery by Bujold. The Moderns is screening at the Quad on August 10 at 6:45.
Bujold made three films with her husband, Paul Almond, during their six-year marriage. In between 1968’s Isabel and 1972’s Journey is the very strange, ultimately unsatisfying The Act of the Heart, which earned Bujold a Canadian Film Award for Best Actress. The low-budget 1970 film hints at being a horror movie, which would have been much better than the rather drab drama it turns out to be, save for a bizarre finale. Bujold is Martha, a shy, devout young woman who has arrived in a small town on the North Shore of Quebec to be a nanny to Russell (Bill Mitchell), a boy being raised by his widowed mother, Johane (Monique Leyrac). Martha auditions for the church choir, which is conducted by Augustinian monk Father Ferrier (Donald Sutherland). As she becomes deeply involved in Billy’s life, which includes his getting seriously injured in a hockey game, she and Father Ferrier take a liking to each other, severely testing their faith. Bujold excels as Martha, as she grows from a church mouse to a woman filled with desire, but Sutherland sleepwalks through the first half of the film, and the subplot with Russell and Johane turns soapy. Still, watching Bujold work her magic is always worth it. Winner of six Canadian Film Awards (Best Director, Best Actress, Best Art Direction, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound, and Best Musical Score), The Act of the Heart is screening August 12 at 5:45 at the Quad. “The Beguiling Bujold” also boasts such other diverse Bujold films as the Michael Crichton medical thriller Coma with Michael Douglas, the Brian De Palma Hitchcock homage Obsession with Cliff Robertson, David Cronenberg’s creepy Dead Ringers with Jeremy Irons, Michael Cacoyannis’s Euripides adaptation The Trojan Women with Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave, and Alain Resnais’s The War Is Over with Yves Montand. And as a bonus, the Quad is showing Mark Robson’s Earthquake, starring Bujold with Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Lorne Greene, Richard Roundtree, Walter Matthau, Victoria Principal, et al., on August 20 and 21 in the upcoming