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In The Seeing Place Theater’s production of Chekov’s Three Sisters the birch trees, rendered abstractly on a back wall of the dilapidated ATA Sergeant Theater on 53rd Street, are uncanny sentinels, observers whose angular geometry comments on the gap between the characters’ hopes and the shifts they are forced to accept to cope with life’s capricious freaks. The company strives for a similar effect in the props and staging. The first thing you notice when you take your seat are labels in the place of theatrical property: a piece of paper with “Book” in black marker, a wooden bench labeled “Olga’s Bed” and a wooden block tagged “CLOCK.” Director Brandon Walker amplifies these Brechtian touches by requiring the stage manager to sit upstage from the actors and give cues to a tech sitting in the booth throughout the performance.
Mel House, Joel Nagle, and Mariko Iwasa in "Rabbit Island"
What would you do to prove your bona fides as a New Yorker? You might say, yo! Jerk face! I was born here! Uhv course Ahm a New Yowkah! You, sir, have nothing to prove. But what about those of us who moved here? Particularly those of us who moved here from The Sticks, the Great Flyover, or, worse yet, the wilds of the Great White North?
Why should politics be left to politicians? If they had their way we’d all be waving flags and buying crap on credit, while the corporate-government revolving door does enough RPMs to power a generator that could light up Manhattan. On the other hand, if the unwashed masses had their way we’d all be burning flags and sharing watery vegan gruel in the mess halls of our workers’ collective. I propose that politics should be handled exclusively by playwrights. If you check out Created Equal at The Theater at the 14th Street Y anytime from now until February 12th, you’ll know why. This collection of six short plays will entertain you, outrage you, inspire you, and give you debating points for weeks to come.
Created Equal is the second production this season for The Red Fern Theatre Company, whose mission is “to provoke social awareness and change through its theatrical productions and outreach.” The six plays that comprise the show are by exciting, young New York playwrights J. Holtham, Kristen and Luanne Rosenfeld, Anna Moench, Rob Askins, Jen Silverman, and Joshua Conkel, who took the assignment to write on inequality in America seriously.
Isaiah Tanenbaum, Matt Archambault, and Sol Marina Crespo in "Menders"
“Instant ardentes Tyrii: pars ducere muros / molirique arcem et manibus subsolvere saxa…” Aeneid I, 423-24
The toiling Tyrians on each other call
To ply their labor: some extend the wall;
Some build the citadel; the brawny throng
Or dig, or push unwieldly stones along. (Dryden)
In pre-modern times cities of any respectable size had walls. If you have ever been to York, Barcelona, Carcassonne, Istanbul, Rome, or Jerusalem, you have seen their skeletal remains, like the spines of long-dead dinosaurs bleaching in millennial sunlight. These days there isn’t much point in putting a wall around your city, what with transcontinental missiles, stealth bombers, drones and such. That doesn’t mean walls have gone out of style though. Bin Laden thought walls would protect him. Ditto for KimDotcom. Rich people from Johannesburg, South Africa to Briar Ridge, Indiana build neighborhoods with walls and walled estates within those neighborhoods. One is tempted to say with Frost, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out.” Is the disparity between rich and poor so great that it has to be protected and reinforced by a wall?
This certainly seems to be the case in Erin Browne’s new play Menders. The play is set sometime in the future when the United States is no more, but a few communities have survived to build protective walls. These walls serve the same purpose as pre-modern walls: they keep out the barbarians. Inside the walls two young people, Aimes and Corey, just graduated from the academy, are field training with Drew, a veteran who is about to retire. The Menders are the professional fence tending force that monitors and maintains the stone border between us and them. In the hierarchy of Browne’s futuristic American police state, they rank second only to Investigators and well above civilians. Corey is an idealistic, patriotic young woman who sees the Menders as a social ladder she will take pride in climbing. Aimes is her cousin. He is nervous and excitable. For him the Menders are a uniform he must put on because he fears what people might think if he doesn’t.
Haley and Morton and The Cube
Julia Jarcho’s new play Dreamless Land is, in fact, all a dream. The action starts when a young woman, Haley, enters the performance space clutching a teddy bear to her chest. Around the stage sit three people: an older man, an older woman, and a young man. She nods to them in turn, and they beep like off-duty automatons from The Stepford Wives or Blade Runner. The young man seems to resist her, so she nods at him forcefully once more. He beeps again, takes a propeller beany out of the wooden box on which he sits, and puts it on his head. Haley takes a seat upstage and watches as the three perform a family drama whose theme is fracture, dislocation, and fear. Father appears to be an alcoholic abuser. Mother is emotionally distant. And Morton, their son, escapes into technology, nebulously defined as a glowing, translucent cube inside a larger transparent plexiglass cube that sits in the center of the stage.
Bad zombie kitty!
Though Halloween is gone, the terror lingers on. Brew of the Dead II: Oktoberflesh is a feature length homage to “horror” (notice the scare quotes) that will literally make your skin crawl.
Pumpkin Pie sounds like Halloween, and if you’re in the mood for a good, fun night of creepy and cheeky, check out “The Pumpkin Pie Show: Lovey Dovey” at Under St. Mark’s Theater from now until October 29th.
Jon Saltzman is a young filmmaker embarking on a promising career. His high school best friend Vince is a burn-out, low level drug dealer. They meet in a hotel room in Lansing, Michigan to catch up and, in Vince’s case, get even. To do so, Vince gets Jon to admit on tape that he date raped Amy, Vince’s high school girlfriend and first love. When Amy, now the assistant district attorney in Lansing, shows up, each one of them has to face the past and choose between forgiveness and justice.
Melody Bates as Dina
The past is a strange and distant country, and we are refugees with no right of return. J. Stephen Brantley’s new play 83 Down playing at Under St. Marks is a postcard from that country. On one side is a montage of evocative images – Duran Duran posters, car telephones, TV top cable boxes, Ronald Reagan’s avuncular smile – and on the other side is a cryptic prophecy that reads: pleasure is punishment; freedom is bondage.
Melissa Johnson as Cassandra and Amy Lee Pearsall as Hecuba in "The Trojan Women"
The enduring appeal of classic plays is sometimes hard to understand. In Shakespeare’s case, the play can be literally hard to understand. Even well-educated viewers can miss out substantially on the Bard’s subtleties of language, not to mention the differences in sensibility between twenty-first century Moderns and sixteenth century Elizabethans. And he wrote in English! With Greek drama – particularly tragedy – the difference between how they saw the world and how we see the world is particularly wide. Though the Athenian government of the 5th century was democratic, only ten percent of the total population was enfranchised, and every family of means owned slaves. Though some ancient Greeks invented rationalism and science, their most devout religious rituals looked like a mix of Burning Man and Bonnaroo. And their view of fate was fare more bleak than our belief in Divine Providence, which, in our secular age, we call American Exceptionalism.
Sarah Quinn’s performs “Other People’s Problems” at Stage Left Studio in Chelsea this Friday and Saturday. It is an entertaining hour of satire on Anglo culture’s obsession with perfection and the soul killing emptiness of the industries that have developed to exploit it.
The show is three short plays punctuated by clever video productions. The first play imagines that we are at a self-help seminar; the second is a web cam chat with a teenage, Australian Ann Landers; and the third is a British woman listening to a self-help tape, hoping it will boost her confidence enough to speak to that special guy.
The skits get better as the show goes on (though that may be because I saw the show opening night). The first one is a bit dated. It is a send-up of the self-help seminars that proliferated in the 1990s that P. T. Anderson satirized in “Magnolia.” Long story short, the person offering advice needs to follow it herself. The second segment is brilliant however – a subtle autopsy of the nexus between technology and our all-too-human need for love and acceptance. Of course, this is the central theme of the entire show: when we seek out “self” help we are, in fact, trying to reach out to another, perhaps our ideal self, but more likely the friend or lover who is going to recognize and complete us.
In all three shorts Ms. Quinn shows off her finely tuned acting chops. She displays fine comedic sensibilities, and there is never a dull second in the hour.
Other People’s Problems
214 W 30th Street, 6th floor
June 23, 24@ 7:30pm
$20
Christina Shipp and Stephen Conrad Moore as A.J. and Ajax in Iraq
Ellen McLaughlin, author of Ajax in Iraq, turned to the ancient Greeks to make sense out of our soldiers’ experience in Iraq because the Greeks were the first to make sense of the fear, rage, and terror that constitute war by creating a theater for veterans and by veterans. Aeschylus fought in both the battles of Marathon and Salamis (c. 480 BCE). Sophocles was 16 when the Greeks triumphed at Salamis and served as a citizen general in the Athenian army during the Peloponnesian War. These were men who knew the terrors of war first hand, and it is their authority McLaughlin draws on to untangle the Gordian knot of meanings that are present for us, Americans, about our ten-year wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nicole Beerman, Joe Varca, and Megan Hill in "Cut"
Welcome to the machine.
Cut by Crystal Skillman is a theatrical piece about TV, a play about the seriousness of the entertainment industry, a post-modern meditation on Post-modernism. If that sounds like a lot to chew on, it is. Cut is a theatrical essay on the socially constructed nature of “reality,” the brass ring to which all serious artists aspire. And Ms. Skillman has fostered a reputation as a downtown playwright who isn’t afraid to take on The Big Questions. Take, for instance, her play The Vigil or the Guided Cradle, a play about the universality and timelessness of torture in the human experience. The “cut” of the play’s title is its guiding metaphor. A “cut” is what an editor does to film to create a story; what your boss does to your job to save his own skin; and – the cruelest cut of all – what the critic does to put you in your place.
Joanne Wilson as Jane in "Dirty Little Machine"
Miranda Huba’s Dirty Little Machine should be subtitled “Jane’s Ambivalence and Dick’s Dilemma.” Jane, the protagonist, is ambivalent about our “dirty little machine,” which is Huba’s elastic metaphor for the mechanization, specialization, technologization, and anatomization of sexuality in this (post)modern era. That is, porn. And the appropriately named Dick is her two-dimensional foil, he who she calls “The Weasel” because he has collapsed the Madonna / whore dichotomy into one misogynistic, incestuous, feminine catch-all category. I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying sex in Dirty Little Machine is what bored people do to pass the time between permanent adolescence and senescent despair.
Lindsay Teed and Anna Marie Sell as Viola and Olivia
“Be not afraid of greatness” is the advice Malvolio gets from an anonymous letter in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.” Our officious, comedic villain hopes the greatness of his mistress Olivia will be thrust upon him, a thought that tickles him in all the wrong places. Ever ready to put a subordinate in his place or flatter his betters, when he sees the opportunity to move up the social ladder a rung or two Malvolio exults in the thought that he could be better than he is.
The idea that you can be better than you are was laughable to the play’s Elizabethan audience. You were born into your place; you stay in your place; and morality consists of being faithful to who you are. People act immorally when they put on airs, or act beneath their station. We laugh at the type of fool Malvolio represents in hopes that public scorn will teach him a lesson in humility. It’s an important lesson to learn, because those who don’t learn it turn into tyrants and / or corpses.
When asked who is the greatest poet in the English language, most people will say “Shakespeare.” When asked who is the second greatest poet they might say “Keats.” But would anyone say “Milton?” These days it’s hard to find a college graduate who has read Animal Farm from cover to cover, much less Paradise Lost, written by a man who was once thought to be a greater poet than Shax himself.
But it was not always thus. John Dryden, himself a onetime contender for the title of greatest poet in the English language, friend and younger colleague to Milton, supposedly said after reading Paradise Lost, “This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too.” Though Milton was an old republican revolutionary and Dryden a loyal monarchist, Dryden liked Milton’s epic so much he adapted it for the stage by rewriting it in rhymed couplets and setting it to music.
Paul Van Dyck has done Dryden one better by keeping Milton’s sublime poetry unrhymed and using all the modern theatrical arts to make Paradise Lost come to life at the FRIGID Festival. I can say without qualification that this is the best theater – the most relevant to our time, the most uplifting, the most artistic, simultaneously the most esoteric and exoteric, visually, aurally, and intellectually stimulating – that I have seen in a long time. And running under an hour, it makes getting some high culture as enjoyable as possible for those of us inflicted with ADD by the modern age.
Lori E. Parquet as Rozetta Stone
“I will speak and end all suspense” ~ Zetta Stone.
Liz Duffy Adams’s play Dog Act is one of those, what do you call them? Where a thing is its definition? Like the word “pentasyllabic.” Anyway, it’s that, a Dog Act: the last shred of dignity the modern world can leave to the later-than-modern world, the no-longer-modern world, the future world. Whatever happens when pastiche becomes fact, that is Dog Act. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and no dream is more satisfying than “the present.”
Amir John and Lakshmi fight in "Before Your Very Eyes"
“Who are you going to believe? Me or you eyes?” —Groucho Marx
I jokingly asked myself on the way to see Before Your Very Eyes, a play about 9/11 at the Flamboyan Theatre, “Is it too soon? Is nine years long enough to get a grip on the real truth of 9/11?”
I thought I was being facetious, but the question goes to the heart of what Edward Elefterion, the writer/director of Before Your Very Eyes is aiming to do with his play. The question “what happened” is a question of perspective. Each one of us who were in the city on 9/11/2001 have a personal story about that day that we have shaped and polished over the years into an appropriate three minute downer that you tell people outside the City. “I did (or didn’t) see a building fall with my naked eyes”; “I knew (or didn’t) someone who worked there.” A lot of us have stories of friends who were supposed to be near the World Trade Center towers that day and for some reason weren’t; many of us saw figures covered in concrete dust streaming across the East River bridges into Brooklyn; some of us trapped outside the city had to watch our city cope with disaster from a distance.
What does a world without hope look like? Is it a bleak moonscape — black sky, cold sun, gray hills? Or is it the too perfect world of American suburbia, where the sun — and the smiles — shine a little too bright; where too-green, cultivated lawns lead to soothing interiors, painted in shades named “Ocean Side”, “Interactive Cream”, and “Moderate White”; where real freedom is banished to the gritty, marginal, blind spots of ubiquitous surveillance cameras?
The Realm, running from now until April 18th at The Wild Project in the East Village, is a futuristic dystopia in the tradition of American post-apocalyptic dystopias like Logan’s Run, A Boy and His Dog (remember that one? Don Johnson starred in the movie!), and, closer to our time, Urinetown. The time is the not-too-distant future. After an unnamed cataclysm, humanity has been forced underground. Natural resources are scarce — especially water. Human beings have learned how to live spare, lean lives, stripped of all superfluity — and fun. And, for that matter, freedom. Water is rationed, life is rationed, even words are rationed.
Last night was Culture Wars: A Night of Trivia with Art21 at the TriBeCa 92nd Street Y. (You can read all about the last Art 21 trivia night on their blog.)
You probably know what a trivia night at a bar is like. You may know something about contemporary art. But did you know that the hosts of Culture Wars coordinate their outfits? Last time it was dark waistcoats and ties. This time it was button-up, v-neck cardigans and t-shirts.
The questions are plenty obscure, as you might expect from a contemporary art trivia night. (The only one I got asked, whose presidential face graces the more esoteric prime number bill. I also half guessed a question about Marc Chagall.) The bar space at the TriBeCa 92nd street Y is huge, has a stage and all the A/V equipment a 21st century technophile could want, and it was put to good use. There were audio questions, video questions, and, of course, visual art questions. It looked to me like most of the teams (up to 5 people per) were groups of interns from various museums around town. My group was composed of a bunch of older (over 30) types. Needless to say, we lost.
The most 21st century aspect of the game was the “Twitter feature.” For those of you who follow me on Twitter, probably saw that I tweeted “#culturewars neue gallery.” That’s because “neue gallery” was my incorrect guess to the “Twitter question.” What will they think of next?!
Richard "Dick" Pricey (a.k.a. James P. Stanley)
How many times over the last ten years have you been embroiled in a conversation about what to call the last decade? The “Ohs”? The “Aughts”? I think part of the outpouring of relief two weeks ago when we entered the identifiable “Tweens” was due to having a commonly accepted label to put on our present historical period. When have the first ten years of a decade had anything in it worth remembering? What happened in 1905? What was the big news of 1810? Retro was popular in the 90s, but these days — sheesh! — you can’t swing a dead cat in a circle without hitting somebody who’s living like it’s 1899.
Is this a sign of national decadence and decline? The impulse to get back to a more wholesome time is surely behind the National Theater of the United States of America’s production of “Chautauqua!” at the Public theater.
Tanya O'Debra in Radio Star
Everything old is new again! At least that’s how it feels these days. Five long years ago the vogue in vintage was vintage 70s — 1870s that is. Remember when conservatives wanted to repeal income tax and Social Security? It was the new Gilded Age.
But ah, how quickly the worm turns! Now vintage styles in dress and drink reflect the more sober times of the Great Depression and the privation of WWII. Only we call it the Great Recession, and our great global war is being fought by guys with explosive powder in their banana hammocks.
‘Tis the season of holiday parties, corporate and otherwise. On the longest night of the year my companion and I dropped in on the SPI Marketing holiday party at the Rootstein Mannequin Showroom on West 19th Street and 7th Ave in Chelsea.
November 19, 2009
Oh the villainies of Facebook! It seems that when word gets out that you write for a blog as prestigious as Cultural Capitol you start getting invited to all kinds of parties. And so it was I was invited to the NCYFF film industry mixer at GStaad last night.
This Friday, November 6th, check out the glorious return of This Is Burlesque with The Pontani Sisters and Murray Hill!
Cultural Capitol talked to Angie Pontani about the new space and the new show. “The new space is fantastic,” she told us. The stage is upstairs at Sweet Carolines on West 45th between 8th and 9th Avenues. “It has a much larger stage and better sight lines for the audience, yet it maintains the intimate style of Corio. We are also pretty excited to be in Times Square!”
If you loved the extended Pontani burlesque famiglia you won’t be disappointed with the new lineup. Murray Hill, The Pontani Sisters (Angie, Helen, and Peekaboo Pointe) with guests-in-residence Melody Sweets and Little Brooklyn are still the hardest working family in showbiz.
I asked if there were any surprises in store for the upcoming run. “Yes,” Angie said, there will be “new numbers for sure and bigger and better then ever. With such a large stage we are going to be able to use more props and perform larger group numbers. The Gin Bath act has a new home — I am so excited to do that act every weekend!”
Friday will be an extra special evening because it is also Angie’s birthday! (Happy birthday!)
Get your tickets now!
This Is Burlesque
Every Friday and Saturday night at 9:30
Sweet Carolines, 322 West 45th Street
For advance tickets call 212-977-3884
Halloween weekend 2009 was as Halloweenie as you can get. The night itself, when ghouls and ghosts walk the spooky streets of New York, fell on a Saturday. The moon was almost (but not quite) full, and by all accounts it was more debauched than a Night on Bald Mountain. November 1st — All Saints Day — fell respectfully on a gray, cold Sunday, perfect weather for nursing a hangover with comforting dim sum and a bloody mary.
Cold sobriety is the kind of thing you have to ease into though — as hostess-with-the-mostest Calamity Chang knows very well. Tasty eats and visual treats are necessary on Sunday eve to ease a soul back into the work-a-day Purgatory awaiting on Monday. That is why she put together Dim Sum Burlesque at Chow Bar, which will run every Sunday for the rest of the month, and possibly the rest of the year. Calamity Chang told me they are booked for the rest of November, but you might be able to score a table if you walk in. No-shows are held until 9:00. I for one would love to have dim sum burlesque at Chow Bar on Sunday January 3rd 2010.
Diane Naegel
We here at CC were intrigued by the Jazz Aged themed parties called “Wit’s End“, so we decided to talk to their hostess to find out more.
CC: Hi Diane! I guess my first question is, where are you from, if not from NYC? Why did you move here, what do you do for work, if that isn’t planning these events? What got you into this style of dress / music / literature? Who is your favorite artist in those genres / periods? What are your other interests? For example, are you into Steam Punk, Victorian Gothic, or 40s swing?; alternatively, do you like macs and cheese, Big Macs, macrobiotic vegan fare? Macrame, textiles, rough spun yarn or spandex? Are you also active in theater or music?
Diane N: I’m actually from the Midwest- Cincinnati, Ohio! I went to fashion school there, and the University of Cincinnati has a cooperative education program where you take six paid internships in your field while you’re in school- so I got to live here in NYC, Seattle, and LA while I was getting my degree…so if you look at it that way, I’ve lived here off and on since 2000- but permanently for the last 4+ years. I’m an accessory designer by day- I actually do all of the kids accessories for OshKosh B’gosh!
If this were in China one might call it “Chinglish.” But this sign is in a bathroom in Midtown Manhattan, in an upscale Indian deli. Those of us who claim English heritage can’t help but take a little pride in the fact that our oppressive, imperialist forebears spread our language and culture so far and wide that we don’t have to learn another language. English is the lingua franca of the world. Even though there are more than 1,500 languages spoken in India, I can travel the whole of the subcontinent without knowing a word of any of them. (Thank you T. B. Macaulay!) Sure, that means I can be a bit condescending and simultaneously ignorant, but what do you want? An ethno-linguistic anthropologist?
These tents were set up on Columbia’s campus as extra housing for incoming students. They also look a bit like a Hooverville, though probably not intentionally. The New York Times is reporting today that the teenage jobless rate is the highest it has been since they started keeping records in the 40s, three times the unemployment rate of the rest of the country. So to you 18-year-olds whose parents can afford it, back to school!
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