Theater
Local Stops
Ride the Next Wave
BAM’s annual festival culls the international performance landscape and plucks some gems for Brooklyn. This year’s theater offerings include:
The Deutsches Theater Berlin production of Emilia Galotti by 18th century writing Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, directed with a “severely minimalist approach,” by director Michael Thalheimer, who severely minimalized the original 4-hour text down to 75 minutes, etching and honing the script to bring out the play’s raw emotion. The plot centers around our favorite subject: the defilement of a beautifully bourgeois woman’s virtue. (10/12-15 at 7:30pm)
4.48 Psychose—celebrated playwright Sarah Kane’s seering, experimental portrait of mental illness, performed in French (English subtitles) by screen goddess Isabelle Huppert and directed at a “fever pitch” by director Claude Régy (10/19-22, 25-29 at 7:30pm, 10/23 & 30 at 3pm)
South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company and the Songolon Puppet Troupe of Mai come together to present us with Tall Horse, a tale flipping the empire on its tail, documenting the African conquest of Europe’s imagination, in the form of a very tall and beautiful giraffe (here, a puppet), sent by the Pasha of Egypt to King Charles of France in 1826. Based (mostly) on a true story. (10/4-8 at 7:30pm, 10/9 at 3pm)
The festival continues into November with further offerings. Tickets: $20 - $60.
For more info: www.bam.org
Pier 25: Shakespeare’s Haunt
Pier 25 is about to close shop, for an extensive “renovation.” But before it does, let the spirits of William Shakespeare and some of his most memorable characters guide you through the site, aboard the historic Yankee Ferry and through the Bard’s own ever-haunting dramas. Crowds will be led through the Hall of Fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Ream, examine Julius Caesar’s wounds, dip toes into Ophelia’s Riverbed of Death (Hamlet), journey through a Shakespearean Chamber of Darkness and dine at the table of Titus Andronicus (where Titus is served a pie with a special filling – his family).
The Faux-Real Theater Company’s William Shakespeare’s Haunted Pier, created and directed by Mark Greenfield, is presented by Chashama, to celebrate Manhattan Youth’s twelve years of community service at Pier 25, creating and assisting in community planning for Battery Park City and its parks.
Performances: 10/29 & 30, 2-6pm, 10/31 4-8pm, Pier 25, West Side Highway @ North Moore Street (perhaps Othello will be there to mark the spot). Tickets: $5 at the door. The show is cyclical in format, with 45-minute loops throughout the 4-hour performance. Audiences can roam as they choose; there will be a special section of the pier designated for “impressionable” younger audiences. For more info, visit www.chashama.org or www.FauxReal.org
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
The Year of the Self
By CortezSEPT 2023 | Fiction
Cortez’s short story, The Year of the Self, centers on a protagonist struggling to recover from a breakup. It’s a familiar premise, but in this case, executed with a fresh vision and voice, as the story resists being driven by causality. Instead, it’s told in impressionistic fragments. We watch the narrator push through the mundanity of everyday life while trying to find ways to shirk the weight of her grief. As the story progresses, the narrator ascribes a kind of existential profundity to the most everyday misfortunes—whether she's stepping in dog shit or getting a yeast infection. The result is a story more wry and sparkling than melancholy.
79. (Brooklyn Navy Yard, Columbia County)
NOV 2021 | The Miraculous
An artist in his mid-30s living in New York and working in a 300-square-foot studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, finds himself consumed by frustration and anger. Although he is having exhibitions, after the shows close his paintings inevitably return to his studio, unsold. He’s not sure he wants to go on being an artist. A psychiatrist he consults helps him to understand that his anger revolves around his feelings about race, class and entitlement. Eventually the psychiatrist recommends that he begin working with a physical trainer, who has him start boxing and working out with a punching bag. Around the same time the artist, who is half-Choctaw and half-Cherokee, has been meeting with traditional Native American artists who tell him how the practices of dancing, drumming and beading have saved their lives. These experiences lead him to make a breakthrough in his work. Instead of focusing on painting, he begins to adorn Everlast vinyl punching bags like those he has been using at the boxing gym in extravagant styles inspired by Native American beadwork, pop culture, and everyday life. Along with beads, he adds tassels, sequins, brass and steel studs, yarn, chains, and sundry items. Some of the bags feature beaded texts quoting everyone from Simone de Beauvoir to Public Enemy.
The Brooklyn Presence at SXSW
By Nic YeagerMAY 2022 | Film
Between March 11 and 20, four Brooklyn-based short films screened at SXSW, each shot in Brooklyn and made by and featuring Brooklynites. SXSW is known for celebrating innovation in tech and education, and these projects offer their own kind of innovation: namely, an irreplaceable artistic ingenuity that flows out of this borough.
The American Revolution: The George Floyd Rebellion, One Year Out
By Jason E. SmithJUL-AUG 2021 | Field Notes
Now that the one-year anniversary of the events of late May and early June—crowned, dramatically, by the immolation of the Third Precinct station in Minneapolis—has come and gone, the need to draw up a balance sheet of what unfolded becomes urgent.
