It’s hard not to recognize her, in the theatrical sense — like the Joans we’ve seen, this one’s armor-clad, cross-bearing, and all-powerful. But is this Joan? Well, of course not; it’s merely a depiction.
But is the performer (a marvelously focused Bre Northrup) playing Joan, or a character who believes they are Joan? This is one of the central questions in Arthur Kopit’s Chamber Music, now playing through September 16 in the basement of St. John’s Lutheran Church (155 Milton Street).
Director Emily Moler makes dynamic use of her staging Kopit’s absurdist play, setting it in the round and utilizing the subterranean locale’s low-budget though ample space. In fact a church basement may be the unlikely, appropriate setting for Chamber Music: the play actually takes place in a mental institution, so a church (with its rigid mores) lends itself winningly to this story’s strict asylum. The “Joan of Arc” and other lady icons, from Osa Johnson to Pearl White, inhabit this jail, and their meeting of the minds feels echoed in the opening of Top Girls, Caryl Churchill’s feminist anthem.Continue reading →
When Will Malitek, the owner of Film Noir Cinema (122 Meserole Ave), turned an old Greenpoint funeral home into his gorgeous new 54-seat movie theater, he remodeled with very specific plans in mind. There’s a sizeable gap between the screen and the first row, where Will says he could have added more seats, but he wanted space to present live music.
This summer, Film Noir Cinema has launched a new series presenting silent films with live music by Reel Orchestrette, a collaboration between musicians Bradford Reed and Geoff Gersh.
After a sold-out screening of Nosferatu in June, Reel Orchestrette is returning to Film Noir Cinema on Saturday, July 22 at 9pm with a live score for Faust, a 1926 German silent film directed by F. W. Murnau.
These two events are only the beginning. Malitek hopes to continue the series with screenings of all the major German silent films: Metropolis, Waxworks, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and more. And in October, he says we can expect to see a full lineup of silent horror films.
Tickets for Faust are $15 and on sale now at Film Noir Cinema (where you should also take a moment to flip through their incredible collection of films available to rent).
To find out more about the performance, we spoke with Reel Orchestrette’s Bradford Reed and Geoff Gersh. Continue reading →
I hope you have the pleasure of meeting Caitlin Bebb, whose addictive and contagious luminosity makes her an ideal artist to write and perform in a show about self-help. Even if you don’t meet her personally, you may feel like you have after experiencing her intimate but wild new show, The Protégé, presented by Glass Bandits and playing June 23–26 at Chez Bushwick (304 Boerum St).
Personal development, therapy, and self-improvement can come with sticky stigmas; by nature, these tactics make us address, confront, and perhaps publicize our imperfections. But in her mysterious yet alluring solo show, Caitlin Bebb rejiggers these ignominies, breaking down the walls of what self-help can expound — well, perhaps not breaking them down, but certainly infusing them with spiritual rejuvenation, a genre-defying performance, and a dance party. Continue reading →
“[porto]” at The Bushwick Starr. Photo by Marina McClure.
It serves pickled pomegranate, fried chickpea, and grilled sage.
No, it’s not the organic/gluten-free/farm-to-table market down the street; it’s the rustic gastropub in The Bushwick Starr’s (207 Starr St.) new play [porto] —though based on Brooklyn’s artisanal food scene trends, these bites might soon appear on your go-to bar’s menu. And like those snacks, the play is a concoction of the satirical, savory, and flat-out strange.
[porto] is part of this year’s (and the second annual) Exponential Festival, a theatrical series promoting works created in New York and performed in Brooklyn. Kate Benson’s funny, meandering, and world-premiere play centers on Porto, a young woman for whom the hipness of Brooklyn’s cultural and foodie offerings has perhaps grown dull.
“In a Sea of Faces” plays now through September 25 at Williamsburg’s Cloud City.
The hero’s journey often follows three simple steps: protagonist leaves home, protagonist faces challenges in the world, protagonist returns home, changed. But with In a Sea of Faces, composer and librettist Jahn Sood turns this adventure on its head, all the while achieving depths as great as the ocean from which his hero originates.
Sood’s new folk opera at Cloud City (85 N 1st Street) is as playful as waves, as theatrical as changing tides. In the wildly inventive world directed by Katie Melby, the ocean talks back, handheld flashlights articulate battle and shipwreck, and swaying sails cradle a wayward father’s song of homecoming.Continue reading →
Curt James (foreground) and Josh Krebs in “Cymbeline” at The Brick
Cymbeline is tonally ambiguous, dramaturgically elusive. This is no weakness of Shakespeare’s so-called tragedy, but it stands out in being one that ends in reunions and discoveries instead of wars and death while featuring beheaded characters and disguised lovers. It’s no wonder, then, that critics have long debated whether Cymbeline is drama, romance, comedy, or something in between. Perhaps Shakespeare was pushing genres out and contemporary storytelling, with its mix of laughter and catharsis, forward. Regardless of category, Stay Awake! Theatre’s production of Cymbeline at The Brick (575 Metropolitan Ave.) in Williamsburg is firm in its footing thanks to its minimalist approach and rather strong performances. Continue reading →
Until February, Triskelion Arts shared a space deep inside a three-story, brick warehouse on 118 North 11th Street in Williamsburg, across from Mable’s Smokehouse and, more famously, on the same block as the ever-expanding Brooklyn Brewery.
“We were in a landmarked building, surprisingly, even though the building was falling apart,” explains artistic and executive director Abby Bender. One of the original co-founders, Abby is wearing navy coveralls and has a loop of keys at her waist that jangle as we walk around the new Triskelion building, recently opened for business on 106 Calyer Street in Greenpoint.
For the past fifteen years, Triskelion has been a place where anyone could go see performances by emerging artists, rent affordable rehearsal space, take fun classes (hoop dance, Poi, martial arts), and get involved with theater. In 2014 alone, over 15,000 hours of rehearsal time were used in the studios, and 128 different companies were part of the programming, which included three open-submission festivals. Continue reading →
“escaping into the who goes there? & now’s not the time to act silly, so wear your big boots & jump on the garbage clowns, the hourly rate & the enema men &…”
Crystal Jukebox Hymn, composed of text from Bob Dylan’s experimental poetry prose collection Tarantula, is an immersive experience for the audience who are beckoned to follow an eclectically eccentric group of characters which have been ripped from the confines of a social hierarchy and woven together in a multi-media performance traversing through a crime scene, a bar, a forest, an asylum, a cave and everywhere in between, always with an inherent call for the road and noise on the street. Their every move is captured and splayed against the back wall by the watchful eye of The Narrator, who likes to disguise himself as the Chief of Police. Issues of prejudice, minority, propaganda, corruption, war and privacy that exist within are all unravelled through the rhythmic stream of conscious flow of Bob Dylan’s imaginative words. Continue reading →
“I consider myself a poet first and a musician second,” said Bob Dylan, “I’ll live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.” Through a captivating performance of Crystal Jukebox Hymn, which was devised from Dylan’s book of experimental prose and poetry Tarantula (1966), his words found new life this past weekend at Glasshouse in Williamsburg. Continue reading →
When your children come in from a long day scavenging for food in the irradiated exurbs and ask for a story while the family is gathered around the meager rubbage fire in the gunshot-punctuated evening, what better one to share than the tale of how you and your partner were first brought together by the barely-functioning totalitarian state?
This is the fairytale romance that you live as a member of the audience at Future Mate, a participatory theater experience that sets you in a wonderfully awkward dating event thrown by a comically despotic government organization seeking to unite the few remaining fertile singles of a fractured world. Continue reading →
