When a trio of edgy, downtown theater producing companies—Soho Rep, piece by piece productions, and Rising Phoenix Repertory—invite audiences to a tea party in an Upper East Side mansion, there must be something subversive afoot. One of this season's hottest tickets is a site-specific theater piece entitled Elective Affinities. You take your seat in the parlor of a townhouse which doubles as the richly decorated living room of a well-heeled socialite, the rather grand Mrs. Alice Hauptman, played to the hilt by Tony-winning actress Zoe Caldwell. Caldwell regales her "guests" (30 theatergoers each night) with a witty and entertaining stream of consciousness. Soon enough, Alice's oh-so-genteel soiree veers into perverse moral territory, leaving you wondering if indeed the choice to bestow love on select people in our lives, demands that we hate the others that don't share our perspective. The author of this hour-long monologue is 38-year-old Brooklyn-born playwright David Adjmi, who first made his name in New York in 2009 with Stunning, a satirical tragedy drawn from his own Syrian-Jewish roots. We talked recently with Adjmi about his work: Continue Reading »
The House Next Door
Archive: Interviews
Exorcising the Dark Side: An Interview with Playwright David Adjmi
by Gerard Raymond on December 4th, 2011 at 3:38 pm in Interviews
Under Your Skin: An Interview with Burning Playwright Thomas Bradshaw
by Gerard Raymond on November 18th, 2011 at 1:00 pm in Interviews
Don't be misled by the warm smile and the fedora in the photograph; Thomas Bradshaw writes plays that can get under your skin in very uncomfortable ways. To be sure, his work can be suave and entertaining, but as anyone who has seen his previous work—Purity, Strom Thurmond Is a Racist, Southern Promises, Dawn, or The Bereaved—would attest, this is a playwright who charts controversial pathways; he has as many detractors as he has admirers. His latest work, Burning, is receiving his most high-profile production so far, by the New Group under the direction of Scott Elliott, and is currently playing at Theater Row in New York. The 14-character play comprises of intertwined stories that take place in 1985 and the present, involving, among others, two partnered men who set up an unconventional domestic/sexual relationship with a 14-year-old aspiring actor in the 1980s; a painter whose work is being exhibited in a gallery in contemporary Berlin; and a brother and sister dedicated to carrying on the traditions of their deceased parents' Neo-Nazi philosophy. The characters in the play—black, white, gay, straight, and questioning—interact with sometimes explosive results. Bradshaw has often been called a provocateur and, given the uncompromising nature of his work, that's a label audiences attending Burning might also readily apply. But the 31-year-old playwright doesn't necessarily agree with that assessment. Continue Reading »
Between East and West: An Interview with David Henry Hwang
by Gerard Raymond on October 28th, 2011 at 9:00 am in Interviews, Theater
David Henry Hwang's new Broadway play, Chinglish, begins with an American sign manufacturer talking about his experiences in China, offering his insights about doing business in that country. Just how well he has succeeded in understanding his partners and business practices in a foreign culture becomes clear as the play progresses. The insightful and witty comedy, written in both English and Mandarin (translated very effectively with subtitles projected onto the set) is the latest from the author of the 1988 Tony and Drama Desk award-winning play M. Butterfly, and is currently playing at the Longacre Theater. Chinglish offers a lively and thought-provoking look at a cross-cultural exchange that is likely to continue to figure prominently in the first half of this century.
Hwang made his mark as a playwright with FOB (an Asian-American derogative term for new immigrants who arrive in in the U.S. "Fresh Off the Boat" from Asia) which was produced in New York at the Public Theater in 1980. In the intervening years, the California-born playwright, now 54, has become one of the preeminent Asian-American voices in the theater. He achieved international recognition with M. Butterfly, which is loosely based on a true story about a French diplomat who fell in love with a Peking Opera star, who also happened to be a Chinese government spy, allegedly without realizing that "she" was really a man. In addition to his plays, Hwang work includes librettos for music theater works by Philip Glass, several screenplays and the books for the Disney musicals Aida and Tarzan. He was nominated for a Tony in 1998 for his second play on Broadway, Golden Child, which is inspired by stories about his ancestors related to him by his Chinese maternal grandmother. After a decade's absence, he returned to the New York stage in 2007 with Yellow Face, a comedy in which he examined his own evolving feelings regarding the controversy in the early nineties caused by the casting of a Caucasian actor as the male lead in Miss Saigon. The Obie-winning play, also a finalist that year for the Pulitzer, was staged at the Public Theater under the direction of Leigh Silverman, who also directed Chinglish. Hwang talked recently to The House Next Door about his new work. Continue Reading »
A Grand Folly: An Interview with Arias with a Twist Masterminds Joey Arias and Basil Twist
by Gerard Raymond on September 26th, 2011 at 8:20 pm in Interviews, Theater
Cabaret, drag, and performance artist, Joey Arias is a potent experience all by himself. Add a Twist—that's master puppeteer Basil Twist—to the mix and you get the heady enchantment that is Arias with a Twist. Arias and Twist's striking collaboration is now playing on the Lower East Side at the Abrons Arts Center, in a nearly century-old theater, the original venue of the Neighborhood Playhouse. It seems fitting that the delightfully zany, visually jaw-dropping, ribald fantasy has berthed at the theater that, in the 1920s, was home to the popular vaudeville spoof, The Grand Street Follies. The current grand folly, Arias with a Twist (playing through October 16) is a series of tableaus, sketches, songs, and theatrical effects strung together to showcase the unique talents of its star and designer.
Arias with a Twist Deluxe, as it is now billed, is a return engagement of the show that became a cult favorite during its eight-month-long run at Soho's HERE theater in 2008, scaled up to fit into a larger stage. Enhanced with a couple of new songs and more elaborate video effects, it still retains the joyously scrappy quality of the original, and continues to surprise and delight with its theatrical magic. Arias, dressed in costumes by Thierry Mugler, holds his own amid Twist's stage creations, which are ably manipulated by a near invisible team of six puppeteers. The very loose plot has the sexually polymorphous character Joey abducted by aliens, duly probed and then dropped back into a lush jungle on this planet; after a mushroom-induced side trip to Hell, a larger-than-life Joey returns to Manhattan to perform in a retro nightclub accompanied by a four-piece puppet orchestra; the act comes complete with a chorus line and a Busby Berkley-inspired finale. Continue Reading »
Capturing the Incapturable: An Interview with Jonas Hassen Khemiri
by Gerard Raymond on September 13th, 2011 at 10:15 am in Interviews, Theater
Nothing is quite what it seems in Jonas Hassen Khemiri's Invasion! If audiences at the Play Company's production of this delightfully subversive comedy feel a tad uncomfortable during the performance, well, that's how the playwright likes it. Produced by the Play Company, which focuses on a global program of adventurous new plays, Invasion! received its American debut last winter, garnering for Khemiri a 2011 Village Voice OBIE award for playwriting. A remount of the PlayCo production is currently playing at the Flea Theater in Tribeca.
Prior to Invasion!, Khemiri, a Stockholm native of Tunisian and Swedish parentage, was best known as a prose writer, acclaimed in Sweden for his first novel, One Eye Red in 2003. He received a prize for best Swedish novel for his next book, published in the United States this year under the title Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger. The novel is an inventive linguistic balancing act which relates the story of the life of a Tunisian immigrant in Sweden from frequently contradictory perspectives.
Shifting perspectives and a duplicity of language are also the hallmarks of Invasion!, which marked Khemiri's debut as a playwright. In Khemiri's play, a single word—"Abulkasem"—keeps morphing and changing its meaning, in the process moving some characters forward while ensnaring others in an all too familiar net of fear and paranoia. In seven fast-paced scenes, expertly calibrated by director Erica Schmidt, a versatile cast of four (Francis Benhamou, Nick Choksi, Andrew Ramcharan Guilarte, and Bobby Moreno) tackle 19 different roles, change personalities and ethnicity on a dime, and always keep the audience on edge. Aided by a deft English translation by Rachel Willson-Broyles, Invasion! stays funny and playful while touching on contemporary politically charged issues that are anything but light-hearted. We spoke recently with the 32-year-old playwright, who was in New York to attend the remount of Invasion!, which opened a few days after the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Continue Reading »
Staging Solos: An Interview with David Greenspan
by Gerard Raymond on July 31st, 2011 at 2:14 pm in Interviews, Theater
David Greenspan sets the tone for a delightful evening of theater magic by jumping onto a jewel-box stage set at the start of The Patsy. There are no doorways on this set, nor is there a ceiling; it's a three-walled cube tastefully decorated with wallpaper and a few sticks of period furniture and props. In the nonstop 75-minute solo performance that follows, Greenspan resurrects a drawing-room comedy from the 1920s—three acts of family drama, witty banter, and romance, complete with a cast of eight characters. First presented on Broadway in 1925, the play, written by Barry Conners, centers on the Harringtons, a quarrelsome middle-class family. The father is a weary travelling salesman, the mother a social-climbing complainer, the elder daughter has just snagged a rich suitor, and the younger, bookish and disregarded by the others, harbors a secret passion for her sister's former, now discarded, lover. Without ever leaving the stage, Greenspan gleefully impersonates all the characters, which includes the girls' two young beaus and two walk-ons, charting their comings and goings and their emotional ups and downs, and setting the scene as needed by reading occasional stage directions as well.
A multiple OBIE winner and Drama Desk nominee, Greenspan is a frequent and distinctive presence on the New York stage. It's not exactly a surprise to see him turn out a bravura performance. Looking back at some of his career highlights, one doesn't easily forget his over the top Other Mother in Coraline, a musical he co-wrote with composer/lyricist Stephin Merritt; his exquisitely stylized portrayal of the acerbic Harold in the 1996 revival of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band; or the exasperating drag queen who delivers a moving rendition of "Over the Rainbow" on the eve of the Stonewall uprising in Terrence McNally's Some Men. Going even further back in time, you might also recall his one-of-a-kind turn as a neurotic artist obsessively channeling Streisand in the 1992 Public Theater production of his own The Home Show Pieces. No stranger to multiple roles, he has also breezed singlehandedly through his own The Myopia, a 25-character cavalcade extravagantly subtitled "an epic burlesque of tragic proportion," which was revived in January last year. Continue Reading »
An Interview with Project Nim's James Marsh
by Steve Erickson on July 7th, 2011 at 9:15 pm in Film, Interviews
[Project Nim opens in theaters on Friday, July 8th. Click here to visit the official website.]
With Project Nim, James Marsh has created a documentary that feels more like a biopic—and one that avoids the genre's usual pitfalls. He follows the life of a chimp named Nim, who was brought up to live with a human family to see whether chimps could communicate as people do. However, Nim soon showed an aggressive side; in one instance, he ripped open a woman's face. He's shuffled from family to institution, including a spell at a lab that tests hepatitis vaccines. As in his previous documentaries, Marsh uses fictional recreations to fill in the gaps in the available footage. The results tell a lot about both animal and human nature.
Steve Erickson: What are the differences between domesticated animals like dogs and Nim? [Note: I asked this question because a dog was roaming around the office where I interviewed Marsh.]
James Marsh: A dog has been bred for thousand years to live with us. Domestic animals are very different from wild animals. That's a small footnote to Project Nim, but I found that out when I was making the film. Continue Reading »
Unnatural Acts: An Interview with Tony Speciale
by Gerard Raymond on June 29th, 2011 at 7:12 pm in Interviews, Theater
Unnatural Acts, a new play at the Classic Stage Company, takes us back to period of intolerance that is hopefully unthinkable today. It focuses on events from nearly a century ago, when, in 1920, a panel of administrators at Harvard University embarked on campus-wide investigation aimed at exposing and then expelling homosexuals in the student body. Triggered by the suicide of a student off-campus, the inquiry resulted in another's on campus a few weeks later, and 14 convictions. All evidence of the so-called "Secret Court" was subsequently covered up and it was not until 80 years later that the transcripts of the unprecedented proceedings came to light when Amit Paley, a student reporter for The Harvard Crimson, stumbled upon a reference to it in the university archives. He gained access to some 500 pages of documents in the buried files and broke the story in 2002. Since then, the story of the gay witch hunt at the Ivy League institution has become the subject of a 2005 book-length study by William Bright, a 2009 movie, Perkins 28, in which Harvard undergraduates reenact the student testimonies, and Veritas, a play by Stan Richardson presented at last year's New York International Fringe Festival. Unnatural Acts, which compellingly portrays the young men whose lives were deeply affected by investigations, is collectively written by members of a new ensemble company Plastic Theatre. Associate artistic director at the CSC, Tony Speciale, who conceived and directed this project, spoke recently with the House about the production. Continue Reading »
A Conversation with Alex Ross Perry About The Color Wheel
by Miriam Bale on June 19th, 2011 at 9:33 am in Film, Interviews
[The Color Wheel screens today at 7 p.m. as part of BAMcinemaFest. Click here for details.]
I know Alex Ross Perry from the movies, from seeing him at repertory screenings in New York. Before I had even met Alex, I heard a rumor that he had made Out 1 T-shirts to commemorate the "I was there" experience of that rare, 13-hour film's U.S. premiere. Who was this kid? Oftentimes I've been at screenings with just five people in the audience: Alex, a notable critic, a DP (who shot Alex's films) and a publicist/programmer (who has a cameo in Alex's latest film). It was rewarding, then, to see his second film The Color Wheel and see that the lessons from all those films had sunk in. Alex made a film that feels like films he seeks out—idiosyncratic and perfectly flawed, and awaiting discovery. I spoke with Alex about his film, and then asked him to make a list of some of his most memorable moviegoing experiences.
Women, Art, and Revolution: An Interview with B. Ruby Rich
by Miriam Bale on June 17th, 2011 at 1:47 pm in Film, Interviews
In Lynn Hershman Leeson's !Women Art Revolution, stalwart feminist film critic B. Ruby Rich says, "A lot of us who survived those fights, bloodied but relatively unscarred, are kind of like the old CIA and KGB agents that get together for reunions. Who else knows what we've been fighting over? Who else is interested in these issues that have really been consigned to a sort of historic scrap pile that people really don't seem that interested in anymore?" The subject of that hit documentary is its subtitle, A Secret History. At the opening of the film in NYC, I had a chance to speak with Rich so that she could unearth that buried past even further and explain why understanding that moment is particularly relevant now.
Miriam Bale: So this is a documentary on feminist art, but also the women's movement. But you're one of the most renowned feminist film critics. So I'll start out by asking you about the connection between feminist art and the women's movement, and also feminist film, during the high time of the feminist movement, the '70s and early '80s.
B. Ruby Rich: So this triangular relationship that you'd assume would be there? It wasn't there very much. It was a pretty weak triangle. They tended to be three different routes that women took and there was a kind of shadowing of one upon the other, but there wasn't much connection. You'd think that there'd be, for instance, a strong connection between the feminist art movement and the feminist film movement. But, in fact, if I think about it, the only people who really crossed over were Carolee Schneemann, who did see herself as very much a feminist, and was very happy to finally have an allegiance to make after so very long of being treated badly by the boys in the art world, and Yvonne Rainer, whose work was shown in some of those very early film festivals, who was just beginning to make film but was coming out of the performance art world. She, at that time, didn't even really consider herself a feminist. She was coming much more out of that world of the performance art left, in terms of anti-Vietnam organizing in politics and dance. Continue Reading »
Labors of Love: An Interview with Moisés Kaufman
by Gerard Raymond on June 12th, 2011 at 12:59 pm in Interviews, Theater
The great Tennessee Williams, unsurpassed poet of the theater and incisive chronicler of the human soul, was born 100 years ago this March. No surprise then that we are likely to see a slew of his work produced on our stages in his centenary year. In New York, we've already had productions of his lesser known Vieux Carré and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. Now we have a particularly unusual offering in the New Group and Tectonic Theater Project's production of One Arm, based on an unproduced Williams screenplay. The production, currently playing at Theater Row, is adapted and directed by Moisés Kaufman, who's best known for the plays Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, The Laramie Project, and the Tony-nominated 33 Variations. Kaufman also recently directed Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, currently playing on Broadway. The Venezuelan born director/playwright talked to The House recently about his labor of love, bringing this little known Williams work to the stage.
Gerard Raymond: How did you get interested in One Arm?
Moisés Kaufman: I found it in a collection of screenplays about 10 years ago and I remember being immediately struck by its frankness. When Williams is depicting gay life in the '40s, '50s, or '60s, for obvious reasons, his gay characters always end up very badly: Blanche DuBois's boyfriend commits suicide off-stage [A Streetcar Named Desire], Paul Newman ends up married to Elizabeth Taylor [the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof], and in Suddenly Last Summer, Sebastian ends up being eaten by cannibals. This screenplay is really about the kind of homosexual underground in which Tennessee Williams lived. The story is based, supposedly, on a hustler, who had one arm, who he knew in New Orleans, who was incredibly beautiful and who resembled the statue of Apollo. Obviously it was autobiographical because he met this hustler, but it was also personal because toward the end of his life most of his sexual encounters were with hustlers. It was the frankest portrayal of that world that I had seen from Williams. I was very moved and very excited by that.
GR: Didn't he write it originally as a short story? Continue Reading »
Tribeca Film Festival 2011: Highlights & Interview with Director of Programming David Kwok
by Miriam Bale on May 9th, 2011 at 10:32 am in Festivals, Film, Interviews
The Tribeca Film Festival allowed this frequent New York festivalgoer a chance to see three genuinely surprising features quite unlike each other, except that they're three pop experiments that flit around their genres' boundaries (music doc, food doc/road film, and porn/musical) and are all quietly unforgettable.
The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye: a rock doc as avant-garde love story (previously discussed here). Continue Reading »
Interview and Live Review: The Tindersticks
by Kalvin Henely on May 2nd, 2011 at 1:04 pm in Film, Interviews, Music
[Photo: Michelle Lee]
The Tindersticks' mini-tour for their new box set of soundtrack work for Claire Denis films graced Los Angeles Saturday night for a show at the little-known Luckman Fine Arts Complex. The band will be completing the tour tonight at the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival. I was able to catch the show and keyboardist David Boulter earlier in their tour for an interview. Continue Reading »
Shaping Portraiture with Sound: An Interview with Filmmaker Marie Losier
by Miriam Bale on April 27th, 2011 at 7:52 pm in Film, Interviews
Marie Losier is an experimental filmmaker and the film programmer at the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) who has brought both her unconventional, intuitive filmmaking methods and her vast film knowledge to the making of her first feature film, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, a documentary about the unconventional love story between Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV musician Genesis P-Orridge and his—and then her—wife, Lady Jaye. It's a heartfelt and unusual masterpiece, and one of the strongest films in this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Marie is a charming blend of otherworldly and gently down-to-earth. She was a pleasure to talk to about the process of finding the form for this unusual and moving film.
Miriam Bale: There are so many great songs to choose from, and you chose such beautiful ones. How did you end up with those?
Marie Losier: I had 15 layers of sounds, so there's a mix of tons of sounds. There are the environment sounds where I would put the mic in the house, then there's sound of rehearsals, and I use a lot of this music because it was live and it doesn't exist on record, it was just that moment that they were practicing and playing. And with those, I chose a lot of the songs that were free, that were from Psychic TV3, the band that I spent time with, because I knew I could use these songs. And then from Thee Majesty, which is Bryin Dall and Genesis. And Bryin also helped me mix the sounds, and he does all the mixing for Psychic TV. So that's how I chose. But I knew I didn't have the rights for the last song which I love, "The Orchids," so that's the one song I had to pay rights for, with Sony. Because, with Gen, there's so many songs that she just sold the rights for over the years, just to live. So it was a complicated process. But sounds and music were as important to me as the editing of the image. Continue Reading »
Lost and Found in Translation: An Interview with Playwright Rajiv Joseph
by Gerard Raymond on April 3rd, 2011 at 11:11 am in Interviews, Theater
Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, which opened March 31 on Broadway, heralds the arrival of compelling new voice in the American theater. And it's not just because the production has snagged A-list comedian Robin Williams to play the title role, or because the play was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize. This surrealistic dark comedy, set in the early months of the U.S. occupation of Iraq's capital city, is a bold and vividly theatrical take on issues and concerns that face Americans in the 21st century. The buzz about the 36-year-old Ohio-born writer has been building for some years now. His first play, Huck and Holden, debuted off-Broadway in 2005. Numerous awards and grants, as well as productions of his plays in theaters across the country, followed. Bengal Tiger, his most powerful play to date, has been given a gripping and imaginative production, directed by Moisés Kaufman, twice in Los Angeles and now in New York at the Richard Rodgers Theater. I spoke with Joseph last month, when the play was still in previews. Continue Reading »
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