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JUNE 9 & 16, 2014
JUNE 9 & 16, 2014
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GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
39
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Rebecca Mead on trigger warnings; Egypt’s election; the De Niros; Broadway eggs; James Surowiecki on industrial espionage. DAVID Gilbert
46
“HERE’S THE STORY”
MARGARET Talbot
60
THE TEEN WHISPERER
John Green and his fans. RAMONA AUSUBEL
70
“YOU CAN FIND LOVE NOW”
HARUKI Murakami
74
“YESTERDAY”
Karen Russell
92
“THE BAD GRAFT”
RACHEL KUSHNER JOSHUA FERRIS COLM TÓIBÍN MIRANDA JULY TOBIAS WOLFF
59 69 72 78 84
THE ADOLESCENTS GOOD LEGS STORIES TV BEAUTIFUL GIRL
Alison Bechdel CHRIS Ware
88 90
MY OLD FLAME
SKETCHBOOKS “GRADUAL IMPACT” “POSSESSION”
BOOKS CHRISTINE Smallwood
102 107
“The Shelf: From LEQ to LES.” Briefly Noted
EMILY Nussbaum
108
“High Maintenance,” “My Mad Fat Diary.”
ANTHONY Lane
110
ON TELEVISION
THE CURRENT CINEMA
“Maleficent,” “A Million Ways to Die in the West.”
Continued on page 8 4
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 9 & 16, 2014
HEART-BOOK PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL MARCELLE
THE CRITICS
POEM JAMES RICHARDSON
joost swarte
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“Essay on Wood”
COVER
“Love Stories”
DRAWINGS Danny Shanahan, Michael Maslin, David Sipress, Benjamin Schwartz, Charles Barsotti, Harry Bliss, Emily Flake, Liam Francis Walsh, Shannon Wheeler, Edward Steed, Roz Chast SPOTS Simone Massoni
“Rekindling an old romance. And you?” 8
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 9 & 16, 2014
CONTRIBUTORS david gilbert (“here’s the story,” p. 46)
is the author of the novel “& Sons,”
which came out in paperback in May. rachel kushner (“the adolescents,” p. 59)
has written two novels, “The
Flamethrowers” and “Telex from Cuba.” joshua ferris (“good legs,” p. 69)
published his third novel, “To Rise Again
at a Decent Hour,” last month. ramona ausubel (“you can find love now,” p. 70) is the author of “A Guide
to Being Born” and “No One Is Here Except All of Us.” colm tÓIbÍn (“stories,” p. 72) will publish a new novel, “Nora Webster,” in October. haruki murakami (“yesterday,” p. 74) has a new novel, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,” coming out in August. miranda july (“tv,” p. 78) is a writer, artist, and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. Her novel, “The First Bad Man,” will be published in January. tobias wolff (“beautiful girl,” p. 84) teaches at Stanford. His books include
“Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories” and the novel “Old School.” alison bechdel (“gradual impact,” p. 88)
is the author of the memoirs “Fun Home” and “Are You My Mother?” and the comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.”
chris ware (“possession,” p. 90), the author of “Building Stories,” will be the artist-in-residence at the East London Comics and Arts Festival on June 14th. karen russell (“the bad graft,” p. 92), a 2013 MacArthur Fellow, published a novella, “Sleep Donation,” in March. She is the author of two short-story collections and the novel “Swamplandia!”
T H E N E W YO R K E R D I G I TA L W W W. N E W YO R K E R . C O M
D I G I TA L E D I T I O N
FICTION
COMMENT
MY OLD FLAME
FICTION
Ramona Ausubel, David Gilbert, and Karen Russell on their stories.
Daily news analysis from Hendrik Hertzberg, Sarah Stillman, and others.
Readings by Joshua Ferris, Rachel Kushner, Miranda July, and Tobias Wolff.
David Gilbert reads his new story.
PAGE-TURNER
PODCASTS
POETRY
On the Fiction Podcast, Miranda July reads a story by Janet Frame.
Sasha Weiss talks to Joshua Rothman and Cressida Leyshon about Karl Ove Knausgaard. Plus, David Remnick and Ryan Lizza on the Political Scene podcast.
James Richardson reads his new poem.
ARCHIVE
HUMOR
VIDEO
CARTOONS
Our complete collection of issues, back to 1925.
A Daily Cartoon drawn by Mick Stevens, and Shouts & Murmurs.
Emily Nussbaum on the Web series “High Maintenance.”
A gallery of bonus humor from the archive.
Access our digital edition for tablets and phones at the App Store, Amazon.com, Google Play, or Next Issue Media.
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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 9 & 16, 2014
THE MAIL MISTA T KEN IDENTITY
Lizzie Widdicombe, in her piece about the Manhattan Institute’s Hamilton Awards, quotes a number of Republican politicians intent on promoting an image of Alexander Hamilton as representing an urban, Wall Street-friendly brand of conservatism (The Talk of the Town, May 26th). In researching my biography of Hamilton, I discovered that, in many battles with Jeffersonian foes, Hamilton proved himself to be a liberal champion. He advocated federal power against the doctrine of states’ rights and favored an expansive reading of the Constitution. He promoted abolitionism and lent his prestige to a school for Native Americans. He was the foremost agent of economic modernity against the slavocracy of the South. When he founded Paterson, New Jersey, he espoused open immigration against the forces of nativism. Even as his Jeffersonian opponents agitated for limited government, Hamilton emerged as the chief architect of a robust executive branch. The patron saint of the Coast Guard and the Customs Service, he made the first federal investments in American infrastructure, showing the creative uses of government and paving the way for the Progressive Era and the New Deal. In his own day Hamilton was vilified for higher taxes and increased government spending—scarcely the forerunner of modern-day Republicanism, in either its Tea Party or establishment incarnations. Ron Chernow Brooklyn, N.Y.
1 FEAR AND REMEMBERING
Michael Specter’s article about the neuroscience of remembering revealed that it has taken us more than a hundred years to come full circle in our understanding of memory (“Partial Recall,” May 19th). It is fashionable to think of Freud as a fantasist who was hopelessly unscientific in his methods and conclusions, but, in recent years, state-of-the-art neuroscientific research has begun to corroborate many fundamental Freudian insights.
With his concepts of “screen memories” and Nachträglichkeitt (“deferred action,” or “afterwardness”), Freud described how memory is a palimpsest, a work of constant reconstruction, and how subsequent experiences can alter both the content and the psychological import of previous memories. Almost ninety years ago, in the landmark essay “The Care of the Patient,” F. W. Peabody wrote, “A scientist is known, not by his technical processes, but by his intellectual processes.” It is time that we recognize Freud as the scientist he was. Dimitri Mellos New York City
Daniela Schiller’s research, demonstrating that traumatic memories can become less painful or even be extinguished, reinforces observations made long ago by psychotherapists. But the discussion about the treatment of traumatic memories should not be limited to cognitive behavioral methods. “Exposure therapy” is but new wine in old bottles. For decades, therapists have been helping patients suffering from traumatic experiences to talk about, or uncover, their memories as a way to ease the emotional power and meaning of the past. The act of remembering requires the construction of new meaning within the context of a relational experience—a fact well appreciated by psychoanalytic theory. Survivors of trauma frequently put themselves in situations that remind them of the trauma they suffered, and this typically has the effect of solidifying the pain associated with these memories. As the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald wrote in 1960, it is by remembering and internalizing new w experiences with the therapist that patients can “turn ghosts into ancestors.” Cathy Siebold Cambridge, Mass.
t Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
[email protected]. Letters and Web comments may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter or return letters. THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 9 & 16, 2014
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GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN J U N E 2014
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No matter how popular Governors Island becomes, it always feels like a getaway. To arrive by ferry— from lower Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridge Park—is to retrace the watery journey of the Spanish, Italian, and Dutch settlers who sailed New York Harbor centuries ago. This summer, the ferries run seven days a week, which means more chances to swing in one of the island’s fifty red hammocks, bike on its car-free streets, or play on the mini-golf course created by local artists. There are plans to make Governors Island accessible year-round, but for now it remains a seasonal pleasure, ending on Labor Day.
photog r a p h by Da n ie l A r n ol d
THE THEATRE art | classical music FOOD & DRINK | DANCE movies | ABOVE & BEYOND NIGHT LIFE
T TEATRE
Openings and Previews Ayckbourn Ensemble The centerpiece off “Brits Offf Broadway” is this trio off comedies by Alan Ayckbourn, playing in repertory: “Arrivals and Departures” (opens June 4), “Farcicals: A Double Bill off Frivolous Comedies” (opens June 10), and “Time off My Life” (opens June 11). Ayckbourn directs the Stephen Joseph Theatre productions. In previews. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.) Carnival Kids Lucas Kavner wrote this play, directed by Stephen Brackett, in which an unemployed former rock star moves in with his grown son, who is adopted. Previews begin June 5. Opens June 9. (TBG, 312 W. 36th St. 212-868-4444.) Clown Bar Pipeline Theatre Company presents an encore of this play by Adam Szymkowicz, with music and lyrics by Adam Overett, in which a man returns to his clowning life after his junkie brother is found dead. Andrew Neisler directs. Saturdays only. Previews begin June 14. (The Box, 189 Chrystie St. 800-838-3006.) Fly by Night: A New Musical Playwrights Horizons presents the New York première off a musical by Kim Rosenstock, Will Connolly, and Michael Mitnick, set during the Northeast blackout off 1965, in which a sandwichmaker meets a pair off sisters. Carolyn Cantor directs. In previews. Opens June 11. (416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.)
Shakespeare in the Park begins its season with “Much Ado About Nothing.”
Marriage material Lily Rabe once again finds love at the Delacorte.
’ , observed, are always marrying down. Is Orlando truly worthy of Rosalind, with her panoptic wit? How does Viola wind up with that ninny Orsino? Perhaps that’s why playing a Shakespearean heroine requires not just poise but a hint of sourness. For the past few years, Lily Rabe has been Shakespeare in the Park’s go-to interpreter of these sharp but compromising women, having appeared as Portia in “The Merchant of Venice” and Rosalind in “As You Like It.” Beginning June 3, she plays Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing,” directed by Jack O’Brien. Beneath Rabe’s alabaster beauty is a shrewd intelligence marked by disillusionment, and a vulnerability that allows her characters to get swept off ff their feet despite themselves. Still, there’s a pool of regret, even solitude, in matrimony. Rabe knows that to be as brilliant as Rosalind or Portia means brooking disappointment, which in Beatrice takes the form of sublime feistiness. “I’m sure Balanchine felt this way when he found certain dancers,” Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theatre, said recently of Rabe. But she wasn’t hard to find. Her father, the playwright David Rabe, made his name at the Public, and her mother was the great stage and screen actress Jill Clayburgh, who died in 2010, as Rabe was in previews of “The Merchant of Venice.” (Rabe memorably went back onstage the next day.) Rabe is thirty-one, not much younger than her mother was in her star-making turn in Paul Mazursky’s 1978 film, “An Unmarried Woman,” and Eustis sees echoes of Clayburgh in her daughter’s “strange combination of strength and fragility.” Like Kevin Kline and Liev Schreiber, Rabe is one of the Delacorte’s homegrown talents, as is her Benedick this summer, Hamish Linklater. As she gains more visibility on television—in her recurring role in “American Horror Story” and in the upcoming ABC series “The Whispers”—let’s hope she keeps finding herself in Central Park, falling in love with some dopey guy by moonlight. —Michael Schulman 16
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 9 & 16, 2014
Holler if Ya Hear Me Todd Kreidler wrote this new musical, based on the lyrics off Tupac Shakur, about life on the streets. The cast includes Tonya Pinkins; Kenny Leon directs. In previews. (Palace, Broadway at 47th St. 877-250-2929.) Hot Season Strange Sun Theatre presents a play by Evan Mueller, in which a group off friends attempt to escape a life-threatening epidemic by taking shelter at a cabin in the woods. Kevin J. Kittle directs. Previews begin June 13. Opens June 16. (Black Box, 18 Bleecker St. 866-811-4111.) The Lion The composer and singer Benjamin Scheuer wrote and performs this autobiographical musical, about his coming off age. Sean Daniels directs, for Manhattan Theatre Club. Previews begin June 10. (City Center Stage II, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212.) Macbeth Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh’s staging of the Shakespeare play stars Branagh as Macbeth and Alex Kingston as Lady Macbeth, in their New York stage débuts. In previews. Opens June 5. (Park Avenue Armory, Park Ave. at 66th St. 212-933-5812.) Much Ado About Nothing Jack O’Brien directs Lily Rabe, as Beatrice, and Hamish Linklater, as Benedick, in the opening play off the Public’s free Shakespeare in the Park season. In previews. Opens June 16. (Delacorte, Central Park. Enter at 81st St. at Central Park W. 212-967-7555.) The Muscles in Our Toes Labyrinth Theatre Company presents a dark comedy by Stephen Belber, in which four friends ILLUSTRATION BY SOPHIA FOSTER-DIMINO
Also Notable Act One
Vivian Beaumont. Through June 15. After Midnight
Brooks Atkinson Aladdin
New Amsterdam All the Way
Neil Simon American Hero
McGinn/Cazale. Through June 15. Beautiful—The Carole King Musical
Stephen Sondheim Bullets Over Broadway
St. James Cabaret
Studio 54 Casa Valentina
Samuel J. Friedman The City of Conversation
Mitzi E. Newhouse The Cripple of Inishmaan
convene at their high-school reunion and hatch a plan to rescue a friend who was kidnapped by a radical political group. Anne Kauffman directs. Previews begin June 14. (Bank Street Theatre, 155 Bank St. 212-513-1080.) Our New Girl Gaye Taylor Upchurch directs the U.S. première of a play by Nancy Harris, about a London woman with a problematic son who receives a mysterious visit from a professional nanny. Mary McCann stars. In previews. Opens June 10. (Atlantic Stage 2, at 330 W. 16th St. 866-811-4111.) The Village Bike MCC presents this play by Penelope Skinner, starring Greta Gerwig, Jason Butler Harner, and Scott Shepherd, about a pregnant woman who takes her desires into her own hands when she buys a used bike. Sam Gold directs. In previews. Opens June 10. (Lucille Lortel, 121 Christopher St. 212-352-3101.)
Cort Early Shaker Spirituals
Performing Garage. Through June 15. A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder
Walter Kerr Heathers: The Musical
New World Stages Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Belasco Here Lies Love
Public If/Then
Richard Rodgers Just Jim Dale
Laura Pels Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill
Circle in the Square Matilda the Musical
Shubert Les Misérables
Imperial Mothers and Sons
Golden Motown: the Musical
Lunt-Fontanne Of Mice and Men
Longacre Once
Jacobs A Raisin in the Sun
Ethel Barrymore. Through June 15. The Realistic Joneses
Lyceum Rocky
Winter Garden Too Much Sun
Vineyard Violet
American Airlines Theatre Wicked
Gershwin
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When January Feels Like Summer Cori Thomas wrote this play, about the effect that five Harlem residents have on one another and the world around them. Daniella Topol directs the Ensemble Studio Theatre and Page 73 co-production. In previews. Opens June 5. (Ensemble Studio Theatre, 549 W. 52nd St. 866-811-4111.) When We Were Young and Unafraid Cherry Jones, Zoe Kazan, Cherise Boothe, Patch Darragh, and Morgan Saylor star in a new play by Sarah Treem, in which a woman running a women’s shelter takes issue with the influence that one of the residents has over her teen-age daughter. Pam MacKinnon directs the Manhattan Theatre Club production. In previews. Opens June 17. (City Center Stage I, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212.) The Who & the What LCT3 presents a new play by Ayad Akhtar, in which a young woman clashes with her Muslim family over the book she has written about women and Islam. Kimberly Senior directs. In previews. Opens June 16. (Claire Tow, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200.)
3 Now Playing The Anthem There’s plenty of talent among the thirteen cast members in this unrelentingly high-camp adaptation of the 1938 Ayn Rand novella. As directed, choreographed, and designed by Rachel Klein, the musical employs techno-rock singing, break dancing, acrobatics, gymnastics, and roller skating, among other theatrical disciplines—some of it pretty impressive—but to what end? The book, by Gary Morgenstein, which is set, the program stipulates, “many
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 9 & 16, 2014
centuries after the early 1980s,” tells a dull, jokey story about a totalitarian state that’s battled by a rebel army of forest fugitives. The songs, by Jonnie Rockwell and Erik Ransom, are lyrically tortured and melodically challenged. The performers, who include Jason Gotay (“SpiderMan”), Jenna Leigh Green (“Sabrina, the Teenage Witch”), Remy Zaken (“Spring Awakening”), and Randy Jones (the Village People), have been encouraged to emote with wide, mindless smiles and melodramatic scowls, but their enthusiasm is not contagious. (Lynn Redgrave Theatre, 45 Bleecker St. 866-811-4111.) Chalk Farm This topical two-hander, part of “Brits Off Broadway,” is a crème brûlée of a play—crackling surface, gooey center. Set amid the London riots in the summer of 2011, it concerns Maggie (Julia Taudevin) and Jamie (Thomas Dennis), a mother and her adolescent son. When the burning and looting kick off, Jamie finds himself drawn out into the streets, to “this huge crack in the world.” The writers, Kieran Hurley and AJ Taudevin, delve into Jamie’s disenfranchisement and Maggie’s class-consciousness, while the director, Neil Bettles, of ThickSkin, keeps the set’s fifteen screens flickering and the sound design shuddering, the better to foment anxiety and unease. Unfortunately, the script devolves into a syrupy encomium to maternal love and sacrifice. And yet a little of the disquiet lingers in the final lines, as Jamie considers the consequences of his actions. “I would do it again,” he muses. “Why not? Best fucking day of my life.” (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200. Through June 8.) The Essential Straight & Narrow The main action of this surreal comedy, co-written by the theatre group the Mad Ones and directed by Lila Neugebauer, takes place in a motel room in New Mexico in the nineteenseventies, where three members of an L.A.-based country-music band (Joe Curnutte, Stephanie Wright Thompson, and Michael Dalto) are hanging out with a local drag queen (Marc Bovino) and working through unfinished business while waiting for their bus to be repaired. Occasionally, though, with a change in lighting, the play becomes about something else entirely: in the same motel room, a young actress (Thompson), all by herself, rehearses a scene from a melodramatic cop show in which she is first seduced, and then shot. There’s some good acting and funny jokes in this imaginative collaboration, but it’s ultimately more playful than deep. (New Ohio Theatre, 154 Christopher St. 888-596-1027. Through June 14.) In the Park This monologue by the writer and performer Edgar Oliver (respect-
fully directed by Randy Sharp) is beautiful—and enthralling in its undisguised but never tedious selfabsorption, in its command of the spoken word, and in its demand for love. It’s a love story about moments and sensations: Oliver rhapsodizes about rain and darkness and the sun and the soul music that he hears at a McDonald’s where he sometimes goes to write. He ends his meditation with a scene of shared human emotion: one evening, as he is leaving Prospect Park, a young black man suggests that they get together. Oliver has felt invisible for much of his life, an invisibility that he relished: it freed him to feel more like an element than like a person. But now, in the park, he has been noticed, as a man. (Reviewed in our issue of 6/2/14.) (Axis Theatre, 1 Sheridan Sq. 212-352-3101. Through June 7.) The Killer Michael Shannon stars in this 1959 parable play by Eugene Ionesco, translated by Michael Feingold, about a serial killer on the loose in an otherwise utopian city. Darko Tresnjak directs the Theatre for a New Audience production. (Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. 866-811-4111.) Nomads Julia Jarcho wrote this play, inspired by the work of Jane Bowles, about two American women in the nineteenthirties who take separate paths. Alice Reagan directs, for Incubator Arts Project. (St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, Second Ave. at 10th St. 212-352-3101. Through June 15.) Sawbones / The Diamond Eater A peculiar exercise in narrative medicine. The celebrated costume designer Carrie Robbins has adapted two of her late husband’s short stories for the stage. The first concerns a Civil War-era doctor and his African-American protégé as they amputate the legs of wounded soldiers, Union and Confederate. The second relates an ostensibly true story of surgical ingenuity at a Second World War concentration camp. Unsurprisingly, each one-act is beautifully apparelled, but neither Robbins nor the director, Tazewell Thompson, has worked out how to equip them for the theatre. Both pieces feature stilted passages in which characters explain settings and circumstances directly to the audience. Still, these speeches are perhaps preferable to the dramatic sequences, which tend toward the overwrought. (There’s a particularly mortifying childbirth scene, though the kidney transplant fares better.) Both works present a steadfastly heroic picture of medical men. If only they could doctor plays, too. (HERE, 145 Sixth Ave., near Spring St. 212-352-3101. Through June 7.)
ART
Cold-pressed Conceptualism: Josh Kline’s sculpture “Skittles” (2014) satirizes the juice-cleanse craze, life-style brands, and aspirational marketing.
Parklife “, damn traffic today,” reads the new white-on-pink mural by Ed Ruscha, above the High Line at Twenty-second Street. On a recent afternoon, the text doubled as a caption for a live-action cartoon, as a man on a scooter wove his way through a gaggle of tourists. Nearby, teenagers held up handwritten signs advertising free hugs and yelled, “It’s emotional Tuesday!” Performance art? No, students from the neighborhood’s Fashion Industries high school, blowing off steam. It can be hard to distinguish what’s art and what’s not on the High Line. “Archeo,” a new exhibition of eight outdoor sculptures by seven young artists, organized by the park’s nimble curator, Cecilia Alemani, plays to the idea of the High Line as a latter-day Readymade. Marcel Duchamp turned his bicycle wheel, snow shovel, and bottle rack into art with scant alteration. But the former elevated railway, once overgrown and abandoned, is now so groomed and urban-chic that it’s a ready-made backdrop for Instagram. The site’s history surfaces in one of the show’s strongest works: Marianne Vitale’s “Common Crossings,” five salvaged railroad switches (they allow trains to change tracks), installed vertically. Below Twenty-fifth Street, the steel totems stand sentry, strange hybrids of Richard Serra and Easter Island. A few blocks south, in another twist on the Readymade, Yngve Holen sets down a pair of gleaming industrial washing-machine drums in a glib piece, titled “Sensitive 4 Detergent,” that does little more than turn a patch of the High Line into a hillbilly front yard. “Plop art” is a derogatory term for public sculpture, coined in 20
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 9 & 16, 2014
the late nineteen-sixties to describe inert minimalism in corporate plazas. In “Archeo,” Isabelle Cornaro is guilty of plopping. Her “God Boxes,” above Gansevoort Street, are black monoliths embellished with casts of stars and twisted rope—the effect is Louise Nevelson lite. Gavin Kenyon’s gray, fur-flecked blob on a polychrome base, at Thirtieth Street, is ironically titled “Realism Marching Triumphantly Into the City,” and seems aimed at deflating the grandiosity of classical monuments. A bull’s-eye it’s not. In the shade of a magnolia tree near Twenty-sixth Street, a flesh-pink slab by Antoine Catala sidesteps inertia through a combination of technical ingenuity and old-fashioned creepiness: a curved green prosthesis on the front of the sculpture slowly expands and contracts, as if breathing. A few yards to the south, Jessica Jackson Hutchins has a homier take on the concept of sculptures as bodies: her ceramic assemblage kicks back in a hammock, slung so far under the walkway that it’s easy to miss. Bodies at rest become the city’s restless bodies in motion in Josh Kline’s brilliant “Skittles,” near the Standard hotel. An illuminated deli display case is stocked with rows of colorful drinks in ridiculous flavors—“Williamsburg,” “Big Data,” “Nightlife”—made from surprising ingredients. (“Condo” blends coconut water, HDMI cable, infant formula, turmeric, and yoga mats.) Think of “Skittles” as Duchamp’s “Bottle Rack,” updated for the age of aspirational marketing, when even a smoothie can be spun as a status symbol. The case is locked and the bottles are beyond reach, but you can press your nose to the glass. —Andrea K. Scott
TIMOTHY SCHNECK/FRIENDS OF THE HIGH LINE
Playing hide-and-seek at a sculpture show on the High Line.
Museums Short List Metropolitan Museum
“The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy: British Art and Design.” Through Oct. 26. Museum of Modern Art
“Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963-2010.” Through Aug. 3. MOMA PS1
“James Lee Byars: 1/2 an Autobiography.” Opens June 15. Guggenheim Museum
“Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe.” Through Sept. 1. Whitney Museum
“American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe.” Through June 29. Brooklyn Museum
“Ai Weiwei: According to What?” Through Aug. 10. American Museum of Natural History
“Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs.” Through Jan. 4. Bronx Museum
“Beyond the Supersquare.” Through Jan. 11. Morgan Library & Museum
“Marks of Genius: Treasures from the Bodleian Library.” Opens June 6. New Museum
“Ragnar Kjartansson: Me, My Mother, My Father, and I.” Through June 29. Queens Museum
“13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World’s Fair.” Through Sept. 7. SCULPTURECENTER
“Katrín Sigurdardóttir.” Through July 27. Studio Museum in Harlem
“When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South.” Through June 29. Galleries Short List Uptown
Lynda Barry Baumgold Through July 11. Dawoud Bey Boone Through June 28. Chelsea
Darren Bader Kreps Through June 21. Mika Rottenberg Rosen Through June 14. Downtown
Polly Apfelbaum Clifton Benevento Through Aug. 8. Sarah Charlesworth Maccarone Through June 21.
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Museums and Libraries International Center of Photography “Urbes Mutantes: Latin American Photography 1944-2013” Although “Mutant Cities,” as the show’s title translates, is too quirky and scattershot to be really groundbreaking, it explores its subject with real verve. In seven decades’ worth of material, only a few names—Graciela Iturbide, Miguel Rio Branco, Enrique Metinides, Gabriel Orozco—are already familiar, so there’s much to discover. Organized by themes (“Nightlife,”“Identities,”“The Forgotten Ones”), the show emphasizes street work, pop culture, portraiture, and social engagement, including fascinating protest documentation. Pictures by Barbara Brandli, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Victor Robledo, and Leon Ruiz whet the appetite for more, and vitrines of posters and publications add to the show’s gritty texture and savvy feel for the histories of Latin America. Through Sept. 7. Frick Collection “The Poetry of Parmigianino’s ‘Schiava Turca’ ” Not a single American museum has a portrait by the greatest Mannerist, so roll out the bunting for this painting of a mysterious woman, on loan from the Galleria Nazionale di Parma: her cheeks are ruddy, her shoulders are sloped, and her elongated fingers daintily curve around an ostrich-feather fan. The sitter is unknown, but she’s definitely not a “Turkish slave,” as the title has it. Her large headdress is not a turban but a balzo, a Northern Italian courtly luxury, to which she’s affixed a gold ornament depicting Pegasus, the classical symbol of poetic inspiration. (The fan may offer a clue about her identity: the sixteenth-century Italian word for “fan” was piume, whose singular, piuma, means “pen,” and some scholars suggest that she may be Veronica Gambara, a poet and stateswoman who ruled the small court of Correggio.) The painting hangs alongside another, lesser Parmigianino, from a private collection, augmented by a few portraits from the Frick’s stash, including Titian’s depiction of the Venetian satirist Pietro Aretino. Through July 20.
3 Galleries—Uptown Anna Maria Maiolino After emigrating to Brazil during the years of military dictatorship, the Italian-born sculptor and draftswoman found her voice in intricate, almost obsessive geometric abstractions. Now a woman whom the dictatorship tortured is President, and Maiolino, at seventy-two, is doing the most visceral work of
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 9 & 16, 2014
her career. Small metal towers with suspended ceramic forms, some still bearing her fingerprints, are as elegiac as anything by Louise Bourgeois; gouged slabs of meringue-like plaster or eroded blocks of cement translate bodily processes or environmental destruction into volatile form. Some unexpectedly punk videos, featuring extreme closeups of Maiolino, complete the portrait of an artist at once private and confident. Through June 21. (Hauser & Wirth, 32 E. 69th St. 212-794-4970.)
3 Galleries—Chelsea Mark Cohen Working on the streets of his coal-blackened home town, WilkesBarre, Pennsylvania, Cohen makes rude, alarming, and often hilarious photographs that could almost be mistaken for drunken snapshots. The pictures are radically cropped, lopping off heads and feet and zeroing in on grimy knees, gesturing hands, and a bare midriff. The hectic mood of this terrific show of color and black-and-white images is broken only by a few back-alley landscapes and still-lifes of debris on the ground, including a gum wrapper that has the uncanny presence of a tiny Claes Oldenburg sculpture. Through June 20. (Danziger, 527 W. 23rd St. 212-629-6778.) Rebecca Horn The veteran German artist is best known for performances and wearable objects that she called “body extensions,” but lately Horn has turned to lyrical, subtly kinetic sculptures that mix natural and mechanical materials. They incorporate branches and volcanic stone and only slowly reveal their motorized elements, such as a pair of little gold sticks that move up and down like a praying mantis. “Marcel Duchamp’s Montgolfière,” one of the best works here, replicates one of the master’s spinning squiggles with two rotating mirrors. As they turn, the light they reflect onto the white gallery walls transmutes from a circle to an oval and then, thrillingly, to a glowing hot-air balloon. Through June 21. (Sean Kelly, 475 Tenth Ave., at 36th St. 212-239-1181.) Jorinde Voigt The swooping lines in this Berlinbased artist’s intricate, large-scale drawings seem at first to have some scientific significance. On closer inspection, however, the drawings resolve into a hermetic, highly personal disquisition on the history of love in Western Europe, with annotations borrowed from the writings of the prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Peculiar, sometimes breathtaking forms, from a gold-and-red double helix to floating clouds and virus-like spiky balls, are ringed by obsessive
glosses on what Voigt, following Luhmann, calls the “codification of intimacy.” You won’t make out every detail, but her superb drawings are far more than the sum of their sometimes inscrutable parts. Through June 21. (Nolan, 527 W. 29th St. 212-925-6190.)
3 Galleries—Downtown Liz Deschenes Conceptually elegant and rigorously minimal, Deschenes’s new installation frames the gallery’s empty space with what appear to be two pairs of V-shaped steel bars, facing each other across the room. But what looks like smudged, striated metal is actually the glossy surface of a seven-foot-high silver-toned photogram, which was exposed to moonlight in the course of a night. There are no images here, only phenomena—fugitive traces of atmosphere brushing up against a sensitive surface. Balancing subtleties of process and perception, Deschenes continues to pare her work down to an alluring but elusive essence. Through June 25. (Abreu, 36 Orchard St. 212-995-1774.) Bill Jenkins This young Brooklyn-based artist has stuffed the gallery’s bay windows with reflective foil, shaped the material in one corner into a funnel, and attached the stem to a snaking duct that, so he tells us, is mirrored on the inside. The duct lets out in a basin inside a dark room, and indeed a faint reflection of daylight illuminates the floor, but only just. Jenkins wittily recycles emblems of sixties art history (the foil is a Warhol motif, the duct borrowed from the minimalist Charlotte Posenenske) for his act of institutional critique. But the point seems to be that his jerry-rigged apparatus is unreliable, as if to acknowledge that art can redirect the world’s energy only so much. Through June 22. (Gitlen, 122 Norfolk St. 212-274-0761.) Jason Loebs This young artist, already a standout in group shows at the Swiss Institute and Artists Space, seduces with three monochrome canvases covered with thermal grease in lieu of paint: the surfaces are a sunlight-gobbling black. There are also three readymades of heat-emitting carbon film, curved into sculptures, and half a dozen chunks of mineral ore—quartz from Pakistan, azurite from China, siderite from Arkansas—to which Loebs has applied the iridescent ink used in banknotes to prevent forgery. He’s the rare artist whose use of unorthodox materials feels necessary rather than tentative. Through June 29. (Essex Street, 114 Eldridge St. 917-263-1001.)
cLASSical MUSIC
culture desk
Michael Schulman recaps the best and the worst of the Tony Awards, hosted by Hugh Jackman on June 8. Plus, read reviews of Tonynominated shows.
Opera Opera Orchestra of New York: “Roberto Devereux” The indomitable Eve Queler returns to Carnegie Hall to lead a concert performance of Donizetti’s bel-canto scorcher, loosely based on the supposed, ill-starred love affair between Queen Elizabeth I and her favorite courtier, the Earl of Essex. Stephen Costello, a prominent young American tenor, takes the title role, with Mariella Devia as Elizabeth. (212-247-7800. June 5 at 7:30.) Opera Cabal: “ATTHIS” New York’s always impressive American Contemporary Music Ensemble joins the Chicago-based group in a visit to an iconic Gotham venue, the Kitchen; the main subject is the music of Georg Friedrich Haas, the admired Austrian modernist composer, whose first season as a Columbia professor is capped by a performance of this work, a monodrama based on texts by Sappho. Three short pieces by Marcos Balter, who joins the faculty at Montclair State University this fall, complete the program. (512 W. 19th St. 212255-5793. June 12-13 at 8.) Chelsea Opera: “The Tender Land” Copland’s affecting opera of life on the American prairie during the Depression was always a little too intimate for the full opera-house treatment; it reached perfection, however, in the widely performed
of note Chelsea Music Festival
The uniquely wide-ranging festival—of new music, old music, and food and drink—returns for another year, under the joint direction of the conductor Ken-David Masur and his wife, the pianist Melinda Lee Masur. With the World Cup soon upon us, this year has a German-Brazilian theme; the acclaimed composer Alexandre Lunsqui, born in São Paulo, is in residence, with the first of several events (a catered gala) featuring a worldpremière piece, as well as music by Villa-Lobos, C. P. E. Bach, Augusta Read Thomas, and Richard Strauss. (Canoe Studios, 601 W. 26th St. chelseamusicfestival.org. June 6 at 7:30. Through June 14.) Music Mountain: Emerson String Quartet
This admirable festival, devoted to the art of the string quartet, starts off its eighty-fifth season in high style: an unexpected visit from the Emerson String Quartet, which, with its new cellist, Paul Watkins, is concertizing widely. Its program is dark-hued: Haydn’s Quartet in G Minor, Op. 20, No. 3; Mendelssohn’s impassioned Quartet in F Minor, Op. 80; and Schubert’s monumental “Death and the Maiden,” the Quartet No. 14 in D Minor. (Falls Village, Conn. 860-824-7126. June 7 at 6:30.) 24
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chamber version, sensitively made by the conductor Murry Sidlin, in 1987. Chelsea, one of the city’s essential new companies, now takes it on, with Joanie Brittingham in the role of Laurie; Samuel McCoy conducts. (St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, 346 W. 20th St. chelseaopera.org. June 13 at 7 and June 14 at 4.)
3 Orchestras and Choruses Riverside Symphony To close its thirty-third season, George Rothman’s intrepid orchestra offers a program infused with the spirit of elegant classicism—music by Nielsen, Prokofiev (the lyrical and urbane Violin Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, with the young soloist Haik Kazazyan), and Bizet (the Symphony in C Major). The wild card is the tone poem “Turner,” an homage to the artist by the composer Marius Constant. (Alice Tully Hall. riversidesymphony.org. June 4 at 8.) “NY Phil Biennial” The last few days of Alan Gilbert’s inaugural festival are packed with high-profile events. Gilbert himself conducts the first of two programs with the orchestra, which welcomes the violinist Midori as its guest; she’ll be out front in the New York première of “DoReMi,” a concerto by the distinguished Hungarian composer-conductor Peter Eötvös. The concerts conclude with the world-première performances of the Symphony No. 4 by the orchestra’s current composer-in-residence, Christopher Rouse; they open with a piece by a yet-to-be-determined young American composer, whose music will be selected in a private reading of six works by the Philharmonic on June 3. (June 5 at 7:30 and June 7 at 8.)©©The Philharmonic’s final concert begins with another piece selected through the orchestra’s June 3 readings, and continues with two eminent New York premières. The first is “Instances,” one of the last works by the late Elliott Carter; the second is “Reflections on Narcissus,” a cello concerto (with the magnetic Alisa Weilerstein) by the German composer Matthias Pintscher, who conducts. (June 6 at 8.) (Avery Fisher Hall. 212-875-5656. For tickets and a full schedule of events, see nyphil.org.) “The Beethoven Piano Concertos: A Philharmonic Festival” Alan Gilbert and the Philharmonic are wrapping up their season in
the right way, with a series that incorporates pieces by two superb young American composers (each a beneficiary of the Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music) into concerts featuring the commanding Yefim Bronfman. The center of the first program belongs to Anthony Cheung, who will enjoy the world première of his work “Lyra”; it is bookended by Bronfman’s performances of Beethoven’s Concertos No. 1 in C Major and No. 4 in G Major. (Avery Fisher Hall. 212875-5656. June 11-12 at 7:30 and June 13-14 at 8.)
3 Recitals “Transvocality”: Music by Mario Davidovsky The music of this enduring Argentinean-American composer, ferociously modernist but slyly expressive, is the focus of the latest concert by the excellent group Counter)Induction; its musicians (including the violinist Miranda Cuckson) celebrate the composer’s eightieth-birthday year by performing such works as “Festino,” the “Duo Capriccioso,” and the Quartetto No. 4. (SubCulture, 45 Bleecker St. subculturenewyork. com. June 7 at 8.) Prism Quartet: “Heritage/Evolution” Prism, one of America’s finest saxophone quartets for three decades, has been collaborating lately with several renowned guest players in a series of concerts in New York and Philadelphia. In the final program, the group is joined by the jazz saxophonists Dave Liebman and Greg Osby in world-première performances of their own music. (Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th St. symphonyspace.org. June 12 at 7:30.) “Early Music Festival: NYC” With the city’s historical-performance community now up to an international level, it’s time to celebrate. This new festival, co-directed by Donald Meineke and Jolle Greenleaf, offers a week of performances (most of which are free) by ensembles both small and large, each making a jubilant sound. One of the first concerts is given by the acclaimed vocal quartet New York Polyphony, who will sing Palestrina’s seminal “Missa Papae Marcelli” (along with music by Andrew Smith) at the Church of St. Jean Baptiste. (Lexington Ave. at 76th St. emfnyc.org. June 13 at 7:30. Through June 19.)
FOOD & DRINK BAR TAB bohemian hall & beer garden
Tables for Two
tavern on the green Central Park West at 67th St. (212-877-8684)
, of renovations, Tavern on the Green reopened with a bang, and this magazine ran a Talk of the Town story describing the “two-and-ahalf-million-dollar, stop-at-nothing, one-thousand-seat-capacity update” of the 1934 sheepfold turned restaurant. On the menu: New Zealand wild boar with gingered apples and lingonberries ($9.50) and pizza ($2.50), prepared by fourteen French chefs. In the brand-new, glass-walled Crystal Room: seven-foot-tall Baccarat chandeliers from Indian palaces, a molded-plaster ceiling in “light mint green, birthday-candle pink, and telegraph-blank yellow,” and a “fantasy mural” with flowers, birds, and butterflies. On opening day, Mayor Abe Beame dipped into the world’s largest ice-cream sundae (7,250 pounds of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry Sealtest), drank a toast from a nine-litre bottle of champagne that had crossed the Atlantic in a first-class Air France seat, and, with a sword, cut into a sixteen-foot-long cake model of Central Park. After an uncertain interlude following a bankruptcy in 2009, the phoenix has risen again, under new management and with considerably less fanfare. On a recent evening, a couple at the oval-shaped mahogany bar—crowned by a gilded mobile of flying horses— didn’t bother to hide their disappointment, complaining about the prices (“Twenty-six dollars for four slices of salmon, ya kiddin’ me?”) and eulogizing: “Remember the older place? It was amazing.” But nothing could dampen the enthusiasm of Ryan, a young grad student from Queens, who was feeling lucky to be moonlighting as a server in the former Crystal Room, now sparer and mostly white. “The opportunity to resurrect a landmark at twenty-four years old . . .” He trailed off dreamily, before explaining that the menu was divided by heat source into three categories—“The Hearth,” “The Grill,” and “The Plancha”—and that the hearth made “a very intimate situation for a lamb shank.” That formidable bone-in hunk of meat, which comes with creamed chard, pickled raisins, and roasted cauliflower, appeared on many tables, calling to mind the Disneyland turkey leg—fitting, given the Tavern’s theme-park overtone, complete with gift shop and doorman in jodhpurs and top hat. Like most things on the menu, the lamb sounds better than it looks or tastes and costs more than it should. A “Serrano ham, cave-aged Gruyère, and sage sandwich” amounts to a tiny, eighteen-dollar grilled cheese, and the “warm local squid salad” is not so much a salad as it is a single squid. Of course, the food is beside the point, and, judging from the restaurant’s past reputation, it might be better now than ever before. Still, it’s a letdown to discover that the brownie sundae is the world’s dinkiest, consisting of a grainy brownie, a single scoop of salted-caramel ice cream, and a paint swipe of chocolate sauce. Mayor Beame had it good. —Hannah Goldfield Open weekdays for lunch and dinner and weekends for brunch and dinner. Entrées $24-$56.
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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 9 & 16, 2014
PHOTOGRAPH BY TRUJILLOPAUMIER
ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW HOLLISTER
29-19 24th Ave., Astoria (718-274-4925) “It’s not very good,” a waitress said, one balmy Sunday, of the Bohemian’s house brew, Rhapsody, an unfiltered wheat Pilsner. “Guess I’m just one of those honest people!” The Bohemian is also just that kind of place: a man offered a stranger bites of his goopy potato salad; another fellow, in a lime-green tank top, yelled “Come join us!” to the stranger, as she fled the potato-pusher. The self-professed oldest beer garden in New York City—tree-shaded picnic tables, populous smoking section—and the adjoining cedar barrooms are owned by the Bohemian Citizens’ Benevolent Society of Astoria, which opened as a social club in 1910. Some of the superior beers now on tap are the citrusy Franziskaner Weissbier and the White Aphro, which has strong lavender notes, as servers warn men who order it. The hefty snacks remain mostly Czech and Slovak—utopenec, palacinka, smazak—but the crowd has grown more diverse. Spanish speakers in sundresses deemed Tel Aviv “like, the spot.” Other ladies debated the merits of Armenian baklava versus Greek. Vying for best-represented minority were Mets fans and toddlers; the latter swarmed a stage that hosts polka performances. Finally, a patron was allowed to sample the Rhapsody. “It tastes like Busch Light,” the drinker said, before tossing out another comparison, to a different liquid, of a similar hue. —Emma Allen
DANCE GOINGS ON, ONLINE
See our Web site for details about Bill Frisell, who is leading an exploration of the electric guitar in America, and an appearance by the saxophoneheavy Microscopic Septet.
FRONT ROW
Richard Brody surveys MOMA’s retrospective of films made by the studio MK2 and its founder, Marin Karmitz.
New York City Ballet George Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1962), the perfect prologue to summer, returns in the company’s final week at Lincoln Center. What makes this—Balanchine’s first wholly original story ballet, set to Mendelssohn’s witty score—such a delight? Could it be the swarms of children from the company school swirling across the stage as gossamerwinged fireflies, or the quicksilver scherzo for Oberon, king of the fairies, in which his feet seem to barely touch the ground? (This solo was created for Edward Villella, who had two of the fastest feet around.) Then, there is the ballet’s tight construction, with its compressed first act, which leaves room in the second half for a series of divertissements, including one of Balanchine’s most limpid pas de deux. (David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-496-0600. June 4-5 at 7:30, June 6 at 8, June 7 at 2 and 8, and June 8 at 3.) American Ballet Theatre This season, the company replaces its intermittently compelling production of “Cinderella” with Frederick Ashton’s gem, created in 1948 for the Royal Ballet. Ashton responded to Prokofiev’s sweeping and occasionally prickly score by creating a ballet that is both riotously funny—the ugly stepsisters are played, pantomime style, by men—and an example of the highest classical refinement. Some of the ballet’s most striking moments are the simplest, as when the heroine enters the ballroom, slowly floating down a long staircase on pointe. Ashton’s “Cinderella” receives its company première on June 9, with the delicate Hee Seo in the role of Cinderella and the tall, elegant Cory Stearns as her prince. Another promising cast pairs Gillian Murphy—a particularly lush dancer—with the even more princely David Hallberg.
of note Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre
For the second year in a row, the beloved troupe offers a short spring season at Lincoln Center, where it projects marvellously from the big stage. The première is “The Pleasure of the Lesson,” by Robert Moses, a San Francisco choreographer whose ambitious ideas can escape his structural control. The repertory pieces on three of the four programs (the fourth is a dud) exhibit an impressive historical and stylistic range, from the balletic futurism of Wayne McGregor’s “Chroma” to “Awassa Astrige,” a 1932 curio for a man in ostrich feathers. A selection of Ailey dances to Duke Ellington comes right in the middle. (David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-496-0600. June 11 at 7, June 12 and June 17 at 7:30, June 13 at 8, June 14 at 2 and 8, and June 15 at 3 and 7:30. Through June 22.) 28
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Before that, the company presents eight performances of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon,” a real bodice-ripper, set to a compilation of Massenet orchestral music.©©June 2-3 and June 5-6 at 7:30, June 4 at 2 and 7:30, and June 7 at 2 and 8: “Manon.”©©June 9-10 and June 12-13 at 7:30, June 11 at 2 and 7:30, and June 14 at 2 and 8: “Cinderella.” (Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center. 212-362-6000. Through July 5.) Ronald K. Brown/Evidence As a choreographer, Brown has many strengths—intensity within ease, rhythmic persuasion—but structural variety isn’t one of them. So it’s regrettable that the brilliant jazz pianist Jason Moran, who composed music for this première, offered a suite, Brown’s go-to form. The subject of “The Subtle One,” the manifestation of spiritual grace, is also well-trod ground for him. But Brown’s repetitions outshine most choreographers’ novelties, especially when embodied by his superb dancers, who are joined by the Alvin Ailey superstar Matthew Rushing in the second program. (Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. June 3-4 at 7:30, June 5-6 at 8, June 7 at 2 and 8, and June 8 at 2 and 7:30.) Platform 2014: “Diary of an Image” “Diary of an Image,” the centerpiece of Danspace Project’s four-week focus on DD Dorvillier, is a solo for the choreographer. Or, at least, she’s the only person dancing in the work, which was made in collaboration with the composer Zeena Parkins, the lighting designer Thomas Dunn, and the set designer Olivier Vadrot. Using borrowed heel-and-toe steps as a kind of indecipherable Morse code, Dorvillier works as much with sound as with image. (St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, Second Ave. at 10th St. 866-811-4111. June 6-7 and June 12-14 at 8.) ZviDance The veteran choreographer Zvi Gotheiner can make vigorous, charged dances that get under your skin. But he’s also fond of the-way-we-live-now gimmicks. In “Zoom,” from 2010, he invited the audience to e-mail suggestions for choreography during the show and to take pictures with their phones. His new piece, “Surveillance,” features live video of dancers and spectators, and Scott Killian’s sound design incorporates recorded conversations between audience members captured during the show. Watch what you say. (New York Live Arts, 219 W. 19th St. 212-924-0077. June 11-13 at 7:30 and June 14 at 2 and 7:30.) Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet Founded ten years ago by a Walmart heiress, the company is an indubi-
table success; each year, it presents high-energy seasons of new works by the hottest names in European contemporary dance. Adjectives like “full-throttle,” “edgy,” and “indefatigable” apply. (If some of the repertory tends to blend together, that says more about the state of contemporary ballet than about the company.) To mark its first decade, the troupe appears at BAM for the first time, with three programs of recent hits. On Program A, “Orbo Novo,” by the Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, is an evening-length exploration, through dance and text, of Jill Bolte Taylor’s surprising account of her sensations while suffering a stroke. Program B is anchored by “Violet Kid,” a militaristic, dystopian take on group dynamics, by the U.K.-based Israeli choreographer Hofesh Shechter. Perhaps the most interesting work of the lot, Crystal Pite’s “Grace Engine” (on Program C), is constructed as a series of enigmatic vignettes that reveal the surreality buried in everyday life. (BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn. 718-636-4100. June 11-14 at 7:30.) Ballet Tech / Kids Dance Ballet Tech is an extraordinary institution: a free elementary school, serving grades four through eight, with a focus on academics and dance. Admission to the academy, which was founded more than three decades ago by the choreographer Eliot Feld, is based wholly on merit. At the Joyce, these talented pupils perform a mixed bill of three works by Feld: his clever “Stair Dance,” based on a series of minutely evolving patterns; the hoedown-like “Apple Pie,” set to lively music by Bela Fleck; and “KYDZNY,” a new work created especially for the occasion to music by the Brooklyn-based Raya Brass Band. Try to catch the June 12 performance, when the band plays live. (175 Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. June 12 at 8, June 13 at 7, June 14 at 2 and 7, and June 15 at 2.) Rioult To celebrate his company’s twentieth anniversary, Pascal Rioult, whose established choreographic skills certainly include borrowing, owns up to his influences by programming works by some of his mentors. Thus, Martha Graham’s “El Penitente” (1940) and May O’Donnell’s “Suspension” (1943), though they’re in an antiquated style that’s difficult for contemporary dancers to pull off, have a chance to overshadow his bland “Views of the Fleeting World” (2008). The second program features a Rioult première set to Tchaikovsky. (Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. June 17 at 7:30. Through June 22.)
MOVIES smart alec Alec Guinness’s centenary, celebrated at Film Forum.
of Alec Guinness’s birth fell, without fanfare, on April 2nd. He would not have lamented the lack of trumpets. His life had begun with a blank, the space for his father’s name left unfilled on his birth certificate, and, to judge by the titles of his memoir and journals (“Blessings in Disguise,” “My Name Escapes Me”), he never lost his taste for a vanishing act. Alone among the great performers, he resolved a paradox: how to be a star without being the center of attention—or, at least, while giving no sign that you crave such a prominent spot. When Laurence Olivier played King Lear onstage, in 1946, it was Guinness, pattering around him as the Fool, with a mime-white face, and with his lines shorn to a bald minimum, who stuck in the mind’s eye. They also shine who only stand and serve. Nonetheless, as though by accident, Guinness grew into a hero—or, rather, into one of life’s supporting players who had heroism thrust upon him, whether he liked it or not. He oozed or scampered through one Ealing comedy after another, making “The Lavender Hill Mob” and “The Man in the White Suit” in a single year, 1951, and British moviegoers, canvassed for their favorites, kept putting Guinness on the list. Cool at times, even remote, he gave them something to warm to. Shifting shape, he remained unmistakable; who knew that chameleons possessed so robust a soul? Where Peter Sellers—who worshipped Guinness, and scrutinized him avidly when they worked on “The Ladykillers” (1955)—would spend himself in a fury of impersonation, Guinness gave no hint of a hollow core. He found a still point in the turning world. 30
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Late but loyal, Film Forum is running a Guinness series, from June 13 to July 3. Most of the obvious candidates are there, including “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” of which nobody could tire, and the six movies that he made with David Lean. (So fair and fresh does he seem as Herbert Pocket, in Lean’s “Great Expectations,” from 1946, that it’s hard to remember that Guinness was already over thirty, and that he had commanded a Royal Navy landing craft in the invasion of Sicily. He was tougher and more seasoned than he looked.) Embedded in the retrospective are semiprecious gems: “The Mudlark” (1950), in which Guinness, relishing the role of Disraeli, holds the House of Commons in his practiced palm, and “The Scapegoat” (1959), adapted by Gore Vidal from a Daphne du Maurier story. Guinness fails to mention the film in his memoir, but Vidal, in his own memoir, “Palimpsest,”
recalls it all too well, not least Guinness’s attitude toward the author: “Alec, a very literary man, was not only patiently tactful but treated her with all the skill of a slightly edgy psychiatrist soothing a potential werewolf at dusk.” Certainly, few actors have been more expert at the smoothing of feathers, or had more of a knack for the mot juste. Invited to comment on a seedy German night club, in the miniseries “Smiley’s People,” Guinness replies, “It was very artistic,” with the faintest of pauses before the final word. Gather all the trades and talents that he displayed onscreen, and you end up with the most curious of amalgams: prince, priest, bank clerk, shrink, dictator, Jedi, vacuum-cleaner salesman, thinker, sailor, soldier, spy. Much was revealed in the serious games that Alec Guinness played. More remains unknown. —Anthony Lane ILLUSTRATION BY EDWARD KINSELLA
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Now Playing Belle This rousing historical fantasia, which is loosely based on a true story, uses Jane Austen’s novels as a template. In the late eighteenth century, two beautiful half cousins, Elizabeth Murray (Sarah Gadon) and Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), live together as loving friends under the protection of their uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson), the Chief Justice of England. Dido, who is the daughter of a British sea captain and his African slave mistress, becomes an heiress. In different circumstances, this elegant young woman might have been someone else’s property, but she’s now capable of conferring property of her own on cash-poor aristocratic suitors. Not much is known about the historical Dido, and the British filmmakers—the director, Amma Asante, and the screenwriter, Misan Sagay—concoct a liberationist fiction in which Dido becomes conscious of herself as a black woman after listening to the fiery anti-slavery rhetoric of a parson’s son (Sam Reid), who falls in love with her. Dido goes on to influence the British abolitionist movement. Factually, the movie is probably a fraud, but it’s crisply entertaining, and Mbatha-Raw, born in Oxford and acting since she was a child, delivers her increasingly confident lines with tremulous emotion and, finally, radiant authority.—David Denby (Reviewed in our issue of 5/19/14.) (In limited release.) Blended Two suburban single parents (Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore) meet on a disastrous blind date and vow not to meet again, but their paths cross at a resort, where their children—his three girls, her two boys—bring them together. The corn of the setup is sweetened by the stars’ easygoing chemistry. Sandler, a live-action Fred Flintstone with a wry garlic drawl, lends heart and humor to the secular Jewish Everyman, and Barrymore— earnest, febrile, breathless—hints at real pain beneath a perky veneer. But the details are an embarrassment: the resort is in South Africa, referred to almost always only as “Africa,” and its black staff members engage in the sort of obsequious glad-handing, often involving song and dance, that harks back to grotesquely racist stereotypes, which pass unquestioned and seemingly unnoticed. (The many nonwhite patrons of the resort are just part of the décor.) For that matter, the plot, with Sandler playing sports dad to an athletically frustrated boy and Barrymore restyling one of the motherless girls, rests on equally retrograde gender models. These blundering dogmas come off, doubtless unintentionally, as an incisive critique of the heart-catching sentiment of family life. Directed
by Frank Coraci.—Richard Brody (In wide release.) Cold in July Strictly for connoisseurs of violent genre pulp. In East Texas, in 1989, an ordinary guy with a mullet (Michael C. Hall) kills an intruder in his house, only to find himself caught up in a miasma of revenge, police corruption, Mafia-made snuff films, and vigilantism. The story, an adaptation by the director, Jim Mickle, and the co-writer, Nick Damici, of a cult novel by Joe R. Lansdale, isn’t credible for a minute, but Mickle has an undeniable talent for sustained and terrifying scenes of stalking and violence. The blood flows plentifully. With Sam Shepard, now somewhat gaunt, as a hard-souled, taciturn ex-con, and Don Johnson, as an amiably fearless private eye; they are both excellent. The talented Vinessa Shaw, as the hero’s wife, is badly underused. Shot in upstate New York.—D.D. (In limited release.) The Double This pseudo-expressionist folly, based on the early Dostoyevsky novella, features a general atmosphere of looming paranoia and characters walking down endless corridors, accompanied by vague howls. Yet it’s worth seeing for Jesse Eisenberg’s amusing dual portrayal of a weakwilled office worker, Simon James, and his malicious doppelgänger, James Simon, who shows up at the office (some kind of steampunk data center) and aces out Simon at work and in bed. With Wallace Shawn, as a domineering boss, and Mia Wasikowska, as a dreamy love object. Written by the British comic Richard Ayoade and Avi Korine, and directed by Ayoade.—D.D. (6/2/14) (In limited release.)
day; Costa’s ritual of mourning, on both sides of the camera, fulfills the family’s cinematic dreams with a self-dramatizing flair.—R.B. (In limited release.) Godzilla The beast is back. Contractually obliged to rise from the waves at irregular intervals, and with no visible improvement to either his temper or his complexion, he surfaces once more in Gareth Edwards’s movie. The story ranges from 1999 to the present day, and from the Philippines to San Francisco, with enjoyably manic excursions to Japan, Hawaii, Las Vegas, and other centers of interest along the way. In case the monster gets lonely or bored, Edwards provides him with rival behemoths, one of whom even sports a pair of ponderous wings, like the world’s most inelegant dragonfly. In terms of geopolitical fallout, the film gives off a weaker signal than Edwards’s “Monsters” (2010), which was infinitely cheaper, more patient, and more febrile with anxiety. Still, as the skies darken, in the second half, the action acquires a grim grandeur, and Edwards seems happiest in the company of the inhuman, with all the little people brushed aside.—Anthony Lane (5/26/14) (In wide release.) Goodbye, Dragon Inn This elegiac 2003 comedy, by the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, is a requiem for a movie theatre. He dramatizes the closing of Taipei’s cavernous Fu-Ho Grand Theatre and its final screening, of King Hu’s martial-arts classic “Dragon Inn.” The show attracts only a handful of patrons, including a puckish Japanese tourist (Mitamura Kiyonobu) whose command of his bewildered gaze could be borrowed from Jacques
Opening Burning Bush
A miniseries, directed by Agnieszka Holland, about the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1968. In Czech. Opening June 11. (Film Forum.) Edge of Tomorrow
Tom Cruise stars in this science-fiction thriller, as a soldier who is caught in a time loop on the day of his death. Directed by Doug Liman; co-starring Emily Blunt. Opening June 6. (In wide release.) The Fault in Our Stars
A drama, based on the novel by John Green, about two teen-agers (Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort) who begin a romance after meeting in a cancer support group. Directed by Josh Boone; co-starring Nat Wolff, Laura Dern, and Willem Dafoe. Opening June 6. (In wide release.) Heli
Amat Escalante directed this drama, about a Mexican factory worker whose placid family life is disrupted by drug dealers. In Spanish. Opening June 13. (In limited release.) Hellion
A drama, directed by Kat Candler, about a troubled Texas teen-ager who hopes to reunite with his father. Opening June 13. (In limited release.) Obvious Child
Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening June 6. (In limited release.)
of note The Best Years of Our Lives Elena This personal documentary by the Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa unfolds a story of grief and thwarted promise with expressive urgency and thoughtful restraint. Its subject is the director’s older sister, Elena Andrade, who, as a teen-ager in the family’s home town of Belo Horizonte, exhibited prodigious talent as an actress and went to New York to pursue a movie career. She soon came home disappointed, but returned to Manhattan—with the seven-year-old Petra and their mother in tow—to study. There, she was engulfed by clinical depression, which drove her to self-destruction. Using archival footage of Elena in performance, home videos shot by Elena herself, and interviews with family members and others, Costa restores her sister to the world of art, to the scene of her love and torment. Their parents’ backstory—fusing cultural and political ambition with the currents of history—brings the action to the present
William Wyler’s intimate epic, from 1946—about three soldiers returning from the Second World War to their families in a small Midwestern city—profoundly and sensitively balances the private demons of scarred veterans and the press of public policies that leave their mark on daily life. Al Stevenson (Fredric March), a prosperous banker and paterfamilias, resumes his warm domestic life with a jaundiced view of country-club presumptions and a hint of a drinking problem. Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), a high-ranking bombardier with recurring nightmares, returns to straitened circumstances and a troubled marriage—and falls in love with Al’s grown daughter, Peggy (Teresa Wright). The third veteran, Homer Parrish, is played by a non-actor, Harold Russell, who, like the character, lost his hands in military service. Though adept with his prostheses, Homer, feeling diminished and dependent, breaks his engagement to the girl next door (Cathy O’Donnell). From lending practices to postwar Red-baiting, liberalized education to the fear of nuclear war, Wyler, working with a script by Robert E. Sherwood, captures the sense of history being written on the fly, of momentous shifts in mind-sets and expectations. In the movie’s nearly three-hour span, the chrysalis of an old world seems to crack open and a fragile new one begins to emerge; a deep and tender romanticism arises from the exposed vulnerabilities.—Richard Brody (Film Forum; June 6-12.) THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 9 & 16, 2014
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One Day Pina Asked . . .
Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening June 6. (Film Society of Lincoln Center.) Ping Pong Summer
Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening June 6. (In limited release.) The Rover
A post-apocalyptic thriller, about a combat veteran who hunts a car thief across the Australian outback. Directed by David Michôd; starring Robert Pattinson, Guy Pearce, and Scoot McNairy. Opening June 13. (In limited release.) 22 Jump Street
A comedy sequel, starring Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill as police officers who conduct an investigation in the guise of college students. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller; co-starring Dave Franco and Peter Stormare. Opening June 13. (In wide release.) Revivals and Festivals
Titles in bold are reviewed. Anthology Film Archives
The films of Charlie Chaplin. June 14 at 2: Program 1, including “Easy Street” ( & © ©9d]T #Pc")#$) Program 2, including “Shoulder 0a\b² ( ' © ©9d]T #Pc $)#$)?a^VaP\"X]R[dSX]V ±CWT?X[VaX\² (!" © ©9d]T $Pc#)" )±CWT6^[SAdbW² (!$ (#! © ©9d]T $Pc%) $) “The Circus” (1928). BAM CinÉmatek
The films of King Hu. June 7 at 2 and 7: “The Love Eterne” (%";X7P] WbXP]V ©©9d]T&Pc #)# P]S()# )±9^W]]h6dXcPa² ($#=XRW^[PbAPh ©©9d]T' Pc#)" )±2^\T3aX]ZfXcW
