Theater: Bucket Club presents "Fossils" at 59E59 NYC, 2017

Vanessa's life is science. 

Fact based, evidence led, no nonsense, no monsters. But when a photograph surfaces showing something in Loch Ness, she must embark on a very personal research project. The multi award-winning company Bucket Club create a "magical, melancholy world" (The List) featuring an extinct fish, a missing father, and breath-taking live electronic sound.

'A beautifully hewn story about how we connect to the past, and how our lives are shaped by the no-longer living things we carry with us... A gem of a piece by Bucket Club, a company taking its own very solid place in the world.'  Total Theatre

'An object lesson in how to take a simple character-driven story and by sheer stagecraft to elevate it to another level of experience' - Fest

From the review in the NYT's https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/theater/review-a-search-for-dad-and-the-loch-ness-monster-in-fossils.html :

Bucket Club’s style mixes story theater and toy theater with both whimsy and rigor. The set consists of a couple of water tanks up front, along with a lot of plastic dinosaurs. At a mixing board in the back, the actors loop music and their own voices to make a wonderfully weirdo score, composed by the sound designer David Ridley. One instrument they use is a repurposed video game console that should have Léon Theremin giggling in his grave. 

Under Nel Crouch’s direction, the performers manipulate stegosaurus figurines and act, score and narrate with scientific precision and obvious warmth. You probably don’t believe in the Loch Ness monster and you may not believe in “Fossils.” But you should have faith in these actors.

Theater: A Doll's House, Part 2

Written by: Lucas Hnath
Starring: Laurie Metcalf, Chris Cooper, Jayne Houdyshell and Condola Rashad
Directed by: Sam Gold

A Doll's House, Part 2 is described as follows: "In the final scene of Ibsen's 1879 groundbreaking masterwork, Nora Helmer makes the shocking decision to leave her husband and children, and begin a life on her own. This climactic event — when Nora slams the door on everything in her life — instantly propelled world drama into the modern age. In A Doll's House, Part 2, many years have passed since Nora's exit. Now, there's a knock on that same door. Nora has returned. But why? And what will it mean for those she left behind?"

For the review: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/theater/a-dolls-house-part-2-review-laurie-metcalf.html

Theater: Iphigenia in Splott at 59E59, 2017

Sherman Theatre presents

IPHIGENIA IN SPLOTT

By Gary Owen
Directed by Rachel O'Riordan
With Sophie Melville
Stumbling down Clifton Street at 11:30am drunk, Effie is the kind of girl you'd avoid eye contact with, silently passing judgement. We think we know her, but we don't know the half of it. Effie's life spirals through a mess of drink, drugs and drama every night, and a hangover worse than death the next day - till one night gives her the chance to be something more. Effie will break your heart.
Inspired by the enduring Greek myth, this urgent new play drives home the high price people pay for society's shortcomings. This critically acclaimed and award-winning new play makes its debut in New York following performances at the National Theatre, London.

Film: Risk, dir. Laura Poitras, 2017

"Laura Poitras, Academy Award winning director of CITIZENFOUR, returns with her most personal and intimate film to date. Filmed over six years, RISK is a complex and volatile character study that collides with a high stakes election year and its controversial aftermath. Cornered in a tiny building for half a decade, Julian Assange is undeterred even as the legal jeopardy he faces threatens to undermine the organization he leads and fracture the movement he inspired. Capturing this story with unprecedented access, Poitras finds herself caught between the motives and contradictions of Assange and his inner circle. In a new world order where a single keystroke can alter history, Risk is a portrait of power, betrayal, truth, and sacrifice."

More: http://www.screendaily.com/festivals/cannes/cannes-laura-poitras-talks-risk/5104101.article
The director says: " Julian, in creating WikiLeaks, understood that the internet would change global power, it would empower states, it would empower citizens in new ways, it would empower journalism.”

Theater: Richard Maxwell’s "Samara," Soho Rep

It is strange when a vision of the horrible can be held as a thing of beauty. 

It is our Greek tragedy. Samara has that quality.

https://www.nycplayers.org/

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/theater/samara-review-steve-earle.html

Even the air aches with mystery in Richard Maxwell’s “Samara,” a sense of life as a teasing and unresolvable riddle.  

... 

It’s as if Mr. Maxwell had elicited the unspoken thoughts that throb within a vintage western, with his characters giving voice to the feelings you may experience when watching such entertainments in an abstracted, melancholy mood. This impeccably realized show — whose first-rate creative team includes Palmer Hefferan (sound), Junghyun Georgia Lee (the funky fairy-tale costumes) and Annie-B Parson (choreography) — gives us story and subtext in one breath.

And just so you know, this play does not conclude when its plot comes to its end. There’s a masque-like dance such as traditionally followed Elizabethan performances, and a subsequent postscript that’s both visual and verbal, a contemporary account of traveling through open spaces. Such is this show’s strange magic that you may well feel it’s your own memory that’s speaking.

Theater: Oslo

PLAY by J.T. Rogers
DIRECTED by Bartlett Sher
THE CAST: http://www.lct.org/shows/oslo-broadway/whos-who/

Inspired by the true story of the back-channel talks, unlikely friendships and quiet heroics that led to the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords between the Israelis and Palestinians, OSLO is a deeply personal story set against a complex historical canvas, a story about the individuals behind world history and their all too human ambitions.

Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/theater/review-a-byzantine-path-to-middle-east-peace-in-oslo.html?_r=0

Film: New York African Film Festival 2017

Vaya
Akin Omotoso  2016 South Africa 115 minutes
Opening Night • U.S. Premiere • Q&A with Akin Omotoso


Beginning on a train travelling from the coastal province of KwaZulu-Natal to Johannesburg, Vaya focuses on three passengers, strangers to one another bound by interlocking destinies and a shared naïveté. Imagine a South African spin on Amores Perros and you're on the right path.

Accra Power
Sandra Krampelhuber and Andrea Verena Strasser, Austria/Ghana, 2016, 49m
Accra Power focuses on the creative and artistic strategies of young Ghanaians situated at the crossroads of tradition and various belief systems, high technological and economic growth, infrastructural deficits and current energy crisis. Co-presented with Africa-America Institute.

ACCRA POWER Trailer from Sandra Krampelhuber on Vimeo.

Footprints of Pan-Africanism
Shirikiana Gerima  2017 USA 77 minutes
New York Premiere • Q&A with Shirikiana Gerima (Footprints of Pan-Africanism), and Sandra Krampelhuber & Andrea Verena Strasser (Accra Power)

The documentary ­­Footprints of Pan-Africanism revisits the era of Ghana’s emergence into independence, when Africans on the continent and in the diaspora participated in building a liberated territory. Co-presented with Africa-America Institute. Preceded by: Accra Power (Sandra Krampelhuber, 49m).

Theater: THE WHIRLIGIG

By Hamish Linklater
Directed by Scott Elliott
with Noah Bean, Norbert Leo Butz, Jon DeVries, Alex Hurt, Zosia Mamet, Jonny Orsini, Grace Van Patten, Dolly Wells

Mr. Elliott called “The Whirligig” “deeply personal” and said “it’s one of the most glorious plays I’ve read in recent memory.”

Music: TENET performs the music of Machaut

Machaut, the Ars subtilior, and the early 15th century

Concert featuring Machaut’s contribution to composition in the late medieval and highlights his predecessors and those who followed him. Machaut was known as an incredible poet and a stylistic inventor.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_de_Machaut

Guillaume de Machaut (French: [gijom də maʃo]; sometimes spelled Machault; c. 1300 – April 1377) was a medieval French poet and composer. He is one of the earliest composers on whom significant biographical information is available. According to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Machaut was "the last great poet who was also a composer". Well into the 15th century, Machaut's poetry was greatly admired and imitated by other poets, including Geoffrey Chaucer.
Machaut composed in a wide range of styles and forms. He is a part of the musical movement known as the ars nova. Machaut helped develop the motet and secular song forms (particularly the lai and the formes fixes: rondeau, virelai and ballade). Machaut wrote the Messe de Nostre Dame, the earliest known complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass attributable to a single composer.

To listen to more music from this performance series:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyA_b9hznsLbIZjwx0ZOYs4tfx6CJ3nwi

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyA_b9hznsLY9QZ83bTOPY46kqulv1xUt

Theater: Arlington at St. Ann's Warehouse 2017

Charlie Murphy

Hugh O'Conor

Dancer: Oona Doherty

https://arlingtontheplay.com/

A waiting room, inside a tower, like all the others: Isla waits for her number to be called. A young dancer finally understands her fate. And a young man faces his stark decision. In a bleak and terrifying world that “echoes Orwell’s 1984” (The Guardian), Enda Walsh dares to imagine a strange and tender love story.

Written and directed by Enda Walsh
Choreographed by Emma Martin
Starring Charlie Murphy, Hugh O'Conor and Oona Doherty

Review:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/theater/enda-walsh-in-nyc-a-double-dose-of-bracing-irish-isolation.html