Eliza Bent gets personal on race and cultural appropriation

Eliza Bent
(photo: Knud Adams)

It's far worse than you might think.

No, that's not my review of Aloha, Aloha, or When I Was Queen, the new monologue written and performed by Eliza Bent, now at Abrons Arts Center. But that's what I believe Bent wants viewers to grasp.

The piece jumps off from the playwright's memories of a film on the 19th Century queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last monarch--a school project Bent cooked up at age 13 with a friend and classmate. The young auteur cast her white affluent self as the indigenous queen and now looks back on it--as we get to do; the film is both cringe-worthy and just ridiculously audacious enough to kind of work, ya know?--with no small amount of shame. I can't gauge how completely woke today's Bent is but, as things unfold, you will definitely see she's got her eyes propped open.

She might have forgiven her teenaged self (and begged our forgiveness) for youthful indiscretion. But she does not stop there.

Surrounded, inexplicably but beautifully, by Elizabeth Chabot's rich, thick textile art and a row of fetching portraits--Bent resembles some combination of high-class talk show host and star monologist. Wearing a buttoned-up little black dress with A-line cut, she talks nonstop with well-practiced intensity that pegs her as facile, artificial, privileged, ready for PBS or an NPR podcast.

Frankly, even when self-revealing, she's off-putting. You take note when she utters something amusing. You note that amusement and yet stand clear of enjoying it. You definitely stand away from Bent, and maybe she means you to do so, because her delivery of text is noticeably, oddly driven, airless, leaving no room for her breathing or your own.

At some point, you get used to that. Which might mean an unseen internal change within her or--and this is really what it felt like--something shifting inside you, like when a climber gets more and more acclimated to lower levels of oxygen.

Maybe, though, Bent's the sort best positioned to lead us where we need to go and show us what we need to see--what she's done and what she's witnessed, particularly in the world of media and the arts. (In addition to her stage work, she served, for several years, as a senior editor at American Theatre magazine.) Deep into the play, she circles back to her own relationships and disconnections--refusing to absolve herself for what remains unresolved, tasking herself and the rest of us with acknowledging the pervasive breadth and durability of privilege and the damage wrought. Not a curious fossil from the ancestral past. Not a specimen of a problem that has not a thing on Earth to do with us now.

Direction: Knud Adams
Textile panel art: Elizabeth Chabot
Sound design/original composition: Jerome Ellis
Lighting: Kate McGee
Make up and styling: Naomi Miyoko Raddatz

Aloha, Aloha, or When I Was Queen continues through April 21. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), Manhattan
(directions)

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Out on the Fringe: Shamamian shakes the earth she loves

Louisine Shamamian
(photo: Kyle MaKrauer)

Courage can take many different forms. Comic Louisine Shamamian binds together distinct forms of true courage in her new monologue, Shake the Earth (FringeNYC), directed by Misti B. Wills. But don't expect one of her standup routines or her offbeat "lesbian matchmaker to the straights" videos.

While Shake the Earth has sweetly amusing moments, its Armenia-born writer-performer earnestly imparts two stories--her immigrant youth and coming out in Brooklyn and the Turkish oppression and slaughter of its Armenian population, including members of her family. This year marks the centenary of the Armenian genocide, a crime still denied by the Turkish government. In fact, in today's Turkey, it's criminal to even breathe the words "Armenian genocide." Shamamian breaks all silence--personal and political.

First, she charms us with family portraits and vignettes. As a kid, her red shock of hair and her size made her stand out; her kin called her "a red round tomato." There were enormous, festive gatherings with "women cooking for days." She recites a litany of food and its flavorful ingredients, the music, the dancing. You know how it goes--familial and, even to this Bajan-American, instantly familiar, the same sort of memories for many in an audience hailing from around the American melting pot.

Curious about the odd eating habits of one relative, the young Shamamian began asking questions and eventually researching the genocide with a "passion for a mythical place," her Armenia. At the same time, another life-altering passion stirred--a crush on a beautiful Black butch who returned her interest. Her sweetheart "didn't entertain shame." They became the first openly queer couple in their high school.

Shamamian took a big step in coming out to her mother. I don't know if the comic is aware of this, but her mom's initial reaction ("There are no gay people in Armenia!") syncs up perfectly with the words of comedian Margaret Cho's mom ("There are no gays in Korea!") in Cho's I'm The One That I Want performance. Some day, these two mothers--both of whom came around because they love their daughters--should really get together.

On occasion, Shamamian falls into a didactic tone that feels arid and artificial. There must be more efficient ways to impart facts than these flat, inserted teachings. (Expand the brief notes on genocide in your program? Project some text on the curtain behind you?) But she hits her high point with a recounting of one man's amazing escape from a Turkish work camp near Aleppo, Syria. We learn the source of her dedication to accurate history and honesty about the continued threat to Armenians and Kurds.

"Hold this information with me today," she says. "It is all I ask."

In accordance, each audience member receives a forget-me-not pin--the centennial symbol not only of past suffering but also the hoped-for unity, futurity and eternity of the Armenian people.

Remaining performances of Shake the Earth:

Saturday, August 22 (7pm)

Monday, August 24 (2pm)

Saturday, August 29 (8:45 pm)

For information and tickets, click here or here.

Read an interview with Shamamian here.

For information on all programming of the 2015 New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC), continuing through August 30, click here.

Spectrum

121 Ludlow Street (between Delancey and Rivington Streets), 2nd floor,  Manhattan

(map/directions)

Marga Gomez has a big problem--and shares it in POUND!

Marga Gomez
(photo: Kent Taylor)

Now that Pride weekend is done and gone, and the USA women's soccer team has its way through New York's Canyon of (She)roes, what's left to do, people?

Opening night's standing ovation made the answer clear. The Dixon Place to be is at POUND, a presentation of the 2015 HOT! Festival and the latest one-lesbian show from Marga Gomez, directed by David Schweizer. You'll need some stamina; the monologue feels much longer than its advertised 75-minutes and could use a few scissor snips. But if you find Hollywood movies involving lesbians in any way absurd and surreal--and why wouldn't you?--you'll laugh your head off.

Gomez whip-blends encyclopedic knowledge of movies and culture, rambunctious physicality, and tireless ability to zip from character to character, decade to decade and gentrified coast to gentrified coast without much mussing her lumberjack flannel. If Bound is on your Favorites list, try POUND. If you agree with Gomez that Basic Instinct made America "a little afraid of lesbians," and that's a really good thing, try POUND. If, like Gomez back in the day, you relied upon the National Legion of Decency to actually be your dyke-flick recommender, try POUND.

POUND continues Fridays and Saturdays, July 11, 17, 18, 24 and 25 at 7:30pm. Click here for information and tickets.

Comic monologist Reno
performs free shows at Dixon Place
during the 2015 HOT! Festival.

Another HOT! tip: Also see Ignorance Is No Excuse, Reno, an hour with the matchless comic provocateuse at Dixon Place--free!--Mondays, now through August 3, at 7:30pm. Click here.

For more HOT! Festival events, click here.

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Street (between Rivington and Delancey Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Roger Guenveur Smith brings "Rodney King" to BRIC

Portraits of Roger Guenveur Smith in Rodney King
(all photos by Patti McGuir)

When I reserved my ticket to review Rodney King--Roger Guenveur Smith's solo performance in its new run at BRIC House--I had no way to know that the Ferguson and Staten Island grand jury decisions would land a one-two punch and knock the breath out of people...at least, people of conscience. And send the bewildered and outraged into the streets. And put some of us suddenly at odds with friends whose hearts and minds we thought we knew.

The show, which first opened in Los Angeles in 2012 and had its New York premiere at the 2013 Under The Radar Festival, lasts just one hour. Trust me, you do not have the fortitude for anything more, for Smith lands blows of his own in this panoramic view of the interlocked tragedies of one Black man and one nation.

On March 3, 1991, Rodney King, a construction worker, was driving with two drinking buddies on a Los Angeles freeway. LAPD cops spotted his speeding white Hyundai and chased it for mile after mile, with more patrol cars and a helicopter joining the pursuit. King's car was eventually trapped on a residential street and all three men ordered out and brutalized by a swarm of cops. King suffered extensive injuries, including brain damage. Despite videotaped evidence of excessive force, a Simi Valley jury--before whom King was never allowed to testify--acquitted his assailants, leading to massive riots throughout LA and incidents of violent retribution.

Rodney King opens with a slurry stew of sounds, designed by Smith's longtime collaborator, Mark Anthony Thompson, from televised news crossed with a musical loop of famous words from a speech he delivered to tamp the unrest: "Can't we all get along?" It becomes an earworm you can't will away. The audience, anticipating Smith, listens and listens as the space, darkened except for a corded microphone lying on the floor inside a large white square of light, remains empty. That white light gradually blooms into the aqua of a swimming pool, like the pool where King, son of an alcoholic who drowned in a bathtub, met his own accidental end.

"Fuck you, Rodney King! You're a goddamn sellout!"

And it begins. Not a monologue so much as a votive offering of Smith's entire body--through fluid, powerful movement, through voice--to a heady, seamless, rhythmic poetry of storytelling with never a wasted gesture or moment.

"You were viral before viral was viral," Smith says, addressing his subject. "Everyone recording you and fastforwarding you." King's ordeal became "the first reality tv show." Smith imagines King watching the televised infernos ("This is for you, Rodney King!"), knocking back brandy to medicate the pain of witness, pulling on a non-threatening Cosby/Huxtable sweater to make a speech to help restore that strange state of "calm" the authorities tell us to respond with when insane things are done to us.

It is a tale tailor-made for a nation obsessed with media and multimedia. But, aside from Thompson's sonic bracketing, Smith has chosen simplicity of form to house complexities and contrasts, letting the supple partnership of voice and body be his channel. Every texture of Smith's narrative is set out in vivid tones, from King's giddy pleasure of surfing a wave to the explosive crack of a baton on facial bones. Smith's words and phrases tumble, pause, swirl, recede, loop around and reappear. Within the confines of his square of light, he conjures energies, impressions, facts, memories.

Smith, aptly, calls his method "jazz acting, where there's a head and a riff, and you come back to the head." (In the post-show Q&A, he also answered an admiring dancer's question by citing his intensive study of dance "in the Cornelius School. Don Cornelius. Every Saturday.") This is an important performance for this very moment--and beyond--but your chances to see it now are few. Rodney King continues only through Sunday on the following schedule: tonight at 7:30pm, Saturday at 7:30pm and 9:30pm, and Sunday at 4:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Smith greets his audience
after performing Rodney King at BRIC.
The actor also sat for a Q&A with writer Nelson George.
(photo by Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Roger Guenveur Smith adapted his Obie Award-winning solo performance of A Huey P. Newton Story into a Peabody Award-winning telefilm. His history-driven work also includes Frederick Douglass Now, Who Killed Bob Marley?, Juan And John, Christopher Columbus 1992, The Watts Towers Project, In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and, with Mark Broyard, the award-winning Inside The Creole Mafia. For Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing, Smith created the stuttering hero Smiley. His astonishing range of film credits also includes Malcolm X, He Got Game, Get On The Bus, Eve's Bayou, All About The Benjamins, Hamlet, Deep Cover and American Gangster, for which he was nominated for the Screen Actors' Guild Award. He starred in the HBO series K Street, Oz, and Unchained Memories: Readings From The Slave Narratives.

BRIC House
647 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

FringeNYC benefits: "No Static At All"

Alex Knox in No Static At All (photos: Karianne Flaathen)

No Static At All

Written and performed by Alex Knox

Directed by Becca Woolff

"Have you ever listened to a song and felt like the singer was telling your story?" asks the wiry, energetic Alex Knox near the opening of his one-hour monologue at FringeNYC, No Static At All. Maybe he should ask Roberta Flack, now that I think of it. Her answer, of course, would be, Why, yes--as would most of ours.

It's a banal question that tells you much of what you need to know about Knox's musing on a couple of supposedly parallel and troubled bromances--the first, between the two Steely Dan stars, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker whose song, FM, is the source of this play's title; the second, between Knox and his old school buddy, Josh. This show, like many bite-sized Fringe numbers, doesn't really have room to stretch out, and that puts pressure on Knox to rush his stuffed narrative and try to deliver something engaging and convincing. Despite a few truly funny moments--his argument that a certain rock in northern Israel renders sacred the name of his favorite band comes to mind--Knox doesn't quite make it.

With the exception of a nearly Talmudic exegesis of "Any World (That I'm Welcome To)," we don't learn anything much about the Steely Dan songs that have come to mean a lot to Knox and exactly what they say about the twists in the lives he and Josh have lived together and apart. We have to take all that as a matter of faith--and, in this work, faith turns out to be a very big matter, indeed.

Knox at first seems an ordinary sort, a bit intimidated by the sharper Josh whom he describes as self-assured to the point of arrogance. But he's just as capable of falling heart-first into an all-consuming religious pursuit--in this case, the Church of the Dan where momentary flashes of arrogance alternate with humiliation. 

Remaining shows:

Friday, August 15, 2:30pm

Sunday, August 17, 12pm

Wednesday, August 20, 9:15pm

Sunday, August 24, 4:15PM

Buy tickets for this and other FringeNYC shows.

The Steve & Marie Sgouros Theatre

115 MacDougal Street, 3rd floor, (between West 3rd Street and Bleecker), Manhattan

(map/directions)

For all things FringeNYC, click below.

New York International Fringe Festival

Qurrat Ann Kadwani: Still calling her Q!

Qurrat Ann Kadwani
(photo Bolti Studios)

Talented and personable Qurrat Ann Kadwani (whose solo show, They Call Me Q!, I wrote about here) is back and, I hope, every bit as "wicked smart and genuinely funny" as I observed back in September. Now she's bringing the show to the Off Broadway St. Luke's Theatre, May 19-June 4, Mondays at 7pm and Wednesdays at 8pm.

THEY CALL ME Q is the story of an Indian girl growing up in the Boogie Down Bronx who gracefully seeks balance between the cultural pressures brought forth by her traditional parents and wanting acceptance into her new culture. Along the journey, Qurrat Ann Kadwani transforms into 13 characters that have shaped her life including her parents, Caucasian teachers, Puerto Rican classmates, and African-American friends. Laden with heart and abundant humor, THEY CALL ME Q speaks to the universal search for identity experienced by immigrants of all nationalities.

Program, schedule and ticket information

St. Luke’s Theatre
308 West 46th Street (just west of Eighth Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

COIL Festival: Mac Wellman's "Muazzez" opens at The Chocolate Factory

Actor Steve Mellor sits at a small table and gazes at the audience with his doughy, oblong face and initially deadpan expression and begins to spill a torrent of words. This verbal current flows fast, faster, fastest without cease--miraculously, without tongue-twisting--and, at times, will rise to a level of dark bitterness. That Mellor--occupying The Chocolate Factory's earthly space as well as imagined interstellar space strewn with asteroids--introduces himself as an "abandoned cigar factory" with "a zygodactyly foot" is only part of the fun of Muazzez, a 45-minute monologue derived from short stories by known word wizard Mac Wellman.

"There's no drift to my thought," Mellor/Wellman tells us. "My thought is a rooted thing." Sure. No drift but definitely a well-greased sci-fi sequence on the move and speeding you along with it, scrambling your brain along with Wellman's mythopoetic play and scramble of words. We're invited to envision the high Eulalians of whom nothing is known except that they "builded" the cigar factories. We learn of the "primal radial symmetry" of "a series of spokes or spokey type spindles radiating from a deep and frosty central secret," which sounds kid of tasty. There are "non-self hedges and the hegemony of the self's perfect picture of the world" and something Wellman calls the "ambulatory frightwig of unappetizing complication," which strikes me as a useful insult to hurl at the next person to cross me. Yeah.

I am completely won over by this "succession a stratigraphic variorum," this "placing of jars and jarring of places" and Mellor's virtuoso performance that charges and populates nearly bare space with the high Eulalian magic(k) of words.

A COIL Festival co-presentation of Performance Space 122 and The Chocolate Factory, Muazzez runs through January 17. For complete schedule and ticketing details, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

Life on the Fringe, still: Q from the BX

Qurrat Ann Kadwani
(bottom photo by Bolti Studios)

"60 minutes..13 characters..1 actress."

That's it. That's how the program notes sum up They Call Me Q!, a monologue about growing up in the Bronx as a child of a family from India, performed by award-winning playwright/actress Qurrat Ann Kadwani. I'd add "an hour well spent with a wicked smart and genuinely funny performer."

Directed by Obaid Kadwani and Claudia Gaspar, the piece manages to charm audiences and critics wherever it goes--from Chicago's Fringe fest to Maui's to Montreal's--and it did well here in New York in the Fringe edition just recently closed. As a result, Kadwani garnered a slot in the FringeNYC Encore series, and you can see her this afternoon at 1pm in the second and final performance of this production.

As a child of an immigrant family (Barbados), I must say Kadwani's anecdotes tickled me, partly because they're truly amusing and wonderfully delivered, but also because, even despite a wide difference in our ages, there may be almost no difference between some of the things her mother told her, what I heard from my folks out in Queens and what my Jewish wife recalls from her family life in the Bronx. This astounded me and reinforced my love of this city as I know it.

See They Call Me Q!, today at 1pm, at Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Avenue (entrance on East 25th Street between Lexington and 3rd Avenues). For program information and tickets, click here.

map/directions

Wallace Shawn's "The Fever" at La MaMa

The Fever--a monologue written by Wallace Shawn in the late 1980s, now interpreted by French-Romanian actress Simona Maicanescu at LaMaMa--has an inevitability about it. An inevitability so downright inevitable, in fact, that Shawn himself once wondered what might be the point in telling his audiences what they already know--that social and economic injustice exists worldwide and the comfortable, consuming classes depend upon it, revel in it, fear even the slightest hint of its correction. The point of Shawn's project seems to be to make all of that as visceral as possible so as to pin in place his typical audience--a choir of thoughtful, even brainy liberals--and exact some soul-searching.

Simona Maicanescu in The Fever

Co-adapted and directed by Swedish playwright Lars Norén, The Fever traps the pleasant, appealing Maicanescu within a square box of space outlined in heavy chalk marks on the floor. Having approached this space by way of the stairs alongside the audience seating--smiling at one or another of us as she slowly descends--she stands and addresses us nonstop for 85 minutes while mainly moving only her face, head, arms and hands. (There's a water bottle a little distance away, and she does take one short break to retrieve it.) Early on, you see her clasping the fingers of one hand inside its opposite, and you realize that there's something odd but--yes--inevitable in that and that she will not let either hand go free for a long while. When she does move the hands or just the fingers, there's a captivating, sometimes amusing, ritualistic inevitability in that, too.

The poor dear has no idea that she has stepped into a kind of interrogation chamber in which she will come to be the interrogator. Her confinement looks both externally-imposed and protectively self-imposed. As she continues to talk, we see that her unwillingness to delve beyond the surface of things--including the surface of her life and the consequences of her lifestyle--represents a mental lockup even more destructive than its current physical display. As Shawn's monologue drives on, Maicanescu shows signs of disruption and fraying. Eventually, the going gets quite raw.

Maicanescu is fiercely alert, detailed and brilliant in this tough, demanding work. Don't miss her.

Now through February 3

Schedule formation and tickets

La MaMa (First Floor Theatre)
74 East 4th Street (between 1st and 2nd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)