Laurie Anderson Crashes Muldoon's Picnic

To see Laurie Anderson perform in such an intimate setting is a joy.  I have only ever seen her before from way up or back in big venues such as the BAM Opera House (Moby Dick) or the Rose Theatre at Lincoln Center.  She appeared smaller than I had thought but her music and words were so much more powerful in that small space. Accompanying herself on electric violin she began with a humorous story about a correspondence she had as a 12 year old with then Senator Jack Kennedy but moved on to recounting a stay with an Amish family in Pennsylvania with a chilling ending about how we teach children to trade affection for favors.

Also appearing were the poet Timothy Donnelly, musician Mark Mulcahy frontman of the bands Miracle Legion and Polaris and Cait O'Riordan founding member and bass player for the London-Irish band The Pogues.  And, of course, Paul Muldoon and his house band Rogue Oliphant.

Muldoon was curiously absent for most of the evening, although he did begin with one of his spoken word poems, this time with some awkward rhymes(which he acknowledged).

Tim Donnelly began with the poem Malamute published in The New Yorker and ended with his ode to Diet Mountain Dew also recently in The New Yorker, both humorous and clever and delivered as spoken word. But I was more struck by his sweet ode to love called The New Intelligence from his book The Cloud Corporation: 

"I love that when I call you on the long drab days practicality
 keeps one of us away from the other that I am calling
 a person so beautiful to me that she has seen my awkwardness
 on the actual sidewalk but she still answers anyway."

A bearlike, bearded Mark Mulcahy performed two soft and dreamy songs about his mother, Esther, on his mind because it was her birthday.  "It's for the Best" were his mother's words after the death of his father.  Cait O'Riordan sang a rousing version of "Kitty Ricketts" accompanied by Mulcahy and Rogue Oliphant who also had the opportunity to play a couple of their own songs.

Laurie Anderson returned with a dark, cautionary piece where she changed her voice electronically to become Donald Trump.  She then joined in with the rest of the musicians for a final number, a duet  that Muldoon had written for O'Riordan and Mulcahy.

Although there were shouts of "Encore! Encore!" from the audience, it was a wrap.

I encourage you to attend the next Muldoon's Picnic on Monday, April 11th, 7:30 when Book Prize-winning Author Anne Enright, A.M. Homes and Pulitizer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa will be performing.  But book early!  This Monday's Picnic was sold out!

http://irishartscenter.org/literature/muldoons_picnic_4_11_16.html

I'll Never Love Again

A visit to the Bushwick Starr is a bit like  falling down the rabbit hole, beginning with the journey there on the L train.  The small theatre is located in a tenement-like apartment building reached by a dingy set of stairs, down a hallway, passing a sign that reads "Out of respect for our neighbors please keep volume to the minimum while hanging out in the hallway " and through a door into a darkly lit room.  We are here to see Clare Barron's latest work, culled from her diary. When last I saw one of her plays it was the brilliant "You Got Older," in my opinion, along with Ann Washburn's "10 Out of 12," one of the two best plays of 2015, both reviewed on this blog.  Now Barron dares to go deeper.

I'm sure that many of us kept diaries when we 16.  Perhaps we destroyed these diaries later in life out of embarrassment.  Thank God Clare Barron did not.  "I'll Never Love Again," her diary from that year,  recounts her sexual awaking as told by a literal chorus of actors, all Clare, through monologues and group performances of tunes like "The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond." We feel the angst of a 16 year old girl through these many lenses.  It is raw; it is painful; it is joyous.

And what an oddly assorted array of actors we have here.  There is an extraordinarily tall man with a shaved head and red beard, a middle aged Asian woman, a pop-eyed young woman with Mamie Eisenhower bangs and a voluptuous African-American.  These are only a few of those who make up the cast, each startlingly different from each other.  While I hesitate to single out individual performances, I have to note those of Nanah Mensah, Kate Benson, Mia Katigbak and Clare Barron herself who engages in the most excruciating and real deflowering I have seen on stage or screen.

Cut to 2012, Clare at 26 played by Nanah Mensah is an office worker.  We are introduced to the 14 year old Oona (a fine Oona Montandon) who has come to meet her mom's partner who is taking her to an event celbrating the Mayan Apolcalypse, a phenomenon with which Clare's younger self had been obsessed. Clare unsuccessfully tries to advise and encourage Oona on how to cope with high school and adolescence (because we know so well how Clare fared with that).  And then on to a monologue by the middle-aged actress Mia Katigbak as the 26-year-old Clare describing a time in which "things fell apart" in her life and, it would seem, in the world at large.  But in the end she says, "Each year I understood more songs."   And so goes the world of Clare Barron.

The inspired direction is by Michael Leibenluft;  Stephanie Johnstone is the show's composer and music director, and the Alice in Wonderland-like set is by Carolyn Mraz.

Between New York and Death Valley

I'm still trying to tie my feelings about the the recent Civilians production of "Rimbaud in New York," written and directed by Steve Cosson, at the BAM Fisher in with their most excellent, brave and exciting production of "Paris Commune" of a few years ago. " Paris Commune" was a brilliantly conceived and beautiful experimental theatrical experience whereas "Rimbaud," aside from Rimbaud's poems, is a hodgepodge of thoughts, poems and songs about Rimbaud by actors representing the 60's East Village artists his work had a profound effect on, Eileen Myles, Patty Smith, John Ashbery and Richard Hell to name a few.  Some of the the original songs are good as are the translations of Rimbaud by John Ashbery but I am so tired of plays ending with garbage being thrown around the stage (in this case yellow balloons) because the director/writer can't seem to think of any other way to wrap up.  There are solid performances, especially from Rebecca Hart and Adam Cochran, and Joseph Keckler has a most unusual and beautiful voice. I did quite like the set design by Andromache Chalfant with it's back wall of interconnecting cubes but the the play was runny liked an uncooked egg.

I don't usually write about film but I was just so moved by Guillaume Nicioux's "Valley of Love" at Rendez-Vous with French Cinema last week that I have to say a few words about it.   "Valley of Love" reunites Isabelle Huppert with Gerard Depardieu who  last appeared together in Pialat's "LouLou" in 1980.  Huppert and Depardieu are actors who had a child together over 30 years before but have since gone on to other marriages, children, lives.  It was the wish of the their son who has committed suicide for them to spend a week together in Death Valley where he will appear to them on the the final day. They both feel, especially Huppert, that they have failed their son so they make good on his wishes.  Huppert is desperate to see her son again, improbable though it may be. The connection between Huppert and Depardieu is palpable and the way that the film addresses their feelings of failure and lost opportunities to connect with their child are profound. Plus the landscapes are stunning!