Tag: Vol. 35 No. 21

As directed by Dori Robinson for the new Actors Revolution Theatre, William Mastrosimone’s 1982 play is funny, smart, and horrifying, especially in the intimate confines of a small studio space where we’re almost sitting beside the actors. On the surface the script is about a woman who bests her would-be rapist, played by Jared Martzell […]

Misleading people and making them laugh both require frustrating their expectations, something writer-performers Patrick O’Brien and Peter Grosz have mastered in this clever sketch show directed by T.J. Jagodowski. Facts are misrepresented in posters and playbills, and audience members are misdirected in various ways each night; the show itself offers a puzzling array of in-the-dark […]

Werner Moebius uses the plasticity of sound to set up dialogues with other media, other music methodologies, and even other species. The Austrian-born sound artist has worked extensively with dancers and video artists, and during a residency last summer at the Boreas Farm, a dance center in Hebron, New York, he created an outdoor installation […]

This ambitious documentary by Eugene Jarecki (The Trials of Henry Kissinger) opens with President Eisenhower’s prophetic 1961 farewell speech, which identified the military-industrial complex as a threat to democratic governance, and follows this premise through the events of 9/11 and the selling of the Iraq war. Jarecki listens respectfully to the right (Richard Perle, William […]

Aculturally specific evening-length work by a company based in Goiania, Brazil, is the opener for the LatinContempo Festival, which runs three weekends in February and March. And Henrique Rodovalho’s Choreography for Listening isn’t just good for you: it’s fun. It’s like a natural-history study–the performers’ quick, quirky, often humorous movements make them look like animals […]

Margo Jefferson’s On Michael Jackson (Pantheon) is partly a slim primer on the things that earned her subject that “wacko Jacko” tag: the dysfunctional family, the plastic surgery, the “Jesus juice.” But it’s also an honorable attempt to humanize Jackson, and if her arguments don’t always wash, Jefferson is for the most part convincingly empathetic […]

I’ve heard a theory that the U.S. government was behind the dissolution of the 80s hardcore scene, which seemed to grow in size and energy with each passing year before imploding virtually overnight. Cointelpro ops were suspected, like the “hippie” riot-inducing shills in Grant Park during the ’68 DNC or the agents who insinuated their […]