UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL AT THE PUBLIC THEATER

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVA AT THE PUBLIC THEATER
CHAMBRE
NOIRE

Reviewed by
Bina Sharif for artsinternational

Directed by:Yngvild Aspeli and Paola Rizza
Actress Puppeteer;Yngvild Aspelie
Percussionist; Ane Marthe Sorlien Holen
Lighting Designer; Xavier Lescat

Chambre Noire is a disurbing story about the life of Valerie Solanas, who was a women's rights
activist and a radical writer who wrote SCUM Menifesto. She had a master's degree in psychology
and issues with men, most men who ran rules and regulations.  She often uttered with great boldness  words such as, "Every man deep down knows he is a piece of shit" She was angry, fearless, reckless
woman who also called herself a, "WHORE" Chambre Noire is a haunting hallucination at the time
when she is dying all alone by herself in a single vacancy hotel room.  She was in and out of mental institutions. She encountered Andy Warhol and was just a minor character in his art space famously known as, 'FACTORY"

She wrote a play and gave it to Andy Warhol to produce and felt extremely ignored when he didn't even returned her calls and one day she took guns to the factory and shot him.  In the play this question is raised many times, "Why did you shoot Andy Warhol?"  She didn't have any precise answer except her hatred towards him because he was one of those men she thought were real scum. But after this incident her mental illness progressed.

Chambre Noire tells the story of valerie Solanas through music, life size puppets, precise and beutifully designed and focused lights and video, thus creating a hallucination which reflects the depth of her complicated and fragmented mind when she is struggling to get out of her collapsing last gasps. Puppeteer/actress Yngvild Aspeli who is also the artistic director of Plexus Polaire orchestrates
life-sized puppets so brilliantly that it's difficult to believe if she is handling a real person or a lifeless puppet with wooden legs.  The lights and her precise handling of Valerie Solanas, (as a puppet) creates beautiful and at times scary images which creates spasms of vertigo like feelings of falling down from a cliff of a wasted life.  The play is beutifully designed.  Images are dark and light with the effect of tunnels full of darkness with some rays of bright light which keeps fading like Valerie Solanas life.  The play has stunning music which is a percussion of signals and alarms and of a dirge of death approaching. This play doesn't have many words, doesn't tell us her whole story but does communicate sadness and sorrow.  The play is fragmented like Solanas mind and it's a beautiful tragedy.

Bina Sharif: Editor/publisher, artsinternational.blogspot.com
Email: binashariff@gmail.com
Facebook
Cell: 212-260-6207

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL AT THE PUBLIC THEATER

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL AT THE PUBLIC THEATER
EVOLUTION OF A SONERO

Written and performed by
Flaco Navaja
Music:  Five muscians-aka The Razor Blades

Flaco Navaja is a poet, singer and an actor.  He is an original member of UNIVERSES and that famous Def poetry Jam cast.  He is from the Bronx and one can see how deeply proud he is of his roots. There is a saying about being on stage." If you have charm, if you have a personality, if you have humor, that's where you belong-on the stage."  And Falco Navaja has all of that and much more.
He has what's most essential, "THE TALENT" He can sing, dance, crack jokes, recite poetry with all it's essence intact and can tell a great story following all the intricate details.  Story telling is the greatest skill, all theater, all drama is infact story telling. And there is no story if one doesn't follow the details and punch lines and the pauses. Falco Navaja knows that.  Maybe he is the ancestor of Greeks and Sankskrit poets and story tellers who were tragic and comic at the same moment.
Falco knows the impact of his spoken words, his poetry, his beat and his dance.  And god bestowed
upon him the most pleasant and charming face with a smile to kill.

He tells us the sad story of his arrest on his mother's birthday and the beating by his father afterwards and we crack up.  He tells us the story of his wife giving birth on the way to Lenox hill hospital all the way from the Bronx in an Uber driven car with the road jam packed with trafic and baby being born and we sit on the edge of our seats with this anxiety and prayer, "Oh! god I hope everything goes right for him and the wife and the baby"  And there is such relief and joy at the end.

Music is just brilliant.  Falco makes fun of himself, his circumstances and of some musical numbers with devastating humor.  He is the most likeable performer I have seen on the stage in a while.
His body is made for the dance, his face is made for that smile and his self deprecating humor is to die.
I throughly enjoyed this actor and his craft and the muscians were equally talented. Hope to catch them all again soon.

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL AT THE PUBLIC THEATER

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIAL AT THE PUBLIC THEATER
MINOR CHARACTER

Created by New Saloon
Directed by Morgan Green
Based on Uncle Vanya by Chekhov

Reviewed by
Bina Sharif for artsinternational

Checkho, one of the greatest Russian dramatist and a writer of short stories has been translated
in many languages.  The New Saloon takes at least six English translations of Uncle Vanya and
experiment with it.  The experiment is a lot of fun in a very confusing way. Many characters are played by different actors of different race and gender with very little change in costume except a mink look alike stole for Yelena in many scenes. Yelena, the beautiful wife of the intellectual professor, Serebryako is being played by three actors, Medeline Wise, Rona Figueroa and Ron Domingo.  All three of them are on stage many times repeating the lines of their character in different translations and the effect is many times startling in a very good way.  Uncle Vanya is considered a tragicomedy because there is hidden humor in it but all the characters in the play, Vanya as well as in Minor Character are unhappy yearnig for somethin unreachable. Yelena is being asked a profound question in all the different translations , "Are you happy?" and her answer always is, "NO"And that is enough to realize how human these nerous, anxiety stricken, unhappy people are.

And Sonya, the hard working niece of Uncle Vanya and the daughter of the professor Serebryakov
declares herself, "Not pretty" "Very Plain" "Not attractive" in all translations. So no matter which language she expresses her despair of her meager existence in, she seems fragmented and a wounded person like the rest of the characters. They are all seeking something without having the awareness of what is it that they are after. I guess it's happiness they are after like the Citizens of 21st Century
thus making Chekhov, the most classical as well as a contemprary playwright.

Only character in this play who is in total defiance and is a control freak is the professor.  He complains about his gout and ill health but not with any kind of despair but with high volume of shreaking anger and ego. He is the most selfish in his material and emotional needs and wants a huge sacrifice by every one especially Sonya and Uncle Vanya.  Played by David Greenspan, (actor/playwright) who enjoys being on stage like no one else, is pretty good in the role

All actors are dedicated and very funny.  I think this experimental production by New Saloon who took a chance on a great classic has worked but I wish it was a bit longer and had more of Chekho's
beautiful monologues in it. But still it has amazing humor and what we learn is that the core meaning of important words remain the same no matter which translation of great works is being used.

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL AT THE PUBLIC THEATER

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL AT THE PUBLIC THEATER

FRANKENSTEIN

Review: by Bina Sharif

Multimedia company Manual Cinema presents the classical story of Frankenstein by Mary Shelly,
interwoen with Mary Shelly's biography and the result is one of the most beauriful, accomplished and stunning movie/theater/performance I hae ever seen.

The shadow puppets are used with live muscians and one can be mesmerized watching the actors
and the muscians creating these hauntingly beautiful images on the screen right in-front of us.
The process is live and so fascinating that one wants to capture every second of this creative process.
I kept going back and forth from the live action and the result being born on the screen.
It is magic, a fantasy, a powerful dream and not a dream at all because you are wide awake and realize fully how talented the whole team is.  Brillant craft created by brilliant craftsmen.  Great talent is for sure great talent ad it is on display in this highly imaginative show.

I am always afraid of monsters and the word Frankenstein scares me but I tell you how fortunate I feel after seeing this production of Frankenstein.  I felt like a child who has been taken to a journey through ancient lands with hills and mountains and thunder and lightening but every moment was a
magical moment of bliss.

This company Manual Cinema was founded in 2010 by Drew Dir, Sarah Formace, Ben Kauffman, Julia Miller and Kyle Vegter, totalky dedicated artists.  Throughout the show I have never seen such concentration by the actors like the one's in this show. This production is highly theatrical and a great pleasure to watch.  I am saddened by the fact that I have never seen any of their work before but I promise that I will never miss any of their future productions.  Bravo to the whole company.

Bina Sharif: editor/publisher
artsinternational.blogspot.com
www.facebook
Cell: 212-260-6207
binashariff@gmail.com

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL AT THE PUBLIC THEATER

HEAR WORD! Naija Woman Talk True'
Written and directed by Ifeoma Fafunwa from the Nigerian company iOpenEye Ltd.
Reviewed by
Bina Sharif

"HEAR WORD!" is a combination of very personel stories told by Nigerian women through dance and song.  Performances by women in vibrantly colorful native costumes are extremely powerful
and their stories are sad and depressing.  They are subjugated by men in their society, they are considerd inferior, ordered around and sexually abused. Men are the power, all kinds of power but these actresses are so strong that sometimes one wonders how can they be so subjugated by those men who seems much weaker in their angry power? And these women towards the end show us how they are capable of defiance and they exert that strength and joy through dance and song with great power.

For a while one forgets that these are the same women who has gone through such humiliation by men. But at the same time one is reminded that some men can be nasty and sexual abusers everywhere, since there has been such cases of sexual assaults here as well but still the system in Nigeria seems like rootd in brutality of all kinds towards women but women are not sitting back and taking it, they are fighting back with great strength. One of those women is Sister Esther, a bible carrying Christian who in the most enjoyable manner tells us that sex is a gift of god and she has the right to enjoy it.

The show is a bit long and the stories have the same similar content thus making the show a bit repetitive.  I wish the show ended after the most joyful performane by Sister Esther.
But still the show is informatie, important as well as necessary.

artsinternational.blogspot.com
Bina Sharif/editor/publisher
facebook
Cell: 212-260-6207

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL AT THE PUBLIC THEATER

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL

THEATER REVIEW
BY
BINA SHARIF

(50/50) old school animation
A collaboration between Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey

(50/)50 is disturbing and hauntingly painful to say the least.  The whole play consists of two monologues delivered by two women.  The first one is by a young woman standing still
in-front of a mike with house lights on talking to all of us directly telling us,  how she enjoys being cruel to people.  She confesses without any fuss that she wants to inflict pain to any one possible including her girl friend with whom she enjoys drinking in bars regularly and how she takes her valuables, money, phone out of her purse and destroys everything to bits without any remorse or guilt at all.

Some time one wonders if this is real and the actress is telling her own story or is it fiction?
But one pray's for her sanity's sake that it is fiction.  She is intense and scary.  She tells us that her
body and her soul are not together, like her soul roams around in another atmosphere outside of her
body.  Nothing is connected.  She tells us how suffering is part of her young existence.  She never smiles till the very end and that smile is more scary and vicious than all her words which came before.
It's a performance which is most effective.  Her stillness while delivering her monologue is like, Hamlet's advice to the players, her words comply to her action, the scary intensity of her stillness.
Perfect performance by Julia Mounsey

The second monologue is delivered by Mo Fry Pasic.  She is much more involved in screaming
her superficial content at everything she touches or utters.  She is loud and frustrated on the phone with her mother, extremely upset at her girl friend for not picking up the phone.  None of her talk on the phone has any depth in it.  It's all the 21st Century blah, blah, suerficiality of the hour.  She is anxiety stricken, unable to relax, twitching throughout, a parakeet, assumingly her pet seen in a video
twitching as well. Both monologues reflects the superficial, wasteful anxiety but deep self hatred
as well.

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIAL AT PUBLIC THEATER