Saturday evening a friend and I attended Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and her Friends at Theatre for a New Audience. Positive points: very cooperative theater staff, comfortable seats, actors (eight women) wore delicious wardrobe, great sets. Bad points: the endless, meaningless, fake profound script/ plot. I had been sucked in to going because I’d had a memory of having seen the play in the seventies. The audience became part of the play in Act 2. What was innovative back then was uncomfortable in 2019. We were divided into groups designated by color. We were Purple. At the beginning of the second act we thirty or so Purples trouped to the stage and gathered around an enclosed glass cell in which a woman was being tortured. The Yellows were in the kitchen, The Greens in the garden. You get the picture. It reminded me of the seven train at rush hour. Very crowded. If you sat on the floor, you made sure you didn’t fall off the stage. That sort of stuff. After twenty minutes of suffering the Purples proceeded to the kitchen, then the garden. The other colors were doing a round robin of their own. Finally, back in my comfy seat for the third act which was long and boring.
Fefu and her Friends resolves my decision to avoid the theater.
William Kentridge in Conversation was presented at the Morgan. The vast Gilder Lehrman Hall had a sizeable audience. The South African artist and director is mounting Berg’s Wozzeck at the Met. He explained staging and the background of the opera.
We went to Film Forum to see an old favorite: Kind Hearts and Coronets. It’s still delicious. Murder has never looked more amusing.
Last night I saw the first of two performances of Al Carmine’s Christmas Rappings. The Judson Music director, Henco Espag, led the chorus and soloists through a thrilling and evocative performance, celebrating the fifty year anniversary of the four gospels musical.
Graphic Lessons: What do a thirty-four-year old, a nine-year-old and an eighteen-year-old have in common? Murder.
Millie Fitzgerald applies for a Windsor School teaching job, faints on a dying man in the school kitchen, deals with a troubled nine-year-old and with the eighteen-year-old niece of the murdered man.
Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears a person fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who accuses her of lying? Her father who’s fled to Singapore? She tells Millie.
Graphic Lessons: NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek is assigned the murder case at the prestigious Windsor School. What’s bugging him? His partner was stabbed. He feels remorse over screwing up an important case. His corrupt boss is a trustee of the Windsor School. His girlfriend married his boss. And his daughter quit college.