Red noses and big shoes fill Lima's streets for Clown Day
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Washington Post
13 hours ago
- Washington Post
Pamela Anderson. Amber Heard. Dancing on ice. All in one theater festival.
WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. — A queer fantasia is underway in the Berkshires, where a premiere provocateur of American theater has been handed the keys to Williamstown Theatre Festival. Under the creative leadership of Jeremy O. Harris, the summer mainstay's 71st season features Pamela Anderson as an ex-courtesan haunted by 'the specter of lunacy,' figure skaters lip-synching to Donna Summer and a new show in which a gaggle of toxic gays 'neocolonize' a Oaxacan nude beach. For die-hards, all that and more can be experienced as a whirlwind three- or four-day binge during one of the festival's three consecutive long weekends, which conclude Aug. 3. (Choosing shows a la carte is also an option. I saw eight in 48 hours.) Spread across four venues — two regular stages, a black box in a strip mall and an ice rink bordering a graveyard — the concentrated programming is a weekender-friendly feast of risky and captivating multidisciplinary performance. It's a big swing from a legacy institution that until recently appeared on the brink of collapse. A longtime magnet for top talent and incubator for New York productions, Williamstown has struggled to find a way forward since 2020, when operations shut down due to the pandemic, and an investigation by the Los Angeles Times revealed a history of troubling labor practices. As the nonprofit has endeavored to remake its creative and financial model, visits there in recent years have been characterized by half-staged works in half-empty theaters. Not so on opening weekend of the reimagined festival, the first in a three-year term as creative director for Harris, the 'Slave Play' author whose career includes screenwriting, producing, acting (in a recurring role on 'Emily in Paris') and being Extremely Online. The world premiere of his new play stars Amber Heard, ushering in her self-described 'theatre era.' There are sufficient faces from young Hollywood among the casts — such as Nicholas Alexander Chavez of 'Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,' Whitney Peak of 'Gossip Girl' and Tonatiuh of the upcoming Jennifer Lopez-starring 'Kiss of the Spider Woman' — that Vogue did a photo spread. Crowds flush with industry insiders spilled onto the main stage lawn between acts and perched elbow-to-elbow at area restaurants. A giddy conviction of stamina accompanied the comparison of itineraries. (There are six different routes to seeing the core lineup, depending on how many days you have.) Tennessee Williams is the season's curatorial inspiration, and the recurring themes are especially suited to midsummer heat: memory and existentialism, languor and confinement, horniness and forbidden desire. The vibes are loose-limbed and playful, irreverent toward convention but mindful of its place among the region's tony patrons. Three of the offerings are full-length plays, two by Williams — the surreal and purgatorial 'Camino Real' and the posthumously published prison drama 'Not About Nightingales' — and Harris's own boozy oddity steeped in Williamsian influence, 'Spirit of the People.' That play's title, a reference to mescal and the modest means of its original distillers, characterizes the festival lineup as a whole: Significant barriers to entry notwithstanding (getting here isn't easy, and staying isn't cheap), there's a pervasive effort to ensure that everything presented can be at least understood by anyone living in present reality. (With the exception of 'Camino Real,' but more on that in a minute.) Harris's mission as both a playwright and producer to position theater as vibrant pop culture gives this season the buzzy air of a music or film festival. 'Spirit of the People' is an overfilled and sloshing glass raised in that direction. The story is one I happen to recognize, as a frequent visitor to the coastal hamlet of Zipolite, where a heartbroken Canadian woman (played by Heard) decamps to reinvent herself as the owner of a Mexican mescaleria. A group of American millennials (played by Brandon Flynn and two 'Slave Play' alums, Ato Blankson-Wood and James Cusati-Moyer, among others) overstays their vacations, and Harris engages in anthropological study of their queerness (image obsession, compulsive mating, drugs, etc.) while mining the impacts of Western tourism on the land and its people. Where 'Slave Play' zeroed in on race and desire, here Harris broadens his lens to explore how power functions across borders by means of money and ignorant entitlement. The play, directed beautifully here by Katina Medina Mora, brims with compelling insights on contemporary anxieties (the dangers of AI, the sullying of social ideals under capitalism, etc.), but is also overrun with what we in the community call 'gay mess' (petty rivalries, bed-hopping and the like) and with heavy-handed reveries about the symbolic significance of mescal. As with pours of straight liquor, moderation will be key to the play's future. (Like several shows on opening weekend, it ran significantly over the approximated run time, clocking in at over three hours.) 'Slave Play' director Robert O'Hara delivers 'Not About Nightingales' as an erotic fever dream, in which the inmates of an Alcatraz-like island and their weasel-like warden (Chris Messina) are in heat. Written by Williams in 1938 and inspired by real events at a Pennsylvania prison, the play chronicles an uprising over wretched food in a brig that resembles a Berlin sex club. The raw animality of the staging emphasizes everyone's appetite for both survival and satisfaction. A triangle of desire develops between Messina's warden, his new secretary (Elizabeth Lail, of 'You') and the Black prisoner (William Jackson Harper, of 'The Good Place') he beats into submission before recruiting him to work in his office. O'Hara draws out the story's resonance not only with present mass incarceration but with the legacy of chattel slavery. It's a brutal production with a touch of Old Hollywood noir and the most affecting of the season's full-length dramas. 'Camino Real,' in which a menagerie of characters (among them Don Quixote, Casanova and Lord Byron), rattle around a carceral town square, is the most remote. The staging from director Dustin Wills evokes a desert landscape by Dalí and is equally beguiling to behold and confounding to interpret. Making sense of the play, a departure for Williams into modernist abstraction, may be beside the point — the author defended its rife symbolism as 'nothing more nor less than my conception of the time and the world I live in.' Funnily enough, of the sprawl of ensemble members, Anderson is the most engaging and accessible. She has no great facility with language or modulation, and a tendency to swallow words — but her unaffected air is endearing and suited to absurdism. As the beleaguered and faded beauty Marguerite, she got the most laughs and a mid-show round of applause. The fest's other happenings — most of them in what's called the Annex, a hollowed-out Price Chopper outfitted into an elongated playing space — benefit from their inclusion in a broader lineup that offers a wide berth for experimentation. The most striking among them, 'Vanessa,' is a chamber opera about a doomed love triangle composed by Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti, themselves forbidden lovers when it premiered in 1958. (My colleague Michael Brodeur has the full review.) 'Many Happy Returns,' a dance piece from Monica Bill Barnes inspired by 'Mrs. Dalloway,' combines everyday musings addressed to the audience (by her collaborator Robbie Saenz de Viteri) with lighthearted movement she executes with wiry precision. In 'The Things Around Us,' musician and writer Ahamefule J. Oluo likewise delivers a shuffle of anecdotes that could be disparate pages torn from a memoir. They're combined with an astounding display of musicianship, in which he wails on the trumpet, controls soundboards with his feet, and creates a score by recording and looping playback in real time. In an after-midnight stand-up set, Julio Torres delivered an earnest plea for job mobility as Pigasaurus, the hog who eats food scraps on 'The Flintstones.' The extreme-sport nature of the marathon schedule reaches its pinnacle on ice, where a virtuosic company of five skaters (lithe, limber and queer-coded) perform interpretive, disco-scored dance inspired by the Williams novel tucked into the show's title, 'The Gig: After Moise and the World of Reason.' Viewers bundle up, park rinkside in folding chairs and don headphones through which Harris narrates the impressions of a struggling writer in 1970s Manhattan who dated a figure skater. Conceived by director Will Davis with ice choreographer Douglas Webster, the hour-long spectacle includes swooping, synchronous glides, passionate pas de deux and a handful of Olympic-style stunts. The forms don't quite synthesize — you could bag the voice-over and just enjoy the icy grooves — but the daring is the point. Summer theater ought to be wild, a playground where soaring high and falling flat are both welcome results. Williamstown's reinvention is a thrilling testament to what's possible when artists are given license to let loose.
New York Times
14 hours ago
- New York Times
Jazz, Fans and 2 Gems: Mark Morris Celebrates His Company's 45th
The dance climate is far from ideal these days, especially for those working in modern dance. But Mark Morris has shown an ability to adapt. While summer, for his company, used to mean a season at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, Morris has pivoted to showing works at the Joyce Theater, where the setting is more intimate — and so are the dances he chooses to show. Unfortunately that has led to a formula. Both of his programs this summer, celebrating the company's 45th anniversary, feature four dances including one premiere, and by the end of the night, that feels less like a delight than a drain. At the Joyce, it makes more of an impact to be surgical, sparing. It was frustrating that the finest dances on each program were saved for last. The first week it was 'Mosaic and United' (1993), set to two string quartet's by Henry Cowell. Its depth of choreography and design — Isaac Mizrahi's shimmering costumes under Michael Chybowski's lighting — creates an earthy, unostentatious atmosphere of mystery. Even more brilliant is the closer for the second program, which runs through Saturday: 'Going Away Party' (1990), a rollicking, carefree and sometimes raunchy dance set to a sparkling recording by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. (The rest of the season's music was performed live.) The two premieres, while proficient, were lighter, slighter versions of those older works. The boisterous 'You've Got to Be Modernistic,' making its debut last week, honors the music of James P. Johnson, a dazzling pianist who was a staple of 1920s Harlem. The atmosphere was all party, but it had little bite. And the hushed aura of 'Mosaic and United' was echoed — if only in enigmatic tone — in 'Northwest,' set to music by John Luther Adams, which takes inspiration from the traditional songs and rhythms of the Athabascan and Yup'ik Native peoples of Alaska. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Atlantic
2 days ago
- Atlantic
The Atlantic Festival Announces New Events Across New York City
July 22, 2025—Today The Atlantic is announcing more speakers, events, and the agenda for the 17th annual Atlantic Festival, taking place September 18–20 for the first time in New York City. This year's festival will be anchored at the Perelman Performing Arts Center along with venues around the city, including the Tenement Museum, the Town Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Hauser & Wirth, and McNally Jackson Seaport. Among the speakers announced today: actor Robert Downey Jr. and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, in conversation with The Atlantic 's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg; actor Tom Hanks, who voices several historical figures in the new Ken Burns documentary series The American Revolution and who will join the premiere screening of the series at the Town Hall; comedian, writer, and director Richard Ayoade in a conversation moderated by talk-show host, comedian, and producer David Letterman; Executive Producer of The Apollo Kamilah Forbes; Professor of Marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur Scott Galloway; clinical psychologist and Founder and CEO of Good Inside Becky Kennedy; and TV personality, chef, author, and activist Andrew Zimmern. Previously announced Festival speakers include Mark Cuban, Jennifer Doudna, Arvind Krishna, Monica Lewinsky, Tekedra Mawakana, H.R. McMaster, and Clara Wu Tsai. The Atlantic Festival will also host an exclusive first look for Season 3 of Netflix's The Diplomat, which debuts this fall, followed by a conversation with the show's stars Keri Russell and Allison Janney and creator and executive producer Debora Cahn; a sneak peek screening of FX's The Lowdown, along with a talk with creator, executive producer, writer, and director Sterlin Harjo and executive producer and star Ethan Hawke; and a screening of The American Revolution, followed by a discussion with directors and producers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, along with actor Tom Hanks, who voices several historical figures, and historian Annette Gordon-Reed. New this year: The Atlantic Festival introduces Out and Abouts, intimate events around the city that are ticketed individually. Among the events announced today: Atlantic Reads book talks at McNally Jackson Seaport. Featuring Walter Mosley for his new novel Gray Dawn; Susan Orlean for her memoir Joyride; and a poetry conversation around The Singing Word: 168 Years of Atlantic Poetry, featuring the book's editor and Atlantic contributing editor Walt Hunter, with Singing Word contributor and MIT professor Joshua Bennett. Premiere of Dread Beat an' Blood at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), featuring a live performance by legendary poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. The Big Story Live events, across downtown venues: 'What Does it Mean to Be an American?,' at the Tenement Museum, featuring staff writers Xochitl Gonzalez and Clint Smith, plus more speakers to be announced. 'The Future of the Arts in a Changing World,' at Hauser & Wirth, featuring Jeffrey Goldberg, Noah Hawley, and Kamilah Forbes, with more speakers to be announced. With more to be announced, including a live taping of the Radio Atlantic podcast. The festival's Single-Day Passes and Out and About tickets will go on sale this Wednesday, July 23, at 11 a.m. ET. Atlantic subscribers receive an exclusive 30 percent discount on festival passes and select Out & About programming. Festival sessions will be led by Goldberg and many of The Atlantic 's writers and editors, including Adrienne LaFrance, Tim Alberta, Ross Andersen, Anne Applebaum, Gal Beckerman, Elizabeth Bruenig, Sophie Gilbert, Jemele Hill, Walt Hunter, Shirley Li, Ashley Parker, and Clint Smith. The 2025 Atlantic Festival is underwritten by Microsoft at the Title Level; CenterWell, Eli Lilly and Company, and Scout Motors at the Presenting Level; and Aflac, Allstate, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Destination DC, Diageo, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, Hauser & Wirth, KPMG, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation at the Supporting Level.
