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Hurricane Sleep
I hesitate to say that HURRICANE SLEEP comes on like an approaching storm, but that, in truth, is what happens. Andrea Goldman’s play (co-directed by Julia Watt) starts slow, builds, and sweeps through in bands, with an eye at the center. There’s the first band, when we’re introduced to Ome (Neysa Lozano), holed up in…
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The Killer
The Bérenger plays of Ionesco – in which an ordinary man finds himself in a variety of situations – are what they are, but it can be illuminating to consider them in terms of artistic and literary movements. I tend to agree that they don’t exactly qualify as existentialist or absurdist. It is, granted, pretty…
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The Mystery of the Ordinary
The René Magritte exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art has stayed with me since I saw it last month, on the day after Thanksgiving. I suppose that, among the Surrealists, I have always thought first of Dalí due to the iconic status of his melting clocks and cinematic collaborations with Buñuel; and then of…
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Tabu
I admit to a certain disappointment in the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s TABU, widely praised as a neo-surrealist masterpiece, and indeed with a number of engrossing qualities. It is visually striking, as though put together from black-and-white home movies and other found footage, although nothing is rough-around-the-edges in its austere and polished imagery. There is…
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To Rome with Love
Woody Allen’s cinematic tour of Europe, having taken us to London, Barcelona and Paris, now sets down in Rome. There’s an obvious Fellini tribute in how the movie is framed, à la Roma, with a Roman traffic cop (a thankless job if ever there was one) delivering opening and closing paeans to the city. But the…
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The Future
I missed this in New York and was intrigued but somewhat doubtful as to how I would feel about it. So I was glad to have the chance to see it in Madrid with the added interest of Spanish subtitles. I need not have worried. Miranda July’s THE FUTURE is eccentrically lovely, a small act…
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Gezeiten
GEZEITEN is directed and choreographed by Sasha Waltz, performed in two parts, and much of it in silence. The style of this dance theater piece is at first abstract, then a sort of deconstructed Naturalism that devolves into a post-apocalyptic Absurdism born of the truth that, having survived, it is the nature of human beings…