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      Adrienne Mancia, Influential Film Curator, Dies at 95

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      Her choices for exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music gave foreign directors and newcomers valuable exposure in New York.Adrienne Mancia, who scoured the world for significant films and brought them to New York as a longtime curator at the Museum of Modern Art and later at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, died on Sunday in Teaneck, N.J. She was 95.Her niece Francine Pozner Ehrenberg confirmed the death, in a care center.Ms. Mancia was instrumental in giving audiences some of their earliest looks at work by Wim Wenders of Germany, Manoel de Oliveira of Portugal and other notable directors, and helped rediscover archival gems and introduce subgenres like European animation and Cinema Novo from Brazil.She joined MoMA in 1964 as the secretary to Richard Griffith, the curator of the museum’s film department. Soon she was given the title of curatorial assistant and began organizing exhibitions; she rose to associate curator and then, in 1977, curator. She held that title until 1998, when she left for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which was opening the BAM Rose Cinemas and moving into film programming.Her choices were crucial in expanding the horizons of American cinephiles, particularly in her early decades at MoMA.“As this was before the age of videotape, internet and niche movie channels,” Jon Gartenberg, a curator of MoMA’s film archive for part of her tenure and a longtime friend, said by email, “the recognition for the films that she curated at MoMA garnered an outsized importance in terms of the New York film culture and beyond.”Other museums would take their cues from the programming at MoMA and in the New Directors/New Films series sponsored by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Film festivals throughout North America would pick up on Ms. Mancia’s finds, and her vast influence led to awards from foreign governments.“Adrienne Mancia has probably contributed more than any other person to the introduction of Italian cinema in America,” Renato Pachetti, the president of the RAI Corporation, which has financed numerous Italian films, said in 1988 when Ms. Mancia received the Order of the Republic of Italy. Four years earlier, France had given her similar recognition, naming her a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.Ms. Mancia traveled extensively in her search for worthy films, both new and old. The film critic J. Hoberman, who knew her for decades and worked with her as a curator on a 1991 exhibition, “Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds,” said Ms. Mancia had not been content with simply accepting the film packages that other countries would send.“She loved to work in archives,” he said in a phone interview. “She didn’t want them to tell her which films to show. She wanted to pick them out herself.”Her interests were not limited to foreign films, or to the highbrow end of the cinematic spectrum.“She was a cinephile,” Mr. Hoberman said, “but she was not a snob.”In 1979 she organized a seemingly un-MoMA-like retrospective of films from American International Pictures, which in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s specialized in low-budget, quickly made movies for the drive-in crowd like “Girls in Prison” (1956) and “Beach Party” (1963). It wasn’t just an exercise in kitsch.“It’s extraordinary to see how many filmmakers, writers and actors — now often referred to as ‘the new Hollywood’ — took their first creative steps at American International,” she said at the time.“Low budgets can force you to find fresh resources,” she continued, adding that there was an “energy to these feisty films that capture a certain very American quality.”In 1985 she presented an exhibition of films featuring Bugs Bunny and other Warner Bros. cartoon characters. Again, nostalgia wasn’t the point; the artistry represented by predigital film animation was.“This exhibition makes me very happy and very sad,” she told The New York Times. “It makes me happy because I love it and sad because it might very well be the end of a great era, the end of complete animation, done frame by frame with great care, approaching art.”Adrienne Phyllis Johnson was born on June 5, 1927, in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her father, Harry Johnson, owned a furniture store, and her mother, Fae (Weintraub) Johnson, was a homemaker.She grew up in Paterson, N.J., and graduated from Eastside High School in 1944 after skipping a few grades. She received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin at 20, and later earned a master’s degree at Columbia University.Her niece said that she married Umberto Mancia in Italy, where she spent much of the 1950s. The marriage ended in divorce.At MoMA, she helped establish Cineprobe, a program that from 1968 to 2002 presented works by independent and experimental filmmakers and hosted discussions with them. Though many of Ms. Mancia’s exhibitions were more mainstream, she especially enjoyed spotlighting new and little-known works and directors.“To discover people who have new ways of saying things with film is thrilling,” she told The Daily News of New York in 1987. “It keeps the idea alive that there are still surprises out there.”Ms. Mancia, who lived in Manhattan, is survived by a sister, Merle Johnson Pozner.Those who worked with her said that filmmakers weren’t the only ones who benefited from Ms. Mancia; she also influenced many younger curators.“For me, Adrienne was a major bridge between creation and curation,” Mr. Gartenberg said. “Early in my career, working at such an august institution as MoMA, Adrienne pulled me aside and reminded me that without filmmakers, none of us would have any jobs. She instilled in me a sense of humbleness that my mission was to support their creativity in my curatorial work.”Upon her death, Ron Magliozzi, a longtime MoMA staff member who is now a curator in the film department, sent an email to colleagues.“If only a little of Adrienne’s unmatched passion for cinema rubbed off on you,” it said, “it was enough to fuel your career.” More

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      Review: Dancing to Tears for Fears, Until They’re Worn Out

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      The Israeli choreographer Emanuel Gat presents “LOVETRAIN2020,” a work set to hits by the British duo, for his company’s Brooklyn Academy of Music debut.It’s true that we are living in a very, very mad world, as the Tears for Fears song goes, surrounded by “worn-out places, worn-out faces.” It’s also true enough that the faces of the dancers in Emanuel Gat’s “LOVETRAIN2020,” set to songs by the British duo, are strangely worn away, too. What’s the difference? Their faded, washed-out expressions are not the result of stress and hardship, but by two enduring tricks of the theater: lights and fog.Sometimes a confluence of music and dance is the tonic you didn’t know you needed. When the show began — “Ideas as Opiates” flowing into “The Prisoner” and, a bit later, “Mad World” — what came with it was the sensation of a fresh surprise, a flamboyant dance in the form of an encouraging pick-me-up. Sadly, that feeling didn’t last long. Gat’s train started to stutter midway through, and by the end, even the dancers’ joyful twirls and smiles couldn’t disguise that it had conked out.For its Brooklyn Academy of Music debut on Thursday, Emanuel Gat Dance made for a striking sight initially as its 14 members, draped in Thomas Bradley’s textural costumes — voluminous and elegant, shape-shifting and fantastical — slowly took over the stage. They created a glittering community, a world in which it seemed like the past was facing its future.The stage, too, glowing in a chiaroscuro treatment of light and shadows, had a way of transporting the landscape into a painting, just as it transformed the dancers, dripping in fabric, from two-dimensional silhouettes — they entered from the back of a hazy stage through narrow panels and stood with their backs to us — into moving sculptures. Their skin was luminous, their taut muscles sinewy.Often, there was push and pull between the rhythm of the music and pace of the dancing; sometimes Gat rejected the beat, and in other moments, embraced it. In one scene, a soloist contorted his body ever-so-slowly at the front of the stage, while a row of dancers were planted behind him, shifting from side to side in a basic step touch while arranging their arms in unison positions: up in the air, one elbow bent, one hand behind the head. It had a certain groove.But gradually it became clear that there was little beneath the ornate mood-board appeal of “LOVETRAIN” to warrant its length. The dancers’ physicality was arresting as they torqued their backs and torsos, melting onto the floor and swooping back up again with a feverish vivacity. Yet as Gat’s groupings persisted — a trio here, a more concentrated cluster there, a lone dancer running into the center of it all to deliver a little wiggle — the repetitiveness of their high kicks, raveling and unraveling arms and speedy, purposeful walks on and off the stage started to blur together.The dusky lighting, so startling at first, became increasingly murky. And Gat’s frequent silent sections — initially giving the setting a kind of haunting, heartbreaking poignancy — turned ponderous. In those quiet moments, I yearned for another Tears for Fears song until I realized just how repetitive “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” is. Don’t even get me started on “Shout.” Was this a missed opportunity, or is Tears for Fears music for the elliptical?But why did this dance happen in the first place? Gat, an Israeli choreographer who formed his company in Tel Aviv — it is now based in France — created it during the darker moments of the pandemic, when audiences needed a release. The world was crying. His musical choice made sense: Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, of Tears for Fears, met in Bath, England, when they were 13 and living in single-parent homes, according to a program note. They named their band after the concept of primal therapy, which focuses, in part, on repressed emotions from childhood: Tears are a replacement for fears.As the show progresses, emotions build through the songs’ lyrics and the dancers’ silky, sinuous power, but Gat’s choreographic frame is too tenuous. Dancers, full of finesse and drive but little urgency, travel up and down the same diagonal; they gesture toward the audience with outstretched, beckoning hands. They rarely seem to be dancing on a precipice.Doesn’t surviving — and dancing through a pandemic — take courage? “LOVETRAIN” is neither daring nor especially passionate. It’s a look. The lighting, by Gat with technical direction and supervision by Guillaume Février, is the show, and the choreography, trapped in a haze of lights and fabric, never rises above it.Emanuel Gat DanceThrough Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org More

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      in Theater

      ‘Hamlet’ Review: A Dirt-Eating Danish Prince, Born to Be Wild

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      Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “Hamlet,” presented as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival, unleashes more madness than what Shakespeare has already offered.“Hamlet” is a work of excesses: an endlessly philosophizing hero, a play within a play and enough casualties that by the end the stage looks like a horror film, scattered with corpses.And yet it is still possible to out-“Hamlet” “Hamlet,” to create a production with even more spilled blood, more graveyard dirt and more madness than what Shakespeare has already offered. For better or for worse, this is Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “Hamlet” for the Schaubühne Berlin, presented as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival: the Danish prince unleashed, like a rabid dog, onto the stage.At the start of the production, running in BAM’s Harvey Theater through Nov. 5, a few figures gather, Last Supper-style, at a long table with a white tablecloth. Their expressions are unclear: They’re not only behind a curtain, but also sitting far from us, upstage. Downstage is a plot of dirt, where a coffin is being lowered into the earth. They’re at a wedding table for Hamlet’s mother Gertrude’s marriage to his uncle Claudius. Hamlet (an unpredictable Lars Eidinger), crouched in a corner, begins his “to be or not to be” speech (yes, a whole two acts early), speaking into a camera he holds close to his face, which is projected large onto the curtain for us to see. (The video design is by Sébastien Dupouey.) A gravedigger fights a coffin — the coffin of the late King Hamlet, who died under mysterious circumstances — into the ground in a long sequence of daffy physical comedy set to a swelling barrage of percussion, strings and guitar. Gertrude, in a white cropped shirt and white slacks, wears a long white veil and belly dances seductively for her brother-in-law-turned-husband.In other words, the performance has begun.Thomas Bading as Claudius and Jenny König as Gertrude kissing at their wedding table, with Eidinger’s Hamlet capturing the moment, which is projected onto a curtain.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis German-language production with supertitles (the German translation is by Marius von Mayenburg) was first staged in 2008 and has toured internationally since then. It takes a Brechtian approach, self-consciously nodding to the performance as a performance. In that way it’s not unlike, say, James Ijames’s thrilling “Fat Ham,” which ran at the Public Theater this spring — shows that push back against both the text and the fourth wall.This “Hamlet,” however, has neither the same poetry nor grace, which isn’t to say it’s unsuccessful. The production exhibits cleverness in its puckishly untamed and untidy circus act, but tips over into excess as it tries to make its spectacle of spit, dirt and trash into a masticated art piece with Shakespeare’s great work as its fodder.The cast of characters is condensed; a six-person ensemble plays 11 parts (everyone except Eidinger takes on two roles). The pairings are cleverly thought through: It makes sense that the actors who play Horatio (Damir Avdic), Hamlet’s closest confidante, and Laertes (Konrad Singer), Hamlet’s peer, also play the prince’s treacherous friends Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, offering opposing views of what Hamlet’s relationships look like. Claudius (Thomas Bading, on this evening) crumbles in a heap on his wedding table, in a drunken stupor, but then rises, as if from the sleep of death, as the late king’s ghost.Robert Beyer takes on two fools: Osric and Polonius. (He delivers an especially fine performance of the inane royal adviser Polonius, not as the clown productions often make him to be, but as a more realistic yet still comical daft uncle who isn’t as wise as he lets on.) Jenny König is left with the play’s troubled women — Queen Gertrude and the ill-fated Ophelia — though they are at least as ill-served in this production as in so many others. The fact that they are conflated here wisely calls to Hamlet’s psychosexual fixation on his mother’s eroticism and Ophelia’s innocence. But these female characters are also reduced to a seductress tongue-wrestling with her dead husband’s brother and a tragic nymphet whose arc is cut even shorter in this adaptation of the story; Ophelia is barely introduced before she is killed off.In the middle of a flurry of action, like a force of nature, is Eidinger, who retches, eats dirt, face-plants into the ground, tumbles, break-dances, twitches, hoots, spasms, shrieks, cross-dresses and wanders into the audience as he pleases. He throws empty drink cans, kicks around plates and flatware, sprays a hose of water across the stage (audience members in the first few rows, beware the splash zone), takes breaks to drop contemporary music references and pop culture jokes in English and to D.J. Though this production relentlessly trims down the text, it’s bloated back up with improv that steers the show to a nearly three-hour running time.König and Robert Beyer as Polonius in the play, which is presented in German and features a muddy graveyard increasingly littered with empty beer cans and other detritus.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd what we get is a show stripped of its pathos; Eidinger’s performance is as vibrant as it is off-putting and as aloof and performative as it is fascinating. This “Hamlet” is no longer a classical Greek-style tragedy of vengeance, mortality and fate but rather a tragedy of a man undone by his own solipsism.In “Hamlet” we see a production that sometimes succumbs to one of the frequent pitfalls of experimental takes on classic works: It feels more attuned to inherited ideas about and traditions of the play as opposed to being attuned to the material itself.Ostermeier’s direction is confrontational, from Eidinger’s interactions with the audience to the occasionally piercing, cinematic music (Nils Ostendorf). The lighting design, by Erich Schneider, takes us from horror to comedy, and occasionally targets the audience when Ostermeier starts to lean against the fourth wall. A nimbly choreographed fencing match (choreography by René Lay) so convincingly recalls the casually deadly jabs you’d see from two boxers in a street fight.One of my many favorite lines in the play is when Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he sees his country as a prison. Rosencrantz challenges him, suggesting that he is trapped in his own mind. Hamlet replies, “I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space.” In Ostermeier and Eidinger’s “Hamlet,” the characters, setting and details become less important; the whole world we have is the chaotic space between Hamlet’s ears. Though being trapped in Prince Hamlet’s mind offers us a new perspective that some will find freeing, others will see only bedlam and madness.HamletThrough Nov. 5 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      ‘A Little Life’ Review: A Collage of Unrelenting Torment

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      Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling novel comes to the BAM stage, and raises the question: How much suffering can the protagonist (and the audience) endure?Pain is something most characters try to outrun — or that results, with some logic, from their actions. But in “A Little Life,” a bold and brutal adaptation of the novel by Hanya Yanagihara now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it is the unyielding system of logic around which an entire play is built. The question is not why a man has suffered, but how much. The answer, it spoils nothing to say, is a lot.Conceived and directed by Ivo van Hove and adapted by Koen Tachelet, “A Little Life” is a kind of endurance test. As a doctor tells Jude, the melodrama’s human punching bag of a protagonist, “Only you know how much pain you can tolerate.”Those who’ve read the 2015 best seller know that the threshold required here is extremely high. Initially a chronicle of four male friends coming up in New York City, the story grows progressively darker as the gruesome details of Jude’s traumatic childhood are revealed. The novel was greeted with widespread acclaim, heralded by The Atlantic as “The Great Gay Novel” and pored over in tear-flooded book clubs. (Yanagihara is the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.) But its reputation has since become more divisive, with critics who consider its torment of Jude to be manipulative and excessive.A character study that descends into misery on the page is an aesthetic experience suited to the form — you can put down a book whenever you want. But there are only so many times you can look away over the course of a four-hour show. A degree of remove, at least, is provided for those who don’t speak Dutch. (This production, which originated at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, where van Hove is the artistic director, is performed with English supertitles.)Yanagihara’s immersion into the lives and minds of her characters (nearly all of them men) gets reordered and distilled here into abbreviated art openings, dinner parties and strobe-lit nights on the town. Slow-motion tracking shots of eerily empty Manhattan streets appear at either side of a sprawling crimson rug, visual cues for context and dread (van Hove’s longtime partner and collaborator, Jan Versweyveld, designed the set, lighting and video). Everyday furnishings (a bathroom sink, a working kitchen, an artist’s studio) are placed in contrast with the grandeur of the space (several rows of onstage seating trick the eye into a sense of intimacy).From left: Heijmans, Majd Mardo, Nasr and Edwin Jonker in the play, which originated at International Theater Amsterdam in 2018.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe men address their thoughts and circumstances to the audience and to one another, in a collage of reflections and exposition. There’s JB (Majd Mardo), the saucy and promising artist for whom Jude is a favorite portrait subject and sometime object of resentment; Malcolm (Edwin Jonker), minimally sketched as the architect who designs all of Jude’s dwellings; and Willem (Maarten Heijmans), whose friendship with Jude consumes much of the novel and suffers the most here from being rendered in shorthand, particularly when their relationship takes an unbelievable turn toward romance.And, of course, there’s Jude (Ramsey Nasr), a magician whose “sole trick is concealment,” according to his doctor (Bart Slegers). Jude is stubbornly elusive even throughout the novel’s 720 pages, less of a character than an amalgam of scars and cipher for the attention of others. Onstage, that disappearing act presents a conundrum. It is grueling to watch Jude use a razor to slice open his forearms a second, and then a third time, blood soaking his clothes. By the play’s third hour he looks like a walking murder scene. Flashbacks to the sexual abuse he experienced as a child, at the hands of a priest and then a doctor, and by a lover in the present (all played by Hans Kesting), are harrowing and unflinching, even as van Hove’s staging is sensitive and not overly explicit.Undoubtedly an argument could be made for facing mankind’s capacity for violence, even in an abstract, philosophical sense. But when does cruelty as a dramatic focal point in itself turn excessive, or at least cease to be compelling? (You might ask roughly a third of the audience members, who walked out by the end of intermission.) Of course, we instinctively recoil at the harm enacted on Jude; it is inhumane in the purest sense — no one should ever have to endure it. But these scenes might actually feel emotionally wrenching, too, were his character more than the sum of his grisly mistreatment.Whittle the story down to its major incidents, and what’s left is a series of escalating debasements until Jude all but disintegrates. This plays out onstage with a level of luridness. More time and attention are paid to Jude’s suffering than to anything else, including the relationships that we are presumably meant to invest in, and that might have been used to reveal more about Jude. It’s a problem in the book as well, but becomes rather stark onstage, as when Willem insists on beginning a sexual relationship with Jude that feels unearned and like another form of punishment.Nasr plays Jude’s agony and frustration to operatic heights, with the bracing screams and the running in circles of a man who wants nothing more than to escape his own body. It’s a marathon performance that manages to lend human form to what is essentially a pileup of impossible burdens. Of the four friends, Mardo’s JB makes the liveliest case for a person with interests other than Jude, a rare glimpse at a world beyond Jude’s quicksand orbit.But if there is an obvious conduit for empathy, it’s Harold (Jacob Derwig), Jude’s mentor and eventual adoptive father. Because a parent’s love is meant to be unconditional, the concern he expresses for Jude with moving insight makes the most sense of anyone’s. (No one talks about the tiny bit of relief that a parent feels, he says, when their worst fears are realized.) Ana (Marieke Heebink), the social worker who rehabilitated Jude as a teenager, pops up as a persistent voice in his mind and an unexpected narrative compass. She is the play’s sole key to forward momentum, encouraging Jude to reveal himself by way of the terrors he’s experienced.There is an absurdity to the bleakness of “A Little Life,” a sense that real life only rarely reaches such abominable depths. It’s a mechanism of great tragedy that it offers such cold comfort. After all that Jude has endured, how bad could death be?A Little LifeThrough Oct. 29 at the Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 4 hours 10 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      Lars Eidinger Might Be the Greatest German Actor You’ve Never Heard Of

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      He might be the greatest Shakespearean actor you’ve never heard of. At last, New Yorkers will get to see his no-holds-barred portrayal of Hamlet in Thomas Ostermeier’s production at BAM.The German actor Lars Eidinger could not have been more easygoing at the photo shoot for this article. After arriving sans entourage in front of the Plaza Hotel, he clambered up a couple of stacked N.Y.P.D. concrete barriers, precariously posing like a gigantic besuited stork. As the photographer eyed a gurgling fountain nearby, Eidinger casually asked: “I go in?”It was a chilly, drizzly October afternoon in New York, but he took off his socks and shoes, pulled up his pants and waded into the water. Afterward, he stripped down to his underwear and changed into the sweats he’d brought along (just in case), unfazed by gusts of wind and gawkers on the street.That go-with-the-flow spontaneity won’t come as a surprise to anybody who’s seen Eidinger onstage. His Richard III at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2017, for example, was a chaotic-evil rock ’n’ roll goblin, the performance simultaneously illuminating and unhinged. This monarch was “a bogeyman guaranteed to haunt your nightmares for weeks to come,” Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review of Thomas Ostermeier’s production for the Berlin Schaubühne theater company.Now New York theatergoers will be able to take in another Eidinger tour de force when he and Ostermeier bring their “Hamlet,” also from the Schaubühne, to BAM on Oct. 27. (The short run concludes Nov. 5.) By the end of the gripping, delirious show — which includes a hip-hop interlude, cross-dressing and Eidinger stuffing dirt into his mouth — you might be tempted to call an exorcist on this prince of Denmark.Thomas Ostermeier’s production for the Berlin Schaubühne company debuted in 2008, and finally arrives in New York with its star ready to wear the upside-down crown.Arno DeclairYet the actor does not set out to get a rise out of audience members. Rather, he uses a good old technique to draw them into the world of the play by creating a highly physical, no-holds-barred performance.“This has much to do with my love for Bertolt Brecht,” the jovial 46-year-old actor said in between sips of a latte outside a Midtown cafe. “Brecht said, ‘Zeigt, dass Ihr zeigt’ — ‘Show that you are showing.’ I’m all the time showing that I’m an actor onstage in a play. It’s the opposite of the understanding of a Method actor: I never become somebody else.“The only thing I try to achieve is to become myself,” he continued. “Maybe I’m more myself when I’m onstage as Hamlet than I am right now talking to you.”Eidinger has toured the world with the Schaubühne, and his charisma and all-in approach have earned him far-flung fans. This may help to explain why in recent years he has become a familiar presence on international screens — chances are you’ve seen that really tall guy with the wide jaw line and narrowly set blue eyes without knowing who he was. He has played his share of extremists, including an industrialist plotting against the Weimar Republic in the Netflix series “Babylon Berlin” and an ice-cold Nazi officer in the BBC alt-historical show “SS-GB.” He has also effectively mined restraint in naturalistic dramas, most notably as a newly separated dad visiting his parents in the German film “Home for the Weekend,” and as an actor dying of cancer in the affecting Swiss film “My Little Sister.” (In that film, his character portrays “Hamlet” in a staging by a director played by … Ostermeier.)“Somehow he’s like the Who breaking their guitars onstage,” the writer-director Olivier Assayas said of the actor who starred in the HBO series “Irma Vep.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesTellingly, our conversation took place while Eidinger was in town for the New York Film Festival, where he helped introduce Noah Baumbach’s latest feature, “White Noise,” in which he stars alongside Greta Gerwig and Adam Driver. The in-demand actor then had to leave our interview in a mad rush because he was running late for a meeting with the director Shawn Levy, for whom he has been starring in a series adaptation of the Anthony Doerr best seller “All the Light We Cannot See.”One of Eidinger’s recent (and most memorable) screen turns was in the HBO series “Irma Vep,” in which he portrayed Gottfried, a flamboyant, crack-addicted German star who loves pushing people’s buttons. “I liked the idea that Lars carries the torch of the madness of 1970s German cinema,” the writer-director Olivier Assayas said this summer in a video chat about his show. “Somehow he’s like the Who breaking their guitars onstage. It’s stuff I grew up on and I think that’s something that’s missing in contemporary cinema.”It’s missing on contemporary stages, too, giving Eidinger’s self-aware hyper-theatrical performances a unique power. But if they resonate with theatergoers past the initial shock to the system, it’s because he never loses sight of his characters.EIDINGER GREW UP in Berlin, where he still lives with his wife and daughter, and studied theater there. He became a salaried member of the Schaubühne ensemble in 1999, though he admits that it took him a while to find his bearings as a professional actor. A production of “Troilus and Cressida” with the British director James Macdonald, in 2005, proved to be a turning point. “I was really lost as Troilus, and I asked James, ‘Can you please help me understand his situation?,’” Eidinger recalled. “He said, ‘Lars, just the words. Just the words.’”Eidinger with Alicia Vikander in “Irma Vep.” He portrayed Gottfried, a flamboyant, crack-addicted German star who loves pushing people’s buttons.Carole Bethuel/HBOEidinger confessed that at the time he didn’t quite get what Macdonald meant. It hit him a few years later, when he started to rehearse “Hamlet,” which premiered in 2008 and has been touring on and off ever since.“Suddenly I thought, “OK, he was absolutely right — it’s just about the words,’” Eidinger said. “Just try it at home: Say the line ‘To be or not to be’ and try to understand what it means for you. I guarantee that there will be an emotion coming up. I don’t have to go onstage with any kind of preparation for the way I go into a mood or to a certain kind of emotion. I go onstage and try to be as open and blank as possible, and then it’s just about the words.” (Eidinger is so attached to “Hamlet” that a forthcoming documentary about him is titled “To Be or Not to Be.”)While it takes some preparation to achieve that state of readiness, Eidinger claims that he doesn’t start from high concepts. “There’s a very nice quote from Helene Weigel: ‘If you have an idea, forget it,’” Eidinger said, quoting Brecht’s wife and the director of the renowned Berliner Ensemble. “I believe in the genius of creation out of the moment. You invent something out of an impulse because you are open-minded, but you are not aware how meaningful it is. For example, in ‘Hamlet’ I wear the crown upside down,” he continued. “We tried several crowns and then we had one that was a bit too big for my head and always fell off. So I put it on the other way around, and then it worked.”It probably helps that he and Ostermeier seem to have a complicated relationship that involves trust but also a degree of one-upmanship. Speaking about their rehearsals in a video conversation, the director said: “We were constantly competing on who has the more crazy idea, who is more funny, who is more inventive, who is more creative. Because we know each other so well, it’s often, ‘OK, but I know even better, it can be even more crazy.’”“I’m aware of everything,” Eidinger said of his acting onstage. “I see the person in the first row taking candy out of his pocket and eating it. It doesn’t distract me: It makes it more complex.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesAnd this does not stop once a show reaches the stage. Jenny König, who plays Gertrude and Ophelia in “Hamlet” and Lady Anne in “Richard III,” knows all too well that acting with Eidinger requires being constantly on alert. “I think he’s really good at creating an illusion that it’s happening the first time right now — he can’t just play the scenes like he did it a hundred times before,” she said in a video chat. “It’s always this special moment where something else could happen. Sometimes it doesn’t work, that’s the risk, but the aim is to be in the moment and to experience real reactions.”Onstage, Eidinger is in a heightened state of consciousness that allows him to experience a hyper-awareness of his environment. That, in turn, helps him modulate and adjust his performance on the spot. “Some actors describe acting like being a tunnel, but it’s the complete opposite for me: I’m aware of everything,” he said. “I’m standing onstage, maybe I’m emotional and crying real tears, but at the same time I see the person in the first row taking candy out of his pocket and eating it. I can think about bringing my daughter to school. It doesn’t distract me: It makes it more complex.”This openness to his surroundings is also expressed into an interest in exploring other mediums. Eidinger, who mentions music as a primary inspiration, released a trip-hoppy album, “I’ll Break Ya Legg,” in 1998; quotes the rapper Tyler, the Creator as freely as Brecht; and has been deejaying for decades, including regular gigs at the Schaubühne. (“I’d say his taste of music is much too commercial,” Ostermeier sniffed. Someone needs to write a play à clef about these two.) He also loves taking photographs and has directed a few shows — this fall he is reprising the adaptation of “Peer Gynt” that he hatched with the artist John Bock and starred in.“For me, there’s not a big difference in how I express myself, so I’m completely satisfied just doing photography, I’m completely satisfied just directing or doing music,” Eidinger said. “Acting is something I stick to because maybe I’m most talented. In all the other art forms, I feel limitations; when I act, I feel no limits. And that’s very attractive, of course.” More

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      Review: Musicians of Color Reclaim Control in a White Space

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      In “Everything Rises,” the violinist Jennifer Koh and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines recount their complicated relationships with classical music.Not long into “Everything Rises,” which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday night, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines confronts the audience with an uncomfortable declaration.“I was the moth, lured by your flame,” Tines, who is Black, sings with disdain. “I hated myself for needing you, dear white people: money, access and fame.”“Everything Rises” is a timely collaboration, created by the Korean American violinist Jennifer Koh and Tines, that interrogates what it means to be a classical musician of color — to have chosen to make a creative life and professional career in a medium and a milieu that are overwhelmingly white, and to have tucked away fundamental elements of their identities in the process. The result of those inquiries is a compact, affecting and meditative multimedia work made entirely by people of color, including the composer and librettist Ken Ueno, the director Alexander Gedeon and the dramaturg Kee-Yoon Nahm.Koh and Tines conceived this show several years ago. Its debut was originally scheduled for spring 2020, but because of the pandemic it instead premiered this April at the University of California, Santa Barbara. What happened across the United States between those two dates — particularly in terms of racial violence perpetrated against Black and Asian Americans — made the enterprise seem even more pressing.The work begins with Koh and Tines dressed in typical concert dress: she in a wine-colored gown, crowned with demure dark hair, and he in a tuxedo. But he is also wearing a black blindfold, which leaves him feeling his way across the expanse of the Fishman Space stage at BAM. Early on, the audience sees a video clip of Koh’s winning performance as a 17-year-old at the 1994 Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, an early highlight of what could have been a traditional career.Soon enough, however, Koh reveals her true, hot pink hair. Tines puts his customary earrings on. The duo wear fitted black tank tops with voluminous black skirts — a coming into their full selves, and a recognition of the parallels of their individual paths.Musically and narratively, “Everything Rises” underlines the fact that Koh and Tines, as well as their creative partners, are constantly code switching, depending on where they are and whom they are with. Ueno imaginatively expresses those frequent alternations between ways of being, drawing texts from their experiences and sampling audio recordings of interviews with the matriarchs of their respective families: Koh’s mother, Gertrude Soonja Lee Koh, who fled the Korean War to the U.S., and Tines’s grandmother, Alma Lee Gibbs Tines, a descendant of enslaved people.Ueno weaves clips of these women recounting chilling, graphic stories. Alma recalls the lynching of one of her relatives — “they killed him and hung him, cut his head off and they kicked his head down the streets” — while Soonja remembers, “I saw people being tortured and people on the trees, bodies hanging on the trees.”There are also moments of melancholic tenderness in “Everything Rises,” such as in the lullaby-like “Fluttering Heart,” and testaments to enduring resilience. Over the course of the show, Tines and Koh hold each other up literally and figuratively: hearing, acknowledging and amplifying each other’s stories.Ueno’s score nods to 19th-century Western idioms, traditional Korean music and shimmering contemporary electronica. The effect is not a pastiche, but a sonic code switching. He also allows Tines and Koh — exemplary technicians and artists of profound intensity — to explore their full tonal and textural ranges. Moments of racial violence are evoked by Koh playing growling, guttural scratch tones, often on her open G string, while Tines cycles from his rich basso profundo to an ethereal falsetto. (The day before “Everything Rises” opened, BAM named Tines as its next artist in residence, beginning in January.)The piece ends with a hopeful original song, “Better Angels,” which is preceded by a particularly haunting sequence. Ueno writes a new setting of “Strange Fruit,” the powerful song, made famous by Billie Holiday, that portrays violence against Black Americans and that, in part, led to Holiday’s prosecution by the U.S. government. It’s impossible not to imagine Holiday’s ancestral shadow as part of this work: Alongside Alma and Soonja, she becomes its third matriarch.Everything RisesThrough Oct. 15 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org. More