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    At a Revamped Under the Radar, New York Greets a ‘Global Downtown’

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    No longer at the Public, the annual celebration of experimental theater disperses 17 productions across the city. About half are international works that are getting harder to import.The writer and performer Inua Ellams was born in Nigeria, is based in England and performs internationally. “As an immigrant, I’m most comfortable when I’m not at home,” he said during a recent conversation. “To go to another country and see if my concepts still stand the test of artistry, that’s what I love doing.”Ellams will take that test in early January, at Lincoln Center’s Clark Studio Theater, when he performs “Search Party,” during which the audience curates an evening of his poetry by shouting out words that Ellams enters into the search bar of an iPad already loaded with his works.“Search Party” is among the works included in this year’s Under the Radar Festival, a celebration of experimental performance. Having lost its longtime space at the Public Theater owing to the Public’s budget cuts, the 2024 festival will disperse 17 full productions (as well as symposia and a disco) across more than a dozen partner venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn.Of those full productions, about half of them are created by artists based outside the United States. In a year in which the festival, with its budget halved, had to scramble for new partners and new spaces, and considering the rising costs and difficulties of artists’ visas, a roster of local artists might have been an easier sell. But that would undercut the ethos of Under the Radar, which has always mingled international artists with local ones in pursuit of what the festival’s founder, Mark Russell, refers to as “the global downtown.”“I want for our artists to see these other artists from around the world and understand that they’re all part of a larger community,” Russell said.To bring an international show to New York is a process that must begin many months (or ideally, years) in advance. The work has to be scouted and deemed appropriate for an American, English-speaking audience and not so bulky — in terms of both cast size and production design — that the cost of importing it becomes prohibitive.Within these criteria, Ellams’s “Search Party” is especially attractive. It requires only Ellams, who had already received a visa as an individual of extraordinary ability, and his iPad. (“Of all the shows that I’ve had performed across the world, this is probably the most eco-friendly,” Ellams said.) The two other shows that Lincoln Center has brought over, “Queens of Sheba” and Pan Pan’s “The First Bad Man,” are also traveling without scenery, a deliberate simplicity.“International artists are getting smarter,” Jon Nakagawa, Lincoln Center’s director of contemporary programming, said.Funding for these shows must be secured, typically a collaboration between the sponsor theater and the international artists, who can apply in their home countries for government and private grants, which can be used to cover airfare and hotel costs. Visas have to be obtained, typically either a P-3, for an artist or entertainer traveling with a work of unique cultural significance, or an O-1 visa, like the one Ellams travels under, granted to individuals of extraordinary abilities. Each type requires both a stateside approval and an in-person interview, typically in the applicant’s country of origin. As wait times for visa approvals have grown exponentially, many arts institutions now work with law firms to expedite the process.Even so, there can be surprises, usually not welcome ones. The Japan Society, which has long imported experimental Japanese performance, ran into a hitch with “Hamlet/Toilet,” an absurdist, pop culture-inflected work from the playwright and director Yu Murai and Theater Company Kaimaku Pennant Race. As the work is based in part on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Yoko Shioya, the Japan Society’s artistic director, had to argue what made this work culturally unique to Japan. Asked by the consular official to submit further evidence, she focused on the production’s toilets. (Murai is also the author of “Romeo & Toilet.” Toilets are a recurring motif.)“Everybody who first goes to Japan, their jaws drop at the toilets,” she said. The official approved the application.The Japan Society will host “Hamlet/Toilet,” a work from the playwright and director Yu Murai and Theater Company Kaimaku Pennant Race.Takashi IkemuraOther productions have had to rely on U.S. senators and foreign officials to arrange timely appointments at American embassies. When none can be found, artists have been flown to other countries whose embassies are less backlogged. This year, the vice mayor of Milan helped to schedule an expedited appointment for a member of the Italian performance troupe Motus, which will perform “Of the Nightingale I Envy the Fate,” adapted from “The Oresteia,” at La MaMa. A cinematographer with Sister Sylvester’s “The Eagle and the Tortoise,” a work about the history of the aerial view that will play at BRIC, wasn’t so lucky. That colleague couldn’t secure an appointment until 2025 and won’t join the production.“It’s becoming more and more risky and more and more expensive,” Denise Greber, La MaMa’s director of artistic operations, said of importing international work. She noted that the cost of visa applications has nearly doubled in recent years. And she had just received word that the cost of one form was set to increase further. “But we still try. It’s important for people in New York City to have an opportunity to see work from other countries. It’s just really important to have cultural exchange.”It isn’t only New York City residents who benefit. Under the Radar, like other January events such as the Exponential Festival, Prototype and The Fire This Time, is in part a showcase that coincides with the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals. Those professionals can reward artists with lucrative touring contracts, and artists can profit in other ways, too.Ellams was looking forward to the conversations among local and international artists, perpetuating his belief in what he called “the global village.”“New York is the concrete jungle of the world,” he said. “It’s where a lot of the world’s conversations begin.” More

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      John Cage Shock: When Japan Fell for Cage and Vice Versa

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      After a 1962 visit, a mutual love affair began between the composer and the country’s musicians. A new series at the Japan Society explores this relationship.About 30 miles south of Tokyo is the city of Kamakura, where the American composer John Cage was taken soon after arriving on his first visit to Japan, in 1962.There, D.T. Suzuki, the Zen authority from whom Cage had learned about Buddhism a decade earlier, greeted him and his close collaborator David Tudor at Tokei-ji, an ancient temple. Cage was given special permission to ring the temple bell; a photograph captures him inside the bell, slightly bent over and smiling a little as he listens to the reverberations.As Serena Yang writes in a recent dissertation on Cage and Japan, the discussion at Tokei-ji turned to the music of a Zen ceremony at another temple, near Kyoto. Cage exclaimed “this ceremony must be dominated by silence” — in other words, it must be similar to the works that had, by then, made him one of the world’s most important experimental composers.The similarity was, indeed, profound. The overlap between Cage and Japan went deep; for us today, suspicious of appropriation, it is a precious example of a truly mutual cultural exchange. And it has inspired a four-part series at the Japan Society in New York that begins on Sept. 28 and continues into December.Cage’s vision of life and music — his embrace of indeterminacy and chance; his use of and trust in silence — was shaped by Japanese philosophy, religion and aesthetics. And the influence of his 1962 visit on Japanese composers was such that it came to be referred to as “Jon Keji shokku”: John Cage Shock.His liberating example helped those composers — who had largely been in thrall to European modernism in the years after World War II — broaden their style, including to use traditional music as source material.John Cage conducting Toshi Ichiyanagi’s “Sapporo” at Hokkaido Broadcasting Company in 1962. From left: Yoko Ono, Yuji Takahashi (behind her), Kenji Kobayashi, Ryu Noguchi, Toshinari Ohashi, Toru Konishi, John Cage (with his back to camera), David Tudor and Ichiyanagi at the piano.Yasuhiro Yoshioka, via Sogetsu Foundation“I think that what we played for them gave them the chance to discover a music that was their own, rather than a 12-tone music,” Cage said, referring to the radical path away from traditional tonality that Arnold Schoenberg had charted a few decades earlier. “Before our arrival, they had no alternative other than dodecaphony.”Toru Takemitsu, the eminent composer who became close with Cage, later recalled: “In my own life, in my own development, for a long period I struggled to avoid being ‘Japanese,’ to avoid ‘Japanese’ qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition.”As Yang emphasizes, the meeting of Cage and Japan did not begin with his arrival in 1962. Avant-garde Japanese musicians had been aware of Cage, who was born in 1912, from the late ’40s, through journalistic accounts of his work and, eventually, scores.“I felt an ‘Eastern’ sense from Cage’s music,” the composer Kejiro Sato wrote in the mid-’50s.In a 1952 letter to the critic Kuniharu Akiyama, Cage wrote, “I have always had the desire to come one day to Japan.” He later wrote to Akiyama that Japan “is the country of the whole world whose art and thought has most vitality for me.”After his early studies with Schoenberg, the prophet of 12-tone technique, Cage had undergone a transformation: a “great leap of the heart,” as the critic Kay Larson put it in “Where the Heart Beats,” her 2012 book on Cage and Zen. Starting in the mid-1940s, he delved into Indian music and philosophy; attended some of Suzuki’s American university lectures on Zen Buddhism; and discovered the “I Ching,” the Chinese text which he began to use as a stimulus for chance techniques in his music. His new course diverged from both tonality and dodecaphony.In 1952, this great leap culminated in a piece that asked a pianist merely to sit at his or her instrument for four minutes and 33 seconds. The music would be all the sound in the performance space that was not music; “4’33,” Cage’s most famous artistic statement, was more a philosophical inquiry into the passage of time, the nature of silence and the distinction between individual and collective experience than a standard concert event.As the ’50s went on, some of the fruits of his innovations began to filter into Japanese publications, which wrote about Cage’s embrace of Eastern art and ideas. Avant-garde critics observed that Cage’s musical choices (like his use of percussion rather than the traditional Western orchestra), his rhythms and his adoption of randomness as a compositional tool were influenced by Eastern examples, including the Japanese concept of “ma,” the notion of empty space or silence.Cage at Nanzenji Temple in Kyoto in 1962. He would return to Japan many times after ’62, including with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.Yasuhiro Yoshioka, via Sogetsu FoundationFor Cage, Zen was not only an aesthetic inspiration; it also spoke to his more general desire to re-energize a Western world he perceived as in serious crisis. At the 1954 Donaueschingen Festival in Germany, he told the critic Hidekazu Yoshida that “America is a mixed nation and has no unified spiritual basis. We rely on material culture and therefore have less and less spirituality. Yet I think the East is totally the opposite. My interest in Zen is based on my hope to recover Americans’ lost spirit.”Inspired by Cage and by European musicians making similar investigations, such as Stockhausen, composers like Takemitsu, Toshiro Mayuzumi and Yuji Takahashi had begun to work with chance; graphic scores, rather than traditional Western notation; and Cagean instruments like the “prepared” piano, adjusted with objects that affected the sounding of its strings. A contemporary music festival in Osaka in 1961, which included works by Cage, brought his brand of indeterminate, malleable music to Japanese audiences for the first time. (The response was decidedly mixed.)This all laid the groundwork for Takemitsu, Mayuzumi and Toshi Ichiyanagi, a composer who had studied with Cage in New York, to invite Cage to visit Japan, under the auspices of the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, a nexus of experimental performance in the 1960s. He and Tudor spent six weeks there: In addition to their trip to Tokei-ji, they toured widely, including Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Sapporo; had the rare honor of viewing a geisha banquet; spent the night at a monastery; and even used a chance procedure to choose the color of a necktie to buy.In Kyoto, they were shown the Zen temple Ryoanji, renowned for a rock garden with 15 stones arranged in a geometric pattern. Cage’s drawings based on the stones, made 20 years after the trip, inspired his highly mutable ensemble piece “Ryoanji,” which will be performed at the Japan Society on Oct. 21 — with some of the performers streaming live from Japan.Cage and Tudor’s concerts during their visit had a galvanizing effect. Performing Cage’s “Music Walk” in Tokyo, Tudor lay under the piano; Yoko Ono, already an important artist and musician who was married to Ichiyanagi at the time, put her body on top on the piano strings. In “Theater Piece,” Tudor cooked rice and stir-fried, with contact microphones attached to objects around the stage: the cookware, a piano, toys.For the premiere of “0’00,” a follow-up silence exercise to “4’33,” Cage sat at a desk and wrote a sentence: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.” Contact microphones had been attached to his pen and glasses, so, as the Cage scholar James Pritchett writes, his action “was both the creation of the score and its first performance.”“0’00,” dedicated to Ichiyanagi and Ono, will be among the works performed at the Japan Society on Dec. 7 in “Cage Shock,” a program meant to convey a sense of the 1962 visit. It was not until 1969 that Hidekazu Yoshida, the critic, used that phrase, and some have suggested it overstates the suddenness of what was actually a more gradual influence.But it is clear that experimental work in a Cagean spirit grew more common in Japan after the visit. Even a composer like Makoto Moroi, who was skeptical about the 1962 performances, took to working with indeterminacy and graphic notation — as well as traditional Japanese instruments — in the wake of Cage Shock.For Cage’s part, Yang writes that visiting the country “corrected his image of Japan. Where he had pictured a Zen-like, ancient Eastern country, he found a vibrant, modern society.” Both sides of the exchange had their ideas of the other refined and deepened.Cage and Tudor returned to Japan two years later on tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and again with Cunningham in 1976 — and then five times in the 1980s. His last visit, in 1989, was to receive the prestigious Kyoto Prize. The citation called him “a prophet who has foretold the spirit of the coming era” through “a new style of contemporary music by his new concept of chance music and non-western musical thought.”By then, Cage was mulling what he called a “Noh-opera,” possibly to be based on works by Marcel Duchamp. But Cage died, in 1992, before he could realize the project. On Nov. 16 at the Japan Society, a team led by the composer and performer Tomomi Adachi will offer a kind of completion of the idea — which, like so much of Cage’s work, transcends traditional boundaries of genre and culture.“It was Cage,” Takemitsu said, “who could ignore all restraints and do whatever he liked, who helped me make up my mind to get out of my own restraints.” More

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      in Movies

      New York’s Movie Theaters, From Art-House to Dine-In

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      New York is the nation’s moviegoing capital, especially for cinephiles who treasure archival prints, experimental cinema and concession stands that go far beyond the standard offerings. Below is a guide to the city’s art houses.Alamo DrafthouseFinancial District, 28 Liberty Street, Suite SC301, Manhattan. Downtown Brooklyn, 445 Albee Square West, Brooklyn. drafthouse.com.This dine-in chain, based in Austin, Texas, has a hip aesthetic and is noted for its brews, queso and screenings of cult classics, in addition to regular showings of new releases. A revived version of Kim’s Video has set up shop within the Manhattan location. A Staten Island theater is scheduled to open this summer.Angelika Film CenterAngelika Film Center, 18 West Houston Street, Manhattan. Cinema 123 by Angelika, 1001 Third Avenue, Manhattan. Village East by Angelika, 181-189 Second Avenue, Manhattan. angelikafilmcenter.com.The original Angelika Film Center is the downtown six-screen theater where you can catch art-house releases, like “Petite Maman” or “Anaïs in Love,” while the subway rattles underneath. The brand name has also been appended to the Village East, whose main auditorium is a gorgeous old Yiddish stage theater. In addition to showing new releases, it hosts “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and periodic revival screenings, and like its uptown sibling, the Cinema 123, it is equipped to show 70-millimeter film.Anthology Film Archives32 Second Avenue, Manhattan; anthologyfilmarchives.org.New York’s polestar of avant-garde film (and the preservation of it) for more than 50 years, Anthology was started by some of experimental cinema’s most important promoters (Jonas Mekas, P. Adams Sitney) and practitioners (Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka). In addition to retrospectives, the theater hosts a rotating series, Essential Cinema, that is free with membership; programming includes seminal narrative works by Alexander Dovzhenko and F.W. Murnau and medium-expanding nonnarrative films from Ken Jacobs and Michael Snow.Brooklyn Academy of Music30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn; bam.org.At any given time in the main BAM building in Fort Greene, three out of four screens show new releases, while one holds retrospectives, such as ones on films shot in New York City in the 1990s or others that place David Lynch’s work alongside movies he influenced. Occasional screenings take place at the BAM Harvey Theater a few blocks away.Film at Lincoln CenterElinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street, and Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, Manhattan; filmlinc.org.Lincoln Center’s film arm, the hosting organization of the New York Film Festival, runs a year-round theater with one of the largest screens in town: the Walter Reade. There you can catch adventurous revivals, such as programs on the Hungarian director Marta Meszaros or the Japanese actress-director Kinuyo Tanaka, and contemporary series, like the annual Rendez-Vous With French Cinema. Across the street is the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, which houses two screens and a food-and-wine bar, Indie.Film Forum: Come for the popcorn; stay for the cinematic edification.Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty ImagesFilm Forum209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; filmforum.org.A New York institution for more than 50 years — it has been at its present location since 1990 and added a fourth screen in 2018 — Film Forum hosts some of the most extensive retrospectives in town, often showing dozens of films from a director or from stars like Toshiro Mifune and Sidney Poitier. Regular attendance constitutes a cinematic education in itself, and the popcorn, to which moviegoers apply sea salt themselves, is a delicacy.French Institute/Alliance FrançaiseFlorence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street, Manhattan; fiaf.org.This classy venue with excellent sightlines hosts screenings on Tuesdays. The programming consists of new and vintage films from France, with English subtitles, bien sûr. Series typically have a theme — it might be Wes Anderson selecting favorites by Ophüls and Truffaut or a program of recent French comedies.IFC Center323 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan; ifccenter.com.This Greenwich Village five-screen theater boasts four first-rate auditoriums (and one cubbyhole) and typically shows many more than five movies in a given week, usually with a short beforehand. Shows can start as early as 10 or 11 a.m. and, on the weekends, as late as midnight. The concession stand sells T-shirts that substitute directors’ names for those of heavy metal bands.Japan Society333 East 47th Street, Manhattan; japansociety.org.This theater’s annual Japan Cuts series is probably the largest single showcase of recent Japanese cinema on the New York cinephile’s calendar. For the rest of the year, new movies share screen space with classics, often shown on 35 millimeter.Light Industry361 Stagg Street, Brooklyn; lightindustry.org.This microcinema, which specializes in experimental film and typically holds screenings on Tuesday nights, hosted its final program at its longtime Greenpoint location in April. It will reopen by June on Stagg Street. Past screenings have varied widely; they’ve included early work by William Castle, a four-hour Mexican serial from 1919, Hollis Frampton and Owen Land films on 16-millimeter and a marathon of “Police Squad!” episodes.Maysles Cinema343 Lenox Avenue, Manhattan; maysles.org.This small (about 60 seats) Harlem venue specializes in documentaries — it was founded by the director Albert Maysles, of “Grey Gardens” fame. The programming often places an emphasis on social issues and local artistry.Metrograph7 Ludlow Street, Manhattan; metrograph.com.An ever-changing (and expensive!) selection of international candies, a nook of a bookstore and a high-class restaurant, the Commissary, are among the features of this Lower East Side two-screen venue, which opened in 2016. (Many don’t notice, but it sits across the street from the neglected Loew’s Canal Theater.) The retrospectives, such as a recurring series of the programmers’ favorites, organized alphabetically, have a correspondingly artisanal feel.Museum of Modern Art11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; moma.org.MoMA has been showing movies since the 1930s, when Iris Barry, the museum’s first film curator, helped advance the idea that films should be collected as art. Today the institution’s two main theaters screen films from its own collection and archives around the world (the annual series To Save and Project highlights recent preservation work). Admission to most screenings is free with membership.Museum of the Moving Image36-01 35th Avenue, Queens; movingimage.us.The high ceilings and blue wall padding give a faintly futuristic feel to the 267-seat Redstone Theater, the main auditorium in this museum in Astoria. That works well when a favorite like “2001: A Space Odyssey” is playing on 70 millimeter. More specialized fare sometimes is shown in the Bartos Screening Room down the hall.Nitehawk CinemaProspect Park, 188 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn. Williamsburg, 136 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn. nitehawkcinema.com.These stylish dine-in theaters have several screens that show new releases and perennial favorites (“Carrie,” “Face/Off”) from brunch time to midnight-snack time. Both venues have bars.The Paris Theater, once a destination for French film, is now leased by Netflix.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesParis Theater4 West 58th Street, Manhattan; paristheaternyc.com.Once a go-to destination for French cinema and films with a literary pedigree, the Paris briefly closed in 2019, but then was leased by Netflix, which uses it for theatrical runs of its streaming titles (like Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog”) and older movies intended to complement them. It’s one of the few remaining New York theaters with a balcony.Quad Cinema34 West 13th Street, Manhattan; quadcinema.com.When this Greenwich Village theater opened in 1972, having four screens was unusual. (“A new way to go to the movies,” boasted a New York Times ad on the first day.) It reopened in 2017 after a renovation that gave it bigger, comfier seats for viewing new art-house releases, like “A Hero” or “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” Plus, there’s an adjoining bar.Roxy Cinema New York2 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan; roxycinematribeca.com.Located in the basement of the Roxy Hotel, this plush red screening room offers a mix of revivals (often on 35-millimeter film) and second-run programming — recent releases that have been in theaters awhile.Spectacle124 South Third Street, Brooklyn; spectacletheater.com.A grungy Williamsburg microcinema started in 2010, Spectacle has a calendar as eclectic as it is inscrutable. There’s horror and martial-arts fare that tends toward the obscure, along with a lot of international titles that never turn up in other New York venues.United Palace4140 Broadway, Manhattan; unitedpalace.org.One of the original Loew’s Wonder Theaters — movie palaces built in the late 1920s, with one in each borough except Staten Island (Jersey City got it instead) — this architectural marvel in Washington Heights is an attraction in itself. It’s now run by an organization that promotes interfaith artistic events, but the theater also hosts concerts and, generally once a month, movie screenings. Lin-Manuel Miranda, a neighborhood resident, chipped in for a new screen and projector. More

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      ‘The Nosebleed’ Review: ‘Who Here Hates Their Father?’

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      Aya Ogawa’s gentle, forthright reckoning of a play is a belated processing of the loss of a parent by a daughter who now has children of her own.“Who here has a father who has died?”As show-of-hands questions for an audience go, that one is pretty personal. But when an actor asked it from the stage the other evening during “The Nosebleed,” Aya Ogawa’s gentle, forthright reckoning of a play, many hands went up.Other questions for the crowd come later: “Who here loves their father?”And, at least as relevant in this emotionally complex, autobiographical show: “Who here hates their father?”At that, all four actors sharing the role of Aya — the playwright — raise their hands, in character.Directed by Ogawa at Japan Society, which presents it with the Chocolate Factory Theater, “The Nosebleed” is a grown-up play about grief and remorse, loathing and legacy. A belated processing of the loss of a parent by a daughter who now has children of her own, it is a touched-with-grace ritual of probing and purgation: about the elements of inheritance that must be passed down, the poison bits that must be expelled and the missing pieces it is too late to claim.If that all sounds grim and — what with the four Ayas — hard to follow, it is not. Impeccably structured and lucidly staged, this play has a disarming sense of welcome, and a down-to-earth ease familiar from Ogawa’s many English translations of the Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada (“Zero Cost House”), who is known for his colloquial immediacy.“The Nosebleed” also has some wackily funny, psychologically insightful scenes reenacted from the reality TV show “The Bachelorette.”“Why haven’t you talked to your dad in two years?” the bachelorette asks her date.“Is it my responsibility to reach out to him and make sure that there’s a relationship there?” her date says. “I don’t know.”In a news release about the play, Ogawa says that it “chronicles what I believe is one of the biggest failures of my life, which is that when my father died almost 15 years ago, I failed to do anything to honor him or his life because of the nature of our relationship.”“The Nosebleed,” in which she plays both her father and her bloody-nosed 5-year-old son, goes some distance toward atoning for that without sentimentalizing the past. The father she shows us is a stolid, taciturn executive who immigrated from Japan to Northern California with young Aya and her mother, and considers his financial support of them proof enough of his love.The gap between Aya and her father, then, is partly cultural. Having spent a good chunk of her childhood in the United States, she fits into it more comfortably than he did — even if entrenched idiots like the character called White Guy (Peter Lettre) can hardly believe that she doesn’t speak English with an accent.With set and costumes by Jian Jung, and lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, “The Nosebleed” is a visually uncomplicated show: a vessel for holding ghosts and regrets, and for deciding what to do with what a parent leaves behind.With the four Ayas — Drae Campbell, Haruna Lee, Saori Tsukada and Kaili Y. Turner, terrific all — and some audience participation from volunteers, the performance becomes a moving communal rite that accommodates both love and hate and locates the filial kindness for a loopily generous send-off.But what it mourns most deeply are the questions for a dead father that went unasked, and the understanding that might have been.The NosebleedThrough Oct. 10 at Japan Society, Manhattan; 212-715-1258, japansociety.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Theater to Stream: Star-Studded Digital Shorts and Escape Rooms

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheater to Stream: Star-Studded Digital Shorts and Escape RoomsThe past year has made us rethink the boundaries between theater and film. Many of these shows are a little bit of both.From left, Vicki Lee Taylor, Tom Bales, Marc Pickering, Ryan Pidgen and Kayleigh Thadani in a musical adaptation of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” at the Southwark Playhouse in London.Credit…Geraint LewisMarch 3, 2021It used to be easy to tell theater from film from streaming. The first was live, physical and by appointment; the others were not. But this past year has made us rethink definitions: Theater is not necessarily live or physical anymore, and film might be a little bit of both.Qui Nguyen, who is taking part in the New Ohio Theater’s NYC Indie Theater Film Festival. Credit…Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesIf anybody knows how to straddle the physical and virtual, it’s the playwright and screenwriter Qui Nguyen. On March 10, Nguyen, the author of the hit show “She Kills Monsters,” will participate in a Q. and A. for the New Ohio Theater’s NYC Indie Theater Film Festival — which will present over 30 pieces by theatermakers exploring new mediums. March 10-14; newohiotheatre.orgThe Young Vic in London inadvertently anticipated this change a few years ago by beginning to make digital companions to some of its shows, with crackerjack casts. Happily, they’re online for free. Directed by and starring Gillian Anderson, “The Departure” imagines Blanche DuBois in the few days before her fateful visit to Stella in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Juliet Stevenson appears in “Mayday,” a postscript to Beckett’s “Happy Days”; while Hattie Morahan gives us a contemporary “Nora” in Carrie Cracknell and Nick Payne’s update of “A Doll’s House.” If you like Peter Brook jokes — and you well might if you are reading a column about theater — click on the dryly funny “The Roof,” whose cast includes Natalie Dormer, Noma Dumezweni, Jude Law and Ian McKellen as fans of the illustrious director. youngvic.org‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’During the past year, the Southwark Playhouse in London has emerged as a dynamic force in British theater, not letting lockdowns get in the way of new shows. After its well-received production of Philip Ridley’s “The Poltergeist,” Southwark is presenting the premiere of Richard Hough and Ben Morales Frost’s gender-flipped — and very, very loose — musical adaptation of the Goethe poem about a young inventor (now a girl, played by Mary Moore) who gets lost in magic. Through March 14; southwarkplayhouse.co.uk‘To the Moon’It’s unfortunate that Kathryn Grody has a lower professional profile than her husband, Mandy Patinkin, because she is a very fine actress in her own right. Here is a chance to watch her in action through the Creede Repertory Theater, a Colorado-based company with which Grody and Patinkin have a long history. She is slated to appear in Beth Kander’s docu-play about survivors of domestic violence. Live on March 5 and 6, then on demand March 15 through April 11; creederep.orgKathleen Chalfant, the star of “The Year of Magical Thinking.”Credit…Marc Deliz‘The Year of Magical Thinking’The pandemic has seen a surge in solo shows, for obvious reasons. Joan Didion’s adaptation of her memoir was a Broadway hit in 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave. Now, Kathleen Chalfant tackles this haunting evocation of grief in a fund-raiser for the Keen Company. March 13-17; keencompany.orgFrom left, Saffron Coomber, Clare Perkins and Adelle Leonce in “Emilia.”Credit…Helen Murray‘Emilia’A recording of Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s “chiaroscuro fantasy of a bio-play,” as The New York Times put it last year, is available again. The Olivier Award-winning comedy is set in the Elizabethan theater scene, where men played women — except here women play the men playing the women, opening up a whole bunch of new opportunities. Through March 31; emilialive.comMax Chernin, center, in “Passing Through.”Credit…Diane Sobolewski‘Passing Through’Goodspeed, a company in Connecticut, is among the greatest champions of American musicals old and new, and it has finally set up an on-demand arm to offer archival recordings of its past productions. The first is this capture of the 2019 developmental production of Brett Ryback and Eric Ulloa’s show about a young man (Max Chernin) who walks from Pennsylvania to California. March 15 through April 4; goodspeed.orgTwo Playwrights Go CampingFood for Thought Productions continues its run at Theater 80 St. Marks with a double bill that should be catnip to connoisseurs of theatrical camp. The program includes the Tennessee Williams one-act comedy “Lifeboat Drill,” set on the Queen Elizabeth II, and Christopher Durang’s “For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls,” a wicked parody of “The Glass Menagerie” in which Laura becomes Lawrence, who collects glass swizzle sticks. Durang and the actress Carroll Baker are expected to turn up for a post-show Q. and A. March 8 and 13-14; foodforthoughtproductions.comPhoebe Hyder in “Dream.”Credit…Stuart Martin, via RSCInteractive ExperiencesAfter its concert of the 1930s Broadway flop “Swingin’ the Dream,” the Royal Shakespeare Company is involved in another experiment inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” A multimedia, choose-your-own-narrative, high-concept show — in other words, it’s unclear how this will look — “Dream” is led by Puck and the Sprites and involves motion-capture technology, as well as a score including the Gestrument, an app that allows for composition through movement. March 12-20; dream.onlineThe New York-based playwright Aya Ogawa’s 2015 play “Ludic Proxy” dealt with virtual reality and incorporated polling. And now Ogawa has adapted part of it for the new “Ludic Proxy: Fukushima,” presented by the Japan Society and PlayCo, with the audience polling conducted online. Live on March 6, 7 and 11, then on-demand March 12-26; japansociety.orgBathsheba Piepe in “Plymouth Point.”Credit…Matt HassThe London Stone TrilogySwamp Motel’s Clem Garritty and Ollie Jones (of Punchdrunk, the immersive-theater company behind “Sleep No More”) have created a tripartite project that is not so much theater as theatrical experience — think virtual escape room, but with actor Dominic Monaghan. In “Plymouth Point,” you and your friends must unravel a sprawling, maleficent conspiracy by summoning all your combined wits and the internet’s resources to crack passwords, solve riddles and search social media. (Full disclosure: My bumbling team put on a display of pitiful detective skills. Who would have thought watching hundreds of hours of cop shows could be so useless?) The next installments, “The Mermaid’s Tongue” and “The Kindling Hour,” will be available in the United States soon. You can already do the British versions; but they are live, so just keep the time difference in mind. plymouthpoint.co.ukAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More