SoHo (Manhattan, NY)

Subterms

    Latest story

    175 Shares159 Views

    Leaping ‘Into the Next Unknown’: Robert Lyons on the End of New Ohio Theater

    by

    The handwriting on the company’s wall, in chalk, was traced by a closing night crowd sharing memories of more than 30 years of landmarks and larks.The last performance of the last show at the 74-seat New Ohio Theater, on Christopher Street in Manhattan’s West Village, was “Ultra Left Violence,” a poetical, political, work-in-progress play by the company’s artistic director, Robert Lyons. Wrapping up the New Ohio’s final Ice Factory festival on Aug. 12, it was thrillingly, even touchingly, weird.Mid-show, members of the convivial audience were given chalk — a motif in the production design — to cover the black-painted walls with their memories of the New Ohio and its predecessor, the Ohio Theater, on Wooster Street in SoHo. After the spectators returned to their seats, the performance continued with the frenzied, prolonged smashing of a watermelon, which sent chunks and juice flying. (Tarps and rain ponchos were provided.)Experimental work was the soul of the New Ohio, a producer and presenter that closed for good on Aug. 31. The publicity line has been that the shutdown is the end of 30 years, but that’s a give-or-take number. It rounds up the life span of Ice Factory, the festival of new works that Lyons founded in 1994, and rounds down his tenure, which started at the Ohio Theater in 1988, when the owner of that space, Bill Hahn, hired Lyons, then 28, to run it. He served as the building’s super, too, and got a rent-free loft in exchange.“My wife says it wasn’t a job, it was a lifestyle choice,” Lyons said. “We lived upstairs. My daughter was raised there.”In 2011, after the Wooster Street building was sold, the Ohio was reincarnated as the New Ohio. Cumulatively, the two stages saw a jaw-dropping profusion of downtown artists (Taylor Mac, Mimi Lien, Knud Adams, Sam Gold, Lee Sunday Evans, James Ortiz) and companies (the Mad Ones, Half Straddle, Target Margin, New Georges, Ma-Yi Theater Company, Rude Mechanicals, Clubbed Thumb, Ping Chong and Company, Elevator Repair Service, Vampire Cowboys, the Talking Band).The shows Lyons remembers most fondly include “Surrender,” by International WOW; “Boozy,” from Alex Timbers; and “Particularly in the Heartland,” by Rachel Chavkin and the TEAM. Back in 1988, Lyons recalled, Anne Bogart’s “No Plays No Poetry” put the Ohio Theater on the map.As for the rented space that was home to the New Ohio, it will remain a theater, renamed 154 and run by the nonprofit ChaShaMa. In the coming season, 154 will host the company Out of the Box Theatrics, which focuses on marginalized communities.Three days after the final performance of “Ultra Left Violence,” Lyons arranged two chairs on the New Ohio’s immaculate empty stage and sat down for an interview. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.What’s your own favorite memory of those 30 years?Definitely one of them was when we did the Vaclav Havel festival, and he came to the [Ohio Theater] two or three nights in a row. Edward Einhorn did the festival. I directed one of the shows, and Havel came and saw it. Then he just hung out, and I bought him a beer at the concessions, and he was telling me about this play he was working on.That seems to epitomize what theater is to you: art and politics and hanging out.Exactly right, yeah. The thing I love the most about these 30 years is the community of people that I’ve got to know and bond with.What grabbed you about the old Wooster Street space?It was spectacular. It was 5,000 square feet of raw space with the old creaky floors, the columns, the barn doors that opened out onto the street. It was falling down around us. It had no air conditioning. It was famously hot during the summer, and it didn’t matter. People were willing to suffer for their art — to consume it and to perform it. It was a different time. I don’t think you could get away with that now.The other night here, what were you thinking as you watched the final show?It was very emotional, of course. I was trying to hold it together. [laughs] But I was just surrounded by so many of my friends. So it was a very warm, safe room to be in. It was a crazy show, and I was very happy to finish on that note. Like, let’s just do a bonkers intellectual circus, and see if it works.Why go out with a work in progress?I was consciously trying to make a statement to myself and maybe to everybody that I’m going to continue to do theater past this date. I’m going to stop running a theater, but I’m not done making theater. Now we’re spring-boarding into the next unknown.I’ve been getting a very steady flow of people telling me how sorry they are that we’re closing. But it was the right time. I’m 64, you know. For me, it’s not so much of a sad thing, but —Is it really not a sad thing?Talk to me in a month. [laughs] I’m still sitting here. I’ve had a key to a theater for 35 years in New York. I could always open up the door to a theater and go in. And Sept. 1, I won’t. The reality of that is going to hit.But it’s the right time?I was kind of done with the day to day of keeping a machine going. There was a point where I said, OK, we have the funding to get through this year. Then next year is a complete catastrophe. Because that’s where the field is, and all that PPP money and Covid money is ending. I would rather go out and [be able to] meet all my obligations and enjoy it instead of do one more year and be chasing money the whole time and worrying about “Can I keep it open?” and then maybe closing in the middle of the season.Your audience stuck around, but the funding got scarcer and —And the cost of making the work and the cost of staffing. That’s the combination.Is there still room for the truly experimental?Here [a downtown producer and presenter] is very good at it. Their work is very strange. They’re also paying people living wages. But I do think it’s harder. We’re always on the margin of a marginal form. I don’t know if we’ve ever been more than that, really.But you seed the wider theater.I agree. This is where everyone gets their chops. This is where everybody learns what they have to say and how to say it and what their aesthetic is. That translates throughout the regional theater system and uptown in the larger spaces. All of those have gotten more adventurous over the 30 years, because people are bringing their aesthetic — maybe not as wild, but still carrying it with them.In your final show, so much was drawn and written in chalk, meant to be wiped away — ephemeral, like theater.It’s very fleeting. Part of the magic of it is you do all the labor that goes into making a piece — the design team, the cast, the stage management team, the writers. Putting all that effort and creativity and thought and commitment into this, and we did it for four performances. You just think, who does that? And it’s theater people. That’s who.What makes it worth it?What do I want the fabric of my life to be? If it’s playing with other people as though it’s the most serious, important thing in the world, that’s a pretty good way to spend your time. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Keith Haring’s Refrigerator Door Is on the Auction Block

      by

      A graffiti-tagged refrigerator door served as the artist’s guest register for Madonna, Angel Ortiz and more. Now it’s on the auction block at Guernsey’s.It began life began as a white refrigerator door in an apartment in SoHo, but by the 1990s, it was anything but plain. It was covered with the graffiti tags and wide-marker signatures of the famous friends of the tenant in the apartment. “Madonna Loves Keith,” read one inscription.Yes, that Madonna. The tenant was the artist Keith Haring, a star of the SoHo art scene, who partied with Andy Warhol and graffiti artists like LA II (whose real name is Angel Ortiz) and Fab Five Freddy (Fred Brathwaite), both of whom signed the refrigerator. Also on the door are the letters JM, which the auctioneer Arlan Ettinger, in an interview, speculated had belonged to Jean-Michel Basquiat, the downtown artist who became a megawatt celebrity. (Ettinger said he had tried to verify the Basquiat signature but that “there’s no way of absolutely confirming” it’s his writing or not.)Ettinger, who will sell the refrigerator door on Wednesday at Guernsey’s, said the door served as Haring’s guest register. “It seemed like everybody who was anybody showed up there,” he said, “and you signed in on that refrigerator door. It’s not beautiful, but it’s of that moment, of that time. It reflects a certain spirit, a creativeness, that is alive today if you think about the people who were there — Madonna, and a long, long list of artists.”Ettinger said the owner, a yoga instructor in California, had insisted on privacy, so much so that he said he did not even know her name. He said his contract to sell the door was with a friend of the owner who forwarded an email describing how the owner had found the apartment on Broome Street — she saw an ad for a “spacious railroad apartment” in The Village Voice in 1990. It came with “this amazing refrigerator covered with the graffiti of the Haring era.” The walls had once been covered, too, but she said that the landlord had repainted them.She returned home one sweltering day to learn that the refrigerator had conked out and was removed; the delivery men had left it on the street to be picked up with the garbage.“I raced outside,” the email said. “There, in the back alley, was our old friend, the Haring fridge, lying on its side. The door slipped off the body of the fridge easily. I brought it upstairs while my roommate retrieved the smaller top freezer door.”In 1993, when she moved to California, she carted the door to her parents’ home in Washington, and stored it in their attic, where it stayed until about 2010, when her mother shipped it to her.Andy Warhol, whose signature is also on the refrigerator door, figures in another item in the auction: A moose head he owned. The auction will be conducted online through Liveauctioneers.com and Invaluable.com, and by telephone from Guernsey’s. Ettinger’s estimate for the refrigerator door is “in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.” More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Hunter Schafer’s Week: A New York Whirlwind

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHunter Schafer’s Week: A New York WhirlwindVisiting town for an awards ceremony, the model and star of HBO’s “Euphoria” unwinds with “Ghost in the Shell” and screamo music.Hunter Schafer arrived in New York to attend the Gotham Independent Film Awards earlier this month.Credit…Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesJan. 19, 2021, 4:25 p.m. ETHunter Schafer’s eyes were boring a hole through her gray hotel room wall, left hand cupping her cheek as though, by wishing hard enough, she could convince the events of the day she was trying to recall to surface.“Let’s see, I know I did the Gotham Awards … yesterday?” the 21-year-old transgender model and breakout star of HBO’s “Euphoria” said in a video call earlier this month.Not quite — the ceremony had been the day before.“My bad,” she said, grinning in a light blue hoodie and black Carhartt-style jacket after just returning from an outdoor photo shoot on a chilly New York afternoon. “Time is confusing right now.”The past year and a half has been a whirlwind for Schafer since she made her acting debut as Jules opposite Zendaya’s addiction-tormented Rue on “Euphoria,” the Emmy-winning drama series about teenagers navigating the temptations of drug use at a Southern California high school. Schafer turns in a sensitive, gut-wrenching performance as a 17-year-old transgender girl who struggles with depression, bullying and gender dysphoria and has a love interest who can’t seem to stay clean.And now she’s taking another leap — into writing. Schafer co-wrote the show’s second special episode, which premieres Sunday on HBO Max, with the “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson. “The writing process took months,” she said. “There was a week where we spent hours on the phone every day to get the episode fleshed out.”Schafer tracked her cultural diary while in New York for the 30th annual Gotham Independent Film Awards earlier this month, from her red-eye arrival on Jan. 10 to falling asleep to screamo music two days later. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“I walked around Downtown while listening to this Aaron Cartier album that one of my L.A. friends put me onto, ‘Aaron Cartier Best Dog.’ It’s energetic and gets my New York endorphins going.”Credit…Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesSunday MorningI got some sleep on my red-eye flight to New York, where I’d be presenting at the Gotham Independent Film Awards on Monday night. I listened to the “Kajillionaire” soundtrack in the car on my way to my hotel in SoHo. I’m in awe of how beautiful Emile Mosseri’s songs are — I’ve been listening to them constantly.Sunday AfternoonI walked around Downtown while listening to this Aaron Cartier album that one of my L.A. friends put me onto, “Aaron Cartier Best Dog.” It’s energetic and gets my New York endorphins going. Then I sat in bed and watched the series finale of “Veneno,” which is my favorite show that I’ve been watching recently. It made me super emo, but it has some of the best portrayals of trans femmes I’ve seen on TV in a very long time — maybe ever.Sunday EveningI went to dinner with some friends in my pod at KazuNori, which is this sushi place with amazing hand rolls. They wrap them right there and bring them out fresh, so the seaweed is still crunchy and the rice is so soft. Definite upgrade from the packaged microwave meals I was living off of before. Then my friend and I popped into this lingerie store across the street, WANT Apothecary, and got these little stripper dresses — just for fun, because it’s important to dress up and put on a show for yourself in quarantine.Back at my hotel, I watched the anime movie “Ghost in the Shell” to go to sleep, which was spooky and gave me simulation vibes. Being in that existential head space influenced my dreams in a weird way.Credit…Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesMonday MorningI’m really bad about hitting the snooze button in the morning, so I need something pretty jarring to wake me up — I just use the regular annoying iPhone alarm. But I’ve also been sleeping to the Kajillionaire soundtrack, so I get nice little bits of that in my five minutes before my alarm goes off again.One thing that’s changed since the start of the pandemic is my shower routine. When I’m filming, I’ve been obsessed with this thing my friend told me you can do where, at the end of your shower, you turn the nozzle all the way cold and let yourself sit in the freezing water for 30 seconds. Its brings you to life.I used to pick out my outfits the night before in high school, but, now that I’m living out of a suitcase, I’ve edited my wardrobe so everything kind of goes with each other, so I’m never too stressed out about whether my outfit makes sense. One of my favorite T-shirts is from the L.A. brand Come Tees, which has beautiful prints of animated characters hat are super bright and colorful.Monday AfternoonHair and makeup came in to get me ready for the Gotham Awards. I wore a bondage-y dress from Matthew Williams’s Givenchy collection with a belt full of gold padlocks and a necklace from my friend Darius Khonsary’s new jewelry collection, Darius Jewels. She’s made this incredible collection of gold, antique-looking pieces that are also modern and mythical.Monday EveningI sat at my own table, socially distanced from the other presenters, at the Gotham Awards ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street. I gave out the short form Breakthrough Series award, which I was so happy to see “I May Destroy You” win. That show took me out when it came out last year — it was [expletive] incredible. I’m a huge Michaela Coel fan.I got back to my hotel around 10 p.m., where I ordered some vegetable fried rice and stripped down to my underwear. Then I scrolled through my friends’ Instagram stories. Gogo Graham, who’s a fashion designer, has an amazing feed — I’m floored every time she releases new garments. And Dara Allen, a stylist and model I used to work with, is a dream — I’m entranced by the amazing looks she creates out of her wild collection of clothes.“I used to pick out my outfits the night before in high school, but, now that I’m living out of a suitcase, I’ve edited my wardrobe so everything kind of goes with each other.”Credit…Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesI’ve been listening to pretty varied music lately: “Dawning,” Davia Spain’s jazzy debut album, and the rapper Quay Dash’s EP “Transphobic.” And my friend Tweaks just came out with a new EP, “Older Now,” which is this futuristic, experimental thing.Tuesday AfternoonI came across this album, “Hunter Schafer’s Boyfriend,” by an artist named CHASE after someone tagged me in it on Twitter. I was like, “What is this?” Then I listened to it, and it’s actually sick. I genuinely enjoyed it — there’s something electronic and poppy about it, but also elements of rap and maybe a little screamo, too.Tuesday EveningI walked to a Japanese restaurant, AOI Kitchen, with three themed mini houses — there were flowers on the wall, and it felt like a little fairy house. It didn’t feel like I was in New York at all. They had really good tofu, mushrooms and sake. Then I walked back to my hotel and listened to some screamo music before relaxing into something a bit more restful — some songs by Colleen, which sound like something plants would dance to.On Her Wish ListI love drawing by the window in my hotel in New York, coffee in hand — that’s my dream of a day. I love Basquiat, Egon Schiele and Sage Adams. I go through waves where I get really into drawing for a couple of weeks, then I set it aside for a bit because I don’t feel that creative. Hopefully I’m going to go through another one soon.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More