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Broadway Play Review—“The Thanksgiving Play” by Larissa FastHorse
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 04 May 2023 12:38
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Thanksgiving Play
Written by Larissa FastHorse; directed by Rachel Chavkin
Performances through June 11, 2023
Hayes Theatre, 240 West 44th Street, New York, NY
2st.com
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| D’Arcy Carden, Chris Sullivan, Katie Finneran and Scott Foley in The Thanksgiving Play (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Larissa FastHorse’s fast-paced farce The Thanksgiving Play finds comedy in a fairly easy target: white theater people trying to assuage their liberal guilt. Set in a grammar school classroom in Anytown, USA, the play centers on Logan, a teacher whose ill-advised student productions have gotten 300 parents to sign a petition to remove her, and her actor boyfriend Jaxton, veteran of local farmer’s market performances, who helps by making sure he calls out whenever their white privilege rears its head.
Logan is planning a Thanksgiving play that won’t offend anyone, she hopes, knowing the parents’ sword of Damocles is perching above her head. So she’s hired who she thinks is a Native actress, Alicia (pronounced Ah-lee-cee-a), with help from a Native American Heritage Month Awareness Through Art Grant.
But when Alicia arrives, it turns out she’s just another white actress from L.A. (She had her dark hair in braids and wore a turquoise necklace in her headshot, which fooled Logan.) Rounding out the quartet is Caden, elementary-school history teacher and closet playwright who’s written scenarios he’s itching to have acted out.
It’s not hard to see where this is heading. As Logan tries to create an illuminating piece of theater for children that has no Native participation, she and the others are desperate to be “fair,” as they see it, which just points up their obvious cluelessness. Alicia seems less foolish because she doesn’t put on any airs. Her “simplicity,” as Logan labels it, bemuses the other three.
FastHorse (who is the first Native American woman playwright to have a play produced on Broadway) gets some mileage out of familiar comic situations but eventually runs out of ideas and goes for “shock” with a tasteless scene of pilgrims kicking around Native heads like soccer balls (similar to the “turkey bowling” from Alicia’s childhood she describes earlier) as fake blood sprays profusely. Still, she displays a happy talent for biting dialogue (as well as naming three characters with the pretentiously white names Logan, Jaxton and Caden).
For example, Logan and Jaxton get into a tiff about her as the play’s director:
LOGAN: Jaxton, I made it clear from the beginning that in this format I will have final say.
JAXTON: Yeah but—
LOGAN: I said no!
JAXTON: You’re being a bitch—bit dictatorial about it.
LOGAN: That is an incredibly offensive gender biased statement.
JAXTON: I went by the pronoun “they” for a full year. I’m allowed one mistake.
LOGAN: That wasn’t a mistake. You’ve always been jealous of me because I’m a theater professional and you aren’t.
And Logan belatedly realizes that Alicia isn’t a real Native actress:
LOGAN: But we need a Native American person to do this play. I got a grant.
ALICIA: Look, you hired me off my Native American headshot, so that’s on you. You can’t fire me because of this. It’s a law.
LOGAN: So we’re four white people making a culturally sensitive First Thanksgiving play for Native American Heritage Month?
ALICIA: Whatever, it’s theater. We don’t need actual Native Americans to tell a Native American story. I mean, none of us are actual Pilgrims, are we?
Director Rachel Chavkin’s swift, slick staging—on Riccardo Hernandez’s accurately cluttered classroom set—adds comic sheen to such exchanges and to the filmed bits of children singing eyebrow-raising tunes like the opening “12 Days of Thanksgiving” (while dressed as pilgrims and Indians) or singing an ironic punk version of “Home on the Range.”
In an otherwise fine cast of four, Katie Finneran, as Logan, overdoes the satire by dialing her performance up to 11 early on and staying there. Scott Foley (Jaxton) and Chris Sullivan (Caden) are more controlled—and funnier—in their characters’ seemingly willful obliviousness.
Best of all is D’Arcy Caden, who shrewdly underplays Alicia, stealing moments left and right with a raised eyebrow, pregnant pause, effortless hair flip (to impress upon Logan how to catch Jaxton’s eye) or a perfectly placed line reading. When she says “simplicity,” almost to herself as a mantra after impressing the others with her guilelessness, The Thanksgiving Play hints at the giddy heights of absurdity it only intermittently reaches.
May '23 Digital Week I
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 03 May 2023 12:51
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week
Four Quartets
(Kino Lorber)
Actor Ralph Fiennes could recite from the phone book and make it riveting, so it’s no surprise that his recitation of T.S. Eliot’s set of poems, “Four Quartets,” is a colossal achievement, meaningful and animated throughout.
Weirdly, though, his sister Sophie Fiennes, who directs, doesn’t think her brother speaking grippingly is enough to hold our interest for 84 minutes, so she keeps cutting to nicely photographed outdoor scenes that not only don’t complement the words but end up separating us from them. Ralph, and Eliot, come off brilliantly at least.
(Film Movement)
Japanese director Naomi Kawase, who sometimes wavers in her sentimentality and contrived plotting, made this memorable film in 2017, about a young woman who crates audio descriptions for films who begins a strange but intimate relationship with a photographer who’s nearly lost his sight.
The contrivance of their meeting and becoming close isn’t an issue when it’s been so compellingly and poetically rendered by Kawase, with formidable performances by Ayame Misaki and Masatoshi Nagase that give a sense of bittersweet melancholy.
Blu-Ray Releases of the Week
Ariadne auf Naxos
(Dynamic)
Richard Strauss’ sidesplitting comic opera about a composer’s serious theatrical work being ruined by the burlesque that will be performed simultaneously—on orders from the richest man in Vienna, whose dinner party has run too long. Too bad that Matthias Hartmann’s messy 2022 Florence, Italy, staging seems more confused than the characters in the opera.
Happily, Strauss’ remarkable music comes to the rescue, played by the orchestra under conductor Daniele Gatti, and sung marvelously by Sophie Koch (composer), Krassimira Stoyanova (Ariadne) and even, in the punishing tenor role, A.J. Glueckert. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.
(Warner Bros)
The final season of HBO’s fantasy series—based on The Amber Spyglass, the third novel in Philip Pullman’s winning trilogy—satisfyingly wraps up the cosmic adventures of teens Lyra and Will, who must travel where no one has returned from in order to save multiple worlds—and each other.
As always, there are visually thrilling moments, especially the fantastical scenes with anthropomorphic beasts. Maybe because it’s the higher stakes, but this season hits more directly than the earlier two, which were technically impeccable but emotionally distant. All eight episodes look spectacular in hi-def.
Jesus Revolution
(Lionsgate)
The true story of a group of young men and women led by a charismatic “savior” that starts a counterrevolution of believers in the late 60s and early 70s has become an engaging drama by the people who earlier made less interesting artifacts as I Can Only Imagine and I Still Believe. Directors Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle and writers Erwin and Jon Gunn have made a movie that doesn’t bludgeon you over the head with its smugness—at least until the end.
The fine acting from Kelsey Grammer, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, Joel Courtney, Anna Grace Barlow and Jonathan Roumie (as the Christ-like leader) is a plus. There’s a good hi-def transfer; the extras—interviews with the filmmakers and cast members, an audio commentary and deleted scenes—are where the sanctimony really goes overboard.
(Film Movement Classics)
Among director Joseph W. Sarno’s would-be titillating features are a pair of 1966 features—Moonlighting Wives and The Naked Fog—making up a set that’s more historically than cinematically interesting. Wives (in color) and Fog (in B&W) contain many naked female breasts that, for some viewers, might compensate for the shallow acting, paper-thin plotting and threadbare characterizations.
The hi-def transfers look OK, although there’s still much visual noise; extras comprise a Wives commentary by film historian Tim Lucas and interviews with Sarno (2006) and cinematographer Jerry Kalogeratos (2007).
DVD Release of the Week
Music Under the Swastika—The Maestro and the Cellist of Auschwitz
(C Major)
The awful contradiction between the lip service the Nazis paid to high culture (especially music and musicians) and their heinous acts of wholesale slaughter is explored in Christian Berger’s insightful documentary that contrasts esteemed conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler—whose reputation was soiled by being a useful idiot for Himmler and his cohorts—and one who paid dearly: Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a Jewish musician taken to Auschwitz and cellist of the women’s camp orchestra.
Plentiful and often moving interviews with Lasker-Wallfisch, along with music writer Norman Lebrecht, conductors Daniel Barenboim and Christian Thielemann and others provide necessary context and testimony that makes this a valuable historical document.
1923
(BR Klassik)
At first glance, the four works on this fine new disc—Ernst Toch’s Dance Suite, Kurt Weill’s Seven Medieval Poems, Ernst Krenek’s three mixed choruses a cappella, and Bela Bartok’s Dance Suite—seem to have little in common except the year they were composed. But that’s part of the point: these are works of astonishing variety and virtuosity by a quartet of European composers who were at the peak of their powers; they make demands on both instrumentalists and singers that shows their ability to consolidate old forms or create new ones.
Soloists and members of the Bavarian Radio Chorus and Orchestra enthusiastically play these works as if they were just written, not created a century ago in response to political, social and economic developments of the time.
Mieczysław Weinberg—String Quartets
(Chandos)
Russia’s Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-96) never witnessed his musical renaissance, which began when his shattering Holocaust opera The Passenger started being performed worldwide and dozens of CDs of his varied orchestral and chamber music was recorded, much of it in the past decade and a half. His 17 string quartets make up a formidable body of work much like his compatriot Dmitri Shostakovich’s 15, and this recording, by the gifted Arcadia Quartet, shows Weinberg in his early and late periods.
The fourth quartet presents a composer still finding his unique voice in this medium, although its passionate writing is pure Weinberg. But the 16th and penultimate of Weinberg’s quartets is something else again, an eloquent if demanding work that finds an artist in complete control.
Bartók, Mozart, & Dohnányi With the New York Philharmonic
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Tuesday, 02 May 2023 14:08
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Ivan Fischer conducts the New York Philharmonic with Artist in Residence András Schiff. Photo by Chris Lee
At David Geffen Hall, on the evening of Thursday, April 20th, I had the great fortune to attend a superb concert presented by the New York Philharmonic under the extraordinary direction of Iván Fischer, one of the finest contemporary conductors.
The most thrilling work on the program was its first, the magnificent, beautifully orchestrated but seldom performed Symphonic Minutes of the undervalued Hungarian composer, Ernő Dohnányi. The opening Capriccio movement is sprightly and charming while the ensuing Rapsodia is sumptuous. The unusual Scherzo is stirring, followed by a lyrical Theme and Variations and a closingRondothat is propulsive and exciting.
The renowned soloist, Sir András Schiff, then joined the musicians for an outstanding account of Béla Bartók’s powerful if difficult Piano Concerto No. 3. The vivacious, sometimes playfulAllegrettothat begins the piece is challenging but captivating. The middle movement is much more interior and intense and the finale is vigorous, virtuosic and unpredictable, building to a striking conclusion. The pianist rewarded enthusiastic applause with a wonderful encore: Bartók’s The Swineherd's Dance from For Children.
The second half of the event was also remarkable, a masterly realization of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s incomparable “Jupiter” Symphony. The beginning Allegro vivaceis joyous although with an undercurrent of disquiet and the Andante cantabile that succeeds it is an appropriately song-likesarabandethat is both elegant and serious with a Trio section that communicates a greater urgency. The unsurprisingly dance-likeMenuettois the most ebullient of the movements, preceding afinalethat is simply astonishing in intricacy, complexity and majesty. The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.
April '23 Digital Week IV
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 26 April 2023 19:35
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theater Releases of the Week
Twilight
(Arbelos Films)
Hungarian director György Fehér, an associate of Béla Tarr—whose use of slow tracking shots and stark B&W camerawork became ubiquitous in his films—made his debut with this strikingly composed procedural. Although he only made one more film (Passion, a 1998 adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice) before his death in 2003 at age 63, the accomplished Fehér has made a resonant exploration of a detective who investigates horrific child murders.
Instead of Tarr’s existential dread, Fehér zeroes in on society’s alienation; there are several extraordinary sequences—shot by master cinematographer Miklós Gurbán, who also did the grading of this brand-new, beautifully restored print—including very unsettling close-up “interviews” with two young girls.
(Music Box Films)
Virginie Efira won the best actress Cesar (the French version of the Oscar) for her devastating performance in Revoir Paris (opening in June), which makes that film seem more penetrating than it is. Efira performs a similar miracle in Rebecca Zlotowski’s film, playing Rachel, a schoolteacher without children of her own who loves her boyfriend Ali’s young daughter Leila as if she is her own—until his ex-wife initiates a reunion that might squeeze Rachel out of their lives altogether.
Zlotowski’s delicate writing and directing provide Efira with another showcase for her emotionally shattering acting; ideally, she should have won the Cesar for her draining portrayals in both films.
Somewhere in Queens
(Roadside Attractions)
Ray Romano has not gotten his hit TV show Everybody Loves Raymond out of his system, as this sitcom-ish feature he wrote, directed and stars in proves for 105 middling minutes. Multiple generations of a Queens extended family are always quarreling and eating—but always circling the wagons when necessary.
It’s amusing but rarely biting, providing little of substance for actors as good as Laurie Metcalf (who plays Romano’s cantankerous cancer-survivor wife) and Tony Lo Bianco (who plays Romano’s cantankerous father). Romano always falls back on stereotypes and clichés, wasting the usually delightful Jennifer Esposito (as a neighboring widow) and Sadie Stanley (as Romano’s son’s erstwhile girlfriend) in nothing parts.
Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge
(Shudder)
For those waiting with bated breath for the sequel to Scare Package, it’s finally arrived: I haven’t seen the original, but it seems obvious that the sequel trods pretty much the same ground, using a thread of a plot—the death of Rad Chad, a horror movie buff whose funeral becomes a series of death traps for the attendees—as an excuse for an anthology of short genre parodies.
The sequences, directed by Aaron B. Koontz, Alexandra Barreto, Anthony Cousins, Jed Shepherd and Rachele Wiggins, are tongue-in-cheek homages that are definitely hit-or-miss, as these sorts of things tend to be. The package itself is presentable: there’s a fine hi-def transfer; and the extras are a directors’ commentary; making-of; bloopers and deleted scenes; and other cheeky bonus material.
Time of Roses
(Deaf Crocodile)
Hot on the heels of the label’s last resurrection, last month’s The Assassin of the Tsar, Deaf Crocodile now unveils another restored, rarely-seen film: Finnish director Risto Jarva’s brooding 1969 sci-fi opus, set in the then near-future of the year 2012.
It’s an antiseptically perfect world whose key word is “progress,” so when a journalist looks into the death of a nude model a half-century earlier for his TV program, he belatedly discovers that this perfect world is not nearly as progressive as he thought. It’s a thought-provoking concept that comes across onscreen as less than full formed; still, Jarva—who died in a 1977 car accident at age 43—made a major contribution to aesthetically interesting sci-fi. The film has been beautifully restored in hi-def.
(C Major)
In Giacomo Puccini’s classic—and tragic—love triangle, the intense emotions in the music are put across superbly by the trio of singers who take on these roles in Davide Livermore’s traditional but gripping production at Milan’s La Scala in 2019.
Francesco Meli as Tosca’s lover, the painter Cavaradossi, Luca Salsi as the evil antagonist, Scarpia, and Anna Netrebko as the heroine, Floria Tosca, are all startlingly effective under conductor Riccardo Chailly’s baton, as are the La Scala orchestra and choir. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.
CD Release of the Week
Thomas Adès—Dante
(Nonesuch)
For choreographer Wayne McGregor’s ballet based on Dante’s Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso trilogy, Thomas Adès has composed a fantastically visceral, marvelously elastic score that is mirrored by the lithe movements of London’s Royal Ballet dancers on the recently released Blu-ray video.
This recording allows one to concentrate on the music as Adès shrewdly consolidates his early avant-garde leanings, like his operatic success de scandale, Powder Her Face, with his later, more sophisticated work like the Shakespearean opera, The Tempest. This remarkable score is given a remarkable performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under music director Gustavo Dudamel.
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